COSMIC FLIGHT, SPIDER BITE

 I'm currently working on an extensive FANTASTIC FOUR critical evaluation that will encompass the two mythcomics posts I have planned for this month, respectively posts #399 and #400. (Since the first time my posts reached 100, I have endeavored to make each hundredth-post something special, as do many comics-serials.) Since I'm planning to eschew my critical jargon where possible, I decided to get at least some of that out of my system by expanding on the following remarks from last year's DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3:

I should qualify this, though, by stating that the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age... In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them.

Here, then, are some demonstrations of my perceptions re: the four potentialities in each Silver Age serial.

 The kinetic potentiality in fiction concerns anything that's an analogue to physical sensation. Often I've referenced this potentiality with respect to those immortal selling-points, "sex and violence," but it also includes all sympathetic and antipathetic affects linked to sensation. Within the sphere of the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, Jack Kirby designed an almost unparalleled rogues' gallery of unattractive villains to engage in combat with the generally attractive heroes (and yes, over time the Thing becomes cute than horrifying). This cover to FF #100-- which I for one wish could have been Kirby's last contribution to the series-- shows a good cross-section of the heroes and their opponents.

Ditko's run on SPIDER-MAN was not as long as Kirby's on FF, and he never showed a literal assemblage of all his best villains. (To be sure, both artists produced a handful of loser-foes, whom no one would particularly want to see again.) The closest thing to a Ditko "greatest hits" would be the "Sinister Six" tale in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1.

Despite how long each artist worked on each series, they're both in the same domain as far as how well they exploited the kinetic potentialities for repulsion and attraction. However, as I said above, the ways in which each writer/artist combo approached the dramatic potentiality took very different forms.

In the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR, melodramatic tragedy arose every once in a while, as in the story "This Man, This Monster." Yet I believe editor Lee chose most of the time to soft-pedal such emotional tumult, if only because he was always writing about four characters in an ensemble that had to remain together for the series' sake, no matter how often they talked about breaking up. Thus I'd argue that comedy rather than tragedy tended to rule the FF-realm, as seen in these pages from FF #54:         

In contrast to this series, though, SPIDER-MAN was a loner. Thought the series displayed an ample amount of comedy-- often in the form of playing jokes on J. Jonah Jameson-- there was a marked emphasis upon Peter Parker being caught in a tangled web, woven by some dispassionate god and in which Parker was tormented as for sport. From AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #17:

I'm not in any way devaluing comedy over drama; that's the sort of thinking that makes the Oscar Awards such a drag. But I am saying that because Lee and Ditko focused so much on teen melodrama, with some parallel crime-melodrama content, they often didn't veer into the vertical level of meaning very often.

 All of the famous Spidey villains seen above are just crooks in costumes; they want to steal things, Spider-Man gets in their way, and they want to kill him so that they can go back to stealing with impunity. That's why I've found so few mythopoeic or dramatic complexities in the L/D SPIDER-MAN, or, for that matter, in later iterations of the franchise. A couple of Spider-foes have world-conquering ambitions, like Doc Ock and the Lizard, but arguably Lee and Ditko devoted less space to their abstract motivations. 

The Red Ghost, in his first (and only good) story, wants to dominate Earth's moon for the glory of Communism. The Puppet Master has more interest in controlling other people's lives than in interacting with his stepdaughter. Doctor Doom is obsessed with being the best at everything and thus wants more than anything to prove that he can beat his detested rival. All of these motivations BEGIN in the dramatic potentiality, but as I've argued in the various mythcomics essays I devoted to each FF-villain, the creators found ways to organically develop the mythopoeic and the didactic OUT of the dramatic motivations.       

And with all that in mind, my next essay will deal with a quick and dirty history of the Fantastic Four after Lee and Kirby.
              

DARK ANTIPATHIES AND COLORFUL SYMPATHIES

Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues, and some of his garments, such as boots and tunic, are designed to evoke famed swashbuckler Robin Hood. Even his main weapon in early stories, a David-style sling, carries an arabesque quality in comparison with Batman’s deadly looking Batarang.-- DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, 2020.

As a prelude to some more involved meditations, I wanted to align my concepts of "the grotesque and the arabesque" (swiped from Poe, who probably swiped them from Walter Scott) with the more pervasive concepts of "antipathetic affects and sympathetic affects." My most elaborate scheme of these parallel affects appeared in 2013's TRIPLE THE TREMENDUM AND THE FASCINANS, though my more distant inspiration was Aristotle's terms of "terror and pity," which I found too limiting.

I didn't specify in the 2020 essay that my interpretations of "dark, fearful visual tropes" and "colorful, life-affirming visual tropes" were affects, so I do so now, going by the definition of affect I laid down in 2014's AFFECT VS. MOOD:

..."affects" spring from the main characters, the focal presences, with whom the readers identify. In this formulation, then, "affects" spring from "character," even though the focal 'character" may not be a human being, since the cathexis of emotional affects can focus upon any number of phenomena, ranging from the will-less robot hero of GIGANTOR to the amorphous spirits of THE EVIL DEAD.

 I will specify, though, that "dark" doesn't always signify antipathetic affects and "colorful" doesn't always signify sympathetic affects; they are merely the DOMINANT ways in which these visual tropes are utilized. As stated in DARK GROTESQUES, Batman uses the fearsome mana of a bat as a means of psyching out criminals, so he remains a heroic figure who dominantly inspires a sympathetic affect, probably closest to what I've called "fascination" (TREMENDUM). 

And though I've labeled some Bat-villains to be "arabesques," such as Penguin and Catwoman, they don't inspire, whether as subordinate or superordinate icons, pure sympathetic affects, but a mingling of the sympathetic and the antipathetic. Catwoman is the main character of CATWOMAN DEFIANT, but she's never purely an admirable hero. There's always a little bit of the villain mixed in with her most heroic acts. 

 That's enough for now on grotesques and arabesques, but referencing the original essay led me to test one of the tentative conclusions I made there. I termed a period of Batman comics from perhaps the mid-forties to the the end of the Golden Age (1955) as the "Dark Procedural" period, in contrast with the very brief period of "Gothic Batman." So I tested that analysis with a random selection of readings, from the solo BATMAN title going from 1950 to 1952. This very minor survey did not yield very many moments of Gothic morbidity, much less justifying my claim that the raconteurs still used a lot of night scenes. The one above, in which Batman struggles with a villain in a Batman outfit, and in which one of them perishes (a trifle gruesomely) is one of the few night-scenes I found, from "Ride, Bat-Hombre, Ride" (BATMAN #56, 1950). 

I still found a few Gothic-isms-- a hoax about a living mummy, or one about a "haunted cellar" that drove visitors mad-- and that's more than one would find in any other DC superhero of the period. And that's because DC tried to make most of its heroes as safe and gimmicky as possible in that period, making an exception for Batman only because that feature was one of their best sellers. At any rate, there aren't enough "dark grotesque" elements to justify my calling the period "Dark Anything," so I now rename that period, "Police Procedural Batman." Penguin, Joker and Catwoman all made significant appearances in those two surveyed years, as did newbies like Killer Moth and Deadshot. But all criminals have mundane criminal motives, including their attempts to slay the Dynamic Duo, and so Batman and Robin must use police procedural methods to corral them. 

There are isolated elements of overt science-fiction, like "Lost Legion of Space" (BATMAN #67, 1951), wherein the 20th century Robin is given the chance to travel forward in time and meet the Batman and Robin of 3051. But there's nothing comparable to the outpouring of wacky, rather light-hearted alien menaces seen in the years from 1955 to 1964, which I continue to term "Candyland Batman." And just to round things out, I also maintain the term "Gothic Procedural" for nearly everything after 1964. Ever since the Julie Schwartz years, I would assert that most raconteurs have sought to emphasize either Gothic elements or Police Procedural elements, or else to combine the two in felicitous ways. The brief series based on Cartoon Network's BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD would probably be the only place where "Candyland Batman" has re-surfaced.

THE DIFFICULTY OF WHAT'S FASCINATING

I subjected most of my essays on crossovers to a spot-reading and came to a conclusion: I don't think I've spent enough time on why people can and do become fascinated-- if not to the extent that I do-- with the way different characters and concepts intertwine.

Looking back on my OUROBOROS DREAMS essay THE LOGIC AND APPEAL OF CROSSOVERS,

 I provided this observation:

... the overlapping of distinct storylines would seem to intensify the degree of mental effort an audience-member must exert in order to participate in the crossover's intersecting universes.  For instance, when Rider Haggard takes a character who exists in a moderately realistic universe, i.e., Allan Quatermain, and causes him to encounter a character whose nature is overtly supernatural, Haggard must find some way to treat both characters with integrity, even though the ground rules of their universes are in conflict.

And then, slightly afterward:

 It's something of a given in literary criticism to state that audiences, literary or sub-literary, maintain interest in fictional characters by identifying with them.  This commonplace observation is not so much wrong as overly simple. As I am what has been called a "myth-critic," I assert that the process of identification comes about as a reader (or viewer) realizes what kind of role the character plays in the story, and what that fictional role means to the reader. This does not mean "identification" in the simple-minded sense of "I want to be like this person," for identification can take place with any number of villains (the Joker, Freddy Krueger), monsters (Godzilla) or even mysterious locales (the subterranean domain of Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth.")  It is more properly an appreciation of what I will call the "mana" appropriate to the character or concept's role in the story. 

This essay was written in April 2014, a good five years before I refined my analysis on the two primary types of reader-identification, in INVESTMENT VS. FASCINATION. These two categories described in more precise terms the dichotomous ways in which readers "identified" with fictional figures. The way of investment was one of sympathy toward one or more figures, loosely sharing their joys or sorrows. The way of fascination was one of seeking to understand the ways of one or more figures who were more antipathetic in nature. The latter type of figures, which would include all of the examples given in the second citation above, might be fairly called by the Sartrean term of "the other," though this phrase only holds value in a comparative sense. What I called "mana" in the 2014 essay I would probably now reference as "the totality of correlations and/or contemplations that make this or that character resonant," drawing somewhat on Frye's idea of myth as "a treasure-trove of literary tropes."

The appeal of crossovers would also seem to line up more with the process of fascination than with investment. With investment one takes the "short view," identifying with the struggles of Spider-Man or Stephen Daedalus or whoever. But as soon as one brings together characters who are part of a larger design-- even if it's just Batman fighting The Flash's enemy The Weather Wizard-- then one is taking something of the "long view" that allows the reader to understand what makes a Joker or a Godzilla tick, for all that one doesn't really especially sympathize with them. 

So much for the reader's response to crossovers. But how do professional writers use pre-established concepts to craft stories? The writers implicitly want the readers to be fascinated-- that's what puts food on the table-- but all writers don't approach crossover-materials the same way.

Every original character or concept provides a template for later creators to either follow closely or to depart from as needed. Readers of serial concepts often perceive how much or how little a given author can accurately reproduce the desired aspects of a particular favored feature. In some cases, even a creator of such a concept may change his creative stance for personal or exigent reasons. BATMAN co-creator Bill Finger collaborated on some of the early stories, with all their delirious Gothic imagery, but he probably ended up authoring far more of the gimmicky "Candyland Batman" stories. 

My loose categories of the template deviations have been thus far the "weak deviation," "the strong deviation," and "the total deviation."

 "Total deviation" applies to figures who may copy some visual or designative aspect of a character, but who actually have no substantial connection with the template. So far I've included in this category characters who impersonate famous figures (or are constructed for that purpose), parodies, and doppelgangers who strongly reference famous figures.

"The weak deviation" is the one where, in theory, the storyteller shares the devoted reader's fascination with the involved continuity of a character, or of the continuities of an ensemble of characters, and does his best to keep everything "on-model," to borrow the animation phrase.

"The strong deviation," however, is the one in which the narrative's creator feels a great deal of freedom to riff on the original template-- and that's where the fans of a given franchise usually come out with knives drawn. I've produced my share of jeremiads on this subject, such as my ruminations on the dramatic shortcomings of Kevin Feige. Nevertheless, I part company with those critics and podcasters who automatically dislike every alternative take on a given template. I admit that it's more common for an alternative take to be bad than to be good, but it does happen. One high-profile version is the Grant Morrison version of DOOM PATROL, which I examined somewhat in the 2011 essay CHIEF CONCERNS. 

From one standpoint, a crossover-production with a great deal of fidelity to established continuity, like the Busiek-Perez JUSTICE LEAGUE/AVENGERS, ought to sustain the readers' fascination with all those involved story-threads. Morrison's strategy with DOOM PATROL-- which had nominal crossover-aspects in certain issues-- was to maintain some minor continuity-aspects while seeking to fascinate readers with Morrison's erudite reading of culture and aesthetics. Morrison's take was successful enough that a number of later creators attempted to follow his lead rather than emulating the older incarnations (though I imagine John Byrne's tenure, which I did not read, was the exception).

Interestingly, on occasion Morrison shows some of the same "political correctness" for which I've faulted Kevin Feige. However, Morrison does have other interests beyond superficial politics. Thus even a scene like the one above-- in which two Silver Age super-villains confess "the love that dare not speak its name"-- has an appealing absurdity. So Morrison, unlike Feige, that makes me, for one, curious about the "new DOOM PATROL universe" Morrison creates, "strong deviation" though it may be, because it's not simply preaching at me.

EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA PT. 2

I should build on the formulations from Part 1 to clarify exactly what sort of freedom I've been describing.

Without doubt the intellectual ramifications of my NUM formula were spawned in reaction against Tzvetan Todorov's attempt to subsume all categories of fantasy under a conceptual umbrella he called "the real," which was very much in keeping with his Freudian leanings. In contrast, I assert that every literary phenomenality has its own unique nature, regardless of what one thinks about the configuration of one's lived experience.

All that said, the base purpose of fictional narrative is expressive, not intellectual, so the primary importance of the three phenomenalities is not their value as thought experiments, but as conjurations of the six forms of affect I last described in 2017's ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

THE MARVELOUS-- antipathetic aspect TERROR, sympathetic aspect WONDER.

Being one mortal reader, I cannot know precisely what affects dominate the minds of other readers. However, I can use deductive reasoning to discern common ground. For instance, Todorov insists that because Poe's HOUSE OF USHER does not actually reveal any marvelous phenomena, its manifestation of the uncanny is subsumed by "the real." But if this was an accurate deduction that one could apply to other readers, why would cinematic versions of the story appear in practically every fantasy-film concordance? Are there any concordances of fantasy-films that go out of their way to emphasize only films of the marvelous; that keep only the sirens and the psychics but exclude all of the serial killers? I will go out on a limb and state that there are none, for the simple reason that the compilers of these works are not blinded by ideology as was Todorov. Even if none compilers of concordances would look with favor upon my overall system, the automatic association of Norman Bates with Odysseus demonstrates that the affects aligned with the uncanny are closer in spirit to those of the marvelous. 

There will still be disagreements. In MASKED MAVERICKS AND SUCH, I noted how Peter Green's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WEIRD WESTERNS did not subscribe to my belief that costumed heroes automatically had a "weird" vibe, though he would include any characters garbed in macabre attire (skulls; phantom-like clothing, etc.) But he unequivocally covered both truly marvelous westerns alongside those that only suggested marvelous phenomena-- and that in my opinion is enough to suggest his awareness of a fundamental "strangeness" linking those categories; a strangeness one cannot find even in westerns with odd content (say, 1942's REAP THE WILD WIND, best remembered these days as the film where John Wayne fights an octopus).

Playful, expressive freedom is the essence of what makes fictional narrative valuable to human beings, in contradistinction of the "work ethic" that dominates non-fiction, no matter the quality of the reporting involved in a given screed. Thus I will stipulate that efficacy in my system concerns "a free selection of causes" with respect to all the affective and cognitive aspects of fictional narrative, but that the affective ones are somewhat more consequential.

MASKED MAVERICKS AND SUCH

 

I've finished reading the second edition of Peter Green's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WEIRD WESTERNS, and I'm resisting the temptation to record assorted niggles about errors or omissions. But the project is relevant to my phenomenological outlook thanks to Green's definition of "weird westerns," which offer not only those that are overtly marvelous but also a smattering of those I would deem "uncanny."

Of Green's four categories, three of them depend entirely on marvelous content, ranging from stories set in the actual Old West, in which supernatural or science fiction concepts appear, or stories set on futuristic Earths or in outer space, but with western motifs included. The fourth category deals almost entirely with the category I call "phantasmal figurations," in which, generally, ordinary human beings pretend to be supernatural boogiemen. Though this trope dates back to the Gothic fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries, Green chooses to name this category "the weird menace western," explicitly taking this term from the so-called weird menace pulp magazines of the 1930s.  To be sure, these periodicals seem much more concerned with torture and mayhem than with people dressing up like ghosts, but I suppose Green wanted to emphasize that the source of the horrors in both cases were purely human in nature.

Not surprisingly, though, Green does not view what he calls "masked cowboys" as relevant to this category. In my system, characters like the Lone Ranger, the Two-Gun Kid and Zorro (more a masked cavalier than a cowboy, I suppose) are intrinsically uncanny by the virtue of their wearing "outre outfits." But Green only includes such characters if an adventure, or series of adventures, make use of either phony horror or of real supernormal phenomena.

I suppose. for Green and others of similar leanings, there's nothing intrinsically "weird" about a hero deciding to dress up in a mask and fight evil. And of course, the masks of the Lone Ranger, the Two-Gun Kid and Zorro don't evoke what I term the "antipathetic affects" associated with the genre of horror. However, I would counter that such masks-- even one like Zorro's, which might be worn by any ordinary bandit-- do conjure up "sympathetic affects" that verge into the phenomenology of the uncanny. 

At the same time, one can only judge the presence or absence of the uncanny on a case-by-case basis, for as I mentioned in PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS, it's possible for an author to have some major character run around for awhile in a mask for purely functional reasons. It's certainly possible that someone could write a Zorro story so down-to-earth that the hero did not attain the larger-than-life persona he has in Johnson McCully's original story. 

On a similar note, I can't be sure how uncanny the original radio dramas of the Lone Ranger were, since I never have (and probably never will) listen to any of them. But the Ranger I encountered was a larger-than-life figure, a knight using a mask rather than a helmet, selflessly devoted to the establishment of justice throughout the unruly frontier.

To be sure, even Green can't entirely avoid touching on some of the "masked cowboys" who aren't pretending to be haunts. Presumably he only includes the 1940 serial DEADWOOD DICK not because the titular hero wears a bandanna-mask, but because the villain, the Skull, goes around wearing a skull-mask. Yet to the best of my recollection, the villain isn't wearing the mask to convince anyone that he's a spook. He's just masked to conceal his identity, which is the same basic motive ascribed to Zorro and the Two-Gun Kid.

To be sure, had Green tried to compile all the masked cowboys who followed in the wake of the Lone Ranger, his ENCYCLOPEDIA might have been twice its current size-- and how many readers would have cared about non-entities like, say, early Marvel Comics' first entry into the costumed cowpoke genre, "the Masked Raider?"

DISCOURSES WITH LIVING SYMBOLS

In DISCOURSES WITH DEAD MEN, I said:

So any artistic narrative always has this dual potential: it can be produced for a wide audience, or for the author alone. Psychic mediums notwithstanding, artistic narrative-- which term here subsumes also music and the visual arts-- is almost the only way that artists can keep "talking" with people long after the artists themselves are dead. To some extent non-fictional narrative shares some of the power of the arts, but artistic narrative seems to hold much more power to remain relevant to audiences born long after the narrative was originated.

I also mentioned in the same essay that I began addressing the subject of "discourses" recently as a way of sussing out the function of the mythopoeic potentiality, whose content is sometimes hard to separate from that of the other three.

Yet, once one is able to isolate a work's symbolic discourse, it often provides much more of a meaningful connection to the author's work than any of the others. One may not care for an author's ability to transmit sensory experiences, personalities, or intellectual ideas, or if one grants that the author has some ability, one still may not like the world-picture he transmits. But there's something ineluctably persuasive about the symbolic process. One can reject whatever intellectual ideas may be attached to it, and yet still admire the author's ability to converse in the language of symbols.

I'll take as example C.S. Lewis, whose non-fiction I've frequently discussed on this blog. While I find Lewis's ruminations on literature stimulating, his remarks on religion have often struck me as narrow-minded and self-serving, particularly in MERE CHRISTIANITY. In this book, Lewis responded to questions about the Christian religion, originally propounded via radio. Here's the one I disliked the most.

“Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the 'Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”

Intellectually, this is nonsense. Lewis is trying to distance religion from its involvement in the witch-hunts of the past by claiming that modern religionists are too educated to believe in such nonsense. Yet he can't completely condemn the fanatics of yesteryear, stating that if he could believe in people who made deals with the devil, he would regard them as "filthy quislings" deserving of death. His position also suggests that at the time he wrote this, whatever "wiccan" practices existed in England had gone so far underground that an educated man like Lewis could believe that no such persons existed in modern times. Lewis passed in 1963, so it's possible he never encountered the idea of modern witches worshiping archaic deities that were in no way affiliated with Satan. Even if Lewis had known of such cults, the writer would probably have given them no more respect than outright Satanists.

Yet, within his creative work, Lewis could entertain syncretic visions of religion. Narnia, despite being patterned on Christian belief, reproduces many of the images and icons of Greek paganism, and in THE LAST BATTLE, there is a dim suggestion that Aslan is not exclusively a "Christian" deity, but will give sanctuary even to righteous men who do not worship him.

The irony of my title is that, while I know that symbols are not alive apart from the role they play in the language of living persons, they can take on a "life" of their own, Indeed, the symbolic formulations of an author may seem much more "convivial" to a reader than the characters or the plot that serve as vehicles for symbolic events-- sacrificial dramas, world-saving conflicts, etc. Nor is there any symbolic formulation that is absolute. Lewis's Aslan embodies one among thousands of literary sacrificial dramas, and one may name others that share none of Lewis's particular themes, but which still possess the same "unity of action" I've identified with strong symbolic discourse in this essay.  The 1971 film THE OMEGA MAN is concerned with many intellectual subjects foreign to Lewis, not least being an American preoccupation with racial matters. However, it is an evocation of the sacrificial pattern no less valuable than that of NARNIA. I quite preferred the film to its prose source material. Yet even though I found Matheson's I AM LEGEND less formidable in its mythic "unity of action," there would have been no OMEGA MAN had the novel not suggested the theme to the film's scriptwriters.

Despite my usage of the established term "unity of action," the unity involved in plurisignative communication is far more about unifying a plurality of affects, both sympathetic and antipathetic. For myths of sacrificial figures, it's about transcending the death that we know all mortal entities must experience. Aslan literally transcends death, while Robert Neville's transubstantiation is more figurative, but symbolic constructs may be said to enjoy both literal and figurative transcendence, if only because, having never lived, they can never really die.

ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT

In my most recent film-review I wrote:

From time to time I've debated, like many others on the web, the question as to whether or not all works in the tradition of the "alternate history" fall into the domain of what many call"fantasy and science fiction"-- or, as I term said domain, "the metaphenomenal." I plan to write another essay for my theory-blog soon about the reasons why INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is an example of a purely isophenomenal "alternate history" film, so I'll dispense with any detailed theoretical justifications in this review. However, like some of the naturalistic films I've reviewed here, BASTERDS is relevant in that it uses many of the same tropes one would find in an "uncanny" version of an alternate-world narrative, such as (to cite a quick example) Philip Dick's THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.

I've written next to nothing thus far on the formal considerations of the "alternate world" concept-- from which, I should say, I'm excluding any narrative that involves overt marvelous phenomena, such as time-travel or even futuristic extrapolation. For example, Orwell's 1984 is such an extrapolation, in that its developments are predicated on what has already happened in historical time. Ward Moore's BRING THE JUBILEE, often considered a pivotal "alternate history" novel, would also be inapplicable since the protagonist does travel in time.  For that matter, now that I've read a summation of HIGH CASTLE-- which I had not re-read in some time-- it too would not qualify, given that the alternate-world Nazis have colonized other planets, so that book also uses a "marvelous" trope. A truly "uncanny" version of an alternate-world scenario could have no broaches in causal coherence, only in intelligibility.

At the end of the BASTERDS review, I gave one example of such an anti-intelligible film, RED DAWN.  DAWN is not commonly regarded as an "alternate world" story, but I view it as such because the script portrays a world in which nuclear war does not ensue as a result of Soviet forces invading the United States. Rather, DAWN chooses to focus on only one aspect of the conflict: that of American teens, nicknamed "Wolverines," who battle the Soviets using the tactics of aboriginal Americans and of so-called "mountain men." Their struggle parallels that of the "Basterds" in the Tarantino film, but the approach is radically different in terms of phenomenality.

As I've said in numerous previous essays, what determines the nature of the phenomenality of a given narrative is the type of affect that the narrative dominantly evokes. Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis have been my primary guides in formulating my most current schema for both the sympathetic and antipathetic affects appropriate to each phenomenality:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

THE MARVELOUS-- antipathetic aspect TERROR, sympathetic aspect WONDER.


In recent essays like PENALTY FOR THRESHOLDING, I centered my argument upon the idea that works of "the uncanny" had a greater effect of "strangeness" than those of "the naturalistic" because the former were more allied to the literary principle of artifice than the corresponding principle of verisimilitude. This describes adequately the way in which narratives can take on the semblance of being "larger than life" but artifice alone is not enough to explain the process, which must be grounded in the pluralist conception that art and literature are primarily expressive in nature.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS contains a great deal of artifice in the ways that its plot continually references film-history. However, even though the writer rewrites real-world history, that rewriting comes about due to factors that broach neither coherence nor intelligibility. The Basterds are the closest thing to an anti-intelligible element in the movie, and yet the emotions they inspire are naturalistic in nature: physical fear to their enemies (best embodied in the figure of the "Bear Jew"), and admiration to the viewers who identify with their history-changing exploits.

In contrast, the Wolverines, while they have no greater resources than the Basterds, achieve the sense of bringing dread to their enemies and inciting fascination from the audience. I would say that this is because Tarantino's heroes are firmly rooted in the here-and-now, while those of John Milius are an attempt to recapitulate the warrior-feats of early American history,  both "white" and "red."

I've subsumed the subgenre of the "alternate world" under the trope I've named "exotic worlds and customs." It might not prove to be the most elegant fit over time. Usually this trope has been used for exoticism found in cultures far from modern post-industrial society. However, on occasion I've also detected the use of exoticism in contemporary societies, as seen in my reviews of such naturalistic films as THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN  and THE SPIDERS, and certainly there have been times when the "exotic custom" has stemmed from a person or persons who comes from an exotic land as he, she, or they encounter the contemporary world.

This may not be all I have to write on the subject of "artifice and the affects," but for now I'll close by stating that in one sense the "alternate world with no marvelous elements" bears a certain resemblance to the narrative world conjured forth in the "delirious dreams and fallacious figments" trope. Certainly, the viewer of BASTERDS is always aware of the "real world's" dissimiliarity from the film's world, just as Alice retains her memory of the Way the World Ought to Be even while meandering through the uncanny terrain of Wonderland. "Fallcious figments" are even closer in structural nature to the idea of the alternate world. Most "figments" are meant to appear briefly and to be ignored as irrelevant to a narrative's diegesis, though occasionally one encounters a comic world in which everything is thoroughly distanced from reality, the best example (from films thus far reviewed) being LITTLE RITA OF THE WEST.  A uncanny use of the figment-trope, but one which profits from drawing upon ludicrous versions of dread and fascination, would be MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE COMPLETE SAGA OF THE VICTIMS" (1974/1988)

In my previous post I cited Michael O'Donoghue's PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST as a mythcomic, based in part upon its ironic-- yet still grandiose-- recreation of almost every "damsel in distress" trope known to popular fiction. But what got me interested in exploring ZEIT-GEIST was that I first happened to reread the Headpress TPB that collected six stories devoted to the Skywald Comics series THE SAGA OF THE VICTIMS. Five of these stories, scripted by Alan Hewetson and penciled by Spanish artist Suso Rego, appeared in Skywald's SCREAM magazine, while the conclusion to the "saga," never published in English because the company went out of business, was expressly put together by Hewetson and Rego (and possibly some uncredited assistants) for the Headpress edition.

PHOEBE was devoted to putting one completely unclad female through the wringer in the service of irony. VICTIMS is in a sense just as absurd, placing not one but two young women-- Rhodesian-born Josey Forster and American Ann Adams-- in constant danger from such menaces as a sacrificial cult, a vampire (who's also a robot), a pterodactyl, an octopus, and a Nazi dwarf with his own submarine. Yet in a couple of ways VICTIMS was somewhat more serious in tone. Although the girls' world was absurd, they were not. They are first seen as two winsome modern women, wearing revealing (but not sluttish) apparel. They're seen to be somewhat sexually active, but the narrative doesn't focus on their being subjected to punishments because of their lubricity. 

 Of course, SCREAM was one of three black-and-white horror anthologies published by Skywald, so it might be argued that VICTIMS, like a lot of horror-material, is concerned with putting pretty ladies on display so that they can scream, suffer, and die-- some would say, purely for the pleasure of male readers.

Josey and Ann are admittedly not "tough girls," like some of those seen in 1970s cinema-- notably the characters played by Pam Grier and Margaret Markov in two "salt and pepper"action-flicks, flicks which might have influenced the Victims' appearance. However, though Hewetson does torment his heroines with endless horrific perils--

--the girls prove themselves pretty gutsy and capable of taking on their opponents, as when Ann manages to strangle one of their captors into unconsciousness.From my Fryean perspective, the fact that the girls' gutsiness is validated-- rather than being seen as another crazy aspect of a crazy world, after the fashion of Elektra's "super ninja" status in Elektra in ELEKTRA ASSASSIN-- I term VICTIMS a "drama" rather than an "irony." Like the vast majority of horror fiction, it's all about using horror to purge the reader through an exposure to *antipathetic affects,* rather than using such affects to tear the reader's sense of rationality apart, a literary *sparagmos* if there ever was one.

That's not to say that there's no humor in the story, particularly in the girls' encounter with the dwarf submarine commander, who's much more entertaining than O'Donoghue's evil Nazi from PHOEBE...

...nevertheless, Hewetson does give the girls some dramatic heft. In the next-to-last story, the last published by Skywald, the girls cry to the uncaring heavens, giving the reader a grindhouse version of LEAR's storm-scene.

This story ends with the girls being taken to a huge Manhattan mansion, whose base suddenly sprouts rocket-flames and takes off, implicitly for outer space. The much-delayed conclusion then reveals that the ultimate source of the Victims' torments is an alien from another universe, who has very involved, and fairly senseless, reasons for persecuting them.

In what seems like a pretty nasty ironic conclusion, the alien destroys both girls. However, Hewetson doesn't follow O'Donoghue's lead in rendering the damsels' distress pointless. The last words of VICTIMS show that, despite their destruction, the young ladies survive as "two bits of flotsam-energy," waiting to be reborn again-- at which point, "Boom! All over again!" The symbolic discourse of VICTIMS isn't nearly as organized as that of PHOEBE, despite the fact that both are imitating the mode of the serial chapter-play. Thus Hewetson's story isn't a "mythcomic." But the potential is there, nonetheless, and it's a fun read as well.

SON OF THE BRIDE OF THE NON-MONSTROUS DEMIHERO

My most recent review on NATURALISTIC (ETC), was for the 1944 film THE CLIMAX. In the course of the review, I noted that it was structurally the opposite of the film that inspired it: the 1943 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. The earlier film followed the dominant pattern of the American horror film, focusing on "the twisted nature of the monster, mad scientist, etc," as he menaced various victims, who are usually demiheroes as I defined the category here.

Demiheroes, even on the occasions where they triumph against their opponents, don't really choose to stand or fall, because they are governed, just like their monstrous counterparts, by a different form of will than one sees in the heroes and their villainous counterparts.

I later refined the name for this "form of will" as the "existential will." It is that force that urges demiheroes to exert themselves in the name of pure survival, in a manner parallel to their negative counterparts-in-existential-will, "the monsters." This is in contrast to the ways in which "heroes" and "villains" work, given that their function is to exert themselves in the name of the "idealizing will," be it for good or evil.

In horror-films that are centered-- as most are-- upon the figure of the monster, the monster's victims-- almost always demiheroes-- are usually not given much depth. But THE CLIMAX is interesting for inverting the pattern, though there isn't much of an increase in character-depth. That is, the real star is not top-billed Boris Karloff as the malefic Doctor Hohner, but singer Susanna Foster's character Angela, of whom I wrote:

the "climax" of the movie is that [Angela] triumphs over [Hohner's] attempted repression even without ever knowing what he did to her.

Now, as I said in the review, THE CLIMAX could do this easily because it wasn't really a horror film like PHANTOM, but an "uncanny murder-mystery."  And yet, this may have been a little glib. Certainly there are other mystery-films in which demiheroes become the stars of the show, as one can also see in Hithcock's THE LODGER, But though there are probably more demihero-centered mystery films than there are demihero-centered horror films, the majority of mysteries at any given time are more likely to center upon either serial heroes (Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan) or upon the source of the mystery, who like the star of the horror-film is often a monster (not sufficient to stand) or a villain (choosing to fall, as it were). As it happens, in this review of two unrelated films, I touched upon two such films, with 1993's SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER supplying an adequate example of "the murderer as a monster" and MURDER BY DEATH forming an excellent illustration of "the murderer as villain"-- a villain so formidable, by the way, that he confounds several hero-detectives, all of whom are spoofs of famous figures like Holmes and Chan.

It would be more accurate to say, not that works in the mystery-genre are characteristically dominated by demihero-personas, but that they're simply much more open to all four persona-types. The purpose of the horror genre is to fill the audience with what I have called "antipathetic affects," and for that purpose, the "monster" is better than any other persona, though I've noted in various essays that the dominantly positive personas of the hero and the demihero have their negative manifestations. Though Angela of THE CLIMAX reaches heroic heights in overcoming Hohner's influence-- though not in the service of a greater ideal, as would be the case with a genuine hero-- some demiheroes exist to be defeated. In the 1964 suspense-film DEAD RINGER Bette Davis' character registers as a demihero because she propounds the existential will in a negative fashion but lacks the more profound traits of "monstrosity" found even in the crappier monsters, like the featured "axe murderer" of the Mike Myers film mentioned above.

One of the few subtypes of horror film that allows for greater latitude in the use of personas is the comedy-horror film. Though in PUMPING THE PRIMACY I was addressing a different subject-- that of the NUM theory rather than the subject of personas-- I mentioned that it was possible for the demihero star of a comedy-horror film to be the main focus of the narrative, rather than whatever spooky phenomena he encountered. I cited Bob Hope's 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY. However, this pattern was not meant to be determinative either, for in the same essay I also mentioned another comedy-horror film-- 1941's THE SMILING GHOST-- in which the plot followed the same pattern as the "serious" horror flick, making the titular monster the narrative focus.

Of parallel interest is the way in which the narrative focus changes in Universal's "monster-mash" films of the 1940s. There's not much question in my mind that in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN,  HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and HOUSE OF DRACULA, the monsters are the stars of each film. Yet, when Universal chose to put paid to the continuing sagas of their "starring monsters," the story chosen put the emphasis upon the comedians. Arguably this was because Abbott and Costello carried more clout for the audiences. Similarly, Bob Hope is arguably the star of the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY, even if the monster known as "the Cat" may be the main focus of the original 1927 silent film, of which the 1939 flick is a remake.

PUMPING THE PRIMACY PT. 2

In retrospect, I should have expected that the majority of works reviewed in the "uncanny phenomenality" would be dominated by "terror" more than "wonder," given the statement I made in THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE PT. 2, where I also cited the now familiar Lovecraft quote:

Of these three patterns, I've hypothesized that the middle one, labeled "Might vs. Non-Might," is the most popular in the totality of literature (by which I mean, the "bad stuff" as well as the "good stuff.")

Now, assuming the truth of this, what would this pattern mean?

It might mean that the surest way to appeal to a human audience is to play upon their fear that they-- represented by the viewpoint characters of their stories-- are always on the verge of being overwhelmed by powers greater than themselves.  As noted in this essay, the aforementioned H.P. Lovecraft felt that fear was the most primal emotion:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Though there are a lot of stories in which ordinary humans are menaced by the forces of "the unknown," the basic pattern is not confined to supernatural stories: a story like the 1962 film CAPE FEAR sports only a "known" fear, that of a ruthless criminal who impinges on an almost-helpless family.  It is also the same pattern we see in Hegel's opposition of the "bondsman"-- who in my system would represent "non-might"-- and the "lord," who of course represents "might."

So if fear has primacy in human emotions, as Lovecraft claims, then that would be the reason why terror might dominate all literary phenomenalities, if indeed it does. To oppose a viewpoint character's "non-might" with the overwhelming nature of some source of "might"-- be it an entity like Dracula or a domain like Wonderland-- would be the easier way to appeal to one's audiences.

That said, the appeal of "might vs. might," which implies that a viewpoint character may become a liberating source of might, using that potency to battle a source of domineering might. In the above essay, I complained that Hegel did not address this possibility.

...within stories that emphasize "might vs. might"-- which is to say, combative stories-- the plurality of might implies that no lord is ever so mighty that a bondsman cannot assume his power and knock him from his lofty position. Of course, in real life this often means "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  But in fiction we can indulge in the possibility that the new lord will make better choices than the old one.

But the elegant simplicity of this process is of course not acknowledged by ideological critics. Ironically, some of them are more terrified by the hero who rises to fight the tyrant than by the tyrant, rather than feeling engaged with sympathy for the hero's travails. The ideological critic-- the obvious example seen here--   is on some level attracted to the "might vs. non-might" formula, in that he imagines himself defeating tyrants by lofty rhetoric and psychological analysis.  From there, it's just a short step for the ideologue to defend the tyrant as being a mistreated "other," tyrannized by some superheroic storm trooper-- a tendency I identified in both Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman. In POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY I noted that their fatuous attempts to read all crimefighting heroes as exemplars of lynch-law were undone by their ignorance of the actual structure of adventure-fiction:

...while the jury may remain out on the question as to whether the adventure-genre can inspire any sort of sadistic vibe in their audiences-- a question I'll address more fully in a future piece-- it seems obvious to me that when heroes fight villains in adventure-tales, the narrative action could not be less like a lynching, much less a Sadean sadist torturing helpless victims or a gangster shooting down old ladies in the street. Wertham and Legman dance around the difference by trying to make it sound as if the villains are merely stand-ins for despised minorities and the like, which argument remains a linchpin of Marxist oppositional thought, both in modern comics-criticism and elsewhere. But neither author can totally expunge this difference of narrative action: in the adventure-genre, *the villain can defend himself.* He may be fated to lose the struggle-- indeed, until recently he always did-- but the struggle itself is essential to the adventure-genre, as it manifestly is not with the crime genre. As Wertham and Legman both point out, the crime-genre books usually ended with a last-minute destruction of the rampaging crook as a "sop" to morality. But the struggles of hero and villain in the adventure-genres-- best represented in comic books by the superhero-- are not thrown in at the last minute. Narratively, structurally, such physical struggles are the selling-points of the genres, and so cannot be conflated with either the crime genre or the Sadean paradigm by any truly rational approach.

 

 Since both writers made so many cutting remarks about conflating superheroes with fascists, it would have been interesting to ask both if they believed that the real Nazis had been defeated with lofty rhetoric and psychological analysis.

In conclusion, while I believe it likely that the formula "might vs. non-might" dominates the majority of all literary works, in all three phenomenalities, I will speculate of the three the domain of the marvelous may be most amenable to the formula "might vs. might," simply because works in this domain are given the license to stray the furthest from consensual experience, and thus, to imagine ways in which heroes can fight tyrants on the tyrants' terms, without becoming tyrants themselves.

PUMPING THE PRIMACY

(While in other essays I've used the terms "wonder" and "terror" to label experiences of sublimity in keeping with the marvelous phenomenality, for this essay only I'm going to use these two terms to replace, respectively, "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects.")

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”-- H.P. Lovecraft, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE.

Over the years I've specified several times-- most recently here-- that just because one phenomenon *may* have come first, it should never be assigned primacy, simply because of primogeniture. Burke, Otto, and Lewis all seem to give some primacy to the affects of "terror" over those of "wonder." Perhaps, like Lovecraft in the quote above, see the "brute man" of humankind's origins as being more moved by the emotions relative to physical survival than to the latter, since the latter affects depend on one's having some degree of perceived safety.

Having written so much about the affects recently, I wondered to what extent they appeared in the films of the uncanny that I've reviewed on NATURALISTIC UNCANNY MARVELOUS. I felt certain that I could find a good distribution of both "wonder" and "terror" in films of the marvelous. But many of my ten tropes were formulated in reaction to narratives dominantly concerned with "terror." Many of the tropes as I christened them even reference ideas of repulsion more than attraction, as with "freakish flesh" and "weird families and societies."

So I scanned over the lists of the reviewed films that had been filed under each trope, trying to determine whether indeed most of them were more dominated by "terror" than by "wonder." And sure enough, as if moviemakers had been in tune with Rudolf Otto himself, most of the uncanny films were based in terror-- UNLESS those tropes occurred in a film focused upon a wondrous hero, whose main purpose was to banish terrors with his life-affirming attitude.


For instance, though most of my films in the "phantasmal figuration" category centered upon kenotic figures of terror, like THE SMILING GHOST, some heroes, like THE PHANTOM, used "phony supernaturalism" to serve the cause of justice. Usually, though, in heroic narratives it's the antagonist, not the hero, who incarnates aspects of terror-- the "bizarre crimes" of Goldfinger, the "freakish flesh" of Dick Tracy's villains, the "exotic lands" faced by Tarzan, Bomba, and other jungle heroes. So obviously the only one of my ten categories to be dominated by the affect of wonder is "outre outfits, skills, and devices," even though all of the elements that fall under this rubric can and have been used by antagonistic figures as well.

Villains, as much as monsters, are also dominantly kenotic figures of terror, even though villains incarnate "idealizing will" rather than "existential will."  However, even today it's rare for villains, unlike monsters, to become the focal presences through which the audience receives its dominant affect.

Demiheroes in uncanny films present a complication. Often they don't inspire a lot of wonder, even when they are unquestionably the stars of the show, as is the Bob Hope character in 1939's THE CAT AND THE CANARY.  But when they are stars rather than simple viewpoint-characters, their triumph, however comic or ironic, still suggests life-affirming forces.  The most fruitful category with respect to life-affirming demiheroes was that of "delirious dreams and fallacious fragments."  Often, even though character would have to awaken from their dreams or their fictional imaginings at story's end, their encounter with the world of dream could be generally wondrous-- as in THE DAYDREAMER--  as easily as they could be filled with terror and confusion, as in both DREAMCHILD and HEAD.

Whether these observations lead me down any deeper pathways remains to be seen.

AN ENQUIRY INTO EDMUND BURKE PT. 3

My re-reading of Burke's ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBLIME AND BEATIFUL sparks a reminiscence of something I wrote about C.S. Lewis with regard to his evocation of a trinity of antipathetic affects, borrowed from Rudolf Otto, through which both philosophers viewed humankind's development:

I accept the deduction of C.S. Lewis as to the tripartite nature of antipathetic reactions to the powerful and/or the unknown, which he describes as "fear," "dread," and "awe"...However, antipathy is only half the story. 

Otto's book-long work THE IDEA OF THE HOLY went into more detail than Lewis' short essay, and Otto did, as I noted in the above essay, evolve the notion of the "mysterium fascinans" to parallel his fear-based idea of the "mysterium tremendum." Still, I would have to say that Otto did not do any better than Lewis in defining the parameters of the sympathetic affects: both seem firmly focused on the antipathetic ones.

Edmund Burke is more aware of the sympathetic affects, but he chooses to view them under the rubric of "pleasure," and he considers them appropriate to the experience of "the beautiful" rather than that of "the sublime." In Section Seven of the ENQUIRY's first part, Burke explicitly aligns the sublime with the experience, or at least, the possibility, of pain.

WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasure which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy....When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience. The cause of this I shall endeavour to investigate hereafter.

Patently, as noted in my many essays on Kant's theory of the dynamic-sublime, the German philosopher accepted and recapitulated many of Burke's formulations-- though Kant proves less useful than Burke with respect to my project of formulating the combinatory-sublime.

Later, Part Two is devoted to the many stimuli that can bring on the sublime.  I'll pass over Burke's inclusion of discrete physical phenomena like "sounds and loudness" and "the cries of animals," valid as they might be on one level or another. I'm concerned here with the abstract qualities Burke invokes, which as are follows: Terror, Obscurity, Power, Privation, Vastness, Infinity, Difficulty, and Magnificence. "Difficulty," in fact, might have subsumed all of Burke's abstractions much better than "pain," for Burke is concerned with the ways in which the human subject responds to anything suggestive of resistance to human will, in marked contrast to the relaxation the subject experiences when one apprehends "the beautiful."

It is the last-named section, "Magnificence," from which I've quoted in this early meditation on the sublime, as well as the essay in which I defined the concept of the combinatory-sublime, also with reference to Burke's section on "magnificence."  In both of the above essays, I was struck by Burke's use of the term "richness and profusion of images" to describe the experience of the sublime with regard to his examples in "Magnificence." For me this described in large part the very appeal of marvelous imagery, as I noted with respect to Tolkien and his "endless combinations." But though I believe that I fully understand Burke's chain of associations, I can't agree that the profusion of images is primarily characterized by such antipathetic affects as "pain," or even "difficulty." It's true that the examples Burke names-- visionary passages from Shakespeare, Virgil and others-- are not characterized by ease of access: the subject who identifies with them will feel his own emotions overwhelmed-- but not in a way suggestive of pain. If anything, it is a pleasure closer to that of the "voluptuary" Burke mentions above; it is, as I said here, "wonder" more than "terror."

Burke, as I noted in ENQUIRY PART 2, was an early defender of the power of the human mind to formulate images that did not correspond to anything in common, observable reality. James T. Boulton, editor of my 1968 reprint from Notre Dame Press, credits Burke as being "in open revolt against neo-classical principles." Burke's opening section on the virtues of "novelty" is echoed by the section "Imitation" from Part One:

It is by imitation far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly...When the object represented in poetry or painting is such as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then I may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of imitation, and to no cause operating in the thing itself. So it is with most of the pieces which the painters call still-life. In these a cottage, a dunghill, the meanest and most ordinary utensils of the kitchen, are capable of giving us pleasure. But when the object of the painting or poem is such as we should run to see if real, let it affect us with what odd sort of sense it will, we may rely upon it, that the power of the poem or picture is more owing to the nature of the thing itself than to the mere effect of imitation, or to a consideration of the skill of the imitator, however excellent. 

 "We should run to see if real" threw me for a moment: at first I thought he meant that if the thing was real, those who beheld it would run from it. But to maintain the parallel with the subject's disinterest in the objects of still life, Burke must have meant that if the poetry or painting depicted something novel, perhaps even outside the realm of nature, then people would run to see that novel thing if they heard about it, just to see if it was real.

This dichotomy also expresses the double-sided significance of Joseph Campbell's "supernormal sign stimuli:" to have their sublime effects, the stimulating signs must be something uncommon, yet somehow they must also share the mundane existence of those who observe them-- an existential conundrum I referenced somewhat in my essay MIRACLE MILES.

Still, it may be that Burke, being of his time, could not entirely escape the neoclassical influence of the eighteenth century, which may be why he tends to think of profusions of colorful imagery as painful and difficult rather than entrancing, as Tolkien does.

Nevertheless, Burke remains, as Boulton correctly says, the first major prophet of the sublime experience:

[Burke was] the principal exponent of the sublime as [being] at once an irrational and a violent aesthetic experience... Whereas in the early stages [with Longinus] the sublime is essentially a style of writing, with Burke it becomes a mode of aesthetic experience found in literature and far beyond it.

 He himself could not picture his "magnificence" as a sympathetic affect, leaving such affects to the realm of the less overwhelming world of "the beautiful." But even though Immanuel Kant proved the superior logician with respect to the sublime, Burke may have been Kant's superior in terms of the aesthetic instincts needed to apprehend this "irrational and violent" experience.

STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: WONDER AND TERROR

I don't think my "Golden Age of Metaphenomenal Fiction" started at the age of 12, as the old joke more or less has it. My earliest memories attest to my liking fantastic works more than realistic works, even though I could see the appeal of both. But I will say that I probably became a *devotee,* rather than a casual consumer, of metaphenomenal works at least by the age of 12. I was 11 when the BATMAN teleseries hit the airwaves, and the accessibility of the Caped Crusader encouraged me to venture into the strange world of comics-that-weren't-primarily-funny, unlike "Archie," "Donald Duck," and the occasional funny superhero-type like "Mighty Mouse." I probably started reading paperback SF regularly a couple of years later; my first such purchase may have a used copy of Michael Moorcock's THE FIRECLOWN.

In this devotee-period I began to read whatever histories of SF. fantasy and horror were available at my local library. In one of those works-- I no longer remember which-- I encountered the assertion that the appeal of science fiction was its simultaneous capacity for "wonder and terror."  

I don't imagine that this work-- probably something published in the 1960s-- was the first to use these tandem terms. But I've never forgotten how the conjoined words resonated with me, though of course I did not feel that their appeal was confined only to one form of metaphenomenal fiction.

Fast-forward to the near present. In this 2013 essay I formulated my terms for the types of emotional affects that accompany the experience of the sublime. For all works of "the marvelous"-- that is, works that stimulate the "anti-real sublime"-- I said that henceforth I'd term the sympathetic affect "exaltation" and the antipathetic affect "awe"-- the latter derived from Rudolf Otto and the former from my reaction against Otto's one-sided hermeneutics.  But I have to admit that these two states of mind can shade into one another rather easily, and it's difficult to invoke Otto's hermeneutics every time I invoke the affects.

Thus, for this essay and at least the next few, I'm substituting "wonder" for "exaltation" and "terror" for "awe."

So for my trinity of sympathetic affects, each of which is responsive to the phenomenality of the work involved, are now FEAR // DREAD // TERROR.

And my trinity of antipathetic affects are now ADMIRATION // FASCINATION // WONDER.

On a quick side-note I'm moved to observe that at least one writer, Anne Radcliffe, viewed "terror" as a faculty which "expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life," as opposed to the contractive effect of "horror." Interestingly, in the passage from Radcliffe's work reprinted here, she makes a number of references to Edmund Burke's work on the sublime-- which I may attempt to address in more detail later on.