TRANSFORMATIONS AND TRICKS
Hermes, the wing-enabled flying messenger, is not only the god of communication, he is also the god of thieves, lies, and jokes. That’s another interesting thing about many airborne non-humans—their odd sense of humour, the delight they seem to take in misleading human beings and playing tricks on them. In the plays of Shakespeare, there are, as I’ve mentioned, two notable non-human flying beings: Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ariel in The Tempest. Both are messengers and servants, carrying out the plans and delivering the decrees of Oberon and Prospero, respectively; and both are disguise artists and trick-players. Do they have their origin in winged Eros (or Cupid), the notoriously practical-joking boy-god of love, messenger of the goddess Venus? Cupid may bring boxes of chocolates today, but formerly he shot his wounding arrows of desire into people who then went crazy with lust and obsessive longing while he himself laughed. The djinni of One Thousand and One Nights tales are similar messenger-servants, as are the winged monkeys in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: airborne, powerful, hard to control except through magic. The morally dubious fairies of English folklore bear a family resemblance: disguising themselves and fooling people are what they seem to take most pride in. Puck is strongly of this lineage, thinking it great fun to turn himself into a stool and then whisk out of the way just as someone is about to sit down on him. Making fools of already foolish mortals is his main game.
Come to think of it, such predilections are shared by the early comic-book superheroes. They weren’t as a rule crude joke-players, but their transformations certainly involved deception—no one was supposed to know that Clark Kent was really Superman, and vice versa. The episodes of most interest to us child readers were not the maiden-rescuing or the parts where Gotham City gets saved from destruction, or even the hand-to-hand sock-bam-pow battles with villains, but the moments of transformation. First, the bespectacled weakling or crippled newsboy, with all the humiliation implied by that role; then off came the disguise, and the true, strong hero sprang into view like a husband shooting out of a closet in a Feydeau farce—surprise!—and the bad folks quailed, and the bullies could no longer kick sand in your face at the beach. It was the notion of deceiving people that we really liked—the idea that you could walk around among unsuspecting adults—the people on the street in the comic books—knowing something about yourself that they didn’t know: that you secretly had the power to astonish them.
In this respect, the 1940s superhero Plastic Man was the champion. His superpower was stretchiness. Because he was plastic—he’d suffered from an unpleasant encounter with a vat of chemicals, which is the modern-day equivalent of having a god for a parent, or being dipped into the River Styx like Achilles—he could mould himself into any everyday object, such as a lamp or ashtray; eavesdrop on everything the crooks and thugs were planning; then leap forth, manifest himself, and wrap his entire body around the evildoers like a long rubber band. He was probably the trickiest, wittiest, and least violent of all the superheroes; more Puck than Oberon, a sort of comic party toy.
The fascination with disguise is very ancient. The gods frequently assumed mortal shapes, the better to walk among humankind unobserved. (This habit was taken up later by folk-tale sultans and kings and even saints, most notably Saint Peter.) The first self-consciously disguised character we meet in literature—or the first who isn’t a god, to my knowledge—is the wily Odysseus of The Odyssey, who, having been away from home for many years, dresses himself as a ragged beggar upon his return to his palace, where a large number of insolent young men are eating up his herd animals, raping his maids, and trying to marry his wife. Imagine their astonishment when he strings his own superbow—the magic weapon no one else can handle—steps back into his role of king, and kills the whole lot of them. The two gods who take a special interest in Odysseus are Athene, who values intellect and quick wits, and our old friend Hermes, the trickster god of artifice and jokes.
Which brings us back to the flying rabbits I was drawing and telling stories about at the age of six or seven. Now we understood why the planet they inhabited was called Mischiefland; though, back then, I myself didn’t know why I’d given it that name. Like many artists, I did it because, well, it just seemed right to me at the time. Balloons, flying, superpowers, mischief: they all went together. Though my superheroes were probably the only ones that had long floppy ears and fluffy white tails.
NOTES
1. Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) presents a race of superior human beings who live in a vast cavern underground, harnessing an inner, electrical life force called vril for power. (Vril gave its name to the beef tea “Bovril”; bovine vril.) The Vril-ya fly around on vril-powered wings and display super-intelligence; the women among them are bigger and stronger than the men, whom they have to treat well lest the latter fly away.
2. The quotation from C. G. Jung is taken from Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature (Abrams and Zweig, 1991).
3. Mandrake the Magician is said to have been the first comic superhero, but his hypnotic gesturing was anticipated by Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the villains of the two eponymous films that feature their wicked hypnotizing powers.
4. Princess Snowflower was found in the comic strip Steve Canyon.
5. The juvenilia is now in the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto.
6. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900.
7. “The Big Red Cheese” is a nickname for Captain Marvel.
8. Diana the Huntress, Artemis: Roman and Greek moon goddesses characterized by virginity, bowmanship, and an affinity with wild animals.
9. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lesson for a Kinder Society, 2010.
10. The Shakespeare quotation is from King Lear, IV, 1, 32–34.
11. Star Trek: a long-running space serial.
12. The Fields of Asphodel were in the Greek Underworld. The Planet Krypton was Superman’s home planet.
13. Sparkly vampires can be found in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer.
14. The Cloak of Invisibility is a feature in folklore; see Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
15. I first encountered the duplicity of Jonathan Wild in the 1840 novel Jack Sheppard by Harrison Ainsworth.
16. The Scarlet Pimpernel is the hero of the 1903 play and subsequent novel by Baroness Orczy.
17. The Tales of Hoffmann: In the 1881 opera by Offenbach, all of the villains are traditionally played by the same singer.
18. Nike: Does this swift-flying goddess determine victory or simply reward it? Accounts differ, but either way it’s a good name for running shoes.
19. Georges Feydeau wrote many farces that depend on impeccable entry-and-exit timing.
Blue bunny comic book cover by Margaret Atwood
The Estonian cover of The Robber Bride (Röövelpruut):
Burning Bushes:
Why Heaven and Hell
Went to Planet X
Those finds concern religious beliefs prevalent during the Eighth Dynasty of Ammer-Ka; they speak of various Perils—Black, Red, Yellow—evidently cabalistic incantations connected in some way with the mysterious deity Rayss, to whom burnt offerings were apparently made.
STANISLAW LEM, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub
[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency towards myth.
NORTHROP FRYE, Anatomy of Criticism
My superhero-creating or flying-rabbit phase ended when I was eight. By the time I was nine or ten, I had become a confirmed under-the-covers midnight flashlight reader, devoting myself not only to adventure stories but also to comic books of an increasingly wide variety. In my daytime life, I would read anything that was handy, including cereal boxes, washroom graffiti, Reader’s Digests, magazine advertisements, rainy-day hobby books, billboards, and trashy pulps. From this you might conclude that I quite possibly have never been an entirely serious-minded person, or perhaps that I simply have eclectic tastes an
d like to rummage. Given a choice between a stroll in a classic eighteenth-century garden and the chance to paw through someone’s junk-filled attic, I would probably choose the attic. Not every time. But often.
As the twig is bent, so the tree grows, they used to say, so I suppose I should reveal what sort of things bent my own twig; for surely at least some of the books that writers eventually produce as adults are precipitated by what they read avidly as children.
Our house had a ready supply of the same kinds of odd and non-naturalist late-Victorian and Edwardian tales that delighted—for instance—Jorge Luis Borges and many of the “magic realists” that emerged from Latin America in the mid-twentieth century. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen, I read M. R. James, the master of the creepy tale, and all of H. G. Wells’s fantastical stories—The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, “The Country of the Blind,” and many more. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, complete with dinosaurs and Primitive Man, was a favourite; so were H. Rider Haggard’s once highly popular King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and She, with their lost civilizations frequently ruled over by beautiful, shoulder-baring, drapery-fluttering queens; and whatever derivative Boy’s Own Annual adventure stories I could get my hands on.
It goes without saying that I was in love with Sherlock Holmes, and, once I got around to it, with Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe as well. There is something to be said for a greatcoat or trenchcoat, a back alley, and a clenched jaw, and that none of these men au fond had much respect for women did not bother me a whit: the blonde usually did it, and I was not a blonde.
I also read a lot of SF. As I proceeded through high school, I dug into the John Wyndhams—The Day of the Triffids came out in 1951, The Midwich Cuckoos in 1957. I devoured any Ray Bradburys I could get—it was the 1950s, so The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 were both available.
I often read this kind of book when I was supposed to be doing my homework. I was, in fact, leading a double life, or even a triple one: the terms highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow were much in use at that time—the metaphor was based on some idea of Neanderthals having receding foreheads—but I seemed to have a taste for all three kinds of brow, which I can’t say disturbed me. In the classroom we took Shakespeare—a play or two a year—and the romantic and Victorian poets, among others. Over the five years of high school that were mandated there and then, we studied two novels each of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, and we studied them very thoroughly. So it was serious highbrow business during the day. But after school, I would lower my brow and indulge in my guilty pleasures: Donovan’s Brain, The Kraken Wakes, and their ilk.
This pattern continued once I was at university, except that my escapism expanded to include double-bill B sci-fi movies of the lowest possible brow level. I saw The Fly when it first came out, and The Attack of the 60-Foot Woman, whose growth in size rendered her semi-transparent, and The Head That Wouldn’t Die, and The Creeping Eye, a giant eye with tentacles that came from Outer Space like a lot of threatening things in those days, and that—when it finally put in an appearance—had tractor treads clearly visible beneath it. Meanwhile, in my highbrow guise, I was making my way through English literature from Anglo-Saxon to T. S. Eliot, and French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and going to Ingmar Bergman and nouvelle vague films.
It did not entirely escape my notice that Beowulf and The Creeping Eye had a few things in common. Both had monsters. Both had gore. Both had heroes. Jane Austen’s heroines, on the other hand, had money worries instead of talking skulls, and Madame Bovary did not have her still-alive head preserved under a bell jar, complete with Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, but died of overspending. Could it be that the sensational, monster-ridden tales of the distant past—now sanctified as part of our priceless literary canon—were joined at the hip to the sensational, monster-ridden tales of the present, which were vilified as trash?
Why do people tell or write such wonder-tale stories? Or, more generally: why do they tell or write any stories at all? How did stories originate? What purpose do they serve in our lives? Are they the result of nurture—we learn our stories, as children, from the adults around us—or are they built in, hard-wired into the brain in “template” form, thus causing stories to generate semi-spontaneously if the epigenetic switch for them is turned on?
To speculate further: do stories free the human imagination or tie it up in chains by prescribing “right behaviour,” like so many Victorian Christian-pop novels about the virtues of virtuous women? Are narratives a means to enforce social control or a means of escape from it? Is the use of “story” as a synonym for “lie” justified, and if so, are some lies necessary? Are we the slaves of our own stories—our family narratives and dramas, for instance—which compel us to re-enact them? Do stories optimistically help us shape our lives for the better or pessimistically doom us to tragic failure? Do they embody ancient tropes and act out atavistic rituals? Are they essential to us—part of the matrix of our shared humanity? Do we tell them to show off our skills, to unsettle the complacent audience, to flatter rulers, or, as Scheherazade the Queen of Storytelling did, to save our own lives? Are they the foundational bedrock of our various societies, or possibly even our various nations—whether those nations have been aspiring ones, in the throes of defining themselves; imperial ones, justifying their domination of others; or declining ones, lamenting their own passing? Are they inseparable from our cultures, whether ancient cultures encrusted with age-old symbols or recently formed cultures in search of such mental jewellery?
Or are stories just pastimes—old wives’ tales to be spun round a cottage fireplace—or sentimental and sensationalistic novels to be devoured by bored young ladies reclining on nineteenth-century chaises longues, or TV-series spinoffs, a minor part of the entertainment industry—in all cases frivolous by definition? And are slabs of foundational bedrock and frivolous, entertaining pastimes mutually exclusive?
The answers to such questions have varied over the years—indeed, over the millennia—and many heads have literally rolled and many panel discussions have been held over the differences among those answers. It was—once, and in some places—of crucial importance to your continued existence whether you told a story about Augustus Caesar that included divinity among his attributes or whether your story about Abraham had him expelling Hagar and Ishmael into the desert or, on the contrary, claiming Ishmael as his son and co-inheritor. In seventeenth-century New England, your health could be permanently affected by whether your story about witchcraft affirmed or denied its existence. In medieval Europe, it was literally of burning importance to you whether you told a story in which God was three in one, or a story in which he was one alone, or whether your story contained two gods, a good one and a bad one. Orthodox stories of any kind always try to eliminate their competitors.
Stories and the significance given to them can alter very quickly. Five years after the onset of the Salem witchcraft trials and their resulting deaths, several of the New England judges and divines who had egged on the trials were issuing public repentances. “The Devil was indeed among us,” said one, “but not in the form we thought.” Yesterday’s righteously condemned miscreant can become today’s martyr, and vice versa. It all depends on the story. But stories themselves, of one sort or another, are always with us, and are always moving and changing through time.
We live in an age of intense speculation about stories and their origins and purposes. Denis Dutton, in his book The Art Instinct, proposes the notion that the arts—and also the impulse toward religion—are encoded in our genes. According to this theory, artistic capabilities would of necessity be evolved adaptations, acquired during the roughly two million years the human race spent in the Pleistocene as hunter-gatherers. To have been “selected” in this way, the arts would have had to have conferred some noteworthy benefits on us during those millennia; that is, those wh
o demonstrated such abilities as singing, dancing, the making of images, and—for our purposes—the telling of stories would have had a better chance at survival than those without them. That makes a certain sense: if you could tell your children about the time your grandfather was eaten by a crocodile, right there at the bend in the river, they would be more likely to avoid the same fate. If, that is, they were listening.
During those millennia, so far as we can tell, there was nothing we might now consider a “religion”—a theology with a set of worked-out abstract dogmas and special dwellings set aside for worship, such as temples. Instead, beliefs about the unseen or numinous world were integrated into all life because everything was thought to have a soul or essence. Any action performed would therefore have been deeply significant in a way that we in modern, secular, Westernized society can scarcely imagine. Such a worldview would have been rich and wondrous, but it would also have contained many fears—fear of crossing boundaries, of offending divinities, of breaking taboos. There must have been a very thin line between gods and monsters.
Vestiges of that worldview linger in the early literature that has come down to us. Greek mythology abounds with stories in which people are transformed by gods into natural beings such as animals, birds, and trees; and, in return, such natural entities often speak to or communicate with people. It’s noteworthy, too, that in the biblical Book of Exodus God does not appear to Moses in human form; instead he is a voice emanating from the well-known Burning Bush—a bush that is in flames but is not consumed. The bush itself is not God in physical form but an angel or messenger: the narrator of this story is taking care to avoid trapping or limiting God, because a God confined to or circumscribed by a physical object such as a bush—however sacred, inflammable, and loquacious—would be a God that was potentially destructible.
In Other Worlds Page 4
