STIMULATING RESPONSES

 Possibly my dissatisfaction with Whitehead's take on symbolism in the two previous posts led me to a formulation on symbolism owing much to Ernst Cassirer, though not only to him.                                       

In the second chapter of AN ESSAY ON MAN, Cassirer attempts to place the human creation of symbolism within the general context of animal biology: "Every organism, even the lowest... [possesses] a receptor system and an effector system... The receptor system by which a biological species receives outward stimuli and the effector system by which it reacts to them are in all cases closely interwoven... Man has... discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link we may describe as the symbolic system." I've covered in diverse other posts how Cassirer distinguished human use of symbolic abstractions into those of "mythical thinking" and "discursive/dialectical thinking."                                                                    

Parenthetically, I'll note that in I.A. Richards' 1936 PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC, reviewed here, he also put forth a similar proposition regarding the origin of organic creatures' ability to "sort," using an amoeba-like creature as his baseline. But Cassirer's model is more constitutive, having some bearing on my theory of the four potentialities, which started with Jung's four functions but diverged from the Swiss psychologist as to what function belonged where. For me, the receptor system lines up with the kinetic potentiality, and the effector with the dramatic potentiality- which means that the "lateral meaning" associated with both is available to many if not all organic creatures. "Vertical meaning," however, is born from the human ability to form complex abstractions, and any parallels that might be found in non-human animals are very limited in nature.                                                                                                                       

 On a somewhat newer tack, it's recently occurred to me that Aristotle's famous definition of narrative from the Poetics bears strong comparison with Cassirer's base level of "stimulus-and-response" for all organic life-forms. Despite his biological acumen, the philosopher chose what I consider a rather unwieldy metaphor for said narrative: 'Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")' Aristotle like Plato used the word "dianoia" for a narrative's "thought" or "theme," but so far as I know no Greek thinker ever elaborated a theory of the mythopoeic elements of narrative that even touches upon the dimensions of Cassirer's schema-- though I believe Frye argued that the Roman-era author "Pseudo-Longinus" might have offered a counter-agent to Aristotle's emphasis upon discursive thought. More on these matters later, possibly.                                                                    

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 2

 Now that I've specified in Part 1 my reasons for taking exception to Jung's characterization of what he termed "perception" and "judging" functions, I want to throw out a speculation as to why that particular duality might have been important to Jung, beyond the reasons cited in his 1912 PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES-- a speculation pertaining to what I've termed "the two forms of knowledge." In William James' THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY, James stated:                                                                                                                            "There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about."                                              

I went into detail as to the history preceding and following this conception in my essay WHITE NOISE, so I won't duplicate that explanation here. What I find interesting, though, is how much the input from what Jung calls the "perceiving functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge by acquaintance," while the "judging functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge-about" (which Bertrand Russell gave the superior term of "knowledge by description.")                         

 Now, I haven't reread PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES in many years, nor, prior to writing this essay, did I even go over the notes I made from my first reading. I doubt that Jung said anything, directly or indirectly, about the parallel I'm suggesting, for the very good reason that TYPES doesn't concern the nature of knowledge. Jung wrote that book to give his detailed analysis of the two types of people he termed "introverts" and "extroverts," and how such psychological types manifest in reaction to the four functions coded in the overall makeup of human beings. It's one of Jung's great books, but inevitably it was influenced by the intellectual currents surrounding it-- which included James, Jung's senior by thirty years, and whom Jung visited twice just before James' passing in 1910. Jung admired James' 1902 VARITIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. and the psychologist devotes twenty pages of TYPES comparing his concept of two types of people to James' two types of philosophers. So, though I didn't reread TYPES, I did check to see everything Jung wrote about James in that particular book.                                           

 Now, one interesting datum is that though Jung claims to have "limited" knowledge of James' corpus of writings, and almost everything Jung cites in his tome about James' "two types" comes from James' 1907 book PRAGMATISM, Jung has one citation from the 1890 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY-- which, as noted above, is the book from which the "two forms of knowledge" is put forth. I don't know that Jung never commented on the two forms elsewhere in his works, but IMO he was too good a scholar to quote from a book he cited in an appendix. And for that matter, had he never encountered James' 1890 formulation and had never been influenced by James in his "perceiving/judging" categories, Jung also could have got something not dissimilar from Schopenhauer's dichotomy of "percepts and concepts." But James is still the best bet for influence-- and even though Jung didn't agree with everything James wrote, he paid the older man an exceeding compliment by being influenced by him-- just as I've sought to compliment Jung in my own small way.               

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 1

 I suppose I must have been at least partly converted by Alfred North Whitehead's PROCESS AND REALITY when I read it in 2020, since over four years later I'm still thinking about ways I might compare and contrast his Kant-rejecting system with the heavily-Kantian conceptions of Carl Jung. Take one of the Jungian formulations to which I'm most indebted, that of the "four functions:"                                                                                                                                                                                                          "Thinking and feeling are rational functions in so far as they are decisively influenced by the motive of reflection. They attain their fullest significance when in fullest possible accord with the laws of reason. The irrational functions, on the contrary, are such as aim at pure perception, e.g. intuition and sensation; because, as far as possible, they are forced to dispense with the rational (which presupposes the exclusion of everything that is outside reason) in order to be able to reach the most complete perception of the whole course of events."-- PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.                                                                                                                                              But despite my "loyalty" to Jung, I departed from the Swiss psychologist on various occasions. In the third part of the 2015 essay-series REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, I said that Jung's psychology-oriented view of the functions contrasted with my literary view:                                                                                         

'Jung calls intuition an "irrational, perceiving function" while thinking is a "rational function of judgment." Despite this difference, both of them seem to be secondary processes for purposes of literary identification.'                                                                                                                                                                                                     In fact, Whitehead may have influenced me when I began thinking about the "lateral meaning" of a literary work as being its "ontology," while its "vertical meaning" as its "epistemology," I began to poke at some of Jung's correlations. For instance, Jung says that the functions of sensation and intuition are both "irrational" and "perception-oriented," while those of feeling and thinking are both "rational" and "judgment-oriented." I think my readings of Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES was thorough enough that I comprehend why he made these correlations. But was he correct?                                     

I have no problem with Jung's "rational/irrational" categories with respect to all four functions, though my approach is entirely literary in nature, rather than psychological. But Jung also makes a distinction based on whether a function is rooted in "pure perception" or in "reflection," while I believe there are strong aspects of both "perception" and "reflection" intermixed in all four functions. Rather, I use a distinction between "more discursive" and "less discursive." "I believe that the functions of "feeling" and "thinking" lend themselves to discursive exploration, and that this is why the vast majority of literary criticism is devoted to sussing out (a) what thoughts an author has about a given topic, and (b) how the author conveys his thoughts through the way his characters feel about the topic. That author may use just as much "reflection" in setting up how the characters interact with respect to the things they experience in sensation, or in terms of symbolic constructs. But the elements of those two functions are more "presentational," to use Susan Langer's term; one reflects on their nature less through reason than through instinct. As a critical thinker, I can write hundreds of words as to why I think one work by Osamu Tezuka makes better use of symbolism than another, possibly even dealing with works written around the same time and with a common set of characters. But many of my arguments will proceed from my instinctive appreciation of the way various symbols play off one another, in contrast to the strongly discursive way that discrete ideas play off one another. I can (and did) write an essay about why an action-sequence masterminded by Jack Kirby is superior kinetically than a sequence constructed by Jim Shooter, but I cannot prove that superiority in the same discursive way I can discursively argue that Stan Lee dealt with "characters' feelings" better than Jack Kirby did. So for me, the categories of "perception" and "judgment" are useless for my project, even though I'm sure a few of my earlier essays probably reproduced Jung's terms "uncritically."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

QUANTUM CHRISTENINGS

 I judged that the film has only "fair" mythicity because it was not as interested in what I have called "correlation-quanta" as on "emotion-quanta."-- TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS.

If the above sentence demonstrates nothing else, it's that I should probably find some better way of expressing the four potentialities' manifestation into coherent story-tropes than just adding "quanta/quantum" to each of my terms. At the very least any sentences I write in future about these quantum manifestations may as a result flow a little better.

Since I've already used "potentialities" with a symbolic reference to quantum mechanics, I will henceforth designate each potentiality's quantum formations with the suffix "tron." In Greek the suffix means "tool or instrument," and in literature each of the potentialities does indeed incarnate some "instrumental intention" on the part of the author/authors. This helpful online post touches on some of the ways "tron" has been used to signify instrumental control, and not just for particle physics, as in "electron."

As a teenager, I was witness to the last gasps of a 20th-century lexical leitmotif. The suffix ‘-tron’, along with ‘-matic’ and ‘-stat’, are what the historian Robert Proctor at Stanford University calls embodied symbols. Like the heraldic shields of ancient knights, these morphemes were painted onto the names of scientific technologies to proclaim one’s history and achievements to friends and enemies alike. ‘Stat’ signalled something measurable, while ‘matic’ advertised free labour; but ‘tron’, above all, indicated control. To gain the suffix was to acquire a proud and optimistic emblem of the electronic and atomic age. It was a totem of high modernism, the intellectual and cultural mode that decreed no process or phenomenon was too complex to be grasped, managed and optimised. The suffix emblazoned the banners of nuclear physics’ Cosmotron, modern biology’s Climatron, and early AI’s Perceptron – displaying to all our mastery over matter, life and information.

I've correlated my theoretical literary quanta with what I believe to be discrete aspects of the human psyche: "excitations" (for the kinetic), "emotions" (for the dramatic), "correlations" (for the mythopoeic), and "cogitations" (for the didactic). But to form "tron-forms," I'll use just the first syllable of each of my chosen labels. This results in:

Quanta of the kinetic: "extrons."

Quanta of the dramatic: "emtrons."

Quanta of the mythopoeic, "cortrons."

Quanta of the didactic: "cogtrons."

So the cited sentence above would now be written, "The film has only fair mythicity because it manifests fewer "cortrons" than it does "emtrons." The implication is that the emtrons also outnumber the extrons and the cogtrons, though I'll add that the extrons, given all the kinetic appeal of the film referenced, occupy roughly second place.

Most of the time, when I've sought to formulate the ways in which a given work fit one of the four Fryean mythoi, I've tended to form mental pictures in which the preponderance of one potentiality outweighs the others. That was the case in the two linked essays titled ADVENTURE/COMEDY VS. COMEDY/ADVENTURE, PART 1, starting here, though in 2011 I tended to use Frye's "myth-radical" terms like "agon," since I hadn't then elaborated the four potentialities from my readings of Jung's functions.

The quantum-particle metaphor feels more complete. It's not that the other three potentialities are simply suppressed by the "weight" of the dominant one. To use my example of BATMAN '66 from the 2011 essay, since that show makes regular use of all four quantum-forms, I don't deny that the "cogtrons" relating to the program's pose of "camp entertainment" were important to its success. But the "extrons" and "emtrons" involving the show's played-straight fight-scenes and the emotional interludes involved were more important, and I would probably even give the "cortrons" pride of place, because BATMAN '66 was the first film/TV adaptation of a comic-book hero that captured any of the appeal of an ongoing costumed-character serial.

More on these matter later as they occur to me.

 

STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES

My recent meditations re: Jung's four functions and the four potentialities I deduced from them lead to another revision-- hopefully, the last, in which I attempt to define just what narrative quanta are evoked whenever an author employs one of the four potentialities. I wouldn't tread this ground again except I think it's necessary for a more extensive formulation.

The last major attempt to form terminology for the four quanta-types appeared in 2017's GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of strength-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of affect-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of idea-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbol-quanta.

Since then, however, I decided that in place of "ideas" and "symbols" I would use "cogitations" and "correlations" in this 2022 essay, and thus far I'm sticking with that revision. In another essay I experimented with substituting "potency" for "strength" under the kinetic umbrella. However, I've used both "power" and "potency" in an earlier terminological opposition. So, since the context of using "strength" was that of discrete forces impinging upon the various human senses, I'm going to substitute the new term "excitations," because I'm concerned with the excitation of neural perceptions by those forces. Whatever emotional context human beings then place upon their neural sensations then line up as "emotion-quanta," which takes the place of the vaguer "affect-quanta." So now my schema comes down to:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.

The new terminology of course essentially coheres with Jung's general formulation that the potentialities rooted in the sensation and intuition functions are what Jung called "perceiving functions," while those rooted in the feeling and thinking functions are what Jung called "judging functions." That said, I do have some departures from Jung's system on which I'll expound in a future essay, in line with remarks already made in PARALLEL PATHS: ARTHUR, CARL, AND ALBERT.

PARALLEL PATHS: ARTHUR, CARL, AND ALBERT

Though in past essays I've drawn some limited comparisons to the philosophical systems of Schopenhauer, Jung, and Whitehead, here I'll try to dovetail the major similarities between all three together.

Though I'd read a lot of Jung before I made my way through THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, in the early days of this blog I believe I focused a bit more on Schopenhauer's contrast of different types of will. In 2016's THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL, I attempted to fold Carl Jung's somewhat Kantian "four functions" into Schopenhauer's system:

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking" finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

One thing that is not made clear by this excerpt is what Jung said about the nature of his four functions, in that he labeled "sensation" and "intuition" are purely perceptual functions, while "feeling" and "thinking" served, respectively, to sort and judge the raw data provided by the perceptual functions. I think this arrangement is implicit from the way I restated Jung's theory as it would apply within a purely literary matrix, but it's best to make it the point as explicit as possible. (I will again note that the above terms "underthought" and "overthought" have to a great extent fallen to the wayside in the course of this ongoing project.)

In many respects this formulation is still fundamental to my system. However, because of my still imperfect assimilation of the process philosophy of Whitehead, I think one might argue that both Schopenhauer and Jung, who share a considerable influence from Immanuel Kant, that both thinkers may have tended to portray the experience of "perception" as essentially passive, while both Jung's "judging functions" and Schopenhauer's higher form of will are comparatively "active." At least one of Jung's pronouncements on the origins of intuition strikes me as rather problematic:

like sensation, intuition is a characteristic of infantile and primitive psychology. It counterbalances the powerful sense impressions of the child and the primitive by mediating perceptions of mythological images, the precursors of ideas. 

Whitehead, who takes issue with Kant in PROCESS AND REALITY, did not deem perception to be passive, as shown by this interpretation from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The critical aspects of SMW were ideas that Whitehead had already expressed (in different forms) in his previous publications, only now with more refined clarity and persuasiveness. On the other hand, the constructive arguments in SMW are astonishing in their scope and subtlety, and are the first presentation of his mature metaphysical thinking. For example, the word “prehension,” which Whitehead defines as “uncognitive apprehension” (SMW 69) makes its first systematic appearance in Whitehead’s writings as he refines and develops the kinds and layers of relational connections between people and the surrounding world. As the “uncognitive” in the above is intended to show, these relations are not always or exclusively knowledge based, yet they are a form of “grasping” of aspects of the world. Our connection to the world begins with a “pre-epistemic” prehension of it, from which the process of abstraction is able to distill valid knowledge of the world. But that knowledge is abstract and only significant of the world; it does not stand in any simple one-to-one relation with the world. In particular, this pre-epistemic grasp of the world is the source of our quasi- a priori knowledge of space which enables us to know of those uniformities that make cosmological measurements, and the general conduct of science, possible.

This emphasis on "pre-epistemic" forms of cognition matches up fairly well with my adaptation of Whitehead's term "concrescence," which I applied to my literary version of Jung's four functions in 2021's PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2:

A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.

In the preceding paragraph I limited my line of inquiry to the human species, but I can accept in a general sense Whitehead's extensive of the "pre-epistemic" stage even to non-sentient phenomena like electrons. Despite some of the conceptual discontinuities between these three philosophical luminaries, I feel that all of them were seeking to unravel the same conundrum of existence, and that their similarities outweigh their differences.

PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS

                     

 I’ve been meditating on the familiar opposition of “problem and dilemma” for possible application to my theories regarding the narrative interactions of lateral meaning and vertical meaning. The regular opposition goes as follows:

 

A problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while a dilemma is a choice that must be made between two or more equally undesirable alternatives.

 

For reasons I’ll discuss shortly, the idea of the “problem” aptly sums up the literary appeal of a text’s lateral meaning, because this is the part of the story in which the reader primarily invests himself, to see how the main character deals with the difficulties he faces, even if said character’s solution may be to avoid said difficulties.

 

However, “dilemma” in no way sums up the appeal of a text’s vertical meaning for readers. So, as my title suggests, I’m substituting the concept of the “conundrum,” variously defined as “an intricate and difficult problem” or “a difficult problem, one that is almost impossible to solve.”

 

My last major statement regarding the lateral and vertical forms of meaning appeared in 2016’s THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL. In the passage that follows, I didn’t utilize the term “vertical meaning,” since at the time I was preoccupied with seeing how that meaning could expressed by the joint terms “overthoughts and underthoughts,” but both of these together were always intended to make up my concept of vertical meaning.

 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking"finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

 

Nowadays I would reword this statement to elide the reference to overthoughts and underthoughts, because over time I have began to find these terms cumbersome. From my current position it’s easier to speak of all these narrative meanings in terms of their potentiality-alignments: “lateral meaning,” which is comprised of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, and “vertical meaning,” which is comprised of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities.

 

As for the essay’s observations on the concepts of “close sight” and “far sight,” these remained unchanged, and the notions of “the problem” and “the conundrum” can be used to symbolize the different ways each of the meaning-formations appeal to readers.

 

As stated above, the lateral meaning is that which presents the reader with the immediate, close-range difficulties in the lives of one or more characters, difficulties which must be solved in some fashion, just as difficulties in the reader’s real life must be solved in some way (even if the reader, like the fictional characters, may make the wrong choice).

 

Vertical meaning, however, is the part of the story that allows the reader to contemplate the character’s conflicts from the long-range view, with the understanding that those difficulties metaphorically embody some “conundrum” regarding the nature of human life. The conundrum exists alongside the problem, and since it’s more abstract in nature, the reader doesn’t necessarily expect to see the conundrum solved, even badly, because it embodies some intellectual or imaginative conflict inherent in human life.

 

Rather than starting with an example drawn from high culture, like HAMLET or LIGHT IN AUGUST, I will begin with applying the conundrum-concept to the two examples of mythopoeic and sub-mythopoeic meanings seen in my essay regarding two Silver Age ATOM stories. Both stories dealt with the Tiny Titan's battles against an insect-themed villain, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, produced by the same creative team and within months of one another. Though I was primarily oriented on the second of the two stories to show its qualifications as a mythcomic, I also included a rationale as to why the earlier story did not qualify as a mythcomic. I argued that the first “Bug-Eyed” story did not have a strong cosmological meaning, because the villain used generic robot-insects against the hero. However, in the second “Bug-Eyed” story, author Gardner Fox more strongly patterned the robot-insects on the capabilities of real insects. This narrative strategy produced a fictional “simulacrum of knowledge” and thus gave the story a stronger mythopoeic meaning. In both stories, the hero's problem is identical; to defeat the villain, primarily through the use of kinetic displays of force. (One story also has a very minor dramatic problem, to keep the villain from kidnapping an old flame, but the kinetic problem is paramount.) There is no didactic conundrum, but the amplification of the villain's insect-theme provides a mythopoeic conundrum; one best summed up as a fascination with biological adaptations in real animals.  

Now, neither of these comic-book stories makes any pretension toward the didactic form of virtual meaning, so a more complex example is needed to show how didactic and mythopoeic conundrums may exist separately or work in tandem.

 One of the most familiar master-threads found in “Classic” STAR TREK pertains to the crew of the Enterprise seeking to interact with more primitive peoples without violating the “Prime Directive” by interfering with the primitives’ cultures. The second-season episodes “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both deal with the same range of kinetic and dramatic problems that arise when the Federation’s political rivals, the Klingons, attempt to gain favor with primitive peoples without showing the Federation’s high-minded restraint. In “Child,” a Klingon agent abets an ambitious warlord to overthrow a ruler who is friendly toward the Federation. In “War,” Klingons give relatively advanced weapons to one tribe of planetary primitives to use against another tribe.

In both stories, the Enterprise-crew must seek to mitigate the Klingons’ influence, and so the “problems” that involves the lateral meaning are virtually identical, even if the solutions are not. “Child” is more of a straight thriller, with no deep reflections about the effects of both Klingon Empire and Federation upon the lives of the primitives. “War,” on the other hand presents the viewer with conundrums that invoke both the didactic and the mythopoeic potentialties. The didactic conundrum is the more obvious, since most viewers would have noted the direct parallels to the then-current Vietnam War, in which Americans had to continually arm their allies in order to offset the forces empowered by the rival superpower of Red China. Allegedly the original script was far more caustic regarding the activities of the “Americans,” i.e., the representatives of the Federation, and series showrunner Gene Roddenberry reworked the didactic conundrum so that it implied that the heroes had to do what they did to prevent the spread of Klingon influence. Not having seen the original script, I can’t say whether or not its author utilized the same mythopoeic tropes that appeared in the finished, Roddenberry-edited script. However, because of the way Roddenberry changed the didactic meaning, the mythopoeic meaning changes somewhat as well. When at the climax Kirk muses that they must introduce “serpents” into this planetary “Eden,” the meaning carries a sense of a less didactic, more mythopoeic conundrum. The implication is that, even as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden provided humankind with a chance for self-determination, Kirk’s ambivalent gift, putting more advanced weapons in the hands of the planetary primitives, may also be a rough but necessary means of setting the natives on their own course of self-determination.

 

As with the two ATOM stories, the problems in the two TREK stories are the same as far as involving the viewer in the travails of the main characters. However, “Private Little War” suggests an enduring conundrum that supervenes the particular problems of the particular situation. “Friday’s Child” implies a possible conundrum but does not seek in articulating it in terms of either the didactic or mythopoeic potentialities.

It's worth mentioning a couple of TREK examples which register only in terms of either a didactic or a mythopoeic conundrum. The third-season episode "The Savage Curtain" places Kirk and Spock in the position of "acting out" the struggle between good and evil for the education of some very literal-minded aliens, the Excalbians. The didactic conundrum implies that the struggle between good and evil-- essentially defined as altruism and selfishness-- is a difficulty that never ceases to confront mankind, no matter what happens to any particular heroic protagonists. But despite the evocation of legendary figures from Earth and from Vulcan-- whether historical like Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan, or made-up types like Sarek and Colonel Green-- none of these characters make strong use of any symbol-tropes. Even the appearance of a vaguely witchy villainess named "Zora" is given no stature as an incarnation of female evil, in marked to comparison to the "Lady Macbeth"-styled villainy of Nona from "Private Little War."

In my reviews of the first four STAR TREK theatrical films, though, I was rather surprised that the one with the weakest dramatic problem was also the one with the strongest mythopoeic conundrum: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The closest thing the film comes to a didactic conundrum is its attempt to show Mister Spock's vaunted logic as inferior to human emotion, but this is underdeveloped in contrast to the predominant mythopoeic conundrum: that of depicting a newly-born machine intelligence recapitulating its creators' need for emotional connection, and enacting a hieros gamos with a human being in order to gain said connection.

I indicated above that I was cycling out the terminology of "overthought and underthought," originally derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of Northrop Frye. I think the terms had a certain usefulness to me, indicating that the "overthought" springs from conscious, often utilitarian forms of thought while the "underthought" springs from subconscious, more playful cogitations. But I value symmetry above everything, and so in future I may start using the following terms:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."

QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM

As a prequel to a longer formulation, I’m recapitulating my “quantum literary theory” with some refinements.

The foundation of the theory remains indebted to Gloomy Schopenhauer’s concept of The Will. In SEVENWAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER, I adapted his theory to literary purposes by asserting that even if we can’t verify the idea of a Will that permeates human existence, it’s axiomatic that authorial Will permeates all narrative phenomena.

A secondary foundation is derived from Jung’s theory of four psychological functions through which all human subjects perceive the world, though Jung makes clear that not every individual will draw upon the functions to the same degree. From Jung’s functions I have extrapolated four potentialities that human beings use in creating any sort of narrative, be it fictional or non-fictional.

My four potentialities are the kinetic, the dramatic, the didactic and the mythopoeic, and in keeping with the meaning “potentiality” is said to carry in quantum physics, all four are modes through which the human subject organizes information.

Units of information are what I call “quanta,” named for the building-blocks of matter, i.e., both atomic and subatomic particles. But in the narratological world, the “energies” of each quantum are representations drawn both from human experience and from human imagination (which may not be entirely dependent upon experience). All quanta are generalized rather than particularized representations, loosely after the fashion of Plato’s Forms. No author makes a representation of a particular lion from a particular time and place; a quantum representing a lion communicates only “lion-ness.” A similar dynamic governs representations of action. A quantum that communicates “falling” cannot assess quantifiable distance, but only rough approximations, so that a quantum representation can only communicate falling either a short distance or a great distance.

Now for something moderately different: just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”

Whatever the word “trope” meant in ancient Greece, today it has assumed the idea of a standardized scenario, usually applied to fiction, though it’s not without relevance to non-fiction. The statement “the lion is the king of beasts” combines a quantum derived from physical experience, the creature we call a “lion,” with a second quantum, an imagined status of kingship imputed to the creature. To continue the parallel with the action of falling, a fall from a great distance often suggests danger while a fall from a short distance does not. This often translates into such tropes as “man and woman fall in love,” representing a non-perilous and even “fortunate” fall, as well as “angels falling from heaven,” which represents catastrophe if not literal physical harm.

My title for this essay plays upon the title of an Ian Fleming James Bond short story, and while many of my puns are just toss-offs, there’s a little more method to my punny madness here. I chose to reference “solipsism” not as an actual defense of that philosophical position—that one can only be certain of one’s own mental existence—but because the making of a narrative can be seen as an elaboration of one’s own mental universe. Non-fictional narratives are, at least in theory, all about relating a series of experiential facts, though arguably the most popular non-fictional discourses are those that impose a desirable interpretation on said facts. But as I’ve previously argued, fiction is less about reporting “truths” than formulating “half-truths:” narratives in which it’s obvious that the author has arranged all elements in the story to achieve certain effects. Even where a fiction-author fails to achieve those effects, an experienced reader can often intuit more or less what sort of “universe” the author sought to create.

Though some tropes may be roughly composed of the same quanta, they can have vastly different effects because authors will inevitably choose to focus more on one potentiality than another. For instance, the trope “the lion is the king of beasts” can take such many differing forms.

A KINETIC utilization of the trope appears with respect to the Gardner Fox villain “Lion-Mane,” a human who becomes transformed into a lion-humanoid in order to challenge Hawkman and Hawkgirl, with the overall scheme of achieving dominance over all the denizens of Planet Earth.

A DRAMATIC utilization appears in the imitation “Tarzan” novel KING OF THE JUNGLE and its cinematic adaptation, insofar as Kaspa, a foundling human, is adopted by a pride of jungle-dwelling lions, with the result that he becomes their “king” and uses both his animal-like skills and his human intelligence to save his fellow beasts.

A DIDACTIC utilization appears in Roland Barthes’ philosophical tome MYTHOLOGIES, in which Barthes attempts to prove that the very idea of imputing kingliness to the animal we call a “lion” is an indulgence in what he terms (with scant justification) mythological thinking.

A MYTHOPOEIC utilization appears in C.S. Lewis’s THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, wherein the kingliness of the lion is given religious connotations, so that Lord Aslan symbolizes both the power and lordliness of Lewis’s concept of Jesus Christ.

Having established the interactions of will, quantum representations, and tropes, I’ll next proceed to more involved meditations upon two particular tropes of significance to my project.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES PT. 2

It may be that my revised versions of overthought and underthought will in future serve me as shortened forms for the respective effects that "the function of thinking" and "the function of intuition" have upon literary narrative.  I concluded in REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PART 3   that both myth-critics and ideological critics were in a similar unenviable position as far as converting the majority of readers to pursue more abstract readings of texts. Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience.-- RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT, 2015.

In my essay POETRY IN MOTION PART 3 I noted how Frye made a distinction between the narrative and significant values of literary narratives. To boil Frye’s argument down to its essentials, he regarded a given element as having a “narrative value” to the extent that it functioned to play a role in the way the narrative was constructed, while a “significant value” applied to an element which was meant to serve the purpose of a pattern hypothetically extrinsic to the narrative, what is usually called “theme” or “meaning.”-- NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES, 2017.

Northrop Frye is the direct source of one "word pair" of terms that I've frequently used, that of "the narrative-significant schism," and the indirect source of another pairing: "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning," with the former encompassing the Jungian functions of sensation and feeling and the latter encompassing the functions of thinking and intuition (which IN TURN beget the narrative's "overthought" and "underthought"). It's sometimes occurred to me that I could simplify things for myself to abandon one set of terms for the other, and that, if I did so, it would be a truly Fryean action, since I don't believe the critic himself made much use of any of these jargonistic terms. He probably refrained from regular use of the terms simply because jargon always needs a lot of explanation to potential newcomers.

But I knew from the first that this literary-theory blog would not be read by many newcomers, and so I've made much heavier use of Frye's jargon than he did. I've found over the years that the terms "narrative and significant" work best for describing just the bare functions of literary dynamics, while the terms "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning" are efficacious to break down the dynamic of the reader's response to the narrative. Thus, in VERTICAL VIRTUES (2014), I aligned lateral meaning with Aldous Huxley's concept of "horizontal transcendence," and vertical meaning with his concept of "upward and downward transcendence." On occasion I've probably used "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning" to mean almost the same thing as "narrative" and 'significant," though the first pair were designed to describe the process of readerly transcendence.

STRENGTH AND SUBSTANCE

Here's a small revision to my terminology in this section of GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2:

....the function of sensation as Jung and I conceive it is entirely "pre-cognitive," while that of feeling is "post-cognitive." It doesn't help me at all to use 'affect" in both senses, so from now on I will take the first-stated position: "affects" are *quanta* that belong to the post-cognitive function of feeling. In contrast, the function of sensation, being non-judgmental, is concerned rather with dynamicity in its purest state, as stimuli that either enhance or detract from the subject's life-quality. This brings me back to Kant's concept of dynamicity as "might" or "strength," and thus I reconfigure the earlier statement of the potentialities thusly:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of strength-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of affect-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of idea-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbol-quanta.

There's a viable logic in defining the quanta of the sensation-function as "strength" or even "might," given that I've sometimes used the latter term as a catchall for any and all physical activity-- which would include an organism's attempt to suss out its environment through the use of the senses. Yet both terms don't seem wholly adequate to describe what the organism is specifically doing when it uses its senses, as opposed to other activities.

I still believe that sensation must be concerned with "stimuli that either enhance or detract from the subject's life-quality," and that this is the foundation for all later formulations about "the good and the bad," and for the attempts of higher organisms to articulate their "gut feelings" into the full-blown affects that belong to the function of feeling. But the word "strength" doesn't work so well, even though I chose it in part to ground the feeling of sensation within the mode of dynamicity. just as the other irrational function, that of intuition, is grounded within the combinatory mode.

The activity of Creature A's sensation-function does have its "strength" associations, at least with respect to whether Creature B can be eaten, or may try to eat Creature A. And yet, there are numerous examples where there is no competitive aspect to sensing one's environment. Just moving about in the environment involves sensing what it's like. For birds it's understanding. through the senses, the currents of the air; for fish, it's understanding, through the senses, the currents of the sea, and so on.

What all sensory activities seem to hold in common is not so much strength or might but *potency.* The sea has a potency both to help a fish find its prey and to escape its predators, and that potency is realized only through the creature's senses.

I have actually uses "potency" earlier in an unrelated sense in 2014's POWER AND POTENCY, but given that I'm so thoroughly influenced by Northrop Frye, I think I would be remiss if I didn't coin at least a handful of terms that had more than one distinct meaning in my system. Also, given the relationship of the terms "kinetic" and "potential" in physics, it makes sense in literary terms for "the kinetic" to arise from something that at least sounds like "the potential."

Thus, in any future meditations about the potentiality of the kinetic:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of potency-quanta.

GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2

I gave one definition of the word "potentiality" in Part One, but I was unaware when I gave the term a Jungian-Fryean connotation that it also had jargonistic applications in the world of quantum mechanics.  Not being heavily into quantum mechanics, I hadn't encountered the datum stated in the Wikipedia article: that David Bohm and Basil Hiley defined "quantum potential/ potentiality" as "an information potential which acts upon a quantum particle." I did not have this in mind when I invoked the metaphor of the quantum particle in the essay THE QUANTUM THEORY OF DYNAMICITY, but the Bohm-Hiley statement provides a strong parallel to one of my long-stated statements about the relationship of literary archetypes to the information that they can be made to convey, as referenced in JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE. 

When I wrote QUANTUM THEORY, I was simply seeking to provide symmetry. I had established that I regarded mythicity as a discourse within the combinatory mode, and it eventually occurred to me that dynamicity could equally be defined as a discourse, but one within the corresponding mode of the dynamic mode. In THEORY I cited various ways in which I perceived "power" as taking different discursive forms within various works within the same genres: comparing, for instance, the "poor discourse" of the Shooter-Zeck SECRET WARS to the "good discourse" of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. In essence, I represented the two modes principally with reference to Jung's two "irrational functions" when I stated:

Mythicity= the discourse of symbolic constructions

Dynamicity= the discourse of quantum constructions.

I did not draw any parallels in THEORY between the symbolizing nature of the "intuition function," nor to the sensory nature of the "sensation function." I used the term "quantum constructions" simply because in physics the word "quantum" is defined as "the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction." Since I was speaking of both mythicity and dynamicity as relationships between literary phenomena, I coined the term "quantum constructions" as short-hand for the ways in which different entities interact with one another on the plane of dynamicity, be it through direct violence, like that of a superhero, or through indirect influence, as per my example of Ibsen's HEDDA GABLER.

However, in the ensuing months I continued meditating on the subject of the four potentialites that I extrapolated from Jung's four functions. Many writers (not least Jung) had opined that the rational function of thinking developed out of the irrational function of intuition, but not as much had been written about a corresponding relationship between the rational function of feeling and the irrational function of sensation. Indeed, my initial statement of the potentialities from FOUR BY FOUR might have suggested too much distinction between the four:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.

Slowly the logical symmetry settled in. If "symbolic constructions" are at the root of "ideational constructions," then there must be a parallel between the other two functions. What I initially called "quantum constructions" originally implied simply the perceiving subject's experience of his own body and other bodies as giving the subject either pleasant or unpleasant sensations. "Discrete personalities" was a reference was based in my understanding of Jung's interpretation of feeling as a more rational meditation as to WHY one's own body or other bodies became a source of a variety of sensations, including those situations in which the pleasant and unpleasant might intertwine. At the time I choose not to delve into PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES to review Jung's position, given that my extrapolation of the potentialities is not strictly Jungian anyway.

My solution to the problem of philosophical symmetry, then, is to propose that all four of the potentialities can be viewed as means by which the perceiving subject-- whether a real person or a literary construct-- sorts out different *QUANTA* of information that the subject encounters in the world. But the solution comes with another problem: how are these quanta at once alike and yet different?

One cornerstone of my theory is the rethinking of Aristotle's "pity and terror" into what I consider a more pleasing terminology: that of "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects," as explored in this 2013 essay.  Another Wikipedia essay states that the term "affect" has in psychology assorted connotations.

Many theorists (e.g., Lazarus, 1982) consider affect to be post-cognitive: elicited only after a certain amount of cognitive processing of information has been accomplished. In this view, such affective reactions as liking, disliking, evaluation, or the experience of pleasure or displeasure each result from a different prior cognitive process that makes a variety of content discriminations and identifies features, examines them to find value, and weighs them according to their contributions (Brewin, 1989). Some scholars (e.g., Lerner and Keltner 2000) argue that affect can be both pre- and post-cognitive: initial emotional responses produce thoughts, which produce affect. In a further iteration, some scholars argue that affect is necessary for enabling more rational modes of cognition (e.g., Damasio 1994).

Plainly the function of sensation as Jung and I conceive it is entirely "pre-cognitive," while that of feeling is "post-cognitive." It doesn't help me at all to use 'affect" in both senses, so from now on I will take the first-stated position: "affects" are *quanta* that belong to the post-cognitive function of feeling. In contrast, the function of sensation, being non-judgmental, is concerned rather with dynamicity in its purest state, as stimuli that either enhance or detract from the subject's life-quality. This brings me back to Kant's concept of dynamicity as "might" or "strength," and thus I reconfigure the earlier statement of the potentialities thusly:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of strength-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of affect-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of idea-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbol-quanta.

Within a fictional context, as stated before, all of these quanta are, unlike real energy-quanta, only real insofar as readers/audiences experience them as incarnations of the author's *WILL,* as stated in SEVEN WAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER.  This "unified field theory" of the four potentialities will probably not inspire in critics the degree of enthusiasm quantum physicists experience as they cover a similar unification between the "four physical forces," but such a theory does make it somewhat easier to talk about the different forms of "will" which creators choose to emphasize.

As a closing note, I return to this statement from the first GOOD WILL QUANTUMS:

...I perceive a general principle: that density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."

But although "density/complexity" is the primary criterion of fictional excellence in any potentiality, there is a role for Raymond Durgnat's "aesthetic of simplicity." Simplicity is the mode or modes through whcih an author seeks to communicate complexity in a pleasing manner, so that the reader absorbs the complexity without the sense of having it forced down his throat. More on this point later.

MERCURIAL RISINGS

My current contemplation of the four potentialities leads me to return to the 2015 essay-series REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE. I wrote this series one month before I started using the terms "overthought," "underthought" and "lateral meaning" to describe my conception of the literary process.  In Part 3 I drew some general comparisons between Jung's ideas about his "four functions" and what parallels these did or did not have with said literary process.

Drawing on Jung's comment about the purpose of each function... in literature [I consider that]"sensation" refers to the readers' identification with the physical sensations of fictional characters, while "feeling" refers to the extrinsic value that the readers place upon the characters' actions.

By contrast, in the previous passage, I said that these were the functions through which the majority of audiences interact with fictional narrative, as opposed to the functions that concern either images and symbols (intuition) or discursive ideas (thinking). This prioritization is at odds with the ontogenesis Jung presents in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, where the two irrational /perceptual functions, sensation and intuition, develop first in the human organism, and are only later followed by the rational / judgment-making functions, thinking and feeling.

In REFLECTIONS I did not so much dispute Jung's prioritization as declare it irrelevant to the literary process:

Now Jung calls intuition an "irrational, perceiving function" while thinking is a "rational function of judgment." Despite this difference, both of them seem to be secondary processes for purposes of literary identification.

The obvious reason for this-- though I didn't state it at the time-- is that while the human organism may have one ontogenetic order, a given literary narrative has another. In fact, it must have a different ontogenetic order, given that while humans are born as children and progress to adulthood, literary works are presented to their audiences in "adult" form. That is, not only are they supposed to have refined away all the confusions of their early conceptions, they are by and large produced by adults who have lived with all four functions since their own childhoods. It is for this fundamental reason that the functions of sensation and feeling are primary in both the artist's creation of his works and his audience's interactions with them, while the functions of thinking and intuition become secondary, requiring a great deal of education before one can navigate their more abstract depths.

In Part 3 I also said:

...I cited a Jung passage in which he spoke of the intuition's "mythological images" as "the precursors of ideas." Given Jung's love of symmetry, he probably contemplated a similar indebtedness between the other two functions, given that the base input of sensations-- as to whether they were agreeable or disagreeable-- can be easily seen as the basis of the feeling-function's more sophisticated decisions about what people and things ought to be accepted or rejected.

Leaving Jung's love of symmetry out of the matter, my own similar love prompts me to observe that I can see how narrative in its most elementary states-- say, stories in Golden Age comic books-- often seem to have nothing on their respective minds than establishing (1) the range of sensations possible and (2) basic (i.e., not "more sophisticated") judgments on whether people or things thus perceived should be accepted or rejected. Thus sensation retains its status as being a function both irrational and perceptual, and feeling keeps its nature as being a function both rational and judgment-oriented.

In my recent meditations on "complexity" and "density," I've come to the conclusion that all four functions, as they manifest in literature, must depend on complexity as a measure of merit. In COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1  I rejected Raymond Durgnat's 'aesthetic of simplicity," in part because I think his notion of symmetry-- i.e., elementary myth-motifs must be opposed to more finely rendered renditions of verisimilitude-- was, ironically enough, too simple. Certainly I don't think of the free flow of images and symbols, as expressed by the function of intuition, is in any way less complex than any mimesis produced by any representative of realism, be it Henry James or Ben Katchor. Maybe if Durgnat had read more of Jung than of Levi-Strauss, he might have modified his stance.

I've already devoted many words to the ways in which the products of the human intuition provide the groundwork for the conceptualizations of the thinking-function. But only in this essay, THE QUANTUM THEORY OF DYNAMICITY, did I come close to verbalizing the potential connections between the sensation-function and the feeling-function as seen through my lit-crit lens. More on this in a separate essay.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL

At the end of one of Colin Wilson's books-- probably MYSTERIES, though I have not hauled it out to check-- I recall that he made a gender statement that would prove utterly unacceptable with many modern readers. Paraphrasing from memory, I believe that Wilson typified women as being "close-sighted" in that they tended to be concerned with immediate reality, while men tended to be "far-sighted," concerned with making long-range plans.

I would imagine that most people can think of examples in which this or that person does or does not conform to the generalization. I'm not interested in the gender statement as such, but only in the contrast of "close sight" and "far sight." These formulations, which are abstractions of the human eye's capacity for both types of visual perception, dovetail fairly well with my notions of the way the literary experience works for readers, as I noted here.

It may be that my revised versions of overthought and underthought will in future serve me as shortened forms for the respective effects that "the function of thinking" and "the function of intuition" have upon literary narrative.  I concluded in REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PART 3   that both myth-critics and ideological critics were in a similar unenviable position as far as converting the majority of readers to pursue more abstract readings of texts. Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience. 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking" finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

A further comparison of the two forms of "sightedness" extends to my terms of the two types of will in literature: "the idealizing will" and "the existential will," on which I descanted in the 2013 essay APES AND ANGELS:

First, "existential will" lines up with a focus upon immediate reality:

This will I'll term the "existential will," because it is a will to remain attached to all the affects that call up everyday sensory existence; our feeling of being inextricably a part of the physical world.

While "idealizing will" lines up, not so much with "long range plans," but with ideals that have a sweeping, long-range applicability to humankind as a whole, whether those ideals serve "good" or "evil:"

This will I'll term the "idealizing will," because it seems obvious to me that any "idea" to which a subject becomes emotionally attached becomes an "ideal."

By the power and glory of the transitive effect, then, a given work's lateral meaning may be said to incarnate the "existential will" of all of the characters combined, who are inextricably focused upon their own interests within the diegesis. The work's underthought and overthought, whatever their quality of expression, would then incarnate the "idealizing will" of the plot-action as a whole: that which often receives the cumbersome and inaccurate term of "the theme." I've tended to speak of the two types of will in identifying characters within the diegesis as being heroes, villains, monsters, or demiheroes. However, here I'm addressing the dual ways in which the reader interacts with the text: identifying with the characters' travails within the diegesis even as he may (sometimes) seek an extra-diegetical meaning to the entire narrative, and so the two types of will have a different function when applied to the possible reactions of the reader rather than the functions of the characters.

RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT

I started out OVERTHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT with this quote from Frye:

Meaning is derived from context, and there are two contexts for verbal meaning: the context of literature and the context of ordinary explicit or intentional discourse. When we first read a concentrated and difficult poem, we first try to grasp its explicit meaning, or the prose sense of what it says. We often call this the “literal” meaning, but actually it is a translation of the poem into a different verbal context, and is not what the poem really means at all. Gerard Manley Hopkins draws a distinction between the poet’s “overthought” or explicit meaning, and his “underthought,” or the meaning given by the progression of images and metaphors. But it is the “underthought” that is the real poetic meaning, and the explicit meaning must conform to it ...-- Northrop Frye (fuller context here).

I didn't use Hopkins' term "overthought" in the essays I directed at a couple of elitist critics, but I did state that they were guilty of "overthinking:" of taking narratives made up of "images and metaphors" and locking them into predetermined complexes of ideas. Within the scope of my essays, "overthought" might describe this tendency, while "underthought" described the reader's tendency to read the narrative's images and metaphors first and foremost as things that aroused either sympathetic or antipathetic affects in him. These emotional responses then lead to the abstract ideas, rather than the other way around.

While I agree with Frye's basic conclusion from the material given, I don't think Hopkins' original thesis goes far enough. I think the "literal meaning" is not something that looms "over" the poem, as a dialectical theme can be descried 'from above." The literal meaning is, amusingly enough, also the "lateral meaning;" one arrives at it by following the progression of events and expressed feelings from point A to point Z, and that is "what happened."

The word "overthought," in my opinion better properly describes a hyper-intellectual approach to art that Frye himself described in his essay "Mouldy Tales," collected in A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE:

{Certain critics] feel that [literature's] essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience...

"Underthought," obviously, I would keep just as it is, with the caveat that just because one believes in starting one's critiques by talking about the progression of images and metaphors, that does not mean one has nothing to say about how the "images of intuition" can become ordered into "structures of dialectic thought."

It may be that my revised versions of overthought and underthought will in future serve me as shortened forms for the respective effects that "the function of thinking" and "the function of intuition" have upon literary narrative.  I concluded in REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PART 3   that both myth-critics and ideological critics were in a similar unenviable position as far as converting the majority of readers to pursue more abstract readings of texts. Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience. Thus, I personally can still enjoy many narratives that don't have much in the way of abstract meaning, as long as they excel in terms of sensation, feeling, or some combination thereof.  Many of my favorite comics from my early days will not make the grade as myth-comics, such as the 1960s DOOM PATROL, which did its level best to emulate the charisma of the 1960s FANTASTIC FOUR. The Drake-Premiani stories are still fun to read for their lateral meaning, for their appeals to sensation and feeling-- but overthought and underthought will not appear nearly as much as they do in the Lee-Kirby FF-tales.

STRIP NO-SHOW

I addressed some of the problems with finding strong mythic discourses in comic strips in the three essays of the series THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, beginning here.  In addition to the LITTLE NEMO analysis that I posted this week, I have a couple more comic-strip candidates in mind for future installments. However, there won't be a "Bizarro version" of the NEMO strip this week. Since NEMO managed to pull off a consummate myth while remaining within the restrictions of the form, I felt that any "bad example" ought to be another comic-strip, but one that failed to consummate its discourse. But though I could find a lot of strips that were inconsummate in other ways, it was tough to find anything that worked for me. (If I was looking for comic strips that were inconsummate with regard to the thinking function, I could pick pretty much any MALLARD FILMORE strip.)

Since I believe that I have a pretty fair knowledge of the best-known comic strips, I find myself asking the question, "Is it possible that I'm not finding much because the restrictions of the comic strip form actively mitigate against the functions of thought and poetic intuition?"

In Part 3 of REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE I posited that these functions are secondary in a developmental sense to those of sensation and feeling. I won't get into the frightfully complicated schema Carl Jung provided for the four functions in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES. I've mentioned that he even subdivided his functions into "concrete" and "abstract" aspects, and that's further than I want to go at this time. I suppose I'll just say that all of the functions I address probably fall into the abstract aspect and leave it at that.

As every comic-reader knows, American comic books developed out of comic strips. The best known comic strips were syndicated in nationally distributed newspapers and were often used as attractions with which to sell the paper as a whole to a predominantly adult audience. A number of the strips were overtly aimed at children, but the only way that the kids could get them was if their parents, or some similar authority, either bought every paper every day or subscribed.

In contrast, American comic books were largely aimed at kids from the first, since individual comics were so cheap that they could be purchased with pocket money. In the early days some features aped the "continued next time" structure of comic strips, which would in theory force the buyer to purchase the next issue as well. For the most part, however, comic books of the Golden Age soon evolved away from the newspaper model-- suggesting to me that although subscriptions was possible with some titles, the majority of the juvenile readers wanted their comics "done in one" so that they wouldn't have to worry about purchasing the next issue.

Based on that quick comparison, one might think that the comic-strip form, being aimed at the adults, would be the more "advanced" medium, if one accepted the priorities of elitist criticism. Comic strips were allied to formidable syndication organizations, so they generally attracted the most formally accomplished artists. Throughout the run of the COMICS JOURNAL print magazines, its editors and raconteurs almost never ceased the sing the praises of the great comic-strip artists-- Caniff, Foster, Raymond-- and to devalue most comic-book artists, aside from a favored few like Eisner, Cole, and most of those associated with EC Comics.

What the elitists missed, however, was that comic strips, even at their greatest levels of excellence, were always hampered by the factors of serial progression. Certainly Sunday pages like NEMO and PRINCE VALIANT could get away with a somewhat "painterly" approach to comics-narrative, but they were the exceptions. Most story-strips, whether they appeared only on weekdays, on Sundays, or in a combined form, chose to pursue a straightforward linear narrative-- again, one designed to seduce the readers into regularly partaking of the newspaper that carried the comic. Caniff may have been the paradigmatic figure here, in part because one can see him channeling the "invisible style" of most Hollywood films of his time.

This linear narrative, in essence, followed the same association I've outlined for the sensation and feeling functions. The visual part of a given strip communicates what kinds of sensations that the characters are experiencing, and the verbal part gives it feeling-context: whether the reader is supposed to be happy or sad when a given character is killed.

Because this was the most efficient means of communicating narratives in a medium that was serial by nature and truncated by form, even the best artists tended to follow the "invisible style."

The comic book medium largely began by reprinting re-arranged comic strips, but as soon as it was evident that an original feature could make big money-- one guess which feature provided that proof-- most comic books began to rely on original material.

But this eventuated in a change in narrative strategies. The comic-creators might have a limited space to tell his story in each comic. But even a 4-page story allowed the creators to expand on narrative aspects that a comic strip could rarely indulge. It's true that the great majority of comic book features in the Golden Age were formulaic-- but they, unlike the best comic strips, possesses the power to expand into the realms I've called "thinking" and "intuition." On the whole most Golden Age comics did not encourage a lot of thinking, with the obvious exception of the EC books. But they could venture more deeply into the realm of intuition and its mythic images-- and they did so, though often only on a sporadic basis. I've commented that a lot of PLASTIC MAN stories aren't well written in terms of any function, but then, there's the one from POLICE #43 that I analyzed here.  I suggest that because Cole felt free to slap down any kind of wild fantasy that occurred to him-- a freedom denied to the Fosters and Raymonds of the "big time"-- he was sometimes able to come up with a fascinating psychological myth like this one.

Possibly next week I'll work on some of the other fascinating myths of the Golden Age, since most of these stories are utterly ignored by current comics criticism.