ACTIVITY REPORT PT 1

 In this essay from last May, I preserved this nugget from Whitehead's book SYMBOLISM:

Here [Whitehead] states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A." 

For whatever reason I reread that section recently and later found myself comparing it to what I remembered writing about my definition of icons in the first essay where I coined the term, I THINK ICON I THINK ICON. Had I said something about defining icons in terms of action? Turns out the answer is, "a little bit yes, a little bit no."

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named.  

I also noted that while one could formally term any entity within a fictional story to be an icon, in practice we only pay attention to the icons that either perform some action or represent some principle within the narrative, while those entities that don't meet those criteria (as I'm now refining things) 'don't merit iconic titles, so that no one bothered to label "that cop who shot at Spider-Man in that one Romita story" or "the 553rd lion killed by Tarzan."'

Whitehead, of course, is speaking of entities within the real world, so his baseline of "activity" is logical. In fictional narratives, all of the icons exist as propositions, so they are not always defined by "kinetic activity," by actually doing things in the story, but also by representing an abstract quality, or qualities-- which is what I take from my words "some characteristic"-- that are important to the story. A pertinent example of an inactive character whose significance stems wholly of his enigmatic characteristics is the title character of Herman Melville's BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER. As the Wiki summary indicates, the title character is a young 19th-century clerk who goes to work for a legal firm, and then, for no evident reason, simply ceases to work, yet will not actually leave the premises of the firm. Even when taken to prison for his intransigence, Bartleby simply declines to take any action at all, even that of eating, and so expires. In my 2013 essay THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT, I said that Ray Bradbury's story "The Last Night of the World" might possess the absolute least amount of conflict that I'd ever encountered. But BARTLEBY is at least the equal of "Last Night" in that respect.

So fictional icons are not definable only by what Whitehead calls "activity." What should one call the form of authorial will that manifests not in actions, but in simply "embodying" what I called a "characteristic?" I think I finally found a use for my earlier term "resonance," which back in May 2023 I considered as a metaphor for centricity, only to discard that theory in favor of eminence last July. It now seems to me that those icons that are not active, like Bartleby, still impinge upon readers because whatever abstractions they embody have a resonance between the universality of fictional depictions and the particularity of actual reader-experience. 

More to come.

THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

 In this essay (and any follow-ups) I want to develop the line of thought in QUICK NUM NOTES. 

As I said in NOTES, I'm not disavowing the assorted analyses I advanced with respect to looking at how fictional realities are governed by different combinations of (1) intelligibility and (2) casual coherence-- at least not in the way I disavowed Aristotle's criteria (as I understood them) regarding "impossibility" and "improbability"). HOWEVER, it has occurred to me that there could be a problem in talking only about the ways in which an author models the phenomenality of his fictional world after the way he perceives the real world to work. The author of fiction is not creating something that's ever totally faithful to the real world, even if the elements of artifice he may use are simply invisible structuring principles. Here's Herman Melville on the unrealistic "symmetry" of fiction as compared to really real reality:

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

In the same essay in which I quoted this Melville passage, I also compared Melville's "symmetry" to my concept of artifice. But one can see the function of symmetry/artifice as being just as present in naturalistic works as in the other two forms, the uncanny (where BILLY BUDD belongs) and the marvelous (where one might place Melville's MARDI, for what little that's worth). I'm not sure that any of Melville's works are purely naturalistic, but just to venture an example with another nautical theme, Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND has no metaphenomena at all, but it's certainly just as determined by artifice. What many critics have missed that this use of artifice is no less present in naturalistic works which seem to be based on "real" events. Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY may appear to the naive eye to be more "realistic" than TREASURE ISLAND, but Flaubert has to use the same range of tropes Stevenson did, in order to create the emotional effects he desired. Neither BOVARY nor ISLAND possesses the "ragged edges" of reality. 

Yet Stevenson and Flaubert use artifice invisibly, somewhat like the "invisible style" attributed to the majority of movies in Classic American cinema. However, I posit that whenever an artist in any medium invokes metaphenomenal tropes to get his desired effects, I believe that he has to exert a new level of "authorial will" as I defined it way back in 2009. That's why I'm now seeking to look at the amount of work-- which I also called "crap"-- that an author has to put across to sell his metaphenomena:

But my current line of thought is more like, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" (like that of The Hound of the Baskervilles)... The opposition I'm currently playing with is that we're used to thinking of "marvelous things" are total inventions while "uncanny things" are supposed to be in line with the way the natural universe works. But the latter are arguably just as much inventions as the former. if you can't observe a real Pit and Pendulum in human history, or a real crime in which someone pretends to be a ghost to get rid of all the heirs to a fortune, then the phenomenon described is still a creation of the imagination-- just not one that requires as much imaginative effort as something overtly marvelous.

What further developments might be fostered from this line of thought, I cannot at this time predict.   

SO, A THREAD-PULLING VECTOR

 My title for this essay spoofs a title I used for two essays way back in 2011, SO, A THREAD-PULLING NEEDLE, Part 1 and Part 2, which in their turn had punned on one of the lyrics from THE SOUND OF MUSIC. I confess I didn't even remember what those essays were about. I just wanted to create a title for this essay that brought the terms "thread" and "vector" together in some halfway-felicitous manner. As it happens, I did find some relevant content in those 2011 essays-- more on which at this essay's conclusion.

This essay sprung into being the way a lot of them do: taking a morning walk for exercise and letting my mind ruminate over the various categories I've created like the proverbial cow chewing her cud. This time, I randomly started associating my idea of "the master thread"-- which usurped all my old conceptions of "theme statements" in this April 2020 essay-- with the Whitehead-ian idea of "vectors" that I first broached in August 2020. Whereas the master thread concept was oriented only upon the way the author organized the "vertical meaning" of his narrative, vectors were designed to describe all category-domains in my system.

...all aspects of art—characters, settings, plot-tropes—derive from authorial will. Similarly, all of the multifarious literary categories I’ve introduced on this blog—dynamicity, mythicity, the combinatory-sublime and so on—are the prisms I use to view patterns of authorial will, patterns formed by the unceasing interactions of authors swiping from each other, competing with each other, and writing love letters to each other.

So far, I have applied the vector-term to such domains as centricity and phenomenality, but not to the differing emphases of a narrative's vertical meaning. However, something akin to vectors is implicit within the first example I offered of those differing emphases, in the essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2.

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

So what, aside from my bare assertion, determines that the trope of "The Hunter and the Hunted" is the "master thread" of MOBY DICK, and not one of the subordinate threads (which I later dubbed "bachelor threads")? When I state that removing the putative master thread would "unravel the whole kit and kaboodle," that should imply that it's too big and complicated to be removed without damaging the whole. And the master thread got big and complicated because Herman Melville concentrated the greatest vector of his authorial will upon that theme, while the bachelor-threads, while important, might be removed without necessarily damaging the whole. 

The idea of removing such a master-thread is not mere theory; it's the sort of thing that often takes place with adaptations of famous works. I have not yet reviewed the 1956 film adaptation of Melville's nautical novel, nor have I seen it in several years. But my recollection is that scripter Ray Bradbury decided to elide most of the religious content of the novel, except for a puerile "Ahab overstepped the bounds of a reasonable mortal" that sounds more like FRANKENSTEIN than MOBY DICK. Banal as this vertical meaning is, though, it's still the master-thread for the 1956 movie because it shows the greatest vector of Bradbury's authorial intent. I should note in passing that my conception of vertical meaning-- in which there is one superordinate thread amidst one or more subordinate threads-- mirrors my conception of centricity, in which one icon, or group of icons, proves superordinate and everything else in the narrative is subordinate in nature. The subordinate threads, like subordinate icons, just don't have that much authorial attention given to them, resulting in lesser will-vectors.

Jumping back eleven years, the first part of SO A THREAD PULLING NEEDLE came about when AT-AT Pilot asked me to provide some guidance on the subject of what I'd called "myth criticism." I responded in part with a perhaps labored metaphor in which I would seek to provide an "Ariadne's thread" through the "labyrinth" of modern discourse about mythology. It didn't occur to me back then that the usual interaction of threads and needles, that of binding cloth together, was the exact opposite of the use of thread in the Minotaur story. However, Part 1 at least shows that the thread-metaphor was one I liked then as much as I do now.

Part 2, though, is the essay with the aforementioned "relevant content" with respect to more recent writings. Riffing on a famous misquote of Heidegger, I wondered whether one could discern a "unifying thread" in all of my ruminations on this blog, and I came up with the quest for an answer to the question:

"Why is there complexity where there doesn't need to be any?"

And my answer, seeking to get away from the more abstract explanations, was to posit that mythic complexity is simply a fun thing for authors to put in their stories, even when they don't expect anyone to find that particular Easter-egg. I still believe this, that all the factors that go into making fiction come about because authors like best the play-element in fiction. Thus in fiction the sense of play has the greatest force-- the greatest vector, one might say-- than even the most sedulous desire to convert others to some moral message. 

SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE)

 

Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. --Mark Twain (or someone imitating him).

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

I’m reasonably sure that neither Twain nor Melville were first to observe that the pure artifice of fiction—whether one calls it “sense” or “symmetry”-- was radically different from the chaos of experience known as “the real world.” Of the two, though, Melville’s term proves more piquant in terms of its associations.

I introduced the concept of “artifice” as a counter to that of “verisimilitude,” and in this essay I aligned verisimilitude with the world of finite things, perata, and artifice with the world of the theoretically infinite, apeiron. Melville’s alignment of “fable/fiction” with “symmetry” has a related appeal, not least because he seems to be saying that the world of facts and reality is by contrast dominated by “asymmetry,” signified by his claim that “truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.”

Assuming that this projected parallel is a fair extension of Melville’s thought, what’s “asymmetrical” about “truth” in its connotation of factual occurrences? The sense I get from Melville’s “ragged edges” is that the real world, unlike the world of fiction and fable, doesn’t ever come to a designated end, be that ending comic or tragic. Reality just goes on and on and on—and so do people. Though the sailors who witness Billy Budd’s symbolic crucifixion are impressed enough that they keep in their hearts “the image of the Handsome Sailor,” people who never met Billy will not only not know of him, they may believe the false reports of newspapers (the “fake news” of the day) that claimed the Handsome Sailor was a base mutineer.

In contrast, though there may not be such a thing as an absolutely “pure fiction,” fiction is “symmetrical” in terms of using recognizable tropes to put across emotional effects. In creating BILLY BUDD Melville knows that by using tropes that associated the titular sailor with Jesus Christ, he can produce a symmetrical effect in which Billy’s sacrificial death parallels that of Jesus. That is not to say that any reader will make a strict one-on-one equation of the two: at most Billy Budd is a literary “imitatio Dei.”

Further, the tropes used in art and literature must be judged to be “open signifiers” after the fashion of Jung’s archetypes. Neither tropes nor archetypes have content as such: their content changes according to the way they are used by creators. Melville uses Christian sacrificial tropes to impress his readers with the nobility of the central character and the pathos of his sacrifice to the “god” of mortal expedience. Another author, however, may use the same images to different effects. The tropes belonging to artifice are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is,” no matter whether the reality is that of ancient Rome or 19^th-century Nantucket. Their effect is asymmetrical insofar as they function to either counteract or at least counterpoint the symmetry of artifice.

MELVILLE’S RAGGED TEXT

 

BILLY BUDD was Herman Melville’s last prose work, though he passed in 1891 and the work wasn’t published until 1924. He spends most of the story relating to his readers the intensely mythopoeic story of the sailor Billy Budd, a good-hearted sailor who undergoes a Christ-like sacrifice. After Billy’s death, Melville then devotes the final three chapters of the book to various aftermaths. Chapter 29 shows the ambiguous fate of Captain Vere, the man who officiated over the sacrifice, Chapter 30 “reprints” a biased journalistic account of the execution, and Chapter 31 has Dead Billy immortalized in a sea-shanty. All three narratives seem devoted to chronicling the various ways factual events may become distorted by later misprision, and the opening paragraph of Chapter 29 seems to be taking the side of immutable fact over “fable:”

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

Now, the most amusing thing about this observation is that the novel is related by an unknown narrator as if said narrator were reporting an actual event, when in fact the book is complete fiction. I don’t know if Melville might have used some real incident as a jumping-off point for the events of BILLY BUDD, much as he used the reports of the whale “Mocha Dick” as a template for MOBY DICK. But there is no sense in which BILLY BUDD has “less to do with fable than with fact,” nor is it in any sense “truth uncompromisingly told.” The three aftermath-chapters are meant to lend the novel the appearance of real-world verisimilitude insofar as readers recognize how real-world events can be distorted by later narrators. But even if in the very unlikely event that some reader might credit Melville’s narrative as a factual chronicle, Melville knew that it was nothing of the kind. Thus even the aftermath-chapters are part of the overall “fable-like” design, not least when the final section discussed how sailors prize fragments of the spar from which Billy was hanged, the narrator comparing the fragments to pieces of the True Cross.

Why does Melville create a “fable” and claim that it is “fact?” It may be that literary priorities changed so much by the end of the 19^th century that serious authors usually had to qualify anything that seemed in any way “fabulous,” and that this is why Melville threw in these supposedly verisimilitudinous chapters. There are other appeals to “life the way it really is” throughout the text, but the Christian parable is so overt that one cannot really take seriously any attempts to show reality’s “ragged edges.” Ironically, because Melville passed before he could produce a final draft of BILLY BUDD, the work we read today was compiled from the “ragged edges” of an incomplete draft by Melville’s widow and by literary scholars. Yet, Melville’s “symmetry of form” evidently overshadowed whatever rough elements he might have chosen to smooth over in a final draft. BILLY BUDD, even in its qualifying moments, has nothing whatever to do with “fact,” but to the extent one finds “truth” in the concept of literary symmetry, the novel certainly is “truth uncompromisingly told.”      

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2

                               

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

All of the subordinate vertical threads of MOBY DICK are so well developed that the author could have made stand-alone stories out of any of them. This is not generally the case, however. Of the thousands of other narratives that possess strong mythopoeic meaning, most of them possess no more than a single strong master thread.

Case in point: CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. When I wrote my mythcomicsreview of CRISIS, I was more than a little aware of the serial’s numerous flaws, from the bland scripting of Marv Wolfman to the drably functional manner in which the story tossed together nearly every famous or semi-famous character in DC Comics history. Those subplots that even came close to vertical meaning were frequently botched, as with a maudlin encounter between Kamandi—Jack Kirby’s “Planet of the Apes” swipe—and Solovar, one of DC’s seemingly endless supply of intelligent gorillas. However—there was one master thread I discerned, one in which Wolfman built upon the “devilish” character of Krona, and contrasted this character’s impiety with a “holy trinity” of characters implicated in the death of the old cosmos and the birth of the new.

On the more positive side, some master-threads receive support in unpredictable ways. Jack Kirby’s NEW GODS saga, reviewed here, has one obvious master-thread: the prophecy of an eventual confrontation between the tyrant Darkseid and the hero Orion. I wasn’t entirely pleased with Kirby’s years-later wrap-up of his epic series. But even though the author went down a somewhat unsatisfying path, HUNGER DOGS wasn’t without mythopoeic meaning in itself.

But I’ve recently noticed one particular subordinate thread, one so subtle that one could barely even assign a didactic meaning. In my review I had no space to examine the curious relationship between Darkseid and his mother Heggra.

The reader only three things about the wizened queen: (1) that she rules Apokolips before Darkseid ascends to the throne, (2) that her influence obliges Darkseid, against his will, to wed a noblewoman named Tigra, who ends up being the mother of Orion, and (3) at some time, Darkseid has his mother killed, probably because she blocked his rise to power.

But in recent months, I noticed that the given names of Heggra and Tigra are not dissimilar, suggesting a symbolic identity between them. Visually, they’re opposites, for Tigra is lean and given to overt violence, while Heggra is sedate, like a brooding hen sitting on her “hegg.” But despite these differences they collude to create Orion, whom Darkseid will make the mistake of casting out. The result is that Orion becomes dedicated to his father’s defeat, and though Orion’s primary mission is to keep Darkseid from gaining the Anti-Life Equation, it would not be incorrect to say that the conflict of father and son ends up avenging the maltreatment of two maternal figures. It’s a subordinate vertical thread that in no way diminishes the master thread of the father-son conflict, but because of this mini-discourse, the master thread is made yet denser and richer.

ONLY AN ARCHETYPE CAN BEAT ANOTHER ARCHETYPE PT. 4

In this essay I defined stereotypes in terms of simple functionality and archetypes in terms of super-functionality. With that in mind I might re-state my title as "only super-functionality can beat super-functionality."

I won't say that the same is the case for stereotypes. It's more common for one stereotype to overcome another, but an archetype of sufficient power can eliminate, or at least mitigate, the power of stereotypes. In this essay I advanced the hypothesis that the archetype of "the African slave as demonic rebel" that permeates Melville's BENITO CERENO was essentially nullified by a more popular archetype, that of "the redeemed slave." In the Judeo-Christian tradition the first descends principally from literary takes on Satan, while the latter may be traced more directly from the Biblical Messiah-tradition.  Yet if Leslie Fiedler is correct in believing that UNCLE TOM'S CABIN is the first American novel that presents black characters as developed narrative presences, then CABIN's influence made it harder to promulgate that view. Wikipedia notes how the minstrel shows attempted to ameliorate the impact of the novel:

Tom acts largely came to replace other plantation narratives, particularly in the third act. These sketches sometimes supported Stowe's novel, but just as often they turned it on its head or attacked the author. Whatever the intended message, it was usually lost in the joyous, slapstick atmosphere of the piece. Characters such as Simon Legree sometimes disappeared, and the title was frequently changed to something more cheerful like "Happy Uncle Tom" or "Uncle Dad's Cabin."

In the 20th century minstrel shows passed out of favor, arguably as part of a very graduated response to the consciousness of "black people as human beings" that the novel promoted. Ironically, before the minstrel shows died, they left behind a reactionary legacy by making the name "Uncle Tom" into a stereotypical shorthand for a "cringing bootlicker to White Massa"-- which the character in the novel is not. But the fact that the character of Uncle Tom is a prophet not honored in his own hometown does not nullify the greater impact of the novel.

I said earlier that the franchise-character of Superman-- who of course is something of a palimpsest, changing his persona according to the proclivities of his authors-- combined both stereotypical and archetypal characteristics. All fictional characters possess the potential for both, from those of Willie Shakespeare to those of Mickey Spillane.  I'm sure that there are critics who choose to view the character's status in American culture to be independent of his archetypal nature; who see his success as purely the result of clever marketing. This pat explanation does not explain why the character became popular in his early ACTION COMICS appearances even though for the first eleven issues the character is only cover-featured three times (though his name is occasionally added in the background of some generic pulp-adventure scene). Earlier I have identified Superman's primary mythic appeal for Americans of the 1940s as a trope I termed CHRIST WITH MUSCLES-- a trope Superman certainly did not originate but one that he came to exemplify better than any previous pop-culture character.

This archetype, though, was to some extent conquered by an archetype closer in tone to the "suffering servant" archetype found in UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. Superman's appeal has never completely vanished, but it has been eclipsed in large part by Stan Lee's trope of the "suffering hero," who is best exemplified by the Amazing Spider-Man.

The first few appearances of the web-slinger are replete with references to the Superman mythos. Sometimes they are straightforward, in that Peter Parker wears glasses like Clark Kent, and at other times they are inverted, in that Parker really is a 98-pound weakling, rather than a strapping fellow who merely pretends to be a weakling.  In some cases the Superman tropes are a little of both: Parker continues to make his living in roughly the same way Kent does-- working for a big-city newspaper-- but Kent works for an editor who is a nice guy beneath his bluster, and Parker works for a conceited windbag with inferiority issues.

At a quick glance some fans might see the Lee-Ditko Spider-Man as a satirical jab at the Siegel-Shuster hero. And there are moments of satire present in early Spider-Man, particularly through the authors' focus on the character's money problems. Clearly, even though both heroes are fantasy-creations, Spider-Man's authors are claiming greater verisimilitude, showing that when their character becomes a costumed superhero, that transformation doesn't obviate all of his other problems.  At an equally quick glance, this might seem to be the same strategy pursued by Harvey Kurtzman in his full-blown satires, such as MAN AND SUPERMAN, discussed here.

Nevertheless, this particular Kurtzman short story is merely stereotypical in the simplicity with which Kurtzman addresses the lack of verisimilitude in comic-book superhero stories. Lee and Ditko's criticism of Superman's lack of "real-life problems" is only one aspect of Spider-Man's mythos, for Spider-Man as much as Superman must deal with such non-realistic worries as preventing mad scientists from creating Bizarro duplicates or turning themselves into giant lizards. Thus Spider-Man is not a satire of Superman, but an attempt to evolve a new ethic for the costumed hero; to show that Spider-Man is more of a hero precisely because he deals with both medical bills and lizard-men.  I don't claim that Lee and Ditko thought about their new approach to heroes in such lofty terms at the time. But I am claiming that both of them drew on a deep reservoir of narrative strategies from various genres-- superheroes, crime, horror, and science fiction-- rather than sticking too close to the superhero model as that had been defined prior to the Silver Age.  This openness to narrative strategies also made them open to the power of the archetype that most defines Spider-Man: the aforementioned "suffering hero."

Superman's emotionally imperturbable archetype once influenced dozens of epigoni. But in the wake of Spider-Man specifically and other Marvel characters generally, that archetype no longer inspires more than a handful of imitators-- and some of those make conscious appeal to nostalgia, rather than celebrating the archetype of "Christ with Muscles" in new forms.

 I won't say that it is impossible to conceive of a modern costumed hero who doesn't juggle both realistic and unrealistic problems, but it has become the "new norm," despite mitigating influences from Miller, Morrison, and others.

Of course, in the case of many Spider-Man imitators-- the 1970s character Nova, for one-- the archetype of the suffering hero has been dumbed down to an array of stereotypical devices, and any archetypal potential goes unrealized.  Even the new breed of cinematic superheroes have inclined toward "Marvel style" rather than "DC style," as shown by such films as SUPERMAN RETURNS and MAN OF STEEL, which failed to mount a persuasive cinema-archetype for the Man of Steel.

SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PART 2

Usually there's not over a year's time between a "Part 1" and a "Part 2" in my postings. This one was brought on, however, by my recent elaboration of the concept of the combinatory-sublime and its possible effect on my earlier statements on the sublime affect.

The first SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY was primarily oriented on making a distinction between the possible validation of each of these literary qualities.  I suggested that the manifestation of the sublime was dependent to some degree on public reception:

I am toying with-- though not completely committed to-- the idea that the sublime affect can be perceived best through works that have proved popular with a majority of their audience, be it a "high-art" or "low-art" audience. With works that have not proved popular with some audience at some time, it's harder to divine this specific affect.

On the other hand, mythicity, I asserted, was not dependent on popular acclaim, but on a critic's ability to reconstruct a symbolic discourse within a given narrative:

This [status of the literary sublime] is in strong contradistinction with [that of] the mythic, which... is properly a discourse rather than an affect...

In this essay I'll be revising this distinction somewhat, by invoking Northrop Frye's dichotomy of "narrative values" and "significant values."  I summed up the dichotomy in this essay:

To blend a foursome of terms derived from disparate Frye essays, narrative values are those that are “centripetal,” applying to values within the structure of the narrative; the values that make the narrative work. Significant values are“centrifugal,” in that they apply to the values that make it possible for audiences to relate to the actions of the characters within the narrative structure.

The dichotomy proposed in the March 2012 essay borders on constituting "mythicity" as a "narrative value" alone and "sublimity" as a "significant value" alone.  This does not stand now that I've articulated two aspects of sublimity-- one of which, the "combinatory-sublime," is implicated in the condition of "mythicity," while the other, the "dynamically sublime," is implicated in the condition of *dynamicity.*  Further, both "mythicity" and "dynamicity" must be seen as having both narrative and significant values, with the sublimity each generates being the primary significant value.  To word it in a schematic sense:


MYTHICITY
is to
THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME
as
DYNAMICITY
is to
THE DYNAMICALLY SUBLIME

I will illustrate all four principles by drawing on one passage from one of the foremonst literary myths, Herman Melville's MOBY DICK:

"Hark ye yet again – the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me."-- Chapter 36.

Beginning with the principle of mythicity:

Narratively at this point in the novel, Melville chooses to introduce the full extent of Ahab's obsession, which goes beyond personal revenge and becomes a credo of protest against the inscrutable reality behind all of the masks.  This credo is a "narrative value" in that it provides Ahab with a fanatical motivation, making it probable that he will continue his quest until its very bitter end. 

At the same time, Melville knows that his "ideal reader" should experience a fascination with Ahab's demonic philosophy, beyond its function in the story proper.  This philosophy goes beyond its statement in this one passage, including many other mythic manifestations, not least being Ahab's baptism of the whale-spears "in the name of the devil" in Chapter 113.  Since Ahab's belief-system must appear to be coherent, no matter how improbable it may seem, Melville constantly builds that belief-system out of a dizzying (and hence potentially sublime) combination of elements: Zoroastrian fire-worship, the Old Testament Leviathan-myths, the Greek Zodiac, and many other myth-elements besides.  This is the "significant value" of Ahab's credo in every instance of the novel where Ahab holds forth on it.


At the same, Ahab is not some airy scholar spinning webs of mythological comparison; he is an experienced whale-hunter who kills other beasts of Moby Dick's species during the novel and renders them down into their constituent parts. By this speech and others like it, he makes himself a fit opponent for Moby Dick, a creature typified by "outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it."  In terms of narrative values, Ahab conjures forth this vision of the White Whale's dynamicity in order to suggest the magnitude of the task he sets himself by attempting the beast's death.  The degree of Ahab's passion, together with his real experience as a whale-hunter, suggests the possibility that he may be able to do what he intends.  Without the possibility that Moby Dick may lose the climactic conflict, the novel would lack the tragic power Melville intends.

At the same time all of Ahab's pronouncements about the whale-- that it may be an "agent" of the "inscrutable thing" behind the masks, that fighting it is comparable to "striking the sun"-- function to imbue the White Whale with a sublime dynamicity that goes beyond the mere power of an ordinary whale; goes beyond the domain of natural fear and into the realm of "daemonic dread," to quote Rudolf Otto.  This dread of a power beyond the natural gives both Moby Dick and his pursuer the significant value of the dynamically sublime.

Having provided this schematic analysis, showing how each principle can have either a narrative or subjective value, I'll proceed in Part 3 to explain how each of them tends more toward one value than the other.

TEN DYNAMIC DAEMONS

Having put forth the idea of "coherent improbabilities" here, it occured to me that though I've given examples of particular tropes or literary works that fit this category, characters are probably more accessible as exemplars.  Thus here are ten characters to match each of the ten tropes with which I've illustrated the manifestation of the "uncanny" phenomenality.

In all but one case, I chose an exemplar who appeared during the period that gave birth to the phenomenon of popular fiction, though a few of my choices come from canonical literary works.

ASTOUNDING ANIMALS-- Moby Dick, from Herman Melville's MOBY DICK.  Melville's book technically remains within the causal realm in a cognitive sense-- that is, the colossal cetacean is constantly compared with godlike beings, but there's no evidence that he's anything but a formidable animal.  But the Great White Whale, like his obsessed co-star Ahab, dwell in a world that constantly pushes into the metaphenomenal in a purely affective sense.

BIZARRE CRIMES-- Juliette, from the novel of the same name by the Marquis deSade. Sade is, in his way, something of an apostle of naturalism to the extent that he constantly denies the ideas of divinity.  Nevertheless, for Sade as for Goethe the motto is, "In the Beginning was the Act!"  But for Sade the act is not creation, but the obsessive need to find new and more exotic ways to destroy human beings-- a need which seems embodied most strongly in the character of Juliette, the blood-hungry sister of the innocent Justine.

DELIRIOUS DREAMS AND FALLACIOUS FIGMENTS-- Alice, from Lewis Carroll's two books starring that prodigious dreamer.  Within this trope, even though causality seems to win the game when Alice wakes from her descent into meaningful nonsense, it's the dreams that become more real to us than the reality.

ENTHRALLING HYPNOTISM AND ILLUSIONISM-- Svengali, from the 1894 TRILBY by George DuMaurier.  As yet I haven't reviewed any of the films starring literature's most famous
hypnotist, though most moderns know the Svengali of the movies if they know him at all.  As noted elsewhere, both "hypnotism" and "illusionism" have the effect of waking persons that dreams do upon the dreamer; making the impossible and improbable become real for the subjects.

EXOTIC LANDS AND CUSTOMS-- Allen Quatermain, from H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel KING SOLOMON'S MINES.  The novel is famous for launching the genre of the "Lost World story," in which an archaic civilization has managed to survive in some remote corner of the world without contact with the onrush of history.  I have not read any of the "Allen" books aside from the one in which Haggard encountered Haggard's other great character, "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed," but have gained the impression that most of the other Allen books possess an uncanny phenomenality, rather than a marvelous or naturalistic one.

FREAKISH FLESH-- Quasimodo,from Victor Hugo's 1831.  Though Hugo's original novel hews closer to the genre of the "historical novel" than that of horror, the image of the hunchback-- be it Quasimodo's or that of some lesser epigone-- has become a familiar icon of horror.  In contrast to a naturalistic exhibition of a "freak of nature," as one sees in the 1980 David Lynch film THE ELEPHANT MAN, Quasimodo's physical freakishness in the novel is constantly tied to the dark nature of humankind as a whole.

OUTRE OUTFITS, SKILLS, AND DEVICES-- These three aspects do not always occur together in a given character, though I group them together because weapons and costumes, as much as a character's physical skills, are extensions of his persona as an uncanny spectre.  One character who combines all three in significant fashion is The Lone Ranger, spawned by a 1933 radio series.  Although the hero moves through a largely naturalistic world in most of his incarnations, the very notion of an Old West champion able to dispense justice despite wearing a bandit's mask and firing silver bullets with flawless accuracy, is a figure who resides only in an uncanny domain.

PERILOUS PSYCHOS-- Norman Bates, from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel PSYCHO.  Though Jack the Ripper is a more famous psycho-killer, he's disallowed here by virtue of being a real character, however mysterious.  The Norman birthed by Bloch and midwifed by Hitchcock seems to have the fictional psycho who, directly or indirectly, spawned the greatest number of imitators.  Some of these may be considered merely naturalistic versions of the original, as with the current BATES MOTEL teleseries.  But an uncanny psycho is always discernible by his ability to invoke more "dread" than simple physical "fear."

 PHANTASMAL FIGURATIONS-- The Phantom of the Opera, from Gaston Leroux's 1909 serial novel of that name.  Leroux also employs the trope "freakish flesh" for this famed monstrous presence, but the trope that most informs the novel is the character's ability to lurk beneath the Paris Opera House, pretending to be "the Opera Ghost."  Regardless as to whether readers believed or did not believe in the existence of this particular ghost at the outset, the Phantom remains far more than the sum of his impostures.

WEIRD SOCIETIES AND FAMILIES-- Fu Manchu, first appearing in Sax Rohmer's 1913 MYSTERY OF FU-MANCHU.  Admittedly, even in that first novel, Fu Manchu displayed more "marvelous" characteristics than any of the other characters cited here, in that he often controlled assorted weapons of "mad science." At base, though, Fu Manchu's greatest appeal to readers was one that did not depend on the marvelous elements of the series: his status as a sort of "Alexander the Great" of Oriental Evil, in that his "Si-Fan" organization embraced a wildly diverse group of Asian fiends-- Indian thuggee, Burmese dacoits, the Sea-Dyaks of Borneo, and so on.  This vast conspiracy by itself stands as one of the period's best evocations of a "weird society" that goes beyond the bounds of a mere criminal organization, and sometimes seems more like a "Pandemonium" presided over by the Satanic genius.

THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 2

Having spent Part 1 discussing literary culture in terms of its being “high” or “low,” in this part I’ll confuse that familiar metaphor all to hell by suggesting a counter-metaphor: that of “big” versus “little.”

In some ways a dualistic metaphor relating to size might prove less prejudicial than the high/low dichotomy.  As humans are hierarchical beings, they have a tendency to conceive that things rated “higher” than others on a given scale are perforce “better.”

There’s arguably more leeway in using size to denote quality.  Some individuals will argue that “bigger is better,” while others will respond, “good things come in small packages.” In biological terms, an elephant fits one ecological niche, while a mouse fits another.  This dichotomy applies equally well to the ecological interactions of canonical literature (usually considered to be “high culture”) and non-canonical literature (usually rated as “low culture.”)

Canonical literature perpetuates its existence through its promulgation of “big myths”— which means by and large “literary myths” rather than “religious myths,” though the distinction is not always as absolute as some critics have claimed.  “Big” literary myths are those works of such colossal significance that they will (in theory) appeal not just to the sophisticated audiences of their own time, but also to many if not all sophisticated audiences from then on.

To be sure, not every work that attempts to obtain the status of lasting “for the ages” succeeds in doing so.  However, even the failures “prove the rule,” as it were, while some works may seize the brass ring of canonical status for a time and then fall into comparative obscurity.  Or, like Melville’s MOBY DICK, some works may not succeed in their time but become canonical myths long after an author’s death. 

In contrast, non-canonical literature is meant to serve the needs of contemporary buyers only, and shows few aspirations toward literary immortality.  It propagates “little myths” that have more widespread accessibility in their time, spreading hither and yon like dandelions on the wind. Canonical myths propagate themselves more like frogs, as the “eggs,” the works themselves, depend on a complex process of cross-fertilization from peers and critical journals in order to obtain their desired “big” reputations.  It’s possible for certain “little myths” to take on a quasi-canonical status—I’m thinking here of the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle.  However, Sherlock Holmes’ “little myth” reputation is partly sustained not solely by the original stories, but by the accessibility of the concept to adaptation in other media—films, prose pastiches, and so on.  In contrast, Melville’s MOBY DICK sustains its “big myth” reputation on the appeal of the original work alone, irrespective of how many movies or pastiches may spring from that appeal.

Now all this talk about “popularity” should not be seen as opening a door to the mistaken definition of “myth” as simply being “that which is popular,” which is what many comics-fans mean when they speak of Batman being “mythic.”  As I’ve specified many times, literary mythicity is defined by the complexity of symbolism in a given work, not by its popularity.  Literary myths, like religious myths, must construct their narratives around aspects of life that their audiences deem important, or else no one would trouble to read any kind of literature, “big” or “little.”  These life-aspects have been most insightfully organized by Joseph Campbell—who admittedly applied them dominantly to religious, not literary, myths—into four crucial functions: the psychological (the dynamics of individual personality), the sociological (the dynamics of the society), the cosmological (the dynamics of the physical world), and the metaphysical (obviously, dealing with whatever is conceived as “behind” the merely physical).

As a quick side-note, I can’t help observing that the function that receives the least amount of attention from canonical critics—that of the cosmological—is extremely important to both of my chosen examples.  Through Ishmael and his fellow whalers, Melville explores the physical nature of the leviathans of the deep.  Through Sherlock Holmes, Doyle anatomizes the physical nature of London itself.

Having re-stated a major component of my theory, I recognize that popularity—or the attempt to garner popularity—is the medium through which the germs of myth are dispersed.  In this essay I examined how a particular story from a Silver Age comics-feature, ADVENTURES OF THE JAGUAR, displayed a higher-than-average level of mythicity.  Still, the author of the story was certainly attempting to garner some level of non-canonical popularity, for the tone and substance of the story are imitative of Silver Age SUPERMAN comics, which were among the best-selling comics-features of the period.  Most JAGUAR stories imitated the tone and substance without managing to convey any content, and this may be a key reason that the existing fandom for Silver Age comics pays scant attention to the Jaguar’s 1960s incarnation.  In contrast, even weak Superman stories of the period derive some glamour from their association with a host of better-regarded stories.

        When I speak of “the care and esteeming of little myths” in my title, I have in mind the point I made in Part 1: that neither “big myths” nor “little myths” are worthy of love as such.  However, one can esteem them as well-made artifacts, artifacts that in some cases succeed in attempting more than the average artifact does.  I’ll add that because modern elitist critics are so concerned with emphasizing the portentous importance of the “big myths” they champion, as against the “little myths” that usually enjoy wider contemporary popularity, those critics are unable to analyze the “big myths” in terms of their actual content, too often falling back on parroting the intellectual arguments of Sigmund Freud or Karl Marx, as if the work became good simply because its complexities can be explained through those conceptual lenses.  Alternately, those same techniques can be used to prove a work to be bad, because the work is then reduced to the level of a symptom of some undesireable "false consciousness." An example can be seen in the Charles Reece WONDER WOMAN essays I critiqued in June, starting here. 


        Without a firm grasp as to how narrative works in its "little" manifestation, one can have no genuine insight into the way it works in the "big" version.

     

THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1

In GROTHERY STORES I referenced a Gary Groth blogpost in which Groth tossed out George Santayana’s second-best-known quotation:

"Americans love junk; it’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love."

Now what does this statement mean, ripped as it so often has been from whatever context lay behind it?

On the bare face of it, it states the author’s disapproval that anyone should show love toward, not literal junk, but the "junk" of popular culture.  Santayana does not state what one should love rather than popular culture, but the construction implies that there is something worthier of love than mere "junky" artifacts.

Given the usual opposition of the terms “high” and “low,” it follows that if one disapproves of other persons loving what’s often termed “low culture,” then its opposite, “high culture,” may well be the missing thing that is worthy of love.  It’s not unlike the logic that says that one may sleep with a “low-class” prostitute and then cast her aside—which seems the attitude Santayana evinces toward low junk-culture—while one confers love and marital status only upon those of a higher and more seemly class.

Given the fuzziness of his statement, I do not know if this is what George Santayana meant.  Gary Groth has made statements to this effect many times, usually following the Adornite argument that high culture leads to greater and finer thought while low culture leads to mental sloth, voting Republican and herpes simplex.  He’s made so many such assertions that I hope the reader will forgive me for not bothering to ferret out an example thereof, in order to stick to the subject: what should one love?

Should George Santayana “love” the play HAMLET, so often heralded as a high point in Western culture?  And if he did love it, as the phrase goes, why didn’t he marry it?  To extend my prostitute/wife analogy, surely no one would disapprove of such a high-minded marriage, even if he did keep some low-culture doxy on the side.  Maybe, while expousing his love of HAMLET to all and sundry, he kept a set of John Buchan books in a cubbyhole somewhere, taking them out only to use them for some quick unearned gratification, though always taking care that the neighbors should never find out.

Now, by my lights one *should not* love either HAMLET nor BATMAN (to choose a pop-culture icon better known than anything George Santayana might’ve read).  It should seem ludicrous to love either the high-culture or the low-culture icon, for the simple reason that no icons, or any of the works in which they appear, can ever love anyone back.    

Of course human beings do, against all logic, express vivid affection for all manner of fictional works and characters, or even for certain kinds of nonfiction (one thinks of Nietzsche’s recollections of his first exposure to the work of Schopenhauer).  But I suspect that the affection people feel for the phantasms of fiction and philosophy are akin to what Herman Melville termed “the shock of recognition.”  Melville claimed that upon reading Hawthorne, he recognized a spirit akin to his own in the works of the older author.

It could be argued that, whatever similarities existed between the two men, there may have been far more differences.  But even admitting this, Melville’s experience of “shock” is not invalidated.  Melville saw in Hawthorne’s works not the spirit of Hawthorne, but the spirit of Melville himself, reflected by the work of Hawthorne, as in a mirror.

The notion of intersubjectivity explains much of the appeal of fiction.  Elitists like Groth generally insist that the difference between good and bad fiction is a matter of highflown sophistication; that which lacks sophistication is perforce bad.  Yet even elitist critics differ among themselves over what is good or bad in Shakespeare just as much as comics-fans do about the proper depiction of Batman.  The arguments themselves may be more sophisticated, but the response for or against any given work spring from the extent to which the work mirrors the subjectivities of critic, fan, or general audience-member.  But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities.

Yet we need not dismiss this sort of “love”—which, when examined more fully, might be better termed “esteem”-- as mere solipsism.  Even as people with wildly differing tastes and personalities can work together to produce civilization, all forms of literature can and do play off one another to create a greater whole.  (And yes, the verbal contrast of “working together” vs. “playing off one another” is no coincidence.)  Northrop Frye, from whom I derived my own “shock of recognition” despite his being one of many intellectual-mentors-whom-I-never-met, viewed this whole as possessing the integrity of archaic myth.  To any reader of this blog, it should be more than clear that I do as well, whatever disagreements I have with Frye (see here).  In part 2 I’ll address the proper way to show esteem for literary myths, be they of noble or base extraction.