A few more thoughts on adventure stories...

Thinking about Leigh Brackett's heroes, I might say that however disillusioned they often find themselves at the end of their adventures, their heroism resides in their capacity to remake the world in which they find themselves for the better. Or perhaps that's putting it too strong. Saving a world doesn't automatically improve it, which is why many adventure stories can be read as in some ways fundamentally reactionary. Sometimes Brackett depicts failure, and whatever her heroes' success, their achievements are always within worlds which are subject to history. It's explicitly stated in at least one story that the romantic world of Mars in which their adventures take place is slowly dying. Over a period of centuries, even millenia, this landscape will disapear. Innocence is already lost.

But think about this more generally. All the various permutations of adventure stories that I've read by this point. Success or failure, it's always an isolated individual who is at the centre of the narrative. Part of the promise of an adventure story is that individuals can save their worlds, even improve them, making their worlds more just. Thinking about heroism in the real world, it's easier to see how seductive such a vision is. Not to take anything away from the heroism that exists, but most heroism occurs within social structures. The heroism of soldiers or firemen  for example, is intensely social. Their professions place them in situations where heroism is possible, which is obviously less open to those of us who spend most of our days in an office. Which is not to say that heroism isn't found in other places. For some of us, ordinary life can require quite astonishing acts of bravery, and that's not to be slighted. Still, the kind of heroism that's celebrated in adventure narratives is rarely performed by romantic individuals here in the real world, where it is more likely to be the work of capable professionals who are trained to perform such acts.

If our sensibility is essentially romantic however, then living in a modern world which is currently largely run for the convenience of an essentially sociopathic elite, and in which heroic action can feel severely limited, the appeal becomes obvious. Think about the words which are used to justify the way the world is at present. So often we seem to be told we must be 'realistic', of the need for 'efficiency'. It's also a concious disavowel of romanticism and fantasy. At several points in reading Leigh Brackett's stories, I was reminded of the work of Graham Greene. Greene's characters are found in a world which is closer to the real (which is no doubt why some would argue his work is more mature), but I don't see how his dissillusioned characters are any less romantic. It's just that they exist in a world in which the kind of heroism available to those in a story by Leigh Brackett is no longer possible. That's what happens to heroic action in a world which is realistic.

In all likeliehood, individual heroism of the kind celebrated by adventure fiction has always been a romantic fiction, which might explain why the best of these kind of stories seem to belong to the past, either through their setting, or because that's when they were written. By their very nature perhaps, many adventure stories are looking backwards to a remembered past. As I noted in my previous post about adventure stories, adventure stories promise is a vision of freedom, a freedom from modernity. Which is not to say that the form is automatically reactionary. My admittedly limited awareness is that these days we don't seem to be able to do adventure stories, at least in the more high profile examples of the form where they're hedged about with irony in one way or another. A proper adventure can contain irony, but it still needs to be told straight.

Leigh Brackett...the queen of romantic interplannetry adventure!

Sea-Kings of Mars & Otherworldly Stories

Since I've already referred to this book a couple of times on this blog, I thought it only fair that I should devote a post to it now that I've finally finished it. I took my time with it because I struggle to read more than 600 pages of such writing. It's a little raw, unpolished, at times more concerned with simply getting from a to b as so much adventure writing is, with an obvious focus on action. it's writing for adolescents, which I don't mean as a criticism. I dearly wish I could have discovered this writer when I was on the verge of adolescence, around the same sort of time I was introduced to the work of her friend Michael Moorcock. And The Empire Strikes Back doesn't count, as it turns out that she didn't write the final script which was used for the film. Her posthumous credit was a sign of affection. She was though involved in the scripts for several Howard Hawks movies, including both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, two of my favourite films of Hollywood's golden age.

No matter, whatever her actual contributions to George Lucas' trilogy, a character like Han Solo is clearly a Leigh Brackett protagonist with the serial numbers filed off. She clearly loved that hard bitten, cynical man of action. Elements of the personas of both Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, appropriately enough. Interesting that from her descriptions, her most famous character, Eric John Stark, hero of three tales in this collection, appears to be black. Not that that's reflected in any cover art I've been able to find online. And Stark's Tarzan-like origin on Mercury as 'N'Chaka' suggests a white skin, growing up amongst savage tribespeople. Still, we're told so often about his dark skin that it doesn't seem wholly inconsistent with what's written. And it's refreshing to think that one of the major heroes of this era of pulp science fiction might have been black.

But yes, as the reference to Tarzan surely suggests, she romanticises primitivism, but so what? It's her romanticism about her fantastical vision of Mars which is surely the main attraction of her fiction. The plots are fairly simple, often reliant on tropes such as telepathy and lost races. What's really powerful is the atmosphere, redolent of fantasies of North Africa and heavy with a sense of ill defined loss, and her powerful descriptions of Mars' landscape. A late story like 'The Last Days of Shandakor', unusually for her told in the first person, is largely plotless, and all the better for it. With many of her stories, I found my attention tended to drift a little as we reached the usually action packed climax of the story. What I most wanted was simply to inhabit this magical, barely habitable Mars for as long as possible. And whilst she may be guilty of romanticising primitivism, a prominent themes is the clash between Mars' aborigines and Earth's destructive bureaucracy. Politically she is on the right side, as far as I'm concerned. Tyrany and authoritarianism, whatever forms they take, is always resisted by her otherwise cynical heroes. Brackett's use of telepathy is interesting in this light. It nearly always takes the form of bodily possession, literally conquering another person's self in taking away their body.

But at times, Leigh Brackett can feel like a bizarrely post-colonial writer! The use of North Africa in the creation of her fictional Mars is obvious - there's even a city called Barrakesh, so it's not like it isn't in plain site - do seem to invite an Orientalist reading. It's difficult to know quite what to make of all this. Her writing displays an obvious love with her invented alien world and cultures, and undoubtedly part of waht's so attractive is a romanticisation of North Africa, which reminds me of something I read online a while ago, that exoticism isn't always a bad thing, because it also expresses a liking for what's being exoticised. It can be the beginning of an engagement with a real place. Something of this development can be traced in this collection, where the final story, the last one Leigh Brackett wrote about Mars, before her romantic vision was lost to our advances in knowledge about the real Mars, is the most explicit confrontation with issues of colonialism of any of them. Here the villains aren't some mysterious lost race as in so many of her stories, but liberal do-gooders who really want to help the natives. The means by which they are ultimately persuaded to stop their interverence might feel implausible, but then this is an adventure story. Some of the endings to other stories are rather more bittersweet, even downbeat. It's actually quite rare that Brackett leaves you with a simple feeling of victory. So her romaticism isn't so far away from the real world after all.

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

'We are not concerned,' he said, 'with long-winded creations, with long-term beings. Our creatures will not be the heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise; their characters - without a background. Sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. We openly admit: we shall not insist either on durability or solidity of workmanship; our creations will be temporary, to serve for a single occasion....'

Bruno Schulz, 'Talior's Dummies'

I always knew I'd love the work of Bruno Schulz. Obviously, since I loved Kafka. And the Quay brothers' film of The Street of Crocodiles. He didn't publish much, and I must have passed over a copy of his collected fiction in more than one second hand bookshop, which is where I turned up this edition of his first book. Originally titled Cinnamon Shops in it's original Polish publication in 1934. I don't know why they used a title of another of the stories for the English edition, except perhaps that it sounds more evocative, more indicative of the way his stories and language infuse objects with life, a quality which is magically captured by the Quays' stop motion animation. It's such good writing that the temptation is just to go on quoting him, instead of going to the bother trying to define what it is one likes about it.

Emerging from a similar middle European background as Kafka, both from former outposts of the Austro Hungarian empire, you can see why they might get bracketed together, although in fact the translator's introduction suggests Schulz didn't read The Trial until after his first book was published. And whilst there is perhaps something of a kinship between the two, a similarly subterranean imagination, there are surely just as many differences. Whereas the Father in Kafka is a menacing incarnation of the Law, Schulz's Father is eccentric, something of a clown and buffoon. A figure of authority certainly, but a much more equivocal one. Where Kafka's stories come in shades of grey, Schulz writing delights in colour. In place of Kafka's impenetrable bureaucracies, Schulz celebrates his memories of a provincial petit-bourgeoisie life.

'Memory' is the right word here. So many of his stories begin by placing their events in a particular time within their first line, but this particularity is unsettled by the way in which it's only 'that' July, or August, or Winter. These months and seasons have no relation to each other, no stable chronology so that we're stranded in the eternal flow of memory. For it is always inevitably past. The translator describes it perceptibly as a 'sunken world, lost forever under the lava of history', which gets to the heart of it really well. It's not 'nostalgia', a word I sometimes worry that I overuse on this blog, and in any case there are plenty of works about the remembering the past which don't fit comfortably within the term. It's not the pain of remembering, or the slightly fuzzy cossiness into which much our contemporary culture has transformed the term. Reading these stories I was thinking that I could think of nothing else like them in English, except perhaps the work of Terrence Davies, but that may only be because I received a DVD set of his films at Christmas and recently saw Distant Voices, Still Lives for the first time. There's the same disorientation of memory, the lack of sentimentality, and a very complicated longing, because what's being remembered is as much a source of trauma as it is something the author would wish to regain. We maybe need another term to describe this sensibility. 'Remembrancer' is the slightly clunky term John Fowles coined to describe Flora Thompson's work, and may serve for lack of anything else.

Perhaps that wound would be harder to heal too, if only the present were more welcoming. To belabour the comparison with Kafka, another difference is that Schulz seems more self conscious about his fiction, if this doesn't contradict what I've written above, placing his fantastical transformations within an historical context. Where Kafka transcribes his dreams of his present, the fiction all encompassing, for Schulz this all took place in the past. The present, as encountered in the story 'The Street of Crocodiles', is shoddy and badly made, flimsy and grey. A common trope of modernity perhaps, which here also includes such horrors as miscegenation and effeminacy. This upsets me rather, as it always does when you discover that someone you like might hold opinions which you find offensive. To quote from the translator's introduction one final time, the world his fiction remembers is a patriarchal one. It's inevitable perhaps that such a world would find those aspects of modernity particularly troubling. And in any case, at the story's end Schulz undercuts his tirade when he observes that this area of the city wasn't as bad as he makes out in the story, merely an impoverished provincial reflection of metropolitan reality. It's always remembered aslant, as it were. And it's also the consciousness of being provincial. There's always an elsewhere to which you are looking.

Adela, leaning against the balcony rails, bent over the distant, stormy roar of the city, caught from it all the louder accents and, with a smile, put together the lost syllables of a song, trying to join them, to read some sense into the rising and falling grey monotony of the day.

Bruno Schulz, 'The Comet'

The Sea! The Sea!

"Compass - Life Jacket - Windgauge - What strange, awe-inspiring words!"

Tove Jansson, 'Moomin and the Sea', The Collected Moomin Comic Strips, Volume 3