Dichotomies

I have been caught up in my regular work and have fallen behind in my writing. There are always family things, too, and the tragicomedy of life to deal with. Anyway, I was reading this morning and came upon a striking thing. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you will see and hear this kind of thing all the time now--now that we live in a science-fiction world. From an interview by Sean Illing of author Martin Gurri:

Sean Illing: Have elites--politicians, corporate actors, media and cultural elites--lost control of the world?

Martin Gurri: Yes and no. It's a wishy-washy answer, but it's a reality. They would have completely lost control of the world if the public in revolt had a clear program or an organization or leadership. If they were more like the Bolsheviks and less like QAnon, they'd take over the Capitol building. They'd start passing laws. They would topple the regime. But what we have is this collision between a public that is in repudiation mode and these elites who have lost control to the degree that they can't hoist these utopian promises upon us anymore because no one believes it, but they're still acting like zombie elites in zombie institutions. They still have power. They can still take us to war. They can still throw the police out there, and the police could shoot us, but they have no authority or legitimacy. They're stumbling around like zombies.

(From: "The Elites Have Failed" on the website Vox, March 27, 2021, accessible by clicking here.)

So here in a discussion between a university professor and a former CIA analyst comes imagery of science fiction and fantasy, of utopianism and stumbling zombies. And it's not just some imagery. It may in fact be the essential imagery of science fiction, the central question or dilemma of the genre: the dichotomy of Utopian/Dystopian order and ultimate dissolution versus apocalyptic chaos and destruction. Is there any other choice? Can we steer ourselves between this Scylla and that Charybdis? Maybe that's the question good science fiction seeks to answer.

I'm reading The Humanoids by Jack Williamson right now. Here's how he phrased this dichotomy, in the words of one of his characters:

". . . the same crisis that every culture meets, at a certain point in its technological evolution. The common solutions are death and slavery--violent ruin or slow decay." (Lancer, 1963, p. 39)

Death and violent ruin: the zombie apocalypse. Slavery and slow decay: Utopia/Dystopia.

Again, the striking thing is that people working at high levels of the academic/governmental-industrial complex resort to science fiction and fantasy for their imagery. That probably could not have happened in the pre-war world (pre-World War II, that is), as science fiction and fantasy were beneath consideration for men born in the nineteenth century. Now, eighty years later, or even just thirty or forty years later, we turn to these visionary and predictive genres for inspiration, maybe because only in them is there imagery adequate to describe or to which we can make adequate allusions regarding our current situation. As in politics, traditional, elitist ways fail, and the elites are forced to fall back on the modes of the popular for their expression.

Above: Zombies in black and white.

Another dichotomy, too, from folklore and literature: the dark versus the fair. And a non-dichotomy, or an analog vs. a digital or binary choice: "not alive . . . nor dead . . ."

By the way, I Walked with a Zombie was produced by a teller of weird tales, Val Lewton (1904-1951).

Original text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley

A Return to Cozy Dystopia

I'm back again after a month, but this probably won't last very long. There's always so much to do until there isn't anymore. I last wrote about the concept of the cozy dystopia in art. This is in contrast to the more common dark dystopia, exemplified, I think, in Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1985), and the less well known Batman: Digital Justice (1990). The cozy dystopia is one in which things are clean, bright, and shiny, yet society and people's lives within it, all creations and outward manifestations of the State, are perfectly awful. In Cozy Dystopia, everyone has what he needs except a chance at happiness.

In my conception of it, the cozy dystopia runs parallel to Brian Aldiss' cosy catastrophe. Examples of the cosy catastrophe are pretty easy to come by. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959) is one. In thinking about it over the past few weeks, I have come up with a possible cozy dystopia, too. It is described in Player Piano by a fellow Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Originally published in 1952, Player Piano has been reprinted many times, in English, Italian, German, French, and even Croatian. I had read a few years back about this book and eagerly sought it out. When I finally found a copy, I dove in and there began a long, long slog through one of the most boring and event-free books I have ever known. I suppose the eventlessness in Player Piano is in keeping with the idea of the dystopian society, which is, after all, one of complete stasis. Or, as D-503, the protagonist in We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, explains to the rebel and his soon-to-be lover, I-330:

"It is inconceivable! It is absurd! Is it not clear to you that what you are planning is a revolution? Absurd because a revolution is impossible! Because our--I speak for myself and for you--our revolution was the last one. No other revolutions may occur. Everybody knows that."

In other words, there can be no revolution after the one that introduces a completely stable and eventless dystopia into the world. 

* * *

By the way, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and Logan's Run (1976) might also be called cozy dystopias. In Logan's Run, as in our world of today, there is even a Tinder-like machine called "the circuit" for choosing sexual partners: in the dystopian future as in the world of today, the individual human being is both objectified and commodified. Reduced in the mind of the user to mere material, the object of his desire is literally materialized within and by "the circuit."

* * *

I wrote before about the bread-and-circuses component of the cozy dystopia. In thinking about these things since then, I remember that the place of origin of the bread (i.e., food) and circuses (i.e., entertainment) that currently arrive in such vast supply on our doorsteps is called a "fulfillment center." Yes, you will be fulfilled by buying more stuff, so keep at it, America. Keep climbing that asymptotic slope towards the mountaintop of your happiness.

* * *

So, I wrote last about dystopia. In the interim we have had instead in the real world a taste of apocalypse. The mob has emerged from all of its dark, fetid places and has fallen upon us like a horde of zombies, bent on our destruction. Dystopia and apocalypse are interrelated--there can be no doubt of that. In much of our popular culture, the latter precedes the former. Anthem by Ayn Rand (1938) is a good example of this. Sometimes dystopia grows out of apocalyptic conditions: the aspiring dystopian ruler simply takes advantage of disaster and disorder to construct his perfectly awful society upon the ruins of the previous, far less awful one. Other times, the tyrant and his minions actually bring about the destruction of the preceding society so as to build their new, dystopian version in its place, complete with a calendar reset to Year Zero. That seems to be the aim of our current breed of aspiring tyrants. Apocalypse first, then Dystopia. We have seen people like them before. We will again. We can gain some comfort in knowing that they have always been and always will be defeated. Nevertheless, we should know this: although reality may be arrayed against them, we can't really count on it to defeat them by itself, not, that is, without the customary heaps of rotting bodies, deep, vast, mass graves, and chains of miserable gulags stretching from sea to shining sea. We have to take an active part in their defeat if we are to head these things off.

* * *

You're not supposed to give advice to your enemies, but the zombie hordes running through our streets, universities, and television studios should know two things. One is a lesson from history, and it is this: although you as a revolutionary may be the one pulling the trigger today, tomorrow you will be the one facing the firing squad. That's not just a figure of speech: it will really happen, as it has happened before. (Why do progressives always think they're doing something new?) Just ask the ghosts of Trotsky and Robespierre. In the worlds of art and entertainment, Jimmy Kimmel and J.K Rowling have had the mob turn upon them. Margaret Atwood, too, I think. Yesterday these people were progressives. Today they are dangerous reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries. The mob is unlikely to rest until they are destroyed, or at least rendered non-persons, or persons of little or no consequence. Just past his allotted threescore-and-ten, Stephen King has been cowed and now speaks nonsense so as to conform to the mob's orthodoxy. In the process he has made himself inconsequential as an artist and thinker. He probably imagines that he has saved himself. He should know, though, that his time before the firing squad will come, too. It's just that instead of tomorrow, it will happen the day after tomorrow. In any event, we might feel sorry for Mr. Kimmel, Ms. Rowling, and others like them who have been hoisted with their own petards. Then again, we might not.

The other thing that the zombie hordes and their tyrant-leaders might want to know is that there is a poison pill in each of us, poison, that is, to those who aspire to control us. However hard they might try to impose dystopia upon us, they must always fail because we each have within us the means of their destruction: each one of us alone has greater power than the entire State. Imagine that. Here is the explanation: because the State is made by man, it is trapped within time and cannot endure. The spirit and nature of the individual, on the other hand, made as they are by something greater than man, exist outside of time and are thus eternal and imperishable. The Progressive believes otherwise of course, that the Perfect State is the end point of History and will thus last forever in its unchanging condition, also that the individual human being is negligible and eradicable, his spirit extinguishable.* The poison pill is of course our freedom, that unalienable, inseparable, and irrepressible condition of our very existence. The tyrant may have his run and murder millions, but in the end human freedom always wins and he is undone.

* * *

Sex, too, is a poison pill, a passion so great that it always undermines the efforts of the State. That's why the State always seeks to control it. See Orwell's 1984 or Anthony Burgess' 1985 for explications of the State's antipathy to sex. One of the problems with sex--from the point of view of the State, I mean--is that it is so completely powerful. It is meant to be that way, I would wager, by the One who planted the seed of sex within us. Another is that sex is inextricably bound to love, marriage, and the formation of families. The State cannot tolerate any of these institutions because they necessarily stand between it and the individual. In other words, if the individual loves and is devoted to another person or persons, then he cannot fully love or devote himself to the State--and he must so love and devote himself. He must prostrate himself before the State. Nothing must intervene between it and him, and there can be no other object for him. That explains the statist/socialist/progressive desire to undermine and ultimately destroy marriage and family. We have had that in rounds of recent supreme court decisions, deposited upon us and our Constitution like stinking piles of manure. Look elsewhere on the Internet for this quote: "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement . . . ." From there it drones on and on as boring and tiresome socialists inevitably do. As Jahn in the Star Trek episode "Miri" might say, Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, too bad for all of them. The poison pill has been expertly placed and cannot be removed. You, the statist/socialist/progressive, can only choke on it. Excuse me if I don't offer you a glass of water or a pump for your stomach.

* * *

*A pertinent quote from George Orwell's 1984, pertinent not just here but to our current situation:

He [the protagonist Winston Smith] tried to make her [his lover Julia] understand. "This was an exceptional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. [Emphasis added.]

Update (June 30, 2020): Here is another quote, from a digital flyer announcing a protest at the home of the multi-bezillionaire who sends us all the stuff we so crave: "Abolish the present. Reconstruct our future." Emphasis added again. Note the recurring use of the word abolish. At the protest itself, modern-day Jacobins set up a guillotine as a not-very veiled threat against him. My comment is this: You can't make this stuff up. My thought: I wonder if the protesters ordered their sign-making materials from the multi-bezillionaire himself and had it delivered to their doorsteps. My disclaimer: I did not pay anyone to do these things just so I might look oh-so-smart and my essay oh-so-prescient. Actually, you don't have to be very smart to see through these people and to understand that when it comes to humanity and its endeavors, there is nothing new under the sun.

Utopia 14 (1954), the Bantam Books edition of Player Piano (1952) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The cover art is by Charles Binger (1907-1974), who also, as it turns out, did the cover art for the Bantam edition of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1953).

Revised during the day and into the evening, June 30, 2020.
Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

July: We, The Moon, and Things to Come-Part One

Here it is the end of September and I'm still on topics from July. This is the last of this series, though. Even so, I'm going to go farther back into the early part of this year and try to catch up on some things that I have left hanging, including a return to the Thompson-Pendragon controversy, plus I'll look at a couple of Weird Tales-related books that I read this past winter and spring.

On July 20, 2019, we celebrated the 50-year anniversary of the first moon landing. I had already been thinking about moon-related topics--actually just one moon-related topic, the subject of this essay and its sequel. The anniversary only brought these thoughts to the fore. I was working on my science-fiction story that weekend, too, and there is a silver moon in the green sky of Carillon, my fictional, faraway planet. That weekend was also the birthday of a girl I knew a long time ago, and she was on my mind as well.

Some friends and I get together once every month or two for a movie night, usually a science-fiction movie night. In March--on the evening of the new moon, March 6, to be exact--we watched Things to Come, from 1936. It was the first time I had seen this movie since I was a teenager or young adult. I have to say, I didn't remember it very well at all, and I had almost forgotten the core of the movie in which Ralph Richardson gives a bravura performance as a kind of strongman leader in a post-apocalyptic world. He is tough where other men are weak, decisive and brave where they are afraid. "I adore him," says his consort, played by a very attractive Margaretta Scott. There might be a lesson in her words and the feelings they express for every man of today.

There are three parts to Things to Come, and they cover a lot of science-fictional ground. First is a future-war. Moviegoers of the 1930s could hardly have avoided thinking about some true things to come when they saw the cinematic Things to Come: just three years after it was released--and eighty years ago this month--the Nazis invaded Poland and thereby plunged the world into war. There are some effective scenes in the first third of the movie, perhaps none more so than the one in which some partygoers step out into the evening to witness the start of the air campaign against their country. In a scene that's as true-to-life as any, they can hardly believe what is before them--that war has come into their lives.

The middle part of the movie depicts the post-apocalyptic world of 1966 and after. As I said, Ralph Richardson plays the Boss, whom I think might have been intended to remind people of Benito Mussolini. Played by another, less skilled actor, this role might have been simple and stereotyped, even comical. Instead we have something a little more nuanced and complex. We're supposed to root against the Boss and in favor of the man who comes along to spoil his fun, played by Raymond Massey. Instead, the Boss has our sympathies--or he at least has mine, or at least a little of mine. I'll get to that in a while.

My friend Hlafbrot made what I think is a really important observation: in this post-apocalyptic world, there are those who suffer from "the wandering sickness." Hlafbrot pointed out that these poor people might have been the first zombies in cinema--not the helpless, solitary zombies of Haiti as in the movies and stories of the 1930s and '40s but zombies as we think of them today, that is, as victims of a contagion that turns them into hordes turned loose in the world, very often in a post-apocalyptic setting. There are some very brief scenes in Things to Come that could easily appear today in The Walking Dead. The Boss, by the way, demonstrates his strength, toughness, and decisiveness by shooting the zombies down.

The last part of Things to Come is a Utopia where everything is clean and modern, everybody is perfect and dresses in gauzy curtain-like garments, and the world, guided by science and reason, has progressed into a great and glorious future. In other words, it's a Dystopia. But in H.G. Wells' extraordinarily breathtaking naïveté (he wrote the screenplay), this is the world we're supposed to want to come about: we're supposed to be in favor of Raymond Massey's character, called Cabal, and his very progressive ideas--he's a man of science and reason after all--and we're supposed to be against the irrationality and reactionary conservatism of the artist played by Cedric Hardwicke, who wants to say, if not "Stop," then at least "Go slowly."

And this is where I had my own insight, for I realized by the end of the movie that Cabal is the real villain of Things to Come, and the whole thing is an exercise in the same kind of utopianism, internationalism, scientism, and collectivism that resulted in the deaths of countless millions of people during the century just past. In other words, here was a movie warning against the true-to-life war that was about to be waged by socialists--national socialists and fascists to be sure, but socialists nonetheless--and offering as a favored alternative just another brand of socialism. I ask myself, how could anyone have been so naïve, so ignorant of history and human nature? But then we have nearly ninety years of history that were unavailable for Wells' review.

In watching the end of Things to Come, I also realized that Wells had been unknowingly outflanked a decade before by a far more clear-seeing author who had had personal experience with the crimes and horrors of socialism and collectivism. In effect, Wells' movie had been rendered obsolete even before it was made.

To be continued . . .

Directed by William Cameron Menzies and with art, design, and special effects by a large crew headed by Victor Korda and others, Things to Come is visually extraordinary. It's still hard for me to believe that this film was made in the 1930s. How did the moviemakers ever figure out how to show these great vistas of buildings and spacecraft, ramps and walkways, with apparently real people walking and rushing here and there among them and over their surfaces? Anyway, as you can see by the movie poster above, Things to Come has a classic science-fiction look that must have influenced artists and writers for years and decades after its release. But that may have been a problem. If it was or is still, the problem was diagnosed nearly four decades ago by William Gibson in his story "The Gernsback Continuum" (1981), which ought to be on your reading list if it isn't already. Again, Wells was outflanked, this time by an author of a later time.

By the way, Things to Come ends in the year 2036, a century after its release and only seventeen short years from now. We should be happy that we haven't yet had an apocalypse as it foresaw, but we should also be happy that the socialist/progressive/collectivist/internationalist Dystopia envisioned--and longed for--by H.G. Wells and others hasn't befallen us . . . yet.

(Just wait until the fake Indian and Crazy Bernie get ahold of us. Then the wailing will begin.)

Original text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Miscellany No. 4

In his recent book The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, 1923-1924, author John Locke reprinted Farnsworth Wright's poem "Self-Portrait," from Fantasy Magazine, April 1935. Wright began his versifying with these words: "The editor's a gloomy guy who fusses, fumes and frets." By the end of the poem, Wright had mentioned all kinds of monsters, including the zombie, here in reference to himself as editor: "A zombie he, undead, yet dead; immortal, and yet mortal." I guess that's one small piece of evidence to show how quickly the zombie moved into American popular culture in the 1930s. Once an obscure Haitian legend, zombies were referred to in common usage in America in less than a decade, from their first appearance in 1928 to Farnsworth Wright's poem of 1935.

Original text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Harold S. Farnese (1890 or 1891-1945)-Part Three

Career in Music-Part Two

The Institute of Musical Education was incorporated in Los Angeles in 1926 by S. D. Weaver, Herbert E. "Bert" Rawlinson, John M. Schergen, and Samuel S. Glenberg. I don't know when Harold S. Farnese began teaching there, but he was an instructor as early as December 1930 (in the same year in which he turned forty). I'm on the track of a group photograph for the school from 1926. I hope to find Farnese in that photo, either as a student or as an instructor.

Farnese worked with some prominent and not-so-prominent people at the institute. I'll go through a list beginning with one of the directors of the Institute of Musical Education:

• John M. Schergen (1885-1961)-A composer, he wrote the music for the song "I'm a Soldier" from 1918.
• Guy Bevier Williams (1873-1955)-Musical director, pianist, composer.
• Josef Borissoff, aka Josef Borissoff Piastro (1889-1964)-Violinist.
• Isadore Braggiotti (1864-1934)-Voice.
• Henry Brenner (dates unknown)-Violinist.
• La Verne (Carlin) Fleetwood (1898-1955) (aka La Verne Addis?)-Violinist, voice.
• Jascha Gegna (1879, O.S.-1944)-Violinist.
• Roland Paul (1875-1942)-Voice.
• William B. Ramsdell (ca. 1880?-1936?)-Dance.
• Barbara Elizabeth Rawlinson (1888-1941)-Drama and speech.
• Herbert E. Rawlinson (1883-1964).

Note that a few of these instructors died in the period 1930-1943 while Farnese was also at the institute. I wonder if a loss of personnel (as well as shortages experienced during World War II) helped bring about the end of the institute in 1943.

* * *

I always like to find connections in our wider or mainstream culture to genre fiction, pulp fiction, and popular culture. I have found just such connections with Guy Bevier Williams, who composed music used in several movies and serials from the 1920s and '30s. Williams was uncredited in all of these:

• Tarzan the Tiger (1929)
• The Cohens and the Kellys in Africa (1930)
• Flaming Guns (1932)
• The Phantom of the Air (1933)
• Perils of Pauline (1933)
• The Red Rider (1934)
• The Roaring West (1935)
• The Adventures of Frank Merriwell (1936) 
• The Phantom Rider (1936)

Williams also composed the chant used in the opening credits of White Zombie, released in 1932. Again, he was uncredited for his composition.

Guy Bevier Williams wasn't the only instructor at the institute with connections to genre fiction, pulp fiction, and popular culture. Farnese had those connections, too, and they were more direct and significant, for Harold S. Farnese was a correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Topics for a Summer Night-Part Three

The National Museum of Brazil burned last Sunday. You may not have known it if you had been watching Yahoo "news" or similar outlets. If a Kardashian had burned, you would have known about it (and the loss would have been pretty negligible in comparison), but two hundred years of a nation's history can go up in flames and we remain oblivious. This is a tragedy and a disaster, and I guess I want to do something about it--to salvage something from the ruins--to raise up if I can in some way the people of Brazil, who have created so much beautiful music and so many great works of art and culture.

So I am searching for Brazilian weird fiction, fantasy, and science fiction, as well as art in those genres. Fortunately I have a two-volume set called Arte no Brasil, published in Brazil in 1979, in which to begin. That set has led me to some works by Brazilian artists that touch on the genres at hand.

From 1636 to 1644, the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout (ca. 1610-1665) lived in Brazil and completed a number of paintings of native peoples, flora, and fauna. Here is his painting Mulher Tapuia (Tapuian Woman), from 1641. She looks pleasant enough, but I'm pretty sure that the basket she has strapped across her forehead isn't big enough to carry a whole man. And what does she have in her right hand but another right hand? Anyway, this is an ethnographic kind of painting, not a genre work, yet it has its macabre elements. Encounters with cannibalism and other strange and exotic things in the jungles and wilds of South and Central America are a mainstay of weird fiction. As in the case of the artist Eckhout, the men and women making those encounters are always Europeans or Americans. It's always us encountering them. But what about a weird tale told from the perspective of an American Indian or a South American native traveling to Washington, D.C., New York, London, or Paris? Would he not encounter equally strange and exotic things? And how would he account for them? How would he explain and describe them to his countrymen?

Most of the works in the first volume of Arte no Brasil are religious or ecclesiastical. A lot of it is of the architecture of churches or sculpture of scenes from the Bible, like life-sized dioramas. In other words, there's a lot of supernatural subject matter, but all of it is Christian, more specifically Catholic in nature. I was a little puzzled by the overall lack of the fantastic, but then I read an article about Brazilian science fiction, and I think I have an explanation. More on that in a while.

The first known use of the word zombi in print in English is in Robert Southey's History of Brazil, from 1819. However, Southey's zombi is nowhere near our zombie of today. He seems to have used the word exclusively to refer to Zombi, the leader of a slave revolt. In looking into the origins of the word, Southey wrote: ". . . I examined a book of religious instructions in the Portuguese and Angolan languages [. . .] and there I found that NZambi is the word for Deity." (Vol. III, p. 24) The man of whom he wrote was Zumbi (1665-1695), a national hero in Brazil and subject of this painting by the twentieth century Brazilian impressionist Antônio Parreiras (1860-1937). I wonder if Zumbi's name as a symbol of rebellion against slavery could have found its way into African cultures in the Caribbean and North America. It hardly seems likely, but then I'm not an ethnologist or folklorist. It seems far more likely to me that the words zumbi, zombi, and zombie (probably also jumbee and jumbie) have a common origin in Africa and were brought here or evolved here in the New World. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when westerners finally noticed, these words had come to mean different things in different places.

It was only when I got into the twentieth century that I found fantastic art in Arte no Brasil, and then only a little.

The Portuguese caption for this print by Marcelo Grassman (1925-2013) reads: "Animais fantásticos, numa atmosfera de pesadelo, evocam sombrias estampas medievais em obras como Incubus Sucubus n.o 2, xilogravura realizada por Marcelo Grassman em 1953."

By an online translation, that means: "Fantastic animals, in a nightmarish atmosphere, evoke sombre medieval prints in works such as Incubus Succubus no. 2, woodcut by Marcelo Grassman in 1953." Some of Grassman's work reminds me a little of that of Lee Brown Coye.

Otávio Araújo (1926-2015) was a Brazilian surrealist. This picture, Saudade de Santa Teresa, is a striking example of his work. Like Grassman, he seems to have looked to the distant past for inspiration.

So what about the apparent lack of weird fiction, fantasy, and science fiction in Brazil? According to Manuel da Costa Pinto in Folha de S.Paulo (May 31, 2003), O Doutor Benignus by Augusto Emilio Zaluar (1875) was the first Brazilian science fiction novel. (It was written, however, by a Portuguese native, naturalized as a Brazilian citizen in his younger years.) In regards to Brazilian science fiction, Signore Pinto writes:

Far from embarking on a copy of European or North American models, Brazilians express the passive, contemplative character that science assumes in a technologically outdated country, as in "Benignus" . . . . (1)

I take that to mean that Brazil, being a more conservative and less progressive kind of country, is less suited to science fiction than its counterparts in Europe or North America. As Arte no Brasil indicates, fantasy would seem to be more up the Brazilian alley, and in reviewing the book Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror in Brazil (1875 to 1950), by Roberto de Sousa Causo, Signore Pinto seems to confirm this idea:

Science fiction itself would have been rooted in fantastic voyages--such as the accounts of Lucian of Samosata ("A True Story"), Jonathan Swift ("Gulliver's Travels"), Kepler ("Somnium") or Cyrano de Bergerac ("The Other World")--and imaginary places like the legendary kingdom of Prester John, "The Utopia" of Thomas More or the world prophesied by Vieira in "History of the Future." 

The siblings [of science fiction] would be "fantasy," in which science gives rise to magical phenomena (as in the cycle of King Arthur), and "horror," whose dreamlike atmosphere of claustrophobia goes back to the Gothic novel and the "Nights in the Tavern" by Álvares de Azevedo. 

This plurality of sources, in turn, gains a special nuance in a Brazilian setting. And if this is valid for all of our literature, it is possible to find traces of medieval folklore both in the popular literature of the Northeast and in Guimarães Rosa, an important author of [science fiction] as Braulio Tavares renews this amalgam by writing the fantastic series titled "The Stone of Noon or Artur and Isadora." (2)

So the pattern seems to hold. Conservative writers, artists, and cultures look to the past and create works of fantasy, history, romance, and horror (or weird fiction), while their more liberal or progressive counterparts look to the future and create works of science fiction. (3) If all of this is true, then a Brazilian author of yesteryear might easily have found a home in Weird Tales. What was lacking for most of the history of the magazine, of course, were strong connections between the United States and our neighbors to the south, connections that would have carried art and literature back and forth between us. We may have received their music (and they received ours) but not much else as far as I can tell. Maybe in some future incarnation of "The Unique Magazine" we will see and read works by Brazilian authors and artists. Maybe in that way a magazine can become a museum that never burns.

Notes

(1) "Science fiction Is the Atlantis of Brazilian Literature" by Manuel da Costa Pinto, Folha de S.Paulo, May 31, 2003, here.

(2) I used an online translator to render this article into English. I have made a few adjustments. As you can see, the results are imperfect, but you get the drift.
(3) I don't think we should underestimate the very powerful influence of the Church on the culture of a thoroughly Catholicized nation. After all, there is in the Bible, Catholic teachings, and Catholic culture all of the stories of the fantastic, the supernatural, the mystical, and the magical that a believer might want or need. Secular fantasy, as in our genre fiction, might be superfluous. Anti-Christian or anti-Catholic fantasy, as in so much of our contemporary genre fiction, would be unwelcome. And science fiction might not gain much traction in such a place, not only because of its inherent conservatism but also because Christians already have a fully satisfying vision of the future, one that looks nothing like Star Trek or The Jetsons.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

I Walked with a Zombie

Next came I Walked with a Zombie, from 1943. People of today like their mashups--an odious word. Well, I Walked with a Zombie could easily be subtitled Jane Eyre Meets the Walking Dead. It's the story of a Canadian nurse, played by Frances Dee, who goes to the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian to care for the invalid wife of a sugar plantation owner. There, for the first time, she encounters the concept--and the apparent reality--of zombie-ism.

I Walked with a Zombie was based on a newspaper feature of the same name by Cleveland journalist Inez Wallace (1888-1966). The title is sensationalistic and confessional. The story in the movie is told in the voice of the nurse, but it's controlled, intelligent, and even in tone. I imagine much of that is attributable to Curt Siodmak (1902-2000), one of the co-screenwriters. As is the case with the best horror movies, much is left to your imagination.

I wrote about zombies a few months back, pointing out at the time that the fear of zombie-ism is the fear among black people of being returned to slavery or of being made a slave forever. It is not the fear of a capitalist exploiter as critical theorists of today would have us believe. The shadow of slavery and of life under slavery is cast across I Walked with a Zombie, even in the opening minutes as the nurse rides in a wagon with a black driver. I can't say how black people of today might react to the movie, but I think that the awareness of the slave experience, of the suffering and pain of slavery, and of the fear black people had or have of slavery are conveyed in the film at a time when portrayals of any authentic black experience were rare in movies.

I Walked with a Zombie is, I think, a very effective film. The sequence in which the nurse leads the invalid wife through the sugar cane to the Voodoo gathering is very fine. Images of Darby Jones as the zombie Carrefour are extraordinary and unforgettable, surely among the most iconic in American movies. And has any singer in movies been more menacing than Sir Lancelot as he advances upon the nurse, singing his song in deadpan, casting his lyrics upon her like a curse?

I Walked with a Zombie was innovative in some ways. It is supposed to have been the first movie with a calypso song in it. Beyond that, I'm not sure that any previous movie had attempted to show the practice of Voodoo with the same evenness or humanity as this one does. I'm also not sure that any previous movie would have used the words houngan or obeah or Damballah or would have given any credence at all to Voodoo belief or practice. One of the things I like most about I Walked with a Zombie is that the black characters are treated as real human beings and not as stereotypes. There may be divisions in the movie--it is after all about white people and the real threat of zombie-ism is against a white woman--but the white and black characters interact with each other as fellow human beings, and the suffering of black people under slavery is essentially the context in which the drama plays out.

One last thing: I Walked with a Zombie was produced by Val Lewton (1904-1951), who wrote one story for Weird Tales, "The Bagheeta," published in July 1930 and the source for Lewton's film Cat People, from 1942. Lewton was of Jewish extraction, as was Curt Siodmak. Perhaps the history of suffering and slavery among Jews gave these men sympathy for black people and their similar experiences here in the New World under a system imported from the Old.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Island Theory of Zombiation

The concept of the zombi(e), like much of our culture, was brought to America aboard a slave ship. The word is African, the idea is African, and the culture in which zombie-ism in America developed is African. Once here, zombi(e)s evolved from perhaps one common original to a number of different species. The speciation of zombies--the zombiation of the title here--seems to have happened on islands of African-slave culture, separated from each other by the waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. In Martinique and other smaller islands, the concept was of the zombi, an evil spirit who creates discord in the night. In Louisiana, it was Li Grand Zombi, the great serpent god and perhaps the closest to the original African concept of zombi. And in Haiti, it was the zombie we know today, the walking dead, a slave to some external agent. Coming from a common origin, zombi(e)s in America, evolving in separate island habitats, became separate species. For whatever reason, the undead zombie of Haiti proved to be the strongest or most adaptable of them and has spread throughout our culture and throughout the world.

Author William B. Seabrook (1884-1945) appears to have been the first to describe the zombi(e), species undead. His reporting from Haiti, published in newspaper accounts in 1928 and issued in book form in The Magic Island in 1929, is sober and evenhanded. It doesn't appear to be sensationalized. I think we have three choices when it comes to Seabrook's writing: First, to consider that he was telling the truth. Second, that, though he may have worked from a kernel of truth, he embellished or exaggerated stories of zombies for the reading public. Or, third, that he made it all up himself. I think we can discard the third possibility. The tone of his writing suggests the unlikelihood of the second possibility. That leaves the first possibility, namely, that he reported more or less truthfully on what he heard, saw, and experienced for himself. That would mean that stories of zombie-slaves in Haiti were true, or at least true to the people who passed them on to Seabrook. I haven't found anything to contradict any of that, and I think we have to conclude that Seabrook reported the truth or something close to the truth as he saw it and, consequently, that he was the father of zombies in America.

Seabrook's account of zombies in Haiti, "Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields," opens not on the island of Haiti, but on a smaller island, Île de la Gonâve, located in the Gulf of Gonâve, west of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. Although it is the largest of the islands in the waters of Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, Île de la Gonâve is dry and barren, a poor place to live or to try to make a living. William B. Seabrook visited the island in 1928 and interviewed a prominent local citizen, Constant Polynice. It was Polynice who first told Seabrook about zombies and who first showed him zombies at work in a cotton field on the trail to Picmy. Seabrook described them in various terms, saying among other things that they were "like automatons."

Constant Polynice also told his American interlocutor a story of zombies working on mainland Haiti, in the "big cane season" of 1918, when the Haitian-American Sugar Company--Hasco--"offered a bonus on the wages of new workers." A man named Ti Joseph took advantage of that offer by recruiting what Polynice said were zombies. In Polynice's telling, the zombies escaped in the only way they can escape, and Ti Joseph met a fitting end. The point of all this is that zombie-ism in Haiti seems to have been a response either to economic hardship, as on Île de la Gonâve, or economic opportunity, as with Ti Joseph and his work for Hasco. It was not capitalists who made or exploited zombies, but other Haitians, black Haitians for whom the affair of zombie-ism was their own. As Lamercie, the overseer of the zombies chopping cotton on the trail to Picmy, said to the American Seabrook, when it comes to zombies, "Z'affai' nèg pas z'affai' blanc"--the affairs of blacks are not the affairs of whites.

So the first accounts of zombies as the undead--the first of the firsthand accounts--came not only from an island but also from an island off the coast of an island. As with the evolution of any new species, zombies as the undead came about through (literal) isolation. Diseases, too, often develop in isolation, often, by our experience, in tropical or sub-tropical fastnesses, where they jump from an animal host to a human host with little notice. HIV/AIDS, which has done such harm in Haiti, is an example. (1) These diseases may operate at low levels for decades before being transmitted to larger populations, after which point they proliferate, sometimes exponentially, becoming in the process plagues or pandemics. That was the case with HIV/AIDS, which claimed its first known victims--known in retrospect, that is--in the 1950s. The same process seems to have occurred, on a far more trivial scale, with the concept of the zombie. Purely by coincidence, the first zombies caused by disease--zombies in retrospect, that is--also appeared in the 1950s, in Richard Matheson's science fiction novel I Am Legend (1954). These were scientific zombies, caused by disease, moving in hordes, and always seeking to infect the uninfected. In short, they were a plague--or pandemic--in human form.

George Romero gets the credit for the first movie--Night of the Living Dead (1968)--showing zombies as we know them today. (It might be more accurate to say that Mr. Romero invented zombies as we know them today.) But two years before, in 1966, Hammer Films released The Plague of the Zombies, a movie far less well known today, but perhaps equally important or more important in evolutionary terms. I have never seen this movie, but by description, it was or may have been the first to show a zombie plague and the first to show threatening zombies rather than harmless zombie-slaves. In fact, The Plague of the Zombies seems to have been a bridge or the bridge between the harmless Haitian zombie-slave (i.e., what I have called the Seabrook zombie) and the lethal scientific zombie horde as in Night of the Living Dead (i.e., what I have called the Matheson-Romero zombie). The bridging effect is made obvious in the movie in that there seems to be a combination supernatural/scientific explanation for its zombies. There is also a zombie-maker who has been to Haiti and has returned to his native Cornwall, carrying zombie-ism from one population to another and from one island to another, where he puts them to work, as Ti Joseph put his zombies to work, this time in a tin mine. Because I haven't seen the movie, I don't know the answers to some key questions: How exactly are the zombies in The Plague of the Zombies threatening--are they murderous or cannibalistic? How are they made? How exactly are they a plague--does the disease of zombie-ism spread from zombie to person somehow? And how exactly are the zombies destroyed? Curiously, The Plague of Zombies is set in 1860, more than two generations before William Seabrook's trip to Haiti.

A long time ago, I read of the concept of the meme, a sort of gene of culture that is propagated, like genes, through a population. Zombies and zombie-ism can be interpreted as memes. As in the evolution of a species, they developed in isolation. (Evolution is defined as a change in gene frequency.) As with any successful species, they have shown themselves to be well adapted for survival. Like a pandemic or an invasive species, they have proliferated in a host or in an environment not like their original host or environment, one in which there are no natural controls on their populations. So what will be the controls on zombies and zombie-ism? Or will they be uncontrolled and continue to adapt and proliferate in our culture? If zombies are, as William Seabrook described them, like automatons, will they simply evolve into a different form, that is, into the form of the robot-zombie, as on the graph of the uncanny divide? Will they cross over from the world of fantasy (or at least allegory) into the real world? And will they eventually overwhelm us, as so many people fear, once robots reach a technological singularity?

Note

(1) Oddly enough, the origin of HIV/AIDS in humans coincides roughly with the American occupation of Haiti, though HIV/AIDS originated in Africa and is not supposed to have reached the New World until after World War II. The first known victim of HIV/AIDS died in Africa in 1959.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Zombibliography-Muse Magazine

Muse: The Magazine of Life, the Universe, and Pie Throwing

(October 2012)

Cover art by Jimmy Giegerich

Muse magazine did a zombie cover story in October 2012, "Zombies on the Brain" by Doug Stewart. A quote:

Blogger and "monster scholar" Jeanette Laredo, a graduate student at the University of North Texas, has another explanation for why people--young people in particular--are drawn to the idea of a zombie apocalypse. "At their core, zombies represent our fear of becoming part of a homogenous mass, our fear of conformity," she says. "That applies especially to teenagers, because they're struggling with that. They want to be 'in,' but at the same time they want to be themselves."

          The important thing about zombies, in other words, isn't that they're creepy. It's that they move around in big, creepy hordes. (p. 12)

It seems to me that Dr. Laredo (what a great name for a professor in Texas) has drawn her six-gun and shot the prevailing academic "narrative" full of holes, as an ultimate conformity is one of the end-points of the leftist-socialist-statist program. It seems to me also that the author Doug Stewart seems to recognize the threat represented by conformist hordes, another feature of that same program. The upshot of all of this--of all of my series relating to zombies, going back to January--is that the leftist attempt at a theory of zombies in favor of their own program falls apart upon examination, as all of their theories eventually fall apart. But that's enough of all of it. I have beaten this undead three-legged horse enough. I have one more entry on zombies, then I'll get back to biographies of the writers and artists who contributed to "The Unique Magazine," Weird Tales.

Original text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Zombibliography-Zombies!

Zombies! An Illustrated History of the Undead by Jovanka Vuckovic

(New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2011), 176 pp.

Cover art by Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn

Zombies! An Illustrated History of the Undead is a popular, pictorial history of zombies in movies, television, comic books, and popular fiction. The author, Jovanka Vuckovic, is a Canadian writer, editor, and moviemaker. She was editor of Rue Morgue Magazine for six and a half years. I'll leave the details to her, but I would like to provide these quotes from Ms. Vuckovic's book:

It's not surprising belief in the zombie flourished during that time [i.e., during the French colonial period], given the large number of seemingly mindless, and near lifeless, drones working on plantations. Robbed of their individuality and free will, the beaten-down African slave worker would have surely had the appearance of the living dead. (p. 20)

Because a person's most valued possession--especially in a cruel slave nation--was their [sic] individuality, the Haitians' primary fear was not of being attacked or eaten by a zombie, but of becoming one themselves. It was considered a fate worse than death, the ultimate horror, particularly after the Haitian revolution, during which the nation finally overthrew its European oppressors. (p. 20)

I don't think I have to remind anyone at this point that those "European oppressors" were, first, feudal-statist overlords, afterwards, leftist-statist overlords. Contrary to the most fervent hopes of American academia, they were decidedly not capitalists.

Ms. Vuckovic again brings up a good point, that zombie-ism is, at its heart, about a loss of freedom, humanity, and individuality. The modern state, whether socialist, communist, fascist, or nazi in its permutation, seeks to reduce its populace to interchangeable (and highly dispensable) ciphers, essentially to zombies, hence, I think, the fear of zombie-ism in the world today, at least in a large part.

Two more points:

First, Jovanka Vuckovic also points out in her book the sensationalism of zombie stories of the 1920s and '30s. In my research, I have sensed the same thing, that there may be more sensationalism than reality in those stories. I wonder how much of the beginning history of zombies in America was true and factual and how much of it came from the imagination--or at least the exaggerations or interpretations--of William B. Seabrook. 

Second, she writes about an author I hadn't encountered before: Captain John Houston Craige (ca. 1886-1954) of Pennsylvania. Like Arthur J. Burks, Captain Craige served with the U.S. Marine Corps in Haiti during the American occupation. And like William B. Seabrook, he wrote about his experiences and observations in non-fictional form. His books included Black Bagdad [sic]: The Arabian Nights Adventures of a Marine Captain in Haiti (1933) and Cannibal Cousins (1934).

According to the website Encyclopedia.com, Captain Craige read up on Haiti in the works of "the French historian Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819), the Haitian historian Thomas Madiou (1814-1884), and the Haitian writer Louis-Joseph Janvier (1855-1911), among others." The source is suspect, but those authors might be a good place to start in pushing the origins of zombies as the walking dead to before 1928. For example: Moreau de Saint-Méry used the word zombi, meaning revenant, in writing, in French, in 1792. Knowing that leads me to the book White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film by Gary D. Rhodes (2001), an even more thorough and scholarly book than Zombies! (1) In fact, Dr. Rhodes' book might be the last word on the history of zombi(e)s in America. It also includes a tantalizing discussion of H. Bedford-Jones' novel Drums of Damballa (1932) and its sources, which are supposed to have been documents or materials, brought from Haiti to the United States in 1803, that mention zombi(e)s. I wish we had more on this. There is no telling what those materials might reveal. One thing all of this reveals is that some American academics, like Dr. Rhodes, do their homework, and some--too many to name here--apparently don't.

Note

(1) That book reveals, surprisingly, that there is a connection between zombie-ism and the consumption of Jamestown weed, also called jimsonweed or Datura, in the form of "concombre zombi," a concoction for inducing the condition in an unsuspecting person. Once again, jimsonweed raises its (seed)head in relation to the supernatural and weird fiction.

Original text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Zombibliography-Monsters and Mad Scientists

Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie
by Andrew Tudor

(Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989), viii+ 239 pp.
Cover design by Miller, Craig and Cocking Design Partnership

When Monsters and Mad Scientists was published, Andrew Tudor was Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. He was film critic for New Society from 1975 to 1982, head of his university Sociology Department from 1988 to 1995, and head of its Department of Theatre, Film and Television from 2006 to 2010. He is now retired.

Dr. Tudor is a scholar and a sociologist. Consequently, Monsters and Mad Scientists is scholarly, sociological, and at least semi-scientific. He begins his study by laying out three pairs of what he calls oppositions, all in regards to the threat in the horror movie. These pairs are: 1) The supernatural vs. the secular (what I have called the scientific); 2) The external vs. the internal, that is, threats that are external or internal to the individual person; for example, a vampire is an external threat, but disease is an internal threat; and 3) Dependent vs. autonomous; for example, the slave-type zombie is dependent, whereas the vampire, again, is autonomous. Dr. Tudor presents these oppositions in tabular form. A subsequent table lists types of monsters by the number of movies in which they appeared from 1931 to 1984. Zombies ranked eleventh, with forty-eight movie appearances. (Psychotics were first with 271 movie appearances.)

In his analysis of horror movies, Dr. Tudor discusses White Zombie. It's worth noting that, although sociology as a discipline tends to be leftist in orientation, Dr. Tudor's discussion is entirely absent of political content or interpretation. (1) Instead, he writes:

That there is an underlying sexual element to [Legendre's] domination [of the film's heroine], however, can hardly be doubted. In turning Madeline into a zombie he makes her entirely compliant to his will, although nowhere does the film fully draw out the implications of that absolute power. (p. 32)

Later, the author relates zombie movies as a group to "the psycho-movie":

Ultimately descended from the hugely influential Night of the Living Dead (1970) [sic], this group includes The Crazies (1978), Zombies (1980), Zombie Flesh-Eaters (1980) and Zombie Creeping Flesh (1982), all of which postulate the spread of dehumanizing 'disease' and present an apocalyptic vision of total social collapse. In effect, they create a world of mass psychosis in which we are doomed to decline into a subhuman state. Unsurprisingly, given their thoroughly apocalyptic tone, they all end with the implication that the 'disease' will continue to spread unchecked. (p. 71)

Again, as in Caligari's Children, there is the implication that the zombie apocalypse movie appeals most to viewers who are already living in a state of despair, extreme alienation, or at the ends of decadence, and that those viewers may also be essentially nihilists or extreme anarchists, not in a political sense, but in a philosophical and ultimately spiritual sense. Again, the zombie apocalypse seems to be a positive fantasy for those who would like to see the world destroyed or who, in their descent into "psychosis," would like to take the whole world down with them.

There is a good deal more on zombies in Monsters and Mad Scientists, too much, really, to discuss here but all of it piercing in its analysis and fascinating in its insights. It's clear that Andrew Tudor is from a previous generation of scholars, those whose work seems to be unpolluted or undistorted by Marxist interpretation. Now, in 2017, it may be too late for anything like it.

Note
(1) This is in no way to imply that Andrew Tudor is or was leftist in orientation. 

Original text copyright 2017 , 2023 Terence E. Hanley