THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS

 I recently re-screened the 1965 Italian horror-film BLOODY PIT OF HORROR but have not yet reviewed the movie on my film-blog. What I found interesting was the way many IMDB reviews treated PIT as comically overstated, though it's not nearly as overbaked as many other "so bad they're good" flicks like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE or TROLL 2. In terms of the general plot, BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein. In fact, BLOODY PIT was filmed at the same castle, Palazzo Borghese, as two previous Euro-horror movies, THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA. The fact that BLOODY PIT comes in for so much disproportionate hilarity suggests to me that something in the way it was filmed, more than the story per se, tickles many viewers' ideas about the fragility of fantasies.

Now, in this essay, I quoted Jung as asserting that all creative work is entirely dependent on "fantasy thinking," a position with which I wholly concur:

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.)

Now, the examples of PLAN 9 and TROLL indicate that the free play of fantasy is not an unalloyed virtue. Games need rules to impose limits on the limitlessness of the imagination, and neither Ed Wood nor Claudio Fragasso were able to formulate rule-systems that made sense for their respective monsters.   

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is directly efficiently if unenthusiastically by Massimo Pupillo, whose disinterest in the horror genre has been widely reported. There are no "Ed Wood" moments that call attention to directorial blunders or FX-shortcomings, so I assume that most of the hilarity stems from something closer to the realm of TROLL 2. Yet the core idea of PIT is no different than that of the celebrated Roger Corman Poe-film PIT AND THE PENDULUM. In Richard Matheson's adaptation of Poe, some innocents-- albeit far fewer in number than those in the 1965 film-- suffer torments by a man who believes himself to be identical with a famous torturer who in reality died years ago. But without looking, I don't think that if I check the IMDB comments for PENDULUM, I will find viewers bagging on that movie for its supposed absurdities, as this viewer did for Pupillo's movie.

The film is filled with lots of sadistic torture and is reminiscent of the German film, THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (talk about a great title). However, unlike the German film, this one is much sillier and the horrible punishments really don't look all that realistic--just cheesy. But, because it is made so poorly (with horrible dialog and action throughout), it is worth seeing to have a few laughs.

I, however, don't find fault with the execution of BLOODY PIT's torture-scenes as that reviewer did. Here's the central visual trope that makes modern viewers take the menace of PENDULUM seriously:

The menace in PENDULUM looks like a respectable Gothic malefactor; he's dressed in dark colors and looks like he means business. Now here's the not dissimilar torture-happy menace in BLOODY PIT.

Because the evil "Crimson Executioner" looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie, I suggest that's the real, and maybe the sole, reason that so many viewers think that BLOODY PIT is so hilarious. Other films are structurally similar, and many may be more badly directed than this one, like the two vampire flicks mentioned above. But they lack such a vivid visual trope.

I don't know exactly why someone chose to juxtapose the masked-wrestler image with that of a Gothic torturer. I'll explore some possibilities in my formal review of the movie, but in this essay, I wanted to spotlight the notion that one or more of the scripters had an agenda. Any agenda probably did not come from Pupillo, who was hoping to move on from horror films to more reputable genres. I think one or more of the writers made some chance correlation between the violence of Gothic films and that of the "muscleman" films. Yet none of the six scripters credited on IMDB have any huge number of outstanding accomplishments in the writing department:

RALPH ZUCKER-- Besides PIT, Zucker did one obscure western, another Gothic horror from 1973, THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT, that I for one found blah, and KONG ISLAND, which is a fairly stupid mad-science jungle flick.

FRANCESCO MERLI-- four other writing credits, but none of the productions are known to me

RUTH CARTER-- aside from PIT, Carter's only other credit is as one of four writers who "adapted" Edgar Allan Poe to produce Pupillo's other major horror flick, TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE, which was a Barbara Steele vehicle.

CESARE MANCINI-- same as Carter except that he also contributed to some romance movie.  

ROMANO MIGLORINI and ROBERTO NATALE-- And here we finally find a couple of guys who racked up a respectable number of writing credits-- 16 for the first guy, 29 for the second-- though the only outstanding credits they garnered, for a couple of Bava films, came after PIT and TERROR CREATURES, on which they worked alongside Carter and Mancini.

So, in the absence of anyone who looks like an "auteur," I'm going to guess that some or all of the writers convened to figure out what to do with yet another film set in a Gothic castle-- and that instead of going with something obvious like another demented follower of Torquemada or another vampire, just decided that their fiend would be the furthest thing possible from those sort of menaces: a torture who put his chiseled musculature on display more than his torture-devices. That nod to the least obvious sort of menace-- much like Claudio Fragasso's vegetarian goblins-- had no chance of being taken seriously, at least to the extent that audiences responded to obvious menaces like vampires. 

And yet the virtue of that appeal to the unobvious got BLOODY PIT a lot more attention than it would have garnered otherwise, even though it was attention of the "so bad it's good" ilk. In my review I'll hold forth on a few things that make BLOODY PIT a more mythic film than simple goofs like TROLL 2 and PLAN 9, so I'll sum up by saying that sometimes flights of fancy can flout the rules in such a way as to create new games, as good or better than the old ones.         

STIMULATING RESPONSES

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

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

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

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

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 2

 Now that I've specified in Part 1 my reasons for taking exception to Jung's characterization of what he termed "perception" and "judging" functions, I want to throw out a speculation as to why that particular duality might have been important to Jung, beyond the reasons cited in his 1912 PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES-- a speculation pertaining to what I've termed "the two forms of knowledge." In William James' THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY, James stated:                                                                                                                            "There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about."                                              

I went into detail as to the history preceding and following this conception in my essay WHITE NOISE, so I won't duplicate that explanation here. What I find interesting, though, is how much the input from what Jung calls the "perceiving functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge by acquaintance," while the "judging functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge-about" (which Bertrand Russell gave the superior term of "knowledge by description.")                         

 Now, I haven't reread PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES in many years, nor, prior to writing this essay, did I even go over the notes I made from my first reading. I doubt that Jung said anything, directly or indirectly, about the parallel I'm suggesting, for the very good reason that TYPES doesn't concern the nature of knowledge. Jung wrote that book to give his detailed analysis of the two types of people he termed "introverts" and "extroverts," and how such psychological types manifest in reaction to the four functions coded in the overall makeup of human beings. It's one of Jung's great books, but inevitably it was influenced by the intellectual currents surrounding it-- which included James, Jung's senior by thirty years, and whom Jung visited twice just before James' passing in 1910. Jung admired James' 1902 VARITIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. and the psychologist devotes twenty pages of TYPES comparing his concept of two types of people to James' two types of philosophers. So, though I didn't reread TYPES, I did check to see everything Jung wrote about James in that particular book.                                           

 Now, one interesting datum is that though Jung claims to have "limited" knowledge of James' corpus of writings, and almost everything Jung cites in his tome about James' "two types" comes from James' 1907 book PRAGMATISM, Jung has one citation from the 1890 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY-- which, as noted above, is the book from which the "two forms of knowledge" is put forth. I don't know that Jung never commented on the two forms elsewhere in his works, but IMO he was too good a scholar to quote from a book he cited in an appendix. And for that matter, had he never encountered James' 1890 formulation and had never been influenced by James in his "perceiving/judging" categories, Jung also could have got something not dissimilar from Schopenhauer's dichotomy of "percepts and concepts." But James is still the best bet for influence-- and even though Jung didn't agree with everything James wrote, he paid the older man an exceeding compliment by being influenced by him-- just as I've sought to compliment Jung in my own small way.               

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 1

 I suppose I must have been at least partly converted by Alfred North Whitehead's PROCESS AND REALITY when I read it in 2020, since over four years later I'm still thinking about ways I might compare and contrast his Kant-rejecting system with the heavily-Kantian conceptions of Carl Jung. Take one of the Jungian formulations to which I'm most indebted, that of the "four functions:"                                                                                                                                                                                                          "Thinking and feeling are rational functions in so far as they are decisively influenced by the motive of reflection. They attain their fullest significance when in fullest possible accord with the laws of reason. The irrational functions, on the contrary, are such as aim at pure perception, e.g. intuition and sensation; because, as far as possible, they are forced to dispense with the rational (which presupposes the exclusion of everything that is outside reason) in order to be able to reach the most complete perception of the whole course of events."-- PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.                                                                                                                                              But despite my "loyalty" to Jung, I departed from the Swiss psychologist on various occasions. In the third part of the 2015 essay-series REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, I said that Jung's psychology-oriented view of the functions contrasted with my literary view:                                                                                         

'Jung calls intuition an "irrational, perceiving function" while thinking is a "rational function of judgment." Despite this difference, both of them seem to be secondary processes for purposes of literary identification.'                                                                                                                                                                                                     In fact, Whitehead may have influenced me when I began thinking about the "lateral meaning" of a literary work as being its "ontology," while its "vertical meaning" as its "epistemology," I began to poke at some of Jung's correlations. For instance, Jung says that the functions of sensation and intuition are both "irrational" and "perception-oriented," while those of feeling and thinking are both "rational" and "judgment-oriented." I think my readings of Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES was thorough enough that I comprehend why he made these correlations. But was he correct?                                     

I have no problem with Jung's "rational/irrational" categories with respect to all four functions, though my approach is entirely literary in nature, rather than psychological. But Jung also makes a distinction based on whether a function is rooted in "pure perception" or in "reflection," while I believe there are strong aspects of both "perception" and "reflection" intermixed in all four functions. Rather, I use a distinction between "more discursive" and "less discursive." "I believe that the functions of "feeling" and "thinking" lend themselves to discursive exploration, and that this is why the vast majority of literary criticism is devoted to sussing out (a) what thoughts an author has about a given topic, and (b) how the author conveys his thoughts through the way his characters feel about the topic. That author may use just as much "reflection" in setting up how the characters interact with respect to the things they experience in sensation, or in terms of symbolic constructs. But the elements of those two functions are more "presentational," to use Susan Langer's term; one reflects on their nature less through reason than through instinct. As a critical thinker, I can write hundreds of words as to why I think one work by Osamu Tezuka makes better use of symbolism than another, possibly even dealing with works written around the same time and with a common set of characters. But many of my arguments will proceed from my instinctive appreciation of the way various symbols play off one another, in contrast to the strongly discursive way that discrete ideas play off one another. I can (and did) write an essay about why an action-sequence masterminded by Jack Kirby is superior kinetically than a sequence constructed by Jim Shooter, but I cannot prove that superiority in the same discursive way I can discursively argue that Stan Lee dealt with "characters' feelings" better than Jack Kirby did. So for me, the categories of "perception" and "judgment" are useless for my project, even though I'm sure a few of my earlier essays probably reproduced Jung's terms "uncritically."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

 ...just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”-- STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS.

I wrote COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE partly because I knew I was about to re-screen and evaluate the Zach Snyder WATCHMEN after having re-read the Moore-Gibbons source novel. I wanted to forge a methodology regarding how an adaptation of a work generates its own "molecular assemblages" in response to those of the original work. 

I imagine that other narratologists have made the same attempt, at least amid the capacious ranks of film theorists. But as I've commented elsewhere on this blog, many modern analysts tend to speak of the meaning of the work in purely intellectual terms, because educational systems taught many if not all of them to use an intellectual approach in assessing what I term "vertical values." I've followed Jung in separating these values into a didactic potentiality, which is focused on proving a work-oriented theoretical point, and a mythopoeic potentiality, which allows a playful flow between symbolic representations, just to see what comes of their interactions. 

In FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, I put forth three works that contrasted in terms of those potentialities-- one wherein the didactic was functionally the only value, one wherein the mythopoeic was the only value, and one in which the didactic and mythopoeic intertwined. But even in the last of the three, I stressed that in "Origin of the Silver Surfer" the mythopoeic potentiality predominated over the didactic one:

 So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.

I addressed a similar dichotomy in my 2015 review of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN. I started out saying--

I said here that I planned to comment upon Alan Moore's tendency to let his didactic tendencies overwhelm his symbolic discourse. However, when I did the same with Dave Sim and Steve Ditko, I first gave examples of works in which they managed to keep their didacticism under control. So I'll do the same with respect to Alan Moore.

 In my conclusion I admitted that WATCHMEN possessed strong didactic tendencies--

Moore, as a modernist author, wants to use his art as a bully pulpit, to warn others of the limitations of their real lives. That's why it's so ironic that he should be assailed for "rapey comics," since he's clearly calling attention to rape's moral consequences. 

But I also concluded that WATCHMEN was dominated by a multi-level symbolic discourse, exemplified in part by Moore's use of syzygy-patterns throughout the art and text. So, even though Alan Moore would abominate any work of his being placed on the same level as a Stan Lee work, WATCHMEN and the Surfer origin are both excellent works dominated by the mythopoeic potentiality.

Now, in the first part of COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE, I gave an example of a secondary work that adapted a mythopoeically complex primary work. I allowed that Rider Haggard's novel SHE was of such complexity that no feature film of standard length could adapt Haggard's interwoven tropes. All adaptations of SHE have to compress the novel into a cinematic narrative, but the 1925 movie was able to choose a "molecular assemblage" from the novel that conveyed at least some of the symbolic discourse of Haggard.

Zach Snyder's WATCHMEN probably intended to do so with respect to the original graphic novel. However, most of Snyder's renderings of Moore's symbolic representations, be they syzygies or other abstractions, are extremely mediocre. So I ended up grading the movie as only "fair" in mythicity because I felt that it ended up stressing all the didactic and political tropes from Moore's script, all of which boil down to "Nasty Conservatives Ruin Everything For All Humanity." This may be why Snyder adumbrates Rorschach's origin story. I mentioned in the review that Moore's portrait of Rorschach is a mixed one, but the one in the WATCHMEN movie is not. Snyder captures none of the Nietzschean ambiguities of the chapter "The Abyss Gazes Also," which might disprove the view of at least one critic who judged Snyder a disciple of Nietzsche.

So in my view Snyder did the exact opposite in his WATCHMEN adaptation than did the writer (and maybe the two directors) of the 1925 SHE. When Snyder compressed the WATCHMEN graphic novel, he gave prominence to all the didactic narrative tropes, minimizing whatever the presence of the mythopoeic ones. The closest he got to myth was in his reworking of the story's conclusion, in that Snyder jettisoned Moore's "alien menace" concept and made Doctor Manhattan the great enemy against whom the world unites. But there weren't enough reinforcing tropes to give that myth-kernel any deep resonance, and so the WATCHMEN movie feels as preachy as one of the preachier Moore stories. 

Now, all of the above assumes the situation that the primary work is superior in some discourse to the adaptation. The opposite is also possible. But that would require further discussion in a separate essay.

QUICK CONCRESCENCE CONTEMPLATION

 I noted in my review of Whitehead's SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD that he introduced many of his jargonistic terms therein, such as "prehension," "occasion," and "event." However, he did not employ the term I found most felicitous for my own usage: "concrescence." The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that this term may have debuted in PROCESS AND REALITY in this quote:

An actual occasion’s holistically felt and non-sequentially internalized concrete evaluations of its relationships to the rest of the world is the subject matter of the theory of “prehension,” part III of PR. This is easily one of the most difficult and complex portions of that work. The development that Whitehead is describing is so holistic and anti-sequential that it might appropriately be compared to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. An actual occasion “prehends” its world (relationally takes that world in) by feeling the “objective data” of past occasions which the new occasion utilizes in its own concrescence. This data is prehended in an atemporal and nonlinear manner, and is creatively combined into the occasion’s own manifest self-realization.

In any case, I've formulated the following relationship between prehension and concrescence, based on my literary priorities, in PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2.

A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.

I will also recapitulate the "quantum literary theory" that I applied to each of the potentialities, which I fancy is somewhat in keeping with Whitehead's view that even subatomic particles were "occasions" whose essence was rooted in prehensive activity. I wrote the following in STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.

As I now view this formulation based on my reading of SITMW, in the world of literature a trope is probably the closest equivalent of a subatomic formation, having a bare utility with no real context, such as "Society Casts Out The Monster." In turn, particular icons within a literary text take on particular forms of concrescence according to which potentiality is most dominant in the narrative, and according to whether the narrative is based upon "trope emulation" or "icon emulation."

And that's probably going to be my last word on both prehension and concrescence for the foreseeable future. I am gratified to see from SATMW that Whitehead favored an interdisciplinary view of humankind's cultural creations, as I cited in his view that Shelley's MONT BLANC displayed "prehensive unification." In other words, he was no facile materialist, asserting that as long as human beings had science, they didn't need things like art and religion. I'm sure Whitehead, had he applied his theories to literature, would not have come up with anything like my own theory. But I believe that my attempt to confer a special form of "self-realization" to non-living quanta like tropes and icons is very much in keeping with Whitehead's priorities.

MIGHT AND MYTH

 In addition to the subjects of the previous essay, my cross-comparison of three influential intellectuals here stimulated an interesting return to a subject I've not addressed much lately: that of sublimity.

A quick recap: when I first began writing about the various literary and philosophical conceptions of sublimity, I was probably overly influenced by Kant's concept of the "dynamic-sublime" as expressed in THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. I wrote quite a bit on the subject as to whether different forms of "might" were exclusively responsible for the fictional manifestations of sublimity, with this 2012 essay as a representative example.

In 2013, though, I reflected upon Kant's other manifestation of the sublime, which he termed "the mathematical-sublime." This conception had no great relevance to the fictional worlds with which I was concerned, but I realized that other scholars ranging from Burke to Tolkien had often spoken of perceiving the sublime through a combination of images and elements. From that insight, I formulated the notion that within a literary matrix there existed two forms of the sublime: the "dynamic-sublime" and "the combinatory-sublime," and I set this observation forth in the TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I series.

Now, my conception of the four potentialities were not specifically focused on any manifestation of the sublime. However, as a result of refining my definition of the potentialities in this essay, I realized that each of Jung's "perceiving functions" had a rough equivalence to the two forms of the sublime that I deduced from Kant.

In Jung's arrangement, the "perceiving functions" of sensation and intuition furnish a given subject with raw data about experience, and the two "judging functions" evolve in order to guide the subject's assessments of the data. I've specified in PARALLEL PATHS that Jung may made his "perceiving functions" a bit too passive in nature in contrast to the more active role that "prehensions" serve in the system of Whitehead. Rather than seeing the judging functions as having a superior role over the perceiving functions, I like better the idea that they are "co-definitional" as the term is used by Stuart Kaufman.

All that said, there's some justification for thinking of the mental products of the sensation and intuition functions as being a sort of prima materia from which a distinct secunda materia arises. My newest refinement of the conceptual quanta present in each of the four potentialities supports this reading. The sensation-responses of a subject to "energy," both his own and that of other entities, give rise to emotional evaluations of himself and those entities, while intuition-based responses that build mythic correlations regarding oneself and other entities are inevitably subjected to the rigor of ordered cogitation. 

Further, the quanta I now call "excitations" align well with what I've called "the dynamic-sublime," while the quanta I call "correlations" align well with the "the combinatory-sublime." Both potentialities are also more strongly associated with the non-utile activities of "play," while the "secunda" potentialities are primarily about helping the subject survive and prosper through the hard work of discrimination.

The essay's title "Might and Myth" is also oriented upon seeing both of the prima materia functions as including a range of those fictional manifestations that do or do not possess a certain level of either "pre-epistemic" OR epistemological knowledge encoded into their discourses. I return to my example of this range from VERTICAL VIRTUES:

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

So "might" would include even those elements meant to appeal to sensation, even if those elements are insufficiently organized, while "myth" would include all elements meant to appeal to intuition, even when not glossed by epistemological insights. And of course the respective "judging functions" would each be aligned with the categories of "might" and of "myth."

Possible meat for future meditations, as usual. 

STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES

My recent meditations re: Jung's four functions and the four potentialities I deduced from them lead to another revision-- hopefully, the last, in which I attempt to define just what narrative quanta are evoked whenever an author employs one of the four potentialities. I wouldn't tread this ground again except I think it's necessary for a more extensive formulation.

The last major attempt to form terminology for the four quanta-types appeared in 2017's GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of strength-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of affect-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of idea-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbol-quanta.

Since then, however, I decided that in place of "ideas" and "symbols" I would use "cogitations" and "correlations" in this 2022 essay, and thus far I'm sticking with that revision. In another essay I experimented with substituting "potency" for "strength" under the kinetic umbrella. However, I've used both "power" and "potency" in an earlier terminological opposition. So, since the context of using "strength" was that of discrete forces impinging upon the various human senses, I'm going to substitute the new term "excitations," because I'm concerned with the excitation of neural perceptions by those forces. Whatever emotional context human beings then place upon their neural sensations then line up as "emotion-quanta," which takes the place of the vaguer "affect-quanta." So now my schema comes down to:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.

The new terminology of course essentially coheres with Jung's general formulation that the potentialities rooted in the sensation and intuition functions are what Jung called "perceiving functions," while those rooted in the feeling and thinking functions are what Jung called "judging functions." That said, I do have some departures from Jung's system on which I'll expound in a future essay, in line with remarks already made in PARALLEL PATHS: ARTHUR, CARL, AND ALBERT.

PARALLEL PATHS: ARTHUR, CARL, AND ALBERT

Though in past essays I've drawn some limited comparisons to the philosophical systems of Schopenhauer, Jung, and Whitehead, here I'll try to dovetail the major similarities between all three together.

Though I'd read a lot of Jung before I made my way through THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, in the early days of this blog I believe I focused a bit more on Schopenhauer's contrast of different types of will. In 2016's THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL, I attempted to fold Carl Jung's somewhat Kantian "four functions" into Schopenhauer's system:

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking" finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

One thing that is not made clear by this excerpt is what Jung said about the nature of his four functions, in that he labeled "sensation" and "intuition" are purely perceptual functions, while "feeling" and "thinking" served, respectively, to sort and judge the raw data provided by the perceptual functions. I think this arrangement is implicit from the way I restated Jung's theory as it would apply within a purely literary matrix, but it's best to make it the point as explicit as possible. (I will again note that the above terms "underthought" and "overthought" have to a great extent fallen to the wayside in the course of this ongoing project.)

In many respects this formulation is still fundamental to my system. However, because of my still imperfect assimilation of the process philosophy of Whitehead, I think one might argue that both Schopenhauer and Jung, who share a considerable influence from Immanuel Kant, that both thinkers may have tended to portray the experience of "perception" as essentially passive, while both Jung's "judging functions" and Schopenhauer's higher form of will are comparatively "active." At least one of Jung's pronouncements on the origins of intuition strikes me as rather problematic:

like sensation, intuition is a characteristic of infantile and primitive psychology. It counterbalances the powerful sense impressions of the child and the primitive by mediating perceptions of mythological images, the precursors of ideas. 

Whitehead, who takes issue with Kant in PROCESS AND REALITY, did not deem perception to be passive, as shown by this interpretation from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The critical aspects of SMW were ideas that Whitehead had already expressed (in different forms) in his previous publications, only now with more refined clarity and persuasiveness. On the other hand, the constructive arguments in SMW are astonishing in their scope and subtlety, and are the first presentation of his mature metaphysical thinking. For example, the word “prehension,” which Whitehead defines as “uncognitive apprehension” (SMW 69) makes its first systematic appearance in Whitehead’s writings as he refines and develops the kinds and layers of relational connections between people and the surrounding world. As the “uncognitive” in the above is intended to show, these relations are not always or exclusively knowledge based, yet they are a form of “grasping” of aspects of the world. Our connection to the world begins with a “pre-epistemic” prehension of it, from which the process of abstraction is able to distill valid knowledge of the world. But that knowledge is abstract and only significant of the world; it does not stand in any simple one-to-one relation with the world. In particular, this pre-epistemic grasp of the world is the source of our quasi- a priori knowledge of space which enables us to know of those uniformities that make cosmological measurements, and the general conduct of science, possible.

This emphasis on "pre-epistemic" forms of cognition matches up fairly well with my adaptation of Whitehead's term "concrescence," which I applied to my literary version of Jung's four functions in 2021's PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2:

A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.

In the preceding paragraph I limited my line of inquiry to the human species, but I can accept in a general sense Whitehead's extensive of the "pre-epistemic" stage even to non-sentient phenomena like electrons. Despite some of the conceptual discontinuities between these three philosophical luminaries, I feel that all of them were seeking to unravel the same conundrum of existence, and that their similarities outweigh their differences.

PUPPETS GOTTA DO THE LIMBO ROCK

Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when [the authors] failed to find a suitable existing puppet.-- Flann O'Brien, AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, 1939. 

I didn't get much out of O'Brien's metatextual novel, which concerns, in very loose fashion, an author who apparently starts hanging out with his characters. But the above passage is interesting partly because it resonates with the rise of postmodern fiction as a reaction against the predominant realism of literary modernism. For the most part modernist authors maintain a strict distance between the domain of the "real" world of the author/creator and the "unreal" world of the author's creations.

O'Brien wasn't saying anything all that original in 1939. In the years before the rise of copyright law, an author like Shakespeare could swipe characters and plotlines from pretty much anywhere. And even after copyright became the law of the land, authors like Mark Twain and John Kendrick Bangs worked Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes into their stories, arguably using the rubric of parody to get away with a little literary larceny. In 1916, psychologist Carl Jung began writing the first of many essays on a concept he'd eventually name "the collective unconscious," which may the closest human culture ever came to imagining a "limbo" in which all fictional and legendary characters might exist, if only as symbolic patterns. Authors as diverse as Philip Jose Farmer and Alan Moore have entertained themselves and others by imagining wonderlands in which a panoply of independently created literary characters rub shoulders with one another.

I'm sure that when O'Brien wrote the lines above, he knew good and well most authors would not want to make their copyrighted works open to public plundering, not least because popular characters can be an author's meal ticket. O'Brien was probably just spoofing the modernist idea of "originality" by claiming that writers should just take whatever they needed from other writers, rather than just making pale copies of characters they admired. 

The quote is also apposite in a small way to my own theory of literary emulation as laid forth in last August's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2. For most of human history, oral literature was created by mostly unknown authors picking up and transmitting traditional stories about familiar figures of history and folklore. This is the pattern I call "icon emulation," in which icons like Heracles or King Arthur might have any number of new adventures appended to their histories. At the same time, sometimes later authors did not emulate a particular icon, but a set of tropes associated with that icon. Supposing, for instance, that, as Wikipedia suggests, the Greek tale of Rhodopis is the earliest extant "Cinderella story." Later authors did not, so far as we know, keep the name "Rhodopis." Instead they utilized "trope emulation," borrowing tropes from the generating first story and reworking the Rhodopis persona to take on whatever name or background would best please a particular audience, including the name and background of the medieval Cinderella of Europe. Ironically, for exigent reasons the late name of Cinderella came to subsume all versions before and after her official creation.

Whether or not O'Brien was being funny about claiming that all of literature should become a "collective commons" as needed, in a real sense, this is how literature really functions. There's nothing new under the sun, except for the way an old wine looks when displayed in a new bottle.

RESPECTING THE SECOND MASTER

The title of this essay functions as a companion piece to SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER, my largely negative review of the 1998 book STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. In my review I faulted the book's authors for having reeled out a "Cook's tour" of prominent views on the analysis of archaic and modern myth, and for having claimed that theirs was a "pluralist" vision, only to turn around and deluge the reader with nothing but Far Left interpretations of the TREK franchise. The authors claimed that they were going to "serve two masters" by appreciating the arguments of both those who criticized mythic content in fiction and and those who "venerated" it, but they were really only serving one of two putative masters and shortchanging the other.

John C. Lyden's 2003 FILM AND RELIGION follows a similar course to DEEP SPACE insofar as the author sets up his critical rationale by comparing and contrasting a wide variety of critical views on the interwoven topics of myth and religion. As of this writing I've only read the first three chapters of Lyden's book, and I have two more to go that are focused purely on his methodology, before even getting to his specific analyses of different films-- some of which are well-known metaphenomenal works, while others would seem to be remote from the average conception of myth-and-religion, such as WHEN HARRY MET SALLY.

Lyden's estimations of various myth-and-religion scholars are, perhaps inevitably, a mixed bag for me. In my 2019 essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I criticized Jung for too often reducing mythological stories to purely psychological projections, and Lyden holds the same opinion. Yet whereas I found it possible to use certain insights by Joseph Campbell to correct Jung's error, Lyden makes it clear that he has no use for Campbell at all, dismissing the author largely because he finds Campbell's concept of "the monomyth" too restrictive. In truth, I have no more investment in that particular conception than did Lyden-- it's one of Campbell's weakest ideas-- but it's clear from Lyden's bibliography that he only read three of Campbell's later works, which doesn't give him much authority to analyze Campbell accurately.

Overall, though, Lydon seems to be broadly fair even to writers with whom he disagrees. I confess that I like the fact that he opposes the very thing I disliked in the DEEP SPACE book: the tendency to confuse sociological purpose with poetic creativity. In MYTHS OF PLEASURE AND PATTERNS  I wrote:

I won’t repeat in detail my conviction that mythology depends upon the evocation of epistemological patterns. But I will add that for tribal humans, these patterns would be the essence of poetry; the fusion of the objective and subjective worlds in which those humans lived. Stories that relate that the sun is really a boat traversing the sky, or that the world was made from the bones of a giant, don’t serve any scientific purpose, nor at base do they serve the purpose of Malinowski’s functionalism (to which Meletinsky seems strongly allied). While myth-stories may eventually be used to support a given culture’s social order, no teller of tales thinks to himself, “Hmm, I think I’ll make up a story about that ball of light in the sky so that this generation and those that follow will have a sense of societal unity.” Nor would any audience listen to such stories for any reason save that imaginative sojourns give them pleasure. One of those pleasures includes the listeners imagining that the mysterious non-human world is at least tinged with human sentiments and priorities—and that may be the base origin of all of the tropes of art and religion, which may precede those stories we moderns would term “myths.”

Similarly, in a section devoted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz-- the scholar with whom Lyden most strongly agrees, albeit one I've not yet explored-- Lyden strongly rejects the tendency toward "sociological reductionism" seen in scholars like Malinowski and Levi-Strauss. Lyden follows Geertz in affirming "that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are." The pairing Lyden calls "the ideal and the real" is in essence identical with what I called above "the objective and subjective worlds." Because Lyden is attempting to see ways in which the enactment of tribal myth-rituals mirrors the much later development of cinematic enjoyment, I'm not surprised that he's aligning himself with the model that best supports that analogue-- and at this point in reading the book, I have no reason to oppose that comparison. I'm reasonably certain that, given his nodding acquaintance with Campbell, Lyden will not validate myth-and-religion according to my notion of "epistemological patterns." But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a view of the subject that I can respect.

 

CORRELATIONS AND COGITATIONS

 My attempt to distinguish between ideas and concepts in terms of narrative tropes isn't even four months old, and I've already decided to jettison those terms for another pair.

Though I labored with might and main to find a logical way to distinguish between ideas and concepts-- with the former leaning toward the mythopoeic potentiality, and the latter toward the didactic one-- the fact is that the two words have been used interchangeably for so long that nothing short of a major revision of all future dictionaries could dis-entangle them. This was borne out to me recently in a conversation with a friend who referred to science fiction as a "literature of ideas." I'd heard the phrase many other times, but hearing it once more convinced me that the word "idea" is conflated with "didactic utilitarian construct" as much or more than is "concept."

So I'm now using the words "correlation" and "cogitation." In keeping with my various observations on the combinatory mode, the mythopoeic is dominated by the process of correlation,  of bringing together disparate phenomena for the sheer pleasure of forging interesting combinations. Cogitation, however, is guided by a rational desire to suss out the imaginary relations of the phenomena in order to make some didactic point. 

I could cite examples of each mode, as I've done in other essays, but I've already cited various opposed examples of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities in earlier essays, so there's no pressing need at this time. The point is merely to distinguish the different ways in which the tropes are formed as well as how they are used in fictional narrative. Didactic cogitations may be profitably aligned with Jung's concept of "directed thinking," while mythopoeic correlations are more in line with the psychologist's concept of "fantasy thinking." Somewhat more abstrusely, a similar dichotomy obtains with regard to Whitehead's distinction between "prehensions" and "apprehensions," an observation I reprinted in this essay:

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

For that matter, though I've not written about Kant for some time, I might also align the pure pleasure of correlation-activity with the philosopher's notion of "the free play of the imagination," whose freedom stands in contrast to the restraints upon that imagination by what Kant calls cognitive understanding. But for now, I've probably put forth plenty of correlations for cogitation.

ADDENDUM: I haven't finished listening to this podcast in which Jordan Peterson hosts a discussion with Richard Dawkins. However, at one point, after listening to Peterson's Jungian rap for a while, Dawkins asks Peterson if he thinks more "in symbols or in ideas." Peterson says "symbols," and when he turns the question back on Dawkins, the latter says that he tends to think more in "ideas." 

SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER

In this essay I noted that I was currently re-reading Wagner and Lundeen's analysis of the STAR TREK franchise, DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. I also noted that I felt a little reluctant to blog further about it, though I only referred to the "chimera" of rebutting points made in a book published over twenty years ago. It's a little different when a critic breaks down an earlier work that still has a following, like Ursula Le Guin's THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT, which I assailed in this essay and the two subsequent posts. Even if I had a larger following, would all that many fans, be it of STAR TREK specifically or of metaphenomenal criticism generally, even care about what Wagner and Lundeen said about "Star Trek in the American Mythos?"

However, one interesting aspect of the authors is their attempt to "serve two masters," as per the Matthew 6:24 quote. In HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PART 2 I attempted to give the authors the benefit of the doubt because they claimed that they were pursuing the course of pluralism, even if they do not do so in the same ways I do. But now that I'm about halfway through the book, I think that the authors' claim to appreciate different paths was just them talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Wagner and Lundeen's claim to pluralism appears in the first chapter, following a generalized history of the many intellectual and academic interpretations of myth. In the concluding section, entitled "Plural Vision," Wagner and Lundeen write:

It is possible, when writing about myth, to be so driven toward a preconceived goal that one may select only the material that fits the chosen approach or stretch and whittle it until it does fit. Those who read myth in order to interrogate its hegemonic messages, are likely to write about such subjects as gender, race, ethnicity... [while] those inclined toward the veneration of myth are more likely to focus on heroism, self-transcendence, the achievement of inner wholeness and illumination...

Now that I've read more of the book, it's quite evident that there's a reason why Wagner and Lundeen first listed the critical, reductive analysis of "hegemonic messages," and gave short shrift to the view, expressed by such authorities as Jung and Frye, that myth has its own integral logic that cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations. Though I intend to keep reading, in the first six chapters I've found nothing to justify the book's title. DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. The title sounds like a response to one of mythographer Mircea Eliade's more "transcendental" books on mythology, such as THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN or THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. But Eliade is only cited three times in the index, just like Carl Jung-- which indicates that the authors were just bullshitting about their supposed respect for the non-reductive views of myth.

Since this is just a blogpost, I'll confine myself to one example of the authors' reductive proclivities. Chapter 5, subtitled "Gender in the STAR TREK Cosmos," concludes with a section with the bumptious title "Tinfoil Bikinis and Political Correctness." The authors assert that in the fourth season of STAR TREK VOYAGER, the producers introduced the svelte character "Seven of Nine" to add sex appeal to the series, with the clear implication that for the show's past three seasons not that many fans. hetero or otherwise, were enthralled with the existing female cast-members. Wagner and Lundeen paraphrase a quote by Berman from a 1997 article in which he made some comment about the show having become too "politically correct." The bias of the authors toward the feminist agenda is clearly shown by their response:

If "political correctness" means a sensitivity to feminism and other left-liberal political views, it is probably too simplistic to blame it for the decline of the "sexy" STAR TREK female.

Wagner and Lundeen then veer off any actual estimation of the "correctness" accusation by accusing the Original Series-- the souce of the "tinfoil bikinis"-- of focusing on "women as the sole object of the sexual gaze, with men doing all the gazing." This is not sustainable, not least because Mister Spock managed to attract a sizeable female fandom-- but he did so as men usually do in the real world, through his actions rather than through the use of makeup and attire. One need not be a Jungian essentialist to notice that hetero men and women have different orientations with respect to the opposite sex, and one cannot glibly downgrade any of the TREKs if they reflect that basic experiential truth. In fact, the "sexual gazes" directed at Seven of Nine's smoking body in her skin-tight attire apparently included a number of lesbians, since during the run of VOAYGER, a petition was circulated to declare Seven as having a lesbian relationship with the ship's female captain, as reported in this Wikipedia article.

I've often made fun of overly politicized critics, such as Noah Berlatsky, who blathered about my myth-critical approach without the slightest understanding of the issues involved. But at least he only served one master, unlike the hypocritical authors of this not-so-deep analysis.

ADDENDUM 12-15-21: I considered devoting a separate post to  the remainder of this book now that I've finished it, but I found it such a mixed bag that I don't think it's worth it. There are some okay insights here and there, but in large point this is a "proto-woke" work, continuously complaining about the STAR TREK franchise's lack of proper intersectionality. Even after admitting that the shows are all television programs that must use human actors for the majority of their players, the authors STILL fault the shows for being too anthropocentric, and so they are guilty of a fundamental dishonesty, throwing out valid reasons for production procedures and then dismissing those reasons out of hand. 

Though there have been Far Left studies with inventive points of view, Wagner and Lundeen are largely derivative and unoriginal in their analyses. The only puzzling aspect of their work is that I don't know why they stuck the phrase "sacred time" in their title. They correctly attribute the phrase to Mircea Eliade, and even quote the context correctly. But given that the authors are mildly hostile toward the claims of any religious hegemonies-- as was, BTW, Gene Roddenberry-- it's clear that they aren't the least bit concerned with the philosophical aspects of Eliade's idea. Maybe in some fashion they viewed Eliade's concept of a originary time before time itself started as some sort of "modernism," which they incorrectly associate with cultural traditionalism. But if so, they failed to make that association clear, and so their whole project shortchanges their readers as well as their "two masters."

PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS

                     

 I’ve been meditating on the familiar opposition of “problem and dilemma” for possible application to my theories regarding the narrative interactions of lateral meaning and vertical meaning. The regular opposition goes as follows:

 

A problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while a dilemma is a choice that must be made between two or more equally undesirable alternatives.

 

For reasons I’ll discuss shortly, the idea of the “problem” aptly sums up the literary appeal of a text’s lateral meaning, because this is the part of the story in which the reader primarily invests himself, to see how the main character deals with the difficulties he faces, even if said character’s solution may be to avoid said difficulties.

 

However, “dilemma” in no way sums up the appeal of a text’s vertical meaning for readers. So, as my title suggests, I’m substituting the concept of the “conundrum,” variously defined as “an intricate and difficult problem” or “a difficult problem, one that is almost impossible to solve.”

 

My last major statement regarding the lateral and vertical forms of meaning appeared in 2016’s THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL. In the passage that follows, I didn’t utilize the term “vertical meaning,” since at the time I was preoccupied with seeing how that meaning could expressed by the joint terms “overthoughts and underthoughts,” but both of these together were always intended to make up my concept of vertical meaning.

 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking"finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

 

Nowadays I would reword this statement to elide the reference to overthoughts and underthoughts, because over time I have began to find these terms cumbersome. From my current position it’s easier to speak of all these narrative meanings in terms of their potentiality-alignments: “lateral meaning,” which is comprised of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, and “vertical meaning,” which is comprised of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities.

 

As for the essay’s observations on the concepts of “close sight” and “far sight,” these remained unchanged, and the notions of “the problem” and “the conundrum” can be used to symbolize the different ways each of the meaning-formations appeal to readers.

 

As stated above, the lateral meaning is that which presents the reader with the immediate, close-range difficulties in the lives of one or more characters, difficulties which must be solved in some fashion, just as difficulties in the reader’s real life must be solved in some way (even if the reader, like the fictional characters, may make the wrong choice).

 

Vertical meaning, however, is the part of the story that allows the reader to contemplate the character’s conflicts from the long-range view, with the understanding that those difficulties metaphorically embody some “conundrum” regarding the nature of human life. The conundrum exists alongside the problem, and since it’s more abstract in nature, the reader doesn’t necessarily expect to see the conundrum solved, even badly, because it embodies some intellectual or imaginative conflict inherent in human life.

 

Rather than starting with an example drawn from high culture, like HAMLET or LIGHT IN AUGUST, I will begin with applying the conundrum-concept to the two examples of mythopoeic and sub-mythopoeic meanings seen in my essay regarding two Silver Age ATOM stories. Both stories dealt with the Tiny Titan's battles against an insect-themed villain, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, produced by the same creative team and within months of one another. Though I was primarily oriented on the second of the two stories to show its qualifications as a mythcomic, I also included a rationale as to why the earlier story did not qualify as a mythcomic. I argued that the first “Bug-Eyed” story did not have a strong cosmological meaning, because the villain used generic robot-insects against the hero. However, in the second “Bug-Eyed” story, author Gardner Fox more strongly patterned the robot-insects on the capabilities of real insects. This narrative strategy produced a fictional “simulacrum of knowledge” and thus gave the story a stronger mythopoeic meaning. In both stories, the hero's problem is identical; to defeat the villain, primarily through the use of kinetic displays of force. (One story also has a very minor dramatic problem, to keep the villain from kidnapping an old flame, but the kinetic problem is paramount.) There is no didactic conundrum, but the amplification of the villain's insect-theme provides a mythopoeic conundrum; one best summed up as a fascination with biological adaptations in real animals.  

Now, neither of these comic-book stories makes any pretension toward the didactic form of virtual meaning, so a more complex example is needed to show how didactic and mythopoeic conundrums may exist separately or work in tandem.

 One of the most familiar master-threads found in “Classic” STAR TREK pertains to the crew of the Enterprise seeking to interact with more primitive peoples without violating the “Prime Directive” by interfering with the primitives’ cultures. The second-season episodes “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both deal with the same range of kinetic and dramatic problems that arise when the Federation’s political rivals, the Klingons, attempt to gain favor with primitive peoples without showing the Federation’s high-minded restraint. In “Child,” a Klingon agent abets an ambitious warlord to overthrow a ruler who is friendly toward the Federation. In “War,” Klingons give relatively advanced weapons to one tribe of planetary primitives to use against another tribe.

In both stories, the Enterprise-crew must seek to mitigate the Klingons’ influence, and so the “problems” that involves the lateral meaning are virtually identical, even if the solutions are not. “Child” is more of a straight thriller, with no deep reflections about the effects of both Klingon Empire and Federation upon the lives of the primitives. “War,” on the other hand presents the viewer with conundrums that invoke both the didactic and the mythopoeic potentialties. The didactic conundrum is the more obvious, since most viewers would have noted the direct parallels to the then-current Vietnam War, in which Americans had to continually arm their allies in order to offset the forces empowered by the rival superpower of Red China. Allegedly the original script was far more caustic regarding the activities of the “Americans,” i.e., the representatives of the Federation, and series showrunner Gene Roddenberry reworked the didactic conundrum so that it implied that the heroes had to do what they did to prevent the spread of Klingon influence. Not having seen the original script, I can’t say whether or not its author utilized the same mythopoeic tropes that appeared in the finished, Roddenberry-edited script. However, because of the way Roddenberry changed the didactic meaning, the mythopoeic meaning changes somewhat as well. When at the climax Kirk muses that they must introduce “serpents” into this planetary “Eden,” the meaning carries a sense of a less didactic, more mythopoeic conundrum. The implication is that, even as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden provided humankind with a chance for self-determination, Kirk’s ambivalent gift, putting more advanced weapons in the hands of the planetary primitives, may also be a rough but necessary means of setting the natives on their own course of self-determination.

 

As with the two ATOM stories, the problems in the two TREK stories are the same as far as involving the viewer in the travails of the main characters. However, “Private Little War” suggests an enduring conundrum that supervenes the particular problems of the particular situation. “Friday’s Child” implies a possible conundrum but does not seek in articulating it in terms of either the didactic or mythopoeic potentialities.

It's worth mentioning a couple of TREK examples which register only in terms of either a didactic or a mythopoeic conundrum. The third-season episode "The Savage Curtain" places Kirk and Spock in the position of "acting out" the struggle between good and evil for the education of some very literal-minded aliens, the Excalbians. The didactic conundrum implies that the struggle between good and evil-- essentially defined as altruism and selfishness-- is a difficulty that never ceases to confront mankind, no matter what happens to any particular heroic protagonists. But despite the evocation of legendary figures from Earth and from Vulcan-- whether historical like Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan, or made-up types like Sarek and Colonel Green-- none of these characters make strong use of any symbol-tropes. Even the appearance of a vaguely witchy villainess named "Zora" is given no stature as an incarnation of female evil, in marked to comparison to the "Lady Macbeth"-styled villainy of Nona from "Private Little War."

In my reviews of the first four STAR TREK theatrical films, though, I was rather surprised that the one with the weakest dramatic problem was also the one with the strongest mythopoeic conundrum: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The closest thing the film comes to a didactic conundrum is its attempt to show Mister Spock's vaunted logic as inferior to human emotion, but this is underdeveloped in contrast to the predominant mythopoeic conundrum: that of depicting a newly-born machine intelligence recapitulating its creators' need for emotional connection, and enacting a hieros gamos with a human being in order to gain said connection.

I indicated above that I was cycling out the terminology of "overthought and underthought," originally derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of Northrop Frye. I think the terms had a certain usefulness to me, indicating that the "overthought" springs from conscious, often utilitarian forms of thought while the "underthought" springs from subconscious, more playful cogitations. But I value symmetry above everything, and so in future I may start using the following terms:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."