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I remember reading many years ago my first Farmer story, which was called "Mother," and being astonished and gratified (a little condescendingly, perhaps) to discover certain Freudian insights into the nature of family relationships, ingeniously worked out and made flesh, as it were, in the world of inter-galactic travel and an endlessly receding future. My surprise and delight were not only cued by the prejudice which then possessed me utterly -- my conviction that pop fiction was necessarily immune to the insights of depth psychology; but arose also because the mythology of Freud was based on the belief that the neuroses were rooted in the past, and that, therefore, the revelation of sexual secrets depended on retrospection. It needed a writer like Farmer, committed to the anticipation of the future, to turn psychoanalysis in the direction of prophecy. The concerns first explored in "Mother" and the other tales later collected in a volume called Strange Relations have continued to obsess him, reaching their culmination in his Hugo Award wi
One of Farmer's major obsessive themes, as a matter of fact, is precisely the theme of Mother as a threat to freedom, a temptation to regression, a womb turned prison. And closely co
In any case, the Cults of the Great Goddess have always obsessed Farmer; and, indeed, there seems something deep within him that yearns for a time, real or imagined, in which the male was not a Hero but a Servant of that great principle of fertility, as in the bawdiest of his subpornographic novels, Flesh. Yet Farmer's third obsessive theme comes into direct (and perhaps irreconcilable) conflict with this fearful nostalgia for the matriarchal security each of us has known in infancy. And this is the myth of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, the lonely phallic ubermensch triumphing by his ability not to create but to kill. Farmer's favorite name for the extravagantly male super-Hero is "Tarzan"; a killer presumably suckled by a she-ape rather than a mere female woman; but really created out of his own head by a god or devil called Edgar Rice Burroughs, and endlessly recreated by a subsidiary deity or demon called Philip Jose Farmer.
In five major books at least, he has returned to that key figure -- who also flickers in and out of his other fictions, sometimes quite irrelevantly: in Lord Tyger, A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, The Mad Goblin, and most recently in Tarzan Alive. The first of these deals with a boy brought up in the jungle by a mad scientist (a caricature of Farmer himself?) eager to save Burroughs' honor by proving that a Savage Noble can indeed survive under the conditions described by Tarzan's original biographer. The second is a sado-pornographic account of a struggle to the death between "Lord Grandrith" (the true Tarzan) and "Doc Caliban" (the true Doc Savage): a struggle which reaches an initial climax when the two super-heroes duel with erect phalluses on a knife-edge of stone bridging a chasm, and ends with both of them deballed. The third and fourth, issued as a double paperback -- this time without the warning, "ADULTS ONLY" -- represent, in Farmer's own words, "something unique... the only spinoff of 'clean books' from a 'dirty' book."
In all of them, however, "clean" or "dirty," Farmer insists not only on Tarzan's virtual immortality, but -- even more strongly -- on his extraordinary sexual endowment: his superiority in this respect to his primate pals and his Black neighbors (though he argues heatedly that Tarzan is no "racist") -- as well as, one presumes, to his author and his readers. The same themes obsess him still in the fifth, to be published April 28 -- but already excerpted in Esquire. It is in all respects the culmination of the others: a delightfully monomaniac attempt to " 'prove' through the use of quasi-scholarly tools..." that Tarzan is (a) "a close relative of such modern heroes as Professor Challenger, Holmes and Wolfe, Lord John Roxton, Denis Nayland Smith, Bulldog Drummond, Lord Peter Wimsey, Raffles, Leopold Bloom, and Richard Wentworth (who is not only the Spider but was once G-8 and is at the same time the Shadow)..." and (b) "that Tarzan is the last of the Heroes of the Golden Age, Nature's final expression..."
But Tarzan, for all his encyclopedic comprehensiveness, represents only a small part of Farmer's larger attempt (at once absurd and beautiful, foredoomed to failure but, once conceived, already a success) to subsume in his own works all of the books in the world that have touched or moved him. For him, the traditions of Science Fiction provide a warrant for constructing Universes of his Own: worlds whose place names turn out inevitably to demand as many footnotes as T.S. Eliot's The Waste
Land -- Dante's Joy, Baudelaire, Ozagen (Oz again!); and which are inhabited not only by new species but old friends, fictional or real -- Hiawatha, Alice in Wonderland, Sir Richard Burton, Ishmael (Melville's), and Herman Goering.
Particularly in his "pocket universes" series and in his more recent Riverworld Books, To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat, all that seemed to have died here on Earth (everywhere at least except in the head of one voracious reader) is resurrected -- or at least reconstructed in quasi-immortal form by omniscient computers in Worlds Out There. Obviously, it is the deepest level of childhood response which Farmer has reached in this pair of novels, in the first of which Sir Richard Burton pursues amorously Lewis Carroll's chastely loved Alice Lidell; while in the second, Mark Twain searches with equal passion for his lost wife, Livy, and for iron ore deposits rich enough to make possible the building of a paddlewheel steamer. The primary images seem erotic, even genital; but in the Riverworld there turns out to be more detailed description of eating than of sex. And, indeed, the most important gadget in its extraterrestrial technology is the "Grail," a kind of portable short-order kitchen provided by the invisible masters of a warmed- over universe.
But this is fair enough; since throughout Farmer's work he demonstrates himself to be the most oral of men -- his heroes being more typically blown than laid; his image of ultimate horror a bitten-off penis; and his vision of Utopian bliss a kind of not-quite-kiss, in which the partners (functionally neither totally male nor female) move their lips ecstatically around a pale snakelike organ which wriggles out of the mouth of one into that of the other. In this light, it seems appropriate to describe Farmer's cultural imperialism as a gargantuan lust to swallow down the whole cosmos, past, present, and to come, and to spew it out again.
Farmer wants even to eat and regurgitate himself; the industrious hack who writes his books, plus that hack's fantasies of what he secretly is or might be. And in the end, he does manage to mingle almost u