HORMONE TROUBLE

 I'm trying to frame this as a response to a post claiming that in the 1980s "comics became a medium for young guys who didn't want to grow up, and who wanted the signifiers of adult themes without the complexity and ambiguity that could be found in novels and cinema." _________________

C.S. Lewis once said something along the lines of, "It's unfair to assume that fairy tales are for children, for many adults like them, and many children do not."   

I feel the same way about the general assertion that adventure stories, in the comics or anywhere else, were aimed at kids and/teens. Don't some adults like the genre all their lives, while some children turn their nose up at superheroes and barbarians when very young?

It's true that adolescents may pursue a genre or form of storytelling avidly for some years and then lose interest. Getting older MAY be a factor why those persons move on to other things. However, the best seller lists suggest that the greater numbers move on not to Nabokov but to "beach books."

Other adolescents, like the majority of comics nerds under discussion, can't be said to simply "not want to grow up." If they like a genre deeply enough, they'll pursue it. Maybe they'll embrace trash as readily as diamonds; maybe they won't. But since the "adult world" supports quite a lot of trash too, getting older doesn't seem to have anything to do with one's tastes.  

   

RULES OF RE-ENGAGEMENT

Partly in response to my current line of thought expressed in QUICK NUM NOTES, I re-examined the five essays I wrote about "the suspension of disbelief" as formulated by Samuel Coleridge and responded to by Stephen King. I concluded that quasi-series with the 2023 post STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT, but now I have some new refinements.

First of all, I failed to account for two different levels of engagement: one primary and "unearned," the other secondary and "earned." I pointed out in the course of the essays that a reader's receptiveness to the genres of fantasy does not depend exactly on "suspending disbelief." Some readers may be so invested in naive realism that they can never accept metaphenomenal subject matter in any way; they find it childish and would never, in line with Stephen King's dictum, even trouble to exert their mental muscles to engage. Yet I've encountered fans of the metaphenomenal who are just as naively realistic as any fantasy-hater, but who view their reading material as simple escapism from the rigors of real life. Other fantasy-readers may believe in one or more forms of the metaphenomenal in real life, ranging from psychic phenomena or the return of the Messiah, or they may be agnostic about such matters but open to real-world possibilities. Some may place credence in science fiction but not in magical fantasy, and so on. All of these forms of engagement proceed from individual taste, and so as far as the author of any given "meta" work is concerned, a given reader's willingness to engage is unearned, because the reader approaches the work with a certain degree of receptivity no matter how good or bad the work is.  

The secondary level of engagement, though, is one that the author does have to earn. In QUICK NUM NOTES I asked the question, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" The question was directed to those Gothic authors who thought they were being more "realistic" by revealing that a purported ghost was just a guy in a bedsheet, when in truth there's not much (if any) real-world evidence for swindlers who dress up in bedsheets (and maybe more for real ghosts). A good storyteller like Conan Doyle can cobble together enough suggestive details as to make it seem logical that the villain of HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES would go through the trouble of painting a dog with phosphorescent paint to get across the effect of a ghost-hound. When an author manages to take the reader to the second level of engagement, the reader feels validated in investing in the far-fetched events of the narrative. A contrary example-- just to name the first that comes to mind-- is a dopey "weird western," HAUNTED RANCH, in which the plotters, as unimaginative as their creators, try to create the illusion of a haunting by simply projecting spooky sounds into the ranch-house. 

The same basic rule pertains to marvelous phenomena. In this month's essay AMAZON ATROCITY, which offered an overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN tenure, I called attention to one story in which a fiery giant arises from the ground beneath Paradise Island-- yet the author neglects to give any rationale for the creature's appearance. I know that had I read this particular tale at age 10 I would have been offended by the author's implication that the kids reading this comic were too stupid to need explanations-- and I say this with a clear memory of another Kanigher story of the same period in which he pissed me off with his cavalier attitude toward storytelling.       

Further, I gave a couple of examples of the barest justifications Kanigher might have employed to gain his readers' secondary engagement: "Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians?" Both of these conceits could have been further expanded upon in line with either didactic or mythopoeic abstractions, and such abstractions might have made the story more interesting, thus encouraging readers to continue reading the heroine's adventures.

This idea of an author having to earn the reader's secondary engagement will play into a future essay on related matters.  

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 3

 So in the previous two installments of this essay-series, I've addressed AT-AT Pilot's essential question. "Is it possible for literature to be evil?" Dominantly my response has been, "most if not all evil is to be found in the parts of literature that encourage 'work,' a concerted effort toward a real-world goal." And even then, one must analyze a work's explicit or implicit polemic in order to determine if the goal advocated is evil. 

An obvious example of explicit polemic can be found in the 1915 BIRTH OF A NATION film, which adapted Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel THE CLANSMAN. The film (and, I assume, the source novel) makes no bones about its message: that liberated Black slaves must be kept down by the Ku Klux Klan. Implicit polemic is harder to identify, because so many critics project polemic where none is intended. However, such identification is not impossible and can usually be pegged by the way the implicit type mimics the irrational propositions of the explicit type. 

I have judged J.M. Coetzee's anti-colonialist novel DISGRACE as implicitly polemical due to the mirroring of two major events in the story. In Event One, the viewpoint character, a White South African professor teaching at the collegiate level, is condemned for allegedly manipulating a female student-- possibly but not definitely Black African-- into an affair. In Event Two, the professor's daughter, who runs a farm in South Africa, is raped by Black African trespassers, one of whom impregnates her. But because the rape took place against a scion of colonizers, it's asserted that the woman will eventually marry her rapist and that the land she owns will return to a Black African family. Obviously, some readers did not judge this disproportionate "tit for tat" as evil, in the same way that most readers today would judge the Dixon work and the Griffith film as evil. Clearly, I find them all morally noxious.

But none of the above works fall into the category I've called "play for play's sake," which takes in generally the majority of popular culture, and specifically the KAMASUTRA manga of Go Nagai, with which this discussion began. So far, most of the Nagai works I've surveyed are wild outpourings of sex and violence, with almost no attempts to impose any moral order on the chaos. The closest thing Nagai himself offers as a key to his works is an "ethic of transgression," insofar as he believes human nature is truly one big playground for a bunch of Freudian Id-Monsters. But he never expouses any sort of polemic-- though even in the more permissive country of his birth, Nagai was often criticized for his explicitness.

The majority of censorious critics don't bother to establish even an implicit polemic as I did with DISGRACE above. These critics usually follow one of two approaches-- the "monkey see monkey do" approach and the "projected polemic" approach-- and it just so happens that the two most prominent enemies of popular comics in the postwar years broke down along those respective lines. Frederic Wertham begins with the supposition that children were as twigs that would be inevitably bent by the wrong influences, and that any time one of them did wrong, an evil comic book done made them do it. Gershon Legman had the idee fixe that American culture nursed a vast conspiracy to substitute healthy sexuality with sadistic violence, and he repeatedly "proved" his thesis with endless facile projections. Neither they nor most of their descendants showed any capacity to define evil except in terms of personal self-interest-- which, some may recall, is explicitly rejected in the Bataille excerpt I cited in Part 2.

Oddly, "projected polemic" works both to champion and denigrate works that don't show either explicit or implicit polemic. Many will be familiar with news stories about evangelical groups criticizing J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER series, claiming that its magical content encourages young people to explore witchcraft and/or Satanism. This Wikipedia article chronicles many of those evangelical denigrations. However, the same article also mentions a number of defenses of the Potter series on the grounds of its encouragement of Christian values-- and even though I like the series, I view these positive characterizations to be projections. It's not that there's no moral content in POTTER. But at base I think that Rowling's series is essentially "play for play's sake" as much as most Go Nagai works, even though POTTER lacks the extreme sex and violence of Nagai.

Francois Truffaut said, "Taste is the result of a thousand distastes," and what many critics label as evil is often more a reaction against something they find unpleasurable. They often impugn the artist, as if he were showing them unpleasant things for some sadistic or politically motivated reason but have little appreciation for another Truffaut observation: that artists are not endorsing everything that appears in their works. All art is founded on conflict-- Bataille would say "transgression"-- and every fictional conflict conceivable can potentially trigger someone in terms of a taste-reaction. I try as much as possible to frame all of my critical downgrades in terms of analyzing a work's explicit or implicit polemic. But I'm sure there are some works I just don't like for reasons of taste, too, as with my generally unfavorable critiques of Mark Millar's comics. I certainly don't think he's guilty of any more polemic than is Go Nagai-- but I find Nagai creative and Millar boring in terms of their violently transgressive content. So even a critic who refutes taste-based criticism can't help but be influenced his own "thousand distastes." Probably the only time I'd denounce "play for play's sake" as evil would be when I think it's boring.

OO, THOSE AWFUL ONTOLOGIES

My title references an essay by snob-critic Edmund Wilson, who sneered at THE LORD OF THE RINGS with a snotty essay, "Oo, Those Awful Orcs." I say, if you're going to steal, steal from elitists; that way, you're just stealing from cheats.

My most sustained thoughts on the subject of "ontology" came about from my relatively recent attempts to suss out the works of Alfred North Whitehead. Even before finishing his most famous philosophical book, PROCESS AND REALITY, I wrote this essay to draw comparisons between his system and mine, based on a perceived conflict between his ontology and my epistemology. In response to Whitehead's statement that his philosophy concerned "the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world," I wrote: 

It could be interesting to see what criteria Whitehead uses to measure his “objective data,” and what if any impact that would have on, say, Kant’s theory of the sublime—this being the Kantian concept that has most affected my own theory. I will say that within my epistemological schema, I rely on a sort of “objective data” that feeds into narrative constructs, and my own “satisfaction” with an author’s use of such patterns is more “intense” when I am convinced that the patterns used reinforce one another, creating my version of “concrescence.” However, within the sphere of literary narrative, “objective data” can be either things that the audience believes to be objectively unquestionable—say, the fact that the sun always rises in the east—or what I’ve called “relative meta-beliefs,” such as the Annunciation, the Oedipus complex, and the Rise of the Proletariat.

I later referred to all such "data" as half-truths, because that's how "truth" operates in fiction. But in more recent months, I began to consider, in the essay A NOSE FOR GNOSIS, that Whitehead's concept of an "ontology of subjective data" might parallel my concept of an "an ontology of fiction," by which I mean everything that *literally* takes place within a fictional discourse."

...I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description."

A new wrinkle I'll now add on top of these previous observations is the following:

Since fictional ontology, whether one defines it as "literal content" or as "pre-epistemic prehensions," is comparable to "knowledge-by-acquaintance" rather than "knowledge-by-description," all judgments based on taste spring from a subject's response to a fictional work's ontology.

In 2012's THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, I defined the function of taste thusly: 

The notion of intersubjectivity explains much of the appeal of fiction.  Elitists like Groth generally insist that the difference between good and bad fiction is a matter of highflown sophistication; that which lacks sophistication is perforce bad.  Yet even elitist critics differ among themselves over what is good or bad in Shakespeare just as much as comics-fans do about the proper depiction of Batman.  The arguments themselves may be more sophisticated, but the response for or against any given work spring from the extent to which the work mirrors the subjectivities of critic, fan, or general audience-member.  But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities.

I still maintain that taste is not a matter of abstract justifications, though one can amuse oneself by debating the logical propositions that others use to justify the superiority of their tastes. Taste relates to the audience's identification with the travails, deserved or not, of fictional characters, and that means identifying with a work's internal ontology. 

The aforementioned Gary Groth, for instance, has often ridiculed the genre of superheroes with a variety of intellectual justifications. His few comments on his early comics-fandom have painted a picture of his younger self as simply ignorant of literary principles. But there's no reason to take Groth's word for his self-evaluation: that he formerly had the propensity to identify with fictional superheroes but then recognized their absurdity for intellectual reasons. A lot of readers fall out of love with a lot of genres that they may love intensely for a time, only to tire of them and chase after some other passion. Ontological identification arises from the reader's perception that the ontology reflects something he or she would like to see play out, regardless as to whether the fictional scenario reflects something the reader would like to see transpire in reality.

Now, if I am correct that reader-taste stems from identification with a work's ontology, how does that influence the same reader's ability to suss out a work's epistemology? My answer is that the reader's non-intellectual tastes can indeed influence whether or not one appreciates the epistemology that can be used to justify the ontology. Even without reading Edmund Wilson's famous anti-Tolkien essay, the title alone tells one that Wilson cannot countenance the basic appeal of villains who repel the reader on the basis of their ugliness and their violence. I'm sure Wilson had all sorts of intellectual justifications for that position, but I don't think that his judgments of taste, any more than those of Groth, stem from intellect, but from an ability, or lack of ability, to identify with the basic-- one might say "pre-epistemic"-- propositions of an ontological scenario. And if one can't grok the "knowledge by acquaintance," one is unlikely to find any validity in the "knowledge by description" used to justify the abstract principles aligning with the pure events of the story.

DWELLING ON DURGNAT

I've mentioned Raymond Durgnat (1932-2002) in passing a few times on this blog, but in the coming days I plan to analyze one of his pieces in depth, the better to amplify some of the aspects of my own theory.

The details of Durgnat's significance as a film-critic can be found on this Wikipedia page. As the bibliography shows, the majority of his works focused on particular film-makers or particular films, but there are some general-theory works. I assume that most of these tomes were, as is traditional in the world of academic publishing, cobbled together from separate essays written for magazines like FILM COMMENT or SIGHT AND SOUND. The Wikipedia page mentions at least one essay that he worked into the book that most resembles a "general theory of film aesthetics," the 1967 FILMS AND FEELINGS. I can well believe it that this book originated as an assortment of essays on related themes, for most if not all chapters are just a few pages long.

Doing a variety of searches on the web for Durgnat and related topics, I don't get the sense that the legacy of this once influential critic has had much impact on current Internet film-writings. Nor did I get any sense that the worlds of elitist comics-criticism were even slightly acquainted with the man; combined searches of Durgnat's name with those of THE COMICS JOURNAL or THE HOODED UTILITARIAN yielded nothing of substance. (As I opined in an earlier piece, I was surprised when I learned that some HUddite even knew who Northrop Frye was.)

There are probably more differences than similarities between the myth-critic Frye and Durgnat the "radical populist" (as the Wiki essay calls him). Still, they share a concern with the idea that popular art is not radically estranged from "high art." On the first page of FILMS AND FEELINGS, Durgnat asks rhetorically:

To what extent does criticism habitually dismiss as "bad art" films which are "coarse-grained"-- but authentic and rewarding-- and so falsify its view of the medium?

Durgnat does not quite explain what he means by "coarse-grained," but I think it likely that he was contrasting "coarse arts" with "fine arts." Chapters in the book defend such "coarse art" as 1945's THE WICKED LADY (about a female highwayman) and 1955's THIS ISLAND EARTH (Earthmen dealing with alien imperialism). The first film Durgnat mentions in the book is Nicholas Ray's 1954 western JOHNNY GUITAR, and though he freely admits that he doesn't claim that the film "is a masterpiece," but he does say that it "typifies the interesting dramatic and moral points, and 'resonance,' of a competently made film." His aestheticized populism is also displayed in the first chapter, where he emphasizes his ambition to "find not only some 'lowest common denominators,' but also some 'highest common factors' of taste, and to do so, less by theory, than by exploring specific films."

As the previous sentence attests, FILMS AND FEELINGS does not dwell on pure theory. I imagine that like most writers of the period, Dirrgnat took some influence from the Marxists film-theorists of the day, though he seems to me far less agenda-driven than a contemporary like Robin Wood. It may be that his type of criticism has been pushed off the stage by the extreme ideologues, though I imagine that some modern readers may still yearn, as I do, to see what the critic called "the wedding of poetry and pulp."

More on Durgnat anon.

THE SUBJECTIVITY WAS ROSY

I stumbled across Dirk Deppey's current blog, which I mentioned before in two posts, here and here. He had supplied a link to one of my old essays in which I argued with him, and I thought that my response-essays would probably be the last I'd write about him.

Then I see that he's got a quote from me in his current portal:

"Like most Journalistas, Dirk Deppey is spiritual kin to Fredric Wertham."

I don't have anything new to say about either the original context of my remark or about the wry, jokey context in which Deppey presents it. So instead I'll touch on something that interests me more: the subjectivity of taste.

I've occasionally discussed my belief that the decade of the 1970s, more or less equivalent to the so-called "Bronze Age of Comics," was a crucial creative time for mainstream American comics. Deppey, in a 2007 essay, found the decade more than a little wanting:

And then there were all the old Marvels of my childhood. At last, I could read all the good stuff that I'd heard people praise, but that I'd never had a chance to see!
Actually reading them disabused me of any notion that these were good comics. Jim Starlin's stuff approached "vaguely interesting," once or twice, but beyond that? Crap. Killraven? Crap. Marvel's horror line? Crap. The early Conan and Red Sonja comics had nice art, but were all written in that stilted voice that Stan Lee had used for Thor comics. ("Zounds!") Even those old X-Men comics quickly lost their luster once I could no longer read them with a nine-year-old's eyes. Hell, the first half of Frank Miller's run on Daredevil was nowhere near as cool as I remembered it.

Obviously, I don't care about his opinions any more than Deppey would care about mine. What I care about is the question as to what individual taste means in a social context.

I scraped at the iceberg of an "intersubjectivity solution" here and here, where in essence I was giving one of Tom Spurgeon's broadsides more attention than it really merited. Deppey's above comment also doesn't really amount to much in analytical terms, but as I said in the intersubjectivity essays, both my opinion that Marvel's KILLRAVEN was good and Deppey's ppinion that it was "crap" are right insofar as they capture whatever expectations either of us has for quality fiction. I summed up the essentially non-rational nature of taste in KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2:

Every expression of personal taste, I suggest, is informed by what I will now dub "proto-propositions."  In attempting to justify my liking of FANTASTIC FOUR over CHALLENGERS, my mind might initially formulate the proto-proposition, "I like The FANTASTIC FOUR better than CHALLENGERS for the emotions in FF."  With conscious thought I can expand this statement into a full-fledged proposition, one phrased so as to show how the FANTASTIC FOUR characters show many dimensions while those of the CHALLENGERS do not, complete with examples and counter-examples to support my propositional logic.  Equally valid is the proto-proposition of a fan who might not like superheroes of any kind: "I like CAPTAIN MARVEL better than HUMAN TORCH because the first one shows superheroes as silly"...  But no matter how good or bad the formal proposition, it remains rooted in a "proto-proposition" that expresses whatever validates the individual subject...

So, as I'm sure I've said a few other times, it's idiotic to debate tastes; all one can only debate the fully logical propositions one uses to defend one's tastes. Deppey chooses to defend his 2007 tastes by the usual elitist attempt to run down the tastes of others, in this case by claiming that anyone who liked the works must have read nothing but comic books.

I suspect that what protected me from 1970s Marvel worship despite having read a bunch of them as a kid was the fact that I read too much prose at the time to ever consider such comics as the be-all and end-all of storytelling. I wasn't exactly reading Proust as a child, but even 1970s YA novels like O.T. Nelson's The Girl Who Owned a City had a depth and grounding to it that was absent at Marvel — or DC, or Charlton, or anything else that published for the spinner racks during the years that Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were president.

Since I know the kinds of things I was reading around the time I was also reading 1970s comics, I think it far from likely that my liking for Bronze Age comics was a consequence of considering them "the be-all and end-all of storytelling." There may well be some extreme comics-fans who would never read anything but funnybooks. But then, where are the statistics to prove that they were typical of the fandom of the period? I noted in KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2 that 'even *intersubjective* agreements are significant only to the degree one finds their statistical dominance important.'

Without any such statistics, Deppey's assertion by itself is just another proto-proposition with nothing to back it up-- and one which validates the individual subject, Dirk Deppey, as a Person of Taste as against the Undiscriminating Rabble.

A final note: I wouldn't mind arguing on some more current Deppey topic if he cared to write something more current. However, an awful lot of space on the site is devoted to the films of Pedro Almodovar, and I can't very well argue about those-- given that they are such unremitting crap.

ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW PT. 3

I'm sure I'll have more to say on HU's lynch-happy attitudes in future, but this should be the last time I respond to Ng Suat Tong's hubristic advice to the late Frank Frazetta. Maybe if I'd known that Ng would only answer one question, I would have asked why scenes of interracial sex would cause the writer to think, even sarcastically, of the "light under a bushel" aphorism. I would think that an ideologue like Ng would be glad that Frank Frazetta didn't conceal from readers-- either during his life or thereafter-- his supposed mammoth racial complexes. If these Frazetta drawings had not surfaced, Ng wouldn't have had an excuse to compare interracial erotica with actual slavery (cf. his Thomas Jefferson hyperbole).


Here, I'll address only the subject of "non-ideological" art, which I brought up in opposition to all of the completely ideological interpretations of Frazetta's oeuvre. In my addenda to my comment-preservation, here's what I remembered saying before NB deleted it:

It's been a couple of days since I checked back, but the remark that probably scored the deepest hit in that post had nothing to do with bad faith; it had to do with interrogating the defenders of Ng Suat Tong's essay in the way that they pretend to interrogate purveyors of mass entertainment. (Author Ng chose not to defend his own essay.) In essence, I asked one of the defenders-- not NB-- as to whether he liked to think that all of his personal inclinations were entirely determined by ideological factors, since that's the complexion all of them choose to place upon Frank Frazetta. I didn't even directly mention any individual's leanings toward sexy entertainment, though of course that too would fall under the heading of such personal inclinations. 

 Another thought: since one of the defenders said she found Frazetta's work boring, I remarked that were Frazetta alive, he might find her (performance art) boring, too, but why would either opinion be a matter for ideology? Why couldn't both opinions be purely a matter of personal taste?

Now, in earlier ARCHIVE essays I've already expatiated on the subject of the non-ideological elements in art, though in this essay I used the term "non-political," meaning essentially the same thing. At one point I cited this essay to NB when he wanted to know my stance on something-or-other, and he refuted just one aspect of the essay. So even if NB doesn't agree with anything I've written on these matters, he certainly does know pretty much what I mean by "non-ideological." Thus, an angel dies when he claims not to understand my position:

Gene, are you saying that pornography is not ideological? Or that pleasure is nonideological? I think both of those things are really not the case. Saying that these are racist images doesn’t mean that someone who takes pleasure in them is evil. It just means that the images are racist. Not because Frazetta hated black people (we can’t see his soul), but because reproducing racist stereotypes means you’re reproducing racist stereotypes. Sometimes, some people reproduce racist stereotypes in order to undermine them, or to think about them, or to critique them, or reclaim them. Frazetta doesn’t seem to be doing any of that. He just thinks racist imagery is sexy and funny. That doesn’t make him a monster, but it does make him, (a) boring, (b) dumb (c) in these particular drawings, racist (and hey, sexist also, as Nix points out.) If you dont’ think the drawings are racist, you need to do a bit more than say that the characters are enjoying themselves. The black slaves in Gone With the Wind enjoy their servitude; that doesn’t mean it’s not racist. In lots of rape fantasies, the fantasy is that the woman enjoys the rape, so the fact that the woman here seems to enjoy being reduced to little more than the marker sexy-white-woman doesn’t change the fact that these are sexist either. There are various ways for artists to deal with their control of the art too. Frazetta is pretty straightforward; his presence in the art is pretty much always, “hey, I”m a badass”. In this case, that comes off meaning, hey, I’m a badass because I can take this black guy and this white woman and bang them together for my pleasure. It’s interesting that you don’t actually have an alternate reading, Gene. It’s just, “oh, porn, that can’t mean anything, la-dee-dah, sex is just sex, black men, white woman, means nothing.” If the pairing doesn’t matter, why is it repeated obsessively? If sex has no meaning, why represent it? Keep telling yourself that dollar signs aren’t symbols, though, if it makes art easier to bear for you.

He feels it easy to make all of these wild accusations and associations even *after* I've repeated my stance that art can have aspects that have nothing to do with the political and ideological:

If you’re saying that the material is not totally reducible to ideology, as Ng did, then that’s not contrary to my basic position. I’ve stated above that I can see *some* ideological content in certain scenarios, like the “white goddess” trope mentioned earlier. I don’t think simple pornographic drawings are automatically implicated in whatever ideological content *may* be present in Tarzan narratives though, so that really would be a “contra.”

Since I clearly said in my first sentence that ideological content could appear in 'certain scenarios," clearly I'm not saying that art as a whole-- be it in the form of pornography or with respect to the many pleasures art generates-- never has ideological content. NB does answer the question I posed to another poster: that he can't countenance what he deems "racist stereotypes" unless they're serving an ideological purpose (critique, reclamation, etc.)  It's pretty amusing that he tries in his opening sentence to make me the mirror of his own ideological obduracy.


It's also ironic that NB cites GONE WITH THE WIND; a work that strongly appealed to a racist audience within the U.S (though not only to them). The racists in the overall audience would have been outraged by the consensual white-black sex Frazetta depicted, but of course that can't be allowed to matter. NB's trying to draw a parallel between objectionable stereotypes in the novel and in the drawings, but his whole case for the Frazetta drawings being objectionable is based in an unsupportable interpretation. One minute NB says we can't know if Frazetta hated black people; the next he mind-reads the artist to say that his only reason for drawing this erotica was because he Frazetta found it "sexy and funny," as well as taking pleasure in being an artistic "badass."


To answer one of NB's few coherent questions, I haven't said that depictions of interracial sex "mean nothing," I just don't think their meaning inheres in passing a political purity test; that they're good if they're used to "subvert the dominant" and bad if they're primarily for pleasure. I think it's possible Frazetta, being an artist, undertook the project just to see if he could pull off (in a technical sense only; ha ha) a set of erotic images involving black and white pleasure. It's even possible that, even if Frazetta never intended the drawings to "go public," that he took some pleasure in imagining how such images would have scandalized Middle America; the same Middle America that might have called him a "wop," or so it's been alleged.


To do my own mind-reading act again, I think what's really at issue here is that Frazetta validates the fantasies of white males, whether he shares them all or not: hence the shots Ng takes at Frazetta's jungle comic books (about sixty years old at the time of Frazetta's death). Is that what NB means black-white imagery being "repeated obsessively?" Who knows? With most if not all HU people, it's "sentence first, evidence not at all"-- especially if it's a white male who dares to play with racial (not racist) imagery without having it vetted by ultraliberal sensibilities.


In closing, I'll note that one of my other deleted remarks responded to NB's wacky reference to Jung, asking me if I thought Jung was a capitalist. I didn't directly respond to this nonsense, except to say that though I'd critiqued his affections for Freud and Wertham on other threads, on this one I hadn't brought up anyone's ideological influences and that I'd only responded to things posters had said, so he ought to do the same. Maybe that's the real reason that last big post got deleted.

ANOTHER QUICK COMMENT-PRESERVATION

In reaction to this Ng Suat Tong essay at HU, I wrote:

I don't think it's correct to take a single incident from one Tarzan continuity and assert that it was standard across the board. Cite several, along the same line, and then you've got something.

I remember the sequence you describe, though I would have to see it again to see if I agree that the apes are extolled over the black natives. I would say that your case is stronger just for the base idea of the "white goddess" trope; at the very least, the trope certainly isn't terribly complimentary. FWIW Burroughs does show white primitives believing in godlike outsiders as well, but I guess one could argue that they are just blacks in whiteface.

Going strictly by the excerpts from the porn art seen here, I don't see racism going on here. I see Frazetta drawing a handful of Black Africans as lustful characters, maybe even with predominantly brutish features, but that may be part of the erotic thing going on here, whatever it meant to Frazetta himself. I think that's a little different from making fun of Blacks for filing their teeth and dumping missionaries in cook-pots, which would, like the "white goddess" thing, suggest a complete and irreversible primitivism.

Nice, how you snuck in that shot at the EC comics. 

ADDENDA: I'm not going to try to preserve all my comments on this thread, but I'm copying this one for future reference because it's an overall putdown of the HU mentality.




"He rejects it for ideological reasons."




Cute, but the correct word is "non-ideological," as in, "those things in life that are not strictly reducible to ideological means and ends."




"Frazetta’s art is always about his virtuosity, so these images are about him giving up control and still being the awesome dude in control."




And a female artist isn't "in control" because-- yeah, reasons.




"I think what Noah was trying to convey (please correct me if I’m wrong here, Noah) was that all art implies and expresses ideology, regardless of whether the purpose of its creation was ideological."


It's one thing to note that ideological aspects may have sneaked their way into a work with no express ideological purpose. It's another to try to fit everything into a Procrustean bed, which is the usual practice here at HU.




What's really at issue in Ng's article? That Frazetta fantasized about either being a hung black dude, or about laying waste to black dudes in the persona of Tarzan? No, none of you care about Frazetta's inner demons. You care about the fact that these erotic drawings, which you (incorrectly) deem racist, are going to sell for a lot of money-- and that there's nothing you can do about that, any more than you can go back in time and convince people about the racial injustices of Tarzan.


I really you could find some real injustices to tilt at. But there's one positive thing. At least you're illustrating the fallacies of taking even a liberal viewpoint too far into la-la land.

SECOND AND LAST ADDENDA: Damn, I almost never anticipate what excuse NB will use to terminate a discussion. Often I've preserved comments here because I thought he would take offense and delete them, and I've usually been surprised that he didn't remove them.


My last couple of posts, which I found inoffensive, were deleted because of what he liked to call "bad faith trolling." Since the posts are gone now, I can only approximate what I said. In response to his claim that I was indulging in ideologically-based arguments while defending the idea of non-ideological factors in art, I said that I was simply turning their own type of arguments against them. That's the only thing I wrote that could be halfway construed as "bad faith," though in truth it's nothing of the kind. Patently it's merely an excuse to terminate the discussion because I'm touching on issues he NB doesn't care to deal with.


It's been a couple of days since I checked back, but the remark that probably scored the deepest hit in that post had nothing to do with bad faith; it had to do with interrogating the defenders of Ng Suat Tong's essay in the way that they pretend to interrogate purveyors of mass entertainment. (Author Ng chose not to defend his own essay.) In essence, I asked one of the defenders-- not NB-- as to whether he liked to think that all of his personal inclinations were entirely determined by ideological factors, since that's the complexion all of them choose to place upon Frank Frazetta. I didn't even directly mention any individual's leanings toward sexy entertainment, though of course that too would fall under the heading of such personal inclinations.


Another thought: since one of the defenders said she found Frazetta's work boring, I remarked that were Frazetta alive, he might find her (performance art) boring, too, but why would either opinion be a matter for ideology? Why couldn't both opinions be purely a matter of personal taste?


Not only does NB not care to answer such questions,  evidently he doesn't want his visitors troubled with them either-- which puts the HOODED UTILITARIAN right square in the same bailiwick as SEQUART-- censoring posts to keep their visitors content. There was a time that no one who professes liberal tendencies would indulge in such small-minded scapegoating, at least not with so little evidence of wrongdoing-- but as noted here, this era has bred a new sort of "liberal-so-called."

MIRROR VS. LAMP PT. 3

Good intellectual intuition first:

I think the real reason many fans (and some creators) of the character may see him as a secular Christ-figure is that, unlike many of the exotically-powered superhumans that followed him (Green Lantern, the Flash, and even the Spectre, who had the literal "Power of God"), Superman always seemed like an ordinary fellow despite his having been born with "power from above." That touch of the mundane was also a pronounced aspect of both Judaism and Christianity, and marks one of the dialectical elements that most separates them (as well as that later "Religion of the Book," Islam) from earlier myth-systems, where arguably the mundane is subsumed by the mythic.-- Gene Phillips, CHRIST WITH MUSCLES, 2008.

And now the bad one:

Superman himself is a response to fascism, a kind of New Deal mirror image of the Nietzschean Nazi Superman, both embodiment and critique.-- Noah Berlatsky, THE RUNNING SUPERHERO, 2014.

To be sure, this observation on Superman's mirroring of Nietzsche is just a throwaway in an essay on a tangentially related subject, so here's one from an essay explicitly on Superman:

In an article in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Chris Gavaler argues that the Klu Klux Klan was one of the main historical sources for superheroes. Specifically, Gavaler says, pulp pro-Klan novels like Thomas Dixon's 1905 The Clansmen put in place many of the tropes used by Siegel and Shuster when they created their first Superman stories. According to Gavaler, Dixon's "Ben Cameron, aka the Grand Dragon, represents the earliest twentieth-century incarnation of an American vigilante hero who assumes a costume and alias to hide his identity while waging his war for good."

Now, my point in juxtaposing these takes on Superman is not to say that my intuition is right and Berlatsky's are wrong.  Given that I have defined "intuition" as "knowledge or belief obtained neither by reason nor by perception," both intuitions are rooted in the perceptions of each subject.  Neither intuition can be proven right, any more than one person's personal tastes can be proven right.

But obviously, I think that the intellectual procedure I use to argue in favor of my intuition is superior to Berlatsky's. Can I prove it to anyone who has not already made up his mind, either to like Superman or to hate Superman?  Possibly not, but it's worth a shot.

Berlatsky's judgment, I'll argue, depends on reflective philosophy as defined by Cerf:

It is typical of reflective philosophy... that it relies on arguments, proofs, and the whole apparatus of logic... that it tries to solve intellectual puzzles rather than give the true conceptual vision of the whole...

The first Berlatsky quote links Superman to "the Nietzschean Nazi Superman" as if all the commonplace links between Nietzsche and the Nazis had been scientifically verified.  Many scholars have pointed out that this is not the case, not least Edward Skidelsky:

Nietzsche's philosophy was commonly read as an incitement to throw off these disguises [of "lofty creations of philosophy and religion"] , to assert the will to power in its glorious nakedness...Nietzsche was never a straightforward vitalist; he always insisted on the creative power of sublimation, symbolized for him by the figure of Apollo.  But to no avail, it was the 'Dionysian' Nietzsche who captured the imagination of Germany in the years after 1890... The German Jewish philosopher Karl Lowith was not alone in embracing the war of 1914 out of a "passion for 'living dangerously' which Nietzsche had instilled in us." An estimated 150,000 German soldiers went off to the trenches with ZARATHUSTRA in their knapsacks.

It would be correct to say-- and here I'm drawing on traditional reflective methods of judgment in saying this-- that the "Nazi Ubermensch" was "vitalist-Nietzschean."  Even by the reflective criteria Berlatsky follows, his pronouncement fails.  The real Nietzsche who suffered his mental breakdown in 1899 and who died in 1900 cannot be logically implicated in Nazi ideology.  All that can be implicated is "vitalist-Nietzsche," whom the Nazis did not create but used for their own purposes.

Again, by the standards of reflective philosophy, does Berlatsky provide any scientific proof that Jerry Siegel or Joe Shuster was aware of even this pseudo-Nietzschean influence at the time they created Superman?  Or, to turn to the second quotation, that Siegel and Shuster borrowed "tropes" that they derived from pro-KKK authors like Thomas Dixon?  He does not, and therefore, by the standards he has professed to follow, his intellectual defense of his intuition fails.

Now, I cannot prove my intuition by reflective standards, either.  But unlike Berlatsky, I don't follow those standards as a primary guide.  I start by observing that assorted depictions of Superman in various media conflate him with Jesus Christ.  In the original essay I demonstrate that I'm aware that there are ways in which Superman's image radically diverges from that of Christ:

Of course, Superman/Christ is not a perfect fit, if for no other reason than that Superman's adventures are a lot less about "turning the other cheek."

Still, I argue that there are aspects to the character-- his mundaneness, his forbearance ("a god almost constantly forbearing to strike with full force even against the evil")-- that contributed the semi-conscious association of the two figures, one that becomes overt in Richard Donner's SUPERMAN and Bryan Singer's SUPERMAN RETURNS, as explicated in this online essay.  My project is, to revisit Walter Cerf's distinction for "speculative philosophy," one devoted to "the true conceptual vision of the whole."  That means that I, unlike Berlatsky, am willing to mention both the continuities and discontinuities that proceed from my intellectual defense of my intuition.  The only parallel to this in Berlatsky is the point where he claims that Superman is both "embodiment and critique," but there's no intellectual support given for this wishy-washy assertion.

KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2

Before coming to a conclusion on the nature of freedom, I should elaborate on the remark with which I closed KIRBY'S CHOICE:

...Kirby, in doing what his inner nature bade him, rather than simply adjusting himself to fit the contingent circumstances, showed a "will to freedom" that remains exemplary for its time.

In making this statement, I do not want to give the misleading impression that free will is signified only by Kirby making "the right choice."  Free will must be seen as a spectrum of possible choices, which would include not only choosing to exert oneself to the fullest, but also the possibilities of "sluffing off" or even doing nothing whatsoever, at least in terms of continuing to write/draw comics.


I also stated that Kirby's 1950s work for DC Comics looked more like hackwork to me than his work for 1960s Marvel. I said this with full awareness that at DC Kirby was hemmed in by conservative editors and that he was not free to do his best.  But the DC work still represents the kind of work produced when a given artist is ruled by contingency.

It may also be asserted that Kirby might not be the best example of "free will" given that he was a genius, and most toilers in the comics field-- or in any medium, whether "popular" or "artistic"-- are not geniuses.

Consider then the example of Carl Burgos.

Failing some revelation that Burgos had some great Golden Age work that has escaped fannish notice, Burgos' stellar moment in the history of comic books remains his creation of the Golden Age Human Torch.  The early Torch adventures are raucous, unpolished work, and it could be argued that Burgos never fully exploits the fantasy-potential of a man who can turn into flames.  Nevertheless, there are strong mythic moments in the Torch's oeuvre, worthy to stand with anything created by Jack Kirby.

In contrast, here's a Burgos work from late in his career, where it would appear that he had no intention of exerting himself unduly.

 

"Human thing-a-ma-jig," indeed. Even apart from the use of the name of Fawcett's Captain Marvel-- which may have been the idea of the publisher or any other collaborator-- the art and scripts for the "M.F. Enterprises" CAPTAIN MARVEL are the very definition of hackwork.  The most one can say for this short-lived series is that some modern fans enjoy seeing such a silly-ass character take form.  This is of course an enjoyment popularized by the celebrated "so bad it's good" meme, but this is a pleasure one takes in viewing a demonstrable lack of competence.  In contrast, as rough and unpolished as the Human Torch work is, the appeal of the character and his raison d'etre show a fundamental inspiration. 

Again, this formalist analysis does not erase the possibility that some readers might enjoy CAPTAIN MARVEL more than HUMAN TORCH.  In the first part of KIRBY'S CHOICE I made it clear that there are some fans who prefer "pure Kirby" at all times, over "Kirby in collaboration." And there is no accounting for tastes:

... I pointed out that there was no objective means by which one could prove any group of comics, superhero or otherwise, to be universally "better." The only objective fact is that if many people like a thing, that liking is objective purely in an *intersubjective* sense, as an agreement of tastes between discrete individuals. 

Every expression of personal taste, I suggest, is informed by what I will now dub "proto-propositions."  In attempting to justify my liking of FANTASTIC FOUR over CHALLENGERS, my mind might initially formulate the proto-proposition, "I like The FANTASTIC FOUR better than CHALLENGERS for the emotions in FF."  With conscious thought I can expand this statement into a full-fledged proposition, one phrased so as to show how the FANTASTIC FOUR characters show many dimensions while those of the CHALLENGERS do not, complete with examples and counter-examples to support my propositional logic.  Equally valid is the proto-proposition of a fan who might not like superheroes of any kind: "I like CAPTAIN MARVEL better than HUMAN TORCH because the first one shows superheroes as silly."  This can be expanded into a formal propostion as well, and buttressed with quotes about "masculine incoherence."  But no matter how good or bad the formal proposition, it remains rooted in a "proto-proposition" that expresses whatever validates the individual subject-- a validation I relate to the concept of "constant tastes," elucidated here.


In short, this is about as far as one can get from Kant's notion that valid judgments of taste can be derived from a "disinterested" state of contemplation.  Contemplation is one means by which the viewing subject seeks to bring a new work into his mental compass of things liked and things not liked, and then to decide whether or not the new thing fits better in one category or the other.  But it is not, in itself, a path to any sort of universal truth-- and even *intersubjective* agreements are significant only to the degree one finds their statistical dominance important.

LET FREEDOM RIDE PT. 2

At the end of NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 4 I said:

It should be easy to find any number of critics, professional or amateur, who support this elitist "sheep and goats" attitude.  I know that I can find, and have found, this attitude in many of my favored targets-- Gary Groth, Noah Berlatsky, Chicken Colin.  But I hate to keep falling back on these "old reliables." 

Ask and ye shall receive.

Here's a Dave McKean comment from a CBR interview, talking about the sexual content of his new graphic novel CELLULOID:

Well, sex is OK. I like sex. Why are there so many books about violence? Why are there so many books and stories about violence? How much violence do you come upon in your daily life? How much sex have you had? It seems out of balance. I think sex is a lovely thing, something to be celebrated and explored in every form — in film, in comics, in all sorts. I touched on it in a book I did called Cages.

I certainly agree with McKean that sex is eminently likeable.  I also liked CAGES enough to put in in my essay 100 BEST COMICS.  What I don't like is McKean's attempt to "fix the game" by resorting to an elitist literary priority: that the situation "seems out of balance" if the number of works that attempt to reproduce reality is not equal or greater in number to those those works that do not. 

To be sure, McKean doesn't extrapolate his dichotomy into a full-blown "sheep vs. goats" opposition, after the fashion of Gary Groth.  But he does structure his argument with a sort of "wake up and smell the reality" rhetoric.  On Robot 6 I stated the terms of my opposition:

If Dave McKean prefers realistic comics, that’s fine. If he thinks literature is better when it attempts to reproduce real life, that too is fine. Making the statement “what I like is supported by the way real life is”– which is IMO far from “obvious”– that’s not fine with me, even if there’s nothing I can do about it.

It's certainly understandable that he should advertise his new work by mentioning whatever he considers to be its crowning virtues.  But what end does he expect to achieve by denigrating, however mildly, the degree to which our culture deals with "so many books and stories about violence?"  Does he believe that any readers who enjoy violent comics will suddenly have the scales fall from their eyes and seek out non-violent forms of entertainment, even if they don't necessarily seek out CELLULOID? I would certainly like to believe that he's not simply preaching to the choir, as is so often the case with full-blown elitists.

I must admit that McKean is not as doctrinaire as the Bloody Comic Book Elitists I mentioned above.  I get the impression that he simply doesn't give much thought to the role of violence in fiction because it's not to his taste, and he doesn't appear to be guilty, like (say) fellow artcomics producer Daniel Clowes, of being what I call a "blend of reductive pessimism and covert self-glorification."  But McKean is still egregiously wrong to make this argument in favor of mimetic realism in fiction:

Why are there so many books and stories about violence? How much violence do you come upon in your daily life? How much sex have you had? It seems out of balance.

Rather than illustrating some strange cultural imbalance, the prevalence of violence in fiction connotes fiction's need for conflict, a need which in turn should suggest fiction's independence from the standards of nonfictional truth-telling.  Were one able to come up with an accurate statistical reading, I don't doubt that works of popular fiction would be found to make more frequent use of violence than do works of whatever we choose to call "canonical fiction."  But that does not eliminate the significant use of violence by literary authors.  An elitist might dismiss the literary lights of the 1800s for being too close to the realm of popular fiction.  He might even choose to dismiss even Faulkner and Hemingway for being tainted by what William Slotkin called the "blood and guts" tradition in American literature.  But by the time we get to Cormac McCarthy publishing NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN in 2007, I think one is justified in seeing that violence as a narrative tool that works just as well for canonical literature as for pop fiction in terms of promoting narrative conflict.


I could delve even further into other reasons why the general phenomenon of violence lends itself to greater narrative utility than does the phenomenon of  sex, but for now I think it's enough to state the obvious: fiction needs conflict, and that violence is a better vehicle of conflict than is sex. 


To be sure, even if sex does not serve to promote narrative conflict as well as violence does, this certainly does not reduce the former phenomenon to a second-class citizenship.  In the schema I call "pluralism"-- the philosophical opponent to elitism-- every element of art and literature is to be appreciated for its distinct qualities, rather than being unilaterally subordinated to another element or elements. 

And, little though I've invoked the concepts of freedom and free will in this essay, this pluralistic ethic is also key to what I deem an accurate depiction of what it means to be free.

THE TASTE OF SEX

Here's a quick quote, courtesy of a BEAT poster, that exemplifies one form of the sexual-superiority rhetoric to which I alluded here. I have read SUPERGODS but have not yet checked the quote for context.

Grant Morrison wrote in “Supergods” that he’s met many bright women who read the better superhero comics as part of their regular pop culture diet. But he admitted that the people who are OBSESSED with superheroes, and who amass huge collections of superhero comic books, tend to be male.

In my response, I pointed out that there was no objective means by which one could prove any group of comics, superhero or otherwise, to be universally "better."  The only objective fact is that if many people like a thing, that liking is objective purely in an *intersubjective* sense, as an agreement of tastes between discrete individuals.  Putting that aside, the more important aspect of the Grant Morrison observation is that it throws some light on the different ways men and women respond to the same fictional entertainments.  I said:

 My takeaway from this admitted generalization is not necessarily that women have better taste than men (not that such a thing can be definitively proven or disproven anyway), but that the former are less concerned with getting “the Big Picture.” Guys will tolerate a lot of crappy MARVEL TEAM-UPS just to keep track of how many times Spidey fought the Sandman in all his appearances. In comparison with this perhaps-obsessive habit, women might fairly be viewed as “more discriminating.”

Though neither Morrison nor the BEAT poster is complaining about "fanboys" after the fashion of the bloody comic book elitists, there's no shortage of such complaints on various forums.  One of the most common complaints speaks to the notion of being "discriminating," in that the elitists cavil against the "fanboy" for continuing to buy comics-titles which he does not even enjoy.

Now, one logical response to the apparent perversity of the diehard fan is to say that the elitists may take his bitching about this or that grievance too seriously.   I deem it impossible to imagine that even the most diehard fan gets no pleasure out of collecting whatever he collects.  Even if he consciously loathes a given run of stories, he's at least getting a degree of validation from "being in the know," from being able to say, "Wow, Frank Miller's new project really bit big-time!" 

Another response is that because the elitist is stumping for the joys of being "discriminating," the elitist cannot possibly understand this desire to know the "Big Picture" with regard to a given feature or features.  Yet often the elitist has his own share of obsessions.  I can far better understand a devotion to MARVEL TEAM-UP, despite all of its faults, over a devotion to the dire, faux-literary works of Daniel Clowes.  But that's just my intersubjective response.

Now, even if there's some statistical truth in Morrison's statement, it should be noted that one reason female readers might be more discriminating is if the idiom is not one which their gender tends to favor.  In THE GENRE-GENDER WARS I noted:

... it isn't that women are incapable of going "yeah!" when they see some nasty bastard (or bitch) blown away by hero or heroine. But their reaction to such purgative scenarios is generally less immediate than a male's, and has to be justified more by appeals to character and situation than a man's does.

And the converse is true: I've certainly heard stories of female readers who devoured romance-paperbacks obsessively, which may have a great deal to do with these statistics from the Romance Writers of America site:

 

Romance fiction generated $1.438 billion in sales in 2012.

Romance was the top-performing category on the best-seller lists in 2012 (across the NYT, USA Today, and PW best-seller lists).

Romance fiction sales are estimated at $1.350 billion for 2013.

74.8 million people read at least one romance novel in 2008. (source: RWA Reader Survey)

 Call me crazy, but somehow I don't think that, where we're dealing with a genre that conforms to gender expectations, you're likely to see nearly as much "discrimination."

TASTE THE BLOOD OF IMMANUEL KANT

Though Rudolf Otto may disagree with Kant in terms of the application of *a priori* qualities, he registers complete agreement with Old Immanuel in terms of judgments of taste.

On the other hand, those judgements that spring from pure
contemplative feeling also resemble judgements of aesthetic
taste in claiming, like them, objective validity, universality,
and necessity. The apparently subjective and personal 
character of the judgement of taste, expressed in the maxim : "De
gustibus non disputandum," simply amounts to this, that
tastes of different degrees of culture and maturity are first
compared, then so opposed one to the other that agreement is
impossible. But unanimity, even in judgements of taste, grows
and strengthens in the measure in which the taste matures
with exercise ; so that even here, despite the proverb, there is
the possibility of taste being expounded and taught, the
possibility of a continually improving appreciation, of con-
vincement and conviction. And if this is true of the judgement
arising from aesthetic feeling in the narrower sense, it is at least
equally true of the judgement arising from contemplation.
Where, on the basis of a real talent in this direction, contemplation grows by
careful exercise in depth and inwardness, there
what one man feels can be expounded and brought to
consciousness in another : one man can both educate himself to
a genuine and true manner of feeling and be the means of
bringing others to the same point ; and that is what 
corresponds in the domain of contemplation to the part played
by argument and persuasion in that of logical conviction.
 

It's probably no coincidence that Otto speaks of taste in terms of "different degrees of culture and maturity" just a chapter or so after he has asserted that the the beliefs of primitives appear "bizarre" or "grotesque" because the whole experience of the numinous has been "incompletely presented" to them.

I won't spend a lot of time refuting this, since I've already asserted that the only "unanimity" of taste that I recognize is that of *intersubjectivity,* which does not see any particular taste-judgment as valid, but only the general psychic processes that lead human beings to make taste-judgments.

Similarly, I reject the idea that taste can radically shift due to "exercise," or being "expounded and taught," or "contemplation."  I am not saying people don't learn new things and alter old views in some respects. But those things that are altered would best be termed, "inconstant tastes," things that do not express the deepest core of a subject's personality, but are aroused by contingent factors.

"Constant tastes," however, are those experiences for which the subject continually seeks throughout his or her life.  A contingent factor such as the changes of a subject's age may cause the subject to seek the desired thing in new forms, but there will remain constant factors beneath the surface of each of those strong enthusiasms.

The practice of reading comic books is necessarily influenced, though not determined, by the subject's age-range. At the level of elementary school, kids read "kiddie comics."  At the secondary levels, one sees older kids graduate to less fanciful fare, including, but not limited to, superhero comics, which generally employ a greater degree of discursive logic than the "kiddie comics" do.  In Piaget's theory the superheroes and their ilk come in right on the cusp between the "concrete operational stage" and the "formal operational stage." 

However, when adolescent fans set aside the pleasures of youth-- an action which also can be influenced by external contingent factors-- it does not occur because there is some unanimous "adult taste" to which they are drawn.  It is because their liking for those pleasures has been an "inconstant taste," one that does not define them at the core.  It should be axiomatic that one cannot judge the "constant tastes" of those who remain fascinated by a given form by the "inconstant tastes" of others-- and certainly not by invoking the baleful spectres of "education" or studious "contemplation."

THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1

In GROTHERY STORES I referenced a Gary Groth blogpost in which Groth tossed out George Santayana’s second-best-known quotation:

"Americans love junk; it’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love."

Now what does this statement mean, ripped as it so often has been from whatever context lay behind it?

On the bare face of it, it states the author’s disapproval that anyone should show love toward, not literal junk, but the "junk" of popular culture.  Santayana does not state what one should love rather than popular culture, but the construction implies that there is something worthier of love than mere "junky" artifacts.

Given the usual opposition of the terms “high” and “low,” it follows that if one disapproves of other persons loving what’s often termed “low culture,” then its opposite, “high culture,” may well be the missing thing that is worthy of love.  It’s not unlike the logic that says that one may sleep with a “low-class” prostitute and then cast her aside—which seems the attitude Santayana evinces toward low junk-culture—while one confers love and marital status only upon those of a higher and more seemly class.

Given the fuzziness of his statement, I do not know if this is what George Santayana meant.  Gary Groth has made statements to this effect many times, usually following the Adornite argument that high culture leads to greater and finer thought while low culture leads to mental sloth, voting Republican and herpes simplex.  He’s made so many such assertions that I hope the reader will forgive me for not bothering to ferret out an example thereof, in order to stick to the subject: what should one love?

Should George Santayana “love” the play HAMLET, so often heralded as a high point in Western culture?  And if he did love it, as the phrase goes, why didn’t he marry it?  To extend my prostitute/wife analogy, surely no one would disapprove of such a high-minded marriage, even if he did keep some low-culture doxy on the side.  Maybe, while expousing his love of HAMLET to all and sundry, he kept a set of John Buchan books in a cubbyhole somewhere, taking them out only to use them for some quick unearned gratification, though always taking care that the neighbors should never find out.

Now, by my lights one *should not* love either HAMLET nor BATMAN (to choose a pop-culture icon better known than anything George Santayana might’ve read).  It should seem ludicrous to love either the high-culture or the low-culture icon, for the simple reason that no icons, or any of the works in which they appear, can ever love anyone back.    

Of course human beings do, against all logic, express vivid affection for all manner of fictional works and characters, or even for certain kinds of nonfiction (one thinks of Nietzsche’s recollections of his first exposure to the work of Schopenhauer).  But I suspect that the affection people feel for the phantasms of fiction and philosophy are akin to what Herman Melville termed “the shock of recognition.”  Melville claimed that upon reading Hawthorne, he recognized a spirit akin to his own in the works of the older author.

It could be argued that, whatever similarities existed between the two men, there may have been far more differences.  But even admitting this, Melville’s experience of “shock” is not invalidated.  Melville saw in Hawthorne’s works not the spirit of Hawthorne, but the spirit of Melville himself, reflected by the work of Hawthorne, as in a mirror.

The notion of intersubjectivity explains much of the appeal of fiction.  Elitists like Groth generally insist that the difference between good and bad fiction is a matter of highflown sophistication; that which lacks sophistication is perforce bad.  Yet even elitist critics differ among themselves over what is good or bad in Shakespeare just as much as comics-fans do about the proper depiction of Batman.  The arguments themselves may be more sophisticated, but the response for or against any given work spring from the extent to which the work mirrors the subjectivities of critic, fan, or general audience-member.  But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities.

Yet we need not dismiss this sort of “love”—which, when examined more fully, might be better termed “esteem”-- as mere solipsism.  Even as people with wildly differing tastes and personalities can work together to produce civilization, all forms of literature can and do play off one another to create a greater whole.  (And yes, the verbal contrast of “working together” vs. “playing off one another” is no coincidence.)  Northrop Frye, from whom I derived my own “shock of recognition” despite his being one of many intellectual-mentors-whom-I-never-met, viewed this whole as possessing the integrity of archaic myth.  To any reader of this blog, it should be more than clear that I do as well, whatever disagreements I have with Frye (see here).  In part 2 I’ll address the proper way to show esteem for literary myths, be they of noble or base extraction.  

GROTHERY STORES

On a private listserve a poster guided me to this COMICS JOURNAL post, in which Gary Groth reacted to a post by Dan Nadel which concerned (in part) a short Internet film described as 'a Punisher “fan film” by Punisher actor Thomas Jane.'  Groth said in response:

It’s funny, I stumbled onto this 10-minute Punisher “trailer” yesterday —which, believe me, is somewhat uncharacteristic— on the website of an effusive blogger who was prattling on about how wonderful it was that such a film could be made for the sheer love of it and not for comnmercial reasons, as if making this brainless piece of shit was somehow made laudable because there was no profit motive behind it when I should think exactly the opposite — I was reminded of of George Santayana’s comment, “Americans love junk; it’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love,” more relevant today, with Comic-Con being its apotheosis and triumph, than ever.

Prior to watching the film and determining that it wasn't, in my opinion, a "brainless piece of shit," I noted that Groth's response was pretty typical, though his comparison of the short to Comic-con didn't seem to make much sense.  Another blogger condemned the "three ring circus" aspect of Comic-con, so I wrote:

[Groth's] not just impugning Comic-Con (yes, how ridiculous it is. to imagine people in search of entertainment going to a circus, three-ring or otherwise). He's slamming the "prattling" blogger for daring to imagine that this take on the Punisher could be deemed "laudable" because it wasn't informed by a profit motive. The Punisher short may or may not be any good by the standard of a critic who would not automatically condemn anything with the character. But Groth isn't such a critic. Over the years Groth has put forth dozens of quotes showing that he only loves a certain type of comics, and virulently hates other types. This is just another one.

I expanded somewhat on this later:

   

As I said before when responding to the original post about the Punisher short, I agree that he's perfectly entitled to like or dislike any genre or genre-production he pleases. But I also said that I disagreed with his notion that a given bad story incarnates the spirit of Comic-con, or whatever weird connection he was making between the two. A bad story is just a bad story.

BTW, I don't know if anyone else here watched the fan-made Punisher short, but I did, and did not find it a particularly bad story. It didn't reinvent the wheel or anything, but its ten minutes was more entertaining than any 10 minutes of the last 2 Punisher films.

Again-- he's free to dislike the short, as I'm free to like it. I'm not disputing his taste, I'm disputing the philosophical conclusions he makes on the basis of his personal taste.

I'll add in conclusion that the blogger who imputed a lack of profit motive to the makers of the Punisher short may have been a bit naive.  It's likely that anyone who makes such a short might like to parley its popularity into paying work.  That said, naivety is not nearly as offensive to me as unstinting arrogance.

BEAUTIFULLY BOUNDED, SUBLIMELY UNLIMITED

"literature, as it develops from the primitive to the self-conscious, shows a gradual shift of the poet's attention from narrative to significant values, the shift of attention being the basis of Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poetry."-- Frye, Fables of Identity.

"Frye uses the terms 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' to describe his critical method. Criticism, Frye explains, is essentially centripetal when it moves inwardly, towards the structure of a text; it is centrifugal when it moves outwardly, away from the text and towards society and the outer world."-- Wikipedia, "Northrop Frye."

The parallels between the dyad of terms used in the first quote, from a 1951 essay, and the dyad used in 1957's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, should be obvious, so I won't dwell on them. But the emphasis on the physical image of movement within, or away from, the center of a circle also offers a fair parallel between Kant's opposition of "the beautiful" and "the sublime:"

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness..."-- Section 245.

The parallel is not exact, but on one level the idea of literary 'centripetal action,' which parallels 'narrative values,' suggests staying within the limits of the imagined circle, while 'centrifugal action' suggests surpassing those limits.

In terms of literary criticism, is there anything to be gained by showing an parallel of "the beautiful" with the narrative values of a story, those elements that make a story work on its own terms, and also one between "the sublime" with the significant values of a story, those elements that refer the reader to a universe of experiences, personal and transpersonal, outside the story?

Possibly so, if one can view the parallel without taking it for the assertion of identicality.

I've argued that "Superman's Return to Krypton" may be seen to have aspects of "the beautiful" and "the sublime" in it.

With respect to the first, I said:

If a disinterested appraisal of beauty stems from the human animal's ability to see the semblance of purpose in aspects of nature that have none, then the story that has a greater refinement of structure-- even within the boundaries of juvenile pop-fiction-- must be viewed as the "fairest of the two."

By this I mean that the story's narrative values have a "beautiful" structure. I don't claim that anyone will forget Homer in favor of Jerry Siegel, but all of the story's narrative values fall into line with a strong logical sequence that was by no means typical of Superman stories in the Mort Weisinger era.

The adventure that causes Superman to leave Earth and fall through a temporal rift that puts him back on Krypton--

The means by which he and his romantic partner Lyla Lerrol encounter one another and fall in love--

Superman's encounter with his parents, during which he must keep his identity secret once more--

And even the ending, which begs one's suspension of disbelief somewhat, even though the reader knows some far-fetched method must be used to get the hero back to Earth--

All of these are narrative values. They are "beautiful" because when joined in a proper order they confer the sense of "purposiveness" to a literary story without allowing one to see the controlling hand of the author at work.

In contrast, any "significant value" in the story would be one that escapes that orderly circumference and takes one into another world of experience. As I'm dealing with a mythopoeic story, that world will be that of the Jungian archetypes. If "SRtK" possesses mythicity to a sufficient degree, it will impress the knowledgeable reader as "sublime."

More on this analysis in Part 2.

AGREEABLE YOU

"I find it disturbing that Lois is so incredibly hot as a villainess."-- Tony Isabella, 1000 COMICS YOU SHOULD READ.









While thumbing through 1000 COMICS for a separate project from my current Kantian considerations, I came across the above quote from Tony Isabella, and immediately thought, "Is he kidding?" I've seen a lot of "incredibly hot" drawings of sexy women in comics, but few things seem less sexy to me than a drawing of Lois Lane by Wayne Boring.

Not that Boring was incapable of drawing a sexy woman: as I'll touch on later, he had such ability. But his renderings of Lois Lane are usually pretty "boring," eyepatch or no eyepatch.

However, Isabella's statement is an ideal illustration of Kant's concept of "agreeability." If the image of a villainous Lois Lane seemed sexy to Isabella when he encountered it, then he wasn't wrong, just as I am not wrong to find it uninteresting.

Such is the domain of Kant's category of "the agreeable," which is governed entirely by one's personal response to sensations, whether those sensations are real or conjured forth by the gestures of arts and entertainment.

Kant doesn't address the question in CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT as to whether or not there exist some raconteurs better able to evoke sensations of agreeability in large audiences. For instance, since Bill Ward was much better known for sexy drawings than Wayne Boring, it should follow that Ward was better able to evoke the kinesis of sexuality than Boring was, at least on a statistical basis. Possibly Boring could have done the same things Ward did had he wished to; perhaps his DC editors encouraged him to draw Lois Lane a certain way. All critics can judge, of course, is the final result.

Now Kant states that one's opinions on the "agreeable" (as well as the "absolutely good," which I'll put aside for this essay) do not carry the same forcefulness, the same insistence that others should acquiesce to that opinion, as do opinions relating to "the beautiful" and "the sublime."

I think Kant is somewhat refuted, in practice, by any number of Internet forums where individuals do indeed propound their personal likings with the same force as any "pure judgment of taste," and do indeed want all to acquiesce. However, Kant's theory is still good as a means for judging whether or not there is a species of reflective taste-judgment that rises above the level of personal interest.

I agree with Kant that such judgments do exist, though I note that he probably wouldn't have agreed with my belief that they can apply to popular fiction. Nevertheless, as my example of such a judgment (as well as demonstrating that Wayne Boring could draw sexy women when he so wished), I present this scene from the Jerry Siegel-Boring tale "Superman's Return to Krypton" (SUPERMAN #141, Nov 1960).









Once more I'll repeat the adumbrated quote that best sums up Kant's attitude toward the beautiful and the sublime:

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness..."-- Section 245.

Now, I don't agree with Kant that the only way one can judge something beautiful in his "disinterested" state is if the judgment can be proved (via logic) "universally valid." For me, dominant patterns alone demonstrate valid, though it's unlikely they could ever be deemed "universal."

Interestingly, Douglas Wolk, in trying to demonstrate the beauty in the images from "ugly" comics, asserts their value (in part) by "the way they function as part of a narrative."

By this criterion (which may or may not correctly represent Kant's rather convoluted take on "purposiveness in that which has no real purpose"), "Superman's Return to Krypton" would be more beautiful than "Lois Lane-- Outlaw" if one could demonstrate that the audience that experienced both stories found the former more dominantly "purposive" than the latter.

Obviously one cannot ask every comics-reader of that time period which story they found more "beautiful." However, a close structural reading of the former story will reveal a greater complexity than that of the latter story. If a disinterested appraisal of beauty stems from the human animal's ability to see the semblance of purpose in aspects of nature that have none, then the story that has a greater refinement of structure-- even within the boundaries of juvenile pop-fiction-- must be viewed as the "fairest of the two."

As for the sublime, in Kant's quote above he connects it with one's experience of the presentation of "boundlessness." The 1960 SUPERMAN story is certainly not primarily about "boundlessness," and yet in the romantic scene I show above, the hero and his new (and doomed) Kryptonian girlfriend is played out against a riot of elemental forces-- rainbows, lava-surges-- which mirror not only the passion of the lovers (in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY fashion) but also the unstable forces that will destroy Krypton.

There's another sense in which pop-culture stories can be sublime, beyond their actual depiction of "boundlessness." But I'll save that for a future essay.