The Phantom, or analyzing Mr. Falker

Lee Falk was a literature student when he came up with his first comic strip about the illusionist Mandrake. He had turned into a theatre man (producing writing, directing, as well as running) when he came up with the idea for the Phantom. And yes, the Phantom is quite theatrical, with many references to that other skull reader, Hamlet. The Phantom is all about secrets and quite aptly Falk soon found himself at the Department of Secret Intelligence as World War II broke out.

The Phantom is in Falk’s narrative known as the wandering ghost, the one that can not die; century after century the same fit muscular man in his thirties. The Phantom hides his face behind a mask and “no one can see his real face and live”. The mask makes his face seem a dead skull, the same mark left on all his enemies. The reference to death is as clear as it is a mystery of what hides behind this mask of eternal life. The reader is presented a story of an origin going four hundred years back to the first Phantom, who as a boy witnesses the killing of his father by pirates on their ship. This original father destroys the ship and the fatherless first phantom is washed ashore in a foreign land sparsely populated by pygmies and with no turning back. He swears on a skull to eradicate all evil and starts building the myth of a phantom that punishes bandits. In a cave inside his secret skull-shaped cliff he keeps a crypt with all his twenty-one dead ancestors and their written chronicles.

                      The Hungarian psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in a series of texts present a transgenerational Freudian theory of crypts, secrets and phantoms. A subjects inner crypt is formed with the loss of a loved object before it has been verbalised and understood as such: As when a parent actually dies early on (like Lee Falk’s father). Instead of introjection of the loss of love of an object that is still there this is a real loss of the object and not just the fantasy of love. By the magic of hallucinatory wish fulfilment (Mandrake!) the lost object is now incorporated. By thus trumping the real loss hallucinatory the road is closed to mourning and the impossibility of speaking it coupled with the shame of not experiencing the loss as such, the object becomes a secret buried in, and for, the subject. The resulting diagnosis is often that of melancholia, a constant dialogue with the object (talking to the skull). According to Freud the subject, in melancholia, wears the features of the object as a mask. Furthermore the need to preserve this traumatic and shameful secret of the presence of a dead ancestor in the living ego creates what they call a phantom. With the encrypted secret transformed into a phantom, designed to mislead its haunted subjects the subject is very difficult to treat. Like Lee Falk’s Ahasveruslike Phantom they are deemed to walk the streets never to be forgiven. Taking of their masks and socialising with ordinary people is like the Phantom turning into his alter (not real) ego “Mr Walker”.

Lee Falk’s Phantom keeps the secret and becomes a superhero (Superman, Spiderman, and Batman all carry similar secrets involving loss, incorporation and shame). That is why they can not disclose the secret, they must remain different from ordinary humans. Abraham and Torok claims, not only that the secret can transfer from unconscious to unconscious but that the phantom inside is a liar, whose only wish is to keep the secret. In their reading of the Wolf man case (yes the Phantom’s dog is really a wolf) Abraham and Torok follows that line of thought showing how the Wolf man spun all kinds of interesting myths on his history for Freud and other analysts (how can the Phantom’s “secret” be the secret when it is repeated so many times for us readers?). So, behind all talk on killing bad guys and the endless revenge of an original father (Lee Falks real father died early) what is the Phantom’s secret?

China in the Nordic Countries

Today and yesterday Stockholm University and its Confucius institute is organizing a conference in order to “put attention to” the book gift Stockholm University was awarded by member of the standing committee of China’s Communist Party’ Politbureau, Xi Jingping. The Confucius Institute was set up in 2005 by the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (Hanban) together with Stockholm University. This was the first of its kind in the West, the second only in the world.

Confucius institutes are indirectly run by the Chinese Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture. But since China is still a Leninist system where the ministries, just as the parliament do not have any real power, it is almost certainly the CCP Central Propaganda Department that oversees the Confucius institutes, just as it has always the Ministry of Culture. Despite some scattered protests from right wing politicians, anonymous scholars etc, debate and criticism against the suitability of an academic joint venture with a regime who does not honour liberties such as freedom of expression, even imprisons scholars on political charges, Stockholm University accepted and after some years prolonged the cooperation. Torbjörn Lodén the head of the Chinese Department became simultaneously the director also of the Confucius Institute.

Lodén’s own reply to criticism voiced publicly in Swedish newspapers was that they did not spread any propaganda only worked to enhance the cultural exchange with China (SVD 15 March 2007). However, opening the Hanban homepage (http://www.hanban.edu.cn/) one is met by a small photo exhibition from Confucius institutes around the world all focusing on a top leader of China’s Communist Party, like Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in front of smiling female students in Jakarta, President Hu Jintao welcomed by students and staff at a Chicago prep school, Li Changchun the party’s secret propaganda chief, a hardliner in questions on censorship and the media, is seen on two of the photos: with young Armenian students dressed in qipaos and waiving Chinese flags and holding hands with happy Nairobian women.

China just as the Confucius institute is still run by a Communist party with full control of the media, an organization that has used propaganda internally but also towards the outside world uninterrupted for six decades. It is a regime who harasses intellectuals and university researchers, does not tolerate differing views on literature, history etc. It is a regime that aims towards, but will never reach, full control of the discourse on Chinese culture history and society. Nevertheless Stockholm University has accepted both teaching material and teachers selected by an organization led by the Chinese dictatorship via the CCP Central Propaganda Department. In a defense against accusations that the institute represented one of the most repressive dictatorial regimes on the earth raised in one of Sweden’s two national daily newspapers its director Torbjörn Lodén argues that he is “happy for the progress that China has made in recent years, with increased freedom and higher standards of living for hundreds of millions” (Lodén 18 March 2011, Svenska Dagbladet). This might pass as an argument for politicians and business people to engage with China, but not for an institute of higher learning where young Swedes gain their view of the world.

The rapid spread of Confucius Institutes around the world has been described as a soft power initiative of the China’s Communist Part leading up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. After that, and especially following the financial crisis in the West the tone became less soft from the Chinese and from both official and popular levels there has been calls for the West to start learn from the “Chinese model” instead. In consequence, less interest is paid by the Chinese leadership to any sensitivity towards its dismal treatment of political and intellectual dissent. For having co-written a petition for democracy and human rights in China’s internationally most renowned professor in Chinese literature Liu Xiaobo was summarily sentenced to eleven years in prison. Only a few months later in connection with the Chinese purchase of the Swedish industrial flagship Volvo Automobiles, a Chinese delegation led by the next supreme leader of China’s Communist Party Xi Jinping visited Sweden.

Although being such an important and busy politician he had time for half a day at the Confucius Institute at Stockholm University officially received by Stockholm University representatives. At what for the Chinese is a Zhongwenxi, a “Department for Chinese literature” Xi Jinping presented the digital book gift which the Stockholm University conference is now held to call attention to.

The conference was filmed by the university and hopefully they will put out the second day’s presentations, including mine (although someone told me they stopped the cameras a few minutes into it).

http://www.sub.su.se/omsub/visaevenemanget.aspx?eid=101

  

Kungliga våldtäkter. Se sexbilderna från slottet här!

Den södra fasaden av Stockholms slott representerar nationen. Den vetter mot Gamla stan och Söder, dvs det verkliga Stockholm. På andra sidan slottet börjar Norrland. Södra fasaden av slottet, eller södra längan som den också kallas pryds av statyer insatta i nischer, några framställande framträdande svenskar, andra, som visas nedan, illustrerar berömda kvinnorov. Det är oklart om alla nischstatyer också representerar nationen, och om i så fall den så omskrivna Karl Gustav, i egenskap av ”Kungen”, också han likställer regerandet över Sverige med kvinnorov.

Nordanvinden, Boreas föll för Orithyas skönhet. Han försökte uppvakta henne men utan resultat och bestämde sig då för att ta henne med våld. Borithya blev både bortrövad och våldtagen. Ingen tvekan vems sida keruben är på. Kärleken vinner alltid!

Prins Paris "rövar" bort den sköna Helena och det är inledningen inte bara till kriget mot Troja utan också till den västerländska litteraturhistorien. Hon ser ganska nöjd ut.

Hades kom ridande förbi ängen där Proserpina och några andra flickor plockade blommor. Hades blev så upphetsad att han kastade sig över och våldtog Proserpina där på platsen. Sen rövade han med sig henne ned till dödsriket. Se så desperat hon försöker slita sig loss den stackaren. Hounds of Hell.

Så här föddes romarriket, då männen från Rom med våld rövade bort de sabinska kvinnorna för att ha som fruar. Det engelska ”rape” kommer från latinets ”raptio” som betyder bortföra. Svenskans ”våldta” täcker in det hela mycket väl.