WORK PLAY ACT PT. 2

At the conclusion of the first WORK PLAY ACT essay I wrote:

How does "play" manifest in a performance, be it live or preserved on celluloid? It may be through innumerable bits of physical "business" that convey to the audience a more organic sense of the character's actuality, or it may be something more sweeping, a mental concept of the character that assembles all of the disparate "parts" of the performance into a whole greater than the sum of those parts. But in any case, the profession of the actor seems particularly apt as a means of distinguishing the interacting forms of work and play.

In the essay I cited Humphrey Bogart as an example of an actor renowned for his performances in many films, not least the 1941 flicks HIGH SIERRA and MALTESE FALCON. I focused on those two films because it was rumored that both lead roles were originally offered to George Raft, an actor of more limited abilities. The likelihood that Raft would have done little for either of these roles does not, of course, mean that Bogart alone could have depicted the characters well. Without doubt, many actors existed then, and still exist now, who could've brought the same level of acting-imagination to those lead characters that Bogart did.

Now, the scripts for both films were above-average as well, so any actor embodying those characters might be said to have "a leg up." In the majority of my movie-reviews I've tended to credit any mythicity films may possess to their writers or their directors. Understandably, the primary aspect of the acting craft relates to the dramatic potentiality: the art of showing how a given character interacts with other characters. The actor can also put across aspects of the other three potentialities-- the kinetic, the didactic, and the mythopoeic-- but in most cases, I would tend to think that the actor translates these from the script he or she works with.

Having conceived of this general rule, I considered possible exceptions. George Raft in MALTESE FALCON would not have been able to bring many of the potentialities of the script to life, even as, arguably, Ricardo Cortez failed to do playing Sam Spade in the 1931 adaptation. But what about actors who realize potentialities that the script does not?

In this review I gave the 1992 SLEEPWALKERS, directed by Mick Garris from an original script by Stephen King, a "poor" rating for its mythicity. If I were rating the film on its other three potentialities, it would prove equally dismal on the didactic level, but might get a "fair" in terms of kinetics (lots of sex and violence). "Dramatic" is a little dicier, since most of the main actors-- Brian Krause, Madchen Amick, Ron Perlman-- turned in no more than serviceable performances for the undercooked, inane script. But I had to give special credit to Alice Krige:

King may have been thinking of Egyptian myths involving incestuous content when he conceived Mary and Charles, for like Horus and Isis in certain tales, the mother and son are sleeping together. As a plot-point this doesn't add much to the story. But it does allow for the film's one source of merit. Though the other actors put across competent performances, only Alice Krige, playing Mary, distinguishes herself. She brings to the under-scripted role a heady ambivalence, in that she's simultaneously a woman jealous of her young lover's possible affections for their targets, and yet also a mother who cherishes her son and perhaps, on some level, wishes he could have a normal life with someone other than her. But as I said, this is only suggested by Krige's performance, for the thud-and-blunder script gives her no help at all. 

Given that I've not seen the script used for the 1992 film, it's not impossible that Krige was given some cues by it, or by director Garris, that enhanced her performance. However, I think it's more likely that she showed the same quality of acting-imagination that I imputed to Bogart in the earlier essay. Much of this imagination was dramatic in nature, just as I've described it in the excerpt. At the same time, Krige's acting shades into the mythopoeic, insofar as one can see in her attitude a complex of emotions comparable to, say, Isis linking up with her son-lover Horus. I doubt that Krige got any help at all from the script, but in a really good script on this mythic theme, Krige's performance would have enhanced by the narrative of such a film. To see how such a film on that theme might be done right, one might look at Stephen Frears' 1990 adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel THE GRIFTERS. Even though the Frears film takes place in a dark and seedy reality, with no metaphenomenal presences whatever, the interaction between son John Cusack and mother Angelica Huston is actually closer to both the dramatic and mythopoeic potentialities of the Isis-Horus myth.

WORK PLAY ACT

In FREEDOM VS. FREEDOM PART 2, I mentioned that:

both "work" and "play" are interdependent necessities, not opposed in the conventional sense that people oppose, say, "right choice" and "wrong choice."

Nowhere is this more true than in the domain of art. There are countless professions that do not invoke the spirit of play. No one asks whether a plumber or a carpenter infuses his labor with such spirits.

It's arguable as to whether some forms of art may be easier to turn out as on an assembly-line. Certainly any number of popular genres, be it mysteries, romances, or superheroes, have been critiqued as being all but identical in form and function. Nevertheless, this elitist criticism overlooks the fact that not every genre-product seems identical to its audience. Writer X succeeds more than Writer Y precisely because the audience thinks Writer X has some quality that Y does not. Often, if not always, this quality stems from X's ability to come up with characters or situations that fire the audience's imagination. This is only possible if Writer X possessed what Kant called (in a different context) "the free play of the imagination."

The art of acting might be considered less amenable to the assembly-line ethic. Millions of actors perform in stage and screen every day, and all of those performances, whether judged as "good work" or "bad work," fall under the rubric of work.

Yet the dynamic of "play" in acting is harder to pin down. On one hand, an actor must strive to mirror the emotions of a given character with as much fidelity as is possible. If the actor plays a tough guy, he must project toughness; if a buffoon, buffoonishness, and so on.

And yet, even though this reproduction sounds like "work," in the same way that an assembly-line worker would produce one identical automobile part after another, the superior actor is distinguished from the inferior one by his imaginative qualities.

To take a couple of examples from Classic Hollywood, I would compare contemporaries George Raft and Humphrey Bogart.

George Raft broke into Hollywood stardom thanks to his role in Howard Hawks' 1932 SCARFACE. Though Raft enjoyed his share of cinematic successes, today he's also known for passing on a number of potentially career-building roles, HIGH SIERRA and THE MALTESE FALCON (both 1941), ostensibly because he thought the roles would make him seem unsympathetic. In my view, he was a limited actor who couldn't manage to put himself in the shoes of such morally ambiguous characters.

One anecdote avers that Humphrey Bogart and George Raft knew one another, and that Bogart sometimes advised Raft not to take this or that role, only to take the role for himself. This has the ring of truth, since actors have been known to undercut one another to get ahead. But if Bogart did this, his actions probably produced better results for films like HIGH SIERRA. It's hard to imagine Raft putting across the combination of toughness and sentiment that make up the character of Roy Earle, as did Bogart.

How does "play" manifest in a performance, be it live or preserved on celluloid? It may be through innumerable bits of physical "business" that convey to the audience a more organic sense of the character's actuality, or it may be something more sweeping, a mental concept of the character that assembles all of the disparate "parts" of the performance into a whole greater than the sum of those parts. But in any case, the profession of the actor seems particularly apt as a means of distinguishing the interacting forms of work and play.

CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

In Part 1, I wrote:

Conscresence, more than its roughly equivalent term "coagulation," suggests the process by which seemingly unrelated phenomena "concretize" into a greater whole. Thus images, symbols and story-tropes which can only have a very limited meaning by themselves, take on greater depth when associated with others that have a reinforcing effect.

What causes this "reinforcing effect," though? Upon rereading August's FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3, it occurred to me that most of the mythcomics essays I've printed here depend on the authors having organized their symbolic constructs around what I called "aspects of discursive symbolism." The full context is as follows:

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

In other words, in order for a narrative to manifest the strongest form of symbolic concrescence-- a.k.a. "hyperconcrescence," as I currently like to call it-- the author(s) must first draw upon what they know of the real world, the world which can be represented by discursive symbolism (or "work"). Then, to make this knowledge function in a fictive world, the kernels of information must be transformed into the tropes of presentational (also called "expressive") symbolism (or "play"). Thus the mind's ability to "work hard" proves essential to the process of "playing hard," and therefore, "playing well."

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

Case in point: Dave Sim's CEREBUS. Most of the time, particularly in the later issues, Sim is seeking to persuade readers of his philosophical positions, and this is probably no less true in the narratives I've deemed mythcomics (the last part of LAST DAYS here, and the first part of GUYS here) as in a narrative I deemed a "null-myth" (the horror of CHASING YHWH). But irrespective of Sim's conscious intentions, his imagination is "working" full blast at the same time his conscious intellect is formulating the didactic schemes of the prior two works, while in YHWH, his imagination has sort of given up the game. So, although discursive symbolism is at work in all three, in CHASING YHWH there is no such transformation of Sim's rhetorical stance into the playful discourse of art. Thus, even though I personally disagree with Sim's position re: "fanboys" as he expresses them in GUYS, I had to give him some props for "promoting a satiric version of Spider-Man to make his points about creeping emotionalism." Thus there's an expressive underthought to complement the rhetorical overthought.

I will expand on the final paragraph from FOUNTS PT. 3:

I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

In similar fashion, I regard Sim's sociological connections between comic book people and "creeping emotionalism" to be incorrect on two counts: one, because there's no way to prove such a connection, and two, because even if there was one, how would it be categorically different from the "creeping emotionalism" present in any other ingroup-- say, Canadian hockey fans?

Hyperconcrescence, then, most often takes place when the discursive mode of work, the overthought, reinforces the expressive underthought. The main exceptions are those narratives that seem to have no strong discursive overthought, like the origin of the Golden Age Hawkman. Yet even here, author Gardner Fox is conjuring with metaphysical tropes that were discursively organized by their pagan proponents. And thus familiar tropes, such as the one regarding the soul's fate after death, still exhibit the modern author's understanding of the original structuring principles, even within the venue of a superhero comic book.

BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE

...the first Greek philosophers were looking for the "origin" or "principle" (the Greek word "archê" has both meanings) of all things. Anaximander is said to have identified it with "the Boundless" or "the Unlimited" (Greek: "apeiron," that is, "that which has no boundaries")... some have pointed out that this use of "apeiron" is atypical for Greek thought, which was occupied with limit, symmetry and harmony. The Pythagoreans placed the boundless (the "apeiron") on the list of negative things, and for Aristotle, too, perfection became aligned with limit (Greek: "peras"), and thus "apeiron" with imperfection.-- INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.-- HAMLET, Act 2, Scene 2.

My plans for the third and last part of UNCANNY GENESIS involve my using certain linguistic terms to expand further on my concepts of artifice, affective freedom and cognitive restraint. So first I'm going to take a shot at clarifying how these concepts diverge from language and all the forms of symbolism underlying language.

I always meant to draw some comparisons between Anaximander's apparent categories of apeiron ("the boundless") and "perata" (the limited) with my categories of freedom and restraint. Admittedly, Anaximander was addressing the origins of the physical universe, which has no direct bearing on my explanation of the universe of art and literature. For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe-- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

However, the closest I came to systematizing these ideas of affective freedom and cognitive restraint is probably this passage from this essay:

One mythical idea to which Cassirer refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation, even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not.

Rational conceptions of causal relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C, resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.

Persons of a positivist slant might point out that one cannot truly call the human "ability to imagine" to be truly boundless. Still, as Hamlet points out, the imagination certainly makes it possible for one to escape the bondage of a nutshell-- even a nutshell called Denmark-- with the vision of being "a king of infinite space." True, the Dane is too melancholy to enjoy such fantasies, because he's also hemmed in by "bad dreams," presumably brought on by his knowledge of the real-world corruptions of his mother and uncle. But Hamlet is a character in a tragedy, doomed to perish along with most of the Danish court, and so his verdict on the imagination may not be the final word.

The tension between these two states-- of being able to imagine anything, yet being hemmed in by the physical world in which one necessarily exists-- is one that Northrop Frye attempted to define:

Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle's word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story. Myths of gods merge into legends of heroes; legends of heroes merge into plots of tragedies and comedies; plots of tragedies and comedies merge into plots of more or less realistic fiction. But these are change of social context rather than of literary form, and the constructive principles of story-telling remain constant through them...-- Northrop Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

My ARCHETYPE VS. ARTIFICE series, beginning here, was devoted to explaining why Frye's use of the term "myth" was not viable, and why I coined the term "artifice" to replace it. "Affective freedom," then, is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in artifice, while "cognitive restraint" is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in verisimilitude.

Further, an author's usage of tropes, whether it is dominated by artifice or by verisimilitude, creates a "literary universe" for each narrative universe, be it a stand-alone novel or a series of interconnected stories. Since I've asserted that no author of fiction ever fails to use tropes both from the domain of artifice and of verisimilitude, this has led me to distinguish three modes of literary "universe-building," which I have termed "the naturalistic," "the uncanny," and "the marvelous." I went into considerable detail about the definitions of each universe when viewed through a lens provided by science-philosopher Roy Bhaskar, but happily these deeper definitions do not pertain to the current argument.

All of the concepts relating to the phenomenality of fictional universes are communicated through language, but they are not linguistic concepts as such. Thus, when I attempt in UNCANNY GENESIS PT 3 to explicate the three phenomenalities with reference to linguistics, this must be seen as a illustration and not as an attempt to conflate the very different domains of language and of phenomenology.

RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT PT. 2

The primordial image has one great advantage over the clarity of the idea, and that is its vitality. It is a self-activating organism, endowed with generative power. The primordial image is an inherited organization of psychic energy, an integrated system, which not only gives expression to the energic process but facilitates its operation.''-- Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, p.. 447.

I'm printing this Jung-quote less than a month after my previous use of it, because I think Jung hit on exactly the distinctions between what I'm now calling the "underthought" (the domain of image and metaphor) and "overthought" (the domain of dialectical ideation). The two are distinct in their operations, and yet, as Jung and others have asserted, they tend to be interdependent as well. It's possible to create a somewhat engaging narrative in which one of the four potentialities reaches consummation-- Ditko's "Static" serial, examined here, is my best example of a story which tries to be about nothing but ideas-- but I believe that Ditko's "overthought" in that case would have been much improved had he allowed his imagination to range a little further, as I think it did in the story "Destroyer of Heroes," which still pursued similar dialectical themes of personal responsibility,

Jung implies that overthought and underthought (as I'm calling these abstract operations) are mutually dependent. That's an attractive notion, but I prefer just to say that they TEND to be interdependent, and then only in narrative. Certainly artists can produce phantasmagorical images that are entrancing for their own sake, without any input of conscious ideas, as one derives from surrealists like Yves Tanguy--

-- though many art-critics will generally prefer their images interlaced with idea-content, as in this Picasso.

In narrative, the tendency is that ideas need a free flux of metaphorical images to give the ideational figures the semblance of life. At the same time, without the structuring principle of discursive ideas, a lot of metaphors tend to disperse into meaninglessness; an "inconsummate paegant faded," so to speak.

Of the various myth-comics I've cited so far, some are like fever-dreams that suggest yet do not fully elaborate some dialectical theme, such as Steve Gerber's "Tower of the Satyr."  The ideational content is slightly overwhelmed by the flux of metaphor, but it isn't non-existent, and can be teased out into the light of day with a little myth-critical amplification. In contrast, a few works, like the Ditko BLUE BEETLE tale cited above, seem to have highly intellectualized the flux of images. The Chichester-Johnson JIHAD is as rich in images as the Gerber work, but admittedly some were created by other authors (just as Marvel's Man-Thing was not created by Gerber), and even the ones original to the opus, like villains Alastor and Chalkis, have been subjected to a great deal of rational thought, in order to distinguish them from the other principal players of the Hellraiser-Nightbreed crossover.

The processes I've called "fever-dream" and "intellectualization" correspond to Jung's dual concepts of "directed thinking" and "fantasy thinking," which I discussed in more detail here. Too often, however, literary critics are, as Northrop Frye pointed out, overly attached to those forms of literature that present them with "imaginative allegories" about life, the universe and everything-- and the majority of comics-critics have followed this line of thinking as well.  Thus in the world of elitist criticism, a work with even a mediocre intellectual approach will win approval.

In my choice of myth-comic and null-myth this week, then, I'll pick examples of comics that have been esteemed across the board for their intellectual content. One of them, according to my lights, succeeds in finding a balance between overthought and underthought, while the other puts across only the most mediocre level of intellectual ideation as a result of the author's inability to consummate his potential for image and metaphor.

PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS

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.)

I regard sensation as conscious, and intuition as unconscious, perception. For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling as independent functions are developed, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation (and equally, of course from intuition as the necessary counterpart of sensation).-- more Jung.

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

From this secondary proposition I articulated, in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4, a schema for assigning merit to each of these art-modes. By the design of this schema, both "good serious art" and "mediocre serious art" would be equal in terms of being "play for work's sake," that is, the narratives of serous art are designed so that the author can put forth some sort of ethical or moral argument. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, I stated that the superior "serious narrative" was one which successfully incorporated elements of play into its "work-oriented" theme. William Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST possessed a "work-oriented" theme comparable to that of J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE, but Faulkner's novel succeeds on more than one level because the author allowed some elements of play to leaven his serious theme.

Similarly, I stated that even though both Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND and Dixon's CLANSMAN were escapist works, ruled by the principle of "play for play's sake," of imagining the world as one might like it to be rather than as it is. Of these two works, Mitchell's was superior because I could discern that she had incorporated elements of work into a "play-oriented theme." I viewed the verisimilitude that Mitchell conferred on her character-types to be one such element of work, and as such one that seems to have been deficient in THE CLANSMAN, though I admitted that I made this judgment purely from viewing the D.W. Griffith film.

But what, a hostile critic might ask, does it really mean to speak of "elements of play" and "elements of work?"

Just as I endorse Jung's opinion with regard to the "dynamic principle" underlying all creative work, the father of depth psychology also provides the answer to this question.

Not mentioned in the second Jung-quote above is that Jung also divided his four functions into two distinct categories: "the irrational," sensation and intuition, in that no rational meditation is needed for them, and "the rational," thinking and feeling, which both require what Jung calls "reflection."

Given my endorsement of these divisions of the human psyche, I found myself applying these to literary qualities.  In a rough way I was influenced by Gerald Mast's 1984 work of cinema-theory, FILM/CINEMA/MOVIE, in which he argued for evaluating films in terms of both "the mimetic" (the film's ability to reproduce verisimilitude) and "the kinetic" (the film's ability to make the audience feel sensations within their imagined experience). So far as I know Mast's theory was not followed up by later film-critics, and I may be the only one to do so, even though I thoroughly re-interpreted his duality into a quaternity of what I called "potentialities," as stated in FOUR BY FOUR:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.
The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.
The THEMATIC is a potentiality that can describe the relationships of abstract ideas.
The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that may describe the relationships of symbols.

(I will henceforth substitute a new name, "the DIDACTIC," to replace "THEMATIC," which word is too easily confused with its more commonplace literary usage.)


I also cited two very brief examples as to how given works in the comics medium might emphasize one or another of the Jungian functions/ Phillipsian potentialities, with a concomitant de-emphasis of the others:

I might attempt to use Jung's function-terms to assert that Dave Sim's cerebral CEREBUS privileges the function of "thinking" more than any other, and that Frank Miller's SIN CITY privileges the function of "sensation." But though it's easy to make such an assertion, it's less easy to demonstrate its truth through textual examples.

I don't plan at this time to develop the theory of the four potentialities, since it's difficult to isolate the operations of each function from the others. But my hypothetical answer to my hypothetical hostile critic would be:

"The elements of play" are those that invoke the irrational kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities of the narrative.

"The elements of work" are those that invoke the rational thinking and feeling potentialities of the narrative.

Again, to a hostile critic, these refinements would still not resonate, but to pursue the concept further, I'll return to the examples cited in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4.

What "realistic" elements are held in common by LIGHT IN AUGUST and DISGRACE?  Both novels are organized around scapegoat-characters. In the Faulkner novel, the character is Joe Christmas, a man who may or may not be half-black, who becomes the lightning-rod for white-black relations in 1930s Mississippi. The same is the case for the Coetzee novel, where the character David Lurie, a white man in South Africa, generates a white-black conflict based in the heritage of European imperialism. Neither novel emphasizes the irrational function of sensation, and so their potentiality for the *kinetic* is mutually nugatory. However, Faulkner's comprehension of the mythopoeic relationships of his narrative far exceed those of Coetzee.

What "escapist" elements are held in common by GONE WITH THE WIND and THE CLANSMAN? Both novels are organized around the sufferings of a community, oppressed by the liberation of slaves in the Deep South. That greater community is boiled down to the sufferings of a particular white family: the O'Haras in the Mitchell narrative, the Stonemans in the Dixon narrative. In both novels one solution to the South's oppression is the formation of a vigilante group, the Ku Klux Klan, though this solution is the main thrust of Dixon and a side-plot in Mitchell. Neither novel is strong on the "abstract ideas" necessary to support the rational function of thinking, and so their potentiality for the *didactic* is mutually nugatory. However, Mitchell's narrative finds its strength in the potentiality of "feeling," given that it manages to conjure forth a rich tapestry of character interactions, an arena in which Dixon's story cannot compete.

All four of these examples, of course, depend on one's having read the novels. In the coming months it may be possible to provide more extended applications of this theory-- a conflation of the work-play dichotomy and the four potentialities-- to media-works that are, at very least, easier to assimilate.

THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE, PT. 1

Back in March I said, at the end of DYNAMICITY/DEMIHERO DELIBERATIONS:

I hope to work around to an "ethic of the combative mode" in future, FYI.

In the context of the essay itself-- meditating on the narrative elements of two very disparate fantasy-films, and the reasons why they were or were not combative in nature-- I suppose that the final remark looked like a throwaway comment.  But there was a method to my madness. 

I'm aware that much of my narratological project would seem irrelevant to elitist critics, if any of them sought to understand any part of it.  For them, criticism is about separating the bad from the good, the sheep from the goats, and little besides.  Such is the limited manifestation of "ethics" in their world. 

I would imagine that for all or most of them, they would hold a similar opinion with regard to Kant's meditation on the sublime, which are the proximate-- though not ultimate-- source for my own meditations on the matter. What, they might ask, do Kant's extraordinarily detailed analyses of aesthetic states have to do with ethics?

Were I asked this question, I would respond that the only way one can speak knowledgably of human ethics is to know what human beings are capable of doing.  If, as Marx and Engels said, we have no free will, then any ethics focused on purposive activity loses all credibility, and one can only examine ethical stances as to whether they are or are not allied to the advance of history's progress.  But of course Kant did believe in free will. Since he did not support theistic solutions to the role of free will in human life, he sought to explore all the ways in which the human mind worked, whether under external compulsion or acting with some measure of freedom.  He advances the notion that the aesthetic affects are promoted by what he calls "the free play of the imagination," a form of play generated without utilitarian purposiveness or even conscious "cognition."  This in turn leads to a potential effect upon the subject's ability to think ethically:

the beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it, even contrary to our (sensible) interest”-- Kant, JUDGMENT, General Remark following §29, 267.

Since my concept of freedom is not identical to Kant's, it took me some time to work out my own concepts as to how free will functions within the aesthetic, ethical, and mythic dimensions of human nature. In additon, while I see some justice in Kant's insistence upon an absence or modification of "interest" in the world of aesthetics, I would not go as far as Kant does in this regard.  My orientation owes more to the position of Bataille, to whom both the taboo and its transgression are holy.

In future installments I will attempt to show how the mode of the combative-- which, I will note again, is essentially allied to Kant's concept of the "dynamic-sublime"-- bears on the ethical propensities of humankind.

QUICK THOUGHT ON IMAGINATION

Kelly Thompson's incorrect use of the term "imagination," examined here, leads me to another line of thought: is "not showing" a given phenomenon inherently put more demands on the audience's imagination than "showing?"

Over the years I've seen innumerable comments in the affirmative.  Here's a book-length study addressing, at least in part, the role of radio serials in promoting the imagination of their audience, since those who listened to radio programs had to conjure up the physical appearance of the perils faced by the Shadow, or the comic appearances of Lum and Abner.

With the horror-genre in movies, some critics have a particular preference for "indirect horror," even though the cinema is inherently a visual medium.  The 1942 CAT PEOPLE frequently receives praise for not showing "the monster," and allowing the audience to make up its own mind as to whether there was a "cat monster" at all.

The absence of a "boogieman" figure, however, does not automatically mean that a given work is more "imaginative" than one that has such a figure.  CAT PEOPLE, though it has its virtues, is not especially complex beyond its basic "is-she-or-isn't-she-a-cat-monster" schtick.

For example, though the 1941 WOLF MAN flirts with a similar "wolf-or-not-wolf" plot, for whatever reason the film does commit itself, making clear that Larry Talbot does indeed transform.

Despite discarding this particular ambivalence, however, I find WOLF MAN to be far more imaginative, far more symbolically complex than anything in the repertoire of CAT PEOPLE's producer, the somewhat overrated, Val Lewton.

However, at this time I don't choose to provide a proof of this opinion, since it is merely a "quick thought."  I don't imagine that any regular reader of this blog would doubt my ability to produce such a proof, though.