CARSON NAPIER: A TEST
I
by Alan Hanson
Likeable, disappointing, loyal, selfish, clever, inept,
inventive, helpless, intelligent, foolish — on the surface Carson Napier
fluctuates between extremes. He’s hard to get comfortable with. Drop John
Carter or Tarzan into a sticky situation, and you can bet they’ll come
out fighting and on top. They’re predictable, but not Carson. In any given
situation, he’s just as liable not to act as to act, just as likely to
turn and run as to stand his ground. He’s a puzzling enigma — or is he?
Is there a pattern to the confusion Carson exhibits on the surface? Let’s
try a short multiple choice test to see if you understand the real Carson
Napier. We’ll start with a sample question.
Sample Question: Carson Napier is
a. a classic hero
b. an unlikely hero
c. a comic hero
d. not a hero
Well, our first impression of him certainly is that
of a man high in hero potential. He walked into ERB’s office and came directly
to the point. He commanded attention. Light skin, blue eyes, blond hair,
athletic and muscular, exceptionally handsome and smiling. He planned mankind’s
greatest adventure, and in its preparation he inspired loyalty and enthusiasm
in those around him. How is it, then, that he came to be generally considered
the most incompetent clod in the Burroughs pantheon of heroes?
First of all, Carson obviously suffers by comparison.
He possibly possesses the physical strength of John Carter or Tarzan, but
he displayed neither the fighting skill of the former nor the nobility
of the latter. Of course, we must take into account that Carson was not
as prepared for his adventures as were the two ERB super heroes. Carter
was already trained and tested in fighting traditions before arriving on
the red planet. Before Tarzan had to deal with the dilemmas of civilization,
his unerring sense of right and wrong had already been developed during
a childhood among the beasts. On the other hand, when Carson floated down
through the clouds of Amtor, he was a man who had never carried weapons
and whose adventures had been confined to the athletic arena.
Still, Carson was surely capable of heroic acts. There
are examples in the Venus series of willing self-sacrifice and his taking
action in the face of overwhelming odds. Carson departs from the image
of a classic hero, however, in that, as noted earlier, he was not always
willing to sacrifice himself, and, in some situations, he withered in the
face of overwhelming odds. At times that made him a disappointing hero,
but a hero nevertheless. Carson’s lack of preparation for his adventures
makes him an unlikely hero. You should have marked “b” on your answer sheet
for the sample question.
Now let’s go on with the main part of the test, which
covers several selected aspects of Carson Napier’s seemingly enigmatic
attitude and behavior. Remember, choose the best answer. Set your own time
limit. When you have made your choice, read on to find the correct answer.
Question #1: Carson Napier is
a. an optimist
b. a pessimist
c. a fatalist
d. an adventurer
Carson Napier himself would have a hard time answering
this question. Consider the following statements, all Carson’s assessments
of himself.
“I’m something of an optimist.”
“Each morning that I awoke on Venus it was with
a sense of surprise that I still lived.”
“While I live I shall never admit the possibility
of death. Somehow it doesn’t seem to be in the cards for me.”
“One must die eventually … so he might as well
crowd all the adventure and experience into his life that he can.”
It is true that at times Carson acted optimistically,
but it was rarely out of confidence in his own abilities. When Carson got
a good feeling in a tight situation, it was usually because he counted
on luck. Take his experience in the room of seven doors. “I have always
enjoyed more than my share of the lucky ‘breaks’ of life, and now something
seemed to tell me that fate was driving me toward the one door beyond which
lay life and liberty. So it was with the optimism of almost assured success
that I leaped from the table and the yawning jaws of the great snake and
ran toward that fateful door.” Of course, his optimism proved unfounded.
Carson was just as likely to dwell on the dark side
of a difficult situation. After Duare had escaped from Voo-ad, Carson and
Ero Shan both had dreams as they hung on the wall in the Museum of Natural
History. Ero Shan’s dream was hopeful, if not exactly prophetic. He envisioned
all of them back in Havatoo with Nalte preparing them a wonderful dinner.
And what did Carson, the self-styled optimist, dream? “I saw the anotar
crash, and I saw Duare’s broken body lying dead.”
Carson surely did not play the optimist when he encountered
a challenge. His initial reaction when faced with trouble was almost always
one of hopelessness and despair. Even before arriving on Venus, Carson
displayed this tendency. He described how the death of his mother left
him absolutely stunned. Life seemed to hold no interest for him immediately
thereafter, and he embarked on a life of recklessness. Then on Venus, consider
his initial reaction to being swept off the deck of the Sofal by a huge
wave. “Even in the immensity of interstellar space I had never felt
more helpless nor more hopeless than I did at that moment on the storm-lashed
sea of an unknown world, surrounded by darkness and chaos and what terrible
creatures of this mysterious deep I could not even guess. I was lost!”
In Carson of Venus, when Carson saw Duare flew away from Sanara without
him, his heart sank. “I was utterly unnerved as I sat there staring
out across that lonely ocean after my lost love.”
However, Carson’s adventures on Venus would have been
short indeed had he not been able to shake off his initial feeling of helplessness.
There seemed to have been three major motivations that inspired Carson
to rise up in the face of impending doom — Duare, friendship, and survival
instinct.
Like most Burroughs heroes, Carson Napier would face
the eternal devil to earn an approving look from his lady. A good example
of how the thought of Duare could overcome Carson’s initial feeling of
despair and replace it with determination came when she told him she didn’t
love him, even after he had killed Moosko to rescue her. “I felt suddenly
cold and wary and forlorn,” recalled Carson. “All hope of happiness
was crushed in my breast. I turned away from her. I no longer cared what
happened to me. But only for an instant did this mood possess me. No matter
whether she loved me or not, my duty remained plain before me; I must get
her out of Kapdor, out of the clutches of the Thorists and, if possible,
return her to her father.”
Carson often put himself in danger to protect Duare.
In Lost on Venus, virtually unarmed he faced a basto, a vere, and a “shaggy
creature as large as an elephant” to defend her. In Carson on Venus, he
refused the honors Tamon offered him in Sanara and sailed out into the
vast ocean in search of her. “I shall never rest in peace until I know
that I have done all that man can do to rescue Duare,” he asserted.
Then there was Carson’s most melodramatic testimony of his devotion. When
he and Duare were suspended on the nobargan grills and about to be barbecued,
Carson turned to her and said, “I would rather be here with you, Duare,
than to be anywhere else in the universe without you.” At least in
his worship of Duare, Carson was not a disappointing hero.
Once Carson formed a friendship, that also proved strong
motivation to overcome his lack of confidence. After he and Duare escaped
from Mypos, Carson was uncomfortable with leaving Dandar and Artol as captives
in the city. “I had commenced to feel responsible for them,” he
explained. “I think we always feel responsible for our friends. I know
I do.” His return to rescue them was but one example of his willingness
to place himself in danger on a friend’s behalf. He also faced the perils
of the dead city of Kormor to rescue Nalte, who had helped him escape from
Skor earlier. When he could have easily left the Zani city of Amlot and
returned to Duare in Sanara, Carson stopped to warn his friend Zerka of
the danger she was in, although it resulted in Carson’s own capture. On
returning to Sanara, Carson delayed leaving in search of Duare long enough
to go undercover and rescue Nna, the daughter of his friend Taman, from
her kidnappers.
So Carson could muster up some fortitude when the safety
of Duare or a friend was at stake. But what about when he was alone? What
motivation saw him through then? Well, if Carson did not attack hopeless
situations with confidence of a John Carter or a Tarzan, he at least wasn’t
a quitter. Carson, while usually expecting failure and death, nevertheless
was always able to convince himself to do something, however feeble, in
his own defense. He was a survivor. Although hopeless after being swept
into the sea off the Sofal, Carson was not willing to meekly go down for
the third time. “No matter how favorably I thought of living,” he
noted, “I knew that I must also do something about it. My present situation
offered me no chance of salvation; the shore alone could give me life;
so I struck out for the shore. As I drew nearer it, many things, some of
them quite irrelevant, passed through my mind; but some were relevant,
among them the Burial Service. It was not a nice time to think of this,
but then we cannot always control our thoughts; however, ‘In the midst
of life we are in death’ seemed wholly appropriate to my situation. By
twisting it a bit, I achieved something that contained the germ of hope
— in the midst of death there is life.”
This unwillingness to crawl into a shell and let the
wave of oblivion pass over him was what saved Carson time and time again.
When he faced his first beast of Amtor high in the trees of Vepaja, he
only had a rope to defend himself. Yet in despair he flicked it in the
face of the creature, and it led to his salvation. In the room of seven
doors, Carson forsook the easy death of the poison drink and opened a door,
risking a horrible death for that one-in-seven chance of life. In Skor’s
castle Carson stood with the point of the jong’s sword at his belly. “I
might have grasped it, but its edges were so sharp that it would have slipped
through my fingers, severing them as it plunged into my body,” he reasoned.“Yet
that I intended doing. I would not wait like a sheep the lethal blow of
the butcher.”
There is a final question to ask about the confusing
motivation of Carson Napier. Why did a man, apparently lacking the level
of confidence needed to deal with dangerous situations, so often find himself
in them? The answer lies in perhaps his most redeeming heroic quality.
He was an adventurer. He was born and raised to be one by a father who
went out tiger hunting on elephants. “When I was young I used to dream
of living an adventurous life,” Carson recalled. “It may be that
these youthful dreams more or less shape one’s later life. Perhaps that
is why I took up flying when I was old enough. It may account for the rocket
ship I built for a trip to Mars — a trip that ended on Venus!” When
Carson first realized his rocket was going to hit Venus, he still expected
death, as sure as if he were flying into the sun. “Yet I was excited,”
he
admitted. “Now that the great adventure loomed so close I was overwhelmed
by contemplation of it and the great wonder that it induced. What would
follow?”
Once on Venus the thrill of adventure spurred him into
further unknown regions and mysterious escapades, overcoming even the fear
of death. Commanding the Sofal, he became a pirate seeking the excitement
of preying on Thorist shipping and exploring portions of Amtor. “The
entire northern hemisphere was a terra incognita to the men of the southern
hemisphere, and for that reason I had been anxious to explore it.” Even
in the room of seven doors, with death close at hand, Carson’s only regret
seemed to be that he would never know the strange races and the new civilizations
that he might have discovered in the northlands. It is fitting that Carson’s
final adventure on Venus resulted from this desire to explore the unknown.
To give the newly built anotar a test flight, Carson chose to fly west,
far over the unexplored portion of Anlap, and there he found the Wizard
of Venus.
It is when he spoke of the alluring call of adventure
that Carson Napier seemed most appealing. “Only by comparison,”
he dreamed, “might I make you see the landscape that stretched before our
eyes … intriguing, provocative, compelling, always beckoning one on to
further investigation, to new adventure.” At times Carson was an optimist,
a pessimist, and a fatalist, but he was always an adventurer. The best
answer to question one, therefore, is “d.”
Now that we have determined that Carson Napier was
an adventurer at heart, for the second question of the test, let’s move
our attention to his head.
Question #2: Carson Napier is
a. intelligent
b. stupid
c. foolish
d. two of the above
If there is one area in which Carson Napier seems to
have it over John Carter and Tarzan, it would seem to be intelligence.
Certainly Carson was well educated on his home planet. He grew up in India
under the tutorage of Chand Kabi, who taught him “many things that are
not in the curriculum of schools for boys under ten. Among them was telepathy.”
Years later in California, Carson attended a small college at Claremont,
“which
is known for its high scholastic standing and the superior personnel of
both its faculty and student body.”
Napier graduated with honors in studies that must have
been scientific in nature, for he often demonstrated a quick mind when
it came to figures. Carson himself worked out the calculations for his
trip to Mars and directed the construction of the gigantic rocket ship
on Guadalupe Island. After takeoff, when Carson first realized his ship
might collide with the Moon, he showed how fast his mind could work. “I
leaped to the periscope, and in the next few seconds I accomplished some
lightning mental calculating that must constitute an all-time record,”
he modestly explained. “As I watched the deflection of our course in
the direction of the Moon, following it across the lens of the periscope,
I computed the distance to the Moon and the speed of the torpedo, and I
came to the conclusion that I had better than a fighting chance of missing
the great orb.”
If Carson, then, can be granted a high level of natural
intelligence, the next question to ask is, “How well was he able to
apply his intelligence in dealing with the problems of the real world?”
Of course, his first attempt to do so was a colossal failure. It is the
first great irony, the first great inconsistency of his adventures, that
after years of studying the planets, making space flight calculations,
and building a rocket, his plan failed because he overlooked the most basic
of considerations. “Explain it if you can; I cannot,” was the only
defense Carson could offer for his failure to include the gravitational
pull of the Moon in his calculations.
Well, allowing that even the most brilliant of minds
can make one simple mistake, more to the point is how Carson used his intellect
once he had been deposited on Amtor. First of all, in Vepaja it only took
Carson three weeks to learn to speak, read, and write the Venusan language.
Even the multi-tongued Tarzan would envy that feat.
“I can use my brains as well as my sword,” explained
Carson to his shipmates on the Nojo Ganja near the end of Carson of Venus.
(Considering the quality of his swordsmanship, it was fortunate that Carson
had his brain to fall back on.) Indeed, there are many instances of Carson
using his smarts to extradite himself from sticky situations. For example,
in the room of seven doors Carson was no physical match for the creatures
loosed upon him, but the mere touch of the noose above him gave quick birth
to thought and Carson climbed to safety.
Later in Havatoo, Carson’s intelligence saved him three
times. First, his knowledge of the universe, causally mentioned, caused
the janjong to reverse the death sentence they had pronounced upon him.
Then, when Carson had gone under the river to rescue Duare and Nalte from
the dead city of Kormor, he faced a dilemma when the disguises he and the
girls were using were reported to Skor. Carson’s hastily devised plan to
remove the disguises and walk toward the searchers to disarm suspicion
worked and they escaped to Havatoo. There Carson faced a third crisis when
the “impure” Duare was condemned to death. When Carson first heard of Duare’s
sentence, rescue never came to mind. The plan came as a sudden inspiration
when he visited Duare at Hara Es’s house. He tied up Hara Es and returned
home with Ero Shan, only to return later to retrieve Duare. They then flew
away into the night to close the second volume of the series.
In Carson of Venus the quick-witted Napier was at work
again. First, he devised a plan to divert suspicion away from Lodas, a
royalist agent at whose farm Carson landed the anotar on his way to infiltrate
the Zani city of Amlot. Carson had Lodas loudly order him to leave the
farm. After landing the anotar on an island, Carson was brought back to
the mainland by Lodas in his boat. “You are a very smart man to have
thought of this plan,” acknowledged Lodas. Later, of course, there
was Carson’s ingenious plan to determine whether or not Mintep was an inmate
in Amlot’s Prison of Death. “I finally hit upon a plan that I hoped
would serve my purpose,” noted Carson. “With difficulty, I wrote
some very bad verse in Amtorian, which I sang to a tune that had been popular
in America when I left Earth. In two of the verses was the message I wished
to use to elicit a sign from Mintep that he was a prisoner there, and thus
to locate his cell.”
Carson’s intelligence was a relative thing on Venus.
More often than not, what saved Carson was not his own intelligence as
much as the stupidity of his adversaries. This disparity in intelligence
was most obvious on the numerous occasions that Carson was able to simply
talk his way out of trouble. When Anoos the spy had been murdered aboard
the Sofal by one of Carson’s Soldiers of Liberty, Carson convinced the
dense Thorist captain that Anoos was actually trying to foment a mutiny.
In Carson of Venus, Mephis ordered Napier tortured immediately after capturing
him at Zerka’s home. However, Carson got Mephis to rescind the order by
telling him the city would be bombed in the morning if he were harmed.
Later in the same novel, when the pirates of Nojo Canja captured Carson,
he knew that he faced sure death. Instead, Carson survived by arrogantly
telling the captain he should make him one of his officers, thus earning
the captain’s respect. When the Myposans captured Carson in Escape on Venus,
he kept possession of his pistol by convincing his captors that anyone
who touched the weapon would die. Carson used the same strategy in The
Wizard of Venus when he told the members of Tovar’s family that touching
the anotar would bring death.
The most remarkable thing about Carson’s intelligence,
however, was not when he did use it, but rather when he didn’t use it.
He possessed a particular mental ability of immense power, but he never
applied it until the end of his chronicled adventures on Venus. Carson
knew the potential of his telepathic skills before he even left Earth.
He caused visions of both a female figure and himself to appear in the
author’s office. During his years on Venus, he periodically beamed his
adventures across the void to the author. And yet, it was not until he
encountered the Wizard of Venus that Napier thought to put this mental
talent to use on Amtor. Often he could have used it to inspire trust in
people, as when his vision of Vanaja’s father counseled her to trust Carson.
And he could have used it to escape capture, such as when his conjured
vision of himself led Morgas and his men on a wild goose chase across the
valley. And when in captivity, he could have used telepathy to free himself,
like when his vision of Morgas ordered the jailer to free Carson and his
companions from the wizard’s castle.
In Carson’s defense, he did offer an explanation for
declining to use this power. “I have practiced these powers but seldom,
for I have the Anglo-Saxon’s feeling of repugnance for anything that smacks
of the black art,” he lamely explained. Still, once deciding to use
the power, Carson showed no repugnance in causing Morgas’s death with it.
The fact is that rather than making a moral decision not to use his telepathic
skills, he simply seemed to forget that he had them through the first four
volumes of the series.
Carson’s intelligence surely did not see him through
all his problems on Venus. In fact, there were times when he seemed positively
dense. In Lost on Venus, he seemed unaware of Duare’s obvious jealousy
toward Nalte. In Carson of Venus, he failed to see through Muso’s thinly
veiled deceit in sending him on a death mission to Amlot. And he made a
foolish error in judgment when he stopped to visit Zerka instead of sailing
away from Amlot with the rescued Mintep.
What, then, is the final evaluation of Carson Napier’s
intelligence? First, there can be no doubt that in some respects he appears
to be the most intelligent person on Amtor. After all, he did build the
anotar in Havatoo, and after he left, it took Ero Shan and “some of
the best minds in Havatoo” a long time, even using Carson’s plans,
to build another ship. While capable of prodigious mental calculations,
he occasionally overlooked the most simplistic of facts. He demonstrated
the ability to come up with lifesaving plans on the run, while at other
times the obvious escaped him. He had the power to throw his thoughts millions
of miles across the void to Earth, yet he forgot he had these skills, even
when they could easily have saved his life. Intellectually he was an enigma.
In fairness, the final evaluation of Carson’s intelligence
should be his own: “It seems to me that I always plan intelligently,
sometimes over meticulously; and then up jumps the Devil and everything
goes haywire. However, in all fairness, I must admit that it is usually
my fault and attributable to a definite timorousness which is characteristic
of me. I am rash. I take chances. I know that that is stupid. The thing
that reflects most discredit upon my intelligence is the fact that oftentimes
I know the thing I am about to do is stupid, and yet I go ahead and do
it.”
Carson, then, admitted what the evidence shows. He
is intelligent, but he was often incapable of the directed and consistent
use of that intelligence. Carson called it stupidity, but foolishness is
more accurate. He is both intelligent and foolish. The answer to question
#2, then, is “d.” How are you doing so far? We are now halfway through
the test.
Concluded in Part II: ERBzine 7186
.
