THE GREAT SUBLIMITY SHIFT

 The PRELUDE to this essay should explain why the concept of "the sublime" is so important to the history of metaphenomenal literature. What now follows is more in the nature of my reworking some of the categories in my personal literary theory.  

Following some of the concepts laid forth by both Carl Jung and Northrop Frye, it's become a rock-solid assertion of my theory that all literary works are comprised of a lateral meaning (this concerns what things happen in the text) and a virtual meaning (this concerns how things happen in the text). Both can be as simple, or as complex, as the author of a work desires these meanings to be. Over the years I have sought to bring the lateral/vertical concepts into a perceived harmony with other categories, particularly in the 2023 essay MIGHT AND MYTH and in the 2025 essay CORRELATING COGITATIONS.  Both essays are largely still valid, but there are some problems with my coordinations between the two modes of sublimity that I deduced from my reading of Kant's CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. I no longer believe this passage from MIGHT AND MYTH:

the quanta I now call "excitations" align well with what I've called "the dynamic-sublime," while the quanta I call "correlations" align well with the "the combinatory-sublime."

Nor these two from CORRELATING COGITATIONS:

That the ontocosm of a literary work includes "All modalities of THE DYNAMIC-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MIGHT."

That the epicosm of a literary work includes "All modalities of THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MYTH."

The respective terms ontocosm and epicosm still incorporate all lateral meanings and all vertical meanings, respectively. But I was incorrect to correlate the ontocosm with the dynamic-sublime, and the epicosm only with the combinatory-sublime. 

I might not have made this error, had I more fully concentrated upon another duality of equal relevance, one I did mention in the 2023 essay but not in the 2025 one. Here's the mention from 2023, which immediately follows the 2023 quote from above:

Both potentialities are also more strongly associated with the non-utile activities of "play," while the "secunda" potentialities are primarily about helping the subject survive and prosper through the hard work of discrimination. 

What I failed to do was to re-assess was the extent to which the four potentialities as a whole aligned with the two very different modes of the sublime. I've now decided that, whatever Kant meant with his modes of the sublime, mine apply to the different ways in which human beings approach the "non-directed thinking" of play and the "directed thinking" of work.

The combinatory-sublime is first and foremost applies to the subject's experience of plenitude of forms, which in my system takes the place of Kant's "mathematical-sublime." Thus I now find that this form of the sublime takes in the least "directed" modes of play, which would be (1) the excitations of the kinetic potentiality, and (2) the correlations of the mythopoeic potentiality. Conversely, the most directed modes of play apply to (3) the emotions of the dramatic potentiality, and (4) the cogitations of the didactic potentiality.

I may explore these matters more thoroughly later, but my new categorical alignments go as follows:

KINETIC-- aligned with the ontocosmic combinatory mode

DRAMATIC-- aligned with the ontocosmic dynamicity mode

MYTHOPOEIC-- aligned with the epicosmic combinatory mode

DIDACTIC-- aligned with the epicosmic dynamicity mode           

 

   

    

THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS

 I recently re-screened the 1965 Italian horror-film BLOODY PIT OF HORROR but have not yet reviewed the movie on my film-blog. What I found interesting was the way many IMDB reviews treated PIT as comically overstated, though it's not nearly as overbaked as many other "so bad they're good" flicks like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE or TROLL 2. In terms of the general plot, BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein. In fact, BLOODY PIT was filmed at the same castle, Palazzo Borghese, as two previous Euro-horror movies, THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA. The fact that BLOODY PIT comes in for so much disproportionate hilarity suggests to me that something in the way it was filmed, more than the story per se, tickles many viewers' ideas about the fragility of fantasies.

Now, in this essay, I quoted Jung as asserting that all creative work is entirely dependent on "fantasy thinking," a position with which I wholly concur:

Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." (Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, 1921, page 63.)

Now, the examples of PLAN 9 and TROLL indicate that the free play of fantasy is not an unalloyed virtue. Games need rules to impose limits on the limitlessness of the imagination, and neither Ed Wood nor Claudio Fragasso were able to formulate rule-systems that made sense for their respective monsters.   

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is directly efficiently if unenthusiastically by Massimo Pupillo, whose disinterest in the horror genre has been widely reported. There are no "Ed Wood" moments that call attention to directorial blunders or FX-shortcomings, so I assume that most of the hilarity stems from something closer to the realm of TROLL 2. Yet the core idea of PIT is no different than that of the celebrated Roger Corman Poe-film PIT AND THE PENDULUM. In Richard Matheson's adaptation of Poe, some innocents-- albeit far fewer in number than those in the 1965 film-- suffer torments by a man who believes himself to be identical with a famous torturer who in reality died years ago. But without looking, I don't think that if I check the IMDB comments for PENDULUM, I will find viewers bagging on that movie for its supposed absurdities, as this viewer did for Pupillo's movie.

The film is filled with lots of sadistic torture and is reminiscent of the German film, THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (talk about a great title). However, unlike the German film, this one is much sillier and the horrible punishments really don't look all that realistic--just cheesy. But, because it is made so poorly (with horrible dialog and action throughout), it is worth seeing to have a few laughs.

I, however, don't find fault with the execution of BLOODY PIT's torture-scenes as that reviewer did. Here's the central visual trope that makes modern viewers take the menace of PENDULUM seriously:

The menace in PENDULUM looks like a respectable Gothic malefactor; he's dressed in dark colors and looks like he means business. Now here's the not dissimilar torture-happy menace in BLOODY PIT.

Because the evil "Crimson Executioner" looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie, I suggest that's the real, and maybe the sole, reason that so many viewers think that BLOODY PIT is so hilarious. Other films are structurally similar, and many may be more badly directed than this one, like the two vampire flicks mentioned above. But they lack such a vivid visual trope.

I don't know exactly why someone chose to juxtapose the masked-wrestler image with that of a Gothic torturer. I'll explore some possibilities in my formal review of the movie, but in this essay, I wanted to spotlight the notion that one or more of the scripters had an agenda. Any agenda probably did not come from Pupillo, who was hoping to move on from horror films to more reputable genres. I think one or more of the writers made some chance correlation between the violence of Gothic films and that of the "muscleman" films. Yet none of the six scripters credited on IMDB have any huge number of outstanding accomplishments in the writing department:

RALPH ZUCKER-- Besides PIT, Zucker did one obscure western, another Gothic horror from 1973, THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT, that I for one found blah, and KONG ISLAND, which is a fairly stupid mad-science jungle flick.

FRANCESCO MERLI-- four other writing credits, but none of the productions are known to me

RUTH CARTER-- aside from PIT, Carter's only other credit is as one of four writers who "adapted" Edgar Allan Poe to produce Pupillo's other major horror flick, TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE, which was a Barbara Steele vehicle.

CESARE MANCINI-- same as Carter except that he also contributed to some romance movie.  

ROMANO MIGLORINI and ROBERTO NATALE-- And here we finally find a couple of guys who racked up a respectable number of writing credits-- 16 for the first guy, 29 for the second-- though the only outstanding credits they garnered, for a couple of Bava films, came after PIT and TERROR CREATURES, on which they worked alongside Carter and Mancini.

So, in the absence of anyone who looks like an "auteur," I'm going to guess that some or all of the writers convened to figure out what to do with yet another film set in a Gothic castle-- and that instead of going with something obvious like another demented follower of Torquemada or another vampire, just decided that their fiend would be the furthest thing possible from those sort of menaces: a torture who put his chiseled musculature on display more than his torture-devices. That nod to the least obvious sort of menace-- much like Claudio Fragasso's vegetarian goblins-- had no chance of being taken seriously, at least to the extent that audiences responded to obvious menaces like vampires. 

And yet the virtue of that appeal to the unobvious got BLOODY PIT a lot more attention than it would have garnered otherwise, even though it was attention of the "so bad it's good" ilk. In my review I'll hold forth on a few things that make BLOODY PIT a more mythic film than simple goofs like TROLL 2 and PLAN 9, so I'll sum up by saying that sometimes flights of fancy can flout the rules in such a way as to create new games, as good or better than the old ones.         

THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER

I've recently finished two DC ARCHIVES collections of Golden Age Batman comics, and once more I am impressed with the level of quality in comparison with other formula-comics from the period. Yet the nature of this extra quality is hard to define.                                       

Whatever that "je ne se quoi" might be, it has nothing to do with a flouting of formula, that tedious preoccupation of the comic-book elitists. During the Golden Age, the dominant practice of comic-book publishers was to load their magazines with short stories of about eight pages each. This seems to have applied whether or not the magazines featured continuing characters, and the strategy probably evolved from the idea that the kid-readers had short attention spans and were more likely to pick up issues if they offered a lot of varied content. For adventure comics in particular, there evolved the formula that some have called the "three-act structure:"   

   (1) Villain, whether new or recurring, launches his first crime, defying either conventional lawmen or the starring hero, but escapes, (2) The hero crosses paths with the villain again, and the villain either simply escapes or subdues the hero and leaves him in a death-trap, (3) The hero either escapes a trap or finds a new means to track down the villain and defeats him, whether he's captured, dies, or merely seems to perish.                                                                       

 I haven't read every Bill Finger out there, even in comics alone. But I think I'm aware of all of his "career highs," and Rik Worth's book on the early days of Finger and his BATMAN co-creator Bob Kane has helped fill in a lot of blanks on this era of comics-history. Going by this biography, as well as an interview with Finger's grown son in ALTER EGO magazine, it appears that Finger didn't have any pretensions beyond making well-crafted formula adventure-stories for most of his life.                         

 What Finger seemed to have, though, was an inordinate talent for creating characters who transcended the limits of their formulaic stories. Dozens upon dozens of other writers followed the aforementioned "three-act structure" for such characters as Vigilante, Wildcat, Star-Spangled Kid, Tarantula, Human Torch, Black Terror and all the rest. But most other formula-stories in other features never escape the bounds of their own restrictions. Finger seems not only to have possessed the ability to take the formula-elements to their furthest extremes-- far more, I'd argue, than many more critically lauded talents like Jack Cole and C.C. Beck-- he also seemed to have inspired most of the other writers in the Bob Kane "stable," such as Edmond Hamilton and Gardner Fox. I'm not saying that any such imitations came about for abstract artistic reasons, though. If Gardner Fox wrote better stories for BATMAN than he did for RED MASK, it's probably because he recognized that the people writing the checks expected a special level of craft.                 

Finger also holds a special place in forging the trope of "the criminal who makes his crimes follow an artistic pattern." There were "pattern criminals," in the sense I'm using the term, in the pulp prose fiction on which most Golden Age adventure-comics patterned themselves, and a few preceded the rise of Superman and Batman. But what I've encountered in those earlier sources usually fit one of two types. First is the "one-gimmick villain,"-- an evildoer who gains control of one distinctive weapon, like the poison vampire bats of the Spider's 1935 foe "The Bat Man." Second is the "all-purpose villain," who can conjure a lot of weapons from an illimitable arsenal, like the 1938 "Munitions Master" from DOC SAVAGE, or Superman's first two "mad scientist" foes, The Ultra-Humanite and Luthor. Barring any new revelations, though, the Joker appears to be the first exemplar of a third type: the "pattern criminal," who repeatedly keeps using gimmicks that reference some particular fetish or propensity. The Joker only uses one humor-based gimmick in his debut, the famed "Joker venom," but Finger and other Bat-writers kept finding new gimmicks for the Clown Prince of Crime to employ in his war of one-upmanship with the Dynamic Duo. 

Jerry Siegel debuted Luthor a month or so after the first appearance of the Joker, but as stated he was always an all-purpose villain. Siegel didn't tap into the appeal of "pattern criminals" until he launched his own somewhat risible take on Batman and Robin with the duo of "the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy" in October 1941. The Kid and his partner began battling arguable pattern-types like The Needle-- though I imagine Finger's second big antagonist, The Penguin, predated all or most of these by some months, since he popped up just a couple months after the Kid's debut. Superman's first recurring pattern-criminals, The Prankster and The Puzzler, both debuted in 1942.                                                                                   

  I think Finger's power to create good villains-- and, hypothetically, his ability to inspire other creators by his profit-making example-- sprang from his interest in figuring out at least rough psychological motives for his evildoers, just as he may have done for his heroes. This interest in even shallow psychology outstrips most of Finger's contemporaries. Jack Cole had an artistic talent which none of the BATMAN artists could have emulated had they wanted to, and also a taste for the ghoulish that exceeded the best japes of the Joker. But Cole's villains are almost entirely one-dimensional, and his best-known hero Plastic Man is not too much better. Both Rik Worth and Fred Finger suggest that Bill Finger was a dreamer who never quite grew up, so that he was rarely able to manage money or time. But I'd argue that even in his weaker stories-- and Finger did a lot of goofy, poorly conceived stories in addition to his quality fare-- he shows a greater, perhaps childlike ability to take the weirdest ideas seriously, in a spirit of uninhibited play.                  

COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL

The overall conclusion of last month's EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series was my affirmation that the elements of "play for play's sake" in literature were largely immune from accusations of "bad influence," while elements of "play for work's sake," which encourage audiences to take a particular real-world action, could be either a good or bad influence. In Part 2, in order to get across a distinction between types of literary evil, I cited this passage from Bataille:

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Now, I also said in Part 2 that "Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature..." Yet even though I've specified that Bataille was not offering a general non-literary definition of evil, his statement deserves some consideration as it might apply to all human experience, both "common and uncommon."

Take the proposition: "If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it." I see why Bataille would use the term "purely evil" for a literary reflection of a human action, but the statement is dubious at best regarding common human experience. The Menendez Brothers killed their parents, but the killers' act of gratuitously taking life does not in itself become less evil if informed only by self-interest. If anything, I would guess that the majority of human beings are most often victimized by acts of evil stemming from self-interest without any particular intent to inflict suffering for the criminal's Sadean pleasure. Grifts and robberies are some of the most common experiences that the average law-abiding adult copes with, and that's without even getting into the political realm, where legislators may commit evil acts as a result of "good intentions."  

With the possible exception of the crucible of middle school and high school, where many immature students indulge in overt sadism to gain the approbation of like-minded peers, most "First World" citizens at least aren't often subjected to any Sade-like forms of evil. Consider how absurd it sounds when the speaker in the following comics-panel prates about the "purity" of killing a victim for no reason.

Of course, this sort of purity does exist in the "uncommon" world of literature, and author Michael O'Donoghue is having fun with the notion that poor, imperiled Phoebe Zeitgeist is trapped in a world where no one who oppresses her is motivated by the "lackluster treadmill of goal-oriented drives." Thomas Hobbes may have distinguished between human motivations of gain and reputation. But when he also popularized the phrase "the war of all against all" to sum up the human condition, most persons involved in that war are worried about people with "goal-oriented drives" like theft, not about chimerical acts of gratuitous cruelty. And sometimes the "thieves" are protecting their own lookout, as with the doctor who makes a mistake in treating a patient and then fails to confess his wrongdoing because it would put him at a financial disadvantage.

Given that so much human evil in common experience is depressingly banal, I think it fair to state that self-interest causes more needless suffering than sadism ever has. Of course, in literature both forms of evil are "good" (as per my earlier essay title) because they are necessary to establish conflict and thus make storytelling possible. But it's peculiar that Bataille downplayed the evils of self-interest in the above quote. I've frequently cited him for his insights on the dynamic of work and play, where work is always oriented on achieving real-world goals, and play exists for its own sake, achieving nothing purposeful with its activity. It would be one thing to say that the Evils of Sadism trump the Evils of Self-Interest within the sphere of literature, because there, a fictional sadist like Heathcliffe or Hannibal Lecter knows how to play "the game of sadism" far better than even real sadists like Ted Bundy. But in this quote, Bataille is unusually generous toward the sins of the self-interested, of "goal-oriented drives"-- especially since it might be fairly said that indifference to the suffering of others is just the other side of the coin from reveling in said suffering.

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 2

In Part 1, I stated that Northrop Frye wasn't an influence on my own literary theories of "work and play," but George Bataille certainly was, even though most of what he wrote on that pair of concepts concerned his view of anthropology and religion, not literature. Yet he certainly transferred his concept of "religious transgression" to the world of literature. In 1957 that he wrote in EROTISM that "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it," and an analogous idea appears in LITERATURE AND EVIL, published the same year:

Evil, therefore, if we examine it closely, is not only the dream of the wicked: it is to some extent the dream of Good. Death is the punishment, sought and accepted for this mad dream, but nothing can prevent the dream from having been dreamt." -- p. 21.

Though I don't consider LITERATURE AND EVIL one of the better books on literature-- it compiles eight essays on particular authors Bataille admired for incarnating his ideas on "literary evil"-- EVIL did greatly influence me to consider that every conflict in a fictional story involved a transgression against someone or something, and that's as good a reason to use Bataille to approach the question posed to me, "Is it possible for literature to be 'evil?'" (And by the bye, Bataille's sense of an interpenetration between Good and Evil is what conjured forth my Miltonian essay-title.)

I don't believe that anyone ever has, or ever will, formulate a definition of evil as such, which any tenable theory of "literary evil" would require. But Bataille's definition is at least a good starting-point. In his very short preface, he states:

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'

Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

His idea of "hypermorality" probably explains why he's not overly concerned with many of the lesser forms of evil that ordinary morality inveighs against: specifically, those centered in self-interest. In his initial essay, whose main subject is Emily Bronte (and her sublime evildoer Heathcliff), Bataille privileges Evil as the deliberate enjoyment of suffering beyond the considerations of personal advantage.

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Obviously, a lot of literature engages in moralistic polemic against the evils of self-interest in all its forms-- though polemicists like Frederic Wertham are well-versed in dismissing any such moralizing as being no more than a protective cover, the better for those pundits to attack literature they deem "morally noxious." So Bataille is in the end not offering a general definition of evil, but of a specifically form of Evil that he associated with the sovereign values of literature as a whole. 

Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature, and therefore it serves as a counterbalance to the views of the pundits. For them, all evil is defined by self-interest, and sadistic thrills are just part of that package-- which is why Wertham constantly conflated readers wanting sadistic thrills and publishers wanting to make money off those customers. For Wertham, the taboo exists only to prevent the transgression, and Good never dreams of Evil in any fashion. Yet Wertham's own altruism is compromised and implicated in self-interest when he's caught cooking his casebooks, or even just making insubstantial arguments.

Bataille's idea that "Sadism is Evil" requires separate consideration from his overall definition of Evil in Literature, and Part 3 will touch on that topic, as well as the age-old question, "When an artist shows a thing, is he endorsing it?"

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 1

As I begin this post, I'm not sure how many parts this essay-series will run. Meditations on the nature of evil tend to lead anyone down a lot of unusual, if not perilous, alleyways, though I have a few directions in mind. The subject came up in a comment by AT-AT Pilot, which I reprint here so that it will be clear what I'm responding to.

Is it possible for literature to be "evil"? I understand that there have always been critics who consider some book or other to be morally grotesque. But they are approaching art in the wrong way, I presume? In the MYTHCOMICS: ["RINGSIDE BLONDIE"] BLONDIE #169 (1963) entry, you mentioned Frye's "protective wall of play." Does it encircle all fiction? From your writings and those of Frye, I would guess that such a barrier does exist and makes all fiction inherently "good." Is that correct? I imagine that controversial literature is allowed to be in print because readers are sophisticated enough to restrain the realm of fantasy and keep some distance away from it, preventing the possibility of negative influence within themselves.

I ask because I find it difficult to effectively defend a work that is deemed to be morally noxious. How would someone, for example, be able to defend a work like Kamasutra (or other manga like Berserk) from accusations of perversion and misogyny?

Now, I already wrote, in the same comments-section, a short answer to the questions, but I think they deserve extended commentary as well. My present plan is to break down some of my short answers and expand upon them in piecemeal fashion and bring in some new commentary as well (some of which should justify my title, a deliberate misquote of the line Milton gives Satan in PARADISE LOST).

What I want to expand on first is my statement about how literary works encompass both "play" and "work:"

My first (short) answer is that *potentially* the wall of play might encircle all fiction. However, it's also axiomatic that fiction always has an equal potential to be used for "work"-- that is, to achieve specific ends-- and using that potential reduces the potential to see the work only in terms of play. Whenever a specific goal is advocated in a fictional work-- Upton Sinclair using THE JUNGLE to persuade Americans that socialism was better than capitalism, or Superman trying to convince young readers to exercise more in line with the health programs of President Kennedy-- that's "play being used for the ends of work."

I should also give the context for my quotation of Frye from his ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, though I may have already done so in previous posts. I also want to clarify that he's in no way responsible for my dichotomy of "play" and "work."

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there.

Probably my most specific attempt to break down categories of "fiction used for play" and "fiction used for work" appeared in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4. In this essay, I cited two works in each category, one of which was of superior literary quality and one which was inferior: Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND and Dixon's CLANSMAN for "play-fiction," and Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST and Coetzee's DISGRACE for "work-fiction." 

In line with my remarks above, I would now kick Dixon's CLANSMAN out of consideration, because even though it was "popular fiction" like GONE WITH THE WIND, Dixon's books were polemical, trying to convince readers that Negro slaves should never have been emancipated. The best substitute that occurs to me now-- and one that was short enough to give a quick read online-- is Florence Kate Upton's TWO DUTCH DOLLS AND A GOLLIWOG. This is admittedly a children's book in verse, but it was phenomenally popular in England and America and spawned twelve sequels-- which I imagine were probably as unserious in their chauvinism as the first book. A pertinent image from the first book follows...

But now, with all those reconsiderations out of the way, the TRIP essay was focused only upon my estimation of literary quality. I would still maintain that both Coetzee's DISGRACE and Upton's DUTCH DOLLS lack the better qualities of both the Faulkner and Mitchell books. But even though both Mitchell and Upton have often been attacked for racial content, I would probably still find Coetzee's book the most morally objectionable, if not "evil" as such, partly because the author was "working" with didactic ideas but did a much poorer, less subtle job of handling them than did Faulkner.

Next up: some possible definitions of "evil."

MIGHT AND MYTH

 In addition to the subjects of the previous essay, my cross-comparison of three influential intellectuals here stimulated an interesting return to a subject I've not addressed much lately: that of sublimity.

A quick recap: when I first began writing about the various literary and philosophical conceptions of sublimity, I was probably overly influenced by Kant's concept of the "dynamic-sublime" as expressed in THE CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. I wrote quite a bit on the subject as to whether different forms of "might" were exclusively responsible for the fictional manifestations of sublimity, with this 2012 essay as a representative example.

In 2013, though, I reflected upon Kant's other manifestation of the sublime, which he termed "the mathematical-sublime." This conception had no great relevance to the fictional worlds with which I was concerned, but I realized that other scholars ranging from Burke to Tolkien had often spoken of perceiving the sublime through a combination of images and elements. From that insight, I formulated the notion that within a literary matrix there existed two forms of the sublime: the "dynamic-sublime" and "the combinatory-sublime," and I set this observation forth in the TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I series.

Now, my conception of the four potentialities were not specifically focused on any manifestation of the sublime. However, as a result of refining my definition of the potentialities in this essay, I realized that each of Jung's "perceiving functions" had a rough equivalence to the two forms of the sublime that I deduced from Kant.

In Jung's arrangement, the "perceiving functions" of sensation and intuition furnish a given subject with raw data about experience, and the two "judging functions" evolve in order to guide the subject's assessments of the data. I've specified in PARALLEL PATHS that Jung may made his "perceiving functions" a bit too passive in nature in contrast to the more active role that "prehensions" serve in the system of Whitehead. Rather than seeing the judging functions as having a superior role over the perceiving functions, I like better the idea that they are "co-definitional" as the term is used by Stuart Kaufman.

All that said, there's some justification for thinking of the mental products of the sensation and intuition functions as being a sort of prima materia from which a distinct secunda materia arises. My newest refinement of the conceptual quanta present in each of the four potentialities supports this reading. The sensation-responses of a subject to "energy," both his own and that of other entities, give rise to emotional evaluations of himself and those entities, while intuition-based responses that build mythic correlations regarding oneself and other entities are inevitably subjected to the rigor of ordered cogitation. 

Further, the quanta I now call "excitations" align well with what I've called "the dynamic-sublime," while the quanta I call "correlations" align well with the "the combinatory-sublime." Both potentialities are also more strongly associated with the non-utile activities of "play," while the "secunda" potentialities are primarily about helping the subject survive and prosper through the hard work of discrimination.

The essay's title "Might and Myth" is also oriented upon seeing both of the prima materia functions as including a range of those fictional manifestations that do or do not possess a certain level of either "pre-epistemic" OR epistemological knowledge encoded into their discourses. I return to my example of this range from VERTICAL VIRTUES:

...I might say that from the POV of "tenor-excellence" alone, the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR excels the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, because I've detected more concrescent stories in the former than in the latter. But in terms of "vehicle-excellence," they are equals. for both generated an impressive array of icons fraught with mythopoeic POTENTIAL, even if the FF is somewhat ahead in terms of mythopoeic ACTUALITY.

So "might" would include even those elements meant to appeal to sensation, even if those elements are insufficiently organized, while "myth" would include all elements meant to appeal to intuition, even when not glossed by epistemological insights. And of course the respective "judging functions" would each be aligned with the categories of "might" and of "myth."

Possible meat for future meditations, as usual. 

SO, A THREAD-PULLING VECTOR

 My title for this essay spoofs a title I used for two essays way back in 2011, SO, A THREAD-PULLING NEEDLE, Part 1 and Part 2, which in their turn had punned on one of the lyrics from THE SOUND OF MUSIC. I confess I didn't even remember what those essays were about. I just wanted to create a title for this essay that brought the terms "thread" and "vector" together in some halfway-felicitous manner. As it happens, I did find some relevant content in those 2011 essays-- more on which at this essay's conclusion.

This essay sprung into being the way a lot of them do: taking a morning walk for exercise and letting my mind ruminate over the various categories I've created like the proverbial cow chewing her cud. This time, I randomly started associating my idea of "the master thread"-- which usurped all my old conceptions of "theme statements" in this April 2020 essay-- with the Whitehead-ian idea of "vectors" that I first broached in August 2020. Whereas the master thread concept was oriented only upon the way the author organized the "vertical meaning" of his narrative, vectors were designed to describe all category-domains in my system.

...all aspects of art—characters, settings, plot-tropes—derive from authorial will. Similarly, all of the multifarious literary categories I’ve introduced on this blog—dynamicity, mythicity, the combinatory-sublime and so on—are the prisms I use to view patterns of authorial will, patterns formed by the unceasing interactions of authors swiping from each other, competing with each other, and writing love letters to each other.

So far, I have applied the vector-term to such domains as centricity and phenomenality, but not to the differing emphases of a narrative's vertical meaning. However, something akin to vectors is implicit within the first example I offered of those differing emphases, in the essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2.

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

So what, aside from my bare assertion, determines that the trope of "The Hunter and the Hunted" is the "master thread" of MOBY DICK, and not one of the subordinate threads (which I later dubbed "bachelor threads")? When I state that removing the putative master thread would "unravel the whole kit and kaboodle," that should imply that it's too big and complicated to be removed without damaging the whole. And the master thread got big and complicated because Herman Melville concentrated the greatest vector of his authorial will upon that theme, while the bachelor-threads, while important, might be removed without necessarily damaging the whole. 

The idea of removing such a master-thread is not mere theory; it's the sort of thing that often takes place with adaptations of famous works. I have not yet reviewed the 1956 film adaptation of Melville's nautical novel, nor have I seen it in several years. But my recollection is that scripter Ray Bradbury decided to elide most of the religious content of the novel, except for a puerile "Ahab overstepped the bounds of a reasonable mortal" that sounds more like FRANKENSTEIN than MOBY DICK. Banal as this vertical meaning is, though, it's still the master-thread for the 1956 movie because it shows the greatest vector of Bradbury's authorial intent. I should note in passing that my conception of vertical meaning-- in which there is one superordinate thread amidst one or more subordinate threads-- mirrors my conception of centricity, in which one icon, or group of icons, proves superordinate and everything else in the narrative is subordinate in nature. The subordinate threads, like subordinate icons, just don't have that much authorial attention given to them, resulting in lesser will-vectors.

Jumping back eleven years, the first part of SO A THREAD PULLING NEEDLE came about when AT-AT Pilot asked me to provide some guidance on the subject of what I'd called "myth criticism." I responded in part with a perhaps labored metaphor in which I would seek to provide an "Ariadne's thread" through the "labyrinth" of modern discourse about mythology. It didn't occur to me back then that the usual interaction of threads and needles, that of binding cloth together, was the exact opposite of the use of thread in the Minotaur story. However, Part 1 at least shows that the thread-metaphor was one I liked then as much as I do now.

Part 2, though, is the essay with the aforementioned "relevant content" with respect to more recent writings. Riffing on a famous misquote of Heidegger, I wondered whether one could discern a "unifying thread" in all of my ruminations on this blog, and I came up with the quest for an answer to the question:

"Why is there complexity where there doesn't need to be any?"

And my answer, seeking to get away from the more abstract explanations, was to posit that mythic complexity is simply a fun thing for authors to put in their stories, even when they don't expect anyone to find that particular Easter-egg. I still believe this, that all the factors that go into making fiction come about because authors like best the play-element in fiction. Thus in fiction the sense of play has the greatest force-- the greatest vector, one might say-- than even the most sedulous desire to convert others to some moral message. 

THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 2

 At the end of the previous essay I wrote:

But the idea of codefinition has some interesting permutations for my notions of literature as a place where truth and non-truth, perata and apeiron, continually co-exist and play off one another.

The ancient Greek terms "perata and apeiron" appeared before in a round of essays I wrote back in January, entitled LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, starting here.

Simply put, the Greek terms connote respectively "things that have limits" and "things that are boundless." I used them thusly: 

 For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe  -- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

I went on to explore this dichotomy through the lens of Georges Bataille's distinction between "work" (productive activity, oriented upon humans dealing with the limited physical world) and "play" (unproductive activity, oriented upon humans taking a vacation from work and its attendant moralities). It should be noted that both of these dichotomies-- limited/limitless and work/play-- might be deemed as "codefinitional" in the sense seen in Kauffman's quote in the previous essay: that one concept generates the other. (Back in the 2012 essay PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION I employed Martin Buber's term "word pairs" to much the same end.)

Yet another pair of linked concepts relevant to this discussion are the opposed concepts of "verisimilitude" and "artifice" that I formulated (or re-interpreted) in the 2016 essay EFFICACY, MEET MYTH. "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. 

With all that in mind, I go back to the two versions of Ludwig Wittgenstein discussed by Stuart A. Kauffman in INVESTIGATIONS. The first version of Wittgenstein was one who, in accordance with the prevalent mood of the period, valued the concept of "logical atomism." Kauffman wrote:

Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.

Before going on Wittgenstein 2.0, I pose the question: does the philosophy of "logical atomism" parallel anything with the corpus of literary criticism? And, perhaps not surprisingly, the parallel I draw is to a type of criticism described by Northrop Frye:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme..."-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

Since Frye is the luminary from whom I partly borrowed my verisimilitude-artifice word-pair, it should be clear that I'm saying that the "high seriousness" critic is the one who values verisimilitude above everything else, and that this type of thinking parallels that of the logical atomists. 

Now for a return appearance, here's Kauffman on Wittgenstein's rejection of the atomist attitude:

Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level, Instead, the concepts at the higher level are codefined.

And is there a parallel between this attitude and the opposing critical tendency described in Frye's essay? Let's see.

Reading a detective story indicates a liking for comic and romantic forms, and for the contemplation of a fiction for its own sake. We begin by shutting out or deliberately excluding our ordinary experience, for we accept, as part of the convention of the form, things that we know are not often found in actual experience, such as an ingenious murderer and an imaginative policeman. We do no want to think about the truth or likelihood of what we are reading, as long as it does not utterly outrage us; we simply want to see what is going to happen in the story.

 

Certainly Frye has ably contrasted the critic who wants "verisimilitude" as against the critic who wants "conventions." I would extend this to say that the appeal of the first is also, as stated before, the appeal of "cognitive restraint," and therefore perata, while the latter appeals in terms of "affective freedom," and therefore apeiron. I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation. And it is through being able to experience both of these proclivities that the often divided minds of humankind may potentially find at least a conditional wholeness.

 

 

LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 1

On January 13 reader AT-AT Pilot helped spur a new line of inquiry by writing the following in the comments-section of TAKING STOCK OF 2021:

I keep looking at the Archetype and NUM blogs noting the titles you've rated as having good or high mythicity. I think you've mentioned that high-art films are not usually mythically potent...

I don't doubt that I've said something along those lines, and since it reminded me of my various essays on "work and play," I scanned some of those posts first. I found this section in 2019's CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2:

I have to reiterate that it's always possible for an author to "dumb down" the expressive symbolism in a narrative in order to get across some limited didactic message. When an author does so, he has to some extent sacrificed "play" on the altar of pure "work" by making the narrative function as persuasive rhetoric. That said, creators who have deep reservoirs of imagination may still at times produce narratives that have the qualities of mythic play even though the authors are trying to convert an audience to some position.

This essay was not in itself a statement of principles regarding the various forms of "high art" and "low art," but I've certainly analyzed the differences between those literary categories many times over the years, and the earliest ARCHIVE essays on that theme are probably the two THEMATIC REALISM essays from 2008.

Here's a relevant section from Part One:

Coleridge's example of the Arabian Nights tale is, like the JUSTICE LEAGUE story I critiqued, not especially concerned with morals as such-- or at least, not to the extent that the ANCIENT MARINER is. Both tales are, in a formal sense, "escapist," though I note that I use the word non-pejoratively. Neither Gardner Fox nor the Arabian Nights scribe existed in a time before fiction had been used for didactic moral purposes, of course, but both stories can be fairly regarded as "vacations from morals." It is not that the protagonists of the tales do not perform actions that the reader considers "good" rather than "bad," but that there is not a true moral dialectic as such.

By contrast, a tale like Coleridge's MARINER, or (to give a superheroic parallel to the JLA tale) WATCHMEN, are clearly tales that are much concerned with analyzing the ways mortal men deal with the moral elements in life, no matter how fantastic their situations. There's nothing wrong with this kind of fiction, and I don't necessarily share Coleridge's opinion that MARINER would have been improved by lacking a moral, especially since he proved himself more than able to summon such a non-moralistic expressiveness in poems like KUBLAI KHAN. However, there is in comics-fandom a considerable prejudice toward a belief opposite to the one Coleridge expresses: that a narrative is *always* superior because it addresses specific dialectical moral issues. Not only is not the case, it can be a prejudice that falsifies the genuine polysemous quality of literature, as I'll show with another example in Part II.

And here's some similar discourse from Part Two:

I noted earlier that much of what we deem to be “real literature” can be distinguished by its thematic commitment to what Freud famously called “the reality principle,” no matter whether the narrative in question portrays a “realistic” version of the world (Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE), outright fantasy (Ursula LeGuin’s WIZARD OF EARTHSEA), or something between the two (Pynchon’s CRYING OF LOT 49). The same principle obtains with those works that fall squarely within the category of “thematic escapism,” which is oriented on what Freud calls “the pleasure principle” and wish-fulfillment. One may envision a middle-ground between the two categories for works that may strike a balance between these opposed themes, but it would seem beyond question that there are notable works that are polarized enough to belong far more in one camp rather than the other. 

 

I also stated in Part Two that both "thematically realistic" and "thematically escapist" works could be rich in mythicity, and I still believe that, though in recent years I've moved more toward aligning literary works with newer terms like "cognitive restraint" (for "realism") and "affective freedom" (for "escapism.") The aforementioned dichotomy of "work and play" has also been around almost as long as realism/escapism, and I wrote a series of three essays, whose main point I summed up in the 2015 essay PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS:

In the third essay of the series THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, I started from Jung's proposition that art should be fundamentally defined as "play," but that so-called "serious art" and "escapist art" respectively would have to be separated out as "play for work's sake" and "play for play's sake."

FUNCTIONS also correlates this work/play dichotomy with my formulation of the four potentialities, but I'll put this matter to one side for the moment, in order to address some possible deficiencies in my definition of realism, and how it might be better elucidated with reference to my titular categories of "the limited and the limitless."

 

 

WORK PLAY ACT PT. 2

At the conclusion of the first WORK PLAY ACT essay I wrote:

How does "play" manifest in a performance, be it live or preserved on celluloid? It may be through innumerable bits of physical "business" that convey to the audience a more organic sense of the character's actuality, or it may be something more sweeping, a mental concept of the character that assembles all of the disparate "parts" of the performance into a whole greater than the sum of those parts. But in any case, the profession of the actor seems particularly apt as a means of distinguishing the interacting forms of work and play.

In the essay I cited Humphrey Bogart as an example of an actor renowned for his performances in many films, not least the 1941 flicks HIGH SIERRA and MALTESE FALCON. I focused on those two films because it was rumored that both lead roles were originally offered to George Raft, an actor of more limited abilities. The likelihood that Raft would have done little for either of these roles does not, of course, mean that Bogart alone could have depicted the characters well. Without doubt, many actors existed then, and still exist now, who could've brought the same level of acting-imagination to those lead characters that Bogart did.

Now, the scripts for both films were above-average as well, so any actor embodying those characters might be said to have "a leg up." In the majority of my movie-reviews I've tended to credit any mythicity films may possess to their writers or their directors. Understandably, the primary aspect of the acting craft relates to the dramatic potentiality: the art of showing how a given character interacts with other characters. The actor can also put across aspects of the other three potentialities-- the kinetic, the didactic, and the mythopoeic-- but in most cases, I would tend to think that the actor translates these from the script he or she works with.

Having conceived of this general rule, I considered possible exceptions. George Raft in MALTESE FALCON would not have been able to bring many of the potentialities of the script to life, even as, arguably, Ricardo Cortez failed to do playing Sam Spade in the 1931 adaptation. But what about actors who realize potentialities that the script does not?

In this review I gave the 1992 SLEEPWALKERS, directed by Mick Garris from an original script by Stephen King, a "poor" rating for its mythicity. If I were rating the film on its other three potentialities, it would prove equally dismal on the didactic level, but might get a "fair" in terms of kinetics (lots of sex and violence). "Dramatic" is a little dicier, since most of the main actors-- Brian Krause, Madchen Amick, Ron Perlman-- turned in no more than serviceable performances for the undercooked, inane script. But I had to give special credit to Alice Krige:

King may have been thinking of Egyptian myths involving incestuous content when he conceived Mary and Charles, for like Horus and Isis in certain tales, the mother and son are sleeping together. As a plot-point this doesn't add much to the story. But it does allow for the film's one source of merit. Though the other actors put across competent performances, only Alice Krige, playing Mary, distinguishes herself. She brings to the under-scripted role a heady ambivalence, in that she's simultaneously a woman jealous of her young lover's possible affections for their targets, and yet also a mother who cherishes her son and perhaps, on some level, wishes he could have a normal life with someone other than her. But as I said, this is only suggested by Krige's performance, for the thud-and-blunder script gives her no help at all. 

Given that I've not seen the script used for the 1992 film, it's not impossible that Krige was given some cues by it, or by director Garris, that enhanced her performance. However, I think it's more likely that she showed the same quality of acting-imagination that I imputed to Bogart in the earlier essay. Much of this imagination was dramatic in nature, just as I've described it in the excerpt. At the same time, Krige's acting shades into the mythopoeic, insofar as one can see in her attitude a complex of emotions comparable to, say, Isis linking up with her son-lover Horus. I doubt that Krige got any help at all from the script, but in a really good script on this mythic theme, Krige's performance would have enhanced by the narrative of such a film. To see how such a film on that theme might be done right, one might look at Stephen Frears' 1990 adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel THE GRIFTERS. Even though the Frears film takes place in a dark and seedy reality, with no metaphenomenal presences whatever, the interaction between son John Cusack and mother Angelica Huston is actually closer to both the dramatic and mythopoeic potentialities of the Isis-Horus myth.

AN URSULINE, ULTRAFEMINIST FANTASY-DEFENDER

I don’t want to take a lot of shots at the late author’s ultrafeminism. I will note that it’s curiously more intense than most Second-Wave feminism, and often resembles the later waves, particularly the current one, in which male priorities and fantasies are ceaselessly attacked. “Is Gender Necessary?”  reads like a very current screed, excelled only by the rhetoric of the short-lived 1970s organization “Women Against Pornography.” And although LeGuin apparently hated sword-and-sorcery with a passion, space opera was at least her second favorite thing to hate.  In “A Citizen of Mondath” the author chronicles her early repugnance at the male-centered nature of most SF magazines:

If I glanced at a magazine, it still seemed to be all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery.

She also showcases her animadversions to the genre’s supposed penchant for “pointy breasted brainless young women” throughout LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT.  Nowhere in the collection does LeGuin entertain the notion that the genre might be reformed to become more woman-friendly, as arguably happened not only with later prose serials like THE EXPANSE but with movies like STAR WARS (which LeGuin reviled in a non-LOTN essay).

Most of LeGuin’s anti-male rhetoric is shallow, but “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” manages to dovetail her feminism with her defenses of the interlocked genres of fantasy and science fiction. Given that I’d been forced to defend the metaphenomenal genres more than once, I’m sure that in my initial reading of LOTN I enjoyed her attack on the tendency of Americans to validate only realistic works of literature, so I had to agree when she claimed that, “We tend, as a people, to look upon all works of the imagination either as suspect or as contemptible.” And I have to admire the concision of her rebuttal: “Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time.”

However, as I reread the way she tends to blame this tendency on “the men who run the country,” I believe that her defense is based in false premises. Often she seems to talking less about the actual tastes of actual persons, and more about some “Puritan work ethic” boogieman. It is also, it seems, a boogieman that infects only men with a lack of imaginative vigor, which leads to their disinterest not only in Tolkien but also in Tolstoy, as well as to their preference for “sterile” works like “bloody detective thrillers on the television” or best-seller fiction.

Although one might assume that American women would become just as influenced by something as pervasive as the “work ethic,” the ladies get a pass. LeGuin tells us that even women read material no less imaginatively impoverished, like “soap operas” and “nursy novels,” they simply haven’t been given the chance to nourish their imaginations, living as they do in a sort of “Femiinine Mystique” America.

The main problem of the “Dragons” essay is that LeGuin is entirely too dismissive of the appeal of verisimilitude in itself, whether it appears in a Tolstoy novel or in a “bloody detective thriller.” Throughout most of its history, American students were raised, as were students in many European cultures, to value naturalistic works of art above those dependent on “imagination.” I’m sure LeGuin would hold Tolstoy blameless insofar as his accomplishments provided support for the position of the “naturalism-first” crowd. I, however, consider WAR AND PEACE to be just as guilty of encouraging the marginalization of the metaphenomenal as any best-seller or “nursy novel.”

LeGuin’s antipathy for the commercial side of book-selling lies at the roots of her skewed rhetoric. She can’t conceive that the naturalistic form of artistic fiction might have a deleterious effect upon Americans’ ability to dream of dragons; it has to be the work of those evil fiction-factories and their soulless hacks. In truth, though, there’s no one to blame. As Northrop Frye wrote, all of literature aligns itself along a spectrum ranging from the purest “verisimilitude” to what Frye called “myth”—which, for him, included beings who could do anything, in contrast to mortal limitations. A critical viewpoint unable to recognize how much the reader of Harold Robbins has in common with a reader of Tolstoy and Zola remains, in the final analysis, no more sophisticated than that of an Edmund Wilson who rejects hobbits and dragons as a matter of course.

Elsewhere in "Dragons," LeGuin cites a definition of the imagination that seems to borrow from both Kant and Tolkien:

By imagination, then, I personally mean the free play of the mind, both intellectual and sensory. By "play" I mean recreation, re-creation, the recombination of what is known into what is new. By "free" I mean that the action is done without an immediate object of profit-- spontaneously.

Philosophically, I have no serious problem with this statement, but only with LeGuin's elitist application of the position. She immediately hedges her "sponteaneity" argument to claim that "the free play of an adult mind" can be something as sophisticated as Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE. Okay, but Tolstoy was a landed aristocrat; he had a lot of free time for his free play, and though he didn't need to write for a living, he certainly wanted his work to have some effect on society. To say that only the object of "profit" invalidates an author's intentions for his work strikes me as special pleading as defined thusly:

Applying standards, principles, and/or rules to other people or circumstances, while making oneself or certain circumstances exempt from the same critical criteria, without providing adequate justification.  Special pleading is often a result of strong emotional beliefs that interfere with reason.

In the process of LeGuin's project to defend imaginative art, she has chosen to blame Americans' supposed preference for realistic art on their seduction by Puritanism and the Protestant work-ethic. But the work-ethic came about in large part because America had few or no aristocrats; almost everyone had to work for a living. And thus a lot of people don't want to "work" for their entertainment as well as for their daily bread. If they reject both Tolstoy and Tolkien in favor of current bestsellers, it may just be that they have a taste for verisimilitude because they don't want to work too hard to be amused. I don't mind challenging such tastes. But I think LeGuin merely sought to create a new aristocracy of taste to replace the more plebeian version she opposed-- and that, for all her highflown rhetoric about imagination, she herself failed to imagine the position of her perceived opponents.

WORK PLAY ACT

In FREEDOM VS. FREEDOM PART 2, I mentioned that:

both "work" and "play" are interdependent necessities, not opposed in the conventional sense that people oppose, say, "right choice" and "wrong choice."

Nowhere is this more true than in the domain of art. There are countless professions that do not invoke the spirit of play. No one asks whether a plumber or a carpenter infuses his labor with such spirits.

It's arguable as to whether some forms of art may be easier to turn out as on an assembly-line. Certainly any number of popular genres, be it mysteries, romances, or superheroes, have been critiqued as being all but identical in form and function. Nevertheless, this elitist criticism overlooks the fact that not every genre-product seems identical to its audience. Writer X succeeds more than Writer Y precisely because the audience thinks Writer X has some quality that Y does not. Often, if not always, this quality stems from X's ability to come up with characters or situations that fire the audience's imagination. This is only possible if Writer X possessed what Kant called (in a different context) "the free play of the imagination."

The art of acting might be considered less amenable to the assembly-line ethic. Millions of actors perform in stage and screen every day, and all of those performances, whether judged as "good work" or "bad work," fall under the rubric of work.

Yet the dynamic of "play" in acting is harder to pin down. On one hand, an actor must strive to mirror the emotions of a given character with as much fidelity as is possible. If the actor plays a tough guy, he must project toughness; if a buffoon, buffoonishness, and so on.

And yet, even though this reproduction sounds like "work," in the same way that an assembly-line worker would produce one identical automobile part after another, the superior actor is distinguished from the inferior one by his imaginative qualities.

To take a couple of examples from Classic Hollywood, I would compare contemporaries George Raft and Humphrey Bogart.

George Raft broke into Hollywood stardom thanks to his role in Howard Hawks' 1932 SCARFACE. Though Raft enjoyed his share of cinematic successes, today he's also known for passing on a number of potentially career-building roles, HIGH SIERRA and THE MALTESE FALCON (both 1941), ostensibly because he thought the roles would make him seem unsympathetic. In my view, he was a limited actor who couldn't manage to put himself in the shoes of such morally ambiguous characters.

One anecdote avers that Humphrey Bogart and George Raft knew one another, and that Bogart sometimes advised Raft not to take this or that role, only to take the role for himself. This has the ring of truth, since actors have been known to undercut one another to get ahead. But if Bogart did this, his actions probably produced better results for films like HIGH SIERRA. It's hard to imagine Raft putting across the combination of toughness and sentiment that make up the character of Roy Earle, as did Bogart.

How does "play" manifest in a performance, be it live or preserved on celluloid? It may be through innumerable bits of physical "business" that convey to the audience a more organic sense of the character's actuality, or it may be something more sweeping, a mental concept of the character that assembles all of the disparate "parts" of the performance into a whole greater than the sum of those parts. But in any case, the profession of the actor seems particularly apt as a means of distinguishing the interacting forms of work and play.

CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

In Part 1, I wrote:

Conscresence, more than its roughly equivalent term "coagulation," suggests the process by which seemingly unrelated phenomena "concretize" into a greater whole. Thus images, symbols and story-tropes which can only have a very limited meaning by themselves, take on greater depth when associated with others that have a reinforcing effect.

What causes this "reinforcing effect," though? Upon rereading August's FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3, it occurred to me that most of the mythcomics essays I've printed here depend on the authors having organized their symbolic constructs around what I called "aspects of discursive symbolism." The full context is as follows:

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

In other words, in order for a narrative to manifest the strongest form of symbolic concrescence-- a.k.a. "hyperconcrescence," as I currently like to call it-- the author(s) must first draw upon what they know of the real world, the world which can be represented by discursive symbolism (or "work"). Then, to make this knowledge function in a fictive world, the kernels of information must be transformed into the tropes of presentational (also called "expressive") symbolism (or "play"). Thus the mind's ability to "work hard" proves essential to the process of "playing hard," and therefore, "playing well."

I have to reiterate that it's always possible for an author to "dumb down" the expressive symbolism in a narrative in order to get across some limited didactic message. When an author does so, he has to some extent sacrificed "play" on the altar of pure "work" by making the narrative function as persuasive rhetoric. That said, creators who have deep reservoirs of imagination may still at times produce narratives that have the qualities of mythic play even though the authors are trying to convert an audience to some position.

Case in point: Dave Sim's CEREBUS. Most of the time, particularly in the later issues, Sim is seeking to persuade readers of his philosophical positions, and this is probably no less true in the narratives I've deemed mythcomics (the last part of LAST DAYS here, and the first part of GUYS here) as in a narrative I deemed a "null-myth" (the horror of CHASING YHWH). But irrespective of Sim's conscious intentions, his imagination is "working" full blast at the same time his conscious intellect is formulating the didactic schemes of the prior two works, while in YHWH, his imagination has sort of given up the game. So, although discursive symbolism is at work in all three, in CHASING YHWH there is no such transformation of Sim's rhetorical stance into the playful discourse of art. Thus, even though I personally disagree with Sim's position re: "fanboys" as he expresses them in GUYS, I had to give him some props for "promoting a satiric version of Spider-Man to make his points about creeping emotionalism." Thus there's an expressive underthought to complement the rhetorical overthought.

I will expand on the final paragraph from FOUNTS PT. 3:

I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

In similar fashion, I regard Sim's sociological connections between comic book people and "creeping emotionalism" to be incorrect on two counts: one, because there's no way to prove such a connection, and two, because even if there was one, how would it be categorically different from the "creeping emotionalism" present in any other ingroup-- say, Canadian hockey fans?

Hyperconcrescence, then, most often takes place when the discursive mode of work, the overthought, reinforces the expressive underthought. The main exceptions are those narratives that seem to have no strong discursive overthought, like the origin of the Golden Age Hawkman. Yet even here, author Gardner Fox is conjuring with metaphysical tropes that were discursively organized by their pagan proponents. And thus familiar tropes, such as the one regarding the soul's fate after death, still exhibit the modern author's understanding of the original structuring principles, even within the venue of a superhero comic book.

WORK PLAY LOVE

In this review from my movie-blog I touched on the dialectic of work and play indirectly. An otherwise average episode of the teleseries KUNG FU, "The Hoots," brings the hero Kwai Chang Caine into prolonged contact with a group of Hutterite sheepherders. The "hoots" are defined in terms of their extreme pacifism and abstemiousness, and while Caine lives a life that is arguably no less disciplined, he does not define discipline in terms of self-denial. Indeed, Master Po tells Young Caine that, "The purpose of discipline is to live more fully, not less."

The scene evolves as follows: while Caine stays with the sheepherders, he pays for his keep with work. He begins cutting wood, singing a work-song as he does so. Schultz, the de facto leader of the group, objects to Caine's singing because he feels that work must be identical with "suffering." Caine expresses the opinion that singing makes the work go more easily, so why not do it? Nevertheless, the Shaolin accedes to his host's wishes but the overall trajectory of the episode is that Caine is right about the practicality of using play to lighten one's work-load, and that Schultz's desire for public suffering-- both his own, and that of his community-- stems from pride: the pride to show off how well he can wear the hair-shirt.

My first comments about the dialectic of "work and play" appears in the two-essay series THE DIVIDING LINE, starting here. I said back then:

In any case other play-acting creatures, just like humans, begin as entities with no ability to work, even if other animals aren't helpless for as long a period as humans. Both animals and humans can, however, play even if they can't work, at least in the most exploratory and unstructured manner. And though humans have a longer development period than other animals, humans don't remain isolated from the concept of work all that much longer than our fellow beasts: if their "vacation" ends with the onset of adulthood in about a year or so, the human freedom to do nothing but play ends not with adulthood but with a protracted period of learning which, because it has a discrete purpose, must be considered as "work."

So human children become intimately acquainted with the dialectic of work and play early on. But because most adults prioritize the need for play in children's development, one may symbolically identify juveniles with the activity of play.

Conversely, though adults too exist within a continuum in which they balance work and play, the essence of being adult is that an adult must work to make it possible for children to grow, develop, and play-- at least until said adult is old enough to retire from work (at least in theory) and to devote the remainder of his life to "play," if he so wishes.

I spoke of how an adult builds on his childhood experience to achieve a "balance" between the elements of work, activity that must be done, and play, activity one is pleased to do. However, I didn't comment upon the basic idea that elements of play are sometimes used to make work more pleasurable, though in FREEDOM VS. FREEDOM PT. 2 I mentioned that the two activities were interdependent:

 I mention this to emphasize that both "work" and "play" are interdependent necessities, not opposed in the conventional sense that people oppose, say, "right choice" and "wrong choice."

The activities are interdependent in part because of the way humans, and many other higher animals, have evolved to explore the world in a playful context before settling down to the business of sustaining oneself, i.e., "work." The observations that a creature makes, or does not make, in its developmental phases may well determine the creature's fitness to survive in its adult form.

Whether or not non-human animals practice any activities comparable with "work-songs," or even Disney's take of "whistling while you work," I cannot say. I think it inarguable that human beings have been pursuing this strategy for centuries. One might choose to judge it purely as an evolutionary adaptive practice, though I believe this would be too simple. At the conclusion of FREEDOM VS. FREEDOM PART 2, I said:

Can one meaningfully draw parallels, then, between the freedom to make moral choices and the ability to change one's phenomenological perspective within fictional narratives? I obviously think so, even with my knowledge that most people are not conscious of those differing perspectives. 

I chose to focus in that context upon "phenomenological perspective" because in that essay I started out contrasting "discursive thinking" and "mythical thinking." However, play need not involve phenomenology as such. Freud suggested that a baby who threw his toys out of their cribs over and over were in the grip of a "repetition-compulsion." But this overlooks the possibility that the baby, learning that his parent will pick up the toy and put it back in the crib, may simply be indulging in a rudimentary form of "play," one oriented on controlling the somewhat unpredictable parental unit.

Play can be a way of sussing out the way the normal world works, if only by contrasting normal behavior with abnormal behavior. To the Hutterite Schultz, the "normal" was defined by labor, suffering, and avoidance of conflict, while Kwai Chang Caine was concerned by the interaction of work and play, the (seemingly) normal and the (seemingly) abnormal, the peaceful mind and the need to fight to defend the body. To be sure, Schultz's over-emphasis on "work" may have come about in reaction to others who played too much: "the house of mirth" to his "house of mourning." But both of the houses include "many mansions," and it would seem that an ability to spend some time in both houses is intrinsic to learning how to live-- and love-- more fully.