THE READING RHEUM: STOP, IN THE NAME OF GOD (2026)

 

In KEEPING VS SHARING, I confessed that I was not well-acquainted with the philosophy of Charlie Kirk at the time of his untimely assassination. Since then, I've listened to assorted podcasts, and I've come to admire his Socrates-like ability to engage total strangers in sustained debate, particularly on college campuses like the one on which a demented trans took Kirk's life. But such forums could not provide a holistic view of Kirk's life-philosophy-- and although the majority of Kirk's books were dominantly political in nature, his devotion to his evangelical organization Turning Point suggests to me that his conservatism was based in his religious views. His last book-- which I will abbreviate as STOP-- concentrates primarily on Kirk's beliefs, centering upon the Judeo-Christian concept of the Sabbath. Kirk declared that since 2021 he had obliged himself to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest, despite his many time-consuming commitments. And as I suspected, in STOP Kirk used his meditations on the Sabbath custom to elucidate his religion in general.

As I've stated elsewhere, I'm an agnostic who admires religion's power to tap humanity's propensity for archetypal concepts. So on one hand I'm somewhat sympathetic to Kirk's religious leanings, though not to his evangelism. Kirk insists that the intertwined faiths of Judaism and Christianity are, or should be, the universal truths for humankind, and I reject that assertion whether it comes from theists or atheists. So I can only value Kirk's formulations in a Jungian fashion, even though Kirk rejects that sort of comparativism.

The short review is that STOP is strongest when Kirk is speaking passionately about the Sabbath as a means of recapturing one's spiritual energies by "tuning out," as the hippies used to say. For instance, since Kirk's God is a being incapable of becoming tired from activity as humans tire, Kirk declares that when God finished creation, his "rest" on the seventh day was not a matter of exhaustion. Rather, he was simply looking upon his creation and deeming it good.  Similarly, for humans the Sabbath is not intended to be just a day to "veg out." Keepers of the Sabbath are supposed to be connecting with the traditions of their faith(s) and recognizing their place in God's creation. 

Since I knew Kirk was not a comparativist, I didn't attach much importance to his statement that the archaic Jews were first to formulate any custom like that of the Sabbath. If corrected on this point, Kirk could have always claimed that even if the Jewish Sabbath wasn't the first custom of its kind, it was still the best because "reasons." This is the sort of special pleading Kirk indulges in during Chapter 1, where he makes the self-aggrandizing claim that for all other religions of the ancient Near East, the gods were purely expressions of natural forces while the Hebrew God was totally outside nature. Kirk holds similar views when speaking of modern polytheism. Also in Chapter 1, he mentions how, as a child, he encountered the many gods of Hinduism and could only think of the lack of "moral order" implied by such a plenitude of competing deities. Yet in a later chapter he's not above quoting Scripture to demonstrate that the Church Fathers possessed a far-sighted tolerance toward individual customs and/or proclivities-- which IMO also explains the early evolution of polytheism:

One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.-- Romans 14:5-6

Thankfully, Kirk mainly attacks secular movements that compete with Judeo-Christianity. He doesn't devote much space to the most execrable movement seen in his lifetime, that of the so-called "anti-racists," but that's probably because he couldn't make their grievance-happy rhetoric relevant to his theme. More space is given to the influence of modern American atheism, but most of these arguments are funneled from Stephen Meyer's RETURN OF THE GOD HYPOTHESIS, which I found interesting though not compelling, given my Jungian preferences. Kirk only attacks one Marxist for having dumbed-down the academic campuses, Herbert Marcuse. But Marcuse seems a good choice, since one Wiki-author claims that he is "considered among the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on American culture, due to his studies on student and counter-cultural movements on the 1960s." But though I realize that STOP's subject could not take on a voluminous topic, I'd like to have seen more on that subject here, since Kirk lost his life making his philosophical appeal to an academic audience.

A couple of titles have a self-help ring to them, such as "The Sabbath Improves Your Sleep," though I believe Kirk was sincere, not playing huckster-games. His most egregious special pleading appears in Chapter 8, which takes as its starting-point Exodus 20:8-11, a section emphasizing that the Hebrew Sabbath and its blessing of rest was extended not only to Hebrew believers but also to "livestock" and to slaves of any faith. Kirk labors mightily to sell the notion that the custom of the Jewish Sabbath was an "ontological" change from older cultures' beliefs about the status of the enslaved. Kirk also seeks to distance Hebrew slavery from the "moral abomination" of American chattel slavery. However, this opens Kirk up to a familiar criticism of 19th-century Christianity, which has become notorious for using a particular Scriptural citation in defense of slavery:

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.-- Genesis 9:24-25

Did 19th-century Christians quote Genesis out of context? Probably, but slavers in both North and South were still practicing Christians. Maybe they were abominable because they didn't keep their version of the Sabbath properly? Also, I tend to doubt that even the most liberal translation could erase the core idea in that passage: that the children of Ham, whoever they were, were destined to serve Hebrews. To a believer, this declaration is as much a part of sacred history as the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. Since as a comparativist I believe that the anthropological evolution of the slavery custom is far more complex than Kirk represents, I could wish he hadn't gone wading in such deep waters.

STOP offers a good portal into the mind of a celebrity evangelist. Not all of Kirk's justifications hold water, but he was still more dedicated to a vision of human improvement than, say, anyone in the Frankfurt School or any of their exploitative descendants.   

THE READING RHEUM: FLAME AND CRIMSON (2019)

Since this essay allowed me to deal with the questions of "escapism in entertainment" raised in Brian Murphy's FLAME AND CRIMSON, here I can concentrate on more of a straight review of the book. 

To my knowledge FLAME probably stands as the first substantive history of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre in prose, with only moderate attention to developments in other media. The author not only shows a strong familiarity with all of the major authors in the subgenre-- even the bad ones-- he took pains to read most or all of the AMRA fanzines (1959-1982) in order to get a sense of how the magazine endeavored to keep alive a very niche type of entertainment, particularly in the days before the Lancer paperbacks of the middle sixties revived the subgenre and made it widely popular for roughly the next fifteen years or so. As I said in the previous essay, I don't necessarily think the subgenre fell out of favor due to "the bad driving out the good." It may just be that the competing subgenre of epic fantasy offered a lot more variety to the fantasy-oriented reader than even the best exemplars of sword-and-sorcery.

In any case, Murphy's research includes many topics of interest, such as the role of Sprague de Camp in launching the sixties Lancer reprints, apart from the work de Camp and Lin Carter did in adding to the saga of REH's most popular barbarian. Murphy provides a lot of detail about the possible influences upon Howard's almost "sui generis" development of sword-and-sorcery-- influences such as Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and A. Merritt. However, Murphy seems laser-focused upon positioning sword-and-sorcery within the tradition of what I call "magical fantasy stories," even though Murphy himself runs down a list of Howard's favorite authors and concludes that "Howard favored historical fiction authors and adventure stories largely absent fantastic elements." To support this claim, Murphy runs down a list of seventeen authors whom Howard is known to have read (and sometimes overtly imitated) and claims that only four of those on the list-- Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft were "fantasy authors." However, there were certainly well-known fantastic works in the oeuvres of such figures as Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard, while the majority of Sax Rohmer works-- works which Howard emulated in his "Skull-Face stories"-- have almost as much focus on "real-world fantasy" as the works of EA Poe.

I won't rate Murphy's opinions of other, non-Howard prose authors of S&S or on S&S cinema; such things boil down to individual opinion. The only estimation I found hard to swallow was his overly politicized reading of CL Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" stories, which were the only female-centric S&S stories produced during Howard's lifetime." When Murphy writes that "the dreamy, out of body sequences typical of the Jirel stories are battlegrounds of traditional gender roles," he not only sounds like he's parroting feminist academic scholarship, he also fails to make a good case for his interpretation.   

Lastly, Murphy tries a little too hard to create a radical opposition between S&S and the epic fantasy of Tolkien. He's somewhat on an interesting track when he quotes from the prologue to an anthology, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editor briefly ventures a comparison between the large scale of the epic fantasy subgenre and the similar scale of Homer's ILIAD, and also between the more limited scale of the S&S tale and the events of Homer's ODYSSEY. But Murphy tries to improve on what the anthology-editor wrote. For Murphy the iconic epic-fantasy hero traces from Hector, the noble antagonist, while the iconic S&S hero is embodied by-- Achilles, the ILIAD'S protagonist? I can only guess why Achilles appealed to Murphy more than Odysseus. But whatever the reason, his idea just obscured the more promising comparison: comparing the concerted, large-scale conflicts of the Trojan War to epic fantasy and comparing the generally peripatetic, small-scale adventures of the S&S heroes to the wanderings of Odysseus. But whatever my technical disagreements with Murphy, I never thought he was a phony, which was my reading of the authors of the proto-woke tome DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME.      

CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY

 I've been trying to find time to review Brian Murphy's 2019 book FLAME AND CRIMSON: A HISTORY OF SWORD-AND-SORCERY, which I basically liked. with reservations. But I happened to make a remark about the book on one online forum, and it occurred to me that I might justify it in advance of a formal review, since the crux of the book is the question as to how to define "sword-and-sorcery" as a genre, as well as its place in history.

FLAME, in addition to charting the predecessors of S&S and its provenance within pulp magazines, also advances a theory as to the subgenre's relative downturn after a surge in mass popularity in 1960s magazines and paperbacks. That theory is loosely a restatement of Gresham's Law-- "bad money drives out good"-- but substituting "bad product/good product." I'm not entirely opposed to that interpretation, though I think the matter might be more involved. The crux of the interpretation depends heavily on what one defines as "escapism" and what different people expect from it. The remark I made was as follows:

"At one point Murphy twitted Lin Carter for his view of S&S as escapist, yet Murphy said something similar at the end of CRIMSON."

To provide a little more context to the statement, Murphy extolls the essential creator of the subgenre, Robert E Howard, as a rare voice of genius within pulp fiction, and he has similar glowing praise for such innovators in the subgenre as Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber. But he considers that much of the less innovative works of the 1960s, by such authors as Lin Carter, John Jakes and Gardner F. Fox, to be generally responsible for the subgenre's downturn in the 1980s. Carter, for those not in the know, was a lifelong devotee of fantasy, though he wrote work in other genres. I have not read or reread any of Carter's books in many years, but I recall only liking a handful of works. I wouldn't credit Carter with much more innovation than Murphy does, and indeed, Carter's statements as Murphy reprints them indicate that Carter sincerely believed that S&S was meant to be "completely derivative" and thus not really defined by innovation. And one must admit that Murphy was hardly unique in denigrating the Conan-imitations of the 1960s, the various works by Carter, Jakes and Fox, as "escapist and wish-fulfillment" (p. 171).

Yet Murphy, as I said above, attempts to define "escapism" in such a way as to validate REH and other esteemed S&S writers-- who to this day are still not really embraced as "real literature"-- as being a cut above the rest. In the last chapter, Murphy says:

"Fantasy is the literature of escape, and sword-and-sorcery falls squarely into this tradition. It offers a glimpse at existence beyond our ordinary round, awakening world-weary hearts to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion." 

Murphy cites Tolkien and a couple of others as champions of this interpretation of fantasy and thus of all its subgenres. However, the author never quite defines what makes "good escape," as opposed to "bad escape." If a given story depicts any sort of fantastic entity or contrivance, doesn't it possess a power to take readers "beyond our ordinary round?" Or is there some special level of communication that a story in any genre should have, to open hearts "to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion?" In the "escapist and wish fulfillment" remark Murphy makes on page 171, he ventures a comparison between paperback sword-and-sorcery and the similar light women's entertainment known as "bodice-rippers." My impression is that the majority of these-- not counting offshoots like Gothics and supernatural romance-- are without fantastic entities or contrivances. But if those stories lack the power to bring forth "good escape," is it because they lack fantastic elements, or do the stories lack something else, something that can also be found in non-fantasy books by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, as much as in the greatest fantasy-authors?

I have my own solutions to these conundrums, of course, and maybe Murphy does too. His purpose in writing FLAME was obviously not to propound a synoptic definition of "fantasy literature vs. realistic literature." Still, any time one uses the word "escapism," it opens some of these pitfalls, into which anybody, even with the best intentions, can fall.                                  

NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART II

 I've now finished the last two chapters of Whitehead's SYMBOLISM lectures, and as it happens, all the best stuff is in the first chapter.                                                                                                                                                           Given that Whitehead only focuses on his particular take regarding symbolism in the last (and shortest) chapter, the title is a little misleading. And when I checked the index for his synoptic work PROCESS AND REALITY, which he began in 1929, I saw that Whitehead only had a few pages devoted to the topic of symbols as such. Given the brevity of this 88-page book, I wasn't expecting anything as comprehensive as Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY or Cassirer's MYTHICAL THOUGHT. But that final chapter doesn't do anything but talk a little about symbolism as one of the abstractions necessary to human culture. In fact, he sums up his opinion of its importance most adroitly in a sentence from PROCESS: "Symbolism is essential for the higher grades of life, and the errors of symbolism can never be wholly avoided." I don't think Whitehead succeeds in establishing a standard as to what constitutes "error" in symbolism, though.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The real concerns of his book manifest in the second chapter; that of advancing his concept of the relatedness of all aspects of reality to one another, rather than trying to see particular aspects in isolation, which he attributes to both the empiricist tradition of Hume and the idealist tradition of Kant. In the second chapter he says, "This Kantian doctrine accepts Hume's naive presupposition of 'simple occurrence' for the mere data... I directly deny this doctrine of 'simple occurrence'... Universality of truth arises from the universality of relativity, whereby every particular actual thing lays upon the universe the obligation of conforming to it." To sum up, the principal strength of SYMBOLISM is that it offers a very concise summation of some of Whitehead's concepts, which I confessed that I found hard to follow in the more ambitious PROCESS.                   

NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART I

 Though I'll probably never gain a thorough knowledge of the Whitehead philosophy due to all my other irons in the Fire of My Philosophy, I did decide to invest some time in a slim book (88 pages) of lectures the author gave at the University of Virginia in 1927. This time, since it is so short, I'm not going to do a summary review as I did with his 1925 SCIENCE IN THE NEW WORLD. Here I'll just confine myself to some quick notes as I go along.

In his first lecture, Whitehead chooses to discuss the process of human symbol-making in two phases, "Presentational Immediacy" and "Causal Efficacy." I won't explore either of these concepts at this time. Here my only interest is in noting the similarity of the first term to Susanne Langer's dyad of "presentational" and "discursive" methods of symbolization as expressed in her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY. Since I've recently learned that Langer took some degree of influence from the earlier work of Whitehead, she may have borrowed one of her terms from him. Of course, when I first started writing about the Langer dyad on this blog, I confess I did not realize that her two terms in essence recapitulated a similar dyad in the late 1800s work of William James, that of "acquaintance" and "description," as I discussed in more detail here.  

My only other gleaning from the first lecture is that though I was puzzled by Whitehead's jargonistic term "event" in PROCESS AND REALITY, the first lecture makes his concept clearer, though he does not use that term. Here he states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A."     

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 4

 For reasons I'll enlarge upon shortly, I was able to finish STORIES WITHIN STORIES, including the chapter I skipped earlier. The reason is simple: the latter chapters of the book concentrated on explicating several modern fantasies I hadn't read, and since I'd already got the overall sense of Attebery's project, I could give them all no more than a cursory once-over.

Even though I broke this review into sections for ease of posting comments, that procedure has one distinct advantage over the usual summary approach: it allows me to anticipate some of the directions in which the argument seems to be trending. In Part 3, even though I'd not seen Attebery use the word "appropriation" in the sense popularized by Roland Barthes, I recognized that this was essentially the argument Attebery was promulgating. Before that chapter, the author had mentioned the word "appropriation" once in the introduction, but in a fairly neutral manner, which MIGHT have been merely discussing the overall political climate for fantasy fiction (or, for that matter, any fiction).

So I feel some vindication when I reach Chapter 5, with the forbidding title, "Colonial Fantasy." and find Attebery discussing Australian author Patricia Wrightson. Attebery gets fairly exercised at Wrightson's hubris, as a White Australian, for having utilized Aboriginal religious concepts in her fantasy novels, and the "A" word is not far from Attebery's lips:

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

Any comparison between (a) a fantasy-author invoking religious concepts not strictly part of the author's heritage to (b) a general process of colonial officials enforcing "assimilation and genocide" on real people is, quite clearly, a thoroughly reprehensible equation. But, for what it's worth, in the same chapter Atteberry claims (despite his earlier negative remarks on an Alan Garner book) that he has no problem with fantasists using "myths of vanished civilizations." Though earlier he criticized Campbell's monomythic interpretation of such myths, here he claims that such myth-tales "no longer belong to anyone but are legitimately part of a cultural commons." But the stories of "living traditions," like those of the Aboriginal native, are different. "They are still surrounded by rituals and obligations; they demand that the listener live by their rules."

But do they, really? When an Aboriginal native orally relates the myth-stories of his people to a group of Australian tourists, certainly the tourists are expected to listen seriously and not critique the stories. But if a modern Aboriginal fiction-writer did what Patricia Wrightson did-- creating a entirely fictional story in which the myths of his people were (presumably) depicted with the same fidelity as the oral storyteller-- what "authority," to use Atteberry's favorite word, does a purely fictional story have over listeners not of the Aborigine's tradition? 

Attebery's mistake is ironic, given that elsewhere he expressly distinguished between traditional myth-narratives and fictional stories based upon them. For instance, in Chapter 1 he states uncategorically that the most famous works of Ovid and Apuleius "function as fantasy to the degree that they are not authorized or reverent retellings of myth... they play with the material, inventing details, rearranging incidents, and inviting a response of amusement rather than awe." 

Tangentially, Attebery never mentions the financial motives for "in-tradition" authors to nullify "extra-traditional" competitors. But the motive remains present, nonetheless. I gave a real-world example of such motives in this 2017 post.

A fuller discussion of the chimera of "appropriation" must await a separate article. Therefore I'll wrap up this part of the review by stating that i the latter sections of the book Atteberry very much thumps the tub for numerous new authors of fantasy who meet his political criteria, while granting older authors either negative assessments (Zelazny, Lewis) or cursory attention (A. Merritt, Robert E. Howard). And there's nothing wrong with this priority in itself. Attebery should absolutely champion the books he likes best. But his politicized justifications for his tastes are up for counter-critique.

I said "this part of the review" because at the end of Part 3 I said that I would speak to another of Atteberry's mistakes regarding "the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture." 

Though Attebery is undoubtedly aware of the tremendous difference between the two cultures, he doesn't make much of the matter. In Chapter 4 he states that "oral traditional stories are always formulaic," though he does a bit of a take-back by claiming that traditional tale-tellers can still choose "the lesser known among alternative formulaic elements." This breeds a somewhat tortured comparison to the interaction in modern stories' "formulaic elements" and "nonformulaic components." But whenever he praises deeper psychological insights in modern fantasists, as against the usually flat characterizations seen in traditional tales, Attebery plows over the question of differing venues. In dominantly oral cultures, a traditional storyteller has no motive for memorizing deep psychological insights for Sleeping Beauty or Rumpelstiltskin; they're just baggage that slows down an orally relayed story. Such fine details are only valuable to literate cultures, who inculcate the habit of reading their stories in static media, where detail can be accurately preserved.

Similarly, at the end of Chapter 2, he gives approbation to the just-discussed works of Hope Mirrlees and Charles Williams because each creates a viewpoint character who "brings to the world of myth and magic a contemporary sensibility and skepticism." This is part and parcel of Attebery's attempt to bestow upon 20th-century fantasy some of the gravitas of Modernist literature. But I definitely do not think that the fantasy genre is typified by authors' emphases of "contemporary sensibility and skepticism," even when those attitudes are rejected. Again, Attebery is entitled to prefer fantasies that signal questions of Modernist skepticism. But his analysis fails any strong test of logic.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3

 Since I'm not sure I'll finish STORIES ABOUT STORIES, I skipped Chapter 3 and read Chapter 4, at least in part because it concerns Attebery's antagonistic relationship to Joseph Campbell.

But before getting to anything about Campbell, it occurred to me to relate Attebery's definition of myth as "any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief" to one of the first "mythographers" I evaluated on this blog, Eric Gould. In the work referenced here, Gould coined a term I've often used, "mythicity," but he did not share Attebery's broad valorization of any mythic tale simply because it "authorized belief."

The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language.

In my own essay I registered my disagreement with Gould on that point. Nevertheless, Attebery seems to have vaulted over the epistemological question, "what authority does religious 'belief' possess, even if it expresses the collective worldview of a given tribe, nation, or ethnicity?" I would be the last to validate the Doubting Thomas fallacy of the materialists, "If you can't dissect the risen body of Christ, that means no such body ever existed." But belief can be epistemologically valid insofar as its narratives reproduce epistemological patterns that are, in a sense, common to all human experience, not just to particular human groupings. For me at least, that transcendence of particular cultures trumps the "limits of language" that Eric Gould finds so disconcerting.

At base, Joseph Campbell shared this belief in such patterns, though he was, as I've said elsewhere, rather scattershot in his hermeneutics during his unquestionably distinguished career. But since Campbell and some of his fellow travelers are not validating myth based only upon whether the myth-narratives "authorize" a particular group's "belief," it's not surprising to me that Atteberry implicitly dismisses many comparativists that came into prominence in the 1960s, lumping together "Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade" as proponents of "myth criticism." Attebery is initially a bit circumspect about pinning down what he doesn't like about myth criticism, though immediately after these citations he brackets the myth-critics as sharing "the assumption that all myths are psychically available to modern writers and readers." Attebery does not at first raise the Barthesian specter of "appropriation," the idea that it's wrong to pilfer cultural artifacts from cultures not one's own. The author's initial reticence may come about because he segues from talking about the cultural influence of the myth-critics (presumably in America and Western Europe, though Attebery doesn't specify) to discussing the concomitant rise of the mass-market proliferation of the fantasy genre in the same decade and thereafter. But when he turns his attention to Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, it's clear the author has that devil Appropriation on his mind.

The problem with Campbell's monomyth as an analytical tool  is that it always works because it simplifies every story to the point where nothing but the monomyth is left. It ignores the many mythic stories that do not have questing heroes, and it leaves out the culturally defined values and symbols that make each tradition unique.

I disagree with only one part of this statement. As I may have said elsewhere on this blog, I have not read HERO in several years, and have not ever reviewed it, but I think it the least epistemologically valid of his works. If I had my way, Campbell would be much better known for his "four functions." But I must admit that Campbell's concept of an over-arching "super-myth," while fallible in many ways, had the effect of getting a lot of people to check out that particular book, including (allegedly) George Lucas. 

Yet Attebery makes the opposite mistake. When he bestows upon traditional myths a uniqueness that sets those stories apart from other cognate stories, he makes the same mistake Barthes did in MYTHOLOGIES. Long before there existed either "capitalist" or "post-industrial" cultures, so-called "traditional cultures" constantly swapped or stole story-ideas from each other. Did Norse Odin precede Germanic Wotan? No one knows, and no one should care. The same principle should apply to the intermingling of elements from disparate cultures in order to craft modern magical fantasies. We would not have a LORD OF THE RINGS if Tolkien had not synthesized many myth-traditions, not least the very disparate traditions of Celtic tales and medieval Christian religion. Alan Garner's WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is nowhere near the greatness of RINGS. But Garner's synthesis was a good one, and does not deserve to be downgraded because (according to Attebery) he "mixed mythologies indiscriminately," with "Nordic dwarves, Celtic elves, a Tolkienian evil force named Nastrond, and a Merlinesque wizard who guards a cave of sleeping warriors like those of the Germanic Frederick Barbarosa." It's odd that Attebery should invoke a 12th century German ruler in concert with a "Merlinesque wizard," rather than referencing the "sleeping warrior" myths about King Arthur, who's more frequently associated with Merlin.

In the end, the argument comes down not to logic but taste. Attebery clearly prefers modern fantasy authors to pick some corpus of culturally related myth-stories and to build from that corpus. But as I said, Tolkien himself did not do this, and as yet I have not seen the author critiquing the Oxford don on the same terms he uses toward both Campbell and Alan Garner. I too can think of many bad admixtures of disparate traditional stories, but that does not prove that "mix and match" is a bad strategy in itself. I also think Atteberry wants authors to stick to particular mythoi so that he can judge better if the creators do what he thinks most valuable: ringing in modern interpretive changes to traditional lore. 

If I make it through another chapter, I plan to address one of the major omissions in Attebery's schema: the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 2

Upon finishing the second chapter, I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Brian Attebery's STORIES ABOUT STORIES.I thought his 1980 book on American fantasy provided a good overview of the genre. But here, the critic seems to be a little too focused on trying to bring the fantasy-genre into the sphere of literary modernism. He can make a statement like, "the principal difference between the Modernists' mythic method and that of fantasy is that the latter constructs apparently seamless narratives that put the mythic on the same diegetic plane as the modern, or at least modern sensibility." And yet, Attebery keeps coming back to the notion that the two are more strongly related by their mutual desire to re-interpret archaic myths for the purpose of modern audiences.

Certainly Attebery did a lot of homework to support his thesis. Long ago, I read the Ballantine edition of Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy novel LUD-IN-THE-MIST, and retained a more or less favorable impression. But I never researched Mirrlees herself, and Attebery informed me that not only did the author run in the same circles as the esteemed literary author Virginia Woolf, both of them had a "mutual mentor, the Cambridge don and classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison." I certainly find that datum of passing interest, given Harrison's key influence upon the mythic analyses of the Cambridge Ritualists-- though my online research did not confirm Attebery's claim that Harrison was Mirrlees' "life companion." But despite the author's intelligent discussion of Mirlees' sole fantasy novel, Attebery almost seems determined to name-drop figures from respectable literature and scholarship in order to build up the repute of the fantasy genre, which was in Mirrlees' day far more socially marginal than works by people like Woolf and Harrison. 

A more key point of departure for me is Attebery's definition of myth. I certainly did not expect anything comparable to my own, or even to that of my key influence Joseph Campbell (though Campbell is given various citations throughout STORIES). But on the book's second page, Attebery provides his definition: "throughout this book, myth is used to designate any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief." And throughout the three sections I've read, Attebery's definition is meant to draw a line between myth, stories upon which archaic cultures center belief, and fantasy, whose virtue is, as the book's subtitle says, that of "the remaking of myth."

To maintain this distinction, Attebery frequently writes as if the archaic myths were changeless, while literary fantasies are all about ringing in changes on that changelessness. I feel sure a critic as learned as Attebery is aware that myths do change over time, even though the religions built around them may insist that the sacred narratives remain immutable over generations. 

Joseph Campbell's work supplied several examples of such cultural shifts, but I'll confine myself to one. In the chapter "Ancient India" in ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY, Campbell describes the religion of the so-called "Aryan" tribes that invaded the Indian subcontinent circa 1500 B.C., which extolled the warrior-god Indra, celebrated for having killed the demonic dragon Vrita. However, a millennium later, the epic Mahabharata introduces the idea that Vrita was a Brahmin, and that Indra's slaying was therefore a crime, no matter Vrita's actions. Campbell interprets this change in the mythic narrative surrounding Indra as a shift in India's cultural matrix, as the former Aryan overlords were assimilated, via intermarriage, by the older tribes then denoted as "Dravidian," a congeries of peoples with very different priorities.

So for me the essence of myth is not the assertion of unchanging narratives, even though religions may claim that the narratives don't change in order to persuade the laity. In Chapter 1, Attebery asserts that we don't know to what extent Roman authors like Ovid and Apuleius really believed in the myths they depicted. But by the same token, we don't really know that the first Native American to tell a story of the trickster-god Coyote was a True Believer. Maybe he'd heard another tribal storyteller tell a myth-story about Raven, and he decided to tell a different story about Coyote for his own tribe. All sorts of motives can go into the making of all sorts of stories. The most one can say is that, as long as a given religious myth endures, someone may hold belief in its literal truth. But is that really fundamentally different from the enduring appeal of literary myths? Their adherents may never believe that the stories were true accounts of the gods, but they often give just as much devotion to all the fine points of those stories, parsing out just as many meanings as the practitioners of religious hermeneutics. And as distinctions between belief and unbelief grow hazy, we find ourselves back looking into Tolkien's "cauldron of story" for our answers, if not also to Jung's collective unconscious. And, to reiterate the conclusion I made in MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3, the base motive to myths both religious and literary may be to propel the listener into the realms of sacred space and sacred time.

PICKING ATTEBERRIES

 My MIND OUT OF TIME series--  not precisely finished, just paused-- encouraged me to revisit some of the other books I'd reviewed here for theories of the process of imagining fantasy-narratives. My review of this 1980 Brian Attebery book shows that I didn't find in Attebery anything that made him one of my best-regarded critics. And yet, I enjoyed the 1980 book despite my disagreements. So when I noted that Attebery had several other reputable books on the fantasy-topic, I decided to check out one from 2013, STORIES ABOUT STORIES: FANTASY AND THE REMAKING OF MYTH. Given my own preoccupations, the subtitle was more than a little intriguing.

I don't know if I will devote many posts to STORIES. Today I finished the introduction and first chapter, and I was surprised that Attebery, in contrast to the 1980 book, talks a bit about his doing field studies in folklore studies. He mentions the matter only to distinguish between the experience of myth as a living practice, as sacred stories handed down through generations to embody the storyteller's culture, and the experience of myth as documented stories written down by folklorists, anthropologists or even modern literary authors.

I certainly agree with his statement distinguishing fantasy-based stories and those centered in an apparent "reality." He calls the former "metaphorical" in nature-- that is, substituting for descriptions of real experience with the depiction of the "unreal." In contrast, the latter type Attebery calls "metonymic," in that such stories create representations of persona and events that could have existed, but did not exist, in actual reality. And I've certainly made statements on this blog similar to Attebery's conclusion, "By renouncing claims to report directly on reality, fantasy requires the potential (not always realized) to generate powerful symbols."

I would say that this overstates the case somewhat, though. Though fantastic content may encourage an author's use of symbolism, certainly since the rise of isophenomenal literature, there have been any number of strongly-symbolic artworks. TITUS ANDRONICUS, generally regarded as Shakespeare's first tragedy, has nothing of "fantasy" about it, even including my category of "the uncanny" (and I will be interested to see if Attebery cites anything I would consider "non-marvelous fantasy.") But this Wiki article points out that the cycle of violence that dominates Titus's Rome could symbolize the degradation of every exalted Golden Age into profane Ages of Iron. And I feel certain that one could find any number of other symbolic analyses of TITUS online, despite its lack of overt fantasy. 

Similarly, most (though not all) fantasies require grounding in the rudiments of real life, and the fantasy-comedy of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is certainly enhanced by Shakespeare's ability to capture the sense of how stage-performers fret and bicker backstage about who gets to play what role.

So far, I haven't found anything in STORIES that strikes me as dubious, though the intro makes a mention of "postcolonial fantasies"-- and that's NEVER a good sign.

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART

 In the last couple of days I was able to finish the remaining portion of Donald Hoffman's CASE AGAINST REALITY. One reason is that it's both an easy read and just a little over 200 pages. But the other reason is that I could skip over a lot of Hoffman's fine points about tests of perception. This sort of slow case-building is necessary in science. But it wasn't strictly necessary for me to grasp his main thesis: the idea that all human perception is seen through the matrix he calls an "interface," as opposed to the common notion that "what we see is what there is." Hoffman's main concern is to demonstrate the superiority of his interface model, and for most of the book it appears he has no interest in inquiring into whatever aspects of reality that we, as products of evolution, are not privy to.

In the next to last chapter, "Scrutiny," Hoffman repeats examples from earlier chapters regarding creatures whose evolutionary instincts, which should promote fitness, may lead them down blind alleys. One prominent example is that of the Australian jewel beetle, which came near extinction because the males kept trying to mate with beer-bottles which resembled the markings of female jewel beetles. However, in an earlier chapter this was presented as no more than a comedy of mating errors. In "Scrutiny" the author goes a little further, claiming that fitness-conditioned entities as a whole cannot help but prefer "extreme" versions of normative stimuli, termed "supernormal stimuli."

Astute readers of this blog (or, more likely, of the works of Joseph Campbell) should recognize these two words. I believe Campbell first used the term in his 1959 book PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, and he derived the phrase from ethological writings of his time. I printed a representative excerpt from said tome in my 2012 essay VERTICALLY CHALLENING. I'm not surprised that Hoffman doesn't mention Campbell, but his only footnote on the stimuli-subject is for a 2010 book that uses that very phrase for its title, SUPERNORMAL STIMULI. Maybe that book properly credits the ethologists of the 1950s. 

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous. I have no doubt that Hoffman embraces the notion because it supports his general theory regarding the limitations of fitness-based perception.

Only in the last chapter does Hoffman venture some thoughts about the excluded perceptions. I was sure that, even though he makes a brief reference to Kant, that Hoffman had no interest in either Kant's philosophical project or any of the religious systems to which Kant was somewhat indebted. What I did not expect was that his version of excluded perceptions would sound not unlike the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

The claim of conscious realism is better understood by looking in a mirror. There you see the familiar-- your eyes, hair, skin and teeth. What you don't see is infinitely richer, and equally familiar-- the world of your conscious experiences. It includes your dreams, fears, aspirations... the vibrant world of your conscious experiences that transcends three dimensions.-- p. 186.

And here's Whitehead writing about his version of "conscious experiences," almost a hundred years ago:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.-- PROCESS AND REALITY.

However, philosophy is not Hoffman's metier, and he proves it later in the same chapter, when he cites this statement by Richard Dawkins:

Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

Immediately after, Hoffman says:

I agree with Dawkins. If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry, the scientific method.

A little later, Hoffman claims that his "conscious realism" system might effect a "rapprochement" between the worlds of science and spirituality. But how could any detente be forged if science alone, even one based in Hoffman's "case against reality," is in the driver's seat? 

I understand that for scientists, religion's history of infringement upon "existence claims" like those of Galileo cast a long shadow. But if Hoffman really valued what he terms "conscious experiences," the hallmarks of a consciousness not yet explained by current science, then he might have seen that a religious "existence claim" is substantially different in nature from one of science. A story about humanity's origins in the Garden of Eden does not compete as an "existence claim" with the story of evolution. The latter is about viewing the universe as what Whitehead called "inert facts," allegedly objective evidence. The former is about the full range of subjective human feelings, extrapolated into a system of mythopoeic correlations.

And so Hoffman's case fails in the light of superior testimony by Alfred North Whitehead. But Hoffman's argument is at least less polarizing than that of science-worshipper Dawkins, and so the court of public opinion may see a better thinker come forth to forge the desired rapprochement.

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES PT 2

 I've finished Chapters 3 and 4 of Hoffman's CASE. I'm getting very strong indications that he's not concerned with disclosing aspects of the reality that human, fitness-oriented senses cannot disclose. His main concern seems to be for countering the dominant opinion that human senses endow their owners with a selective advantage. Future chapters may address what this does or does not alter about humans' place in the evolutionary chain of being.

Two interesting quotes I may use in the future:

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual world as in the physical. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.-- Thomas Henry Huxley.

This accords with some of my perspectivist essays regarding the freedom to make choices depending on particular circumstances.

There is, as we have discussed, genetic drift -- the chance spreading of a neutral allele, which has no effect on fitness, throughout a population. This is more likely in smaller populations. Such drift, some claim, accounts for most of molecular evolution. It is possible that today's neutral drift might, as niches change, become tomorrow's game changer. -- Hoffman, p.71.

If one extends the principle of the "unexpectedly useful allele" to that of the "unpopular philosophical concept" or "obscure literary trope," one could make a good case for a scientifically supported take on "the stone the builders rejected."

 

 

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES

Though a lot of my philosophy-oriented posts read against simplistic conceptions of reality, whatever notes I make in this possible series are my responses to a 2019 book by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, THE CASE AGAINST REALITY. I don't know that I will finish the book, but after two chapters I already have some comments to record.

Roughly three centuries ago Immanuel Kant argued that human beings do not see reality "as it is," that they only see a series of "phenomena" which do not represent the conceptually known "noumenon" beyond human sense. Hoffman uses evolution to argue a theory that our perceptions are in large part an "interface," and that this interface came about in order to promote the fitness of the human subject.

Hoffman defends his thesis fairly well in the opening chapter, though of course I can't yet judge the full extent of his logic. But in Chapter 2, "Beauty," Hoffman seems to lose track of his own argument.

So there's nothing new about the idea that human genetics are responsive to socially and biologically determined perceptions of beauty. Like many lower animals, the humans in which all those genes reside often privilege various physical attributes, considering them indicators of good health and thus worthy candidates for mating. In Chapter 2, Hoffman focuses on just one indicator of both youth and good health: that of the eye. Apparently he either did detailed research on this attraction-factor himself or chose to focus only upon this single factor. But, given that in human culture there are a fair number of artifacts celebrating the beauties of the eye, it's a fair example.

However, though CASE is Hoffman's fourth published book, he throws out some unjustified statements. On page 30, he states that "a woman's fertility is not the same as her reproductive value." They certainly sound like the same thing to my ears, but Hoffman doesn't offer a solid distinction. He further remarks that a woman at 25 may be more fertile than she was at 20, but that at 20 her reproductive value was greater. What? Why? Is he assuming that the 25-year-old is simply going to turn out a few less offspring because she's five years older? That seems a reach.

On the same page he states the truism that older males who want offspring are more likely to seek younger females, rather than older ones, because of the former's superior fertility. So far, so expected. But then he makes the unsubstantiated claim, which he claims has been supported by "experiments," that "Men over twenty prefer younger woman. No surprise. But teen males prefer women who are slightly older." Hoffman supplies a footnote to a study that presumably supports this conclusion. But he himself does not explain the conclusion, or why he believes the purported evidence is relevant to his primary assertion that males select mates based on physical markers indicating fertility and fitness.

I can think of social and/or psychological reasons that "teen males" might seek older female sex-partners, and I assume anyone else can do the same. But Hoffman's trying to prove that sexual selection is determined by physical indicators, to support the genetic interpretation of how beauty is reckoned. He didn't even need to speak of what teen boys like to make his main point. My impression is that he knew of the cited research and wanted to reference it, but didn't realize that it was an unnecessary side-point.

That's my only note so far. More may be coming.

VERY NEXT DAY ADDENDUM: Though Hoffman does not mention Kant or his "noumenon" thesis anywhere in the first two chapters, the subject comes up in Chapter Three. There Hoffman quotes from correspondence he maintained with the famous biologist Francis Crick of "double helix" fame. Crick brings up the Kant conception as a way of illustrating the difference between what humans perceive, and the reality that may be beyond their ken. Not sure if Hoffman will pursue the comparison except to illustrate various scientific positions re: perception.

WHY MATERIALISM JUST DON'T MATTER

In any occasion of cognition, that which is known is an actual occasion of experience, as diversified by reference to a realm of entities which transcend that immediate occasion in that they have analogous or different connections with other occasions of experience.... Also... every actual occasion is set within a realm of alternative interconnected entities.-- Alfred North Whitehead, SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD, p. 227-28.

I've been playing off of concepts introduced in Whitehead's process philosophy, but have admitted that some of his more abstruse uses of jargon have confounded me. So I decided to get a better grounding in such concepts as "prehension," which by one account the great mathematician first introduced in this book, SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD, a series of lectures on a unitary theme that saw book publication in 1925.

I foregrounded the above quote because it is one of many similar statements with which Whitehead critiques scientific materialism. In the first part of the quote, the author makes clear how the process of knowledge, in particular that of scientific cognition, depends upon drawing comparisons between different entities that "analogous or different connections with other occasions of experience." For instance, to create my own example of such a cognition, a scientist will classify one group of creatures as mammals because they have "analogous connections," and will classify other creatures as belonging to other categories because they have "different connections." 

This first statement is all but identical to the way scientific materialists proceed with their cognitions. Whitehead, however, faults them on their over-willingness to abstract "discrete occasions of experience" from their connections with other entities. Continuing my example, other entities might be the ecosystem in which assorted creatures exist, and from which science abstracts them.

Although Whitehead's main project is to outline his concept of a science responsive to organic existence, he makes clear that his philosophy embraces all forms of human cognition, including ethics, religion, and aesthetics, which he calls "cosmologies." This is not a major feature of his theory, but it bears an interesting resemblance to Ernst Cassirer's theory of knowledge-forms, apparently first circulated four years prior to these lectures (so no likelihood of cross-influence between the two scholars).

Until reading SCIENCE, I didn't comprehend that his formulation of the term "prehension" was intimately linked to Whitehead's concept of a unity within discrete entities that standard materialism chooses to overlook. A couple of times he even speaks of "prehensive unification," once with explicit comparison to the opening lines of Percy Shelley's poem MONT BLANC. This tracks with separate references I've encountered, emphasizing prehension as "non-epistemological knowledge." Whitehead applies this form of unity both to biological organisms and to subatomic phenomena, asserting that both share an "inherent transitoriness" that is offset by their "actual unity," a unity that is by its nature outside the sphere of cognitive knowledge.

Though Whitehead does not devote many pages to such cultural pursuits as art and literature, he makes clear that he feels that scientific materialism, with its emphasis on discrete phenomena, resulted in a de-valuing of human experience. I was pleased to see that, though Whitehead does not use the word pluralism, SCIENCE supports a pluralist ethos. Following the opening quote, he explains that the "realm of alternative interconnected entities" is "disclosed by all the untrue propositions which can be predicated significantly of that occasion. It is the realm of alternative suggestions, whose foothold in actuality transcends each actual occasion.The real reference of untrue propositions is disclosed by art, romance, and by criticism in reference to ideals." Whitehead does not expand on this statement, and I confess that he eventually goes off on a mathematical demonstration of "possibility" that's outside my wheelhouse. But I'm egotistical enough to cite one of my own statements that shares some commonality with Whitehead's take on "untrue propositions," as seen in the fourth part of my essay-series LET FREEDOM RIDE:

For the pluralist the best understanding of freedom may be seen through an appreciation for a plurality of choices, rather than the ritualized choices between "good" and "bad" as encoded by religion or by philosophy, particularly that of Kant, who at times seems to be reinstuting the old maxim that "service is perfect freedom."  I do not define freedom as service, but neither is it rebellion against service.

I am not arguing for relativism, but rather a form of Nietzchean perspectivism.  Free will proves difficult not because it's hard to choose the straight path over the crooked path, or to choose tough-minded reductive realism over escapist fantasy.  It's difficult because we as humans can see every situation from many perspectives, and can only choose in terms of what we think may lead to the best conclusion... Ergo, pluralist freedom is the free will to choose-- even when one makes the wrong choice-- with the knowledge that *the wrong choice always has the potential to be the right choice in another set of circumstances.*

THE SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES

There was a time when the majority of liberal thinkers distanced their political and philosophical statements from anything falling under the rubric of "myth." For much of the twentieth century, myth meant "untruth," and neither Lefties nor Righties wanted their thoughts to be associated with the fantasies of archaic tribesmen. Marxist Roland Barthes was particularly insistent about distinguishing his ideology from the "mythology" that he claimed pervaded his society, as I showed in this 2010 essay.

But the lure of money titillates a lot of authors, even ideologues. Even anti-Jungian Richard Noll, toward the end of THE JUNG CULT, admitted that Jungianism had gained ground over other psychological systems thanks to the "New Age" subculture. Jung was gone by that era, but Joseph Campbell rose to prominence in the sixties, and many of his books have remained in print for the past sixty years. I think it's likely that Campbell's success in the marketplace led to many liberal thinkers putting aside any qualms about myth and trying to draft the allure of mythic discourse to validate political ideologies. I've shown this by demonstrating the anti-mythic agendas both in 1998's DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME, which I view as a "proto-woke work," and in 2011's THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, wherein the author tried to prove that fairy tales were all about Marxist dialectic.

Maria Tatar's 2021 HEROINE WITH 1001 FACES is at least partly honest, since her agenda is to break down the masculinist emphasis she claims to find in all of Joseph Campbell's works. (Strangely, toward the end of her book she cites a quote from a 2013 collection of Campbell essays, GODDESSES, but Tatar does not in any way engage with anything Campbell said in that book.) Her main target, as her book's title indicates, is Campbell's 1949 HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, in which the author promoted a "monomyth" that unified all the major motifs relating to male heroism, which left female heroes without any say in the matter.

Having a say is extremely important to Tatar, so much so that her volume might have been better titled "1001 VOICES." Tatar never critiques Campbell in depth, either fairly or unfairly. She only attacks those aspects of Campbell that she views as attempts to stymie or silence the voices of women, and she pursues the same strategy with respect to archaic myth and folklore. If the story's about men winning glory in battle, it's bad. If the story's about women exposing male perfidy through speaking out, it's good. It's no coincidence that an early chapter of HEROINE is subtitled "From Myth to #MeToo." At all times, Tatar remains lockstep within the boundaries of that ultra-feminist ideology. Thus, even though she sometimes evinces impressive erudition, everything she writes about is distorted by that determination to make her own monomyth that excludes the supposedly male province of glory and violence.

One amusing thing about HEROINE is that Tatar duplicates one of Campbell's minor vices: that of assuming a commonality of meaning between archaic fables and modern literature. I call it a minor vice because Campbell was a good enough writer that his comparisons were usually interesting if not always logically supportable. But when Tatar windmills from talking about the English folktale "Mister Fox" to modern works by such authors as Philip Pullman and Toni Morrison, she fails to build even a loose chain of associations.

If Tatar had merely claimed that there had been plenty of writings about male heroes and that she was simply going to focus on what she deemed examples of female heroism, she would have been on surer ground. But the #Me Too ideology requires the demon of toxic masculinity. Thus Tatar sprinkles her text with glib indictments of masculine myths. In her first chapter she inextricably associated archaic myths of male heroism which "we no longer lionize but call toxic masculinity" (p. 20). No hero in Tatar's ideology ever protects a woman from rape; men are just in it to force women into servile bondage, keeping them barefoot and pregnant.

I will give Tatar this much: though many of her potential readers will assume that she's going to address the presence of martial heroines in antiquity and in present-day pop culture, Tatar gives this "face of femininity" short shrift. On page 258. she tosses out a short list of "pumped-up, tough-talking women," including Diana Rigg, The Catwoman, Wonder Woman,Lara Croft and the Bionic Woman,"  but then chimerically changes the subject to first GAME OF THRONES and then to Disney heroines. Why? Well, on page 26 she also listed martial heroines of antiquity, but opined that it was a "perversion of the feminine" to show female characters "usurping the power of the heroic." So at least she's consistent in her antipathy to a power she wants to view as strictly male and therefore toxic.

That's not to say she's consistent about anything else. Wonder Woman is the only martial heroine to whom Tatar devotes any extensive attention, but her analysis is wonky, even leaving out the outright error on page 152, when the Amazon is said to be "the first female action figure in the Marvel Universe," but that she owes her live-action cinematic debut to "DC Films." At the start of Chapter 4 she excoriates Frederic Wertham for his hostility toward Wonder Woman because Wertham believed that the Amazon might keep young girls from becoming homemakers. But how is that any different from complaining that such heroines are a "perversion of the feminine?" On page 232 Tatar claims that "the love of justice-- avenging injustices and righting wrongs-- is what makes Wonder Woman so powerful a force in the pantheon of superheroes." Wait-- so aside from Wonder Woman, no other superheroes, even other female heroes, had any interest in avenging injustice or righting wrongs? I should note in passing that Wertham's ideology also could not see fictional violence as being anything but anti-social in its effects.

Her nastiest inconsistency, though, is that after having burned up a lot of hyperbole inveighing against male violence, she unleashes snark against the late Campbell in her first chapter, implying that he promoted his 1949 adulation of heroism as some sort of compensation for his having "sat out the war" (that is, World War II). This armchair psychology takes up about a page and a half, and amounts to nothing more than character assassination. (At least Richard Noll provided a detailed critique against Jung.) But this side-swipe shows Tatar's basic hypocrisy. Is it good to refuse the allure of toxic male violence, or is it not? 

Tatar doesn't care; any dirty trick will serve her ideological agenda, making her a kindred spirit with the #MeToo movement, whose leaders ranted about believing all women but decided to ignore a woman who leveled charges of sexual harassment against Presidential candidate Joe Biden. If one goes into HEROINE knowing that it's a snake pit, one may learn some interesting facts about serpent behavior, but not much more.

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."

HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PT. 2

Around the same time I began turning my thoughts to the topic of half-truths, problems and conundrums, as seen in Part 1, I started re-reading the 1998 critical work DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME: STAR TREK IN THE AMERICAN MYTHOS, by Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen. I consider this a felicitous, given that "Classic Trek" was the source of some examples as to how both problems and conundrums function in narrative within the originating essay. In an earlier formulation I had also used Classic Trek and one of its many epigoni as illustrations of the more specific notions of "moira" and "themis" in this essay, which probably sustains some parallels with my current opposition of problems and conundrums.

I remember enjoying MYTHOS, though I'm reasonably sure I haven't revisited it in ten years. But the opening chapter by Wagner and Lundeen does state some views on the idea of "myth in popular fiction" with which I'll take issue.

The first passage presents no serious problems:

Because the bare physical universe offers so little comfort to the mind, people strive through the medium of myth to center themselves and to make cosmological sense of their experiences.

I would not personally favor the term "comfort," even though it bears comparison with Tolkien's concept of "consolation," and at present I have greater liking for Whitehead's concept of *concrescence,* which has more to do with a perceiving entity sussing out the values that other entities have for him and for his culture. But this is a viable and popular interpretation of myth's function, and the authors bend over backwards not to get caught on the proverbial "Procrustean bed" of any single interpretation. 

On the same page, though, the question of a given narrative's truth-value comes up. The authors admit that "fantasy fiction and science fiction" are the two "narrative realms" that most often invite comparison with archaic myth, but then, as if signaling their own Procrustean preferences, they state that "While fantasy may bear a superficial resemblance to traditional myth in its rustic and magical character, science fiction has a stronger functional parallel with older myths, because its futuristic setting can entail a more serious truth claim." A bit later the authors claim that "Like the primal past but unlike overtly fictional settings, the future can be thought of as potentially real and true."

I won't launch into a detailed defense of fantasy fiction's equal claim to "truth" in the sense I've discussed it here. It's clear to me that even though cutting fantasy fiction out of the picture is a pretty large process of logic-chopping, I understand that the authors' prime consideration was to provide support for the position that science fiction generally had a superior "truth claim" because this argument allows them to concentrate on the superior capacity of the STAR TREK franchise to reflect truth. They also admit that "all literature is thought experiment," with which I partly agree, though with the caveat that mythopoeic thought tickles a different part of the human psyche than does didactic thought-- and that Classic Trek in particular is an ideal modern narrative which can show each form working separately or in tandem. 

To admit that "all literature is thought experiment," even without a well formulated theory of mythopoesis, is tantamount to making the same purpose I've identified in both archaic myth and in literature: that of "exposing audiences to pure possibilities." I assume that like many other modern authors, Wagner and Lundeen attempt to promote the idea of those possibilities as having a "truth claim" because the majority of readers have been trained via public school to view literature as fiction whose real purpose is to communicate enlightening messages. This is one of those bromides that sounds so logical on the surface that it's practically impossible to eradicate without a book-long argument to that effect. Naturally, Wagner and Lundeen are mostly concerned with simply validating the linked narratives of one overarcing fiction-franchise, not seeking to stem the tide of functionalism, so they can't be criticized for not doing something they didn't purpose to do. I don't know if I will blog about other aspects of their study in future, but if I do, I imagine I will continue to pursue the chimera of, "Now here's what *I* would say about the matter..."

 

RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 1

 I've recently finished I.A. Richards' 1936 THE PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC, which, despite its imposing title, is a slim book consisting of six lectures the literary critic gave on the interrelated topics of rhetoric and metaphor. I don't believe I have read any of his work previous to this one, though in other essays I had encountered what may his most oft-quoted analysis: that of defining "metaphor" as a construct of two essential elements, which he labeled "the tenor" and "the vehicle." In Part 2 I will look at how these terms impact on my current concept of metaphorical meaning.

One of the odd things Richards says in Lecture is a self-comparison to the work of Alfred North Whitehead, whom I first discussed on this blog here.

It will have been noticed perhaps that the way I propose to treat meanings has its analogues with Mr, Whitehead's treatment of things.

Given that my reading of Whitehead was spotty at best, I'm no expert on him any more than I am on Richards. Still, I'm not seeing much resemblance between the advocate of process reality and the critic who became best known for the boosting of "close reading" and the New Criticism. It's possible, since Richards' next line is somewhat facetious, that this was an inside joke on his part.

In this short book Richards does address some other salient matters besides the "tenor and vehicle" subject. For one thing, he's comparable to Philip Wheelwright in assuring readers that the very richness of human language is an advantage, rather than a deficit, to the practice of rhetoric and its related usages of metaphor. But even more useful to me is his concept of conceptual thinking as "sorting."

A perception is never just of an *it;* perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to the highest-- whatever else it may be-- is sorting.

He further supports this by asserting that "...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker."

Any regular readers of this blog should be able to anticipate my attraction to this notion, given the considerable quantity of categories I've reeled out over the past thirteen years. And this influences me not only in terms of theory. In one of my introductory pieces to my newest blog, THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA, I remarked that I didn't feel particularly interested in reposting my "supercombative" film reviews by order of publication or alphabetically by title. What I found most challenging was to repost the essays by "sorting" them according to actors who had distinguished themselves in each of the items under review-- making it a little tougher on myself by establishing that each actor got only one post to his or her credit. (In a few cases I may expand this to include other creative personnel when I feel like it.) 

Oddly, it's in this section on "sorting" that Richards uses the ten-dollar word most associated with Alfred North Whitehead, which is also the word I have remorselessly appropriated for my own use.

A particular impression is already a product of concrescence. Behind, or in it, there has been a coming together of sortings.

I don't see in this statement anything that resembles Whitehead's concept of concrescence, but it's of minor importance, since Richards does propound a stimulating discussion of the ways in which human beings utilize the constructs of metaphor-- more on which in the subsequent post.

 

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.