CASSIRER AND POPULAR FICTION

I don't have anything further to say about the assorted pluses and minuses of Edward Skidelsky's Cassirer book, but I should note that the following quote raised my eyebrows a bit.

Man is held fast, even more inexorably than by the mechanism of work, by the mechanism into which he is thrust by the mechanism into which he is thrust by the products and proceeds of technical culture, and in which he is thrown, in a never-ending frenzy, from appetite to consumption, from consumption to appetite.-- Cassirer, "Form und Technik."

I didn't need Skidelsky to point out the similarities to doctrines propounded by uber-Marxist Theodor Adorno.  Adorno and Cassirer were both German-Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany to the bosom of the United States.  In one of Adorno's most famous works, he too took aim at the "never-ending frenzy" of America's consumerism and technological standardization:

A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.-- Adorno, DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT.

Skidelsky points out the similarity between Cassirer's remarks and similar observations by both Adorno and Martin Heidegger, but does not comment except to point out that "[Cassirer's] protest is not against social injustice so much as hedonism: his stance is not that of a Marxist but a classical moralist. Gains in efficiency cannot, for one raised on Plato and Kant, weigh against the much graver forfeit of virtue inherent in modern consumerism."

Not having read "Form und Technik," I cannot comment on Cassirer's logical arguments against modern consumerism, though I am happy to see that the quotes given are not as shrill and as poorly constructed as Adorno's argument, critiqued in detail here and here.  But I have wondered at times what Cassirer, a man raised in the high mandarin culture of the German intellectual tradition, made of American popular art when he emigrated to this country. I have occasionally argued that I felt that the logical extrapolation of Cassirer's "philosophy of symbolic forms" was one that, by logical extension, should embrace the diversity of the popular arts:

It's clear (to me at least) that one can plausibly extrapolate from this endorsement of human freedom in all its cultural forms an ethos which also tolerates all forms of literature, ranging from the great works that have endured for decades to those works that were intended only to please a particular, perhaps ephemeral audience.

And also here:

To be sure, Cassirer does not address in this book the provenance of the mythical imagination in literature.  He does address in general terms the transition from “the mythical image world and the world of religious meaning to the sphere of art and artistic expression.”  But it seems plain to me that literature functions far more through “association” than through “analysis,” and that it depends just as much as myth on creating “networks of fantastically arbitrary relations,” a phrase borrowed by Cassirer from one Hermann Oldenberg.

I've mentioned that Cassirer never wrote a poetics, though Skidelsky asserts that art and literature were Cassirer's first loves before he gravitated to the study of philosophy.  From the quotes here it seems likely that had Cassirer written a poetics, it would have been one rooted in "classical morality."  Goethe was Cassirer's literary idol, and Goethe's circle may have favorably influenced Cassirer's acceptance of myth and folklore as valid expressions of human reason.

Herder and Goethe collected popular ballads; Humboldt and Schlegel studied languages and place-names; the Brothers Grimm anthologized folktales.-- Skidelsky, p. 72.

However, though it's demonstrable that European folklore serves some or all of the same aims as modern popular culture, it seems evident that Cassirer liked the "never-ending frenzy" of the latter no more than Adorno did.  At base, though, one can speculate that both men, like Frederic Wertham, were alienated from this culture simply because it was not their own.  This is not to say that some native Americans have not also inveighed against American consumerism, Gary Groth being the outstanding proponent of Adornite philosophy in the comic-book domain.  But what is a "never-ending frenzy" to one man is a thrilling wave of creativity to another.  "Fantastically arbitrary relations" govern the worlds of popular fiction no less than the worlds of myth, and one's appreciation for the tenor of those relations depends largely on whether or not one is "tuned to hear."

O MIGHTY CASSIRER, DOST THOU LIE SO LOW?

The above pun on a famous Shakespeare line might make more sense if one has heard that the name of the German philosopher is apparently pronounced the same as "Caesar."

My latest reading from Skidelsky's book-- which still earns high ratings from me despite my disagreements with it-- concerns Cassirer's debt to Goethe, who is to this day often regarded as the quintessential German literary figure of the period.  Skidelsky, as I mentioned here, advanced a view of Cassirer as a German-Jewish intellectual whose primary aim was to find a means of reconciling the traditions of his Jewish minority culture with the culture of the numerically superior German Gentiles.  (Note that I do not say "Christians," since there's ample evidence to indicate that the factions of fascism were not particularly observant of the dominant German religion.)

Skidelsky's research reveals that Cassirer's initial academic focus was literary, and only later became related to philosophy and its search for validity against the intellectual dominance of scientific inquiry, a.k.a. "Naturwissenschaften."  And of all Cassirer's favored literary stars, none shone more brightly than German romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had the ability-- along with fellow travelers like Herder, Humboldt and Schlegel-- to effect a "transformation of the Kantian heritage," redeeming the role of the "sensuous, emotional life" which Kant at best marginalized.

In Cassirer's 1916 FREEDOM AND FORM-- again, one I've not read-- Cassirer defends Goethe's attempt to formulate "an intuitive theory of nature," reacting against the materialistic empiricism of the burgeoning natural sciences.  Goethe sought to articulate a sense that human feelings were not mere epiphenomena to the physical world, that they were in their own way just as "objective" as physical matter.  Goethe did not succeed in convincing the scientists of his time, though arguably the later concept of *intersubjectivity* might throw a light on Goethe's ambitions.  Skidelsky, though, argues that the divide between the objectivity professed by the purveyors of physical-science theory and the objectivity proposed by Goethe is almost impossible to surmount.

Cassirer, he shows, did formulate a defensible rationale, even before he had fully developed his "philosophy of symbolic forms."  Cassirer did so through his articulation of the multivalence of the symbol:

The concept of the symbol is both broad enough to unite the various cultural forms and flexible enough to do justice to their individuality.  It thus replaces, in Cassirer's more mature thought, Kant's more rigid notion of "a priori" form.  In schematic terms, one can see the philosophy of symbolic forms as an attempt to encompass Kantian epistemology within a broader Goethean anthropology.

Skidelsky finds this project problematic, though, because it relativizes the truth-finding claims of science and religion:

The problem goes to the heart of the philosophy of symbolic forms.  The attempt to mediate between the various branches of culture threatens to rob them of their seriousness, to transform them into a play of symbols.

Having read and reread Cassirer's expatiations on symbolic forms, I do not agree that they reduce the complex subjects of myth, religion, art, or science into mere "play."  On the contrary, the very reason that these conceptual spheres even have coherent form is because countless intellectuals have put a great deal of work into honing all their complexities, work which Cassirer reports and evaluates.  By his emphasis upon truth-telling Skidelsky seems to be making common cause with Bertrand Russell's readings of symbolic logic, noted here.

I won't address the obvious problems inherent in this alleged "search for truth." But I will point out that Skidelsky, in attempting to invalidate Cassirer's idol Goethe, relies on questionable evidence.  The author claims that Goethe was only a liberal in his literary works, and that his true measure was the "political illiberalism" he practiced in real life-- though Skidelsky does not prove this assertion, except for citing a couple of lines about Goethe's admiration for powerful political figures.  Following this dubious characterization, Skidelsky draws upon the verdict of art historian Edgar Wind, who was critical of Goethe's "capacity to treat every interpretation of reality symbolically."  This is supposedly a marker of the inability of Goethe, and of Cassirer, to come to terms with reality.  Finally, Skidelsky draws upon, not a real-life account of someone who knew Goethe, but Thomas Mann's 1939 novella LOTTE IN WEIMAR.  This Mann work takes the viewpoint of Charlotte Kestner, Goethe's real-life mistress, to indict Goethe as "an aloof, inhuman figure" who barely remembers his tryst with Charlotte.

And yet, even supposing that Mann's portrait of the Goethe-Kestner relationship was as "true" as anyone, even a biographer, could reproduce it-- what does this prove about Goethe's particular outlook?  Are there ways in which individuals can ignore other individuals by seeing them as mere "symbols?"  Certainly, but there are thousands of other ways in which people can downgrade or ignore other people without seeing them as "symbols."  Thus Skidelsky's criterion for "reality testing" is rendered entirely suspect, and may compromise other aspects of his evaluative endeavor.

APES AND ANGELS

"Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast,
And each will wrestle for the mastery there,
The one has passion's craving crude for love,
And hugs a world where sweet the senses rage;
The other longs for pastures fair above,
Leaving the murk for lofty heritage."-- Goethe, FAUST.

In Part 2 of RETURN OF THE MASTERY MASTER I meditated on the utility of the terms I'd derived from Schopenhauer, "the intellectual will," derived from what he called "abstract representations," and "the instinctive will," derived from what he called "intuitive representations."  These representations, said Schopenhauer, stemmed from humankind's dual tendency to build representations from both "percepts"-- which humans share with animals-- and "concepts," which only humans possess due to the faculty of reason.

Now, when I read the above Goethe quote, I thought it implicit that Goethe was not writing about only his character of Faust having "two souls."  Clearly he was implying that all humans possessed this two-souled nature, though instead of speaking of reason and intuition, Goethe speaks of "lofty heritage" and "passion's craving crude for love."  These concepts, however poeticized, may come a lot closer to describing the "two souls" that struggle within the "breasts" of fictional characters.

By the third part of the MASTERY MASTER essay-series, I debated the possibility of using Frank Fukuyama's Hegel-derived terms "megalothymia" and "isothymia" as a theoretical foundation for the dichotomy of "goal-affects," the concrete affect "persistence" and the abstract affect "glory."  However, Fukuyama's terms are still not that useful in describing specific ways in which fictional characters mirror the affects of their creators and their audiences.  The idea of determining these affects as having been produced by two variant forms of "will" still holds appeal for me.

The failing of my first set of Schopenhauer terms is that they rely too directly on the philosopher's formulations rather than extrapolating them into the necessary literary continuum.  Since Goethe is clearly translating philosophical concepts into emotive qualities, he suggests a possible avenue for identifying the types of "will" that truly impact on the ways human beings imagine fictional personas.

Obviously the "world where sweet the senses rage" is the world of Schopenhauer's "intuitive representations," not to mention the elements that Jung, in refuting Freud, calls "physiological concepts."  Yet to call such elements "physiological," "intuitional," or "instinctive" are all overly specific in a literary context.  However, they all connote the subject's will to "hug" the world of sensual reality, the will to remain so attached as against any contravening will. 

This will I'll term the "existential will," because it is a will to remain attached to all the affects that call up everyday sensory existence; our feeling of being inextricably a part of the physical world.
In my argument here defining the quality of "persistence" in the demihero and monster personas, I stressed that the good demihero Jimmy Olsen was defined more by his life in the workaday world than by his forays in heroism, and that sort-of-bad monster  King Kong was defined by his "craving crude" for a blonde charmer.


Now, though Schopenhauer speaks of "concepts" in an affect-free manner, it's patently true that human beings do derive emotional validation by attaching themselves to abstact conceptions, or what Jung calls "superordinate ideas."  Such ideational states allow one to imagine "leaving the murk for lofty heritage."  Whatever the psychological truth of such devotions-- and there are any number of ways to deconstruct a real human's ideas and/or ideals-- fictional characters can be constructs patterned on such ideals, and are in their own context "real." 

This will I'll term the "idealizing will," because it seems obvious to me that any "idea" to which a subject becomes emotionally attached becomes an "ideal."  When I spoke of "intellectual will" with respect to heroes and villains, I favored the notion that they made conscious decisions to defend good or to champion evil, as per my oft-cited Milton quote: "sufficient to stand, but free to fall."  But of course fictional characters do not make conscious decisions; they incarnate the ideals of authors who make conscious decisions based on their perceptions of good and evil.  In this essay I defined the parallel striving of both heroes and villains after the abstact goal-affect of "glory:"

Heroes and villains are more focused on “grand gestures,”made in defiance of consequences. Not all villains are larger-than-life like the Joker: Batman often fights criminals who are no more than *mesodynamic*...  Even the mundane crooks as portrayed in these stories want more than simple survivial. Typically they desire wealth, which may be seen as establishing a form of willed control over their environment. This will to control often manifests in the crooks forming their own society counter to that of honest citizens. Unlike monsters, who are most often seen as forces gone out of control, villains seek to exercise total control, be it of city-neighborhoods or the entire world. The hero responds in turn with his own counter-efforts to control the pernicious counter-society of crime. Those efforts—whether they stem from a vigilante like Batman or a constituted legal authority like Judge Dredd—also go beyond the criteria of simple survival, emphasizing the power of the law to curtail the will of the lawbreakers.       

In conclusion, I believe that these new portmanteau terms also line up well with the Fukuyama terminology: the "idealizing will" with "megalothymia," and the "existential will" with "isothymia." 
Thus, if I were to rewrite the relevant sections of this essay, I could omit the mental gymnastics necessary to state why Fu Manchu incarnated "intellectual will" as a villain while Baron Frankenstein incarnated "instinctive will."  The two characters are not adequately separable, even in a metaphorical sense, in terms of an "intellect vs. instincts" dichotomy.  But one can demonstrate from the corpus of the film CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN that Baron Frankenstein, despite his intellectual attainments, has no real "ideal" in mind when he starts piecing together dead bodies, even though he might use such idealism as a rationale. Rather, this Frankenstein is like a big child who wants to do something because it's been forbidden.  In contrast, Fu Manchu possesses both intellectual attainments and a demonstrable ideal: to restore the glory of his people.

A side-point: I don't want to give the impression from the quoted paragraph above that I think all "mundane crooks" are necessarily worshippers at the Fane of Evil; some of them may commit crimes out of frustration or petty pique, as well, which would make them closer to the persona of the "monster." But many mundane crooks have ideals by which they justify their depredations, and when they demonstrate these, they fit in every way the persona of the true villain.

ANYTHING THAT CAN BE DONE WELL IS WORTH DOING

The above title is a riposte to the famous third question of Goethe, to which I alluded in my essay “Two and a Half Questions.” The first two questions are, as I said, valid. What was the artist trying to do?” and “How well did he do it?” speak to what the artist intends to create and to the level of craft he brings to his endeavor, which are both questions on which one can expatiate logically. The third question, however—“Was what he did worth doing?”—is a worthless question as phrased, for no matter what set of standards any given critic may put forth, there can never be any consensual agreement as to what forms of art are or are not worth doing. Nothing affirms this better than the great line formulated by some unknown critic to cover forms of art for which he has no feeling: “For the people who like this type of thing, this is the type of thing those people will like.”

Buried in this flip line is the nugget of a good insight that can reform Goethe’s question, if in place of “type” one substitutes “mode,” and with that term alter the question, “How well does the finished work fulfill the potential of the work’s mode?” This may seem like a rephrasing of the second question, but it is not, since there’s nothing in the second question that pertains to assigning value. Even the most elitist critic-- the sort who believes that, say, “bad Daniel Clowes work” is always worth more than “good Jack Kirby work”—is usually capable of discerning the pure skill evident in the work of both artists. But the third question of Goethe allows him to dismiss the Kirby work for not being as “serious” or as “refined” as the work of Clowes. This intellectual laziness is no longer possible if one follows the logic of a theory of literary modes.

(And lest anyone ask as to whether such elitists actually exist, I strongly recall—though I don’t have to hand—how one Houston artist did a strip eulogizing Kirby after the artist’s death, which still managed to complain about the “boyishness” of Kirby’s oeuvre. So yes, Virginia, elitists do exist.)

So what’s a mode? In literary terms, a “mode” is simply the method by which a literary effect is accomplished. One can analyze modes (as Northrop Frye does in the “Theory of Modes” section of ANATOMY OF CRITICISM) in much the same way one analyzes genres. Genres, though, are patterns of convention and invention that form “families” of literary works given names like “tragedy” and “comedy,” or “westerns” and “mysteries.” Modes, in contrast, cross such familial patterns. THE WRITER’S WEB definition for “mode” supports this:

“MODE: an unspecific critical term usually identifying a broad but identifiable literary method, mood or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular form of genre.”

Among the examples listed is a “comic mode,” which might sound like a contradiction if “comedy” is also, as I said in the previous paragraph, is also a “genre.” But the contradiction is more apparent than real.

If there are “comic modes” defined by the moods, methods, or manners of communication used by an artist, while a “comedy genre” is defined by “story-patterns,” it should be possible to see how these manifest in any two comedies with some similar elements. For instance, we recognize that Noel Coward’s DESIGN FOR LIVING and Mike Myers’ WAYNE’S WORLD both belong to the genre of comedy because both works are designed to make audiences laugh, and that both use a similar strategy in centering the comic action around the plot-device of two men competing for the affections of one woman. But the modes by which they accomplish their comedic goals are very different. The Coward play is urbane and witty; the Mike Myers film is gross and bawdy (though not without a measure of wit for all that). It is common to speak of their differences as if they were subgenres within the greater genre of comedy, to use terms like “sophisticated comedy” and “grossout comedy.” But I don’t think that these terms should be considered subgenres, after the fashion of genuine subgenres like “horror comedies” or “western comedies.” Rather, “sophisticated comedies” and “grossout comedies” represent concatenations of methods rather than story-patterns.

Now, since the earliest days of criticism—that is, the days of Aristotle, since his POETICS is our earliest extant example of literary criticism—there has always been the tendency to value what is considered “high” over what is considered “low.” Early in the POETICS (going by the translation by S.H Butcher) Aristotle tells us that following a period of “improvisations” in which the rules of art were still being worked out, these “rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry,” and then:

“Poetry now diverged in two directions, according to the individual character of the writers. The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more trivial sort imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires, as the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men.”

Taken just by itself—and I’m sure an expert on Aristotle would be more aware than I of the many permutations of Aristotelian thought in other essays that bear upon one’s full understanding of the philosopher’s opinion—there can be little question that Aristotle’s valuation is fairly elitist in nature. He sounds much like any contemporary critic valuing a “serious” work over a “trivial” one. However, even though Aristotle is esteeming “high” forms over “low” ones, he is, unlike many contemporary critics, presenting a synoptic view in which even the “low” forms have meaning within the totality he calls “poetry.” This stands in contradistinction to those critics who feel that only the higher forms have any relevance. Even a middlebrow event like the Oscar Awards show reflects this highbrow prejudice, consistently ignoring comedies in favor of “serious” dramas—though, as an ironic commentary on changing tastes, our own highbrow culture rates the genre of satires much higher on the artistic scale than Aristotle did for the satires of his time.

Now the original third question by Goethe—“Is what the artist did worth doing?”—is a more baldly elitist statement than Aristotle’s, not least objectionable because it’s implied that there is some unitary set of standards by which one can instantly judge the worth of a given work, apart from the skill with which it was crafted. At base, such statements go against the grain of Aristotle’s synoptic theories. I do not know if Goethe himself declared critical war against all things escapist and trivial in favor of things grave and serious, but I’m certain there has been no shortage of critics who imply that the world would be better off if most comedies were of the higher, sophisticated mode and few (if any) were of the low, grossout mode. More often than not, this sort of opinion is informed by the notion that “low” forms have no value in themselves, and that the “high” ones contain all that the low forms offer and more.

However, this doctrine—called by some the “more good things” doctrine—is proved incorrect the more one understands the functioning of modes. It’s possible for a lover of comedy to convince himself that DESIGN FOR LIVING is superior to WAYNE’S WORLD because the former may have intellectual elements that the latter does not. However, it is just as demonstrable that the Coward play (as well as the movie adapted from it) are lacking in the visceral elements found in WAYNE’S WORLD. Both the “sophisticated mode” and the “grossout mode” contain a range of narrative possibilities and are not comparable except in statements of pure personal taste. Thus DESIGN FOR LIVING is superior only to comedies in its own mode, and the same is true of WAYNE’S WORLD.

I don’t expect that anyone well-rounded enough to know the oeuvres of both Noel Coward and Mike Myers will seriously demur that both works were “worth doing,” but even if I’m correct in this supposition, it may only be because critics can be more forgiving toward comedies, which after all are not largely expected to be “grave” or “serious,” even if some can be more sophisticated than others. The high/low prejudices can be much more virulent when dealing with works in differing modes that do not have humor as their aim, leading to (for instance) the tendency to reject modes dealing with adventure or melodrama in favor of those dealing with “serious drama”—on which I’ll expatiate further in a future essay.
 

TWO AND A HALF QUESTIONS

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed that Three Questions be asked about any work of art. They must be answered in order.1. What was the artist trying to do?2. How well did he do it?3. Was it worth the doing?

I've heard this Goethe-nugget tossed out many times, at least once by comics-critic Gary Groth, and you can be sure what kind of comics he would consider not "worth the doing." However, the last question has always struck me as really half a question. The other two are complete in themselves, for the first involves the critic summing up the artist's intentions as the critic understands them, while the second is the critic's opinion as to the skill with which the intention was executed. Both are questions that a given critic might judge inaccurately, but one can easily see that there is some degree of objectivity involved in each query: the artist is likely to have intended some things more than others (no matter what Roland Barthes might think), and since there is a definite difference in skill between authors, that fact makes it possible to judge failures in executing one's intentions.

However, with the third question, "worth the doing" takes for granted that worthiness is a constant, which of course it is not. At the beginning of ANATOMY OF CRITICISM Northrop Frye pretty much demolishes the usual arguments for valuing this author over another author for superficially "sophisticated" reasons, and shows, with an almost Nietzschean perspectivism, how such valuations depend on what factors the critic chooses to find worthy.

This ineluctable fact does not mean that no one should ever attempt to place value about what works are or are not worthy. As Nietzsche also observed, man is an animal who must create meaning. The danger of regarding artistic worthiness as a constant is that it makes the critic unable to judge anything that is outside his personal realm of preferences.

Therefore, if I praise a JUSTICE LEAGUE adventure for its mythic qualities, I am saying that it compares favorably in artistic execution with others of its type. And if I say that I consider Dan Clowes' DAVID BORING a failure in terms of worthiness, despite the fact that it executes exactly what its artist intended, then it is because I have compared it to other works of the same basic type and found BORING-- er-- wanting.

More about comparing type to type later.