THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 2

Continuing the conceptual thread from the previous essay, I reiterate that whenever I analyzed the phenomenality of a work that falls within the domain of the uncanny, I'm looking for phenomena which do not overtly violate causal coherence but nevertheless create a sense of "strangeness" through violating intelligibility: the reader's sense that regular causality can only yield a sense that the world is understandable and therefore intelligible. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate some examples by which authors use the three rationales I formulated in Part 1 to create that sense of strangeness.

The rationale of science is probably the most common one in the domain of the uncanny. Arthur Conan Doyle's novel THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES sports one of the most famous examples of a "phony ghost." Back in Doyle's time, the parameters of the mystery-genre would have suggested from the first that any intimation of a ghost, much less a spectral demon-hound, probably will not be validated. Yet for the greater part of the novel Doyle creates a strong sense of a supernatural threat before revealing that the titular hound is just an ordinary trained canine covered in phosphorescent paint. In contrast to many critics, I would say that the aura of strangeness is not entirely dispelled, because even if the hound is not a real demon, the person who orchestrates the Hound's existence is strange in its own uncanny right.

While HOUND uses a scientific principle to create an illusion, numerous heroes and villains utilize fairly simple scientific gadgets to give themselves an edge over their opponents. In contrast to the original Ian Fleming novel, the 1973 LIVE AND LET DIE includes a scene in which James Bond, suspended over a shark pool by ropes, cuts through his, er, bonds by unleashing a miniature rotary saw from his watch. Whether any gadget like this would work in the real world is as immaterial as whether one could build an actual FTL drive; the point is to create the sense of Bond having a special "ace in the hole."

It's not quite as easy to use the magical rationale to generate uncanny strangeness, but it can be employed in relatively mundane worlds. Wilkie Collins' 1868 mystery-novel THE MOONSTONE is built around the crime of an Englishman who steals a sacred jewel from an Indian cult , flees with his booty to England and secures the gem in a bank deposit box. The cultists follow, seeking to recover the jewel and kill the thief, but they have no way to break into the bank. Collins thus set up a situation in which the cultists, who don't precisely look like your average Englishmen, must find some way to monitor the thief's movements. Therefore, they use their own knowledge of a simple magical procedure, which Collins does not name but is usually called "scrying." The cultists buy the services of an English boy who has a talent one might call "psychic" or "magical" as one pleases, but Collins' description has more of a "magical" vibe in my view. Eventually the thief checks the gem out of the bank with the idea of escaping, and when he does, the cultists pounce and recover their property.

In the previous essay I gave an example of a marvelous "just because" rationale taken from a magical realism novel, so for this essay, I will invoke another magic-realism work for this category. China Mieville's novel THE CITY IN THE CITY supposes an unspecified locale on "our" Earth where two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupy the exact same physical space, with the buildings of one city cheek-to-jowl with those of the other. Further, Mieville posits  that the inhabitants of one city willfully pretend not to be aware of the citizens of the co-existing city. The author does not provide any rigorous backstory as to how this state of affairs came about, and so its underlying rationale is that of "just because." Ironically, though its parameters in no way resemble either mainstream fantasy or mainstream SF, Mieville's CITY was welcomed by various awards-committees associated with those movements, since the novel won a 2010 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was also nominated (but did not win) a award named for the famed SF-editor John W. Campbell. 

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1

 My posts on the NUM theory have gone into great detail as to how literary metaphenomena, whether uncanny or marvelous, are created through the use of story-tropes. In both cases, the author of a fictional world seeks to diverge from the world of the naturalistic, the domain in which all phenomena are unified (and therefore are termed "isophenomenal.") In the essay LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE, I said:

The domain of “the naturalistic” emphasizes conformity with whatever idea of “natural law” an audience may expouse, whereas the domain of “the marvelous” conforms to whatever concepts are seen as transcending natural law, be it through Christian miracles or futuristic inventions. The domain of “the uncanny,” though, endeavors to perform a high-wire balancing act between these two literary phenomenalities. 

My general metaphor for the difference between the two metaphenomenal domains has been the difference between breaking down normal causality or simply bending it.  However, I have not supplied a list of rationales that authors use to justify the tropes that either bend or break causality. The three rationales are as follows:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."

Most of what fans view as "mainstream" fantasy and science fiction deals with phenomena that breaks down the viewer's sense of causality, or, in my system, "causal coherence," by evoking either the fictional logic-systems of either science or magic. There is no limit as to the extensiveness of the tropes open to either the magic-rationale of mainstream fantasy or the science-rationale of mainstream science fiction. Fantasy has elves, SF has aliens. Fantasy has doors into fairyland; SF has faster-than-light space travel. Fantasy has Doctor Strange; SF has Iron Man. The distinction is not between any hypothetical limit upon either rationale, for in effect there is no limit. Rather, the distinction is between the ideas attributed IN FICTION to the system of magic as opposed to the system of science. 

Both magic and science operate to manipulate commonplace causality. In science, the logical ideal is that the scientist produces causality-breaking miracles by discovering new principles that underlie those phenomena, and he manipulates those principles to explain FTL travel or transistor-powered armor. In magic, however, the logical idea is that the magician transcends the overt principles underlying commonplace phenomena in order to create faery-doors and magical spells. Human will of some type, whether for good or ill, directly impinges upon reality within the magical rationale, while in the scientific rationale, the will acts indirectly, creating re-arrangements of phenomena.   

Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd. 

I conceived the idea of the three rationales some time back, but I recently realized that all of them were configured with respect to the phenomenality of the marvelous, the one that breaks causality. In my second essay, I will deal with how the same such rationales appear within the domain of the uncanny.

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 4

 I ended the previous essay in the series on this observation:

From one viewpoint, if the prehistoric myth-maker was trying to counter the unfamiliarity of the physical world with images of the familiar (like making the sun into a godly charioteer), the authors of metaphenomenal fiction were challenged by the familiarity of science's reading of the physical world into generating new images of the unfamiliar.

By "new" I meant images that were not wholly rooted in traditional mythico-religious concepts of unfamiliar presences or activities. Given my Jungian outlook, I don't believe that any such images are ever completely novel. The renascent dinosaurs of THE LOST WORLD are functionally identical with the dragons of knightly romance, even though each carries its own specific mystique. But because of the influence of science-based naturalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, both dinosaurs and dragons had to be justified as never before. So even a magical dragon has to explained as having originated in some special locale, like Oz, Middle Earth, or some period of Earth-history not yet governed by science, like Howard's Hyboria.

In fact, all marvelous things or entities, being a contradiction of naturalistic law, are implicitly separated from the naturalistic order by some *estrangement* from either the laws of time, space, or both. This deduction underscores the one of the flaws in Rudolf Otto's system. In the quote I cited in Part 1 of this series, Otto speaks of "the uncanny" as "a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes." This raises the question as to what if any term the Lutheran Otto would apply to such Biblical marvels as the Ark of the Covenant or the burning bush. 

With the literary forms of uncanny phenomena, there's much more of an attempt to conform to the rules of naturalistic law. To my knowledge the term "uncanny"-- which debuted in the 18th century-- doesn't take on any literary significance until it appears in the works of Otto, Ernst Jentsch, and Sigmund Freud. None of them focus on the exact same interpretation of the world, but it can be argued that they all have in common is what Jentsch calls "psychical uncertainties." 

The Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe, most of which appeared at the end of the 18th century, may or may not ever use "uncanny," but they became famous for setting up supposed supernatural occurrence, only to explain it away with some contrivance. What is often overlooked, though, is that the feeling of the "uncanny uncertainty" is not necessarily dispelled by the revelation of the contrivance. Indeed, the contrivance itself, while not usually extravagant enough to contravene laws of time or space, may be sufficiently imaginative that it *seems* to depart from the naturalistic world. In Sherlock Holmes' world, no real demon-hounds can exist. Yet how realistic is a world in which murderers plot to kill their victims with trained dogs covered in phosphorescent paint?

In order to create strangeness of either phenomenality, the author must take a temporary holiday from verisimilitude, and draw upon tropes that exist not in the real world, or in our perceptions of it, but exist purely within the corpus of literature. Such tropes are fiction's conduits to the unfamiliar-- though, after a time, they too can become overly familiar, and can only be rejuvenated by seeking to put new wine in old bottles.

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 3

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement... Coleridge, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, PT. 14.

 

Coleridge's concept of art as a vast fusion of many different contrary aspects of life substantially agrees with my notion of the dialectic between "the unfamiliar" and "the familiar." In the previous two essays, I've defined a "primary familiarity" that applies principally to "life-as-we-live-in-every-day," and a "secondary familiarity" that is applied to the construction of abstract conceptual forms. I discussed the forms of science and of myth, connecting the latter to the practice of art by speaking of "mythology and its expression through art-works." By this I was not implying an absolute identity between myth and art. I believe that both forms strive for a fusion between the familiar and the unfamiliar, in contrast to science's quest for total familiarity of a quantifiable nature. However, regardless as to how deeply myths were believed by their adherents in pre-technological societies, the myth-tales were promulgated with the idea that the society OUGHT to believe them, at least to some degree. The stories of art and literature are promulgated with the idea that the listeners don't necessarily have to believe in them, particularly once the stories began to diverge from stories associated with religions concepts. 

Myth by definition needs concepts that extend beyond familiar life, since myth is meant to explain the workings of the universe through gods or giants or spirits or whatever. Fiction, however, can represent states of existence that go beyond immediate phenomena ("metaphenomenal") or it can represent states of existence that strongly resemble immediate phenomena ("isophenomenal.") We don't know how sort of isophenomenal  stories might have been related by early tribal humans, because most surviving narratives do have mythico-religious associations. Still, one may fairly assume that primitive humans had their versions of simple naturalistic stories even as we do-- fish stories about "the one that got away," or "Your mama is so fat that, etc." Still, for many centuries, metaphenomenal tropes seemed dominant, with the higher classes in, say, medieval Europe telling stories of knights chasing Grails while the lower classes told stories of talking wolves and horses. Centuries would go by before literature would to some extent embrace the POV of science, coming to focus more on stories of ordinary people moving around in a world without magic or miracles.

 In reaction to this sense that the naturalistic world had become more dominant-- arguably showing "contempt" for the old religious myths-- one also sees artists in say, post-Renaissance Europe making more of a freestyle use of magic and miracles than one saw in medieval Europe. Certainly Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM feels more like the playwright's personal and playful take on fairies than like any attempt to adhere to any mythic or folkloric concept of fairies. Roughly a century later Europe would begin to see the rise of what some call "proto-science-fiction," as seen in Swift's 1726 GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, while, about forty years after that, we see the invention of the first Gothic novel with Walpole's 1764 CASTLE OF OTRANTO. As different as these two eighteenth-century works are from one another, they both depend on challenging the familiarity of the average reader by opening them up to new worlds of unfamiliarity-- though it's axiomatic that no metaphenomenal work can be too totally divorced from the familiar world, or it would be impossible for readers to understand, to say nothing of failing to exercise what Coleridge calls art's "synthetic" power.

This is the sense in which I'm claiming that Aesopian contempt-- the sense that things can be taken for granted, including the predominance of a naturalistic phenomenality-- "bred" unfamiliarity. At a time when it was difficult if not impossible to put forth new mythico-religious concepts, due to the vested interests of established religions, literature develops a wide number of genres designed to perpetuate a sense of unfamiliarity within an apparently familiar world. Even many "high class" artists, particularly among the English and German Romantics, launched such experiments with metaphenomenal material, as we see with Hoffmann's GOLDEN POT and "The Sandman," Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, and Coleridge's own experiment with vampire-fiction, the unfinished ballad CHRISTABEL. From one viewpoint, if the prehistoric myth-maker was trying to counter the unfamiliarity of the physical world with images of the familiar (like making the sun into a godly charioteer), the authors of metaphenomenal fiction were challenged by the familiarity of science's reading of the physical world into generating new images of the unfamiliar.

Hmm, I believe I need at least one more essay to clarify the specifics of the differences between the uncanny-metaphenomenal and the marvelous-metaphenomenal. Possibly tomorrow. 

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 2

"Primary familiarity," as I've defined it in Part 1, is essentially the same as Aesopian contempt, the passive tendency to take aspects of experience for granted, whether or not one is justified in so doing. This species of familiarity is expressed largely by a sense of being comfortable with accepted realities-- though the downside of this comfort is that in some ways it can become boring. The person who experiences this boredom may seek some way to escape his dull round-- going on vacation, having an affair-- but in so doing the individual is not really assessing the things in his regular life that might suggest unfamiliarity.

"Secondary familiarity" is active in the sense that it seeks to reduce perceived unfamiliarity through one of two major methods, both of which involve the amassing of abstract conceptions about the world. This impulse relates to the famous statement by Aristotle at the opening of his Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know." There's a sense that the person seeking to familiarize the unfamiliar relates to the unknown thing as a challenge to his intellect and/or imagination.

Take as example the aspect of human experience most associated with life's "dull rounds:" the generally steady rising and setting of the sun. Now, in pre-industrial societies, humans lacked any instruments capable of assessing the physical nature of the sun. Proto-scientists of the period, particularly those in hierarchical cultures like those of Egypt and Sumer, certainly amassed a certain amount of data about the movement of the planets they could perceive, and some may have even realized that Earth and the other planets moved around the sun. This close study of the patterns of particular aspects of experience is one of the two major methods, and can be lined up with Ernst Cassirer's idea of theoretical science. In our own time, of course, science has progressed to the point that the sun's nature is not especially unfamiliar to our culture. As a part of rote learning, schoolchildren assimilate such facts as the composition of the solar orb and how far it is from Planet Earth. Ironically, all of the findings of this type of "secondary familiarity" may devolve back into a form of primary familiarity for non-scientists: people know these facts and they may appreciate having a greater sense of the coherence of the physical world. Yet, for non-specialists, the data doesn't possess any special resonance. Presumably there are still scientists who regularly examine Old Sol looking for more mysteries to solve. But I would think that their quest to familiarize the unfamiliar would be rather limited these days.

The other major method of seeking secondary familiarity is, as any regular readers of this blog ought to expect, that of mythology and its expression through art-works. A primitive poet may have neither scientific knowledge nor perhaps any inclination to follow that discipline. So he formulates a story that familiarizes the unfamiliar nature of the glowing fireball that circles Planet Earth by saying that it's the flaming chariot of the sun-god Helios, who flies across the sky daily to bring warmth to living things. This assertion does not attempt to reduce unfamiliarity by accreting data about what causes underlie what effects. The storyteller presents what Cassirer calls a "free selection of causes," meaning in this context that the author selects the cause most appropriate to the artistic effect he wants to have on his listeners, rather than seeking the physical nature of the phenomenon in itself. The storyteller does not seek to explain-- few if any people believe the old "myth-was-primitive-science" canard-- but rather, he seeks to imbue an unfamiliar phenomenon with familiar associations, by surrounding the phenomenon with human-like trappings of chariots and horses.

Now, as scientific knowledge advances, the Helios assertion loses some though not all of its cultural force. By the time a Greek thinker like Aristarchus advanced the idea of heliocentrism, most intellectuals probably did not accept the mythic rationale for the sun's existence and purpose. By modern times, the story of Helios can be derided by scientific proselytizers as evidence of the gullibility of non-scientific primitives, and many persons with no interest in the subject will accept that verdict. Nevertheless, once the Helios story is a known facet within the vast history of both myth and literature, it never totally loses the charm of its aspirations to familiarize the unfamiliar. And thus a modern author like Madeline Miller may choose to place new wine in the old bottle labeled "the Helios myth," even if her story is more about the sun-god's famous daughter Circe. In contrast to the findings of theoretical science, the stories told by myth and art, in order to bestow familiarity upon the chaos of experience, can be take almost infinite permutations depending on what cause an author selects to achieve his desired effect.

More in Part 3, where I'll get back to the topic of the NUM formula.

 

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 1

 

A very young Fox, who had never before seen a Lion, happened to meet one in the forest. A single look was enough to send the Fox off at top speed for the nearest hiding place.

The second time the Fox saw the Lion he stopped behind a tree to look at him a moment before slinking away. But the third time, the Fox went boldly up to the Lion and, without turning a hair, said, “Hello, there, old top.”

This is a standard retelling of the Aesop fable "The Fox and the Lion." for which the moral is always, "Familiarity breeds contempt" (which word connotes not a negative feeling for another person but simply taking for granted that the other means you no harm). 

The fable came to mind after I received some input to the effect that I ought to try writing a new summation of my "NUM Theory." This appealed to me because I know that some fine points of the theory have changed since I first started devoting essays to the subject of fictional phenomenality, even though the essentials are the same. With this project in mind, I reread all ARCHIVE posts on the subject of "NUM formula," and came across this interesting sentence I quoted from Rudolf Otto, whose musings on "the uncanny" influenced me through a mention in a C.S. Lewis essay.

 "...this expression [of unfamiliarity] is popularly used for a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes, and in whose presence we have the feeling of the uncanny."

-- THE IDEA OF THE HOLY (1917), p. 197.

As it happens, I have written a number of essays on the subject of "strangeness," a quality I find universally in works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous," but not in works of "the naturalistic." I've tended to focus on the nature of the work's relationship to the notion of causal coherence, i.e., the idea that the physical world and everything in it is fully explicable by the laws of cause and effect. In such a world, "strangeness" has no place. When in fiction an author chooses to depict something that does not conform to the proposition of causal coherence, he produces something that seems "strange," and often (to use a related term) "unintelligible" to the reader's experience. 

Now, to speak of "familiarity" focuses the conundrum more upon the writer's expectations of the reader's affective world, rather than  his cognitive apprehensions. Now, in the real world, from which all readers draw their conclusions about what is or is not strange or unintelligible, what creates the impression of familiarity and its opposite?

First, familiarity arises from the expectation that aspects of the causal universe will work in a predictable fashion. In the Aesop fable, the fox does not KNOW that the lion will not attack him the third time. He makes a supposition on the fact that in the first two encounters, the lion did not choose to attack him, and so the fox allowed himself to act in a familiar manner toward the King of Beasts. 

This would be what I will term "primary familiarity," which is essentially the same as the Aesopian "contempt." This can range from all presumptions about physical predictability-- the expectation that gravity will continue to keep us attached to the earth-- to predictions about the way we expect other sentient persons to react. It's easy to imagine a version of "the Fox and the Lion" in which things don't turn out well for the Fox because the Lion happens to be hungry on the third occasion of their meeting. Yet the fable is accurate enough in describing how sentient persons calculate the reactions of other sentients. The psychology of this familiarity does not diminish just because a particular expectation does not bear fruit; it will just make the perceiving person more militant about a particular entity.

More on "secondary familiarity" in a future post.

 

RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAL PROBLEMS

Back in March 2014 I was deeply involved in sussing out metaphors for my conception of intelligibility. In the essay RIDDLE, MYSTERY, ENIGMA, I used those terms as analogues for the different types of phenomenality I've analyzed under the concept of the NUM formula. In this essay I'll use just two of these terms for a totally different purpose: to denote two poles of what's commonly called the "mystery genre."

Though mystery may have roots going back to the Greek Oedipus and the Hebrew Daniel, it's not inappropriate to credit Edgar Allan Poe with creating the genre. Poe was so deeply invested in working out his personal epistemology, his quest for the meaning of knowledge. that he conceived of both the "riddle" and the "enigma" versions of the genre.

In the earlier essay, I used this definition of riddle:

a "riddle" is a perplexing arrangement of words that does (as Macmillan says) does finally have some rational or quasi-rational answer

This would aptly describe the "rational pole" of the mystery-genre, as represented by the stories of the so-called "first detective," C. Auguste Dupin. In each of his three tales, Dupin is confronted by some bizarre phenomenon that no one else can explain, but which he alone can resolve through his analytical power. The first of the Dupin stories, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," devotes its first four paragraphs to a discussion of said power, starting out by characterizing the genius of people like the story's main character, who will be able to entangle "enigmas," "conundrums," and "hieroglyphics" with equal acumen:

THE mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension pr�ternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

However, though Dupin never meets a problem he cannot solve, other Poe characters do so. In 1844, the same year that Poe wrote the last Dupin story, he also completed the less-heralded stand-alone story, "The Oblong Box," which I believe ends with an "enigma," defined earlier as:

"a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation"

Since the events of "Oblong Box" aren't as well as known as those of "Rue Morgue," I'll summarize the former's action. Poe's unnamed narrator takes a sea-cruise, and finds that the guests include his former fellow college-student Wyatt, his wife, and his two sisters, who also bring aboard the ship a mysterious "oblong box." The extremely nosy narrator observes some odd discontinuities in the behavior of Wyatt and his fellow travelers, and wonders if it somehow bears on the unseen contents of the box. While the unnamed fellow doesn't come to the correct conclusion, the resolution of the mystery-- one of the few in mystery-fiction that doesn't involve a crime as such-- is explained at the end. And yet, despite the (accidental) solution of the mystery, the nature of Wyatt's relationship to the oblong box is one that remains enigmatic even after the basic situation is understood-- with the result that the narrator is haunted by the disclosures, as C. Auguste Dupin never is, as the story's closing lines relate:

My own mistake arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament. But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night. There is a countenance which haunts me, turn as I will. There is an hysterical laugh which will forever ring within my ears. 

I would say, then, that all mysteries after Poe tend to follow either the rational model of the Dupin stories, where the detective's acumen resolves all the problems, and or the irrational model of "The Oblong Box," where even the solution of a given problem merely generates a sense of greater mystery, often of some mystery that remains insoluble.

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 3

I foregrounded this essay in the first paragraph of BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE:

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.

The primary linguistic terms I'm invoking are the two most crucial to the concept of symbolism: the *simile* and the *metaphor.* Truth to tell, the particular significance of the simile became clearer to me when I looked again at my argument in the POWER AND POTENCY series, regarding G. Wilson Knight's assertion that Shakespeare's Hamlet was "a superman among men:"

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.

The rest of Part II I devoted to showing how other manifestations of uncanny phenomenality seemed to possess some potency that exceeded the world of naturalistic causality. Since uncanny works by definition cannot exceed the coherence aspect of causality, they can only exceed naturalistic causality in the sense of *intelligibility,* which is why I argued that such fictional presences as Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan are more allied with the world of the metaphenomenal than that of the isophenomenal.

So, what does it mean if the world of the uncanny is governed by the construct of the simile, and do the other two phenomenalities accord with other linguistic forms of speech?

Well, as noted earlier the simile and the metaphor are often paired as related but non-identical linguistic terms. The simile draws a comparison between two or more phenomena, one which may be expressively memorable but is not meant to change one's view of consensual reality. The metaphor, however, expresses the identity of two or more phenomena, in a manner that parallels the direct association of phenomena in Cassirer's view of mythical thinking:

Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

 In THE GREAT CODE, Northrop Frye spun forth a mammoth theory of language derived from the work of Renaissance scholar Giambattista Vico. In essence, Frye asserts that human language has three phases: the *hieroglyphic,* which is the language of the gods, the *hieratic,* which is the language of the aristocrats, who also give birth to what Cassirer calls "discursive reason," and the *demotic,* the language of ordinary-world description (what Wheelwright calls "stheno-language.")

Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

I don't intend to draw direct comparisons between Frye's formulations and mine, for as I've mentioned elsewhere, Frye has no real interest in phenomenology. But I mention Frye's schema as a prelude to outlining my own, which concerns not the nature of language but the application of linguistic terms to the three phenomenalities, to wit:

The NATURALISTIC is governed by the concept of the "stheno-symbol," of the base sign that is supposed to represent exactly what it shows and nothing more.

The UNCANNY is governed by the concept of the "simile," in that there is a restricted level of symbolism. Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs can compare his hero Tarzan to a "forest god," which gives the hero the semblance of godliness to the character, yet without actually imputing the nature of a god, or that god's power, to Tarzan in any literal way.

The MARVELOUS, however, is governed by the concept of the "metaphor," in which the symbolism is meant to imply some base identity between two or more phenomena, as seen in Cassirer's last two examples, the sun being created from a stone and men being created from rocks or trees. Within fiction, this transcendence of experienced reality may be explained by magic, by some not-yet-discovered principle of real-world science, or by nothing whatever. But the action involved is always that of an identification of two disparate phenomena, becoming associated after the "magical" fashion of the metaphorical connection.

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 1

Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

It's recently occurred to me to pose the question, "When did human works of art and/or religion manifest the phenomenality of the uncanny?"

After all, as the above passage from Cassirer indicates, most if not all early religion concerned itself with marvelous magical transformations. This is not to say that early humans did not have their share of mundane stories along the lines of "the one that got away" or "who's so-and-so's wife is sleeping with," much of which would approximate what we now deem naturalistic narrative. At the same time, it should be considered a given that in archaic times, even the most skeptical disbeliever lived in a culture dominated by conceptions of the marvelous. Thus a story like Homer's ILIAD, a tale of human beings going to war, is continuously entangled with the narratives of the gods behind the scenes.

But what about the interstitial category of the uncanny? This phenomenality, as I've often mentioned, shares with the naturalistic the characteristic of casual coherence, yet also shares with the marvelous the characteristic of anti-intelligibility-- though most of the artifacts I've identified with this phenomenality are of comparatively recent creation.

Is it possible to find this phenomenality within the earliest myths and tales of humankind? Rudolf Otto, one of the key philosophers to employ the term "uncanny," thought so. However, he applied the term largely to pre-Christian religions, rather than analyzing a variety of religious and literary works across the span of human history. Here's Otto's most concise judgment on the matter, from Chapter 4 of THE IDEA OF THE HOLY:


let us give a little further consideration
to the first crude, primitive forms in which this numinous
dread or awe shows itself. It is the mark which really
characterizes the so-called Religion of Primitive Man , and
there it appears as daemonic dread . This crudely naive and
primordial emotional disturbance, and the fantastic images to
which it gives rise, are later overborne and ousted by more
highly-developed forms of the numinous emotion, with all its
mysteriously impelling power. But even when this has long
attained its higher and purer mode of expression it is possible
for the primitive types of excitation that were formerly a part
of it to break out in the soul in all their original naivete and
so to be experienced afresh.

So for Otto, "the uncanny" was essentially an early if crude form of "the mysteriously impelling power" that he calls "the numinous." Man's capacity for experiencing the numinous stands as an ideal function of the human mind, one that is best developed by the higher religions, though the numinous experience cannot, he says, be boiled down to anything like Kant's notion of "the sublime." Otto clearly deems "the so-called Religion of Primitive Man" to be an illusion born of "naivete," but this has nothing to do with the actual content of most primitive religious narratives, which are implicitly dominated by the marvelous.

If the tropes of the uncanny exist in early literature, presumably they would exist with the same status as naturalistic tropes, within the greater scope of a marvelous phenomenality. For instance, all three phenomenality-tropes appear in the non-canonical Hebrew text "Bel and the Dragon:"

The NATURALISTIC part appears when the prophet Daniel exposes the way the priests of Bel sneak into the temple to eat the sacrifices, the better to convince the naive that the gods are real.

The UNCANNY would be Daniel's investigation of yet another hoax, but one with a greater degree of mystery to it, when he finds that some colossal animal inhabits (presumably) another temple, which the local priests consider a "living god." Apparently the "dragon" is not a common animal that anyone in town might recognize as a simple creature, so within my system I would deem it an "astounding animal." Daniel's method of slaying the creature I might further deem a "bizarre crime." The thrust of the story is that the "dragon" dies specifically because it is does not share the marvelous nature of a god, so that it is strange enough to be anti-intelligible but not something outside the bounds of causal coherence.

The MARVELOUS phenomenality, however, dominates the story as a whole, in that Daniel is thrown into the lion's den and succored by angels. This section of the story provides beings whose nature exceeds both intelligibility and causal coherence-- not to mention being the best-known part of the story for most people today.

Just as a guess, I would imagine that oral culture may have produced assorted stand-alone stories that would conform to my definition of the uncanny phenomenality, wherein which the tropes of the naturalistic or the marvelous did not hold sway. But most such stand-alone stories were not written down until the dawn of European rationalism, and if we have them in any form, they were probably incorporated into longer tale-cycles, like the Six Labors of Theseus that precede his encounter with the marvelous Minotaur.

More to come.

LUNATIC LAWMEN

While messing around in Merriam-Webster's online thesaurus in search of a title for this essay, I was surprised that a search for synonyms for "heroic" included the following:

crazy, foolish, half-witted, insane, lunatic, mad, nutty

I think this connotation of "heroic" occurs only under specialized circumstances, as when someone of faint heart thinks that a hero is "crazy" for attempting some heroic act. Yet it's a fortuitous cross-comparison, because I gave some thought today on the significance of "crazy heroes" for my NUM formula.

As I've noted on many occasions, there are certain works which just barely seem to cross the threshold of the naturalistic into the uncanny. In this 2012 essay, I gave three examples of thriller-films that had a very "naturalistic" look overall, though I asserted that one of them, EYES OF A STRANGER, registered as "uncanny" thanks to certain diegetic factors:

EYES debuted in theaters at a time when psycho-slasher films were still in ascendance, but this film's killer has little in common with the more colorful fiends of the period: he isn't deformed, wears no distinctive mask or clothing, and uses no special gimmicks or bizarre methods to commit his murders-- all in spite of the fact that one of the writers credited with the EYES screenplay also worked on the seminal 1980 FRIDAY THE 13TH.  Nevertheless, for all the naturalistic touches here, the script does give the villain a larger-than-life quality that confers a sense of dread to the proceedings.  For one thing, though the psycho-rapist never earns a distinctive nom du crime, on occasion the heroine, news reporter Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes), dubs him "the Phone Freak" because he preys on women after tormenting them with lascivious phone calls. 

I mentioned the example of "the Phone Freak" earlier on this blog in my more recent essay ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4, as one of a handful of examples of "psycho killers" who attained a "larger-than-life" quality that I subsumed under the term "artifice."

But this conception returns me to the line of thought expressed in my "Power and Potency" series, where I drew a comparison between G. Wilson Knight's thoughts on Shakespeare's character Hamlet and the general idea of the "perilous psycho."

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.
Until reading Knight, I had always classified HAMLET and most of its film adaptations as instances of the trope I call "phantasmal figuration." However, Knight's description makes Hamlet sound very much like the type of uncanny-or-naturalistic figure of another trope: "the perilous psycho."  In terms of the play proper, one may argue back and forth whether or not Hamlet, in feigning madness, may have actually gone mad. But whether the Danish prince is mad or merely infected with a pestilential cynicism, his attitude has given him a special "potency," even though he has no special power-- just like all of the "psycho" characters I've studied.

The "psycho" usually takes the persona of either a monster or a demihero, but I began thinking: is it possible to view any mostly naturalistic "heroes" as being uncanny purely because they're, well, somewhat crazy?

Often I've put forth examples of heroes who are uncanny in terms of their appearance. In this essay, I asserted that the oater-hero the Durango Kid was one such uncanny hero, even thought there was absolutely nothing to separate one of his adventures from a Roy Rogers western except for the Kid's uncanny garb.

I've also defined some heroes as being in an uncanny phenomenality due to the monsters they oppose, as I did in my review of 1984's FEAR CITY, wherein traumatized boxer Matt Rossi makes it his business to take down a weird serial-killer.

But to be a direct parallel to the example of EYES OF A STRANGER, my hypothetical "lunatic lawman" would have to have nothing special about his appearance, his resources, or his antagonists.

Now, as it happens, vigilante lawmen are frequently figures of terror to criminals in a manner analogous to the way serial killers terrorize ordinary citizens. But since I've said that the Phone Freak invokes "dread" rather than just simple "fear," as my 2012 essay argues in detail, a mostly naturalistic hero would have to do the same thing. This is less common for heroes than for monsters, since heroes are usually pretty flamboyant about who they are and what they do.

One possible example of a "crazy hero" type might be the ex-'Nam vigilante hero. This hero-type was largely initiated by the incredible popularity of the paperback hero The Executioner, who in 1969 began his run of over 400 novels and almost certainly influenced Marvel Comics' Punisher. I've read only one of these novels and so could not make any determinations about the series without much more research. However, according to my system, the only way that such a hero could be uncanny would be if his acts were so crazy that they went beyond the basics of the heroic type. For instance, here's a description by blogger Joe Kenney of a particularly horrific execution pulled off by one of the Executioner-imitators, the Penetrator:

The battles are mostly one-sided, with the goons no match for Hardin's skills. Regardless the action sequences are all well staged and expertly rendered, particularly a great scene where Hardin gets a small army of mobsters stuck in a canyon and lobs white phosphorous down upon them. This is probably the most brutal treatment I've ever seen delivered to the mob in a men's adventure novel! 

Having read few works in this genre, I probably can't do more than make general hypothetical statements. However, another possible example of a "crazy hero" might be seen in 1984's RED DAWN. I judged this film as uncanny largely because of it's "what if" situation of showing a Russian invasion of the United States. But the heroes of the film, Jed Eckert and his "Wolverines," have taken a certain uncanny potency by virtue of following in the footsteps of aboriginal Americans. Thus Eckert may be the "crazy hero" who offers the best contrast to the almost naturalistic "crazy monster."

SIGNMAKING AND WORLDBUILDING

I concluded Part 3 of ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE  with this statement:

it stands to reason that artifice as a mode embraces both simple variables ("stereotypes") and complex variables ("archetypes.")

I followed up this distinction in Part 4:

I may have on occasion connected "affective freedom" with the author's ability to generate discourses of symbolic complexity, but if I have done so, this would be a mistake. "Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude, and that freedom can be found in any uncanny or marvelous work, regardless of its symbolic complexity, a.k.a. "mythicity." 

Although both of these are abstract conceptions, the best way to figure out how they work is to treat them as if they were physical objects, able to be broken down into their constituent parts.

Archetypes, both in their Jungian and Fryean conceptions, stand outside the realm of the semiotics disciplines of Saussure, Pierce and Morris. Yet clearly many ideas from semiotics coincide with those of archetypal psychology and "myth criticism." Frye's concept of simple and complex variables sounds a lot like Morris's distinction between straightforward "signals" and more involved "symbols," and they both also resemble Wheelwright's arguments for a spectrum of language ranging from the *monosignative,* or "denotative," to the *plurisignative,* or "connotative." So even though the term"archetype" may have special usages, it's not hard to see that it bears a strong relation to semiotics, the study of signs, even though Jung probably would not agree that an archetype reduces down to a linguistic sign.

"Artifice," however, cannot reduce down to something as elementary as a "sign." I said that it lined up with an author's intention to privilege tropes peculiar to literary expression than to "tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude." My use of "trope" is probably closest to the definition cited at Dictionary.com:

any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and
irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense.

Within a naturalistic phenomenality, the author must always privilege verisimilitude, though it's always possible to bend the rules of the strictly probable to suit the audience. The 'birth-mystery plot" from Dickens' OLIVER TWIST is an artifice designed to begin the main character's life without any of the familial support that most children receive in their upbringing. Nothing that happens in the early chapters of the novel is purely outside the domain of the naturalistic, in which, as I've said before, reality is both coherent and intelligible. Yet, once Dickens has generated the maximum pathos from his character's plight, the author bends the rules so that Oliver's first, Fagin-inspired attempt to burgle a house puts him in contact with the character of Rose, who just happens to be Oliver's long-lost aunt. At the same time, Dickens must use a certain amount of verisimilitude in setting up the situation-- for instance, Fagin's gang must have good reason to think that the house is worth robbing. There's some artifice in Oliver's deliverance from the hardships resulting from the mystery of his origins, but not enough to render it "anti-intelligible--" and further, all the "literary or rhetorical devices" Dickens uses, whether allied to artifice or to verisimilitude, should all be seen as tropes.

So, whereas archetypes can be seen as related to, or identical with, those atomistic entities we call "signs," both the artifice-mode and the verisimilitude-mode are related to those "molecular entities" built up from the sign-atoms. Jung probably did not use the term "trope" back in his day, but in some essays he did use "motif" as a more neutral term than archetype, and I imagine that for him "motif" carried the same meaning that "trope" does for readers today.

One scholar whom Jung influenced, Joseph Campbell, was attracted to the use of the term "signs," though his orientation seems more toward ethology than semiotics. In this early essay, I hazarded a parallel between Campbell's concept of supernormal signs and Frye's concept of complex variables:

For the purpose of this argument I'll assume that though Campbell's "supernormal sign stimuli" don't share the same philosophical etiology as Frye's "complex variables," the two writers are essentially talking about the same thing: the power of certain signs to evoke far stronger responses-- affective and perhaps cognitive as well-- than do their opposite numbers: "normal sign stimuli" and "simple variables." Both Campbell and Frye frequently addressed the interpenetration of art and myth, though naturally each man hewed to his specialty.

However, of late I've been doubting that "supernormal signs" are adequate for talking about either Fryean or Jungian archetypes. Ethologists evolved the notion of such signs for talking about the instincts of lower animals, to better understand how, to use one of Campbell's examples, a newborn chick might fear the image of a hawk even though the newborn has never seen a hawk before. But most lower animals are not able to respond to images or motifs beyond the level of the simple "sign." In contrast, as soon as human beings were able to formulate language, and to begin the long process of symbolic elaboration seen in culture, they took the step into the domain of the pure symbol. The images we see in early man's cave-paintings may vary between sign and symbol, but by the time we see an image as elaborate as "The Sorcerer" from Trois-Freres, we're probably not dealing with a simple sign, but with a "molecular" trope built up from many "atomistic" signs. Thus I would say that as a rule, there are no "supernormal signs" in human culture, only "supernormal tropes."

A partial exception is suggested by this passage from Philip Wheelwright, last printed here:

Certain particulars have more of an archetypal content than others; that is to say, they are 'eminent instances' which stand forth in a characteristic amplitude as representatives of many others; they enclose in themselves a certain totality, arranged in a certain way, stirring in the soul something at once familiar and strange, and thus outwardly as well as inwardly they lay claim to a certain unity and generality.-- FOUNTAIN, p. 54.

I gave my own example of both an "eminent instance" and its "non-eminent" relation:

It's true that one cannot say, in any meaningful context, that real eagles are more important, more significant, than real mudlarks. However, in any symbolic universe the symbolic (or gestural) eagle is worth more than the symbolic/gestural mudlark. 

And yet, by the end of the essay, I've noted that the richness of the symbolic eagle is still something that resulted from an ongoing process:

The concept of complexity, which suggests an "eminent instance" with a huge accretion of associations, not unlike the outer periphery of a black hole:

In short, then-- Tropes, good. Signs, not as good.

ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT

In my most recent film-review I wrote:

From time to time I've debated, like many others on the web, the question as to whether or not all works in the tradition of the "alternate history" fall into the domain of what many call"fantasy and science fiction"-- or, as I term said domain, "the metaphenomenal." I plan to write another essay for my theory-blog soon about the reasons why INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is an example of a purely isophenomenal "alternate history" film, so I'll dispense with any detailed theoretical justifications in this review. However, like some of the naturalistic films I've reviewed here, BASTERDS is relevant in that it uses many of the same tropes one would find in an "uncanny" version of an alternate-world narrative, such as (to cite a quick example) Philip Dick's THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.

I've written next to nothing thus far on the formal considerations of the "alternate world" concept-- from which, I should say, I'm excluding any narrative that involves overt marvelous phenomena, such as time-travel or even futuristic extrapolation. For example, Orwell's 1984 is such an extrapolation, in that its developments are predicated on what has already happened in historical time. Ward Moore's BRING THE JUBILEE, often considered a pivotal "alternate history" novel, would also be inapplicable since the protagonist does travel in time.  For that matter, now that I've read a summation of HIGH CASTLE-- which I had not re-read in some time-- it too would not qualify, given that the alternate-world Nazis have colonized other planets, so that book also uses a "marvelous" trope. A truly "uncanny" version of an alternate-world scenario could have no broaches in causal coherence, only in intelligibility.

At the end of the BASTERDS review, I gave one example of such an anti-intelligible film, RED DAWN.  DAWN is not commonly regarded as an "alternate world" story, but I view it as such because the script portrays a world in which nuclear war does not ensue as a result of Soviet forces invading the United States. Rather, DAWN chooses to focus on only one aspect of the conflict: that of American teens, nicknamed "Wolverines," who battle the Soviets using the tactics of aboriginal Americans and of so-called "mountain men." Their struggle parallels that of the "Basterds" in the Tarantino film, but the approach is radically different in terms of phenomenality.

As I've said in numerous previous essays, what determines the nature of the phenomenality of a given narrative is the type of affect that the narrative dominantly evokes. Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis have been my primary guides in formulating my most current schema for both the sympathetic and antipathetic affects appropriate to each phenomenality:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

THE MARVELOUS-- antipathetic aspect TERROR, sympathetic aspect WONDER.


In recent essays like PENALTY FOR THRESHOLDING, I centered my argument upon the idea that works of "the uncanny" had a greater effect of "strangeness" than those of "the naturalistic" because the former were more allied to the literary principle of artifice than the corresponding principle of verisimilitude. This describes adequately the way in which narratives can take on the semblance of being "larger than life" but artifice alone is not enough to explain the process, which must be grounded in the pluralist conception that art and literature are primarily expressive in nature.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS contains a great deal of artifice in the ways that its plot continually references film-history. However, even though the writer rewrites real-world history, that rewriting comes about due to factors that broach neither coherence nor intelligibility. The Basterds are the closest thing to an anti-intelligible element in the movie, and yet the emotions they inspire are naturalistic in nature: physical fear to their enemies (best embodied in the figure of the "Bear Jew"), and admiration to the viewers who identify with their history-changing exploits.

In contrast, the Wolverines, while they have no greater resources than the Basterds, achieve the sense of bringing dread to their enemies and inciting fascination from the audience. I would say that this is because Tarantino's heroes are firmly rooted in the here-and-now, while those of John Milius are an attempt to recapitulate the warrior-feats of early American history,  both "white" and "red."

I've subsumed the subgenre of the "alternate world" under the trope I've named "exotic worlds and customs." It might not prove to be the most elegant fit over time. Usually this trope has been used for exoticism found in cultures far from modern post-industrial society. However, on occasion I've also detected the use of exoticism in contemporary societies, as seen in my reviews of such naturalistic films as THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN  and THE SPIDERS, and certainly there have been times when the "exotic custom" has stemmed from a person or persons who comes from an exotic land as he, she, or they encounter the contemporary world.

This may not be all I have to write on the subject of "artifice and the affects," but for now I'll close by stating that in one sense the "alternate world with no marvelous elements" bears a certain resemblance to the narrative world conjured forth in the "delirious dreams and fallacious figments" trope. Certainly, the viewer of BASTERDS is always aware of the "real world's" dissimiliarity from the film's world, just as Alice retains her memory of the Way the World Ought to Be even while meandering through the uncanny terrain of Wonderland. "Fallcious figments" are even closer in structural nature to the idea of the alternate world. Most "figments" are meant to appear briefly and to be ignored as irrelevant to a narrative's diegesis, though occasionally one encounters a comic world in which everything is thoroughly distanced from reality, the best example (from films thus far reviewed) being LITTLE RITA OF THE WEST.  A uncanny use of the figment-trope, but one which profits from drawing upon ludicrous versions of dread and fascination, would be MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL.

ANCESTORS OF FEAR AND DREAD

C.S. Lewis's analysis from AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM remains my touchstone for the distinction between fear and dread:

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost.

Lewis formulated this opposition by drawing on Rudolf Otto's 1917 THE IDEA OF THE HOLY. However, a much earlier distinction appeared in a 1826 analysis by Gothicist Ann Radcliffe, where she distinguished between "terror" and "horror." This analysis, later given the title "On the Supernatural in Poetry" by an editor, isn't particularly well-organized. In essence, Radcliffe-- whose Gothic novels depended on suggestion rather than explicit gore and gruesomeness-- has her principal character argue that "terror" is a much subtler and finer emotion than "horror," which is all about the explicitness. Here's her most definite statement on the difference:

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.

This doesn't really clarify the matter all that much, but a later section makes clear that Radcliffe equates the sublimity of terror with that of the merely suggested, the merely imagined. When an interlocutor asks the speaker what he thinks about Milton's line, "On his brow sat horror plumed," the speaker essentially co-opts MIlton's use of the word "horror" for the speaker's (and Radcliffe's) idea of "terror:"

As an image, it certainly is sublime; it fills the mind with an idea of power, but it does not follow that Milton intended to declare the feeling of horror to be sublime; and after all, his image imparts more of terror than of horror; for it is not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades, the great outlines only appearing, which excite the imagination to complete the rest; he only says, ‘sat horror plumed ;' you will observe, that the look of horror and the other characteristics are left to the imagination of the reader; and according to the strength of that, he will feel Milton's image to be either sublime or otherwise. 

According to this site, Radcliffe was not a fan of explicit gore, and wrote her book THE ITALIAN (which I have not read) as a pointed response to the excesses of Matthew Lewis's 1796 Gothic novel THE MONK. I have read the Lewis book, and I can confirm that it does not hold back in "distinctly picturing forth" its ghastlier scenes).

If there are any significant parallels between the formulations of Ann Radcliffe and of C.S. Lewis (by way of Otto), it would seem to be the mutual attempt to define the nature of fear based in purely physical causes. Lewis' tiger can only inspire fear because there's no deeper concept to be understood about it, save that it's an animal capable of killing a human being. This is only a partial parallel to Radcliffe's use of "horror," which "contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates" both the soul and the faculties. But her contrast to "terror," like Lewis' contrast to the "uncanny" feeling of seeing a "ghost," is pretty clearly based upon the familiar body/mind duality, which poet Octavio Paz more aptly rendered into a duality between "body" and "non-body" (or as I once called them, "corporeal" and "non-corporeal.")

To further complicate the matter, although Lewis is to some extent addressing the question of different phenomenal presences in different situations, Radcliffe apparently has no interest at all in aligning either "terror" or "horror" with any type of phenomena. Though she doesn't mention THE MONK in the above essay, it's plain that she would class it as a work of "horror" simply because it "distinctly pictures forth" all of the unseemly situations it includes-- ranging from the monk Ambrosio's (naturalistic) incestuous union with his own sister, to his (marvelous) doom at the hands of a demon, who flings Ambrosio's body from a great height and allows the monk to perish in agony. If anything, Radcliffe's distinction of "distinct" and "indistinct" is closer to my distinction between "clean" and "dirty violence" in this essay:

I said in an earlier essay that I would address the differing "intensities" of violence in fiction, by which I meant what I called "clean violence" vs. "dirty violence." These are NOT meant to be covalent with my versions of Twitchell's preposterous violence and its unnamed opposite. I refer to the "intensities" of clean and dirty because they are determined purely by how intensely the work does or does not present scenes of violence. As I see it preposterous violence and its opposite are not determined by intensity of effect but by narrative function.

Again, the parallel is still not exact. Still, just as the proponent of "suggestive terror" does not want to "freeze the soul/faculties" of the reader by bringing in gross effects, the proponent of "clean violence"-- my principal example being the 1977 STAR WARS-- is also seeking to avoid grossing out the audience, albeit for a very different aesthetic purpose.

Now, my own definition of "dread" moves away from Lewis's example of a "ghost:" to anything covered by my Ten Tropes, which occur in both naturalistic and uncanny forms-- the first forms inspiring only "fear," while the second may inspire fear but more importantly inspires "dread" as well. The latter comes about because even though both forms obey the laws of causal coherence, the uncanny forms violate the law of intelligibility. In the interest of further defining the process through which intelligibility is violated, I'll devote the upcoming essay JUDGING DREAD PART 2.