Xenograffiti (7 page)

JOHN NORMAN AND THE ENNUI OF SEXUAL FANTASY
(1983)

It is difficult to be fair when writing of John Norman’s Gor novels. On the one hand, they have sold in the aggregate perhaps five million copies, making this series one of the most popular contemporary novel sequences in imaginative literature. On the other hand, they have been almost universally castigated by the critics, who claim that they are poorly written and highly derivative and that they espouse a philosophy of cruelty and sexual bondage that is at best morally reprehensible.

John Lange (pronounced “lenj”) is a curious candidate for such controversy, being in real life a mild-mannered professor of philosophical logic at a New York university. So shy is he of publicity that for years after publication of his first novel, he refused to reveal his identity or address to fans, having all his mail forwarded through his publisher; it has only been in recent years that he has consented to appear at a few fan conventions and to be interviewed by the press. Even now, he makes no effort to publicize his work or to cater to the desires of his readers. He keeps his professional work completely separate from what he considers to be a private avocation.

Yet the controversy continues. The first Gor novel,
Tarnsman of Gor
, appeared in 1966 from Ballantine Books. Thereafter, the books were published at the rate of one volume a year in the following order:
Outlaw of Gor
(1967),
Priest-Kings of Gor
(1968),
Nomads of Gor
(1969),
Assassin of Gor
(1970),
Raiders of Gor
(1971), and
Captive of Gor
(1972). The eighth book,
Hunters of Gor
, although announced by Ballantine, was ultimately rejected by Betty Ballantine and sold to Donald A. Wollheim at DAW Books; it appeared early in 1974. Thereafter, DAW released seventeen more novels in the series before killing it:
Marauders of Gor
(1975),
Tribesmen of Gor
(1976),
Slave Girl of Gor
(1977),
Beasts of Gor
(1978),
Explorers of Gor
(1979),
Fighting Slave of Gor
(1980),
Rogue of Gor
(1981),
Guardsman of Gor
(1981),
Savages of Gor
(1982),
Blood Brothers of Gor
(1982),
Kajira of Gor
(1983),
Players of Gor
(1984),
Mercenaries of Gor
(1985),
Dancer of Gor
(1985),
Renegades of Gor
(1986),
Vagabonds of Gor
(1987), and
Magicians of Gor
(1988), the twenty-fifth and final volume in the series.

Tarl Cabot, a college professor at a New England school, is kidnapped by an alien spaceship while on a camping trip and awakes on Gor, a planet that has been artificially moved into an orbit on the opposite side of the sun from Earth. Gor is a barbarous world peopled by cruel warriors bound into a rigid caste system that segregates men and women partly by innate ability, partly by heredity. Tarl’s father, Matthew Cabot, is the administrator of a Gorean city; he orders that his son be trained for the highest caste, the warriors. The younger Cabot soon learns the use of the sword, spear, and knife, and he is trained to fight aboard the fierce tarns, giant birds that carry their warrior-masters into battle. Weaponry on Gor is strictly limited by the unseen Priest-Kings, who use their superior technology to destroy attempts by inventors to introduce gunpowder or other modern improvements in their armaments. Tarl is determined to discover the secret of the Priest-Kings, and he penetrates their stronghold. There he participates in a civil war between two factions of the antlike creatures, a conflict that destroys much of their headquarters. The surviving Priest-Kings enlist Tarl on a crusade against the Kurii, the Beasts, bear-like enemies of the Priest-Kings who threaten to take both Earth and Counter-Earth as their new home. The Kurii’s original world has been destroyed; they now survive only in space bases and ships, from which they conduct periodic raiding parties on the two planets. The Kurii remain unaware of the Priest-Kings’ helplessness; consequently, they fear to invade either world directly, but conduct clandestine operations against both.

Tarl is waylaid on his first mission as the Priest-Kings’ agent and enslaved by the marsh-dwellers; his innate shame at his abasement destroys his illusions and makes him independent of both parties; still, he will fight for Gor when he can. He travels to Port Kar, a free city occupied by pirates and thieves, calling himself Bosk; there he helps set up a government of free captains, ridding the town of undesirables and establishing himself as an equal of these hard-bitten men. Samos, first captain of Port Kar, is an agent of the Priest-Kings. Eventually, Tarl befriends one of the Kurii, resumes his former name of Cabot, and gradually finds himself performing errands for the Priest-Kings in spite of himself.

Inherent in Norman’s world is the Darwinian philosophy of survival of the fittest; the caste society of Gor operates strictly in this fashion. The strongest, the brightest, and the cruelest rule this world without pity. Those who are weaker are crushed by those who are stronger. Since women are physically weaker than men, they deserve only slavery; this, says Norman, is their natural position in life, imposed upon them by heredity and physiological and psychological necessity.

Men on Earth have failed to recognize this reality, and therefore men and women on Earth are generally unhappy with their lives; women’s equality is a myth standing in the way of sexual liberation. If women submitted to men as they should, then both sexes would reach true satisfaction, the kind of satisfaction sorely missing from twentieth-century civilization.

That Norman believes this philosophy inherently is clear from interviews with him published over the years. For Norman, sexual satisfaction implies bondage, sadomasochistic interaction between men and women, and an acknowledgment of the respective roles of the inferior and the superior; no other relationship will produce true emotional release for either party. Norman regards his ideas as revolutionary, his books as earth-shaking masterpieces.

They are hardly that. The first six books do possess a power, an inventiveness, an energy that carry the reader past their obvious flaws. Even here, however, Norman tends at times to be ponderous, self-reflective, and didactic; yet somehow one tolerates these glitches as part of the fictional framework the author is erecting. Norman is at his best when fleshing out the details of Gorean civilization—for example, the meaning of a word, the structure of the Gorean calendar, the training of a tarn. All of these things are endlessly fascinating to an imaginative reader and add greatly to the verisimilitude of Gor. Norman’s extensive knowledge of ancient civilizations on Earth is used to color Gor life, dissuading those who might spot correlations between the two planets by noting the “voyages of acquisition,” through which the Priest-Kings and Kurii have added to Gor’s population over the centuries. Since all men on Gor presumably derive originally from Earth (the only native intelligent life on Gor being Priest-Kings), it is only natural that one would encounter earthly customs, names, and bits of language fragments interspersed randomly throughout the native cultures. For example, the Gorean word for sea,
thassa
, clearly derives from the Greek word for sea,
thalassa
[
θαλασσα
] (confirmed by personal correspondence with Lange).

Furthermore, Tarl Cabot as depicted in the early books is a strong, attractive male figure with ideals, a sense of honor, immense self-confidence, qualities of leadership, and intelligence. He readily adapts to Gorean society and quickly becomes an independent figure, his independence guaranteed by his prowess at arms and by his strength of character. As he changes, however, so do the books change, and unfortunately, the change ultimately improves neither.

The key books are volumes seven and eight in the saga,
Hunters of Gor
(the book that was rejected by Ballantine) and its predecessor,
Captive of Gor.
In these books, finally, the philosophy of slavery, bondage, and the inferiority of women, which had played a low-key role in the first six novels, becomes the central theme of the Gor series, displacing plot, action, story line, and character development, and thus losing the reader’s interest. Hereafter, women become mere ciphers for groveling animals that can enjoy only degradation. In these books Tarl Cabot becomes a moody, introspective antihero who seems remarkably joyless in his domination of his women/slaves. The novels become filled with long expository passages devoted to nothing more than a constant harping on the joys of subjugation (for women) or mastery (for men), with interchangeable characters of both sexes who seem to be exact substitutes for one another. The societies into which Tarl Cabot finds himself manipulated by his creator seem to be lifted almost unchanged from their earthly paradigms, showing little of the creative energy which filled the earlier novels. In one book, an Eskimo society is featured; in another, an Arab milieu; in
Savages of Gor
, the Indians of North America are transplanted (with different names) onto a Gorean plain.

One wonders what has happened to the verve displayed in
Tarnsman of Gor
, to the
élan
of
Priest-Kings of Gor
, or to the humor inherent in the plot of
Nomads of Gor.
There is no humor in these later creations, but only the seemingly endless sermons of a man standing on a very low soapbox. One can still occasionally glimpse flashes of the old talent and energy, but they are too few to raise the later books from the mud bath in which they are immersed. The thinness of Norman’s plots after the sixth volume is insufficient to carry the reader over the exposition, particularly since the later books average four hundred pages of small type each; indeed, it is clear from the way in which they were published that several of these monsters were actually one novel broken into two very large chunks for publication.

In the end, too, one must question the morality of novels that directly advocate violence (whether mental or physical) as a means of sexual satisfaction and which promote masochism as a substitute for love. Norman’s later work completely lacks the finer emotions: kindness, pity, understanding, forgiveness, compassion, sacrifice, and love. His is a harsh world, which many readers will ultimately find lacking in substance. The promise and the spirit demonstrated by the first six Gor novels have been replaced by
ennui
and lassitude, and by a certain sadness on the part of the reader that such a talent could have been debased to the level of its subject.

THE DUNSANIAN PASTICHES OF VERNON KNOWLES
(1983)

Vernon Knowles died in 1968, certain that his work had been completely forgotten within his own lifetime, that his reputation as a writer had achieved that curious status neither praised nor criticized, but simply abandoned altogether. Yet for a few years during the late 1920s and early 1930s, it appeared that Knowles might step into the shoes of Lord Dunsany or assume the appellation of a British Robert Nathan; that he failed to do so, that he failed to write further or to find a publisher for his work, is a great tragedy for imaginative literature.

In an eleven-year period, from 1924-1935, Knowles published six slim books of fantasy: one novel,
Eternity in an Hour
; one novella,
The Ladder
(also included in his third collection); and four collections of stories,
The Street of Queer Houses and Other Stories
,
Here and Otherwise
,
Silver Nutmegs
, and
Two and Two Make Five
; the two middle books were also collected in 1978 as
Sapphires
(Arno Press). His stories may be grouped together roughly into three categories: Dunsanian pastiches, allegories, and everyday fantasies. These categories should only be used as a general guide, however, for all of his stories, of whatever type, employ the same basic themes and language, relying heavily on irony and satire to make their points.

The first group of tales clearly derives inspiration from the early stories of Lord Dunsany, featuring places, persons, and beings just beyond the edge of the known world. Knowles, however, is not Dunsany: whereas Dunsany’s passion tends toward exotic names and characters, Knowles’s are plain; whereas Dunsany revels in the language, Knowles revels in ironic effect; whereas Dunsany often works toward a climactic turn of phrase at story’s end, Knowles often twists the entire tale one degree from the ordinary. In “The Gong of Transportation,” for example, young King Merea, bored with his duties, turns to reading and dreaming in order to escape from life; then, when he has read everything he can find in the kingdom, he uses a magical artifact to create the perfect environment in one corner of his kingdom, spending his entire natural life searching for perfect natural wonders. Having completed his task, he dies, leaving the wonderland to his son and heir, who, contemplating the scene for the first time, also demands the Gong. Perfection, it seems, varies in the eye of the beholder.

In “The Birds,” Medena, Chairman of the Council of Twenty, is ousted from power and imprisoned by his enemies; in his jail he draws his only solace from the birds he can spy through his window. Vowing to grant his avian friends protection if he is ever restored to power, Medena quickly forgets his pledge following the ensuing revolution; as his memory of their beauty fades, so does his regard for the men he serves; in the end, he strikes a bird that gets in his way, and is found later the same day lying in the park, stone dead, with two vultures tearing out his heart.

“The Mask” restores the Court Poet’s wife to life, but with a price: for each year of additional life she lives two are subtracted from the Poet’s. In the end, as he lies dying, he must view her real face again—and what he sees is the visage of a corpse.

The allegories are the least successful of Knowles’s stories, perhaps because their removal from reality also removes the necessary glue to bind them emotionally to the reader. Of these vignettes, perhaps the best is “The River and the Road,” in which the watercourse and its companion muse about the travelers who use them, finally deciding to abandon their positions altogether.

At least half of the tales fall into the third category, that of “everyday fantasies,” in which an ordinary person experiences an extraordinary event. In “The Shop in the Off-Street,” Mr. Bennett buys a pair of magical wings, thereby fulfilling his secret desire to fly, and visits fairyland (the shopkeeper cannot allow his customers to fly about London, after all); he finds it so enchanting that he abandons his everyday life altogether, finally choosing fantasy over reality. “The Chimpanzee” is trained by an English criminal exiled to Africa to act as his servant, and finally to speak; but the Englishman treats the beast so vilely that it escapes back into the jungle. There it organizes its fellows and returns to the small settlement of thieves and murderers, subjecting them to Chimpanzee society and language.

In “The Broken Statue,” Anne breaks a sculpture of herself that her lover has spent months in carving, and on which he had based his fortune. With the help of an imp, she takes its place on the pedestal; but her lover, bereaved by the loss of his love, loses all interest in life, and never shows the sculpture. When he eventually dies of sorrow, the statue topples over, and therein the dead body of Anne is found.

The most successful of Knowles’s work, however, is to be found in his novella-length books,
The Street of Queer Houses
(1924),
A Set of Chinese Boxes
(1926), and
The Ladder
(1927, published in book form in 1929). In the latter story, Alan Porter opens a box sent to the family by his brother, who is adventuring in the Far East; immediately a ladder springs up into the sky, vanishing into the heavens. Alan decides to climb the ladder, and disappears up the rungs. One by one, the other villagers investigate and follow him up, until none is left. When the authorities elsewhere discover the ladder, they wall it off and appoint a Royal Commission to investigate; two years later an 1800-page report comes to the conclusion that the government ought to send someone to investigate. A servant of the Crown is chosen and prepares to embark on his journey before a crowd of reporters. As he grasps the first rung, the entire structure collapses, having rotted away under the combined siege of sun and rain, burying him under a pile of rope.

A Set of Chinese Boxes
features a series of semi-connected stories told to entertain an ailing friend.
The Street of Queer Houses
is an architectural anomaly: “John Street,” as it is called, has been created by a very odd architect to depict the dozen sides of his character; like its structures, the inhabitants of this avenue are a strange lot indeed, including a gardener who turns into a giant purple flower, and lovers who open a peculiar book and walk into an enchanted land filled with yellow light and singing.

Knowles was a master of style and mood; he aimed to create an effect of otherworldly grace and gentleness solely through his languid language. His characters are often unable to cope with the real world, and are saved—or save themselves—only through the intervention of fantasy, if they can be saved at all. There is a sadness in his work that reminds one of the later short novels of Robert Nathan. Many of his fantasies—like the real world—are irresolute, coming to no final conclusion. The ironic position of man in what he believes to be
his
universe is continually emphasized. For Knowles, redemption, if it exists, is accidental; there are no saviors and often no salvation; but there is beauty, love, and devotion to an ideal, and these make life worth living. These jewels of fantasy, lambent sapphires glittering with touches of literary brilliance and flashes of insight, will be treasured by all lovers of fantastic literature.