Jirel of Joiry: "Black God's Shadow"

I'm going to get sentimental today. So if that's not for you, I understand.

I knew this guy in college named Matt Stevenson. My wife actually knew him a lot better than I did. Matt was Jewish and everyone knew that about him, partially because he wore a kippah daily. There were a lot of Matts at her college, so people would refer to him as "You know, Matt" and cup their hand on the back of the crown of their head.

This is relevant because it became clear during their college years that one of their acquaintances, a guy they'd had classes with and hung with occasionally, was a Nazi. I'm not using that just as a pejorative; his name was Derek Black and he was the son of Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, which was (and maybe still is) the largest white supremacist website in the world. His godfather was David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

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When the news on their college forum broke, Derek got  ostracized pretty much immediately. This was a very liberal south Florida college, so his social circle shrank to effectively nothing overnight. A car the same make and model as Derek's (but not actually Derek's) was vandalized, my wife remembers flipping him off from across the quad.

Matt was a unique thinker, though. He found it odd how Derek had made friends at their school, even without disclosing his beliefs, which he had gone from tacitly not-bringing-up to completely concealing during his time at school. He'd noticed that Derek had become close with international students, queer students, and, you know, a Jewish guy like him. He had an idea.

Matt hosted Shabbat dinners in his dorm frequently. He'd invite friends over, they would eat, play some board games, and have the kind of heady philosophy discussions you only want to have when you're in college. So one week, he invited Derek over. He wasn't sure he'd come, but Matt explicitly instructed everyone to not bring it up if he did, and just see how things went. Much to his surprise, Derek came, bearing a bottle of wine to share. 

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To everyone's surprise, Derek came back the next week, and then the next. They weren't so sure what to think at first: was Derek cultivating a group of multicultural friends to use as a shield when people called him a racist? Was he trying to get dirt on them to use later? Surprisingly, no. After a while, Matt started bringing up Derek's beliefs to him and discussing. Over time, Derek not only softened his beliefs, but began to outright reject his upbringing. He told his dad he didn't want to call into his propaganda radio show anymore. He deleted his accounts on the white nationalist boards he was on. 

Matt became one of his closest friends and Derek has gone on to become an anti-racist speaker and activist. He changed his name and a whole lot else, too.

I teach a quarter-long Holocaust literature unit every school year to 8th graders, and one time we interviewed Matt as a part of it. Why did he take the time to show kindness and patience to Derek, who deserved it least of all? Matt told me that as part of his faith, he believes that everyone has a spark of pure goodness at their core, put there by there creator. This has stuck with me ever since, and I find a lot of truth in it even as an atheist who was raised Lutheran. I try to remember what Matt told me, and to keep that spark of pure goodness in mind when I talk to people.

I think C.L. Moore understood this concept and baked it into Jirel of Joiry, most specifically in her second story "Black God's Shadow," published in the December 1934 Weird Tales, just a few months after "The Black God's Kiss."

"Black God's Shadow" is a straight sequel to "The Black God's Kiss" and picks up in the immediate aftermath of the first story. Something within Jirel rumbles with something like regret for how she quite literally damned Guilluame's soul with the magic of the black god's kiss (I mean, Guilluame damned himself plenty, but it was Jirel who kind of cut the brakes on his one-way ride into to Hell).

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Jirel returns to the underground dreamworld, which has morphed to maintain its creepy, off-putting nature. Even though we've been there once before, it doesn't feel like we can ever anticipate the next thing Jirel will encounter.

That brings me to where I started this blog post. When Jirel finds Guilluame, we get this passage:

"And what subtle torment the black god's kiss had wrought upon him! To dwell in the full, frightful realization of his own sins, chained to the actual manifestation, suffering eternally in the obscene shape that was so undeniably himself—worst and lowest self. It was just, in a way. He had been a harsh and cruel man in life. But the very fact that such punishment was agony to him proved a higher self within his complex soul—something noble and fine which writhed away from the unspeakable thing—himself. So the very fineness of him was  weapon to torture his soul, turned against him even as his sins were turned."

Guilluame deserves his punishment: the text says that what he's writing in is nothing but his own sins. But Jirel fights this ugliness with all of her positive emotions and is clearly at times protected in the story by her very human dignity. She looks into evil periodically and knows intuitively that it cannot touch her because of her goodness. 

Now, Jirel's not perfect (that's what makes her interesting!) but she has lots of goodness within her. I was talking to current Jirel author Molly Tanzer recently and she brought up that some people dismiss Jirel as being just a "girl who fell in love with her rapist." I think that's far too simplistic of a reading. In this story, Jirel is seeing the humanity of someone who didn't deserve it. She does this not because Guilluame isn't bad, but because she is good. I have a hard time imagining any other pulp hero doing that. I also find it hard to believe that with morally-moving stories like this (Is it just me? Could be.) that people can dismiss all of pulp as a format or S&S as a genre out of hand. Philosophically, this reminds me of David Foster Wallace, Superman, or certain scripture.

"Black God's Shadow" reads as a story about finding peace within yourself by moving on and forgiving those who've hurt you in the past, completely disconnected from whether or not that person deserves it, since it's not about them at all. If you're just referring to the plot events of the story, "Black God's Shadow" is has the least going on out of any Jirel story, but the character work within it and many of the lines (the black god was "coldly inimical to all things human") more than make up for any sort of lack of sword & sorcery romping. 

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Please don't get me wrong or take me too literally here; I'm not saying that the way to defeat the Nazis is to befriend them. I'm not saying that if someone traumatizes you that you need to forgive them. Far from it, in fact. But I am pointing out that there is a higher ideal towards which we can strive. It's probably unrealistic in most situations in life, but it does cause me to get a little worked up and feel connected to a 92 year-old pulp story, which speaks to C.L. Moore's skill as a writer. She puts a lot of heart into Jirel, which still beats nearly a century later.

Cora Buhlert, the writer whose work introduced me to C.L. Moore, has a tremendous piece about this story that is far more eloquent than mine. Read it here.