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.

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror (Post 6): Technology-as-Human versus Technology-as-Anti-Human

Pre-Post Preamble

Today I'm going to continue my post series that is an attempt to log and to preserve the insights that came out of a science fiction class that I taught at Case Western Reserve University in the Summer of 2011, titled, "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th century." 

Here is a link to the first post: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror

Now that I'm on post 6 I feel compelled to offer a table of contents of previous posts. Here they are:

Post 2: Ray Kurzweil and "Transcendent Man"

Post 3: Cultural Studies Classrooms and Aesthetic Value Judgments

Post 4: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Loving and Hateful Androids in *Star Trek* Episode 7 

Post 5: Technology-as-Woman in *The Twilight Zone*

As I'm proceeding through this post series I'm starting to realize how each post is going to become less and less "self-contained" as I proceed; by which I mean, I find I am compelled to refer to previous posts in a way I haven't had to in previous post series. 

***

Another text we treated in my science fiction class was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The was episode 14 of season 1, titled, "Datelore." This episode truly captures the theme of ambivalence towards technology that was at the heart of the class.

Data and Lore

Some summary (I'm taking some ST:TNG corpus knowledge for granted here): the Enterprise stops by the planet where Data was found by the Federation. There they find in a hidden chamber an exact replica of Data, except this replica is disassembled. They bring the android pieces on to the Enterprise and reassemble them. It turns out, this is Data's brother, another android by the name of Lore. Immediately there are things about Lore that begin to disturb and stir the suspicions of the crew. It turns out Lore was disassembled because of his evil tendencies. He thinks androids are better than humans and therefore they deserve to die, or at least serve androids as slaves.

What is so interesting about this episode, I think, is the two separate visions of technology that emerge out of the two different android characters. 

Lieutenant Commander Data is a kind of "Pinocchio" figure who loves humans and strives to be a human. Data is moral and helpful and very often endearing. 

Lore, on the other hand, is a megalomaniac. He is deceiving and extremely powerful; furthermore, he thinks of humans as flawed and as insects that are dispensable.

We begin to see in this episode all sorts of parallels with the previous texts we've treated in this class. 

Ray Kurzweil and Transcendent Man

In Kurzweil's documentary, Transcendent Man, a major debate is whether or not the super intelligences he predicts will be empathetic to humans or hold us in contempt as insects. Hugo De Garis obviously believes the latter is the case while Kurzweil believes that not only will the robots serve us, make us better (his argument is much stronger), but that the robots will be us. 

And so, we can perhaps see in Data--struggling to become human--as suggesting Kurzweil's vision of technology; and we can see Lore--the evil, human hater--as suggesting De Garis's vision of technology.

Star Trek (Episode 7): "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

We see this very ambivalence played out in the Star Trek episode I treated in an earlier post. In episode 7 of Star Trek you have two avatars of robots or technology: Ruk, the human hater, and Andrea, the robot who falls in fall and commits suicide when she realizes she will never be able to love.

The Twilight Zone (Episode 7): "The Lonely"

At the end of this episode the android, Alicia, is shot and killed. I'd like to suggest that the episode doesn't key us into how to read this. Is this a murder? Something horrendous? OR! Has the protagonist (who was in love this this android?) been freed from a kind of spell? Was Alicia truly in love with the protagonist? Or, was Alicia's love an illusion, the product of software?

***

Robots-as-humans versus robots-against-humans: this is an ambivalent, vexed issue that recurred consistently throughout the class. The core queston these texts seem to be asking is, is technology of us? For us? Inextricably bound to us? 

OR! It technology becoming something else? Something other? And therefore, something hostile or something we should be suspicious of?

Hmm...

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Cultural Studies Classrooms and Aesthetic Value Judgments

This is the 3rd post in a series of posts. They are focused on a science fiction class I taught in the Summer of 2011. Here is a link to the previous posts: Visions of Delight,Visions of Horror

This post is an attempt to begin to justify the texts I chose for this class, many of which might be considered "popular culture" or "mass culture".

When I referred to "Visions of Horror, Visions of Delight: Technology and the 20th Century Cultural Imagination" as a "science fiction" class, I wasn't specific enough. It wasn't just a science fiction "literature" class; it was a "science fiction" class in the broadest sense. We didn't just read science fiction literary texts (although there were some). We looked at all sorts of media: films, television shows, musicians, etc.. The approach to the class might fall under the umbrella of "cultural studies," because very little was done in the class to defend the texts we were analyzing as "works of art". It didn't seem to matter what kind of "aesthetic value" the texts had that we pulled from.

Before I proceed in later posts to analyze television shows and films and comic books and video games (as well as literary texts), I want to briefly meditate on the principles by which I included these texts in my class. I want to reflect on the "cultural studies" classroom.

This is a reason why "cultural studies" or "sociological approaches" to literature get a bad rap. They treat "art objects" as no different than any other cultural texts (e.g. a cereal box or magazine ad). Both art objects and other "cultural texts" derive from a given culture, the argument goes, and so both of these things--it stands to reason--might be able to tell us something about that culture. This suggests Don DeLillo's famous criticism of popular culture studies in his novel, White Noise, where he discusses how popular culture departments spend all their time studying cereal boxes and gumball machine toys. 

I take issue with this. I don't think any and every text is worth studying. I believe that there is, indeed, such a thing as "artistic value," but I don't think it's easy to describe the source of that value. Why do we "value" some texts over others? Why do we think some texts are more "artistic" than others? More beatufiul? More ugly? To answer that question we are required to probe the fundamental, ideological assumptions of our culture.

Often times this sort of probing is outside of the scope of a class that utilizes a "cultural studies" approach. And so teachers will choose texts that have not been traditionally considered "valuable" to shock students into realizing and questioning why they value, say, Shakespeare over comic books.

While I truly think it's worthwhile to analyze and lay bare the first principles that inform our aesthetic judgements, I think it's also important, however, to make the most out of classroom time. What do I mean? Well, if you're going to spend hours and hours of class time discussing a text, it should probably be one I "stand by".

What do I mean by this? I can't bring myself to discuss a text that I don't consider art. I feel like it's too much of a waste of time. That's not to say I don't bring texts into the classroom that many might question as "art." For example, in this class I had my students watch a Twilight Zone episode, a Star Trek episode, and a Star Trek: the Next Generation episode. And. Yeah. I think these episodes are artistic; by which I mean, I think they create interesting effects and that they can be used to think about the world in interesting ways.

So here's my thesis: in a cultural studies classroom, it's important for a teacher to get students to analyze the ideological (by which I mean social, or conditional) principles that inform their value judgments. Students should leave a cultural studies classroom looking awry at established "canons of taste" (and not necessarily having thrown them aside). And yet, this sort approach shouldn't be a reason to just bring any text into the classroom. The principle of decision should rest with the instructor, whose professional commitment to scholarly goals will be the determining factor.

Here's what I believe: when "cultural studies" teachers pick texts, their judgement is necessarily aesthetic. Even when they choose a cereal box to study, they are assessing this object as a piece of art, even if they're simply saying it's ugly, or uninteresting, or a negative-art object. Often times cultural studies folks attempt to adopt a "neutral" or "non-aesthetic" posture towards the work they study. I don't think we can do that. We necessarily deploy value judgments onto texts we choose to discuss or study.

In the end, my point is simple: students should evaluate the assumptions that inform their aesthetic value judgements, and so should instructors. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't make them.