THREE FORMS OF ANTI-TRANSGRESSION, PT. 2

The terminology of "types" that I introduced in this preface can now be brought into line with the terminology of "forms" that I introduced in Part 1.

My main reason for bothering with all of these highly specific terms relates to my fascination with the idea of thresholds as they relate to both real and fictional experience. Earlier I've quoted Philip Wheelwright with respect to his assertions about "the intrinsically threshold character of experience." For me this means that there are certain crucial points, at least in fiction, where one phenomenality shades into another-- as with the naturalistic into the uncanny-- or where a subcombative level of violence can, with just a little extra *amplitude,* be transformed into the level of the combative. The same dynamic also applies to the shadings in between age-related clansgressions.

I gave one example of this subtle shading in this section of CROSSING THE LAWLINES PART 2:

However, even in real-life culture the spectre of clansgression can appear with respect to age-appropriate pairings, even when the subjects involved are not physically related, nor are they raised in circumstances of regular propinquity (cf. "neighbor-kids who grow up together.") In fiction this motif is most frequently seen in the trope "high school girl dates college boy," or (more rarely) the reverse situation with respect to gender assignment. Typically no more than four years separates the collegian from the high-schooler, so it isn't feasible for such pairings to carry the "May-September" vibe. Yet the sense of boundaries traversed is clansgressive, usually because it's assumed that one member of the couple has already had sex and will be initiating the other. 

Looking at this observation through the lens of the "chronophilia" article referenced in the preface, one might assume that even though there's not a large span of years separating "high school girl" from "college boy," the former aligns with what I've called the "E-type," the late adolescent usually aged from 15-19 years of age, while the latter often (though not always) aligns with the "M-type," the functional adult, even though the average collegian would not usually be all that much older than the high-schooler. Still, a sense of transgression, and of clansgression, pertains because there's the sense of mixing "clans" that ought to be separate.

For instance, in Rumiko Takahashi's long-running MAISON IKKOKU, the principal relationship is that of Godai, a college-age young man and a slightly older woman, Kyoko, whose age is cited as 22 on one wiki. However, one barrier to the relationship is the fact that Kyoko, who married her first husband when she herself was in high school, is a widow, and so the potential romance between her and the college student seems slightly out of balance, even if the age-discrepancy is not a great one. However, Takahashi erects other barriers as well.One of these is the above-pictured high-school student Ibuki, who sets her sights on the twenty-something Godai. Ibuki is never successful in her romantic campaign. But since Godai registers as an "M-type," any association with a "E-type" seems massively inappropriate, and Godai always gets in trouble with Kyoko whenever she suspects him of pursuing a high-schooler.

Yet age doesn't always confer the semblance of maturity. In the same LAWLINES essay I wrote this of the manga-series LOVE HINA:

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka... but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house...

So even though the Keitaro character is in the same age-range as Takahashi's Godai, Keitaro is often treated as being an "E-type." so that there's no sense of age-based clansgression when he tries to make time with high-schooler Naru. However, I mentioned above that the "clan" in LOVE HINA included middle schoolers.

One is a wacky "foreign" girl. Kaolla, who likes to torment Keitaro both physically and quasi-sexually.

The other is a serious but shy Japanese girl, Shinobu, who's honestly attracted to the older male but becomes easily embarrassed in his presence.

Predictably, though Keitaro doesn't make any moves on either "H-type" girl, he's constantly placed in situations where it seems like he's guilty of this particular age-transgression.

In the Preface I also mentioned that age-based clansgressions might occur even when a particular character only "appeared to be" within a particular span of years. There are quite a few of these in Japanese entertainment, but for variety's sake, I'll give as example the American DC Comics character Arisia Rrab.

When first introduced, the character-- an alien Green Lantern, and a member of the same Corps as Hal Jordan, the titular DC hero-- looked very much an "H-type." She had a schoolgirl crush on M-Type Jordan, and that was all there was to that.

One online reference puts her age at 13 in this introduction, though in a later comic, Arisia argues that even though she looks like an immature Earth female, she's actually much older than her looks because of the longer span of time that her planet revolves around its sun. Jordan still rejected her as a potential lover, urging her to seek out boys "her own age." However, Arisia's inner torment caused her to subconsciously advance her own body in age, so that she became, in effect, an "M-Type" like Hal Jordan.  And at that point, Jordan acquiesced to her logic.

The story in GREEN LANTERN CORPS #206-- in which Arisia became "a woman" in more than one sense-- was entitled "In Deep," and writer Steve Englehart may have chosen this title knowing that he was going to get "in deep" with fan-reaction. He even anticipates the general reaction in the following dialogue:

It's hard to say whether or not the writer had any notion of breaking down this particular clansgressive stereotype, but the story had no such effect. Instead, the trope of "Green Lantern, Child Molester" has become an ongoing joke. Arisia did not last long as Hal Jordan's inamorata, and later continuity seemed to have papered over Englehart's scenario.

To bring the analysis back to the three forms--

The Primary Form would be best represented by Keitaro's romance with high-schooler Naru. Though she's part of the "sorority" in the hotel, and she actually knew Keitaro briefly when the two of them were pre-schoolers, she's the least 'sisterly" of the cast-members.

The Secondary Form is represented by the romance of Godai and Kyoko, whose transgressive association is filtered through, and somewhat inverted by, the interaction with Ibuki. One reason Ibuki becomes obsessed with Godai results from his having been a substitute-teacher at her high school. This institution happens to be the same one where Kyoko, in her high-school years, fell in love with the older man whom she married. Thus, even though Kyoko is older and more experienced than Godai, Godai's apparent flirtation with a high-school girl resonates as a reverse-recapitulation of Kyoko's history with an older man.

The Tertiary Form is represented by the "brief candle" of love between Hal Jordan and Arisia, who attempt to use sci-fi rationalizations to justify the clangression between an "M-Type" and a character who had at most been a "E-Type" before she wrought the Change of Womanhood upon herself.

ADDENDUM: I'll note that one reason Keitaro doesn't seem an "M-Type" despite his age is because he's failed his college entrance exams so often, thus consigning him to a sort of "immaturity limbo."

PENALTY FOR THRESHOLDING

I reviewed both the 1987 STEPFATHER and the 1993 PRAYING MANTIS  in the same month in 2017, but it only recently occurred to me that the later film exemplifies what I said at the end of the first review:

While there's no question in my mind that Jerry is a "perilous psycho" in the uncanny mode, I had to think whether or not STEPFATHER also made use of the uncanny version of the "bizarre crime." Certainly Jerry's not an artful psycho: he clubs one victim to death with a board. But I finally decided that his motif of moving from family to family in pursuit of his twisted ideal qualified as a bizarre crime in itself-- though of course, like any uncanny facet of a narrative, it can be reconfigured to take on a purely naturalistic phenomenality, as one indeed sees in some of STEPFATHER's imitators.

I don't think that PRAYING MANTIS was an intentional copy of STEPFATHER, foi the later movie just doesn't seem to "quote" the earlier one the way a true knock-off emulates its original. It's interesting, though, that the movie to which MANTIS has been most often compared (on IMDB) is also from the year 1987: the Theresa Russell vehicle BLACK WIDOW.  In any case, here are the similarities and differences:

(1) Both narratives deal with a psycho who repeatedly moves from family to family, killing as he or she goes. However, Jerry Blake kills all the members of the family into which he marries, while Linda Crandell kills only the man whom she marries.

(2) In both films, the cops assigned to the case assert that the unknown killer must have a major trauma in his or her background. In both films, the trauma is never revealed to the audience.

(3) Both psychos are artless killers who display no more particular creativity in their methods of murder. Blake uses blunt objects or edged weapons, while Crandell uses poison.

(4) In both films, young members of the family into which the psycho marries are largely responsible for exposing each evildoer, though the initial person to suspect Crandell is the sister-in-law of the first wife of Crandell's intended victim.

(5) In my critical opinion, neither film does much of anything with the psychological potential of their scenarios.

Given that I've stated that there's no single element about the uncanny film that couldn't have appeared in a naturalistic film, it behooves me to ask then: what makes Jerry Blake an uncanny psycho, while Crandell's only naturalistic? I've alluded to at least part of the answer in saying that the "twisted ideal" Blake pursues gives his "bizarre crime" the tonality of the uncanny. In contrast, Crandell really doesn't have an ideal as such: she's merely compensating for her past trauma by trying to find someone who won't betray her, possibly in the form of a father-substitute. This would also accord with what I've written about the nature of all naturalistic fictions: that they must always seem to be "logical extrapolations from [the author's] observations of experience."

Since the physical phenomena in STEPFATHER and in MANTIS are essentially identical, the only thing that can possibly separate them is that the former is far more invested in the tropes of story-telling-- that is, in the principle of artifice-- as opposed to that of experience, a.k.a. verisimilitude.

"Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude...-- ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4.

But once again, I stress that I can only make such a judgment by imaging a *threshold* that separates the limitations of "affective freedom" in a naturalistic work from its more intense expression in an uncanny one. It's a subjective judgment that STEPFATHER just barely manages to step over that threshold, despite all of its similarities to PRAYING MANTIS; that STEPFATHER is more a figure of uncanny artifice akin to the much more outrageous-looking Jason Voorhees (in his early incarnation, that is). But I still favor this approach over a "recipe" mentality, in which, say, the presence of any psycho of any kind automatically crossed into the greater category of the metaphenomenal.

STORMING THE THRESHOLD PT. 2

In Part 1 I referenced a trio of scenarios that I'll henceforth call the "Anti-heroic Trio," with reference to this 1992 Hong Kong superhero film. The Anti-Heroic Trio lists the three most common scenarios by which a given work might appear to be combative when it is not, using as examples plays from the pen of the Bard of Violence.

If I belabor these matters, it's because I myself have so frequently found myself re-thinking my categorizations. I chronicled here some of the difficulties I've had in isolating the special character of the combative mode from other modes that are proved conflictive in nature. Aside from the difficulties mentioned in this essay and its links, I'll note that sometimes I've looked back at certain reviews on my film-blog and realized that I incorrectly categorized them. When I originally typed my 2011 review for DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and my 2012 review for DOCTOR GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS, I classed both of them as combative simply because there was some sort of "fight-scene" at the conclusion. I amended both reviews later on, but the lesson is clear. If I, the person attempting to promote the concept of the combative mode, could get misled by the presence of a fight-scene, then it would be all the harder for anyone else to see the difference between a subcombative fight and a combative one. This is a concern to me not so much for what I write on this blog, which as I've said is principally pure theory, but for what I might write in future. I'm meditating how I might,  if I so chose, approach these subjects in the form of a book, but without invoking the heavy-duty philosophical thinkers that would scare away not only the average reader of superhero comics, but also the critics, so many of whom flatter themselves as educated but are content to dismiss thinkers like Nietzsche as irrelevant.

My November essay ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE contributed to my recent attempt to imagine domains as having thresholds, principally as a way of characterizing the different ways that megadynamicity can manifest in the "dynamic-sublime domains." I said in STORMING PART 1 that "HAMLET does not cross [the threshold] at all, while TITUS and CORIOLANUS do" -- reason being the way in which the latter two create at least one megadynamic presence of a naturalistic nature. An example of a Shakespeare work that "storms" across the threshold because it does possess all the aspects of the combative mode would be HENRY IV PART 1, given that the playwright fudges with history in order to give the audience a stimulating confrontation between Henry IV and his rival Hotspur.

Without resorting to this sort of conceptual illustration, I can see why even a fair-minded skeptic might have a difficulty with my reasons for saying that the 1976 KING KONG is subcombative even though it utilizes some though not all of the narrative tropes that make the 1933 classic combative. I could well understand such a skeptic saying, "So what if the later film only uses copters to attack Kong, while the earlier one uses biplanes? So what if '76 Kong doesn't fight as many big beasties as the '33 original? It still has roughly the same type of fights, so why isn't it 'combative?'"

Similarly, the same skeptical argument could be raised with regard to the giant-monster films of Eugene Lourie, both his BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and THE GIANT BEHEMOTH. As much as their cinematic progenitor, the 1933 King Kong, both depend on giant critters wreaking havoc in big cities and then being defeated by whatever forces human beings can muster against them. In the end, no matter what specific arguments I put forth, they boil down to the subjective feeling that BEAST only tromps its way over the megadynamicity threshold, while BEHEMOTH "storms" across, in part because it shows a greater propensity toward the "dynamic-sublime."

On a less monumental level, most of the "invisible man" films I've reviewed merely step across the threshhold, such as the 1933 INVISIBLE MAN, its first sequel, and the franchise's one distaff iteration.  Only one film in the Universal series, INVISIBLE AGENT, conveys a sense that the invisible individual is truly challenged by the "might" of his adversaries, and so I can only picture that film as making the threshold-passage a "stormy" one.

Only time will tell if this tempestuous line of thought proves useful in my attempts at simplifying my formulations for a more general audience.

STORMING THE THRESHOLD PT. 1

Recently I've been making a number of attempts to illustrate my various conceptual principles as "domains," in posts like this one and this one. This returned me to a line of thought dealing with the idea of "threshold experiences." I haven't dealt with the topic on this blog very often, the most pertinent post being my meditations on Philip Wheelwright's theories in the 2011 essay FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, BURNING BRIGHT.

Another significant theme Wheelwright explores throughout FOUNTAIN is what he calls "the intrinsically threshold character of experience"... in a sense a tremendous amount of my theory involves movements from one phenomenolgical threshold to another.

In that essay, I addressed the ways the concepts of the NUM theory shade into one another, but I could also have spoken of the three dynamicities I formed in this 2012 essay. During this period I drew heavily upon Kant's concepts of "might" and "dominance" to describe two opposed types of narrative use of power/ dynamicity:

"Might," as situated in Kant's argument, is simply a superior force amid inferior ones.  This would parallel the type of story in which there exists an anomalous force (say, the vampire Dracula) with which a group of ordinary people must contend.

"Dominance" generates a very different type of plotline, in which at least two superior forces are arrayed against one another.  

During the following year I invoked this Kantian opposition in THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS, but I gave it a Nietzchean spin with regard to its ethical significance (with the usual caveat that unlike me, neither philosopher was writing primarily about art/literature):

(1) Megadynamicity, the level of extraordinary strength, is the narrative "proof of strength" in that its very excessiveness suggests a propensity to transcend ordinary limits.

(2) Mesodynamicity and microdynamicity, the levels of "good" and "poor" strength, cannot be used in narrative to prove the nature of strength because by their respective natures they are determined by limitation.

The above statement regarding "might" focuses upon the disparity of dynamicites: "a superior force amid inferior ones," while the statement regarding "dominance" posits "at least two superior forces." Both of these forms of literature can be indicative of what I called "the proof of strength," as opposed to those types in which no forms of superior strength are seen, as with, say, JANE EYRE-- to my mind a fair comparison to DRACULA, given that it mentions the superstition of vampires but there is no invocation of any form of megadynamic presence, not even in the novel's "madwoman in the attic" character. Thus whereas any reasonably faithful iteration of DRACULA can be explored for its relevance to Nietzsche's concept of the "proof of strength through excessiveness," no form of JANE EYRE can be, unless an unfaithful adaptation chose to upgrade one or more of the characters to such a status.

Thus any work of art which depicts even one megadynamic presence has crossed a threshold that separates one from the experience of limitation.

Keeping in mind this extrapolation from the aforementioned "narrative rule of excess," I'll now examine the three examples of subcombative manifestations I listed in MYTHOS AND MODE PART 3. All of my chosen examples-- CORIOLANUS, TITUS ANDRONICUS, and HAMLET-- contain scenes of violence, for as I've stated before, Shakespeare was a playwright with a particular penchant for such scenes. But do they any of them, even given that they are subcombative works, cross out of the threshold of limited violence, where only the "mesodynamic" and the "microdynamic" reign?

CORIOLANUS creates two superior (albeit entirely naturalistic) forces, embodied by its martial title hero and his frequent battle-opponent Aufidius. Thus it does passes the imagined threshold. Because these two superior forces do not extend their initial contention through to the climax, I don't find that the play satisfies my criteria for the combative mode. But it does at least pass the threshold by virtue of showing two such superior forces to have a real existence.

TITUS ANDRONICUS is similar in that the opponents, Titus and Tamora, are masters of the trope I call the "bizarre crime," though the execution of the trope falls into the naturalistic domain.  There's something closer to a "fight" in the way that Titus manages to trump Tamora's abomination with his own Sadean sortie, though again I judged their conflict to be subcombative. Still, even if Titus were purely a Sadean schemer rather than a physically proficient general, that ability to imagine and execute excessive scenarios of slaughter would still cross the threshold, for the idea of dynamicity doesn't connote only physical strength, but also what I've called "potency."

HAMLET, on the other hand, does not really satisfy either criterion. Hamlet and Laertes have a fight at the play's climax, but it's difficult to say for certain whether or not either combatant displays "superior force," which is my reason for deeming it subcombative.

So HAMLET does not cross at all, while TITUS and CORIOLANUS do. How then is their crossing any different from the way a fully combative work makes the transition?

I've chosen the metaphor "storming the threshold"-- as in "storming the heavens"-- to describe the difference. Any subcombative work that creates a megadynamic presence simply steps across the threshold, but a combative work cascades over the threshold like a wind-driven thunderhead. It's because the combative mode gives megadynamic violence this quality that I claimed it has the greatest capacity to evoke the feeling of the dynamic-sublime in this essay:

...what I've called the "combative mode" is an academic way of speaking about an archetypal construct, one that, in my view, is capable of stirring from at least some readers the response of a "hard, gemlike flame" of ecstasy. 

More later.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTRICITY OF THE NARRATIVE

In EGO, MEET AFFECT I adapted the aforesaid terms, presented by C.G. Jung in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, for the purpose of applying them to narrative:

I suggest that the distinction between a psyche being "ego-oriented" or "affect-oriented" also applies to narratives.

In that essay I illustrated this difference in orientation by comparing two famous Rider Haggard novels, but both novels contain just one focal character who is either the center of all "ego-oriented" or "affect-oriented" narrative attention.

Prior to that essay, I had discussed in some detail the concept of the "ensemble," here and here.

ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE established simply that it is possible for a work to possess two or more "focal presences," who may work as a team (the two alleged vampires in 1935's MARK OF THE VAMPIRE, various superhero groups) or may be utterly opposed (1934's THE BLACK CAT, 1968's WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS).  The latter is an important point in that the concept of "mortal enemies" pervades most if not all literary genres in one way or another. Usually either a "hero" or a "villain" alone is the focal presence, just as one sees with the examples from Haggard: the "heroic" Allen Quatermain and the "villainous" She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. 

It's usually easy to identify when a team of heroes- or even demiheroes-- constitutes the narrative's focal presence: they're often the featured characters with whom the reader identifies in an "ego-oriented" manner. Villains and monsters, who are dominantly types set against the welfare of a given community, are usually treated like "She," as fascinating affects, but they don't tend to form "teams" quite as often.

In CREATOR AND CREATED ENSEMBLED HE THEM I set forth my meditations regarding several famous interdependent "creator-and-created" characters from the horror genre: Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Frankenstein and his monster, and Doctor Moreau and his beast-men.  Though all are "affect-oriented" types, I determined that only Frankenstein and his monster shared "ensemble status" in their original appearance. Stevenson's original Mister Hyde was a "created" being who did not share ensemble status with his creator Jekyll, while to the contrary monster-maker Doctor Moreau was the sole focal presence of Wells' novel, with the beast-men rating as no more than "excresences."  However, I also pointed out that any of these narrative arrangements could change in an adaptation of the same characters, and provided the example of the Universal Frankenstein series, which tended to emphasize the Monster far more than the creator.  Other critics have pointed out that the Hammer Frankenstein series pursued the opposite strategy.

Now, as to my method of making those determinations, I must admit that I deem this a "pure deductive" judgment that cannot be proved analytically.  This sort of judgment is not notably different from most judgments about literary structure and/or merit.  The closest I can come to concretizing this abstract process is to say that the thing that makes one or more characters occupy the imaginative center of a story may be best compared to the crossing of a threshold, a metaphor I used earlier here.

During the last year, in my reviews on my movie-review blog, I've been pursuing with some diligence the nature of that subgenre of horror/SF called "the giant monster film."  Almost without exception, any time there is but one giant monster in the narrative, it will be affect-oriented, as I wrote with regard to 1933's KING KONG.  The same dynamic applies to Kong's most successful cinematic imitator, GODZILLA.

However, the original Godzilla series shows far more variability than either of the aforementioned Frankenstein series-concepts.  In the first sequel to the original GODZILLA, the script instituted a practice derived from the 1933 KING KONG but different in its permutations. Just as King Kong battled assorted giant monsters who did not share "ensemble status" with the titular monster, in  GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN the Big G fights a second monster, one Anguirus.  I doubt that anyone would question that Anguirus plays a secondary role in this role, that he does not enjoy ensemble status.

However, the very next Godzilla film creates a team of "mortal enemies" who do share that status, and I remarked on this in my KING KONG review:

Some "affect-oriented" works even offer two focal presences for the price of one, as in Japan's 1962 KING KONG VS. GODZILLA. 

The same was true of the next Godzilla entry, MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA, even though structurally speaking the film seems more of a sequel to the first MOTHRA.

The next two films in the series presented the first "monster teams" in the series, with the narrative interest in the ensemble consisting of Godzilla, Rodan, and (in only one of the two films) Mothra, as they battle against common enemy Ghidrah. Afterward the original "Showa" series varied between using Godzilla as a "solo star" opposed to some other monster or monsters, or teaming him up with either a new character or with an old standby.  Even Anguirus, who was a simple monster-antagonist to Godzilla and was killed off in his first outing, was revived to serve as part of an "all-monster squad" in 1968's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS and even becomes part of a two-monster team with his old enemy the Big G in 1972's GODZILLA VS. GIGAN.

In contrast to this practice by Japan's Toho Studio, most American studios, when they were doing giant-monster films at all, confined themselves always to the pattern of having just one giant affect-oriented creature who had to be destroyed by story's end.  Only the fantasy-films of Ray Harryhausen and a few imitators attempt to create "monster mythologies," though none of these were employed for more than one.  Arguably the culture of the Japanese, given their polytheistic heritage, may have provided more fertile ground for such mythologies than any comparable attempt from the United States or the handful of European countries that contributed works to this subgenre.

FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, BURNING BRIGHT

I mentioned earlier that I was reading Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN, subtitled "A Study in the Language of Symbolism." Wheelwright's prose is much like Northrop Frye's: intellectual but not academic, and generous in the use of specific examples as against drowning the reader in general theory. For me Wheelwright's theories of symbolism don't quite eclipse those of Susanne Langer, but unlike Langer he does devote more than a little attention to the concept of symbols having different levels of complexity.

On the Forum That Dare Not Speak Its Name, I remember trying, without success, to convince one individual of the demonstrable fact that certain symbols or symbol-clusters have a phenomenological ability to attract more associations than do other representations. It's true that one cannot say, in any meaningful context, that real eagles are more important, more significant, than real mudlarks. However, in any symbolic universe the symbolic (or gestural) eagle is worth more than the symbolic/gestural mudlark. This is an important strike against the empiricist tendency to view all connotational associations as equally epiphenomenal, and relates back to the Frye quote which remains the foundation-stone of this blog:

“Archetypes are associative clusters, and differ from signs in being complex variables.”—ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, p. 102

To be sure, Frye doesn't present an adequate theory of symbolic complexity, but Wheelwright glosses Frye's comment more than adequately.

"Certain particulars have more of an archetypal content than others; that is to say, they are 'eminent instances' which stand forth in a characteristic amplitude as representatives of many others; they enclose in themselves a certain totality, arranged in a certain way, stirring in the soul something at once familiar and strange, and thus outwardly as well as inwardly they lay claim to a certain unity and generality."-- FOUNTAIN, p. 54.

This is not, of course, Platonic essentialism, an accusation leveled at Jung by some empiricist critics. Wheelwright is not saying that there is an archetype of "Eagle-ness" that sends its *eidolos* down to the huddled masses that they might worship the Glory of the Eagle. The "characteristic amplitude" is not bestowed upon the "eminent instances" by something outside history, and yet, the eminence of the eagle is not *simply* the humdrum concatenation of all the particular times that various human cultures decided that eagles looked cool, as a materialistic blockhead like Roland Barthes would insist. Wheelwright compares his notion of "archetypal content" and "amplitude" to Goethe's concepts of beauty, though personally I think Kant's concept of the beautiful and the sublime might make a better comparison.

Of course, Kant has been accused of essentialism, too, but even if one believed this, only another blockhead of Barthesian proportions could believe Kant's "a priori" categories to be one with Plato's archetypes.

Another significant theme Wheelwright explores throughout FOUNTAIN is what he calls "the intrinsically threshold character of experience." I made direct reference to the concept of the threshold in this discussion of Jungian theory and the Cambridge myth-ritual school. But in a sense a tremendous amount of my theory involves movements from one phenomenolgical threshold to another. My theory of the uncanny derives in part from Tzvetan Todorov's preoccuation with his own "threshold" concept, "the fantastic." The dominant emotional associations I assign to my AUM theory-- fear, dread, and awe-- inevitably shade into one another, and make it difficult, though not impossible, to make phenomenological distinctions between each conceptual experience. And the same applies to such categories as the beautiful and the sublime, the connotative and the denotative, Superman and Batman, ad infinitum.

I may explore a few more of Wheelwright's concepts in future posts, but for now, it's sufficient to focus on these two almost oppositional concepts:

The concept of complexity, which suggests an "eminent instance" with a huge accretion of associations, not unlike the outer periphery of a black hole:

And the concept of a threshold, which suggests the black hole itself.

LURKERS ON THE THRESHOLDS

Back in GATE OF THE GODS PART 4 I referenced the terms "Moira" and "Themis" as short-hand terms for the unconscious and conscious functions of the human mind, which to my knowledge had been coined by Jungian analyst Joesph L. Henderson. I hadn't read the Henderson book at the time I wrote the essay, and what I said about it depended on an excerpt from Richard Slotkin's REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE.

However, now I have read the Henderson book, and it turns out that the author himself cites other authorities for the notion of a "Moira/Themis" opposition:

"Just as [F.M.] Cornford had shown that Moira, a sanctity older than the gods, was identical with the origin of social order, so Miss [Jane Ellen] Harrison pointed to the ensuing process of social evolution, where Themis represents the behavior dictated by social conscience... Above all, Themis was "Justice in the realm of Zeus," which checked the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement, symbolized in a Mother Goddess who suffered a yearly death and rebirth through her son."-- Henderson, THRESHOLDS OF INITIATION, PP. 10-11.

On one level, this contrast may remind one of the contrast raised by Cassirer in MYTH OF THE STATE, which I mentioned in ALTERING STATES. Cassirer contrasts Plato's views of the social state as a conflict between a "mythical" paradigm for governance (i.e., "Moira") and an "ethical" one (i.e., "Themis"). The context of Cassirer's contrast was to emphasize the choice Plato made in his vision of the ideal state, with Cassirer emphasizing how Plato chose the latter, as against superficial criticisms that he Plato was supposedly trying to use his "ideal forms" to promote some new quasi-religious authority.

A more important level, however, is that Henderson's takes his inspiration from two of the leading exponents of the "myth-ritual" school of the early 20th centuty: Francis Cornford and Jane Ellen Harrison. I've referred to this mythographic school back in AN OPEN QUEST PART 1, referencing in particular the way in which another scholar of that school, Gilbert Murray, provided Northrop Frye with some of his key literary terminology. Now it would seem that terms provided by two other myth-ritualists have also proven useful in expanding on my Fryean/Jungian literary schema. In GATE OF THE GODS I used the duality of Moira and Themis as umbrella-terms for both Jung's notion of conscious and unconcsious mental functions and for Frye's concept of "primary and secondary concerns:"

Since Henderson's "Moira" incarnates the "unconscious" part of the human mind, it doesn't seem a stretch to see it as encompassing both of Jung's irrational functions: sensation and intuition, while Themis, which Slotkin explicitly sees as "rational," encompasses both thinking and feeling. Ergo, for me at least, "Moira" also = "primary concerns" and "Themis"= "secondary concerns.

Again, the need for such polarizing terms remains important for literary criticism insofar as there remains a tendency for many critics to ignore the contributions of the unconscious/"primary concern" functions to art, in favor of those that seem to be conscious/"secondary concern" (and therefore ideological) functions. It's even more important in the criticism of the comics medium insofar as most critics of the medium are unable to think outside the ideological box.

Ideological critics, by their nature, must depend on the narrow reductionism of Marxist aesthetics or of so-called "cognitive science." These tools are not without proper use within the total sphere of literary criticism, but they are useful only in limited sociohistorical circumstances, and are useless for understanding what Jung called the constructive or amplificative abilities of the human mind.

The Henderson book, by the way, is not especially useful in this regard. THRESHOLDS is a competent but not overly ambitious expansion of Jung's ideas of ritual initiation, in which primitive religius rituals are compared to the concepts of Jungian individuation. REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE and other Slotkin works are probably better sources than Henderson for understanding how constructive creativity manifests in literary and even subliterary works.