THE EXCLUDED THIRD

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

My use of the term "excluded third" is an idiosyncratic one, for it has nothing to do with the term's use in formal logic, where it's better known as "the excluded middle." But it amused me to use a high-flown philosophical term for a "third" that I simply neglected to include in one of my classification endeavors.

In 2020's DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, I applied the established art-terms "grotesques" and "arabesques" to two dominant trends in the mythos of the BATMAN comics. First I applied the term "grotesque" to Batman, due to the forbidding nature of his costume and his origins in a traumatic experience. Then I applied "arabesque" to Robin, to characterize his bright, colorful costume and the dominant playful attitude he took to fighting crime alongside his mentor. Then I extended the same metaphors to the duo's rogues' gallery, according to whether the rogues were dominantly "fearful" or "fanciful."

In my second essay on the topic,THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD, I attempted to distinguish between the dominant motives of grotesque villains and arabesque villains:

So, having made Robin’s presence more essential to the overall development of the Bat-mythos, the bachelor-thread for the overall series must balance the elements of darkness and brightness. Additionally, although the heroes are victims of trauma, many of the villains are less traumatized than simply maladjusted, usually by virtue of greed. Obsession rather than trauma as such seems to define the Bat-mythos. Batman himself starts the ball rolling by extending his chosen identity to such tools as the Batarang and the Batmobile; the Joker follows suit with a poison that causes his victims to laugh themselves to death, and so on. So perhaps a trial thread might read something like, “Though the Greeks wanted to find beauty only in bright things and ugliness in dark ones, virtue and vice have equal propensities to be either light or dark, depending on the nature of the obsession.” This thread-concept would even remain in operation during the era I call “Candyland Batman,” when Batman himself is very nearly the only character who projects any grotesque affects, and nearly every new villain is conceived along the lines of the Penguin’s arabesque obsessions, thus leading to crooks who base their crimes on the use of kites and freeze-rays and polka dots.

I don't retract any of these classifications, which I think apply across the board to all of the "super-villains." However, there is a third category of Bat-foe who is not "super" in any way: the category of the "ordinary crook." Extraordinary crooks and ordinary crooks align respectively with what I have called "abstract goal-affects" and "concrete goal-affects" in the essay EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS:

In THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PART 2 I formulated the joint idea of "concrete goal-affects" and "abstract goal-affects," which were affects located within the personas of fictional characters, with whom audiences are meant to identify.  I asserted that the former affects were "directed toward the goal of gain or the goal of safety," that is, to the desire to achieve a specific real-world effect, while the latter were more oriented on the faculty of *esteem,* which the Greeks called *thymos.*  I noted that "neither the logic of the desire for gain nor the desire for safety seems to govern the operations of *thymos.* 

The more I think about Hobbes' "three principal causes of quarrel," however, the more I come to believe that these three might be subsumed into two.  The aggressor who wants to build up his store of goods by robbing his neighbor is in a sense following the same concrete instinct as the victim who fights back, trying to protect what he already has... One might therefore see Hobbes' categories of "gain" and "safety" subsumed into one concrete goal-affect, which I will term "acquisition" after Bataille's use of the term. "Glory," in contrast to both "gain" and "safety"-- the main manifestations of acquisition-- lacks the practicality of the concrete affects, so that its overriding category is that of expenditure, also covered in the above essay. 

The majority of ordinary crooks in Batman's world have no interest in playing "games of expenditure" with the Dynamic Duo. Pure acquisition is their modus operandi: either they want to acquire the goods of others or to keep tight hold of the riches they've plundered. They don't challenge Batman with jokes or riddles, and even though some of them may come up with imaginative schemes to promote their larceny, particularly during the gimmicky tales of Batman's Golden Age, making money is their concrete goal, and so they carry the association of acquisition. 

The principal exception is that of revenge, as when a malefactor seeks to seek vengeance on a law-abiding person, or a law enforcement figure, for having caused harm to the malefactor or some ally. At first glance this might seem related to Hobbes' notion of "reputation," as when Crook A wants to show the law-dogs that Policeman B cannot get away with causing him injury. But this sketch fails the expenditure test, for at the roots of Crook A's desire for vengeance is the desire not to be challenged in his criminal activities, not the will to challenge a superior opponent, as we get whenever the Riddler attempts to out-riddle Batman.

Though most Bat-fans have enjoyed the hero's jousts with extraordinary criminals far more than the opposite, it's a mark of the franchise's groundedness that the hero has always had a substantial number of encounters with ordinary, acquisitive felons. This is certainly logic given that both Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson lost their parents to ordinary crooks, and this coheres with the fact that although children enjoyed Golden Age Batman comics in an escapist fashion, those same children knew the consequences of real crime. If they had no real-world experience of crime in their mundane lives, they would still know how thoroughly organized crime had infested American life, would have heard of scandals like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. And, at least in fantasy, they could imagine a hero capable of tearing out such festering sores.

All of the Batman mythcomics I've reviewed on this blog concentrate upon "extraordinary crooks," who inevitably have a stronger tendency to inspire symbolic discourse than their ordinary compeers. The sole exception is the two-page ORIGIN OF BATMAN, and even this concentrates not on the nameless criminal who kills the Waynes, but on the hero's singular response to this trauma. There may well be examples of "mythic ordinary crooks" somewhere amid the Bat-mythos, possibly obscured by the larger-than-life array of grotesques and arabesques. Additionally, the problem of crime itself may be conceived of as mythic in nature. In a previous post I noted that although ordinary crooks cannot harm the Spectre thanks to his almost unlimited powers, collectively the world of crime has the power to prevent the Ghostly Guardian from giving up his crusade and passing on to his heavenly reward. Crime as a whole has a similar hold on The Batman. Ordinary crooks cannot challenge him, but their ubiquity remains a constant thorn in his side-- and this is the role ordinary, acquisition-based crooks play in the next mythcomic I review, BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN. 

QUICK CANTER ON A HOBBESIAN HORSE

I've recently started reading the "Caprona trilogy" of Edgar Rice Burroughs, two of which-- THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT and THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT-- became dinosaur-adventure films in the 1970s.  But it's not the novels proper that relate to my Hobbes-derived definition of narrative goal-affects-- i.e, "glory" and "persistence"-- but the introduction to Modern Library's 2002 collection of the three novels.  This unattributed introduction quotes Gore Vidal, talking about his childhood love of Burroughs' books.  At the conclusion of his reminiscence, Vidal said:

In its naive way, the Tarzan legend returns us to that Eden where, free of clothes and the inhibitions of an oppressive society, a man can achieve in reverie his continuing need... to prevail as well as endure.

Clearly, Vidal's idea of "prevailing" links with the value of "glory," which I have linked to the Bataillean concept of "expenditure," of going beyond what one needs just to survive, while "enduring" is characteristic of the concept of "acquisition," of maintaining the existential status quo.  I find it interesting that Vidal should make this mental leap, given that most figures from the world of canonical literature don't show any ability to think in such abstract terms.

I have some thoughts as to how these categories of goal-affect might relate to Frank Fukuyama's categories of "thymos:" *megalothymia* and *isothymia.*  But these will be elaborated in a separate essay.

EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 4

In Part 3 I contrasted two teleseries—LOST IN SPACE and THE LOST WORLD-- which shared the same base concept—a group of castaways journeying through strange worlds, often obliged to help others in keeping with a dominant moral outlook of Good Samaritanism.  I did so to clarify that the differences between the personas of “heroes” and “demiheroes” are not determined by what they do, but how they do it.

The emphasis on "what they do" is one I've started calling “the recipe mentality.”  Vladimir Propp’s folktale-morphology, which I’ve admired hugely, is one example of this mentality.  For Propp the difference between his two types of protagonist, the “seeker” and the “victimized hero,” is a difference based in their orientation in terms of folkloric plot: one is largely active, the other is largely passive.

I admire Propp’s intent, to focus on the bare rudiments of narrative as closely as possible, presumably to avoid imposing some heuristic vision of his own upon the original materials. However, some time ago I realized that in popular fiction at least, there was no clear division between such plot-based actions, and I doubt that one exists in folktales either.  LOST IN SPACE and LOST WORLD are two serials with essentially the same premise, but their respective protagonist-ensembles combine, in varying proportions, the actions of Propp’s “seekers” as well as his “victimized heroes.”  In terms of dominant plotlines, I would have to say that more often than not the ensembles are placed in the position of the “victimized heroes,” in that trouble usually seeks them out rather than the other way round. Still, the Proppian distinction doesn’t capture the difference in character-attitude, which might be fairly deemed a failure of Propp’s analysis (one attacked in general terms by J.R.R. Tolkien, as mentioned here).

A parallel difference in character-attitude must also be the determining factor between the personas of the villain and the monster.  I’ve observed in past essays that some critics have tried to see the persona of “the monster” as applying only to creatures that seem without “motives, ambitions, or soul.”  In CREATED AND CREATOR ENSEMBLED HE THEM I gave evidence as to why even a very intellectual type of character, such as Wells’ Doctor Moreau, could still be a “monster.”  This reasoning also applies as to what qualities would separate Moreau’s monstrous nature from the nature of a “villain” who might employ the same modus operandi, that of making animals from men.  At some point I may try to make a direct comparison between Wells’ Moreau and some more villainous version of his type.  For the time being I’ll illustrate my “villain/monster” divide with reference to two of the most famous “mad scientists” in popular literature, Victor Frankenstein and Doctor Fu Manchu.

When this opposition occurred to me, I realized that it might have been awkward to compare the original novel-characters.  Mary Shelley’s mad scientist (who technically never becomes a licensed doctor) begins and ends within the scope of one novel.  Sax Rohmer’s “devil-doctor” seems to have been intended as a serial character from the beginning.  To keep the parallels closer, I decided to examine how each character was constructed in terms of works that were both intended as ongoing serial works.

I’ve now reviewed only the first entries of the Hammer FRANKENSTEIN series and the Harry Alan Towers-produced FU MANCHU series.  Both serials starred British actors and focused upon characters created by British authors.  The Hammer series debuted in the late 1950s and lasted sporadically until the early 1970s.  The Towers series debuted in the middle 1960s and lasted only about five more years, and arguably it coattailed on the success of the Hammer horror-films, since the Fu Manchu series starred an actor made internationally famous by his assocation with Hammer.  The Hammer Frankenstein series is well regarded in some critical circles, while Towers’ Fu Manchu films are generally beneath any critical radar.  But for my purposes, the serials’ most important point of comparison is how each uses the “mad scientist” trope.

The Shelley novel devotes considerable time to Frankenstein’s backstory, and Rohmer’s novels build up a complex if indirect portrait of Fu Manchu’s character.  Neither THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN nor THEFACE OF FU MANCHU delves into motivation, however.  As I remarked in my CURSE review, the only motivation Victor Frankenstein has for his experiments is that he is a “precocious child of privilege” who also happens to be a genius and wishes to prove it.  Towers’ Fu Manchu doesn’t even get this much.  Nayland Smith describes the devil-doctor as “the most dangerous and evil man in the world,” and that’s the only motive needed, with Towers eschewing even the minimal political motivations of the novels (i.e., Fu Manchu may have been a product of China’s Boxer Rebellion).

Nevertheless, even with spotty depictions of character, it can be demonstrated that of the two characters—both devoted to a consciensce-less pursuit of science for personal gain-- one of the two conforms to the persona of the monster, and the other to that of the villain.

I indicated in EXPENDITURE PT. 3 that LOST IN SPACE’s characters were characterized by the value of “persistence.”  The characters in that series comprised a family whose primary concern was one of homeostasis; the ability to survive from day to day while allowing the children to mature under the best achievable circumstances. In the Shelley novel Victor Frankenstein—whom I would view as the demihero counterpart of his monstrous creation—also seeks a homeostasis, but in a thoroughly negative sense. Threatened by the agency of other people, Frankenstein subconsciously wants to be a community of one, and so allows his monster-doppelganger to kill all those that threaten his solitary hegemony.

The Victor Frankenstein of CURSE extends this scientific preoccupation to Sadean proportions.  Like his novelistic forbear, Hammer-Frankenstein becomes the prisoner of his own idée fixee, but the Hammer version is much more calculatingly cruel than Shelley’s original.  Whereas the novel version agonizes over his love for his cousin Elizabeth, Frankenstein barely wants his beauteous cousin in his life. At most he consents to marry her for societal convenience, though he may also be aware that his tutor Paul loves her, and so wants to keep Elizabeth around in order to manipulate Paul.  Sex for Frankenstein is an itch that he scratches with his convenient maid Justine.  When Justine has the temerity to get pregnant, Frankenstein has no interest in the fact that she carries his child, and he sets up the mother of his child—and his child—to be killed by his captive creature.  As I pointed out with regard to Doctor Moreau, the negative manifestations of the demihero—dominantly a positive persona-- are never as extreme as those of the monster, a persona statistically dominated by a negative nature.  Like Moreau, Frankenstein prates about having his genius recognized by others, but neither of them really cares about fame.  They exist to unleash the dark forces of their respective obsessions, and their genius-intellects are merely the vehicle for those obsessions.  The voice of a more humanistic side of genius is heard early in the film, before Baron Frankenstein harvests the genius’ brain for his obscene creation:   

“… we [scientists] quickly tire of our discoveries.  We hand them over to people who are not ready for them—while we go off again into the darkness of ignorance—searching for other discoveries, which will be mishandled in just the same way.”—Doctor Bernstein, courtesty of CURSE scribe Jimmy Sangster.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that scribe Sangster associates the productions of science with the delving into “the darkness of ignorance.” Normally one imagines science as a light that dispels ignorance, but Sangster’s Bernstein sees it as unleashing dark forces in a human community ill-prepared for such revelations, while those doing the unleashing are no less prisoners of their own obsessed psyches.  Thus science, rather than dispelling darkness, merely allowes it to propagate new forms, like Frankenstein’s monster.  Thus the intelligent genius of a Frankenstein conveys the same value of a “negative persistence” that we see in unthinking monsters like Leatherface or the Blob.

I said earlier that Hammer-Frankenstein’s obsession had been extended to Sadean proportions.  By that I meant that his cruelty is more deliberate than that of the demihero-protagonist of the Shelley novel.  However, it’s a cruelty that is largely reactive to circumstances, like the threat Justine poses to Frankenstein’s operations.  True Sadean sentiments are proactive; they seek cruelty for its own sake, not simply to achieve homeostasis.

The Towers Fu Manchu, as I noted earlier, shows no political motivations in his desire for world domination.  The Fu Manchu of the Rohmer novels dreams an impossible dream, seeking the return of the hegemony of ancient China in the face of European dominance and (in the later novels) in opposition to Chinese Communism.  True, since Towers’ Fu Manchu is served mostly by Asian aides—his Chinese daughter, his dacoits, who strangle people with their “Tibetan prayer scarves”—one presumes that if Fu Manchu achieved world conquest, the result would be a world with Asians on top. So the threat of the “Yellow Peril” is still one of Asian hegemony, even though Towers tries to stay away from real-world politics.   

       

Whereas Frankenstein’s senseless ambition merely stems from the “negative persistence” of his own ego, Fu Manchu’s mad science is informed by “negative glory.”  Admittedly, the Towers Fu Manchu doesn’t seem to defy history quite as much as the Rohmer character does with his passion to revive dynastic China.  Still, Fu’s central plan might be deemed a pre-technological take on nuclear brinkmanship.  He eschews dirtying his hands with modern technology; Fu wants to destroy Western hegemony with a natural weapon born in the remote wilds of the East, specifically Tibet. Today modern audiences would never place credence in a death-drug brewed from some rare Eastern flower.  These audiences have too much belief that the next source of chemical warfare will come from some terrorists’ laboratory.  Such weapons, even if conceived by Eastern enemies of the West, would still be a continuation of Western science, but would not be the exclusive properties of the mysterious East.

Because of this primitivist urge, Towers’ Fu Manchu still carries the aura of Satanic defiance, of purposefully transgressing the norms of society, as all good villains must. Monsters, in contrast, usually transgress norms without as much conscious intention, or else by using some false rationale, as do mad doctors like Moreau and Hammer-Frankenstein.  Thus Fu Manchu is also a Sadean in the true sense of the word, in that he desires power for its own sake—though in FACE it is his daughter, rather than the devil-doctor, who shows a desire to take erotic pleasure in cruelty.  

I must note in closing that in the first Towers Fu Manchu film, the devil-doctor isn’t seen showing off his own scientific genius as Victor Frankenstein does in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN.  In FACE OF FU MANCHU the evil genius allows other experts to brew the death-drug of the Black Lotus, and one never sees his own perfidious inventions.  However, later Towers entries do show Fu Manchu conceiving weird weapons of his own, so I would say that the Black Lotus peril of FACE is still evidence of Fu’s scientific aegis, even if he has others doing the work for him.  Certainly he comes across as more of a wonder-worker in FACE than he does in MYSTERIOUS DR. FU MANCHU, where he just knows a few exotic poisons. 

Even the endings of the respective films differ in their presentations of “persistence” and “glory.”  CURSE ends with Frankenstein about to go to the guilloutine, but since the film proved successful, Hammer’s producers found a way to show that the baron escaped execution so that there could be further appearances of Peter Cushing’s obsessed scientist.  FACE OF FU MANCHU starts from the other extreme: Fu Manchu appears to die in the film’s first scene, but his nemesis Nayland Smith still imagines that he lives despite being beheaded.  Nayland Smith eventually figures out how the evil doctor pulled off the trick, and attempts to kill Fu Manchu in the film’s final scene.  But Fu Manchu implicitly survives any and all devastating dooms levied upon him, due to the villainous glory attaching to him.  Hammer’s Victor Frankenstein also persists from film to film, destined to come up with a new monster each time.  But Frankenstein never becomes a glorious figure.  No matter how many innocents die for his experiments, he, the wandering monster, is arguably more pathetic than any of them—as I hope to show with further examinations of the Hammer series.

EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 3

Since writing the conclusion to EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 2, I've decided that it might be simpler to illustrate my point about the distinctions between "glory" and "persistence" with another pair of hero/demihero examples.

This essay was somewhat informed by consideration of the notion of character-types introduced in Vladimir Propp's MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE, of which I wrote:

What Propp's paradigm [of the "seeker"type of folklore-protagonist and the "victimized hero"] describes is essentially a difference between "heroism in activity" versus "heroism in passivity." "Heroism" in this context must be divorced from the nature of any particular hero: in folklore studies it connotes simply the actions (or non-actions) of the characters with whom the audience is supposed to sympathize. The same parallel obtains with characters who dominantly represent the forces of chaos, with villains representing a very active form of evil, while monsters tend toward greater passivity (dragons who are minding their own business guarding their hoards when knights come calling, and so on.)

Propp's characterization of the latter protagonist-type, the "victimized hero," puts me in mind of a particular type of hero-type which seems, on the face of things, to conform to the paradigm: the castaway-protagonist, who, either alone or as part of a group, is stranded in some unfamiliar locale or environment.  At first glance one might assume all castaway-types to be passive and victimized figures, given that they are generally focused purely on survival and, where possible, finding a way back to familiar territory.  One might inquire as to whether the castaway's efforts to find his way home do not make him the sort of "seeker" Propp writes about in his first category.  Again, in my reading of Propp, the actions of a seeker imply a much more active status than the usual castaway-type-- though there are, as I will show, exceptions to that generalization.

The values of "persistence" and "survival" are strongly encoded in the 1965-68 teleseries LOST IN SPACE, whose family of space-castaways take their name from the novel SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON.  The Robinsons' original mission is one of space-exploration, which again might be read as a sort of "seeking," though not one that necessarily carries the value of "glory."  The characters' spaceship is thrown off course, and for the remainder of the series they follow the standard pattern of castaway-fiction, alternating between attempts to survive and attempts to find a way home.

Many episodes-- possibly a majority-- involve some violent conflict between the Robinsons and various aliens who menace them for assorted reasons.  The explorers command a limited number of space-age weapons.  These register as having high dynamicity-- even though said weapons usually prove ineffective-- and their artificial cast-member the Robot also commands a fair amount of power, as well.  In keeping with my observations on the nature of the combative mode, this opposition of superlative forces does imbue the series with the narrative value of the combative, in that combative conflicts do take place. However, the significant value is not satsisfied, in that the conflicts do not dominate the theme of the narrative, as they do in a comparable series like STAR TREK.

Despite the family's original purpose of space-exploration, the majority of the castaways-- mother Maureen Robinson, children Judy, Penny, and Will, and the cowardly stowaway Doctor Sniith-- are presented as being far from inclined to fight under most circumstances.  Only two of the male protagonists-- "alpha male" John Robinson and "beta male" Major Don West-- show much competence in the combat department, and even then, Major West only rarely shines as being more than just a "good" fighter.  John Robinson-- played by Guy Williams, the former TV "Zorro"-- is more frequently positioned as an above-average combatant, occasionally even displaying Zorro-style swordfighting skills.

Though the Robinsons are potrayed as being willing to go to the wall to save persecuted or put-upon victims from aggressors, they only do so as a last resort, which makes them very different from the concept of the hero as a more active defender of right.  For this reason I find that the tenor of the Space Family Robinson's adventures is concerned with "persistence" first and "glory" second if at all.

But as I indicated above, not all castaway-series necessarily follow this pattern.  Consider in contrast another teleseries, the 1999-2002 "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World."

For simplicity's sake I'll pass over any analysis of the original Arthur Conan Doyle novel, which was a novel of exploration but did not involve any castaway-themes, as well as the various films that purported to adapt the novel.  The syndicated series takes only a few elements from the novel, such as the names of several characters in the party that ends up stranded within the "lost world," a plateau in South America where prehistoric creatures and quasi-human tribes still exist.

On the surface, the "Lost World" party was concerned with the same contingencies as the Robinson party, surviving amidst abnormal dangers and searching for a way back to the real world.  However, from the first, the value of "glory" is emphasized, even in the voice-over to the series' introductory theme:

“At the dawn of the last century, a band of explorers searched for a prehistoric world, driven by ambition, secret desires, a thirst for adventure, and seeking the ultimate story..."

These four thumbnail motivations were meant to suggest respectively the four dominant (and most combat-worthy) members of the original party: Sir John Challenger, Marguerite Krux, Lord John Roxton, and Ned Malone.  The theme also references the "late addition" of the fifth character, Veronica the jungle-girl, introduced as "an untamed beauty."  Veronica was transparently modeled on such jungle-heroes as Tarzan and Sheena, and unlike the others, is eventually given an official status as a mystical protector of the plateau-world.

However, even without focusing on the function of Veronica, the Challenger party don't act as the Robinsons do, simply trying to mind their own business and survive.  Over their three seasons all of them (with the exception of noncombatant character Summerlee, who's killed off in Season One) become de facto "policemen" to the plateau, constantly intervening to sort out good from evil.  Admittedly none of the other regular characters verbally expouse the sort of "mission" that Veronica does.  Still, their various reasons for coming to the plateau all suggest the desire to be magnified in some way.  Since the aim of the LOST WORLD series is to be as exciting as possible-- rather than emphasizing the melodramatic persuasions of LOST IN SPACE-- all five of the heroes are constantly engaging in combative activities, and are seen, more often than not, enjoying the "glory" of martial triumph.

On to "villain vs. monster" in Part 4.

EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 2

In Part 1 I took the trouble to articulate category-names for Bataille's formulation on humankind's attitudes toward consumption-- elsewhere referenced as "the desire to conserve and the desire to expend"-- as well as to fuse them with my Schopenhauer-derived categories of "will."  To be sure, were Bataille alive he'd probably condemn the endeavor, as Stuart Kendall's biography mentions that the French author had no love for the German philosopher.

Having done all this, I must admit that the categories of "expenditure" and "acquisition," which describe how the affects of fictional characters impress themselves on readers, don't have great utility as working terms.  I've been striving to isolate two common words that summarize the emotional tenor of, respectively, "abstract goal-affects" and "concrete goal-affects."

In my first attempt at finding two such tenor-terms, I drew on a dichotomy of "courage" and "endurance" suggested by actor Christopher Reeve-- though had I wanted to resort to a more intellectually respectable source, I could have just as easily cited Socrates' opposition of "courage" and "temperance" in THE STATESMAN.  I said that Johnny Thunder, despite his mental limitations, was essentially an "active hero" who suggested the tenor of intellectual courage. In contrast I said of Jimmy Olsen:

For all of his flirtations with heroism, Olsen is first and foremost an "ordinary guy," which allowed him to show an "endurance" sort of heroism in some stories, and to be a pure "victim" in others.
 

Later I tended to use terms derived from Hobbes, as in the PLAYING MERRY HOBBES essay:

I would say that the qualities of "glory" and "diffidence" also seem better matches for the characters discussed in that earlier essay, with Johnny Thunder following a pattern of "glory" while Jimmy Olsen follows one of "safety" (which I find that I prefer to "diffidence," as that seems to imply a trait of the character rather than a plot-action).
 

I did so again at the end of TWICE THE MIGHT PT. 2: 

I'll note in passing that I rate the central heroes of both films as "demiheroes" in that they are concerned more with the Hobbesian value of "safety" than of "glory."
 

Of these two terms, "glory"-- which is meant to be applied to the "intellectual will" embodied in the hero-persona and the villain-persona-- is not problematic.  Anyone who makes the effort can imagine "glory" being given positive connotations for heroes and negative connotations for villains.

"Safety," however, does not apply across the board to the two persona embodying "instinctive will," the demihero-persona and the monster-persona.  I believe that I was concentrating so much on defining the nature of the demihero, as against the hero, that I failed to find a tenor-term that applied equally well to the persona incarnating the dominantly negative aspect of the instinctive will, the "monster."  The "concrete goal-affects" of a "monster" are not adequately described by "safety."

However, I think that Hobbes' original terms of "safety" and "diffidence"-- which are entirely in line with the "desire to conserve"-- can be subsumed not by what the monster-persona does, but by what it dominantly wants.  In this essay I said.

I’ve defined the persona of the “monster” as the generally negative counterpart of the demihero. Usually the monster is also defined principally by self-preservation, whether the creature is destructive on a large scale (Godzilla) or covets some forbidden prize (King Kong). Self-preservation and endurance also typify even benign monsters, like Man-Thing...
 

The tenor-term for both monsters and demiheroes must be a positive value that can be turned into a negative aspect.  This leaves out Hobbes' terms "safety" and "diffidence," for neither are positive values.  The same holds true for "temperance," the term used in my STATESMAN translation, which doesn't translate easily into a negative manifestation.  Reeves' term "endurance" wasn't quite right, either, but one of its synonyms-- "persistence"-- does have the desired positive connotation.

I for one find it easy to think of the demihero, the "ordinary guy-hero" like Jimmy Olsen, being virtuous primarily in terms of his persistence.  As I said in the cited essay, Olsen is a reporter first and a hero second, while his opposite number Johnny Thunder is defined by being a hero first and a whatever-he-did-for-a-living second.  Thunder may be a dopey comic hero, but he's all about sharing the abstract glory of fighting crime and hanging out with the Olympian company of the Justice Society.  Olsen, a comic demihero, is content to be "Superman's pal," and his forays into heroism are perforce of limited duration.

However, monsters like the ones mentioned above-- Godzilla, King Kong, and the Man-Thing-- are best seen as negative parodies of either human beings or other animal-species.  And yet, though the audience recognizes that their affects are negative in relation to what their victims want, the monsters are charming because of their quality of persistence.  The persistence-virtue of Godzilla and the Man-Thing manifests in their being very nearly immortal; no matter how many times they die, they just keep coming back in some incarnation.  Kong's original incarnation perishes, and to my knowledge only one latter-day effort made the attempt to revive that specific Kong.  However, Kong still comes back in what might termed "template" versions, versions that have no ostensible connection with the original 1933 entity.  But even though Kong is not diegetically immortal, what Kong's afficionados admire in the big ape is another form of "persistence," his dogged if unrequited love for his female co-star.

Clearly, I need to explore the tension between "glory" and the newly-minted term "persistence" with respect to the two negative personas, "monster" and "villain," so that will be the subject of EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 3.

EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

 It is interesting, however, that Propp's summation of his two protagonist-types also turns on a distinction between a protagonist who makes a grand gesture based in "courage"-- that of the seeker following a villain who's seized someone else-- and the survival-instincts of a "victimized hero," whose principal virtue is one of "endurance."-- COMIC HERO VS. COMIC DEMIHERO.

In THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PART 2 I formulated the joint idea of "concrete goal-affects" and "abstract goal-affects," which were affects located within the personas of fictional characters, with whom audiences are meant to identify.  I asserted that the former affects were "directed toward the goal of gain or the goal of safety," that is, to the desire to achieve a specific real-world effect, while the latter were more oriented on the faculty of *esteem,* which the Greeks called *thymos.*  I noted that "neither the logic of the desire for gain nor the desire for safety seems to govern the operations of *thymos.* 

The more I think about Hobbes' "three principal causes of quarrel," however, the more I come to believe that these three might be subsumed into two.  The aggressor who wants to build up his store of goods by robbing his neighbor is in a sense following the same concrete instinct as the victim who fights back, trying to protect what he already has.  The same parallel applies to the paradigm asserted by Propp: an antagonist who simply seizes a victim often (if not always) seeks to satisfy some concrete end, just as the "victimized hero" who endures in order to eventually win free wants to satisfy a similar concrete end.  One might therefore see Hobbes' categories of "gain" and "safety" subsumed into one concrete goal-affect, which I will term "acquisition" after Bataille's use of the term.

"Glory," in contrast to both "gain" and "safety"-- the main manifestations of acquisition-- lacks the practicality of the concrete affects, so that its overriding category is that of expenditure, also covered in the above essay. 

This dichotomy compares favorably with the Schopenhauer-influenced dichotomy formulated in HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3:

In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts." But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts." 

Keeping in mind that I revised Schopenhauer's terms above into terms I found more pleasing-- i.e., "intellectual will" as the principle underlying abstract concepts, and "instinctive will" as the principle underlying concrete percepts-- I will further extend the parallels thus:

Acquisition= the totality of concrete goal-affects, which represent "instinctive will"
Expenditure= the totality of abstract goal-affects, which represent "intellectual will"

Both categories in turn have their positive and negative manifestations.  Following Hobbes' examples, the thief who seeks to acquire property not his own is usually (though not always) a negative force in fictional stories, while the property-owner seeking to defend his goods is usually (though not always) a positive force in fictional stories.  I've gone into detail elsewhere as to why the "persona-types" I've termed "the monster" and "the demihero" stand as representations of the instinctive will.  Both of these personas, then, are dominantly subsumed by the concept of acquisition.

In contrast, most of what I write about the "intellectual will" personas of "the hero" and "the villain" in HERO PT 3 and elsewhere suggests an emphasis on the motive of "glory" for both.  This is clearer with regard to the hero, who sometimes shares the motives of the demihero "writ large" as it were, than with the villain.  However, I maintain that even though we see the villain undertaking acts of "acquisition," the true villain incarnates intellectual transgression.  I wrote in D IS FOR DEMIHERO PT 3: 

Even the mundane crooks as portrayed in these [Batman] stories want more than simple survivial. Typically they desire wealth, which may be seen as establishing a form of willed control over their environment. This will to control often manifests in the crooks forming their own society counter to that of honest citizens. Unlike monsters, who are most often seen as forces gone out of control, villains seek to exercise total control, be it of city-neighborhoods or the entire world.

More on expenditure and acquisiton when I again examine the concepts of "work and play."