THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 5

 I decided I needed to follow up PART 4 with a couple of variations on the thymotic/epithymotic word-pair-- but this time, taken from American rather than Japanese cartoons.

In my previous writings on thymos, I've drawn to some extent on Thomas Hobbes in defining what I now call "epithymotic" as actions taken for either "gain" or "security." The anime example I used in Part 4 was that of the character Sakura in URUSEI YATSURA, who repeatedly beats up Ataru to defend her personal security vis-a-vis not having him paw her. But a "gain" example can be found in the 1944 Warner Brothers short PLANE DAFFY, written by Warren Foster and directed by Frank Tashlin.

PLANE is set in a cartoon version of WWII, in which the noble American warbirds are having their plans stolen by the insidious Axis spy Hatta Mari. Hatta romances naive flyers into giving her their secret plans and then convinces them to kill themselves. The high command sends their best "woman-hating" pilot into enemy territory, Daffy Duck. Daffy is ambushed by Matta, who almost does melt him into a pool of goo with her ardor. However, Daffy rallies, giving as good as he got, and then tries to escape with the secret plans. 

As he tries to escape, Matta tries to kill Daffy in various ways, failing only because he's such a darn-fool duck. He swallows the secret paper to keep it out of her hands, but she seizes him and sticks him in an X-ray machine so that she and her leaders can see what's written on the paper. The big conclusion is that the secret is no secret, but the point is that all Matta's actions are oriented upon "gain," the gain of military advantage for her allies. There's no indication that she enjoys the activities of killing or seducing for their own sake, so all of her gain-focused violence would be epithymotic in nature.

Another flavor of the opposite category, the thymotic, appears in the 1952 Daffy Duck short THE SUPER SNOOPER (reviewed here), written by Tedd Pierce and directed by Robert McKimson. The flavor I described in Part 4 focused on the general pattern of Lum of URUSEI YATSURA. Whereas Sakura whales on Ataru to protect her own security, Lum does so because she's in love with him and wants to bend him to her will. This is a particular form of thymotic activity I've previously labeled "megalothymia," indicating that the person exercising his/her will seeks supremacy (though it's suggested that if Ataru settled down to be a good husband, Lum would become a good wife-- or at least, a better one than, say, Peg Bundy). 

The opposite flavor to megalothymia goes by the name of "isothymia," and it applies to the violence unleashed upon Daffy by the statuesque seductress, "The Body." Isothymia strives to bring about equality of recognition, and in SNOOPER's parody of gumshoe-fiction, Daffy-- a very different, often-self-defeating form of the duck than we see in PLANE-- barges into The Body's home in the belief that a murder's been committed. Because The Body comes on to Daffy, he assumes she's trying to cover up a murder she committed, so he starts tossing out wild scenarios about How She Dunnit.

 The Body is of course no more complex than Hatta Mari, but the script gives the former a little more nuance. The Body keeps trying to make whoopee with the detective, but he just keeps trying to justify his fantasies by setting up murder-methods and casting himself as the murder-victim. Of the four gags in the short, only the last one shows The Body lying back and letting Daffy half-kill himself. The other three culminate with the Body either shooting Daffy or dropping a heavy weight on his head. In two of the three, she seems slightly shocked when she accidentally precipitates violence on him, and in the third-- the rifle-scenario shown above-- the artists draw her in a stoic mode, neither pleasured nor troubled by her action of shooting Daffy a dozen times. The overall suggestion is that she's just patiently indulging the goofy gumshoe's fantasies, until she finally gets a chance to explain that he's in the wrong house. Prior to the revelation, she's only mildly protested her innocence, and when he finally agrees with her, she uses that as an excuse to go after him again-- and he flees, because he has no (theoretical) defense against the menace of wedded bliss. The Body does not show any passion to hurt Daffy, but she's willing to accomodate his fantasies if it keeps him close to her. And so the Daffy Duck (of this isolated short, at least) meets the matrimonial fate Lum threatens Ataru with, but without the implication that the guy's better half will always get her way with the help of electric shocks.            

COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL

The overall conclusion of last month's EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series was my affirmation that the elements of "play for play's sake" in literature were largely immune from accusations of "bad influence," while elements of "play for work's sake," which encourage audiences to take a particular real-world action, could be either a good or bad influence. In Part 2, in order to get across a distinction between types of literary evil, I cited this passage from Bataille:

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Now, I also said in Part 2 that "Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature..." Yet even though I've specified that Bataille was not offering a general non-literary definition of evil, his statement deserves some consideration as it might apply to all human experience, both "common and uncommon."

Take the proposition: "If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it." I see why Bataille would use the term "purely evil" for a literary reflection of a human action, but the statement is dubious at best regarding common human experience. The Menendez Brothers killed their parents, but the killers' act of gratuitously taking life does not in itself become less evil if informed only by self-interest. If anything, I would guess that the majority of human beings are most often victimized by acts of evil stemming from self-interest without any particular intent to inflict suffering for the criminal's Sadean pleasure. Grifts and robberies are some of the most common experiences that the average law-abiding adult copes with, and that's without even getting into the political realm, where legislators may commit evil acts as a result of "good intentions."  

With the possible exception of the crucible of middle school and high school, where many immature students indulge in overt sadism to gain the approbation of like-minded peers, most "First World" citizens at least aren't often subjected to any Sade-like forms of evil. Consider how absurd it sounds when the speaker in the following comics-panel prates about the "purity" of killing a victim for no reason.

Of course, this sort of purity does exist in the "uncommon" world of literature, and author Michael O'Donoghue is having fun with the notion that poor, imperiled Phoebe Zeitgeist is trapped in a world where no one who oppresses her is motivated by the "lackluster treadmill of goal-oriented drives." Thomas Hobbes may have distinguished between human motivations of gain and reputation. But when he also popularized the phrase "the war of all against all" to sum up the human condition, most persons involved in that war are worried about people with "goal-oriented drives" like theft, not about chimerical acts of gratuitous cruelty. And sometimes the "thieves" are protecting their own lookout, as with the doctor who makes a mistake in treating a patient and then fails to confess his wrongdoing because it would put him at a financial disadvantage.

Given that so much human evil in common experience is depressingly banal, I think it fair to state that self-interest causes more needless suffering than sadism ever has. Of course, in literature both forms of evil are "good" (as per my earlier essay title) because they are necessary to establish conflict and thus make storytelling possible. But it's peculiar that Bataille downplayed the evils of self-interest in the above quote. I've frequently cited him for his insights on the dynamic of work and play, where work is always oriented on achieving real-world goals, and play exists for its own sake, achieving nothing purposeful with its activity. It would be one thing to say that the Evils of Sadism trump the Evils of Self-Interest within the sphere of literature, because there, a fictional sadist like Heathcliffe or Hannibal Lecter knows how to play "the game of sadism" far better than even real sadists like Ted Bundy. But in this quote, Bataille is unusually generous toward the sins of the self-interested, of "goal-oriented drives"-- especially since it might be fairly said that indifference to the suffering of others is just the other side of the coin from reveling in said suffering.

THE EXCLUDED THIRD

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

My use of the term "excluded third" is an idiosyncratic one, for it has nothing to do with the term's use in formal logic, where it's better known as "the excluded middle." But it amused me to use a high-flown philosophical term for a "third" that I simply neglected to include in one of my classification endeavors.

In 2020's DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, I applied the established art-terms "grotesques" and "arabesques" to two dominant trends in the mythos of the BATMAN comics. First I applied the term "grotesque" to Batman, due to the forbidding nature of his costume and his origins in a traumatic experience. Then I applied "arabesque" to Robin, to characterize his bright, colorful costume and the dominant playful attitude he took to fighting crime alongside his mentor. Then I extended the same metaphors to the duo's rogues' gallery, according to whether the rogues were dominantly "fearful" or "fanciful."

In my second essay on the topic,THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD, I attempted to distinguish between the dominant motives of grotesque villains and arabesque villains:

So, having made Robin’s presence more essential to the overall development of the Bat-mythos, the bachelor-thread for the overall series must balance the elements of darkness and brightness. Additionally, although the heroes are victims of trauma, many of the villains are less traumatized than simply maladjusted, usually by virtue of greed. Obsession rather than trauma as such seems to define the Bat-mythos. Batman himself starts the ball rolling by extending his chosen identity to such tools as the Batarang and the Batmobile; the Joker follows suit with a poison that causes his victims to laugh themselves to death, and so on. So perhaps a trial thread might read something like, “Though the Greeks wanted to find beauty only in bright things and ugliness in dark ones, virtue and vice have equal propensities to be either light or dark, depending on the nature of the obsession.” This thread-concept would even remain in operation during the era I call “Candyland Batman,” when Batman himself is very nearly the only character who projects any grotesque affects, and nearly every new villain is conceived along the lines of the Penguin’s arabesque obsessions, thus leading to crooks who base their crimes on the use of kites and freeze-rays and polka dots.

I don't retract any of these classifications, which I think apply across the board to all of the "super-villains." However, there is a third category of Bat-foe who is not "super" in any way: the category of the "ordinary crook." Extraordinary crooks and ordinary crooks align respectively with what I have called "abstract goal-affects" and "concrete goal-affects" in the essay EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS:

In THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PART 2 I formulated the joint idea of "concrete goal-affects" and "abstract goal-affects," which were affects located within the personas of fictional characters, with whom audiences are meant to identify.  I asserted that the former affects were "directed toward the goal of gain or the goal of safety," that is, to the desire to achieve a specific real-world effect, while the latter were more oriented on the faculty of *esteem,* which the Greeks called *thymos.*  I noted that "neither the logic of the desire for gain nor the desire for safety seems to govern the operations of *thymos.* 

The more I think about Hobbes' "three principal causes of quarrel," however, the more I come to believe that these three might be subsumed into two.  The aggressor who wants to build up his store of goods by robbing his neighbor is in a sense following the same concrete instinct as the victim who fights back, trying to protect what he already has... One might therefore see Hobbes' categories of "gain" and "safety" subsumed into one concrete goal-affect, which I will term "acquisition" after Bataille's use of the term. "Glory," in contrast to both "gain" and "safety"-- the main manifestations of acquisition-- lacks the practicality of the concrete affects, so that its overriding category is that of expenditure, also covered in the above essay. 

The majority of ordinary crooks in Batman's world have no interest in playing "games of expenditure" with the Dynamic Duo. Pure acquisition is their modus operandi: either they want to acquire the goods of others or to keep tight hold of the riches they've plundered. They don't challenge Batman with jokes or riddles, and even though some of them may come up with imaginative schemes to promote their larceny, particularly during the gimmicky tales of Batman's Golden Age, making money is their concrete goal, and so they carry the association of acquisition. 

The principal exception is that of revenge, as when a malefactor seeks to seek vengeance on a law-abiding person, or a law enforcement figure, for having caused harm to the malefactor or some ally. At first glance this might seem related to Hobbes' notion of "reputation," as when Crook A wants to show the law-dogs that Policeman B cannot get away with causing him injury. But this sketch fails the expenditure test, for at the roots of Crook A's desire for vengeance is the desire not to be challenged in his criminal activities, not the will to challenge a superior opponent, as we get whenever the Riddler attempts to out-riddle Batman.

Though most Bat-fans have enjoyed the hero's jousts with extraordinary criminals far more than the opposite, it's a mark of the franchise's groundedness that the hero has always had a substantial number of encounters with ordinary, acquisitive felons. This is certainly logic given that both Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson lost their parents to ordinary crooks, and this coheres with the fact that although children enjoyed Golden Age Batman comics in an escapist fashion, those same children knew the consequences of real crime. If they had no real-world experience of crime in their mundane lives, they would still know how thoroughly organized crime had infested American life, would have heard of scandals like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. And, at least in fantasy, they could imagine a hero capable of tearing out such festering sores.

All of the Batman mythcomics I've reviewed on this blog concentrate upon "extraordinary crooks," who inevitably have a stronger tendency to inspire symbolic discourse than their ordinary compeers. The sole exception is the two-page ORIGIN OF BATMAN, and even this concentrates not on the nameless criminal who kills the Waynes, but on the hero's singular response to this trauma. There may well be examples of "mythic ordinary crooks" somewhere amid the Bat-mythos, possibly obscured by the larger-than-life array of grotesques and arabesques. Additionally, the problem of crime itself may be conceived of as mythic in nature. In a previous post I noted that although ordinary crooks cannot harm the Spectre thanks to his almost unlimited powers, collectively the world of crime has the power to prevent the Ghostly Guardian from giving up his crusade and passing on to his heavenly reward. Crime as a whole has a similar hold on The Batman. Ordinary crooks cannot challenge him, but their ubiquity remains a constant thorn in his side-- and this is the role ordinary, acquisition-based crooks play in the next mythcomic I review, BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN. 

EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 2

In Part 1 I took the trouble to articulate category-names for Bataille's formulation on humankind's attitudes toward consumption-- elsewhere referenced as "the desire to conserve and the desire to expend"-- as well as to fuse them with my Schopenhauer-derived categories of "will."  To be sure, were Bataille alive he'd probably condemn the endeavor, as Stuart Kendall's biography mentions that the French author had no love for the German philosopher.

Having done all this, I must admit that the categories of "expenditure" and "acquisition," which describe how the affects of fictional characters impress themselves on readers, don't have great utility as working terms.  I've been striving to isolate two common words that summarize the emotional tenor of, respectively, "abstract goal-affects" and "concrete goal-affects."

In my first attempt at finding two such tenor-terms, I drew on a dichotomy of "courage" and "endurance" suggested by actor Christopher Reeve-- though had I wanted to resort to a more intellectually respectable source, I could have just as easily cited Socrates' opposition of "courage" and "temperance" in THE STATESMAN.  I said that Johnny Thunder, despite his mental limitations, was essentially an "active hero" who suggested the tenor of intellectual courage. In contrast I said of Jimmy Olsen:

For all of his flirtations with heroism, Olsen is first and foremost an "ordinary guy," which allowed him to show an "endurance" sort of heroism in some stories, and to be a pure "victim" in others.
 

Later I tended to use terms derived from Hobbes, as in the PLAYING MERRY HOBBES essay:

I would say that the qualities of "glory" and "diffidence" also seem better matches for the characters discussed in that earlier essay, with Johnny Thunder following a pattern of "glory" while Jimmy Olsen follows one of "safety" (which I find that I prefer to "diffidence," as that seems to imply a trait of the character rather than a plot-action).
 

I did so again at the end of TWICE THE MIGHT PT. 2: 

I'll note in passing that I rate the central heroes of both films as "demiheroes" in that they are concerned more with the Hobbesian value of "safety" than of "glory."
 

Of these two terms, "glory"-- which is meant to be applied to the "intellectual will" embodied in the hero-persona and the villain-persona-- is not problematic.  Anyone who makes the effort can imagine "glory" being given positive connotations for heroes and negative connotations for villains.

"Safety," however, does not apply across the board to the two persona embodying "instinctive will," the demihero-persona and the monster-persona.  I believe that I was concentrating so much on defining the nature of the demihero, as against the hero, that I failed to find a tenor-term that applied equally well to the persona incarnating the dominantly negative aspect of the instinctive will, the "monster."  The "concrete goal-affects" of a "monster" are not adequately described by "safety."

However, I think that Hobbes' original terms of "safety" and "diffidence"-- which are entirely in line with the "desire to conserve"-- can be subsumed not by what the monster-persona does, but by what it dominantly wants.  In this essay I said.

I’ve defined the persona of the “monster” as the generally negative counterpart of the demihero. Usually the monster is also defined principally by self-preservation, whether the creature is destructive on a large scale (Godzilla) or covets some forbidden prize (King Kong). Self-preservation and endurance also typify even benign monsters, like Man-Thing...
 

The tenor-term for both monsters and demiheroes must be a positive value that can be turned into a negative aspect.  This leaves out Hobbes' terms "safety" and "diffidence," for neither are positive values.  The same holds true for "temperance," the term used in my STATESMAN translation, which doesn't translate easily into a negative manifestation.  Reeves' term "endurance" wasn't quite right, either, but one of its synonyms-- "persistence"-- does have the desired positive connotation.

I for one find it easy to think of the demihero, the "ordinary guy-hero" like Jimmy Olsen, being virtuous primarily in terms of his persistence.  As I said in the cited essay, Olsen is a reporter first and a hero second, while his opposite number Johnny Thunder is defined by being a hero first and a whatever-he-did-for-a-living second.  Thunder may be a dopey comic hero, but he's all about sharing the abstract glory of fighting crime and hanging out with the Olympian company of the Justice Society.  Olsen, a comic demihero, is content to be "Superman's pal," and his forays into heroism are perforce of limited duration.

However, monsters like the ones mentioned above-- Godzilla, King Kong, and the Man-Thing-- are best seen as negative parodies of either human beings or other animal-species.  And yet, though the audience recognizes that their affects are negative in relation to what their victims want, the monsters are charming because of their quality of persistence.  The persistence-virtue of Godzilla and the Man-Thing manifests in their being very nearly immortal; no matter how many times they die, they just keep coming back in some incarnation.  Kong's original incarnation perishes, and to my knowledge only one latter-day effort made the attempt to revive that specific Kong.  However, Kong still comes back in what might termed "template" versions, versions that have no ostensible connection with the original 1933 entity.  But even though Kong is not diegetically immortal, what Kong's afficionados admire in the big ape is another form of "persistence," his dogged if unrequited love for his female co-star.

Clearly, I need to explore the tension between "glory" and the newly-minted term "persistence" with respect to the two negative personas, "monster" and "villain," so that will be the subject of EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 3.

EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

 It is interesting, however, that Propp's summation of his two protagonist-types also turns on a distinction between a protagonist who makes a grand gesture based in "courage"-- that of the seeker following a villain who's seized someone else-- and the survival-instincts of a "victimized hero," whose principal virtue is one of "endurance."-- COMIC HERO VS. COMIC DEMIHERO.

In THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PART 2 I formulated the joint idea of "concrete goal-affects" and "abstract goal-affects," which were affects located within the personas of fictional characters, with whom audiences are meant to identify.  I asserted that the former affects were "directed toward the goal of gain or the goal of safety," that is, to the desire to achieve a specific real-world effect, while the latter were more oriented on the faculty of *esteem,* which the Greeks called *thymos.*  I noted that "neither the logic of the desire for gain nor the desire for safety seems to govern the operations of *thymos.* 

The more I think about Hobbes' "three principal causes of quarrel," however, the more I come to believe that these three might be subsumed into two.  The aggressor who wants to build up his store of goods by robbing his neighbor is in a sense following the same concrete instinct as the victim who fights back, trying to protect what he already has.  The same parallel applies to the paradigm asserted by Propp: an antagonist who simply seizes a victim often (if not always) seeks to satisfy some concrete end, just as the "victimized hero" who endures in order to eventually win free wants to satisfy a similar concrete end.  One might therefore see Hobbes' categories of "gain" and "safety" subsumed into one concrete goal-affect, which I will term "acquisition" after Bataille's use of the term.

"Glory," in contrast to both "gain" and "safety"-- the main manifestations of acquisition-- lacks the practicality of the concrete affects, so that its overriding category is that of expenditure, also covered in the above essay. 

This dichotomy compares favorably with the Schopenhauer-influenced dichotomy formulated in HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3:

In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts." But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts." 

Keeping in mind that I revised Schopenhauer's terms above into terms I found more pleasing-- i.e., "intellectual will" as the principle underlying abstract concepts, and "instinctive will" as the principle underlying concrete percepts-- I will further extend the parallels thus:

Acquisition= the totality of concrete goal-affects, which represent "instinctive will"
Expenditure= the totality of abstract goal-affects, which represent "intellectual will"

Both categories in turn have their positive and negative manifestations.  Following Hobbes' examples, the thief who seeks to acquire property not his own is usually (though not always) a negative force in fictional stories, while the property-owner seeking to defend his goods is usually (though not always) a positive force in fictional stories.  I've gone into detail elsewhere as to why the "persona-types" I've termed "the monster" and "the demihero" stand as representations of the instinctive will.  Both of these personas, then, are dominantly subsumed by the concept of acquisition.

In contrast, most of what I write about the "intellectual will" personas of "the hero" and "the villain" in HERO PT 3 and elsewhere suggests an emphasis on the motive of "glory" for both.  This is clearer with regard to the hero, who sometimes shares the motives of the demihero "writ large" as it were, than with the villain.  However, I maintain that even though we see the villain undertaking acts of "acquisition," the true villain incarnates intellectual transgression.  I wrote in D IS FOR DEMIHERO PT 3: 

Even the mundane crooks as portrayed in these [Batman] stories want more than simple survivial. Typically they desire wealth, which may be seen as establishing a form of willed control over their environment. This will to control often manifests in the crooks forming their own society counter to that of honest citizens. Unlike monsters, who are most often seen as forces gone out of control, villains seek to exercise total control, be it of city-neighborhoods or the entire world.

More on expenditure and acquisiton when I again examine the concepts of "work and play."

TWICE THE MIGHT PT. 2

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In keeping with my observations in Part 1, I'll detail two more examples of films that share the quality of being combative in terms of one value (the significant), though they divide in terms of the other (the narrative).

The first film to consider is 1959's THE ANGRY RED PLANET, which I reviewed here.

The above film-ad shows a combat between the futuristic astronaut-protagonists of the film-- armed, naturally, with the requisite ray-guns-- as they contend with the most famous beastie they encounter, the so-called "Rat-Bat-Spider."  Clearly both the ray-wielding astronauts and the monster qualify as megadynamic sources of might, which satisfies the significant value.

However, ANGRY RED PLANET cannot be combative in a narrative sense, as the film does not center around any of the combats between the astronauts and the Martian monsters.  The various menaces are something of a gauntlet the heroes run until they are sent back to Earth, more or less with their tails between their legs.  Therefore the overall spirit of this space-drama is subcombative.

In contrast, 1956's FORBIDDEN PLANET-- which possesses a wealth of virtues that the later film does not-- also possesses the narrative combative value as well as the significant combative value.

The significant value is obvious in the assorted scenes in which the astronaut-protagonists come to grips with the "Id Monster," prior to finding out that it's been generated by Krell machines which are in turn responding to the anxieties of scientist Dr. Morbius. 

However, whereas the sense of escalation to a final confrontation is absent from ANGRY RED PLANET, FORBIDDEN PLANET builds this sense by virtue of the baffled astronauts as they attempt to learn the nature of their invincible enemy. 

To be sure, when the Id Monster is defeated, it isn't because of the clash between the weapons of Earth-science and the power of the Krell machines.  The Monster is defeated by undermining the source of its power in Morbius, who is in essence the Monster's Achilles heel.

Nevertheless, without the clash of energies that establishes how potent the Id Monster is, there would be no narrative perception of the need to seek such a vulnerable point.

I'll note in passing that I rate the central heroes of both films as "demiheroes" in that they are concerned more with the Hobbesian value of "safety" than of "glory."

PLAYING MERRY HOBBES WITH HEROES AND DEMIHEROES

IIn this essay I commented on my use of the terms "courage" and "endurance" to distinguish the persona-types of "hero" and "demihero:"

I still believe that Reeve's opposed categories of "courage" and "endurance" have strong applicability, though I never meant to imply that these categories summarized all distinctions between hero and demihero.
 

I'm glad I said that, given that the Hobbes comment I recently employed for the posts on goal-affects also seems to have broad applicability to personas.

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
 

These three motives-for-violence-- which I usually summarized as "gain," "safety,"  and "passion" of a specifically thymotic type-- also apply well to the motives of heroes in fictional narratives.  Or at least the second two do; more often than not, the motive of "gain/competition" is the motive assigned to the villain.

Thus, without dismissing the applicability of the "courage/endurance" reading, I'll offer a quick look at my proposed hero/demihero distinctions using "diffidence" (aka "safety") and "glory" (aka "passion").

As an example for a hero who evinces "glory," I'll use an example of one of the most microdynamic heroes known to me.

MIGHTY MAX, a character devised to promote a toy line in a 1993 tv cartoon, was one of the oddest "heroes" I've encountered in terms of his dynamicity. Though this simple Earth-boy was frequently referred to as "the Mighty One," he had no powers whatsoever, except a magical cap that could transport him to other realms.  In the company of a chicken-like entity ("fowl, actually") who supplied information on the threat of the week and a big warrior named Norman who provided the heavy lifting, Max foiled dozens of vile villains over the course of 40 episodes.  He did so largely through neither power nor skill, but just by having the dumb luck to constantly avoid being squashed by werewolves or dragons or whatever.

And yet, weakling though he was, he was still a hero squarely in the genre of adventure, in that the stories were all about his invigorating victories over evil.  He may prove a better example of a microdynamic hero than some of those I've used before, such as Brenda Starr and Doctor Who.

In contrast, there's the character of Mrs. Brisby from Don Bluth's dramatic cartoon THE SECRET OF NIMH.  As I mention in my review of the film, I have not read the juvenile book on which the film is based, so I confine myself to the character as depicted in the Bluth film.  From what I understand, only in the film does this mouse-character demonstrate what might termed "super-powers."

These powers are entirely the gift of a magical talisman, which Mrs. Brisby can summon only because, despite her humble appearance, she possesses the necessary virtue of "courage"--which characterization is ironic to me because I would have assigned her persona the quality of "endurance."  The magic she summons isn't used in any combative scenario, but to solve a non-violent conflict: how to transport her home to a place of safety.  But even if this mousey protagonist had used her power offensively-- as does Doctor Craven, an equally mousey protagonist whom I used as one of my first examples of a "demihero" -- would she have qualified as a hero?

By my current reasoning, no.  Brisby is a good example of "instinctive will" in that although she possesses courage, as the script says, it isn't the sort of courage that distinguishes the "intellectual will"-- a will which I link to the Hobbesian concept of "glory."  Everything Brisby does in the film is motivated by the Hobbesian concept of "diffidence/ safety," which might be characterized as more "reactive" than "proactive."

I've not advanced a "proactive/reactive" dichotomy here in so many words, but it does have applicability to what I wrote here about folklorist Vladimir Propp's opposition of the "seeker" and the "victimized hero."

I would say that the qualities of "glory" and "diffidence" also seem better matches for the characters discussed in that earlier essay, with Johnny Thunder following a pattern of "glory" while Jimmy Olsen follows one of "safety" (which I find that I prefer to "diffidence," as that seems to imply a trait of the character rather than a plot-action).

More explorations of glory and safety will probably follow, though probably not until next year.

THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PT.2

What I have called "concrete goal-affects" in Part 1 are, whether directed toward the goal of gain or the goal of safety, governed by a simple logical cause-and-effect, to wit:

(1) Subject A wants X.  Subject B owns X.  If Subject A attacks Subject B, A can get X as long as A feels he can overcome B without consequence.

(2) Subject B is attacked by Subject A.  Subject B responds violently to prevent his being injured or killed by A.

These scenarios don't deal with the affects, the emotional states themselves, which are more various than Hobbes' analysis, also in Pt 1.

For instance, both the attacker and attacked can experience the related emotions of fear and anger. The attacker may fear never possessing X, and thereby experience righteous anger with the psuedo-logic that the attacker does not deserve to own X.  The attacked will certainly feel both fear and anger in response to the attempt to rob him.

The desire for vengeance is also oriented on a concrete goal, though by its nature we understand that it applies more often to seeking redress wrongs done at some other time, either at a time when the one attacked could not fight back and was otherwise constrained against responding.  We think of this as being a response to one's being directly attacked, but in some circumstances an attacker may feel that he is attacking a race, creed or profession that has offended him, rather than a particular person.

A more attenuated affect-- sometimes associated with the motive of gain but more often with promoting the general safety of some group-- subsumes such concepts as "discipline" and "duty."  It's possible for Subject A to rob Subject B not for A's personal gain but for the enrichment of his ingroup, while B may risk his life to stop A on the same terms: not because he personally would lose but because the theft imperils his ingroup.  A further refinement is that violence can be perpetrated from the member of one ingroup to another for purpose of a particular type of discipline called "training," though such violence is theoretically designed to "toughen up" the one subjected to it, as with the Spartan rituals whereby older boys within a communal society would beat the younger ones for that purpose.

Doubtless I've omitted some affects in this sketch, but I consider that these three emotional states are the most frequently used concrete goal-affects within the sphere of fiction, which, as noted earlier, in my main consideration.

However, abstract goal-affects are not governed by the same straightforward logic.  At the end of Part 1 I said:

...outside this circle of "attack-and-defense," there is a much rarer species of quarrel-motivation, whose goals are as abstract as any goals can be. I will deal more fully with these motivations, at least in terms of fictional narrative, in Part 2.

Abstract goal-affects relate more properly to *thymos,* the emotional need for esteem.  Receiving high esteem in a given society does, to be sure, sometimes manifest in concrete benefits: lofty political advancement, sexual partners who want to sleep with someone "famous."  Yet without doubt there are individuals who labor to do things they deem difficult but right without any remuneration, because they can better esteem themselves for having performed such actions.  Neither the logic of the desire for gain nor the desire for safety seems to govern the operations of *thymos,* whether one speaks of real-life or fictional motivations.

I've repeatedly emphasized that the radical of all fiction is conflict.  This is far from a new notion, but it's virtually ignored by those critics who prefer to see canonical "art" fiction as phenomenologically separate from "popular fiction."  I reject that separation, of course.  Most popular fiction concerns itself with the immediate, kinetic threats of violence and/or death, and I find that these kinetic effects illustrate a "death-drive" that is present in all narrative, though it's generally disguised in fiction aimed at a minority audience. 

Popular fiction is also particularly adept at providing its characters with motivations that seem unrealistic from a mimetic standpoint but which nevertheless resonate in terms of illustrating the raw human need for "esteem," which as stated earlier parallels Hobbes' motive of "reputation."  Esteem, whether experienced within a society of peers or within one's own self-evaluation, can take many different forms in fictional narrative, but the form I find most relevant is the notion of strength, be it physical or moral.

I borrow the term "death-drive" from Freud, but reject the logic he applied to it, rooted as it was in the concept of sexuality as the fundamental form of human "libido."  Freud's late concept of "thanatos," a death-impulse to parallel "eros," the life-impulse, never proves persuasive, but the two terms could be adapted to better effect in a system that admitted, as Jung did, that "libido" must relate to all phenomena in which humans descry the phenomena of strength and/or energy.  Not infrequently human observers relate to high levels of strength or energy with what has been variously called "the sense of the sublime" or "the sense of wonder."  One might also regard this as functionally covalent with the paraphilia known as "sthenolagnia," though obviously one would not be dealing with something possessed of the same specified intensity that appears in a sexual fetish.

Narrative requires the movement from one equilibrium to another, which is usually accomplished by some form of conflict.  Of course said conflict need not require a violent or strength-oriented conflict.  However, in an etiological sense violent conflict, ranging from cave-paintings of bear-hunts to the Gilgamesh Epic, has been played a vital role in the evolution of human narrative, and cannot be reasonably set aside as irrelevant to the nature of art.  Thus the "death-drive" of narrative is that aspect of narrative that most often resolves transitions through the threat of violence and/or death.

In this essay I coined the term "sthenosadism" as a counter to the Freud-Delueze interpretation of the phenomenon of sadism, as well as to argue that Freud-influenced critics Wertham and Legman had misjudged the potential for syndromic sadism to develop in mass audiences due to their exposure to popular fiction.  My corrective position suggests that most audiences participate in a "casual sadism" insofar that they may wish to see even "good" characters put through the wringer, what Schopenhauer considers the things that the audience finds "interesting" but which are often painful for the fictional characters.  The one failing of this formulation is that this might be better called "sadomasochism," in that the reader can both identify with the character's sufferings ("masochism") and also step outside and regard those sufferings clinically ("sadism.")  Thus I'm refining the earlier position to include masochistic identification in the sthenolagniac context-- an extreme case of which can be found in Kafka, touched on here.

As a closing clarification, I am not saying that concrete goal-affects do not appear in hero-villain narratives.  Maybe the Joker sends Batman a mocking note so that Batman will come chase him, but clearly the Penguin would rather get away with the loot rather than tilt with the Caped Crusader again.  But the act of reading about Batman's struggles with both types of villains is in itself an example of an "abstract goal-affect," since the pleasures we derive from reading fiction cannot be said to promote either gain or safety in a direct relationship.

I'll give more extensive examples of abstract goal-affects that are within a given diegesis, rather than located within the reader's motive for seeking fictional "quarrels," in a future post.

THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE, PART 1

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men's persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.

-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

 

Spock: There is no logic in Gav's murder.

Shras: Perhaps you should forget logic and devote yourself to motivations of passion or gain; those are reasons for murder.-- STAR TREK, "Journey to Babel," 1967.

Spock never comments on the advice given him by Shras. but he could presumably refute the Andorian's terms.  While the term "passion" can embrace a variety of emotions, including murderous ones, the motive of committing violence-- what Hobbes calls "quarrel"-- for the purpose of gain can be pursued with the coldest of cold logic conceivable.  And as the plot shakes out in the TREK episode, "gain" is indeed the motive behind Gav's murder and various other acts of sabotage.

But what of passion?  Is passion just one thing that one should see as ineluctably opposed to cold logic, as writer D.C. Fontana suggests?  Admittedly Fontana was not propounding this notion as philosophy, merely as a notion to round out an exciting melodrama, but the question comes up in other venues as well.  So the question becomes, is it feasible that the word "passion" subsumes a variety of mental activities, two of which could in theory subsume two of the "principal causes of quarrel" Hobbes cites, "safety" and "glory?"

As it happens, the question of the various meanings of the word "passion" has come up on this blog before, quite apart from any associations with a popular teleseries currently held in simple-minded contempt by the Bloody Comic Book Elitists. In THYMOS BE DE PLACE PART 1 I devoted considerable space to refuting Noah Berlatsky's conflation of aesthetics and desire.

I don't think "desire" (which Noah defines as inherently erotic) is at the heart of human experience. I think that desire is but one interdependent chamber of a three-chambered heart that Socrates chose to call "the tripartite soul," with the other two parts being nous (intellect) and thymos (passion).

But I hear some wonder whether or not "desire" and "passion" aren't the same thing...
 

There follows a citation of a passage from Plato's REPUBLIC, which I confess I've seen cited in both Francis Fukuyama and James Twitchell, albeit to different ends.  Having noted how Socrates demonstrates the existence of a "passion" that is not goal-oriented, I continued:

Thus Socrates demonstrates that what we translate as *passion* (though the most accurate translation seems to be "spiritedness," as the root word for thymos comes from "breath"), is not identical to desire since it can oppose desire. I can think of examples in which *passion* might side with desire against intellect, but that doesn't undermine Socrates' distinction, for in both cases thymos is still a separable concept. Further, this *spiritedness* has a lot to do not with just satisfying one's temporary appetite to have something, be it food or money or sex, but to have esteem for oneself regarding one's own personal self-control. Socrates' example applies to one's internal esteem but it obviously has a wealth of applications with respect to gaining the esteem of others in more social situations.

So in this argument I've defined "desire" as both covalent with Plato's "eros" and with all goal-oriented affects, while "passion" is covalent with Plato's "thymos" and with affects that are more abstract in their satisfaction, whether they take the form of a subject establishing one's "reputation" (Hobbes) or identifying with a host of fictional characters (my own contra-Berlatsky take on aesthetics). 

I won't explore aesthetics or character identification in this essay-series; the interested readers (?) will have to assume that both can be subsumed by what I now call "abstract goal-affects," which quite naturally contrast with "concrete goal-affects."

In his time Hobbes was certainly aware of Plato, so it's not impossible that his "three principal causes of quarrel" owes some debt to Plato's concept of the tripartite soul.  But whereas Hobbes makes no distinction between his three causes, the aforementioned Fukuyama asserts that Plato's faculty of *thymos*-- more than a little comparable to the cause Hobbes calls "reputation"-- is distinct from eros/desire in that *thymos* was properly a "desire for a desire," that is, to be seen as a person of esteem in a given community.  In my terms this makes *thymos* an "abstract goal-affect." 

Eros/desire is without question within the sphere of "concrete goal-affects," whether one wishes to "gain" one's goals with passionate emotion or cold logic/reason.  For Plato nous/reason would have been the highest faculty of the soul, set to control the others, but the closest parallel it has in Hobbes' formulation is what Hobbes calls "diffidence" or "safety," which to the extent that it's a desire is principally a desire for self-preservation, for rational homeostasis.

Extrapolating from Fukuyama's reading of both Plato and Hegel, I would say that the first two quarrel-causes in Hobbes fall under my heading of "concrete goal-affects."  In fiction as in reality, violence is most often-- though not always-- motivated by the prospect of "gain."  This in turn prompts violence perpetrated in the name of those victimized to protect their "safety."

However, outside this circle of "attack-and-defense," there is a much rarer species of quarrel-motivation, whose goals are as abstract as any goals can be.  I will deal more fully with these motivations, at least in terms of fictional narrative, in Part 2.