WHAT'S IN A NOMINATIVE TEXT?

 In A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 4 I wrote:

Moving away from this type of High Charisma crossover, I want to return to the matter of "crypto-continuity" introduced in Part II, I asserted that "King Kong II," though not technically in continuity with "King Kong I," borrows enough motifs from the original that the later character may be seen as what I term a "weak template deviation." 

However, there are also "strong template deviations," which often involve authors totally overwriting not totally fictional characters, but characters from myth, legend, and history-rendered-into-fiction.

Though I may have reason later to utilize these "template deviation" terms, I'll put them aside for this essay to discuss the two types of texts from which a later narrative may deviate: the *nominative* text and the *innominate* text. Innominate texts are all texts that arise from anonymous sources, whose history is hard to determine. Nominative texts are all texts whose origins and authorship are easy to verify. 

Some texts from very archaic times may combine aspects of both, in that we know the historical placement of the BEOWULF poem and of the EPIC OF GILGAMESH, but not who wrote them. We know the name of Homer, who composed the two epics once believed to be the earliest literary works in existence, and we know the probable times in which the epics were circulated, but we know next to nothing about the author himself. Homer's epics, Beowulf and the GIlgamesh Epic were most probably built up from assorted shorter stories of myth and folklore, and indeed the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY might be considered the world's first major crossovers, given that they are forging connections between legendary characters who may not have been associated with one another in anterior eras.

 To further complicate the matter, even some legendary characters may have verifiable historical associations. The figure of Gilgamesh is attested to have been a mortal king in an early period of Sumerian history. However, in keeping with the theory of the Greek scholar Euhermus, later Sumerians used the name Gilgamesh for one of their gods, and it is as a demigod that the character appears in the aforementioned epic. For this reason I tend to regard all of the archaic works, even the epics of Homer, to be innominate because their full history is sometimes murky in its specifics.

In contrast, the majority of texts produced since the rise of European culture in the post-Renaissance era are usually known quantities for  the most part. From that time on, a much stricter distinction between fiction and non-fiction pertains in Western culture. In Shakepeare's historical plays, he feels free to change details of real history-- sometimes of historical eras very close to his own-- and this may be because he knew that his audience would dominantly regard his plays as fiction based on fact, in contrast to any archaic Greeks that may have regarded the ILIAD as the history of Troy's fall. 

In CROSSOVERS PART 4 I contrasted two characters whom I regarded as a "high-charisma crossover," the titular figures of the 1966 weird western BILLY THE KID VS DRACULA. It should go without saying that the Dracula of this film, despite having little if anything in common with the Dracula of Bram Stoker, nevertheless descends from a *nominative* text: a book published in 1897.

Billy the Kid, however, was a real historical personage, who became over time a folk-hero in a process roughly analogous to what may have happened with the historical Gilgamesh. A scholar knowledgeable in the subject of dime-novel westerns could probably cite a particular work that contributed to the growth of the Kid's repute. However, it's unlikely that any single literary or even cinematic work was responsible for the articulation of the legend. Most of the real-life exploits of the outlaw born "Henry McCarty" are not in the least admirable, and maybe not even all that daring. Yet simply because the real-life person became a figure that people could talk about, the people began building him into a legendary personage, even to the extent of making him a righteous hero. 

Thus in my system every fictional story including Billy the Kid is an *innominate* text-- even one that purports to represent the "real" Billy, like the 1972 film DIRTY LITTLE BILLY. 

An *innominate* text, because its main characters are not grounded in a text with a particular history, cannot boast characters that have any stature relevant to a crossover. Every Billy the Kid in every serial or stand-alone work is different from every other one, and so there exists not even the tenuous "crypto-continuity" that exists between the Dracula of Stoker and the Dracula of William Beaudine. 

To be sure, it's not impossible for an author to use the name of a character from a nominative text for a new character who has nothing in common with the original save the name. In a series of B-westerns starring Ken Maynard, the hero rode a horse named 'Tarzan." I assume the filmmakers legally got away with using the name of the Burroughs ape-man because no one in any audience would have believed that the horse was an attempt to imitate the copyrighted Tarzan character. 

BLAZING RATIOCENTRISM

Alan Moore's 2007 BLACK DOSSIER was the first time I'd ever heard of THE BLAZING WORLD, a utopian fiction published in 1666 by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. From what I've read online, Cavendish's work has only been revived in the last decade or so by feminist scholars.

I've now read THE BLAZING WORLD, though not any of Cavendish's other works, most of which tended to fall into the format of Renaissance-era philosophical discourses. WORLD's level of philosophical thought feels fairly derivative of the Greek and Roman authors then being re-discovered in Europe, supplemented by a few tropes dear to the heart of English aristocrats, such as the topic of aristocratic rule. It's probably not fair to judge Cavendish by WORLD alone, since utopian novels are generally boring affairs, including the 1516 Thomas More work that started the whole thing. But though I can validate feminist academia's project to reclaim lost female voices from the days of a dominant patriarchy, I have my doubts, based on WORLD, that Cavendish ranks as more than a curiosity. Certainly it's silly to deem WORLD "the first science-fiction novel," just because Cavendish's utopian otherworld includes SF-tropes like hybrid animal-men. If you're going to judge a work as science fiction simply because of the presence of such tropes, then Cavendish is obviously still a long way from first, out-firsted by the classical author Lucian of Samosata. It's possible that the main reason Moore referenced Cavendish was because of the work of those aforesaid feminist scholars, because there's not a lot of common ground between the respective themes of Moore and Cavendish.

In short, Cavendish's WORLD is an example of what I've caused ratiocentrism. Her viewpoint character, a young noblewoman called "the Lady," is precipitated into what SF-authors now call a parallel world. The Lady is instantly married by the Emperor of the Blazing World. As Empress, she's in the position to learn about all the government and philosophy of her new realm, though there's never much of an explanation about the otherworld's most prominent feature: humanoids with animal aspects, such as "bird-men," "bear-men," and, perhaps most improbably, "lice-men." All of the animal-men have particular societal functions, which sounds like a simple restatement of the Great Chain of Being, as re-formulated by European Christian scholars. This is one of the things that seems least like Alan Moore's anarchic system of belief, and though he puts the animal-men into his version of the Blazing World, he doesn't assign them any particular thematic function. Either he or artist Kevin O'Neill did stick in a cameo shot of one moderately famous insect-man: "Turan," mentor to the Simon and Kirby Silver Age character "the Fly."

I believe that Moore's re-use of the Blazing World is in essence just another synonym for the occult concept of "the astral plane," on which Moore had already descanted in his 1999 PROMETHEA series for ABC Comics. But whereas Moore is fascinated with the influence of the irrational upon human thought and desire, Cavendish clearly falls into the category of reason-worship. In one section, the Empress rails against the abstruse syllogisms of the realm's logicians, who are satirically pictured as descended from magpies, jackdaws, and parrots. The Empress says:

I have enough, said she, of your chopped logic, and will hear no more of your syllogisms, for it disorders my reason, and puts my heart on the rack; your formal argumentations are able to spoil all natural wit; and I'll have you to consider: that art does not make reason, but reason makes art, and therefore as much as reason is above art, so much is a natural rational discourse to be preferred above an artificial: for art, is for the most part, irregular, and disorders men's understandings more than it rectifies them, and leads them into a labyrinth whence they'll never get out...

In the end, though the Empress does not forbid the bird-men to carry on their logic-chopping, she stresses that they need to keep these labyrinthine meditations to themselves, rather than letting them escape to cause societal unrest with the greater populace. I think I'm justified in seeing the long shadow of Plato-- or rather, of his own fictional utopia, the Republic-- as having provided the better part of Cavendish's ideas about reason's precedence over art.

I don't know exactly why Moore chose to allude to Cavendish's concept, though it may be largely because she's a female creator from the generation immediately after that of Shakespeare, whose influence is much more significant in DOSSIER. I strongly doubt that Moore worships reason as Plato' and Cavendish do, given that Moore concludes DOSSIER by talking about what I termed 'the opposition between "matter's mudyards" and the "radiant synthesis" of this multi-story mashup.' But then, no author ever really adapts another author with complete fidelity. Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of HAMLET is really Kenneth Branagh's HAMLET, not Shakespeare's, Steve Ditko's SPIDER-MAN is nothing like the raw Simon-Kirby concept with which Ditko started, and Alan Moore's idea of THE BLAZING WORLD is only minimally connected with that of Margaret Cavendish.

MY OWN PRIVATE COMPOSITE BIZARRO

Many many years ago I read a book by the Orientalist Lafcadio Hearn. It seems like it might have been GLIMPSES OF UNFAMILIAR JAPAN, but the only part I'm referencing is the ending. As I recall, Hearn narrates a final scene when he's attending a dinner party. He glances down at the bowl of soup before him, and sees his own face reflected. In a moment of clarity, he realizes that everything he's ever written is also a reflection of his inner self, which, if it could take on material form, would look something like the image of his own face.

Whether I'm remembering this narrative trope correctly or not, every writer, whether of fiction, non-fiction, or both, does the same thing Hearn was doing. No matter how adeptly one seeks to represent the reality in which one lives, one always comes back to depicting that reality through the prejudices and sentiments of his own inner self.

Now, last month I provided this working definition of the term "superhero":

The superhero is a hybrid figure, in which the reader's feelings of awe and admiration for the spectacle of heroic endeavor are melded with those feelings typically called "the sense of wonder" by science fiction, fantasy and related genres.

I glossed this by asserting unequivocably that this was my attempt to boil down my theories of sublimity-- of "the dynamic-sublime," which is heavily influenced by Kant, and of the "combinatory-sublime," which derives variously from Burke and Tolkien-- into a simplified formula that focuses on the "sense of wonder." It should go without saying that even though I consider these sublimities to be as universal as any affects can be, they don't necessarily have across-the-board appeal for every sentient human being ever. Nor could I say that the way I perceive the two sublimities is in every respect identical with the way others perceive them. I can only say that the writings of Kant, Burke and Tolkien persuade me that they experienced something akin to what I Gene Phillips experience in the department of the sublime.

Therefore, if I want to emulate Hearn's epiphany, then I would have to say that my definition of superhero, in which I find it a confluence of two distinct but complementary affects, necessarily reflects that my inner self has a particular liking for both the affect associated with dynamicity-- with special though not exclusive reference to the dynamicity of combat-- and with the affect associated with the free symbolic interplay of everything in existence.

As I said, these are only "universal" in the sense that a lot of people register the appeal of these affects-- though not always in combination with one another. Some readers only like to view scenes of dynamicity when they take place in naturalistic worlds which those readers can find credible: for instance, prior to the success of STAR WARS, many film-goers scorned any form of fantasy-fiction-- whether it was violent or not-- as "that Buck Rogers stuff," while fully investing themselves in violently-heroic films about cowboys or detectives.  At the same time, some enthusiasts of particular types of fantasy-fiction scorned violent entertainment of all types, and only liked fantasy-fiction when it was full of "deep thoughts," so to speak.

So if my inner self is "guy who likes both fights and fantasy of all kinds," then who would be my Bizarro-opposite?

I've complained a lot on this blog about ideological critics on the web, but most of them are not iconic enough (or interesting enough) to use for drawing comparisons.

At length I decided that my perfect Bizarro would have to be a composite of two iconic figures, a la DC Comics' The Composite Superman:

On one side, my Composite Bizarro would look like Frederic Wertham:

HOODED UTILITARIAN is currently a go-to for all manner of kooky types who share a righteous revulsion toward violence, glossed by an omnipresent fear that somehow, somewhere, even fictional violence can be used against well-meaning Lefties. A little while back I critiqued J. Lamb, here and here, for blatantly misrepresenting the theme and plot of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. I almost thought, "Wow, that's such an egregious misreading that it's worthy of Frederic Wertham himself." But though Lamb is every bit as incoherent as Wertham, he lacks Wertham's studied vitroil against even the most minor acts of violence-- slapstick, vanilla fistfights-- and so Wertham represents the ideal icon of one who takes pleasure in rejecting the affect of dynamic sublimity.


Wertham occasionally tossed in a few brickbats against the fantasy-elements of comic books, too: he didn't like an issue of SUPERBOY that misrepresented history by showing the young hero helping out George Washington at Valley Forge.  But the arch-foe of all forms of fantasy really has to be Wertham's fellow traveler Sigmund Freud.

Many other intellectuals had preceded Freud in attempting to reduce human fantasy-constructs down into simple formulas of negative compensation: not least Voltaire and Marx. But Freud more than anyone succeeded in tapping into the righteousness of "reality thinking," and he did so by tying his version of "reality thinking" to the ontogeny of the individual human being, forever ensnarled in the web of the "family romance." Fantasy could never be anything but an escape from the prison of reality, made up of one's erotic fixations-- or lack of same-- upon one's parental units.

In COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT. 4 I mused that some readers only enjoyed the manifestations of the "combinatory mode" and the "dynamicity mode" when they were, in essence, recapitulated in "non-sublime forms:" as, essentially, lions whose fangs had been drawn. The Freuds and Werthams of this world are also somewhat devoted to "non-sublime" versions of the affects that enthrall the vast majority of readers, but they are "non-sublime" for a different reason: for the purpose of illustrating some ratiocentric theory of reality, rather than as a way of engaging with a less overwhelming version of fictive "reality."