Conan Meets the Academic Wankery

The academics weigh in!

I mentioned last week the concept of academic wankery. This book is an excellent example.

Conan Meets the Academy (McFarland, 2013), trade paperback, 216 pages, edited by Jonas Prida.

Introduction/ Jonas Prida: The Preface states “the changing face of academic discussion has opened up figures such as Conan to a wider range of approaches. . .the focus remains on Conan.”

The Introduction discusses the cultural impact of Conan. The book is subdivided into two sections: The Literary Conan and the Cultural Conan.

“Hyborian Age Archaeology” (Unearthing Historical and Anthropological Foundation)/Jeffrey Shanks: Shanks has written some articles with an archaeology base. “Hyborian Age Archaeology” is a variation of his PCA “Age Undreamed Of” paper. He discusses the Hyborian, mentions of pre-Hyborian periods in stories like “Men of the Shadows” and possible influences by Lewis Spence, H. G. Wells, and E. A. Allen. The piece is readable. Nothing new for me but as an editor once said to me, assume the reader is new to the subject and knows nothing. He takes pain to dismiss “racialist theories” of the period. Race was central to Robert E. Howard. You can't escape it in his fiction.

“Barbarism Ascendant” (The Poetic and Epistolary Origins of the Character and His World)/ Frank Coffman: An examination of the interplay of the barbarian with civilization. He has some excerpts from poems to make his point that Howard held back on total barbarism in his fiction. This is the best essay in the book.

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Women” (Gender Dynamics in the Hyborian Age)/Winter Elliott: This is the first of the obligatory -isms chapters. Of course, “The Frost Giant's Daughter” is trotted out as Exhibit A. Why is it almost everyone is wrong about “Frost Giant's Daughter?” Elliott quotes from Darrell Schweitzer's Conan's World which undercuts credibility she is attempting to build. Darrell has denounced Conan's World to me in person.

“Female objectification in the stories is most present in situations in which women are not merely raped but are clear objects of trade or conquest between men.”

She has a footnote on “Vale of Lost Women” as being problematic. Females have been plunder and the spoils of conquest throughout history. Our current era is not the norm. Read more history. I do like Winter Elliott's term “rampaging lesbian.”

“Robert E. Howard's Barbarian and the Western” (A Study of Conan Through the West and Western Hero)/Daniel Weiss: Potentially a good subject. No mention at all on the westerns that REH had in his possession. Weiss spends lots of time about “bodies.” He almost goes homo discussing bodies. I get the impression Weiss knows little or nothing about western fiction from 1910-1936.

“Canaan Lies Beyond the Black River” (Howard's Dark Rhetoric of the Contact Zone)/Paul Shovlin. I had hopes for this one as Shovlin made the cut with a piece in The Cimmerian. Another article covering one of the -isms.

“As a growing and diversified fan base has begun to poke at Howard's work from a scholarly perspective, arguments about the location and implications of Howard's views of race in his writing have persisted.”

“Statistics in the Hyborian Age” (An Introduction to Stylometry)/Daniel Look: This is an article on what is stylometry. There is some mention of Robert E. Howard but really nothing related to Howard. There has been talk on stylometry but I have not seen it really do anything.

Part II: The Cultural Conan

“Arnold at the Gates” (Subverting Star Persona in Conan the Barbarian/Nicky Falkof: A lot of space is spent going over Schwarzenegger's career to contrast two different types of films he made and how Conan the Barbarian falls into neither category. Seems more space is spent on Chip Rommel's political career than his films.

“His entry into politics drew heavily on one part of the national immigrant mythology whereby the only barrier to success is one's own ability. This romantic notion is obscenely inverted in the U.S.'s treatment of and xenophobic response to economic migrants from elsewhere.”

“In the triumph of star persona, this Austrian immigrant with his murky family history of Nazi involvement, his questionable gender relations, his thick accent and his excessive musculature has become an 'all-American guy.” Schwarzenegger is understood within the culture to be prototypically white. . .it was a white hero who rode in the the sunset after saving the day, it was a white president who climbed into a fighter jet to take on the alien invaders in Independence Day, a white subject who was unconsciously constructed as the recipient of the benefits of the structure of the American Dream.”

“He has been given a pair of colored contact lens that turn his eyes an entrancing blue. This well-known black actor is thus given the physical significations that would mark a white person. He is almost un-raced, given a new designation so that he will fit into the mise-en-scene. I reiterate that there is nothing progressive about this; but the very desire to erase or reconfigure his rather than to mark him always-already as a black character is enormously different.”

Falkof quotes more than once from a book, Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt by “Gary Indiana” (The New Press, 2005). I did some digging and found the book online.

“Gary Indiana” has this to say in Schwarzenegger Syndrome:

“The breastified male is neither Greek nor antediluvian. It originates in comic books and adventure magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. The pasts of Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, and other Schwarzeneggerian characters are a pastiche of Mongol Empire, the Rome of Tiberius, Arthurian legends, and the planet Krypton. In this amalgam, which is arguably the 'prehistory' of the world as imagined by Creationists (who now have their own myth of origin posted as as an alternative to the geological, scientific facts in our national parks and places like the Grand Canyon), women achieve personhood by becoming warriors-- in other words, men—while the harsh exertions of men equip them with breasts, usurping one of the biological functions of women.”

“'Hot Avatars' in 'Gay Gear'” (The Virtual Male Body as Site of Conflicting Desires in Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures)/ James Kelley: Weiss almost went homo in his article, Kelley goes full homo in this one. The Age of Conan game, people who play, and how everyone is looking to come out of the closet.

“As the more extensive of these references illustrates, the online game severs here, too, as a release from the boys' real-world frustrations.”

“Age of Conan has thus received little specific attention, and few of the sources reviewed here address questions of gender and sexuality in Age of Conan. . .Diane Carr observes that while games often limit the expressions of nonconformists gender and sexual identities.”

Kelly quotes Jonathan Alexander: “gay gamers show us the possibilities and strategies of resisting such norms and opening up a a space for thinking differently and more diversely about sexual expression and intimacy.”

“Daryl Higgins and others, Nicholas Lanzieri and Tom Hildebrandt has recently aruged that, through muscle training, many gay men can use their own body “as a vehicle to connect to masculine power.'”

“Fandom and the Nostalgia of Masculinity”/Stephen Wall: “This project began as endeavor to understand the place of masculinity in Conan fandom, an effort to determine if the hypermasculine image of Conan the Barbarian prompted or halted discussion of the subject readers.”

Wall visited the old Conan.com forum. He also had a member that he plumbed for information. The point was to show Conan fans and forum members were mean old homophobes. Wall takes some time out for the discussion on the forum if REH died a virgin. A big point of this essay was male fans don't like their space invaded. A minor writer I never heard of, Barbara Tarbox who has had five stories published in small press mags and one of' the Sword & Sorceress anthology post Marion Zimmer Bradley. She came on the forum and got into it with the late PainBrush. PainBrush said “she declared she was going to single-handedly 'feminize Sword [and] Sorcery – or give it a long-needed 'woman's touch.'” I got a good laugh over that one.

“'Barbarian Heroing' and Its Parody”/Imola Bulgozdi: This is a comparison of Howard's Conan and Terry Pratchett's “Cohen the Barbarian.” I am not a fan of Terry Pratchett, that sort of fiction does not appeal to me. I do have a Pratchett book that Glenn Lord gave to me around 25 years ago. It might be the Cohen book. This was a totally useless article.

Reading Conan Meets the Academy was tedious. There was none of the sense of affirmation reading Cerasini and Hoffman's Starmont Reader's Guide to Robert E. Howard, the mental light-bulb turning on with The Dark Barbarian, or enjoyment reading The Barbaric Triumph.

The entries were all too often the case of forcing academic square pegs into round holes. You get the sense the majority of the authors don't even like Robert E. Howard.

The contents did not deliver the intent of the introduction. The influence on Robert E. Howard on popular culture could have been a great book in the hands of the right editor. Instead, it all too often meandered in the weeds.

Presentism pervades the book. The contributors lack of historical context and view 2012 as the default position. There was overuse of quotes of other works with no originality of ideas. The authors came off as credentialed mediocrities.

Academic weasel words such as body, objectification, diversified are used. The book checks the boxes acceptable to academia being anti-male, anti-Western, and deviant sexuality whenever possible. The book also manages to be anti-Robert E. Howard. This is not a half-bad book, this is a three quarters bad book. Conan Meets the Academy works well as a cultural Marxist tract.

My guess is the editor put out the call for a book and took whatever came his way despite not fulfilling the intended premise laid out in the introduction. This stands in stark contrast to The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph. My take home assessment is academia has three obsessions: sexism, racism, and sodomy.

Howard will do fine without academia. Larry Correia said at his Monster Hunter Nation website:

“The one good thing about being forced to read The Great Gatsby was that I discovered Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft afterwards because I figured that not everybody from that time frame could have been that incredibly annoying.

My sophomore English teacher dismissed those works as “pulp” not “literature”. Really? Because who has influenced more people in succeeding generations? Cthulu or Gatsby? My money is on the big squid.”

Practical conclusions rooted in eternal truths should be the goal, not abstract contemporary fads. The de Camp edited books The Spell of Conan and The Blade of Conan have had the biggest impact despite the often short nature of the articles.

A check with Worldcat.org has Conan Meets the Academy in 109 libraries. The Dark Barbarian is in 268 libraries.