PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 2

Upon finishing the second chapter, I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Brian Attebery's STORIES ABOUT STORIES.I thought his 1980 book on American fantasy provided a good overview of the genre. But here, the critic seems to be a little too focused on trying to bring the fantasy-genre into the sphere of literary modernism. He can make a statement like, "the principal difference between the Modernists' mythic method and that of fantasy is that the latter constructs apparently seamless narratives that put the mythic on the same diegetic plane as the modern, or at least modern sensibility." And yet, Attebery keeps coming back to the notion that the two are more strongly related by their mutual desire to re-interpret archaic myths for the purpose of modern audiences.

Certainly Attebery did a lot of homework to support his thesis. Long ago, I read the Ballantine edition of Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy novel LUD-IN-THE-MIST, and retained a more or less favorable impression. But I never researched Mirrlees herself, and Attebery informed me that not only did the author run in the same circles as the esteemed literary author Virginia Woolf, both of them had a "mutual mentor, the Cambridge don and classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison." I certainly find that datum of passing interest, given Harrison's key influence upon the mythic analyses of the Cambridge Ritualists-- though my online research did not confirm Attebery's claim that Harrison was Mirrlees' "life companion." But despite the author's intelligent discussion of Mirlees' sole fantasy novel, Attebery almost seems determined to name-drop figures from respectable literature and scholarship in order to build up the repute of the fantasy genre, which was in Mirrlees' day far more socially marginal than works by people like Woolf and Harrison. 

A more key point of departure for me is Attebery's definition of myth. I certainly did not expect anything comparable to my own, or even to that of my key influence Joseph Campbell (though Campbell is given various citations throughout STORIES). But on the book's second page, Attebery provides his definition: "throughout this book, myth is used to designate any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief." And throughout the three sections I've read, Attebery's definition is meant to draw a line between myth, stories upon which archaic cultures center belief, and fantasy, whose virtue is, as the book's subtitle says, that of "the remaking of myth."

To maintain this distinction, Attebery frequently writes as if the archaic myths were changeless, while literary fantasies are all about ringing in changes on that changelessness. I feel sure a critic as learned as Attebery is aware that myths do change over time, even though the religions built around them may insist that the sacred narratives remain immutable over generations. 

Joseph Campbell's work supplied several examples of such cultural shifts, but I'll confine myself to one. In the chapter "Ancient India" in ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY, Campbell describes the religion of the so-called "Aryan" tribes that invaded the Indian subcontinent circa 1500 B.C., which extolled the warrior-god Indra, celebrated for having killed the demonic dragon Vrita. However, a millennium later, the epic Mahabharata introduces the idea that Vrita was a Brahmin, and that Indra's slaying was therefore a crime, no matter Vrita's actions. Campbell interprets this change in the mythic narrative surrounding Indra as a shift in India's cultural matrix, as the former Aryan overlords were assimilated, via intermarriage, by the older tribes then denoted as "Dravidian," a congeries of peoples with very different priorities.

So for me the essence of myth is not the assertion of unchanging narratives, even though religions may claim that the narratives don't change in order to persuade the laity. In Chapter 1, Attebery asserts that we don't know to what extent Roman authors like Ovid and Apuleius really believed in the myths they depicted. But by the same token, we don't really know that the first Native American to tell a story of the trickster-god Coyote was a True Believer. Maybe he'd heard another tribal storyteller tell a myth-story about Raven, and he decided to tell a different story about Coyote for his own tribe. All sorts of motives can go into the making of all sorts of stories. The most one can say is that, as long as a given religious myth endures, someone may hold belief in its literal truth. But is that really fundamentally different from the enduring appeal of literary myths? Their adherents may never believe that the stories were true accounts of the gods, but they often give just as much devotion to all the fine points of those stories, parsing out just as many meanings as the practitioners of religious hermeneutics. And as distinctions between belief and unbelief grow hazy, we find ourselves back looking into Tolkien's "cauldron of story" for our answers, if not also to Jung's collective unconscious. And, to reiterate the conclusion I made in MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3, the base motive to myths both religious and literary may be to propel the listener into the realms of sacred space and sacred time.

CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 1

The epic poet is all taken up with what he called klea andron, “glorious deeds of men,” of individual heroes; and what these heroes themselves ardently long and pray for is just this glory, this personal distinction, this deathless fame for their great deeds.-- ― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

When I first coined the terms "centric and diffuse force" in this essay, I was seeking to provide a distinction that accounted for my observation that even narratives that possesses "opposed megadynamic forces" might not manifest the combative mode. 1953's WAR OF THE WORLDS employs the same narrative trope seen in 1954's GODZILLA: the spectacle of modern-day humankind hurling all of its technological forces against a metaphenomenal threat. However, because that contest is not the "focus," as I called it, of the former narrative, I stated that the 1953 film could not possess the narrative value of the combative mode.

In PERIPHERAL GENIES I invoked the centric/diffuse "word pair" only in a very limited sense, to suggest some of the ways in which a given protagonist might have access to megadynamic forces, even though he himself may not register as megadynamic. Drawing upon my "djinn-summoner" distinction, I said that the examples I cited in that essay failed to achieve the narrative value because their powerful "genies" were peripheral to their own spirits. "Peripheral," going by the definition I used, means pretty much the same in my system as "diffuse." Both connote for me the image of something either out from the center, or without a center-- which in its turn relates back to my use of the term "focus."

Without indulging in any orgies of cross-comparisons, I will now put forth the notion that the "types of narrative violence" I proposed in SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 1 might be better termed "centric and diffuse will," since "will," at least according to the Schopenhauer/Nietzsche model I've constructed, takes in all forms of sex and violence, in both their isothymic and megalothymic manifestations.

For instance, I've written numerous times about the disparate effects of different forms of violence, particularly "functional violence" and "spectacular violence." Either one of these can be centric in the formal sense: that the climax of a narrative depends on one form or the other, and in fact in this essay I contrasted two films which both had violent conclusions, though only one showed enough sense of "spectacle" to be labeled "combative." I stress "sense" of spectacle because the combative film displayed the intent to produce spectacle even though the execution of said spectacle was lousy.

 But I've been toying lately with the notion that there's another potential application of the centric/diffuse terminology, and that is to distinguish the ways in which the narrative impacts the audience, rather than dealing exclusively with the way dynamicity manifests within the diegesis of the narrative. In short, "diffuse will" can apply to all of the "forces" in the narrative that are peripheral to whatever holds the "center" in the narrative-- which is usually one of the radicals that describes the narrative's primary mythos-- which "centric will" can apply purely to those forces around which the narrative is truly centered. I suggest that the centricity of the primary radical has for modern audiences a ritualistic quality, not unlike the klea andron of which Harrison writes in the above quote. That manifestation of centric will is almost always the most important thing in the story and thus provides an imaginative center, even if a given author may choose to wander from that center to some extent.

ADDENDUM: I retooled this essay-- originally set down yesterday under the title "Centric and Diffuse Violence"-- because after a little thought I decided that the use of "narrative violence" as expressed by Bataille was interesting to explore somewhat, but was ultimately too confusing for prolonged usage. Therefore I revised the essay to speak of "narrative will" instead, to better reflect one of the cornerstones of my theory, first expressed here.