Ohioana Library Ohio Legacy Series: Roger Zelazny, An Essay by Mary A. Turzillo

The Ohio Legacy Series

Roger Zelazny, Hero-Maker
An essay by Mary A. Turzillo

Reprinted from the Winter 2003 Ohioana Quarterly

I was fresh out of grad school, in the middle of a job interview at Kent State University. At my previous interview, in Pittsburgh (please don’t ask which school, it’s too painful), the chairman of an English department had asked me what I wanted to teach, and I had the temerity to say science fiction. Murmuring arose between the other two interviewers. Do I have to mention that science fiction was not considered respectable back in the seventies? The chairman asked which authors I would teach. I said, Shakespeare, Milton, Voltaire, Swift - I got that far when he snorted and walked out of the room. My theory of science fiction and its place in the world of literature had not met with approval. Perhaps that chairman has since found enlightenment, but I doubt it.

So now, as an applicant for this teaching job at Kent, I had no idea how the interview was going. I liked the interviewer, one Carl B. Yoke. As we talked, my gaze wandered to the books on his shelf, including Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley. “Zelazny,” I said. “You read science fiction?”

“I have been Zelazny’s close friend since sixth grade,” he answered.

Oh, my.

The two had, I discovered, met as boys when Zelazny, seated in alphabetical order behind Yoke, wrote a satiric poem about a disgusting monster named Yok. Carl reciprocated with a piece about the Zlaz monster. Their friendship continued through high school as the two interwove a series of narratives about Zlaz (for Zelazny) and Yok (for Yoke).

I believe that Carl would have hired me rather than somebody else even if I hadn’t been able to compare Zelazny’s novel with the movie Damnation Alley. I do know that he knew a lot of important people in science fiction. Over the course of the next twenty years, he got me two book contracts and introduced me to scholars and writers who paved the way to getting published both as a scholar and later as a fiction writer.

One of these people was Roger Zelazny himself.

When I met Zelazny, I noticed he always seemed attentive to the conversation at hand, but something in his eyes suggested he was thinking of something else, too. In fact, I now realize, he was always writing, in his head.

Roger was a notoriously poor driver, Carl told me. Once, after they had dined at Shaker Square, Zelazny had turned left onto the Rapid Transit tracks. After a few minutes of terror, Zelazny managed to get the car back on the street, and Carl asked him what he’d been thinking of.

Sorry, Zelazny said. He’d been plotting a story.

Roger Zelazny was slender and wiry, an elegant, Keanu-Reeves, cyber-punk thin whip of a guy with a long aristocratic nose. After he published the Amber novels, teen girls hung on him as if he were some sort of noir rock star. Ohio novelist Maureen McHugh (China Mountain Zhang and other novels) was a guest at a Columbus convention with him, and said he had agreed to come only if the management whisked him from appearance to appearance through secret passageways in the hotel to protect him from throngs of fans. He wasn’t drop-dead handsome, though; don’t get that idea. It was his heroes they were after.

The first memory I have of Zelazny’s work was well before I began thinking of science fiction as an important twentieth-century literary movement. I was in graduate school at Western Reserve University. Al, my then-husband, an omnivorous SF reader, emerged from the bathroom, slapped a magazine on the table, and grunted, “Good stuff.” The story was Zelazny’s “ . . . And Call Me Conrad,” which later became the novel This Immortal. It contained a scene of threatened torture so vivid that, despite my lamentably poor memory, I recall to this day that passage where the villain speculates on which victim’s intestines would stretch further.

So when Lord of Light came out in paperback I grabbed a copy. What a bright fictive dream Zelazny was able to create in my mind! Genre writers before him had used mythology and literary allusions. He wasn’t the first SF writer able to create purple-fronded gardens, but his gardens, perfumed with the spices of an alien world were so real I wanted to walk into them and press my hands together in namaste to statues of Kali and Yama. Passages were so vivid that when, after rereading the book a few days ago, I mentioned them to my husband, Geoff Landis, he smiled and said, “Yes, I especially liked that part,” even though he had not read the book in years.

Though I was a student of English Literature, I privately judged too much of it written after 1700 to be subdued, polite, lacking in speculative power, and, well, mundane. Science fiction, on the other hand, had the spanking bright ideas I craved, but most was written clumsily, with no feeling for character, style, or setting. I acknowledged that little of science fiction was really literature. But this Zelazny guy was able to play with the Big Ideas of SF and still incorporate literary values.

Zelazny was a member of the New Wave of science fiction. He may not have been the first to write science fiction for adults with sophisticated taste. But he was the first I’d encountered.

And he had something more. Fans in the ’80s had good reason to descend on him in droves when he appeared at conventions. It was his heroes.

Zelazny, like many science fiction writers, was originally an English literature major. He earned an M.A. from Columbia in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. His master’s thesis was titled “Two Traditions and Cyril Tourneur: an Examination of Morality and Humor Comedy Conventions in The Revenger’s Tragedy.” He must have read widely not just in the plays of Middleton, Tourneur, and Shakespeare’s contemporaries and imitators, but in all of Renaissance literature. And because his field of study was drama, he had models on how to create dramatic situations. He often described himself as weak in plotting; but some who collaborated with him said he was a brilliant plotter. I once asked him how he outlined and he shocked me by saying he never did.

And I believe that was exactly true. He created the characters, and they created the plots.

The core of Revenge Tragedy (as in the subject of his master’s thesis) is a hero with a score to settle, beset with deadly enemies. A familiar example of a Revenge Tragedy hero is Hamlet. The hero is often melancholy, wears black, makes grim jokes, feigns madness, and lurks about waiting for a chance to knife his enemy. I hesitate to use that awful word formula, because neither Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy nor Zelazny’s work is “formula” in a negative sense, but if there ever was an engine to create fascinating characters, it’s the “formula” of Revenge Tragedy.

And that was the element in Zelazny’s work that fascinated people, that fascinated me: his heroes: sinewy and outcast, immortal and doomed, powerful and desperate, wise guys and wizards with bad attitudes and broken hearts. They were Byronic, Faustian. They were maybe the source code for all those William Gibson cyberpunks, occasionally even down to the computer skills. They reminded me of all the guys I shouldn’t have dated. Vivid bad boys. There’s a little bit of Ophelia in all of us, ladies. Look up the definition of Borderline Personality Disorder in the dictionary, and you’ll find portraits of Zelazny’s Princes of Amber.

I admit many students of the Renaissance take a different approach toward these plays. Revenge Tragedy also exhibits beautiful language, rich literary references, borrowings from history and classical drama, and gonzo scenes of torture and violence. And certainly Zelazny helped himself to all that, using it liberally, in whatever he wrote. But when he created Sam of Lord of Light, Corwin of the Amber books, Gallinger of “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” or Carlton Davits of “The Doors of his Mouth, the Lamps of his Eyes,” he was consciously or unconsciously portraying a Revenge Tragedy protagonist: a hero with a secret wound, an insult to avenge, or a woman to win back.

Allow me to dip into one of Zelazny’s representative novels, Lord of Light, to demonstrate. The hero is Sam, whose compatriots have access to machinery that will transplant their psyches into new bodies when their old ones are worn out: a technology of reincarnation. They colonize a planet with the descendants of their original bodies. But the descendants are not allowed access to the machinery of reincarnation; instead, they are taught to worship the original immortals as Hindu gods. Sam expresses discontent that the descendants do not have access to technology. When it’s time for his aging body to be replaced, the other “Hindu gods” try to give him a defective body. Assuming the identity of the Buddha, he takes up the cause of bringing down “heaven” to create justice for himself and the disadvantaged.

Zelazny creates a mystery about Sam and his past by a deliberately confusing flashback that allows Zelazny to present Sam as an inscrutable tragic figure whose motives are unknown, but whose purpose tantalizes us. Thus we have a hero out to avenge a wrong, but also a man of mystery.

Also characteristic of the revenger in Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy is that the revenger is clever and scheming. Sam is a man of cryptic motives, given to long walks and strange contracts, as those with the demon Rakashas, with whom he gambles for power. For a familiar comparison aside from The Revenger’s Tragedy of Zelazny’s thesis, think of Hamlet’s lonely wanderings and his scheming with the Players. Zelazny must have seen how such ploys worked for the audiences of Tourneur’s or Middleton’s time. So he used them himself.

Sam is also bloodthirsty and brilliant, like the revenger in Revenge Tragedy. He tricks a certain Shan into collecting the defective body his enemies have prepared for him. Sam has little pity for the Shan, although at least he sends the poor fellow back to receive a better body. Once Sam knows he has enemies in high places, he turns treacherous. The fights in the novel are gory, with feints and betrayals on both sides, but the effect is fully as powerful when Sam lures his enemy Yama into quicksand.

Zelazny even borrows the low humor of Revenge Tragedy (remember what a punster Hamlet is). The diction of the novel modulates from highly formal to low colloquial, even crude wordplay: when the poor Shan returns with his epileptic brain, Zelazny quips, “The fit hit the Shan.”

How did Zelazny know this stuff would work? He studied the Jacobean theater; he knew a number of dramatists of that period earned good money by wowing the public with dramas of lonely, clever heroes acting out bloody revenge. So he knew something in the human imagination was riveted by this sort of hero. More than that, he himself liked it. He chose, after all, to study Renaissance drama.

And this is why the fans followed him around, why the girl-fans at science fiction conventions thronged to his signings and readings. And if the girl-fans yearned to love Zelazny’s badboy characters, the male fans wanted to be them. I can well understand the fascination with Zelazny’s work. I’ve been a teenager, vulnerable to infatuation with characters and unable to distinguish the author from his creatures. Had I been younger, and deeper into fandom, maybe I might have married another fan at an Amber wedding, an affair that mixed contemporary dress with imaginative fairy-tale outfits from Zelazny’s Amber series.

Older and wiser, I’ve spawned my own fantasy heroes and heroines.

* * * * *

This essay is supposed to be about Zelazny’s influence on the world of letters, and particularly on my writing, and maybe this is the place to mention that he was one of the judges impaneled when I won second in the Writers of the Future contest. I assume he read my story, but I have no idea if he was the one who chose my story, because there were several other judges.

But perhaps it is no coincidence that my naive tale, about a genetically altered winged being who has been betrayed into falling in love with her master, featured a heroine with a motive for revenge, and that she uses craft to murder her betrayer.

* * * * *

But all that came later, after my cryptoscience fictional doctoral dissertation, in which I analyzed what I called the “conspiratorial mode” in fiction. My dissertation, The Writer as Double Agent: An Investigation of the Conspiratorial Mode in Contemporary Fiction argued that certain contemporary writers played games with their reader. I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to write openly about science fiction writers, not back then, at Western Reserve University, so I wrote about Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Actually, however, all the novels I treated except Barth’s End of the Road had speculative fiction elements.

After I successfully defended my dissertation, and after Carl Yoke hired me for Kent’s Trumbull Campus, after Zelazny’s innovative blending of classical revenge themes with contemporary realistic dialog and characterization, Yoke and I and a lot of others conspired to make science fiction and fantasy legitimate. Carl founded the Journal on the Fantastic in the Arts and nursed it into a respected publication. And we started using the term speculative fiction instead of science fiction, still calling it SF. We argued that science fiction and fantasy speculate about worlds that don’t exist, but might: worlds of magic and of future technological change.

It took more than one New Wave writer like Zelazny and more than a few scholars like Carl Yoke and me to implement this revolution. Indeed, some of the literary establishment will never embrace the magic Trumps of Amber or the impossible Martians of “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” as part of American literature. Do I blame them? Is the pyrotechnic verve of speculative fiction seemly, when compared to the genteel restraint of pallid literary realism? Call speculative fiction lurid, even sensational. Maybe we should leave literature to the critics and dive head first into the steamy melodrama of worlds like Zelazny’s Mars, Venus, Amber, and the universe of Lord of Light.

In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (which appeared about the same time Zelazny was earning his first Hugo), a character named Ralph Driblette directs a play called The Courier’s Tragedy, the ten-page synopsis of which incorporates grotesqueries from every Elizabethan/Jacobean Revenge Tragedy ever written. Of the play, Driblette says, “It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything.”

Zelazny had studied Revenge Tragedy, and he knew that it had not started as an attempt to be great art. It started as a way of bringing in audiences, of entertaining people.

I would submit that speculative fiction in its purest form is written to entertain people. It starts with that goal. But from there it can become art, just as Hamlet starts as a Revenge Tragedy and proceeds, by sublime craft, to become art. And if a work doesn’t start by entertaining people, how can it ever achieve anything more?

Every trope and every device Zelazny uses is aimed toward entertaining us. His symbolism, his mythic figures, his Revenge Tragedy heroes are all meant ultimately to speak to readers as high drama. Call it melodrama or escapism, point a finger at the tools of psychological manipulation Zelazny learned from writers like Cyril Tourneur or Thomas Middleton or William Shakespeare, but acknowledge that his work kicks us directly in the imagination.

I admire that single-mindedness of purpose. The New Wave, and Roger Zelazny, for me its most representative and popular figure, captured the imaginations of those of us who loved speculative fiction, and made us validate it as literature.

Have I learned from him? I hope I have. I’ve studied literature from all times and places, seek material as rich as Zelazny’s. I’ve examined his use of narrative voice, hoping to find the secrets of his power. And I will examine again and again his craft, seeking sublime themes and low tricks.

While preparing to write this essay, I wanted to hear Zelazny read his own work. I felt it would bring to me a feeling for Zelazny as a person and as a force in American literature.

The Cuyahoga County Library System listed three audiotapes of Zelazny reading his own work, two of which were missing, probably library code for stolen. Maybe some fan liked them a bit too well. I settled for an abridged version of Trumps of Chaos. The tape had been damaged, and the sound effects in the background roared in waves of static, making listening a trial. But Zelazny was a good reader, and better than that, he believed in his own material.

The Amber books are about a family with the power to change and create reality by traveling through Shadow, using magical cards. Amber is the true reality; Earth is a shadow created by them, far from central Amber.

The symbolism seems to me Platonic; the family members are artists, writers who create worlds, and Amber is art itself.

I confess that hearing Zelazny’s performance thrilled me. I heard his voice resonate and thicken as Merle Cory, alias Merlin, son of Corwin, ends up sealed in a cave. Merle, Zelazny’s Prince of Amber, seemed a force of imagination, potent with world-building, but trapped in a stone. I felt as if Zelazny himself were imprisoned in that tape, that sound.

But I also felt that his creative powers, like those of the princes of Amber, still live. The worlds Zelazny created, in which angry immortals scheme for vengeance, remain a force in the imagination of America.

Mary A. Turzillo is a science fiction author.