The Rosy Cats of Doctor Paracelsus - and other poems

Further to The Time of Achamoth, and before that The Hole in the Zero, I've just been looking at the poetry of the 1950s-70s New Zealand author MK Joseph.

He was pretty good. The Poetry Archive has a feature on him - MK Joseph - with nine of his poems; but I just found a very good weblog, Reading for Believers, which has a number of his hard-to-find poems (check out the internal search) such as The Rosy Cats of Doctor Paracelsus. There are undoubtedly copyright issues with this poem, but he's long out of print and I reproduce it out of sincere homage to a great writer.

The Rosy Cats of Doctor Paracelsus M.K. Joseph

(paste-up, with montage of old movies)

Paracelsus claimed that he could make homunculi
(Little men) a span high, growing the lifeseeds
in vessels buried in dungheaps to maintain
a mild and even heat . . . Wise Paracelsus believed that if a rose
was burned in a crucible to finest ash
then in the heatshimmer as the smoke ascended
it would hover and shape itself into the grey
ghost of a rose. My grey ghost hand
plucks from the air, presents to you
This ghost of a rose.

When Nijinkski danced the Spectre of the Rose
leaving the dreaming girl he seemed to
float out of the window into the moonlight
light as a rose petal
then fell into a chair
backstage, where two attendants worked him over
like a heavyweight boxer's seconds with towel and sponge.

That was Jean Cocteau's story, perhaps he was lying.

Cocteau the magician conjured an Orpheus
who could walk through mirrors into death's kingdom.
He also had a story about cats. It went like this.

'The English poet Keats once rode
At night-time through an gloomy wood
When all at once he seemed to hear
A sound of tiny trumpets near.
Dismounting from his horse he sees
Small torches flickering through the trees
Bobbing and twinkling two by two
And presently came into view
Cats all dressed in funeral black
Marching along the woodland track.

Only the tap of drum is heard,
Six drummers pass without a word,
Then the trumpet's mournful cry
As six cat-trumpeters march by,
Six cats in mourning for the dead
Wave six black banners overhead,
With trumpets' cry and tap of drum
And flapping bannners on they come.

Then guards-men cats with arms reversed
Of which six musketeers were first
To fire the volley at the grave,
Six swordsmen-cats with whiskers brave,
Six grenadiers with drooping tail,
Six pikemen with pikes at trail,
Six cat-princesses glided by
Blackveiled and sobbing bitterly.
Last came six blackgowned pallbearers
Bearing heavily on their shoulders
The coffin draped, and on it set
A tiny golden coronet.
Silent they marched by where he stood
And vanished in the darkling wood.

When many a weary mile was past
Keats reached a friendly house at last.
Beside him on the hearth-rug sat
And purred a handsome ginger cat
As resting by the fireside
He told of his strange evening ride -

Torches and drums and minstrelsy
Banners and guards and heraldry
Princesses sobbing bitterly
But when he came to the coronet
Upon the little coffin set
The cat said: That means I'm king
Of all the cats. With sudden spring
He cleared the windowsill and quite
Disappeared in the summer night.'

(And when Swinburne died - so Karl Stead
told me - Yeats said
Now I'm king of the cats).

but Mary Shelley heard of this from Monk Lewis
at Geneva in the summer Frankenstein,
she also believed that if a cat ate roses
it would turn into a beautiful woman.

'Quickly, come quickly, the little cat
is eating the roses. It will turn into a beautiful woman
with green eyes and short sharp fingernails.'

O catwoman mother of monsters
may the pads of your paws be
as soft and pearly as rose petals
your claws no sharper than thorns.
(A huge hand ripped off in a closing door
clawed with gigantic thorns.
Where could this be? In the arctic hut in
The Thing from Outer Space
the tall walking vegetable vampire*
whose seedlings must be nourished
with human blood. Trapped in the end
screaming in electric arcs
fried down for compost.)

*(played by James Arness later known as Matt Dillon.)

[Samuel Johnson had a cat named Hodge.
When it fell ill his friend the barroom doctor
Levett prescribed a nourishing diet of oysters.
Dilemma: should he send his black servant
Francis Barber who might feel put upon
running errands for a fat old cat?
Solution: Doctor Samuel Johnson went himself
to Billingsgate to purchase oysters for
Hodge who recovered. This is a digression.]

Doctor Pretorius (played by Ernest Thesiger)
was a paracelsian who kept his homunculi
imprisoned in glass belljars; when they knocked
with tiny fists upon the glass it rang
like toy telephones: this in The Bride of Frankenstein
In which the Bride (the Monster's of course: Frankenstein's
bride was played by Valerie Hobson who later
married a British Cabinet minister named
John Profumo, which is strange but not relevant)
was played by Elsa Lanchester who in 'real'
i.e. offscreen life was married to Charles Laughton
who was Quasimodo in the second Hunchback
of Notre Dame and Doctor Moreau in The Island
of Lost Souls in which the leader
of the Beast Men was Bela Lugosi who
(need I say it?) played the title-role in the original
Dracula in which Renfield the madman
who ate flies was Dwight Frye who acted
the malignant hunchback who in Frankenstein the first
selected the wrong brain for the poor Monster
(doomed from the start) who was played
by Boris Karloff who was played by
a very gentle Englishman named
William Henry Pratt.

Ash in the crucible revives
Roses and monsters hover in the mind.

Bernard de Fonatanelle who lived for a century
And dreamed of men dwelling on other stars
Also listened-in on the conversation of roses.
He overheard one rose say to another
No gardener has ever been known to die.

As a paste-up, it may well have meaning only discernible to the reader, but it's readable as a stream-of-consciousness piece by a writer who had wide interests across literature and popular culture. MK Joseph's interests show through in this poem - echoes of Samuel Johnson and Dr Pretorius turn up in The Hole in the Zero (see the update) and one of the future vignettes in The Time of Achamoth repeats the Paracelsus and Mary Shelley stories.

See The king of the cats for a follow-up on the Keats allusion.

- Ray

The Time of Achamoth

Yesterday afternoon I did a first-pass reading of a book I'm sure I'll return to: Michael Kennedy Joseph's 1977 science fiction novel The Time of Achamoth. MK Joseph (1914-1981) was a British-born New Zealand author and academic who wrote in fairly diverse genres (historical, war, adventure, and SF), all tending to be characterised by erudite historical and literary interests, traditional morality and philosophy, anti-war views, and a distinct interest in experimental writing. I've enthused previously about his experimental SF novel The Hole in the Zero (see The Hole in the Zero and the Update), so it was an opportunity I couldn't miss when I found an affordable UK-sourced copy of The Time of Achamoth on Amazon; it's moderately rare, and was only published in New Zealand.

The Time of Achamoth is a time-travel novel set initially in  near-future New Zealand. It begins with the historian protagonist, Mark Hollister, suddenly finding himself with a rifle in the Waitomo Caves about to shoot an Asian military officer. He doesn't do so, but while fleeing the scene he meets a young man called Harry who somehow knows what has happened. Harry takes him to Tau Station, a secluded research establishment, where he is rapidly recruited into a group called Tempo that is conducting time travel experiments.

Hollister is sceptical, so Tempo offer to send him to "some nice safe neutral spot" as a demonstration. In fact it sends him into the thick of battle in the World War One trenches, where he finds himself as a British officer and only narrowly escapes with his life. On his return, he gets the full explanation: that Tempo is using mental time travel into past lives, mediated by telepathy and the "The Man Upstairs", a shadowy figure from the future.

Hollister goes on three further trips: to the final days of the Paris Commune in 1871; to a jousting tournament (closely modelled on the Eglinton Tournament) at the faux-mediaeval estate of a Victorian aristocrat; and to a house party at a Georgian mansion, where he finds himself using anachronistic methods to solve a murder mystery.

During these trips, it becomes increasingly clear that the Tempo travellers are being attacked by hostile rival travellers from similar projects in the USA and Russia. However, this investigation is curtailed when Hollister returns to find Tau Station under attack by an armed student protest group. While escaping, he is captured in a gas attack, and finds himself imprisoned along with Russian and American travellers, at the Chinese equivalent of Tempo. Although Feng, who heads the project, is initially suspicious, they compare experiences and conclude that they are being set at each other by some unknown party, which is orchestrating the destruction of time travel projects. They agree to cooperate and undertake the dangerous experiment of going forward in time, in the hope of gaining information.

Feng tries, and dies. Hollister goes second, passing through many glimpses of the centuries to come: a dystopian New Zealand of feral teenagers and gated communities; neo-Puritan book burning at Oxford University; a wandering cleric plying airports; a child being told as a bedtime story a far-future mutated retelling of The Emperor's New Clothes; various glimpses of an increasingly decentralised low-population future as humanity eventually reaches the stars ("new planets named such like Poenamo, Elsinore, Merdeka, Kamikaze") ... Ultimately he finds himself in an android body talking to "the Caretaker", who is the "Man Upstairs" who has been guiding the travellers. In fractured English the Caretaker explains to Hollister that their common enemy is a Gnostic sect (headed by the demiurge Achamoth) which seeks to bring about the premature end of humanity by possessing individuals to commit destructive acts at key points in history (this is evidently what had happened to Hollister at the beginning of the novel). In Hollister's era, its instrument is the evil and ancient telepath Achamoth, and the Caretaker gives him a vision of its lair, a stone tomb with a giant head.

Hollister returns to his own time, where he and his colleagues identify the location: Karl Marx's tomb in Highgate Cemetery. Police reports show a recent enigma: the finding in a vault of a giant corpse shot with nylon-tipped arrows, and that of a Russian clerk. Achamoth, it seems, is already dead - but to close the timeline, Hollister and another traveller, Kornilov, have to go back make sure this showdown plays out exactly as history records. Hollister survives the encounter, and finds himself back on his original timeline in the abandoned ruins of Tau Station.

Just viewed as time travel SF, it's a well-constructed novel (its structure is strangely reminiscent of Keith Laumer's Dinosaur Beach). But it works on a number of other levels, primarily as a take on the problem of evil - in fact the same territory as tackled by Colin Wilson in The Mind Parasites, an attempt to explain the perception that history has repeatedly and spectacularly been driven by the dark side of humanity over the past few centuries (the Caretaker and Achamoth are not explicitly identified as God and the Devil, but the implication is there). Joseph's anti-war sentiments also show through, in his vignettes of the horrors of conflict; in a prefatory note, he credits the World War One poets Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden.

As with The Hole in the Zero and Joseph's mainstream novel I'll Soldier No More, the narrative makes strong use of existential vignettes - snippets of time that Hollister experiences - and Joseph's vivid and erudite prose conveys these powerfully. Many of them appear to be allusions to other writers and works: for instance, Hollister experiences at one point the mind of HG Wells as he coins the word "Morlock", and at another he becomes one of the prisoners in a scene clearly referring to Doré's classic engraving of Newgate Exercise Yard. I'm sure there are other allusions that I haven't yet identified. The Note says:

Readers may recognise that Hollister's narrative has association with the work of other operatives in the field including Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Karl Baedeker, Frank Jellinek, Ian Anstruther, Arthur Bryant, Dorothy Stroud, James Bruce, Steven Runciman, Hans Jonas and, of course, Herbert George Wells.

Frank Jellinek in particular must be the source for the Paris Commune segment; his 1937 The Paris Commune of 1871 is a classic account from a Marxist perspective. Ian Anstruther's 1963 The Knight and the Umbrella undoubtedly informed the segment based on the Eglinton tournament. The book cover is recognisably Karl Marx as depicted on his tomb; the New Zealand Book Council biography mentions that Joseph attended St Aloysius's College, Highgate Hill.

Tomb of Marx, Wikipedia photo by 'JohnArmagh'

Very little seems to have been written about The Time of Achamoth, but Bruce Alvin King rates it highly in his 1991 The Commonwealth Novel since 1960:

The Hole in the Zero (1967) and The Time of Achamoth (1977) ... were also the first New Zealand novels, possibly since Erewhon, to move into any variety of fantasy, apart from Frame's more psychic variations. Again, Joseph surpassed the realists, for instance, in Achamoth's vivid historical episodes, and in futuristic scenes that rival Wells and Burgess at the same time as they graciously allude to them. Achamoth neatly flips over the conventional role of New Zealand in futuristic fiction as post-cataclysmic haven, by presenting that notion from the local point of view.

- Ray

The Hole in the Zero: update

Site update: I just expanded last February's The Hole in the Zero JSBlog post - about MK Joseph's amazing 1967 novel of that name - to include an enlightening 1969 review by JP Downey in the New Zealand literary magazine Landfall.

Briefly, The Hole in the Zero is a tour de force of literary SF in which four characters are cast into the 'Nothing' outside space and time, where they play out their conflicts in a series of incarnations into a diverse set of different realities. The subject of Dr Johnson brought the book back to mind, since it has an episode in which its character Paradine, in one such reality, becomes a Frankenstein-like magus who creates an artificial man clearly modelled on Dr Johnson.

The carved eyelids blinked and opened and wrinkled up as the eyes peered out shortsightedly on upon the world. The figure sneezed enormously and sat up. He draped over its shoulders a loose white robe and led it gently to a chair, where it sat like an ancient emperor, with its vast swathed body and its noble flawed face. He held a glass of cordial to its lips; it took the glass from him, swallowed it down, and sighed appreciatively.

"Claret," it said in a voice like the echo of thunder, "is the liquor for boys, port for men, but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy."

"What am I to call you?" said Paradine.

"John Samuelson," said the figure firmly.

"You are now alive, John Samuelson. Does it give you pleasure to be alive?"

"To talk is good and to laugh is good," said the figure, holding out its glass to be replenished. "A tavern-chair is the throne of human felicity."

"Then what is the purpose of life?"

The figure rolled about in distress, and the seamed face crumpled. "The whole of life ... is ... but keeping away the thoughts .. of death."

"Is there no choice?"

"Nature sets her gifts on the right hand and on the left," said the figure more calmly.

"Are not all things possible to the mind?"

"We may take our fancy for our companion but we must let reason be our guide. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity."

"By what then will you rule your life?"

The figure started to its feet and its voice rolled out in full thunder. "Give me something to desire," it shouted, staring with blank eyes to the east, suddenly cold and rigid, a heroic statue eroded by the ages.

All of the creature's words are Johnson quotations, and this poignant vignette of his enthusiasms and torments is one of many literary allusions in The Hole in the Zero.

This particular section of the book has many layers, drawing on the Frankenstein mythos even deeper than the basic scenario of Paradine animating his creation on a slab. Paradine's laboratory also contains a set of homunculi, little figures with single strong personality traits

He passed slowly along the bench where stood his first tentatives, the tiny homunculi, some dreaming, some frenziedly active, in their warm prisons of glass. They were the toys of his youth, childish but lovable - the musician-prince with his little tinkling harp; the spider-woman who had eaten her mate; the idiot-girl, bald and yellow; the spangled juggler perpetually whirling his indian-clubs; the knight, like a small iron statue; the duchess making eyes at the tattered beggar inthe next jar; the sleep-walker; the washerwoman; the siamese-twins; the black boxer sparring with his own shadow; the girl who sang perpetually on one note amid the shining golden waterfall of her own hair.

These are very similar to the jarred homunculi created by Dr Pretorius 1 in the film The Bride of Frankenstein: a king, a queen, an Archbishop, the Devil, and a little ballerina who "won't dance to anything but Mendelssohn's Spring Song and it gets so monotonous". The allusion appears self-referential too, in that in The Hole in the Zero, the main characters are similarly forced to play out scenarios shaped by the fixtures of their individual personalities. Some of Paradine's homunculi are also applicable to the characters themselves. Anyhow, for context, see The Hole in the Zero.

1. The above Dr Pretorius tribute site says "One wonders where Dr. Pretorius got the little costumes-the crown, capes, tutus and ballet slippers. Did he sew them himself? Is the good doctor a closet fashion designer?" Probably the author, Elizabeth Stein, is having an in-joke here: the actor playing Pretorius, the excellent Ernest Thesiger, was an expert in needlepoint, and even wrote a book on the subject, Adventures in Embroidery.

Addendum: see also The Time of Achamoth.

- Ray

Heroes

Further to Watchmen: The Movie, I see there's a serious glitch in the production - as The War for Watchmen reports, Fox and Warner Bros. are in dispute over the rights. Hopefully, as happened with Dukes of Hazzard, it'll just come down to a financial settlement rather than a permanent block, as films that at some level analyse the genre they portray are always interesting.

The superhero genre has been a remarkable literary/cultural phenomenon of the 20th century, conventionally traced to Segal & Schuster's invention of Superman in the late 1930s. However, the superhero wasn't entirely without precedent: Victorian and early 20th century fiction was full of crime-fighters, adventurers and villains with attributes such as particular costumes, special abilities and secret identities. Rather than try listing them, the easiest recomendation is to point to the The Wold Newton Universe, Philip José Farmer's lovely unifying conceit of the "Wold Newton Family". Its premise is that these outstanding fictional individuals - notably Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and Doc Savage - are all related, their powers arising from mutations when the occupants of a carriage were exposed to radiation from the 1795 Wold Newton meteorite.

Nevertheless, the idea builds on mythic motifs going back as far as you like. M Night Shyamalan's film Unbreakable, which also analyses comic books, takes as its superhero definition one who has powers but a particular vulnerability. This fits Samson (super-strong as long as his hair isn't cut); Achilles and Siegfried (invulnerable except for one location), or Lleu Llaw Gyffes in the Mabinogion, who can't be killed

during the day or night, nor indoors or outdoors, neither riding nor walking, not clothed and not naked, nor by any weapon lawfully made

Like Samson, he makes the mistake of telling his lover how this can be circumvented. If you ignore the vulnerability part, there are many others: in Greek mythology the obvious one is the super-strong Herakles (who meets at least one super-villain, Antaeus), and in Celtic mythology, the warrior band of the Fianna contained individuals with unusual and idiosyncratic powers. Quite apart from the basic qualifications ...

the applicant would stand in a waist-deep hole armed with a shield while nine warriors threw spears at him; if he was wounded, he failed. In another his hair would be braided, and he would be pursued through the forest; he would fail if he was caught, if a branch cracked under his feet, or if the braids in his hair were disturbed. He would have to be able to leap over a branch the height of his forehead, pass under one as low as his knee, and pull a thorn from his foot without slowing down. He also needed to be a skilled poet
- Wikipedia, probably paraphrased from Celtic Myth and Legend, Charles Squire, 1905

... many of the Fianna had special powers: Diarmuid Ua Duibhne had a "love spot" on his forehead, which would make any woman who saw it fall in love with him; Caílte mac Rónáin could run remarkably fast and communicate with animals; and the leader, Fionn mac Cumhaill, had tasted the Salmon of Knowledge after burning his thumb while cooking it, and could access special knowledge and wisdom thereafter (I suppose the equivalent of Googling) by sucking on that thumb. Another hero from the same mythology, Cúchulainn, achieved immense powers in battle by a shape-changing frenzy that makes the Incredible Hulk look effete. In his battle frenzy, termed "warp spasm" by the translator Thomas Kinsella, Cúchulainn became:

a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot, shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream. His body made a furious twist inside his skin, so that his feet and shins switched to the rear and his heels and calves switched to the front... On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck, each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child... he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane couldn't probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull; the other eye fell out along his cheek. His mouth weirdly distorted: his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared, his lungs and his liver flapped in his mouth and throat, his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow, and fiery flakes large as a ram's fleece reached his mouth from his throat... The hair of his head twisted like the tange of a red thornbush stuck in a gap; if a royal apple tree with all its kingly fruit were shaken above him, scarce an apple would reach the ground but each would be spiked on a bristle of his hair as it stood up on his scalp with rage.
- The Táin, trans. Thomas Kinsella, Oxford University Press, 1969

There are similar examples - see Google Books - in The Epic Hero (Dean A Miller, JHU Press, 2002, ISBN 0801862396) which looks generally worth finding for its exhaustive survey of the characteristics of the epic hero (a deal of it is previewable via Google). Miller devotes considerable space to the many attempts by commentators - JG Frazer, FR Somerset (Lord Raglan), RB Onians, and Joseph Campbell - to fit into a common framework the often very similar life scripts of epic heroes. Judging by the Campbell section from The Epic Hero shows, Miller doesn't appear to much like Campbell's work, especially later when he turned very Jungian and New Age; nor is Miller the only critic (more later). Nevertheless, Campbell's analysis of hero myth is probably the most celebrated and popularly known.

Campbell's iconic work is The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which proposes a "monomyth", a single heroic story (commonly called the "Campbell Cycle"). In its simplest form, it can be summarised as

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man

Click to enlarge the diagram:

There are various text descriptions that describe it in more detail; Wikipedia's Monomyth page summarises it pretty well. The applicability as a storyline to a number of classic heroes such as Herakles and Gilgamesh (including major religious figures such as Moses and Jesus Christ) is pretty clear. Jesus, Herakles and Moses, for instance, all suffer threats on their lives in babyhood. There's a bit of a wimpy tendency for modern expositions to tone it down by removing the final fall from grace and death of the hero (with this final quadrant included, the monomyth looks like an allegory of the human life-span).

Many works of fiction draw on the concept; I first ran into it in John Barth's Chimera, a self-conscious exploration of mythic storytelling which interweaves the tales of Dunyazade (sister of Scheherazade), Perseus and Bellerophon (the above diagram comes from that book). MK Joseph's The Hole in the Zero has a segment explicitly showing the cyclic nature of a Campbell myth. In that segment, Paradine becomes such a hero, but finds himself in a book:

"Lord Paradine is, in fact, a typical example of the kind of heroic superman almost invariably invented in cultures undergoing a final period of steep decline, as compensation for the experience of cultural overthrow. They are then normally taken over and elaborated in the romance cycles of the succeeding culture".

How accepted an observation this is, I don't know, but it certainly fits King Arthur (suggested by some to be based on a chieftain holding out against the Saxons in the Sub-Roman period) and Robin Hood (a mythical Saxon guerilla in an England long since taken over by the Normans).

However, the Campbell Cycle has acquired a particular foothold in cinema.

Movie and other myths

The best-known cinematic connection is with Star Wars, who was a fan and friend of Campbell, which led to a great deal of synergy: see, for instance, The Power of Myth, in which Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell at Lucas' Skywalker Ranch; and The Mythology of Star Wars with George Lucas and Bill Moyers. How much the Campbell monomyth shaped the original Star Wars trilogy isn't entirely clear; some critics have spotted that Lucas didn't begin talking about Campbell motifs until after their completion, even suggesting a degree of retrofitting. For example, Steven Hart - Galactic gasbag, Salon - finds more credible roots in pulp SF, and Lucas himself acknowledged influence from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress.

Campbell-spotting has become a bit of a hobby among movie buffs - The Matrix is another that's applicable with little effort - but it can be hard to separate stories that use a monomyth framework by happenstance from those that rework older heroic stories already following that framework, and those that use it by conscious choice (especially as Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey is standard reading for screenwriting courses).

Another director interested in the Campbell and myth is George Miller, and this manifested particularly in his post-apocalyptic Mad Max trilogy. These films, particularly Beyond Thunderdome, are full of standard mythic motifs - acquiring of helpers, puzzles and perils, and tricksters. The point where Max awakes from a coma to emerge from a cave in an idyllic gorge called Crack-in-the-Earth is about as blatant a figurative rebirth as you can get. Heroic Apocalypse: Mad Max, Mythology and the Millennium (Mick Broderick, orig. in Chris Sharrett (ed), Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film, Maissoneuvre Press, Washington DC, 1993, pp. 250-272) is a detailed analysis in Campbellian terms; and there's more at Transparency Now's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: Salvaging the Future. (A couple of bits of Mad Max connection trivia: 1) the uncredited RiddleyWalkerisms in the "doing the tell" segment; 2) Paul A Cantor's lovely description of the works of Odd Nerdrum - such as The Water Protectors - as "the result if Rembrandt had painted the sets of The Road Warrior").

I don't 100% buy the Campbell interpretation of Mad Max. Even taking the whole trilogy together, in many ways Max doesn't fit the model of the Campbell hero. He doesn't particularly go on a quest. There is, arguably, a general theme of his personal development (from driven avenger toward altruism), but mostly he turns up out of the wilderness for routine aims such as finding fuel or recovering stolen property, eventually grudgingly facilitates the rescue of others, then departs back into the wilderness. In fact he is a character more in the mould of the "Man with No Name" style of hero whose story runs:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

This is not Campbell at all, but the "American Monomyth" postulated by the theologian Robert Jewett and the philosopher John Shelton Lawrence in their books beginning with the 1977 The American Monomyth. For the basics, see this Dialogic Interview with John Shelton Lawrence and this Humanist reviewof The Myth of the American Superhero. Jewett and Lawrence argue that American storytelling, particularly within modern cinema, focuses on an essentially antidemocratic monomyth involving a hero wading in to alter a society that isn't working. They argue further that this even flavours US social policy (paradoxically, in a society for which collective democracy is supposed to be a core ideal; the same phenomenon as noticed by revisionist historian Ray Raphael - see July 4th and invented traditions - who is also concerned at the USA's perception of its past in terms of superhuman figures).

There is, then, a dark side to heroic myth, and that's one of the aspects that appeals about Watchmen. It's not just about darkness for its own sake; there has been a drift toward darker treatments of superheroes, but movies (as in the latest Dark Knight interpretation of Batman) still lean toward an implicit "end justifies the means" conclusion. Watchmen, at least in the book, uses darkness in a way that subverts the genre; some of its nominal heroes are intrinsically toxic (the Comedian, for instance, shoots his pregnant mistress, attempts to rape a fellow crimefighter, and throughly enjoys napalming the enemy in Vietnam) - something that as Zach Snyder says would never be countenanced in mainstream superhero movies that are linked to corporate franchises.

It comes down to world-view. Generally the superhero world is one in which these powerful individuals are presented as trustworthy to make decisions on humanity's behalf, and Moore's Watchmen runs counter to that. The Tides of History: Alan Moore's Historiographic Vision explores his stance in detail; it argues that, unfortunately, the comics industry didn't grasp his intentions and took Watchmen merely as precedent to "transform superheroes into violent, amoral killers". The essay is at ImageTexT, "a peer-reviewed, open access journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of comics and related media", which looks likely to repay further exploration.

Addendum: I forget to mention that it was Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19th - which reminds me of one of the premises of Watchmen. In its world where costumed crimefighters actually exist, comic genres had taken a different turn and focused instead on lurid pirate stories. Tales of the Black Freighter at The Boredom Festival has stripped out the extraneous main story to reconstruct Marooned, the counterpointed pirate comic within Watchmen, about a shipwrecked mariner undergoing a horrific journey to warn his home town. ("The Black Freighter" alludes to Seeräuber Jenny from Die Dreigroschenoper).

- Ray

The Hole in the Zero

Over the Christmas holiday I had more than the usual free time to read (having had my appendix out in the small hours of Christmas morning), and I had a chance to re-read MK Joseph's 1967 novel The Hole in the Zero. Joseph is little-remembered these days, but in the 1950s-1970s he was a significant and versatile academic, poet, novelist and critic. Born in Chingford, he spent most of his life and career in New Zealand. His mainstream novels, such as A Soldier's Tale and A Pound of Saffron, focused on human, even implicitly pacifist, themes of wartime experience. However, he also wrote two science fiction novels, The Hole in the Zero and The Time of Achamoth.

The Hole in the Zero (I'll call it THITZ for brevity) starts as what appears to be a stereotypical "space opera"). A tough intergalactic tycoon, Kraag, visits a space station along with his mentally fragile daughter Helena and cynical playboy son-in-law Merganser. There a conscientious warden, Paradine, watches for incursions of the "Nothing" - a region where all time and space breaks down - at the edge of the known universe. Kraag and his group have arranged an excursion into the Nothing in a heavily-shielded ship, but following an argument, Merganser sabotages the ship during the tour. As it drifts, systems failing, they have time to briefly swap life stories - all revealing painful secrets - before being pitched into the Nothing.

At this point, THITZ pitches similarly into entirely different territory, a series of varied but thematically-connected vignettes as the characters come into conflict shaping their own realities according to their personalities. A particular emphasis is the struggle between the ordered Paradine and chaotic Merganser.

Paradine, for instance, appears successively as a gloomy storeman living in a supply shed on the sidelines of an eternal WWII-style war, as an aesthete art thief with a mastery of gadgets, and as a Frankenstein-like magus. Helena appears as a sentient tree in a hostile world populated by wood-burning steam automata, as a mermaid, and as a bored princess. Merganser appears as a a warrior of a clan living on the backs of giant birds (Julie Heyward just corrected me - for some reason I misrecalled this as being Paradine) and a succession of cynical tricksters; and Kraag as a force of nature in various forms: a rock-creature, an undersea statue, the unseen Stalinesque leader of a Soviet-style state, a heroic-but-flawed artificial man (somewhere between Samuel Johnson and Frankenstein's creature), and ultimately as God. Paradine repeatedly encounters various guises of an unreliable helper character, the Gespenster, who may be the similarly helpful but unstable identity-shifting robot from his space station.

These character interactions, furthermore, take place in a variety of realities. Some obey normal causality. In one, the bifurcating "many worlds" model from quantum theory is literally true. In another, reality is shaped by the strongest will. Yet another follows cyclic time, repeating the Campbell Cycle hero myth of Joseph Campbell.

THITZ is a tour de force of literary SF, with a strong experimental edge and more than a few literary asides. (For inside, Paradine's garden has honeybees and "nine bean rows" - a quote from WB Yeats' The Lake Isle of Innisfree - and his bookshelves a Holmes's Practical Handbook of Bee-Culture). There are political and philosophical elements too: one episode, where two societies interpret the same physical laws in radically different ways, both as stifling, can be read as allusion to the Cold War; and in another, equally unconstructive ideas arise from a Hegel-style synthesis of Paradine and Merganser's diametrically opposed views.

If you like the sound of all this, THITZ isn't radically rare: the 1969 Avon paperback is easy to find in the USA, as is the 1968 Science Fiction Book Club hardback edition in the UK.

For background on MK Joseph, see this New Zealand Book Council biography, Michael Kennedy Joseph, and the New Zealand Literature File bibliography. The Time of Achamoth is, incidentally, a time-travel story. It looks less easy to find, as it was only ever published in New Zealand. But I see a fair number of copies exist there.

Addendum, March 9, 2009. I just managed to hack out of Google Books an interesting 1969 review by JP Downey in Landfall magazine, the long-running New Zealand quarterly literary journal. Enjoy.

THE HOLE IN THE ZERO

Although I have read some of the work of such recognized masters of science fiction writing as Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham and Isaac Asimov, I am not a devotee of the form. My approach to the exercise in science fiction, The Hole in the Zero by MK Joseph, was if not one of trepidation then at least one of unenthusiastic wariness. I was wrong to be so cautious. The Hole in the Zero is a most extraordinary and intriguing work. The book does not quite succeed. Its structure is too episodic. The lack of a direct connection between the chapters and events is an essential element in the book, but the attempt in the last few pages to relate the eipsodes to one another is not adequate. The disintegrating effect of the clash of styles and themes in the preceding chapters cannot be so easily overcome. But if the book cannot be hailed as a complete success neither can it be dismissed as a failure. The Hole in the Zero, as a contribution to New Zealand literature, and as an imaginative work in its own right, possesses two major qualities: depth and maturity. It has depth in apprehension of life in its manifold forms, and it has maturity in imaginative expression. This is not surprising as MK Joseph's poetry, and to some extent his two earlier novels, I'll Soldier No More and A Pound of Saffron have shown these qualities. The Hole in the Zero, however, represents an entirely different literary approach and breaks away from the traditions of New Zealand fiction.

There is an extraordinary episode in which the main character, Paradine, comes to visit New Zealand. This is as casually savage a picture of our New Zealand life way of life as Swift himself could have drawn.

"It's not bad," said Vince. "A bit slow."
"That's why I like it. It's like the rest of the world fifty years ago. You've got a different kind of time here."
"We've got a utopia here," said Vince, "and in utopia, time stops, inevitably. The end of an evolutionary chain, perfect adaptation, perfect stability."
"Degeneration?"
"Doesn't follow. Listen— there's a bird we've got— there might be one out there in the bush, but they're pretty rare. It's a little dumpy bird'— he made a '— he made a shape with his hands— 'and it's forgotten how to fly, but it's sort of dull-coloured and minds its own business and doesn't flap around or make a noise.It just stays that way. There's no reason it should ever die out — '

Vince did not finish that ironical sentence because he was shot.

It is not possible to try to explain the plot for, in any ordinary sense, there is no plot. In the first two chapters a group of people go out from the universe to a place that, as one character says, "is unspace, untime, unlaw, unpossibility". To which another character replies, "It sounds like falling through the hole in a zero". Or as it is explained elsewhere: "Take away what you think of— it's not there—no probability, no possibility. So anything is probable, anything is possible. No time— all time. No space— any space. Nothing -everything.' When the four characters do go out into this never-never place they have an accident, fall through the hole in the zero and then proceed in the following chapters to live a variety of lives. There is first the life of randomness, the life where there is no explanation of causality. The next chapter tells of a world where time bifurcates. One life becomes many lives as each individual when faced with personal decisions of an either/or nature, takes both; and then proceeds to lead two lives, as must all those to whom whom his decisions relate. And so the book goes on with the same set of characters living in a series of worlds that are not worlds, but are nevertheless recognizable reflections of aspects of our world. The book raises a series of basic philosophical issues which are concerned in some way with the reality of human existence. The chapters select some particular aspect and treat of it as if it were the basic principle of the universe, as with the character who declares "there is no principle but the will. What I believe is true".

MK Joseph attempts to sum up and tie together these disparate aspects of human life with three quotations in the last chapter. The first is from Christ: "The Kingdom of God is within you". The second is from Plotinus: "The eye could not behold the sun if its essence were not formed like the sun". The third is from Blake: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time". Theology, philosophy and art are thus cited, in effect to show that man uniquely lives within a series of interconnected universes. These are the spiritual and the temporal; the universe of nature contained within the realm of thought (the microcosm containing the macrocosm which itself contains the microcosm); and finally the limitations of time and the freedom of eternity. It would be a mistake to take from this that The Hole in the Zero is, like Plato's dialogues, merely a series of philosophical lessons, presented in dramatic or ficitonal form for easy assimilation. The book is a novel within the conventions of science fiction. It is primarily a literary work and not a didactic piece of philosophizing or theologizing. While it is concerned seriously with serious issues of human existence, it is no less a literary work because of that. Considered simply in stylistic terms it is beautifully, and in some parts brilliantly, written.

Through the book there are literary references, cross-references, hints and suggestions. The key to the book, or at least the literary key to the book, is to be found in the first paragraph which ends with a reference to beehives and nine bean rows. Here stands the shade of Yeats, and throughout the book he is to be found, as in the continuous symbolism of the tower. Clearly to be recognized too are references to James Joyce and Ulysses. There is a carnival scene that echoes Lawrence Durrell, as does the extraordinary episode of the homunculus. The central character is named Paradine, and this I am sure is a reference to Hitchcock's film The Paradine Case. The character of the Gespenster owes much to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, something to Melville, and something to Malory's Merlin. There is an obvious indebtedness to Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibovitz. Alice in Wonderland has been drawn on. No doubt there are many more such such possible references. The Hole in the Zero must be the most cerebral novel yet written by a New Zealander both on the philosophical and on the literary level. It would be to misjudge the It would be to misjudge the book, however, to interpret it as a literary puzzle-picture designed for the amusement of candidates for a PhD thesis. MK Joseph is no Vladimir Nabokov or Jorge Luis Borges offering answers which are themselves still questions.

Basically this novel is concerned with the nature of spiritual reality, with personal identity, with those the author calls "christbearers". The homunculus that is constructed, John Samuelson, when asked the purpose of life, replies: "The whole ... is ... but keeping away the thoughts ... of death." Here is the theme - that the creation of life necessarily involves the question of death. The Hole in the Zero is a beautiful, subtle, and oblique disquisition on death.

JP Downey, Landfall magazine, v. 23, 1969

See also The Hole in the Zero: update for a note on the literary allusions in the John Samuelson episode. Downey has it wrong on one factual detail: although Paradine does have a set of homunculi, Samuelson isn't one, but a full-sized Dr Johnson. Presumably he's thinking of Durrell's Nunquam as inspiration for this scene, though I'm not clear why when it more resembles Frankenstein itself than Durrell's retelling.

Addendum: see also The Time of Achamoth.

- Ray