THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

 In this essay (and any follow-ups) I want to develop the line of thought in QUICK NUM NOTES. 

As I said in NOTES, I'm not disavowing the assorted analyses I advanced with respect to looking at how fictional realities are governed by different combinations of (1) intelligibility and (2) casual coherence-- at least not in the way I disavowed Aristotle's criteria (as I understood them) regarding "impossibility" and "improbability"). HOWEVER, it has occurred to me that there could be a problem in talking only about the ways in which an author models the phenomenality of his fictional world after the way he perceives the real world to work. The author of fiction is not creating something that's ever totally faithful to the real world, even if the elements of artifice he may use are simply invisible structuring principles. Here's Herman Melville on the unrealistic "symmetry" of fiction as compared to really real reality:

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

In the same essay in which I quoted this Melville passage, I also compared Melville's "symmetry" to my concept of artifice. But one can see the function of symmetry/artifice as being just as present in naturalistic works as in the other two forms, the uncanny (where BILLY BUDD belongs) and the marvelous (where one might place Melville's MARDI, for what little that's worth). I'm not sure that any of Melville's works are purely naturalistic, but just to venture an example with another nautical theme, Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND has no metaphenomena at all, but it's certainly just as determined by artifice. What many critics have missed that this use of artifice is no less present in naturalistic works which seem to be based on "real" events. Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY may appear to the naive eye to be more "realistic" than TREASURE ISLAND, but Flaubert has to use the same range of tropes Stevenson did, in order to create the emotional effects he desired. Neither BOVARY nor ISLAND possesses the "ragged edges" of reality. 

Yet Stevenson and Flaubert use artifice invisibly, somewhat like the "invisible style" attributed to the majority of movies in Classic American cinema. However, I posit that whenever an artist in any medium invokes metaphenomenal tropes to get his desired effects, I believe that he has to exert a new level of "authorial will" as I defined it way back in 2009. That's why I'm now seeking to look at the amount of work-- which I also called "crap"-- that an author has to put across to sell his metaphenomena:

But my current line of thought is more like, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" (like that of The Hound of the Baskervilles)... The opposition I'm currently playing with is that we're used to thinking of "marvelous things" are total inventions while "uncanny things" are supposed to be in line with the way the natural universe works. But the latter are arguably just as much inventions as the former. if you can't observe a real Pit and Pendulum in human history, or a real crime in which someone pretends to be a ghost to get rid of all the heirs to a fortune, then the phenomenon described is still a creation of the imagination-- just not one that requires as much imaginative effort as something overtly marvelous.

What further developments might be fostered from this line of thought, I cannot at this time predict.   

STRENGTH TO DREAM, THE SEQUEL

 In the first two parts of STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN, respectively here and here, I pursued a comparison between Samuel T. Coleridge's comment about "the suspension of disbelief" and Stephen King's response to that concept. I then followed up with a third essay based on my two categories of the metaphenomenal. I applied some of my observations to King's comments in his 1981 book DANSE MACABRE, concluding that what he and Coleridge called "disbelief" was more like "disengagement." Naturally, since King only talked about the metaphenomenal in general terms, there were no explicit comparisons between what he wrote in DANCE MACABRE and my NUM theory.

However, when I reread BATMAN #400, reviewed here, I was reminded that this very special anniversary issue included an essay by King, entitled "Why I Chose Batman." In this essay, King explains that as a comic-reading kid he far preferred Batman to Superman, and the reason he gives for that preference seems to be rooted in his personal sense of disbelief-- even though the way he frames that disbelief would seem to contradict everything he wrote in his DANSE essay. In that essay, King seems to disparage those who can't allow themselves to roll with a good fantasy-yarn:

They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

Now, in the following segment of the 1986 essay, King seems to be endorsing a lack of imaginative muscle.

I remember the ads for the first SUPERMAN movie...the ones that said YOU'LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY. Well, I didn't... But when Batman swung down into the Joker's hideout on a rope or stopped the Penguin from dropping Robin into a bucket of boiling hog-fat with a well-thrown Batarang, I believed. These were not likely things, I freely grant you that, but they were possible things.

Now, King probably did not know anything about any theories about fantasy-fiction, least of all those of Tzvetan Todorov and his theory of the uncanny, which I've refuted here numerous times. But he-- or at least his younger self-- is validating his Batman preference over Superman (though he says he did like the Man of Steel somewhat) simply because he didn't think Batman violated Young King's sense of what was possible in the real world. And nowhere in "Chose" does Older King invalidate what Young King thought about these matters, even though five years earlier he'd turned a pitying eye on audiences who couldn't place credence in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One.

Of course, everyone has blind spots, and I'm reasonably sure that King, having been asked to celebrate the Caped Crusader for an anniversary special, just reeled off his kid-memories to serve that purpose. He certainly wasn't making an aesthetic statement. However, what he said is not unique, since a lot of comics-fans have expressed a similar preference for the Bat-dude over the Super-dude. And often the criteria of these fans is similar: Batman seems possible, Superman impossible. 

Of course, in fiction nothing is impossible; readers only make that judgment if they are of the belief that fiction MUST reflect the reality of everyday experience. Years ago I played around with the idea that I might define the marvelous and the uncanny in terms of probability. But as I recall, I abandoned this notion, because I don't think fiction must reflect everyday experience, and indeed, fiction is attractive specifically because it is not tied to external reality, the reality of "one cause=one effect." Some people don't want fiction to indulge in impossibilities, and that's their prerogative, but by King's own 1981 standards, their disengagement from overt fantasies might be deemed a sign of imaginative underdevelopment.

Lastly, just to pick at King's analysis on one more point, I don't know exactly what Batman comics he read. But I don't think that there was ever a time when Batman didn't have substantial encounters with marvelous, "impossible" phenomena. King cites examples of bizarre criminals that in themselves conform to the domain of the uncanny. Since he was born in 1947, he wouldn't have seen the hero's contentions with vampires or mad scientists who change people into destructive giants. But if he was reading comics in the 1950s, then he certainly would have seen Batman contending with super-crooks who used freeze-rays and force-fields, even if he King made it a point not to buy any of the "Batman vs. aliens" entries.

On a side-note, King's essay also mentions in passing the same-year success of Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. In 1986, this only meant a new validation for Batman after years of being deemed the Number Two DC hero after the company's Kryptonian mascot. But neither King nor anyone else could have guessed how sweeping the influence of Miller, and after him Tim Burton, would prove, so that today, more often than not, the Gotham Guardian gets top billing over the Metropolis Marvel. And so King's essay seems slightly prescient, even if I don't think people prefer Batman for exactly the same reasons he specified. 

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this series, I established that one can imagine, in keeping with Stephen King's reading of Samuel Coleridge, a special "muscular effort" the reader must make in order to entertain metaphemomena in fiction, given that metaphenomena go against what most readers "deem the expected phenomena of this world." But was King right about the nature of said effort? Once more, here's how King interpreted Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief:"

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

One problem with this extrapolation is that Coleridge did not say much about the nature of the "disbelief" that must be "suspended" in order for a reader to entertain "shadows of imagination." I hypothesized that one might compare this disbelief with Cassirer's "naive realism," the human tendency to believe only in what one can perceive through the senses. But though it's possible to read that in King, Coleridge doesn't generalize so much. It's possible he meant this "disbelief" to be something purely characteristic of his historical era.

So is King right that disbelief that "has to be hoisted, and held up by main force?" That might be the case with individuals' disbelief in metaphenoma occurring in the real world, and indeed, King's dichotomy about belief and disbelief takes places in a chapter where he narrates an experience in which a relative demonstrated the apparent reality of dowsing to Young King. But is the same effort necessary when an individual faces fictional phenomena that don't accord with what he expects?

Many individuals who don't believe in the existence of anything but material objects will prefer fiction that coheres with their beliefs; fiction which does not portray any "shadows of imagination" as real. But many readers may share that materialist philosophy, and yet they indulge in metaphenomenal fiction precisely because it does not resemble the real world, and so affords them an escape from reality's demands. Further, whereas as some people may earnestly believe in such rural fantasies as sprites and brownies, no one truly believes in hobbits, because hobbits are self-evidently the fictional creations of a particular author.

Given all these contingencies, I think that what Coleridge and King call "disbelief" is really "disengagement." 

As I observed previously, isophenomenal fiction does not have to establish ground rules for its phenomena, but both forms of the metaphenomenal, the marvelous and the uncanny, must do so, however implicitly. 

The marvelous, as I established in CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN, rebels against the isophenomenal formula of "one cause yields one definite effect." For example, in the real world, there are no chemicals that can cause a person to turn invisible, but in H.G. Wells' INVISIBLE MAN, such chemicals are imagined into existence, and so Griffin's "invisibility formula" is a "shadow of imagination" given reality. A reader may choose either to engage with that shadow on its own terms or not, but the reader's credence in the concept does not affect the work's ground rules. The uncanny does not overtly challenge the causal order, but its creations carry the semblance of multicausality (is the House of Usher really alive in some fashion, or is it just a non-sentient building upon which people project their delusions?)

Historically, some readers have found it easier to engage with works of the uncanny than with marvelous ones. Early Gothic fiction, such as VATHEK and CASTLE OF OTRANTO, traded heavily in marvelous content, patently following models supplied by Arabian Nights fables and European knight-romances. But though Ann Radcliffe might not be the very first author to invent the "supernatural rationally explained," she supplied a new paradigm for those who didn't want to credence, even in fiction, the more outrageous imaginative shadows. Yet it's a major error on the part of many critics (not least Tzvetan Todorov) to believe that Radcliffe's "rational Gothics" had anything to do with realistic fiction, in which the possibility of ghosts and demons can't even be entertained for a moment.

Most uncanny fictions require a lesser "muscular intellectual act" for a reader to engage with their content, simply because the uncanny conveys the superficial appearance of adhering to rules of casual coherence. By contrast, overtly marvelous fictions usually formulate their own multicausal ground rules, ranging from a Tolkien, who imagines a world full of elves and trolls and angel-like entities, to an animated cartoon that can depict any bizarre transformation, "as long as it's funny." However, Herman Melville's MOBY DICK stands as an example of an uncanny work that requires just as much intellectual musculature as the most sophisticated marvelous fiction in order for a reader to fully engage with its ground rules. So, in essence, both the uncanny and the marvelous are equally capable of providing heavy-lifting exercise for a reader's imaginative muscles.

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 2

Continuing the conceptual thread from the previous essay, I reiterate that whenever I analyzed the phenomenality of a work that falls within the domain of the uncanny, I'm looking for phenomena which do not overtly violate causal coherence but nevertheless create a sense of "strangeness" through violating intelligibility: the reader's sense that regular causality can only yield a sense that the world is understandable and therefore intelligible. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate some examples by which authors use the three rationales I formulated in Part 1 to create that sense of strangeness.

The rationale of science is probably the most common one in the domain of the uncanny. Arthur Conan Doyle's novel THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES sports one of the most famous examples of a "phony ghost." Back in Doyle's time, the parameters of the mystery-genre would have suggested from the first that any intimation of a ghost, much less a spectral demon-hound, probably will not be validated. Yet for the greater part of the novel Doyle creates a strong sense of a supernatural threat before revealing that the titular hound is just an ordinary trained canine covered in phosphorescent paint. In contrast to many critics, I would say that the aura of strangeness is not entirely dispelled, because even if the hound is not a real demon, the person who orchestrates the Hound's existence is strange in its own uncanny right.

While HOUND uses a scientific principle to create an illusion, numerous heroes and villains utilize fairly simple scientific gadgets to give themselves an edge over their opponents. In contrast to the original Ian Fleming novel, the 1973 LIVE AND LET DIE includes a scene in which James Bond, suspended over a shark pool by ropes, cuts through his, er, bonds by unleashing a miniature rotary saw from his watch. Whether any gadget like this would work in the real world is as immaterial as whether one could build an actual FTL drive; the point is to create the sense of Bond having a special "ace in the hole."

It's not quite as easy to use the magical rationale to generate uncanny strangeness, but it can be employed in relatively mundane worlds. Wilkie Collins' 1868 mystery-novel THE MOONSTONE is built around the crime of an Englishman who steals a sacred jewel from an Indian cult , flees with his booty to England and secures the gem in a bank deposit box. The cultists follow, seeking to recover the jewel and kill the thief, but they have no way to break into the bank. Collins thus set up a situation in which the cultists, who don't precisely look like your average Englishmen, must find some way to monitor the thief's movements. Therefore, they use their own knowledge of a simple magical procedure, which Collins does not name but is usually called "scrying." The cultists buy the services of an English boy who has a talent one might call "psychic" or "magical" as one pleases, but Collins' description has more of a "magical" vibe in my view. Eventually the thief checks the gem out of the bank with the idea of escaping, and when he does, the cultists pounce and recover their property.

In the previous essay I gave an example of a marvelous "just because" rationale taken from a magical realism novel, so for this essay, I will invoke another magic-realism work for this category. China Mieville's novel THE CITY IN THE CITY supposes an unspecified locale on "our" Earth where two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupy the exact same physical space, with the buildings of one city cheek-to-jowl with those of the other. Further, Mieville posits  that the inhabitants of one city willfully pretend not to be aware of the citizens of the co-existing city. The author does not provide any rigorous backstory as to how this state of affairs came about, and so its underlying rationale is that of "just because." Ironically, though its parameters in no way resemble either mainstream fantasy or mainstream SF, Mieville's CITY was welcomed by various awards-committees associated with those movements, since the novel won a 2010 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was also nominated (but did not win) a award named for the famed SF-editor John W. Campbell. 

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1

 My posts on the NUM theory have gone into great detail as to how literary metaphenomena, whether uncanny or marvelous, are created through the use of story-tropes. In both cases, the author of a fictional world seeks to diverge from the world of the naturalistic, the domain in which all phenomena are unified (and therefore are termed "isophenomenal.") In the essay LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE, I said:

The domain of “the naturalistic” emphasizes conformity with whatever idea of “natural law” an audience may expouse, whereas the domain of “the marvelous” conforms to whatever concepts are seen as transcending natural law, be it through Christian miracles or futuristic inventions. The domain of “the uncanny,” though, endeavors to perform a high-wire balancing act between these two literary phenomenalities. 

My general metaphor for the difference between the two metaphenomenal domains has been the difference between breaking down normal causality or simply bending it.  However, I have not supplied a list of rationales that authors use to justify the tropes that either bend or break causality. The three rationales are as follows:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."

Most of what fans view as "mainstream" fantasy and science fiction deals with phenomena that breaks down the viewer's sense of causality, or, in my system, "causal coherence," by evoking either the fictional logic-systems of either science or magic. There is no limit as to the extensiveness of the tropes open to either the magic-rationale of mainstream fantasy or the science-rationale of mainstream science fiction. Fantasy has elves, SF has aliens. Fantasy has doors into fairyland; SF has faster-than-light space travel. Fantasy has Doctor Strange; SF has Iron Man. The distinction is not between any hypothetical limit upon either rationale, for in effect there is no limit. Rather, the distinction is between the ideas attributed IN FICTION to the system of magic as opposed to the system of science. 

Both magic and science operate to manipulate commonplace causality. In science, the logical ideal is that the scientist produces causality-breaking miracles by discovering new principles that underlie those phenomena, and he manipulates those principles to explain FTL travel or transistor-powered armor. In magic, however, the logical idea is that the magician transcends the overt principles underlying commonplace phenomena in order to create faery-doors and magical spells. Human will of some type, whether for good or ill, directly impinges upon reality within the magical rationale, while in the scientific rationale, the will acts indirectly, creating re-arrangements of phenomena.   

Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd. 

I conceived the idea of the three rationales some time back, but I recently realized that all of them were configured with respect to the phenomenality of the marvelous, the one that breaks causality. In my second essay, I will deal with how the same such rationales appear within the domain of the uncanny.

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 2

"Primary familiarity," as I've defined it in Part 1, is essentially the same as Aesopian contempt, the passive tendency to take aspects of experience for granted, whether or not one is justified in so doing. This species of familiarity is expressed largely by a sense of being comfortable with accepted realities-- though the downside of this comfort is that in some ways it can become boring. The person who experiences this boredom may seek some way to escape his dull round-- going on vacation, having an affair-- but in so doing the individual is not really assessing the things in his regular life that might suggest unfamiliarity.

"Secondary familiarity" is active in the sense that it seeks to reduce perceived unfamiliarity through one of two major methods, both of which involve the amassing of abstract conceptions about the world. This impulse relates to the famous statement by Aristotle at the opening of his Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know." There's a sense that the person seeking to familiarize the unfamiliar relates to the unknown thing as a challenge to his intellect and/or imagination.

Take as example the aspect of human experience most associated with life's "dull rounds:" the generally steady rising and setting of the sun. Now, in pre-industrial societies, humans lacked any instruments capable of assessing the physical nature of the sun. Proto-scientists of the period, particularly those in hierarchical cultures like those of Egypt and Sumer, certainly amassed a certain amount of data about the movement of the planets they could perceive, and some may have even realized that Earth and the other planets moved around the sun. This close study of the patterns of particular aspects of experience is one of the two major methods, and can be lined up with Ernst Cassirer's idea of theoretical science. In our own time, of course, science has progressed to the point that the sun's nature is not especially unfamiliar to our culture. As a part of rote learning, schoolchildren assimilate such facts as the composition of the solar orb and how far it is from Planet Earth. Ironically, all of the findings of this type of "secondary familiarity" may devolve back into a form of primary familiarity for non-scientists: people know these facts and they may appreciate having a greater sense of the coherence of the physical world. Yet, for non-specialists, the data doesn't possess any special resonance. Presumably there are still scientists who regularly examine Old Sol looking for more mysteries to solve. But I would think that their quest to familiarize the unfamiliar would be rather limited these days.

The other major method of seeking secondary familiarity is, as any regular readers of this blog ought to expect, that of mythology and its expression through art-works. A primitive poet may have neither scientific knowledge nor perhaps any inclination to follow that discipline. So he formulates a story that familiarizes the unfamiliar nature of the glowing fireball that circles Planet Earth by saying that it's the flaming chariot of the sun-god Helios, who flies across the sky daily to bring warmth to living things. This assertion does not attempt to reduce unfamiliarity by accreting data about what causes underlie what effects. The storyteller presents what Cassirer calls a "free selection of causes," meaning in this context that the author selects the cause most appropriate to the artistic effect he wants to have on his listeners, rather than seeking the physical nature of the phenomenon in itself. The storyteller does not seek to explain-- few if any people believe the old "myth-was-primitive-science" canard-- but rather, he seeks to imbue an unfamiliar phenomenon with familiar associations, by surrounding the phenomenon with human-like trappings of chariots and horses.

Now, as scientific knowledge advances, the Helios assertion loses some though not all of its cultural force. By the time a Greek thinker like Aristarchus advanced the idea of heliocentrism, most intellectuals probably did not accept the mythic rationale for the sun's existence and purpose. By modern times, the story of Helios can be derided by scientific proselytizers as evidence of the gullibility of non-scientific primitives, and many persons with no interest in the subject will accept that verdict. Nevertheless, once the Helios story is a known facet within the vast history of both myth and literature, it never totally loses the charm of its aspirations to familiarize the unfamiliar. And thus a modern author like Madeline Miller may choose to place new wine in the old bottle labeled "the Helios myth," even if her story is more about the sun-god's famous daughter Circe. In contrast to the findings of theoretical science, the stories told by myth and art, in order to bestow familiarity upon the chaos of experience, can be take almost infinite permutations depending on what cause an author selects to achieve his desired effect.

More in Part 3, where I'll get back to the topic of the NUM formula.

 

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 1

 

A very young Fox, who had never before seen a Lion, happened to meet one in the forest. A single look was enough to send the Fox off at top speed for the nearest hiding place.

The second time the Fox saw the Lion he stopped behind a tree to look at him a moment before slinking away. But the third time, the Fox went boldly up to the Lion and, without turning a hair, said, “Hello, there, old top.”

This is a standard retelling of the Aesop fable "The Fox and the Lion." for which the moral is always, "Familiarity breeds contempt" (which word connotes not a negative feeling for another person but simply taking for granted that the other means you no harm). 

The fable came to mind after I received some input to the effect that I ought to try writing a new summation of my "NUM Theory." This appealed to me because I know that some fine points of the theory have changed since I first started devoting essays to the subject of fictional phenomenality, even though the essentials are the same. With this project in mind, I reread all ARCHIVE posts on the subject of "NUM formula," and came across this interesting sentence I quoted from Rudolf Otto, whose musings on "the uncanny" influenced me through a mention in a C.S. Lewis essay.

 "...this expression [of unfamiliarity] is popularly used for a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes, and in whose presence we have the feeling of the uncanny."

-- THE IDEA OF THE HOLY (1917), p. 197.

As it happens, I have written a number of essays on the subject of "strangeness," a quality I find universally in works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous," but not in works of "the naturalistic." I've tended to focus on the nature of the work's relationship to the notion of causal coherence, i.e., the idea that the physical world and everything in it is fully explicable by the laws of cause and effect. In such a world, "strangeness" has no place. When in fiction an author chooses to depict something that does not conform to the proposition of causal coherence, he produces something that seems "strange," and often (to use a related term) "unintelligible" to the reader's experience. 

Now, to speak of "familiarity" focuses the conundrum more upon the writer's expectations of the reader's affective world, rather than  his cognitive apprehensions. Now, in the real world, from which all readers draw their conclusions about what is or is not strange or unintelligible, what creates the impression of familiarity and its opposite?

First, familiarity arises from the expectation that aspects of the causal universe will work in a predictable fashion. In the Aesop fable, the fox does not KNOW that the lion will not attack him the third time. He makes a supposition on the fact that in the first two encounters, the lion did not choose to attack him, and so the fox allowed himself to act in a familiar manner toward the King of Beasts. 

This would be what I will term "primary familiarity," which is essentially the same as the Aesopian "contempt." This can range from all presumptions about physical predictability-- the expectation that gravity will continue to keep us attached to the earth-- to predictions about the way we expect other sentient persons to react. It's easy to imagine a version of "the Fox and the Lion" in which things don't turn out well for the Fox because the Lion happens to be hungry on the third occasion of their meeting. Yet the fable is accurate enough in describing how sentient persons calculate the reactions of other sentients. The psychology of this familiarity does not diminish just because a particular expectation does not bear fruit; it will just make the perceiving person more militant about a particular entity.

More on "secondary familiarity" in a future post.

 

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 3

I foregrounded this essay in the first paragraph of BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE:

My plans for the third and last part of UNCANNY GENESIS involve my using certain linguistic terms to expand further on my concepts of artifice, affective freedom and cognitive restraint.

The primary linguistic terms I'm invoking are the two most crucial to the concept of symbolism: the *simile* and the *metaphor.* Truth to tell, the particular significance of the simile became clearer to me when I looked again at my argument in the POWER AND POTENCY series, regarding G. Wilson Knight's assertion that Shakespeare's Hamlet was "a superman among men:"

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.

The rest of Part II I devoted to showing how other manifestations of uncanny phenomenality seemed to possess some potency that exceeded the world of naturalistic causality. Since uncanny works by definition cannot exceed the coherence aspect of causality, they can only exceed naturalistic causality in the sense of *intelligibility,* which is why I argued that such fictional presences as Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan are more allied with the world of the metaphenomenal than that of the isophenomenal.

So, what does it mean if the world of the uncanny is governed by the construct of the simile, and do the other two phenomenalities accord with other linguistic forms of speech?

Well, as noted earlier the simile and the metaphor are often paired as related but non-identical linguistic terms. The simile draws a comparison between two or more phenomena, one which may be expressively memorable but is not meant to change one's view of consensual reality. The metaphor, however, expresses the identity of two or more phenomena, in a manner that parallels the direct association of phenomena in Cassirer's view of mythical thinking:

Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

 In THE GREAT CODE, Northrop Frye spun forth a mammoth theory of language derived from the work of Renaissance scholar Giambattista Vico. In essence, Frye asserts that human language has three phases: the *hieroglyphic,* which is the language of the gods, the *hieratic,* which is the language of the aristocrats, who also give birth to what Cassirer calls "discursive reason," and the *demotic,* the language of ordinary-world description (what Wheelwright calls "stheno-language.")

Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

I don't intend to draw direct comparisons between Frye's formulations and mine, for as I've mentioned elsewhere, Frye has no real interest in phenomenology. But I mention Frye's schema as a prelude to outlining my own, which concerns not the nature of language but the application of linguistic terms to the three phenomenalities, to wit:

The NATURALISTIC is governed by the concept of the "stheno-symbol," of the base sign that is supposed to represent exactly what it shows and nothing more.

The UNCANNY is governed by the concept of the "simile," in that there is a restricted level of symbolism. Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs can compare his hero Tarzan to a "forest god," which gives the hero the semblance of godliness to the character, yet without actually imputing the nature of a god, or that god's power, to Tarzan in any literal way.

The MARVELOUS, however, is governed by the concept of the "metaphor," in which the symbolism is meant to imply some base identity between two or more phenomena, as seen in Cassirer's last two examples, the sun being created from a stone and men being created from rocks or trees. Within fiction, this transcendence of experienced reality may be explained by magic, by some not-yet-discovered principle of real-world science, or by nothing whatever. But the action involved is always that of an identification of two disparate phenomena, becoming associated after the "magical" fashion of the metaphorical connection.

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 1

Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

It's recently occurred to me to pose the question, "When did human works of art and/or religion manifest the phenomenality of the uncanny?"

After all, as the above passage from Cassirer indicates, most if not all early religion concerned itself with marvelous magical transformations. This is not to say that early humans did not have their share of mundane stories along the lines of "the one that got away" or "who's so-and-so's wife is sleeping with," much of which would approximate what we now deem naturalistic narrative. At the same time, it should be considered a given that in archaic times, even the most skeptical disbeliever lived in a culture dominated by conceptions of the marvelous. Thus a story like Homer's ILIAD, a tale of human beings going to war, is continuously entangled with the narratives of the gods behind the scenes.

But what about the interstitial category of the uncanny? This phenomenality, as I've often mentioned, shares with the naturalistic the characteristic of casual coherence, yet also shares with the marvelous the characteristic of anti-intelligibility-- though most of the artifacts I've identified with this phenomenality are of comparatively recent creation.

Is it possible to find this phenomenality within the earliest myths and tales of humankind? Rudolf Otto, one of the key philosophers to employ the term "uncanny," thought so. However, he applied the term largely to pre-Christian religions, rather than analyzing a variety of religious and literary works across the span of human history. Here's Otto's most concise judgment on the matter, from Chapter 4 of THE IDEA OF THE HOLY:


let us give a little further consideration
to the first crude, primitive forms in which this numinous
dread or awe shows itself. It is the mark which really
characterizes the so-called Religion of Primitive Man , and
there it appears as daemonic dread . This crudely naive and
primordial emotional disturbance, and the fantastic images to
which it gives rise, are later overborne and ousted by more
highly-developed forms of the numinous emotion, with all its
mysteriously impelling power. But even when this has long
attained its higher and purer mode of expression it is possible
for the primitive types of excitation that were formerly a part
of it to break out in the soul in all their original naivete and
so to be experienced afresh.

So for Otto, "the uncanny" was essentially an early if crude form of "the mysteriously impelling power" that he calls "the numinous." Man's capacity for experiencing the numinous stands as an ideal function of the human mind, one that is best developed by the higher religions, though the numinous experience cannot, he says, be boiled down to anything like Kant's notion of "the sublime." Otto clearly deems "the so-called Religion of Primitive Man" to be an illusion born of "naivete," but this has nothing to do with the actual content of most primitive religious narratives, which are implicitly dominated by the marvelous.

If the tropes of the uncanny exist in early literature, presumably they would exist with the same status as naturalistic tropes, within the greater scope of a marvelous phenomenality. For instance, all three phenomenality-tropes appear in the non-canonical Hebrew text "Bel and the Dragon:"

The NATURALISTIC part appears when the prophet Daniel exposes the way the priests of Bel sneak into the temple to eat the sacrifices, the better to convince the naive that the gods are real.

The UNCANNY would be Daniel's investigation of yet another hoax, but one with a greater degree of mystery to it, when he finds that some colossal animal inhabits (presumably) another temple, which the local priests consider a "living god." Apparently the "dragon" is not a common animal that anyone in town might recognize as a simple creature, so within my system I would deem it an "astounding animal." Daniel's method of slaying the creature I might further deem a "bizarre crime." The thrust of the story is that the "dragon" dies specifically because it is does not share the marvelous nature of a god, so that it is strange enough to be anti-intelligible but not something outside the bounds of causal coherence.

The MARVELOUS phenomenality, however, dominates the story as a whole, in that Daniel is thrown into the lion's den and succored by angels. This section of the story provides beings whose nature exceeds both intelligibility and causal coherence-- not to mention being the best-known part of the story for most people today.

Just as a guess, I would imagine that oral culture may have produced assorted stand-alone stories that would conform to my definition of the uncanny phenomenality, wherein which the tropes of the naturalistic or the marvelous did not hold sway. But most such stand-alone stories were not written down until the dawn of European rationalism, and if we have them in any form, they were probably incorporated into longer tale-cycles, like the Six Labors of Theseus that precede his encounter with the marvelous Minotaur.

More to come.

ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT

In my most recent film-review I wrote:

From time to time I've debated, like many others on the web, the question as to whether or not all works in the tradition of the "alternate history" fall into the domain of what many call"fantasy and science fiction"-- or, as I term said domain, "the metaphenomenal." I plan to write another essay for my theory-blog soon about the reasons why INGLORIOUS BASTERDS is an example of a purely isophenomenal "alternate history" film, so I'll dispense with any detailed theoretical justifications in this review. However, like some of the naturalistic films I've reviewed here, BASTERDS is relevant in that it uses many of the same tropes one would find in an "uncanny" version of an alternate-world narrative, such as (to cite a quick example) Philip Dick's THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.

I've written next to nothing thus far on the formal considerations of the "alternate world" concept-- from which, I should say, I'm excluding any narrative that involves overt marvelous phenomena, such as time-travel or even futuristic extrapolation. For example, Orwell's 1984 is such an extrapolation, in that its developments are predicated on what has already happened in historical time. Ward Moore's BRING THE JUBILEE, often considered a pivotal "alternate history" novel, would also be inapplicable since the protagonist does travel in time.  For that matter, now that I've read a summation of HIGH CASTLE-- which I had not re-read in some time-- it too would not qualify, given that the alternate-world Nazis have colonized other planets, so that book also uses a "marvelous" trope. A truly "uncanny" version of an alternate-world scenario could have no broaches in causal coherence, only in intelligibility.

At the end of the BASTERDS review, I gave one example of such an anti-intelligible film, RED DAWN.  DAWN is not commonly regarded as an "alternate world" story, but I view it as such because the script portrays a world in which nuclear war does not ensue as a result of Soviet forces invading the United States. Rather, DAWN chooses to focus on only one aspect of the conflict: that of American teens, nicknamed "Wolverines," who battle the Soviets using the tactics of aboriginal Americans and of so-called "mountain men." Their struggle parallels that of the "Basterds" in the Tarantino film, but the approach is radically different in terms of phenomenality.

As I've said in numerous previous essays, what determines the nature of the phenomenality of a given narrative is the type of affect that the narrative dominantly evokes. Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis have been my primary guides in formulating my most current schema for both the sympathetic and antipathetic affects appropriate to each phenomenality:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

THE MARVELOUS-- antipathetic aspect TERROR, sympathetic aspect WONDER.


In recent essays like PENALTY FOR THRESHOLDING, I centered my argument upon the idea that works of "the uncanny" had a greater effect of "strangeness" than those of "the naturalistic" because the former were more allied to the literary principle of artifice than the corresponding principle of verisimilitude. This describes adequately the way in which narratives can take on the semblance of being "larger than life" but artifice alone is not enough to explain the process, which must be grounded in the pluralist conception that art and literature are primarily expressive in nature.

INGLORIOUS BASTERDS contains a great deal of artifice in the ways that its plot continually references film-history. However, even though the writer rewrites real-world history, that rewriting comes about due to factors that broach neither coherence nor intelligibility. The Basterds are the closest thing to an anti-intelligible element in the movie, and yet the emotions they inspire are naturalistic in nature: physical fear to their enemies (best embodied in the figure of the "Bear Jew"), and admiration to the viewers who identify with their history-changing exploits.

In contrast, the Wolverines, while they have no greater resources than the Basterds, achieve the sense of bringing dread to their enemies and inciting fascination from the audience. I would say that this is because Tarantino's heroes are firmly rooted in the here-and-now, while those of John Milius are an attempt to recapitulate the warrior-feats of early American history,  both "white" and "red."

I've subsumed the subgenre of the "alternate world" under the trope I've named "exotic worlds and customs." It might not prove to be the most elegant fit over time. Usually this trope has been used for exoticism found in cultures far from modern post-industrial society. However, on occasion I've also detected the use of exoticism in contemporary societies, as seen in my reviews of such naturalistic films as THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN  and THE SPIDERS, and certainly there have been times when the "exotic custom" has stemmed from a person or persons who comes from an exotic land as he, she, or they encounter the contemporary world.

This may not be all I have to write on the subject of "artifice and the affects," but for now I'll close by stating that in one sense the "alternate world with no marvelous elements" bears a certain resemblance to the narrative world conjured forth in the "delirious dreams and fallacious figments" trope. Certainly, the viewer of BASTERDS is always aware of the "real world's" dissimiliarity from the film's world, just as Alice retains her memory of the Way the World Ought to Be even while meandering through the uncanny terrain of Wonderland. "Fallcious figments" are even closer in structural nature to the idea of the alternate world. Most "figments" are meant to appear briefly and to be ignored as irrelevant to a narrative's diegesis, though occasionally one encounters a comic world in which everything is thoroughly distanced from reality, the best example (from films thus far reviewed) being LITTLE RITA OF THE WEST.  A uncanny use of the figment-trope, but one which profits from drawing upon ludicrous versions of dread and fascination, would be MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL.

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.

GEOMETRIC APPROXIMATIONS OF THE TWO SUBLIMITES

As one of my intermittent attempts to better illustrate the complexity of my theory of the two sublimities, I decided to explore some visual comparisons.

In the March essay WITH ENFOLDED HANDS, I compared the three phenomenalities to the three distinct parts of a seed. Though I still like this image, I have to admit that it doesn't capture the way all of these abstractions interact in the world of finished artworks. I noted in that essay that even in a work as devoted to loopy fantasy as Carroll's ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, some references to coherence still had to exist for the story to make sense. Thus the Cheshire Cat may take his leave of Alice in a fantastic manner, but when the feline fades out, it still serves the same narrative purpose as if he simply got up and walked away.

Thus I turn to the pleasures of geometry, and find more satisfaction in describing the three phenomenalities as three interlocking circles.

Each of the circles should be seen as representing not a distinct section of physical matter, as is the case with the seed, but rather a non-physical "field of force." Because there are no true physical boundaries between the three phenomenal domains, it may be easier to imagine each of them having limited influences over the other than would be the case with my earlier seed-metaphor.

In this 2014 essay I described the workings of the combinatory-sublime according to the two principles of causality, "intelligibility" and "regularity" (later superseded by a better term, "coherence," which I've edited into this passage):

...the combinatory-sublime arises rather from the transgression upon the reader's expectations in terms of intelligibility and causal coherence. DIRTY HARRY, a naturalistic work which conforms to general expectations regarding intelligibility and coherence, 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 coherence but not intelligibility; being "anti-intelligible," it has a higher potential to arouse the combinatory-sublime. And STAR WARS, which violates both intelligibility and coherence, has the greatest mythicity of the three in reality, as well as the greatest potential for symbolic combinations and thus for the combinatory-sublime.

This geometrical arrangement approximates the way the phenomenalities evolve from one another. Had I found on the Net an image of three rings that were both interlocked and surmounting one another, that would have hewed closer to my conceptual premise. But this one works tolerably well. The red ring is the naturalistic phenomenality, representing adherence to both coherence and intelligibility. The blue ring, only indirectly tied to the Region of the Red, flouts both coherence and intelligibility. The interceding green ring takes one principle from each of its neighbors: abiding by the principle of causal coherence like Region Red, but transgressing the principle of intelligibility like Region Blue. (If I cared about exact parallels, Region Red ought to be Region Yellow, and the parallel would be stronger-- but it doesn't exactly weigh heavily in my scales.)

Thus, for the sublimity of the combinatory. But what about the dynamic-sublime, to which I've devoted much more space on this blog?

Here's the geometrical visual on the sublimity of power:

My reason for choosing concentric circles is because each "field of force," and the sublimity it represents, registers as independent of the other two, perhaps more like three planetary orbits rather than interlocked rings. I established this principle in SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PT. 3:

As far as the film DIRTY HARRY is concerned, there is no being more powerful than Harry Callahan, though some of his foes, particularly Scorpio, are capable of challenging the hero.  The same holds true for Lee and his foe Han in ENTER THE DRAGON, and for Luke Skywalker and his opponent Darth Vader in the first three STAR WARS films. 

To pursue the orbit-simile, Dirty Harry's "planet" is one that obeys all the laws of a naturalistic cosmos, so that's why his type of power elicits the *admiration* of the audience.

The "planet" of DRAGON's Lee, however, allows for a transgression of the law of intelligibility. This doesn't precisely give Lee more physical power than Dirty Harry, but the flouting of intelligibility means that Lee *seems like* he possesses a greater *potency,* as defined here in a three-part essay series beginning here. This quality of anti-intelligible potency gives rise to the audience's *fascination.*

And finally, Luke Skywalker exists on a "planet" that allows for the transgression of both intelligibility and causal coherence. This doesn't necessary mean that every protagonist in a marvelous phenomenality necessarily has powers that transgress coherence, just because Skywalker does: obviously Indiana Jones does not have such powers. But he too exists in phenomenal worlds wherein such powers are possible. Thus, when a non-powered hero like Indiana Jones triumphs over, say, a Thuggee priest who can rip peoples' hearts out of their chests, Jones acquires roughly the same aspect of the "dynamic-sublime" as Luke Skywalker-- and both characters elicit the audience's *wonder* (also sometimes called *exaltation* in various essays here).

However, this aspect is only "real" on the "planets" of the marvelous phenomenality, because it is a narrative, rather than a significant, value. Both Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker have no power, or even potency, within the narrative worlds of Lee and Harry Callahan, because these are worlds where causal coherence cannot be transgressed.

I'm strongly considering adding yet another specialized term to my already overburdened lit-crit continuum: "domains." The word would connote all of the above-described fields of force, whether they pertain to combinatory values or dynamicity values. In the near future I'll probably experiment with it in a planned follow-up to UNCANNY CITY.  But what will be the use of it, at least over the long haul, is more than I can say.

COSMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

In the first month of posts devoted to "1001 comics myths" and to their Bizarro counterparts the "null-myths," I've covered three of the four types of Campbellian function: "the psychological," "the sociological," and "the metaphysical." The next two will focus on the last of Campbell's functions, "the cosmological," which I also explored in some depth in the essay COMBINATORY CONSIDERATIONS. However, I need to expand still further on the status of the functions with respect to real-world knowledge.

In the aforesaid essay I emphasized the fact that the "regularity" of certain phenomena led to their being encoded in both archaic myths and modern literature. However, whereas regularity (aka "causal coherence," as explained here) is a paramount consideration in the domain of science, it's a secondary consideration in art and literature. In the domain of art, one can choose to adhere absolutely to the demands of a naturalistic cosmos, or one can explore the realms of the uncanny or the marvelous, without any loss of mental rigor.

Though this principle applies equally well to all four Campbellian functions, I stress it with respect to the cosmological-- the function that deals with all the various "science-based" data-- because it's become tediously routine for many fans to sneer at various comics-stories-- usually though not only superhero tales-- because they offend against the Great God Science.

This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of dopey, careless mistakes with regard to violations of physical law, and I've mocked a lot of these myself. In the circles of Marvel fandom, one of the most egregious appeared in the pages of MARVEL TEAM-UP, and was spotlighted in the MARVEL NO-PRIZE BOOK, as follows:

But the sort of tedious sneering I'm thinking of is more on the level of, "Ha ha, Peter Parker would never have received spider-powers from the bite of a radioactive spider; he would've caught CANCER and DIED." Rather than showing either wit or perspicacity, the mocker who comes up with this sort of nonsense is closer to the child playing "shoot-'em-up" who refuses to lie dead when he's shot. It shows an inability to recognize that within the sphere of a given game, the rules as established supersede the considerations of reality.

Thus it should be seen that the forms of knowledge within a fictional universe should not be downgraded because they do not align with what is deemed "scientific knowledge" in the real world. All forms of knowledge in a fictional universe should be deemed *simulacra of knowledge.*  The same holds true for the other functions. Audiences need not believe in Jung's psychological concepts to regard Fellini's Jung-influenced films as illuminating the human condition; need not validate the socialist fallacy of "the rise of the proletariat" in order to derive pleasure from Jack London's IRON HEEL, nor even credit Dave Sim's fusion of Judaism, Islam and Christianity to get insights out of CEREBUS THE AARDVARK.

I should add in closing that while many SF novels and comics have used "science-factoids" as minor gimmicks within narratives, these in themselves are no better than *motifs;* their presence does not necessarily confer high mythicity upon the story as a whole. When considering the first new cosmological myth for this series, I looked at the early stories of the Silver Age FLASH. I might have liked to have included, under "1001 myths," the first Captain Cold story. However, though the villain's origin-tale does dole out a few references to "the phenomena of cold," those references don't eventuate in a high level of cosmological mythicity.

OUTRE OUTFITS OVERVIEW

My NUM trope "outre outfits, tropes and devices" is a smorgasbord of aspects that have to do with the *dynamicity* of a given character. But I've never taken the time to observe how each of the three, despite their close association, sort out with respect to the naturalistic and the uncanny.

When attire is not actually marvelous--  that is, when it does not confer marvelous power on a character, like Iron Man's armor-- it must conform to the rules of causal coherence. However, it can still be "uncanny" rather than "naturalistic" on the terms cited in POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2.  It's not that clothes "make the superman," as they do with Iron Man. But if they are uncanny, they can make the man SEEM LIKE a superman.

Now, this is easy to demonstrate with regard to costumed heroes. Non-powered heroes like Batman and the Shadow are known for imitating unusual presences with their attire, which obviously gives them the aura of the uncanny. Yet in this essay I specified that it isn't even necessary to don an imitative costume to gain this charisma:

...Zorro’s costume confers on him a charisma that provides him with greater narrative dynamicity. The Zorro narratives, while insisting that Zorro is merely a skilled human, emphasize his presence as a spectre of fear to his opponents, and it is this which gives the black-clad avenger the charisma of “the uncanny.”

Now, science fiction narratives don't typically show their protagonists waltzing around in garments that depart from the norm. Yet though everyone in a FLASH GORDON narrative wears the same "outre" garments, Flash's outre outfit is the only one where his normal dynamicity is enhanced by the uncanny look of his outfit, because he's the hero. (Well, as Flash's opponent, Ming gets some uncanny mileage too, but definitely not Dale and Zarkov.)

Many future-Earth scenarios, though, feature a concatenation of "ordinary garments" with "somewhat weird garments." On my movie-blog I've just finished reviewing three post-apocalyptic films of the 1980s that may illustrate the dichotomy.

Here's the redoubtable Snake Plissken from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK:

Then, his close imitator "Parsifal" from 1983's 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK:

And finally, here's the un-redoubtable "Slade" from 1987's EQUALIZER 2000:

Now, even though all three men inhabit a "marvelous" future, none of them are real supermen. But do their clothes make them "seem like" supermen?


Though I liked the first two films and disliked the third, I don't think that fact prejudices me against the costuming of Slade in the 1987 film. The garments of Slade are simply bland and functional on their own terms; there's nothing about them that suggests the uncanny.

In contrast, though Plissken and Parsifal are not wearing "costumes" in the true sense, there has been some attention to how they convey heroic stature upon those who wear them. Russell is simply wearing almost all-black attire, as does Zorro, and the addition of the eyepatch gives him an iconic stature-- although it would be easy to get any of these elements wrong, so that they do not convey such an impression (I'll try to think of a good counter-example for later). Parsifal is not entirely copying all aspects of Plissken's look, though the influence is plain, but director Martino has given him a snazzier jacket that perhaps befits his "knightly" cognomen.

More costume-conundrums to come.

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.

PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS

In ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS, my extended contemplation of my trope "exotic lands and customs," I wrote:

For a time I flirted with the notion that maybe the "jungle-adventure" film was unique in offering so many uncanny versions of its cultures, both real and imagined. Westerns, for example, are full of real and imagined "exotic" Native American cultures, but the majority are almost always naturalistic.

I've read very few western prose stories, so I'm far from an expert on that subject. But I've viewed a few hundred western films, and most of them, in my opinion, regularly take the same elements that are usually "uncanny" in jungle-stories and render them as "naturalistic."  In this essay I mentioned that the original Zorro story from 1919, "The Curse of Capistrano," was an exception to this rule, and I'm sure that there have been various others in all media. But my recent reading of an avowed prose western classic, Zane Grey's 1912 RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, gives me an example of how westerns more often than not use tropes with uncanny potential in a thoroughly naturalistic manner.

I've mentioned before that a character's wearing of a concealing mask is not enough to confer an uncanny phenomenality-- that of the trope I term "outre outfits, skills and devices"-- upon a narrative.  RIDERS makes an excellent counter-example to figures like Zorro and the Durango Kid, in that the Grey novel also contains a "masked rider," and not just in the context of a commonplace holdup artist.  About a third of the way through the novel, Bern Venters-- a young hero who occupied a sort of "B-plot" next to the primary tale of hero Lassiter and his romantic partner Jane Withersteen-- encounters a masked rustler. Because no other rustlers go masked, the locals have dubbed this figure "Oldring's Masked Rider"-- that is, a member of a rustling-gang bossed by their leader, an owlhoot named Oldring. Venters comes across the masked rider and another rustler, whereupon the unnamed fellow tries to shoot Venters. Venters slaps lead, killing the second rustler but only wounding the masked rider-- whom he soon discovers is actually a female who has been passing herself off as a male bandit. Venters nurses the young woman back to health, and eventually learns that the woman, Bess by name, was explicitly masked so that no outsider to the gang would know that she was female.

This employment of a "masked rider" trope is thus entirely functional.  Bess wears a mask not to create an attitude of awe, as Zorro and the Durango Kid do, but only to camouflage her gender. (Since she is not known by any locals save the rustlers, the mask doesn't even serve to conceal her identity.)

RIDERS comes slightly closer to the domain of the uncanny in its creation of Surprise Valley. This valley is imbued with slight overtones of the Garden of Eden, particularly since it's the place where Venters nurses Bess and where they mutually fall in love, though neither ends up staying in the valley.  The entrance to Grey's Eden is metaphorically guarded not by an angel with a whirling sword, but Balancing Rock, a gigantic stone that nature has positioned at the valley's only passageway to the outside world. But though Balancing Rock serves an important role in the novel's conclusion of the Lassiter-Jane plot, it is not given any uncanny phenomenality whatsoever.

However, inside one of the valley's multitudinous rock formations is a cave-aperture which makes a bell-like sound when the wind rushes through it. Bess tells Venters that the superstitious rustlers call the sound "Oldring's Knell," claiming that it will sound when their boss Oldring meets his maker.  Under the right circumstances, this geographical peculiarity could assume an uncanny phenomenality. In Rider Haggard's 1885 novel KING SOLOMON'S MINES, Allan Quatermain's voyage to exotic Kukuanaland is presaged by his expedition's encounter with a pair of peaks called "Sheba's Breasts:"

These mountains placed thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman's breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth; and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. 

Or, on a much less ambitious note, another wind-produced sound lends an uncanny tenor to the B-western RIDERS OF THE WHISTLING SKULL.

But Zane Grey, though he has created the opportunity for a spooky moment-- say, of having the wind create its "knell" through the caves just as the rustler Oldring perishes-- the author does not follow up on this narrative opportunity. Oldring does die in the novel, but he perishes in town, far from Surprise Valley. Thus I would conclude that the only reason Grey creates the Knell is a purely functional one: he wants to prepare readers for the inevitability of Oldring's death, just as the author uses a "masked rider" purely to conceal the gender-identity of the character Bess.

In closing I'll note that I'm using my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality" in a different manner than I did in A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY. In that essay I said that a stereotype was merely functional because, unlike an archetype, it was a simple variable that could not garner more than very limited associations. This essay was concerned with the symbolic complexity extrinsic to narratives, not the intrinsic factors that determine a narrative's phenomenality.  When speaking of phenomenality, functionality applies rather to the idea of pure materialistic causality, in which every effect has but one cause, and so on, while "super-functionality" applies rather to the ways in which the phenomenalities of the uncanny and marvelous ally themselves to principles that oppose pure causality, i.e. "anti-intelligibility" and "anti-coherence."