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Monday, December 10, 2007
WARRIOR
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Show Your Bones
Interscope : 2006
[Buy It]
ACADEMY FIGHT SONG
Mission of Burma
Signals, Calls and Marches
Ace of Hearts : 1981
[Buy It]
I DON'T NEED YOU (TO SET ME FREE)
Grinderman
Grinderman
ANTI- : 2007
[Buy It]
Now, I'm a very serious reader. I read serious books in a serious way. But if we're being honest, I have to admit that I have a deep and abiding fondness for sword-and-sorcery stuff. I often get my fix sneakily, via books established as literature, but I don't think that it's any coincidence that some of my favorite books are rooted in mythology, folklore, magical Shakespearean drama, etc. - Donald Barthelme's The King maps Arthurian legend onto modern warfare, John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse is grounded in Greek mythology and the 1001 Arabian Nights, Steven Millhauser's The King in the Tree retells the tragic romance of Tristan and Ysolt in wonderfully lucid and hermetic prose, David Foster Wallace's Infinte Jest is a postmodern Hamlet set in a tennis academy.
Despite this affinity, I've never really been interested in straight fantasy novels, even less so in sci-fi (although I've recently discovered Neal Stephenson's scarily prescient 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and holy cow, is it ever good - like a Pynchon novel written by a Mark Leyner with an attention span). I tend to slake my fantasy jones through other, more pictorial channels. I used to be way into the Final Fantasy series of video games, for instance, although in retrospect I think this had as much to do with my affinity for list-making, inventory management, and stat-building - this self-replenishing system of incentives and rewards that are all the more pleasing for being meaningless outside of themselves - as it does with my fantasy-adventure streak.
I also love graphic novels, particularly Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, which is just about the pinnacle of smart, engaging, historically-rooted fantasy with a heavy visual component. But beyond Sandman, I don't even read a lot of fantasy comics, and I blame Gaiman for this - no one else in comics seem to do it as well. (Bill Willingham for instance, who's supposed to be some kind of spiritual heir to Gaiman, is terrible - too self-consciously clever and ironic. Gaiman can be both of these things, but he seldom lets them get in the way of whatever classically-proportioned story he's telling, while reading Willingham feels like being constantly nudged in the ribs, like oh these stories so banal but what are you going to do.)
Anyway, this pickiness on my part means I go through sizable portions of my life without anything of substance to nourish my hunger for resonant, well-built fantasy, and so it was with great excitement that I recently discovered that I fucking love Conan the Barbarian graphic novels: both the 1970s Marvel Comics series, The Chronicles of Conan by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith, and the more recent Dark Horse seres, Conan, by Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord. I picked one up at the library on a whim and was instantly immersed in its rich world, in a way that I've learned means a burgeoning obsession for me (when I find something I really like, I tend to read all of it I can get my hands on in one long stretch). The writing in these volumes in wonderfully pulpy - absolutely purple, in a self-aware and genre-suited way - and the artwork, especially Nord's, is fantastic. But I think there's more than this to my affinity for Conan, and it has to do specifically with what the character respresents. But before we get to that, a brief history:
Conan, an itinerant barbarian from the land of Cimmeria who through a long series of adventures would eventually become a king, was created by the Texas-based writer Robert E. Howard in the early 1930s, making his first appearence in Weird Tales magazine. The character, Howard wrote in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith (he also carried on a long correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, debating the tensions between civilization and barbarism that informed so much of his work), "is simply a combination of a number of men I have known...Some mechanism in my subconscious took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil-field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I have come in contact with." Howard died in 1936, having published many Conan stories in magazines, but never seeing them collected into the paperbacks with terrifically lurid Frank Frazetta paintings on their covers you always see at secondhand bookshops. I haven't read any of Howard's original stories yet, just their retellings in the graphic novels - I still kind of balk at the idea of Conan with no pictures. But just through the graphic novels, I've isolated three characteristics of Conan and the world he inhabits that excite my imagination and my intellect, characteristics that, underlying the escapist fantasy, I find admirable and instructive.
I. Conan's primary motivation is curiousity, and he lives in a world with untapped frontiers.
It might seem that, as a barbarian, Conan's primary motivation would be pillaging, and this is true to an extent. Conan's individual adventures tend to involve getting tangled up with various supernatural entities in his pursuit of wealth. But it was more than wealth that compelled the young barbarian to leave Cimmeria in the first place - he wanted to see the world, he craved the unknown. As a mercenary, there are plenty of ways for Conan to acquire gold, but he tends to eschew the safe bets in favor of jobs that entail some sort of adventure. Story after story finds him accepting wildly dangerous missions (when, being basically invincible, he could just take what he wants from people who aren't ten-thousand-year-old malevolent sorcerers) on the premise that he "hasn't seen the city of Ophir yet" or some variation thereof. Conan, in other words, has his priorities straight - he needs to make a living, but he's never willing to sacrifice his quality of life to do so. In the modern parlance, he works to live instead of living to work, and this uncivilized brute has a deeper sense of curiousity - a greater lust for life ("with gigantic melancholies...and gigantic mirth") - than the effete cognoscenti whose ways baffle him so when he goes reaving through their walled cities. And while in our world, you can travel almost anywhere in a day, and research the place on the Internet first, Conan's world is raw and untapped: you have to triumph over the land to traverse it, and there's nothing to prepare you for what you'll find over the next hill - cities with their own architecture, gods, languages, magics, unmapped and utterly unknown. Howard's sympathies, like ours as we read, are clearly with those who move through these cities as they traverse the world, not with those cloistered in their walls, who are figurants in the real business of living, which is Conan's business - in this context, civilization seems like a paltry and point-missing thing indeed. This frontier spirit is a staple of fantasy, but I think it's more than nostalgic escapism - it's important for us to remember that inquisitory spirit of adventure in a world that seems increasingly circumscribed, and that knowing the population and customs of China isn't the same as knowing the land.
II. Conan is an anarchist.
Some of the best Conan stories involve his adventures in civilized society. Conan comes from a lawless land, without legal codes and hierarchies, where each lives by their own code, not by institutionally-conferred protections. Conan doesn't recognize the sanctity of private property - he's a thief, because he can be, because people who've surrendered their wills to the rule of law are no longer self-sufficient enough to stop him. Conan's stealing isn't necessarily admirable because it's motivated by self-interest (although within some modern anarchist discourse communities, it's possible to build a strong case for stealing from institutions as a socially and politically positive act), but it represents his realistic approach to the world - materials exist, and can be taken if one wants them, unless a greater force intervenes. Conan's world is unmediated by conceptual debris. But more saliently, he simply doesn't recognize the legal authority of men - or more accurately, he recognizes it as something artificial and constructed, a power that is prone to corruption, and which only exists insofar as the subjugated give it credence. When I think about our modern ideologues, statesmen and cops, I'm less amazed by their desire to consolidate power over us - the drive toward power is easy to understand - than I am by our collective willingness to give it to them, simply because they want it. Recognizing the falsity of this kind of power, Conan refuses to comply (this is harder for us, because we're scared of discomfort and death, and willing to trade certain freedoms to forestall them, while for Conan, the surrender of freedom is discomfort and death). In the story "The Temple of Kallian Publico," Conan is apprehended by city officials while attempting to steal a relic from the temple, where a murder, which Conan did not commit, has also taken place. The corrupt city officials immediately attempt to bring Conan into rational legal proceedings, yet Conan quickly evaporates their authority simply by refusing to acknowledge it. During the inquisition, Conan doesn't lie - when asked why he broke into the temple if not to kill the priest, he answers tersely, "to steal," and if he had killed the priest, one suspects he would have readily admitted to it, with sword drawn- or even try to defend himself against the murder charge. He simply plays along with the investigation in a bemused way, waiting, as the city officials make threats and accusations, for some definitive moment when action - fight or flee - would be called for. "Save your bullying for the fools who fear you," he says. Conan reminds us that authority is always provisional and often corrupt. Along these lines, Howard's correspondence with Lovecraft contains two passages of the highest interest: "I note that some indignation is being expressed over the country in regard to the detestable police practice of grilling prisoners. It's about time. I think police harshness is mainly because the people have become so cowed by the heel of the law, that they do not resent or resist any kind of atrocity inflicted on them by men wearing tin badges." And: "If people seem bitter against the enforcers of the law, it is but necessary to remember that perhaps they have some slight reason. When I resent things as I've mentioned, I don't consider myself a criminal. It isn't law enforcement I resent, but the vandals that parade under the cloak of law. Condoning everything a man does, simply because he happens to wear brass buttons, is something I have no patience with."
III. Conan's inborn moral imperatives often trump his social conditioning.
Conan lives in a world where might makes right. His native Cimmeria is a harsh, lawless land of warrior-competition, where one takes what one wants without regard for others. Of course, there's a tacit warrior code of honor by which Conan abides - don't stab a man in the back, don't betray your friends - but of greater interest are the times when the barbarian will put aside his immediate self-interest and act upon his instinct for righteousness instead, which seems to be out of step with his cultural conditioning for self-preservation. A notable example occurs in the very first Conan story Thomas and Windsor-Smith created for Marvel in 1970, "The Coming of Conan." If finds Conan, still a "mighty-thewed youth fresh from his first taste of battle at Venarium - and become a mercenary with this raiding-band from the nearby borders of wind-swept Aesgaard," surveying a battle between the Aesir of Aesgaard and the dishonorable reavers of the Vanir. Three Vanir set upon a single Aesir warrior - an unfair fight. "That bearded Aesir," says Conan, "besieged by a trio of yapping foes! No affair of mine. I've done my day's work for Aesir gold." Yet, the matter seemingly settled, Conan keeps pondering: "Still, why should one lion die...and three jackals live? By Crom! They should not," leaping decisively from his perch to intervene, "and, by Crom - they shall not!" Conan's willingness to let his moral instinct guide him when cultural norms seem insufficient is the third aspect of this fictional barbarian that make him such a counterintutive role-model.Labels: brian, conan
posted by Brian
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