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Review: “The Mark of Zorro”
Mar. 8th, 2023 11:30 amI decided to try out the actual Zorro origin story, published in 1919. It’s written in English by a guy from Illinois named McCulley, and man, can you tell. The book is deeply weird because the nominal reason for all the action is contesting the governor’s oppression of both the friars and natives, but it doesn’t find those goals incredibly contradictory. It also has a deeply nasty conception of The Natives, which crops up again and again. “And then he ruined the native forever by giving him another coin.” I don’t think a single one of them gets a name. Even our heroine, who is in many respects competent and admirably sound in her conviction, is casually and deeply racist. The whole moral universe of the novel is bizarre. A don will really agree with Zorro’s aims, and then be totally chill with playing host to the people hunting him down. What you do in this story hardly seems to matter, so long as you do some stuff: it’s kind of reminiscent of the Italian Renaissance concept of ‘virtu’, or agency, basically, as an innate good, which come to think of it is highly techbro. There’s some Masculinity nonsense afoot.
Zorro had been Long Gaming his double-identity plan since age fifteen. Not even his decent, switched on dad has an idea of his real character. The reasoning behind this choice is thin. The book is less annoying than “Pimpernel”, because you can kind of get into Zorro’s whole slightly-incoherent but not outright reactionary Project. That still doesn’t make the core conceit of a posh Mexican chunibyo deciding to All According to Keikaku reforms far more easily accomplished as Himself, A Young Man With a Fuckton Of Money and Influence, make sense. Batman problems.
People keep talking about their Zorro-related plans in front of this guy who is actually Zorro, while he just sits there like the ‘Interesting!’ computer girl in the gif.
Don Diego: Man, I wish I could hunt that Zorro guy too! But you know I have boringposhitis real bad in my hip. You’ll turn on Findfriends and text me pics of all your preparations twice a day though, right? So I can feel included?
The dumbest policeman in California: Oh no doubt bro, no doubt.
Don Diego spends the bulk of the novel looking at the camera, wondering how this is so easy.
At the end of the book—having been active for what, a year? after a decade of planning?—Zorro willingly unmasks before everyone. The governor has promised to do what he wants, but has not actually done it yet. You could say that Zorro trusts him as a gentleman, or is relying on the continued solidarity of the other fickle young gentlemen around him, but that would be very dumb. (The cavalry rescue scene is a bit stirring, but it is just posh-pageantry porn. Like, very chivalric shit.) Zorro thus exposes himself and his family to entirely unnecessary danger, undercuts his core project and limits his sphere of action in the future, just for the limited satisfaction of a reveal scene (which could absolutely have been achieved in other ways). Zorro fucks himself over for future endeavours, even as the writer backs himself into a corner for sequels. It’s like the author can’t bear to have Zorro’s public persona continue to be seen as negligible. Everyone has to KNOW!!
This book feels like it was written by Dumas’ idiot cousin. It might be interesting to do a reading or writing course on popular or influential but kind of shitty novels like “Zenda” and “Zorro”, and to talk about what they did for their audiences and how they work (but also how much shit they leave on the floor, even considered on their own terms). “Dumas and Dumbass.” Essentially, to deconstruct the appeal and weaknesses of these texts that are far enough away from us that we can get some perspective, but not Great Works: we’re not all qualified to mud wrestle the legacy of Chaucer, but most of us could take McCulley any day. His prose is fine, his pacing is break-neck and his characterisation is somewhat perfunctory: what are these choices in service of? I’m intersected in reception and afterlives, as well as construction. I haven’t yet read Isabel Allende’s big “Zorro” project, so cannot testify as to whether it just kicks this book’s ass.
Zorro had been Long Gaming his double-identity plan since age fifteen. Not even his decent, switched on dad has an idea of his real character. The reasoning behind this choice is thin. The book is less annoying than “Pimpernel”, because you can kind of get into Zorro’s whole slightly-incoherent but not outright reactionary Project. That still doesn’t make the core conceit of a posh Mexican chunibyo deciding to All According to Keikaku reforms far more easily accomplished as Himself, A Young Man With a Fuckton Of Money and Influence, make sense. Batman problems.
People keep talking about their Zorro-related plans in front of this guy who is actually Zorro, while he just sits there like the ‘Interesting!’ computer girl in the gif.
Don Diego: Man, I wish I could hunt that Zorro guy too! But you know I have boringposhitis real bad in my hip. You’ll turn on Findfriends and text me pics of all your preparations twice a day though, right? So I can feel included?
The dumbest policeman in California: Oh no doubt bro, no doubt.
Don Diego spends the bulk of the novel looking at the camera, wondering how this is so easy.
At the end of the book—having been active for what, a year? after a decade of planning?—Zorro willingly unmasks before everyone. The governor has promised to do what he wants, but has not actually done it yet. You could say that Zorro trusts him as a gentleman, or is relying on the continued solidarity of the other fickle young gentlemen around him, but that would be very dumb. (The cavalry rescue scene is a bit stirring, but it is just posh-pageantry porn. Like, very chivalric shit.) Zorro thus exposes himself and his family to entirely unnecessary danger, undercuts his core project and limits his sphere of action in the future, just for the limited satisfaction of a reveal scene (which could absolutely have been achieved in other ways). Zorro fucks himself over for future endeavours, even as the writer backs himself into a corner for sequels. It’s like the author can’t bear to have Zorro’s public persona continue to be seen as negligible. Everyone has to KNOW!!
This book feels like it was written by Dumas’ idiot cousin. It might be interesting to do a reading or writing course on popular or influential but kind of shitty novels like “Zenda” and “Zorro”, and to talk about what they did for their audiences and how they work (but also how much shit they leave on the floor, even considered on their own terms). “Dumas and Dumbass.” Essentially, to deconstruct the appeal and weaknesses of these texts that are far enough away from us that we can get some perspective, but not Great Works: we’re not all qualified to mud wrestle the legacy of Chaucer, but most of us could take McCulley any day. His prose is fine, his pacing is break-neck and his characterisation is somewhat perfunctory: what are these choices in service of? I’m intersected in reception and afterlives, as well as construction. I haven’t yet read Isabel Allende’s big “Zorro” project, so cannot testify as to whether it just kicks this book’s ass.
