NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES PT. 2

It may be that my revised versions of overthought and underthought will in future serve me as shortened forms for the respective effects that "the function of thinking" and "the function of intuition" have upon literary narrative.  I concluded in REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PART 3   that both myth-critics and ideological critics were in a similar unenviable position as far as converting the majority of readers to pursue more abstract readings of texts. Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience.-- RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT, 2015.

In my essay POETRY IN MOTION PART 3 I noted how Frye made a distinction between the narrative and significant values of literary narratives. To boil Frye’s argument down to its essentials, he regarded a given element as having a “narrative value” to the extent that it functioned to play a role in the way the narrative was constructed, while a “significant value” applied to an element which was meant to serve the purpose of a pattern hypothetically extrinsic to the narrative, what is usually called “theme” or “meaning.”-- NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES, 2017.

Northrop Frye is the direct source of one "word pair" of terms that I've frequently used, that of "the narrative-significant schism," and the indirect source of another pairing: "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning," with the former encompassing the Jungian functions of sensation and feeling and the latter encompassing the functions of thinking and intuition (which IN TURN beget the narrative's "overthought" and "underthought"). It's sometimes occurred to me that I could simplify things for myself to abandon one set of terms for the other, and that, if I did so, it would be a truly Fryean action, since I don't believe the critic himself made much use of any of these jargonistic terms. He probably refrained from regular use of the terms simply because jargon always needs a lot of explanation to potential newcomers.

But I knew from the first that this literary-theory blog would not be read by many newcomers, and so I've made much heavier use of Frye's jargon than he did. I've found over the years that the terms "narrative and significant" work best for describing just the bare functions of literary dynamics, while the terms "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning" are efficacious to break down the dynamic of the reader's response to the narrative. Thus, in VERTICAL VIRTUES (2014), I aligned lateral meaning with Aldous Huxley's concept of "horizontal transcendence," and vertical meaning with his concept of "upward and downward transcendence." On occasion I've probably used "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning" to mean almost the same thing as "narrative" and 'significant," though the first pair were designed to describe the process of readerly transcendence.

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.

AN ENQUIRY INTO EDMUND BURKE PT. 1

As I've admitted in some of my later writings on the topic of sublimity, my earliest blog-essays depended heavily on Kant and his concept of the dynamic sublime, while more or less dismissing the author's formulation of the "mathematical-sublime" as irrelevant to my project.  I had by that time read not only Kant's primary works on the subject but also that of his predecessor, the English empiricist Edmund Burke, but I must admit that then I had a preference for Kant's superior power of categorization. Burke's signature work-- A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL-- is marked by a tendency toward arbitrary categories, supported by what editor James Boulton calls "highly selective evidence."

Nevertheless, as I noted in this essay, Burke was much more prodigal than Kant when it came to identifying the sublime within literary works.  Recently I began to meditate once more on the possible connections between Joseph Campbell's concept of "supernormal sign stimuli," first referenced here, and the two forms of the sublime as I've now formulated them, "the dynamic-sublime" and the "combinatory-sublime." On some level I suppose I was coming back to a topic I said that I'd write about at the end of this essay, but never did.  Perhaps at the time I felt I'd said all I needed to say about Huxleyan transcendence.  In VERTICAL VIRTUES  I defined the interrelationship of this concept of transcendence with the concept of the sublime:

Csicsery-Ronay asserted that "sublimity" was produced by an "expansion of apprehension"-- an argument very much in line with philosophers of sublimity like Burke and Kant-- and added that his parallel category, "the grotesque" was produced by "a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction." I reject Csiscery-Ronay's separation of these two affects, and instead regard them as "expansive" and "contractive" forms of the same affect: the affect of of the sublime.

I should add that in portraying "the sublime" as unitary, I was following the lead of Csicery-Ronay, who speaks of the sublime as "a response to an imaginative shock."  Within the sphere of my own system, I agree that this shock is responsible for the sublimity-affect, whether it manifests through the subject's reaction to "power" or to "endless combinations."  I must admit that in some cases, I have found the concept of the "combinatory-sublime" more widely applicable, as in the aforementioned conclusion of the essay TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME PT. 2:

Campbell, though not a literary critic, supplies a corrective to the overemphasis on reasonableness and ideological correctness. In a future essay I will also draw comparisons between Campbell's heuristic system and the forms of transcendence that are not reasonable; that can mount to the heavens or descend into the darkness of Hades-- and in either form, are covalent with what I have termed the combinatory-sublime.

I see now that this was a misstatement. I believe that Campbell's own evocations of the sublime-- even if he does not use that word-- depend largely on the imaginative shock that arises from "endless combinations," an assertion I demonstrated in the essay COMBINATORY CONSIDERATIONS.  However, in works by other authors, the dynamic-sublime can play just as great a role in evoking downward and upward transcendence. I established this in the later essay VERTICAL VIRTUES PT. 2, where I asserted that Melville's BENITO CERENO derived its sense of downward transcendence from the power of its demonic African character Babo, while Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN derived its sense of upward transcendence from the power of Uncle Tom's self-sacrificing imitatio dei-- even though Tom is only figuratively aligned with the Son of God, and has no power save the power of a noble example.

What would these modes of transcendence look like when applied to examples of the combinatory-sublime?
The easiest comparison that comes to mind occurs because I referenced Doctor Strange in the second TWAS essay. The good doctor exists in a world where he, a mortal human, straddles countless dimensions dominated by all manner of colorful entities and phenomena. Yet the dominant emotion is one of enchantment, since the hero's power to triumph is a given, and thus all of the varied phenomena in this series-- at least in its classic Lee-Ditko iteration-- would be an example of upward transcendence.  H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Call of Cthulhu," however, evokes just as many entities and phenomena, but this tale registers as an example of downward transcendence, because it suggests that the universe is infinitely horrible by virtue of its infinite variegations. (Of course, the "dynamic-sublime" appears in both of these, so neither choice represents the "combinatory-sublime" in isolation.)

So I've now concluded that if I do analyze Campbell's supernormal sign-systems further, they will be best described with reference to the two modes of sublimity rather than the two forms of transcendence, because the first deals with what kind of stimulus produces the affect while the second deals with its sympathetic or antipathetic tonality.  And with all of that in mind, in my next essay I'll finally be able at last to inquire into Edmund Burke, and show that contrary to my earlier opinion, his work on the sublime may prove more fruitful than that of Immanuel Kant.

VERTICAL VIRTUES PT. 2

In this essay I began my current set of essays on the interlinked topics of sublimity and transcendence in reaction to the outlook dominant among comic-book critics, and possibly academics generally as well:

Whatever their individual differences, in general all [comic critics] display the desire not to regard the productions of fantasy as significant in themselves, but only as signifiers of "reality" that can be viewed as either ideologically pure or ideologically suspect.

In my follow-up essay I cited a discussion-thread on HOODED UTILITARIAN, whose link I provided there. Here is a prime example of a critic deciding to reduce a fantastic text to realistic signifiers:

Any status quo is heterogeneous. When you’re fighting to keep things the same, you’re fighting to keep things the same. I guess it would depend on the particular narrative at hand, but (for example) in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the destruction of the universe is embodied in the anti-monitor, who’s basically a super-villain; opposite of all that is good (monitor, anti-monitor, whatever.) So fighting to save the universe is figured basically as just another especially big battle against bad guys who are trying to change who’s in charge. They’re evil rebels, a la Shakespeare (who also always supported the status quo.)

I think you’d have to talk about a particular green lantern story, but this is how a lot of destroying the universe stories work. It’s just a big, impressive way of saying “you’re going to destroy the status quo!”

Since I recognize that this was not a formal analysis of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, I won't repeat the points I made in the thread to refute Berlatsky. However, since I have myself stated that it's possible to produce narratives whose appeal is largely on the "horizontal plane," this means that there are some narratives where this sort of reasonable "status quo" argument can be correctly applied. Further, since so many sociological readings of this type boil down to "Superman= Super-Imperialist," I may as well choose three examples of texts that involve the sort of race/class struggles so beloved by critics of the Sociological School.

For my horizontal example, I choose Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND. I recently finished this work for the first time, and it's my verdict that although it's rife with all manner of agreeable "sympathetic affects" (the blissful images of the Southern aristocracy) and disagreeable "antipathetic affects" (those uppity Carpetbaggers and white trash), I find no trace of any affects that reach into the realms of the sublime, either going "up" or "down." Religion appears in the novel but only as a social form; a character like Scarlett's mother may incarnate a sort of mundane Madonna-figure, but she's only significant to the novel as a whole as an incarnation of the blessed South. There can be little question that this is a novel set up to defend a status quo, albeit one that has been overthrown. Mitchell's justification for slavery is based on the viewpoint character's conviction that all black people are essentially childlike, except when bad whites put ideas of freedom in their heads, thus causing the blacks to run amuck. Interestingly, Mitchell makes a brief reference to the Haitian slave revolt of the late 1700s, but no one in the novel ever inquires as to the reasons for this revolt.

However, not all works involving slavery can be reduced to "is it ideologically pure or ideologically suspect." Case in point: in 1855, less than ten years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Herman Melville wrote BENITO CERENO. This fictional tale was based on a real 1805 incident wherein a group of slaves revolted aboard a Spanish ship and took it over, only to be later defeated by American forces. Melville does not argue for or against slavery in this novella. Rather, his purpose is to show how the Spanish captain, the "Benito Cereno" of the title, is traumatized by the suspense of being captured by the black slaves. The viewpoint character is an American, Captain Delano, who comes aboard the ship after the slaves have taken it over. However, Delano is so dense that he never guesses until the end that the slaves are forcing the Spaniards to pretend that everything is normal. The Spanish captain Benito Cereno is particularly terrorized by the slaves' demonic-seeming leader "Babo," who at one point holds a razor to Cereno's throat in full view of Delano, on the pretext of giving Cereno a shave. In time Delano tumbles to the deception and naval forces re-take the slave ship. Babo is sentenced to death but never once shows any concern for what the white people may do to him. The last conversation between Delano and Cereno makes clear that Cereno, despite having escaped his captors without injury, is haunted by the power of the rebellious slave. Cereno even goes to his own grave a mere three months after Babo's execution, signifying the typical fate of a man enthralled by a demonic presence.

To call this story either a defense of slavery or a refutation of it would be foolish in the extreme. Melville is concerned with portraying Cereno as a man haunted by ill fortune, in terms similar to the fate of the author's more famous Captain Ahab. Babo is at no time a literal demon, but he and his fellow slaves are spectres of demonic retribution, and as such, are grotesques who produce the effect of downward transcendence as surely as more obviously monstrous figures like Dracula and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Is it possible to realize the obverse, to transform the ugly realities of American slavery into something that suggests "upward transcendence," the experience of a sublime affect that expands consciousness?  I find a serviceable example in the novel Leslie Fiedler asserts to have been the first novel to create fully realized black characters: Harriet Beecher Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

Like GONE WITH THE WIND and BENITO CERENO, CABIN is resolutely naturalistic in its phenomenality. However, whereas in GONE WITH THE WIND religious symbols are used merely to buttress Mitchell's beatific vision of Southern society, Stowe uses religious discourse to condemn the abomination of slavery. As Fiedler and others have observed, though, this does not signify that the Connecticut-born authoress believed that African traditions were on a par with the Christianity of her world. Fiedler asserts that she envisioned a future in which black people were both freed from slavery and sent back to Africa, where their Christianity would spread throughout the "Dark Continent." Modern readers might find this only slightly more palatable than Margaret Mitchell's political views. Still, the fact remains that Stowe used her religious ideals to oppose the secular defenses of the slave institution.

Yet UNCLE TOM'S CABIN at base is not a political novel. Stowe's commentary attests that the novel began with a vision of a black man being beaten to death by a white man: later, the novel itself would feature the titular character beaten by two black slaves under the aegis of the Yankee slaver Simon Legree. CABIN recapitulates many motifs common to the Christianity of Stowe's time-- not least that of the mother wailing for her children, a motif that had strong emotional appeal for an author who, like Stowe, had borne children. But the most important one is that of the imitatio dei enacted by Uncle Tom when he gives up his life to shield two slaves who escape Legree. Whatever emotions the scene may inculcate in modern readers, clearly the intent at the time was to invest Tom's sacrifice with the gravity of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Thus the effect of seeing Tom forgive his murderers before he dies is an expansive one, one that transforms Tom's sufferings into a scenario of expansive, positive emotion-- that is, in Huxley's terms, "upward transcendence."

Again, this is not to suggest that there are no affects in the latter two novels that approximate the "horizontal transcendence" affects that dominate the Mitchell novel. But BENITO CERENO and UNCLE TOM'S CABIN are more concerned with bringing forth extreme states of sympathetic or antipathetic affects-- and for that reason, they cannot, any more than a fantastic farrago of apocalyptic superheroes, be reduced to simplistic sociological factors.

VERTICAL VIRTUES

In this essay I said: "In a future essay I will also draw comparisons between Campbell's heuristic system and the forms of transcendence that are not reasonable; that can mount to the heavens or descend into the darkness of Hades..."  However,Campbell will have to wait, as I delve a little more into the heuristics of Aldous Huxley, the man who conceptualized the concepts of vertical and horizontal forms of transcendence.

I noted in this essay that Huxley's essay on self-transcendence included barely any examples of "upward transcendence," but he may have felt it unnecessary to do so given his previous book, 1945's THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY. This book, which I have not read, represents itself as "an attempt to present this Highest Common Factor of all theologies by assembling passages from the writings of those saints and prophets who have approached a direct spiritual knowledge of the Divine."

One may fairly speculate that this book's pluralistic vision of mankind's ongoing attempts to seek for a mystical "ground of being" parallels the dynamics of the 1953 "self-transcendence" essay, which appeared as an epilog to Huxley's non-fiction work THE DEVILS OF LOUDON. Throughout the essay Huxley scorns the tendency of human beings to lose themselves within the mazes of the countervailing "downward transcendence." However, he's fair-minded enough to admit that some of the techniques used to produce this sense of transcendence-- what Mircea Eliade has called "techniques of ecstasy"-- can be used in a disciplined fashion. When Tantric priests utilize "elementary sexuality" as part of their sacred rites, they do so in order to "transform the downward self-transcendence of elementary sexuality into an upward self-transcendence."

What's puzzling about the 1953 essay is that even though Huxley had been publishing fictional works since 1921, he does not apply his concept of transcendence to any aspect of art, which has, as much as religion, a reputation for allowing its audiences to escape "the tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves." That is not to say that he never addressed this possibility elsewhere in his voluminous writings. However, since Huxley was not a systematic literary critic, I find it probable that he never explored this aspect of "transcendence."

In my essay UP THE DOWN TRANSCENDENCE  I drew a brief comparison between Huxley's two forms of vertical transcendence and two categories proposed by SF-critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay.
Csicsery-Ronay asserted that "sublimity" was produced by an "expansion of apprehension"-- an argument very much in line with philosophers of sublimity like Burke and Kant-- and added that his parallel category, "the grotesque" was produced by "a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction." I reject Csiscery-Ronay's separation of these two affects, and instead regard them as "expansive" and "contractive" forms of the same affect: the affect of of the sublime. Further, these forms differ with respect to whether the art-work producing the affect is more dominated by "sympathetic affects" or "antipathetic affects." Sympathetic affects produce feelings of expansion and harmony, while antipathetic affects produce feelings of contraction and separation. (I first posted my conception of these affects on this blog here, though I formulated them long before I ever began this blog, in dissatisfaction with Aristotle's inadequate categories of "pity and terror.")

Here I should specify that I am not limiting either type of affects to works that produce the sublime. Every conceivable narrative is defined by these affects, and the reader generally orients himself within a text according what the focal characters "like" or "don't like." This is not to say that the reader is confined to the feelings of the viewpoint character alone, a matter I've covered in some detail here. But his reactions, so far as he is engaged by at least one character in the text, will be patterned by what the story's significant characters like or dislike. I concluded the above essay by adapting Huxley's schema to one suggested by Octavio Paz:

Horizontal transcendence= Paz's "the body"
Upward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense of Ronay's "expansion of apprehension"
Downward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense that "the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization; i.e., contractive"

Thus the domain of horizontal transcendence is one where the reader experiences things as one experiences one's own body in a state of relative stability. Whether one encounters things one likes or does not like, those things have no special power to inspire either the expansion or the contraction of apprehension. In this state, one can self-identify with any human activity-- collecting stamps or studying birds, to cite two of Huxley's examples-- or, equally, one can choose not to find these things of interest. But one's sympathy or antipathy to the activity of collecting stamps remains on a stable, horizontal plane; the activity cannot act as (to use Campbell's felicitous phrase) as a "supernormal sign stimulus" that propels one into either a radical expansion or a contraction of one's consciousness.

In my next essay I'll use this formulations as a springboard to discuss the problems I have detected in the overly "horizontal" critical attempt to run roughshod over narratives that possess a more vertical appeal.

TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME PT. 2

In Part 1 I asserted that "most comics-critics are of the view that the realm of the reasonable and agreeable is the one to which all other forms of transcendence should be reduced." The proof of this particular pudding can be best observed in the critical dialogue that came about in response to Noah Berlatsky's essay SUPERHEROES ARE ABOUT FASCISM, which I analyzed in a series of essays on the nature of violence, real and fictional, beginning here. Remembering that what I call "reasonable and agreeable" is also known as Huxley's "horizontal self-transcendence," I'll quickly repeat one of Huxley's examples of this form of reasonable transcendence:

most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. 

For Berlatsky and most of his respondents, the trope of "the hero battling evil" is entirely reducible to sociological factors. If the hero aims to defend the status quo, this is "bad;" if the hero seeks to change it on some level-- as with Wonder Woman's campaign to reform male-dominated society even while beating back Nazis-- then this is "good." In the course of the thread I mentioned Marvel's Doctor Strange as an example of a world-saving hero whose adventures tended to focus on the metaphysical rather than the sociological. Berlatsky allowed that Doctor Strange was not as good a fit as the majority of superheroes but did not choose to modify any aspect of his ideologically-based critical view.

My use of the words "sociological" and "metaphysical" are by no means accidental: they are two of the categories devised by Joseph Campbell in his 1964 work OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY, along with "the psychological" and "the cosmological." I've quoted Campbell at length on these conceptual categories here, so I won't spend time on further definitions. The relevance of Campbell's four functions in this essay is that it shows how each of these concepts for the organization of knowledge and/or insight can be viewed in a manner that is not "reasonable and agreeable."

Here's Campbell on Berlatsky's favorite if not exclusive category, "the sociological:"

Third is the sociological function. Myth supports and validates the specific moral order of the society out of which it arose. Particular life-customs of this social dimension, such as ethical laws and social roles, evolve dramatically. This function, and the rites by which it is rendered, establishes in members of the group concerned a system of sentiments that can be depended upon to link that person spontaneously to its ends.

It should be obvious that this definition is more comprehensive than Berlatsky's in that Campbell does not define the sociological function in terms of what he personally considers liberating or repressive.

Campbell, being human, is certainly not immune to the temptations of ideology: in this essay I pointed out a section of Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES wherein the author's ideology does influence what he deems the "best" explanation for the ritual of the Paschal candle. Nevertheless, I also noted that HERO was written in 1949, while Campbell's more latitudinarian concept of the four functions first appears in 1964, so I for one have no difficulty in seeing the later insight as the flowering of Campbell's more mature thought.

It may be correctly pointed out that Berlatsky is only one comics-critic. But I could cite any number of other critics I've disputed on this blog, most of whom have also been guilty of similar "reasonable" reductionism, ranging from Gary Groth and Bart Beaty to the simpletons of Sequart.  Whatever their individual differences, in general all display the desire not to regard the productions of fantasy as significant in themselves, but only as signifiers of "reality" that can be viewed as either ideologically pure or ideologically suspect.

Campbell, though not a literary critic, supplies a corrective to the overemphasis on reasonableness and ideological correctness. In a future essay I will also draw comparisons between Campbell's heuristic system and the forms of transcendence that are not reasonable; that can mount to the heavens or descend into the darkness of Hades-- and in either form, are covalent with what I have termed the combinatory-sublime.

TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME

Having now devoted over 50 posts to the topic of "the sublime" in one form or another, I find myself giving thought as to whether or not other comics-critics would have any takes on these matters.  I tend to doubt it, though, and the least self-aggrandizing reason I can concoct for said critics' general disinterest in the sublime comes down to their affection for a type of transcendence that I find to be of lesser interest.

Sublimity, as coiner-of-the-term Longinus pointed out, is not something that takes part in the everyday or the "agreeable"-- a term which Kant may have borrowed for his own theories of art and the sublime.  This translation of Longinus says:

A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgment, and eclipses that which is merely reasonable or agreeable. To believe or not is usually in our own power; but the Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no. Skill in invention, lucid arrangement and disposition of facts, are appreciated not by one passage, or by two, but gradually manifest themselves in the general structure of a work; but a sublime thought, if happily timed, illumines an entire subject with the vividness of a lightning-flash, and exhibits the whole power of the orator in a moment of time.


Though all of Longinus' statements on the sublime are significant, they are not all necessarily correct. I believe that all of art exists to "take [a reader/listener] out of himself," but not that every effect that does so is sublime.  In this essay I quoted and/or paraphrased a great deal of Aldous Huxley's 1953 essay "On Self-Transcendence, comparing and contrasting Huxley's concepts of "downward transcendence" and "upward transcendence" with cognate concepts in Carl Jung's system.  In the middle of these two forms of transcendence, Huxley describes "horizontal transcendence" in terms that may compare with Longinus' idea of the "that which is merely reasonable or agreeable."

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds. Horizontal self- transcendence is of the utmost importance. Without it, there would be no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, indeed no civilization.

Why does Huxley say that horizontal self-transcendence is "of the utmost importance?" I presume that it is because "self-identification with any human activity" may be deemed the bedrock of cognitive experience. It is the way every human being learns his or her individual propensities: what one likes to do, what one does not like to do, what one is good at doing, and so on. I'm enough of a Bataillean to state a slight disagreement, to the effect that there will always be the temptation to transcend the horizontal plane of the "reasonable and agreeable."  But I take the point-- assuming that I have read Huxley's point correctly-- that there is a primacy to the horizontal plane, albeit not a supremacy.

Unfortnately, most comics-critics are of the view that the realm of the reasonable and agreeable is the one to which all other forms of transcendence should be reduced.  Not that the practice is confined to critics, whom I'll explore a little more in Part 2.  Often it's a prime source for humor.

Harvey Kurtzman's story "Man and Superman" (WEIRD SCIENCE #6, 1951)  is a spoof not of the Man of Steel on that character's own terms-- Kurtzman would produce such a spoof two years later in MAD, with the famous "Superduperman." Rather, "Man and Superman" spoofs the comics medium's happy ignorance of basic scientific principles. Charlemagne, a thick-headed "muscle culture" nut, exposes himself to a physicist's ray, which increases his density to fantastic proportions, just as one sees in countless superhero origins.

However, the upshot of the satire is that Charlemagne ignores the scientist's warnings about how his "expenditures of energy" will cause him to "wilt away."  Not only does his mass constantly cause him to fall through walls and floors-- a consequence of greater mass that Superman never had to deal with-- he, the massive muscleman, ends up evaporating into "rapidly dispersing neutral mesons."

Of course Kurtzman's made-up science is no more probable than that of Superman. What's significant in the aesthetic sense is that Charlemagne's admittedly lunk-headed attempt to transcend the limits of normality is shot down by the author's all-knowing appeal to reason and logic.

In the next essay I'll show how this paradigm informs the reductive principles of certain critics of fantasy-literature, both within and without the medium of comic books.

UP THE DOWN TRANSCENDENCE

"The sublime is a response to an imaginative shock, the complex recoil and recuperation of consciousness coping with objects too great to be encompassed. The grotesque, on the other hand, is a quality usually attributed to objects, the strange conflation of disparate elements not found in nature. This distinction is true to their difference. The sublime expands consciousness inward as it encompasses limits to its outward expansion of apprehension; the grotesque is a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction out into objects that consciousness cannot accommodate, because the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization. In both cases, the reader/perceiver is shocked by a sudden estrangement from habitual perception, and in both cases the response is to suspend one's confidence in knowledge about the world, and to attempt to redefine the real in thought's relation to nature."-- Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. 'On the Grotesque in Science Fiction', Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 2002), pp. 71-99.

I confess that as of this writing I've only skimmed this academic's essay, but at present I see no reason why it would apply only to that branch of metaphenomenal narrative labelled "science fiction"-- especially since
Csicsery-Ronay also notes within the text of the essay that in some science-fiction tropes the sublime and the grotesque appear to unite, as with the T-1000 from James Cameron's TERMINATOR 2: "Its fascinating shape-shifting would be the object of sublime awe were it not for its sadistic violation of mundane flesh."  This is a convenient admission from my standpoint, as I think that the interpenetration of Ronay's concepts of "the sublime" and "the grotesque" demonstrates that they are best seen as mirror-images of transcendence, but transcendence that is, as I examined here, so radically different from the commonplace that it feels as if it is either "upward" or "downward." 

I've noted in the aforesaid essay that most of the phenomena Huxley uses to characterize "downward transcendence" suggest, as Ronay suggests, "fascinated repulsion/attraction out into objects that consciousness cannot accomodate," for they relate to the human body being subjected to various kinds of stress-- principally drugs, degrading sex, and crowd-induced delirium, though Huxley also mentions the effects of "rhythmic movement," "rhythmic sound," and "corporal penance."  Huxley unfortunately does not provide as many examples of upward transcendence, though in this follow-up essay I noted how Joseph Campbell tended to focus only on images that I find suggestive of Huxley's upward transcendence, as well as having the effect of "expanding consciousness" in a manner shared by both traditional accounts of the sublime and modern accounts of the "sense of wonder."

Re-establishing my earlier suggestion that sublimity and "sense of wonder" are fundamentally covalent, it follows then that although science-fiction enthusiasts often use the latter phrase only to connote wonder in this "upward" end of its spectrum, it should be used no less to connote the aspect of terror in the "downward" manifestation.  Both of these forms of sublimity share the nature of what I called, in this essay, the "strange-sublime," and are phenomenologically opposed to the remaining form, "the odd-sublime," which can be roughly correlated with Huxley's horizontal transcendence, the transcendence in which one does not truly exceed what Ronay calls "habitual perception."

The two extremes of the "strange-sublime" suggest a possible parallel with Octavio Paz's dichotomy of "body/non-body."  I've already made a purely illustrative (i.e., not constitutive) comparison between my NUM formula and Paz's dichotomy in this essay, so I don't want to confuse matters by bringing sublimity into that mix.  But given that Huxley's downward transcendence suggests becoming overly attracted by, and perhaps subsumed by, the body, while upward transcendence suggests becoming liberated from same, into "non-body" in some manifestation, I will venture this comparison:

Horizontal transcendence= Paz's "the body"
Upward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense of Ronay's "expansion of apprehension"
Downward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense that "the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization"

I must note then that neither "the marvelous" nor "the uncanny" firmly line up with either form of transcendence exclusively.  It's true that we're perhaps more likely to associate "expansion of apprehension" with thinking about wonderful things like Campbell's dragons or Ronay's molten cyborg, and "repulson/attraction" with icons of terror.  Yet "the marvelous" also includes a horror like ALIEN, while the "the uncanny" can include cheery upbeat action-fantasies like Miyazaki's CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO, reviewed here.  For the latter, obviously, "attraction" to those things that suggest but are not reducible to "the body" would supersede "repulsion."

Having more or less concluded this game of intellectual connect-the-academics, the only thing that remains will be to cite three specific examples of my perceived sublimity: the "odd-sublime" in a naturalistic context, the "strange-sublime" that suggest upward transcendence, and the "strange-sublime" that suggests downward transcendence.  More on that in a separate essay.

VERTICALLY CHALLENGING

"And so a legend is born, and a new name is added to the roster of those who make the world of fantasy the most exciting realm of all!"-- Stan Lee, AMAZING FANTASY #15.

A suggestive analogy is to be seen in the case of the grayling moth, which prefers darker mates to those actually offered by its present species. For if human art can offer to a moth the supernormal sign stimulus to which it responds more eagerly than to the normal offerings of life, it can surely supply supernormal stimuli, also to the IRMs [Innate Releasing Mechanisms] of man and not only spontaneously, in dream and nightmare, but even more brilliantly in the contrived folktales, fairy tales, mythological landscapes, over- and underworlds, temples and cathedrals, pagodas and gardens, dragons, angels, gods, and guardians of popular and religious art. It is true, of course, that the culturally developed formulations of these wonders have required in many cases centuries, even milleniums, to complete. But it is true also . . . that there is a kind of support for the reception of such images in the deja vu of the partially self-shaped and self-shaping mind. In other words, whereas in the animal world the "isomorphs," or inherited stereotypes of the central nervous structure, which for the most part match the natural environment, may occasionally contain possibilities of response unmatched by nature, the world of man, which is now largely the product of our own artifice, represents to a considerable extent, at least an opposite order of dynamics; namely, those of a living nervous structure and controlled response systems fashioning its habitat, and not vice versa; but fashioning it not always consciously, by any means; indeed, for the most part, or at least for a considerable part, fashioning it impetuously, out of its own self-produced images of rage and fear.-- Joseph Campbell, PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, p. 75.

Stan Lee's conclusion to the first Spider-Man tale was plainly intended not as philosophical statement, but as hyperbole designed to convince readers of the hero's significance within "the world of fantasy."

But, even though it is hyperbole, one may examine it to see what philosophical import it has, quite apart from the author's intentions.

When I as a teenaged comics-fan read Lee's hyperbole, I was gratified to see him validate fantasy as a "world" in its own right; a bit of self-referential analysis on Lee's part, the sort of thing rarely found in other comics-writers of the time.  During that period both adults and peers tended to denigrate anything fantastic as juvenile escapism, irrespective of the medium, though of course comics were the most despised of the escapist works because they were supposedly the crudest, the least thoughtful.

All that said, it's easy to poke holes in Lee's claim.  By what criterion could one say that "the world of fantasy" was "the most exciting realm of all," and who are the other contenders in the Mister Excitingness Paegant?  "The world of reality" would seem to be the only logical competitor to "the world of fantasy," and if in 1963 one were going by popular acclaim, "Reality" certainly attracted the lion's share of the consumers and far greater accolades from the critical establishment.

Further, even in this new century, wherein the cultural paradigm now validates fantasy to an extent no one could have imagined in 1963, it's still questionable as to which of the contestants is more popular.  In this essay I wrote:

Some readers preferred only realistic wonders, as [Joseph] Conrad apparently did, some readers bowed down exclusively at the fane of [J.R.R.] Tolkien, and some learned to appreciate both intersubjective wonders.

Joseph Campbell's theory of "supernormal sign stimuli" offers a heuristic tool for understanding the separate-but-equal appeals of "fantasy" and "reality" (or as I usually call them with regard to literary works, "the metaphenomenal" and "the isophenomenal.")   Though Campbell only mentions "popular art" fleetingly at the end of the second sentence in the passage quoted above, he implies that popular art could invoke the emotional effect of the "supernormal stimulus" as easily as did religious art.  He would embrace that position in spades once Campbell came to be seen as A Significant Influence on STAR WARS, which film not coincidentally caused much of the paradigm shift toward fantasy noted above.

"The world of reality," then, would line up with the animal responses that are designed to "match the natural environment," while "the world of fantasy" parallels those responses that are "unmatched by nature."  This in turn suggests a further parallel with Kant's concepts of reproductive and productive imagination, though I'll pursue that on its own terms in a forthcoming essay. 

In addition, though Campbell's list of supernormal stimuli may seem somewhat of a catch-all, the chaos can be brought to a greater semblance of order by seeing it through the lens of Aldous Huxley's distinctions between "horizontal transcendence" and "vertical transcendence," explicated here.

Huxley characterizes those who experience "horizontal transcendence" as  people who "identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values."  This suggests a concern with one's "natural environment," and thus with the common perception of the "world of reality." 

Interestingly, while I observed in the earlier essay that Huxley listed very few examples of his "upward transcendence"-- which is merely one end of the total spectrum of vertical transcendence-- Campbell takes the opposite tack.  Almost everything in his list of supernormal stimuli suggests "upward transcendence"-- temples and cathedrals, angels and gods, and even (depending on one's cultural background, perhaps) dragons.  The only mentions of signs that might connote negative, "downward transcendence" are one reference to "nightmares," one reference to "underworlds" (in the sense of the worlds of the dead), and one reference to "rage and fear."

Nevertheless, it would seem that as a concept Huxley's "vertical transcendence" is oriented upon both the heavenly and the hellish, particularly because Huxely suggests that the latter can sometimes be the portal to reach the former.  As both strategies of transcendence are so linked, they clearly echo the same dynamic as Campbell's supernormal sign stimuli, for all that the two men had very different orientations in other respects.

In the era sometimes called the Silver Age, which happened to be the time of my own youth, one often had to justify a liking for fantasy.  Now, there is no real cultural need to do so: enough people openly like it-- even in comic book form-- that justifications are rarely seen.  Nevertheless, if one had to justify fantasy in terms of being in some sense "useful," I would do so by linking it to the human need to exceed nature, to make its own cultural "habitat," which is too often seen as human beings simply responding to nature.

As counter-intuitive as it may seem-- especially to those of an atheistic persuasion-- for human beings the only way to truly create their reality is (to reinterpret the famous saying of Virgil) is to first "move" both heaven and hell.

HUXLEY, JUNG AND STRANGENESS

Without an understanding of man's deep-seated urge to self-transcendence, of his very natural reluctance to take the hard, ascending way, and his search for some bogus liberation either below or to one side of his personality, we cannot hope to make sense of our own particular period of history or indeed of history in general, of life as it was lived in the past and as it is lived today. For this reason I propose to discuss some of the more common Grace- substitutes, into which and by means of which men and women have tried to escape from the tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves.-- Aldous Huxley on Self-Transcendence, opening paragraph.

As the online reprint of Huxley's 1953 essay notes, the author wrote this roughly a year before he took mescaline under a psychiatrist's guidance.  The result was the famous book THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, which took a very different attitude than this essay toward one's finding "transcendence" through chemical substances.  To be sure, Huxley does allow in the 1953 essay that some brief "moment of spiritual awareness" can be acquired through drugs, but he's skeptical as to whether it can be maintained.

Regardless of one's opinions on this particular issue, the salient concern of Huxley's essay is to understand "the urge to self-transcendence."  The last sentence of his opening paragraph, speaking of "escape from the tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves," seems to imply that such escape is a form of what Adler would call "negative compensation," but the bulk of the essay shows a more analytical approach.

Briefly, Huxley sees the "urge to self-transcendence" as taking three forms:

UPWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind that Huxley doesn't adequate define, though he associates it with "theophanies" and the veneration of a " liberating and transfiguring Spirit."


 DOWNWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind in which the transcendence "is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal."  Huxley's three main venues toward this form of transcendence are "drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication," though he mentions some others as well.

HORIZONTAL TRANSCENDENCE-- Huxley himself is worth quoting at length here:

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds. Horizontal self- transcendence is of the utmost importance. Without it, there would be no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, indeed no civilization.

To invoke Jungian terminology once more, "horizontal transcendence" most nearly approximates the idea of a given subject's purely "personal" psychology, dealing with activities that pertain to one's day-to-day consciousness, such as acquiring a given skill:
 

If Person One wants to build a birdhouse, that individual is in a static state with respect to his non-knowledge about birdhouse-building, and he reaches a dynamic state once he has learned the method of crafting birdhouses and does successfully build one.-- A SIEGEL SEGUE.

Jung's concept of the "transpersonal," however, compares favorably with Huxley's concept of both "upward" and "downward transcendence."  Even though the latter concerns a descent into sordid physicality that Huxley deems "lower than personal," it, unlike horizontal transcendence, can lead to the other kind:

To what extent, and in what circumstances, is it possible for a man to make use of the descending road as a way to spiritual self-transcendence; As first sight it would seem obvious that the way down is not and can never be the way up. But in the realm of existence matters are not quite so simple as they are in our beautifully tidy world of words. In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent. When the shell of the ego has been cracked and there begins to be a consciousness of the subliminal and physiological othernesses underlying personality, it sometimes happens that we catch a glimpse, fleeting but apocalyptic, of that other Otherness, which is the Ground of all being.

Jung does not speak of "downward transcendence" as such, but in some writings he too views the darkness in man-- what he terms "the shadow"-- as a source of upward transformation:

Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries.-- Jung, The Integration of the Personality (1939)

Huxley's theory also has some worthwhile applications to my theory of metaphenomenality and isophenomenality.  Obviously the working manifestion of isophenomenality, "naturalism," denotes a state of being in which the subject remains on a horizontal plane.  Within that plane, all phenomena are essentially the same, differing only by degree in terms of how typical or atypical a given subject considers them.

In contrast, the two characteristics of metaphenomenality are marked by the attempt to transcend the world of sameness, of contingency, as I noted in a not unrelated context here:

But what form can transcendence take, if one does not nullify the world of the contingent?

In a sense "strangeness"-- the quality that I find in both divisons of metaphenomenality-- is that nullification of the world of the contingent, of sameness, in that strangeness presents to us a world of ghosts and gods, a world that implicitly trumps the tigers of materialism.  Strangeness can operate equally well in terms of "upward" or "downward" forms of transcendence, evoking presences that are beyond one's horizontal consciousness, irrespective of whether they incline more toward heaven or hell.   One might even loosely term the supergenre "fantasy" as having a predilection for images of upward transcendence, while "horror" tends toward images of down-bound movement.

More to come in the next essay.

THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY, PT. 1

To what extent, and in what circumstances, is it possible for a man to make use of the descending road as a way to spiritual self-transcendence? At first sight it would seem obvious that the way down is not and can never be the way up. But in the realm of existence matters are not quite so simple as they are in our beautifully tidy world of words. In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent. -- Aldous Huxely on Self-Transcendence.

So rape, a heinous crime, becomes in fiction a source of titillation, at least when it's being perpetrated by a handsome swain. In itself this is no different than a host of similar dynamizations which fictional narrative makes possible. But having said that, is titillation all there is to the matter?...

...the power to rape, if it does signify potency in these stories, also signifies that the rakish hero is worth the heroine's trouble. She would hardly want to bother "stooping to conquer" him otherwise-- me, FROM ROMANCE TO THE RITUAL OF RAPE.

This essay is a prelude to an essay-series responding in part to Curt Purcell's recent GROOVY AGE post, entitled "Superheroines Lose."

I have not yet decided how many essays will comprise the series.  I've written more than a little here about the intertwined cultural subjects of sexuality and violence.  Because I don't get a lot of commentary, I'm not certain to what extent I'm talking to myself.  This in itself isn't necessarily a problem, as the blog was essentially conceived as a method of working out various aspects of my theories.  However, lack of input makes it tougher to avoid duplicating points.

The bracketed quotes above have in common a disinclination to view even the most physical aspects of human culture as nothing more than physical "things" with no cultural "soul," especially in Huxley, who details an assortment of practices that he terms "downward transcendence." This may be harder to demonstrate, though, with the subject matter of Curt's essay than with, say, romance-novels.

Time will tell.