Musings on Fritz Leiber

Ok, I've read several pages ahead, and I think I'd better lay down at least the gist of the rest of the Gravesian period, because it's important for understanding what follows. Basically Leiber and Graves disagreed very strongly on the roles of men and women, in both the social and domestic spheres. Graves believed women had more power in both, and Leiber believed men do. But both of them believed it was due to something like projection of men onto women, though that specific term wasn't in common use yet, because it was coined by Jung (or maybe just popularized by him, but already in existence? Not sure), and it was exceedingly difficult to read Jung in English until somewhere in the late 50's, because his books were coming out only in German until then (the language spoken in his native Switzerland). Plus the prohibition on Jung was already in effect in schools, universities, and across much of the spectrum of intelligentsia, as it still is. I remember Jordan Peterson saying that people in various universities told him he'd better not mention Jung or openly try to study him, or there would be consequences. Jung was as much of a pariah in his time (and still) as Peterson is now. And of course the prohibition only made Peterson more determined to study Jung. Leiber had to deal with that same prohibition against Jungian theory in his day as well, but sought out and studied Jung as the translated books began coming out. Graves had already dismissed Freud and Jung, and all psychotherapists really, when only Jung's earliest books were available (and I suspect not in English). So he was unaware of Jung's later theories. Most people at the time, unless they were fluent in German and buying his books from overseas, knew only the prevailing attidues of the professors and intelligentsia concerning Jung (which were harshly negative). So no more than rumors spread by people with an axe to grind against him.

Ok, I think that covers it well enough. The important distinction being the differing opinions between Graves and Leiber concerning the power levels of men and women.

Spoilers ahead for The Snow Women

I said earlier that I don't care much for the three stories comprising the first book—Swords and Deviltry. That's not really true. It's true for the second story, the Mouser's origin—The Unholy Grail, though even that story has its qualities. But I'm currently reading The Snow Women, Fafhrd's origin, and though it has some longish dull parts, now I understand why I think they're there, and I see some extremely deep symbolism I never even glimpsed before (Last time I read these stories I wasn't aware of symbolism yet, or at least didn't think to look for it in the stories).

First thing I noticed tonight is that there's a strong Oedipal element. It isn't there until about three quarters through, at the point where Fafhrd has decided he must flee Cold Corner and his mother and his barbarian girlfriend (and unborn child) and go south with Vlana the Culture Dancer, who he associates with civilization and the warm, sun-drenched cities of the south. At this point the story is excellent—all dull parts long left behind. As for the oedipal stuff, it isn't direct, it's symbolic, but clearly laid out. Fafhrd is a youth, about 18, and though his mother is depicted in such a way that she seems quite old but still tall and sturdy, it clearly says at one point she really isn't old, and when I thought it through, she would be about 40. Well, that's the same age Vlana is. This fact also must be gathered from clues, like his mother's age. Most of the time she seems only slightly older than he.

Here's where the symbolism gets crazy.

Fafhrd has a dream just before he decides he needs to flee south with Vlana, in which he's talking with his (dead) father. His father is looking at him with obvious pride and love, and Fafhrd is trying to feed him, and has the feeling that something terrible will happen to dad if he doesn't eat. Dad looks glowingly healthy, but he keeps his 'eating hand' hidden inside his cloak and refuses to show it. Finally in desparation Fafhrd snatches the cloak and pulls it away, to reveal a hand of bone. Then he remembers his father is dead and has been for some time, killed by his mother. He wakes in a feverish delerium, now understanding that he must flee, and heads for Vlana's tent, where his mother and her coven make a serious attempt to kill them both. He barely manages to save Vlana, and himself really, and her other suitor comes running because he heard the falling, ice-coated branch that crushed most of the tent. This man is the same age as Vlana (and Fafhrd's mother), and despite their vying for Vlana's attentions, the man has a very kind and fatherly attitude toward Fafhrd. It even says clearly that he behaves toward him much like his father did in his dream.

Thinking about this it suddenly struck me—his mother Mor is associated with the frozen north, with cold and ice and snow, and with the barbaric way of life, and Vlana with the hot sunny South and civilization. Mor's hair is white and Vlana's is red. It's freakin fire and ice baby! They each are presented almost as goddesses—sort of a Heat Miser and a Cold Miser, and Fafhrd has to choose the goddess of fire and civilization, at great peril since his mother is the goddess of cold and barbarism. His mother finally admits openly to killing his father because he had a wandering gene, in his case just for the mountains, but she knows Fafhrd has a much stronger one for the South and civilization. She tells him straight up if he goes her curse is upon him and there's nowhere he can flee—she says in past times the power of the frozen North has invaded the South and laid waste to cities and civilizations, and where it has once gone it can go again through witchcraft.

Now I understand why a lot of groundwork had to be set up to get all this symbolism in there, and I suspect that's why the duller parts are there. But damn, what an incredible sendoff right at the beginning of the series! It reminds me of the way Hera kept attacking Hercules throughout the show The Legendary Journeys (I assume it comes from the myths, but not sure). She also was a very shrewish wife to Zeus, Herc's dad. Quite likely Leiber took that as his model for Fafhrd's origin.

At one point Mor is depicted as a spider with her icy web extending to cover the entire world of Nehwon, and Fafhrd and Vlana as little flies traversing that web and causing twitches that carry straight back to her anywhere they go. Geeze—talk about having a gigantic form! Much bigger than any mountain or tent. This is more subtle though than the other stories (which were actually written before this one).

I just made the connection—the North would be where Norse mythology comes from, and the sun-drenched South would be analogous to the Mediterranean, where Greek and Roman mythology dwell. Obviously though Leiber was mixing them up if he borrowed from Hercules' myth for Fafhrd. He undoubtedly did that to get in the stuff about the powerful mother goddess cursing and atttacking her husband and son. I've read a good deal of Norse mythology and I never ran across anything like that relating to Thor.

If it seems strange that Leiber believed women were not powerful in the world but in his stories they're far and away the most powerful things, it's because he thought many men had such Anima figure projections that made women seem so powerful, and they tried to limit the power of actual women in their lives to compensate for that. What I'm not sure he understood, and never seems to have included in the stories, is that not all men see their Animas as all-powerful threatening goddesses that must be appeased or opposed. Many see them as kind gentle figures—either nurturing mother figures or as goddesses that provide boons and assistance, even if they also demand he perform quests or tasks for her.

Finished The Snow Women last night (more spoilers)

Interesting title. At the beginning Fafhrd was described as slender and speaking in a high voice, because he was trained through his childhood and adolescence as a Singing Skald, and was lanky and 'rangy' rather than muscular. In fact at his first appearance he almost seemed like a woman, and several people mistook him for one. As part of his escape he had to ski-jump across a gap where many of Cold Corner's adventeresome young men had died trying to jump across, but he took two of the big professional fireworks used to announce the opening of The Show (the traveling Culture Show, of which Vlana was the lead dancer), whch are made like bottle rockets but big enough and sturdy enough to use as ski poles. First he pulled the fuse from a third one and tested to see how long precisely it takes to burn down (problem solving), and then he lit the fuses on his two 'ski poles,' poled as fast as he could toward the gap, and leaped out into space, falling so low there was no hope of making it across. Until the fireworks went off and lifted him up high enough to make it.

This is fire, plus it's the symbol of the Show, which is itself symbolic of the South and Civilization, and Vlana is the lead dancer of it, its High Priestess. He used her fire magic against the ice magic of his mother and her coven. And at the height of the climax a half-dozen misty figures took shape off in the middle distance of the forest, as tall as the trees, seemingly made of ice, that resembled hooded gigantic women. It seemed they were beginning to move. He shot off the rest of the fireworks and destroyed them. I believe in a sense these were the 'Snow Women' of the title, but so were Mor and her coven, of which the ice giants were avatars. So much symbolism, and I had never noticed it before, at least not in the sense of how it relates to the fire and ice motif, and Barbarism vs Civilization etc.

In the big climactic fight scene the clearing was getting hemmed in tighter and tighter with a web of ice crystals, which made it feel like an icy womb closing in. Womb seemed a bit over the top, but really got the message across. And there was a sense of something like a gigantic invisible spider (but said at one point, when he was having a vision of it, to be covered with white hair) weaving its inescapable net around him. All of this sets up the conflict so powerfully (of himself against his mother's ice magic) that you expect to see more of it througout the series, but there's none. Largely because the other stories had already been written decades earlier (this one was written in the 60s specifically for the paperback release). At times the symbolism is too on-the-nose or clumsy, especially the womb reference, which would sound really bizarre if you're not aware of the subtext or the oedipal stuff. Leiber is a very adventuresome writer, sometimes overextending, but overall his writing is so evocative and powerful and capable that, if you fall under its spell, you'll tolerate all those minor mishaps.

Leiber equated himself with the feminine, because he was creative and brainy and an actor rather than athletic. Hence I suppose why Fafhrd was a Singing Skald and spoke with a high voice. Also, as a Skald, he wore white furs like the women did in the village, whereas the men wore black or colorful furs. It was traditional that the Skalds be rasied almost as girls, to keep them in touch with the muses of poetry and song.

Leiber also said that it's women, artists, and poets who are in touch with the irrational, by which he meant the unconscious. He wrote poetry as well as prose.

But while Fafhrd was associated with the feminine in all these ways, he also was quite masculine and strong, and had the courage needed to rescue Vlana and fight off several huge burly barbarians (one who was called a giant, and seemed to be about 8 feet tall).

I want to make it clear though, Fafhrd never again seemed feminine, except that, for a barbarian, he was oddly fascinated by civilization and had a very even temper, not at all a brawler until it became necessary, or mayhap when he had tipped a few too many tankards. He's gentle by nature, and level-headed, not given to violence, panic, or superstition as most barbarians apparently are.

Launching into the Early Jungian Period (Back to Witches of the Mind)

"Jung was vastly more aware than other psychiatrists of the close brotherhood between them and novelists and dramatists... according to most modern psychologists a serious writer has no more insight into mental and emotional troubles than any other layman"—Fritz Leiber, The Anima Archetype in Science Fantasy.

"In archetypal theory, maturation is the process of establishing an identity distinct from that of the mother. This process involves the development of a conscious mind, whose core is the Ego, the mediator with the environment. Once the conscious mind is established, the Ego ideally develops an increasing resemblance to the Self, the central archetype that represents a person's full potential (AKA the Archetype of Wholeness—X). Called Individuation, the mirroring of the Self is never completed. It is furthered, however, by the temporary projection of the archetypes onto external events, which leads to the reorganization of the archetypes within the unconscious. Individuation, Jung believes, is the subject of most myths and fairy tales, in which the hero is the Ego and other archetypes are other characters, an idea that Joseph Campbell develops in The Hero With a Thousand Faces."​

Apparently before 1959 Leiber's understanding of Jung was very partial and taken at secondhand from unknown sources. In that year he began to study the real thing, through translations of his actual books. Leiber probably took to Jung so strongly because it so closely resembled Graves' ideas about The White Goddess, though Graves despised Jung.

In the early 50's Leiber fell into alcoholism and barbiturate use, and so did his wife. They were 'partially estranged,' and she took mostly to her bed and he to solitary hobbies like chess, astronomy, and long walks and drives. (Don't blame me, the author of Witches of the Mind keeps jumping wildly back and forth through time.) He also at some point took to studying psychotherapy, and launched into some form of self-exploration. More and more of his characters began to become self-portraits. Fafhrd had begun that way but became more and more like him in some ways (not further explained). He also became much more introspective. During the 60s he stops writing the sociological fiction he had been doing in his Gravesian period and started depicting his personal problems in his stories. First person becomes his favorite voice.

After three years lost to alcoholism, he devoted himself to learning writing technique in general and symbolism in particular. Leiber stresses that symbolism in literature works on the same principles as it does in dreams and delusions.

Taking a break here, but I hope to get four more pages read and make another post yet tonight. That way I can finish the massive book report that is this blog thread by the end of the month, as I determined I would.

I don't think I need to say this, but clearly The Snow Women was meant to depict Fafhrd's Individuation from his mother and his transferrence of his Anima onto Vlana instead.

Due to his personal issues, Leiber was apt to present the Anima in conjunction with the Shadow, specifically hilighting his past failures, lost opportunities, and fear of death. His story The Oldest Soldier, apparently written before his Jungian period (?) had a pacifist for the MC who, like Leiber, regreted his failure to get involved in WWII. His work in the late fifties tended to have a pessimistic edge concerning the possibility of alternatives. In particular his Change War stories, about time travel in which it's difficult to actually cause any changes. Time resists change.

Leiber believed that the Shadow is something largely unfamiliar to most modern people living in comfort. In times of war or extreme hardship it shows itself, but in times of comfort it slumbers and rarely wakes. Many people refuse to believe in it, or dismiss the idea contemptuously. We need artists to call up the Shadow and show us its nature. Leiber said ( I think in his essay Monsters and Monster Lovers) that "An understanding of the Monster is always healthy, but never more so than now, when widespread depersonalization means that the mind's repressed contents include the elements of individuality. As a result, while it was once enough for the vampire in Dracula to act as a catharsis for Victorian fears of sexuality (or, as others allege, of syphilis or feudalism), horror writers of the last half century have felt compelled to understand and sympathize with the monster as a symbol of embattled individuality." Facing the Shadow is extremely therapeutic if done with honesty, either through therapy or in reading or writing about it. He considered his own Shadow-based stories to be a part of his ongoing search for Self. He saw the Monster as an inexhaustible symbol, as shown by science fiction's recasting of it in the form of aliens (and many other forms in more recent times).

Leiber had identified the values he admired to be associated with the feminine, and because he also believed he had failed to live acccording to them, he depicted them as partially repressed (and what's repressed can be projected). His Shadow became fused with his Anima. And he began to write stories where that was the case.

Oh man, too tired to continue tonight. I'll try to pick up the slack tommorrow.

Must get this in before sleep—

"He considered his own Shadow-based stories to be a part of his ongoing search for Self."

My mind just connected this up with something from an earlier post about Neo-Noir. Apparently it's always (usually anyway) about the search for the self. Classic Holmes-era detective fiction was about Watson searching for Holmes as a consciousness, Noir was about the detective hounding the villain, and Neo-Noir is about the inner search for the Self of the detective, perhaps located in the villain he's searching for. I may well have screwed that all up—tommorrow I'll find that post, link to it, and fix my quote.

So post-50s, around the time Jung's books started becoming available in translated versions (and when noir became neo-noir), we began to search for the Self. He had planted it in our consciousness.

Gha... bed now.

I'll just do this down here, because the way I remembered the quote was basically right:

• Notes on Neo-Noir (and The First Two Terminators)

So the evolution of the detective story is in this sense the evolution of our understanding of the inner Self, or of how we approached it in the various time periods. First came the objective, third-person account of Watson, trying to understand the inner nature of Holmes through external clues as Holmes sought out the villain. Then it became a the detective searching for the villain, without the interposition of a Watson as narrator. And finally a first-person search inwardly for the detective's own Self. An attempt to complete his or her own Individuation, or some important stalled stage of it I think. That's something we all must struggle with, and it's never easy. Usually it's when we're pushed to our limits and must go deeper than we ever have before, face terrifying or shameful or unpalatable aspects of our own nature, that we're able to make progress at this ongoing task. It's only when some cataclysm shows us our inner monsters, the ones that had been slumbering previously, that we get the clues needed to take another step along the way.

A little exploration into why this would be the case—

A detective story is largely about how we think. The detective knows human nature, and knows how to find clues, or in other words how to investigate the inner nature of other people. And, as I keep pointing out throughout this blog,

the way to investigate inner nature is through three methods—observe the behavior of people, compare it to their self-reporting, and observe your own inner states.​

This was the method Freud came up with for investigating the unconscious and those strange states of mind we call mental disorders, but it also involves trying to understand how the healthy mind functions. This is all done through comparison and contrast—comparing the behavior of the subject to that of other people in similar situations, comparing what people say they're experiencing deep inside to what they actually do, and comparing other people's behavior and self-reported inner experience to your own inner experience and behavior. As far as I can determine these are the only methods we have to study and understand something as esoteric and elusive as inner experience or thought—feeling and affect. As I've said, you can't cut it apart, put it on a microscope slide, and examine what elements it's made of. It doesn't yield to the methods of science, because it isn't anything physical. It yields only to the methods of psychological investigation.

I think this explains why detective stories were at some level always about the investigation of the human mind, because the work of a detective is to discover why a particular person is doing things 'normal' people don't do. Or maybe it's more accurate to say the job of a detective is to profile the mind of the perpetrator in order to figure out whodunit and whytheydunit. That was peripheral in the classical days of Holmes, the main focus was on physical clues, but there was always an undercurrent that says Holmes can solve these impossible crimes only because he has an extraordinary mind, and it's capable of understanding these abnormal minds of the perps. Then in more modern times it became a first person account (usually) of the detective doing the investigating himself. That isolating third person perspective and comforting objectivity was stripped away. We're now inside the messy mind of the investigator himself, struggling through all his own issues to discover the nature of the criminal's mind, and often finding unsettling similarities with his own. But again, that apsect was subliminal when present. But it came to the forefront in the neo noir. I'm thinking in particular about the movie Manhunter—prequel to Silence of the Lambs, in which the detective must have disturbing dialogues with Hannibal Lecter, the only one brilliant enough and disturbed enough to understand the mind of the serial killer, and throughout the movie, the detective became disturbingly aware of his own inner similarities to both Lecter and the serial killer. In fact Lecter reveled in pointing them out. In the end he solved the case, but needed a good deal of therapy. I think the sense that, in order to understand the killer you must discover that inside of yourself which is like the killer, has always been at the heart of the detective story, if generally hidden. It's the basis of method acting—to play a convincing killer or villain, you must find him within yourself authentically. Often method actors become disturbed while spending an extended amount of time inside the mind of the disturbed, as witness Heath Ledger while playing The Joker, or Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now pursuing Colonel Kurtz and discovering himself along the way (and Martin Sheen's breakdown while playing the part).

I was going to burn through the rest of the book and try to get this done by the end of the month, but if I do it that way I'll miss all these side-trips where I make important connections and examine aspects of things that would otherwise go unexplored. And if I do that, there's no discovery writing going on, and that's the whole point of this blog. I write to discover things.

So I'm slowing it back down (hah! Obviously I've already done that). It'll take as long as it takes. No point to an arbitrarily-set deadline (a ridiculously short one) that kills off the whole reason I'm doing this. I still consider this my graduation piece, and a perfectly chosen one that seems to be connecting up with some of my other more important threads of thought. But it needs to be done right, and that ain't by rushing through it. Plus I'll quite likely be doing some post-grad work now and then. In fact I doubt I'll ever really stop with the investigation through discovery writing (I mean outside of fiction)—it's too important to me and my approach. But I definitely need to do it less frequently and re-launch on fiction writing. Now that I've let go of The Beastseekers (its previous form) for a while the ideas behind it have begun to change into something I think will work a lot better. You need to just let go sometimes for that to happen. The mind (the unconscious) often needs some time away—the pressure to be let off—so it can do its work. In fact it needs you to be concentrating on something else entirely. And those are great times to intensify your external searching through things like exploratory blog entries.

And in case this isn't clear from the above—the only way to get a glimpse of the Self (barring catastrophe or some random vision of it) is by working your way through the Shadow and then the Anima or Animus. You must do a lot of shadow work before you begin to see Anima or Animus figures in your dreams or fantasies or to notice them in the world around you, projected onto people. It isn't a hard-line division, more like you'll see anima figures (or animus if you're more feminine) along the way—glimpses now and then—but mostly shadow figures. But after you've done a certain amount of shadow work (it took me around three years) you'll see less and less of them and more anima or animus figures. Things get more difficult when you move to the anima/animus stage—hence why Jung said shadow work is the apprentice-piece and anima work the master-piece.

Here's a lot more info:

• Introduction to Shadow Work
• Shadow work
• Jungian Dream Interpretation
• Characteristics of Shadow dreams

I spent three years studying and practicing to compile all that information.

I never realized it before, but the description of the Mouser's apartment in Ill-Met in Lankhmar is really a description of his character. He's come to Lankhmar with a new girlfriend—the innocent, aristocratic and naive Ivrian, daughter of a duke, brought up in wealth and surrounded by servants tending to her every whim. Now that he's killed her father (long story, but he was a bad dude), he's sworn to keep her up in the same kind of opulence she's accustomed to. We discover his pad when he brings new friend Fafhrd home (along with Fafhrd's new girlfriend Vlana). It's on Ordure Blvd, in the bad part of a bad neighborhood, in a sagging and age-blackened tenement slum where the wooden stairs up the back wall of the building (on the outside) are half rotten (they can barely support Fafhrd's weight) and the floor sags alarmingly in the center. But once inside it's a different story. Thick layers of richly woven rugs cover the floor, tapestries and hangings adorn the walls—every inch of them—and even the ceiling is covered with decadent black velvet shimmering with tiny glittering 'stars.' Behind the ornate draperies are gilded shutters, and all around stand gleaming brass, bronze, and gold objects like candleholders, braziers—all manner of odds and ends to make the place look opulent and palatial. Fafhrd rapidly puts two and two together and realizes his new friend is the infamous thief that's had an undefeated run of filching away the fittings and furnishings of the wealthy in nearby areas. But then he begins to notice the little gaps here and there, where stained and peeling walls peek through. A few cockroaches scurry across the fabulous surfaces. A few wisps of street fog drift in through unseen cracks in windows and walls. The Mouser rapidly moves around the room fixing each little chink in his disguise, all done with aplomb and grace, in the exaggerated manner of a courtier or an extravagant stage performer, and at the end of his round he sits on a cloth-of-gold sofa and gives Fafhrd a hard challenging look, daring him to say anything.

Yep, pretty much sums up his character.