VERTICAL VEHICLES

I've talked a bit about early iterations of my myth-theory in various posts, such as 2021's RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 2, but usually I've confined such reminiscences to the last ten to twenty years. This is the period during which I feel that I brought to bear the full focus of my readings in philosophy-- Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer-- in line with the proto-theory I'd evolved in the seventies and eighties, a.k.a. "The JOURNAL years." I was by no means ill-informed in those days, having drawn a lot of my early observations from such diverse scholars as Jung, Frye, Eliade, Campbell and Fiedler. But a greater emphasis on philosophical rigor was necessary for a detailed analysis of what "myth" is in fictional narrative and how it contrasts with any and all other elements of narrative.

Yet in the early days of "Gene's Theories," I don't think I was entirely discriminating about what fictional icons did or did not possess "symbolic complexity." Case in point: while going through some old papers I found a list I'd tossed together of "mythopoeic serial concepts," by which I meant serials that showed the greatest mythopoeic values. I didn't date the list but the 2004 TV show LOST has the latest date of any of my selections. I didn't write down any criteria for inclusion, but I must not have been thinking of mythicity in terms of "epistemological patterns," since I included on that list a serial that's damn close to being anti-epistemological: that red-headed step-child of Henry Aldrich, ARCHIE.

So, assuming the near-total absence of epistemology in ARCHIE, what might have impressed me about the long-lived teen humor series? The only thing ARCHIE had going for it was that its creators cobbled together an ensemble cast made up of clearly defined "types"-- the Average Guy, the Mean Guy, the Rich Girl, the Poor Girl, and the Sardonic Cynic. (On a side note, I've sometimes thought that Jughead and his "what fools these mortals be" attitude might be the one thing that kept the Riverdale kids distinct from their many competitors.) 

Now, I'm also of the opinion that whenever pundits speak of a movie or a comic book as being "mythic," they're really funneling the idea that the work's characters and situations are popular with a wide audience because they're broadly conceived and probably rather simplistic next to "the fine arts." The word "types," though, is rather pejorative. The literary term "tropes" functions better to describe either characters or situations that become well-traveled for the very reason that they communicate their content quickly and efficiently, fulfilling the audience's expectations and yet allowing for a certain amount of free play.

Now I wouldn't have brought up this matter if I didn't have a way of bringing it into line with current theories, and as it happens, the aforementioned post RHETORICAL FLOURISHES 2 is also the first time I explored in detail the division of the mythopoeic trope into a "tenor" and a "vehicle," in line with the insights of I.A. Richards. I mentioned in FLOURISHES that the epistemological pattern would be the tenor, since it is a pattern partly conceived from the creator's experience in the real world, while a familiar trope used to communicate the pattern would be the vehicle.

My standard for excellence for "the tenor" is that of concrescence; the sense that an author has managed to bring several disparate elements into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Vehicle-excellence, though, would rely more on sheer frenetic creativity, the the author's (or authors') ability to produce a fascinating variety of tropes, what Edmund Burke called "the richness and profusion of images." These days I might not allow that the characters of ARCHIE function on any conceptual level, that they remain staunchly lateral and thus non-vertical in most of their adventures. But I can think of a few comedy-romance serials that would qualify, one being Rumiko Takahashi's ONE POUND GOSPEL-- a series which, like the majority of ARCHIE stories, contains no fantasy-SF content. 

Thus I might say that from the POV of "tenor-excellence" alone, the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR excels the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, because I've detected more concrescent stories in the former than in the latter. But in terms of "vehicle-excellence," they are equals. for both generated an impressive array of icons fraught with mythopoeic POTENTIAL, even if the FF is somewhat ahead in terms of mythopoeic ACTUALITY.

COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT. 4

In SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 1, I outlined a way in which both fictional sex and violence, although ultimately distinct in their various applications, could be subsumed as a sort of narrative "violence" that brought about the transformation from the outset of the narrative to its resolution.  My future discussions of sex and violence in this essay-series, however, aren't meant to be focused on the abstraction of pure narrative, so I've decided to continue this aspect of my ruminations under the rubric COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS. This 2014 essay-series was the first time I considered that both the combinatory mode and the dynamicity mode might be applied to my adaptation of Adler's theory of positive and negative compensation.

The terms "combinatory mode" and "dynamicity mode" are new extrapolations from the established terms "combinatory-sublime" and "dynamic-sublime." The latter terms were appropriate to the particular types of fantasy-narrative I was analyzing in the earlier essays. However, now that I'm speaking of narrative as a whole, I'm forced to apply the concepts across the board. After all, in VERTICAL VIRTUES  and its second part, I took the Huxley-derived position that all fiction is concerned in some way with transcendence, be it "horizontal," "upward," or "downward." The first form of transcendence is defined by its lack of the sublime affects present in the other two forms. But narratives of "horizontal transcendence," while not constituted to deliver the major emotional upsurges seen in the other forms, must be rooted in the same matrix of will and desire that informs the others.  So it follows within my system that a work of horizontal transcendence-- Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND being my chosen example in the VIRTUES essays-- must conform to the same pattern as the two sublime forms. WIND's main theme relates to dynamicity, in that it addresses the regulation of power in its society is negotiated: the death of the Old South and its resistance to the victorious North, even while the North is subtly changing the old values. However, the mode of the combinatory appears as well. Tolkien, whose seminal essay "On Fairy Stories" was a key influence on my refinement of my sublimity-theory, discusses this form of the non-sublime combinatory mode:

Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue.

And in this regard Mitchell's "freshness of vision." her invocation of the combinatory mode in its non-sublime form, appears in WIND's highly variegated characters. In this essay I mentioned that "GONE WITH THE WIND lacks the affects of the sublime, but that lack doesn't take anything from Mitchell's amazing ability to create characters who can seem well-rounded even though they may appear for no more than a paragraph or two." I'm not an expert on historical fiction of Mitchell's period, or of any period, but I would venture to guess that most popular writers working in Mitchell's idiom did not work as hard as she did rendering all of these characters, both major and minor. For that matter, there are quite a few authors of canonical literature who are must weaker on minor characters than Mitchell, including "big guns" like Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Turning back to a topic raised in SACRED AND PROFANE, I sought to bring my Bataillean concept of narrative "violence" in line with what I'd written in the essay THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT. I hadn't noticed until recently that I wrote the BASE LEVEL essay a couple of weeks before I made my breakthrough in deducing two forms of sublimity. Prior to the TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I series, I had only defined sublimity in terms of dynamicity. Thus, when I tried to analyze Bradbury's story "The Last Night of the World," I was on some level seeking to express the nature of conflict in terms that would make sense within the dynamic-sublime, and so I asserted that the story was an example of Nietzsche's "will to nothingness." This isn't so much wrong as incomplete, for the "conflict" I was seeking is not one of dynamicity, but of the combinatory mode.

In the past couple of years I've identified instances of "combinatory thinking" in authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Campbell and Grant Morrison, but the unintentional father of this concept must be, in a historical sense, Edmund Burke, who emphasized its power in this passage:

Thirdly, by words we have it in our power to make such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining, we are able, by the addition of well-chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the simple object. In painting we may represent any fine figure we please; but we never can give it those enlivening touches which it may receive from words.

I still assert that the predominant appeal of "The Last Night of the World" is its defiance of audience-expectations re: the equanimity with which the viewpoint-characters-- and implicitly, all other people in the world except the children-- meet the world's irrevocable end. But this conflict arises from the combination of a dire situation with reactions which do not seem to fit that situation, as seen by this exchange:

"Do you know, I won't miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or autos or factories or my work or anything except you three. I won't miss a thing except my family and perhaps the change in the weather and a glass of cool water when the weather's hot, or the luxury of sleeping. Just little things, really. How can we sit here and talk this way?"
"Because there's nothing else to do."

I should note that this was one of several 1950s stories Bradbury wrote that referenced the possibility of nuclear devastation. "Last Night" hints that the peaceful ending of the world takes the place of such a devastation, and that it comes about specifically because nuclear death is so close to reality:

"There are bombers on their course both ways across the ocean tonight that'll never see land again."
"That's part of the reason why."

Thus Bradbury's strategy for giving "new life and force" to the overly familiar threat of nuclear war was to undercut its power by invoking a greater power, one that simply chooses to end the story of mankind in the manner of "the closing of a book"-- an apt metaphor for a writer frustrated with the follies of mankind.

Thus the conflict of Bradbury's story is expressed through the combination of things that don't quite seem to match, much like the images I reproduced in COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PART 3.  Of course, these images, like the Bradbury story, seek to evoke the "strangeness" of the sublime, and this provides a contrasting employment of the combinatory mode to what we see in Margaret Mitchell's purely horizontal, representational cast of characters. Yet even the horizontal manifestations serve to illustrate the incredible fecundity of the combinatory mode.

AFFECT VS. MOOD

In recent essays I've re-examined Edmund Burke's work with regard to the ways subjects experience sublimity, either with an affect of sympathy or one of antipathy.  Because of those essays, I find myself looking at how both the sympathetic affects and the antipathetic affects appear in works of popular fiction-- specifically, how narratives tend to center around either one set of affects than the other, though both may easily appear in both. 

This, however, suggested to me a parallel with my writings on centricity with regard to myth-radicals, probably best summed up in JUNG AND CENTRICITY.  Jung specified in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES that each individual had within him four psychological functions, but that only one of these would have "absolute sovereignty" as against the others. I asserted that the same logic could also be applied to Frye's four mythoi, using as example the teleseries BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which I regard as falling properly into the category of adventure, even though the series regularly also calls upon elements common to the comedy, the irony, and the drama.

However, to complicate the matter further, I also linked Frye's four functions with the four "moods," as I called them, that Theodor Gaster listed for the dominant functions of his categories of religious ritual. REFINING THE DEFINING was one of the relevant essays on this topic:

ADVENTURE conveys the INVIGORATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how protagonists who defend life and/or goodness from whatever forces are inimical to them. The protagonists' power of action is at its highest here.
COMEDY conveys the JUBILATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how the heroes seek happiness/contentment in a world that has some element of craziness to it (what I've termed the "incognitive" myth-radical), yet does not deny the heroes some power of action.
IRONY conveys the MORTIFICATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon characters in a world where the "power of action" is fundamentally lacking.
DRAMA conveys the PURGATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon "individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society." Power of action here is more ambivalent than that of the adventure-mythos but seems more crucial to the individual's problem than it does for that of the comic hero.

But this raised in my mind the question: what difference is there, if any, between an "affect" and a "mood?"

The best conclusion I've come to, for the time being, is that the Gasterian moods are functions of plot: he and Frye both speak primarily of the *actions* characters take in order to facillitate one dominant literary or religious mood. In contrast, "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. For the time being, then, I will allot the Gasterian moods to the domain of "narrative values," while the affects-- indebted, as I've said many times to the thinkers Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis-- would be "significant values," in keeping with my first essay on this Fryean distinction.

Obviously the two sets of emotional reactions overlap, just as plot and character must, and here's one example. One further complication to my system is that in this essay I have also formulated four persona-types-- the hero, the villain, the monster, and the demihero-- with respect to the ways in which they incarnate a given story's "life-affirming" (or plerotic) forces or its "life-denying" (kenotic) forces. I have also related these types to my own concepts of the *idealizing will* and the *existential will.*   So my persona-types are also narrative rather than significant values. Gigantor, even though diegetically the character has no will as such, incarnates both "the idealizing will" in combination with a plerotic attitude. The "Evil Dead spirits" are monsters, and they incarnate the "existential will" in combination with a kenotic attitude. And just to complete the quaternity, Fu Manchu incarnates the idealizing will as much as Gigantor, but with a kenotic, life-denying attitude, while the demihero Doctor John Robinson incarnates the "existential will" in tandem with a plerotic, life-affirming attitude.  Of course I've specified elsewhere that none of the persona-types are locked into these relationships at all times-- that they are "plerotic" monsters and "kenotic" demiheroes-- but these four are the dominant ways in which the four types are employed in human art and literature.

Having crossed all these critical "t's," I'll return to the question of affects again in the next essay.

AN ENQUIRY INTO EDMUND BURKE PT. 2

VERTICALLY CHALLENGING was the first essay in which I attempted an in-depth exploration of the applicability of Joseph Campbell's heuristic system of "supernormal sign stimuli" to works of differing phenomenality. I reprinted a section from PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY in which Campbell listed an assortment of possible sign that might stimulate human beings in a "supernormal" fashion:

A suggestive analogy is to be seen in the case of the grayling moth, which prefers darker mates to those actually offered by its present species. For if human art can offer to a moth the supernormal sign stimulus to which it responds more eagerly than to the normal offerings of life, it can surely supply supernormal stimuli, also to the IRMs [Innate Releasing Mechanisms] of man and not only spontaneously, in dream and nightmare, but even more brilliantly in the contrived folktales, fairy tales, mythological landscapes, over- and underworlds, temples and cathedrals, pagodas and gardens, dragons, angels, gods, and guardians of popular and religious art. It is true, of course, that the culturally developed formulations of these wonders have required in many cases centuries, even milleniums, to complete. 

I also mentioned in the same essay that this list was something of a catch-all, and I attempted to impose some order upon it with reference to Huxley's theory of vertical transcendence. I also compared my own distinctions between "reality-fiction" and "fantasy-fiction" to Campbell's distinctions between the differing ways in which animals may react to its environment.

"The world of reality," then, would line up with the animal responses that are designed to "match the natural environment," while "the world of fantasy" parallels those responses that are "unmatched by nature."  This in turn suggests a further parallel with Kant's concepts of reproductive and productive imagination, though I'll pursue that on its own terms in a forthcoming essay.

Now that I've re-read Burke's ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL, I find it interesting that the eighteenth-century philosopher also made a distinction between the aspects of art-- which he calls "poetry" for short-- in terms of its abilities to imitate observable nature, and of its abilities to go beyond nature.  In the ENQUIRY, Burke entitles one short section-- the next to last of his sections-- "Poetry Not Strictly an Imitative Art," and presents the argument below:

HENCE we may observe that poetry, taken in its most general sense, cannot with strict propriety be called an art of imitation. It is indeed an imitation so far as it describes the manners and passions of men which their words can express; where animi motus effert interprete lingua.There it is strictly imitation; and all merely dramatic poetry is of this sort. But descriptive poetry operates chiefly by substitution; by the means of sounds, which by custom have the effect of realities. Nothing is an imitation further than as it resembles some other thing; and words undoubtedly have no sort of resemblance to the ideas, for which they stand.

In the next and final section of the ENQUIRY, "How Words Influence the Passions," Burke details three modes of influence. One mode deals with the influence of our opinions and those of others. The second deals with those things which "have never been at all presented to the senses of any men but by words, as God, angels, devils, heaven, and hell," though Burke does not explicitly confine these  representations "which can seldom occur in the reality" only to representations of the marvelous-metaphenomenal.  And then Burke's final mode of influence practically provides a gloss to my own formulation of the combinatory-sublime.

Thirdly, by words we have it in our power to make such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining, we are able, by the addition of well-chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the simple object. In painting we may represent any fine figure we please; but we never can give it those enlivening touches which it may receive from words.

Though I've noted in earlier essays that I had read Burke before, I doubt that I remembered this section of the ENQUIRY when I formed my term. To the best of my recollection, I derived my term "combinatory" from my readings of both Cassirer and Tolkien.

For Burke, this final emphasis on the mind's power to combine disparate objects proved important enough that when the ENQUIRY, first published in 1757, received a second edition two years later, Burke expanded on this combinatory theory, prefacing his "sublime and beautiful" arguments with an essay entitled "Introduction on Taste," published for the first time in that 1759 edition.  Here he descants upon his opinion that there is an imagination-stimulating pleasure in finding "resemblances" between disparate phenomena, while no such pleasure attends discovering the sort of differences one expects to find in such things:

When two distinct objects are unlike to each other, it is only what we expect; things are in their common way; and therefore they make no impression on the imagination: but when two distinct objects have a resemblance, we are struck, we attend to them, and we are pleased. The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblances we produce new images; we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination; the task itself is more severe and irksome, and what pleasure we derive from it is something of a negative and indirect nature. 

Here too it is not incorrect to see another parallel between "reality" and "fantasy." Reality is the domain of distinctions between this or that: all things that "match the natural environment," while fantasy is the domain that annihilates those distinctions, producing "new images" that are "unmatched in nature." And I may as well throw in Tolkien's remarks on the "newness" of what he calls "creative fantasy:"

Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was  dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.

Having demonstrated some of the interesting similitudes between Campbell and Burke, my next essay will talk in more detail about Burke's concept of the sublime, and why it has superior application to art and literature in contrast to Kant's concept, on which some of my earliest essays on the sublime were perhaps overly dependent.

AN ENQUIRY INTO EDMUND BURKE PT. 1

As I've admitted in some of my later writings on the topic of sublimity, my earliest blog-essays depended heavily on Kant and his concept of the dynamic sublime, while more or less dismissing the author's formulation of the "mathematical-sublime" as irrelevant to my project.  I had by that time read not only Kant's primary works on the subject but also that of his predecessor, the English empiricist Edmund Burke, but I must admit that then I had a preference for Kant's superior power of categorization. Burke's signature work-- A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL-- is marked by a tendency toward arbitrary categories, supported by what editor James Boulton calls "highly selective evidence."

Nevertheless, as I noted in this essay, Burke was much more prodigal than Kant when it came to identifying the sublime within literary works.  Recently I began to meditate once more on the possible connections between Joseph Campbell's concept of "supernormal sign stimuli," first referenced here, and the two forms of the sublime as I've now formulated them, "the dynamic-sublime" and the "combinatory-sublime." On some level I suppose I was coming back to a topic I said that I'd write about at the end of this essay, but never did.  Perhaps at the time I felt I'd said all I needed to say about Huxleyan transcendence.  In VERTICAL VIRTUES  I defined the interrelationship of this concept of transcendence with the concept of the sublime:

Csicsery-Ronay asserted that "sublimity" was produced by an "expansion of apprehension"-- an argument very much in line with philosophers of sublimity like Burke and Kant-- and added that his parallel category, "the grotesque" was produced by "a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction." I reject Csiscery-Ronay's separation of these two affects, and instead regard them as "expansive" and "contractive" forms of the same affect: the affect of of the sublime.

I should add that in portraying "the sublime" as unitary, I was following the lead of Csicery-Ronay, who speaks of the sublime as "a response to an imaginative shock."  Within the sphere of my own system, I agree that this shock is responsible for the sublimity-affect, whether it manifests through the subject's reaction to "power" or to "endless combinations."  I must admit that in some cases, I have found the concept of the "combinatory-sublime" more widely applicable, as in the aforementioned conclusion of the essay TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME PT. 2:

Campbell, though not a literary critic, supplies a corrective to the overemphasis on reasonableness and ideological correctness. In a future essay I will also draw comparisons between Campbell's heuristic system and the forms of transcendence that are not reasonable; that can mount to the heavens or descend into the darkness of Hades-- and in either form, are covalent with what I have termed the combinatory-sublime.

I see now that this was a misstatement. I believe that Campbell's own evocations of the sublime-- even if he does not use that word-- depend largely on the imaginative shock that arises from "endless combinations," an assertion I demonstrated in the essay COMBINATORY CONSIDERATIONS.  However, in works by other authors, the dynamic-sublime can play just as great a role in evoking downward and upward transcendence. I established this in the later essay VERTICAL VIRTUES PT. 2, where I asserted that Melville's BENITO CERENO derived its sense of downward transcendence from the power of its demonic African character Babo, while Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN derived its sense of upward transcendence from the power of Uncle Tom's self-sacrificing imitatio dei-- even though Tom is only figuratively aligned with the Son of God, and has no power save the power of a noble example.

What would these modes of transcendence look like when applied to examples of the combinatory-sublime?
The easiest comparison that comes to mind occurs because I referenced Doctor Strange in the second TWAS essay. The good doctor exists in a world where he, a mortal human, straddles countless dimensions dominated by all manner of colorful entities and phenomena. Yet the dominant emotion is one of enchantment, since the hero's power to triumph is a given, and thus all of the varied phenomena in this series-- at least in its classic Lee-Ditko iteration-- would be an example of upward transcendence.  H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu," however, evokes just as many entities and phenomena, but this tale registers as an example of downward transcendence, because it suggests that the universe is infinitely horrible by virtue of its infinite variegations. (Of course, the "dynamic-sublime" appears in both of these, so neither choice represents the "combinatory-sublime" in isolation.)

So I've now concluded that if I do analyze Campbell's supernormal sign-systems further, they will be best described with reference to the two modes of sublimity rather than the two forms of transcendence, because the first deals with what kind of stimulus produces the affect while the second deals with its sympathetic or antipathetic tonality.  And with all of that in mind, in my next essay I'll finally be able at last to inquire into Edmund Burke, and show that contrary to my earlier opinion, his work on the sublime may prove more fruitful than that of Immanuel Kant.

TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I -- PART 4

At the conclusion of Part 3 I said:

...the further a given work ventures into the domains of the metaphenomenal, the greater its capacity for "endless combinations in living shapes that move from mind to mind."

To put it another way within my terminological terrain, the capacity for "endless combinations"-- what I call the "combinatory-sublime"-- is at its lowest ebb in all works that possess a naturalistic phenomenality. This capacity stands independent of any other standards of merit that might separate, say, some low-rent romance-melodrama from Shakespeare's HENRY IV-- which happens to be the play from which Edmund Burke derives one of his definitions of the sublime: "richness and profusion of images."

In my early writings on the subject of sublimity, I tended to try to see this image-profusion as simply one of many manifestations of a general idea of the sublime, one which depended on a quality of being "overwhelming."  As I noted earlier, since I was primarily influenced by Kant's writings on the "dynamically sublime," at times I attempted to subsume all aspects of "infinitude" under the rubric of "might," as I did in the 2012 essay SUBLIMELY SUPER. Analyzing the story "Superman's Return to Krypton" from SUPERMAN #141 (1960>


Within my then-current formulation of "the sublime," I reprinted this panel:

And in a subsequent essay, I wrote of this scene:

...the scene in which Superman and Lyla culminate their romance (in terms of Silver Age kid-comics, at least) displays a propensity for the sublime, using churning magma and a vaulting rainbow as objective correlatives for the unleashed passion. This indirect depiction of physical passion not only displays Burke's "profusion of images," but also explicitly (thanks to Siegel's caption) associates their passion with might:

"But the flames of the planet are like cold glaciers compared to the mighty love blazing between Superman of Earth and Lyla Lerrol of Krypton!"

 I don't withdraw that insight re: "might."  However, I will note that the scene could be equally sublime-- in a combinatory sense-- if it took place against any other strange Kryptonian background, such as the "Living Jewel Mountains" or "the Scarlet Jungle." 

The Krypton of the "Silver Age" period of Superman comic books is, in contrast to the barely described setting seen in Jerry Siegel's first Superman stories, portrayed as a cornucopia of wonders, many of which are pleasing re-combinations of phenomena known to us on Earth, such as J.R.R. Tolkien described in the essay "On Fairy Stories:"

Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough—though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise.  To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

Tolkien is of course not concerned with any formulations about "the sublime" here, but he does speak of an affect that he calls "enchantment."

Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World.

Tolkien probably would not have cared to see this quality of "enchantment" as a subspecies of what I call "strangeness," which appears not only in the sort of fantasy Tolkien means, but in all manner of "marvelous" and "uncanny" metaphenomenal works.

In Part 5 I will deal more fully with the combinatory capacity as it occurs in both phenomenalities.

TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I -- PART 1

I began writing about the various iterations of "the sublime" as defined by such authors as Longinus, Burke, and Kant with the intent of comparing this affect with the more widely known "sense of wonder."  As I sought to formulate some common ground used by all authors, I came up with this:

Longinus, Burke and Kant all agree that the affect of sublimity comes into being only through a subject's contact with some overwhelming power/might/infinitude.
 

This suggested to me the affect Rudolf Otto termed the *mysterium tremendum,* but even prior to reading Otto I did not think that this was an adequate characterization of all aspects of sublimity/sense of wonder.  Here I noted:

In AGE OF WONDERS David Hartnell centers his definition of the term "sense of wonder" in an awestruck fascination with strange phenomena that does not suggest the aspect of the *mysterium tremendum:*
 

Similarly, at times I sought to expand on the meanings explicitly stated by the philosophers, to bring it into line with my impressions of the sublimity in myth.

Neither Burke nor Kant demonstrate any great fascination with mythic symbolism as such. However, I would expand some of the terms they use to describe the sublime, such as "might" or "magnificence," to include the sense of a greater mythic pattern that brings the events of a given story into the wider "family" of mythic narrative.

Once again, I repeat the W.B. Yeats quote I used in my first post here as a touchstone for the "familial" nature of myths of all kinds:

“It is the charm of mythic narrative that it cannot tell one thing without telling a hundred others. The symbols are an endless inter-marrying family. They give life to what, stated in general terms, appears only a cold truism, by hinting how the apparent simplicity of the statement is due to an artificial isolation of a fragment, which, in its natural place, is connected with all the infinity of truths by living fibres.”
 

Now, however, rather than simply seeing this as an "expansion," I think that I was actually seeking to conflate two distinct aspects of the sublime.

I'll be expounding on the dichotomy further in Part 2, but I end this retrospective post by noting that the majority of my posts dealing with "the sublime" deal with only one species of its nature, what Kant calls the "dynamic sublime" in CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT.  Most of these posts have dealt with the sublime in its aspect of "might," but there is another aspect that proves equally important, particularly with regard to my recent attempt to suss out the quality of sublimity within the three phenomenal worlds, seen here.

SUBMARINE SUBLIMITY

At the end of THE THREE PART HARMONY OF DYNAMICITY I said:

In a future essay I'll relate these three levels of dynamicity to the more general concept of *sublimity,* which I relate to science fiction's "sense of wonder"-- of which Verne's book is a leading exemplar.

Possibly I shouldn't have implied that "sense of wonder" was characteristic of science fiction alone, since I devoted this entire essay to the proposition that isophemenal literaure could capture the sublime as well as any metaphenomenal work, using the specific example of Joseph Conrad,  noted pooh-pooher of fantastic tales. I said, among other things:

Plainly, in contrast to the TYPHOON passages I cited earlier in my Conrad analyses, this is Conrad picturing a naturalistic scene with just as much "sense of wonder" as anything in fantasy or science fiction.

And of course the literature of the metaphenomenal-- be it uncanny or marvelous-- may also draw on naturalistic descriptions to the same end of conveying wonder.  Here's another section from Chapter 24 of Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA:

Actual petrified thickets and long alcoves from some fantastic school of architecture kept opening up before our steps. Captain Nemo entered beneath a dark gallery whose gentle slope took us to a depth of 100 meters. The light from our glass coils produced magical effects at times, lingering on the wrinkled roughness of some natural arch, or some overhang suspended like a chandelier, which our lamps flecked with fiery sparks. Amid these shrubs of precious coral, I observed other polyps no less unusual: melita coral, rainbow coral with jointed outgrowths, then a few tufts of genus Corallina, some green and others red, actually a type of seaweed encrusted with limestone salts, which, after long disputes, naturalists have finally placed in the vegetable kingdom. But as one intellectual has remarked, "Here, perhaps, is the actual point where life rises humbly out of slumbering stone, but without breaking away from its crude starting point."

Finally, after two hours of walking, we reached a depth of about 300 meters, in other words, the lowermost limit at which coral can begin to form. But here it was no longer some isolated bush or a modest grove of low timber. It was an immense forest, huge mineral vegetation, enormous petrified trees linked by garlands of elegant hydras from the genus Plumularia, those tropical creepers of the sea, all decked out in shades and gleams. We passed freely under their lofty boughs, lost up in the shadows of the waves, while at our feet organ–pipe coral, stony coral, star coral, fungus coral, and sea anemone from the genus Caryophylia formed a carpet of flowers all strewn with dazzling gems.

What an indescribable sight! Oh, if only we could share our feelings! Why were we imprisoned behind these masks of metal and glass! Why were we forbidden to talk with each other! At least let us lead the lives of the fish that populate this liquid element, or better yet, the lives of amphibians, which can spend long hours either at sea or on shore, traveling through their double domain as their whims dictate!

This dazzling vision-- very much in accord with one of the qualities Edmund Burke found in the sublime, "the richness and profusion of images"-- describes nothing that is either uncanny or marvelous, except for the brief reference to the futuristic diving-suits of Nemo and narrator Aronnax.  Nearly everything in this passage shows Verne attempting to capture the wonder of real submarine life-- most of which, I'm told, he managed to render with extraordinary faithfulness.  Yet without doubt the entire tonality of the scene is charged not with the "atypical-sublime" that one might find in a Conrad wonder-producing story, but with the "strange-sublime," which possesses a different character simply by virtue of the presence of the overall qualify of "strangeness."  Without the marvels produced from the genius of "superman" Nemo--  the diving-suits, the Nautilus-- this richness of imagery would be inaccessible to the eyes of humankind, at least in this fictional universe.  Thus even naturalistic details within a marvelous cosmos might be said to take on "the strange-sublime."

To touch on the concerns mentioned in THREE PART HARMONY, the above section from LEAGUES parallels the first section quoted in the earlier essay: all energies in the excerpt are "at rest," whether or not they are capable of greater activity.  This renders all agents in the except as "microdynamic."

How, then, is the section "sublime" if there is no sense of "might" or of danger?  Kant very definitely alloys the sublime with a sense of possible peril-- thus calling once more for what should now be a very familiar Kant-quote:

“…consider bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky [and other examples of furious nature]... Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range..."-- Section 261.

Schopenhauer more or less agrees:

"The feeling of the sublime arose from the fact that something positively unfavourable to the will becomes [an] object of pure contemplation."

In this essay I disagreed with both Kant and Schopenhauer and allied myself somewhat more with Burke, for all that Burke was of the Empiricist faction:

I can agree with every aspect of [Schopenhauer's] statement but one. For the word "positively" I would substitute "potentially." Longinus, Burke and Kant all agree that the affect of sublimity comes into being only through a subject's contact with some overwhelming power/might/infinitude. However, none of them go so far as to say that this power must be invariably unfavorable to the human will.

Indeed, I would say that many of the most familiar "wonder-inducing" scenes in fantasy and science fiction-- of C.S. Lewis' kid-heroes stepping through a wardrobe to encounter the snowy world of Narnia, of 2001's space-station revolving in orbit to the strains of Johann Strauss-- represent nothing either "threatening" or "unfavorable."  These, I believe, are just one aspect of the sublime, which depends first and foremost on the sense that the subject experiencing the affect feels overwhelmed in some way, even as narrator Aronnax feels at the "indescribable sight" of the world of the coral realm.  Having already addressed the dual nature of the numinous in the above-linked essay, I won't repeat myself on this score.  But the multifarous nature of sublimity is worth keeping in mind as I continue to develop some of these distinctions re: dynamicity.

ODDLY OR STRANGELY SUBLIME

Does one necessarily *need* "arresting strangeness" to convey a sense of the marvelous? It would seem not, but at the same time there must logically be a coherent asesthetic governing these very different approaches to enchantment... -- from this essay.

As much as I admire the deductive reasoning behind C.S. Lewis' introductory essay in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN-- analyzed here and in my other essays referencing Lewis-- one might criticize Lewis for broadly implying that the "awe of the numinous" could be associated only with those things that suggested a "mighty presence," i.e., gods or God, while things of the ordinary/isophenomenal world could only imply "fear."  Clearly Joseph Conrad could find both wonder and terror in the "marvels and mysteries" he creates in his stories, most if not all of which take place in an isophenomenal world of naturalistic presences.

What can save Lewis' insight, however, is a closer look at the the terminology employed by Rudolf Otto, whom Lewis quotes briefly but does not explore in depth.

Quoting myself once more:

In my own conception the pure horror film doesn't necessarily need the element of the supernatural, but it does need the element of the *mysterium,* which is my shortened form for the two Latin phrases invoked by Rudolf Otto is his classic IDEA OF THE HOLY, where he explains the numinous experience in terms of the *mysterium tremendum,* the overwhelming mystery that compels fear and trembling in the viewer, and the *mysterium fascinans,* which compels the viewer to be attracted to the fascinating mystery.

Lewis' trinity of fear, dread, and awe-- which I've paralleled to my Todorov-derived trinity of the naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- works quite well as long as one is considering only the *mysterium tremendum,* which seems to be the only aspect Lewis regards.  But Otto's other formulation, the *mysterium fascinans,* suggests a less antipathetic attitude toward whatever-it-is that inspires the sense of something beyond ordinary experience. 

For instance, regard the opening paragraph of Chapter 3 of Conrad's LORD JIM:

A marvellous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars, together with the serenity of their rays, seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propeller turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme of a safe universe; and on each side of the Patna two deep folds of water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within their straight and diverging ridges a few white swirls of foam bursting in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that, left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre.

Plainly, in contrast to the TYPHOON passages I cited earlier in my Conrad analyses, this is Conrad picturing a naturalistic scene with just as much "sense of wonder" as anything in fantasy or science fiction.  In AGE OF WONDERS David Hartnell centers his definition of the term "sense of wonder" in an awestruck fascination with strange phenomena that does not suggest the aspect of the *mysterium tremendum:*

Any child who has looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they are, how there is no end or outer edge to this place, this universe – any child who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at such thoughts stands a very good chance of becoming a science fiction reader. To say that science fiction is in essence a religious literature is an overstatement, but one that contains truth. SF is a uniquely modern incarnation of an ancient tradition: the tale of wonder. Tales of miracles, tales of great powers and consequences beyond the experience of people in your neighborhood, tales of the gods who inhabit other worlds and sometimes descend to visit ours, tales of humans traveling to the abode of the gods, tales of the uncanny: all exist now as science fiction. Science fiction’s appeal lies in combination of the rational, the believable, with the miraculous. It is an appeal to the sense of wonder.

Now, I've also gone on record as comparing the affect of the "sense of wonder" to the affect identified by Burke and Kant as "the sublime."  Burke and Kant do not make any distinctions as to whether the sublime affect arises from a phenomenon or a fictional work that has either isophenomenal or metaphenomenal characteristics, and as I pointed out here, Burke is as apt to find the quality of the sublime in works as far apart in phenomenality as HENRY IV and THE FAERIE QUEENE.

I have not previously referenced Arthur Schopenhauer's concept of the sublime.  Most of his meditations on it oversimplify its character due to his focus on its antipathetic, *mysterium tremendum* characteristics, as noted on this site:

For Schopenhauer, the sense of the sublime is attained by the aesthetic contemplation of an object that is inherently hostile to one’s will (or to human will in general).

This focus upon hostility, like Lewis' focus upon similar antagonistic states of mind, makes no allowance for the more "fascinated" state of sublimity.  However, in THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, the gloomy philosopher does conceive one notion of the sublime not found in Burke or Kant: the idea that the sublime can appear in differering *degrees.*

I won't quote Schopenhauer's particular examples of sublimity's degrees, since they are all predicated on what I deem an incomplete vision of the concept.  But the notion of such a concept having different degrees proves very useful for my investigations of the sublime in fiction, for I too conceive that there are differing degrees of sublimity according to the phenomenalities of a given work.

Since works of an entirely naturalistic phenomenality are always defined by limitations, in which it is deemed impossible to transcend the cause-and-effect universe, such works do not evoke "arresting strangeness" in Tolkein's sense.  They do, however, depict worlds in which "the typical" is frequently superseded by "the atypical."  This may include anything from an anomalous event, such as a bank robbery, to a personal epiphany, such as Conrad's narrator describes by catching a ship at sea in a mood of sublime repose.

This kind of sublimity/sense of wonder, which does not break with the order of causality, I term the "odd-sublime," in that whatever takes place in the naturalistic world does not transcend either the cognitive or affective aspects of that orderliness.

Works in the sphere of the uncanny and the marvelous, however, fall into a category best termed the "strange-sublime."  Marvelous works break with both the cognitive and affective aspects of normative order, while uncanny works break with the affective aspect appropriate to causal relations but largely stay within the cognitive sphere of causality.

And of course, it should go without saying that the aspects of the *tremendum,* which Lewis's schema captures so well, also fall in line with this division, so that his "tigers" can be repositories of the "odd-sublime," whether they inspire fear or fascination, while his "ghosts" and "gods" incarnate the "strange-sublime" in all its aspects of dread, awe, and fascination.

I should note in passing that "the odd-sublime," where it occurs in naturalistic fictional works, sometimes has such a strong familial relationship with the "strange-sublime" that it can cause makers of film-compendia to incorrectly associate the two.  Many isophenomenal films by Alfred Hitchcock, for instance, are listed in such film-compendia as belonging within the sphere of metaphenomenal works.  But a film like 1972's FRENZY carries none of the "strangeness" of 1960's PSYCHO, even though the two films share a basic subject matter (the actions of a psychotic killer).  If FRENZY is sublime at all, it is only "odd-sublime," and shares more kinship in its phenomenality with LORD JIM, while affectively speaking PSYCHO is a phenomenal kissing cousin to THE LORD OF THE RINGS.





  

CUTEY FUNNY, PART 1

My response to Curt Purcell’s recent question-- "What do cute versions of monsters tell us about horror?"-- will be considerably more circuitous than the responses of other horror-bloggers who’ve thus far responded to the question, and who are listed in CP’s original blog-essay. This is perhaps inevitable given my recent ruminations re: Kantian formulations about beauty and the sublime, as seen here and here.

This essay won’t answer the question per se, but will attempt to place the idea of “cuteness” in line with Kantian concepts of “types of liking.”

Kant’s CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT gives an excellent logical estimation of beauty but doesn’t provide adequate concrete examples. Edmund Burke, who preceded Kant in formulating a general theory of aesthetics, defines beauty in such terms as “delicacy” and “weakness,” in contrast to the awesomeness of “the sublime.” According to James T. Boulton, even in Burke’s time his detractors found Burke’s criteria too predicated on his personal tastes and not representative of broader notions of “the beautiful,” an opinion with which I concur. I’d venture that Burke may also have been attempting to theorize beauty as the opposite of the sublime in every way, which was too extreme an opposition.

It’s true that beauty is not dominantly associated with the same sort of awe-filled experience one may gain from one’s experience of what Kant calls “the unbounded.” But beauty, the experience of that which is bounded, is often associated with a lesser form of awe, or at least one more associated with “order” than with “chaos.”
However, the qualities Burke assigned to beauty, such as “weakness,” apply quite well to the idea of “cuteness,” as long as one predicates that some forms of this weakness are cognitive while others are affective.

Baby animals possess weakness in the cognitive sense, in that they are helpless either to escape or defend themselves from danger. It’s been speculated that in humans the instinct to protect and care for one’s offspring is at the root of the ability to find nonhuman beings or even objects “cute.” But even if this evo-psych explanation could be decisively validated, the impulse has clearly branched out to include many affects that have nothing to do with infant care.

In affects relating to sexual attractiveness, “weakness” translates into something closer to “that which is appealing,” overlapping with Kantian “agreeability.” For a “cute hat,” the question of weakness doesn’t apply, except in the roundabout sense that its appeal may “weaken” an onlooker to its owner’s charms. If a teenage girl considers a bulky football player “cute,” she certainly doesn’t cognize him as “weak” the way a baby is, but rather that he is, in her mind, both agreeable and approachable. By contrast beauty, as a sexually related affect, connotes “difficulty of approach,” along the lines of Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian.

For children, the principle audience for Curt’s “cute critter-creations,” agreeability manifests in terms of empathic bonding. Dolls may be most often used to allow the child to simulate caring for an infant, but they can, as much as other toys, assume other roles: siblings, playmates, parental substitutes, guardian spirits. But it’s important to note that many toys with no “monstrous” associations may represent creatures that are not helpless in nature. Thus a doll that looks like an animal that either is dangerous or is usually perceived so --a lion, a snake-- can as easily become a child’s agreeable companion as a doll based on a creature that looks innocuous. And the process by which a lion or serpent has its less agreeable aspects softened or purged is functionally identical with the process by which Great Cthulhu’s fearsome face-tentacles turn into “bunny ears," as noted in Curt's essay.





Now, unless a child is not raised knowing that lions are dangerous, the “Soft Lion,” like the “Soft Monster,” is a study in contrast, so it carries a different affect from the more purely agreeable “teddy bear.” And as studies in contrast, they are best understood in tune with Schopenhauer’s concept of “the incongruous,” which I’ll explore further in Part 2.

PARALLEL PATHS: THE SUBLIME AND THE MYTHIC

In this essay I demonstrated a parallel between Kant’s concept of the sublime and my concept of the uncanny. In Kant the sublime is that affect arising from the subject’s perception that a given phenomenon seems boundless, even though it may not really be boundless, as in the case of sublime natural phenomena (storm-clouds, mountains, etc.) The uncanny applies to literary elements that suggest a transcendence of ordinary “isophenomenal” causality even though those elements do not transcend in the cognitive sense, as do elements of the other category of metaphenomenality, “the marvelous.”

To expand on the caution I expressed before in the above essay, this parallel does not imply identity, for the sublime can appear in any work regardless of its phenomenal category. I mentioned Maugham’s book THE RAZOR’S EDGE, which contains the sublime affect even though it’s an entirely isophenomenal work, while Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER, a work of uncanny metaphenomenality, has its own sublimities. The same aesthetic applies to the marvelous form of the metaphenomenal, but I stress that a work is not automatically sublime just because it contains marvels that do transcend causality. As mentioned earlier I’ll be examining the 1960 comic-book story “Superman’s Return to Krypton” as an example of this form of sublimity, but first—more Philosophy 302.

As noted earlier, Kant doesn’t give adequate examples of the literary sublime. Longinus, the earliest extant writer to use the term, doesn’t supply more than a few examples, one of which is the “silence of Ajax” scene in Homer’s ODYSSEY. Thus, though one of Longinus’ definitions of the sublime is to say that it is “beyond nature,” he can characterize the sublime in terms that have nothing to do with “nature” as such. By contrast Kant most often characterizes the sublime in terms of natural phenomena, though he does not define it in those terms alone. If one agrees that Longinus’ example is indeed sublime, then a full consideration of the sublime cannot be confined to awesome natural forces, or even to what Douglas Wolk calls “the crush of the infinite.”

Fortunately, though Longinus and Kant don’t give one much to build on, another anatomist of sublimity was more prodigal in his use of examples: Edmund Burke. His 1756 work, "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", is an empiricist take on the affects of the sublime and the beautiful, and is also one of the works to which critical idealist Kant directly responds in the AESTHETIC JUDGMENT. As a post-Kantian I certainly disagree with Burke’s attempt to reduce all affects down to pure sensation. However, Burke provides many useful examples. Most of them are taken from works with marvelous content—the Bible, Virgil, Milton, the Faerie Queene—but at no point does Burke call any of these sublime merely because they are marvelous. His examples are usually presented under categorical headings that suggest aspects of the sublime—“terror,” “power,” “infinity”—but it’s significant that one of his most telling examples is taken from the isophenomenal Shakespeare play HENRY IV:

All furnished, all in arms,
All plumed like estridges that with the wind
Baited like eagles having lately bathed,
Glittering in golden coats like images,
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer,
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly armed
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropped down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus

Burke then justifies calling this scene "sublime" due to its “richness and profusion of images.” This would not be the only criterion applicable to marvelous works, but it applies well in terms of the 1960 Siegel-Boring Superman story.

What sets this superhero-romance tale apart from hundreds of other Superman stories of lesser complexity is indeed its “richness and profusion of images,” as well as (to extend Burke's terms into post-Kantian territory) their symbolic resonance. In AGREEABLE YOU I indicated that one scene alone, with its imagery of violent natural phenomena, might suggest the sublime, not so much in terms of Kant as in terms of Doug Wolk's (erroneous) reading of Kant. But as I said at the end of that essay:

There's another sense in which pop-culture stories can be sublime, beyond their actual depiction of "boundlessness."

Obviously I’m not implying that a 26-page comics-story, in which Superman accidentally time-travels back to his pre-apocalyptic homeworld Krypton, is on the same level of visionary complexity as PARADISE LOST. Nevertheless, the mythic symbolism of the former story should not be discounted, particularly when that symbolism exceeds that of many of the artcomics works touted by Wolk. I’ve mentioned in this essay that a Freudian-flavored interpretation of the story might view the Man of Steel’s return to his homeworld, and his encounter with a woman who name reproduces the syllables of his mother’s name twice, to be a recapitulation of the incest symbol-complex. But it might also be viewed more profitably in a Jungian context, given that the Superman character does not compete with his father as the Freudian paradigm insists he should. Indeed, while on Krypton Superman not only befriends Jor-El, he also becomes more like his father, showing a propensity for scientific invention rarely seen during his heroic phase on Earth. In addition, the sense that all of the wonders of Krypton, natural and man-made, hang upon the precipice of disaster gives the story an aura of tragedy, albeit a very sexy tragedy: more ROMEO AND JULIET than HENRY IV.

I could expound upon other images in “SriK,” such as the peculiar behemoth-creature at the story’s beginning, who leads Superman into his temporal misstep the way the “Questing Beast” of Arthurian tales would lead knights into misadventure, but the general point is made: that sublimity follows along any path that arouses the emotions of fear and awe, even if that path leads one down the hardscrabble roads of commercial comic books.

Neither Burke nor Kant demonstrate any great fascination with mythic symbolism as such. However, I would expand some of the terms they use to describe the sublime, such as "might" or "magnificence," to include the sense of a greater mythic pattern that brings the events of a given story into the wider "family" of mythic narrative.

Once again, I repeat the W.B. Yeats quote I used in my first post here as a touchstone for the "familial" nature of myths of all kinds:

“It is the charm of mythic narrative that it cannot tell one thing without telling a hundred others. The symbols are an endless inter-marrying family. They give life to what, stated in general terms, appears only a cold truism, by hinting how the apparent simplicity of the statement is due to an artificial isolation of a fragment, which, in its natural place, is connected with all the infinity of truths by living fibres.”

As noted above, one of Burke's categories for the sublime also references "infinity."