THE READING RHEUM: STOP, IN THE NAME OF GOD (2026)

 

In KEEPING VS SHARING, I confessed that I was not well-acquainted with the philosophy of Charlie Kirk at the time of his untimely assassination. Since then, I've listened to assorted podcasts, and I've come to admire his Socrates-like ability to engage total strangers in sustained debate, particularly on college campuses like the one on which a demented trans took Kirk's life. But such forums could not provide a holistic view of Kirk's life-philosophy-- and although the majority of Kirk's books were dominantly political in nature, his devotion to his evangelical organization Turning Point suggests to me that his conservatism was based in his religious views. His last book-- which I will abbreviate as STOP-- concentrates primarily on Kirk's beliefs, centering upon the Judeo-Christian concept of the Sabbath. Kirk declared that since 2021 he had obliged himself to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest, despite his many time-consuming commitments. And as I suspected, in STOP Kirk used his meditations on the Sabbath custom to elucidate his religion in general.

As I've stated elsewhere, I'm an agnostic who admires religion's power to tap humanity's propensity for archetypal concepts. So on one hand I'm somewhat sympathetic to Kirk's religious leanings, though not to his evangelism. Kirk insists that the intertwined faiths of Judaism and Christianity are, or should be, the universal truths for humankind, and I reject that assertion whether it comes from theists or atheists. So I can only value Kirk's formulations in a Jungian fashion, even though Kirk rejects that sort of comparativism.

The short review is that STOP is strongest when Kirk is speaking passionately about the Sabbath as a means of recapturing one's spiritual energies by "tuning out," as the hippies used to say. For instance, since Kirk's God is a being incapable of becoming tired from activity as humans tire, Kirk declares that when God finished creation, his "rest" on the seventh day was not a matter of exhaustion. Rather, he was simply looking upon his creation and deeming it good.  Similarly, for humans the Sabbath is not intended to be just a day to "veg out." Keepers of the Sabbath are supposed to be connecting with the traditions of their faith(s) and recognizing their place in God's creation. 

Since I knew Kirk was not a comparativist, I didn't attach much importance to his statement that the archaic Jews were first to formulate any custom like that of the Sabbath. If corrected on this point, Kirk could have always claimed that even if the Jewish Sabbath wasn't the first custom of its kind, it was still the best because "reasons." This is the sort of special pleading Kirk indulges in during Chapter 1, where he makes the self-aggrandizing claim that for all other religions of the ancient Near East, the gods were purely expressions of natural forces while the Hebrew God was totally outside nature. Kirk holds similar views when speaking of modern polytheism. Also in Chapter 1, he mentions how, as a child, he encountered the many gods of Hinduism and could only think of the lack of "moral order" implied by such a plenitude of competing deities. Yet in a later chapter he's not above quoting Scripture to demonstrate that the Church Fathers possessed a far-sighted tolerance toward individual customs and/or proclivities-- which IMO also explains the early evolution of polytheism:

One person considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each of them should be fully convinced in their own mind.-- Romans 14:5-6

Thankfully, Kirk mainly attacks secular movements that compete with Judeo-Christianity. He doesn't devote much space to the most execrable movement seen in his lifetime, that of the so-called "anti-racists," but that's probably because he couldn't make their grievance-happy rhetoric relevant to his theme. More space is given to the influence of modern American atheism, but most of these arguments are funneled from Stephen Meyer's RETURN OF THE GOD HYPOTHESIS, which I found interesting though not compelling, given my Jungian preferences. Kirk only attacks one Marxist for having dumbed-down the academic campuses, Herbert Marcuse. But Marcuse seems a good choice, since one Wiki-author claims that he is "considered among the most influential of the Frankfurt School critical theorists on American culture, due to his studies on student and counter-cultural movements on the 1960s." But though I realize that STOP's subject could not take on a voluminous topic, I'd like to have seen more on that subject here, since Kirk lost his life making his philosophical appeal to an academic audience.

A couple of titles have a self-help ring to them, such as "The Sabbath Improves Your Sleep," though I believe Kirk was sincere, not playing huckster-games. His most egregious special pleading appears in Chapter 8, which takes as its starting-point Exodus 20:8-11, a section emphasizing that the Hebrew Sabbath and its blessing of rest was extended not only to Hebrew believers but also to "livestock" and to slaves of any faith. Kirk labors mightily to sell the notion that the custom of the Jewish Sabbath was an "ontological" change from older cultures' beliefs about the status of the enslaved. Kirk also seeks to distance Hebrew slavery from the "moral abomination" of American chattel slavery. However, this opens Kirk up to a familiar criticism of 19th-century Christianity, which has become notorious for using a particular Scriptural citation in defense of slavery:

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.-- Genesis 9:24-25

Did 19th-century Christians quote Genesis out of context? Probably, but slavers in both North and South were still practicing Christians. Maybe they were abominable because they didn't keep their version of the Sabbath properly? Also, I tend to doubt that even the most liberal translation could erase the core idea in that passage: that the children of Ham, whoever they were, were destined to serve Hebrews. To a believer, this declaration is as much a part of sacred history as the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy. Since as a comparativist I believe that the anthropological evolution of the slavery custom is far more complex than Kirk represents, I could wish he hadn't gone wading in such deep waters.

STOP offers a good portal into the mind of a celebrity evangelist. Not all of Kirk's justifications hold water, but he was still more dedicated to a vision of human improvement than, say, anyone in the Frankfurt School or any of their exploitative descendants.   

EXTREME UNCTION FOR FUNCTIONS

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

An archetype is equivalent to what I have called a complex variable, following Northrop Frye's logic on this subject. A complex variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that proves itself dynamic with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities. -- A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY, 2014.

 

Affective freedom," then, is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in artifice, while "cognitive restraint" is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in verisimilitude. -- BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE, 2018.

I recently conjured forth the ideas of functionality and super-functionality from the vasty deeps of 2014 in my last essay. I then found myself cross-comparing those early thoughts to those more recently expressed this October, in both QUICK NUM NOTES and THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD. In the latter essay I opined that both the "metaphenomenalities" privilege tropes of artifice over those of verisimilitude, though works of "the uncanny" seek to create the impression of greater alliance to verisimilitude than one finds in works of "the marvelous." (Thus everything that falls into the pattern of "the uncanny Gothic" always comes up with some artifice to explain away phenomena that seem to be marvelous.) My "October surprise" was the insight that from one POV, the artifice of the uncanny may be just as "artificial" as that of the marvelous, even if the rationales are opposed to one another.

So, by the logic established in the 2014 essay, both the uncanny and the marvelous are defined by "super-functionality," at least in an ontological sense. This means a potential to take on multiple functions within the ontological structure of the narrative, which functions may align with the epistemological structure, or may not. But this "super-functionality" is also an "anti-functionality" insofar as pure functionality is being overshadowed in favor of things that track only in terms of literary artifice. To recapitulate one of the examples from QUICK NUM NOTES, when Ian Fleming has his crime-chief Blofeld execute a subordinate with an electric chair rather than with a pistol or baseball bat, it's because Fleming wants his readers to sit up and take notice of what a singular crime-boss Blofeld is-- that he's NOT a mundane criminal like Al Capone.                                

VARIANT REVISIONS PT. 2

 Some of my current terminology re: "originary and variant propositions" was preceded by the two essay-series CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS, starting here. In those essays I more or less used "template" to stand in for the current "originary proposition," "template deviation" to stand in for "variant propositions," and "total deviation" to stand in for "null-variant propositions." All of these terms, though, are predicated on analyzing the propositions "from outside," seen from the POV of the "real" reader.

However, it's not impossible to see many if not all such variations "from inside," as if all of the propositions weren't just created by isolated raconteurs but were instead variations on archetypal tropes that precede even the first "originary proposition." 

It's true thar often the originary proposition is the strongest one in terms of evoking one or more of the four potentialities, which is why I previously compared such propositions to the sort of template used, say, in early printing technology. I mentioned in the CRYPTO series major icons like KING KONG and DRACULA, and it would be hard to argue that any of the variations on these figures, however entertaining, exceeded the originals in any way. 

      

  However, there are times that the originary proposition is not the most compelling, even on simpler levels. The durable Terrytoons stars "Heckle and Jeckle" are known by most viewers as a pair of wisecracking male magpies. However, the first cartoon in the series, 1946's "The Talking Magpies," posited them as a married male-and-female couple that caused no end of trouble for Farmer Al Falfa. Paul Terry then chose to issue a "rebooted" Heckle and Jeckle that same year with "The Uninvited Pests," and as two identical males with differing accents, the characters enjoyed another 51 theatrical cartoons. So in terms of popular success, the variant proposition was the more successful, not least because two obnoxious males could be used in many more slapstick situations than a married magpie pair.

Now, if one wanted to take the archetypal perspective I suggested above, one could imagine two parallel worlds, one in which Heckle and Jeckle were both male, and one in which they were a married couple. Most fictional propositions regarding parallel worlds are not much less chimerical. The parallel-world explanation for duplicate versions of DC characters such as Flash and Green Lantern sometimes verged on expressions of archetypal realities, though usually in fairly clumsy terms. The first Green Lantern begins very poorly-- I read the first volume of Golden Age reprints and could barely see any reasons for the success of the character beyond the base idea of a hero with a wonder-working "magic ring." Later in the series writers conceived a few subordinate characters-- Solomon Grundy, Vandal Savage-- evocative enough that DC Comics made them major figures in the company's later cosmology. But I'm not sure that, taken just on their Golden Age appearances, Grundy or Savage were as good IN THEIR TIME as the better villains of that era, from serials like Batman, Wonder Woman, or even Airboy and The Hangman. In contrast, the Silver Age Green Lantern, which crossbred the rudimentary Alan Scott concept with the "space ranger" ideas of the prose "Lensmen" series, displayed excellence in the kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities within a few years.

Even "soft reboots" within the same cosmos-- which make no use of "parallel worlds" as such-- are often treated as constituting variant propositions in, say, fandom-wikis like the DC Database. The 1988 ANIMAL MAN, reviewed here, dispenses with any idea that two separate Animal-Men co-exist in two distinct worlds. Rather, the first one knows that he was created by one author and rejected in favor of an updated hero with the same name by another author. Yet at the same time, Grant Morrison suggests that there's some loosely archetypal limbo where even the lamest characters ever created (hello, Ultra the Multi-Alien) continue to exist. And some soft reboots are performed not through intention but through error. In the first VARIANT REVISIONS, I took pains to analyze how Bob Haney first created a reasonably evocative mystery villain in one TEEN TITANS story. Yet when Haney later needed a make-work villain to plug into a hastily conceived scenario, the writer simply rewrote the established character's motivations to suit his current needs. As if to compound the error, George Perez constructed yet another ramshackle artifice on top of Haney's blunder and, to the extent that DC fans think of The Gargoyle at all, they probably defer to the Perez interpretation.

Some soft reboots even occur simply in response to changing tastes or priorities. Jerry Siegel's original Superman, while always devoted to justice, sometimes played fast and loose with legalities. DC editors didn't like that, possibly fearing a profitable character would get targeted by moral watchdogs-- which eventually happened anyway-- and so Silver Age Superman became an absolute stickler for obeying the law, even the law of made-up planets. Here too I would probably argue that Silver Age Superman surpassed the originary proposition in many though not all respects-- though the more creative Golden Age concepts of Siegel and his collaborators became the essential foundation for the Silver Age proposition.  

More to come.

        

CHAOS OVER ORDER PT. 2

 This essay won't discuss any of the authors mentioned in Part 1, and in fact it deals less with "impossible things" than "unlikely things." The stimulus for this essay was a blogpost dealing with a vaguely "evolutionary psychology"  approach to what I called in 2019 "the pervasiveness of the Amazon archetype."  Said blogpost, however, did not in my opinion make any valuable observations, so I'm not troubling to cite it.

The image of amazon-like women in world cultures are not all subsumed by the specific Greek myth of the Amazon tribes. Some figures evolve from purely polytheistic concepts of war-goddesses like Athena and Anath. Others may evolve either from figures believed to be real, but actually purely legendary (the Chinese Ha Mulan), to those clearly rooted in history, like the pirate Anne Bonny. The element most of these would have in common would seem to be females who in some way challenge males on the field of battle, and so would not include other archetypes like sorceresses (Morgan Le Fay) or women who kill men with deception (the Biblical Jael, who lulls an enemy general into sleep and then kills him).

That said, one may fairly question the provenance of the Amazon archetype. I've stated that I can engage philosophically with the archetype, whether it's rooted in any historical reality or not, simply because the archetype reverses the expectations of normal life. The norm, even in prehistorical eras, would have been the division of labor arising from sexual dimorphism. Even in tribes where the men might not have been much taller than their women, the men always had greater body mass thanks to testosterone, and this hormone usually, though not universally, encouraged males to be the foremost protectors of their respective tribes against marauding males from other tribes, or from predacious animals.

By and large, it seems likely that most females in all eras accepted the division of labor, not least in the belief that offspring were best nurtured by the female of the species. If there were individual women of this or that tribe-- what moderns sometimes call "tomboys"-- who pushed back against the division of labor, seeking to compete with men in various ways, no feminism existed to champion their outlying nature. Archaic women are as likely to have been just as conservative as archaic men, condemning any females who deviated from the norm.

Given this likely tendency toward conservatism from both genders, then, why would any archaic tribespeople come to imagine goddesses of war, which is at least part of the makeup of the Greek Athena and the Ugaritic Anath? 

Though the pure appeal of "unlikely things" could be the reason for the appeal of the archetype, there's one "evo psych" influence that might have provoked the development of the archetype, and that is the influence of the Ha Mulan/Anne Bonny type, the woman who joins male ranks to fight alongside them for whatever reason. 

To the extent that tribes all across the face of the Earth have always been fighting with one another for supremacy, it's not impossible that "women warriors" fighting alongside men, possibly in disguise more often than not, could be a cross-cultural phenomenon that spurred the equally cross-cultural archetypes of "warrior goddess" and "Amazon society." A few societies may have normalized the participation of worthy females alongside males, such as the Brazilian woman-warriors whose storied existence led to the naming of South America's Amazon River. The roving tribes of the Scythians, which allegedly included both horsewomen and horsemen, is often nominated as a real-world source for the Greek myth of a society ruled by dominant female warriors.

I'm familiar with only one resource that went into great detail regarding the widespread phenomenon of women fighting in the battlefield with men: Jessica Salmonson's 1991 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMAZONS. I read the book long ago, and primarily remember some interesting narratives regarding women who fought in male guise during the American Civil War. I have not found any detailed reviews of the Salmonson book online, only this indirect disparaging comment in the course of reviewing a separate book about "women in war." It's quite possible that Salmonson's book is not well sourced. However, since I'm concerned more with the archetype than with real history, even stories with no basis in real history, like that of Mulan, are relevant to my line of thought.

It's not demonstrable that "women warriors" were a continuous presence in any historical society. For all we know, even the horsewomen of the Scythians might have been a temporary aberration from the norm of whatever "nurturing vs. protection" division of labor existed in Scythian society over the centuries. However, as I said primitive societies were liable to being attacked more often than not, and that could have eventuated in the irregular but consistent appearance of "tomboy heroines." Greeks and Romans sometimes explained individual warrior-women like Camilla and Atalanta as virgin huntresses devoted to Artemis/Diana. But there need not be a specific allusion to religion. In some versions of the Brunhilde story, she seems to be a mortal woman despite being termed a "valkyrie." Her strength is such that she can easily repulse the advances of the weakling warlord Gunnar, though not those of the hero Sigurd, who in one iteration masquerades as Gunnar, overpowers Brunhilde in the marriage bed, and so deceives her as to Gunnar's masculine prowess, causing her to marry an unworthy man.

In the fantasy-novel THE LADIES OF MANDRIGYN, a group of women have to train themselves to fight men to achieve a particular goal. In the course of that training, author Barbara Hambly has the trainer impress the women with a crucial difference between the sexes, to wit: "Women fight because they have to; men fight because they want to." But even if one takes that as an absolute, there could have been countless instances where women, even those who were not disposed to be tomboys, took the field purely to defend their homes and children. And that is the one factor of "evolutionary psychology" that I can imagine as pertinent to the evolution of the Amazon archetype.

FUNCTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE

 In this 2015 essay I wrote:

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

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

Therefore in my schema:

A stereotype is defined by bare functionality.

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

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

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

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

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

THE PERVASIVENESS OF THE AMAZON ARCHETYPE

Action-heroines, however, work their own will.  They align themselves with a reverse-archetype that describes not real experience but a gesture toward desired experience.  That implies a greater level of conflict in this reverse-archetype in that it contravenes (albeit in fiction, where nothing is impossible) both physical law and cultural experience.-- WHAT WOMEN WILL PT. 3. 

At least three or four times I've had personal encounters with persons of the feminine gender who've complained about the supposed dearth of empowered female heroines in mass media. The fact that I've encountered only a few does not signify that this is a rare opinion, given how often I've responded to similar comments on this blog from such sites as THE BEAT, THE MARY SUE, and HOODED UTILITIES.

In one of these personal encounters, I partly refuted the claim by mentioning a couple of "empowered heroine" films that my opponent hadn't even heard of, one being the 2005 AEON FLUX.

That particular contretemps didn't go any farther, but I can well imagine how it might have continued were I speaking to, say, a proponent of the toxic feminism from THE MARY SUE. For example, such a proponent might've said that even though AEON FLUX was a major Hollywood release, budgeted at $62 million, it flopped at the box office and thus could be seen as an indicator of the audience's refusal to accept strong women in their entertainment. (It's probably a lot more likely that the film, after enjoying a strong opening, got a certain amount of negative response from moviegoers who discouraged others from seeing it.)

This conversation and others like it usually evoke the spirit I termed THE RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS in 2009. To persons infused with the spirit, nothing matters but success, the ceaseless striving to obtain a state of perfect equity (in this case, equity of status between male and female protagonists in fictional entertainment). For instance, here's a quote from a positive review of CAPTAIN MARVEL on THE MARY SUE:

In the end, Captain Marvel was on the same level as the first Thor for me: a solid re-watchable-when-it-comes-on-cable movie for me. It didn’t solve the problems of female representation in the MCU, because the problem is larger than just finally giving one female character a leading role in a movie. It’s about them creating dynamic and complex heroines across their films. I am glad she got this movie on her own to shine, and while it didn’t make me wish she had a bigger role in Endgame, it did make me long for a time when we don’t have to keep having these conversations about female-led movies.

If a financially successful flick like CAPTAIN MARVEL gets such a lukewarm reception-- the writer also complains that the film didn't have enough "queer representation" to suit her-- then what would the author of the essay make of unsuccessful female-led movies like AEON FLUX, CUTTHROAT ISLAND, or, perhaps more appropriately, that toxically political femfest known as "2016 GHOSTBUSTERS?" I would speculate that if a successful MCU film doesn't "solve the problems of female representation in the MCU," then a female-led flop would be even less contributory toward the Final Solution of equity for female characters in films everywhere. Thus, even though I've frequently written about the topic of heroines in fiction, I find that I'm on a totally different page from those who want to behold a total equity on the silver screen, presumably with the notion that it will somehow enhance total equity between men and women in the real world. (The possibility that some might want the formerly disenfranchised gender to be "more equal than the other gender" has also occurred to me.)

In comparison to this politically utilitarian viewpoint, I suppose I'm a formalist by comparison. I gave CAPTAIN MARVEL a better review than I did AEON FLUX. Despite my being aware of how much the later film was infused with the philosophy of ressentiment, and how many flaws the film had apart from its political stance, CAPTAIN MARVEL was better made than AEON FLUX.

On the other hand, were I compiling a formalist's list of the hundred best-made female-led action-films of all time, CAPTAIN MARVEL's success at the box office would give it no more chance to make my list than AEON FLUX would have. Yet, though CUTTHROAT ISLAND, that 1995 paean to old-time pirate films, probably flopped harder than AEON FLUX, that one might make it. CUTTHROAT has perhaps just as many narrative problems as CAPTAIN MARVEL, but Geena Davis's pirate adventure possesses a visceral charm to it nowhere evident in the 2019 film. And CUTTHROAT's feminism, while no less real than that of CAPTAIN MARVEL, is far more grounded in the film's simple but persuasive portrait of its larger-than-life heroine.

Currently on my FEMMES FORMIDABLES blog-- where I've been inactive for some months-- I've started putzing around with an idea not unlike the "SUPERHEROES ARE DAMN-NEAR EVERYWHERE" posts I've been putting on OUROBOROS DREAMS-- both of which owe something to the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" celebrity-matching game. Without question it's important to me to see how such archetypes-- that of the "superhero idiom" figure and that of the amazon's "reverse-archetype"-- pervade popular literature, whether a given iteration of an archetype is financially or artistically successful. The first such post about the "amazon archetype" appears here, and initially I didn't think I'd do more than one outing of the game. I don't want to take too much time from other projects for this bagatelle, and though I thought about devoting a little time to describing my standard for citing "starring femmes formidables," I probably ought to keep that concern to myself for now.

THE HORRIFIC TRIO

Despite my love for the classic monsters of literature and film, I must admit I've been a very dilatory votary in terms of making posts along a Halloween theme. But I happened to pick up a TPB that collected the DC war/horror hybrid THE CREATURE COMMANDOS, and to comment on that, I need to devote a little time to "the Horrific Trio" (a term I've coined for three particular monsters, in loose imitation of the "Terrific Trio" cognomen from the 1966 BATMAN series).

There are, as I've pointed out in serial essays like RALLY ROUND THE ROGUES' GALLERY, many permutations of the "monster rally" concept. However, for whatever reason, one particular permutation has become arguably the most popular one in the United States: an ensemble-act consisting of a Dracula-like vampire, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein-like monster. Universal Studios unquestionably began this meme with a trio of forties "monster rallies:" HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN,  HOUSE OF DRACULA, and-- perhaps most widely seen-- ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN.  There have been numerous works in all media that only teamed up two of the three, or that added a mummy here and a black-lagoon creature there. But no monster-meme has been more durable than that of the "Horrific Trio," as seen by works as far apart as 1980s's DRAK PACK and 2000's MONSTER MASH.

In the first CREATURE COMMANDOS story, writer J.M. DeMatteis puts forth his premise. During America's involvement in World War Two, American scientists create a commando unit able to strike terror in Nazi hearts by patterning three elite commandos on "the subconscious archetypes-- the symbols of fright and horror that all men seem to share, regardless of social and cultural conditioning." I believe DeMatteis oversimplifies Jung by a country mile, for the Americans choose "symbols" that seem more patterned on Universal monsters than on Jungian archetypes. What the Americans produce are three superhumans that have more in common with Deathlok than with Captain America, and like Deathlok, the Commandos equivocate between loyally fighting for their country and perpetually cursing the government that made them into inhuman monsters. DeMatteis wrote five stories, starting off in WEIRD WAR TALES #93, and Mike Barr wrote one. Then veteran scribe Robert Kanigher took over, writing the final eleven stories, which ended the series in issue #121, except for a one-page farewell when the title WEIRD WAR itself ended with issue #124. 

No matter who wrote the original three Commandos, they were always very crude renditions of the mythologies of the "Horrific Trio." Nor for the most part did the writers manage to give any of the sinister-looking soldiers any viable characterization. Two of the soldiers-- Vincent Velcro and Warren Griffith-- reluctantly submitted to genetic tinkering that turned them into a vampire and a werewolf, respectively. The third member-- not counting their human commander, Matthew Shrieve-- worked a little better, in that he was blown apart by an explosive, which prompted American scientists to experiment by giving him a super-strong "patchwork body." I found it risible when the comic showed me a fanged, widow's-peak-wearing vampire and a wolf-man running around in green army fatigues. However, the green-fleshed "Lucky" Taylor had a certain Hulk-like appeal, given that he was a loyal soldier who found himself into a patched-up monster who couldn't even speak coherently. In place of real characterization, the heroes merely indulged in Marvel-style whinging, and their human leader Shrieve was no better. He was pretty vanilla under deMatteis and Barr, while Kanigher's "solution" was simply to turn Shrieve into a jerk who continually disparaged his own troops as "freaks." Kanigher had a lot more generosity toward his original creation for the commando-team, Doctor Medusa, more on whom in the next essay. For good measure, the venerable DC "war weirdie" G.I. Robot (whose basic concept appeared back in 1962) pulled a couple of guest shots in the Commandos feature, before he too lost his berth with the end of WEIRD WAR.

Though I consider all of the Commandos' adventures to be null-myths due to their lack of imagination, it's interesting to speculate as to why the creative talents behind it had so little understanding of the Horrific Trio's appeal. DeMatteis gives his readers pretty much what one would expect of the Universal critters: Griffith the wolf man is a savage berserker, Velcro (hate that name!) is also bloodthirsty but has a more worldly, ironic manner of speaking, and Taylor the patchwork man is mute and sensitive despite being the "heavy lifter" of the group. Yet, while the 1940s "monster mashes" are much less mythically resonant than the individual Universals featuring Dracula, the Monster and the Wolf Man, there's some modest attention to how each of them develops as a symbolic creation. DeMatteis, though, signals an indifference to expanding on the symbolism of the three Commandos. Despite using Marvel-style dialogue, the co-creator (with artists Broderick and Celardo) of the feature apparently patterned his plotting after that of most DC war features, in which characters tend to remain static. 

Somehow, the combination of savage werewolf, urbane yet manipulative vampire, and brutal yet sensitive hulk works in many combinations, even when they don't work together, or even they're played for comedy. But THE CREATURE COMMANDOS never catches any of that combinatory fire.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3

I've frequently cited this passage from Jung on the combinatory nature of archetypes:

"[The archetype's] form, however ... might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited , only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts."-- Jung, THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, p. 79.

Pursuant to the current discussion, the aspect of the archetype that can be "inherited" is only a "possibility of representation," whereas the specific representations-- say, whether or not the sun is represented as the boat of Ra or the chariot of Helios-- are limited to whatever culture conceives them. So the pure form of the archetype may be compared to Langer's presentational symbolism, which simply discerns the role of a given archetypal trope in the culture. But given that Langer's other category, discursive symbolism, is focused on the pursuit of logic and rule-making, is there any way in which a culture's elaboration of specific representations aligns with that form?

In JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE, I wrote:

In Jung's view, myth, both in its archaic and modern manifestations, is a creative response to the archetypal experience.  He opposes the idea of "myth as primitive science" advanced by E.B. Tylor and James Frazer, claiming that primitive man possesses an "imperative need... to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events."  I agree, but with the caveat that in many instances primitive humans did look for aspects of "outer sense experiences" that were regularly replicated.  This is the sort of thing Tylor mistook for primitive science; the idea that, for instance, a story about a sun-god was an attempt to understand how the real sun worked. 

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky.  However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- were sacred clues to the nature of divine power.  The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated.  For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.

Now, Jung was a psychologist, not a theoretical anthropologist, so he never focused on the ways archaic cultures utilized myth. When he pursues the rituals of alchemy, he's not especially concerned with whether or not the ancient alchemists were alluding to real or imagined chemical processes: he's concerned with how alchemical processes parallel the experiences of patients undergoing visionary states. In contrast, Joseph Campbell was more focused on the social functions of archaic religion, and thus he's arguably been a better guide to me than Jung in terms of seeing how myths in all eras encode what I called "sacred clues." I stated as much in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR:

For the majority of my essays on both THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE and NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!, I have somewhat privileged Campbell's functions in terms of analyzing the mythical representations found in both canonical and popular fiction. That's because Campbell's functions deal with functions of information-- forms he earlier termed "metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological"-- rather than pure states of consciousness. 

I would now add that Campbell's four functions are intrinsically discursive in nature, and so he proves this in this passage from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, presented in greater context here:

... there is a third factor, furthermore, which has everywhere exerted a pervasive influence on the shaping of mythologies, a third range and context of specifically human experience, of which the developing individual becomes inevitably aware as his powers of thought and observation mature, the spectacle, namely, of the universe, the natural world in which he finds himself, and the enigma of its relation to his own existence: its magnitude, its changing forms, and yet, through these, an appearance of regularity. Mankind's understanding of the universe has greatly altered in the course of the millenniums -- particularly most recently, as our instruments of research have improved. But there were great changes also in the past: for example, in the time of the rise of the early Sumerian city-states, with their priestly observers of the heavenly courses; or in that of the Alexandrian physicists and astronomers, with their concept of an earthly globe enclosed within seven revolving celestial spheres.

However, even though discursive observations like the heavens' "appearance of regularity" appear in both religious and literary myths, they have a very different function than they do in the purely discursive discipline of science. Scientific investigations can be executed within what Wheelwright called a *monosignative* language, where every word used is intended to signify a discrete phenomenon. Myth and literature have an innate tendency toward the *plurisignative,* which, as I noted in a Cassirer-quote in Part 2, is also necessary to the formation of human language.

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).

ADDENDUM: 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.

SIGNMAKING AND WORLDBUILDING

I concluded Part 3 of ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE  with this statement:

it stands to reason that artifice as a mode embraces both simple variables ("stereotypes") and complex variables ("archetypes.")

I followed up this distinction in Part 4:

I may have on occasion connected "affective freedom" with the author's ability to generate discourses of symbolic complexity, but if I have done so, this would be a mistake. "Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude, and that freedom can be found in any uncanny or marvelous work, regardless of its symbolic complexity, a.k.a. "mythicity." 

Although both of these are abstract conceptions, the best way to figure out how they work is to treat them as if they were physical objects, able to be broken down into their constituent parts.

Archetypes, both in their Jungian and Fryean conceptions, stand outside the realm of the semiotics disciplines of Saussure, Pierce and Morris. Yet clearly many ideas from semiotics coincide with those of archetypal psychology and "myth criticism." Frye's concept of simple and complex variables sounds a lot like Morris's distinction between straightforward "signals" and more involved "symbols," and they both also resemble Wheelwright's arguments for a spectrum of language ranging from the *monosignative,* or "denotative," to the *plurisignative,* or "connotative." So even though the term"archetype" may have special usages, it's not hard to see that it bears a strong relation to semiotics, the study of signs, even though Jung probably would not agree that an archetype reduces down to a linguistic sign.

"Artifice," however, cannot reduce down to something as elementary as a "sign." I said that it lined up with an author's intention to privilege tropes peculiar to literary expression than to "tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude." My use of "trope" is probably closest to the definition cited at Dictionary.com:

any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and
irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense.

Within a naturalistic phenomenality, the author must always privilege verisimilitude, though it's always possible to bend the rules of the strictly probable to suit the audience. The 'birth-mystery plot" from Dickens' OLIVER TWIST is an artifice designed to begin the main character's life without any of the familial support that most children receive in their upbringing. Nothing that happens in the early chapters of the novel is purely outside the domain of the naturalistic, in which, as I've said before, reality is both coherent and intelligible. Yet, once Dickens has generated the maximum pathos from his character's plight, the author bends the rules so that Oliver's first, Fagin-inspired attempt to burgle a house puts him in contact with the character of Rose, who just happens to be Oliver's long-lost aunt. At the same time, Dickens must use a certain amount of verisimilitude in setting up the situation-- for instance, Fagin's gang must have good reason to think that the house is worth robbing. There's some artifice in Oliver's deliverance from the hardships resulting from the mystery of his origins, but not enough to render it "anti-intelligible--" and further, all the "literary or rhetorical devices" Dickens uses, whether allied to artifice or to verisimilitude, should all be seen as tropes.

So, whereas archetypes can be seen as related to, or identical with, those atomistic entities we call "signs," both the artifice-mode and the verisimilitude-mode are related to those "molecular entities" built up from the sign-atoms. Jung probably did not use the term "trope" back in his day, but in some essays he did use "motif" as a more neutral term than archetype, and I imagine that for him "motif" carried the same meaning that "trope" does for readers today.

One scholar whom Jung influenced, Joseph Campbell, was attracted to the use of the term "signs," though his orientation seems more toward ethology than semiotics. In this early essay, I hazarded a parallel between Campbell's concept of supernormal signs and Frye's concept of complex variables:

For the purpose of this argument I'll assume that though Campbell's "supernormal sign stimuli" don't share the same philosophical etiology as Frye's "complex variables," the two writers are essentially talking about the same thing: the power of certain signs to evoke far stronger responses-- affective and perhaps cognitive as well-- than do their opposite numbers: "normal sign stimuli" and "simple variables." Both Campbell and Frye frequently addressed the interpenetration of art and myth, though naturally each man hewed to his specialty.

However, of late I've been doubting that "supernormal signs" are adequate for talking about either Fryean or Jungian archetypes. Ethologists evolved the notion of such signs for talking about the instincts of lower animals, to better understand how, to use one of Campbell's examples, a newborn chick might fear the image of a hawk even though the newborn has never seen a hawk before. But most lower animals are not able to respond to images or motifs beyond the level of the simple "sign." In contrast, as soon as human beings were able to formulate language, and to begin the long process of symbolic elaboration seen in culture, they took the step into the domain of the pure symbol. The images we see in early man's cave-paintings may vary between sign and symbol, but by the time we see an image as elaborate as "The Sorcerer" from Trois-Freres, we're probably not dealing with a simple sign, but with a "molecular" trope built up from many "atomistic" signs. Thus I would say that as a rule, there are no "supernormal signs" in human culture, only "supernormal tropes."

A partial exception is suggested by this passage from Philip Wheelwright, last printed here:

Certain particulars have more of an archetypal content than others; that is to say, they are 'eminent instances' which stand forth in a characteristic amplitude as representatives of many others; they enclose in themselves a certain totality, arranged in a certain way, stirring in the soul something at once familiar and strange, and thus outwardly as well as inwardly they lay claim to a certain unity and generality.-- FOUNTAIN, p. 54.

I gave my own example of both an "eminent instance" and its "non-eminent" relation:

It's true that one cannot say, in any meaningful context, that real eagles are more important, more significant, than real mudlarks. However, in any symbolic universe the symbolic (or gestural) eagle is worth more than the symbolic/gestural mudlark. 

And yet, by the end of the essay, I've noted that the richness of the symbolic eagle is still something that resulted from an ongoing process:

The concept of complexity, which suggests an "eminent instance" with a huge accretion of associations, not unlike the outer periphery of a black hole:

In short, then-- Tropes, good. Signs, not as good.

ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 3

So far the only thing I've written about any linkage between archetypes and the concept of artifice-- which should properly be considered a "mode" given that it, like verisimilitude, deals with ways that authors create their stuff-- is this section from EFFICACY, MEET MYTH:

if myth [NOTE: as Frye is using the term] is really defined by the transhuman powers of deities, then what is being transmitted from the clearly mythic story of "Euripides' Ion" (where the protagonist is the offspring of a god) to the verisimilitudinous story of Oliver Twist? It seems likely to me that the way myth [NOTE: by which *I* mean "archaic mythology"] interacts with "the constructive principles of story-telling" is that myth supplies archetypes that have an expressive, emotive appeal irrespective of their phenomenal context. Thus, Frye is much nearer to the truth later in the ANATOMY, when he defines archetypes as "complex variables." I believe that though the literary critic distanced himself from the psychological views of Jung, Frye may have been exposed to Jung's argument about the archetypes as a structuring principle.

So what Frye calls "the constructive principles of story-telling" should take in both "verisimilitude" and what I have renamed "artifice," since in the same section where he introduces his two terms, he states that, "Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other."   

Now, though Frye elsewhere defined archetypes as "complex variables," I don't think he's always consistent in emphasizing their complexity, be it potential or actual. For instance, I don't deem the use of the "birth-mystery plot" in OLIVER TWIST to be particularly complex. Though I believe Frye had been exposed to some modern semiotic theory, such as I invoke in my differentiation between simple and complex variables, he sometimes uses the word "archetype" to describe any trope in a modern story that resembles a story from archaic myth.

I, however, favor the Segal definition of the archetype cited earlier, since I think it best coheres with Jung's writings on the subject:

An archetypal experience is not any emotional event but only an overwhelming one, the extraordinariness of which stems exactly from the power of the archetype encountered through projection.

What makes archetypes "overwhelming?" I would say that it is the same complexity of associations that I have elsewhere termed "the combinatory sublime." Simpler associations characterize simple variables, and I would say that the "birth-mystery" aspect of OLIVER TWIST is pretty simple, even compared to its use in, say, GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

We can easily imagine that Dickens, in composing both works, draws upon his knowledge of "birth-mystery" plots in earlier myths and literary works. But if OLIVER is a simple version of such plots, and EXPECTATIONS is a complex one, then it stands to reason that artifice as a mode embraces both simple variables ("stereotypes") and complex variables ("archetypes.")

More to come in Part 4.

ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 2

At the end of PART 1 I stated that I would investigate a particular archetypal trope, that of the "birth-mystery plot," across the three phenomenalities of the NUM theory. The two examples more or less introduced by Frye in the earlier quoted section from his ANATOMY were Oliver Twist (my selection of a Dickens "mystery orphan") and Ion (from the Euripides play of the same name). Within the domain of "the uncanny," the most famous example of this trope is almost inevitably Tarzan. whose origin-tale may be more widely known than that of the other two.

I'll backtrack here just enough to reference my 2013 statement here as how the uncanny differs from the purely naturalistic, both in terms of the principle of "strangeness" and in terms of a potential for combinatory power:

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

Now, in PART 1 I made a brief comparison between the narrative strategies of Oliver's creator and the dramatist of ION:

the author [Dickens] will seek to emphasize that, say, Oliver Twist is the product of an unjust social system, rather than the obvious spawn of either a fiction-writer or of any mythological entities that might stand in for the author. (Again following Frye's example, the god Apollo exists to "explain" the provenance of his mortal son Ion, in more or less parallel fashion to the sacrificed giant whose death "explains" the origins of the universe.)

Now, the caveat must be made that Euripides did not "invent" Ion as the other two invented their respective characters. Nevertheless, an author who follows the basic outlines of a traditional myth-tale about a traditional character tacitly accepts the phenomenality implied in that material, and anyone who attempts to produce a mythology out of whole cloth, as Tolkien did, is likely to pursue roughly the same narrative strategies as the archaic authors, as far as how the gods function with relation both to mortals and to godly kindred.

Again I return to the definition I formulated of the three phenomenalities in response to my reading of Roy Bhaskar: 

In the NATURALISTIC category, all phenomena are both "coherent" and "intelligible."
In the UNCANNY category, all phenomena are "coherent" in that they do not exceed the cognitive//physical nature of causality, but some phenomena are not "intelligible" given that they may prove unintelligible by the standards of the NATURALISTIC.
In the MARVELOUS category, some phenomena may be neither "coherent" nor "intelligible."

(Note:my current term "coherent" substitutes for the discontinued one "regular.")

Everything in Oliver Twist's world is both coherent and intelligible, just as certain things in Ion's world are neither coherent nor intelligible. In the world that Burroughs created for Tarzan, however, he pursues some of the same goals as the naturalistic author as described in Part 1:

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

But Tarzan is not strictly intelligible as is Oliver Twist. I'm not speaking of incidents in the first book that strain credulity, like the ape-man teaching himself to read, because Burroughs wants his readers to believe that this miracle falls within the bounds of naturalistic possibility. Rather, it's that the author allows his character an "affective freedom" that exceeds the type of affectivity normally possible for characters in naturalistic worlds. Burroughs isn't being literal when he styles Tarzan a "forest god," but the impression of godhood is conveyed by the hero's strength, which on one hand is entirely human in its scope, and yet on the other hand has been developed to an extent most men never experience, including jungle-dwelling tribesmen who haven't been raised by apes.

Marvelous works by their nature must privilege the world of literary artifice, whether they are creating a whole world of marvelous things (Tolkien again) or just one marvelous thing in an otherwise natural-seeming world (Verne, and, in a narrative sense, Euripides). Naturalistic works privilege the perceptions, by the author and his culture, as to the restrictions of verisimilitude. The uncanny author utilizes strategies from both domains. Poe in Todorov's example of "House of Usher" allows his reader to pursue a naturalistic interpretation if he really wants it, but the author doesn't buttress that interpretation with assorted facts about the tendency of houses to sink into tarns at the least provocation.

In Part 3, I'll get back to the matter of how archetypes and artifice go together.

ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 1

An archetypal experience is not any emotional event but only an overwhelming one, the extraordinariness of which stems exactly from the power of the archetype encountered through projection.-- Robert A. Segal, THEORIZING ABOUT MYTH, p. 93. (quoted in greater context here).

A stereotype is defined by bare functionality.
An archetype is defined by some degree of "super-functionality."-- A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY

The primary similarity between (1) the many facets of "the archetype" as described by Jung and others and (2) the concept of "artifice" that I introduced in EFFICACY, MEET MYTH is that both are abstract constructions. Both are built up not from observed experience but from patterns one projects upon abstract ideas about experience. Such abstractions tend to intermingle willy-nilly, which is why my EFFICACY essay might have been better titled ARTIFICE, MEET MYTH, since I was arguing that my new term provided a more effective substitute for Northrop's Frye use of "myth" in the particular Fryean schema I quoted.

Still, "efficacy" wasn't without significance. Cassirer introduced the term as a way of seeking to understand the "non-causal causality" one finds in myth, as one sees in favorite tropes like that of the giant who is dismembered to create the universe. I drew a comparison between Cassirer's definition of efficacy as a "translation and  transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence" and viewing this as comparable to the will-based process by which a literary author creates a world out of his own "subjective emotions and drives."  No matter how much an author may think that he's attempting to hew close to observed experience, the moment he seeks to create fiction-- as opposed to nonfiction and memoir-related works like those of Harvey Pekar-- he will always impose some sense of order on his fictive world that parallels that of the cosmic order one finds in myth.

Nevertheless, many authors seek to buttress their visions of real life with direct observations that they or others have taken from experience, and all such attempts to bring the fictional world into line with observed experience fit under the heading of Frye's category "verisimilitude." Ironically, "verisimilitude" can even take in inaccurate information. In HENRY IV PART 1, Shakespeare makes Henry and Hotspur the same age, which was not historically accurate. However, misinformation serves the same purpose in the play that accurate information would: to give the audience a set of particular facts about the antagonists.

The author who wants to be admired for his verisimilitude, then, endeavors to imply that any subjective concerns that inform his work are logical extrapolations from his observations of experience. Thus, even when he employs an archetypal trope, such as Frye's example of the "birth-mystery plot" in various Dickens works, the author will seek to emphasize that, say, Oliver Twist is the product of an unjust social system, rather than the obvious spawn of either a fiction-writer or of any mythological entities that might stand in for the author. (Again following Frye's example, the god Apollo exists to "explain" the provenance of his mortal son Ion, in more or less parallel fashion to the sacrificed giant whose death "explains" the origins of the universe.)

I'll state then a general maxim: no fiction-author can ever completely succeed in divorcing himself from the domain of artifice and totally cleaving to the domain of verisimilitude.

That said, an author's focus upon verisimilitude means that he automatically seeks to limit the potential "affective freedom" of his work, in favor of a "cognitive restraint" based in his own acceptance, and that of his potential audience, of all the rules of consensual reality. And that means that the "will" incarnate in the work of a (usually) naturalistic author like Dickens is not quite the same as what one sees in the work of one best known for marvelous scenarios, like Euripides, or of one who uses the same archetype in an uncanny work-- more upon which in Part 2.

         

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERMAN'S RETURN TO KRYPTON" (SUPERMAN #141, 1960)

I've already used this Jerry Siegel story a couple of times, in 2010 as an example of a Jungian incest-motif and in 2012 as an example of sublimity. Since the former subject relates more to mythicity than the latter, I'll explore in more depth some of the thoughts from the 2010 essay.

I wrote:

In terms of tone, this is less Freudian than Jungian incest. Jor-L and Lora are “heavenly” echoes of the couple that Superman and Lois will become, however long the latter relationship may be deferred. (Critics who make windy arguments about the perpetual childhood of the superhero should remember that in 1940 Jerry Siegel attempted to set the stage for a more mature Superman-Lois relationship, but was overruled by his editors.) But even though the visual resemblance of Lois and Lora is probably just a visual joke, the resemblance of their names may carry a little more psychological heft. Critics may never be sure exactly why Jerry Siegel used the name “Lora” for Superman’s mother, in contrast to the name of the father Jor-L, whose name is certainly derived from JERry SiegEL. But as we don't know of a particular "Laura" who influenced Siegel in these years-- at least I find none in Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW-- it’s possible that consciously or subconsciously Siegel modeled the mother’s name on the girlfriend’s. Not only does “Lora” have the same number of letters/syllables as “Lois,” one finds an interesting congruence given that the first two letters of Lois Lane's first and last names come out to LO and LA. And if one makes a metathetic substitution of the letter ‘R’ for the second ‘L,’ one sees that the name of the prospective wife symbolically embodies that of the mother.

However, wordplay is not the only aspect of the story that might be fruitfully analyzed though the process of Jungian amplification.

Now, it should be said up front that Jerry Siegel was an inveterate fan of wacky humor. Thus even though "Return" is admired by a fair number of critics-- not least Gerard Jones-- for its pathos, Siegel apparently couldn't resist transporting his hero to his former home-world in a rather peculiar way, as seen below:

There's no way of knowing whether or not Siegel's original script specified that the planet-sized creature should look so goony; for all anyone knows, the creature's depiction may have been the choice of artist Wayne Boring. But I suspect that Boring wouldn't have depicted the creature as  being the size of a planet unless Siegel had specified that detail, and that suggest to me that the beast's likeness to a planet is a foreshadowing of the superhero's encounter with an actual planet, the home-world of Superman's birth-parents.

In accordance with the mythology, the hero immediately loses his super-powers on Krypton, but though he's relegated to the status of an ordinary man, his super-costume confers on him a new status. Siegel compensates for his hero's lost power by putting Superman in contract with Krypton's version of Hollywood (note that the "director" below wears something akin to a beret). This in turn leads to the hero being scoped out by Krypton's version of Marilyn Monroe.

Later, the movie-company will also serve as the device by which Siegel returns Superman to his role on Earth. For the time being, Superman's association with the film-world provides a mundane excuse for him to go wandering around Krypton in inappropriate clothing. He uses this excuse when he visits his newly married father and mother, who haven't even given birth to him yet.

The above scene makes it seem as if Superman's priorities are all about connecting with the father he never knew. That wish-fulfillment is certainly present. However, though Superman doesn't try to connect with his mother, Lara intuits their relationship, and does her best to mother-hen him by setting him up with the aforementioned actress / Monroe-double, Lyla Lerrol. Superman mentally compares her to his earlier "LL" loves, Lois Lane and Lori Lemaris, but as I note above, Lyla's nature, being Kryptonian, is most like that of the hero's mother. Thus, by Superman's action of returning to his "mother-world," it may be logically said that he is also returning to his mother-- though more in the symbolic manner of Jung than after the manner of Freud's Oedipus complex.

Arguably, this freedom from future consequences-- in which Superman feels he can do anything, since he's now doomed to perish when Krypton explores-- allows Siegel and Boring to "cut loose" in terms of romantic imagery, as the super-swain pursues his lady love amid sublimely colorful imagery.

To be sure, during one part of the story Superman and Jor-El seek to construct a space-ark capable of saving some of the Kryptonians from the coming destruction. But in keeping with previously established mythology-- which Superman himself apparently forgets until it's too late-- the space-ark is spirited away by the evil city-stealer Brainiac.

By this time, Superman sees no way out, and is content to die bravely with his parents and his beloved. Yet, by the writer's twist of fate, Krypton's version of the fantasy-factory Hollywood serves the cause of "reality" over "fantasy." It's the power of the movies that returns Superman to his usual stomping-grounds-- even though the rationale makes even less sense than the planet-sized goony-bird critter.

It's interesting that after Siegel has played the romance-story so "straight" for the majority of the story, that the author should come up with this daffy scenario: that the infuriated creature's fiery breath acts like rocket propulsion and launches the moviemakers' prop rocket all the way back to Earth's solar system-- thus returning Superman to his role of the dutiful superhero. The last two panels even show the hero waffling on his experience, one moment thinking that he'll always "treasure" the memories of his Kryptonian experience, and in the next, regarding it as a "strange, incredible dream."

Since I'm not advancing the incest-theme in terms of Freud, I don't have to drag in a lot of deadwood about "disavowal" or "fear of castration by the father." The romance with the quasi-maternal figure is derailed not for such fear-based reasons but because the serial character had to be returned to his normal sphere of adventure. However, while many Superman-stories of this period were replete with bizarre whimsy, "Superman's Return to Krypton" is one of the few times that whimsy gave way to a deeper level of archetypal fantasy.