Part 3 Something Of Value I
October 24, 2007
SOMETHING OF VALUE I, PART III
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3 of Vol. I.
Freud was severely emasculated in both personal ego and in his group ego. He was in fact a practicing homosexual. His relationship with Fliess was homosexual in nature which Freud confessed vowing never to do it again. His group, the Jews, were and are a severely emasculated people. They have been since they walked away from Ur. But on with Freud.
Freud was fond of telling the story of his father and his hat, it seems that Mr. Freud related a story to Sigmund, or Sigismund as he was known then, (His Hebrew name significantly was Solomon) of how when he was a young man walking down the street proudly wearing his new hat, a gentile knocked the hat from his head into the gutter, snarling: ‘Go get your hat, Jew.’
When Sigmund asked breathlessly what his father did, expecting an heroic response, the old gentleman replied: ‘I stepped into the gutter and picked up my hat.’ severely disappointing the young boy.
Since Freud told and retold this story we may be forgiven for believing it had a profound effect on his young conscious and subconscious minds and possibly his ‘unconscious’ too. On the one hand he may have been so ashamed of his father’s very reasonable reaction that he shared his emasculation encapsulating it in his subconscious as a fixation. It is possible that this story either made or contributed to his homosexuality. On the other hand we know for a fact that it inflamed his group ego with an ardent desire for revenge against the gentiles.
As a result of the story he made the Carthaginian Semite, Hannibal, his alter ego. When Hannibal’s father was defeated by the Romans he had his son swear that the would never cease waging war on the Romans until he died. Obviously Freud made his vow against the Europeans although his father didn’t demand it.
It is no coincidence that both Freud and Hannibal were Semites and that the Romans and Europeans were gentiles. Nor is it a coincidence that both Hannibal and Freud were defeated after seemingly winning the war and that rather than fighting the enemy to the end both fled. Now, it therefore follows that Freud never ceased waging war against the Europeans.
You say: How? Come along. I can’t take you into the Inner Sanctum, which way you will have to find on your own, but I can show you some of the records I have been allowed to abstract from the files.
This will involve the secret history of the human race but don’t be alarmed. If you don’t want to believe it you don’t have to. It still is a rousing good story. Besides, if you should ever come around the archives you’ll find it is true.
Freud himself made an attempt to explain a little of the origins of the Jewish psyche in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and Moses And Monotheism. The earlier millennia don’t concern us here. The Jews throughout history in their egotism have felt much put upon. This sense of grievance grew until with the expulsion from Spain after the Reconquest their sense of injustice burst into open flames. The group swore revenge on Europe. It must be remembered that at the end of the thirteenth century they were expelled from England, at the beginning of the fourteenth from France and for the duration, well, they were really welcome nowhere.
They swore to stultify Europe. Judaism is the history of messianism.
Sabbatai Zevi.
Zevi- The Last Of The Messiahs
This man was the last great messianic imposter. In 1666, the number of the beast plus a thousand, the Jews of Europe awaited the word from Sabbatai, then at the Ottoman Court to begin the slaughter. But Zevi apostatized to Moslemism instead. The uprising never came off. Hung fire. Fizzled.
Hope beats eternal. The learned Rabbis vowed never to place their hopes on a single individual again. They now concocted a plan for the group to rise as one man in rebellion. The date selected for the revolution was the period 1913-28. You want to give yourself a little leeway there. Born in 1856, in 1913 Sigmund Freud was fifty-seven years old. Although none of his biographers say much about his his Jewish background it is quite clear that he was read in Jewish lore. You may say that he wasn’t a religious Jew but he nevertheless was devoutly Jewish.
Freud quite consciously hated the gentiles for personal reasons that meshed quite well into those of his group identity.
During 1913-17 Freud’s reputation was immense both within and without the Jewish community. It was true his heir apparent, C.J. Jung had broken with him perhaps for this very reason but he and Psychoanalytic Movement had suffered no damage.
In psychoanalyis Freud had the means to instruct his group and control the gentiles. It is said that he gave up hypnotism when he turned to psychoanalysis but as a perusal of ‘Group Psychology’ will show he was preparing for a breathtaking attempt at hypnotizing the entire Western world not unlike that of Burroughs’ Lotharians against their invaders.
Freud lived in Vienna where for years, even decades before 1913, emigrating Jews had flowed through from the entry port into Austria from the East of Brody on their way to America via the North German ports. The prosperity of the whole German shipping lines was built on steerage passengers. Nor were the decisions to emigrate necessarily individual; it may have begun that way but to emigrate was soon organized and directed by the international Jewish community. Check the career of Baron Maurice Hirsch.
The Jewish establishments of both Europe and America provided funding. At about this time provisions were made to transport the entire Jewish population of the Pale, from Lithuania to Romania, to the United States Of America. At the time the international Jewish goverment led by Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall was located in the United States, New York City. The decks were being cleared so as to remove resistance in America. So as not to call too much attention to the fact by having hordes disembark entirely in New York and Boston, for there would be resistance however feeble, the ports of New Orleans and Galveston were organized to deal with millions of immigrants.
This plan was aborted by the Great War. The Jews had already been at war with Russia, or the Czar as they personalized it, for a hundred years. The international Jewish community had engineered the Russo-Japanese war almost pulling off a revolution in its wake in 1905.
Activities were now intensified. At the time and for about the next sixty years the Jews threw a veil of obfuscation over their activities always denying involvement in Communist or Revolutionary matters. In recent years Jewish scholars, for whatever reason, have now found it expedient to admit that which they were accused of but always denied. They now admit that every national subversive Communist part was over fifty percent Jewish. Those of Russia and Germany were considerably higher. Freud had been involved in Jewish subversive organizations like the B’nai B’rith for many years. As the master psychologist, an expert in the unconscious, he prepared the Jewish mind for the great task of the millennial years in Central and Eastern Europe, which would require much bloodshed, while formulating his psychological plan of conquest not dissimilar from the military plans of his hero, Hannibal.
Freud himself was centered in Vienna. A lieutenant, Abraham, was his man in Berlin while Frerenczi was posted to Budapest in Hungary. The three crucial central European points were covered. Jung in Zurich had split off shortly before this. It is interesting that the Jewish psychoanalytic extablishment spitefully denounced him as a Nazi.
The Jewish millennial years began in 1913. The Great War began in 1914. The Bolshevik Revolution occurred in 1917. Freud’s Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis appeared in 1917 also, even though there must have been an extreme paper shortage; it is not a short book. Freud encoded last minute instructions to the Revolutionists in the book.
At this point in 1917 Freud released the inhibitions of millions of Mr. Hydes in Russia, Hungary and Germany. The Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war signing a seemingly humiliating peace treat at Brest-Litovsk. As Lenin said the peace treaty was meaningless because it was his intent to stab Germany in the back.
Germany had a huge Communist Party which it is now admitted was around sixty percent Jewish. Now with the United States in the war, Germany debilitated internally and crippled psychologically, thousands of Jewish revolutionaries intent on the realization of the millennium flowed back into Germany from Russia in hopes of achieving the Revolution there, giddy with the hopes of thereby annexing Central and Eastern Europe. That they didn’t was because of the efforts of the German Volkish groups such as Hitler and his Nazi Party.
The unconscious psychoses of the Jewish people who it will be remembered as a group were suffering from severe emasculation were erupting. Emasculation of the Ego is always expressed in a sexual manner frequently sadistic. Freud had been preaching the practice of unrestrained sexual activity for years. Murder is a sexual act. He was against ‘repression’ you remember.
When Russia began its program of expansion under the Romanovs it annexed an enormous number of nationalities. The Russians then tried to impose their language and manners on the conquered peoples in an attempt to form an homogeneous State. In so doing they emasculated the subject peoples. Those same subject peoples were now the masters of the Russians with permission to indulge their ‘unconscious.’
Jews, Letts, Poles and others let loose. Stalin himself was a Georgian.
Jacob Schiff- PM of the International Jewish Government at this time.
As Jean Genet correctly saw of the Nazi State, in Russia a criminal intellect was now joined to the political and legal apparatus of the State. The criminal code was changed from an objective one to a subjective one; one of vengeance. For a period of years law was suspended in Russia. Amidst the chaos International Jewish organizations including those of the United States operated openly to coordinate their hopes for the millennium.
Bela Kun- Communist Psychopath
What I’m about to say has been denied and suppressed but the example was before both Hitler and Stalin. In Hungary Freud had his man Ferenczi to coordinate the Hungarian Jews. The Jewish Bela Kun (Cohn) seized the government beginning a reign of terror against the gentiles during which thousands of non-Jews were murdered in a horrible sadistic manner commensurate with a severely emasculated Ego.
For some time the Jews had been clamoring for a State of their own. Taking advantage of the chaos in Russia the Jewish American Joint Distribution Committee under the leadership of Schiff and Marshall decided to appropriate the Crimea. Bela Kun who had escaped Hungary during the inevitable reaction, going to Moscow, was sent down to the Crimea to exterminate the population to make lebensraum for the Jews. He was in the process when Lenin died. Stalin then recalled him to Moscow where he was subsequently shot.
All these activities were obscured and suppressed. It is forbidden in American universities to study the subject to this day.
Still, Europe was so horrified that they declined to discuss it or even acknowledge it. But Hitler and Stalin remembered.
The Communists in Moscow being composed solely of emasculated peoples functioning from Freud’s vision of the unconscious like so many Hydes conducted a criminal homosexual style State that would have delighted Genet had he been there. The author the The Thief’s Journal would have gasped at the warehouses full of stolen furs, diamonds and other jewels, art objects and whatever of value that the poor emasculated wretches had stolen from their murdered victims. It was the triumph of the Common Man.
As soon as Stalin gained power he began to discredit and remove Jews from influential positions. Trotsky was sent to a malarial swamp in Siberia to die but from which he escaped to be killed by Stalin’s assasins later. As Stalin consolidated his power he acted more directly until he held the famous show trials of 1936. He then began the systematic elimination of Jews which resulted by the end of 1945 in the death of millions.
Adolf Hitler
Joseph Stalin
Thus Hitler, an emasculated man leading an emasculated people had the Judaeo-Communist example before him. As an avid anti-Communist and open anti-Semite he was virtually isolated by the world that by 1936 was under the control of Judaeo-Communists. He was the antagonist not the protagonist.
While Stalin who had religious training was clever enough to seemingly work through the system openly followed legal controlled methods although the law had been subordinated to his ends. Hitler acted as a homosexual with an ax in his hand. Stalin’s officers dispatched prisoners hidden in the depths of the Lubyanka with a bullet in the back of the head, which method, by the way, was favored by Jewish and Italian members of Organized Crdime in America of the time, while the Nazis brutally beat prisoners, finally shooting them in the back while escaping.
Stalin, Hitler, Freud, which was worse? Freud enabled, Stalin and Hitler executed. They were all the same.
In Russia during the first year or so of Lenin some Russian workers were being read to as they worked. Were they being read the works of Marx or Lenin? No. They were being read the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burrougs. This infuriated the Politburo. The State was trying to impose a collectivist unconscious psychology on the Russians while Burroughs and his great psychological projection were individualist and responsible. In fact, Burroughs offered a concept of the unconscious which was directly opposed to that of Freud. One might say that Burroughs was Dr. Jekyll to Freud’s Mr. Hyde.
Burroughs himself had been severely emasculated at the age of nine. The situation seems to be this: Burroughs came from a prosperous Chicago family. His parents were very proud of their English ancestry. If you’re unwilling to understand national and racial prejudices that were very pronounced at the time then you probably won’t be able to understand. There were strong feelings between the Anglo-Saxon and Celt or English and Irish. The Anglos considered the Celts if not inferior at least eccentric. The Burroughses employed two Irish girls as servants. In all probability Young Burroughs assumed an attitude of superiority which the girls resented. They then concocted a plan to cut young Burroughs down to size.
They had a friend or relative by the name of John who was aged twelve to Burroughs’ nine. Being much larger and tougher than Burroughs he stopped the younger boy on the way to school one day where he thoroughly intimidated and terrified him. It is quite possible that Burroughs messed his pants. In any event, he suffered severe emasculation that was to haunt him all his life. He does not seem to have ever practiced homosexuality although he was haunted by a feeling of sexual ambiguity.
The incident with John the Bully not only played havoc with Burroughs personal psychlogy in the narrow sense of creating a psychosis but there was also an effect in what Freud’s erstwhile associate, C. J. Jung called the collective unconscious. The individual is limited by his very humanity to a small number of general responses.
Thus Burroughs was given a cast of mind which the Hindus denoted as Shivaistic. This is a general outlook or philosophy of life, if you wish, which one adopts unconsciously as the consequence of one’s experience. I share it although it took me nearly a lifetime to recognize and accept it.
Edgar Allan Poe- The Father Of Modern Literature
Burroughs himself was aware of the fact by at least 1931 when he wrote Tarzan And The Leopard Men. In one key or on one level the story is one of Shiva and Kali his consort. Burroughs names his heroine Kali while she is selected to be the White Goddess of the Leopard Men as part of their death cult.
As can be seen by their complete disregard for life Freud, Hitler and Stalin were also Shivaites.
Shiva and Kali are the Hindu representation of Life and Death. Shiva plays unconcernedly on the pipes while the carnage of life and death goes on around him. The song goes on. Kali, his consort, the goddess of death and regeneration dances on the bodies of the dead to Shiva’s music while wearing a necklace of skulls. Death means nothing because she as the eternal mother has the means to multiply unendingly. Do multitudes die? Why then, multitudes die. Not to worry. Life goes on.
Burroughs also developed an interest in psychology in his attempt to free his mind of the fixation given him by John the Bully. As his psychological notions were well formed by 1911 when he began to write in his attempt to expiate his guilt it follows that he acquired his knowledge during his early married years from 1900 to 1911. He married at 24. He had little opportunity to do his reading before then as the major works were only appearing in the late ’90s.
His main concern was the subconscious mind. While his evolutionary ideas are easier to trace he has left no mention of his psychological reading. It seems certain that he was familiar with FWH Myers who, as noticed, first defined the notion of the unconscious in 1886. He must have read James while Freud’s notions would have been discussed, if not yet translated; thus DH Lawrence had highly developed ideas on the Freudian unconscious in his 1911 Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious while I doubt Burroughs had read Freud in the German.
Also it seems probable that Burroughs had read Le Bon.
Burroughs’ idea of the unconscious differed greatly from Freud’s while being more soundly based in the actual functioning of the mind. While Burroughs’ hero Tarzan seems to function with an integrated personality from his creation in 1911-12 Burroughs himself came very close to integrating his own from 1913 to ’17 or may have although he always had trouble with his Animus and Anima.
Even though Freud advertised the fact that he had taken a year off (golly, a whole year) for self-analysis, whatever the results may have been he never succeeded in integrating his personality or, apparently, realized he should have. He was severely conflicted all his life. Just take a look at his photo where you can see that huge welt running from his lover right cheek across his nose into his forehead. That was caused either by excessive cocaine use or mental conflict in the brain stem, probably both.
As did all mythographers, Burroughs had read his Poe, like them he was concerned with the conscious and subconscious minds. While Stevenson’s Jekyll lost his conscious mind in his subconscious mind, Burroughs cencentrated on the concept of the beast within the man, the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious. In Chapter 3 of The Return Of Tarzan, in what appears to be a plagiarization of the murder scene of Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue, Burroughs has Tarzan act out the parts of both the Sailor and the Orang.
Lured up to the apartment on the pretext of helping a young woman, Tarzan is set upon by her accomplices. Discarding the trappings of his recently acquired civilization Tarzan reverts to his anthropoid education of the Jungle becoming Poe’s Orang, yet always retaining the restraints of his humanity or the Sailor.
When the police come he leaps out the window to a telephone pole which one imagines were more common in Chicago than Paris. (Burroughs had never been to Paris so he replicated the urban scene he knew.) While still in his ape guise he has the sense to look down where he sees a policeman below so he climbs up leaping to a rooftop.
Racing across the rooftops of Paris he climbs down another pole. Then in a Hyde-like transformation back to Jekyll he shakes himself from his ape self back into his human self, without the aid of drugs, enters a restaurant to clean up in the rest room then saunter jauntily down the street as though nothing had happened.
Thus the plagiarization of not only Poe but Stevenson was merely an attempt to give a better solution by using the mythological symbols.
Return was written at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913.
Burroughs’ own self-analysis would continue through his astonishing output of 1911-17 when he finally integrated his personality with the final volume of his Mucker Trilogy published as the Oakdale Affair but alternately titled Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid which is the better title. At that time he had exorcised his major fixations which should have integrated his personality.
In understanding that the disintegration of the personality was caused by an affront or affronts to the Ego or Animus that resulted in the creation of fixations that festered in the subconscious that in turn manufactured affects that evidenced themselves in various physical and psychological ways he realized that the same could be exorcised returning the Ego to a whole state.
Unfortunately he strung his theory on through a couple dozen works of fiction disguised as incident. A very few would read all the novels while the only possible interpreters could be those who had read them all not only with a psychological background but an open, inquisitive mind. We’re a very small minority.
If I hadn’t been through the same process on my own I probably never would have recognized it. However as his theories were embodied in his hero Tarzan as mythology they passed into the unconscious of his readers of which, as a teenager, I was one, so shall we say, my mind was prepared.
A Review: 1921’s The Sheik by E.M. Hull
October 12, 2007
A Contribution To The Edgar Rice Burroughs
Library Project.
A Review
The Sheik
by
E.M. Hull
by R.E. Prindle
The Novel
The Sheik by E.M. Hull is found in ERB’s library. The novel published at the beginning of 1921 was a runaway bestseller going through thirty-0ne printings by October. My copy is of the thirty-first printing. How many more it may have gone through I am not aware.
The book was quickly made into the movie of the same name starring Rudolph Valentino and released on November 20th of the same year. Thus the impact would have been redoubled on ERB reading the book and seeing the movie.
Having troubles in his relations with Emma, he was somewhat bedeviled by what she wanted as Freud was by what women wanted. The Sheik presented one woman’s solution to the problem of what women want. The Englishwoman E.M. Hull examined the problem in some detail. Her solution would find expression in ERB’s Tarzan And The Ant Men of 1923 in the story of the Alalus women.
2.
While Mrs. Hull’s novel is invariably reviewed as a soft core porn novel it is actually quite a serious attempt to explore what women want. Not a potboiler, the story is well thought out and carefully constructed.
The story falls into the category of the desert nomad thriller.
The scene is somewhere between Biskra and Oran in Algeria. Biskra is the southernmost point on the railroad from the coast to the Sahara in the East of Algeria. It is an oasis area and was a winter resort for Europeans. This area was also the scene of Robert Hitchen’s The Garden Of Allah and the Sahara scenes from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Return Of Tarzan.
The Author
As with Hitchens’ the desert serves as a symbol for self-realization and redemption. The story was written as the career of the rebel Abd El Krim was reaching its apex in the Rif. Krim’s story was terrifically romantic for women of the era. I had a high school history teacher in the fifties who was still capable of gushing about Krim thinking him the most manly and desirable of men.
As with Hitchens the story revolves around a man and a woman. The woman an Englishwoman and the man a Krim like sheik of the desert.
3.
The woman is appropriately named Diana. Diana was the virgin huntress of Greek mythology who spurned all relations with men thus putting her in enmity with Aphrodite. She is somehow related to the Lady Of The Lake of ancient Lacedaemon which name means Lady Of The Lake and in a line of progression to the Northern European archetype of the second half of the Piscean Age. This is a rather strange female archetype to represent the Northern European psyche. She is a cold unloving symbol that may have something to do with the European character.
Whether Mrs. Hull knew these things or not she represents them perfectly in her story. This is quite extraordinary.
Thus her Diana was raised by her brother as a boy. She is represented throughout the story as an ambiguous girl-boy, nearly a hermaphrodite. She is herself a skilled huntress who has no use for men. As the story opens she has yet to be kissed. Mrs. Hull skillfully represents the respect that Northern European men have for their women which in itself may be conditioned by the Diana image. They are easily put off. When one man asks Diana for a kiss he accepts his rejection with equanimity asking only if they can at least be pals.
The Sheik as the wild man of the desert knowing no law but his will offers quite a contrast. By the time of Mrs. Hull’s novel ERB had already explored the same literary territory in the Return Of Tarzan and The Lad And The Lion as well as The Cave Girl. I would hesitate to say Mrs. Hull had read Burroughs but the Sheik is portrayed as a Tarzan like superman in a decidedly pulp manner.
The Sheik does not observe any civilized niceties. At one point Mrs. Hull refers to his civilization being less than skin deep. As the Sheik, Ahmed, says, if he wants something he takes it. Having seen Diana in the marketplace of Biskra he sets out to kidnap and rape her. There are no other words for it and Mrs. Hull does not mince them.
His plan worked out so that he buys off Diana’s desert guide to deliver her to him on the first night out of Biskra. Prior to that he surreptitiously serenaded her on the night before even entering her room in the dark while she is there to replace the bullets in her pistol with blanks to prevent her from shooting him in the desert which she did attempt to do.
4.
Now, Mrs. Hull is presenting an allegory so the novel is filled with symbols. The key symbol is the horse. The horse is, of course, a symbol of the female associated with the Greek god Poseidon. In ancient times the symbol of the bull was associated with the missing y chromosome of the female being replaced in Patriarchal times with the horse. Thus the Patriarchal goddess Athene is sometimes represented as horse headed.
When the guide brings Diana a horse to ride it is a magnificent creature much better than she might have expected from a commercial enterprise. The horse has actually been provided by Ahmed the Sheik so as Diana leaves Biskra she is already mounted on the Sheik’s horse- a powerful sexual symbol. The horse is trained to respond to signals from The Sheik.
The story is filled with horses and horse races between she and the Sheik. In one race the Sheik gives her a minute to stop or he will shoot her horse dead which he does. He then places Diana in front of him on his horse (these horses are all magnificent and beyond magnificent) at which point she realizes that she is not only in love with the Sheik but has been for some time.
Previous to this time she had noted in the camp
…but it was the horses that struck Diana principally. They were everywhere, some tethered, some wandering loose, some excercising in the hands of grooms.
So everywhere is the symbol of the female. At this stage Diana has been sexually subordinated to the Sheik but she is intellectually resisting. The Sheik puts on a demonstration of how useless her resistance is as he fully intends to break her.
A man eater is brought out who has killed a man earlier that morning. The horse obviously represents Diana. Some two or three men attempt to break the horse but they all fail. Then the Sheik mounts. The result is a thoroughly exhausted and beaten horse. She stops fighting with her legs splayed while the Sheik jumps off. Then the horse rolls over left with no will of its own.
This is exactly Diana’s situation. Earlier she had boasted to her brother: I will do what I choose, and I will never obey any will but my own.
That is now proven an empty boast as the Diana riding in front of the Sheik chooses to obey the Sheik’s will.
Perhaps Mrs. Hull has prophesied the submission of England’s will of today to the desert Sheiks. As of now the Moslems have all but assumed religious control of England. Thus England as Diana has submitted its sexuality to the sons of the Sheiks.
However Diana’s Sheik still has to prove himself as the dominant male of his society to retain her allegiance. One hesitates to say that she perversely tests him nevertheless having been cautioned to take care on her desert rides she insists on going too far afield. Naturally she and her seven man escort are ambushed by the fat swarthy greasy rival sheik’s men. Six of the seven escorts die joyously defending their sheik’s property. The seventh, the sheik’s European manservant gets the classic bullet crease alongside the head. Diana disappears into the fat greasy sheik’s tent. This guy is everything an Arab sheik should have been in contemporary European eyes. Fat, greasy, swarthy, unbelievably smelly, uncouth to the nth degree. There’s no doubt there’s the fate worse than death for the boyish, sylphlike, slender, lithe Diana. Yes, it seems pretty certain, unless…
Here comes the Sheik with a small but loyal and dedicated band of followers eager to die for their leader. Just as the greasy, swarthy sheik has got it out and ready in crashes Ahmed in the nick of time. Rather than shooting the bastard and getting it over with he wants to dispatch El Greaso by hand. As we all know strangling a a struggling strong man takes a little time. Enough time for El Greaso’s vile Ebon followers to burst into the tent. Right behind them come Ahmed’s men. Shades of Tarzan! Ahmed takes a severe blow to the head and a couple long blades in the back.
Will he live? After muttering a couple pages similar to the last words of Dutch Schultz the matter is in the hands of Allah and the European surgeon. As much as I like having god on my side, in certain situations a good surgeon is even better.
Nevertheless if Ahmed lives he has proven himself to be the right man for Diana. Interestingly the virgin huntress has submitted to the law of Aphrodite. The European archetype has accepted the dominance of the Moslem Arab.
Well, almost. In the first place the tribe of Ahmed is very interesting according to his French friend who arrived in time for the big battle. It seems that Ahmed’s tribe is different from the rest of the desert greasers. It is inferred that his tribe is one of the legendary White tribes supposed to be living in the Sahara. Undoubtedly a surviving remnant of Atlantis that moved South when the Mediterranean flooded.
Why, in addition, it turns out that Ahmed isn’t even an Arab. It seems that he’s actually English. Well, an English Spanish blend. His English father when in his cups did some unspeakable thing to Ahmed’s mother when she was pregnant with him and she was found by Ahmed Sr. Ahmed Jr.’s adopted father wandering dazed and confused beneath the broiling desert sun.
Taken in she dropped Ahmed Jr. and died. The baby was raised as the successor to Ahmed Sr. But he developed an uncontrollable hatred for England, its people and all things English. That’s why he captured and raped Diana over and over. But it’s OK, they both realize they love each other now.
The lesson seems to be that that’s what woman wants: a man who can earn her repect by dominating and controlling her while at the same time being the dominant male in his society, being able to provide all her wants and desires while being able to defend her from the El Greasos of the world. So all the necessary elements come together here and we have a marriage if not made in heaven perfect for terrestrial travails.
If nothing else ERB learned where he had failed Emma in the beginning but who now wondered in his own role of sheik where the rewards from Emma were.
I’m going to speculate that ERB read the story in 1921. He might have enjoyed Valentino in the movie but I think it improbable that the silent film came near capturing the nuances of the novel. I’m sure the signficance of Diana as female European archetype didn’t come through on celluloid.
Was it even in Mrs. Hull’s mind one may perhaps ask. Is it possible I’m projecting my beliefs on Mrs. Hull’s story? It is possible but consider this passage in The Sheik:
He was so young, so strong, so made to live. He had so much to live for. He was essential to his people. They needed him. If she could only die for him. In the days when the world was young the gods were kind, they listened to the prayers of hapless lovers and accepted the life they were offered in the place of the beloved whose life was claimed. If God would but listen to her now.
So we know that Mrs. Hull was read in Greek mythology. It would seem inevitable that she was familiar with the stories of King Arthur to some degree. Certainly she knew the story of Merlin and Vivian. She was a writer. Knowing little about Mrs. Hull it is impossible for me to know for certain exactly what she read or understood. And yet, there it is in the pages of her novel if one has eyes to see. The Sheik is as much a work of mythology as is that of Burroughs’ Tarzan. It is possible that neither was conscious of what they were saying but the information taken into their minds was transformed subconsciously, at least, into the form in which it issued forth from their pens. It works that way for writers. I am often astonished at the subliminal message of what I write. Did I intend it? Must have. There it is. Still, I do put myself into a mild trance when I’m writing so that I concentrate on words rather than ideas. So the words are more conscious while the content is more subliminal. We know ERB wrote from a trancelike state and Mrs. Hull’s story has that quality. I think we have enough evidence to know that she had read the mythological material so that whether she had consciously formulated her ideas they come out in her writing. In short, I don’t think I’m projecting much if anything. Tra la.
There is no doubt that The Sheik made a big impression on ERB. The question is how did he understand it. His first reaction appeared in 1923’s Tarzan And The Ant Men in the weird parody of the Alalus people in which he reverses the male-female roles with the women being stronger and dominant. As Ahmed figures the women brutally dominate the men. Using them for sexual pleasure then discarding them. ERB’s story seems to be tongue in cheek but without a reference point the ridiculous story is hard to follow. With E.M. Hull’s The Sheik I believe we have the reference point.
It seems clear that Mrs. Hull was influenced by Robert Hitchens’ The Garden Of Allah. What is not clear is whether she was influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs and if so by what novels. The Sheik follows a pulp format. So, if Mrs. Hull read the pulps on a regular basis there is no reason to believe that she was not familiar with some of his work as Burroughs certainly by 1920 when she probably began the novel was already the premier pulp writer.
If that was the case it seems likely that she might have read The Return Of Tarzan and The Lad And The Lion, perhaps The Cave Girl. If she read Lad then she reversed the roles of the chief male and female characters making the Woman English and the man Arab.
I haven’t read the magazine version of The Lad And The Lion so I am not sure of the specific changes ERB made between the 1913 version and the 1938 rewrite for book publication. The rewrite shows clear evidence of influence from The Sheik unless of course Mrs. Hull was reflecting the influence of the Lad on herself. In any event the two books reflect an influence from one to the other.
So, as with Trader Horn and Burroughs it is possible that Hull was influenced by Burroughs and with both of these authors Burroughs reading of them was reflected in his subsequent writing.
Our list of reciprocal influences is growing when one adds that of H.G. Wells. What once seemed simple grows more complex.
Postscript: I have since learned that Mrs. Hull was a student of mythology.
Something Of Value I
October 1, 2007
Something Of Value I
by
R.E. Prindle
If a man does away
With his traditional way of living
And throws away his good customs,
He had better first make certain
That he has something of value to replace them.
–Basuto proverb as quoted by Robert Ruark
Dedicated to
Greil Marcus
Part One
One Hundred Years In The Sewers Of Paris
With Jean Valjean.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud
And The Myth Of The Twentieth Century
1.
The Concepts Of The Unconscious And Emasculation
It has been truly said that man does not live by bread alone. He also requires a mythic foundation on which to base his actions. In the neolithic era his mythology was governed by a Matriarchal vision of reality. In the subsequent Egypto-Greco-Mesopotamian mythology the Matriarchal series went through a revision being replaced by an advanced Patriarchal mythological consciousness. This system was followed by the Judaeo-Christian mythological system which endured as the basis of mythological belief until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the belief system was subverted by the emergence of the Scientific Consciousness.
Unlike the mythopoeic consciousness which preceded it the Scientific Consciousness left no place for supernatural explanations; all had to be explained within a rational scientific framework. This placed a great strain on a significant portion of the population which did not have the intellectual equipment to evolve. Thus the basis of psychological comfort provided by religion was destroyed. The code of behavior seemingly sent down from the sky had lost its validity.
In place of an apparent unified consciousness it now became noticeable that EuroAmerican man had an unconscious or subconscious mind as well as a conscious mind. Thus another evolutionary degree of differentiation unfolded that separated the advanced Scientific Consciousness from the anterior Religious Conciousness. A struggle has ensued in which advanced people are compelled to reintegrate their conscious and subconscious minds while the Religious Consciousness divided into the two camps of the Devout and the Reds resist.
The discovery of what was known as the Unconscious began with the emergence from the Religious Consciousness during and after the Enlightenment. Anton Mesmer with his discovery of Animal Magnetism or hypnotism may have been the first stage. Goethe and others carried the discussion forward until the Englishman FWH Myers isolated or identified the subconscious by the name of the unconscius in 1886.
The notion of the unconscious as known during the twentieth century was formulated by Sigmund Freud during the twentieth century’s first decade. Both Myers and Freud misconceived the nature of the sub or unconscious. Myers’ conception was more generous than Freud’s and more in accordance with proto-scientific Patriarchal Greek mythological conceptions which were also mistaken but visionary.
In Myers’ vision of the unconscious it had two aspects: the destructive aspect which he gave the Greek name of Ate and the constructive aspect he termed Menos. Thus he recognized that the unconcious could be good or bad.
Myers’ vision may have been based in Greek mythology. It will be remembered that the creative god, Hephaestus, was married to the emotional goddess, Aphrodite. Hephaestus and Aphrodite had their digs at the bottom of the sea which is to say the symbol of the unconscious which corresponds to the seeming location of the unconscious at the bottom of the mind or, in other words, the brain stem.
Thus it is said that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, which is to say irrationality, emerged from the sea on the half shell.
So, I suppose, love, being never rational is a subconscious decision which is one sided or a half shell. Love may be either constructive or destructive.
Thus also good ideas, a la Hephaestus, seem to rise unbidden from the subconscious or the depths.
Hephaestus and Aphrodite were ancient gods dating back to the Matriarchy. The incoming Patriarchal god, Zeus, had no part in their creation; they were solely a part of Hera the great goddess of the Matriarchy. She was much older than Zeus but the youthful Zeus united with her in the form of a cuckoo bird who as she clutched it to her breast slipped down her dress and ravaged her. So the Patriachy subsumed the Matriarchy.
When Hephaestus later sided with his mother against Zeus, the great Olympian threw him from heaven laming him. Then Aphrodite was given to him to wife. Unbridled lust combined with creative activity, Ate and Menos.
Aphrodite was not happy with the lamed god. While Hephaestus was on trips to Olympus she dallied with another Matriarchal god, Ares, the symbol of uncontrollable desire or rage. Hephaestus having been informed of Aphrodite’s infidelity set a trap for her and Ares. He constructed a finely meshed net of gold which he suspended over his bed.
Aphrodite, unbridled lust, and Ares, uncontrollable rage, were literally caught in the act being unable to disengage. Thus we have two aspects of Ate, lust and rage, caught by the efforts of creativity in the depths of the sea or the unconscious
Hephaestus called the other gods to witness. Athene, a new Patriarchal goddess who was the counterpart and antithesis of Ares and Aphrodite turned away in disgust. Apollo, another new Patriarchal god and the antithesis of Hermes just laughed. Hermes, the patron god of thieves, a Matriarchal god, said he would change places with Ares in a second. Thus, lust, rage and dishonesty are combined in one figure of Ate in the subconscious.
The image of Ate and Menos is what Myers meant by his idea of the unconscious. Freud, on the other hand, understood the unconscious as pure Ate.
Both the Greeks and Myers attempted scientific explanations while Freud gave the unconscious a religious and supernatural twist. He seemed to believe that the unconscious has an independent existence outside the mind of man which is beyond man’s control while being wholly evil.
Opposed to morality, Freud then wished to unleash this conception of the unconscious on the world. He was uniquely prepared to do so. All he had to do was manipulate the symbols of psychoanalysis of which he had full control. The question then is did Freud have deeper understandings that he concealed in order to bring about his desired ends?
Such is the case with his conceptions of sexuality. There is no need for him to have had deeper understanding, after all he was a pioneer opening a new field of inquiry. On the other hand…
Defining the unconscious was done by many men preceding Freud so that his is only one of many understandings, not necessarily the best, although today in common belief he invented the concept of the unconscious.
Next he chose to define the concepts of sex. He was equally successful in this field as far as the public was concerned, although I differ in understanding the matter as I do with the unconscious.
In analyses with patients Freud discovered that there was a fear of castration out of all proportion to actual incidents of sexual mutilation. It follows then that castration symbolizes something other than the removal of the genitals. I contend that it was impossible for Freud to have missed the signficance of castration as a symbol.
Castration as a symbol represents the broader concept of Emasculation, in this case psychological emasculation. This does occur in everyone’s life in many different manifestations while being something to really fear or avoid. Unless I am mistaken all neuroses and psychoses depend from it.
Understanding Emasculation is as much a ‘royal road to the unconscious’ as dreams.
I do not accept Freud’s map of the mind but we both agree that the Ego or Animus is the key to identity. Freud fully understood the significance of the Ego. Thus when the Ego is challenged with an affront or insult to which it is either unable or doesn’t know how to respond to successfully emascualtion to some degree takes place. There is no unconscious, just as there are no instincts so that a fixation is suppressed in the subconscious as a result of the affront. These fixations produce effects, which can be grouped in categories such as hysteria, paranoia, obsessive-compulsiveness and the whole panoply of general affects. The affects then find expression physically and psychologically, or in another word, psychosomatically. The mind and the body is one unit. These affects answer to what Freud called neuroses and psychoses.
When the Ego or Animus is denied its right to assertion the denial is frequently espressed in a hysterically sexual manner corresponding to the the insult. If the victim feels he has been taken from behind he will undoubtedly resort to anal intercourse as one type of underhanded response in an attempt to get back his own as in the case with homosexuality. Homosexuality is Emasculation par excellence.
The human mind is very limited in its inventiveness so all these affects can be catalogued and matched with the insult so that, absent resistance under analysis, they can easily be addressed and exorcised. The problem is not as complicated as it has been made out.
Freud understood so much more than he was willing to tell the goys but then he was not a scientist but a Jewish prophet. In his Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego to which we will return he gave the game away.
The individual can and does submerge his own ego into a, or at various times, many group egos. Prominent among these group egos are ethnic, national and religious group egos.
Just as the individual can be emascualted so can ethnic, national or religious groups be emasculated which the individual will share. I mention the Jews only as the most obvious case although Negroes, American Indians or any defeated people suffer emasculation to one degree or another.
Thus I will discuss the unconscious from a general point of view with Freud’s concept prominent while the concept of Emascultion will be discussed by my understanding based on the studies of Freud on the castration complex and group psychology.
Bear in mind that I think Freud criminally distorted scientific knowledge for ethnic, national and religious ends.
2.
Quo Vadis?
Born with an integrated mind, circumstances soon disintegrate the personality so that the mind must be reintegrated to return to a state of psychic wholeness. A sort of personal mythology is created by one’s early disintegrative experiences which form one’s dreamscape in an attempt to deal with an overwhelming reality. However, when a person gains some control over external reality when the personality is integrated and the initial dreamscape based on early memories is eliminated a sort of distressing vacuum ensues that exists until a new dreamscape is formed which, while sufficient to ease the discomfort lacks the depth and substance of the fully mythologized dreamscape of childhood. One had reached a scientific consciousness. It may not be as satisfying but it fills the space while not controlling one’s behavior.
Western man, Euroamerican man, as the only segment of mankind so differentiated had then to begin to work out a new mythology based on rational scientific ideas. In other words he had to create a comfortable basis from which to understand and interpret the world.
Thus after a couple proto-mythographies in the early nineteenth century a cluster of writers or neo-mythographers began to create a mythology for the Scientific Consciousness.
The destruction of the Religious Consciousness began to become obvious after the eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in England. With the advent of steam the problem began to become acute.
The proto-mythologers may be Walter Scott, Byron, Peacock and the Shelleys. There is a departure in feel and style with these writers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein posits the scientific problem laying a foundation for the new mythology but does not itself deal with the psychological effects.
The first mythographer to make an attempt to explain the split consciousness from my own researches was the American, Edgar Allan Poe, 1801-49.
Poe began his writing career as a psychologically troubled man ending it insane. Along the way he wrestled with the problem of the void in the subconscious created by the elimination of the supernatural. His message was received by the later group of mythographers who read him without exception all being influenced by his work.
Poe caught the great intellectual change as it emerged. The period from 1830-1880 was the period of the great initial scientific advances that would change the world. From Poe’s death in 1849 to the emergence of the new breed of mythographers beginning in the 1880s was a period of literary quiescence.
Poe began his influential masterpiece The Murders In The Rue Morgue with the paragraph:
Quote:
As the strong man exhibits his physical ability, delighting in such excercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in the moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his intellect into play. He is fond of enigmas, conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension as praeternatural. His results brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have in truth the whole air of intuition.
Unquote.
By analysis Poe didn’t mean the sort of educated guesswork that had passed for analysis in the pre-scientific consciousness. No, this was scientific analysis that disassembled a problem into the component parts revealing the secret than reassembling the problem to its original state.
In doing so Poe revealed himself as a master mythographer as well as a scientist. In C. August Dupin, the initials spell cad, Poe created the archetype of the eccentric madman who would be the here of countless novels. As a projection of Poe’s own mentality Dupin and his unnamed alter ego live in a dilapidated house. The house is the psychological symbol for self which Poe used almost to exhaustion. As the Fall of the House of Usher prefigured Poe’s own descent into insanity as to a number of alter egos representing his sane side figure in the House of Usher, William Wilson, Rue Morgue and most notably in the System of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether in which his sane alter ego drops his other half off at the door of an insane asylum.
The two Dupins live in a darkened house during the day, creaking not unlike the House Of Usher, going out only into the depressed asylum of the night.
Poe thus presents the separation of the conscious and subconscious modern man in the riddle of the murders in the Rue Morgue. In the Rue Morgue the subconscious is represented by the Orang u tang or animal side of human nature while the conscious is represented by the sailor owner. From Poe to at least Freud the subconscious was popularly considered a dangerous wild side of man.
In Dupin and his alter ego versus the sailor and the Orang, Poe may have perceived the emergence of a new species much as H.G. Wells was to do at the end of the century. Thus both men perceived that the antecedent consciousness and the Scientific Consciousness were not just matters of learning but a genetic difference although they didn’t put it that way that couldn’t be bridged.
Both aspects were brought out brilliantly by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) in his 1880 novel: The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. This book may properly be said to be the first true represention of the scientific myth.
In this case the good Dr. Jekyll is the disciplined, self-controlled scientist committed to doing good in the world. Beneath his intelligent exterior he feels the primitive wild man lurking. The primitive of what is in fact a predecessor Homo Sapiens is very very appealing to him. Unable to bring this aspect of his psychology to the surface by conventional means he resorts to drugs.
Having once freed his wild side, who he names Mr. Hyde, he is unable to put Hyde back into the bottle or syringe, whichever the case may be. Hyde assumes control of the personality which leads both aspects of the personality to destruction. This is not unlike Freud’s notion of the unconscious.
Thus Stevenson brilliantly prefigured the twentieth century future in which the scientist is dragged back to the level of the predecessor species through a psychological inability to take the great leap forward and turn his back on his past.
The same sense of the alienation from a predecessor existence was evidenced in the work of a great transitional figure, H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925). Let me say that Haggard is a much neglected literary figure. As his topics concerned Esoterica and Africa, the former which is scorned and the latter ignored, his literary reputation has been allowed to virtually disappear. Having read a large part of his work in the pursuit of these studies I would rank Haggard very highly, certainly among the top ten authors, possibly as high as number five. one and two are Walter Scott and Balzac, while Dumas holds down third and possibly Trollope in the fourth spot. Haggard is a writer of genius.
He spent his late teens and early twenties in the South African provinces of Natal and Zululand where he acquired a vision of the difference between the first Homo Sapiens, the Negro, and the current scientific man. As the saying goes, there’s something to be lost and something gained when you move up the ladder.
Haggard never made it to scientific man himself being stuck in the Religious Consciousness. He belonged to the Esoteric side rather than the Christian. In the third novel of his great African trilogy, Allan Quatermain, Haggard examined the difference between the African and European in this manner.
Quote:
Ah! this civilization what does it all come to? Full forty years and more I spent among savages, and studied them and their ways; and now for several years I have lived here in England, and in my own stupid manner have done my best to learn the ways of the children of light; and what do I find? A great gulf fixed? No, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across. I say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses a faculty of combination…but in all essential the savage and child of civilization are identical.
Unquote.
In the same book Haggard also put the problem more poetically:
…he dreams of the sight
of Zulu impis
breaking on the foe
like surf upon the rocks
and his heart rises in rebellion
against the strict limits
of the civilized life.
Here Haggard states the central thesis of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. In the evolution of the species there is always a small gulf between two adjacent species: nature does not take great leaps, it moves in small increments. Thus it may be a small leap between the two, expecially when the next transition creates not only a new variety but a new species, but the leap is backwards as in Jekyll’s case while it is impossible for Hyde to make the leap forward, nor is he capable of adjusting to the new strict limits. Wasn’t Stevenson precocious?
Haggard who was not of the Scientific Consciousness was left behind while his work formed the basis of the greatest of the scientific mythographers.
Before moving on let us here consider the patron saint of the future Red/Liberal aspect of the Religious Consciousness, the Frenchman, Victor Hugo (1802-85).
Paris Is A Leaky Basket
Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries and its circulation, which is slime minus its human form.
~Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
As Haggard was a transitional figure for the mythographers one might say that Victor Hugo created the literary foundation for the Red/Liberal faction of the Religious Consciousness. His Les Miserables with its tragi-comic format forms the bedrock of Revolutionary beliefs. Hugo was himself a Revolutionary. His novel Les Miserables is the account, so he says, of the apotheosis of Jean Valjean from bestiality to salvation. Along the way to his apotheosis Valjean makes a detour through the sewers of Paris.
Hugo was a poet; his account of the sewers of paris is, shall we say, poetic. In fact a scatalogical masterpiece worthy of our own Lenny Bruce. If Lenny had studied Vic a little he would have been able to say everything he wanted to say while staying out of jail at the same time.
One wonders whether Freud read Hugo. There are certain similarities in style. Certainly they both seem to have had the same notion of the unconscious. Valjean’s trip through the sewers of Paris, he with the bleeding Marius on his back must have been intended as a representation of the unconscious. And a very funny one at that.
Freud would certainly have agreed with Hugo when the latter wrote: The history of men is the history of cloacae. From Hugo’s description of the sewers of Paris it is clear that Paris was not anal retentive.
Freud was no less scatological in his approach to psychology than this astonishing section of Hugo’s book. Who wouldn’t be miserable down in a sewer; miserable enough if only your mind was in the sewer. In Hugo one gets the same macabre, morbid sense of humor Freud exhibits in his own work. Oh yes, read properly Freud tells a lot of jokes. Didn’t he write a book titled: Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious? Sure he did. Knew what he was talking about too.
The first chapter of the section of Hugo’s book, The Intestines Of Leviathan is a series of morbid one liners which are as funny as anything Lenny Bruce came up with. Double entendre? To say Paris is a leaky basket! In the underworld homosexual argot of Jean Genet the term basket refers to a man’s crotch and penis. Undoubtedly the same argot was current in Hugo’s time. He was a student of criminal argot. So Paris being a leaky basket is equivalent to saying Paris was incontinent, pissing all over itself. Don’t you think that’s funny?
And then: “The sewer is the conscience of the city.” Hm? ‘This can be said for the garbage dump, that it is no liar.” I ask you, does Victor Hugo know how to get down and boogie? Let us follow Jean Valjean into the “Conscience of Paris” “which is no liar” from which Hugo says Villon talks to Rabelais. Fabulous funny images, morbid but fabulous and funny.
To be sure, psychology in 1862 when Les Miserables was published, had not been developed, yet notice how closely Hugo’s tongue-in-cheek, laughing in his sleeve, description of Jean Valjean’s journey through the pitch black maze of this subterranean worker’s paradise into which from time to time faint glimmerings of light enter answers to the images of Freudian Depth Psychology. Depth psychology? Was that a pun or play on words?
Just imagine Jean Valjean as he enters the sewer. Take time to construct concrete images in your mind. After this, shall we say, harrowing of hell not unlike that of Theseus and Peirithous, from which Perithous never returned, Valjean receives his apotheosis not unlike Hercules. One might also compare this scene with the temptation of Christ.
Valjean is carrying the bleeding Marius on his back who might or might not be dead. Hugo doesn’t let us know. This might be compared to one’s old self before or during the integration of the personality. In fact Valjean sheds Marius after emerging from the sewer from which the gatekeeper of Hell, Thenardier, allows him to emerge after being paid his obol.
The sewer is certainly a symbol of the unconscious for the scatological Freud who seems to revel in such fecal images. Amidst a chatty history of the sewers of Paris which Hugo keeps up as Valjean plods through the darkness always intuitively heading in the right direction, down. He evades the thought police who are searching for him or someone just like him in the sewers. A shot sent blindly down his gallery grazes his cheek. Jesus! Isn’t a man safe from harassment in the depths of his own mind? If you think Paris is dangerous, try the sewers.
Valjean is exhausted from his long walk carrying Marius on his back, poor suffering humanity, the sign of the cross, nevertheless with the heart of a lion he plods on. He moves forward through deepening fluids as his bare feet sink into fecal matter “which does not lie” while Hugo carries on a charming separate conversation with we readers about little known facts of the Paris sewers. No, the fecal matter, as well as Hugo, tells the truth however hard that may be to decipher from the material at hand as well as underfoot.
As the fluid (also however that may be composed as Hugo is writing scatologically) rises, his feet sink up to his knees into “the conscience of the city.” Get this! Valjean is one of the great strongmen, he lifts the dead weight of Marius above his head on his extended arms still sucking his feet from the muck. Hugo does not reveal whether Valjean lost his shoes during this ordeal or not but surely a while back. Perhaps of all the details Hugo records this particular item which consumes my interest had none for him.
Nevertheless, heedless of the the danger to her shoes, Valjean plods on. Plod, plod.
Now, here’s a detail of interest Hugo does record. Feet and legs deep in the conscience of paris, Marius held above his head visualize this, the fecal fluid had risen above Valjean’s mouth and nose so that he has to tip his head back, I’m not sure this would have been effective, until only a mask can be seen rising eerily above the surface, as well as two arms and Marius. He ain’t heavy, he’s my other self. Seen in Stygian darkness that is.
If we’re all in the same sewer here imagine particles of the conscience of Paris, scatologically know as turds, bumping up against the mask probably trailing behind Our Man Of The Sewer in a wake of fetid glory.
Even in the pitch black Thenardier is watching this spectacle. Fortunately the psychic crisis is past. Valjean leaves the conscience of Paris which does not lie, you can say that about it, behind striking solid, er, ground.
A striking vision of Freud’s and the Revolution’s reality. Had Valjean been given the name Spartacus the Revolutionary vision would have been complete. The Red/Liberals had spent a hundred years or more in the sewers of Paris before they turned this primary text of theirs into the Broadway musical of Les Miserables. Next time you see it put it into this context of the sewers of Paris. The songs will take on new meaning.
Part II of Something Of Value I follows.
Part 4c Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
July 10, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
4c
How Waldo Became A Man
In the complex of meanings of Waldo the question is how much Burroughs bases the character on himself. In the question of health there is no question that Burroughs had issues after his bashing in Toronto in 1899.
Judging from the Girl From Farris’s his health was a serious problem for him at least until early 1914 when he finished Farris’s. During those years he suffered from debilitating excruciatingly painful headaches for at least half the day. He either awakened with them or they developed mid-day. There is evidence that he became interested in Bernarr Macfadden’s body building and health techniques when Macfadden opened his Chicago facilities in 1908. If he were involved then perhaps the benefits of such a regimen were becoming apparent in1913-14. In 1916 in the photograph in puttees taken at Coldwater he looks like a healthy specimen and proud of it.
ERB gives Waldo the wasting disease Tuberculosis putting him on a regimen of exercise in the healthy dry air of his island thus curing him within a few months. This process is reminiscent of Grey’s hero John Hare of Heritage Of The Desert or the development of the Virginian in Owen Wister’s novel.
Burroughs claimed that his writing was heavily influenced by his dreamworld. If so then in this story as well as his others each character must represent a real person who figures in his life; the story must represent a real situation in symbolical form.
As authors so often claim their characters are composites it is likely that Burroughs also combines memories of other people with his own dreams. As Burroughs consciously manipulates his dream material he tweaks it into shape to make an entertaining novel then overlaying his conscious desires on his subconscious hopes and fears.
page 1.
In addition Burroughs retains his literary influences using them to give form to his dreamscapes. Indeed, his influences fill his mind so full they become part of his dreamscapes. The island he creates is similar to but not identical with Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island. This becomes very apparent in the sequel, The Cave Man, when Waldo sets about to improve his little society. He isn’t as obsessive-compulsive as Verne but along those lines.
Verne’s island figures prominently in many of Burroughs narratives. Oddly the book isn’t in his library.
ERB began telling his life’s story the moment he took up his pen. While John Carter seems to be dissociated from his own personality Tarzan is a true alter ego, a psychic doppelganger. Tarzan Of The Apes is a symbolical telling of his life’s story from birth to 1896 while the Return of Tarzan covers the four years from 1896 to 1900 and his marriage. (See my Four Crucial Years In The Life Of Edgar Rice Burroughs here on ERBzine.)
The Girl From Farris’s deals with the troubled years from 1899 to, it appears, March of 1914. Thus Cave Girl addresses his difficulties in making the transition to writer and then full time writer with the attendant marital or sexual problems. These marital or sexual problems occupy him through many novels in this first burst of creativity from 1913 to 1915.
Porges in working from Burroughs’ own papers in his biography has very little input from outside sources but some. The first material we have to work with from an outsider’s point of view is Matt Cohen’s fine edition of Brother Men, the collection of the Burroughs-Weston correspondence. Weston being ERB’s friend from MMA days. At the time of the divorce they had been in touch for forty years.
However I think that figure may be a little misleading as the two men had very little contact during that period. ERB met Weston in 1895 at the MMA at the beginning of the school year. He was one year younger than ERB. As Burroughs left the MMA in May of ’96 the two must have become fast friends in just eight or nine months. It isn’t probable that they met again before 1905 when Weston was passing through Chicago with his wife Margaret. At that time both Westons would have met Emma. From that time to the end of ERB’s Chicago period except for the occasional brief layover in Chicago the relationship was carried on by correspondence although as Burroughs seems to have some knowledge of Weston’s home town, Beatrice, Nebraska as evidenced in the second half of The Mad King it is possible he and Emma visited Weston but that would have had to have been between March ’14 and August ’14. Narrow window.
Thus when Weston talks so knowingly of Burroughs’ character in the letter of 1934 I will refer to I would have to question the depth of his knowledge. At any rate he claims to have knowledge of the difficulties of the marriage.
Weston was completely devastated by the announcement of the divorce. He immediatly sided with Emma breaking off relations with ERB for several years.
It appears from the letter of 1934 reproduced on page 233 of Brother Men that he contacted Burroughs’ LA friend Charles Rosenberger for information on the divorce. We have only Weston’s reply but not Rosenberger’s letter.
In reply to Rosenberger Weston says:
Quote:
I have known Ed since the fall of ’95. He has always been unusual and erratic. I have told Margaret many times, when Ed has done or said anything which seemed sort of queer that as long as I had known him he had always done or said such things.
(One of the most significant odd things would have been Burroughs leaving the MMA in mid-term in May to join the Army. One imagines that when he didn’t show up for classes next day the faculty asked: Where’s Burroughs. Perhaps Weston was the only one who knew and had to say: Uh, he joined the Army.)
I suppose looking back, that the fact that Ed has always been unusual, erratic and perhaps queer, has been his great charm and attraction for me.
Unquote.
I don’t know about you but if my best friend talked about me like that I would be less than flattered. There is another back handed compliment that Weston made to Burroughs’ father in his defense.
Burroughs’ father had made the comment to Weston that his son was no damn good. Good to have your dad on your side too. Weston defended ERB vigorously saying that he thought there was plenty of good in ERB, he just hadn’t shown it yet. Thank you, Herb Weston.
If one judges from the actions of Ogden Secor in Girl From Farris’s after he was hit on the head and if his actions approximated those of Burroughs from 1899 on then there was probably a very good reason for ERB’s unusual, erratic perhaps queer behavior apart from the fact that ERB had developed the typical character of his difficult childhood.
In reading the correspondence Weston comes across as a very conventional and highly respectable person; in other words, stodgy. It must have been that settled bourgeois quality in him that ERB appreciated. Weston did many of the things that Burroughs would have liked to have done. Weston did go on to Yale from the MMA which is what Burroughs would have liked to have done. Weston did become an officer in the Army.
On page 157 of Brother Men is a discussion of the Spanish American War. If I read it correctly Weston actually served in Cuba with a Tennessee regiment. So Burroughs had reason to be envious of him as he failed in his own attempts to get into Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.
Nevertheless Weston’s evaluation of Burroughs uses some strong language who after all didn’t have that intimate a relationship with him: unusual, erratic perhaps queer. Honestly, I don’t think I would have a friend very long who thought of me that way.
Weston is bitterly disappointed but later in the letter he refers to Burroughs as a crazy old man so, at the least, we can assume that to the average mentality Burroughs appeared eccentric. As one in the same boat I can’t help but root for the author of Tarzan. What but an unconventional mind could have conceived such a story.
Burroughs antecedents had created his persona by 1895 so the crack on the head in Toronto merely added to his unusual persona.
Apart from any inferences about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists the sickly character of Waldo may represent Burroughs’ own health problems from 1899 to the time of The Cave Girl.
I feel certain that Burroughs followed some sort of health or body building regimen from perhaps 1908-09 when the American body building king Bernarr Macfadden opened his Chicago facilities to 1913. Although Ogden Secor of Girl From Farris’s was still sickly in 1914 perhaps Burroughs health was improving as Waldo evolves from a skinny sickly person to a ‘blond giant’ before our eyes. ‘Blond Giant’ also brings to mind Nietzsche’s ‘Great Blond Beast.’ I think it would be pushing it to say Burroughs read Nietzsche, nevertheless Burroughs always seems to be well informed when you look closely. He might easily have picked up references to the ‘Blond Beast’ from newspapers, magazines and conversation.
Weston is especially incensed at Burroughs leaving Emma who both he and his wife Margaret seem to have preferred. They did travel to California to visit Emma while ignoring ERB.
Weston quotes Rosenberger to the effect that ERB told Rosenberger that he had always wanted to rid himself of Emma. To which Weston replies:
Quote:
Charming, unusual, erratic personality that Ed is, there is no woman on earth that would have lived with him, and put up with him except Emma, and do not be fooled! Emma suited Ed plenty, until this insane streak hit him.
Unquote.
So we have an outsider’s view of the situation. He considers Burroughs over the line in his personality to be redeemed by his charm. Weston had asked Rosenberger his opinion of the situation between ERB and Emma. ERB had apparently told Rosenberger after the split that he had always wanted to rid himself of Emma.
As far as Burroughs’ persdonality goes it would be in keeping with a person of his background who had been bounced from school to school. Waldo may in part be a nasty caricature of the East Coasters Burroughs associated with at the Phillips Academy. As is well known Easterners at the time and still today disdain those from the West. One has the feeling that Burroughs valued his Idaho experiences highly thus the transformation from the wimpy Easterner of Waldo to the Blond Giant of the great outdoors may be Burroughs snub of his Eastern classmates.
At any rate when Weston met Burroughs at the beginning of classes in ’95 ERB’s personality seems set.
By ‘saying things’ one presumes that Weston means Burroughs had an outsider’s ‘eccentric’ sense of humor. I have a feeling that a few of we Bibliophiles know where that’s at. Certainly Burroughs’ stories reflect this trait. So, between Burroughs and Weston we have a clash of two different backgrounds.
As to Emma I believe that Burroughs was always dissatisfied with the fact that he had married when he did whoever he might have married. He has been quoted as saying that Tarzan never should have married so that idea can probably be applied to him.
If circumstances hadn’t forced his hand he very likely would have remained single. According to his psychology the right time for him to find a woman and marry would have been after 1913 and his success when he was in effect born again and a new man.
So when he says he never really wanted Emma as a wife I’m sure that is true. However he did marry the woman. So from 1913 to 1920 we have Burroughs struggling with his desire to honor his life long committment to Emma and his contrary desire to find his ideal ‘mate’ a la Dejah Thoris, La, Nadara and a number of others. Not so easily done in real life and after great success but still possible.
Added to his problem was his embarrassing behavior in Idaho when he gambled away the couple’s last forty dollars. Emma reacted badly to the Western interlude in their marriage. Burroughs’ rather feckless attitude toward earning a living between the return from Idaho and his early success in 1913 undoubtedly caused emotional problems for Emma but as Weston says she stuck by him during those lean years and as he says, there were a lot of them.
Even in 1913 when the couple earned the first real money they had ever seen Burroughs was recklessly spending it before he got it based only on his confidence that he would always be a successful writer something which by no means necessarily follows.
Emma was very proud of Burroughs as the photo ERBzine published of the couple in San Diego shows however her pride obviusly conflicted with her fears so that she may have nagged ERB in what he considered an unjustified way.
On one level Cave Girl can be construed to be a record of their relationship up to the moment with Burroughs trying to reconcile the relationship according to his confident understanding of the situation.
Writing in February-March in Chicago we have this view. In September of 1913 the family left for San Diego. Writing in San Diego during October-November in the Mad King things seem to be deteriorating as Burroughs seems to be pleading with Emma to be reasonable. Thus the Mad King concerns Prince and Pauper doppelgangers who are appealing to the same woman.
This situation may have been caused by a situation that would be very reminiscent to Emma of her situation in Idaho of ten years earlier. On this trip in which ERB and Emma were as alone and isolated as in Idaho ERB was taking another very large gamble with Emma’s and her three little children’s wellbeing at stake. As ERB proudly tells it the family, no longer just a wife, but a family of five were within an ace of being flat broke if any one of the stories Burroughs wrote in 1913 failed to sell. Unlike Idaho this was a gamble the Roving Gambler won. Now, perhaps Burroughs thought this redeemed his earlier faux pas, probably to himself it did. But what about Emma? What terrific anxieties assailed her as she wondered whether they would have a roof over their heads from day to day.
We need more facts. Perhaps the move from Coronado to San Diego was forced by necessity to reduce costs. Perhaps selling the Vellie was necessary to raise cash. Thus Emma in the midst of this actual plenty of a $10,000 income was a virtual pauper in silks and diamonds. Would there be any wonder if she were cross and nagging? As Weston said there were difficulties in living with Burroughs.
Burroughs then rather than attempting to make reasonable adjustments in his behavior yearned for the perfect mate who would ‘understand’ him.
Nevertheless he had to bear the burden assigned him. Let us assume that as Weston said, at one time Emma suited Ed plenty. That’s an outsider’s opinion but the evidence of this group of novels is that ERB was doing his best to rectify his past for Emma. If Waldo is portrayed as clownish I’m sure that ERB had played the clown in real life for some time. As Weston said ERB had always said and done unusual things. He doesn’t say what they were but in all likelihood the things he said and did were meant to be jokes, to be funny. After all he describes Tarzan as a jungle joker. The jokes that Tarzan perpetrated originated in ERB’s mind so he had to think those jokes were funny. They were usually practical jokes. No one really like a practical joker. The psychological needs that go into a practical joke are compensatory.
Where he failed Emma in the past he seems to be trying to make up for it. Perhaps his financial gamble in 1913 in some way compensates for his gambling failure in 1903 reversing the outcome of 1903 and making it alright. His actions in 1913 are so zany one has to ask what he thinks he is doing.
e.
Leaving their little Eden Waldo and Nadara set out for her village where Korth and Flatfoot await him with Nagoola in the background.
Thus Waldo’s tasks as set for him by Nadara are to kill Korth and Flatfoot. Waldo quite correctly realizes that these two tasks are beyond his present powers. So, within sight of the village he makes excuses to Nadara then abandons her running away. He heads out to the Wasteland. He appears to be living in a near desert.
Over the next several months he transforms himself from a tubercular wimp into a ‘Blond Giant.’ Tarzan has black hair so perhaps Waldo has to be blond.
One can’t be sure but this period may represent the years from John The Bully to ERB’s proposal to Emma. At any rate Waldo can’t forget Nadara having a longing for her. During his period in the Wasteland he fashions weapons for himself that make him superior in prowess to the cave men. He fashions a spear, a shield and what Burroughs jokingly, I hope, refers to as a sword, that is a sharp pointed short stick with a handle. No bow and arrow. So rather than a primitive Tarzan we have a primitive Lancelot. Waldo is actually outfitted as a knight, a la Pyle, while when he acquires the pelt of Nagoola he will be, as it were, encased in armor. So Pyle, or at least Arthur, is an influence.
In a comedy of errors Nagoola manages to kill himself by falling on Waldo’s spear. In one sense this means that Waldo has invested his sexual desires in Nadara while perhaps it is symbolic of Burroughs’ desire to do the same with Emma. At the same time the panther skin makes Nadara the best dressed girl around. It is perhaps significant that he kills Nagoola first before Korth and Flatfoot.
If one looks again at that ERBzine photo of ERB and Emma in San Diego one will notice that Emma is wearing some spiffy new togs. In her father’s house Emma was a clothes horse. In another ERBzine photo showing ERB and Emma walking in the wilds of Idaho Emma is still dressed to the nines while ERB shambles along beside her in a cheap baggy suit.
From that point in 1903 to the efflorescence of wealth in 1913 Emma had to make do with whatever garb she could afford which must have been depressing for her. As Weston says that was a sacrifice she was willing to make for her man.
Not in 1913 in Cave Girl but in 1914 in Cave Man Waldo invests Nadara with Nagoola’s pelt. Now, Waldo suffered grievously to acquire this skin. That was a major battle out there in the Wasteland. Let us assume that the skin represents Waldo’s sexual desires and that in clothing Nadara in the skin he is making her his queen or princess.
Thus in 1913-14 for the first time in his life ERB is able to reestablish Emma as a clothes horse. He has finally been able to do his duty as a man and husband. She can now buy as many clothes of whatever quality she likes and ERB is happy to have her do it. So, in a symbolic way ERB had a terrific struggle that scarred him psychologically as Waldo was physically scarred by the talons of Nagoola. Now, Burroughs was proud to be able to dress Emma to her desires. In the same way that the panther represents Waldo’s investing Nadara with his sexual desires so Emma’s clothes represent the same to ERB.
It was now up to Emma to forgive ERB for his failings and treat him as her hero. Perhaps ERB was a little premature. I think that he would have had to woo her all over again. While he had conficence he would be able to go on writing indefinitely the surety of such was problematic to others like Emma and actually ERB’s editor at Munsey, Bob Davis. Davis told him point blank that guys like Burroughs start strong, shoot their wad and fall out after two or three years. As far as others were concerned Burrroughs future remained to be seen. The evidence is that Davis and other editors thought that Burroughs had Tarzan and that was it. Apart from the Mars series how much of this other stuff was pubished to humor Burroughs to cajole more Tarzan novels is a question. Still, the fans seemed to receive it well. Cave Girl was even serialized in the New York papers.
Nadara has set Waldo three tasks all of them murderous. He is to kill Nagoola, Korth and Flatfoot. Having fulfilled the killing of Nagoola Waldo after several months sets out to return to Nadara to fulfill his last two committments.
Before he invests Nadara with Nagoola’s pelt he first kills Korth and Flatfoot. These are monster battles where like the knights of old, Lancelot, Waldo is hurt near to death.
Now, what would Emma nag ERB about during those lean years? The clothes have already been discussed so that leaves the monetary success to acquire them. So the slaying of the pair of cave men may represent financial success. Financial success came with the creation of John Carter and Tarzan. So let’s assume that Korth represents John Carter and Flatfoot Tarzan. The creation of the two or the slaying of those dragons opens the way for the hero Waldo/ERB to present Nadara/Emma with the first task, clothing.
Having killed Korth and Flatfoot Waldo still has to make up with Nadara for abandoning her at the threshhold to her village. Not an easy task. Waldo pleads that he has done everything she asked but she remains obdurate. This probably relflects ERB and Emma’s situation. A situation that apparently was never satisfactorily resolved.
But then it seems as though there is a change in the characterization and Nadara reverts back to Nadara of the beginning of the book while Waldo, believe it or not, becomes a god, if Nadara had known what gods were. Waldo scrambles up some fruit trees to toss down some food that seems to bring them together. In the last pages Burroughs gets schmaltzy writing close to purple passages.
At this time Nadara spots a yacht out over the waves. The yacht is a major theme during the teens and especially in this 1913-14 period. The significance seems to be that Burroughs envisioned his early life as The Little Prince as life on a yacht. Then the big storm comes changing his life as it sinks. Then begins the struggle for existence capped by the eventual triumph.
The yacht first appeared in Return Of Tarzan. This is its second appearance. Tarzan wasn’t on the yacht in Return and Waldo doesn’t get on the yacht in Cave Girl although he does in the sequel The Cave Man but that was a year later in 1914. So things are evolving rapidly in ERB’s psychology.
In this case he plans to join the yacht that he recognizes as his father’s. Having abandoned Nadara once she imagines he is about to do so again so she runs off.
Thoughts run through Waldo’s mind as he envisions a return to civilization with Nadara.
Quote:
For a time the man stood staring at the dainty yacht and far beyond it the civilization which it represented, and he saw there suave men and sneering women, and among them was a slender brown beauty who shrank from the cruel glances of the women- and Waldo writhed at this and at the greedy eyes of the suave men as they appraised the girl and he, too, was afraid.
—-
“Come,” he said, taking Nadara by the hand, “let us hurry back into the hills before they discover us.”
Unquote.
And so Waldo decides to remain in the stone age.
He and Nadara had left the little bag containing the relics of her mother behind. The crew of the yacht discover the bag just on the inland side of the forest.
Then we discover that Nadara is in fact the daughter of French nobles. Burroughs seems to have some love affair going on with the French. Many of his most attractive characters such as Paul D’Arnot, Nadara here, Miriam of Son of Tarzan are Gallic. So Burroughs admires most the English, the French and the Virginians it would seem.
Nadara is the daughter of Eugenie Marie Celeste de la Valois so she is a legitimate princess.
Thus ends the Cave girl with seeming finality. The way is open to the sequel but the closing seems final.
I haven’t read a book that replicates the final scene but I suspect that ERB borrowed it. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of an earlier duplicate.
End Of Part 4c.
Part 4a,b Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
June 21, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
3.
In The Beginning:
The Renascent Burroughs
a.
The psychological release Burroughs experienced when he began to realize the potential he had always felt must have been especially gratifying. In all likelihood he believed he was beginning a new life, born again, as it were. It wouldn’t have been unusual in this circumstance that he wished to dissociate himself from his entire past of failure.
For this reason it is possible that California loomed as the destination in which his new life would unfold. Making the change was difficult and would take him six years to consummate. One asks, why California? Why not Florida, for instance. I think the answer may be in his three most favorite novels: Mark Twain’s Prince And The Pauper, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Wister posits the West as a place of redemption and fulfillment while Burroughs youthful visit to Idaho may have had that effect on him. Hence Waldo the consumptive lands on an island as primitive as Idaho was to Chicago and becomes a man. So Burroughs may have viewed his visits in the West.
In the Prince And The Pauper a Prince becomes a Pauper and a Pauper becomes a Prince. In Fauntleroy the unknown princeling discovered his true identity thus exchanging the role of Pauper for a Prince while his alter ego the pauper Dick The Shoeshine Boy is transformed as well and through luck and pluck assumes a role of success in California as a rancher at the end of the story.
The Burroughs born a princeling then disinherited to a Pauper reassumed his role as a Prince but he had been inefaceably declassed hence though now a Prince as Fauntleroy he retains the psychology of the declasse as in the character of Dick The Shoeshine Boy. Dick at the end of Fautleroy moves to California where he finds work on a rach eventually becoming a success as a rancher himself.
It seem obvious that burroughs considered Little Lord Fauntleroy a book of destiny. Thus California would appear as his destiny. I believe that the reason for the six year delay in the actual move was necessitated by a need to combine the Fauntleroy and Dick the Shoe Shine Boy or The Prince and the Pauper into one identity. He had to have enough money to support the appearance of the Prince. I haven’t figured out why he wanted to raise hogs as yet but when he moved he anticipated only buying 20-40 acres which was well within his means, but when he arrived there Colonel Otis’ magnificent estate presented an opportunity to realize both identities in a property he couldn’t resist although he may have known he was acting in an unwise manner.
Even then it may have been possible to sustain the property if his economic situation hadn’t come under attack by the Judaeo/Red/Liberal Coalition in the early twenties.
A second very major p;roblem for him was Emma who now definitely became unwanted baggage. But, he also had the three children who were also as definitely wanted baggage. It is possible that for their sake he didn’t abandon Emma until they were grown.
His Anima ideal was foreshadowed in Dejah Thoris while in Tarzan Of The Apes he creates the stodgy but beautiful Jane Porter as a flesh and blood woman but not an Anima ideal.
The actual split begins to occur in The Return Of Tarzan when Burroughs bursting with confidence realizes that he is about to realize his visions of self-worth. At that point the past and all related to it becomes hateful to him. As might be expected he wanted to put all that behind him. Thus in creating a land of his fossilized past in Opar he also creates a vision of the ideal woman he would like to have in La of Opar. In Return the conflict between Jane and La becomes apparent when La is about to sacrifice Jane on the altar of the Flaming God. That she doesn’t means that Burroughs has elected to stay with Emma undoubtedly for the children’s sake.
But he begins to toy with ideal images in resolution of his sexual dilemma. Another woman becomes a possiblity that didn’t exist before. It would seem apparent that as Burroughs fame grew and he became a desirable sex object to women that opportunities for philandering would present themselves. At one time I believed for certain that he didn’t. Now I am less certain but there is nothing to indicate he did.
Nevertheless he does begin to explore other ideal possibilities. Nadara of Cave Girl can be seen as one of those explorations. Having created other possibilities in La of Opar Burroughs begins to develop the idea with the cave girl, Nadara. She is perhaps the most human of all of Burroughs’ Anima ideals. She is the daughter of civilized French aristocrats raised by a caveman to be a primitive woman. Thus she has none of the civilized inhibitions especially toward sex. Burroughs will now begin a series of novels concerning the sexual relationship well in advance of what he may have heard about Freud.
Once Nadara has accepted Waldo as her mate she is ready to cohabit. Burroughs seems to be advocating this as a sociological ideal; a revolt against the strict limits of civilization. However in a clash of cultures Waldo who is subject to the strict limits of civilization finds it impossible to establish sexual relations unless they have married according to civilized rites and customs. As there is no one in this stone age society to perform these rites Waldo keeps putting consummation off until such an opportunity arises, if it ever shall.
Bearing the psycho-sexual situation in mind an interpretation of The Cave Girl is possible on a number of levels. The story is set in motion with a variation of what will become the familiar ship wreck motif. In this case the Prince, Waldo, is washed off the deck of the ship by a huge wave that deposits him on the strand of a large stone age island in the South Seas. Thus Waldo has to begin life without any survival skills, born again as it were as a new born babe. He has become the Pauper.
At this point it might be best to introduce the major sources for the story that I have found. As usual there are several.
And then I received an email a day or so before this writing from Mr. Caz Cazedessus of Pulpdom Magazine. Having read the first couple sections he pointed out that Mr. J.G. Huckenpohler had written an article in the first Pulpdom issue relating Cave Girl to Zane Grey’s Heritage Of The Desert. I haven’t read Huck’s essay but I have read The Heritage Of The Desert which I have just reviewed. I can see a possible line of argument that shows a number of similarities in the plotting of the two novels.
Heritage was published at some point in 1910 while Cave Girl was written in February-March of 1913. That does leave a sufficient window for Burroughs to have read Grey’s book but it seems a little light especially as Grey was a newish author at the time without a definite reputation. However whether or not he may have read the book earlier it is possible that he read the book shortly before writing Cave Girl having elements of his plot suggested to him.
Thus both Waldo and John Hale, the hero of Heritage, are consumptives or ‘lungers’ as they say Out West. Waldo is from Boston, Hare from Connecticut. Hare goes West to Mormon Country to begin his regeneration while Waldo lands on his island. In both cases a woman is involved and two enemies are overcome by their respective heroes. So, as I say, I don’t know Huck’s argument but I’m sure it’s a good one. There are good reasons to believe that the plot line was an influence, an additional influence, on Cave Girl. Thus Heritage would be another influence on Cave Girl. OK, Caz?
As Burroughs was beginning life over there is also a definite influence from the first eleven chapters of Genesis from the Bible which I will make apparent in my essay.
Another very major influence seems to be the King Arthur mythology. I will make this apparent as I go along. While there is no doubt that Burroughs would have been familiar with Genesis it might do to try the root out his possible Arthurian influences.
While we have at least a portion of Burroughs’ library listed here on ERBzine we should never gorget that while growing up ERB would have had access to the libraries of his brothers as well as that of his father. George T.’s library would have gone back to the 1840s and probably earlier not including the then English classics such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress et al.
One imagines that there were Arthurian titles in the collections, at least Mallory’s Arthur. If the young Burroughs didn’t read the volumes through he would at least have handled them, browsed them and looked at the pictures, if any. We know his brothers recommended the related Greek mythology to him.
Certainly the medieval world was more often discussed in papers and magazines then than in our day. And then Burroughs did like Tennyson having his collected poems in his library. Thus ERB was likely familiar with the poet’s Idyls Of The King dealing with Arthurian stories. And those not following Mallory. Perhaps the most important Arthurian influence was Howard Pyle’s four volume retelling that while similar to Mallory’s differs significantly while Pyle adjusts the story to his own perceptions and moral concepts.
The reputation of Pyle would have loomed large to ERB. There is one Pyle title in his library, Stolen Treasure, but Pyle’s reputation as an illustrator would have drawn ERB’s attention to him. Pyle was the most influential illustrator of his time and perhaps in US history. His disciples were legion including Burroughs’ own illustrator, St. John. Pyle founded what is known as the Brandywine school of illustration.
It should be borne in mind that Burroughs had an aborted career as an illustrator before he began his successful career as writer. Burroughs was very proud of the time he spent at the Chicago Art Institute. So it would seem that ERB would have kept up on Pyle, Maxfield Parrish and others.
Pyle began rewriting the Arthurian story in 1903 completing the last volume in 1910 so Burroughs had plenty of time to ingest and digest the work before he began to egest it. Nor would Pyle and Tennyson be his only Arthurian influences.
I didn’t catch this in time to include the idea in my review of The Lad And The Lion but that story seems to be highly influenced by Pyle’s telling of the story of Percival from Pyle’s second volume, The Champions Of The Round Table. Naturally Burroughs borrows elements rather than the complete story.
Percival, I follow Pyle, was an orphan living in the forest with his mother far from the haunts of men. P. 263, prologue to Percival.
Quote:
Nor did he ever see anyone from the outside world, saving only an old man who was a deaf mute.
Unquote.
So Burroughs took the hint of the deaf mute and elaborated the idea.
The Lad’s entry into the world follows that of Percival. So also the Lad’s first sight of the desert horsemen replicates Percival’s first view of the ‘angelic’ knights.
As I did mention in my review there is a similarity between lad’s being named Aziz, translated as Beloved, by Nakhla and Percival’s thinking his name was ‘Darling Boy’ as his mother referred to him. If this last connection is valid then Burroughs also read some other Arthurian story as Pyle doesn’t tell his version in that way.
So, as usual, Burroughs mines the literature of the world to tell his story. Just as I was not aware of the influence of Grey’s Heritage Of The Desert I’m sure there are more I haven’t noticed. I may even find more as my essay unfolds.
Across the strand at no great distance is a forest representing the search for self-discovery and realization. On the mragin of the forest at dusk a figure appears. As we will learn this is the beautiful Nadara but Waldo in his hyper-fear and cowardice imagines the form to be some kind of monster of which he is terrified. The monster stands between him and the food and water he needs. In a metaphoric way then he is between the devil and the deep blue sea. He cannot go back and he is afraid to go forward.
In Burroughs own situation as he is making the fateful decision to quit his day job to devote his life to full time writing the meaning of the metaphor is quite clear.
There is also a way of looking at the tale as retelling of the Biblical Genesis. This opening scene may be represented as the Biblical chaos in which nothing is differentiated with the upper and lower firmaments resting on each other. Then a divine wind arose which separated the upper and lower firmaments.
Waldo is a comic figure while the novel itself is intended to be a comic or satiric novel. Thus Waldo who can stand the tension between the devil and the deep blue sea no more runs howling and screaming into the forest to do or die against the monster.
The shrieking may be seen as a humorous representation of the divine wind. Man having been created first as it seems pursues the phantom who turns out to be a woman. Thus Waldo and Nadara represent Adam and Eve.
Waldo’s charge into the wood can also be seen as a representation of Burroughs’ decision to become a full time writer. This must have been as stressful a decision for him as was Waldo’s charge against the demon. Once through the wood Waldo is presented with a sheer cliff that appears to be inpenetrable. So, another barrier presents itself.
Having traversed the forest that was after all fairly narrow Waldo had seen a woman scrambling up the barrier. Rather than pursue her directly Waldo reenters the wood to pick fruit and refresh himself.
This can be seen as Burroughs’ desperate attempt to become a writer. Another view of the strand and the demon of the forest- between the devil and the deep blue sea- is that Burroughs had to make the desperate attempt to redeem his life by writing. Thus that original difficult decision that might possibly be compared to Waldo’s being washed off deck by the wave while now Burroughs is faced with the even more difficult decision of working at it full time. Thus the charge through the woods might represent his giving up his day job.
It would be interesting to know at what point in the story’s composition his father died. What is even more interesting is that his father’s death did not interrupt his writing schedule. In fact in a year packed with traumatic occurrences nothing did; Burroughs continued to turn out his stories at two month intervals no matter what. It is true that he had several incomplete stories in this year which means he hadn’t thought the stories through so that it is possible that while he averted severe writer’s block when he reached the end of his chain of thought he just stopped, resuming the story when he had thought it out.
A prime example would be The Girl From Farris’s that he began about this time finishing it nearly a year later. The Cave Girl was completed at this point while The Cave Man its other half and sequel was completed the following July and August of 1914. It is possible Burroughs was trying to double his monetary return but I think it more probable that he was writing so fast with such a tight schedule that he didn’t have time to worry over completion so he just terminated his story at a convenient point and moved on to the next one that was also only half thought out.
As all this stuff is based on autobiography I am truly astonished that Burroughs was so undisturbed by the happenings in his life that he had so little reaction. I have read of authors who found writing personal stuff so difficult that they were driven to bed for a week or two at a stretch. I have never faced a long stretch like that but I have sought refuge in bed for a day or two a couple times. So Burroughs writing achievement here over 1913, ’14 and ’15 is fairly remarkable.
At any rate having made the decision to become a full time writer as symbolized by the charge through the wood. Burroughs if faced with an unforeseen barrier so he goes back to pick fruit. This could possibly be seen as having written his intial ideas out, that is John Carter and Tarzan, he had to organize his second crop of stories none of which had the impact of Carter or the Jungle God. Grey’s Heritage may fit in here as Burroughs searching for ideas and plot lines may have the read Grey’s stories at this time or just previously.
Led on by the woman Waldo had mistaken for a demon he now faces the new barrier seeking a way through. He has difficulty finding the path but once on it he discovers the opening through the wall. This is a motif Burroughs will use a number of times most notably in The Land That Time Forgot and Tarzan Triumphant, not to mention the entrance to Opar.
Now, all these openings resemble the birth canal or being born again. In the instance of The Cave Girl the result of the rebirth is self-evident as well as perhaps Tarzan Triumphant when he is about to leave Emma for Florence. The Oparian episodes would have to be examined more closely from that point of view especially as the four episodes occur at critical points in Burroughs’ life while involving sexual conflict between himself and Jane/Emma and another woman represented by his Anima ideal La. Thus, in Golden Lion when Tarzan leaves Opar with La to enter the Valley of Diamonds is it possible that he had a dalliance with another woman? One wonders.
At any rate Waldo squeezed through the opening to come out on a wonderland on the other side. There is never a thought of going back. In fact a cave man places himself between Waldo and the opening driving him forward. This could correspond to the flaming sword protecting the entrance to the Garden of Eden which would continue the biblical motif.
At the same time we have a clear reference to Alice In Wonderland or down the rabbit hole. We know Burroughs was familiar with the two Lewis Carroll stories.
Yet another barrier presents itself. Another cliff is before Waldo this one of cave dwellers another favorite motif of Burroughs especially during this period. Burroughs would have been familiar with actual cliff houses from his sojourn in Arizona with the Army while he would have been fascinated with the replica built for the Columbian Expo of ’93. At this point God created Woman as Waldo pairs up with nadara. Thus Waldo’s fears on the strand when he projected the character of a demon on this beautiful and compliant female were totally unjustified. But if Nadara represents the success that had eluded him for so long then his fears born of hysteria were warranted by his past. This is a comic novel at least at the beginning when Waldo begins his transition from the skinny, consumptive academic bookworm to that of a man of Tarzanic proportions. Thus at this stage of the book Waldo is a bumbling buffoon.
Burroughs is obviously ridiculing the Boston Transcendalist school of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Waldo’s name merely leaves off the Ralph and adds the ridiculous hyphenated Smith-Jones. The latter of course has pretensions to nobility but is compounded of the two most plebeian and common English names. Waldo’s name is as comic as Burroughs could make it. Worth a laugh or two on its own.
He may also be making a snub at his fellow students of Phillips Academy when he went East. It is well known that Easterners of the time, if not still, deprecated Westerners. Burroughs would have had to put up with much jesting and ridicule while there so perhaps he is now ridiculing those who ridiculed him.
Also he may be ridiculing his own former self.
Burroughs is fairly hostile to New England throughout his writing. He is positive on the South having more than one hero from Virginia while he is considerate of the middle states. Thus Waldo beginning as an effete New Englander will turn into something resembling John Carter/Tarzan or the Virginian of Owen Wister’s strange novel. Thus if one views Waldo in light of Burroughs three most favorite novels, The Prince And The Pauper, Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Virginian the basic tenor of all the stories is made apparent.
Waldo being pursued toward the cliff dwellings by the cave men with his legs pumping up to his chin and the stick twirling in his hand resembles a scene from a newspaper comic strip. It would seem that Burroughs was an ardent reader of the newspaper Funnies. David Innes Earth Borer was undoubtedly taken from a newspaper comic strip also. This incessant modeling or borrowing may explain a bit of the contempt for his work by contemporaries. ERB comes real close from time to time.
Having paired up with Nadara she and Waldo hold off the cave men slipping away in the night to Chapter 3, The Little Eden, which is a key chapter.
4b.
It’s A Lover’s Question
This chapter is so compacted I find it difficult to find a starting point. If Burroughs’ marriage with Emma had not run smoothly from 1900 to 1913 their relationship would become even more stressed from 1913 to 1920. The marriage apparently barely survived a major crisis c. 1918-20 finally being terminated in 1934.
The relationship of ERB and Emma is very difficult to comprehend. It seems clear that ERB had no intention of actually marrying her but wished to keep her on a string. This arrangement was doing well until Frank Martin entered the scene in 1897 or ’98. Martin forced Burroughs’ hand who was then compelled to marry Emma in 1900.
Over the years from 1900 on Burroughs developed an intense antipathy to Emma which expressed itself in its most naked form at the time of her death when ERB did everything but desecrate her grave. There must have been some deep psychological cause for this that isn’t apparent from what we know for sure of the relationship.
Perhaps the most critical event in their lives occurred on that streetcorner on the way to Brown School in the fifth grade when ERB was emasculated by John the Bully. Burroughs was then removed to the girl’s school a few months later. I have no evidence that ERB and Emma were walking to school together on that the fateful day but subsequent literary evidence points in that direction.
As a result of his emasculation it would appear that ERB was fixated in such a manner that he was unable to form relationships with women after that date and that Emma was the only female with whom he retained one. But as she reminded him of that fateful day he both rejected her and couldn’t do without her. Thus he refused to marry her yet didn’t want her to marry anyone else. When circumstances forced him to marry her this may have begun his irrational resentment toward her. As there was no other woman possible for him until the beginning of his psychological liberation in 1913 he may have tolerated her, but just.
Success seemed to liberate repressed areas of his personality and we find him dreaming of an ideal mate quite different from Jane/Emma. If one assumes that John Carter is an idealized Edgar Rice Burroughs although Burroughs projects the role of uncle on him while maintaining a dissociation from him until the end then Carter’s affiliation with Dejah Thoris on Mars would be ERB’s first Anima projection. However Dejah Thoris is more closely related to Jane. In La of Opar and Nadara Burroughs’ Anima ideal shifts more toward a wild or nature woman. This aspect of the ideal is realized in Balza, The Golden Girl of 1933 who is also represented by Florence.
So, in Cave Girl an emaciated, consumptive, over intellectualized Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones mates with the primitive Nadara who still retains the imprint of her civilized parents down by the river in the Little Eden. Thus we have Adam and Eve in the Garden before they leave never to return.
The problem of male-female relations is a dominant theme in Burroughs’ writing. Indeed the theme is one that preoccupies all writers of fiction in one degree or another. In this aspect Freud is merely a prominent writer on the sexual condition of men and women. He is perhaps more systematic but not necessarily more profound.
For instance Freud asked in a title to one of his essays What Does Woman Want and gives neither a profound nor very thoughtful answer. If he had read E.M. Hull’s 1921 novel, The Sheik, he would have have had somthing of an answer written by a woman. Burroughs did read the Sheik. He understood what Hull was saying. His answer was the major burlesque of the Alalus people of the Tarzan And The Ant Men of 1922. In this charming story of the The Cave Girl he give his 1913 answer to the question of what woman wants in a credible manner.
The answer in this case is age old. The answer was clear from ancient times to E.M. Hull’s clear story. Mostly it would appear what woman wants is a powerful protector willing to perform her will when a problem exceeds her own powers thus recompensing her for the missing X and more especially the missing y chromosome. The latter what Freud called Penis Envy. One can only conclude that woman wants to be whole, to be chomosomally undivided. Thus as a famed LA procuress once said: A woman is only as powerful as the man beside her.
Now, Nadara projects a character on Waldo as her fierce and powerful protector. As love begins in Waldo’s heart the spectre of sex arises in their little Eden in the form of the Black Panther Nagoola. Is it a coincidence that the first syllable of both names is the smae while both end in a long A? Nadara the sexual temptress.
Prompting Waldo she demands whether he could kill Nagoola. That may have a couple meanings. It may mean could he despatch the animal and it may mean can he conquer or control the sexual urge. In Waldo’s case the anwer will be yes to both questions.
He does kill Nagoola in a comedy of errors in this comic novel. In its sequel The Cave Man he will adorn Nadara with the pelt of Nagoola thus making her the physical incarnation of sexual desire. Who says Burroughs wasn’t subtle.
Too desirous of impressing Nadara as a man of prowess he allows her to think he has already killed several Nagoolas.
Very pleased to hear this she says: ‘Good. When we get to my village I want you to kill Korth and Flatfoot.’ Well now, there was a committment that Waldo had no intention of honoring, at least in his present condition.
Thus, we have a demonstration of the thesis that women are responsible for conflict. Woman proposes, man imposes.
As they can’t stay in their little Eden forever they make the trek to Nadara’s people. Waldo is committed to killing the fearsome Korth and Flatfoot. He is terrified to confront them as well he might be. As they approach the village Waldo sends Nadara ahead then legs it out of there.
Thus we have the flight or fight dilemma that is another major theme of Burroughs. At this point in his career he isn’t ready to articulate his feelings as he will later. The dilemma relates to his confrontation with John the Bully in the fifth grade. At that time as Waldo in this story Burroughs elected to run. Now, you will notice that Waldo is with Nadara which is a pretty sure indication that ERB was with Emma that fateful morning on the way to school.
In point of fact either Korth or Flatfoot would easily have killed Waldo at this stage in his career as John would have cremated the much younger Burroughs. When he would later rationalize it there is no dishonor if fleeing overwhelming force which is surely true but has its consequences.
Thus Waldo like Burroughs was sent into the Wasteland. His problem now will be to figure out how to return to kill Korth and Flatfoot to reclaim Nadara.
4c.
How Waldo Became A Man
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
May 29, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs, Part One
Including A Review Of
The Cave Girl
by
R.E. Prindle
Book I: The Cave Girl
1.
In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs was looking back on nearly forty years of humiliation and failure. As 1913 dawned, after that lifetime of suppression and depression it must have seemed as though the Millennium had arrived. Success on his own terms seemed to be within his grasp. The Gambler had finally won the gamble.
As the year turned he finished his fifth novel since he took up his pen in 1911, The Return Of Tarzan. As of the beginning of 1913 only two had been published and those only in pulp magazine form. Perhaps such publication was rewarding in the personal sense but the pulps had a very low literary reputation. Pulp writers were always second class literary citizens. Both his first publications created a sensation among the pulp readership while the second ‘Tarzan Of The Apes’ was a stunner.
His reputation was augmented when Tarzan Of The Apes began to be serially published in various newspapers. So while he had not established a reputation from the pulp publications the newspapers had spread his fame. Book publication was still a full year away.
Thus by 1913 A Princess Of Mars and Tarzan Of The Apes were before the world. Gods Of Mars would be published later in the year. His second novel, Outlaw Of Torn, had been met with outright rejection.
Based on this promising but hardly conclusive beginning, less than 2500.00 had changed hands in two years, Burroughs decided to throw over his day job to became a full time writer. As he says everyone thought he was crazy; without the benefit of foresight he most surely was. Burroughs himself even says he thought so. The Gambling Man was risking his all on a turn of the cards. His whole life he had seemed driven to take the riskiest and longest of long shots. His characters would behave in the same way. Shall we say on the positive side that it was an act of supreme confidence?
page 1.
Not only did he give up his day job but he set himself the daunting task of writing a story every two months of which he expected every one to sell. He ultimately wrote seven in 1913 of which all did sell. In this year of the most daring audacity he did earn over 10,000 dollars and that beat the cost of living and then some.
Burroughs won that bet, too.
The first book of the year, At The Earth’s Core began his Inner World series. It was also the begining of his exploration of prehistoric and evolutionary themes. The prehistoric novel was already a genre. Fictional treatments by Jack London and H.G. Wells were certainly known to him while he may have been familiar with the anthropological studies of J.G. Frazer in one form or another. Frazer made the phrase ‘the thin veneer of civilization’ a household phrase that Burroughs was so frequently to use and mock throughout his work. He may possibly have picked the phrase up through newspapers and magazines or possibly as David Adams has suggested through Jack London who used it before him and who we can be reasonably certain Burroughs read.
Frazer was at the height of his influence at this time having written three different versions of his most famous work, The Golden Bough. In 1910 he published a four volume study called Totemism and Exogamy that Sigmund Freud cribbed to write his own semi fictional work, Totem And Taboo.
Personally I would place Totem And Taboo with the prehistoric work of London, Wells and Burroughs. Read as a novel Totem And Taboo isn’t all that bad. Unfortunately Freud took himself seriously thinking he had more than he did. But as fiction Totem And Taboo is OK.
page 2.
Interestingly for Freud he formed his very speculative theories in the historical blind spot in the place between his intense Jewish Patriarchalism and the discovery of the Matriarchy that preceded Patriarchy. So his theories are somewhat skewed. Matriarchal theories were very stoutly resisted gaining any degree of acceptance only after the 1960s.
It is to Freud’s credit that he didn’t resist the concept. Even as early as Totem And Taboo he had heard of the discovery of the Matriarchy through the work of the Swiss mythologist, J.J. Bachofen, although he didn’t know how to incorporate the material. By 1938 he seemed to be conversant with Matriarchalism but still didn’t know how to fit it into his system. He was still touting the ridiculous theories of Totem And Taboo.
For some reasons I haven’t yet identified I find similarities between Freud’s and Burroughs’ writing. After all Freud did get his Nobel prize for literature not science.
Freud was in many ways a speculative and wild writer and so in fact was Burroughs. While the others wrote interesting but conventional prehistoric stories Burroughs discovered ways to link the various evolutionary stages with the present. While it is overlooked, at the time it was very innovative. The approach may have been suggested to him by his Prince and Pauper mentality in which he believed a clean break between his past and present had been made when he was sent to the Michigan Military Academy.
There is no clearer link for this possibility than the story of Tarzan. In Tarzan Of The Apes Tarzan was born a ‘Prince’ to an aristocratic British family but became a ‘Pauper’ when his parents died and he was adopted by the great she ape, Kala. Thus he was raised in a prehistoric environment before the advent of man. Tarzan then evolves into the fully human right before our eyes eventually becoming the very epitome of civilization. A thin veneer perhaps but a veneer.
So ERB devises all sorts of clever ways to somehow get his contemporary characters into prehistoric environments. In his fifth book, The Return Of Tarzan, he invents the lost land of Opar. Opar is a fossil city dating back to prehistoric Atlantis. The Oparians have never advanced beyond the culture of Atlantis and lost most of that. Behind Opar is an even earlier stage of culture called The Valley Of The Diamonds. This place is ruled by a highly developed form of gorillas.
page 3.
In Tarzan The Terrible Tarzan crosses a great swamp to arrive in prehistoric Pal-ul-Don. In the Inner World series he employs two methods of entering. In the first David Innes invents an earth borer that drills through the crust to discover a hollow core containing the Inner World. In Tarzan At The Earth’s Core Burroughs employs the notion of a North Pole entry using the dirigible O-220 to enter in that manner.
In the most wild of all the stories, The Eternal Lover, his hero Nu is gassed in what Burroughs calls the Neocene to wake up in the twentieth century. He acquires a lover with whom he successfully travels back to the Neocene. On the return journey to the present he failed to keep his grip on the strap and didn’t make it. Wonderful story concept. Certainly as fine as anything Burroughs ever did.
Then in the trilogy The Land That Time Forgot the crew of the submarine discover a submarine entrance to the lagoon of a large island that is prehistoric but covers the whole range of evolution from amoeba to full fledged humans. Quite daring actually and Burroughs is able to make these impossible stories work. If one compares The Land That Time Forgot with Freud’s Totem And Taboo I think it possible to find many similarities. Of the two Burroughs was by far the most successful writer in their time although he received no Nobel prize. Both writers have weathered the vicissitudes of fortune quite well. One hundred years from those days both men are top sellers although Burroughs has the edge.
page 4.
The novel under consideration, The Cave Girl has a terrifically interesting scenario. In this story Burroughs anticipates The Land That Time Forgot by creating a large prehistoric island off the shipping lanes that is ‘seldom visited’ although it seems that no one has trouble finding it.
In this story Burroughs reverses Tarzan Of The Apes. Instead of an infant boy being abandoned he has the infant girl, Nadara, survive her parents. Instead of a female ape rescuing Tarzan he has a cave man rescue and nurture the girl. The Cave Man retains a little leather bag containing the emblems of Nadara’s origins, while Tarzan has his father’s cabin and books.
In this instance Nadara having been left on the island, just as Jane and her party are landed on the spot of Tarzan’s father’s cabin so the civilized castaway, Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is washed from the deck of the steamer by a big wave during a storm landing on the siland where as Tarzan watched Jane’s party arriving Nadara observes the arrival of Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones.
It isn’t stated how old she was when she and the civilized Waldo got together but I should think twenty on the analogy of Tarzan.
Burroughs’ two favored terrestrial locations for his stories are Africa and the South Seas. Both locations occupy legendary possibilities in the imagination of the West. They were thought to be locations where the White man was freed from the restraints and limitations of civilization.
page 5.
Go to Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs Part II
Freud
March 16, 2007
Freud And His Unconscious
Redefining A Fallible Idea
by
R.E. Prindle
Sometime after I wrote the first part of Something Of Value (see erbzine.com) I read David Bakan’s Freud And The Jewish Mystical Tradition. Bakan’s book confirmed my findings while developing Freud’s relationship to his culture’s mystical tradition based on Bakan’s understanding of the Zohar and the Jewish Kabbalah that I haven’t read or studied, nor do I intend to unless I exhaust other pursuits which doesn’t seem likely. You never know though.
However a point to consider is how Jewish is the Jewish mystical tradition, that is, what are its roots? Are they rooted in Judaism or elsewhere? Bakan seems to believe that the Jewish Kabbalah is derived entirely from Jewish sources independent of the general milieu. I don’t believe this to be true. The Jewish mystical tradition like all others is based on the very ancient Egyptian. Bakan believes that the Kabbalah arose in the first century AD. This is probably true.
The Hermetic tradition which is equivalent to a European Kabbalah took form as such in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic period when Greek and Egyptian ideas interreacted. Hermiticism evolved from much earlier doctrines centered around the Egyptian god Thoth. The Zohar and Kabbalah then is Hermetic material adapted for Jewish needs. The whole can be traced back to Alexandria.
The Zohar, or primary mystical book, which is attributed to the first and second century Rabbi, Simeon Ben Yohai, was rewritten, edited and whatever in twelfth century Spain by Moses de Leon reaching the Middle East after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in the sixteenth century. Its influence then was transmitted to the seventeenth century messiah, Sabbatai Zevi.
According to Mr. Bakan Freud was familiar with the Zohar and Kabbalah. I couldn’t go so far as to claim so myself but Mr. Bakan can quote chapter and verse. While Freud claimed to be scientific Mr. Bakan relates almost all of Freud’s psychology to the Kabbalah showing Freud’s dependence on Sabbatianism and Frankism as I indicated in Something Of Value Part I.
page 1
Thus while seeming to be working from a scientific point of view Freud is actually blending a bit of scientific approach acquired from European sources, as there is no science in Jewish culture, with his Jewish religious material to subvert the European moral order. While Freud himself was at war with European civilization the international Jewish organizations extended his field of operations to the United States and Canada. Thus while Freud speaks specifically of Europe he can be taken to mean Euroamerica.
2.
A further background for his psychology, Freud’s central childhood fixation, appears to be the incident in which a European knocked his father’s hat into the gutter which his father meekly, or wisely, depending on your point of view, accepted without a demur. Because of this story Freud wished to avenge himself on Europeans.
Probably at this point Freud assumed the Moses complex that stayed with him to the end of his life. He, Freud, would lead his people to triumph over the Europeans as Moses had led the People out of Egypt while Pharaoh and his army were drowned in the Red Sea.
However, oddly enough, as he claimed to be wholly Jewish, Freud was conflicted in his attitude toward Europeans. As a child he had a Roman Catholic nurse who introduced him to Christianity by taking him to church. Most probably she also tried to wean him from Judaism. This experience had a great effect on young Freud. In the following anecdote, as with most fixations, he seemed to have lost the exact memory of the situation. From Bakan:
Quote:
…that my ‘primary originator’ [of neuroses] was an ugly, elderly, but clever woman who told me a great deal about God and hell, and gave me a high opinion of my own capacities.
On October 15, 1897, he quotes his mother about the old nurse who took care of him when he was very young.
“Of course,” she said “an elderly woman, very shrewd indeed. She was always taking you to church. When you came home you used to preach, and tell us about how God conducted his affairs.
Unquote.
His memory had become confused while it does not appear that he ever exorcised his fixation, for fixation this is. He apparently loved this nurse at the time rather than hated her. When she was later accused and convicted of stealing from the Freuds being dishonored and actually sent to jail, Freud was heartbroken while changing his opinion of her. But, he had had contact with Christian Europeans which left a lasting impression on him that he could not consciously recognize or acknowledge. If I am correct, this impression resurfaced when he came into contact with C.G. Jung who he adopted as a surrogate for this nurse transferring his love and hatred for her to Jung.
page 2.
Just as he loved this nurse there were apparently strong homosexual overtones in his relationship toward Jung. As Freud would have known, the compulsion toward repitition would have been a component in his relationship with Jung as with his nurse although he apparently did not recognize this. So much for his self-analysis. He found reasons to break off with Jung or drive him away while bitterly claiming to be betrayed by Jung just as his nurse had been accused and convicted of theft thus betraying the child Freud. Thus once again his contact with a Christian European was brief ending in sorrow for himself.
A third situation occurred late in life when he wrote Moses And Monotheism. Rather startlingly he claimed that Moses was not Jewish but was an ethnic Egyptian. This means Freud, who had a Mosaic fixation, split his personality between his Christian longings and his professed Jewish identity. Another result would be that monotheism was not a Jewish invention but actually a goyish invention so that all the evil arising from monotheism was not the fault of the Jews but the goys. They had no one to blame but themselves. Thus Freud’s notion of Moses may have been a sort of dream reversal of the facts.
Whatever the results of Freud’s self-analysis back before the turn of the century it is quite clear that he was unable to resolve his fixations nor, one believes, was he aware of their influence on him. He never integrated his personality remaining under the influence of his subconscious fixations. No wonder he ignored the conscious mind.
3.
Like most people Freud had to find his way from adolescence to adulthood and his true ambitions by a circuitous route.
This editor’s note to 1927’s The Future Of An Illusion says this:
Quote:
In the ‘Postscript’ which Freud added in 1935 to his Autobiographical Study he remarked that a ‘significant change’ had come about in his writings during the previous decade. “My interest,” he explained, “after making a long detour through the natural sciences, medicine, and psychotherapy, returned to the cultural problems which fascinated me long before, when I was a youth scarcely old enough for thinking.
Unquote.
page 3.
He undoubtedly refers to his experiences in church with his Christian nurse contrasted with the ‘Christian’ who knocked his father’s hat into the gutter. As Freud is very duplicitous in his use of language one should try to be very sensitive to the meanings behind the obvious meanings of his words. Thus I believe his use of the term ‘cultural problems’ can usually be understood as his inner conflict between his Christianity and Judaism.
As Bakan points out, that while Freud rejected Rabbinical religious Judaism he was deeply immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition of the Zohar and Kabbalah. Thus one can discount his claim to be an ‘atheistic’ Jew. Or atheism has a more specific meaning for him.
I would place the change of emphasis in his writing or, at least the beginning of the change, in 1915. My guess would be that Freud was unaware of the Jewish Revolution until he joined B’nai B’rith in 1895. That knowledge would have shaped the direction of his researches. Whatever science was involved would have been subordinated toward achieving the Revolution. At the same time that he was working out the nature of psychoanalysis as Bakan indicates he must also have been studying the Zohar and Kabbalah. I haven’t read or studied either so I have to rely on Bakan’s analysis of their influence. Bakan traces strong mystical influences running side by side with what passed for science in Freud’s mind. As Freud persistently says he’s going to ignore facts in favor of projections one must assume that there is more mysticism than science in Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis- as he says ‘his creation.’
Bakan points out that Freud transited from the role of physician to that of ‘healer.’ That is analogous to the hands on approach of Christian Fundamentalism. Freud then for all practical purposes abandoned medicine for healing. Then, sometime between 1913 and 1915 he abandoned psychoanalytical research for his ‘cultural’ studies. In other words, he began to apply his psychological studies to the manipulation of cultures through his developing ideas on Group Pschology.
page 4.
Just as Freud learned that there were screen memories that transformed more painful memories into something more acceptable to salve those injured feelings so Freud learned that he could develop ‘screen’ language to serve up unpalatable meanings in palatable ways. Thus what he says has a reasonable meaning to the uninitiated but has a totally different meaning to the initiated- those with the key. In many ways it is the same as a criminal argot. Those who understand the argot can discuss topics openly while only those with the key can twig it. Ya dig?
The key incident that fixed his mind on ‘cultural interests’ was his father’s story of the guy who knocked his hat into the gutter. Freud then, in attempting to disguise his hatred for ‘Christianity’, while secretly admiring it because of his nurse, and his desire to avenge his father and hence, all Jews, through his Moses fixation developed his program. Thus he acting in his own mind altruistically and need feel no guilt.
Freud was very seriously conflicted, also suffering from depression according to Bakan. Hence his purpose was to knock the whole of European Christianity into the gutter, which is to say the actual persons of Europe.
Thus the use of terms like ‘Culture’ and ‘Civilization’ should always be placed in the context of Jews and Europeans. In this manner he avoids the appearance of bigotry and hatred while sounding ‘scientific.’
Now, this obsession and extreme form of vengeance for something that, after all, didn’t happen to him nor did he witness it, might certainly be considered a neurosis, probably a psychosis and possibly a degree of insanity. In reading Bakan there is a hint that he believes Freud had a disordered mind. Indeed, Lang’s Testament Of Dr. Mabuse should be held steadily in mind when reading of Freud’s later career. Lang must have had Freud in mind when he filmed Mabuse.
page 5.
Lang,s departure from the denouement of the Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari ended on the conventional note of the victim, or whistle blower, being declared insane. Lang reversed this by making the perpetrator, Caligari/Mabuse insane as in real life with Freud. Further the disciple of Mabuse, the head of the asylum, Dr. Baum was also declared insane. Although the problem appears to be solved the threat of the conspiracy continuing from the cell now occupied by Dr. Baum looms like a spectre over the ending.
While Freud was never incarcerated as he should have been, he was imprisoned in his mind no less than Drs. Mabuse and Baum or the character in Gradiva. It is interesting that Freud had a plaster cast of the relief on which the story of Gradiva was based that he displayed prominently in his office. The story obviously had greater significance for him than his ‘objective’ analysis of the story would lead one to suspect.
Thus from 1915 to 1935 like Dr. Mabuse he sat imprisoned in his projection of reality churning out page after page, volume after volume of criminal plans for the subversion of civilization which is to say of Euroamerican civilization but not Jewish culture. He makes a definite point of that illusion of whose future he is discussing applies only to Europe and Christianity rather than religion in general which would include his own Judaism. At this point he is not aware of the burgeoning Wahabi Moslemism so that his message is that Jewish beliefs are real while Christian beliefs and Scientific reality are illusory. One has to penetrate the screen language and convert it into the proper psychological intent.
As David Bakan points out Freud lived his whole life in a sort of Jewish ghetto having very little contact with Europeans.
His choice of Jung as the potential heir to his ‘creation’ may have had as much to do with a desperate attempt to reestablish a connection similar to that of his childhood Christian nurse. Thus his overtures to Jung while under extreme stress were driven from his unconscious while he himself was unaware of his true motivations. This would have been an expression of a repetition compulsion. Thus as his nurse disappeared from his life under discreditable circumstances he replicated the situation in Jung. His attempt to convert Moses (hence himself) into an Egyptian may have been a last attempt to replicate and resolve this early contact with Christianity. His view of European civilization then was filtered wholly through a Jewish projection of possibilities. He really had no intimate knowledge of European mores.
page 6.
From 1915 on, then, his writings were obsessed with hatred for Euroamericans and a desire to wreak vengeance on them by destroying the basis of their civilization. His ideas for the subversion of European civilization were carried to America by the international B’nai B’rith organization to be adopted and employed there. In addition Revolutionary plans executed in Europe in 1917 were financed and organized by the world Jewish government in the US. While functioning according to local conditions the Revolution was conducted an an international scale. Act locally, think globally. Hence Jewish revolutionaries left the US for Russia after 1918 to aid in the consolidation going on there. This is really an incredible if repressed story in the Freudian cultural manner. Very Freudian that such phenomenal criminal activity that were best left invisible was repressed into humanity’s unconscious.
At this point I think it might be well to examine Freud’s vision of the unconscious in more detail. While there can be little doubt that there is a subconscious function to the human mind usually referred to as the unconscious after Freud that had been an accepted fact amongst scientific researchers for a hundred years. The exact nature had not been determined nor does Freud determine it. His view is merely a projection of his own conscious and subconscious needs.
In David Bakan’s view Freud had made ‘a compact with Satan.’
page 7.
Certainly not in the literal sense but in the figurative sense that Freud would do anything, abandon any moral precepts, to achieve fame. Bakan points out the superscription to Freud’s ‘Interpretation Of Dreams’ quote from Virgil: Flectere si nesqueo superos, Acheronta movebo. Translated as: If the gods above are no use to me, then I’ll move all hell. Freud further blurred the line between good and evil or amalgamated the two from the influence of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank who cast off all morality. Since Freud has been successful in altering both Euroamerican and Jewish morality toward these immoral or amoral beliefs by false ‘Satinic’ criminal doctrines it is imperative to debunk his personal projection of the subconscious.
As he ‘made a pact’ with powers below- the unconscious- against the powers above- the conscious- he invested his projection of the unconscious with the attributes of ‘Satan’ or evil. This view of the subconscious is a self-serving fiction not based on any science.
He sets up the unconscious as an autonomous entity with the main function of blighting the conscious. He give the powers of hell supremacy over the powers of heaven. This notion is mere fantasy; it cannot be. There is no possibility that the function of the subonscious doesn’t have a positive function in and of itself and in relation to the conscious. If you actually think about it for a moment you will realize this must be true; every part of the body works to the benefit of the whole; there can be no exception for the subconscious.
Now, Nature is not flawless. The order that the religious seem to find is not there. Nature functions in a much more haphazard way. It takes only one peek through the Hubble to see that.
However the relationship between the conscious and subconscious is delicate and easily disrupted especially in the early years of the organism when it has no experience with which to evaluate the events occurring to it. The Ego and Anima are not part of the subconscious and possibly not of the conscious but function through the conscious and unconscious minds.
page 8.
The conscious mind perceives phenomena and acts on them but the terrific inflow of impressions is more than it can deal with so the day’s input is received into the subconscious for further reference. Thus a major function of dreams in the sleeping state is to review and process, organize the information into a coherent whole for future reference. The subconscious then is able to compare incoming information with experience for response. When the conscious and subconscious minds are attuned, that is to say the personality is integrated, the system works properly, otherwise the response is distorted by one’s fixations. This is very easy to see in Freud.
However, especially in youth when experience is scant, the mind may be challenged with some devastating new experience for which there are no reference points. If an appropriate response is made there is no problem. If an inappropriate response is made against which future experience is in variance, the earlier resp0nse which has become fixated will over rule an attempt at an appropriate response and substitute the fixated inappropriate response. Thus the current response will constellate around these earlier fixations which gives one bizarre symbolic dreams and inappropriate responses.
The inappropriate response will usally result from an insult to the Ego or, in other words, the Sexual Identity. In turn the response to this insult will be expressed in a sexual affect.
The purpose of psychoanalysis, which is real science, although Freud didn’t see that, is to locate and exorcize them allowing the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind to function properly as a unit. Dreams are actually important because they are an analysis of life’s experence providing responses. None of this, of course takes in intelligence, discipline and other functions of mind and character that Freud dismisses as irrelevant.
page 9.
Now, in the cultural war between Judaism and Euroamerica, or as Jews express it, Christianity, Freud infused the Jewish subconscious with a disregard for morality a la Jacob Frank in relation to Sabbatai Zevi. Any evil was excused so long as it seemed to advance the cultural war. While this infusion may not have reached down throught the ranks of Jewry- which is to say they behaved in a certain way but didn’t know why- the ideas were thoroughly planted in the minds of what Henry Ford would call the international Jew.
The cold war between Jews and Europeans became a shooting war in the wake of the Great War. Men, money and munitions flowed in a wide steady stream from the United States to Russia. Coordinators established themselves in strategic locations. If one reads restricted, censored literature the impression is made that horrible anti-Semites harassed and hated innocent unresisting Jews. Jews may have been killed but they were not innocent and unresisting. To the contrary freed from guilt, or supposedly so, by Freudian/Sabbatian/Frankist precepts, abattoirs were established throughout Russia where unsuspecting Russians were led in one door and flowed out the other in liquid form. This is not the place to dwell on gruesome details. The literature exists but the collective Jewish mind has repressed the deeds into the collective unconscious. In other words, history has been denied and censored so that the crimes can’t be known. Actually Whittaker Chambers, the Red spy, translated a number of these books concerning the Hungarian atrocities of Bela Kun and Tibor Szmuelly, but those are impossible to come by. All this slaughter was made possible and justified by the doctrines of Freud.
In relation to the 1919 atrocities of the Jews in Hungary and the response which expelled them from power it should be noted that Israeli troops were recently introduced into Hungary to reestablish the tyranny of Kun and Szmuelly. Don’t ever think the historical memories are short.
Freud sat comfortably in Vienna looking on as the carnage occurred. If, as believed, the tenor of his writing changed in 1925 that was probably due to the death of Lenin in 1924. By 1925 it was apparent that the Jewish Revolution was on shaky grounds as Stalin began his rise to power so that Freud may have renewed his cultural attack or, on the other hand, as 1928 was the terminal projected year of the Jewish Revolution Freud may have been celebrating the death of European Civilization when he published The Future Of An Illusion. By the illusion he meant European Christianity and he meant European civilization was finished. The Rome of the Popes would have fallen.
page 10.
In Illusion and Civilization And Its Discontents Freud makes us believe that the malcontents of civilization are synonymous with civilization rather than being a minority that always exists during great revolutionary changes. Freud whose Judaism was challenged by the Scientific Revolution as much as Christianity or Moslemism must have been aware of the reactionary ‘instinct’ as he himself was in reaction to both European Christianity and the Scientific Revolution.
David Bakan closes his volume with these words:
Quote:
…under the ruse of “playing the devil” (Freud) served Sabbatian interests. In this respect, however, just as Freud may be regarded as having infused Kabbalah into science, so may he be regarded as having incorporated science into Kabbalah. Sabbatian-wise, by closing the gap between Jewish culture and Western Enlightenment he acts as the Messiah nor only for Jewish culture but for Western culture as well.
Unquote.
Note that Western Enlightenment is reduced to Western culture putting it on a par with Jewish culture which is a tacit admission that there is no science in Jewish culture and none is wanted in Western culture. Language as a screen.
Bakan’s is a hefty statement. Under the guise of the Devil Freud becomes the Messiah not only for Jews but for Euroamericans. Truly in this scenario good comes from evil, assuming that the Messiah is good. In case you missed it, Freud according to Bakan was the Second Coming. Narrowing the gap between the two cultures means the imposition of Jewish culture as the Chosen or Abelite people over Western or Cainite culture. Thus the age old goal of reversing the Cain and Abel story so that Cain is obligated to give preference to Abel is accomplished.
page 11.
By infusing Kabbalah into science, science has been subjugated to the unscientific Jewish culture so that the Catholic/Jewish situation of Medieval Europe has been restored. The Enlightenment that invalidated Judaism, Christianity and Moslemism has been obliterated, hence the revival of religion happening today. Thus in Bakan’s eyes and according to Freud’s intent Judaism has deconstructed Euroamerican society so the reconstruction according to Jewish cultural mores can commence.
The result has been accomplished by the destruction of the Scientific Consciousness as there is little of science in Freud’s cultural writings. He just says what he believes and wants you to believe and asserts it as fact. As always there were some Westerners who resented the encroachment of the strict limits of science. Rider Haggard in his Allan Quatermain made that as clear as possible. The topic is the dominant theme of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels. Henry Ford and his mass production methods was a symbol of that rebellion against the strict limits set by the clock. Some denounced it as Taylorism; but with each passing decade the West became more acclimated to the change as the reactionary mood became acclimated to the new reality.
Freud invents ‘instincts’ and their ‘renunciation’ to give sense to his arguments; the ‘renunciation of instincts’ almost sounds scientific but it isn’t. There are no instincts nor does Freud even attempt to demonstrate their existence. Like the rest of Freud’s psychology the notion is just something Freud made up. As always he notes only the negative societal destructive effects. He says nothing of the ‘instinct’ to be around people which would conflict with his instinct against civilization- the last is a vague enough term the way he uses it. But, as Lang points out the hypnotic spell cast by Mabuse negates criticism so that the head psychologist, the objective scientist himself, Baum, suspends critical judgment falling under the spell to the point of becoming a disciple just as Lang himself did. Indeed, as the West has. Hitler was a blessing in disguise for the Jewish Revolution. The guilt caused by Hitler completely disarmed the West allowing the Reconstruction of Western mores to proceed at a faster pace than would have been possible without Hitler. Indeed, the Nazi Era drove the entire pyschotic Jewish Revolution to the shores of the United States beginning in the early thirties. Thus the deconstruction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America was assured.
To return to 1919.
I, Dynamo 