EXTREME UNCTION FOR FUNCTIONS

 A stereotype, or stereotypical device, is identical to what I called a "simple variable" in this essay. For my purposes a simple variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that is as close as one can conceive to a bare function; one that is static with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities.

An archetype is equivalent to what I have called a complex variable, following Northrop Frye's logic on this subject. A complex variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that proves itself dynamic with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities. -- A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY, 2014.

 

Affective freedom," then, is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in artifice, while "cognitive restraint" is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in verisimilitude. -- BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE, 2018.

I recently conjured forth the ideas of functionality and super-functionality from the vasty deeps of 2014 in my last essay. I then found myself cross-comparing those early thoughts to those more recently expressed this October, in both QUICK NUM NOTES and THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD. In the latter essay I opined that both the "metaphenomenalities" privilege tropes of artifice over those of verisimilitude, though works of "the uncanny" seek to create the impression of greater alliance to verisimilitude than one finds in works of "the marvelous." (Thus everything that falls into the pattern of "the uncanny Gothic" always comes up with some artifice to explain away phenomena that seem to be marvelous.) My "October surprise" was the insight that from one POV, the artifice of the uncanny may be just as "artificial" as that of the marvelous, even if the rationales are opposed to one another.

So, by the logic established in the 2014 essay, both the uncanny and the marvelous are defined by "super-functionality," at least in an ontological sense. This means a potential to take on multiple functions within the ontological structure of the narrative, which functions may align with the epistemological structure, or may not. But this "super-functionality" is also an "anti-functionality" insofar as pure functionality is being overshadowed in favor of things that track only in terms of literary artifice. To recapitulate one of the examples from QUICK NUM NOTES, when Ian Fleming has his crime-chief Blofeld execute a subordinate with an electric chair rather than with a pistol or baseball bat, it's because Fleming wants his readers to sit up and take notice of what a singular crime-boss Blofeld is-- that he's NOT a mundane criminal like Al Capone.                                

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES

 I introduced the term "weirdies" in this essay as a description for a subset of characters in the comics-medium, and I justified the term in part with a reference to a label DC Comics had used in the late 1990s: "the Weirdoverse." But the proximate source of the term was a chapter in Brian Aldiss' 1973 history of science fiction, BILLION YEAR SPREE (revised in 1986 as TRILLION YEAR SPREE). 

Aldiss' "spree," while very readable, was typical of most science fiction histories. The author had no general theory of all metaphenomenal forms of literature, and in that respect he probably knew his audience well, as being almost exclusively interested only in the genre of science fiction. Most science-fiction histories are blithely uninterested even in SF's two best-known rivals for metaphenomenal popularity: "horror" and "fantasy," and Aldiss's SPREE conformed to this paradigm for the most part. But though I have not read any edition of SPREE for over twenty years, I remember well one chapter in which Aldiss more or less accounted for the less reputable (to SF fans) forms of the metaphenomenal, and that chapter was entitled, "ERB and the Weirdies."

"ERB," of course, was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who, in addition to creating a certain ape-man, was renowned for a host of otherworldly adventures that most purists would not deem "science fiction." I'm not certain, but the portmanteau "science fantasy" may have been devised, if not strictly for Burroughs, then for everything that didn't satisfy the supposed rigor of mainstream science fiction. As for "The Weirdies," I believe this category took in all the horror and fantasy authors who were popular during the heyday of American pulps, with special reference to the "Big Three" of WEIRD TALES: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Aldiss's analysis of all four authors struck me as generally condescending, even when he admitted having enjoyed this or that particular "weirdie" work.

I interpret the proponents of mainstream science fiction as having a superiority complex toward horror and fantasy via my interlinked concepts of freedom and restraint. With much the same logic used by elitists who boost naturalistic canonical literature above all other forms, fans of mainstream SF consider their favored genre to possess "cognitive restraint," the propensity to take boundless fantasies and make them reflect "real" issues in society or culture. Horror and fantasy are not incapable of such restraint, but the overall perception of both genres aligns with my concept of "affective freedom." The grotesques of Lovecraft and the arabesques of Smith are seen as stemming mostly from an appeal to affects/emotions, and to purists, that gives those genres less intellectual rigor.

Now, as a result of reviewing the JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK story-line, I began thinking more about what qualities made certain comics-characters seem like "weirdies." The Wiki article alleges that most of the Weirdoverse characters were aligned with the "mystery/occult" genres. This may be true of three of the four: NIGHT FORCE, SCARE TACTICS, and THE BOOK OF FATE (i.e, one of various titles about the sorcerer-superhero Doctor Fate). Yet, the fourth title under this rubric was CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, and even a quick look at online copies of this 1997 series indicated that it was not steeped in the tropes of horror or fantasy.

I don't think "weirdies" are purely allied to the supernatural in itself, and the 2018 incarnation of JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK bears this out, in that two of the members are productions of "mad science" like Detective Chimp and the Man-Bat. By the same token, those characters with opposing connotations-- what I now term "worldies"-- can also include any number of characters with supernatural associations, like Thor and Wonder Woman. (The Amazon Princess gets her occult mojo ramped up for her membership in the 2018 JLD.)

"Worldies," as I conceive them, may possess all manner of supernormal powers, but they seem to be tied to a commonplace representation of "the world," in much the same way that prose SF stories take place in logically consistent worlds with one or more "wonders" in them. "Weirdies," though, exist BETWEEN the commonplace world and another, twilight realm wherein nothing is logical or consistent. I relate Aldiss' use of "weirdies" to the origins of the word "weird," taken from an Old English word meaning "fate," which connotes an illogical order superimposed over mundane existence. I may devote some future posts on OUROBOROS DREAMS to some of the more interesting forms that the "weirdies" take in the comics medium.

SUPERNORMAL POETICS REVISITED

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous.-- READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART.

The fatuity of Hoffman's claim doesn't need much elaboration. Without even looking at his footnoted source, I surmise that its "proof" of male preference is derived from purely visual tests, where male subjects look at photos, possibly subliminal, of the different types of feminine breasts. This of course would be a thoroughly incomplete study without invoking tactile sensations as well. But try to persuade some research center to give the go-ahead on a study in which a set number of male subjects grope a set number of both real and fake boobies.

But I will elaborate upon Campbell. In this blog's infancy I examined in detail Campbell's supernormal poetics (my term), in this 2009 blogpost. Whereas Hoffman rejects the "existence claims" of myth and religion, Campbell embraces them in the following terms:

[Campbell]  suggests that though mythology cannot be rationally understood, it may be "viewed in the light of biological psychology as a function of the human nervous system, precisely homologous to the innate and learned sign stimuli that release and direct the energies of nature." Campbell, building largely on the ethological researches of Lorenz and Tinbergen, calls this psychobiological system "the supernormal sign stimulus," and implies that it is through such stimuli that both myth and art work their wiles on audiences.

There was a time when I was very invested in Campbell's theory. When I was writing my as-yet-unpublished book on the superhero phenomenon, I initially devoted a chapter to the supernormal sign theory. However, I soon realized, through close analysis of that chapter of PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, that an awful lot of Campbell's heuristic conjectures proved shaky. For instance, later in my 2009 essay, I extrapolated from Campbell the idea of "normal sign stimuli," but Campbell never actually renders such a conception. It's possible that the author was exposed to the semiotics of his time, but if so, he's too caught up in explicating supernormal signs to worry about their opposite. Further, though in the essay I agreed with Campbell's quoted poet A.E. Houseman that "intellect is not the fount of poetry," I caviled that Houseman had not given intellect its due in the process of making art.

Much later I expanded upon the intertwining of intellect and imagination, under the more general terms "cognitive restraint" and "affective freedom," in this appropriately titled essay. And though I favor the poetics of Campbell and Houseman far more than those of Hoffman and Richard Dawkins, I tried in this and other essays to strike a balance with respect to how these two aspects of human existence affect creativity:

Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 2

I have to backtrack a little with regard to my statements here about Stephen King's take on Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief."

I wrote in part:

I agree [with King] that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories.

I thought King was slanting his argument a bit by comparing a highly complex metaphenomenal writer like HPL with an isophenomenal writer with a reputation for very simple bestseller fiction. (I think King was playing to that reputation, whether he had read any Hailey books back then or not, though I never have and so can only go on general allegations.) That's why I said the materialist literary author Joseph Conrad would have been a nearer match in terms of literary complexity.

However, though I still believe King's comparison of HPL and Hailey was off-kilter, King's standard would be true in terms of the ways in which isophenomenal authors of any complexity-level approach the phenomenality of their fictional worlds, in contradistinction to the way metaphenomenal authors face those same considerations.

Isophenomenal works, whether they are as complex as a Conrad novel or as simple as a Franklin Dixon HARDY BOYS (just to name something I did read in great quantity), are alike in that they utilize the same range of phenomena. I say that this range is "isophenmenal" because, even though nothing in Conrad or Dixon is actually "real," it is supposed to be "the same as" (Greek "iso") what a majority of readers would deem the expected phenomena of this world. That's not to say that there aren't potential readers who believe in their heart of hearts that everything that seems solid and dependable could vapor away if some god or computer-network sent the message. But they will always be outnumbered by the majority of readers, who are governed by what Cassirer called "naive realism, which regards the reality of objects as something and unequivocally given" (LANGUAGE AND MYTH, p. 6). An isophenomenal author cannot vary from what is known about the real world. At most he might introduce some little-known fact of nature that might have some of the charm of novelty, simply because the reader had not heard of said fact.

Every metaphenomenal work, though, whether as complex as a Lovecraft story or a simple as a Gerry Conway SPIDER-MAN tale, goes "beyond" (Greek "meta") what we expect of real-world phenomena. Further, even writers who pick up serial fantasy-concepts created by other authors are usually obliged to add new fantasy-concepts to the series-- Conway's most famous contribution being The Punisher. King is right that in order to formulate the ground rules for any fantasy-cosmos, however complex or simple, do require a special "muscular" effort for one to engage with whatever type or types of metaphenomena the author chooses to depict. This "muscular effort" has nothing to do with the parallel "muscular effort" that determines whether or not the work is complex or simple.

In Part 3, I anticipate expanding these thoughts with respect to the two complementary forms of the metaphenomenal, the uncanny and the marvelous.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN

 I borrowed the phrase "Strength to Dream" from Colin Wilson's book of that title, but only for the basic felicity of the phrase, not because I'm discussing any of Wilson's themes here. (I'm fairly sure I read it many years ago and have placed it on my to-be-reread list.)

I began thinking about the association of "strength" with "dreaming" thanks to the works of two famous writers who discussed how readers accept what I call metaphenomenal fiction. The first writer is Samuel T. Coleridge, whose most famous phrase in common parlance may not be anything from his poems, but from his autobiography, wherein he coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief." 

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

I confess that I have never read the full text of the bio, but I doubt that Coleridge uses the phrase again since none of the online references mention more than the one quote. The book concerns Coleridge's far-ranging theory of poetry, and so is not primarily about the ways fantasy-loving readers justify their preferences. In fact, the full context of "suspension of disbelief" is that Coleridge and William Wordsworth, in collaborating to produce various poems for their 1798 collection LYRICAL BALLADS, took two differing approaches to poetry, with Wordsworth favoring "things of every day" while Coleridge concentrated upon "shadows of imagination" that necessitated "poetic faith." Early in the history of this blog I described this literary dichotomy as one between works of "thematic realism" (Wordsworth) and "thematic escapism" (Coleridge), though in recent years I've inclined more toward an opposition between "verisimilitude" and "artifice," as in the last year's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2:

"Verisimilitude" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limits of the physical continuum, while "artifice" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limitless nature of the continuum of abstract concepts. 

 

Coleridge did not develop the "suspension of disbelief" concept, but many later writers quoted it and gave their takes on the idea, among them the second writer I mentioned above: Stephen King. King's 1981 book DANSE MACABRE largely concerns his theories about the horror genre, just as Coleridge's biography concerned poetry. King mentions "suspension of disbelief" in Chapter 4, where he extrapolates a meaning of "strength" from Coleridge's "suspension" metaphor.

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

And then he validates many fantasy-fans by turning a pitying eye upon those persons who reject all metaphenomenal content as being unreal in terms of real experience:

They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

Though I like King's extrapolation of Coleridge, ultimately it's a little too simple. I agree that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories. In Part 2 of 2015's THE DOMAIN GAME, I contrasted Conrad with Tolkien:

What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns.

Coleridge's contrast between his chosen form of poetry and that of his colleague Wordsworth is also a much fairer one, and I find it interesting when he says that Wordsworth does not just sedulously reproduce the everyday things he sees, but that he gives them "the charm of novelty." It does take a "muscular intellectual act" to re-organize the things of common experience to make them into art, even art that may argue that it's silly to read fantasy-stories (say, Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY). To pursue an opposition for the dream-metaphor I've introduced, the advocate of realism may often believe that he's "awakened" from the delusional dreams of religion or superstition. I of course relate these modes further to the categories of cognitive restraint and affective freedom, but at present these do not need further elaboration in this new context.

On a small side-note, the decade in which Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on the LYRICAL BALLADS-- said by some to have launched the English Romantic movement-- is also the decade in which the Gothic novel enjoyed its first major flowering with such authors as Radcliffe and Lewis, with a second but distinct outgrowth evolving in the next twenty-odd years with Mary Shelley, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Allan Poe. Though there had been scattered important metaphenomenal works throughout the 18th century, the 19th century would be conceived in the midst of ongoing arguments about the virtues of naturalistic fiction as against stories of fantasy, many of which are still argued about today, and which inform the warp and woof of modern fiction.

ABUNDANT EXCHANGES

I've now finished the remainder of Stuart A. Kaufman's INVESTIGATIONS. To be sure, I had to skip most of the heavily statistical stuff, but I flatter myself that I understood most if not all of Kauffman's abstruse concepts. 

In THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 1, I primarily contemplated Kauffman's response to Wittgenstein's philosophy vis-a-vis "codefinition," which parallels Kauffman's concept of "coevolution." Briefly summarized, Kauffman believes that evolution is not always, as in the popular paradigm, a matter of each individual organism blindly chancing upon whatever adaptations help that organism survive. Survival is still paramount in Kauffman's universe, but in some situations evolution may have taken place due to an exchange between two separate entities-- for instance, as may have happened when some prokaryotic cells bonded with others in order to produce eukaryotic cells. which unlike the earlier type of cell possess a nucleus and mitochondria. I note in passing that in 1967 Lynn Sagan/Margulis termed this process "endosymbiosis," but for whatever reason Kauffman does not use this term or mention Margulis in the bibliography to INVESTIGATIONS. 

Kauffman devotes most of the book to coevolution. This doctrine hinges on the concept that organisms co-evolve not by blind chance alone-- though Kauffman does not deny the chance-factor of mutations-- but out of some prehension (as Whitehead would term it) of a need for greater diversity and therefore abundance. From page 150:

...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world.

The idea of such a "knowing" is of course anathema to reductive science, which cannot imagine organisms without brains as manifesting anything like consciousness, much less a desire for abundance. I interpose that word, which is not in INVESTIGATIONS, in keeping with my one use of it in the essay ABUNDANCE AND EXPRESSIVITY, just to keep myself on track about relating Kauffman's biological theories to my cultural/literary theories.

Kauffman devotes his next to last chapter, "The Persistently Innovative Econosphere," to a sustained comparison of biological exchange (in the "biosphere") with the human custom of trade (in the "econosphere," saying:

The advantages of trade predate the human condition among autonomous agents. Advantages of trade are found in the metabolic exchange of legume root nodule and fungi, sugar for fixed nitrogen carried in amino acids. Advantages of trade were found among the mixed microbial and algal communities along the littoral of the earth's oceans four billion years ago. The trading of the econosphere is an outgrowth of the trading of the biosphere.

Kauffman also disputes the definition of exchange as based in the scarcity of goods, and instead champions an aesthetic of diversity/abundance, saying on page 227: 

Think of the Wright Brothers' airplane. It was a recombination between an airfoil, a light gasoline engine, bicycle wheels, and a propeller. The more objects an economy has, the more novel objects can be constructed.

This statement bears on what I deem the "narratosphere"s" need for novel objects, which also depends on the recombination of elements taken from the co-defined spheres of "affective freedom" and "cognitive restraint," as discussed in WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2.  This is why, throughout the history of this blog, I have disputed "Iliad critics" who interpret fictional narrative as comprising a vast series of moral or rational lectures. While the cogitations of cognitive restraint are indispensable to fiction, said cogitations cannot produce novel objects in themselves. The correlations of affective freedom are necessary to break through habitual patterns of thought. (I note in passing a possible comparison between Kant's distinctions between productive and reproductive imagination, explored in 2011's FINDING SIGMUND PART 1.)

The belief that literature can and should pursue all imaginative linkages-- even those that some may find tainted by racial or sexual chauvinism-- lies at the heart of my devotion to the practice of archetypal criticism.

EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA PT. 2

I should build on the formulations from Part 1 to clarify exactly what sort of freedom I've been describing.

Without doubt the intellectual ramifications of my NUM formula were spawned in reaction against Tzvetan Todorov's attempt to subsume all categories of fantasy under a conceptual umbrella he called "the real," which was very much in keeping with his Freudian leanings. In contrast, I assert that every literary phenomenality has its own unique nature, regardless of what one thinks about the configuration of one's lived experience.

All that said, the base purpose of fictional narrative is expressive, not intellectual, so the primary importance of the three phenomenalities is not their value as thought experiments, but as conjurations of the six forms of affect I last described in 2017's ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

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

Being one mortal reader, I cannot know precisely what affects dominate the minds of other readers. However, I can use deductive reasoning to discern common ground. For instance, Todorov insists that because Poe's HOUSE OF USHER does not actually reveal any marvelous phenomena, its manifestation of the uncanny is subsumed by "the real." But if this was an accurate deduction that one could apply to other readers, why would cinematic versions of the story appear in practically every fantasy-film concordance? Are there any concordances of fantasy-films that go out of their way to emphasize only films of the marvelous; that keep only the sirens and the psychics but exclude all of the serial killers? I will go out on a limb and state that there are none, for the simple reason that the compilers of these works are not blinded by ideology as was Todorov. Even if none compilers of concordances would look with favor upon my overall system, the automatic association of Norman Bates with Odysseus demonstrates that the affects aligned with the uncanny are closer in spirit to those of the marvelous. 

There will still be disagreements. In MASKED MAVERICKS AND SUCH, I noted how Peter Green's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WEIRD WESTERNS did not subscribe to my belief that costumed heroes automatically had a "weird" vibe, though he would include any characters garbed in macabre attire (skulls; phantom-like clothing, etc.) But he unequivocally covered both truly marvelous westerns alongside those that only suggested marvelous phenomena-- and that in my opinion is enough to suggest his awareness of a fundamental "strangeness" linking those categories; a strangeness one cannot find even in westerns with odd content (say, 1942's REAP THE WILD WIND, best remembered these days as the film where John Wayne fights an octopus).

Playful, expressive freedom is the essence of what makes fictional narrative valuable to human beings, in contradistinction of the "work ethic" that dominates non-fiction, no matter the quality of the reporting involved in a given screed. Thus I will stipulate that efficacy in my system concerns "a free selection of causes" with respect to all the affective and cognitive aspects of fictional narrative, but that the affective ones are somewhat more consequential.

EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA

 I've only touched upon Ernst Cassirer's concept of efficacy in passing in previous essays, but I did recently conceive of a possible adaptation of the term for my own system.

Once more with feeling, here's what Cassirer wrote of the concept in MYTHICAL THOUGHT:

…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

Cassirer is concerned only with contrasting efficacy, elsewhere described as a "free selection of causes," with the scientific concept of limited causality, so I have no reason to think that the philosopher would have had any reason to apply his categories to the subject of literary phenomenality. But it occurred to me recently that "free selection of causes" is a choice that potentially faces any reader/audience-member when presented with any narrative: that it may be dominated by either the naturalistic, the uncanny, or the marvelous phenomenality.

For once I won't put forth new examples of each phenomenality, but will default to the statement I made in last year's LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE:

In my discussion of Aristotle I mentioned that Classic Greek literature could embrace both “naturalistic tropes,” which were often with the limitations of human fallibility and mortality,” and with “marvelous tropes” about gods and ghosts, describing imagined states of existence beyond the realm of human limitations. Gothic fiction was instrumental, however, in promulgating the interstitial category of “uncanny tropes.” Such tropes had existed even in mankind’s prehistory, and in my essay UNCANNY GENESIS I cited some examples of uncanny tropes from archaic story-cycles, such as the extra-Biblical “Bel and the Dragon” and “the Six Labors of Theseus.” But there’s no doubt that Gothic practitioners like Ann Radcliffe had a much more sustained effect in elaborating stories in which supernatural occurrences were “explained rationally.” In truth, though, the “rationality” of uncanny stories like THE ITALIAN and THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO is compromised from the start by even allowing for the possibility of the supernatural, in contrast, say, to Jane Austen’s Gothic spoof NORTHANGER ABBEY, in which the existence of the supernatural is not even slightly validated.

 All of these examples require that the reader fall into sympathy with whatever attitude the author projects regarding "the world of subjective emotions," even if that attitude may include total dismissal of said emotions. 

In life, each person makes a similar choice: whether or not to believe that emotions have "objective existence," or to credence that whatever abstract forms those emotional continua may assume-- Heaven, Hell, the astral plane-- have any meaning to them. But in fiction, the choice always remains open to interpretation with each new text-- which is one reason literature will always be oriented more toward freedom than to restraint.

RUNNING ON ABOUT DISCOURSE

In the 2016 essay AFFECTIVE FREEDOM,COGNITIVE RESTRAINT and in the two parts of 2019’s AND THE HALFTRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I aligned the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities with, respectively, my categories of “cognitive restraint” and “affective freedom.” I made heavy use of Ernst Cassirer in these essays, but for this one, I’ve decided to take a different path in order to dilate on the salient differences between the ways these potentialities operate.

In literature as in other cultural forms, all potentialities express themselves through processes of discourse. The discourses of “lateral meanings” deal with concrete subject matter—that of what sensations the subject experiences, and of the subject’s emotional reactions to those sensations. In contrast, the discourses of “vertical meanings” concern themselves with abstractions, with the didactic making use of “ideas” while the mythopoeic makes use of “symbols.” For the sake of argument, I will treat both ideas and symbols as if they existed as discrete monads, which is not the way either are experienced. Both ideas and symbols are best expressed in the form of typical story-tropes. Levi-Strauss was pleased to term these tropes “mythemes,” conveniently ignoring how such monadic forms were dispersed throughout all forms of human communication, not just myth.

Didactic discourse and mythopoeic discourse are not as intimately entwined as those of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. The discourses can appear independently of one another, or they may intertwine within a narrative to support one another, or they may conflict with one another so as to confuse the narrative. An example of the last-named would be Steve Ditko’s story “Am I Roma…,” which I explicated it in this post.

The word “discourse” stems from a Latin root meaning “to run around.” However, all four discourses run in different ways, though I’ll only discuss the two vertically aligned potentialities here.

The didactic discourse runs in the fashion of a single contestant in a one-on-one foot race. The course of the race may be winding or straight, but the contestant runs in as direct a line as possible from start to finish. Didactic discourses may employ idea-tropes as disparate as “Christ died for our sins” or “Capitalism is doomed by its own excesses,” but the discourses are always aimed at teaching some sort of linear lesson to listeners.

In contrast, a mythopoeic discourse is more akin to a team of runners in a relay race, opposed, naturally, by a corresponding team. There’s still a goal that a given team aspires to reach first, but achievement of the goal depends on the successful interaction of all players on the team. Symbols can be used to help convey linear lessons, but their primary potency is poetic and associative. In my first post on the ARCHIVE, I quoted William Butler Yeats, who asserted that “symbols are an endless inter-marrying family.” The interactions of members in a family is of course analogous to the concerted efforts of a relay-team, and symbol-tropes in a mythopoeic discourse only win their “race” when they work so as to reinforce one another.

As noted, the vertical discourses align respectively with the categories I’ve termed “cognitive restraint” and “affective freedom.” Didactic discourse aspires to teach, and while some teachers seek to help students learn how to think for themselves, it’s implicit that each student will still end up choosing to advocate favored ideas over non-favored ones—in essence, “restraining” any potential tendency to advocate the latter idea-group. Even writers who analyze myths, both religious and literary, must use didactic discourse to assign a particular set of values to the myths analyzed. In this essay I showed how Claude Levi-Strauss advocated a “scientific” approach to myth and stated that he believed that mythic activity was on its way out of human culture. By contrast, Ernst Cassirer championed myth as an irreducible element of human culture. But both had to use didactic discourse to explain their respective ideas and philosophies. The didactic discourse thus is at its strongest within the sphere of non-fiction but has a more tendentious hold in fiction.

The mythopoeic flourishes in fiction but only appears sporadically in non-fiction, and then usually only in commentaries on fictional constructs, such as Raymond Durgnat’s FILMS AND FEELINGS. Mythopoeic discourse doesn’t so much send a message as open up all lines of communication. In contrast to the old saw “If it feels good, do it,” the mythopoeic discourse says, “If it seems significant, symbolize it.”

Mythopoeic discourse aligns to the category of “affective freedom,” meaning that symbols can combine in any way a creator may please to arrange them, irrespective of logical amenities. To be sure, mythicity takes on greater value when an author relates the symbols to the epistemological patterns that the audience recognizes from the world of experience. But I’ve argued, as did Cassirer in MYTHICAL THOUGHT, that mythic symbols are not gain their power from simply copying what audiences see around them. Cassirer had a more Platonic emphasis than I do. On page 3, he speaks of how Plato valued myth as signifying “the world of becoming” in contrast to the adherents of the allegorical school, and throughout the book he emphasizes myth’s potential to dissolve the boundaries between inner reality and outer reality (particularly on page 156). I agree, but for me the dissolution comes about when myth and its near relative literature make use of “real” epistemological patterns for “unreal” purposes.

In mythopoeic discourse, “perfect freedom” not only doesn’t mean “perfect service,” said freedom can be free of any utilitarian purpose. Case in point: Robert E. Howard’s 1936 novelette BLACK CANAAN, recently reviewed here. I pointed out that although Howard placed his story of an aborted race-war in a real location-- an Arkansas town named Canaan-- the author showed no real interest in reproducing the realities of life in that time (post-Civil War) and place. I noted that the outcome of the Civil War made no difference to the novel, and that Howard had no interest in what inequities might have contributed to the mutual hatred between the whites of Canaan and the blacks of the neighboring swamplands, called Goshen. Going purely by the content of the existing story—while acknowledging that the author was forced to cut his original draft for publication—it’s apparent that Howard wanted a pure “clash of civilizations.” The only motivation for the strife is rooted in the tropes of fantasy-fiction, in that Howard imagines the blacks of Goshen as having made diabolical alliances with elder voodoo-deities. Yet this is certainly not a didactic argument, since Howard says absolutely nothing about the presumed Christian orientations of the Canaanites.

Indeed, the only references to Judeo-Christianity devolve also to the blacks of Goshen. Howard named his imaginary swampland after the Egyptian domain where the pre-Exodus Jews were kept in bondage, before they escaped the land of the Pharaohs into Canaan. This symbolic trope is reinforced by the history of the way blacks of pre-emancipation America identified with the pre-Exodus Jews, which I tend to believe a Southerner like Howard could not help but know of. Thus, in the story the minions of Saul Stark, by rising up against white Canaanites, duplicate the action of the archaic Jews who conquered archaic Canaan and transformed that land into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

But what message was Howard sending in the story? None, I would venture. While he certainly could have infused his story of a fictional uprising with his own political opinions, as did many other authors, here Howard only cares about a conflict of good and evil. And even Howard’s concept of “good” may be problematic, since the righteousness of protagonist Kirby becomes compromised by his unquestionable hunger for the “forbidden fruit” of the quadroon voodoo-priestess, the Bride of Damballah. If Howard had wanted only to denigrate the evil represented by Black People—whom, to be sure, he denotes with the customary Nasty Taboo Word of the period—he could have left out this tantalizing sorceress. From first to last, though, she has Kirby under her thrall, and she’s defeated only by the chance intervention of a minor support-character. The hero enjoys the final triumph over the evil Stark, but Kirby doesn’t win because he’s white, and in many ways Stark and Kirby are mirror-images of each other, each striving to make sure his own race holds the whip hand.

There’s no harm in admitting that such a story has no moral to offer, but it’s far from proven that a story with a moral is necessary superior. On a personal note, in my youth I probably liked a good number of preachy stories, since my own ethos was still being formed. But today I tend to find even the best “idea-tropes” in fiction to have less value than the best “symbol-tropes,” while in non-fiction I often fault authors who load their arguments with clumsy symbolism, as per Frederic Wertham’s tortuous comparison between children and garden-flowers. Both discourses have their strengths, but the races they run come off to best effect on level playing-fields.  

THE CAVE OF FREEDOM AND RESTRAINT

 

In my essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALLSET YOU FREE, I noted one of the vital distinctions between philosophy and literature: that philosophy attempts to suss out truth from falsehood, while literature’s primary function is to promote fictions that have an ambiguous relationship to “truth,” whatever a given artist’s personal convictions may be. For instance, Dave Sim may believe explicitly in the revelations of the “Peoples of the Book,” but he’s still encoding those beliefs within the context of the fiction called CEREBUS.

Numerous philosophers have come up with metaphors for the search for truth, but in my personal opinion no one has ever topped Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave," summarized thusly:

Plato tells of men who have remained closed since they were children in a subterranean cave, chained so that they can only see the bottom of the cave.

Behind them stands a high and remote light, and between the light and the prisoners there is a wall that runs alongside a path. On the path walk some people carrying different objects, some argue, others do not.

Whoever is in the caves, having never observed the true object, thinks that the shadow cast at the bottom of the cave must be the real object, and that the echoes are the true voices of those people.

A prisoner frees himself and goes up the cave.

For him it is long and painful, because his eyes, which are not accustomed to light, hurt so much more that he approaches the opening of the cave.

Once accustomed, however, the prisoner can see that the shadows were only the projection of the objects brought by the servants behind the wall and now he thinks these are the real objects.

It tells of men who have remained closed since they were children in a subterranean cave, chained so that they can only see the bottom of the cave.

Behind them stands a high and remote light, and between the light and the prisoners there is a wall that runs alongside a path. On the path walk some people carrying different objects, some argue, others do not.

Whoever is in the caves, having never observed the true object, thinks that the shadow cast at the bottom of the cave must be the real object, and that the echoes are the true voices of those people.

A prisoner frees himself and goes up the cave.

For him it is long and painful, because his eyes, which are not accustomed to light, hurt so much more that he approaches the opening of the cave.

Once accustomed, however, the prisoner can see that the shadows were only the projection of the objects brought by the servants behind the wall and now he thinks these are the real objects.

The dominant interpretation of the allegory is that the chained people in the cave, able to perceive only shadows of the reality beyond the cave, symbolize human confinement to the input of their physical senses. According to the idealism of Plato (sometimes given the chimerical name of “Realism”), the World of Forms is the actual Truth Beyond the Cave, and presumably the individual who escapes the cave, and tries to convey that insight to his chained fellows, symbolizes the dilemma of the Platonic philosopher.

In addition of my deeming this the best of the “truth-seeking” metaphors, I would hazard that this may be the best known metaphor in philosophy as a whole, given that it furnishes the reader with all the basic challenges of epistemology. Further, the Cave-Allegory may be seen as consequential for the two major branches of metaphenomenal fiction: what we call “fantasy” and “science fiction.”

There have been dozens of involved histories of both “super-genres,” but I’m most concerned with the ways in which both categories developed in the late 1800s. Despite many significant precursors, the two super-genres receive their greatest codification in this period, when Jules Verne and H.G. Wells defined science fiction and William Morris defined the alternate-world fantasy. (To be sure, horror fiction undergoes a similar codification in this period, but many works in this genre make so much use of either “fantasy motifs” or “science fiction motifs” that I can’t think of horror as being entirely separable from the other two.)

Plato’s allegory in itself evokes both images of freedom and restraint; of human beings bound by their physical circumstances but nonetheless capable of obtaining some degree of freedom. Readers of this blog will be familiar with my assertion that human existence is characterized by both “affective freedom” and “cognitive restraint.” We can imagine nearly anything, despite being restrained by all the demands of physicality, winsomely styled as the “Four F’s:” food (edible matter), flax (clothing), flags (shelter) and frig (continuance of the species). As I wrote previously, the imagination may or may not lead to useful inventions that enhance the physical quality of life, but it should always be seen as instrumental to all mental formulations.

Now, fantasy and science fiction pursue distinct epistemological patterns, each in tune with the dominant matrix in which they exist. In science fictional worlds, all wonders are predicated on extensions of scientific principles, while in fantasy, they arise from the concept of magic, which may range from traditional “faerie” spellcraft to organized notions of thaumaturgy. Within all of these worlds, the main characters are generally in the position of the man freed from the chains of his fellows and propelled into a greater cosmos.

In fantasy, a common trope is to show a youth who lives in a bucolic existence, and who finds himself drawn into events of cosmic importance, often involving the combat of good and bad wizards and/or deities. Morris uses a rough variation of this trope in his four fantasy-novels, particularly in THE SUNDERINGFLOOD, though he isn’t as successful in giving his protagonist a grounding in the magical principles governing the world. Morris’s spiritual disciple Tolkien is of course famous for having hurled protagonists Bilbo and Frodo into the greater world of sorcery, walking trees and enchanted rings. The bucolic world of the Shire, from which both hobbits hail, does not as a whole wish to be tainted with all of these momentous and enigmatic presences, but its inhabitants are not really able to reject the magical cosmos in a manner comparable to the chained people in the Cave. The very idea of magic, as a force that transcends the limits of time and space, stands aligned with the concept of affective freedom.

In contrast, the epistemology of the Cave has a more ambivalent function in science fiction. For all the differences between Verne and Wells, they have in common the fact that many of their scientific seekers—the ones who part company with the world of ordinary reality—meet catastrophic fates, explicit with respect to Captain Nemo, implicit with respect to the Time Traveler. Thus, science fiction can be somewhat aligned with the concept of cognitive restraint, and not only because the forces of science—even those of made-up, “impossible” science—are supposed to cohere with the limits of time and space.

At the same time, science fiction shows a greater emphasis upon following the destiny of the society than that of the individual. Wells’ Eloi and Morlocks are bound by the chains of a chimerical evolution much as are Plato’s cavepeople, and they are doomed never to escape, existing to illustrate to the protagonist the futility of life. Yet many of Wells’ disciples altered the Platonic paradigm in order to promote a triumphalism of science. It would probably be difficult to find a science fiction author who advocated “truth” in a Platonic World of Forms, but there are hundreds who see capital-S “Science” as such a truth. Science fiction is riddled with protagonists who live in some constricted society, whose people know nothing of scientific principles, but who break free and bring the Good News of Science to convert disbelievers. Such cosmic conversions underlie the enduring appeal of a series like Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION trilogy, where the advocates of a logical means of “reading history” are proven to have superior insight over all competitors.

Not a few advocates of science fiction have shown themselves to be hostile to the representations of fantasy, confounding the fictional premises of fantasy-stories with resentment of real-world religion and/or superstition. In so doing, they validate only those products of the imagination which seem to champion real-world science—even though, in point of fact, constructs like Niven’s “Ringworld” and Blish’s “Cities in Space” are not likelier to come into being than elves and orcs. It’s a shame that science fiction enthusiasts have made this conflation, for the activity of trying to fit the human imagination into a box is not only fatuous, but futile beyond anyone’s attempt to—imagine.

AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE PT. 2

Whereas empirical thinking is essentially directed toward establishing an unequivocal relation between specific "causes" and specific effects, mythical thinking, even where it raises the question of origins as such, has a free selection of causes at its disposal... Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46.

In Part 1, I wrote:

...the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

As I reconsidered this in greater depth, I feel it necessary to explain that though the kinetic and the dramatic potentialities certainly do draw upon "patterns" derived from sense experience, those two potentialities don't make substantial use of what I've called "epistemological patterns." I suppose I might term the first type of patterns "existential," since these two potentialities are more concerned with translating existence as the fictional characters *seem* to experience it.

The other two potentialities, however, are rooted in a fictional form of epistemology, because the forms they deal with depend on abstract constructions. Once more with feeling:

The DIDACTIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.

Ernst Cassirer's passage above is one of many I've cited to clarify how modern "empirical thinking" (or "theoretical thinking" in other passages) develop out of mythical thinking. Both "symbols" and "ideas" are abstract constructions, but symbols offer the artist "a free selection of causes"-- which I have aligned with my concept of "affective freedom"-- while ideas depend more upon establishing a chain of cause and effect, which I have aligned with "cognitive restraint." But both abstract constructions depend upon the use of fictive epistemology.

Now, to repeat my conclusion from Part 1, all epistemology in fiction can only lead the reader to the experience of "half-truths," whereas epistemology in philosophy can lead the reader to the perception of "truth," at least for that particular reader.

In CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2,  I discussed some of the interpenetrations of the mythopoeic and the didactic potentiality. My example of a work dominated by the mythopoeic potentiality was Gardner Fox's Hawkman origin, but even while establishing that primacy, I also mentioned that the author had utilized "metaphysical tropes that were discursively organized by their pagan proponents." In contrast, the various CEREBUS excerpts I analyzed were all dominated by the didactic potentiality, but I asserted that author Dave Sim was at his best when he created an "expressive underthought to complement the rhetorical overthought."

Nevertheless, even though Fox is of the "affective freedom" party and Sim of the "cognitive restraint" persuasion, both authors construct their narratives around principles of an abstract nature, and so are both purveyors of sacred half-truths.

BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NULL-MYTHS: RIBIT 1-4 (1989)

In GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT.3, I summed up the "null-myth" thusly:

Nowadays, I would not associate my idea of the "null-myth" with this base denotative functionality: over time it's come to mean a work that had "super-functional" potential coded into the narrative but which became denatured by authorial confusion or misjudgment. 

In most of the examples I've analyzed so far, most of the time the "authorial confusion" stems from the author using mythopeoic symbols in a desultory manner, as if they were mere functionalities, or allowed the symbols to be reined in by didactic considerations. However, there's also the possibility that the author may allow himself to be overwhelmed by his own symbolic prolificity. Like the monarch who complained that Mozart had "two many notes," an author can produce "too many symbols" for his narrative to support. Case in point: Frank Thorne's four-issue Comico title, RIBIT.

RIBIT is almost impossible to summarize. It takes place in some vague future in which there abound references to 20th-century culture, but there's no physical resemblance to any 20th-century settings. Thorne's world is a phantasmagoria out of Bosch, in which both magic and science are hopelessly intermingled. In essence, it's a one-shot feature that allowed Thorne to draw any damn thing he felt like drawing, whether it worked within the context of a narrative or not.

For most of the story, the title character looks like a three-foot-tall version of Thorne's most famous comics-character, Red Sonja. Ribit starts out as the lizard-like familiar of a sorceress named Sahtee, and though Ribit is not human, she nurtures a devotion for Thog, a big ox of a human who works for Sahtee, Sahtee, like a lot of fantasy-sorcerers, has rivals, and she tries to create a formidable warrior-woman as a servant. The creation goes awry with Sahtee's magic combines with little Ribit, who then turns into slightly bigger Ribit. Ribit has no real loyalty to Sahtee, though, being totally devoted to Thog. Nevertheless, events transpire to get Ribit, Thog and Sahtee-- who gets transformed into a furry little homunculus-- involved in a lot of crazy fantasy-world shenanigans. 

I note with amusement that in the Grand Comics Database entry for this series, the contributor didn't list any character except Ribit-- which may indicate that he simply threw up his hands at Frank Thorne's tendency to whip out a new character every few pages. The result is definitely an "embarrassment of riches," in the sense that the art always looks impressive and imaginative, but there's not much context to any of it, except that one can be sure that whatever Thorne drew amused the heck out of him. 

(Incidentally, from the angle of the combative mode, Ribit occasionally demonstrates some fighting-talent, but the stories are so shapeless that Thorne clearly had no intention in creating a warrior-woman to rival Red Sonja. Indeed, by series' end Ribit goes back to being a lizard-- which makes one wonder what kind of lizard Thorne ever heard, that made the sort of sound associated with frogs?)

In my review of PRINCESS KNIGHT, I said that the "problematic structure" of certain works by Tezuka might 'stem from the same "problem" one finds in the works of Jack Kirby: both artists were just so damn creative they sometimes overwhelmed their own narratives with "new stuff."' Yet I felt that PRINCESS KNIGHT still had some structure, enough that I termed it a "near myth." RIBIT reminds me of the later issues of the RED SONJA. Supposedly Thorne worked on these with two writers, the very wordy Roy Thomas and comics-newcomer Clair Noto, but these issues-- aside from issue #1, reviewed here-- look like Thorne just drew whatever struck him as fun to draw. This was a sad state of affairs, because Thorne's artwork was at its best depicting Sonja's world of fantasy-- but the stories wandered and made no sense.

To sum up, RIBIT is an example of "underthinking" rather than "overthinking." Or as I put it in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

...freedom without a complementary form of internal restraint is, as Janis Joplin sang, “just another word for nothing left to lose.”  Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT

                    

 In my 2013 essay AFFECTIVITY, MEET EFFICACY, I focused upon Ernst Cassirer distinction between “causality” and “efficacy.” Causality, the philosopher said, represented humanity’s ability to think about cause and effect in a rational, discursive manner, and from this we get the first stirrings of early philosophy, and later, the developments of science. Efficacy, however, belonged to the language of myth: it depends on a blurring of the distinctions between the objective and subjective worlds.

…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

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

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

I’ve written a lot on my blog about the concept of freedom, and it’s a major reason as to why I’ve devoted so much blog-space to such obscure concepts as “the combative mode” and the various forms of phenomenality, sublimity, and so on. But freedom without a complementary form of internal restraint is, as Janis Joplin sang, “just another word for nothing left to lose.”  Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

Human beings, we may fairly deduce, relate to the world in different ways than other animals. We cannot know what goes on in the head of a lion when it stalks a bird, and then fails to catch the bird because the latter flaps its wings and flies away, We can fairly guess that the lion is frustrated, and possibly with its limited mentality it might entertain the wish to continue chasing the bird into the air. But that would seem to be as far as a lion’s imagination could go.

We also cannot really know what thoughts may have passed through the mind of a Neanderthal hunter in the same situation. Maybe our caveman stalker had no thoughts at all when his prey escaped. Yet we can at least reasonably suspect that the primitive fellow may have entertained the idea of what it would like to be a bird: to sprout wings and chase the bird into its own territory. And once he had this thought—say, for argument’s sake, that no one had entertained the thought before him—he might not be limited to thinking only about filling his belly with bird-flesh. He nay have started to think about what it would feel like to fly, to be a bird; to soar above the limits of other cavemen. At this point he probably doesn’t  think about imitating the bird by designing his own pair of wings, but he may decide to translate this vagrant imaginings into a mythic form. The caves at Lascaux attest to some sort of mental alchemy that combined man and bird, even if today we can only look at drawings of bird-man hybrids and label them “portraits of shamans.”  They may have been just that, but their original context may matter less than their role in determining humankind’s affective freedom.

In one conversation I mentioned that humankind’s advancements in powered flight would have been impossible without this sort of internal, subjective appreciation for the possible thrill of flying. My opponent simply said something along the lines, “Yeah, but powered flight wouldn’t have been possible without science and logical thinking.”  Quite true; as far as achieving an effect in the physical world, wishing never makes it so. But my opponent in my opinion missed the point: the wish makes everything else thinkable. To the earthbound human who can only run and jump and swim, the idea of flying cannot be imagined as having some practical applications—not even just that of catching birds—until *after * it has been re-imagined as something that the earthbound human can imagine bringing into his own “sensuous, objective experience.” 

One of the greatest “myths” propounded by empiricist-types has been that of the “caveman-engineer:” the primitive who instantly sees some practical advantage in making a new type of spear or a rooftop, because he’s so much more attuned to the scientific principles in the physical world, even if he doesn’t have a scientific system as such. This very selective conception of the early scientist was of course an anachronism: an imagining of some 18^th-century scientist born before his time; one who would be in no way influenced by the myths and religion of his time. This was one of many verbal strategies used by empiricists to tout the supreme importance of cognitive restraint, of valuing only practical cause and effect, and to consign myth to the dust-bin of “failed science.”

The mistake of utilitarianism—that the only things that matter are those which have a defined use—is one that depends upon the formulations of cognitive restraint. A utilitarian might allow some niggling truth to my “flying caveman” example, but he would view the caveman’s “fancy of flight” to be relevant to the human condition only because it did lead to a useful development. In contrast, the utilitarian would not be impressed by, say, Tolkien’s example of “arresting strangeness:” of imaging a world with a green sun. Even in the world of fiction, the world of the green sun would have no relevance unless it illustrated the restraints on physical life expressed through scientific fact. Thus, if autrhor Hal Clement devoted a book to explaining the makeup of a fictional world that happened to have a green sun for some scientific reason, then that, and that alone, would have relevance to utilitarianism.

What I’ve repeatedly emphasized that the world of affective freedom is a whole package: that the ability to imagine impossible things is crucial to human nature, whether it leads to specific inventions or not. Depicting a shaman as a bird-human hybrid may not have led directly to any fantasies of personal flight, and thus the shaman-dream might have no relevance at all to the development of powered flight. I argue, rather, that whether the subjective outpourings of myth and fiction do or don't lead to useful developments, all of them are equally important in determining the meaning of human freedom.