ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 1

 My December review of the comedy-western LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING caused me to knock down some of my old mental dominoes and set them up in new configurations.

The key factor to my conception of the "superhero idiom" is that the character must be a high-dynamicity icon (which can include all of the four personas, not just heroes) who has some "super" attributes or affiliations. As I hadn't watched FRENCHIE in its entirety for over fifty years-- though I'd frequently enjoyed discrete parts of the movie--I was surprised to find that it did include a minor metaphenomenon: that of a peculiar, non-realistic form of acupuncture. The metaphenomenon is not directly associated with either of the film's two "likeable villains," Frenchie (Brigitte Bardot) and her friendly enemy Maria (Claudia Cardinale), and neither of them even witnesses said phenomenon. The audience alone bears witness while the movie's "unlikable villain," murderous Doc Miller, is given the acupuncture treatment by a Chinese doctor, a treatment which both heals Miller of his wounds but also delays him long enough to keep him from impeding the Frenchie-Maria dust-up. After the fight, Miller shows up and throws some weight around, only to get killed, almost as an afterthought. But even the small metaphenomenon of pseudo-acupuncture shifts FRENCHIE's world away from the domain of the standard isophenomenal western. 

I decided to include FRENCHIE as one of the "superhero idiom" films on my GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA blog, but this got me thinking about some of the narratives that I tended to disallow in earlier posts here. For instance, in the 2016 essay THIRD PRESENCE, PERIPHERAL, I then favored the concept that if the metaphenomenon was peripheral to the narrative action of the eminent icon, the icon, no matter how megadynamic, was not metaphenomenal in nature. Of the handful of works I examined, the best known was the 1998 MULAN. The only metaphenomena I recall from the Disney film were two Sub icons who are theoretically on Mulan's side-- an intelligent cricket and a dinky ancestral dragon -- but they contribute nothing to Mulan's climactic battle with the Mongol chieftain, which seemed to me then to be isophenomenal in nature. Now, however, I would tend to say that just the presence of two metaphenomenal entities in the story makes the entire narrative metaphenomenal. So now I would include Disney's Mulan as a member of the superhero idiom as well.   

It's possible that to some extent I remained slightly influenced by the conceptions of the "rational Gothic" writers of the late 18th century and of their spiritual kindred, Tzvetan Todorov. Both Todorov and the rationale Gothicists viewed all types of fantasy as reactions against the "reality" experienced by real-world readers and thus viewed both uncanny and marvelous phenomena as escapes from reality. I've never agreed with that simplistic view, but I can look at some of my older essays, like THIRD PERSON PERIPHERAL, and see a small tendency on my own part to privilege the world of the isophenomenal. My 2025 essay QUICK NUM NOTES marks a shift in this viewpoint, in that now I see both uncanny and marvelous phenomena as equal departures from consensual reality. This doesn't invalidate anything I've written on Prime icons who lack high dynamicity, though. Hubert Hawkins of THE COURT JESTER exists in a fictional world where hypnosis can transform an ordinary fellow (albeit with some terpsichorean skills) into a master swordsman. But he himself remains low-dynamicity. Because Hawkins is never able to consciously tap the sword-skills the hypnotist brings out in him, his world is dominantly uncanny, but Hawkins doesn't possess any metaphenomenal attributes or affiliations that play into his combative status.

This part of the essay ran so long that I didn't get to the "anomaly" part, so that'll be for Part 2.                     

  

THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

 In this essay (and any follow-ups) I want to develop the line of thought in QUICK NUM NOTES. 

As I said in NOTES, I'm not disavowing the assorted analyses I advanced with respect to looking at how fictional realities are governed by different combinations of (1) intelligibility and (2) casual coherence-- at least not in the way I disavowed Aristotle's criteria (as I understood them) regarding "impossibility" and "improbability"). HOWEVER, it has occurred to me that there could be a problem in talking only about the ways in which an author models the phenomenality of his fictional world after the way he perceives the real world to work. The author of fiction is not creating something that's ever totally faithful to the real world, even if the elements of artifice he may use are simply invisible structuring principles. Here's Herman Melville on the unrealistic "symmetry" of fiction as compared to really real reality:

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

In the same essay in which I quoted this Melville passage, I also compared Melville's "symmetry" to my concept of artifice. But one can see the function of symmetry/artifice as being just as present in naturalistic works as in the other two forms, the uncanny (where BILLY BUDD belongs) and the marvelous (where one might place Melville's MARDI, for what little that's worth). I'm not sure that any of Melville's works are purely naturalistic, but just to venture an example with another nautical theme, Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND has no metaphenomena at all, but it's certainly just as determined by artifice. What many critics have missed that this use of artifice is no less present in naturalistic works which seem to be based on "real" events. Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY may appear to the naive eye to be more "realistic" than TREASURE ISLAND, but Flaubert has to use the same range of tropes Stevenson did, in order to create the emotional effects he desired. Neither BOVARY nor ISLAND possesses the "ragged edges" of reality. 

Yet Stevenson and Flaubert use artifice invisibly, somewhat like the "invisible style" attributed to the majority of movies in Classic American cinema. However, I posit that whenever an artist in any medium invokes metaphenomenal tropes to get his desired effects, I believe that he has to exert a new level of "authorial will" as I defined it way back in 2009. That's why I'm now seeking to look at the amount of work-- which I also called "crap"-- that an author has to put across to sell his metaphenomena:

But my current line of thought is more like, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" (like that of The Hound of the Baskervilles)... The opposition I'm currently playing with is that we're used to thinking of "marvelous things" are total inventions while "uncanny things" are supposed to be in line with the way the natural universe works. But the latter are arguably just as much inventions as the former. if you can't observe a real Pit and Pendulum in human history, or a real crime in which someone pretends to be a ghost to get rid of all the heirs to a fortune, then the phenomenon described is still a creation of the imagination-- just not one that requires as much imaginative effort as something overtly marvelous.

What further developments might be fostered from this line of thought, I cannot at this time predict.   

RULES OF RE-ENGAGEMENT

Partly in response to my current line of thought expressed in QUICK NUM NOTES, I re-examined the five essays I wrote about "the suspension of disbelief" as formulated by Samuel Coleridge and responded to by Stephen King. I concluded that quasi-series with the 2023 post STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT, but now I have some new refinements.

First of all, I failed to account for two different levels of engagement: one primary and "unearned," the other secondary and "earned." I pointed out in the course of the essays that a reader's receptiveness to the genres of fantasy does not depend exactly on "suspending disbelief." Some readers may be so invested in naive realism that they can never accept metaphenomenal subject matter in any way; they find it childish and would never, in line with Stephen King's dictum, even trouble to exert their mental muscles to engage. Yet I've encountered fans of the metaphenomenal who are just as naively realistic as any fantasy-hater, but who view their reading material as simple escapism from the rigors of real life. Other fantasy-readers may believe in one or more forms of the metaphenomenal in real life, ranging from psychic phenomena or the return of the Messiah, or they may be agnostic about such matters but open to real-world possibilities. Some may place credence in science fiction but not in magical fantasy, and so on. All of these forms of engagement proceed from individual taste, and so as far as the author of any given "meta" work is concerned, a given reader's willingness to engage is unearned, because the reader approaches the work with a certain degree of receptivity no matter how good or bad the work is.  

The secondary level of engagement, though, is one that the author does have to earn. In QUICK NUM NOTES I asked the question, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" The question was directed to those Gothic authors who thought they were being more "realistic" by revealing that a purported ghost was just a guy in a bedsheet, when in truth there's not much (if any) real-world evidence for swindlers who dress up in bedsheets (and maybe more for real ghosts). A good storyteller like Conan Doyle can cobble together enough suggestive details as to make it seem logical that the villain of HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES would go through the trouble of painting a dog with phosphorescent paint to get across the effect of a ghost-hound. When an author manages to take the reader to the second level of engagement, the reader feels validated in investing in the far-fetched events of the narrative. A contrary example-- just to name the first that comes to mind-- is a dopey "weird western," HAUNTED RANCH, in which the plotters, as unimaginative as their creators, try to create the illusion of a haunting by simply projecting spooky sounds into the ranch-house. 

The same basic rule pertains to marvelous phenomena. In this month's essay AMAZON ATROCITY, which offered an overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN tenure, I called attention to one story in which a fiery giant arises from the ground beneath Paradise Island-- yet the author neglects to give any rationale for the creature's appearance. I know that had I read this particular tale at age 10 I would have been offended by the author's implication that the kids reading this comic were too stupid to need explanations-- and I say this with a clear memory of another Kanigher story of the same period in which he pissed me off with his cavalier attitude toward storytelling.       

Further, I gave a couple of examples of the barest justifications Kanigher might have employed to gain his readers' secondary engagement: "Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians?" Both of these conceits could have been further expanded upon in line with either didactic or mythopoeic abstractions, and such abstractions might have made the story more interesting, thus encouraging readers to continue reading the heroine's adventures.

This idea of an author having to earn the reader's secondary engagement will play into a future essay on related matters.  

THE READING RHEUM: LIGHT IN AUGUST (1932)

So they looked at the fire with that same dull and static amaze which they had brought down from the old fetid caves where knowing began, as though, like death, they had never seen fire before.

LIGHT IN AUGUST is definitely the most singular "Christmas" story I've reviewed on this blog, being that it's a highly ironic parody of the story of Jesus Christ set in the rural American South of the 1930s. Despite the fact that the novel is entirely isophenomenal, Faulkner constantly refers to interior states of mind that, like the quote above, suggest some primeval ethos that predates not only the racial matrices of the South but of organized religion as such. LIGHT is also a mystery loosely in the vein of the detective fiction that was becoming a major American genre in the 1930s, but the "mystery" Faulkner aspires to solve relates to the nature of human identity, more in keeping with the "mystery plays" of medieval European Christianity.    

The narratives of three principal characters intertwine to give LIGHT its mythopoeic structure, though many of the supporting characters are no less mythic. One is defrocked Christian minister Gail Hightower, who resides in the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi and who lives a lonely existence isolated from the other citizens, aside from one confidante. The other two main figures are relative newcomers to Jefferson. One is the very pregnant hillbilly girl Lena Grove, who has hitchhiked from her home in Alabama, looking for Lucas Burch, the man who knocked her up. The other is the main target of Faulkner's Christological parody, petty criminal Joe Christmas (note the initials), who is also the vehicle of the author's views on the simmering racial matrix of American culture, mostly that of the South though not without some trenchant commentary on the Northern states as well.     

In a use of coincidence that most genre-mysteries would scorn, Lena finds her way to Jefferson by asking passersby if anyone has encountered her not-yet-husband Lucas Burch. Someone tells her to seek a "Burch" working in Jefferson, but the speaker is thinking of a man with a similar last name, Byron Bunch (the minister's one Jefferson confidante), who in most ways is the ethical opposite of Lucas Burch. The coincidental part is that Lucas Burch truly is working in Jefferson as well, but under the assumed name of Joe Brown, possibly to avoid Lena or anyone tracking him down. During Burch/Brown's time in Jefferson, he enters into a partnership with Joe Christmas, who runs a covert bootlegging operation there.  

Whereas the Jesus Christ of scripture was always sure of his divine parentage no matter what any mortal thought, Joe Christmas was raised an orphan and accused of being half-Black. The reasons behind this accusation constitute a secondary mystery, but the main mystery concerns the apparent murder of a Jefferson citizen, rich Joanna Burden, the spinster daughter of a Yankee abolitionist family. Burden allows Christmas and Brown to dwell on her land because she's carrying on a secret affair with Christmas. When she's killed and her house burned, Brown makes public the rumors of Christmas's racial heritage, the better to enflame the public against the fugitive-- less for his having killed a rich abolitionist than for having slept with a white woman. Then, in the last third of the novel, supporting character Epheus Hines reveals his part in the evolution of Christmas' situation, in a development so entangled as to make GREAT EXPECTATIONS seem straightforward.

There are far too many symbolic complexities in LIGHT to explore in a blogpost, far more than one would ever find in a simple novel about racial justice. Faulkner compares Southern Whites' constant persecution of the Negro race with the sufferings of the Christian savior, even though the likeness is ironic given that Joe Christmas is anything but saintly. For Faulkner it's only a small step between societal scapegoat and sacrificial lamb, and Christmas-- whose mixed heritage is never definitively proven-- suffers a martrydom that deeply impresses those who lynch him, as Christmas "seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever." And yet, as noted earlier Faulkner sees the same scapegoating process in the Christianity of the allegedly more liberal North. One of Joanna Burden's ancestors speaks the following convoluted rant about the intertwined destiny of Whites and Blacks in the New World:

The curse of the black race is God's curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God's chosen because He once cursed Him.

Faulkner leaves this skein tangled, probably because he believes that it represented the confusion of sentiments in American religion. Is the speaker comparing American Blacks to the Bible's "chosen people," the eternally persecuted Jews? Or is "the black man" of the passage comparable to the name Puritan settlers used for Satan, also "The Black Man"-- and if so, is the curse of God (the first "He") the curse that hurled "Him" (Satan/Lucifer) into perdition? Or does the speaker have in mind some muddled notion of the Biblical Curse of Ham by God's prophet Noah, a curse which originally had nothing to do with African Blacks but which was used to justify the subjugation of Black slaves?

And this fraction of Faulknerian analysis doesn't even touch on the author's view of the multitudinous conflicts of male and female natures, which could engender a separate post or two by itself. I'm also skipping most of the details on Gail Hightower and Lena Groves, though as one might expect, nativity myths are implicitly invoked with respect to Lena, with naive Byron Bunch standing in for "cuckolded" Joseph.      

Of the many mythopoeic prose novels out there, literary or otherwise, LIGHT IN AUGUST is one of the densest and most rewarding. It doesn't beat out the champion, Melville's MOBY DICK, but even Herman's own BILLY BUDD looks rather simple next to this Faulkner masterpiece.

                 

PICKING ATTEBERRIES

 My MIND OUT OF TIME series--  not precisely finished, just paused-- encouraged me to revisit some of the other books I'd reviewed here for theories of the process of imagining fantasy-narratives. My review of this 1980 Brian Attebery book shows that I didn't find in Attebery anything that made him one of my best-regarded critics. And yet, I enjoyed the 1980 book despite my disagreements. So when I noted that Attebery had several other reputable books on the fantasy-topic, I decided to check out one from 2013, STORIES ABOUT STORIES: FANTASY AND THE REMAKING OF MYTH. Given my own preoccupations, the subtitle was more than a little intriguing.

I don't know if I will devote many posts to STORIES. Today I finished the introduction and first chapter, and I was surprised that Attebery, in contrast to the 1980 book, talks a bit about his doing field studies in folklore studies. He mentions the matter only to distinguish between the experience of myth as a living practice, as sacred stories handed down through generations to embody the storyteller's culture, and the experience of myth as documented stories written down by folklorists, anthropologists or even modern literary authors.

I certainly agree with his statement distinguishing fantasy-based stories and those centered in an apparent "reality." He calls the former "metaphorical" in nature-- that is, substituting for descriptions of real experience with the depiction of the "unreal." In contrast, the latter type Attebery calls "metonymic," in that such stories create representations of persona and events that could have existed, but did not exist, in actual reality. And I've certainly made statements on this blog similar to Attebery's conclusion, "By renouncing claims to report directly on reality, fantasy requires the potential (not always realized) to generate powerful symbols."

I would say that this overstates the case somewhat, though. Though fantastic content may encourage an author's use of symbolism, certainly since the rise of isophenomenal literature, there have been any number of strongly-symbolic artworks. TITUS ANDRONICUS, generally regarded as Shakespeare's first tragedy, has nothing of "fantasy" about it, even including my category of "the uncanny" (and I will be interested to see if Attebery cites anything I would consider "non-marvelous fantasy.") But this Wiki article points out that the cycle of violence that dominates Titus's Rome could symbolize the degradation of every exalted Golden Age into profane Ages of Iron. And I feel certain that one could find any number of other symbolic analyses of TITUS online, despite its lack of overt fantasy. 

Similarly, most (though not all) fantasies require grounding in the rudiments of real life, and the fantasy-comedy of A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is certainly enhanced by Shakespeare's ability to capture the sense of how stage-performers fret and bicker backstage about who gets to play what role.

So far, I haven't found anything in STORIES that strikes me as dubious, though the intro makes a mention of "postcolonial fantasies"-- and that's NEVER a good sign.

MYTHICITY ACCORDING TO GENRE-DISPERSAL

 In the American academic criticism of both prose literature and film, so-called "myth criticism" is fairly spotty, without a dominant theoretical voice. Not that I would want everyone to sound the same. But there were a better general understanding of what distinguishes mythopoeic discourse from didactic discourse, authors like the ones who assembled this travesty might have a harder time promoting their drivel.

I believe American film criticism has one important advantage over its prose kindred, though. Because of the way commercial films were and are marketed, film critics have paid more attention to the ways mythic content can be expressed according to genre-expectations. No one has to my knowledge ever attempted a myth-history even for American popular films, and thus every interested critic, be it Raymond Durgnat, Richard Slotkin, or Geoffrey Hill, simply focuses on whatever genres or genre-products each finds most rewarding.

As a generalization based on personal reading, I find that three genres have generally attracted the most attention from myth-critics: horror, science fiction, and westerns. There's considerably less focus upon war and crime/mystery/espionage, except where critics have concentrated a particular creator with a particular genre-specialization, as with Hitchcock. And although one might argue that even silent film employed characters one might call "superheroes," understandably this quintessential comic-book genre has remained out of favor with most critics.

In comics criticism, I would say the bulk of myth-criticism has focused upon particular characters, be it perennials like Superman and Wonder Woman or relative upstarts executed by a particular creator, as with Frank Miller's Daredevil. So when I state that the bulk of comic-book criticism focuses upon superheroes, I'm talking about such focused examinations, and not so much on seeing myth broadly, through examinations of overall genre expectations. At least I'm not aware of any parallels in comics criticism to Slotkin's 1992 GUNFIGHTER NATION, which embraced a wide variety of frontier/western narratives of the 20th century.

I'm not thumping my own tub to claim that my blog seems to be the only one that has searched through the majority of comic-book  genres In Quest of Myth; it is, as far as I know, simple unadorned truth. Despite my efforts to be open to all generic forms, though, there can be no doubt that I too have found myth-discourse most often in the comic-book genre of the superhero. Probably the superhero-tale's nearest rival on this blog is the horror comic, with considerably fewer exemplars in the domains of science fiction, teen humor, and westerns.

Now, this is not so much the case on the blog I've dedicated to metaphenomenal film. Movies and television episodes with a "good" mythicity rating may actually be stronger there for both "horror" and "science fiction" than they are for "superheroes," though again, I have not attempted a precise breakdown, nor do I tend to do one.

 Now, the very fact that the NUM blog focuses only metaphenomenal film means that I almost never examine in detail one of the film-genres that earns the widest plaudits from academics: the western. Whereas horror, science fiction, and superheroes all might be expected to have heavy mythicity thanks to their evocation of metaphenomena, western narratives, even relatively simple efforts by "non-auteurs," often generate complex symbolic discourses even within purely (or largely) isophenomenal worlds. And I would say, again without making any attempt at a statistical breakdown, that western films do so much more frequently than other genres that tend to be dominantly isophenomenal, such as crime and mystery, romance, teen humor, and war.

I may come up with a theory to explain this discrepancy after doing more research into western-myth criticism as it exists, but for now, this essay serves mostly as a lead-in to my next essay: How Many Western Myths Have I Found?

STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT

In STRENGTH TO DREAM, THE SEQUEL, I summed up some previous arguments thusly:

I applied some of my observations to King's comments in his 1981 book DANSE MACABRE, concluding that what he and Coleridge called "disbelief" was more like "disengagement." 

Having made that fine point, though, I didn't follow through on the question of whether Stephen King's extrapolations from Coleridge re: the "muscular" nature of disbelief might apply equally to disengagement. Once more, just to keep track of what Coleridge originally said:

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. 

Again I note that Coleridge does not define what he means by "suspension," though he certainly doesn't use any of King's muscular metaphors. If anything, when he speaks of "transferring from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth" in order to overcome some state of "disbelief," it sounds more like he's saying that he the author has to "charm" the disbeliever into putting aside his disbelief in favor of "poetic faith." It's not impossible that, since he's comparing his "endeavors" to those of his partner-in-poesy Wordsworth in a general way, Samuel T. may be covertly implying that Wordsworth's more grounded ruminations aren't capable of delving into "our inward nature," that they are only capable of giving "the charm of novelty to the things of every day."

Though both Coleridge and Stephen King were somewhat at odds with literary trends toward naturalism in their respective times, the kind of literature that Coleridge above calls "romantic" had made a modest comeback, and this is at least part of the reason that later critics lumped Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others into the category called "Romantic poets." In contrast, both during King's youth and his writing career, the general consensus in American literary culture was that Naturalism had essentially won the battle against Romanticism. This culture might admit to the existence of a handful of post-Renaissance literary works worthy of being called "good literature." But most "romantic" works, particularly those that involved metaphenomenal fantasy-content, were considered trash, and they generally appeared in such trashy media as pulp magazines, comic books, and kiddie television. (Fantasy-films arguably gained a greater stature than fantasy-works in other media during Stephen King's youth, but the possible reasons for this would comprise a separate essay.)

King's statements in DANSE MACABRE and the essay "Why I Chose Batman" show that he was fully invested in fantasy-fandom, though he, like many fans, formed his own non-academic criteria for what was good and what was bad. Yet I suggest that he was always conscious of the scorn of majority culture for many if not all of the fantasy-stories he favored. I also suggest that King didn't really have much of a rebuttal to naturalism except the idea that one's imagination might possess something like "muscles" that fantasy-fans regularly exercised while realism-fans did not. It's a stimulating idea but does not really speak to a deeper issue. It's true that realism-fans may dislike metaphenomenal fiction because they think it important that all fiction should emulate "the things of every day." But I've pointed out that most fantasy-fans don't literally "believe" that the fantastic content in their favored stories is real. Rather, they choose to engage with such content for reasons of aesthetic taste, not cognitive assessment. 

I think that when Coleridge speaks of how "suspension of disbelief" can foster "poetic faith" by way of the aforementioned "inward truth," he's a lot closer to stating that the human psyche draws equally upon both "inward truth" and what might as well be called "outward truth." In the second part of 2022's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS, I related these categories to the Greek ideas of "the limitless and the limited."

I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation.

Since both categories have relevance to the human condition as a whole, it is not so much that "realism-fans" disbelieve in fantasy-content as they do not engage with it as strongly as they do with realism-content, and the reverse formula would apply to "fantasy-fans." And of course there are those who can engage strongly with works in either category. Though I have a fascination with the complicated dynamics of how fantasy-content is expressed, I appreciate the rigor of a well-conceived "realism-work."

My theory of aesthetic engagement also speaks to reader-preference in terms of the two major categories of the uncanny and the marvelous. Possibly for the last time, here's King's statement as to why he "chose" Batman over Superman.

I remember the ads for the first SUPERMAN movie...the ones that said YOU'LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY. Well, I didn't... But when Batman swung down into the Joker's hideout on a rope or stopped the Penguin from dropping Robin into a bucket of boiling hog-fat with a well-thrown Batarang, I believed. These were not likely things, I freely grant you that, but they were possible things.

I don't really credit that Young Stephen King liked these uncanny Bat-feats simply because they were more believable, and in part I dismiss this recollection because King had almost certainly allowed himself to "believe" in marvelous phenomena no more extraordinary than Superman in many other fantasy-works mentioned in DANSE MACABRE. I think the dynamic of the uncanny engaged him more than that did the dynamic of the marvelous, possibly because the former seemed to have a greater supply of what I've called "rigor." And given that King also WROTE quite a few stories with marvelous content-- some of which, rather improbably, tried to compete with the secondary-world mastery of J.R.R. Tolkien-- I think he could engage with the marvelous whenever he pleased, irrespective of his "belief" systems.

ADDENDUM: I may as well note that the reason I've gone so long about the use of the word "disbelief" is that I don't think anyone who knows what fiction is comes to it with the idea of "believing" in it, since the essence of fiction is that it is not factually true. One can accept a lot of fictional propositions and reject others, but always in the context of what I once called "relative meta-beliefs." Engagement or its lack, however, is crucial for anyone's appreciation of fictional narrative-- and it's anyone's guess whether I'll leave things at that pass for the near future.

 

SILVER SCREEN PSYCHO KILLERS

 Responding to remarks about the influence of Hitchcock's 1960 PSYCHO on the history of the psycho-killer subgenre...

I'm only aware of one year-by-year "psychofilmography" of this subgenre, and that's the one compiled by John McCarty in his 1993 MOVIE PSYCHOS AND MADMEN. I don't agree with a number of his inclusions, such as "Jekyll and Hyde" films and "evil mastermind" films like those of Fu Manchu and Doctor Mabuse. But he's generally good about focusing on killers who seem motivated less by gain than by some mad pleasure in killing, usually more than just one victim. His list suggests that, aside from Mister Hyde, supernaturally-endowed psycho-killers barely existed in any quantity before the 1980s, so that most of the malcontents on the list are either uncanny or naturalistic. 

According to McCarty, there's barely anything relevant in cinema's silent years, though Hitchcock's 1926 THE LODGER builds on the legend of Jack the Ripper. I don't consider the original LODGER a true psycho-killer film, though, because the evildoer is mainly important as a catalyst, causing an innocent man to be falsely accused.

Fritz Lang's M heads up the sound era, but it, like most of the other psycho killer films of the thirties, doesn't beget more of its own subgenre kindred. The strongest pattern I see are a series of one-offs on a theme I would call "the mad hobbyist." This means a character who's so obsessed about his hobby that he makes murder integral to his pursuits, thus taking in 1932's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, 1935's THE RAVEN, and 1936's THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET. 

By contrast, the forties really develop the subgenre as cinema never had before. Many years during this decade can boast (according to McCarty's parameters) as many as four or more psycho-killer films each year. Was there an upsurge in the public's perception of psychology, particularly of the Freudian brand, so that ticket buyers took the subject more seriously as a way to explain deviant behavior? Es posible.

In 1944 we get the first psycho-killer film that spawns, not a sequel or remake, but a wholly different movie in the same idiom. John Brahm's THE LODGER is a wholly different film from Hitchcock's, for the psycho-killer is the focus of the story. The killer's mental makeup is described in much more detail than most thirties parallels, even more than in Lang's M. LODGER was successful enough that the studio got Brahm to do an idiom-sequel for 1945 release, adapting the novel HANGOVER SQUARE in such a way as to duplicate the appeal of LODGER.

A lot of crime-films started using crazed killers, too. Scarface and Little Caesar had their obsessions, but they didn't murder for pleasure like the psycho-crooks of BORN TO KILL, KISS OF DEATH, or Hitchcock's ROPE.

The fifties show roughly roughly the same pattern as the forties, though in this decade we get an idiom-sequel to a "mad hobbyist" flick, when the success of Vincent Price's 1953 remake of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM leads to his appearance in 1954's THE MAD MAGICIAN. Toward the end of the fifties we're beginning to get a few films like 1958's SCREAMING MIMI and 1959's HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM, which might have encouraged (if not literally influenced) the provenance of not only PSYCHO, but the same-year PEEPING TOM by Michael Powell.

In terms of the history of psycho-killers, PSYCHO's biggest influence was that it provided a pattern that proved easy to follow. Instead of one or two idiom-knockoffs of a successful movie, the "hills" of the 1960s were alive with the sounds of psycho-killings. Going purely by McCarty, year 1966 is the only one that has as few as four such movies, and that's with me eliminating the irrelevant FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN. After 1970, McCarty's list, which concludes with Year 1992, shows almost every year with at least ten such films listed.

And to think-- it all started with a noisy shower.

METAPHENOMENAL MUSINGS PT. 2

The second and last elephant in the room is that even though fans of what I call "the metaphenomenal" often use the term "fantasy-fans" for themselves (unless they're really uncompromising SF-adherents), they often consume a lot of content that would not meet the definition of fantasy I proposed in Part 1, "as violations of what can happen in either time, space, or both." This is particularly true in the world of fantasy-film fans. It's for these audiences that concordances of fantastic film include such items as PSYCHO (serial killer), TARZAN OF THE APES (man raised by animals), and even the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ (extended fantasy dream-sequence).

None of these movies technically break with accepted standards of causation within time and space. Serial killers, feral children and extended dreams are all conceivable in our reality, so they don't break with the perceived rules of time and space. However, the way in which each of these famous movies presents these unusual phenomena may be deemed to *bend* those rules. Serial killers don't commonly have the complicated double identities of a Norman Bates, long dreams are not as structured as those of Dorothy Gale, and there has never been a feral child who turned out as good-looking as Tarzan.

At the same time, it's not impossible to depict parallel versions of these real-world phenomena in which no rule-bending takes place. Carl Jung had many symbolically complex dreams that could be recapitulated in the medium of cinema without making them seem as if they had the structure of fiction, after the fashion of OZ. And there have been cinematic treatments of the real-life deviate Ed Gein, on whom Norman Bates was partly based, and of the real feral child Victor of Aveyron, the basis of Francois Truffaut's THE WILD CHILD.

Following (but not wedded to) some terminology introduced in academic circles, I've called this "rule-bending" category of the metaphenomenal "the uncanny" while the "rule-breaking" category is "the marvelous." In contrast, all those works that simply "follow the rules" I deem "the naturalistic." There are surely concordances that don't follow my categories, that may occasionally include THE WILD CHILD or the 2000 movie ED GEIN. But I believe these are minor exceptions. Most such compendia avoid the strictly naturalistic studies of serial killers like Ted Bundy or the Hillside Stranglers, but serial killers whose fictional careers suggest the bizarre and the extraordinary generally find themselves in such encyclopedias.

I plan to devote a separate essay to some of my recent thoughts about the process by which "works of the uncanny" distinguish themselves from "works of the naturalistic," but to conclude, my idea of the typical fantasy-fan, with an equal appreciation for both forms of the metaphenomenal, is illustrated by this except from the letter of a somewhat famed fantasy-author:

If. in fact, man is unable to create living things out of inorganic matter. to hypnotize the beasts of the forest to do his will, to swing from tree to tree with the apes of the African jungle...or to explore... the deserts of Mars, permit us, at least, in fantasy, to witness these miracles, and to satisfy that craving for the unknown, the weird, and the impossible which exists in every human brain.-- H.P. Lovecraft.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this series, I established that one can imagine, in keeping with Stephen King's reading of Samuel Coleridge, a special "muscular effort" the reader must make in order to entertain metaphemomena in fiction, given that metaphenomena go against what most readers "deem the expected phenomena of this world." But was King right about the nature of said effort? Once more, here's how King interpreted Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief:"

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

One problem with this extrapolation is that Coleridge did not say much about the nature of the "disbelief" that must be "suspended" in order for a reader to entertain "shadows of imagination." I hypothesized that one might compare this disbelief with Cassirer's "naive realism," the human tendency to believe only in what one can perceive through the senses. But though it's possible to read that in King, Coleridge doesn't generalize so much. It's possible he meant this "disbelief" to be something purely characteristic of his historical era.

So is King right that disbelief that "has to be hoisted, and held up by main force?" That might be the case with individuals' disbelief in metaphenoma occurring in the real world, and indeed, King's dichotomy about belief and disbelief takes places in a chapter where he narrates an experience in which a relative demonstrated the apparent reality of dowsing to Young King. But is the same effort necessary when an individual faces fictional phenomena that don't accord with what he expects?

Many individuals who don't believe in the existence of anything but material objects will prefer fiction that coheres with their beliefs; fiction which does not portray any "shadows of imagination" as real. But many readers may share that materialist philosophy, and yet they indulge in metaphenomenal fiction precisely because it does not resemble the real world, and so affords them an escape from reality's demands. Further, whereas as some people may earnestly believe in such rural fantasies as sprites and brownies, no one truly believes in hobbits, because hobbits are self-evidently the fictional creations of a particular author.

Given all these contingencies, I think that what Coleridge and King call "disbelief" is really "disengagement." 

As I observed previously, isophenomenal fiction does not have to establish ground rules for its phenomena, but both forms of the metaphenomenal, the marvelous and the uncanny, must do so, however implicitly. 

The marvelous, as I established in CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN, rebels against the isophenomenal formula of "one cause yields one definite effect." For example, in the real world, there are no chemicals that can cause a person to turn invisible, but in H.G. Wells' INVISIBLE MAN, such chemicals are imagined into existence, and so Griffin's "invisibility formula" is a "shadow of imagination" given reality. A reader may choose either to engage with that shadow on its own terms or not, but the reader's credence in the concept does not affect the work's ground rules. The uncanny does not overtly challenge the causal order, but its creations carry the semblance of multicausality (is the House of Usher really alive in some fashion, or is it just a non-sentient building upon which people project their delusions?)

Historically, some readers have found it easier to engage with works of the uncanny than with marvelous ones. Early Gothic fiction, such as VATHEK and CASTLE OF OTRANTO, traded heavily in marvelous content, patently following models supplied by Arabian Nights fables and European knight-romances. But though Ann Radcliffe might not be the very first author to invent the "supernatural rationally explained," she supplied a new paradigm for those who didn't want to credence, even in fiction, the more outrageous imaginative shadows. Yet it's a major error on the part of many critics (not least Tzvetan Todorov) to believe that Radcliffe's "rational Gothics" had anything to do with realistic fiction, in which the possibility of ghosts and demons can't even be entertained for a moment.

Most uncanny fictions require a lesser "muscular intellectual act" for a reader to engage with their content, simply because the uncanny conveys the superficial appearance of adhering to rules of casual coherence. By contrast, overtly marvelous fictions usually formulate their own multicausal ground rules, ranging from a Tolkien, who imagines a world full of elves and trolls and angel-like entities, to an animated cartoon that can depict any bizarre transformation, "as long as it's funny." However, Herman Melville's MOBY DICK stands as an example of an uncanny work that requires just as much intellectual musculature as the most sophisticated marvelous fiction in order for a reader to fully engage with its ground rules. So, in essence, both the uncanny and the marvelous are equally capable of providing heavy-lifting exercise for a reader's imaginative muscles.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 2

I have to backtrack a little with regard to my statements here about Stephen King's take on Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief."

I wrote in part:

I agree [with King] that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories.

I thought King was slanting his argument a bit by comparing a highly complex metaphenomenal writer like HPL with an isophenomenal writer with a reputation for very simple bestseller fiction. (I think King was playing to that reputation, whether he had read any Hailey books back then or not, though I never have and so can only go on general allegations.) That's why I said the materialist literary author Joseph Conrad would have been a nearer match in terms of literary complexity.

However, though I still believe King's comparison of HPL and Hailey was off-kilter, King's standard would be true in terms of the ways in which isophenomenal authors of any complexity-level approach the phenomenality of their fictional worlds, in contradistinction to the way metaphenomenal authors face those same considerations.

Isophenomenal works, whether they are as complex as a Conrad novel or as simple as a Franklin Dixon HARDY BOYS (just to name something I did read in great quantity), are alike in that they utilize the same range of phenomena. I say that this range is "isophenmenal" because, even though nothing in Conrad or Dixon is actually "real," it is supposed to be "the same as" (Greek "iso") what a majority of readers would deem the expected phenomena of this world. That's not to say that there aren't potential readers who believe in their heart of hearts that everything that seems solid and dependable could vapor away if some god or computer-network sent the message. But they will always be outnumbered by the majority of readers, who are governed by what Cassirer called "naive realism, which regards the reality of objects as something and unequivocally given" (LANGUAGE AND MYTH, p. 6). An isophenomenal author cannot vary from what is known about the real world. At most he might introduce some little-known fact of nature that might have some of the charm of novelty, simply because the reader had not heard of said fact.

Every metaphenomenal work, though, whether as complex as a Lovecraft story or a simple as a Gerry Conway SPIDER-MAN tale, goes "beyond" (Greek "meta") what we expect of real-world phenomena. Further, even writers who pick up serial fantasy-concepts created by other authors are usually obliged to add new fantasy-concepts to the series-- Conway's most famous contribution being The Punisher. King is right that in order to formulate the ground rules for any fantasy-cosmos, however complex or simple, do require a special "muscular" effort for one to engage with whatever type or types of metaphenomena the author chooses to depict. This "muscular effort" has nothing to do with the parallel "muscular effort" that determines whether or not the work is complex or simple.

In Part 3, I anticipate expanding these thoughts with respect to the two complementary forms of the metaphenomenal, the uncanny and the marvelous.

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 2

Continuing the conceptual thread from the previous essay, I reiterate that whenever I analyzed the phenomenality of a work that falls within the domain of the uncanny, I'm looking for phenomena which do not overtly violate causal coherence but nevertheless create a sense of "strangeness" through violating intelligibility: the reader's sense that regular causality can only yield a sense that the world is understandable and therefore intelligible. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate some examples by which authors use the three rationales I formulated in Part 1 to create that sense of strangeness.

The rationale of science is probably the most common one in the domain of the uncanny. Arthur Conan Doyle's novel THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES sports one of the most famous examples of a "phony ghost." Back in Doyle's time, the parameters of the mystery-genre would have suggested from the first that any intimation of a ghost, much less a spectral demon-hound, probably will not be validated. Yet for the greater part of the novel Doyle creates a strong sense of a supernatural threat before revealing that the titular hound is just an ordinary trained canine covered in phosphorescent paint. In contrast to many critics, I would say that the aura of strangeness is not entirely dispelled, because even if the hound is not a real demon, the person who orchestrates the Hound's existence is strange in its own uncanny right.

While HOUND uses a scientific principle to create an illusion, numerous heroes and villains utilize fairly simple scientific gadgets to give themselves an edge over their opponents. In contrast to the original Ian Fleming novel, the 1973 LIVE AND LET DIE includes a scene in which James Bond, suspended over a shark pool by ropes, cuts through his, er, bonds by unleashing a miniature rotary saw from his watch. Whether any gadget like this would work in the real world is as immaterial as whether one could build an actual FTL drive; the point is to create the sense of Bond having a special "ace in the hole."

It's not quite as easy to use the magical rationale to generate uncanny strangeness, but it can be employed in relatively mundane worlds. Wilkie Collins' 1868 mystery-novel THE MOONSTONE is built around the crime of an Englishman who steals a sacred jewel from an Indian cult , flees with his booty to England and secures the gem in a bank deposit box. The cultists follow, seeking to recover the jewel and kill the thief, but they have no way to break into the bank. Collins thus set up a situation in which the cultists, who don't precisely look like your average Englishmen, must find some way to monitor the thief's movements. Therefore, they use their own knowledge of a simple magical procedure, which Collins does not name but is usually called "scrying." The cultists buy the services of an English boy who has a talent one might call "psychic" or "magical" as one pleases, but Collins' description has more of a "magical" vibe in my view. Eventually the thief checks the gem out of the bank with the idea of escaping, and when he does, the cultists pounce and recover their property.

In the previous essay I gave an example of a marvelous "just because" rationale taken from a magical realism novel, so for this essay, I will invoke another magic-realism work for this category. China Mieville's novel THE CITY IN THE CITY supposes an unspecified locale on "our" Earth where two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, occupy the exact same physical space, with the buildings of one city cheek-to-jowl with those of the other. Further, Mieville posits  that the inhabitants of one city willfully pretend not to be aware of the citizens of the co-existing city. The author does not provide any rigorous backstory as to how this state of affairs came about, and so its underlying rationale is that of "just because." Ironically, though its parameters in no way resemble either mainstream fantasy or mainstream SF, Mieville's CITY was welcomed by various awards-committees associated with those movements, since the novel won a 2010 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was also nominated (but did not win) a award named for the famed SF-editor John W. Campbell. 

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1

 My posts on the NUM theory have gone into great detail as to how literary metaphenomena, whether uncanny or marvelous, are created through the use of story-tropes. In both cases, the author of a fictional world seeks to diverge from the world of the naturalistic, the domain in which all phenomena are unified (and therefore are termed "isophenomenal.") In the essay LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE, I said:

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. 

My general metaphor for the difference between the two metaphenomenal domains has been the difference between breaking down normal causality or simply bending it.  However, I have not supplied a list of rationales that authors use to justify the tropes that either bend or break causality. The three rationales are as follows:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."

Most of what fans view as "mainstream" fantasy and science fiction deals with phenomena that breaks down the viewer's sense of causality, or, in my system, "causal coherence," by evoking either the fictional logic-systems of either science or magic. There is no limit as to the extensiveness of the tropes open to either the magic-rationale of mainstream fantasy or the science-rationale of mainstream science fiction. Fantasy has elves, SF has aliens. Fantasy has doors into fairyland; SF has faster-than-light space travel. Fantasy has Doctor Strange; SF has Iron Man. The distinction is not between any hypothetical limit upon either rationale, for in effect there is no limit. Rather, the distinction is between the ideas attributed IN FICTION to the system of magic as opposed to the system of science. 

Both magic and science operate to manipulate commonplace causality. In science, the logical ideal is that the scientist produces causality-breaking miracles by discovering new principles that underlie those phenomena, and he manipulates those principles to explain FTL travel or transistor-powered armor. In magic, however, the logical idea is that the magician transcends the overt principles underlying commonplace phenomena in order to create faery-doors and magical spells. Human will of some type, whether for good or ill, directly impinges upon reality within the magical rationale, while in the scientific rationale, the will acts indirectly, creating re-arrangements of phenomena.   

Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd. 

I conceived the idea of the three rationales some time back, but I recently realized that all of them were configured with respect to the phenomenality of the marvelous, the one that breaks causality. In my second essay, I will deal with how the same such rationales appear within the domain of the uncanny.

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 3

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement... Coleridge, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, PT. 14.

 

Coleridge's concept of art as a vast fusion of many different contrary aspects of life substantially agrees with my notion of the dialectic between "the unfamiliar" and "the familiar." In the previous two essays, I've defined a "primary familiarity" that applies principally to "life-as-we-live-in-every-day," and a "secondary familiarity" that is applied to the construction of abstract conceptual forms. I discussed the forms of science and of myth, connecting the latter to the practice of art by speaking of "mythology and its expression through art-works." By this I was not implying an absolute identity between myth and art. I believe that both forms strive for a fusion between the familiar and the unfamiliar, in contrast to science's quest for total familiarity of a quantifiable nature. However, regardless as to how deeply myths were believed by their adherents in pre-technological societies, the myth-tales were promulgated with the idea that the society OUGHT to believe them, at least to some degree. The stories of art and literature are promulgated with the idea that the listeners don't necessarily have to believe in them, particularly once the stories began to diverge from stories associated with religions concepts. 

Myth by definition needs concepts that extend beyond familiar life, since myth is meant to explain the workings of the universe through gods or giants or spirits or whatever. Fiction, however, can represent states of existence that go beyond immediate phenomena ("metaphenomenal") or it can represent states of existence that strongly resemble immediate phenomena ("isophenomenal.") We don't know how sort of isophenomenal  stories might have been related by early tribal humans, because most surviving narratives do have mythico-religious associations. Still, one may fairly assume that primitive humans had their versions of simple naturalistic stories even as we do-- fish stories about "the one that got away," or "Your mama is so fat that, etc." Still, for many centuries, metaphenomenal tropes seemed dominant, with the higher classes in, say, medieval Europe telling stories of knights chasing Grails while the lower classes told stories of talking wolves and horses. Centuries would go by before literature would to some extent embrace the POV of science, coming to focus more on stories of ordinary people moving around in a world without magic or miracles.

 In reaction to this sense that the naturalistic world had become more dominant-- arguably showing "contempt" for the old religious myths-- one also sees artists in say, post-Renaissance Europe making more of a freestyle use of magic and miracles than one saw in medieval Europe. Certainly Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM feels more like the playwright's personal and playful take on fairies than like any attempt to adhere to any mythic or folkloric concept of fairies. Roughly a century later Europe would begin to see the rise of what some call "proto-science-fiction," as seen in Swift's 1726 GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, while, about forty years after that, we see the invention of the first Gothic novel with Walpole's 1764 CASTLE OF OTRANTO. As different as these two eighteenth-century works are from one another, they both depend on challenging the familiarity of the average reader by opening them up to new worlds of unfamiliarity-- though it's axiomatic that no metaphenomenal work can be too totally divorced from the familiar world, or it would be impossible for readers to understand, to say nothing of failing to exercise what Coleridge calls art's "synthetic" power.

This is the sense in which I'm claiming that Aesopian contempt-- the sense that things can be taken for granted, including the predominance of a naturalistic phenomenality-- "bred" unfamiliarity. At a time when it was difficult if not impossible to put forth new mythico-religious concepts, due to the vested interests of established religions, literature develops a wide number of genres designed to perpetuate a sense of unfamiliarity within an apparently familiar world. Even many "high class" artists, particularly among the English and German Romantics, launched such experiments with metaphenomenal material, as we see with Hoffmann's GOLDEN POT and "The Sandman," Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, and Coleridge's own experiment with vampire-fiction, the unfinished ballad CHRISTABEL. From one viewpoint, if the prehistoric myth-maker was trying to counter the unfamiliarity of the physical world with images of the familiar (like making the sun into a godly charioteer), the authors of metaphenomenal fiction were challenged by the familiarity of science's reading of the physical world into generating new images of the unfamiliar.

Hmm, I believe I need at least one more essay to clarify the specifics of the differences between the uncanny-metaphenomenal and the marvelous-metaphenomenal. Possibly tomorrow. 

THE MOST FAMOUS SUBCOMBATIVE ADVENTURE

In ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT.2, I detailed some of the problems with which I’d grappled in terms of assigning ROBINSON CRUSOE its place within my literary system. I didn't have any problems in stating that CRUSOE qualifies as “the first major work of popular fiction.” The book’s mode of communication is markedly different from the mode of earlier elite-culture works that happened to become popular with the masses, ranging from Shakespeare’s PERICLES to Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE. I also view CRUSOE, as well as its first sequel, as touchstones for the modern development of the adventure-mythos. However, this distinction must be qualified. Readers during the Enlightenment may have believed that chivalric romances belonged to an outmoded genre, but both “high” and “low” readers remained aware of how that type of fiction worked, how knightly heroes disported themselves. As I remarked earlier, Crusoe is anything but knightly in his bourgeois orientation, and though I do consider Defoe’s two Crusoe-novels to fall into the mythos of adventure, Crusoe himself is at best a demihero, and not a very impressive one. Even Friday, describing how he took the life of a wild bear just for kicks, comes closer to the model of the combative knight than does Robinson Crusoe.

Now, as my essay-title portends, Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND (published as a book in 1883 but serialized in a kids’ magazine two years previous) is also subcombative in terms of the dynamicity of its protagonist Jim Hawkins. However, while not all readers may think of ROBINSON CRUSOE as a pure adventure-novel, TREASURE ISLAND is practically a watchword for the mythos. To be sure, it’s preceded by many other classics in the same mythos, particularly the Big Three Perennials: Scott’s IVANHOE, Dumas’s THREE MUSKETEERS, and Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Yet though there had been numerous adventure-tales—now mostly unread—that featured juveniles as protagonists, ISLAND seems a breakthrough in terms of creating a true hero who simply happens to be a juvenile. By “true hero” I mean the type of character who fits the persona of “the hero,” more devoted to glory than immediate survival.


Hawkins is not utterly without economic motive. As much as his “good mentors” Livesy and Trelawney, and his ‘bad mentor” Long John Silver, Hawkins wants to profit by uncovering the lost treasure of pirate captain Flint. But there’s a sense in which the treasure gives Jim an excuse to get away from the mundane life of running an inn with his widowed mother. To be sure, he doesn’t expect to meet danger during the voyage to the isle of treasure (called “Skeleton Island”). Peril only looms its head when Hawkins learns that Silver has brought hardened pirates into the crew, who are willing to murder or maroon all of the ship's honest citizens, once the pirates have acquired Flint’s treasure. Nevertheless, twice in the story Hawkins boldly strikes off on his own, first to explore the island, and then to recapture the ship when it’s set adrift. Hawkins can’t fight or shoot, and he’s saved from being killed in his only battle-scene by losing his footing and falling down a hill. Nevertheless, Hawkins displays both the honor and courage of a hero. The sense of honor extends even to the duplicitous Silver, for Hawkins refuses to break his word to the pirate even to save Hawkins’ own life, and his courage is all the more remarkable because of the very real fears he experiences. Cinematic adaptations sometimes are accurate in conjuring with the terror-aspects of the boy’s early encounter with the fearsome Blind Pew, or Hawkins’ life-or-death struggle against the murderous Israel Hands. But the island itself is rarely shown as Stevenson shows it, as a place of potential malarial sickness, inhabited by “huge slimy monsters” (sea lions, unfamiliar to the young Englishman). And I’ve never seen a film that ended as the novel ends; with Jim Hawkins, years later, still haunted by nightmares of piratical iniquity, summed up by the memory of Long John’s parrot, mindlessly screaming “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Like many of Stevenson’s works, TREASURE ISLAND was originally directed at young readers, for its original title was THE SEA COOK: A STORY FOR BOYS. I for one did not read the novel in my youth. My first memory was that of seeing a thirty-minute cartoon adaptation as an episode of THE FAMOUS ADVENTURES OF MISTER MAGOO, in which a version of Magoo, an actor rather than a blind old coot, essayed the role of Long John. The cartoon, like many live-action adaptations, played up Silver’s charm and wit, and downplayed the consequences of his intentions toward the honest treasure-seekers. I didn’t read the book until I was in my fifties or thereabout, when I sought to sort out the book’s relationship to the literary form of “the romance.” Indeed, Stevenson’s epigraph alludes to “the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way,” which I take to be a reference to the chivalric romances, whose spirit Scott had revived in IVANHOE. To be sure, I doubt if any medieval romance ever had a villain as ambiguous as Long John Silver, who is the dark side of Hawkins as much as Hyde, five years later, would become the alter ego to Jekyll. Ironically, while Jekyll and Hyde perish together, Stevenson allows Silver to escape the fate he’s earned and to steal a sack of coins for his trouble, while Hawkins on the contrary is too haunted by his experience of “man’s inhumanity to man” to enjoy his share of the pirate treasure.

Despite the many horrific images in the novel, TREASURE ISLAND is entirely naturalistic, just like the Big Three Perennials. However, the book is indirectly responsible for spawning the cornerstone of the nineteenth century’s formulation of the superhero idiom. After reading ISLAND, H. Rider Haggard bet a friend that he Haggard could write a novel as good as Stevenson’s work. While there had been pirate adventures before ISLAND, KING SOLOMON’S MINES instituted the subgenre known as the “lost race novel.” Perhaps more importantly, MINES introduced one of the nineteenth century’s first serial characters whose adventures were both (1) predominantly metaphenomal in nature, and (2) predominantly based around the agon of combat. Allen Quatermain, star of MINES and the eight books that followed, does end up chasing a legendary treasure as does Hawkins. But Quatermain is a seasoned campaigner rather than a beardless boy, and though Haggard killed off his character in the second book, the series was popular enough for the author to bring Quatermain back in six “prequels.” To my knowledge Stevenson never wrote anything that belongs to the superhero idiom, but TREASURE ISLAND remains an important link in the chain of events that led to that idiom, ranging from Nick Carter to Tarzan and John Carter and on through the costumed offspring of four-color comics.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 3

In the first two sections of this intermittent essay-series, I argued with myself that the "significant values" of a given work, or set of works, could affect the "narrative values" of the item under discussion.  However, only recently did I consider this effect could be metaphorically illustrated in mathematical terms.

In the original ACTIVE SHARES, PASSIVE SHARES argument, I surveyed the Silver Age Marvel comic-series, of which I said:

I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid.

But this presumes that every metaphenomenal story in the series has exactly the same value as every isophenomenal story; that one story equals a value of "one." Yet in EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, I said:

So I have at least made the essential statement that for the combinatory mode as for the dynamicity-mode, "excess of strength is proof of strength," as Nietzsche aptly said.

By this paradigm, a story with metaphenomenal elements is "stronger" than one without them, if only in the degree to which the former type forces the reader to utilize his imagination. Given that strength even in the non-imaginary world carries more value than comparative weakness, then it's arguable that every metaphenomenal RAWHIDE KID story ought to have a value of more than one.

To be sure, I fudged the original percentages by allowing a value of "one" simply to each issue of RAWHIDE KID, even though some of the earlier issues contain more than one story with the starring character. Since I felt that the feature progressed away from multiple stories fairly soon, I decided I didn't want to count out every story, with the result that I regarded the whole run of the KID as comprising 113 "points" (at least two issues featured reprints before the title went all-reprint).  Of those 113, I considered that 15 of the stories had metaphenomenal content, though I'll note here, as I did not in the earlier essay, that only two of them are "marvelous" and all of the others are "uncanny."

Now, whatever calculator gave me eight percent I evidently misused, because when I tried the operation today, it came out as a little over 14 percent. The error makes no difference to the 51 percent rule: eight and fourteen are equally unable to enjoy a "controlling interest."

So, if I posit that each isophenomenal story, because it makes no great appeal to the imagination, is only worth one point, then that gives 98 points for the roughly 98 isophenomenal stories in the Kid's original run.

Now suppose that I say that a marvelous-metaphenomenal story is worth not one, but five points. Only two stories in the run are unquestionably marvelous in nature, the "Red Raven" story and the "Living Totem" tale, so with those added we have 10 points for the stories themselves, 108 points for the grand total.

Then there are thirteen "uncanny" stories, so I'll arbitrarily assign them three points to each of these. So the subtotal of metaphenomenal stories becomes 10 + 39, equaling 49, and the total points overall are 147. Out of 147, 49 is roughly 33 percent. It's still not 51 percent or more, but it begins to look more like the sort of "passive share" I argued about earlier.

Now, I could continue to jigger the ratings of the metaphenomenal stories until they did raise above fifty-one percent, but if I set that standard in stone, then it would be totally arbitrary. By asserting greater values for the metaphenomenal stories in a merely theoretical manner, this adjusted paradigm adequately illustrates the principle of the passive share I sought to explore.

A contrasting example, brought up in NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 2. was that of the 1960s TV serial LOST IN SPACE. I wasn't concerned with sussing out phenomenology here, but the appearance of the combative mode, and as with RAWHIDE I assigned every story (including parts of continued stories) just one point. Eighty-three stories meant eighty-three total points, Nineteen of the episodes were combative, which registers as 23 percent of the whole.

But to be consistent with my assertions in EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, the higher dynamicities of a combative work should be valued higher than those that lack this dynamicity. So the total number of points for the subcombative episodes, assigning each one point, is 64.

Since combative dynamicity doesn't make quite the same appeal to the imagination as does metaphenomenality, I'll conservatively assign the value of three to the nineteen episodes. So the subtotal for the combative episodes is 57 and the overall total is 121. The subtotal is about 44 percent of the total, so it too does not meet the 51 percent criteria, though it too is closer to being a "passive share." However, because combative adventure does not seem to have been as important to LOST IN SPACE as metaphenomenal content was to RAWHIDE KID, it's possible that the significant value of the former might have a negativizing effect upon the whole of the teleseries. More on that later, if I get suitably inspired.

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.