LEGENDS OF YESTERYEAR PT 2

 In the first LEGENDS OF YESTERYEAR, I said:

I won't pause at this time for a rigorous definition of what I mean by "legends," but I think it important to stress that though there are hundreds of famous historical figures who have been committed to fiction, very few of them have taken on the quasi-unreal status of legends. Billy the Kid is such a legend. A later author can imagine him doing all sorts of unhistorical things-- becoming a vampire who fights Bloodrayne, or being taught gunmanship by the Two-Gun Kid, but each fictionalized Billy has that legendary quality. Thus even in a story in which the Kid is a superordinate character, Billy sustains only "crossover-charisma" when he appears alongside a stature-bearing character like Bloodrayne or Two-Gun. In contrast, the vast majority of historical figures, even when they're shown doing unhistorical things, are still no greater than what the reader/audience knows of the originals. Winston Churchill is just Winston Churchill even if he's seen consulting with The Invaders. Adolf Hitler is just Hitler, even if he's depicted as the secret creator of The Red Skull.

When I wrote the above passage almost a full year ago, I was concentrating on creating a coherent lexicon for all possible manifestations of crossovers, so I back-burnered any possible definitions of what I tentatively called "legendary quality." But it came to me recently that legendary or historical fictionalized figures with this "quality," are subsumed by the literary mode I have termed "artifice," while fictionalized figures without such a quality are subsumed by the literary mode I have termed "verisimilitude." 

My most direct comparison of these two modes appeared in ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4, where I paralleled the modes with their literary effects of "affective freedom" (for artifice) and "cognitive restraint" (for 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...

Also, in the same essay, I specified that "artifice-tropes" were the source of everything I might have previously styled as "larger than life" in its literary effects. "Verisimilitude-tropes," by contrast, always signal that phenomena within their purview can only be "life-size," reflecting that "adherence" to ordinary, limited experience. (I'll forbear to pursue my additional parallels to the categories of "the limitless" and "the limited" at this time.)

Now, in other essays I've judged as *innominate* both fictionalized figures of history-- which are all I discussed in the except above-- and fictionalized figures of legend. The distinction, which I may not have made clear, is that historical figures are generally well documented as to when they lived and what deeds they performed, while legendary figures are not as well documented. Some of the latter may never have existed at all, which seems to have been the case for the 19th century outlaw Joaquin Murrieta. Some, like King Arthur, Robin Hood and Gilgamesh, may have been based, VERY tenuously, upon historical figures. But whether the legend-figures were totally imaginary or were based on real, once-living people, legends are manifestly dominated by "artifice-tropes."

Historical figures, when subjected to fictionalization, can go either the way of artifice or the way of verisimilitude. To repeat one of my earlier counter-examples to Billy the Kid, Adolf Hitler's historical record can never be diminished by fictionalization. Hundreds of years in the future, he might become a legend of evil, but at present his presence in literature is always dwarfed by his presence in history. A fiction-story can depict Hitler in dozens of completely artificial situations-- he creates the Red Skull, he gets burned to death by The Human Torch, his body (or, more frequently, just his brain) gets preserved so that he can be revived in some new, world-conquering form. But these artifice-tropes never supersede the historical record.

In the case of Billy the Kid, the record of his real-life exploits as a hired killer ARE superseded by all the artifice-tropes built around the name, "Billy the Kid." In fact, only a relative handful of fictional depictions even make the Kid a nasty customer. His conversion into a righteous hero may have started in 19th century dime novels, but I would venture that none of these remained available to pop-fiction audiences by the beginning of the 20th century. Somehow, just the name "kid" seemed to connote not only youth, but righteousness. In the 1940s, Buster Crabbe made ten B-westerns about a heroic Billy, while Charlton's baby-faced crusader earned a comics-title in 1957 and endured until 1983. But good Billy or bad Billy, the name of the character has become divorced from almost every aspect of the historical figure. And the legend that grew out of the long dead Henry McCarty even engendered countless "western kids" in cinema and comics, who borrowed the artifice-trope inherent in the name and nothing else.

THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 2

I've responded to the "anti-superhero" remarks of Martin Scorsese on this blog a couple of times. The first time, my basic conclusion was that Scorsese was most invested in what I'm pleased to term  "the mythos of the drama." This is why, in his 2019 remarks, he places such great emphasis on whether or not a given piece of cinema concerns "the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures." Elsewhere, while speaking of the enormous allure of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, he notes:

The set-pieces in NORTH BY NORTHWEST are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story and the absolute "lostness" of Cary Grant's character.

This quote relates well to the observation I made in my second essay, which didn't really examine Scorsese in depth, though I did reference my personally articulated concepts of artifice and verisimilitude:

...the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

 

Now, Hitchcock did not make "franchise films" in the sense the term is usually employed, in which the franchise offers the audience either continuing characters (Spider-Man, Antoine Doinel) or a series of roughly analogous stories linked by some umbrella concept or theme (Tales from the Crypt). But the Master of Suspense certainly used a situation beloved by espionage stories: that of "fugitive, while seeking to prove his innocence, must seek to prevent catastrophe." This situation can be fairly deemed a "trope" insofar as it has been used, and probably will continue to be used, by many authors to get audiences to invest in the fictional events.

Now, Scorsese says that without the "painful emotions" transmitted to the audience by the Cary Grant character, NORTH BY NORTHWEST would only be "a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts." There's no knowing that this would be the case, for all we can't "un-see" the version of NORTHWEST that we know. But one may fairly wonder if that less emotional version would have looked like Hitchcock's first major version of the aforementioned artifice-trope, 1935's THE 39 STEPS. 

I have not read, and am not likely to read, John Buchan's 1915 novel. Still, the summation I've read of the book makes it sound identical to the situation of Richard Hannay in the 1935 movie as embodied by Robert Donat: that Hannay is pretty close to being an emotional cipher in terms of dramatic intensity. 

And yet, it seems to me that Hitchcock's 39 STEPS is still a great movie, even without "painful emotions," and I also think it's more than the sum of its compositional shots.  It took a relatable, if artificial, situation and engrossed the audience in the outcome of the protagonist's seemingly insoluble dilemma-- often by adding elements foreign to the book, like the romantic angle. Near the movie's end Hannay has tracked the titular spy organization, the 39 Steps, to its base of operations at the London Palladium. There Hannay the ordinary man has an extraordinary insight: the spies plan to use a performer with exceptional memory (also a movie invention) to memorize vital state secrets for transportation elsewhere.

Trouble is, the London police are there too, and they're about to pull Hannay out of the crowd surrounding Mister Memory's stage. On all sides, audience-members are challenging the performer to answer any question put to him: fine details about atomic weights or historical dates and the like. Mister Memory meets every challenge, answers every question put to him, until Hannay, almost in the clutches of the cops, yells to the performer, "What are the 39 Steps!"

The crowd of fair-goers don't have any idea what Hannay is talking about, but they see Mister Memory hesitate at Hannay's inquiry, and they all take up the chant, "What are the 39 Steps?" The viewing audience doesn't know what goes through Mister Memory's mind, for he's even more of a cipher than Hannay. But as if the man can't help responding to a question to which he knows the answer, Mister Memory speaks the literally fatal words, "The 39 Steps is an organization of spies," just before his compatriots shoot him. And his death liberates Richard Hannay.

I've never seen Martin Scorsese say anything about THE 39 STEPS, but I think it impossible that a cineaste like him could avoid loving this scene. And if I am correct on that point, I argue that he wouldn't be loving the scene for its compositional rigor, and he certainly wouldn't be loving it for any character's "contradictory and paradoxical nature." 

He would be loving it because it's a vital part of a puzzle that makes the whole picture come clear. It's a picture that has nothing to do with verisimilitude, with the way people live their lives.

But it has everything to do with artifice, the way people wish they could live.

On a side-note: though Hitchcock did not make franchise-films by the definition I've used above, John Buchan's Richard Hannay enjoyed four more novels after the success of his debut, though as far as I can tell no one ever adapted any of the other Hannay-adventures. And the success of Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO eventuated in Bloch doing two sequels to his novel, neither of which were adapted for the other three movies (and teleseries) in Universal's "Norman Bates franchise."

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I noted that a lot of film critics have ample ways of authenticating the major developments both in general film history and with respect to particular film genres. When a cineaste like Martin Scorsese talks about a genre like film noir, he can draw upon a wealth of critical writings about the most important exemplars of the genre, and about the overall history of the genre's development. 

In Part 1 I also pointed out that comics-fans have over time generated both general histories of the comic book medium and of the particular genre of the superhero in comics. Yet none of these histories has any impact on the development of superheroes in the film medium, any more than a history of noir books would impact on noir films. And in essence, there is no strong developmental history of superheroes on the big screen, not even when one shows how that history intertwines with the history of superheroes on the small screen.

If one uses the term "superhero" only in its more restricted sense of "the costumed crusader," then in American cinema the genre starts in silent cinema with 1920's MARK OF ZORRO. But that film, and its 1940 remake, were one of a very small number of feature films spotlighting costumed crusaders prior to the 1950s. The main source of costumed crusader cinema were the serials, which also began in the silent era, but which did not make substantial adaptation of superhero (and superhero-adjacent) properties until the late 1930s, the beginning of the so-called "Golden Age of Serials." Zorro put in an appearance in the serial format in 1937's ZORRO RIDES AGAIN. while 1938 saw the cinematic debut of two other prose-derived superheroes, the Spider and the Lone Ranger. Many "superhero-adjacent" comic strips also were filmed around the same time, particularly those of FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS. Finally, in response to the burgeoning popularity of costumed heroes in comic books, ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL in 1941 provided the first adaptation of a particular comic book superhero. Comic book superheroes continued to be adapted until the studios quit making serials in 1956, resulting in a list of adaptations that includes Spy Smasher (1942), Batman (1943), Captain America (1944), The Vigilante (1947), and Superman (1948). Serials never indulged in the gory violence seen in many Golden Age superhero comics, but they shared the same basic aesthetic: action, action, and more action.

Serials, which made their money from kids regularly going to the movies to see the latest serial-chapter, were doomed as soon as television began offering serial-style entertainment for free. Yet television in that decade, and through the early 1960s, paid the superhero almost no attention, even as juvenile entertainment. Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. Slightly later, Disney produced in 1963 a three-part limited teleseries, THE SCARECROW OF ROMNEY MARSH.

The same basic dynamic informed the genre of animated theatrical shorts, which appeared alongside theatrical feature films. In the "golden age of cinema," two costumed-crusader cartoon-series predominated, resulting in seventeen SUPERMAN episodes and eighty-one MIGHTY MOUSE episodes. TV's competition with the movies meant the eventual doom of cinematic cartoon shorts and the rise of TV cartoons. On the small screen Mighty Mouse arguably gained a greater following than he ever had on the big screen, enjoying a long run as repackaged Saturday morning fare in the form of 1955's MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE.

There had been a very tiny number of costumed-crusader feature films in the 1940s, such as three SHADOW B-films from Columbia. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were only a smattering of mostly forgotten "masked swashbuckler" B-flicks and two LONE RANGER feature films, the latter issued by the same production company that made the TV show. 

The upshot of all these changes was that even though the Silver Age of Comics had brought new life to the superhero genre in the late 1950s, neither the big screen nor the small screen evinced any strong interest in the genre-- until 1966.

Was '66 BATMAN influenced first by a producer reading a BATMAN comic book, or by Hugh Hefner screening the old Bat-serials for a laugh, or by Pop Art usages of comic book art? Primacy does not really matter. But although "camp Batman" was opposed to the "straight" content of the more streamlined BATMAN comics of the Silver Age, the 1966 show was the first film/TV serial that successfully communicated the appeal of a superhero who continually battled a horde of repeating adversaries. Indeed, one could argue Silver Age Bat-comics began emphasizing the hero's colorful rogues a lot more than Golden Age Bat-comics ever had, and so the 1966 show was very much in tune with that sea-change.

 Later that same year, Hanna-Barbera's cartoon studio jumped into the costumed crusader business with galaxy-protecting superhero SPACE GHOST. The same company would present six other such TV cartoons, among them an adaptation of FANTASTIC FOUR, before concerned parents campaigned against this fancied increase in Saturday morning violence.

But neither the large screen nor the small screen did much else with the superheroes for the remainder of the decade. However, one could posit that most of the superheroes of the 1970s were in the same mold as BATMAN and SPACE GHOST, and at least some of the Silver Age comics: colorful, fairly intelligent adventures with light humor and none of the gory violence seen in Golden Age funnies. This aesthetic embraced not only moderately successful 1970s teleserials like WONDER WOMAN and INCREDIBLE HULK, but also misfires like the 1975 feature-film DOC SAVAGE. Roughly the same Silver Age aesthetic stayed in place for the four live-action SUPERMAN films and the considerably less noteworthy super-films of the eighties, such as LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. During this "late Silver Age" of film and TV, I tend to find most of the costumed crusaders from cartoon-land to be nugatory, with the possible exceptions of 1983's HE-MAN and 1987's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.

Now, one might say that cinema started exploiting the grittier nature of the comic-book Bronze Age with Tim Burton's first two BATMAN films in 1989 and 1992, and maybe even with the 1989 PUNISHER and the 1990 DARKMAN. However, if elements of the comic book Silver Age only appeared in very rough fashion in American comic books of the 1970s through the 1990s, such elements continued to appear alongside the edgier fare in movies and TV shows of the nineties. Thus the other two BATMAN films of the 1990s sought to hearken back to 1966 BATMAN, albeit in a very clumsy manner. Similarly, the hallmark superhero cartoon of the nineties, BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, emulates the tight plotting of Silver Age Bat-comics and, unlike the first two Burton Bat-films, eschews the transgressive violence found in Frank Miller's signature Bronze Age DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The live-action TURTLES films followed the lead of the eighties cartoon, choosing light humor over blood and guts.

As I see it, even in 2023 we remain in a sort of "superhero soup" in cinema and TV, constantly mixing together either the sunny Silver Age motifs (the MCU's ANT MAN) or the dark and transgressive tropes of the Bronze Age (ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE). It's like modern superhero movies and TV can't decide if they want to follow the lead of Stan Lee or of Alan Moore. 

In one respect, modern costumed-crusader films and TV shows have allied themselves with the comic-book "Iron Age." In PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS, I hypothesized that the 2009 "diversity hire" of the MS MARVEL creator marked the beginnings of hyper-politicized comic books. MCU films would not substantially begin following this storytelling model until roughly 2015, but to date the studio has not deviated significantly from said model. I don't know what it would take, in any of these media, to re-orient storytelling priorities enough to produce a "New Age" not entirely beholden to any of the others, but I suspect something's got to change eventually, even if its the extinction of the superhero genre in all its variegated forms.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 1

 In 2019 Martin Scorsese said, in part:

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

I've already responded loosely to aspects of Scorsese's essay in this post, and I won't repeat my response here, except to say that the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

But one problem with critiquing "escapist works" is that it can be difficult to demonstrate how they develop over time. I recently re-watched Part 2 of the director's PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (the only part that happened to be free on Youtube). I noticed that in the documentary Scorsese directed a great deal of attention, at least in the subsection "The Director as Illusionist," to the linear development of various forms of directorial technique, ranging from D.W. Griffith to Alfred Hitchcock. Today anyone can read comparable histories of the development of film techniques, or particular film genres, because general film history has been analyzed in great depth by many writers, long before Scorsese's analysis.

There are a few good general histories of comic books, though none that go into a lot of detail about overall diachronic development of genres (say, how superheroes and funny-animals dominated much of early original comic-book content). However, many histories provide a good linear history of superheroes only, which usually breaks down by designated "ages." I supplied my breakdown of the ages in this essay, but there I focused only the "big events" that defined those ages. A more nuanced analysis, devoted to describing how each age responds to the use of artifice-tropes, would go something like this:

THE GOLDEN AGE-- Because nearly all publications are aimed at children, the entire age is defined largely by wild, pulpish artifice and almost no verisimilitude. Even standout comics artists like Eisner, Cole and Barks only invoke verisimilitude conditionally.

THE SILVER AGE-- Possibly in response to the demands of the Comics Code, the long-time editors of Marvel and DC made an effort to explore techniques that lent greater verisimilitude to their still-pretty-wild fantasies. With DC it was greater use of organized motifs of sci-fi or occult fantasy, while Marvel worked on making characters seem two-dimensional. Almost no other companies followed their lead, though.

THE EARLY BRONZE AGE-- Mainstream comics got edgier, and superheroes followed suit. THE NEW X-MEN, for example, often looked as breezy as many 1960s superhero groups, but often Chris Claremont surreptitiously worked in story-elements suggestive of sadomasochism and rape, among others.

THE LATE BRONZE AGE-- What was kept fairly sub rosa in the seventies became big business as mainstream superhero comics embraced the ideal I've called "adult pulp," of which WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS were the exemplars.

THE IRON AGE-- With greater examination, I might end up dividing this era into "early" and "late" as well, since the "adult pulp" tropes from the eighties and nineties are first compromised by a chimera one might call "the Literary Superhero," and later by "the Politicized Superhero." 

But even if one does not agree with my characterizations, it's possible to see how the superhero genre showed definite changes from era to era. 

But superheroes in cinema-- that's a question for Part 2.

FUNCTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

 In this 2015 essay I wrote:

A stereotype, or stereotypical device, is identical to what I called a "simple variable" in this essay. For my purposes a simple variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that is as close as one can conceive to a bare function; one that is static with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities.

An archetype is equivalent to what I have called a complex variable, following Northrop Frye's logic on this subject. A complex variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that proves itself dynamic with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities.

Therefore in my schema:

A stereotype is defined by bare functionality.

An archetype is defined by some degree of "super-functionality."

I haven't invoked either type of functionality since 2018's CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE, and in that essay, I cited "super-functionality" as one of various terms I'd used to denote certain literary works that displayed complexity. However, in my earliest writings I was concerned primarily with "symbolic complexity," with complexity within the domain of the mythopoeic potentiality. By contrast CONVERGING explicitly asserts that the process of concrescence leads to the product of complexity in all four potentiality-domains. 

These days I also tend to avoid the term "archetype" in favor of trope, since my process of review here and on other blogs shows that tropes can take archetypal or stereotypical forms, meaning that "trope" serves to subsume both terms. But what makes an archetypal trope "super-functional?"

The answer is "knowledge," albeit the knowledge of fictional "half-truths," truths that dwell half within the domain of verisimilitude and half within the domain of artifice. I believe that over the years I probably implied this in various ways, but I wanted to state outright that the "extra functions" that boost an archetypal trope above the level of a stereotypical trope relate to the author's ability to make his trope reflect these *quanta* of knowledge. 

In the world of non-fiction, many individuals don't agree on what constitutes real knowledge, be it the knowledge of political rectitude or of evolutionary patterns. But in the world of fiction, there is no verifiable knowledge, only what Coleridge called "shadows of imagination," some of which come with knowledge-quanta attached to them. Knowledge exists to unite the world of the objective with the world of the subjective, in such a way that audiences can gain what Whitehead would call a "prehension" of feeling that incorporates knowledge. This insight becomes more fruitful with respect to all four potentialities thanks to Whitehead's insights into "non-epistemological knowledge."

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 2

I have to backtrack a little with regard to my statements here about Stephen King's take on Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief."

I wrote in part:

I agree [with King] that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories.

I thought King was slanting his argument a bit by comparing a highly complex metaphenomenal writer like HPL with an isophenomenal writer with a reputation for very simple bestseller fiction. (I think King was playing to that reputation, whether he had read any Hailey books back then or not, though I never have and so can only go on general allegations.) That's why I said the materialist literary author Joseph Conrad would have been a nearer match in terms of literary complexity.

However, though I still believe King's comparison of HPL and Hailey was off-kilter, King's standard would be true in terms of the ways in which isophenomenal authors of any complexity-level approach the phenomenality of their fictional worlds, in contradistinction to the way metaphenomenal authors face those same considerations.

Isophenomenal works, whether they are as complex as a Conrad novel or as simple as a Franklin Dixon HARDY BOYS (just to name something I did read in great quantity), are alike in that they utilize the same range of phenomena. I say that this range is "isophenmenal" because, even though nothing in Conrad or Dixon is actually "real," it is supposed to be "the same as" (Greek "iso") what a majority of readers would deem the expected phenomena of this world. That's not to say that there aren't potential readers who believe in their heart of hearts that everything that seems solid and dependable could vapor away if some god or computer-network sent the message. But they will always be outnumbered by the majority of readers, who are governed by what Cassirer called "naive realism, which regards the reality of objects as something and unequivocally given" (LANGUAGE AND MYTH, p. 6). An isophenomenal author cannot vary from what is known about the real world. At most he might introduce some little-known fact of nature that might have some of the charm of novelty, simply because the reader had not heard of said fact.

Every metaphenomenal work, though, whether as complex as a Lovecraft story or a simple as a Gerry Conway SPIDER-MAN tale, goes "beyond" (Greek "meta") what we expect of real-world phenomena. Further, even writers who pick up serial fantasy-concepts created by other authors are usually obliged to add new fantasy-concepts to the series-- Conway's most famous contribution being The Punisher. King is right that in order to formulate the ground rules for any fantasy-cosmos, however complex or simple, do require a special "muscular" effort for one to engage with whatever type or types of metaphenomena the author chooses to depict. This "muscular effort" has nothing to do with the parallel "muscular effort" that determines whether or not the work is complex or simple.

In Part 3, I anticipate expanding these thoughts with respect to the two complementary forms of the metaphenomenal, the uncanny and the marvelous.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN

 I borrowed the phrase "Strength to Dream" from Colin Wilson's book of that title, but only for the basic felicity of the phrase, not because I'm discussing any of Wilson's themes here. (I'm fairly sure I read it many years ago and have placed it on my to-be-reread list.)

I began thinking about the association of "strength" with "dreaming" thanks to the works of two famous writers who discussed how readers accept what I call metaphenomenal fiction. The first writer is Samuel T. Coleridge, whose most famous phrase in common parlance may not be anything from his poems, but from his autobiography, wherein he coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief." 

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

I confess that I have never read the full text of the bio, but I doubt that Coleridge uses the phrase again since none of the online references mention more than the one quote. The book concerns Coleridge's far-ranging theory of poetry, and so is not primarily about the ways fantasy-loving readers justify their preferences. In fact, the full context of "suspension of disbelief" is that Coleridge and William Wordsworth, in collaborating to produce various poems for their 1798 collection LYRICAL BALLADS, took two differing approaches to poetry, with Wordsworth favoring "things of every day" while Coleridge concentrated upon "shadows of imagination" that necessitated "poetic faith." Early in the history of this blog I described this literary dichotomy as one between works of "thematic realism" (Wordsworth) and "thematic escapism" (Coleridge), though in recent years I've inclined more toward an opposition between "verisimilitude" and "artifice," as in the last year's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2:

"Verisimilitude" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limits of the physical continuum, while "artifice" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limitless nature of the continuum of abstract concepts. 

 

Coleridge did not develop the "suspension of disbelief" concept, but many later writers quoted it and gave their takes on the idea, among them the second writer I mentioned above: Stephen King. King's 1981 book DANSE MACABRE largely concerns his theories about the horror genre, just as Coleridge's biography concerned poetry. King mentions "suspension of disbelief" in Chapter 4, where he extrapolates a meaning of "strength" from Coleridge's "suspension" metaphor.

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

And then he validates many fantasy-fans by turning a pitying eye upon those persons who reject all metaphenomenal content as being unreal in terms of real experience:

They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

Though I like King's extrapolation of Coleridge, ultimately it's a little too simple. I agree that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories. In Part 2 of 2015's THE DOMAIN GAME, I contrasted Conrad with Tolkien:

What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns.

Coleridge's contrast between his chosen form of poetry and that of his colleague Wordsworth is also a much fairer one, and I find it interesting when he says that Wordsworth does not just sedulously reproduce the everyday things he sees, but that he gives them "the charm of novelty." It does take a "muscular intellectual act" to re-organize the things of common experience to make them into art, even art that may argue that it's silly to read fantasy-stories (say, Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY). To pursue an opposition for the dream-metaphor I've introduced, the advocate of realism may often believe that he's "awakened" from the delusional dreams of religion or superstition. I of course relate these modes further to the categories of cognitive restraint and affective freedom, but at present these do not need further elaboration in this new context.

On a small side-note, the decade in which Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on the LYRICAL BALLADS-- said by some to have launched the English Romantic movement-- is also the decade in which the Gothic novel enjoyed its first major flowering with such authors as Radcliffe and Lewis, with a second but distinct outgrowth evolving in the next twenty-odd years with Mary Shelley, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Allan Poe. Though there had been scattered important metaphenomenal works throughout the 18th century, the 19th century would be conceived in the midst of ongoing arguments about the virtues of naturalistic fiction as against stories of fantasy, many of which are still argued about today, and which inform the warp and woof of modern fiction.

A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE WISHED

 Over the past month I've been contemplating the concept of consummation with respect to the insights I put forth in the 2020 essay SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

...what’s “asymmetrical” about “truth” in its connotation of factual occurrences? The sense I get from Melville’s “ragged edges” is that the real world, unlike the world of fiction and fable, doesn’t ever come to a designated end, be that ending comic or tragic. Reality just goes on and on and on—and so do people.

I may be thinking of this subject in part because year 2022 is soon to end, to be replaced by a new one. And despite what I said above about people "going on and on," every individual mortal is also destined to come to his or her respective end and to be replaced by a representative of a new generation. But to the best of our knowledge, the endings of both years and mortals are not designated to have the symmetries of fictional narratives. The Greeks liked to say, "call no man happy until he is dead," but to death, one's happiness or sadness is irrelevant. Death cuts off one's own self-narrative, leaving only the "ragged edges" of the reality that survives the individual. Imputing any particular design to a person's life-- whether as an adventure, a drama, a comedy or an irony-- would be the height of impertinence.

Stories, though, can come to definitive ends, so as to illustrate particular sympathies and antipathies, and that's why we like them. Whether the protagonists come to good ends or bad ends, the conclusions have a symmetry that life does not. Whatever emotional charge we as readers/audiences may get from the tropes that serve as the "quanta" of narrative, those tropes are far more dependable than life's vagaries, and they make us feel immortal by identifying with these symmetrical characters, even those who meet unpleasant fates. Not every reader likes the same consummations, and that's why many critics have disparaged hopeful comedies and adventures and have favored sobering dramas and ironies. But in the "end" all of these are individual preferences, and so we need all of the mythoi in play in order to accomplish the true mission of fiction: to make us feel temporarily immune to the irregularities, the "ragged ends," of life and death.

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.-- FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY.

I considered making a continued use of the title RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS after reviving it here. Yet I soon realized that I would be talking about a lot of cultural manifestations that weren't exclusively "nerdy," and so I switched to RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS.

In the NERDS essay, I provided a lengthy Nietzsche quote in which he contrasted the "noble man" with "the man of ressentiment." Nietzsche's definition of ressentiment served his philosophical purposes, but I'm more interested in the application of the concept to literary theory. Over the years I've devoted no small attention to Frank Fukuyama's adaptation of Nietzsche's distinctions into the concepts of *megalothymia* and *isothymia," and how these concepts in turn can be applied to fiction, as in (for example) my October 2011 essay THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4.

Nietzsche scorns the "man of ressentiment" for many reasons, and only faults the "noble man" for being "naive," at least in the excerpt I'm considering. But of course the history of Classic liberalism has been rife with criticisms of the *megalothymotic* type, who rules by strength, and the earliest extensive critique of popular comic books was that of Frederic Wertham, who complained of super-characters "how did Nietzsche get into the nursery?" 

Most of these critiques were simplistic in the extreme, but it's at least fair to state that the noble man can dehumanize those he conquers, reducing them into an underclass. The man of ressentiment pursues the opposite course: the "overclass" is the class of "pale kings and princes," and that is meant to be despised and rejected in every way. 

Both of these rhetorical stances influence literature, but as I noted in my quote from FUN FROM PHENOMENOLOGY, they're both reducible to epistemological patterns. These patterns 'exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination.' 

That doesn't mean, of course, that artists don't create works which advocate one political stance or the other. In MYSTERY OF MASTERY 4 I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures. Both authors have created a wealth of genuinely mythic works, but neither has been able to avoid taking ideological positions that usually result in inferior works, such as Miller's HOLY TERROR and Moore's KILLING JOKE.

"Non-nerd literature" boasts its own ideological tendencies, which come down to "things would be great if we could control/destroy that damned overclass/underclass." Two authors who produced their best known works within the same literary period would be underclass-despiser Thomas Dixon Jr (THE CLANSMAN, 1905) and overclass-despiser Upton Sinclair (THE JUNGLE, 1906). Both novels are fantasies of mastery, but they lack what Nietzsche termed "self-overcoming," and which I have renamed "self-mastery"-- and which I have associated with the artist's capacity for "free variation."

Nietzsche argued that the noble man is more capable of self-mastery than the man of ressentiment, which argument I explored more fully in COURAGE OVER FEAR. Whether or not this is true in real culture, I tend to think that the "noble man fantasy" tends to favor self-mastery/free variation more than the "man of ressentiment fantasy," because the former is more overtly a product of artifice than the latter, while the latter often appears to be a response to the need for verisimilitude in fiction. I noted in SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

The tropes belonging to "artifice" are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is..."

Since I have defined fiction and general literature more in terms of artifice than of verisimilitude, I find myself unreceptive to a lot of literature devoted to ressentiment: to the fantasies of overthrowing some tyrannical overclass seen in, say, Marxist lectures like Sinclair's JUNGLE or racial ideologies like the oeuvre of Spike Lee. However, I hope to find time in the near future to review one of the few novels I've encountered that manages to portray the ressentiment fantasy through the lens of free variation, which allowed the author to imbue self-mastery upon the standard fantasy. 

SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE)

 

Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense. --Mark Twain (or someone imitating him).

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

I’m reasonably sure that neither Twain nor Melville were first to observe that the pure artifice of fiction—whether one calls it “sense” or “symmetry”-- was radically different from the chaos of experience known as “the real world.” Of the two, though, Melville’s term proves more piquant in terms of its associations.

I introduced the concept of “artifice” as a counter to that of “verisimilitude,” and in this essay I aligned verisimilitude with the world of finite things, perata, and artifice with the world of the theoretically infinite, apeiron. Melville’s alignment of “fable/fiction” with “symmetry” has a related appeal, not least because he seems to be saying that the world of facts and reality is by contrast dominated by “asymmetry,” signified by his claim that “truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.”

Assuming that this projected parallel is a fair extension of Melville’s thought, what’s “asymmetrical” about “truth” in its connotation of factual occurrences? The sense I get from Melville’s “ragged edges” is that the real world, unlike the world of fiction and fable, doesn’t ever come to a designated end, be that ending comic or tragic. Reality just goes on and on and on—and so do people. Though the sailors who witness Billy Budd’s symbolic crucifixion are impressed enough that they keep in their hearts “the image of the Handsome Sailor,” people who never met Billy will not only not know of him, they may believe the false reports of newspapers (the “fake news” of the day) that claimed the Handsome Sailor was a base mutineer.

In contrast, though there may not be such a thing as an absolutely “pure fiction,” fiction is “symmetrical” in terms of using recognizable tropes to put across emotional effects. In creating BILLY BUDD Melville knows that by using tropes that associated the titular sailor with Jesus Christ, he can produce a symmetrical effect in which Billy’s sacrificial death parallels that of Jesus. That is not to say that any reader will make a strict one-on-one equation of the two: at most Billy Budd is a literary “imitatio Dei.”

Further, the tropes used in art and literature must be judged to be “open signifiers” after the fashion of Jung’s archetypes. Neither tropes nor archetypes have content as such: their content changes according to the way they are used by creators. Melville uses Christian sacrificial tropes to impress his readers with the nobility of the central character and the pathos of his sacrifice to the “god” of mortal expedience. Another author, however, may use the same images to different effects. The tropes belonging to artifice are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is,” no matter whether the reality is that of ancient Rome or 19^th-century Nantucket. Their effect is asymmetrical insofar as they function to either counteract or at least counterpoint the symmetry of artifice.

ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4

The long-term applicability of the concept of the artifice-mode is that it finally allows me to formulate a solid rationale for all of my declarations that such-and-such a character was "larger than life," like this one from my review of EYES OF A STRANGER:

EYES debuted in theaters at a time when psycho-slasher films were still in ascendance, but this film's killer has little in common with the more colorful fiends of the period: he isn't deformed, wears no distinctive mask or clothing, and uses no special gimmicks or bizarre methods to commit his murders-- all in spite of the fact that one of the writers credited with the EYES screenplay also worked on the seminal 1980 FRIDAY THE 13TH.  Nevertheless, for all the naturalistic touches here, the script does give the villain a larger-than-life quality that confers a sense of dread to the proceedings.

I later contrasted this psycho-film with NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY, where I said of the killer-- who does have a minor "gimmick" in his ability to disguise himself--

Gill proves a far more more consummate actor than Kate, for his gimmick is to assume various disguises in order to get the older women to let him into their apartments, whereupon he kills them. Yet, despite this disguise-skill, Gill never inspires the "dread" that I look for in uncanny psychos, even of the mundane sort that appears in EYES OF A STRANGER. Everything about Gill, as well as his functional double Brummer, is easily explained by Freud's emphasis upon "physiological concepts," as Jung termed them.

But "physiological concepts" are just a specific example of the 1968 film's adherence to pure verisimilitude, of its attempt to minimize the role of "artifice" in fictionalizing the real story of the Boston Strangler. I described this tendency in Part 1:

an author's focus upon verisimilitude means that he automatically seeks to limit the potential "affective freedom" of his work, in favor of a "cognitive restraint" based in his own acceptance, and that of his potential audience, of all the rules of consensual reality.

I may have on occasion connected "affective freedom" with the author's ability to generate discourses of symbolic complexity, but if I have done so, this would be a mistake. "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, and that freedom can be found in any uncanny or marvelous work, regardless of its symbolic complexity, a.k.a. "mythicity." Indeed, I have rated both EYES OF A STRANGER and NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY as "poor" in terms of their mythicity, but the former is uncanny specifically because its author(s) show a greater appreciation for the inherited tropes of slasher-fiction, while the authors of LADY do not.

Sometimes that appreciation does not even take the form of any single trope that can be definitely nailed down. I recently labeled the 1987 film THE STEPFATHER as uncanny, and this psycho in this movie is, like the one in LADY, a chameleon who changes his appearance in order to ingratiate himself with his future victims. I also rated STEPFATHER as poor in relation to mythicity, but although there's a little more of an attempt to psycho-analyze the killer than one sees in EYES OF A STRANGER, there's also a sense that the Stepfather's madness is something outside the boundaries of a reasonable world. Neither Christopher Gill nor Jerry Blake wear any truly bizarre disguises a la Norman Bates, and their methods of murder are fairly mundane. But Blake's madness is "larger than life" because his creators, unlike those of Gill, seem far less preoccupied with proving that the killer's madness is typical for madmen of his type. Thus Blake's creators privilege "affective freedom" over "cognitive restraint."

In short, when in future I use the term "larger-than-life," it will be applied to narrative entities and situations that *seem like* (see POWER AND POTENCY 2) they are greater than life, even though they are not greater in a cognitive sense. Such things become "anti-intelligible" because at the core they are more aligned with the domain of artifice--the home of both stereotypes and archetypes-- than with the domain of verisimilitude.