Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock first appeared in the September 1966 edition of New Worlds and won a Nebula Award for Best Novella. In 1969 it was expanded by Moorcock into the version now widely available. In a review I wrote last year I noted that Moorcock is a gap in my reading I want to address, and I am glad to have the taken first step in this endeavour, because Behold the Man is an interesting book; a book that examines a man’s sexual and other neuroses, and how this interplays with the nexus between fact and myth.
Behold the Man works primarily as a character study of its protagonist, Karl Glogauer. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Glogauer’s Austrian father left him at an early age to be raised by his struggling mother. Glogauer’s childhood memories are littered with incidences of physical abuse by authority figures, including paedophilia, and bullying by other children. Revealed to the reader through vignettes depicting his relationship with women, Glogauer has a messiah complex and a negative desire for attention, at the extreme manifesting in a proclivity for staged suicide attempts. Glogauer develops a view of religion, which he associates with sexuality, where a silver cross equates to with his desire for women, and a wooden cross equates with his repressed desire for men. Glogauer’s attempts at doing anything with his life are repeatedly thwarted by his avoidance of reality mingled with his self-doubt. Glogauer’s mother is Jewish, but she has not raised her son as religious. Nevertheless, Glogauer becomes obsessed with both the symbolic and historical figure of Jesus Christ. Moorcock convincingly portrays and analyses a character that is compelled to travel in time to not only witness the execution, but also ultimately assume the role, of a martyr.
This takes us to the main the plot of Behold the Man and Moorcock’s examination of the cyclical relationship between myth and fact. Glogauer finds himself with the ability to travel back in time and the book starts with arriving injured and stranded in 28 AD, with the intention of witnessing the crucifixion of Christ. His worldview is shattered when he discovers that Mary is considered the village whore, Joseph is a bitter old carpenter, and their son Jesus is both intellectually and physically disabled. However, circumstances are such that Glogauer is able to assume the role of the messiah. He uses his knowledge of future events to prophesize, his uses psychiatric training to heal a range of psychosomatic ailments, and he recites the sermons he recalls from the New Testament. After he builds his relationship as Jesus of Nazareth, he orders a Judas Iscariot to betray him to the Romans, and dies on the cross. His last words, are not “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani”, but the phonetically similar English “it’s a lie … it’s a lie … it’s a lie …”
Glogauer is committed to the concept of Jungian archetypes, particularly the hero archetype. In the writings of Jung, archetypes are subconscious collective elements that create myths, religions, and philosophical ideas; these ideas have the potential to influence the course of history, and Christianity is a prime example one such idea. There are several passages where Glogauer argues with his atheist girlfriend that the myth itself is unimportant, and it the shared impulse that creates the myth that is significant. In the events of the story, Glogauer relies on his knowledge of Jungian archetypes to harness the need for compassion, of love and forgiveness, and assume the role of Jesus Christ. Moorcock, in turn, suggests that the historical figure of Jesus is almost irrelevant to the birth of Christianity, but what is truly of interest are the conditions that allowed for Christianity to flourish. It points to the idea that there is a chicken-and-egg relationship between truth and myth: we fashion our own experience of truth from our collective beliefs; yet our collective beliefs influence how we construct our own realities.
I think Behold the Man is an ideal starting point for anybody interested in Moorcock’s science fiction writings. It is a short and intense read that exposes the reader to all of its author’s considerable skills. Moorcock’s prose is literate and concise, and he uses precise detail to evoke his setting and establish a sense of psychological realism. The book plays with structure and stream of consciousness, and often at times reads like a fever dream. Whilst the subject matter will be challenging, perhaps even blasphemous, to those with strong Christian convictions, it’s undoubtedly handled with superior skill and intelligence by an author who wants to push his readers into uncomfortable and intellectually stimulating areas. I don’t need a time machine to know that reading more of Moorcock’s fiction waits for me in the near future.
Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock
ISBN: 978-1-85798-848-2
124 pages
Published by Gollancz, November 1999
First published by Allison & Busby, March 1969
Review by Luke Brown
