MYTHCOMICS: "SWAN SONG OF THE LIVING DEAD DUCK" (HOWARD THE DUCK #10, 1977)

Prior to this essay, the only HOWARD THE DUCK issue I pegged as a mythcomic was issue #11, for the story "Quack-Up." In fact, I noted that the story was part of a longer arc, one that did not hold up as a mythcomic-narrative, which I still believe. I further asserted that I didn't think that HOWARD's superordinate creator Steve Gerber had emphasized the mythopoeic potentiality as much as the didactic and dramatic ones.

In the case of "Swan Song," the story immediately preceding "Quack-Up," I've given it a more sustained look for this essay. I've decided that though there is a lot of didactic content in "Song"  -- on the second page, the hapless mallard protagonist begins a rant about "socialization"-- there are also a fair number of myths in the mix as well. In this case, the two potentialities reinforce one another, as with the Silver Surfer tale I discussed in FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2. 

So "Song"-- most of which is entirely in Howard's head after he suffers a traumatic mental breakdown-- begins with him emerging, fully adult (and unclothed except for his stogie) from an oversized egg. A giant hand tries to smash him, so he flees into a room and immediately begins discoursing about the socialization common to all societies, which Howard views as pure indoctrination. He takes refuge in an unfurnished room and encounters a bunch of miniature humans ("hairless apes," in Howard's parlance). The symbolism isn't that clear-- I guess the mini-humans are beings who have surrendered to indoctrination, and accepted a barren, confined existence.

But the next symbol could not be clearer: "Indoctrination in the Form of Monstrous Monetary Dominance," a.k.a. "Kong Lomerate," a.k.a. Gerber's publisher Marvel Comics-- though in 1977 we're a long way from that company being anything akin to a real conglomerate. Anyway, when Howard expresses surprise that a hairy ape could claim to be the owner of all these mini-humans, Kong voices the interesting sentiment, "It's because I'm not human that my word is law! I only exist on paper!" Of course, this is also true of Howard in 1977, and when Howard gives Kong backtalk, the gorilla-boss shows his authority by "cancelling" the abrasive drake. 

(Fun interstitial fact: HOWARD wasn't cancelled while Gerber was on the feature, but after he was fired from the company, neither the color comic, a subsequent black-and-white magazine, nor a comic strip lasted past 1981. Talk about killing the duck that laid the golden eggs.)

Howard's next dream-scene takes him to a mountain hut, seeking some motivating wisdom to carry him through his own cynical vision of existence. He meets another Gerber character, the short-lived superhero Omega, and they exchange a few inconclusive pleasantries. 

Another quick transition takes Howard to one of the main sources of his consternation: his maybe-girlfriend Beverly Switzler. But alas, it's not the Beverly he knows, but Surrealist Beverly, on loan from Rene Magritte perhaps. While Real Beverly only indirectly obliges Howard to act heroically, Surrealist Beverly exists to torment and humiliate him with her carefully contrived absurdity.

Then Howard thinks he wakes up, but no, it's as he says: "Welcome to my Nightmare Part 2." He meets "your friendly neighborhood Piano," almost surely selected as a precursor to the mallard's crisis of socially generated guiltiness. Spider-Piano suggests that Howard read a book-- the 1975 bestseller WHEN I SAY NO, I FEEL GUILTY-- but Howard, being something of a snob, refuses to accept counsel from pop psychology.

But Howard's a Marvel Comics character, so despite his estrangement from the heroic code of other characters, his nature keeps leading him back that way. First, he meets his own private "rogues' gallery." Then he meets another wisdom-dispensing acquaintance, Doctor Piano (who went by the name "Strange" when Howard met him in a DEFENDERS tale). But Howard rejects the doctor's advice re: altruism, and as if in reaction to Howard's pessimism, his counselor disappears. In his place appears yet another of Howard's adversaries, the Kidney Lady, who by no mean coincidence the duck will encounter in the real world of "Quack-Up." 

He also encounters LeBeaver, the goofball super-villain whom Howard refused to fight to defend Beverly. This time Howard tries to battle the evildoer, to perpetuate a "masculine stereotype"-- and as a result he ends up in a hell of his own creation, mocked by his old foes and Surrealist Beverly.   

Does Gerber's screed against socialization stand in terms of making a good didactic argument, a "formal proposition?" No, since I think Gerber posed questions and didn't answer them. But as an "informal proposition," which conjures with the chaos of random correlations, this particular song was one of Steve Gerber's strongest.

 

"SNAP BACK" VS. "LOST CHANCE"

I posted this today on CHFB:

________________

I recently came across a link to a Gail Simone twitter-thread that addresses some of the comments on this thread (about the BIRDS OF PREY film).

Simone, as some here will know, is famous for being one of the most celebrated BIRDS OF PREY scripters. Her twitter defends the right of the filmmakers to go "off model," saying in part:

I believe the truly great characters are elastic. You can pull them and bend them, you can stretch them. The great ones snap back. We all know what their core is. They snap back.

Now, the fact that Simone liked the film, and doesn't feel offended by the filmmakers' changes, doesn't in itself make me feel obliged to like the film. For all we know, she may have been as offended as any of us by other films in which comics characters got changed about.

In some ways, the "snap back" theory-- which I''ll attribute to Simone even though I'm sure others have voiced similar things--  is the inverse of the old "lost chance" theory. Back in the sixties, hardcore comics fans resented the Batman live-action show, because it traduced the more serious stories in the comic book. To these fans, the Batman TV show was a lost chance to show the fans' favored character in a good light, to explain to outsiders why they the fans found the character appealing and not merely "kid stuff."

The eventual fate of Batman, of course, would seem to validate Simone's "snap back" theory.  Probably no non-fans in the sixties were enthralled enough with the show to start buying Batman comics. Yet both the Bat-mania that briefly captivated an adult audience and subsequent re-runs of the sixties show, gave Batman a lot more media-currency than he'd ever had before. In the seventies comic-book Batman "snapped back" to a level of quality far beyond those of the mid-sixties "New Look" stories. It's even arguable that some comics-creators brought back "Dark Gothic Batman" as a reaction against the TV show's version, which I'm tempted to call "Candyland Batman." Tim Burton's 1989 BATMAN capitalized on this mode, and some publicity at the time even speculated about whether or not a "serious Batman" could prosper after the example of the sixties teleseries.

All of this doesn't mean that there are no situations in which a bad version of a concept or series poisons the well. The box-office failure of 1997's BATMAN AND ROBIN certainly kept the Big Bat off the live-action screen for a time, though it didn't hurt the character so much that he couldn't recover from the debacle, either in comics or in other media. On the other hand, for some characters there really was just one shot at success, and a mediocre adaptation can undermine future potential-- as witness the ancillary results of 1986's HOWARD THE DUCK.

I don't think total fidelity to the original comics is necessarily a solution, either. For me, all arguments regarding the role of fidelity boil down to one formula:

"There are good changes, and there are bad changes."

As to what makes one change good and another bad-- that can only measured through the lens of subjective perception.

MYTHCOMICS: NEVADA 1-6 (1998)

In general I didn't like a lot of Steve Gerber's post-Bronze Age work. The antic creativity present in such 1970s features as THE DEFENDERS, MAN-THING and HOWARD THE DUCK faded in favor of an often nihilistic sourness. Possibly this feeling caused me to quickly pass over NEVADA, a six-issue 1998 Vertigo series by Gerber and artist Phil Winslade. But now it seems to me one of Gerber's best accomplishments from the latter part of his career.

In a roundabout way, NEVADA arose from one of the author's more bizarre inspirations. The story goes that in 1977 Gerber missed his deadline for HOWARD THE DUCK #16, and that, rather than simply reprinting an earlier HOWARD story, he and some artists whipped together a series of illustrated meditations on life, the universe, and everything, sometimes through the eyes of the acerbic duck, sometimes from Gerber himself. One two-page piece allowed Gerber to express his absurdist take on the then-prevalent "obligatory fight scene," in which a Las Vegas chorus girl and her pet ostrich battled an animated lamp. Many fans didn't care for the stratagem-- one reader wrote simply "Next time go reprint"-- but supposedly Neil Gaiman opined that he'd actually like to see such a story. Twenty years later, Gerber and Winslade produced NEVADA, though not from Marvel, the publisher of HOWARD, but under DC's Vertigo imprint.

Like many Gerber protagonists, the Vegas showgirl Nevada, whose birth-name is not disclosed, would have no luck if not for the bad kind. She dances for her living at the tacky "Nile Hotel and Casino," has an assortment of cool, trippy friends, and shows her essential kind-heartedness by rescuing her pet Bolero (named for the Ravel ballet composition) from an ostrich farm. Though she has some ongoing hassles, like a rejected boyfriend who won't take "no" for an answer, she came to Vegas to start a new life. To be sure, we learn nothing about the old life except that at nine years she auditioned for a Christmas church play by portraying the Virgin Mary with a pillow that realistically showed the icon as "great with child," thus evoking the ire of Christians who didn't like too much reality in their religion. As if to satirize religion in general, her featured dance at the Nile is a re-enactment of the Egyptian story of Osiris' dismemberment, but given a snarky feminist denouement.

However, soon Nevada has bigger problems than a stalker (who, by the way, gets totally trounced by one of Bolero's deadly kicks). Some innocent tourists at the Nile get literally dismembered by an alien visitor from another realm, and Nevada finds herself the victim of time-slips, causing her to encounter cavemen or to witness a guillotine-execution during the Reign of Terror. Who's responsible? Is it Mister DeVesuvio, a mysterious crime-boss who has a glass tube in place of his head? (A similar character, Ruby Thursday, appeared in Gerber's DEFENDERS.) Or is it the drunken sot Odgen Locke, who once taught theoretical physics but now seems to be able to transform himself into an angel-winged warrior? But no, the real culprit is a cosmic event breaking down the boundaries between worlds, which incidentally makes possible the invasion of the aforementioned killer alien. Nevada actually meets and kills the alien, but there's an unnamed higher power who wants her special talents to be a "Rift Warrior," a defender of the cosmic order.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of reluctant heroes since the debut of Marvel Comics, but Gerber isn't interested in characters who make token protestations before easily acceding to the call of destiny. Through the author's Bronze Age work alone it's clear that Gerber enjoyed the allure of combative heroes while still feeling a lot of ambivalence about the use of violence, particularly sanitized violence, as a means of escape. Thus when Nevada's abducted by the "higher power" to put her through an ordeal called "the Hammer," we're not talking a few strenuous training-sessions with Master Yoda. Instead, Nevada goes through tons and tons of patented Gerber mindfuckery, leaving the reader wondering if her cosmic perceptor is on the side of the angels or not. But Gerber does make Nameless Higher Power the vessel of one essential nugget of wisdom: that most of sentient suffering arises from a hunger so great that it rises to the level of universal decay, not unlike the principle of entropy expoused by the villains in the Man-Thing tale "How Will We Keep Warm When the Last Flame Dies."  Nevada, despite her distrust of her perceptor, Nevada does have the stuff to fight back a downfall that could be brought about not by an evil overlord, but rather by "some moronic soul whose ego cannot endure being second in line." And thus Nevada does become a Rift Warrior and forces back a greater invasion of alien dipsticks bent on destroying the fabric of space-time

After this, the dancer returns to reality, though not without more attendant troubles. Clearly, the author left the door open for more stories with Nevada, Bolero and their quirky pals, but since it was a creator-owned project, this was the last show for the Vegas showgirl. Perhaps it's just as well that she went out on a high note. Nevada sums up her situation and her mordant but courageous philosophy in a letter, ending in part with the words:

"So what do you do when reality bites back and the new life falls apart. I can only speak for myself. Fuck it raw and keep dancing."

MYTHCOMICS: "QUACK-UP!" (HOWARD THE DUCK #11, 1976)

Since in this post  I devoted some space to asserting how poorly Bill Mantlo did with a particular HOWARD THE DUCK story, it seems only fair to address the question of mythicity in Steve Gerber's original run on the franchise he co-created.

A quick scan of the first 27 issues of the HTD comic book suggests that Gerber's stories-- and they seem to be principally his creation, with only minimal creative input from artists like Gene Colan and Val Mayerik-- are not generally intended to evoke the mythopoeic potentiality. While Gerber's preoccupations on the Man-Thing-- one story analyzed here-- tend toward the kinetic and the mythopoeic, most of the HOWARD stories focus on elements of the dramatic and the didactic. This seems to have been a logical development, given that Gerber's protagonist was a classic misanthrope, his animus toward society accentuated by the fact that, as a talking duck, he wasn't even an "anthrope." Gerber sometimes wrote HOWARD into situations that required him to play the part of a "hero," in keeping with 1970s Marvel's emphasis upon having a fight-scene in every issue. However, Howard was what I've termed a *demihero,* more concerned with survival than with the glories of the heroic life. It's arguable that the HOWARD series is the first mainstream Marvel series that seriously called into question the glory-seeking ethic of the Marvel superhero line.

The story in question here is actually one segment on an arc concerning Howard's inability to tolerare the heroic ethic. At the end of issue #9, Howard refused to meet the challenge of a villain called "Le Beaver," even though said villain was threatening Howard's quasi-romantic "hairless ape" companion, Beverly Switzler. By sheer dumb luck, Le Beaver is killed and Beverly's life is preserved. However, the duck is tormented by his psychological conflicts. Even during his dreams, he reflects that "There's really nothin' glamorous or honorable about gettin' killed to perpetuate [other people's] masculine stereotype." Yet the refusal of heroic action generates enough mental stress that Howard experiences something akin to a nervous breakdown, leading to a surrealistic dream-sequence that lasts throughout issue #10. Issues #11 through #14 deal with Howard being sentenced to a mental health ward for observation-- but overall the arc is still largely concerned with the dramatic and didactic sides of Howard's conflict, not the mythopoeic. In the end Howard receives help from a Marvel guest-star whose adventures Gerber had been writing the previous year-- Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan-- but at best the arc of Howard's "quack-up" was a mixed bag.

The story of HOWARD #11, though, is strong enough that it can read without much reference to the other issues, particularly because Gerber conceived a means to place his protagonist in a situation absurd enough to generate its own ironic mythos. Howard awakens from his dream-- literally a bedeviling nightmare, since it ends with him being tormented in hell by a comic-looking devil-- yet the duck remains haunted by quasi-schizophrenic voices that only he hears. He happens to see Beverly apparently making up to a handsome "hairless ape," and his jealousy provokes him to seek out the local bus-station and take the first bus out of town. The duck is so aggravated that he doesn't even notice that the bus is going to Cleveland, a hairless-ape city Howard has encountered before and for which he has no pleasant associations.

The idea of being stuck on a long bus-ride with a bunch of strangers would ordinarily connote only mundane experience. However, Gerber makes Howard's experience in the consensual world almost as surrealistic as anything in his dreams. Gerber's probable inspiration here is the Firesign Theater's 1971 comedy album I THINK WE'RE ALL BOZOS ON THIS BUS, but Howard's bus is overrun not with clowns but with religious frauds.

The duck, who styles himself a "pragmatist," would be among the last to ever seek religious counseling for his mental difficulties. So of course in an ironic universe he boards a bus replete with wackos who seem to sense his psychic upheaval and try to sell him their wares-- a book on "Gnosticology" (a spoof on Scientology), a neo-Christian text called "Martyrdom for the Millions" (hawked by a guy dressed up like Jesus), and others. Howard does make one marginal ally-- a cheerful, lisp-voiced innocent named "Winda," who will continue as a supporting character for the rest of Gerber's run.

However, the inevitable fight-scene occurs when Howard encounters an old nemesis from his part: the Kidney Lady (seen from behind on the cover), who is convinced that Howard is part of an "international kidney-poisoning conspiracy."

A fracas ensures, in which the Kidney Lady demonstrates her religious tolerance.

Gerber's at the top of his form here. He delivers a lot of silly puns that read better in a comic than they would if I put them in a blogpost. Many writers (*koff* Mantlo) would not be able to think of Howard as anything but a repository of MAD-like puns and simplistically moral storylines, Gerber's strength, in contrast, lies in his ability to merge the banal and the surrealistic in a manner that goes beyond mere frivolity. And while none of the religious goofballs on the bus are, properly speaking, representatives of genuine religions (even within the context of the Marvel Universe), it's surely not coincidence that Howard, though greatly in need of counseling, can only find religious elements intermixed with crass commercialism and verbal malapropisms ("You should love thy neighbor and be true to thy school.")

There are assorted myth-motifs throughout the "breakdown-arc," but only in "Quack-Up" do they assume a high level of mythicity.

NULL-MYTHS: "A CHRISTMAS FOR CAROL" (HOWARD THE DUCK #3, 1979)

Since the theme of this week's reviews was "Christmas stories in comics," this presented me with a dilemma. The medium plays host to many simple, sentimental Xmas-stories, but few of them have any symbolic depth. I'm not aware of any pro-Christian comics that have the symbolic depth of, say, C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, and the satirical, anti-Christian comics are usually superficial, along the lines of Justin Green's BINKY BROWN.

Most of the aforementioned Xmas-stories are about candy canes rather than crosses, but they don't do much more than rehearse the usual routines. Superman meets Santa. Wonder Woman meets Santa. The (Golden Age) Sandman gets a hoodlum to play Santa and change his ways. The Spirit won't fight crime on Christmas Eve because "the spirit of Christmas" takes care of it for him. (I wonder if that worked for Jewish people, like Will Eisner himself?) Many of these provide simple pleasures, but no complex ones. The "myth-comic" selected this week is an adventure-oriented parody of Christian themes, but for a comic to be a null-myth, it has to demonstrate at least the potential for symbolic complexity, but done badly.

Oddly, Bill Mantlo-- the same writer who wrote the "Son of Satan" story extolled this week-- also wrote the perfect "bad Santa" story-- or at least, perfect for my purposes.

I'll pass quickly over the business conflicts that caused the expulsion of Howard the Duck's creator, Steve Gerber, from the title. Bill Mantlo inherited the feature because of these behind-the-scenes occurrences, but my only concern here is whether or not Mantlo did a good job in presenting the character of Howard and his generally ironic universe. Even putting aside the resentment of readers who might've championed Gerber over Mantlo, it seems evident that Mantlo's version did not win any hearts and minds, for when the HOWARD feature was switched to Marvel's black-and-white line, theoretically to reach a more adult audience, the magazine only lasted a paltry nine issues, after which Howard's publication at Marvel became increasingly checkered.

Though artist Gene Colan continued to draw Howard's adventures in several of the b&w stories, Mantlo's version of the character undercut Colan's art in that his stories were neither funny, nor satirical, not even touchingly sentimental. The cover above is by Jack Davis more or less captures the lameness of Howard-the-magazine. What's all that funny about an angry duck sitting on a store-Santa's lap while presumably reading from his Xmas want-list? It might have been a little funny if Howard had been fawning, or if someone had caught him in such an embarrassing posture.

The story is essentially another "disbelieving-protagonist-meets-the-real-Santa" tale, and the "Carol" of the title is a little girl who's become disillusioned in Christmas because of her family troubles. The duck is pulled into Carol's orbit in a fairly hackneyed manner, after which both of them are almost flattened by a crashing sky-sleigh. Occupying the sleigh are the Big Claus himself and one of his elves, who is, like most elves, a sardonic type to balance Santa's jollity.

Howard reluctantly helps Santa gas up his sleigh, but then both he and the girl must take a ride to the North Pole workshop for reasons I won't bother detailing. Once there, Mantlo decides that the perfect way to celebrate the Christmas spirit is to-- launch a screed against nuclear power? Yes, Santa was a dope who let himself be talked into using nuclear power in his workshop, by a reptilian fellow called "the Pinball Lizard"-- though the Lizard is only the story's subsidiary villain; a henchman of a nuclear madman named "Greedy Killerwatt." 

I won't dwell on the obvious awfulness of these pun-names, except to say that Harvey Kurtzman at his worst would never have deigned to use either one-- particularly since the reference to the "Pinball Wizard" of the 1975 film TOMMY was about four years out of date. Worst than that, though, is that Mantlo's anti-nuclear screed isn't even true to the scientific knowledge of the time. Santa's elf claims that he tried to talk Santa into using clean solar power. Where was this completely problem-free solar power in 1979? Maybe on Marvel-Earth it existed, but even there, I doubt how much efficacy solar power would have had at the freaking North Pole.

As seen in many other null-myths, real symbolic play takes a backseat to speechifyin' and preachifyin'. There's no spirit, Christmas or otherwise, to be found in such pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness.

DANCING ON THE DWARF PT. 2

On 4-21-14 I wrote GENDERIZATION GAP PT. 2, in which I took a somewhat cynical view of Janelle Asselin's critique of the cover of DC Comics' TEEN TITANS #1, though not, I should add, of the sexual harassment she received as a result of that critique.

Nine days later, Jonah Wieland announced the change to the CBR forum. This was the first time I'd read that Asselin had been victimized by something more than loose sexual threats on the Internet:

so-called "fans" around the Internet, on various message boards and social media, including the CBR Forums, attacked Janelle personally, threatening her with rape and assault. These same "fans" found her e-mail, home address and other personal information, and used it to harass and terrorize her, including an attempted hacking of her bank account.

After reading that, I wondered if I had been overly dismissive of Asselin's complaints.  Though I prefer not to enter the "rage-fests" that typify so much online discourse about comic books, I'm sure that I would have been as angry as Asselin if something comparable happened to me, or to someone close to me, as a result of having made a critical comment of anything, be it pop culture or politics. I'll further admit that I'd be angry even if I was in Asselin's exact position of not knowing just how many specific hostile activities stemmed from the harassers.

I also wondered if I had been too dismissive of Asselin's comments, which I referred to as "poking the bear." I've poked certain bears myself on many occasions, and I've laid out some of my reasons for feeling that "opposition is true friendship" in this essay.  But what still bothers me about Asselin's original argument is that it lacks clarity as to whether it's attacking the idea of sexualizing teenaged girls generally, or the TITANS cover's failures in the arena of artistic excellence.  So, by the terms of my argument, I don't think Asselin provides a reasoned opposition of the comic-book tendencies she dislikes.

Jonah Wieland's reaction-- or over-reaction-- deserves further analysis as well. Putting aside the question of his motives, which may well be exactly what he claims they are, I have to question the feasibility of his solution. I've had my share of headaches from venom-spouting trolls on both CBR and Comicon.com, but to some extent that's what any poster lets himself in for by venturing into an Internet community.  I only occasionally posted on CBR before the Change, but I don't anticipate joining the new CBR community.

Why? Well, in GENDERIZATION GAP 2 I said that I valued the "evil thoughts" produced in the name of entertainment, even when they were, or seemed to be, sexist or racist in some way.  By the same logic, I suppose that I prefer even the slimy deceptions of moralistic Neopuritans, be they of the Elitist or the Populist persuasions, to any attempts to smooth them over with a bland standard of politeness-- such as we get in this famous HOWARD THE DUCK cover.

THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, PT. 1

Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination, and have their source in what one is pleased to call infantile fantasy.

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.)

Is [Flaubert] right when he claims that we do not know what Shakespeare loved or hated?... the statement is most definitely mistaken if it means that the implied author of Shakespeare's plays is neutral toward all values... the implied Shakespeare is thoroughly engaged with life, and he does not conceal his judgment on the selfish, the foolish and the cruel." (Wayne C. Booth, THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, 1961, p. 76.)

As always, when one juxtaposes quotes from scholars, one should note differences in the specialties of the scholars quoted. 

Carl Jung was a psychologist, not a literary theorist.  His remarks on the foundational nature of "fantasy" and its "dynamic principle" of "play" is therefore not presented as a formal literary theory.  Nevertheless the concept expressed-- that fantasy is integral to the nature of human art-- is far from foreign to literary studies, and finds echoes in varying fashions in the theories of Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke and Rene Wellek-- not to mention the archaic opposition of "delight" and "instruction" posited by Horace.  John Dryden even went so far as to say that "poetry only instructs as it delights." 

Dryden's assertion will certainly resonate with most if not all readers.  When one wants pure instruction, one does not look toward art, narrative or otherwise, but to didactic works, most of which will be non-fiction, with occasional exceptions in the fiction category.  Thus Wayne Booth is careful to frame his theory around what he terms "non-didactic fiction."  I understand this to apply to all works works whose main purpose is to cause audieces to identify with either utterly fictional characters, or characters drawn from reality but made over to be in some way charming or "delightful."  Even the late Harvey Pekar, who sought to create art from the generally mundane circumstances of his life in AMERICAN SPLENDOR, chose events that he could make interesting, the "delight" in this case stemming from the attention to mimetic detail.

The "art for art's sake" movement of the 19th century-- which arguably still has its own resonances in modern work-- might be viewed through the Jungian lens as a condition of pure play, in which, as Booth argues, art is emancipated from any moral or utilitarian considerations.  Often this manifests in the attitude that the ideal creator of art should be above those considerations, that he should always refuse to render any judgment upon his characters.  Booth quotes Jose Ortega y Gasset:

"...preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper."

I agree with Jung that the principle of play is the basis of all forms of what humans choose to call "art."  At the same time, Booth is correct in stating that values, which are rooted in "human content," are a significant aspect of literature.  What does "human content" connote?

 Booth's RHETORIC OF FICTION takes issue with the notion of author immunity to moral and social considerations. The book demonstrates in great detail how many authors-- or at least, "implied authors," which signifies the public faces of those authors-- encode their values in their works.  This proves the case whether authors simply step back from their works, as we see in Shakespeare's plays, or whether they choose content that seemed to flout human morality, as with Booth's examples of Andre Gide and Robbe-Grillet. 

I'll advance the view that although Jung's "principle of play" is the foundation of all art, Jung's corresponding "principle of serious work" has been so long associated with human artforms that the two have become thoroughly imbricated.  "Serious work," in my view, includes the idea of using art to instruct, to inform, to render judgments upon "the selfish, the foolish, and the cruel," to make readers aware of the old homily "actions have consequences"-- a homily repeated by Howard Le Canard in the issue seen above.

It's ironic that the "art for art's sake" ethos, in claiming that that art's technical excellence exempts it from moral considerations, employs a basic logic not far from my exculpation of popular literature from the expectation that it must be moral.  In THEMATIC REALISM PART I I stated that works of "thematic escapism" were in effect "vacations from morals," while works of "thematic realism" are defined by being grounded in considerations of moral nature and/or behavior.  Fortunately, for me to say that the latter form is or has become "grounded" is not quite the same as saying that its intrinsic nature is realistic. 

As yet I haven't applied these matters of "play" and "work" to the subject of so-called High and Low Art, which has become integral to the modern understanding of art.  More on this in Part II.