SUFFER THE LITTLE MASTERS

I've just finished reading NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND for the first time. I probably have not read any Dostoyevsky in twenty years, despite my admiration for his major novels and my knowledge that he was a major influence on Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy.

I won't review the book as a whole, since there's far too much to unpack in the space of a blogpost. The wider context of UNDERGROUND is that the book consists of the diary-like ramblings of an unnamed Russian clerical type. He addresses many of Dostoyevsky's own concerns about the pending modernization of Imperial Russia and the project to make the nation able to compete with the great countries of Western Europe. Parts of the narrative are a coded response to another Russian intellectual of the period, who advised a utilitarian, reason-based conception of culture. 

The strangest thing about UNDERGROUND is that Dostoyevsky makes no attempt to make his narrator seem admirable, which is a frequent strategy for authors trying to sell whatever philosophy their characters expouse. Rather, Nameless Man admits that he's perpetually full of spite and given to imagining grand schemes of revenge against those who offend him-- schemes which he has absolutely no real desire to carry out, even if he possessed the will to do so. He seems in many ways the incarnation of Nietzsche's "ressentiment," except that he's aware of his own absurdity, excusing it only in the sense that all of humankind is no less absurd.

Because Nameless Man is something of an unreliable narrator, one can't be entirely sure that everything he advocates is what Dostoyevsky himself advocated, any more than Captain Ahab represents the totality of Herman Melville's beliefs. But the author clearly meant for readers to carefully weigh the opinions set forth by the narrator, and one of the most interesting opinions concerns the rejection of utilitarian "reason" as the defining characteristic of human beings.

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases. And in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our individuality.

The Nameless Man doesn't really define the nature of the "will" that he believes a fuller expression of humanity, so there may be no way to know if he's referencing something akin to Schopenhauer's "universal will." He does seem to have some of the Gloomy Philosopher's attitude toward suffering, however.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive – in other words, only what is conducive to welfare – is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. 

I agree that "will" should be seen as the totality of human thought and expressivity, and that the full expression of will is indeed the key to "our personality, our individuality." It's also universally true that people chafe against living their lives only for "advantage," and that they may rebel against their own interests, seeking to "smash things" to assert their individual will. George Bataille built much of his philosophy upon the opposed ideas of "consumption," all reason-based activities that keep a culture alive and viable, and "expenditure," those activities that have no real rational ends. 

I would part company from Dostoyevsky on the subject of suffering, however. Without doubting that many persons "kick at the slats" of their cultures simply to feel the thrill of defiance-- or else use fictional proxies for the same purpose-- there is a broader context to suffering in world cultures. Here's Nietzsche on the subject:

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering?” -- BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

This particular Nietzsche quote does not directly cite his concept of uberwinden, "self-overcoming," for which I substitute (for possible greater clarity) the term "self-mastery" in my own philosophical ruminations. But clearly, he has stated that suffering can bring forth all of the "inventiveness and bravery" that humankind has used to mitigate or alleviate misfortune. 

As I am not an expert on Dostoyevsky, I don't know if anything comparable to Nietzsche's concept appears in his other works, but it's not in UNDERGROUND. I believe that the great Russian writer was just as opposed to small-minded utilitarianism as the great German philosopher. But my best guess is that Dostoyevsky was narrowly focused upon the goal of refuting a particular utilitarian writer through this nameless spokesperson, and so he did not make any connections between suffering and self-mastery. Or perhaps Dostoyevsky made some such connection, and thought it contravened his ideal of a "will" that had absolutely no practical applications.  

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3

                             
The last comics-item I rated as an inconsummate null-myth was 1965’s “THE HAUNTED ISLAND” (CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43). It’s without question a story whose constituent parts don’t cohere into a pleasing whole, but it also illustrates my new distinction regarding concrescence, in that its parts don’t even relate to one another within the narrative.



For purposes of comparison with other narratives, I’ll identify ISLAND’s master thread as being that of “hero must confront evil counterpart.” To be sure, the story probably came about for extrinsic reasons of stoking the feature’s sales, in that editor Murray Boltinoff probably made the decision to give the heroes new uniforms, and assigned Bill Finger to come up with a rationale in story-form. Finger’s oddball solution was to have the “Challs” (as they were informally called) kidnapped by five mutated scientists, all of whom considered that they lived “on borrowed time”as did the quartet of adventurers. I mentioned that the imagery of ISLAND is all over the place, best exemplified by a mutant who looks like the Frankenstein Monster in a Beatle wig (the haircut even gets an explicit comment from one of the heroes). Yet even more damaging to the story as a whole is that the mutants initially want the heroes to subject themselves to mutation willingly—meaning that they’ll no longer be the heroic figures that the mutants found appealing. When the Challs decline, the mutants threaten to put them in suspended animation like the rest of their collection—though both scenarios would seem to render the idea of giving the heroes new costumes nugatory. Thus ISLAND demonstrates both a state of inconsummation and a poor level of mythopoeic concrescence.

To remain focused on the “evil counterpart” thread, a more effective example is 1969’s “AND SO MY WORLD ENDS” (JLA #71). Like the Challengers story, this one focuses upon an ensemble of heroes, though one among them, the Manhunter of Mars, receives “special guest star” billing. J’onn J’onzz convinces the heroes of Earth to follow him to Mars to prevent a Martian threat to Earth, but even the Martian doesn’t know that a civil war between Mars’ two races has decimated both sides, leaving only handsfuls of survivors on both sides. Green Martian J’onn meets his White Martian opposite number in battle, and though J’onn prevails, the victory is pyrrhic, since his civlization is all but perished. This is an entirely consummate story insofar as it gives the reader a feeling of completeness and satisfaction, even if it may incorporate one or two lapses in logic. But the master-thread of “hero’s evil counterpart” is only adequately explored, though a subordinate thread about the futility of war provides ample support, giving WORLD a fair level of mythopoeic concrescence.

   Finally, the 1947 story “THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD” provides an example of both consummate status and a high level of concrescence. In my review I wrote:

Other comics-features had played around with the idea of pitting heroes, whether in solo features or in groups, against teams of villains, so the basic idea of the Injustice Society was nothing new in 1947. What makes this story a "mythcomic," though, is Kanigher's attention to making the villain-group a formidable reflection of the good-guy group.
Much of the time, the JSA heroes won their battles a little too easily, partly because so many of their foes were just ordinary thugs and swindlers. I've argued elsewhere that one has to respect the gumption of commonplace crooks in challenging do-gooders who had godlike powers, but it still didn't usually give rise to many memorable battles.

I won’t repeat the various reasons I stated for validating the mythopoeic discourse of INJUSTICE, though, like the other two stories analyzed here, the tale’s not free of flaws and is not one of the more“sophisticated” even within the superhero genre. But it provides a good example of a story notable for just one strong master-thread, and nearly no subordinate threads in the mythopoeic vein.

SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 1

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

…we must inquire into the very nature of narrative. Let us begin by constructing an image of the minimum narrative, not the kind we usually find in contemporary texts, but that nucleus without which we cannot say there is any narrative at all. The image will be as follows: All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.-- Tzvetan Todorov, cited here.

I've mentioned many times that the philosophy of Georges Bataille is key to my project of analyzing the affects of fictional sex and violence in rigorous narratological terms. At the same time, I've gone to great pains to refute this Bataille statement:

In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation.

This 2010 essay states the argument succinctly, but it has recently occurred to me that when Bataille says "in essence," he might have been thinking of the similitudes of sex and violence in terms other than as "the sensuous frenzy" that he claimed was the link between both activities. Now it seems possible to me that Bataille-- though he does not expressly say so-- may have been thinking about the function of both activities in human society, to which topic he also devotes considerable space in EROTISM:

In the domain of our life [the principle of] excess manifests in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behavior where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome [these impulses] a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment.

In this societal sense, the "domains" of sex and violence are indeed homologous given that they so frequently conflict with the world of useful work.  Yet even given this paradigm, one cannot overlook that both practices admit of being used to support "productive efficiency," channeling the violent impulses of the young into warfare that brings more resources into a given society, or making advantageous marriages in order to create social bonds between separate groups. Nor should one make the Mickey Marx mistake of assuming that these stratagems are imposed upon innocent members of society by their devious rulers. There's nothing that a group's ruler has ever conceived that did not have its genesis in the stratagems used by "ordinary people" in their dealings with one another.

Now, since one of the main concerns of this blog is "fictional sex and violence," how if at all does Bataille's linkage of the domains of sex and violence apply to fictional narrative?

For clarity I return to the two complementary analyses cited above, by Frank Cioffi and Tzvetan Todorov, as to the nature of narrative. It's a well-worn truism that all fiction must revolve around some form of "conflict," but that truism doesn't say anything about the various ways in which conflict operates.

Of the two scholars, Cioffi employs a violent term-- "disrupted"-- to describe the way the "reality" at a story's beginning is transformed into another reality by the story's conclusion. (See the fuller quote in the cited essay for Cioffi's thoughts about the ways in which the "status quo" may be upset, or how the same dynamics apply no less to other genres than to the science-fiction genre with which he's concerned.)

Typically enough, Todorov-- a more elitist critic who barely takes notice of the permutations of popular literature-- avoids any such violent metaphors. Yet it's difficult to imagine what brings about his "movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical" except by some kinetic activity. Of course, not all activity is violent activity, and I myself have examined a particular Ray Bradbury story as providing a "base level of conflict." This might be an apt example of Todorov's minimal requirements for narrative movement: the Bradbury story begins with a couple that wakes in the night (initial equilibirum, or Cioffi's "status quo"), discuss between themselves their mutual vision that the world is about to end (movement), and are quickly reconciled to the world ending in a whimper (new equilibrium).

I took the position that the "conflict" in the Bradbury story was not intrinsic, since the tale only has two characters who immediately agree as to their new situation-- but extrinsic, in that their reaction conflicts with the expectations of the story's readers, who are likely to expect a bit more wailing and gnashing of teeth. I termed the characters' acceptance of their lot a "will to nothingness," But the matter may go deeper than that, as I will explore in more detail in the forthcoming Part 2.

[correction: since the essay mentioned above doesn't pertain directly to the matter of fictive violence, I've decided that it fits better as a follow-up to the two COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS essay.]

THE READING RHEUM #4: WANTED (2003)

I first read WANTED as a graphic novel compilation after seeing and enjoying the 2008 film derivation.  I say "derivation" because the film could not be called an adaptation in the true sense: it merely borrows the loose outlines of the graphic novel.  WANTED the GN concerns a pathetic wage-slave who learns that due to his heritage he can become a member of a globe-spanning network of costumed super-criminals, while WANTED the movie concerns a pathetic wage-slave who learns that due to his heritage he can become a member of a globe-spanning network of non-costumed super-assassins. 

Though the filmmakers may have any number of justifications for changing the content of their scenario, I speculate that the biggest reason was one of narrative clarity. When dealing with matters metaphenomenal, live-action audiovisual media, which must use actors to some extent, it's difficult to present huge hordes of metaphenomenal characters, as comic books frequently do.  The cinematic medium-- like its cousin, television in its serial manifestation--  is dominantly allied to what science fiction readers have called the "one gimme rule," in which for the length of the narrative the story may ask the reader to believe one impossible thing-- time-travel, an alien invasion-- but not two impossible things. 

Prose, however, has long been able to weave together many impossible things together into a single strand, ranging from archaic epics like THE ARGONAUTICA to THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, the novel that advocated believing in six impossible things before breakfast.  Ironically, the "one gimme rule" was first articulated with prose fiction in mind, but prose-- and all media dependent on the printed word, such as comics-- have always had a greater ability to entertain many impossible things, with or without detailed explanation.

The WANTED movie chose to use super-assassins-- a bunch of ordinary men transformed into a cult of killers by a secret organization's rituals and weapons--because that was the easiest narrative concept to put across in a two-hour film.  The WANTED graphic novel, however, began as a proposal to DC Comics, which would have taken the old 1970s SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS concept and cranked it up for the ultraviolence audience, imagining an alternate dimension-- evocative of, but not identical with, DC's normative universe-- in which the more numerous supervillains banded together to kill off or render helpless all the superheroes.  Further, the villains managed to erase the memories of everyone on that earth as to the former existence of superheroes.  Thus, given that ordinary law-enforcement was incapable of fighting hordes of fiends with super-weapons and super-powers, nothing restricted the supervillains but their own kind.  They formed guilds in order to rein one another in, not out of any sense of probity but simply to avoid (1) killing the "goose" of common humanity and depriving themselves of its golden eggs, and (2) drawing the attention of whatever superheroes existed in alternate dimensions.

I said above that I enjoyed the movie, and then read the GN, which I mentioned briefly in this 2008 post.  To the best of my recollection I had not read any other Mark Millar work; at most I might've known his name as one of many British (specifically Scottish) authors who became noteworthy in the 1990s.  I briefly followed up my short post with ID-IOT'S DEMISE, in which I compared the constant battles of heroes and villains in adventure-fiction to the adversarial interactions of "the ego" and "the id" in the Freudian schema.  To repeat the obvious pun once more, I found WANTED wanting in this regard:

One might think that in a world where the supervillains have successfully killed off all of the superheroes (and even wiped out humanity's memory of the event), one might see the supervillain in All His Glory: might see all sorts of weird, perverted, diabolical id-impulses on display. But I see more "id-iosyncracies" in an average issue of BATMAN than in this facile antiheroic tripe.

In addition to critiquing WANTED on the basic of its paucity of imagination, though, I want to add that its take on the human capacity for evil is far more meretricious than almost every superhero comic book ever made.  The only tool in Miller's kit is that of the Punk Who Shouted Hate at the Heart of the World, and he screws that up almost as badly as he fails to create strong villainous presences. 

It's certainly possible to imagine a world where villainy is the ruling principle.  The Marquis deSade did so, and even though Sade's vision is rife with philosophical weaknesses, he never for a moment compromises his belief that persons possessed of the will to torture and destroy others should be able to do so. 

In contrast, Millar shows just as much compromise as the wage-slave "assholes" he professes to despise.  At one point in the story, protagonist Wesley Gibson-- the fellow who is saved from life as a corporate drone, so that he can enjoy endless adventures of rape and murder-- confesses that after he made a one-man assault on a police station, killed almost everyone in the station, and then suddenly had a crying-jag.  He reflects to his bed-partner Fox that now he thinks about how he ruined the families of all the cops he killed, and observes that "maybe this 'being evil all the time' crap's just starting to feel a little forced." His bed-partner Fox, also a spree-killer, has these words of wisdom:

You really think we just go around fucking shit up all the time?  This is a global business, man,  We got our fingers in a little piece of everything and that means you gotta be disciplined.

Where a Sade character would dispel moral objections against sadistic acts with a breezy lecture about the necessity of imposing force on others in order to live, Millar dodges the issue of moral recriminations entirely.  Fox does not comment directly on Wesley's crying-jag at all; she merely says that Wesley has "hit the same wall we all hit after the first few months [of rape and murder]."  Fox counsels the same deferral of passions that motivates the original Wesley not to rebel against the people who sign his paychecks: "business"-- except that now Wesley is one of the bosses instead of one of the underlings.  It's interesting that discipline for the sake of efficiency and "time" are her watchwords:

You don't have time to rape, kill and mutilate people all the time, baby... [your father] just wanted you do what you really wanted to do with your life and sometimes that means watching TV in bed all day long and other times it's murdering some fucker.

The characters of Sade view their libertine excesses as a sort of self-actualization as well, but Sade himself is a positive zealot about tearing down the old hypocrisies of religion and morality.  In WANTED Millar, the prophet of an "idiot id," can't summon up the least interest in moral issues, even to dispel them. Fox doesn't even bother to tell Wesley that he's probably less concerned with the cops' families than with his own family traumas, which would be a logical enough conclusion given the psychobabble limitations of Millar's universe.  Implicitly the crying-jag is not actual remorse, just a physical reaction to stress.  Once Wesley has the discipline of a true killer like his father-- whose biggest guilt is that he allowed Wesley to be raised by his pacifist mother-- he will be able to sublimate any guilty reactions to the acts of rape and murder and will be able to chill out watching TV in bed all day when he so pleases.


To be sure, I only reread this graphic novel to test the accuracy of my original reaction and because I was obliged recently to agree with one of Millar's statements in this essay. I wanted to give at least one reason why I considered Millar's use of "ultraviolence" to be stupid and meretricious. Perhaps in a future review I'll cite an example that proves a little more in tune with the "expenditure" ethic of the Grand Marquis, and less with Millar's "consumption" ethic of simply consuming more consipicuously than the ordinary asshole wage-slave.