THE READING RHEUM: THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1902)

I've probably read Doyle's HOUND two or three times just for pleasure, but not since starting this blog in 2007. I recall occasionally ascribing high mythicity to the novel in this or that essay, but I never analyzed the book, even though the story is one of the best-known in literature, making it something of a "popular myth." That, however, doesn't count in terms of my charting a narrative's epistemological patterns. I have reviewed at least four cinematic adaptations of HOUND on the movie-blog, and I've never discerned high mythicity even in the two best and most famous films, the 1939 Fox film and the 1959 Hammer outing. 

Having reread the book now with my myth-stalker's hat on, I find that Doyle was in no way subtle about his primary myth-theme. The author hints at that theme in the first chapter, when Holmes and Watson discuss the pedigree of their client Dr. Mortimer by consulting a medical directory (the Victorian version of the Internet). They find that the doctor has authored articles with titles like "Is Disease a Reversion?" and "Some Freaks of Atavism." This concern with the distant past plays into the case Mortimer had brought to Holmes. The doctor tells Holmes and Watson that he half-believes in the Baskerville curse, that may have killed the former baronet Charles and may yet take the life of the sole heir. Sir Henry.

I've mentioned in one film-review that there's never a possibility, in Holmes' modern London, that there exists a demon-hound that slew the Baskervilles' degenerate ancestor in the 17th century, or one that might take the life of Sir Henry. Holmes duly mocks the very idea, despite taking the case. In the end the existence of a demon-hound matters less than the fact that the world that bred such superstitions still endures. Thus the still-savage land of Dartmoor can cast a spell upon some Victorian men, as attested by Watson when, as Holmes' agent, he first views the wild moorland around Baskerville Hall:

MY DEAR HOLMES: My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.

The curse of the Baskervilles might not extend back to the days of prehistoric menhirs, but the event that brought about the supposed curse, in which a hot-blooded lord dedicated his soul to Satan for the sexual possession of an innocent maiden, remains no less remote from the experience of Victorian Londoners. 

And yet, England has its share of non-superstitious degeneracy. Selden, the murderer who haunts the moors, is directly compared to a caveman when Watson first sees him. Master plotter Stapleton, the one who arranged his uncle's death and tries to do the same with his cousin Henry, is called a "throwback" when Holmes descries how much a portrait of a 17th-century Baskerville resembles Stapleton. Stapleton's real name is the same as that of his father Rodger Baskerville, and no one knew of Stapleton's existence because he was born abroad, when his father left England under some cloud. In fact, a fair number of modern Britons have similar clouds. Stapleton and his wife Beryl get involved in some vague corruption long before the hound plot, and Laura Lyons, one of Stapleton's pawns, suffers from having made a bad marriage, though Doyle imputes all the wrongdoing to a no-good husband. If, as Mortimer believes, all disease really is a "reversion" to some less exalted state, that would include the disease of crime, which can be cured only by the relentless logic of a master detective.

While the cinema has its own ways of conveying mythicity, so far even the most faithful adaptations of HOUND known to me haven't been able to tune into Doyle's myth-theme. After finishing the novel, I re-watched the 1939 version again. Sure enough, the script only uses the prehistoric settings briefly and doesn't even show the villain meeting the harsh justice of a death in the Grimpen Mire. It's not impossible, though, that there's some HOUND-film I've not seen that taps into the deeper theme, and I look forward to finding it. 

ADDENDUM: I didn't originally apply the "clansgression" label to the 1902 novel, because Doyle downplays the fact that Stapleton is Sir Henry's cousin. And the author certainly does not pass comment on the fact that when Stapleton seeks to pimp out his wife by causing Sir Henry to fall for the glamorous Beryl, he's "sharing" her with a first cousin, even though (1) no sexual congress takes place, (2) Beryl does not become emotionally entwined with Henry as he does with her, and (3) Stapleton/Baskerville becomes jealous of the tete-a-tete even though no transgression has occurred. The novel ends with Stapleton's death and the assertion that Beryl knew nothing of the murder plot, implying that she'll be exonerated of complicity-- though Doyle also devotes little space to the cooling of Henry's passion for his cousin's wife.  

        

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS

My next mythcomics post will deal with a moderately obscure manga, GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (1991-99), and so part of this essay will be to explicate the manga's rationale and the background of its main characters. But I also want to use elements of this series to illustrate a special dynamic about epistemological patterns in fiction: that, unlike the patterns that human beings ascribe to aspects of reality, fictional patterns proceed not from cause to effect, but from effect to cause.

Every author who utilizes epistemological patterns in his fiction is naturally influenced by those found in reality. But whether the author is the organized type who plans out everything, or the type who flies by his pants-seat, authors in general first conceive of the effect they want to make with their characters/situations and then work backwards to justify the cause of the effects. The justification may not even be one that is currently validated by the dominant intellectual culture. Freudianism is not as validated today as in past eras. But when an author wants his story to invoke the psychological potentiality, Freud supplies the needed rationales for works ranging from MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA to "Superman's Return to Krypton."

Here's what I wrote about the manga series for my review of the anime TV show:             

Starring character Reiko Mikami is a "ghost sweeper" in her late twenties or early thirties, and she uses a variety of supernatural weapons to exorcise troublesome ghosts and demons who plague modern-day people and businesses. Mikami is as courageous and resourceful as the best heroes, but she's also extremely mercenary, taxing her customers with huge bills so that someday she can become a rich woman. She's also slightly larcenous-- one episode displays her knowledge of burglary techniques-- and she constantly underpays her male assistant, seventeen-year-old Tadao Yokoshima. She gets away with this because she's super-hot and knows that horndog Yokoshima will accept any wage just to scope her out. The fact that she's exploiting the youth, however, does not keep her from doling out brutal punishment to the teen any time he tries to feel her up, or even expresses a negative opinion of her. Yokoshima, for his part, is clearly meant to be the "goat" of the series, the one who has all the terrible things happen to him-- and because he's such an unregenerate perv, his sufferings are funny.

(NOTE 4-8-06: A closer reading of the manga indicates no support for the idea-- derived from both Wikipedia and Grokipedia-- that Mikami is 31 years old. In one specific story, she says she's 20 years old while Yokoshima is 17. I'll explore this facet of the series more thoroughly in a forthcoming Meditation.)  

Now, many long-running manga serials have exploited similar situations without imbuing their characters with anything like a psychology, and the first two years of SWEEPER seem like a lot of other comedy-oriented shonen manga: lots of high-powered action with some comedy relief in the form of a dumb guy getting clobbered. Reiko Mikami's first episode clearly shows her as a master of her ghostbusting craft, as well as her determination that anyone who needs her services must pay heavily for them. 

In contrast, she underpays assistant Yokoshima because he appears to be a subservient minion and even implies that she gives him fringe benefits whenever he peeps at her in the bath-- though when he goes so far as to touch her, or even to make lewd propositions, she beats the hell out of him. And yet, unlike similar serials like LOVE HINA and ZERO'S FAMILIAR, there's no internal rationale for keeping the fractious couple together. If Mikami is really repelled by Yokoshima's attentions, why doesn't she just fire him and find another cheap, horny teenager? 

 During the first two years of the feature, most of the stories were adapted to the aforementioned tv show-- though not the one entitled "Dad's Here." At the opening of the story, Mikami's second assistant Okinu, a naive young ghost, teases the sexy exorcist about being "gloomy" in Yokoshima's absence. Mikami asserts that she doesn't take the youth seriously because he's a lust-filled "brat" while she's a mature woman. Yet she hedges her bets by stating that if he ever did become a real man, she might reconsider her verdict. The rest of the story, however, just shows Yokoshima messing up as usual.      

Now, while the manga-artist Takashi Shiina doesn't expend a lot of time on a backstory for Yokoshima, the story "Love Needs Its Time" provides some basic info on how high-schooler Mikami became a superior ghostbuster by training under a Christian exorcist. In addition, Shiina is careful to show that the priest is too idealistic to ask for remuneration. Yet his student Mikami is nothing like her sensei, being exceptionally desirous of making lots of money once she sets up her own ghost-sweeping business. But Shiina doesn't tell the reader why she came to be this way: a fairly unique admixture of heroism and avarice. 

Shiina does bring up the subject intermittently, though. One story shows how an enemy de-ages Mikami into a little girl, after which even Mikami's sensei remarks on the differences between the cute munchkin and her money-hungry adult self. In my next post, I'll show how I think Shiina built up some of Mikami's psychology in order to render a partial answer, guiding his readers to get the effect he Shiina desired.

ADDENDUM: To relate the SWEEPER series to the "thymotic and epithymotic" categories I introduced in THYMOS BE THE PLACE PT. 4, Mikami's repeated clobberings of Yokoshima would be "epithymotic" if she were only concerned with defending herself. However, if she has, even on a subconscious level, started regarding Yokoshima as a potential mate-- in the event that he can become a "true man"-- then her assaults can be deemed "thymotic," in that she's trying to interact with him on a soul-to-soul level, even if she still wants to be "on top."

A newer meditation on a 1996 sequence, "Death Zone," provides the first direct testimony by Mikami as to why she hired Yokoshima, because he was "funny."

  

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.2

In this 2022 post, I briefly described a few ways in which I differed from the statements Susanne Langer made in the section I quoted here. To sum up my main line of critique, I stated that I felt that the "unknown creators" of both archaic religious myths and folktales possessed the ability to allow "their imaginations to roam freely," but that both forms of narrative also channeled epistemological patterns, though myths tended to develop those patterns more "thoroughly." So I disagreed with Langer's essential claim: that tales were focused wholly upon "wish fulfillment" while myths encompassed "a world picture, an insight into life generally, not a personal imaginary biography." What I liked about her formulation is that she distinguished between the tales' supposed reliance upon "subjective symbols" and the myths' predilection for "observed folkways and nature-ways." Though I did not say so in the 2022 post, the subjectivity that Langer attributes to tales may be loosely comparable to my concept of a narrative's "lateral meaning," while her focus upon "folkways and nature-ways" parallels my criteria for "virtual meaning." That demonstration of an intersubjective pattern of thought between myself and a deceased scholar I never knew prompts me to indulge in this "compare-and-contrast" game.                                                                                          

But none of the above relates to the topic of emulation, which I've raised in my title. As it happens, 2022 was also the year I began writing a lot more about crossover, agency, and interordination, as in this August post. In that post, I used two iterations of Steve Ditko's originary character The Question to formulate the concepts of "trope emulation" and "icon emulation." To shorten the argument a bit, I said that when Alan Moore conceived Rorschach, his variation on The Question, he was in no way asserting any identity between his character and Ditko's character. Rather, what Moore did was to borrow tropes from Ditko's character and from other sources in order to create an independent icon. This, I asserted, was trope emulation. But when Denny O'Neil created his variation on the Ditko crusader, he attempted to assert an identity between his creation and that of Ditko, if only for the sake of impressing fans of the older creation. This, I asserted, was icon emulation.                                 

Since Langer was in no way attempting to form a general theory of literary narrative, naturally she started from a different place than I did. But I find it interesting that. rightly or wrongly, she characterizes all the figures of folktales as entities completely independent of one another, claiming that they are little more than the functions of various wish-fulfillment scenarios. This I regard as "trope emulation," though with the caveat that in my system characters like Cinderella are not just functions, but icons in their own right, no matter how much they fluctuate from one iteration to another. In the case of myth-figures, Langer regards that they are capable of merging with one another because "myth tends to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin enter into definite relations with one another." This I regard as "icon emulation," and there's even a loose parallel of purpose. Just as O'Neil promulgates his version of "a Question" but some but not all of the poetic tropes of the Ditko character, Irish Christians promoted a saint called Brigid in order to appeal to a laity familiar with a pagan goddess of the same name. There will probably be a few other points of comparison, because whatever my disagreements with Langer, I find her fertility of mind on matters mythopoeic to be equal to that of Jung and Campbell.

MYTHCOMICS: "TO DREAM-- PERCHANCE TO LIVE" (FLAMING CARROT #8, 1985)

 "Certain particulars have more of an archetypal content than others; that is to say, they are 'eminent instances' which stand forth in a characteristic amplitude as representatives of many others; they enclose in themselves a certain totality, arranged in a certain way, stirring in the soul something at once familiar and strange, and thus outwardly as well as inwardly they lay claim to a certain unity and generality."-- FOUNTAIN, p. 54.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Wheelwright's borrowed (from Melville) phrase "eminent instances" parallels my repeated distinction between the simple variables and the complex variables that make up narrative fiction. Unlike Wheelwright, my definition of "eminence" is strongly if not fundamentally bound to the ways in which the elements, or "instances," of a narrative reflect epistemological patterns found throughout human culture, which patterns provide what I define as "complexity." By the same token, simple variables in a narrative might be termed "non-eminent instances," because they are purely, or almost purely, functional in nature. Often these elements are just there, providing no more than background. However, in some narratives-- particularly those of the "nonsense fantasy" category I've been discussing-- an author can invoke in his readers a particular type of strangeness by undercutting a familiar "eminent instance" by infusing it with some non-eminent depictions or associations. Take the cover of FLAMING CARROT #2.                                                             

In this single-panel joke, author Bob Burden has his main character, the demented, absurdist superhero Flaming Carrot, refuse the challenge of "Mister Death" to play a game of chess, and instead propose a game of whiffleball. Though Burden often made random substitutions of silly images to undermine the Carrot's adventures, this substitution of whiffleball for chess is not so random. There can be little doubt that the trope "Death playing chess with a mortal" is derived from Ingmar Bergman's famous scenario from his 1957 film THE SEVENTH SEAL. A reader who knows nothing of that cinematic milestone, however, may still get the essence of the joke: chess is serious, whiffleball is silly, so substituting whiffleball for chess in any context is likely meant to carry a humorous context. Often Burden's substitutions were simple inversions like this one. But in the story I'll discuss here, Burden again invokes familiar images or tropes that have "eminent" associations and then tries to undercut them with their "non-eminent" opposites-- but what he assembles still keeps some of the original epistemological patterns, mostly belonging to the metaphysical category.                                             

  The splash panel for PERCHANCE abounds in random imagery. Yet Burden can't quite manage to exclude the topic that the story is functionally about: the Carrot's descent into, and escape from, the world of death.                                                                                           

               

                               

                                                                                                                                                                           A few pages provide setup for the situation: that the Carrot fell victim to an ignominious accident that almost killed him, though a clique of "practitioners of eccentric and oddball science" revive the looney hero, and the rest of the issue is devoted to his description of the wacky limbo into which he descended. The dream of falling is fairly basic, even with the caveat that the hero falls in a drawn-out manner, like Alice, but Burden adds an interesting twist. After striking the ground, the Carrot finds himself hanging from a tree, where bugs crawl upon him. This may not be a reference to any specific story, though it did remind me of the story of Ishtar's descent into the underworld. In that myth, Ishtar is forced to surrender all of her vestments, leaving her as an empty shell to be hung on a peg until she's later rescued. In contrast, the Carrot only escapes his helpless suspension by surrendering "the things that held me to the tree"-- though he gets some help from luck, for he only gets completely free when he rolls his lucky number.                                     

             

                                                               

Carrot gets some minimal guidance from a "broadcast speaker" implanted in his chest by a person unknown, apparently in one or more previous stories, but the hero still needs a lot of input from the limbo-locals. A random association reminds Carrot of his early life, so he wanders to a suburban division where he encounters his childhood home, complete with his mother, who's now a vicious monster. Carrot escapes her with ease, and then gets advice from a "Beanhead," who tells him can only escape limbo by seeking a crossroads, though the fastest way to get there is to play a round of golf. The two of them encounter a city, though Beanhead declines to follow Carrot there.      

Carrot wanders a little in the city until he happens to enter a gambling joint. There he meets an unnamed man with an eyepatch (so I'll call him Patch), one who's been looking for Carrot to return him to the real world, sort of a reversal on the Greek psychopomp who guides souls to the underworld. Unfortunately, Patch is Limbo's version of a Lyft driver, obliged to take more than one soul back. Carrot and Patch are joined by two guys whose only function is to give Burden a few new joke-routines. However, Patch meets his fate when he seeks to pick up a third "rider," for the third man objects to the name Patch calls him, and both of them perish in a gun-duel. Carrot steals Patch's ring and the three survivors flee an unseen horror, "The Dragoon."                                                                                      

A clue inside the dead guide's ring leads the trio to another dimensional traveler, Cracked Jack (presumably a pun on the cereal Crackerjack, in which one could find cheap prizes, including rings). This decrepit individual, who has a spider living in his skull, sends the trio to Potter's Field, which is the common phrase for a cemetery dedicated to people who can't pay for funerals.                                             

  

On the belief that they can only enter Potter's Field with a bribe, the three goofuses waste a page burglarizing a rich lord's tower for some silver (pantyhose) eggs-- none of which matters, since they never meet anyone who asks for a bribe. When the three reach Potter's Field, it's not a cemetery but a movie theater, and the ticket-taker calls security on them. The guards prove to be the same long-legged wights seen on the splash page, but Carrot drives them off with his "real world" pistol (which he acquired from the very unreal simulacrum of his early home). And then the Dragoon overtakes the trio, proving to be a gigantic version of the Carrot himself. Can you say, "hero must fight evil version of himself?"                                     

              

Following the demise of Carrot's companions, he rather belatedly asks the voice in his chest how the Dragoon can get so big. The voice tells him the giant makes himself big with "the power of suggestion," but when Carrot wonders if he can do it too, the voice discourages him. However, this time the demented crusader is correct; he enlarges himself and knocks his big doppelganger for a loop. He rushes to the movie-screen, entreating entrance back to the real world, but someone on the other side wants a password. Then the chest-voice finally justifies its existence with a word "means everything," and that gets Carrot back to the world of the living. He finishes telling his story to the mad scientists, who debate its truth-value while Carrot invites a bunch of cute bar-singers to serenade him. The End-- except for my verdict that if one excised all the "non-eminent" elements with which Burden tries to make the hero's journey wacky rather than imposing, what one would have would resemble many of the "straight" after-death voyages in both canonical and pop fiction.           

ADDENDUM 1-24-2025: I totally misread the section in which the Carrot meets the character I thought to be nameless (hence I gave him the name "Patch.") The caption I reprinted for that page actually says that the patch-eyed man is named "Hurtubiese," and this has an "eminent instance" significance because Burden also said that Hurtubiese used to be a chauffeur. I hadn't seen Cocteau's ORPHEUS in many years when I wrote this essay, but I did re-watch and review the 1950 film in late December. Therefore I now recognize that Burden was referencing the character of Heurtebise, who's first introduced as the chauffeur of Princess Death, and who later guides Orpheus into the underworld. So there was textual support in "Perchance" for the idea I expressed above: that Patch/Hurtubiese was a psychopomp-in-reverse, guiding the Carrot out of the death-world back into life. In keeping with his nonsense-aesthetic, Burden deliberately undercuts the character's function by having him killed, but then the Carrot and his allies still have to seek out an oracle to get where they want to go. There's nothing "one-eyed" about the Cocteau character, so that element in Hurtubiese may be random. Maybe Burden was thinking of the Graiae in the Greek myth of Perseus, who only shared one eye between them-- or maybe he just liked Nick Fury as a young reader and felt like drawing a character with a patch over one eye.                                                                                           

PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 3

 Since I'm not sure I'll finish STORIES ABOUT STORIES, I skipped Chapter 3 and read Chapter 4, at least in part because it concerns Attebery's antagonistic relationship to Joseph Campbell.

But before getting to anything about Campbell, it occurred to me to relate Attebery's definition of myth as "any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief" to one of the first "mythographers" I evaluated on this blog, Eric Gould. In the work referenced here, Gould coined a term I've often used, "mythicity," but he did not share Attebery's broad valorization of any mythic tale simply because it "authorized belief."

The fact that classical and totemistic myths have to refer to some translinguistic fact-- to the Gods and Nature-- proves not that there are Gods, but that our talents for interpreting our place in the world may be distinctly limited by the nature of language.

In my own essay I registered my disagreement with Gould on that point. Nevertheless, Attebery seems to have vaulted over the epistemological question, "what authority does religious 'belief' possess, even if it expresses the collective worldview of a given tribe, nation, or ethnicity?" I would be the last to validate the Doubting Thomas fallacy of the materialists, "If you can't dissect the risen body of Christ, that means no such body ever existed." But belief can be epistemologically valid insofar as its narratives reproduce epistemological patterns that are, in a sense, common to all human experience, not just to particular human groupings. For me at least, that transcendence of particular cultures trumps the "limits of language" that Eric Gould finds so disconcerting.

At base, Joseph Campbell shared this belief in such patterns, though he was, as I've said elsewhere, rather scattershot in his hermeneutics during his unquestionably distinguished career. But since Campbell and some of his fellow travelers are not validating myth based only upon whether the myth-narratives "authorize" a particular group's "belief," it's not surprising to me that Atteberry implicitly dismisses many comparativists that came into prominence in the 1960s, lumping together "Claude Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade" as proponents of "myth criticism." Attebery is initially a bit circumspect about pinning down what he doesn't like about myth criticism, though immediately after these citations he brackets the myth-critics as sharing "the assumption that all myths are psychically available to modern writers and readers." Attebery does not at first raise the Barthesian specter of "appropriation," the idea that it's wrong to pilfer cultural artifacts from cultures not one's own. The author's initial reticence may come about because he segues from talking about the cultural influence of the myth-critics (presumably in America and Western Europe, though Attebery doesn't specify) to discussing the concomitant rise of the mass-market proliferation of the fantasy genre in the same decade and thereafter. But when he turns his attention to Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, it's clear the author has that devil Appropriation on his mind.

The problem with Campbell's monomyth as an analytical tool  is that it always works because it simplifies every story to the point where nothing but the monomyth is left. It ignores the many mythic stories that do not have questing heroes, and it leaves out the culturally defined values and symbols that make each tradition unique.

I disagree with only one part of this statement. As I may have said elsewhere on this blog, I have not read HERO in several years, and have not ever reviewed it, but I think it the least epistemologically valid of his works. If I had my way, Campbell would be much better known for his "four functions." But I must admit that Campbell's concept of an over-arching "super-myth," while fallible in many ways, had the effect of getting a lot of people to check out that particular book, including (allegedly) George Lucas. 

Yet Attebery makes the opposite mistake. When he bestows upon traditional myths a uniqueness that sets those stories apart from other cognate stories, he makes the same mistake Barthes did in MYTHOLOGIES. Long before there existed either "capitalist" or "post-industrial" cultures, so-called "traditional cultures" constantly swapped or stole story-ideas from each other. Did Norse Odin precede Germanic Wotan? No one knows, and no one should care. The same principle should apply to the intermingling of elements from disparate cultures in order to craft modern magical fantasies. We would not have a LORD OF THE RINGS if Tolkien had not synthesized many myth-traditions, not least the very disparate traditions of Celtic tales and medieval Christian religion. Alan Garner's WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN is nowhere near the greatness of RINGS. But Garner's synthesis was a good one, and does not deserve to be downgraded because (according to Attebery) he "mixed mythologies indiscriminately," with "Nordic dwarves, Celtic elves, a Tolkienian evil force named Nastrond, and a Merlinesque wizard who guards a cave of sleeping warriors like those of the Germanic Frederick Barbarosa." It's odd that Attebery should invoke a 12th century German ruler in concert with a "Merlinesque wizard," rather than referencing the "sleeping warrior" myths about King Arthur, who's more frequently associated with Merlin.

In the end, the argument comes down not to logic but taste. Attebery clearly prefers modern fantasy authors to pick some corpus of culturally related myth-stories and to build from that corpus. But as I said, Tolkien himself did not do this, and as yet I have not seen the author critiquing the Oxford don on the same terms he uses toward both Campbell and Alan Garner. I too can think of many bad admixtures of disparate traditional stories, but that does not prove that "mix and match" is a bad strategy in itself. I also think Atteberry wants authors to stick to particular mythoi so that he can judge better if the creators do what he thinks most valuable: ringing in modern interpretive changes to traditional lore. 

If I make it through another chapter, I plan to address one of the major omissions in Attebery's schema: the differing dynamics of oral culture vs. written culture.

A NOSE FOR GNOSIS

What a difference a year makes.

It was in May 2019 that I first began referencing the four functions of Joseph Campbell's system as "epistemological patterns"-- which, as far as I know, he did not-- in the essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE. Of those functions I wrote:

For me, as a modern amateur pundit, I believe that both myth and literature utilize epistemological patterns-- whether sociological or psychological, cosmological or metaphysical-- to create structured fictional worlds in which those patterns confer meaning, or at least perspective, upon real life as it is lived, without any imposed meaning or perspective.

Yet, in August 2018, I didn't see any connection between my system and epistemology in the FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE series:

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs could display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters...

In subsequent essays I noted that most if not all of my previous essays had indeed been epistemological in nature, but it was, as the HALF-TRUTH essay specifies, an epistemology of "half-truths," which is not the type of knowledge with which philosophers like James and Russell were concerned. 

FOUNT also specified that I deemed merely "functional" aspects of narrative fiction to be aligned to the perceptual form of knowledge, "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while the "super-functional" aspects were aligned to the conceptual form, "knowledge-by-description." I might, at some point, see whether or not my "lateral values" line up with "acquaintance" and "vertical values" with "description." But instead I'll segue to a subject I've neglected far more than epistemology: ontology.

The two philosophical terms were formulated by different thinkers at different times, but in modern times they've become joined at the hip, as in this basic statement online:

ontology asks what exists, and epistemology asks how we can know about the existence of such a thing.

Since I began examining Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy for possible application to my literary hermeneutics, as in essays like MIGHT AND MYTH, I've been examining the idea that Whitehead's "pre-epistemic prehensions" comprised an ontology, while the epistemologically oriented apprehensions formed an epistemology. Prehensions as I understand them would necessarily flow from "knowledge-by-acquaintance," while apprehensions would line up with "knowledge-by-description." So far, as I observed in MIGHT AND MYTH, I've confined these alignments to sussing out what it means that the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR had more concrescence within the mythopoeic potentiality than the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, though to be sure, that era of SPIDER-MAN is more concrescent with respect ot the dramatic potentiality.

DIDACTICISM DELIBERATIONS

Originally this essay was meant to build on my distinction between problems and conundrums. In my September 2023 post WHAT VS. HOW, I gave examples of two narratives which used a particular psychological source of knowledge, that of Freud, as a "half-truth" to set up conflicts between fictional characters. The first narrative dealt only with the ontological pattern in terms of "what things happened in the story," so it used its pattern superficially, just to create a "problem" that the characters could solve. (A superficial use of the pattern would also be a "problem" even if the characters failed to solve the difficulty.) The second narrative did make a thorough use of its epistemological pattern in such a way that it illustrated a "conundrum" for the audience. This level of difficulty would continue to exist for real people in their world, no matter whether the characters did or did not solve the way the conundrum manifested in their world. Originally, I wanted to emphasize that fictional works in which the author thoroughly explores a given epistemological pattern parallel the way real humans beings are obliged, by the nature of the reality they experience, to judge the patterns of that reality and make decisions on their interpretations of experience.

However, in the course of ruminating, I reread another epistemological post from May of this same year, FUNCTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. In this post I distinguished two complementary terms, the "stereotype" and the "simple variable," as distinct from two other complementary terms, the "archetype" and the "complex variable," in that the latter possessed a greater than average functionality, itself termed "super-functionality."

All well and good, according to my system. But "stereotype" and "archetype" only apply to one of the two "vertical" systems by which authors and audiences derive knowledge-based meaning from stories. That virtue belongs to the "mythopoeic potentiality," which manifests through the elaboration of the *quanta* I term "correlations."

Still okay, but I've not said nearly enough about the other vertical system, the didactic potentiality, whose quanta I've termed "cogitations." Stereotypes and archetypes have often been applied to symbolic discourse, so those terms don't translate well to talking about didactic constructions of meaning. But I've certainly seen cogitations that I thought were simple and merely functional, as against those that are complex and super-functional-- but for the time being, I'm proposing no new terms for these respective states. 

In my survey of the individual episodes of Classic STAR TREK, I'm sure I generally confined myself to exploring the mythopoeic correlations of each episode. But in theory, I *could* have explored that particular series purely in terms of whether its didactic cogitations were "functional" or "super-functional." Here are two examples.

As most TREK fans know, showrunner Gene Roddenberry was an avowed atheist. Nevertheless, the scripts he accepted for filming (and which he always re-wrote to suit his beliefs) sometimes involved the role of religion in the future-culture of the Federation, and Roddenberry did not present a standard atheist's view of religion. He knew his audience would not accept overt atheism, so often the producer accepted scripts that simply talked in general terms about the role of religion in society.

I gave the second season episode a poor rating "Bread and Circuses" in terms of its mythopoeic correlations, but it doesn't fare any better in terms of didactic cogitations, as should be clear from this excerpt:

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are initially captured by a resistance-group fighting Roman hegemony. They are much puzzled by the members' claim to be worshipers of the Sun, and McCoy even states, with amazing falsity, that the Romans of Earth had no sun-worship. By the end of the episode, though, it's revealed that the renegades are actually the Christians of this pseudo-Earth; they just took an extra 2000 years to show up. Despite an early claim in the story that the Federation embraces many religions, the story ends on an egregiously proselytizing note. Safe back on the ship, the crew-members content themselves with the ideal-- derived from many a Cecil B. de Mille movie, no doubt-- that in due time the evil of the Romans will be conquered by the goodness of the Christians. One may safely assume that Magna Roma's destined religion will also eventually lead to liberal democracy.

In my view, the episode advanced the didactic view that the pattern of cultural development seen on Earth was going to be duplicated on the world of Magna Roma: brutal polytheism being succeeded by a kinder, gentler monotheism, which is turn would be succeeded (though the episode does not directly say so) by the sort of secular humanism one beholds in TREK. It's in such a secular humanism that it's possible, as my note specifies, that many religions can prosper alongside one another, though it's a mark of Roddenberry's true sentiments that one hardly ever sees religious celebrations either on the Enterprise or in Federation colonies. I think the proselytizing note with which "Bread" ends was nothing but protective coloration, to diffuse any possible accusations of "space atheists," but whether I'm right or not, the proselytization contradicts the earlier statement of overall tolerance, and so the "cogitation" is not well executed. Even the reference to "panem et circenses" in the title fizzles out after the first arena-scenes.

In contrast, another second-season episode, "Who Mourns for Adonais," while it only rates "fair" in terms of its mythic correlations, might enjoy a "good" rating in terms of didactic cogitations. I would surmise that Roddenberry was probably more in sympathy with the story's ethos, even though again he threw in a minor anti-atheistic statement:

The trope of "aliens who were once Earth-gods" has always been absurd, but Coon and Ralston strive to give it some gravitas. On one hand the future-men declare that they no longer need the parenting influence of gods-- though, perhaps to keep from sounding too atheistic, Kirk delivers a line about finding it adequate to have "one" god. On the other hand, the script attempts to capture the Glory That Was Greece in this science-fictional context, and to admit, however obliquely, that all human culture descends from early man's attempts to understand the universe through a multiplicity of deities.

This script is not interested in the actual dynamics of Greek religion any more than "Bread" was interested in the dynamics of early Christianity. Still, there's a much better understanding of how early religion provides a foundation for secular humanism, even though the two seem opposed. That's why, following Apollo's defeat and extirpation, Kirk wistfully wishes they could have burned one laurel leaf to the memory of the deities that brought humanity out of ignorance. And so "Adonais" provides a "super-functional" cogitation, and for good measure works as a elaborate "conundrum" within the didactic potentiality, while the story of Magna Roma is merely a superficial "problem."

CHAOS OVER ORDER

...Calvino concluded that, although belief in the power of literature to promulgate a particular political doctrine was as deluded as the conventional view that literature expresses immutable truths of human nature, the writer still has legitimate political roles. He can help to give a voice to the inarticulate. By presenting possible worlds, he can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.

Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not a calculated order.  -- George Bataille, LITERATURE AND EVIL, p. 89, 1957. (translation Alastair Hamilton)

Despite bracketing Calvino and Bataille, I'm only citing them to support some of my recent thoughts on the legacy of Lewis Carroll.

 

I'm entirely on Carroll's side when he burlesques the moralistic priorities of his time. The "Father William" poem was one that I enjoyed as a child, though I had no idea that it was a parody of an earlier work. I responded, on an elementary level, to visual incongruities like an old man balancing an eel on the tip of his nose. 

At the same time, I remarked that Carroll did not set up any sort of direct counter-argument against the utilitarianism of the moralists. Doing anything like that would have run counter to his project, to embrace incongruous images and wordplay above all other considerations. Even if he meant to mock English orthodoxy with his spoof of the heraldic symbols of the Lion and the Unicorn, he wouldn't be doing so to envisage some other, better ethos, which, in the first quote, Peter Washington claims was former Communist Calvino's motive for embracing non-representational fantasy.

I've no idea if Bataille had any contact with the works of Calvino, though I tend to doubt it. Yet it's interesting that the French philosopher undercuts, in general terms, the notion that the "chaos" of impossible notions might simply be used for non-specific utilitarian purposes, for forging new ideas about re-ordering society along better lines. I'm sure that I've occasionally touched on this notion in one context or another, but I like to think I've never descended into the banality of Jack Zipes, claiming that fantasy is good for "questioning the hierarchical arrangements of society." 

I don't know that Carroll, despite his considerable intellectual gifts, would have thought my ethos any less constricting than the Victorian moralists. Because I'm always validating narratives full of "epistemological patterns," some onlookers might assume I'm automatically claiming such works to be superior in my private literary hierarchy. I've tried to counter-act this misreading with my definition of all literary insights as "half-truths." They are not immutable truths or hearkenings of better societal orders. Of fantasy are half-truths born, and to fantasy they all return, even the ones with heavy utilitarian content. Still, I validate the psychological patterns of the Alice books as epistemologically concrescent, rather than the books being "pure nonsense." Perhaps Carroll would not have agreed.

Anyone who has read my blogposts attentively, if not uncritically, should anticipate that I might validate Bataille's analysis of impossible things. (I haven't written on Calvino before, but I will note in passing that though I liked some of the nonsense of COSMICOMICS, the aforementioned WINTER'S NIGHT is just another lit-guy fetishizing his disinterest/incapacity to tell an interesting story.) Bataille probably would also not get my distinctions regarding "epistemology built on literary patterns of knowledge rather than as knowledge as consensually defined." But I agree with him that "impossible things" in fiction always suggest the violence of chaos more than new patterns of order, in "orderly" fantasists like Tolkien as much as "chaotic" types like Carroll.

In the fourth section of LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, I disagreed with Susanne Langer that folktales were no more than a "remarkable form of nonsense," and that they did on occasion encode some of the same epistemological patterns of "full-fledged myths." That said, the latter types of stories tend to privilege epistemological half-truths. I would tend to assume (though no one can be sure) that the chaotic elements in The Epic of Gilgamesh, like the giant scorpions encountered by the title hero, are "ordered" by, say, metaphysical correlations about the nature of the universe. In contrast, a lot of the talking animals of the simpler folktales Langer scorned may not have any such patterns. But as basic constructs the giant scorpions and the talking animals equally communicate the chaos of *strangeness," as much as do (say) Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter and the Mad Hatter of the BATMAN comics.

WHAT VS. HOW

 One key notion I argued in the cited essay was the importance of epistemological patterns to the process of concrescence in fiction. It's not that any work of fiction necessarily seeks to make definitive statements about epistemology. But in the process of any act of imitation, it's natural though not inevitable for authors to attempt buttressing their fictional works by drawing upon patterns that represent the "real world." Often these patterns are based upon propositions that the consensus-audience no longer accepts, or does not accept universally, ranging from the Oedipal theories of Freud to the 19th-century theories of "the Hollow Earth." To the audience, what's important is whether or not the author can make even the most absurd proposition "entertaining"-- and this, not real-world applicability, is what gives even the weakest of weak propositions a peculiar endurance, if not strength in the usual sense.-- THE FULL VALUE OF THE HALF-TRUTH.

Today I thought of a simpler way to distinguish "problems" from "conundrums" as I originally defined them in  2021's PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS, to wit:

A narrative's "problems," its lateral/literal virtues as expressed through either the kinetic potentiality, the dramatic potentiality, or a combination of the two, concern WHAT THINGS HAPPEN in the narrative.

A narrative's "conundrums," its vertical virtues as expressed through the either the didactic potentiality, the mythopoeic potentiality, or a combination of the two, concerns HOW THINGS HAPPEN in the narrative.

I gave a few examples of specific problems and conundrums in the 2021 essay, but rather than go over the same ground, I'll try to show how one of the examples I gave in FULL VALUE can apply across the "problem/conundrum" continuum. I haven't encountered a surfeit of stories about the Hollow Earth, but certainly there should be a number of ways in which Freud's Oedipal theory has been used for both lateral and vertical formulations.

In the interest of testing my theory on as broad a canvas as possible, I'll choose my examples from among the most recent analyses I made of Oedipal narratives on my movie blog, rather than choosing examples from famous franchises like DRACULA or PSYCHO.

The very last Oedipal narrative I examined happens to fall into the category of "what things happen." The cheapie sword-and-sorcery adventure EYES OF THE SERPENT uses what might be termed a feminine "Oedipal conflict," but it uses the pattern only for the dramatic potentiality. In the rambling narrative, young princess Fiona falls in love with roving (and somewhat kooky) swordsman Galen. Fiona enlists Galen to help Fiona's mother Neema fight Neema's enemies and regain control of the kingdom. However, Neema covertly puts the moves on the younger Galen. It's loosely implied that Neema does so in order to keep control of the warrior, rather than her doing so just because she's attracted to him. In this, Neema is the mirror image of her sister Corva, in that both are ruthless in their pursuit of power, and the movie's conclusion, in which the two sisters destroy one another in battle, indicates that the "lateral meaning" of EYES is to validate the more innocent Fiona as the royal figure who deserves to control the realm. I will happily admit that the story of EYES has only a fitful claim to the dramatic potentiality. However, the scene in which Galen tells Fiona about Neema's treachery, and Fiona refuses to believe him, does have the bare function of establishing that at some point Fiona must come to terms with Neema's corrupt nature and bind herself to the comparatively virtuous Galen.

In contrast, the last Oedipal narrative I examined which concerns "how things happen" is 2010's THE WOLFMAN. In my review, I contrasted the clear Freudian schema of this film in comparison to the 1941 classic.

There's no rational-minded, overbearing dad this time. Scripters Walker and Self wanted a Heavy Father straight out of Freud's TOTEM AND TABOO. The original Larry Talbot left the British Isles for America for reasons loosely associated with sibling rivalry. In contrast, Lawrence is sent to an asylum after he, as a child, claims to have witnessed Sir John's act of uxoricide, slaying Lawrence's mother during one of the lord's beast transformations. (Lawrence, unlike Larry, at least has a mother in his story.) After years of being treated by the barbaric alienists of the late 1800s, Lawrence recants his story and becomes an actor. (I'm convinced Walker and Self made this alteration to the protagonist's background simply so that they could reference HAMLET, which Freud famously associated with Oedipal urges.) 

One point I didn't cover in detail is that the film implies an equivalence between both violence and sex in the wolf-persona of Sir John, though I did address somewhat the Freudian concept of the "primal scene:"

Freud hypothesized that children who witnessed their parents having sex for the first time-- the so-called "primal scene"-- might believe that the mother was being attacked, or even murdered. Lawrence sees his mother murdered for real, and then his brother is slain because his father craves the brother's future wife. 

To expand on this formulation slightly, even though Sir John gets his werewolf curse from an outside source, his actions can only be explained by Freudian dynamics about sex and violence, which explain "how things happen" in the WOLFMAN world. Sir John's murder of his wife can logically be viewed as the beast's way of satisfying both a lust for sex and for violence, though the film does not make this proposition explicit. But if it is true that the beast slew Lawrence's mother to satisfy both bloodlust and sex-lust, then it follows that deep down Sir John intends to wreak the same violence upon Gwen, whom Sir John believes to have a resemblance to the unnamed mother of Lawrence and the late Ben. (Viewers don't see the mother, so the default assumption would be that Sir John is correct about the resemblance, and it certainly fits the Freudian paradigm that both of the mother's sons fixate upon Gwen for the same reason Sir John does.)

So the TOTEM AND TABOO paradigm of a father-son battle is carried out in a very different manner from a similar trope in 1941's WOLF MAN, meaning that Lawrence must defeat his vicious father in lycanthropic battle. In the review I mentioned in passing that Lawrence, unlike Fiona in EYES OF THE SERPENT, does not prosper after slaying the Heavy Father. I stated that Gwen shoots Beast-Lawrence with a silver bullet to spare him further suffering. However, Beast-Lawrence is by his nature as great a physical threat to Gwen as was his nasty dad, and so there's certainly an element of self-protection in Gwen's action as well. By her action Gwen alone is spared the holocaust of the Oedipal conflict, though of course the film has no interest in what happens to her once the story is over. 

I may conceive of other demonstrates between the pathways taken by "what" versus those of "how," but for now these two suffice for my purposes.

MASTERING EPISTEMOLOGY

As I look over my various posts on both the topic of "epistemological patterns" and that of the "master thread," I don't think I ever managed to show how the former plays into the latter. 

I have been reasonably consistent about showing how different literary works display different levels of mythicity because their authors either do or do not render the four epistemological patterns with a sense of their complex possibilities. In 2018 I dubbed the process of mythic coalescence as "concrescence," and attempted to link it to the Aristotelian concept of "the unity of action," even though I almost immediately revised that standard phrase into a "unity of effects."

In 2020, I proposed "master thread" as a substitute for the familiar "theme statement" formulation, given that the image of a "master thread" could better account for all the "lesser threads" that might be tied into the dominant one. The essay was also the beginning of the end for the terms "overthought" and "underthought," both of which appear therein. Now, having claimed that master threads are either dominantly didactic or dominantly mythopoeic, I won't bother with those outmoded terms in future. But I didn't really set down how the process of concrescence depended on translating ideas and intuitions about the four epistemological patterns so that they become such a master thread.

Following the same pattern I'd used to argue THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, I offered three types of "master thread" as they occurred particular stories on the same theme in the 2020 essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3. This essay requires updating in line with the formulation of the necessity for epistemological patterns in the process of concrescence.

All three cited stories depend on the same type of master thread, which I stated to be "hero must defeat evil counterpart." The purpose of such confrontations are always to better define the hero's virtues as against the vices of the counterpart, and so the reigning epistemological pattern is psychological.

The first example, which had a *poor* level of mythicity, was "The Haunted Island" from CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN #43. I noted the various ad hoc elements of the story, but at heart its greatest weakness is that the "evil counterparts" aren't given any psychological grounding. The mutants, having survived weird transformations but continuing to live on, draw an irrational comparison between themselves and the heroic Challengers, simply because they think that the latter are also living on "borrowed time." The author can only explain this association by falling back on the makeshift rationale that the mutants have gone mad, which in theory frees the author from coming up with a plausible psychology for his villains.

The next cited story, with a *fair* level of mythicity, was "And So My World Ends," from JLA #71. This story actually had an editorial agenda behind it, as much as did "Haunted Island," in that the story eliminated all civilization on J'onn J'onzz's version of Mars and also provided an exit scene for the Martian Manhunter, who had lost his regular berth and was no longer a good fit in the JLA. But this time the writer gave the villain, Commander Blanx, a reason for his decimation of his homeworld: his utter contempt for the way his people have become "weaklings." This heightens the tragedy felt by J'onn as he mourns his world's fate at the hands of "one individual, sick with the need for violence."

And in the example of *good* mythicity, I claimed that "The Injustice Society of the World" was one in which the titular Society succeeded in showing their devotion to crime and evil just as intransigently as the Justice Society defend justice and goodness. None of the individual villains are any more "psychologized" any more than the heroes are. But I argued that the story was a landmark because the villains as a group were atypically portrayed as being just as super-competent as the heroic team, and they display their warped psychology by putting the good guys on trial for their opposition to criminal activity. 

All of these takes on the "evil counterpart" master thread are mythopoeic rather than didactic. But the level of concrescence rises according to the density of correlations that the author brings to all the respective evil counterparts, with the result that the first is not symbolically compelling at all, the second is only compelling in a limited way, and the third has been compelling enough that the Injustice Society remains a myth-presence to be reckoned with in current comics, while the other villains are either wholly or nearly forgotten.

NEAR MYTHS: "BUS FUSS" (ARCHIE AND ME #50, 1972)

In this essay I spoke of the ARCHIE franchise as "damn close to being anti-epistemological." I don't believe it's impossible that somewhere, someone did a story that meets my criteria for epistemological myth. But if there's even one, it's buried under thousands upon thousands of average stuff.

And then I came across this near-myth, probably both written and drawn by Al Hartley, whimsically titled "Bus Fuss." I gasped at the first page, in which Principal Weatherbee is seen having the seats of a bus taken out, and Jughead quips that the old fellow has "flipped his lid over the school busing thing." Gasp, thought I. Is an ARCHIE comic going to say something about desegregation?

Instead, Weatherbee has a different sort of bee in his bonnet, not political in the least. He's taking everyone on a trip into the Great Outdoors, not only the most prominent teen regulars but also three teachers, the janitor and the lunch-lady. In other words, the lesson to be imparted is not for kids only, and it begins with a prayer. "Can we do that in school?" asks Jughead in his atypical Confederate cap. "We're not in school now," responds Betty. Weatherbee's prayer contains no specific religious allusions, only invoking the protection of the creator as they journey to see "the beauty of your creation."

For the next six pages, Weatherbee gives his captive audience a Cook's tour of natural wonders, with no other religious context, beginning with the importance of trees and their wood by-products to the early American settlers. I like the fact that Hartley isn't so evangelical that he misses a chance for a covert reference to the canine love of trees. He also throws in a tiny bit of conflict at the end of page six.

The bear's advent forces everyone back into the bus while the ursine intruder eats all their food. Jughead rages about the loss of the victuals, which prompts Weatherbee to take a shot at the lunch-lady: "[the bear] will pay for it. Miss Beazley prepared that food." Nothing daunted, the next day the improvised camper travels to a local range of mountains. Though Weatherbee reductively assumes that ancient peoples revered mountains because of volcanic activity, he nevertheless draws upon the archaic sense of the numinous by mentioning their connection to deities (which of course they also have in Judeo-Christian belief).

And to top off the rambling quasi-lecture, "the Bee" then shows his charges their insignificant place in the universe by pushing them to look up at the stars, untrammeled by the interference of civilization. And with that simple but non-denominational revelation, the story ends and they descend to "find our place in the scheme of things."

I had read two or three of Al Hartley's "Archie gets religion" stories and found them heavy on Christian proselytizing. But here, even though all of the other stories in this issue are just routine teen hijinks, with Weatherbee playing the fool, this lead tale was refreshingly subtle. I'm not sure I even know why Hartley even gave this gently spiritual story a goofy title like "Bus Fuss," unless he just anticipated that his editors would expect such a title. "Fuss" is not elaborate enough to be a fully epistemological myth, but at least it has some of the right ingredients.