The Literary and the Popular Versions of Conan the Barbarian

I recently purchased a book of academic essays focused on Robert E. Howard's famous Conan the Barbarian character. The title is Conan Meets the Academy: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Enduring Barbarian (McFarland 2012) edited by Jonas Prida. I haven't began reading the essays just yet, but I did read the introduction. Prida offers a very insightful heuristic for literary approaches to all sorts of "genre" and/or "popular culture" texts, and he came to this insight, it seems, because of a problem that confronts anyone who wants to study Robert E. Howard and/or Conan the Barbarian.

The problem can be put this way: is the character, Conan the Barbarian, kitsch or art, a literary character or a mere pop culture icon?

To a lot of Robert E. Howard fans, Conan is a character who derives specifically from Robert E. Howard's original short stories published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales that feature as their main character, Conan the Cimmerian. From this perspective, later works based on this character--pastiches, comic books, movies, video games, etc..--aren't particularly worth considering. Some are invalid. Others are are impostors.

For example, there is an animated series based on Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Adventurer, that ran for 65 episodes from September 12, 1992 until November 22nd, 1993. I remember this series, and for the longest time this was linked up to my young mind with Conan. In this series, Conan is a clear-cut good guy. He has friends he makes chivalric sacrifices for them. He has a lovable pet phoenix. He's always learning lessons and changing and growing (yes, this is an animated series for children). I loved the series as a little kid.

To a lot of people, from the perspective of the "literary Conan," this is an impostor text, a merely commercial affair that exploits Howard's artistic creation and, worse, denigrates it. Howard's moral world was so many shades of gray, violent, unforgiving, but structured around a multiplicity of codes of behavior, some of which Western readers have to struggle to understand. Of course none of this moral/cultural complexity appears in the cartoon.

I had also seen the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film directed by John Milius. I loved that movie. When I saw it around 9 or 10, I was cognizant enough to realize that the cartoon version of Conan was much nicer, less violent, and involved more "good" characters than the movie, but I never thought in terms of "authentic Conan" or "false Conan." Having no literary precedent to go on, this film was Conan. To this day the soundtrack of that film--which is awesome--is one I listen to as I run or work out.

To a lot of people, from the perspective of the "literary Conan," this is an inaccurate text. Sure, it's not nearly as much of a travesty as the cartoon, but it nevertheless deviates from the literary text to the extent that it seems distasteful.

In 2005 I was introduced to Conan the Barbarian as a written narrative in prose. My first literary encounter with Conan was, strangely--and this is difficult to admit--the novelization of the Milius movie, written by L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Catherine Crook de Camp. I was visiting my girlfriend in Indiana and we happened upon a used book store. Tucked away among the older, slightly musty fantasy novels was this film adaptation. On a whim I bought it. It was less than 200 pages, featured lots of bloodspilling action, and I was struck by the setting. But what really lingered with me was the introduction. In the introduction there were continuous references to this Robert E. Howard guy (of whom I had no knowledge).

This pastiche of literary Conan is considered by many just as much an impostor as the previous two examples. But it was through this strange pastiche that I came in contact to the original, literary texts.

By this stroke of luck, I was set "right." I learned who Robert E. Howard was, I read the original texts, and learned to sympathize with the purists. There is a level of seriousness, an aesthetic complexity, a surprising philosophical denseness to Robert E. Howard's work that is obscured by these more "pop culture" uptakes of his most famous creation, Conan. Nothing drove this home for me more than the most recent movie, the 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie directed by Marcus Nispel, which was a disaster.

But the clarifying and insightful point that Prida makes in the introduction to this anthology is that it's not just me or other Howard fans or even Howard himself (if he were alive, of course) who can determine who or what Conan is or will be. We can tirelessly labor to direct the discourse, but Conan has become larger than the original texts that featured him. And I think that's a good thing. He's been immortalized.

The concept of Conan as Cultural Production as opposed to Conan as a literary character is so useful because it constructively reframes the issue: it stops being about separating the chaff from the wheat (a silly exercise, to my mind) and more about the specific conversations people want to have.

If you want to talk about the influence Robert E. Howard has had on popular culture, then you're talking about "cultural production." If you're concerned about the aesthetics of the original literary work, well, you're talking literature.

These are simply two separate conversations.

The American Space: Percolating the Genres in the Pulps

I'm revved up to attend PulpFest 2012 in Columbus, Ohio this weekend. I'm really interested in connecting with the pulp magazine collecting community. As a genre fiction enthusiast / aspiring writer / scholar, I often take for granted the real material origins of the genres we take for granted. I have to remind myself that science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror didn't emerge, fully formed, from our culture like night mushrooms. They slowly but surely evolved out of many different contexts, one of the major ones (dare I say *the* major one) being American pulpwood magazines.

Sure, sure: modern supernatural fiction or "weird literature" can be linked to the British Gothic novel; science fiction can be connected to the science romances of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne; modern fantasy can be said to be fully founded or at least fully outlined by J.R.R. Tolkien. The British Isles can claim, indeed, to be a major "ur" location for the supernatural genres we love. And yet--something happened to these genres when they were "percolated" through the pulp magazines. The American pulp writers drew from this old world traditions and began to add to them, to change them.

In comparison to H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, and J.R.R. Tolkien, I offer Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard. Generally speaking, all of these writers--all six of them--have mass appeal. Their work--which the clever genre historian has firmly situated within the history of the modern supernatural genres (the "weird" genres, as I like to call them)--was read and continues to be read by a lot of people. But there are characteristics that flag Burroughs, Lovecraft, and Howard as being in distinct camps from Wells, Shelley, and Tolkien: distinct shifts in tone, content, character, style, narrative structure, etc.. It just may (just *may*) be useful to attempt to map these shifts along national grounds. Hmm... A major project.

A distinct characteristic, I'm thinking, inherent in the pulp versions of science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror is the presence of, simply, a lot of geographical space. In Burroughs Mars stories, for example, you have Barsoom, a new world to explore and discover, to fight in and conquer, to organize. In Howard, you have the great vistas of Hyborian Age--all the many kingdoms, cities, dread ruins, and wilderness expances plumb, explore, conquer, organize. In Lovecraft, nothing less than the entire cosmos are unflung for the characters to experience, meditate on, and finally recoil from.

This is just a start, a tentative "toe-dip" along this line of thought. But it may be a fruitful road, I'm convinced: a major distinction between pulp versions of genre and their corresponding British representatives, it seems to me, is something as simple as space, more space: in the pulps the narratives are set against a lot of room for the characters to move around in, to adventure in. Hmm...