MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 5

 To cut to the chase, my answer to the question "why is heroic Reiko Mikami such a greedhead sadist" boils down to compensation for daddy issues. 

Given how little information artist Takashi Shiina offers about Mikami's developmental years, it's likely that he never meant to lay bare his character's soul. Though he wasn't unique in concocting a shonen heroine with both positive and negative traits, Shiina may not have wanted to kill his golden goose by dissecting its innards. But that doesn't mean he didn't contrive a working psychological concept of his heroine.  

Mikami's passion for the ghost sweeping profession is first highlighted in the arc "Message from Mother," in a flashback showing Little Reiko with her mother Michie. In present times, though, Adult Mikami believes that her mother has died some years back. Thus it's a considerable shock when Michie time-travels to Adult Mikami's era to ask Mikami and her team to guard over Mikami's younger self, Little Reiko. Then Michie disappears, and Mikami mentions that she was in middle school when Michie died. Mikami tries to contact her still living father Kimihiko Mikami, but he's out of the country, and the incident only reveals to the reader the existence of some emotional rift between daughter and father. Then Mikami and her allies must confront a demon trying to kill Little Reiko for reasons that remain somewhat obscure by the story's end. In any case, Michie returns, so that mother and daughter vanquish the demon, after which Michie and Little Reiko return to their own time.

Shiina later follows up with an arc named "Someday, Somewhere." Though nothing much has been said about Mikami possessing the same time-travel power as her mother, both Mikami and Yokoshima experience premonitory dreams about Mikami's mother. Then a convenient "accident" propels both of them through time back to Japan's medieval era. During a battle with a demon, Yokoshima is killed, and a rage-filled Mikami attacks the demon. However, the fiend hits her with lightning, and this triggers her power, bumping her back a few minutes, so that she's able to save Yokoshima and defeat her enemy. They then return to the 20th century, and the story ends just before "The Man Who Can Summon a Storm." 

Having seen Yokoshima perish doesn't make Mikami any more generous to him, but in "Storm," she does soften when she encounters her childhood crush Saijou. Michie Mikami is still alive at this time, but though we don't know anything about ten-year-old Reiko's relationship with her still unseen father, a much later story will establish that Kimihiko's an absentee father. There's no way to prove that Shiina had fully planned out his intentions with Kimihiko, but on the hypothesis that he always had something sketched out, then Ten-Year-Old Reiko could be compensating for an inattentive father by crushing on an older, and not much less inappropriate, male figure. The conclusion of "Storm," however, suggests that Mikami has become totally invested in making money as self-validation, as opposed to Saijou's selfless altruism.  

I've stated that the earliest "internal chronology" mention of Mikami's fierce desire to make money appeared in an early story, where a middle-school-aged Mikami finds herself at odds with her sensei's desire to exorcise demons without making any profit. This early tale, "Love Needs Its Time," doesn't mention either of Mikami's parents, but it would be interesting to speculate that by this time Michie has passed (or rather, Mikami believes that she's dead). In such circumstances, even a middle-school-aged girl might have needed her father, and if he was still unavailable, that might have caused Mikami to believe that she was totally on her own as a ghost sweeper. Thus the desire to amass wealth becomes the lady exorcist's sole source of validation, which is why in "Storm" she goes catatonic from stress after trying to pursue Saijou's altruistic standards. 

Several episodes later, the arc "Death Zone" starts off with Mikami diverging from her usual habit of disparaging her junior assistant, by showing appreciation of his efforts with a salary increase. That it makes her uncomfortable to think about treating Yokoshima as a human being, rather than as a tool for her profit, is significant. Then another time-travel trip to medieval Japan ensues. Mikami and Yokoshima encounter their "reincarnation ancestors," respectively a demoness named Mephisto and a young exorcist of the medieval era. This is followed, after various interceding arcs, by the previously discussed "Mom's Here," which goes even further in demolishing Mikami's assurance that she won't ever succumb to Yokoshima's dubious charms. 

"Zone" loosely sets up a later series of arcs, over 60 episodes in number, that pits Mikami against Ashtaroth, the "Big Bad" of her entire series. In the arc "Merciless War," Ashtaroth, a demon obsessed with destroying humanity, sends three emissaries to launch hostilities, demonesses whom he spawned, much the same way he earlier spawned Mephisto, Mikami's "reincarnation ancestor." In the arc "The Longest Day," Ashtaroth seeks to subvert Mikami's will by speaking to her as if she were his daughter, making him the first real Mikami "father figure" the readers have seen "on-panel." Little does Ashtaroth know that Mikami is already somewhat father-alienated, so she head-butts him. Unwittingly, Ashtaroth scores more of a point against Mikami in that one of his new "daughters," Luciola, falls in love with Yokoshima. Luciola becomes Mikami's first real rival for Yokoshima's affections, and this state of affairs will eventually lead to Luciola's extinction.

It's in one of these "endless arcs" that Mikami's time-traveling mother Michie returns, taking command of the operation to defeat Ashtaroth. Not till the end of the 60-something episodes does Mikami learn the truth: her mother actually did not die during Mikami's middle-school years but has remained in hiding ever since faking her death. Why? Frankly, I didn't follow the author's logic, but it does make one wonder if Mikami didn't get her manipulative streak from her mother.

Only in a very late sequence did the readers finally encounter Mikami's actual mortal father Kimihiko Mikami-- but in flashback for the most part. Mikami seeks out her trainer Father Karasu and he relates to her, and other members of the Mikami posse, the story of how Michie and Kimihiko met, fell in love and got married. In many ways Kimihiko is the opposite of Yokoshima. Kimihiko possesses a freakish level of super-telepathy, a talent which he cannot control and which causes him to read people's minds and know all their secrets. In fact, after the spirited Michie proposes to him, Kimihiko tries to run away from her, but she tracks him down and compels him, with the intensity of her affection, to marry her. Nevertheless, Kimihiko remains aloof from his daughter throughout her childhood for fear of having a bad effect on her due to his telepathic influence. Ultimately, adult Mikami is able to transcend the disappointments of her childhood, by promising her father-- seen only from a distance-- to mend fences.

That's the last word of the series on fatherhood, both from Mikami's true father Kimihiko and from her "false father" Ashtaroth. Mikami's greediness doesn't play a big role in either of these scenarios, so my critical analysis remains only a weak correlation, since Shiina does not expressly connect Mikami's greed to her paternal issues. Further, by the technical end of the series-- not counting the "earthquake relief" story Shiina produced in 2011, which I'll address in my next essay-- Mikami is still expousing her gospel of profit. 

The story *appears* to commence in the far future, when Mikami, Yokoshima and Okinu have all died, leaving behind their spirits, or possibly just approximations of themselves, to haunt their old agency-building in year 2199. Two modern ghostbusters, a robot and a cyborg, intrude on the "ghosts" not to send them to paradise but to capture their spirits for profit-- but Mikami's superior GS skill defeats her enemies. 

Then Mikami and Yokoshima wake up in present times, having experienced the same futuristic dream. They and their colleague Okinu are then drawn into yet another of many battles with supernatural foes, and Mikami's last words are her motto, "Present profit comes first." The connotation I take from this is that even though Mikami sometimes looks gauche or foolish for wanting money so much, at base her desire for profit is an excuse, a motivation to drive herself to heights of excellence in ghost-sweeping. Her wish to emulate her mother may have engendered that ideal, but there's a reality of running a business that goes with that idealism, and the conclusion suggests that Mikami has reached a perfect balance between idealism and realism. To be sure, the final stories in the series don't provide closure for the 1991-99 series with regard to the Mikami-Yokoshima bond. But the "really final" 2011 story does provide the best of all possible conclusions to GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI.

                              

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MAN WHO CAN SUMMON A STORM" (GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI, 1995)

 As I write this, I've not yet finished reading the entire GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga online, but paused at Volume 2 (1996), three years from the feature's conclusion. In MIKAMI MEDITATIONS I opined that mangaka Takashi Shiina intended to provide an epistemologically grounded psychology for his starring character Reiko Mikami, as to why she was both a peerless hero and a money-hungry businesswoman who exploited at least one employee. However, Shiina chose to dispense elements of that psychology in dribs and drabs. Shiina's biggest "drab" so far, 1995's "Storm," does not provide a total psychology for his heroine, but I'm seeing a strong pattern suggestive of Adler's compensation theory. So I'm writing this essay without reading all of the available volumes of SWEEPER, as something of a test of my method, before finishing the series and seeing what else the artist has in store.

"Storm" doesn't concern any sort of real tempest, and so far as I can tell, it's a metaphor for psychological upheaval. The story starts out largely with the status quo, although after roughly four years of acting the fool, Yokoshima has upgraded his skills, enough to function as an assistant ghost sweeper. But his ability to charm the skirt off Mikami remains non-existent.

Then Mikami learns that there's a competing GS outfit nearby, one subsidized by the Japanese government. She seeks them out, only to find that she knows the head of the agency-- and Yokoshima sees an unusual sight, that of Mikami acting "girly."

Saijou, head of the "Occult G-Men," lived with Mikami's family when she was just a child, because Saijou was training in GS skills with Mikami's mother. It's soon clear to Yokoshima that although Mikami calls Saijou "brother," her attitude toward him is hardly fraternal. Yokoshima immediately assumes that Saijou hopes to conquer Mikami's heart, especially since Saijou is taller, more handsome, and a stronger GS fighter than Yokoshima. However, it's soon disclosed that Saijou really doesn't see Mikami romantically, and his main purpose for seeking her out is to recruit her for his agency. And Mikami accepts, even though government pay is nothing like the money she makes as a private agent.

      

A flashback established that Saijou was the first crush of ten-year-old Mikami, and that she even confessed her feelings to him, though he didn't for an instant take her seriously. To be sure, Mikami only joins Saijou's agency on a probationary basis, and she expects Yokoshima and Okinu to keep running her private business, making big money for her. The young man, knowing Mikami better than Saijou does, enlists some of Mikami's colleagues to make the GS business more profitable than ever. However, when Mikami visits her agency, she's clearly depressed to see it functioning well without her.

Mikami overcompensates by trying to throw herself into her g-men work, but Saijou has seen the way she acts with Yokoshima. He gives Mikami a minor assignment to get her out of the way while Saijou has words with Yokoshima. The younger guy still believes that Saijou is a romantic rival despite the latter's denials, but Saijou still has only fraternal feelings for Mikami, and so he tests Yokoshima in battle. Yokoshima knows he's physically outclassed, so he not only flees battle, he humiliates Saijou with a variation on the old "order 100 pizzas for your enemy" trick.

   

However, Saijou accidentally pushes Mikami over the brink by giving her a mundane assignment--lecturing to schoolchildren-- that he'd easily perform with his altruistic mentality, but which is like poison to the high-spirited exorcist. Saijou, Yokoshima and Mikami's other friends find her in a hospital, not responding to anyone. She mechanically repeats the word "money," but doesn't respond when Okinu holds a pile of cash in front of her nose. She also doesn't respond when her first crush speaks to her. Then Yokoshima declares that her coma-like status means that he can take advantage of her, and Mikami immediately snaps back to normal and elbow-slams him. Saijou realizes that even though he only wanted to work with Mikami for non-romantic reasons, she's more suited to non-altruistic pursuits, so he fires her and returns her to Yokoshima. However, Saijou gets the last laugh by duplicating Yokoshima's "100 pizzas" trick, which has the added effect of putting the hapless schmuck back in the crosshairs of Mikami's wrath.

 So in "Storm," Shiina isn't quite ready to tell his readers exactly what makes Mikami coo-coo for currency. He does show that ten-year-old Mikami crushes so hard on "brother" Saijou that she acts just like a self-sacrificing female, willing to do anything to please her man. Yet when she tries to do it in her mature years, the effort almost destroys her, even though she can face down ghosts and demons without blinking. Further, whatever gave Mikami "gold fever" apparently happened between her pre-teen and teenaged years, going by the story I summarized in MIKAMI MEDITATIONS. "Storm" suggests to me that after ten-year-old Mikami was left behind by her crush when he sought altruistic pursuits, she overcompensated by pursuing a parallel course of heroic action, but only when she was well-paid. So she both followed Saijou's example and deviated from it.

And yet, if money was really all Mikami desired, she would have been pulled out of her coma by the presence of greenbacks. Instead, what awakens the sleeping beauty is not love's first kiss, but the (probably feigned) threat of rapine. Experienced readers are not likely to believe that Yokoshima would ever really rape a woman, in this story or in any other. He's a reader-proxy for very minor acts of molestation-- groping boobs, stealing kisses-- and in this story, he seems to realize, if only instinctually, that Mikami gets "fired up" when he molests her. In part, it stokes her ego to know that she can always kick his ass, while still feeding her sense of self-worth with his constant appreciation of her looks-- both pleasures she could never get from noble Saijou. Where Shiina will take his heroine from here, I don't yet know. But even if he goes in a different direction from "Storm," I expect I'll find his psychological twists just as engrossing. 

ADDENDUM: It belatedly struck me that although the title implies that the new character may be the "man" of the title, it seems to be Yokoshima who actually brings forth the full storm of Mikami's emotions, as opposed to causing her to repress them. That's assuming there's no special Japanese cultural meaning to the phrase, of course.       

ADLER PATED PT. 3

Not that I've mentioned it before, but I've been working on a book explaining my take on the superhero idiom. What I'm printing here now is a section that I wrote for a first draft, only to decide that it no longer fit the general plan any more. This excerpt may repeat some of the points from the ADLER PATED series, beginning here, but that's because it wasn't written for this blog.

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As I noted in Chapter 1, Aristotle’s assertion that all fiction includes an agon or conflict has become a commonplace principle in literary criticism. Aristotle says nothing about any type of conflict being inherently better than another form. However, combative forms of conflict—those in which a dispute was resolved through two or more characters coming to violent blows—became less commonplace in literature as poetic epics gave way to realistic fiction. Violence still occurred in realistic fiction, but it usually lacked archetypal dimensions. There was no sense of a monumental contest when Robinson Crusoe simply used a rifle to shoot down a tribe of bloodthirsty cannibals. In some metamundane works of the post-Renaissance period, such as Gulliver’s Travels, conflict tended toward absurd resolutions. When Lilliput suffers an attack by an enemy fleet, gigantic Gulliver discourages the invasion by urinating on the attackers. Not exactly in line with the Marquise of Queensbury rules.

After I watched an action-movie with a friend, I asked him afterward what if any meaning he assigned to the film’s climactic fight-scene. Why was it pleasurable? His answer was one that most readers will find familiar: audiences enjoy watching characters engage in life-and-death struggles because audience members can’t enjoy such visceral pleasures in real life without consequences. Punch out your mean boss in real life; you get fired and/or go to jail.

Between the years 1907 and 1911, psychologist Alfred Adler formulated the concept of “compensation.” Having studied the ways in which the human body compensated for “innate anomalies of organs”—for instance, weakness of sight—Adler extended his observations into the realm of psychology. Adler argued that from childhood on, human beings inevitably found themselves challenged by their physical and social experiences. For instance, Adler, a second child himself, sometimes discussed how sibling rivalries could evolve when a child felt that his sibling was receiving all the parental affection, thus leading to feelings of inferiority and emotional deprivation that could affect the child even in later life

Though Adler is not as well known today as his contemporaries Freud and Jung, his compensation theory has become axiomatic in modern culture, particularly when dealing with questions like “why people like fictional stories.” The usual response goes something like, “People lead boring lives, so they like to compensate by reading about fictional characters who lead exciting lives.”

There’s undoubtedly a partial truth in this. Even some fictional works, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, focus upon characters unable to separate reality from fantasy. However, Alfred Adler was a little more nuanced than the routine reading of compensation theory. The psychologist distinguished between positive and negative forms of compensation, one being an activity that strengthens the individual, while the other activity has a weakening effect. For instance, in his lecture “Outcomes of Overcompensation,” he points out that paranoiacs are so obsessed with seeing their perceived truths that they manifest “hallucinatory fits.” However, an artist can channel his desire for better sight into art. Adler cites the example of Johann Schiller, a playwright known to have suffered from weak eyesight. Rather than seeking to see better than he could in real life, Schiller channeled his desire for superlative sight into fiction, by creating a hero who could see well enough to shoot an apple off his son’s head: the semi-legendary William Tell.

The “negative compensation” explanation for fictional pleasure is often applied to combative forms of fiction, but it would seem to apply across the board to everything. Do you read stories about romantic love? You don’t have enough love in real life. Do you read stories about faraway places? You’re fed up with your current location. Do you read stories about mad kings and melancholy Danes? You must have a deep-seated envy for the privileges of the monarchical system. By its nature, this concept of compensation accentuates the negative to such an extent that anyone’s taste can be reduced to a simple equation: “You only like X in order to compensate for Y.” Indeed, critics have so often put forth the negative compensation argument against things they don’t like—be it cozy mysteries or big-budget superhero movies—that even the fans of those types of fiction have been known to utter the same arguments, along the lines of “I know it’s junk, but I like it.”

What would criticism look like if it used Alfred Adler’s full proposition, rather than just the half that makes the critics feel good about themselves? Then critics would have to agree that readers of any type of fiction are capable of approaching that genre or form in a positive, self-strengthening manner or in a negative, self-weakening manner. If this is the case, then there must be ways in which combative stories exemplify positive compensation, rather than simply being substitutes for experiences that the audience cannot access.

I said in Chapter 2 that fantasy elements in fiction had the power to open the nearly limitless powers of the imagination. Fictional combat stimulates the imagination as well, though it’s oriented largely on a specific theme: what I’ve called ‘the archetypal battle of good and evil.” In real life, outbreaks of violence are often stupid, pointless, and chaotic. Certain sports-games, like wrestling and football, pit athletes against one another in violent activities, though the activities are dictated by a set of rules. Some fans become so invested in these games that they have been known to riot— usually because their team has lost, though on occasion they even do so when their team wins. But at the core, the society as a whole doesn’t believe that the “villain” in the wrestling-ring is really evil, or that the home-team’s victory makes the community’s life any better.

In fiction, fantasies of a struggle between good and evil can be fully explored, the better to understand one’s ideas of good and evil when they’ve been embodied in the forms of heroes and villains. The fact that the combative form of fiction has been able to prosper over centuries, despite the opposition of so-called “higher culture,” speaks to its pertinacity.

ANATOMY OF A PSYCHO KILLER NARRATIVE PT .2

In addition to the other names given the "psycho killer" subgenre that I mentioned in Part 1, "serial killer" is often used to designate the subgenre in film. It's true that in this sense "serial killer" and "psycho killer" mean almost the same thing, and the former even implies that "the killer must kill again," to borrow the title of a 1975 giallo film.

However, "psycho killer" is a better term in another respect. Unlike other types of murderous monsters, the psycho killer is separated by being the creation of psychological forces, which in turn stem from his place within the cultural concept of monsters: the sense of *modernity.*

If one dates horror fiction from the rise of the Gothics in the 18th century, then most of the classic monsters are linked to their predecessors in archaic folklore: vampires, werewolves, and demons. Even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Monster, despite serving as a prototype for the later science-fiction genre, owes some inspiration to the writings of alchemists like Albertus Magnus. Early cinema was a little more devoted to killers who didn't owe that much to archaic lore, such as the 1925 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, adapted from Leroux's 1910 novel. But even in films, the best known names in horror either sprang from archaic ideas about magic, like Dracula and the Golem, or from an opposite strain: that of proto science fictional concepts like Frankenstein, Doctor Jekyll and Doctor Moreau.

Technically, any of these monstrous menaces might be deemed "serial killers" insofar as they kill a lot of people during their exploits. But vampires, werewolves and the results of mad science don't kill first and foremost out of their psychological maladjustment. Such monsters are the products of magic or mad science, not of bad parenting or broken homes.

The modern idea of "psychology" stems from the late 19th century, and over time provided a new model for motivation. The aforementioned Phantom, of course, pursues a goal of romantic fulfillment in compensation for the physical disfigurement that makes normal life impossible for him. To be sure, the Phantom doesn't actually kill many people in the original novel, but cinematic adaptations have tended to ramp up his kill-count.

Thus I favor "psycho killer" over "serial killer" because the former already implies seriality, and it also implies that the *character* of the killer: that he/she is either a "true psycho" or a "fake psycho." The latter category, of course, would not be conceivable unless audiences could credit the idea of a serial-murdering psycho as a real threat.

Now, in real life "psychos" are considered to be the results of an entirely naturalistic process, However, in fiction, it's possible to have a psycho-killer who conforms to the tropes of the naturalistic, the uncanny or the marvelous. The one common factor they all share is the idea of *modernity.*

Now, whether one is talking about a "modernity" taking place in modern times or in earlier, post-industrial eras, it's as easy to see an uncanny psycho-killer operating with the same basic modus operandi as a naturalistic one, as I pointed out in PENALTY FOR THRESHOLDING. However, what sort of psycho-killer can be both modern and marvelous?

And the answer is "a gho-gho-gho-GHOST!"-- albeit only a very recent revenant.

Thus Freddy Krueger qualifies as a marvelous psycho-killer--

However, the Headless Horseman, were he a real specter, would not, since he's become a thing of legend over the course of years. The same applies to the gigantic spectral helmet that kills a victim at the beginning of THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO.

More examples in Part 3.

SKINNY BUTTS AND ALL

CBR's "Minorities Bitching All the Time" thread (not the real name, of course) gave me another reason to waste time with my own bitching about SJWs. Specifically, Sergio Mims, author of this online essay, takes great pleasure in the box-office success of the currently released black-themed comedy GIRLS TRIP. OK, I wouldn't begrudge anyone, whatever their own race, the privilege of celebrating when a movie that represents a marginalized group-- that of black women, in this case-- enjoys hefty profits.

However, I have an ethical problem when the same writer use his bully pulpit not only to display schadenfreude at the failure of other films simply because they don't feature POC actors, but also displays a sizable amount of reverse racism. Here's Sims on VALERIAN:

It didn't help to make a confusing, visually tedious (despite all the special effects) film based on a mid-1960s French comic book that no one heard of in the United States with two charisma challenged, skinny white leads that no one ever heard of before 

There are three or four things that are stupid or at least dubious about this statement, but I'll confine myself to the one I mentioned on the CBR thread. I took issue with the idiocy of Sims claiming that the supposed physical qualities of lead actors had some relevance to the film supposedly being bad, and wondered rhetorically if it would have been a better film if the leads would have still been "charisma challenged." but "fat and black" rather than "skinny and white." Naturally, I didn't get any substantive debate, but I decided to elaborate my position anyway, saying in part:

The point is that the writer of the article thinks it's OK to use both "skinny" and "white" as pejoratives, which they should not be, any more than "fat" and "black."

Yet try to imagine the reaction if a professional reviewer claimed he hated seeing a Queen Latifah movie because he didn't personally enjoy watching a "fat black woman." All three words are completely descriptive of Queen Latifah, but the bare assertion would be deemed racist because it's automatically racist to criticize black people.  The logic of the accusation, such as it is, is rooted in the idea that any criticism of marginalized people is also an attempt to further marginalize them. This is a fallacy, as is the idea that you can make white people want to see more POC in the cinema by fostering a negative visual image of white people. Hence the lunkheaded remark of the reviewer, who's OK with racist body-shaming as long as it's directed at white actors.

I also remarked that within the ten to twenty years it's become a common thing in pop culture to have black characters piss on white characters by remarking on their "skinny butts" or "narrow behinds." I assume that this is some sort of negative compensation, in which said characters represent that part of real black culture that isn't content to glorify "big butts" (paging Sir Mix-a-lot) but has to try to shame anyone who doesn't have a particularly protuberant posterior. There is also, in black pop culture, a lot of anxiety about the fate of "acting too white." So why is it not 'acting white" to attempt to assign negative qualities to another race due to their physical qualities?

Here, by the way, are the actors who are supposedly too "skinny" for Mister Sims, and I'd have to say that they look pretty normally proportioned to me.

By the way, male lead Dane DeHaan seems to be a fairly experienced American actor, appearing in the second AMAZING SPIDER-MAN film, and while female lead Cara Delevingne started as a model, she showed up in the box office success SUICIDE SQUAD. It's true that neither actor is well-known enough to carry a film. But would Sims be protesting the leads' lack of box-office clout if they weren't white? Suppose the characters Valerian and Laureline-- who have always been Caucasians of implied French ancestry-- had been played by two other SQUAD actors, Viola Davis and Jay Hernandez. Would we hear protests about the foolishness of casting them, since neither has proved capable of carrying a film-- or would that be DIFFERENT?

HEROES AREN'T HARDBODIES TO FIND

Backing up a little: though I've stated that there out to be a "unity of action" between a work's overthought and underthought, that doesn't mean that the two have to agree in all respects. Given that they spring, respectively, from the didactic and from the mythopoeic potentialities of the creative mind, it would hard to imagine such perfect agreement.

After all, I established in THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS  that certain stories could be "underthought-dominated stories," my example being the "Origin of Metamorpho." In that story the symbolic discourse is very complex and the didactic discourse is very simple, which is entirely the reverse of the POGO sequence discussed in that essay. Since it's my project to suss out complex mythicity wherever I find it, whether accompanied by a strong didactic theme or not, I make no bones about including both (1) works that are "underthought-dominated" and (2) works where the two thoughts are equally strong: for instance, Morrison's FLEX MENTALLO.

An "overthought-dominated" work will align itself with the sphere of "thematic realism" as I've examined it in many earlier essays, while an "underthought-dominated" work will align more with the sphere of "thematic escapism." In works like MENTALLO, though, the artist has a foot in both worlds, so that the two potentialities interact to a greater extent, as I stated in Part 2 of THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE:

I have maintained, however, that the relationship between "realistic works" and "escapist works" is closer to that of conjoined siblings, dependent on one another for life.  

The course of said interaction, though, doesn't always run smooth. Note my comment in the FLEX MENTALLO review:

Wally observes that the Golden Age of superheroes was “pretty simple,” boiling down to the “Charles Atlas hard body homoerotic wish-fulfillment.”  (I disagree, but this one interpretation doesn’t undermine the general strength of Morrison’s theme.) Wally then observes that the Silver Age changed the paradigm. “Strange transformations, multiple realities, dreams, hoaxes… it was like the hard body began to turn soft...” I could carp that this description mostly applies to the line of Superman comics supervised by Mort Weisinger, with a little Julie Schwartz on the side, but it’s still a stimulating reading.

Now, Morrison has stated in interviews that sometimes he comes up with bizarre fantasies through a process akin to free association. However, there's nothing "free" about this association: it's a familiar opinion in a number of film studies I've encountered, and I feel reasonably sure that Morrison encountered some comparable opinions in his own reading. The notion of the hardbody as a homoerotic fantasy appears in Wertham's SEDUCTION, and it seems to come up almost any time a film-studies prof chooses to analyze any sort of action or adventure film. Case in point: here's a review-except describing Neal King's 1999 HEROES IN HARD TIMES, from this site:

"King's analysis remains valuable for the contribution it makes in taking seriously an oft derided and dismissed form of popular culture that speaks directly to issues of masculinity…. This book will be a useful resource for those interested in understanding how images of hyper-masculinity--the "hard man"--represent both the excess and the ordinary parts of masculinity in cinema. King's methodology is helpful in reading media texts, and his provocative interpretations of these films--particularly his readings of homosocial sadomasochism--will likely generate much discussion." 

Unlike the majority of the film-critics, Morrison isn't explicitly trying to put his heroes on the psychiatrist's couch so that he can find out what terrible traumas caused them to overcompensate by becoming superheroes. Unlike many if not all of the academic critics, Morrison doesn't seem to be indulging in a "nyah-nyah, you think you're manly when you're really GAY" sort of ressentiment. Still, Morrison is in the business of shocking his audience, so whether or not he really believes that Golden Age heroes were homoerotic wish fantasies, the appearance of such a statement in the voice of his viewpoint character suggests that it may hold at least a provisional truth for Morrison-- though to be sure, the character making the statement is a superhero fan who is not, in any obvious way, gay.

So here we have the overthought and the underthought, while definitely bound together by the narrative's unity of action, coming down on opposite sides of Adler's compensation theory. Underthought is saying that superheroes are a part of the collective unconscious, and that lines them up with the idea of "positive compensation," which benefits the organism. Overthought is saying that superheroes at least begin as homoerotic fantasies of "hard men," which seems to align with "negative compensation"-- although apparently the same fantasies can become soft and thus "feminized"-- which *might* be a type of positive compensation in Morrison's world.

The entire homosocial/homoerotic reading of adventure-fiction, of course, might be just as rooted in "negative compensation" as Dirty Harry's massive magnum or Clark Kent's blue undergarments: critics may like to feel like they've one-upped the hardbody. But in so doing, they overlook a basic principle of adventure-fiction: that characters, male and female alike, may simply get harder because the body gets harder when you exercise properly, eat all the right foods, and punch a super-villain in the mush twice a day.

MORE COMMENT PRESERVATION

From a CBR thread this time:

_____________________
Well, I'd automatically put aside comparisons between entertainment and addictive substances. You can put alcohol and tobacco through the proper chemical analyses, and indicate pretty much what makes human beings want them. Thus far, no one's managed to do that with fiction,

The comparison between entertainment and domestic violence is wrong in a different way, Say that it's been statistically demonstrated that nine-tenths of all kids who witness domestic violence grow up to perpetrate domestic violence. But the kids of abusive families are not CHOOSING to see their parents batter one another; it's utterly outside their control. In contrast, patronizing violent entertainment is a CHOICE. The patrons may or may not be messed up by their personal circumstances, and they may or may not be employing what Adler called "negative compensation" to escape his problems. But we don't yet have proof that nine-tenths of, say, all horror-gorehounds become serial killers, perpetrators of road rage, or whatever.


I tend to think that entertainment has been violent since the dawn of humankind-- albeit with oscillations in tune with cultural priorities-- because fictional violence does serve as a stopgap. The contrasting view-- that violence ought to be rigidly controlled-- was once the province of pundits like Frederic Wertham and his fellow-traveler Gershon Legman. Given the effects of wild anti-comics claims, I might have thought that modern comics critics would shun that sort of extremism. Instead, I've seen both Wertham and Legman being represented as sober scholars rather than extremist cranks-- and I guess that too has much to do with current antipathies toward the very idea of representing violence, no matter how unreal it may be.


_____

A follow-up:

I'm not following. The anti-comics movement of the time may or may not have comprised a majority of the populace, but they had power because they appealed to a common belief among the majority, to the extent that that majority thought about comic books at all. That majority believed that comic books were for children, and so the majority of people did not oppose the minority that demanded some form of censorship. So, in effect, the vocal minority got their way by appealing to societal customs-- though the end game of Wertham was to get comics put off limits to children.

I can't see why you'd say Wertham lost. True, he didn't get the scenario he expressly said he wanted: because he didn't trust comic-book publishers to clean up their own houses, he wanted the magazines off limit to kids under 15-- which, I think we'll all agree, would have killed the medium if that scenario had been implemented. But in effect, Wertham won, because he got the U.S. government to intervene at all, regardless of what they actually did about the perceived problem. The Senate probably didn't want to be bothered with monitoring comics on a regular basis, and so they were probably satisfied with horror and crime comics were for the most part exiled from newsstands.

Yes, the comics publishers may have had less than honorable motives for their clean-up campaign, but it can be argued-- and I think John Goldwater did say something to this effect-- why should the guys who were providing clean entertainment be penalized by the ones who were promoting sex and violence?  Even though I myself favor a pluralistic marketplace, where "clean" and "dirty" both have their place, I can empathize with the logic of this statement; obviously the statement of someone who didn't want his own corner of the business destroyed.

"Comics won?" Well, specific comics companies did not win. We'll never know if EC Comics would've lasted much longer, but in effect they were driven off the stands, and Max Gaines only saved his bacon by converting MAD into a B&W magazine format. There's only one way in which I can see that comics benefitted. Because the majority audience didn't have the animus toward superheroes that Wertham did, the "cleaner" comics-atmosphere paved the way for superheroes to become relatively more sophisticated in the Silver Age, ranging from Julie Schwartz's love of SF-themed gimmicks and Stan Lee's emphasis upon dramatic moments. But in between 1955 and 1960, a lot of people were hassled by the Code or lost their jobs because of it.

COMPENSATION, KENOSIS AND PLEROSIS, PART 2

I've never claimed to be an expert in the culture of archaic Greece, so I can only make tentative assertions based on fragmentary evidence. Within the halls of academia, there may be extensive analysis of the provenance of these terms, but the most thorough references I can find on the Net credit Hippocrates and related medical authors for using the two terms in my title-- "kenosis" and "plerosis"-- to mean "an inadequate diet" and "a more-than-adequate diet." It should surprise no one that these arcane technical terms originally connoted something having to do with the body, pertaining to whether it was too empty or too full-- both conditions that are opposed to one's diet being, as in the Goldilocks tale, "just right."

In Theodor Gaster's schema, there are two primary types of ritual action performed for both kenosis and plerosis, and each is focused on creating a distinct mood for the witnessing audience:

First the rites of mortification, symbolizing the temporary eclipse of the community. Next the rites of purgation, by which all noxious elements that might impair the community's future welfare are eliminated. Then the rites of invigoration, aimed at stimulating the growth of crops, the fecundity of humans and beasts, and the supply of needed sunshine and rainfall throughout the year. Finally, when the new lease is assured, come the rites of jubilation; there is a communal meal at which the members of the community recement their bonds of kinship by breaking bread together, and at which their gods are present.

These descriptions may or may not be adequate to describe all forms of archaic ritual activity, but they adapt well to the Fryean scheme of the four mythoi, which is my main concern here.

In Part 1 I asserted the logic of Alfred Adler's compensation theory, in which individuals might seek to compensate for various forms of conflict-- or what Hans Selye calls 'stress"-- in various ways. Some compensation strategies might prove negative in that they weakened the individual who pursued said strategies, while others would be positive, in that they made the individual stronger in some way.

I've been exploring, and will continue to explore, the ways in which fiction does or does not succeed in terms of the mythopoeic potentiality. This is a purely formal argument that does not impact directly on considerations of positive and negative compensation, though in Part 1 I stated that any such considerations would have to line up with my analysis that fiction had to be true to its greatest potential.

Because of my concept of *thematic escapism,* I've validated a lot of narratives that other critics have viewed as "fascist." I won't repeat my various arguments here, but one that I advanced in the March essay POSSE COMIC-TATUS might also be seen in terms of Adlerian compensation for the mythos of adventure. In that essay I wrote:

In my essay TORTURED, PROSAICALLY, I largely defended the trope of inquisitorial torture from the usual attacks on it, but noted two exceptions, in which the television programs 24 and HAWAII 5-O indulged in the trope purely for the sake of showing the hero in the position of doling out violence without restraint. These shows were in part bad because there was no sense that the authorities involved might face any consequences for their actions, and in part because they were, in Sadean terms, stupid and unimaginative. At least when a Mickey Spillane hero tortures someone, there's a sort of brain-fevered fascination with the act itself, and I've often thought that Spillane's ideological posturings were just an excuse to bring about retributive violence. In other words, Spillane, like Sade, esteemed violence for its own sake, not as a means for preserving the police state.

The exploits of Mike Hammer and Jack Bauer depend heavily on retributive violence, which means that they pertain to the mythos of adventure, which according to my adaptation of Gaster's four moods is primarily meant to be "invigorative" in its effect upon its audience.  But I would have to say that the Sadean air that Mickey Spillane brings to his righteous heroes is one that can "strengthen" the reader if said reader is able to read it as a wild fantasy, rather than mistaking it for a rendition of reality. In contrast, the "stupid and unimaginative" fantasy of the teleseries 24 lacks any of the qualities seen in the Spillane works. Both are "plerotic" works, in that the audience is supposed to feel invigorated by seeing evildoers defeated by the representatives of social good. But I label only Spillane as being a "good plerotic meal," while the contrasting examples are the sort of meals that will make one feel full, but in a way that weakens the body and the mind.

COMPENSATION, KENOSIS AND PLEROSIS

I haven't revisited Theodor Gaster's concept of "kenosis and plerosis" for some time, but it's occurred that some of my writings on the subject should be cross-compared with my observations on Adler's concept of "positive and negative compensation."

In this April essay, I cited what I found to be the closest Alfred Adler came, at least in a particular collection of his works, to giving examples of positive and negative compensation with respect to a particular bodily activity: that of sight:

As a negative example of overcompensation, Adler posits a situation in which a paranoiac is so impelled by "the drive to see" that "the weakness of the overcompensation expresses itself in hallucinatory fits and visual appearances"... In contrast to this, Adler gives a positive example of a documented writer with poor vision: Friedrich Schiller, who exorcised his nearsighted demons by creating a fictional hero reputed for faultless aim and vision: William Tell.

I further observed that many elitist critics tended, unlike Adler, to view all such heroic fantasies as if they were negative compensations, as if they were automatically bad for being "escapes from reality." Since I have from the beginnings of this blog championed the idea that "fictions of escape" cannot be judged by the same terms as "fictions of realism,"  my verdict in this essay was that the only sin of a given fictional narrative can manifest is that of not living up to its potential as fiction:

This, then, would be my criterion for both "negative compensation" in literature and the only ways in which fiction can be correctly seen as escaping responsibility. Only when a given work of a given mode fails to be true to its own mode would it be "escaping" from anything in a negative manner; that of escaping from its own potential as fiction.

That said, aside from the very broad categories of "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism," I've also tried to map out how particular types of potential are oriented according to other criteria. Northrop Frye was my original guide in terms of viewing every fictional narrative as being principally dominated by a type of *mythos:* each of which owed something to Frye's elaboration of material from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray. I kept two of Frye's terms for these mythoi, "comedy" and "irony," and substituted modern terms "drama" and "adventure" for his terms "tragedy" and "romance." In my opinion the substituted terms were more in keeping with the actual affects that each mythos was meant to invoke, not to mention being more in tune with the formulations of Theodor Gaster. Gaster was certainly a primary force upon Frye's meditations in 1957's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, though Frye, being more taken with the Aristotelian model provided by Murray, did not say much about Gaster's formulations.  I, in contrast, was particularly taken with the predominant "moods" that Gaster identified in his four types of myth-ritual narrative, and how these moods followed patterns of what the archaic Greeks called "kenosis" and "plerosis." Over the years I've endeavored to meld Frye's schema of the four mythoi with Gaster's schema of the four moods, as in this 2012 essay:

In the first part of HERO VS. VILLAIN I aligned drama with irony in terms of what Theodor Gaster terms *kenosis,* the process that expels harmful energy from society, and adventure with comedy in terms of *plerosis,* the process that brings positive energy back into the community, in the following terms:

,,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

In the rituals Gaster describes, one must assume that both *kenosis* and *plerosis,* as societal rituals, were intended to have beneficial effects upon the society that practiced them.  The question of "escaping from potential as fiction" does not even come up in the context of religion.

However, because fiction is almost always presumed to be man-made, the question of whether or not it does its job well-- whether one uses terms like "positive and negative compensation," or "consummation and inconsummation"-- is one that recurs again and again.

In Part 2 I'll address some of the complexities involved in applying Adler's compensation argument to my adaptation of Gaster's concepts of plerotic and kenotic narratives.

COURAGE OVER FEAR

Suddenly, might is not an overwhelming force that exists outside the human subject, imposing fear as the lord does to the bondsman.  Might is something that can be summoned from within oneself, and is thus available to all human subjects who manifest the necessary will.  In addition, might is plural in nature: it has many faces, and in folktales and fairytales this many-sidedness often appears when a beleaguered viewpoint character receives supernatural help from some benign donor to "even the odds" against a powerful enemy.Thus, 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. -- THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE, PART 2.

Despite my liking for Nietzsche's concept of the *ubermensch*, I can't say that THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA is my favorite book on the subject. The philosopher's alter ego Zarathustra uses the concept to illustrate his ideal of "self-overcoming," a point which was resolutely ignored by later pundits in favor of the calumny that Nietzsche was a worshiper of violence, an anti-Semite, and a proto-Nazi. Though Nietzsche is clear enough on his core philosophy to anyone willing to read closely, it's not always pellucid as to what he's opposing. Zarathustra, speaking largely in a series of quasi-poetic, incantatory aphorisms, rails against all sorts of metaphorical evils that represented the mediocrity of European, calling them things like "the small men," "the Ultimate Man," "the fleas," and "the tarantulas."

Keeping this criticism in mind, in the section "On Science" Nietzsche is extremely clear when he advances a doctrine about "fear" and "courage." Since ZARATHUSTRA was not one of my favorite Nietzsche-reads, I think it's unlikely that this particular section influenced my "ethic of the combative," which as I've noted began from the seeds spread by Hegel and tended by Kojeve and Fukuyama. It's possible that Nietzsche, who's known to have read at least some Hegel (whom he did not overly like), may have absorbed some aspects of Hegel's "master-slave" dialectic. If so, he clarified some of the aspects of the dialectic that I found too obscure in Hegel.

"On Science" (translation here by Thomas Common) carries over from earlier sections in which Zarathustra has been convening with several disciples ("higher men," as Nietzsche calls them). One of the disciples, whom is described as "the conscientious man," advances a doctrine that defines humankind as the product of fear.

"Thou praisest me," replied the conscientious one, "in that thou
separatest me from thyself; very well! But, ye others, what do I see? Ye
still sit there, all of you, with lusting eyes--:

Ye free spirits, whither hath your freedom gone! Ye almost seem to me
to resemble those who have long looked at bad girls dancing naked: your
souls themselves dance!

In you, ye higher men, there must be more of that which the magician
calleth his evil spirit of magic and deceit:--we must indeed be
different.

And verily, we spake and thought long enough together ere Zarathustra
came home to his cave, for me not to be unaware that we ARE different.

We SEEK different things even here aloft, ye and I. For I seek more
SECURITY; on that account have I come to Zarathustra. For he is still
the most steadfast tower and will--

--To-day, when everything tottereth, when all the earth quaketh. Ye,
however, when I see what eyes ye make, it almost seemeth to me that ye
seek MORE INSECURITY,

--More horror, more danger, more earthquake. Ye long (it almost seemeth
so to me--forgive my presumption, ye higher men)--

--Ye long for the worst and dangerousest life, which frighteneth ME
most,--for the life of wild beasts, for forests, caves, steep mountains
and labyrinthine gorges.

And it is not those who lead OUT OF danger that please you best, but
those who lead you away from all paths, the misleaders. But if
such longing in you be ACTUAL, it seemeth to me nevertheless to be
IMPOSSIBLE.

For fear--that is man's original and fundamental feeling; through fear
everything is explained, original sin and original virtue. Through fear
there grew also MY virtue, that is to say: Science.

For fear of wild animals--that hath been longest fostered in
man, inclusive of the animal which he concealeth and feareth in
himself:--Zarathustra calleth it 'the beast inside.'

Such prolonged ancient fear, at last become subtle, spiritual and
intellectual--at present, me thinketh, it is called SCIENCE."--

Zarathustra counters with an argument that defines humanity in completely opposite terms.

Thus spake the conscientious one; but Zarathustra, who had just come
back into his cave and had heard and divined the last discourse, threw a
handful of roses to the conscientious one, and laughed on account of
his "truths." "Why!" he exclaimed, "what did I hear just now? Verily, it
seemeth to me, thou art a fool, or else I myself am one: and quietly and
quickly will I put thy 'truth' upside down.

For FEAR--is an exception with us. Courage, however, and adventure, and
delight in the uncertain, in the unattempted--COURAGE seemeth to me the
entire primitive history of man.

The wildest and most courageous animals hath he envied and robbed of all
their virtues: thus only did he become--man.

I'd love to know what scientists of his period Nietzsche believed to be guilty of defining humankind predominantly in terms of fear. Regardless, I believe that he was fundamentally correct. Adherents of empirical science validate the logic of "cause and effect" above all other principles, with "Occam's Razor" wagging its tail behind. Thus if the simplest explanation seems to be that humankind developed out of a need for security, to reduce fear's sway, then that would also be the correct explanation. It's surely no coincidence that H.P. Lovecraft, whose early flirtations with religion were dispelled by his conviction in the empirical sciences, penned the following:

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

Nietzsche was no less influenced than Lovecraft by the empirical science of his time. However, to judge from the words Nietzsche places in the mouth of his prophet, the philosopher believed that "courage" was "the entire primitive history of man"-- and that's keeping in mind that he's speaking of the "man" who is not even close to becoming the transcendent "superman:" the superman that, by his own attestation, Zarathustra believes in but has not actually seen. Whereas Lovecraft, who loved horror stories, defined humankind in terms of a negative reaction to "fear of the unknown," Nietzsche founds his vision of humanity in terms of "delight in the uncertain." I'll mention that these opposing viewpoints may also be glossed by Adler's notions of positive and negative compensation, on which I expatiated here.

I'll explore some of the ramifications of Nietzsche's viewpoint in future essays, but this essay is constructed largely as a resource for the viewpoint as such.

COMBAT PLAY

I've often remarked that ideological critics are a superstitious, humorless lot, in that they're obsessed with performing "purity tests" for artists-- not just for those that advance reactionary political schemes, like Margaret Mitchell, but even for creators who show liberal tendencies, like Joss Whedon and Quentin Tarantino, but aren't quite militant enough for the ultraliberals' tastes. Yet I use the word "militant" advisedly, because most ideological critics are particularly superstitious about any expression of force or violence, as I examined in detail in Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3 of A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE.

In that essay-series I mentioned how a pacifist political figure of the 19th century, Adin Ballou, coined the phrase "Might makes right." Throughout the following century, most ideological critics have shared Ballou's implicit opposition to this state of human affairs. Throughout the 20th century all types of heroes-- not even just the boulder-shouldered supermen, but also the purely ratiocinative detectives-- have been accused of promulgating "lynch law" in the name of some murky governmental organization.  This mood of continual ressentiment leads, ironically enough, to its own form of "lynch law," in which the ideologues can condemn anybody for anything, without providing any sort of internally consistent proof. I cited various non-HU examples in Part 1 and Part 2 of VICTIMOLOGY 101.

That said, I'm not utterly opposed to reading fictional narratives in terms of what moral lessons they *may* directly convey to audiences, but all such readings require (1) a basic understanding that fiction is not a form of direct moral address in the same way that non-fiction is, and (2) the courage to to build a solid case against a narrative's alleged immorality, rather than simply depending on simplistic, knee-jerk associations. Most ideological critics are not willing to go to this much effort, though many of them will pay lip service to preferring logical examination of issues over "the rule of force."

I've often theorized that the emotional pay-off from the ideological outlook is that it makes the ideologue feel as if he's made a difference by talking about the "tough issues" of racism, sexism, and so on. Ideologues ranging from Nathanael West to Rod Serling have chosen to view heroic fantasies as being "negative compensation" at best, and "bread and circuses" at worst. But if we go with Alfred Adler's own definition of the term he invented, then "negative compensation" only takes place when the person fails to show "courage" in adapting to a negative situation. One will never get an ideologue devoted to the ideal of social realism to view any form of heroic-or-violent fantasy as "positive compensation." But when the ideologues cite simplistic, knee-jerk ideas in lieu of solid evidence, they themselves are guilty of a failure of courage, and so fall within the vale of "negative compensation" by the terms of their own ideology.

Now, I've put forth a high-flown, Hegelian defense of "the combative mode," despite my knowledge that few if any popular critics will be able to grapple with the issues this defense raises. Yet the defense is not, in itself, my own "emotional pay-off." For me to have typed so many words fine-tuning all ideas relating to "the combat myth," it obviously carries some personal association, which I'll deal with more fully in Part 2. Clearly no form of "the combat myth" means anything to the ideologues, either because the myth never meant anything to them, or because they felt its impact as children but have come to associate it entirely with childhood. By the standard of *intersubjectivity* as I've outlined it here, the ideologues are not wrong, in terms of taste, not to like something that I like. They are only wrong in terms of promulgating bad logic to lift up whatever they like at the expense of what I like.

There's a key irony here. I'm fully aware that one of the very things I like about the "combat myth" is that it doesn't resemble the way real life arranges its various conflicts-- say, with courts and governments and insurance companies. That's one of my main reasons for liking it, whether one cares to believe that's "negative compensation" or not. In contrast, the ideologues want fictional narrative to conform perfectly not to reality as it is lived, but to one that clearly marks out who are the good people and the bad people-- yet not in any escapist terms, but in terms that are supposedly responsive to "reality."

More later.

ADLER PATED PT. 2

I've often referenced Alfred Adler's theory of compensation on this blog, particularly in the series COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS, beginning here. In the first of those essays, I loosely compared Adler's idea of "positive" and "negative" forms of compensation with the two forms of fictional "escape" Tolkien references in his essay ON FAIRY STORIES: in the sense of "escape from responsibility" and of "escape from a prison"-- implicitly as much a conceptual prison as a physical one. I considered expanding on that thought for a full essay, but felt that I needed to study Adler a bit more than I have since I wrote this 2009 essay.

I chose to read THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ALFRED ADLER, an overview of his work  edited by one Heinz Ansbacher, with copious excerpts from Adler and explanatory notes form Ansbacher. I did not find the main thing I was looking for: a single Adler essay in which he expatiated at length on his two forms of compensation. However, this idea definitely appears in his first work on the subject, 1907's "Organ Inferiority and Compensation." In this essay Adler sets the groundwork for his conviction that pathological psychological conditions may evolve out of a subject's perception of personal inferiority: "The inferior organ is not a pathological formation, although it represents the basic condition for pathology." As a negative example of overcompensation, Adler posits a situation in which a paranoiac is so impelled by "the drive to see" that "the weakness of the overcompensation expresses itself in hallucinatory fits and visual appearances." Adler is certainly not saying that all paranoia evolves out of imperfect visual apparati-- he states that he does not offer his examples as "complete proof"-- but puts his examples forth as a tenable explanation for certain cases.

In contrast to this, Adler gives a positive example of a documented writer with poor vision: Friedrich Schiller, who exorcised his nearsighted demons by creating a fictional hero reputed for faultless aim and vision: William Tell. Current elitist criticism generally deems this form of compensation to be "negative." I mentioned in COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS, Jerry Siegel himself portrayed himself as the weakling who couldn't get lots of girls, and "compensated" by creating a mighty hero who easily attracted the female of the species.

What does it mean, that Adler deems this form of "artistic exorcism" as a positive response to perceived inferiority? Ansbacher notes that about the same time Adler broke away from Freud's circle and his doctrine, Adler took a palpable influence from the now-forgotten philosopher Hans Vaihinger. Ansbacher says of this author:

Fictions, according to Vaihinger, are ideas, including unconscious notions, which have no counterpart in reality, yet serve the useful function of enabling us to deal with [reality] better than we could otherwise.

Adler's former mentor Freud could not place any value on such fantasies, and he stands as one of the greatest influences upon the tendency of 20th-century intellectuals to devalue fantasy and/or "the pleasure principle" in favor of a supposed "reality principle."  Whereas Adler eventually wrote "I began to see clearly in every psychological phenomenon the striving for superiority" his old mentor wrote pessimistically that all should "abandon the belief that there is an instinct toward perfection at work in human beings." Most amusingly, Freud is so pessimistic that for him there could no future evolution along the lines of Nietzsche: "[The leader of the primal horde] at the very beginning of mankind was the Superman whom Nietzsche only expected from the future,"

Now, so far as I can tell from the Ansbacher book, Adler did not write of "negative compensation" in terms of literature. As he was a psychologist, he was most concerned with the ways in which human beings became psychologically dysfunctional. I have no idea if he had any particular feelings about the popular fiction of his day, though if he validated Schiller's personal fantasy of a far-sighted archer-hero, I would posit that he might not be entirely hostile toward the pop-fiction "supermen" of the early 20th century. At worst he might consider them in the same terms as Vaihinger: useful fictions that help one deal with reality.

In elitist criticism, it's a given that all escapist fiction is by its nature a "negative compensation" that insulates the audience from reality, as I've noted with respect to Theodor Adorno in particular. "Positive compensation," if one could put the elitists' convictions into Adler's terms, would presumably be the sort of "high literature" that validates the intellectual's struggle for personal meaning.

For a pluralist like myself, the matter is more complex. Though I prefer works with symbolic complexity to works without it, I can't state outright that the latter are "inferior organs" next to the latter. Even a story that works as nothing but a good "thrill-ride" fulfills, for me, Tolkien's definition of fantasy as an "escape from a prison," i.e., "positive compensation."

So is there a principle that works across the spectrum of "art-fiction" and "popular fiction" that parallels both Adler's "negative compensation" and Tolkien's "escape from responsibility" (which, to be sure, is not something Tolkien himself endorses; he's simply explaining the position of his opponents). The closest I can come is to repeat what I said in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4.  Both types of fiction are fundamentally defined by the activity of "play," though "art-fiction" is play turned to the purpose of "work," while "pop fiction" is play for play's sake. In that essay I said that I found that DESPAIR, a work of "thematic realism," was inferior to Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST because the former had too little "play," while THE CLANSMAN, a work of "thematic escapism," was inferior to GONE WITH THE WIND because the former showed too little "work." This, then, would be my criterion for both "negative compensation" in literature and the only ways in which fiction can be correctly seen as escaping responsibility. Only when a given work of a given mode fails to be true to its own mode would it be "escaping" from anything in a negative manner; that of escaping from its own potential as fiction.

TAKING STOCK OF 2014

In the early years of this blog I didn't trouble much about "first posts of each year." But I did so at the beginning of 2014, so I might as well ring in the new year in the same manner.

From my admittedly biased POV, 2014 was an important year in filling in some important elements of my literary theory.  If my "big discovery" of 2013 was my slow determination was that Kant's "dynamic sublime" did not adequately explain all aspects of the fictional sublime, a.k.a. "the sense of wonder," then for 2014 it was my chance exposure to Roy Bhaskar's work on scientific phenomenology. As described in this essay, Bhaskar's work proved helpful in guiding me away from the influence of C.S. Lewis and his persuasive but ultimately unrewarding meditation on probability. In the same essay I suggested a new refinement for the methods by which the phenomenalities of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous" appeal to the wonder-seeking audience.

Now I would rephrase [the above] to say that the combinatory-sublime arises rather from the transgression upon the reader's expectations in terms of intelligibility and regularity. DIRTY HARRY, a naturalistic work which conforms to general expectations regarding intelligibility and regularity, has its own proper level of mythicity but is not likely to inspire a high level of the combinatory-sublime because of said conformity. ENTER THE DRAGON conforms to expectations regarding regularity but not intelligibility; being "anti-intelligible," it has a higher potential to arouse the combinatory-sublime. And STAR WARS, which violates both intelligibility and regularity, has the greatest mythicity of the three in reality, as well as the greatest potential for symbolic combinations and thus for the combinatory-sublime.

Now, 2015 may bring even further refinements. But if I'm correct in thinking that Bhaskar's terminology has provided me with a firmer ground for the NUM theory that I ever derived from Lewis, Cassirer, or Todorov, then the question arises: is there an efficient way to communicate the theory of the combinatory-sublime to the actual seekers of wonder, the readers of horror, fantasy and science fiction?

That it represents my own responses to the joys of metaphenomenal art goes without saying. But the proof of the theory is, at least partially, to be found in practice.  I would expect that some readers of metaphenomenal literature would be somewhat more approachable to analyzing their responses in philosophical terms. They might not be up on all the Burke and Kant stuff, but a simple essay dealing with what makes marvelous images appealing-- something along the lines of COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT. 3-- might be one avenue of approach to the more bookish of the book-readers.

As for fans of fantasy-movies or fantasy-comics-- I have a feeling such analytical ruminations would not be to their taste. Whenever I've put forth feelers on such subjects on forums devoted to popular media, I almost get the feeling that these fantasy-fans have allowed their dominant culture to define the metaphenomenal experience for them, as with, "I know it's fantasy, but I like it anyway." Unfortunately this admission can lead anti-fantasists to accuse said fans of practicing simple "negative compensation," which I've attempted to refute here repeatedly.

It may be that one of my impending projects for 2015 may yield a better forum for these insights than one among a thousand blogs.  We shall see.