In epic poetry, scholars refer to the “high mimetic” to describe poetry that elevates a subject to a larger than life mode. Take war for instance. Homer’s The Iliad elevates mortal combat to the heights of poetry. The low mimetic mode would be a more ordinary view of the same. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895) or Erich Maria Remarque‘s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) does the opposite. These novels show war to be the dirty, soul-crushing torture it was. Understanding these two levels within a story could be useful in looking at the super-sagas of the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage.
Lester Dent and the publishers at Street & Smith prided themselves on placing Doc and his five amazing aides in a realistic New York City of 1933. No make-believe in the setting was allowed before the amazing action takes place. This is the low mimetic aspect of Doc Savage’s story. The reader, assuming most of these were New Yorkers, could immediately relate to subways, skyscrapers and urban life. But to tell a story about a guy who rides the subway to his boring job in the city, where he pushed paper all day, lusts over the girls in the secretarial pool, and goes home to a bleak evening with a wife he doesn’t love. We’ll leave that kind of soul-crushing ennui to the Henry James crowd.
Enter Doc Savage. A man of amazing talents and skills, he is a Gilgamesh among ordinary men. Enter the high mimetic mode. The story is no longer about anything ordinary. World-threatening crises are going to propel Doc, Monk, Ham, Johnny, Renny and Long Tom (and sometimes Pat) into a world of action, blazing color and excitement. We are fully in another level of story-telling of The Iliad proportions.
The story could stay in NYC or go to the Arctic, to the jungle, the desert or a foreign country. We aren’t going third class but in a gyrocopter, a speed boat or a speed plane. While the action is firing we are in the high mimetic mode, a heightened level of adrenaline that won’t stop until the secret villain is revealed, the bad hats arrested (and heading for brain surgery!) or even dead. The monster that has risen to challenge Doc in a fight of Beowulfian proportions has been unmasked and found to be a fraud. No real supernatural here folks, move along…
For 181 original novels and others that came later, Kenneth Robeson (whether he is Dent, Donovan, Johnson, Murray or anyone else) invited us to journey to a place where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. And you can say that the hero Pulps never rose to the heights of great art (Homer, Virgil and those old dead guys get those laurels, at least until Cervantes throws them into a cocked hat) but the Pulps– Lester Dent and Doc Savage in particular –gave us something culturally wonderful…a modern high mimetic hero story.
This dual-natured story was borrowed by Jerome Siegel and Joel Shuster when they created Superman and Clark Kent. The entire superhero genre took the hero and secret identity from Siegel & Shuster, allowing characters both a high and low mimetic level. While the reporter, Clark Kent, Superman can worry about things like traffic, Perry White’s demands and taxes. As Superman he immediately ascends into high mimetic mode and Sup has to worry about super-villains, saving the planet and cosmic sized problems. The switching back and forth between these is part of the fun in the hands of a good writer.
The word superhero itself belies this heightened stage. A hero might take on a bunch of terrorists in a skyscraper at Christmas (you know the film) but it doesn’t become “super” until Iron Man and the Avengers show up to defeat Thanos and his army of darkness. Ever ask yourself how a Norse god could become a superhero? The move wasn’t all that far to go, just a floor down. Superheroes, the god children of Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider and Phantom Detective, are the high mimetic for the 21st Century.
Jack Mackenzie continues telling stories in the tradition of Doc Savage with his team of super agents, Wild Inc.