EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 3

 So in the previous two installments of this essay-series, I've addressed AT-AT Pilot's essential question. "Is it possible for literature to be evil?" Dominantly my response has been, "most if not all evil is to be found in the parts of literature that encourage 'work,' a concerted effort toward a real-world goal." And even then, one must analyze a work's explicit or implicit polemic in order to determine if the goal advocated is evil. 

An obvious example of explicit polemic can be found in the 1915 BIRTH OF A NATION film, which adapted Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel THE CLANSMAN. The film (and, I assume, the source novel) makes no bones about its message: that liberated Black slaves must be kept down by the Ku Klux Klan. Implicit polemic is harder to identify, because so many critics project polemic where none is intended. However, such identification is not impossible and can usually be pegged by the way the implicit type mimics the irrational propositions of the explicit type. 

I have judged J.M. Coetzee's anti-colonialist novel DISGRACE as implicitly polemical due to the mirroring of two major events in the story. In Event One, the viewpoint character, a White South African professor teaching at the collegiate level, is condemned for allegedly manipulating a female student-- possibly but not definitely Black African-- into an affair. In Event Two, the professor's daughter, who runs a farm in South Africa, is raped by Black African trespassers, one of whom impregnates her. But because the rape took place against a scion of colonizers, it's asserted that the woman will eventually marry her rapist and that the land she owns will return to a Black African family. Obviously, some readers did not judge this disproportionate "tit for tat" as evil, in the same way that most readers today would judge the Dixon work and the Griffith film as evil. Clearly, I find them all morally noxious.

But none of the above works fall into the category I've called "play for play's sake," which takes in generally the majority of popular culture, and specifically the KAMASUTRA manga of Go Nagai, with which this discussion began. So far, most of the Nagai works I've surveyed are wild outpourings of sex and violence, with almost no attempts to impose any moral order on the chaos. The closest thing Nagai himself offers as a key to his works is an "ethic of transgression," insofar as he believes human nature is truly one big playground for a bunch of Freudian Id-Monsters. But he never expouses any sort of polemic-- though even in the more permissive country of his birth, Nagai was often criticized for his explicitness.

The majority of censorious critics don't bother to establish even an implicit polemic as I did with DISGRACE above. These critics usually follow one of two approaches-- the "monkey see monkey do" approach and the "projected polemic" approach-- and it just so happens that the two most prominent enemies of popular comics in the postwar years broke down along those respective lines. Frederic Wertham begins with the supposition that children were as twigs that would be inevitably bent by the wrong influences, and that any time one of them did wrong, an evil comic book done made them do it. Gershon Legman had the idee fixe that American culture nursed a vast conspiracy to substitute healthy sexuality with sadistic violence, and he repeatedly "proved" his thesis with endless facile projections. Neither they nor most of their descendants showed any capacity to define evil except in terms of personal self-interest-- which, some may recall, is explicitly rejected in the Bataille excerpt I cited in Part 2.

Oddly, "projected polemic" works both to champion and denigrate works that don't show either explicit or implicit polemic. Many will be familiar with news stories about evangelical groups criticizing J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER series, claiming that its magical content encourages young people to explore witchcraft and/or Satanism. This Wikipedia article chronicles many of those evangelical denigrations. However, the same article also mentions a number of defenses of the Potter series on the grounds of its encouragement of Christian values-- and even though I like the series, I view these positive characterizations to be projections. It's not that there's no moral content in POTTER. But at base I think that Rowling's series is essentially "play for play's sake" as much as most Go Nagai works, even though POTTER lacks the extreme sex and violence of Nagai.

Francois Truffaut said, "Taste is the result of a thousand distastes," and what many critics label as evil is often more a reaction against something they find unpleasurable. They often impugn the artist, as if he were showing them unpleasant things for some sadistic or politically motivated reason but have little appreciation for another Truffaut observation: that artists are not endorsing everything that appears in their works. All art is founded on conflict-- Bataille would say "transgression"-- and every fictional conflict conceivable can potentially trigger someone in terms of a taste-reaction. I try as much as possible to frame all of my critical downgrades in terms of analyzing a work's explicit or implicit polemic. But I'm sure there are some works I just don't like for reasons of taste, too, as with my generally unfavorable critiques of Mark Millar's comics. I certainly don't think he's guilty of any more polemic than is Go Nagai-- but I find Nagai creative and Millar boring in terms of their violently transgressive content. So even a critic who refutes taste-based criticism can't help but be influenced his own "thousand distastes." Probably the only time I'd denounce "play for play's sake" as evil would be when I think it's boring.

PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS

Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." (Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, 1921, page 63.)

I regard sensation as conscious, and intuition as unconscious, perception. For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling as independent functions are developed, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation (and equally, of course from intuition as the necessary counterpart of sensation).-- more Jung.

In the third essay of the series THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, I started from Jung's proposition that art should be fundamentally defined as "play," but that so-called "serious art" and "escapist art" respectively would have to be separated out as "play for work's sake" and "play for play's sake."

From this secondary proposition I articulated, in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4, a schema for assigning merit to each of these art-modes. By the design of this schema, both "good serious art" and "mediocre serious art" would be equal in terms of being "play for work's sake," that is, the narratives of serous art are designed so that the author can put forth some sort of ethical or moral argument. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, I stated that the superior "serious narrative" was one which successfully incorporated elements of play into its "work-oriented" theme. William Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST possessed a "work-oriented" theme comparable to that of J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE, but Faulkner's novel succeeds on more than one level because the author allowed some elements of play to leaven his serious theme.

Similarly, I stated that even though both Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND and Dixon's CLANSMAN were escapist works, ruled by the principle of "play for play's sake," of imagining the world as one might like it to be rather than as it is. Of these two works, Mitchell's was superior because I could discern that she had incorporated elements of work into a "play-oriented theme." I viewed the verisimilitude that Mitchell conferred on her character-types to be one such element of work, and as such one that seems to have been deficient in THE CLANSMAN, though I admitted that I made this judgment purely from viewing the D.W. Griffith film.

But what, a hostile critic might ask, does it really mean to speak of "elements of play" and "elements of work?"

Just as I endorse Jung's opinion with regard to the "dynamic principle" underlying all creative work, the father of depth psychology also provides the answer to this question.

Not mentioned in the second Jung-quote above is that Jung also divided his four functions into two distinct categories: "the irrational," sensation and intuition, in that no rational meditation is needed for them, and "the rational," thinking and feeling, which both require what Jung calls "reflection."

Given my endorsement of these divisions of the human psyche, I found myself applying these to literary qualities.  In a rough way I was influenced by Gerald Mast's 1984 work of cinema-theory, FILM/CINEMA/MOVIE, in which he argued for evaluating films in terms of both "the mimetic" (the film's ability to reproduce verisimilitude) and "the kinetic" (the film's ability to make the audience feel sensations within their imagined experience). So far as I know Mast's theory was not followed up by later film-critics, and I may be the only one to do so, even though I thoroughly re-interpreted his duality into a quaternity of what I called "potentialities," as stated in FOUR BY FOUR:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.
The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.
The THEMATIC is a potentiality that can describe the relationships of abstract ideas.
The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that may describe the relationships of symbols.

(I will henceforth substitute a new name, "the DIDACTIC," to replace "THEMATIC," which word is too easily confused with its more commonplace literary usage.)


I also cited two very brief examples as to how given works in the comics medium might emphasize one or another of the Jungian functions/ Phillipsian potentialities, with a concomitant de-emphasis of the others:

I might attempt to use Jung's function-terms to assert that Dave Sim's cerebral CEREBUS privileges the function of "thinking" more than any other, and that Frank Miller's SIN CITY privileges the function of "sensation." But though it's easy to make such an assertion, it's less easy to demonstrate its truth through textual examples.

I don't plan at this time to develop the theory of the four potentialities, since it's difficult to isolate the operations of each function from the others. But my hypothetical answer to my hypothetical hostile critic would be:

"The elements of play" are those that invoke the irrational kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities of the narrative.

"The elements of work" are those that invoke the rational thinking and feeling potentialities of the narrative.

Again, to a hostile critic, these refinements would still not resonate, but to pursue the concept further, I'll return to the examples cited in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4.

What "realistic" elements are held in common by LIGHT IN AUGUST and DISGRACE?  Both novels are organized around scapegoat-characters. In the Faulkner novel, the character is Joe Christmas, a man who may or may not be half-black, who becomes the lightning-rod for white-black relations in 1930s Mississippi. The same is the case for the Coetzee novel, where the character David Lurie, a white man in South Africa, generates a white-black conflict based in the heritage of European imperialism. Neither novel emphasizes the irrational function of sensation, and so their potentiality for the *kinetic* is mutually nugatory. However, Faulkner's comprehension of the mythopoeic relationships of his narrative far exceed those of Coetzee.

What "escapist" elements are held in common by GONE WITH THE WIND and THE CLANSMAN? Both novels are organized around the sufferings of a community, oppressed by the liberation of slaves in the Deep South. That greater community is boiled down to the sufferings of a particular white family: the O'Haras in the Mitchell narrative, the Stonemans in the Dixon narrative. In both novels one solution to the South's oppression is the formation of a vigilante group, the Ku Klux Klan, though this solution is the main thrust of Dixon and a side-plot in Mitchell. Neither novel is strong on the "abstract ideas" necessary to support the rational function of thinking, and so their potentiality for the *didactic* is mutually nugatory. However, Mitchell's narrative finds its strength in the potentiality of "feeling," given that it manages to conjure forth a rich tapestry of character interactions, an arena in which Dixon's story cannot compete.

All four of these examples, of course, depend on one's having read the novels. In the coming months it may be possible to provide more extended applications of this theory-- a conflation of the work-play dichotomy and the four potentialities-- to media-works that are, at very least, easier to assimilate.

JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4

In PART 3 of THE ONLY DEFINTION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, I followed up my examination of "art as fundamental play" with this reference to Bataille:

I considered putting forth a longer definition with special reference to Bataille's "two types of economic consumption," lining up "the reality-oriented aspect of consumption, "production and acquisition" with the dynamic of work and "the desire to pointlessly but satisfyingly expend one's energies" with the dynamic of play. 

I decided not to pursue that line of thought at the time. Now I'm bringing it up again because I've been giving more thought as to the proper pluralist evaluation of the kinetic elements of sex and violence in fiction-- though this will only be developed in subsequent essays.

In the ONLY DEFINITION essay-series, I expanded on my fundamental division of all art into two realms-- that of "thematic escapism" and "thematic realism"-- with reference to Jung's assertion that all creative endeavor requires play, regardless of how much of the "principle of serious work" enters into the mix. From this standpoint the two realms took on the formulas of "play for play's sake" and "play for work's sake."

Now, contrary to some critics, defending escapist narratives is not the same as defending bad narratives. Both realist and escapist narratives can be good or bad, but when they are bad, it is not with reference to one another, but on their own respective terms.

Superior narratives of "thematic realism," a.k.a,, "play for work's sake"-- are what most people would call "good literature." Such stories almost if not always have a moral or aesthetic point to convey, one that aligns with Jung's "serious work" principle. But the best "realist art" can make its rhetorical points without losing the dimension of creative play.  Faulkner's 1932 novel LIGHT IN AUGUST and Coetzee's 1999 novel DISGRACE both take as their subjects the evils of Caucasians abusing Negroes (sorry, there's no other established word that takes in both African Americans and Black Africans).  But Faulkner's novel contains great imagination and creative fertility, while DISGRACE is, well, a disgrace in that respect.  I only have space for a very simplified comparison. Faulkner's "Southern Gothic" exposes the absolute dependence of the then-modern South on the demonization of the black underclass, but makes it part and parcel of their existence, while Coetzee presents a South African scenario whose brilliant insight never goes beyond this Wiki-statement: that its protagonist "is a white South African male in a world where such men no longer hold the power they once did."

I choose to reduce the nature of inferior "thematically realistic" narratives to the following formula: such narratives suffer from "too much work," so much so that the rhetoric overpowers the principle of creative play.

Superior narratives of "thematic escapism," a.k.a. "play for play's sake," have a more involved relationship to the principle of serious work. In these stories the principle of work does not bond with the principle of play as in the previous form. It is always the nature of thematically escapist works to provide a vacation from morals and rigor. Yet the work-principle does have a decided influence on the quality of a "play for play's sake" narrative.

What does the realistic theme of "white sins against black people" look through the lens of thematic escapism? Well, an escapist story can express roughly the same sentiments as the Faulkner and Coetzee novels cited above, but the rhetoric will generally remain superficial because the narrative is predominantly focused upon fanciful content. A well-known example in the realm of comic books would be LOIS LANE #121.  Thus in this tale veteran white journalist Lois Lane temporarily transforms herself into a black woman so that she can see how the "other color" lives. I don't doubt that this story was well-intentioned, but to say the least it lacks the *gravitas* of even a bad literary novel like DISGRACE.

I provide this example only to illustrate the point about political affiliations; it isn't fair to compare a short comic book story with two prose novels. For that reason, and to provide a validation of my criterion that one can find "good play" even in novels with bad ideas, my contrary examples are Margaret Mitchell's 1936 GONE WITH THE WIND and Thomas Dixon's THE CLANSMAN.  Some may regard this a flawed comparison, because I must admit that I have not read the Dixon novel. I only know the CLANSMAN story from the famous film BIRTH OF A NATION, which was technically an adaptation of the play Dixon wrote from his own novel. Nevertheless, from what I've read the film is generally an accurate representation of the author's ideology.

Both CLANSMAN and GONE WITH THE WIND are primarily concerned with presenting an idealized view of the American South and its pro-slavery ethic, and any story-elements that might detract from that ideal are either ignored or dismissed.  Yet the aesthetic failure of Dixon's story is not that it holds stupid political views; it is that it has nothing else to offer. Dixon reportedly despised both Harriet Beecher Stowe's views and her novel, but he seems to have learned nothing from his predecessor about how to create appealing characters that can persuade the target audience into at least a consideration of the author's rhetoric. It's a mark of D.W. Griffith's genius that Dixon's paper-thin characters become vital when they're depicted by a master of the cinematic art.

Mitchell's ideal, in contrast, is not just a superficial paean to the South: for many readers, it is the South. I've mentioned in this essay that GONE WITH THE WIND lacks the affects of the sublime, but that lack doesn't take anything from Mitchell's amazing ability to create characters who can seem well-rounded even though they may appear for no more than a paragraph or two.  Ironically, though Dixon actually experienced the Old South and Mitchell did not, Mitchell succeeds in putting across her fantasized ideal because the people inhabiting it possess the vitality needed to make it seem real.

Now, since I'm downgrading Dixon for over-dependence on his concept of "serious work," that might sound like CLANSMAN, like DISGRACE, could be guilty of the same fault: that of "too much work." On the contrary, though, CLANSMAN suffers from "too little work"; of Dixon's inability to provide the verisimilitude that could make his characters come alive, even in the service of a poorly reasoned ethic.  Mitchell doesn't consciously pattern her characters on literary archetypes, but she knows how to invoke such figures as the whore, the Madonna, the scapegrace, and the vixen with enough verisimilitude that they seem to be real people. This apparent grounding in reality provides the "decided influence" I mention above. Play is the dominant mode of both GONE WITH THE WIND and THE CLANSMAN, but only GONE WITH THE WIND puts any work into the game-- and as some may have noticed, often the best games are those on which the players exert the most effort.

Hmm, I worked in Bataille this time, but nothing on goal-affects. Maybe next time.