QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM

As a prequel to a longer formulation, I’m recapitulating my “quantum literary theory” with some refinements.

The foundation of the theory remains indebted to Gloomy Schopenhauer’s concept of The Will. In SEVENWAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER, I adapted his theory to literary purposes by asserting that even if we can’t verify the idea of a Will that permeates human existence, it’s axiomatic that authorial Will permeates all narrative phenomena.

A secondary foundation is derived from Jung’s theory of four psychological functions through which all human subjects perceive the world, though Jung makes clear that not every individual will draw upon the functions to the same degree. From Jung’s functions I have extrapolated four potentialities that human beings use in creating any sort of narrative, be it fictional or non-fictional.

My four potentialities are the kinetic, the dramatic, the didactic and the mythopoeic, and in keeping with the meaning “potentiality” is said to carry in quantum physics, all four are modes through which the human subject organizes information.

Units of information are what I call “quanta,” named for the building-blocks of matter, i.e., both atomic and subatomic particles. But in the narratological world, the “energies” of each quantum are representations drawn both from human experience and from human imagination (which may not be entirely dependent upon experience). All quanta are generalized rather than particularized representations, loosely after the fashion of Plato’s Forms. No author makes a representation of a particular lion from a particular time and place; a quantum representing a lion communicates only “lion-ness.” A similar dynamic governs representations of action. A quantum that communicates “falling” cannot assess quantifiable distance, but only rough approximations, so that a quantum representation can only communicate falling either a short distance or a great distance.

Now for something moderately different: just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”

Whatever the word “trope” meant in ancient Greece, today it has assumed the idea of a standardized scenario, usually applied to fiction, though it’s not without relevance to non-fiction. The statement “the lion is the king of beasts” combines a quantum derived from physical experience, the creature we call a “lion,” with a second quantum, an imagined status of kingship imputed to the creature. To continue the parallel with the action of falling, a fall from a great distance often suggests danger while a fall from a short distance does not. This often translates into such tropes as “man and woman fall in love,” representing a non-perilous and even “fortunate” fall, as well as “angels falling from heaven,” which represents catastrophe if not literal physical harm.

My title for this essay plays upon the title of an Ian Fleming James Bond short story, and while many of my puns are just toss-offs, there’s a little more method to my punny madness here. I chose to reference “solipsism” not as an actual defense of that philosophical position—that one can only be certain of one’s own mental existence—but because the making of a narrative can be seen as an elaboration of one’s own mental universe. Non-fictional narratives are, at least in theory, all about relating a series of experiential facts, though arguably the most popular non-fictional discourses are those that impose a desirable interpretation on said facts. But as I’ve previously argued, fiction is less about reporting “truths” than formulating “half-truths:” narratives in which it’s obvious that the author has arranged all elements in the story to achieve certain effects. Even where a fiction-author fails to achieve those effects, an experienced reader can often intuit more or less what sort of “universe” the author sought to create.

Though some tropes may be roughly composed of the same quanta, they can have vastly different effects because authors will inevitably choose to focus more on one potentiality than another. For instance, the trope “the lion is the king of beasts” can take such many differing forms.

A KINETIC utilization of the trope appears with respect to the Gardner Fox villain “Lion-Mane,” a human who becomes transformed into a lion-humanoid in order to challenge Hawkman and Hawkgirl, with the overall scheme of achieving dominance over all the denizens of Planet Earth.

A DRAMATIC utilization appears in the imitation “Tarzan” novel KING OF THE JUNGLE and its cinematic adaptation, insofar as Kaspa, a foundling human, is adopted by a pride of jungle-dwelling lions, with the result that he becomes their “king” and uses both his animal-like skills and his human intelligence to save his fellow beasts.

A DIDACTIC utilization appears in Roland Barthes’ philosophical tome MYTHOLOGIES, in which Barthes attempts to prove that the very idea of imputing kingliness to the animal we call a “lion” is an indulgence in what he terms (with scant justification) mythological thinking.

A MYTHOPOEIC utilization appears in C.S. Lewis’s THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, wherein the kingliness of the lion is given religious connotations, so that Lord Aslan symbolizes both the power and lordliness of Lewis’s concept of Jesus Christ.

Having established the interactions of will, quantum representations, and tropes, I’ll next proceed to more involved meditations upon two particular tropes of significance to my project.

THE READING RHEUM: THE NIGHT LAND (1912)

Over the years, as I’ve researched the evolution of fantasy-concepts in prose fiction—with special attention to their significance for either the superhero idiom or the combative mode—I’ve meant to force myself to re-read the 20,000 word monster known as William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND. It’s probably been thirty years since I first read it, and even then, such critics as C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft warned me in advance that many of the novel’s virtues were impaired by assorted vices. I remember agreeing with those critics in large part. On my second (and probably last) reading, I’m less impressed with the specific virtues of NIGHT LAND than with its place in fantasy-lit history.

The year of the book’s publication, 1912, boasts at least four major conceptual achievements. In America Edgar Rice Burroughs authored two of the four, debuting both Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. In the same year two English authors, Sax Rohmer and Arthur Conan Doyle, conceived respectively the first great Asian supervillain, Fu Manchu, and the first perfectly preserved prehistoric domain, the Lost World. Four years previous, William Hope Hodgson had published his best-conceived novel, THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, and in 1912 he sought to up the ante with an even more ambitious fantasy-scape, THE NIGHT LAND.

Though there had various “fantastic voyage” tales before THE NIGHT LAND, I don’t know how many succeeded in picturing a futuristic version of Earth in apocalyptic terms. Readers of the late 20^th century grew up on numerous post-apocalyptic tales where Earth was ravaged by disaster, often nuclear holocaust, and reshaped into a bizarre new environment, but such stories were relatively rare in the early 2oth. NIGHT LAND doesn’t even sport a disaster as such. Following a lame framing-device, in which a man of relatively modern times suffers bereavement, he imagines a far-future world dominated by darkness and strange lurking monsters. Most of humankind has been eradicated, and the survivors endure in a few super-scientific cities known as “Redoubts.” In contrast to later post-apocalyptic worlds, the nameless hero’s purpose is not to redeem the fallen world, but to rescue a single woman, implicitly the reincarnation of the woman who dies during the framing-device. The modern man and the future-man are inexplicably the same person, and both of them talk in a fustian manner that reminds me of the labored language of medieval epics. It’s this literary style—coupled with a first-person narration that eschews any dialogue—that makes the monstrous NIGHT LAND so hard to enjoy.

I’ll call the unnamed narrator “X,” since Hodgson once published a cut-down version of the novel entitled THE DREAM OF X. X lives in the largest of the human enclaves, a vast pyramid known as the Last Redoubt. Implicitly futuristic technology keeps these scions of humanity alive against the external threats, though for Hodgson future-science is just a source of visual wonders and nothing more. In the course of the novel X sometimes makes veiled references to evolution, though not using that specific name, but similarly, his creator has no interest in showing how the Night Land evolved from the old world. This provides yet more common ground with the world of the medieval romance, wherein noble knights forged through assorted strange domains like nothing on Earth, scaring up witches and dragons and knights of evil intent.

X, though for the most part an ordinary man, possesses a form of telepathy, and this allows him to apprehend that another human enclave, the Lesser Redoubt, has been attacked by the Night Land’s monsters. However, at least one woman has survived: Naani, who is the reincarnation of the woman lost by the original narrator. “Five hundred youths” of the Last Redoubt storm forth to fight the monsters, and they’re all killed. So X decides to mount a lone rescue-mission, moving on foot and armed only with a weapon called a “Discos,” which can cut through monster-flesh like a buzzsaw.

Lewis and Lovecraft opined that the first half of the novel, with the warrior making his way through the Night Land, was better than the second half, in which X locates Naani and starts the arduous process of taking her back to the Last Redoubt. Granting that in both sections Hodgson’s style is archaic, prolix, and monotonous, I became a little more interested once X reached the halfway mark, and was forced thereafter to guard over a mostly helpless maiden during his exploits. (Naani does stab one of the various monsters that attack the couple on their way back, but a valkyrie she ain’t.) One point of interest is that though X does get Naani back to their refuge, the occasion is almost marked by tragedy, but Hodgson allows for a happy ending after all.

In addition to castigating the horribly affected style Hodgson attempts in the novel, Lovecraft and Lewis blast the romantic arc, with the former attacking the “sticky romantic sensibility” and the latter assailing the “irrelevant erotic interest.” Indeed, in editor Lin Carter’s introduction to Ballantine’s 1972 paperback edition of NIGHT LAND, he remarks that Ballantine’s editors cut down a lot of the billing and cooing. Even what remains in the Ballantine edition is horrendously repetitive, and Naani is no more interesting as a character than is X: both are just stereotypes of heroine and hero. The romantic arc is never compelling, but at times there’s a mild perverse interest in seeing how Hodgson depicts feminine impracticality during the long pilgrimage. The two protagonists naturally never have sex, since they’re not married, but Hodgson devotes so much space to telling us how often they kiss that a modern reader has to wonder.

Editor Lin Carter compares the Night Land to the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, but that’s an overly ambitious claim. Hodgson conjures up a lot of weird horrors, including gigantic slugs and monstrous hounds, but the ones the reader sees clearly are fairly dull, and the creatures that are not seen clearly are a little too hazy and ill-defined. Hodgson isn’t interested in carefully building a picture of his apocalyptic world, he wants to evoke “the horrors of the half-seen.” But I think he was less interested in building his world than his hero: all the monsters exist only for X to slay them with his mighty Discos. In fact, the fight-scenes are the novel’s strength, particularly one in which X contends with a four-armed humanoid and literally “disarms” the monster by cutting off its upper set of arms with his weapon.

Thus THE NIGHT LAND qualifies as a combative work. However, the world itself is too vague to deserve the status of a literary myth. It strikes me as an uneasy blend of two such myths promulgated during the late 19^th century: the bizarre future-scape that appears in H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE, and the endless geographical vistas found in the faux-medieval fantasies of William Morris. I cannot say with any certainty if Hodgson had read either author; it’s possible the Night Land was inspired by other, comparable sources. But the combination of concepts seems fortuitous. Wells supplied the eerie image of a world mutated by the ravages of time, but the main action of the story was confined to a limited “stage,” a small part of England, in order to illustrate the cultural downfall of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Morris’s fantasies were the first purely literary works to take an Earth-like landscape and populate it with magical locales and inhabitants thereof. Hodgson, by cross-breeding the ideas of the apocalyptic world and the endless fantasy-landscape, didn’t so much create a new lit-myth as to pave the way for greater works to follow.

WHAT PHANTASMS AND PSYCHOS MAY COME

The subject matter of LUNATIC LAWMEN got me thinking once more about the elements of artifice that I've said are responsible for propelling a narrative from the naturalistic world of affects-- one where all affects are dominated by either fear or admiration-- to the uncanny world of affects, dominated by dread or by fascination.

Once more, here's one of my most recent statement on "artifice" as a principle in ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 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." 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 culturally transmitted tropes of slasher-fiction, while the authors of LADY do not.

Once again, I started thinking about what makes "Psycho A" dreadful and "Psycho B" merely fearsome, and somehow I also started thinking about another of my phenomenality-tropes, the "phantasmal figuration," probably because I'd just reread what I said about that trope having influence upon the conceptual domain of Shakespeare's HAMLET.

Then it struck me that the salient difference that I perceived in Psycho A and Psycho B had much to do with what I called "the eerie vibe" in M FOR EFFORT: 

The "eerie vibe" I look for in uncanny works with the "phantasmal figuration" trope is produced when some agent within the story has managed to produce a phantasmal effect-- but only through some sustained effort. That effort might be fairly compared to the effort that the story's author must sustain in order to produce that effect within the story proper-- which may in future need further exploration in tune with my concept of artifice. 

This suggests to me that there's a threshold-crossing 'effort" involved in the villain who creates the titular deception of Doyle's THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, while there is no such effort in, say 2009's ONDINE. It's significant to me that though I reviewed ONDINE in 2014, before I'd formally conceived the principle of "effort," I stated that Ondine the phony mermaid was of a naturalistic phenomenality because she didn't really try to be anything else:

Ondine herself does little to build up her mythic persona; both Syracuse and Annie want to believe it, perhaps to escape their own mortality and limits. However, in the end it's revealed that Ondine's name is the only thing mythical about her. She is in reality a Romanian drug-mule who lost her last shipment. She fled to Ireland to escape her vengeful bosses, but the stranger in town spots her and brings in his confederates, resulting in a fight between the drug-runners and Syracuse.

In similar wise, the "uncanny psycho's" physical acts may be identical to those of the "naturalistic psycho"-- but what the former has, and the latter lacks, is that the former has a deeper investment in the insane rules of his world, rather than being determined by the "physiological factors" that dominate the latter's world. I return to C.S, Lewis, who manifestly did not believe that "dread" was simply an extrapolation from "fear:"

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread.

Building on Lewis's comment, then, Psycho A is dreadful because the viewer sees more of "what he is," through the culturally tropes of psycho-fiction. Thus he, like Lewis's ghost, is dreadful because of what he is, and not what he can do.

Further, Psycho A projects his twisted vision of the world in defiance of the "real world," just as the instigator of a "phantasmal figuration" does-- or for that matter, any agent of any of the other eight "uncanny" story-tropes I've identified. I won't go down the list at this time, but an equally relevant trope is that of "delirious dreams and fallacious figments." Leaving aside the "figments" part of the equation for a possible later essay, "uncanny dreams" also require much more "effort" on the part of their diegetic dreamer than "naturalistic dreams" do from their creators.

For instance, in my review of THE STILL OF THE NIGHT, I noted that Roy Scheider's dreams were almost totally derivative of experienced reality:

However, though the imagery is creepy-- a weird little girl with a teddy beat, for instance-- the images are clearly straightforward representations of things the dreamer has seen in real life, which marks STILL as being strongly influenced by Sir Alfred's SPELLBOUND. 

Contrast this to the way the dreamer of FRIDAY THE 13TH foretells the recrudescence of Jason Voorhees, even though her conscious mind knows that "his" crimes were committed by Jason's now-dead mother:

What's fascinating about this sequence is that even though Alice, like all of her friends, is fundamentally innocent, on some level she accepts and internalizes the guilt of Mrs. Voorhees.  Even though she wakes from the dream, she ends the film telling the surrouding officials, with an unshakable conviction, that Jason is "still down there," under the lake, haunting it with his unquiet spirit.  

The dreamer in an uncanny film, just like his uncanny brethren the psycho and the phantasm-maker, is always fully invested in the larger-than-life artifice of his world, making a consistent effort to embody those tropes rather than allowing them to be banished by the clear light of day.

ADDENDUM: Though "the uncanny" as I've defined it can only exist within the sphere of narrative literature, I will note that there have been incidents in the real world in which living persons attempted to take on the aura of something uncanny. I mentioned one such example, the real-life "Jack the Ripper," in A MOVABLE HELLFEAST.

DISCOURSES WITH LIVING SYMBOLS

In DISCOURSES WITH DEAD MEN, I said:

So any artistic narrative always has this dual potential: it can be produced for a wide audience, or for the author alone. Psychic mediums notwithstanding, artistic narrative-- which term here subsumes also music and the visual arts-- is almost the only way that artists can keep "talking" with people long after the artists themselves are dead. To some extent non-fictional narrative shares some of the power of the arts, but artistic narrative seems to hold much more power to remain relevant to audiences born long after the narrative was originated.

I also mentioned in the same essay that I began addressing the subject of "discourses" recently as a way of sussing out the function of the mythopoeic potentiality, whose content is sometimes hard to separate from that of the other three.

Yet, once one is able to isolate a work's symbolic discourse, it often provides much more of a meaningful connection to the author's work than any of the others. One may not care for an author's ability to transmit sensory experiences, personalities, or intellectual ideas, or if one grants that the author has some ability, one still may not like the world-picture he transmits. But there's something ineluctably persuasive about the symbolic process. One can reject whatever intellectual ideas may be attached to it, and yet still admire the author's ability to converse in the language of symbols.

I'll take as example C.S. Lewis, whose non-fiction I've frequently discussed on this blog. While I find Lewis's ruminations on literature stimulating, his remarks on religion have often struck me as narrow-minded and self-serving, particularly in MERE CHRISTIANITY. In this book, Lewis responded to questions about the Christian religion, originally propounded via radio. Here's the one I disliked the most.

“Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the 'Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”

Intellectually, this is nonsense. Lewis is trying to distance religion from its involvement in the witch-hunts of the past by claiming that modern religionists are too educated to believe in such nonsense. Yet he can't completely condemn the fanatics of yesteryear, stating that if he could believe in people who made deals with the devil, he would regard them as "filthy quislings" deserving of death. His position also suggests that at the time he wrote this, whatever "wiccan" practices existed in England had gone so far underground that an educated man like Lewis could believe that no such persons existed in modern times. Lewis passed in 1963, so it's possible he never encountered the idea of modern witches worshiping archaic deities that were in no way affiliated with Satan. Even if Lewis had known of such cults, the writer would probably have given them no more respect than outright Satanists.

Yet, within his creative work, Lewis could entertain syncretic visions of religion. Narnia, despite being patterned on Christian belief, reproduces many of the images and icons of Greek paganism, and in THE LAST BATTLE, there is a dim suggestion that Aslan is not exclusively a "Christian" deity, but will give sanctuary even to righteous men who do not worship him.

The irony of my title is that, while I know that symbols are not alive apart from the role they play in the language of living persons, they can take on a "life" of their own, Indeed, the symbolic formulations of an author may seem much more "convivial" to a reader than the characters or the plot that serve as vehicles for symbolic events-- sacrificial dramas, world-saving conflicts, etc. Nor is there any symbolic formulation that is absolute. Lewis's Aslan embodies one among thousands of literary sacrificial dramas, and one may name others that share none of Lewis's particular themes, but which still possess the same "unity of action" I've identified with strong symbolic discourse in this essay.  The 1971 film THE OMEGA MAN is concerned with many intellectual subjects foreign to Lewis, not least being an American preoccupation with racial matters. However, it is an evocation of the sacrificial pattern no less valuable than that of NARNIA. I quite preferred the film to its prose source material. Yet even though I found Matheson's I AM LEGEND less formidable in its mythic "unity of action," there would have been no OMEGA MAN had the novel not suggested the theme to the film's scriptwriters.

Despite my usage of the established term "unity of action," the unity involved in plurisignative communication is far more about unifying a plurality of affects, both sympathetic and antipathetic. For myths of sacrificial figures, it's about transcending the death that we know all mortal entities must experience. Aslan literally transcends death, while Robert Neville's transubstantiation is more figurative, but symbolic constructs may be said to enjoy both literal and figurative transcendence, if only because, having never lived, they can never really die.

ANCESTORS OF FEAR AND DREAD

C.S. Lewis's analysis from AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM remains my touchstone for the distinction between fear and dread:

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost.

Lewis formulated this opposition by drawing on Rudolf Otto's 1917 THE IDEA OF THE HOLY. However, a much earlier distinction appeared in a 1826 analysis by Gothicist Ann Radcliffe, where she distinguished between "terror" and "horror." This analysis, later given the title "On the Supernatural in Poetry" by an editor, isn't particularly well-organized. In essence, Radcliffe-- whose Gothic novels depended on suggestion rather than explicit gore and gruesomeness-- has her principal character argue that "terror" is a much subtler and finer emotion than "horror," which is all about the explicitness. Here's her most definite statement on the difference:

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.

This doesn't really clarify the matter all that much, but a later section makes clear that Radcliffe equates the sublimity of terror with that of the merely suggested, the merely imagined. When an interlocutor asks the speaker what he thinks about Milton's line, "On his brow sat horror plumed," the speaker essentially co-opts MIlton's use of the word "horror" for the speaker's (and Radcliffe's) idea of "terror:"

As an image, it certainly is sublime; it fills the mind with an idea of power, but it does not follow that Milton intended to declare the feeling of horror to be sublime; and after all, his image imparts more of terror than of horror; for it is not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades, the great outlines only appearing, which excite the imagination to complete the rest; he only says, ‘sat horror plumed ;' you will observe, that the look of horror and the other characteristics are left to the imagination of the reader; and according to the strength of that, he will feel Milton's image to be either sublime or otherwise. 

According to this site, Radcliffe was not a fan of explicit gore, and wrote her book THE ITALIAN (which I have not read) as a pointed response to the excesses of Matthew Lewis's 1796 Gothic novel THE MONK. I have read the Lewis book, and I can confirm that it does not hold back in "distinctly picturing forth" its ghastlier scenes).

If there are any significant parallels between the formulations of Ann Radcliffe and of C.S. Lewis (by way of Otto), it would seem to be the mutual attempt to define the nature of fear based in purely physical causes. Lewis' tiger can only inspire fear because there's no deeper concept to be understood about it, save that it's an animal capable of killing a human being. This is only a partial parallel to Radcliffe's use of "horror," which "contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates" both the soul and the faculties. But her contrast to "terror," like Lewis' contrast to the "uncanny" feeling of seeing a "ghost," is pretty clearly based upon the familiar body/mind duality, which poet Octavio Paz more aptly rendered into a duality between "body" and "non-body" (or as I once called them, "corporeal" and "non-corporeal.")

To further complicate the matter, although Lewis is to some extent addressing the question of different phenomenal presences in different situations, Radcliffe apparently has no interest at all in aligning either "terror" or "horror" with any type of phenomena. Though she doesn't mention THE MONK in the above essay, it's plain that she would class it as a work of "horror" simply because it "distinctly pictures forth" all of the unseemly situations it includes-- ranging from the monk Ambrosio's (naturalistic) incestuous union with his own sister, to his (marvelous) doom at the hands of a demon, who flings Ambrosio's body from a great height and allows the monk to perish in agony. If anything, Radcliffe's distinction of "distinct" and "indistinct" is closer to my distinction between "clean" and "dirty violence" in this essay:

I said in an earlier essay that I would address the differing "intensities" of violence in fiction, by which I meant what I called "clean violence" vs. "dirty violence." These are NOT meant to be covalent with my versions of Twitchell's preposterous violence and its unnamed opposite. I refer to the "intensities" of clean and dirty because they are determined purely by how intensely the work does or does not present scenes of violence. As I see it preposterous violence and its opposite are not determined by intensity of effect but by narrative function.

Again, the parallel is still not exact. Still, just as the proponent of "suggestive terror" does not want to "freeze the soul/faculties" of the reader by bringing in gross effects, the proponent of "clean violence"-- my principal example being the 1977 STAR WARS-- is also seeking to avoid grossing out the audience, albeit for a very different aesthetic purpose.

Now, my own definition of "dread" moves away from Lewis's example of a "ghost:" to anything covered by my Ten Tropes, which occur in both naturalistic and uncanny forms-- the first forms inspiring only "fear," while the second may inspire fear but more importantly inspires "dread" as well. The latter comes about because even though both forms obey the laws of causal coherence, the uncanny forms violate the law of intelligibility. In the interest of further defining the process through which intelligibility is violated, I'll devote the upcoming essay JUDGING DREAD PART 2.

JUDGING DREAD

During 2013 I devoted a great deal of blog-space to investigating the source of C.S. Lewis' trinity of "fear, dread, and awe" as he expressed them in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. These terms, in less organized form, stemmed from Rudolf Otto's 1917 THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, which Lewis had read and appreciated. Both writers fall into the philosophical category of "Rationalists," whom Kant defines as those who "intellectualize experience."

I also wrote, in HOLY NUMINOSITY PART 2, that I believed Sigmund Freud may have encountered Otto's book and the author's use of the term "the uncanny" to describe a Rationalist's conception of religon, and that Freud then hijacked the term for his own Empiricist project. However, on reconsideration it's more likely that Freud derived the term from a 1906 essay by fellow psychologist Ernst Jentsch, especially since he's mentioned in the text on Freud's work. I don't imagine there's any way to prove that Rudolf Otto did or did not read the Jentsch essay, and in any case it's perhaps more likely that he was drawing upon the way the word was used in demotic speech.

Otto's religious conception of the word is central to his argument, as he argues that tribal cultures were governed by what he called "daemonic dread," the fear and fascination of imagined spirits. Otto didn't argue for any one-on-one equivalence between this form of worship and later forms, particularly the author's own Christianity. Yet he suggested something of a teleological relationship, in which the greater form more or less grew from the latter, even as Aristotle imagined great tragedies growing from the crudities of satyr-plays. This was plainly a different approach to the idea of "superstitious dread" than that of Freud, who would largely consign all religious to the dustbin of failed ideas.

These Empiricist-Rationalist intellectual arguments have not died out in these later decades: they simply found new expression, such as that of James Twitchell's 1987 DREADFUL PLEASURES. I'm in the process of rereading this book, but I'm not so much concerned with tracking its highly Freudian interpretation of the horror-genre, as I am with Twitchell's attempt to reduce the genre's appeal to the "physiological factors" that Freud used as the bedrock of his system.

Freud's disaffected disciple Carl Jung was perhaps the first major voice to detract from Freud's emphasis on the physiological. In my essay WAKE ME UP BEFORE I IMAGO-GO,  I featured this segment from Jung's 1936 essay outlining his opposition to Freud:

Now religious ideas, as history shows, are charged with an extremely suggestive, emotional power. Among them I naturally reckon all "representations collectives," everything that we learn from the history of religion, and anything that has an "ism" attached to it. The latter is only a modern variant of the denominational religions. A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating "representation collective." His very materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism, or what not, testifies against his innocence. Somewhere or other, overtly or covertly, he is possessed by a supraordinate idea.

I tend to think that Jung's "superordinate ideas" probably come closer to what Otto was trying to say about the relation of "the uncanny" to "the numinous," even though as a religious man Otto would have opposed Jung's tendency to subsume religion into pure psychology.

Just in reading the first chapter of DREADFUL PLEASURES, I'm impressed by Twitchell's foursquare effort to define the horror-genre through "physiological factors." He quotes Otto just once in the first chapter, clearly doing so in order to distance himself from Otto's concept of "dread." (After a quick summary of Otto's project, Twitchell avers that "My concerns are thankfully less transcendental.")

I don't for a moment believe that Twitchell's project as a whole has broad applicability to either the specific genre of horror or metaphenomenality in general. However, I think that some of his observations may impact upon the concept of *artifice* that I broached here, and in future essays, I'll be investigating these matters more fully.

TAKING STOCK OF 2014

In the early years of this blog I didn't trouble much about "first posts of each year." But I did so at the beginning of 2014, so I might as well ring in the new year in the same manner.

From my admittedly biased POV, 2014 was an important year in filling in some important elements of my literary theory.  If my "big discovery" of 2013 was my slow determination was that Kant's "dynamic sublime" did not adequately explain all aspects of the fictional sublime, a.k.a. "the sense of wonder," then for 2014 it was my chance exposure to Roy Bhaskar's work on scientific phenomenology. As described in this essay, Bhaskar's work proved helpful in guiding me away from the influence of C.S. Lewis and his persuasive but ultimately unrewarding meditation on probability. In the same essay I suggested a new refinement for the methods by which the phenomenalities of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous" appeal to the wonder-seeking audience.

Now I would rephrase [the above] to say that the combinatory-sublime arises rather from the transgression upon the reader's expectations in terms of intelligibility and regularity. DIRTY HARRY, a naturalistic work which conforms to general expectations regarding intelligibility and regularity, has its own proper level of mythicity but is not likely to inspire a high level of the combinatory-sublime because of said conformity. ENTER THE DRAGON conforms to expectations regarding regularity but not intelligibility; being "anti-intelligible," it has a higher potential to arouse the combinatory-sublime. And STAR WARS, which violates both intelligibility and regularity, has the greatest mythicity of the three in reality, as well as the greatest potential for symbolic combinations and thus for the combinatory-sublime.

Now, 2015 may bring even further refinements. But if I'm correct in thinking that Bhaskar's terminology has provided me with a firmer ground for the NUM theory that I ever derived from Lewis, Cassirer, or Todorov, then the question arises: is there an efficient way to communicate the theory of the combinatory-sublime to the actual seekers of wonder, the readers of horror, fantasy and science fiction?

That it represents my own responses to the joys of metaphenomenal art goes without saying. But the proof of the theory is, at least partially, to be found in practice.  I would expect that some readers of metaphenomenal literature would be somewhat more approachable to analyzing their responses in philosophical terms. They might not be up on all the Burke and Kant stuff, but a simple essay dealing with what makes marvelous images appealing-- something along the lines of COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT. 3-- might be one avenue of approach to the more bookish of the book-readers.

As for fans of fantasy-movies or fantasy-comics-- I have a feeling such analytical ruminations would not be to their taste. Whenever I've put forth feelers on such subjects on forums devoted to popular media, I almost get the feeling that these fantasy-fans have allowed their dominant culture to define the metaphenomenal experience for them, as with, "I know it's fantasy, but I like it anyway." Unfortunately this admission can lead anti-fantasists to accuse said fans of practicing simple "negative compensation," which I've attempted to refute here repeatedly.

It may be that one of my impending projects for 2015 may yield a better forum for these insights than one among a thousand blogs.  We shall see.

HOW NOT TO MOVE THE EARTH

• Give me a firm spot on which to stand, and I shall move the earth.-- variant version of Archimedes' quote.

To inquire into the substance of what has been observed
is possible in natural science only where there is an Archimedean
point outside. For the psyche, no such outside standpoint
exists—only the psyche can observe the psyche. Consequently,
knowledge of the psychic substance is impossible for us, at least
with the means at present available. This does not rule out the
possibility that the atomic physics of the future may supply us
with the said Archimedean point. For the time being, however,
our subtlest lucubrations can establish no more than is expressed
in the statement: this is how the psyche behaves.-- Carl Jung,
"The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales."

The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution--appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. Furthermore, whereas in tales told for entertainment such mythical themes are taken lightly--in a spirit, obviously, of play--they appear also in religious contexts, where they are accepted not only as factually true but even as revelations of the verities to which the whole culture is a living witness and from which it derives both its spiritual authority and its temporal power-- Joseph Campbell, PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, p. 3.

When I re-read the Jung essay, I was once again struck by his point about how the human psyche possesses no "Archimedean point" on which an observer can stand upon, whereby to either move its substance or to analyze it.  

Of course, Jung has his detractors. That arch-Rationalist C.S. Lewis remarked of Jung's writings that "the definition of water should not itself be wet," which was Lewis' way of taking a shot at the psychologist who believed that all religions had their roots not in revelation but in psychological intuitions.  I imagine that Jung might have answered this criticism by saying that the psyche is not a substance which could be dispassionately observed "from outside," as the element of water is; thus Lewis' comparison is clever but meaningless.  It's also interesting that if one did not know Lewis' history, from that one remark it would be possible to imagine him an Empiricist of a particular positivist slant.

Empiricists, however, have been the current shapers of the reflective mode of thought, and those who have most consigned Jung to the periphery of science, like the remark I first reprinted here:

Post-modern critics have more or less dispatched Jung. At the same time his archetype concept has morphed into the more empirically testable prototype theories of cognitive linguistics and visual arts. Developed in the 1970s and 1980s largely by Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff, prototypes reinterpret Wittgenstein's 'family resemblances' and basic-level categories, arguing that cognition produces a set of canonical categories (mental schema) that aid memory by producing somewhat abstracted or idealized feature sets of an object or object class (birds, for example) (Lakoff 1987).

I replied:

I believe I understand the appeal of this sort of science, particularly where its adherents believe it gives them weapons to knock down the idols of superstition and religion. But even if all of humankind's abilities to abstract and conceptualize *may* have arisen from cerebral attempts to conserve energy, that base fact does not define what the power of abstraction finally means, any more than the seed of an oak tress "means" the birds that nest within the tree.

It further struck me that this desire for an Archimedean point, from which one can imagine that one stands far enough removed from a given subject to analyze it, is common in elitist critics. Thus, though I wrote here that the appeal of Freud and Marx for elitists is founded in the appeal of a "reversal of values," I also noted at the essay's conclusion that such elitists did not prize revolution for its own sake. They want, as I concluded, "only one revolution, one story-- and sadly, just one truth." To accomplish that end, they attempt to give their analyses the pretense of psychological or sociological certainty, or, as I said in the above-cited "Dead-Alive Hand of the Past," following Freud and Marx because "Freud and Marx offer reductive paradigms which boast the rock-solid integrity of the physical sciences."

In passing I will note that the concentration upon supposed scientific veracity, or at least a "tough-minded" attitude comparable to the sciences, might also be the mark of what Northrop Frye calls an "Iliad critic," an argument I explored in my 2009 essay BREAKING OPEN MOULDY TALES.

In the quote above, Jung stressed the fact that we can only speak of the behavior of the psyche, and not of its substance. In doing so I believe he was trying to break out of the false positivism of his mentor Freud and of the psychological field generally, and present the experiences of the psyche as phenomenologically valid in themselves.   And in Joseph Campbell's above quote, he fundamentally agrees with Jung on this point, even though the two scholars approached the same material from very different orientations (Campbell being far less the Kantian that Jung was, for instance).

Nonetheless, when I encounter a remark from someone who believes that archetypes are somehow limiting, such as I referenced here, Campbell's quote proves instructive.  Campbell, like Jung, sees endless fascination in the productions of the psyche, even though they might reduce down to countless variations on a few limited themes. I repeat one phrase from the quote:

...such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution--appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. 

What might this mean to a subject aligned to science and reflective philosophy?  Presumably that individual would view such themes as restrictive because they might bind those who give them credence in the same way religious precepts have bound whole civilizations, at least according to the dominant "myth of religion" propounded by the more fanatical adherents of science. Such a reader would only see the words "always the same" and would assume that it was an attempt to convert others to a static, religion-based view of the universe-- and entirely overlook Campbell's emphasis on the "new combinations" that could spring "like the elements of a kaleidoscope," from those repeated themes.  And of course, that individual would conveniently overlook that supposed "scientists" like Freud and Marx have proselytized for their visions of the universe no less often than Jung and Campbell.  In fact, I've also sometimes suspected that the real popularity of Freud, Marx and all of their kindred is that a budding intellectual, by grounding himself in these doctrines, can safely ignore all the "speculative philosophy" that went before-- and a few representatives that endured into the twentieth century, such as Frye and Cassirer.  Certainly Edward Skidelsky, whose tome on Cassirer I began analyzing here, starts from the assumption that reflective philosophy has already won the day against the remnants of what I call "speculative philosophy."

On a side-note, I'm impressed yet again by the emphasis in Campbell on "combinations," just as I was upon finding a similar concept in Edmund Burke.  But any meditations on how Campbell relates to the combinatory-sublime will wait for a later essay.

AFFECT VS. MOOD

In recent essays I've re-examined Edmund Burke's work with regard to the ways subjects experience sublimity, either with an affect of sympathy or one of antipathy.  Because of those essays, I find myself looking at how both the sympathetic affects and the antipathetic affects appear in works of popular fiction-- specifically, how narratives tend to center around either one set of affects than the other, though both may easily appear in both. 

This, however, suggested to me a parallel with my writings on centricity with regard to myth-radicals, probably best summed up in JUNG AND CENTRICITY.  Jung specified in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES that each individual had within him four psychological functions, but that only one of these would have "absolute sovereignty" as against the others. I asserted that the same logic could also be applied to Frye's four mythoi, using as example the teleseries BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which I regard as falling properly into the category of adventure, even though the series regularly also calls upon elements common to the comedy, the irony, and the drama.

However, to complicate the matter further, I also linked Frye's four functions with the four "moods," as I called them, that Theodor Gaster listed for the dominant functions of his categories of religious ritual. REFINING THE DEFINING was one of the relevant essays on this topic:

ADVENTURE conveys the INVIGORATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how protagonists who defend life and/or goodness from whatever forces are inimical to them. The protagonists' power of action is at its highest here.
COMEDY conveys the JUBILATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how the heroes seek happiness/contentment in a world that has some element of craziness to it (what I've termed the "incognitive" myth-radical), yet does not deny the heroes some power of action.
IRONY conveys the MORTIFICATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon characters in a world where the "power of action" is fundamentally lacking.
DRAMA conveys the PURGATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon "individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society." Power of action here is more ambivalent than that of the adventure-mythos but seems more crucial to the individual's problem than it does for that of the comic hero.

But this raised in my mind the question: what difference is there, if any, between an "affect" and a "mood?"

The best conclusion I've come to, for the time being, is that the Gasterian moods are functions of plot: he and Frye both speak primarily of the *actions* characters take in order to facillitate one dominant literary or religious mood. In contrast, "affects" spring from the main characters, the focal presences, with whom the readers identify. In this formulation, then, "affects" spring from "character," even though the focal 'character" may not be a human being, since the cathexis of emotional affects can focus upon any number of phenomena, ranging from the will-less robot hero of GIGANTOR to the amorphous spirits of THE EVIL DEAD. For the time being, then, I will allot the Gasterian moods to the domain of "narrative values," while the affects-- indebted, as I've said many times to the thinkers Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis-- would be "significant values," in keeping with my first essay on this Fryean distinction.

Obviously the two sets of emotional reactions overlap, just as plot and character must, and here's one example. One further complication to my system is that in this essay I have also formulated four persona-types-- the hero, the villain, the monster, and the demihero-- with respect to the ways in which they incarnate a given story's "life-affirming" (or plerotic) forces or its "life-denying" (kenotic) forces. I have also related these types to my own concepts of the *idealizing will* and the *existential will.*   So my persona-types are also narrative rather than significant values. Gigantor, even though diegetically the character has no will as such, incarnates both "the idealizing will" in combination with a plerotic attitude. The "Evil Dead spirits" are monsters, and they incarnate the "existential will" in combination with a kenotic attitude. And just to complete the quaternity, Fu Manchu incarnates the idealizing will as much as Gigantor, but with a kenotic, life-denying attitude, while the demihero Doctor John Robinson incarnates the "existential will" in tandem with a plerotic, life-affirming attitude.  Of course I've specified elsewhere that none of the persona-types are locked into these relationships at all times-- that they are "plerotic" monsters and "kenotic" demiheroes-- but these four are the dominant ways in which the four types are employed in human art and literature.

Having crossed all these critical "t's," I'll return to the question of affects again in the next essay.

AN ENQUIRY INTO EDMUND BURKE PT. 3

My re-reading of Burke's ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBLIME AND BEATIFUL sparks a reminiscence of something I wrote about C.S. Lewis with regard to his evocation of a trinity of antipathetic affects, borrowed from Rudolf Otto, through which both philosophers viewed humankind's development:

I accept the deduction of C.S. Lewis as to the tripartite nature of antipathetic reactions to the powerful and/or the unknown, which he describes as "fear," "dread," and "awe"...However, antipathy is only half the story. 

Otto's book-long work THE IDEA OF THE HOLY went into more detail than Lewis' short essay, and Otto did, as I noted in the above essay, evolve the notion of the "mysterium fascinans" to parallel his fear-based idea of the "mysterium tremendum." Still, I would have to say that Otto did not do any better than Lewis in defining the parameters of the sympathetic affects: both seem firmly focused on the antipathetic ones.

Edmund Burke is more aware of the sympathetic affects, but he chooses to view them under the rubric of "pleasure," and he considers them appropriate to the experience of "the beautiful" rather than that of "the sublime." In Section Seven of the ENQUIRY's first part, Burke explicitly aligns the sublime with the experience, or at least, the possibility, of pain.

WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasure which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy....When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience. The cause of this I shall endeavour to investigate hereafter.

Patently, as noted in my many essays on Kant's theory of the dynamic-sublime, the German philosopher accepted and recapitulated many of Burke's formulations-- though Kant proves less useful than Burke with respect to my project of formulating the combinatory-sublime.

Later, Part Two is devoted to the many stimuli that can bring on the sublime.  I'll pass over Burke's inclusion of discrete physical phenomena like "sounds and loudness" and "the cries of animals," valid as they might be on one level or another. I'm concerned here with the abstract qualities Burke invokes, which as are follows: Terror, Obscurity, Power, Privation, Vastness, Infinity, Difficulty, and Magnificence. "Difficulty," in fact, might have subsumed all of Burke's abstractions much better than "pain," for Burke is concerned with the ways in which the human subject responds to anything suggestive of resistance to human will, in marked contrast to the relaxation the subject experiences when one apprehends "the beautiful."

It is the last-named section, "Magnificence," from which I've quoted in this early meditation on the sublime, as well as the essay in which I defined the concept of the combinatory-sublime, also with reference to Burke's section on "magnificence."  In both of the above essays, I was struck by Burke's use of the term "richness and profusion of images" to describe the experience of the sublime with regard to his examples in "Magnificence." For me this described in large part the very appeal of marvelous imagery, as I noted with respect to Tolkien and his "endless combinations." But though I believe that I fully understand Burke's chain of associations, I can't agree that the profusion of images is primarily characterized by such antipathetic affects as "pain," or even "difficulty." It's true that the examples Burke names-- visionary passages from Shakespeare, Virgil and others-- are not characterized by ease of access: the subject who identifies with them will feel his own emotions overwhelmed-- but not in a way suggestive of pain. If anything, it is a pleasure closer to that of the "voluptuary" Burke mentions above; it is, as I said here, "wonder" more than "terror."

Burke, as I noted in ENQUIRY PART 2, was an early defender of the power of the human mind to formulate images that did not correspond to anything in common, observable reality. James T. Boulton, editor of my 1968 reprint from Notre Dame Press, credits Burke as being "in open revolt against neo-classical principles." Burke's opening section on the virtues of "novelty" is echoed by the section "Imitation" from Part One:

It is by imitation far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly...When the object represented in poetry or painting is such as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then I may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of imitation, and to no cause operating in the thing itself. So it is with most of the pieces which the painters call still-life. In these a cottage, a dunghill, the meanest and most ordinary utensils of the kitchen, are capable of giving us pleasure. But when the object of the painting or poem is such as we should run to see if real, let it affect us with what odd sort of sense it will, we may rely upon it, that the power of the poem or picture is more owing to the nature of the thing itself than to the mere effect of imitation, or to a consideration of the skill of the imitator, however excellent. 

 "We should run to see if real" threw me for a moment: at first I thought he meant that if the thing was real, those who beheld it would run from it. But to maintain the parallel with the subject's disinterest in the objects of still life, Burke must have meant that if the poetry or painting depicted something novel, perhaps even outside the realm of nature, then people would run to see that novel thing if they heard about it, just to see if it was real.

This dichotomy also expresses the double-sided significance of Joseph Campbell's "supernormal sign stimuli:" to have their sublime effects, the stimulating signs must be something uncommon, yet somehow they must also share the mundane existence of those who observe them-- an existential conundrum I referenced somewhat in my essay MIRACLE MILES.

Still, it may be that Burke, being of his time, could not entirely escape the neoclassical influence of the eighteenth century, which may be why he tends to think of profusions of colorful imagery as painful and difficult rather than entrancing, as Tolkien does.

Nevertheless, Burke remains, as Boulton correctly says, the first major prophet of the sublime experience:

[Burke was] the principal exponent of the sublime as [being] at once an irrational and a violent aesthetic experience... Whereas in the early stages [with Longinus] the sublime is essentially a style of writing, with Burke it becomes a mode of aesthetic experience found in literature and far beyond it.

 He himself could not picture his "magnificence" as a sympathetic affect, leaving such affects to the realm of the less overwhelming world of "the beautiful." But even though Immanuel Kant proved the superior logician with respect to the sublime, Burke may have been Kant's superior in terms of the aesthetic instincts needed to apprehend this "irrational and violent" experience.

BREASTS, BLOOD AND JUSTICE PT. 3

At the end of Part 1 of this series I wrote:

In Part 2 I will discuss some reasons as to why this is at most a lesser threat, one that pales in comparison to one that a modern Nietzschean might call "men and women with no chests."

This was a little misleading: the phrase "men without chests" originates not with Nietzsche or any Nietzschean, but in a quote by a critic who was in some ways opposed to everything Nietzsche stood for: the redoubtable C.S. Lewis, who wrote in his book THE ABOLITION OF MAN, "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

Francis Fukuyama only quotes Lewis once in THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, but he utilizes this memorable phrase as the title of Chapter 28, which is principally his discussion of Nietzsche's objections to what we now call "liberal democracy."  Fukuyama does not dwell on the differences between Lewis and Nietzsche; he's interested only in comparing one similarity-- the pursuit of excellence, which Fukuyama associated with *megalothymia,* the human desire to prove oneself superior to others.

Liberal democracy, in contrast, is devoted to *isothymia,* the desire to prove oneself equal to others-- a desire to which both Lewis and Nietzsche were opposed, albeit for different reasons. 

It may be fairly claimed that often a given agent's desire to prove equality is spurred by another agent's attempt to prove superiority. Indeed, the key concept of what I define as ultraliberalism is the assumption that this defensive, reactive posture by a marginalized entity is the sine qua non of the liberal outlook. Thus in Berlatsky the majority of superhero narratives are defined as validations of the status quo,  and in Kelly Thompson the majority of sexy female costumes in superhero narratives are attempts to marginalize and/or dehumanize real women.

Real liberalism, in my view, allows its agents the freedom to campaign for greater real-world equality and, simultaneously, the freedom to compete for superior status upon a hypothetically level playing-field.  This level playing-field, however, does not mean that everyone strives after superior status in the same way, and when said field is occupied by both men and women, different strategies can fairly pertain.

In JUG BOND I printed this photo of a "girl about to go wild:"

Now, while both males and females have the ability to display their secondary sexual characteristics, and while hetero women do like to view the sec-sex characteristics of men, there's really no display males can mount that is quite this elemental. Yes, a given man can develop his pecs and abs to Schwarzeneggerian proportions, but this is a modification that takes a lot of work. Body-builders sculpt, they don't go 'wild," and many hetero women claim that they don't like this type of extraordinary musculature. In the end, there's no sec-sex characteristic that a male can display that reaps the same automatic, enthusiastic response. And while a woman's unveiling of her breasts can mean more than one thing, as I also noted in JUG BOND, in my opinion it most often connotes sexual readiness.

Camille Paglia famously argued that the ability of women to display themselves often had a profound, empowering aspect. One need not believe that it applies to all situations, as Paglia seemed to credence, but this view does supply a necessary corrective to the ultraliberal/WAPster notion that feminine sexual display can mean nothing but "coming across for The Man."

Further, sexual display is a strategy that works for some but not for all, even on a hypothetically level playing-field. Not all breasts are equal, and no matter how much WAPster feminists may campaign for a sisterhood in which all are equal, some women can flash tit to great approval, and some can't.  There have been any number of workplace suits alleging preferential treatment for women with "better" looks, and there's no excuse for that sort of unfair competition in the world of business.  But in fiction, it's entirely possible for "beauty" to correctly signify "goodness" and "ugliness" to signify "evil." The attempt to eliminate such hierarchies of "beauty vs. non-beauty" isn't politically possible in real life, and the attempt to curtail them in fiction is the sine qua non of absurdity.

As noted above, Lewis the proselytizing Christian and Nietzsche the advocate of "the death of God" were on very different pages. However, they were essentially agreed that human beings needed to strive toward excellence. Now it may be that neither scholar would have advocated that excellence in the form of being either a male or a female "hottie."  But I do, at least within the sphere of fiction, because physical beauty is often a conduit for the affect of the sublime-- a connection I may explore in more detail in a later essay.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 1

My reading of Bhaskar's REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE led me to advocate a bifurcated conception of fictive causality, characterized by "regularity" and "intelligibility." However, as it happens I had encountered a less persuasive use of the latter term, referenced in this 2012 essay.

But perhaps one should go a step farther than Barthes [in THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT] and say that the facts that lead him to propose these two views [of "joissance" and "plaisir"] indicate that we are dealing not so much with a historical process in which one kind of novel replaces another as with a kind of opposition which has always existed within the novel: a tension between the intelligible and the problematic.-- Jonathan Culler, STRUCTURALIST POETICS, p. 191.

I specified that Culler's dichotomy was "probably useless to my phenomenological project" because it arose "from a limited and hyper-literary classic novel/experimental novel comparison." But I did draw a limited parallel between Culler's terms and those of C.S. Lewis' reading of Rudolf Otto:

Thus, to invoke once again the C.S. Lewis trinity referenced here: the "tigers of fear" belong entirely the world of Cullers "intelligible," in that they may cause one to fear for one's physical safety but nothing more.  In contrast, both the "ghosts of dread" and the "gods of awe" belong in the world of the "problematic," if one defines the problematic as the human desire to exceed the limits of the merely intelligible.

Despite the provisional definition above, I didn't use "the problematic" as a literary term, since it was a little too-- problematic, and "the intelligible" wasn't much better in this context.  At one point I advocated viewing the two levels of the metaphenomenal as united by their common trait of their "strangeness," while the single level of the isophenomenal was characterized by what I called "oddity." I later moved away from this view in favor of one in which each phenomenality was characterized by the type of sublimity potentially possible in that phenomenality, detailed in this essay.

This tripartite concept of sublimity, though, was at the time dependent upon the traditional Thomist opposition of the "cognitive" and the "affective."  I tried to finesse these concepts with reference to the notions of probability derived from Aristotle and Lewis:

All three phenomenalities-- naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- are established by the ways in which the authors of works in each division choose to present "evidence" for the nature of their worlds.  For a critic like Tzvetan Todorov, this means establishing whether or not a "fantastic" event is "real" or "unreal."  But as I've demonstrated in my formulation of the NUM theory, even the most 'realistic' narrative merely reproduces gestures suggestive of a reality dominated by causality.

Now, in keeping with my readings of Bhaskar, I would revise this to read that a naturalistic narrative would be "suggestive of a reality dominated by both regularity and intelligibility." Roughly four months after writing PROBABILITY SHIFTS, I determined here that my usages of "probability" were no longer viable, drawing as they did on 'the now untenable, Aristotle-derived association of "the impossible and improbable."' 

Thus I rejected the idea of a "probability factor," which would fluctuate depending on the "evidence" presented by a given author regarding the world he portrays. I then returned to Cassirer's concept of magical efficacy as a counterpart to traditional causality in the three-part AFFECTIVE FREEDOM series, here, here, and here. Basically, I sought to unify Cassirer's opposition between causality and efficacy-- the latter representing a "free selection of causes" rather than classical "cause-and-effect"-- with the "affective freedom" I found in the literary phenomenalities of the uncanny and the marvelous.  Within these phenomenalities, a reader could experience the intertwined affects of either "dread/fascination" or "awe/exaltation" without necessarily believing them to be reducible to the affects that dominate the naturalistic: i.e., "fear/admiration." 

I don't reject Cassirer's concept of magical efficacy, in that I still believe what I said here:

Eventually I discerned that the “free selection of causes” Cassirer identified in archaic mythologies was identical in mode to the “fudge factors” writers use whenever they describe all manner of marvelous beings and devices.

But Cassirer was only interested in a dichotomy between the views of "theoretical thinking," represented by traditional causality, and "mythic thinking," represented by the multicausal nature of efficacy.  Ironically this allows for a conceptual divide between the two-- a divide suggestive of Tzvetan Todorov's dichotomy between "the real" and "the unreal," which I rejected in my earliest essays on his theory:

 It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.-- Todorov, THE FANTASTIC.

I believe "critical realist" Cassirer sought to avoid this sort of empiricist reduction, as did rationalists Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis.  I might have expected a post-Kantian, more than a rationalist, to have ferreted out the need for an interstitial category between traditional causality and multicausality.  But for whatever reasons, Otto and Lewis managed to supply the rationale for this category, as well as some of the clues as to its relationship to traditional causality. 

 It's a further irony that Roy Bhaskar, concerned in REALIST THEORY with the phenomenology of scientific investigation, should suggest my current-- and hopefully permanent-- solution to the problems of causal relations in fiction.  Prior to reading Bhaskar, I would have thought it no more possible to split causality's aspects than to follow King Solomon's advice about splitting a child down the middle to satisfy both of the child's putative parents.  Now I perceive that causality is not unitary, at least not in fiction.  Therefore the splitting of fictive causality is more comparable to a separation of conjoined twins-- twins who can live either together or apart, depending on what effects a given author wants to achieve.

MIRROR VS. LAMP PT. 4

Liberalism may have triumphed in the political sphere, but it was the illiberal philosophy of Heidegger that won the day at [the Davos debate between Heidegger and Cassirer] and went on to leave the deepest stamp on 20th-century culture. Who now shares Cassirer's faith in the humanizing power of art or the liberating power of science?  Who now believes that the truth will make us free? Even optimists limit their hopes to economics and politics, disclaiming any broader vision of human redemption.  Francis Fukuyama's end of history is not the glorious consummation of Hegel or Marx, but a vista of endless banality. Contemporary liberals are faced, whether they like it or not, with the unpromising task of erecting a philosophy of political hope on a foundation of cultural despair.-- Edward Skidelsky, EDWARD CASSIRER, p. 222.

Skidelsky's profoundly pessimistic verdict in the final chapter of his book hinges on his conviction that the dominion of the technical sciences has effected a permanent "alienation of reason," one that can no longer countenance reason as a faculty beneficial to human beings or their culture.  When I first starting writing about the book here, I noted that Skidelsky had distanced himself from Cassirer's Goethean stance:

In his first draft of his book Skidelsky advocated Cassirer's goal of finding the unity of all human endeavors into terms of their value as "symbolic constructions."  However, in the finished version of the book, Skidelsky confesses that he changed his mind: that he somewhat devalued Cassirer because the philosopher "did not see what Heidegger and many others saw so clearly: that the secular idols of humanity and progress were dead."

I would not deny that most discussions of culture today, whether from the "left" or the "right," are consumed with utilitarian "economics and politics."  I'm not as certain that these utilitarians are alienated from reason in the sense Skidelsky defines alienation.  To them, reason and utilitarian ends are identical, and "redemption" is simply a matter for those with a taste for religious concepts.

That said, Francis Fukuyama isn't a particularly well chosen exemplar of the utilitarian attitude.  It's true that his seminal work, 1992's THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, does not delve deeply into such matters as "the humanizing power of art" or "the liberating power of science."  Nevertheless, END OF HISTORY, written in the full bloom of 1990s optimism, does demonstrate a conviction in the idea that the reason typified by liberal democracy can indeed "redeem" society, even if Fukuyama doesn't advocate Hegel's more ambitious visions.

Further, Fukuyama certainly does not claim that the triumph of liberal democracy will inevitably lead to any "vista of endless banality."  I surmise that Skidelsky may be thinking of those sections of Fukuyama's book in which he takes the other side of the liberal-democracy thought-experiment.  In these sections Fukuyama speculates that a truly "isothymic" society, one in tune with the ideals of liberal democracy, *might* result in a culture devoted to what C.S. Lewis called "men without chests;" i.e, human beings who lack the deeper passions of *thymos* and are indeed concerned with nothing but means and ends.  But at no time does Fukuyama claim that this is an inevitable development, and I for one find it heartening that he considers the possibility of such a downside, as most modern utilitarians will not.


It's true that Fukuyama is not as ambitious as Hegel about considering all aspects of human culture, but then, Fukuyama is not a philosopher like Hegel or Cassirer.  He's a political and economics theorist, so it's understandable that he should frame his arguments strictly in those terms, even though I've argued that his Hegel/Kojeve-influenced mediations can have meaningful application to literary studies. 

In a much more recent essay-- one written over 20 years since the aforesaid 1990s optimism-- Fukuyama admits that he sees the need of "an ideology of the future that could provide a realistic path toward a world with healthy middle-class societies and robust democracies," and that at most he can only suggest a few potential aspects of such an ideology.  It's true that nowhere in the essay will one find a Goethean belief in "the humanizing power of art," but "the liberating power of science" does put in an appearance:

The ideology would need to somehow redesign the public sector, freeing it from its dependence on existing stakeholders and using new, technology-empowered approaches to delivering services. It would have to argue forthrightly for more redistribution and present a realistic route to ending interest groups’ domination of politics.

Is this a "vista of endless banality?"  I would say not, and the fact that Skidelsky propounds this demonstrably false argument shows that he's oversold his own vision of the extent to which the current world must erect its hopes upon "a foundation of cultural despair."  Fukuyama may not be as visionary as Hegel-- indeed, some of his later books are less ambitious, perhaps because END OF HISTORY was in some arenas hijacked by American right-wing political groups, and led some commentators to falsely claim that Fukuyama was about nothing but "triumphalism." 

Nevertheless, while I don't entirely credence Skidelsky's "foundation of cultural despair," I will reiterate that it is rooted in the real polarizations of culture, as I expatiated at the end of my first essay of this new year:

...[Skidelsky] offers a useful warning about how extremists can deliberately misrepresent the arguments of others-- especially of those offering a synthesis between extremes-- and with that warning in mind, one can view just how long the road ahead will be.

TERMINOLOGICAL TRACKDOWN PT. 1

Since I’ve stated in STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: THE THREE PROBABILITIES that it was a mistake to invoke the concept of coherence in respect to probability, I should hold forth on the original context of the concept.

 

         I articulated the concept in response to Susanne Langer’s useful distinction between “discursive symbolism” and “presentational symbolism” in her 1942 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY. Langer did not say anything about judging particular literary manifestations of these two forms of symbolism.  In contrast, I wanted to expound on ways in which these very different symbolic discourses could be used competently or not so competently.  So the argument came down to two interdependent parts:

 

         (1) A well-known trope, like Batman- villains placing the Crusader in a death-trap rather than simply shooting him, was not a worthless endeavor simply because it flew in the face of logical, discursive symbolism.  Patently the death-trap had a function even if it was one that couldn’t be justified discursively: the device served to test the ability of Batman—or a similar hero in similar dire straits—for the enjoyment of the reader.  Hence it was justifiable in terms of Langer’s “presentational symbolism,” having no more connection with logical discourse than a symphonic piece.

 

         (2) The second part was my own idea: that even though the trope of the death-trap could not be critiqued on the basic of logic, it could be critiqued aesthetically: as to whether it communicated a certain effect.  In GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 3 I showed why one death-trap was coherent and expressive while another one was not. 

The corresponding essay PART 4 argued that the same principle of coherence should apply to tropes that were intended to be discursively meaningful, and I gave examples of, respectively, coherent and incoherent manifestations of discursive symbolism. 

I now perceive that by I linked the concept of coherence to the NUM formula  because I formed an unconscious link between the very different ways in which Langer and C.S. Lewis spoke of “presentation.” 

 

In NEW KEY Langer used the term to distinguish an aspect of human perception: to underscore that when humans were presented with sense-experiences, they did not ipso facto interpret them with respect to discursive symbolic models. 

 

In THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, though, C.S. Lewis spoke of “realism of presentation” as a socially constructed discourse, which is to say one that *was * informed by a given reader’s expectations as to what or was not believable in a logical and discursive sense.   

        I now surmise that when Lewis spoke of “realism of content,” I lined up this conceptualization with that of Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of "the marvelous," that category of all fictions that represented something “unreal” as being “real,” rather like Aristotle’s “probable impossibility.”

      Similarly, I’ve repeatedly claimed, in my rewrite of Todorov, that the differences between “the naturalistic” and “the uncanny” depend not on the reader’s perceptions of the narrative, as Todorov had it, but on the way in which an author “presents” a trope like, say, “psychotic madman on the rampage.” 

      Todorov wished to assert that whatever was not cognitively unreal was perforce “real.” I assert that the category of “the uncanny” depended on an affective factor—the presence of “strangeness”—that allied that category with that of the marvelous, so that both were categories of the metaphenomenal.   

From there, I unfortunately tried to bring in the other half of Aristotle’s famous dictum, the “possible improbability,” and judge it not by “possibility” but by coherence—hence the “coherent probability” (for the uncanny) and the “incoherent probability” for the naturalistic.  But the use of probability and/or possibility, whether invoked by Lewis or by Aristotle, are not determinative, because they depend on socially constructed criteria as to what is possible or probable. As I noted in PROBABILITY SHIFTS, the nature of probability depends on the ground rules of a given fictional cosmos, and those ground rules are created not by expectations external to the work but by the way in which the work’s author constructs the cognitive and affective aspects of the work—to which I will turn next.