This same question was asked in 1950 in Ray Bradbury’s “The
Martian Chronicles.” A collection of short stories that were combined into a
longer work, “Chronicles,” as Bradbury himself explained, uses a few fictional
touches borrowed from Sherwood Anderson and John Steinbeck to illustrate how human life might flourish on the red planet. I previously wrote
about Bradbury’s short story “The Man” here.
Human beings land on Mars and begin exploring it, though the
first encounters are horrific and end violently for earth. The Martians’ use of
mind manipulation sends the first Earth missions into their own imaginations,
with the scenery mimicking small town American life from the 19th
century. Eventually, the Earth men gain a foothold, and settlements begin to
flourish.
There are familiar plot points any student of Earth history
will appreciate, since many Martians die as a result of disease. But many of
them blend into the background, head into the wilderness, seemingly to bide
their time until the Earthmen decide to leave.
In one particular chapter, “November 2033: The Fire Balloons,”
we see the beginnings of extraterrestrial evangelism. Bradbury introduces us to
two priests – Father Peregrine and Father Stone, who are preparing for their
journey to Mars.
Father Peregrine is the hopeful explorer, while Father Stone
is a bit harder. Peregrine wonders might a new planet, and new life forms, mean
discovering new sins? What kind of sins would a being with extra senses beyond
the human kind be tempted with? Peregrine asks if the journey should even be
made, posing a strange question for a Christian priest: “Shouldn’t we solve our
own sins on Earth?” The Gospel would answer this question simply with: You can’t
solve your own sins. That’s one of the reasons you preach.
Earlier in “The Martian Chronicles,” and within the story,
Bradbury plays with the traditional locational physics of theology – up means
heaven, down means hell. But Mars is red, and gives off a Satanic vibe. The red
planet’s explorers are sometimes tempted to think they have arrived at heaven,
only to find some unexpected, infernal end.
Arriving on Mars, our two priests learn that there is sin
aplenty among the earthly settlers, but the Martians are an enigmatic bunch.
They are described as “spheres of blue fire,” obviously intelligent but not
human in any sense at all. Peregrine convinces a skeptical Father Stone to
follow him into the hills in search of the Martians, who have demonstrated by
their conduct with others that they are benevolent. Following an encounter,
Peregrine is moved to try some type of evangelistic outreach. To prove his
theory, he even puts his life in jeopardy – or is it a dream? – and one is
reminded of Satan’s temptation of Christ, goading Him to leap from the temple
and trust that angels will rescue Him.
Father Peregrine will not be dissuaded, and he conceives
of a Martian church, with a circle replacing the Cross as its symbol. He
commissions another priest, Brother Matthias, to create a glass globe, to be
filled with bright fire and placed on the church altar. Trying to make his case
to skeptical church fathers, Peregrine shows all the zeal of the evangelist:
“We are giving them
God in an understandable image. If Christ had come to us on Earth as a octopus,
would we have accepted readily? … Was it then a cheap magic trick of the Lord’s
to bring us Christ through Jesus, in man’s shape? After we bless the church we
build here and sanctify its altar and this symbol, do you think Christ would
refuse to inhabit the shape before us? You know in your hearts he would not
refuse. …Christ will fill any vessel that is offered.”
The first Martian Christian church, then, is a rock altar, much like would have existed
in ancient Israel, with the fiery globe. An organ plays Bach, and a bell sounds
the time for worship. After a moment, the Martians arrive around the shivering
priests to explain themselves. They were once like humans, until a legendary
figure – “a good man” – discovered “a way to free man’s soul and intellect, to
free him of bodily ills and melancholies, of deaths and transfigurations, of
ill humors and senilities, and so we took on the look of lightning and pale
fire…We have put away the sins of the body and live in God’s grace.”
As with “The Man,” Bradbury’s use of the Christ image is not
necessarily that Christ is unique to earth. We aren’t sure whether this “good
man” the Martians speak of is an Incarnation or simply a Buddha-like figure,
but obviously the Martians have become beings no longer in need of redemption.
This becomes obvious when Father Stone shakes off his skepticism and declares “It
is Him, after all.” The Martians have perfectly magnified the Almighty. Stone
declares that as humans travel to various planets, they will uncover
pieces of “The Big Truth,” which will allow them to eventually add up the sum
of its parts until “one day the whole Total will stand before us like the light
of a new day.”
It’s easy to take this apart Scripturally – the Martian
self-redemption sounds much like Peregrine’s earlier question about overcoming
earthbound sins. You might also say that the Big Truth already stands in front of us
all, but we don’t like the light and aren’t interesting in knowing it if it
interferes with our plans for the day. But Bradbury isn’t being theological as
much as aspirational. Evangelism is hopeful, because it believes the journey is
worth making because there are people – or beings – who will believe. Likewise,
space travel is also hopeful, questing, unafraid of the journey in the hope of
what may be learned and encountered. We make the trip because we not only want
to learn about them, but about us. And because we are dealing with space, any
journey we make into God’s creation will reveal the Creator to us.
But the story does illustrate that any encounter beyond our
own comfortable churches, the familiar hymns, the rituals we cling to, will
inevitably shake our assumptions about God, Christ, and the nature of the Holy
Spirit. Small wonder then that the Apostle Paul, no stranger to long voyages,
challenged us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Notice that he
didn’t say we should transform ourselves. When we attempt this, our new guises
look a lot like the old. Transformation, in any world we create, is an
impossible task when we face it alone. And the Gospel assures us that we never will.
Buy my book, "Brilliant Disguises," for .99 cents here. Available in all e-formats. Buy my book, "The Uncanny Valley," for $5.99 here. Available in all e-formats.
“I can see you’re a fan of grand gestures,” says one
character to his kidnapper in Dave Eggers’ new novel, which takes its title
from the book of Zechariah. This is my first novel by Eggers, though I’ve
obviously kept my eye on his career. The critical reaction to “Your Fathers”
has been decidedly mixed, with some readers criticizing the book for its “preachiness”
and others saying its arguments are flawed. I think some of these criticisms
have more to do with how Eggers approached telling his story.
While the premise of the book sounds exciting, there is in
fact, no real action. The “action” in this novel begins on Aug. 25, 2012, the
same day as the death of Neil Armstrong, the American who, on July 20, 1969,
was the first human being to set foot on the moon. The significance of this
date is no accident.
The main actor through the novel is Thomas – and that’s
because everyone else is chained to posts. The story is told through a series
of sometimes one-sided dialogues between Thomas, a mentally unbalanced
30-year-old man, and several people he has kidnapped and chained to pillars on
the old Fort Ord property in Salinas, Calif.
His first captive, Kev, is an astronaut who Thomas knew in
school. Thomas sees a great injustice in the fact that Kev became an astronaut
at the exact moment the Space Shuttle program was discontinued due to budget
constraints. This sends him out on a quest to find someone responsible.
The quest leads him to kidnapping former Congressman Mac
Dickinson, a legless Vietnam veteran; Mr. Hansen, a middle school teacher of
Thomas’ undone by a submerged kind of pedophilia; Thomas’ recovering addict
mother, and even a woman he meets at random on the beach. It’s all rendered in pure dialogue, with the
reader left to discern who is talking. There is no hint at tone or inflection,
save when it is revealed through another character’s observation or reaction.
Because of the storytelling strategy, the ideas are
paramount. Gradually, it is revealed that what is really eating Thomas is the
memory of his friend Don Banh, a child of Vietnamese parents who was shot dead in
2010 by police after he lunged at a group of them with a knife after behaving
erratically. The title of the novel probably comes from this episode, when Don
was supposedly shouting at police in apocalyptic tones, and is remembered as
having said that he wrote the Bible. “He called us shades,” recalls a policeman
who shot him. “He said he was the source of light, that he was the sun.”
Thomas’ obsession with Don is seemingly undercut when his mother
informs us that Thomas didn’t always care so much for Don; that he, in fact,
abandoned Don when Don’s behavior became too erratic. We accept this because,
by this time, we are better acquainted with Thomas’ erratic behavior.
It’s appropriate that Eggers has taken the words of a martyred
Old Testament prophet for his work. In his seminal study “The Prophets,”
Abraham Heschel wrote that what distinguished the prophets was their conception
that justice is not an abstract concept but has practical implications at the
ground level for humanity. “The prophet is a person who is not tolerant of
wrongs done to others, who resents other people’s injuries.”
Like the prophetic books, Eggers work is an extended dialogue. Where
the prophets employed the Divine voice – “Thus saith the Lord” – Eggers has
Thomas enumerate injustices that we are all aware of, but about which no one
seems to doing anything. This is true not only of Thomas, but of Eggers’
audience. The prophetic vision encompasses the small, the mundane,things that
we accept because they have become commonplace. We are invited to ask how the
shooting of a young man anywhere can become commonplace.
But the prophet carries the divine office, given words from the
Almighty, to show that God does not consider these things trivial, but offences
worthy of retribution. Through the words
of Thomas, and occasionally his captives, Eggers gives us little glimpses at
the leviathans of injustice we accept.
Thomas diagnoses, and then returns to, what he sees as a central
problem – America’s lack of a defining, national task that illuminates what is
best about the nation. Armstrong’s death, 40 years after America’s last lunar
mission, merely underlines the distance we feel now from the last time our
nation accomplished something of enduring, unifying pride. He feels a young man
born out of time, denied his chance at something transcendent.
There is irony in this. Thomas brings his captives to an abandoned,
iconic military base, closed in 1994 as part of America’s “peace dividend” – a
casualty of the fact that we no longer needed to maintain a sophisticated
network of installations following the end of the Cold War. The thinking at the
time was that America could finally concentrate on purely domestic concerns.
But there are other social ills that get rehearsed in the pages – government
spending, irresponsible bureaucracy, societal angst, police brutality, substance
abuse, the War on Terror. The dissatisfaction of some readers seems to come, I
think, because Eggers isn’t interesting in having his characters do anything
but vent about these problems, and not in a way different than what you might
hear in line at the coffee shop. When there is eloquence among his characters,
it stands awkwardly out.
I saw one criticism that the characters marshal arguments that
occasionally carry incorrect assumptions. But this criticism misses the point –
part of what Eggers is diagnosing is the problems that come when a society
clings to incomplete or incorrect information, with the arguer wondering why
the world defies any attempts to put right its excessive wrongs. No one knows
the whole story – they can only sense that it is wrong.This too illustrates his overall theme,
because it is also part of the overall problem.
Each of the characters riffs along the same lines as Thomas.
Hansen, the teacher, argues there is no nuance in life anymore – people are
only too happy to write someone off. “Each person we throw away fills our lungs
with new air.”
The book gets mildly implausible when Thomas kidnaps Frank,
one of the policemen who shot Thomas’ friend Don.Thomas initially acts as though he did not
know Frank’s contribution to that episode, and we are never sure whether he is
being facetious or otherwise. By kidnapping the cop, it allows Thomas to decry “this
ability to stand between a human being and some small measure of justice and
blame it on some regulation.”
Thomas later observes:
“Do you realize what a
strange race of people we are? No one else expects to get their way like we do.
Do you know the madness that this unleashes upon the world – that we expect to
have our way every time we get some idea in our head?"
The irony bends back on itself when we remind ourselves that
Thomas has kidnapped seven people basically because he is abstractly
dissatisfied with the state of his country. Why is he doing this? His mother, chained
like the rest, blames his aggrieved actions on Christianity, “ a whole religion
based on accountability.” This seems an odd thing to throw in. Is Eggers, like
others, suggesting the irrationality of belief, and giving his hero yet another
evidence of mental illness? No – Thomas wants someone to take responsibility,
not just for Don’s death, but for everything. He’s over thirty, and his life means nothing,
just like Don’s. The universe grinds on.
How many times have you, looking over a newspaper, watching
television, trolling Twitter, come across a news item like Don Banh’s death?
For some of us, it inspires a sigh. For others, nothing. Some don’t even click
on the story. Others never hear about it. But reality moves on. We know other stories
will happen just like it. But it has not changed us. Taken that way, it’s easy
to see Eggers’ strategy for the novel – nothing but talk. Because that is all
our society does. We talk among ourselves. We talk on television and radio. We
talk at each other. We talk through each other. We say much, understand little,
listen hardly at all. And young men die, violently or otherwise. If the
characters sound preachy, that’s the characters, not necessarily the write. Because
of the way Eggers is telling the story, they have no choice but to state their
arguments as arguments. (And frankly, I prefer Eggers’ strategy to, say,
Jonathan Franzen. When his characters preach, I hear their creator’ssmugly-confident voice.)
It’s easy to see the story’s progression. Thomas kidnaps Kev,
perhaps not for any other reason than a brush with greatness, but he feels
sorry for the man, and seeks out someone who may be responsible. From there, his
perception of responsibility shifts to the Congressman, but Dickinson agrees
with Thomas on some issues, sounds like a father figure, and doesn’t seem
responsible either. So he moves to someone he knows is guilty of something –
Hansen the teacher. But he feels he may have been taken in by Hansen as a boy
because of his mother’s carelessness. Moving on from his mother, whom he has always
blamed for everything, his next captive is Don’s cop. And then the clerk at the
hospital where Don’s body was ordered cremated as a way to hush up the
circumstances of his death. Now Thomas has diagnosed the problem. He needs a
solution, but it is a personal one. He knows he can’t go back, so he wishes to
escape with a girl he meets on the beach. All the while, he knows time is
ticking. He retreats back to Dickinson, just as the end is coming. We don’t
know if his end will be the same as Don’s.
Dickinson gives him some advice. “Seek your truth…Exalt
yourself, son.” Though these are the words of an old man trying to save
himself, one is tempted to say that seeking his own truth is exactly what
Thomas has been doing. He’s hardly been inactive. But Thomas isn’t a prophet,
because his quest is generally a selfish one. A prophet knows it is impossible
for us to exalt ourselves of our own volition. And the prophetic vision cares
about society not because it is good, but because God cares about people, and
He is good. If God cares about us, then we are worth saving.
Deep into Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1914 novel “Tarzan of the
Apes,” Jane Porter, accompanying her father on an African jungle excursion,
understands that she has just met the most important figure in her life, whom she
discusses with the captain of the ship. In reply, he calls the Lord of the Apes
an interesting name.
“I admit that he
would be worth waiting for, this super-man of yours,” he says.
Tarzan, and Burroughs’ other creation John Carter, are
prototypes not only of the Man of Steel, but countless other heroes of fantasy
and science fiction. Reading the first Tarzan novel, and “A Princess of Mars,”
one is reminded of how much ground science has travelled in the past century, but
also how close speculative fiction has stayed to these two works.
Aaron Parrett wrote
of Burroughs’ work that what makes it eternally compelling “is the way he
stretches the bounds of verisimilitude by narrating purely fantastic events
with such nonchalant matter-of-factness that what he describes becomes
believably present.” It had been at least 30 years since I read both books, and
I was pleasantly surprised how much came back to me once I picked them up again.
Burroughs begins the novels in much the same manner. “A
Princess of Mars” opens with the conceit of an autobiography, written by a
supposedly dead man, relayed by the man’s favorite nephew, Burroughs. “Tarzan
of the Apes,” as Gore Vidal stated, has an opening worthy of Joseph Conrad: Just
like with John Carter, there is the conceit that this is an actual story,
gleaned from a diary and pieced together from records and a few witnesses.
In the beginning of “Mars,” John Carter several times
presents himself as a man beyond time and space, and brings up the subject of
resurrection, even though Burroughs has told us in an introduction that Carter
was probably not “in the strict sense of the term a religious man.”
“I am a very old man; how old I do not know…So far as I can
recollect I have always been a man,” Carter begins, giving us a taste of
someone who has been stretched beyond the bounds of his – and our – common humanity.
He says few will believe his story, but that science will one day vindicate
him. And so begins a dance between faith and experience that runs through the
novel.
John Carter’s tale, though otherworldly, has a tinge of the
Victorian about it, as does Tarzan, which means Christian iconography lurks in
the background. One of the aspects of the Gospels that ensures they stand out
from literature of the same period – and an indicator to their credibility –
is that the authors never attempt to explain the miracles of Jesus. We are not
told how the multitudes are fed, how water is transformed into wine, nor are we
given an eyewitness account of the moment Jesus strides from the tomb. We are
instead given the voices of witnesses who saw and believed in Him.
Burroughs, for the purposes of his fantastic tales,
occasionally adopts the same strategy. He gives us a date of John Carter’s
departure from the earth – March 3, 1866 – but does not tell us how Carter,
fleeing from Indians into a mine, awakens naked on the planet Mars. Carter has
a brief out-of-body experience, thinks he has died, but is transported to the
very real red planet and not “forever into that other life!”
On Mars, Carter is transformed, after several feats of
daring-do, into a savior of the various races of Barsoom, what the natives call
Mars. The Martians are warlike and never far from a weapon, so the impulsive,
fearless, confident Confederate veteran fits in well among the landscape. Many
times, Burroughs –and Carter – sacrifices common sense for the sake of a chase,
a duel, or an escape, and so we discover the warring Tharks, Jeddaks, the
Zodanga and the ruling families of Helium.
A modern reader is amazed at how breezily Burroughs goes
about the business of world building to flesh out his story. We know that he
borrowed from Lowell's 19th century theories regarding Martian
canals, which gives us the ancient Martian ruins Carter explores – a theme of
abandoned antiquity that Burroughs would revisit again and again. It is also
one other authors were keen to take up, such as Ray Bradbury in “The Martian
Chronicles.”
But when Carter calls Mars a “planet of paradoxes,” he is
commenting on the mix of high and low culture, technology and savagery.
Burroughs gives us a planet of scare resources and barren life with warring
tribes engaged in an unpopular war, but tells us that in one aspect the
Martians are happy in that “they have no lawyers.” (This is a rare touch of humor- much of “Princess”
is breezily brutal.) He introduces themes of telepathy and mind control in only
a few sentences, mostly so that Carter doesn’t have a hard time learning the
Martian tongue. He will return to these at the story’s conclusion.
Descriptions are foreshortened for time’s sake. Only Carter
gets the honor of long fight scenes. His friend Tars Tarkas’ act of revenge
against the evil Tal Hajus is carried out in two sentences. And he introduces
concepts that other writers would dwell on, just to prick our interest. A paragraph
primer in Martian theology, which speaks of a 1,000 year pilgrimage down the mysterious
river Iss, makes us long for another adventure.
As does the climax, when the citizens of Helium sense their
purified atmosphere is running out and they will all suffocate, until John
Carter solves the problem in his last act (in this story) on Mars. Burroughs plants
a seed with the reader by introducing the image of John Carter and Dejah Thoris
standing over the egg that bears their child, giving us the fear that all will
be lost, and then leaves us with the Princess awaiting her
warlord’s return after he departs.Carter, like King Arthur, like Christ, cannot leave on such a note.
John Carter saves Barsoom, but, as inexplicably as he came
to Mars, he returns to Earth. His death on one world means his resurrection on
another.
As he did with the Martian canals, Burroughs played with
Darwinian evolution, genetics and contemporary theories of race when he wrote “Tarzan”
three years later. He told interviewers he created Tarzan as a “contest between
heredity and environment.” Nature vs. nurture, in other words. Just like Carter, Tarzan spends much of the
tale naked, and even though he was born in the jungle, there is the sense that
he, like Carter, is a stranger there.
The story begins with John Clayton, the Earl of Greystoke,
and his wife Alice headed to Africa to an overseas post. Their journey goes
awry when the Fulwalda, their ship,
undergoes a mutiny, and the crew deposits the couple on the coast. Clayton
constructs a treehouse for his wife where Alice gives birth to the Greystoke
heir before sinking into death. The baby Tarzan is spirited away from the crib –
like Jesus, like Moses - by the ape mother Kala, who trades the living human
child for her dead ape one.
Tarzan shows some progress in Burroughs’ style – there is
humor in Tarzan even at his most sinister, as when he taunts his jungle
enemies. About the age of 10 Tarzan realizes he is different from the apes he
has grown up among, and seeing his image reflected in water is only the first
step. He eventually finds his way to the jungle cabin where the skeletons of
his parents rest among a library of books, and he patiently teaches himself to
read English. He takes his father’s knife and begins using it to turn himself
into the King of the Apes. And then, as he reaches manhood, he meets a party of
jungle explorers, which includes Jane.
The most meaningful relationship is, of course, the one with
her, but Tarzan owes a debt of gratitude to the Frenchman D’Arnot, who teaches
him to speak English and French while the apeman nurses him back to health.
When Hollywood last made an attempt at a more faithful rendition of the novel,
it made the D’Arnot friendship the pivotal one, as it is the one that ensures
Tarzan will leave the jungle. D’Arnot was played wonderfully by Ian Holm in “Greystoke:
The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes,” as it is D’Arnot who also helps Tarzan
solve the mystery of his origin.
This is despite the fact that D’Arnot is introduced in the
last fourth of the novel, as Tarzan travels, at whirlwind pace, from Africa to
Paris to America, from loin cloth to becoming a cultured traveler in scarcely
40 pages.
With both books, the overarching theme is civilization. In “Princess,”
when it appears Helium will dissolve with its atmosphere, listen to the typically
grandiose words of Tardos Mors:
“Let us bid each other farewell. The days of
the greatness of Barsoom are over. Tomorrow’s sun will look down upon a dead
world which through all eternity must go swinging through the heavens peopled
not even by memories. It is the end.”
There is a sense in “Tarzan” that he represents the best of
both worlds – the son of a noble raised among the wild. “In his veins…flowed
the blood of the best of a race of mighty fighters, and back of this was the
training of his short life among the fierce brutes of the jungle.” The "cream" inevitably
rises to the top, in whatever setting. This is
roughly the same for Carter, the rebel who survived the Civil War. It seems
logical that singlehandedly conquering Mars wouldn’t be too much trouble for a
man of such experience. It is civilization that instills such virtues into its
men and women, Burroughs seems to be telling us, and those things are worth
preserving because they embody the timeless, no matter what planet one may be
on.
Again, there are things in this book Burroughs will not
explain. For example, Tarzan is friends with Tantor the elephant. “How?” he
writes. “Ask me not.” While Tarzan is the name the apes give him, Burroughs
makes no attempt to explain how this was translated, since the ape language
obviously doesn’t make any sounds close to English. (In “Greystoke,”
Christopher Lambert’s Tarzan is never called by that name.) Occasionally,
Burroughs shows flashes of what Tarzan’s life trajectory could have been –
contrasting his eating raw flesh with that of the present Lord Greystoke, his
uncle, at that moment sending his chops back in a London restaurant for being
underdone.
Though Burroughs’ style shows progress between the two novels,
there are obviously pulpy passages indicating the haste of his writing process.
Among the two novels, Burroughs endlessly repeats the word “anthropoid.” Jane’s
maid Esmeralda is obviously the comic relief minstrel mammy character, complete
with cringe-inducing dialect.I nearly
threw the book across the room after Professor Porter repeated the phrase
“Tut-tut” for what felt like the thousandth time.
But Burroughs seasons both tales with enough familiar pulp
devices to keep the pages turning. In “Tarzan,” we have mutinous sailors,
pirate treasure, ancient civilizations (again), jungle combat, cannibals, a North
American forest fire and action on three continents. Burroughs isn't creating a religious faith - he merely wants faith in his hero to survive long enough to keep you reading. There is a kind of weird logic in it all, because ultimately this is the reader's adventure, and the reader must believe if the story is to survive.
And he saves the most interesting development for the end –
a finish that makes the Tarzan story on the page much more potent than it has
ever been rendered on the screen. Tarzan has rescued Jane and made it
unnecessary for her to enter into a loveless marriage for financial
convenience. He has saved her life, but he has also rescued the present Lord
Greystoke, the man whom he learns from D’Arnot holds the title that should be
his. He has forsaken the jungle to make his way in the civilized world, all in
hopes of gaining Jane, who plans on marrying Greystoke. Like John Carter, he
has been prepared for a destiny that he is now denied.
How does he describe himself to the man who, we are led to
believe, will rob him of his happiness? “My mother was an Ape, and of course
she couldn’t tell me much about it,” Tarzan tells Lord Greystoke. “I never knew
who my father was.” It is an act of self-sacrifice that adds to the mystery and
allure of the man.
Like John Carter, dreaming of his wife and unborn child
millions of miles away, we are denied the happily ever after – at least until
the next episode, which we, at the creator’s bidding, desperately wish to begin
immediately.
