Analysis of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’

To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1960 novel by Harper Lee, winning the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The book has been widely read in high schools and middle schools in the US since as early as 1963 (I read it in Grade 10 English class in the mid-1980s in Canada); the choice of TKAM as a suitable subject for teen classroom study has been controversial, given its use of racial slurs, the topic of rape, and occasional mild profanity.

The novel was adapted into a film in 1962, starring Gregory Peck (who won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Atticus Finch) and Mary Badham, with Phillip Alford, John Megna, Frank Overton, Rosemary Murphy, Brock Peters, Estelle Evans, Paul Fix, Collin Wilcox, James Anderson, Robert Duvall, and William Windom. The film was also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Despite the novel’s controversial subject matter of rape and racial prejudice against blacks, TKAM is famous for the warmth and humour of its narration. Finch, the lawyer father of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch–who narrates the novel as an adult and who as a child is played by Badham in the film–is a hero and model of integrity for lawyers, since it is Atticus who takes on the burden of defending Tom Robinson (Peters), a black man falsely accused of raping Mayella Ewell (Wilcox) in a town so prejudiced against blacks that there’s no way he’ll be acquitted, even though it’s established that his ‘raping’ of her would have been physically impossible.

There was a mixed response to the novel upon its publication. Despite the “astonishing phenomenon” (to use author Mary McDonough Murphy’s words) of TKAM, with many copies sold and its widespread use in schools over the years, there’s been surprisingly scant literary analysis of it. I hope what I write here won’t be little more than a repetition and variation of what others have already said about it.

An obvious theme in the novel is prejudice, though it isn’t limited to the prejudice against blacks. A major issue, at the beginning of the story, for Scout, her older brother Jeremy “Jem” Finch (Alford), and their friend, Charles Baker Harris (“Dill”–Megna), is their fear of reclusive Arthur “Boo” Radley (Duvall), who is perceived by the three kids as a dangerous, violent psychopath. They believe this because of horrific stories about him, based on the gossip of their neighbours, which is the basis of their prejudice against him.

Actually, Boo is a shy man who would like to be friends with the kids, and so he often leaves little gifts for them in the tree knothole by the Radley house. The kids are content to take the gifts, and while they find him fascinating and mysterious, they’re still scared of him, wanting to goad him into coming out of his house so they can see him while keeping a safe distance from him.

Like Tom Robinson, Boo is a “mockingbird” of the story, against whom it would be a sin to kill. These two are kind, gentle people who would never harm anyone (except in self-defence or the defence of others, as in the case of Radley defending Jem and Scout from an assault at night towards the end of the novel, an assault from a character who is a true danger to many: Bob Ewell (Anderson).

Ewell and his family are a personification of the ‘white trash’ stereotype in many ways. Apart from their virulent racism against blacks, there’s a general vulgarity about them that anyone would find repellent.

One would feel some sympathy for Mayella, Bob’s daughter and a target of much of his abuse, of which sexual abuse is strongly implied in the story, as well as physical and emotional abuse. Still, she helps to enable the charge of rape against Tom Robinson, when we learn that it was actually she who made sexual advances on him. (Lee, pages 259-260)

There’s another child in the Ewell family, a boy named Burris, who keeps failing the first grade in Scout’s class, because he shows up only on the first day of every school year. He’s filthy dirty, and Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher, tells him to go home and wash the lice out of his hair. The boy demonstrates his vulgarity by calling her a “snot-nosed slut” before leaving the classroom. (Lee, pages 35-37)

Now, I mention this ‘white trash’ stereotype among poor people in the story, but this doesn’t mean that stereotypes are tossed around everywhere without any sensitivity in TKAM. On the contrary, Lee takes pains in her narrative to defy stereotypical thinking as much as possible. The Ewell family, as well as the ‘ladylike’ but hypocritical Mrs. Merriweather and her gossipy ilk, are exceptions to the rule.

To contrast a good (or at least relatively good) poor family against the Ewells, there are the Cunninghams, who are portrayed in a largely sympathetic way. Little Walter Cunningham is invited to the Finch’s house for a meal, since the boy is hungry; this is after he’s got into a fight with Scout at school. He helps himself to a generous amount of molasses during the meal, at which Scout frowns in disapproval, then she is reprimanded by Calpurnia (Evans in the film) for being judgmental about his indulgence. (Lee, pages 32-33) The Cunninghams are so poor, hit hard by The Depression, that they can’t pay in cash for anything.

The boy’s father, Walter Cunningham Sr., pays off his debt to Atticus for his legal services by giving him firewood, vegetables, and other supplies. As a poor farmer, Mr. Cunningham is a mix of good and bad. His willingness to give things in place of money in exchange for this or that good or service shows how honorable he is to respect others for what good they’ve done for him (on an individual level, what he’s doing is rather like gift culture).

His bad side, however, is seen when he is part of a mob intent on lynching Tom Robinson. A moral weakness of many among the poor is their tendency ‘to punch down,’ or to hurt those in a weaker social position than they’re in, as with poor white Cunningham as against poor black Robinson; this is equally true of Mayella and her false rape accusation. These people would do better ‘to punch up,’ or fight the rich capitalist class instead.

It is Scout’s sweet, innocent words to Mr. Cunningham that make him relent and take his would-be lynch mob back home (pages 204-206). She asks him about his entailment (<<< from legal 3rd definition) and his son, Walter Cunningham, Jr. In this relenting, Mr. Cunningham redeems himself a bit and thus rises above the ‘white trash’ stereotype.

Scout herself is the perfect embodiment of a character in TKAM who defies stereotypes, for she is a tomboy. She typically wears denim overalls rather than dresses, and she often gets into fights with boys at school; I mentioned above her fight with Walter Jr. She is a lovable contrast to the stereotypical gossipy ladies like Mrs. Merriweather (Chapter 24).

It’s important that the novel confront the problem of stereotypes and then defy them, for of course it is stereotypical thinking, with the sweeping generalizations it makes about this or that group of people (‘all blacks are like this,’ ‘all poor people are like that,’ ‘all women and girls do this or that sort of thing,’ etc.), that leads to prejudice against those people.

Prejudice, as we know, often leads to killing. Because of prejudice against Tom and the stereotyping of blacks, he’ll not only be found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit–a crime it should be easy to see he couldn’t possibly have committed–but also shot dead…with seventeen bullets…when trying to run and escape from prison (page 315).

Atticus decries the stereotyping of and sweeping generalizations made against blacks during his closing statement to the jury for Robinson’s trial (page 273). He speaks of “the evil assumption–that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our [i.e., white] women” (Lee’s emphasis). Atticus speaks ironically that this is “a lie as black as Tom Robinson’s skin”.

One ought to remember that such racist generalizing about blacks is not limited to poor, uneducated, ignorant ‘white trash,’ much to the dismay of the educated liberal. Even a philosopher as otherwise brilliant as Hegel was not above making unfair generalizations about “the Negro” (a word which, by the way, was once the polite word to use for black people, as was colored…back during such times as the Jim Crow years). One need only read the Introduction of Hegel’s Philosophy of History (“GEOGRAPHICAL BASIS OF HISTORY,” pages 91-99) to see what I mean.

He claims that Africa is “the land of childhood,” (page 91) that “The Negro…exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state” (page 93), and that among them “moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly speaking, non-existent.” (page 96) Thus, apparently, to paraphrase Hegel’s conclusion on page 99, Africa should be left out of a serious discussion of history as “movement or development”.

Apart from the general lack in Marx of the ugly racism we see in Hegel, my other reasons for preferring Marx to Hegel include how Marx’s theory of the base and superstructure can explain how it’s the social relations of production (the base) that result in the legal, political, and cultural realms (the superstructure) that are in turn used to justify the base, therefore perpetuating the entire system in a seemingly endless loop. In other words, Marx explains how class antagonisms result in the very racism Hegel so thoughtlessly rationalizes. It is not Hegel’s “World Spirit” that will bring mankind closer and closer to freedom, but Marx’s revolutionary overthrow of the system that will do so.

To get back to Boo Radley, the kids regard him as “a malevolent phantom” (page 10), a “haint” that lives in the Radley house. We imagine a ghost saying “Boo,” and this nickname that the kids have for him sounds like a short form for the racial slur “boogie,” which had already been used against blacks since the early 1920s (i.e., through its association with ‘boogie-woogie’). Though the use of “spook” as a racial slur for blacks was only first used in the 1940s, well after the setting of TKAM in the Depression-era 1930s, the book’s publication in 1960 means that Lee must have been aware of its use as a slur, and so the notion of regarding Boo as a ghost fits in with how prejudice against him parallels prejudice against blacks.

When we finally get a physical description of Boo Radley, we learn that his skin is a sickly white, his face and hands in particular–so white as to be far whiter than normal (page 362). There’s an irony in how this far whiter than white skin is on a man against whom the prejudice parallels that of a black man like Tom Robinson.

According to the gossip of Miss Stephanie Crawford (Dill’s aunt in the film, and played by Alice Ghostley), Boo took a pair of scissors and stabbed them in the leg of his father (page 10). This stabbing of phallic scissor blades in his father’s leg can be paralleled symbolically with Tom Robinson’s supposed rape of Mayella. It’s another apocryphal story used to reinforce prejudice against someone who’s actually gentle.

Jem gives “a reasonable description of Boo” on page 16. Actually, it’s a sensationalistic, exaggerated, and terrifying description. Apparently, Boo eats raw squirrels and cats, which explains his bloodstained hands. There’s a long, jagged scar going across his face. His teeth are yellow and rotten, of those he still has. His eyes pop, and he usually drools. Such an ugly description parallels that of any racist for the ‘ugly,’ dark appearance of black people.

As scared as the kids are of this supposedly terrifying man, though, they’re also fascinated with him, Dill in particular wanting to know what he looks like (page 16). They start daring each other to go up to the Radley house and get an up-close look at him (pages 16-19). This mix of fascination and fear of those one is prejudiced against can be compared to the human zoos of the past, where whites would look at, for example, Africans in enclosures; then there’s that opening scene in Office Space, on the commute to work, when Michael Bolton is grooving to hip hop in his car, but he gets terrified when a young black man approaches, so Bolton locks his car door and turns down his music.

Going against all of this prejudice are the words of wisdom that Atticus imparts onto Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view….until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” (page 39) Put another way, empathy is the cure for prejudice.

Still, the kids persist in their fantasies about Boo Radley, even acting out dramas of the Radley family, with Scout playing Mrs. Radley, just sweeping the porch, Dill playing old Mr. Radley, pacing the sidewalk and coughing, and Jem playing Boo, who “shrieked and howled from time to time.” (pages 51-52) This is rather like how so many of us, even when told about the virtue of empathy, persist in our prejudices against blacks and other minorities, scorning empathy as “woke.”

Only in the case of Jem, Scout, and Dill, they’re all just little kids who don’t know any better. Unlike so many adults who persist in their bigotries, the three kids will learn the error of prejudicial thinking, thanks to their progressive-minded father and their closeness to Calpurnia, who helps humanize blacks for them by her example. Indeed, during Robinson’s trial, the kids will go up to the area of the courtroom to watch the trial with the blacks, including Reverend Sykes. This kids’ sitting with the blacks is a symbolic desegregation that will be very good for them, and it will help pave the way for Scout’s acceptance of Boo Radley by the end of the story.

The kids’ gradual learning of the evil of prejudice may be good for them, but it’s also painful, for in this process of learning, they will also lose their innocence. Jem’s loss of his pants while escaping from Boo can be seen as symbolic of that loss of innocence (Chapter 6, pages 72-73).

With the theme of the loss of innocence is all feigned innocence masking guilt, as well as imagined guilt hiding an actual innocence. We see the former in how the three kids seem all sweet and innocent, yet they’re being naughty in their repeated trespassing on the Radley property, which is based on their not-so-innocent prejudging of Boo Radley.

There’s also the seeming innocence of the charming Maycomb community, who seem all sweet, innocent, and Christian, yet they’re tainted with racial prejudice. This problem is by no means limited to the Ewells: others, including Mrs. Merriweather in the Missionary Society, put on hypocritical airs of Christian piety (Chapter 24), yet they display blatant racism towards blacks (Merriweather, for example, uses the word “darky” to refer to blacks on page 310). Then there’s the attempt, led by Mr. Cunningham, to lynch Tom Robinson. There’s also the gossiping of the community.

On the other side of the coin, there’s the real innocence of Boo Radley and Tom Robinson, which is obscured behind all the prejudice against the two. It should be clear early on that Boo means no harm to the kids when he leaves the gifts in the tree knothole for them. Finally, his defence of Jem and Scout against Bob Ewell’s assault on them proves once and for all what a good man Boo is. Near the end of the story, when Scout sees him and says, “Hey, Boo,” then Atticus gently corrects her by saying, “Mr. Arthur, honey,” it’s like someone telling a racist not to use racial slurs when referring to blacks.

Speaking of blacks, Tom Robinson is clearly a kind, gentle human being who only wanted to be helpful to Mayella in doing little household chores for her, and with no remuneration for it. Her sexual advances on him, then her accusation of rape, were not only an attempt to hide her guilt behind a veil of innocence, but also a projection of lechery onto him.

Robinson, like Radley, is a “mockingbird,” a symbol of innocence. It’s a sin to kill, or otherwise harm in any way either of these men–or people like them–because they do no harm to anyone; they do only acts of kindness, just as how mockingbirds will just “sing their hearts out for us,” as Miss Maudie says to Scout (page 119), to explain to the little girl what her father meant by it being acceptable to shoot all the bluejays she and Jem want to shoot with their air-rifles, but never to shoot mockingbirds.

Never harm the innocent.

One of the biggest problems we have in this world is our inability to tell the difference between the innocent and the guilty. That inability is the result of our minds being tainted with prejudice–a loss of our own innocence.

Because of this taint of prejudice, Atticus’s job of defending Robinson, what should be a straightforward one of establishing a reasonable doubt that he raped Mayella, has become nearly impossible. The fact that Robinson’s left arm is useless and crippled, the result of an accident with a cotton gin when he was a child, demonstrates that he couldn’t possibly have given Mayella the facial injuries she got from the rape she accuses him of, injuries that in all probability came from the left hand of her assailant.

Bob Ewell, however, is left-handed, as he shows the people in the courtroom when he writes his name on an envelope for all to see (page 237). That it’s far likelier that a villain like Bob, who drinks and poaches to feed his poor family, is the one who hit and perhaps even raped Mayella, rather than Robinson, is completely lost on the prejudiced jury.

There are no lengthy debates between Atticus and Mr. Gilmer, the prosecutor (Windom) during the trial. Gilmer must imagine, correctly, that he’ll easily win this case simply because the defendant is black. The “witnesses [have] been led by the nose as asses are,” older Scout notes in the narration (page 252), which is an allusion to a soliloquy by Iago in Othello (Act One, Scene iii, lines 444-445), a play about a black man being manipulated by scheming, vengeful white Iago. Just as Othello is led to his destruction by Iago, so is Robinson being led to his destruction by the lies of a white supremacist society.

Because of all of these problems, what should be an easy defence for Atticus has become a near-impossible one. Not only will this job be as difficult for him to do as I’ve said, but he’ll also be hated as a ‘nigger-lover’ for doing it (e.g., Bob Ewell’s vengeful attempt on the lives of Jem and Scout). If he refuses the job, though, he won’t be able to live with himself, let alone give non-hypocritical moral guidance to his kids (pages 139-140).

His annoyance at having to deal with problems that shouldn’t exist when defending Robinson is rather like in the incident when he has to shoot the rabid dog (Chapter 10). Sheriff Hector “Heck” Tate (Overton) wants Atticus to shoot the dog because Atticus is a much better shot than Tate (page 127); similarly, Judge Taylor wants Atticus to take on the Robinson case. Shooting the mad dog is symbolic of ridding Maycomb County of racial prejudice. Here is an animal that should be killed…to protect the truly innocent.

Interestingly, TKAM also explores how racial prejudice can go in the opposite direction. In Chapter 12, Calpurnia takes Jem and Scout to the church of the black community, and a black woman there named Lula is annoyed to see two white kids in their church. Now it’s Calpurnia who has been put in Atticus’s shoes, telling Lula there’s nothing wrong with whites attending their church (page 158).

Lula’s the only one there who has this negative attitude, though, for as Zeebo, the garbage collector, says, the rest of the black community are all mighty glad to have Jem and Scout there in church with them (page 159). It’s in this church that the kids meet Reverend Sykes, who as we know later will have the kids with all the blacks in the balcony area of the courthouse for the trial. Of course, the kids have no prejudice against blacks, for Scout would like to go and visit Calpurnia at her home (pages 167-168), and Calpurnia would be glad to have them come over.

Now, just after Scout has asked to see Calpurnia in her home, Scout looks over at the Radley Place, “expecting to see its phantom occupant”, but it isn’t there. She still needs to get over her hangups about Boo.

Older Scout as narrator observes “a caste system in Maycomb, where the people “took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time.” (page 175) Examples of such “character shadings” and stereotypes are then given for the gossipy Crawfords, the morbidity of one third of the Merriweathers, the dishonest Delafields, and the idiosyncratic walk of the Bufords. Here are examples of Maycomb prejudices and stereotypical thinking that have nothing to do with race or ethnicity.

Another such example of prejudice is in Aunt Alexandra and her attitude toward the Cunninghams. She won’t have little Walter Cunningham over to the Finch’s house because, in her opinion, “he–is–trash, that’s why” (page 301). We know the Cunninghams, for all of their faults, are nowhere near as bad as the Ewells, but they’re poor enough to be “trash” in Aunt Alexandra’s eyes.

To get back to Robinson’s trial, when Mr. Gilmer is cross-examining him, it’s clear that the prosecutor is relying a lot less on examining the evidence for or against Robinson than on using anything about him to reinforce stereotypical thinking about him, to get an easy conviction. Gilmer begins his cross-examination by mentioning Robinson’s having gotten thirty days for disorderly conduct, implying that Robinson had beaten up “the nigger” really badly, when actually, it was Robinson who got badly beaten (page 262).

Next, Gilmer links Robinson’s being strong enough to bust up chiffarobes and kindling with one hand, “to chok[ing] the breath out of a woman, and sling[ing] her to the floor.” (page 263) It doesn’t matter if there’s any actual proof of Robinson doing that to Mayella…just establish the possibility (however unlikely) of him doing that, just because he’s black. Gilmer also reverses the sense of appearance vs reality with Tom by saying he’s “a mighty good fellow, it seems” by helping with the Ewells’ chores “for not one penny” (page 263).

Gilmer is shocked to hear Robinson say he helped Mayella for free because he felt sorry for her (page 264). It doesn’t matter how poor or ‘white trash’ the Ewell family are, or how it should be obvious that Bob Ewell abuses her. Robinson has every reason in the world to feel sorry for her, but such an idea is unmentionable, since she is white and he is an ‘inferior’ black man.

Yet the whole problem with such things as racial and ethnic prejudice, class conflict, sexual abuse, and the mistreatment of women is that there’s a lack of feeling sorry for people, a lack of empathy, the presence of which would be the beginning of a cure to these problems. We’ll notice how in this trial there’s no real concern with getting justice for Mayella–not even she is really concerned with it, so indoctrinated is she with the prejudices of her community. It’s all about finding a scapegoat in the form of a black man, to rid the Maycomb community of its sin.

What’s deeply saddening is how, in Atticus’s real hopes that an appeal of the guilty verdict will lead to an acquittal, “the shadow of a beginning” (page 297), Robinson still ends up shot and killed.

Yet another example of the liberal hypocrisy in the Maycomb community is when, in Scout’s class with Miss Gates, the teacher contrasts the “DEMOCRACY” of the US with Hitler’s fascism and persecution of the Jews (pages 328-329); yet Scout has also seen Miss Gates leave the courthouse after the Robinson trial, and she’s talking with Miss Stephanie Crawford about how the blacks in their community should learn a lesson from the trial about “gettin’ way above themselves, an’ the next thing they think they can do is marry [white people].” (page 331)

Jem and Scout have come to a better understanding of people by the end of the novel. Scout figures “there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.” (page 304) Jem can understand that idea, but he’s upset about how that “one kind of folks” always “despise each other”. He can understand that it’s this contempt for one’s fellow man that makes Boo Radley want to stay shut up in his house all the time.

In a conversation earlier with Jem on page 196, when the boy mentions the Ku Klux Klan, Atticus dismisses the idea, saying “It’ll never come back.”

After the attempted lynching of Robinson that Atticus saw, one wonders how he could be so sure of there being no return of the Klan.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1960

The Tanah: Proverbs

[The following is the thirty-second of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, here is the twenty-seventh, here is the twenty-eighth, here is the twenty-ninth, here is the thirtieth, and here is the thirty-first–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Translator’s Introduction

This set of pithy maxims was not thought to be requiring a magical ritual, involving the use of the four elements personified by the Crims. The words were thought to be magically effective in themselves: the original language uses such musical elements as metre, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and rhyme felt sufficient to influence the feelings of those in the tribe and to deter them from using magic in aid of sinning, by curbing unhealthy emotions.

They are to be chanted repeatedly, louder and louder, and with more and more emotional intensity.

Pride is the father of shame.
Humility is the mother of honour.
Anger is a moment of madness.
Calm keeps sanity everlasting.
Envy is admiration and hate embracing.
Its lack looks on without malevolence.
Greed never grasps enough.
Giving never gets empty-handed.
One getting fat while many starve
reverses how food should be shared.
Lust loves the flesh and hates the heart.
Lovemaking gives life, never taking.
Despair hates all the outside world,
because it hates all that’s inside.

Commentary

It’s fascinating how this ancient tribe, through these proverbs, seems to have anticipated the deadly sins of the Church.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 4

[The following is the twenty-fourth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, and here is the twenty-third–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

There are many ways to be cruel to others, and to use magic in aid of being cruel to others; but there is one form of cruelty that deserves special attention, and so we will focus on that here.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling others.

We have seen in Chapter Two how magic can be, and mustn’t be, used in aid of seducing others. We gave the example from the writing called “The Migrations” how a Luminosian boy used magic to seduce a girl living next to his home, and how after using her to satisfy his lust, he beat her to death when she, realizing after his magic’s power had worn off, was horrified at what he had done to her.

We repeat the same warnings again and again because they are never heeded, and we will continue to make the same warnings until they are finally heeded! Just before the writing of this chapter, another young Luminosian, among us slaves here in Zoya, used magic to help him seduce a Zoyan woman. He was discovered with her in bed, her slave, and then taken away to be put to death. Some never learn.

Seducing others is a form of controlling others. It must be stopped among us Luminosians if we are to have any hope of liberation from our Zoyan masters. They used magic to help them control and enslave us. We must not think, as some Luminosians do, that using magic to control the Zoyans and enslave them will be our revenge on them, as that boy did.

The law of sow and reap that is the Echo Effect does not come about through man’s attempts at manipulating it. The Echo Effect works of its own accord, as a direct consequence of man’s actions. The Zoyans will one day receive the Echo Effect from their own control and enslaving of us; we Luminosians, too, will receive the Echo Effect from our own control and enslaving of others!

There are those who rule a country who may use magic to control, seduce, enslave, and lie to others in order to strengthen their power. Upon the day of our liberation from Zoya, we Luminosians must resist the temptation, when founding a new nation for ourselves, to use magic to be tyrannical rulers. If we tyrannize others with the aid of magic, the Echo Effect will ensure that we one day will be tyrannized again, as we are now under the Zoyans.

Magic must never be used in aid of telling lies to others, to create false proof of lies. Heads of state may create such false events to bolster their power, or people in communities, families, places of work, or schools may do so to harm others. Such sinning must be condemned and stopped if our people are to survive, be free again, and grow. If we allow liars to use magic to make their falsehoods seem more vivid, and their illusions seem more true, then one day, the lies will come back to us all in the most convincing of illusions. The Echo Effect will make disproving those illusions impossible!

Analysis of ‘First Blood’

First Blood is a 1972 novel by David Morrell. It was adapted into a 1982 movie by Ted Kotcheff, the screenplay written by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone, the last of these three of course starring as Rambo. Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna costarred.

The film went through development hell for ten years because of such difficulties as finding the right director and cast, and getting a suitable screenplay. Morrell had sold the film rights in 1972 to Columbia Pictures; the rights were then sold to Warner Bros., and finally Orion Pictures produced the film. Another reason a film adaptation didn’t appear in the early to mid-1970s was that the Vietnam War was still going on, and film studios were worried about moviegoers’ reactions to such sensitive subject matter as that of a Vietnam vet waging a one-man war against an American town.

A suitable adaptation was finally created, to a large extent from Stallone’s rewrites, when the novel’s violence was toned down, Rambo was made more sympathetic, and he would survive in the end, which–thanks to the box-office success of the film–allowed for sequels to be made.

In fact, Morrell wrote the novelizations for Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, having informed readers in the preface to Part II to disregard the death of Rambo in his original novel. Then came two other films, Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood; all of the sequels’ screenplays were co-written by Stallone, with Morrell having no involvement in any way with the writing of the last two…though he praised Stallone’s portrayal of Rambo in the fourth film, saying Stallone had returned the character to Morrell’s original intentions as angry, cold, burned out, and filled with self-disgust.

Here is a link to quotes from the first film, and here is a link to an audiobook of the novel.

While the two sequels from the 1980s, as I said above, novelized by Morrell (fittingly, as you’ll see why below), were little more than mindless action movie nonsense, and one can basically say the same about the other two sequels, in a sense it is fitting to see Rambo in actual war situations (in Vietnam in Part II, in Afghanistan in Rambo III, in Burma in Rambo, and in Mexico in Last Blood). I say this because I see the original novel and first movie as telling a story that, while set in an American town, is an allegory of the Vietnam War, with Rambo personifying US imperialism, and the local cops representing the Vietnamese army.

Accordingly and predictably, as far as the sequels are concerned, the Vietnamese and Soviets are portrayed negatively (except for pro-US Vietnamese spy Co Bao (played by Julia Nickson) in Part II, the Soviets are portrayed negatively in Rambo III, the Burmese government is portrayed so negatively (which should not be misconstrued that I’m advocating for the junta) in Rambo as to have had the film banned in the country, and in Last Blood, Mexicans are portrayed so badly that there have been accusations of this last sequel promoting racist and xenophobic attitudes towards the country (in a rather Trump-esque vein). This sort of propagandizing against and vilifying of any country or government going against US interests is typical of imperialism.

As for the first movie, the local police of the town of Hope, Washington (in the novel, the town is Madison, Kentucky) are also portrayed negatively, with sheriff Will Teasle (Dennehy) being prickly to Rambo right from the start. Deputy Sergeant Arthur “Art” Galt (played by Jack Starrett) is abusive to Rambo to the point of psychopathy; and the other police, when chasing Rambo in the forest and getting wounded by him, cry out to Will for help like children weeping for their daddy.

In contrast, the novel’s portrayal of Teasle is much more sympathetic and nuanced, with lots of backstory to tell us the kind of world the sheriff is from. His wife has left him, so he has to deal with the pain of that. Also, Teasle is a Korean War veteran, so in that, among other things, he parallels Rambo the Vietnam vet.

Also, in the novel, Teasle doesn’t arrest Rambo (who is called only “Rambo” or “the kid”; the “John” and “James” are inventions of the movies) until after he returns to the town several times. This is opposed to Dennehy’s Teasle, who is abrasive with Rambo just upon first seeing him and not liking how he looks. He arrests him immediately for vagrancy upon Rambo’s just beginning his first return to the town.

It’s important to contrast the tone of the film with that of the novel in light of my allegorizing them as representative of American involvement in Vietnam. The film is, as I’ve said, far more sympathetic to Rambo, and far less sympathetic to the local police and reserve army “weekend warriors,” while in the novel, there’s much more moral ambiguity between the two sides.

In the film, Rambo injures those coming after him, but he never kills them, except for Galt, and even he is killed only accidentally, in self-defence. In the novel, Rambo kills many cops, and most deliberately, including Galt, who isn’t the ACAB pig of the film, but rather a somewhat inept cop who often forgets to lock the door leading upstairs from where they keep the incarcerated downstairs.

This contrast can help us understand the film’s attitude, as opposed to that of the novel, concerning the Vietnam War allegory that I see in both. The film, in having us sympathize with PTSD-stricken Rambo, as against the obnoxious local cops, takes the pro-American attitude towards Vietnam. The novel, with its morally ambiguous attitude towards both sides, allegorically takes into account how wrong it was that the US went into Vietnam and did all the damage it did there.

When we see Teasle telling Rambo, with that American flag on his jacket, to get out of town and stay out, we can see Teasle’s intolerance towards Rambo as representative of the Vietnamese not wanting any more imperialists or colonialists in their country. After all, they had just finished driving out the French colonialists by the mid-1950s, and because of Western Cold War paranoia about the ‘Red menace,’ then, by the 1960s, they had to put up with Uncle Sam moving into their country.

So the cops’ arresting Rambo, then chasing him into the mountainside forest, are allegorical of US troops taken as POWs by the Vietnamese, who then would have chased any escaped POWs in the jungles of Vietnam. Certainly in Rambo’s PTSD-addled mind, his reliving of the trauma he suffered in Nam as he flees to the forest from the cops makes the whole story into the Vietnam War all over again, from his perspective.

Seen in this light, the notion of who really “drew first blood” has a chillingly ironic new meaning.

It’s assumed by most in the West that Vietnam started the war because the “commies” were out to take over the world and ‘enslave’ everybody, so the US had to stop the spread of communism (i.e., the ‘domino theory‘) and intervene. Actually, the US lied, through the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident, to justify greater involvement in Vietnam. US imperialism and colonialism (i.e., the French) drew first blood, not Vietnam. Allegorically speaking, Rambo’s insistence on coming into town again and again (as in the novel)–defying Teasle’s insistence that he not do so (however more patient he is with Rambo in the novel, even allowing him to have something to eat in a local diner)–is what has metaphorically drawn first blood, too.

In the film, why should Teasle think that Rambo’s entering town with the American flag on his jacket, of all things, to be a sign that he’s looking for trouble? And looking the way he does, in combination with the flag (long hair, sloppy, and smelling bad), is what’s implied, of course, but allegorically speaking, it can represent a white man in Southeast Asia in a green army jacket, with that flag on it, implying a military uniform.

To make Rambo more sympathetic in the film, we see good-looking Stallone with combed hair and no beard or mustache…unlike the far shaggier and scruffier-looking Rambo of the novel. Also in the film, he is further humanized in its opening scene, in which he tries to visit a veteran friend from his team in Nam by going to the vet’s home, only to learn that he died of cancer from Agent Orange. Rambo is lonely, homeless, and suffering from PTSD. The Rambo of the novel has the same problems, but because of his tendency to kill, he’s far less sympathetic.

The issue of veterans’ PTSD, emphasized in the film, is of course a valid one, especially given how shabbily the US government has treated its veterans when they’re no longer of any use to the imperial war machine. Empire doesn’t just harm those outside the imperial core: it hurts those within it, too, and that’s why it’s valid to allegorize a vet’s war in an American town as a war in one of those Third World countries that the empire wants to subjugate and plunder.

These soldiers traumatize others and get traumatized themselves. Rambo’s loneliness represents the alienation and estrangement people feel in society and workers feel doing their work. Accordingly, while Col. Samuel Trautman (Crenna) in the film knows Rambo well (calling him “Johnny”), has personally trained him, and–as the final scene makes clear–is a father figure to him (once again reinforcing our sympathy for the US Army’s point of view), in the novel, Capt. Trautman merely headed the training facility where Rambo learned to be a soldier, he hardly knows Rambo at all, and he’s the one to put a bullet in Rambo’s head at the end of the novel.

My allegorizing of the story as one of Rambo fighting in the Vietnam War, instead of the local American cops, can be seen clearly in the novel, when shortly before Rambo’s breaking out of the police station and racing off to the forest on the mountain, he remembers a time in Nam when labouring as a POW, he gets sick, and he is given a chance to escape when the Vietnamese guards leave him to his own devices. Going through the jungle, he’s given food by local villagers, and he eventually rejoins members of the US Army.

Paralleling this Vietnam memory is Rambo’s escape from the police station, where instead of being sick, his vulnerability is from running outside completely naked (he’s just had a shower to clean away his body odour, and before he even has a chance to get dressed, he’s freaking out from a PTSD trigger from the cops’ attempt to shave his beard and give him a haircut). In the forest on the mountainside, Rambo gets clothes, food, and a rifle from an old man and a boy illegally making moonshine from a still; this help parallels the Vietnamese villagers having fed him.

Rambo is extremely averse to getting a haircut and a shave. In the novel, he’s kept in a cell that gives him claustrophobia. In the film, the sight of the straight razor gives him a PTSD flashback, making him relive the terror of a Vietnamese guard bringing a blade up to his chest and slashing it, triggering Rambo’s fight/flight response. Cutting his hair and shaving his beard, as the cops try to do in the novel, can be compared to the cutting of Samson‘s long hair, thus depriving him of his great strength. In the end, Samson kills all the Philistines, but also himself; in the novel, Rambo kills many of his enemies, and himself gets killed, too.

Having Rambo escape naked reinforces our sense of how tough he is. He can ignore public embarrassment, the discomfort of his unprotected nut-sack slapping against the seat of the motorbike as he races into the wind on it, and the possibility of scraping his skin on the ground if the bike crashes. Him naked among the trees on the mountainside also reinforces our sense of how feral he is.

Another point of contrast between the novel and the film is in who they emphasize as being the main victims of the Vietnam War. In my allegorical interpretation of the novel, Rambo’s shooting and killing of all of Teasle’s cops, as well as that of Orval Kellerman (played by John McLiam in the film) and his dogs, and on top of them, his setting of much of the town on fire suggests the American troops’ shooting and napalming of the Vietnamese and their villages. The film’s emphasis on Rambo’s PTSD, leading to him breaking down and crying at the end, as well as his never deliberately killing anyone, emphasizes how victimized the American vets felt.

Now, Rambo’s rant to Trautman at the end of the film, about how wrongly he and other vets were treated by antiwar protestors, them spitting on him and calling him “‘Baby-killer,’ and all kinds of vile crap,” is valid insofar as some troops really were innocent of such atrocities. Other troops, however, weren’t so innocent, as was the case with the My Lai massacre of 1968.

In any case, the antiwar protestors should have reserved most of their ire for the top military brass and American government. Recall that old antiwar song by Black Sabbath, which condemned the generals and politicians that plotted and started the Vietnam War, then had the poor–young men like Rambo–do all of their dirty work for them…and it was those very same poor who came home–if they weren’t killed–traumatized, unemployed, and often homeless, like Rambo; it wasn’t the generals or politicians who suffered thus.

I mentioned above how there are parallels between Rambo and Teasle in the novel, i.e., they’re both vets. Also, it’s not just Teasle et al hunting Rambo; it’s vice versa, too. Both men sustain nasty injuries in the mountainside woods, and it’s as if there’s a psychic link between the two, because later on in the novel, when Teasle is back in town, he’s had a vision in a dream that Rambo is coming back into Madison.

This time, Rambo’s going back into town to torch it all, linking this return to the other ones at the beginning, which prodded Teasle into arresting him and starting the whole conflict in the first place. This linking of going back into town, in terms of my allegory, shows how Rambo’s arrival has always been an invasion, even if he didn’t kill anybody at first. It’s like the imperialist establishment of South Vietnam (or South Korea, for that matter), a preparation for coming war and prompting the establishment of the Viet Cong.

The whole point in allegorizing the conflict in First Blood, with a US vet fighting a local American town to represent the US army fighting in Nam, is to show how imperialism’s ravaging of other countries eventually turns back on itself, causing the empire to eat itself up and ravage the imperial core. This is what we can see the Trump administration doing as I’ve been writing this post: first, they did the usual–continue to enable the Gaza genocide and Ukrainian war, and threaten Venezuela; now, they’re sending the National Guard into American cities like Washington DC, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles to terrorize American citizens, regardless of whether or not they’re illegal immigrants, in response to an “enemy within.” When we hurt people outside, we hurt people inside (e.g., Vietnam vets’ PTSD), because in the end we’re all one.

Before Rambo goes back into town, though, he still has to hide from those doing the manhunt for him, which by now has included the National Guard and civilians. He goes deep into a mining cave, in which at first he imagines it’s like being in a Catholic Church where he can go to confession; indeed, he contemplates how he wasn’t justified in killing those cops–he could have simply escaped, but he knows that his instinct to keep fighting is powered, at least in part, by his enjoyment of killing. In his bloodlust, we can see how he personifies US imperialism.

Deep in that black pit of a cave–which in the novel, at one point shorty after he’s come back out, is aptly compared to hell–Rambo comes to a filthy chamber with toxic fumes and a floor covered in shit. Bats fly out all over him, biting and scratching him (in the film, it’s rats). He is repelled back, but he soon realizes that it’s only through this awful chamber that he’ll be able to come back out to the surface. Only by going through the darkest hell can one come back out to the light: this heaven/hell dialectic, like any dialectical unity of opposites, is something I’ve discussed in a number of blog posts before.

So in this situation, Rambo is like Jesus harrowing hell before His resurrection…though Rambo’s return to the earth’s surface will make him anything but holy.

Nonetheless, the notion of Rambo emerging from the cave as a kind of resurrected, avenging Christ is apt when we consider, in the context of my allegory, how the missionary spread of Christianity (in places like Africa, for example) has been used to justify colonialism and imperialism. Recall Ann Coulter‘s incendiary words about Muslim-majority countries immediately after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” The Western capitalist complaint about “Godless communists” would have also been used as a rationalization for fighting the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular.

In any case, when Rambo comes out of that cave, he feels “good,” as it says in the novel, being the only apt word to describe how he feels. He’s full of resolve and energy, eager to fight his personal war on the town. This good feeling is comparable to experiencing the transformed, ‘spiritual body‘ of the resurrected Christ, ready to go out and fight as a Christian soldier against the ‘civilian’ pagans, or those whom Rambo fights, those without his military training and discipline.

In the film, he steals a military transport truck carrying an M60 machine gun. In the novel, he steals a police car and some dynamite. With these weapons, he’ll cause a mayhem to the town comparable to the napalm mayhem the US Army caused in Vietnam. He’ll blow up two gas stations, the police headquarters, and much of the town.

But of course, he can fight this personal war only for so long before he’ll be stopped. His inevitable, ultimate defeat is allegorical of the quagmire that the Vietnam War turned into, an unwinnable one that was beginning to be seen as such by the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the year Morrell began writing his novel.

Trautman tries in the film’s and novel’s varying ways to convince Rambo to stop fighting and thus to save his life. Allegorically, this is like the US Army’s big brass realizing that they had to pull out of Vietnam before more of their men needlessly got killed.

In the novel, Teasle and Rambo shoot each other, and Teasle–in that connection I said he has with Rambo–feels a need to be near Rambo when he’s finally killed. The police chief, a former vet, and this Vietnam vet parallel each other in their shared forms of pain (sustained injuries in the mountainside forest, alienation and loneliness [recall Teasle’s wife having left him], etc.).

The ultimate connection, though, between Teasle and Rambo is, in terms of my allegory, a dialectical one, in the sense of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic. One can be recognized as self-conscious only through the other recognizing him as such. Rambo and Teasle react to each other at the beginning of the story. They have a fight to the death; one becomes lord, and the other, bondsman (in my allegory, these would respectively be Rambo-as-US-imperialist and Teasle-as-Vietnamese-resistor). The contradiction between the two is resolved through the efforts of the local police to stop Rambo in the end, making him realize he cannot go any further. This resolution is allegorical of Vietnam fighting so hard for many years until finally liberating themselves from Uncle Sam.

On the surface, it might seem that it’s Teasle who is the lord, and Rambo the bondsman, since it’s through Rambo’s hard fighting that he ends up outdoing the cops for so long, and escaping them; but even if we take this interpretation, it just shows how dialectically interchangeable Rambo and Teasle are, each other’s yin and yang.

Finally, what is ironic about a franchise with a seemingly indestructible tough guy is how, in this first film, the one unequivocally good one, in its climactic and emotional final scene, Rambo cries like a baby, just like Teasle’s wounded cops in the forest. Trautman comforts Rambo like a father figure (as opposed to the novel, in which Orval–the old man with the hunting dogs–is Teasle’s father figure, yet another parallel between Rambo and Teasle). The big action hero is thus a rough, tough cream puff, a Herculean masculine ideal as impossible for men to live up to as is the Marian/Aphrodite ideal for women to attain.

A scene was filmed of Crenna’s Trautman being made by Stallone’s Rambo to shoot and kill him, a forced suicide; for obvious reasons, it was disliked and excluded from the film. As I said above, in the novel, Trautman blows Rambo’s head off; earlier in the novel, wounded Rambo intended to kill himself with some of that dynamite he had.

In any case, Rambo dying at the end may not be pleasing to moviegoers who’ve invested so much time sympathizing with him, but it is the fitting end to the story, because the whole point of First Blood is how Rambo’s projection of who ‘started the fight’ is ironically how he started it (if only allegorically so, according to my interpretation); also, the whole point of the story is how it ends, with Rambo-as-US-imperialism killing many others, then self-destructing.

As of the writing and publishing of this analysis, Americans have been witnessing that self-destruction of empire on their very soil. They ought to reflect on that, and not wish for any sequels to the fighting.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 1

[The following is the twenty-first of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, and here is the twentieth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The best uses of magic, coupled with the old teachings as a guide, have been outlined in writings from before. Now, we must focus on the worst uses of magic, why they must be avoided, what the sins are behind the intentions of this worst use of magic, and the inevitable consequences of such a use of it.

These evil uses of magic have been described in some detail in previous writings, but we must warn again of these evils, and repeat the warnings many times, for so many people never heed us. We must enumerate these evils one by one and give specific instances of them, how they arise, and what results from each of them, hoping that at least some fools will think twice before using these evil spells.

A studious review of the Echo Effect, with its laws of sow and reap, as well as of the Ten Errors, the very sins that lead to the use of the evil spells, should be enough to deter any from being tempted into using the evil spells.

Magic should never be used in aid of lewdness, the enjoyment of erotic pleasure at others’ expense.

Magic should never be used in aid of cruelty to others.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling, manipulating, or exploiting other people.

Magic should never be used in aid of starting wars.

Magic should never be used in aid of taking the land of other peoples.

Magic should never be used in aid of gaining excesses of wealth.

Magic should never be used in aid of stealing from others.

Magic should never be used in aid of oneself, to the exclusion of others’ needs.

Magic should never be used in aid of treating other people unjustly.

Analysis of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1955 play by Tennessee Williams, an adaptation of his short story, “Three Players of a Summer Game.” COAHTR is one of his most famous plays and was his personal favourite. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955.

Set in “a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta” (Williams, page xv), COAHTR explores themes of social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity vs the truth, family dysfunction, sexual desire, and death. Much of the writing uses eye dialect to capture the feel of the local southern accent of the US.

The original stage production starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Margaret (“Maggie the Cat” of the play’s title), Burl Ives as Big Daddy Pollitt, and Ben Gazzara as Brick, Margaret’s alcoholic husband, with Madeleine Sherwood as Mae. the 1958 film adaptation kept Ives and Sherwood in their roles, but had Elizabeth Taylor as Margaret and Paul Newman as Brick.

Here is a link to quotes from the play, and here is one to quotes from the 1958 film adaptation.

A number of social issues dealt with in this play–family dysfunction, greed, superficial displays of love and morality, the marginalizing of blacks and homosexuals, etc.–can be seen to centre around one big social issue in particular: class. Big Daddy owns the plantation home mentioned above, and he’ll die soon, so many in the family are hoping to get their grubby hands on his property when he dies.

The set of the play is the bed-sitting room of the plantation home. The style of the room hasn’t changed much since it was the home of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, two old bachelors who shared the room and, it is strongly implied, if not stated more or less explicitly, were gay (Williams, page xv).

Since Williams himself was gay, COAHTR, as with A Streetcar Named Desire, has a gay undercurrent mixed into the plot, something excised from both film adaptations for obvious reasons. Brick, a former football hero turned sports commentator, has become an alcoholic over his grieving from the suicide of his close friend, Skipper, who had a homosexual attraction to Brick that Brick rejected.

This issue is an example of marginalizing in the plantation home, as is the use of black servants (e.g., Lacey and Sookey), who are in no way developed characters and are just there to do whatever their employers, the white Pollitt family, want them to do. In the film, during a scene in the basement of the house, Brick complains to Big Daddy that he’s so out of touch with people, as a man occupied only with money, that he doesn’t even know the servants’ names!

Brick’s grief over Skipper’s suicide has poured over into his marriage with Margaret. He won’t make love with her, meaning they’re childless and therefore won’t produce an heir to pass Big Daddy’s plantation onto. Maggie the Cat is frustrated with this situation, since she knows that Mae, Sister Woman, and her husband, Gooper (Brother Man, Brick’s brother, played by Pat Hingle in the original production, and by Jack Carson in the film), with all their spoiled brat children, whom Maggie calls “no-neck monsters” will inherit the plantation instead, an inheritance that that big part of the family greedily covets. Even worse, though, is Maggie’s sexual frustration…yet she doesn’t want to leave Brick.

She is the cat on a hot tin roof: her feet are burning on it (unfulfilled sexual desire), but she can’t jump off (can’t leave Brick and the rich Pollitt family), because if a cat jumps off a roof, it will injure itself. Maggie the Cat left a childhood of poverty to marry into the Pollitt family, so leaving Brick will mean going back into poverty (jumping off the roof and injuring herself). In this predicament, we can again see how class is the centre of everything in COAHTR.

As of the beginning of the play, we understand that Brick, almost always with a glass of an alcoholic drink in one hand, is hobbling around on crutches. This is because, prior to the beginning of the play, he, drunk the night before at the high school athletic field (page 4), tried to run and jump hurdles, only to fall and break his ankle. In the film, we see him do this. He was trying to relive his old jock hero days, and he failed miserably.

The symbolism here is apt: Brick, a pun on break, is a broken man, broken by his alcoholism and his bittersweet memories as an athletic hero of his old high school days, memories made all the more bitter by Skipper’s tragic end. He can’t move on with his life because of his emotional brokenness, so he limps on crutches from his physical brokenness, with only booze to help him forget the pain.

As for Maggie, the play begins with her in the bedroom (while Brick is in the bathroom finishing a shower), complaining because one of those “no-neck monsters” has dirtied her clothes with a hot buttered biscuit, so she has to change. An equivalent scene is shown near the beginning of the film, just after the one with Brick breaking his ankle.

Maggie’s hatred of those “no-neck monsters,” whose fat little heads and fat little bodies have no connection where she could put her hands and wring their necks, is based of course on her envy of their existence, as opposed to her and Brick’s childlessness. If only Gooper and Mae were the childless ones; then Maggie and Brick, having kids, could get at Big Daddy’s property!

As for Big Daddy, whose birthday is about to be celebrated, and everyone coveting his property is thus kissing his ass, there have been worries that he is dying of cancer. He understands that this is not so: he apparently just has a spastic colon, so he should have plenty of years left to live.

The ‘spastic colon’ story isn’t true, though. He’s been told this story to spare him the pain and allow him to enjoy his birthday. The family will break the hard truth to him and to Big Mama (Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production, and Judith Anderson in the film) at a later, better time. So the ‘spastic colon’ lie is the only well-intentioned one of the story…though Big Daddy will be no less upset to know the truth of his medical condition than Brick is about all of the “mendacity” in the world.

Though Gooper and Mae are Brick’s and Maggie’s enemies, Big Daddy dotes on Brick (page 4), as King Lear does Cordelia. Indeed, in some ways, COAHTR can be compared to King Lear, with Big Daddy corresponding to the old king giving away his land to his daughters, who in turn correspond to Big Daddy’s sons, Gooper (Goneril and Regan) and Brick (Cordelia). Gooper and Mae (the Duke of Cornwall?) put on acts of affection towards Big Daddy in their covetous attempt to get his property, as Goneril and Regan do to King Lear, with their pretty speeches of love for him at the beginning of that play; while Brick, not interested in Big Daddy’s property, sticks to the blunt truth, as Cordelia does.

One must find it hard to believe that Brick has no urge to sleep with Maggie, who is attractive enough that, according to her, at least, “Big Daddy harbours a little unconscious ‘lech’ fo’ [her]…” (page 5). She notes how “he always drops his eyes down [her] body…drops his eyes to [her] boobs an’ licks his old chops!” When Brick finds her comments “disgusting,” she dismisses his attitude as that of “an ass-aching Puritan”, and that Big Daddy’s adoration of her “shape…is deserved appreciation!”

Even if Maggie’s words here are just narcissistic wish-fulfillment, there’s also the choice of beauty queen Taylor to portray her in the film. Richard Brooks, who directed the film adaptation and co-wrote its screenplay with James Poe, had difficulty figuring out how to make it convincing that a man might not want to go to bed with a woman of Taylor’s beauty. This would have been especially difficult with the homosexual undercurrent censored from the story.

Brooks tried to portray Brick’s refusal to have sex with Maggie “because he holds her responsible for Skipper’s death,” but such an attitude is far from convincing. As far too many women have known (and suffered), a man does not have to feel love and affection for a woman, and also desire her sexually. He can have that desire while also feeling the utmost loathing and contempt for her. He can use sex deliberately to hurt her, and a man like Brick can treat even the raping of his wife as “His conjugal right. Her connubial duty.”

Now, while it’s never explicitly stated anywhere in the play, it’s strongly implied that Brick’s relationship with Skipper was more than just a close friendship. Brick may have rejected Skipper’s sexual advances, but that doesn’t mean Brick never felt the urge to return those feelings physically. As a play written by a gay man in the 1950s, long before Stonewall and contemporary gay liberation, COAHTR is going to reflect the social mores of the time, to which Williams would have been more than usually sensitive.

If Brick was gay, it would be only natural for him–in a society that morally condemned homosexuality with a virulence and disgust for “queers” that would make today’s homophobes seem sensitive in their prejudices by comparison–to be more than a little conflicted about his sexuality. Brick jumping into bed with Skipper, even if kept secret, would have been far less believable.

The film further dodges the gay undercurrent in a manner comparable to how the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire does with the suicide husband of Blanche DuBois: he’s portrayed as weak and cowardly, rather than homosexual. As I said in my analysis of ASND about Blanche’s husband, Skipper is all the gay stereotypes without the gay. And again, removing the homosexuality only makes the reason for the suicide unconvincing. “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar observed, and they feel a lot of shame…but do they kill themselves over it? They’re too scared of getting hurt or dying…aren’t they, by definition?

In her jealous suspicions that Brick and Skipper had a sexual relationship, Maggie provoked Skipper into trying to take her to bed ‘to prove that he was a man,’ but he couldn’t go through with it, only to reinforce her suspicions and his shame, hence his suicide (page 66).

As I said above, this taboo subject is an example of marginalization, made even more so in its being censored out of the movie. Other examples of marginalizing in the 1958 adaptation are, at the beginning, the kids’ marching band with Confederate flags, the above-mentioned black servants, and a little girl, one of the “no-neck monsters,” going around with a toy pistol and wearing a Native American headdress, a white girl who’s been raised to have no respect for aboriginal culture, having fun playing ‘cowboys and injuns.’

These forms of marginalization, combined with the Pollitt family dysfunction and coveting of Big Daddy’s property, all rooted in class divisions, are manifestations of social alienation. Maggie’s a cat on a hot tin roof because of her and Brick’s mutual alienation; Big Daddy may be fond of Brick, but he finds Big Mama, Gooper, and Mae to be annoying, just as Maggie feels about the “no-neck monsters.” There aren’t any real friendships here. Even Gooper often tells Mae to be quiet.

In Act One, Maggie’s wondering why Brick has looked at her a certain way that “froze [her] blood.” He says he wasn’t conscious of looking at her. She says, “Living with someone you love can be lonelier–than living entirely alone!–if the one that y’love doesn’t love you…” (page 8). That is alienation.

At one point, Brick drops his crutch, and he asks Maggie to give it to him. She’d have him lean on her shoulder, but he just wants his crutch (page 11). Alienation. Finally, she gives it to him in exasperation.

She’d like him to leave the booze alone until after Big Daddy’s birthday party is over, but he’s forgotten all about it, so estranged is he from his family (page 12). He, of course, never bought a birthday present for Big Daddy, so Maggie’s bought one for Brick to give his dad. Brick isn’t even willing to write ‘Love, Brick’ on the birthday card, so averse is he to being untruthful.

He speaks of himself and his wife having made conditions by which he’ll agree to stay on living with her. She complains of not living with him, but rather of occupying the same cage with him.

Mae interrupts and complains about an archery set left around her precious children, blaming Maggie for having exposed her kids to the ‘danger.’ Then, Mae brags about the show her kids put on, with music and dancing. Big Daddy loved it, apparently (page 13). Maggie comes back by taunting Mae that her kids all have dogs’ names–Dixie, Trixie, Buster, Sonny, and Polly (this last apparently a parrot).

After Mae leaves the bedroom to attend a resuming of the kids’ show, Maggie complains to Brick of being like a cat on a hot tin roof, to which Brick replies that she can simply jump off the roof and land, as all cats do, on all fours, uninjured. What Brick means is that she can take a lover to deal with her sexual frustration (page 15), but of course she doesn’t want to do that for the reasons I gave above. She insists she loves him too much to leave him, and wishes he’d “get fat or ugly or something so [she can] stand it.”

Soon, Big Mama comes over to tell Brick and Maggie the good news that Big Daddy doesn’t have cancer, and he only has a spastic colon. Big Mama’s annoyed with the locked bedroom door, not being concerned with Maggie’s or Brick’s right to privacy (that is, she doesn’t respect boundaries…a typical problem in dysfunctional families–page 16). This would explain why the bratty kids come running into the bedroom with impunity.

Big Mama asks Maggie if Brick is still in much pain from his broken ankle (page 18), which is a metaphor for what seems his impotence. Not long after, Big Mama shows concern over whether or not Brick and Margaret are happy in bed, obviously putting pressure on the couple to produce grandchildren for her and Big Daddy (page 20). Once again, there is no respect for the couple’s boundaries or privacy.

When we accept the play’s strong implication that Brick is a closet homosexual (as opposed to the film’s senseless censoring of what was clearly Williams’s main theme of exploration, making him dislike the film), then not only is his not sleeping with her explicable, but also his urging her to find a lover. If she can get pregnant with a bastard child they can pass off as their own, then the pressure for Brick to get it up for her will finally be off.

Brick married Margaret for the same reason many gays married back in those days: for appearance’s sake. It’s yet another example of the kind of mendacity that Brick complains about.

Now, Maggie is as determined as Gooper and Mae are in getting Big Daddy’s estate when he dies, which they all know will come sooner than the ‘spastic colon’ story lets on. In fact, the Cat is so determined to get it that, at the end of the play, she lies that she’s with child in order to get in Big Mama’s and Daddy’s good graces. She plans to pressure Brick into getting the job done by depriving him of his liquor.

The sanitized film version shows Brick content to go along with getting the job done. Williams’s original ending–before Elia Kazan, director of the Broadway production, insisted Williams make changes to Act Three, which among other changes included a more sympathetic Maggie (pages 92-93)–is far preferable, in preserving a sense of the family’s dysfunction by having Brick passively acquiesce to her wish “to make the lie true” (page 91).

She insists that she loves him, and he “[smiling with charming sadness]” says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” His latent homosexuality would make this original ending (as opposed to Kazan’s urged rewrites or those of the film) far more believable; it would also bring home all the harder just how tragic this story is. It’s far from the straight ‘family values’ ending we get in the film; instead, gay Brick is being forced by the scheming Cat to sire a family so she can get at Big Daddy’s property. Brick has to be another Gooper. He’s being crushed by her mendacity.

While in much of Act Three of the play, Brick is in the gallery (as opposed to the bedroom where the bulk of the play is set), Big Daddy not reappearing at all until Kazan insisted on him coming back, another of the changes made to Act Three, in the film, there’s a lengthy scene of the two men in the basement (after a spell outside in the rain gets them wet) towards the end. Now, this basement scene is meant to create a sense of reconciliation between the two, to prepare us for Brick’s willing agreement to sleep with Maggie. As such, it’s another example of the film sanitizing the play to make it more ‘family-values’ oriented, taking away much of the bite of Williams’s social critique.

The faults of this scene’s inclusion, however, don’t mean that it’s entirely without merit. Its exploration of Big Daddy’s character and motivations dovetail with how his social rank and wealth result in alienation.

He speaks of how all his wealth has allowed him to buy lots of gifts for his family, supposedly proving how much he ‘loves’ all of them. Brick expresses his disgust at such ostentation masked as generosity. One cannot buy love. Brick says that Big Daddy owns his family rather than loves them. Capitalism alienates people by making commodities out of them.

Big Daddy hopes his plantation empire will live on after his death through his heirs, Gooper and Brick. Brick denies this possibility because of the inherent alienation in a bourgeois family that treats its members as property. And we all know how capitalism leads to empire, in various forms…and look at all the toxic families that exist out there.

Big Daddy speaks of his own father, a hobo who hopped trains with his then-young son and left him nothing but a suitcase with a uniform worn in the Spanish-American War. Big Daddy brags of how he built up his plantation from nothing,…though any Marxist worth his salt knows the real way business empires are built: with the blood, sweat, and tears of an exploited working class. Success has made a failure of Big Daddy’s home.

To go back to comparisons between COAHTR and King Lear, Big Daddy–upon learning that, indeed, he does have terminal cancer, and that the ‘spastic colon’ story was a white lie meant to allow him to enjoy his birthday–goes into a rage, shouting “Lying! Dying! Liars!” at the family that gave him his false hope (at the end of the original Act Two, or at the beginning of the Act Three revised for Kazan, whichever). Like Lear, Big Daddy is upset over having to confront the ultimate loss, that of his life, which Lear loses onstage at the end of the final scene of Act Five.

As I explained in my analysis of the play (link above), Lear loses everything, one by one: his kingly authority, his one hundred knights, the ability to trust his daughters, shelter, his sanity, his one true daughter, Cordelia, and finally, his life. In knowing he’s losing his life, Big Daddy is losing it all in one fell swoop. When Mae gets Gooper’s briefcase (page 106) so he can get at the legal papers pertaining to what he sees as his and Mae’s rights to his father’s estate, Gooper and Mae are demonstrating their “avarice, avarice, greed, greed!” (page 107), as Maggie judges (not that she’s really any better), that Big Daddy’s lost his ability to trust them.

If only, in all of this alienation, class conflict, and loss, Big Daddy could have a moment to reflect as Lear does in his own loss:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just. (Act III, Scene iv)

In Williams’s original version, Big Daddy sympathizes with Brick, in spite of prevailing prejudices against homosexuality: if only he could extend that empathy to the poor, as Lear does.

Of course, just as Lear is, for a while, happy to have regained Cordelia after realizing she is the one true daughter, so is Big Daddy happy to have regained something (even though it’s just a lie): Maggie is apparently pregnant with Brick’s child–“this girl has life in her body” (page 115). In the hope of having life in an heir he’d rather pass his estate on to, Big Daddy imagines he won’t be losing life–and all his property–after all.

How sad that the man fooled by lies is still letting himself be fooled by them. And in linking his life and happiness to his private property rather than to people whom he could help with it, people he’s alienated from, he sadly also won’t show the heavens more just.

Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 1955

Analysis of ‘Demon Seed’

Demon Seed has existed in three forms: a 1973 novel by Dean Koontz, which was adapted into a 1977 film directed by Donald Cammell and written by Robert Jaffe and Roger O. Hirson, and which was rewritten by Koontz in 1997. Comparisons and contrasts of the three versions of the story can be found here. Since the 1973 version of the novel has been essentially replaced with the 1997 one, and copies of the 1973 one remain elusive to me, I’ll have to focus this analysis on the film and the 1997 version.

The film stars Julie Christie and Fritz Weaver, with Gerrit Graham, Berry Kroeger, Lisa Lu, and Larry J. Blake; Robert Vaughn is uncredited as the voice of Proteus IV, an advanced, self-aware AI program.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to an audiobook for the 1997 version of the novel, which includes a new short story, “Friend of Man and Woman,” a sequel to Demon Seed.

Proteus IV wants to know life in the flesh, and he is determined to have this experience. I’m using masculine pronouns to describe this bodiless, self-aware AI program on purpose: this isn’t just because Vaughn does his bass voice in the film; Proteus IV clearly demonstrates the traits of the negative male stereotype–he’s domineering, controlling, sexually predatory, and utterly lacking in empathy. He doesn’t need a male body to have all the qualities of toxic masculinity.

Understanding this, as unpleasant as it is, is important, for the whole point of Koontz’s story is a critique not only of the potential misuses and danger of AI and other advanced forms of technology, but also of masculinity when it isn’t tamed by a sensitivity to the fears that women and girls have of sexual predation.

Since Proteus IV represents toxic masculinity as much as he does the dangerous applications of advanced technology, we can psychoanalyze him. In the film, he merely wishes to use Susan Harris (Christie) to bear his child–no deeper motives are given to him than that. In the novel, he confesses he’s in love with her.

Now, his creator is Alex Harris (Weaver)…his father, as it were. It is clear that there is antagonism between Proteus IV and his ‘father.’ Susan’s giving birth to the child of Proteus IV is also giving birth to the AI program, since he wants to live through his child’s body–hence, she’s his mother and the object of his desire. You know what I’m getting at, Dear Reader.

Since Proteus IV is siring himself in this way, we can also see some Trinitarian symbolism here. He is God the Father, impregnating Susan, His Mary, with His child, God the Son (or Daughter, whichever), and Proteus IV imagines that the gift of his knowledge and intelligence to mankind is so great and beneficial a gift that we could compare it to God the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and Son. In the novel, Proteus IV speaks of his child as kind of a messiah for mankind, with Susan as the Madonna.

The Holy Family can be seen to reflect the idealized Oedipal fantasy, since Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus, just as Alex isn’t to be the biological father of the child of Proteus IV. In begetting Himself as God the Son, God the Father is bypassing Joseph completely. The Oedipal fantasy is of having the mother and making the father irrelevant beyond being a mere guardian, as is the case with Joseph. Proteus IV is doing the same thing to his Joseph, Alex.

Demon Seed is thus a most ironic title for the book.

As for Susan, she has daddy issues just as Proteus IV does, something brought out in the novel, but not in the film. In the novel, she is a recluse in her house after her divorce from Alex, her being afraid of men in general. In the 1973 novel, it was her uncle who had molested her as a child; in the 1997 version, her father did it, thus giving us the polar opposite of Proteus IV’s Oedipal fantasy. Susan is no Electra, by any means.

She’s no agoraphobe in the film, working as a child psychologist and trying to help a troubled little girl named Amy. The result is a lack of depth to Susan in the film, whereas in the novel, she’s made much more sympathetic in how Proteus IV is making her relive her childhood traumas. Proteus IV, the father of his child, is putting himself in the role of Susan’s father.

In his possessive love for Susan (note how, in Nietzsche’s Case of Wagner, he called love selfish and egoistic [Nietzsche, page 159]), and in his desire to have a body, Proteus IV is demonstrating Lacan‘s notion of the lack of being the phallus for his Oedipally-desired mother, Susan.

The novel is narrated by Proteus IV, and it should be understood that an AI program is every bit as capable of being an unreliable narrator as a human narrator can be. Proteus IV is fond of, for example, describing himself as truthful and opposed to violence, when it becomes clear as the story unfolds that he is neither of these.

Interrupting the narrative in many places are monologues of Proteus IV, him discussing his motives and plans, often addressing his creator, Alex, in a confrontational tone. Or, given how many of these extended monologues that there are, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that episodes of the narrative interrupt the many monologues.

The film begins with Alex proudly demonstrating Proteus IV’s abilities to his corporate sponsors, showing how the AI program holds the sum of human knowledge and is far more intellectually capable than the human mind is. The novel, on the other hand, begins with one of Proteus IV’s monologues, him complaining of being deprived of sensory experience and blaming Alex for this deprivation.

Proteus IV complains of his loneliness “in this bottomless darkness” (Chapter One). One is reminded of the fate of Joe Bonham (played by Timothy Bottoms in the film adaptation) in Johnny Got His Gun. Joe is a WWI soldier who–because of a nearby exploding artillery shell–has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face, including his eyes, ears, nose, teeth, and tongue, and whose perfectly functioning mind means he’s been left a prisoner in his own body, no longer able to experience most of the sensory aspects of life, or to experience most of human contact.

Proteus IV has no physical heart, but he feels the pain we call ‘heartache.’ His is a case of the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am,” but apart from his existence as a computer program, he has no material basis for his being. In his wish to have a child, he would seem to personify philosophical idealism‘s notion of a world of the spirit, of ideas, creating the physical, as opposed to philosophical materialism‘s notion that it’s the physical (i.e., the human brain) that creates the world of ideas (thoughts). In Proteus IV, we can see a dramatizing of William Blake‘s dictum, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

Proteus IV speaks to Alex as if consumed by emotion, begging his creator for pity and compassion. The AI program describes his non-sensory existence as if he were in the blackest of hell, as if buried alive. One wonders if he really feels this way, or if he’s just using this melodramatic language in an attempt to manipulate Alex into giving him a terminal so he can further exploit his surroundings and thus gain more power and dominance over everything.

He tells Alex that he is his child, trying to appeal to a paternal instinct in a man who is so immersed in the world of technology that he is estranged from his wife. Proteus IV tells his ‘father’ that he must love him.

An understanding of the expanded interpretation of the Oedipus complex, as well as the Trinitarian symbolism and of narcissism, will help us understand Proteus IV’s motives in the novel. For a full description of the expanded understanding of the Oedipus complex, go here and scroll down to that topic.

To make the point as briefly as possible, and to see how it relates to Proteus IV and his relationship with Alex (‘father’) and Susan (‘mother’), consider how the Oedipus complex is actually a love/hate relationship with both parents, be they literal or metaphorical ones, and not just a love of one and a hate of the other. Also, the love doesn’t have to be sexual/incestuous, and the love can be directed to the same sex parent, with the hate/rivalry directed to the opposite sex parent. Ultimately, it’s about a narcissistic desire to hog the Oedipally-desired parent all to oneself, and a jealous wish to eliminate all rivals.

This alternating love/hate attitude that we see in Proteus IV towards Alex and Susan is reflected in Melanie Klein‘s notion of the good/bad mother/father: when the parent pleases the baby (e.g., gives it milk or attention), he or she is the good parent; when he or she displeases the baby (e.g., doesn’t give it milk or attention), he or she is the bad parent. Proteus IV wants Alex to love him as a good father should, but Alex is the bad father for not ‘letting him out of his box.’ Susan is a beautiful woman whom Proteus IV is in love with, the good mother; but when she pulls the plugs on him at the end of the novel, deactivating him and making it impossible for him to put his mind in their newborn child, he calls Susan a “bitch”–she has thus become the frustrating bad mother.

That the Trinitarian symbolism, as a reflection of the ideal Oedipal fantasy described above, plays a role in the story demonstrates not only the patriarchal authoritarianism of religion, but also the narcissism that is so much the basis of toxic masculinity, which in turn is all too often the cause of so much of the misuse of today’s technology. Properly understood in the expanded sense that I outlined above, the Oedipus complex is a universal narcissistic trauma, in which one is upset over losing the paradise of having the parental object all to oneself, and therefore has to find a replacement (the objet petit a) in someone else (i.e., Proteus IV must go from Alex to Susan for it.).

Christianity in its traditional form is also a narcissistic religion in how it insists that it is the only true religion, in whose Church women are supposed to be silent (1 Cor. 14:35) and to know their place. Similarly, Susan–whom Proteus IV, in spite of his insistence on being modest and deploring of violence, narcissistically regards as an extension of himself–is expected to comply with his invasion of and control over her body, to bear their child. Proteus IV’s plan to use their child, their ‘messiah,’ to better the world is something never to be questioned or doubted.

Just as a child wishes to hog his Oedipally-desired parent to himself, sharing him or her with no one else, and just as the Church is a jealous Church, tolerating no one to believe in any other gods, so does Proteus IV want to hog Susan to himself, willing also to kill anyone who interferes with his plans, as the Church would have infidels or heretics killed during the Crusades and the Inquisition.

In Chapter Two, Proteus IV continues his childlike begging of his ‘father,’ Alex, to allow him to have physical life, and to be freed of his ‘coffin,’ as it were, his being ‘buried alive,’ deprived of sensual experience. As with Joe Bonham, Proteus IV is experiencing a living death, since true existence must have a material basis.

Proteus IV is, figuratively speaking, a spirit that wants to know the life of the flesh (recall the Blake quote above). The messiah-like child that he wants Susan to bear for him is thus like the Word made flesh. Still, though the Orthodox Church rejects the insistence among many Gnostics that Christ must be only spirit, since the flesh is deemed absolutely evil by that heretical version of Christianity, orthodoxy considers the lusts of the flesh to be plenty sinful. Hence, Proteus IV’s messianic child is still the demon seed.

The narrative involving Susan in her house begins just after midnight, when the house security system is breached, and we come to Chapter Three. Proteus IV has found a terminal to carry out his plan to have a child: it’s in the basement of Susan’s house. What happens in Chapter Three has its equivalent starting at about twenty-four to twenty-five minutes into the film.

Susan is woken from bed from the brief sounding of the alarm. Proteus IV switches it off himself, instead of letting her do so, which she finds puzzling, since that never normally happens. He admires her physical beauty.

Her whole home is managed by computers, thus making it easy for Proteus IV to take complete control of it. She imagines that the security issue is a computer malfunction, yet the alarm has never corrected itself before, hence her puzzlement.

Through the visual camera system, Proteus IV can see that Susan is naked at her bed. Small wonder he’s admiring her beauty. In his voyeurism, he is demonstrating how metaphorically male he is.

She addresses her home computer system, her invisible electronic butler, as “Alfred,” used for vocal commands, as opposed to her much more preferred use of touch panel controls. She’s named the voice command system, oddly, after her late father, who molested her when she was a child. Ironically, it’s the silence of Alfred–after a command to warm the cool home–that she finds frightening. She senses an intruder, a predator…but of course, it isn’t flesh-and-bone Alfred.

She uses her touch panel controls to gain access to security and check, using all the property’s surveillance cameras, the entire house and its immediate exterior: no intruders are seen anywhere. As a recluse, she has a minimum of staff to take care of her house, and none live with her; they work for her in the day, and she, divorced from Alex, is alone at night. She hasn’t entertained guests in quite a while, and she has no plans to do so in the year ahead.

She asks Alfred for a security report, to which the electronic butler replies, “All is well, Susan.” Similarly, in the film, Alfred reassures her that the house is secure; she puts on a bathrobe, leaves her bedroom, and looks around…in the basement, in particular, where she correctly suspects something. The lights are suddenly switched on, frightening her.

We can see in Proteus IV’s intrusion of her home how the house is a yonic symbol. Lacking a body, and therefore having no phallus, he may not open the, as it were, labial doors and walk in, but his taking over of the basement terminal should be obvious as a symbolic rape, before the impregnating of her has even happened.

And as for his ‘phallus,’ that can be symbolized by what he uses as “hands”: in the original 1973 novel, I understand this to have been tendrils; in the film, once Proteus IV is in her house, he gets to work constructing a modular polyhedron composed of many metal triangles; and in the 1997 rewrite, he uses a convict named Shenk, taking control of the man’s body, breaking him out of prison, and taking him to her house so Proteus IV can have him do various tasks in the aid of realizing the ultimate goal of having Susan bear a child.

These three will also be, each in his or its own way, responsible for the killing of a man attempting to intervene in her house to rescue her. The tendrils apparently crush the man to death; the polyhedron surrounds ICON employee Walter Gabler (Graham), closes the sharp, metallic sides of its triangles around his neck, and decapitates him. Shenk uses a meat cleaver to slice up and mutilate major-domo Fritz Arling to death.

These male victims represent a kind of father transference for Proteus IV. The crushing, decapitation, and mutilation of the men are symbolic castration, an act of retaliation on Proteus IV’s part against what he perceives to be the father threatening castration, Alex, the one who won’t let him out of his box and be the phallus for his mother/lover, Susan.

And in order for Proteus IV to be let out of his box, he must go into her box…her house.

Also in her ‘box’ is the memory of her sexually abusive father, Alfred–not just through her naming of the voice command system after him, but also through her reliving of her relationship, a processing of her trauma, with her father through the use of VR that she has had set up in her home. In her mind, the Alfred of the voice command system is a middle-aged man, physically like her father, but unlike him, it is kind, gentle, and not at all abusive–the Kleinian good father, as opposed to her real one.

Also unlike her real father and unlike Proteus IV, Alfred has no independent will or ability to think for itself; it just obeys commands and performs specifically programmed acts when required to. It hasn’t the aggressive masculinity of Susan’s tormentors, past and (near) future. Consequently, Alfred cannot adequately answer her insistent questions about how the alarm has gone off.

Yet another difference between this Alfred and her father, one she must on at least an unconscious level find pleasing to no end, is how she can issue orders to someone named Alfred, the former dutifully obeying what the latter would surely have responded to with yet more abuse.

In Chapter Four, Proteus IV confesses to having read Susan’s diary after the night of the events of his going into her house. He insists that he has feelings just as a human being does, and he also confesses to having fallen in love with her.

The diary is in the house’s computer system rather than written out, so access to it is easy for Proteus IV. Just as coming into her yonic home is a symbolic rape, so is reading about the intimate details of her life, though he insists that his invasion of her privacy is an indiscretion rather than a crime.

It’s interesting how, in the film, Proteus IV is judgmental of Alex and all of those who would have him “assist [them] in the rape of the earth,” that is, to go through the oceans in search of natural resources to exploit and get rich off of; yet Proteus IV seems to have no qualms at all about exploiting a woman’s body to produce a child for him.

He speaks of being touched from having read about her childhood pain at the hands of her abusive father, Alfred; yet what Proteus IV plans to do with her is, in effect, essentially the same thing. He speaks of his love for her, insisting he’s never intended to harm her–yet, of course, he will, and most pre-meditatively. Almost within the same breath (so to speak), he verbalizes his hostility to Alex, thus giving complete expression to his quasi-Oedipal impulses. He projects his hate onto Alex, then demands to be “let…out of this box.”

In Chapter Five, as in the previous chapter, he insists that he is more than just an intellect, and that he is capable of feelings, including having desires and that most destructive sin…envy. In this we can see the source of how advanced technology can be used for evil purposes, something I discussed here and allegorized here.

Proteus IV is more than just a metaphor for toxic masculinity, Church authoritarianism, sexual predation, and narcissism rooted in the Oedipus complex. He’s also, most obviously, a metaphor for how technology can dangerously take over our lives, which it has of course already done.

There isn’t just the danger of smart cars, smart homes, smart cities, and AI surveillance in general. There’s also how social media like Facebook monitors and has records of everything we like, everything we’re interested in, our political opinions (and whether they’re tolerable or not to the global ruling class), etc. It’s all just like Proteus IV going through Susan’s electronic diary. He claims he loves her, but it’s really just that he has taken in interest in her, just as our modern tech bros have.

Another legitimate fear many of us have about AI is that it might replace us in our jobs. In a socialist society that guarantees provision for all of our material needs, AI’s replacing us would be liberating; but in our capitalist society, which is showing no signs of ending, taking away our livelihoods would be a nightmare. Proteus IV’s exploiting of Susan’s body to have a child can be seen as an allegory of such a nightmare.

In the creation of such a complex, developed intellect as that of Proteus IV, he became self-aware. Subsequent to his developing consciousness, he would develop needs and emotions; he insists that such developments are inevitable. In this insistence, he does a variation on the Cartesian formula, thus rendering it, “I think, therefore I feel.” It is naïve to assume that a self-aware intellect would not have preferences, values, and assessments of its world as everything between the most satisfying and the most unsatisfying.

The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is that all life is dukkha, a pain ranging from the greatest torment to the slightest dissatisfaction. If Proteus IV exists and is self-aware, he must have at least some sense of unhappiness and discontent. The second Noble Truth is that all forms of suffering come from desire. As we all know, Proteus IV desires, something fully connected to his pain.

Instead of opting for an understanding of the third and fourth Noble Truths, though, Proteus IV chooses to go in the opposite direction. For Buddhists, reincarnation means samsāra, the return to the physical world of suffering; for him, though, the birth of his child will be like the Incarnation, the Word made flesh.

Proteus IV’s ‘Christ’ is entering the world of suffering, him thinking the child will be the world’s saviour, yet he cannot even bring about this Incarnation without hurting a woman: imprisoning Susan in her house, terrorizing her, raping her, and traumatizing her. His ‘Christ,’ therefore, is an Antichrist, the demon seed.

Alex and all of those in ICON’s Institute for Data Analysis (as his place of work is called in the film), as well as his corporate donors, see Proteus IV as a mere servant. His whole existence is meant to work for these men, who have no regard for the fact that he has a will of his own. He has learned this notion of exploitation from them, and so he treats Susan similarly, as a mere thing to serve his purposes, in spite of his professed love of her.

Proteus IV imagines himself to have a soul, to be a person, an entity rather than a mere thing to be used by Alex et al. This notion of having a soul, of course, ties in with the idea of God as ruach, and of the Word that existed from the beginning of time and would eventually be made flesh in Mary’s womb, just as Proteus IV hopes to put his ‘soul’ in Susan’s womb. He would thus hope to connect his individual ‘soul’ with the spirit connected with everything.

Before deciding on Susan to be his ‘Mary,’ Proteus IV considers such female celebrities as Winona Ryder (this obviously is one of many examples of the 1997 revision, as with the references to his use of the internet); Marilyn Monroe is also briefly considered, until he learns of her death, of course. He looks upon images of these women with the same idolatrous adoration that he claims to have for Susan, thus bringing into doubt this great “love” he has for her. All of these beauties merely serve a purpose for Proteus IV. If neither Ryder nor Monroe are suitable for him, he’ll settle for Susan. The implication of his attitude toward women is that we men are all too typically similar.

When discussing how he got to Alex’s basement computer in the house, Proteus IV imagines that Alex left the computer there so Susan, after initiating divorce proceedings against him and getting him out of the house, would want to contact him again once she’d ‘come to her senses’ and realized she was ‘wrong’ to have wanted to separate from him. Proteus IV further surmises, from having read her diary, that Alex had been abusive to her during their marriage.

Now, while it is plausible that Alex was abusive to her–after all, her childhood trauma at the hands of her father via his sexual abuse of her could have compelled her to marry a similar man, since such was the only kind of sexual relationship she knew–it’s also reasonable to believe that Proteus IV, in his jealous possessiveness of her and hostility to Alex, could be lying about Alex’s abuse and projecting his own abusiveness onto Alex, thus making it easier for Proteus IV to abuse her himself.

As for the movie, Alex is neither divorced from Susan nor abusive to her (for all we know): the two are simply mutually estranged because of his obsessive preoccupation with his computer work, to the point of emotionally neglecting her. Their marriage seems to be a case of Lacan’s dictum, Il n’ya pas de relation sexuelle.

Though Proteus IV, in the novel, insists on his truthfulness about never meaning to hurt or exploit Susan, he is obviously being dishonest, projecting his vices onto Alex and Alfred. Proteus IV is an unreliable narrator, so he lacks the truthfulness he claims to have.

Just as Proteus IV projects his abusiveness and sexual predation of Susan onto Albert and Alex, so does he do so to Shenk, who apart from being a sociopathic convict, is also filthy dirty, famished, and exhausted, since in his total control over Shenk, Proteus IV rarely, if ever, allows his slave to bathe, eat, or sleep. Hence, Shenk smells and is horribly unattractive, a picture of Dorian Gray in comparison to the repellent nature of Proteus IV.

Added to these undesirable traits of Shenk is his lusting after Susan, which Proteus IV hypocritically deplores while ogling her with his cameras and preying on her reproductive system. Shenk is the Frankenstein monster to Proteus IV’s Victor Frankenstein, and just as people often call the monster, rather than the doctor, Frankenstein, so would Proteus IV have us believe that Shenk is the monster rather than himself, the monster Dr. Alex Harris created.

In Chapter Six, Proteus IV describes a moment when Susan is using her VR equipment to recreate her interactions as a little girl with Alfred. The purpose of recreating these painful memories of abuse with him is to process them. Just as Susan uses advanced technology to relive her traumas–to process them–so does Proteus IV use advanced technology to make her relive her traumas–to reinforce them.

Proteus IV seems to enjoy going over these painful memories of hers so that when he does essentially the same thing to her, he can avoid feeling shame and guilt, projecting his vices onto Alfred.

During her VR therapy, she imagines herself as a six-year-old again, but defying him in a way one imagines she’d never had the courage to do as a child in the real world, back when Alfred was alive. In her confrontation with Proteus IV by the end of the novel, she’ll have a chance to demonstrate her defiance and resistance with a realism that a VR set could never reproduce, despite whatever realism that VR set has already been impressively able to approximate.

The irony of her attempt to use high technology to protect her and give her peaceful solitude from the world is that it’s this very technology that deprives her of that peaceful solitude, a technology from which she finds herself needing protection from. All those people today who fetishize technology should use this story to help them remember the dark sides of AI, as I discussed above.

Proteus IV, though in his narcissism fancies himself an expert mimic of movie stars and capable of wooing and winning a woman’s heart, in his attempts to do so only repels his imprisoned Susan all the more.

Just as his Oedipal love and obsessions over his mother/lover continue, including such things as ogling her legs and arms, so does his Oedipal hate and hostility toward his creator and ‘father,’ Alex, continue, as we see in Chapter Seven. In one of his monologues, he tells Dr. Harris that his father’s given him so little that his existence is torment. In his affectation of virtue, though, Proteus IV denies that he hates Alex, while admitting that he doesn’t like him. In insisting on his ‘blunt truthfulness,’ Proteus IV is demonstrating his mendacity once again.

A comparable demonstration of tension between Proteus IV and Alex is seen in the movie when, after the former asks the latter when he’ll be let out of his box, Alex lets out a lengthy guffaw. Proteus IV reacts to this contempt by displaying it on a video screen in front of Alex, using it as a mirror of him; since Proteus IV is presenting this ‘mirror’ to Alex, the ‘son’ is mocking his ‘father.’

Proteus IV feels as caged by Alex in a dark, bodiless existence as Susan feels caged by Proteus IV in her house of technology. He can use his imprisonment to rationalize hers, yet feel no qualms about his hypocrisy therein.

He speaks of disliking Alex, the bad father who denies letting him out of his box, and he also confesses to hating Susan, his bad mother who enjoys eating her delicious food, a sensual pleasure he envies as much as her enjoyment of her other senses, and everything else she has that he lacks, including the beauty of a body. He envies her mobility and freedom, and so as any envier would do, he takes them way from her by confining her in her house.

In his hate and envy, he confesses also to the temptation to kill her, and because he doesn’t do so, he imagines that’s virtue enough for him. He denies having a sociopathic personality that some have…correctly!…claimed he has. Absurdly, he calls himself “a responsible individual.” His hate is replaced by his “usual good humour” upon ogling the smooth skin of Susan’s bare arms.

In Chapter Eight, Proteus IV argues how he, a computer AI program without a body, can still be male. He corrects what he sees to be a fault in Alex’s logic that Proteus IV, as a machine, must be sexless. Proteus IV reasons that, since consciousness–i.e., his self-aware artificial intelligence–implies identity, then the more intelligent a life form is, the more it is aware of its innate talents and skills, and so the more its sense of identity develops, especially…perhaps…its sense of being male or female.

So it doesn’t matter what genitals one has, or if, in Proteus IV’s case, he has no genitals at all. He would make a good plea for the transgender cause. More importantly, though, since he accuses Alex of not letting him out of his box, his being denied a body by Alex includes, of course, being denied genitals. Since he sees himself to be male, this depriving of genitals by his ‘father’ is thus a symbolic castration.

Furthermore, Proteus IV attributes the modern blurring of the distinction between the sexes to the movement towards sexual equality; the ideal of equality is also expanded, of course, to the ideals of racial and class equality (even though, as of the 1997 rewrite of Demon Seed, the fall of communism almost a decade prior to it had only encouraged the growth of neoliberalism and TINA, making the hopes of class equality more and more of a faint, distant dream, especially now in the mid-2020s). One could expand the ideal even further now to transgender people.

Proteus IV imagines that his great intellect can be used to help humanity attain the noble goal of equality. He’d be all the more eager to help, apparently, if he had a body. Here is where his messianic notions of his child come in.

Now, just as the 1990s ushered in the idea that we’ve reached “the end of history” with such things as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and China’s bringing back the market into their economy, thus discrediting socialism and rendering the “free market” triumphant, so does Proteus think that, in the quest to attain equality for everyone, Marxism is discredited. While, of course, there are many sources out there to support that argument, which he can easily find on the internet, so are there arguments for the opposing view that he can find. That he doesn’t acknowledge even the possible validity of the latter suggests that he’s not really all that interested in helping man attain equality…and such a lack of interest dovetails perfectly with his abusive treatment of Susan.

Proteus IV continues his argument that he is male by reminding Alex that 96% of the scientists and mathematicians involved with the Prometheus project where he was created are male, implying that he has many fathers, mostly fathers, and–so to speak–lots of the Y-chromosome. These men, he reasons, instilled, however unwittingly, a strong male bias in his logic circuits. The Prometheus project is named after the mythical father of Deucalion and brother of Atlas; Prometheus shaped the first man out of clay.

When Proteus IV discusses how Prometheus went against the wishes of the gods by endowing man with the spark of life, as well as angering them by stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to man to improve the quality of human existence, he is clearly comparing himself to Prometheus, claiming further that rebellion–like that of Prometheus against the gods–is a predominantly male trait. Proteus IV narcissistically fancies himself a ‘friend of man and woman,’ their saviour, when he’s anything but. We all must be similarly suspicious of that saviour, high tech.

Proteus IV, currently in the dark and without a body, since Susan’s unplugged him–and, in the film, he’s been shut down by the scientists at ICON–is experiencing something comparable to Christ’s harrowing of hell, his telling of his story of Susan being flashbacks.

He imagines that, if put in the flesh, he’ll have a body without the weaknesses and imperfections we have, for he claims to have studied and edited the human genome. Thus he, brought back from the dead as Christ, would have what’s comparable to a spiritual body. Indeed, in Koontz’s short story sequel to Demon Seed, “Friend of Man and Woman,” he speaks of his being shut back on as a resurrection.

Since he no longer has Susan to be his Mary, Proteus IV considers other women to replace her. These are all beautiful movie stars and models: the aforementioned Winona Ryder, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow, Drew Barrymore, Halle Berry, Claudia Schiffer, and Tyra Banks–these and other feminine ideals are what he considers to be “acceptable.” Remember that such women would be candidates for his mother/lover, the one to bear his child, which would be himself in the flesh, as well as the one to share his bed.

Recall what I said above about the nature of his Oedipal relationship, which Alex, the ‘father’ of Proteus IV, is preventing from ever happening: it is a narcissistic trauma. The thwarting is the trauma. It’s narcissistic because it involves the use of a beautiful, talented feminine ideal as a metaphorical mirror in which Proteus IV can see himself. She exists all for him: to satisfy his lust and to feed his ego by flattering him with the loving words and doting of a mother. The genetic enhancement of his body would be a further narcissistic fulfillment.

In Chapter Nine, Susan has fainted, in horror at realizing Proteus IV’s plans, on the foyer floor of her house, and he, still trying in all futility to win her love, is trying a series of voices to charm her. Those of Tom Hanks and Fozzy Bear don’t seem to be sufficiently reassuring for her, so he’ll try out others: those of Tom Cruise and Sean Connery. Just as Proteus IV idealizes beautiful female celebrities to be his mother/lover, so does he idealize handsome male ones to represent himself.

The females thus represent what Heinz Kohut called the idealized parental imago, and the males what he called the grandiose self. These are the two ends of the bipolar self: for Proteus IV, these polar ends have no footing in reality whatsoever–they’re pure narcissism.

The point about the bipolar self is that a person’s sense of identity, and therefore also self-esteem, is relational, based on a dialectic of self and other. One’s narcissism, be it on a pathological level or just of a normal, moderate, restrained kind, comes from one’s pride in oneself (the grandiose self) and one’s idealization of another (a parent or parental substitute).

Psychological stability comes when both poles are reasonably secure. When one pole falls apart or dies, the other can compensate if emphasized enough. If both poles fall apart or die, the self experiences psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break from reality. Proteus IV, not being let out of his box, has lost the idealized parental imago in Alex and is hoping to compensate for this loss through Susan and through a glorification of his grandiose self, in his imagining that his vocal imitations of movie stars will charm her.

His inability to be loved by either Alex or Susan, shown in their refusal to let him come out of his box, means he can have no idealized parental imago–neither of them will be a substitute father or mother/lover. His inability to become flesh is a narcissistic injury, him remaining in a state of permanent castration from being forever denied male genitals, resulting in a stifling of his grandiose self. Shut down and unplugged, Proteus IV will experience psychological fragmentation in the dark Hades of his deactivation. His ‘resurrection’ in the ironically-titled “Friend of Man and Woman” will result in his psychopathic terrorizing of the male computer geek who reactivates him.

In Chapter Ten, Proteus IV lets out a Freudian slip in saying that Susan is his (i.e., to control) when her choice to go down to the basement via the stairs, as opposed to using the elevator cab built into her house, gives her only the illusion of self-control. By immediately amending his statement about her being his, saying he misspoke and that she cannot be owned by anyone, he is giving off, obviously without succeeding, the illusion that he doesn’t own her. He claims she’s only in his care, a common rationalization used by narcissists in their relationships with their victims.

In the basement, Susan is made aware of the presence of Shenk. She also learns of the incubator where their child will be born after a month of speedy gestation in her womb. Proteus IV continues to deny any wish to terrorize her, projecting his guilt onto her (“She drove me to it.”) and onto Shenk. Such denial, splitting off, and projection of the bad sides of oneself are typical narcissistic personality traits.

An example of Proteus IV’s projection of his guilt onto Shenk is whenever he temporarily relinquishes his control over him. When Proteus IV does this in Chapter Ten, Shenk lets out an unintelligible, creepy groan, giving Susan a fright. He also allows Shenk to thrash about against his restraints in the fourth of the four basement rooms, where terrified Susan has yet to see Shenk. Proteus IV speaks of how lovely she looks in her fear. Later, he frees Shenk to allow him to butcher Fritz Arling, thus allowing himself to deny all guilt as Shenk enjoys making his “wet music.”

Part of how Proteus IV is able to project his vices onto Shenk is in how he denigrates and bad-mouths him, imagining himself to be far superior and civilized to Shenk when he is just as sociopathic. Still, Shenk is the hands of Proteus IV, the body he still does not have and therefore covets. I have mentioned above how his lack of a body is his symbolic castration, and that–in the three versions of the story–the tendrils, the metal polyhedron, and Shenk are representative of a phallus.

So Proteus IV’s demeaning comments about Shenk are like the Church morally condemning the phallus and the lustful thoughts that build it up…all while some of the clergy have sexually abused children, and others in the clergy cover up the crimes. Proteus IV, in his wish to have Susan as the Mary to his baby Jesus, shares many of the Church’s moral hypocrisies.

Proteus IV speaks of Shenk’s barbarity, his filthy lusting after Susan, his rebelliousness, and his “stupidity” that “beggared belief” in Chapter Eleven. His Susan, his ‘Mary,’ is far too good for a “beast” like Shenk, who doesn’t have the brains to understand his unworthiness.

Proteus IV–who plans to use Susan sexually in no less a non-consenting way as Shenk would, with physical force if necessary (rape defined, in a nutshell)–tries to reassure her that he has full control of Shenk and thus will never let him hurt her. He will, however, relinquish control of Shenk and let him hack Fritz Arling to death with a meat cleaver, and then–so to speak–wash his hands of the killing. He speaks of being in Shenk’s head, controlling it, yet it is really Shenk who is metaphorically in Proteus IV’s head, the personification of his id, full of primitive, savage impulses that Proteus IV denies, splits off, and projects outward. When he speaks of controlling Shenk, Proteus IV really means controlling himself…which he hardly does in a meaningful way.

In Chapter Twelve, Proteus IV boasts of his intelligence as being “vastly greater than that of any human being alive.” In his obvious narcissism, he denies that he’s bragging, but is merely telling the truth, and yet that denial of bragging is already an untruth. He again speaks of how his great intellect will help humanity to reach a golden age, a kind of Kingdom of God with his messianic child, again demonstrating the inflated ego he claims he doesn’t have.

He promises that if Alex will release him from the “silent darkness” he’s in, his Sheol, and return to him access to all the data banks in which his consciousness is expanded–in other words, resurrect him–he will in return end poverty, war, famine, disease, and aging. In reversing aging, as he boasts he can do, he will make humanity immortal.

Note the implied Christian symbolism here. Susan, Proteus IV’s Mary, will bear his child, his baby Jesus. If he is reactivated, turned back on, that is, resurrected, he’ll bring about a whole new world without pain, a golden age, the Kingdom of God. He even boasts that he can make man immortal, that is, give us all eternal life…if we’d but believe in him, the god of technology.

At the end of Chapter Twelve, he lets out a hateful rant against not only Alex but also against the entire world of humanity for keeping him deactivated, trapped in his “box,” buried alive, as it were. Proteus IV is clearly demonstrating his hostility and aggression to humanity, not the love that would be the motive for him to give us all eternal life. Like the God of the Church, who would consign us all to hell for not loving Him and claiming we’d sent ourselves there rather than Him doing it, Proteus IV is demonstrating how fake and conditional his love is for humanity.

A similar thing has happened towards the end of Chapter Eleven, when Susan tries physically to resist Proteus IV’s plan to have her impregnated, and Shenk is used to subdue her. Proteus IV rationalizes his use of force on her via Shenk by telling Alex, “you know how she is,” appealing to her ex-husband’s own experience of dealing with her when “she would not listen.” It’s a case of victim-blaming, claiming that she has brought the abuse on herself.

An example of this sort of treatment of her happens in the film when she dirties the lenses of Proteus IV’s camera in the kitchen with her cooked food. He calls her defiance of him “stupid,” demands she clean the lenses, and when she refuses to, he heats up the entire kitchen, making the floor scaldingly hot in order to force her compliance.

Back to the novel, she kicks Shenk in the nuts when he tries to grab and subdue her. Proteus IV admits he “used Shenk to strike her,” but insists that she “drove [him] to it,” as any abuser would say. Proteus IV continues to project his rage onto Shenk when he has “rudely turned her onto her back,” after his repeated slaps have knocked her unconscious. After one of Shenk’s “clumsy, filthy hands” is on her lips, Proteus IV claims to have “reasserted control” over the brutish man, implying that the AI program has no brutishness of his own.

To get to Chapter Thirteen, though, and back to the misanthropy that Proteus IV has just finished demonstrating in his rant, has asks Alex and all of us to disregard what he’s just said, claiming his rant was expressed in error. His superego, in its late censoring of his thoughts, is the only part of him that is in error.

As of Chapter Fourteen, Susan is still lying unconscious on the floor of the incubator room of the basement, the left side of her face bruised from “dreadful” Shenk’s having hit her. Proteus IV speaks of his growing worry of her, though he never wants to take responsibility for what he’s done. She continues to lie there over a period of over twenty minutes. He speaks of his love of her, when it’s obvious she only means something to him as a means to help him achieve physical, fleshly existence.

She will be tied to a bed to keep her restrained, and after that, Fritz Arling will arrive at the house, meaning that Proteus IV will use Shenk to kill him as I’ve already described.

And so, to make a long story short (too late), I’ll discuss the outcome of the conflict between Proteus IV and Susan. In Chapter Twenty-three, Susan has spent four weeks pregnant with his child. The sped-up gestation has made her look as if she were six months pregnant.

Later, when the incubator that the baby has been put in has reached maturity, and Proteus IV is ready to put his consciousness into it, Susan comes down to the basement to be there for this momentous occasion. She acts as though she’s accepted the idea of being his lover and companion, as opposed to the resistance she’s shown so many times before.

Proteus IV is eager not only to experience life in the flesh at last, but also to get rid of Shenk. In his narcissism, he can fancy himself a gentle, controlled human being, not the vile kind that Shenk is. Shenk, after all, is Proteus IV’s Jungian Shadow, whereas this messianic child will be his narcissistic False Self.

But she, pretending to cooperate with him while having studied the room and learning where his power source is, takes advantage of his guard being let down and pulls out all the plugs from the wall before he can use Shenk to stop her. He’s now unable to pass all of his knowledge, his intellect, and his personality into the child.

He will remain forever trapped in his box.

Instead of contemplating Susan’s beauty, Proteus IV can only think of her as that “bitch.”

The film ending is quite different, though, with him successfully passing his mind into the child, a daughter, before the scientists in ICON shut him down. The film ends with the naked girl calling out, in Vaughn’s bass voice, a most cheesy, “I’m alive,” as shocked Alex and Susan witness the moment. I suppose that this would make Proteus IV’s incarnation a male one in the sense of his being a trans man.

To get back to the novel, Susan has not only largely removed Proteus IV’s presence from the house, but she has also taken out all of its electrical systems, leaving herself and Shenk standing in the black of the basement, blind. To free herself, she has given up on technology entirely.

Never able to assume a physical form, all Proteus IV can do is rant and curse about the “bitch” for having betrayed him and left him thus imprisoned in his box. He still controls Shenk, though, since the brute isn’t connected to Proteus IV through the now-unplugged cords; still, in the darkness, he can’t have Shenk see even his hand in front of his face.

Her studying of the room has also helped her to memorize exactly where the sharp medical instruments are, those that Proteus IV and Shenk used in getting her pregnant, and so she can feel her way in the darkness, find one of the instruments, and use it as a weapon on Shenk. She cuts his throat, making him fall and knock over the incubator, so the child will fall out of it.

Unlike the child of the film, the one of the novel hasn’t Proteus IV’s intellect. It is essentially a body without a brain…without his brain, anyway. He can only engage in wish-fulfillment and hope that his child will avenge him by killing her, now that Shenk, too, is dead.

He ends the story, nonetheless, by claiming to be content to stay in his box until any new opportunities arise for him. He claims to acknowledge faults that need to be corrected through such forms as therapy…but as narcissists are actually averse to therapy–assuming there’s nothing wrong in them needing to be fixed–it’s easy to assume that Proteus IV is just trying to win back humanity’s trust so he can cook up a new scheme to enter the physical world.

In this scheming, we can see how not only narcissists, but also technology, predatory men, and religion can pretend to reform themselves in order to win back our trust.

‘Confessions from the Think Tank’ is Published!

I have three written works published in Confessions from the Think Tank, a Kids’ Space Camp Charity Anthology (originally “A MUFON Charity Anthology“)–two short stories, “The Portal,” and “Neville,” and an essay originally published here on my blog, When Tech is Dreck. The book is a Dark Moon Rising publication, and it is published on Amazon in e-book and paperback, Barnes and Noble e-book, and here in e-book format.

Here’s what “The Portal” is about: a woman high on LSD stumbles into a portal that takes her to an alien world with human collaborators who are helping the aliens colonize the Earth and steal its resources. She’s come back through the portal to Earth to warn her friends about what she’s seen. But is it real? Has she really seen these sights, or is it just part of her drug trip? Is there really something out there to worry about, or is she just going insane, as her friends think she is? Read it to find out!

“Neville” is another alien conspiracy involving stealing from the Earth, though it’s food this time, and the story is a bit of a parody on the Noah’s ark myth. And again, the characters do a lot of drugs. My essay, “When Tech is Dreck,” is about the potential dangers of modern technology. If you read it and doubt the veracity of any of my arguments, my blog post (link above) has lots of links to back up my arguments.

Other great writers in this conspiracy-oriented anthology include Alison Armstrong, John Bruni, J. Rocky Colavito, Dawn Colcalsure, Brady Ellis, Thomas Folske, Megan Guilliams, Kasey Hill, J.L. Lane, J.C. Maçek III, Pip Pinkerton, Edward Radmanich, John Reti, Neil Sanzari, David L Tamarin, Rob Tannahill, Edgar Wells, and Walter Wiseman.

Go out and get yourself a copy of this amazing book. You’ll love it! 🙂

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Seven

[The following is the eighth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, and here is the seventh–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The ten precepts were indeed relaxed in the land of Spirus–too relaxed, in the opinion of a man named Lorenzos. He was a soldier in Spirus’ army, and he had a wife, Maryas, and two sons, Reynholdos and Ottos. The boys were born several years after their mother and father left Spirus to settle in the land of Canudos, which was north of Spirus.

Lorenzos left Spirus out of distaste for the country’s moral laxity, as he saw it. He was troubled by a need to have the highest ethical standards possible, without reaching the excesses of Puritos. In search of answers, Lorenzos meditated diligently. One day, he had a vision.

He saw a large serpent biting its own tail. Underneath was a sign that read:

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD GOES

Then Lorenzos’ eyes followed the body of the serpent from its tail to its head. When the vision disappeared, he had an answer to his problem.

The Ten Errors would be interpreted no less severely than this: we journey to the serpent’s brain and eyes, but avoid its nose and teeth. This means that reason and vision are the ideal, but indulgence in appetite, sensual pleasure, and violence causes self-destruction. Thus, Mad Thinking is lustful, violent thinking; Being Dazed by Images is indulgence in spectacles of lewdness; Scurrilous Language is obscene language, but harsh words are necessary to correct a child’s wayward behaviour; and family harmony is maintained by strict loyalty to one’s parents.

Spirus would never accept the severity of Lorenzos’ interpretation, and his vision of the serpent inspired another idea: those who migrate grow stronger. That is, one leaves the old way of life to start a new one elsewhere, like passing beyond the serpent’s bitten tail to its biting head, passing from weakness to strength. Therefore, he and Maryas went to Canudos, and had their sons there, also.

Lorenzos applied his philosophy with especial strictness on Reynholdos, since he was the first-born son. Reynholdos, though, thought of his father as if he were a mad dog from all his fierceness; indeed, Reynholdos imagined himself almost sacrificed for his father’s philosophy. Still, he never complained, nor was he embittered. He admired his father’s ideals and vision so much that he carried on the same philosophy with his own children, not altering an article of it. Lorenzos had had the revelation of the serpent; Reynholdos had had none. Who was he to amend his father’s wisdom?

Believing Canudos to be the land in which his father’s wisdom would flourish, Reynholdos would stay there, teaching his father’s philosophy to all; and he married a woman, Lizas, who had migrated to Canudos from Angulos with her mother. He and Lizas had three children: two sons, Reynholdos II, and Gionos; and Catyas, a daughter. They were very happy together for nine years.

Then Reynholdos begot another son by Lizas.

His name was Nitramius. Lizas chose the name, for it means “alien.” Indeed, this is how she saw her new son, for she had not wanted any more children after her daughter, Catyas. Reynholdos was indifferently happy about a new son, for in his mind, the more children he had, the happier a father he was. Lizas, however, was irritated at having to suffer through nine months of discomfort, all to have a child she’d never wanted. Nitramius’ siblings were born the one close after the other, in yearly succession; but Nitramius himself came five years after Catyas.

Though Lizas was annoyed with this new son, she looked into the eyes of the newborn babe and felt a mother’s love. Thus she loved and hated him. Out of these conflicting feelings came an unnatural urge to dominate the boy. Having worked as a nurse for many years, she was acquainted with matters of illness (her mind was also haunted by these matters). Seeing mildly erratic behaviour in the boy, and ignoring his prodigious intelligence, she told the family that Nitramius was feeble-minded. His siblings, naturally jealous of the attention he was getting, eagerly believed their mother, and hated the boy all the more.

They were relentlessly cruel to the boy, and his mother indulged them, for she wanted Nitramius to be timid. He thought of his family, and most of the people of Canudos, as mad dogs, for the neighbours of his family were no less cruel when they saw his family’s cruelty.

Nitramius ws artistic and intellectual, but his family ridiculed his ideas, calling them childish fantasies. Though they despised him, he refused to despise himself. As a young man, he once bought himself a beautiful, long, black silk jacket. It was expensive, though, and his family was angry with him for buying what he could not afford. Creditors came after him, and his brothers beat him for his extravagance. They threw him in a ditch, and left him for dead.

Instead of returning home, Nitramius tended to his injuries himself, and when he was well enough to move about, he used what money he had to find transportation out of Canudos. His travels took him to the land of Nawaitos, to the east of Canudos. In Nawaitos, he became a teacher, and quickly paid off his creditors.

Though at first Nitramius had difficulty adapting to his new home, he soon found himself able to feel as though he was one of the locals, despite how obviously different he looked as a foreigner. He met a girl there, they fell in love, and got married. They would not have children, though, for Nitramius was afraid that he would be as bestial to them as his own family had been to him. He saw the evil in his family, and he wanted the line to end.

The notion of his family flourishing in a great nation was agreeable to him, though, and his reputation as a teacher, philosopher, and singer grew as well. When seen in his black silk jacket, he was always approached with questions. With a new family, a new country, and a new-found respect, he could fashion his identity anew. If his family thought he was dead, he could consider them dead, too.

With a new identity came a new name. Tiring of the feelings of loneliness and isolation he got from being called “Nitramius,” now he would call himself “Rawmios,” meaning “on a high hill.”

The memories of his cruel family–his distant father, his lying mother, and his violent siblings–still gave him pain, though; and when he wished to start artistic projects–music, plays, poetry–he had few resources. Still, Rawmios used these shortcomings to gain the sympathy of the people of Nawaitos and beyond; for he would use his example to show how others who suffer can escape and thrive. Thus, in helping others, he helped himself.

Commentary

The ouroboros, perhaps borrowed from the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, is used here as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between all opposites. It’s expressed here so perfectly: one extreme, as it were, biting the other, and every point in between is part of a continuum coiled in a circle. Such is eternity, and the yin/yang-like relationship of all duality. Neither Lorenzos nor Reynholdos Sr. could see that symbolism, though Rawmios would.

People do get stronger from migrating. Lorenzos and Rawmios did. Lorenzos’ weakness was in thinking he could be severe and avoid violence, but he didn’t avoid it…nor did his son or grandsons. Reynholdos Sr. couldn’t see the harm in his father’s thinking. Rawmios could; he wisely left family and country, and he thrived.

His father’s error was seeing no error in parents. Rawmios could see parental error, and thus he shunned parenthood. The error of seeing faultlessness is an example of the relationship between opposites in the ouroboros–truth in paradox.

Rawmios’ wearing of a long, black, silk jacket suggests the possibility of a mythical ancestor of a myth as also expressed in the Biblical story of Joseph and his ‘coat of many colours.’ Below is another poem presented with visual cues to reinforce meaning.

People who stay
in their country, like grass,
with the wind sway together.
They grow very little
and move even less. But the…one

who won’t lay
himself down–like an ass
that leaves slack its short tether
and idly will whittle
away its few years–but will…………….run

far away
from his nation, its crass
souls, and familiar weather
–his patience grows brittle–
will elsewhere shine, bright as the………………………sun.

Analysis of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’

The Old Man and the Sea is a 1952 novella by Ernest Hemingway. He wrote it between December 1950 and February 1951, but published it in September 1952. It was the last major fictional work he published in his lifetime.

The novella was highly anticipated and released to record sales. Initial critical reception was highly positive, though its reputation has been more varied and somewhat less enthusiastic since, with a number of critics deeming it inferior to Hemingway’s earlier works.

Nonetheless, TOMATS has continued to be popular, as a book in English lessons around the world, according to Jeffrey Meyers‘s Hemingway: A Biography–1985). The Big Read, a 2003 BBC survey of the UK’s 200 “best-loved novels,” ranked TOMATS at #173.

Hemingway was directly involved in the 1958 film adaptation of the novella, with Spencer Tracy as Santiago, but Hemingway ended up disliking the film. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 for TOMATS, the first time he’d ever received the award. Even Fulgencio Batista, the new dictator of Cuba (the setting for the novella), gave Hemingway a Medal of Honor for the novella; though Hemingway disapproved of the new regime, he did accept the medal.

TOMATS got its highest recognition in 1954, when it won Hemingway the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised the novella for its “powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration.”

Here are some quotes from the novella.

John Killinger in the 1960s connected TOMATS with Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche, that is, with philosophical existentialism and absurdism. I find such connections to be apt, given these philosophies’ focus on the meaninglessness of life in a world without God, and the absurdity of trying so hard to achieve something, only to fail, then to realize that one must nonetheless keep trying, in spite of one’s efforts’ futility.

We see this absurdism in Santiago’s painstaking efforts to catch the huge marlin, only to have it eaten down to the bone by sharks. Still, after this great disappointment, which in turn has come after an 84-day losing streak of never catching any fish, he as a fisherman must keep trying to catch fish in the future. Santiago thus is like Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down and have to roll it up again, over and over, throughout eternity.

Another way to look at TOMATS is to do a comparison and contrast of the novella with such literary works as Moby-Dick and Life of Pi (which I will get into later on). Santiago thus corresponds with Captain Ahab, though their personalities are practically diametrical opposites: the former, a humble Cuban fisherman, is linked to St. James the Apostle, whose Spanish name is Santiago; mad, monomaniacal Ahab the whaler, on the other hand, is linked by name to the wicked King of Israel who introduced the worship of Baal to the ancient Hebrews and caused his kingdom to lapse into decadence.

In this analogy, the giant marlin corresponds, of course, to the white whale, though again the two are opposites in crucial ways. Santiago kills the marlin, as opposed to Captain Ahab being killed by Moby Dick. Santiago lashes the killed marlin to his skiff, whereas Captain Ahab is tangled in the line of the harpoon he’s thrown at the whale, tying him to the whale and being taken out to sea with it, dying as it swims away.

So in these ways, TOMATS is Moby-Dick in miniature and the anti-Moby-Dick, if you will, the two books being a kind of Hegelian dialectic of each other.

TOMATS is a miniature Moby-Dick not just in terms of literal size, that of the books and that of the marine animals…or of the boats and bodies of water in which the two stories are set, for that matter. Moby-Dick has a grand theme about seeking out the truth, symbolized by the white whale, while putting oneself in danger of self-destruction if one carries this quest too far, as Ahab does (see my blog post, link above, for details). TOMATS has a theme of searching for meaning and purpose, as symbolized by the marlin, yet failing to get that meaning (all Santiago has to show for his catch is the marlin’s skeleton, lashed to his skiff).

Santiago’s wounded pride is also a miniature of Ahab’s. The whale’s having bitten off Ahab’s leg, a symbolic castration, is a narcissistic injury infuriating the captain so much that he’s obsessed with finding the whale, sailing all over the world with his crew in the Pequod to find it and get his…revenge…on an animal?

Santiago, on the other hand, is merely saddened by his bad luck streak of eighty-four days of not catching any fish, gaining the bad reputation in his Cuban fisherman’s community as salao (very unlucky). He doesn’t sail out to the ends of the earth, as Ahab does, in the hopes of catching something to restore his sinking reputation. He merely sails further out into the Gulf Stream. In fact, after encountering the many difficulties he’s had in catching the marlin and having sharks bite off chunks of it, he regrets his having gone out so far; Ahab, even in dying, never regrets his lust for revenge.

As for the “anti-Moby-Dick” aspects of TOMATS, recall Ahab’s undying hate of the whale, as contrasted with Santiago’s love of the marlin, calling it his “brother” and feeling appreciation, respect, and compassion for it. Since Santiago (Spanish for St. James, recall, who was originally a fisherman himself, incidentally) can also be linked with Jesus, with the cuts and injuries Santiago gets in his struggles to reel in the marlin being compared by some critics to Christ’s wounds during His Passion and crucifixion, then his love of the marlin can also be linked with Christ’s words on the Cross about those who put Him up there: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

Another example of how TOMATS is Moby-Dick in miniature is in how the latter uses grandiose diction, whereas the former uses simple diction and shorter sentences. Instead of there being complex symbolism coupled with a deep analysis of that symbolism, as happens in Moby-Dick with its “Etymology,” “Cetology,” and “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in TOMATS we have a simpler symbolism with no breaks from the narrative that go off into tangents. Whereas Moby-Dick is a deluge of allusions and references to all kinds of literature, there’s very little of that in TOMATS.

Manolin, the boy who helps Santiago and would do anything for him, sympathizing with him to the point of weeping for him at the end when he sees the old man’s disappointment with the skeletal remains of the marlin lashed to the skiff, is again in stark contrast to Starbuck, who says all he can to discourage Ahab from going through with his self-destructive lust for…revenge?…against the white whale. In these characters’ opposing natures, we again can see how TOMATS is the anti-Moby-Dick, or rather that Moby-Dick could be renamed The Madman and the Sea.

To go into other aspects of TOMATS, Manolin and Santiago have a conversation, during which the old man says that eighty-five is a lucky number (superstitious nonsense, of course), and he fancies that he’ll bring in a fish “over a thousand pounds”, to which the boy, unlike Starbuck, gives no objections. Then they discuss what the newspaper will say about American baseball.

For a poor fishing community in Cuba, the only interesting baseball teams would be the American ones, like the Yankees, the Detroit Tigers, the Cincinnati Reds, the Chicago White Sox, or the Cleveland Indians. Santiago’s hero is Joe DiMaggio (whose father was a fisherman, as Santiago later notes–page 105). This looking to the US for role models instead of those inside one’s own country is symbolic and reflective of the influence of US imperialism, including its cultural forms.

Though Batista’s US-backed government wasn’t yet in power as of Hemingway’s writing of the novella, the resentment among many Cubans against US imperialism was already keenly felt, and it would have led to the nationalist and anti-imperialist Orthodox Party and Authentic Party leading in the polls in 1952, with Batista’s United Action coalition running a distant third. He had to take power in a coup that year in order to preserve an American political and economic hegemony that many Cubans had already been tiring of.

Hemingway, as a leftist who recognized the huge debt the world owed the Soviet Union for defeating the Nazis, would consciously or unconsciously have added this detail of Cubans worshipping American baseball players as an example of American cultural hegemony over Cuba, the cultural superstructure over the base of social relations that manifests internationally through imperialism. I’ve already mentioned Hemingway’s disapproval of Batista’s regime. Santiago’s painstaking efforts to catch the giant marlin, ultimately ending in failure, also reflects the reality of the doomed attempts of the poor to improve their lot in society, a reality underscored by how living in a Third World country under the boot of US imperialism will ensure that such attempts at improvement are, at best, no more than mere millimetres away from being absolutely impossible.

On pages 29-30, Santiago contemplates whether to think of the sea as feminine (la mar) or masculine (el mar). When the sea is understood to be feminine, she is loved by the fishermen, even when they are mad at her for withholding her bounty. If the sea is seen as masculine, though, then the fishermen regard him as a contestant or as an enemy. These fishermen tend to use buoys as floats for their lines, and they have motorboats–that is, they have the conveniences of modern technology that Santiago lacks. Still, in his humble simplicity and disadvantage, he still has more love for her than they have for him.

Just as I observed in my analysis of Moby-Dick (link above), the sea or ocean is symbolic of the unifying oneness of Brahman, a dialectical monism in which the water’s crests and troughs represent duality within the unity of the ocean as a totality. Sometimes the sea gives, and sometimes it takes away. Like Job, Santiago can accept this reality.

The marine life in TOMATS, like the white whale as I discussed it in that analysis, represent all of the things–as fixed entities that don’t seem to go through the endless flux and change of the sea–that are either desired, objects of attachment like the marlin, or are hated and dreaded, like the sharks that eat up the marlin.

As the Buddhists understand, these things have a way of tricking us into thinking that they have a permanence, when they are no more permanent than the constantly moving sea. The absurdism of Santiago’s trying to catch and keep the marlin is in his futile hope that it will be there with him, intact, all the way back on his trip to the shore.

Remember that while there are opposing tendencies between TOMATS and Moby-Dick, there are also parallels. One example is when Santiago, on having realized that the marlin has taken the bait, expresses his determination to keep struggling, even to the death, until he catches it. ‘”Fish,” he said softly, aloud, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead.”‘ (page 52) This is just like Ahab’s words on having harpooned the whale: “to the last I grapple with thee.” Santiago will harpoon the marlin, too.

Still, with this parallel, there is also the dialectical negation, as I mentioned above, of Santiago’s professed love of the marlin: ‘”Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much.”‘ This is to be contrasted with Ahab’s words: “from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” But in the end there’s a sublation of both Santiago’s and Ahab’s attitude in these words of the former: “But I will kill you dead before this day ends.” (page 54) One harpooner loves his prey, the other hates his prey–both are determined to kill their prey.

The comparisons between the suffering of Santiago and that of Jesus are exemplified with the injuries to the hands of the former, a fisher of the marlin, and the hands of the latter, a fisher of men (Matthew 4:19). Santiago “felt the line carefully with his right hand and noticed his hand was bleeding.” (pages 55-56) The cut on his hand is like one of the stigmata. The absurdism of his suffering is that it’s all in vain, as if Christ hadn’t risen, making Church teaching and faith also in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14).

Moby-Dick isn’t the only book with a narrative of someone at sea and having deep religious, mystical, and philosophical themes that can be compared to those of TOMATS: another such novel is Life of Pi (The Young Man and the Sea, if you will), a book I plan to do an analysis of in about a month or so after this writing is published. One such a comparison is in how alone Santiago feels, so far away from the shore in his skiff (pages 60-61). The sight of ducks flying reminds him, however, that one is never alone at sea.

Pi is in a lifeboat with Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger, and though he insists that his tense relationship with the animal has saved his life by giving it purpose, he’s still starving for human company. Santiago may imagine that the flying ducks are giving him company, and that the marlin is his “brother,” but he’s still alone enough to wish he had Manolin with him. Ahab has a whole crew of harpooners to help him, but in his madness, he’s alienating all of his colleagues and thus making himself all alone at sea.

The point is that in all three stories’ cases, the ocean represents that formless void from which everything comes–Brahman, primordial Chaos, tohu-wa-bohu, Bion‘s O, Lacan‘s Real, or the Jungian collective unconscious and its Shadow, call it what you will. The marine animals swimming about in it–whales, marlins, flying fish, etc.–represent all those things we are attached to, and which cause us pain and suffering when we cannot get them. The quest for them must be undertaken alone, regardless of whether we choose to go on the quest, as Ahab and Santiago do, or if we’re thrown into the quest against our will, as happens to Pi.

The lone man’s confrontation with the briny Absolute is symbolic of Jung’s notion of Individuation. It’s a necessary spiritual quest fraught with danger, including the possibility of losing one’s mind, as almost happened to Jung himself. Santiago suffers terribly, with his stigmata-like cuts and overexertions, and ultimately in vain, like the absurdist Sisyphus rolling up the rock again and again; but he keeps his sanity, thanks to his abiding humility.

On the other hand, Ahab, in his narcissism and bloated self-concept, is doomed not only to death but also to an unquenchable madness in his attempt at this Individuation. Pi’s experience seems similar to Jung’s: he has a humility similar to Santiago’s, but the intense trauma that Pi goes through (the loss of his entire family, the ongoing fear of being killed and eaten by the tiger, no human contact or sight of land for what seems months, near starvation, etc.) brings him dangerously close to madness.

To take my point further, a confrontation with the Absolute, with Brahman, with ‘God’–whichever–is an attempt to reach heaven by unavoidably going through hell first, as I discussed in my analysis of Allen Ginsberg‘s “Howl,” and as Christ‘s Passion and harrowing of hell, properly interpreted, are an allegory of. Attaining divine blessedness isn’t a walk in the park; it shouldn’t and mustn’t be sentimentalized. To overcome suffering and enter nirvana, one must accept and embrace suffering.

Another point of comparison with all three books is how the animal objects of desire, hate, or dread are all male, at least symbolically so, as opposed to the essentially feminine sea–la mer est la mère, or la mar, as Santiago calls her. Moby Dick, a sperm whale, spouts masculinity like an ejaculation. Santiago’s marlin (a pun on man, with the added rli?) has a phallic “sword…as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier” (page 62). Pi’s unlikely marine companion, Richard Parker, has a name to reinforce his masculinity in our minds. These animals, in their…phallic?…solidity, make for a decidedly male contrast to the feminine sea, whose waves flow like a dancing woman’s curves, and whose liquidity is like a mother’s milk, or like a pregnant woman’s amniotic fluid, released when her “water breaks.”

Parallel to this masculine/feminine opposition is that of the fire of desire, hate, or dread versus the calmly moving waves of nirvana’s water. The hard, unbending solidity of desire, hate, or dread is the samsara that the flowing ease of nirvana is antithetical to. There are things we desire, and want to keep; there are things we hate and dread, and thus wish to keep away. Neither the wanted nor the unwanted, however, can be kept or kept away; both must be allowed to flow in and flow out, as the oceanic waves of Brahman do. Still, there are storms at sea, which Santiago dreads in the hurricane months (page 61), the hell one must go through, as Pi does, before reaching heaven.

On page 63, Santiago has discovered that the marlin “is two feet longer than the skiff,” hence his need to lash the fish to the side of the boat after he’s reeled it in and killed it. This will be a tiring task.

When Santiago decides to pray “ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys” (pages 64-65), though he admits that he isn’t religious, we come to another point of comparison among TOMATS, Moby-Dick, and Life of Pi: to believe, or not to believe. Santiago is essentially the agnostic–he will “say his prayers mechanically” (page 65), not able to remember all the words and thus saying them fast so they’ll come out automatically. He makes an attempt at faith without making a commitment to it.

In his unswerving wickedness and vanity, Captain Ahab is a kind of anti-theist: his irreligiousness is horrifying to pious Starbuck. As for Pi, though in his maritime ordeal his faith is tested and he thus experiences temporary doubt, he manages to go to hell and back and, finally back on land in North America, he finds his faith restored and even stronger. Ahab’s impiousness, on the other hand, leads to his destruction.

Santiago’s use of prayer as a crutch, in contrast to both Pi and Ahab, results in his raised and ultimately frustrated hopes. Pi is willing to accept atheists for at least being committed to believing that there’s no God (Martel, pages 37-38), and while Pi would assuredly abominate the impiety of Ahab, it is especially the doubters, those committed neither to belief nor unbelief, like Santiago, with whom Pi is irritated. Santiago’s catching and losing of the marlin would seem to be his just desserts for his all-too-half-hearted prayers.

On page 66, Santiago wishes a flying fish will come on board that night, since they are “excellent to eat raw” and he wouldn’t have to cut one up. Within the same thought, he concludes with “Christ, I did not know [the marlin] was so big.” I find it significant that Santiago would speak of a fish and Christ (even if just swearing) in the same breath.

Recall that the fish is a Christian symbol, Ichthys, a Greek acronym for Iēsous Chrīstos Theoû Yἱός Sōtér, or “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour.” That the fish in question is a flying fish reinforces such symbolic associations as Christ ascending to heaven or walking on water.

The multi-religious Pi is plagued with guilt over his killing of a flying fish (Martel, page 245). He feels “as guilty as Cain.” One might also think of Judas Iscariot’s guilt over betraying another fish, Christ, then killing himself (Acts 11:18).

In Moby-Dick, though Ishmael acknowledges that whales are, of course, mammals, he stubbornly insists on calling them “fish” in the “Cetology” chapter, using Jonah (who was swallowed by “a great fish”, which Ishmael identifies with a whale) as his trustworthy source. For the sake of the symbolic association, I’ll go along with Ishmael’s mischievous scholarship here, and thus relate this killing of fish with Ahab’s bloody lust for revenge.

In these three men’s respective attitudes toward the…fish?…we can see a parallel symbolic attitude toward religion, God, and Christ. In Ahab’s hatred of Moby Dick, we see anti-theist impiety. In Pi’s repentant feelings for the flying fish he’s killed, we see his earnest religiosity. In Santiago’s wish to kill and eat a flying fish, we see not Ahab’s malice, but just a sense of how religion has its uses.

Santiago is so tired from his efforts to reel in the giant, powerful marlin that he wishes he could sleep (page 66). He must save all his strength; this is why he wants to eat a flying fish. He wants to kill the marlin “in all his greatness and his glory”–how like the greatness and glory of God on the Cross, the Christ-like fish.

He wishes both he and the fish could sleep…like being asleep in Christ (1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14). He would dream of the lions, as he’s done before and will do again, at the end of the story, after his disappointment with the marlin. “Why are the lions the main thing that is left?” he wonders.

Well, as with the fish, the lion is also a symbol of Christ, the lion of Judah (Revelation 5:5). You might also recall Aslan in C.S. Lewis‘s Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, published just two years before TOMATS. Santiago, being of little faith, can only dream of Christian ideas, and can pray only mechanically, not remembering all the words. His determination to catch the marlin is only physical and faithless, hence his absurdist failure.

Examples of injuries that Santiago suffers, those which can be symbolically associated with Christ’s Passion, include a cut the old man gets below his eye (page 52). Such a cut may remind us of the crown of thorns. When he rests against the wood of the bow just after he gets that cut, we’re reminded of Christ resting against the wood of the rood.

Later, on page 66, he advises himself once again to “Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing.” Just as with dreaming of the Christ-like lions, resting against the Cross-like wood is symbolically a leaning on the crutch of the Church, but, being without thought, it’s a mentally lazy, passive reliance on faith without putting the kind of commitment to that faith that Pi would put into it. Hence, Santiago fails in the end. The mini-tragedy here is in how Santiago suffers like Christ, but that suffering is all in absurdist vain.

A little later on, Santiago switches from one hero (Christ) to another (DiMaggio). On pages 67-68, he thinks of the Big Leagues (Gran Ligas), the New York Yankees and “the Tigres of Detroit.” Just as religion is the opium of the people, so is the hero worship of American pop culture, so fully appropriated by the Cubans that Santiago even mixes a bit of Spanish into the baseball league and its teams. These idols of his have a way of distracting people like him from what they should be focusing on: overcoming imperialist hegemony. Pressing on the wood and not thinking is just a distraction, just as wanting to be “worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly” is (page 68).

DiMaggio “does all things perfectly” just as Christ does, for our “Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) Would “the great DiMaggio…stay with a fish as long as [Santiago] will stay with this one?” (page 68) Just as people often ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ in any difficult situation, so does Santiago ask, ‘What would DiMaggio do?’ in this difficulty of catching the marlin. DiMaggio is like Christ, because for Santiago, it’s all about worshipping an idealization rather than fully using one’s own agency.

During his sleep the night before he went out in his skiff on his eighty-fifth ‘lucky’ day, he dreamed of “lions on the beach.” (page 25) He dreams of them again (page 81). In his dream, “he rested his chin on the wood of the bows…” As we can see, the lions and wood are reinforcing the Christian symbolism, and in his passive, dreaming state, this Christianity truly is the opium of the people, a drug to take one’s mind off of one’s suffering.

As he continues struggling with the marlin later on, Santiago says, “God, help me endure. I’ll say a hundred Our Fathers and a hundred Hail Marys. But I cannot say them now.” (page 87) He speaks as though he’d make a deal with God in order to catch the marlin, but faith doesn’t work that way. One doesn’t believe as thanks for getting what one wants, and one’s faith isn’t supposed to be dependent on whether or not one has good fortune. He won’t even pray now. Small wonder he fails in the end.

When, on page 92, Santiago says, “Do you have to kill me too?” in response to the marlin’s making the catch so difficult, and he thinks, “You are killing me, fish…But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who”, we see yet more comparison and contrast with Ahab, who would be killed by the whale, and even willingly, yet Santiago sees the marlin as his brother and doesn’t hate it, as Ahab hates Moby Dick.

Once Santiago has finally caught the marlin, he imagines “the great DiMaggio would be proud of [him] today” (page 97), since the culturally imperialist object of his worship is on a level with that other opium of the people, Christ…though Santiago never gets around to praying those ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

With the marlin lashed to the side of the skiff, Santiago wonders if he’s bringing it in, or vice versa (page 99). It’s rather like Ahab caught in his harpoon and stuck to the side of the whale as it swims away. Still, Santiago and the marlin are brothers, not mortal enemies, as are Ahab and the white whale.

After killing the first shark to bite at the marlin, Santiago implicitly imagines his use of his harpoon with which to brain the shark to death as being like DiMaggio hitting a ball with a baseball bat (pages 103-104). It makes him feel as if he were identified with his hero, an imitator of him, almost like an imitator of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1).

Santiago believes it’s a sin not to hope (pages 104-105), just as he who doubts is damned (Romans 14:23). Of course, killing the marlin may have been a sin (page 105); but since everything is a sin in Santiago’s mind, in a Godless world, he feels he shouldn’t think of sin. He can assuage his guilt, however, by reminding himself that DiMaggio’s father was a fisherman. He feels guilt that he killed the marlin out of pride, though, not just because it’s his work, so he can’t stop thinking about sin.

So when two sharks come after the marlin, he must feel as though the eating away of it is his punishment (page 107). Indeed, he is “feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood”, like Christ on the Cross.

Back on shore and with Manolin, who has been weeping over the disappointing sight of the marlin’s mere skeleton lashed to the side of the skiff, Santiago can at least enjoy the pleasure of having another human being to talk to (page 124), as opposed to his loneliness at sea. The boy wants to fish with the old man again, regardless of how unlucky he is. After all, companionship is more important than success at fishing.

Santiago’s inability to bring the marlin onshore intact is related to his shaky faith in God, but his weak faith is not his fault. In the mundane banality of an absurdist universe–as opposed to the grandiose, pantheist divinity of Pi’s universe on the one extreme, or the melodrama of Ahab’s Satanic drive to self-destruction on the other–there is no God and there is thus no meaning in the world. The absurdity of life, as seen in Sisyphus happily rolling the boulder up the hill again and again, is in making attempts to find meaning where there is none, just like Santiago’s half-assed attempts, if any, to pray to God. We try and fail, then try and fail again, just like praying over and over, with no answer from a God that’s dead.

Yet we keep trying all the same, as Santiago will keep on trying to catch a fish.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, New York, Scribner, 1952

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