UP AND DOWN THE PATHOS PATH

 I proposed the theory of "gravity" and "levity" in 2012's GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW. This was one of my many attempts to suss out how categories of "the serious" and "the ludicrous," as Schopenhauer called them, impacted the NUM system that I extrapolated from Northrop Frye's theory of mythoi and finessed with considerations of phenomenality with which Frye was not concerned. 

In my previous post I decided that speaking of these categories as "tonal" in nature was too vague. My new solution for this problem was to import two terms I recorded here in 2013: "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects," my substitution for Aristotle's (inadequate in my view) terms "pity" and "terror." Further, these can also be dovetailed with the assertions I made in the four-part FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS, concluding here. I emphasize the conclusion of that series because that's close to being the only other time, outside of the CROSSBOW series, that I applied the levity/gravity idea to another domain within my theoretical universe. I sorted out the relations of the two "literary forces" to the four mythoi thusly:

COMEDY-- plerotic and oriented on light levity
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and oriented on light gravity
DRAMA-- kenotic and oriented on high gravity
IRONY-- kenotic and oriented on high levity

At the time I couldn't think of any better way to characterize the variations in levity and gravity than with a faux-quantitative metaphor. But I should have been focused on the qualitative difference that are served by the two forces as they meld with the two forms of affect. Putting aside the plerosis/kenosis dyad as having been adequately defined by Theodor Gaster, now the four mythoi look like this:

COMEDY-- the emphasis upon "the jubilative," on things that seem funny because of their positive incongruity, results in a surfeit of *sympathetic levity* 

ADVENTURE-- the emphasis upon "the invigorative," on things that portray positive success in the battles of sex and violence, results in a surfeit of *sympathetic gravity* 

DRAMA-- the emphasis upon "the purgative," on things that connote the expulsion of negative elements, results in a surfeit of *antipathetic gravity*  

IRONY-- the emphasis upon "the mortificative," on things that demonstrate a general state of increasing degradation, results in a surfeit of *antipathetic levity"

This formulation means that I have to dump all the Schopenhauerean arguments I made in DYNAMIS PT 4, wherein I was trying to meld his observations with those of Gaster re: plerosis and kenosis. Now I forswear the idea that "levity" lifts one away from being invested in the fictional characters in comedy as it does in irony, and that "gravity" causes one to be just as invested in the characters of drama as one is in those of adventure. Since ancient times comedy and adventure have been more broadly popular than the other two mythoi because they encourage audiences to identify with the characters, promising for the most part that the sympathetic characters will be vindicated. This makes those mythoi "plerotic" because they're all about incorporating positive energies into the lives of favored characters. In contrast, drama and irony discourage direct identification with the characters as they struggle with, and often lose to, forces antipathetic to them or even to the audience members. They are both "kenotic," as they are focused upon expelling or sublimating negative energies from characters who are not so much "identified with" as "studied" from a distanced view of things. "Levity" encourages positive energy and rising upward, "gravity" encourages negative energy and falling downward.   

There's a bit more to come, but that's a good stopping place.               

MEDITATIONS ON MILLER

I don't have any plans to review THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, Miller's 2001 follow-up to the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. However, with the help of Google I see that I did insert one observation on the messy sequel in my 2010 essay LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION:

It's a little harder to talk about narrative or significant values in TDKSA because it's something of a jumble of Scenes Frank Miller Thought Would Be Really Cool. 

But I felt I should make a few comments on the 2001 work, given that I, like many fans, probably expected more of the same when Miller teamed with Brian Azzarello on the 2015 DARK KNIGHT: MASTER RACE. I don't know what the critical consensus on MASTER RACE was, though Wiki asserts that it received more "positive reviews" than TDKSA. But for me, reading MASTER RACE was like reading a thirty-years-later sequel to TDKR in terms of the continuity of theme and content. True, MASTER RACE used a lot of stuff from TDKSA, but I almost felt that Miller and Azzarello were simply obliged to pick up on story-material executed by some other bozo, the way (say) Roger Stern might concoct a good story based on some moldy, half-forgotten plot-thread.

Of course, that's just an idle fantasy, since I know that TDKSA wasn't an exception in the Miller oeuvre. There's also HOLY TERROR, to which I gave a negative review despite my tendency to condemn all the politically correct hand-wringing I saw from most critics at the time. I faulted TERROR for its many narrative failings, but Miller also produced a number of lame projects that had no connection to his ostensible political leanings.

For instance, there's the 1994 one-shot SPAWN/BATMAN, a monumentally stupid crossover that combines the worst excesses of writer Miller and artist Todd Mac Farlane. Whereas TDKR had been basically respectful to the Batman mythos despite pushing some of its characters to extreme positions (Batman has sadistic tendencies, Catwoman becomes an implicit prostitute), SPAWN/BATMAN seems to be the birthplace of the near-parody known as "the goddamn Batman."

Speaking of which, about eleven years later Miller and Jim Lee teamed up to produce an even more acidulous version of the Caped Crusader, in the form of the 2005-08 serial ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN.

Yet, even though I think all three of these are mammoth wastes of time, I feel that they aren't simply the work of a disinterested hack. All three spring from Miller's distinct creative impulses, which include (1) a conviction to move the reader with any number of visceral appeals, and (2) a tendency to defuse all the intense visceral stuff with sprinklings of absurdist humor. When I look upon these three Miller misfires, I see them as Miller letting his taste for absurdity overrule all of his other creative propensities.

That said, 2001's TDKSA, while it sometimes seems like Miller's love letter to the craziness of Silver Age DC (right down to a gratuitous reference to the Legion of Super-Heroes). does have a few inspired moments, which is more than the other three have going for them. I've forgotten a lot of the silly shit in the rambling storyline, but I must say that I was amused by the idea that some weird version of Robin-- less a DC creation than the "Burt Ward Robin" of television-- becomes immortal in order to take down Batman, and even has conversations when his head's been separated from his body.

 Happily, though, MASTER RACE didn't continue in this dubious direction-- more on which later.

QUICK COMMENT ON JAMES GUNN'S FIRING

Here's another one of my reworked forum-posts, beginning with a quote from my favorite literary critic, Northrop Frye:

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye wrote this in the 1950s, when some intellectuals viewed bestselling authors like Mickey Spillane (who did a LOT of "brutal thrillers") as threats to the intellectual landscape. Frye is arguing that there's a "protecting wall of play" that keeps people from becoming literally infected by the mood of the lynch-mob, which, about ten years previous, Gershon Legman seriously argued was going to happen.

How does this apply to nasty jokes? I think that there's a "wall of play" in Gunn's tweet-jokes. They may not be good jokes, but he's not claiming that he attacked some kid after watching THE EXPENDABLES (one of the more coherent jokes), he's talking about how the movie made him feel "manly" enough to do it-- which I would bet he didn't *really* believe back in the day.

The gist of your post seems to imply that if a real rape-victim read Gunn's jokes, or jokes like them, they would feel terrible to see their trauma trifled with. But if it's a joke, it's NOT REAL. I can't tell a real victim how to deal with trauma, but their pain is not coming from a joke, it's coming from a real act of violence.  Gunn's tweet-jokes are not to my taste, but I have seen black-humor jokes I found funny. Yet no matter where you go, you can find someone, somewhere, who's offended by any joke. 

Black humor is part of our culture, and maybe of every culture, even if some cultures don't want to admit it. I can understand why some people conflate the joke about something bad with the act that actually is bad. But I can't agree with the conflation.

MYTHCOMICS: ["SCALP ITCH"}, JOE COLLEGE #2 (1950)

In a previous essay I won't trouble to track down, I wondered whether or not American "teen humor" comics had any potential to produce the symbolic discourse necessary for a mythcomic. Just the fact that both Gershon Legman and Frederick Wertham took a few shots at the genre might indicate that there was some potential for gold, where these two ignoramuses saw only dross. Legman was a little more explicit than Wertham about the psychosexual undercurrents of the genre, though like Wertham he was content to cite one supposedly disruptive example of said genre to prove his contentions. I quoted him in greater detail in this 2008 essay:

...there are published not only a handful of female crime-and western-comics, but whole series of so-called 'teen-age' comic-books specifically for girls, in which adolescent sexuality is achieved in sadistic disguise... through a continuous humiliation of scarecrow fathers and transvestist boyfriends by ravishingly pretty girls, beating up the men with flower-pots and clocks and brooms..."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), p. 47.

This quasi-Freudian reading manages the feat of making teen humor comics sound a lot more psychologically interesting than they really are. I've seen Legman's one example, a 1947 Timely issue of JEANIE, and it's no than so-so slapstick, though it does have a scene where a pretty girl's father gets conked by his daughter when she mistakes him for a burglar. "So-so slapstick" pretty well describes the majority of all teen humor comics from Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages-- and I speak as one who, whether motivated by intellectual genre-curiosity or by nostalgia for simpler times, has sampled most of the titles out there. Such forgotten ARCHIE-imitators as ALGIE, GINGER, MAZIE, DEXTER, and Thoth knows how many others sometimes had nice art, but offered little more.

Then I came across my copy of JOE COLLEGE #2. There were only two issues of this Hillman title over the years 1949 and 1950, and none of the stories in #1-- which I read on COMIC BOOK PLUS-- were anything special. Nor were any of the stories in #2, except for the cover-featured "Joe College" story. The artist on both of Joe's stories was Bob Powell, and though Joe's first story is ordinary, Powell did dip into some psychological waters for the second and last tale. The cover shown above, though it depicts an imaginary situation (a savage Indian seeks to lift Joe's scalp under the pose of being a barber), captures the essence of the tale's screwball premise.

By 1949 "Joe College" was a term for a fun-loving college student, and that's all there is to the series' youthful protagonist as he attends his alma mater, Hardknox University. But in the story I've retroactively entitled "Scalp Itch," all of the mythicity inheres in the young WASP's encounter with certain not-yet-vanished Americans.

Following a page on which Joe accidentally antagonists a cranky red man named "Horse Feathers" (a decorous euphemism for "horseshit"), one of Joe's professors explains the complicated reasons why there's a whole quasi-reservation of Indians on the campus grounds, Long ago an Indian tribe donated the land to the college's founder, and in a very improbable exchange, they and all their descendants got to live in some mansion near Hardknox. One assumes that the campus provides them some upkeep as well, though the professor asserts that all their money comes from standing around the campus begging for coins. (This is how Joe antagonizes Horse Feathers; mistaking him for a statue of an Indian and passing remarks about the redman's ugly mug.) On top of these considerations, the tribe gets two more privileges. First, one of their women-folk is apparently allowed to "roam der campus until she finds a mate," and though it's an ordinary mortal woman named Princess Dreamboat, Joe has somehow heard about this part of the custom and claims "I thought she was just a myth." However, Joe hasn't heard the second stipulation: that once every ten years, the men of the tribe "are allowed to take vun scalp from vun student"-- and though in practice this means nothing more than shaving the victim's head, it's definitely a demonstration of resentment at white people, since the Indians "always pick der longest and blondest hair."

Naturally, the two customs converge upon blonde, hapless Joe. First, he rescues the wandering maiden "Princess Dreamboat" from a waterfall, and she promptly falls in love with him. (Joe somehow neglects to mention that he has a steady girlfriend.)

At the same time, it happens to be the night when the tribal members can enact their hair-cutting hazing ritual, and Horse Feathers almost gets his wish, until Dreamboat intrudes in fine Pocohontas style.

I'll omit one of the climactic turnarounds, in which Horse Feathers's evil intent rebounds on him, but I will reprint the other climax, in which Joe's girlfriend catches the Indian maiden spooning with Joe, and proceeds to give her a trim job.

The fact that the Indian girl wants the white guy's loving feelings, while the men of her tribe want to cut something off of him, shouldn't require a lot of comment, beyond the commonplace notion that "hair= virility" in myth and folklore. I particularly like Dreamboat's line, "I've just been scalped by a savage white woman." The little tear in Horse Feathers' eye is a coincidental bonus, which takes on extra humor given its resemblance to this famous "crying Indian" commercial image.

I have no idea if JOE COLLEGE was Bob Powell's first "teen humor" comic book, though I know that he worked in the genre again in later years. The artist's wild sense of humor looks forward to the inspired lunacy of the MAD comic book that began two years after JOE COLLEGE's demise. though, oddly enough, Powell didn't do much if any work for EC Comics.

The entire story can be read here.

LOWBROW, BUT HIGHLY SERIOUS

He Chaucer lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an important part of their virtue.-- Matthew Arnold.

I seem to be one of the few people in the country who didn't like THOR: RAGNAROK, and found its over-dependence on jokes to be an indicator of how little the show-runners "got" the character.  However, the more I think about it, the failings of RAGNAROK may indicate even more about the problems of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as put forth by the fellow most associated with its success, studio chief Kevin Feige.

I say this with the full knowledge that Feige's version of "the Marvel Universe" is not likely to be surpassed within my lifetime. Feige clearly gets some of the key elements that made 1960s Marvel a success. Had there been no Marvel, it seems unlikely that (1) fans would have been motivated enough to create the direct market, and thus (2) mainstream comic books probably would not have survived their distributor problems of the 1970s.

Feige has reportedly called himself a "fanboy," and almost all of his cinematic credits support this assertion. Prior to 2008's IRON MAN, Feige worked in a production capacity on fourteen films, all based on superhero characters. In time he may be seen as being every bit as influential as Jim Shooter in promoting Marvel as a "superhero-first" company. And in some ways, Feige "got' Marvel better than Shooter. Feige understands three major aspects of Marvel's "Silver-Age" success;

(1) The Continuity Thing.

Stan Lee, as editor of the Marvel Line, probably had no aim beyond cross-promotion whenever he had Spider-Man try to join the Fantastic Four and the like. However, as time went on, he apparently found that continuity was not only popular with readers, it was a useful tool for a writer. For instance, in 1964's AVENGERS #4, he and Kirby whipped up a villain, Baron Zemo, who used a super-glue against two of the heroes, Giant-Man and Captain America.

How to get out of it? Well, you have the Avengers consult another expert on glue, the Human Torch's foe Paste-Pot Pete (whose face Kirby apparently forgot, making him look rather like his sometime partner the Wizard).

More importantly for the MCU, Lee also found a lot of material simply in having heroes from different milieus, and with different speech-patterns. Here's Daredevil trying to prove his "mad skills" to a certain thunder-god.

Whereas a lot of writers would have written the two characters indistinguishably, Lee understood that a thunder-god wasn't going to talk the same as a modern superhero. This discovery also led to another aspect of Lee's approach:


(2) Heroes with Problems.

For Stan Lee, this was clearly another device to draw readers into the fictional worlds of the Marvel characters, so that they would buy each and every issue of a given series, rather than just picking up random issues according to chance. But there's every indication that Lee himself became invested in the characters, as when he decided that he wanted to lay near-exclusive claim to chronicling the adventures of the Silver Surfer when the character graduated to his own series. I can't be positive that there might not have been some hard-boiled business decision behind Lee's claim, since he'd publicly admitted that Jack Kirby alone created the character. However, Lee definitely attempted some things he never attempted in other Marvel features, such as making his main character a Christ-figure.

(3) The Prevalence of Humor.

Of these three aspects of Marvel's success, this is clearly the one that Kevin Feige most emulates. Long before the rise of Marvel Comics, Lee's writing demonstrated an ability for "snappy patter" in humor comics like TESSIE THE TYPIST and MY FRIEND IRMA, and in many ways he simply translated that talent to the 1960s superhero books. However, he also made much of the humor flow from character, which had generally not been the rule for the superhero genre. Most of the Marvel features of the Silver Age were replete with a jazzy sense of humor, and even the more "serious" titles, like the aforementioned THOR, allowed for moments of whimsy, as seen with characters like "Volstagg the Magnificent."

Ironically, SILVER SURFER was possibly the only Lee-written title that boasted no humor of consequence, which may have contributed to the feature's early demise.


I believe that no fans familiar with Silver Age Marvel would dispute these three aspects as major factors in the Marvel success,but I think there's a fourth one that usually goes unacknowledged, and that is Lee's flirtations with what Arnold, in the quote above, called "high seriousness."

What Arnold meant by the phrase doesn't matter to me here, since the phrase has taken on a life of its own. In general it connotes a sense of gravitas, and is almost always applied to works of literary merit. At the time Lee made his first breakthroughs with Marvel, it's a given that the forty-something editor had no illusions about the status of comic books, no matter what he may have said later in his "bullpen bulletins." He knew that they were deemed lowbrow entertainment, and that any efforts he made to "elevate the form"-- like SILVER SURFER-- were aimed to impress fan-readers who wanted something a little different with their superhero action.

But even though Lee probably knew that he'd never be "taken seriously," he showed a talent for scenes of faux high seriousness, even within a lowbrow context. For instance, here's Thor facing the death-goddess Hela from the Mangog saga I analyzed here.

Granted, Jack Kirby staged the visuals that contribute at least fifty percent of the page's serious tone. Still, it's easy to imagine a modern writer-- say, Peter David-- trying to dialogue the same page, and missing the boat entirely. Lee's amateur experience in the theater, however limited, seems to have contributed to his sense of how to show characters both in their "light" and "heavy" moods.

My personal interpretation of Feige is that he's someone who may have read Marvel Comics like a demon, but who was into Marvel, like many readers, mainly for the jokes. The rapid-fire quips of Downey's Tony Stark read a lot more like the snappy patter of the Stan Lee persona than they do like the relatively sober-sided Stark of the comics. Feige even showed some facility with characters with a basically serious outlook, like the Evans version of Captain America, finding ways to exploit humor in other characters without hamming up the main hero.

In the first two THOR films, one can see Fighe and his collaborators trying to do something similar, keeping Thor basically serious while allowing support-characters-- in particular Kat Dennings' "Darcy"-- to provide the humor. That said, Fighe's Thor films don't really make any organized attempts at "high seriousness." The wars of the gods and the giants have no more mythic resonance than the opposing parties of a videogame, and thus it's not surprising that the figure of Hela the Death-Goddess becomes similarly over-simplified in RAGNAROK.

The only other time that Feige attempted another Marvel feature grounded in Lee's lowbrow version of high seriousness was the 2016 DOCTOR STRANGE. I've not yet been able to force myself to re-watch this artless adaptation for purposes of review. But the mere fact that it had to import some dumbed-down humor into the straight-laced STRANGE mythos in the form of the master magician's CAPE speaks volumes about the producers' inability to do anything without the support of jokes, no matter how inane. Thus I shouldn't have been surprised when THOR RAGNAROK stuck a bunch of pratfalls into the encounter of two of Stan Lee's more poker-faced characters, the thunder-god and the master of the mystic arts.

Before seeing RAGNAROK, I had numerous warnings as to how much comedy to expect, but I like to think that I kept an open mind, hoping for something no better or worse than the two GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY films. But when the film started out with Thor, chained in Muspelheim and teasing info out of evil Surtur--

-- and I realized that it was just a steal from a similar scene in 2012's AVENGERS, with a bound Black Widow interrogating her captors--

-- it became clear to me that Feige's MCU is beginning to cannibalize itself, and with less interesting results that when Marvel Comics began repeating themselves so badly in the 1970s.

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERDUPERMAN" (MAD #4, 1953)

Looking through the seminal early MAD issues, one often finds a lot of clever puns and inversions of pop-culture tropes. However, the famous "Superduperman" story goes a little further into the realm of psychological myth than its contemporaneous fellows, like "Plastic Sam" and "Batboy and Rubin." At a time when the superhero genre was at its arguably at its lowest ebb in the history of American comic books-- when said genre certainly was nowhere near dominating the medium as would be the case from the 1980s onward-- Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood crafted a story that embodied the anti-mainstream arguments of Adorno and Wertham: the argument that I summarized thusly:

In elitist criticism, it's a given that all escapist fiction is by its nature a "negative compensation" that insulates the audience from reality, as I've noted with respect to Theodor Adorno in particular. "Positive compensation," if one could put the elitists' convictions into Adler's terms, would presumably be the sort of "high literature" that validates the intellectual's struggle for personal meaning.

Kurtman and Wood, being concerned with gonzo slapstick and puns, don't put forth any grand schemes of meaning in "Superduperman," but by making their spoof-hero a real nebbish instead of a pretend-one, they cast a critical eye upon the idea of superheroes as compensation for one's failures in life-- a fair enough subject for satire, given that creator Jerry Siegel himself framed Superman's appeal in such terms:

Clark Kent grew not only out of my private life, but also out of Joe Shuster's. As a high school student, I thought that someday I might become a reporter, and I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn't know I existed or didn't care I existed.-- Jerry Siegel.

In addition, over ten years before Julies Feiffer suggested that Superman might be a "secret masochist," Kurtzman and Wood present their nebbishy ne'er-do-well "Clark Bent" as the helpless thrall of "Lois Pain's" charms.

Shortly after this encounter, Bent changes into Superduperman and goes looking for the story's mystery thief, "the unknown monster."  The heist artist obligingly reveals himself to be a fellow superhero, Captain Marbles, who has decided to quit fighting crime and to begin looking out for number one. Countless critics have mentioned that the year of this story's publication was the same year Fawcett Comics quit publishing Captain Marvel features as well as discontinuing their comics-line, largely in response to the expensive plagiarism suit DC Comics had filed against Fawcett. It's hard to tell whether or not the outcome of the super-dudes' battle is a comment upon the legal battle, but it's at least significant that Superduperman must resort to a dirty trick in order to win.

Lastly, Kurtzman and Wood undermine the wish-fantasy implicit in the Superman mythos, and in many-- though certainly not all-- superhero narratives. Instead of responding to Superduperman's bulging muscles, Lois rejects the hero and knocks him on his ass just as she did when he was Clark Bent, averring that his super-bod doesn't obviate him still being "a creep."

 I might argue that no single comics-story of the period-- not Kurtzman's war-stories, not Barks' duck-stories-- had more effect on the intellectual development of comics-fandom than "Superduperman." I can't say that it was always the *best* effect. But "genre politics" aside, it's no less a masterful story of its kind.

MYTHCOMICS: BECAUSE I'M THE GODDESS, BOOKS 1-3 (2003-04)

No one will mistake Shamneko's BECAUSE I'M THE GODDESS,  a short comedy-manga comprised of three collected books, as one of the seminal works of Japanese comics. However, it does illustrate a point I want to make about the overt adaptation of tropes from archaic myth into narratives that may not have much resemblance to the original subject matter.

In a pair of back-to-back essays from May2009, I cited two usages of the Greek myth-character Icarus. I validated this one, because the writer had a sound symbolic purpose in using a variation on the name-- "Icy Harris"-- as a touchstone for the same type of psychological myth seen in the Greek tale: showing the consequences of unbridled ambition. On the other hand, I invalidated this one,
because the creator simply took the name "Icarus," changed the spelling a little, and used it to connote nothing more complex than a hero who could fly around. Thus "Icy Harris" is a more mythic character than "Ikaris" even though the latter has a more mythic appearance, and is tied into a world of gods who are also mostly named after Greek personages. On that logic, it's less important to keep faith with the actual situations of myth-figures than to show insight into their symbolic essence.

GODDESS is one of many manga-tales that borrows freely-- some might say "wildly"-- from the corpus of Greek myth. One of its two main characters is named Pandora, but she's not the rather passive figure of the traditional tales. On one hand, she's being used as a figure of light, T&A themed comedy. On the other, she represents a meditation on the nature of the "eternal female" as the "giver of all things" (which is more or less the way the name "Pandora" renders in English).

In the Greek tale, Zeus sends the beautiful mortal girl Pandora to Earth to bring trouble to mankind. In some renditions of the story, the Titan Prometheus has just given fire to mankind, and Zeus wants to keep mankind in line by allowing Pandora, the eternally curious female, to open the forbidden box (also a jar in some versions) and unleash many evils upon mankind. The manga does include its own versions of both Zeus and Prometheus, and they play roles not too far removed from their Greek counterparts, though both are essentially supporting characters.

Pandora, in many respects a stereotypical busty blonde ditz, is created by Zeus and sent to modern-day Earth to corral mysterious objects called "gifts." It will be later revealed that these gifts were dispersed upon Earth by another goddess-figure, symbolically linked to the new Pandora and in some sense an "evil twin" of the younger character. Pandora, unlike the mortal character of the tale, possesses the power to do almost anything with a magical gesture, and she demonstrates her godly capacity to a befuddled young Japanese student, Aoi Ibara. However, she soon finds that every time she uses the power, she "deflates" to a shadow of herself; a ten-year-old girl. Pandora also discovers a solution to this dilemma: she can recharge her power by kissing Aoi, the young man with whom she shares a supernatural destiny.

Obviously, the author was having fun with-- and maybe at the expense of-- the well-known Japanese tradition of the Lolicon, or "Lolita fantasy." Aoi feels a mild paternal protectiveness toward the juvenile Pandora, but he doesn't want to kiss her. At the same time, he's also upset by the boobalicious-ness of Pandora's adult form. Whereas many male protagonists of comedy-manga are unrepentant horndogs, Aoi is portrayed as a righteous young fellow who's a little phobic about females, possibly due to the circumstances of his upbringing.  The mere fact that Shamneko can expect his audience to laugh when an underage girl kisses an adolescent male illustrates the gulf that still separates Japanese humor from what mainstream America will tolerate.

However, it may go deeper than that. I've puzzled for some time over Japanese culture's pre-occupation with the "Lolicon" theme. Even "harem manga," in which a fortunate male has four or more cute girls living with him, frequently include a female character who's underaged. Without trying to delve too deeply into these waters, I'll just say here that I think Japanese culture is fascinated with the inevitability of the transition between pre-pubescent innocence and increasing maturation-- which in itself is NOT something real Lolita-fanciers care about, if one cares to believe Humbert Humbert.

Aoi is somewhat dragged into his role as Pandora's protector and manservant, a running joke about female dominance that is mirrored in less flattering terms by the manifestation of the "gifts." The "gifts" are actually small god-entities-- some resembling Cupid-- who possess only mortal women and cause them to enslave men to do their bidding. Obviously Shamneko was also playing with another common Japanese sexual trope, that of female-over-male domination. I don't think he manages to illuminate this trope quite as insightfully as he does with the one about the "Lolita complex." Still, the comedy situations are never less than entertaining, and they consistently play into Aoi's aforementioned "bad upbringing" as well.

This being a Japanese manga, it will be no surprise that one of the characters endures a heroic death, but Shamneko still finds a way to end on a upbeat comic note. In the end Pandora appears in a form that is neither the immature juvenile nor the over-endowed sex-doll, but merely than of an ordinary woman. I'm tempted to say that Shamneko is showing that real femininity, as opposed to the fetishes thereof, is the most profound "gift" of heaven. But I'll freely admit that this is only my own conclusion, for the author doesn't try to draw any such morals himself.

BE BRIGHT OR BE DUMB

In future I may taper off on my assaults against HOODED UTILITARIAN after finishing ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW.  But though I didn't bother informing NB of my response to his essay BE WHITE OR EXPLODE, I did waste a little time the other week trying to wring out of Berlatsky a more precise definition of a word he tosses around too freely: "parody." In my series essays entitled THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY, starting here, I noted that NB painted a very one-sided picture of comics-fans' desire for serious heroes, as against the quasi-satirical elements of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. Not surprisingly, NB wasn't willing to admit any failing in his analysis-- a recalcitrance common both to ultraconservatives and ultraliberals, as I noted in STINKING ULTRALIBERALLY. Thus as usual the only thing produced by the "discussion" was a few definitions of my own that I choose to reproduce here. It also sparks some considerations on the question of my influence by Jung, something that NB chose to bring up for no stated and/or logical reason, but I'll deal with these in a separate essay.

I opened with:

Re: “superhero parodies”– there has to be a difference between a thoroughgoing superhero parody and a regular superhero story with its fair share of humor. There may never a way to break it down beyond “I know it when I see it, but otherwise, if you say Fawcett’s Captain Marvel is a parody because it had ludicrous elements, then the same criterion applies to various Superman and Batman stories– particularly the Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite stories.

NB apparently couldn't get that I was saying he was being too general in identifying items like the Fawcett CAPTAIN MARVEL as parody, because he simply repeated his statement that parody was central to the genre:

There are some genres where a parody does mean you’re not really in the genre any more, or where parodies at least aren’t quite so central to the genre. But superhero parodies are really dead center in the superhero genre, and always have been. 

When I repeated that it wasn't enough to have humorous elements in a story to make it a parody, which I said was also the case with PLASTIC MAN, NB tried to find a way to make the non-humorous elements of the superhero genre subordinate to those that he finds humorous and/or parodic:

Superhero stories are about empowered individuals, often. And then they’re often also about parodying the idea of empowerment, and making fun of the idea that silly guys in tights can save the world. 

I was glad to see him admit this agenda, even if he wanted to promote it as sober fact:

I suspected you were favoring a definition that was short-hand for “anything that seems to contradict narratives of empowerment,” so thanks for confirming it. I for one don’t think that Superman’s machismo is nullified in any significant way as long as he keeps booting Mxyzptlk back to the imp-dimension, but I assume your mileage varies.
Here’s the problem with such a broad definition of parody: it doesn’t sufficiently take into account the fact that “the other side” can do parodies with the opposite meaning. THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS contains a parody of a touchy-feely psychologist, who is rendered ludicrous through the lens of Frank Miller’s endorsement of Bat-machismo. I would hope that you’d consider this parody, even though it has nothing to do with satirizing heroic empowerment.
-

NB had to admit that the sequence in TDKR is parodic, but chose to believe that Miller's ode to heroic empowerment was still a self-parody. Tautology, thy name is Berlatsky!

Skipping across most of the rest of the back-and-forth, I will end with my own remarks regarding NB's political agenda, to which he did not respond and which he claimed not to have read:

When I first posted, I knew that we would not agree on the subject of humor, but I thought you should at least acknowledge that not all humorous elements are “elements of parody.” That’s still the way you’ve chosen to define parody, though, because you’re not concerned with the intrinsic meaning of the word, but with some extrinsic, politicized interpretation of the word. As per your Sedgewickean argument in “Comics in the Closet,” you’re content to interpret all humorous elements as weapons in your campaign to strike down the hated “serious superhero.” This project doesn’t have anything to do with making superheroes more “complex,” as you claimed earlier. it has to do with promoting your own distinctly limited vision of what superheroes ought to be. 

The most bizarre aspect of the exchange, however, was that though I didn't bring up anything about the analytic psychology of Carl Jung, NB kept insisting that not validating his faulty definition of parody was tantamount to being-- a Jungian?  At least this time he was a little more correct than when he condemned me for being an exclusive devotee of Joseph Campbell, as I recounted in BATTLING THE ELEMENTS. I do draw upon Jung more often than Campbell, because I think Campbell was not as organized a thinker-- though of course he's Immanuel Kant in comparison to Noah of the Many Wandering Thoughts.

Contrary to NB, there's nothing about Jung or Jungianism that contravenes the spirit of humor. What NB is seeking to defend is his specific notion, probably derived from Eve Sedgewick, that "the idea of empowerment" is unstable and incoherent. Jung makes assorted references to male empowerment in his writings, but it would hardly be correct to deem him a monolithic defender of standard sex-roles. I demonstrated the exact opposite in my analysis of his "anima/animus" terminology in the essay WHAT WOMEN WILL PART 3.  Like Gary Groth before him, NB wants a "devil" to scapegoat, and his devil happens to be "male empowerment." Jung, being one of the foremost exponents of psychological pluralism, is not opposed to humor, but he is opposed to the idea that some archetypes are good and others are bad. Thus, though we can only guess what Jung would've made of American superheroes, there's no way that he would have validated NB's ideological reasons for touting the Adam West Batman over, say, that of Frank Miller.

Superheroes profit from good humor, as much as any genre. But to centralize the element of humor-- or whatever one likes to call it-- is more nonsensical than anything in a Mxyzptlk story.

ADDENDA: I should note that if I've been influenced by any authors who validate the archetype of the "serious hero"-- be he "super" or otherwise-- it's not from either Jung or Campbell, who only address the concept infrequently. Frye is probably most responsible for giving me the logic for that validation, though Fiedler and Paglia have provided interesting viewpoints on the topic.

GENDERIZATION GAP PT. 4

In GENDERIZATION GAP PT. 2 I observed that some, though not necessarily all, of the scathing responses directed at Janelle Asselin and others in comparable situations *might* have been justified as "a nasty species of humor."  That does not mean that such responses are *good* humor.  There are any number of bad comedians whose only idea of humor is that of degradation.  The appeal of Rudy Ray Moore's famous routine "Shine on the Titanic" is rooted in a fantasy of watching a bunch of foolish white people on the Titanic die while pleading with a gutsy black crewmen to save them.  There's nothing noble or satiric in this type of humor whether it's related by a dominant culture or a marginalized subculture; it exists just to vent nasty feelings of this type:

Shine said, "Bitch, Ya knocked up and gone have a kid,
but your ass got to hit this water
just like ol' Shine did."

A similar example of bad, degrading humor appears in this T-shirt:

This is a pretty stupid sentiment, but it's of the same species: it draws any power it has from its ability to infuriate people-- as it did with Greg Rucka.

I feel sympathy when I read the story Rucka relates about his daughter, who certainly deserves to enjoy being a fantasy-fan as much as any male fan.  But there's no point in getting mad at dumbasses who think that this sort of thing is funny.  I can't find the exact quote uttered by Alan Moore, but it was something like, "You can spend your time arguing when some drunken street-bum hassles you, or you can ignore him and do something constructive with your time."

It's a hard lesson, but everybody's kid has to learn to avoid letting the idiots get to him-- or her.

CUTEY UNFUNNY

In this essay, I expatiated at length on the association of the affect of  "cuteness" as it applied to, among other things, children's acceptance of cute versions of dangerous monsters or natural creatures.  I noted that "cuteness" could carry the connotation of "weakness," but that this needed to be seen in a broader spectrum.

In affects relating to sexual attractiveness, “weakness” translates into something closer to “that which is appealing,” overlapping with Kantian “agreeability.” For a “cute hat,” the question of weakness doesn’t apply, except in the roundabout sense that its appeal may “weaken” an onlooker to its owner’s charms. If a teenage girl considers a bulky football player “cute,” she certainly doesn’t cognize him as “weak” the way a baby is, but rather that he is, in her mind, both agreeable and approachable. By contrast beauty, as a sexually related affect, connotes “difficulty of approach,” along the lines of Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian.

Kant's idea of "agreeability," which I've expanded into the state of an object's being both agreeable and approachable, serves to show how some types of characters may have an "approachable" outward appearance, but this appearance conceals considerable strength, as with the football-player example.

In this essay I cited some reasons why I disagreed with those critics who have tried to claim Quality Comics' PLASTIC MAN as a comedy.  For me, comedy-elements are certainly present in the feature, though I find them less determinative than the adventure-elements.  Certainly many PLASTIC MAN covers sought to project the hero as playful:

However, there were a fair number of covers which also stressed Plastic Man as a crime-buster, as Jack Cole's interior stories usually did:

This is not to claim that the character was not rethought to become dominantly comedic in later renditions-- in fact, quite possibly all later renditions.

An even more uncharacteristic usage of "agreeability" visual motifs are seen in the 1964 television cartoon UNDERDOG.  Certainly the visual design of the character suggests a superhero spoof.

For that matter, the first "pilot" episode of the UNDERDOG show was completely comic in tone, dealing with the canine superhero screwing up royally in his attempt to save a young boy from perishing in a bank vault.

Nevertheless, for whatever reason, the cartoon's makers soon shifted to an approach structually like that of Cole's PLASTIC MAN.  The majority of the episodes were designed to be "cliffhangers," in which Underdog's city would be placed in peril by the villain of the week.  And though there was still a liberal use of humor, particularly stemming from the unheroic sound of Underdog's voice by actor Wally Cox, the UNDERDOG series usually played the menaces straight, no matter how quirky their looks or names might be.  A prominent example is that of the episode called "the Witch of Pikyoon" sequence.  A summary from IMDB encapsulates the essence of the conflict:

After Polly's plane gets caught in a freak storm, she calls for Underdog. He comes after it crash-lands in a strange uncharted land of the Pickyoon. Magically shielded from the rest of the world by a despotic witch that rules it. The Witch becomes aware of Underdog's great powers, which rival hers. Devising a plan in which to exploit that power, she captures Polly and places her under a spell. Ransoming Polly in order to force Underdog to perform Herculean labors. The last labor causes Underdog to forsake Polly and he battles with the witch. To the Death!   

The sequence is, once again, not bereft of humor, but the fight between Underdog and the Witch is played straight, rather than being resolved in some comic fashion.  Perservering readers may recall that I identified this invigorative attitude in the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries earlier.

Because the heroes seem genuinely threatened by bizarre villains and death-traps, both plot and character validate the power of the adventure-mythos even while managing to keep the comic elements in play. This is why, even for later generations of kids not yet jaded enough to laugh at Batman, the series can still excite and fascinate them, precisely because even with the giant OOFS and WHAPS, the invigorating thrill of the agon still predominates.

Therefore it should be noted that having a "cute" or "funny" appearance-- as is the case with Underdog, Plastic Man, and the Adam West Batman-- does not necessarily denote that the character's adventures must fall into any of the "funny" categories.

            

AT LAST LOST BOYS

Just as I read THE CORSICAN BROTHERS (covered in my previous post) in order to understand the origins of the later "uncanny" films made from it, I recently re-read J.M. Barrie's 1911 PETER PAN in order to justify the comment I made in a review of the 2011 telefilm NEVERLAND:

NEVERLAND, though it was financed by the Syfy Channel as was the two-part ALICE, shows Willing warming to his material to better effect. Possibly this was because J.M. Barrie's PETER PAN has stronger adventure-currents than the source material of either Alice or Oz. To be sure, were I classifying the Barrie novel, I'd tend to consider it a "combative comedy," in that I think the comic tones of the book overpower the adventurous tones. Likewise the Disney version of PETER PAN. However, Nick Willing's version falls more completely into the category of the pure adventure-work.

I never saw PETER PAN performed as a play.  This was the medium in which Barrie premiered his most famous creation in its best known form, though a somewhat non-continuous version of Peter appeared first in Barrie's 1902 novel THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD.  I knew only the Disney film, which didn't impress me all that much.  I don't know when I read the novel except that it was not as a child: it could have been ten or twenty years ago. 

Without question in my mind, the book PETER PAN qualifies not only as a "combative comedy" but as a "combative comedy-adventure" after the fashion mentioned in this essay. However, the example I used in that essay, DC's INFERIOR FIVE, represents a very different form of "comedy" than the one evoked by James Barrie.

In my essay FUNNY BONERS I contrasted Freud's "relief theory of humor" with that of Schopenhauer's "incongruity theory."  However, to be honest I have not read anything but excerpts from Freud's JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS.  When I recently came across a reference to Freud's having made a distinction between two types of humor-- one "tendentious" and the other "non-tendentious"-- I realized that I had not give Freud his due, having depended too much on secondary sources.  Though I still believe that Schopenhauer's theory encompasses more psychic territory than does Freud's, this Wikipedia entry establishes that Freud was aware of the type of humor that Heinlein called "the gentle smile:"

Freud made a key distinction between tendentious and non-tendentious humor. Tendentious humor involves a “victim,” someone at whose expense we laugh. Non-tendentious humor does not require a victim. This innocuous humor typically depends on wordplay, and Freud believed it has only modest power to evoke amusement. Tendentious humor, then, is the only kind that can evoke big laughs. However, Freud believed a mixture of both tendentious and non-tendentious humor is required to keep the tendentious humor from becoming too offensive or demeaning to its victim. The innocent jokework of the innocuous humor would mask the otherwise hostile joke and therefore “bribe” our senses, allowing us to laugh at what would otherwise be socially unacceptable. Therefore, we often think we are laughing at innocuous jokes, but what really makes them funny is their socially unacceptable nature hidden below the surface.

While I can't say that INFERIOR FIVE ever produced "big laughs," it was intended to do so, in that the feature was meant to "victimize" the standard straight version of the superhero with parodies of clumsy superheroes, dumb superheroes, etc. 

In contrast, Barrie's PETER PAN seems more focused on a low-key, homey type of comedy, tinged with a modest irony.  The opening chapters set the tone with their emphasis on what I've called "the small-scale world of home and neighborhood," and even the Darling children's voyage into a land of unbridled adventure never completely escapes that tone.  The same tone undercuts much of the potential nastiness of the conflict between Peter and his allies vs. Hook and his pirates.  There can be no doubt that the play and the book are combative works (though THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD does not seem to be), but the excitement is subordinate to the tone of incongruity.

Barrie's sense of irony rarely if ever translates to later film or television adaptations.  I can think of none that have communicated the frank but knowing estimation of children Barrie repeats throughout the book, one that most if not all children will instantly recognize:

and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

SEX, SETH, AND SATIRE PT. 1

Once again the spectre of sexual objectification rises up to disturb the innocent souls of Hollywood. It's been a week since Seth MacFarlane hosted the Oscars with these partial lyrics to "the Boob Song."

We saw your boobs
We saw your boobs
In the movie that we saw, we saw your boobs.
Meryl Streep, we saw your boobs in "Silkwood"
Naomi Watts' in "Mulholland Drive"
Angelina Jolie, we saw your boobs in "Gia"
They made us feel excited and alive.

Anne Hathaway, we saw your boobs in "Brokeback Mountain"
Halle Berry, we saw them in "Monster's Ball"
Nicole Kidman in "Eyes Wide Shut"
Marisa Tomei in "The Wrestler," but
We haven't seen Jennifer Lawrence's boobs at all.
We saw your boobs
We saw your boobs
In the movie that we saw, we saw your boobs.

On this BEAT post, entitled "Why Seth MacFarlane Is Not a Great Satirist," Heidi found the lyrics somewhat less than politically correct, saying:

Let’s take the most obvious example: “We Saw Your Boobs.” The set up is William Shatner as Captain Kirk slingshotting back in time to warn MacFarlane not to do the horrible tasteless things he’s about to do and thus earn the label of worst Oscar host ever. To show what’s about to happen. Shatner cuts to a video of MacFarlane singing a song called “We Saw Your Boobs” where he names actresses and the films in which they appeared sans shirt.

Now, if the object of the humor was actually MacFarlane and his penchant for ribald attack humor, a simple 15-second cutaway—much like those on Family Guy—would have gotten across the point…and the humor. But no, it goes on for nearly two minutes—the point is to name and shame, say the word boobs and turn actresses into dehumanized objects yet again. I have a dream that someday women will be judged by the content of their character and not the content of their Maidenforms, but that day has not come for MacFarlane. In his world, if you’re a woman and doggedly track down the worst terrorist the world has ever known, you’re not a hero—you’re just another woman who’s mad at being stood up on a date.
 

I have no idea where Heidi gets the "mad at being stood up on a date" thing from; it's not in MacFarlane's song and doesn't seem to reference any of the movies MacFarlane names. I assume the "terrorist" remark refers back to 2012 Oscar nominee ZERO DARK THIRTY.

Heidi's initial definition of "satire" is pretty close to my own, in that I think real satire includes some moral element.  Heidi says:

Satire is meant to take one thing and examine it through a humorous lens, usually in a critical way.
 

However, I certainly would not agree that it can or should only be directed at the people Heidi thinks should be critiqued:

 Now of course, there is often pop culture satire on Family Guy, but the humor is as much aimed at the helpless as at targets that need to be taken down a peg. It’s the mocking humor of the powerful, not social critique.
 

I wonder what Heidi would make of this typical scathing shot which Al Capp of LI'L ABNER fame took at the counterculture of his time.

Now, Capp may have regarded hippies as "targets that needed to be taken down a peg" if he genuinely did not like their worldview.  Does the fact that hippies were marginal in terms of real-world power mean that it's not satire when he attacks them, but that it is satire when Capp attacks General Bullmoose, he of the famed motto, "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the country?"

Though I agree with Heidi that some moral criticism is intrinsic to satire, the example of Capp indicates that satire's mode of criticism has nothing to do with whether the targets do or do not wield power in society.


All that said, I also disagreed with those who defended the Boob Song in terms of its being satire, whether of MacFarlane's image or Hollywood art movies, or whatever.  I also disagree with Heidi deeming MacFarlane as "not a great satirist" because I don't deem him to fite that category.  I said on the thread:

MacFarlane’s not a satirist at all. He’s a farceur; he makes his daily bread poking at any and all sensitive areas (unlike the SOUTH PARK posers).The object of his humor in the “boobs” skit was to point out that Oscar can nominate all the high-falutin’ flicks, can ignore pretty much every good comedy every made– and hetero guys will still primarily remember which hot chick showed her tatas in which flick. 

“Forget it, Jake. It’s hardwired sexual response.”
 

 Having said that, though, I decided to search the web to see whether or not Seth MacFarlane had ever *claimed* to be a satirist.  I did find an offical response from him that made such a claim, in response to a protest over one of those jabs at "the helpless," Down Syndrome victims, with an additional jab at a "powerful" figure, Sarah Palin, in the FAMILY GUY episode "Extra Large Medium."

The Times asked "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane for an interview regarding the matter. But he opted to send a statement via his publicist: "From its inception, 'Family Guy' has used biting satire as the foundation of its humor. The show is an "equal-opportunity offender."-- SHOW TRACKER.
 

Nevertheless, even now that I know that MacFarlane has on one occasion defined himself as a satirist, that doesn't alter my view.  FAMILY GUY may produce a "feminist episode" in which Peter Griffin's normal male chauvinism is replaced by a New Age feminine sensitivity.  But meaningful change is anathema to the broad farce of the show, and so Peter's newfound sensitivity vanishes in the face of a riotous appeal to male fetishism: a catfight between Peter's female boss and his wife Lois.

Now, even if I say that a comic routine is not meant to make a serious moral criticism, that isn't the same as divesting the routine of all meaning.  I won't dwell on the distinction here, but will only note that I examined the matter of non-moral meaning somewhat more in A MORAL FIXATION.

Next up: having disposed of Seth and satire, that other thing-- I forget its name-- will appear in Part 2.

WHEN TITANS GET CROSS-COMPARED! PART 1

Finding common ground between two scholars one admires-- as I've noted I planned to do with Arthur Schopenhauer and Theodor Gaster-- offers a certain challenge.  On one hand, one certainly doesn't want to paper over all the differences between the scholars just for the sake of some (hopefully) artful theoretical cross-comparisons.  On the other, if one can demonstrate parallel developments of thought between scholars whose concerns would not seem to overlap, this might attest to the existence of an intersubjective ethos that surpasses direct influence.  For instance, Theodor Gaster, having lived long after Schopenhauer, could have read the philosopher, but I for one don't find that Gaster's work reflects any of the earlier author's particular concerns.  So any patterns they would share are either (1) part of that ethos, brought about by the nature of the human mind attempting to order perceived existence, or (2) totally within the mind of the person making the argument.

The gross similarity between the two scholars is that both tried to make sense, albeit from very different perspectives, of the human capacity for seriousness and for humor.  Theodor Gaster confines his analysis to the way this capacity had appeared in archaic myths and rituals, at least according to the evidence remaining to contemporary times.  Schopenhauer cast a much wider net in his investigations of human nature, though his mammoth WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION says very little of myth. Building on the old saw that all philosophy comes down to the quarrels between Plato and Aristotle,  I'd opine that where Aristotle might have cared, roughly like Gaster, about his literature's indebtedness to archaic "goat-songs" and the like, Plato cared more about art's relation to the infinite, and that Schopenhauer followed Plato in this regard.   In addition, as I've noted elsewhere, Schopenhauer was definitely an elitist with little or no interest in "lower" forms of art, as he considered that only "genius" could generate the quality of sublimity.

Another similarity is that neither scholar sought to deal with the aforesaid capacity in terms of literary concerns.  Schopenhauer's theory of art is just one aspect of his overall philosophy, while Gaster is careful to assert that the mythology he surveys does not belong to "the department of literature or art; the latter are merely [mythology's] vehicles or instruments."

In other essays I've noted how Northrop Frye most likely derived some aspects of his quaternary theory of the literary mythoi from Gaster's quaternary theory of seasonal rituals. In still other essays, especially the GRAVITY'S  CROSSBOW series, I cross-compared the Fryean mythoi with certain Schopenhauer concepts, thus leading to my formulation of the notion of "conviction."  But though I no longer use that concept in quite the same way that I did earlier, I want to set down just what aspects of the theory are similar to or different from Schopenhauer's writings.

I've quoted a few times Schopenhauer's remarks on his distinctions between "seriousness" and "laughter and joking," which come from Chapter 8 in Part Two of THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.  Chapter 8 builds on previous assertions, particularly in Chapter 7, regarding the interdependence of two types of human representations: "representations of perception and abstract representations."  He does not address humorous discourse in Chapter 7, but gives various examples of serious discourse wherein perception and abstract principle agree.  The easier of these examples is probably the one from Cervantes, where the author wishes to illustrate the abstract mood Schopenhauer calls "profound contemplation" with an accurate perceptual representation:

"...like a draped statue, for the wind moved his garments"

But though Schopenhauer uses literature for some of his illustrations, he doesn't distinguish between serious discourse of the sort he's doing, where he's expounding directly on his personal philosophy, and the serious discourse in literature itself, which is founded more on indirect propositions conveyed through the audience's identification with the characters.  This doesn't hurt Schopenhauer's argument, but it makes it a little harder to apply in a one-on-one manner with literature.

In literature (and I'm concentrating on narrative literature here, though I think the same principles may apply to much if not all forms of art), all of the "representations of perception" within a given narrative are constructs; something I expounded upon in HERE COMES DAREDEVIL THE MAN WITHOUT IDENTITY. All such representations remain constructs, no matter how much or how little fidelity they may show to our world of real-life perceptions.

This fidelity is what we usually call "verisimilitude" in literature, and covers everything from Upton Sinclair's reproduction of Chicago  in THE JUNGLE to  J.R.R. Tolkein's involved history of the Elves and their relations in LORD OF THE RINGS.  It also includes the logic by which all characters within a given work-- with special focus on the viewpoint characters-- pursue their own interests and their own fates, in line with what I wrote in GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 1:

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of *tonal gravity,* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity,* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

I've subsumed the terms of "tonal levity" and "tonal gravity" under the concept of "conviction."  In Schopenhauerean terms conviction is the "abstract representation" that arises from the "perceptual representation," as well as being comparable, in my much-used Fryean terms, to the dyad of "narrative values" and "significant values"-- though I'll try not to bring this latter comparison in any more than necessary.

Further, the conviction that the audience places upon the narrative situations of the identificatory characters is determined by sets of literary expectations that Frye calls "mythoi." Assuming that one is able to identify both with an adventure-heroine like Buffy Summers and with a drama-hero like Harry Potter, one cannot help but have different expectations of them.  Both suffer, and both triumph, but for Harry Potter, the possibility for failure within his dramatic mythos is somewhat stronger, and causes (I assert) a degree of pulling-back from the character on the part of the audience.  To insert Gaster's terms once again, Buffy's struggles are meant to invoke invigorating emotions, while Potter's are meant to invoke those of purgation, even if Potter's pathos comes with a reprieve.

Similarly, it is because of culturally learned expectations that if the audience does have a "humorous or at least distanced response" to both Marshal Law, representative of irony, and to Ranma Saotome, representative of comedy, then the distinctions within this spectrum of responses is determined by what the audience expects of them.  Only in a spoof could one imagine a jubilative character like Ranma freighted with the heavy satirical content of MARSHAL LAW, or a mortificative character like Law having happy-go-lucky sitcom-style exploits.

Having established at least that the rules for literature are in some ways not like those of the real world Schopenhauer was describing, Part 2 will pursue in more depth the comparisons I've already made between the gloomy philosopher's theory and the functions of literary mythoi.

GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 1

For the last week I've been meditating over the question, "Does sublimity (a.k.a. "the sense of wonder") occur in all four Fryean mythoi equally?  The answer-- "no"-- is easy.  Figuring out why it should be so is a bit more involved.

I've noted before that of all the major philosophers to write about sublimity in connection with literature, Edmund Burke is one of the most profligate in providing examples.  However, I note that most of his examples fall into one of two mythoi: the "drama" (PARADISE LOST, HENRY IV) or the "adventure" (THE FAERIE QUEENE).  Schopenhauer, for his part, recognizes only "tragedy" (which I regard as identical with the category "drama") as sublime.

Moving to those readerships concerned with "the sense of wonder," it's my informal impression that when fans of fantasy and SF wax enthusiastic about those works with that quality, they rarely if ever center upon works of the other two mythoi, "comedy" and "irony."  In the domain of prose, works like Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS are celebrated for their ability to elicit wonder.  But though one can find science-fictional marvels and magical mysteries in such works as Fredric Brown's WHAT MAD UNIVERSE or the deCamp-Pratt COMPLEAT ENCHANTER, I would say such works-- both of which are comedies-- are never celebrated for the "sense of wonder."  Ironic science fiction is often celebrated for its intellectual rigor-- indeed, if one reads Kingsley Amis' NEW MAPS FROM HELL, one gets the impression that no one ever wrote good SF but Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth-- but Amis praises them for satirical visions, not for the "sense of wonder."

So, are comedy and irony in some way inimical to the sense of wonder? In the essay REFINING THE DEFINING I placed them in opposition to drama and adventure:

The drama and the adventure, often perceived as two "serious" types of entertainment, are easy to confound, even as are the two types of "unserious" entertainment, comedy and irony.

However, I haven't yet devoted a great deal of attention to what separates notions of "serious" and "unserious" fiction. Since I've noted before that I subscribe largely to Schopenhauer's "incongruity theory" of humor, it behooves me to quote "Uncle Arthur" once again:

“The opposite of laughter and joking is seriousness. This, accordingly, consists in the consciousness of the perfect agreement and congruity of the concept, or the idea, with what is perceptive, with reality. The serious person is convinced that he conceives things as they are, and that they are as he conceives them. This is just why the transition from profound seriousness to laughter is particularly easy, and can be brought about by trifles.”—Arthur Schopenhauer, WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION (trans. Payne), p. 99.

Elsewhere in WORLD the philosopher also speaks of "drama or descriptive poetry"-- which I understand to connote narrative art as a whole-- in these terms:

we call drama or descriptive poetry interesting when it represents events and actions of a kind which necessarily arouse concern or sympathy, like that which we feel in real events involving our own person.

Taking the two statements together, it seems not unreasonable to hypothesize that in narrative fiction "the perfect agreement of the concept, or the idea, with what is perceptive, with reality" accords with the idea of a reader's investment in the narrative's events as if they arouse straightforward "concern or sympathy."  However, if events in the narrative undermines the reader's investment because they seem incongruous, then the reader, while not necessarily losing all "concern and sympathy," is moved to a humorous reaction, which may vary along a wide spectrum of affects from the deep belly-laugh to the more intellectualized "I laugh that I might not weep" response.
Thus I suggest this dichotomy:

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of  *tonal gravity,* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity,* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

I'm moved to add that most narrative works borrow from both principles at varying times, though I stand by my assertion that every narrative work has a fundamental core that inclines it more to one of the four mythoi over the other three.  Narratives of drama and adventure frequently use humor to break up the relentless seriousness of the story, while narratives of comedy and irony must usually invoke some notion of fateful consequence to keep the reader "interested" in the character's experiences.   But though a film like STAR WARS often uses humor to temporarily dispel tension, the audience recognizes that the humorous moments don't determine the thrust of the narrative, and so the brief appeals to "tonal levity" don't dispel the watchers' investment in seeing the characters live or die.   Conversely, PLANET OF THE APES uses many devices taken from adventure-narratives to make the audience partially invested in the fate of Charlton Heston's astronaut Taylor.  But the spectacle of the intelligent apes repeating all of mankind's old mistakes-- particularly religious fanaticism-- evokes a wry sense of humor in the viewer, confirming the dark pessimism that Taylor expresses early in the film.  Taylor's heroic exertions almost dispel his pessimism, but this development merely sets him up as the butt of a colossal ironic joke, as he's plunged back into despair by the "statuesque" proof of man's stupidity.  Admittedly PLANET's conclusion is supposed to be more sobering than funny, but I'd argue that it still conforms to the principle of "tonal levity" in that the viewer has become distanced from the protagonist's travails.

I'll explore these concepts more in further essays, but I'll note in closing that neither "levity" nor "gravity" lines up with two similar-sounding concepts introduced here long ago, "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism."  While the former terms are specifically oriented toward sussing out the nature of two opposed sets of mythoi-- one which includes two dominantly "serious" mythoi and one which includes two dominantly "unserious" mythoi-- the latter terms apply to any mythos across the board.  "Thematic realism" connotes the attempt of authors to reflect "real-world" concerns in their fiction, while "thematic escapism" connotes the attempt to take "a vacation from morals."
Thus, were I asked for a random film-example for each mythos and each thematic focus, I would write something like this:

THEMATIC REALISM                                   THEMATIC ESCAPISM

Comedy-- MODERN TIMES                        Comedy-- WAYNE'S WORLD
Adventure-- THE WIND AND THE LION           Adventure-- STAR WARS
Drama-- BLADE RUNNER                                  Drama-- DRACULA
Irony-- PLANET OF THE APES            Irony-- 1934's THE BLACK CAT