THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1831)

 In this review I'll use the English language title for Victor Hugo's novel rather than the French one. One reason is that the word HUNCHBACK is easier to use as a short form for the title. But I also think it's a better title. Quasimodo is indubitably the novel's central icon, and as important as the 15th-century Parisian setting is, that importance is secondary. Supposedly foreign tourists became more interested in the Notre Dame cathedral after the publication of Hugo's novel. But I'd bet few tourists came to observe the cathedral's architectural wonders, but rather thought about the setting in which the pitiable hunchback came to his sad end.                                                       

In contrast to some 19th-century novels that I have frequently reread, like MOBY DICK and FRANKENSTEIN, I only read HUNCHBACK once before, thirty-forty years ago. I don't remember most of my impressions from the first reading. I had probably seen the classic 1939 movie adaptation and may have heard that it was not entirely faithful to the Hugo novel. I probably didn't know that Esmerelda too meets a terrible fate, and back then, I might have called that end "tragic." But on this reread, I realized that almost everything about the Hugo book is oriented toward the mythos Northrop Frye termed "irony." Esmerelda is the only character who incarnates any potential for good, and that means that she must be sacrificed to the stupidity and venality of 15th-century Paris. Quasimodo's claim to goodness is shakier, but he starts out with all the odds massed against him, so he too is doomed. Of the few characters in HUNCHBACK who prosper, all are utterly unworthy. 

   Often HUNCHBACK has been adapted in other media that obscured the book's ironic mode, focusing on the pathos of Quasimodo rather than his inevitable doom. Some versions also give Esmerelda a "happy ending" with her beloved guardsman Phoebus, one of those worthless characters mentioned above. But I've yet to see a truly ironic version, one that follows the book in depicting the entire society as informed by cruelty and rapacity. Usually all the negative aspects of Quasimodo's world are channeled into the hunchback's father-figure Frollo, who becomes obsessed with the beautiful Esmerelda's physical charms. Ironically, Esmerelda herself is no less captivated by beauty, becoming smitten with Phoebus for his looks (the reference to Apollo is a telling one). Quasimodo may be the one individual, even with his limited mentality, who appreciates Esmerelda as much for her kindness as for her beauty.           

 

Hugo is sometimes linked with the artistic movement called "Romanticism," but I don't think HUNCHBACK is a Romantic novel, as are both MOBY DICK and FRANKENSTEIN. It contains larger-than-life scenes that everyone with a basic education knows, like Quasimodo's public flogging and the mercy shown him by his sort-of victim Esmerelda, and the hunchback's dramatic rescue of Esmerelda from the hangman's noose. But HUNCHBACK also contains reams of incredibly prolix prose, as Hugo burns up space descanting on the foolishness of the Parisians, from the highest to the lowest. Hugo acts as if he thinks he invented satire, with the result that most of the other characters are superficial. HUNCHBACK is one of those rare novels which has become a sort of secular literary myth, at least in the sense that most people have at least a broad knowledge of its contents. Yet Hugo's mythopoeic powers are at odds when his didactic ones. For instance, one of the novel's most mythic moments takes place when one of Hugo's POV characters is victimized by the denizens of The Court of Miracles, possibly the first "city of thieves" in canonical literature. This is a great nightmarish scene, potentially portraying the thief-society as the inversion of normal Parisian existence. But once I saw that "overground" Paris was just as rotten and arbitrary as "underground" Paris, I felt that Hugo was making a very superficial equation between the two. In the end, HUNCHBACK is a classic novel that I can admire in many respects. But because of the conflict I perceive between Hugo's intellectual and imaginative powers, it's not a novel I like.                                                                                                       

Unlike most of the "monsters" who appeared first in 19th-century fiction, Quasimodo is never as imposing a menace as Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster or even Mister Hyde. I still believe he belongs to the domain of the uncanny because his crippled-yet-powerful status is not completely in the naturalistic mode.   
          

CURIOSITIES #45: ALTRUISM ANALYSES

 Since posting this mythcomics essay on one of the stories in Reiji Miyajima's THE SHIUNJI FAMILY CHILDREN, I've kept monitoring the series. It's not likely to come to a conclusion any time soon, given that Miyajima created five possible romantic subplots for the male hero. The newest installments, Part 44 and 45 (both untitled according to the online translation I read), concerned one of the sisters whose relation to her not-brother Arata has not yet received a lot of attention. This is the "science-nerd" Seiha, on whom I briefly commented in the earlier essay. I've no insight on where Miyajima might be going with this subplot, but I found one page interesting for the following philosophical reflection on altruism.                                                                                                     

The plot-context of Seiha's meditation, conveyed to her rather puzzled brother-in-name-only Arata, is that moments before this conversation, Seiha was assaulted by a couple of punks who thought she'd accrued a slutty reputation due to school-gossip. Hunky brother Arata shows up and chases the punks away, so that all Seiha suffers is some brief manhandling. Arata seems to recover from the experience very quickly, for she immediately launches into a lecture about how "self-sacrifice and self-importance are two sides of the same coin." Is she trying to distance herself from the unpleasant experience? Quite likely, and she qualifies that her general opinion of altruism does not affect her feeling of gratitude to Arata for his intervention. However, given her earlier lecture about the chemical determinism of human biology, clearly these thoughts are not new to her. One might assert that, based on what the artist reveals about Seiha's life, she might be the type who distances herself from all experience in her attempt to take a dispassionate, quasi-scientific view on life.                                                                                         

   So, since Seiha admits that she has been the beneficiary of Shiunji's altruistic action-- an action one assumes he would have taken for any woman, from real sister to perfect stranger-- why veer off into a discussion of how an individual act of "self-sacrifice" is inevitably tied to that individual's sense of "self-importance?" The reader doesn't know, yet. I considered another possibility: that Seiha also might be seeking to de-emphasize any instinctive feminine reaction to her being a defenseless young woman "saved" by an armorless (but maybe not amour-less) knight.  Saying that Arata was motivated in part by his own sense of self-importance perhaps takes away some of the "savior glamor." Her last remarks bring the conversation back to the fact that they're not real siblings, so that his rescue isn't a response to blood ties. But I don't know how seriously to take the idea Miyajima puts in Seiha's mouth: the idea that their non-relation should negate basic altruism, such as defending an imperiled woman whether one knows her or not. Presumably Seiha would say that this form of altruism too would be compromised by the "other side of the coin," though this seems like false rhetoric at this point.                                                                                                 

 I may revisit Miyajima's concept in future posts. For now, I'll note that this short reflection resembles a much more developed line of similar thought in one of Mark Twain's last works, the 1906 essay WHAT IS MAN? I have not read this in twenty years, but at the time I found it massively impressive. This too I may seek to revisit in future posts somewhere down the line.           

NULL-MYTHS: "THE ARROW OF ETERNITY" (BRAVE AND BOLD #144, 1978)

 While I don't retract anything I said about the two Bob Haney stories I analyzed in this post, here I want to show that even a story constructed from a tissue of coincidences can be pretty entertaining-- the more so since this one is a "rediscovery," one I didn't remember reading the first time round.                                                                                               

 So the action starts when Green Arrow, that noted bibliophile (sarcasm emoji), approaches Batman in his secret ID as rich guy Bruce Wayne, about a discovery the archer made. Arrow came across an old tome talking about a magic arrow made by Merlin himself. This arrow turned up much later in the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, and though history lies and tells us that the English won the battle thanks to superior archery weapons, the book tells Arrow that the English won because of just ONE arrow, when the magic bolt was used to bring down one particular French champion. Arrow being a bug of all things related to archery, the financially restricted hero asks Bruce for a lift to France. Bruce agrees.                                       

 So Arrow bails out of the Batplane, but after he leaves, Batman discovers that Arrow left his book behind. Batman doesn't plan to do much about this, but Some Mysterious Watcher fears that the crusader might launch an investigation of the tome's provenance. The Watcher spirits away the book, and-- causes the Batman to launch an investigation, tailing Arrow to his French destination.       

   

Batman then gets whipped back to 1415 at Agincourt, to which point in time Green Arrow has also been deposited. The mysterious manipulator is none other than The Gargoyle, one of the better Teen Titans villains created by Haney. He didn't want Batman, only Green Arrow, whom he manipulates into shooting him with the magic arrow of Merlin. Seems Gargoyle got exiled to the dimension of Limbo at the end of both of his previous two adventures, and though for some reason he's entered Earth back in the 13th century, he dopes out that he can return to the 20th if he gets shot by the arrow. Why does he have to be shot only by Green Arrow, and only during the Battle of Agincourt? Because the script says so, of course.                                   

                      

Gargoyle succeeds in getting shot, sending him back to the 20th century of his origins. Batman and GA follow, pour on tons of exposition, and eventually send the evildoer back into limbo by shooting him a second time. Despite all these tortured plot contrivances, this is a fun story based just on how well Haney succeeds in playing up the respective strengths of the bat and the archer. And how often do modern comics-stories even reference important historical events like Agincourt, even if the events are rewritten for the purpose of wild fantasy?                                                       

  Similarly, though artist Jim Aparo is no Hal Foster, I can't even imagine a modern comics artist attempting the sort of knightly grandeur seen in the above illustration. 

CURIOSITIES #44: BLACK RIDER

 This retelling of The Black Rider's origin from 1950 struck me as a little more fulsomely dramatic than the average Golden Age origin.         

 And from issue 12 in 1951, this atypical oater shows the hero defending the right of Mormons to practice their own customs in a democracy. The message is undermined a bit by the consistent misspelling, "Mormans."                                                                           

  

THE READING RHEUM: "SECOND VARIETY" (1953)

 

I'm reviewing this lone Philip K Dick tale purely as a prelude to reviewing the 1995 film adaptation. Although "Second Variety" shows some of Dick's familiar tropes, it's mainly a gimmick story with a surprise ending. In a future where the US and Russia go to war, most of Earth is annihilated. The surviving American forces send a military detachment to their Moon base as a defensive maneuver, but the Soviets have a base there and do the same thing. However, Yankee know-how allows the Americans to stymie the Commie forces with a series of robots called "claws." Humans originally crafted these mechanical attack dogs-- which burrow beneath the ground and spring out to attack living things with sharp implements. However, over time the humans left the creation of the claws to automatic factories. As a result, the claws began to make improvements on the forms they take. These alterations include emulating the forms of humans-- a trope Dick would explore to much greater effect in 1968's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?                                                                                   

American soldier/ viewpoint character Hendricks-- who, like the other characters in the story, is a cypher-- receives intel that the Russian contingent wants a parley. Alone, he proceeds to the Russian moon base. On the way he's joined by a pathetic little ragamuffin, theoretically the survivor of some armed conflict. Once he reaches the other moon base (nothing is said about how the moon has been terraformed for human survival there), the Russians shoot the kid, who proves to be a new variety of "claw." Once Hendricks is inside the compound, he finds that the three soldiers, one of whom is a woman named Tasso, fear that they've been infiltrated by a "second variety" of human-mimicking robot, in contrast to the other two varieties that they can recognize. Suffice to say, they're right. There are a couple of other tropes Dick works into the story. One is the idea that the claws' relentless self-improvement is a form of evolution, hearkening their replacement of humankind, which does not transfer to the 1995 movie. The other is the idea that the robots are going to be just as divisive against their own kind, which does make it into the film, albeit in altered form.   

NULL-MYTHS: IT'S METAMORPHOSING TIME!

Before the Silver Age, if a series-character didn't sell, no publisher tried to bring said character back. But four years after the cancellation of METAMORPHO in 1968, writer-creator Bob Haney paired with editor Murray Boltinoff-- who had edited the Element Man's title-- to interest fans in the character. Their attempt failed, but a couple of the stories now give me examples of two species of "null-myths." In past essays, I've asserted that this category covers two types of story: those that are just flatly stereotypical, bringing no insight or emotion to the symbolism of their content, and those that make inconsummate use of those symbols. I'll now distinguish these as "passive null-myths," in which no real mental activity is in evidence, and "active null-myths," in which the mental activity goes down some weird pathway.                                                                                               

In 1972 Haney had been writing most if not all of the scripts for DC's teamup title THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD for seven years, and although Metamorpho had appeared once before in that title, the pulpishly-titled story "Cold Blood, Hot Gun" re-introduces the hero to readers. The 1968 title, BTW, had ended on an unresolved cliffhanger, but to my knowledge neither Haney nor anyone else ever tried to wrap up that story.                                                                   

  According to Haney's new scenario, Metamorpho has been off the grid for four years because he's been undergoing an experimental treatment to undo his freakish mutation, courtesy of conniving rich guy Simon Stagg, father to Metamorpho's beloved Sapphire Stagg. Much to the Element Man's frustration, Simon prematurely aborts the treatment because Simon has received news that an assassin seeks to kill Sapphire, who needs extra protection.                               

The source of this info is none other than Batman, but the means by which the Dark Knight acquires the intel is extremely dicey. After a businessman is flung to his death from his office on a high floor, Batman investigates. Haney needs the detective to find a list of the other people the assassin plans to knock off, but the author isn't content with simply having the hit man drop a written list in the office. Instead, after offing his target, the killer sits down and types out such a list in the office and takes it with him-- but Batman's able to reconstruct what was typed from analyzing the typewriter ribbon. And you thought the Internet was bad about preserving deleted content. Inevitably Batman and Metamorpho team up to prevent heiress Sapphire from getting killed, though Sapphire doesn't take the threat seriously and makes the heroes' job harder. The only distinction of this routine formula-tale is the typewriter nonsense, but this is a failure of verisimilitude, not mythicity.                               

 Haney managed to sell DC on giving Metamorpho a backup feature in ACTION COMICS, but the Element Man only hung in there for six installments before getting pushed out by the Human Target. However, by that time Bob Haney was writing WORLD'S FINEST, so he used a story in issue #217, entitled "Heroes with Dirty Hands," to re-relaunch Metamorpho. Fans sometimes complain about modern writers expecting the readers to remain clued in on whole histories of characters, but Haney is no different here, clearly expecting that the WORLD'S FINEST reader is going to remember the setup about Metamorpho undergoing the experimental treatment. The splash above barely shows the hero stewing in a nearby laboratory vat, while focusing mostly on a burly fellow wearing a costume that's half Superman and half Batman, who were, as most will know, the co-stars of the title. Is this some freaky return of the team's old villain, The Composite Superman?                                                               

But no, it's Java, Simon Stagg's dull-witted assistant, a Neanderthal man pulled from a bog and restored to something like sentient life. I'll forego citing Java's lame reasons for wearing the half-and-half costume, but the last panel of page 2 is one of those examples of an active null-myth I spoke of-- though I'll elaborate on it later.                     

                                       

   Haney then throws in a BS explanation about how the computer programmed the powers and propensities of Batman and Superman into the makeup of the Element Man, so that when he emerges from the vat, he's now wearing the half-and-half costume. He doesn't seem to be able to change back to his regular form, but maybe that's because hes been a D-lister for about seven years now, and he kind of likes biting the style of the World's Finest team. Simon Stagg dubs Metamorpho "Super-Freak," anticipating the Rick James song hit by eight years. Off goes Super-Freak to fight crime, and in jig time he's embarrassed Superman and Batman by doing their thing better than they can. So the heroes do the logical thing and defect to a foreign country, Slavia.                                                                                           

                                                               

I doubt that even the dumbest kids in 1973 didn't anticipate that DC's foremost heroes were just running a scam. In this case, they're hoaxing Rastinyak, Slavia's evil ruler, so that he'll accept their allegiance and reveal to them his special secret weapon. Apparently, this overly complicated "mission impossible" also requires the US President to ask Metamorpho to fetch the renegade heroes back to their country, as if they don't have the right to defect, just because. Metamorpho isn't informed of the deep fake and fights the heroes for real, so they have to throw the fight so that the evildoer will show his hand. The villain is defeated and Super-Freak's career ends with the fading of his bogus powers. This guest-star appearance led to Metamorpho getting a handful of backup strips in WORLD'S FINEST. But there was no real comeback for the Man of a Thousand Elements, and even membership in that lame super-team THE OUTSIDERS didn't get Metamorpho off the D-list.                                                                                                                                                                                                            Unlike "Cold Blood," "Dirty Hands" does have the kernel of a myth at its mostly hollow center. In a literal sense, the costumes of Superman and Batman don't confer any power on the heroes. But on the symbolic level, even imitations of the heroes' actual costumes incarnate the mana of the two crimefighters, and it's that mana that's being transferred to Metamorpho, rather than attributing such a power-boost to Simon Stagg's computer. As an extra added attraction, Haney blows his own fantasy-rules for Metamorpho's powers. Supposedly Metamorpho can only alter his body into new shapes if those shapes are made of elements naturally in the human body. So-- how does he manage to imprison Superman in a globe made of "anti matter?"                                                                                                      

MY CAPTAIN AMERICA REPLACEMENT THEORY

 To some extent the recent debut in theaters of CAPTAIN AMERICA BRAVE NEW WORLD plays into some aspects of my essays about totalitarian tokenism, beginning here-- though there are also some other aspects to consider in the response of reviewers to the controversial movie. In this essay I'm not responding to the movie itself-- which I don't plan to see until it hits DVD-- or to complaints about its narrative failures. I want to address just one subject: the question of how Captain America should have been replaced.                                                                                  

The conclusion of AVENGERS ENDGAME laid down the new dispensation: whatever the MCU's behind-the-scenes reasons for getting rid of the Steve Rogers character, as essayed by Chris Evans, Steve Rogers was written out of the Marvel Universe. I didn't think much of the idea of the MCU rather arbitrarily transferring the shield and costume of Cap to Sam "The Falcon" Wilson, and many of the reviewers I mentioned have cited reasons why they thought the replacement was badly executed. I would probably agree with most of these arguments. However, I also disagree with one of the most-cited alternatives of said reviewers: that the MCU should have put Bucky "Winter Soldier" Barnes into the star-spangled costume instead.                                                                                                         

                                                                                    


 To boil down many of the complaints about Sam Wilson to one narrative, the dominant gist seems to be that the showrunners presented no compelling reason for the Falcon to take on the Captain America mantle. What I think many if not all of them wanted was something along the lines of the "grenade scene" in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE FIRST AVENGER. In that scene, pantywaist Steve Rogers, one of many candidates for the super-soldier transformation, proves his fitness for the role through an act of imagined self-sacrifice. The logic with which AVENGER's script makes Steve' selection seem credible proved key to making Steve Rogers himself compelling to a mass audience that had no particular investment in the Rogers Cap of the comic books.                                                              

Now, the 1940s MCU version of Bucky Barnes also makes his debut in AVENGER, but that character has next to nothing in common with the juvenile sidekick of the comics. The new Bucky is a strapping young adult, a friend and contemporary to Steve, and what little the audience knows of him in that movie is that he just seems like an all-around nice guy. Also, he's able to join the army during WWII, unlike Sickly Steve. But Bucky, just as much as Sam Wilson, is given no specific connection to the American ethos, of which Steve Rogers is the embodiment, according to AVENGER's script. So if neither Bucky Barnes nor Sam Wilson was justified in terms of symbolizing that ethos, why would Bucky be any better a replacement than Sam? And these considerations don't even take in the problem that in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE WINTER SOLDIER, Bucky of the 1940s is preserved beyond his original lifespan, after which he's transformed into a brainwashed assassin with one metal arm. Call me crazy, but that personal history doesn't resonate with the ideal of Captain America any better than a Black military officer whose feelings about the United States of America are left vague, whether by design or by incompetence.                              

I personally don't want to either Falcon or Winter Soldier to assume the mantle; their characters are already set, and I don't think they can be retooled to make them resonate with audiences as Steve Rogers did. Nor do I think the current MCU can produce a new character, of any race, creed, or color, who can replace Steve Rogers. I assume that the current showrunners are married to the idea that the Rogers of the "official timeline" must go back in time and live out his life with his destined wife, so even though that outcome could be altered with the usual time-traveling BS, I don't think it will be. But now that DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE established that alternate-world versions of characters can travel to the main timeline, that means that a new Steve Rogers could still show up in the MCU, though not necessarily one played by Chris Evans, in case the MCU is too cheap to pay his price.