Part 3 Something Of Value I
October 24, 2007
SOMETHING OF VALUE I, PART III
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 3 of Vol. I.
Freud was severely emasculated in both personal ego and in his group ego. He was in fact a practicing homosexual. His relationship with Fliess was homosexual in nature which Freud confessed vowing never to do it again. His group, the Jews, were and are a severely emasculated people. They have been since they walked away from Ur. But on with Freud.
Freud was fond of telling the story of his father and his hat, it seems that Mr. Freud related a story to Sigmund, or Sigismund as he was known then, (His Hebrew name significantly was Solomon) of how when he was a young man walking down the street proudly wearing his new hat, a gentile knocked the hat from his head into the gutter, snarling: ‘Go get your hat, Jew.’
When Sigmund asked breathlessly what his father did, expecting an heroic response, the old gentleman replied: ‘I stepped into the gutter and picked up my hat.’ severely disappointing the young boy.
Since Freud told and retold this story we may be forgiven for believing it had a profound effect on his young conscious and subconscious minds and possibly his ‘unconscious’ too. On the one hand he may have been so ashamed of his father’s very reasonable reaction that he shared his emasculation encapsulating it in his subconscious as a fixation. It is possible that this story either made or contributed to his homosexuality. On the other hand we know for a fact that it inflamed his group ego with an ardent desire for revenge against the gentiles.
As a result of the story he made the Carthaginian Semite, Hannibal, his alter ego. When Hannibal’s father was defeated by the Romans he had his son swear that the would never cease waging war on the Romans until he died. Obviously Freud made his vow against the Europeans although his father didn’t demand it.
It is no coincidence that both Freud and Hannibal were Semites and that the Romans and Europeans were gentiles. Nor is it a coincidence that both Hannibal and Freud were defeated after seemingly winning the war and that rather than fighting the enemy to the end both fled. Now, it therefore follows that Freud never ceased waging war against the Europeans.
You say: How? Come along. I can’t take you into the Inner Sanctum, which way you will have to find on your own, but I can show you some of the records I have been allowed to abstract from the files.
This will involve the secret history of the human race but don’t be alarmed. If you don’t want to believe it you don’t have to. It still is a rousing good story. Besides, if you should ever come around the archives you’ll find it is true.
Freud himself made an attempt to explain a little of the origins of the Jewish psyche in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety and Moses And Monotheism. The earlier millennia don’t concern us here. The Jews throughout history in their egotism have felt much put upon. This sense of grievance grew until with the expulsion from Spain after the Reconquest their sense of injustice burst into open flames. The group swore revenge on Europe. It must be remembered that at the end of the thirteenth century they were expelled from England, at the beginning of the fourteenth from France and for the duration, well, they were really welcome nowhere.
They swore to stultify Europe. Judaism is the history of messianism.
Sabbatai Zevi.
Zevi- The Last Of The Messiahs
This man was the last great messianic imposter. In 1666, the number of the beast plus a thousand, the Jews of Europe awaited the word from Sabbatai, then at the Ottoman Court to begin the slaughter. But Zevi apostatized to Moslemism instead. The uprising never came off. Hung fire. Fizzled.
Hope beats eternal. The learned Rabbis vowed never to place their hopes on a single individual again. They now concocted a plan for the group to rise as one man in rebellion. The date selected for the revolution was the period 1913-28. You want to give yourself a little leeway there. Born in 1856, in 1913 Sigmund Freud was fifty-seven years old. Although none of his biographers say much about his his Jewish background it is quite clear that he was read in Jewish lore. You may say that he wasn’t a religious Jew but he nevertheless was devoutly Jewish.
Freud quite consciously hated the gentiles for personal reasons that meshed quite well into those of his group identity.
During 1913-17 Freud’s reputation was immense both within and without the Jewish community. It was true his heir apparent, C.J. Jung had broken with him perhaps for this very reason but he and Psychoanalytic Movement had suffered no damage.
In psychoanalyis Freud had the means to instruct his group and control the gentiles. It is said that he gave up hypnotism when he turned to psychoanalysis but as a perusal of ‘Group Psychology’ will show he was preparing for a breathtaking attempt at hypnotizing the entire Western world not unlike that of Burroughs’ Lotharians against their invaders.
Freud lived in Vienna where for years, even decades before 1913, emigrating Jews had flowed through from the entry port into Austria from the East of Brody on their way to America via the North German ports. The prosperity of the whole German shipping lines was built on steerage passengers. Nor were the decisions to emigrate necessarily individual; it may have begun that way but to emigrate was soon organized and directed by the international Jewish community. Check the career of Baron Maurice Hirsch.
The Jewish establishments of both Europe and America provided funding. At about this time provisions were made to transport the entire Jewish population of the Pale, from Lithuania to Romania, to the United States Of America. At the time the international Jewish goverment led by Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall was located in the United States, New York City. The decks were being cleared so as to remove resistance in America. So as not to call too much attention to the fact by having hordes disembark entirely in New York and Boston, for there would be resistance however feeble, the ports of New Orleans and Galveston were organized to deal with millions of immigrants.
This plan was aborted by the Great War. The Jews had already been at war with Russia, or the Czar as they personalized it, for a hundred years. The international Jewish community had engineered the Russo-Japanese war almost pulling off a revolution in its wake in 1905.
Activities were now intensified. At the time and for about the next sixty years the Jews threw a veil of obfuscation over their activities always denying involvement in Communist or Revolutionary matters. In recent years Jewish scholars, for whatever reason, have now found it expedient to admit that which they were accused of but always denied. They now admit that every national subversive Communist part was over fifty percent Jewish. Those of Russia and Germany were considerably higher. Freud had been involved in Jewish subversive organizations like the B’nai B’rith for many years. As the master psychologist, an expert in the unconscious, he prepared the Jewish mind for the great task of the millennial years in Central and Eastern Europe, which would require much bloodshed, while formulating his psychological plan of conquest not dissimilar from the military plans of his hero, Hannibal.
Freud himself was centered in Vienna. A lieutenant, Abraham, was his man in Berlin while Frerenczi was posted to Budapest in Hungary. The three crucial central European points were covered. Jung in Zurich had split off shortly before this. It is interesting that the Jewish psychoanalytic extablishment spitefully denounced him as a Nazi.
The Jewish millennial years began in 1913. The Great War began in 1914. The Bolshevik Revolution occurred in 1917. Freud’s Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis appeared in 1917 also, even though there must have been an extreme paper shortage; it is not a short book. Freud encoded last minute instructions to the Revolutionists in the book.
At this point in 1917 Freud released the inhibitions of millions of Mr. Hydes in Russia, Hungary and Germany. The Bolsheviks took Russia out of the war signing a seemingly humiliating peace treat at Brest-Litovsk. As Lenin said the peace treaty was meaningless because it was his intent to stab Germany in the back.
Germany had a huge Communist Party which it is now admitted was around sixty percent Jewish. Now with the United States in the war, Germany debilitated internally and crippled psychologically, thousands of Jewish revolutionaries intent on the realization of the millennium flowed back into Germany from Russia in hopes of achieving the Revolution there, giddy with the hopes of thereby annexing Central and Eastern Europe. That they didn’t was because of the efforts of the German Volkish groups such as Hitler and his Nazi Party.
The unconscious psychoses of the Jewish people who it will be remembered as a group were suffering from severe emasculation were erupting. Emasculation of the Ego is always expressed in a sexual manner frequently sadistic. Freud had been preaching the practice of unrestrained sexual activity for years. Murder is a sexual act. He was against ‘repression’ you remember.
When Russia began its program of expansion under the Romanovs it annexed an enormous number of nationalities. The Russians then tried to impose their language and manners on the conquered peoples in an attempt to form an homogeneous State. In so doing they emasculated the subject peoples. Those same subject peoples were now the masters of the Russians with permission to indulge their ‘unconscious.’
Jews, Letts, Poles and others let loose. Stalin himself was a Georgian.
Jacob Schiff- PM of the International Jewish Government at this time.
As Jean Genet correctly saw of the Nazi State, in Russia a criminal intellect was now joined to the political and legal apparatus of the State. The criminal code was changed from an objective one to a subjective one; one of vengeance. For a period of years law was suspended in Russia. Amidst the chaos International Jewish organizations including those of the United States operated openly to coordinate their hopes for the millennium.
Bela Kun- Communist Psychopath
What I’m about to say has been denied and suppressed but the example was before both Hitler and Stalin. In Hungary Freud had his man Ferenczi to coordinate the Hungarian Jews. The Jewish Bela Kun (Cohn) seized the government beginning a reign of terror against the gentiles during which thousands of non-Jews were murdered in a horrible sadistic manner commensurate with a severely emasculated Ego.
For some time the Jews had been clamoring for a State of their own. Taking advantage of the chaos in Russia the Jewish American Joint Distribution Committee under the leadership of Schiff and Marshall decided to appropriate the Crimea. Bela Kun who had escaped Hungary during the inevitable reaction, going to Moscow, was sent down to the Crimea to exterminate the population to make lebensraum for the Jews. He was in the process when Lenin died. Stalin then recalled him to Moscow where he was subsequently shot.
All these activities were obscured and suppressed. It is forbidden in American universities to study the subject to this day.
Still, Europe was so horrified that they declined to discuss it or even acknowledge it. But Hitler and Stalin remembered.
The Communists in Moscow being composed solely of emasculated peoples functioning from Freud’s vision of the unconscious like so many Hydes conducted a criminal homosexual style State that would have delighted Genet had he been there. The author the The Thief’s Journal would have gasped at the warehouses full of stolen furs, diamonds and other jewels, art objects and whatever of value that the poor emasculated wretches had stolen from their murdered victims. It was the triumph of the Common Man.
As soon as Stalin gained power he began to discredit and remove Jews from influential positions. Trotsky was sent to a malarial swamp in Siberia to die but from which he escaped to be killed by Stalin’s assasins later. As Stalin consolidated his power he acted more directly until he held the famous show trials of 1936. He then began the systematic elimination of Jews which resulted by the end of 1945 in the death of millions.
Adolf Hitler
Joseph Stalin
Thus Hitler, an emasculated man leading an emasculated people had the Judaeo-Communist example before him. As an avid anti-Communist and open anti-Semite he was virtually isolated by the world that by 1936 was under the control of Judaeo-Communists. He was the antagonist not the protagonist.
While Stalin who had religious training was clever enough to seemingly work through the system openly followed legal controlled methods although the law had been subordinated to his ends. Hitler acted as a homosexual with an ax in his hand. Stalin’s officers dispatched prisoners hidden in the depths of the Lubyanka with a bullet in the back of the head, which method, by the way, was favored by Jewish and Italian members of Organized Crdime in America of the time, while the Nazis brutally beat prisoners, finally shooting them in the back while escaping.
Stalin, Hitler, Freud, which was worse? Freud enabled, Stalin and Hitler executed. They were all the same.
In Russia during the first year or so of Lenin some Russian workers were being read to as they worked. Were they being read the works of Marx or Lenin? No. They were being read the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burrougs. This infuriated the Politburo. The State was trying to impose a collectivist unconscious psychology on the Russians while Burroughs and his great psychological projection were individualist and responsible. In fact, Burroughs offered a concept of the unconscious which was directly opposed to that of Freud. One might say that Burroughs was Dr. Jekyll to Freud’s Mr. Hyde.
Burroughs himself had been severely emasculated at the age of nine. The situation seems to be this: Burroughs came from a prosperous Chicago family. His parents were very proud of their English ancestry. If you’re unwilling to understand national and racial prejudices that were very pronounced at the time then you probably won’t be able to understand. There were strong feelings between the Anglo-Saxon and Celt or English and Irish. The Anglos considered the Celts if not inferior at least eccentric. The Burroughses employed two Irish girls as servants. In all probability Young Burroughs assumed an attitude of superiority which the girls resented. They then concocted a plan to cut young Burroughs down to size.
They had a friend or relative by the name of John who was aged twelve to Burroughs’ nine. Being much larger and tougher than Burroughs he stopped the younger boy on the way to school one day where he thoroughly intimidated and terrified him. It is quite possible that Burroughs messed his pants. In any event, he suffered severe emasculation that was to haunt him all his life. He does not seem to have ever practiced homosexuality although he was haunted by a feeling of sexual ambiguity.
The incident with John the Bully not only played havoc with Burroughs personal psychlogy in the narrow sense of creating a psychosis but there was also an effect in what Freud’s erstwhile associate, C. J. Jung called the collective unconscious. The individual is limited by his very humanity to a small number of general responses.
Thus Burroughs was given a cast of mind which the Hindus denoted as Shivaistic. This is a general outlook or philosophy of life, if you wish, which one adopts unconsciously as the consequence of one’s experience. I share it although it took me nearly a lifetime to recognize and accept it.
Edgar Allan Poe- The Father Of Modern Literature
Burroughs himself was aware of the fact by at least 1931 when he wrote Tarzan And The Leopard Men. In one key or on one level the story is one of Shiva and Kali his consort. Burroughs names his heroine Kali while she is selected to be the White Goddess of the Leopard Men as part of their death cult.
As can be seen by their complete disregard for life Freud, Hitler and Stalin were also Shivaites.
Shiva and Kali are the Hindu representation of Life and Death. Shiva plays unconcernedly on the pipes while the carnage of life and death goes on around him. The song goes on. Kali, his consort, the goddess of death and regeneration dances on the bodies of the dead to Shiva’s music while wearing a necklace of skulls. Death means nothing because she as the eternal mother has the means to multiply unendingly. Do multitudes die? Why then, multitudes die. Not to worry. Life goes on.
Burroughs also developed an interest in psychology in his attempt to free his mind of the fixation given him by John the Bully. As his psychological notions were well formed by 1911 when he began to write in his attempt to expiate his guilt it follows that he acquired his knowledge during his early married years from 1900 to 1911. He married at 24. He had little opportunity to do his reading before then as the major works were only appearing in the late ’90s.
His main concern was the subconscious mind. While his evolutionary ideas are easier to trace he has left no mention of his psychological reading. It seems certain that he was familiar with FWH Myers who, as noticed, first defined the notion of the unconscious in 1886. He must have read James while Freud’s notions would have been discussed, if not yet translated; thus DH Lawrence had highly developed ideas on the Freudian unconscious in his 1911 Psychoanalysis And The Unconscious while I doubt Burroughs had read Freud in the German.
Also it seems probable that Burroughs had read Le Bon.
Burroughs’ idea of the unconscious differed greatly from Freud’s while being more soundly based in the actual functioning of the mind. While Burroughs’ hero Tarzan seems to function with an integrated personality from his creation in 1911-12 Burroughs himself came very close to integrating his own from 1913 to ’17 or may have although he always had trouble with his Animus and Anima.
Even though Freud advertised the fact that he had taken a year off (golly, a whole year) for self-analysis, whatever the results may have been he never succeeded in integrating his personality or, apparently, realized he should have. He was severely conflicted all his life. Just take a look at his photo where you can see that huge welt running from his lover right cheek across his nose into his forehead. That was caused either by excessive cocaine use or mental conflict in the brain stem, probably both.
As did all mythographers, Burroughs had read his Poe, like them he was concerned with the conscious and subconscious minds. While Stevenson’s Jekyll lost his conscious mind in his subconscious mind, Burroughs cencentrated on the concept of the beast within the man, the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious. In Chapter 3 of The Return Of Tarzan, in what appears to be a plagiarization of the murder scene of Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue, Burroughs has Tarzan act out the parts of both the Sailor and the Orang.
Lured up to the apartment on the pretext of helping a young woman, Tarzan is set upon by her accomplices. Discarding the trappings of his recently acquired civilization Tarzan reverts to his anthropoid education of the Jungle becoming Poe’s Orang, yet always retaining the restraints of his humanity or the Sailor.
When the police come he leaps out the window to a telephone pole which one imagines were more common in Chicago than Paris. (Burroughs had never been to Paris so he replicated the urban scene he knew.) While still in his ape guise he has the sense to look down where he sees a policeman below so he climbs up leaping to a rooftop.
Racing across the rooftops of Paris he climbs down another pole. Then in a Hyde-like transformation back to Jekyll he shakes himself from his ape self back into his human self, without the aid of drugs, enters a restaurant to clean up in the rest room then saunter jauntily down the street as though nothing had happened.
Thus the plagiarization of not only Poe but Stevenson was merely an attempt to give a better solution by using the mythological symbols.
Return was written at the end of 1912 and the beginning of 1913.
Burroughs’ own self-analysis would continue through his astonishing output of 1911-17 when he finally integrated his personality with the final volume of his Mucker Trilogy published as the Oakdale Affair but alternately titled Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid which is the better title. At that time he had exorcised his major fixations which should have integrated his personality.
In understanding that the disintegration of the personality was caused by an affront or affronts to the Ego or Animus that resulted in the creation of fixations that festered in the subconscious that in turn manufactured affects that evidenced themselves in various physical and psychological ways he realized that the same could be exorcised returning the Ego to a whole state.
Unfortunately he strung his theory on through a couple dozen works of fiction disguised as incident. A very few would read all the novels while the only possible interpreters could be those who had read them all not only with a psychological background but an open, inquisitive mind. We’re a very small minority.
If I hadn’t been through the same process on my own I probably never would have recognized it. However as his theories were embodied in his hero Tarzan as mythology they passed into the unconscious of his readers of which, as a teenager, I was one, so shall we say, my mind was prepared.
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.
Part VII Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
October 6, 2007
Springtime For Edgar Rice Burroughs
by
R.E. Prindle
Part VII
Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Sequels
The return from San Diego in March-April 1914 was a turning point in Burroughs’ life. In a sense it was a childhood’s end. The past was now the past. ERB’s future lay ahead.
The fact that he had won the gamble of the stay in San Diego being able to spend recklessly and still have his back financially covered must have been a tonic to his self-confidence. He was able to do nearly anything he wanted to do. One was to begin his library. A key book in his library was Edward Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. He recorded its purchase date in 1913 and the day he completed the work just after his birthday in 1915. One imagines that by the time he wrote his three sequels in mid-1914 he had read a few of the volumes of his twelve volume set.
This is important because reading Gibbon is a life changing event. In the language of the sixties the history is consciousness expanding. In a sense it is a transition from childhood to maturity.
It is impossible to stress sufficiently the changes that ERB is going through or the rapidity of the changes. Already just returned from San Diego he is purchasing a new automobile, a Hudson. It is perhaps no coincidence that The Mad King opens with Barney Custer/ERB careening down the road in a new Roadster. That it is gray is of very little significance because the only colors available in 1914 were probably grey and black. Or perhaps as the Hudson appears to be grey in black and white photos Barney’s car for that reason was grey.
One can only imagine the exhilaration ERB experienced as he climbed behind the wheel of big new touring car. It was Hudson not a cheap Ford. Nineteen fourteen was also a turning point in the history of Ford Motors. ERB always disparages Fords in these years proud that he’s driving a more expensive automobile. The woes of not being able to afford a car from 1903 on must have melted away.
Not only did ERB buy a new car but he and his family of wife and three children moved into luxurious new quarters in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak Park. So ERB began a new life on his return to Chicago.
Shortly after his return Tarzan Of The Apes was released in book form by A.C. McClurg. Magazine and newspaper response to his stories had been terrific so there was no reason for Burroughs not to anticipate large sales. One can imagine him sitting up nights calculating the number. A hundred thousand? Too low. A million? Well, if he got really lucky. We’ve all enjoyed the anticipation of some sort along those lines.
The book was released in May, 1914 but there is no indication that McClurg’s even sold through the fifteen thousand of the contract or, indeed, that they even ever printed that many. The title was turned over to the reprint house of A.L. Burt early the next year in 1915. Burt was so uncertain of the books reception that they made McClurgs guarantee the first printing. When Burt turned the title over to Grossett and Dunlap they claimed to have sold less than seven hundred thousand copies at fifty cents each. Royalties were only four and a half cents a copy of which McClurg’s got half so Burroughs realized a mere pittance.
So what then?
He was thrown back almost wholly on his magazine revenues. He began to receive some money from newspaper syndication but this was relatively a pittance given his expectations. Within a few years movie money would begin coming in but for the time being Burroughs had to keep writing bcause as usual he was spending in advance of receipts.
I believe one can detect a change in the style of his writing at this point.
Whereas prior to the return from San Diego with the energy of the bloom of Spring relying perhaps on stories that had evolved in his mind as he daydreamed in the lean years stories just flowed from his pen. It seems likely that he exhausted that reservoir in San Diego so that now he had actually to work at dreaming up stories. In all three of the titles the sequels are significantly longer than the first halves while changing from personal revelations more toward formal stories.
The editorship of Munsey’s had also changed from Metcalf to Bob Davis- Robert H. Davis. From the available evidence Metcalf seems to have been the more tolerant and indulgent of Burroughs’ writing. When Davis was assigned Burroughs in 1914 the latter was an established star of the Munsey stable of writers. Davis wrote an autobiography c. 1940 that I haven’t been able to obtain but which should have much information on his dealing with ERB.
Davis appears to have been much more critical of Burroughs, even bullying him, pushing suggestions on him that the vulnerable writer couldn’t resist. Davis was the one who suggested that Tarzan have a son something Burroughs always regretted doing. Davis seems to have been of the opinion that ERB used a number of trite situations, situations that have subsequently been amply exploited by the movies. Not having grown up in ERB’s milieu and being sufficienctly underread in the various literatures of the times I am unable to say whether or not Burroughs presentation of Barney Custer’s execution by firing squad was trite or not as Davis states. Why Davis should have accepted the grazing of the head by the bullet that has become so commonplace in the movies and rejected the first episode is beyond me.
That Davis accepted Barney’s escape through the sewer without a demur when the episode is a blatant plagiarism of Jean Valjean’s escape through the sewer in Les Miserables is beyond me also. Burroughs even duplicates the upturned face as the filth rises about Valjean. ERB does provide the original twist of Barney being completely submerged in the sewage. Gruesome enough.
So Davis’ intent seems to have been a contest for control and dominance. It seems then that there were large variations between the magazine stories and the published books as ERB reinserted deleted passages and changed details back to his original writing. Overall, from the available evidence, I hold an unfavorable opinion of Davis’ interference.
On the home front, while ERB may have thought to find acceptance for his success as a writer and his newfound prosperity he was to be bitterly disappointed as his writing was disparaged and his topics made him a literary clown in his contemporaries eyes. To my undertanding he has never been accorded the respect that is his due to this day either in Oak Park or Chicago.
The fact is that he was able to please his audience in the pulp fiction genre mightily not only in 1913-14 but for at least a quarter century until his medium, pulp fiction, began to flounder in the thirties and forties. Having now read so many of his novels four to six times I am beginning now to have a much greater respect for ERB’s writing abilities.
The sequels of all three novels under consideration show an extreme focus on exactly what the story is and told with great economy yet with words so well chosen that the reader learns everything that he has to know. I am especially impressed with the single minded drive of The Mad King.
While obviously desiring acceptance and even importance in Chicago’s society ERB made an effort to be accepted by the newspaper columnists he had so admired from young manhood on. These men were very much admired by ERB. Indeed the columnists occupied a position analogous to the drive time radio commentators of our day. Chicago had some of the best.
Burroughs had collections of Eugene Field and George Ade in his library so that it is clear that he was much influenced by them. He does not seem to have cared for Peter Finley Dunne and his Mr. Dooley Irish dialect stories. Now as man he began to contribute to the successors of Field and Ade. Bert Leston Taylor’s column A Line Of Type Or Two in the Chicago Tribune printed some of Burroughs’ verse submitted under his pseudonym, Normal Bean, as well as another column in the Tribune, In The Wake Of The News by Hugh E. Keogh also known as HEK. (source: Porges) Both columns were prestigious so that the acceptance of ERB’s verse would indicate that it was high enough quality for the columns. After all it isn’t that easy to get into such columns or even have a letter to the editor published. Burroughs also joined the White Paper Club that sounds like a catchall scribblers club. He was ignored and shunned by the prestigious clubs.
A note on cars and then to the books on review. In 1913 he had and sold a Velie. In 1914 he bought and drove a Hudson while he drove a Mitchell in 1915.
The Velie is of interest (see http://www.angelfire.com/mt/velie/ )
The Velie was a low priced model bought second hand so it probably didn’t put ERB out too much. Willard Velie attended Yale at the same time as the Burroughs Boys graduating in 1888. One wonders if the Brothers knew of Velie at Yale. Perhaps such a knowledge may have influenced Burroughs choice or perhaps not.
The choice of the Hudson was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that ERB’s hero, L. Frank Baum, who ERB almost certainly visited in 1913, drove one.
If there is a possible story behind the Mitchell I haven’t learned it as yet. Also it shoud be noted that the movie industry did not affect Baum’s decision to move to Hollywood. Cecil B. Demille and Jesse Lasky didn’t step off the train in LA until 1914 when they introduced Hollywood to the movies.
2.
So now ERB began to organize his life around his future rather than his past. The first burst of writing in which he released his pent up emotions was now spent. On the return to Chicago his writing becomes a vocation in which he had to turn out stories every year for the pulps so that he became a professional writer rather than a quasi-amateur.
Tarzan Of The Apes was published in May upon his return but it would seem to disappointing sales. It was even difficult for McClurg’s to get the reprint firm of A.L. Burt to take it however it did well for Burt although apparently not in the spectacular numbers so often reported. Nevertheless money began to come in from that source.
Burroughs’ writing would also be influenced by the political situation presented by the Wobblies or I.W.W. as well as the outbreak of the Great War in August. That conflict became the subject of the sequel to The Mad King that was written after the war began.
The tone of the three sequels then changed from the first halves becoming less personal in their presentation but still concerned with ERB’s relationship with Emma.
The opening sequence of The Cave Girl-The Mad King-The Eternal Lover was changed to The Cave Man-Sweethearts Primeval (Eternal Lover)-and Barney Custer Of Beatrice (Mad King).
Barney Custer of Beatrice seems to display some first hand knowledge of Bert Weston’s business so it is possible that ERB and family visited Weston and Beatrice on the way back from California. In the only letter in the Weston correspondence near the 1914 date, that of June 14, ERB does not allude to any such visit which may or may not mean anything.
The Cave Man then was written first of the sequels as was The Cave Girl of the original stories. There are very significant elements to the story. ERB would later use the Nadara as the White Goddess in Tarzan And The Leopard Men. That in turn links Nadara to La and thence to Florence. In this story Nadara has been captured by some aborigines and made their goddess as will be Kali Bwana. Just as Nadara was wearing the Panther pelt so Kali Bwana would be associated with the Leopard as goddess of the Leopard Men. So both women are invested with ERB’s symbol of female sexuality.
Just as the long temple here was on a river so would be the Leopard temple. Waldo as Thandar uses the roof as does Tarzan. ERB thus duplicates the story. As Florence entered his life he began to associate her with this early dream of Nadara as well as her successor, La. Signficantly La makes her last appearance in 1930s Tarzan The Invincible transformed to reappear immediately as Kali Bwana of Leopard Men. That would indicate that by 1930 ERB had decided to leave Emma for Florence.
Another interesting twist is the similarity of Nadara and the temple to those of Trader Horn. We know that Trader Horn read Burroughs so it is probable that he somehow picked up a copy of the magazine version of Cave Man gestating the story for a decade or so when it came out of his head in 1927. Thus the close association of Burroughs and Horn before and after the publication of the latter’s story. Keeps getting more and more interesting, doesn’t it?
A second major issue seems to be ERB trying to reconcile himself and his parents. The second half of the Cave Man is very concerned with portraying Thandar/ERB’s father as a fine old man in contrast to the crazy deaf mute of Lad And The Lion. In this story the father figure is sympathetic while the mother figure is more harsh. She does become reconciled to Nadara in the end when she learns the girl is a French Princess. French again. One wonders if ERB’s mother was opposed to his marrying Emma.
Nadara herself who waffles between a representation of Emma/Jane and La in the Cave Girl begins Cave Man as more Ema but becomes morel like La/Kali Bwana as the story progresses ending strongly as the latter which would indicate that ERB already preferred his dream Golden Girl to Emma. He finally settled for the rather commonplace Florence as his version of the Wild Thing.
The story opens with the usual adventures. Getting Nadar back to her people it is necessary to kill King Big Fist to keep her. Thus we have a series of male images that reflect ERB’s conflict with Frank Martin.
Big Fist dead the people appoint Tandar/Waldo as their king. Thandar is in the process of converting the tribe to American Democracy when the earth quake strikes. In addition to head bashing one is astonished at the role earthquakes play in these early stories along with memory loss.
In this one Thandar/Waldo is creating a new society somewhat in imitation of the bizarre improvements Jules Verne made to his Mysterious Island when the earthquake strikes ending Thandar’s experiment.
The earthquake separates him from Nadara who is then pursued by another neanderthal type; perhaps this is a varation on the theme of ERB’s ccontest with marank Martin for Emma’s hand.
In a bizarre episode Thandar puts to sea in a bobbing strange little boat finally falling in with Pirates. From then on the story resembles Pirate Blood. Pirate Blood appeared at the same time as his relationship with Florence developed so the two are proable related to his Anima fantasies.
All comes out right in the end as the Pirates restore the belongings of Waldo’s father and mother whose yacht they had captured. Thandar rescues Nadara, all are reunited and Thandar/Waldo and Nadara are able to consummate their natural union with the marriage rites of civilization. An odd little story overall.
ERB next turned to the sequel of The Eternal Lover, Sweethearts Primeval. I just like this story. Nu and Victoria return to the Niocene. ERB missed some opportunities here. While Nu left the Niocene to go to the present Nat-ul never did. So when Victoria made her first trip to the Niocene both she and Nat-Ul should have been there. It would have been well if ERB had explained how their two being meshed after the munerous rebirths of Nat-Ul that produced Victoria.
In this story Nat-Ul who is a variation of La, and Nu become separated. The story is their attempt to reunite. Once again a character who may represent Frank Martin attempts to abduct Nat-Ul but she escapes him to fall into the clutches of another cave man only to escape finding her way to a small island.
The imagery is quite wonderful. Burroughs at his best. The scenery is quite reminiscent of Pellucidar with its coasts and islands. The pirate theme is also prominent in the Pellucidar stories of this time.
Nat-Ul manages to be abducted a number of times escaping each time.
Nu is hampered in his search for Nat-Ul by the appearance of a woman named Gron the wife of Tur of the Boat People. She attches herself to Num who has a difficult time getting rid of her. In the end Nu goes off in seach of the tiger OO this time dying while Victoria/Nat-Ul returns to the present leaving a hole in Space and Time.
In the end we learn that the whole story of Nu took place in the three mintues Victoria was unconcious.
Burroughs then turned to the sequel of The Mad King. The reversal in sequence of The Mad King and The Eternal Lover was necessitated by the fact that after the first part of The Mad King Barney had gone to Africa so that it was now necessary to get him back to Lutha.
Thus the Mad King and The Eternal Lover are actually one novel of the History of Barney Custer. The two books could be combined and titled something like The Adventures Of Barney Custer in Lutha and Africa.
The proper way to read the two books then is Part I of The Mad King, both parts of The Eternal Lover and then the sequel to The Mad King.
After losing Emma in Mad King Part I, Barney goes to Africa to ‘forget’ along with Butzow. Leaving Africa we next find him and Butzow in Beatrice, Nebraska visiting Bert and Margaret and their grain mill.
If Peter of Bletz had lost rack of Barney in Africa he relocates him in Beatrice (I am informed that Beatrice if pronounced Be-at-trice). After a failed murder attempt by Peter’s henchman Maenck Barney and Butzow return to Lutha.
As the story was written after the beginning of the Great War Austria is now attempting to annex Lutha. Apparently ERB was opposed to Austria as he sides with the Serbs.
Having been unable to forget Emma in Africa Barney now attempts to win her hand from King Leopold.
Barney and Leopold are yet another variation on The Prince And The Pauper then. Barney is captured trying to enter Lutha and put before a firing squad. Miraculously escaping death he escapes the Austrians by a direct borrowing of Jean Valjean’s escape through the sewers of Paris.
He is temporarily reunited with Emma but then captured by Maenck. Taken to Leopold he is sentenced to death but contrives to escape by exchanging identities with Leopold. In the guise of Leopold Barney manages to save Lutha from the Austrians. He dressed in Royal and Leopold dressed in rages the two are impossible to tell apart which replicates Twain’s story.
Barney is more seriously injured than Leiop[old so more vulnerable and also stupidly trusting. It should be clear that Barney and Leopold are doppelgangers of ERB. The crux of the problme here is the struggle for Emma. She had been promised in marriage to Leopold so that she is unwilling to disengage fromt he agreement without Leopold’s consent.
ERB writes this remarkable passage about his tow identities, the one the loser of yesteryear, Leopold, and the other the success of his present, Barney.
Quote:
‘What do you intend doing with me?” (Leopold) said. “Are you going to keep your word and return my identity?”
“I have promised,” replied Barney, “and what I promise I always perform.”
“Then exchange clothing with me at once,” cried the king, half rising from his cot.
‘Not so fast, my friend,” replied the American. “There are a few trifling details to be arranged before we resume our proper personalities.”
Unquote.
One of the trifling details is the release of Emma from her obligation to Leopold. Barney extorts the letter releasing the king placing it under his pillow. Exhausted from his wound he then falls asleep. Not so tired Leopold waits until Barney is asleep than recovers his clothes takes back the letter and leaves Barney to his fate.
Up to this point in 1913-14’s output ERB has been struggling to make amends with for his dismal performance in the first thirteen yers of marriage and regain her confidence. Thus Leopold represents the old ERB and Barney the new. As Emma has been married to ERB and is familiar with his loser persona it is difficult for her to transit from Leopold to Barney in her affections. As they are so similar in appearance she had difficulty telling them apart. This has been ERB;s dilemma for the last year and a half, convincing Emma that he is trustworthy and will continue to be a good provider.
ERB has confidence in his ability to continue his writing and finanical success but his future was not so clear to Emma as he continued his wastrel ways. As she could not share his optimism she continued to be wary refusing to accord him the trust and actually the respect he desired.
Leopold in possession of the letter identifying him as Barney races to Lustadt presumably with the intent to present Emma with the letter identifying him as Barney, the man she really wants, the marrying her quickly under the false pretense thus foiling Barney.
His own plan is foiled when upon arriving at the castle in Lustadt he is shot dead by Maenck who mistakes him for Barney . Barney then shows up claiming the hand of Emma.
He is then proclaimed king. Emma says to him:
Quote:
“There is no other way, my lord King,” she said with grave dignity. “With her blood your mother requeated you a duty which you may not shirk. It is not for you or me to choose. God chose for you when you were born.”
Unquote.
Thus with the line: God chose for out ERB unites the stories of Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Prince And The Pauper. The Little Prince of ERB’s early years returns to his God appointed place. He and Emma are united.
One believes that the story and its ending was intended for Emma to observe ahd heed. Apparently she didn’t because in the next Tarzan story, Jewels Of Opar of 1915, Tarzan and La flirt again.
Anyway The Mad King sequel rounds out the stories of 1913 bringing Burroughs’ springtime to an end. The tragedy is that Emma couldn’t foresee that ERB had tapped into the Mother Lode. No matter how improvident ERB would continute to be the money would always be there to continue their new life style. Perhaps if she had surrendered to fate and Made ERB her king in fact both she and La would have been united in one figure.
It seems that the Cave Girl, The Eternal Lover and The Mad King explored ERB’s relationship with Emma fromt he beginning to the point aht ERB was minded to replace her with an ideal woman.
The notion would develop in his mind until in 1927 he actually did so.
The three sequels ended the quest of his Springtime. His youthful enthusiasm was exhausted. From this point on he would compose more formal novels searching for story lines.
Personally I find his post 1914 to 1920 work some of his best. The two sequels to The Mucker yet to come are outstanding.
Female problems continued to dominate his work. Then in 1921 he read a work on male-female relations by E.M. Hull that had a profound effect on him. that was the novel of The Sheik. I would like to do a review of that next before I return to the Tarzan series.
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 Pt. IX: Greil Marcus
September 11, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces:
Greil Marcus
Part IX
Into The Abyss
It sounded like a lot of fun wrecking the world.
It felt like freedom.
Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces
It is probably time to look a little into Mr. Marcus’ antecedents. He was born in the summer of 1945 between VE and VJ day as he tells us. He was ten, then, in 1954-55 when Rock and Roll came into existence. He doesn’t seem to imply that he was particularly interested in records in the next decade that would have made him twenty in 1964-65. He would have been 15 to 20 from 1960-65 during which time he would have listened to the radio. He also seems to have been in Philadelphia at some time during that period when he attended a Bob Dylan concert. I haven’t read yet where he mentioned that he had a record collection during that period. He doesn’t seem to recall much from memory before 1965 with the possible exception of Bob Dylan.
One is forced to conclude then that most if not all his record lore was acquired between his twentieth and thirtieth years from 1965 to 1974-75. He began his career as a critic in 1966 when he went to work for Rolling Stone. He left that post a year later to write for Creem Magazine. His first book Mystery Train was published in 1975 so he should have acquired his lore over maybe eight years.
He should have been a sophomore in ’64 which means he should have graduated in’66 so his real record education would have been from ’66 to ’74. Not much time for someone posing as an expert in ’75.
He says he was born in San Francisco moving into Menlo Park in 1955 so that he went to Menlo Park-Atherton High. The area is one of the ritziest in the Bay Area. Atherton is top of the line for the Bay so his step-father must have been doing pretty well. In other words Mr. Marcus is a rich kid. I haven’t read exactly where he lived between 1948 when his mother remarried and 1955.
At any rate he comes from a very well to do background. After graduating from MPA he went over to Berkeley to attend UC. He was there for the whole Free Speech brouhaha. At some time after graduation from UC he returned to Berkeley to live which is his home base at the present time.
At the time he wrote Mystery Train I would question the depth and breadth of his knowledge.
He published Mystery Train at the last possible moment such a book could be published. From ’66 to ’75 those of us concerned with records were convinced that something monumental and earth shaking was happening. Wonderful theories of the music’s importance were spun of which Mystery Train is one. I think it probable that Mr. Marcus saw a string of such books rolling off his pen. A funny thing happened on the way to the forum however. Disco and Punk blew up the Rock monolith about the same year destroying the grandiose notions we were all believing in. All of a sudden as Mr. Marcus points out confidence was destroyed and survival became the issue. Mr. Marcus and his plans were thrown for a loop.
Not until 1989 did he find another tack to try to get back on track. In that year he published Lipstick Traces. Feeling that his first career had been blown out of the water by Punk he paid homage to it by concentrating on Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols. Broadening out some he incorporated the history of what he considered various Dada movements. His concern with Dada had found expression in Mystery Train so it was only necessary to relate Dada to Punk with which he had no trouble.
Since ’89 he has published a continuous series of books, the most recent being The Shape Of Things To Come.
2.
I hesitate to do this but I feel the reader should know something of my credentials to give some basis for judging my criticism and analysis.
I’m about seven years older than Mr. Marcus having been born in 1938. I was therefore sixteen in 1954 which is more or less the cut off date for the beginning of Rock and Roll.
I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. We were apparently out of the mainstream of Rock development. Even though we had a fairly large Black population there was no Rhythm And Blues or Black music on the local radio. There were only traditional music shows on radio in 1954 when Top Forty was in embryo. By ’55 and ’56 we had full fledged Top 40 and what a blast it was.
With Top 40 came Black artists like Bill Doggett, Fats Domino and Little Richard but they were a Top 40 sound whether they called it Rhythm And Blues or not. One could tune into Detroit for Black records but I didn’t know anyone who did. I tuned in a couple times but Black music per se repelled me.
I was in the class of ’56. The class of ’55 knew nothing of Rock and Roll at the time and very little of Top 40 radio. I was in a distinct minority in the class of ’56 who listened to Rock at all. The class of ’57 was the first class attuned to the music.
As to first R & R records, who knows? The early and mid-fifties were a blend of musics so I heard a fair amount of Swing. Anyone who traces Rock and Roll directly to Swing is dreaming. I know Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa and the Swing drummers. None of them had the R&R feel. Swing rhythm sections were miniscule compared to Rock which to my mind is a singer, lead guitar and a two or three piece rhythm section. Very faint resemblance to Swing.
When it became financially impossible for Big Band to survive I suppose the instrumental quartet was the next logical step which led to the Big Beat. Neither Elvis nor Sun had a Big Beat. He had rhythm but no beat; he was essentially a hillbilly singer doing fast songs which is how everyone thought of him. That’s what I heard and none of the people I knew would listen to him because he was a hillbilly. As far as I’m concerned the Big Beat was developed by Lonnie Donegan and that is where the English Beat groups come from. Lonnie’s early stuff was as much Rock as anything else although he was primarily a terrific Folk and Blues singers. Unparalleled. He was as good as Elvis but somewhat more traditional sounding than Presley. Elvis could really move you.
Elvis was virtually unknown in Saginaw before Heartbreak Hotel. I missed out on the Sun records by a day. The record store had returned them the day before I got there so I have all RCAs. I never knew anyone else who had heard of Elvis between the time I bought my 45s and Heartbreak Hotel.
I never thought of Elvis as a Rock and Roller on those early records. There really was no Rock and Roll except for Bill Haley And The Comets and that stuff was really leadfooted. I didn’t really enjoy Rock Around The Clock and I never bought it. Elvis was just a hillbilly cat who could really sing a song. I knew from reading the labels that Arthur Crudup wrote That’s All Right Mama but that meant nothing to me. Who ever heard of Arthur Crudup?
I don’t understand why I don’t have Sun Presleys as I bought every Sun record as it came out. I had to have them special ordered as nobody wanted them but I was very familiar with the Sun sound. Not impossibly Sam Phillips had as much to do with Rock and Roll as anyone because all the records he produced had that forward leaning scudding way. You could have substituted Elvis for Johnny Cash on Get Rhythm and there wouldn’t have been much difference.
When Elvis left Sun his production values changed with the sound becoming flat footed and vertical rather than forward leaning. Elvis was always Elvis for me but I never had the incentive to buy his RCA produced 45s.
Some may say the music died with Buddy Holly’s plane crash but that is a gross exaggeration. Holly’s career was virtually over by February ’59. He was singing solo and fading fast. The Big Bopper was a no one who had one trash talking record while Richie Valens was as close to a zero as you can get.
Elvis was kept alive by RCA during his Army years but Little Richard was finished after Heebie Jeebies and Jerry Lee’s Rock career was stalled. High School Confidential was so-so. Jerry Lee’s marriage to his cousin may have put him in bad odor in some quarters but that was a fishing expedition to discredit him. Might have hurt his personal appearances but not his record sales, they were already down. To my mind Duane Eddy came out with Rebel Rouser on the heel of the plane crash and Rock and Roll bounced right along without missing a beat. Apparently not too many people remember the effect of Eddy and Rebel Rouser but it was the second kick in the pants after Presley. Kept us all going.
The big problem for Rock and Roll was Organized Crime. The Mafia and Chicago Outfit controlled Juke boxes. Those idiots determined that only their acts got on the Juke boxes. If you want a good representation of what the record industry was like check out the best Rock and Roll movie ever made- The Girl Can’t Help It. If you watch closely and pay attention you are being told exactly how it was.
An Outfit figure greatly resembling Al Capone, although the time period was long after Capone, controls the Juke boxes for the Outfit. That means the Juke boxes at least West of the Appalachians to the Coast. The Juke boxes in Saginaw were stocked by the Outfit that for all practical purposes controlled the town. All towns.
Girl Can’t Help It stars Jayne Mansfield and Tommy Ewell. Mansfield is the Mafia figure’s moll. He wants to make her a record star which he figures he can do because he controls the Juke boxes. All of ’em. But the Girl Can’t Sing. The producers are at their wits ends because they have to do something with her. They accidentally discover that she has this high pitched squeal. So, a la Tequila in which periodically the instrumental music stops and someone announces ‘Tequila’, at certain points in the record the music stops and Mansfield squeals. This is so captivating the record does become a hit.
Now, the movie highlights several Mafia acts like Teddy Randazzo and the Gum Drops that would never draw anyone into the theatres. Teddy didn’t even have an attractive high pitched squeal to go along with his great accordion playing. But as is usual with non-record types the belief is that if you can expose non-talent acts to enough people they will sell. So the Outfit did understand they needed some draws to get people in to expose the non-talent. Who are you going to go to? Well, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Little Richard for starters. I went because of Gene Vincent.
The movie was released in ’58 so not many of us had ever actually seen any of these guys. The Mob had their draws but they wanted to showcase the Italian acts which they did. Gene Vincent was shot through the window of a recording studio for about half of Be Bop A Lula; Eddie Cochran did his Twenty Flight Rock shot off a TV set and Little Richard was shot through a crowd in a club about fifty feet away.
As I say if you pay attention you can get a very good idea of what was going on. Mansfield and Ewell were great but they were at the terminal point of their careers.
The early sixties were pretty duddy as far as I was concerned, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I was right, so I went back to my true love, Country and Western. As I noted in Part One I was drawn back into pop by my brother-in -law. As I said I then graduated from college in ’66 going up to Oregon from the Bay Area. It was there in ’67 that I opened a record store. From ’67 to ’80 I was a decent sized player in the record business. I thought I heard everything but I am always amazed at the records for which I have no recollection even seeing.
I was there when the first Rolling Stone came out. I don’t know where the magazine sold but it wasn’t Oregon. Pretty boring actually. Got worse as time went on and then it got Political.
I quit listening to records in 1980 when I closed my record store. Punk was too ridiculous to waste your time on although I do have two or three Disco records I value. Well, Rock and Roll was great while it lasted but it really did die in ’75. Not only Punk and Disco but the untalented Epigone came along. The splitting out of Heavy Metal as a genre didn’t help either. God! I know how Marcus felt. Everything just crashed to the ground.
3.
Mr. Marcus’ themes and direction remain the same from Mystery Train to The Shape Of Things To Come. His attitudes are controlled by his dual Israeli and American passports: his Semitism and anti-Semitism. These two citizenships coincide in his psyche with his twin racial concerns. The Israeli citizenship as Semitism and his American citizenship with anti-Semitism. Naturally his Israeli Semitism takes precedence in his loyalty over his American anti-Semitism. Americans are Nazis in his mind. As with Adam in the Garden of Paradise and God, the twin concepts exist side by side in his mind with Adam representing Semitism and God anti-Semitism. Thus his Jewish/Adamic/Israeli identity represents his absolute purity in his mind while America/God represent his foul or Devil side. He and his fellow Jews think that by trashing the Garden, Europe, Palestine, America or wherever they happen to reside that their ‘purity’ will triumph and they will be as they represent themselves: a Holy People suited to govern mankind, Judge-Penitents. That is what the eighteenth century messiah, Jacob Frank, meant by saying that if the Jews commited all the evil in their minds then this ‘purity’ will shine to light the way for the peoples. You don’t have to be Freud to know it ain’t going to work. Thus Mr. Marcus’ subliminal message is all good comes from Jewish musicians and all evil from American musicians. The Jewish Bob Dylan becomes his ultimate hero taking precedence over the American anti-hero, Elvis Presley.
That’s why in Lipstick Traces he juxtaposes the anti-hero Presley and the Jewish hero Isidore Isou.
Mr. Marcus scatters several clues throughout his work to hint at what he’s attempting. He mentions John Ford’s movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and one of its morals a couple times concentrating on the movie’s stated notion that once an event becomes legendary even though the received version may be untrue people prefer the myth to the fact. There may be some truth to the notion although as Mr. Marcus explores the counter notion of detournement he gives us the means to strip such an ingrained notion from the story and turn it in any direction we want. Thus in the twenties the Judaeo-Communists on the one hand debunked American heroes and myths while at the same time detourning them so that Jefferson and Lincoln become founding members of Communism as Communism in turn becomes Twentieth Century Americanism. A neat trick that didn’t quite work.
Actually the two practices denote the transition from one religion to another which also lays bare Mr. Marcus’ intent. Thus in the first few centuries of the Piscean Age the Catholic Church detourned ancient Taurian and Arien religious sites by stripping them of their pagan connotations replacing the meaning with little balloons containing Christian messages. Eventually they replaced Arien temples with Piscean churches.
Jack Finney’s 1950’s novel The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers describes the same thing in which aliens while maintaining exact replicas of the bodies they take over inform the minds with entirely different content. Finney understood detournement completely long before Guy Debord had it figured out.
That is exactly what the Jews, who are attempting to replace Christianity are doing. Mr. Marcus mentions Philip Roth’s The Plot To Destroy America approvingly. Of course Mr. Marcus and Roth are both Jewish. In Roth’s detournement of American history he portrays the Jewish rescue of the true America, which the Jews in their wisdom created, from the Weird Old Americans who are trying to twist the Promised Land into some Nazi hate filled paranoid perversion of what one is led to believe was the American paradise Jews had created.
Roth chooses to recklessly defame Charles Lindhberg, a great and true American, but that is what detournement is all about. Thus on the one hand Roth detournes ‘Weird Old American’ heroes into villains while at the same time creating the myth of the Jewish saviors a la Liberty Valence.
The Jews then become the men who shot Liberty Valence thus destroying the Weird Old America while bringing into existence this Jewish paradise we enjoy today. Shut your mouth, you anti-Semite.
Why Liberty Valence?
Well, Liberty is the opposite of collectivity or the Jewish Law. He represents the sort of ‘rugged individualism’ that threatened Jewish collectivity or subordination to the Mosaic Law. Valence means valour, courage or valiance. That is, a man who has what it takes to stand out against the crowd or Mosaic Law. I’m sure it was an unintended compliment. No one of the collectivity has what it takes to stand up against him, not even the hero of the collectivity, John Wayne.
The legend that is so hard to kill is that Jimmie Stewart shot Liberty Valance down in a fair and square man to man fight. Actually Wayne is the agent of the collectivity who bushwhacked Liberty from a dark alley, Wayne and his Negro servitor and alter ego who tossed his rifle to him.
So this is the secret message of Lipstick Traces creating a legend and detourning existing beliefs that run counter to those of the collectivity. For that reason the branch of academic history known as American Studies has been captured by Jews who stand up laughingly epatering the Americans, debunking and detourning as they go.
I see where Mr. Marcus and a yoyo by the name of Todd Gitlin are joining forces to epater the Americans together. Ought to be funny if you’ve got the right sense of humor.
4.
All the seeds of Mr. Marcus later work are apparent in his 1975 Mystery Train. One should examine Mr. Marcus construction of Train carefully.
He examines six recording stars. Two of which he calls ancestors and four ‘Inheritors.’ The six are Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, Dylan/The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley.
Out of the period of 1950-75 Mr. Marcus chooses a very personal list of bands. One would call the list debateable but there’s not much to debate. Whether they are supposed to be important or influential isn’t clear. Apart from Presley none of them were overwhelming important or influential. Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, the Doors? No, they aren’t on board Mr. Marcus’ Mystery Train. So, what do we have?
The list is bracketed by two White performers, Harmonica Frank and Elvis Presley. Robert Johnson and Sly Stone are Black. Dylan/The Band are Jewish and Canadian while Robbie Robertson is mentioned as having a Jewish father. Thus Dylan/The Band and Randy Newman are two Jewish outfits. Two Whites, two Blacks, two Jews. Obviously we have an agenda here.
The two ancestors are questionable. I may have a vague memory of having heard the name Harmonica Frank but the man influenced absolutely no one. Technically he is no ancestor. His only connection with, say, Elvis, is that both were produced by Sam Phillips at Sun records. In that sense Harmonica Frank may be representative of what Phillips as a producer was trying to do but that represents Phillips and not Harmonica Frank.
Thus when Phillips decided to produce Presley he used the same musical tenets or ‘ear.’ Elvis was very fortunate to have Phillips to hear his talent and draw him out. Without Phillips there would never have been an Elvis Presley other than this guy driving a truck.
As far as ‘White’ ancestors go Phillips would have been more appropriate than Frank. I suppose what I am saying is that I find Mr. Marcus either too shallow or too tendentious.
Mr. Marcus doesn’t use a Jewish ancestor but as a Black ancestor he chooses Robert Johnson. As he states there were no Robert Johnson recordings available for anyone to hear before the 1960 Columbia release. Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbettor would have been a much more influential ancestor. Not only had his recordings been continuously available but his songs formed a staple for Folk artists from the post-war years on. His Good Night Irene and Midnight Special were ten times more influential than anything Robert Johnson ever wrote, a hundred times…heck, a thousand times, more. Johnson’s songs began to appear by other artists only in late sixties.
Mr. Marcus’ enthusiasm for Johnson’s lyrics is absolutely inexplicable. He quotes the following as an example of Johnson’s genius:
Me and the devil, was walking side by side
Oooo, me and the devil was walking side by side.
I’m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied.
Pretty choice stuff, huh? I’m surprised the ladies haven’t boycotted both Johnson and Mr. Marcus’ Mystery Train.
Nevertheless his choice of Johnson seems arbitrary at the best and tendentious at the worst.
I presume he chose the Band because of their association with Bob Dylan. Mr. Marcus definitely sets Dylan up as the greatest of the era replacing Presley. This is patently ridiculous.
His final paragraph detournes Elvis in favor of Dylan. Bear in mind that in 1975 Elvis still had two years to live so Mr. Marcus may be understood to be addressing Presley indirectly:
Quote:
All in all there is one remaining moment I want to see; One epiphany that would somehow bring his (Elvis’) story home. Elvis would take the stage as he always has; the roar of the audience would surround him, as it always will. After a time, he would begin a song by Bob Dylan, singing slowly. Elvis would give it everything he has. “I must have been mad,” he would cry, “I didn’t know what I had- until I threw it all away.”
And then with love in his heart, he would laugh.
Unquote.
That’s a pretty tale. As a detournement the kingof rock n’ roll passes the scepter to Dylan. While as a hypnotic suggestion to the living Elvis Mr. Marcus is attempting to bring his dream to come to pass. We’ll never know if it would have worked but it was the traditional Judaeo-Freudian method.
Thus the two sections on Harmonica Frank and Elvis are slurs on Mr. Marcus’ concept of The Weird Old America. That title of another of his books is itself a detournement of America.
For the last few years I have been wavering but after reading Mr. Marcus’ ideas on Dylan I have probably irrevocably turned against him. To write of the Band is to write of Dylan. Dylan would always have been Dylan but the Band would never have been anything without Dylan. The Band probably stands to Dylan as Presley does to Sam Phillips.
The first two Band LPs are the result of direct contact with Dylan in the sessions that resulted in the basement tapes. With the separation from Dylan the effect wore off with the Band returning to their R & R roots. At their peak they were no Doors or Led Zeppelin. Like Dylan I find them unlistenable today.
Mr. Marcus wrote a two or three hundred page essay on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone which he seems to consider the greatest song ever written. He perversely refuses to accept the song for what it is- a hymn to ingratitude. In the song Dylan clearly resents his dependence on Joan Baez for his early success. He, in fact, used her but now in his pride of success he spurns her from him- with his foot so to speak. A real ingrate as a matter of fact.
Mr. Marcus reproduces the lyrics in their entirety as a preface to the book. I’m not going to do the same here but Like A Rolling Stone is in a genre of Dylan songs that can be defined only as mocking or ‘hate songs.’ Along with Rolling Stone one can include Positively Fourth Street, Please, Crawl Out Your Window, Ballad Of A Thin Man, Desolation Row and any number of others. Sooner Or Later, One Of Us Must Know.
Again with Dylan the tone of his voice is more important than the words. For me I responded to the pain and anger in his voice that seemed to reflect my own experiences and which I interpreted in my own way. The same attitude would be reflected differently by the baby boomers born in the early fifties. As noted they came along at the time of Mystery Train’s writing to shatter Mr. Marcus immediate dream of a Rock And Roll Czardom.
One presumes that the song Mr. Marcus wanted Presley to sing in order to detourne himself in favor of Bob Dylan ‘with love in his heart and a laugh’ thus allowing one religious idol to replace another was ‘Like A Rolling Stone.’
Unfortunately due to Mr. Marcus’ interpretation I now see ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as an actual hymn of hate scorning and mocking Joan Baez. Throughout Bob Dylan’s career he had the habit of purloining things of others…said the Joker to the Thief. In Minneapolis and Colorado he actually stole records from other people. His excuse was that he really needed them. In New york he lifted the arrangement of a song of Dave Von Ronk’s and recorded it without permission. He had a ‘good excuse’ for that too. He needed it.
Perhaps his greatest theft was of the career of Joan Baez. Baez out of a generous heart used her influence and reputation to gain acceptance for the caterwauling Dylan. He couldn’t admit this theft without exposing himself as an ingrate subject to the scorn of the Folk community of Greenwich Village. This may possibly be the secret meaning of Positively Fourth Street in which he seems to heap scorn on the whole Folk community.
Mr. Marcus is especially impressed with the disgustingly hateful lines:
Ain’t it hard
When you discover that
He really wasn’t
Where It’s at
After he took from you everything
He could steal?
How does it feel?
How does it feel to be on your own
No direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone.
Dylan has identified the person he is speaking to as ‘Miss Lowly’ who went to a fine school and here he says that he has stolen everything from her that he can steal and then he taunts her as though he had reduced her to his condition when he first arrived in New York City. ‘How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home like a complete unknown?’
Yes. It must have been terrifying for Dylan to arrive in New York City as a complete unknown with no understanding of how to get started, homeless and starving. Dylan solved his problem by scrounging lodging and his next meal. He just moved in on people, ate their food, read their books, listened to their records, picked their minds, stole from them everything he could steal and then turned his back on them. Cut them cold. Scorned them as in Positively Fourth St. Well, all right. OK. But I don’t find it as admirable as Mr. Marcus does. As I say I never really thought of Like A Rolling Stone deeply before reading Bob Dylan At The Crossroads. (Robert Johnson again. Is Mr. Marcus suggesting that Dylan sold his soul to the Devil?) but now that I have I am appalled at the coarseness of actually composing a song about your perfidy and advertising it to the world.
If Mr. Marcus had handed Presley the song saying this is going to be what you’ll sing next, Presley who had perfect musical sense would have said: ‘Not on your life, Baby Blue.’
No laugh and a shrug from the King.
After Dylan/The Band Mr. Marcus moves on to Sly Stone. Sly was not a major talent. He had a couple fair R&B songs bordering on open racism. Sinking rapidly beneath drugs Sly Stone rapidly sunk his career.
Moving next to Randy Newman I must confess that Mr. Marcus has lost me. Perhaps he is trying to help the career of a fellow Semite along. Got me. Newman’s songs were always repulsive to me and Mr. Marcus’ quotes merely make them more repellent. Gee, I wonder why Elvis never sang ‘Short People?’
And then of course we come to what Mr. Marcus intends as his piece de resistance of criticism, Elvis himself. This piece is a regular tear down job.
Mr. Marcus was a trifle too young during the late forties and first half of the fifties to understand the situation. During those years the musical culture was in the hands of Jews and Italians. New York’s Tin Pan Alley from the twenties on had controlled American popular music. The clubs in which artists performed were all mobbed up as all the artists were mobbed up will they nil they. Thus nobody got through who wasn’t thoroughly vetted.
On the fringes one had areas of Black musicians who were outside the scope of popular music hence not worried about. At the same time one had Hillbilly music that was so despised that proper Whites retched at the mere mention of it and that is no exaggeration. Concomitant with Hillbilly although culturally acceptable was Folk music. Postwar from 1946 to 1964 in my estimation Folk was the only listenable pop musical expression. Unfortunately Folk music was in the hands of the Reds making it culturally suspect.
During the twenties and thirties Tin Pan Alley songs were vital enough to satisfy the nation’s listening ear although there were those who complained about it. Whatever had worked for Tin Pan Alley between the wars the ethic had worn too thin between ’46 and ’54. The music was so godawful and stiff that few could listen to it especially the young. Into the Jewish vacuum stepped the Black and Hillbilly songwriters and performers. While Hank Williams may have slipped slightly over the line of pop his songs were welcomed with open arms by pop cover artists. At that time there was no shame in covering a song made popular by another artist, even as the original version was still moving up the charts.
A golden time was created for unvetted performers and songwriters to step into the vacuum. While Eddie Fisher, Ezio Pinza and Mario Lanza and a stable of Italian pop singers attempted to hold the Tin Pan Alley fort Black street singers were emerging as Doo Wop groups while in Memphis Sam Phillips was developing the distinctive Sun Sound of which Elvis was the cornerstone. Elvis and his songs were completely unvetted by Tin Pan Alley and the Mob. As far as I’m concerned Presley’s breakthrough was such a fortunate concatenation of circumstances as to be miraculous. There are few times when things work out so perfectly for all concerned from Sam Phillips to Elvis to Colonel Parker and RCA. While Elvis was the transcendant talent he was only a component in the Elvis Presley success story. He had the good sense to stick to singing while he had the good fortune to be associated with managers of talent, circumspection, genius and above average integrity. So rare as to be almost unbelievable.
Phillips brought the talent to the surface that anyone else would have overlooked. A shy retiring Elvis given the opportunity dug deep to release the inner singer to become a polished singer almost immediately- in fact immediately. All of his Sun singles are absolutely stunning. There was no reason not to be swept off your feet from the first note of That’s All Right Mama.
Elvis’ genius was that he handled songs in a perfect blend of hillbilly and pop. He may have used some songs written by Blacks but there was no Black singer that could possibly have made of those songs what Elvis did.
Greil Marcus, Guralnick and others seem to be of the opinion that something went wrong with Elvis. Nothing went wrong with Elvis; he had the perfect career from his first single to his death in 1977. He was unable to withstand the pressures of his unparalled success. Unable to move in public because of his fans he was virtually under house arrest. For crying out loud, the guy couldn’t even go to McDonald’s. On top of that he aroused the anger and enmity of the ‘greatest generation’, the Mob and if Mr. Marcus is any example, the Jews. I’m sure he had difficulty just staying alive.
His goal was the movies. Thus his singing style changed to fit the venue. As much as I loved the Sun Elvis there is no possible way he could have continued in the same vein and sustained popularity for twenty some odd years. The new Elvis of Heartbreak Hotel and the early RCA years lost me as a record buyer. Still, as Dr. Hook sang: Elvis, he’s a hero, he’s a superstar…. as a hero Elvis always retained my loyalty.
While the Army seemed a disaster, his tour of duty may have been fortuitous for his career. The Army allowed the excitement to abate even as anticipation increased but when he returned it was as a return with a different feel. His style once again changed from the early RCA years. Listening to those old Mario Lanza and Ezio Pinza records inspired him to sing operatic C&W. Rather startling to my ear but with sure musical sensibility it worked for Elvis.
And then his popularity was so immense that he was able to star in two to three movies a year with all of them being money makers. The songs may have been less than memorable but he had to reach a mass audience for which popular music allowed of no vocal eccentricities. His fan base was strong enough and his talent great enough to sustain his popularity through a couple dozen movies that were frequently scorned and mocked but as Mr. Marcus generously points out they offered something that set them apart.
As all things must his movie career passed its ethic and cannily realizing it Elvis moved on. Thus in 1968 he produced a special that catapulted him back to the top of the musical scene. Even Mr. Marcus was overwhelmed by the ’68 transition from movie star back to recording master.
Nor did Elvis stop there but went on to a musical triumph that dwarfed anything that had gone before it including Frank Sinatra’s whole career- that was the satellite transmission form Hawaii to the whole world, the entire planet, simultaneously. The whole world tuned in to Elvis at one time. The equivalent of several hundred Woodstocks and something that has never been equaled by any other performer or groups of performers.
So, what did go wrong? Elvis had an unimaginably perfect career. The tragedy is that the enormous pressures were too great for this amazingly centered performer. It took a lot to beat him down.
Now, Elvis had a popularity that Bob Dylan couldn’t even dream about. Dylan could sing cranky little songs of hatred and viciousness such as Like A Rolling Stone to the ‘abused, confused, misused strung out ones and worse’ but Elvis couldn’t sing such viciousness to a worldwide audience. Imagine Elvis Live from Hawaii singing to a mob of adoring women lines like this:
Aw, you’ve
Gone to the finest school alright Miss Lowly but you know you only used to get
Juiced in it.
Nobody’s ever taught you to live out on the street
And now you’re gonna
Have to get
Used to it.
You say you never
Compromise
With the mystery tramp but now you
Realize
He’s not selling any
Alibis
As you stare into the vacuum
Of his eyes
And say:
Do you want to
Make a deal?
How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be on your own
With no direction home
A complete unknown…
Pardon me, I’m laughing so hard at the image I’m falling out of my chair. Oops, there I go.
—–
I’m back. Didn’t hurt myself.
So, anyway I consider Mr. Marcus’ whole critique so skewed as to be vitiated. It would take a whole lot of love in Elvis heart to make such a musical gaffe, blowing his career in one misguided song and then say: ‘I didn’t know what I had until I till I threw it all away.’ Sorry Greil, Bob Dylan is actually a minor talent. Let us not forget that he once opened a show for the Rolling Stones.
5.
There was a long hiatus of fourteen years between Mystery Train and the appearance of Lipstick Traces in 1989. During that period one assumes that Mr. Marcus had ‘no direction home.’ How the elements that make up Lipstick Traces formed is open to conjecture. He attributes his direction to one John Rockwell on the dedication page. His style was also apparently heavily influenced by the Firesign Theatre hence the herky jerky, jumpy non-sequitur style. The Firesign Theatre was one of the great recording acts of the late 60s and the 70s, still going too. They have continued to release CDs on into their old age, such as it is, but, as I say, I stopped listening to anything after 1980.
As the Firesign is essential to Mr. Marcus I suspect there is loads of humor in Traces that I’m not getting. Hard enough to make those difficult jumps. Juxtaposing Presley and Isou wasn’t even a jump, it was a gap.
John Rockwell was some sort of music critic at the NYT so not exactly the sort of influence one would want. As Mr. Marcus would have been already familiar with the Frankfurt School of which he is a continuator and mentions Dada in Mystery Train one imagines that critic Rockwell pushed him in the direction of the Presley lookalike Isidore Isou and incidents like the rather obscure Invasion of Notre Dame. Mr. Marcus was five at the time of the Invasion; one doubts he remembers it. Thus, perhaps Mr. Rockwell directed his eyes to the morgue of intriguing but all but forgotten news clippings with which he would have been familiar. Thus Mr. Marcus found the Lettrist/Situationist International.
The Paris disturbance following on the heels of the Free Speech brouhaha would then have given him a focal point. It appears that at some point Mr. Marcus met Debord becoming very well acquainted with the old drunk and pervert, as it were, a disciple. When Debord shot himself through the heart in 1994 as with Drs. Mabuse and Baum Debord’s soul apparently entered Mr. Marcus’ body so that he appears to have assumed leadership of the SI.
Traumatized by the Punkers who he gives credit for bringing down Rock he also became fascinated with Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols as well as several other Punk units. Personally I have always thought Punk was absolutely useless hence I find Mr. Marcus’ fascination with this sub-marginal trash actually objectionable. While his subjects knew that they were nothing and sought to be everything the means they chose to raise their chances of becoming something were ill advised.
However as Mr. Marcus integrates them into the Dada/Lettrist/Situationist program it may be worth considering at least Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols who according to Mr. Marcus are an outgrowth of the SI.
After the failure of the 1968 disturbance in Paris Debord’s SI seems to have become truly international what with Greil Marcus in the US and people like Malcom McLaren and Jamie Reid in England. God only knows how many covert cells there were and what looneys they were allied with.
McLaren and Reid were casting about for some way to epater the bourgeois when McLaren had an interview with the New York Dolls. From them he conceived the notion that no talent was needed at all to become a rock band. One only needed the ability to make noise. Fortunately for Reid and McLaren there were myriads of young losers who felt the same way. One only had to pick and choose the most likely candidates on a cosmetic basis and give their repertoire a Situationist slant. You know, create a situation.
Mr. Marcus wonders from where the musical infuences for the Punkers came. I have to say that their inspiration was largely Bob Dylan. Johnny Rotten (ne Lydon) was born in 1956 so in 1975 he was twenty years old. The Punks then would have been eighteen to twenty-five. A primary influence on them would have been Bob Dylan. Dylan’s first records give the impression of an untutored musician. The stuff was just noisy. He could neither sing nor play.
The mean streak that Mr. Marcus finds so attractive in Like A Rolling Stone runs throughout the corpus. As much as I hate to admit it that hateful mocking derisive attitude is the essence of Dylan’s style. After having Mr. Marcus point this out to me so unmistakably I’m having to rearrange my memories of Bob to change their faces and give them all brand new names. I’m having to become a revisionist of my own history.
While Dylan is a real cultural name dropper so that he gives the impression of being learned, he isn’t. Chronicles proved that. His criticisms of society are merely emotional rants rather than informed or intellectual critiques. That he could wing tripe like Masters of War past what must have been a fairly sophisticated Folk crowd is truly phenomenal. Or, maybe I was wrong about them too.
At any rate the Punkers were merely unhappy with their teenage angst. I can assure you that I and my age cohort were too. If the right social environment had been provided perhaps we would have responded in the same way.
Johnny Rotten could not have had many of the thoughts Mr. Marcus attributes to him, the kid was only nineteen, so one must believe that McLaren and Reid filled in the blanks with Situationese and Rotten rearranged the words. While McLaren and Reid may have turned a few dollars from the act it is difficult to see what else they accomplished.
Society was developing rapidly without their help. The band Devo released their significant LP Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo that quite clearly reflected the direction in which society was headed.
The amazing thing is that Mr. Marcus can discuss these insignificant nits at such length and with such seriousness. His long discussion of Johnathon Richman’s ‘Roadrunner’ was entirely uncalled for. Neither Richman nor his song had any influence in record circles. The record wasn’t even available for sale.
As Mr. Marcus neither owns up to being in the SI or gives any idea of the direction of the SI and ‘revolutionary’ groups I find that his book while full of interesting details is pointless. I have read the thing five or six times for this review. I have given the book more thought than it deserves. If the intent is a sly joke I don’t find it very funny. If the intent is to recruit members for the SI I find nothing agreable in the organization. I remain unrecruited. As a collection of non-sequiturs I find the book actually unreadable.
If Mr. Marcus modeled himself on the Firesign Theatre his choice was admirable but his execution was execrable. As a historian I’m afraid I would have to grade him below a C. Perhaps the quality of the book is best expressed by the cover.
Why is he nothing when he should be everything?
End Of Review
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus Part VIII
September 1, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
Escape From Reality
by R.E. Prindle
One gathers the impression from Mr. Marcus’ work that all his characters are in an extreme flight from reality. This would be equally true of the historical movements he describes of the Begins and Beguines and Free Spirit. His conception of the Free Spirit is a downright denial of reality and a full scale unlimited retreat into fantasy. Coinciding with this is an impossible demand for absolute freedom. The freedom of the Free Spirits, the Dadaist/Lettrist/Situationists and indeed, the Jews in general, is a freedom that requires passive objects- in other words Masters and Slaves. The freedom of the Free Spirits that on one level demanded unlimited sexual gratification for men at the same time required the abuse and degradation of women. Indeed, the image of a woman having sex with ten different men in succession is sexual abuse of a major kind that must irreparably damage the psyche of the woman.
I return again to the striking images of the insane asylum or Maison de Sante of Poe’s The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether. There is a great similarity in that story between the inmates seizing control of the asylum and the present situation in which all the disaffected factions such as homosexuals, Jews, Blacks and whatever have turned society on its head suppressing the asylum attendants or establishing an order in their own favor.
As I read Mr. Marcus’ remarkable book there is no one loonier than Guy Debord and the Lettrist/Situationist International. Both he and Isou are busy inventing systems that have no relationship to a just or benevolent society.
Their purpose while framed in grandiose proclamations of ‘changing society for a better world’ merely mask a desire of revolution for revolution’s sake as with the 1968 Paris disturbance that seems to have been meant only to ‘epater le bourgeoisie.’ To sow discord for the sole purpose of giving meaning to Debord’s life, to make him feel that indeed he was a Mastermind and powerful individual.
How the Situationist International meshed with the Frankfurt School for the furtherance of the Jewish Revolution is predictably left unexamined by Mr. Marcus. By the early fifties the Institute For Social Research was once again headquartered in Europe. Herbert Marcuse had been left behind in the US where he took up residence at UC- San Diego translating the claptrap of Adorno and others into English.
As a continuator of the Frankfurt School then Mr. Marcus provides a link between the Dadaists of 1916, The Frankfurt School of 1923 and the postwar Lettrist/Situationist International.
Thus as Debord replaced Isou in ’57-’58 the path then led into the so-called Free Speech Movement at UC- Berkeley and spreading from there to US campuses during the decade of the sixties linking up with the Cultural Revolution of Mao that made 1968 such a significant year not only in Paris but worldwide.
Mr. Marcus gives us a stirring account of his peripheral involvement in the Free Speech Movement of Berkeley of which he seems to be very proud. While he doesn’t inform us that he himself was a chief in any committees of public safety or actually involved in any sit-ins with consequent arrest he was present at several large rallies and assemblies in which as he tells us he cheered lustily.
He seems to be convinced that the cause of ‘freedom’ was thereby greatly advanced. If so, one asks, ‘freedom’ for whom? As in Poe’s Maison De Sante for the inmates as opposed to the guards obviously. The inmates won their freedom from the asylum administrators and guards by capturing and imprisoning them. Thus as Paul Simon has been known to chant: One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Oh, yes, indeed!
Now, Mr. Marcus’ works are sprinkled with images and metaphors drawn from the act of fellatio. While I have drawn my conclusions on the matter I leave it to the reader to draw theirs. No matter what happens then the issue at hand is of a not so subconscious sexual nature. Ultimately Mr. Marcus’ ‘total freedom’ gets down to the unlimited sexual gratification of an elite.
In pre-Revolutionary France this elite was the hereditary aristocracy. Their victims were drawn from the ‘lower orders’. For a fair example of how that aristocracy conducted itself it is only necessary to turn the pages of the works of the Marquis de Sade which Mr. Marcus undoubtedly has.
I hope I won’t offend if I say that what the Revolutionaries want is purely to displace the old elite and substitute themselves if for no other reason than to be able to gratify their sexual fantasies.
There have been several sex havens in the twentieth century where Western men could go to gratify these illicit passions. One need only mention Marrakesh, Tangiers, Thailand and locations where one can or could get all the dope one wanted, young girls and boys whose bodies could be violated at will for the appropriate price. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. One’s sexual passions can only be gratified on someone else’s body. That is what makes de Sade’s writings so terrifying.
While these sexual retreats are balms for perverted souls it is damned inconvenient to have to go so far at such great expense for such transient pleasures that require constant renewal. What to do? Why create possibilities closer to home of course.
Thus one has women lured from far away with false promises, to be installed in brothels in your home town. Or local girls plied with drugs until they will do anything you want. Better still are the hypnotic drugs, but I don’t have to go into detail on the date rape drugs.
Or, better yet, train whole generations to perverted sexual practices in the public schools from kindergarten up. Catch the little bastards at five and fill their brains with sexual filth in the name of mental health and sexual liberation.
This stuff isn’t new but what is new is its public nature and audacity. There have been small scale attempts to train men and women to gratify an elite. The Geishas of Japan are a famous example. And then there were the Irish slave women and mulattoes of the West Indies brought up to gratify the sexual needs of the planter elite with no unpleasant frictions.
One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. Full freedom for the elite is complete slavery for the majority. If Huxley’s gammas are needed they will be created, for elites need gammas.
The elite has even cleverly arranged matters so that they can train five year old little boys and girls to be buggers and whores. In control of the mainstream media they plump continuously for ‘freedom’ from ‘Puritanical strictures.’ They demand sex ‘education’ in the name of developing the full ‘human’ potential of the little buggers.
The law is perverted for the purpose. While the concept of the Law may be sacred, laws created by a minority for their convenience aren’t. As in the sixties when civil disobedience was a sacred duty it is now no less a sacred duty to disobey these laws that benefit the few to the injury of all. The principle of Law will not be violated anymore now than it was in the sixties. That was when Greil Marcus was in the bleachers of Freedom howling his lungs out.
Well, so Guy Debord somehow brought this civil disturbance in France in 1968 to fruition or so he claimed and believed. As Mr. Marcus justly points out President De Gaulle lamented the fact that the entire disturbance was caused by a few malcontents. The ‘freedom’ of Debord and the French Situationists meant the disruption if not the destruction of the lives and happiness of those who were trying to create a better civilization. But, and this is a key point, in order to do so they had to work. Debord’s key slogan was ‘ne travaille jamais’. Never work- suck off the productive.
This is where I disagree with Mr. Marcus, I don’t find the attitude admirable. One again asks the question who is the new elite that will replace the pre-Revolutionary elite? One asks for whose benefit was the babel of languages introduced in that ancient never never land or multi-culturalism into today’s Europe and America? There’s the real question Mr. Marcus isn’t critiquing. When the old world is destroyed who will rule the new order? Who will be masters and who will be the slaves? Where will the new Law and laws come from? Ah, Mr. Marcus, write a new book and tell us.
I don’t think we’ll be hearing from Mr. Marcus on that issue soon even though I am eager.
So, by 1968 the inmates were well on the way to being in charge of the asylum trying to get outside their clothes rather than in them. As I noted earlier Mr. Marcus begins his story at the end. I will now continue, taking the head of the ouroboros and place its tail in its mouth. We proceed to the first chapter of Mr. Marcus’ book, Lipstick Traces and the last part of my review.
Lipstick Traces Pt. VII: Greil Marcus
August 29, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
Part VII
The Assault On Charlie Chaplin
by R.E. Prindle
Apparently satisfied with the attention called to themselves by The Invasion Of Notre Dame in 1950 Isou and the Lettrist International next made an assault on the film industry and Charlie Chaplin.
Mr. Marcus doesn’t say where Isou announced his views on film or if anyone was listening but…
Qu0te:
…(Isou) both pronounced and demonstrated the manifesto of cinema decrepant, mixing up his images and his soundtrack, negating the filmic aspect of the film with torn and scratched celluloid, intentional flickering and passages of blank screen. “I believe first of all that the cinema is too rich,” he proclaimed. “It is obese. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of rupture in this fat organism we call film.”
Unquote.
What does one say to such grandiose nonsense as this? What does “the first apocalyptic sign of rupture” mean? While Isou was concentrating so heavily on letters he should have worked on the vocabulary of words a little bit. How many people listened or cared? Not many. No one, actually. Cinema decrepant? Well, it was a concept but when you peeled away all the meaning, the ‘fat’, and showed nothing but black or white film, and made the strips of blank film unconscionably long, what then? No one was willing to sit thrugh four and a half hours of blank film. Once you’d seen one frame you’d seen them all, literally.
Attention was required. How to get it? The Invasion Of Notre Dame had gotten the proto-Lettrists world wide attention. That was one successful prank. If coopting someone else’s gig worked once then it ought to work twice or perhaps three or four times running. Well, that’s questionable, the old adage is never try the same joke three times running. Isou, Debord and the other guy hadn’t heard that old adage.
The second running of the joke got results but not all that much attention.
The Lettrists stormed the citadel of the cinema at the Cannes Film Festival in a blazing display of chutzpah. The boys were resisted but through the efforts of the homosexual lobby led by Jean Cocteau the Lettrists had a modest success.
Quote:
Through the graces of Cocteau, the festival actually awarded Isou the ‘Prix de l’ Avant Garde’ which was contrived on the spot.
Unquote.
With or without the Prix de l’ Avant Garde few people were interested in viewing four and a half hours of blank film.
The joke worked twice so the boys decided to ‘epater le bourgeouisie’ one more time without variation.
Charlie Chaplin was coming to Paris to premier his film ‘Limelight’. Chaplin was already in the afterglow of his long career. Limelight wasn’t his last film but it should have been. By the time he produced A Countess Of Hong Kong his career had turned into one eternal yawn.
The boys launched a campaign printing leaflets of the most insulting and tasteless content. Except that they were of the Left they would have been jailed. An excerpt:
Quote:
Go to sleep, you fascist insect. Rake in the dough. Make it with high society (we loved it when you crawled on your stomach in front of little Elizabeth.) Have a quick death, we promise you a first class funeral.
Unquote.
All chutzpah and no civility. It’s like these guys crawled out of the sewer for the occasion. Three in a row was no charm. Who the hell cared about Charlie Chaplin? In the first place he was a Commie not a Fascist. But you can’t call a guy a Commie and insult him in France. What was he compared to Easter Mass at Notre Dame or even the pitiful Cannes Film Festival. Next to nothing. Nothing. Three strikes and you’re out. The not very interesting notion of cinema decrepant made little progress. Even the ‘films’ have disappeared.
I hope Mr. Marcus was being intentionally funny or perhaps his humor was unconscious but he says that although the film had disappeared he was working from a printed ‘script.’ It apparently takes more to write about a blank screen than to show it.
So much for cinema decrepant. So now the Lettrist-Situationist International is in mid-career from 1950-52 to 57 when Debord and Isou split. So far these guys have made no impression at all. It might be of interest to note that Lawrence Sterne in his eighteenth century novel, Tristram Shandy, had a chapter that was a blank page so Debord and Isou had an illustrious predecessor.
At any rate we’ll next attempt a review of the last chapter, titled Lipstick Traces, before returning to the first chapter. When I first saw the title Lipstick Traces I leaped to the conclusion of lipstick traces on a man’s collar betraying clandestine activities but Mr. Marcus following his song source closely gives the chapter title in full as Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette.) Nothing clandestine there, just vulgarity. To Part VIII.
Lipstick Traces: Part VI: Greil Marcus
August 24, 2007
A Review
Lipstick Traces:
Greil Marcus
Part VI
by R.E. Prindle
Sometime in the early 1920s that supreme fantasist Sigmund Freud belatedly discovered the supreme impediment to the Jewish fantasy of world dominion- the Reality Principle. He should have discovered it in the Garden Of Paradise right at the beginning.
Freud had spent most of his life constructing a shining vision of the realization of Jewish dreams but he encountered that wall so wide you can’t go around it and so high you can’t go over it and it wouldn’t matter how many masochists beat their head against it that wall won’t fall down.
This was exactly the problem that the Free Spirits who are the centerpiece of this chapter faced. The Free Spirits of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries sect who evolved into the Libertines of the 18th century essentially were precursors of the ancient Jewish attitude that nothing was to be denied them; all things were permitted to the elect. As wild fantasists as the Jews they purportedly believed that if a woman had consecutive sex with ten different men if the last was a Free Spirit her virginity would be restored. As you can see the Reality Principle had no meaning for either sect.
Freud in the end chose to ignore the Reality Principle although how he maintained hope for the redemption of Jewish hopes is difficult to follow. It should have been clear to him that no matter how strenuously Jews pursued their dreams and fantasies they would always be doomed to failure.
As with the Garden of Paradise expulsion destruction would always be their lot. Ah, but there would always be that…remnant. What sort of dream is that?
Thus as Mr. Marcus points out even after the devastation of the death camps the Jews of Europe bounced back even before the ovens were cold with schemes to take over ‘our’ Europe. That is the remarkable story that Mr. Marcus tells us in this chapter.
I don’t know if Mr. Marcus is aware that every character in his historical novel is a psychotic. All of them are in full retreat from the Reality Principle. While I’m not sure he intends it all of them are facing terrific tensions in their daily living especially the ostensible protagonist of this story, Michel Mourre. I’m going to treat Mr. Marcus’ book as a novel and accept his interpretation of the feelings and emotions of his characters as real. Certainly he puts thoughts and notions in their minds that are beyond historians. So while the situations and characters he portrays may be factual enough his story isn’t.
The ostensible protagonist of the Invasion Of Notre Dame is a disturbed, psychotic Roman Catholic by the name of Michel Mourre. He had been reared a Communist with all the attendant utopian projections and fantasies. The test of the Communists and Mourre’s disillusionment came in 1940 when the Nazis arrived and the brave Communists including his father who had indoctrinated him crowded the train stations in an attempt to flee South.
Having lost one faith Mourre attempted a replacement in Catholicism. Catholicism failing him he was intellectually adrift wandering around the cafes of Paris spouting his discontent. He was a perfect tool. He quickly found those who knew how to use him.
These were a group of young Jews seeking to epater l’eglise. Scarcely skipping a beat on the way back from the extermination camps if they were ever in one they were continuing the Jewish war on Christianity and Europe that began long before Hitler and Stalin.
The group worked up a plan using Mourre as a tool to disrupt Easter services at Notre Dame in the year of Our Lord, 1950. How Mourre could allow himself to be duped in such an egregious manner is beyond me. Well, maybe it’s not. I was absolutely amazed- non-plussed, blown out of the water- to watch on television when Queen Elizabeth visited Jamaica to watch her being handed a sheaf of paper just before the cameras rolled and told that this was her speech. She actually read it sight unseen. If the Queen of England with a body of advisors to protect her from just such egregious errors can be duped, managed, hustled by bunch of ganja smoking hustlers then perhaps Mourre wasn’t at fault or perhaps White people are just fools. I’m still working on that one but I’m afraid of the conclusion I might have to reach.
At any rate Mourre wearing a Dominican outfit rushed up the aisles bearing a speech written for him by his Jewish confreres. Mourre must have been drugged or hypnotized. I don’t know what Queen Elizabeth’s excuse might be.
According to Mr. Marcus the speech was written by a Serge Berna one of Mourre’s Jewish handlers. The speech is written in the familiar J’ accuse manner made popular by the dupe and fool Emile Zola during the Dreyfuss Affair of the 1890s. One wonders whether Zola drafted his own letter or whether his Jewish handlers wrote it for him as in the case of Mourre. One is reminded of the ‘apology’ of Henry Ford that the American Jews wrote for him.
Although written in the first person so that Mourre mouthing the words would appear to be voicing his own thoughts he is actually expressing the views of his Jewish handlers. The language is violent, vicious and coarse expressing the deep Jewish hatred of Europe and America. It seems incredible that this message went unheeded especially coming as it did on the heels of the war. Despite both Hitler and Stalin the Jews had learned nothing.
Two quotes are outstanding of this deep abiding hatred. One should never hate nothing but hatred- Bob Dylan.
Quote:
I accuse the Catholic Church…of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West (and)…your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.
Unquote.
That is very strong and violent language. The reference to our Europe clearly states that the conflict between Hitler, Stalin and the Jews was not one sided. It is less a question of Hitler and Stalin exterminating Jews than whether they authorized the killing of Jews before the Jews authorized the killing of Europeans. I have already mentioned the Jewish plan as expressed by their spokesperson, Noel Ignatiev, to exterminate the entire billion strong White species. The plan has been made public. If the reader refuses to take the plan and threat seriously the more fool he.
Once can cite numerous examples of Jewish murderousness as I have in my writing both on I, Dynamo and my writing on the site, ERBzine. I’m not going to repeat them now. You may consider me a prophet as Mr. Marcus considers himself.
The whole plan to bring ‘multi-culturism’ to the West is merely a variation on the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Just as the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Paradise shows the contradiction of the Jewish mind in which Semitism and anti-Semitism exist side by side so the story of the Tower of Babel that is a product of Jewish aspirations merely elucidates the principle of divide and conquer. The original notion said to be that in the building of the tower all spoke one language hence they could effectively coordinate their efforts. ‘God’, or the Jewish intellect, realized that if they spoke many languages i.e. if ‘multi-culturalism’ were introduced the peoples would not only not be unable to coordinate their efforts but there would be perpetual fighting.
Hence ‘multi-culturalism’ was introduced into Europe and America after the holocaust. That the Euroamericans would eagerly buy such a bill of goods shows what superb salesmen the Jews are.
Mr Marcus rather confusingly posits the origin of Lettrism to 1952 but then, if I read correctly, attributes the invasion of Notre Dame in 1950 to Isou and the Lettrists. I’m sure if I make Lipstick Traces my life’s work all will come clear.
At any rate Isou and disciple somehow kept Lettrism alive until 1957 when Guy Debord became involved and began the conversion of Lettrism to Situationism. Situationism somehow became involved with Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School. As soon as things calmed down in Europe and the Jews were safe again Adorno and the School sans Herbert Marcuse returned to the scene. Thus in this mysterious way Debord and the Situationist International, Adorno and the Frankfort School and Greil Marcus are brought into the same bundle and Mr. Marcus assumes his prophetic role.
It takes a tangled mind to tell a tangled tale.
The next stop on Mr. Marcus’ itinerary is entitled The Attack On Charlie Chaplin. A review of that will follow in Part VII.
Pt. V Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
August 21, 2007
A Review
Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces
Part V
The Crash Of Yesterday’s Art
by R.E. Prindle
At this stage of the review it will turn into a secret history of the secret history. Since last writing I have read Mr. Marcus’ opus on Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone, The Dustbin Of History and Mystery Train plus a few articles available on line. The qualities not as apparent from a volume or two become more apparent when enough material is read. No writer can write several hundred pages without revealing himself and his intentions.
Thus it becomes clear that Mr. Marcus was reared as both a Communist and a Jew. Of course he uses the palliative, socialist. He seems to have come from a privileged background while having received a Jewish conditioning. He was born in the summer of 1945. His father, Greil Gerstner, died during WWII so he must have been adopted by his stepfather, obtaining the name of Marcus.
As part of the Critical Theory of The Frankfurt School he has been trained to view life as one tragedy after another. Whereas in the Western tradition we are trained to see life as a series of adventures in which if we triumph, good; if not, then efforts must be taken to rectify the situation. There is no mystery in situationism; it is just the way it is. Thus the Westerner even more that the Jewish Guy Debord is trained as a situationist.
In his criticism Mr. Marcus unremittingly condemns the United States as fatally flawed and ripe for destruction. As this is his vision he is compelled to work toward its realization. This might be considered strange because when his grandparents or great-grandparents landed on these shores c. 1900 they thought they had found the Promised Land. So what happened in the years between then and now to turn the Promised Land into the shitheap Mr. Marcus sees? Nothing. The conditioned Jewish character merely asserted itself and Paradise turned into fecal matter. One might look to Freud for a solution but I think the answer can be found even earlier in that ridiculous Holy Book of the Jews that Westerners call the Bible.
Now, they are always looking for a paradisical ‘situation.’ According to their Holy Book 5700 and some odd years ago which is when they believe that the world was created they lived in the literal Paradise. All they had to do was keep their nose clean and mind their manners. So as to leave room for no mistakes their mentor God, or as Jews spell it G-d, told them all of Paradise was theirs to enjoy but they must never eat of the fruit of a forbidden tree. Pretty clear wasn’t it?
So then the Jews defied their mentor by eating the forbidden fruit. This act enraged their mentor so greatly he picked them up and bodily threw them from Paradise thus beginning a very long list of expulsions. Also their God did not fool around. He was unforgiving telling them to never come back at the same time setting up a guard who couldn’t be fooled to make sure they never did come back. Thus the first act of the conditioning of the Jewish people took place.
So, the scenario is that the Jews are welcomed, then the Jews repel mentor or hosts, the host eventually becomes sufficiently angry with the Jews to expel them from their midst. This scenario has been repeated for, by Jewish calculations, 5700+ years.
C. 1900 Mr. Marcus’ ancestors arrived in what they jubilantly described as the Promised Land, in another word, Paradise. They prospered mightily. Mr. Marcus himself is the product of that prosperity but, like the Jews in the Garden of Paradise, Mr. Marcus is busily trashing the Land of Promise. As he sees it the United States is fecal matter that has to be flushed down the toilet. Further he wants you to view the United States the way he does and trash the only home you have ever known or will ever know. Mr. Marcus is a dual citizen; when the country is trashed he and his successosrs will just move on as they have always done.
That’s the short form.
Now, Mr. Marcus and his fellow culturalists have declared war on the Aryan species as well as on the United States and, actually Europe. They will settle for nothing less, according to their spokesperson Mr. Noel Ignatiev, than the abolition or genocide of the entire species, one billion strong.
While this goal can be achieved by psychological means, indeed is well advanced, the fun comes from openly fuddling people. To do that one needs a power base. A power base was first achieved in Russia in 1917 but that one slipped through their hands.
But then this summer Sarkozy got himself elected President of France thus placing the power of that State in Jewish hands. One of the first things Sarkozy did was to begin to distribute French atomic weapons to France’s enemies. Unless the Jews and Moslems are secretly allied this act seems suicidal for the Jews. Who knows maybe it has reached that point in Jewish minds. It should be clear to all that as there is no God the story of Paradise is merely a reflection of the Jewish ego. In the search for anti-Semitism it is quite clear that it is a product of the Jewish outlook. In the conflict within the Jewish mind God became the first anti-Semite. The whole Jewish scenario develops from this inner psychological conflict.
A second thing that began happening after the Sarkozy election was that key Jews were beckoned to France for instructions in somewhat the same manner as Judaeo-Communist revolutionaries returned to Russia just after the October Revolution when as Mr. Marcus quotes Trotsky as saying, the Mensheviks were tossed into the dustbin of history.
Mr. Marcus was called to France in July of this year under the auspices of The Cartier Foundation For The Contemporary Arts [ http//www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1649503,00.html ]
ostensibly to give his views on Buddy Holly. Whether Mr. Marcus actually met with Jewish conspirators in private to receive instructions I can’t say but it would have to be proved to me he didn’t, especially as this ‘cultural’ forum turned into a podium for America bashing in which Mr. Marcus gleefully participated.
Speaking of Elvis Presley and Jackson Pollack the director Alain Perrin described them as “Two young people living in a society that they want to provoke to rebel against, and to mock sometimes.” I think perhaps Mr. Perrin is projecting his and France des Juifs’ opinion on Elvis, I don’t know about Pollack. I never had the notion that Presley was mocking America and I wouldn’t have liked him if he did. The early Rock n’ Rollers were not mocking anything they were just trying to break in a different musical form against great opposition and make it big. That opposition merely had to do with people who were shocked at the musical departure.
I graduated HS in ’56 and was one of a minority who accepted the music in my class. The new era began really with the class of ’57 when the form had penetrated to the youth consciousness.
The skewed Mr. Perrin goes on to say “This was the America that had liberated the world of Nazism…’ Surely Mr. Perrin meant France although in his skewed imagination it may have seemed like the world. “…but this was also a racist America, a puritan America, (no capital. It might be possible to say America was still Puritan but it was not puritan.) a hyper conservative, McCartyite America.” Well, one out of five ain’t bad especially for France as America did what the French couldn’t do themselves. I hope Mr. Perrin wasn’t offended that America wasted its own men, some of whom were my relatives, money and resources to save an ungrateful France from itself. As I understand it there was no scarcity of French collaborators in that glorious lovely Liberal Communistic ‘pure’ France of Mr. Perrin’s imagination. One would expect a Communist of Mr. Perrin’s stripe to be opposed to weird old ‘conservative’ America. But, then I’m sure he doesn’t want to talk about that in an open forum. No one expects gratitude from the French but a little realistic appraisal of the past wouldn’t hurt. Liberals are Liberals, but, geez.
Mr. Marcus slips and slides in with his two cents worth:
Quote:
In the 1950s (ten long years note) the official story was that America was back to normal (the Depression?) women were out of the factories, (happened in the forties) everything was working like clockwork, (not so, but Mr. Marcus was a nine year old and it may have seemed so) but underneath this was an entirely different story (secret history again) of confusion, conflict, desperation, (how did I survive?) desire for grandeur. Life could have been an epic story, life was dangerous ( aw, come on, Mr. Marcus, don’t put me on with all these cliches) you could step outside the role that had been preordained for you. (by whom?)
Unquote.
Now, let’s see. How many cliches are in that novelistic approach to history. Mr. Marcus says he was born in the summer of ’45. McCarthy was shot down in ’54 so Mr. Marcus would have been eight or nine. His memories of the fifties then are pretty thin so he must be reading the Time-Life Decade series for the 50s. Even then they wouldn’t have made such puerile remarks. Well, I’ve read the series and they do, so… My memory of the time was that there was no normal. The discord was right on the surface and that was no fooling around. Our town was virtually in the hands of the Chicago Outfit. Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamster bomb wielders were serious, the Korean War, the Commie Threat (that Mr. Marcus and the French refer to as ‘McCarthyite America’) produced great tensions. The Atom Bomb, my god Mr. Marcus don’t you ‘remember’ the Rosenbergs in 1953?
If you’re going to try to write history give up your sophomoric Jewish presentation. Hunker down. Get objective.
Mr. Marcus has his own secret history and mocking America is central to it.
In concentrating on the nonentities clowning it up in Zurich Mr. Marcus fails to relate Da Da to the course of the evolutionary development of Western society thus exaggerating the importance of these clowns grossly. Their effect on the development of society was minimal. The Da Da art movement did have some effect. Bear in mind that Da Da is merely a state of mind shared by a percentage of any age cadre from say 17 to 25 or so when they are struggling to find their way. Finding one’s way isn’t easy and does have its stresses. The situation of this particular group occurred as the Scientific Revolution, the real revolution, begun in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s Origin Of Species was disrupting Western society to the maximum extent. Science challenged religious concepts including those of the Jews.
The ethos of art had run its course having achieved all that representational art could achieve. The search for novelty or an avant garde, if you will, produced Cubism, Da Da and Surrealism. Thus these clowns in Zurich who produced nothing but had a narcissitic crush on themselves were presumably able to make a noise. In reading Mr. Marcus one isn’t sure exactly what that noise was. In any event the Cabaret Voltaire changed nothing that had not already been changed or was changing.
Other than rescuing this crew from the dustbin of history and amusing us aside it is difficult to understand what significance Mr. Marcus finds in this clown act performing hackneyed stunts.
He somehow segues this act into his following act, even more insignificant than the opening act. The Crash Of Yesterday’s Art concerns the career of another complete and insane non-entity, one Isador Isou.
In order to give some significance to Isou he manages to compare him with both Elvis Presley and Tony Curtis. Not bad footwork for a fancy dancer.
As is usual with Mr. Marcus all the people he considers important are Jewish and those he denigrates are goys. Thus in the comparison between the earth shaker Presley and the non-entity Isou the latter comes out as the more signficant of the two. How Tony Curtis comes in isn’t clear unless it is his famous pompadour that is said to have influenced Presley’s hair style. At any rate the two Jews to one goi with Presley basing his hair style on one Jew while the other’s portrait often mistook him for a ‘pop star’ which it would appear raises him to a level slightly above Presley seems relevant in Mr. Marcus eyes. I don’t know, hard to dicipher.
As Mr. Marcus describes the megamaniacal Isou it would appear that he could have been at the famous dinner at the Maison de Sante described by Edgar Allan Poe in his famous The System Of Dr. Tarr And Professor Fether. In fact much of Mr. Marcus writing reminds me of nothing so much as Poe’s lady who tried to get outside her clothes rather than in them. I have great difficulty taking Mr. Marcus discussion of Isou as seriously as he seems to, although I find the story a fascinating bit of trivia.
Leaving Isou’s manias aside it seems that his contribution to the deconstruction of Western Civilization was to insist that paragraphs, sentences and words were meaningless while the only thing of importance was the bare letter itself. A building block. You see what I mean by trying to get outside one’s clothes than inside. Mr. Isou grandiloquently called his ‘organization’ The Lettrist International with he and his other member. He wished to establish the Lettrist Dictatorship.
Actually as a Jew Isou was merely following the letter mysticism of the Jewish alphabet in which not only does each letter have incredible symbolic meaning but each curve and segment of a letter is also endowed with incredible symbolism. A whole several hundred page volume could easily be written concerning the letter aleph and each additional letter thus adding up to a magnificent Harvard five foot shelf of the Jewish alphabet.
Somehow Charlie Starkweather and Caril figure in here but I’ll have to go back and study to get it which would scarcely be worth it. I’ll see if I can find the time.
Mr. Marcus also recasts a version of his musings on what appear so be his favorite song: It’s Too Soon To Know of the mid-forties. Favorite songs are often inscrutable to anyone who doesn’t ‘get it.’ I know the song and while I like it, I don’t get it like Mr. Marcus does. On the other hand I don’t expect Mr. Marcus to get a couple of secret favorites of mine, one by a singer whose name I forget, Clint something or other, although I should still have the 45. I got the disc in a close out mystery package of 10 for 99 cents. The song goes something like ‘Bertha Lou, Bertha Lou, I wanna conjugate with you.’ I like it however I have never met another person who has ever heard the song.
Another favorite of mine is by the Crows (Orioles-Crows- the bird, the bird, the bird’s the word) of Gee fame that reads something like this:
I’ve got a girl named Rosie Lee,
I wanna tell ya what she did for me.
She took me in when I had nowhere to go
And that is the reason I love her so.
—-
Face like a tadpole, shape like a bear,
But when it comes to lovin’ Rosie is there.
The lyricist is certainly no Allen Ginsberg but as you can see both these songs and Ginsberg’s Howl are concerned with a certain word begining with the letter F. And the usage is indeed international. God bless Isidore Isou and the Lettrist International.
Well, enough of this funnin’, let’s get on with the serious stuff. So Isou and his Lettrist Interntional is going to segue into Guy Debord and his Situationist International but first we have to go to church. It seems to me that I have a vague memory of Part VI so the invasion of Notre Dame must have been a true international scandal.
Part VI Follows.
I, Dynamo 