UP AND DOWN THE PATHOS PATH

 I proposed the theory of "gravity" and "levity" in 2012's GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW. This was one of my many attempts to suss out how categories of "the serious" and "the ludicrous," as Schopenhauer called them, impacted the NUM system that I extrapolated from Northrop Frye's theory of mythoi and finessed with considerations of phenomenality with which Frye was not concerned. 

In my previous post I decided that speaking of these categories as "tonal" in nature was too vague. My new solution for this problem was to import two terms I recorded here in 2013: "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects," my substitution for Aristotle's (inadequate in my view) terms "pity" and "terror." Further, these can also be dovetailed with the assertions I made in the four-part FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS, concluding here. I emphasize the conclusion of that series because that's close to being the only other time, outside of the CROSSBOW series, that I applied the levity/gravity idea to another domain within my theoretical universe. I sorted out the relations of the two "literary forces" to the four mythoi thusly:

COMEDY-- plerotic and oriented on light levity
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and oriented on light gravity
DRAMA-- kenotic and oriented on high gravity
IRONY-- kenotic and oriented on high levity

At the time I couldn't think of any better way to characterize the variations in levity and gravity than with a faux-quantitative metaphor. But I should have been focused on the qualitative difference that are served by the two forces as they meld with the two forms of affect. Putting aside the plerosis/kenosis dyad as having been adequately defined by Theodor Gaster, now the four mythoi look like this:

COMEDY-- the emphasis upon "the jubilative," on things that seem funny because of their positive incongruity, results in a surfeit of *sympathetic levity* 

ADVENTURE-- the emphasis upon "the invigorative," on things that portray positive success in the battles of sex and violence, results in a surfeit of *sympathetic gravity* 

DRAMA-- the emphasis upon "the purgative," on things that connote the expulsion of negative elements, results in a surfeit of *antipathetic gravity*  

IRONY-- the emphasis upon "the mortificative," on things that demonstrate a general state of increasing degradation, results in a surfeit of *antipathetic levity"

This formulation means that I have to dump all the Schopenhauerean arguments I made in DYNAMIS PT 4, wherein I was trying to meld his observations with those of Gaster re: plerosis and kenosis. Now I forswear the idea that "levity" lifts one away from being invested in the fictional characters in comedy as it does in irony, and that "gravity" causes one to be just as invested in the characters of drama as one is in those of adventure. Since ancient times comedy and adventure have been more broadly popular than the other two mythoi because they encourage audiences to identify with the characters, promising for the most part that the sympathetic characters will be vindicated. This makes those mythoi "plerotic" because they're all about incorporating positive energies into the lives of favored characters. In contrast, drama and irony discourage direct identification with the characters as they struggle with, and often lose to, forces antipathetic to them or even to the audience members. They are both "kenotic," as they are focused upon expelling or sublimating negative energies from characters who are not so much "identified with" as "studied" from a distanced view of things. "Levity" encourages positive energy and rising upward, "gravity" encourages negative energy and falling downward.   

There's a bit more to come, but that's a good stopping place.               

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PART 3

Here I'll be bringing my formulations in Part 1 and Part 2 into line with some of my observations regarding audience-conviction.

In the FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS series, I argued that there were four states of "dynamis," which both Northrop Frye and I use to signify the "power of action" of characters in fiction. and that those four states parallel the four-staged development of human beings as described by Ovid in his METAMORPHOSES. In the poem Ovid asserts that every human being starts out as being like Spring, "quickening yet shy," develops into "Summer's hardiness," loses those "first flushes" upon entering Autumn's "temperate season," and finally enters the domain of "senile Winter," which is marked by the "terror in palsy" that will precede Death. These states I then compared to my four quasi-Fryean mythoi, respectively comedy, adventure, drama and irony.

Now, all of my formulations regarding kenosis and plerosis, informed largely by the analyses of Theodore Gaster and Jane Ellen Harrison, which are focused not on individual growth and decay but upon a given society's attempt to maintain itself in what Gaster calls the "durative" sense. Thus there are four forms of ritual-- what Gaster calls "the jubilative,""the invigorative," "the purgative," and the morificative," all of which also align with the four mythoi, and in the same order.

So the four mythoi line up well when paralleled to the "ages of man," or to the yearly rituals of archaic societies , which are intended to maintain the society as if it were a cyclical living entity, able to reconstitute itself indefinitely, unlike individual persons. However, there's far less uniformity in terms of the ways each mythos works with the audience's *conviction* regarding the narratives of each mythoi, since it's possible for audiences to take some mythoi seriously and others unseriously:

The drama and the adventure, often perceived as two "serious" types of entertainment, are easy to confound, even as are the two types of "unserious" entertainment, comedy and irony.-- GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, PART 1.

In the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW series, I meditated upon the attitudes of "serious conviction" and "unserious lack of conviction." In the POETICS, Aristotle had characterized these states of audience-perception as "weighty" and "light" respectively. I followed this formulation somewhat by speaking of the first category as being dominantly characterized by "tonal gravity," while the other was dominantly characterized by "tonal levity." Assuming that one keeps to the order by which Frye arranged his mythoi, explicitly patterned after the four seasons, then here we have not a smooth progression, but a sort of oscillation. We start with the jubilative form of the unserious, which is perhaps the "lightest" of the four, and proceed to the invigorative, which is dominantly serious. The purgative mythos then increases the "gravity" and instills an even greater sense of seriousness-- and yet, this particular center cannot hold, and the mortificative mythos arises from the purgative, taking on a new form of "levity," one so free of the bonds of literary gravity that hardly anything can be valued.

Similarly, the ritual processes of *kenosis* (emptying) and *plerosis* (filling) also follow this oscillating progress, as I pointed out in SOMETIMES THEY WIN, SOMETIMES THEY LOSE:

I generalized that two of the four Fryean mythoi allow the protagonist to win sometimes, lose sometimes.  One of the two is *drama,* a mythos which possesses a serious tone and a *kenotic* (emptying) audience-function, and *comedy,* a mythos which possesses an unserious tone and a  *plerotic* (filling) audience-function. In contrast, as I also stated in that essay, the function of *adventure* is "to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat," while in contrast "the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction."  Just to keep symmetry with the above assertions, I'll reiterate that *adventure* is a mythos with a serious tone and a *plerotic* audience-function, while *irony* is a mythos with an unserious tone and a *kenotic* audience-function.

So here too we see an oscillation between modes:

COMEDY-- plerotic and levity-oriented
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and gravity-oriented
DRAMA-- kenotic and gravity-oriented
IRONY-- kenotic and levity-oriented

In the same essay plerosis-kenosis essay, I specified that what society is being "filled with" is whatever a given society perceives to be "life-supporting" elements, while the same society attempts to "empty itself" of "life-denying" elements. But then the objection arises: if the jubilative and mortificative mythoi address their respective processes of filling and emptying with only a "light" sense of conviction, why would those processes have any societal importance?

My best solution for the time being is that most if not all societies need what I've called "vacations from morals," and that works of tonal levity, simply by the fact that they are NOT meant to fill the audience with a sense of "the grave and the constant," serve as a counterpoint to their more serious-minded counterparts. Hard to say if this line of thought will bear more fruit.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS

“Look at the four-spaced year
That imitates four seasons of our lives;
First Spring, that delicate season, bright with flowers,
Quickening, yet shy, and like a milk-fed child,
Its way unsteady while the countryman
Delights in promise of another year.
Green meadows wake to bloom, frail shoots and grasses,
And then Spring turns to Summer's hardiness,
The boy to manhood. There's no time of year
Of greater richness, warmth, and love of living,
New strength untried. And after Summer, Autumn,
First flushes gone, the temperate season here
Midway between quick youth and growing age,
And grey hair glinting when the head turns toward us, 
Then senile Winter, bald or with white hair,
Terror in palsy as he walks alone.” -- Ovid, METAMORPHOSES

...in future uses, I'll define *dynamis* only as a significant value, in that the character "power of action" in the story is pre-ordained by the type of story in which he finds himself, be it adventure, comedy, irony or drama.-- DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY.

My thoughts recently turned to Frye's application of the four seasons to his four mythoi, which I've frequently glossed with the four "moods" cited by Theodor H. Gaster in his THESPIS, as seen in REFINING THE DEFINING:

ADVENTURE conveys the INVIGORATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how protagonists who defend life and/or goodness from whatever forces are inimical to them. The protagonists' power of action is at its highest here.
COMEDY conveys the JUBILATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how the heroes seek happiness/contentment in a world that has some element of craziness to it (what I've termed the "incognitive" myth-radical), yet does not deny the heroes some power of action.
IRONY conveys the MORTIFICATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon characters in a world where the "power of action" is fundamentally lacking.
DRAMA conveys the PURGATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon "individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society." Power of action here is more ambivalent than that of the adventure-mythos but seems more crucial to the individual's problem than it does for that of the comic hero.

It then occurred to me that these different forms of dynamis, of the power-of-action, might line up rather well with the so-called "four ages of man." I read through Frye's original formulation of the mythoi in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, and could not see that he'd made any Ovidian comparisons between the seasons  and the ages of man, though it's not impossible that I saw someone else make such a correlation. Theodor Gaster didn't make any such correlations either, but in THESPIS he provided examples of the dominant characteristics of each religious ritual that summoned the four Gasterian moods. The invigorative ritual, according to Gaster, always revolves around acts of combat. The purgative ritual centers upon the expulsion of the scapegoat. The mortificative ritual emphasizes ceremonies of abjection, such as fasting and lamentation for vanished communal energy. Lastly, Gaster addresses the jubilative ritual, but does not go into nearly as much detail as he does with the others, merely stating that there's already a wealth of data on such jubilative rituals, most of which accord with the idea of harvest-celebrations. Curiously, I've criticized Frye in past essays for not quite being able to get a handle on the radical of the comedy mythos, so that I had to come up with my own, "the incognitive," which may or may not accord with the formulations of the ancient world.

So which mood/mythos aligns with which "age of man?" In this I'm guided by Frye's remarks on comedy, which he asserts to be guided by a passage from "law" to "liberty," as when the protagonist starts out being constrained by some seemingly arbitrary restriction-- as in Greek New Comedy, it's the young man being denied access to his lady-love by a "heavy father." But although this familiar trope suggests the activities of the adolescent, I find that the dynamis involved in moving from a state of restriction to one of liberty most resembles the struggle of EveryChild. All kids are born into cultures whose values must be accepted as given, and though no child escapes being influenced by his or her culture, the child also defines him/herself in terms of struggling against that matrix. The comic mood arises from the incongruity of the child's struggle to "delight in promise of another year," to find his/her place in the culture of one's birth, even while rejecting some aspect of the culture.

The real star of "Summer's hardiness" is therefore the protagonist of the adventure-story, who exists to invigorate the audience by showing a desirable outcome to the war between Good and Evil, Summer and Winter, etc. This is a state of affairs where, following Frye's pattern, "law" in the sense of onerous restrictions ceases to exist, and the hero has almost untrammeled "liberty" to remake the world in line with his heroic ideals. Even heroes who perish at the end of their stories, like Beowulf, leave the reader with this sense of societal transformation.

Following close on the dynamis-heels of the adventure-story is the drama, whose protagonist is often a figure with some claim to heroic status, but who has become dangerous to his society in some way. The dynamis of the dramatic hero reverses that of the comic hero, for the protagonist is first seen in some condition of relative "liberty," at which point he begins to succumb to some arbitrary "law." Ovid's phrase, "quick youth and growing age," catches the sense that the dramatic protagonist is succumbing just as the person in his middle years, the "temperate season," is slowly losing his hold on the "first flushes" of youthful energy.

Finally, it should be obvious that the domain of the irony-mythos is one that is almost entirely dominated by that of arbitrary "law," with precious little "liberty" to speak of. This is the world of the last age, wherein the protagonist displays "terror in palsy as he walks alone"-- knowing, of course, that the society cannot rescue him from being conquered by the law of death, when there is no "promise of another year."

I may investigate these four age-oriented radicals in terms of some specific examples in a future essay.

AUTHORITIES, PLEROTIC AND KENOTIC PART 1

The reason I wrote this sequel to the 2014 essay OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER was not because that particular subject had been occupying my mind on-and-off for the past three years. Rather, I returned to that obscure topic because I'd been giving more thought to the categorization of different types of presences, focal or non-focal, that appear in fiction, as seen in September's PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES. These meditations got me thinking not only about following up on the implications of the 2014 essay, but also about the application of my persona-classification system to non-focal figures.

A quick recapitulation of the roots of said system: first, though I said this at the beginning of the PALE KINGS essay:

The strongest influence on my theory of the four persona-types has been the work of Schopenhauer, but I'll confess that Northrop Frye's writings on literary dynamis had an impact on the theory...

This was an oversimplication on my part. It's true that Frye's ANATOMY influenced only the concept of the four mythoi, and that his theories contributed little if anything to my concept of literary personas. However, Frye's work led me to a deeper consideration of one of his influences, Theodor Gaster, and my conceptualization of persona-types coalesced from my attempt to bring Gaster's concepts of "plerosis and kenosis" into line with Schopenhauer's concepts of will, as I expounded in Part 1 and Part 2 of WHEN TITANS GET CROSS-COMPARED. A short summing-up of the Gaster concepts appears in this essay, where I cross-compared Gaster's categories with Frye's four mythoi:

,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

One of my major differences with Frye is that I don't think he paid enough attention to persona-types in the ANATOMY. Here's his meditation on figures of aristocratic authority, who inhabit what he calls the "high mimetic mode:"

 If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.

This formula overlooks certain distinctions between different types of rulers. Some of these protagonists are genuinely heroic in all senses of the word, such as Homer's Achilles. But others, despite their level of authority, are closer to being what I term "demiheroes," which means that they align more with the idea of the sacrificial victim than of the hero. Indeed, Shakespeare's most famous protagonists-- Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth-- are closer to being victims than to being heroes. Frye passed away in 1991, but I imagine that if he had somehow lived long enough to become acquainted with the two examples I contrasted in PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES-- Neil Gaiman's Morpheus and Nozomu Tamaki's Mina Tepes-- then I hazard that he would have seen in both of them the pattern of the high mimetic mode. Despite the fact that both characters possess supernormal powers that make them somewhat superior to their natural environment, Frye might have perceived that they were both rulers of fantasy-realms and were thus forced to deal with limitations upon their powers. I think the fact that both characters possess temporal authority is less important than what they do with it. Both Morpheus and Mina seek to consolidate their kingdoms, but the former seems concerned mostly with maintaining a status quo-- which in my mind associates him with a very high rank of demihero-- while Mina Tepes is more heroic in nature, forging her kingdom against a horde of opposing forces.

It would seem axiomatic that such authority-figures can also take on the persona-roles of either "monsters" or of "villains," but I'll deal with those eventualities in Part 2.

ETHICS AMONG THE SUBCOMBATIVES PT. 3

At the end of Part 2 of this series, I said:

In Part 3 of this new series, I'll explore some of the ramifications involved when a subcombative work aligns itself with themes most often seen in combative works.

This comment grew out of my reading of a particular subcombative work, Mark Twain's PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC. The ideal expressed in Twain's work is one I find uncharacteristic of most subcombative works. I take this snippet from Chapter 17:

She was great in battle—we all know that; great in foresight; great in loyalty and patriotism; great in persuading discontented chiefs and reconciling conflicting interests and passions; great in the ability to discover merit and genius wherever it lay hidden; great in picturesque and eloquent speech; supremely great in the gift of firing the hearts of hopeless men and noble enthusiasms, the gift of turning hares into heroes, slaves and skulkers into battalions that march to death with songs on their lips. But all these are exalting activities; they keep hand and heart and brain keyed up to their work; there is the joy of achievement, the inspiration of stir and movement, the applause which hails success; the soul is overflowing with life and energy, the faculties are at white heat; weariness, despondency, inertia—these do not exist.

Now the thematic reason that Twain writes eloquently of "the soul-- overflowing with life and energy" is to serve a greater purpose, to make clear what values Joan incarnates, the better to serve the book's theme, to show readers what was lost when she was destroyed by vicious and small-minded persecution. In the terms I've appropriated from Theodore Gaster, Twain's JOAN OF ARC most closely aligns with the *purgative* mode:

First the rites of mortification, symbolizing the temporary eclipse of the community. Next the rites of purgation, by which all noxious elements that might impair the community's future welfare are eliminated. Then the rites of invigoration, aimed at stimulating the growth of crops, the fecundity of humans and beasts, and the supply of needed sunshine and rainfall throughout the year. Finally, when the new lease is assured, come the rites of jubilation; there is a communal meal at which the members of the community recement their bonds of kinship by breaking bread together, and at which their gods are present.

Still, I find it interesting that, in the section printed above, Twain frames Joan's virtues in terms that I consider more linked to the mode of invigoration. This is a very different approach from, say, George Bernard Shaw's SAINT JOAN, where the author is more concerned with seeing Joan not in terms of her immediate impact on France's fortunes on the battlefield, but in terms of intellectual history:

“A Frenchman! Where did you pick up that expression? Are these Burgundians and Bretons and Picards and Gascons beginning to call themselves Frenchmen, just as our fellows are beginning to call themselves Englishmen? They actually talk of France and England as their countries. Theirs, if you please! What is to become of me and you if that way of thinking comes into fashion?” 

Shaw's SAINT JOAN is much more unified in terms of its mode, which I would consider that of *mortification,* which I've lined up with the Fryean mythos of irony. Twain, however, returns me to the concept of "subdominant elements" as expressed in this 2011 essay:

“Subdominant” indicates that a given narrative makes extensive use of the elements of one mythos even though the narrative as a whole fits another mythos better.

Now, although Twain's JOAN OF ARC is still a drama in the *purgative* mode, the author also makes a subdominant invocation of the *invigorative* mode. This means that it aligns itself, like such classic works as THE ILIAD, with my "narrative rule of excess," as glossed by Nietzsche.

 "To demand of strength that it should not express itself, that it should not be a will to overcome, overthrow, dominate, a thirst for enemies and resistance and triumph, makes as little sense as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength."-- ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS.

What's fascinating is that while THE ILIAD is concerned with its heroes, who display this "thirst for enemies and resistance and triumph," Twain's work is concerned with an inspirational figure who encourages Frenchmen to fight and overcome their English enemies. At the same time, her ability to inspire warriors in the field does not extend to the legalists and religionists of her own nascent nation, and this is the "Achilles heel" that dooms her. Still, Twain's perception of "the rule of excess"-- obviously, through his own distinct cultural lens-- arguably makes his JOAN OF ARC a deeper and more artistic accomplishment than, say, SAINT JOAN.

PATTERN COGNITION

In THE DOMAIN GAME PT. 2 I wrote:

The three phenomenal domains of my NUM-theory operate in what I deem an archetypal sense. Different artists are drawn toward images and tropes that promise, or at least suggest, different types of freedom. What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns. Yet both, as much as "heavy thinkers" like Gaster and Schopenhauer, are alike in searching for the formula that gives them a sense of transpersonal fulfillment-- which, in the last analysis, is what all persons, of all races and creeds, desire when they speak of their need for freedom. Yet it is a freedom that is only possible in terms of perspectivism and pluralism-- and any creed that takes a different stance is merely seeking the fulfillment of some favored group or groups.

The same "sense of transpersonal fulfillment" applies not just to "phenomenal domains," but also to any conceivable pattern of human belief or behavior.

For instance, I gain a sense of fulfillment from the patterns discussed by Northrop Frye in his critical work ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, wherein he schematized the whole of literature in terms of four mythoi, which he in turn based on the four seasons. My fascination for the wide applicability of this system does not necessarily make me think that it can necessarily explain everything, but for a critic of my inclinations, it's a damned good starting-point. Ditto the above-referenced insights of Theodor Gaster, a strong influence upon Frye, who also favored a quaternary pattern, though he was oriented on understanding the different emotional affects brought forth by different religious rituals:

First the rites of mortification, symbolizing the temporary eclipse of the community. Next the rites of purgation, by which all noxious elements that might impair the community's future welfare are eliminated. Then the rites of invigoration, aimed at stimulating the growth of crops, the fecundity of humans and beasts, and the supply of needed sunshine and rainfall throughout the year. Finally, when the new lease is assured, come the rites of jubilation; there is a communal meal at which the members of the community recement their bonds of kinship by breaking bread together, and at which their gods are present.

I've been wondering whether or not modern-day critics are even capable of thinking in these terms, however; of seeing emotional expression at the heart of all literature. As I'm sure I've said on many occasions, the only patterns recognized by most pop-culture critics is one of political ideology. Marx is the primary instigator of this pattern, and indirectly led to most of the common tropes of Marxist thought: appropriation, "the culture industry," and so on. These are, in contrast to the pluralism I advocate, positions of elitism, in part because they favor a view of art that depends on ideological correctness, and that such a view is dispensed by an educated elite that seeks to control the emotional expressivity of human beings.

Nevertheless, I don't doubt that the elitists have currently won the day, for most pop-culture criticism is unable to think outside the box of ideology. While one can find online references that give popular characters the status of "myths," there's no serious conversation about the intersection of religious myth and any kind of fiction. I can easily imagine that, for an ideological elitist, the elegant patterns observed by Frye and Gaster would seem mere arbitrary categories. I freely admit that my appreciation of the myth-critical patterns stems from my own subjective preferences, though I think that in the long run myth-criticism offers a broader perspective of art than ideological criticism. Yet I can't deny that the ideologues are also motivated by a "sense of transpersonal fulfillment" when they get the chance to point the finger at the latest sinner against ultraliberal politics. Most recently I discussed this pattern in SKINNY BUTTS AND ALL, where I observed how the cited critic's response to perceived racism was to do noting more than indulge in racist slights against the supposed oppressors.

At the same time, it may be that the ideologue's sense of fulfillment is confined to what Aldous Huxley called "horizontal transcendence," as I discussed in TRANSECENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME. Here's Huxley on defining this pattern of transcendence:

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds.

Huxley only mentions political activities as one example, but I think it's inarguable that all such activities represent a "cause wider than [one's] immediate interests." Marxist critics would of course have little interest in Huxley's concepts of "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence," since these would, like the works of Frye and Gaster, involve some validation of religion as an essential aspect of humankind's expressivity. It would be interesting, then, to explore the works of an ideologue like Noah Berlatsky, or one of his myrmidons, for the purpose of seeing how they represent proper human fulfillment as it's represented in fiction, since those expressed ideals would probably present a mirror-image of their own ideas of transcendent fulfillment.  Maybe in a Part 2--

CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 3

This essay is not only a follow-up to parts one and two in the series, but also to the April essay RADICAL CONFLICTS. In addition, the endeavor to expand upon the conceptual word-pair and "centric/ diffuse" is also an attempt to formulate better language for the way in which a "dominant" story element achieves dominance over other elements.

Back in 2011, in essays like this one, I put forth the distinction of "dominant" and "subdominant" elements, and said of the latter:

"Subdominant” indicates that a given narrative makes extensive use of the elements of one mythos even though the narrative as a whole fits another mythos better.

But I never made extensive use of these terms. The word "dominance" descends from the Latin dominus, meaning a lord or master,  and this imagery more or less accords with the thoughts I expressed in JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY. And yet, though I don't reject any of these meditations, in recent years I've been drawn less to the image of a "master" lording it over lesser elements, and more drawn to the image of the circle. If a given narrative has elements characteristic of all four Fryean mythoi, one may see the centermost circle as being the myth-radical that most determines the total content of the narrative.  Below is one of the few images I could find on the Web, in which four circles (the four mythoi) are contained within a greater circle, but one of the inner circles, the smallest, approximates occupies the center position--though it's smaller than I'd like insofar as providing a useful illustration.

With this model in mind it's more feasible to see how the author of a given narrative may allow the "sphere" of his narrative to encompass all four moods represented by the four myth-radicals. In this essay I used BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER teleseries as an example of a narrative-- admittedly, an extended narrative compose of several interrelated stories-- in which the authors sought to put their central character through all four of the psychological situations that Theodor Gaster calls his moods of "the invigorative," "the jubilative," "the purgative," and "the mortificative" (cited with greater detail in the above-cited AFFECTS VS. MOODS). My conclusion, of course, was that the "centric will" of the extended narrative focused upon providing the audience with invigorative scenes of Buffy triumphing over assorted enemies.

In RADICAL CONFLICTS I alluded briefly to Aristotle's use of two terms, "simple" and "complex," which the philosopher linked to whether or not a given work possessed a particular sttrucuring element, that of the *anagnorisis.* I'll now proceed to swipe his categories for my own use.

Many narratives, extended or otherwise, never stray from one dominant myth-mood, and so these would be *simple* narratives. But if there is a pronounced use of even one other mood-element, then the narratives would be *complex.* Buffy is an example of a "sphere" that encompasses all four radicals. In the ADVENTURE/COMEDY VS. COMEDY/ADVENTURE, PART 1,  I cited two extended narratives, that of the BATMAN teleseries and the INFERIOR FIVE comic book series, which I then believed to be concentrated largely upon the invigorative and jubilative moods. I later modified this view with regard to BATMAN, in that I found a sort of gentle irony pervading that narrative. However, even INFERIOR FIVE, with only two discernible moods, would be complex, and its illustration would look something like this, where "B" was the center radical, that of comedy, while "A," representing the radical of adventure. was somewhat off to the side.

In the above example, then, the radical of jubiliation / comedy would incarnate the *centric will* of the narrative, while the radical of invigoration / adventure would be relegated to the narrative's *diffuse will."

THE DOMAIN GAME PT. 2

As stated in Part 1, the term "domains" can apply to any number of the multifarious principles, or groups of principles, that I've introduced on this blog since its inception. Obviously I could have continued to call them "principles," "rules," or "laws" just as easily. The word "domain," however, communicates a potential image of home and hearth, for all that in recent years that meaning may have been shoved aside for its connotation of "an address on the Internet," which is not much less abstract than a "principle."

Nevertheless, even the modern Internet usage is not without its "homey" associations. I compared my pluralist theory of art and literature to a "house with many mansions," where the separate rooms could contain such separable concepts as "Gene Phillips' version of Northrop Frye's generally accurate idea of the comedy-mythos" and "Gene Phillips' take on Todorov's thoroughly misguided idea of 'the uncanny.'" Since it's my house, it's inevitable that all of the rooms will reflect the owner's priorities.

But of course, just because I have priorities in my views of art and life does not mean that they have relevance only to me. Every philosophical posture is a open challenge to readers: it seeks to invite those who can agree with that posture, if only in part, and to downplay the priorities of those who disagree. A positivist would view all of these interactions from an atomistic standpoint: people agree and disagree purely according to their own interests.

Jung's concept of the "collective unconscious" was the psychologist's solution to science's tendency to view all psychological activity as belonging purely to what Jung called the "personal unconscious." From an entirely personal vantage, there can be no points of meaningful commonality between figures as removed in time as, say, Arthur Schopenhauer and Theodore Gaster. Yet, by seeing these philosophers' priorities through an archetypal lens, it may be possible to see what conceptual "mansions" they hold in common, rather than assuming that they just experienced similar patterns of toilet-training or the like.

Artists are not quite as focused on issuing conceptual challenges as philosophers. Sir Philip Sidney argued that "the poet never affirmeth." Surely "never" is certainly too strong given all the poets who trumpet their political affiliations to the world-- yet Sidney has correctly identified the archetypal nature of the artist far better than the ideologues who want to have their beliefs, be they ultraliberal or ultraconservative, supported by the artist's persuasive powers. The artist is one who potentially can see all things from all perspectives, even perspectives that may be alien to him. Thus, though most critics, including me, would judge Frank Miller's HOLY TERROR an artistic failure, it remains significant that he attempted, despite his limitations, to place some human face upon the political movement he wished to vilify.

On a related note, I spent a fair amount of time recently analyzing Frank Miller's SIN CITY in terms of my phenomenological NUM-project. SIN CITY is strongly indebted to the genre sometimes called "hard-boiled crime," and the shadow of Mickey Spillane's work looms long over Miller's crime-cosmos. Given Miller's status with his readership at the time SIN CITY began, he could have chosen to pursue the domain of a naturalistic phenomenality and left all the signs of the uncanny and the marvelous behind, as Mickey Spillane largely did when he moved out of comic-book writing and into the world of crime paperbacks.  But despite all the ways in which Miller chose to emulate Spillane's style and content, he did not set SIN CITY in the same sort of naturalistic domain as the majority of the Mike Hammer books. As my study shows, a large though not totally dominant proportion of Miller's SIN-works fall into the domain of the uncanny-- and though none of the comic-book works flirt with the marvelous, one story in the film SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR does allow for the presence of a literal, if nearly impotent, ghost.

The three phenomenal domains of my NUM-theory operate in what I deem an archetypal sense. Different artists are drawn toward images and tropes that promise, or at least suggest, different types of freedom. What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns. Yet both, as much as "heavy thinkers" like Gaster and Schopenhauer, are alike in searching for the formula that gives them a sense of transpersonal fulfillment-- which, in the last analysis, is what all persons, of all races and creeds, desire when they speak of their need for freedom. Yet it is a freedom that is only possible in terms of perspectivism and pluralism-- and any creed that takes a different stance is merely seeking the fulfillment of some favored group or groups.

COMPENSATION, KENOSIS AND PLEROSIS, PART 2

I've never claimed to be an expert in the culture of archaic Greece, so I can only make tentative assertions based on fragmentary evidence. Within the halls of academia, there may be extensive analysis of the provenance of these terms, but the most thorough references I can find on the Net credit Hippocrates and related medical authors for using the two terms in my title-- "kenosis" and "plerosis"-- to mean "an inadequate diet" and "a more-than-adequate diet." It should surprise no one that these arcane technical terms originally connoted something having to do with the body, pertaining to whether it was too empty or too full-- both conditions that are opposed to one's diet being, as in the Goldilocks tale, "just right."

In Theodor Gaster's schema, there are two primary types of ritual action performed for both kenosis and plerosis, and each is focused on creating a distinct mood for the witnessing audience:

First the rites of mortification, symbolizing the temporary eclipse of the community. Next the rites of purgation, by which all noxious elements that might impair the community's future welfare are eliminated. Then the rites of invigoration, aimed at stimulating the growth of crops, the fecundity of humans and beasts, and the supply of needed sunshine and rainfall throughout the year. Finally, when the new lease is assured, come the rites of jubilation; there is a communal meal at which the members of the community recement their bonds of kinship by breaking bread together, and at which their gods are present.

These descriptions may or may not be adequate to describe all forms of archaic ritual activity, but they adapt well to the Fryean scheme of the four mythoi, which is my main concern here.

In Part 1 I asserted the logic of Alfred Adler's compensation theory, in which individuals might seek to compensate for various forms of conflict-- or what Hans Selye calls 'stress"-- in various ways. Some compensation strategies might prove negative in that they weakened the individual who pursued said strategies, while others would be positive, in that they made the individual stronger in some way.

I've been exploring, and will continue to explore, the ways in which fiction does or does not succeed in terms of the mythopoeic potentiality. This is a purely formal argument that does not impact directly on considerations of positive and negative compensation, though in Part 1 I stated that any such considerations would have to line up with my analysis that fiction had to be true to its greatest potential.

Because of my concept of *thematic escapism,* I've validated a lot of narratives that other critics have viewed as "fascist." I won't repeat my various arguments here, but one that I advanced in the March essay POSSE COMIC-TATUS might also be seen in terms of Adlerian compensation for the mythos of adventure. In that essay I wrote:

In my essay TORTURED, PROSAICALLY, I largely defended the trope of inquisitorial torture from the usual attacks on it, but noted two exceptions, in which the television programs 24 and HAWAII 5-O indulged in the trope purely for the sake of showing the hero in the position of doling out violence without restraint. These shows were in part bad because there was no sense that the authorities involved might face any consequences for their actions, and in part because they were, in Sadean terms, stupid and unimaginative. At least when a Mickey Spillane hero tortures someone, there's a sort of brain-fevered fascination with the act itself, and I've often thought that Spillane's ideological posturings were just an excuse to bring about retributive violence. In other words, Spillane, like Sade, esteemed violence for its own sake, not as a means for preserving the police state.

The exploits of Mike Hammer and Jack Bauer depend heavily on retributive violence, which means that they pertain to the mythos of adventure, which according to my adaptation of Gaster's four moods is primarily meant to be "invigorative" in its effect upon its audience.  But I would have to say that the Sadean air that Mickey Spillane brings to his righteous heroes is one that can "strengthen" the reader if said reader is able to read it as a wild fantasy, rather than mistaking it for a rendition of reality. In contrast, the "stupid and unimaginative" fantasy of the teleseries 24 lacks any of the qualities seen in the Spillane works. Both are "plerotic" works, in that the audience is supposed to feel invigorated by seeing evildoers defeated by the representatives of social good. But I label only Spillane as being a "good plerotic meal," while the contrasting examples are the sort of meals that will make one feel full, but in a way that weakens the body and the mind.

COMPENSATION, KENOSIS AND PLEROSIS

I haven't revisited Theodor Gaster's concept of "kenosis and plerosis" for some time, but it's occurred that some of my writings on the subject should be cross-compared with my observations on Adler's concept of "positive and negative compensation."

In this April essay, I cited what I found to be the closest Alfred Adler came, at least in a particular collection of his works, to giving examples of positive and negative compensation with respect to a particular bodily activity: that of sight:

As a negative example of overcompensation, Adler posits a situation in which a paranoiac is so impelled by "the drive to see" that "the weakness of the overcompensation expresses itself in hallucinatory fits and visual appearances"... In contrast to this, Adler gives a positive example of a documented writer with poor vision: Friedrich Schiller, who exorcised his nearsighted demons by creating a fictional hero reputed for faultless aim and vision: William Tell.

I further observed that many elitist critics tended, unlike Adler, to view all such heroic fantasies as if they were negative compensations, as if they were automatically bad for being "escapes from reality." Since I have from the beginnings of this blog championed the idea that "fictions of escape" cannot be judged by the same terms as "fictions of realism,"  my verdict in this essay was that the only sin of a given fictional narrative can manifest is that of not living up to its potential as fiction:

This, then, would be my criterion for both "negative compensation" in literature and the only ways in which fiction can be correctly seen as escaping responsibility. Only when a given work of a given mode fails to be true to its own mode would it be "escaping" from anything in a negative manner; that of escaping from its own potential as fiction.

That said, aside from the very broad categories of "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism," I've also tried to map out how particular types of potential are oriented according to other criteria. Northrop Frye was my original guide in terms of viewing every fictional narrative as being principally dominated by a type of *mythos:* each of which owed something to Frye's elaboration of material from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray. I kept two of Frye's terms for these mythoi, "comedy" and "irony," and substituted modern terms "drama" and "adventure" for his terms "tragedy" and "romance." In my opinion the substituted terms were more in keeping with the actual affects that each mythos was meant to invoke, not to mention being more in tune with the formulations of Theodor Gaster. Gaster was certainly a primary force upon Frye's meditations in 1957's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, though Frye, being more taken with the Aristotelian model provided by Murray, did not say much about Gaster's formulations.  I, in contrast, was particularly taken with the predominant "moods" that Gaster identified in his four types of myth-ritual narrative, and how these moods followed patterns of what the archaic Greeks called "kenosis" and "plerosis." Over the years I've endeavored to meld Frye's schema of the four mythoi with Gaster's schema of the four moods, as in this 2012 essay:

In the first part of HERO VS. VILLAIN I aligned drama with irony in terms of what Theodor Gaster terms *kenosis,* the process that expels harmful energy from society, and adventure with comedy in terms of *plerosis,* the process that brings positive energy back into the community, in the following terms:

,,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

In the rituals Gaster describes, one must assume that both *kenosis* and *plerosis,* as societal rituals, were intended to have beneficial effects upon the society that practiced them.  The question of "escaping from potential as fiction" does not even come up in the context of religion.

However, because fiction is almost always presumed to be man-made, the question of whether or not it does its job well-- whether one uses terms like "positive and negative compensation," or "consummation and inconsummation"-- is one that recurs again and again.

In Part 2 I'll address some of the complexities involved in applying Adler's compensation argument to my adaptation of Gaster's concepts of plerotic and kenotic narratives.

AFFECT VS. MOOD

In recent essays I've re-examined Edmund Burke's work with regard to the ways subjects experience sublimity, either with an affect of sympathy or one of antipathy.  Because of those essays, I find myself looking at how both the sympathetic affects and the antipathetic affects appear in works of popular fiction-- specifically, how narratives tend to center around either one set of affects than the other, though both may easily appear in both. 

This, however, suggested to me a parallel with my writings on centricity with regard to myth-radicals, probably best summed up in JUNG AND CENTRICITY.  Jung specified in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES that each individual had within him four psychological functions, but that only one of these would have "absolute sovereignty" as against the others. I asserted that the same logic could also be applied to Frye's four mythoi, using as example the teleseries BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which I regard as falling properly into the category of adventure, even though the series regularly also calls upon elements common to the comedy, the irony, and the drama.

However, to complicate the matter further, I also linked Frye's four functions with the four "moods," as I called them, that Theodor Gaster listed for the dominant functions of his categories of religious ritual. REFINING THE DEFINING was one of the relevant essays on this topic:

ADVENTURE conveys the INVIGORATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how protagonists who defend life and/or goodness from whatever forces are inimical to them. The protagonists' power of action is at its highest here.
COMEDY conveys the JUBILATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how the heroes seek happiness/contentment in a world that has some element of craziness to it (what I've termed the "incognitive" myth-radical), yet does not deny the heroes some power of action.
IRONY conveys the MORTIFICATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon characters in a world where the "power of action" is fundamentally lacking.
DRAMA conveys the PURGATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon "individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society." Power of action here is more ambivalent than that of the adventure-mythos but seems more crucial to the individual's problem than it does for that of the comic hero.

But this raised in my mind the question: what difference is there, if any, between an "affect" and a "mood?"

The best conclusion I've come to, for the time being, is that the Gasterian moods are functions of plot: he and Frye both speak primarily of the *actions* characters take in order to facillitate one dominant literary or religious mood. In contrast, "affects" spring from the main characters, the focal presences, with whom the readers identify. In this formulation, then, "affects" spring from "character," even though the focal 'character" may not be a human being, since the cathexis of emotional affects can focus upon any number of phenomena, ranging from the will-less robot hero of GIGANTOR to the amorphous spirits of THE EVIL DEAD. For the time being, then, I will allot the Gasterian moods to the domain of "narrative values," while the affects-- indebted, as I've said many times to the thinkers Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis-- would be "significant values," in keeping with my first essay on this Fryean distinction.

Obviously the two sets of emotional reactions overlap, just as plot and character must, and here's one example. One further complication to my system is that in this essay I have also formulated four persona-types-- the hero, the villain, the monster, and the demihero-- with respect to the ways in which they incarnate a given story's "life-affirming" (or plerotic) forces or its "life-denying" (kenotic) forces. I have also related these types to my own concepts of the *idealizing will* and the *existential will.*   So my persona-types are also narrative rather than significant values. Gigantor, even though diegetically the character has no will as such, incarnates both "the idealizing will" in combination with a plerotic attitude. The "Evil Dead spirits" are monsters, and they incarnate the "existential will" in combination with a kenotic attitude. And just to complete the quaternity, Fu Manchu incarnates the idealizing will as much as Gigantor, but with a kenotic, life-denying attitude, while the demihero Doctor John Robinson incarnates the "existential will" in tandem with a plerotic, life-affirming attitude.  Of course I've specified elsewhere that none of the persona-types are locked into these relationships at all times-- that they are "plerotic" monsters and "kenotic" demiheroes-- but these four are the dominant ways in which the four types are employed in human art and literature.

Having crossed all these critical "t's," I'll return to the question of affects again in the next essay.

TWELVE PILLARS OF WISDOM

At the risk of getting this blog associated with an economics book sporting this title, I deciced to compile a list of the authors whose nonfiction works have had the greatest impact upon my critical theory.  I wanted to keep it down to the more traditional "ten" but I felt I'd be leaving out too many important figures.

Coincidentally I also recently finished reading Gary Lachman's book JUNG THE MYSTIC.  It's a well-researched corrective to overblown ultraliberal attacks on Jung, like Richard Noll's THE JUNG CULT, but it has only one point of relevance here.  In his book Lachman critiques, fairly enough, Jung's ponderous writing-style, and the fact that it's easy to lose track of Jung's thesis because he brings in dozens of quotes and references to earlier authors. 

However, I disagree with Lachman that Jung did this because he wanted to project what Lachman calls the "Herr Doktor Professor" attitude: to drown the prospective reader in so much erudition that he would be overwhelmed enough to agree with the implied thesis.  I won't say that this isn't an aspect of Jung's character, but when I delve into a heavy-going tome like Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, I sense a definite pleasure in the psychologist that I find in myself: the pleasure in making connections between authors who had no real-life connections but who participate in the symbolic space created for them in the author's mind.  In my opinion no one's going to go as far as Jung did with such activity purely for a rhetorical advantage.  In my own case only such a pleasure explains why I would devote considerable time to exploring similarities between figures as diverse as Schopenhauer and Gaster.

That said, here then are the "twelve titans" who have proved to be the shaping influences on my theoretical endeavors on this blog and elsewhere:

BATAILLE, GEORGE-- This French philosopher has been particularly valuable in terms of elucidating the common ground between those phenomena we commonly call "sex" and "violence."  In addition, he offers a brilliant critique of Marxist beliefs about consumption that deserves to be far better known than it is.

CAMPBELL, JOSEPH-- commonly regarded as a"popularizer of myth," Campbell may well be flawed in the scholastic sense but his theories on the notion of "supernormal sign stimuli" and his formulation of the "four functions" have set a heuristic challenge few academics have met.

CASSIRER, ERNST-- At the beginning of his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT this German-Jewish scholar credited the philosopher Schelling with having made the idea of myth intellectually respectable after centuries of disinterest from the intellectual elite.  However, Cassirer has become the most prominent of the "critical idealists" to deal with the topic, and his concept of "symbolic forms" deserves to be better appreciated.

FRYE, NORTHROP-- I hardly need point out that Frye has been the greatest influence on my idea of a synoptic theory uniting canonical and popular forms of literature.  His concept of "mythoi" has had the greatest impact on my theory but I flatter myself that I've found some interesting new applications for his theory of the dichotomy of narrative and significant values.

GASTER, THEODOR-- Gaster was a demi-acknowledged influence upon Frye. His most important contribution to my work has been his view of ritual dramas as signifiers of either "kenosis" or "plerosis," emptying or filling.

JUNG, CARL-- Jung's concept of the archetypes remains his best known contribution to culture, though he's been influential in many other respects, particularly in his commitment to the notion of "sovereignty," which I recast somewhat as "centricity."

KANT, IMMANUEL-- I've written more about Kant's concept of "the sublime" than on any other topic, but despite my disagreements with, say, his desire for "objective taste," Kant was the first philosopher of importance to show a "middle way" between the extremes of Empiricism and Rationalism.

LANGER, SUSANNE-- Langer, a fellow traveler of the aforementioned Cassirer, formulated a concept of  an opposition between "discursive" and "presentation" symbolisms, which has been useful though perhaps not central in my theory.  Far more central are her reminders that fictional narrative is always "gestural" in nature, to say nothing of her concept of "diffuse meaning."

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH-- His greatest impact in literary circles-- extending even to modern-day advocates like Camille Paglia-- would seem to be that of his Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy.  This hasn't had a marked effect on my theory; in general Nietzsche has affected me more in terms of his gnomic pronoucements on the nature of art and human psychology.  In the same way this very non-systematic philosopher had a considerable impact on Bataille.

OTTO, RUDOLF-- Of all the influences cited here, I probably agree the least with the rhetorical position advocated by Otto, as noted here.  That said, his concept of the "fear/dread/awe" trinity, somewhat indebted to Kant but filtered through a Rationalist lens, has been more than a little helpful in my attempt to define the sympathetic and antipathetic affects common to myth and literature.

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR-- Though Nietzsche is a lot more fun to read, Schopenhauer's dogged theorizing has its charms as well.  Through him I came to the concept that all literary narratives must necessarily be seen as embodiments of will in conflict, and his comparisons of the attitudes of "seriousness"and "the ludicrous" have proved stimulating as well.

TOLKIEN, J.R.R.-- Of all the twelve Tolkien is the only author better known for his fiction than his nonfiction.  However, the Oxford don's concept of the "secondary world," while admittedly designed with only "fairy stories" in mind, should have immense importance for anyone's theory of "fantasy in fiction."

Naturally, there are others who have had strong if more peripheral effects: Paglia, Fukuyama, Wheelwright-- and even some influence from those with whom I have sought to refute, such as Freud Marx and Todorov.  The fact that even one female philosopher made it into the top twelve hopefully says something favorable, though I don't know what.  In terms of cultural influence, the Germans win hands down (Kant, Schopenhauer, Otto, Nietzsche, and Cassirer), with American philosophers in a strong second place (Langer, Campbell and Gaster, though Gaster was born in Britain).  With just one apiece are the Swiss (Jung), the Canadians (Frye), the British (Tolkien), and the French (Bataille).

RETURN OF THE MASTERY MASTER PT. 3

I find that I did work a reference to Gaster's "plerosis/kenosis" dyad into HERO VS. VILLAIN PT. 3:

In "plerotic" narratives, it's a basic given that the forces of life will win the most significant struggles, whether they do so through *agonic* effort or through *incognitive* good fortune.

In "kenotic" narratives, it's a given that the forces of life will lose the most significant struggles, whether they do so under the sway of *pathetic* or *sparagmotic* forces.

I would probably rephrase this differently today, thanks to having articulated more of the *ambivalent* nature of the life-supporting forces and the life-denying forces as they apply to all four of the personas. The general gist of the argument was twofold.  First, the process of *plerosis,* of "filling," was a parallel to Milton's idea that "free will" hinged upon being "sufficient to stand, but free to fall," and this then connected to the quasi-Schopenhaurean concept of "intellectual will."  Second, the process of *kenosis,* of "emptying," connoted an insufficiency to stand, which would apply to creatures without "free will," who would, one expects, be dominated by the quasi-Schopenhauerean concept of "instinctive will."

Later, in this essay I introduced the terms "concrete goal-affects" as a parallel to "instinctive will," and "abstract goal-affects" to "intellectual will."  But during this period I also started working in references to Fukuyama's *megalothymia* and "isothymia* once again, this time in unison with Thomas Hobbes' "causes of quarrel."

So what if I had bypassed Schopenhauer and drawn my comparisons between Gaster-ritual and Milton-will to Fukuyama-*thymos?*

I might begin, perhaps, by contemplating the ways in which *megalothymia* and *isothymia* are reputed to work. Then I would probably note that the "filling" of plerosis roughly parallels the "excess" of *thymos* implied by the very coinage of the Fukuyama term, while the idea of *isothymia,* of seeing or making oneself equal to all others in society, implies the expulsion, or emptying, of any potential excessive *thymos.*

From this reasoning, my revised formulation of the four personas through the Gaster lens would look like this:

The HERO's "positive glory" comes about because he "fills" himself with "positive will," defined as the will that supports the furtherance of life.

The VILLAIN's "negative glory" comes about because he "fills" himself with "negative will," defined as the will that denies the furtherance of life.

The DEMIHERO's "positive persistence" comes about because he "empties" himself of "negative will," the will that denies the furtherance of life.

The MONSTER's "negative persistence" comes about because he "empties" himself of "positive will," the will that supports the furtherance of life.

In Fukuyama-esque terms, then:

 *Isothymia* depends on emptying out elements of will that seem excessive to one's society or environment, in order to seek homeostasis.  The demihero empties himself of negative will in order to live with society, so that both he and society can "persist."  The monster empties himself of positive will.  He often attempts to living a life on the borders of a society or environment yet maintains a dominant negative will toward all other forms of "persistence" but his own.

*Megalothymia* depends on filling oneself with elements of will excessive to normal functioning.  The hero is filled with a positive, altruistic will to protect society, one that often goes beyond the dictates of society's normal functions.  Like the monster the villain is filled with a negative will toward society or the environment, but he is the mirror-image of the hero in that he glories in his independence from society, rather than yearning after a lost "normalcy" as the monster does.
 
However, though I still align the mythoi of drama and irony to "kenosis," and the mythoi of comedy and adventure to "plerosis," I do not claim that any of the four mythoi are aligned with either form of *thymotic* validation.  Other factors, not least the combative and subcombative modes, can also affect the nature of such validations.

HOLY NUMINOSITY! PART 4

In Chapter 8 I've now come across one of the sections where Otto unquestionably stumps for the superiority of the Christian faith over other religions, as his translator mentioned that he did.

No religion has brought the mystery of the need for
atonement or expiation to so complete, so profound, or so
powerful expression as Christianity. And in this, too, it
shows its superiority over others. It is a more perfect religion
and more perfectly religion than they, in so far as what is
potential in religion in general becomes in Christianity a pure
actuality.

 

This approach stands in contrast to a more rigorous thinker like Ricoeuer, who demonstrates a preference for Christian forms in SYMBOLISM OF EVIL but still grounds his theory in anthropological studies of religious practice. Otto does not justify his opinion in this comparative fashion. This leads me to conclude that his attitude was essentially the same as C.S. Lewis as I described it here:

When Lewis wants to show the universality of the concept of "the Numinous" (first named as such by Rudolf Otto), he has no problem quoting examples of awe-filled responses from Ovid and Virgil alongside examples from the Old Testament. Nevertheless, it's clear throughout his screed that no mere pagan religion can possess its own validity. There's only enough room in town for One Revelation.

 However, Otto's attempt to separate all the shadings of the *mysterium* experience are so thorough that he manages to tap into general archetypal attitudes toward religiosity, even in spite of his Christian preference-- though at times it's best to gloss Otto's opinions with those of authors more versed in comparativist analysis of all religions.

The shading that most interests me here is one that Otto makes on the subject of "the holy as a category of value" (also the chapter's title).  Having isolated various attributes of the mysterium-experience, such as that of "tremendum" and "fascinans," Otto proceeds to ask how the idea of the holy is valued, given that it cannot be valued in the way human beings value natural assets, and invokes the Latin term "sanctus," meaning "holy:"


And at the same moment he [the person experiencing the mysterium] passes
upon the numen a judgement of appreciation of a unique kind by the category
diametrically contrary to the profane,
the category 'holy," which is proper to the numen alone, but to it in an
absoIute degree ; he says : Tu solus sanctus . This sanctus
is not merely perfect or beautiful or sublime or good ,
though, being like these concepts also a value, objective
and ultimate, it has a definite, perceptible analogy with them.
It is the positive numinous value or "worth," and to it corresponds
on the side of the creature a numinous disvalue or "unworth ."

I placed quotes around the words "worth" and "unworth" for emphasis. Although Otto's use of these terms arises from his specifically Christian idea of a God who invokes fear and trembling, as in his example of Abraham before his deity as seen here, such terms can go beyond the bounds of Christian valuation. For one thing, even though Otto views "worth" as applicable only to the deity while "unworth" applies to the groveling worshipper, one can also see such terms in a wider spectrum, as affects comparable to those proposed by Theodor Gaster.

Rites of jubilation and invigoration are both characterized by *plerosis,* or "filling," because both give the sense that the ritual fills the community with new life. Rites of mortification and purgation are both characterized by *kenosis,* or "emptying," because they "empty out" the community of "noxious elements" one way or another.
 

In ENERGY EXCHANGE I advanced a tentative comparison of "plerosis" and "kenosis" to Otto's "tremendum" and "fascinans." But "worth" and "unworth" more nearly approximate the *affects* that the participants of a ritual action or narrative derive, with plerotic rituals filling the community with a sense of renewed self-worth-- giving them the opportunity to celebrate either heroic action or comic good cheer-- and with kenotic rituals giving the participants the chance to expel from the community the sense of negative forces of "unworth" that stem from "black humor" and from tragic flaws. 


More unexpectedly, I find that in this chapter Otto, despite his Christianity, anticipates some of the formulations of Georges Bataille.

The feeling [of transgressing aginst the numinous]is beyond question  

not that of the
transgression of the moral law, however evident it may be that
such a transgression, where it has occurred, will involve it as
a consequence : it is the feeling of absolute *profaneness.*

By itself this is just Otto re-emphasizing his earlier point that one cannot reduce the sense of
transgressing against the numinous to transgressing against human law, as Freud famously asserted.
However, it makes interesting comparison to Bataille's anthropologically informed concepts of transgression.

First, Bataille makes clear in EROTISM that all forms of transgression, legal or religious, stem from a universal human need for transgression:

"The taboo within us against sexual liberty is general and universal; the particular prohibitions are variable aspects of it... It is ridiculous to isolate a specific 'taboo' such as the one on incest, just one aspect of the general taboo, and look for its explanation outside its universal basis, namely, the amorphous and universal prohibitions bearing on sexuality."-- EROTISM, pp. 50-51.

Second, because of this need, "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it."  However, this transcendence was essentially rejected by Christian philosophy, as Bataille explains in Chapter VIII of EROTISM, which is subtitled "Christianity, and the sacred nature of transgression misunderstood":

The main difficulty is that Christianity finds law-breaking repugnant in general. True, the gospels encourage the breaking of laws adhered to by the letter when their spirit is absent. But then the law is broken because its validity is questioned, not in spite of its validity.-- EROTISM, P. 89.
 

I suspect that Otto will not be capable of seeing any such limitations of his preferred faith.  Still, it's fascinating to see that Otto has conceived of a "profanation" that goes beyond the strictures of utilitarian moral law, for one can see a similar will to profanation and transgression in any number of non-Christian beliefs.  For instance, one sees mortal defiance of the gods in such ancient works as the Gilgamesh Epic and the Epic of Aqhat.  Quasi-tragic heroic figures like Aqhat and Enkidu may be doomed for such transgressions, but their relationships to the numinous are far removed from the "fear and trembling" of Abraham in the earlier-cited quote.  I seem to remember that at some point Otto mentions his awareness that one response to the numinous is a desire to become "godlike" oneself, but as yet I can't locate the  passage.  This would seem to be a natural extension of the idea of celebrating numinous "worth," however: not just feeling that Zeus is the mysterious creator of the universe, but that Heracles, begotten on a mortal by the Father of the Gods, can provide a conduit by which mortals can participate in that divine mystery.

ENERGY EXCHANGE

Just to explore a minor point I neglected in RUDOLF, MEET THEODORE: I don't think I was sufficiently clear on the common ground between the two. 

In the paradigms Gaster formulates in order to deduce his categories of *plerosis* and *kenosis,* he takes the basic view that ritual exists to mirror a society's views as to whether the forces of life are on the ascent or in decline.  A ritual need not be a full-fledged story, as a myth almost always is; a ritual can be a simple recital of the proper acts one takes at a critical juncture.  But any ritual does depend on the idea that a society-- usually represented by a protagonist or group of protagonists-- must either invite into themselves the energies one associates with life (plerosis), or else expel the energies one associates with death, or at least life in a worn-out condition (kenosis).

Rudolf Otto's analyses with regard to the two different manifestations of "the Numinous" are not as overt in implying an "energy exchange" between the Numinous and the subject who beholds it.  Otto is, based on my limited reading, more focused on the internal response of the subject.  I hope to read THE IDEA OF THE HOLY fully in near future, but it would seem that a few authors, among them Carl Jung and C.S. Lewis, have been able to configure Otto's dichotomy of responses-- the *mysterium tremendum* and the *mysterium fascinans*-- so as to apply them to the sphere of human art and storytelling.  Given that I've already stated my tenet that literature and religion are opposed yet intimately interelated pheomena, I would tend to see that in literature the reader is more or less in the same position as the protagonist in Gaster's paradigm: one who must formulate either a sympathetic or antipathetic relation to the "energies" he beholds in the narrative.

More later.

RUDOLF, MEET THEODORE

...[Rudolf Otto] 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.--  F/D/A MEETS AUM
 

...Gaster introduces two Greek terms that identify how the respective rites work. Rites of jubilation and invigoration are both characterized by *plerosis,* or "filling," because both give the sense that the ritual fills the community with new life. Rites of mortification and purgation are both characterized by *kenosis,* or "emptying," because they "empty out" the community of "noxious elements" one way or another.-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM.
 

In the first of these essays, I made a parallel comparison between the three affects described by C.S. Lewis in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN and the three phenomenalities I deduced-- formerely called the AUM formula, revised to "NUM formula" in this essay.  Later, I sought to define the three phenomenalities in terms of my concept of "the sublime" in the essay ODDLY OR STRANGELY SUBLIME.  The terms proposed in that essay have now been superseded by this recent essay, but I have not forgotten one of the problems I associated with the Lewis essay:

Lewis' trinity of fear, dread, and awe-- which I've paralleled to my Todorov-derived trinity of the naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- works quite well as long as one is considering only the *mysterium tremendum,* which seems to be the only aspect Lewis regards. But Otto's other formulation, the *mysterium fascinans,* suggests a less antipathetic attitude toward whatever-it-is that inspires the sense of something beyond ordinary experience. 
 

As an example of a *mysterium fascinans,* I chose a scene from Conrad's LORD JIM which depicted an onlooker's naturalistic "sense of wonder" on beholding a "marvelous stillness" in the world-- a scene in which natural beauty is at rest-- what basic physics terms "potential energy"-- and which scene is the exact observe of a Conrad-scene from TYPHOON, cited here. This depiction of a violent storm at sea is, as I noted, more typically with the sort of phenomena authorities like Kant have associated with "the sublime," violent, overwhelming phenomena, which can be generally likened to physics' concept of "kinetic energy."

I'm not saying that scenes of "energy at rest" inevitably correlate with the affect of the *mysterium fascinans,* or that scenes of "violent energy" inevitably correlate with the affect of the *mysterium tremendum.*  On the contrary, it's possible to conceive of being "attracted to a fascinating mystery" that happens to be sublimely violent; the Conrad storm-scene simply is not one such because the audience is likely to feel fear on behalf of the storm's victims.  Similarly, the "marvelous stillness" from the LORD JIM passage could just as easily inspire "fear and trembling" if he were describing the stillness of a desert where a human victim could not perservere. 

Just as Otto's terms can be aligned according to how a subject views a scene-- that is, whether he feels sympathy toward or antipathy against it-- the same dichotomy also applies to Gaster's terms of *plerosis/filling* and *kenosis/emptying.*  The former I have identified with forms of literature which are dominantly "life-affirming," while the latter compares with those forms which are dominantly "life-denying."  It now occurs to me that these wordings are a bit too value-laden, and that it would be more accurate to say "life-triumphing" and "life-defeating"-- the term "life" referring to those characters with whom the audience is meant to identify its interests.  (This is of course not to say that the audience does not identify with other characters, as I discussed in more detail here.)

I'll have more to say about the ways in which antipathy/*tremendum* and sympathy/*fascinans* apply to specific works in terms of sublimity, but for the purpose of this essay, it's enough to underline my conflation with Otto's dichotomy of "the Numinous" with Gaster's dichotomous division of ritual orientations.

MONSTROUS MISCELLANY PT. 2

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's"-- William Blake.

This is a much more elegant way of saying what I said in TERMINOLOGY OF ENDEARMENT:

I'm aware that my lexicon of terms on this blog has been and probably will remain daunting to most readers. But I believe that no critic worth his salt is ever comfortable with passively receiving terms set down by other analysts, whether lit-critics like Frye or persons from other disciplines like Big Sigmund.
 

My "system," of course, will probably never have any impact as a series of blog-posts.  To have any impact in any sphere, the system would have to be set down in some coherent form, be it a book or a wiki.

That said, one reason I'll probably never put down a lexicon on the blog is that I'm constantly finding new linkages that redefine the old ones.  Critics who want to stick with the predictable terminologies of the Freudians and the Marxists and their kinded-- following what I deem the delusion that those disciplines have some real connection to the world of "objective science"-- are welcome to do so. 

On to one such connection:

Not since 2011 have I written of the dichotomy "Moira/Themis."-- a pairing principally derived from the formulatons of 20th-century myth-critics, such as Jane Ellen Harrison, whom I discussed somewhat in BACK TO THE LIBRARY.

The creator toiling in the fields of "high" or canonical literature expects to impose a theme upon the phantasms of the imagination, much as (in a different context) Jane Ellen Harrison argued that early myth's early phase, dominated by the "Moira," or fate, gave way to a second phase, that of "Themis," which dealt with the ordering of myth as attuned with "behavior dictated by social conscience." The parallel to the operations of "high" and "low" literature need not be belabored.

In a related essay, I compared the characteristics of "moira," associated with ritual and "the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement," with Frye's concept of "primary concerns," while "themis" was a socially articulated concept of "justice," comparable to Frye's concept of the "secondary concerns" that guide civilized humans in the right attainment of the "primary concerns."

The paradigm here is one of evolutionary development.  Subconsciously powerful forces-- be they "moira" or "primary concerns"-- eventually evolve into the more discursively organized, conscious concepts of "themis/secondary concerns."  And Schopenhauer advocates the same developmental distinctions between "primary" and "secondary" levels of experience:

"...the world as will is the primary (world) and the world as idea the secondary world. The former is the world of desire and consequently that of pain and thousand-fold misery. The latter, however, is in itself intrinsically painless: in addition it contains a remarkable spectacle, altogether significant or at the very least entertaining. Enjoyment of this spectacle constitutes aesthetic pleasure." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p.156.

The two literary personas that I compare with the primary "instinctive will" of moira-- the monster and the demihero-- might not be as entirely governed by "misery" as the Gloomy Philosopher chooses to typify ordinary life.  However, the images of sacrifice and suffering capture the "emptying" essence of the concept of *kenosis* as conceived by Theodor Gaster.  One might say that the positive incarnation of "moira" is the community of ordinary, "persistent" humanity-- a community destined to be eternally threatened by its shadow-side, the negative "monster."

In contrast, I would not say that the world of the secondary "intellectual will" is "intrinsically painless."  However, I would say that its personas, the "hero" and the "villain" are defined not by sacrifice but by the "filling" essence of *plerosis*, which takes the form of glorious spectacle.  It's therefore no coincidence that the principal quarrel between the hero and the villain is not one of simple existence, as it is between the monster and his demihero victims.  Rather, their quarrel concerns the validity of "themis," the intellectually imposed law, which the negative "villain" defies and the positive "hero" defends.