THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAOS OVER ORDER

...Calvino concluded that, although belief in the power of literature to promulgate a particular political doctrine was as deluded as the conventional view that literature expresses immutable truths of human nature, the writer still has legitimate political roles. He can help to give a voice to the inarticulate. By presenting possible worlds, he can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.

Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not a calculated order.  -- George Bataille, LITERATURE AND EVIL, p. 89, 1957. (translation Alastair Hamilton)

Despite bracketing Calvino and Bataille, I'm only citing them to support some of my recent thoughts on the legacy of Lewis Carroll.

 

I'm entirely on Carroll's side when he burlesques the moralistic priorities of his time. The "Father William" poem was one that I enjoyed as a child, though I had no idea that it was a parody of an earlier work. I responded, on an elementary level, to visual incongruities like an old man balancing an eel on the tip of his nose. 

At the same time, I remarked that Carroll did not set up any sort of direct counter-argument against the utilitarianism of the moralists. Doing anything like that would have run counter to his project, to embrace incongruous images and wordplay above all other considerations. Even if he meant to mock English orthodoxy with his spoof of the heraldic symbols of the Lion and the Unicorn, he wouldn't be doing so to envisage some other, better ethos, which, in the first quote, Peter Washington claims was former Communist Calvino's motive for embracing non-representational fantasy.

I've no idea if Bataille had any contact with the works of Calvino, though I tend to doubt it. Yet it's interesting that the French philosopher undercuts, in general terms, the notion that the "chaos" of impossible notions might simply be used for non-specific utilitarian purposes, for forging new ideas about re-ordering society along better lines. I'm sure that I've occasionally touched on this notion in one context or another, but I like to think I've never descended into the banality of Jack Zipes, claiming that fantasy is good for "questioning the hierarchical arrangements of society." 

I don't know that Carroll, despite his considerable intellectual gifts, would have thought my ethos any less constricting than the Victorian moralists. Because I'm always validating narratives full of "epistemological patterns," some onlookers might assume I'm automatically claiming such works to be superior in my private literary hierarchy. I've tried to counter-act this misreading with my definition of all literary insights as "half-truths." They are not immutable truths or hearkenings of better societal orders. Of fantasy are half-truths born, and to fantasy they all return, even the ones with heavy utilitarian content. Still, I validate the psychological patterns of the Alice books as epistemologically concrescent, rather than the books being "pure nonsense." Perhaps Carroll would not have agreed.

Anyone who has read my blogposts attentively, if not uncritically, should anticipate that I might validate Bataille's analysis of impossible things. (I haven't written on Calvino before, but I will note in passing that though I liked some of the nonsense of COSMICOMICS, the aforementioned WINTER'S NIGHT is just another lit-guy fetishizing his disinterest/incapacity to tell an interesting story.) Bataille probably would also not get my distinctions regarding "epistemology built on literary patterns of knowledge rather than as knowledge as consensually defined." But I agree with him that "impossible things" in fiction always suggest the violence of chaos more than new patterns of order, in "orderly" fantasists like Tolkien as much as "chaotic" types like Carroll.

In the fourth section of LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, I disagreed with Susanne Langer that folktales were no more than a "remarkable form of nonsense," and that they did on occasion encode some of the same epistemological patterns of "full-fledged myths." That said, the latter types of stories tend to privilege epistemological half-truths. I would tend to assume (though no one can be sure) that the chaotic elements in The Epic of Gilgamesh, like the giant scorpions encountered by the title hero, are "ordered" by, say, metaphysical correlations about the nature of the universe. In contrast, a lot of the talking animals of the simpler folktales Langer scorned may not have any such patterns. But as basic constructs the giant scorpions and the talking animals equally communicate the chaos of *strangeness," as much as do (say) Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter and the Mad Hatter of the BATMAN comics.

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.

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 2

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

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

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

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

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

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 3

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 1

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on "secondary familiarity" in a future post.

 

THE READING RHEUM: FANTOMAS (1911)

I've heard for many years that the character of Fantomas, originating in a series of French novels (forty-three in all), has been pegged as one of the important "proto-superheroes," for all that he was an unregenerate villain, unlike "gentleman-thieves" along the lines of 1905's "Arsene Lupin" and 1914's "Gray Seal." I've now read only the first of the novels, and there's some evidence that Fantomas is an important transitional figure. However, one of the primary visual tropes to which superhero fans respond-- that of costume-- does not apply in the case of the initial prose version of Fantomas. The cover of the first book edition, showing the villain wearing evening dress and domino mask as he looms over a city, is not borne out in the prose, nor does he wear the hooded garments seen in some if not all of the Feulliade silent serials.

Instead, Fantomas's costume, if he has one in the first book, is that of being "a man of many faces." Now, being a simple "disguise expert" is not enough to mark a protagonist as belonging to what I've termed "the superhero idiom." In past essays I've noted the existence of various characters who went around in masks, some of whom belonged to the idiom, like the Durango Kid, and some who did not, like Oldring's Masked Rider. By the same token, there are various "men of many faces" who do make my cut for belonging to the idiom, like the 1934 pulp-hero Secret Agent X--

--while others do not, like "Paris" from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

The original FANTOMAS novel does, I believe, create the sense of strangeness needed for any character relevant to the superhero idiom. Indeed, when the novel begins, various ordinary French citizens are discussing the rumors of Fantomas, and the first thing they mention is his penchant for disguise:

In these days we have been distressed by a steady increase in crime, and among the causes we shall henceforth have to count a mysterious and most dangerous creature, to whom the baffled authorities and general rumor have for some time now given the name of Fantomas. It is impossible to say exactly what or to know precisely who Fantomas is. He often assumes the form and personality of some particular and often well-known individual; sometimes he assumes the forms of two human beings  at the same time. Sometimes he works alone, sometimes with accomplices; sometimes he can be identified as such and such a person, but no one has ever gotten to know Fantomas himself.

Later novels do unveil aspects of the master villain's history, but as far as the first novel is concerned, Fantomas is a shadow that constantly looms over law-abiding civilization, committing crimes with impunity, despite being pursued by a resourceful detective, Juve, who also dabbles in disguises himself. Imposture seems like a disease spread by the evildoer. One of Fantomas's early victims, a young man named Charles, is framed for a murder probably committed by the master villain, and to escape prosecution the youth must, with Juve's help, take on a fictitious new identity, that of Jerome Fandor, who often joins Juve in future novels to pursue Fantomas. Indeed, for reasons that are never entirely clear, the fictitious cognomen "Fandor" is explicitly taken from that of the master criminal.

In this novel Fantomas is even less "on stage" than other famous villains, like Dracula in Stoker's novel or Fu Manchu in the Rohmer series. Usually the criminal's misdeeds are discovered long after he is gone. Only in one sequence does a victim confront for some time a disguised criminal who may or may not be Fantomas, but the only reason that the villain maintains the confrontation is to suss out where the victim's valuables can be found. During this encounter, the maybe-Fantomas speaks of himself in lofty terms; when the victim says that he "must" leave, he replies, "Must? That is a word that is not often said to me."

A preface to my edition of the novel mentions that in later works, the malcontent attacks victims with such devices of plague-rats and sulfuric acid stored in perfume-spritzers. There are no gimmicks in the first outing, though. Even more important, though, for the determination of a character's relevance to the superhero idiom is that there is also an absence of spectacular violence.

In contrast to the Fu Manchu novels that began the very next year, all of the villain's violent acts are committed off-stage. There are sporadic incidents of violence, but no combat in the sense of the combative mode. This isn't surprising, since the narrative seems more allied with that of the detective tale, so that it's quite as if the authors had sought to create a series in which the Great Detective's lauded foe Moriarty received his own universe in which to play games upon the righteous.

FANTOMAS by itself is a good if not exceptional proto-pulp story. Upon reading further novels, I may be able to determine whether the character deserves to be associated with the combative idiom of superheroes and their supervillain adversaries, or whether he belongs to a side-category of "subcombative supervillains."

ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT

In my most recent film-review I wrote:

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

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

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

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

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

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


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

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

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

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

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

BEFALL, DULL CARE

The lyrics of this traditional folklore song adjure the listener to bid "begone" to "dull care" in favor of song and dance.

I prithee, be gone from me, Begone! dull care, You and I shall never agree. Long time hast thou been tarrying here, And fain thou wouldst me kill, But i' faith, dull care, Thou never shall have thy will.

However, an awful lot of modern literature is devoted to embracing "dull care" as an indication that the author is able to accomplish the "tough-minded" task of representing reality-as-it-really-is. This is more than simply an attention to verisimilitude. Rather, it is a philosophical rejection of the idea that the world can ever transcend what various authors have termed "the dull round of existence."

By the criteria I introduced in VERTICAL VIRTUES PT. 2, "transcendence" of a purely horizontal, non-sublime nature can occur in naturalistic works like Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND. Of course, WIND, though not in any way sublime, is focused on portraying the life of Scarlett O'Hara as intensely interesting. In JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4, I mentioned another work of naturalistic phenomenality-- J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE-- though not in a direct one-on-one comparison to GWTW. But I will make such a comparison now: DISGRACE is the sort of work that is dedicated to telling a dull story, for the apparent purpose of showing reality as dull, the better to contrast said work to the excitement of escapist fiction.

Now, my ruminations on the different forms of transcendence obliged me, in COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT.. 4, to refine my earlier concepts of the two forms of the sublime, in order to locate both forms within more general principles" the "combinatory-sublime" with a "combinatory mode" and the "dynamic-sublime" within a "dynamicity mode." I have also stated that works within the uncanny and marvelous phenomenalities inherently possessed greater potential for combinations than did the naturalistic. However, though the principal use of both phenomenalities is to evoke different forms of "strangeness," there have been many attempts to vary this dominant approach. In COMBINATORY-GLORY, I said that "not all works in the marvelous phenomenality are equally able to inspire the affect of the combinatory-sublime." My proximate reference was to a traditional folktale, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was," because even though the tale shows its protagonist encountering assorted fearful monsters, the creatures don't really inspire the sublime sense of "strangeness" because the story's focus is upon the tale's main joke: that the young man overcomes all these monsters but learns "fear" (of a sort) from a woman.

That said, the folktale does not offer what I'm seeking: a narrative that manages to undermine the potential of the combinatory-sublime appropriate to the marvelous, just as DISGRACE fails to evoke even the limited horizontal transcendence possible in naturalistic works of art. I haven't reviewed too many metaphenomenal works that fully embrace "dull care," but I have encountered such works in "arty" prose science fiction or fantasy. Some examples would include Samuel R. Delany's novel TRITON and Kazuo Ishiguro's THE BURIED GIANT. These two novels have a few of the virtues of Mitchell, but they tend to favor the vices of Coetzee. I also regard both novels, like DISGRACE, as inconsummate works, by reason of their tendency to "overthink the overthought."  But if nothing else, the Delany and Ishiguro works serve to illustrate that not all works in the marvelous phenomenality necessarily deliver the appeal of the combinatory-sublime.

At the same time, just as GONE WITH THE WIND delivers on "horizontal transcendence" in marked contrast to the failings of DISGRACE, there are certainly uncanny or marvelous works that lack vertical transcendence (a.k.a. sublimity) but manage to produce some level of horizontal transcendence, thus taking advantage of the more general pattern of the combinatory mode. Ishiguro's earlier SF-work NEVER LET ME GO, while also devoted to "dull care," at least benefits from a better handling of interpersonal relationships, though nothing comparable to the level of Mitchell's accomplishment.

OUTRE OUTFITS OVERVIEW PT. 2

In Part 1 I mentioned the example of Flash Gordon. As most fans will know, he's an Earthman with no special physical powers, but he sometimes makes lists of "superheroes" because he becomes so thoroughly a "man of Mongo." Gordon makes intermittent use of Mongo's marvelous high-tech, but he's not as tied to his ray-gun as is, say, his predecessor Buck Rogers. Indeed, the earliest FLASH GORDON strips emphasize Gordon as a monster-slaying he-man, probably in emulation of the popular TARZAN comic strip by Hal Foster. Thus the most consistent indicator of his metaphenomenality is his otherworldly costume-- usually some variation on the image above, though Gordon probably changes his clothes more than most of his SF-competitors.

But Gordon is only partially a man in a science-fiction universe. From the aspect of the NUM theory, how should one regard the attire of characters fully born within such marvelous environments?

The denizens of the STAR TREK universe aren't wearing attire that would seem in any way strange to the sentients of their cosmos, while any aliens who meet them for the first time certainly wouldn't have any expectations about what sort of clothes they ought to be wearing. Unlike many latter-day science-fiction teleserials, TREK is consistent in showing that  everyone in its future is wearing some outre-looking fashion. Clearly the costume department was instructed to make even simple jumpsuits seem subtly "alien," and not by referencing European Renaissance garb, as FLASH GORDON often did.

But in most regards, the NUM theory is based not in the reactions of characters within their fictive universes, but on the response of the reader. The simple, vaguely-naval velour shirts of Classic Trek don't participate in the opulence of FLASH GORDON's fashions, or even of many of the other characters in their own universe.

Nevertheless, the uniforms of both the original TREK and its serial descendants successfully convey the aura of the uncanny: they convey "strangeness" on their own terms even apart from their association with high-tech marvelous items, like the "phasers" that duplicate the function of Flash's "ray-gun."


Here's a contrasting example, from the short-lived 1990s teleseries SPACE RANGERS:

SPACE RANGERS is less in TREK's mode of intellectualized space opera and more in that of FLASH GORDON's unapologetic science-fantasy adventure, but like TREK it takes place in a distant future wherein multiple alien worlds have been colonized by the descendants of contemporary humans, as is made clear by character names like "John" and "Daniel."

Yet, even though RANGERS takes place within a marvelous setting, the producers did not make an attempt to give their heroes' attire any strangeness. All of them wear suits that resemble a bulky form of military fatigues. To me they resemble contemporary outfits, though I can't place just where I've seen such outfits utilized. Regardless, the costuming department clearly patterned the costumes on modern dress, and so gives them all a functional "naturalistic" aura, despite the otherworldly settings of the stories.

In Part 3 I'll be dealing in more detail with the ways in which the naturalistic inevitably underlies the other two phenomenalites, albeit without defining them.

ADDENDA: Changed my mind and decided to explore the above matters in an essay with a different title, and so not confined to one particular trope.

CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN PT. 2

For this essay I'll just tie together the observations between the previous essay and my last general-theory essay on the NUM formula.

In the former essay, I'm now asserting that causality in a literary context-- which, contra Todorov, is not homologous with the causality human beings experience in life-- has both a cognitive aspect and an affective aspect, summed up as "regularity" and "intelligibility."  Though I have not stated it in so many words, the same would be true of the Cassirer-esque parallel to causality, "efficacy," whose cognitive and affective aspects would be "anti-" versions of both concepts above.

In THE INTERSECTING AXES essay, I was still regarding causality as unitary in this statement:

It occurs to me that with both my categories of "the naturalistic" and "the marvelous," all of the "intangible shit" is highly dependent on whether or not the diegetic world depicted is one in which causality can or cannot be disrupted.

Now, I would say that it is only the regularity aspect of causality that has been violated in the domain of the marvelous.  Works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous" both violate the "intelligibility" aspect of causality, and the affects associated with the over-ruling quality of "strangeness"-- a quality Rudolf Otto insightfully termed an "overplus."  But many audience-members, when looking at works in the domain of the uncanny, tend to ally such works with the domain of the naturalistic simply because all they can see is that the author has not violated the cosmos' appearance of regularity.

For instance, take the case of the Batman, whom I used here as an example to demonstrate the problematic status of such an alliance:

Like the Todorov book I’ve recently critiqued, the naïve critic’s assertion, “Batman isn’t a superhero because he doesn’t have superpowers,” contains a fundamental insight despite being essentially wrong. The latter also takes a lot less time to refute. The naïve critic has chosen to view the adjective “super” in “superhero” as meaning one thing and one thing only: the possession of powers, giving one the ability to perform “super” feats that human heroes cannot perform. However, “super” clearly does not connote this, either in dictionaries or in the opinions of many readers who do consider Batman a superhero—usually for an equally simple reason, because he wears a costume.

It's clear to me that even if Batman never encountered any marvelous entities or used any marvelous weapons, he would have a stronger alliance with the domain of "the marvelous" than that of "the naturalistic." His case would be the same as Zorro, the Lone Ranger, and many other costumed types who had no powers and dominantly opposed only naturalistic menaces.

The only affects appropriate to the domain of the naturalistic, then, are those governed by what I have called "the atypical," which combines the regularity and intelligibility aspects of causality.  Those affects were described in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT. 1:

In a fictive world where affectivity is defined by the causal order, the dominant sympathetic affect is "admiration" of things characteristic of the causal order, particularly what Jung called Freud's "physiological factors," while the dominant antipathetic affect is "fear" of aspects of the causal/physical order.

Now, I have chosen in other essays to make clear distinctions between the two different types of "strangeness," types I labeled by the relation of their sublimity-potential to the depiction of "reality" in the narrative.  But though I still feel those distinctions are important to a discussion of how sublimity occurs across the three domains, those distinctions do not bear on analyzing the maintenance of fictive causality.

Thus, I would now revise this sentence from the AFFECTIVE FREEDOM essay:

the uncanny flourishes precisely in the contrast between the monocausal nature of cognitive reality in a given work, while affectivity "symbolically exceeds the cognitive order," taking the dominant forms of "fascination" for the sympathetic affect and "dread" for the antipathetic affect.

It is not a "cognitive order" that has been exceeded, but the "affective aspect" of fictive causality.

The statement I make in that essay regarding "the marvelous" regarding its affects also requires some revision:

Where affectivity exceeds the causal order in accordance with the multicausal nature of the world's cognitivity, the dominant sympathetic affect is "exaltation" toward the multicausal, and the dominant antipathetic affect is "awe" toward it.

The affectivity alluded to above is in effect the same "anti-intelligibility" that makes a more muted appearance in works of the uncanny, but now it is allied to an "anti-regularity" that dominates the causal order of works of the marvelous.

CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN

I've finished another book that I started back in December: Roy Bhaskar's A REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE, first mentioned here.  I'm not going to devote anything like the extensive coverage I gave to Edward Skidelsky's book, however.  Bhaskar's book started out well, but quickly became repetitious and devoted to Wittengenstein-like logic-chopping.  The most interesting section is this one:

Regularity determinism must be straightaway distinguished from two
other forms of determinism: which may be called 'ubiquity'
determinism and 'intelligibility" determinism. Ubiquity determinism
asserts that every event has *a* real *cause*; intelligibility
determinism that every event has *an* intelligible *cause*; regularity
determinism that the same (type of) event has the same (type of)
*cause*. The concepts of 'cause' involved in the three determinisms
are of course distinct. For the ubiquity determinist the *cause is
that thing, material or agent that is productive of an effect*; for
the intelligibility determinist it is simply that which renders an
event intelligible to men; for the regularity determinist
it is the total set of conditions that regularly proceeds or
accompanies an event.-- Bhaskar, ARTOS, p. 70.



It occurred to me that given how often I talk about "causality" with respect to the NUM formula, as I do in this essay, I might experiment by comparing Bhaskar's distinctions about the "concepts of cause" to the nature of causality in my Cassirer-indebted schema.

The most obvious disconnect is that I'm interested in a schema that takes in all of the "symbolic forms," while Bhaskar is interested only in a theory of science.  Further, as I noted here Bhaskar cites three philosophical approaches to science and allocates each of the "determinisms" above to one of the three.  But Bhaskar's three approaches are irrelevant to parallels to Cassirer's opposition of causality and efficacy, which I've also identified as the split between the *cognitive* and the *affective."

With such a comparison in mind, both "ubiquity determinism" and "regularity determinism" seem like two closely related statements about the nature of "real causes," which means that they could be subsumed under Aquinas' definition of the cognitive: "how we know the world." By contrast, "intelligibility determinism" makes a statement regarding humankind's perception of "real causes," which may be subsumed under Aquinas' definition of the affective: "how we understand the world." In so saying I assert that the conviction that all things should prove intelligible is an affective, not a cognitive, state of mind, which may well be at odds with Bhaskar's intention.

In this essay I attempted to reconfigure my older cognitive/affective schema with one more aligned to Cassirer's concepts:

NATURALISTIC-- cognitivity and affectivity are defined by the causal order; i.e. "one definite cause yields one definite effect"

UNCANNY-- cognitivity is defined by the causal order, but affectivity exceeds causal order and participates in the multicausal nature of "efficacy"

MARVELOUS-- both cognitivity and affectivity exceed the causal order and participate in the multicausal nature of "efficacy"

But as I said above, this configuration doesn't adequately define causality.

I hypothesize, then, that causality within the sphere of human art is reducible to two interrelated aspects: that of regularity (cognitive) and intelligibility (affective).  With that in mind, then:

In the NATURALISTIC category, all phenomena are both "regular" and "intelligible."

In the UNCANNY category, all phenomena are "regular" in that they do not exceed the cognitive//physical nature of causality, but some phenomena are not "intelligible" given that they may prove unintelligible by the standards of the NATURALISTIC.

In the MARVELOUS category, some phenomena may be neither "regular" nor "intelligible."

This breakdown would allow for both of the following definitions of fantasy to be true.  The first speaks primarily of causality's cognitive aspect:

“The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday reality.”—Roger Caillois, AU COEUR DU FANTASTIQUE.

While this one challenges causality's affective aspect:

“The fantastic in literature doesn’t exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle.”-- Lars Gustaffson, cited in Franz Rottensteiner's THE FANTASY BOOK.

I also note that Cassirer, in his comparison between the discursive mode of theoretical reason and the expressive mode of myth, essentially takes aim against the "regularity" aspect of causality:

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

And, a couple of pages later, he contrasts them on the principle I call intelligibility:

Here again it is not the concept of causality as such but the specific form of causal explanation which underlies the difference and contrast between the two spiritual worlds [of theoretical reason and myth]... Science is content if it succeeds in apprehending the individual event in space and time as a special instance of a general law... The mythical consciousness, on the other hand, applies its "why" precisely to the particular and the unique.  It "explains" the individual event by postulating individual acts of the will."

It's worth noting, too, that a page later Cassirer emphasizes that for myth-consciousness "all the forces of nature are... nothing other than expressions of a demonic or divine will."

Thus, when I experience "strangeness" in either an uncanny or marvelous work of art, I am feeling myself divorced by its violation of either the "regularity" or "intelligibility" aspects of causal law.

OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS

The motive for my recent meditations on the "nonbody" nature of the uncanny in this essay came about as I meditated on my analysis of the 1965 film A STUDY IN TERROR.

Sherlock Holmes, both in the canonical stories and in the character's many public domain adaptations, has been valuable to my studies in that he has been all over the phenomenal map.  In addition, though I've judged that the original canon does not generally manifest the mode of the combative, many of the adaptations-- including STUDY-- have been instructive about the ways in which a character known primarily for deduction became equally associated with martial adventures.

Now, when I declare STUDY IN TERROR to be a metaphenomenal film, I do so in the conviction that its use of the "perilous psycho" trope-- incarnate in the film's version of Jack the Ripper-- conveys the element of "strangeness" necessary for any metaphenomenal work. 

I also find that STUDY satisfies my requirements for a combative work: a narrative focus upon a plotline leading to an important battle at or near the story's climax, and a battle that depicts "spectacular violence" between two or more entities.  It is possible for one of the two to be *naturalistic* in nature-- which was my original estimation of this version of Holmes-- but for a work to be both combative and metaphenomenal, the other combatant must be either uncanny or marvelous.

I started thinking, though: in what qualities does Jack the Ripper's metaphenomenality inhere?  As his only qualification for the metaphenomenal is his status as a "perilous psycho," that metaphenomenality must inhere in a mental, "non-body" quality.  His madness is his method, and therefore his metaphenomenality.

So far so good.  But I began to wonder-- what about Sherlock's own mental attributes?  He isn't a psycho, at least in this version.  But his polymath deductive skills might qualify Holmes-- or some versions of Holmes-- as a metaphenomenal figure, in keeping with another trope, "Outre Outfits Skills and Devices."  Holmes does not use any special devices in most iterations, and though his traditional appearance has become iconic it is not in itself "outre."  But what of his mental skills?

The last time I weighed in on Sherlock's mental propensities, I judged that they were entirely naturalistic.  In my review of the 1922 SHERLOCK HOLMES I wrote:

Many of Doyle's Holmes tales inhabit a world between the naturalistic and the uncanny. In contrast to many detectives, who seem merely clever, Holmes repeatedly conveys the impression of an all-knowing psychic. However, this impression is always (both in original stories and media-adaptations) quickly dispelled by Holmes himself explaining his intuitions in terms of empirical observations. Holmes' deductive skills thus always register in the naturalistic mode and never in the uncanny.

But now I'm not so sure.  True, Holmes always offers rational reasons for his amazing deductions, and, unlike his creator, frowns upon the idea of psychic phenomena.  But in some sense, his abilities to descry peoples' occupations or peregrinations from their appearance appears much like the tricks of mentalists, who appear to be psychic by virtue of "knowing" things about strangers.  This comparison would also give Holmes a link to the trope of "enthralling illusionism."

After weighing the matter, I would say that most of Holmes' amazing observations about people still tend to belong to the naturalistic, as they do not create a sense of strangeness.  So Holmes uses a naturalistic, not an uncanny, version of the "illusionism" trope. 

However, I must consider that another aspect of his mental skill-set seems more uncanny. I called him a "polymath" before, and in truth one key to Holmes' deductions is his ability to know more than the common man knows.  There are many naturalistic characters who are virtual storehouses of knowledge.  Yet Holmes' fount of knowledge does, at times, seem to verge into the territory of the uncanny.  It might be best to posit that Holmes-stories are uncanny only when he taps into some knowledge that seems too recondite for even a consulting detective to know.

This in turn leads me to consider that other characters may have uncanny propensities due to their outre levels of knowledge. In Bram Stoker's DRACULA the human opponents of the vampire would be practically powerless to fight Dracula, if not for Van Helsing's knowledge of the occult.  By this logic Van Helsing would be an even stronger candidate to be considered an "uncanny" opponent to the "marvelous" central character.

Other polymaths appear throughout popular literature, and many of them show excessive abilities to devise a wide number of devices by virtue of scientific genius.  In A SHORT HISTORY OF HEROIC FANTASY-ADVENTURE I concluded that the dime novel "Steam Man of the Plains" seems to have been one of the first modernistic works of heroic fantasy-adventure, as well as depicting a combative encounter between the titular Steam Man and a band of nasty Indians.  The protagonist of that story, then, might be deemed to have an uncanny skill in being able to devise such a creation, even though the dominant phenomenality of the story is "marvelous." 

TERMINOLOGICAL TRACKDOWN PT. 2

THREE INTO TWO WILL GO, SOMETIMES PT 1 was my first schematized assertion that asserted that the cognitive and affective aspects of a given work were equally important in determining its overall effect.  I stated this in contradistinction to Tzvetan Todorov, who advocated an approach based only in the cognitivity—specificially a cognitively heavily invested in Freudian hermeneutics. 

      The work of Ernst Cassirer was not a proximate influence on this division of "the cognitive" and "the affective."  The division was a routine one seen in psychological studies, often phrased roughly along the lines of Freud’s famous “reality principle” (for the cognitive) and “pleasure principle” (for the affective).  On occasion I allowed a few of my essays to repeat this dichotomy without examining it in greater depth, though in general my readings of Cassirer, as seen in my earliest posts, have helped preserve me against the errors of naïve positivism.  I always appreciated Cassirer’s advocacy of expressivity in literature, as opposed to Todorov’s all-cognitive-all-the-time orientation.  Still, not until Oct 12, 2011 did I investigate any aspect of Cassirer’s main argument re: his “concept of force” as expounded in MYTHICAL THINKING.  Cassirer affirmed that there was a justifiable approach to the “concept of force” that paralleled that of Freud’s “reality principle,” one that depended upon analyzing physical forces in an empirical/theoretical manner.  However, Cassirer certainly did not dismiss the contrary mode as some sort of fatuous “pleasure principle,” as Freud did.  Thus he designated “causality” was the domain of empirical/theoretical thinking, while he used the term “efficacy” to denote the domain of mythical thinking, which focused upon a “free selection of causes.” 

       Eventually I discerned that the “free selection of causes” Cassirer identified in archaic mythologies was identical in mode to the “fudge factors” writers use whenever they describe all manner of marvelous beings and devices.  In AFFECTIVE EFFECTS PT 2 I said:

...I would say that the "strangeness" of the metaphenomenal assumes qualities covalent with those of Cassirer's "magical efficacy." 

     Yet it's a little harder to demonstrate that writers who invoked “the uncanny” were making the same “free selection.”  Because uncanny works do not violate the causal order, many readers will not view them as being allied to the marvelous, which does violate that order. 

       Nevertheless, in the first of a possible series of essays to which I alluded at the conclusion of THREE PROBABILITIES,  I will offer a proof that "the uncanny" does indeed participate in the quality of Cassirer's "magical efficacy," even though it does so in a different manner than "the marvelous" does.  I’ve repeatedly asserted that the uncanny is that category in which causality is not broken, as in works of the marvelous, but merely bent.  This “bending” is, like any similar physical alteration, must be the result of an application of force.  But in works of the uncanny, that force only appears to accede to the iron law of causality. In truth such works are dominated by a countervailing law: the law of what I have termed the “combinatory-sublime.”