GOULD RUSH

 One of the earliest essays I wrote when I commenced this blog in 2007 was MYTHICITY, THREAT OR MENACE?, which partly concerned Eric Gould's 1981 MYTHICAL INTENTIONS IN MODERN LITERAURE. The book was not a major influence on my thinking, and I'm not even sure when I read it. In fact, at the time I wrote the 2007 essay, I didn't have a physical copy of INTENTIONS, and up to now, the only times I quoted Gould, it was from the few INTENTIONS passages in William G. Doty's MYTHOGRAPHY. However, thanks to a bargain purchase on Amazon, I now have a good copy of Gould's book.

I don't know if INTENTIONS justifies a large-scale explication. I expressed some disagreements with Gould in that early essay, and in the two or three others here where his name appears. My only strong influence from his work was his argument for the term "mythicity," meaning "the nature of the mythic," as Gould says in the introduction. From a Google search I don't get the sense that this term caught on with other literary critics, and it only gets mentioned in reference to INTENTIONS or to my own essays-- with one exception. A blog called Culturesmith devotes an essay both to Gould's term and to its earlier coinage by one Wilhelm Dupre in his 1975 book RELIGION IN PRIMITIVE CULTURES. It may be that Gould credited Dupre somewhere in INTENTIONS, but the latter's name is not in the index or the select bibliography.

Here's the only citation of Gould I made in the original essay:

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.

This also appears in the intro to INTENTIONS, and my reaction to it now is the same as what I said in PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3, where I was disputing what author Brian Attebery said against what he called "myth critics," including Joseph Campbell:

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."

Though Gould's book had nothing to do with anything Atteberry wrote, or even the fantasy-genre with which Atteberry was concerned, as it happens Gould's introduction spells out his disagreement with Atteberry's focus upon purely historical manifestations of religious myth. Gould notes that "the issue for literary studies has long been the synchronic problem, that of trying  to explain what the mythic is..." The contrast between synchronic and diachronic approaches to linguistic analysis appears in this Wiki citation:

Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach – from Ancient Greek: συν- ('together') + χρόνος ('time') – considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. In contrast, a diachronic – from δια- ('through, across') + χρόνος ('time') – approach, as in historical linguistics, considers the development and evolution of a language through history.^[1]

Gould does not actually say in the intro that his is a diachronic approach-- of analyzing a subject across many different historical manifestations-- but that's the interpretation I take from his mention of the "synchronic problem." As noted above, I've found my own solution to all "synchronic problems," largely in the domain of epistemology-- though I have more recently averred that "epicosms," the domains of epistemological patterns, are inextricably interlaced with the domains of ontological declaration, or "ontocosms." I further in passing that I think Gould is far more preoccupied with ontology than with epistemology, though in a very different manner than Attebery, so I'm not sure how useful a re-read of INTENTIONS will be. 

EXTREME UNCTION FOR FUNCTIONS

 A stereotype, or stereotypical device, is identical to what I called a "simple variable" in this essay. For my purposes a simple variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that is as close as one can conceive to a bare function; one that is static with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities.

An archetype is equivalent to what I have called a complex variable, following Northrop Frye's logic on this subject. A complex variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that proves itself dynamic with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities. -- A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY, 2014.

 

Affective freedom," then, is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in artifice, while "cognitive restraint" is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in verisimilitude. -- BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE, 2018.

I recently conjured forth the ideas of functionality and super-functionality from the vasty deeps of 2014 in my last essay. I then found myself cross-comparing those early thoughts to those more recently expressed this October, in both QUICK NUM NOTES and THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD. In the latter essay I opined that both the "metaphenomenalities" privilege tropes of artifice over those of verisimilitude, though works of "the uncanny" seek to create the impression of greater alliance to verisimilitude than one finds in works of "the marvelous." (Thus everything that falls into the pattern of "the uncanny Gothic" always comes up with some artifice to explain away phenomena that seem to be marvelous.) My "October surprise" was the insight that from one POV, the artifice of the uncanny may be just as "artificial" as that of the marvelous, even if the rationales are opposed to one another.

So, by the logic established in the 2014 essay, both the uncanny and the marvelous are defined by "super-functionality," at least in an ontological sense. This means a potential to take on multiple functions within the ontological structure of the narrative, which functions may align with the epistemological structure, or may not. But this "super-functionality" is also an "anti-functionality" insofar as pure functionality is being overshadowed in favor of things that track only in terms of literary artifice. To recapitulate one of the examples from QUICK NUM NOTES, when Ian Fleming has his crime-chief Blofeld execute a subordinate with an electric chair rather than with a pistol or baseball bat, it's because Fleming wants his readers to sit up and take notice of what a singular crime-boss Blofeld is-- that he's NOT a mundane criminal like Al Capone.                                

A TALE OF TWO COSMS

 Though the terminology introduced here may not stand the test of (my) time, I felt like better organizing my thoughts on "ontology and epistemology." I'm fairly sure that nothing I write here will supersede my literary definition of both, I formulated in 2023's WHAT VS. HOW. But the proposed terminology might be better than trying to repurpose the standard "tenor/vehicle" terms I put forth in 2024's VERTICAL VIRTUES.

My current difficulty stems from my realization that in essays like A NOSE FOR GNOSIS I've frequently been using "ontology" and "epistemology" as if they could stand for all the ontological or epistemological elements in a narrative, when in fact the words signify the disciplines involved in thinking about what things exist or how we have knowledge of their existence. "Tenor and vehicle" also don't work that well because each word sounds like a single unitary thing, rather than a combination of elements that comprise a greater whole. Since the connotation for Greek *cosmos* is that of an ordered whole, my new terms are *ontocosm* for the totality of lateral elements (relating to the kinetic and dramatic potentialities) and *epicosm* for the totality of vertical elements (relating to the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities). Whether I'll use the terms a lot depends on my future sensibilities. But at this point it seems easier to reword my statement in NOSE FOR GNOSIS re the respective potentialities of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN and the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm. 

On a related note, while I was looking at my "greatest crossovers" series on OUROBOROS DREAMS, it occurred to me that my criteria for greatness were certainly not primarily epicosmic. There were some crossover-stories with strong vertical elements, like JIHAD and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC. But for the majority of my choices, I believe I responded to the elements of lateral storytelling. Thus I included Spider-Man's first encounter with The Avengers on the basis of both kinetic and dramatic elements, while the wall-crawler's first meeting with the Fantastic Four was, in a word, forgettable in ontocosmic terms. Other times, I might not think the lateral story was all that good in itself, but that it comprised some landmark crossover-event-- the first time the Avengers met the western-heroes of Marvel's Old West, or that GAMBLER movie that brought together a dozen or so actors to play either real or simulated versions of their TV-characters. In these stories, it wasn't so much the actual execution of the concept but its potential that I found intriguing.        

OO, THOSE AWFUL ONTOLOGIES

My title references an essay by snob-critic Edmund Wilson, who sneered at THE LORD OF THE RINGS with a snotty essay, "Oo, Those Awful Orcs." I say, if you're going to steal, steal from elitists; that way, you're just stealing from cheats.

My most sustained thoughts on the subject of "ontology" came about from my relatively recent attempts to suss out the works of Alfred North Whitehead. Even before finishing his most famous philosophical book, PROCESS AND REALITY, I wrote this essay to draw comparisons between his system and mine, based on a perceived conflict between his ontology and my epistemology. In response to Whitehead's statement that his philosophy concerned "the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world," I wrote: 

It could be interesting to see what criteria Whitehead uses to measure his “objective data,” and what if any impact that would have on, say, Kant’s theory of the sublime—this being the Kantian concept that has most affected my own theory. I will say that within my epistemological schema, I rely on a sort of “objective data” that feeds into narrative constructs, and my own “satisfaction” with an author’s use of such patterns is more “intense” when I am convinced that the patterns used reinforce one another, creating my version of “concrescence.” However, within the sphere of literary narrative, “objective data” can be either things that the audience believes to be objectively unquestionable—say, the fact that the sun always rises in the east—or what I’ve called “relative meta-beliefs,” such as the Annunciation, the Oedipus complex, and the Rise of the Proletariat.

I later referred to all such "data" as half-truths, because that's how "truth" operates in fiction. But in more recent months, I began to consider, in the essay A NOSE FOR GNOSIS, that Whitehead's concept of an "ontology of subjective data" might parallel my concept of an "an ontology of fiction," by which I mean everything that *literally* takes place within a fictional discourse."

...I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description."

A new wrinkle I'll now add on top of these previous observations is the following:

Since fictional ontology, whether one defines it as "literal content" or as "pre-epistemic prehensions," is comparable to "knowledge-by-acquaintance" rather than "knowledge-by-description," all judgments based on taste spring from a subject's response to a fictional work's ontology.

In 2012's THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, I defined the function of taste thusly: 

The notion of intersubjectivity explains much of the appeal of fiction.  Elitists like Groth generally insist that the difference between good and bad fiction is a matter of highflown sophistication; that which lacks sophistication is perforce bad.  Yet even elitist critics differ among themselves over what is good or bad in Shakespeare just as much as comics-fans do about the proper depiction of Batman.  The arguments themselves may be more sophisticated, but the response for or against any given work spring from the extent to which the work mirrors the subjectivities of critic, fan, or general audience-member.  But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities.

I still maintain that taste is not a matter of abstract justifications, though one can amuse oneself by debating the logical propositions that others use to justify the superiority of their tastes. Taste relates to the audience's identification with the travails, deserved or not, of fictional characters, and that means identifying with a work's internal ontology. 

The aforementioned Gary Groth, for instance, has often ridiculed the genre of superheroes with a variety of intellectual justifications. His few comments on his early comics-fandom have painted a picture of his younger self as simply ignorant of literary principles. But there's no reason to take Groth's word for his self-evaluation: that he formerly had the propensity to identify with fictional superheroes but then recognized their absurdity for intellectual reasons. A lot of readers fall out of love with a lot of genres that they may love intensely for a time, only to tire of them and chase after some other passion. Ontological identification arises from the reader's perception that the ontology reflects something he or she would like to see play out, regardless as to whether the fictional scenario reflects something the reader would like to see transpire in reality.

Now, if I am correct that reader-taste stems from identification with a work's ontology, how does that influence the same reader's ability to suss out a work's epistemology? My answer is that the reader's non-intellectual tastes can indeed influence whether or not one appreciates the epistemology that can be used to justify the ontology. Even without reading Edmund Wilson's famous anti-Tolkien essay, the title alone tells one that Wilson cannot countenance the basic appeal of villains who repel the reader on the basis of their ugliness and their violence. I'm sure Wilson had all sorts of intellectual justifications for that position, but I don't think that his judgments of taste, any more than those of Groth, stem from intellect, but from an ability, or lack of ability, to identify with the basic-- one might say "pre-epistemic"-- propositions of an ontological scenario. And if one can't grok the "knowledge by acquaintance," one is unlikely to find any validity in the "knowledge by description" used to justify the abstract principles aligning with the pure events of the story.

A NOSE FOR GNOSIS

What a difference a year makes.

It was in May 2019 that I first began referencing the four functions of Joseph Campbell's system as "epistemological patterns"-- which, as far as I know, he did not-- in the essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE. Of those functions I wrote:

For me, as a modern amateur pundit, I believe that both myth and literature utilize epistemological patterns-- whether sociological or psychological, cosmological or metaphysical-- to create structured fictional worlds in which those patterns confer meaning, or at least perspective, upon real life as it is lived, without any imposed meaning or perspective.

Yet, in August 2018, I didn't see any connection between my system and epistemology in the FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE series:

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs could display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters...

In subsequent essays I noted that most if not all of my previous essays had indeed been epistemological in nature, but it was, as the HALF-TRUTH essay specifies, an epistemology of "half-truths," which is not the type of knowledge with which philosophers like James and Russell were concerned. 

FOUNT also specified that I deemed merely "functional" aspects of narrative fiction to be aligned to the perceptual form of knowledge, "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while the "super-functional" aspects were aligned to the conceptual form, "knowledge-by-description." I might, at some point, see whether or not my "lateral values" line up with "acquaintance" and "vertical values" with "description." But instead I'll segue to a subject I've neglected far more than epistemology: ontology.

The two philosophical terms were formulated by different thinkers at different times, but in modern times they've become joined at the hip, as in this basic statement online:

ontology asks what exists, and epistemology asks how we can know about the existence of such a thing.

Since I began examining Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy for possible application to my literary hermeneutics, as in essays like MIGHT AND MYTH, I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description." So far, as I observed in MIGHT AND MYTH, I've confined these alignments to sussing out what it means that the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR had more concrescence within the mythopoeic potentiality than the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, though to be sure, that era of SPIDER-MAN is more concrescent with respect ot the dramatic potentiality.

DIDACTICISM DELIBERATIONS

Originally this essay was meant to build on my distinction between problems and conundrums. In my September 2023 post WHAT VS. HOW, I gave examples of two narratives which used a particular psychological source of knowledge, that of Freud, as a "half-truth" to set up conflicts between fictional characters. The first narrative dealt only with the ontological pattern in terms of "what things happened in the story," so it used its pattern superficially, just to create a "problem" that the characters could solve. (A superficial use of the pattern would also be a "problem" even if the characters failed to solve the difficulty.) The second narrative did make a thorough use of its epistemological pattern in such a way that it illustrated a "conundrum" for the audience. This level of difficulty would continue to exist for real people in their world, no matter whether the characters did or did not solve the way the conundrum manifested in their world. Originally, I wanted to emphasize that fictional works in which the author thoroughly explores a given epistemological pattern parallel the way real humans beings are obliged, by the nature of the reality they experience, to judge the patterns of that reality and make decisions on their interpretations of experience.

However, in the course of ruminating, I reread another epistemological post from May of this same year, FUNCTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. In this post I distinguished two complementary terms, the "stereotype" and the "simple variable," as distinct from two other complementary terms, the "archetype" and the "complex variable," in that the latter possessed a greater than average functionality, itself termed "super-functionality."

All well and good, according to my system. But "stereotype" and "archetype" only apply to one of the two "vertical" systems by which authors and audiences derive knowledge-based meaning from stories. That virtue belongs to the "mythopoeic potentiality," which manifests through the elaboration of the *quanta* I term "correlations."

Still okay, but I've not said nearly enough about the other vertical system, the didactic potentiality, whose quanta I've termed "cogitations." Stereotypes and archetypes have often been applied to symbolic discourse, so those terms don't translate well to talking about didactic constructions of meaning. But I've certainly seen cogitations that I thought were simple and merely functional, as against those that are complex and super-functional-- but for the time being, I'm proposing no new terms for these respective states. 

In my survey of the individual episodes of Classic STAR TREK, I'm sure I generally confined myself to exploring the mythopoeic correlations of each episode. But in theory, I *could* have explored that particular series purely in terms of whether its didactic cogitations were "functional" or "super-functional." Here are two examples.

As most TREK fans know, showrunner Gene Roddenberry was an avowed atheist. Nevertheless, the scripts he accepted for filming (and which he always re-wrote to suit his beliefs) sometimes involved the role of religion in the future-culture of the Federation, and Roddenberry did not present a standard atheist's view of religion. He knew his audience would not accept overt atheism, so often the producer accepted scripts that simply talked in general terms about the role of religion in society.

I gave the second season episode a poor rating "Bread and Circuses" in terms of its mythopoeic correlations, but it doesn't fare any better in terms of didactic cogitations, as should be clear from this excerpt:

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are initially captured by a resistance-group fighting Roman hegemony. They are much puzzled by the members' claim to be worshipers of the Sun, and McCoy even states, with amazing falsity, that the Romans of Earth had no sun-worship. By the end of the episode, though, it's revealed that the renegades are actually the Christians of this pseudo-Earth; they just took an extra 2000 years to show up. Despite an early claim in the story that the Federation embraces many religions, the story ends on an egregiously proselytizing note. Safe back on the ship, the crew-members content themselves with the ideal-- derived from many a Cecil B. de Mille movie, no doubt-- that in due time the evil of the Romans will be conquered by the goodness of the Christians. One may safely assume that Magna Roma's destined religion will also eventually lead to liberal democracy.

In my view, the episode advanced the didactic view that the pattern of cultural development seen on Earth was going to be duplicated on the world of Magna Roma: brutal polytheism being succeeded by a kinder, gentler monotheism, which is turn would be succeeded (though the episode does not directly say so) by the sort of secular humanism one beholds in TREK. It's in such a secular humanism that it's possible, as my note specifies, that many religions can prosper alongside one another, though it's a mark of Roddenberry's true sentiments that one hardly ever sees religious celebrations either on the Enterprise or in Federation colonies. I think the proselytizing note with which "Bread" ends was nothing but protective coloration, to diffuse any possible accusations of "space atheists," but whether I'm right or not, the proselytization contradicts the earlier statement of overall tolerance, and so the "cogitation" is not well executed. Even the reference to "panem et circenses" in the title fizzles out after the first arena-scenes.

In contrast, another second-season episode, "Who Mourns for Adonais," while it only rates "fair" in terms of its mythic correlations, might enjoy a "good" rating in terms of didactic cogitations. I would surmise that Roddenberry was probably more in sympathy with the story's ethos, even though again he threw in a minor anti-atheistic statement:

The trope of "aliens who were once Earth-gods" has always been absurd, but Coon and Ralston strive to give it some gravitas. On one hand the future-men declare that they no longer need the parenting influence of gods-- though, perhaps to keep from sounding too atheistic, Kirk delivers a line about finding it adequate to have "one" god. On the other hand, the script attempts to capture the Glory That Was Greece in this science-fictional context, and to admit, however obliquely, that all human culture descends from early man's attempts to understand the universe through a multiplicity of deities.

This script is not interested in the actual dynamics of Greek religion any more than "Bread" was interested in the dynamics of early Christianity. Still, there's a much better understanding of how early religion provides a foundation for secular humanism, even though the two seem opposed. That's why, following Apollo's defeat and extirpation, Kirk wistfully wishes they could have burned one laurel leaf to the memory of the deities that brought humanity out of ignorance. And so "Adonais" provides a "super-functional" cogitation, and for good measure works as a elaborate "conundrum" within the didactic potentiality, while the story of Magna Roma is merely a superficial "problem."

NOTES ON WHITEHEAD PT. 2

I’m about a hundred pages into PROCESS AND REALITY now, and I surmise that Whitehead’s project isn’t all that relevant to mine. From what I can tell, his philosophy of “organism” is primarily a response to all the ontology arguments that have been propounded over the centuries, from Plato to Kant to Heidegger. For instance, on page 88 Whitehead says:

The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason describes the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world. The philosophy of organism seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satisfaction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satisfaction.

Even if one may not be entirely sure as to the meaning of some of Whitehead’s jargonistic uses of words like “intensity” and “satisfaction,” the basic opposition is clear enough. I’m not really into ontology. To rephrase a G.K. Chesterson quote, “epistemology is my –ology.” It could be interesting to see what criteria Whitehead uses to measure his “objective data,” and what if any impact that would have on, say, Kant’s theory of the sublime—this being the Kantian concept that has most affected my own theory. I will say that within my epistemological schema, I rely on a sort of “objective data” that feeds into narrative constructs, and my own “satisfaction” with an author’s use of such patterns is more “intense” when I am convinced that the patterns used reinforce one another, creating my version of “concrescence.” However, within the sphere of literary narrative, “objective data” can be either things that the audience believes to be objectively unquestionable—say, the fact that the sun always rises in the east—or what I’ve called “relative meta-beliefs,” such as the Annunciation, the Oedipus complex, and the Rise of the Proletariat.

Still, even if I never end up using Whitehead as anything but a source of terms to redefine, I can see much more value in his project than in most comparable philosophical projects of the twentieth century.

TALES FROM THE WOMB PT. 2

As noted in Part 1, Carl Jung's ruminations on child development in the womb would never have satisfied an empiricist.  His description of the psychological functions-- sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking-- is deductive, not inductive, in nature.   Jung consistently calls for psychology to make all possible use of empirical sources of information, but notes in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES that the best one can hope, when dealing with the subjective subject matter of internal psyches, is that one should not be "too subjective" in making one's conclusions.  I take this as an up-front admission that such judgments will always be colored by the subjective state of the analyst-- a subjectivity that Thomas Kuhn finds even in the work of those who labor in the fields of the physical sciences, as noted in passing here.


Jung states that the first two named functions appear in the fetus while still in the womb, which makes sense to me as a working hypothesis though there may be no way to prove that the fetus, while certainly capable of sensation in the womb, is also capable of intuition at that early stage.  In fact, the author of the Jung site to which I referred in Part 1 feels that intiution might be prior even to sensation:

This, I believe, describes the thinking function as the fourth function (when intuition is seen as the first, in the womb), a total conscious orientation that is a result of the number three, the creative flow of the feeling function. Thinking appears as the last in the evolution of the functions as they turn, and appears to be the picture of what has previously taken place in the other functions, via the archetype which is later expressed as images, ideas, or language. Thinking is not the experience, but the copy, stamp, imprint, or image of the experience.

I'd prefer a more Kantian take, in which we posit that sensation is the first thing the gestating subject experiences, though intuition may pre-exist in that subject as an "a priori" potential.  This would seem to follow from Jung's primary definition of intuition within his system as "perception via the unconscious."

As I said in Part 1, it's important for any literary criticism-system to make a determination as to whether or not there exists " meaning within the chaos of sensation," whether one is speaking of a fetus becoming slowly aware of its surroundings but lacking any context for them, or a fully developed subject within what Cassirer calls the "symbolic universe."  Though I think critics of an empiricial stripe dismiss this level of unconscious meaning too quickly, at least those that ground their opinions in some discipline, such as cognitive science, are better off than those who simply don't even consider the question.

TALES FROM THE WOMB PT. 1

At the conclusion of PRIDE OF PREJUDICE 2 I said:

Sensationalism, with its ability to grab the audience by the lapels and make them want to see "the Parliament of Monsters" (to invoke old Wordsworth again), remains the chief foe of anyone attempting to sell something that is allegedly more elevated, more incisive, more devoted to telling the real truth (whatever that truth-framework may be). The hunger for the Big Important Themes is a genuine intersubjective experience, true enough. But it does not define the boundaries of art.

In that two-part essay-series I largely confined my argument to disputing the priorities of those who privilege an alleged rationality over all forms of sensationalism.  However, there are also ontological dimensions to the argument.

Back in my essay-series THE GATE OF THE GODS I pointed out that Northrop Frye, who eventually became a moderate defender of pop fiction, penned an amazingly scathing putdown of "sub-literary" narratives in one of his early writings:

All of us, even the most highbrow, spend much time in the sub-literary world; all of us derive many surreptitious pleasures from it; but this world is, from the point of view of actual literature, mainly a babbling chaos, waiting for the creative word to brood over it and bring it to literary life.

At the same time, in the same essay I pointed out that Frye was not being as utilitarian as many of those who advance similar arguments, many of which come down to, "If the sensationalistic story isn't part of the solution, it's part of the problem."  Still, Frye's early metaphor for sub-literary works, that of a "babbling chaos," touches on a misconception common to the ratiocentrists.  For them, any work that might be termed "pulpish" or "sensationalistic" is just such a chaos, unredeemed by any discursive meanings-- which for the ratiocentrist, are the only possible meanings.  Since the rise of modernist literature, elitists of all stripes tend to regard the world of pure sensation as no more than epiphenomena.

In PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, Jung theorizes a possible ontogenesis for meaning within the chaos of sensation as said chaos is experienced by the infant in the womb.  I'll be examining Jung's theories more thoroughly in future essays, but with the upfront admission that Jung had no credentials as an expert on child development.  As this site clarifies: 

A developmental model that begins not only at birth, but with conception and the experience of the child in the womb, can be constructed that reflects and extends the psychological concepts of Carl Jung, based on his theories of the four psychological functions and on his theory of the transcendent function. This model would include not only the beginning of ego development, but the development of the soul complex and its origin in human consciousness.

Jung did not construct a developmental model defining the origins of human consciousness. A model that defines and reflects his concepts in a developmental theory that begins with the beginning of life would contribute to the understanding of the Self. There is presently no developmental psychology that provides a model based on Jung's description of psychological functions that begin in the womb. The Jungian analyst Michael Fordham does discuss issues relating to the child in the womb, and early ego development. His model uses Jungian concepts that describe the process of individuation in childhood.

More to come.

CONCERNING GORE AND ALLEGORY

I’ve forgotten what recommendation led me to read CONCERNING THE GODS AND THE UNIVERSE, though I think it had to do with pointing out that its author had some common ground with Joseph Campbell in terms of categorizing aspects of archaic mythology. The short treatise was written by Sallustius, a Roman scholar who wrote in the era of Julian and who was, according to translator Arthur Nock, heavily influenced by the intellectual milieu of his time, which tended to analyze myth in terms of allegory. Thus he makes a convenient platform for speaking of the uses and potential abuses of the “allegory explanation” with respect to analyzing mythic stories.

In Sallustius’ time, the myths of Greco-Roman antiquity were under fire, both by the critics of the early Christian church and by sophisticated “pagan” philosophers. The latter grouping would be “pagan” only by the strict definitions of the Christian Church, for the philosophers of the allegorizing persuasion were almost as offended as the Christians by the salacious and/or sadistic aspects of archaic myths. Here’s how Sallustius attempts to come to grips with how such scandalous stories can possess any sacrality or cultural importance:

“Again, myths represent the active operations of the gods. The universe itself can be called a myth, since bodies and material objects are apparent in it, while souls and intellects are concealed… Why, however, have the ancients told in their myths of adulteries and thefts and binding of fathers and other strange things?” (p. 5)

One sentence later, Sallustius suggests that the purpose of this “seeming strangeness” of the myths is that it’s a strategy meant to “teach the soul” of the gods’ hidden nature. And this rationale is essentially correct, insofar as he claims that myths serve to communicate a mystery that proves obscure to rational discourse. However, like most allegorizers he makes the mistake of thinking that the mystery can, after a little thought, be summed up by a rational-sounding concept.

Here’s Sallustius on the myth of Kronos devouring his children:
“Of myths, some are theological, some physical; there are also psychical myths and material myths and myths blended from these elements. Theological myths are those which do not attach themselves to any material objects but regard the actual natures of the gods. Such is the tale that the god Kronos swallowed his children; since the god is intellectual, and all intellect is directed towards itself, the myth hints at the god’s essential nature.”

Much later Joseph Campbell would suggest a different set of myth-analyzing categorizations more in tune with the philosophies of post-industrial human culture, which would be less likely to view the Kronos myth are so unattached by “material objects.” In modern parlance, Sallustius would be seen as repressing the more visceral aspects of the Kronos myth, and forcing onto it a purely-metaphysical explanation—an act which recalls for me Northrop Frye’s definition of allegory as “forced metaphor.” But this is not to suggest that Sallustius is wrong simply because he renounced the visceral, as it would be just as easy to imagine an interpretation which forced the metaphor in the opposite direction: toward, rather than away from, the visceral. I don’t recall whether or not Sigmund Freud ever made a detailed examination of the Kronos myth, but given the theories he advanced on similar themes, he would almost certainly see the myth informed by the “material object” of the Oedipus complex, in which a near-victim of Kronos’ appetites, such as Zeus, escapes and kills his tyrant father as a stratagem for marrying his mother, which does in fact take place (though we should keep in mind that Kronos devours his female children as well as his male ones, which might weaken the Freudian thesis).

In his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT, philosopher Ernst Cassirer sough a third approach to the analysis of myth that did not depend on either “the essence of the absolute” or “the play of empirical psychological forces.” For this he evoked the authority of Plato:
“Thus, for Plato, too, myth harbors a certain conceptual content: it is the conceptual language in which alone the world of becoming can be expressed. What never is but always becomes, what does not, like the structures of logical and mathematical knowledge, remain identically determinate but from moment to moment manifests itself as something different, can be given only a mythical representation.”


A strongly-evocative image, such as Kronos eating his children, is just such a “mythical representation.” Since the authors of myths are lost to history, there is no knowing what intent was in the mind of the individuals who first formulated this representation. They may have wished to capture the visceral transgressiveness of a father eating his young, or they may have had some notion comparable to Sallustius’ “theological” interpretation, even if it was probably a good deal less refined than the one Sallustius gives. But if Cassirer is right, then the initial intentions behind the myth are unimportant, for the myth expresses something about a conceptual world that is never “identically determinate,” but which can shift to encompass an array of meanings.

I would give Sallustius credit, though. Even if his specific interpretation of the Kronos myth is forced, he seems to have been among the first to conceive ways in which myths might contain a wide array of meanings, even going so far as to note that some of the myths contained “blended” elements. In his OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY Campbell put forth four categories—given the headings of “the cosmological,” “the metaphysical,” “the sociological,” and “the psychological”-- by which one might analyze the contents of mythic stories. Although Campbell would later use other names for his categories, these remained largely in the tradition of the ones used by Sallustius. Perhaps appropriately, the most telling criticisms of Campbell have been those that focused on his more allegory-oriented interpretations.

In a previous essay I noted that there might be a way to counter the interpretation of Eric Gould, of viewing myth as a failure to bridge an ontological gap between the world we live in and what our minds make of it. I would suggest that Campbell’s categorical approach—as long as it is restrained from pure allegorizing by a Cassirer-like understanding of myth’s indeterminate conceptualizing nature—does bridge the ontological gap, as much as humanity can expect to. Campbell’s categories are, at their base, attempts to discern patterns in reality, whether one is dealing with external realities (what Sallustius calls “material objects”) or internal ones (“souls and intellects.”) To the extent that these patterns are coterminous with the world we live in, then myth in its most conceptual aspect is an intuition of how the world works, and how men relate to it. And as such, it is not simply failed ontology. It is the mirror that shows us both unity and diversity: which, in showing us all of our indeterminate faces, also shows us our identity.

MYTHICITY, THREAT OR MENACE?

In an earlier post I tossed out the term "mythicity," which term was, to the best of my knowledge, originated by Eric Gould in his MYTHICAL INTENTIONS IN MODERN LITERATURE. As I understand Gould's theme (I read the book some years back but don't have it handy), "mythicity" connotes the quality of being "myth-like" that one can find in all literary productions, thus making plain how one can justifiably speak of certain stories as "myths" because of that quality, rather than because they fulfill all other qualifications of myths. A distinction between "literary myths" and "religious myths" is probably appropriate, as well.



Though it's risky to write of a scholar's meanings without his work close to hand, I do have some excerpts provided in William Doty's MYTHOGRAPHY, which support my case. Here are some of Gould's comments on the intersections of myth and literature:



"The meaning of a fiction is always potentially mythic" (113)

"It is impossible to create a fiction without approaching the condition of myth"



I agree with both of those statements, though I would probably say that what makes a fiction actively mythic is a matter of "symbolic complexity," which notion I more or less derive from Northrop Frye. Here's Gould on what myth signifies in fiction:



"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." To that I would answer, "Possibly," but Doty's summarization of Gould troubles me: "We live within a world where symbolic meanings may help-- do help-- yet are never fully able to bridge the ontological gap." In other words, primtives who don't know what a storm is, but who simply formulate a storm-god as a relational aid to the unknown phenomenon, have made an ontological myth, but one which is bound to collapse.

But is this really the case? Is is always going to "one step forward, two steps back," ontologically speaking?

I would suggest that in its most complex form the act of symbolification is a little more than just a vain attempt to bridge an ontological gap: that it is a way to see at least an aspect of selfhood. Though I'm not a Hegelian, I'm drawn to this phrase in a foreword to Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, written by one J.N. Findlay:

"...in construing the world conceptually [absolute knowledge] is seeing everything in the form of self..."

And also....

"In its conceptual grasp of objects it necessarily grasps what it itself is..."

I will enlarge on the specific application of this conceptual grasping with respect to complexity in a future post.