Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture

Barbara Korte, Simon Wendt, Nicole Falkenhayner, Barbara Korte, Simon Wendt, Nicole Falkenhayner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429557842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Heroes and heroic discourse have gained new visibility in the twenty-first century. This is noted in recent research on the heroic, but it has been largely ignored that heroism is increasingly a global phenomenon both in terms of production and consumption. This edited collection aims to bridge this research void and brings together case studies by scholars from different parts of the world and diverse fields. They explore how transnational and transcultural processes of translation and adaptation shape notions of the heroic in non-Western and Western cultures alike. The book provides fresh perspectives on heroism studies and offers a new angle for global and postcolonial studies.

1
‘Like a Cinema When the Last of the Audience Has Gone and Only the Staff Remain’

Biggles and (Post-)Imperial Heroism

Michael Goodrum¹

Few heroes in British history divide like Biggles. James Bigglesworth, the man who would become known around the world as Biggles, began his published adventures in 1932 with retrospectively narrated escapades as a fighter pilot in the First World War. His creator was Captain W. E. Johns, a veteran of the Royal Flying Corps and then Royal Air Force who had served in these divisions throughout the world (and empire). By 1932, Johns was editor of the magazine Popular Flying and it was in this role that he became aware of a trend for stories written about the war in the air. Many of these stories were by and about Americans. Biggles therefore came into being as a corrective to this, a nationalistic assertion of British excellence in war aviation. Johns remarked that he ‘needed an air story to counterblast some of the war-flying nonsense that was being imported in the cheap papers,’ a statement indicative of a position asserting truth through fiction, with a conscious bias against the ‘cheap papers’ and their version of reality; it also, however, promoted Britain above its geopolitical competitors.² In the ways in which they were treated in fictional representations, the colonized often shared the fate of competitors; this is one reason why Biggles has been, and still is, so divisive: Within the narratives are embedded issues of race and empire in a decolonizing world. Biggles’s popularity in Britain in this context might be understandable—a means of continuing to live a reality through culture that was itself becoming fictional. The popularity of the character elsewhere is harder to explain, but, contrary to initial assumptions, at the height of his popularity, Biggles was a global, as well as a globe-trotting, hero.

Biggles as Global Hero

Notions of heroism in Britain were already in flux before the First World War and ‘by 1914, narratives of imperial heroism, exemplary scripts for admiration and emulation, had become so commonplace as to attract satire and critique.’³ Yet Biggles began life in 1932 and, given the trend towards decolonization after the Second World War, Biggles’s initial popularity might logically have been projected to decline with the empire that formed the backdrop of and context for many of his adventures. At least initially, Biggles was intended to capture something of the reality of war: In ‘The White Fokker,’ the first Biggles story, the hero is introduced as having a

pale face upon which the strain of war, and sight of sudden death, had already graven little lines. His hands, small and delicate as a girl’s, fidgeted continually…. He knew he had to die some time and had long ago ceased to worry about it. His careless attitude suggested complete indifference, but the irritating little falsetto laugh which continually punctuated his tale betrayed the frayed condition of his nerves.⁴

A commanding officer subsequently says that ‘Bigglesworth’s going to bits fast,’ a far cry from how the character came to be defined after a successful diversion into more juvenile fiction with The Cruise of the Condor (1933). Dennis Butts remarks that ‘by the late 1930s, Biggles has become a confident, almost imperturbable leader, and he gradually hardens into an increasingly masterful hero, impervious to almost all dangers.’⁵ That persona developed in the interwar period as Biggles took to adventuring of the more general sort. It was through just such stories that ‘many of the future pilots of the wartime RAF… were first introduced to air combat.’⁶ It was also in this period that Biggles acquired his nemesis, Erich von Stalhein, a German spymaster from the First World War who was introduced in Biggles Flies East (1935).⁷ Following on, and building on, this early success, Captain W. E. Johns wrote approximately 100 Biggles books; recent selections for republication represent the highlights of the first 35, those that were published up to and in the Second World War.⁸ A great deal of the character’s history is therefore being omitted in contemporary curations of Biggles. Yet it was after the Second World War that Biggles attained the greatest contemporary popularity: It is, however, this post-1945 history that has encountered the most resistance, both at the time of original publication and subsequently. Given the conflicts in and about his narratives, Biggles offers a heroic model of significant historical interest. Evolutions in characterization and reception chart shifting attitudes to changing geopolitical conditions and Britain’s place within them.

As an indication of contemporary popularity, in 1964, Biggles was ranked by the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook as ‘the most popular hero in the world to schoolboys’; Biggles also ‘placed 29th in a list of the world’s most translated books.’⁹ Such popularity indicated that Biggles was therefore extremely popular outside Britain, even with colonial audiences. Max Jones argues that heroes are screens onto which contemporary values can be projected, and it is also readily apparent that heroes can be used (by themselves or by others) as a vehicle to promote the values they are said to represent¹⁰—although screens are not just for projecting on to: In engaging with projections, those consuming them are drawn into a relationship where messages can either unconsciously reinforce or inspire consideration of the consumer’s own reality—that is, the historical conditions that give rise to the ideologies that pervade them. There is also the question of where and when the screen is situated. Time and location will give rise to different, historically specific, ideological conditions that influence reception.

When Louis Althusser states that ideology has no history, he means that it is something illusory or that ‘all its reality is external to it.’¹¹ It is therefore impossible to talk of ideology outside of the historical conditions that give rise to it. The hero is a particularly instructive way of investigating sociopolitical conditions at specific moments, since, in the bodies of heroes, we come close to witnessing an individual agent capable of representing, in complex ways, sociopolitical values. A fictional character such as James Bigglesworth might suggest that all reality is external to him and that we are dealing entirely with ‘an imaginary assemblage’; ideology, however, is written into the very fabric of the character, whether consciously or unconsciously, and Biggles’s creation and reception provide a means of investigating the ways in which ideology, in the form of heroes, circulates through societies with different approaches to the character and the ideologies that underpin him. Butts reports that Biggles was translated into Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Bahasi Malaysian, and 37 Biggles books also appeared in Braille. Perhaps unexpectedly for such a ‘British’ figure as Johns, ‘in the 1950s he became the fourth best-selling author in France.’¹² The recurring character of Marcel Brissac, who first appeared in Biggles Works It Out (1951), exists in dialogue with this positive reception in France.¹³ Strong popularity in Australasia was boosted by radio broadcasts and frequent serialization of Biggles books in Australian newspapers in the 1950s.¹⁴ An interesting perspective on postcolonial circulation is indicated by one book in my possession: Biggles Flies to Work (1963) bears the imprint of the ‘Indian Association Library, Pulau Penang,’ a society established to serve the desires of the Indian community in that region of Malaysia. Although a single example, it demonstrates the continuing popularity of Biggles in an expatriate Indian community into the 1960s.

Another, more fully realized, example of Biggles being read in the context of empire is provided by the Kenyan playwright Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who notes that ‘in reading Biggles in the years 1955 and 1956, I was involved in a drama of contradictions’: While Ngũgĩ consumed the adventures of an avatar of empire, his brother joined the Mau Mau rebellion, whose anti-imperial activities were ended only by RAF bombers.¹⁵ In a testament to the concept of ‘authoritative narration,’ Ngũgĩ discusses how ‘strong action… made one forget, or swallow, all the racist epithets of the narratives. The books did not invite meditation; just the involvement in the actions of the hero,’ and it was only when lived experience intruded forcefully on fictional reality that the ideological project of the latter was laid bare.¹⁶ Alexei Sayle documents the same shift from a British perspective, noting how Biggles’s pursuit of communists in the 1950s, which could have included Sayle’s parents, ended his previously strong interest in the character.¹⁷ It is testament to the strength of the authoritative narration, however, that the very ideological projects inherent in Biggles were initially missed: Ngũgĩ was reading Biggles even as his brother was fighting against British rule. He remarks that ‘Biggles… would have been pitted against my own brother,’ yet he failed to make the connection due to the strong action and simplistic juvenile morality that underpinned the authoritative narration of the series.¹⁸ Ngũgĩ’s ready acceptance of, or at least his failure to immediately acknowledge and resist, the ideological projects inherent in the Biggles series demonstrates the pervasive reach of the Western system of knowledge and the heroic models it sought to export through fiction and education more broadly. The Biggles series, according to Ngũgĩ, makes it clear that ‘all white people were equal in relation to the non-European universe but the English were more equal than the other whites,’ and, through the frequent recurrence of the trope ‘what would Biggles do?’ readers know that Biggles is the ‘most equal’ of all.¹⁹ That system of knowledge, the framework for interpreting the world and events, was imposed on others for the benefit of itself, through colonial schools such as that attended by Ngũgĩ.

As indicated in these specific examples, shifts in ideological context go a significant way to explaining shifts in the critical reception of Biggles. New conditions give rise to new cultural products, values, and approaches that complicate the reception of manifestations of earlier systems of values. Ellis and Williams assert that ‘there is no question that Biggles and his friends are always courageously on the side of right against might,’ but it is not necessarily so simple.²⁰ Definitions of ‘right’ must be considered along the lines of the beneficiaries of actions, at both individual and national levels, and the sociopolitical values ascribed to the concept require consideration beyond simple platitudes. In this respect, Biggles does not exist in a vacuum. Graham Dawson states that ‘the adventure hero is never the only available identification’ on offer to readers. Rather, the figure of the adventure hero exists in ‘complicated and conflicted relations with the other components of any lived masculinity,’ factors that have an impact on the reception of apparently outdated elements.²¹ While politics in terms of domestic relations and affairs of state are more obviously present in the stories, Biggles’s masculinity is present largely through its absence: In this, it represents a specific fantasy of masculinity as an invisible norm, a factor that enables its possessor to undertake whatever actions are necessary. Femininity is represented only rarely, which led to accusations of misogyny being levelled at Johns (though his protofeminist series about Worrals, a female pilot, significantly complicates this).²² Glimpses of anything that might compromise Biggles’s efficacy, such as romantic entanglements, are, like the stresses of war, introduced in the first collection of Biggles stories, never to reappear.²³ It is therefore necessary to consider how Biggles’s temporality exists in relationship with, and potentially at odds with, the conditions that informed the creation and global reception of his adventures.

Conflicted Hero in a Decolonizing World

Biggles must be read in and through the context of his creation and reception. In doing so, it is possible to understand the tensions that emerge in these novel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Studying Heroism from a Global Perspective
• 1 ‘Like a Cinema When the Last of the Audience Has Gone and Only the Staff Remain’: Biggles and (Post-)Imperial Heroism
• 2 Y’a Bon? Popularizing the Tirailleurs as Heroes of (Anti-)Colonialism
• 3 Princess of a Different Kingdom: Cultural Imperialism, Female Heroism, and the Global Performance of Walt Disney’s Mulan and Moana
• 4 One Hero Fits All? Cultural Translations in Doctor Strange (2016) as ‘Global Hero’ Movie
• 5 Zashchitniki (Guardians): A Failed Russian-Soviet Answer to Superman and Batman
• 6 ‘This Beast in the Shape of a Man’: Right-Wing Populism, White Masculinity, and the Transnational Heroization of Donald Trump
• 7 Axe and Helmet: The Widening Range of New York Firefighters as (Super-)Heroes
• 8 Unlikely Tragic (Anti-)Heroes: Gangsters Translated into Hindi Films
• 9 Heroism and the Pleasure and Pain of Mistranslation: The Case of The Act of Killing
• 10 Shaolin Martial Arts Heroes in Industrial Hong Kong: Between Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism
• 11 Interhuman. Interspecies. Global. Heroism in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (2018)
• 12 Global Heroism as a Discursive Tradition: A Critical Response
• Contributors
• Index