STIMULATING RESPONSES

 Possibly my dissatisfaction with Whitehead's take on symbolism in the two previous posts led me to a formulation on symbolism owing much to Ernst Cassirer, though not only to him.                                       

In the second chapter of AN ESSAY ON MAN, Cassirer attempts to place the human creation of symbolism within the general context of animal biology: "Every organism, even the lowest... [possesses] a receptor system and an effector system... The receptor system by which a biological species receives outward stimuli and the effector system by which it reacts to them are in all cases closely interwoven... Man has... discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link we may describe as the symbolic system." I've covered in diverse other posts how Cassirer distinguished human use of symbolic abstractions into those of "mythical thinking" and "discursive/dialectical thinking."                                                                    

Parenthetically, I'll note that in I.A. Richards' 1936 PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC, reviewed here, he also put forth a similar proposition regarding the origin of organic creatures' ability to "sort," using an amoeba-like creature as his baseline. But Cassirer's model is more constitutive, having some bearing on my theory of the four potentialities, which started with Jung's four functions but diverged from the Swiss psychologist as to what function belonged where. For me, the receptor system lines up with the kinetic potentiality, and the effector with the dramatic potentiality- which means that the "lateral meaning" associated with both is available to many if not all organic creatures. "Vertical meaning," however, is born from the human ability to form complex abstractions, and any parallels that might be found in non-human animals are very limited in nature.                                                                                                                       

 On a somewhat newer tack, it's recently occurred to me that Aristotle's famous definition of narrative from the Poetics bears strong comparison with Cassirer's base level of "stimulus-and-response" for all organic life-forms. Despite his biological acumen, the philosopher chose what I consider a rather unwieldy metaphor for said narrative: 'Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")' Aristotle like Plato used the word "dianoia" for a narrative's "thought" or "theme," but so far as I know no Greek thinker ever elaborated a theory of the mythopoeic elements of narrative that even touches upon the dimensions of Cassirer's schema-- though I believe Frye argued that the Roman-era author "Pseudo-Longinus" might have offered a counter-agent to Aristotle's emphasis upon discursive thought. More on these matters later, possibly.                                                                    

VERTICAL VEHICLES

I've talked a bit about early iterations of my myth-theory in various posts, such as 2021's RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 2, but usually I've confined such reminiscences to the last ten to twenty years. This is the period during which I feel that I brought to bear the full focus of my readings in philosophy-- Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer-- in line with the proto-theory I'd evolved in the seventies and eighties, a.k.a. "The JOURNAL years." I was by no means ill-informed in those days, having drawn a lot of my early observations from such diverse scholars as Jung, Frye, Eliade, Campbell and Fiedler. But a greater emphasis on philosophical rigor was necessary for a detailed analysis of what "myth" is in fictional narrative and how it contrasts with any and all other elements of narrative.

Yet in the early days of "Gene's Theories," I don't think I was entirely discriminating about what fictional icons did or did not possess "symbolic complexity." Case in point: while going through some old papers I found a list I'd tossed together of "mythopoeic serial concepts," by which I meant serials that showed the greatest mythopoeic values. I didn't date the list but the 2004 TV show LOST has the latest date of any of my selections. I didn't write down any criteria for inclusion, but I must not have been thinking of mythicity in terms of "epistemological patterns," since I included on that list a serial that's damn close to being anti-epistemological: that red-headed step-child of Henry Aldrich, ARCHIE.

So, assuming the near-total absence of epistemology in ARCHIE, what might have impressed me about the long-lived teen humor series? The only thing ARCHIE had going for it was that its creators cobbled together an ensemble cast made up of clearly defined "types"-- the Average Guy, the Mean Guy, the Rich Girl, the Poor Girl, and the Sardonic Cynic. (On a side note, I've sometimes thought that Jughead and his "what fools these mortals be" attitude might be the one thing that kept the Riverdale kids distinct from their many competitors.) 

Now, I'm also of the opinion that whenever pundits speak of a movie or a comic book as being "mythic," they're really funneling the idea that the work's characters and situations are popular with a wide audience because they're broadly conceived and probably rather simplistic next to "the fine arts." The word "types," though, is rather pejorative. The literary term "tropes" functions better to describe either characters or situations that become well-traveled for the very reason that they communicate their content quickly and efficiently, fulfilling the audience's expectations and yet allowing for a certain amount of free play.

Now I wouldn't have brought up this matter if I didn't have a way of bringing it into line with current theories, and as it happens, the aforementioned post RHETORICAL FLOURISHES 2 is also the first time I explored in detail the division of the mythopoeic trope into a "tenor" and a "vehicle," in line with the insights of I.A. Richards. I mentioned in FLOURISHES that the epistemological pattern would be the tenor, since it is a pattern partly conceived from the creator's experience in the real world, while a familiar trope used to communicate the pattern would be the vehicle.

My standard for excellence for "the tenor" is that of concrescence; the sense that an author has managed to bring several disparate elements into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Vehicle-excellence, though, would rely more on sheer frenetic creativity, the the author's (or authors') ability to produce a fascinating variety of tropes, what Edmund Burke called "the richness and profusion of images." These days I might not allow that the characters of ARCHIE function on any conceptual level, that they remain staunchly lateral and thus non-vertical in most of their adventures. But I can think of a few comedy-romance serials that would qualify, one being Rumiko Takahashi's ONE POUND GOSPEL-- a series which, like the majority of ARCHIE stories, contains no fantasy-SF content. 

Thus I might say that from the POV of "tenor-excellence" alone, the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR excels the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, because I've detected more concrescent stories in the former than in the latter. But in terms of "vehicle-excellence," they are equals. for both generated an impressive array of icons fraught with mythopoeic POTENTIAL, even if the FF is somewhat ahead in terms of mythopoeic ACTUALITY.

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD

Though there are ways in which my new categories, "novelty" and "recognizability," apply to stand-alone works (henceforth called "monads"). the categories are intended mostly to describe the dynamics of old stuff and new stuff in a serial format.

I.A. Richards, summing up his definition of all mental activity as "sorting," imagines the response of a single-celled organism to a stimulus and recognizing it as something encountered before.

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Such a sorting, of course, is only possible if the organism can distinguish between things it has or has not encountered before. I think Richards is correct in his intuition, though with the caveat that the amoeba can't conceptualize anything about the things it finds familiar or unfamiliar.

Serial franchises depend on a constant "new and old" dynamic. The majority of serials focus on a particular character or ensemble of characters. (I have addressed the concept of non-character icons here.) Even if no other elements are repeated within the serial, the main character(s) provide the reader with "recognizability." In adventure-oriented serials, "novelty" is most often supplied by the hero's opponents, though after a time they too may take on a strong aura of recognizability.

To be sure, serials with a domestic tone may focus not upon opponents but upon foils. The comic strip BLONDIE stars the duo of Blondie and Dagwood, and most of their conflicts with other characters stem from stock figures in the subordinate ensemble: the neighbors, Dagwood's boss, the mailman. New characters may appear-- for instance, Dagwood constantly faces an onslaught of annoying salesmen who importune the house-holder with aggressive sales techniques-- but usually these characters have no names and never make a second appearance as such.

Crossovers exist to extend the "cosmos" of a given icon by relating it to the "cosmos" of another icon. Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE is one of the first such crossovers. The entirely fictional main character encounters a few historical characters, such as Richard the Lion-Hearted, but they are not crossovers because they are aligned with the cosmos of Ivanhoe. However, Scott also works the mythology of Robin Hood into the narrative, and Robin Hood even in 1819 was a highly recognizable figure with his own "cosmos." Since IVANHOE is a novel without sequels, everything aligned to the knight's mythology-- the hero himself, his romantic interests, and his enemies-- are all "novel" compared to the mythos of Robin Hood, at least from the viewpoint of most readers.

In serial narratives, it's more often the case that the author seeks to promote two separate fictional universes by having them intersect. Often this means the encounter of two characters-- She and Allan Quatermain, Daredevil and Spider-Man-- though it can also mean a crossover of a character and an established physical environment. TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE does include David Innes, one of the heroes of the "Earth's Core" series, but Innes barely appears in the story, and the greater focus is upon Tarzan's encounter with the savage world of Pellucidar.

Now, while the author of such a work knows that the intersecting icons may both be recognizable to some readers, the base idea is to interest those readers to whom one of the icons is "novel," the better to convert that audience. Usually, within the diegesis of the story, the first meeting of two icons is marked by novelty, just as it is in real experience, though afterward the icons are generally familiar with one another, and within the diegesis they become recognizable, even if their next interaction may provide some elements of novelty.

Lastly, a great deal of "icon emulation" relies on at least a superficial level of recognizability, even where that recognizability contradicts everything known about the icon's established history. For instance, the film BLOODRAYNE: DELIVERANCE pits its heroine against a vampire named Billy the Kid, ostensibly four hundred years old. If this version of Billy has been around that long, then clearly he has nothing to do with either the real or folkloric history of Billy the Kid, and the film-script makes no attempt to rationalize the discordances. But because the writer sought to make his villain recognizable, the film nevertheless delivers a "strong template deviation" type of crossover.

PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 1

 In NOTES ON WHITEHEAD PT. 3, I expressed my regrets that the philosopher had not chosen to define many of his terms more precisely in his most famous book, PROCESS AND REALITY. I wasn't even able to get a concise sense of what a "prehension" was, even in the chapter "Theory of Prehensions."

However, by sheer chance I found a definition without even looking for it. I happened to pick up an old book I'd not read through despite owning it some twenty years: COLIN WILSON, a literary study by one John A. Weigel, devoted to examining Wilson's works up to the year 1975. I have only read two of Wilson's philosophy books, none of which include RELIGION AND THE REBEL. It's from this book that Weigel alternately quotes and paraphrases Wilson's take on Whitehead's concept of the prehension, which is far clearer than anything Whitehead wrote in PROCESS AND REALITY.

Of central importance is Whitehead's idea of "prehension," which is dramatically defined, following Whitehead's specifications, "as that act of the soul, reaching out like an octopus to digest its experience." Fixing on "prehension" as the basic act in existentialism, an act carefully to be distinguished from "apprehension," which is based on intellectual rather than soulful understanding, Wilson rests his own case.

Wilson's "octopus" metaphor brings to mind a more primitive form of organic life: that of the one-celled amoeba, which has no perceptual organs and so assesses its contact with the "outside universe" purely by touch. I feel like I've resorted to the amoeba once or twice to suggest the base process of perception somewhere, but even if I haven't, I.A. Richards did, as I noted in my summation of his book PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC here:

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Richards doesn't specifically link his notion of conceptual "sorting" to Whitehead, though as I also noted, the author does mention Whitehead elsewhere in RHETORIC. Both Wilson's octopus metaphor and Richards' amoeba metaphor stress the faculty of perception through non-intellectual methods, which I would broadly compare to Jung's concept of the organism reacting to the world through the irrational functions of sensation and of intuition. Moreover, such metaphors cohere well with what I have labeled Whitehead's "theme statement" for the whole of PROCESS AND REALITY:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.

Since I discontinued my reading of PROCESS, I cannot say whether or not Wilson's use of the term "soulful" is accurate with respect to Whitehead's heuristics. But for me, "soulful" embodies a "concrescence" of all four of the potentialities, acting in unison to sort experience in all its multi-faceted variety. And it's with this covalence in mind that I'll examine the idea of prehensions in line with my concept of the four literary personas in my next post.

 

RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 2

 I begin by admitting that I'm going to apply I.A. Richards' "tenor and vehicle" categories for other purposes than simply the diagramming of isolated metaphors. Here I'm interested in the potential of the two-part construct to discuss the function of mythicity in literary work.

From the blog's beginnings I had defined "mythicity" as "symbolic complexity," and had frequently used Joseph Campbell's functions as a methodology for showing how different categories of knowledge played into the symbolic process. However, it was only in this 2019 essay that I began speaking of the things being recapitulated in symbolized forms as "epistemological patterns." To boil down a great deal of complicated verbiage, I decided that even though it had become fairly common to speak of modern literary products as "mythic," the elements of literary narratives that most nearly approximate the nature of archaic myths are those that break down the narrative's universe into epistemological patterns-- and that they are more "mythic" according to their sheer density of conception. 

Two years prior to that essay, I had rejected an insight from Northrop Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM that I had prized for years during the formation of my own myth-criticism: Frye's insight that "myth is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other." Most of my ruminations about "affective freedom" and "cognitive restraint" probably owe something to Frye's formulation, but in ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 3,  I pointed out that I didn't think Frye's use of the term "myth" cohered with my own. For him, myth was essentially a treasure-trove of literary tropes, which might or might not be complex in the epistemological sense (as per my negative example of OLIVER TWIST). 

Yet, I confess that it's impossible to speak of "myth" without speaking of "tropes." Even when a given narrative in a literary work fails to invoke a complex epistemological pattern, a given reader may often recognize mythic potential through a manipulation of tropes, even in a simplistic manner. I've frequently remarked that little if anything in the early SUPERMAN stories of Siegel and Shuster does one find anything I consider "mythicity." But juvenile readers of SUPERMAN comics recognized Superman as a breakthrough in the sense of bringing a super-powerful hero into a contemporary setting. Those young readers probably didn't think of the hero's alleged archaic models, such as Herakles and Samson, as being anything more than tough guys killing beasts and monsters, and so they would not have even apprehended the epistemological aspects of the archaic figures. 

So I began thinking: are not familiar tropes the only means by which archaic myths communicate their epistemological patterns? Stories of Herakles have nearly no verisimilitude to them; they involve familiar stories of the hero's feats, his humiliations, and his ultimate death. Say that one believes that Herakles' victory over the Hydra represents, say, the archetypal hero's struggle against chthonic nature. No one in the story will voice such an interpretation; only later rationalists of the myth might do so. Yet the metaphysical epistemological pattern is present even if it is not stated outright, being communicated only indirectly, through the familiar arrangement of events in the trope-scenario. It's on this same level that I believe Frye was thinking of "the birth-mystery plot" that he finds in OLIVER TWIST.

In Richards's essay, he claims that before his essay critics had to make clumsy formulations of the two parts of metaphor being "the underlying idea" and "the imagined nature," or "the principal subject" or "what is resembles." He offers a more precise set of terms, calling "the thing referred to" as "tenor" and "the thing compared to it" as "vehicle." As a more concrete example, Richards offers a poem which compares "the flow of the poet's mind" (tenor) to "a river" (vehicle), though he points out that in some constructions the tenor is the most important element, and in others, the vehicle assumes greater significance.

My current concept, then, is that the expanded metaphorical structure that I have called "the mythopoeic potentiality" in literature may also be broken down into these two conjoined elements, where the epistemological pattern is "the thing referred to," the "tenor," while the familiar tropes through which the pattern is expressed is "the thing compared to it," the "vehicle." 

And so, in a roundabout way, I end up validating one aspect of Frye's argument re: myth and naturalism, even if I do so in a way that allows me to also validate the very different insights of authors like Jung, Cassirer and Campbell.

RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 1

 I've recently finished I.A. Richards' 1936 THE PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC, which, despite its imposing title, is a slim book consisting of six lectures the literary critic gave on the interrelated topics of rhetoric and metaphor. I don't believe I have read any of his work previous to this one, though in other essays I had encountered what may his most oft-quoted analysis: that of defining "metaphor" as a construct of two essential elements, which he labeled "the tenor" and "the vehicle." In Part 2 I will look at how these terms impact on my current concept of metaphorical meaning.

One of the odd things Richards says in Lecture is a self-comparison to the work of Alfred North Whitehead, whom I first discussed on this blog here.

It will have been noticed perhaps that the way I propose to treat meanings has its analogues with Mr, Whitehead's treatment of things.

Given that my reading of Whitehead was spotty at best, I'm no expert on him any more than I am on Richards. Still, I'm not seeing much resemblance between the advocate of process reality and the critic who became best known for the boosting of "close reading" and the New Criticism. It's possible, since Richards' next line is somewhat facetious, that this was an inside joke on his part.

In this short book Richards does address some other salient matters besides the "tenor and vehicle" subject. For one thing, he's comparable to Philip Wheelwright in assuring readers that the very richness of human language is an advantage, rather than a deficit, to the practice of rhetoric and its related usages of metaphor. But even more useful to me is his concept of conceptual thinking as "sorting."

A perception is never just of an *it;* perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to the highest-- whatever else it may be-- is sorting.

He further supports this by asserting that "...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker."

Any regular readers of this blog should be able to anticipate my attraction to this notion, given the considerable quantity of categories I've reeled out over the past thirteen years. And this influences me not only in terms of theory. In one of my introductory pieces to my newest blog, THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA, I remarked that I didn't feel particularly interested in reposting my "supercombative" film reviews by order of publication or alphabetically by title. What I found most challenging was to repost the essays by "sorting" them according to actors who had distinguished themselves in each of the items under review-- making it a little tougher on myself by establishing that each actor got only one post to his or her credit. (In a few cases I may expand this to include other creative personnel when I feel like it.) 

Oddly, it's in this section on "sorting" that Richards uses the ten-dollar word most associated with Alfred North Whitehead, which is also the word I have remorselessly appropriated for my own use.

A particular impression is already a product of concrescence. Behind, or in it, there has been a coming together of sortings.

I don't see in this statement anything that resembles Whitehead's concept of concrescence, but it's of minor importance, since Richards does propound a stimulating discussion of the ways in which human beings utilize the constructs of metaphor-- more on which in the subsequent post.