LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 3

 My recent discourses on "the limited and the limitless" aspects of creative expression reminded me of a passage from Northrop Frye. I discussed it in greater detail in this 2009 essay, but here I'll confine myself to looking at the passage from a new perspective.

...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its 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... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme...-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

Frye brackets two of his literary mythoi, tragedy and irony, as having appeal for the "realist" critic, while the other two, comedy and romance, are the preference of the "romantic" critic. In the essay Frye's principal distinction between the "Iliad critic" and the "Odyssey critic" is that the latter reads the narrative to enjoy the story for its own sake, while the former is looking for an "imaginative allegory" whose purpose is to illuminate "the immediate world outside literature." 

Frye doesn't precisely formulate a reason as to why the Iliad critic seeks his illumination in two of the four mythoi, irony and the one I've renamed "drama."  Nor does he do so for the Odyssey critic with respect to comedy and the mythos I've renamed "adventure." But I believe the essential contrast is that between "the happy ending" and "the unhappy ending." The Odyssey's denouement is moderately "happy," insofar as Odysseus, despite many ordeals and lost years with his family, succeeds in his goal to return to his homeland and to be reunited with his wife and son. In contrast, The Iliad concludes with Achilles yielding the dead body of slain Hector to his father, an outcome that looks forward to the fact that in the greater continuity Achilles too is doomed to perish before the walls of Troy come tumbling down. The Iliad fills the reader with an awareness of the dramatized limitations of life, and while The Odyssey is not unaware of those curtailments on freedom, the adventurous elements of the journey fill one with a sense of limitless potential, in that a mortal hero has managed to survive against the ill will of the gods.

Though I didn't address the limited/limitless dichotomy in my four essays on THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS, the fourth essay touches on similar territory.

Now, as it happens, in arranging the four mythoi, I followed Frye's season-based arrangement, which to the best of my recollection did not involve Ovid's "four ages." In the first two FOUR AGES essays, I said that the *dynamis* of each mythos compared well with one of the "ages of man:" child, adolescent, mature adult, older adult. Thus I perceive that even though adventure is "serious" in terms of how its readers are expected to invest themselves in the character's struggles, it is a "light seriousness" that canon-critics do not regard as covalent with their "high serousness." Adventure-stories, while they may not involve adolescent characters, are often regarded as adolescent in nature because they tend to have happy endings, no matter what sufferings their characters may endure  to reach said ending. Not all works within the dramatic mythos have unhappy endings, of course. But critics tend to prefer dramas because there is a certain expectation of a stronger chance for a dolorous, and therefore more bracing, conclusion to the story. Thus dramas meet the critic's desire for high seriousness.

With the two "mythoi of levity," comedy, more than irony, still allows for more identification with its characters than does irony, and thus comedy also shows a predilection for happy endings. Though the phrase "light comedy" does not apply to all comedies across the board, it suggests something of the attitude that the Iliadic critic has toward comedy in general: there's still enough of a tendency for viewers to invest in the characters' fates and to want to see said characters validated to some degree. This is not true of the irony, for the creator of the irony has, so to speak, turned up the dial on his levity-making machines until everything in the story floats free of any readerly attachment. Again, some ironies-- such as Voltaire's CANDIDE-- may have relatively "happy" endings in comparison to other, more relentless ironies. But there is no sense, to paraphrase Frye, that the world has been reborn by a ritual of jubiliation: if anything, even the worlds with relatively happy endings are doomed, just as "older adults" are doomed to end their days and their experience of the ongoing world.

Thus, this current rethinking invalidates the verdict of the GRAVITY'S RAINBOW series, in that I would now opine that both adventures and comedies show a greater tendency toward encouraging reader identification than one sees in dramas or ironies. To pursue the metaphor of the four ages once more, it's as if the comedy and the adventure allow for the most identification because their characters were designed to be triumphant, while the drama and the irony are designed to allow the reader to pull back from the characters, even if for very different reasons.

One more installment to go...

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE SONG OF HIAWATHA (1855)

 Given my keen interest in charting the course of adventure-fiction within the greater context of prose and poetic literature, I took considerable time getting around to Longfellow's famous narrative poem.

The bulk of Longfellow's work is not well regarded with younger audiences today, although older connoisseurs of poetry are likely to remember the engrossing rhythms of "The Children's Hour," "Paul Revere's Ride," and the epic of a figure who began as a historically verifiable 16th-century chief but was transformed by the poet into a catch-all demigod amalgamating assorted Native American stories. By the time Longfellow wrote the SONG, the entire tradition of the epic poem, which could trace its heritage back to many of the earliest civilizations, was clearly on the decline, and I would say that the SONG was probably the last specifically "heroic" epic of any consequence (including such latter-day efforts as Yeats' "Wanderings of Oisin.") After the SONG, almos all adventure-related narratives, whether as high-toned as IVANHOE or as trashy as THE BLACK MONK, became dominated by the medium of prose.

Archaic heroic epics served many purposes: to celebrate a nation's founding (the Aeneid), to dramatize a great martial conflict (the Iliad), or to bring a warrior back to his homeland (the Odyssey). The SONG is probably closest in spirit to the Iliad, which alludes to, but does not chronicle, the fall of Troy. The SONG describes the way of life of the Iroquois tribes that lived in the Northeastern United States, at a time before that way of life ended due to the incursions of European colonists. But even though by 1855 not all Native American tribes had been fully subdued by the U.S. government, the decline of the Iroquois stands for the eventual decline of all Native Americans within the U.S. borders (and to some extent to all such colonial endeavors). which I would imagine Longfellow foresaw. 

Experts on myth and folklore have declare that Longfellow's mixing and matching of Native American stories is far from faithful, even to the few written records of the oral tales in the poet's own time. Nevertheless, I don't judge literary myths primarily by accuracy to source, and so I found the SONG replete with many fascinating myth-tropes. Some of them are etiological in nature, like describing the invention of pictographic writing or the formulation of rituals to banish the spirits of the deceased. And many tales reflect the Indians' focus on all non-human creatures as "people" in their own right, capable of helping or harming the principal hero in his adventures. But for me I was frankly surprised at how many combative stories Longfellow works into his epic. 

Longfellow's Hiawatha is a demigod. A divine being, the West Wind, sires the future hero on a mortal woman (albeit with her own deific background), and then deserts her, patently competing with the Greek gods for the place of "worst deadbeat dad." As an adult Hiawatha takes his magical weapons and engages his heavenly father in combat to avenge his mother, who dies lovelorn-- but the West Wind can't be killed, so that Hiawatha must return to Earth and become a culture hero to the Iroquois. Aside from the etiological myths mentioned above, most of Hiawatha's activities are martial in nature, as he subdues the great sturgeon that swallows him whole, and conquers the immortal magician Meggisogwon, who has one vulnerable point (helpfully revealed to the hero by a clever woodpecker). Hiawatha also has a couple of larger-than-life friends-- Chiababos the minstrel and Kwasind the Strong Man-- but they end up meeting untimely ends, arguably signaling the decline of the fantasy-world in which Hiawatha dwells, even before the European colonists arrive to plunge the timeless wilderness into "real time." Most of the major characters are male, and so there's not much focus upon the lives of Native American females. The only time a female character is especially significant involves a magical ritual of corn-protection performed by the hero's famous wife Minnehaha, who performs the ritual by walking around a cornfield nude. Yet Minnehaha also dies during famine, underscoring that even in the fantasy-land Death still held its dominion.

Since the founding of the United States changed so much about the world, both in its "New" and "Old" incarnations, it's somewhat appropriate that an epic about the decline of the "noble savages" occupying that land should also stand as the last of the great heroic epics.

LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE

                           

 Whatever the virtues of my essay-series HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY,  it did not succeed in supplying a succinct “summation of my NUM theory,” so here’s a one-essay shot at simplification.

 Almost all Western critics from the 18^th century on have formed their theories against a background of predominantly “realistic” literature, in which it is taken for granted that the world of literature ought to emulate the world one sees outside one’s window, or, failing that, the world one would have seen had one lived at a certain time and place. Only in the 20^th century did some critics, such as Northrop Frye and Leslie Fiedler, attempt to articulate systems that accounted for the appeal of what is usually called “fantastic literature.” Even so, these authors still focused mostly on authors whose metaphenomenal visions had proved popular for centuries: Swift, Milton, Poe, et al.

My amateur “poetics” takes metaphenomenal literature as the starting-point and views all the developments of realistic literature as reactions against the literary formulas—tropes, as many call them-- of myth and folklore.

 

As it happens, the earliest literary critic—or at least, the earliest whose works have survived to the present day—lived in an era (384-322 B.C.) in which most major literary works took place in metaphenomenal worlds, whether they recapitulated the major mythic narratives associated with the Greek pantheon, as seen in Homer’s two epics, or simply used relatively minor fantasy-tropes, like the ghost that appears in Aeschylus’s THE PERSIANS. Because Aristotle’s literary world was full of gods, curses and oracles, his POETICS, the first extant statement of artistic principles, does not address in depth the subject of phenomenality; of how a given literary work portrays the nature of the phenomena available in its world. The POETICS makes several statements that are relevant to the subject of phenomenality, such as when the philosopher opines that comedy tends to be more down-to-earth than tragedy. But the closest Aristotle comes to an overall statement on what phenomena a work can portray is his elaboration upon the concept of mimesis (“imitation.”) For Aristotle, what he calls “poetry” is the “imitation of an action” of which the poet has conceived, and the philosopher breaks down three categories of narrative action of which the poet can conceive: “things as they are or were,” “things as they are said to be” (that is, things whose veracity the poet cannot vouch for), and “things as they ought to be.” The last category may have taken in for the rare narratives that paralleled what we now call science fiction, such as Aristophanes’ THE BIRDS (414 BC), which depicts the titular avians creating the imaginary domain of Cloud Cuckoo Land. But Aristotle does not offer more than one or two examples of each of these categories, for he did not live in a world whose literature privileged the naturalistic. There was no need to justify the metaphenomenal worlds of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, since everyone accepted them as genuine art.

 

If there is a “fatal flaw” in Aristotle’s categories, it would be his failure to point out that even the author’s depiction of “things as they are” were not windows upon reality as such; that they were, as much as depictions of gods and ghosts, literary tropes; formulas that were meant to evoke certain responses in their audiences. For instance, a scene in THE ODYSSEY depicts a servant’s recognition of the disguised Odysseus thanks to an unhealed scar on the hero’s leg. Even though the epic is full of gods and monsters, this scene is predicated on a naturalistic detail that convinces because everyone in the audience is familiar with the fact that wounds don’t always heal properly. Nevertheless, the scene is not “reality,” but an “imitation of reality.” It is not any less a construct than, say, a scene in THE ILIAD wherein Zeus makes the very un-human statement that, if he so desired, he could absorb all of his fractious fellow gods into himself as a show of his omnipotence.

 

Aristotle almost certainly knew that even realistic tropes were still products of human artifice, but he does not explicitly say so. There is no over-arcing statement to parallel that of the modern philosopher Suzanne Langer, who labeled all the productions of art as being “gestural,” i.e., that they gestured toward aspects of human existence without actually being coterminous with those aspects. The rediscovery of Aristotle’s works during the European Renaissance resulted in a misinterpretation of his concept of mimesis, so as to emphasize only “things as they are or were.” Of course, it may be that the Renaissance critics merely chose to emphasize the parts of Aristotle that validated their own culture, since during that period literature became increasingly naturalistic.

 

The predominant naturalism of 18^th-century works like MOLL FLANDERS and TOM JONES as I said, a reaction against the older forms of European romance and religious rhetoric, which had served roughly the same cultural purpose in the European countries that Greek polytheism had served in Greece. That century saw a limited counter-reaction against naturalism in a short-lived vogue for “Arabian Nights” fantasies and the more protracted European fascination with Gothic horrors. In the 19^th century the latter form of metaphenomenal literature also spread to the United States of America and affected the oeuvres of Poe and of Hawthorne. But the Gothics and all the subcategories of metaphenomenal fiction—eventually given the rubrics of “fantasy, horror and science fiction” in the ensuing century—were not regarded as being on the same quality-level as naturalistic literature. Not until the latter half of the 20th century did naturalism lose some of its hold on the Western psyche, resulting in the proliferation of so-called “speculative fiction,” much of which was given more literary cachet than the old “science fiction and fantasy.”

 

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

 

The domain of “the naturalistic” emphasizes conformity with whatever idea of “natural law” an audience may expouse, whereas the domain of “the marvelous” conforms to whatever concepts are seen as transcending natural law, be it through Christian miracles or futuristic inventions. The domain of “the uncanny,” though, endeavors to perform a high-wire balancing act between these two literary phenomenalities. It might be argued that some forms of “the uncanny” sway toward the domain of naturalism, as when the story’s hero unmasks a marauding ghost as sinister Uncle Eben. But other forms sway closer to the domain of the marvelous. Nothing in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original TARZAN story literally transcends natural law, however much one questions the probability of the hero’s advancement to his status of “lord of the jungle.” Tarzan is supposedly no stronger than a human male can be at the peak of development. But his immense strength SEEMS to make him a “superman,” as does his rapport with jungle-beasts like apes and elephants. And so, even though the author is working with a set of uncanny tropes akin to those of Ann Radcliffe, emphasizing *semblance* rather than *actuality,* Tarzan’s origins do not reduce him in stature in the way that arguably Uncle Eben is reduced by the revelation of his ghostly imposture.

 

All of these sets of phenomenality-tropes reflect the desire of human audiences to see stories that reflect either direct physical experience or indirect mental experience. It may be argued that the exigencies of physical existence signify that humans can never be “free” in the sense of being independent of those exigencies. However, literary work allows audiences to think and feel what it would like to enjoy such freedom, whether that sense of freedom is ultimately validated or frustrated. The freedom to think in terms outside those of immediate experience have arguably made it possible for humans to concoct real handheld communication devices to match those of the fictional STAR TREK. But even if no such innovations came about in response to fictional inspirations, literature is at its best when it offers its audiences the mimesis of all possible worlds.

QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2

The “longer formulation” of quantum literary theory that I mentioned in Part 1 represents an attempt to apply the insights regarding the master tropes of the combative mode, expressed in 2019’s GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE  to the discourses of the four potentialities. In 2017’s GOOD WILLQUANTUMS PT. 2  I wrote that “the primary criterion of ficti onal excellence in any potentiality” was that of “density/complexity,” which criterion was merely a conflation of two covalent terms I’d used separately over the years. Not until late 2018, with the essay CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE,  did I decide that the authorial process of creating complexity merited its own term, and that this process, called concrescence, pertained to any work, no matter which of the potentialities proved dominant in the author’s intentions. I devoted one 2019 essay, CLANSGRESSION COUNTDOWN, to listing fifty separate works, all of which dealt with similar subject matter, and then showing how each work emphasized one of the four potentialities more than it did any of the other three.

I wrote GIVE-AND-TAKE in late 2019, but that essay was the culmination of many years of meditating on the different forms that the combative mode took in fictional narratives, with special reference to forms which did not end with a “give-and-take” of energies between combatants. Apparently, I was reasonably satisfied with these makework terms for the two tropes throughout most of 2020. However, during 2020 I finally read PROCESS AND REALITY, and this caused me to re-interpret some of my critical parameters in terms of the “vector metaphor” Whitehead used in PROCESS. Thanks to this process of re-interpretation, I gave further thought to the two tropes of GIVE-AND-TAKE in terms of vectors.

With the trope originally designated as “the killing stroke,” recently renamed “the deathblow,” I noted that the combative energies could flow in one of two directions:

From inferior force to superior force, as with the humans who blind the mighty Cyclops as well as the humans who vanquish mighty Godzilla with an “oxygen destroyer”—

Or from superior force to inferior force, as with Dionysus’s destruction of Pentheus and with the Spectre’s destruction of pestilential criminals.

However, with the trope originally designated as “give-and-take” and renamed “deathmatch,” the flow of energies must be on roughly the same plane. Often the deathmatch-trope takes place between just two entities of roughly equal power, such as Aeneas and Turnus, or Orion and Kalibak. A second variation would be that of two formidable warriors taking a larger number of opponents with some disadvantages (Odysseus and Telemachus vs. the suitors, who lack full armor and weapons, Batman and Robin vs. gangs of armed hoods who lack any special combative skills). A third popular variation is that of a huge assemblage of combatants vs. another huge assemblage of equally skilled opponents (the Greek gods vs. the Titans, the Justice Society vs. the Injustice Society), and a fourth can pit a large assemblage of heroes against one superior opponent, as with the Greek gods fighting Typhon and the Teen Titans battling Trigon. But all of these variations are subsumed by a vector showing energies flowing in both directions.

Because the “strength-quanta” energies of the deathblow-trope focus upon a vector going only in one direction, I choose to label this trope as *univectoral. *

However, because the “strength-quanta” energies of the deathmatch-trope flow in at least two directions at minimum, I choose to label this trope as *multivectoral. *

In GIVE-AND-TAKE, I erred on the side of caution by stating that I wasn’t yet certain that the two combative tropes were the only significant ones. However, having rethought the tropes in terms of vectoral analysis, I’ll now state that these two are the only principal tropes for “strength-quanta,” and that everything in between the two is simply a variation of one or the other.

Now, how does this affect potentialities whose tropes deal with different quanta? I will submit that excellence in all of the other three potentialities arises from a concrescence of energies that also follows either a *univectoral * or a *multivectoral * process.

Some loose examples:

In a work dominated by the dramatic potentiality, the work might be *univectoral * if it focuses only upon how one character’s “affect-quanta” influences other persons, as with Ibsen’s HEDDA GABLER. Another work might be *multivectoral * if it focused on how a group of characters influenced one another with their quanta, as would be the case in the same author’s ROSMERSHOLM. Similarly, one might have two works dominated by the didactic potentiality, one in which the author wishes to expatiate only one ideology, while in another the author wishes to oppose at least two ideologies in order to show one as superior to the other. Both Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE and Jack London’s THE IRON HEEL concern the ideology of socialism. But London provides an argument for the counter-ideology of capitalism, while Sinclair does not.

As for the mythopoeic potentiality, the one that arguably receives the greatest attention on this blog, I may as well use as illustrations the last two mythcomics I analyzed here. “Ixar, Sinister Statue of the Cyclades” is *univectoral,* in that all of the symbol-quanta are invested in the giant statue’s recapitulation of the myth of Orion and Cedalion, while all other characters, settings and plot-actions in the story are symbolically nugatory.

In contrast, the two-part story “PublicEnemy/Lifedeath” is *mutivectoral.* The first part begins by showing the interactions of two heroes, Storm and Rogue, as they overcome their initial conflicts and forge a bond of superheroic sisterhood, in part thanks to Rogue being able to “become” Storm by assimilating Storm’s command of natural forces. The sequence then concludes by showing a different set of symbolic interactions between Storm and potential lover Forge. Forge, an incarnation of the de-mythifying power of science, accidentally brings about the eradication of Storm’s godlike mutant abilities. Because Storm does not know that Forge is responsible for her loss, she comes close to being seduced both by his virility and his state of wounded-ness (missing leg replaced by a mechanical substitute). When she learns of his culpability, she rejects any bond with him, except in the sense that she swears to overcome the state of abjection he’s forced upon her, promising that she will find a way to “fly” again, if only in a metaphorical sense.

Time will tell whether or not I will explore other potentialities in terms of their vectoral nature. If so, I would have to devise trope-names appropriate to the other three potentialities, since “deathmatch” and “deathblow” apply only to the kinetic.

GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE

Might is an ability that is superior to great obstacles. It is called dominance [Gewalt] if it is superior even to the resistance of something that itself possesses might.-- Kant, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT.

Plainly, Kant, in formulating his linked concepts of "might" and "dominance," is never as concerned as I am with sussing out the diverse ways in which two mighty forces may contend to produce the sense of dominance. And at present I now see two major archetypal tropes by which fiction creates the sense of dominance, though to be sure I'm not claiming that the two tropes, that of "give-and-take" and "the killing stroke," are necessarily the only ones.

"Give-and-take" refers to the sort of battles in which at least two entities, both possessed of some analogous level of might, come to blows in some manner as to show that both characters can "dish it out" as well as being able to "take it." In my 2015 essay COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, I correlated the ideal of an equally matched battle as one that depended on the ethic of fair play, whether or not the two fighters both subscribe to that ethic:

 ...the notion of "fair play" becomes important within the sphere of fiction and fantasy, possibly more important than it can ever be in the real world of political negotiation and compulsion. In my own lit-critic cosmos, the ideal of "fair play" assumes the role of "self-limitation" that is, in Nietzsche's philosophy, occupied by "self-overcoming."

In the COMBAT PLAY series I already used images from a Jack Kirby bout between Thor and Ulik, so for variety's sake, this time I'll illustrate with scenes from an analogous fight between THE NEW GODS' hero Orion and his evil half-brother Kalibak:

However, the second archetypal trope has less to do with evenly matched combat than with a character, possesses of some level of personal might, who finds a weakness in a mighty opponent's defenses. In my 2012 essay MIGHT VS. DOMINANCE, I pointed out that in the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD the climax is not one of direct contention:

There is no one-on-one combat as such between the principal heroes and the principal villain in THIEF, as usually takes place in related adventure-films.  Earlier sequences show Jaffar triumphing over the heroes with his magic with no real contest, but when Ahmad and Abu join in flouting his forces with the help of a flying carpet, Jaffar seems to run out of magic and flees, only to receive the same fate most villains get even when they do engage in combat.

In this case, Jaffar is struck down by an arrow, sent from a bow wielded by the film's hero Abu. Some dialogue suggests that the bow's bolts cannot miss when they're aimed at "injustice." In some instances, such as that of Neil Gaiman's protagonist in the novel NEVERWHERE, I've cited examples where a "killing stroke" is brought about by a magic weapon wielded by a subcombative character. However, Abu's combative credentials should prove beyond reproach for most viewers, given the manner in which he overcomes a gigantic spider in an earlier scene.

It may be of some interest that both combative tropes take place in Homer's ODYSSEY. During the imprisonment of Odysseus and his men in the cave of the Cyclops, it's made abundantly clear that even as a group the mortals are unable to battle Polyphemus directly. Thus they come up with a way to wound him that also allows them to escape the cave.

However, should any reader doubt the pugnacity of Odysseus, the epic concludes with the traveler returning to his island home Ithaca, where he, his son Telemachus, and a few other allies decimate the ranks of Penelope's unwanted suitors, who are initially unarmed but who, during the onslaught, do manage to acquire weapons and are able to put up a fight before being slain.

I'll note for the time being that most of the "monster-slaying" films I discussed in the essay WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 3 depended on the monsters being slain in Cyclops-fashion, by some human being who uncovers an Achilles Heel. That said, I usually don't view such works as combative unless they've first depicted some "give-and-take" in which the monster withstands the onslaughts of conventional human weapons.

AN ODYSSEAN ILIAD

Last year I re-read THE ILIAD, as mentioned in my essay AN ILIADIC ODYSSEY, so this year I've done the same for Homer's other great epic, THE ODYSSEY. My focus this time, however, is somewhat different.

In the earlier essay, my main focus was on how both the creator of THE ILIAD and his audience viewed such ideas as glory and the fortunes sent to mortals by the gods. THE ODYSSEY, though, sparks a different vein of thought.

On average I've tended to think of THE ILIAD as more grounded in reality. The Greek gods hover over the events of the Trojan War, subtly influencing the fortunes of the warriors on both sides of the conflict. However, it's easy to imagine the war proceeding roughly the same way if the gods never got involved. In contrast, much of THE ODYSSEY concerns Odysseus' adventures for a decade after the ten-year Trojan War, as he and his sailors attempt to return home but are delayed by all manner of supernatural beings. So THE ODYSSEY seems, from one standpoint, to be more in the vein of all later fantasy-romances, in that the hero's exploits are divorced from ordinary reality. Northrop Frye expressed a similar predilection in his essay "Mouldy Tales," quoted here:

...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its 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... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme...-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

I believe that Frye is basically correct about two opposed conceptions of literary experience. However, the actual structure of Homer's ODYSSEY is not nearly as invested in pure fantasy as one might think.

For one thing, the epic's structure mitigates against such investment. The first part of THE ODYSSEY focuses upon the consequences of Odysseus' long absence to his household on Ithaca. There his faithful wife Penelope continually puts off other noble suitors, while her nearly adult son Telemachus chafes at the suitors' abuse of the hospitality customs. The gods themselves are seen in Olympus, just as they are in THE ILIAD, but they're less concerned here with meting out merciless fate and more with assisting the hero in his troubles. Athena, more than any other deity, intervenes to succor both Telemachus and his father, but she doesn't produce a lot of extravagant miracles. Most of the really extraordinary myth-events seem to have happened long ago, like Menelaus relating how he wrestled the sea-god Proteus.

The second part of THE ODYSSEY contains all the metaphenomenal elements for which the epic is justly famous. The hero is condemned to be kept away from his home by the will of Poseidon after Odysseus blinds the savage Cyclops, though a lot of the beings he encounters-- a tribe of cannibals, sea monsters, the sirens, and two separate demi-goddesses-- impinge upon Odysseus and his men with no particular reference to Poseidon's will. Still, a lot of this fantastic material is played down in the Robert Fitzgerald translation, particularly the adventure of the lotus-eaters, which is completed in a few lines. Further, the reader does not experience any of these wild adventures in "real time," for all of them are related by Odysseus to his hosts the Phaecians.

Finally, the third part mirrors the structure of the first part: though Athena intervenes in very minor ways, the author focuses upon the realistic details of Odysseus' incognito return to Ithaca. Homer goes into scrupulous detail about the way ordinary life is experienced on the hero's island home, from the pecking-order of the local beggars to the way the household is run in Odysseus' absence. The final battle of Odysseus and his son against the villainous suitors is as bloody as anything in THE ILIAD, and the remainder of the novel concerns the hero proving his identity to his wife and his father through reference to their shared history.

Strangely for an epic with so much fantastic material, THE ODYSSEY seems to have even more investment in what Frye calls "life-like characterization," in part because the epic's concerns are so far from the world of warriors dying for glorious repute. I would agree with Frye that THE ILIAD is more openly "instructive" as to the ethical message it seeks to oonvey, and therefore the critic is justified in speaking of "Iliadic critics" as being more invested in "imaginative allegory." That said, THE ODYSSEY is not as deeply invested in what Frye deems the stance of the "Odyssean critic," in the "escapist" mythoi of comedy and romance. That total investment into the mode of the romance might actually be better represented by earlier epics like that of Gilgamesh, or later ones like the Argonautica and the Mahabharata.

STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 6

Before going on to the essay I mentioned in PART 5, I'll follow up on my remarks regarding distributive and non-distributive applications of charisma.

I mentioned in PART 4 that there were situations in which heroic characters could remain on the periphery of a ensemble while remaining subordinate to the ensemble. It's also possible for a very large group to be subordinate to one centric protagonist, even when that group has elements in common with the centric ensemble.

I've already discussed my determination that Ivanhoe, the protagonist of Scott's novel, is inextricably the focal presence of the narrative, even though the character may not be nearly as interesting as many other characters in the story. But few of the support-characters of IVANHOE play off one another to the extent one expects of a real ensemble-narrative.

To turn to an example generally deemed the centerpiece of Western fiction, Aristotle opined in the POETICS that THE ILIAD served as a model for his concept of "unity of action." The philosopher states that, despite all the many side-stories involving both Greek and Trojan warriors, the epic poem is primarily about "the anger of Achilles," in that the story begins with Achilles withdrawn from the battlefield in anger, and concludes with the hero mastering his rage to some extent when he releases the body of Hector to Priam. If Aristotle is judged right, then all of the other characters in THE ILIAD are subordinate to Achilles. Thus the charisma of the Greek warrior, at least in Homer's rendition, is non-distributive.

In contrast, at a much later date Apollonius Rhodius attempted his own epic, THE ARGONAUTICA, which like THE ILIAD consisted of imposing a single order upon an assortment of myth-tales. That said, although one may argue, after Aristotle, that the quest of heroic Jason for the Golden Fleece is a single action, the quest isn't as indubitably tied only to Jason's charisma as THE ILIAD is to the charisma of Achilles. Not a few comic-book people have asserted a basic identity between Jason's assemblage of many heroes for the quest and the 20th century's invention of the "superhero team." Questions of direct influence, however, are less important than discerning basic structural similarities, and I would say that the idea of  a multi-character ensemble is far more important to THE ARGONAUTICA than it is to THE ILIAD. The most prominent warriors of Homer's epic-- Odysseus, Ajax, et al-- tend to have adventures that are simply side-notes to the theme of the great Achilles' anger, which, both extrinsically and extrinsically, determines the course of the poem. However, in THE ARGONAUTICA, there are assorted moments where this or that hero performs a task that advances the achievement of the quest. Examples of these feats include Calias and Zetes driving the harpies away from Phineus, and Polydeuces using his specialized boxing skill to defeat a mountainous enemy. So in Apollonius's work, the charisma is clearly distributive, and characters like Polydeuces and Heracles are clearly coordinated with Jason's centricity .

That said, it isn't necessarily the case that every single character who went along with Jason is a crucial part of the ensemble. Hylas, allegedly the lover of Heracles, exists in the poem simply to be swept away to his doom by a water-nympth, and this event provides the occasion for Heracles to leave the quest. Whatever the provenance of this story-element in oral myth, this circumstance does give Apollonius the chance to create suspense as to whether the endeavor can succeed without the presence of the Greek strongman.

So perhaps the true determining factor here is whether or not the characters associated with the ensemble undertake a particular type of action important to the story-- possibly "charismatic action." I devoted Part 4 to explaining why the Black Widow in the 1960s AVENGERS series did not belong to the centric ensemble, in contrast to Marvel's Hercules, and my distinction was not that the Widow simply was not a member of the team, but the fact that her actions in the story did not contribute substantially to the ensemble's assorted "quests."

Thus, even though THE ARGONAUTICA, unlike THE ILIAD, distributes its charisma to a group of characters, all of whom are "coordinate clauses" to one another, some characters allied to the group remain subordinate, or, as the lingo of the theater has it, they remain 'spear-carriers."

This brings me back, in my usual circuitous fashion, to the comment I made at the end of ENSEMBLES DISASSEMBLED:

....if I were ever moved to list exactly which characters in the compendious CRISIS [ON INFINITE EARTHS] belonged to the ensemble, I would probably include only those that had a very strong influence upon the outcome of the overall plot.

At some future point I may investigate why I deem that certain long-running serials, like the manga-serials DRAGONBALL and BLEACH, are non-distributive like THE ILIAD, rather than distributive like the Jason epic.

AN ILIADIC ODYSSEY

I'd been meaning to re-read Homer's ILIAD for some time, and it happened that I had the chance to do so following my re-reading of Shakespeare's TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, discussed here.

My first thought is that although I contrasted Homer's original account of the Achilles-Hector duel with Shakespeare's ironic rewriting of the event, the prose account I excerpted doesn't allude to one important aspect of the fight: that Hector loses in large part because Zeus wants Achilles to win. The two warriors exchange blows and fail to inflict telling wounds. According to translator Richard Lattimore, Hector, wearing the armor of Achilles stolen from Patroklus, charges the Greek warrior. Achilles, who knows the armor well, hits a weak point and wounds Hector. The Trojan pleads to have his body ransomed, but Achilles mercilessly kills him. Later the Greek degrades Hector's body for several days before the Trojan king Priam succeeds in ransoming the corpse from Achilles.

Throughout the conflict, the gods perform many tricks to keep the Greeks on the defensive, and even to keep any other Greek hero from performing Achilles' destined deed of slaying Hector. (At one point, it looks like the Greek Ajax might be able to take Hector, but since this would ruin the story, the gods intervene to save Hector's life.)

Now, from one standpoint the idea of the Greek deities rigging the fight might seem to be no different than Shakespeare's revision, in which Hector is caught without armor and slain by Achilles' troop of warriors. But there's a world of difference between an inequity between men-- which is what Shakespeare presents-- and one between men and gods. There's nothing equitable about the way the gods treat mortals, but to an archaic Greek, this would just be the nature of things. By the very nature of the gods, they send mortals both good and bad fortune, and when it's the latter, mortals can only face their fate with as much courage as possible. Hector's evil fate, of course, mirrors the prophecies of Achilles' own impending downfall, not seen in Homer's epic but repeatedly referenced through prophetic allusions.

Prior to the discovery of other, older heroic epics, the ILIAD seemed to be the oldest extant version of a legendary battle between destined opponents. Various myth-fragments referenced battles that took place long before the Trojan War, not least Zeus' combat with Typhon. The ILIAD mentions most of the most famous Greek heroes of olden days: Heracles, Jason, Bellerophon. But these fragments of religious myths can't be considered art as such, whereas Homer's epic is, like the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first flowerings of narrative art that is not purely religious in nature.

While discussing the book with friends, I was amazed that they had no real regard for the greatness of either Achilles' deed or those of other warriors, such as Ajax and Diomedes. Over and over, they insisted on reading the inequitable actions of the Greek gods as being no more than metaphors for human propaganda, of the tendency of human leaders to con young people into giving their lives in the name of glory. But this overlooks the fact that war is, as often as not, a response to the inequities of fate. Fate often gives one tribe riches and another impoverishment. and to the extent that the second tribe loves life as much as the first, the impoverished ones are thus more likely to risk their lives for gain and for glory-- which can be, but are not always, interdependent. I'm not saying here that human beings don't go to war for bad reasons; obviously they do. But the idea that war is always wrong-- or even always avoidable-- is one of the key mistakes of the Neopuritan liberal.