‘The Advantage of his Civilized Mind’

Robert E. Howard - Conan - The God In The Bowl, An Impression by James LaFond

In The God in the Bowl, an unsold story, Howard uses a standard who-done-it, one-setting story that could have been played on an unchanging stage, in order to paint two pictures: a collage of ageless social types which have made up civilized society from its dawn until today, and which form an unsteady mirror of social frailty against which the reader views Conan, as a picture of ethnically identified pride, a thief, yet still more honorable than the mass of civilized folk. This might as well have been seen in a Saint Louis museum in 1890 in which a Comanche come to steal some artifact stands accused of murdering the proprietor. In such a case only the sheriff would share the warrior’s masculine status and then only in outline.

The God in the Bowl is Howard’s best wrought contrast between barbarism [ethnic masculine identity] and civilization [emasculating compromise]. In this story, Conan is seen from various other perspectives, from Arus to Astrius:

• Arus the watchman, an increasingly irrelevant cog of the mechanism he serves, especially in light of the horror he encounters “in a lonely place at midnight.” Like most murder victims, Calian Publico, the slain employer of Arus, is found by a lowly soul, a person rarely permitted to cast judgment in what he first discovered.
• A gaggle of guardsmen, their numbers imprecisely stated, as befits a surprised gathering of men in a shadowed precinct, lending their looming silhouettes, their presented arms, confining hands, matter of fact voices and the occasional facial expression.
• Demetrio, the only man among the civilized characters combining intelligence and a sense of honor.  He is the key character with most of the dialogue. “Demitrio’s keen eyes swept the somber stranger,” Howard tells us, letting us feel most comfortable in the sandals of the police official.  “I am no dog,” Conan answers Demetrio, questioning the authority of the master class and bringing the wrath of the thug cop who is simply the timeless overseer and brute enforcer of the elite.
• Dionus, the Prefect of the police detail, a thug who beats confessions from men and gouges out the eyes of women to get them to turn on their men. His threats bring out the hard edge of the barbarian like a dog's bark might elicit a snarl from a wolf. Dionus “was a materialist” one of Howard’s most scathing indictments of a character. Dionus, is a large fierce man, the civilized degeneration of the warrior, Conan’s counterpart with whom the author develops most of the tension.
• Promero, the chief clerk.  He gives Howard a chance to sketch the despised middle class one misstep from debt slavery: “Typical of that class, which risen from the ranks of artisans, supplies right-hand men to wealthy merchants and traders.” Promero almost steals the show with his loquacious emotions and intelligent narration.
• Enaro, the charioteer and illustration of a lower class.  Enaro is an embittered, branded “debtor slave,” who humiliatingly lived in “the slave quarters.”
• Astrius the final character, a member the elite whom Demetrio represents.  He is the foppish, lisping, young aristocrat who completes the circle of masculinity as the effeminate degenerate par excellance.

Over and over again the characters call those they feel beneath them “dogs” just as the protagonists and chief villains in Conan tales are likened to wolves, leopards, panthers, tigers and lions, denoting them as standing apart from the domesticated and enslaved supporting characters as direct actionists. Large civilized men are not likened to such totems by Howard, nor are the puppet-master characters, who all lack a certain physicality.

Demetrio, the only qualified people-manager in the story, attempts to maintain things on a conversational and investigative level and not go directly for the arrest of his suspect, Conan, who stands as the only direct actionist in this story, with Dionus as his blubbering, grunting caricature.

Anochronistic to a large degree, The God in the Bowl is essentially a story that supposes a civilization so old that it had adopted many of what we might consider modern affectations and procedures without industry ever transfiguring it beyond recognition, fitting of a prehistoric age with Atlantean roots.

The reading of this story, with all of its distinct voices, projected across the masculine prism, from rumbling bully to whimpering coward. The use of accents, especially Conan’s outland accent, is superbly rendered by the reader.

The fight scene is excellent, and reminds me of Charlton Heston’s performance against 13 men in the movie El Cid. The ultimate behavior of the supporting civilized cast and the barbarian hero demonstrated the author’s command of the human psyche.

Note

The 10 years hard labor designated for housebreaking is a very American law, halfway between the 7 owed by a debtor and the 14 owed by a convict in colonial America, a place Howard was well read on, which was ruled by “scented dogs” such as Conan names the most privileged of his accusers.

(c) 2018 James LaFond