EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA PT. 2

I should build on the formulations from Part 1 to clarify exactly what sort of freedom I've been describing.

Without doubt the intellectual ramifications of my NUM formula were spawned in reaction against Tzvetan Todorov's attempt to subsume all categories of fantasy under a conceptual umbrella he called "the real," which was very much in keeping with his Freudian leanings. In contrast, I assert that every literary phenomenality has its own unique nature, regardless of what one thinks about the configuration of one's lived experience.

All that said, the base purpose of fictional narrative is expressive, not intellectual, so the primary importance of the three phenomenalities is not their value as thought experiments, but as conjurations of the six forms of affect I last described in 2017's ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

THE MARVELOUS-- antipathetic aspect TERROR, sympathetic aspect WONDER.

Being one mortal reader, I cannot know precisely what affects dominate the minds of other readers. However, I can use deductive reasoning to discern common ground. For instance, Todorov insists that because Poe's HOUSE OF USHER does not actually reveal any marvelous phenomena, its manifestation of the uncanny is subsumed by "the real." But if this was an accurate deduction that one could apply to other readers, why would cinematic versions of the story appear in practically every fantasy-film concordance? Are there any concordances of fantasy-films that go out of their way to emphasize only films of the marvelous; that keep only the sirens and the psychics but exclude all of the serial killers? I will go out on a limb and state that there are none, for the simple reason that the compilers of these works are not blinded by ideology as was Todorov. Even if none compilers of concordances would look with favor upon my overall system, the automatic association of Norman Bates with Odysseus demonstrates that the affects aligned with the uncanny are closer in spirit to those of the marvelous. 

There will still be disagreements. In MASKED MAVERICKS AND SUCH, I noted how Peter Green's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WEIRD WESTERNS did not subscribe to my belief that costumed heroes automatically had a "weird" vibe, though he would include any characters garbed in macabre attire (skulls; phantom-like clothing, etc.) But he unequivocally covered both truly marvelous westerns alongside those that only suggested marvelous phenomena-- and that in my opinion is enough to suggest his awareness of a fundamental "strangeness" linking those categories; a strangeness one cannot find even in westerns with odd content (say, 1942's REAP THE WILD WIND, best remembered these days as the film where John Wayne fights an octopus).

Playful, expressive freedom is the essence of what makes fictional narrative valuable to human beings, in contradistinction of the "work ethic" that dominates non-fiction, no matter the quality of the reporting involved in a given screed. Thus I will stipulate that efficacy in my system concerns "a free selection of causes" with respect to all the affective and cognitive aspects of fictional narrative, but that the affective ones are somewhat more consequential.

THE BEST DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE

 Though I've used the literary term "narrative" frequently since the beginnings of this blog, I've never stated an explicit definition of the term. In some of my early posts I more or less deferred to the definition provided by Tvetzan Todorov, as cited in TODOROV O TODOROV PT. 4: 

Only at one point in THE FANTASTIC does Todorov make an assertion that seems to put “the Fantastic” and “the Realistic” on the same plane as literary constructs, and it’s the only point where I can entirely agree with him, though probably not with any of his extrapolations from it. This appears in his final summing-up chapter: “…we must inquire into the very nature of narrative. Let us begin by constructing an image of the minimum narrative, not the kind we usually find in contemporary texts, but that nucleus without which we cannot say there is any narrative at all. The image will be as follows: All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.” This is an apt restatement, in valid structuralist terms, of the narrative progress that Aristotle calls “complication and resolution” and that Frank Cioffi explores in terms of science-fiction “anomalies.”

In point of fact, I don't believe that I ever stuck to Todorov's rather value-neutral proposition, given that one of my earliest concerns was the identification of particular narratives in terms of their Fryean mythoi. My many meditations on centricity came a little later, and I've often stated, in one way or another, narratives always require organizing principles of some sort. Todorov, as a Marxist of one sort of another. probably didn't care for anything that implied hierarchical concepts. But now I would rephrase Todorov in this manner:

All narrative is a movement consisting of the interaction of one or more Primes (superordinate presences) with one or more Subs (subordinate presences).

Though the Primes are the organizing principles through which the authorial expresses whatever resolution he plans for the narrative's complications, this does not mean , as a hyper-Marxist might presume, that the Prime is always the Guy in the Catbird Seat. Hamlet is the Prime presence in the play that bears his name, but although he does manage to avenge his slain father by play's end, his quest creates so much ancillary chaos that one can hardly claim he's acted as an avatar of justice. In Borges' 1944 story "Death and the Compass," the author inverts the paradigm of the "genius-detective" subgenre and has his detective Elias Lonnrot outsmarted and slain by his criminal rival. But Lonnrot is just as much a Prime presence in his story as Sherlock Holmes is, and stories with tragic or ironic conclusions for the Primes are not inherently better or more mature than those in which the Primes enjoy the relatively "happy endings" typical of comedy or adventure.

And with that avenue explored, I can proceed to the matter of how Prime and Sub presences function within that species of narrative inbreeding known as the crossover.

UNCANNY ARTIFICE

In response to some comments on this post on my movie-blog, I started thinking about Rudolf Otto again. Some time back I devoted over half a dozen posts to my reading of Otto’s most famed book, THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, which originally I knew only through a C.S. Lewis essay. Though I believe these posts show how Otto’s thinking informed his concept of “the uncanny,” I wrote them before I had fully formulated my literary concept of “artifice,” influenced by but not determined by some of Northrop Frye’s formulations.

When Rudolph Otto published IDEA OF THE HOLY in 1923, he was in effect challenging an intellectual tendency in his time to define religion purely in terms of either “naturalistic” or “marvelous” phenomenologies. Religion, of course, was in every clime and time justified in terms of a phenomenology that transcended the strictures of space and time. Creation-myths show this transcendence of natural law most clearly. The world is created from some marvelous series of events, whether it springs from the bones of fallen giants or from God moving on the face of chaotic waters. A few scattered skeptical accounts of universal genesis did appear during certain archaic periods. Still, it’s fair to state that the assertion of purely naturalistic explanations didn’t really gain ground until the growth of non-religious or even anti-religious philosophies in Europe’s post-Renaissance eras.

Otto, being a Lutheran theologian, was inevitably allied to the notion of a marvelous Christian theology, in which God had sent his only begotten son to be sacrificed by and for humanity. He was, as IDEA makes clear, quite aware of the intellectual currents of the preceding centuries, which tended to view not only the world, but religion itself, as reducible to natural causes. For instance, in 1902 William James had in essence taken an empiricist attitude in analyzing THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. And while James’s catholic approach to world religions may have influenced Otto, the theologian rejected James’s emphasis on naturalistic explanations of religious practice.

As I commented in HOLY NUMINOSITY PART5, Otto held to the Christian belief that other religions were not valid in terms of revelation. Yet he also advocated what might called an Aristotelian sense that the “crude, primitive forms” of early religion had at least foreshadowed “the more highly developed forms of the numinous emotion,” that is, the ability to experience the awe and dread lurking beneath the naturalistic appearance of the universe. I don’t believe that Otto says all that much in IDEA about the reality of Christian metaphysics, but only because he’s more concerned with showing how his notion of “the numinous” pervades all religions, crude and advanced alike.

What makes the early religions crude by Otto’s lights is that they derive their “daemonic dread” from entities that Otto considers unreal in terms of phenomenology—ghosts, abstract forces like mana. An advocate of naturalistic phenomenology would of course argue that the entities of the higher religions, such as heaven-sent saviors, were just as unreal, but Otto does not argue this point. His concern is to show that human beings have a special capacity for transcendent emotions which are not reducible to naturalistic affects like fear or lust, and that this capacity appears in both the lesser and the greater religions.

Though Otto does not systematize his use of the term “the uncanny,” he applies it largely to the crude religions of daemonic dread. Modern readers of any persuasion might tend to view a ghost-story as a concept belonging to a marvelous phenomenology, but Otto does not believe primitives to be capable of such advanced concepts. The ghosts of early pagan stories are mere fancies, having no more reality than a ghost in a Sherlock Holmes tale—my comparison, not Otto’s. But in Otto’s paradigm, even a crude concept of ghosts still invokes the numinous capacity, which makes the early pagan fancies relevant to Otto’s project of defining all religious activity as rooted in something other than naturalistic causes. Otto does not use the term “artifice” at all, certainly not as I am using it. However, in effect he has stated that made-up stories, stories that have no real relevance to the phenomenological nature of the universe, stimulate emotions that exceed the limits of naturalistic phenomenology.

In this essay I revised Northrop Frye’s opposition of “myth” and “verisimilitude,” suggesting that, because “myth” had so many divergent meanings, “artifice” was a better term for the totality of the fictional (and religious) tropes through which human beings create coherent narratives. “Artifice” always draws upon this imagined totality to give narratives structure, just as “verisimilitude” draws upon the totality of lived experience to give narratives credibility.

Since I am not a materialist, I do not argue against phenomenologies that explain the visible world in marvelous terms, as proving-grounds for the war of Good and Evil or as a meaningless mote in the eye of an indifferent god. I only state that as soon as human beings translate their concepts of the marvelous—no matter how those concepts are obtained—into narrative, then they must structure concepts of the marvelous by the use of artifice; the use of elaborate tropes. In Jesus’s time, the Romans used real crosses for the mundane purpose of punishing thieves and rebels. But although Christian religion asserts that Jesus died on a real cross made of real wood, the real substance of the Christian cross is composed of earlier story-tropes about sacrificial victims perishing in or around trees. Eventually such tropes become so elaborate that the cross, rising from a hill called Golgotha, becomes covalent with the Tree of Knowledge, and the hill with the skull of the long dead Adam.

Now, uncanny phenomenologies do not diverge this much from verisimilitude. Causality remains naturalistic, but the events depicted suggest the presence of the numinous through the heightened emotions possible only through the appropriate tropes. Though the story of King David is often seen as a precursor to the meta-narrative of the Messiah, not that much of David’s story is marvelous in nature. If one discounts from the narrative the implicit will of God in David’s exploits, David’s closest encounter to anything that even seems marvelous is the story of the giant Goliath. Yet Goliath is not a mythic giant, but a mortal who happens to be about ten feet tall—an unlikely, but not indubitably marvelous, stature. Verisimilitude is much more of an influence upon the narrative of King David than upon that of the King of the Jews, but in the end, David’s story is also meant to stimulate, through artifice, the sense of what Otto calls “the numinous.”

In my writings I’ve usually referenced the Kantian concept of the sublime in place of the numinous, an association Otto explicitly denied, for reasons relating to Otto’s concept of his own religion. In essence, my long and winding exploration of the different phenomenological categories of fiction exists to refute Tzvetan Todorov’s purely empiricist formulation of those categories I call “uncanny” and “marvelous,” which he viewed as subsumed by “the Real.” Otto would probably not endorse any of my conclusions. But I like to think he would prefer them over the dreary materialism of either Todorov or any similar Marxmallow pundit.

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 2

If anything good came of my reading Jack Zipes' THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, it is that my take on the author's use of the psychological term "the uncanny" spurred me to look for the first time both at Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny" and at the 1906 essay by Ernst Jentsch, which Freud credited as a partial inspiration for his more famous work.

In the aforementioned take, I stated:

Freud came up with his term "the uncanny" in order to distinguish the questionable nature of a story like Hoffman's "The Sandman" from, say, the world of fairy tales, in which Freud says that "the world of reality is left behind" by a constant stream of marvelous things and beings.

Since Freud's remarks on literary phenomenology are crude and undeveloped, I wondered whether or not he had taken any cues from Jentsch in this regard. 

Jentsch, however, is concerned only with one psychological motif, which for him brings about the experience of "the uncanny:" 

Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate – and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness. The mood lasts until these doubts are resolved and then usually makes way for another kind of feeling. 

Throughout the rest of the essay, Jentsch's examples are all over the phenomenological map. He mentions, albeit briefly, the E.T.A. Hoffman short story, THE SAND-MAN in which Freud finds his own version of this "feeling of trepidation." Yet Jentsch also finds the uncanny in the thoroughly naturalistic ROBINSON CRUSOE:

The episode in the Robinsonade, where Friday, not yet familiar with the boiling of water, reaches into simmering water in order to pull out the animal that seems to be in it, is also based on an inspiration of the writer that is psychologically very apposite. 

Jentsch also finds the "animate/non-animate" quandary in vague daydreams, like those in which one sees in "the outline of a cloud... a threatening Satanic face," or in organized literary works, which engage an audience's empathy "with all the emotional excitements to which the characters of the play, or novel, ballad, and so forth, are subject." Sometimes Jentsch emphasizes phenomena that are more specifically "strange," like dryads in trees, and sometimes they're somewhat macabre, like the spectacle of dead bodies and skeletons. It can certainly be concluded that in this concept of "the uncanny" Jentsch casts his net far too widely.

According to online biographical material, Freud did not write "The Uncanny" in direct response to Jentsch, but chose to rewrite an earlier, unpublished essay-- no longer extant-- in order to frame his concepts. Freud  acknowledges some indebtedness to Jentsch, but clearly diverges from Jentsch's opinion that the most important source of "the uncanny" in THE SAND-MAN is that of a non-animate artiface, the life-size doll Olympia, becoming :animated." Rather, Freud rather conveniently finds the trepidation of the uncanny in all those motifs of the story that reinforce Freudian concepts of castration and the repetition-compulsion. 

This short summary leaves, I think, no doubt that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes; and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with this effect.

Freud also concludes-- in contrast to his later quasi-follower Tzvetan Todorov, for whose system "intellectual uncertainty" is critical-- that once Hoffmann has completed his story, the author has made clear that this is clearly "a purely fantastic one of his own creation," at least partly because Hoffmann makes such an indubitable identification between "Coppola the optician" and "Coppelius the lawyer," both of whom are the "secret identities" of the Sand-Man.

Yet, having claimed that Hoffmann created a "fantastic" world rather than one based in reality, later in the essay Freud makes clear that he's not extending his special interpretation to just any old fantasy, which is one of the section with which Jack Zipes so fervently disagrees. 

Fairy-tales quite frankly adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy-story which has anything uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when inanimate objects—a picture or a doll—come to life; nevertheless in Hans Andersen’s stories the household utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive and nothing could perhaps be more remote from the uncanny. And we should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to life. 

And later:.

The story-teller can also choose a setting which, though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual entities such as daemonic influences or departed spirits. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality their usual attribute of uncanniness fails to attach to such beings. The souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the ghostly apparitions in Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than is Homer’s jovial world of gods. We order our judgement to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and spectres as though their existence had the same validity in their world as our own has in the external world. And then in this case too we are spared all trace of the uncanny. The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case, too, he can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact.

So it's clear that even though Jentsch has cast his net too widely, Freud casts his own within a quite narrow range: that is, "the uncanny" applies only to fantasies, whether psychological or literary, that reflect Freudian concepts. 

For me, one of the most interesting revelations of this comparison is that it shows that Tzvetan Todorov, though he only quotes Freud's "The Uncanny" in his book THE FANTASTIC, seems to have far more in common with Ernst Jentsch in terms of identifying the idea of the uncanny with what Freud calls "intellectual uncertainty." Here's Todorov defining his category of "the fantastic," within which "the uncanny" forms a subcategory:

The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and [viewpoint] character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion” (p. 41).

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JUDGING DREAD PART 2

That the experience of horror is first physiological, and only then maybe numinous, is revealed by all its hybrid and mutant linguistic forms.-- James Twitchell, DREADFUL PLEASURES, p. 11.

...though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.-- Kant, CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON.

By this early statement in DREADFUL PLEASURES, Twitchell makes clear his Freudian, and counter-Kantian, position: the "experience of horror" arises principally from physiological factors:

...the shiver that we associate with horror is the result of the constricton of the skin that firms up the subcutaneous hair follicles... From this comes the most appropriate trope of horror: creeping flesh, or "the creeps."-- PLEASURES, p. 10.

Kant's concept of "a priori"influences upon human experience doesn't come up in the course of the book, but Twitchell does find time for a few disparaging words on Jung, making clear that he would probably also dismiss the Swiss psychologist's concept of "superordinate ideas" as well, much less that of the collective unconscious.

In defense of his primarily physiological definition of horror, Twitchell follows an interesting, if ultimately incorrect, line of thought. Whereas, as I showed here, Ann Radcliffe promoted the sublime superiority of terror over horror due to the former's greater ability to "expand the soul," Twitchell rethinks both terror and horror along doctrinaire Freudian lines, and valorizes horror precisely because it emphasizes "body" over "non-body." In contradistinction, while Radcliffe wanted to minimize the significance of horror because it was too explicit, Twitchell minimizes his version of terror because he deems it rooted only in transitory phenomena:

...terror will pass... but horror will never disappear, no matter how rational we become about it"-- p. 16.

Shortly after this statement, Twitchell makes a statement that almost sounds Jungian:

;;;the eriology of horror is always in dreams, while the basis of terror is in actuality."-- p. 19.

 However, the "dreams" Twitchell has in mind are what might termed the Freudian "collective unconscious," because they are a concatenation of images and symbols rooted purely in physiological factors. Twitchell's figures of horror are primarily those literary figures that have stood the test of time-- Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, Mister Hyde--because he believes that they all owe their long-lived nature to being in tune with Freudian complexes. In contrast, figures of "terror" are not so much those that are "actual" in the sense of a naturalistic phenomenality, but in the sense of being overly dependent on transitory "fads" and obsessions of a particular time-frame. Thus he finds most of the sci-fi terrors of the 1950s to be beneath his scholarly notice, because they're merely rooted in transitory fears of The Bomb or Communist invasion. (He does devote some space to 1956's FORBIDDEN PLANET, surely because it upholds his Freudian paradigm.)

As I noted in Part 1, Twitchell is aware of Rudolf Otto's use of the term "dread," but he's not interested in the "numinosity" of Otto or of C.S. Lewis, only in the Freudian concept of "the uncanny." Freud's "uncanny" is no less subsumed by physiological factors than anything else: it's just that these factors have "gone underground," becoming what Twitchell calls "projections of sublimated desire." This is the reason that Dracula and his kindred outlast terror-figures like "big bug films" and "The Leech Woman," because the latter represent transitory, overt fears, rather than those that have (so to speak) become "sublime" by virtue of being "sublimated."

Though Twitchell's book stimulated new trains of thought for me when I read it in the 1990s, it was rather painful to read the early chapters this time. For one thing, it's easy to refute his idea that "the Freudian collective unconscious" (as I'm calling it) was responsible only for the great figures of Dracula et al. Plainly one can also find numerous Freudian tropes in any number of the 1950s SF-flicks that Twitchell sneers at, such as THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES. I'm not saying that BEAST is an exemplary film by my own lights. But if one is going to claim that "sublimation of desire" is the key to the excellence of Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN or Stoker's DRACULA, then that criterion ought to apply to every work that fits that formula, and not just to those works that have already acquired some cachet in literary circles.

Further, because Twitchell is something of a literary snob, he fills the pages of DREADFUL PLEASURES with numerous pontifications on the history of horror in legitimate art and literature, while showing considerable ambivalence on the status of pop-fiction horrors. Sometimes it sounds as if the "slasher-killers" of the 1980s are mere figures of terror, and other times it sounds like they may participate in the same Freudian dreamscape as any other "Mr. Hyde"-like figure. I think that Twitchell, like many academics who seek to deal with popular art as if it was as simple as its critics aver, falls victim to the same tyranny of "the literary" that I criticized in Todorov:

I suspect Todorov's emphasis on horror-story authors stems from literary elitism. In 1970, names like Poe and Hoffman were still accepted in the Land of the Literary Canon, but Wells and Verne had barely established a foothold in academia, much less modern authors of SF (including Lem himself), or any authors of fantasy except for perhaps Carroll. By the mid-to-late 70s this would change, but clearly Todorov's theory is geared to highbrow tastes only. Arguably the horror genre is privileged by Todorov not because it possesses the best or more fulfilling examples of "the fantastic," but because artists known for their more naturalistic works, such as Balzac and Dostoyevsky (also briefly mentioned in TF), dabbled in it.

It's a mark of Twitchell's literary elitism, that he chooses to focus on just one form of the metaphenomenal and builds his entire theory around that aspect, rather than seeking to see that form (in this case, horror) in a continuum with its kindred. This approach may be designed as a sort of "defense mechanism"-- in Freudianism, a "disavowal"-- to convince other academicians that the speaker does not plan to overthrow the standard categories of literary excellence. It's a shame that Twitchell's schema doesn't stand serious scrutiny, but at least it does provide me with some interesting insights into my own more pluralistic conception of the narrative arts-- as I'll discuss in Part 3.

SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 1

“Status quo” science fiction. . . . opens with a conventional picture of social reality. . . . This reality is disrupted by some anomaly or change--invasion, invention, or atmospheric disturbance, for example--and most of the story involves combating or otherwise dealing with this disruption. At the story’s conclusion, the initial reality (the status quo) reasserts itself (ix).-- Frank Cioffi, cited here.

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

I've mentioned many times that the philosophy of Georges Bataille is key to my project of analyzing the affects of fictional sex and violence in rigorous narratological terms. At the same time, I've gone to great pains to refute this Bataille statement:

In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation.

This 2010 essay states the argument succinctly, but it has recently occurred to me that when Bataille says "in essence," he might have been thinking of the similitudes of sex and violence in terms other than as "the sensuous frenzy" that he claimed was the link between both activities. Now it seems possible to me that Bataille-- though he does not expressly say so-- may have been thinking about the function of both activities in human society, to which topic he also devotes considerable space in EROTISM:

In the domain of our life [the principle of] excess manifests in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behavior where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome [these impulses] a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment.

In this societal sense, the "domains" of sex and violence are indeed homologous given that they so frequently conflict with the world of useful work.  Yet even given this paradigm, one cannot overlook that both practices admit of being used to support "productive efficiency," channeling the violent impulses of the young into warfare that brings more resources into a given society, or making advantageous marriages in order to create social bonds between separate groups. Nor should one make the Mickey Marx mistake of assuming that these stratagems are imposed upon innocent members of society by their devious rulers. There's nothing that a group's ruler has ever conceived that did not have its genesis in the stratagems used by "ordinary people" in their dealings with one another.

Now, since one of the main concerns of this blog is "fictional sex and violence," how if at all does Bataille's linkage of the domains of sex and violence apply to fictional narrative?

For clarity I return to the two complementary analyses cited above, by Frank Cioffi and Tzvetan Todorov, as to the nature of narrative. It's a well-worn truism that all fiction must revolve around some form of "conflict," but that truism doesn't say anything about the various ways in which conflict operates.

Of the two scholars, Cioffi employs a violent term-- "disrupted"-- to describe the way the "reality" at a story's beginning is transformed into another reality by the story's conclusion. (See the fuller quote in the cited essay for Cioffi's thoughts about the ways in which the "status quo" may be upset, or how the same dynamics apply no less to other genres than to the science-fiction genre with which he's concerned.)

Typically enough, Todorov-- a more elitist critic who barely takes notice of the permutations of popular literature-- avoids any such violent metaphors. Yet it's difficult to imagine what brings about his "movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical" except by some kinetic activity. Of course, not all activity is violent activity, and I myself have examined a particular Ray Bradbury story as providing a "base level of conflict." This might be an apt example of Todorov's minimal requirements for narrative movement: the Bradbury story begins with a couple that wakes in the night (initial equilibirum, or Cioffi's "status quo"), discuss between themselves their mutual vision that the world is about to end (movement), and are quickly reconciled to the world ending in a whimper (new equilibrium).

I took the position that the "conflict" in the Bradbury story was not intrinsic, since the tale only has two characters who immediately agree as to their new situation-- but extrinsic, in that their reaction conflicts with the expectations of the story's readers, who are likely to expect a bit more wailing and gnashing of teeth. I termed the characters' acceptance of their lot a "will to nothingness," But the matter may go deeper than that, as I will explore in more detail in the forthcoming Part 2.

[correction: since the essay mentioned above doesn't pertain directly to the matter of fictive violence, I've decided that it fits better as a follow-up to the two COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS essay.]

WITH ENFOLDED HANDS

This essay's title is derived from that of a SF novelette from 1947, "With Folded Hands," by Jack Williamson.  "Enfolding," it seems to me, is a better word to describe the interaction of the three phenomenalities than "underlie," as used here:

...I'll be dealing in more detail with the ways in which the naturalistic inevitably underlies the other two phenomenalites, albeit without defining them.

Where "underlie" implies stratification and hence an arbitrary separation, "enfolding" has a more organic connotation. Aristotle famously illustrated his notions of teleology with the image of an acorn, within which the pattern of an oak tree is "enfolded," even though said pattern cannot be seen from the seed itself.

Continuing the seed metaphor, here's a cutaway I found online, this time of a wheat kernel:

I like this image just because it has three distinct parts to it-- germ, bran, and endosperm-- all of which are interdependent in the sense that you take one of them away, and you have no seed.

Now, as I've noted in my essays on Todorov, like this one, that his theory of metaphenomenal literature implies that "the Real" not so much "underlies" as "undermines" other phenomenalities, which are seen as examples of Freudian disavowal.

It's true that what I call the naturalistic cannot be avoided. Even the most marvelous constructs in literature depend on some form of causality. We as readers don't know how or why the Cheshire Cat disappears, but even though his smile lingers for a very long time, eventually it does go away, thus duplicating in essence what would happen if a real cat simply got up and left. All literary phenomenalities inevitably reference the principle of causal coherence.

However, even in real life there's some doubt as to whether causal coherence is the *actual" ground of all real-world experience. The late physicist David Bohm proposed the idea that physical existence, which he called "the Explicate Order," might be "enfolded" within a greater "Implicate Order:"

Bohm's theory of the Implicate Order stresses that the cosmos is in a state of process. Bohm's cosmos is a "feedback" universe that continuously recycles forward into a greater mode of being and consciousness.

Bohm believes in a special cosmic interiority. It *is* the Implicate Order, and it implies enfoldment into everything. Everything that is and will be in this cosmos is enfolded within the Implicate Order. There is a special cosmic movement that carries forth the process of enfoldment and unfoldment (into the explicate order). This process of cosmic movement, in endless feedback cycles, creates an infinite variety of manifest forms and mentality. -- THE COSMIC PLENUM, on the site Stoa del Sol.

In literature, of course, the Implicate Order would be the totality of what a given author's will seeks to express. Some authors might be entirely satisfied with depicting only the naturalistic aspects of phenomena. Others might hew closely to the naturalistic but would allow for just enough ambivalence about the intelligibility of that phenomenality to give birth to "the uncanny." And finally, a third type of author would be invested in things that are marvelous enough to defy both the causal principles of coherence and intelligibility-- though, as I say, it's not only impossible to create a fantasy pure enough to defy all the "rules," it would also be impossible for anyone to read or view it.

More on this theme as examples of enfoldment occur to me.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 1

My reading of Bhaskar's REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE led me to advocate a bifurcated conception of fictive causality, characterized by "regularity" and "intelligibility." However, as it happens I had encountered a less persuasive use of the latter term, referenced in this 2012 essay.

But perhaps one should go a step farther than Barthes [in THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT] and say that the facts that lead him to propose these two views [of "joissance" and "plaisir"] indicate that we are dealing not so much with a historical process in which one kind of novel replaces another as with a kind of opposition which has always existed within the novel: a tension between the intelligible and the problematic.-- Jonathan Culler, STRUCTURALIST POETICS, p. 191.

I specified that Culler's dichotomy was "probably useless to my phenomenological project" because it arose "from a limited and hyper-literary classic novel/experimental novel comparison." But I did draw a limited parallel between Culler's terms and those of C.S. Lewis' reading of Rudolf Otto:

Thus, to invoke once again the C.S. Lewis trinity referenced here: the "tigers of fear" belong entirely the world of Cullers "intelligible," in that they may cause one to fear for one's physical safety but nothing more.  In contrast, both the "ghosts of dread" and the "gods of awe" belong in the world of the "problematic," if one defines the problematic as the human desire to exceed the limits of the merely intelligible.

Despite the provisional definition above, I didn't use "the problematic" as a literary term, since it was a little too-- problematic, and "the intelligible" wasn't much better in this context.  At one point I advocated viewing the two levels of the metaphenomenal as united by their common trait of their "strangeness," while the single level of the isophenomenal was characterized by what I called "oddity." I later moved away from this view in favor of one in which each phenomenality was characterized by the type of sublimity potentially possible in that phenomenality, detailed in this essay.

This tripartite concept of sublimity, though, was at the time dependent upon the traditional Thomist opposition of the "cognitive" and the "affective."  I tried to finesse these concepts with reference to the notions of probability derived from Aristotle and Lewis:

All three phenomenalities-- naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- are established by the ways in which the authors of works in each division choose to present "evidence" for the nature of their worlds.  For a critic like Tzvetan Todorov, this means establishing whether or not a "fantastic" event is "real" or "unreal."  But as I've demonstrated in my formulation of the NUM theory, even the most 'realistic' narrative merely reproduces gestures suggestive of a reality dominated by causality.

Now, in keeping with my readings of Bhaskar, I would revise this to read that a naturalistic narrative would be "suggestive of a reality dominated by both regularity and intelligibility." Roughly four months after writing PROBABILITY SHIFTS, I determined here that my usages of "probability" were no longer viable, drawing as they did on 'the now untenable, Aristotle-derived association of "the impossible and improbable."' 

Thus I rejected the idea of a "probability factor," which would fluctuate depending on the "evidence" presented by a given author regarding the world he portrays. I then returned to Cassirer's concept of magical efficacy as a counterpart to traditional causality in the three-part AFFECTIVE FREEDOM series, here, here, and here. Basically, I sought to unify Cassirer's opposition between causality and efficacy-- the latter representing a "free selection of causes" rather than classical "cause-and-effect"-- with the "affective freedom" I found in the literary phenomenalities of the uncanny and the marvelous.  Within these phenomenalities, a reader could experience the intertwined affects of either "dread/fascination" or "awe/exaltation" without necessarily believing them to be reducible to the affects that dominate the naturalistic: i.e., "fear/admiration." 

I don't reject Cassirer's concept of magical efficacy, in that I still believe what I said here:

Eventually I discerned that the “free selection of causes” Cassirer identified in archaic mythologies was identical in mode to the “fudge factors” writers use whenever they describe all manner of marvelous beings and devices.

But Cassirer was only interested in a dichotomy between the views of "theoretical thinking," represented by traditional causality, and "mythic thinking," represented by the multicausal nature of efficacy.  Ironically this allows for a conceptual divide between the two-- a divide suggestive of Tzvetan Todorov's dichotomy between "the real" and "the unreal," which I rejected in my earliest essays on his theory:

 It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.-- Todorov, THE FANTASTIC.

I believe "critical realist" Cassirer sought to avoid this sort of empiricist reduction, as did rationalists Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis.  I might have expected a post-Kantian, more than a rationalist, to have ferreted out the need for an interstitial category between traditional causality and multicausality.  But for whatever reasons, Otto and Lewis managed to supply the rationale for this category, as well as some of the clues as to its relationship to traditional causality. 

 It's a further irony that Roy Bhaskar, concerned in REALIST THEORY with the phenomenology of scientific investigation, should suggest my current-- and hopefully permanent-- solution to the problems of causal relations in fiction.  Prior to reading Bhaskar, I would have thought it no more possible to split causality's aspects than to follow King Solomon's advice about splitting a child down the middle to satisfy both of the child's putative parents.  Now I perceive that causality is not unitary, at least not in fiction.  Therefore the splitting of fictive causality is more comparable to a separation of conjoined twins-- twins who can live either together or apart, depending on what effects a given author wants to achieve.

TERMINOLOGICAL TRACKDOWN PT. 2

THREE INTO TWO WILL GO, SOMETIMES PT 1 was my first schematized assertion that asserted that the cognitive and affective aspects of a given work were equally important in determining its overall effect.  I stated this in contradistinction to Tzvetan Todorov, who advocated an approach based only in the cognitivity—specificially a cognitively heavily invested in Freudian hermeneutics. 

      The work of Ernst Cassirer was not a proximate influence on this division of "the cognitive" and "the affective."  The division was a routine one seen in psychological studies, often phrased roughly along the lines of Freud’s famous “reality principle” (for the cognitive) and “pleasure principle” (for the affective).  On occasion I allowed a few of my essays to repeat this dichotomy without examining it in greater depth, though in general my readings of Cassirer, as seen in my earliest posts, have helped preserve me against the errors of naïve positivism.  I always appreciated Cassirer’s advocacy of expressivity in literature, as opposed to Todorov’s all-cognitive-all-the-time orientation.  Still, not until Oct 12, 2011 did I investigate any aspect of Cassirer’s main argument re: his “concept of force” as expounded in MYTHICAL THINKING.  Cassirer affirmed that there was a justifiable approach to the “concept of force” that paralleled that of Freud’s “reality principle,” one that depended upon analyzing physical forces in an empirical/theoretical manner.  However, Cassirer certainly did not dismiss the contrary mode as some sort of fatuous “pleasure principle,” as Freud did.  Thus he designated “causality” was the domain of empirical/theoretical thinking, while he used the term “efficacy” to denote the domain of mythical thinking, which focused upon a “free selection of causes.” 

       Eventually I discerned that the “free selection of causes” Cassirer identified in archaic mythologies was identical in mode to the “fudge factors” writers use whenever they describe all manner of marvelous beings and devices.  In AFFECTIVE EFFECTS PT 2 I said:

...I would say that the "strangeness" of the metaphenomenal assumes qualities covalent with those of Cassirer's "magical efficacy." 

     Yet it's a little harder to demonstrate that writers who invoked “the uncanny” were making the same “free selection.”  Because uncanny works do not violate the causal order, many readers will not view them as being allied to the marvelous, which does violate that order. 

       Nevertheless, in the first of a possible series of essays to which I alluded at the conclusion of THREE PROBABILITIES,  I will offer a proof that "the uncanny" does indeed participate in the quality of Cassirer's "magical efficacy," even though it does so in a different manner than "the marvelous" does.  I’ve repeatedly asserted that the uncanny is that category in which causality is not broken, as in works of the marvelous, but merely bent.  This “bending” is, like any similar physical alteration, must be the result of an application of force.  But in works of the uncanny, that force only appears to accede to the iron law of causality. In truth such works are dominated by a countervailing law: the law of what I have termed the “combinatory-sublime.” 

TERMINOLOGICAL TRACKDOWN PT. 1

Since I’ve stated in STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: THE THREE PROBABILITIES that it was a mistake to invoke the concept of coherence in respect to probability, I should hold forth on the original context of the concept.

 

         I articulated the concept in response to Susanne Langer’s useful distinction between “discursive symbolism” and “presentational symbolism” in her 1942 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY. Langer did not say anything about judging particular literary manifestations of these two forms of symbolism.  In contrast, I wanted to expound on ways in which these very different symbolic discourses could be used competently or not so competently.  So the argument came down to two interdependent parts:

 

         (1) A well-known trope, like Batman- villains placing the Crusader in a death-trap rather than simply shooting him, was not a worthless endeavor simply because it flew in the face of logical, discursive symbolism.  Patently the death-trap had a function even if it was one that couldn’t be justified discursively: the device served to test the ability of Batman—or a similar hero in similar dire straits—for the enjoyment of the reader.  Hence it was justifiable in terms of Langer’s “presentational symbolism,” having no more connection with logical discourse than a symphonic piece.

 

         (2) The second part was my own idea: that even though the trope of the death-trap could not be critiqued on the basic of logic, it could be critiqued aesthetically: as to whether it communicated a certain effect.  In GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 3 I showed why one death-trap was coherent and expressive while another one was not. 

The corresponding essay PART 4 argued that the same principle of coherence should apply to tropes that were intended to be discursively meaningful, and I gave examples of, respectively, coherent and incoherent manifestations of discursive symbolism. 

I now perceive that by I linked the concept of coherence to the NUM formula  because I formed an unconscious link between the very different ways in which Langer and C.S. Lewis spoke of “presentation.” 

 

In NEW KEY Langer used the term to distinguish an aspect of human perception: to underscore that when humans were presented with sense-experiences, they did not ipso facto interpret them with respect to discursive symbolic models. 

 

In THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, though, C.S. Lewis spoke of “realism of presentation” as a socially constructed discourse, which is to say one that *was * informed by a given reader’s expectations as to what or was not believable in a logical and discursive sense.   

        I now surmise that when Lewis spoke of “realism of content,” I lined up this conceptualization with that of Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of "the marvelous," that category of all fictions that represented something “unreal” as being “real,” rather like Aristotle’s “probable impossibility.”

      Similarly, I’ve repeatedly claimed, in my rewrite of Todorov, that the differences between “the naturalistic” and “the uncanny” depend not on the reader’s perceptions of the narrative, as Todorov had it, but on the way in which an author “presents” a trope like, say, “psychotic madman on the rampage.” 

      Todorov wished to assert that whatever was not cognitively unreal was perforce “real.” I assert that the category of “the uncanny” depended on an affective factor—the presence of “strangeness”—that allied that category with that of the marvelous, so that both were categories of the metaphenomenal.   

From there, I unfortunately tried to bring in the other half of Aristotle’s famous dictum, the “possible improbability,” and judge it not by “possibility” but by coherence—hence the “coherent probability” (for the uncanny) and the “incoherent probability” for the naturalistic.  But the use of probability and/or possibility, whether invoked by Lewis or by Aristotle, are not determinative, because they depend on socially constructed criteria as to what is possible or probable. As I noted in PROBABILITY SHIFTS, the nature of probability depends on the ground rules of a given fictional cosmos, and those ground rules are created not by expectations external to the work but by the way in which the work’s author constructs the cognitive and affective aspects of the work—to which I will turn next.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING

In the physicist Murray Gell-Mann's definition, a "natural law" is a compact description beforehand of the regularities of a process.  But if we cannot even prestate the possibilities then no compact descriptions of these processes beforehand can exist.  These phenomena, then, appear to be partially beyond law itself.-- Stuart A. Kauffman, REINVENTING THE SACRED, p. 5.

I've only finished the first four chapters of Kauffman's book, but already I see some felicitious overlap between his school of theoretical (and philosophically elaborated) biology with (1) Ernst Cassirer's concept of separate "forms" that are not reducible to one another, and (2) my own literary theories regarding (a) the interstitital category of "the uncanny" and (b) the idea of "super-functionality," which in my system aligns with Philip Wheelwright's concept of "plurisignative" language.

One of Kauffman's theme statements, expressed in the introduction, deals with his refutation of the over-reductive tendencies of most modern scientists, which Kauffman represents through a frequently referenced quote from Nobel prizewining physicist Stephen Weinberg:

All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.  

Kauffman dissents:

I shall show that biology and its evolution cannot be reduced to physics alone but stand in their own right... Life, and with it agency, came naturally to exist in the universe.  With agency came values, meaning and doing; all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. 

Since I have not finished the book, I won't recount Kauffman's logical proofs as to why the processes of biology, principally though not exclusively evolution, are not reducible to physics.  A quick summation would be that physics, stressing the randomness of particle motion, is incapable of explaining the development of what Kauffman calls "nonequilibrium physical chemical systems," that is, systems that maintain themselves in an active "doing" manner by taking in matter to function and grow.  Though this may sound to some readers like an endorsement of "intelligent design," Kauffman consistently denies the need for a supernatural creative force and advocates the concept of emergence, all elaborated through concepts of hard science. When the author starts explaining an obscure-to-non-scientists scientific principle like "chirality," I think it's a given that he doesn't belong in the New Age book section.

I won't dwell on the comparisons to Cassirer, except to say that Cassirer is noteworthy for having insisted that a form such as "myth" could not be reduced down to the concepts of theoretical, discursive knowledge.  What I find interesting is the phrase from the first quote, to the effect that the phenomena he describes-- by which he means a phenomenon like "natural selection," which "cannot be reduced to any necessary and sufficient set of statements about this or that set of atoms or molecules." 

In my essays on the NUM formula I've stressed the inadequacy of Tzvetan Todorov's system, which in effect recognizes only the world of "the real" and the world of "the marvelous," which is an imaginary offshoot/subset of "the real," in that the marvelous sets aside causality. Though Todorov uses the term "uncanny" to signify merely those works in which one does not know for a time whether marvels are real or not, I asserted that it should be used rather to denote those works that bend, rather than break, the rules of causality.  Works of "the marvelous" break with causality and works of "the naturalistic" remain within the causal domain, but "the uncanny" is a category "partially beyond law itself," in which "the law" regardling "the regularities of a process" is covalent with the laws of causality that impart a sense of regular phenomena to a reader.

The phrase "beyond law" does not connote for Kauffman-- any more than it does for me-- an escape from physical law, but rather from overly reductive concepts of physical law.  In a roughly similar manner, I find myself constantly defending the presence of "mythic" or "plurisignative" elements in popular fiction because the alternative philosophy -- that creativity matters only when it comes from the Right Side of the Tracks, i.e., Canonical-- or Would-Be Canonical-- Literature-- is a philosophy that seeks to reduce literature to a unitary set of formulas.  The self-serving viewpoint of a Clement Greenberg is a model that too many comics-critics choose to follow as a means of creating their own cloistered canons.  For myself, reading the work of Northrop Frye approximates the vision of a biologist like Kauffman, who is clearly fascinated the illimitable plenitude of biological possibilities; a plenitude that also compares well with Rudolf Otto's understanding of religion as containing an "overplus" that goes beyond emotions of fear and animal desire.

It's possible that as I read further in the book, Kauffman may disappoint me on some level.  However, I believe that my appreciation for the first four chapters will not be easily dimmed.

PROBABILITY SHIFTS

I've invoked the term "probability" with reference to its place in the critical works of Aristotle and C.S. Lewis, but I should certainly make clear what I mean when I invoke the word.

I confess that I have no interest in any philosophical studies that invoke mathematics-- not because I don't like mathematics, but because I don't think the discipline correlates adequately with the discipline of human art. Additionally, as I pointed out in this essay, no fictional narrative-- which is the only form of art with which I concern myself on this blog-- is bound by physical law in the way that reality is: hence, I formed the notion that each of my phenomenalities has its own unique, gestural relationship to causal reality.

Various online essays, one of which is this Wikipedia entry, cite two major divisions in the interpretation of probability.  One is what is called variously "physical" or "frequentist" probability

Physical probabilities... are associated with random physical systems such as roulette wheels, rolling dice and radioactive atoms. In such systems, a given type of event (such as the dice yielding a six) tends to occur at a persistent rate, or "relative frequency", in a long run of trials. Physical probabilities either explain, or are invoked to explain, these stable frequencies.

This form can in no way relate to my use of literary probability, or the uses seen in Aristotle or Lewis, because nothing within a literary continuum has real physical properties.

The other main type, "evidential probability," shows more potential for literary application.

Evidential probability... can be assigned to any statement whatsoever, even when no random process is involved, as a way to represent its subjective plausibility, or the degree to which the statement is supported by the available evidence. On most accounts, evidential probabilities are considered to be degrees of belief, defined in terms of dispositions to gamble at certain odds.

All three phenomenalities-- naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- are established by the ways in which the authors of works in each division choose to present "evidence" for the nature of their worlds.  For a critic like Tzvetan Todorov, this means establishing whether or not a "fantastic" event is "real" or "unreal."  But as I've demonstrated in my formulation of the NUM theory, even the most 'realistic' narrative merely reproduces gestures suggestive of a reality dominated by causality.  I've also noted that within this context, everything is by definition "probable," and any narrative element suggestive of improbability is "incoherent."


The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes usually deals with this sort of naturalistic probability.  The majority of his prose adventures solve "atypical" mysteries by revealing new perspectives proving them to be the results of "typical" influences.  This would be characteristic of a Conan Doyle story like "The Five Orange Pips," or, to cite a non-Doyle work, the 1939 film ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. I noted in my review of this film that one character in the film's narrative "comes very close to edging the film into the phenomenality of the uncanny."  Yet because the viewer always knows that it's merely a human assassin manipulated by Moriarty, the film must offer a purely causal explanation for the killer's method of killing.

Todorov's work THE FANTASTIC argues that much of what I can "the uncanny" also falls into the domain of "the real" if an apparent fantasy-creature is revealed to be a falsehood that is far from immune to causal reality, as with Doyle's "Hound of the Baskervilles."  In contrast, I argue that the note of "irreducible strangeness" in an uncanny work like "Hound" divorces it from the type of reality favored in "The Five Orange Pips." Thus the explanation of the Hound via the rules of ordinary causality, while it serves a valid narrative purpose, does not dismiss the affective sense of strangeness from the narrative.  This dynamic holds true even when one is dealing not with a deception but simply a strange sort of menace, like an insane serial murderer, such as one sees in another non-Doyle Sherlock film, A STUDY IN TERROR.

Finally, though Holmes did not often encounter the genuinely marvelous in the Doyle mythos, this 1923 story verges into the arena of science fiction, in that Holmes encounters a special drug that can somehow transfer the attributes of an animal to a man.  In non-Doyle films, this phenomenality would be best represented by the 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES film.  Oddly, though this film begins by suggesting the existence of marvelous supernatural powers-- usually verboten in a Holmes story-- it can only "explain" this marvel by resorting to another marvel: an electrical projection-device.

Probability in literature, then, depends entirely upon the nature of the evidence mustered by the author.  It's my general finding that even works that attempt to vacillate between the depiction of two phenomenalities in the same narrative tend to favor one over the other, as I asserted in my review of LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH.

TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I -- PART 5

“The fantastic in literature doesn’t exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle.”-- Lars Gustaffson, cited in Franz Rottensteiner's THE FANTASY BOOK.

Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue. The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realize that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits; but it cannot do more than that: act as a time-telescope focused on one spot. Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.-- Tolkien, ON FAIRY-STORIES.

There are fictional works that come as close to pure verisimilitude (as defined by Frye here) as is humanly possible, and many writers follow Zola's dictum that the best fiction is that which adheres to observed reality.  Still, fidelity to nature can be in the eye of the beholder. When I read GERMINAL, I found it incredible that Zola's brutish peasants apparently subsisted on nearly no food at all.  This would be, in the terms I introduced in the above essay, an "incoherent improbability."

In all naturalistic works, both improbability and impossibility can only be sources of incoherence, even in works from a period less demanding than that of Zola's era.  At the climax of THE WINTER'S TALE, the audience is asked to believe that Queen Hermoine, supposedly dead for the last sixteen years,can fool her husband Leontes into thinking she is a statue of herself simply by standing very still. And Leontes seems to be convinced, though he does express curiosity that the sculptor has made Hermoine look the same age she would be in the present, rather than the age she was at her "death."  Some audience-members might jeer at the improbability, while others might cheer.  But in neither case has the improbability served any function comparable to the one Lars Gustaffson assigns to "the fantastic:" that of forming a "challenge to reason" itself.

 This "challenge" is the foremost element which gives rise to the affect of "strangeness" in a fictional work, irrespective of whether or not the work abides by the rules of causality (at least on the "cognitive" level) or thwarts those rules.  In works like GERMINAL and WINTER'S TALE, the "incoherent improbability" cannot challenge causality either in its cognitive or affective senses.  The audience simply passes over these moments of improbability like a fleet of trucks trundling over low speed-bumps.  Such moments have no positive value in themselves: they're nothing but minor instances of "the atypical," instantly subsumed by the straight road of naturalistic typicality.  Because naturalistic works seek to be "iso-real," to imitate consensual reality, their ability to produce the affect of sublimity-- of feeling as if the boundaries of experience have been dizzyingly extended-- is necessarily, as Tolkien observes in the above quote, "only a limited power."

In Tzvetan Todorov's formulation of his Freud-influenced version of "the uncanny" in THE FANTASTIC, a work that even takes an ambivalent stance toward the marvelous has all but capitulated to the forces of causality and reason:

“Although the resurrection of Usher’s sister and the fall of the house after the death of its inhabitants may appear supernatural, Poe has not failed to supply quite rational explanations for both events.”

What Todorov fails to comprehend here is that the "quite rational explanations" in USHER do not dispel the sense of something bizarre taking place, as is seen when the "statue" in WINTER'S TALE seems, ever so briefly, to have come to life.  The slight nods to possible rational explanations in USHER do not the banish the strangeness of the House, with its face-like facade, its doomed occupants and its cataclysmic descent into the tarn.  This is the common element of all of my ten uncanny-tropes.  In each case the uncanny-author plays a game that resembles the game of the advocate of naturalism, in that he does not violate causality.  But he does so not to reify "the real," as Todorov suggests.  He does so to create a "supra-real world," one in which there is a far greater potential for combinatory sublimity than in any naturalistic work. 

I suspect that if any current comics-critics read the above statement, their collective panties would become as twisted as tourniquets.  "How dare you say," they might protest, "say that any of the works you cite as "uncanny" are in any way "better" than any naturalistic work!  Even if THE WINTER'S TALE is not the greatest Shakespeare, it's still greater in every way than all those things you list in TEN DYNAMIC DAEMONS, except maybe the approved canonical literary works by Carroll, Hugo and Melville."  (Current comics-scholars tend to suck on the tits of High Literature without about as much comprehension of the juice of their sustenance than a swaddling infant has.)

Of course, what I've stated is that the potential is always greater, not that every work in the "uncanny" category fulfills that potential.  I've experienced a considerable number of "Lone Ranger" comics and television shows, but with very few exceptions the franchise has only rarely fulfilled the potential of the "supra-real sublime."  However, I have no scruples against asserting that a pop-fiction work like Sax Rohmer's MYSTERY OF FU-MANCHU does tap into a higher level of combinatory power.  Whether or not it's as great or greater than the sublimity-quotient of Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS scarcely matters to me.  Once a work partakes of  the uncanny phenomenality, that work is dealing with far more than mere "freshness of vision."  Such works are "coherent improbabilities," in which the source of the "strangeness"-- be it a weird house or a weird society, a wildly improbable hero or criminal-- circumvents the causal reality in which that element exists.  I don't know if this will be any easier to understand that my having said that "affectivity exceeds causality," though.

Obviously the "marvelous" phenomenality is one where both the cognitive and affective worlds of the work break with consensual reality, so that the combinatory sublimity here is of an "anti-real" nature.  Sometimes the marvelous phenomenon is relatively minor in its combinatory power: I recently reviewed a 1940 B-horror film called THE APE, in which the only marvelous element was a mad doctor's rather grotesque cure for polio.  But the potential of "anti-real" worlds for combinatory power is always greater than the execution, as Tolkien analyzes in his hypothetical example of a fiction about a "green sun:"

To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

I've stated before that the three phenomalities are absolutely equal in terms of their potential for mythicity-- defined as the complexity of symbolic discourse-- and in terms of their potential for what I now define as "dynamic sublimity."  But I'm reversing myself on the first of these. The sublimity of combinatory power is not one where equality reigns.  The marvelous possesses the greatest power of this kind, followed by the uncanny, with the naturalistic possessing nothing more than the power to  recover "the freshness of vision."

HOLY NUMINOSITY, PART 2

To follow up on an observation I made in Part 1, Otto does indeed use the term "the uncanny" as a specialized term, just as did Freud in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny."  It's tempting to imagine Freud coming across Otto's Rationalist usage of the term prior to writing his own essay, and determining to claim the selfsame term for the forces of Empiricism in his own quasi-scientific endeavors.  However, if there's any proof of this influence, I have yet to come across it. 

From the end of Chapter 6, Otto (as translated by Harvey) quotes one version of a famous line from Sophocles' ANTIGONE:

'Much there is that is weird ; but nought is weirder than man.'

He then justifies this assertion of man's essential "weirdness" (or "strangeness," if one prefers the more standard translation of Sophocles) in terms of his beliefs about the nature of "the numinous."

'This line defies translation, just because our language has no term that can isolate distinctly and gather into one word the total numinous impression a thing may make on the mind. The nearest that German can get to it is in the expression * das Ungeheuere (monstrous), while in English weird is perhaps the closest rendering possible... The German ungeheuer is not by derivation simply huge , in quantity or quality ; this, its common meaning,is in fact a rationalizing interpretation of the real idea ; it is that which is not geheuer , i. e., approximately, the uncanny in a word, the numinous. And it is just this element of the uncanny in man that Sophocles has in mind. If this, its fundamental meaning, be really and thoroughly felt in consciousness, then the word could be taken as a fairly exact expression for the numinous in its aspects of mystery, awefulness, majesty, augustness,and energy ; nay, even the aspect of fascination is dimly felt in it.All of the qualities Otto lists in the final sentence are qualities he has apprehended in the experience of "the numinous."'

Since I'm simply making notations as I read the book, I can't be sure whether or not this passage is the only one where Otto conflates his version of "the uncanny" with "the numinous."  I noted in Part 1 Otto seemed to be applying the adjective "uncanny" specifically to early, "crude" forms of religious awe characteristic of pagan beliefs, which he characterized as "daemonic dread."  In neither use of the word is he giving "the uncanny" the status of an interstitial category, as Todorov did in THE FANTASTIC and as I have done on this blog with my phenomenological rewriting of Todorov's (clearly derivative) categories.  However, earlier in Chapter 5, Otto does suggest such a "neither fish nor fowl" state of being.

'In accordance with laws of which we shall have to speak again later, this feeling or consciousness of the wholly other will attach itself to, or sometimes be indirectly aroused by means of, objects which are already puzzling upon the natural plane, or are of a surprising or astounding character; such as extraordinary phenomena or astonishing occurrences or things in inanimate nature, in the animal world, or among men. 
But here once more we are dealing with a case of association between things specifically different-- the numinous and the natural moment of consciousness-- and not merely with the gradual enhancement of one of them the natural till it becomes the other. As in the case of natural fear and daemonic dread already considered, so here the transition from natural to daemonic amazement is not a mere matter of degree. But it is only with the latter that the complementary expression mysterium perfectly harmonizes, as will be felt perhaps more clearly in the case of the adjectival form mysterious . No one says, strictly and in earnest, of a piece of clockwork that is beyond his grasp, or of a science that he cannot understand : That is " mysterious " to me.'


The relevant sentence is this one:

'But here once more we are dealing with a case of association between things specifically different-- the numinous and the natural moment of consciousness-- and not merely with the gradual enhancement of one of them the natural till it becomes the other.'

Todorov does not have a phenomenological conception of an interstitial state where the phenomenality of a fictional work is not either subsumed by "the real" or characterized by an avoidance of "the real."  In contrast, the NUM theory uses the category of "the uncanny" to take in those narrative works in which cognitive reality (what Otto calls "the natural") appears to be upheld as it is in within the naturalistic phenomenality, but the sense of "strangeness" (Otto's "wholly other") prevents the "enhancement" of the naturalistic on the plane of the affects.  Otto's idea of "gradual enhancement," in which either "the natural" subsumes "the numinous" perfectly describes the phenomenological approach of all naturalistic works, while in all marvelous works the progress goes the other way, whether the numinous takes the form of a literal divinity, as in Milton's PARADISE LOST, or something on a lower plane, like a miraculous submarine in Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.  An example of the latter subsumption was noted here, when I showed that even the naturalistic wonders in Verne's work were tied to the fantastic resources of Nemo:

Without the marvels produced from the genius of "superman" Nemo--  the diving-suits, the Nautilus-- this richness of imagery would be inaccessible to the eyes of humankind, at least in this fictional universe.  Thus even naturalistic details within a marvelous cosmos might be said to take on "the strange-sublime."

Once again, I am encouraged to see that Otto, despite his Rationalist tendencies, prove far more insightful than those of Empiricists like Freud and Todorov.  It doesn't quite make me want to join the party of Rationalism, however.

More on the way.