RIDDLE, MYSTERY, ENIGMA

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...-- Winston Churchill (or maybe his speech-writer(s), BBC broadcast, 1939.

The primary definitions of Churchill's three metaphors for Russia from Dictionary.com are as follows:

RIDDLE: "a question or statement so framed as to exercise one's ingenuity in answering it or discovering its meaning; conundrum."

MYSTERY: "anything that is kept secret or remains unexplained or unknown."

ENIGMA: "a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation."

Macmillan Online has the following:

RIDDLE:  " a question that seems impossible or silly but has a clever or funny answer"

MYSTERY: " something that you are not able to understand, explain, or get information about"

ENIGMA: "someone or something that is mysterious and difficult to understand"


With infinite time and patience I could probably list out all cited definitions to these three overlapping yet different words.  But even if I did so, and determined that there is a statistically dominant definition for each, I don't think those statistically-arrived-at definitions would cancel out my conviction that Churchill's three words have a particular function in that speech about Russia.  In short, in order to make his point about the unfathomability of Russia, Churchill chooses three words that all connote unfathomability in increasingly greater degrees.  And this becomes important to my theory of literary causality in that each of the three phenomenalities the degree of intelligibility becomes greater.  

Just as a "riddle" is a perplexing arrangement of words that does (as Macmillan says) does finally have some rational or quasi-rational answer, the domain of the naturalistic is one in which all objects and situations, however perplexing they may be at a given time, are ultimately intelligible to reason.

A "mystery," as both cited definitions note, does not automatically have an answer-- which might mean that the majority of the ratiocinative works generally called "mysteries" perhaps ought to have been called "riddles," since almost all of them have answers of some sort.  The two cited definitions place an emphasis on the attempt of a subject to gain knowledge or information that is hard of access.  There is no guarantee, as with a literal riddle, that the mystery will be unveiled, though I would argue that this does not mean it cannot be.  Further, not all mysteries are revealed as plays upon rational understanding, since one also finds the word used for the set of initiation ceremonies known as the Eleusianian Mysteries.

Of the two cited definitions for "enigma," I believe that Macmillan's is essentially identical to its definition for "mystery," so I disagree with it. Dictionary.com's suits me more in that it suggests that the "occurrence or situation" referenced may be not just temporarily unknowable, but may be permanently "puzzling or inexplicable."

Now, the best way to show how this eventuates in the world of literature is to focus on how intelligibility is reflected in the narrative function of "the anomaly."  Once again, I draw upon the definition supplied by academic Frank Cioffi:

This reality [of a traditional narrative] is disrupted by some anomaly or change--invasion, invention, or atmospheric disturbance, for example--and most of the story involves combating or otherwise dealing with this disruption.

Unlike Cioffi-- who does note that anomalies can stem from such mundane factors "such as family, the love ethic, manly heroism, the American Way, and the like"-- I link the nature of the anomaly to its function within a bifurcated causality, one comprised of both a regularity aspect and an intelligibility aspect.  In recent essays I've given copious examples as to how narratives conform to, bend, or break with the regularity aspect, but the "riddle, mystery, enigma" progression suggests to me a way to provide a structure for the differing degrees of intelligibility. 

In this essay, I attempted to assess to employ an argument about "degrees of probability" the same way I now advocate "degrees of intelligibility." I don't dismiss the arguments re: evidential probability, but they are not as useful as I had hoped to catch the affective distinctions between the three phenomenalities.  But the examples I provided work just as well for this current argument:

Sticking only with the Doyle stories this time:

THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS is a naturalistic RIDDLE. The conspiracy Holmes unmasks is one that is fully intelligible to reason, and once the answer is known, it has no further repercussions.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES is an uncanny MYSTERY. In the earlier essay I argued then, and still argue, that "the explanation of the Hound via the rules of ordinary causality, while it serves a valid narrative purpose, does not dismiss the affective sense of strangeness from the narrative."

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN is a marvelous ENIGMA, because the anomaly around which the plot is structured is something outside the rules of "causality's regularity aspect," i.e., "a special drug that can somehow transfer the attributes of an animal to a man."  This level of intelligibility is enigmatic and insoluble specifically because the author must introduce some "fudge factor" that allows him to justify the appearance and/or behavior of the anomaly. 


I should note that the sheer number of "fudge factors" is irrelevant to the degree of enigmatic intelligibility.  It's quite true that Jules Verne did not need to provide as many "fudge-factors" in justifying the existence of his imagined submarine as H.G. Wells did in justifying the existence of gravity-nullifying Cavorite in FIRST MEN IN THE MOON-- nor does it matter, contrary to Verne's opinion, that in real life human beings could and did create real submarines, while no one has come close to synthesizing anything like Cavorite.  Both devices are equally marvelous, and equally enigmatic, within the sphere of the fictional universe their authors create.

I should also note that in some narratives it's possible that an uncanny or marvelous situation or entity may appear as a "throwaway," rather than being as central to the narrative as Cioffi's anomalies are. In this essay I reviewed two films in which marvelous occurrences or entities appear within the scope of comparatively mundane storylines.  But I tend to think that even when an uncanny or marvelous item intrudes upon a naturalistic framework in this marginal manner, they still transfer their qualities to the whole, as much as if they were central to the narrative.

THE TWO VERISIMILITUDES PART II

In Part I, I said:

Lewis does not reference concepts of causality. I've interpolated these, drawing on influences ranging from Cassirer to Roger Caillois to Tolkien. Lewis is purely concerned with what is acceptable as "realistic" in social terms.

By way of substantiating this assertion, here's the definition Lewis advances for his formulation, "realism of content:" "A fiction is realistic in content when it is probable or 'true to life.'"

This bears a degree of resemblance to what I have said of narratives with a naturalistic phenomenality; that they conform to the base level of causality and that everything that would seem to strain the laws of causality is dismissed as some form of "incoherent improbability."  I'm more concerned than Lewis with the dialectics of causality because I feel it offers a more dependable criterion for "realism" than what a given generation of readers believes to be "true to life." In TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I-- PART 5  I said:

In all naturalistic works, both improbability and impossibility can only be sources of incoherence...

At the same time, when I was first defining the three phenomenalities I noted here:

Nonfictional narrative is always about the typical; fictional narrative is always about the atypical.

I made this pattern of the "anomaly" more explicit in this essay:

The anomaly may be any number of things within the scope of the Num Formula: a ruthless criminal (naturalistic), a bizarre psycho-killer (uncanny), or a blood-hungry vampire (marvelous). As different as these three examples are in terms of phenomenality-- with one appealing to what I've called the "odd-sublime," the other two to the "strange-sublime"-- they are identical in terms of function in terms of how the plot-dynamicity works out.

Although I came to use the term "atypicality" only for the naturalistic sphere, I find that Lewis' idea of "content" includes any sort of anomaly in any phenomenality.  As I noted in Part 1, and as Lewis himself confirms, he selects many of his examples of "realism of presentation" from "stories which are not themselves 'realistic' in the sense of being probable or even possible."  I mentioned just one of these examples, taken from BEOWULF, but there's also one taken from the entirely naturalistic HENRY V.

Throughout the essay Lewis makes clear that he also believes that fiction needs the element of what is "atypical" in order to make it more expressive and/or affecting.  Of another naturalistic work, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Lewis writes:

It is extremely unlikely that a poor boy should be suddenly enriched by an anonymous benefactor who later turns out to be a convict.

Having admitted that many such tropes are improbable, Lewis examines the claims of those critics who feel that all fiction should be "true to life, and then rejects the idea that probability is ever uppermost in the minds of those seeking to be entertained.

For those who tell the story and those (including ourselves) who receive it are not thinking about any such generality as human life. Attention is fixed on something concrete and individual; on more than ordinary terror, splendour, wonder, pity, or absurdity of a particular case. 

Shortly after this passage, Lewis puts forth the centrality of "hypothetical probability":

The hypothetical probability is brought in to make the strange events more fully imaginable.

And though the essay goes on longer on the topic of "escapism," Lewis essentially finishes up his discussion of the two realisms by concluding that, "The demand that all literature should have realism of content cannot be maintained... But there is a quite different demand which we can properly make; not that all books should be realistic in content, but that every book should have as much of this realism as it pretends to have."

I find it interesting that in this essay Lewis lumps together all forms of improbability and impossibilty-- ranging from the main plot of GREAT EXPECTATIONS (naturalistic) to Homer's claim that his heroes can lift huge stones that "no two modern men" could move (uncanny) to "the bad luck of Oedipus" (marvelous, in that it invokes god-given prophecies and at least one literal monster).  Yet in his essay from THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, first referenced here, Lewis systematized the affects of 'fear, dread, and awe" that are somewhat intermingled in the Rudolf Otto work from which Lewis derives those terms.  In this essay I described three positive affects to complement the three negative affects supplied by Otto and Lewis, and I anticipate that I will be able to invoke these in my further explorations of the nature of "improbability" in the three phenomenalities.

MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS, AND STORIES TOO

In STRENGTH, IN NUMBERS  I made this generalization about the corpus of stories within the famous folktale-collection Grimms' Fairy Tales:

I would generalize that most of the Grimms' folktales fall into one of these two categories [i.e., having the plot-dynamicity labeled "basic strength" or the one labeled "might"].

In contrast, I only pegged one Grimms' tale which displayed the plot-pattern of "dominance," focused on two contending superior forces.

But that's just one story-collection.  How do these three deductively-extrapolated patterns disperse over the whole of literature?

I suppose my view may be influenced by a lifetime of genre-reading.  Nevertheless, genre-- and I consider folk literature to be a close relation to genre literature-- has been the dominant type of narrative (both in written and oral forms) favored by the majority of human beings in historical time.  And basing my view on everything I've read of what other people generally read, the "middle type"-- the one that Goldilocks pronounced as "just right" in another context-- is the one that I believe would rack up the highest statistics, were any kind of statistical evaluation feasible.

I hinted at the predominance of the "might" pattern in my QUICK SCHOPENHAUER POST: 

As I've mentioned elsewhere I find Cioffi's term "anomaly" useful to describe the element or elements that provide the motive force of the narrative, so it would seem that the anomaly expresses the narrative's need for conflict/transgression.

To make my meaning more explicit, I'm saying that the dominant type of story within genre narrative-- which narrative is the dominant narrative experience of historical mankind-- is one in which the characters who inhabit a normal, "typical" continuum-- characters usually possessed of no more than "basic strength"-- is confronted with an atypical anomaly-- be it a natural force or a character-- which impinges its "might" upon the continuum's static equilibrium. The anomaly may be any number of things within the scope of the Num Formula: a ruthless criminal (naturalistic), a bizarre psycho-killer (uncanny), or a blood-hungry vampire (marvelous).  As different as these three examples are in terms of phenomenality-- with one appealing to what I've called the "odd-sublime," the other two to the "strange-sublime"-- they are identical in terms of function in terms of how the plot-dynamicity works out.

If the "might" pattern is, as I assert, the dominant pattern in genre-literature-- thus supervening the patterns of non-genre literature as well-- then this would support H.P. Lovecraft's belief as expressed at the start of his critical history of the terror-tale, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Of course no one can be sure as to which emotion was the first to be kindled in the breast of nascent humanity.  But it's possible that the confrontation of mundane "basic strength" with the power of sublime "might" is the dominant pattern because it has the greatest appeal across all genre-types.

More on these matters in a forthcoming Part 2.

QUICK SCHOPENHAUER POST

"For poetry differs from reality by the fact that in it life flows past us, interesting and yet painless ; while in reality, on the contrary, so long as it is painless it is uninteresting, and as soon as it becomes interesting, it does not remain without pain."-- Schopenhauer, Part 204. Supplements to the Third Book of THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.

I started re-reading Schopenhauer to follow up the issue of "feminine will" currently pursued in the WHAT WOMEN WILL essay-series, but the gloomy philosopher has application to other aspects of my lit-crit theory as well.

In the quote above, Schopenhauer speaks of the fact that for the reader of "poetry" (by which he means prose and plays as well as traditional poetry) the "life" depicted in the narrative is both "interesting and yet painless" for the reader.  Of course Schopenhauer knows very well that those narrative events he deems "interesting" are for the fictional characters sources of conflict, and therefore sources of real or potential pain, but here he's concentrating on the irony that our real lives cannot become "interesting" and at the same time "remain without pain" (or again, at least the potential for pain).  Schopenhauer suggests that in some sense this is much of the appeal of poetry inheres in this ability to watch others suffering terrible fates from afar.  This description recalls Kant's identification that the affect of "the sublime" depended largely on the subject's knowledge that he himself was not threatened by the awesome source of sublimity:

“…consider bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky [and other examples of furious nature]... Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range..."-- Section 261.

Schopenhauer does pursue Kant's concept of sublimity elsewhere in WORLD, but not in this section.  However, the above observation has even greater application to my notion, expressed here,

that the traditional notion of narrative conflict should be seen as coterminous with George Bataille's concept of "the transgressive," as detailed in his work LITERATURE AND EVIL.  I've observed that even in isophenomenal works-- works wherein there is no challenge to reason as such; no manifestations of the uncanny or the marvelous-- there remains a tension between "typical reality" and "atypical reality," as schematized by Frank Cioffi in this resource:

The “classic detective story” (as defined by John G. Cawelti) takes a similar structure [to that of the status quo formula story]. Into a fairly conventional and familiar world a crime intrudes, and by the story’s conclusion, the crime is solved, and the integrity of society is reinforced (40).

As I've mentioned elsewhere I find Cioffi's term "anomaly" useful to describe the element or elements that provide the motive force of the narrative, so it would seem that the anomaly expresses the narrative's need for conflict/transgression.

However, one need not assume, as Schopenhauer gloomily does, that all that is "interesting" is entirely defined by "pain."  It would be more useful to see pain linked to pleasure in a continuum of kinetic emotional affects which the narrative conjures forth to make possible both conflict and character identification.  Paglia, indeed, speaks of "pleasure-pain" as being "the gross continuum of nature." In reality we always have this potential for pain or pleasure; in fiction our delectation of fictional conflicts is always somewhat removed from immediate experience, as I've covered in my extrapolations of Susanne Langer's concept of the gesture.  This would apply even to a work would seem to offer pure pleasure rather than pain-- say, a simple pornographic tale in which the "anomaly" is that a pizza-boy goes to make a delivery to an apartment (uninteresting) but comes away after a sexual encounter with the apartment's hot-babe resident (interesting).

Interestingly, in a separate essay Schopenhauer seems to see fiction's diversions as distracting from one's knowledge of real pain (which elsewhere he regards as necessary for one's transcendence of the will):

we call drama or descriptive poetry interesting when it represents events and actions of a kind which necessarily arouse concern or sympathy, like that which we feel in real events involving our own person. The fate of the person represented in them is felt in just the same fashion as our own: we await the development of events with anxiety; we eagerly follow their course; our hearts quicken when the hero is threatened; our pulse falters as the danger reaches its acme, and throbs again when he is suddenly rescued. Until we reach the end of the story we cannot put the book aside; we lie away far into the night sympathising with our hero’s troubles as though they were our own. Nay, instead of finding pleasure and recreation in such representations, we should feel all the pain which real life often inflicts upon us, or at least the kind which pursues us in our uneasy dreams, if in the act of reading or looking at the stage we had not the firm ground of reality always beneath our feet. As it is, in the stress of a too violent feeling, we can find relief from the illusion of the moment, and then give way to it again at will. Moreover, we can gain this relief without any such violent transition as occurs in a dream, when we rid ourselves of its terrors only by the act of awaking.

However, in the very next section of this essay Schopenhauer anticipates Northrop Frye's distinction between the "narrative values" and "significant values" of a work, by distinguishing between its "interest" and its "beauty:"

It is obvious that what is affected by poetry of this character is our will , and not merely our intellectual powers pure and simple. The word interest means, therefore, that which arouses the concern of the individual will, quod nostrâ interest ; and here it is that beauty is clearly distinguished from interest. The one is an affair of the intellect, and that, too, of the purest and simplest kind. The other works upon the will. Beauty, then, consists in an apprehension of ideas; and knowledge of this character is beyond the range of the principle that nothing happens without a cause. Interest, on the other hand, has its origin nowhere but in the course of events; that is to say, in the complexities which are possible only through the action of this principle in its different forms.

The association here between beauty and Ideas in a quasi-Platonic sense may relate Kant's association between "the beautiful" and "boundedness:"

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded.-- CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, Section 245.

I've not yet finished re-reading Schopenhauer's reflections on the sublime, so this remains only a tenative conclusion.  Still, Schopenhauer's distinction between "the concern of the individual will" and "an affair of the intellect" should yield interesting applications to an archetypal theory of art and literature.

STRANGENESS ADVENTURES

“The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday reality.”—Roger Caillois, AU COEUR DU FANTASTIQUE.

In this essay I discussed parallels between Kant’s concept of the sublime and my concept of “the uncanny,” in terms of how both could be produced purely from affects within an experience of any kind. Both can suggest that the experience is “beyond nature” in a Longinian affective sense, without a literal violation of causality’s “acknowledged order,” as one sees in the category of “the marvelous.”

Shortly later this essay covered parallels between the Kantian sublime and "the mythic," which refers to all narratives that possess high symbolic complexity like that of archaic myths. I emphasized both in that essay and earlier ones that "the mythic" could appear in any of my three phenomenal categories, just as was the case for the sublime:

To expand on the caution I expressed before, this parallel does not imply identity, for the sublime can appear in any work regardless of its phenomenal category. I mentioned Maugham’s book THE RAZOR’S EDGE, which contains the sublime affect even though it’s an entirely isophenomenal work, while Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER, a work of uncanny metaphenomenality, has its own sublimities. The same aesthetic applies to the marvelous form of the metaphenomenal, but I stress that a work is not automatically sublime just because it contains marvels that do transcend causality.

All that said, it should be obvious that there's some quality about my two metaphenomenal categories that is *not* shared by the "odd man out," the isophenomenal. And as it happens, Caillois also supplies the best word for this quality, when he defines fantasy in terms of "an irreducible strangeness."

My choice is deliberately ironic. Stanislaw Lem asserts that "étrange," the French word for "strange," is the actual word used by Todorov for his category "the uncanny." Possibly the translator thought Todorov was tossing around so many Freudianisms that the critic would not be averse to the association with Freud's famous formulation of the quality he called "umheimlich", "unfamiliarity," which was translated as "uncanny" for this 1919 essay. I would tend to agree that the translator was right, considering this observation by Freud:

"Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich."

Clearly this is in total agreement with this Todorov statement:

“It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.”

Thus it would seem that Todorov's "étrange” is very reducible to such influences as Freud’s infamous “family romance.”

In his 1978 work THE FANTASY BOOK, Franz Rottensteiner also cites Caillois: “Fantasy in the narrow sense, as defined by Caillois, is directly contrary to reason, describing events not susceptible to rational explanation by natural laws.” As I have not read Caillois aside from a few translated excerpts, I have no clue as to what works fall into Caillois’ concept of fantasy that is “irreducibly strange.” I would hope that a work like Poe’s HOUSE OF USHER, which I judged to be “uncanny” here, would qualify: that Caillois would not, unlike Todorov, consider that USHER falls into “the category of the real” simply because Poe supplies the reader with possible “rational explanations.”

Rottensteiner provides a quote from another writer whom I have not read in full: one Lars Gustafsson, whose essay, “On the Fantastic in Literature,” appeared in a collection of essays a year before Todorov’s THE FANTASTIC was published. Rottensteiner finds Gustafsson to be in agreement with Caillois:

“The fantastic in literature doesn’t exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle.” Rottensteiner supplies one example that Gustaffson found “fantastic,” a work by the artist Piranesi, but obviously this doesn’t give one enough to evaluate Gustaffson’s criteria in depth.

However, Gustaffson’s contrast between the “probable” and the “reasonable” is interesting. I’ve stated that “All fictional narrative concerns the atypical,” and functionally all three of my phenomenality-categories may be considered differing iterations of atypicality, though I generally use “the atypical” as short for the “base atypicality” that rules the world of isophenomenal causality, a.k.a. “the acknowledged order.” This is the world governed by what Gustaffson calls “what is probable,” as should be suggested by my observation from this essay:

“The pleasures and pains of character identification are in no way altered with respect to whether the story seems utterly fantastic, somewhat fantastic or not fantastic at all. However, the reader’s aesthetic perceptions are affected by their perception as to what phenomena are possible in the fictional world.”

A narrative world governed entirely by rational causation never deals with “reason” as a mode of being. It cannot, for nothing in that world can challenge reason; in that world there can only exist varying degrees of probability. In the two levels of the metaphenomenal, however—though of the “utterly fantastic” or “somewhat fantastic”—reason, at least in its commonplace form, is challenged.

True, in the essay “On Fairy Stories” Tolkien is careful to state that fantasy “does not destroy or insult Reason.” Still, while LORD OF THE RINGS may present a world which is in some ways more “reason-friendly” than that of Poe’s USHER, in Middle-Earth commonplace reason is transcended by the forces of magic and magical entities. So in Tolkien’s world, the combat between “reason” and “unreason” is won by “unreason” simply by the act of depicting the marvelous as unquestionably real. This principle applies no less to science-fictional works wherein the marvel is explained by some science that is at the time still hypothetical, in that this hypothetical science is still outside the bounds of the acknowledged order.
In uncanny works the “reason/unreason” battle results in a draw. Cognitively the metaphenomenon does not totally dispel causation, but it can and does do so in the affective sense Thus it is fair to speak of both categories as sharing the quality of “strangeness,” for both challenge rationality and causation to some extent, while atypical works merely challenge one’s notion of probability.

Side-note: My above ruminations about how I’ve used “atypicality” make me aware that I shouldn’t use the same word for both a general category and a specific category within that category. From now on, what I’ve called “general atypicality” is better described as “the anomalous,” drawing on Frank Cioffi’s use of that term.

ANOMALOUS ENCOUNTERS: RESOURCE

Even as I created a simple resource to deal with Dwight Swain's notion of the "focal character," here I'm creating a resource to sum up Frank Cioffi's idea of "the anomaly" as expressed in his 1982 critical book FORMULA FICTION, which I briefly reviewed here.

Cioffi's main purpose in the book is to suss out the attitudes found in science fiction stories toward that which seems anomalous or unusual:

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

Status quo science fiction served to affirm existent reality in much the same way that other popular genres of the troubled 1930s affirmed values such as family, the love ethic, manly heroism, the American Way, and the like (ix).

The “subversive” formula. . . [is] a variety of SF that comes directly out of the status quo formula and, in fact, closely resembles it. . . . In the subversive formula, the anomaly is not expelled, but somehow incorporated into society; in short, society is subverted by it (ix.)

Rather than demonstrating how society snaps back to normal after any disruption, subversive science fiction depicts how society adapts to and incorporates the anomalous. . . . The anomaly is making an impact on the social structure depicted: altering it, subverting it, destroying it (x).

However, Cioffi is careful to point out that any formula story is likely to use the same basic approaches to storytelling:

The “classic detective story” (as defined by John G. Cawelti) takes a similar structure [to that of the status quo formula story]. Into a fairly conventional and familiar world a crime intrudes, and by the story’s conclusion, the crime is solved, and the integrity of society is reinforced (40).

It even more closely resembles the “fantastic journey” variety of adventure story: the protagonist of a central group of characters journeys into the unknown or the forbidden but safely returns to the comforting, familiar world by the end of the story. Horror stories often exhibit a similar structure. The horror element is introduced into a conventional world (or sometimes arises through placement of conventional types in a horror setting such as a haunted house) and causes excitement, chills, and thrills; but finally the real world reasserts itself and order reigns (41).

An ur-text. . . is formed by looking for conventional plots, heroes, conflicts, and anomalies which appear in large numbers of stories but only rarely appear all at once in any one tale. The ur-text, then, is a composite picture of the most oft-repeated and conventional features of a formula. . . . The ur-text . . . is entirely conventional, containing more clichés than a writer would ever be able to sell in one story. Conversely, no story would be able to sell without at least a good portion of these ur-text features (42).

(Brief pause to tip my hat to Gary L. Pullman of CHILLERS AND THRILLERS-- see bloglist-- for putting these references on the web.)

Now, though Cioffi's book doesn't reference Aristotle, clearly his structural summation of how anomalous presences impact on "conventional social reality" is of a piece with Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.") I don't agree with Cioffi that all responses to anomalous presences in science fiction or any other genre can be neatly categorized between a "status quo" type and a "subversive" type: for me a given story is better categorized according to the Fryean *mythos* its author dominantly follows. What's most valuable about Cioffi's formulation is that his analysis reveals that in much science fiction, and implicitly in other genres as well, the "anomaly," which in standard literary studies would be in the position of the "antagonist" to a viewpoint "protagonist," may actually be the focus of a given story while the protagonists are, in essence, rather forgettable.

For instance, Cioffi references A.E. Van Vogt's 1939 short story "Black Destroyer," mentioning that its first sentence takes place in the viewpoint of the rapacious alien Coeurl, prior to his ALIEN-like encounter with spacefaring humans. In Arthur Quiller-Couch's terms, this would be a "man vs. man" encounter even though Coeurl is only symbolically a "man" in that he is a sentient creature like his opponents. However, though the reader's sympathies will usually side with the human protagonists in this and similar stories, in "Black Destroyer" antagonist Coeurl is the memorable "star of the show," much as Dracula (to cite again one of Dwight Swain's examples) is the star of the novel named after him, rather than any of that novel's sympathetic viewpoint characters.

I don't plan to return to Cioffi in further essays on the "superhero idiom" theme, which is one reason I chose to isolate reference to him in this resource. But his FORMULA FICTION, despite its Marxist-sounding bias, remains valuable to the analysis of the complexities of genre fiction.