MYTHOS MEDITATIONS

I've recently finished Lev Grossman's MAGICIANS trilogy, which probably deserves another full reading to take in all of its themes with respect to magical thinking, free will, and so on. But for now I'm only moved to analyze the trilogy in terms of its mythos.

I won't go into as much detail as I have on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE about Northrop Frye's four "mythoi," or patterns of literary myth, but I want to suss out which of these patterns best describes the trilogy.

In the essay FANTASIES OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE I examined the possible categorizations for Wally Wood's KING OF THE WORLD. That graphic work, like MAGICIANS, has the surface appearance of aligning with the adventure-mythos, because the plots involve "invigorative elements" like magical battles, explorations of strange worlds, etc.

I ended up viewing KING OF THE WORLD as an "irony" despite all of these elements, because so much of KING was devoted to undermining the conventional meanings of adventure-tropes. And MAGICIANS could be interpreted as an ironic take on the straightforward fantasy-tropes found in C.S, Lewis's NARNIA books, whose influence Grossman has cited.

However, Grossman seems to be pursuing different themes than simple dissimulation.  His young, college-age-ish protagonists have neither the innocence nor the "good vs. evil" designs of Harry Potter. But like Potter-- whose mythos I've pegged as a "drama"-- they are characters who are largely defined by the radical of *purgation,* as they slough off their old, imperfect personas and work clumsily toward new, somewhat more mature ones.

More later, possibly.

THE READING RHEUM: KISS ME DEADLY (1952)

This is not a full review of Mickey Spillane's sixth Mike Hammer novel, but rather a companion to a forthcoming review of the far-from-faithful 1955 film adaptation. The novel's a good read, and perhaps displays less of the so-called misogyny for which Spillane's works are routinely criticized-- until the ending, which I'll proceed to reveal, so...

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

For most of the novel, the tough-guy hero has pursued a mysterious package, causing him to come into conflict with sinister Mafiosi. As is standard in such novels, Hammer also protects a gorgeous "helpless femme," this one going by the name of Lily Carver. In contrast to many such novels, Hammer doesn't get any advance romantic rewards from the mysterious young woman, but there's a good reason for this, beyond Hammer simply playing the part of a noble rescuer. Probably no one was much surprised back in the day when it's revealed that Lily is a femme fatale who's also seeking the valuable whatsit. She's not even the real Lily Carver, but an unnamed schemer who has assumed the real woman's identity. But the concluding scene suddenly amps up the misogyny by Warp Factor Five:


"Her hands slipped through the belt of the robe, opened it. Her hands parted it slowly....until I could see what she was really like. I wanted to vomit worse than before. I wanted to let my guts come up and felt my belly retching. She was a horrible caricature of a human! There was no skin, just a disgusting mass of twisted, puckered flesh from her knees to her neck, making a picture of gruesome freakishness that made you want to shut your eyes against it." 

This strange image of a woman who presents an alluring face and form but whose garments conceal a monstrous "freakishness" remains riveting even today, and even though I've only read a handful of the author's works, I'll hypothesize that this may well be Spillane's most misogynistic-- and mythopoeic-- scene in any of his books. Hammer only gets a look at the goods after Lily has shot him once, and is preparing to shoot him again, but she stops only to mess with his mind before she kills him. While pointing her gun directly at Hammer's "belt"-- which is probably as close as a 1950s pop-culture author could come to intimating the groin-- she tries to force him to "kiss me, deadly," knowing that he'll be grossed out by her injuries, briefly explained as having been caused by a fire. Hammer manages a last-minute save, improbably managing to set "Lily" on fire because she's soaked in alcohol from an earlier rubdown.

I for one would not characterize Spillane's use of violence against a woman to be misogynistic in itself, for Hammer is just as wildly violent against his male enemies.Yet, as averse as I am to quick-stop Freudianian readings, I must admit that Spillane's era was uniquely saturated with the ideas of the Viennese "father of psychology." There had been many femme fatales before "False Lily," and they too combined the idea of physical allure coupled with a "masculine" will to turn on the hero and try to kill him. But few of them reproduced an image that was so resonant of the Medusa-myth, in which the female combines aspects of normative beauty and a repulsive hideousness.  A Freudian-influenced reader would probably opine that the ugliness beneath Lily's garments was a displacement for male fears of the vagina; indeed, in SEXUAL PERSONAE Camille Paglia goes so far as to claim that Western culture's enshrinement of feminine beauty is a means of avoiding the unlovely reality of the female sex organ (not that Paglia thinks the male organ is much better). I myself don't subscribe to this reading as being broadly applicable, but it does seem to fit Spillane's particular brand of female-fear.

The 1955 adaptation, while it subverts many of the masculine priorities of Spillane's novel, doesn't make its version of Lily a hideously scarred woman. However, in place of the original's rapacity, the film script makes learned comparisons to the myth of feminine curiosity, directly referencing such figures as Medusa and Lot's wife, and implicitly invoking the idea of the Greeks' Pandora and the Box of Evils. And since Pandora's Box may also be seen as a symbol for the female sex organ, it's arguable that the film-maker may have also demonized femininity every bit as much as Spillane did.

THE ILLEARTH WAR: THOUGHTS

I had read the first six books in the CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT some time ago, and recently considered trying to work through the last four books in the series.  To refamiliarize myself with the series, I reread the first two books in the series, LORD FOUL'S BANE and THE ILLEARTH WAR, but then got distracted by other reading-demands and tabled that idea.

What still impresses me about Donaldson's epic-- spoilers ahead for anyone who doesn't want to see endings discussed-- is that both his central character and his story have something of an "anti-Tolkien" tone to them. 

To be sure, Tolkien's "Middle-Earth" is almost completely cut off from anything resembling the modern world, while the Covenant books involve a modern Earthman voyaging to a magical land.  In this the CHRONICLES show a greater resemblance to C.S. Lewis' Narnia book than to LORD OF THE RINGERS, or even to Joy Chant's RED MOON AND BLACK MOUNTAIN.  At a convention I happened to ask Donaldson if he'd read RED MOON, and he said that he had.

But to pursue the RINGS connection anyway-- Tolkien's cosmos, far more than Narnia, appeals because it transmits the view of a pristine pre-industrial world.  Donaldson also gives the reader such a world, called simply "the Land."   However, the presence of outsider Thomas Covenant immediately calls its perfection into question by introducing an outsider who doubts the Land's veracity, because Covenant is a leper who constantly fears losing control of his own senses and/or sanity.

Book 2, THE ILLEARTH WAR, is particularly interesting with respect to one of the Land's characters, High Lord Elena.  Her magic nominally protects the Land from the satanic influence of the story's villain Lord Foul, but she has a psychological weakness one won't find in Tolkien and Lewis.  Without going into too many details, Elena was the offspring of Covenant, who united-- under less than ideal circumstances-- with Lena, a woman of the Land.  The long absence of her father results in what a psychologist might call an "overvaluation" of the father, so that when Covenant returns, she falls in love with him.  Happily, Covenant does not reciprocate, but Elena's father-complex crops up at the climax.  She uses her vast magical powers to revive the spirit of one of the Land's foremost defenders, Lord Kevin, intending to pit against Lord Foul's forces.  Instead, this "father-spirit" proves utterly unable to overcome the evildoers, and instead is turned against Elena, killing her.

I try to avoid analyzing characters too much in terms of sociological developments of the period, since I believe that it's generally wrong to see fiction as a direct representation of those developments.  But I do think that the 1970s, when Donaldson wrote and published these books, was dominantly a time when many of the cultural narratives had broken down, whether as a result of the counterculture or the Vietnam War or what have you.  This concluding scene in ILLEARTH WAR, whatever it meant to Donaldson in terms of his overarching theme, suggests to me an eroison of the idea of a stable savior-figure-- specifically, that of a benign father-figure who rides in and conquers the bad guys.   However, without my having read the entire ten-book series, this is at best a rough hypothesis.

ELECTRA COMPLICATIONS

Though I'm trying not to recycle an inordinate number of my fantasy-film reviews on this blog, I want to examine in greater depth the concepts suggested by this passage from my review of the 2012 SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN:

Apparently Magnus' wife does die naturally, but following that event, Ravenna uses her sorcery to stage a fake attack on herself, so that Magnus can come to her rescue and be ensorcelled by Ravenna's charms.  This duplicity leads to the film's strongest scene, when Magnus attempts to celebrate his wedding-night with his new wife.  Ravenna, after immobilizing Magnus with her power, rants about her previous abuse: "I was ruined by a king like you once... I replaced his queen-- an old woman..."  "Ruin" here implies rape, albeit one presumably sanctioned by a forced marriage.  We don't know what happened to Ravenna's original abuser, but she's clearly chosen to vent her rage on a surrogate, slaying Magnus with a (phallic?) knife, after which she takes over the kingdom with her own forces, commanded by her now-grown brother Finn. 

I wrote this in part to point out how the screenwriters had chosen to rewrite the traditional folktale of Snow White with an eye to feminist politics.  But this is not to say such feminine-based concerns don't have valid roots with the traditional Snow White folklore-stories.  Indeed, when I heard the Queen's justification for taking over Magnus' kingdom, I thought that in effect the writers had managed to invoke two archetypes of the "persecuted maiden" and to play them off one another: what I'll call "the Maiden Persecuted by Hera" and "the Maiden Persecuted by Zeus."

The original Snow White story does not dwell on any deep motivations for the Queen.  The tale is concerned only with the persecution of the maiden Snow by her stepmother, who is explicitly jealous of the younger woman's beauty.  She is thus covalent with at least one aspect of the Greek goddess Hera, who in modern times is best known for jealously persecuting either the lovers of her husband Zeus or the fruits of his amours with other women. 

As Ravenna recites her litany of injuries, though, the film's screenwriters evoke the opposing trope of the maiden pursued and persecuted by a powerful, quasi-paternal figure, a la the Greek father-god Zeus.  The best known exemplar of this trope is the folktale known as "Donkey Skin," though the tale's basic structure appears in as many variant forms as the structure of Snow White does. The princess who comes to be known as "Donkey Skin" duplicates the trope of the young woman who is as beautiful or more so than an older rival.  However in this case, the rival is her own mother, now deceased, who perversely tells her husband not to marry another woman unless that woman is as beautiful as the aforesaid mother.  This pledge leads the king to covet his own daughter as a wife. Most versions enable the princess to escape this fate and to be married to an age-appropriate suitor.  Some versions allow the king to prosper with another wife, others cause him to be killed for his wickedness.

Ravenna's story seems a bit like "Donkey Skin with an unhappy ending." Because Ravenna is in the narrative position of the antagonist, viewers of HUNTSMAN do not know much about the circumstances of her "ruination," her mastery of occult powers, etc. Aside from what Ravenna tells the audience while killing Magnus, there's just one other scene that directly expounds on Ravenna's history.  In a scene occuring much later in the story, the audience sees Ravenna in her childhood.  She is in the company of her mother in what appears to be a humble village, and the mother is placing on young Ravenna a spell that will give the power to manipulate men by enhancing her natural beauty with enchantment.  The main function of the scene is to reveal Ravenna's sorcerous weakness, so that the heroine may kill her later.  In addition, Ravenna's mother takes this step because she already anticipates a raid on the village by soldiers who are going to take Ravenna away to be the bride of their master.  A younger version of Ravenna's brother Finn is present when the mother casts the spell.  There is the suggestion that the village will be razed even though the villagers don't resist the soldiers, and the scene ends with Ravenna being carried away.  If Finn is not taken along with Ravenna to the unknown king's castle, he presumably survives in some other manner, since he's alive and well at the time when Ravenna takes over Magnus' kingdom.

What's interesting about this scene is the conspicuous absence of the father of Ravenna and Finn.  One presumes that they had a sire of some sort, who is either dead or otherwise unavailable.  But the resonance of Ravenna's words in the murder-scene suggest that symbolically, outside the actual diegesis of the film, it is the unidentified monarch who is father to them both.

Recall that the basic oppositions of Ravenna's monologue duplicates the basic structure of the "Donkey Skin" story.  The king's old wife does not perish naturally, but is put away by the king because she has committed the unforgiveable act of growing old.  This trope does appear in some traditional tales, though natural death seems to be the preferred method to place the persecuted maiden in danger, whether from a lascivious father or a jealous stepmother.  It is arguable that the very nebulousness of Ravenna's unknown ravager leads one to associate him with the absent father-figure; the sire whom no one sees.

The queen's brother Finn seems to have no basis in any traditional "Snow White" or "Donkey Skin" tale.  In the film Finn serves as Ravenna's enforcer, leading her men to hunt down Snow White and to fight with her protector, the Huntsman.  The screenplay does not explicitly state that there has been some incestuous hanky-panky between the queen and her brother, but certain lines-- as when Finn tells Ravenna that he has given her "my all"-- were effective enough that dozens of online reviews of the film have "read" the characters' relationship as incestuous.  I agree with this, but I would extend it to imagine that their relationship might have its origin in the recapitulation of Ravenna's ruination by her "symbolic father."  If Ravenna had been depicted as the actual, rather than the symbolic, daughter of her ravager, one would expect her to show Freudian ambivalence to him: both loving him as her parent and hating him for his crime.  Finn may be "read" as the helpless male sibling who allows his sister's rape to take place, onto whom Ravenna projects the love that the father betrays.  And yet the love Ravenna and Finn share has also been tainted by the father's rape of Ravenna, with the result that their relationship also devolves into incest-- though this is the least of their crimes.

The unknown monarch may or may not pay for his crime; the film tells us nothing of him save what Ravenna says about him.  The audience never knows in what way Ravenna thinks Snow's father Magnus is similar to the nameless king.  In the traditional "Snow White" tale, one may read the father's willingness to remarry after his wife's natural death as a loose betrayal, and it seems likely that the screenwriters were drawing a symbolic connection between this level of betrayal-- which would only seem so to Magnus' daughter, though she never objects to Magnus' remarriage in the film proper-- and the more overt form of betrayal seen in "Donkey Skin," wherein a father oversteps his bounds by seducing his daughter, with or without having "put away" her mother.

It's interesting that both Ravenna's mother and Snow's mother conjure with the image of the traditional tale's "three drops of blood," which is usually applied only as a signifier of Snow White's charmed beauty.  By extending this motif to the queen in her childhood as well as to Snow, the writers suggest that the function of women's charms and beauty is one that all women potentially have at their command, and that it is-- or can be used-- to counter male acquisitiveness and/or aggression.  The screenplay isn't quite intelligent enough to distinguish the specific moral reasons as to why Ravenna's sorcerous charms are evil while Snow's natural charms are good. The script does portray Ravenna as tyrannizing women as much or more than her male victims, and conjures somewhat with the Arthurian motif of the "waste land" to demonstrate that Ravenna has been too tainted by her misfortune to make a decent ruler.  The most one can say is that in some manner the power invoked by both mothers is one that can be turned to good or evil, a familiar trope supported by the elucidation of Ravenna's weakness.  On one hand, if Ravenna devours Snow White's heart-- rather than simply having it torn out to kill Snow, as in the traditional tale-- she can be immortal and beyond any of the ravages of time.  On the other, Snow's blood-- depending on the film's somewhat confusing plot-circumstances-- can and does slay the evil queen.  Since the whole film leads up to the battle of Magnus' natural daughter and his ilicit second wife, one might say that the main point of the film is to validate the very aspect of life which Ravenna refuses to accept-- the ability of the young to overthrow the elder generation.  In this familiar equation, the sole comfort of the elders who watch the film is that their representative in HUNTSMAN gets all the best lines and the most evocative scenes in the story.


ADDENDA: I meant to add that Ravenna gets one definite proof of Snow's ability to replace her, as she Ravenna replaced the "old woman" of the backstory.  Early in the film, Snow is able to escape her jail because Ravenna's brother Finn has been watching her mature for some time.  He confronts her in her cell, trying to talk her into yielding to him, and she breaks free by wounding him.  Though the action of Snow getting free could have taken place with any random guardsman, there's a special irony that even Ravenna's brother-- with whom she shares some special bond-- is lured by Snow's charms.  To be sure, when Ravenna upbraids Finn, her dialogue doesn't communicate the sense of a jealous rage toward an incestuous lover.