Tag Archives: rick riordan

Vampire in the Mirror

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In Lacan’s mirror stage, an infant looks in the mirror and sees itself as a coherent, capable whole. That joyful instant of recognition is actually a misrecognition; the infant is not in fact that whole yet; it’s a vision of what will be. Or of what the infant imagines will be; Lacan’s point is that the image is false; the vision of coherence is not really a coherence to come; it’s a fantasy. Moreover, the future imagined coherence creates a past imagined incoherence. Part of the misrecognition of the mirror stage is the illusion of a stage, the dream of chronology. The future adult self is created simultaneously with the past child self; identity comes into being at the same moment as a past non-identity comes into being. The self as a chronology is an invention; the past, like the future, is a fiction.

The child, therefore, is precisely a fiction; it is a character in a novel, with a made up background to go with the made up narrative. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, that a number of novels that are especially interested in reader identification or mirroring deliberately thematize the mirror stage (or at least an imagined version thereof.) For example, Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Identity semi-famously opens with the main character getting a crack on the skull and forgetting himself. The reader, therefore, enters the novel just as the character does — bereft of a past as of a future, seeking to piece together a coherent self which extends backwards as well as forwards in time. Similarly, in Rick Riordan’s fantasy quest novel The Lost Hero, the main character, Jason, wakes up on a bus with no memory of how he got there. More, those around him (his girlfriend and his best friend) do remember him, because the gods have altered their memories. His past is (within the book) actually false; his story is (again, within the story) actually invented. Entering the book is entering a meta-fiction; to read is to falsely identify with a character whose identity is false. The fiction is really fiction, so your identity (as hero) is all the more thorough in being true to its falseness. You are lost, and are therefore the hero.

Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling works in a similar way. The novel opens in media self — the first person narration does not know who it is; identity comes into being all at once, without a past or a chronology.

Again, the effect of this move is to put you in the same place as the character — you are linked to the protagonist through joint ignorance. Neither of you knows yourself. In the Bourne Identity and Lost Hero, this is used as an excuse to provide you with a default, standard-issue protagonist self — you become a deadly assassin (with a heart of gold) or the son of a God. In both cases, the fantasy fiction self is white, male, and heterosexual; the image sets you up as the iconic cultural mainstream.

Butler does something rather different. As you read, you discover that the fictional self you are building in the mirror is a black female child who also happens to be a vampire. Though it takes a while to figure it out, the first thing “you” do in the book is kill and eat a friend (to help you heal your wounds); shortly thereafter, you find an adult male, sleep with him, and suck his blood. In this instance, then, the child looks in the mirror and discovers that it is a black female monster, cannibal, murderer, and pedophile. The imagined self is an other; the created past is a nightmare — at least if you’re the supposed male heterosexual white male reader of the Bourne Identity.

That’s really the most interesting part of Fledgling; following the opening revelations, the book is mostly devoted to filling in details about cool vampires, a task which is ultimately as mundane as Ludlum’s genre spy story or Riordan’s video-game-esque fantasy battle set-pieces. The implications, though, are interesting. The imagined self, is, after all, not the self; that thing in the mirror is a thing, some simulacrum wearing your form (which didn’t exist before it wore it.) Who you are is a fiction, which could be a dream of empowerment, but could also be a dream of alienation and monstrosity. And Butler neatly points out that which is which is not necessarily all that obvious. For a black queer woman reader, couldn’t Jason Bourne, the violent white mass-murderer with a gun, be the monster, while the subversive super-powered vampire is the vision of coherent empowerment? One person’s joyful empowerment fantasy can be another person’s nightmare of self-alienation — especially since the one person and another person are just fictions; somebody else you devour to climb into your story, which had already always started without you.
 

fledgling

The Good, The Bad, and the Fascist

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COMIC_hellboy_wake_the_devil

 
Lots of folks have told me to read Mike Mignola, most recently Craig Fischer. So when I saw the second volume, “Wake the Devil”, at the library the other day I figured I’d give it a shot.

And the verdict is…eh. Either the hype is way out of proportion, or “Wake the Devil” isn’t the thing to read. For whatever reason, though, and however you look at it, volume 2 of Hellboy is a thoroughly mediocre piece of genre nothing. Characterization barely exists, while the plot mostly involves various monstrous super villains making ominous portentous speeches and then getting their slimy butts kicked as Hellboy cracks wise and talks tough. If you think Lee/Kirby were geniuses of pulp construction — then, yeah, this still wouldn’t be especially good.

For that matter, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, which is somewhat similar in its reliance on mythological baddies and in its video-game one big-boss-battle-after-another structure, is significantly wittier and more inventive — and, for that matter, more viscerally suspenseful. Riordan’s characters are kids; they’ve got great powers, but they’re not always sure how to use them, and when they fight monsters they’re scared. In Lost Hero, there’s a scene where one of the kids, Leo, has to rescue his friends from a bunch of cyclops, and finally lets loose with the fire powers he’s been afraid of, and he blasts them.
 

He pointed one finger in the air and summoned all his will. He’d never tried to do anything so focused and intense—but he shot a bolog of white-hot falmes at the chain suspending the enging block above the Cyclops’s head—aiming for the link that looked weaker than the rest.

The flames died. Nothing happened. Ma Gasket laughed. “An impressive try, son of Hephaestus. It’s been many centuries since I saw a fire user. You’ll make a spicy appetizer!”

The chian snapped — that single link heated beyond its tolerancepoint—and the engine block fell, deadly and silent.

“I don’t think so,” Leo said.

Ma Gasket didn’t even have time to look up.

Smash! No more Cyclops—just a pile of dust under a five-ton block.

I wouldn’t make any claims for that as great literature, but it’s exhilarating and awesome and fun, with a nice Looney Tunes timing, and you care because he was at risk and you’re rooting for him and then he triumphs.

But Hellboy is the impassive undefeatable gunslinger from the beginning. He never seems to doubt his ability to win, and the comic never doubts it either. He just blasts one baddy after another, be they vampire, lamia, or whatever. You never feel exhilarated or impressed, or even interested. The comic is one long crescendo, without any build-up or melody. It starts off irritating, and by the end you just wish it would shut the fuck up. Even the gratuitous deaths of some minor extra side-protagonists can’t elicit much more than a shrug. Some action movie cannon-fodder got offed. Might as well have killed a storm trooper. Ho-hum.

The utter lack of emotional resonance means that the good guys and bad guys become virtually interchangeable. It’s true that the bad guys are clearly labeled as Nazis — but even so, it wasn’t clear why I should root against them. They didn’t actually seem to care about Jews or racial purity from anything that they said; they just wanted to destroy the world. And halfway through, I wanted to destroy Mignola’s world too. If a dragon from the deep rose up and swallowed Hellboy and the earth as well, leaving the second half of the volume just big, blank, black pages, I would have said, hey, the story’s over, I don’t have to read anymore, cool. I’d even enjoy seeing Hellboy have his boasting and wisecracking shoved up his infernal and impassive ass-crack. It’s true that most of the villains were boring and stock too, but their constant defeat did lend them a kind of pathos. The one sad guy who reanimates his friend as a head in a jar only to have them both killed shortly thereafter; Rasputin (yes that Rasputin) whining to his mama at the end because Hellboy beat him again — I mean, I don’t want to read any more about either of them, really. They’re no rat creatures. They just have slightly more personality than Hellboy. It’s not a high bar, but better to clear it than not.
 

INT_HELLBOY_WHITE

Bad guy boasts. Hellboy boasts. Bad guy gets stomped. Repeat.

 
The clumsiness and the lack of inspiration in “Wake the Devil” does lead to a kind of brute, Neanderthal genre insight, though. The comic really isn’t about anything but good guys and bad guys hitting each other, those “good guys” and “bad guys” designated by arbitrary fiat. One side is good, the side you root for, which wins. The other is bad, the side you root against, which loses. That’s the algorithm — the ideologies (destroy the world! bathe in blood! whatever!) barely register as anything but an overheated garble of rhetoric. The cops stomp their hellboots on that whining, sneering face for all eternity — and who cares what the face tries to say before the boot comes down? Behold the Superman as anti-fascist fascism — the devil who beats the devil.

Might as well be a comic: Percy Jackson and the Olympians

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So a couple of weeks ago, I had a nasty cold, and I mainlined all of the Percy Jackson books via Audible.  Yes, all five of them.
For those who don’t know, the Percy Jackson series is a childrens/YA popcorn action-adventure-fantasy series about demigods (children of a mortal and an Olympic deity).  Percy is short for Perseus, naturally, and yes, he battles a titan while riding a Pegasus, but  Sir Laurence Olivier is not involved (alas?).

These are not deep books.  They’re silly and fast paced and filled with summer-blockbuster like explosions and sword fights and classic monsters.  I listened to them all, so I was entertained.  I mean audiobooks ain’t cheap, and the reader, Jesse Bernstein, is kind of terrible.  But they have lots of funny moments and Percy is a really likable, regular sort of kid with the kinds of traits I most enjoy reading about (he’s kind, he has some faults, he gets discouraged but bucks up).  However….

When I was in the last book of the series I finally lost patience with some of the recurring themes that troubled me in earlier books.  As longterm readers probably know, I’m a chick.  As longterm readers might not know, I was a classics major so I could  (and did) do things like read all of Homer in Greek.  (The catalog of ships, by the way, is even more borrrrrrring in the original.  Blah blah blah whatever, I do not care how many warriors came from your little town.)  Which is to say, I’ve got a pretty good grasp on some of the original sources that Riordan had to draw on (mostly he used Pseudo-Apollonius, apparently).  Anyway.

I’m going to say upfront that these books have a ton of cool stuff.  There’s a hilarious pegasus named BlackJack who insists on calling Percy “Boss”, for instance.  He lands on Percy’s stepdad’s Toyota at the beach one day and leaves hoofmarks on the Prius, which cracked me up.  Blackjack is always dragging Percy off to help various sea creatures, which leads Percy to help this strange sea-cow-creature that Percy names Bessie.  (It turns out to be a boy cow sea monster, but hey.  It’s still a cool name!)

When they run into the Circe of legend, you know, the witch who turned Odysseus and company into pigs?  She turns the guys into pigs all right.  Guinea pigs.  They all go Reeet Reeet Reeeeeet in the way of guinea pigs in classrooms everywhere.

But, as I said, by the time I reached the last book, I lost patience with the repeating themes.  This series has some massive problems, and I was strongly reminded of Noah’s theory about the backlash against Twilight.  That it isn’t the poor plot (there’s worse plots) or prose or whatever, but that these books are the embodiment of young teen girls, and our culture kind of hates teen girls with a passion.  Hence the Twilight hatred.

And I think that the Percy series suffers from a lot of that kind of hatred, as well as several other truly depressing choices, and so I thought I would inflict my thoughts on them upon you all.

The basic premise of the story, as I said, is that the Olympian gods are alive and well, and they continue to go around, mating with mortals (as one does), and having kids, who are demigods.  The gods sometimes acknowledge these kids and sometimes not.  Monsters in the world, like Cyclops or Harpies or whatnot, sniff out these demigod kids and attack them.  There’s a camp, run by Dionysos and Chiron, who send out satyrs to find these children and bring them to Camp Halfblood for the summer, so they can train in their special powers and learn how not to get eaten by monsters and so that their parents can, if they wish, recognize them.  The Camp has a cabin for each of the major Olympian gods, and it’s on the East Coast in America, because that’s where the heart of Western Civilization now resides (sorry Greece, you’re just not good enough anymore).

The main character is Percy, from Perseus, Jackson and he’s a son of Poseidon.  Through each book we get a chance to meet other children of the gods, and the gods themselves.  Percy’s girlfriend is a daughter of Athena, his early mentor Luke is a son of Hermes, and his nemesis Clarisse is a daughter of Ares, and so on.  Rivalries between the gods tend to result in rivalries between the kids (Poseidon and Athena never got on) and each kid embodies their parent’s prowess or skills or whatever.  Some gods, like Artemis, don’t bear children but go about things differently (she has a hunting pack of maidens that she adopts).  It’s a straightfoward but pretty cool idea.
Except the execution is telling.  And not in a good way.

Artemis, for instance, is a big problem.  She’s portrayed in the book as a pre-teen, a girl who is about ten or twelve.  She’s a maiden, which, you know, fine.  That’s cool.  But Riordan also portrays her as hating boys like she was in an old-fashioned French lesbian separatist novel.  That’s wrong.  Canonically wrong.  The classic  Artemis vs Aphrodite fight is over a guy, Euripides’s Hippolytus.  Hippolytus is Artemis’s favorite hunting buddy.  (It’s also got my favorite line, by the way, which is Forgiveness is for mortals, vengence is divine. )  The reason, by the way, that Aphrodite smacks down Hippolytus is that he is too chaste, too sworn to Artemis.  The followers of Artemis are not singularly female, and this is a pretty classic, well-known work (one of Euripides’ best).

When the Ancient Greeks are more even handed about gender politics, it makes me go hhhhhm, is all I’m sayin’.

Overall, Artemis and her hunters are portrayed as forces for good.  Sexist jerks, yes, but forces for good.  Except, and I admit to finding this troubling, they’re portrayed as good based on traditionally male ideas of good, that is to say bravery in a fight, prowess with weapons and tracking, and since they do not age, they’re often described in ways that do not display their female sex traits (breats, hips, etc).  They’re very much girls, not women.

Which is fine, so far as it goes.  I like positive portrayals of girls.  But.  The next step in the aging line (for most or many females) is to turn into a sexually active young woman.  Which brings us to Aphrodite and Hera.

Aphrodite is portrayed as might-as-well be evil.  She’s shallow.  She’s caught canoodling with Ares (again).  She tricks people and causes problems for Percy’s lovelife.  She appears to have no good traits besides having Angelina’s boobies.  Her children are portrayed in the same way: they run away from fights, screaming about their hair.  They worry about their nails.  They obsess about appearances and generally are jerks.  Except for Celina, who is portrayed as their leader.

I thought, OK, you know, that does balance it some, since one of the themes in the book is that the demigods are better than their parents, are the good side to any power.  But then we hit the last book of the series (where I lost my patience and hurled the ipod at the wall.) Because Celina is the spy who has been betraying them the whole time and it is her betrayal that gets her own boyfriend killed as well as a whole bunch of other people!

Moving right alone, we hit Hera, who has no children at camp, because she’s the goddess of marriage and family.  She’s portrayed as beautiful, which instantly clued me in to the fact that she’s evil.  Sure, she doesn’t side with the villains, but she’s a villainous jerk all the same.

Lots of people don’t like Hera or Aphrodite, and you know, I’m OK with that.  I get it, and I see it, and I can appreciate it, if there’s appropriate balance with other good characters.  Like, say, Demeter and Persephone.  I mean, Demeter.  She’s the goddess of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries, which only lasted two thousand years and were the most important mysteries of all.  Secret worship!  Big party!  Lots of awesome throwing of phallic shaped pig cookies into pits!  Great fodder for a story, right?  Lots of opportunties to balance the nasty old Aphrodite with a warm, mother figure who controlled that little minor thing called the harvest.

But in this series, Demeter is a nagging mother in law who wants people to eat cereal, and her kids are known for the flowers in their cabins.  And that’s it.  That’s all she gets.  Her daughter Persephone, the wife of Hades, is no better.  She’s portrayed as annoyed that her husband slept around and bored with her mom’s cereal obsession and again, that’s it.  Again, Riordan had choices to make, and he chose a more one-sided view of goddesses than even the Greeks.

We do have one goddess to balance the tide, and that’s Athena.  She’s portrayed as wise, and interesting, and smart, and good.  She’s also sexless.  Her children are children of the mind, born from her head in the way that she was born, and her daughter, Annabeth, Percy’s girlfriend, eventually gets a makeover, but it looks wrong on her.  Because Annabeth wouldn’t wear makeup.  Which is fine, so far as it goes, except that the not-wearing makeup has become a sign of Annabeth’s goodness.  The makeover person is Circe, and she’s hosting a spa for lady visitors and turning guy visitors into guinea pigs who go reet.  And you know what?  ENOUGH.

There are only two choices for women in these books.  1.  You can be a psuedo boy: like to fight, stay youthful without secondary sex characteristics, enjoy battle or science.  That’s the ‘good’ choice.  2. You can be a woman: grow breasts and hips, enjoy broad friendships and romantic relationships, wear makeup.  That’s the ‘bad’ choice, and eventually you will betray someone, steal, nag, lie, fuck around, trick people.

I think those are some remarkably crappy choices.  But you probably shouldn’t listen to me, since I’m currently wearing MAC’s Amplified Cream Lipstick in Blankety.

(I had some other issues with these books, but I’ve decided to cover the parenting problems in another essay, since this one is already ridiculously long.)