Part 2 Something Of Value I
October 14, 2007
Something Of Value I
Part 2
by
R.E. Prindle
Back To Solid Ground, More Or Less
At the same time Stevenson and Haggard appeared, another of the great mythographers made his appearance. Arthur Conan Doyle brought his great psychological projection Sherlock Holmes onto the world stage. Doyle listed Poe as his second most influential author with whom he had been familiar since his youth. All the great mythographers were well acquainted with Poe. He was the great originator.
Holmes is the first great psychological projection of the Scientific Consciousness. He fulfills the role of Mastermind. His intellectual greatness fulfilled Poe’s dictum of the analytical mind.
As the two Dupins fulfilled the roles of ego and alter ego so Doyle gave Holmes Dr. John H. Watson as alter ego and foil. Holmes represented the future while Watson was a relic from the religious past. As the evil Hydelike representative of the subconscious Doyle provided us with the infamous criminal mastermind Dr. Moriarty.
With the introduction of Holmes the Scientific mythology began to take shape.
The new mythology was based on the new discoveries of science. The scientific mind was pouring out new technological wonders almost on a daily basis but it was the discoveries in the sciences of biology and psychology that would most undermine the Religious Consciousness.
Darwin had organized biology along the new scientific lines when his Origin Of Species appeared in 1859. There was no greater challenge to the orthodox belief system than this. When a few years later Darwin issued The Descent Of Man things really erupted. According to the religious viewpoint, since the origins of consciousness the notion had been that man was descended from the gods, later monotheistically amended to God. In a really inept choice of words Darwin states, or his followers did, that man was descended from monkeys. The idea of evolution might have met with less reistance had Darwin titled his book: The Ascent Of Man since, properly speaking, Homo Sapiens is an advance on monkeys and all that has gone before. Thus man could have been said to ascend the evolutionary scale from apes but descend from God meeting somewhere in the middle. Darwin wasn’t so farsighted.
At the same time great advances were being made in psychology. The Frenchman, Jean Martin Charcot, was proving the effect of the subconscious on our minds in his studies of hysteria and hypnosis. The sub or unconscious mind had been a topic of consideration since the days of the Enlightenment but discussion was carried on in vague terms. In 1886 the English psychologist FWH Myers identified the subconscious by the name of the Unconscious preparing the way for Freud who would set the world on its psychological ear the way Darwin had its biological ear.
The way was now prepared for one of the two greatest mythographers, H.G. Wells (1866-1946). Wells had a split personality. On the one hand he was a mythographer and on the other he was a Red/Liberal/Utopian. In 1920 the Utopian side won out and he became a whole-hearted Revolutionist.
Wells began writing about 1893. His early work was in the genre of scientific fantasias, as they were called at the time, of which genre he is said to be the founder. Wells noted quite correctly that about mid-century a new type of scientific man became increasingly apparent.
Let there be no mistake but that a few centuries earlier these scientific disturbers of the peace would have been murdered. The reaction by the beginning of the twentieth century was that science was evil and ought to be stopped. George Griffith, himself writing a scientific fantasia for Pearson’s Magazine, Stories Of Other Worlds, put these words into his heroine Zaidie’s mouth as she was on the way to Mars:
“They’re very ugly aren’t they?” said Zaidie; “and really you can’t tell which are men and which are women. I suppose they’ve civilized themselves out of everything that’s nice, and are just scientific and utilitarian and everything that’s horrid.”
And Zaidie was a sweet thing too. Against an even more hostile background Wells understood that tempers against science were running high but he came down on the side of the New Men. In his interesting fantasia The Food Of The Gods he postulates that the new men had perhaps been fed some new synthetic food which made them intellectual and physical giants.
Actually they had been around for centuries but had been suppressed by the Religious Consciousness in the form of the Judeo-Catholic religion. As their forces gathered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they became strong enough to defy the Judeo-Catholics. Thus when the evidence of their emergence became evident in mid-nineteenth century they were already too numerous and too strong to be set aside. The two consciousnesses came into conflict with the Religious Consciousness splitting into the reactionary Devout group and the other the more forward leaning Red/Liberals.
Thus Wells on his Utopian side became the advocate of a form of the Religious Consciousness as he struggled with his Scientific Consciousness. After the Russian Revolution he wholeheartedly went over to the revolution.
While very influential on subsequent mythographers Wells was unable to create a psychological projection of his own while after 1920 he became a member of religious communism turning out politico-religious tracts.
Emerging at about the same time as Wells the Irishman Bram Stoker contributed the master psychological projection of the twentieth century in his masterwork, Dracula while E.W. Hornung (1866-1921) created the minor projection, the Amateur cracksman- A. J. Raffles. A cracksman was a burglar; Raffles was the archetype of the gentleman thief. While Raffles himself has virtually disappeared from the collective memory the notion of the gentleman criminal has taken hold on the mythological consciousness. Raffles is not to be confused as a version of the earlier Robin Hood who ‘stole from the rich to give to the poor.’ No, Raffles unashamedly kept and spent all the proceeds.
In the background all this time the greatest of the creative mythographers, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was waiting for his consciousness to mature. It matured in 1911 when he first created John Carter of Mars then followed up with the prodigious psychological projection of Tarzan Of The Apes. Shew, bigger than an A-bomb.
Burroughs was the plateau to which all other roads led and from which all other roads proceeded. He managed to consolidate all the mythological trends of the previous decades into his work where he refined and perfected them sending them on to new heights.
Edgar Rice Burroughs. To coin a cliche, Burroughs was an enigmatic figure. While himself a great original writer he managed to incorporate the various strands of the myth into his writing in such a way, either clumsy or tributary, as you wish, that he stands accused of being a plagiarist. This is nonsense of course. Like any mythographer he had to work with established materials. Myths are not original– they are cooperative efforts. The great Greek cycle, of which Homer is the center, was the work of many hands. The fact does not diminish Homer’s contribution.
Burroughs was able to incorporate the two most significant disciplines of psychology and evolution into his work in such an entertaining manner that the seriousness of his thought was lost in the glamour.
While the sources of Burroughs’ evolutionary ideas which will be discussed in Part II, are relatively easy to trace his psychological sources are more difficult. That he had already thought deeply on psychological matters before he began writing is obvious. That he continually added to his learning in psychology as well as evolution is clear from the development of his thought throughout the corpus.
Burroughs was especially concerned with the nature of the unconscious. He was an intelligent man who knew that his own behavior was controlled from his subconscious. I am certain that he was familiar with the 1886 work of FWH Myers, as well as Myers’ 1903 work Human Consciousness. As Freud was not translated into English before 1912 it seems certain that he had not had direct contact with the man’s work before then, however, by 1916 in his short story ‘Tarzan’s First Nightmare’ it seems evident that he had read at least The Interpretations Of Dreams.
Still, Burroughs had considerable contact with practicing psychologists as he indicated in The Gods Of Mars.
As the notion of the unconscious was discussed in various journals he very probably had read a number of articles, while as the notion of the Freudian slip was current in the second decade of the twentieth century he may have been familiar with Freud’s Psychopathology Of Everyday Life.
At any rate his writing of that decade drove relentlessly toward the goal of integrating his personality which is to say unifying the subconscious and conscious minds which he succeeded in doing by 1917 when he published The Oakdale Affair or, as alternatively titled, Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid.
In his portrayal of the big Bwana, Tarzan has an integrated personality from his beginning in 1912. In his other works Burroughs constantly offers many portrayals of the subconscious.
The contrast between the conscious, or intelligent mind, and the unconscious, subconscious or ‘instinctive’ mind is one of the central tenets of the myth.
For Burroughs the study of the subconscious was to liberate, for Freud it was to subjugate the human will. Make no mistake, I consider Freud an evil presence while being the most destructive force of the twentieth century equal to any number of atomic bombs. Freud’s notion of the subconscious as a Hydelike repository of horrid repressed criminal needs was very mistaken.
One has the feeling that Freud learned much more about the human psyche than he told and that he told what he did with ulterior motives in mind. Those ulterior motives did not go unnoticed at the time. As D.H. Lawrence expressed it is his Psychoanalysis And The Unconscius of 1911:
And does it need a prophet to discern that Freud is on the brink of a Weltanschauung- or at least a Menschenschauung, which is a more risky affair? What detains him? Two things. First and foremost the moral issue. And next, but more vital, he can’t get down to the rock on which he must build his church.
Actually the unconscious was the rock but another rock was how to turn the basis of psychoanalysis, which is emasculation, into something palatable. Freud stumbled over his concept of castration which he was apparently sincerely unable to extend into the workable concept of Emasculation. The Castration Complex is only a symbol for Emasculation. And then there was the difficult moral issue. Lawrence again, same work:
First and foremost the issue is a moral issue. It is not here a matter of reform, new moral values. It is the life and death of all morality. The leaders (Freud, Ferenczi, Abraham) among the psychoanalysts know what they have in hand. Probably most of their followers are ignorant, and therefore pseudo-innocent. But it all amounts to the same thing. Psychoanalysis is out, under a therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man. (My italics.)
Lawrence put his finger on the criminal intent. Freud was in fact running an Order in which one learned the true intent as one moved from initiate to adept. Freud in fact did wish to destroy the concept of Christian, that is to say European morality, and he had his reasons. But why the ‘unconscious’, why something which in his vision lies outside, even beyond, our minds, some alien evil force which controls our actions against our will. Lawrence persists:
It is obvious we cannot recover our moral footing until we can in some way determine the true nature of the unconscious (Percipient O!) The word unconscious itself is a mere definition by negation and has no positive meaning. Freud no doubt prefers it for this reason. He rejects subconscious and preconscious, because both of these would imply a sort of nascent consciousness, the shadowy half-consciousness which precedes mental realization. And by his unconscious he intends no such thing. He wishes rather to convey, we imagine, that which recoils from consciousness, that which reacts in the psyche away from mental consciousness. His unconscious is, we take it, that part of the human consciousness which though mental, ideal in its nature, yet unwilling to expose itself to full recognition and so recoils back into the affective regions and acts there as a secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent, and usually destructive. The whole body of repressions makes up our unconscious.
Here Lawrence states the obvious, there is no such thing as the unconscious. There is a subconscious that he rightly understands Freud to have rejected for ulterior motives. A subconscious is part of us which can be dealt with while an unconscious which is metaphysical cannot, it therefore follows that there cannot be an unconscious which would be a religious symbol, or in other words, supernatural.
However Lawrence while he scoffs seems to understand the function or a function that Freud gave to his unconscious which is in fact partially true of the subconscious. ‘The whole body of repressions makes up our unconscious.’ Not a fact because when the personality is integrated and fixations or what Freud call repressions disappear there is still a function to the subconscious which is unrelated to the fixations or repressions. I believe repression to be an inaccurate term. Rather what Freud calls repressions are fixations. A Challenge that the mind finds overwhelming is received and perpetuated as a fixation in the subconscious that in its control of the personality appeared to Freud as repression. Freud repeatedly reports the symbol as the fact whether through misconception or in intent to deceive is not always clear.
What is clear is that as Lawrence perceived so clearly in 1911 was Freud’s intent to destroy morality in a Jekylllike intent to release the Hydelike repressions on the world. In this he succeeded quite well. Much to his own injury. Just as Hyde brought destruction on himself so Freud brought destruction on the Jews in this Jewish millennial period.
At this point it might be instructive to examine an aspect of the intellectual milieu in which Freud developed. A large part of personal psychology is integral in one’s group psychology and general psychology as in, for instance, education. By education I do not mean schooling per se, but all the influences which constitue character formation.
Freud’s father came from the area of the Pale known as Galicia. This area is very close to the homeland of the ecstatic variant of Judaism known as Hasidism, and in fact his father was a Hasid. This sect arose out of the period of the last great messianic individual, Sabbatai Zevi. This man was active during the period 1640-66. As might be expected in group psychology when the Day approaches the faithful raise their expectations, growing elated, becoming forgetfull of niceties. This is what happened to the Jews of the southern Pale in 1648. As auxiliaries of the Poles who had conquered the Ukraine the Jews suffered the same fate as the Poles when the Ukrainians revolted. this massacre occurred at the same time as the expected millennium which was a complete contradiction in terms, or in other words, how mysterious can the ways of God be? Then in 1666 the whole millennial illusion collapsed when Zevi failed as a messiah.
One result of the failure was the attempt to regenerate Judaism by means of ecstatic Hasidism. By all rights Yahvey, not for the first time, having failed his people should have been renounced. The Jews couldn’t do this. There was also a second effect. Out of the wreckage of Zevi a man named Jacob Frank evolved another strain of Judaism in which he said that the age of the millennium would never appear until the Jews had exhausted their proclivity for evil. It was therefore necessary for Jews to indulge in whatever evil impulses they had to purge their systems to make way for the good or millennium.
Here also is where the Jewish notion of good arising from evil finds its clearest expression. Jewish ideas are never distinct from the ideas of the general community, in this case European. A European reaction to Judaeo-Catholicism had been going on for centuries passing through many manifestations such as the Beggars, the Free Spirtis, Anabaptists and others. All of these like the Frankists believed, like Freud, in the free expression of subconscious impulses.
Now joined by the Frankist notions after the beginning of the eighteenth century the basis of the Revolution was formed.
By mid-eighteenth century many of these groups, now styled Libertines, were functioning openly in England and on the Continent. Perhaps the most famous organization representing these beliefs which were integral to the Revolution which had been developing for centuries were clubs like the Hell Fire Club of England.
These groups of people were quite extreme. Their credo was startlingly expressed in Tobias Smollett’s 1748 novel Roderick Random. Note the date, which is just before the destruction of the notorious prisons, Newgate in England and the Bastille in France. Smollett’s novel is forty-one years before the outbreak of the French Revolution which was supported in England by members of these clubs.
Smollett’s hero, Roderick Random, was introduced into the home of one of these incendiaries to whom he attribute the following poem:
Thus have I sent the simple king to hell
Without or coffin, shroud or passing bell.
To me what are divine or human laws?
I court no sanction but my own applause!
Rapes, robb’ries, treasons, yield my soul delight;
And human carnage gratifies my sight;
I drag the hoary parent by the hair,
And toss the sprawling infant on my spear,
While the fond mother’s cries regale my ear.
I fight, I vanquish, murder friends and foes;
Nor dare the immortal gods my rage oppose.
Sound like any two revolutions you may have heard of? The above pretty much defines Freud’s intent in his use of the subconscious while forming the framework of his personal Weltanschauung. Whether Freud was consciously aware of these notions or whether they were part of his subconscious is open to question. Much of the education of this sort is absorbed on the subliminal level perhaps never being or becoming conscious. Most of this primal education is buried so deep that one is never aware of its source. I scoff at Freud’s claim that he was able to analyze himself in just one year at the turn of the century.
Now, the majority of Freud’s thought was completed by the time he published his Introductory Lectures In Psycho-Analysis in 1917 just before the Bolshevik Revolution. In order to explain the results of the Freudian ideas of the ‘unconscious’ let me provide a framework by moving ahead a little.
What we are talking about here is the context of Freud’s notion of the castration complex. Castration is a specific symbol while the generalized concept is Emasculation. the Castration Complex is not even an affect but only a symbol. If Freud was aware of the generalized Emasculation concept he nowhere lets us know. Emasculation is caused by an unresolved affront to the Ego from which all men and women suffer to some degree.
The scapegoat for our sins or arch-villain of all time as some would have it was and remains Adolf Hitler. Hitler was seriously emasculated. Having read all the major Hitler biographies while delving is some detail into the hisory of post-Great War Germany I was at a loss to explain the man and his time down to the Rock of his Church. Having folowed through on Freud’s notion of the Castration Complex exlucidating it into the Emasculation theory I came across the novels of that most horribly emasculated and repulsive figure in modern literature, Jean Genet.
For those not familiar with Genet, he wrote plays which I have not read and five novels I have which I list: Our Lady Of The Flowers, The Miracle Of The Rose, Funeral Rites, The Thief’s Journal and Querelle Of Brest.
Genet was a vicious homosexual and criminal which is to say he was completely emasculated. He wore women’s dresses but not as a transvestite. Any self-respect he had was totally negative. However, it is possible to recognize something of oneself in his hurt. He knew how to universalize his anguish. His degradation gave him some insight into his times and its personalities. He traveled in Nazi Germany between 1930 and 1940.
While not using these terms he understood and applauded the criminal annexation of Law and government to the uses of Freud’s concept of the unconscious or, in another word, criminality. The criminal nature of the regime was so in accord with his own perversions that he had no desire to thieve as such crimes seemed to him to be no insult to society in Germany.
It seemed to him that Hitler was one with himself in his desires.
I don’t believe Hitler was a practicing homosexual but he was emasculated to the point of deformity. Which is what I suppose revolted his contemporaries so. However, as all emasculation is expressed in a variant homosexual manner, self hatred being a form of homosexuality, one may believe that he was a ‘latent’ homosexual. One wonders about his relationship with Hindenburg; what exaggerated respect and smoldering resentment must have been there.
In may ways Genet forms a link between the ante and post WWII worlds. In his own goals and aims he was peculiarly related to Freud.
Shortly after the Great War Freud wrote ‘Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego.’ The essay is applied Freudianism; it doesn’t do you any good to have the scientific knowledge if you don’t apply it. Man has his individual ego while sharing it in one or more group egos. The question then becomes how does one engineer the individual ego into a group ego so that the individual within an artificial group can achieve your desired political ends will he nil he, hypnotized as it were.
Freud tackles this problem in Group Ego. The book raises several interesting questions. Freud based this work on an 1895 study by the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon titled: The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind. Le Bon’s was a seminal work still in print after 110 years. He might be said to have originated the concept of group psychology which Freud appropriated.
‘Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego’ is virtually the Crowd rewritten with better organization and definition. At the risk of quoting too extensively I have abstracted several quotes from Le Bon used by Freud in Group Ego which form the basis of Freud’s essay. Le Bon’s book may be illustrative of the manner in which Freud built several of his
The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological group is the following. Whoever be the individuals who compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group. The psychological group is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly. (p. 29)
It is easy to prove how much the individual forming part of a group differs from the isolated individual but it is less easy to discover the causes of this difference.
To obtain at any rate a glimpse of them it is necessary in the first place to call to mind the truth established by modern psychology, (1895) that unconscious phenomena play an altogether preponderating part not only in organic life, but also in the operations of intelligence. The conscious life of the mind is of small importance in comparison with its unconscious life. The most subtle analyst, the most acute observer, is scarcely successful in discovering more than a very small number of the conscious motives that determine his conduct. Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious stratum created in the mind mainly by hereditary influences. The substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, (The issue is not issue, Mark Rudd) but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still, of which we ourselves are ignorant. The greater part of our daily actions are the result of hidden motives which escape our observation. (Ibid. 30
A necessary transition note from Freud. (Page 8, Group Psychology). ‘Le Bon thinks that the particular acquirements of individuals become obliterated in a group, and that in this way their distinctiveness vanishes. The racial unconscious emerges, what is heterogeneous is submerged in what is homgeneous. As we should say, the mental superstructure, the development of which in individuals shows such dissimilarities is removed, and the unconscious foundations, which are similar in everyone, stand exposed to view.
In this way individuals in a group would come to show an average character. But Le Bon believes that they also show new characteristics which they have previously not possessed, and he seeks the reason for this in three different factors.’
Freud quoting Le Bon again:
The first is that the individual forming part of a group acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to interests which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself, from the consideration that, a group being anonymous and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely. (Ibid. 33)
The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestations in groups of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence but which it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a group every sentiment and act is contagious, and cantagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. this is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a group. (Ibid. 33)
A third case and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a group special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by their isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is also an effect.
To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries. We know today that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful investigations seem to prove than an individual immersed for some length of time in a group in action soon finds himself– whether in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the group, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant– in a special stae, which much resembles the state of ‘fascination’ in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.
…The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotizer.
Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological group. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotized subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, other may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of groups than in that of the hypnotized subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all individuals in the group, it gains in strength by reciprocity. (Ibid. 34)
We see, then, that the disappearnce of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in the identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested idea into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a group. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will. (Ibid. 35)
The remainder of Freud’s Group Psychology is the application of Le Bon’s observations as a manual for psychologically manipulated groups through hypnosis and suggestion to achieve an agenda. I will repeatedly refer to Group Psychology in Freud’s plan hereafter. While it is clear that Freud read Le Bon’s 1895 book absorbing much, the book was immediately translated into English in 1896 where it became accesible to a world public, it is therefore probable that a number of other people read the book taking what they needed for their purposes.
One of these may very well have been Edgar Rice Burroughs. I know of no way of determining the fact that he read the book but one asks is there any evidence in his novels that would indicate that he had. I’ll be darned, there is. As I said, because of the frivolous nature of the novels one dismisses Burroughs as an uneducated fantasist. He himself said that he would take a political or social idea and highly fictionalize it into something else. If one reads his 1914 novel Thuvia, Maid Of Mars one finds a story suspiciously like Le Bon’s ideas in The Crowd but highly fictionalized.
Burroughs’ psychological ideas are difficult to trace but well developed. Throughout his corpus Burroughs is well informed about hypnosis. It appears to be a subject he gave special attention to. Le Bon’s ideas are based on group hypnosis. In Thuvia the hero finds his way to the Martian kingdom of Lothar. He engages his invaders in a battle with the Lotharians. The city walls of Lothar are manned by innumerable bowmen firing arrows on the Green Men of Mars. The field is strewn with dead Green men killed by the arrows of he phantom bowmen.
The fight ending the hero looks away for an instant breaking eye contact with Lothar. When he looks back the field is strewn with dead Green Men but the arrows are gone. Wondering about this he looks back at Lothar to find the bowmen are gone too.
As it turn out the Lotharians no longer exist in physical form but are merely psychological projections who have learned to mass hypnotize their enemies into believing that they do exist and are shooting real arrows. Their enemies believe they are real arrows and so die by them.
Thus it is quite possible that in Thuvia we have a fictionalization of Le Bon’s ideas which Burroughs must have picked up from the 1895 book converting them into fiction in 1914 well ahead of Freud and Hitler.
Oh yes. Him again. Hitler. Whether historians would agree that Germany was ‘stabbed in the back’ or not, it was universally believed by Germans, especially by Hitler, and they and he acted on that belief. Thus the psychic injury suffered by the privations of war, the loss of the war, and the belief that victory had been taken from them by traitorous means made a curious form of group emasculation of the collective ego shared by each individual creating the conditions for a group psychology which under the influence of a hypnotizer they would not be responsible for their acts. The group ego is where the emasculation occurs being then relegated to the group subconscious where it surfaces under various names and impulses. As the American Jew Mark Rudd was to say in respect to his group’s post-WWII emasculation: The issue is not the issue. In other words, their complaint was the disguise for their emasculation which is what they were really trying to address.
Jean Genet was not a philosopher or a politician so that he did not understand that Hitler was not the protagonist but the antagonist. He was not acting but reacting. What was he reacting to? Let’s go back to Freud.
End of Part 2. Go To Part 3
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.
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
A Review
Part IV
The Art Of Yesterday’s Crash
by R.E. Prindle
As I mentioned in Part II Mr. Marcus seems to consider himself first an Old Testament prophet prophesying fire and destruction for the United States. Secondly he sees himself as a continuator of the Frankfurt School or New School Of Social Research and thirdly the spiritual successor to Guy Debord and perhaps the new leader of the Situationist International.
In the situations under consideration he turns his New School For Social Research and SI sides up.
Now as it happens that when I attended Cal State At Hayward one of the professors was a fellow named Theodore Roszak. Mr Roszak wrote a volume called The Making Of A Counter Culture while teaching at Cal State; probably something called American Studies or some such, I can’t remember, which these Frankfurters always aim for and we’ll see why.
We are now talking ’64-’65. Sixty-five is probably best known for the Black rebellion in LA’s Watts district. That kicked off the violent revolt of the Blacks which smolders on today flaring up here and there. Thus in Mr. Marcus’ The Shape Of Things To Come he prophesys blood in the streets.
It was also the beginning of the San Francisco Scene. The San Francisco Mime Troop- a Communist outfit- had been active in street theatre for some little time. Then Kesey organized the Merry Pranksters, Owsley entered the picture and the Acid Tests began. I was invited to the Acid Test but declined to go. Couldn’t see the social utility; it would have been interesting but I’m not sorry I missed it.
Roszak. So everybody assumed that this book he advertised he was writing called The Making Of A Counter Culture was about what Jack Kerouac called ‘The Rucksack Revolution.’ These were the post-British Invasion days so long hair was slowly making inroads into the East Bay. I didn’t have long hair but I had a strange long ducktail from the fifties. Cal State was on a windy plateau so everytime I went outside I looked like a hurricane walking around. This was enough for the profs and administration who were terrified that the Free Speech Movement would edge up from Berkeley to classify me as a ‘radical.’
I was sent to Roszak as he was presumably writing a book on the ‘counter culture’ which is what the hip movement was known as. I found Roszak one guilty customer. Dark mind too, repellent. He thought I was sent as a spy. That increased his guilty reaction.
When his book came out it didn’t have anything to do with a Hippie counter culture. It was all about the Frankfurt School, Marcuse et al. The book was about the Jewish Revolution. Roszak must have thought the ‘anti-Semites’ sent me. So, now I understand Mr. Marcus; use of the term ‘Secret History.’ He doesn’t just mean obscure. Roszak was part of history being made but it was unintelligible to the uninformed mind. Even though the Frankfurt School was operating openly I don’t know if anyone knew that subterranean history was being lived in the open but there it was as plain as day. Roszak was a continuator. I don’t know if Mr. Marcus knows Mr. Roszak but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did, they are both Jews etc, but as a continuator of the Frankfurt School Mr. Marcus may be described as having the baton passed to him through Mr. Roszak. Mr. Marcus is more prolific and effective while being more obscure and secretive than Mr. Roszak. The reader, even the informed reader, probably doesn’t know he is being spoon fed Semitism.
Mr. Marcus even allows himself to be called by the presumptuous title of The Holy Greil even further insulting his subordinate Euroamerican culture. I don’t mind Mr. Marcus and others insulting the half-Jewish Jesus but I do want him to keep his hands off the essence of Euroamerican Culture. I can accord Mr. Marcus neither Holiness nor any association with the Grail stories even though his style incomprehensible as it is is pretty entertaining. Must have learned that from Old Bob.
Mr. Marcus establishes himself as a continuator of the Frankfurt School and then says he is going to criticize the living crap out of everything. Well, alright, OK! I would like to point out however that criticism is not analysis. Any fool can criticize but analysis requires a little science. There’s a serious rub in Mr. Marcus’ style, not science, all, well, not all, blather.
I will give him credit for not beginning this Situation with the Armory Show. My god and Jesus H. Christ we know how that changed America but, well, as an Israeli citizen and man of the world Mr. Marcus isn’t talking about America or anything as earth shaking as the Armory show. No. He’s talking about six inconsquential nerds pulling sophomoric stunts in Zurich in 1916 while there was a war going on. All a bunch of draft dodgers too, except for the woman doing the splits with the madonna face whatever one of those is. I been looking but not finding.
These six Mr. Marcus informs us created Da Da. They gave their shenanigans a name that stuck. While Mr. Marcus seems to revere their stuff I have to confess that it doesn’t seem much different than the shenanigans of any other generation. Da Da is just a state of mind that certain people experience at a certain stage and condition of life.
If Mr. Marcus had looked around Berkeley and the Bay Area he would have seen plenty of evidence of the state of mind in the Mime Troupe, the whole San Francisco Sound was Da Da. Kesey was Da Da, and everyone was pulling the same kind of stunts with the same results. That trick with the splits and madonna face is so commonplace it doesn’t bear mentioning. A guy playing an imaginary violin? Whew! Wow, who in the world could ever have thought that one up?
The hell with this Da Da crap. Real men dying in the trenches and these guys are scraping an imaginary violin? Not too impressed, Mr. Marcus. Let’s get on to the real stuff. This gets passed over by The Holy Greil. The foundation of the Frankfurt School c. 1923. Here’s the real crux of Mr. Marcus; psychology, the culture wars between the Semitic intellect and the European intellect. A lttle clash of loyalties here in that dual citizenship Mr. Marcus holds.
While the clowns in Zurich, for that is what they were , were trying to live down their antics at the Cabaret Voltaire the real revolution was forming in Frankfurt. This the revolution of which Mr. Marcus is the continuator. This is the real substance of Mr. Marcus’ work. Nice work too, don’t get me wrong.
I’ve done some work on this subject but I’m going to refer any possible readers to this web page for a quick history of the Frankfurt School: http://no-maam.blogspot.com/2007/07/great-historical-outline-of-cultural.html The article was posted by Mr. Rob Fedders. Bear in mind this analysis represents the foundation of Mr. Marcus thought, intellect and purpose. His writing makes much more sense in this context.
Quote:
Before World War I, Marxist theory said that if Europe ever erupted in war, the working classes in every European country would rise in revolt overthrow their govenments and create a new Communist Europe, but when war broke out in the summer of 1914, that didn’t happen. Instead the workers of every European country lined up by the millions to fight their country’s enemies….After World War I ended in 1918, Marxist theorists had to ask themselves a question: What went wrong?…two leading Marxist intellectuals, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and George Lukacs in Hungary…independently came up with the same answer. They said that Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interests, that a Communist revolution was impossible in the West, until both could be destroyed. That objective, established as cultural Marxism’s goal right at the beginning, has never changed.
Unquote.
There’s a little secret history for you. The Frankfurt School employed the political theory of Marx, the psychological theory of Freud and the relativistic nonsense of Einstein to undermine Western culture backed up by the ever potent charge of ‘anti-Semitism.’ Their BS could easily have been resisted and rejected but for their alliance with Liberals. To merely state that a critic was anti-Semitic was enough to set the conditioned Liberals on the accused and make him or her a non-person in society. Thus without their Liberal slaves the Frankfurt School would not have been that effective. Liberals are the true enemy.
Now, skipping the interim machinations, by the time of the Free Speech Movement the Jewish Revolution had been nearly completed.
In addition to the music the introduction of hallucinigens made the capture of the whole generation child’s play.
As with the so-called Free Speech Movement the problem was not one shared by society as a whole which was functioning quite nicely, thank-you, but a cultural problem within the Semitic species. As always the inability of the Semites to compete effectively with the Indo-Europeans, or to be brief, Aryan species was the crux of the problem. The Terachites challenged the Ur of the Chaldees. In the ancient conflict between the Semites and the Aryan Sumerians the latter were centered about Ur while the Semites were centered further North. So Abram as a Semite was challenging the Aryan Sumerians who had understood and developed Astronomy. The Egyptians were an amalgam of the HSII Libyans and the Egyptians of the Upper Nile valley. In my opinion the intellectual content of Egypt was injected by the Libyan refugees from the post-ice age flooding of the Mediterranean.
The Semites then came into collision with the superior intellecual and scientific civilization of the Hellenes more especially in Greek Alexandria where Philo attempted to subvert Hellenic science in favor of ‘Talmudic’ mythology. The Romans who created the most amazing empire the Mediterranean world had ever seen once again, as it were, illuminated the inferiority of the Semitic intellect. The Jews set about to subvert and destroy the Roman Empire which, in my opinion they did both in the exhausting Roman-Jewish Wars and the succeeding Pauline Judeo-Christian subversion. Matters were then stalemated for centuries until Aryan science finally pushed through the Judeo-Christian meshes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Once again the inferiority of the Semitic intellect was displayed. Marx, Freud and Einstein created the basic non-scientific means posing as science to subvert the Aryan scientific intellect. The groundwork laid by the big three, the epigone went to work. The nitwits of Da Da may be considered shock troops while the Frankfurt School- The Institute For Social Research- formed c. 1923 began the serious work of undermining Western Civilization. Once again, Mr. Marcus seems to consider himself first a continuator of the Frankfurt School, a reincarnation of Guy Debord and then in The Shape Of Things To Come to graduate to the role of a Hebrew prophet.
Now, in every instance in which the Jewish Semites have confronted the Aryans they have failed to excel them although taking advantage of the reluctance to face the problem directly on the part of the Aryans the Jewish Semites have been able without exception to destroy the Aryan achievement.
The Jews also insist that they are the Chosen People of mankind just as the Arabs insist that they are The Central People. Chosen, Central are the same things. We are talking a characteristic of the Semitic species. Yet evolutionarily they are constitutionally or genetically inferior to Aryans. No matter what happens they will never be able to match or sustain Aryan achievements.
What to do? I know most readers have never delved deeply into this area of study so that the reader may be astonished by what is going on and find it unbelievable. It isn’t. Realizing that they can never excel the Aryans the Jewish Semites have resolved to exterminate- that is commit genocide- on the whole species. They propose to and are fairly well advanced in their program to eliminate a species of over a billion people.
Astounding and unbelievable isn’t it. Well, while you were sleeping astounding developments were in progress. It is time for the sleeper to awake. Be patient with me and I’ll explain how it is being done and why Mr. Marcus may possibly see himself advance from Hebrew prophet to Judge-Penitent of the Aryan peoples. (See my review of Albert Camus’ The Fall here on I, Dynamo.)
The plan is available on line at a site run by a former Harvard professor, Noel Ignatiev called Race Traitor. Mr. Ignatiev believes in races even though he is a Jew and the current Jewish line is that races do not exist. The first stage of this program is part of psychological warfare based on the Freudian model.
Mr. Ignatiev as spokesman for the Jewish culture asserts that all the evil in the world proceeds from the Aryan ‘races.’ It is true that the Jews argue in other situations that ‘race’ exists only as a social construct however as ‘race’ is useful in this instance the idea is reconstituted. The approach is a key tenet of ‘critical theory’ in which the critical base point is one’s relative need at the moment.
As all evil proceeds from the Aryan ‘race’ it follows that if the Aryan race is eliminated from the face of the earth by ‘any means necessary’ that evil will disappear from the world. This notion is apparently a variation on the eighteenth century Jewish notion of Jacob Frank that Jews will only become good when they expend all the evil in their system. Apparently at that time Jews were the evil ‘race’ but at some point between then and now they have expended all the evil in their system and have become ‘good’ along with the rest of the world. All this stuff sounds good according to Jewish ‘critical theory’ but falls apart under ‘Aryan’ scientific analysis.
The problem is the obvious Aryan superior intelligence so that Mr. Ignatiev invents the concept of ‘White Skin Privilege.’ Using critical theory the only reason Aryans or Whites, to which term I will revert, have obtained the prominent position among the ‘races’ is because Aryans have White Skin. Real Tarzans if you know what I mean. Thus the superiority is based on cosmetics. Change the cosmetics and the superiority will go away. Not bad reasoning really. It therefor follows that if Whites can be persuaded to give up their ‘White Skin Privilege’ why, the Utopia will become a reality and evil will disappear from the world. I’m not making this up.
Therefore from sheer shame Whites should voluntarily abandon ‘Whiteness.’ Remember this line of reasoning comes from a Harvard graduate and a Harvard professor. I would have been laughed out of a ‘third rate’ college like Cal State for proposing such nonsense. To my knowledge neither the Jewish culture or Harvard University have ever publicly repudiated Mr. Ignatiev so one must assume he speaks with the full approval of both.
Mr. Ignatiev also calls his program the New Abolitionism calling for the abolition of the White ‘race.’
The easiest course, or least painful, for Whites to abolish themselves, actually, is to marry Black people. Any resulting offspring will be non-White so that if all Whites could be persuaded to do this ‘Whiteness’ would disappear within, well, a generation.
Realistically this isn’t going to happen although historically conquerors have killed the men and kept the women. Without White men White women will have to produce colored children. This was actually done during the Haitian revolution from France. The men were killed and the White women were told that they could live only if they served as wives to Black men. Most of them did. Thus we have the result of Haitians being the most beautiful people in the world while having constructed the most successful and glorious society not to mention culture.
Now, if you follow what’s happening in education, kindergartners are being taught to be homosexuals. Is it necessary to say that homosexuals cannot reproduce themselves? It therefor follows that if White boys are raised as homosexuals White women will have to turn to Black men while if such a program is successful White men will diminish say by a half life a generation. Thus another method to eliminate Whites. And White people are dumb enough to go for it. Can’t ask for more than that, can one?
And then for the remainder of hard cases there are always industrial means to eliminate them. Gas chambers or whatever means necessary, who cares?
So as you can see Mr. Ignatiev is not theorizing but helping to implement a program that is well advanced.
Now then, the strength of the US economy and well being of Whites as a result is a standing rebuke to the other ‘races’ of the world and a cause of the most destructive envy. We don’t want to look at Zimbabwe and South Africa do we? Naw. How’s that going to prove anything? Thus jobs were exported out of the country to everywhere. The US economy as a whole was picked up and moved to China which for all practical purposes is run with the lowest cost slave labor possible.
The unions have been broken and the well being of the working man has been destroyed by unrestricted Mexican immigration which is lower cost. Technical jobs have been given to lower cost immigrant labor via the worker visa program.
Back in the eighties the savings and Loan industry was savagely looted. One of the beneficiaries of that theft was the family of the current President of the United States. The housing debacle which will be a blow from which the US economy will not recover was engineered from the start to impending finish with the full knowledge of that President.
It only remains to gut the savings of the older generation. At the appropriate time this will be done by inflation. At that point the United States and the West will be defenseless. One can’t imagine what the Liberals have to gain from this.
So, within the matter of a few decades ‘White Skin Privilege’ will be just a memory. Of course other ‘situations’ may enter in to redirect the course of history. No one can accurately prophesy including Mr. Marcus.
Thus if Mr. Marcus lives long enough he may finish his life as a ‘Judge Penitent’ choosing who may live and who not.
I will end this Part here and meld the end of The Art Of Yesterday’s Crash with the next situation The Crash Of Yesterday’s Art.
Second Thoughts Greil Marcus Shape Of Things To Come
July 23, 2007
Greil Marcus
Shape Of Things To come
Second Thoughts
A Review
by R.E. Prindle
Freud in his 1921 essay Group Psychology And The Analysis Of The Ego laid down the basis of what would later evolve into the concept of Multi-Culturalism. Thus each culture is a discrete entity governed by its own cultural iudeals or Ego. Judaism is a culture with a set of ideals and a culture. Americanism is a set of edeals without either an ego or culture of its own. Hence ‘Americans’ are eclectic borrowing from many cultures while believing in none and also while granting a sort of sanctity to these cultures because of the lack of its own.
From the Jews ‘American’s borrowed the concept of the Chosen People and redeemers of the world. Greil Marcus in his latest effort ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ seems to know this but I don’t think he understands its implications. Mr. Marcus seems to be motivated by a sdort of cultural envy. Indeed the Jews and Americans are in competition for the role of the ‘Chosen People.’ Perhaps it is significant that like all Jews Mr. Marcus has dual passports. He is at one and the same time an Israeli and an American. In other words he is neither one nor the other but like any other American he blesses the non-American side of his split identity.
Mr. Marcus in this volume of prophecy takes on the role of one of the ancient prophets of Israel. He seems angry that John Winthrop would borrow the description of Jerusalem as a City On The Hill and apply it to New England.
Mr. Marcus takes offence at this and comes back to it repeatedly.
As he points out that as with the Jews those who form a covenant with God will be scourged by God as the Jews have repeatedly been. He seems to think that the colonial predilection for slavery is somehow offensive in the eyes of God although slavery was an institution among the ancient Jews for thousands of years. Solomon the Wise sold his own people into slavery to pay for his temple.
American slavery, offensive to the nostrils of any decent person, was first White then evolved to Black when scoundrels of various nationalities, including a hefty proportion of Jews, unloaded shiploads of Africans in America. The Blacks eventually displaced the Whites but there is many an African-American with the blood of a raped White ‘servant girl’ in his veins.
All this is neither here nor there. The point is that Mr. Marcus believes the day of retribution is at hand. That is The Shape Of Things To Come that he prophesies. He seems ato take a fair amount of pleasure in his visions of blood running in the streets.
Having established the notion that ‘Americans’ are going to get their comeupance he then goes on to give the Jewish cultural vision of America and Americans. He relies on John Dos Passos USA trilogy and the paranoid delusions of Philip Roth both of whom are Jewish. It is a characteristic of Mr. Marcus to cast his fellow Jews as virtuous while the evil persons are goyish.
As it chances I have read Dos Passos’ USA trilogy a trilogy of times. While able to plow through the occasional Roth volume no more than once although I did enjoy The Breast immensely. Perhaps Mr. Roth’s novelette may explain his psychology.
Now, Mr. Marcus entitled on of is earlier volumes The Weird Old America. I tranlsiterate the title into The Bad Old America. thus Mr. Marcus emphasizes the negative appraisal of America by Dos Passos. There is no denying the negative side of any culture. But it is wrong to speak only positively of the Jewish culture and only negatively of the American. My undersanding of the work has changed with each reading so that by the end of the third volume, The Big Money, in my third reading I was ready to vomit. If one were to contrast Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and Seventeen with the USA trilogy you would not only think yourself on another planet but in a parallel universe. I personally remember the evils of growing up but I also remember the joys. I have seen the slums, lived in them, but I have also seen the magnificent college campuses before the really big money, concrete and masses of humanity arrived.
Yes, I have had my moments of displeasure too but I have also experienced the exaltation of delight. More importantly so has Greil Marcus.
After having condemned the Bad Old America of the past from the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock to 1936 when Dos Passos finished The Big Money to the present. All right Mr. Marcus, I’ve got it. We’re sorry for Hitler did to the Jews. OK? But let’s not forget what the Jews did to the Amalekites among numerous others. There are no innocents. Right?
As an example of how foul small town American ‘really was’ Mr. Marcus offers us the vision of an apparent psychopath, movie maker David Lynch. Mr. Lunch, apparently from Boise was responsible for an aborted TV series, Twin Peaks and a movie sequel called Fire Walk With Me which apparently entranced Mr. Marcus.
Well, why go into details. Suffice it to say who would want to live in such a hell hole. If Mr. Lynch’s vision coincides with that of Mr. Marcus I’m amazed that he can take any pleasure in living let alone living in a place like Berkeley. Seems exceedingly masochistic to me. Mr. Marcus’ fellow Berkeleyans had better hope that he never takes it in mind to reveal the real Berkeley steeped in crime and infamy.
Well, I could go on like this but I’m getting tired of all this negativity. I do agree with Mr. Marcus that it is a wicked, wicked world out there that requires a lot of caution and precaution to more or less successfully negotiate it. There is a lot of evil out there to prophesy but the real danger Mr. Marcus as another Jewish prophet, Jacob Frank once foresaw is the evil within. urge thyself Mr. Marcus. I won’t be moving to Israel anytime soon to escape the evils of America.
End Of Second Thoughts
A Review: Jack Finney: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
July 20, 2007
A Review
Invasion Of The Body Snatchers
Pub. 1955, Revised 1978
by
Jack Finney
Review
by R.E. Prindle
Jack Finney
Body Snatchers was one of a number of books of the mid to late fifties dealing with the loss of identity. One by Richard Matheson was titled I Am Legend. Another was The Blob from a story by Irving Milgate. They were all made into motion pictures and because they dealt with a real problem experienced by the whole population of the US have survived in memory becoming ‘cult classics.’
Finney tackles the problem in the most direct and comprehensible manner. The problem was becoming apparent about 1954-55 when I Am Legend and Body Snatchers were written. It took a poet’s mind to see it. I am not aware of the date of Millgate’s story but as the movie The Blob was conceived about ’56-’57 the story is in the same time frame.
The problem was that the doctrine of the Freudian unconscious was beginning to subvert the American consciousness. Operative from the beginning of the twentieth century Freud’s views were accelerated by the mass exodus of Freudian analysts from Europe to the US during the 1930s. The analysts were concentrated in the US cultural capitols of New York and Los Angeles. After WWII ended Freudian doctrines were promulgated from the publishing capitol of New York and the entertainment capitol of Los Angeles/Hollywood.
The average American was A-bombed, literally, out of his mind by these doctrines which were alien to him. As Finney suggests metaphorically they descended on him from outer space. Formerly normal people were now pathologized as ‘sick.’ This was the era of sickness- sick humor, sick novels, sick movies, everything was sick. You were sick, I was sick, everyone was sick. No one was normal.
Finney caught the malady perfectly, and early, in his Body Snatchers. Indeed, the wife, the husband, brother, sister, mother, father everyone you thought you knew seemed to be someone else. They seemed the same on the outside as Finney indicates but they were somehow different. They were being taught that all their ideals, morals and beliefs were wrong. Thrown into doubt they had no real defences as these ideas had ‘drifted down from outer space.’ Authorities told them that Freud was right and they were wrong. Oh, they hated Freud as one hates any other oppressor because they had to be responsible for their actions but they gobbled up his fraudulent sexual theories because they liked that, they readily accepted that, as they were controlled from the subconscious, they should not repress themselves, that they should abandon self-control but they were no longer able to discriminate between good and bad, right and wrong.
Their minds were opened to all the wrong influences while all the wrong people were in control of the hypnopaedic media. Movies, television, records, books, magazines, and newspapers all directed them on to self-destructive paths. Thus in Finney’s sense a body snatcher grew an identical person with a different set of values replacing each.
In the book the Body Snatchers got no further than Mill Valley but in real life they captured or neutralized the majority while retaining control of the hynopaedic media leaving only a minority to resist. Matheson’s legend- The Omega Man. The battle goes on.
It has taken sixty years for the intelligent to begin to organize but as evil can never triumph no matter how close it may come, the tide has now turned. Decency will triumph just as it did in Finney’s prophetic novel- The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
End Of Review
Albert Camus: The Fall A Review
July 19, 2007
A Review Of
THE FALL
by
Albert Camus
Review by R.E. Prindle
Table of Contents.
I. Review of The Fall
II. Article and Commentary on Camus’ and Jews
III. Review Of The Outsider
IV. Comparison of The Fall and A Rebours. (Projected as of 12/27/11)
V. Comments
Albert Camus- Prototypical Hipster Pose
This novel goes to show that you can fool all the people all the time.
The cover blurb of my edition has the New York Times yodeling: ‘An irresistably brilliant examination of the modern conscience.’ which is complete and total nonsense. This isn’t even the examination of anyone’s conscience.
Camus was a French Jew from Algeria then living in France. He was not an Algerian Jew as the Jews of Algeria were made French citizens in the revolution of 1830. This distinction is important.
The Fall Camus is talking about is the post-Enlightenment destruction of the religious basis for considering the Jews as a Chosen People, or rather, The Chosen People. In Jewish mythology the world is organized God>Jews>the rest of humanity>the animal kingdom. As Camus was not unintelligent he realized that without God the Jews had no special status. HIs purpose here is to reestablish a reason for Jewish superiority over the rest of mankind. Thus he creates Jean-Baptiste Clamence as his spokesman to represent Jewry originating the role of judge-penitent for him and them.
Clamence is not an admirable person. Never was, never can be. His extreme arrogance before the Fall is characteristic of the Jewish people. The Fall was undoubtedly the extermination of Jews during WWII. While Hitler is given sole credit for the dirty work, in the Jewish mind they were rejected by the whole world. One should not underestimate the effect on the Jewish mind of the turning back of the St. Louis from Cuba. These facts were devastating.
Camus’ Clamence thus felt degraded by the Fall from confidence. He becomes libertine, criminal, degenerate, taking up his abode in the criminal quarter of Amsterdam which he seems to equate with the most criminal place in the world. He is a penitent. There in sackcloth and ashes. It is precisely because he knows extreme degradation, having once been of God’s Chosen People, that he has appointed himself a judge over all the peoples of the world.
He- the Jews- have regained their imagined position of the Chosen People through extreme debasement and degradation.
That is why they have made the Holocaust the central feature of their new identity. Their God rejected them, once again, allowing the Nazis to destroy them. Thus the Holocaust replaces God. If the Holocaust is not sacred to them and honored by the rest of the world, as their God once was, then they not only lose their place as the Chosen People but have no chance of regaining it.
That is the import of Camus’ The Fall. The book has nothing to do with an examination of the ‘modern conscience’, which is to say my conscience. I reject Camus. I reject his book. I reject his situation. He and it have nothing in common with me. His problem is not a universal problem as the NY Times states. Camus’ book is merely a tedious rendition of someone else’s angst that has nothing to do with me or mine.
End Of Review
https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/part-i-the-deconstruction-of-edgar-rice-burroughsamerica/
The below response to Robert Zaretsky’s article develops the argument of the origin of The Fall. http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/82555/camus-the-jew/
CAMUS THE JEW
by
R.E. Prindle
Mr. Robert Zaretsky who wrote the above titled article for Tablet Ezine is indeed an example of the absurdity he deplores. He is atavism personified. How can anyone in this post-Darwinian age be so simple and naive as to be a believing Jew. The human intellect has moved well beyond such simplicity. To be a Jew, a Moslem or even Fundamentalist Christian which is to say a distaff Jew should be a logical impossibility.
One might claim to be an Israeli, claiming allegiance to Israel, without making oneself look ridiculous but to claim nationality the same as everyone else is to renounce the extraordinaryly specious claim to some sort of special superiority based on an equally specious divine preference is quite akin to insanity in this post-Darwinian scientific world. The very idea of Yeshivas and Seminaries is repellent to contemporary knowledge.
Given this willful obtuseness one is not astonished to realize that ‘Jews’ renounce all involvement as the cause of the disorder, death and destruction from 1913, when the Jewish millennium was said to begin, to the present. In the height of arrogance the ‘Jews’ ascribe any resistance to the genocidal war begun by them in 1913 as ‘anti-Semitism.’ In other words one is to accept their dominance without a struggle; to resist is considered perverse.
Thus, what makes Camus at least an honorary Jew was his deferential embracement of the Jewish cause as his own. To Bob Zaretsky the actions of God in testing the Jews by an inexplicable defeat can only be compared to the trials of Job. Having been stripped of his children and property but remaining loyal to his perverse god:
We think we know how the story of Job ends: Rewarded by God for his loyalty, Job is paid back with even more children, sheep and property. But is this the ending? A number of biblical scholars suggest the Job we hear in the final chapter, the one who accepts and resigns himself to God’s power play, is not the same Job we hear in the preceding 40 chapters. Instead, he is a throwback to an earlier story that was grafted onto the otherwise perplexing account. Instead the real Job is Camus’ Job. He is a Job who answers God’s deafening and dismal effort at self-justification with scornful silence.
Thus, Bob, and one suspects all Jews refuse to take responsibility for their actions perceiving Camus here as some sort of intermediary. Bob, has a distorted notion of the relationship between his Jews and Europeans. He says:
In republican France Jewishness was largely a private matter: it was only when Nazi Germany buried the Republic in 1940 that Jewishness became a public matter and indifference to the fate of the Jews was no longer possible- or should not have been possible.
Bob completely overlooks the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s that underlined the basic conflict between the French and Jews. Nor did the opposition cease with the unjust reversal of Dreyfus’ conviction but simmered along through the Popular Front and Blum years until the Nazi reaction. French dissatisfaction with the Jewish situation was always prominent, especially after the Eastern Jews stampeded the border during the late thirties and early forties creating havoc and destroying the French quality of life:
Yet when the authoritarian regime of Vichy passed a salvo of anti-Semitic laws in 1940, most Frenchmen and -women did not blink. One of the few who did blink- in fact doubled over in shock and revulsion- was Camus. Working for the newspaper Paris-Soir, Camus was stunned when his Jewish colleagues were fired. In a letter to his wife Francine Faure- a native or Oran, Algeria, who was very close to the Jewish community- Camus said that he could not continue to work at the paper; any job at all in Algeria, even one on a farm, would be preferable. As for the new regime, he was merciless: “Cowardice and senility is all they have to offer. Pro-German policies, a constitution in the style of totalitarian regimes, a great fear of a revolution that will not come: all of this to truckle up to an enemy who has already pulverized us and to salvage privileges which are not threatened.”
Camus was less than prescient about the revolution and totalitarian regimes as both are succeeding now worldwide. The question is who did Camus mean was pulverized- the Jews or the French? Camus according to Bob is plainly casting his lot with the Jews although conveniently excaping to Algeria beyond the Nazi reach. This then is the background of The Fall that gives Clamence his depression. God’s trial of Job was too severe in this instance for continued belief so that rather than complain Clamence/Camus turns his back on God in a disdainful ‘silence’ while pouting and drinking his life away.
Camus is a Jew, fully so in sentiment and the Fall is in reaction to the holocaust.
End of supplement.
III.
A Review
The Outsider (L’Etranger)
by
Albert Camus
Review by R.E. Prindle
Edition: Folio Society 2011
Comes now the time to review Camus’ The Stranger, Outsider or Misfit. A commenter or two have suggested I read The Outsider and I have. The only thing I can compare it and Camus to is the Grateful Dead. It is said that the Dead are an acquired taste. Over the years I have listened to the Dead for many hours in the attempt not so much to acquire the taste as to understand it. I know that Deadheads think that Jerry Garcia, of blessed memory, was a great guitarist but I can’t penetrate his style. In fact I find the Dead so distasteful I’ve given up on them.
I put Camus in the same category as the Dead; he must be an acquired taste except for those of a similar mind. Actually, I recently read the Myth of Sisyphus on line while I read The Plague several years ago. Zero sympathy.
The Outsider strikes me as a high school novelist trying to be heavy. Camus was twenty five in 1938 when he conceived the idea of his little trilogy, that included this book. The novel must have been written in ‘40-’41 as it was published in ‘42 during the war. I suppose most of us experienced the confusion of life in much the same way at twenty-seven or twenty-eight just before the age of reason bit at thirty.
My edition contains an afterword by Camus dated 8 January 1955 in which he says:
A long time ago I summed up The Outsider in a sentence which I realize is extremely paradoxical: ‘In our society (meaning French Algeria I suppose) any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.’ I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game. In this sense, he is an outsider to the society in which he lives, wandering on the fringe, on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual. And for this reason, some readers have been tempted to regard him as a reject. But to get a more accurate picture of his character, or rather one that conforms more closely to his author’s intentions, you must ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn’t play the game. The answer is simple; he refuses to lie.
Camus’ evaluation of his story only proves once again that no author truly understands what he has written. Not only that but his is such a perverse interpretation as to be incredible. Meursault neither lies or tells the truth; he is just a passive receptacle of other people’s needs. Further, the book even if considered a fantasy doesn’t make sense; it doesn’t appear to be founded on human experience.
Obviously the story does not hinge on Meursault’s refusal to lie but simply his treatment of his mother and his refusal to show emotion at her funeral. That’s it. The fact that he killed a man in self-defense which is not brought out is merely an excuse for executing him for his perceived coldness toward his mother.
I don’t know the nature of French Algerian jurisprudence of the time but I find it very difficult to believe that judges adjudicating an ostensible murder would conduct the trial on the basis of whether a man cried at his mother’s funeral or not. Who knows what his actual relationship his mother had with him and so what?
The issue is the killing. As I read the story Meursault only drew his gun when the Arab flashed his knife. The glare of the sun on the blade intensified the threat so in self defense Meursault shot him. There is absolutely no reason that Meursault couldn’t have told the judge ‘the truth’- he drew a knife on me so having a gun I shot him. Where is the refusal to lie? The mother combined with the killing doesn’t make sense; there is no connection. But, maybe that’s what existentialism means, you got me.
The center of the novel which merely demonstrates the extreme passivity of Meursault doesn’t satisfactorily explain the sudden act of volition in shooting the Arab especially as he apparently didn’t construe it as an act of self-defense.
All through the main body he lacks volition just going where the wind blew. Raymond demands that Meursault be his ‘mate’ to which he complies even though Raymond is the last guy anyone would want to know while to be the mate of someone who mercilessly beats a woman is beyond comprehension. What is going through Albert Camus’ mind?
Marie, a woman he hardly knows proposes marriage to him so Meursault assents although he tells her he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t care. For me this nonsense is merely exasperating. I had no interest in any of the characters; the sequence of events make no sense other than to demonstrate the extreme passivity and lack of volition of Meursault.
The final outburst is in contrast to his passivity:
…I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.
Why hatred? The guy just said he was happy and contented. Like I say, Camus is an acquired taste. I have no interest in him but if you do- Enjoy.
By the way, has anyone read Sartre’s trilogy, The Roads To Freedom?
Part 2 Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
June 5, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
Part II
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Civilization And Its Discontents.
The period of Burroughs’ life was one of those great pivotal times of civilization. Civilization was in the midst of one of its great metamorphoses, scientific, political and intellectual. Changes which had been building up the last few centuries could no longer be absorbed by the existing religious structure. That structure was no longer viable. Its bursting mode was not only for the new Scientific Consciousness but the increasing scientific examination of the past opened the way for the revival of forgotten forms such as the Matriarchy. Thus along with the inevitable Patriarchal religious reaction the Matriarchy as well as suppressed occult religions forced their way through.
The reaction from contacts between civilizations sent various alien religions and ideologies into the Western leaven.
Confused with these intellectual challenges the agricultural basis of civilization evolved into a technological one. In the mid-teens for the first time in the United States there were more urban residents than there were rural residents.
New demands were placed on consciousness as more precision was required of the human mind. Man had had little difficulty adapting his methods to cycles of the seasons but the adaptation tothe rigors of the assembly line caused him problems.
That there was a backlash from this tremendous succession of changes should take no one by surprise. Adjustments were difficult and critical. In 1930 the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, published what may be his most famous title: Civilization And Its Discontents in response to this challenge. His notion of who the discontents were and of what they were discontented about is vague, indeed undecipherable.
In my estimation he doesn’t deal with the malaise at all.
On the other hand Edgar Rice Burroughs not only dealt with the malaise but offered a reasonable, if difficult to apply, solution to the problem.
page 1.
The malaise found many expressions. On the political front the socialists, Communists and anarchists were the most prominent reactionaries. Their activities reached a fever pitch in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century resulting in the two phases of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and ’17. The institutionalized discontents had their homeland after the latter date.
While Freud’s discussion of Discontents sounds generalized by the way he writes he is actually talkiking about himself and the members of his own Jewish culture and their problems with Western Civilization.
Thus Freud’s notion of Discontents falls somewhere between a general malaise and the discontent of the Communists.
The Religious Conciousness of course faced a problem that could only be resolved by surrender or reaction. There was no middle way. The evolution into Scientific Consciousness completely invalidated the religious approach. All religions are based on a false premise and Science exposed that falsity.
The transition to the Scientific Consciousness must be difficult and demanding as so few attain it. In my opinion this is because of the ongoing evolution of the brain. The Scientific Consciousness can apparently only be grasped by the further evolved. This doesn’t mean that those of a Religious Consciousness can’t work with scientific knowledge which requires only basic intelligence and a scientific environment provided by others but they are unable to envision advances.
Thus they find themselves left behind intellectually. It is the same as the difference between high and low IQ. Nothing can be done about that. However the Religious reaction is to attack those of the Scientific Consciousness to lower them to their own level.
page 2.
The problem was especially acute with Freud and his culture as Science per se invalidated all Semitic religious pretensions. This means all Semites and not just Jews. Neverthless as Jews were embedded in Western Civilization at that time and other Semites weren’t the Jewish culture was ‘discontented’ and was forced to negate science and the Scientific Consciousness.
Led by the Semitic surge of both Judiaism and Moslemism the very serious attempt to bury the Scientific Consciousness through genocide might just succeed.
As I point out in Part VII of The Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America the Jewish campaign to ‘abolish the White ‘race’ should be taken very seriously. Just because it sounds preposterous doesn’t mean it’s a joke. A segment of Whites is the bearer of the evolved gene or genes or combination of genes so that if this advance species were destroyed the wild religious reaction would succeed. Sounds just like some science fiction movie doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t.
The Scientific Consciousness created its own malaise in the newly evolving species. As literary and artistic types are always the monitors who pick up these trends first, if they don’t necessarily understand them, we shouldn’t be surprised to find a number of literateurs immersing themselves in the problem. One of the big texts is H.G. Wells important but neglected novel: The Food Of The Gods. In this novel Wells postulates that the emerging scientific Consciousness is a new species of human being. As with the real religious reaction Wells’ predecessor people wish to kill the new species. In earlier times when the world was less populated new or different species of human beings could move away from the old species. Now, the question is what makes Homo Sapiens Homo Sapiens and makes it different from the Last Hominid Predecessor? It is assumed by our scientific community that the Negro is the first Homo Sapiens species having evolved in Africa. This means that the Negro evolved from some sub-human Homo Sapiens predecessor. It’s easy, it has to be. So far no one has been able to produce an example of the Last Hominid Predecessor.
Now, the Negro was not the only, how shall we say, hominid species in Africa. The Negro apparently orginated in West Africa. The rest of Africa was inhabited by other species such as the Bushmen and Hottentots. These peoples are not Negroes and originated in Africa so the question is are they predecessors of the Negroes who we are told are the first Homo Sapiens or are they Homo Sapiens who precede or follow the Negro in evolution. Or, are they a separate non-Homo Sapiens species or are they perhaps the Last Hominid Predecessor. They are not Negroes so a place has to be found for them.
In any event the Negro and Arab combined to produce a new race or sub-species known as the Bantu peoples. The Bantus then invaded the territories of the Bushmen and Hottentots who ranged all of Africa South of the bulge, so we are told, driving the Bushmen before them. As I understand it the Hottentots are now extinct while Bantu pressure on the Bushmen is driving them toward extinction.
At the same time a newer hybrid of Black and Semite is driving the Bantu before it from its base in the Northeast corner of Africa known as the Horn.
So, Wells novelistic problem was that there was no longer a place on Earth for his new species to isolate itself. He was presented with the choice of his new species either displacing or killing off the anterior species or being eliminated itself much as the Hottentots and Bushman have been eliminated by the Bantu and as the Bantu and Negroes are being displaced and elminated by the new Black and Semitic Hybrid.
page 4.
So this was the problem c. 1900. This solution was repulsive to the existing Religious Consciousness that was psychologically unequipped to deal with this impasse.
As can be seen the Semitic special consciousness does not fear the problem In Africa in Darfur and the South of the Sudan they are actively pursuing genocide. In Euroamerica the Jewish Semitic culture is pursuing or advocating the same resolution of their problem with the White Euroamerican population. Following Semitic actions in Africa it should be clear to American Blacks what is in store for them.
So, Wells dealt with the problem in its political aspect. The internal aspect, the split in consciousness between the old and new was ably handled by a number of writers.
For a good introduction to the contrast between the Scientific Consciousness compare Holmes and Watson in Conan Doyle’s stories. In this essay I will concentrate on three others as well as Freud- H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not coincidentally, I think, all three writers place their most important work in Africa. Haggard as the earlier writer rising to fame in Burroughs’ youth quite naturally had a great influence on the younger man, although I think Burroughs would have written of Tarzan and Africa with or without Haggard’s influence. The appeal of Africa is the contrast between the civilized White and the primitive Black. The two aspects of White consciousness. I hope to tackle this problem in more detail in my next essay, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sigmund Freud And The Holy Grail.
There was nothing clearer to the English explorers, as well one might note as to the Southern planters of the US, than that there was a gulf between the intellect of the African and that of the White man.
Haggard expressed this difference in his novel Allan Quatermain. I’ve used the quote before but I will include it again here to keep the problem clear before us:
Quote:
All this civilization what does it come to? Full forty years and more I spent among the 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; save and except also the savage as I have known him, is to a large extent free from the greed of moey, which eats like a cancer in the heart of the white man. It is a depressing conclusion, but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical.
The great Liberal H.G. Wells was also clear on this difference. The nature of the gulf was the Scientific intellect of the White and the non-Scientific intellect of the Black. The question is how large did these nineteenth century men perceived the gap to be. Haggard in his Allan Quaterman, quoted above perceived the gap to be small while if one is to judge by the distance between Tarzan and the Africans Burroughs perceived it be not only large but insurmountable. Haggard thought the gap easily bridged while judging from Tarzan Burroughs thought it unbridgeable.
page 5.
It should be noted that Haggard was of the Old Religious Consciousness while Burroughs was of the advanced Scientific Consciousness. Of the two men Haggard writes from the experience of having viewed Africa or at least South Africa first hand. Everyone talks of Africa as though it were a county in Kansas whereas it is a huge continent of many diverse cultures. But, perhaps as the cultures seem to share the same level of consciousness perhaps that is the justification for speaking of Africa and Africans as a single unit.
Haggard lived in South Africa for several years as a young man while he was an astute historian and anthropologist. As a mythologist he was of the most gifted. His understanding is astonishing. He was quite familiar with all the Black peoples from the Zulus, Swazis and Basutos tothe Hottentots, Bushemen and Griquas. His judgements of the various intellects seems quite reliable. His writing is of most interest for the current rage of Zulu interest. His actual story telling ability is beyond compare.
Now, this is difficult to speak of because of the ideological stance of the Liberals and their Religious Consciousness that take the procrustean stance of trying to fit facts and reality into ideology whether they can be conveniently forced or not. They are currently anti-White and pro-African even going so far as to call for the genocide of the White species as I pointed out in the Deconstruction Of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ America. This is more than evidenced in their support of the genocide being executed in South Africa by the Shona chief robert Mugabe and the Bantu peoples of the Union of South Africa.
page 6.
There’s not much evidence that Haggard was interested or even aware of the theories of evolution which, if I may be so daring, it seems clear that Burroughs either was at the beginning of his career or became so as he aged aware of all the various strands of evolutionary theory. Thus Haggard comes across as more humane while Burroughs is more accurate.
A third opinion on the nature of the situation was provided by Joseph Conrad in his novelette: The Heart Of Darkness. One can’t be sure how much contact Conrad had with the situation he describes, but the influence of the primitive African mentality had the effect of dragging down the White intellect. As the advance in intellect was not so pronounced as Haggard noted the attraction of the primitive was so strong that many Whites retrogressed. Conrad’s hero Kurtz was an ivory buyer in the heart of the Congo. Through fraternization with the African he indeed loses his ‘thin veneer of civilization’ going native. On his death bed in viewing his period in the interior he exclaims ‘The horror, the horror’ and then ‘Exterminate the brutes.’
In point of fact if, as we are told, Homo Sapiens originated in Africa and the Negro is the departure point from the Last Hominid Predecessor which may be the Bushman or Hottentot then if this departure occurred c. 150,000 years ago, at the time the African came into contact with Whites he had made no move toward becoming civilized. Nor was he inclined to when given the example.
When H.M. Stanley interviewed the Uganda chief Mtese, that chief was incapable of visualizing anything other than trading. As he said he noticed that goods traded by the Arabs, who were first in the area, all came from Europe so he assumed that Europeans were more clever than the Arabs however he had no inclination to acquire the knowledge or skills. Nor have Africans attempted it to this day.
page 7.
As unpleasant as it may be to deal with facts or accept the science of the matter it is nevertheless necessary to consider that in the course of evolution the African brain has evolved to a certain level and stopped much as all the Hominid Predecessors did. Although Bruce Lahn of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has been silenced his researches made it clear that the human brain was still evolving but not in all human species, only one.
It should be clear to even the most prejudiced observor that Robert Mugabe the Shona leader of Zimbabwe is in way over his head while as savage in his methods as any character Joseph Conrad could create. Nor is the reason unclear to certain Africans.
Writing in the Kampala Monitor of February 7, 2007 in an article entitled Uganda: Why Black People Have Remained Backward by Elias Biryabarema the author examines the problem:
Uganda has been fairly stable long enough. The conditions for an economic takeoff have been there for 20 years. Mr. Musevini has enjoyed generous goodwill from nearly all the world’s rich governments. Their largesse has poured in ceaselessly and in hefty amounts.
Uganda should have taken off. We haven’t. We’re stuck. And so is Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Eretria, Malawi, Congo Republic and pretty much all of Black Africa, excluding the regions sole economic power, South Africa. This led me to pose a question to myself: Can Black people build prosperous societies?
Just about every reason- from slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism to inequitable world trade rules- cited for the backwardness of Black African nations has been so debunked that it has now become necessary to look beyond the realm of such contemporary explanations.’
http://allafrica.com/stories/200702061131.html
Mr. Biryabarema concludes that Africans ‘only rise and touch a low ceiling.’ A disheartening realization but a cruel fact of nature because of the progression of evolution.
page 8.
So Africa came to represent an attractive past to Whites while the psychical split caused by the evolving brain caused them discomfort too. The brain had not evolved far enough to make a clean break with the animal past. What was Man, all species to do? Haggard relapsed into nostalgia. A longing to go back while nevertheless retaining his cranial development. His hero, Allan Quatermain while retaining his intellectual superiority to the Africans attempts to establish his kinship with his ‘Black brothers.’ Thus he takes a ‘Liberal’ attitude toward African/White relations that while seemingly humane has resulted in the atrocities against Whites being perpetrated by the likes of Mugabe and the South African leaders.
One shudders at Conrad’s Kurtz’s exclamation to ‘exterminate the brutes’ and yet the choice has turned out to be exterminate or be exterminated, while Africans have inexplicably opted for the latter. What can one say?
Burroughs on the other hand working from a philosophical point of view came up with a different solution. Nor is it entirely impracticable on the intellectual level. Both he and Freud begin from the same base. Both are reacting to the inhibitions and repressions placed on Man by civilization.
Burroughs seems willing to accept the ‘thin veneer of civilization’ in certain places and under certain conditions but he demands the right to be able to move freely from the primitive to the civilized state. Thus when Tarzan takes off his clothes he also removes the ‘thin veneer of civilization.’
page 9.
The basic problem for Haggard, Conrad, Freud and Burroughs is that they wish to retain the advantages of the intellectual aspects of civilization; none of them wish to opt for the ‘low ceiling’ of the primitive. They all wish to retain their advantages while indulging their primitive ‘natures.’ In some way each has to remain superior to the primitive state.
One can contrast this attitude with Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the ANC of South Africa who seem to be edging in the direction of removing all vestiges of the civilized state. They seem to be opting for a nostalgic return to the their savage past. They must have some understanding of the results of their destructive acts against civilization but choose to ignor them.
Conrad says simply- exterminate the brutes. Haggard adopts an avuncular attitude toward perpetual children. Burroughs assumes the role of…well…a god. Freud wishes to assume the role of plantation owner. The problem is insoluble except by the Shona method of ‘exterminating the arrogant bastards.’
For Burroughs as well as for Freud sex seems to be the key. Burroughs position is difficult to fathom. In all his cultures, societies and civilizations, and he creates a great many, nudity or near nudity is the ideal although as he is writing for popular consumption his characters remain sexually unexited and incredibly chaste under the most provocative conditions. Freud of course had everybody going at it like bunnies.
In Cave Girl Burroughs’ hero, Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones is the example of the over intellectualized man of extreme and enervating culture. Quite the opposite of Burrughs who obviously feels he has reached an ideal balance between the intellectual and the physical.
Waldo is meager then and consumptive when he lands on the island. He is obligatorily cowardly. He will find his Anima ideal in Nadara who is the antithesis of the civilized Jane being both nude and perhaps the most obviously sexually unihibited of any of ERB’s female characters. Burroughs contrasts her natural uninhibited sexuality with the inhibited sexuality of Waldo. There is a nice comparison with Freud possible here. Also with the Burroughs corpus there is room for an analysis of Nadara, La, and Balza.
During the course of his stay on the island , the natural primitive life will flesh Waldo out, build him up, give him conficence and make him courageous as well as curing his TB. Of course he never loses his intellectual attainments while using them to better his opponents and improve his situation. Thus neither Haggard, Conrad, Freud or Burroughs is able to resolve the conflicts of the discontents caused by civilization. As attractive as the primitive is it must remain an intellectual ideal.
Go to Part 3.
In The Beginning.
During the course
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
I, Dynamo 