FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I'm a big fan of one of Leslie Fiedler's quotes from his 1982 book WHAT WAS LITERATURE?: "Mythopoeic excellence is independent of formal excellence." I've never invoked the quote in any of my various analyses of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, either singly or in collaboration. Yet the quote came to mind while I was mulling over some recent friendly arguments between fellow comics-bloggers Kid of CRIVENS and Rip Jagger of RIP JAGGER'S DOJO, if only because both of them made some allusions to "myth."

Now the thing called "myth" is a many-splintered thing, and no one entirely agrees on how to define it. My overall concept of myth is probably not the same as that of Kid, Rip, or Leslie Fiedler. However, one possible common element may be the idea that mythic elements in fiction are those we commonly call "larger than life," and possibly all of us would agree that these two titans of comic-book storytelling predominantly told stories that were "larger than life." (I include Fiedler because he did make a couple of positive remarks on the Fourth World, though I believe he credited the opus to Stan Lee.)

I'll get to quotes by Kid and Rip soon, but first I want to clarify that I'm not entirely sure what specific targets Fiedler was reacting against when he coined his quote. In the book he generalizes a lot about the literary elitism of his time, without naming specific opponents. The way his quote is worded, one assumes that there were critics who believed that "formal excellence" in literary works was everything. If a writer like Virginia Woolf (my example, not Fiedler's) could turn out highly finessed prose that one could admire for its own sake, it would seem that Woolf's lack of any "larger than life" story did not matter to such critics. Fiedler represented himself as someone who could appreciate what he called "myth" in popular as well as elite culture; could appreciate a bestseller-type like Margaret Mitchell as much as he appreciated a literary light like William Faulkner, if not in the exact same way.

OK, so here are the relevant quotes from Kid and Rip from this comments-section of this Dojo post. First Rip mentions two of the more "mythic tales" of Jack Kirby's Fourth World  cosmology, and Kid responds:

I think it likely that many of the themes that people saw in Kirby's work, weren't actually there (or were exaggerated) and had probably never even occurred to him. The Fourth World is laid against a superficial backdrop of 'myth', purely for the purpose of telling stories about good guys versus bad guys.

And Rip responds:

I disagree with you adamantly that Kirby's tapping of mythic themes was by chance. He was intentionally evoking those themes. The "Anti-Life Equation" is a core idea that permeates the stories and is all about the individual freedoms we aspire to.

Now at this point one may be thinking, "okay, all three quoted persons said something about myth, but where does all the fuss about 'formal excellence' come in? Neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee was any sort of 'literary light' with a reputation for fine wordsmithing." Quite true. But Kid makes clear that he didn't find Jack Kirby's solo works, Fourth World and otherwise, to be as "readable" as the collaborative works between Kirby and Stan Lee, and this has been a frequent complaint from many other fans over the years in assessing the virtues of the Lee-Kirby collaborations as against the "Solo Kirby" stories, including but not limited to the Fourth World.

It's true that the sort of critics Fiedler was responding to would have deemed both comics-makers to be melodramatic trash. However, I believe that Fiedler was arguing that certain authors did tap into a special type of creativity, one that didn't require a well-turned literary phrase at all. But "readability" was another aspect of story-crafting, and it's as good a word as any for what fans liked in the Lee-Kirby collaborations that they didn't find in the Solo Kirby stories.

Since I'm not trying to make any new enemies, the only reason I quote Kid and Rip is to ground my own responses to their estimations, not to attribute to either blogger something he did not say. And my response is as follows. I agree with Rip that there's a lot of intentional myth-making in the Fourth World, though not so much in the rest of Kirby's solo oeuvre. But I also think Kid is correct that many contemporary comics-readers found the Fourth World hard to follow, and I believe that the hardcore comics-fans didn't invest themselves in Kirby's myths because by 1970 many of them had come to expect a certain level of "formal excellence" even in funnybooks. 

What does "formal excllence" look like on the low level of comic-book melodrama? I see one crucial element that Lee brought to the collaborations that Kirby was not able to master despite his best efforts-- and I'm going to capitalize this element to indicate its importance--

THE APPEARANCE OF CONSISTENT TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS (defined as characters who seem to have two or more dominant characteristics that give the impression of consistency)

Now, I say "appearance" because of course there were dozens of Marvel characters, either by Stan and Jack or by other creators entirely, who were only one-dimensional (defined by just one trait) or no-dimensional (defined by the function the character performs in the story). Both Lee and Kirby grew up with comics in which one-dimensional and no-dimensional characters practically defined the medium, and the main exceptions were in the works of particular raconteurs like Will Eisner and Carl Barks. Lee and Kirby separately experimented a little bit with two-dimensional characters, mostly in one-shot anthology stories, where they didn't have to worry about a serial status quo. 

I might argue that both authors had made minor inroads toward two-dimensional characterizations, Kirby in the comic strip SKY MASTERS, and Lee in his collaboration with Joe Maneely on the five issues of THE BLACK KNIGHT. But they weren't moved by any lofty literary aims in either case. By the late 1950s the comics-business was in chaos, and no one was sure what would sell. DC, long the home to the reigning super-dude, had started pushing superheroes in the last years of the decade. But even these were at best one-dimensional. Barry Allen was a dogged police scientist, Hal Jordan was a slightly more venturesome test pilot. 

Then Lee and Kirby, who had both been doing a lot of stand-alone SF/horror stories for the Company That Would Be Marvel, came together for FANTASTIC FOUR. In those anthology stories both men had sometimes emulated the two-dimensional characters in 1950s SF-films, and they brought a similar dynamic to this new group of superheroes. The feature's success was a blend of Kirby's great talent for character design and Lee's sensitivity to the different "voices" each character might possess. I would never credit all the "myth-elements" to Kirby alone, or all the "characterization-elements" to Lee alone. But each of them had their primary strengths, and together they were able to present a variety of larger-than-life fantasy-situations that seemed more "relatable" because the characters had an apparent consistency of voice and attitude.

I may build on some of these considerations elsewhere, since Fiedler's use of the word "formal" reminds me of my distinction here between "formal and informal postulates." But none of those hypothetical essays are likely to involve the eternal "Stan and Jack" question.

QUICK ADDENDUM: Here's an example of what I would deem a two-dimensional character by Stan Lee, which story he completed with John Romita long before Kirby returned to Martin Goodman's company.

SACRED PROFANITIES PT. 3

 One corollary result of my reading of Eliade's 1957 THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE is that I began comparing his ideas of primitive life with those of George Bataille, of whom I've written far more often here. One reason for this is that Bataille's philosophy concerns both religion and literature far more than most if not all Eliade works. Eliade did write fiction but as he was first and foremost a historian of religion, he did not work his thoughts about literature into his seminal works, whereas as Bataille, also a writer of fiction, did so.

So it would seem that Bataille had a rough contrast between "sacred" and "profane" activities in the formative eras of human evolution. But he did not speak, in any major way, of ancient man following what Eliade calls "paradigms." Eliade seeks to understand the phenomenon of religion from the imagined perspective of religious adherents, based more on custom than on direct testimony. Bataille follows the lead of the anthropologists he favored, such as Mauss and Durkheim, and so his analysis is more from the perspective of an outsider seeking to understand a phenomemon "from outside," to the extent that this was possible for Bataille. From my citation in BACK TO BATAILLE PT. 1:

“Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts.  The first reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of the individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity.  The second part is represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality) - all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves.  Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production.”—Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure.”

Obviously Bataille does not use the terms "sacred and profane," but he is in many respects duplicating the distinction between profane activity, which is pursued for "the conservation of life," for entirely practical reasons, and sacred activity, which involves "unproductive expenditures." Of those he lists, only the category of "cults" is expressly linked to religion, though anyone can think of ways in which such categories as war, mourning, monument-building, games and arts are linked to religious concepts and practices. 

Now Eliade focuses on paradigms because he theorizes that their appeal is that they depict some transcendental action taken by God or the gods that impinges upon human affairs. Eliade does not distinguish between hierophanies that benefit man in a practical way, as when a god gives a tribe the secret of cultivating grain, or hierophanies that imagine some more abstract process, like Marduk forging the world out of the corpse of a vanquished dragon-goddess. I might theorize that the more practical God-acts might not meet Bataille's definition of "unproductive expenditures," but I can't be sure based on the Bataille works I've read.

In contrast, Eliade lightly passes over what some would call the "Dionysian" aspects of religion; his concern is strictly Apollonian in nature. In fact, though I did not remember this when I began exploring my previous Bataille issues, to some extent I made a comparable comparison in BACK TO BATAILLE PT 1, in that I drew a possible contrast between Bataille and Joseph Campbell. (I briefly mentioned Jung in the section quoted but I did not explore any specific Jungian content.)

Bataille would probably have deemed both Joseph Campbell and his chief influence Carl Jung as overly oriented upon idealism, which Bataille despised due to both his personal history and his reading of Marx. But Jung and Campbell were far from being the foursquare defenders of Platonic Idealism that detractors claim. Both were invested in dynamic psychological processes akin to what Kendall calls “negotiation.” The principal difference between Bataille and Campbell is that Bataille focuses on images of destruction for his concept of expenditure, emphasizing customs like animal/human sacrifice and the Amerindian potlatch.  In contrast Campbell focuses on images of construction: on negotiating the identity of the world through piecing together its separable aspects: the cosmological, the metaphysical, the sociological and the psychological.

I have the general sense that Bataille was so obsessed with his concept of the Dionysian "sensuous frenzy" as it applied to both human psychology and religion that he would have had little patience with Campbell's epistemological patterns, and maybe even less with Eliade's definition of religion on the model of the Christian *imitatio dei* (which Eliade explicitly mentions on page 106 of THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE). Given my investment in the epistemological model-- which may theoretically subsume Eliade's paradigmatic model-- I must prefer Apollo over Dionysus. Still, Bataille's focus on "unproductive expenditures" does tie in to the fact that all religious activity is fundamentally impractical. This insight can be related to my assertions here and here, that although the epistemological patterns in literature are based on concepts of knowledge, they are not the same "truths" found in non-fiction, but become instead "half-truths" in a fictional context, allowing them to keep open the doors of affective freedom.

 

SACRED PROFANITIES PT. 2

 So I've finished re-reading Eliade's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE as mentioned in the previous essay. I remembered a lot of Eliade's essential points, probably because he tended to re-iterate similar positions in his other books. 

SACRED is probably not Eliade at his most expansive in a philosophical sense. If there's one sentence that most captured the book's theme statement, it might be the one on page 106:

... through the reactualization of his myths, religious man attempts to approach the gods and to participate in being; the imitation of paradigmatic models expresses at once his desire for sanctity and his ontological nostalgia.

This sounds very high-minded, but terms like "being" and "ontology" are not defined here, though Eliade may have previously descanted about such concepts in earlier works. Nor does he define the "existential situation" of the profane as he suggested he might in this quote from his introduction-chapter:

The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.

Eliade certainly does state in that chapter that his priority is to expound on the "modalities of the religious experience," and he does this by listing dozens of ways in which human beings sacralize the ordinary necessities of the world. The building of houses or temples is founded upon the paradigm of the gods' creation of the world; the tilling of the fields is linked to the paradigm of the gods' gift of vital foodstuffs for man to harvest. In the absence of a thoroughgoing definition of the profane, though, what one has is the sense that the profane is a chaos which must be made into a cosmos through the process of sacralization. One of Eliade's more effective examples is that of "the Vedic ritual for taking possession of a territory; possession becomes legally valid through the erection of a fire altar consecrated to Agni." I would add, in addition to the various cited conquests of dragons or giants that bring about the founding of new terrains, the somewhat more mundane event of Aeneas' single combat with Turnus, which ends the AENEID as we have it and prefigures the rise of the Roman people in the Latin country they conquer.

So all these paradigms are very well, but is that all that common, profane experience actually is: raw matter to be transcended? Does profane experience not have its own modality?

I do not doubt that many primitives sought meaning in acts of paradigmatic imitation, and this may indeed be the source of all religion. Certainly it's a better theory than the materialists' idea that religion was a con-game originated by various knavish priests, who in caveman days figured out a way to rook the naive laity. Still, I don't think even cavemen would have been endlessly absorbed in paradigms. The modality of the profane would be the idea that one is doing a thing purely out of necessity. I imagine a primitive cursing his fate to labor for his daily bread...

"DAMN I got to hollow out this DAMN log to make a DAMN canoe so I can catch some DAMN fish!"

As I said in the previous essay, this is the "short-term" view of life; one does what one can to live, and nothing more. Such a view naturally breeds as many if not more dissatisfactions as the imposition of paradigmatic models on mundane activities, and such dissatisfactions may be the main reason that religion took hold upon preliterate societies. They might not need "ontological nostalgia" as such, but they could well need an escape from drudgery-- which would also be the inspiration for all forms of art and storytelling as well as religion. Not surprisingly, Eliade is so focused on his thesis that he's entirely silent about the parallel developments of expressive art and paradigmatic religion in general pre-literate societies. In the final analysis, THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE is primarily significant for exemplifying Eliade's methodology and erudition, but as a philosophical exploration of "the sacred" it's a very limited work.

SACRED PROFANITIES

Though I've only mentioned Mircea Eliade once or twice here, I've read most of his works over the years, and I was probably an Eliade fan in college before I knew anything about Northrop Frye, since I remember discovering Frye after graduating.

Most of Eliade's key works were published in the 1950s and 1960s, and recently I happened to pick up a copy of one of the most influential, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE (the source of my punny title). This will be the first Eliade book I've reread since beginning this blog, so I don't yet know if I will write more than one post on it.

Whenever I first read the book, I surely didn't know Rudolf Otto from a hole in the ground. So I found it interesting that Eliade's opening chapter names Otto's 1917 IDEA OF THE HOLY as an influence upon Eliade's theories of the sacred, particularly since I myself ultimately wrote a series of analyses on Otto's book, starting here. The Romanian myth-critic claims that while most historians of religion concerned themselves with "the ideas of God and religion," Otto focused on "the modalities of the religious experience." 

Eliade then segues to his own definition of those modalities, which are dominated by the perception that the sacred "is the opposite of the profane." That said, he admits that the sacred often manifests through objects in profane reality, through "some ordinary object, a stone or a tree." In this chapter Eliade does not distinguish what are the sacred qualities that distinguish a profane object that has been "sacralized," though I presume other chapters will expand on this assertion.

He may also expand later on this passage:

The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.

But before I read further, I will say that I've also frequently emphasized "two existential situations" in human culture, though my inspirations there have more often been Schopenhauer, Frye and Cassirer. My 2016 essay THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL posits that one may view the metaphors of "close-sightedness" and "far-sightedness" as they might apply to the two types of will identified by Schopenhauer. I did not specifically relate these types of will to the sacred/profane duality, though I can see ways in which it would apply, with "close-sightedness" aligning with "the profane" and "far-sightedness" aligning with "the sacred."

Take as a quick example the exogamy restrictions of primitive tribes. Claude Levi-Strauss was quick to point out that contiguous tribes may have totally opposite customs, with one tribe forbidding marriage between cousins in the maternal line while another tribe restricts marriage between cousins in the paternal line. An advocate of the profane, "close-sighted" view might find these customs pointless, since the tribal citizens had no real way of knowing that either form of consanguineal marriage had any ill effects on either the spouses or their offspring. But a "far-sighted" view might argue that total lack of restriction is not beneficial to the tribe's sense of identity. Thus taboos may, in a short-term sense, seem arbitrary. However, in the long-term sense of defining the tribe's identity, the sense that some behaviors are restricted is a necessary evil, even when there is no rational justification.

And that is where I'll leave things for now.

UNTIMELY RUMINATIONS #2

Here's another blast from the past, taken from AMAZING HEROES #51 (1984), when Steve Gerber was hyping VOID INDIGO:

Gerber believes that contemporary examples of popular culture that attempt to recreate myths do not truly do so. "One of the qualities of myth is that it looks at both the light and dark sides of humanity, and the escapist mentality is incapable, really, of looking at the dark side...There's a certain ugliness in every one of us that we all have to face and confront at some time or another"-- and that, Gerber says, in myth we recognize and condemn in ourselves, therefore achieving a catharsis.

To be sure, the first sentence of this quote makes clear that Gerber isn't trying to define myth overall, unlike some of the myth-theorists I've critiqued on this blog. But he's also putting forth an overly rationalized notion of a supposed facet of myth, because it jibes with the particular work he's expousing. I wouldn't say that his observation is completely untrue. But the very mention of "catharsis" in this context makes it sound as if Gerber has a didactic view of myth-- which is ironic given that many of Gerber's works meet my definition of literary myths, precisely because they don't have an overly didactic organization.

I can see, though, why an intelligent creator like Gerber would become seduced by the Didactic Side of the Force, for as I noted elsewhere, the tropes of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities not infrequently intermingle with one another:

Didactic discourse and mythopoeic discourse are not as intimately entwined as those of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. The discourses can appear independently of one another, or they may intertwine within a narrative to support one another, or they may conflict with one another so as to confuse the narrative. 

Given that in the primary art of fiction there can be so many permutations in the interaction of these two potentialities, it's not surprising that they also become confounded within the secondary art of criticism.

RESPECTING THE SECOND MASTER PT. 2

 At the end of my previous half-a-review of John Lyden's FILM AS RELIGION, I wrote:

Similarly, in a section devoted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz-- the scholar with whom Lyden most strongly agrees, albeit one I've not yet explored-- Lyden strongly rejects the tendency toward "sociological reductionism" seen in scholars like Malinowski and Levi-Strauss. Lyden follows Geertz in affirming "that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are." The pairing Lyden calls "the ideal and the real" is in essence identical with what I called above "the objective and subjective worlds." Because Lyden is attempting to see ways in which the enactment of tribal myth-rituals mirrors the much later development of cinematic enjoyment, I'm not surprised that he's aligning himself with the model that best supports that analogue-- and at this point in reading the book, I have no reason to oppose that comparison. I'm reasonably certain that, given his nodding acquaintance with Campbell, Lyden will not validate myth-and-religion according to my notion of "epistemological patterns." But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a view of the subject that I can respect.

I've now finished the 2003 book, and I can appreciate that its author kept true to his objective, rather making contradictory claims, as did the authors to which I compared him earlier. I strongly disagree with his methodology, but I respect that he stuck to his conceptual guns.

As noted earlier, I approve of Lyden's attempt to steer clear of the reefs of reductionism. Though he provides cogent analyses of an assortment of various religious critical attitudes, such as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Otto, Clifford Geertz is his main guide, though he does tip his hat toward one of the anthropologist's precursors in Chapter 2:

In distinguishing art from religion, [Geertz} accepts Susanne Langer's view that art deals with illusion and appearance, imagining how the world could be, whereas religion claims to represent the world as it really is. But religion also imagines how the world might be, and as Geertz's own theory indicates, religion links together what "is" and what "ought" to be in its ritual structure.

This idea of religion binding "is" and "ought" within a ritual structure is Lyden's sole justification for seeing a wide variety of commercial films as "religious." What Lyden oversimplifies is that when the "is" and "ought" dichotomy appears in actual religious narratives, it's usually to  illustrate a contrast between the phenomenal world that everyone experiences and the noumenal world which underlies the "illusion and appearance" of ordinary life. Lyden eradicates this core aspect of religious narrative so that he can bring under his scrutiny all sorts of films in which some "illusion vs. truth" dichotomy exists. Thus a film like 1989's WHEN HARRY MET SALLY falls within the compass of Lyden's idea of ritualized entertainment, because its narrative opposes one narrative illusion-- a world in which Harry and Sally don't realize their essential rightness for one another-- with a narrative truth, one in which they find one another. 

I notice that though Lyden mentions Susanne Langer to gloss Geertz's theory, Langer's nowhere to be found in the book's bibliography. Had Lyden read Langer, he might have gained some appreciation for the ways in which mythic and religious symbolism can be used to form narratives that are fundamentally distinct from those which are largely about conflicts in the naturalistic world. As I have not read Geertz as yet, it may be that he too is a little too cavalier with the "is/ought" dichotomy.

I don't particularly like downgrading Lyden, whereas I took some pleasure in identifying the foolish fallacies of the authors of the SACRED TIME book. I admire that he's trying to value fiction not for its supposed representations of literal truth, as has been the case with the majority of literary criticism since the days of Classic Greece. Rather, Lyden appreciates that fiction can be used to describe situations that do not exist, and may not ever exist, as a way of considering all possibilities. In this his position resembles mine as I've expressed it in essays like AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

But good intentions are not the only measure of a critical work, and once again, I'll point out that an author like Jung-- whom Lyden rejects-- has been instrumental in pointing out that the human psyche has "many mansions," so to speak. A film like WHEN HARRY MET SALLY has nothing to do with the symbolic correlations one finds in mythic and religious discourse, but it's perfectly valid within the sphere of the dramatic potentiality. Because Lyden tries to extend his definition of religious ritual narrative far beyond its scope, his reviews of various films, whether possessed of mythic content or not, have a bland, all-cats-are-grey sound to them.

It is amusing, though, that a modern scholar champions just the sort of non-mimetic possibilities that used to throw earlier generations into hissy-fits, as one sees with a "critic" like Frederic Wertham, who was so married to representational reality that he picked at a SUPERBOY story because its representation of George Washington at Valley Forge wasn't the way the real history of things went.

RESPECTING THE SECOND MASTER

The title of this essay functions as a companion piece to SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER, my largely negative review of the 1998 book STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. In my review I faulted the book's authors for having reeled out a "Cook's tour" of prominent views on the analysis of archaic and modern myth, and for having claimed that theirs was a "pluralist" vision, only to turn around and deluge the reader with nothing but Far Left interpretations of the TREK franchise. The authors claimed that they were going to "serve two masters" by appreciating the arguments of both those who criticized mythic content in fiction and and those who "venerated" it, but they were really only serving one of two putative masters and shortchanging the other.

John C. Lyden's 2003 FILM AND RELIGION follows a similar course to DEEP SPACE insofar as the author sets up his critical rationale by comparing and contrasting a wide variety of critical views on the interwoven topics of myth and religion. As of this writing I've only read the first three chapters of Lyden's book, and I have two more to go that are focused purely on his methodology, before even getting to his specific analyses of different films-- some of which are well-known metaphenomenal works, while others would seem to be remote from the average conception of myth-and-religion, such as WHEN HARRY MET SALLY.

Lyden's estimations of various myth-and-religion scholars are, perhaps inevitably, a mixed bag for me. In my 2019 essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I criticized Jung for too often reducing mythological stories to purely psychological projections, and Lyden holds the same opinion. Yet whereas I found it possible to use certain insights by Joseph Campbell to correct Jung's error, Lyden makes it clear that he has no use for Campbell at all, dismissing the author largely because he finds Campbell's concept of "the monomyth" too restrictive. In truth, I have no more investment in that particular conception than did Lyden-- it's one of Campbell's weakest ideas-- but it's clear from Lyden's bibliography that he only read three of Campbell's later works, which doesn't give him much authority to analyze Campbell accurately.

Overall, though, Lydon seems to be broadly fair even to writers with whom he disagrees. I confess that I like the fact that he opposes the very thing I disliked in the DEEP SPACE book: the tendency to confuse sociological purpose with poetic creativity. In MYTHS OF PLEASURE AND PATTERNS  I wrote:

I won’t repeat in detail my conviction that mythology depends upon the evocation of epistemological patterns. But I will add that for tribal humans, these patterns would be the essence of poetry; the fusion of the objective and subjective worlds in which those humans lived. Stories that relate that the sun is really a boat traversing the sky, or that the world was made from the bones of a giant, don’t serve any scientific purpose, nor at base do they serve the purpose of Malinowski’s functionalism (to which Meletinsky seems strongly allied). While myth-stories may eventually be used to support a given culture’s social order, no teller of tales thinks to himself, “Hmm, I think I’ll make up a story about that ball of light in the sky so that this generation and those that follow will have a sense of societal unity.” Nor would any audience listen to such stories for any reason save that imaginative sojourns give them pleasure. One of those pleasures includes the listeners imagining that the mysterious non-human world is at least tinged with human sentiments and priorities—and that may be the base origin of all of the tropes of art and religion, which may precede those stories we moderns would term “myths.”

Similarly, in a section devoted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz-- the scholar with whom Lyden most strongly agrees, albeit one I've not yet explored-- Lyden strongly rejects the tendency toward "sociological reductionism" seen in scholars like Malinowski and Levi-Strauss. Lyden follows Geertz in affirming "that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are." The pairing Lyden calls "the ideal and the real" is in essence identical with what I called above "the objective and subjective worlds." Because Lyden is attempting to see ways in which the enactment of tribal myth-rituals mirrors the much later development of cinematic enjoyment, I'm not surprised that he's aligning himself with the model that best supports that analogue-- and at this point in reading the book, I have no reason to oppose that comparison. I'm reasonably certain that, given his nodding acquaintance with Campbell, Lyden will not validate myth-and-religion according to my notion of "epistemological patterns." But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a view of the subject that I can respect.

 

SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER

In this essay I noted that I was currently re-reading Wagner and Lundeen's analysis of the STAR TREK franchise, DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. I also noted that I felt a little reluctant to blog further about it, though I only referred to the "chimera" of rebutting points made in a book published over twenty years ago. It's a little different when a critic breaks down an earlier work that still has a following, like Ursula Le Guin's THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT, which I assailed in this essay and the two subsequent posts. Even if I had a larger following, would all that many fans, be it of STAR TREK specifically or of metaphenomenal criticism generally, even care about what Wagner and Lundeen said about "Star Trek in the American Mythos?"

However, one interesting aspect of the authors is their attempt to "serve two masters," as per the Matthew 6:24 quote. In HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PART 2 I attempted to give the authors the benefit of the doubt because they claimed that they were pursuing the course of pluralism, even if they do not do so in the same ways I do. But now that I'm about halfway through the book, I think that the authors' claim to appreciate different paths was just them talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Wagner and Lundeen's claim to pluralism appears in the first chapter, following a generalized history of the many intellectual and academic interpretations of myth. In the concluding section, entitled "Plural Vision," Wagner and Lundeen write:

It is possible, when writing about myth, to be so driven toward a preconceived goal that one may select only the material that fits the chosen approach or stretch and whittle it until it does fit. Those who read myth in order to interrogate its hegemonic messages, are likely to write about such subjects as gender, race, ethnicity... [while] those inclined toward the veneration of myth are more likely to focus on heroism, self-transcendence, the achievement of inner wholeness and illumination...

Now that I've read more of the book, it's quite evident that there's a reason why Wagner and Lundeen first listed the critical, reductive analysis of "hegemonic messages," and gave short shrift to the view, expressed by such authorities as Jung and Frye, that myth has its own integral logic that cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations. Though I intend to keep reading, in the first six chapters I've found nothing to justify the book's title. DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. The title sounds like a response to one of mythographer Mircea Eliade's more "transcendental" books on mythology, such as THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN or THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. But Eliade is only cited three times in the index, just like Carl Jung-- which indicates that the authors were just bullshitting about their supposed respect for the non-reductive views of myth.

Since this is just a blogpost, I'll confine myself to one example of the authors' reductive proclivities. Chapter 5, subtitled "Gender in the STAR TREK Cosmos," concludes with a section with the bumptious title "Tinfoil Bikinis and Political Correctness." The authors assert that in the fourth season of STAR TREK VOYAGER, the producers introduced the svelte character "Seven of Nine" to add sex appeal to the series, with the clear implication that for the show's past three seasons not that many fans. hetero or otherwise, were enthralled with the existing female cast-members. Wagner and Lundeen paraphrase a quote by Berman from a 1997 article in which he made some comment about the show having become too "politically correct." The bias of the authors toward the feminist agenda is clearly shown by their response:

If "political correctness" means a sensitivity to feminism and other left-liberal political views, it is probably too simplistic to blame it for the decline of the "sexy" STAR TREK female.

Wagner and Lundeen then veer off any actual estimation of the "correctness" accusation by accusing the Original Series-- the souce of the "tinfoil bikinis"-- of focusing on "women as the sole object of the sexual gaze, with men doing all the gazing." This is not sustainable, not least because Mister Spock managed to attract a sizeable female fandom-- but he did so as men usually do in the real world, through his actions rather than through the use of makeup and attire. One need not be a Jungian essentialist to notice that hetero men and women have different orientations with respect to the opposite sex, and one cannot glibly downgrade any of the TREKs if they reflect that basic experiential truth. In fact, the "sexual gazes" directed at Seven of Nine's smoking body in her skin-tight attire apparently included a number of lesbians, since during the run of VOAYGER, a petition was circulated to declare Seven as having a lesbian relationship with the ship's female captain, as reported in this Wikipedia article.

I've often made fun of overly politicized critics, such as Noah Berlatsky, who blathered about my myth-critical approach without the slightest understanding of the issues involved. But at least he only served one master, unlike the hypocritical authors of this not-so-deep analysis.

ADDENDUM 12-15-21: I considered devoting a separate post to  the remainder of this book now that I've finished it, but I found it such a mixed bag that I don't think it's worth it. There are some okay insights here and there, but in large point this is a "proto-woke" work, continuously complaining about the STAR TREK franchise's lack of proper intersectionality. Even after admitting that the shows are all television programs that must use human actors for the majority of their players, the authors STILL fault the shows for being too anthropocentric, and so they are guilty of a fundamental dishonesty, throwing out valid reasons for production procedures and then dismissing those reasons out of hand. 

Though there have been Far Left studies with inventive points of view, Wagner and Lundeen are largely derivative and unoriginal in their analyses. The only puzzling aspect of their work is that I don't know why they stuck the phrase "sacred time" in their title. They correctly attribute the phrase to Mircea Eliade, and even quote the context correctly. But given that the authors are mildly hostile toward the claims of any religious hegemonies-- as was, BTW, Gene Roddenberry-- it's clear that they aren't the least bit concerned with the philosophical aspects of Eliade's idea. Maybe in some fashion they viewed Eliade's concept of a originary time before time itself started as some sort of "modernism," which they incorrectly associate with cultural traditionalism. But if so, they failed to make that association clear, and so their whole project shortchanges their readers as well as their "two masters."

FRYEAN BLIND

 One detail I didn’t mention in my quasi-review of THE POETICS OF MYTH is that when the author presents his rather rushed summary of Northrop Frye’s contributions to myth-criticism, Meletinsky conflates two different selections of Frye’s work, quoting from both ANATOMY OF CRITICISM and from an essay from six years earlier, “The Archetypes of Literature.” But Frye’s arrangement of his mythoi is not the same in these two works. Meletinsky ends up telling readers that Frye has equated comedy and romance with the seasons of summer and of spring, which is true in the essay. But in ANATOMY, Frye reversed the two comparisons. Given that the book represents the fullness of the critic’s thought, this was a rather clumsy mistake on Meletinsky’s part.

However, Meletinsky’s section on Frye did remind me of a topic I brought up in my essay THE FOUR AGES OFDYNAMIS. I said in that essay that I couldn’t find any evidence that Frye had based his four-season, four-mythos schema on anything in Ovid. A fresh scrutiny, though, reveals that a page or two before Frye begins his first section on this subject, entitled “The Mythos of Comedy: Spring,” he does make reference to other famous quaternities, including “the four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death).” There’s not much chance that Frye was unaware of Ovid’s famous poem. It’s more likely that the “Four Ages of Man” as Ovid conceived them simply did not line up with Frye’s conception of his four mythoi, which took its principal influences from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray and Theodor Gaster.

Without question Ovid’s four ages are more persuasive than Frye’s foursome, not least because “death” is not really a period of life. In the ANATOMY Frye is acutely conscious that spring is associated with images of rebirth, not least in his own religion of Christianity, and also that historically Greek New Comedy tended to focus on the attempts of young men and women to be married despite the opposition of tyrannical authority figures. Thus, the critic leapfrogs over the period of actual childhood—Ovid’s “frail shoots and grasses”—so that he Frye can draw symbolic comparisons between mundane marriages of young people and the sacred union of God and humankind. In my early readings of the ANATOMY I was blown away by all of these mythopoeic allusions. Yet in later years I’ve come to decide that there are some problems with pages and pages of criticism on the subject of comedy that barely addressed the functions of humor.

Just as problematic is Frye’s attempt to disassociate the mythos of adventure-oriented romance with the “age” in which heroes venture forth to battle dragons and witches. Since Frye’s spring-protagonists must necessarily be adolescents, his summer-protagonists would have to be of a somewhat later age in order to represent “maturity.” In real life, however, adolescent males are more likely to seek combat-glory before they marry and settle down, even if New Comedies and their descendants tend not to depict that aspect of life. In my own writings, I tend to see that all of the strivings of adolescents, whether relating to Eros or Thanatos, belong on the same plane, since both activities are dominantly associated with persons in their “hardened” summer-phase. Raymond’s FLASH GORDON provides an example of focusing upon both romantic love and on romance in its connotation of a story of great conflict and adventure.

As I stated in FOUR AGES, comedy depends upon the frustrations of incongruity, and these frustrations aren’t exclusive to, say, the “heavy fathers” of Greek New Comedy. Slapstick humor, which may well have been prominent in Greek Old Comedy, may involve no romantic interest whatsoever. The incongruity can arise when the victim’s expectation of immunity from harm is thwarted by a banana peel under the shoe or a pie in the face. Yet Frye was right in thinking that comedy was essentially a mythos about “coming together:” it’s just not a union defined by romance. Rather, nearly every mortal ever born can laugh when a fictional character, good or bad, gets humiliated because every mortal ever born had experienced humiliation in some form, if only during the vicissitudes of childhood. Frye’s concept of comedy, centered upon the experience of adolescents, would seem to have nothing to say about a humor feature like SUGAR ‘N’ SPIKE, where the titular toddlers are constantly trying to make sense of the confusing adult world, but always fail because they see things “through a milk-bottle darkly.”

Frye’s period of “age” lines up loosely with what Ovid calls “the temperate season…midway between quick youth and growing age,” but Ovid’s conception remains superior here as well. The protagonists of serious drama need not be middle-aged, any more than the protagonists of comedy need be children (although it’s been remarked that Hamlet seems to have been a student at Wittenberg long enough to have left adolescence behind him). But in the mythos of drama the protagonists begin to feel the limitations of their personal power, just as living things begin to wane in autumn. Despite many of the adventure-trappings in the teleseries STAR TREK, the serial is at its heart a drama, given that it constantly deals with such limitations, even in such triumphant narratives as “Arena” and “Day of the Dove.”

Clearly what Frye means by “death” is a specific period of human decrepitude, the last phase for any given mortal before he or she dies, and Frye is entirely correct in lining up this state of existence with the season of winter and the mythos of the irony. Comedy levels human beings because everyone shares the humiliations of early life, but in a state of being in which life still holds endless hopes. Irony levels human beings in the opposite manner, separating rather than uniting, reminding us that we all die alone. The only redemption from the season of winter in actual life is the knowledge that one’s limited life may be perpetuated by either literal offspring or by “good works” that go down in history. In literature this slight satisfaction may give rise to a bittersweet black humor, so that even when an irony-tale ends with some sort of romantic alliance—as we see in both Voltaire’s CANDIDE and Elio Perti’s THE TENTH VICTIM —the romance only succeeds because the principals manage to isolate themselves from the madding world.

MYTHS OF PLEASURE AND PATTERNS

 

I had an additional reason for LEVERAGING LEVI-STRAUSS recently. For some time I’ve been meaning to get around to reading THE POETICS OF MYTH by Russian scholar Eleazar Meletinsky. I purchased the book purely because I was intrigued by the title, not knowing anything about the genesis of the project or the author’s background. The title suggests that the author means to produce a poetics for mythology, arguably humankind’s first literature, in a manner analogous to Aristotle formulating his Poetics for Greek art.

I had scanned a few sections of POETICS, though, and I noted that the author expressed an uncritical admiration for Claude Levi-Strauss. This did not in my opinion bode well, but before delving into Meletinsky I wanted to be as grounded as possible—or at least as grounded as I could tolerate—in Levi-Strauss’s work. Now that I have a solid grasp of the French anthropologist’s methodology, I can better understand why this Russian theorist admires him, and how I think that predilection hurts his theory.

Meletinsky’s project is to provide a broad overview of the many ways in which scholars have sought to explain the nature of archaic myth, with some additional material discussing the use of myth in modern literature. (This justifies the inclusion of scholars who are literary rather than religious scholars, such as Northrop Frye.) Meletinsky provides a substantially accurate timeline of the development of myth-analysis, beginning, as do similar timelines, with the 15^th-century writer Giambattista Vico. Meletinsky even makes Vico into a sort of “founding figure” for myth-studies:

Vico’s philosophy of myth also contains in embryo … almost all of the main tendencies of later mythological studies… Herder and the Romantic poeticization of myth and folklore; the link between myth and poetic language analyzed by Max Muller, A.A. Potebnja, and Ernst Cassirer; the theory of survivals associated with English anthropology; the work of the folklore historians; and even distant allusions to Durkheim’s collective representations and Levy-Bruhl’s notion of primitive rationality—p. 7.

This is an appealing “cultural myth” on its own, even if Meletinsky expresses the vaguely Marxist idea that Vico had these vital insights because his native land of Italy was “undergoing a general and political decline” in that historical era. The “main tendencies” that the author finds in Vico divide into “two contrasting schools of myth interpretation” in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of these schools Meletinsky calls “the anthropological school,” whose method inheres in “comparative ethnography.” He doesn’t apply a specific name to the other school but aligns it with Romanticism and linguistic analyses. For my own convenience I will rename them as the Synchronic School and the Diachronic School.

Followers of the Synchronic School are focused upon studying material in a particular time frame. They either collect data about traditional tribal-style societies “in the field” or collate data derived from such anthropological investigations. The “field” types would include such thinkers as Tylor, Malinowski, Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss, while the armchair analysts would include Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualist School.

The Diachronic School is more concerned with taking the long view of myth in many different and often contrasting cultures, seeking to come to grips with the essence of myth as a human activity. Of the figures Meletinsky names, this school includes Herder, Schegel, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Langer, Frye, Jung and Eliade.

A foreword remarks that the author may have received some hostile scrutiny from Soviet authorities because “any book or theory that privileged thought—the “superstructure” in Marxist jargon—at the experience of empirical contingencies and economic infrastructure was not readily welcomed in Soviet ideology.” I admit that Meletinsky doesn’t come off like a driveling Marxmallow, but some of his remarks suggest that he still had more concern with “empirical contingencies” than with the “poetry” that his book is supposedly concerned with. For instance, he faults Frye for an “anti-historical undercurrent’ (p. 87). Yet he has no problem with Roland Barthes for diminishing myth in favor of “acknowledging the primacy of history” (p. 69). When he began claiming, erroneously, that Cassirer had failed to logically distinguish the form of myth from the forms of literature and philosophy, I quit reading the book.

Meletinsky’s bias toward historicism and the Synchronic School reveal a critical inability to think of myth as a poetic activity, which inability renders his book’s title fatuous. He has almost zero interest in the ways in which myths appeared in the literature of Greeks and Romans, Babylonians and Egyptians, and pole-vaults over centuries of art so that he can address the use of myth in Modenist literature. (He does work in some desultory comments on Defoe and various Romantics.) But even Aristotle’s offhand comparison between the tragedies of his time and old traditions of “goat-songs” is more poetically insightful than anything Meletinsky writes.

Given my voluminous postings on writers like Jung, Frye and Cassirer, plainly I’m as much of the Diachronic Party as Meletinsky is of the Synchronic one. I’m not for a moment claiming that everything those worthies wrote was flawless, and at the very least the approach of the more data-oriented writers might serve as a check on over-Romantic tendencies. But it takes an extreme narrowness of vision to imagine that one can speak meaningfully of the link between myth and poetry without writing SOMETHING about the archaic origins of both.

Of course, one can only approach such origins diachronically, synthesizing general tendencies from such fragmented data as cave paintings and early hieroglyphs. But even if by some miracle we knew more about the general origins of myth and art, such knowledge does not change the fact that myth is not determined by history. Yes, one must presume that every story has come into being within historical time, even when we do not know just when. But the elements making up the stories—elements I’ll call “tropes” for simplicity’s sake—are ahistorical, arising and combining in endless chimerical ways according to the needs of a given audience. Even Levi-Strauss’s tedious anatomical dissections of countless archaic tales don’t testify to the abstruse “mathematics” that Levi-Strauss hypothesizes. Rather, such tales reveal the actions of innumerable nameless storytellers, seeking to please their audiences with patterns and pleasures.

I won’t repeat in detail my conviction that mythology depends upon the evocation of epistemological patterns. But I will add that for tribal humans, these patterns would be the essence of poetry; the fusion of the objective and subjective worlds in which those humans lived. Stories that relate that the sun is really a boat traversing the sky, or that the world was made from the bones of a giant, don’t serve any scientific purpose, nor at base do they serve the purpose of Malinowski’s functionalism (to which Meletinsky seems strongly allied). While myth-stories may eventually be used to support a given culture’s social order, no teller of tales thinks to himself, “Hmm, I think I’ll make up a story about that ball of light in the sky so that this generation and those that follow will have a sense of societal unity.” Nor would any audience listen to such stories for any reason save that imaginative sojourns give them pleasure. One of those pleasures includes the listeners imagining that the mysterious non-human world is at least tinged with human sentiments and priorities—and that may be the base origin of all of the tropes of art and religion, which may precede those stories we moderns would term “myths.” Meletinsky has a long section in POETICS. “The Classic Forms of Myth,” which seems to be nothing but a haphazard list of assorted mythological characters and situations, grounded in the aforementioned functionalism. I suppose this may be his idea of a diachronic overview, but even the most self-indulgent myth-commentaries by Jung and Joseph Campbell are better thematically organized. The author’s inability to discern the pleasurable element in mythic stories keeps his book as distant from being a “poetics of myth” as it’s possible for any single work to be.