MASTERING EPISTEMOLOGY

As I look over my various posts on both the topic of "epistemological patterns" and that of the "master thread," I don't think I ever managed to show how the former plays into the latter. 

I have been reasonably consistent about showing how different literary works display different levels of mythicity because their authors either do or do not render the four epistemological patterns with a sense of their complex possibilities. In 2018 I dubbed the process of mythic coalescence as "concrescence," and attempted to link it to the Aristotelian concept of "the unity of action," even though I almost immediately revised that standard phrase into a "unity of effects."

In 2020, I proposed "master thread" as a substitute for the familiar "theme statement" formulation, given that the image of a "master thread" could better account for all the "lesser threads" that might be tied into the dominant one. The essay was also the beginning of the end for the terms "overthought" and "underthought," both of which appear therein. Now, having claimed that master threads are either dominantly didactic or dominantly mythopoeic, I won't bother with those outmoded terms in future. But I didn't really set down how the process of concrescence depended on translating ideas and intuitions about the four epistemological patterns so that they become such a master thread.

Following the same pattern I'd used to argue THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, I offered three types of "master thread" as they occurred particular stories on the same theme in the 2020 essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3. This essay requires updating in line with the formulation of the necessity for epistemological patterns in the process of concrescence.

All three cited stories depend on the same type of master thread, which I stated to be "hero must defeat evil counterpart." The purpose of such confrontations are always to better define the hero's virtues as against the vices of the counterpart, and so the reigning epistemological pattern is psychological.

The first example, which had a *poor* level of mythicity, was "The Haunted Island" from CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43. I noted the various ad hoc elements of the story, but at heart its greatest weakness is that the "evil counterparts" aren't given any psychological grounding. The mutants, having survived weird transformations but continuing to live on, draw an irrational comparison between themselves and the heroic Challengers, simply because they think that the latter are also living on "borrowed time." The author can only explain this association by falling back on the makeshift rationale that the mutants have gone mad, which in theory frees the author from coming up with a plausible psychology for his villains.

The next cited story, with a *fair* level of mythicity, was "And So My World Ends," from JLA #71. This story actually had an editorial agenda behind it, as much as did "Haunted Island," in that the story eliminated all civilization on J'onn J'onzz's version of Mars and also provided an exit scene for the Martian Manhunter, who had lost his regular berth and was no longer a good fit in the JLA. But this time the writer gave the villain, Commander Blanx, a reason for his decimation of his homeworld: his utter contempt for the way his people have become "weaklings." This heightens the tragedy felt by J'onn as he mourns his world's fate at the hands of "one individual, sick with the need for violence."

And in the example of *good* mythicity, I claimed that "The Injustice Society of the World" was one in which the titular Society succeeded in showing their devotion to crime and evil just as intransigently as the Justice Society defend justice and goodness. None of the individual villains are any more "psychologized" any more than the heroes are. But I argued that the story was a landmark because the villains as a group were atypically portrayed as being just as super-competent as the heroic team, and they display their warped psychology by putting the good guys on trial for their opposition to criminal activity. 

All of these takes on the "evil counterpart" master thread are mythopoeic rather than didactic. But the level of concrescence rises according to the density of correlations that the author brings to all the respective evil counterparts, with the result that the first is not symbolically compelling at all, the second is only compelling in a limited way, and the third has been compelling enough that the Injustice Society remains a myth-presence to be reckoned with in current comics, while the other villains are either wholly or nearly forgotten.

WHEN IS A VIGNETTE NOT A VIGNETTE?

 The word “vignette,” which I referenced in CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH, originally wasn’t applied to any sort of narrative, having been formulated to describe a type of illustrative design work. Only later did it take on such meanings, according to Merriam-Webster, as “a quick narrative sketch” or “a brief scene within a play or movie.”

For the purpose of literary analysis, I make a distinction between two types of vignettes. The non-narrative type of vignette may be set apart from the main narrative, but it doesn’t have its own unity, often existing solely to relate some information to the audience, as with a character’s flashback that uses past events to explain the present. The narrative type of vignette, though, does possess some form of unity, usually seen in the consummation of one of the four potentialities. I’ll provide examples by drawing on previous mythcomics analyses, which of course means that in both examples I’m emphasizing the mythopoeic potentiality.

In the version of Wonder Woman’s origin set forth in WONDER WOMAN #1, the author, having already introduced his character in both ALL STAR COMICS and SENSATION COMICS, opens with an extended flashback to show the beginnings of the heroine’s homeland Paradise Island. Princess Diana herself has not even been born during the first four pages of the flashback, which are devoted to the origin of the Amazons and the travails they suffer at the hands of cruel male warriors. I would deem this section to be a non-narrative vignette. In terms of form, it meets my criteria: that of focusing mostly upon the beginning and the end of the story, without much in the way of a middle. Once the reader gets to the point where Paradise Island is established, the natural response is likely to be, “Yes, and then?”

The two-page “Origin of the Batman” from DETECTIVE COMICS #33, however, is a narrative vignette. The origin-tale is not organically part of the larger story in which it appears, and in truth the same two-pager might have been inserted into any story in that time-period, with the same narrative results. Yet it’s not the vignette’s functional independence that gives it the quality of unity, but the way in which the mythopoeic potentiality builds from beginning (“young Bruce Wayne suffers the trauma of seeing his parents killed by a ruthless criminal”) to end (“mature Bruce Wayne decides to use the omen of a creature of darkness to terrorize the denizens of the underworld.”)

To draw upon my observations from the essay-series THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, the difference is comparable between a “disorganized essay with a strong theme statement” and an essay well organized enough to reinforce its central argument with copious evidence.

CONCRESCENCE AND COMPLICATION

...though Cioffi's book doesn't reference Aristotle, clearly his structural summation of how anomalous presences impact on "conventional social reality" is of a piece with Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")--
ANOMALOUS ENCOUNTERS: RESOURCE.

 This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.-- INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

I've been using the imagery of wave formations whenever I've invoked the idea of amplitude, but here's another metaphor for connectedness: that of the knot-imagery put forth by Aristotle.

Since the beginnings of this blog, I've defined the significance of literary symbolic activity in terms of complexity. The idea of complexity as a value does not seem to appear as such in Aristotle's POETICS, in that the bulk of his argument focuses on art's ability to describe the good and the beautiful. The philosopher does use the categories of "simple" and "complex," but the categories reflect nothing save whether or not a given work contains what Aristotle called "the recognition scene." A simple narrative doesn't have a recognition scene; a complex narrative does.

Aristotle doesn't connect these categories to the "desis/lusis" dichotomy, which I assume was not original to him. However, I think that Aristotle found a moral value in the recognition scene, and that by the trope's presence, it gave a given narrative a greater moral potential. Thus a play like Euripides' MEDEA is simple because it possesses no turnabout scene, in which a protagonist realizes his "connectedness" to some other person or event, as Sophocles' OEDIPUS does.

For my purposes, the presence or absence of a recognition scene makes no difference. However, I find it interesting that the literary activity Aristotle calls "tying" is often rendered in English as "complication," while "untying" is often rendered with the French word "denouement," which originally had the same meaning of "unraveling."

Aristotle's logic is persuasive. Clearly he has examined, in his analytical manner, the way a given author creates interest in his protagonist's struggles by "tying" him up with one or more complications, and then "untying" him in such a way that the hero is either delivered up to good or bad fortune.

As a description of the authorial process, this is accurate, but I don't think it describes the finished literary narrative. I would certainly agree that the process by which Oedipus pieces together the clues regarding his true identity is a complex process. However, the metaphor of an unraveled knot doesn't adequately describe the conclusion of OEDIPUS REX, which is no less complex than all the knotty complications that lead up to the conclusion. The only way in which the play's denouement resembled an untied knot is in terms of a viewer's relief once he knows what has happened to the protagonist and all other significant characters. But the actual narrative process, by my lights, is either (1) simple all the way through, (2) simple in some places and complex in others, or (3) complex all the way through. Not surprisingly, these three levels of complication line up fairly well with my analysis of the levels of literary quality I called "poor," "fair," and "good." At the time I wrote that essay, I was using Aristotle's term "unity of action" to explain the presence of complexity in a given discourse; now, the concept of concrescence has largely usurped the place of said unity.

Thus, for me, every narrative is a knot, perhaps most visually approachable through this representation of different levels of complexity in molecular knots:

Now, since I've gone to great effort to expound upon the ways in which complexity can only be judged through examination of the four potentialities, I won't repeat that argument here, except to say that I've allowed for the possibility that symbolic complexity is not the only form of complexity. I've also allowed that "simplicity" has a role to play even in the most complex narratives. But focusing just on symbolic discourse, then a symbolically poor work would resemble the simple knot "A," a fair work would resemble B or C, which are more complex by virtue of having more crossings, and a good work would resemble D or E.

MYTHCOMICS: "SISTER SYNDROME" (LOVE HINA BOOK 12, 2001)

I've already written a long summation of the LOVE HINA manga here, and so will write this essay as if the reader has already acquainted himself with the basics.

More often than not, manga-serials are written with a definite conclusion in the author's mind. This doesn't mean that every story that has a well-conceived ending necessarily has "unity of action." Still. I did regard the completed story of HELLSING to comprise one big myth, and though DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND is still a "work in progress," I judged that the most recent addition to its storyline suggests the high amplitude of a mythcomic.

LOVE HINA ends with the culmination of the romance between young lovers Keitaro and Naru. However, the stories leading up to that culmination are much more episodic in nature than, say, those of HELLSING, or even another comedy-romance like BECAUSE I'M THE GODDESS. Author Ken Akamatsu breaks up the forward progress of his main plot with countless wacky escapades, sometimes for the purpose of expanding on character-traits, and sometimes just for fun. Thus LOVE HINA as a whole does not meet the mythcomics test. However, I've analyzed one particular episode, SECRET OF THE MYSTERIOUS GIRL, as a story that shows high mythicity. The same principle applies to one of Akamatsu's more cohesive arcs, which I've titled "Sister Syndrome" after one of the story-titles used in the Tokyopop English translation.

If the underthought of LOVE HINA could be boiled down to a binary statement, it might read something like, "The lover who is not the guy's sister triumphs over those who are almost-sisters." Of all the women in Keitaro Urashima's "harem," Naru has the least resemblance to a sibling, and so from one point of view, she would seem to be the best possible mate for Keitaro. "Sister Syndrome," however, deals with one of the greatest threats to Naru's romantic hegemony-- Kanako, who has formed a passion for her adoptive brother Keitaro. She appears in the previous arc, showing up at Hinata House at a time when Keitaro is away studying archaeology, and she uses the Urashima name to take control of the dormitory and force everyone to obey her whims. Even before Keitaro returns, Kanako regards Naru as her primary rival, while for her part, Naru;s insecurities are brought out by the prospect of meeting a female with a more profound connection to Keitaro-- that of family-- than she Naru has.

Volume 12 begins with Keitaro returning to the dormitory. At this time he has confessed his romantic devotion to Naru, but she has not made a full reciprocation, due to her ongoing insecurities. When he first sees Kanako, he doesn't recognize her as his adoptive sister, since he hasn't seen her in years.

For her part Kanako mirrors some of Natu's own insecurities, reflected by her penchant for assuming complicated disguises. Uncertain of making open advances on Keitaro, she masquerades as Naru in order to get close to him and to find out what Keitaro thinks of his sister.

Keitaro has no conscious desire for Kanako, but her constant attentions start to wear him down somewhat. Strangely, even though Naru is rather repulsed by the idea of even adoptive siblings becoming intimate, she sympathizes with her rival, telling Kanako "I know you're siblings, but sometimes you just have to come right and say what's on your mind." This, as much as Kanako's masquerades, suggests a mirroring-effect between the two characters.

Keitaro starts having dreams about marrying his sister, but as if to prove his fidelity to Naru, he renews his attempts to court her. He invites her to the "Hinata Annex," an isolated building on the same grounds as the dorm. The Annex,, which in earlier days served as an inn, has acquired the aura of legend, in that any romantic couple would become bonded if they spent the night there. However, Kanako gets there first, and in the darkness Keitaro more or less pledges his troth to her, following the myth-trope of "the statement that can't be taken back."

Then weird things start happening to Naru, as if the legendary magic of the Annex is trying to keep Kanako and Keitaro together. Keitaro fights for his true love by trying to give Naru an engagement ring, but through the usual crazy antics, it lands up on Kanako's finger.

Naru responds to this setback by fleeing Hinata House and all of her friends. This allows Akamatsu to unleash yet more goofy antics as Keitaro and his harem give chase. This leads to an outright battle between Naru and Kanako, which Kanako, a real martial artist, wins easily. Note that the engagement ring seems to take on the aspect of a Tolkienian "ring of power."

However, Keitaro's conscientious rejection of his sister's erotic feelings finally has a reverse-effect on Kanako. She seeks out Naru and badgers her to declare her true feelings to Keitaro.

Still, to give Naru more time to sort out her feelings, Kanako uses her disguise-talents to make herself look like Naru, while Naru takes the appearance of Kanako. A more obvious example of the mirroring-trope would be hard to imagine.

Finally, Kanako surrenders to Keitaro's unconquerable passion for Naru, though she hedges her bets by telling him that she's not totally giving up on him.

And then there's a big climax in which Naru and Keitaro finally get it on-- though their differences keep driving the romance for two more volumes-- and even the women who wanted them to get together become inflamed with jealousy and try to kill them both.

In conclusion, I'll note that my assignment of the phenomenality as "marvelous" is dependent mostly on elements that are nominal in the story, like Kaolla Su's super-science toys and a species of flying turtle.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 3

In Part 2, I enlisted Jung's idea about function-sovereignty to champion Aristotle's preference for "unity of action" over Levi-Strauss's structuralist, "nothing-is-more-important-than-anything-else" approach to analyzing the themes of archaic myth. Yet the Jungian concept that most resembles Levi-Strauss's formulation of binary oppositions is that of enantiodromia. From PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES:

I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.

Naturally, since I'm concerned with the themes of literary works rather than myths as such, I'm not concerned with Jung's idea about an unconscious "counterposition" arising in reaction to a "one-sided tendency" that "dominates conscious life." The writer of fiction may be drawing on both conscious and unconscious factors in his own mind, but the work he presents to the reader depends on a conflict between at least two opposed principles, usually personified into characters. Levi-Strauss implied such a conflict in his binary oppositions, though he does not seem nearly as interested in Aristotle's idea of the *agon,* the idea that conflict is fundamental to "poetry." If anything, Levi-Strauss's approach to the way a myth-tale approaches opposed forces resembles Tzvetan Todorov's model for an aesthetics that "just happens,' based not in conflict but in changing equilibriums.

…we must inquire into the very nature of narrative. Let us begin by constructing an image of the minimum narrative, not the kind we usually find in contemporary texts, but that nucleus without which we cannot say there is any narrative at all. The image will be as follows: All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.

I suppose Todorov may have de-emphasized the radical of conflict because he was aware of literary works that appeared to dispense with overt conflict. However, in my analysis of the Ray Bradbury story "The Last Night of the World," I found that even in a story with no apparent intrinsic conflict, there existed a conflict between what the story portrayed and the audience's expectations:

In the minds of some if not all readers of the story, there will be the expectation that if humanity were faced with an "end of days," it would be an occasion of great tumult, of "raging against the dying of the light."  What Bradbury's story offers is, in keeping with the literary audience to which it is directed, is a triumph of the "will to nothingness" against all the audience's expectations.

In Part 2, I gave my "binary opposition" to describe the potential underthought in a Jack Kirby story: "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story was equally weak in terms of having a discursive overthought, which came down to nothing more than "good must triumph over evil." So what would a strong underthought on the same theme look like?

The Golden Age Origin of Hawkman might be seen as following roughly the same paltry "good vs. evil" overthought, though its development of its underthought is one of the strongest in the comics medium.

In Fox's Hawkman story, as in Kirby's Challengers story, the heroes are tough guys who prove skillful with weapons, while their respective enemies more or less align with the archetype of the evil sorcerer. So the opposition here would be not unlike that of "sword versus sorcery."

To move on to a different underthought which keeps to the same good-vs.-evil overthought, I'll cite Kanigher's 1947 "The Injustice Society of the World." In this story the underthought is more like "law vs. crime," perhaps best represented by the scene where the villains put the heroes on trial for their deeds against crime. This underthought is not nearly as well developed as Fox's Hawkman story. However, the Kanigher story is one of many that I've considered as mythcomics simply because the stories had one "binary opposition" devoted to giving readers a discourse regarding the opposed elements.

Similarly, I have at times given the mythcomics designation to works in which the overthought and underthought are both strong, though not necessarily forming a unity.

The 1982 graphic novel "God Loves, Man Kills" does provide such unity, though. This time the overthought isn't just a vague opposition of good and evil, but that of "religious doctrine versus biological reality." Various earlier X-Men stories had opposed the biological reality of mutantkind to human beliefs regarding normality. However, those earlier stories didn't reference the more controversial topic of religion, as Chris Claremont's story does.

Cyclops's speech depicts the positive opposition of the overthought, using logic to assert that mutants are part of humankind. In contrast, Reverend Stryker fulfills the negative function, anathematizing the abnormal and stressing the need for purification.

Since both of these philosophical postures relate to the history of ideas, they belong to the story's overthought. The underthought, however, is concerned more with the opposition of images and the numinous associations they carry. Elsewhere in the story, the sometime villain Magneto makes what I've termed the "separatist argument," that humans and mutants should be separated from one another. But his appearance in this panel gives Magneto a less rational appearance, making of him a sympathetic "devil"-- born up by magnetic waves rather than wings-- who storms the church-like meeting-hall of the obsessed preacher.

"God Loves" is not as rich in images and symbols as other stories, particularly the Hawkman-origin. Clearly Claremont's story functions primarily as a dramatic exploration of ideas, while the symbols are less important. However, "God Loves" is one of the better stories in which overthought and underthought form a significant unity.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 2

A careful analysis of the text of this myth, which in one version alone takes up thirteen pages of Dorsey's work, discloses that it is built on a long series of oppositions: (1) initiated shaman versus non-initiated shaman, that is, the opposition between acquired power and innate power; (2) child versus old man, since the myth insists on the youth of one protagonist and the old age of the other; (3) confusion of sexes versus differentiation of sexes; all of Pawnee metaphysical thought is actually based on the idea that at the time of the creation of the world antagonistic elements were intermingled and that the first work of the gods consisted in sorting them out. […] (7) magic which proceeds by introduction versus magic which proceeds by extraction.-- Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthology

In STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 1, I drew certain comparisons between Aristotle's concept of the unity of action with Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage. Levi-Strauss is far better known, though, for his concept of binary oppositions,  a few of which he cites in the quote above. Many of Levi-Strauss's analyses are much like the one above, citing an assortment of binary oppositions between abstract representations, such as "confusion of sexes versus differentiation of sexes." This would seem, on the face of things, to contradict Aristotle's dictum, which I last cited in THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS in February 2016.

The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. . . . The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

For the purpose of literary criticism, however, I think that these two insights can prove complementary, and once more I turn to the mediating influence of Jung, whose views of "sovereignty" I surveyed in JUNG AND CENTRICITY:

This “absolute sovereignty always belongs, empirically, to one function alone, and can belong only to one function, because the equally independent intervention of another function would necessarily produce a different orientation which, partially at least, would contradict the first. But since it is a vital condition for the conscious process of adaptation always to have clear and unambiguous aims, the presence of a second function of equal power is naturally ruled out. This other function, therefore, can have only a secondary importance.”

Jung, who devotes PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES to analyzing the many mental functions revealed by his depth psychology, ascribes "secondary importance" to any and all other functions as against the primary one, just as Aristotle says that the poet must confine his attention to "several incidents...so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole."

Of these three academics-- anthropologist, philosopher (and proto-literary critic), and psychologist-- the anthropologist is not especially interested in seeing a "unity of action" in his narratives (and here I'm considering Jung's analyses of the internal goings-on of his hypothetical patients as "narratives.") Levi-Strauss's orientation stems, I believe, from his having focused his studies primarily on the sort of often-fragmentary tales that he encountered in tribal peoples. This led him to view myths as fundamentally fragmentary, rather than being capable of forming "wholes" as Aristotle believes that stories should.

Anyone dealing with modern stories, of course, is not dealing with products of a tribal aesthetic. Such stories are usually informed by Aristotle's idea of *dianoia,* which I've loosely translated as "theme statement" elsewhere. In literature the "unity of action," the unity that arises from a given work's theme, does not preclude that other "imitations of action" that complement the main action. This concept of unity parallels Jung's concept of sovereignty, that a given personality-- or at least, Jung's abstraction of a personality-- will have other functions, but that a central function will be "in charge."

Now, often in my own myth-critical analyses of films and comic book stories, I've found that the most mythic works I've surveyed possess a strong underthought, one that often can be expressed as one of Levi-Strauss's binary oppositions.  In this essay, I summarized the potential (yet inadequately expressed) theme statement of a particular Jack Kirby-Dave Wood story:

Boiled down, the potential underthought-- for Kirby and Wood probably would never have become didactic enough to produce a complementary overthought-- might read something like, "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." 

Kirby's NEW GODS series, which I also touched on the same essay, received a fuller examination in this mythcomics essay, and there too I summarized the implied theme of the short-lived series:

...where NEW GODS excels is in Kirby’s take on a theme that Tolkien himself had evoked. In a world where mythic good and mythic evil have palpable existence, and where their battle is the proper working-out of their joint destiny, how does good keep from becoming corrupted by the power of evil?

There are patently other binary underthoughts expressed in Kirby's saga, notably that of "father vs. son," but I would regard all of these are, as Jung says, "of secondary importance." 

More in Part 3.

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 1

In short, ODKIN SON OF ODKIN is an assortment of odds and ends, lacking the relative unity of KING OF THE WORLD. But certainly many of those conceptual "bricks" possess considerable mythic power by themselves, even if they aren't assembled into a satisfying structure. In contrast to the works I've labeled inconsummate, the symbolic value of the building-blocks has not been distorted. The value merely "lies in state," like one of Atlan's bodies, and fails to come alive.-- NEAR MYTHS: ODKIN, SON OF ODKIN.

This 2016 essay is the only one in which I adapted Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage to literature. I'm sure other critics have ventured the comparison, though I also tried to tie it to the Aristotelian concept of the "unity of action," which in two essays, here and here, provides my "line between fair and good." In the second essay I compared different examples of Jack Kirby's work, just as in ODKIN I had opposed two examples of Wally Wood's work. It occurred to me, though, that two of my essays on Al Capp's LI'L ABNER might better illustrate both bricolage and unity of action, not least because the two story-cycles-- ["D. Yokum's Visit"] and ["General Bullmoose's Debuts"]-- were produced right on top of one another, at a time when the artist's powers of expression were undiminished (in contrast, say, to Wood's debilitating condition at the time he completed ODKIN).

"Visit," starting in late December 1952 and lasting through March of the next year, is shorter than "Debuts," lasting from March to August 1953. Brevity sounds like it might be conducive to Aristotle's unity of action, since the philosopher argued that the most unified works should focus on one primary action, though not without the potential for assorted subplots. (For instance, the primary action of THE ILIAD is "the wrath of Achilles," though there's room for quite a few subplots about Paris and Helen, Hector and his family, et al.) However, in modern fiction brevity does not necessarily confer unity.

In the second part of THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, I mentioned that the superior works were those that seemed to articulate a sort of "theme statement," though I was careful to distinguish between themes associated with discursive thinking, or "the overthought," from those associated with symbolic discourse, or "the underthought." I also specified that these themes could reinforce one another, though they did not necessarily have to do so. In the case of both Capp story-cycles, Capp succeeded in having them reinforce each other for the most part, though I consider the overthought and underthought weaker in "Debuts" as opposed to "Visits." Thus, since Capp's powers of expression had to be roughly equal when he produced the two sequences, I had to decide what if any factors led him to de-emphasize what I've started calling the "vertical meaning" of "Debuts." And back in RETHINKING THE OVERTHOUGHT, I identified the somewhat competitive partner of vertical meaning, "lateral meaning:"

The literal meaning is, amusingly enough, also the "lateral meaning;" one arrives at it by following the progression of events and expressed feelings from point A to point Z, and that is "what happened"...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. Thus, I personally can still enjoy many narratives that don't have much in the way of abstract meaning, as long as they excel in terms of sensation, feeling, or some combination thereof. 

Thus it seems to me that Capp's approach to ABNER, from its genesis in 1934 to its conclusion in 1977, was one which, like most comic strips, privileged lateral over vertical meaning, as I mentioned in 2015's STRIP NO-SHOW:

What the elitists missed, however, was that comic strips, even at their greatest levels of excellence, were always hampered by the factors of serial progression. Certainly Sunday pages like NEMO and PRINCE VALIANT could get away with a somewhat "painterly" approach to comics-narrative, but they were the exceptions. Most story-strips, whether they appeared only on weekdays, on Sundays, or in a combined form, chose to pursue a straightforward linear narrative-- again, one designed to seduce the readers into regularly partaking of the newspaper that carried the comic. Caniff may have been the paradigmatic figure here, in part because one can see him channeling the "invisible style" of most Hollywood films of his time.... This linear narrative, in essence, followed the same association I've outlined for the sensation and feeling functions. The visual part of a given strip communicates what kinds of sensations that the characters are experiencing, and the verbal part gives it feeling-context: whether the reader is supposed to be happy or sad when a given character is killed.

While there's no inevitable conflict between vertical and linear meaning, any more than there is between overthought and underthought, such conflict can take place when the artist becomes a little too "workmanlike" in terms of how he assembles the "bricks" of his storylines. This is particularly true of Capp, who shows a particular fondness for piling one story-trope atop another, with no detectable concern for Aristotelian unities.

In the upcoming Part 2, I'll justify the connection of the two types of meaning with my title regarding the nature of strong and weak propositions.

DISCOURSES WITH LIVING SYMBOLS

In DISCOURSES WITH DEAD MEN, I said:

So any artistic narrative always has this dual potential: it can be produced for a wide audience, or for the author alone. Psychic mediums notwithstanding, artistic narrative-- which term here subsumes also music and the visual arts-- is almost the only way that artists can keep "talking" with people long after the artists themselves are dead. To some extent non-fictional narrative shares some of the power of the arts, but artistic narrative seems to hold much more power to remain relevant to audiences born long after the narrative was originated.

I also mentioned in the same essay that I began addressing the subject of "discourses" recently as a way of sussing out the function of the mythopoeic potentiality, whose content is sometimes hard to separate from that of the other three.

Yet, once one is able to isolate a work's symbolic discourse, it often provides much more of a meaningful connection to the author's work than any of the others. One may not care for an author's ability to transmit sensory experiences, personalities, or intellectual ideas, or if one grants that the author has some ability, one still may not like the world-picture he transmits. But there's something ineluctably persuasive about the symbolic process. One can reject whatever intellectual ideas may be attached to it, and yet still admire the author's ability to converse in the language of symbols.

I'll take as example C.S. Lewis, whose non-fiction I've frequently discussed on this blog. While I find Lewis's ruminations on literature stimulating, his remarks on religion have often struck me as narrow-minded and self-serving, particularly in MERE CHRISTIANITY. In this book, Lewis responded to questions about the Christian religion, originally propounded via radio. Here's the one I disliked the most.

“Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the 'Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”

Intellectually, this is nonsense. Lewis is trying to distance religion from its involvement in the witch-hunts of the past by claiming that modern religionists are too educated to believe in such nonsense. Yet he can't completely condemn the fanatics of yesteryear, stating that if he could believe in people who made deals with the devil, he would regard them as "filthy quislings" deserving of death. His position also suggests that at the time he wrote this, whatever "wiccan" practices existed in England had gone so far underground that an educated man like Lewis could believe that no such persons existed in modern times. Lewis passed in 1963, so it's possible he never encountered the idea of modern witches worshiping archaic deities that were in no way affiliated with Satan. Even if Lewis had known of such cults, the writer would probably have given them no more respect than outright Satanists.

Yet, within his creative work, Lewis could entertain syncretic visions of religion. Narnia, despite being patterned on Christian belief, reproduces many of the images and icons of Greek paganism, and in THE LAST BATTLE, there is a dim suggestion that Aslan is not exclusively a "Christian" deity, but will give sanctuary even to righteous men who do not worship him.

The irony of my title is that, while I know that symbols are not alive apart from the role they play in the language of living persons, they can take on a "life" of their own, Indeed, the symbolic formulations of an author may seem much more "convivial" to a reader than the characters or the plot that serve as vehicles for symbolic events-- sacrificial dramas, world-saving conflicts, etc. Nor is there any symbolic formulation that is absolute. Lewis's Aslan embodies one among thousands of literary sacrificial dramas, and one may name others that share none of Lewis's particular themes, but which still possess the same "unity of action" I've identified with strong symbolic discourse in this essay.  The 1971 film THE OMEGA MAN is concerned with many intellectual subjects foreign to Lewis, not least being an American preoccupation with racial matters. However, it is an evocation of the sacrificial pattern no less valuable than that of NARNIA. I quite preferred the film to its prose source material. Yet even though I found Matheson's I AM LEGEND less formidable in its mythic "unity of action," there would have been no OMEGA MAN had the novel not suggested the theme to the film's scriptwriters.

Despite my usage of the established term "unity of action," the unity involved in plurisignative communication is far more about unifying a plurality of affects, both sympathetic and antipathetic. For myths of sacrificial figures, it's about transcending the death that we know all mortal entities must experience. Aslan literally transcends death, while Robert Neville's transubstantiation is more figurative, but symbolic constructs may be said to enjoy both literal and figurative transcendence, if only because, having never lived, they can never really die.

THE LINE BETWEEN '"FAIR' AND "GOOD" PART II

In Part 1 I proposed that the narrative element that most made the difference between works of "fair mythicity" and "good mythicity" was that the latter sustained more of a "unity of action," so for Part 2, I decided to provide some examples based largely upon the work of one artist, Jack Kirby, either by himself or in collaborations.

To this date one of my preferred examples for an inconsummate null-myth is the debut tale of the Jack Kirby/Dave Wood collaboration, "The Sorcerer's Box" from 1957's SHOWCASE #6. I won't repeat the arguments presented here as to why the Kirby/Wood story proved inconsummate, but here's the closest I found to a "theme statement" for the story, which in turn would have provided it with any unity of action:

....the "villain" of the story, whose name so obviously references "Merlin," is a rather half-assed version of the Faustian over-reacher.  I noted earlier that the story does touch upon the nature of masculinity, and it does, in the sense of evoking pleasure in the heroic acts of the Challengers.  But the story doesn't work well as far as positing Morelian as the obverse of the heroes, simply because he pays them to do a dangerous job.  Is Morelian in some sense "anti-masculine" for having done so?  This is a possibility, but Kirby's story (and Dave Wood's dialogue) offer little to explain why the heroes suddenly take a dislike to Morelian at the end.  

Boiled down, the potential underthought-- for Kirby and Wood probably would never have become didactic enough to produce a complementary overthought-- might read something like, "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story doesn't succeed in evoking even that simple a theme statement, though as I pointed out in the essay, Kirby had probably completed more unitary works prior to his CHALLENGERS outings.

Now, I did not label this THOR story a "near-myth" when I examined it in COMBAT PLAY PT. 2, but it does attain a clearer theme statement than the CHALLENGERS story, even though the Lee/Kirby collaboration is no more truly didactic in its main purpose.

What does keep #152 from being just another big battle-tale, though, is that Thor and Ulik are arranged to represent philosophical postures. Thor, son of Odin and scion of Asgard, is heir to a philosophy of noblesse oblige, while Ulik describes himself as "lowly-born-- with naught to lose-- and a world to gain."

Though the sociological myth here is much clearer and more deeply resonant, though, it's still just what I've called a "myth-kernel" in the midst of a "very rambling arc" that involved, not just Thor and Ulik, but also Balder, the Norn Queen, Loki, and various other Asgardian personnel, all with arcs that don't complement one another. So it's a near-myth possessed of only "fair" mythicity. It's sort of like a disorganized essay with a strong theme statement, while the CHALLENGERS story is disorganized all the way through.

Sociological myth once more takes the fore in another Lee/Kirby collaboration, this one from a few years previous to the Thor tale. The FANTASTIC FOUR tale titled "The Red Ghost" is included as one of my mythcomics,which should suggest to readers that I give it at least some level of good mythicity. My current line of thought about the necessity of a "unity of action" within the story, which in turn supports the creators' symbolic discourse, is borne out by my observations about the balance between what could have been flat elements in a purely didactic argument:

...in contrast to other, less complex allegories-- whether from Marvel Comics or elsewhere-- Lee and Kirby devote an inordinate amount of effort to contrast the exemplary behavior of the four American heroes versus the selfish and controlling behavior of Ivan Kragoff.  This elevates the argument beyond merely "good democracy vs. evil Communism," for it speaks to what is good in humankind generally as well as to what is evil in humankind generally.  I note, just for one possible example, a scene in which Reed announces his plan to fly to the moon alone.  His comrades set him straight with a little horseplay, which nevertheless underscores that though Reed Richards leads the group, he does so with "the consent of the governed."

At the same time, I'm moved to ask whether or not this "unity of action" can also apply to longer works. I find that one of Kirby's solo achievements, the original NEW GODS epic, resonates with Aristotle's pronouncement that Homer had managed to provide unity to THE ILIAD by focusing upon "the anger of Achilles," no matter how many other separate war-related plot-lines might have spun off from that.

Kirby's abbreviated epic, reviewed here, garnered some complaints for having gone in too many directions at once, but despite some admitted flaws, the artist does always keep a unity of action in the NEW GODS comic proper. Whatever particular plot Kirby might have followed in a given issue, the concern of the title was always about the relationship of heroic Orion to his devious father Darkseid-- a relationship that Orion only suspects at the start, and which reaches a thematic culmination in the 1984 graphic novel THE HUNGER DOGS.

I concluded Part 1 with this hypothesis:

I may use this line of thought to a lead-in to another question, regarding whether it's most beneficial to have a "unity" of idea between a work's overthought and underthought, or whether the two exist on essentially separate but intersecting mental planes, not unlike the interdependence of harmony and melody in music.

I think at least the two examples of "good" mythicity in this essay demonstrate that the mythopoeic underthought does intersect with the more didactic overthought: that the former supports the latter but that neither is defined by the other.

THE LINE BETWEEN "FAIR" AND "GOOD"

I recently ran through all of the film-reviews I'd rated for "mythicity" on my film-blog for the past six years, and as I did I noted how many of them had received the rating of either "good" or "superior." Not surprisingly, there weren't a lot of these, and though I didn't amass totals for either "fair" or "poor," my overall impression is that the vast majority of my reviews got a "fair" rating.

When I started the "1001 myths" project in June 2015-- which took in a smattering of earlier blog-reviews-- the only specific statement I made regarding the level of mythicity in the stories selected was this paragraph:

Starting the week of June 28-July 4, I will start posting at least one review of a comic book that meets my criteria for being "mythic." I would like to do two, but that may not be realistic. It's also occurred to me that it might be instructive to post not only an analysis of a consummate "myth-comic," but also one of an *inconsummate* story. Such stories make good counter-examples, in that they will possess myth-elements-- as do all narratives, by virtue of being narratives-- but the story uses them poorly or not to their greatest potential. It might also serve to make clearer that I don't regard "mythic complexity" as some sort of rapture that descends upon the writer as from heaven. Some raptures result only in babbling, while others culminate in a poetry that transcends all the Babel-like confusions of language. 

There's clearly no "rating" associated with my idea of the "consummate 'myth-comic,'" so it's more than a little likely that on some level I associated it even with comics that were either "good" or "superior." I didn't stick with analyzing "null-myths" for very long, but clearly they compare pretty well with the rating of "poor mythicity," partly in line with my remark about "babbling" and partly in line with my formulation of why potentially mythic texts end up as mere null-myths.

...because of my realization that on occasions a given work may have symbolic potential, and yet does not use it because of some flaw in the execution, I've started utilizing "null-myth" as a label for all examples of "frustrated mythicity." Thus far all of the null-myths I've identified thus far have frustrated their potential due to one of two reasons. Either their authors UNDERTHINK the UNDERTHOUGHT-- that is, the authors show some realization of the power of myth-symbols on their own, but said authors use the symbols as if they were static functions, like Joyce's door... Or they OVERTHINK the OVERTHOUGHT, in that they impose some mental straight-jacket around the potentially free-flowing images and symbols. This might include phenomena as intellectually disparate as the over-intellectualizations of figures like Sim and Ditko, as well as instances where some editorial consideration overrides the free flow.-- MORE NULL-MYTH NOODLINGS.

 

So "null-myths" are works in which the mythic potential is "poor"-- but what works are merely "fair" (without yet even getting to the question of what "fair" itself means)? The simplest answer is that these would be the "near-myths" that I started formally identifying in this May 2016 essay, where I wrote:

I've defined a "null-myth" as a narrative that shows potential for mythicity / symbolic discourse but fails to articulate that potential to its best effect. In contrast, "a near-myth" is a part of a narrative that sustains a mythic kernel of meaning, but does not become unified into a fully-developed "underthought" throughout the narrative.

So, to answer my question as to what provides the line between "fair" and "good," it would seem to be the "unity of action" I described in THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS.

I may use this line of thought to a lead-in to another question, regarding whether it's most beneficial to have a "unity" of idea between a work's overthought and underthought, or whether the two exist on essentially separate but intersecting mental planes, not unlike the interdependence of harmony and melody in music.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS

In RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT, I took Frye's concept of "overthought" and "underthought," which he took from Gerard Manley Hopkins, and refurbished both terms to my Jungian preferences. By my scheme, the "underthought" is a given work's discourse of "images and metaphors," toward which the audience feels sympathy or antipathy, and the "overthought" is a given work's discourse of abstract, didactic ideas. The first I posit as identical to Jung's "function of intuition," and the second to the "function of thinking," while the other two functions comprise the "lateral meaning" of the work, the audience's basic sense of what happened to the story's characters ("sensation") and how it affected them emotionally ("feeling.")

As I continue to meditate on various comics-works to see if they qualify as mythcomics, I'm finding that whether a given work is more dominated by its overthought or by its underthought, it works best when it follows Aristotle's dictum for the "unity of action."

The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. . . . The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

This is one reason why, even though I stated long ago that I considered the X-MEN's "Dark Phoenix": storyline to be a mythic work, I would now consider it more of a "near myth." Like many serial comic books of the period-- DEATHLOK and BLACK PANTHER, for example-- the writers often plotted the stories in episodic, helter-skelter fashion. This can be potentially more fun to read than a rigidly plotted opus, but it doesn't produce the desired "unity of action."

I don't have plans as yet to create a category for "overthought-dominated works," but if I did, I might include a 1953 sequence from Walt Kelly's POGO comic strip. The sequence, in which Kelly heaps satirical barbs upon the still formidable public figure of Joseph P. McCarthy, has been lauded by many comics-critics. I respect both Kelly's craft and his intent, but the sequence is most interesting to me in that any free flow of symbolic content has been tamped down, so to speak, to serve the primary purpose of elucidating Kelly's ideas about McCarthy, demagoguery, and American commercialism.

By way of contrast, an "underthought-dominated work"-- one which happens to be as complex in terms of symbolic discourse as Kelly's work is in terms of didactic discourse-- is examined in my essay on the Origin of Metamorpho. The main purpose of Bob Haney was not focused upon ideas, but upon the symbols attendant to his newly crafted superhero. This includes both (1) the Oedipal quadrangle of hero, hero's girlfriend, girlfriend's rich father and the father's brutish stooge, (2) assorted references to Egypt and vaguely alchemical symbols ("the rose stone.')

While it would be impossible for an ideological critic to admit any sort of equivalence between a high-minded political satire and a wildly escapist superhero tale, both works do display a necessary unity of action. One merely have to be tuned to hear and/or see.