THREE INTO TWO WILL GO, SOMETIMES (part 1)

The body/nonbody opposition advanced by Octavio Paz provides an elegant simplication of the many unwieldly dichotomies that have haunted Western philosophy: body/mind, body/spirit, etc. One can, if one chooses, follow Sigmund Freud in believing that in the world of common experience, “nonbody” is merely an epiphenomenon to the fundamental reality of “body.” But in literary studies one cannot say this. As Frye observed, all literary narratives have a centrifugal and a centripetal aspect.

A narrative is centrifugal in that its author cannot help but reference the world extrinsic to the narrative, the primary world of bodily experience for himself and his audience. Whether the author writes of New York or Narnia, he will reference the "body" of the corporeal world.

However, narratives also possess a centripetal aspect, for they turn inward, connecting their serries internal elements to produce a symbolic discourse, a "nonbody" that is entirely conceptual in basis, since no can prove that anything similar exists in common experience. This dual nature clearly separates literary representations from those of experience, where the degree to which mind and body interpenetrate is infinitely arguable.

In my literary theory, then, “body” represent the totality of aspects in a work that appear governed by the cognitive order of cause-and-effect, while “nonbody” represents the totality of aspects in a work that seem outside the cognitive order of cause-and-effect. In addition, some aspects are amphibian, managing to dwell in both worlds at once.


I demonstrated in my examination of Tzvetan Todorov’s THE FANTASTIC that Todorov’s theory of fantasy (for which I henceforth use my term, “the metaphenomenal”) is overly indebted to cognitively-oriented Freudian conceptions of “reality” and “fantasy.” This duality, however, resulted in a trinity of categories for Todorov, to wit:


The category of “the marvelous” concerns narratives that openly transgress the cognitive order of cause-and-effect.


The category of “the uncanny” contains narratives that seem to transgress the cognitive order but ultimately prove to be governed by cause-and-effect.


The category of “the fantastic” contains narratives in which either the reader, the viewpoint character or both aren’t sure whether or not the order has been transgressed.


Todorov is very clear that the affective aspect of fantasy is beyond the pale of his theory. This restates the Freudian position aptly. Affectivity, like Paz’s concept of “nonbody,” is essentially the tail wagged by the cognitive dog.


In contrast, my AUM theory argues that the “non-body” aspects of a narrative are as real within the narrative as those aspects that are directly derived from the physical experience of author and/or audience. My theory essentially agrees with Todorov that a given narrative presents an “equilibrium” that is meant to be transgressed in such a way that a new equilibrium is established, but my theory of transgression includes both cognitive and affective aspects equally.


I reworked Todorov’s trinity so as to include all so-called “realistic” works. In all three of my categorizations, the narrative functions by virtue of an “anomaly” that creates the above-mentioned disequilibrium.


If the anomaly takes place within a world where the cognitive order rules, and where affectivity is indeed the tail wagged by the dog, then the narrative’s phenomenality is “atypical.”


If it takes place within a world that breaks with the cognitive order, in which causs-and-effect is in some way suspended, then the phenomality is “marvelous,” and the affectivity produced is one that also strives to go beyond the cognitive order.


If the work seems to suggest that the cognitive order is violated, when in fact it is not, its phenomenality will be “uncanny” as long as the work succeeds in evoking an affectivity that symbolically exceeds the cognitive order.


“The uncanny” is my “amphibian” category. “Atypical” narratives depict worlds where cause-and-effect rules absolutely, so it would be dominantly ruled by “body,” or corporeality. “Marvelous” narratives present worlds where cognitivity and affectivity merge, signifying the dominance of “nonbody,” incorporeality. “Uncanny” narratives occupy a space between, for though cognitive cause-and-effect rules their phenomenal nature, the narratives carry associations that, so to speak, allow the tail-phenomenon to wag the dog-phenomeon. These associations manifest in the world of common experience in the form of fantasy-film guides that include “uncanny” films like PSYCHO chock-a-block with “marvelous” films like CHRONICLES OF NARNIA and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.


My earlier repetition of the word “transgress” is not accidental, for Bataille’s theory of “literature as transgression” informs some aspects of my rewriting of Todorov. In the second part of THREE INTO TWO WILL GO, SOMETIMES, I’ll offer another tripartite schema, also informed by Bataille’s philosophy, but this time I’ll be rewriting Freud’s concept of the transgression he thought fundamental to the human psyche: that famed “vice” that was not merely “nice,” but the “best” of all.

STRANGENESS ADVENTURES

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

In this essay I discussed parallels between Kant’s concept of the sublime and my concept of “the uncanny,” in terms of how both could be produced purely from affects within an experience of any kind. Both can suggest that the experience is “beyond nature” in a Longinian affective sense, without a literal violation of causality’s “acknowledged order,” as one sees in the category of “the marvelous.”

Shortly later this essay covered parallels between the Kantian sublime and "the mythic," which refers to all narratives that possess high symbolic complexity like that of archaic myths. I emphasized both in that essay and earlier ones that "the mythic" could appear in any of my three phenomenal categories, just as was the case for the sublime:

To expand on the caution I expressed before, this parallel does not imply identity, for the sublime can appear in any work regardless of its phenomenal category. I mentioned Maugham’s book THE RAZOR’S EDGE, which contains the sublime affect even though it’s an entirely isophenomenal work, while Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER, a work of uncanny metaphenomenality, has its own sublimities. The same aesthetic applies to the marvelous form of the metaphenomenal, but I stress that a work is not automatically sublime just because it contains marvels that do transcend causality.

All that said, it should be obvious that there's some quality about my two metaphenomenal categories that is *not* shared by the "odd man out," the isophenomenal. And as it happens, Caillois also supplies the best word for this quality, when he defines fantasy in terms of "an irreducible strangeness."

My choice is deliberately ironic. Stanislaw Lem asserts that "étrange," the French word for "strange," is the actual word used by Todorov for his category "the uncanny." Possibly the translator thought Todorov was tossing around so many Freudianisms that the critic would not be averse to the association with Freud's famous formulation of the quality he called "umheimlich", "unfamiliarity," which was translated as "uncanny" for this 1919 essay. I would tend to agree that the translator was right, considering this observation by Freud:

"Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich."

Clearly this is in total agreement with this Todorov statement:

“It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.”

Thus it would seem that Todorov's "étrange” is very reducible to such influences as Freud’s infamous “family romance.”

In his 1978 work THE FANTASY BOOK, Franz Rottensteiner also cites Caillois: “Fantasy in the narrow sense, as defined by Caillois, is directly contrary to reason, describing events not susceptible to rational explanation by natural laws.” As I have not read Caillois aside from a few translated excerpts, I have no clue as to what works fall into Caillois’ concept of fantasy that is “irreducibly strange.” I would hope that a work like Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER, which I judged to be “uncanny” here, would qualify: that Caillois would not, unlike Todorov, consider that USHER falls into “the category of the real” simply because Poe supplies the reader with possible “rational explanations.”

Rottensteiner provides a quote from another writer whom I have not read in full: one Lars Gustafsson, whose essay, “On the Fantastic in Literature,” appeared in a collection of essays a year before Todorov’s THE FANTASTIC was published. Rottensteiner finds Gustafsson to be in agreement with Caillois:

“The fantastic in literature doesn’t exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle.” Rottensteiner supplies one example that Gustaffson found “fantastic,” a work by the artist Piranesi, but obviously this doesn’t give one enough to evaluate Gustaffson’s criteria in depth.

However, Gustaffson’s contrast between the “probable” and the “reasonable” is interesting. I’ve stated that “All fictional narrative concerns the atypical,” and functionally all three of my phenomenality-categories may be considered differing iterations of atypicality, though I generally use “the atypical” as short for the “base atypicality” that rules the world of isophenomenal causality, a.k.a. “the acknowledged order.” This is the world governed by what Gustaffson calls “what is probable,” as should be suggested by my observation from this essay:

“The pleasures and pains of character identification are in no way altered with respect to whether the story seems utterly fantastic, somewhat fantastic or not fantastic at all. However, the reader’s aesthetic perceptions are affected by their perception as to what phenomena are possible in the fictional world.”

A narrative world governed entirely by rational causation never deals with “reason” as a mode of being. It cannot, for nothing in that world can challenge reason; in that world there can only exist varying degrees of probability. In the two levels of the metaphenomenal, however—though of the “utterly fantastic” or “somewhat fantastic”—reason, at least in its commonplace form, is challenged.

True, in the essay “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien is careful to state that fantasy “does not destroy or insult Reason.” Still, while LORD OF THE RINGS may present a world which is in some ways more “reason-friendly” than that of Poe’s USHER, in Middle-Earth commonplace reason is transcended by the forces of magic and magical entities. So in Tolkien’s world, the combat between “reason” and “unreason” is won by “unreason” simply by the act of depicting the marvelous as unquestionably real. This principle applies no less to science-fictional works wherein the marvel is explained by some science that is at the time still hypothetical, in that this hypothetical science is still outside the bounds of the acknowledged order.
In uncanny works the “reason/unreason” battle results in a draw. Cognitively the metaphenomenon does not totally dispel causation, but it can and does do so in the affective sense Thus it is fair to speak of both categories as sharing the quality of “strangeness,” for both challenge rationality and causation to some extent, while atypical works merely challenge one’s notion of probability.

Side-note: My above ruminations about how I’ve used “atypicality” make me aware that I shouldn’t use the same word for both a general category and a specific category within that category. From now on, what I’ve called “general atypicality” is better described as “the anomalous,” drawing on Frank Cioffi’s use of that term.

KANT STOPS THE MUSIC, PT 1

"The attainment of an aim is always connected with the feeling of pleasure... then [there is] a basis that determines the feeling of pleasure *a priori* and validly for everyone."-- Kant, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, p. 27.

I noted at the end of this essay that I didn't share Kant's belief that subjective judgments, such as those of taste, had to be universal to be valid; for me it's enough that they're statistically dominant, though what the dominance means in each case will vary.

Nevertheless, one can't set Kant aside lightly. In his history of aesthetics Monroe Beardsley points out that Kant "became the first modern philosopher to make an aesthetic theory an integral part of a philosophic system."

Moreover, I believe his idea of the sublime may have some suggestive applications to my Aumtheory, so I'm currently rereading CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT.

As a tertiary motivation I hope to apply what I find to Douglas Wolk's attempt to apply Kant to the modern comics-scene. I haven't watched Wolk's five-minute video yet, but I did read his remarks from READING COMICS and found them too glib by half.

One problem I anticipate with applying Kant to modern literature, particularly modern popular literature, is that Kant came from a fine-arts background that may have been strained to deal with phenomena that didn't seem to validate the ruling concept of the fine arts. An example would be his remarks on music from section 329:

If, on the other hand, we estimate the worth of the fine arts by the
culture they supply to the mind, and adopt for our standard the
expansion of the faculties whose confluence, in judgment, is
necessary for cognition, music, then, since it plays merely with
sensations, 'has the lowest place among the fine arts-just as it has
perhaps the highest among those valued at the same time for their
agreeableness. Looked at in this light, it is far excelled by the [visual]
formative arts. For, in putting the imagination into a play which is
at once free and adapted to the understanding, they all the while
carry on a serious business, since they execute a product which serves
the Concepts of understanding as a vehicle, permanent and appealing
to us on its own account, for effectuating their union with
sensibility, and thus for promoting, as it were, the urbanity of the
higher powers of cognition. The two kinds of art pursue completely
different courses. Music advances from sensations to indefinite ideas:
formative [visual] art from definite ideas to sensations. The latter gives
a lasting impression, the former one that is only fleeting. The former
sensations imagination can recall and agreeably entertain itself with,
while the latter either vanish entirely, or else, if involuntarily
repeated by the imagination, are more annoying to us than agreeable.
Over and above all this, music has a certain lack of urbanity about
it.

To be sure, Kant's comment about music's "lack of urbanity" is predicated on judging the fine arts "by the culture they supply to the mind," so this comment is not meant to be a constitutive statement about music. Nevertheless, if music-- which was generally considered a "fine art" by Kant's class in his own time-- fails the test of "urbanity" and giving "definite ideas," what tender mercies would a fully Kantian system show to modern-day popular fiction?

Nevertheless, post-Kantian philosophers like Schopenhauer, Cassirer and Langer have managed to diverge from the specific analyses of their "master" while managing to reap credible philosophic rewards from application of his method.

So I too will be giving old Kant a whirl (as in "attempting to make him turn over in his grave") in future essays.

JONNYQUESTING: THE AUM THEORY IN PRACTICE, PART 3

A quick review of the three categories before going on:

The category of the ATYPICAL describes the phenomenality of those works that take place entirely within a sphere of mundane causality, where no marvels are possible.

The category of the MARVELOUS is precisely the opposite. Of course it's a given that there must always be some resemblance to the reader's phenomenal reality of cause-and-effect: as Brian Attebury points out in his FANTASY TRADITION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, "We cannot picture the unknown unless we hear it described in terms of the known." But the emphasis in a marvelous story is clearly upon the break with the commonplace natural law.

The UNCANNY is midway between the two. In cognitive terms it is *isophenomenal,* in that the rules of accepted reality are validated in the narrative, but in affective terms it is *metaphenomenal.* In Todorov's THE FANTASTIC he views the uncanny as being a category of "the real," as with his most prevalent example, the Radcliffean Gothic-tale, in which spooks and spectres are proven to be false or delusory. As I've noted earlier I don't agree with this categorization. On top of that, whereas Todorov only considers his "uncanny" within the sphere of horror-fiction, focusing on "the fake supernatural," i have in addition to "fake supernatural" nine other categories of "affectively metaphenomenal" story-elements. I won't detail all nine here, though in earlier essays I've mentioned that certain stories about psychotic madmen (though not all) fall within the sphere of the uncanny, a la PSYCHO.

Some of the other nine categories *might* be applied to this essay's subject, JONNY QUEST. However, though I lost any bid for "simplicity" on this blog long ago, I will invoke it here. Thus in surveying the phenomenality of JONNY QUEST episodes I'll only label an episode "uncanny" if it contains an element of "the fake supernatural," as per Todorov's reading.

The Mystery of the Lizard Men (18 September 1964)-- This episode begins with a sort of "sea-Gothic" conceit, in which enemy agents masquerade as "lizard men." However, the villains' attempt to use a laser-gun to shoot down an American capsule propels the episode into the MARVELOUS category, as such laser-weapons are an extrapolation from then-current laser technology.



Arctic Splashdown (25 September 1964)-- This episode, involving spies in the Arctic and polar bears, falls under the ATYPICAL

The Curse of Anubis (2 October 1964)-- story begins with a plot to fake an Egyptian curse, but ends with the MARVELOUS introduction of an invulnerable mummy

Pursuit of the Po-Ho (9 October 1964)-- an ATYPICAL adventure against savage jungle natives

The Riddle of the Gold (16 October 1964)-- another ATYPICAL adventure involving counterfeit gold and a mundane impersonator

Treasure of the Temple (23 October 1964)-- ATYPICAL lost-treasure search

Calcutta Adventure (30 October 1964)-- MARVELOUS in that it includes the heroes invading not only a hidden sci-fi installation that makes poison gas, but the villains are defeated by Dr. Quest's use of a "sonic gun"

The Robot Spy (6 November 1964)-- one of the most MARVELOUS episodes, in which an entire army fails to stop the invulnerable "robot spy," and again Quest's super-technology comes to the rescue






Double Danger (13 November 1964)-- another ATYPICAL impersonation-plot

Shadow of the Condor (20 November 1964)-- ATYPICAL thrills when Race Bannon is forced to engage in a biplane duel with a mad World War I aerial ace

Skull and Double Crossbones (27 November 1964)-- modern-day pirates; ATYPICAL

The Dreadful Doll (4 December 1964)-- UNCANNY, in that the villains use drugs to fake voodoo curses

Dragons of Ashida (11 December 1964)-- a mad scientist gives rise to MARVELOUS flesh-and-blood dragons

A Small Matter of Pygmies (11 December 1964)-- ATYPICAL jungle-adventure

Turu the Terrible (24 December 1964)-- MARVELOUSly, a giant pterodactyl survives into modern times



The Fraudulent Volcano (31 December 1964)-- Doctor Zin using MARVELOUS technology to make a dormant volcano blow its stack

Werewolf of the Timberland (7 January 1965)-- fake werewolf, so UNCANNY

Pirates from Below (14 January 1965)-- more modern pirates; ATYPICAL

Attack of the Tree People (21 January 1965)-- apes and blackmailers; ATYPICAL

The Invisible Monster (29 January 1965)-- a MARVELOUS (and scary!) invisible critter

The Devil's Tower (4 February 1965)-- madman forces natives to dig for diamonds; ATYPICAL

The Quetong Missile Mystery (11 February 1965)-- another MARVELOUS sci-fi installation with a missile buried beneath a swamp (!)

The House of Seven Gargoyles (18 February 1965)-- phony gargoyle; UNCANNY




Terror Island (24 February 1965)-- MARVELOUS giant monsters

Monster in the Monastery (4 March 1965)-- fake Yetis give way to a real one; ergo MARVELOUS

The Sea Haunt (11 March 1965)-- and topping it all off, a MARVELOUS marine monster

(And would you believe I just now got the joke of "Sea Haunt," a pun on that old 1950s deep-sea diving teleseries!)

So this analysis comes down to:

TWELVE episodes of JQ are in the "marvelous" category: Lizard,Anubis, Calcutta, Robot, Ashida, Turu, Volcano, Invisible, Quetong,Terror, Monastery, Sea H.

ELEVEN episodes of JQ are in the "atypical" category: Arctic, Pohos, Gold, Temple, Double, Condor, Skull, Pygmies, Pirates, Tree People, Devil's Tower

Using Todorov's schema only three fall into the "uncanny" category: Doll, Werewolf, and Gargoyles.

A straight comparison of "atypical" and "marvelous" gives the latter category a dominant position in terms of narrative phenomenality: sort of the narratological version of a "51% controlling interest."

However, the category of the "uncanny" functions as something like a "swing vote."

If one considers that the exposure of the supernatural element as false puts the episode's phenomenality into the domain of "the real," as Todorov does, then those three episodes join with those of the "atypical" and give reality the "controlling interest."

If one considers (as I do) that the simple evocation of the supernatural orients the episode's phenomenality toward that of "the unreal," and considers "the uncanny" as being no less an expression of the metaphenomenal than is "the marvelous," then "fantasy" retains the upper hand.

And this is without even taking into account a lot of the little fantasy-touches that are tossed into the series as diversions: minor inventions of Doctor Quest, or Hadji's famed "sim sim sallah bim" levitation gag.

So my verdict is that though Joe Barbera and Doug Wildey probably would *rather* have crafted a hard-hitting adult-pulp adventure series after the exampe of TERRY AND THE PIRATES, what they gave fans was a work that better fits into the idiom of the superhero.

Not all serial works are so affected by their use of fantasy-tropes. Marvel's long-running RAWHIDE KID was a serial that flirted off and on with various superhero conceits, particularly costumed villains. Yet a full-fledged analysis of the original series in terms of Rawhide's opponents would certainly put that character in the "atypical" mode, since Rawhide faced far more injuns and gunslingers than he ever did costumed cavaliers.

Next up: some justification as to why this kind of categorization is important.

JONNYQUESTING: THE AUM THEORY IN PRACTICE PART II

Often, after I've attended a convention-panel and heard a professional make an interesting statement, I've wished myself trained in shorthand, to write the statement down quickly before the memory fades. Not having so trained myself, I'm relying only on memory when I recall the following--

At a convention in the 1990s, JONNY QUEST creator Doug Wildey was on a panel, and I remember him saying that he wasn't crazy about having to introduce sci-fi/fantasy monsters into the JQ mix, and that he did so as a means of appealing to kids. He gave me the impression that he much preferred the JQ episodes that focused on realistic adventure, such as "Shadow of the Condor." He also had choice things about what he and his fellow animators would've liked to have done to the cartoon-dog Bandit, but that's grist for some other mill.

Now, when JONNY QUEST debuted in 1964, it did so as a evening show for ABC-TV. So, unlike the Saturday morning cartoons directed wholly at juveniles, JONNY QUEST was trying, like Hanna-Barbera's earlier nighttime success THE FLINTSTONES, to appeal to both kids and adults with "all-ages" material. Unlike FLINTSTONES, JQ did not last more than a year and so ended up being recycled to Saturday mornings during those pre-cable days, where most juvenile watchers may have noticed in the show a harder edge than one usually found in the Hanna-Barbera superhero shows around the same time.

That harder edge, that element of rigor is important to the subcategory of popular fiction I've termed "adult pulp" in other essays. This hardboiled take on the adventure genre shows up in many fictional works of the early 20th century, such as those of Jack London and Dashiell Hammett. In GUNFIGHTER NATION literary critic Richard Slotkin refers to this form as the "blood-and-thunder" genre, and though American comic strips didn't seriously embrace this approach until the late 1920s, they had a pertinent effect on popular culture as a whole and on specific pop-cultural works, including, as a quote from this site makes clear, JONNY QUEST:

Although at first Jonny Quest seems most closely related to the Tom Swift, Jr. juvenile science fiction novels of the 50's and 60's penned under the name Victor Appleton, Hanna-Barbera co-founder Joseph Barbera in his autobiography My Life in 'toons cites the comic strip Terry and the Pirates as being the primary inspiration for Jonny Quest.

"It was a major departure for us, but both Bill and I had been hooked on adventure stories and superheroes since we were kids. As I've said, Bill and I really don't have much in common, but we both spent our nickels and dimes on movie serials and had read Frank Merriwell and Tom Swift novels as kids. I particularly admired Milt Caniff's long-running newspaper comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and that was the main inspiration for Jonny Quest - not only for some of the characters...but also in the sharp, angular look of the artwork, the emphasis on scientific gadgets and high-tech hardware, and the far-flung, exotic locales for the action."

Now, what's interesting about this reminiscence is that it shows JONNY QUEST as having a foot in two worlds: that of Tom Swift, which was directed wholly at juveniles, and of Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES, which was technically "all-ages" but written in a melodramatic vein meant to appeal a little more to adults than to children. Unlike Tom Swift, TERRY, as any comics-maven should know, did not actually have much in the way of "scientific gadgets and high-tech hardware," and it certainly did not have such kid-appeasing figures as Egyptian mummies and Tibetan yetis.

Indeed, I would say that Caniff, comic strips' foremost (albeit not first) proponent of realistic "blood-and-thunder" adventures, is also a Great Ancestor to many comic-book artists-- Severin, Kubert, and Toth as well as Doug Wildey-- who preferred to work in a more realistic vein of adventure. At least one could call it more realistic in comparison to the major superhero artists of the period: Kirby, Simon, Schuster, Kane, Peter et al. Kirby and the rest of these worked in an idiom where the marvelous, the uncanny and the atypical could merge at any given time, and none of the characters involved would give a second thought to clashing phenomenologies. The Caniff tradition, however, strove for realistic depiction, and so generally speaking the pulpish peregrinations of works in this tradition concerned *atypical* occurences within an *isophenomenal* setting.

JONNY QUEST may have the isophenomenal TERRY AND THE PIRATES as a major model, but in terms of phenomality the program bears more resemblance to the classic superhero model, in which stories may center about any combination of atypical, uncanny or marvelous elements. And because the original run of the teleseries was only 26 episodes, it will be easy to break down on this blog just how often the serial fell into each of the three AUM modes. By doing so I can then determine whether or not the series-concept qualifies to be placed within the category of the superhero idiom, much as I considered Zorro's fitness in this essay.

The breakdown will begin in Part 3 of "Theory in Practice."

THE AUM THEORY, IN PRACTICE PART 1

Back in this essay I criticized a fantasy-film reference-work, R.G. Young's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASTIC FILM for holding fuzzy standards in terms of what the author counted as a "fantastic film." There's no introduction in the volume, so there's no way to tell how Young justified calling some of his cited works "fantastic." I assume that this author suffered from a tendency seen in many such compilers: the tendency to place a film's presentation of a mundane emotion, such as physical fear, alongside the fear suggested by the extra-mundane as if all were covalent.

To further illustrate the problems with this problematic categorizing, I decided to see how broadly my categories "atypical, uncanny and marvelous" applies to Young's choices. I picked one letter with a smallish number of entries, namely the letter "Y," and broke down all the films Young included into what I deemed their proper categories.



I won't bother detailing how many films fell into each category, but instead I'll comment on three examples therefrom. First and easiest were the films along the line of the Japanese monster-flick YOG MONSTER FROM SPACE. Clearly no one would question that a film about a giant space amoeba is a film belonging to the category of the marvelous.



A film like this presents more of a challenge. YOU'LL FIND OUT is a comedy starring bandleader Kay Kyser but slanted toward the horror-audience by its inclusion of three horror-actor icons: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre. But even had these characters been played by actors with no horror-associations, the script propels the film into the category of the uncanny. Readers of my Todorov essays should recall that Todorov thought that any work in which the supernatural was suggested but not proven to be real should be considered "uncanny," and that holds true even without my revisions of Todorov's theory. YOU'LL FIND OUT concerns in part a phony spiritualism racket, and while it's true that the audience is never really beguiled into thinking ghosts really exist, the film's flirtation with the marvelous also makes it a "fantastic film" (albeit not in the way Todorov would have used the term).

Finally, we have YOUNG AND INNOCENT, a film Young apparently included because it was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a director who usually did thrillers in the "atypical" mode but dabbled in the world of the uncanny with films like PSYCHO and THE BIRDS. But in this film the only fear presented is that of those mundane "tigers" called the police, as this imdb summation makes clear:

A film actress is murdered by her estranged husband who is jealous of all her young boyfriends. The next day, writer Robert Tisdall (who happens to be one such boyfriend) discovers her body on the beach. He runs to call the police, however, two witnesses think that he is the escaping murderer. Robert is arrested, but owing to a mix up at the courthouse, he escapes and goes on the run with a police constable's daughter Erica, determined to prove his innocence.

Of course, not all films in the shadow-area between *the atypical* and *the uncanny* are so easy to dismiss. Is any film with a serial killer *uncanny* because a lot of them, like PSYCHO, carry the uncanny's emotional tonality? Or can one dismiss only those that seem to treat the concept of the serial killer in a mundane fashion, which for me would include both Richard Fleischer's BOSTON STRANGLER and Hitchcock's own FRENZY?

These are questions whose answers I can only suggest in the space of a blogpost. In part 2 I'll deal with how all three categories can be viewed, not as three separate works, but in terms of entries in an ongoing serial.

F/D/A (FEAR/DREAD/AWE) MEETS A*U*M*

One of the most intellectually stimulating online essays I've encountered in the last year is CRWM's 5-24-10 essay, "The Lion, the Witch, and the Uncanny," which excerpts passages from C.S. Lewis' 1940 book THE PROBLEM OF PAIN and applies said passages to modern concerns about the conceptualization of horror-fiction.

Here's the relevant passage that deals with three possible situations in which a subject experiences the emotions, respectively, of fear, dread, and awe:

"Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’, and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words ‘Under it my genius is rebuked’. This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous."

To recap: Lewis provides three possible entities that might excite these related emotional states. The idea of a tiger provokes fear in the subject. The idea of a ghost provokes dread, which lies upon "the fringes of the Numinous." And the idea of a "mighty spirit" provokes awe, awe of "the Numinous." Lewis' use of this term is derived from Rudolf Otto-- who is quoted in a later passage-- who popularized the term in his 1917 book THE IDEA OF THE HOLY. Otto's "Numinous" is meant to convey a sense by the subject of experiencing some divine-seeming spirit before which one feels fearful, and yet at the same time fascinated. I've quoted Otto myself in relation to making a distinction between horror-stories and suspense-thrillers:

The "suspense" genre, I said in a related post, was oriented not on seeking to scare the audience, but to "startle and disorient." In my own conception the pure horror film doesn't necessarily need the element of the supernatural, but it does need the element of the *mysterium,* which is my shortened form for the two Latin phrases invoked by Rudolf Otto is his classic IDEA OF THE HOLY, where he explains the numinous experience in terms of the *mysterium tremendum,* the overwhelming mystery that compels fear and trembling in the viewer, and the *mysterium fascinans,* which compels the viewer to be attracted to the fascinating mystery.

I've known about Otto's work since my college years, but I may've started thinking about ways to approach his insights in the last year or so thanks to other bloggers, such as Curt Purcell, who also cited Otto in relation to the horror-genre, like in this 12-11-08 essay. I wouldn't mind crediting CRWM in this respect as well, since I've been meaning to link to his Lewis essay all year given the right circumstances, but as it happens THRILLER KILLING was written a little before CRWM's piece.

"The right circumstances," in this case, relate to my own trinity of concerns as to establishing the phenomenal nature of narratives: the A*U*M* formula of "Atypical," "Uncanny," and "Marvelous," as derived in part from the writings of Tzvetan Todorov. I find it quite pleasing that my trinity lines up with Lewis', whether I was subconsciously thinking about his insights or not.

Lewis' "tiger," being that it is unquestionably an entity of the real, causal world, signifies the narrative world of The Atypical. Of course not all Atypical narratives are about physical danger. It is merely that within Atypical narratives, the source of the narrative disequilibrium is something that is easy to understand within the realm of what Todorov calls "the rational."

Lewis' "ghost" is an entity that hovers, as Lewis says, on "the fringes of the Numinous." In other sections of his essay Lewis is careful to avoid the reductive view of ghosts: he rejects the notion that they must be spectres conjured up purely via the subject's wishful thinking or some similar delusion. At the same time, Lewis admits that for primitive man ghosts may have simply been viewed as a mundane source of danger:

It is therefore theoretically possible that there was a time when men regarded these spirits simply as dangerous and felt towards them just as they felt towards tigers.

For me, then, this ambivalence as to the ghost being mundane or quasi-Numinous lines up well with my adaptation of Todorov's category of "the uncanny." Todorov believes that once a narrative reveals that the Hooded Phantom is really just Mr. Hawkins using his handy-dandy slide projector (now known far and wide as the Scooby Doo Ending), the narrative was thus reclaimed for "the category of the real." But as earlier essays should make clear, I don't agree. For me, even narratives in which the metaphenomenon of, say, a ghost is proved to have no cognitive truth, the fear of the spectre renders the narrative *affectively* metaphenomenal, as against, say, a more mundane thriller where ghosts are not even worthy of consideration.

Finally, Lewis' concept of his "mighty spirit" unquestionably compares well with the category of "the marvelous." Far more than in his consideration of the ghost, Lewis, though not a Kantian, takes a quasi-Kantian view as to whether reductionism explains the Numinous experieces of "the mighty spirit":

Now this awe is not the result of an inference from the visible universe. There is no possibility of arguing from mere danger to the uncanny, still less to the fully Numinous.

One need not conceive of the "mighty spirit" in precisely the same way Christian-apologist Lewis may have, in order to see its relevance to the narratological category of "the marvelous." Where "uncanny" aspects stand on the borderline between the real and the unreal (if only affectively), "marvelous" aspects are all about invoking the sense of the sublime; of things that unquestionably go beyond the boundaries of time, space, and causality in one way or another. In horror the "mighty spirit" might be a vampire; in fantasy it might be a wizard; in science fiction it might be Jules Verne's Center of the Earth. All are narratologically similar even if the precise nature of the phenomena described take different forms.

In closing I'll note that many, many concordances on "fantastic film" have fallen victim to a tendency to lump all sorts of films that invoke "fear" of the distinctly mundane type with films of the uncanny and the marvelous. One of the worst offenders is R.G. Young's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASTIC FILM, which is valuable in terms of chronicling many obscure British fantasy-shorts but muddies its concept by including all sorts of genres peripheral to fantastic film, such as film noir, swashbucklers like CUTTHROAT ISLAND, and what a back-cover blurb calls "heavy melodramas." I sympathize with the desire to reference all these lesser evocations of fear and danger-- but one ought to draw the line SOMEWHERE.

TALES OF THE ATYPICAL, UNCANNY, AND MARVELOUS

“All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.”-- Todorov, THE FANTASTIC, p. 163.

The unspoken corollary to this formula would be that between these two dissimilar equilibriums lies a disequilibrium, which I choose to call "the atypical" because it goes against one's expectations of typical life-routine. In TODOROV O TODOROV PART 2 I stated that “fictional narrative is always about the atypical.” By that I meant that readers derive pleasure from seeing some change in the status quo presented at the story’s beginning. One can even see some degree of this change in nonfictional narrative, though such narrative doesn’t hinge on the change in the characters. When Harvey Pekar presents a nonfictional narrative that allegedly reproduces a real-life conversation in which two black women chitchat about “okry,” that narrative isn’t dependent on the two real-life characters changing their “equilibrium.” It's possible that the reader’s perception of reality-- if only on the level of “how such-and-such people talk”-- may undergo an alteration, but even that alteration isn't as necessary in nonfiction as it is in fiction.

In my terms Todorov’s theory fails because it privileges his “category of the real” as a mimetic reproduction of reality, rather than focusing on the readers’ pleasure/pain in viewing the change that takes characters from one equilibrium to another. The readers' pleasures and pains of character identification are in no way altered by the phenomena within the story: by whether the story seems utterly fantastic, somewhat fantastic or not fantastic at all. However, other aesthetic perceptions *are* affected by their perception as to what phenomena are possible in the fictional world.

In this essay I bracketed three characters—the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, and Batman—who are modeled upon the same fictional archetype: the merely-mortal ‘crusader for justice who has a secret identity.” Invested readers can identify with all three characters in terms of their personal quests for justice, but how the reader feels about the hero’s charisma changes according to their phenomenality.

The Scarlet Pimpernel, to the best of my knowledge, is never presented as anything but an ordinary man crusading for justice. Some cinematic adaptations may give the Pimpernel more swashbuckling fighting-skills than others, but to his enemies he is never more than a physical threat. Thus the Pimpernel represents what I call “base atypicality,” because there’s nothing in his world that suggests the metaphenomenal.

In the many iterations of Johnston McCulley’s Zorro, most take place in a world that is essentially like that of the Pimpernel: a world which seems to have no metaphenomenal aspects. Zorro, however, is the exception. Where “Scarlet Pimpernel” is simply a code-name for a mysterious figure, Zorro’s costume confers on him a charisma that provides him with greater narrative charisma. The Zorro narratives, while insisting that Zorro is merely a skilled human, emphasize his presence as a spectre of fear to his opponents, and it is this which gives the black-clad avenger the charisma of “the uncanny.”

However, Batman, though also merely mortal, qualifies for the category of "the marvelous" irrespective as to how many hyper-powered or costumed villains he may battle. Earlier I reprinted a panel in which Golden-Age Batman was first seen with his new inventions, the “Batarang” and the “Batgyro.” If tools like these remained in their simplest configurations perhaps Batman would fall into the “uncanny” category. But over time Batman’s arsenal was expanded beyond the level of conventional weapons. And while many Batman stories don’t play up his marvelous weapons, they remain a consistent aspect of his mythology. The 1966-68 teleseries took camp pleasure in depicting the many improbable gadgets that could spring from Batman’s “utility belt,” but that mockery contained a grain of truth, for comics-writers did at times use the Utility Belt as a sort of “Aladdin’s lamp” through which the hero could transcend normal limitations. Despite all the narrative attempts to convince readers that Batman was the opposite of Superman in being “merely mortal,” Batman’s belt and other paraphernalia boost him above the power available to a Zorro or a Scarlet Pimpernel. Thus he falls into the literary category of “the marvelous” just as much as Superman, and has just as much a claim as Superman on being a “superhero.” Zorro, in contrast, may not qualify for the appellation “superhero” as it is popularly used, but his uncanny aspects at least put him within the superhero idiom, while a figure who is merely “atypical,” like the Scarlet Pimpernel, remains on the outside looking in.

ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF A*U*M*

The following is just a quick sketch of a formula I'll expound on later in more detail.

We have here three characters who all belong to the Fryean adventure *mythos.* Their main distinction from one another here depends on their phenomenal nature.

As presented here, they boil down thusly:

The phenomenality of THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL is ATYPICAL.

The phenomenality of ZORRO is UNCANNY.

The phenomenality of BATMAN is MARVELOUS.

Hence, I label this for future reference the AUM formula.

More later.