EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA PT. 2

I should build on the formulations from Part 1 to clarify exactly what sort of freedom I've been describing.

Without doubt the intellectual ramifications of my NUM formula were spawned in reaction against Tzvetan Todorov's attempt to subsume all categories of fantasy under a conceptual umbrella he called "the real," which was very much in keeping with his Freudian leanings. In contrast, I assert that every literary phenomenality has its own unique nature, regardless of what one thinks about the configuration of one's lived experience.

All that said, the base purpose of fictional narrative is expressive, not intellectual, so the primary importance of the three phenomenalities is not their value as thought experiments, but as conjurations of the six forms of affect I last described in 2017's ONE PART ARTIFICE, TWO PARTS AFFECT:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

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

Being one mortal reader, I cannot know precisely what affects dominate the minds of other readers. However, I can use deductive reasoning to discern common ground. For instance, Todorov insists that because Poe's HOUSE OF USHER does not actually reveal any marvelous phenomena, its manifestation of the uncanny is subsumed by "the real." But if this was an accurate deduction that one could apply to other readers, why would cinematic versions of the story appear in practically every fantasy-film concordance? Are there any concordances of fantasy-films that go out of their way to emphasize only films of the marvelous; that keep only the sirens and the psychics but exclude all of the serial killers? I will go out on a limb and state that there are none, for the simple reason that the compilers of these works are not blinded by ideology as was Todorov. Even if none compilers of concordances would look with favor upon my overall system, the automatic association of Norman Bates with Odysseus demonstrates that the affects aligned with the uncanny are closer in spirit to those of the marvelous. 

There will still be disagreements. In MASKED MAVERICKS AND SUCH, I noted how Peter Green's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WEIRD WESTERNS did not subscribe to my belief that costumed heroes automatically had a "weird" vibe, though he would include any characters garbed in macabre attire (skulls; phantom-like clothing, etc.) But he unequivocally covered both truly marvelous westerns alongside those that only suggested marvelous phenomena-- and that in my opinion is enough to suggest his awareness of a fundamental "strangeness" linking those categories; a strangeness one cannot find even in westerns with odd content (say, 1942's REAP THE WILD WIND, best remembered these days as the film where John Wayne fights an octopus).

Playful, expressive freedom is the essence of what makes fictional narrative valuable to human beings, in contradistinction of the "work ethic" that dominates non-fiction, no matter the quality of the reporting involved in a given screed. Thus I will stipulate that efficacy in my system concerns "a free selection of causes" with respect to all the affective and cognitive aspects of fictional narrative, but that the affective ones are somewhat more consequential.

EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA

 I've only touched upon Ernst Cassirer's concept of efficacy in passing in previous essays, but I did recently conceive of a possible adaptation of the term for my own system.

Once more with feeling, here's what Cassirer wrote of the concept in MYTHICAL THOUGHT:

…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

Cassirer is concerned only with contrasting efficacy, elsewhere described as a "free selection of causes," with the scientific concept of limited causality, so I have no reason to think that the philosopher would have had any reason to apply his categories to the subject of literary phenomenality. But it occurred to me recently that "free selection of causes" is a choice that potentially faces any reader/audience-member when presented with any narrative: that it may be dominated by either the naturalistic, the uncanny, or the marvelous phenomenality.

For once I won't put forth new examples of each phenomenality, but will default to the statement I made in last year's LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE:

In my discussion of Aristotle I mentioned that Classic Greek literature could embrace both “naturalistic tropes,” which were often with the limitations of human fallibility and mortality,” and with “marvelous tropes” about gods and ghosts, describing imagined states of existence beyond the realm of human limitations. Gothic fiction was instrumental, however, in promulgating the interstitial category of “uncanny tropes.” Such tropes had existed even in mankind’s prehistory, and in my essay UNCANNY GENESIS I cited some examples of uncanny tropes from archaic story-cycles, such as the extra-Biblical “Bel and the Dragon” and “the Six Labors of Theseus.” But there’s no doubt that Gothic practitioners like Ann Radcliffe had a much more sustained effect in elaborating stories in which supernatural occurrences were “explained rationally.” In truth, though, the “rationality” of uncanny stories like THE ITALIAN and THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO is compromised from the start by even allowing for the possibility of the supernatural, in contrast, say, to Jane Austen’s Gothic spoof NORTHANGER ABBEY, in which the existence of the supernatural is not even slightly validated.

 All of these examples require that the reader fall into sympathy with whatever attitude the author projects regarding "the world of subjective emotions," even if that attitude may include total dismissal of said emotions. 

In life, each person makes a similar choice: whether or not to believe that emotions have "objective existence," or to credence that whatever abstract forms those emotional continua may assume-- Heaven, Hell, the astral plane-- have any meaning to them. But in fiction, the choice always remains open to interpretation with each new text-- which is one reason literature will always be oriented more toward freedom than to restraint.

ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 1

An archetypal experience is not any emotional event but only an overwhelming one, the extraordinariness of which stems exactly from the power of the archetype encountered through projection.-- Robert A. Segal, THEORIZING ABOUT MYTH, p. 93. (quoted in greater context here).

A stereotype is defined by bare functionality.
An archetype is defined by some degree of "super-functionality."-- A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY

The primary similarity between (1) the many facets of "the archetype" as described by Jung and others and (2) the concept of "artifice" that I introduced in EFFICACY, MEET MYTH is that both are abstract constructions. Both are built up not from observed experience but from patterns one projects upon abstract ideas about experience. Such abstractions tend to intermingle willy-nilly, which is why my EFFICACY essay might have been better titled ARTIFICE, MEET MYTH, since I was arguing that my new term provided a more effective substitute for Northrop's Frye use of "myth" in the particular Fryean schema I quoted.

Still, "efficacy" wasn't without significance. Cassirer introduced the term as a way of seeking to understand the "non-causal causality" one finds in myth, as one sees in favorite tropes like that of the giant who is dismembered to create the universe. I drew a comparison between Cassirer's definition of efficacy as a "translation and  transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence" and viewing this as comparable to the will-based process by which a literary author creates a world out of his own "subjective emotions and drives."  No matter how much an author may think that he's attempting to hew close to observed experience, the moment he seeks to create fiction-- as opposed to nonfiction and memoir-related works like those of Harvey Pekar-- he will always impose some sense of order on his fictive world that parallels that of the cosmic order one finds in myth.

Nevertheless, many authors seek to buttress their visions of real life with direct observations that they or others have taken from experience, and all such attempts to bring the fictional world into line with observed experience fit under the heading of Frye's category "verisimilitude." Ironically, "verisimilitude" can even take in inaccurate information. In HENRY IV PART 1, Shakespeare makes Henry and Hotspur the same age, which was not historically accurate. However, misinformation serves the same purpose in the play that accurate information would: to give the audience a set of particular facts about the antagonists.

The author who wants to be admired for his verisimilitude, then, endeavors to imply that any subjective concerns that inform his work are logical extrapolations from his observations of experience. Thus, even when he employs an archetypal trope, such as Frye's example of the "birth-mystery plot" in various Dickens works, the author will seek to emphasize that, say, Oliver Twist is the product of an unjust social system, rather than the obvious spawn of either a fiction-writer or of any mythological entities that might stand in for the author. (Again following Frye's example, the god Apollo exists to "explain" the provenance of his mortal son Ion, in more or less parallel fashion to the sacrificed giant whose death "explains" the origins of the universe.)

I'll state then a general maxim: no fiction-author can ever completely succeed in divorcing himself from the domain of artifice and totally cleaving to the domain of verisimilitude.

That said, an author's focus upon verisimilitude means that he automatically seeks to limit the potential "affective freedom" of his work, in favor of a "cognitive restraint" based in his own acceptance, and that of his potential audience, of all the rules of consensual reality. And that means that the "will" incarnate in the work of a (usually) naturalistic author like Dickens is not quite the same as what one sees in the work of one best known for marvelous scenarios, like Euripides, or of one who uses the same archetype in an uncanny work-- more upon which in Part 2.

         

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT

                    

 In my 2013 essay AFFECTIVITY, MEET EFFICACY, I focused upon Ernst Cassirer distinction between “causality” and “efficacy.” Causality, the philosopher said, represented humanity’s ability to think about cause and effect in a rational, discursive manner, and from this we get the first stirrings of early philosophy, and later, the developments of science. Efficacy, however, belonged to the language of myth: it depends on a blurring of the distinctions between the objective and subjective worlds.

…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

One mythical idea to which Cassirer refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation, even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not.

Rational conceptions of causal relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C, resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.

I’ve written a lot on my blog about the concept of freedom, and it’s a major reason as to why I’ve devoted so much blog-space to such obscure concepts as “the combative mode” and the various forms of phenomenality, sublimity, and so on. But freedom without a complementary form of internal restraint is, as Janis Joplin sang, “just another word for nothing left to lose.”  Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

Human beings, we may fairly deduce, relate to the world in different ways than other animals. We cannot know what goes on in the head of a lion when it stalks a bird, and then fails to catch the bird because the latter flaps its wings and flies away, We can fairly guess that the lion is frustrated, and possibly with its limited mentality it might entertain the wish to continue chasing the bird into the air. But that would seem to be as far as a lion’s imagination could go.

We also cannot really know what thoughts may have passed through the mind of a Neanderthal hunter in the same situation. Maybe our caveman stalker had no thoughts at all when his prey escaped. Yet we can at least reasonably suspect that the primitive fellow may have entertained the idea of what it would like to be a bird: to sprout wings and chase the bird into its own territory. And once he had this thought—say, for argument’s sake, that no one had entertained the thought before him—he might not be limited to thinking only about filling his belly with bird-flesh. He nay have started to think about what it would feel like to fly, to be a bird; to soar above the limits of other cavemen. At this point he probably doesn’t  think about imitating the bird by designing his own pair of wings, but he may decide to translate this vagrant imaginings into a mythic form. The caves at Lascaux attest to some sort of mental alchemy that combined man and bird, even if today we can only look at drawings of bird-man hybrids and label them “portraits of shamans.”  They may have been just that, but their original context may matter less than their role in determining humankind’s affective freedom.

In one conversation I mentioned that humankind’s advancements in powered flight would have been impossible without this sort of internal, subjective appreciation for the possible thrill of flying. My opponent simply said something along the lines, “Yeah, but powered flight wouldn’t have been possible without science and logical thinking.”  Quite true; as far as achieving an effect in the physical world, wishing never makes it so. But my opponent in my opinion missed the point: the wish makes everything else thinkable. To the earthbound human who can only run and jump and swim, the idea of flying cannot be imagined as having some practical applications—not even just that of catching birds—until *after * it has been re-imagined as something that the earthbound human can imagine bringing into his own “sensuous, objective experience.” 

One of the greatest “myths” propounded by empiricist-types has been that of the “caveman-engineer:” the primitive who instantly sees some practical advantage in making a new type of spear or a rooftop, because he’s so much more attuned to the scientific principles in the physical world, even if he doesn’t have a scientific system as such. This very selective conception of the early scientist was of course an anachronism: an imagining of some 18^th-century scientist born before his time; one who would be in no way influenced by the myths and religion of his time. This was one of many verbal strategies used by empiricists to tout the supreme importance of cognitive restraint, of valuing only practical cause and effect, and to consign myth to the dust-bin of “failed science.”

The mistake of utilitarianism—that the only things that matter are those which have a defined use—is one that depends upon the formulations of cognitive restraint. A utilitarian might allow some niggling truth to my “flying caveman” example, but he would view the caveman’s “fancy of flight” to be relevant to the human condition only because it did lead to a useful development. In contrast, the utilitarian would not be impressed by, say, Tolkien’s example of “arresting strangeness:” of imaging a world with a green sun. Even in the world of fiction, the world of the green sun would have no relevance unless it illustrated the restraints on physical life expressed through scientific fact. Thus, if autrhor Hal Clement devoted a book to explaining the makeup of a fictional world that happened to have a green sun for some scientific reason, then that, and that alone, would have relevance to utilitarianism.

What I’ve repeatedly emphasized that the world of affective freedom is a whole package: that the ability to imagine impossible things is crucial to human nature, whether it leads to specific inventions or not. Depicting a shaman as a bird-human hybrid may not have led directly to any fantasies of personal flight, and thus the shaman-dream might have no relevance at all to the development of powered flight. I argue, rather, that whether the subjective outpourings of myth and fiction do or don't lead to useful developments, all of them are equally important in determining the meaning of human freedom.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN PT. 2

For this essay I'll just tie together the observations between the previous essay and my last general-theory essay on the NUM formula.

In the former essay, I'm now asserting that causality in a literary context-- which, contra Todorov, is not homologous with the causality human beings experience in life-- has both a cognitive aspect and an affective aspect, summed up as "regularity" and "intelligibility."  Though I have not stated it in so many words, the same would be true of the Cassirer-esque parallel to causality, "efficacy," whose cognitive and affective aspects would be "anti-" versions of both concepts above.

In THE INTERSECTING AXES essay, I was still regarding causality as unitary in this statement:

It occurs to me that with both my categories of "the naturalistic" and "the marvelous," all of the "intangible shit" is highly dependent on whether or not the diegetic world depicted is one in which causality can or cannot be disrupted.

Now, I would say that it is only the regularity aspect of causality that has been violated in the domain of the marvelous.  Works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous" both violate the "intelligibility" aspect of causality, and the affects associated with the over-ruling quality of "strangeness"-- a quality Rudolf Otto insightfully termed an "overplus."  But many audience-members, when looking at works in the domain of the uncanny, tend to ally such works with the domain of the naturalistic simply because all they can see is that the author has not violated the cosmos' appearance of regularity.

For instance, take the case of the Batman, whom I used here as an example to demonstrate the problematic status of such an alliance:

Like the Todorov book I’ve recently critiqued, the naïve critic’s assertion, “Batman isn’t a superhero because he doesn’t have superpowers,” contains a fundamental insight despite being essentially wrong. The latter also takes a lot less time to refute. The naïve critic has chosen to view the adjective “super” in “superhero” as meaning one thing and one thing only: the possession of powers, giving one the ability to perform “super” feats that human heroes cannot perform. However, “super” clearly does not connote this, either in dictionaries or in the opinions of many readers who do consider Batman a superhero—usually for an equally simple reason, because he wears a costume.

It's clear to me that even if Batman never encountered any marvelous entities or used any marvelous weapons, he would have a stronger alliance with the domain of "the marvelous" than that of "the naturalistic." His case would be the same as Zorro, the Lone Ranger, and many other costumed types who had no powers and dominantly opposed only naturalistic menaces.

The only affects appropriate to the domain of the naturalistic, then, are those governed by what I have called "the atypical," which combines the regularity and intelligibility aspects of causality.  Those affects were described in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT. 1:

In a fictive world where affectivity is defined by the causal order, the dominant sympathetic affect is "admiration" of things characteristic of the causal order, particularly what Jung called Freud's "physiological factors," while the dominant antipathetic affect is "fear" of aspects of the causal/physical order.

Now, I have chosen in other essays to make clear distinctions between the two different types of "strangeness," types I labeled by the relation of their sublimity-potential to the depiction of "reality" in the narrative.  But though I still feel those distinctions are important to a discussion of how sublimity occurs across the three domains, those distinctions do not bear on analyzing the maintenance of fictive causality.

Thus, I would now revise this sentence from the AFFECTIVE FREEDOM essay:

the uncanny flourishes precisely in the contrast between the monocausal nature of cognitive reality in a given work, while affectivity "symbolically exceeds the cognitive order," taking the dominant forms of "fascination" for the sympathetic affect and "dread" for the antipathetic affect.

It is not a "cognitive order" that has been exceeded, but the "affective aspect" of fictive causality.

The statement I make in that essay regarding "the marvelous" regarding its affects also requires some revision:

Where affectivity exceeds the causal order in accordance with the multicausal nature of the world's cognitivity, the dominant sympathetic affect is "exaltation" toward the multicausal, and the dominant antipathetic affect is "awe" toward it.

The affectivity alluded to above is in effect the same "anti-intelligibility" that makes a more muted appearance in works of the uncanny, but now it is allied to an "anti-regularity" that dominates the causal order of works of the marvelous.

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT. 3

At the end of THREE PROBABILITIES  I said:

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."

For the time being I'll supply just one of the ten: the trope I labeled "perilous pyschos."  For this trope I chose the literary-and-cinematic figure of Norman Bates.

I considered drawing a comparison between the fictional character of Norman-- whose film I reviewed here -- and a film based on the principal real-life model for Norman, ED GEIN.  I do find GEIN to be a film bereft of the subtler types of antipathetic effect, of dread and awe: it is first and foremost a film about fear, where physical peril is the dominant threat.  Though GEIN tells the true story of the real psycho's misdeeds, it takes the form of "fictionalized reality" rather than a pure documentary. The film begins with a few quotes from persons who knew Gein or persons involved in his murders, but following this preface-like section, the film depicts all real-life events in a fictionalized manner, portraying events that a pure documentary could not legitimately represent, as with a scene where Gein traipses around his yard in his "woman-suit." Yet, even though GEIN pursues the tropes of fiction, it seems inappropriate to draw comparisons between even a fictionalized version of a real person and a completely fictional figure.

But it is appropriate to compare one version of Norman with another.  Here's the Anthony Perkins version, whom I view as "uncanny" due to the nature of his madness.

And here's another version, from the recent A&E teleseries BATES MOTEL.

MOTEL shuffles a few of the basic configurations of the original PSYCHO-- the nervous young man (still in high school here), his domineering mother, and the titular motel.  However, MOTEL shows none of the intensity of the madness depicted either by Bloch or by Hitchcock.   The ten episodes thus far aired have dealt with assorted mundane menaces-- a crooked sheriff, a white-slavery ring, a rapist-- who makes the mistake of raping Norman's mother, who retaliates by knife-murdering him-- and Norma Bates herself, who may be narcissistically devoted to her son but falls very short of the sort of dreadful madness one sees in Bloch and Hitchcock.  If the teleseries lasts long enough to develop the character of Norman-- who is depicted as nothing more than a slightly geeky, but not repulsive, young fellow who captivates some of the local girls-- BATES will certainly have him doing some of the same sort of things that the Bloch-Hitchcock character does.  But in the predominantly naturalistic atmosphere of the series, it seems unlikely that it will conjure forth any of the uncanny atmosphere utilized by either Bloch or Hitchcock.

A side-point: at the end of AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT 1 I demonstrated the conditions under which a particular film-- in this case, the serial ACE DRUMMOND-- could have been naturalistic, uncanny or marvelous, depending on whether or not certain elements were present in the diegesis.  I viewed ACE as being dominated by the antipathetic affect of "awe" because I felt that this affect "trumped" those of "fear" and "dread," even though the other two were present and could have been dominant given the aforesaid alterations.  I want to add that it is feasible in some cases for the "subtler" affects to be "trumped" as well.  Hitchcock's suspense-drama SHADOW OF A DOUBT possesses a naturalistic phenomenality, for the monstrous "Merry Widow Killer" is principally a physical threat to anyone who discovers his identity, including his niece, "Young Charlie."  Yet though fear is the controlling affect, there are instances in which the film does depict moments of dread, a dread that stems from Young Charlie's anitpathy to her very relatedness to her insane relative.  This antipathy, at base a fear of psychological absorption by a threatening "Other," is not dwelled upon in SHADOW.  But roughly seventeen years later Hitchcock returned to a far more intense meditation upon that theme, thanks to his encounter with Robert Bloch's work.

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY, PT. 2

Before preceding on to a detailed example of uncanny affectivity such as I proposed at the end of THREE PROBABILITIES, I want to emphasize a point that came up in my recent film-blog review of a trio of uncanny films: all B-westerns starring the masked hero "the Durango Kid."

Prior to that review, I had examined just one other Durango Kid film-- the 1952 KID FROM BROKEN GUN, the last in the long-running series. I pointed out that BROKEN GUN had only one uncanny aspect, which is also the case with the other three films:

In almost all ways GUN is a naturalistic western like hundreds churned out by the studios of the time. Nothing except the "outre outfit" of the Durango Kid moves it into the domain of the uncanny-metaphenomenal. But as I've noted elsewhere, particularly my review of this "Lone Ranger" film, the hero's mask in this sort of film becomes more than just a mundane device, as it is for some of the villain's hirelings, who also go about masked with bandannas for a few minutes. Though I doubt that I'll ever see the majority of these outlaw-chasing oaters, I'd tend to classify them all as metaphenomenal works. The scene in which the black-clad masked man threatens the villain with execution gives that scene a touch of the uncanny that one would never get from a similar threat made by Gene Autry.

However, even though I insist on this same formalism in my interpretation of other "oaters" in this series, when I reviewed the other three I had to admit they made less impressive use of their metaphenomenal potential.

By saying that [the statement re: Durango as executioner], I didn't mean to suggest that a given Durango Kid would not fit my category of "the uncanny" unless it conveyed such an emotion. The only reason to regard these films as metaphenomenal is based on the POTENTIAL to create such emotions, not in the actual execution. Though the masked western-hero of this series never became a name to conjure with, along the lines of the Lone Ranger-- or even Marvel's "Two-Gun Kid"-- his masked persona removes him from the rank and file of oater-heroes like Roy Rogers and the rest, irrespective as to whether the filmmakers do anything with the potential.

As I emphasized above, a naturalistic western hero, such as Roy Rogers could have played, could have threatened a villain with death, and in that situation such a scene in this hypothetical Autry-film would be dominated by the affect of fear.  The scene in BROKEN GUN is dominated by the affect of dread because the Durango Kid's masked persona, even though he's making the same physical threat, carries a symbolic valence that a commonplace cowpoke does not.  The other three "Durango films" that I reviewed did not USE the symbolic potential of the masked persona, but it was potentially within the grasp of the scripters, regardless of what they chose to do with it.


Given that I've set up a hypothetical Roy Rogers flick to represent the dominant affect of fear, and a particular Durango Kid film to represent the dominant affect of dread, for symmetry's sake I'll show what kind of awe-inspiring affect is possible when the hero can use a plurality of marvelous powers in order to manipulate the ungodly.

AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY, PT. 1

In THREE INTO TWO WILL GO, SOMETIMES PT. 1  I described the NUM formula-- although when I wrote the essay the category of " the naturalistic" was "the atypical"-- in the following terms:

If the anomaly takes place within a world where the cognitive order rules, and where affectivity is indeed the tail wagged by the dog, then the narrative’s phenomenality is “atypical.”


If it takes place within a world that breaks with the cognitive order, in which causs-and-effect is in some way suspended, then the phenomality is “marvelous,” and the affectivity produced is one that also strives to go beyond the cognitive order.


If the work seems to suggest that the cognitive order is violated, when in fact it is not, its phenomenality will be “uncanny” as long as the work succeeds in evoking an affectivity that symbolically exceeds the cognitive order.

I now intend to bring this in line with Cassirer's observations re: the distinctions of the "causality" concepts characteristic of empirical thought versus the "multicausal" concepts characteristic of mythical thought, especially as conveyed through what Cassirer calls the opposing conception of causality, "magical efficacy."


Thus a Cassirer-based reconfiguration reads thus:

NATURALISTIC-- cognitivity and affectivity are defined by the causal order; i.e. "one definite cause yields one definite effect"

UNCANNY-- cognitivity is defined by the causal order, but affectivity exceeds causal order and participates in the multicausal nature of "efficacy"

MARVELOUS-- both cognitivity and affectivity exceed the causal order and participate in the multicausal nature of "efficacy"

The nature of affectivity in each phenomenality is logically glossed by the antipathetic and sympathetic affects I've detailed on the blog, each of which form a triunity.  The negative affects-- fear, dread, and awe-- were formulated by Rudolf Otto in THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, schematized by C.S. Lewis in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN,  and first examined on this blog in this essay.

Because I felt neither Otto nor Lewis had adequately defined a set of corresponding positive affects, I supplied a corresponding triunity in this essay.  Shortly later,  I revised one of the three terms in this essay, so that my corresponding set of sympathetic affects now sport the names of "admiration" (the counterpart to "fear"), "fascination" (the counterpart to "dread"), and "exaltation" (the counterpart to "awe" of the abysmal type described by Otto).

Therefore affectivity in the three phenomenalities can be aligned thusly:

In a fictive world where affectivity is defined by the causal order, the dominant sympathetic affect is "admiration" of things characteristic of the causal order, particularly what Jung called Freud's "physiological factors," while the dominant antipathetic affect is "fear" of aspects of the causal/physical order.

Where affectivity exceeds the causal order in accordance with the multicausal nature of the world's cognitivity, the dominant sympathetic affect is "exaltation" toward the multicausal, and the dominant antipathetic affect is "awe" toward it.

It's easy to descry affects of admiration and fear in naturalistic works, or affects of exalatation and awe in marvelous works.  The uncanny, however, is harder to demonstrate, precisely because the causal order rules the cognitive aspect of the uncanny work, causing many viewers-- like Todorov-- to mistake it for the purely naturalistic.  Instead, the uncanny flourishes precisely in the contrast between the monocausal nature of cognitive reality in a given work, while affectivity "symbolically exceeds the cognitive order," taking the dominant forms of "fascination" for the sympathetic affect and "dread" for the antipathetic affect.

None of this means that affects most characteristic of one phenomenality cannot occur in another phenomenality, but those affects are not characteristic.  As a quick example, the little remembered adventure-serial ACE DRUMMOND-- reviewed here-- imperils its hero with threats that are, at varying times, naturalistic, uncanny, or marvelous, and all controlled by the serial's villain, "the Dragon."

If the villain had only been able to threaten Drummond with mundane guards, then the phenomenality of the serial would have been naturalistic, and its dominant antipathetic affect would be fear.

If the villain had been able to threaten Drummond with both his mundane guards and his "Room-with-Crushing-Walls," then the presence of the latter threat would trump the naturalistic elements and change the phenomenality to the uncanny, so that even though the affect of 'fear" still existed with respect to Drummond's battle with mundane guards, "dread" of a villain able to control a weird weapon like a '"crushing room" would make "dread" the dominant antipathetic affect.

However, as things stand, the evil Dragon could menace Drummond and his buddies with the previously cited threats and a marvelous death-ray device as well-- and indeed, the death ray gets the most narrative attention in this particular serial.  Thus the dominant antipathetic affect, overruling those of  "fear" and "dread," is one of "awe" before the villain's marvelous resources.

I will enlarge on these observations in Part 2.

THE POWERS THAT BIND, PART 2

Whereas empirical thinking is essentially directed toward establishing an unequivocal relation between specific "causes" and specific effects, mythical thinking, even where it raises the question of origins as such, has a free selection of causes at its disposal... Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

This ability of one form to morph into another is crucial to Cassirer's understanding of "magical efficacy," which embraces, yet goes far beyond, Robert Codrington's explorations of the concept of "mana" in tribal societies.  This point is not explored in MYTHICAL THINKING nearly as well as it might have been, given that Cassirer's overall project was to determine the status of myth within the hierarchy of "forms of knowledge."  In my essay INTERSUBJECTIVITY INTERLUDE I expressed some regret that he had not been able to deal with the theme expoused by Frye: that of the interrelation and interpenetrations of myth and literature.

Now when conceptualizing the above forms, particularly "myth," Cassirer focused almost exclusively upon the evolution of archaic mythico-religious systems. He seems to have been aware that some thinkers believed that myth survived into his contemporary times in one guise or another, but in his writings on art he did not strongly expouse myth as a principle overlapping with literature, as was the case with Northrop Frye, the best-known proponent of "myth criticism" as well as a critic strongly influenced by Cassirer in other ways. Cassirer's work explored the ways in which archaic cultures, dominated by mythico-religious systems, gave birth to the discursive theoretical forms of science and philosophy. Thus whenever Cassirer speaks of myth, as in his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT, he primarily refers to the state of myth in archaic human societies, prior to the rise of the theoretical forms.

Though I've touched in other essays on Jung's use of the word "acausal," Cassirer speaks, as I show above, of a "free selection of causes." Mythical thinking is grounded not in the physical demonstrable and repeatable effects one sees in empirical science, but in "the intuition of purposive action-- for all the forces of nature are for myth nothing other than expressions of a demonic or divine will" (p. 49).

I also touched on the concept of "purposive action" in Part I of THE POWERS THAT BIND by way of showing that every demonstration of supernatural power in archaic myth is tied to "creating a narrative effect," one whose core is the expression of an affect or affects. 

I can imagine a companion book to MYTHICAL THINKING in which Cassirer might have explored in detail many of the forms through which "magical efficacy" flowed in the myths and legends of many cultures.  He mentions in the section above many of the transmutations of creation myths, and on page 57 he mentions, in line with Codrington, how the "material substance" of magical force suffuses such "powerful personalities" as "the magician and the priest, the chieftain and the warrior."  But to these examples one could also explore the ways in which this force manifested in weapons like Excalibur, in hybrid beasts like Pegasus and the Chimera, and in entire races of quasi-humanoids-- those like trolls, faeries, and leprechauns, who may be regarded as implicit spirits of the dead come back-- and those like vampires, who are more explicitly the dead come back to life.

Further, such a companion book might have also explored how purely literary metaphenomenal works were universally obliged to resort to the same "free selection of causes" in providing context for whatever wonders they invented-- whether those wonders invoked the figures of myth and legend, as we see in Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST, or attempted to ground those wonders as well as was possible in empirical science, as with Verne's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.

This mutual narrative dependence on a "free selection of causes," then, is a key link between the realm of archaic myth and the realm of metaphenomenal narrative; a link that is not in the least diminished by arguments defining myth through functionalism, or even by my own distinction between religious myths and literary myths as that of "closed rituals vs. open rituals."  And when the metaphenomenal author chooses his causal agent, he is placed in the same position as the archaic myth-maker.  The rules of normal cause and effect, of regular time and space as the author knows them, must be transcended by an authorial "efficacy," as in, "It works this way because I say it does."

This is much more evident in fictions that break the known rules of causality: that is, works of "the marvelous."  However, in a future essay I will demonstrate that the same authorial efficacy applies to works of the uncanny.  I may also use this Cassirerean concept of "causal freedom" to work my way back to writing an "ethic of the combative," which I suggested that I would write back in March of this year.

THE POWERS THAT BIND

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.-- Northrop Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, p. 51.

Eddie Valiant: You mean you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?

          Roger Rabbit: No, not at any time, only when it was funny. 

      --WHO FRAMED  ROGER RABBIT?

Frye's statement that the characters of myth are "characters who can do anything" might have been a little more judiciously phrased.  I understand that he's contrasting the world of the gods with that of humans in terms of the power-differential: that humans, prisoners of "reality," are limited to a small sphere of power, whereas deities can do innumerable things that men cannot do, and often would like to be able to do. 

However, it isn't really accurate to say that gods can do anything.  Whether any sort of gods exist or not, the stories that we tell about them are always informed by the human perception of limitation-- and therefore the stories about gods perforce limit their power.

For instance, if Zeus can do anything, then he cannot be overthrown, even temporarily, by Typhon.  The story of his combat with Typhon requires that he be vulnerable.  Similarly, in the story of Demeter, the wasting of the seasons during Demeter's sorrows is not something Zeus can undo by sheer will; only through compromise with the Earth-goddess can the Earth be saved.

In all of the major religions the Hindu Krishna may be the incarnate god who most seems able to do any feat he attempts.  Nevertheless, when a story was needed to illustrate the death of Krishna-- or perhaps just Krishna in that incarnation--  then Krishna succumbs to the same fatal limitation as mortals.

With an otiose divinity like the Judeo-Christian god, it's harder to determine whether or not he is as omnipotent as the texts claim.  Some authorities have argued that fragmentary mentions of conflicts with "Rahab" or with a "bent serpent" in the Old Testament are remnants of a story akin to that of Zeus and Typhon.  Even so, though it's taboo within the religion to suggest that God is anything but omnipotent, one cannot get away from the admittedly comic logic of the proposition, "Can God make a weight so heavy he can't lift it?"

In both fictional and religious narrative, then, power cannot be articulated without the storyteller imagining some form of limitation, even a self-imposed one like God's decision to let human beings choose good or evil.   Unquestionably what Frye calls the realm of "myths proper," allots a much greater diversity of powers to some-- though not all-- inhabitants of that domain than one sees in more realistic narratives, where the absence of such powers is a key aspect of being "plausible and credible."

Those powers, further, are not infinite, for they are always in the service of creating a narrative effect, as per Roger Rabbit's confessed limitation, that he can only slip out of the handcuffs when the effect is funny.  The same principle holds true even if the effect is meant to be invigorating, purgative, mortificative or whatever permutations of the above can be imagined.

In Part Two I'll explore how this determination meshes with my previous writings on Ernst Cassirer's concepts of *magical efficacy.*






  

AFFECTIVITY, MEET EFFICACY

In this essay I compared the spectrum of affectivities that appear within all three phenomenalities of literary narrative to Ernst Cassirer's concept of "efficacy." Since I support a pluralistic phenomenology-- that is, one in which each literary phenomenality has its own valuable modus operandi-- I relate this to Cassirer's appreciation for "the world of subjective emotions" and their ability to form "a sensuous, objective existence." Cassirer compares his concept of objective affectivity with that of "magical efficacy" as he conceives it from anthropological reports on primitive concepts of magic and "mana," or "spiritual energy."

It should go without saying, though, that Cassirer's comparison was purely metaphorical. He wanted to demonstrate that archaic primitives had an appreciation for the sensous, objective side of emotions, as against the tendency of the empircists and positivists to regard emotional states as epiphenomenal.  He was not drawing a comparison between "the world of subjective emotions" and the literal belief in magic, even the sort of passive magic associated, say, with the notion that sacred kings of old could not touch the ground with their feet in order to prevent the loss of kingly "mana."

Of course, there may be no point in making such nice distinctions, since I have also advocated Jung's archetypes as a valid way of analyzing the many permutations of the intersubjective world of shared, often highly structured emotions.  Comics-fans of my acquaintance have often proven astoundingly ignorant of Jung's phenomenology, choosing to believe that if he approached religious subjets with anything but a hard-nosed empirical bias, he could be nothing more than a dreamy-eyed mystic.  Presumably the same ignorant reaction would pertain with regard to Cassirer.

Jung did, to be sure, theorize about synchronicity as an "acausal" principle, and I summarized some aspects of his argument here. Interestingly, Jung does draw upon the psychic experiments of J.B. Rhine to suggest that "under certain conditions space and time can be reduced almost to zero, causality disappears along with them, because causality is bound up with the existence of space and time and physical changes, and consists essentially in the succession of cause and effect."  Thus Jung did suggest the possibility-- though not an outright conviction-- that the mind's possible capacity for psychic phenomena could be connected to the acausal principle of synchronicity, in which the human mind more or less "synchonized" its affectivity with whatever elements mirrored its nature.  Jung's famous story of the scarab is axiomatic:

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.

I would not rule out a possible correlation between psychic phenomenon and the objective phenomenology of emotional unity. But one does not necessarily depend upon the other. 

AFFECTIVE EFFECTS PT. 2

Since I want to redefine my usage of the terms "cognitivity" and "affectivity" so as to get them as far as way as possble from an empiricist like Todorov, there seems no better corrective than Ernst Cassirer.  In this passage from MYTHICAL THOUGHT he opposes the law-following nature of theoretical formations of causality to the extra-legal, non-theoretical nature of cultural myth.

Physical space is in general characterized as a space relevant to forces: but in its purely mathematical formulation the concept of force goes back to the concept of law, hence of the function.  In the structural space of myth, however, we see an entirely different line of thought. Here the universal is not distinguished from the particular and the accidental, the constant from the variable, through the basic concept of law; here we find the one mythical value accent expressed in the opposition between the sacred and profane.  Here there are no purely geometrical or purely geographical, no purely ideal or merely empirical distinctions; all thought and all sensuous intuition and perception rest on an original foundation of feeling.-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THOUGHT, p. 95.

In my discussions of my NUM formula of phenomenality, I've often stressed the "rational order" or "the causal order" as the domain of "the cognitive," which utterly dominates works of "the naturalistic" phenomenality.  In works of "the marvelous," this borders of this orderly domain are completely breached by the non-rational intrusion of elves, aliens, crazy rays and all the rest.  In works of "the uncanny," the borders are not so much broken as stretched like a membrane by such figures as men raised by wolves, psychos, hunchbacks, and the rest of that lot. 

In contrast, I've stated that affectivity in the naturalistic domain is entirely subjected to the causal order.  However, I didn't formulate just how affectivity took on new levels of sublimity in the metaphenomenal works, though I did make some suggestions to that effect in this essay.

In MYTHICAL THOUGHT Cassirer defines causality as "the general concept of force" (p. 14). Cassirer knew that primitive peoples were as aware of causal forces as was Isaac Newton; otherwise, they could hardly have constructed those objects that take advantage of Newtonian forces, such as clubs and boats and pyramids. However, in addition to their awareness of such forces, Cassirer asserts that primitives also believed in what I would term an "acausal force," though Cassirer's term is "magical efficacy."

And later:

Given that myth "appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy," the two of them together comprise "a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence."

Now, thanks to my investigations into the concept of the combinatory-sublime-- wherein I've reversed some earlier statements, and taken the position that such sublimity is stronger in works of the metaphenomenal-- I would say that the "strangeness" of the metaphenomenal assumes qualities covalent with those of Cassirer's "magical efficacy."  In one of the "combinatory" essays I wrote:

This "challenge [to reason]" is the foremost element which gives rise to the affect of "strangeness" in a fictional work, irrespective of whether or not the work abides by the rules of causality (at least on the "cognitive" level) or thwarts those rules.

In the first Cassirer quote the philosopher makes clear that all aspects of thought, intuition and perception proceed from an "original foundation of feeling," which is to say, an affective order, though one that cannot be reduced down to associations produced by mundane experience. 

Things that are strange-- that is, that are either impossible or extremely improbable within a naturalistic phenomenality-- are incoherent within that phenomenality, and so have no status, no "efficacy," of their own.  But in the uncanny and marvelous phenomenalities, they do possess such efficacy, and in that sense they challenge the cognitive order, whether with an outright breach or an elastic stretching of the boundaries.

Within my phenomenological system the emotions that exist in "the space of myth" are as real as the physical objects within "the space relevant to forces."  For that reason I have some qualms about the terms I devised for the three types of phenomenality sublimity in this essay. The terms "iso-real," "supra-real," and "anti-real" would all seem to privilege the idea of "reality" as one dependent on physical objects.  However, I probably won't modify them, given that I've also defined the three phenomenalities in terms of their challenging, or not challenging, the rules of reason.  That is certainly not the sole appeal of each phenomenality, but it's signficant enough that it should remain a touchstone nevertheless.  And in any case I will defining the questions of "reality" in fictional narrative more narrowly in a forthcoming essay, "The Two Verisimilitudes."

INTERSUBJECTIVITY INTERLUDE

Before proceeding to the conclusion of the METAGODZILLA VS ISOGHIDRAH essay-series, I'll divert to the subject of Cassirer once more to explore the interrelation of intersubjectivity and myth.

Ernst Cassirer never formulated a poetics of art and/or literature.  His principal significance to literary theory is his conceptualization of irreducible cultural forms, including not only art/literature but also mythology (covalent with religion), science and philosophy. Cassirer's conception is fundamentally pluralistic, in that no form subsumes any other, in contradistinction with the way a figure such as Sigmund Freud viewed both art and mythology as extensions of his (alleged) scientific paradigm.

Now when conceptualizing the above forms, particularly "myth," Cassirer focused almost exclusively upon the evolution of archaic mythico-religious systems.  He seems to have been aware that some thinkers believed that myth survived into his contemporary times in one guise or another, but in his writings on art he did not strongly expouse myth as a principle overlapping with literature, as was the case with Northrop Frye, the best-known proponent of "myth criticism" as well as a critic strongly influenced by Cassirer in other ways.  Cassirer's work explored the ways in which archaic cultures, dominated by mythico-religious systems, gave birth to the discursive theoretical forms of science and philosophy.  Thus whenever Cassirer speaks of myth, as in his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT, he primarily refers to the state of myth in archaic human societies, prior to the rise of the theoretical forms.

Nevertheless, some of Cassirer's formulations certainly influenced Frye.  I've mentioned in other essays Frye's conception of literature as a spectrum with naturalistic "verisimilitude" at one extreme and what Frye termed "myth" at the other-- by which, of course, Frye did mean a form of myth-like complexity present in formal literature.  This parallels Cassirer's opposition between the world of causality, over which science comes to hold dominion, and the world of internal expressivity, which is first communicated among humans through myth and mythic rituals.  Indeed, though "intersubjectivity" as a term does not appear in Cassirer, his analysis of archaic myth makes clear that it can be easily regarded as mankind's first attempt at intersubjective communication.

In MYTHICAL THOUGHT Cassirer defines causality as "the general concept of force" (p. 14).  Cassirer knew that primitive peoples were as aware of causal forces as was Isaac Newton; otherwise, they could hardly have constructed those objects that take advantage of Newtonian forces, such as clubs and boats and pyramids.  However, in addition to their awareness of such forces, Cassirer asserts that primitives also believed in what I would term an "acausal force," though Cassirer's term is "magical efficacy."

"Magical efficacy" almost certainly traces from the "mana" theory of Robert Codrington's book THE MELANESIANS (1891), to which Cassirer refers in other works.  However, in keeping with Cassirer's post-Kantian project, he's concerned with the application of this "efficacy" as a prelude to religion:

"More and more clearly we see the beginnings of a mythological view which assumes a distinct concept, neither of God nor of the psyche and personality, but starts from a still entirely undifferentiated intuition of magical efficacy, of a magical force inherent in things." (p. 16) 

This force approaches ontology from a different perspective than that of commonplace causal reality, in part because space itself is transformed by internal sensation:

"For myth all difference of spatial aspect involutarily changes into a difference of expressive features, of physiognomic characters.  Thus [myth's] spatial view, in spite of its tendencies toward objective formation, remain bathed in the color of feeling and subjective sensation" (p. 152).

Given that myth "appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy," the two of them together comprise "a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence."

To be sure, Cassirer does not emphasize that this objectivity is dependent upon its transmission through culture, in contradistiction to scientific law, which science assumes to be true independent of any human opinion on the subject.  But in my view it's only a short step from Cassirer's "expressive features" and "physiognomic characters" to the archetypes of Jung, which, as past essays have demonstrated, provide clues to a phenomenology capable of putting both causal and mythical worlds into their proper perspective.
And in the conclusion to the METAGODZILLA series, I'll go into more detail as to how the antithesis of the causal and the intersubjective throws light on the valuation of different literary phenomenalities.