THE LARGE AND THE SMALL PT. 2

 Neologism Neurosis time again-- 

In Part 1, I discussed the way "scale," with respect to the number of pivotal icons in a narrative, affected the tenor of different literary genres. I was talking specifically about the disparate ways readers and critics react to the polarized fantasy-subgenres of J.R.R. Tolkien's "epic fantasy" and Robert E. Howard's "sword-and-sorcery." Some poking around revealed that there are actually jargonistic ways of talking about scale in the sciences, where "macroscale" means "large scale" and "microscale" means "small scale." But coinages like "macroscale-icons" and the opposing neologism are both cumbersome.

I'll note in passing that Tolkienian "epic fantasy" has sometimes been marketed as "high fantasy," though I'll bet nothing has ever been marketed as "low fantasy" even though critics have bent their brains about what the "high/low" distinction ought to connote. I won't endorse the dichotomy here in any way. "Low" carries irrelevant negative connotations, just as I mentioned in Part 1 that antonyms for words like "epic" and "expansive" usually have negative connotations. But going back to the contrasted examples of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, there's nothing intrinsically negative about the latter narrative following the destinies of one main character and a couple of pivotal support-characters, rather than charting a huge panoply of pivotal characters as does the former. The humbler "microscale" endeavors of Sir Gawain in GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT possess what I'll call an "intensive" quality, a quality not possible for any single story in the macroscale world of Malory's MORTE D'ARTHUR-- "intensive" being more or less opposed in my mind to "expansive."

I may as well mention that these distinctions about "large scale/expansive" vs. "small scale/intensive" certainly don't apply only to magical fantasy stories. The first literary opposition that occurred to me was that of the "expansive" MOBY DICK of Melville and the "intensive" LIGHT IN AUGUST of Faulkner, and I'm sure that there are thousands of other potential examples. 

So "expansive/intensive" is a possible jargonistic application, which I may or may not keep exploring. I will note that when I was looking at other words that carried the tonality of "epic," I was very attracted to both the words "panoramic" and "panoptic." Both certainly characterize Tolkien and his emulators, and "panoptic" is likeable because the essence of expansive narratives is that they give the reader the sense of participating in a huge number of viewpoints, i.e., lots of "eyes" with their own interpretations. By comparison, Howard and his emulators offer readers a more circumscribed number of eyes-- but here too, there's no good antonym for "panoptic." If I wanted to bring that word into my jargon-verse, I'd have to make up another neologism, such as "oligoptic," based on the Greek word-element "oligo" for "a few." So for the time being, if I use any terms at all, I'll describe "macroscale iconicity" as "expansive" and "microscale iconicity" as "intensive."

Of course the actual readership of fantasies will inevitably keep using the familiar terms of "epic fantasy" and "sword-and-sorcery." Yet even while I admit that fact, I'll still maintain that sword-and-sorcery holds "intensive narrative tendencies" with other subgenres that focus on small casts of characters, like PINOCCHIO, GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, and the majority of both rural "folktales" and citified "literary fairy tales."        

Yet if I wanted to change all the marketing terms to suit me, what would I choose? It would have to be something straightforward, and the first thing that comes to mind is the way 20th-century pop fiction was given shorthand terms based on elements widely common to the genres involved: "horse operas" for westerns, "space operas" for science fiction. So what would be the dominant elements that I would use, not only to distinguish expansive fantasy from the intensive type, but also to bring together all those subgenres I thought fell under the aegis of the intensive type?

Two words, sometimes used to mean the same thing, occur to me: "quest" and "journey." But in my view, a "quest" is intrinsically an organized endeavor, often by several people as in MORTE D'ARTHUR and LORD OF THE RINGS, to accomplish a specific end. In contrast, a "journey" need not have a specific end. It can have such, as when Gawain wanders about trying to figure out how to avoid falling victim to the Green Knight's ax. But the prose versions of both Conan and Pinocchio travel from adventure to adventure, often giving their readers a sort of guided tour of a particular world's weird wonders. A "journey" can also be performed by an ensemble-- the two heroes of Fritz Leiber's, the four kids of Lewis's first Narnia book-- but I'd generalize that if an author goes over six pivotal characters in his ensemble, he loses his ability to "intensely" focus on the fortunes of a handful of characters.    

So "quest operas" would be my preferred term for both LORD OF THE RINGS and THE ILIAD, though in the latter, the quest is for the Greeks to find a way to conquer Troy, which is possible through both the reclamation of Achilles (in Homer) and the invention of the Trojan Horse (in other works of the so-called "Epic Cycle").     

And "journey operas" take in CONAN THE CONQUEROR, THE ODYSSEY, PINOCCHIO and "Jack the Giant Killer."    

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.

                 

INTERRUPTED MEDLEY

I'm putting a short hold on the next EVIL post, to respond to a comment by AT-AT Pilot in the comments to Part 2. One of his two references included a link to a post on the EDUCATED IMAGINATION blog, excepting a section from one of Northrop Frye's essays, albeit one devoted entirely to the Christian religion he practiced, and not to the literary works he more often analyzed. 

In an argument against the social tendencies toward literal readings of Biblical passages, Frye says in part:

In short, the Bible is explicitly antireferential in structure, and deliberately blocks off any world of presence behind itself. In Christianity, everything in the Old Testament is a “type” of which the “antitype” or existential reality is in the New Testament. This turns the Bible into a double mirror reflecting only itself to itself. How do we know the Gospel is true? Because it fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the prophecies of the Old Testament are true? Because they are fulfilled by the Gospel. Is there any evidence for the existence of Jesus as a major historical figure outside the New Testament? None really, and the writers of the New Testament obviously preferred it that way. As long as we assume a historical presence behind the Bible to which it points, the phrase “word of God,” as applied both to the Bible and the person of Christ, is only a dubious syllepsis. In proportion as the presence behind disappears, it becomes identified with the book, and the phrase begins to make sense. As we continue to study the significance of the fact that the Bible is a book, the sense of presence shifts from what is behind the book to what is in front of it. (CW 4, 82-6)

I like to think I fully understand Frye's point in stressing the circular nature of the Bible-- and possibly, by extension, of most or all other religions. However, Christianity in particular has encouraged some degree of literalism in its discourse, not least as a result of grounding many events of Scripture in the perspective of a linear history. True, the Bible does not offer the sort of close chronicling of minutiae that readers today expect of "history." Further, many narratives in the Bible that purport to relate historical events are disputed by the evidence assembled by modern historiography. Yet it's unquestionable that Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, centered all narratives within a *simulacrum* of linear history. 

Thus, certain key events happen in a straight line; the Jewish captivity in Egypt always precedes Rome's dominance of Judaea, for example. The Biblical writers tie all these events together with the repetition of religious images or tropes, as Frye says-- but the use of history is meant to convince the unconverted of the vastness of God's scheme for humankind. All three "religions of the Book" profited enormously from grounding their religious narratives within the sphere of "real" history. 

Reading the Frye excerpt coincides with my having read another chapter of Bataille's LITERATURE AND EVIL-- and, as in Part 2 of my essay-series, I find myself again endorsing Bataille's view over Frye's. In a chapter devoted to William Blake, Bataille agrees with Blake's idea that "Poetic Genius is the true Man," Bataille extended that statement, contending that "there is nothing in religion that cannot be found in poetry." The chapter's main point concerns Bataille taking issue with a particular Jungian scholar who, in Bataille's opinion, sought to reduce Blake's narratives to Jungian paradigms. Bataille, who disputed any philosophy that smacked of idealism, concocted an interesting take on how Poetry "destroys immediate reality" yet "admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego."

Though poetry does not accept sense-data in their naked state, it is by no means always contemptuous of the outer world. Rather, it challenges the precise limitations of objects between themselves, while admitting their external nature. It denies and it destroys immediate reality because it sees in it the screen which conceals the true face of the world from us. Nevertheless poetry admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego. Blake’s lesson is founded on the value in itself, extrinsic to the ego, of poetry. -- LITERATURE AND EVIL.

For Bataille, then, Poetry subordinates but does not negate all "real-world referentiality." I would say that, even though I don't concur with Bataille that Poetry and Religion are consubstantial, Religion follows the same dynamic, in which even linear history is subsumed by the vision of godhood continually interacting with mortals confined within, but not limited to, that history. If I wanted this essay to go on forever, I'd bring in the ways "real-world referentiality" also takes in the endorsement of specific, work-oriented goals, found in both religion and literature.

Next, back to considerations about taste, sadism, and perceptions of evil.

 

SUPERNORMAL POETICS REVISITED

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous.-- READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART.

The fatuity of Hoffman's claim doesn't need much elaboration. Without even looking at his footnoted source, I surmise that its "proof" of male preference is derived from purely visual tests, where male subjects look at photos, possibly subliminal, of the different types of feminine breasts. This of course would be a thoroughly incomplete study without invoking tactile sensations as well. But try to persuade some research center to give the go-ahead on a study in which a set number of male subjects grope a set number of both real and fake boobies.

But I will elaborate upon Campbell. In this blog's infancy I examined in detail Campbell's supernormal poetics (my term), in this 2009 blogpost. Whereas Hoffman rejects the "existence claims" of myth and religion, Campbell embraces them in the following terms:

[Campbell]  suggests that though mythology cannot be rationally understood, it may be "viewed in the light of biological psychology as a function of the human nervous system, precisely homologous to the innate and learned sign stimuli that release and direct the energies of nature." Campbell, building largely on the ethological researches of Lorenz and Tinbergen, calls this psychobiological system "the supernormal sign stimulus," and implies that it is through such stimuli that both myth and art work their wiles on audiences.

There was a time when I was very invested in Campbell's theory. When I was writing my as-yet-unpublished book on the superhero phenomenon, I initially devoted a chapter to the supernormal sign theory. However, I soon realized, through close analysis of that chapter of PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, that an awful lot of Campbell's heuristic conjectures proved shaky. For instance, later in my 2009 essay, I extrapolated from Campbell the idea of "normal sign stimuli," but Campbell never actually renders such a conception. It's possible that the author was exposed to the semiotics of his time, but if so, he's too caught up in explicating supernormal signs to worry about their opposite. Further, though in the essay I agreed with Campbell's quoted poet A.E. Houseman that "intellect is not the fount of poetry," I caviled that Houseman had not given intellect its due in the process of making art.

Much later I expanded upon the intertwining of intellect and imagination, under the more general terms "cognitive restraint" and "affective freedom," in this appropriately titled essay. And though I favor the poetics of Campbell and Houseman far more than those of Hoffman and Richard Dawkins, I tried in this and other essays to strike a balance with respect to how these two aspects of human existence affect creativity:

Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

CHAOS OVER ORDER

...Calvino concluded that, although belief in the power of literature to promulgate a particular political doctrine was as deluded as the conventional view that literature expresses immutable truths of human nature, the writer still has legitimate political roles. He can help to give a voice to the inarticulate. By presenting possible worlds, he can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.

Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not a calculated order.  -- George Bataille, LITERATURE AND EVIL, p. 89, 1957. (translation Alastair Hamilton)

Despite bracketing Calvino and Bataille, I'm only citing them to support some of my recent thoughts on the legacy of Lewis Carroll.

 

I'm entirely on Carroll's side when he burlesques the moralistic priorities of his time. The "Father William" poem was one that I enjoyed as a child, though I had no idea that it was a parody of an earlier work. I responded, on an elementary level, to visual incongruities like an old man balancing an eel on the tip of his nose. 

At the same time, I remarked that Carroll did not set up any sort of direct counter-argument against the utilitarianism of the moralists. Doing anything like that would have run counter to his project, to embrace incongruous images and wordplay above all other considerations. Even if he meant to mock English orthodoxy with his spoof of the heraldic symbols of the Lion and the Unicorn, he wouldn't be doing so to envisage some other, better ethos, which, in the first quote, Peter Washington claims was former Communist Calvino's motive for embracing non-representational fantasy.

I've no idea if Bataille had any contact with the works of Calvino, though I tend to doubt it. Yet it's interesting that the French philosopher undercuts, in general terms, the notion that the "chaos" of impossible notions might simply be used for non-specific utilitarian purposes, for forging new ideas about re-ordering society along better lines. I'm sure that I've occasionally touched on this notion in one context or another, but I like to think I've never descended into the banality of Jack Zipes, claiming that fantasy is good for "questioning the hierarchical arrangements of society." 

I don't know that Carroll, despite his considerable intellectual gifts, would have thought my ethos any less constricting than the Victorian moralists. Because I'm always validating narratives full of "epistemological patterns," some onlookers might assume I'm automatically claiming such works to be superior in my private literary hierarchy. I've tried to counter-act this misreading with my definition of all literary insights as "half-truths." They are not immutable truths or hearkenings of better societal orders. Of fantasy are half-truths born, and to fantasy they all return, even the ones with heavy utilitarian content. Still, I validate the psychological patterns of the Alice books as epistemologically concrescent, rather than the books being "pure nonsense." Perhaps Carroll would not have agreed.

Anyone who has read my blogposts attentively, if not uncritically, should anticipate that I might validate Bataille's analysis of impossible things. (I haven't written on Calvino before, but I will note in passing that though I liked some of the nonsense of COSMICOMICS, the aforementioned WINTER'S NIGHT is just another lit-guy fetishizing his disinterest/incapacity to tell an interesting story.) Bataille probably would also not get my distinctions regarding "epistemology built on literary patterns of knowledge rather than as knowledge as consensually defined." But I agree with him that "impossible things" in fiction always suggest the violence of chaos more than new patterns of order, in "orderly" fantasists like Tolkien as much as "chaotic" types like Carroll.

In the fourth section of LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, I disagreed with Susanne Langer that folktales were no more than a "remarkable form of nonsense," and that they did on occasion encode some of the same epistemological patterns of "full-fledged myths." That said, the latter types of stories tend to privilege epistemological half-truths. I would tend to assume (though no one can be sure) that the chaotic elements in The Epic of Gilgamesh, like the giant scorpions encountered by the title hero, are "ordered" by, say, metaphysical correlations about the nature of the universe. In contrast, a lot of the talking animals of the simpler folktales Langer scorned may not have any such patterns. But as basic constructs the giant scorpions and the talking animals equally communicate the chaos of *strangeness," as much as do (say) Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter and the Mad Hatter of the BATMAN comics.

PUPPETS GOTTA DO THE LIMBO ROCK

Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when [the authors] failed to find a suitable existing puppet.-- Flann O'Brien, AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, 1939. 

I didn't get much out of O'Brien's metatextual novel, which concerns, in very loose fashion, an author who apparently starts hanging out with his characters. But the above passage is interesting partly because it resonates with the rise of postmodern fiction as a reaction against the predominant realism of literary modernism. For the most part modernist authors maintain a strict distance between the domain of the "real" world of the author/creator and the "unreal" world of the author's creations.

O'Brien wasn't saying anything all that original in 1939. In the years before the rise of copyright law, an author like Shakespeare could swipe characters and plotlines from pretty much anywhere. And even after copyright became the law of the land, authors like Mark Twain and John Kendrick Bangs worked Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes into their stories, arguably using the rubric of parody to get away with a little literary larceny. In 1916, psychologist Carl Jung began writing the first of many essays on a concept he'd eventually name "the collective unconscious," which may the closest human culture ever came to imagining a "limbo" in which all fictional and legendary characters might exist, if only as symbolic patterns. Authors as diverse as Philip Jose Farmer and Alan Moore have entertained themselves and others by imagining wonderlands in which a panoply of independently created literary characters rub shoulders with one another.

I'm sure that when O'Brien wrote the lines above, he knew good and well most authors would not want to make their copyrighted works open to public plundering, not least because popular characters can be an author's meal ticket. O'Brien was probably just spoofing the modernist idea of "originality" by claiming that writers should just take whatever they needed from other writers, rather than just making pale copies of characters they admired. 

The quote is also apposite in a small way to my own theory of literary emulation as laid forth in last August's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2. For most of human history, oral literature was created by mostly unknown authors picking up and transmitting traditional stories about familiar figures of history and folklore. This is the pattern I call "icon emulation," in which icons like Heracles or King Arthur might have any number of new adventures appended to their histories. At the same time, sometimes later authors did not emulate a particular icon, but a set of tropes associated with that icon. Supposing, for instance, that, as Wikipedia suggests, the Greek tale of Rhodopis is the earliest extant "Cinderella story." Later authors did not, so far as we know, keep the name "Rhodopis." Instead they utilized "trope emulation," borrowing tropes from the generating first story and reworking the Rhodopis persona to take on whatever name or background would best please a particular audience, including the name and background of the medieval Cinderella of Europe. Ironically, for exigent reasons the late name of Cinderella came to subsume all versions before and after her official creation.

Whether or not O'Brien was being funny about claiming that all of literature should become a "collective commons" as needed, in a real sense, this is how literature really functions. There's nothing new under the sun, except for the way an old wine looks when displayed in a new bottle.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SONG OF HIAWATHA (1855)

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE READING RHEUM: THE SATANIC VERSES

 

Salman Rushdie’s mammoth 1996 “magical realism” fantasy is less well known for its actual content than for having enraged the fundamentalist Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini with the book’s supposed blasphemies. The cleric placed an assassination order on Rushdie, and though he was never attacked, other persons associated with the book’s publication met unpleasant fates.

Over twenty years after the controversy, SATANIC hardly seems like the sort of work capable of generating such friction. The title refers to a traditional narrative that asserts that during the period when the Prophet Mohammed was dictating the verses of the Koran, Satan—or, to use the more traditional rendering, Shaitan—attempted to interfere by corrupting the text with falsehoods. In Rushdie’s novel, two modern-day Pakistani Muslims, Gibreel and Saladin, find themselves caught up in an unexplained recapitulation of Islamic mythology. Gibreel sometimes morphs into an angelic being modeled on the traditional “Gabriel” of the Old Testament, while Saladin finds himself literally going to the Devil, taking on horns and hooves and a general goatish appearance. There’s no plot as such; just countless scenes of weird things happening to Gibreel, Saladin, their family members and various supporting characters. It may not be coincidence that both main characters are Bollywood actors, for often SATANIC seems like a bunch of barely connected scenes devised for a sprawling religious epic; a Mahabharata for the pop culture age.

I’ve not sought out any interviews in which Rushdie may have held forth on his aims in writing the novel. My own inexpert take is that the author hoped to do for Muslim culture what James Joyce did for Ireland: to create a long book stuffed to the gills with abstruse references from both canonical and popular culture. Late in the book, a character coins the phrase “I Sing the Body Eclectic,” punning on the title of a Walt Whitman poem, which in turn became better known as the title of a Ray Bradbury short story. Eclecticism is both the bane and the bounty of modern life to both Gibreel and Saladin, who in my view are barely distinguishable extensions of the author’s consciousness. In the modern world, there can be none of the cultural purity ascribed to the beginnings of Muslim culture (whether said purity actually existed or not). Thus, the modern world is not only one where Whitman rubs shoulders with Bradbury, but also one where one person is named for two Samuel Richardson characters while another’s name references Rider Haggard’s “She.” William Blake rubs conceptual shoulders with Superman and Wonder Woman; Bollywood Hindu epics share mind-space with that of Japanese arthouse-animator Yoji Kuri.

Beyond showing modern life to be an unrelenting Babel, I don’t think SATANIC accomplishes much in terms of its characters or plot-action. However, Rushdie’s foremost talent here is that of coming up with witty epigrams, even if they are all spoken by people who sound substantially the same. Rushdie often parodies the chauvinism of the Brits who once dominated India and much of the “Third World,” and he’s acutely aware of the history of American Civil Rights conflicts. That said, the author proves almost prescient in anticipating how the marginalized might seek to manipulate the dialogue about race in their favor:

What one hates in whites—love of brown sugar—one must hate when it turns up, inverted, in black. Bigotry is not only a function of power.

I don’t know what phenomena Rushdie might have beheld in the nineties that might have made him anticipate the eventual articulation of the “systemic racism” concept, which argues that only racism enforced by a majority counts as “real racism.” But I found epigrams like this one to be much more interesting than any of his attempts to describe the Joycean Babel of modern culture.

THE READING RHEUM: MOLL FLANDERS (1722)

I've devoted four posts to Daniel Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE, which I consider to be the starting-point for Western popular fiction. Until recently I had not read Defoe's second-best-known novel, MOLL FLANDERS, though I'd seen a couple of cinematic adaptations. In one 2014 essay,
however, I conjured with Defoe's Moll as an example of an early female character who was not a "damsel in distress." I said back then:

According to the summaries I have read, CRUSOE, unlike OTRANTO, has no significant female characters at all, so it neither proves nor disproves Colangelo's assertion. None of Defoe's other works fit my criteria for popular culture, though it is worth noting that Defoe was not hostile to the idea of empowered female characters, given that his second best-known novel is 1722's MOLL FLANDERS. The titular character probably is not a femme formidable, though Wikipedia notes that she "begins a career of artful thievery, which, by employing her wits, beauty, charm, and femininity, as well as hard-heartedness and wickedness, brings her the financial security she has always sought."

Now that I have read MOLL, my conjecture-- probably based  as much on film-adaptations of the Defoe novel as on the Wiki summary-- is borne out. Moll starts out life on the down side, being born to a prostitute-mother in Newgate Prison. Moll-- whose titular name is made-up, though supposedly Defoe based her on a real woman with the same first name-- is separated from her mother at an early age. However, at age eleven she's apprenticed as a maid to a well-to-do family. This circumstance eventually leads her to her first romance, when she hooks up with one of the young men of the family. However, he seduces her with promises of marriage, but has no intention of making her anything but his mistress. This character-- who goes unnamed, like most of Defoe's characters here-- becomes one of several men whom Moll beds and/or weds in her quest for security, though none of these liaisons really "take." The early mortality of men during 18th-century England spares Moll from the fate of being a black widow murderess, though Defoe gets rid of male characters so quickly one might suspect him of murderous tendencies being exorcised through fiction.

In truth, Defoe seems to have a proto-feminist concept of Moll. On occasion men come to Moll's "rescue" with greater monetary resources, but it's almost as often that she makes her own money in clever ways, particularly in the latter half of the novel, when she becomes a professional thief. The only real time a male "rescue" really counts comes near the conclusion, when she's faced with hanging, and an unnamed minister manages to get her sentence changed, so that she's transported to America. But none of the "rescues" are so structured as to make Moll seem a "damsel in distress." I suppose she wouldn't be "feminist" these days because she generally uses sexuality and trickery to get ahead in life, rather than either political action or even the forceful endeavors of a femme formidable, like some of the female knights and rulers I've discussed elsewhere.

Both of Defoe's most famous characters, Robinson and Moll, incarnate the spirit of the entrepreneur as it was being re-defined in post-Renaissance Europe, and I would say that Defoe gives both of them as much agency as was possible for their respective genders in that time-period. Moll does suffer a certain amount of mistreatment by males, but she's usually able to escape being controlled-- so that if one deems her the First Lady of Popular Fiction, she definitely escapes the status of being "a damsel in distress."

AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

From the first posts on this blog, I've asserted a commonality, though not an absolute identity, between religious myth and all later forms of literature. I've also claimed that the basis of that commonality is "symbolic complexity." Here I want to address in greater detail the way this complexity operates in both myth and literature.

I'll start with my reading of Jung:

In Jung's view, myth, both in its archaic and modern manifestations, is a creative response to the archetypal experience.  He opposes the idea of "myth as primitive science" advanced by E.B. Tylor and James Frazer, claiming that primitive man possesses an "imperative need... to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner psychic events."  I agree, but with the caveat that in many instances primitive humans did look for aspects of "outer sense experiences" that were regularly replicated.  This is the sort of thing Tylor mistook for primitive science; the idea that, for instance, a story about a sun-god was an attempt to understand how the real sun worked.

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky.  However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- were sacred clues to the nature of divine power.  The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated.  For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.-- JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE (2012)

Since Jung was focused almost entirely upon explaining everything in myth and literature in terms of "inner psychic events," I've frequently turned to Joseph Campbell to deal with the specific ways that myth and literature translate "outer sense experiences" into archetypal discourse.

For my purpose it doesn’t matter whether or not most modern psychologists dominantly recognize the Oedipus complex as valid. Within the sphere of literature, any storytelling trope that has expressive significance to humankind is, phenomenologically speaking, “real.” This is why the “four functions” that Joseph Campbell applies to mythology have so much potential for pluralist literary studies. Campbell's approach allows not only for the psychological and the sociological aspects of humankind, which I find to be the two modes on which most literary analyses draw. Campbell's formula also allows one to interpret aspects of the “cosmological” (the nature of physical reality) and the “metaphysical,” (the nature of reality beyond the physical). And just as myth-criticism doesn't judge a myth as "wrong" because it's built upon a cosmological or metaphysical conceit that moderns don't recognize, the same holds true for literary studies. Thus the Oedipus complex, whether "real" or not in the psychological sense, becomes real in the literary continuum by virtue of its expressive power. But of course, in contrast to Freud's exaggerated claims for his complex's universality, Oedipus shares his reality with Jung's Mercurius and any number of other formulas.-- INCEST WE TRUST PART 5 (2010)

In the first citation I spoke of ancient myth-tellers orienting their stories upon "sacred clues" regarding "the nature of divine power." Such "clues" might be better termed "epistemological patterns," whether they fall into one or more of Campbell's four categories. Further, when I used the phrase "the nature of the divine power," I was not speaking of my own interpretation of the symbolic process in myth and literature. Rather, I sought to approximate the way that an ancient myth-teller *might* believe that his observations about celestial movement or vegetative reproduction reflected something vital about either his gods or the ways in which the gods chose to make the world.  For me, as a modern amateur pundit, I believe that both myth and literature utilize epistemological patterns-- whether sociological or psychological, cosmological or metaphysical-- to create structured fictional worlds in which those patterns confer meaning, or at least perspective, upon real life as it is lived, without any imposed meaning or perspective.

Now, Wikipedia supplies a detailed definition of epistemology as it is generally used in philosophy.

Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas: (1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification,^[1][2] (2) various problems of skepticism, (3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and (4) the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?",^[3] "What does it mean to say that we know something?",^[4] and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?

By this definition, neither myth nor literature are relevant to epistemology as it exists in philosophical discourse. These expressive forms assert epistemological patterns but even the most complex works of myth and literature do not seek to subject these patterns to sustained philosophical inquiry. I wrote last year:

...literature is not concerned with outright declarations as such. Sir Philip Sidney argued that "the poet never affirmeth, and therefore never lieth." This is tantamount to Sidney's stating that the poet's declarations are structured more as possibilities than absolute truths. Obviously, there are some poets who do "affirm" more than others, but Sidney's analysis is on target. Commonplace language deals with strong propositions, but literature favors weaker propositions.-- STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2.

(Parenthetically, I'll note though this quote addresses only literature, I see the same spectrum in archaic mythology as well: some myths are oriented on "affirming" truths that are pleasing to a given community, while others are more free-form.)

So if philosophical epistemology is concerned with the nature of absolute truth-- even if it might be, as in William James, to disprove its existence-- then mythico-literary epistemology is concerned only with "half-truths," with exposing its audience to pure possibilities. Supposing that one could find a particular storyteller who first contextualized the daily revolution of the sun as "Helios driving his chariot across the sky." That storyteller might "affirm" this story in a religious sense, in that he might choose to believe that Helios or some other god inspired to relate the narrative, or he might know that it was purely his own conceit. But no matter what his personal attitude toward his story might be, the story can still go one of two ways for his audience: either believing the story as a literal revelation or simply regarding the narrative as a useful metaphor for a largely incomprehensible physical phenomenon.

The phrase "epistemological patterns" more or less supplants a term I used only once in COSMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS, that of "simulacra of knowledge:"

Thus it should be seen that the forms of knowledge within a fictional universe should not be downgraded because they do not align with what is deemed "scientific knowledge" in the real world. All forms of knowledge in a fictional universe should be deemed *simulacra of knowledge.*  The same holds true for the other functions. Audiences need not believe in Jung's psychological concepts to regard Fellini's Jung-influenced films as illuminating the human condition; need not validate the socialist fallacy of "the rise of the proletariat" in order to derive pleasure from Jack London's IRON HEEL, nor even credit Dave Sim's fusion of Judaism, Islam and Christianity to get insights out of CEREBUS THE AARDVARK.

Further, the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Finally, I will trace back my preference for "half-truths" over alleged "philosophical truths" in my definition of "affective freedom from 2016's AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

What I’ve repeatedly emphasized that the world of affective freedom is a whole package: that the ability to imagine impossible things is crucial to human nature, whether it leads to specific inventions or not. Depicting a shaman as a bird-human hybrid may not have led directly to any fantasies of personal flight, and thus the shaman-dream might have no relevance at all to the development of powered flight. I argue, rather, that whether the subjective outpourings of myth and fiction do or don't lead to useful developments, all of them are equally important in determining the meaning of human freedom.

CONCRESCENCE AND COMPLICATION

...though Cioffi's book doesn't reference Aristotle, clearly his structural summation of how anomalous presences impact on "conventional social reality" is of a piece with Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")--
ANOMALOUS ENCOUNTERS: RESOURCE.

 This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.-- INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

I've been using the imagery of wave formations whenever I've invoked the idea of amplitude, but here's another metaphor for connectedness: that of the knot-imagery put forth by Aristotle.

Since the beginnings of this blog, I've defined the significance of literary symbolic activity in terms of complexity. The idea of complexity as a value does not seem to appear as such in Aristotle's POETICS, in that the bulk of his argument focuses on art's ability to describe the good and the beautiful. The philosopher does use the categories of "simple" and "complex," but the categories reflect nothing save whether or not a given work contains what Aristotle called "the recognition scene." A simple narrative doesn't have a recognition scene; a complex narrative does.

Aristotle doesn't connect these categories to the "desis/lusis" dichotomy, which I assume was not original to him. However, I think that Aristotle found a moral value in the recognition scene, and that by the trope's presence, it gave a given narrative a greater moral potential. Thus a play like Euripides' MEDEA is simple because it possesses no turnabout scene, in which a protagonist realizes his "connectedness" to some other person or event, as Sophocles' OEDIPUS does.

For my purposes, the presence or absence of a recognition scene makes no difference. However, I find it interesting that the literary activity Aristotle calls "tying" is often rendered in English as "complication," while "untying" is often rendered with the French word "denouement," which originally had the same meaning of "unraveling."

Aristotle's logic is persuasive. Clearly he has examined, in his analytical manner, the way a given author creates interest in his protagonist's struggles by "tying" him up with one or more complications, and then "untying" him in such a way that the hero is either delivered up to good or bad fortune.

As a description of the authorial process, this is accurate, but I don't think it describes the finished literary narrative. I would certainly agree that the process by which Oedipus pieces together the clues regarding his true identity is a complex process. However, the metaphor of an unraveled knot doesn't adequately describe the conclusion of OEDIPUS REX, which is no less complex than all the knotty complications that lead up to the conclusion. The only way in which the play's denouement resembled an untied knot is in terms of a viewer's relief once he knows what has happened to the protagonist and all other significant characters. But the actual narrative process, by my lights, is either (1) simple all the way through, (2) simple in some places and complex in others, or (3) complex all the way through. Not surprisingly, these three levels of complication line up fairly well with my analysis of the levels of literary quality I called "poor," "fair," and "good." At the time I wrote that essay, I was using Aristotle's term "unity of action" to explain the presence of complexity in a given discourse; now, the concept of concrescence has largely usurped the place of said unity.

Thus, for me, every narrative is a knot, perhaps most visually approachable through this representation of different levels of complexity in molecular knots:

Now, since I've gone to great effort to expound upon the ways in which complexity can only be judged through examination of the four potentialities, I won't repeat that argument here, except to say that I've allowed for the possibility that symbolic complexity is not the only form of complexity. I've also allowed that "simplicity" has a role to play even in the most complex narratives. But focusing just on symbolic discourse, then a symbolically poor work would resemble the simple knot "A," a fair work would resemble B or C, which are more complex by virtue of having more crossings, and a good work would resemble D or E.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3

I've frequently cited this passage from Jung on the combinatory nature of archetypes:

"[The archetype's] form, however ... might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited , only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts."-- Jung, THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, p. 79.

Pursuant to the current discussion, the aspect of the archetype that can be "inherited" is only a "possibility of representation," whereas the specific representations-- say, whether or not the sun is represented as the boat of Ra or the chariot of Helios-- are limited to whatever culture conceives them. So the pure form of the archetype may be compared to Langer's presentational symbolism, which simply discerns the role of a given archetypal trope in the culture. But given that Langer's other category, discursive symbolism, is focused on the pursuit of logic and rule-making, is there any way in which a culture's elaboration of specific representations aligns with that form?

In JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE, I wrote:

In Jung's view, myth, both in its archaic and modern manifestations, is a creative response to the archetypal experience.  He opposes the idea of "myth as primitive science" advanced by E.B. Tylor and James Frazer, claiming that primitive man possesses an "imperative need... to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events."  I agree, but with the caveat that in many instances primitive humans did look for aspects of "outer sense experiences" that were regularly replicated.  This is the sort of thing Tylor mistook for primitive science; the idea that, for instance, a story about a sun-god was an attempt to understand how the real sun worked. 

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky.  However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- were sacred clues to the nature of divine power.  The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated.  For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.

Now, Jung was a psychologist, not a theoretical anthropologist, so he never focused on the ways archaic cultures utilized myth. When he pursues the rituals of alchemy, he's not especially concerned with whether or not the ancient alchemists were alluding to real or imagined chemical processes: he's concerned with how alchemical processes parallel the experiences of patients undergoing visionary states. In contrast, Joseph Campbell was more focused on the social functions of archaic religion, and thus he's arguably been a better guide to me than Jung in terms of seeing how myths in all eras encode what I called "sacred clues." I stated as much in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR:

For the majority of my essays on both THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE and NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!, I have somewhat privileged Campbell's functions in terms of analyzing the mythical representations found in both canonical and popular fiction. That's because Campbell's functions deal with functions of information-- forms he earlier termed "metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological"-- rather than pure states of consciousness. 

I would now add that Campbell's four functions are intrinsically discursive in nature, and so he proves this in this passage from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, presented in greater context here:

... there is a third factor, furthermore, which has everywhere exerted a pervasive influence on the shaping of mythologies, a third range and context of specifically human experience, of which the developing individual becomes inevitably aware as his powers of thought and observation mature, the spectacle, namely, of the universe, the natural world in which he finds himself, and the enigma of its relation to his own existence: its magnitude, its changing forms, and yet, through these, an appearance of regularity. Mankind's understanding of the universe has greatly altered in the course of the millenniums -- particularly most recently, as our instruments of research have improved. But there were great changes also in the past: for example, in the time of the rise of the early Sumerian city-states, with their priestly observers of the heavenly courses; or in that of the Alexandrian physicists and astronomers, with their concept of an earthly globe enclosed within seven revolving celestial spheres.

However, even though discursive observations like the heavens' "appearance of regularity" appear in both religious and literary myths, they have a very different function than they do in the purely discursive discipline of science. Scientific investigations can be executed within what Wheelwright called a *monosignative* language, where every word used is intended to signify a discrete phenomenon. Myth and literature have an innate tendency toward the *plurisignative,* which, as I noted in a Cassirer-quote in Part 2, is also necessary to the formation of human language.

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

ADDENDUM: I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES

In keeping with my observations in DISCOURSES WITH LIVING SYMBOLS, I've advanced the idea that when an author who is in touch with the mythopoeic potentiality-- even if only temporarily-- he displays the greatest ability to generate discourses of symbolic density. These discourses may exist either for the author's own delectation and illumination (Kafka) or, more typically, for the entertainment and/or enlightenment of his audience.

In my essay POETRY IN MOTION PART 3 I noted how Frye made a distinction between the narrative and significant values of literary narratives. To boil Frye’s argument down to its essentials, he regarded a given element as having a “narrative value” to the extent that it functioned to play a role in the way the narrative was constructed, while a “significant value” applied to an element which was meant to serve the purpose of a pattern hypothetically extrinsic to the narrative, what is usually called “theme” or “meaning.”

This week’s “near myth” essay analyzes MAYO CHIKI, a manga derived from a Japanese “light novel” series. My analysis identified a psychological pattern of clansgression, but this pattern was largely extrinsic to the narrative in which the characters are involved. This pattern can only be deduced by looking at Jirou’s psychological quirk-- that of desiring a love-partner who bears some resemblance to his younger sister—as if it were the hidden meaning toward which the story’s events point. This, then, would be dominantly a “significant discourse," since the narrative serves the primary purpose of piecing together the story's events, after the fashion of inductive reasoning, in order to reveal a meaning. 

However, it’s possible for an author to structure his narrative not to reflect a hidden significant value, but more as a commentary on other narratives. This reflects the "top-down" approach of deductive reasoning, and I term this form a “narrative discourse.”

I touched on an example of a “narrative discourse”—albeit without this terminology -- in my essay on “The InjusticeSociety of the World,” Robert Kanigher’s first story for the Justice Society of America series in ALL-STAR COMICS. Kanigher’s tale was not the first time a superhero feature had teamed up a group of villains to oppose a hero, or group of heroes, but it seems to be the first time a comics-writer used this narrative situation to create a Carroll-esque mood of inverted values. This too stands scrutiny as a psychological pattern in my quasi-Campbellian sense. However, the reader can only apprehend the particular qualities of Kanigher's narrative by comparing them to the broad patterns of other, similar narratives.

This distinction came to mind as a result of my mediations on this week's mythcomic, which will be immediately forthcoming.

ETHICS AMONG THE SUBCOMBATIVES PT. 2

In Part 1 I noted that even though two unrelated films were both subcombative, they had widely divergent attitudes toward evoking the affect of courage.

I read Mark Twain's 1896 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC for the first time this week, and I was rather surprised to find Twain, the master satirist, delivering the legend of "the Maid of Orleans" with complete seriousness. He only utilizes his trademark humor to delineate some of the side-characters in Joan's dramatic arc, but contrary to my expectations the book was surprisingly affecting.

In terms of the book's plot and main character, it rings in as a subcombative work. Joan herself does not fight, but simply leads her troops to victory up to the middle portion of the book, and the rest of the story is inevitably devoted to her martyrdom at the hands of her political and religious enemies. To be sure, however, there are a handful of strong fight-scenes in the book. Even more surprisingly, Twain endorses a view of Joan's glorious greatness that seems at odds with such down-to-earth Twain characters as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Here's how the POV character-- implicitly speaking for Twain himself, IMO-- sums up the greatness of Joan in Chapter 17, during the ardors of her accusation.

Consider. If you would realize how great Joan of Arc was, remember that it was out of such a place and such circumstances that she came week after week and month after month and confronted the master intellects of France single-handed, and baffled their cunningest schemes, defeated their ablest plans, detected and avoided their secretest traps and pitfalls, broke their lines, repelled their assaults, and camped on the field after every engagement; steadfast always, true to her faith and her ideals; defying torture, defying the stake, and answering threats of eternal death and the pains of hell with a simple "Let come what may, here I take my stand and will abide."

Yes, if you would realize how great was the soul, how profound the wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any land, pagan or Christian.

She was great in battle—we all know that; great in foresight; great in loyalty and patriotism; great in persuading discontented chiefs and reconciling conflicting interests and passions; great in the ability to discover merit and genius wherever it lay hidden; great in picturesque and eloquent speech; supremely great in the gift of firing the hearts of hopeless men and noble enthusiasms, the gift of turning hares into heroes, slaves and skulkers into battalions that march to death with songs on their lips. But all these are exalting activities; they keep hand and heart and brain keyed up to their work; there is the joy of achievement, the inspiration of stir and movement, the applause which hails success; the soul is overflowing with life and energy, the faculties are at white heat; weariness, despondency, inertia—these do not exist.

Yes, Joan of Arc was great always, great everywhere, but she was greatest in the Rouen trials. There she rose above the limitations and infirmities of our human nature, and accomplished under blighting and unnerving and hopeless conditions all that her splendid equipment of moral and intellectual forces could have accomplished if they had been supplemented by the mighty helps of hope and cheer and light, the presence of friendly faces, and a fair and equal fight, with the great world looking on and wondering.

This subcombative work, which recognizes the importance of "exalting activities," makes a marked contrast with Shakespeare's 1602 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. Like JOAN, TROILUS is a work which includes a handful of violent scenes which are not integral to the main arc of the plot. Troilus, unlike Twain's Joan, actually engages in one or two briefly described martial encounters on a battlefield. Yet Shakespeare, who sometimes emphasized the ethic of glory in earlier plays, rejects that ethic firmly in TROILUS, as I noted in my commentary here:

....in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who lets his personal guard the Myrmidons, chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor.

In Part 3 of this new series, I'll explore some of the ramifications involved when a subcombative work aligns itself with themes most often seen in combative works.

PATTERN COGNITION

In THE DOMAIN GAME PT. 2 I wrote:

The three phenomenal domains of my NUM-theory operate in what I deem an archetypal sense. Different artists are drawn toward images and tropes that promise, or at least suggest, different types of freedom. What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns. Yet both, as much as "heavy thinkers" like Gaster and Schopenhauer, are alike in searching for the formula that gives them a sense of transpersonal fulfillment-- which, in the last analysis, is what all persons, of all races and creeds, desire when they speak of their need for freedom. Yet it is a freedom that is only possible in terms of perspectivism and pluralism-- and any creed that takes a different stance is merely seeking the fulfillment of some favored group or groups.

The same "sense of transpersonal fulfillment" applies not just to "phenomenal domains," but also to any conceivable pattern of human belief or behavior.

For instance, I gain a sense of fulfillment from the patterns discussed by Northrop Frye in his critical work ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, wherein he schematized the whole of literature in terms of four mythoi, which he in turn based on the four seasons. My fascination for the wide applicability of this system does not necessarily make me think that it can necessarily explain everything, but for a critic of my inclinations, it's a damned good starting-point. Ditto the above-referenced insights of Theodor Gaster, a strong influence upon Frye, who also favored a quaternary pattern, though he was oriented on understanding the different emotional affects brought forth by different religious rituals:

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.

I've been wondering whether or not modern-day critics are even capable of thinking in these terms, however; of seeing emotional expression at the heart of all literature. As I'm sure I've said on many occasions, the only patterns recognized by most pop-culture critics is one of political ideology. Marx is the primary instigator of this pattern, and indirectly led to most of the common tropes of Marxist thought: appropriation, "the culture industry," and so on. These are, in contrast to the pluralism I advocate, positions of elitism, in part because they favor a view of art that depends on ideological correctness, and that such a view is dispensed by an educated elite that seeks to control the emotional expressivity of human beings.

Nevertheless, I don't doubt that the elitists have currently won the day, for most pop-culture criticism is unable to think outside the box of ideology. While one can find online references that give popular characters the status of "myths," there's no serious conversation about the intersection of religious myth and any kind of fiction. I can easily imagine that, for an ideological elitist, the elegant patterns observed by Frye and Gaster would seem mere arbitrary categories. I freely admit that my appreciation of the myth-critical patterns stems from my own subjective preferences, though I think that in the long run myth-criticism offers a broader perspective of art than ideological criticism. Yet I can't deny that the ideologues are also motivated by a "sense of transpersonal fulfillment" when they get the chance to point the finger at the latest sinner against ultraliberal politics. Most recently I discussed this pattern in SKINNY BUTTS AND ALL, where I observed how the cited critic's response to perceived racism was to do noting more than indulge in racist slights against the supposed oppressors.

At the same time, it may be that the ideologue's sense of fulfillment is confined to what Aldous Huxley called "horizontal transcendence," as I discussed in TRANSECENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME. Here's Huxley on defining this pattern of transcendence:

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds.

Huxley only mentions political activities as one example, but I think it's inarguable that all such activities represent a "cause wider than [one's] immediate interests." Marxist critics would of course have little interest in Huxley's concepts of "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence," since these would, like the works of Frye and Gaster, involve some validation of religion as an essential aspect of humankind's expressivity. It would be interesting, then, to explore the works of an ideologue like Noah Berlatsky, or one of his myrmidons, for the purpose of seeing how they represent proper human fulfillment as it's represented in fiction, since those expressed ideals would probably present a mirror-image of their own ideas of transcendent fulfillment.  Maybe in a Part 2--

ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 2

At the end of PART 1 I stated that I would investigate a particular archetypal trope, that of the "birth-mystery plot," across the three phenomenalities of the NUM theory. The two examples more or less introduced by Frye in the earlier quoted section from his ANATOMY were Oliver Twist (my selection of a Dickens "mystery orphan") and Ion (from the Euripides play of the same name). Within the domain of "the uncanny," the most famous example of this trope is almost inevitably Tarzan. whose origin-tale may be more widely known than that of the other two.

I'll backtrack here just enough to reference my 2013 statement here as how the uncanny differs from the purely naturalistic, both in terms of the principle of "strangeness" and in terms of a potential for combinatory power:

What Todorov fails to comprehend here is that the "quite rational explanations" in USHER do not dispel the sense of something bizarre taking place, as is seen when the "statue" in WINTER'S TALE seems, ever so briefly, to have come to life.  The slight nods to possible rational explanations in USHER do not the banish the strangeness of the House, with its face-like facade, its doomed occupants and its cataclysmic descent into the tarn.  This is the common element of all of my ten uncanny-tropes.  In each case the uncanny-author plays a game that resembles the game of the advocate of naturalism, in that he does not violate causality.  But he does so not to reify "the real," as Todorov suggests.  He does so to create a "supra-real world," one in which there is a far greater potential for combinatory sublimity than in any naturalistic work. 

Now, in PART 1 I made a brief comparison between the narrative strategies of Oliver's creator and the dramatist of ION:

the author [Dickens] will seek to emphasize that, say, Oliver Twist is the product of an unjust social system, rather than the obvious spawn of either a fiction-writer or of any mythological entities that might stand in for the author. (Again following Frye's example, the god Apollo exists to "explain" the provenance of his mortal son Ion, in more or less parallel fashion to the sacrificed giant whose death "explains" the origins of the universe.)

Now, the caveat must be made that Euripides did not "invent" Ion as the other two invented their respective characters. Nevertheless, an author who follows the basic outlines of a traditional myth-tale about a traditional character tacitly accepts the phenomenality implied in that material, and anyone who attempts to produce a mythology out of whole cloth, as Tolkien did, is likely to pursue roughly the same narrative strategies as the archaic authors, as far as how the gods function with relation both to mortals and to godly kindred.

Again I return to the definition I formulated of the three phenomenalities in response to my reading of Roy Bhaskar: 

In the NATURALISTIC category, all phenomena are both "coherent" and "intelligible."
In the UNCANNY category, all phenomena are "coherent" in that they do not exceed the cognitive//physical nature of causality, but some phenomena are not "intelligible" given that they may prove unintelligible by the standards of the NATURALISTIC.
In the MARVELOUS category, some phenomena may be neither "coherent" nor "intelligible."

(Note:my current term "coherent" substitutes for the discontinued one "regular.")

Everything in Oliver Twist's world is both coherent and intelligible, just as certain things in Ion's world are neither coherent nor intelligible. In the world that Burroughs created for Tarzan, however, he pursues some of the same goals as the naturalistic author as described in Part 1:

an author's focus upon verisimilitude means that he automatically seeks to limit the potential "affective freedom" of his work, in favor of a "cognitive restraint" based in his audience's acceptance of the rules of consensual reality. 

But Tarzan is not strictly intelligible as is Oliver Twist. I'm not speaking of incidents in the first book that strain credulity, like the ape-man teaching himself to read, because Burroughs wants his readers to believe that this miracle falls within the bounds of naturalistic possibility. Rather, it's that the author allows his character an "affective freedom" that exceeds the type of affectivity normally possible for characters in naturalistic worlds. Burroughs isn't being literal when he styles Tarzan a "forest god," but the impression of godhood is conveyed by the hero's strength, which on one hand is entirely human in its scope, and yet on the other hand has been developed to an extent most men never experience, including jungle-dwelling tribesmen who haven't been raised by apes.

Marvelous works by their nature must privilege the world of literary artifice, whether they are creating a whole world of marvelous things (Tolkien again) or just one marvelous thing in an otherwise natural-seeming world (Verne, and, in a narrative sense, Euripides). Naturalistic works privilege the perceptions, by the author and his culture, as to the restrictions of verisimilitude. The uncanny author utilizes strategies from both domains. Poe in Todorov's example of "House of Usher" allows his reader to pursue a naturalistic interpretation if he really wants it, but the author doesn't buttress that interpretation with assorted facts about the tendency of houses to sink into tarns at the least provocation.

In Part 3, I'll get back to the matter of how archetypes and artifice go together.