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I made a short video of Baalbek, which is available on my You Tube channel.
Articles
Stale Heroes Tell the Same Old Story
WHAT’S NEW?
There is nothing new under the sun, at least not in the world of fiction. We are all, it would appear, either listening to or retelling the same old story. Every hero you can think of, from Marvel’s comic book superheroes to Luke Skywalker, from the Christ to the Buddha, is nothing more than an archetype on a journey that we have been making since the dawn of consciousness.
Or so Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell would have us believe. In this essay, I will briefly discuss their theories and how they affect our view of the world and the shared fictions that make up so much of it.
THE HERO AND THE QUEST
Campbell’s Monomyth and Propp’s Morphology of Folk Tales are similar in that they have both examined wide corpora of texts and extrapolated common threads and themes. While the soviet scholar Propp restricted himself to fairy stories, Campbell went further and looked for similarities in religious stories. He claimed to have tied religions as disparate as Buddhism and Christianity together into one generic storyline.
In both theories, it is the ‘quest’ and the role of the hero that dominate. Characters tend toward archetypes, and exist only as the ‘hero’ or extensions of the hero, such as the ‘villain’, the ‘helper’ and the ‘false hero’.
Campbell, in ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’, summarized the quest as follows:
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man”
IS GOD MADE UP?
One has to admit that the above quest forms a large part of the narrative in the New Testament, the Koran and in the life of Buddha. If we analyse ‘holy books’ objectively and treat them as mere examples of narratives, then the heroes portrayed and their journey they enact are no different from those of more mundane heroes.
TODAY’S HERO
The hero continues to reinvent itself, while always staying the same.
Star Wars and the Matrix, for example, are simple quest stories. Indeed, if one were to spend a weekend in a movieplex and watch every blockbuster on offer, one would be hard pressed to find a single film without the same three-act quest pattern. Most characters have no character and are little more than roles on which to hang the archetypal hero plot.
WHY DO WE NEED HEROS?
But why do we feel the need for this hero figure so greatly that we will build so much of our culture around it? When the narrative is taken as fact, as in religion, we are even prepared to live and die for a story, for a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.
It seems to me that the desire to become omnipotent is crucial in Monomyth' and 'Morphology. With Propp’s fairytale analysis, the child’s desire to become an adult is more obvious, but even with Campbell, we can see the wish to move from mere mortal to divine God-like figure; the desire to transcend the restrictions placed on us by tedious mortality; the will to become the superman. God may be dead, or at least dying, but the desire to be the hero lives on.
Secondly, I believe that the hero archetype could be a useful panacea to the scourge of consciousness: isolation. Campbell makes much of the theme of ‘oneness’ and integration, and in Propp’s fairytales, this is transmuted into a desire for special powers and universal acknowledgement. We cannot bear to be alone and the hero story helps us believe it is possible to escape isolation.
And if we take the search for cause one step further back, and move from the psychological to the evolutionary, then one must ask, what is the evolutionary advantage of the meme of the hero?
The hero, as they say, always gets the girl. Those attributes possessed by heroes, and the protection afforded by the heroes themselves, will tend to increase the genetic fitness of any offspring of the hero. Heroes beget heroes. So, by aspiring to be like the hero figure in fairy tales and even adult texts, a male will increase his likelihood to attract a mate.
I hope this does not sound like chauvinism, but it strikes me that heroes are almost always male, in fairy tales and in religions. Following emancipation, one would have expected this to have changed, but to a large extent, it has not. This, I suspect, is because the fundamental rules of sexual selection have not changed: males still feel the need to display the peacock feathers of heroism to attract the attention of the female.
GRIM CONCLUSIONS
Personally, I find this all rather depressing. Are we no more than beasts deprived of reason who plough the same fields day after day, doomed to repeat the same old tricks like an old dog which cannot learn a new one, and all in the hope of attracting a mate? In a way, I fear, the answer is yes. We do not expect more than a certain repertoire of behaviours from an animal, and we are just tool-making animals, so why should we be expected to do anything other than tell the same story over and over?
And yet, we are more than animals, my heart cries out. We have landed on the moon, built cities of glass and concrete, tamed nature and bent the planet to our will. So, why can’t we come up with an original plot?!
And if I may end where I began, and join the ashes of the last paragraph to the dust of the first, we are all telling the same old story, and all that marks a good writer from a bad one is that the great writer will tell the story well.
Barack Backs Beans
In a surprise move, congress will meet in emergency session next week and be asked to pass a further stimulus package from Iraq O' Barmy, who wants to secure approval for a 100-billion dollar package to invest in magic beans.
In will be a close vote, and many budget hawks have already expressed their reservations on the long-term implications of spending so much money on a handful of magic beans. However, Barnacky Fed Bean insisted that the “M. Beans will create a wave of hope that will carry the nation through the storm of these turbulent economic seas and leave us safely of the beach of economic good times, and the tan of prosperity will soon follow.”
When pressed for more details over how the possession of MB's would restore competitiveness to the crumbling American economy, the O' Barmy camp emphasised the ‘hope dividend' that would sprout forth and stated that the green shoots of recovery were already evident.
Critics remain, however, and Britain's Premier Gordung Brown and Chancellor Chancer Darling has been publically critical of the Beanstalk Solution, stating that there would be “no BS for Britain”, and that the government would instead be spending its borrowed money on buying bankrupt banks in order to restore confidence and trust.
The Vampire — From Ghoul to Teen Idol
Vampires have become the idols of the young, adopting roles formerly played by pop stars and political messiahs. Where once a poster of Che Guevara or Jim Morrison might have graced a bedroom wall, a gloomy vampire now stares moodily down. But why should teenagers idolize creatures who feed on the blood of the living to prolong their own life? Where has this morbid fashion come from?
To answer that question, we first have to establish when it all began. Who was the first vampire?
If we take vampire to mean drinker of blood then the vampire is immortal, as old as our fear of death, but early Roman, Greek and Chinese bloodsuckers are more demons or evil spirits than bone-fide vampires.
Without meaning to offend religious sensibilities, there is even something of the vampire is Christianity. “The blood is the life” is a line shared by Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and the Book of Genesis. The catholic Eucharist explicitly states that “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him.”
Christianity, however, is much older than vampirism, and it is clear what is feeding on what. Indeed, the word ‘vampire’ did not even exist until 1734. It moved quickly from the east,
via the Slavic languages (upyr) to German (vampir) to French (vampyre) and then to English.
The first true vampires were seen in eastern European folklore, but the original vampire was far nearer to the ghoul or zombie of today, built around man’s primordial fear that the dead might not stay dead and might come back to eat you. Their physical appearance in sightings in the vampire hysteria of the Balkans in the 18th century showed vampires to be more cadaver than Count. Their bodies were engorged, their skin was ruddy and waxy, their shrinking flesh left teeth and nails more prominent. Blood covered their faces.
All of this was taken to be the result of drinking the blood of the living, usually relatives and close friends, supplemented with the occasional sheep. But of course what the peasants actually saw was something far more frightening than vampires. What they saw was death. It was the corpse’s own bodily fluids, leaking from the nose and rising through the mouth, that covered the ruddy faces and the swollen purple bodies. The description of vampires are really the descriptions of disinterred corpses. Death is not pretty and early vampires were monsters.
Gothic literature changed all of this, grafting grace onto the bloodsucker. Lord Byron’s The Burial: A Fragment which his friend Polidori expanded into The Vampyre are still villains but they are charming villains. The peasant ghoul becomes a degenerate aristocratic. However, it was the Victorian Bram Stoker’s vampire, Count Dracula, who many take as the archetype.
Film adaptations of Count Dracula, from Hammer Horror productions starring Christopher Lee to Coppola’s 1992 masterpiece, paint a far more alluring picture of the Count than the original novel does, and this helps to explain the vampire’s transformation from villain to hero. But at this stage, even in celluloid, he was still a lustful and predatory hero, a stud-with-fangs, a cloaked id and a hero for the sexually repressed. There was still something very dark in the vampire — an undercurrent of infection and sexual disease, a shadow of Stoker’s syphilis.
Some films painted the vampire darker still. The 1922 Nosferatu Dracula is a sinister monster and Stephen King’s vampires in Salem’s Lot could hardly be called alluring. These darker vampires still exist, but they have degenerated into shoot-em-up slasher movies, like John Carpenter’s Vampires (98), Tarantino’s Dawn to Dusk (96), and the graphic novels of Underworld (2003) and Blade (98).
The sea change in our depiction of vampires occurred with Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire, especially after Tom Cruise played Louis in the film adaptation in 1996. Here we see the first pin-up vampire, and the first maudlin and introspective vampire — the first existentialist vampire. Although Anne Rice has been critical of Meyer’s Twilight, and I must admit I am not a Meyer’s fan, I think that in many ways Meyer’s Edward Cullen, the moody centenarian teen vamp from Forks, is an extension of Anne Rice’s Louis. They are both sullen, moody and a little misanthropic. In many ways they are teenagers, or rather they are how teenagers like to see themselves.
The crucial similarity, however, is that both characters choose to fight against their more carnal desires. So, in a sense, sexual desire and the repression of that desire is still at the core of the vampire’s appeal. What has turned villain to hero, perhaps, is that the vampire is now an agent of sexual repression rather than a despoiler of virgins. Vampires no longer promote free love — they promote abstinence. Meyer’s vampires are ascetic in the extreme: earnest vegetarian celibates. Even their enemies, the werewolves, bond for life.
As I said in the beginning of this essay, it is ironic that teenagers, who have traditionally worshipped rebels, from Dean to Dylan, have now started worshiping the undead, but it is a double irony that they have started to idolise the sexually inactive undead.
How far the vampire has come — from ghoulish fiend, to suave seducer to celibate teen idol!
THE END
Fiction
Letters from the Ministry
The Inaction Man
The Conscript, the Girl and the Virus
The Screen
Travel Writing
Lebanon – Between East and West
Notes on Nam
China
India
Message from the Author
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