THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS

 I recently re-screened the 1965 Italian horror-film BLOODY PIT OF HORROR but have not yet reviewed the movie on my film-blog. What I found interesting was the way many IMDB reviews treated PIT as comically overstated, though it's not nearly as overbaked as many other "so bad they're good" flicks like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE or TROLL 2. In terms of the general plot, BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein. In fact, BLOODY PIT was filmed at the same castle, Palazzo Borghese, as two previous Euro-horror movies, THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA. The fact that BLOODY PIT comes in for so much disproportionate hilarity suggests to me that something in the way it was filmed, more than the story per se, tickles many viewers' ideas about the fragility of fantasies.

Now, in this essay, I quoted Jung as asserting that all creative work is entirely dependent on "fantasy thinking," a position with which I wholly concur:

Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." (Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, 1921, page 63.)

Now, the examples of PLAN 9 and TROLL indicate that the free play of fantasy is not an unalloyed virtue. Games need rules to impose limits on the limitlessness of the imagination, and neither Ed Wood nor Claudio Fragasso were able to formulate rule-systems that made sense for their respective monsters.   

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is directly efficiently if unenthusiastically by Massimo Pupillo, whose disinterest in the horror genre has been widely reported. There are no "Ed Wood" moments that call attention to directorial blunders or FX-shortcomings, so I assume that most of the hilarity stems from something closer to the realm of TROLL 2. Yet the core idea of PIT is no different than that of the celebrated Roger Corman Poe-film PIT AND THE PENDULUM. In Richard Matheson's adaptation of Poe, some innocents-- albeit far fewer in number than those in the 1965 film-- suffer torments by a man who believes himself to be identical with a famous torturer who in reality died years ago. But without looking, I don't think that if I check the IMDB comments for PENDULUM, I will find viewers bagging on that movie for its supposed absurdities, as this viewer did for Pupillo's movie.

The film is filled with lots of sadistic torture and is reminiscent of the German film, THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (talk about a great title). However, unlike the German film, this one is much sillier and the horrible punishments really don't look all that realistic--just cheesy. But, because it is made so poorly (with horrible dialog and action throughout), it is worth seeing to have a few laughs.

I, however, don't find fault with the execution of BLOODY PIT's torture-scenes as that reviewer did. Here's the central visual trope that makes modern viewers take the menace of PENDULUM seriously:

The menace in PENDULUM looks like a respectable Gothic malefactor; he's dressed in dark colors and looks like he means business. Now here's the not dissimilar torture-happy menace in BLOODY PIT.

Because the evil "Crimson Executioner" looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie, I suggest that's the real, and maybe the sole, reason that so many viewers think that BLOODY PIT is so hilarious. Other films are structurally similar, and many may be more badly directed than this one, like the two vampire flicks mentioned above. But they lack such a vivid visual trope.

I don't know exactly why someone chose to juxtapose the masked-wrestler image with that of a Gothic torturer. I'll explore some possibilities in my formal review of the movie, but in this essay, I wanted to spotlight the notion that one or more of the scripters had an agenda. Any agenda probably did not come from Pupillo, who was hoping to move on from horror films to more reputable genres. I think one or more of the writers made some chance correlation between the violence of Gothic films and that of the "muscleman" films. Yet none of the six scripters credited on IMDB have any huge number of outstanding accomplishments in the writing department:

RALPH ZUCKER-- Besides PIT, Zucker did one obscure western, another Gothic horror from 1973, THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT, that I for one found blah, and KONG ISLAND, which is a fairly stupid mad-science jungle flick.

FRANCESCO MERLI-- four other writing credits, but none of the productions are known to me

RUTH CARTER-- aside from PIT, Carter's only other credit is as one of four writers who "adapted" Edgar Allan Poe to produce Pupillo's other major horror flick, TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE, which was a Barbara Steele vehicle.

CESARE MANCINI-- same as Carter except that he also contributed to some romance movie.  

ROMANO MIGLORINI and ROBERTO NATALE-- And here we finally find a couple of guys who racked up a respectable number of writing credits-- 16 for the first guy, 29 for the second-- though the only outstanding credits they garnered, for a couple of Bava films, came after PIT and TERROR CREATURES, on which they worked alongside Carter and Mancini.

So, in the absence of anyone who looks like an "auteur," I'm going to guess that some or all of the writers convened to figure out what to do with yet another film set in a Gothic castle-- and that instead of going with something obvious like another demented follower of Torquemada or another vampire, just decided that their fiend would be the furthest thing possible from those sort of menaces: a torture who put his chiseled musculature on display more than his torture-devices. That nod to the least obvious sort of menace-- much like Claudio Fragasso's vegetarian goblins-- had no chance of being taken seriously, at least to the extent that audiences responded to obvious menaces like vampires. 

And yet the virtue of that appeal to the unobvious got BLOODY PIT a lot more attention than it would have garnered otherwise, even though it was attention of the "so bad it's good" ilk. In my review I'll hold forth on a few things that make BLOODY PIT a more mythic film than simple goofs like TROLL 2 and PLAN 9, so I'll sum up by saying that sometimes flights of fancy can flout the rules in such a way as to create new games, as good or better than the old ones.         

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 2

I have to backtrack a little with regard to my statements here about Stephen King's take on Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief."

I wrote in part:

I agree [with King] that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories.

I thought King was slanting his argument a bit by comparing a highly complex metaphenomenal writer like HPL with an isophenomenal writer with a reputation for very simple bestseller fiction. (I think King was playing to that reputation, whether he had read any Hailey books back then or not, though I never have and so can only go on general allegations.) That's why I said the materialist literary author Joseph Conrad would have been a nearer match in terms of literary complexity.

However, though I still believe King's comparison of HPL and Hailey was off-kilter, King's standard would be true in terms of the ways in which isophenomenal authors of any complexity-level approach the phenomenality of their fictional worlds, in contradistinction to the way metaphenomenal authors face those same considerations.

Isophenomenal works, whether they are as complex as a Conrad novel or as simple as a Franklin Dixon HARDY BOYS (just to name something I did read in great quantity), are alike in that they utilize the same range of phenomena. I say that this range is "isophenmenal" because, even though nothing in Conrad or Dixon is actually "real," it is supposed to be "the same as" (Greek "iso") what a majority of readers would deem the expected phenomena of this world. That's not to say that there aren't potential readers who believe in their heart of hearts that everything that seems solid and dependable could vapor away if some god or computer-network sent the message. But they will always be outnumbered by the majority of readers, who are governed by what Cassirer called "naive realism, which regards the reality of objects as something and unequivocally given" (LANGUAGE AND MYTH, p. 6). An isophenomenal author cannot vary from what is known about the real world. At most he might introduce some little-known fact of nature that might have some of the charm of novelty, simply because the reader had not heard of said fact.

Every metaphenomenal work, though, whether as complex as a Lovecraft story or a simple as a Gerry Conway SPIDER-MAN tale, goes "beyond" (Greek "meta") what we expect of real-world phenomena. Further, even writers who pick up serial fantasy-concepts created by other authors are usually obliged to add new fantasy-concepts to the series-- Conway's most famous contribution being The Punisher. King is right that in order to formulate the ground rules for any fantasy-cosmos, however complex or simple, do require a special "muscular" effort for one to engage with whatever type or types of metaphenomena the author chooses to depict. This "muscular effort" has nothing to do with the parallel "muscular effort" that determines whether or not the work is complex or simple.

In Part 3, I anticipate expanding these thoughts with respect to the two complementary forms of the metaphenomenal, the uncanny and the marvelous.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN

 I borrowed the phrase "Strength to Dream" from Colin Wilson's book of that title, but only for the basic felicity of the phrase, not because I'm discussing any of Wilson's themes here. (I'm fairly sure I read it many years ago and have placed it on my to-be-reread list.)

I began thinking about the association of "strength" with "dreaming" thanks to the works of two famous writers who discussed how readers accept what I call metaphenomenal fiction. The first writer is Samuel T. Coleridge, whose most famous phrase in common parlance may not be anything from his poems, but from his autobiography, wherein he coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief." 

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

I confess that I have never read the full text of the bio, but I doubt that Coleridge uses the phrase again since none of the online references mention more than the one quote. The book concerns Coleridge's far-ranging theory of poetry, and so is not primarily about the ways fantasy-loving readers justify their preferences. In fact, the full context of "suspension of disbelief" is that Coleridge and William Wordsworth, in collaborating to produce various poems for their 1798 collection LYRICAL BALLADS, took two differing approaches to poetry, with Wordsworth favoring "things of every day" while Coleridge concentrated upon "shadows of imagination" that necessitated "poetic faith." Early in the history of this blog I described this literary dichotomy as one between works of "thematic realism" (Wordsworth) and "thematic escapism" (Coleridge), though in recent years I've inclined more toward an opposition between "verisimilitude" and "artifice," as in the last year's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2:

"Verisimilitude" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limits of the physical continuum, while "artifice" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limitless nature of the continuum of abstract concepts. 

 

Coleridge did not develop the "suspension of disbelief" concept, but many later writers quoted it and gave their takes on the idea, among them the second writer I mentioned above: Stephen King. King's 1981 book DANSE MACABRE largely concerns his theories about the horror genre, just as Coleridge's biography concerned poetry. King mentions "suspension of disbelief" in Chapter 4, where he extrapolates a meaning of "strength" from Coleridge's "suspension" metaphor.

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

And then he validates many fantasy-fans by turning a pitying eye upon those persons who reject all metaphenomenal content as being unreal in terms of real experience:

They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

Though I like King's extrapolation of Coleridge, ultimately it's a little too simple. I agree that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories. In Part 2 of 2015's THE DOMAIN GAME, I contrasted Conrad with Tolkien:

What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns.

Coleridge's contrast between his chosen form of poetry and that of his colleague Wordsworth is also a much fairer one, and I find it interesting when he says that Wordsworth does not just sedulously reproduce the everyday things he sees, but that he gives them "the charm of novelty." It does take a "muscular intellectual act" to re-organize the things of common experience to make them into art, even art that may argue that it's silly to read fantasy-stories (say, Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY). To pursue an opposition for the dream-metaphor I've introduced, the advocate of realism may often believe that he's "awakened" from the delusional dreams of religion or superstition. I of course relate these modes further to the categories of cognitive restraint and affective freedom, but at present these do not need further elaboration in this new context.

On a small side-note, the decade in which Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on the LYRICAL BALLADS-- said by some to have launched the English Romantic movement-- is also the decade in which the Gothic novel enjoyed its first major flowering with such authors as Radcliffe and Lewis, with a second but distinct outgrowth evolving in the next twenty-odd years with Mary Shelley, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Allan Poe. Though there had been scattered important metaphenomenal works throughout the 18th century, the 19th century would be conceived in the midst of ongoing arguments about the virtues of naturalistic fiction as against stories of fantasy, many of which are still argued about today, and which inform the warp and woof of modern fiction.

LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 1

On January 13 reader AT-AT Pilot helped spur a new line of inquiry by writing the following in the comments-section of TAKING STOCK OF 2021:

I keep looking at the Archetype and NUM blogs noting the titles you've rated as having good or high mythicity. I think you've mentioned that high-art films are not usually mythically potent...

I don't doubt that I've said something along those lines, and since it reminded me of my various essays on "work and play," I scanned some of those posts first. I found this section in 2019's CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2:

I have to reiterate that it's always possible for an author to "dumb down" the expressive symbolism in a narrative in order to get across some limited didactic message. When an author does so, he has to some extent sacrificed "play" on the altar of pure "work" by making the narrative function as persuasive rhetoric. That said, creators who have deep reservoirs of imagination may still at times produce narratives that have the qualities of mythic play even though the authors are trying to convert an audience to some position.

This essay was not in itself a statement of principles regarding the various forms of "high art" and "low art," but I've certainly analyzed the differences between those literary categories many times over the years, and the earliest ARCHIVE essays on that theme are probably the two THEMATIC REALISM essays from 2008.

Here's a relevant section from Part One:

Coleridge's example of the Arabian Nights tale is, like the JUSTICE LEAGUE story I critiqued, not especially concerned with morals as such-- or at least, not to the extent that the ANCIENT MARINER is. Both tales are, in a formal sense, "escapist," though I note that I use the word non-pejoratively. Neither Gardner Fox nor the Arabian Nights scribe existed in a time before fiction had been used for didactic moral purposes, of course, but both stories can be fairly regarded as "vacations from morals." It is not that the protagonists of the tales do not perform actions that the reader considers "good" rather than "bad," but that there is not a true moral dialectic as such.

By contrast, a tale like Coleridge's MARINER, or (to give a superheroic parallel to the JLA tale) WATCHMEN, are clearly tales that are much concerned with analyzing the ways mortal men deal with the moral elements in life, no matter how fantastic their situations. There's nothing wrong with this kind of fiction, and I don't necessarily share Coleridge's opinion that MARINER would have been improved by lacking a moral, especially since he proved himself more than able to summon such a non-moralistic expressiveness in poems like KUBLAI KHAN. However, there is in comics-fandom a considerable prejudice toward a belief opposite to the one Coleridge expresses: that a narrative is *always* superior because it addresses specific dialectical moral issues. Not only is not the case, it can be a prejudice that falsifies the genuine polysemous quality of literature, as I'll show with another example in Part II.

And here's some similar discourse from Part Two:

I noted earlier that much of what we deem to be “real literature” can be distinguished by its thematic commitment to what Freud famously called “the reality principle,” no matter whether the narrative in question portrays a “realistic” version of the world (Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE), outright fantasy (Ursula LeGuin’s WIZARD OF EARTHSEA), or something between the two (Pynchon’s CRYING OF LOT 49). The same principle obtains with those works that fall squarely within the category of “thematic escapism,” which is oriented on what Freud calls “the pleasure principle” and wish-fulfillment. One may envision a middle-ground between the two categories for works that may strike a balance between these opposed themes, but it would seem beyond question that there are notable works that are polarized enough to belong far more in one camp rather than the other. 

 

I also stated in Part Two that both "thematically realistic" and "thematically escapist" works could be rich in mythicity, and I still believe that, though in recent years I've moved more toward aligning literary works with newer terms like "cognitive restraint" (for "realism") and "affective freedom" (for "escapism.") The aforementioned dichotomy of "work and play" has also been around almost as long as realism/escapism, and I wrote a series of three essays, whose main point I summed up in the 2015 essay PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS:

In the third essay of the series THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, I started from Jung's proposition that art should be fundamentally defined as "play," but that so-called "serious art" and "escapist art" respectively would have to be separated out as "play for work's sake" and "play for play's sake."

FUNCTIONS also correlates this work/play dichotomy with my formulation of the four potentialities, but I'll put this matter to one side for the moment, in order to address some possible deficiencies in my definition of realism, and how it might be better elucidated with reference to my titular categories of "the limited and the limitless."

 

 

THE NEVER-ENDING BATTLE OF REALISM AND ESCAPISM

Here's a mini-essay I wrote in response to a post on this CHFB thread regarding the recent demise of highbrow film critic John Simon:

__________

I may write a longer essay somewhere in response to this, but for now let me break this down into a couple of different factors.

First, to clarify my position, I have my own problems with certain aspects of "comic book movies," though my complaints are more in the nature of whether or not they could be better as comic book movies, and not because of their effects on other movies. 

Second, I don't want anything I say here to be misconstrued as a defense of contemporary "serious movies." I think they've been in an awful slump for the past twenty years, which is not outside the influence of the so-called "summer blockbusters," though it's arguable that superhero movies as such didn't become a dominant genre until 2008, when the MCU found ways to make even formerly second-rate comics-characters marketable. So IMO I think the slump in quality may have come from other factors, though it's arguable, I suppose, that if there'd been no MCU there would still be continued TRANSFORMERS and NINJA TURTLES franchises.

Third, I think things like CGI effects and hyper-active editing are not directly responsible for any lack of variety in modern movies. I think these are epiphemona to the greater phenomena of "escapist entertainment," and for a couple of centuries, even before movies existed, critics and "serious artists" have caviled at the influence of unserious entertainment. Before we had movies, William Wordsworth carped about carnival sideshows, for Thoth's sake. The argument about the deleterious influence of summer blockbusters, of STAR WARS specifically, and even barely related entertainment phenomena like "slasher films" have been around since the seventies. Maybe some really good films have been killed off because producers were chasing the bright shiny ball of The Big Pay-Off, but I don't think "Good Films" have ever really ceased to be made at all, even if studios make them more for the purpose of the sake of reputation than for filthy lucre. When I go through Oscar's best-films nominations for the 1990s-- by which time  high-priced genre films were all over the place-- I still think a lot of those films stand with the best of Classic Hollywood. But once we get into the 2000s, there's a notable fall-off in quality.

To sum up, it's that drop-off from one decade to the next that makes me suspect other factors, some curious failing that separates a good drama like AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999) from a empty exercise like CHICAGO (2001). 

I have no theories as to what caused this failing, which I've seen for the last 20 years in most of the alleged "best films."

But I just don't think escapist entertainment is the cause-- which, to bring this post back to the main topic, is one of my big disagreements with both "highbrow" critics like Simon and "middlebrow" types like Siskel and Eberr. 

OVERTHINKING THEMIS, UNDERTHINKING MOIRA

Followers of Zeus claimed that it was with him that Themis produced the Moirai, three Fates.^[10] A fragment of Pindar,^[11] however, tells that the Moirai were already present at the nuptials of Zeus and Themis; that in fact the Moirai rose with Themis from the springs of Okeanos the encircling world-ocean and accompanied her up the bright sun-path to meet Zeus at Mount Olympus.-- Wikipedia entry on Themis.

I have to assume that the academics I've quoted on the subject of Moira's co-existence with Themis were influenced by something like the Pindar fragment cited above. In 2010's LURKERS ON THE THRESHOLDS, I wrote:

Just as [F.M.] Cornford had shown that Moira, a sanctity older than the gods, was identical with the origin of social order, so Miss [Jane Ellen] Harrison pointed to the ensuing process of social evolution, where Themis represents the behavior dictated by social conscience... Above all, Themis was "Justice in the realm of Zeus," which checked the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement, symbolized in a Mother Goddess who suffered a yearly death and rebirth through her son.-- Henderson, THRESHOLDS OF INITIATION, PP. 10-11.

I haven't read Harrison's THEMIS and so can't be sure if Henderson has correctly represented her views. Still, I also pointed out in LURKERS that Ernst Cassirer entertained similar views,  so to some extent the opposition of Moira and Themis has become independent of Harrison's specific views. For Cassirer, Moira represents human governance by a god-centered, "mythical" mode while Themis represents a man-centered "ethical" mode.

I've devoted considerable space to the difference between the Frye-derived concepts of "the overthought" and "the underthought," which I've aligned with the literary modes of "realism" and "escapism" respectively. Further, I would add that the "overthought," the more logical and discursive function of literature has displaced the function of the symbolically associative "underthought" in the world of criticism much as the ideal of Themis supposedly replaced that of Moira.

And yet, even though there's a place for works dominated by rational overthought or by "irrational" underthought, my concept of pluralistic tolerance doesn't keep me from finding superior those works in which overthought and underthought are balanced. In such works, the artist has access to what Jung called "the collective  unconscious" and the many archetypes found therein, rather than his simply using discrete symbols for the sake of allegorical illustration.

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference might be the various iterations of the STAR TREK franchise. Though there are certainly some inferior episodes within the three seasons of "Classic Trek," Roddenberry in his capacity as head producer (for the first two seasons, at least) infused the show with a substructure of mythical ideas that balanced the show's apparent enshrinement of sweet reason.

In my commentary on the second-season episode "Amok Time," I mentioned that even though the writer was Theodore Sturgeon, I suspect that Sturgeon came up with the idea for the story as one he hoped that a producer with Roddenberry's tastes would purchase: one focused on the struggle of two males over a female. Even the caveat that one of the two doesn't actually want the female-- that Kirk is actually fighting Spock with the object of saving Spock from a more dangerous antagonist-- does not banish the archetype that I've termed "Savage Masculinity." This archetype of "men gone wild" persists in many episodes penned by many authors-- all of whom, it's been alleged, Roddenberry re-wrote for his own purposes-- and helps keep the TREK universe from being too antiseptic.

Years ago I engaged in a mammoth re-watch of most of the TREK epigoni, all except for NEXT GENERATION. I searched in vain for any sustained use of an archetype with the mythic power I've associated with "Moira." But even though a lot of these episodes were entertaining, the writers of the epigoni had next to no understanding as to how to invoke the deep level of the underthought. Rational overthought dominates almost everything, and for the most part there's no sense that any other mode of thought can even exist.

Vulcans were not very popular with the executive producers of the epigoni up until the last series, ENTERPRISE. Even in that series, the series-makers were not able to grasp the dramatic contrast of Vulcan culture's conflict between impulse and rationality. But if there was any episode that best shows the producers' incompetence in the realm of Moira, it would be the 1997 VOYAGER episode, "Blood Fever."

Here the purely rational drama dwells upon regular character B'Eleanna Torres and her interaction with a minor crewperson, a Vulcan male named Vorik. Because the starship Voyager is far from the parent Federation and its planets, Vorik experienced a "pon farr" just as Spock did in "Amok Time." Like Spock, Vorik desires to get back to his homeworld to marry and spawn a designated fiancee. However, when circumstances seem to frustrate Spock in this goal, he at least contemplates having sex with a female crewperson to defuse his sexual torment. Captain Kirk makes it possible for Spock to carry out his ancient rituals of "marriage or challenge," but no one aboard Voyager can do this for Vorik. He works a Vulcan whammy on Torres, almost causing her to desire to mate with him. However, because such forced nuptials would be condemned as immortal by the show's audience, Torres is able to resist the Vulcan mind-magic. Finally Vorik initiates the "marriage or challenge" ritual, but this time, "the bone gets to fight." Torres roundly defeats Vorik in unarmed combat and defuses both his sexual desire and her own.

Now, the basic idea of a female character standing against a male aggressor CAN be archetypal. But here the writer of "Blood Fever," one Lisa Klink, merely uses both Vorik and Torres as flat representations of male desire and female resistance respectively. "Blood Fever" is by no means the worst example of a latter-day TREK-tale that has "too much Themis on its mind." Nowhere in the episode is there the sense that the "pon farr" is rooted in a centuries-old ritual designed to organize the interactions of males and females. Instead, it's just an inconvenient alien quirk that has to be defused so that Vorik can go back to being a useful member of the crew. (Not surprisingly, he never has a major plot devoted to him afterward.)

This suggests to me that the author's ability to make free associations with symbols has to be to some extent independent of moral considerations. Authors who are too concerned with framing moral messages cut themselves off from the depths of their own creativity. Thus the concept of Moira underlying Themis gives literary support to the philosophical opinion of Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.”

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.

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.

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.

FRYE UNDER FIRE

I have strayed into the fields of the Hubristic Underminers once more, but in this essay at least, I'll confine myself to reflecting on some of the blog's recent comments on my favorite critic, Northrop Frye.

Actually, I was a little surprised to see any mentions of Frye on HU at all. I had seen one of their contributors dismiss Frye as "old-fashioned"-- albeit on a forum, not on HU itself. Thus I thought it unlikely that any of HU's pundits would display an interest in the late Canadian myth-critic-- if only because his synoptic orientation, relating to seeing all literature as part of a vast pattern, would mean little in terms of HU's vaunted ideological aims.

Frye did get mentioned, albeit in passing, in Chris Gavaler's THE PHYSICS OF FICTION. After I read this essay, I googled Frye's name alongside that of HU, and saw a handful of essays that cited Frye, though none did so in a more substantive manner than Gavaler's piece. While I'm still surprised that the HU crew is even aware of Frye, the paucity of substantive writing suggests that he's merely a name to conjure with for these essayists, not someone that they trouble to research with the same intensity that they pursue the tortuous tautologies of Marx and Freud.

Gavaler's primary reference to Frye appears only because Frye is quoted by a critic with whom Gavaler disagrees:

Rothman resurrects Northrop Frye to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing genre system, but the Frye model’s four-part structure (novel, romance, anatomy, confession) is more likely to spread chaos (“novel” is a kind of novel?). 

Now, I myself expressed some ambivalence about Rothman's citation, to wit:

As for Rothman, I see where he’s going with the invocation of Frye, but the four forms Rothman cites are not especially relevant to current literature. However, in the ANATOMY Frye also elucidated four *mythoi”– which he termed the romance, the comedy, the tragedy, and the irony– that are far more applicable.

For instance, some critics might say that WATCHMEN is good because it skewers the traditions of the adventure-oriented superhero narrative, which in Fryean terms would be “romance.” But that view is simplistic. WATCHMEN is a good work within its own mythos, that of the “irony,” whose nature is to satirize and downgrade all forms of human experience, not just types of disreputable pop-fiction. If adventure-oriented superheroes are good, they are either good or bad according to the romantic parameters they follow– but not because they don’t have enough satirical shit in them.

So I can give Gavaler a pass regarding his ambivalence on the "novel category" thing, since I myself don't think it's currently useful. However, later Gavaler once again assails Frye on his supposed lack of consistency:

Literary fiction is another problematic term. It traditionally denotes narrative realism, fiction that appears to take place here on Earth, but it’s also been used as shorthand for works of artistic worth. With the second half of the definition provisionally struck, we’re left with realism. Its solar center is mimesis, the mirror that works of literature are held against to test their ability to reflect our world. Northrop Frye declared mimesis one of the two defining poles of literature, though he had trouble naming its opposite. Frye located romance—a category that includes romance as well as all other popular genres (and so another conceptual strike against the Frye model)—in the idealized world, so Harlequin romances are part fantasy too (real guys just aren’t that gorgeous and wonderful). 

In my own adaptation of Frye, I foreswore his term "romance" in favor of "adventure," in part because currently the word "romance" does have this modern connotation. However, I pointed out that Gavaler had falsified Frye's supposed "trouble" in naming the literary mode opposed to verisimilitude. I commented:

[The center’s] more like a binary star, and the people facing the other “sun” are the ones who like Borges more than Trollope.

I don’t think Frye had any difficulty naming the opposite of mimetic realism. In the ANATOMY he contrasts “versimilitude”– which is the reigning principle of the mimetic– with “myth.” And I quote:

“Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle’s word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story.”

There have been defenders of “literary myth” in the humanities long before Frye, such as Andrew Lang. Their voices just weren’t as loud– hence, Gavaler’s description of modern criticism as being totally oriented upon verisimilitude/ mimeticism.

Interested parties may check out Gavaler's response for themselves, but I found it superficial at best. I suggest that Gavaler dismissed Frye's image of a spectrum with two opposed modes because he's thoroughly in love with his "mimetic solar center" image, and Frye's continuum simply doesn't allow for such centrality.

Gavaler's confidence in the centrality of "the mimetic" extends to describing a experiment that supposedly demonstrates the pre-eminence of the mimetic mode. I won't spend any time describing it-- again, interested parties can check it out for themselves-- but I view it as a stunningly useless pseudo-experiment, one which doesn't even begin to answer my implied question, "If mimeticism is so on top of it all, how did Jose Luis Borges become a Literary Light?"

No big changes here, so no surprise that everything at HU stays the same.

WORKING VACATIONS

I recently posted this simplified summation of my work/play concept on a forum-thread dealing with the question of whether or not superheroes were intrinsically juvenile.

"Escapism" is an important concept here, because on occasion (not necessarily on this thread) people sometimes conflate it with all things juvenile, which is not the case.

On my blog I've frequently contrasted two modes of literature which can be constructed for both juvenile and adult audiences. There's "escapism," which I consider "the literature of play," and "realism," which is "the literature of work."

Playing games means accepting a prescribed set of rules and limitations that aren't based on real-world means and ends, even if they might be loosely patterned after them (RISK, STRATEGO). But there's no real-world benefit from playing games. In a way, the player accept the game's fictional limits as a means of escaping the real world of limitations like inconvenient death, romantic loss, etc.

Work is all about means and ends, and the literature of work, "realism," is all about getting its audience to come to terms with mortal limitations. We may think of juvenile works as being only about escapism. But if someone writes a book for kids, aimed at coming to terms with the loss of loved ones, then that's both a "realist" work and a juvenile work.

Not that one has to be only within a naturalistic world in order to be "realistic." Lewis's Narnia books are aimed at kids, but their intent is to give the young audience a simplified grounding in the author's ideas of Christian philosophy. That's aimed at achieving a particular end by a particular means, and so I consider Narnia "realistic" in its thematic sense, even though it's a fantasy-- just as I do WATCHMEN and a handful of other "mature superheroes."

I've also occasionally asserted that the literature of thematic escapism functions as a "vacation from morals," moral prescriptions being the primary cultural manifestation of limitation: of what a member of a society must or must not do to remain a viable member of that society.

Early in THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Northrop Frye discusses the ways in which types of melodrama-- he mainly references the detective story and the "thriller"-- can invoke in their audiences feelings of moral indignation, which might under different circumstances might involve the ideal of work in its sense of "means and ends."

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye was IMO completely correct in assuming that the violent aspects of these "thrillers" is insulated by "a wall of play." However, he was wrong is assuming that it was "not possible" for critics to take violent melodramas "seriously" enough to believe that they were indeed "advance propaganda for the police state." About thirteen years prior to the publication of Frye's ANATOMY, Marxist Theodor Adorno attacked all products of the so-called "culture industry" as manifestations of a new fascism, though his analysis of the relation of violence to its audience may sound more Freudian than Marxist:


In the very first sequence [of a story] a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized amusement changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction [until] the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.

In 1949, Gershon Legman self-published his book of essays, LOVE AND DEATH, which in part assailed comic books as institutionalized fascism, virtually duplicating Adorno's argument about how it served the ends of an implied "police state" that wanted citizens to fantasize about venting violence on scapegoat victims so that said citizens would then accept any punishment the government dished out.

And of course, there's the debbil-doctor himself:

Superman (with the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and "foreign-looking" people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasize themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them—by force.


And, lest anyone reading think that these views no longer have currency, here's reliable Noah Berlatsky, from the comments-thread in which I recently participated, taking the POV that all superheroes are essentially cops, representatives of a police state:

 superheroes function as a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force; they’re doing the dirty work of justice that even the police can’t do. That’s a lineage that goes back to the KKK; I don’t think it gets out of the dynamic I discussed. I think that applies to a lot of the lone badass against the system narratives too. 


What all of these individuals have in common is that they have refused to give the melodramatic entertainments they attack the credit for being "play." Thrillers, comedy cartoons, and superheroes are all defined by the "work" that the culture industry wants them to do, whether it's to create admiration for the forces of law-and-order or to provide "bread and circuses" so that the citizens won't notice how beaten-down they are by the forces of authority. Escapist melodramas might provide vacations from whatever morality these elitists tout as superior, but since the melodramas are working for authority, they only supply "working vacations."

Clearly I'm with Frye in believing that the consumers of these fantasies, violent or not, have the awareness to know that they're engaging a playful activity that doesn't represent the way the real world works. It can be fairly stated that concerns of "realism" do appear in any work, no matter how "escapist," be it a story set in the audience's own world or in some "Dungeons and Dragons" universe. But the element of play generally takes precedence, though permutations do arise in both the escapist mode and the realistic mode, as discussed more fully here.

The biggest problem of the "heroes are fascist" argument is that it soon becomes entirely tautological, like Freud. In Freud's opinion the Oedipal theory was validated whether or not  a man did or didn't marry a woman like his mother. A man who married a woman like his mother confirmed Freud's theory directly; a man who married a woman completely unlike his mother was undergoing "displacement," which in some roundabout way still validated the Oedipal theory.

Similarly, most of the "heroic fascist" arguments fall into the same circular arguments seen above. Does the hero work directly for the government? Then he's a fascist. Does the hero work on his own, reporting to no authority? Then he's "a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force." Is the hero a badass fighting against the system, like (say) Snake Plissken? The argument will admit of no meaningful exceptions: the badass fighting the system is a fascist too. In other words, everything proves what the theory's proponent wants to prove, and the few exceptions the advocate may provide, if he provides any, simply happen to appeal to his or her particular moral system.

JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4

In PART 3 of THE ONLY DEFINTION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, I followed up my examination of "art as fundamental play" with this reference to Bataille:

I considered putting forth a longer definition with special reference to Bataille's "two types of economic consumption," lining up "the reality-oriented aspect of consumption, "production and acquisition" with the dynamic of work and "the desire to pointlessly but satisfyingly expend one's energies" with the dynamic of play. 

I decided not to pursue that line of thought at the time. Now I'm bringing it up again because I've been giving more thought as to the proper pluralist evaluation of the kinetic elements of sex and violence in fiction-- though this will only be developed in subsequent essays.

In the ONLY DEFINITION essay-series, I expanded on my fundamental division of all art into two realms-- that of "thematic escapism" and "thematic realism"-- with reference to Jung's assertion that all creative endeavor requires play, regardless of how much of the "principle of serious work" enters into the mix. From this standpoint the two realms took on the formulas of "play for play's sake" and "play for work's sake."

Now, contrary to some critics, defending escapist narratives is not the same as defending bad narratives. Both realist and escapist narratives can be good or bad, but when they are bad, it is not with reference to one another, but on their own respective terms.

Superior narratives of "thematic realism," a.k.a,, "play for work's sake"-- are what most people would call "good literature." Such stories almost if not always have a moral or aesthetic point to convey, one that aligns with Jung's "serious work" principle. But the best "realist art" can make its rhetorical points without losing the dimension of creative play.  Faulkner's 1932 novel LIGHT IN AUGUST and Coetzee's 1999 novel DISGRACE both take as their subjects the evils of Caucasians abusing Negroes (sorry, there's no other established word that takes in both African Americans and Black Africans).  But Faulkner's novel contains great imagination and creative fertility, while DISGRACE is, well, a disgrace in that respect.  I only have space for a very simplified comparison. Faulkner's "Southern Gothic" exposes the absolute dependence of the then-modern South on the demonization of the black underclass, but makes it part and parcel of their existence, while Coetzee presents a South African scenario whose brilliant insight never goes beyond this Wiki-statement: that its protagonist "is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did."

I choose to reduce the nature of inferior "thematically realistic" narratives to the following formula: such narratives suffer from "too much work," so much so that the rhetoric overpowers the principle of creative play.

Superior narratives of "thematic escapism," a.k.a. "play for play's sake," have a more involved relationship to the principle of serious work. In these stories the principle of work does not bond with the principle of play as in the previous form. It is always the nature of thematically escapist works to provide a vacation from morals and rigor. Yet the work-principle does have a decided influence on the quality of a "play for play's sake" narrative.

What does the realistic theme of "white sins against black people" look through the lens of thematic escapism? Well, an escapist story can express roughly the same sentiments as the Faulkner and Coetzee novels cited above, but the rhetoric will generally remain superficial because the narrative is predominantly focused upon fanciful content. A well-known example in the realm of comic books would be LOIS LANE #121.  Thus in this tale veteran white journalist Lois Lane temporarily transforms herself into a black woman so that she can see how the "other color" lives. I don't doubt that this story was well-intentioned, but to say the least it lacks the *gravitas* of even a bad literary novel like DISGRACE.

I provide this example only to illustrate the point about political affiliations; it isn't fair to compare a short comic book story with two prose novels. For that reason, and to provide a validation of my criterion that one can find "good play" even in novels with bad ideas, my contrary examples are Margaret Mitchell's 1936 GONE WITH THE WIND and Thomas Dixon's THE CLANSMAN.  Some may regard this a flawed comparison, because I must admit that I have not read the Dixon novel. I only know the CLANSMAN story from the famous film BIRTH OF A NATION, which was technically an adaptation of the play Dixon wrote from his own novel. Nevertheless, from what I've read the film is generally an accurate representation of the author's ideology.

Both CLANSMAN and GONE WITH THE WIND are primarily concerned with presenting an idealized view of the American South and its pro-slavery ethic, and any story-elements that might detract from that ideal are either ignored or dismissed.  Yet the aesthetic failure of Dixon's story is not that it holds stupid political views; it is that it has nothing else to offer. Dixon reportedly despised both Harriet Beecher Stowe's views and her novel, but he seems to have learned nothing from his predecessor about how to create appealing characters that can persuade the target audience into at least a consideration of the author's rhetoric. It's a mark of D.W. Griffith's genius that Dixon's paper-thin characters become vital when they're depicted by a master of the cinematic art.

Mitchell's ideal, in contrast, is not just a superficial paean to the South: for many readers, it is the South. I've mentioned in this essay 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.  Ironically, though Dixon actually experienced the Old South and Mitchell did not, Mitchell succeeds in putting across her fantasized ideal because the people inhabiting it possess the vitality needed to make it seem real.

Now, since I'm downgrading Dixon for over-dependence on his concept of "serious work," that might sound like CLANSMAN, like DISGRACE, could be guilty of the same fault: that of "too much work." On the contrary, though, CLANSMAN suffers from "too little work"; of Dixon's inability to provide the verisimilitude that could make his characters come alive, even in the service of a poorly reasoned ethic.  Mitchell doesn't consciously pattern her characters on literary archetypes, but she knows how to invoke such figures as the whore, the Madonna, the scapegrace, and the vixen with enough verisimilitude that they seem to be real people. This apparent grounding in reality provides the "decided influence" I mention above. Play is the dominant mode of both GONE WITH THE WIND and THE CLANSMAN, but only GONE WITH THE WIND puts any work into the game-- and as some may have noticed, often the best games are those on which the players exert the most effort.

Hmm, I worked in Bataille this time, but nothing on goal-affects. Maybe next time.

THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE, PT. 2

In speaking of an "ethic" with respect to any literary formulation, as with my "mode of the combative," it's necessary to re-state the obvious: human ethics as they apply to the world of art can never be coterminous with human ethics as they apply to life.  Though I've stated some of my disagreements with Camille Paglia here, her statement opposing life and art remains appropriate:

We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between art and reality, tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us what nature is up to.-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 39.

I will not repeat my many statements distinguishing the properties that separate "works of thematic realism" from "works of thematic escapism."  I'll simply point out that the former type often grapple with matters that the other type does not address, matters which are not limited to, but often deal with, the ethical dimension of real life.  One author, be he Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, or Jack London, may have full-fledged propositions about how to make life better, which he encodes in his works.  Another, like Shakespeare, may use his work to imply an ethical dimension without stating it outright.  A third type, like Voltaire, may propose no solutions whatever but still imply that somehow or other, things could be better than they are, and then expresses that conviction through his work.  

Because all such works suggest that they provide utilitarian value-- not because they can actually foster new systems of morality but for providing "thought experiments"-- elitists often presume that these favored few works are as the rare diamonds scattered through a mountainous heap of trash.  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.  This parallels my conclusions in the final LET FREEDOM RIDE essay, that "right choice" and "wrong choice" are inextricably intertwined within a perspectivist concept of free will.  However, perspective plays a greater role in sussing out the ethical nature of real-life events than it does in literary matters, for the simple reason that in real life human beings gamble their own lives rather than participating in gestural re-creations of ideas and emotions.

A minor example would be the ethical disagreement of American citizens circa World War Two, in which some citizens wished to intervene directly against the Axis while others wished to pursue a course of non-involvement.  Today the consensus was that the former choice was "the right choice," but some would claim that it is validated only because "history is written by the victors," and still others might aver to this day that things might have turned out better had the U.S. left Europe and Asia alone. Though I agree that non-involvement was the "wrong choice," that does not dispel all aspects of the rational process by which some citizens thought it the right choice. 

No lives hang in the balance within the ethical scope of the literary process, though in the real world people have suffered or died to have the right to participate in that process.  Yet the nature of merit, including that of ethical consensus, is far more fluid: authors' works may be esteemed in a minor way, forgotten for a time, and then re-discovered in some new perspective, as occurred with the oeuvres of Herman Melville, H.P. Lovecraft, and Fletcher Hanks. Some elitist fans of science fiction have imagined that the genre would have been finer and more literary had the American and European tradition of science-fiction magazines-- particularly those of a pulpish nature-- never existed.  There is of course no way to prove this, but this does not extinguish the reasoning by which those proponents choose to believe that in their scenario the market would have spawned more types like H.G. Wells and fewer like Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I assert, though, that the reasoning is over-simple: another example of over-privileging those works that purport to have thematic-- and thus ethical-- depth, over those that make few if any such claims.  It overlooks the fundamental interactivity of thematic and escapist works in the literary continuum, as well as failing to understand the deeper symbolic nature of the escapist works.

In my previous essay I chose three stories from Grimm's Fairy Tales.  None of them are works of "thematic realism:" like the great majority of stories overall,  I define all three stories as "genre," meaning that they belong to categories governed by reader-expectations far more than by authorial intentions.  I used the three stories as exemplars of differing combinations of dynamicity-conflict.

The first story, "Bremen Town Musicians," portrays a conflict with no spectacular or sublime aspects.

The second story, "Hansel and Gretel," portrays a conflict in which there exists a conflict between one character, who possesses "might," and two other characters who do not possess might but who are able to trick the first character into defeat.

The third story, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was," portrays a conflict between one character who possesses enough "might" to overcome several other mighty opponents.

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

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

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

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


I cannot speak to all of Hegel's subtleties on this point, but I find it interesting that, for all that the philosopher emphasizes 'the effects of the "fear of death" on "being-for-self,"' he doesn't show much interest in one other consequence of the lord-bondsman conflict: that the bondsman inevitably seeks to become a lord, to take on the lord's power and privilege.

One cannot do this, however, through the evasive maneuvers of trickster-heroes like Hansel and Gretel.  One only proceeds away from the condition of "non-might" by acquiring "might" oneself. 

In fairy tales as in superhero stories, "might" can be thrust upon a story's protagonist, as it is with characters ranging from Aladdin to the original Captain Marvel.  However, though the story about the Youth Who Sought Fear doesn't inform us as to how he got so mighty, one may speculate that he could have acquired his might by the Batman method: training and effort.

In either case, there is a change in the ethos of the "might vs. might" stories, as opposed to the more popular "might vs. non-might" type.  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. Of course, in real life this often means "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  But in fiction we can indulge in the possibility that the new lord will make better choices than the old one. 

Kant repeatedly stresses that all of his observations upon the sublime affects are that they arise spontaneously from humans, themselves in positions of safety, observing the potent forces of nature expending themselves with their own version of "might."  He does not attribute to these affects any ethical consequence in themselves, though as noted before he did assert that all aesthetic emotions did lead to ethical application.  When he introduces the concept of "dominance," which is his terms for the conflict I call "might vs. might," it too is intended to have only indirect ethical application

I suggest that one such application is this appreciation of the plural manifestations of might.  Nearly every schoolchild is exposed to some approximation of the "caveman looking up in wonder" as he espies the birds in flight and wishes to imitate them, which becomes a symbolic representation of human progress as a whole.  But no single act of wonder exists by itself, and from what we know of early man, it does seem that many of them viewed the world as a concatenation of powerful presences, from which the earliest versions of "shamans" could derive power. In later years such presences would codified into polytheistic mythologies, and there too, though men were always inferior to the gods, there remained a conviction that they were worthy to stand with the gods in terms of the will-to-power if not sheer power itself.

The shaman deriving power from his numinous presences, the warrior gaining supernatural presents or guidance from his patron god, the bondsman studying the ways of the mortal lord in order to overthrow him-- all of these participate in the ethical dimensions of the combative mode.  Thus "might" exists to continually challenge others to partake of its nature, rather than being utterly inaccessible, as it is to the humble creatures of "Bremen Town," or being something that can only be overcome through trickery, as in "Hansel and Gretel." This potency, to challenge one's own will to greater acts of agency, is the essence of the ethic that springs from the combative mode.