UP AND DOWN THE PATHOS PATH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PART 3

Here I'll be bringing my formulations in Part 1 and Part 2 into line with some of my observations regarding audience-conviction.

In the FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS series, I argued that there were four states of "dynamis," which both Northrop Frye and I use to signify the "power of action" of characters in fiction. and that those four states parallel the four-staged development of human beings as described by Ovid in his METAMORPHOSES. In the poem Ovid asserts that every human being starts out as being like Spring, "quickening yet shy," develops into "Summer's hardiness," loses those "first flushes" upon entering Autumn's "temperate season," and finally enters the domain of "senile Winter," which is marked by the "terror in palsy" that will precede Death. These states I then compared to my four quasi-Fryean mythoi, respectively comedy, adventure, drama and irony.

Now, all of my formulations regarding kenosis and plerosis, informed largely by the analyses of Theodore Gaster and Jane Ellen Harrison, which are focused not on individual growth and decay but upon a given society's attempt to maintain itself in what Gaster calls the "durative" sense. Thus there are four forms of ritual-- what Gaster calls "the jubilative,""the invigorative," "the purgative," and the morificative," all of which also align with the four mythoi, and in the same order.

So the four mythoi line up well when paralleled to the "ages of man," or to the yearly rituals of archaic societies , which are intended to maintain the society as if it were a cyclical living entity, able to reconstitute itself indefinitely, unlike individual persons. However, there's far less uniformity in terms of the ways each mythos works with the audience's *conviction* regarding the narratives of each mythoi, since it's possible for audiences to take some mythoi seriously and others unseriously:

The drama and the adventure, often perceived as two "serious" types of entertainment, are easy to confound, even as are the two types of "unserious" entertainment, comedy and irony.-- GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, PART 1.

In the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW series, I meditated upon the attitudes of "serious conviction" and "unserious lack of conviction." In the POETICS, Aristotle had characterized these states of audience-perception as "weighty" and "light" respectively. I followed this formulation somewhat by speaking of the first category as being dominantly characterized by "tonal gravity," while the other was dominantly characterized by "tonal levity." Assuming that one keeps to the order by which Frye arranged his mythoi, explicitly patterned after the four seasons, then here we have not a smooth progression, but a sort of oscillation. We start with the jubilative form of the unserious, which is perhaps the "lightest" of the four, and proceed to the invigorative, which is dominantly serious. The purgative mythos then increases the "gravity" and instills an even greater sense of seriousness-- and yet, this particular center cannot hold, and the mortificative mythos arises from the purgative, taking on a new form of "levity," one so free of the bonds of literary gravity that hardly anything can be valued.

Similarly, the ritual processes of *kenosis* (emptying) and *plerosis* (filling) also follow this oscillating progress, as I pointed out in SOMETIMES THEY WIN, SOMETIMES THEY LOSE:

I generalized that two of the four Fryean mythoi allow the protagonist to win sometimes, lose sometimes.  One of the two is *drama,* a mythos which possesses a serious tone and a *kenotic* (emptying) audience-function, and *comedy,* a mythos which possesses an unserious tone and a  *plerotic* (filling) audience-function. In contrast, as I also stated in that essay, the function of *adventure* is "to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat," while in contrast "the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction."  Just to keep symmetry with the above assertions, I'll reiterate that *adventure* is a mythos with a serious tone and a *plerotic* audience-function, while *irony* is a mythos with an unserious tone and a *kenotic* audience-function.

So here too we see an oscillation between modes:

COMEDY-- plerotic and levity-oriented
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and gravity-oriented
DRAMA-- kenotic and gravity-oriented
IRONY-- kenotic and levity-oriented

In the same essay plerosis-kenosis essay, I specified that what society is being "filled with" is whatever a given society perceives to be "life-supporting" elements, while the same society attempts to "empty itself" of "life-denying" elements. But then the objection arises: if the jubilative and mortificative mythoi address their respective processes of filling and emptying with only a "light" sense of conviction, why would those processes have any societal importance?

My best solution for the time being is that most if not all societies need what I've called "vacations from morals," and that works of tonal levity, simply by the fact that they are NOT meant to fill the audience with a sense of "the grave and the constant," serve as a counterpoint to their more serious-minded counterparts. Hard to say if this line of thought will bear more fruit.

AUTHORITIES, PLEROTIC AND KENOTIC PART 1

The reason I wrote this sequel to the 2014 essay OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER was not because that particular subject had been occupying my mind on-and-off for the past three years. Rather, I returned to that obscure topic because I'd been giving more thought to the categorization of different types of presences, focal or non-focal, that appear in fiction, as seen in September's PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES. These meditations got me thinking not only about following up on the implications of the 2014 essay, but also about the application of my persona-classification system to non-focal figures.

A quick recapitulation of the roots of said system: first, though I said this at the beginning of the PALE KINGS essay:

The strongest influence on my theory of the four persona-types has been the work of Schopenhauer, but I'll confess that Northrop Frye's writings on literary dynamis had an impact on the theory...

This was an oversimplication on my part. It's true that Frye's ANATOMY influenced only the concept of the four mythoi, and that his theories contributed little if anything to my concept of literary personas. However, Frye's work led me to a deeper consideration of one of his influences, Theodor Gaster, and my conceptualization of persona-types coalesced from my attempt to bring Gaster's concepts of "plerosis and kenosis" into line with Schopenhauer's concepts of will, as I expounded in Part 1 and Part 2 of WHEN TITANS GET CROSS-COMPARED. A short summing-up of the Gaster concepts appears in this essay, where I cross-compared Gaster's categories with Frye's four mythoi:

,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

One of my major differences with Frye is that I don't think he paid enough attention to persona-types in the ANATOMY. Here's his meditation on figures of aristocratic authority, who inhabit what he calls the "high mimetic mode:"

 If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.

This formula overlooks certain distinctions between different types of rulers. Some of these protagonists are genuinely heroic in all senses of the word, such as Homer's Achilles. But others, despite their level of authority, are closer to being what I term "demiheroes," which means that they align more with the idea of the sacrificial victim than of the hero. Indeed, Shakespeare's most famous protagonists-- Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth-- are closer to being victims than to being heroes. Frye passed away in 1991, but I imagine that if he had somehow lived long enough to become acquainted with the two examples I contrasted in PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES-- Neil Gaiman's Morpheus and Nozomu Tamaki's Mina Tepes-- then I hazard that he would have seen in both of them the pattern of the high mimetic mode. Despite the fact that both characters possess supernormal powers that make them somewhat superior to their natural environment, Frye might have perceived that they were both rulers of fantasy-realms and were thus forced to deal with limitations upon their powers. I think the fact that both characters possess temporal authority is less important than what they do with it. Both Morpheus and Mina seek to consolidate their kingdoms, but the former seems concerned mostly with maintaining a status quo-- which in my mind associates him with a very high rank of demihero-- while Mina Tepes is more heroic in nature, forging her kingdom against a horde of opposing forces.

It would seem axiomatic that such authority-figures can also take on the persona-roles of either "monsters" or of "villains," but I'll deal with those eventualities in Part 2.

COMPENSATION, KENOSIS AND PLEROSIS, PART 2

I've never claimed to be an expert in the culture of archaic Greece, so I can only make tentative assertions based on fragmentary evidence. Within the halls of academia, there may be extensive analysis of the provenance of these terms, but the most thorough references I can find on the Net credit Hippocrates and related medical authors for using the two terms in my title-- "kenosis" and "plerosis"-- to mean "an inadequate diet" and "a more-than-adequate diet." It should surprise no one that these arcane technical terms originally connoted something having to do with the body, pertaining to whether it was too empty or too full-- both conditions that are opposed to one's diet being, as in the Goldilocks tale, "just right."

In Theodor Gaster's schema, there are two primary types of ritual action performed for both kenosis and plerosis, and each is focused on creating a distinct mood for the witnessing audience:

First the rites of mortification, symbolizing the temporary eclipse of the community. Next the rites of purgation, by which all noxious elements that might impair the community's future welfare are eliminated. Then the rites of invigoration, aimed at stimulating the growth of crops, the fecundity of humans and beasts, and the supply of needed sunshine and rainfall throughout the year. Finally, when the new lease is assured, come the rites of jubilation; there is a communal meal at which the members of the community recement their bonds of kinship by breaking bread together, and at which their gods are present.

These descriptions may or may not be adequate to describe all forms of archaic ritual activity, but they adapt well to the Fryean scheme of the four mythoi, which is my main concern here.

In Part 1 I asserted the logic of Alfred Adler's compensation theory, in which individuals might seek to compensate for various forms of conflict-- or what Hans Selye calls 'stress"-- in various ways. Some compensation strategies might prove negative in that they weakened the individual who pursued said strategies, while others would be positive, in that they made the individual stronger in some way.

I've been exploring, and will continue to explore, the ways in which fiction does or does not succeed in terms of the mythopoeic potentiality. This is a purely formal argument that does not impact directly on considerations of positive and negative compensation, though in Part 1 I stated that any such considerations would have to line up with my analysis that fiction had to be true to its greatest potential.

Because of my concept of *thematic escapism,* I've validated a lot of narratives that other critics have viewed as "fascist." I won't repeat my various arguments here, but one that I advanced in the March essay POSSE COMIC-TATUS might also be seen in terms of Adlerian compensation for the mythos of adventure. In that essay I wrote:

In my essay TORTURED, PROSAICALLY, I largely defended the trope of inquisitorial torture from the usual attacks on it, but noted two exceptions, in which the television programs 24 and HAWAII 5-O indulged in the trope purely for the sake of showing the hero in the position of doling out violence without restraint. These shows were in part bad because there was no sense that the authorities involved might face any consequences for their actions, and in part because they were, in Sadean terms, stupid and unimaginative. At least when a Mickey Spillane hero tortures someone, there's a sort of brain-fevered fascination with the act itself, and I've often thought that Spillane's ideological posturings were just an excuse to bring about retributive violence. In other words, Spillane, like Sade, esteemed violence for its own sake, not as a means for preserving the police state.

The exploits of Mike Hammer and Jack Bauer depend heavily on retributive violence, which means that they pertain to the mythos of adventure, which according to my adaptation of Gaster's four moods is primarily meant to be "invigorative" in its effect upon its audience.  But I would have to say that the Sadean air that Mickey Spillane brings to his righteous heroes is one that can "strengthen" the reader if said reader is able to read it as a wild fantasy, rather than mistaking it for a rendition of reality. In contrast, the "stupid and unimaginative" fantasy of the teleseries 24 lacks any of the qualities seen in the Spillane works. Both are "plerotic" works, in that the audience is supposed to feel invigorated by seeing evildoers defeated by the representatives of social good. But I label only Spillane as being a "good plerotic meal," while the contrasting examples are the sort of meals that will make one feel full, but in a way that weakens the body and the mind.

COMPENSATION, KENOSIS AND PLEROSIS

I haven't revisited Theodor Gaster's concept of "kenosis and plerosis" for some time, but it's occurred that some of my writings on the subject should be cross-compared with my observations on Adler's concept of "positive and negative compensation."

In this April essay, I cited what I found to be the closest Alfred Adler came, at least in a particular collection of his works, to giving examples of positive and negative compensation with respect to a particular bodily activity: that of sight:

As a negative example of overcompensation, Adler posits a situation in which a paranoiac is so impelled by "the drive to see" that "the weakness of the overcompensation expresses itself in hallucinatory fits and visual appearances"... In contrast to this, Adler gives a positive example of a documented writer with poor vision: Friedrich Schiller, who exorcised his nearsighted demons by creating a fictional hero reputed for faultless aim and vision: William Tell.

I further observed that many elitist critics tended, unlike Adler, to view all such heroic fantasies as if they were negative compensations, as if they were automatically bad for being "escapes from reality." Since I have from the beginnings of this blog championed the idea that "fictions of escape" cannot be judged by the same terms as "fictions of realism,"  my verdict in this essay was that the only sin of a given fictional narrative can manifest is that of not living up to its potential as fiction:

This, then, would be my criterion for both "negative compensation" in literature and the only ways in which fiction can be correctly seen as escaping responsibility. Only when a given work of a given mode fails to be true to its own mode would it be "escaping" from anything in a negative manner; that of escaping from its own potential as fiction.

That said, aside from the very broad categories of "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism," I've also tried to map out how particular types of potential are oriented according to other criteria. Northrop Frye was my original guide in terms of viewing every fictional narrative as being principally dominated by a type of *mythos:* each of which owed something to Frye's elaboration of material from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray. I kept two of Frye's terms for these mythoi, "comedy" and "irony," and substituted modern terms "drama" and "adventure" for his terms "tragedy" and "romance." In my opinion the substituted terms were more in keeping with the actual affects that each mythos was meant to invoke, not to mention being more in tune with the formulations of Theodor Gaster. Gaster was certainly a primary force upon Frye's meditations in 1957's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, though Frye, being more taken with the Aristotelian model provided by Murray, did not say much about Gaster's formulations.  I, in contrast, was particularly taken with the predominant "moods" that Gaster identified in his four types of myth-ritual narrative, and how these moods followed patterns of what the archaic Greeks called "kenosis" and "plerosis." Over the years I've endeavored to meld Frye's schema of the four mythoi with Gaster's schema of the four moods, as in this 2012 essay:

In the first part of HERO VS. VILLAIN I aligned drama with irony in terms of what Theodor Gaster terms *kenosis,* the process that expels harmful energy from society, and adventure with comedy in terms of *plerosis,* the process that brings positive energy back into the community, in the following terms:

,,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

In the rituals Gaster describes, one must assume that both *kenosis* and *plerosis,* as societal rituals, were intended to have beneficial effects upon the society that practiced them.  The question of "escaping from potential as fiction" does not even come up in the context of religion.

However, because fiction is almost always presumed to be man-made, the question of whether or not it does its job well-- whether one uses terms like "positive and negative compensation," or "consummation and inconsummation"-- is one that recurs again and again.

In Part 2 I'll address some of the complexities involved in applying Adler's compensation argument to my adaptation of Gaster's concepts of plerotic and kenotic narratives.

ADLER PATED PT. 2

I've often referenced Alfred Adler's theory of compensation on this blog, particularly in the series COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS, beginning here. In the first of those essays, I loosely compared Adler's idea of "positive" and "negative" forms of compensation with the two forms of fictional "escape" Tolkien references in his essay ON FAIRY STORIES: in the sense of "escape from responsibility" and of "escape from a prison"-- implicitly as much a conceptual prison as a physical one. I considered expanding on that thought for a full essay, but felt that I needed to study Adler a bit more than I have since I wrote this 2009 essay.

I chose to read THE INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ALFRED ADLER, an overview of his work  edited by one Heinz Ansbacher, with copious excerpts from Adler and explanatory notes form Ansbacher. I did not find the main thing I was looking for: a single Adler essay in which he expatiated at length on his two forms of compensation. However, this idea definitely appears in his first work on the subject, 1907's "Organ Inferiority and Compensation." In this essay Adler sets the groundwork for his conviction that pathological psychological conditions may evolve out of a subject's perception of personal inferiority: "The inferior organ is not a pathological formation, although it represents the basic condition for pathology." As a negative example of overcompensation, Adler posits a situation in which a paranoiac is so impelled by "the drive to see" that "the weakness of the overcompensation expresses itself in hallucinatory fits and visual appearances." Adler is certainly not saying that all paranoia evolves out of imperfect visual apparati-- he states that he does not offer his examples as "complete proof"-- but puts his examples forth as a tenable explanation for certain cases.

In contrast to this, Adler gives a positive example of a documented writer with poor vision: Friedrich Schiller, who exorcised his nearsighted demons by creating a fictional hero reputed for faultless aim and vision: William Tell. Current elitist criticism generally deems this form of compensation to be "negative." I mentioned in COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS, Jerry Siegel himself portrayed himself as the weakling who couldn't get lots of girls, and "compensated" by creating a mighty hero who easily attracted the female of the species.

What does it mean, that Adler deems this form of "artistic exorcism" as a positive response to perceived inferiority? Ansbacher notes that about the same time Adler broke away from Freud's circle and his doctrine, Adler took a palpable influence from the now-forgotten philosopher Hans Vaihinger. Ansbacher says of this author:

Fictions, according to Vaihinger, are ideas, including unconscious notions, which have no counterpart in reality, yet serve the useful function of enabling us to deal with [reality] better than we could otherwise.

Adler's former mentor Freud could not place any value on such fantasies, and he stands as one of the greatest influences upon the tendency of 20th-century intellectuals to devalue fantasy and/or "the pleasure principle" in favor of a supposed "reality principle."  Whereas Adler eventually wrote "I began to see clearly in every psychological phenomenon the striving for superiority" his old mentor wrote pessimistically that all should "abandon the belief that there is an instinct toward perfection at work in human beings." Most amusingly, Freud is so pessimistic that for him there could no future evolution along the lines of Nietzsche: "[The leader of the primal horde] at the very beginning of mankind was the Superman whom Nietzsche only expected from the future,"

Now, so far as I can tell from the Ansbacher book, Adler did not write of "negative compensation" in terms of literature. As he was a psychologist, he was most concerned with the ways in which human beings became psychologically dysfunctional. I have no idea if he had any particular feelings about the popular fiction of his day, though if he validated Schiller's personal fantasy of a far-sighted archer-hero, I would posit that he might not be entirely hostile toward the pop-fiction "supermen" of the early 20th century. At worst he might consider them in the same terms as Vaihinger: useful fictions that help one deal with reality.

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

For a pluralist like myself, the matter is more complex. Though I prefer works with symbolic complexity to works without it, I can't state outright that the latter are "inferior organs" next to the latter. Even a story that works as nothing but a good "thrill-ride" fulfills, for me, Tolkien's definition of fantasy as an "escape from a prison," i.e., "positive compensation."

So is there a principle that works across the spectrum of "art-fiction" and "popular fiction" that parallels both Adler's "negative compensation" and Tolkien's "escape from responsibility" (which, to be sure, is not something Tolkien himself endorses; he's simply explaining the position of his opponents). The closest I can come is to repeat what I said in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4.  Both types of fiction are fundamentally defined by the activity of "play," though "art-fiction" is play turned to the purpose of "work," while "pop fiction" is play for play's sake. In that essay I said that I found that DESPAIR, a work of "thematic realism," was inferior to Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST because the former had too little "play," while THE CLANSMAN, a work of "thematic escapism," was inferior to GONE WITH THE WIND because the former showed too little "work." This, then, would be my criterion for both "negative compensation" in literature and the only ways in which fiction can be correctly seen as escaping responsibility. Only when a given work of a given mode fails to be true to its own mode would it be "escaping" from anything in a negative manner; that of escaping from its own potential as fiction.

AFFECT VS. MOOD

In recent essays I've re-examined Edmund Burke's work with regard to the ways subjects experience sublimity, either with an affect of sympathy or one of antipathy.  Because of those essays, I find myself looking at how both the sympathetic affects and the antipathetic affects appear in works of popular fiction-- specifically, how narratives tend to center around either one set of affects than the other, though both may easily appear in both. 

This, however, suggested to me a parallel with my writings on centricity with regard to myth-radicals, probably best summed up in JUNG AND CENTRICITY.  Jung specified in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES that each individual had within him four psychological functions, but that only one of these would have "absolute sovereignty" as against the others. I asserted that the same logic could also be applied to Frye's four mythoi, using as example the teleseries BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which I regard as falling properly into the category of adventure, even though the series regularly also calls upon elements common to the comedy, the irony, and the drama.

However, to complicate the matter further, I also linked Frye's four functions with the four "moods," as I called them, that Theodor Gaster listed for the dominant functions of his categories of religious ritual. REFINING THE DEFINING was one of the relevant essays on this topic:

ADVENTURE conveys the INVIGORATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how protagonists who defend life and/or goodness from whatever forces are inimical to them. The protagonists' power of action is at its highest here.
COMEDY conveys the JUBILATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how the heroes seek happiness/contentment in a world that has some element of craziness to it (what I've termed the "incognitive" myth-radical), yet does not deny the heroes some power of action.
IRONY conveys the MORTIFICATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon characters in a world where the "power of action" is fundamentally lacking.
DRAMA conveys the PURGATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon "individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society." Power of action here is more ambivalent than that of the adventure-mythos but seems more crucial to the individual's problem than it does for that of the comic hero.

But this raised in my mind the question: what difference is there, if any, between an "affect" and a "mood?"

The best conclusion I've come to, for the time being, is that the Gasterian moods are functions of plot: he and Frye both speak primarily of the *actions* characters take in order to facillitate one dominant literary or religious mood. In contrast, "affects" spring from the main characters, the focal presences, with whom the readers identify. In this formulation, then, "affects" spring from "character," even though the focal 'character" may not be a human being, since the cathexis of emotional affects can focus upon any number of phenomena, ranging from the will-less robot hero of GIGANTOR to the amorphous spirits of THE EVIL DEAD. For the time being, then, I will allot the Gasterian moods to the domain of "narrative values," while the affects-- indebted, as I've said many times to the thinkers Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis-- would be "significant values," in keeping with my first essay on this Fryean distinction.

Obviously the two sets of emotional reactions overlap, just as plot and character must, and here's one example. One further complication to my system is that in this essay I have also formulated four persona-types-- the hero, the villain, the monster, and the demihero-- with respect to the ways in which they incarnate a given story's "life-affirming" (or plerotic) forces or its "life-denying" (kenotic) forces. I have also related these types to my own concepts of the *idealizing will* and the *existential will.*   So my persona-types are also narrative rather than significant values. Gigantor, even though diegetically the character has no will as such, incarnates both "the idealizing will" in combination with a plerotic attitude. The "Evil Dead spirits" are monsters, and they incarnate the "existential will" in combination with a kenotic attitude. And just to complete the quaternity, Fu Manchu incarnates the idealizing will as much as Gigantor, but with a kenotic, life-denying attitude, while the demihero Doctor John Robinson incarnates the "existential will" in tandem with a plerotic, life-affirming attitude.  Of course I've specified elsewhere that none of the persona-types are locked into these relationships at all times-- that they are "plerotic" monsters and "kenotic" demiheroes-- but these four are the dominant ways in which the four types are employed in human art and literature.

Having crossed all these critical "t's," I'll return to the question of affects again in the next essay.

RETURN OF THE MASTERY MASTER PT. 3

I find that I did work a reference to Gaster's "plerosis/kenosis" dyad into HERO VS. VILLAIN PT. 3:

In "plerotic" narratives, it's a basic given that the forces of life will win the most significant struggles, whether they do so through *agonic* effort or through *incognitive* good fortune.

In "kenotic" narratives, it's a given that the forces of life will lose the most significant struggles, whether they do so under the sway of *pathetic* or *sparagmotic* forces.

I would probably rephrase this differently today, thanks to having articulated more of the *ambivalent* nature of the life-supporting forces and the life-denying forces as they apply to all four of the personas. The general gist of the argument was twofold.  First, the process of *plerosis,* of "filling," was a parallel to Milton's idea that "free will" hinged upon being "sufficient to stand, but free to fall," and this then connected to the quasi-Schopenhaurean concept of "intellectual will."  Second, the process of *kenosis,* of "emptying," connoted an insufficiency to stand, which would apply to creatures without "free will," who would, one expects, be dominated by the quasi-Schopenhauerean concept of "instinctive will."

Later, in this essay I introduced the terms "concrete goal-affects" as a parallel to "instinctive will," and "abstract goal-affects" to "intellectual will."  But during this period I also started working in references to Fukuyama's *megalothymia* and "isothymia* once again, this time in unison with Thomas Hobbes' "causes of quarrel."

So what if I had bypassed Schopenhauer and drawn my comparisons between Gaster-ritual and Milton-will to Fukuyama-*thymos?*

I might begin, perhaps, by contemplating the ways in which *megalothymia* and *isothymia* are reputed to work. Then I would probably note that the "filling" of plerosis roughly parallels the "excess" of *thymos* implied by the very coinage of the Fukuyama term, while the idea of *isothymia,* of seeing or making oneself equal to all others in society, implies the expulsion, or emptying, of any potential excessive *thymos.*

From this reasoning, my revised formulation of the four personas through the Gaster lens would look like this:

The HERO's "positive glory" comes about because he "fills" himself with "positive will," defined as the will that supports the furtherance of life.

The VILLAIN's "negative glory" comes about because he "fills" himself with "negative will," defined as the will that denies the furtherance of life.

The DEMIHERO's "positive persistence" comes about because he "empties" himself of "negative will," the will that denies the furtherance of life.

The MONSTER's "negative persistence" comes about because he "empties" himself of "positive will," the will that supports the furtherance of life.

In Fukuyama-esque terms, then:

 *Isothymia* depends on emptying out elements of will that seem excessive to one's society or environment, in order to seek homeostasis.  The demihero empties himself of negative will in order to live with society, so that both he and society can "persist."  The monster empties himself of positive will.  He often attempts to living a life on the borders of a society or environment yet maintains a dominant negative will toward all other forms of "persistence" but his own.

*Megalothymia* depends on filling oneself with elements of will excessive to normal functioning.  The hero is filled with a positive, altruistic will to protect society, one that often goes beyond the dictates of society's normal functions.  Like the monster the villain is filled with a negative will toward society or the environment, but he is the mirror-image of the hero in that he glories in his independence from society, rather than yearning after a lost "normalcy" as the monster does.
 
However, though I still align the mythoi of drama and irony to "kenosis," and the mythoi of comedy and adventure to "plerosis," I do not claim that any of the four mythoi are aligned with either form of *thymotic* validation.  Other factors, not least the combative and subcombative modes, can also affect the nature of such validations.

HOLY NUMINOSITY! PART 4

In Chapter 8 I've now come across one of the sections where Otto unquestionably stumps for the superiority of the Christian faith over other religions, as his translator mentioned that he did.

No religion has brought the mystery of the need for
atonement or expiation to so complete, so profound, or so
powerful expression as Christianity. And in this, too, it
shows its superiority over others. It is a more perfect religion
and more perfectly religion than they, in so far as what is
potential in religion in general becomes in Christianity a pure
actuality.

 

This approach stands in contrast to a more rigorous thinker like Ricoeuer, who demonstrates a preference for Christian forms in SYMBOLISM OF EVIL but still grounds his theory in anthropological studies of religious practice. Otto does not justify his opinion in this comparative fashion. This leads me to conclude that his attitude was essentially the same as C.S. Lewis as I described it here:

When Lewis wants to show the universality of the concept of "the Numinous" (first named as such by Rudolf Otto), he has no problem quoting examples of awe-filled responses from Ovid and Virgil alongside examples from the Old Testament. Nevertheless, it's clear throughout his screed that no mere pagan religion can possess its own validity. There's only enough room in town for One Revelation.

 However, Otto's attempt to separate all the shadings of the *mysterium* experience are so thorough that he manages to tap into general archetypal attitudes toward religiosity, even in spite of his Christian preference-- though at times it's best to gloss Otto's opinions with those of authors more versed in comparativist analysis of all religions.

The shading that most interests me here is one that Otto makes on the subject of "the holy as a category of value" (also the chapter's title).  Having isolated various attributes of the mysterium-experience, such as that of "tremendum" and "fascinans," Otto proceeds to ask how the idea of the holy is valued, given that it cannot be valued in the way human beings value natural assets, and invokes the Latin term "sanctus," meaning "holy:"


And at the same moment he [the person experiencing the mysterium] passes
upon the numen a judgement of appreciation of a unique kind by the category
diametrically contrary to the profane,
the category 'holy," which is proper to the numen alone, but to it in an
absoIute degree ; he says : Tu solus sanctus . This sanctus
is not merely perfect or beautiful or sublime or good ,
though, being like these concepts also a value, objective
and ultimate, it has a definite, perceptible analogy with them.
It is the positive numinous value or "worth," and to it corresponds
on the side of the creature a numinous disvalue or "unworth ."

I placed quotes around the words "worth" and "unworth" for emphasis. Although Otto's use of these terms arises from his specifically Christian idea of a God who invokes fear and trembling, as in his example of Abraham before his deity as seen here, such terms can go beyond the bounds of Christian valuation. For one thing, even though Otto views "worth" as applicable only to the deity while "unworth" applies to the groveling worshipper, one can also see such terms in a wider spectrum, as affects comparable to those proposed by Theodor Gaster.

Rites of jubilation and invigoration are both characterized by *plerosis,* or "filling," because both give the sense that the ritual fills the community with new life. Rites of mortification and purgation are both characterized by *kenosis,* or "emptying," because they "empty out" the community of "noxious elements" one way or another.
 

In ENERGY EXCHANGE I advanced a tentative comparison of "plerosis" and "kenosis" to Otto's "tremendum" and "fascinans." But "worth" and "unworth" more nearly approximate the *affects* that the participants of a ritual action or narrative derive, with plerotic rituals filling the community with a sense of renewed self-worth-- giving them the opportunity to celebrate either heroic action or comic good cheer-- and with kenotic rituals giving the participants the chance to expel from the community the sense of negative forces of "unworth" that stem from "black humor" and from tragic flaws. 


More unexpectedly, I find that in this chapter Otto, despite his Christianity, anticipates some of the formulations of Georges Bataille.

The feeling [of transgressing aginst the numinous]is beyond question  

not that of the
transgression of the moral law, however evident it may be that
such a transgression, where it has occurred, will involve it as
a consequence : it is the feeling of absolute *profaneness.*

By itself this is just Otto re-emphasizing his earlier point that one cannot reduce the sense of
transgressing against the numinous to transgressing against human law, as Freud famously asserted.
However, it makes interesting comparison to Bataille's anthropologically informed concepts of transgression.

First, Bataille makes clear in EROTISM that all forms of transgression, legal or religious, stem from a universal human need for transgression:

"The taboo within us against sexual liberty is general and universal; the particular prohibitions are variable aspects of it... It is ridiculous to isolate a specific 'taboo' such as the one on incest, just one aspect of the general taboo, and look for its explanation outside its universal basis, namely, the amorphous and universal prohibitions bearing on sexuality."-- EROTISM, pp. 50-51.

Second, because of this need, "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it."  However, this transcendence was essentially rejected by Christian philosophy, as Bataille explains in Chapter VIII of EROTISM, which is subtitled "Christianity, and the sacred nature of transgression misunderstood":

The main difficulty is that Christianity finds law-breaking repugnant in general. True, the gospels encourage the breaking of laws adhered to by the letter when their spirit is absent. But then the law is broken because its validity is questioned, not in spite of its validity.-- EROTISM, P. 89.
 

I suspect that Otto will not be capable of seeing any such limitations of his preferred faith.  Still, it's fascinating to see that Otto has conceived of a "profanation" that goes beyond the strictures of utilitarian moral law, for one can see a similar will to profanation and transgression in any number of non-Christian beliefs.  For instance, one sees mortal defiance of the gods in such ancient works as the Gilgamesh Epic and the Epic of Aqhat.  Quasi-tragic heroic figures like Aqhat and Enkidu may be doomed for such transgressions, but their relationships to the numinous are far removed from the "fear and trembling" of Abraham in the earlier-cited quote.  I seem to remember that at some point Otto mentions his awareness that one response to the numinous is a desire to become "godlike" oneself, but as yet I can't locate the  passage.  This would seem to be a natural extension of the idea of celebrating numinous "worth," however: not just feeling that Zeus is the mysterious creator of the universe, but that Heracles, begotten on a mortal by the Father of the Gods, can provide a conduit by which mortals can participate in that divine mystery.

ENERGY EXCHANGE

Just to explore a minor point I neglected in RUDOLF, MEET THEODORE: I don't think I was sufficiently clear on the common ground between the two. 

In the paradigms Gaster formulates in order to deduce his categories of *plerosis* and *kenosis,* he takes the basic view that ritual exists to mirror a society's views as to whether the forces of life are on the ascent or in decline.  A ritual need not be a full-fledged story, as a myth almost always is; a ritual can be a simple recital of the proper acts one takes at a critical juncture.  But any ritual does depend on the idea that a society-- usually represented by a protagonist or group of protagonists-- must either invite into themselves the energies one associates with life (plerosis), or else expel the energies one associates with death, or at least life in a worn-out condition (kenosis).

Rudolf Otto's analyses with regard to the two different manifestations of "the Numinous" are not as overt in implying an "energy exchange" between the Numinous and the subject who beholds it.  Otto is, based on my limited reading, more focused on the internal response of the subject.  I hope to read THE IDEA OF THE HOLY fully in near future, but it would seem that a few authors, among them Carl Jung and C.S. Lewis, have been able to configure Otto's dichotomy of responses-- the *mysterium tremendum* and the *mysterium fascinans*-- so as to apply them to the sphere of human art and storytelling.  Given that I've already stated my tenet that literature and religion are opposed yet intimately interelated pheomena, I would tend to see that in literature the reader is more or less in the same position as the protagonist in Gaster's paradigm: one who must formulate either a sympathetic or antipathetic relation to the "energies" he beholds in the narrative.

More later.

RUDOLF, MEET THEODORE

...[Rudolf Otto] explains the numinous experience in terms of the *mysterium tremendum,* the overwhelming mystery that compels fear and trembling in the viewer, and the *mysterium fascinans,* which compels the viewer to be attracted to the fascinating mystery.--  F/D/A MEETS AUM
 

...Gaster introduces two Greek terms that identify how the respective rites work. Rites of jubilation and invigoration are both characterized by *plerosis,* or "filling," because both give the sense that the ritual fills the community with new life. Rites of mortification and purgation are both characterized by *kenosis,* or "emptying," because they "empty out" the community of "noxious elements" one way or another.-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM.
 

In the first of these essays, I made a parallel comparison between the three affects described by C.S. Lewis in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN and the three phenomenalities I deduced-- formerely called the AUM formula, revised to "NUM formula" in this essay.  Later, I sought to define the three phenomenalities in terms of my concept of "the sublime" in the essay ODDLY OR STRANGELY SUBLIME.  The terms proposed in that essay have now been superseded by this recent essay, but I have not forgotten one of the problems I associated with the Lewis essay:

Lewis' trinity of fear, dread, and awe-- which I've paralleled to my Todorov-derived trinity of the naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- works quite well as long as one is considering only the *mysterium tremendum,* which seems to be the only aspect Lewis regards. But Otto's other formulation, the *mysterium fascinans,* suggests a less antipathetic attitude toward whatever-it-is that inspires the sense of something beyond ordinary experience. 
 

As an example of a *mysterium fascinans,* I chose a scene from Conrad's LORD JIM which depicted an onlooker's naturalistic "sense of wonder" on beholding a "marvelous stillness" in the world-- a scene in which natural beauty is at rest-- what basic physics terms "potential energy"-- and which scene is the exact observe of a Conrad-scene from TYPHOON, cited here. This depiction of a violent storm at sea is, as I noted, more typically with the sort of phenomena authorities like Kant have associated with "the sublime," violent, overwhelming phenomena, which can be generally likened to physics' concept of "kinetic energy."

I'm not saying that scenes of "energy at rest" inevitably correlate with the affect of the *mysterium fascinans,* or that scenes of "violent energy" inevitably correlate with the affect of the *mysterium tremendum.*  On the contrary, it's possible to conceive of being "attracted to a fascinating mystery" that happens to be sublimely violent; the Conrad storm-scene simply is not one such because the audience is likely to feel fear on behalf of the storm's victims.  Similarly, the "marvelous stillness" from the LORD JIM passage could just as easily inspire "fear and trembling" if he were describing the stillness of a desert where a human victim could not perservere. 

Just as Otto's terms can be aligned according to how a subject views a scene-- that is, whether he feels sympathy toward or antipathy against it-- the same dichotomy also applies to Gaster's terms of *plerosis/filling* and *kenosis/emptying.*  The former I have identified with forms of literature which are dominantly "life-affirming," while the latter compares with those forms which are dominantly "life-denying."  It now occurs to me that these wordings are a bit too value-laden, and that it would be more accurate to say "life-triumphing" and "life-defeating"-- the term "life" referring to those characters with whom the audience is meant to identify its interests.  (This is of course not to say that the audience does not identify with other characters, as I discussed in more detail here.)

I'll have more to say about the ways in which antipathy/*tremendum* and sympathy/*fascinans* apply to specific works in terms of sublimity, but for the purpose of this essay, it's enough to underline my conflation with Otto's dichotomy of "the Numinous" with Gaster's dichotomous division of ritual orientations.

MONSTROUS MISCELLANY PT. 2

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's"-- William Blake.

This is a much more elegant way of saying what I said in TERMINOLOGY OF ENDEARMENT:

I'm aware that my lexicon of terms on this blog has been and probably will remain daunting to most readers. But I believe that no critic worth his salt is ever comfortable with passively receiving terms set down by other analysts, whether lit-critics like Frye or persons from other disciplines like Big Sigmund.
 

My "system," of course, will probably never have any impact as a series of blog-posts.  To have any impact in any sphere, the system would have to be set down in some coherent form, be it a book or a wiki.

That said, one reason I'll probably never put down a lexicon on the blog is that I'm constantly finding new linkages that redefine the old ones.  Critics who want to stick with the predictable terminologies of the Freudians and the Marxists and their kinded-- following what I deem the delusion that those disciplines have some real connection to the world of "objective science"-- are welcome to do so. 

On to one such connection:

Not since 2011 have I written of the dichotomy "Moira/Themis."-- a pairing principally derived from the formulatons of 20th-century myth-critics, such as Jane Ellen Harrison, whom I discussed somewhat in BACK TO THE LIBRARY.

The creator toiling in the fields of "high" or canonical literature expects to impose a theme upon the phantasms of the imagination, much as (in a different context) Jane Ellen Harrison argued that early myth's early phase, dominated by the "Moira," or fate, gave way to a second phase, that of "Themis," which dealt with the ordering of myth as attuned with "behavior dictated by social conscience." The parallel to the operations of "high" and "low" literature need not be belabored.

In a related essay, I compared the characteristics of "moira," associated with ritual and "the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement," with Frye's concept of "primary concerns," while "themis" was a socially articulated concept of "justice," comparable to Frye's concept of the "secondary concerns" that guide civilized humans in the right attainment of the "primary concerns."

The paradigm here is one of evolutionary development.  Subconsciously powerful forces-- be they "moira" or "primary concerns"-- eventually evolve into the more discursively organized, conscious concepts of "themis/secondary concerns."  And Schopenhauer advocates the same developmental distinctions between "primary" and "secondary" levels of experience:

"...the world as will is the primary (world) and the world as idea the secondary world. The former is the world of desire and consequently that of pain and thousand-fold misery. The latter, however, is in itself intrinsically painless: in addition it contains a remarkable spectacle, altogether significant or at the very least entertaining. Enjoyment of this spectacle constitutes aesthetic pleasure." Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 (Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale, trans., London Penguin Books, 1970), p.156.

The two literary personas that I compare with the primary "instinctive will" of moira-- the monster and the demihero-- might not be as entirely governed by "misery" as the Gloomy Philosopher chooses to typify ordinary life.  However, the images of sacrifice and suffering capture the "emptying" essence of the concept of *kenosis* as conceived by Theodor Gaster.  One might say that the positive incarnation of "moira" is the community of ordinary, "persistent" humanity-- a community destined to be eternally threatened by its shadow-side, the negative "monster."

In contrast, I would not say that the world of the secondary "intellectual will" is "intrinsically painless."  However, I would say that its personas, the "hero" and the "villain" are defined not by sacrifice but by the "filling" essence of *plerosis*, which takes the form of glorious spectacle.  It's therefore no coincidence that the principal quarrel between the hero and the villain is not one of simple existence, as it is between the monster and his demihero victims.  Rather, their quarrel concerns the validity of "themis," the intellectually imposed law, which the negative "villain" defies and the positive "hero" defends.

QUICK COMPENSATION COMPARISON

Though I've only recently chanced across a reference to the pioneering work of endocrinologist Hans Selye-- a Nobel-Prize winner credited with formulating the 20th century concept of "stress"-- even a quick Wikipedia reference points out a useful comparison with the compensation theory of Alfred Adler, first examined on this blog here.

Here's a Wikiquote I've cited before re: positive and negative compensation-- a concept I've found useful in refuting critics like Julian Darius:

Positive compensations may help one to overcome one’s difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority.
 

In 1975 Hans Selye pioneered a roughly similar "positive/negative" classification of glandular excitement states.  Again quoting from Wiki's essay on stress:

Selye published in 1975 a model dividing stress into eustress and distress.^[16] Where stress enhances function (physical or mental, such as through strength training or challenging work), it may be considered eustress. Persistent stress that is not resolved through coping or adaptation, deemed distress, may lead to anxiety or withdrawal (depression) behavior.
 

Neither psychologist Adler nor biologist Selye applied their insights to literary criticism.  On occasion lit-critics have looked at fiction through Adler's lens, though Adlerian examinations are far outnumbered by those following the lead of Sigmund Freud, the past master of explaining psychology purely through acts of "negative compensation."

While Selye's biological research in itself probably would not lend itself to the analysis of literary constructs, its central conceit-- that of "stress" having both negative and positive connotations-- proves useful to a literary hermeneutics based in notions of conflict and will, as my own is.  The notions of "eustress" and "distress" may also prove an interesting gloss on Theodor Gaster's division of the emotional tones evoked by ritualized endeavors into tones of "plerosis" or of "kenosis."

HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 2

For some time I've tended to see a polarity between the above-named scenarios.  I mentioned in this 2010 essay, which addresses the multivalence of the genres "crime" and "horror," that in practice both were dominated by the dramatic mythos.  In various academic essays I've seen efforts to treat them, at least in their 1930s film-manifestations, as parallel genres, since both deal with the destruction of a "monster" that imperils society.  Robin Wood, speaking solely of horror, boiled the genre down to the phrase, "Normalcy is threatened by the monster."

In the first part of HERO VS. VILLAIN I aligned drama with irony in terms of what Theodor Gaster terms *kenosis,* the process that expels harmful energy from society, and adventure with comedy in terms of *plerosis,* the process that brings positive energy back into the community, in the following terms:

,,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

Now, having meditated awhile on Schopenhauer's distinctions between the homogenous status of "serious" discourse versus the heterogenous status of "comic" discourse, the above thought requires some modification.

As noted in this essay, Schopenhauer determined his assessment of either homogeneity or heterogeneity with respect to the agreement or disageement between "perceptual representations" and "conceptual representations." In order for me to apply these principles to literature, I had to make the distinction that in a literary world the former meant the verisimilitude within a given world, while the latter meant the expectations that the audience brought to the work.

In the second part, I argued that Schopenhauer's term "objective" compared well with both the irony and the drama-- and thus with Freud's so-called "reality principle"-- and the term "subjective" could be aligned with the adventure and the comedy, and thus with the "pleasure principle."  But what's the nature of the disagreement in the heterogenous forms, "irony" and "comedy?"

The nature as I express it is summed up by the different metaphors of "hero vs. villain" (pleasure principle) and "monster vs. victim" (the reality principle).

In the adventure-tale, every internal aspect of its world is dominated by the need for the hero to win out in the end, which is made credible to the audience by the fact that the hero possesses above-average combative power/skill.  Thus both "percept" and "concept" are homogenous because both are dominated by the pleasure principle. expressed by the metaphorical phrase "hero over villain."

In the dramatic story, every internal aspect is dominated by the possibility that the hero may fail, and that even if he wins, his triumph will evince substantial *pathos.*  Thus every aspect of the world is meant to convey the possibility of failure, in keeping with the expectations of the audience, rendering the two potentialities homogenous as well.  The hero's power of action is often compromised, so that it's credible when and if he meets a dire fate-- which fate is summed up by the triumph of "monster over victim," aka the reality principle.  

Now, Northrop Frye often alludes the idea that the irony reverses many tropes of the adventure, and the comedy of the drama, and Schopenhauer *might* say that it is because the latter two express heterogeneity between "percept" and "concept."  I express the first reversal as "villain over hero." As noted many times before, the hero of the irony is even more compromised than the hero of the drama, meaning that even when he has power he has no positive power-of-action.  But because the reader's level of conviction has dropped precipitously, the reader no longer identifies strongly with the disempowered hero, but instead views the hero's reduction by the reality principle in ironic, humorous terms.  Thus the reality principle dominating the world is reversed in terms of its effect, yielding a heterogenous form of pleasure.

Finally, the world of the comedy is dominated by the reversal "victim over monster."  Thus, though the comic hero usually does not possess the heroic stature one would expect of anyone able to conquer monsters (be they real monsters, criminals, heavy fathers or whatever)-- and thus sacrifices the verisimilitude logic would demand-- the world, dominated by the pleasure principle, is oriented on giving the comic hero a "free pass" that allows him to triumph-- though in some ways the compromise makes it clear that the reader gains that pleasure by "foul means" rather than the "fair means" of the adventure-mythos.  This too is entirely congruous with Schopenhauer's remarks on the nature of this type of humor.

As far as *plerosis* and *kenosis" are concerned, however, it doesn't matter whether they are reached by fair means or foul-- or homogenous or heterogenous devices.  Thus my earlier assignment of comedy and adventure to *plerosis,* and irony and drama to *kenosis,* remains applicable.