Keftu Dissected

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.

— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

Being halfway completed, my Enoch novels are undergoing their midlife crisis. Where are they coming from? Where are they going? Should they shave their head and get a sports car?

Since my blog is the place where I write about things I want to think about, my lucky readers get to glimpse some writerly musings in the next few posts. Today let's begin with Keftu, my protagonist.

Keftu is of a sanguine temperament. He would never write a post like this, unlike melancholic-phlegmatic me! He's also a bit of a fool, as my other characters remind him from time to time. He owes a lot to Percival, the bumpkin-turned-quest-knight whose innocence and stupidity allow him to be used by God. Whether Keftu is useful to the abscondent gods of Enoch remains to be seen, of course.

Like Daedalus, he makes his own wings, but he really has more in common with Icarus. My depiction of him with only one wing on the back cover of Dragonfly is meant to suggest Paul Klee's The Hero with the Wing, which depicts a tragicomic figure who has injured himself in his idiotic attempts to fly.

Quite a few other figures from fable, myth, history, and romance are present in Keftu's DNA, both positively and negatively. He is Gilgamesh (seeker after immortality), Cain (wanderer) and Abel (sacrifice-offerer), Noah (ark pilot), Nimrod (mighty hunter), Abraham (visionary) and Jacob (dream-traveler), Moses (seer of the burning bush), Tobias (vanquisher of demons), and Christ (harrower of hell). He is Prometheus (fire-giver), Hermes (argus-slayer), Theseus (maze-runner), Perseus (gorgon's head-bearer), Bellerophon (steed-tamer and chimera-slayer), Heracles (monster fighter), Orpheus (singer of the dead), and Odysseus (trickster). He is Solon the Lawgiver and Pompey the Great. He is Beowulf and Siegfried. He is the Continental Op and Gilbert Gosseyn. He is Batman, Superman, and Luke Skywalker.

In addition to all of this, I consider Keftu an ironic antitype of Frodo Baggins. Frodo's quest is more or less handed to him. You know where he's going from the first chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The drama lies in the spiritual cost of his continued adherence to this goal. But what if he'd been driven out of the Shire – driven into the arms of the quest, so to speak – without ever having heard of Gandalf, Sauron, or the One Ring? Gandalf is busy elsewhere, with no time to spare for Hobbits; Sauron himself couldn't care less about them; there never was a Ring to wrap incarnate evil up in a neat little package. Frodo has no high destiny but, cut off from his past, finds himself unable to live without one, and therefore invents it for himself. Nevertheless, not a day goes by in which he doesn't look into the abyss and think: what if I'm only deluding myself?

Who in our time hasn't experienced this anxiety? I've gone through phases when I imagined myself acting on a divine mandate. I'll bet that just about everyone, even thoroughgoing materialists, try to see some kind of pattern or logic in the events of their lives. It's part of being human. But, for me, it's always been undercut by a nagging doubt that I'm just talking to myself. After many colorful disappointments, I've come to decide that, if there is a divine agency guiding us to some appointed end, then its action is dark and mysterious, not a voice booming on a mountaintop. It's something that acts from outside time, and therefore in a way that's not really comprehensible to us, and is much less concerned with "geography" than we are.

I attempt to capture some of this in my description of Keftu's songlines, which I adapt from the worldview of the Indigenous Australians, combining it with the mnemonic palace of Sephaura inspired by the method of loci developed by Simonides of Ceos. Keftu's greatness, if he has any greatness, lies in that he knows that he does not know. But his world is littered with grand failures, with persons, human and otherwise, who think they know but do not.

One such is Vaustus, whose character is a composite of several pastors and missionaries I encountered back in my wild college days. The episode that lost him his leg actually happened to someone I knew, except that my friend was unsuccessful in his amputation, which he attempted, naked, with a handsaw in a stranger's open garage. (There, doesn't that make you want to read my book?) But we were all a bit like that.

You'd think that a person, when faced with the cosmic contradiction to the divine mandate they've claimed as a guide for their personal actions, would be forced to admit that they've been acting under a delusion. But you'd be wrong. Their entire ego and worldview are wrapped up in a particular vision of themselves. So, instead, they go a little bit crazy. They revise the past, reinterpret the prophecy, attempt to see what isn't there. Every time this happens, they go a little bit crazier. Deliberately short-circuiting your ability to see reality isn't good for your psychic integrity.

My point is, life is a frightening, painful, messed-up experience ending in death. We all desperately want it to have some kind of meaning. A quest fantasy is comforting because it seems to present life as a logical progression of events with a clear and definite end. But real life isn't like that. Attempts to live like it is only result in madness and despair, or else boundless fatuity and narcissism. Sword-and-sorcery, as opposed to epic fantasy, seems to take what we might call the cynical view. At any rate, it's not particularly concerned with overarching narratives. That's what I like about it.

Still, we are all on a kind of journey, aren't we? It's just that we're making the quest up as we go along. We're more like Don Quixote than the Redcrosse Knight. The joke's on us. Perhaps there is a path, but, if so, it's not like the road to Rivendell. We go blindly, trustingly or not, choosing as seems best at each moment, never quite knowing whether we do well or ill. The climax of our journey is otherwise than we imagine it, and what we regard as most insignificant is possibly quite the contrary.

Come to think of it, though, that could be applied to Frodo's journey. At no point is he altogether certain of his means. The goal is never really in question, but all responsibility is laid on his shoulders. Even Gandalf and Elrond refuse to advise him. And, in the end, he fails! Or would have failed, had not Gollum intervened. In fact, you could argue that, far from being Winnie-the-Pooh for adults, The Lord of the Rings is way more cynical (or mature) than the Elric Saga. So I find that my characterization of Frodo's quest doesn't do justice to the text, though it does describe your cookie-cutter mass market quest fantasy.
 
Still, it's true that Keftu has no Gandalf, as is pointed out in the passage quoted at the top of Fletcher Vredenburgh's kind review of my most recent novel. He's on his own in a way that Frodo never was. He has no goal but what he sets himself.

The Lost Continent

How is it that, before this summer, I'd never read C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne's The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis? I'm glad to say that I've just corrected the omission. Published serially in 1899 and as a book in 1900, it bears the stamp of the best of H. Rider Haggard's novels, but stands alone in being set wholly within antediluvian times, apart from a ridiculous framing story that serves only to explain why the narrative begins and ends so abruptly.

The book seems not very well known or respected these days. E. F. Bleiler in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy dismisses it in one sentence as "a stodgy dynastic romance that is now occasionally laughable." This, in the article on Atlantis; neither Hyne nor his novel have their own entry, and they are not mentioned in the article on Lost Lands and Continents. This judgment seems unduly harsh. Drawing heavily on Ignatius L. Donnelly's "nonfictional" work, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882, it is a work of real power and imagination, and, one suspects, a major influence on the many pulp writers who explored prehistoric civilizations in their stories.

Hailed by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp as the best Atlantis novel out there, The Lost Continent was rescued from obscurity through its publication in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Here is a scan of my copy's cover, with wrap-around painting by Dean Ellis:

 

The story opens in the Yucatan (although, sadly, this setting receives only a cursory glance), but most of the action takes place in the lost continent itself. The narrator and protagonist is Deucalion (as in the Greek deluge myth), a successful viceroy and general called home by the beautiful, capricious, self-deified empress Phorenice. She intends him as her husband, a plan that ends in disaster, owing in part to Deucalion's extreme moral rigidity (in the Atlantean sense). The characters are stiff, the love-making awkward and underdeveloped, the plot strangely meandering. But if you want a good and robust late Victorian romance set against a backdrop of mythic splendor and prehistoric mystery, then look no further.

There's a sea-battle between solar-powered ships and plesiosaurs. There's a seductive empress who rides a colossal wooly mammoth through the streets of the capital. There's a labyrinthine palace in a giant pyramid lit by subterranean fires. There are secret passages. Superdrugs. Volcanoes. Premature burials. Pagan anathemas. Warrior priests. Hairy half-bestial invaders. Pterodactyls that swoop down to steal sacrificial victims. A doomsday escape vessel that seems a cross between the Ark of the Covenant, Noah's ark, and a seed bank.

The novel also shows a creative attention to weird little details, a quality often sadly lacking in later, more derivative fantasy. Consider, for instance, this grotesque description of Deucalion's lover, disinterred from the tomb where she has sat buried alive for nine years:

Her beauty was drawn and pale. Her eyes were closed, but so thin and transparent had grown the lids that one could almost see the brown of the pupil beneath them. Her hair had grown to inordinate thickness and length, and lay as a cushion behind and beside her head. [...] The nails of her fingers had grown to such a great length that they were twisted in spirals, and the fingers themselves and her hands were so waxy and transparent that the bony core upon which they were built showed itself beneath the flesh in plain dull outline. Her clay-cold lips were so white, that one sighed to remember the full beauty of their carmine. Her shoulders and neck had lost their comely curves, and made bony hollows now in which the dust of entombment lodged black and thickly.

Or again, the description of the superbly imagined ark:

A wonderful vessel was this Ark, now we were able to see it at leisure and intimately. Although for the first time now in all its centuries of life it swam upon the waters, it showed no leak or suncrack. Inside, even its floor was bone dry. That it was built from some wood, one could see by the grainings, but nowhere could one find suture or joint. The living timbers had been put in place and then grown together by an art which we have lost to-day, but which the Ancients knew with much perfection; and afterwards some treatment, which is also a secret of those forgotten builders, had made the wood as hard as metal and impervious to all attacks of the weather.  

In the gloomy cave of its belly were stored many matters. At one end, in great tanks on either side of central alley, was a prodigious store of grain. Sweet water was in other tanks at the other end. In another place were drugs and samples, and essences of the life of beasts; all these things being for use whilst the Ark roamed under the guidance of the Gods on the bosom of the deep. On all the walls of the Ark, and on all the partitions of the tanks and the other woodwork, there were carved in the rude art of bygone time representations of all the beasts which lived in Atlantis; and on these I looked with a hunter's interest, as some of them were strange to me, and had died out with the men who had perpetuated them in these sculptures.

At every point the author shows a predilection for grandiose adventure, but tempers it with an attention to visceral detail:

Blood flowed from the mammoth's neck where the spikes of the collar tore it, and with each drop, so did the tameness seem to ooze out from it also. With wild squeals and trumpetings it turned and charged viciously down the way it had come, scattering like straws the spearmen who tried to stop it, and mowing a great swath through the crowd with its monstrous progress. Many must have been trodden under foot, many killed by its murderous trunk, but only their cries came to us. The golden castle, with its canopy of royal snakes, was swayed and tossed, so that we two occupants had much ado not to be shot off like stones from a catapult. [...] 

I braced myself to withstand the shock, and took fresh grip upon the woman who lay against my breast. But with louder screams and wilder trumpetings the mammoth held straight on, and presently came to the harbour's edge, and sent the spray sparkling in sheets amongst the sunshine as it went with its clumsy gait into the water. 

But at this point the pace was very quickly slackened. The great sewers, which science devised for the health of the city in the old King's time, vomit their drainings into this part of the harbour, and the solid matter which they carry is quickly deposited as an impalpable sludge. Into this the huge beast began to sink deeper and deeper before it could halt in its rush, and when with frightened bellowings it had come to a stop, it was bogged irretrievably. Madly it struggled, wildly it screamed and trumpeted. The harbour-water and the slime were churned into one stinking compost, and the golden castle in which we clung lurched so wildly that we were torn from it and shot far away into the water

Refreshingly, the narrator and other characters follow a pagan moral code wholly alien to modern social mores. Deucalion in particular shows utter unconcern with the lives of the peasant and slave classes, whom he plainly despises, and in fact openly reviles in several passages. (Slaves, incidentally, come chiefly from Europe.) Though odious, his attitudes greatly enhance the book's verisimilitude. The destruction of a continent and people to satisfy the zeal of a priestly caste outraged by a single woman who has stolen their secrets is related as a matter of course. Atlantis the nation is mourned, but the people merit not even a second thought.

As I read The Lost Continent, I kept thinking of authors who might have been influenced by it. A comparatively recent example is Michael Moorcock in his Elric books. Like Melniboné, Atlantis is an amoral dynastic island culture fallen into decadence that evinces a strong disdain for the up-and-coming peoples of the mainland; also, interestingly, the approach to both capitals is rendered difficult, the former by a maze of passages, the latter by the twists and turns of an extremely long, narrow, and high-walled inlet. Possible echoes in other works of fantastic literature abound, Edgar Rice Burroughs's stories being the most obvious example.

So if you like to read, not only the great pulp writers, but what influenced them; if you enjoy a good H. Rider Haggard romance and don't mind a bit of Victorian stodginess; if you want an interesting early imagining of ancient high technology; if you're looking for Bronze Age battles with giant prehistoric beasts – if you're into any of these things, I say, then give The Lost Continent a try.

Sailor on the Seas of Elric

So, I've been reading those Elric books of Michael Moorcock. It's taken me a while for one reason or another, but so far I've read Elric of Melniboné, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and The Weird of the White Wolf. I have Part II of the Elric Saga on my bookshelf, so we'll see how it goes.

I didn't realize before I started them that the latter two works were short story collections rather than fix-ups or novels. Which is fine; I think sword and sorcery works best in a short format, actually. There's just not enough continuity or coherence to warrant calling the Elric Saga a saga. I mean, I've read a good many Icelandic sagas – Egils saga, Njals saga, Laxdæla saga, Vatnsdœla saga, etc. – and they're anything but episodic. I suppose I'm being nitpicky, since the term just used as a marketing label. They call anything a saga if it's long enough.

The opening of Elric of Melniboné is what really got me hooked, I think.

It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is bone-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody…

and so on. Worthy of the finest fantasists of yore. The throne carved of a single ruby took me back to The Worm Ouroboros, which I suppose must have been an influence. (Side note: I always thought these precious-objects-carved-from-single-stones were just fantastic nonsense, until I visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science last weekend, and saw an entire chair carved from a single piece of jasper, and whole goblets carved from quartz and amethyst.) The Dreaming City, Imrryr, and its deadly harbor labyrinth and fleet of floating ziggurats were exactly to my taste, evoking an unspeakably ancient, alien, wicked power. The hokey magical stuff not so much. But that's just me.

Elric himself… Well, let me first say that all the characters are quite flat, more or less defined by their physical features. Nothing necessarily wrong with that – it isn't as though we're expecting (or wanting) Dostoevsky here – but their actions are artificial and almost absurd. And as for absurdity, Elric himself takes the cake. Yes, he's angsty and moody and disdainful, but he's as capricious as a schoolgirl, too.

capricious - (adj.) determined by chance or impulse or whim rather than by necessity or reason. [Webster's 1913 Dictionary]

This about sums up his public policy in Elric: "My wicked cousin Yyrkoon is ambitious and envious. I'll cynically provoke him into trying to take the throne. Then I'll defeat him. Then I'll set him on the throne and go on vacation. Somehow this will end up saving the nation." What? What kind of sense is that? And then afterward he decides he's going to destroy the nation and slay his cousin? Wouldn't it have been easier to have done that at the end of Elric? And his cunning plan to save his ensorcelled betrothed from the city he's about to destroy is to sneak into said city on the eve of the surprise attack, basically announce to everyone that he's there, and arrange to have an unaided old man take his betrothed to a certain tower when the attack begins. To no one's surprise, this doesn't work out very well. After which he goes around the world, sitting in taverns and staring moodily into his beer, cursing his unhappy fate.

I liked the set-up of an unthinkably ancient, antehuman civilization in the midst of the upstart New Kingdoms, and I would have enjoyed a more rational and drawn-out account of Imrryr's downfall, rather than seeing it used as mere angst fodder. The independent short pieces I found more enjoyable, because there Elric's moodiness and irritating egotism are just givens from which the story proceeds. My favorite, I think, is the first part of Sailor, which involves a pair of weird, giant biomechanical aliens from another dimension. In general, this learnéd and moody albino who relies on the strength that flows to him from his soul-stealing sword is a nice counterpoint to the beefy ebullience of Conan and his clones, fond though I am of them.

Now, perhaps this is neither here nor there, but the Law – Chaos continuum has never appealed to my mind. This isn't a criticism of Moorcock particularly. Certainly he didn't originate the paradigm. Or did he? Who did? I don't know. Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961) is certainly an early example. But the first Elric story came out then as well.

Anyway, it's a nice metric for role-playing games, but philosophically it doesn't make much sense to me. How can there be a tug-of-war between two such extremes? Law is the exception; chaos is the default. Entropy is easy; order is hard. As Chesterton puts it: "It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands." Order contains all that is romantic and exciting and beautiful in this world; chaos is flat and tepid and gray. Those who think they prefer chaos are really just drawn by the dramatic first stages of its advance, when order is still mostly present. It's the persisting order that lends it drama and glamor. Let them wait until things even out and heat death sets in and nothing happens ever again forever and ever. Bo-ring!

Well, to conclude, I must confess that I set out to read these books with a less than open disposition, knowing what Mr. Moorcock thinks of the works I hold dearest. I will put it this way: if there were to occur a deathmatch with Túrin Turambar in one corner and Elric of Melniboné in the other, I think the Dragon-helm would win with an arm tied behind his back, and probably be pretty decent about it, to boot. But then, perhaps it's just a matter of taste.

I will continue to read them, though, and see what happens. A greater compliment than that I cannot give any author.