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 Weird History of the Novel (Part 3): "Whether devil or man I knew not"

So, I have a complicated argument I want to make in this post, but I don't have the time to really "get into it." There are a lot of premises that I probably need time more laying out and substantiating. Let me just be forthright and lay those premises in a schematic fashion:

Premise 1: Weird fiction (by which I mean modern fantasy, supernatural horror, and science fiction) is genealogically linked to realist literature. This is because weird fiction takes as its first principle the deviation from reality. You need a bedrock of reality to deviate from before you have weirdness and strangeness.

Premise 2: Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defore, is one of the inaugural texts of realism. It's a good text to consider the "beginning of realism" in fiction.

Premise 3: If something evolves from something else (e.g. reptiles evolve from fish), then within the originary element we can perhaps retroactively glimpse elements of what will evolve from it. Let me stick with my fish and reptile example to further demonstrate what I mena. We can see in the "cold-blooded" nature of fish the cold-blood" nature of reptiles.

Considering these three premises, here's my argument: we can glimpse in Robinson Crusoe, what I am framing here as the inaugural moment of realism in literature, the shape of "weird fiction" literature to come. The fetus that will become modern fantasy, supernatural horror, and science fiction is growing within the stomach of early "realist" texts.

Let me try to make a case for this by supplying an example of what I mean. As my example I offer an analysis of an extended passage from Robinson Crusoe. Some context: Robinson is gathering some wood and he has a very strange experience:

While I was cutting down some wood here, I percieved that behind a very thick branch of low brushwood or underwood, there was a kind of hollow place; I was curious to look into it, and getting with difficulty into the mouth of it, I found it was pretty large, that is to say, sufficient for me to stand upright in it, and perhaps another with me; but I must confess to you, I made more haste than I did in, when looking father into the place, and which was perfectly dark, I saw two broad shining eyes of some creature, whether devil or man I knew not, which twinkled like two stars, the dim light of the cave's mouth shining durectly in and making the reflection. (174-75, my emphasis).

Here you have a moment of uncertainty. Robinson encounters something and he's not sure what it is. We can describe this experience in terms of his ability to interpret the world, to know it--his cognitive faculties. Here his cognitive faculties have failed. He's confronted with something that he is struggling to interpret: "Whether devil or man, I knew not."

This moment, when our "interpretive frameworks" fail us, i.e., when our ability to understand the world fails us, these moments are considered by famous literary Tzvetan Todorov as "the fantastic." The fantastic for Todorov is that experience where we are no longer able to know the world. Something handicaps our ability to know reality. Therefore, reality becomes an uncertainty. This is the fantastic.

Thus, the argument I want to begin to make with this post is that a kernel for modern fantasy, supernatural horror, and science fiction can be glimpsed as emerging alongside realism.

We can see something in early realism, in the first novels: it's as if when the first literary light was cast on reality this reality necessarily cast many shadows, shadows that were strange, and confusing, and occasionally wonderful, and occasionally horrifying.