STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: CAUSAL COHERENCE

In Part 1 of THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT I wrote:

My reading of Bhaskar's REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE led me to advocate a bifurcated conception of fictive causality, characterized by "regularity" and "intelligibility."

I used these two terms because Bhaskar had used them. However, every time I invoke the former term-- speaking, for instance, of "the regularity aspect of fictive causality"-- I find the term awkward.   I'm sure that part of my discomfort stems from certain risible associations with the word "regularity." In addition, the word doesn't seem to take in what I mean when I speak of how "the marvelous" intrudes upon the ordered world of normal causation.

I recalled a phrase from Northrop Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, in which he asserts that literary criticism should mirror the physical sciences in making "an assumption of total coherence." In science, this coherence implies that every physical law impacts upon and coheres with every other physical law. In science's domain at present, there are no fields of space where, as Lovecraft put it, the laws can be different than they are in the fields we know; no obtuse angles that can suddenly behave as if they were really acute.

So my solution to my discomfort is that from now on everything I denotes as "regularity" will be termed "causal coherence" in the labels and just plain "coherence" in text. The label differentiation is meant to distinguish it from my use of the term "coherence" as an indicator of a particular type of critical merit, as I explained in TERMINOLOGICAL TRACKDOWN PT. 1. 

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

Over the years since I first descanted on matters Langerian, though, I've hardly ever used "coherence" in this manner: to describe the qualitiative merit of a work's use of either "discursive" or "presentational" symbolism. So this becomes another term that is not incorrect, just inadequate for continued use. I will now speak of the "coherence aspect of causality" because the word "coherence" better describes what happens in a reader's consciousness when he sees a supposedly coherent world violated by the phenomenality of the marvelous; that is, when a world that seems in some ways like our own becomes at least partially incoherent by the presence of a numinous-seeming situation, object or presence, be it the entire fantasy-mythos of Tolkien or the "one gimme" of Jules Verne's Nautilus.

Therefore my "bifurcated conception of fictive causality" from now on will be characterized by two aspects, "coherence" and "intelligibility." For the three phenomenalities these terms sort out the same way the old ones did:

NATURALISTIC-- fictive causality is both coherent and intelligible
UNCANNY-- fictive causality is coherent but not entirely intelligible
MARVELOUS-- fictive causality is neither entirely coherent nor entirely intelligible

TERMINOLOGICAL TRACKDOWN PT. 1

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: THE THREE PROBABILITIES

The wonders of Google allow me to quickly search out the places where I used the term "coherent improbabilities," here, here, here, and here.  All of these terminological usages are now, though not entirely irrelevant, have been superseded, as are any mentions of "incoherent improbabilities."

The linked ideas of coherence and incoherence, which I introduced here in my essays on Susanne Langer, now strike me as immaterial to the subject of probability in fiction.  I've mentioned that the degree of personal conviction that an audience-member brings to a work is highly personal, and so the matters of coherence and incoherence properly belong to the domain of the intersubjective. I have not used them in any organized way to apply to the phenomenalities of the NUM formula, though I'm aware of having tossed a few indications in that direction, which, had I elaborated them, would have come out to something like:

NATURALISTIC-- "incoherent improbability"
UNCANNY-- "coherent improbability"
MARVELOUS-- "impossibility"

This was a mistake, for manifestations of coherence and incoherence appear in all three phenomenalities.  For instance, I've mentioned that many comedy films toss out "impossible" occurences for the sake of humor, but that they are not "marvelous" because the impossible elements are not meant to be taken seriously.  An easy example of an unserious impossibility is the "automatic pilot" joke in AIRPLANE, who comes to life and smiles for a moment or two for the sake of a joke anyone reading this blog ought to know.

However, I do continue to believe, as stated in PROBABILITY SHIFTS, that each phenomenality is determined by the nature of probability:

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

My very next sentence, however, privileges an association of the naturalistic with probability itself:

I've also noted that within this context, everything is by definition "probable," and any narrative element suggestive of improbability is "incoherent."

Were I writing this now, I would eliminate the second half of the sentence and would specify that everything in a naturalistic continuum is by definition "probable in respect to a rigid cognitive/affective causality."  The breakdowns I've mentioned in respect to the cognitive'affective spheres in the three phenomenalities, cited here, remain unaltered.


However, in that essay, I attempted for the first time to schematize the nature of the sublime in each phenomenality with terms "devised...to reflect the causality-relationship of each phenomenality."  Thus:

In NATURALISTIC works the affect of sublimity was ISO-REAL.

In UNCANNY works the affect of sublimity was SUPRA-REAL.

In MARVELOUS works the affect of sublimity was ANTI-REAL.

I believe that I was following C.S. Lewis' lead, attempting to see "probability" as something determined by its socially determined degree within a given context.  Yet, as I noted in Part II of THE TWO VERISIMILITUDES, Lewis is not especially concerned with defining probability in terms of causal reality, while I am, drawing in part on Cassirer, Caillois, and Tolkien.

Since I have clearly stated that the affect of sublimity is different in each phenomenality because of "the causality-relationship of each phenomenality," it now seems obvious to me that the nature of probability is also affected by the relationship of the causal boundaries and the sublimities by which those boundaries are broken.

Therefore, probability too breaks down the same way as the sublime: "ISO-REAL" for the naturalistic, "SUPRA-REAL" for the uncanny, and "ANTI-REAL" for the marvelous. 

Some specific examples of the different intersections of probability and sublimity seems called for.  I'll be drawing on my examples from TEN DYNAMIC DEMONS, since that's one of the essays in which I invoked the now untenable, Aristotle-derived association of "the impossible and improbable."

THE TWO VERISIMILITUDES PART II

In Part I, I said:

Lewis does not reference concepts of causality. I've interpolated these, drawing on influences ranging from Cassirer to Roger Caillois to Tolkien. Lewis is purely concerned with what is acceptable as "realistic" in social terms.

By way of substantiating this assertion, here's the definition Lewis advances for his formulation, "realism of content:" "A fiction is realistic in content when it is probable or 'true to life.'"

This bears a degree of resemblance to what I have said of narratives with a naturalistic phenomenality; that they conform to the base level of causality and that everything that would seem to strain the laws of causality is dismissed as some form of "incoherent improbability."  I'm more concerned than Lewis with the dialectics of causality because I feel it offers a more dependable criterion for "realism" than what a given generation of readers believes to be "true to life." In TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I-- PART 5  I said:

In all naturalistic works, both improbability and impossibility can only be sources of incoherence...

At the same time, when I was first defining the three phenomenalities I noted here:

Nonfictional narrative is always about the typical; fictional narrative is always about the atypical.

I made this pattern of the "anomaly" more explicit in this essay:

The anomaly may be any number of things within the scope of the Num Formula: a ruthless criminal (naturalistic), a bizarre psycho-killer (uncanny), or a blood-hungry vampire (marvelous). As different as these three examples are in terms of phenomenality-- with one appealing to what I've called the "odd-sublime," the other two to the "strange-sublime"-- they are identical in terms of function in terms of how the plot-dynamicity works out.

Although I came to use the term "atypicality" only for the naturalistic sphere, I find that Lewis' idea of "content" includes any sort of anomaly in any phenomenality.  As I noted in Part 1, and as Lewis himself confirms, he selects many of his examples of "realism of presentation" from "stories which are not themselves 'realistic' in the sense of being probable or even possible."  I mentioned just one of these examples, taken from BEOWULF, but there's also one taken from the entirely naturalistic HENRY V.

Throughout the essay Lewis makes clear that he also believes that fiction needs the element of what is "atypical" in order to make it more expressive and/or affecting.  Of another naturalistic work, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, Lewis writes:

It is extremely unlikely that a poor boy should be suddenly enriched by an anonymous benefactor who later turns out to be a convict.

Having admitted that many such tropes are improbable, Lewis examines the claims of those critics who feel that all fiction should be "true to life, and then rejects the idea that probability is ever uppermost in the minds of those seeking to be entertained.

For those who tell the story and those (including ourselves) who receive it are not thinking about any such generality as human life. Attention is fixed on something concrete and individual; on more than ordinary terror, splendour, wonder, pity, or absurdity of a particular case. 

Shortly after this passage, Lewis puts forth the centrality of "hypothetical probability":

The hypothetical probability is brought in to make the strange events more fully imaginable.

And though the essay goes on longer on the topic of "escapism," Lewis essentially finishes up his discussion of the two realisms by concluding that, "The demand that all literature should have realism of content cannot be maintained... But there is a quite different demand which we can properly make; not that all books should be realistic in content, but that every book should have as much of this realism as it pretends to have."

I find it interesting that in this essay Lewis lumps together all forms of improbability and impossibilty-- ranging from the main plot of GREAT EXPECTATIONS (naturalistic) to Homer's claim that his heroes can lift huge stones that "no two modern men" could move (uncanny) to "the bad luck of Oedipus" (marvelous, in that it invokes god-given prophecies and at least one literal monster).  Yet in his essay from THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, first referenced here, Lewis systematized the affects of 'fear, dread, and awe" that are somewhat intermingled in the Rudolf Otto work from which Lewis derives those terms.  In this essay I described three positive affects to complement the three negative affects supplied by Otto and Lewis, and I anticipate that I will be able to invoke these in my further explorations of the nature of "improbability" in the three phenomenalities.

THE TWO VERISIMILITUDES

I promised an essay on "the two verisimilitudes" at the end of AFFECTIVE EFFECTS, but I had already touched on the topic in the April 2013 essay AN INCOHERENCE TRUTH:

What Frye calls "verisimilitude" overlaps with Langer's discursive symbolism. The author seeking verisimilitude seeks to make his work consistent with his culture's ideals with regard to proper mimesis and consistency, which can only be arrived at through discursive thought.  The quality of verisimilitude is certainly not limited to realistic fiction, though.  Zola's desire to write kitchen-sink novels of observed life displays one form of verisimilitude.  Nevertheless, when a science-fiction writer like Isaac Asimov seeks to ground his fantasy of super-intelligent robots in an aura of believability, he too resorts to a form of verisimilitude, by invoking the discursive symbolism found in current scientific theory, from which he then extrapolates in order to buttress his fantasy.

And long before that, I had seen one of the best distinctions of "the two verisimilitudes"-- better IMO than anything I've found in Northrop Frye as yet-- in the essay "On Realisms" in C.S. Lewis' AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM.

As a book, EXPERIMENT is a milestone work in pluralistic literary criticism, in that Lewis-- who was not quite in step with the dominant literary trends of his lifetime-- attempts to analyze such questions as why some people enjoy "bad books," and how even the sophisticated reader "must make sure that his contempt [for bad books] had in it no admixture of merely social snobbery or intellectual priggery."

In the essay "On Realisms," Lewis seeks to suss out the difference connotations of the word "realism," by distinguishing a "realism of content" and a "realism of presentation."  In my Asimov example above, the author's use of discursive symbolism to make robots seem "real" aligns with Lewis' "realism of presentation."  However, no matter how expertly Asimov articulates the fictional rules by which his robots function, they will always be unacceptable to the "realism of content." From this positivistic orientation, both well-described Asimovian robots and weakly described tin-can automatons out of BUCK ROGERS are beyond the pale of this realistic standard.  Only one type of robot might be acceptable to this standard: one that has already been constructed for use in current scientific laboratories, like the ones seen in the essay FIVE REAL ROBOTS THAT OUTPERFORM HUMANITY.   

Once such robots have been created, they are entirely within the sphere of casuality; one need not appeal to some hypothetical concept like Asimov's "positronic brains" to rationalize the robots' functions.  In similar fashion, no matter how learnedly Jules Verne referenced the science of his time to explain the operation of the Nautilus, his submarine was outside the bounds of causality in that it was depended upon "fudge factors" created by authorial imagination.  With real robots and submarines, as Lewis says, "there is no disbelief to be suspended."

Now, I add a caution: Lewis does not reference concepts of causality.  I've interpolated these, drawing on influences ranging from Cassirer to Roger Caillois to Tolkien.  Lewis is purely concerned with what is acceptable as "realistic" in social terms.  For this reason his take on "realism of presentation" is somewhat different from mine.  He's not overly concerned here with how a given author provides verisimilitude to explain a given wonder-- though of course he pursued such narrative strategies in his own fantasy and science fiction novels.  In this essay he's concerned with gestures that connote a continuity of realistic action, even when they appear in fantastic narratives. Thus one of his chief examples-- which are, as he himself says, mostly drawn from fantastic fiction-- includes "the dragon 'sniffing along the stone' in BEOWULF."  This action makes the dragon seem more like a real creature, in that he guides himself by scent, but it does nothing to explain the nature of his dragon-ness.

I had not read EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM in several years, and mainly remembered the opposition of the two realisms.  I reread it about a month after I finished the "Two Sublimities Have I" essay-series, where I proposed that narrative works in the uncanny phenomenality, even if they are governed by causality in the final analysis, possess a greater combinatory-sublimity than naturalistic works, and that they did so by articulating "coherent improbabilities."

Once a work partakes of  the uncanny phenomenality, that work is dealing with far more than mere "freshness of vision."  Such works are "coherent improbabilities," in which the source of the "strangeness"-- be it a weird house or a weird society, a wildly improbable hero or criminal-- circumvents the causal reality in which that element exists. 

Now, even though Lewis is not concerned with matters of causality, he is, as much as Cassirer, concerned with fulfilling the potential of literature:

The raison d'etre of the story is that we shall weep, or shudder, or wonder, or laugh as we follow it.

This strikes closely to Cassirer's conviction that *expressivity* is the bedrock of the arts, as opposed to Emile Zola's conviction that fiction should follow a "scientific methodology" as to what was or was not real-- which had the effect of privileging a *cognitive* view of the arts.  A paragraph or so down, Lewis grants special dispensation to improbabilities simply because they are entertaining:

The effort to force such stories into a radically realistic theory of literature seems to me perverse.  They are not, in any sense that matters, representations of life as we know it, and were never valued for being so.  The strange events are not clothed with hypothetical probability in order to increase our knowledge of real life by showing how it would react to this improbable test. It is the other way round.  The hypothetical probability is brought in to make the strange events more fully imaginable.

Though I doubt that Lewis would agree with my formulation of "coherent improbabilities" as they appear in "uncanny fiction," I think that at base we are talking about the literary use of "probability" in a very similar manner.  At the very least, we agree that the test of "the knowledge of real life" to which Zola would evaluate fiction is not an accurate test.

Just for symmetry's sake, since in this essay I invoked both naturalistic and marvelous conceptions of "the robot," I might as well throw in one of the few that belongs to the uncanny phenomenality-- sort of a "killer wind-up toy" from the serial SHADOW OF CHINATOWN.

 

AN INCOHERENCE TRUTH

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.-- Aristotle, POETICS.

Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle's word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story. Myths of gods merge into legends of heroes; legends of heroes merge into plots of tragedies and comedies; plots of tragedies and comedies merge into plots of more or less realistic fiction. But these are change of social context rather than of literary form, and the constructive principles of story-telling remain constant through them...-- Northrop Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

Prior to investigating in greater depth the idea of the "combinatory-sublime" as it applies to works within a "super-real" context, I must return to the concept of "coherence" as I formulated it in GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 3:

...symmetry requires that if there are works that are to be judged examples of "presentational incoherence," such as TROLL 2 and GLEN OR GLENDA, then there must exist works that are almost like fever-dreams, full of what Langer calls "diffuse meaning," but which still possess "presentational coherence."

In that essay I provided contrasting examples of coherence and incoherence as it applied to Susanne Langer's concept of "presentational symbolism." I stated that the positive value of coherence was characterized by "the way the writers present the [applicable] trope to the audience, and whether or not they succeed in putting across the absurdity affect with some degree of cleverness."  By contrast, it's a given that the incoherent types of presentational symbolism lack that clever quality; that there's something comparatively desultory about the author's *attempt* to be wild and crazy.  The same dichotomy was applied in PART 4 with regard to coherence and incoherence in terms of Langer's matching concept of "discursive symbolism." In that essay I found fault with the knee-jerk nature of Christopher Nolan's "imposition of overly-realistic strictures upon an escapist concept," i.e., that of Batman.

With all that in mind, I turn to Frye's opposing poles of literature.

What Frye calls "verisimilitude" overlaps with Langer's discursive symbolism. The author seeking verisimilitude seeks to make his work consistent with his culture's ideals with regard to proper mimesis and consistency, which can only be arrived at through discursive thought.  The quality of verisimilitude is certainly not limited to realistic fiction, though.  Zola's desire to write kitchen-sink novels of observed life displays one form of verisimilitude.  Nevertheless, when a science-fiction writer like Isaac Asimov seeks to ground his fantasy of super-intelligent robots in an aura of believeability, he too resorts to a form of verisimilitude, by invoking the discursive symbolism found in current scientific theory, from which he then extrapolates in order to buttress his fantasy.

Frye's general concept of "myth" similarly overlaps with Langer's "presentational symbolism," but arguably the former has many more mansions.  With respect to the above quote, the only conceptions of importance are that (1) myth in its original form concerns beings who "can do anything," and (2) myth set up what he later calls "fictional formulas" that can be adapted for stories more invested in plausibility, as when "birth-mystery plots" like those of Perseus and Moses are reworked for naturalistic novels like TOM JONES and OLIVER TWIST. 

I should say here that nowhere in his analysis is Frye concerned with how well a given author succeeds in his evocation of the "verisimilitude pole" or of the "myth pole;" he's only concerned in the ANATOMY with how each tendency inevitably shades into the other.  My attempt to provide standards for attributing merit in each department is entirely my own.

Now Aristotle's homily is one with which many readers may agree. The philosopher's example of a "probable impossibility" probably would not mean much to moderns, but for modern readers this might be something like J.R.R. Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS, a secondary world worked out with such detail that it seems "probable" on its own terms, even though all prudent persons would deem it "impossible."  By contrast, a "possible improbability" seems more like an authorial cheat.  Christopher Nolan's BATMAN film-series is full of improbabilities that undermine his supposed realism, a few of which I addressed in this quasi-review. I've had my share of encounters with viewers who defended, say, the variable characterizations of Nolan's Catwoman simply by saying that it was "possible." Those viewers were quite comfortable with possible improbabilities.


The defense of such improbabilties usually takes the form of asserting either that the form of a fictional work is a dismissable game anyway ("It's only a movie") or that a specific genre is one to which verisimilitude need not apply ("It's a story about a guy who dresses up like a bat, fergodsake!")
I agree that every genre is a game with some operating rules, though inevitably players will project some of their own ideals into the game and often dismiss the "official" rules.

But some improbabilities do have positive values of coherence.  As noted in the GESTURE series, there's no verisimilitude to be found in the trope of a hero's villains setting him up to be killed in some death-trap.  Still, the trope possesses "presentational coherence" when it's done with enough cleverness to serve its mythopoeic purpose: to display the hero's superior escape-abilities.  Lack of verisimilitude is not an error within that context, while within a structure that purports to show superior discursive mentality, lack of verisimilitude simply shows a lack of mental rigor.

All that said, what I find most interesting about Frye's schema of opposing poles is that Frye clearly imagines a "great middle." Hypothetically within this "middle"-- as with my "uncanny" category-- it's possible to place works that are more invested in verisimilitude than the stories of gods and legends of heroes, but are as deeply implicated as is Kitchen-Sink Zola in the discursively organized limits of causality.

Within this middle ground one might find all "coherent improbabilties," ranging from improbable "comedies and tragedies" like PERICLES and THE WINTER'S TALE-- as well as those works that I have denoted as having an "uncanny phenomenality."

TO BREAK OR NOT TO BREAK PT. 2

In January 2013 I wrote this review of the 1934 Laurel and Hardy fantasy-comedy BABES IN TOYLAND, the first film to be based on the successful 1903 stage-operetta.  I had also reviewed the 1961 Disney version of the film in December, and I posted both reviews on this forum of the Classic Horror Film Board for response.

As I don't have permission to reprint anyone's comments from that board, I won't go into the specific objections raised to my review of the 1934 film, except to say that in part they come down to giving TOYLAND a pass because it was designed as a children's fantasy, which is essentially the same as the "it's only a movie" defense I covered in Part 1.

I re-viewed TOYLAND to examine its narrative structure more closely and see whether or not I felt it offered me any reasons to give the film a pass.

TOYLAND the film, as I noted in the first review, bears little resemblance to the Wikipedia summary of the stage-play, with which I have no familiarity otherwise.  The film's main indebtedness to the play is the central conflict.  In Toyland, a town populated by various Mother Goose or fairytale characters, evil old banker Silas Barnaby plots to force sweet young thing Little Bo Peep to marry him (Contrary Mary in the play and the Disney film).  Barnaby holds a mortgage on the house of Bo Peep's mother-- who happens to be the Old Woman Who Lives in the Shoe-- and threatens, in the long-lived tradition of operetta villains, to foreclose on the house if Bo Peep does not marry him. In the film as in the stage-play the heroine ends up marrying an age-appropriate protagonist, named "Alan" in the play and "Tom Tom the Piper's Son" in the 1934 film.  The play also contributes subplots in which (1) Alan is falsely accused of a crime and (2) two protagonists are abandoned in a hostile environment called "the Forest of No Return."

For roughly the first half, the script for BABES IN TOYLAND-- credited to Frank Butler and Nick Grinde-- stays on reliable operetta ground.  Because it's a Laurel and Hardy film, the script emphasizes two well-meaning bumblers-- Stannie Dum (Stan Laurel) and Ollie Dee (Oliver Hardy).  They work in the Toymaker's toy factory-- whose presence is the only explanation for the town's name.  At the factory Stannie and Ollie bungle an order from Santa Claus for tiny toy soldiers, producing instead a group of man-sized soldiers capable of marching around (hence the film's better-known title, MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS.)

For the rest of the film, Stannie and Ollie, who room with the Old Woman in the  Shoe, make it their business to protect Bo Peep against Barnaby and help her marry Tom Tom.  They bungle their first effort to steal the Old Woman's mortgage from Barnaby.  The banker catches them and has the city's ruler Old King Cole sentence the twosome to be ducked in water and then exiled to "Bogeyland"-- the first mention that there's some hostile place outside Toyland, more or less the equivalent of the play's "Forest of No Return."  Bo Peep promises to marry Barnaby if he'll drop all charges against the boys and give her mother the mortgage on her home.  Stannie and Ollie trick Barnaby into giving up the mortgage without marrying Bo Peep.

It's at this point that the script starts to go off the rails.  Barnaby decides to get even by framing Tom Tom for "pignapping," i.e., kidnapping Elmer, one of the Three Little Pigs, and turning him into sausage.  Inconsistencies immediately start to pile up:

(1) Barnaby, despite having a servant, performs the pignapping himself.  Repeating the Big Bad Wolf's routine in reverse, he tries to gain entrance to two pig-houses, gets clonked by both pigs, and then succeeds in capturing Elmer after blowing his house down.

(2) Thanks to Barnaby's servant planting evidence, most of the town immediately turns against Tom Tom, even though the Piper's Son appears to be a standup guy who's never caught doing anything more than sparking his girl.  No one gives the slightest heed to Bo Peep's testimony that Tom Tom was with her, and the two remaining pigs conveniently don't mention that Barnaby accosted them on the same night that Elmer disappeared.

(3) The evidence against Tom Tom includes a link of sausages that are supposedly Elmer's remains.  Elmer is actually alive and hidden away in Barnaby's house.  But this elicits the question: why doesn't Barnaby kill Elmer?  He might not want to make the little pig into sausages, but the longer he keeps Elmer alive, the greater the chance that his plan will be compromised-- which it is, when Stannie and Ollie infiltrate Barnaby's house and free the pig.

However, before Stannie and Ollie find him, the officials of the city transport Tom Tom by raft across a river and to "Bogeyland," a stalactitic cavern whose main inhabitants are the cannibalistic Bogeymen (though in one sequence also displays some etheral dwarves and a figure resembling the Sandman). After the officials leave Tom Tom and return to Toyland, Bo Peep steals a raft and joins her lover in Bogeyland.

When Stannie and Ollie expose Barnaby, he flees back to his dwelling and climbs down a ladder in a dry well behind his house.  He passes through a crevice in the well-- a crevice which he may or may not have created himself-- and enters a subterranean passage which leads into Bogeyland.  Stannie and Ollie alone see the banker descend into the well, but since they don't know about the passage, they initially try to wait Barnaby out.  Eventually they descend and find the passage.

Meanwhile Barnaby comes across Tom Tom and Bo Peep,  both asleep.  The villain tries to steal the girl.  Tom Tom waits and fights with Barnaby.  As I said in my original review:

" For absolutely no reason, Barnaby is suddenly able to enlist the aid of the cavern's monster-men inhabitants, "the Boogeymen," and the villain leads them in an assault on Toyland."

I left out the specific manner in which Barnaby calls the Bogeymen to his aid: after his fight with Tom Tom, Barnaby beats his cane against the stone walls of the cavern.  Tom Tom and Bo Peep flee the monsters and run across Stannie and Ollie, who manage to lead them to the well-exit.  It's not clear why Barnaby doesn't follow them up the well, which would put him and his army directly in the center of Toyland.  Instead, he somehow knows that Bo Peep has left a raft where he can find it easily, and commands his last-minute army to use it to make a frontal attack on Toyland.  Something like twenty or thirty beast-men-- far more than could fit on the raft that we see-- are seen pushing in the apparently unlocked gates of the city, their main motive being to turn the inhabitants into entrees.  (Lots of cannibalism in this children's film!) The only thing that saves Toyland is that Stannie and Ollie figure out how to activate the giant toy soldiers, who repel the Bogeymen and send them back to the river, which is full of crocodiles.  Barnaby is last seen getting clonked on the head by one of the Toyland-people, the young couple is united, and Ollie ends the film with one of the many comic humiliations in the career of Oliver Hardy.

The possibility was raised on the aforementioned forum that Barnaby has some previous connection with the Bogeymen.  The film certainly doesn't make any such connection explicit, but I would certainly concede that possibly Barnaby found that the well led to Bogeyland.  The villain's banging on the walls might be a call he had established earlier in order to call them for feedings-- though there's no evidence in the film that Barnaby ever nurtured any ambition beyond being a rich inhabitant of Toyland, with Bo Peep as his wife.  And if he had fed previous victims to the Bogeymen-- why didn't he get rid of Elmer by dumping him down the well behind his house, instead of keeping the pig *inside* his house?

As I said in Part 1, it should be obvious that I find nothing in the film justifies giving it a pass for its numerous inconsistencies.  I did give a pass to the trope of Batman's escapes, because they serve the purpose of putting the hero's cleverness on display.  But the erratic logic of the Butler-Grinde script serves no purpose but to allow the writers to leap over whatever story problems they may have encountered.

In conclusion, if the defense "it's only a movie"-- or even "it's only a kid's fantasy-movie"-- can ever be used as a defense, it ought to be reserved for a much better film than the 1934 BABES IN TOYLAND.

GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 3

In TROLL PLAYING PART 2 I wrote:

...maybe something like "presentational incoherence" would be just as good to distinguish works like TROLL 2 or GLEN OR GLENDA from works that may be equally non-discursive but which show more authorial control, as per the examples of Tex Avery and Jerry Siegel.

Now, though as noted earlier Susanne Langer didn't apply her terms "discursive" and "presentational" to literature in PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, she did imply that presentational symbols could be used to make the world more coherent, as seen in the quote provided at the outset of the aforementioned essay. Therefore symmetry requires that if there are works that are to be judged examples of "presentational incoherence," such as TROLL 2 and GLEN OR GLENDA, then there must exist works that are almost like fever-dreams, full of what Langer calls "diffuse meaning," but which still possess "presentational coherence." Avery's short run of "Screwy Squirrel" exemplify the principle of his presenting "rapid-fire sensational events lacking any rationale beyond telling a joke." With Jerry Siegel one has to hunt a little harder for particular examples where the premise is non-discursive in nature, yet where it also coheres despite its absurdity. Siegel's SPECTRE might provide better hunting-grounds than his Golden Age SUPERMAN work.

Numerous times on this blog I've defended all sorts of narrative devices (which I lean toward terming "gestures" in the Langerian sense) specifically because I think they call attention to themselves as presentational narrative devices. As such I consider that they fall outside any judgment as to their validity in terms of discursive logic and/or verisimilitude. Some of these devices flow from the expectations of serial narrative, such as the one that keeps Superman, Dagwood Bumstead and the Fonz outside the aging-process. (In the Fonz's case it's true in theory though not in practice.) Other devices I've defended have to do with genre-expectations that possess no controversial political value in themselves (Batman's villains like to stick the hero in traps and then see if he can escape). Yet other positions may carry more sociopolitical resonance for some (the position that Batman can torture without being a "bad guy" in certain situations, or that the killing of the Ryan Choi Atom should represent no more "regression" on the part of DC Comics than the killing of a Caucasian superhero). I could choose any of these categories from which to develop parallel examples of presentational coherence and incoherence, so I'll go with Door Number Two: "Batman's villains like to stick the hero in traps and then see if he can escape." And since the 1966-68 Batman teleseries boasts the greatest variety of said traps, I'll draw my examples from that serial.

It should be obvious that there can be no hint of verisimilitude in this trope. While real people have been known to torment other real people for amusement, the notion that nearly every single villain in the Bat-universe would choose to indulge in this trope, rather than a more expedient solution for hero-killing, points up the nature of the device as presentational of a certain absurd-flavored form of suspense.

At the conclusion of the 1966 episode "The Joker Trumps an Ace," Joker has come to capture the Dynamic Duo. He makes them a bargain: if they can stay afloat in a tank as it's filling up, they'll be set free. But once the heroes are in the tank, they find it filling up with deadly gas. When the Caped Crusader duly lodges a protest that one can't swim in gas, the Joker gleefully retorts, "No, but you can drown in it!" This sequence nicely captures both the villain's characteristic sadistic glee as well as his cleverness; the heroes must then match this cleverness in order to execeute an escape. I call this plot-sequence coherent because it "plays fair" by the terms of the fantasy and yet still captures the absurd expressivity desired by the audience.

A less coherent example of a Bat-trap can be found in another 1966 episode, "Green Ice." One picture should be worth a thousand words.




























Naturally, I do have more words.

I don't want to say that the sight of Batman and Robin being turned into human popsicles by Mister Freeze isn't entertaining; it is. However, the death-trap here doesn't seem a natural outgrowth of the character's nature as portrayed in this particular episode by Otto Preminger. "Death by Frosty Freezee" isn't quite as impressive as "death by poison gas," no matter how absurd one's universe may be, and since Mister Freeze has an ice-gun, couldn't he do about the same thing to the heroes by just slowly blasting them? Similarly, even granting that many of the heroic escapes on the teleseries were played for self-conscious laughs, the escape here still smacks more of desperation than light-heartedness. Batman and Robin simply manage to deactivate the giant milkshake-freezers with their feet. As the Church Lady was wont to say, "How con- veee--nient!"

To belabor my point a little, I'm not merely using "incoherent" as a synonym for "bad." Trap #2 is less interesting than Trap #1, but I'm concerned here with the way the writers present the trope to the audience, and whether or not they succeed in putting across the absurdity affect with some degree of cleverness.

This schema becomes yet more complicated in part 4, where I'll deal with the proposition that discursive symbolism too has its coherent and incoherent manifestations.

TROLL PLAYING PART 2

"The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational order'. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-exerience is understood."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 98.

The other major facet of TROLL 2 that brought about its unlooked-for cult popularity is identical with the facet that vaulted Ed Wood to prominence in the 1980s: a lunatic disregard for the discursive mode of storytelling. What takes the place of this mode is just this "pandemonium of sheer impression," though in contrast to Langer's formulation it's a pandemonium that fails, due to authorial incompetence, to resolve itself into a presentational (or, to use Cassirer's term, "expressive") order.

Late in '08 I wrote an essay on the early Superman stories of Siegel and Shuster, titled "OCD on a Hotplate" as a way of describing how Siegel's scripts seemed to "wander without knowing what effect they're shooting for." But even Siegel's scripts are governed by more of the Aristotelian unities than TROLL 2. Rossella Drudi's script for the film clearly is trying to riff on many things at once. Two aspects already noted in TROLL PLAYING PART 1 include both vampire tropes and folklore about cannibalistic boogiemen (for which Scandinavian trolls *might* actually be better suited than Celtic goblins). I'll also speculate that given the film's heavy emphasis on the goblins forcing the beleaguered human protagonists to eat tainted food so that the humans will turn into plants, Drudi might even have been influenced by the mythic motif I'll call "eating the otherworld's food," which invariably causes mortals from Persephone on down to remain in the otherworld. All of these myth-motifs could have been arranged into some impressive presentational order, perhaps on a par with Jim Henson's 1986 film LABYRINTH.

But of course, Drudi and her director-collaborator Claudio Fragasso DON'T manage to arrange their sensational concepts into any kind of order, and what one gets is pure pandemonium. There have been many popular authors whose essential way of impressing their public involves basically throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at the audience in the hope of grabbing its attention. It's been a particularly popular strategy in the world of animated cartoons, which as I noted here are often the first contact young audiences have with presentational symbols lacking any discursive rationale. Of course, when Tex Avery bombards his characters with rapid-fire sensational events lacking any rationale beyond "telling a joke," both he and his audience know that they're participating in this kind of non-discursive form of entertainment. I view this form as identical with the sort of non-discursive order that Langer finds in the fairytale, whose "purpose is to gratify wishes."

But though TROLL 2 has sequences that were probably meant to be broadly humorous by Drudi and Fragasso, Fragasso's complaint that audiences were laughing at a lot of the other sequences indicates that neither he nor his wife could see how weirdly incongrous their rewritings of archaic myths had turned out. It may be remembered that Schopenhauer considered incongruity the basic appeal of all humor, and TROLL 2 is almost as much a montage of incongruous scenes as Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA. If cannibal vegetarian goblins don't seem incongrous enough, one encounters also:

--The kid-character pissing on a table of tainted goblin-food to prevent his beloved family from eating it--

--a spectral protector, the kid's grandpa, who in one scene can blast a goblin with lightning and in another gives the kid a mundane Molotov cocktail to throw at the boogeymen--

--the aforementioned use of a "double decker baloney sandwich" as a crucifix--

--an evil witch-goblin who can transform herself into a hot babe who then proceeds to have sex with a young dude while popping him some popcorn in a unique manner--

--and the source of the evil ones' powers, a "Stonehenge magical stone" which the heroes use to defeat the goblins, even though the creatures come back for a horrific coda looking none the worse for their defeat.

Appropo of my "kitchen sink" remark, I'd be tempted to call all this "kitchen sink surrealism" if an online search hadn't shown me that the term has already been used for a distinct artistic movement. But maybe something like "presentational incoherence" would be just as good to distinguish works like TROLL 2 or GLEN OR GLENDA from works that may be equally non-discursive but which show more authorial control, as per the examples of Tex Avery and Jerry Siegel. Certainly the makers of TROLL 2-- including the actors, costumers, etc.-- were all guilty of incoherence of some sort, be it conceptual or purely linguistic.