MY THOUGHTS ON CLIVE BARKER

 I could write overall evaluations of a lot of writers given that I've read all or most of their repertoires. But I can't do more than make general comments about English horror-writer Clive Barker. I'm currently about to finish SCARLET GOSPELS, which I'll review separately, but what I have finished didn't impress me much-- the 1985 DAMNATION GAME and the 1988 CABAL (reviewed here) and one of his short story collections. I certainly didn't feel that he was "the future of horror" as Stephen King fulsomely claimed decades ago.        

At first, I thought the only thing I didn't like about Barker was that I found most of his characters superficial. Yet I've enjoyed a lot of authors who aren't particularly good at characterization and who depend mostly on "types." But reading GOSPELS makes me realize that a lot of my problems with Barker depend on his heavy dependence on projecting his oft declared S&M fetish into his fiction. This would not be a problem if he was able to make his characters come alive, to sound as if each of them has specific motivations. But without a sense of individual character, Barker's constant barrage of hyperviolence and (usually gay) sexuality becomes wearying and takes me out of his stories. True, I sometimes have the same reaction to the works of Sade, the author whose name begat the term "sadism." But whenever I enter Sade's world, I know in advance that sex-and-violence scenarios are pretty much all he offers.                 

In my review of the last firm that Barker both wrote and directed, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, I remarked that the Barker stories I've read don't "hold together" because of his lack of ability to empathize with the world of ordinary people, in contrast to the occult demimonde in which his characters move. I have not read the story Barker used as the source of his movie HELLRAISER, but I note that in the movie Barker did an admirable job of showing how the ordinary folks Kirsty and her father get trapped in the bizarre domain of the Cenobites and their votaries. Yet Barker also scores fairly low in the realm of imaginative play when he's not depicting his sadism scenes, as the version of Hell he depicts in GOSPELS is not nearly as interesting as the one in the HELLRAISER sequel that was given to two other raconteurs, Tony Randel and Peter Atkins.                        

In conclusion, there's some irony that Barker is just as hemmed-in by his dependence on his demimonde tropes as a more conservative creator-- say, Frank Capra-- might be by his concentration on tropes of middle-class life. The moral of the story might then be, as Captain Kirk sagely said, that "too much of anything isn't necessarily a good thing."                                           

REPETITION AND PROLONGATION PT. 1

The main reason I devoted time to sussing out "the two escalations" was because the earlier-conceived term bears on my also sussing out the quantitative form of "conflict-escalation" with respect to the long neglected topic of fictional sadism. To be sure, this line of thought was generated when I began thinking about how the quantitative form of "stature-escalation" depended on duration, and this led me to think about duration's influence upon a particular type of conflict-escalation.

My most concentrated observations on sadism were made in essays like POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY, aimed at disproving the simplistic attempts of Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman to define all forms of fictional violence as "sadism." In the same month I also observed, in SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND, that the majority of audience-members are not vulnerable to becoming syndromic sadists just because they get a little jazzed reading about some criminal going on a crime-spree, which was another piece of nonsense from Wertham and Legman.

But while all forms of violence are not reducible to sadism, sadism and its "opposite number" masochism (which will have to wait for later discussion) have their own respective dynamics. 

Sadism, as previously related, is the ethical opposite of combat. Combat almost always involves two or more subjects in contention, where all have some ability for self-defense. Sadism depends upon one subject wielding control over the other subject and imparting physical (and sometimes emotional) violence upon the latter. I distinguish four patterns of fictional sadism. Two categories are the newly minted "prolongation" and "repetition," which are further subdivided (at the risk of inducing terminological overload) by my earlier categories of "the exothelic and the endothelic."

ENDOTHELIC PROLONGATION-- This type of scenario largely focuses upon one sadism-victim, or a group of victims, suffering prolonged acts of sadism, whether it's just one repeated scenario or an assortment of assaults. In fiction one of the most famous scenarios is that of Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum," in which an unnamed prisoner must endure the agonies of the titular horrors, without his even interacting with the sadistic authors of his predicament.

ENDOTHELIC REPETITION-- Repetition, in contrast to prolongation, often depicts several independent scenarios separated by assorted time-frames. One of the most famous victims of repeated sadism appears in Sade's JUSTINE. Toward the end of the book the afflicted heroine provides a long chronicle of the many persons who have tormented her just for the hell of it, a list which apparently includes whatever God rules her world. Just a partial list:

During my childhood I meet a usurer; he seeks to induce me to commit a theft, I refuse, he becomes rich. I fall amongst a band of thieves, I escape from -hem with a man whose life I save; by way of thanks, he rapes me. I reach the property of an aristocratic debauchee who has me set upon and devoured by his dogs for not having wanted to poison his aunt. From there I go to the home of a murderous and incestuous surgeon whom I strive to spare from doing a horrible deed: the butcher brands me for a criminal; he doubtless consummates his atrocities, makes his fortune, whilst I am obliged to beg for my bread. I wish to have the sacraments made available to me, I wish fervently to implore the Supreme Being whence howbeit I receive so many ills, and the august tribunal, at which I hope to find purification in our most holy mysteries, becomes the blcody theater of my ignominy: the monster who abuses and pluncers me is elevated to his order’s highest honors and I fall back into the appalling abyss of misery.

As "endothelic" describes centric icons with whose will the reader is expected to sympathize, "exothelic" describes centric icons who ought to inspire antipathy.

EXOTHELIC PROLONGATION-- Whereas the unnamed narrator of "Pit" is the sufferer, the narrator of Poe's "The Cask of Amontilado," one Montresor, shows the slow and careful progress of Montresor's plan to trap his perceived enemy Fortunato into a death-trap; that of being confined behind a wall of bricks in a catacombs, where Fortunato will, and does, suffer a lingering demise.

EXOTHELIC REPETITION-- And, to maintain parallelism, my selection here also comes from Sade, who followed up JUSTINE with JULIETTE. The latter book takes the point of Justine's sister Juliette, who prospers despite visiting pain and death on innumerable victims, the most notable of which I discussed in this essay. 

More variations to come in Part 2.

THE READING RHEUM: TORTURE GARDEN (1899)

For horror fans. the name "Torture Garden" calls to mind a 1967 film-anthology that adapted a bunch of unrelated Robert Bloch terror-tales. Even in 1967 I doubt many readers remembered the 1899 fin-de-siecle novel by French writer Octave Mirbeau. Thus I've no clue as to why any of the film's producers thought the title worth conjuring with for contemporary filmgoers, in contrast, say, to titles borrowed by Edgar Allan Poe. For my part, I'd read a few remarks about this 19th-century book in Mario Praz's study of transgressive literature, THE ROMANTIC AGONY. Yet I didn't really expect much of a story, so I didn't get round to reading GARDEN until now, though I'd had a second-hand copy lying around for over ten years.

My intuition was correct: Mirbeau's work is a nearly plotless meditation on the human fascination with diverse kinds of torture, structured much like a travelogue. There's not much question in my mind that Mirbeau was grappling with issues raised by the Grand Master of Literary Sadism, the Marquise de Sade, though Mirbeau's ambivalence to the topic makes unclear as to how much he was of Sade's party. The novel might be considered the last of the European decadent movement of the 19th century, and the fact that Europeans were still emulating Sade might be deemed a compliment of sorts, given that most of Sade's major works had been completed (if not always published) before the end of the previous century.

Sade's works are so fervid in their description of torture that they verge on falling into the domain of naturalistic horror, and even possibly even the uncanny variety at times. GARDEN, however, is too meandering to sustain a mood of horror, and despite some description of inventive tortures, Mirbeau's work is too reality-based to rise to an uncanny level of artifice.

So what's it about? After a framing-device in which several men debate morality in a French men's club, one man, whom I'll call NoName because he refuses to give one, tells the story that fills the rest of the novel, without ever coming back to the frame-story. He briefly describes himself as a young layabout who imposes on a friend and gets a sinecure to study biology in Ceylon, though he's not at all a biologist, and is really just scamming the system. 

There are assorted comments about torture before NoName tells his story, usually in the context of people talking about using extreme measures to enforce colonial dictates. Mirbeau *may * be satirizing French colonialism in these segments, or he may be simply contrasting these functional uses of torture with Sade's uncompromising fascination with the subject-- though to be sure Sade is never mentioned. However, while taking a ship to Ceylon, NoName hooks up with Clara, a wealthy young European woman. Implicitly NoName becomes her gigolo, and he abandons his plans, following Clara to her home in an unnamed city in China prior to the Boxer Rebellion.

Clara is in essence Mirbeau's take on Sade's Juliette: a wealthy woman who is unregenerately fascinated with suffering and torture. In the city closest to Clara's estate, the Chinese authorities maintain a palisade known as "the Torture Garden," wherein criminals are subjected to harsh punitive torments even though they're surrounded by meticulously managed flower-gardens, replete with peacocks. While NoName merely flirts with transgression, Clara is orgasmically obsessed with the pain of others, celebrating the Chinese for their inventiveness in this art. "No other race," says Clara late in the novel, "knows how to tame and domesticate nature with such painstaking skill." The parallel between culling both flowers and rebellious citizens will probably strike contemporary readers as a pretty backhanded compliment to the Chinese. But one might note that Mirbeau speaks only through the voice of Europeans: there are almost no Chinese characters who get any dialogue to articulate their beliefs or obsessions. I tend to think that NoName is an unserious dilettante, who merely flirts with transgressive topics yet still has vestiges of conscience. Clara-- whose total fascination with human suffering remains undiminished by the novel's end-- stands comparison with those Sade characters who manage to liberate themselves from all conscience-considerations. Since the author does seem at times to be satirizing the deeds of European colonizers, maybe there was a part of Mirbeau that envied a Sade-like being who could look upon horror without any pangs of remorse or empathy.

Just as the tortures are too realistic to stand as uncanny crimes, Clara is never bizarre enough to stand alongside the many "fatal women" who, according to Mario Praz, throng the pages of European prose and poetry during this period. The one advantage GARDEN has over most of Sade's works is that, precisely because Mirbeau may have been ambivalent on the torture-topic, he doesn't become as obsessed as Sade with chronicling acts of cruelty until they become profoundly boring. That said, TORTURE GARDEN, while it has the virtue of brevity, is still just a mediocre fiction-travelogue with a few mildly memorable passages. Despite its subject matter, it belongs neither to the genre of horror or to any category of metaphenomenal fiction. 

MYTHCOMICS: "THE ADVENTURES OF PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST" (1965-66)

Somewhere in Leslie Fiedler's voluminous writings, he asserts-- and I obviously must paraphrase-- that even though Western literature is replete with dozens of images of women suffering cruel fates at the hands of men, this does not necessarily make the women into mere victims. On the contrary, in some cases-- such as the classic English novel CLARISSA, written by one of the founders of modern prose literature-- woman's ability to survive the perils that ought to break her spirit provides proof of her *perdurability.*

"Perdurability," though not exactly a commonplace word, would almost do as well for me as "persistence," one of the two literary goal-affects I first categorized amidst these Hobbesian-Bataillean meditations. Persistence is certainly not a quality confined to females, but I'd argue that from one point of view it's possible to assert a logical-- though not to say "necessary"-- correlation between "femaleness" and "persistence," as well as a concomitant correlation between "maleness" and the other goal-affect, "glory."

I don't imagine that Michael O'Donoghue, the writer who created Phoebe Zeit-Geist, was thinking in quite these terms. My reading of PHOEBE is that it was meant as an extreme satire of all the "women in peril" stories that had permeated popular culture for decades. O'Donoghue might not have known Richardson's Clarissa from a hole in the ground (so to speak), but he almost certainly knew of the long tradition of melodramas that placed women in peril, perhaps epitomized by the 1914 film-serial THE PERILS OF PAULINE. Some of these melodramas put the woman in peril so that she could rescue herself; sometimes she is set up to be rescued by a more dynamic male character. Since O'Donoghue consistently places his heroine in situations where she cannot rescue herself, clearly he expected the audience to default to the latter formula-- for throughout the episodic storyline, Phoebe is almost never rescued in "the nick of time," or if she is, it is only to subject her to some even more terrible danger and/or humiliation.

This isn't to say that O'Donoghue was totally unaware of the more capable heroines of fiction. Indeed, according to an essay on THE COMICS JOURNAL site, the editors of the literary magazine EVERGREEN REVIEW asked O'Donoghue to do something along the lines of Barbarella, the saucy siren of French comics. Barbarella had debuted in 1962 and, according to Wikipedia, had three of her adventures translated for EVERGREEN in the same year that PHOEBE began. Barbarella wasn't exactly a tower of strength in the comics I've read, but she was sometimes capable of extricating herself from trouble, and so, assuming that O'Donoghue even looked at the translations, I'd assume that he decisively rejected that approach. If anything, O'Donoghue's approach with PHOEBE has strong affiliations with the ouevre of Sade, who liked nothing better than images of degraded women, though on occasion he does torture his fictional men as well.

So is PHOEBE ZEIT-GEIST a Sadean work? Well, sort of. Once Phoebe loses her clothes in the opening chapter, her lithe feminine charms remain on constant display throughout the narrative; not even at the conclusion, with its ironic "victory," is she allowed to put on any clothes. So O'Donoghue, whether or not he personally enjoyed his heroine's humiliation, played to the "sexploitational" tastes of some potential readers. Of course, the fact that PHOEBE appeared in a literary magazine meant that it wasn't overtly directed at pure porn-lovers-- not even to the extent that the original BARBARELLA was-- and in theory, one could interpret the trope of continuous exposure as hypothetically ironic. And although Phoebe is subjected to loads and loads of sadistic punishment-- including being killed outright-- O'Donoghue treats these torments in a much more cartoonish fashion than Sade. Sade would certainly never conjure up an Eskimo magical ceremony to restore one of his deceased victims, and if he had one of those victims beat to a pulp by a huge lesbian (O'Donoghue's cunningly named "Blob Princess"), Sade would have savored every wound. But when Phoebe endures this fate, she somehow suffers pain without having any wounds to mar her flesh, at least as rendered by Frank Springer's luscious, Caniff-style artwork.

I called the work episodic, and therefore there's no point in summarizing the faux-plot. What makes the work mythic, however, is the over-the-top inventiveness with which O'Donoghue tortures his bizarrely named heroine. He also takes a number of shots at other contemporary forms of pop culture. At one point the author teases the reader into thinking that Phoebe may be rescued by a super-competent Bond-like agent, only to have him killed out of hand before he even begins the case.

Strangely, though the satirist's intention may have been to lampoon popular fiction-formulas-- like having Phoebe facing the prospect of rape by a Komodo lizard-- there's a sense in which he reveals his own dependence on those formulas. O'Donoghue sets things up so that the reader never sees what happens to his imperiled heroine, thus making fun of the reader's desire to see the narrative played out. And yet, not fulfilling the narrative expectations is just as much a storytelling trope as fulfilling them. I would say that when O'Donoghue simply shows Phoebe surviving the ordeal without explanation, he's simply tapped into tropes like those of the animated cartoon, where the characters can survive insane violence for no reason but because the author says that they can. By conjuring up so many stock villains to menace Phoebe-- Nazis, poncey gays, lesbians, foot fetishists-- O'Donoghue gives them new life in this ironic form, rather than undermining their influence by creating new and more viable menaces. In any case, Phoebe may not really be a *femme formidable,* but she is at least a *femme perdurable.*

CROSSING THE LAWLINES PT. 5

I'll probably wind up my essays on clansgression for the time being with this entry. There are a number of other subtle ramifications of the theory, but by next week I plan to work on some new angles regarding the NUM theory and the concept of freedom.

In THE CLANSGRESSION FORMULATION I mentioned in passing that violence as much as sex could function, under the proper circumstances, to provide the reader with "the sense of being "caught up" in the experience of having boundaries broken in an explosive, irresistible state of being." Yet I have not explored the element of violence in respect to clansgression, for all of my examples have primarily focused on clansgressive sexual interactions: OEDIPUS, FANTASTIC FOUR, THE MOONSTONE, and GONE WITH THE WIND.  Given that my essay LEAD US INTO TRANSGRESSION details the ways in which the two kinetic elements can either remain separate or become melded into "impure states," the element of violence requires some exploration.

Now, as Bataille has observed, violence is essentially any activity that disrupts the workaday world, and for that reason he viewed sexuality as an aspect of violence, with which statement I do not agree. One of the most significant differences is that violence is not surrounded with nearly as many arbitrary codes as sex is, though there are some. In Part 4 I wrote:

The principle of transgression, however, stems from both the diegetic world of the narrative's characters, as created by the author, and the extra-diegetic world of the audience.

Where violence is coded into a very simple form of transgression-- Criminal A threatens Victim B with violence but is thrashed by Hero C-- there's not a lot of distinction between what the characters think about a fictive act of violence and what the audience thinks about it.  But in the "impure states," violence does become almost as complicated a matter as sex.

The two impure states as defined in the TRANSGRESSION essay were "erotic violence" and "violent sex." Although these are frequently confused, they can be best distinguished by close reading of the motive imputed to the one who commits the violence, to wit: is the agent of violence more concerned with injuring or with screwing?

Of the examples used thus far, only one of the four utilizes either of the impure states, and this is GONE WITH THE WIND. In PART 2 of my essay-series THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE, I observed that Scarlett O'Hara's deeds earned her opprobrium from both various characters in the novel and from at least some readers:

Scarlett commits many sins for which readers will want to see her punished, as do her detractors within the novel-- but for many readers this will be her worst sin: failing to love the man devoted to her, and forbidding him from her bed simply because she does not want more children. 

It seems obvious to me that generations of female readers did not take Mitchell's novel to their bosoms because they thought that it advocated spousal rape, or rape of any kind, as a general policy, though some modern ideologues have expressed such opinions. The only way that these female readers can possibly forgive Rhett's action-- or even take vicarious pleasure in it-- is if they are convinced that Rhett's motivation is honest passion, not violence. Violence certainly does shade into the rape-scene: Rhett is clearly trying to humble her, but not to cause her injury as such, even though prior to the rape he openly fantasizes about crushing her skull like an eggshell. And as I noted, Mitchell herself is implicated in the fantasy of rape, or else it would be impossible for her to portray Scarlett in post-coital bliss-- a bliss that implicitly goes beyond whatever functional, baby-making sex the couple has had before.

For a contrasting representation of "erotic violence," where the intent to injure is paramount, I turn to the novel that I cited here as an ideal example of the "bizarre crimes" trope: the Marquis de Sade's JULIETTE. Sade's violence, of course, is always aimed at inspiring erotic satisfaction through violence, but one particular scene relates, unlike the Mitchell scene, to both transgression and clansgression. Juliette, an orphan raised in a convent, escapes the world of righteous morality and becomes a happy convert to the philosophy of torment expounded by a male mentor. There follow many somewhat rote descriptions of Juliette and her fellow sadists getting off on pain and death, but only one strikes me as noteworthy. Late in the novel, orphan Juliette meets M. Bernal, her birth-father. She determines to transgress against all laws of parental respect by killing him, but first she seduces him. Then, having shown that Bernal is a massive hypocrite by society's lights, she binds him, verbally torments him, and then shoots her father through the head. To his credit as the father of a Sadean woman, M. Bernal doesn't beg for his life before he dies.  Although sex certainly figures into this episode, clearly Juliette's intent is always to injure, not to screw.


These two examples are reasonably clear-cut, but others can be confused by the question, "Is violence being used in place of sex?" In SHOOTING THE SHIRT I pointed out how often Japanese comedy-manga made use of the trope in which irate females clobbered the guys they secretly liked when said guys stepped over, or appeared to step over, some lawline. I observed:

the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male.

Often these comic versions of Juliette don't admit that violence stokes their engines. Rumiko Takahashi makes frequent use of this trope throughout URUSEI YATSURA, RANMA 1/2, and INU-YASHA, but as far as I can tell through translations, the female protagonists never express any reaction beyond feminine pissed-offed-ness-- an oddly demure reticence from an author who includes so much sex and violence in her work. Takahashi only touched such overt Sadean territory once to my knowledge, in a comic short story about a modern married couple who displayed a peculiar fetish for having violent fights in their home-- but though comic sexual stimulation is suggested, the principal emphasis is on the neighbors giving the couple hell for their disruptive ways.

Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA, though, seems to be one of the few works that eventually admits to the sexual nature of the trope, if one can trust the Tokyopop translation. In the last volume, after innumerable incidents in which Keitaro intrudes upon Naru and gets beaten on for it, the two protagonists confess their true feelings to an interlocutor. Keitaro doesn't precisely say that he gets off on masochistic treatment, but he claims that he loves peeping on Naru so much that he doesn't care that he gets beaten for it, while Naru explicitly admits that she loves both his attentions and getting to beat on him for crossing the lines.

If, as I tend to believe, Akamatsu's sado-masochistic representations explain much about the popularity of this trope, then into which "impure state" do they fall? Since intent to injure is the predominant factor, they belong principally to the domain of "erotic violence." However, unlike Juliette's unlucky papa, these victims of female violence always survive their ordeals, so they may eventually have actual sex-- although, like Akamatsu's Keitaro, even "getting the girl" in the end may turn into "getting it in the end," so to speak.

BOOLA, BOOLA, BOULEVERSEMENT PT. 2

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison.

The Break-Though... is also marked by the promulgation of a theory of revolution as a good in itself, and most notably perhaps, by a new concept of inwardness... Quite as influential as Diderot (or Richardson or Rousseau) in the bouleversement of the eighteenth century is the Marquis de Sade, who stands almost emblematically at the crossroads of depth psychology and revolution-- Leslie Fiedler, LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL, p. 32--33.

Obviously Jefferson and Fiedler are talking about two very different forms of rebellion/revolution, the first as purely political, the second as literary and cultural, though both of the latter are inextricably influenced by political developments, as per the American and French revolutions. Both authors are weighing the benefits of a revolutionary *bouleversement,* though Jefferson speaks of occasional attempts of the citizens to rebel against "encroachments," while Fiedler addresses a change in the history of cultural values, which he terms "the Break-Through"-- a change that transpired within one particular time-frame and influenced a variety of Western cultures.

Given my many admonitions against reading literature along overly politicized ideological terms-- seen prominently in a series beginning here-- it should be obvious that I'm concerned with art and literature, not with politics as such. In the OVERTHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT series, I took issue with what I called "adversarial criticism," which specialized in creatively misreading literary narratives in order to take aim at supposed political boogeymen. Nothing that I write here contradicts that philosophical stance.

However, because I am a real liberal rather than an ultraliberal, I find it necessary to situate even wrong-headed comic book elitists within the history of revolutionary concepts.  I don't believe there's any substance to Berlatsky's claim that the Superman character is a fascist or a bully, as he's stated in separate essays. In this essay I refuted Berlatsky with much the same way that I refuted Reece earlier:

I might understand your queasiness about "extra-judicial violence" if we were frequently seeing Superman descending on African villages to make the natives obey the colonial powers. But Superman's first heroic deed in ACTION #1 is to prevent an act of bullying, beating down a man who is beating his wife (can't remember if the text calls her that or not). Yet in your view Superman becomes a bully even when he stops bullying. How many real-life bullies do that-- unless, of course, it's for some ulterior motive?
I don't buy your objection to vigilantism because you're applying it only to narratives you don't like for whatever reason. Wonder Woman is just as much a vigilante as Superman; she acts with no authority save that of the goddess Aphrodite, whom I suspect would be considered extra-legal in American courts. Any number of WW stories have scenes in which WW slaps down bully-boys with the same ease that Superman does, so is she a bully? Is she therefore "not good" for the same reasons? Or does she get a pass because you agree with Marston's politics?

Readers of this blog may refer to the aforementioned thread to see if they find Berlatsky's response any more informative than I did. Still, even though I think the assertion itself is nonsense, it stems from a powerful, possibly archetypal motif:  the Reversal of Values.

Leslie Fiedler does not reference either Sigmund Freud or Karl Marx in his opening chapter of LOVE AND DEATH, though they are referenced elsewhere in the book, and I deem it axiomatic that both Freudianism and Marxism inform most if not all of Fiedler's judgments.  I've remarked elsewhere that these two "titans of tedium," as I like to style them, have enjoyed their dominion over much of Western thought because of their affective, rather than their cognitive, appeal.  Freud shocked Europe by asserting that the purity of the parent-child relationship was sullied by the brute mechanics of sexual stimulation and emotional entrainment. Marx preceded him, though, not only by "turning Hegel upside-down," as the saying goes, but more importantly, by promoting his secular revision of the archetypal concept that "the last will be first."

Of the two, Marx has been much more influential than Freud in terms of producing an overall "theory of revolution," to which many of Marx's latter-day fellow-travelers-- Adorno and Foucault, for two-- have subscribed. But there's a huge difference between the Marxist theory of revolution and that of Jefferson, much less that of how reversals work in literature.

Political comparisons first: Jefferson envisions a republic in which there will always be discontent, which will be expressed through assorted forms of rebellion, but which can be ameliorated through education and pacification of the electorate.  Marx is certainly aware that even in his imagined workers' paradise, there will continue to be conflicts within the body politic. But most later Marxists do not deal with this practical aspect of life. For them, every defense of an allegedly mistreated or marginalized subject is a step toward paradise, World Without End.

In literary studies this can become even more fatuous. Frederic Wertham remains the go-to guy for Reversing Values in the comic book medium. In his view, every hero is a bully and a fascist, irrespective as to the nature of the villains upon whom he wreaks violence.  In this Berlatsky is his earnest pupil, except insofar as he esteems Wonder Woman for promoting the politics that he Berlatsky agrees with.

In our exchange Berlatsky accuses me of wanting to promote some sort of "one truth" hermeneutic simply because I advocated giving every narrative a fair, close reading. In addition, I've consistently asserted that one of the cornerstones of my criticism is Schopenhauer's theory of will. For me the very appeal of literature is reducible to one form of "will" with "another," not a "politically correct will" with a "politically incorrect will."  Obviously this would apply to a literalist "mainstream" reading as much as to an adversarial one.

I'm also heavily invested in Bataillean transgressivity-- also produced through the influence of Freud and Marx, albeit with an artful mediation via Nietzsche. So I can only approve when Fiedler writes of his "Break-Through" that "whatever has been suspect, outcast, and denied is postulated as the source of good." But aside from some of the more hectoring practitioners of literature-- and Sade would be one of these-- most authors would not be comfortable with a single great revolution. Most authors take pleasure in being able to rebel even against rebellion, if it means telling a good story.

 Elitists, however, want only one revolution, one story-- and sadly, just one truth.

THE READING RHEUM #4: WANTED (2003)

I first read WANTED as a graphic novel compilation after seeing and enjoying the 2008 film derivation.  I say "derivation" because the film could not be called an adaptation in the true sense: it merely borrows the loose outlines of the graphic novel.  WANTED the GN concerns a pathetic wage-slave who learns that due to his heritage he can become a member of a globe-spanning network of costumed super-criminals, while WANTED the movie concerns a pathetic wage-slave who learns that due to his heritage he can become a member of a globe-spanning network of non-costumed super-assassins. 

Though the filmmakers may have any number of justifications for changing the content of their scenario, I speculate that the biggest reason was one of narrative clarity. When dealing with matters metaphenomenal, live-action audiovisual media, which must use actors to some extent, it's difficult to present huge hordes of metaphenomenal characters, as comic books frequently do.  The cinematic medium-- like its cousin, television in its serial manifestation--  is dominantly allied to what science fiction readers have called the "one gimme rule," in which for the length of the narrative the story may ask the reader to believe one impossible thing-- time-travel, an alien invasion-- but not two impossible things. 

Prose, however, has long been able to weave together many impossible things together into a single strand, ranging from archaic epics like THE ARGONAUTICA to THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, the novel that advocated believing in six impossible things before breakfast.  Ironically, the "one gimme rule" was first articulated with prose fiction in mind, but prose-- and all media dependent on the printed word, such as comics-- have always had a greater ability to entertain many impossible things, with or without detailed explanation.

The WANTED movie chose to use super-assassins-- a bunch of ordinary men transformed into a cult of killers by a secret organization's rituals and weapons--because that was the easiest narrative concept to put across in a two-hour film.  The WANTED graphic novel, however, began as a proposal to DC Comics, which would have taken the old 1970s SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS concept and cranked it up for the ultraviolence audience, imagining an alternate dimension-- evocative of, but not identical with, DC's normative universe-- in which the more numerous supervillains banded together to kill off or render helpless all the superheroes.  Further, the villains managed to erase the memories of everyone on that earth as to the former existence of superheroes.  Thus, given that ordinary law-enforcement was incapable of fighting hordes of fiends with super-weapons and super-powers, nothing restricted the supervillains but their own kind.  They formed guilds in order to rein one another in, not out of any sense of probity but simply to avoid (1) killing the "goose" of common humanity and depriving themselves of its golden eggs, and (2) drawing the attention of whatever superheroes existed in alternate dimensions.

I said above that I enjoyed the movie, and then read the GN, which I mentioned briefly in this 2008 post.  To the best of my recollection I had not read any other Mark Millar work; at most I might've known his name as one of many British (specifically Scottish) authors who became noteworthy in the 1990s.  I briefly followed up my short post with ID-IOT'S DEMISE, in which I compared the constant battles of heroes and villains in adventure-fiction to the adversarial interactions of "the ego" and "the id" in the Freudian schema.  To repeat the obvious pun once more, I found WANTED wanting in this regard:

One might think that in a world where the supervillains have successfully killed off all of the superheroes (and even wiped out humanity's memory of the event), one might see the supervillain in All His Glory: might see all sorts of weird, perverted, diabolical id-impulses on display. But I see more "id-iosyncracies" in an average issue of BATMAN than in this facile antiheroic tripe.

In addition to critiquing WANTED on the basic of its paucity of imagination, though, I want to add that its take on the human capacity for evil is far more meretricious than almost every superhero comic book ever made.  The only tool in Miller's kit is that of the Punk Who Shouted Hate at the Heart of the World, and he screws that up almost as badly as he fails to create strong villainous presences. 

It's certainly possible to imagine a world where villainy is the ruling principle.  The Marquis deSade did so, and even though Sade's vision is rife with philosophical weaknesses, he never for a moment compromises his belief that persons possessed of the will to torture and destroy others should be able to do so. 

In contrast, Millar shows just as much compromise as the wage-slave "assholes" he professes to despise.  At one point in the story, protagonist Wesley Gibson-- the fellow who is saved from life as a corporate drone, so that he can enjoy endless adventures of rape and murder-- confesses that after he made a one-man assault on a police station, killed almost everyone in the station, and then suddenly had a crying-jag.  He reflects to his bed-partner Fox that now he thinks about how he ruined the families of all the cops he killed, and observes that "maybe this 'being evil all the time' crap's just starting to feel a little forced." His bed-partner Fox, also a spree-killer, has these words of wisdom:

You really think we just go around fucking shit up all the time?  This is a global business, man,  We got our fingers in a little piece of everything and that means you gotta be disciplined.

Where a Sade character would dispel moral objections against sadistic acts with a breezy lecture about the necessity of imposing force on others in order to live, Millar dodges the issue of moral recriminations entirely.  Fox does not comment directly on Wesley's crying-jag at all; she merely says that Wesley has "hit the same wall we all hit after the first few months [of rape and murder]."  Fox counsels the same deferral of passions that motivates the original Wesley not to rebel against the people who sign his paychecks: "business"-- except that now Wesley is one of the bosses instead of one of the underlings.  It's interesting that discipline for the sake of efficiency and "time" are her watchwords:

You don't have time to rape, kill and mutilate people all the time, baby... [your father] just wanted you do what you really wanted to do with your life and sometimes that means watching TV in bed all day long and other times it's murdering some fucker.

The characters of Sade view their libertine excesses as a sort of self-actualization as well, but Sade himself is a positive zealot about tearing down the old hypocrisies of religion and morality.  In WANTED Millar, the prophet of an "idiot id," can't summon up the least interest in moral issues, even to dispel them. Fox doesn't even bother to tell Wesley that he's probably less concerned with the cops' families than with his own family traumas, which would be a logical enough conclusion given the psychobabble limitations of Millar's universe.  Implicitly the crying-jag is not actual remorse, just a physical reaction to stress.  Once Wesley has the discipline of a true killer like his father-- whose biggest guilt is that he allowed Wesley to be raised by his pacifist mother-- he will be able to sublimate any guilty reactions to the acts of rape and murder and will be able to chill out watching TV in bed all day when he so pleases.


To be sure, I only reread this graphic novel to test the accuracy of my original reaction and because I was obliged recently to agree with one of Millar's statements in this essay. I wanted to give at least one reason why I considered Millar's use of "ultraviolence" to be stupid and meretricious. Perhaps in a future review I'll cite an example that proves a little more in tune with the "expenditure" ethic of the Grand Marquis, and less with Millar's "consumption" ethic of simply consuming more consipicuously than the ordinary asshole wage-slave.

TEN DYNAMIC DAEMONS

Having put forth the idea of "coherent improbabilities" here, it occured to me that though I've given examples of particular tropes or literary works that fit this category, characters are probably more accessible as exemplars.  Thus here are ten characters to match each of the ten tropes with which I've illustrated the manifestation of the "uncanny" phenomenality.

In all but one case, I chose an exemplar who appeared during the period that gave birth to the phenomenon of popular fiction, though a few of my choices come from canonical literary works.

ASTOUNDING ANIMALS-- Moby Dick, from Herman Melville's MOBY DICK.  Melville's book technically remains within the causal realm in a cognitive sense-- that is, the colossal cetacean is constantly compared with godlike beings, but there's no evidence that he's anything but a formidable animal.  But the Great White Whale, like his obsessed co-star Ahab, dwell in a world that constantly pushes into the metaphenomenal in a purely affective sense.

BIZARRE CRIMES-- Juliette, from the novel of the same name by the Marquis deSade. Sade is, in his way, something of an apostle of naturalism to the extent that he constantly denies the ideas of divinity.  Nevertheless, for Sade as for Goethe the motto is, "In the Beginning was the Act!"  But for Sade the act is not creation, but the obsessive need to find new and more exotic ways to destroy human beings-- a need which seems embodied most strongly in the character of Juliette, the blood-hungry sister of the innocent Justine.

DELIRIOUS DREAMS AND FALLACIOUS FIGMENTS-- Alice, from Lewis Carroll's two books starring that prodigious dreamer.  Within this trope, even though causality seems to win the game when Alice wakes from her descent into meaningful nonsense, it's the dreams that become more real to us than the reality.

ENTHRALLING HYPNOTISM AND ILLUSIONISM-- Svengali, from the 1894 TRILBY by George DuMaurier.  As yet I haven't reviewed any of the films starring literature's most famous
hypnotist, though most moderns know the Svengali of the movies if they know him at all.  As noted elsewhere, both "hypnotism" and "illusionism" have the effect of waking persons that dreams do upon the dreamer; making the impossible and improbable become real for the subjects.

EXOTIC LANDS AND CUSTOMS-- Allen Quatermain, from H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel KING SOLOMON'S MINES.  The novel is famous for launching the genre of the "Lost World story," in which an archaic civilization has managed to survive in some remote corner of the world without contact with the onrush of history.  I have not read any of the "Allen" books aside from the one in which Haggard encountered Haggard's other great character, "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed," but have gained the impression that most of the other Allen books possess an uncanny phenomenality, rather than a marvelous or naturalistic one.

FREAKISH FLESH-- Quasimodo,from Victor Hugo's 1831.  Though Hugo's original novel hews closer to the genre of the "historical novel" than that of horror, the image of the hunchback-- be it Quasimodo's or that of some lesser epigone-- has become a familiar icon of horror.  In contrast to a naturalistic exhibition of a "freak of nature," as one sees in the 1980 David Lynch film THE ELEPHANT MAN, Quasimodo's physical freakishness in the novel is constantly tied to the dark nature of humankind as a whole.

OUTRE OUTFITS, SKILLS, AND DEVICES-- These three aspects do not always occur together in a given character, though I group them together because weapons and costumes, as much as a character's physical skills, are extensions of his persona as an uncanny spectre.  One character who combines all three in significant fashion is The Lone Ranger, spawned by a 1933 radio series.  Although the hero moves through a largely naturalistic world in most of his incarnations, the very notion of an Old West champion able to dispense justice despite wearing a bandit's mask and firing silver bullets with flawless accuracy, is a figure who resides only in an uncanny domain.

PERILOUS PSYCHOS-- Norman Bates, from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel PSYCHO.  Though Jack the Ripper is a more famous psycho-killer, he's disallowed here by virtue of being a real character, however mysterious.  The Norman birthed by Bloch and midwifed by Hitchcock seems to have the fictional psycho who, directly or indirectly, spawned the greatest number of imitators.  Some of these may be considered merely naturalistic versions of the original, as with the current BATES MOTEL teleseries.  But an uncanny psycho is always discernible by his ability to invoke more "dread" than simple physical "fear."

 PHANTASMAL FIGURATIONS-- The Phantom of the Opera, from Gaston Leroux's 1909 serial novel of that name.  Leroux also employs the trope "freakish flesh" for this famed monstrous presence, but the trope that most informs the novel is the character's ability to lurk beneath the Paris Opera House, pretending to be "the Opera Ghost."  Regardless as to whether readers believed or did not believe in the existence of this particular ghost at the outset, the Phantom remains far more than the sum of his impostures.

WEIRD SOCIETIES AND FAMILIES-- Fu Manchu, first appearing in Sax Rohmer's 1913 MYSTERY OF FU-MANCHU.  Admittedly, even in that first novel, Fu Manchu displayed more "marvelous" characteristics than any of the other characters cited here, in that he often controlled assorted weapons of "mad science." At base, though, Fu Manchu's greatest appeal to readers was one that did not depend on the marvelous elements of the series: his status as a sort of "Alexander the Great" of Oriental Evil, in that his "Si-Fan" organization embraced a wildly diverse group of Asian fiends-- Indian thuggee, Burmese dacoits, the Sea-Dyaks of Borneo, and so on.  This vast conspiracy by itself stands as one of the period's best evocations of a "weird society" that goes beyond the bounds of a mere criminal organization, and sometimes seems more like a "Pandemonium" presided over by the Satanic genius.

MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS, AND STORIES TOO PT. 2

Though I'd been reading Kant off and on over the past twenty years, I'll readily admit I didn't invoke him often in the early years of this blog, aside from drawing on his logic to come up with my term "metaphenomenal." I didn't make comparisons between Old Immanuel and any of the scholars who had provided primary influences on my theories, such as Frye, Jung, and Cassirer-- for all that Cassirer himself was a loyal post-Kantian, and Jung probably owes more than a small debt to Kant's categories.  I didn't start assiduously studying the possible benefits of Kant until 2011.  For that I have to thank in part the wrongheaded misapplications of Kant by one Douglas Wolk, for having spurred me to delve more deeply into Kantian philosophy.  Still, even without Wolk,  I think I would have forged pretty much the same link between "sublimity" and "sense of wonder," given my considerable interest in that aspect of literature.

Now, of course, a great deal of my current theory incorporates Kant's commentary on art and sublimity, as well as parallel thoughts by authors like Burke and Schopenhauer, and a reader can't swing a cyber-stick around here lately without encountering discourse on "might" and "dominance", etc.  However, though I wasn't invoking Kant much back in 2008, I find it of archetypal relevance that I touched on elements very like the Kantian concepts above in a series of essays whose purpose was to refute the Wertham-Legman theory of literary sadism.

I began in THEORY OF SADISM by disputing the validity of the Freudian paradigm of sadism, which clearly influenced both Wertham and Legman, as well as the much more sophisticated but still erroneous take of Gilles Deleuze.

Though I agree with Deleuze in his distinctions between sadism and masochism, I think that both Freud and Deleuze are guilty of over-intellectualizing the somatic aspects of these sexual syndromes. "Disavowal" is just another intellectual construct devised to emphasize "absence" rather than "presence," thus putting both thinkers in line with similar types like Sartre and Lacan. I would emphasize more the aspect of bodies clashing against bodies, which IMO is the main reason that either activity summons up associations of sexual excitement. With this caveat in mind one can schematize the respective attitudes so: the pure sadist wants to actively inflict his power/strength upon others without opposition; the pure masochist wants to have the power/strength of others inflicted upon him, albeit under controlled conditions. I prefer the term "strength" to the now-dated term "phallic power" employed by Freud and Deleuze, since the former term does not limit itself to the phallically-endowed gender.

As a side-point I would later reference the fascination of "clashing bodies" within the framework of Georges Bataille's concept of "sensuous frenzy," a metaphor that could subsume both sex and violence.

Within the essay called POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY, it seems that I anticipated Kant's formula of "might" as applied to a literary context, described in MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS PT 1 as the type of fiction that unleashes a superior force upon inferior forces-- though of course I didn't say anything in 2008 about finding this form of narrative to be statistically dominant.

... most current analysts of genre would tend to see "crime" as a distinct genre, almost entirely focused on the depradations of 20th or 21st-century gangsters, usually in an urban environment. Wertham and Legman have a good rhetorical reason to emphasize "crime" as applying across the board, for the specific crime genre usually does emphasize the criminal rather than his law-abiding opponents, and could be, with some small fairness, accused of lining up with the paradigm of the Marquis deSade. Admittedly, Sade's stories are usually about victimizers who capture and then torture victims for pleasure, rather than gunning down little old ladies in the street as did the comic-book gangsters during the heyday of crime comics. Still, one may grant that the essential Freudian paradigm seems common to both: the aggressor vents his aggression on the helpless, and in theory the reader of crime comics enjoys and internalizes the spectacle, "unless he is a complete masochist," as Legman helplfully tells us.

A paragraph later, I disputed Legman and Wertham's oversimple identification of this one-sided contest with the triumphant combat-scenarios of heroic adventure.

Now, while the jury may remain out on the question as to whether the adventure-genre can inspire any sort of sadistic vibe in their audiences-- a question I'll address more fully in a future piece-- it seems obvious to me that when heroes fight villains in adventure-tales, the narrative action could not be less like a lynching, much less a Sadean sadist torturing helpless victims or a gangster shooting down old ladies in the street. Wertham and Legman dance around the difference by trying to make it sound as if the villains are merely stand-ins for despised minorities and the like, which argument remains a linchpin of Marxist oppositional thought, both in modern comics-criticism and elsewhere. But neither author can totally expunge this difference of narrative action: in the adventure-genre, *the villain can defend himself.* He may be fated to lose the struggle-- indeed, until recently he always did-- but the struggle itself is essential to the adventure-genre, as it manifestly is not with the crime genre. As Wertham and Legman both point out, the crime-genre books usually ended with a last-minute destruction of the rampaging crook as a "sop" to morality. But the struggles of hero and villain in the adventure-genres-- best represented in comic books by the superhero-- are not thrown in at the last minute. Narratively, structurally, such physical struggles are the selling-points of the genres, and so cannot be conflated with either the crime genre or the Sadean paradigm by any truly rational approach.
 

I feel sure that when I pointed this elementary difficulty in the reasoning of the two anti-comics authors, I had no idea of invoking the Kantian categories of sublime force.  Now, given my current line of thought-- that the formula "superior force is arrayed against inferior forces" is the one that most dominates popular storytelling-- does that mean that the dominant form of popular fiction is of a sadistic nature?

On that matter, deponent saith not-- except to say that if it's probably no less true of canonical lit-fiction than pop-fiction.  Camille Paglia devoted her book SEXUAL PERSONAE to that argument, and whereas one could quarrel with some of her terms, her findings would suggest that sadism can manifest quite as well in a world where no "might" manifests-- say, the works of Henry James or Honore de Balzac-- as in worlds with a very definite "mighty" presence, which we see in ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and MOBY DICK.

So where does that leave the concept of "dominance?"  I stated above it's a given that the victory in most "combative" stories will go to the character who embodies the force of life-- or who at least comes closer to it than his opponent.  But even allowing for this pre-ordained victory, it's clear that the readers desire to see the hero *earn* his dominant status following a struggle of powerful equals-- a struggle goes against the grain of the sadistic concept.  This isn't to say that the "sensuous frenzy" of sadism doesn't have some place the world of the "combative" form of conflict.  But clearly, contra Legman and Wertham, violence takes a radically different form in the idiom of the adventure-hero.  It's because stupidities like those of Legman and Wertham remain pervasive that there remains a need to suss out the many complexities of conflict and combat, even if the sussing-out is likely to fail, in keeping with the old adage:

"Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain."

STINKING ULTRALIBERALLY

On the essay to which I’ve linked under JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT, the blogger henceforth known here as Colin Liar (no implied relation to Billy Liar) raised the question of my politics.  He went so far as to accuse me of a “faith-based” orientation, even though neither of the essays to which Liar responded (or any other essay on Sequart) concerned religion.  This accusation, while incredibly stupid even by the standards of the famed trope “someone is saying something stupid on the Internet,” prompts me to some observations about the nature of ultraliberal ideology.

I identify myself as a liberal, but I distance myself from all those who let liberal ideology do their thinking for them.  I consider such people to be “ultraliberals.”  Their responses to any sustained argument invariably comes down to quoting chapter-and-verse of whatever manifesto they favor.  This rote response renders them common kin with their supposed enemies, the “ultraconservatives.”

While I have written essays on religion on THE ARCHIVE, I feel reasonably sure that Liar read none of these in making his baseless accusation.  It’s far more likely that, given that he had simplistically labeled me a conservative because I opposed a particular liberal position—that of feminist Kelly Thompson—it stood to reason in his pea-brain that I must be opposing said liberal cause in the name of religion.  Obviously, to one governed by rote response, it goes without saying that all conservatives expouse religion, while no liberals do.

For me neither the total corpus of all things liberal nor the total corpus of all things conservative can be reduced to such pat formulas—though both ultraliberals and ultraconservatives manage to reduce themselves to formulaic creations.  Both “ultra” types suffer from a profound attachment to their formulaic responses, an attachment that has its origins in unresolved fear.

On a CBR messboard, I gave my terse (for me) answer to the question, “Why do we believe what we believe:”

We all believe what we believe because we're either reacting to fear of something that threatens us personally, or because we see that threat extended to a person or persons with whom we sympathize.

The extent to which a person will not hold reasoned discourse on a given topic marks the intensity of that fear.

The statement’s implications ally it loosely with the Adlerian theory of compensation, but hopefully with more of Adler’s original subtlety.  Adler realized that the sense of being threatened by outside forces was intrinsic to the nature of psychic formation, but he distinguished between ‘positive compensation,” which afforded the individual (and by extension, his society) some palpable advantage, and “negative compensation,” which was merely regressive in nature.  Thus when I characterize ultraliberals and ultraconservatives in terms of “unresolved fear,” I’m distinguishing that from a stance in which the subject confronts his fears with some open-mindedness, at the very least not resorting to empty rhetoric, or, of course, lies.

Now, when I made my original objections to the Kelly Thompson essay, one might say I was addressing a particular “fear” of mine.  The reforms for which Thompson called didn’t threaten me directly, since I don’t think Thompson’s essay is going to have any measurable effect on the marketing of direct-market comic books to a dominantly male audience.  But I do see her essay playing to certain ultraliberal positions, which I’ll examine more fully in another essay, and so I responded, knowing I wasn’t likely to convince anyone but still wishing to have my contrary say.  One could certainly disagree with my logic and conclusions without being an ultraliberal, but it’s impossible to do so by referring to stock arguments.

Take as a further example Colin Liar’s scorn for two intellectuals cited in an unrelated essay of mine: Nietzsche and Sade.  For Liar any interest in these two figures must be proof of some demonic desire to degrade women. 

Now, a half-intelligent liberal opposed to my views—or a half-intelligent conservative, for that matter—might have justified this fatuous position by quoting selected passages from the two authors. He might have quoted one of the most controversial passages from THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA: “You are going to women?  Do not forget the whip!”  As for Sade, that’s even easier: one can hardly turn a page in Sade without finding the author describing the delights of torturing women (though a few pages allow for some masculine victims).

This position would have ignored the fact that both authors have been reclaimed to some extent by feminism.  One example of the reclamation of Nietzsche is the 1994 academic essay-collection NIETZSCHE AND THE FEMININE, in which roughly half of the contributing authors were unquestionably female. (Oddly, one author sports the same gender-ambivalent name as Ms. Thompson, “Kelly.”)  As for Sade, Angela Carter’s THE SADEAN WOMAN would refute a unilateral conflation of Sade and anti-feminism.

But ultraliberal Colin Liar doesn’t even mount the half-intelligent arguments.  He is so awash in his stock responses that he feels he can denigrate both authors in cavalier fashion and that none of his readers will demur—which, as of this writing, none of the Sequart respondents have.  Colin Liar shows supreme contempt for his audience by mounting such flimsy, not-even-half-intelligent arguments.  Their response thus far has been to roll over like dogs and ask for more.

Moreover, Liar doesn’t even realize how he’s contradicted his own position re: my “faith,” since even a half-intelligent opponent would know that neither Nietzsche nor Sade fit into a “faith-based” philosophy.

And this is my fear: that ultraliberals of such mammoth incompetence will someday become the norm in comics-criticism.  THE JOURNAL is bad, but at least it’s still half-intelligent.  What brave new comics-world can we foresee, if numbskulls like Colin Liar represent its dominant thought?

While Kelly Thompson’s essay is nowhere as massively idiotic as Colin Liar’s, she does endorse an ultraliberal position.  I’ll be analyzing a few more aspects of her problematic essay in future installments.

     

ADDENDA: I knew I shouldn't bother looking at Colin Liar's own blog, but I posted this anyway and wanted to put it here too, in the likelihood that he'll just erase it and so prove himself a coward as well as a moron and liar.

No time bother sorting through the above comments, most of which are crap-- and I especially wouldn't bother on a blog where I could be easily censored, but here's a response to Tordelback's comment:

"Your demolition of the childish whining of Mr. Philips was a pleasure to read, Colin."
If Colin Liar "demolished" me so well, why hasn't he responded to my counter-assertions in the comments-thread?

One word answer;

Chickenshit.

RAPT IN PLASTIC

In SUPERHUMAN ALL TOO SUPERHUMAN I used the William Moulton Marston WONDER WOMAN as my exemplar of the use of "dynamic violence," with attention to the fact that what makes the violence in WONDER WOMAN "dynamic" is that the characters possess some degree of interiority, of a capacity for transformation that has consequences for the way conflict and violence play out in the story's structure.

For my example of the opposite use of violence, the "static" kind, I offer up Jack Cole's Sadean PLASTIC MAN.

To say that the Cole PLASTIC MAN is esteemed over the Marston WONDER WOMAN would be putting it mildly. There are some good reasons for this, for though the art of H.G. Peter has been dismissed unfairly by many critics, there can be no doubt that Jack Cole was the more innovative of the two artists. Consequently, it's Cole's eyeball-stretching depictions of his "India Rubber Man" that caused a highbrow type like Art Spiegelman to co-author a book on Cole's creativity with collaborator Chip Kidd.

Nevertheless, the exceptional nature of Cole's artwork is of secondary consideration to this essay, which deals with the nature of violence in Cole's work.

Now when I say that I find Cole's work-- both on PLASTIC MAN and other creations-- to be "Sadean," I don't mean that I believe that Cole was literally turned on by his own images of death, torture and mayhem, as the Marquis de Sade reputedly was by his own autopornography. I do however think that Cole was personally fascinated by violent and transgressive materials. I'm sure that on one level he *may* have viewed the labor of grossing out the kiddies as just another aspect of a job, but even so Cole doesn't seem as distanced with such material as, say, his contemporaries Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Around the same time PLASTIC MAN got started, Simon and Kirby could ladle out bucketsfuls of juvenile-appropriate gore and grue in Timely's CAPTAIN AMERICA. And yet the two of them could, without muss or fuss, transition to a "clean" style of violence the moment they started working on features like NEWSBOY LEGION for DC Comics, while Cole continually pursued transgressive images throughout his 14 years in comic books and on into his work for PLAYBOY, in which Paul Tumey of COLE'S COMICS finds "themes of virility and impotence, wholeness and fragmentation."

In support of Tumey's analysis, one finds that even in the first year of PLASTIC MAN, when Cole was still finding his way with the new genre of the superhero, images of violence, death and grotesquerie abound, next to which even the grim BATMAN stories seem rather tame. Plastic Man's first major villain-- a very butch (and implicitly lesbian) woman named "Madame Brawn"-- appears first in PC #4 and makes her first and last comeback in #5, where she dies when she takes a fall and hits her head on a spike. PC #6 includes a victim whose hands are cut off and then used by evildoers for malicious mischief; PC #9 features a villain named "Hairy Arms," who appears to have a shrunken torso out of proportion with the rest of his body. And

then there's POLICE COMICS #11. The cover at left suggests playful fantasy-slapstick, but inside is neck-breaking, bodies blown apart, brain transplantation, and a giant who (a) walks on his hands because he can't walk on his useless legs, and (b) tries to eat Plastic Man alive.

Now, pound for pound Marston's WONDER WOMAN may be no less violent, but as with my comparison of STAR WARS and ALIEN in this essay, WONDER WOMAN never seems as transgressive because the violence is of the *clean* variety. (And if anyone cares, with respect to the other category mentioned in said essay, both works belong to the "spectacular" rather than "functional" category in terms of whether the violence is a means or an end in the story.) But an additional reason as to why WONDER WOMAN might appear less transgressive is precisely because the feature so frequently focuses on the interiority of the characters, with their melodramatic miracles of personal transformation, their better living through the chains of lovingkindness.

There's nearly no interiority in the stories of Jack Cole. Cole gives Plastic Man a couple of stories where the hero expresses his guilt over his antisocial acts as Eel O'Brien, but those are soon forgotten, and, as Paul Tumey points out, the very identity of Eel O'Brien disappears in time as well. Both villains and victims know themselves but slenderly, and so have barely any rational motive for getting involved with criminal doings. The non-body aspect of symbolism only occasionally appears in Cole: often it seems like nothing but body, body, body. Bodies hit, bodies stab, bodies kill or get killed (though Plastic Man seems to stay above the carnage, his unique physique in its way as invulnerable as that of Superman).

Of course that invulnerability is certainly key to understanding the Sadean meaning of PLASTIC MAN. Physically the hero is as above the sufferings of victims and villains, loosely in the same way that a Sade protagonist's money and aristocratic standing put him above those he debauches. The curse of ordinary mortality is what Tumey calls "fragmentation:" only a fantasy-body can be absolutely above it.

Given the unique viewpoints of Marston and Cole respectively, it's not surprising that later iterations of their most famous characters have failed to duplicate the complex symbolisms at their heart. However, of the two WONDER WOMAN has been treated somewhat better. Even when latter-day raconteurs abjure following Marston's specific programs, often the essence of gender-conflict still informs their stories, and invariably some aspects of the Marston mythology are used, with whatever success.

Cole's PLASTIC MAN suffers a more peculiar form of erasure, for with that character latter-day raconteurs labor to imitate only the aforementioned formal aspects of the artwork-- how many crazy shapes can Plastic Man assume-- and the elements of goofy slapstick. It's almost as if they never read the actual Cole stories, but only looked at the pictures. It seems odd that in these days of superhero decadence and the dawning of adult pulp comics, even Kyle Baker's PLASTIC MAN should resemble LOONEY TUNES more than the violent and Sadean world of Jack Cole.

THE GENRE-GENDER WARS PART 3

"This book takes the point of view of Sade. the most unread major writer in western literature... Sade follows Hobbes rather than Locke. Aggression comes from nature; it is what Nietzsche is to call the will-to-power... As Freud, Nietzsche's heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead."-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 2.

"I follow Freud, Nietzsche and Sade in my view of the amorality of the instinctual life"-- Paglia, SP, p. 14.

In contrast to the way the Freudian-influenced Fredric Wertham brackets Sade and Nietzsche as being hostile to his concept of the social commonweal, Camille Paglia brackets Sade, Nietzsche and Freud as prophets of a salutary realization of the aforesaid "amorality of the instinctual life." This bedrock of amorality then proves of great significance with respect to her theory as to how all art, canonical and popular, partakes in Nietzsche's concept of "spiritualized cruelty," also quoted in an early chapter of SEXUAL PERSONAE, and which I covered somewhat in Part 2 of this essay-series. Paglia's theory is a challenging one with considerable importance to pluralist aesthetics, coming only third in importance to the contributions of Frye and Fiedler. However, does Paglia do justice to Nietzsche's concept of spiritualized cruelty by associating it with Sade and Freud? Do these three "instinctualists" really belong in the same category?

Sade, the only fiction-writer in the trinity, is ironically the one who shows the least imagination in propounding his philosophical/literary cosmos. Sade's fantasies of rapine and murder range from the inventive to the tedious, and are exceeded only by the author's ceaseless railings against religion and social convention.

In contrast, Freud wrote as an empiricist of a different stripe, as he regarded all literary efforts as compensation for the repressed "wish-dreams" of his Oedipal development-theory. Freud had no more belief in God than Sade did, but Freud firmly believed that the illusion of belief was necessary for society, while his interest in sadism and masochism seems to have been purely clinical.

Nietzsche, the prophet who announced that God was dead, did seem to believe in a Sade-like cruelty that he found at the heart of higher culture. However, Sade is almost entirely focused on the thrill of hurting other people, with only rare exceptions in which one tormentor might whip another for a bit of painful (but non-fatal) titillation. Nietzsche's concept of spiritualized cruelty involves the artist's "over-abundant enjoyment of one's own suffering," which seems to involve a deeper mental transformation than anything a Sade protagonist might contemplate. It's worth noting that later in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL Nietzsche even allows for the possibility that an *ubermensch* may choose to "aid the unfortunate," as a Sade character would never do, though a Nietzschean spirit would do so not from pity but from his very super-abundance of energy.

For this reason I perceive that the "amorality" of a Nietzsche is far different from that of a Sade or Freud. Because Sade's "sovereign men" are as incapable of transformation as the elements of Freud's "id," I would say that theirs is a *static* amorality/cruelty, while Nietzsche's is a *dynamic* amorality.

Thus I can't agree with Paglia's implication that all cruel cats are grey in the dark: given a certain light, we do see some differences between static and dynamic formations. Paglia's Sade-dominated concept is perfectly fine for works, canonical or popular, that are principally static in their aesthetics. Thus her analysis is Spenser's "hierarchical" FAERIE QUEENE remains one of her strongest essays.

Her weakness shows, however, when she tries to apply a static model to a more dynamic creation, as with her chapter on Shakespeare. To take on her briefest analysis, she pronounces TITUS ANDRONICUS to be a "slapstick comedy."

True, this verdict does at least emanicpate TITUS from the curse of "high seriousness" attached to all things Shakespearean, and admittedly the 1999 film adaptation of the play does flirt with arch humor. But tempting though it may be to see the tit-for-tat violence of Titus and Tamora in terms of a Three Stooges short, there's no place in this conception for the moving drama of Aaron the Moor surrendering his knowledge of Tamora's misdeeds in order to save his infant son, even though the villainous Moor knows that he himself must perish. Thus, though TITUS is perhaps not nearly as successful a drama as other bloody-minded Bard-offerings, the play deserves a more dynamic, more truly Nietzschean conception of its necessary cruelty and amorality.

Next up: static and dynamic assessments of cruelty in-- what else-- contemporary comic books. Expect some references to "adult pulp" if not full-on "superhero decadence."

THE GENRE-GENDER WARS PART 2

The more atrocious the hurt [which the strong individual] inflicts upon the helpless, the greater shall be the voluptuous vibrations in him... it is now that he makes the greatest use of the gifts Nature has bestowed upon him.-- One of Sade's many identical mouthpieces, JULIETTE, p. 119.

Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty—this is my proposition; the "wild beast" has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely become—deified. That which constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; that which produces a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity, indeed fundamentally in everything sublime up to the highest and most refined thrills of metaphysics, derives its sweetness solely from the ingredient of cruelty mixed in with it."-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Section 229, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

Disparaging references to both Sade and Nietzsche are scattered throughout Frederic Wertham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, and the good doctor isn't any better at distinguishing the differences between them than he is at sussing out differences between different comics-genres. But whatever common ground the two philosophers share (including, apparently, a liking for the word "voluptuous" in connection with "cruelty"), such distinctions are important. Wertham is long gone, but one still encounters new versions of his simplistic view of both philosophers as fascist power-mongers, to say nothing of his characterization of comic books.

Even from these two quotes, though, it should be clear that the two men are not coming from the same place.

Sade's "strong individual," as much as the "weak individual" on whom he also discourses, is a fixed entity; the recipient of "gifts" or tendencies bestowed by Nature. Even Sade's concept of "voluptous vibrations" is based in the positivistic science of his day with regard to concepts of neurology. To return once more to the Octavio Paz Dichotomy, Sade is concerned only with "Body."

Nietzsche, however, is advocating not physical inertia but a transformation taking place within the dynamics of the human mind: i.e., of "Non-Body." Cruelty, which focuses first upon a fascination with bodily suffering, is an "ingredient" within the spectrum of "higher culture," but it's one that must undergo the alchemical-sounding "spiritualization and intensification" in order to partake of "everything sublime."

Most pundits who decry violence in the comics, whether the violence may be dominantly sexual or nonsexual in character, tend to project the Sadean ideal onto the patron of violent fiction, with little if any reflection as to the role that the element of violence has played in "higher culture." SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT complains that a CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED comic book dumbs down HAMLET to the level of bloody swordfights, but says nothing about the fact that there ARE bloody swordfights in HAMLET, not to mention poisoning, a suicide and diverse offscreen murders. In what way does a pundit such as Wertham enjoy an Elizabethan play such as HAMLET and somehow ignore its bloody-mindedness? The answer will never be known in Wertham's case, but one may assume that the way involves some sort of mental alchemy corresponding to Nietzsche's spiritualization and sublimation.

Nietzsche himself was probably not very interested in anything but "higher culture," though some scholars, following remarks made by Antonio Gramsci, have asserted that Nietzsche's *ubermensch* concept had its roots in the "pop culture" of his time, specifically Dumas' THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. However, some moderns have managed to adapt Nietzsche's theories in interesting new ways, so as to show that the creative alchemy extends across the board, finding expression in both "low" and "high"-- as I'll demonstrate in Part 3.