A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE WISHED

 Over the past month I've been contemplating the concept of consummation with respect to the insights I put forth in the 2020 essay SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

...what’s “asymmetrical” about “truth” in its connotation of factual occurrences? The sense I get from Melville’s “ragged edges” is that the real world, unlike the world of fiction and fable, doesn’t ever come to a designated end, be that ending comic or tragic. Reality just goes on and on and on—and so do people.

I may be thinking of this subject in part because year 2022 is soon to end, to be replaced by a new one. And despite what I said above about people "going on and on," every individual mortal is also destined to come to his or her respective end and to be replaced by a representative of a new generation. But to the best of our knowledge, the endings of both years and mortals are not designated to have the symmetries of fictional narratives. The Greeks liked to say, "call no man happy until he is dead," but to death, one's happiness or sadness is irrelevant. Death cuts off one's own self-narrative, leaving only the "ragged edges" of the reality that survives the individual. Imputing any particular design to a person's life-- whether as an adventure, a drama, a comedy or an irony-- would be the height of impertinence.

Stories, though, can come to definitive ends, so as to illustrate particular sympathies and antipathies, and that's why we like them. Whether the protagonists come to good ends or bad ends, the conclusions have a symmetry that life does not. Whatever emotional charge we as readers/audiences may get from the tropes that serve as the "quanta" of narrative, those tropes are far more dependable than life's vagaries, and they make us feel immortal by identifying with these symmetrical characters, even those who meet unpleasant fates. Not every reader likes the same consummations, and that's why many critics have disparaged hopeful comedies and adventures and have favored sobering dramas and ironies. But in the "end" all of these are individual preferences, and so we need all of the mythoi in play in order to accomplish the true mission of fiction: to make us feel temporarily immune to the irregularities, the "ragged ends," of life and death.

NULL-MYTHS: ["A HOUSE NAMED DEATH"] (SUB-MARINER #41-42, 1971)

 As I've mentioned from time to time, I don't generally do "null-myth" reviews just for ordinary junky comics. A comics-story has to be particularly bad to earn such a review, and not just in terms of having bad verisimilitude, but bad mythicity/artifice as well. Even given these self-imposed strictures, I find it amazing that I haven't managed to savage more than one of the many works of Gerry Conway up till now. 

In the early seventies I turned 15, and I very nearly hated every comic with Conway's name on it. In retrospect, I would give him his due by saying that unlike a lot of other pros who turned out tons of undistinguished formula-work, Conway did seem to have a genius for co-creating characters with great potential-- the Punisher, the Man-Thing, Killraven-- though usually that potential was realized not by Conway but by some later raconteur. I despised most of his famed run on SPIDER-MAN, and the best that I can say of it is that he was no longer trying to be "artsy" on the title, as he was in some of his early scripts for DAREDEVIL and THE SUB-MARINER.

I take the title "A House Named Death" from the cover-copy of the second story in this SUB-MARINER two-parter. At the time of this tale, the feature was clearly losing steam, and the editors sought to give Prince Namor a new cachet by killing off his beloved (4-5 years before Gwen Stacy in SPIDER-MAN) and sending the hero off on various peripatetic adventures. "House" essentially sticks the Atlantean prince in a sci-fi Gothic. One night, the prince is flying along, minding his own business, when some guy on the ground zaps Namor so that he falls. The mysterious guy is joined by an aged woman, and they skulk off into the darkness.

Namor wakes up on the cobblestones of a nearby small American town. where he's immediately succored by Lucille, an attractive young brunette. He apparently recovers enough that she can lead him to shelter, given that she couldn't carry him by herself-- and as it happens, Lucille's dwelling place is the house of her aunt, first given the peculiar name "Aunt Serr." Namor is weak from both his injuries and his lack of exposure to water, though no one in Conway's story, including Namor, ever thinks about his getting access to some H2O. After Lucille gives Sub-Mariner a little set-up on his circumstances, he passes out again-- and wakes up chained in a room by Aunt Serr, whom the reader recognizes as the old lady from before. Auntie relates some of her personal tragedies to Namor, about her birthing a "devil spawned monster" due to radiation exposure, and she seems to be contemplating some "unformed" master plan and thinking about using Namor to help her. The prince breaks loose but gets zapped again by Auntie's son, who is now revealed to have the body of a humanoid-shaped slab of rock.

After some more fights and histrionics, Auntie shows Namor the mechanism she'd used to cement her hold on the locals, which she has also used to transform them into a bunch of multiform monsters, though we don't find this out until Part 2. At the end of Part 1, Auntie reveals that she's used her machine on her niece, causing Lucille to transform into a hot energy-girl, whom Auntie wants to be the bride of her monstrous son. Lucille, who in this form is totally under Auntie's mental control, zaps Namor for the cliffhanger ending. 

Possibly Auntie and her rockhead son think Namor's dead, for Part 2 begins with him recovering in the wilderness, where the villains desposited him. Conway tosses in an oddball erudite reference to the Spartan custom of abandoning deformed infants in the wild, yet he can't find time to note that the rain falling upon Namor's form, courtesy of artist George Tuska, must be restoring the prince's strength. Sub-Mariner wanders into town, and, after another gratuitous fight-scene, meets the town's residents, whom have all been made into monsters by the woman who wants her freakish son to have a town of freaks to cohabit with (though there's no indication that "Rock" ever does so). Soon Namor meets the rest of the townfolk, who bear Aunt Serr no good will for their fate.

The only thing Namor learns from the freak-people is that they claim that Aunt Serr has no niece, which may mean that none of them have ever laid eyes on Lucille (despite the fact that she was first seen traipsing around their town in her human-looking form). Namor can't comprehend this mystery, so he makes a frontal assault on Auntie's house again, and once more gets knocked for a loop by Lucille's powers.

 For anyone who may've come in late to the story, Auntie soliloquizes once more about her plans to mate Lucille with her son, and she makes a loose implication that she may have created Lucille from some artificial process, as she threatens the energy-girl: "Do as I say, you silly fool-- lest I return you to the dissipator." Possibly Conway meant to imply that this was the same device by which Aunt Serr transformed normal humans into monsters, though if so then the "dissipator" must be one of the more all-purpose multi-tasking machines ever depicted in Marvel Comics. Namor recovers just as Big Rock Serr comes in, and as they fight again, the townspeople sneak into Auntie's lab and blow everything up. Lucille, still for some strange reason more attracted to Namor's biceps than to Big Rock's literal "boulder shoulders," finally turns on Aunt Serr, blasting the old lady and then using her power to send Sub-Mariner careening out of the house, saving him from being consumed in the conflagration.

The one amusing thing I noticed on this reading of the "House" tale is that Aunt Serr's name is almost certainly meant to be a pun on the word "answer." But like everything else in the story, this wordplay is inconsummate since even the reader who "gets it" can have no strong idea what it references. Aunt Serr may believe that her mad course is the only "answer" to her dilemma, and Conway gives her a few lines in which she waxes Nietzchean: "No man is free... Only by succumbing to the will of the universe-- of those greater than themselves-- can they find true freedom." But it's a clumsy moral at best.

The verisimilitude blunders throughout the story are considerable, but those affecting the mythicity are far worse. Conway might have penned the story of a woman who felt her personal creativity cursed by the uncaring fates, and who decides to mutate all the "norms" in order to make them share her misery. The subplot about "how do you handle the problem of Lucille's origin" goes absolutely nowhere, and Conway further undercuts his own narrative by working in a bunch of irrelevant ongoing subplots, one of which is meant to cross-promote events transpiring in Conway's continuity for DAREDEVIL. In the annals of out-of-control stories in the medium of comics, "A House Named Death" deserves some sort of retroactive Golden Raspberry at least.

WHEN IS A VIGNETTE NOT A VIGNETTE?

 The word “vignette,” which I referenced in CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH, originally wasn’t applied to any sort of narrative, having been formulated to describe a type of illustrative design work. Only later did it take on such meanings, according to Merriam-Webster, as “a quick narrative sketch” or “a brief scene within a play or movie.”

For the purpose of literary analysis, I make a distinction between two types of vignettes. The non-narrative type of vignette may be set apart from the main narrative, but it doesn’t have its own unity, often existing solely to relate some information to the audience, as with a character’s flashback that uses past events to explain the present. The narrative type of vignette, though, does possess some form of unity, usually seen in the consummation of one of the four potentialities. I’ll provide examples by drawing on previous mythcomics analyses, which of course means that in both examples I’m emphasizing the mythopoeic potentiality.

In the version of Wonder Woman’s origin set forth in WONDER WOMAN #1, the author, having already introduced his character in both ALL STAR COMICS and SENSATION COMICS, opens with an extended flashback to show the beginnings of the heroine’s homeland Paradise Island. Princess Diana herself has not even been born during the first four pages of the flashback, which are devoted to the origin of the Amazons and the travails they suffer at the hands of cruel male warriors. I would deem this section to be a non-narrative vignette. In terms of form, it meets my criteria: that of focusing mostly upon the beginning and the end of the story, without much in the way of a middle. Once the reader gets to the point where Paradise Island is established, the natural response is likely to be, “Yes, and then?”

The two-page “Origin of the Batman” from DETECTIVE COMICS #33, however, is a narrative vignette. The origin-tale is not organically part of the larger story in which it appears, and in truth the same two-pager might have been inserted into any story in that time-period, with the same narrative results. Yet it’s not the vignette’s functional independence that gives it the quality of unity, but the way in which the mythopoeic potentiality builds from beginning (“young Bruce Wayne suffers the trauma of seeing his parents killed by a ruthless criminal”) to end (“mature Bruce Wayne decides to use the omen of a creature of darkness to terrorize the denizens of the underworld.”)

To draw upon my observations from the essay-series THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, the difference is comparable between a “disorganized essay with a strong theme statement” and an essay well organized enough to reinforce its central argument with copious evidence.

CONSUMMATION AND CONCRESCENCE

My recent essays on the concept of the master-thread have sparked some re-consideration of the titular categories.

When I wrote CONSUMMATING PASSIONS in 2011, I may have contemplated the notion of using consummation to explain certain operations of fictional narrative, more or less in the same fashion that I now utilize "concrescence." However, I didn’t end up using “consummation” as a consistent term over the years. I now believe that the term is too static. Going by the standard usage of the word and its opposite, a work can only be consummate or inconsummate insofar as the parts of the narrative do or do not work in harmony to give the reader a sense of “completion.” PASSIONS, though, was written before I began formulating my concepts of the four potentialities, and of discourse between the various *quanta * of those potentialities.

In contrast, concrescence is not about the relationship of the parts to a hypothetical whole; it concerns the relation of parts to other parts within the narrative, in a rough parallel to the mundane medical use of the word. One part, as I’ve written at the beginning of the master-thread series, is always dominant within the narrative, and the other parts are woven around this central thread. The thread-metaphor helps to explain how a given narrative may be strong within a given potentiality, mythopoeic or otherwise, even if the narrative develops only the superordinate master thread but no subordinate threads. I’ll provide further explication of the proper terminological relationships of these two categories in my next essay.

NULL-MYTHS: THE SILVER AGE SUICIDE SQUAD (1959-66)

In this essay, which contains an explanation of my term "null-myth," I mentioned that Mark Millar's WANTED was one of the few works I considered inconsummate in every way, that is, in terms of all four literary potentialities. Now here's another one.

I hate to knock this omnibus collection of the Silver Age SUICIDE SQUAD, which, as most DC fans will know, indirectly gave rise to the SUICIDE SQUAD concept of the Late Bronze Age. Since to my knowledge none of these stories were reprinted before, the collection is of great benefit to the devoted comics-historian who wants to know the origins of everything. These tales were almost entirely executed by editor-writer Robert Kanigher and his possibly-favorite artist-team Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. (There's one story written by another writer and a couple of entries by Joe Kubert and by Gene Colan.) One group of stories were set in the 1960s, featuring four government agents, who usually battled recrudescent dinosaurs. The other group concerned an assortment of non-recurring characters who belonged to a secret commando squad, and who-- also usually ended up fighting dinosaurs. To be sure, the later batch belonged to an overarching serial concept, also mostly by Kanigher, "The War That Time Forgot," in which American GIs kept encountering big saurian monsters whose modern presence went largely unexplained. Of the two concepts, the 1960s one was a direct influence upon the Bronze Age concept, which took the first serial's stalwart hero Rick Flag and put him in command of a team of DC supervillains. I really have nothing to say about the WWII tales, except that I found them all very boring, even the one with an early version of that curious DC creation, "the G.I. Robot."

The stories of the "Rick Flag Squad" are no better, but it's historically interesting to show how poorly Kanigher works out his concept. First of all, he selects his four adventurers-- Flag, nurse Karen Grace, and scientists Evans and Bright-- for all having one thing in common: survivor guilt, after having witnessed other persons perish while the future Squad-members themselves survived.  This sounds a lot like the idea Jack Kirby and Dave Wood debuted for the long-running 1958 feature CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, wherein the four heroes all survived brushes with death. However, whereas the Challengers all pretty much forget about their trauma in their quest for fun exploits, it becomes a source of ongoing melodrama in the hands of Kanigher.

Naturally, Kanigher doesn't have any of these survivor-victims literally court death; "suicide" is only a tag-line to suggest how dangerous their missions are. To supply optimal melodrama, Kanigher comes up with a romantic schtick in which Flag and Karen ache with mutual love for one another, but cannot be seen together. Why not? Well, their other Squad-members, Evans and Bright, are both in love with Karin too, though neither man ever seems to make the slightest pass at Karin. However, virtuous Flag insists that the Squad's missions come first, and therefore he and Karen cannot wed. 

Kanigher rolls out this trope over and over with no development, as if each pseudo-romantic encounter were produced via Xerox machine. The group's menaces are the same: they're almost all dinosaurs that have survived somehow, sometimes with super-powers. The last adventure has the characters, who have never functioned as crimefighters, threatened with death by a gang-boss who pays a villain, "the Sculptor Sorcerer," to turn the quartet into gold statues. It's not a good story either, but it's certainly better than any of the dino tales.

I've often pointed out that Kanigher had an unusual ability to breed real poetry out of his endless repetition of pulp-tropes, which often seems  a minor miracle, given how much junk Kanigher wrote. But the only significance of the Silver Age SUICIDE SQUAD is that of providing a template for the superior Bronze Age creation.

"RACIAL OTHER" MYTHCOMICS MONTH

Noticing that Black History Month has begun once more, I wondered if I had enough material to do my own very loose version thereof. The short two-part answer is (a) I have plenty of "racial myth" material to do mythcomics on this theme for this week as well as the next three, and (b) I don't think I have nearly enough corresponding material for null-myths on the same theme.

Dealing with (b) first:

There have been a lot of mediocre and/or offensive racial images throughout the history of comic strips and books, but I'm not interested in following the lead of knee-jerk ideological criticism. The mythcomics project  is focused upon studying the many ways in which comics narratives use symbolic discourse, both in consummate and inconsummate ways. I've called to mind many bad stories that use racial images of one kind or another, but they're usually bad in a way that doesn't involve any complex symbolic discourse. The one major exception is the PLASTIC MAN story analyzed here. Building on my knowledge of what little political content manifests in Jack Cole's published work, I think that the "Great Warrior" story shows Cole conflicted about the marginalization of Native Americans while seeking to validate the U.S. power structure, and that mixed message led me to classify it as inconsummate.

But most racial images in the comics are too simplistic to bear analyzing. I couldn't even find any complex racial images in my review of the SUPER GREEN BERET comics; these stories were inconsummate largely because of the creators' misguided attempt to meld the wacky whimsy of Golden Age Captain Marvel with a homage to a Green Beret who went around fighting not only modern wars but also wars in other eras. So I will either (a) not bother to analyze any null-myths this month, or (b) choose to expatiate on themes having nothing to do with racial myths.

On to (a):

There are a fair number of consummate myth-comics on this topic that would fill the four weeks. Yet I rather like the idea of being more general in my approach, by dealing with an assortment of "racial others" as they have been defined by contrast to Caucasian Americans. And no, not just Caucasian American males: the considerable quantity of women who venerated Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND ought to be enough to implicate white women as having participated in all manifestations of racial myth in American culture. I would say that in many cases American Jews have been subsumed within the sphere of American Christians and have responded to the "racial other" in largely covalent ways.

Since I'm writing about art rather than history here, I'm primarily interested in the way that creative minds have chosen to play with the images of race. This means that even some images may have a mythic complexity even if they are not viewed as empowering by real-world members of various ingroups. But offending people has never stopped me before.

RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT PT. 2

The primordial image has one great advantage over the clarity of the idea, and that is its vitality. It is a self-activating organism, endowed with generative power. The primordial image is an inherited organization of psychic energy, an integrated system, which not only gives expression to the energic process but facilitates its operation.''-- Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, p.. 447.

I'm printing this Jung-quote less than a month after my previous use of it, because I think Jung hit on exactly the distinctions between what I'm now calling the "underthought" (the domain of image and metaphor) and "overthought" (the domain of dialectical ideation). The two are distinct in their operations, and yet, as Jung and others have asserted, they tend to be interdependent as well. It's possible to create a somewhat engaging narrative in which one of the four potentialities reaches consummation-- Ditko's "Static" serial, examined here, is my best example of a story which tries to be about nothing but ideas-- but I believe that Ditko's "overthought" in that case would have been much improved had he allowed his imagination to range a little further, as I think it did in the story "Destroyer of Heroes," which still pursued similar dialectical themes of personal responsibility,

Jung implies that overthought and underthought (as I'm calling these abstract operations) are mutually dependent. That's an attractive notion, but I prefer just to say that they TEND to be interdependent, and then only in narrative. Certainly artists can produce phantasmagorical images that are entrancing for their own sake, without any input of conscious ideas, as one derives from surrealists like Yves Tanguy--

-- though many art-critics will generally prefer their images interlaced with idea-content, as in this Picasso.

In narrative, the tendency is that ideas need a free flux of metaphorical images to give the ideational figures the semblance of life. At the same time, without the structuring principle of discursive ideas, a lot of metaphors tend to disperse into meaninglessness; an "inconsummate paegant faded," so to speak.

Of the various myth-comics I've cited so far, some are like fever-dreams that suggest yet do not fully elaborate some dialectical theme, such as Steve Gerber's "Tower of the Satyr."  The ideational content is slightly overwhelmed by the flux of metaphor, but it isn't non-existent, and can be teased out into the light of day with a little myth-critical amplification. In contrast, a few works, like the Ditko BLUE BEETLE tale cited above, seem to have highly intellectualized the flux of images. The Chichester-Johnson JIHAD is as rich in images as the Gerber work, but admittedly some were created by other authors (just as Marvel's Man-Thing was not created by Gerber), and even the ones original to the opus, like villains Alastor and Chalkis, have been subjected to a great deal of rational thought, in order to distinguish them from the other principal players of the Hellraiser-Nightbreed crossover.

The processes I've called "fever-dream" and "intellectualization" correspond to Jung's dual concepts of "directed thinking" and "fantasy thinking," which I discussed in more detail here. Too often, however, literary critics are, as Northrop Frye pointed out, overly attached to those forms of literature that present them with "imaginative allegories" about life, the universe and everything-- and the majority of comics-critics have followed this line of thinking as well.  Thus in the world of elitist criticism, a work with even a mediocre intellectual approach will win approval.

In my choice of myth-comic and null-myth this week, then, I'll pick examples of comics that have been esteemed across the board for their intellectual content. One of them, according to my lights, succeeds in finding a balance between overthought and underthought, while the other puts across only the most mediocre level of intellectual ideation as a result of the author's inability to consummate his potential for image and metaphor.

NULL-MYTHS: "HOW DO YOU FIGHT A NIGHTMARE?" (GREEN LANTERN #82. 1971)

My choice for a null-myth mirrors the theme of the week's mythcomic: the theme of feminine sovereignty.

As written by Denny O'Neil and pencilled by Neal Adams, the last fourteen issues of the Silver Age GREEN LANTERN feature-- which changed its masthead title to GREEN LANTERN/ GREEN ARROW during that period-- remains one of the touchstones of the early Bronze Age. I won't attempt to critique the entire rum here, which has both its fans and its detractors. It's enough to say that the revised feature followed the lead of the "relevance craze" in popular fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This meant that the GL/GA stories dealt with social problems in a compartmentalized, one-social-topic-per-story fashion, whether the problem was drugs, Native American problems, censorship, Black American problems, and so on.

I don't know whether or not advance advertising on "Nightmare" positioned the story as an examination of the "problem" of feminist concerns. I recall that at least some of the lettercol mail attacked the story as a travesty of those concerns, but the text of O'Neil's story doesn't foreground the narrative as a "cause of the month." Mythologems about femininity make their appearance in the story, but it's hard to see what value O'Neil meant them to have. Hence, "Nightmare" qualifies not as just a mere bad story, but also an inconsummate one, in terms of its symbolic discourse.

Long before the beginning of the Silver Age, the writers of DC comics became notorious for the use of heavily plotted stories which often depended on the contrivances of villains seeking to trap or hoodwink the stories' heroes. "Nightmare" is first and foremost a "trap" story, beginning with an absurd but eye-catching opening. Green Arrow, somewhat on the outs with his girlfriend Black Canary, decides to buy her a box of roses. He shows up at her house, greets her (in her civilian ID as Dinah Lance), gives her the box-- and out of the box spring a pair of creatures that resemble the harpies of Greek myth. Arrow and Canary try to fight the monsters, then flee the house-- only to find that the harpies disappear a moment or two later. The archer calls on his power-ring partner to help him investigate the attack-- and therein lies the trap. Without dwelling too much on the particulars of the ramshackle plot, Green Lantern's old foe Sinestro and his previously-unseen sister are behind the whole thing: they contrive to menace the Lantern's friends in order to draw him out of hiding, so that they can lay their trap.

It's useless to critique O'Neil's story in terms of verisimilitude-- to object that a villain as resourceful as Sinestro surely could have found a more efficacious way to draw out the Emerald Guardian; one less dependent on anticipating Green Arrow's wooing habits. In all likelihood O'Neil contrived this wild, thoroughly improbable opening primarily to sell the issue to young readers and for no other reason. A secondary benefit is that the flower-store gimmick gives Arrow and Canary something to investigate after the Lantern has been trapped, and the same gimmick makes it possible for them to save their friend after having accidentally put him in danger. But more importantly, such a critique is ultimately irrelevant, since I'm concerning myself not with consistency of character, but the way the symbols are utilized.

The substance of Sinestro's trap is that he tricks an entire civilization-- one made up of the harpies, a group of huge Amazon women, and a ruler who calls herself Medusa-- into doing his dirty work in trying to kill his enemy. Green Lantern, upon encountering these leftovers from the mythic past, gets a quick-and-dirty explanation for their animus toward men. Their entire city was hurled into a dimensional other-world by an ancient wizard, who was pissed because Medusa laughed at his marriage-proposal. Apparently this is the only "feminist" issue in the story-- essentially, that some men do some shitty things to women-- although once or twice Black Canary gives Green Arrow a hard time for his overbearing masculinity.

Even for comic books, dumping together harpies, Amazons, and snake-haired Medusa makes for a pretty motley myth-crew (further complicated by Adams dropping the motif of Medusa's scary petrifying face, and instead giving her a headful of snakes that can strangle their victims). I must admit that some mythographers, notably Robert Graves, have argued that the legendary Amazons of Libya worshipped Medusa as a more horrific version of the martial goddess Athena. I suppose it's possible that Denny O'Neil happened across this factoid and wrote it into his story, but I've read many of O'Neil's comics-tales and he doesn't impress me as a mythophile. It could just as easily be true that O'Neil was unaware of the mythographers' connection between Medusa and the Amazons, and that he just associated these figures because in their traditional stories they are opposed to normative Greek patriarchy-- the Amazons, because they maintain a role-reversed female-centric society, and Medusa because she's raped by Poseidon but goes on to menace mortals as a monstrous gorgon. Still, harpies don't really have a place in the equation. They've been variously interpreted as wind spirits and spirits who torment the dead, so they really don't fit in with the theme of women treated badly by patriarchal males. It may be that they're only there because Neal Adams felt like drawing harpies.

O'Neil's script states that Sinestro stumbled across the exiled Amazons by accident, somehow figured out that they were man-haters, and so enlisted his sister, the so-called "Witch Queen" to approach the Amazons. One of the martial maidens sums up their program: "to make all men pay for the crime of the wizard." But, even granting comics' penchant for absurd premises, it's hard to see how Sinestro's sister could convince the Amazons and harpies that any particular man should be pulled into their world and executed, as they attempt to do to Green Lantern.

One fan complained that the O'Neil/Adams story trivialized the subject of feminism by simply using a bunch of female monsters as the hero's adversaries. I might have validated a story that was simply out-and-out gynophobic, like certain EC horror-stories that I'll be addressing in future. But O'Neil and Adams maintain the butt-kicking Black Canary as an icon of formidable femininity, so the creators certainly aren't downgrading women as a whole. Perhaps the key to this awkward, inconsistent tale is that of male melodrama, for when Green Lantern is hauled before Medusa, he's condemned to death simply for "being like he who banished us" Black Canary shows up and talks Medusa out of killing the hero by revealing that they've been manipulated by another man, rather than being helped by a fellow female. So the moral, such as it is, is not to assume that shared sex organs mean shared interests.

It's also interesting that although the Amazons don't like being in the dimensional otherverse, nothing whatever is said in the story's hurry-up-and-finish conclusion about Green Lantern or his fellow superheroes freeing them from their exile. Granted, such a motley crew wouldn't fit in on modern Earth, but it seems like even the narrative's author wanted to get rid of these female foes as soon as he'd conceived them-- an interesting contrast to the more incisive treatment of feminine concerns in the earlier "Star Sapphire" stories in this title.

PRACTICALLY INCONSUMMATE IN EVERY WAY

I said at the end of PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS that I'd seek to find examples of the four potentialities that might be more accessible than the novels I cited (GONE WITH THE WIND being the only one of the four that is widely read these days). But it's occurred to me that since I revived the concept of the potentialities alongside the Langerian concept of consummation, adapted here with application to literary merit.

I chose "potentialities" as the term for these four types of relationship between literary elements because such elements are not "given," like physical elements. The author is, as Tolkien rightly says, a "sub-creator," and for a work to succeed with respect to any of the potentialities, a significant number of readers must feel that all or at least most of the proper elements are well enough assembled that the work feels "finished," which is the definition of the adjective "consummate," But when the audience feels that the work is "unfinished" in some way-- i.e., "inconsummate"-- the result is audience dissatisfaction. Of course, "consummate" and "inconsummate" will never replace common terms like "good" and "bad," or even "cool" and " sucky." But I believe that they are not only more accurate with respect to the vagaries of taste, the dichotomy allows one to explore the potentialities with a somewhat more objective eye.

I've stated in a general way that most works are dominated by a particular potentiality, but here I want to state that my principle of centricity applies to the potentialities as much as to mythos. In JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY I stated:

 One of the key features of my ongoing theory is the notion that every coherent narrative, even if it contains elements of all four of Northrop Frye's mythoi, only one of the mythoi dominates the narrative.... I find it interesting that even though Frye does not invoke Jung's four psychological functions (sensation, intuition, thinking, feeling), Frye's "logic of dominance" (my term) mirrors the logic Jung uses to assert that only one of the psychological functions can be dominant when it is in a "conscious" state. 

The same logic pertains to the potentialities. In FOUR BY FOUR I used Dave Sim's CEREBUS as an example of a work dominated by the potentiality of "the didactic." (And though I've never stated it outright, its overall structure conforms to the mythos of the Fryean irony.) The same "logic of dominance" pertains to both. CEREBUS contains elements characteristic of the drama, the comedy, and the adventure, but overall the elements of the irony dominate. And like all works that are primarily about "thinking," its potentiality is dominated by the didactic. Elements of the kinetic, the dramatic and the mythopoeic are all present, but they don't inform what Frye would call the "total vision" of the work.

Now, since Sim was a superlative (if problematic) artist, even the "inferior potentialities" are generally well executed, even if they are "side dishes" to the main entree. So in none of my four categories do I consider Sim's work "inconsummate."  In contrast, if a work seeks to craft even a side dish, and does so in an unsatisfactory manner, then the work is inconsummate with respect to that potentiality. For instance, in this essay I judged that Mark Millar's WANTED fails in the domain of the dramatic. Dramatic relations are certainly not the focus of WANTED, but since Millar fails in this department as much as he does in the centric area of WANTED-- that is, the sensation-oriented "kinetic"-- then in these two areas the work is inconsummate.

Similarly, Millar botches any mythopoeic elements that might have been inherent in his proposition that "this is what happens when the villains win." So WANTED is inconsummate with respect to those three potentialities.

But is it fair to view WANTED as having failed in the domain of the didactic? Millar isn't really dealing with abstract ideas at all; he doesn't even bother to lend any intellectual rationalizations to the characters' actions. I would probably judge the potentiality of the didactic to be inconsummate as well, but in a different way than the others. It's not so much "tried to run the marathon and failed to complete it" as "didn't even show up at the starting-post."

ADDENDA: I should add that it's certainly possible for an author to use one of his non-centric potentialities in a minimal fashion, yet still prove satisfying and thus "consummate" with respect to that potentiality. Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, like Millar's WANTED, is primarily intended to evoke the audience's thrill in pure kineticism, and so like WANTED, the other three potentialities are all used to a lesser extent. Yet whereas WANTED fails to support its extravagance with any hint of abstract concepts, RAIDERS evokes didactic concepts-- like modern man's indebtedness to ancient history-- to a degree which is satisfying even though it remains even more minimal than the film's dramatic and mythopoeic components.

CONSUMMATING PASSIONS

"[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol.  Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression.  The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.

Definition of CONSUMMATE


1: complete in every detail : perfect

2: extremely skilled and accomplished
3: of the highest degree

-- Merriam Webster online.

 In order to talk further about the question I've raised re: the nature of Jack Kirby's creativity, I find myself drawn back to Langer's use of this term, "unconsummated symbol," in order to suss out some of the different levels of expressive power found in his work.

My first approach with the brilliant philosopher Langer is, unfortunately, to correct her terminology.  On a minor note first, I would not call music itself a "symbolic form."  The philospher most associated with that term, under whom Langer studied in the 1930s, was Ernst Cassirer, and he tended to use the term "form" only for those large-scale phenomena of human culture that could not profitably reduce into one another, such as Art, Science, and Philosophy.  "Music," being a subdivision of Art, would be better considered as a "symbolic discourse."

Langer is entirely correct, however, that pure music, unalloyed with lyrics or other forms of artistic expression, has no "permanent contents," and that it expresses emotion but cannot assert thought as such, even to the extent that a wordless comics sequence may.  Yet her use of the term "unconsummated" is badly chosen because it suggests transience, as if music had not yet reached its consummation (devoutly to be wished, surely!) but that it might do so at some future date.

There is no official dictionary term for a state in which it is impossible for a person or thing to become "complete in every detail."  However, I experimented with the neologism "inconsummatable," and found that a few Internet sites had also used it to mean pretty much what I meant.  Thus it is proper to say that music is an "inconsummatable symbolic discourse," in that, *if* one accepts that Art should be capable of both articulation and assertion, expressiveness and expression, then music can never be "complete" in the sense that other art-forms can.  This takes absolutely nothing away from music, for it's a judgment that can only be made within the cited definition of art's completeness.  Viewing art as having this dual capacity for assertion and expressiveness makes for a convenient heuristic tool in terms of judging other forms of symbolic discourse which *do* have the capacity for consummation on both levels.

Now, dictionaries do recognize that the opposite of the adjectival "consummate" is "inconsummate," which means precisely the same as "unconsummated."  Both mean that a given object has not reached a state of completeness.

In earlier essays I've spoken in symbolic discourse in terms of *mythicity,* through which concept it's possible to detect differing degrees of symbolic complexity within a range of literary works.  This remains the cornerstone of my theory, but Langer's terms are useful for determining the processes behind the articulation of complexity. In this essay I formulated the term "null-myth" for a given element in a narrative that did not happen to be complex in a particular iteration, with the explicit statement that no such element was beyond a high-mythic transformation elsewhere. In yet another essay I conjoined my Frye-influenced theories of symbolic complexity with those of Philip Wheelwright, who employed the terms *plurisignative* and *monosignative* for differing levels of symbolic expression.



In a future essay I plan to develop distinctions between a *consummate* symbolic discourse and an *inconsummate* one, probably with reference to the work of Jack Kirby.