THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD OF VIOLENCE

In the series JOINED AT THE TRIP, beginning here, I refined some of my earlier statements about the nature of fictional sex and violence. My interpretation of these categories through the lens of Francis Fukuyama's thymotic system goes something like this: violence and sex in their "pure states" represent *megalothymia* and *isothymia* respectively. However, there are "impure states" in which sex can assume a function of dominance, and in which violence can assume a function of egalitarianism.

If you ask the average person what most separates sex and violence, the most likely response-- assuming you can get a coherent one on such a volatile subject-- would be that sex can produce progeny, and violence cannot, except through the medium of sex.

But, in the words of Yoda, "there is another."  In both activities human beings in their identity of *Homo habilis* have evolved dozens of artificial tools and devices that can be used either to enhance the activity (all manner of offensive weapons, sexual enhancement devices) or to curtail some aspect of that activity (all manner of defensive weapons, such as shields and armor, and pregnancy prevention devices).

Yet, when one enters the sphere of art and religion, one finds that both activities may be validated through both gods of war and gods of love, the tools don't receive equal representation.

Archaic culture is rife with the veneration of great weapons. King Arthur wields the most famous sword, Excalibur. Odin wields the spear Gungnir, Thor wields the hammer Mjolnir. In some cases an ancient culture has become so remote from us that it's sometimes unclear as to what Cuchullain's "gae bolga" was, or what it could do, but there's little question that it had some supernormal status.

In contrast, archaic culture invests a lot of items with sexual significance, but most of these are things that do not actually function as aids to sexual performance-- the Holy Grail, the Paschal candle. Some cults involved with sexual ritual, such as the Tantrics, have specialized names for emissions, so they may have names for sexual tools as well. But it seems more typical in most archaic cultures to invest sexual charisma not to objects that enhance sexual activity, but to objects that aren't usually involved in the matter.

Jumping ahead to contemporary popular culture-- in many ways the inheritor of archaic folklore's modes of communication-- we see that outside of fantasy-works that explicitly imitate archaic stories, most heroes don't name their weapons. Still, a cult of charisma still enfolds many weapons, usually referring to them not with cultic cognomens but by brand-names. Wild West heroes are often identified with their "Colts" and "Winchesters." Dirty Harry is so identified with his Magnum firearm that the second movie in the film-series is entitled "Magnum Force," as if to suggest an equivalence between the hero's power and that of his weapon-- roughly in the same way Arthur and Excalibur become mythically covalent.

In contrast, sex tools, many of which are by their nature disposable, don't receive special names. The only notable exception is a comic one; that of the sexually neglected woman who gives a man's name to her favorite dildo. But wherever this trope appears, it's invariably done As a Joke, and so even dildos with names like "Bruce" or even "Mjolnir" are comic exceptions that prove the rule.

This, then, is one side of the double-edged blade of violence. Weapons, perhaps because they allow human beings to extend their spheres of influence over other ingroups and territories, are venerated. Sex, despite being important to the furtherance of the species, is in some ways regarded as merely personal, and so the tools that extend pleasure to two or more participants "don't get no respect." The correlation between Durkheim's definitions of "the sacred" and "the profane," as explained in this essay,  should be obvious.

However, although modern pop culture sometimes evinces great respect for weapons, they can also be viewed as tools that are inferior to the primary means by which humans extend their power: the body itself. This, then, is the other side of the double-edged blade.

If there are many Wild West sagas in which a Colt .45 or a Winchester rifle are invested with positive significance, there are also many instances in which weapons register as negative markers. Whenever a narrative wants to show a character as villainous, one of the easiest ways is to have him resort to using a weapon, often-- though not always-- when his sympathetic opponent is unarmed. When the sympathetic character is a hero, rather than a victim, he usually wins out over the armed villain by the demonstration of such a high level of hand-to-hand skill that it negates the supposed advantage of the weapon.

The modern martial arts film often evinces the same disdain for the armed villain. In my recent review of 1973's ENTER THE DRAGON, I drew attention to the film's depiction of the villain Han. Han is able to use one of his weapons-- a detachable metal hand-- to kill one heroic character, in part because the hero doesn't suspect the weapon's presence. However, when Han is defeated by the superior fighter Lee-- who does use weapons in other scenes, but not against Han-- it is as if Han is a "human beast" thwarted by "the morally superior Lee." 

The teleseries KUNG FU reflected this same anti-weapons tendency. Although it was clear that the protagonist Kwai Chang Caine had been trained in the use of weapons, it was a commonplace event during the series' run to see the hero snatch away a villain's weapon and then discard it, as if its use polluted the purity of his body's superlative fighting-skill. As with Lee, there were occasions on which Caine did use weapons in battle, but an "anti-weapons aesthetic" was clearly in place.  In these and similar narratives, it is the unarmed human body that is "sacred," and weapons are "profane."

SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PART 3

Though it may not be evident from the argument in Part 2, I am oriented on finding a rapprochement between my earlier statements, to the effect that "mythicity" and what I now call "dynamic sublimity" were independent of the phenomenality involved, and my current statement here, where I've said that the nature of the phenomenality does make a difference to the "combinatory sublime."

My solution, then, is that the earlier statements were not adequately worked out with regard to the "narrative value-significant value" schism.

Both "mythicity" and "dynamicity," to the extent that they have particular functions in making a narrative work, comprise "narrative values."

The sublime affects associated with them, "the combinatory sublime" and the "dynamic sublime," are inevitably "significant values."

Nevertheless, there is a slight skewing in purpose between each of the two interrelated categories.

I conjure forth once more the three pop-fiction films I used to illustrate "violent sublimity," aka "dynamic sublimity."

Within each of these worlds, the phenomenality makes no difference to the narrative function of the "focal presence" involved.  As far as the film DIRTY HARRY is concerned, there is no being more powerful than Harry Callahan, though some of his foes, particularly Scorpio, are capable of challenging the hero.  The same holds true for Lee and his foe Han in ENTER THE DRAGON, and for Luke Skywalker and his opponent Darth Vader in the first three STAR WARS films. 

These diegetic dynamicities inevitably call forth significant values, of course.  But viewers do not often think of the "dancers" of violent conflict-- the presences of the narrative-- as being separate from the energy of their "dance," which is the significant value experienced by those who watch.  Thus the narrative value of *dynamicity* often takes precedence over the significant value of the *dynamic sublime* evoked by it.

Mythicity, however, is much more referential in nature.  As soon as one descries the presence of symbolic discourse, one tends to think less of its function within the story and more about what it means to the person experiencing the story.  Say, for sake of argument, that the symbolic discourse in all three of the cited films is equally complex.

DIRTY HARRY-- symbolizes the psychology of the (fictional) Old West, reborn in a modern urban environment
ENTER THE DRAGON-- symbolizes the psychology of the peerless martial artist, whose power lies not only in physical strength but also in his ability to "see" the weaknesses of his enemies
STAR WARS-- symbolizes the psychology of the archetypal orphan-hero, seeking to prove himself in a cruel world and finding his strength in opposition to a father (and a grandfather) archetype

On the level of the narrative value, all of these myth-functions are equal.  HOWEVER-- the potential of myth-combination is inevitably limited in Dirty Harry's world, since a naturalistic world always values verisimilitude over myth's improbabilities.  Works in an uncanny world have more leeway to be improbable, and thus greater combinatory power-- while marvelous works, able to present various levels of "the impossible," can present more combinations of elements than either.  Thus it seems demonstrable that because mythic/symbolic aspects are so highly referential in nature, this principle skews more toward the significant value of the "combinatory sublime," toward calling attention to the difference between the dancers and the dance.

On a somewhat conclusive note, I probably will not attempt to introduce the term "dynamic-sublime" into my tags.  Since as I explained in Part 1, almost all of my references to "sublimity" have been predicated on the Kantian concept of might.  So for the future I will continue to use "sublimity" as a tag to denote only "dynamic sublimity."

THE THREE-PART HARMONY OF SUBLIMITY

For others, the advent of spring means cleaning out the house.  For me, it means yet more terminological revisions to my previously advanced terms regarding the experience of sublimity.

First, prior to any such revisions, a quick revisit to the cognitive and affective conditions that describe my trinity of phenomenalities.  In NOTES ON NORTHROP FRYE AND THE NUM-THEORY I defined the three phenomenalities in terms of their relationship to "causality," insightfully defined by Roger Caillois as "the changeless everyday reality."

“the marvelous”— cognitive and affective aspects of phenomena both exceed causality
“the uncanny”—causality cognitively preserved, but affectivity exceeds causality
“the naturalistic”—cognitive and affective aspects are both contained by causality

In ODDLY OR STRANGELY SUBLIME, I advanced these terms for the differing operations of the sublime within these phenomenalities.

Since works of an entirely naturalistic phenomenality are always defined by limitations, in which it is deemed impossible to transcend the cause-and-effect universe, such works do not evoke "arresting strangeness" in Tolkein's sense. They do, however, depict worlds in which "the typical" is frequently superseded by "the atypical." This may include anything from an anomalous event, such as a bank robbery, to a personal epiphany, such as Conrad's narrator describes by catching a ship at sea in a mood of sublime repose.

This kind of sublimity/sense of wonder, which does not break with the order of causality, I term the "odd-sublime," in that whatever takes place in the naturalistic world does not transcend either the cognitive or affective aspects of that orderliness.

Works in the sphere of the uncanny and the marvelous, however, fall into a category best termed the "strange-sublime." Marvelous works break with both the cognitive and affective aspects of normative order, while uncanny works break with the affective aspect appropriate to causal relations but largely stay within the cognitive sphere of causality.

I later decided that I didn't think "oddity" worked as well as "atypicality," and without otherwise revising this aspect of my system made a one-on-one substitution in NUM-INOUS CONFRONTATIONS, VIOLENT SUBLIMITY, the first essay in which I applied my evolving concept of "the sublime" to three phenomenologically-distinct works.  Of my naturalistic example, the character of "Dirty Harry" from the film of the same name, I wrote of this form of naturalistic sublimity:

At this point, if no other, Dirty Harry takes on a transcendent quality. I would call this particular quality (revised since I last wrote of it here) as the "atypical-sublime." In a naturalistic world, even the most extreme actions by hero and villain can never be more than atypical occurences in a world dominated by typical events.
 

I undertake the revisions of the currently reigning terms-- "atypical-sublime" and "strange-sublime"-- because I've decided that my terms ought to be able to reflect the phenomenological difference between the types of "strange-sublime" in the uncanny and the marvelous.  I've protested Tzvetan Todorov's totalizing tendencies, wherein he views an "uncanny" story as one subsumed by Freud's "reality principle:"

Todorov thinks that the rational order, Freud’s “reality principle,” has won out in the Poe tale because Poe does not literally have the house smitten by the hand of God, after the fashion of more marvelously-oriented Gothics like THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO. But I believe Poe only includes these realistic devices as a means of showing that even with those sops to rationality, the affect of sublime terror remains undiminished.

Nevertheless, though a work like HOUSE OF USHER is not subsumed by causality and the reality principle, unlike (say) Poe's PURLOINED LETTER, it also does not share the exact same relationship to causality as that of Walpole's CASTLE OF OTRANTO.  In order to keep the distinctions of that relationship to "the real," I've devised three terms to reflect the causality-relationship of each phenomenality.

In NUMINOUS CONFRONTATIONS, I used the heroes of three adventure-films to contrast the different phenomenalities of each film.  These respective heroes can also be used to define the relationship of the sublime in each film to the causal order.

Again, 1971's DIRTY HARRY is entirely defined by a naturalistic phenomenality.  This phenomenality is not "real," any more than any other fictional production.  However, because all the forces and presences within DIRTY HARRY attempt to be identical with the causal order that we perceive in our shared cultural existence, any sublimity generated by the film-- in particular, by the conflict between the hero and his opponent-- must be termed an "iso-real" sublimity; that is, one limited to the forces and presences that are "the same" as what we know in "the changeless everyday reality."

1973's ENTER THE DRAGON breaks with this "everyday reality" not in terms of the cognitive aspects of causality, but with the affectivity appropriate to a purely naturalistic universe.  Of one metaphenomenal detail of DRAGON I wrote:

A hall of mirrors certainly does not violate our ideas of causality, so it is not metaphenomenal in any cognitive sense, but because it does suggest the metaphenomenal in an affective sense-- pushing [the villain] Han more toward the domain of the supervillain proper-- this scene in particular captures violent sublimity in one of its two metaphenomenal modes, both of which I still designate as "the strange-sublime."
 

All of the tropes I've designated in my critical writings on film *can* be expressed within a purely naturalistic phenomenality, where both the cognitive and affective aspects are "iso-real."  But uncanny works always push beyond the boundaries of the naturalistic in an affective sense.  This more exaggerated, perhaps more improbable form of affectivity generates a different manifestation of sublimity, one that is rooted in "the real" but transcends it partially.  For this reason I term this manifestation a "supra-real" sublimity.

Finally, with 1977's STAR WARS audiences manage to combine the two most famed genres of the marvelous: "science fiction" and "fantasy."  There are significant phenomenological differences between the two genres, which come down to a different approach to the nature of reality.  In science fiction an apparent "marvel" results from some discovery of a hitherto-unrecognized principle or application of science, while in fantasy,, the "marvel" results from some transcendence of all principles of reality.  Thus most of the characters in STAR WARS use "marvelous" devices like droids and ray-guns without regarding the devices as marvelous, though of course they remain so for the audience.  In contrast, the Jedi powers of Luke Skywalker and his fellow Jedi, though given a smattering of science-fictional rationalization through the concept of the Midi-chlorians, has far more in common with ideas of magic as promoted in otherworldly magical fantasy-fiction. 

Despite all the quarrels between exclusivist fantasy-fans and SF-fans of the same stripe, in a narrative sense the marvels of science fiction and fantasy work the same way: they invoke forces that are not commonly explicable within the domain of "the real."  For that reason, the type of sublimity I discern within the marvelous-metaphenomenal I'll term an "anti-real" sublimity.

NUM-INOUS ENCOUNTERS, VIOLENT SUBLIMITY PART 2

In this essay I commented that I found Schopenhauer's doctrine of the sublime unsatisfying, but I didn't specify on my reasons.  This time out I'll enlarge on those reasons as well as my use of his concept of "degrees" of sublimity.

In his WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer gives this short definition of the sublime:

"The feeling of the sublime arose from the fact that something positively unfavourable to the will becomes [an] object of pure contemplation."

I can agree with every aspect of this statement but one.  For the word "positively" I would substitute "potentially."  Longinus, Burke and Kant all agree that the affect of sublimity comes into being only through a subject's contact with some overwhelming power/might/infinitude.  However, none of them go so far as to say that this power must be invariably unfavorable to the human will.  Of all the intellects that I've examining over the past few months regarding the interlinked concepts of "the sublime," "transcendence," "numinosity," and "the sense of wonder," only C.S. Lewis resembles Schopenhauer in his tendency to characterize the awestruck affect purely as a negative affect.  (The consequences of Lewis' tendency are examined here.)
To extend some of those remarks here, Lewis and Schopenhauer both to characterize the "mysterium" (Rudolf Otto's term) purely in terms of what Otto calls the fearful response of the "tremendum."  Neither adequately accounts, at least in the works examined here, for the opposing response Otto chronicles, the sense of attraction denoted as "the fascinans."

Still, Schopenhauer did conceive the notion of sussing out the sublime in terms of its degrees of expression, though none of his specific examples in WORLD are useful to me here.
In Part 1 I put forth three fictional characters from heroic cinema-- the protagonists of DIRTY HARRY, ENTER THE DRAGON and STAR WARS-- and argued that they incarnate sublimity in the quasi-Kantian  form of "dominance."

However, for each work the affect has a different characteristic due to the degree to which the phenomenality of the work bears on that affect. 

In DIRTY HARRY, as noted before, the hero dwells within an entirely naturalistic cosmos.  The viewer is undoubtedly led to feel as if Harry is a divine avenger, and delights in seeing him dominate and destroy the evildoer, particularly because Scorpio has proved a worthy foeman.   At the same time, the viewer knows that the fantasy is essentially an illusion in both Harry's world and his.  I submit that this factor lessens the power of the sublimity-affect upon the viewer's mind.

In ENTER THE DRAGON, the hero dwells within a cosmos that largely appears naturalistic but deviates in a few vital aspects, which have a marked effect on Lee's struggle for dominance.  These aspects open up new possibilities, what Kant calls "free play," within a world that can no longer be purely naturalistic, but must rather be termed "uncanny."  To be sure, most of Bruce Lee's films do remain resolutely within naturalistic confines.  However, the Hong Kong kung-fu film that his legend furthered (even though it did not create that film-genre) would continually spawn many quasi-realistic works in the same basic tradition as ENTER.  In such films, the sublimity-affect is considerably freer.

In STAR WARS, the heroes dwell witin a cosmos that may be "natural" to them but which is clearly "marvelous" to us.  Though there are some theoretical limitations-- Luke Skywalker presumably cannot encounter a fantasy-version of a genie, though he might encounter a science-fictional version of same-- the free play of phenomenal content is wide open.  Of the three, STAR WARS, whether one speaks of the film, the film-series or even the whole corpus of media-adaptations, clearly has the strongest resemblance to Burke's characterization of the sublime in terms of "the richness and profusion of images."
Of course, to say that the last version of the sublime possesses the freest nature is not to say that it is "the best."  Some readers will prefer only sublimity in its naturalistic forms, some in its uncanny forms, and some in its marvelous forms.  My form of pluralism does not stoop to meaningless preferences, but seeks to identify the spectrum over which human desire distributes itself into fictional narratives.

More on Schopenhauer to come, though not with respect to sublimity.

NUM-INOUS CONFRONTATIONS, VIOLENT SUBLIMITY

Though Kant remains the go-to person for this basic definition of the beautiful and the sublime, as per this oft-quoted-by-me passage...

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness..."-- Section 245.

...one must admit that Kant requires some retooling for a post-psychological age.  Kant's ideas of boundedness and unboundedness probably owe much to Classical philosophers like Plato and Anaximander, but as Kant presents them, they don't have any apparent links to human psychology.

The modern philosopher Georges Bataille, however, took no small influence from early Freudianism.  In my recent reading of a Bataille biography I can find no indication that he was definitely aware of that Freudian offshoot "object relations," spun off from doctrinaire Freudianism by Ferenczi and Rank in the 1920s. However, whether by accident or influence, his theories of transgression suggest a basic understanding of what it means to violate the borders of the human body, particulary in EROTISM (p. 106):

The [sexual] urge is first of all a natural one but it cannot be given free rein without barriers being torn down ... Demolished barriers are not the same as death but just as the violence of death overturns - irrevocably - the structure of life so temporarily and partially does sexual violence...

This in turn bears interesting implications for my revisions of sublimity as covalent with Huxley's concept of "vertical transcendence," as a radical ascent from or descent into the imagined nature of the body.

I've addressed elsewhere my disputation with Bataille with respect to his tendency to regard sexuality as an aspect of violence.  From that argument it should be clear that many forms of narrative violence are not notably sexual in nature, but despite that disagreement with Bataille I believe that his concept of "demolished barriers" shows how sublimity can arise from violent encounters in fictional narratives.  As noted earlier this does not mean that ALL violent encounters, any more than all sexual encounters, will possess the intensity needed to convey the sublime.  The potential is always there, however.

I've chosen three examples of cinematic heroism which are so well celebrated that I believe their violence goes beyond mere functionality; that it becomes an aspect of transpersonal myth for audiences.  Each of these examples focuses on a hero whose violent action becomes sublime, though each with its own phenomenal character.  In addition each focuses upon a climactic part of the narrative, when a given hero has a deciding impact on the narrative's conclusion, and each narrative appears in the decade of the 1970s, which would prove a critical period for the rennovation of heroic narratives in that medium.

First, as an example of the naturalistic phenomenality, I offer DIRTY HARRY (1971):

As most movie-mavens will know, this shot capsulizes the violent final encounter that will soon take place between the protagonist Harry Callahan and his maniacal enemy Scorpio.  Despite the criminal's "supervillain" name and the dastardly act he undertakes at the film's climax-- i.e., kidnapping a busful of children for ransom-- both villain and hero are entirely mundane in nature.  Diegetically Harry is an ordinary man with no special abilities beyond those conveyed by police department training.  However, at this climactic moment Harry becomes, in symbolic terms at least, an avatar of "the wrath of God" that will soon be visited, to the audience's implicit delight, upon the heinous antagonist. 

At this point, if no other, Dirty Harry takes on a transcendent quality.  I would call this particular quality (revised since I last wrote of it here) as the "atypical-sublime."  In a naturalistic world, even the most extreme actions by hero and villain can never be more than atypical occurences in a world dominated by typical events.

As an example of the uncanny phenomenality, I offer ENTER THE DRAGON (1973):

DRAGON, which I've not yet examined in depth on my film-blog, is one of many action-films that could be entirely naturalistic in nature with the removal of certain content within the film.  For instance, had Bruce Lee's character (also named Lee) simply battled the villainous Han in a more mundane setting, that would have removed one metaphenomenal element from the film.  However, the idea of a villain trapping a hero in a "hall of mirrors" goes quite a bit beyond the habits of even the most inventive of the naturalistic villains, such as the aforementioned Scorpio.  A hall of mirrors certainly does not violate our ideas of causality, so it is not metaphenomenal in any cognitive sense, but because it does suggest the metaphenomenal in an affective sense-- pushing Han more toward the domain of the supervillain proper-- this scene in particular captures violent sublimity in one of its two metaphenomenal modes, both of which I still designate as "the strange-sublime."

Finally, as an example of the marvelous phenomenality, STAR WARS (1977) proves efficacious:

The climax of STAR WARS takes a different tack from the previous two films in that it deals with a much more monumental threat, the Death Star, and destroys it not in a *mano-a-mano* confrontation as in the other two films, but after the fashion of "David and Goliath," with the heroes defeating a superior enemy through an attack on a weak point.  The two heroes most involved, Solo and Skywalker, employ during the climax offensive weapons that are perhaps "natural" to the characters, but to the viewing audience remain as fundamentally marvelous as the spells of a wizard.  There is of course still a sense that the two heroes put their lives as much on the line as the other referenced characters, but once again the audience is given an ecstatic pleasure at the sight of seeing this particular body demolished, just as in the more down-to-earth films a particular villain must be destroyed.

More on this in part 2.