Man versus All

The Hero against the Gods, Men and Monsters: 

A Masculine Manifesto for Literature and Life

I am in the process of writing two heroic novels, Sold and Yusef of the Dusk and am trying to rectify the elements of the heroic in my mind. I have done this more stylistically with the Well of Heroes project, which has already netted two volumes of commentary on the works of Robert E. Howard, all of which had heroic themes. These themes, identified as aspects of his work are:

• Trails: The natural world, the actions of man and all of those other six threads of the heroic life, act on the hero to shape his form and test his substance. 
• Race: The racial makeup of the hero, his racial sentiments or rejection of same and racial politics—usually exterior to the hero, who tends to an elemental worldview and is often an interloper—frame and impel the hero through the story arc.
• Civilization: In a civilized setting, the constructed and affected world of sedentary, hoarding man and scheming woman frames the heroic in stark contrast—for the setting is his elemental opposite, best depicted in film by Tarzan visiting New York and diving off the Brooklyn bridge and King Kong fighting airplanes from the spire of the Empire State Building—to the unjust world, and also, in the hands of genius writers such as Melville, London, Howard and Wolfe, illustrates the corrosive effects of degenerate living on the human character.
• Barbarism: In a tribal setting the hero is tested in more physically active ways though in a context with no less moral gravity than its civilized counterpart. The best adventure stories in terms of entertainment occur in such settings, tending to a less complex message and less compromised hero. In terms of character development, Howard and Burroughs surpass all by bouncing their barbarian heroes back and forth between the wilting embrace of civilization and the savage allure of the tribal life.
• Dream: The inner vision of the hero, his education by way of dream, marks a return of the outwardly energized direct actor to his center, coiling him like a spring to leap back into the field that defines him. More than anything, dream in heroic fiction and myth joins the hero with the reader and renews his connection with his revealing agent, the writer, who must not be his creator. Of the many statements about Howard that this author thinks he would object to, the oft quoted blurb “by the Creator of Conan” would probably irritate him the most, as he seemed to be a shamanic type of writer who channeled his heroic visions as much as imposed forms upon them. In terms of the man entombed in modernity, dream is where we come to know ourselves and establish an inner distance from the filthy grotesques of modernity, as well as gravitating closer to our mythic ancestors. 
• Gulfs: Modernity accepts only physical gulfs, and eschews gulfs of morality, cognition and metaphysics, denying transcendence as a matter of first principal. Such a worldview, that denies the existence of horribly incomprehensible minds, of unfathomable evil or unimaginable gulfs in understanding cultivates the fatally domesticated mind that asks “why” as the city walls collapse, that says “no, this cannot be” as killers sweep down upon them motivated by such nonsensical notions as race, where the hero, fatalistically resigned to facing incomprehensible powers, springs into action. 
• Cataclysm: When gulfs separating the powers that buffet the tiny human soul converge upon the realms of civilization and rend it, memories of such events are only passed down to us through the ages in the form of heroic actions. The clash of man versus nature and man versus God in the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, of hero versus the gods in the Iliad, of hero versus gods, monsters and hierarchies in the Odyssey, of Saracen versus Christian in the Song of Roland, of hero versus nature, monster and prince in Beowulf, all come at the clashing of nations and religions and lifeways that brought down tribes and civilizations. The hero is at the heart of our collective, moral memory and we discard him at our peril. 

How do these themes align with what I have separately sketched as the elements of the primal man, or of the uncompromising masculine?

I will address these themes in terms of Yusef, hero of The Dusk, adventuring on The Red Sea and Indian Ocean in 1201 A.D., and Jeffy Tun, an enslaved orphan, sold twice in England and once in Virginia in 1678 in the novels attributed to them. But in life, we at the End of Masculine Time, must see the heroic in ourselves in order to guard against the final abomination of our world—not on the political scale, but on the personal. For a discussion of this aspect, or the expression of Twilight Masculinity, continue to At the Feast of Souls and Grace Speaker.

(c) 2017 James LaFond