The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (22 page)

In 1912, this was a radically new set of characteristics for a hero, charming for its newness. It was a pure pleasure to follow a John Carter just to see what unexpected things he might do next.

But there is another fuzzy element in
A Princess of Mars,
ultimately as completely unexplained as Carter’s nonspecific being. This is the means of John Carter’s sudden transference to Mars.

John Carter tells us that after the American Civil War, he was prospecting for gold in Arizona. He took refuge from Apache attack in a convenient cave. An eerie moaning sound was heard, which frightened the Indians away. Then Carter suddenly found himself standing naked beside his own apparently lifeless body. Outside the cave, his attention was drawn to the red planet Mars near the horizon:

As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron. My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness.
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When John Carter opens his eyes again, he is lying naked in the midst of a strange landscape. He knows himself to be on the planet Mars. And immediately his adventures in this land of wonder begin. He experiments with the effects of the lower gravitation of this smaller planet. He discovers a Martian egg hatchery. And before the chapter is out, he is taken prisoner by savage white-tusked four-armed Martian warriors standing fifteen feet high.

What a peculiar headlong transition into the World Beyond the Hill this is! Earlier writers like Verne might delicately probe at the boundaries of the World Beyond the Hill with the aid of some super-scientific vehicle, and then hastily retreat at the first evidence of wonder. Burroughs makes no attempt at all to present a plausible means of travel to Mars. He simply picks his character up by the scruff of the neck and sets him down naked in a transcendent realm.

Is the transition to Mars a dream? Burroughs tells us immediately that it is not: “I was not asleep, no need for pinching here; my inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth. You do not question the fact; neither did I.”
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Has Carter’s soul left his body behind in that Arizona cave and gone off on its own to do some astral traveling? This seems possible; especially since Carter wakes at the end of the story to find himself back in that same cave. But there is this objection—while John Carter is on Mars, he is no spirit. He has his normal physical body, and when he is in danger, he seems to stand every risk of dying the real death from which there is no resurrection.

When Carter comes to himself again in the Arizona cave at the conclusion, he discovers the remains of a mummified old woman crouched over a brazier containing some green powder, while behind her, hanging from rawhide thongs, is a row of skeletons. But we have no easy connection that we can draw between this Indian witch—if that is what she is—and Carter’s adventures on Mars.

So how did John Carter get to Mars? The best answer we can give is that Edgar Rice Burroughs wanted this particular representative of humanity there, and put him there.

The real question is why the readers of
All-Story
were willing to accept such bare-faced implausibilities as the special nature of John Carter and his sudden and miraculous removal to Mars. The answer would seem to be that the readers of
All-Story
were as curious as Edgar Rice Burroughs to discover what a lone human being might accomplish if set down naked in an alien world where the struggle for existence was even fiercer than on Earth. Burroughs’ Mars was a fascinating experimental test case of the strengths and limitations of civilization, of the acceptance of animal nature, and most of all, of human encounter with the mysterious scientific universe of space and time. Readers were willing to accept almost any initial improbability in the setting up of cases in order to see this particular thought experiment played through.

Mars—known as Barsoom to its inhabitants—is a dying world whose original high civilization collapsed 100,000 years ago when the Martian oceans dried up. After a prolonged period of barbarism, civilization has been restored by red-skinned Martians who are a mixture of the yellow, black and white races of olden times. These red-skinned Martians lay eggs, but otherwise appear normally human.

In many ways, the civilization of the red-skinned Martians resembles a typical Victorian technological utopia. It possesses mechanical wonders far in advance of contemporary Earth technology. There are automated restaurants, elevator houses that rise into the air at night, and super-telescopes that can see everything that passes on Earth. Above all, the red-skinned Martians command the powers of the mysterious eighth and ninth rays of the solar spectrum.

This new Martian civilization may now be the match of the old civilization that fell. Its knowledge may equal the old knowledge that was lost. John Carter tells us:

During the ages of hardships and incessant warring between their own various races, as well as with the green men, and before they had fitted themselves to the changed conditions, much of the high civilization and many of the arts of the fair-haired Martians had become lost; but the red race of today has reached a point where it feels that it has made up in new discoveries and a more practical civilization for all that lies irretrievably buried with the ancient Barsoomians, beneath the countless intervening ages.
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At the same time, the eternal struggle to exist goes on here in this harsh world. The cities of the red Martians continue to contend with each other for scarce resources, and must also beat off the attacks of the savage green Martian hordes that roam the dead ocean bottoms.

The red Martians have not left all of their barbarism behind them in the long ages of recovery. When they are not traveling by airships powered by the eighth ray, they are jouncing around on the backs of horselike thoats. When they are not firing radium rifles that can shoot projectiles two hundred miles, they are engaging in hand-to-hand combat with long swords.

This is a very strange mixture of incongruous elements. It might almost seem that Burroughs, faced with the immense challenge of imagining the details of an alien planet, had responded by tossing anything and everything that occurred to him into the pot and stirring. Here a bit of occultism, like the transfer of John Carter to Mars. There a dash of utopianism, like the red Martian civilization. A dollop of lost race elements like the vanished ancient Barsoomian high civilization. And some choice scientific ingredients like the concern with the lesser Martian gravitation, and the central Darwinian struggle for existence.

But Burroughs is not merely messing around. He means something by all this. However clumsy the attempt, Burroughs is aiming to reconcile the best of civilization and the best of savagery, two states formerly thought to be totally incompatible.

There are times when he is not completely successful. When Burroughs juxtaposes his radium rifles that can shoot for miles and intimate combat with edged weapons, the effect is brash and colorful—perhaps acceptable as a novel notion, but otherwise more than a little bit silly. The two forms of fighting do not exist comfortably in the same frame of reference.

In one detail, however, the blending of utopianism and barbarism is perfectly achieved. This is the nakedness of the characters. It is not only John Carter who encounters Mars naked. Except for a few decorative trappings of leather, metal and feathers, the red Martians habitually go naked. So do the green ones. Here—in 1912!—is our first glimpse of Dejah Thoris, Martian princess:

“She was as destitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked, nor could any apparel have enhanced the beauty of her perfect and symmetrical figure.”
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This nakedness may be taken as utopian. It is the ultimate end point in that rationalization of clothing that we can see beginning with the discarding of wigs in Louis Sebastien Mercier’s
Memoirs of the Year 2440.

But nakedness is also barbaric. The pervasive nudity in
A Princess of Mars
may be taken as an expression of a new mood that began to surface in the Teens—a positive eagerness to shed Victorian constraint and acknowledge humanity’s animal nature.

During the Teens, people were beginning to try to get in touch with their bodies. The new popular music of the day was ragtime and jazz—racy music, improvised music, Negro music, body music. It was now okay to eat new foods like hamburgers and ice cream cones right out of hand, just as though civilized eating utensils had never been invented. And the Teens were the decade in which women shucked their corsets, and it first became possible to talk of sex, the forbidden Victorian topic.

The pulp magazines were part of this unloosening process. And so, in particular, were the early stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

John Carter is equal to the challenge of the red Martians. For all their nakedness, they are a somewhat repressed lot, bound by rigid convention. John Carter is quicker on his feet than they and does not share their fixed prejudices. In Burroughs’ second Martian story—
The Gods of Mars,
serialized in
All-Story
in 1913—Carter exposes the exploitative religion of Mars with its false priests, false gods, and false hereafter. In the third story—
The Warlord of Mars,
which had its serialization in
All-Story
in late 1913 and early 1914—Carter conquers virtually the entire planet.

If the half-super-civilized, half-barbaric red Martians are one standard of measure by which John Carter is tested, the green four-armed Martian savages are another. These gigantic beings are embodiments of pure animal ruthlessness. Every green Martian is in constant direct competition with every other green Martian. The higher sentiments of love, mercy and compassion are all but unknown among them—regarded as dangerous atavisms. They laugh at the death of their companions and derive their greatest amusement from the torture of their enemies.

John Carter wins the initial respect of these creatures by beating them on their own terms. When a green Martian abuses him, he lashes out with his tremendously powerful Earth-bred muscles: “As he banged me down upon my feet his face was bent close to mine and I did the only thing a gentleman might do under the circumstances of brutality, boorishness, and lack of consideration for a stranger’s rights; I swung my fist squarely to his jaw and he went down like a felled ox.”
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But John Carter is superior to the green Martians on other grounds than mere might. When brutal and decisive action is not called for, he is capable of love, friendship, loyalty and compassion. He can convert a savage Martian watchbeast into a friendly pooch. He is even able to command the personal friendship of one superior green Martian, Tars Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark.

Ultimately, the most successful blending of civilized enlightenment and barbaric vitality in
A Princess of Mars
is John Carter himself. As his princess, Dejah Thoris, says to him early in their acquaintance: “ ‘You are a queer mixture of child and man, of brute and noble.’ ”
¹⁷⁴

It is Carter’s openness and personal flexibility that enable him to arrive naked in an alien world of wonder, meet it without prejudice or fear, and battle his way to the top. If we must struggle to exist within the scientific universe of space and time, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ recommendation is that we be done with all our reluctant hanging-back. We should embrace the fact with the receptivity and eagerness of a John Carter.

Much of Burroughs’ charm and freshness derive from the new attitude that he displays toward the universe. He does not perceive the scientific universe as an inexorable grinding-on of immutable cosmic laws certain to reduce all human effort to rubble. Rather, he sees the universe of space and time as an endless source of unfamiliar conditions which may try us, but which we may respond to. It is this attitude that permits Burroughs to imagine Barsoom as a transcendent realm throwing forth one marvelous challenge after another.

In this new attitude toward the universe and in his neotenic hero, Burroughs is offering the materials of an answer to the tangled problem of man, civilization, and nature. If the universe is not a meat grinder, then there is no need for us to make a choice between a high culture sure to grow effete and destroy itself and a wild and brutal savagery that trades morality for momentary survival. Rather, it is in adaptation to circumstances that the answer lies.

It is an answer for society. Do we need to fear that the fall of civilization will be the end of man? No. When the Martian oceans dried up and the ancient Barsoomian civilization fell, the Martians survived, and after “readjustment to new conditions” erected civilization anew.

Adaptation is also an answer for man. John Carter is a living example of adaptability. Among Southern gentlemen, he is a Southern gentleman. With children, he laughs and plays like a child. And when he is amongst the civilized red Martians, he is a natural red Martian prince.

John Carter is an early version of the Twentieth Century existential man who finds his meaning in encounter, not in affiliation. And in whatever circumstances he finds himself, Carter trusts to his intuition and always acts with instantaneous rightness, even when faced with death:

 . . . In all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later. My mind is evidently so constituted that I am subconsciously forced into the path of duty without recourse to tiresome mental processes.
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Here, then, in the implausible pulp romance
A Princess of Mars
—published the very same year as Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague”—was the answer to all of London’s questions, a reconciliation of
The Call of the Wild
and
White Fang.
The answer was: Adapt. Do what is appropriate. When it is time to be Buck and lead the wild wolves, be Buck. When it is time to be White Fang and defend civilization, be White Fang. But don’t make the mistake of identifying man’s true flexible nature exclusively with either civilization or savagery.