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."

CRAFTING WALL STONES PT. 2

Assuming that one validates my equation between artistic creativity and Mary Wollstonecraft's concept of "virtue" as it is determined by the sexual division of labor-- what then?

Well, if everyone viewed such discrepancies in virtue as the result of a long-standing biological process, we wouldn't get things like THE OBITUARY MARIE SEVERIN SHOULD HAVE RECEIVED, in which we learn, according to author Alex Dueben, that it represents "the career she could have had, had she been born a man."

Not since the days of "Spiderbuttgate" have I seen such a display of blithering ressentiment, in which the shortcomings of any person who fits an intersectional profile can be excused by references to "endemic sexism."

Now, I wrote my own obit for Marie Severin, combined with one for Gary Friedrich, who coincidentally passed on the same day. Mine was not a general assessment of either comics pro, aside from crediting them both with "better-than-average formula entertainment," which assessment I would apply to both pros separately.

What we have here is sheer revisionism, an attempt to build Marie Severin up to a major figure in comic books. In the comments-section, Heidi McDonald avers:

Looking at the work here, Severin should always be mentioned in the same breath as Wood and Kurtzman.

To say the least, I do not agree. Severin simply was not that imaginative. Forget comparisons to Wood and Kurtzman; Severin was not even as accomplished as a contemporaneous "Marvel Bullpen" artist like Bill Everett. Everett is of course most famed as the creator of the Sub-Mariner, but even if one compared Everett's accomplishments in the Silver and Bronze Ages to those of Severin in the same period, there's nothing on Severin's resume that even rates with Everett's co-creation of Daredevil. Indeed, Everett even created one of Marvel's most prominent sixties villainesses, Umar the Unrelenting--

--whom Severin also drew a few issues later.

Now, if one agrees with my proposition that, based only on their Silver-and-Bronze Age contributions Everett was superior to Severin, is there a biological explanation for this opinion? Certainly I would not advocate Camille Paglia's explanation, as discussed in Part 1, to the effect that Everett's abilities in male projection-- and being able to write his own name in the snow-- had anything to do with it.

But Everett may have been a better creator simply because, being a man, he was more invested in excelling in a largely male arena, while Severin was not so invested.

Granted, one can certainly find male practitioners who weren't even as good at formulaic entertainment as was Severin. But on the whole, there were simply more good male creators than there were female ones, and no revisionism can change that.

I assert, further, that there are a fair number of female comics-pros who not only show exceptional creativity, but who arguably can excel their male contemporaries. An example would be Rumiko Takahashi, one of the foremost manga-artists, who IMO easily outpaced her former manga-teacher, the recently departed Kazuo Koike. I admire Koike's writing on such properties as LONE WOLF AND CUB and LADY SNOWBLOOD. But even allowing for the manga-works I have not read, I would say that Takahashi displays a far greater profusion of disparate characters and concepts. And she did so, even though it seems likely that Japan had its own tradition of "endemic sexism."

CRAFTING WALL STONES PT. 1

The title of this  essay is an extremely forced pun on the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose 1792 VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN I've recently started reading. I knew when I began that VINDICATION is a precursor to "first-wave feminism." However, even though I have always approved of the practical goals of the first wave, I never thought Wollstonecraft would prove so useful to me in combating "third wave feminism," that bloated monster of Nietzschan ressentiment. Further, the author-- whose name I'll abbreviate to MW just because I feel like it-- proves insightful in buttressing some of my own theories on what I'll call the "sexual division of creativity."

In one respect I might have anticipated such an application, once I knew that one of the bastions of male privilege whom MW assaults is the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Camille Paglia, whose views on gender-creativity I'll soon reference, asserted that Rousseau was the font of Western liberalism. Paglia does not comment on Rousseau's sexism, but claims that he is one of the main sources of the liberal idea that social engineering can "fix" any apparent problem-- an outlook shared by most if not all third-wave feminist authors.

For example, most third-wave feminists would agree that if there is an apparent discrepancy in the creative accomplishments of the two primary genders-- the dominant one being that there are no female playwrights equal to Shakespeare, no female comics-artists equal to Kirby or Tezuka-- then that discrepancy must spring from social inequity, and social inequity alone. It's all about the old boys' club, silencing women's voices, and other forms of ressentiment. The sexual division of labor can have no relevance when one is seeking to prosecute a supposed enemy.

In the first chapter of SEXUAL PERSONAE, Paglia asserts that there is a real gap in the accomplishments of feminine creators in comparison to those of masculine ones. Her explanation for this discrepancy is rooted in a complicated synthesis of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. However, though Paglia freely calls upon various Nietzschean terms, such as the "Apollonian-Dionysian" duality, Freud will be seen to be the dominant influence:

Art makes things. There are, I said, no objects in nature, only the gru¬ 
elling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, 
reducing all matter to fluid, the thick primal soup from which new 
forms bob, gasping for life. Dionysus was identified with liquids— 
blood, sap, milk, wine. The Dionysian is nature’s chthonian fluidity. 
Apollo, on the other hand, gives form and shape, marking off one being 
from another. All artifacts are Apollonian. Melting and union are Dio¬ 
nysian; separation and individuation, Apollonian. Every boy who leaves 
his mother to become a man is turning the Apollonian against the Dio¬ 
nysian. Every artist who is compelled toward art, who needs to make 
words or pictures as others need to breathe, is using the Apollonian to 
defeat chthonian nature. In sex, men must mediate between Apollo and 
Dionysus. Sexually, woman can remain oblique, opaque, taking plea¬ 
sure without tumult or conflict. Woman is a temenos of her own dark 
mysteries. Genitally, man has a little thing that he must keep dipping 
in Dionysian dissolution—a risky business! Thing-making, thing- 
preserving is central to male experience. Man is a fetishist. Without his 
fetish, woman will just gobble him up again. 

Hence the male domination of art and science. Man’s focus, directed- 
ness, concentration, and projection, which I identified with urination 
and ejaculation, are his tools of sexual survival...

Thus Paglia is firmly in the Freudian camp that claims "biology is destiny." There's even a passage a few pages later in which Paglia seems to be advocating Freud's tendency to view male sexuality as primary and female sexuality as epiphenomenal, as when she claims that "art is [man's] Apollonian response toward and away from woman."

As stimulating as I find Paglia, I can't subscribe to her system, since I regard biology as being at best "partial destiny."

So, even before reading MW, I began to think in terms of sociological explanations that would be rooted not in Rousseauist wishful thinking, but in the sexual division of labor as we understand it today. The statement that "men hunt and women nest" may not be entirely fair to either gender. However, it certainly has broader applicability than the old "damn that boy's club" rant.

As it happens, MW seems to have touched on this problem in her time. VINDICATION continually argues in favor of women receiving a broader education than European culture tended to allow in that time. However, despite taking males to task for the faulty reasoning, MW seems to be a stranger to the circular argument of endless ressentiment seen in third-wave feminism. Rather than simply prating about boys' clubs, MW says:

Let it not be concluded, that I wish to invert the order of things; I have already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must, therefore, if I reason consequentially, as strenuously maintain, that they have the same simple direction, as that there is a God.

To be sure, lest this be misinterpreted, Carol Poston, editor of Norton's second edition of VINDICATION, adds this footnote:

Being physically inferior can lead to women's being morally inferior: not just physical size but [man's] worldly pursuits allow men a greater opportunity to make moral choices and thus attain virtue.

MW, in addition to cautioning her readers that she does not "wish to invert the order of things," asserts that men may at a particular time attain greater virtue than women because their "worldly pursuits" give them the chance to make moral choices. This in no way contradicts her advocacy of woman's right to full education, but rather, sees the division of labor as bringing about womankind's inability to attain virtue through informed choice.

MW is not addressing artistic creativity at all, but her concept of "virtue" applies to my concept of creativity as it exists in the temporal world-- as I'll argue further in Part Two.

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE DEATH OF IRIS"] THE FLASH #270-283, 1979-80)

This mythcomics essay didn't start as a blogpost, but as an essay for Robert Young's COMICS INTERPRETER magazine.  The issue for which the essay was intended wasn't published to my knowledge, and since the last recorded issue came out in 2004, I probably wrote it around that time. The magazine's demise anticipates the overall death of the print-magazine comics-fanzine, culminating in the end of the print COMICS JOURNAL somewhere around the  beginning of this decade.

Since it's an essay, it's longer and gets more into my personal aesthetics. I had occasionally thought about re-reading the FLASH issues analyzed in order to see if they still met my mythopoeic standards, and finally, I did so. I cleaned up a few cumbersome sentences, and I follow up the essay with a couple of extra comments, but substantially this post is the same as the essay submitted in 2004.
________________

In WHAT WAS LITERATURE?, critic Leslie Fiedler observed that the “mythopoeic power” of works, whether of high or low literature, was “independent of formal excellence.” If I had a hammer capable of pounding this insight into the skulls of comics-readers everywhere, I would use that hammer—on about 50% of the readers.   The other 50% could go on being elitists, populists, or nothing in particular, which would still leave me opponents with whom to debate. But the converted 50%, thanks to their newfound appreciation of Fiedler’s insight, would be granted greater understanding of the the amazing variety of myth-symbols present in all levels of literature, not to mention better posture and 75% fewer cavities than the other group.  But as I have no such hammer, I had to write this essay instead.

Fiedler does not explicitly define in the book what he means by “formal excellence." As far as this essay is concerned, it connotes the totality of literary qualities that have traditionally impressed the cultural elite against which Fiedler was reacting. It would thus take in elements like distinctive style, originality, mature content, and the one that concerns me most here, what I call “thematic complexity.”   I stress this over what’s usually called just “theme” because almost any coherent narrative has some sort of theme, no matter how simple—the triumph of true love, the defeat of the forces of evil. But simple themes do not generally impress the elite. I have nothing against the appreciation of thematic complexity in literature, but I think that often readers of an elitist bent overlook another kind of complexity in their search for deep themes about the meaning of life—what I will call “symbolic complexity.”  This complexity may be what gives some of these simple works about love and death the power to survive over generations, even when the works may have crafted as “throwaway entertainment,” and certainly lack much “formal excellence.”

At this point I should probably warn any elitists reading that they should probably just stop right here, as most of them have hardened their hearts (and heads) against the notion that myths and symbols have any value apart from how they are used in a narrative to enhance the theme.  Many of them have expended considerable intellectual resources to sound the clarion call for “comics as respectable art,” which often (though not exclusively) means comics with complex themes.   Because theme is predominant in the minds of elitists, they often have no ability to see how symbols can work apart from theme even as they work together, not unlike harmony and melody in music.   In any case I have a little tired of answering the charge of being simply a “superhero apologist” (as one Milo George was good enough to tag me on a message board), as well as being bored with the usual predictions of what will happen if the barbarians of pop culture should ever be allowed past the gates of respectability in any way: the downfall of civilization, rioting in the streets, and no new issues of EIGHTBALL.

In one way, though, fans of trashy genre-literature (whether they are myth-critics or not) have one thing in common with the elitists: both groups are faced with an often-staggering mass of garbage through they must dig to find gemstones. Most elitists solve this problem by ignoring everything that seems thematically conventional, unless it is given the gloss of superior technique. Fans, for their part, will keep on trucking through the muck and mire in search of whatever kind of gems they prefer, but most of them are guided by their individual tastes.  The unique situation of the Hunter of Modern Myths, though, is that he may find himself discerning interesting gems—mythologems, to be precise-- in works he doesn’t particularly like (as I will be doing here).   However, assuming that even a cynical elitist will take that critic’s word on the matter of his own tastes, one might consider this relative detachment a rebuttal of a classic elitist canard: that the myth-critic is merely attempting to use archetypal discourse to justify his nostalgic affection for things he read in childhood.   Indeed, the sequence I’ll be critiquing from the adventures of “the Fastest Man Alive” is actually devoted to tearing down much of what I have liked, in a nostalgic sense, about the character of the Flash.

But then, at times destruction can be as interesting as creation, as is testified by Camille Paglia’s interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous opposition of Apollo and Dionysus in art:

“Art makes things. There are, I said, no objects in nature, only the grueling erosion of natural force, flecking, dilapidating, grinding down, reducing all matter to fluid… Dionysus was identified with fluids; blood, sap, milk, wine.  The Dionysian is nature’s chthonian fluidity. Apollo, on the other hand, gives form and shape, marking off one form from another.  All artifacts are Apollonian.”—Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 30.

The most common characterization of the superhero by the elitist is an Apollonian one.  The superhero is, we are told, the staunch defender of order at all times, which in itself proves him a potential fascist.  And even many of those who style themselves fans of the superhero genre would prefer to see their character unsullied with Dionysian darkness.  As I began this essay, issue #2 of DC’s crossover-miniseries, IDENTITY CRISIS, came out, occasioning considerable ire from many fans for its flirtation with such darkness.   This darkness took the form of the rape and murder of Sue Dibny, a character of some thirty years’ vintage (and who originally appeared in the FLASH comic).   The fans that did not like this development did not think such excessive violence belonged in a superhero comic, which was meant to be a fun, “all ages” form of entertainment.

Though I disagree with this conclusion, I sympathize on one symbolic level.   Most characters of genre-literature, particularly those in continuing series, are “Apollonian artifacts,” conventions given human form that do not even try to be three-dimensional human beings. One does not have to be Leslie Fiedler to suggest that it must be something akin to a mythopoeic power that keeps certain genre-characters fresh over generations.   Further, the superhero may be the most artificial of cultural artifacts, for he resembles nothing “real,” in the way that the fictional cowboy is patterned on his historical forbears.  There’s some logic behind the idea that the superhero’s adventures should be as strictly ritualistic as a Noh drama: nothing but endless tales of good conquering evil, in the form of a bizarre superhero constantly thwarting equally-absurd supervillains—which formula does, in truth, describe the early adventures of the Flash. 

When DC Comics introduced the character in 1956, he represented the first major attempt to revive the genre of the superhero, which had seen its greatest popularity during WWII and had been largely unpopular for almost ten years following the end of the war. Perhaps because of the period in which he began, the Flash then developed into the most Apollonian of superheroes.   Whereas even Superman had the catastrophe of planetary destruction lurking in his past, the Flash barely possessed any background at his start, and certainly not a tragic one.   He began as police scientist Barry Allen, first seen sitting around his laboratory reading a comic book of the original FLASH (the first, WWII-era version of a speedster-hero, also from DC Comics), and wondering what it would be like to have super-speed.  With that, mirable dictu, a lightning bolt crashed through his window, splashed various chemicals upon Barry, and endowed him with the desired power of super-speed.   From there he went on to encounter a colorful “rogue’s gallery” of villains, most of whom chose some natural phenomenon on which to base their powers or weapons—the Mirror Master, Captain Boomerang, the Top-- and who would go around stealing things mostly so that the Flash would come out and fight them.   

As developed under the aegis of editor Julie Schwartz, artist Carmine Infantino, and writers like John Broome and Gardner Fox, this Flash was distinguished by all sorts of Apollonian charms—a breezy humor, ingenious psuedoscientifc rationales for all the absurdities, and almost no emotional conflicts.  (I might except a tale in which the Flash’s “evil double,” a speedster called Professor Zoom, tries to steal Barry Allen’s fiancée Iris West: the Flash actually gets refreshingly angry at this act of bride-stealing.)

And yet, the Dionysian was in the early superheroes as well: in the violence of most of their origins (like the aforementioned death of Krypton), and often in the fear-invoking appearances many of them assumed in their crimefighting identities: the Batman, the Hangman, the Spectre. When the Flash appeared in 1956, the industry had been largely purged of overt sex and violence by its acceptance of the Comics Code Authority as a means to assure parents’ groups that comics with the Code seal were safe for Little Timmy.  Without knowing whether IDENTITY CRISIS will prove to be anything possessed of any sort of complexity, I can say that the Dionysian will always invade even the most conservative-seeming genres, and that both the elitist scoffers and the nostalgic fans are both wrong: one for not recognizing those dark undercurrents, and the other for not appreciating what complexities they can engender.   

And so at long last I come to that version of THE FLASH that was in many ways the antithesis of the “classic FLASH” of Schwartz and his creative team.  I recall being rather less then enthralled in 1979 when this new version took shape. New editor, Ross Andru took over the FLASH feature, promising on the cover of #270 that “starting with this issue—Flash’s life begins to change, and it will never be the same again!”  Andru’s editorial tenure lasted only thirteen issues, from #270-283. Cary Bates, who had been the principal writer on the title for some years, executed all of the Andru-edited issues, though the tone of the Andru tenure was so different from what Bates had been doing under editor Julius Schwartz, so I hypothesize that Bates was working from an editor’s plan.  The artists probably had next to no influence on these issues, given that during this period the penciling-chores changed hands five times. 

From an aesthetic angle, I’m ambiguous about the aforementioned changes, but in retrospect I see that there is method in the madness that editor Andru and writer Bates inflicted on the Flash’s life: a method that consists of disrupting the Apollonian pattern of the hero’s adventures with elements of chaos—drug running, police corruption, madness, suspicions of infidelity, and ultimately, the death of the Flash’s longtime spouse, Iris West-Allen.  For writer Bates this was fairly new territory, as he’d written the Flash’s adventures in “classic mode” for many years previous. Andru, for his  part, was essentially continuing in the more Dionysian mode of one of his earlier seventies’ assignments: as penciller for Marvel’s SPIDER-MAN series, during which, perhaps not coincidentally, that hero’s longtime girlfriend also bit the dust. Other motifs from the SPIDER-MAN series seem to make the leap as well: Barry Allen becomes more of a “Hard Luck Harry,” with his boss busting his chops and his wife nagging him about missing dinner to fight crime.  But symbolically, the most interesting thing is Barry Allen becomes implicated in an experiment that creates a Frankenstein-like monstrosity that almost incarnates the chaos overtaking his life—as well as his wife.

Indeed, the literary myth of Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN bears strong resemblance to certain aspects of the Andru years, particularly in respect to the symbol of the doppelganger, the “evil twin” that does the things his good twin will not.   In contrast to many of the cinematic adaptations of FRANKENSTEIN, Shelley’s monster hews close to the doppelganger pattern, obsessively killing off all the persons, friends and family, whom Frankenstein values, including his new bride.  The Andru-Bates continuity also manages to duplicate many of the same motifs, though one cannot be sure how conscious the creators were of such parallels.

I wrote before that Barry Allen was “implicated” in the creation of a monster, but his contribution is more indirect than Frankenstein’s.  In the first issue, Barry is invited to a demonstration of a new “aversion therapy” process designed to reform criminals; a process which its inventor, Dr. Nephron, based on a criminology thesis Barry Allen wrote in college.   Possibly Bates introduced this twist only to give Nephron a reason to invite Barry to see the process demonstrated, but the effect is to render Barry complicit for having “postulated the possibility of organic causes for criminal behavior.”   Barry has considerable reservations about Nephron’s use of aversion therapy, and eventually uses his authority to have the project shut down—temporarily, as it later develops.

And as if all this is not enough to come down on the poor fellow, at the same time his wife’s giving him grief, a much younger girl, name of Melanie, comes into his life; a girl who idolizes him for being a powerful superhero.   No, it’s not a presentiment of “American Beauty,” given that Flash never actually seeks her out. At the outset she seems to be stalking him, using her mind-control powers to facilitate her search for her idol.   Yet it could be argued that within the greater pattern of the story she is Flash’s fantasy-projection, since she's younger than his wife and much more appreciative of his superhero career.   Indeed, she becomes something of a siren-like figure in the early issues, twice using her powers to summon him to her.   The first time she does so, in #272, she causes him to crash into a wall, much the way the sirens wrecked sailors on their reefs, and then stands over his unconscious body, saying, “I made you come to me, Flash.   I desired it—and it was so!   This proves I can make you do anything I want.”   This scene is the cliffhanger at the end of #272, but in #273 she doesn’t end up either making Flash do anything-- or doing anything to him-- and simply leaves the hero to wake up perplexed by the whole experience.  

However, by the end of #273 Flash has a more deadly opponent. Despite Barry Allen’s censure, Nephron continues his experiment on convict Clive Yorkin. The process turns Yorkin into a drooling, super-strong madman who imprisons Nephron in the same “therapy” device, reducing Nephron to a “vegetable.”   

Yorkin then escapes and somehow makes his way to Barry Allen’s house, motivated by a belief that Barry was one of his tormentors.   The madman spies on Iris, potentially setting up a scenario like the one where Frankenstein’s creation kills the scientist’s bride—but nothing happens at that point.  In #275 Iris, suspicious of her husband’s absences, uses a homing device to track him down—coincidentally, on the second occasion when Melanie decides to summon the Flash to a motel room.   Since Flash has no power to resist the teenaged psychic, the stage seems set for Iris to walk in a nonconsensual tryst—but the ditzy young teenager herself short-circuits that potential, for when she mentally forces the Flash to unmask, she’s disappointed by his “ordinary” looks (“I guess I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but whatever it was—you haven’t got it!”)    She leaves just as Iris arrives, and though Iris doesn’t catch her husband en flagrante, she still leaps to the usual conclusion.   Despite this, Barry manages to convince his wife of the truth, partly because he’s visibly distraught at having been called “ordinary.”  Thus the character that appeared poised to break up Barry’s marriage ends up bringing about a reconciliation between hero and wife, and even a brief discussion about having children.

That same evening, it seems the Frankenstein theme comes back into play.  Barry and Iris attend a costume party (with Barry in his own costume, and Iris dressed as Batgirl). The mad Yorkin follows them to the scene.   Barry is separated from Iris by circumstances too complicated to detail here, but by the issue’s end, Barry hears Iris being attacked. He bursts into a room and sees Yorkin standing over her dead body, in what seems a direct emulation of the famous bride-slaying scene from FRANKENSTEIN—though in a world of Dionysian chaos, all is not as it seems.

In #276 Yorkin escapes, and Flash goes a bit mad himself for a time, trying to convince his fellow Justice Leaguers to help him bring Iris back to life, and fighting with them when they profess helplessness.  By #277 he recovers enough to attend Iris’ funeral and to decide he should quit the superhero game.   Issue #277’s cover how divided against himself he is, in that the cover shows Flash rushing at a seeming duplicate of himself.   As it happens, it’s merely a trick of Flash’s old foe Mirror Master, who causes the hero to collide with a mirror-created image of himself before the hero manages to vanquish the villain.   But it’s interesting nonetheless for showing another take on the doppelganger theme, as are the words Barry uses when he goes before an audience to confess his “double life,” prefatory to resigning.   The crowd, fired by rumors of the Flash’s quitting, fails to understand what he’s talking about and drowns him out yelling, “We want the Flash!”   At that point Melanie reappears, having thought better of her dismissal of Barry’s “ordinary” nature, and persuades him to keep his superhero identity.  By doing so, she effectively puts to rest any “temptress” image she might have originally projected, and becomes not only an ally to Flash, but something of a “faithful daughter” to take the place of the one he never had.

Of course, with the apparent murderer of Flash’s wife on the loose, there wasn’t much likelihood of Flash really quitting, and he and his new “daughter” continue looking for the elusive madman.  Things come to a head in issue #280, in which Melanie manages to track down Yorkin to a condemned town, abandoned because the “whole place had become one giant sink-hole!”  (One might call the town a physical reflection of Yorkin himself, whose thoughts, Melanie finds, “reek of death and decay.”)   She also learns she cannot use her mind-powers on him, which stands as something of a reversal of her dominant position over Flash earlier: where earlier she controlled him, and could perhaps have “raped” him had she so chosen, here Melanie first perceives Yorkin as “that cold vile sensation!   I feel as if my mind’s been GROPED!”    She isn’t even able to summon Flash to her side, though conveniently the hero finds Melanie and Yorkin through following an unrelated lead.  Melanie then becomes a temporary enemy to the speedster, for her psychic powers boost Yorkin’s evil thoughts and repel Flash with “waves of fear.”  A seesaw battle then causes the three combatants to fall into one of the sink-holes.  Then, at a point when the madman has almost bested Flash, Melanie projects into his mind the image of Iris, which fortifies the hero and allows him to escape the sink-hole with her, leaving Yorkin to be deluged by falling mud (“his fall the final insult to the groaning earth beneath”).

So is the villain well and truly sent to his proper hell?  Well, as I hinted above—yes and no, for at the conclusion of this issue (the last in which either Yorkin or Melanie appears), new evidence comes to light, affirming that though Yorkin was a madman and murderer, he was not the killer of the Flash’s wife.   Once again the ground is pulled out from under Flash’s fleet feet, as he runs from pillar to post trying to find the real killer. And when he does find him, the final and most important doppelganger motif crops up, for it’s revealed that Iris’ true killer was an earlier rival for Iris’ affections, the aforementioned Professor Zoom.   

Zoom, unlike other villains, was dependent on the Flash for his identity, being that he was a denizen of the future who despised the historical records of Flash’s heroism and so used his super-science to become a speed-powered criminal version of Flash.  He even adopted a costume exactly like the hero’s, except for a reversal of its primary colors-- hence his secondary cognomen, “the Reverse-Flash.”  Only in one way is he exactly like the Flash, for he confesses that “I truly loved Iris Allen with a passion… the same passion that compelled me to snuff out her life” when she rejected his advances.   (As an odd doppelganger touch by Bates, Zoom even mentions that he disliked the hair style Iris had adopted at the time of her death, a style with which Barry Allen himself was less than taken.)  

Once again Flash manages to defeat Zoom, and despite his temptation to take full vengeance, spares the villain’s life, purposing to take him back to the future in Zoom’s time-machine, for legal execution.   But Zoom booby-traps the machine to take them “to an era where no human being can possibly exist—before the very creation of the universe itself” and mocks Flash, saying, “You and I are going to die together!”   Flash leaps from the time machine to take his chances in the time-stream, while his “other self” yells, “You can’t leave me to face the end alone--”   The circumstances at the end of Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN are not precisely the same, but there is some resemblance, in that creator and creature pursue one another through an arctic waste, terminated only when the creator dies and leaves the creature alone to face eternity.   Unlike Frankenstein, the Flash (indirectly responsible for both the creation of Zoom as well as the maddened Clive Yorkin)  is seen to survive in his next issue, but by that time the editorial reins passed to Len Wein, so that Ross Andru’s last issue ends, perhaps fittingly, with both the hero and his double apparently lost “beyond the brink of time itself!”

As has so often been the case in comic books, the insidious Professor Zoom also did not meet his final fate in eternity, but returned for more encounters with the hero: indeed, he outlived the Flash, who perished in the DC crossover-event CRISIS.  I doubt any later writer would have cared to bring back either Clive Yorkin or Melanie, though, since many fans considered this something of a low point for the series (which largely went back to “classic mode” until the title was finally cancelled).  For although Zoom killed Iris, both Melanie the “beauty” and Yorkin the “beast” were the principal Dionysian elements introduced by Andru, and can be seen as having symbolically presided over the death of Iris and all other changes in Flash’s life.   Indeed, the cover of their last appearances, #280, latches onto the story-element of Melanie having been accidentally turned against Flash, but exaggerates it for maximum effect, showing the beauty being cradled in the arms of the beast while nonchalantly telling Flash to “buzz off,” as if Melanie and Yorkin are allies under the skin.  So perhaps it’s fitting that the two of them disappear at the same time, just a few issues before Andru left the book.

Now, in focusing on the symbolic complexities of this story, it’s true that I’ve left out a fair amount of narrative material that wasn’t all that complex: the aforementioned subplots regarding drug smuggling and police corruption, for instance.   And I can practically hear some smartass Journalista saying, “You also left out the detail that the story SUCKED.”   My reply, of course, would be that I said early on I only esteemed certain elements of the story, not the story as a whole: in terms of its conscious thematics it’s rather mediocre, and visually hindered by a hodgepodge of conflicting art-styles.    I can’t even claim that it’s as entertaining on the level of simple genre-fare as is a better-conceived saga like the “Kree-Skrull War” from the Thomas/Adams AVENGERS—and yet, though I find the latter more entertaining, I don’t discern that extra level of symbolism in the AVENGERS tale.   The Andru/Bates FLASH also has the added attraction that it demonstrates how easily the elements of the Dionysian could invade even the most Apollonian of heroes, a full six years before the so-called “grim and gritty” movement in comics supposedly began with Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Moore’s WATCHMEN, and a much longer time prior to IDENTITY CRISIS.

There are certainly better works out there, some possessed of both thematic and symbolic complexity, and surely given the old “what comics would you take to a desert island” test, any of these would make the cut before this FLASH tale.   But since none of us is voluntarily going to that desert isle any time soon, we are left with sorting out questions of merit in all its manifestations, and with trying to constantly hammer our interpretations into others’ skulls.   And whether this hammering serves to let in some light into darkness, or just increases the degree to which the skulls are already cracked, also remains to be “sorted out” by posterity.     ______________________________________   

Two minor additions:

One odd detail about Clive Yorkin's transformation is that it comes about because he's dyslexic, which supposedly causes his brain to interpret the negative input from Nephron's aversion process as pleasurable. Writer Bates doesn't even try to make this bit of "comic book science" seem logical-- much less giving a reason as to why Yorkin gets super-powers from the process. Yet the explanation proves modestly interesting in that it means the reason Yorkin can shrug off the aversion therapy is that he reverses "pain" into "pleasure," a symbolic reversal that slightly resembles that of Milton's Satan saying, "Evil be thou my good."

And though I made copious comparisons of Clive Yorkin to Mary Shelley's monster, I see I neglected to toss in a possible influence from James Whale's two FRANKENSTEIN films, both of which starred-- Colin Clive.     

BREASTS, BLOOD, AND JUSTICE PT. 4

In part 1 of this essay-series I said:

Whether anyone believes it or not, I can understand why a female viewer would be experience cognitive dissonance while watching a film like ANGELFIST. Let us suppose that the hypothetical female viewer can fully identify with the basic trope of an action-revenge film like this one, that this viewer can take pleasure in seeing the kickboxing-heroine slam around nasty crooks, mostly if not entirely of the male gender, using the same methods that a male action-hero would. That visual pleasure would probably be disrupted by seeing the heroine fight off those hoods while she's mostly naked.

Now, I should note that for some feminist critics the problem would not just be the fact of the woman's unveiling, but also the circumstances that led to it: that actresses like the star of ANGELFIST, the late Cat Sassoon, were victims of a "boys' club" mentality that put women on display in order to marginalize them.

In Part 3 I critiqued this attitude with respect to Camille Paglia's philosophy:

Camille Paglia famously argued that the ability of women to display themselves often had a profound, empowering aspect. One need not believe that it applies to all situations, as Paglia seemed to credence, but this view does supply a necessary corrective to the ultraliberal/WAPster notion that feminine sexual display can mean nothing but "coming across for The Man."

I still believe this. However, it has occurred to me that there's a smattering of logic in the WAPster association of "female display= control by males." In JUG BOND I hypothesized the evolution of the female breast in hominids as a somatic strategy born in part of the woman's desire to encourage and discourage the male, as needed. Yet as a Bataillean, I must admit that as soon as early Woman created a Taboo, it created the ineluctable potential for Transgression. 

So for Woman, there is no pure state of affairs in which the revelation of the breast is always under her control, signaling either her readiness for sex or her desire to titillate without consequence. The possibility for transgression is quite real, as has been seen in an unlikely site for transgressive activities: the comics convention.

Nevertheless, no fantasy-transgression has the same meaning as a real one. I can't claim that "Monkey See Monkey Do" never takes place, for there are some pretty monkey-minded people out there. Still, there's no dependable correlation between what people watch and what they do. Anyone who claims that adult fantasies must be curtailed to control the real behavior of adults is a bullshit artist.

I find it fascinating that in the earlier cited Heidi McDonald BEAT-essay, Seth MacFarlane is raked over the coals for having made certain actresses into "dehumanized objects" because he sang about the boobs they exposed in their upscale films. Not one word was spoken against the actresses, though.  Even if MacFarlane is a boob for having sung about boobs, he didn't make any of those actresses disrobe, whether for art or commerce.  Said disrobings were the choices of the actresses involved, and by violating the Taboo themselves, they did in a broad sense (heh) invite at least a verbal Transgression.

I suppose that it's probably easier for WAPsters to sneer at the lowbrow monetary motives of a Roger Corman. He would never claim to be Unveiling the Sacred Image of Womankind for Art, and if he was honest he'd probably admit that he was giving male viewers what they were willing to pay for, period. I can see why this might evoke in some feminists' minds the spectre of the Boys' Club. However, this limited perspective overlooks a deeper vein of symbolism that attends all hetero male-female relationships, and that deeper vein cannot be ignored in favor of a puerile political correctness.

A QUICK SHOT OF ECSTACY

I observed in FIEDLER NABBED  that Leslie Fiedler was not able to advance a theory that described "ecstatics" or gave reasons as to why this mode should be preferable to the more standard literary modes of analysis, "ethics" and "aesthetics."  As I often do, I turn to Carl Jung for elucidation:

Almost every day we can see for ourselves, when falling asleep, how our fantasies get woven into our dreams, so that between day-dreaming and night-dreaming there is not much difference.  We have therefore two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking.  The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless working as it were spontaneously, with the contents ready to hand, and guided by unconscious motives. -- Jung, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS.

I won't dwell long on Jung's categories, since I discussed them here to some extent. What I want to consider here is the possibility that Fiedler, in responding to an "ecstatics" that he apparently found in both the art of William Faulkner and the junk of Margaret Mitchell, was responding to the spontaneous quality found in "fantasy-thinking." I think that late in life Fiedler realized that the same basic principles of imagination informed both Temple Drake and Scarlett O'Hara. However, given that Fiedler's early work seems more strongly influenced by both Freud and Marx than by Jung or any comparable figure, he couldn't really hammer out what principles linked the two types of fictional works.

I assert that "fantasy thinking" is heavily dependent on what Jung called the "irrational functions" of consciousness; that is, "sensation" and "intuition."  Jung contrasts these to the "rational functions" of "thinking" and "feeling," which involve a process of conscious judgment (do I like so-and-so, do I agree with Ayn Rand) which can be subsumed under the activity of "directed thinking." However, the irrational functions don't wait on judgment: they just occur spontaneously, and then allow the subject to make of them what he will. The experience of "sensation"-- in which one literally perceives one's surroundings through the senses-- is much more common than that of "intuition," in which one seems to perceive a sentiment or idea without sensory meditation.

Jung devised his categories to describe the multifarous nature of humankind: why some people are more oriented on feelings, others on thoughts, etc.  The psychologist did not apply the categories to literature, but I have attempted to do so recently in the essay FOUR BY FOUR, in which each of the four functions can be found in a specific potentiality one may express in art:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.

The THEMATIC is a potentiality that can describe the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that may describe the relationships of symbols.

To state my thesis as simply as possible, I believe that the majority of what we call "popular art" is conceived through "fantasy-thinking" alone, and that its charm is that it appeals primarily to sensation, while inevitably calling some degree of symbolic values into being through a more or less intuitive process.

In contrast, what some call "canonical art" may well begin with the irrational functions, but it is soon subsumed by one or both of the rational ones: of thinking, of feeling, or both. Traditional literary criticism has been so wedded to the idea of the rational in art that even the process of symbolic formation-- a process highly dependent on an artist intuitively bringing together a congeries of meaningful images or tropes-- has often been relegated to the function of "thinking."

But though the irrational functions are somewhat damped down in "high art," they are not entirely absent: thus we see a critic like Camille Paglia attempting to draw attention to the visceral nature of art in her famous (or notorious) book, SEXUAL PERSONAE.

For all the very real differences between "high art" and "low art," they are bound together by their sharing of the irrational functions, which are the cornerstone of the "fantasy-thinking" process. It is a spontaneous process which at its most complex levels cannot be reduced to rational judgments, and for that very reason, incites a pleasure that is literature's closest analogue to the religious concept of "ecstacy."

Some will not credit Leslie Fiedler's implication that Scarlett O'Hara incarnated both a sensual and a symbolic presence comparable to the presence of Temple Drake. But it's my continued assertion that those who cannot see this commonality are not honestly regarding the combination of sensuality and symbolic value in the Faulkner creation, but are rather responding only to the latter figure's incarnation of "thinking" and "feeling" values-- thus moving in lockstep with a thoroughly barren elitist tradition of literary criticism.

THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE, PT. 2

In speaking of an "ethic" with respect to any literary formulation, as with my "mode of the combative," it's necessary to re-state the obvious: human ethics as they apply to the world of art can never be coterminous with human ethics as they apply to life.  Though I've stated some of my disagreements with Camille Paglia here, her statement opposing life and art remains appropriate:

We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between art and reality, tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us what nature is up to.-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 39.

I will not repeat my many statements distinguishing the properties that separate "works of thematic realism" from "works of thematic escapism."  I'll simply point out that the former type often grapple with matters that the other type does not address, matters which are not limited to, but often deal with, the ethical dimension of real life.  One author, be he Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, or Jack London, may have full-fledged propositions about how to make life better, which he encodes in his works.  Another, like Shakespeare, may use his work to imply an ethical dimension without stating it outright.  A third type, like Voltaire, may propose no solutions whatever but still imply that somehow or other, things could be better than they are, and then expresses that conviction through his work.  

Because all such works suggest that they provide utilitarian value-- not because they can actually foster new systems of morality but for providing "thought experiments"-- elitists often presume that these favored few works are as the rare diamonds scattered through a mountainous heap of trash.  I have maintained, however, that the relationship between "realistic works" and "escapist works" is closer to that of conjoined siblings, dependent on one another for life.  This parallels my conclusions in the final LET FREEDOM RIDE essay, that "right choice" and "wrong choice" are inextricably intertwined within a perspectivist concept of free will.  However, perspective plays a greater role in sussing out the ethical nature of real-life events than it does in literary matters, for the simple reason that in real life human beings gamble their own lives rather than participating in gestural re-creations of ideas and emotions.

A minor example would be the ethical disagreement of American citizens circa World War Two, in which some citizens wished to intervene directly against the Axis while others wished to pursue a course of non-involvement.  Today the consensus was that the former choice was "the right choice," but some would claim that it is validated only because "history is written by the victors," and still others might aver to this day that things might have turned out better had the U.S. left Europe and Asia alone. Though I agree that non-involvement was the "wrong choice," that does not dispel all aspects of the rational process by which some citizens thought it the right choice. 

No lives hang in the balance within the ethical scope of the literary process, though in the real world people have suffered or died to have the right to participate in that process.  Yet the nature of merit, including that of ethical consensus, is far more fluid: authors' works may be esteemed in a minor way, forgotten for a time, and then re-discovered in some new perspective, as occurred with the oeuvres of Herman Melville, H.P. Lovecraft, and Fletcher Hanks. Some elitist fans of science fiction have imagined that the genre would have been finer and more literary had the American and European tradition of science-fiction magazines-- particularly those of a pulpish nature-- never existed.  There is of course no way to prove this, but this does not extinguish the reasoning by which those proponents choose to believe that in their scenario the market would have spawned more types like H.G. Wells and fewer like Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I assert, though, that the reasoning is over-simple: another example of over-privileging those works that purport to have thematic-- and thus ethical-- depth, over those that make few if any such claims.  It overlooks the fundamental interactivity of thematic and escapist works in the literary continuum, as well as failing to understand the deeper symbolic nature of the escapist works.

In my previous essay I chose three stories from Grimm's Fairy Tales.  None of them are works of "thematic realism:" like the great majority of stories overall,  I define all three stories as "genre," meaning that they belong to categories governed by reader-expectations far more than by authorial intentions.  I used the three stories as exemplars of differing combinations of dynamicity-conflict.

The first story, "Bremen Town Musicians," portrays a conflict with no spectacular or sublime aspects.

The second story, "Hansel and Gretel," portrays a conflict in which there exists a conflict between one character, who possesses "might," and two other characters who do not possess might but who are able to trick the first character into defeat.

The third story, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was," portrays a conflict between one character who possesses enough "might" to overcome several other mighty opponents.

Of these three patterns, I've hypothesized that the middle one, labeled "Might vs. Non-Might," is the most popular in the totality of literature (by which I mean, the "bad stuff" as well as the "good stuff.")
Now, assuming the truth of this, what would this pattern mean?

It might mean that the surest way to appeal to a human audience is to play upon their fear that they-- represented by the viewpoint characters of their stories-- are always on the verge of being overwhelmed by powers greater than themselves.  As noted in this essay, the aforementioned H.P. Lovecraft felt that fear was the most primal emotion:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Though there are a lot of stories in which ordinary humans are menaced by the forces of "the unknown," the basic pattern is not confined to supernatural stories: a story like the 1962 film CAPE FEAR sports only a "known" fear, that of a ruthless criminal who impinges on an almost-helpless family.  It is also the same pattern we see in Hegel's opposition of the "bondsman"-- who in my system would represent "non-might"-- and the "lord," who of course represents "might."


I cannot speak to all of Hegel's subtleties on this point, but I find it interesting that, for all that the philosopher emphasizes 'the effects of the "fear of death" on "being-for-self,"' he doesn't show much interest in one other consequence of the lord-bondsman conflict: that the bondsman inevitably seeks to become a lord, to take on the lord's power and privilege.

One cannot do this, however, through the evasive maneuvers of trickster-heroes like Hansel and Gretel.  One only proceeds away from the condition of "non-might" by acquiring "might" oneself. 

In fairy tales as in superhero stories, "might" can be thrust upon a story's protagonist, as it is with characters ranging from Aladdin to the original Captain Marvel.  However, though the story about the Youth Who Sought Fear doesn't inform us as to how he got so mighty, one may speculate that he could have acquired his might by the Batman method: training and effort.

In either case, there is a change in the ethos of the "might vs. might" stories, as opposed to the more popular "might vs. non-might" type.  Suddenly, might is not an overwhelming force that exists outside the human subject, imposing fear as the lord does to the bondsman.  Might is something that can be summoned from within oneself, and is thus available to all human subjects who manifest the necessary will.  In addition, might is plural in nature: it has many faces, and in folktales and fairytales this many-sidedness often appears when a beleaguered viewpoint character receives supernatural help from some benign donor to "even the odds" against a powerful enemy.

Thus, within stories that emphasize "might vs. might"-- which is to say, combative stories-- the plurality of might implies that no lord is ever so mighty that a bondsman cannot assume his power and knock him from his lofty position. Of course, in real life this often means "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  But in fiction we can indulge in the possibility that the new lord will make better choices than the old one. 

Kant repeatedly stresses that all of his observations upon the sublime affects are that they arise spontaneously from humans, themselves in positions of safety, observing the potent forces of nature expending themselves with their own version of "might."  He does not attribute to these affects any ethical consequence in themselves, though as noted before he did assert that all aesthetic emotions did lead to ethical application.  When he introduces the concept of "dominance," which is his terms for the conflict I call "might vs. might," it too is intended to have only indirect ethical application

I suggest that one such application is this appreciation of the plural manifestations of might.  Nearly every schoolchild is exposed to some approximation of the "caveman looking up in wonder" as he espies the birds in flight and wishes to imitate them, which becomes a symbolic representation of human progress as a whole.  But no single act of wonder exists by itself, and from what we know of early man, it does seem that many of them viewed the world as a concatenation of powerful presences, from which the earliest versions of "shamans" could derive power. In later years such presences would codified into polytheistic mythologies, and there too, though men were always inferior to the gods, there remained a conviction that they were worthy to stand with the gods in terms of the will-to-power if not sheer power itself.

The shaman deriving power from his numinous presences, the warrior gaining supernatural presents or guidance from his patron god, the bondsman studying the ways of the mortal lord in order to overthrow him-- all of these participate in the ethical dimensions of the combative mode.  Thus "might" exists to continually challenge others to partake of its nature, rather than being utterly inaccessible, as it is to the humble creatures of "Bremen Town," or being something that can only be overcome through trickery, as in "Hansel and Gretel." This potency, to challenge one's own will to greater acts of agency, is the essence of the ethic that springs from the combative mode.

MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS, AND STORIES TOO PT. 2

Though I'd been reading Kant off and on over the past twenty years, I'll readily admit I didn't invoke him often in the early years of this blog, aside from drawing on his logic to come up with my term "metaphenomenal." I didn't make comparisons between Old Immanuel and any of the scholars who had provided primary influences on my theories, such as Frye, Jung, and Cassirer-- for all that Cassirer himself was a loyal post-Kantian, and Jung probably owes more than a small debt to Kant's categories.  I didn't start assiduously studying the possible benefits of Kant until 2011.  For that I have to thank in part the wrongheaded misapplications of Kant by one Douglas Wolk, for having spurred me to delve more deeply into Kantian philosophy.  Still, even without Wolk,  I think I would have forged pretty much the same link between "sublimity" and "sense of wonder," given my considerable interest in that aspect of literature.

Now, of course, a great deal of my current theory incorporates Kant's commentary on art and sublimity, as well as parallel thoughts by authors like Burke and Schopenhauer, and a reader can't swing a cyber-stick around here lately without encountering discourse on "might" and "dominance", etc.  However, though I wasn't invoking Kant much back in 2008, I find it of archetypal relevance that I touched on elements very like the Kantian concepts above in a series of essays whose purpose was to refute the Wertham-Legman theory of literary sadism.

I began in THEORY OF SADISM by disputing the validity of the Freudian paradigm of sadism, which clearly influenced both Wertham and Legman, as well as the much more sophisticated but still erroneous take of Gilles Deleuze.

Though I agree with Deleuze in his distinctions between sadism and masochism, I think that both Freud and Deleuze are guilty of over-intellectualizing the somatic aspects of these sexual syndromes. "Disavowal" is just another intellectual construct devised to emphasize "absence" rather than "presence," thus putting both thinkers in line with similar types like Sartre and Lacan. I would emphasize more the aspect of bodies clashing against bodies, which IMO is the main reason that either activity summons up associations of sexual excitement. With this caveat in mind one can schematize the respective attitudes so: the pure sadist wants to actively inflict his power/strength upon others without opposition; the pure masochist wants to have the power/strength of others inflicted upon him, albeit under controlled conditions. I prefer the term "strength" to the now-dated term "phallic power" employed by Freud and Deleuze, since the former term does not limit itself to the phallically-endowed gender.

As a side-point I would later reference the fascination of "clashing bodies" within the framework of Georges Bataille's concept of "sensuous frenzy," a metaphor that could subsume both sex and violence.

Within the essay called POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY, it seems that I anticipated Kant's formula of "might" as applied to a literary context, described in MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS PT 1 as the type of fiction that unleashes a superior force upon inferior forces-- though of course I didn't say anything in 2008 about finding this form of narrative to be statistically dominant.

... most current analysts of genre would tend to see "crime" as a distinct genre, almost entirely focused on the depradations of 20th or 21st-century gangsters, usually in an urban environment. Wertham and Legman have a good rhetorical reason to emphasize "crime" as applying across the board, for the specific crime genre usually does emphasize the criminal rather than his law-abiding opponents, and could be, with some small fairness, accused of lining up with the paradigm of the Marquis deSade. Admittedly, Sade's stories are usually about victimizers who capture and then torture victims for pleasure, rather than gunning down little old ladies in the street as did the comic-book gangsters during the heyday of crime comics. Still, one may grant that the essential Freudian paradigm seems common to both: the aggressor vents his aggression on the helpless, and in theory the reader of crime comics enjoys and internalizes the spectacle, "unless he is a complete masochist," as Legman helplfully tells us.

A paragraph later, I disputed Legman and Wertham's oversimple identification of this one-sided contest with the triumphant combat-scenarios of heroic adventure.

Now, while the jury may remain out on the question as to whether the adventure-genre can inspire any sort of sadistic vibe in their audiences-- a question I'll address more fully in a future piece-- it seems obvious to me that when heroes fight villains in adventure-tales, the narrative action could not be less like a lynching, much less a Sadean sadist torturing helpless victims or a gangster shooting down old ladies in the street. Wertham and Legman dance around the difference by trying to make it sound as if the villains are merely stand-ins for despised minorities and the like, which argument remains a linchpin of Marxist oppositional thought, both in modern comics-criticism and elsewhere. But neither author can totally expunge this difference of narrative action: in the adventure-genre, *the villain can defend himself.* He may be fated to lose the struggle-- indeed, until recently he always did-- but the struggle itself is essential to the adventure-genre, as it manifestly is not with the crime genre. As Wertham and Legman both point out, the crime-genre books usually ended with a last-minute destruction of the rampaging crook as a "sop" to morality. But the struggles of hero and villain in the adventure-genres-- best represented in comic books by the superhero-- are not thrown in at the last minute. Narratively, structurally, such physical struggles are the selling-points of the genres, and so cannot be conflated with either the crime genre or the Sadean paradigm by any truly rational approach.
 

I feel sure that when I pointed this elementary difficulty in the reasoning of the two anti-comics authors, I had no idea of invoking the Kantian categories of sublime force.  Now, given my current line of thought-- that the formula "superior force is arrayed against inferior forces" is the one that most dominates popular storytelling-- does that mean that the dominant form of popular fiction is of a sadistic nature?

On that matter, deponent saith not-- except to say that if it's probably no less true of canonical lit-fiction than pop-fiction.  Camille Paglia devoted her book SEXUAL PERSONAE to that argument, and whereas one could quarrel with some of her terms, her findings would suggest that sadism can manifest quite as well in a world where no "might" manifests-- say, the works of Henry James or Honore de Balzac-- as in worlds with a very definite "mighty" presence, which we see in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and MOBY DICK.

So where does that leave the concept of "dominance?"  I stated above it's a given that the victory in most "combative" stories will go to the character who embodies the force of life-- or who at least comes closer to it than his opponent.  But even allowing for this pre-ordained victory, it's clear that the readers desire to see the hero *earn* his dominant status following a struggle of powerful equals-- a struggle goes against the grain of the sadistic concept.  This isn't to say that the "sensuous frenzy" of sadism doesn't have some place the world of the "combative" form of conflict.  But clearly, contra Legman and Wertham, violence takes a radically different form in the idiom of the adventure-hero.  It's because stupidities like those of Legman and Wertham remain pervasive that there remains a need to suss out the many complexities of conflict and combat, even if the sussing-out is likely to fail, in keeping with the old adage:

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 3

I have no problem with anyone asserting the need for gender equity in these real-world terms. However, imposing gender equity upon fiction-- which I believe [Heidi] McDonald has called for on more than one occasion-- is a different matter.-- me in GENDER, BEND HER.

We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between art and reality, tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us what nature is up to.-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 39.

 While I don't agree with Camille Paglia on many matters, I believe that an "ethical cleavage" between art and reality is entirely necessary, both in terms of theory about art and the practice of art in all its variations. 


While discursive morality always plays some role in art, moral straightjacketing benefits no one in the long run.  In the essay cited above, I took issue with Heidi McDonald because I found that she had passed 'an unsubstantiated judgment upon all previous incarnations of Bond fiction: said judgment being that, because they were originally fictions designed principally with male buyers in mind, new iterations must and should be corrected to become more “female-friendly.”'  From a pluralist perspective, the oeuvre of Ian Fleming may possess its own "integrity" even though it was directed at male buyers.  The application of the above objection to the Thompson essay seems obvious.

In my Sequart critiques of the Kelly Thompson essay, I will confess to one misstep.  It's possible that I might have justified the perspective of pluralism somewhat more thoroughly. Certainly some of those readers were as the barren ground in the Parable of the Sower, but still I might have made more clear that I was not allied to those fans who defended so-called "sexism" on the basis of "keep the status quo at all costs."  The lack of criticism, which must take in some quantity of unfair criticism, may be just as injurious to art as moral straightjacketing.  Ideally one should seek a middle ground between Paglia, who recognizes few if any moral components in literature, and John Gardner's over-emphasis on "moral fiction."

I've critiqued Thompson for an overzealous political correctness, and I have no faith in her notion of a "trickle down theory" of moral influence, which I sum up by the old formula "monkey see, monkey do."  I admit that I don't have an objective yardstick as to when moral critique is on target, and when it goes over the line and obstructs creative work.  Like most people, I know the difference when I see it.  However, I disagree with any argument that insists that one gender's artistic preferences should trump another's.  Speaking purely in terms of statistical dominance, men and women have different preferences in terms of entertainment, and in the final analysis it doesn't matter whether this difference springs from biological or societal influences.  It's here, it's not particularly queer, and we have to get used to it.

Since I value the distinctions of "gender focus" in both art and entertainment, I don't subscribe to Thompson's endorsement of a hypothetical "great middle" (my term) that would supposedly bring in more male and female readers than the current DM enjoys.  My solution, if I knew how to implement it, would be a strategically gender-divided market, as we see with Japan's divison of boys' *shonen* and girls' *shojo,* to say nothing of all the other relevant divisions in the Japanese manga-market.  I realize that the chances to bring this about in the United States aren't especially good, given the failure of a gender-focused imprint like DC's short-lived MINX line.

For some, of course, this would be the equivalent of keeping the status quo; of having a market where those pervy guys could still enjoy pictures of women wearing thongs and bustiers.  But guess what: there's already a pretty big entertainment-market where guys much pervier than comics-fans can purchase any kind of objectification they may desire.  It's called the Internet.

"Status quo," then, is the wrong way to think about the matter.  It goes without saying that even in a gender-divided market, criticism of hyper-sexualization would go on (though hopefully those critics might prove more thorough than Thompson, and would distinguish extreme sexuality from the "cleaner" kinds).  I don't suppose every Japanese manga-fan approves of the existence of OGENKI CLINIC.

Men like different things than women.  Sometimes the things men like are very good, if only in an aesthetic sense, and sometimes they're very bad.

Women like different things than men.  Sometimes the things women like are very good, at least in an aesthetic sense, and sometimes they're very bad.

However, one cannot sort out the nature of an aesthetic good with appeals to morality, as thinkers ranging from Kant to Oscar Wilde have demonstrated.  When I state pluralism's message in the saying, "Anything that can be done well is worth doing," my idea of being "done well" isn't confined to following some simplistic credo of political correctness, be it ultraliberal or ultraconservative. 

I noted at the end of THE CHICKEN CHRONICLES that I meant to address the question, "What's the difference between "sexism" and "sensationalism?"  I thought of so doing simply it amused me that Chicken Colin appeared to have no earthly idea as to how the two could be connected.  But the more I think about it, his thick-headed incomprehension deserves no answer. 

However, though I have just two more Thompson-related essays to get out of the way, I may have come across another resource that supplies me with more debate-worthy fodder. Stay tuned.