OVERTHINKING THEMIS, UNDERTHINKING MOIRA

Followers of Zeus claimed that it was with him that Themis produced the Moirai, three Fates.^[10] A fragment of Pindar,^[11] however, tells that the Moirai were already present at the nuptials of Zeus and Themis; that in fact the Moirai rose with Themis from the springs of Okeanos the encircling world-ocean and accompanied her up the bright sun-path to meet Zeus at Mount Olympus.-- Wikipedia entry on Themis.

I have to assume that the academics I've quoted on the subject of Moira's co-existence with Themis were influenced by something like the Pindar fragment cited above. In 2010's LURKERS ON THE THRESHOLDS, I wrote:

Just as [F.M.] Cornford had shown that Moira, a sanctity older than the gods, was identical with the origin of social order, so Miss [Jane Ellen] Harrison pointed to the ensuing process of social evolution, where Themis represents the behavior dictated by social conscience... Above all, Themis was "Justice in the realm of Zeus," which checked the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement, symbolized in a Mother Goddess who suffered a yearly death and rebirth through her son.-- Henderson, THRESHOLDS OF INITIATION, PP. 10-11.

I haven't read Harrison's THEMIS and so can't be sure if Henderson has correctly represented her views. Still, I also pointed out in LURKERS that Ernst Cassirer entertained similar views,  so to some extent the opposition of Moira and Themis has become independent of Harrison's specific views. For Cassirer, Moira represents human governance by a god-centered, "mythical" mode while Themis represents a man-centered "ethical" mode.

I've devoted considerable space to the difference between the Frye-derived concepts of "the overthought" and "the underthought," which I've aligned with the literary modes of "realism" and "escapism" respectively. Further, I would add that the "overthought," the more logical and discursive function of literature has displaced the function of the symbolically associative "underthought" in the world of criticism much as the ideal of Themis supposedly replaced that of Moira.

And yet, even though there's a place for works dominated by rational overthought or by "irrational" underthought, my concept of pluralistic tolerance doesn't keep me from finding superior those works in which overthought and underthought are balanced. In such works, the artist has access to what Jung called "the collective  unconscious" and the many archetypes found therein, rather than his simply using discrete symbols for the sake of allegorical illustration.

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference might be the various iterations of the STAR TREK franchise. Though there are certainly some inferior episodes within the three seasons of "Classic Trek," Roddenberry in his capacity as head producer (for the first two seasons, at least) infused the show with a substructure of mythical ideas that balanced the show's apparent enshrinement of sweet reason.

In my commentary on the second-season episode "Amok Time," I mentioned that even though the writer was Theodore Sturgeon, I suspect that Sturgeon came up with the idea for the story as one he hoped that a producer with Roddenberry's tastes would purchase: one focused on the struggle of two males over a female. Even the caveat that one of the two doesn't actually want the female-- that Kirk is actually fighting Spock with the object of saving Spock from a more dangerous antagonist-- does not banish the archetype that I've termed "Savage Masculinity." This archetype of "men gone wild" persists in many episodes penned by many authors-- all of whom, it's been alleged, Roddenberry re-wrote for his own purposes-- and helps keep the TREK universe from being too antiseptic.

Years ago I engaged in a mammoth re-watch of most of the TREK epigoni, all except for NEXT GENERATION. I searched in vain for any sustained use of an archetype with the mythic power I've associated with "Moira." But even though a lot of these episodes were entertaining, the writers of the epigoni had next to no understanding as to how to invoke the deep level of the underthought. Rational overthought dominates almost everything, and for the most part there's no sense that any other mode of thought can even exist.

Vulcans were not very popular with the executive producers of the epigoni up until the last series, ENTERPRISE. Even in that series, the series-makers were not able to grasp the dramatic contrast of Vulcan culture's conflict between impulse and rationality. But if there was any episode that best shows the producers' incompetence in the realm of Moira, it would be the 1997 VOYAGER episode, "Blood Fever."

Here the purely rational drama dwells upon regular character B'Eleanna Torres and her interaction with a minor crewperson, a Vulcan male named Vorik. Because the starship Voyager is far from the parent Federation and its planets, Vorik experienced a "pon farr" just as Spock did in "Amok Time." Like Spock, Vorik desires to get back to his homeworld to marry and spawn a designated fiancee. However, when circumstances seem to frustrate Spock in this goal, he at least contemplates having sex with a female crewperson to defuse his sexual torment. Captain Kirk makes it possible for Spock to carry out his ancient rituals of "marriage or challenge," but no one aboard Voyager can do this for Vorik. He works a Vulcan whammy on Torres, almost causing her to desire to mate with him. However, because such forced nuptials would be condemned as immortal by the show's audience, Torres is able to resist the Vulcan mind-magic. Finally Vorik initiates the "marriage or challenge" ritual, but this time, "the bone gets to fight." Torres roundly defeats Vorik in unarmed combat and defuses both his sexual desire and her own.

Now, the basic idea of a female character standing against a male aggressor CAN be archetypal. But here the writer of "Blood Fever," one Lisa Klink, merely uses both Vorik and Torres as flat representations of male desire and female resistance respectively. "Blood Fever" is by no means the worst example of a latter-day TREK-tale that has "too much Themis on its mind." Nowhere in the episode is there the sense that the "pon farr" is rooted in a centuries-old ritual designed to organize the interactions of males and females. Instead, it's just an inconvenient alien quirk that has to be defused so that Vorik can go back to being a useful member of the crew. (Not surprisingly, he never has a major plot devoted to him afterward.)

This suggests to me that the author's ability to make free associations with symbols has to be to some extent independent of moral considerations. Authors who are too concerned with framing moral messages cut themselves off from the depths of their own creativity. Thus the concept of Moira underlying Themis gives literary support to the philosophical opinion of Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.”

MONSTROUS MISCELLANY PT. 2

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's"-- William Blake.

This is a much more elegant way of saying what I said in TERMINOLOGY OF ENDEARMENT:

I'm aware that my lexicon of terms on this blog has been and probably will remain daunting to most readers. But I believe that no critic worth his salt is ever comfortable with passively receiving terms set down by other analysts, whether lit-critics like Frye or persons from other disciplines like Big Sigmund.
 

My "system," of course, will probably never have any impact as a series of blog-posts.  To have any impact in any sphere, the system would have to be set down in some coherent form, be it a book or a wiki.

That said, one reason I'll probably never put down a lexicon on the blog is that I'm constantly finding new linkages that redefine the old ones.  Critics who want to stick with the predictable terminologies of the Freudians and the Marxists and their kinded-- following what I deem the delusion that those disciplines have some real connection to the world of "objective science"-- are welcome to do so. 

On to one such connection:

Not since 2011 have I written of the dichotomy "Moira/Themis."-- a pairing principally derived from the formulatons of 20th-century myth-critics, such as Jane Ellen Harrison, whom I discussed somewhat in BACK TO THE LIBRARY.

The creator toiling in the fields of "high" or canonical literature expects to impose a theme upon the phantasms of the imagination, much as (in a different context) Jane Ellen Harrison argued that early myth's early phase, dominated by the "Moira," or fate, gave way to a second phase, that of "Themis," which dealt with the ordering of myth as attuned with "behavior dictated by social conscience." The parallel to the operations of "high" and "low" literature need not be belabored.

In a related essay, I compared the characteristics of "moira," associated with ritual and "the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement," with Frye's concept of "primary concerns," while "themis" was a socially articulated concept of "justice," comparable to Frye's concept of the "secondary concerns" that guide civilized humans in the right attainment of the "primary concerns."

The paradigm here is one of evolutionary development.  Subconsciously powerful forces-- be they "moira" or "primary concerns"-- eventually evolve into the more discursively organized, conscious concepts of "themis/secondary concerns."  And Schopenhauer advocates the same developmental distinctions between "primary" and "secondary" levels of experience:

"...the world as will is the primary (world) and the world as idea the secondary world. The former is the world of desire and consequently that of pain and thousand-fold misery. The latter, however, is in itself intrinsically painless: in addition it contains a remarkable spectacle, altogether significant or at the very least entertaining. Enjoyment of this spectacle constitutes aesthetic pleasure." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p.156.

The two literary personas that I compare with the primary "instinctive will" of moira-- the monster and the demihero-- might not be as entirely governed by "misery" as the Gloomy Philosopher chooses to typify ordinary life.  However, the images of sacrifice and suffering capture the "emptying" essence of the concept of *kenosis* as conceived by Theodor Gaster.  One might say that the positive incarnation of "moira" is the community of ordinary, "persistent" humanity-- a community destined to be eternally threatened by its shadow-side, the negative "monster."

In contrast, I would not say that the world of the secondary "intellectual will" is "intrinsically painless."  However, I would say that its personas, the "hero" and the "villain" are defined not by sacrifice but by the "filling" essence of *plerosis*, which takes the form of glorious spectacle.  It's therefore no coincidence that the principal quarrel between the hero and the villain is not one of simple existence, as it is between the monster and his demihero victims.  Rather, their quarrel concerns the validity of "themis," the intellectually imposed law, which the negative "villain" defies and the positive "hero" defends.

SNAKES AND SNAILS AND PUPPY-DOG TAILS

Pornography and art are inseparable, because there is voyeurism and voracity in all our sensations as seeing, feeling beings."-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 35.

I noted in THE SHE-RA MAN-HATERS CLUB that during the BEAT's discussion of the Great Feminist Postcard Mystery, hardly anyone said anything about Ladydrawers' WAP-like denunciation of "rape and abuse" at DC and Vertigo Comics. In my essay I disagreed with Ladydrawers' unsubstantiated accusations as well as with Trina Robbins's counter-reaction: that female creators ought to "let the boys have their superheroes."

I've gone on record here as agreeing with Johanna Draper Carlson that the superhero genre is what Carlson called a "gender-identified genre." At the same time I added that the genre might benefit from some input from the less dominant gender:

To some extent I can respect the attempt of a minority audience to make its voice heard, to make an impression on a genre dominated by the opposite gender. But when the demands seem determined to leech away those absurd or larger-than-life aspects that characterize the genre itself, that comes down to a case of cutting off the nose to spite the face.

And at the end of MAN-HATERS I reiterated this:

The fact that I find Robbins' statement without logical basis does not in itself mean that I necessarily defend the idea that either mainstream comics or artcomics publishers should be a "boys' club." I do think that female creators can bring a lot to the table. But I don't believe they can do so in the mainstream without a clear vision of how modern genre-comics work, no matter what success they have in the greater world of graphic novels.

What element most obstructs the vision of most female (and some male) creators with regard to "how modern genre-comics work?"

The beam in the eye of such creators has a familiar name: "objectification." For such creators, it does not matter that the superhero genre is one heavily dependent on what Paglia calls "voyeurism and voracity." Depending on who one asks, such creators are either (1) foursquare against all depictions that suggest objectification, or (2) deeply offended that there should be any inequity in depictions of sexual objectification, as per Ladydrawers' complaint that "829 women were depicted naked or partially nude, compared to only 486 men."

I should repeat, as in the previous essay, that Ladydrawers does extend its complaint to such non-superhero publishers as Fantagraphics and Last Gasp, so said complaint isn't confined to the superhero genre, despite attempts by BEAT-posters Trina Robbins and Kim Thompson to make it All About the Supah-Heroes. Still, when Ladydrawers complains of "rape and abuse" from DC-- which does concentrate most of its efforts within the superhero idiom-- I have to wonder what idealized notions of the genre the protesters must have formed.

Paglia isn't correct to conflate all art and pornography, but her extreme statement is a good counterforce to the overintellectualization of the arts. Thus her avowed project-- to identity the "amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art"-- is a worthy goal. Finding these elements in popular art is no less worthy, whether said elements appear openly or in veiled form. In both " high" and "low" art, one cannot have only the crystalline intellectualism of *themis;* one must also have the more earthy world of *moira,* the world that appears to be one of bodies and objects, no matter how distorted or absurd they may seem from a realistic stance.

Or as Kant said in PURE REASON, albeit from a different vantage: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."

Are there bad iterations of the rape, abuse and violence that has sometimes been styled "superhero decadence?" Of course there are. But there have been times when "decadent" elements have been necessary to well-crafted superhero stories-- not least Gail Simone's impressive series BIRDS OF PREY, which explored the avenues of objectification with a distinctly feminine outlook.

Given the aesthetic success of Simone's BIRDS (and the relative popular success of the original series), I'd say that any female creator who shies away from using sex and/or violence in a "gender-identified" genre may be doing nothing more than covering up her own inadequacies. Further, to insist that a male-identified genre should surrender its particular appeal to male sensations is merely a new form of gender-marginalization, and one not guaranteed to bring in the supposed hordes of "new readers" who are, like one of the BEAT posters, less offended by nudity than by Power Girl's big hooters. Admittedly, I suppose that if the superhero genre were to be as de-objectified as some female readers wish it, some male creators, who for one reason or another reject their snake-n'-snail origins, would probably also be on board with the neutering.

But I would rather they could all just get on board with the notion that human art always depends on "objectification" of some sort. Paglia takes feminists, and women as a whole, to task for this inability to see past pure self-interest:

“Let us stop being small-minded about men and freely acknowledge what treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture."

In other words, give us puppy-dog devils our due, already.

THE EMPIRICIST OF DREAMS

“What does rock ‘n’ roll mean but fucking?”—Nigel Cox, TARZAN PRESLEY.

""Say, whoever you are, you know what Freud said about dreams about flying? He said it means you are really dreaming about having sex."
"Really? Then tell me, what does it mean when you dream about having sex?"-- Neil Gaiman, SANDMAN #15.

My title is one of my many puns-that-no-one-else-gets. This time the source is more obscure than usual, as it's the first line of Clark Ashton Smith’s epic poem THE HASHISH-EATER: “Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.”

So who’s the “empiricist of dreams?” Well, though Sigmund Freud's far from being the only reductivist in the game, he does cast a long shadow over the interpretation of dreams and related fantasies, whether explicitly (as in the statement of the SANDMAN character Rose Walker) or indirectly (as in the quote from a Nigel Cox book-- which I confess I obtained from a secondary source).

To be sure, certain manifestations of pop culture *are* about nothing but sex, though maybe not quite in terms of Freudian psychology. Whatever one thinks about the multivalence of rock 'n' roll, clearly "Skinemax" movies and Tijuana Bibles can't be concerned with very much else. However, the Sandman’s riposte to Freudian dream-interpretation should remind one of the perils of overstatement.

In this essay I asserted that Frederic Wertham, obsessed with finding evidence of comics’ overabundant sexuality and violent transgressiveness, was unable to comprehend that certain fictional fantasies, such as the fantasy of crimefighting, might have some relation to an audience's fear of violent crime in the real world, as opposed to those fantasies being a "cover" for something else, like hatred of one's father. Later, in yet another essay I approved of Carl Jung’s ability to see fantasies as having their own integrity as psychic creations, as opposed to being camoflague for other psychological conflicts. Jung might have expanded on the Sandman’s riposte by saying that even though human beings cannot fly, fantasies of flight don’t automatically translate into the more “realistic” activity of sex. It's as easy to suppose that the fantasy of flying could connote for an audience the pleasure in being able to behold what is impossible in the normal world. From such contemplations, not tied in and of themselves to specific "realistic" referents, there arises what Kant calls sublimity and what the 1940 film THIEF OF BAGDAD calls "the beauty of the impossible."

The battle between Freudian reductionism and Jungian amplification has been fought on other fronts, as when Northrop Frye describes the “distinction between two views of literature that has run all through the history of criticism. These two views are the aesthetic and the creative, the Aristotelian and the Longinian, the view of literature as product and the view of literature as process.”—Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, p. 66.

Frye probably borrowed the terms "product and process" from the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, while his opposition of Aristotle and Longinus may remind some readers of this blog of a similar opposition by R.A. Habib, which I reprinted in THE SPHERE OF LONGINUS. I frankly don’t like Frye's terms “aesthetic” and “creative,” which Frye himself doesn’t use often, either in the ANATOMY or elsewhere. I much prefer the opposition he makes in another essay, quoted here, between a story’s “narrative values” and its “significant values.” In contradistinction to what Frye writes in this section of the ANATOMY, I would say that while I agree that Aristotle is indeed more aligned to the view of literature as product, this goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to see literature as a means of transmitting “significant values.” Thus literature is just one step up from rhetoric, in that its purpose is to convey those values through a fictional façade, much as Freud would’ve believed that a dream’s purpose was to convey the psychological truths of sexual repression. In contrast, though Longinus wasn’t without his own concern for “significant values,” on the whole he seems more concerned with pure “narrative values” when he speaks of how poetry’s effects bring forth the internal ecstasy he calls “the sublime.” This in turn squares up with Jung’s tendency to value dream-fantasies for their own communicative power, not as representations of something else.

I may as well also reference this essay too, where I compared the two different species of Frye-values with Jane Ellen Harrison’s concepts of *moira* and *themis.* In essence art and literature worship at the fanes of both “gods,” even if particular works may be more slanted toward one than the other. The flying horse of Powell’s THIEF OF BAGDAD seems to signify the raw exuberance of fantasy far more than it does sex, but the aerial ballet of Superman and Lois in Donner’s SUPERMAN is clearly more in the Freudian mold. In between the two I find Gaiman’s SANDMAN, for though I quote one of its stories to support Jungian priorities, that work generally succeeds in “worshipping” both *moira* and *themis* in such a way that one can hardly separate “narrative values” from “significant” ones—a consummation devoutly wished by many readers, if one rarely achieved.

BACK TO THE LIBRARY

Before I put aside my copy of Susanne Langer for the time being, it occured to me to revisit my ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY, posted in September 2008, to look over the "50 essential items" I listed there and see what if any relevance they had to my recent ruminations on Langer's dichotomy of symbolic modes.

In my essay comparing the symbolic concepts of Samuel Coleridge and Susanne Langer, I wrote:

So-called "high" and "low" forms of literature, then, preserve some of the myth/tale dichotomy in terms of the usage of presentational or discursive modes, but either can be strong in the *mythicity-force* irrespective of what mode it dominantly takes.

This I find indubitably true of all of the 50 items listed, whether they were particular standout stories or entire runs of a series by a particular creator or creative team. Regardless as to whether the comics cited could be considered of a "high" or a "low" idiom, the mythicity each of them possesses remains complex regardless of that idiom.

Still the two have important differences in other respects. "High" literature can be defined, from a myth-critical vantage, as literature that does what Coleridge claims in his Biographia essay, where the author uses his "conscious will" to shape the materials supplied by the so-called "primary imagination. The creator toiling in the fields of "high" or canonical literature expects to impose a theme upon the phantasms of the imagination, much as (in a different context) Jane Ellen Harrison argued that early myth's early phase, dominated by the "Moira," or fate, gave way to a second phase, that of "Themis," which dealt with the ordering of myth as attuned with "behavior dictated by social conscience." The parallel to the operations of "high" and "low" literature need not be belabored.

I do find that most of the symbolisms offered by my 50 choices dominantly fall into Langer's "presentational" mode, where the symbol-complex is offered up sans much in the way of rational meditation. Some strong particular examples of this mode include Quality's "Karlova Had a True Underworld" from BLACKHAWK #14, with what I called its "weirdo racial myth," and the peculiar alliance of crime and oral fixation in Jack Cole's "A Match for Satan" from TRUE CRIME COMICS #2. Stories like these work primarily by an aesthetic logic and little more.

There are of course "mainstream" works which succeed in blending the non-discursive concepts of the presentational (say, the whole Batman mythos) with discursive symbolism, seen to best effect in Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Some of the discursive focus is merely "how-would-this-shit-work-in-the-real-world" speculation, and critics have been mixed as to how well Miller succeeded on this score. He does somewhat better in terms of projecting his own personal theme onto the raw matter of the Batmythos, though there's not much chance that anyone will be placing TDKR in the realm of "high" art anytime soon. The Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN probably has a better shot, not least because the novel is a closed system with no ties to a mythos of interrelated stories.

One can see something of the same "discursivity first" pattern in a number of the contenders to canonical/"artcomics" status, such as CEREBUS, JAR OF FOOLS, and PALOMAR. Like WATCHMEN JAR OF FOOLS is a self-contained GN,which in turn makes for a self-contained theme, though I confess I find the ongoing sagas of Sim and Hernandez more ambitious. CEREBUS would seem to be especially indicative of Coleridge's standard that the work of secondary imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate," since unlike the other candidates listed the author Sim more or less re-created his own chosen theme partway through his continuing epic, switching from a Jungian relativism to a conservative Christianity.

I mentioned earlier that there existed certain canonical works, such as Carroll's ALICE books, where discursive concerns were present but were also more strongly concealed by a wealth of presentational materials. It's interesting that this approach is shared both by certain "mainstream" works, such as the Morrison/Quitely DOOM PATROL, by at least one "artcomic" on the list, Chester Brown's YUMMY FUR. Moreover, a work like Windsor McCay's DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND proves harder to classify that either of these two, since it was syndicated for a mass audience yet seemingly wore a mantle of "classiness" not much affected by most of the strip's contemporaries. It may be that for these three works, many of the discursively-based barriers that critics erect to keep DARK KNIGHT on one side and PALOMAR on the other prove extremely negotiable. Indeed, Morrison's DOOM PATROL, despite its genre affiliations, may excel both McCay's DREAMS and Brown's YUMMY FUR in the discursive department, while remaining equal in the realm of the mythically significant.

LURKERS ON THE THRESHOLDS

Back in GATE OF THE GODS PART 4 I referenced the terms "Moira" and "Themis" as short-hand terms for the unconscious and conscious functions of the human mind, which to my knowledge had been coined by Jungian analyst Joesph L. Henderson. I hadn't read the Henderson book at the time I wrote the essay, and what I said about it depended on an excerpt from Richard Slotkin's REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE.

However, now I have read the Henderson book, and it turns out that the author himself cites other authorities for the notion of a "Moira/Themis" opposition:

"Just as [F.M.] Cornford had shown that Moira, a sanctity older than the gods, was identical with the origin of social order, so Miss [Jane Ellen] Harrison pointed to the ensuing process of social evolution, where Themis represents the behavior dictated by social conscience... Above all, Themis was "Justice in the realm of Zeus," which checked the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement, symbolized in a Mother Goddess who suffered a yearly death and rebirth through her son."-- Henderson, THRESHOLDS OF INITIATION, PP. 10-11.

On one level, this contrast may remind one of the contrast raised by Cassirer in MYTH OF THE STATE, which I mentioned in ALTERING STATES. Cassirer contrasts Plato's views of the social state as a conflict between a "mythical" paradigm for governance (i.e., "Moira") and an "ethical" one (i.e., "Themis"). The context of Cassirer's contrast was to emphasize the choice Plato made in his vision of the ideal state, with Cassirer emphasizing how Plato chose the latter, as against superficial criticisms that he Plato was supposedly trying to use his "ideal forms" to promote some new quasi-religious authority.

A more important level, however, is that Henderson's takes his inspiration from two of the leading exponents of the "myth-ritual" school of the early 20th centuty: Francis Cornford and Jane Ellen Harrison. I've referred to this mythographic school back in AN OPEN QUEST PART 1, referencing in particular the way in which another scholar of that school, Gilbert Murray, provided Northrop Frye with some of his key literary terminology. Now it would seem that terms provided by two other myth-ritualists have also proven useful in expanding on my Fryean/Jungian literary schema. In GATE OF THE GODS I used the duality of Moira and Themis as umbrella-terms for both Jung's notion of conscious and unconcsious mental functions and for Frye's concept of "primary and secondary concerns:"

Since Henderson's "Moira" incarnates the "unconscious" part of the human mind, it doesn't seem a stretch to see it as encompassing both of Jung's irrational functions: sensation and intuition, while Themis, which Slotkin explicitly sees as "rational," encompasses both thinking and feeling. Ergo, for me at least, "Moira" also = "primary concerns" and "Themis"= "secondary concerns.

Again, the need for such polarizing terms remains important for literary criticism insofar as there remains a tendency for many critics to ignore the contributions of the unconscious/"primary concern" functions to art, in favor of those that seem to be conscious/"secondary concern" (and therefore ideological) functions. It's even more important in the criticism of the comics medium insofar as most critics of the medium are unable to think outside the ideological box.

Ideological critics, by their nature, must depend on the narrow reductionism of Marxist aesthetics or of so-called "cognitive science." These tools are not without proper use within the total sphere of literary criticism, but they are useful only in limited sociohistorical circumstances, and are useless for understanding what Jung called the constructive or amplificative abilities of the human mind.

The Henderson book, by the way, is not especially useful in this regard. THRESHOLDS is a competent but not overly ambitious expansion of Jung's ideas of ritual initiation, in which primitive religius rituals are compared to the concepts of Jungian individuation. REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE and other Slotkin works are probably better sources than Henderson for understanding how constructive creativity manifests in literary and even subliterary works.

THE GATE OF THE GODS Part 4

In the last essay devoted to this topic I was looking for some terminology to substitute for the rather unspecific "primary and secondary concerns" employed by Frye, and suggested that one might find such terms through the help of Professor Jung and his fantastic four functions. But given a blog isn't the best place to examine Jung's mental phenomenology in depth, I'll content myself with linking to one of the sites that examines the subject in depth:

Here one can read loads of insights about the various ways in which Jung conceived his rather Kantian four functions: what he called the "irrational" functions (sensation, intuition) and the "rational" functions (thinking, feeling). For the purposes of this essay I'll confine myself to one quote of Jung's on the subject of the functions:

"I regard sensation as conscious, and intuition as unconscious, perception. For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling as independent functions are developed, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation (and equally, of course from intuition as the necessary counterpart of sensation)."

I then relate this concept of "mutually compensating functions"-- specifically, those of sensation and intuition at this point, to what I wrote here:

'We surmise that at some point early man began to codify customs that he thought would better control or maintain the practice of pleasurable intercourse with the least amount of friction (of the fatal kind, that is). But before those "secondary concerns" could be codified, we should also surmise that the existential fact of sexuality would have taken on symbolic resonance as a thing apart from the sensational stimulations of intercourse. We don't know if early man made associative links like those of later cultures, where, say, "man" became poetically associated with the sun and "woman" with the moon. (Not that the aforementioned was at all universal even in later cultures.) But it seems to me likely that a certain symbolic resonance was born from the stimulations of those primary concerns, to say nothing of a whole lotta physical progeny.'

By now it should be obvious that I'm splitting up Frye's "primary concerns" into the pair of "irrational functions" asserted by Jung, with "sensation" being the concern of the body-- does this thing feel good or bad-- while "intuition" associates the sensory input with other mental constructs, such as idealized elements, astral bodies, etc.

By the same token Frye's "secondary concerns" are relatable to the two rational functions of thinking and feeling.

But is this any simpler to talk about than the Fryean schema? Probably not, so for the terminology needed I move to a Jungian theorist named J.L. Henderson. At this time I have not read THRESHOLDS OF INITIATION, the book from which the quote below originally derives, but the segment reproduced in Slotkin's REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE would seem to fill the bill, for me at least:

'...Henderson (developing a Jungian thesis) characterizes the basic psychological tension [of archetypal myths] as a conflict between "Moira" and "Themis"-- between the unconscious and the conscious, the dream or impulse and the rational idea, the inchoate desire and the knowledge of responsibility, the gratification-world presided over by the mother and the world of laws and reasons ruled by the father.'

Since Henderson's "Moira" incarnates the "unconscious" part of the human mind, it doesn't seem a stretch to see it as encompassing both of Jung's irrational funcitons: sensation and intuition, while Themis, which Slotkin explicitly sees as "rational," encompasses both thinking and feeling. Ergo, for me at least, "Moira" also = "primary concerns" and "Themis"= "secondary concerns."

A quick example of how this terminology might be used goes like this:

'When Gary Groth wrote that Frank Miller's DAREDEVIL work "was not about violence, it was just violent," he obviously had no appreciation for how qualitatively different Miller's dynamics of violence were from the commonplace kinetics seen in most superhero comics of the time (including most of the ones being drawn at that time by some of Miller's inspirations, like Ditko and Gil Kane). Given that Gary Groth was not stupid, or unversed in reading comics, one may speculate that the only way he would have seen Miller's work to be "about violence" would be if it appealed to the rational functions of **THEMIS,** perhaps after the examples of Kurtzman and his ilk. What Groth apparently could not appreciate was that the violence in Miller's DAREDEVIL was not just an appeal to sensation alone--which is how I interpret the words "just violent"-- but that there were also symbolic ramifications to the violence-- that is, to the other side of **MOIRA**-- which may have played a greater role in Miller's rise to popularity than simply the appeal to sensation.'

While I do believe what I just wrote about Gary Groth's critical blindspots, the more important aspect of this essay, for me, is attempting to deal with art in terms of both its irrational and rational functions, of both MOIRA and THEMIS. Hitherto most comics-critics wouldn't know a poetic association if it were crammed down their throats, as most of them are far more concerned with projecting the image of themselves as being the intellectual version of "king-of-the-mountain."

New terminology, of course, is not likely to change this state of affairs.

But--

It couldn't hurt, either.