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A review by akemi_666
The Tower of the Elephant by Robert E. Howard
3.0
If the magic of D&D was inspired by The Dying Earth, then its dungeons were inspired by Conan. Roguish companions, deadly traps, and enigmatic gemstones abound. Mournful gods ensnared by malevolent sorcerers in fantastic towers.
Not as much of a libertarian hellscape as I thought it would be. Howard posits that civilisation (with its laws and institutions, I assume), permits psychic violence in place of physical violence. People may insult, demean, and shame you, because they know you can't strike back. In barbarism, there is honesty in ones exchanges (you wouldn't insult someone unless you had the courage to fight them); in civilisation, there is cruelty (you can insult whoever you like, and if they rise to your bait, they're the one who gets in trouble).
This is pretty insightful. While I don't agree with Howard that a big man with a big sword is more noble than a city-dwelling intellectual, he succeeds in diagnosing a perverse contradiction of civilisation: the manifestation of passive-aggressive and spiteful behaviours out of polite and civil social conventions.
Consequently, he affirms Hobbes and Freud's theses that civilisation is neuroticising, yet denies the state of nature as brutish and cruel. Rather, the cruel and brutish arise out of civilisation. (Hobbes and Freud project the cruelty of modernity back to the dawn of time!) This idea, of civilisation as the source of cruelty, is eerily similar to postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. These thinkers critiqued the perceived progress of Western civilisation, whose privileged status exists atop the erasure of black histories — through the construction of a barbarism outside of itself, as emptiness and lack. (Bear in mind, Fanon and Césaire were writing from and about peripheral colonies, while Howard was writing from and about the centre, albeit a centre transposed into a fantasy past whose coming into contact with its barbaric peripheries reveals it as savage.)
This isn't just an inconsequential sword and sorcery story — it's an ontological revision of Victorian adventure stories, which would find their highest expression in the The Lord of the Rings. In place of liberal-capitalist sentimentality (we
Not as much of a libertarian hellscape as I thought it would be. Howard posits that civilisation (with its laws and institutions, I assume), permits psychic violence in place of physical violence. People may insult, demean, and shame you, because they know you can't strike back. In barbarism, there is honesty in ones exchanges (you wouldn't insult someone unless you had the courage to fight them); in civilisation, there is cruelty (you can insult whoever you like, and if they rise to your bait, they're the one who gets in trouble).
This is pretty insightful. While I don't agree with Howard that a big man with a big sword is more noble than a city-dwelling intellectual, he succeeds in diagnosing a perverse contradiction of civilisation: the manifestation of passive-aggressive and spiteful behaviours out of polite and civil social conventions.
Consequently, he affirms Hobbes and Freud's theses that civilisation is neuroticising, yet denies the state of nature as brutish and cruel. Rather, the cruel and brutish arise out of civilisation. (Hobbes and Freud project the cruelty of modernity back to the dawn of time!) This idea, of civilisation as the source of cruelty, is eerily similar to postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. These thinkers critiqued the perceived progress of Western civilisation, whose privileged status exists atop the erasure of black histories — through the construction of a barbarism outside of itself, as emptiness and lack. (Bear in mind, Fanon and Césaire were writing from and about peripheral colonies, while Howard was writing from and about the centre, albeit a centre transposed into a fantasy past whose coming into contact with its barbaric peripheries reveals it as savage.)
This isn't just an inconsequential sword and sorcery story — it's an ontological revision of Victorian adventure stories, which would find their highest expression in the The Lord of the Rings. In place of liberal-capitalist sentimentality (we