WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT 4

 In the previous three installments of the WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES series, starting here, I tried to distinguish two traditions of metaphenomenal storytelling thusly:

"Worldies," as I conceive them, may possess all manner of supernormal powers, but they seem to be tied to a commonplace representation of "the world," in much the same way that prose SF stories take place in logically consistent worlds with one or more "wonders" in them. "Weirdies," though, exist BETWEEN the commonplace world and another, twilight realm wherein nothing is logical or consistent. I relate Aldiss' use of "weirdies" to the origins of the word "weird," taken from an Old English word meaning "fate," which connotes an illogical order superimposed over mundane existence. 

I'd revise this now to reword a "realm where nothing is logical or consistent" because it sounds too much like what I've written about "nonsense-fantasy" in my three-part AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE, starting here. The "weirdie genres" I was addressing-- principally horror, magical fantasy and science-fantasy-- aren't foreign to logic, much less consistency.

What I should have written was that the "order superimposed over mundane existence" is one that has more to do with an emphasis upon subjective (or "intersubjective") feeling, as opposed to what is supposedly objective fact. In this essay I wrote of 'Plato's synopsized view of Art: a "shadow of a shadow," the originary shadow being the phenomenal world, which is itself "cast" by the Eternal Forms. But for Plato, the Forms were objective reality. Centuries later, materialist philosophers would regard all the phenomena associated with "the real world" as the only measure of objectivity, while all things subjective were at best epiphenomenal.' Plato of course derives loosely from a long tradition of both religion and philosophy in which the world of the objective arose from abstractions with emotional tonalities, like Empedocles' "Love and Strife," or, going back even further, to the world being born from giant eggs or the bones of giants. 

A more correct phrase would be to say that "normative science fiction" follows the conception of Western science, in which all sorts of wonders may appear, but they're conceptually grounded in the notion that the world proceeds from natural causes, with all internal subjectivities being epiphenomenal to such phenomena. But in early religion and philosophy, the world of natural things is the epiphenomenal world, and the subjectively tinged abstractions are the base phenomena. 

The "worldlies" assume a world where emotional subjectivity is secondary to physical reality. The "weirdies," though, emphasize subjective tonality. In the genre of horror, "mad science" is not really the same sort of science one sees in Robert Heinlein or John W. Campbell. It's science refracted through the subjectivities of the scientists: of Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau. This parallels the way magical fantasies operate as well, whether they take place in far-removed magical eras, like sword-and-sorcery, or in modern times, like fantasy-comedies in the Thorne Smith mold.

So in the "weirdies" there is a logic and consistency that derives from how writers and their readers interpret the worlds of the intersubjective. The nonsense-fantasies of Carroll and others are intentionally more erratic, seeking to avoid the appearance of consistency, to depict worlds where things happen "just because." Arguably the better exponents of nonsense-fantasy can't help but project subjective fantasies that have intersubjective relevance-- Alice's fears of either being eaten or of eating something with calamitous effects-- but those fantasies seek to project the APPEARANCE of randomness, in contrast to any of the fantasy, horror, or science-fantasy authors thus far mentioned.                        

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 1

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

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

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

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

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

  

THE GREAT SUBLIMITY SHIFT

 The PRELUDE to this essay should explain why the concept of "the sublime" is so important to the history of metaphenomenal literature. What now follows is more in the nature of my reworking some of the categories in my personal literary theory.  

Following some of the concepts laid forth by both Carl Jung and Northrop Frye, it's become a rock-solid assertion of my theory that all literary works are comprised of a lateral meaning (this concerns what things happen in the text) and a virtual meaning (this concerns how things happen in the text). Both can be as simple, or as complex, as the author of a work desires these meanings to be. Over the years I have sought to bring the lateral/vertical concepts into a perceived harmony with other categories, particularly in the 2023 essay MIGHT AND MYTH and in the 2025 essay CORRELATING COGITATIONS.  Both essays are largely still valid, but there are some problems with my coordinations between the two modes of sublimity that I deduced from my reading of Kant's CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. I no longer believe this passage from MIGHT AND MYTH:

the quanta I now call "excitations" align well with what I've called "the dynamic-sublime," while the quanta I call "correlations" align well with the "the combinatory-sublime."

Nor these two from CORRELATING COGITATIONS:

That the ontocosm of a literary work includes "All modalities of THE DYNAMIC-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MIGHT."

That the epicosm of a literary work includes "All modalities of THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MYTH."

The respective terms ontocosm and epicosm still incorporate all lateral meanings and all vertical meanings, respectively. But I was incorrect to correlate the ontocosm with the dynamic-sublime, and the epicosm only with the combinatory-sublime. 

I might not have made this error, had I more fully concentrated upon another duality of equal relevance, one I did mention in the 2023 essay but not in the 2025 one. Here's the mention from 2023, which immediately follows the 2023 quote from above:

Both potentialities are also more strongly associated with the non-utile activities of "play," while the "secunda" potentialities are primarily about helping the subject survive and prosper through the hard work of discrimination. 

What I failed to do was to re-assess was the extent to which the four potentialities as a whole aligned with the two very different modes of the sublime. I've now decided that, whatever Kant meant with his modes of the sublime, mine apply to the different ways in which human beings approach the "non-directed thinking" of play and the "directed thinking" of work.

The combinatory-sublime is first and foremost applies to the subject's experience of plenitude of forms, which in my system takes the place of Kant's "mathematical-sublime." Thus I now find that this form of the sublime takes in the least "directed" modes of play, which would be (1) the excitations of the kinetic potentiality, and (2) the correlations of the mythopoeic potentiality. Conversely, the most directed modes of play apply to (3) the emotions of the dramatic potentiality, and (4) the cogitations of the didactic potentiality.

I may explore these matters more thoroughly later, but my new categorical alignments go as follows:

KINETIC-- aligned with the ontocosmic combinatory mode

DRAMATIC-- aligned with the ontocosmic dynamicity mode

MYTHOPOEIC-- aligned with the epicosmic combinatory mode

DIDACTIC-- aligned with the epicosmic dynamicity mode           

 

   

    

PRELUDE TO THE GREAT SUBLIMITY SHIFT

“We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life.”

― Maurice Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble 

I'll be writing more about the impending "shift" in some of my literary categories in the next post. This post provides a history of the concept of "the sublime," supplementing much of what I've already written here about the concept's appearance in the works of such 18th-century critics as Burke and Kant.

I confess that, though I've read more about the sublime than many people, for overall history I'm as dependent on online sources as anyone. But as a first-time experiment, I decided to consult not just the dominant source Wikipedia, but also Grokipedia, Elon Musk's AI-generated competition for the allegedly over-liberal online encyclopedia. What I found has nothing to do with the political sympathies of either encyclopedia's compilers, whether direct (Wikipedia) or indirect (the programmers behind the Grokipedia AI). The Grokipedia entry is much stronger than the competing entry on the elaboration of the sublimity concept, and cognate concepts, in ancient Greece. But it then cites, as did other sources I relied upon in past, Edmund Burke's 1757 writings as the first important post-Renaissance meditations on the sublimity concept. The Wikipedia entry says little about the Classic Greek developments but includes more data about the 17th and 18th centuries. Since I'm more interested in the post-Renaissance developments, from now on I'll build on Wiki's historical observations, like this one.

In Britain, the development of the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality in nature distinct from beauty was brought into prominence in the 18th century in the writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and John Dennis. These authors expressed an appreciation of the fearful and irregular forms of external nature, and Joseph Addison's synthesis of concepts of the sublime in his The Spectator, and later the Pleasures of the Imagination. All three Englishmen had, within the span of several years, made the journey across the Alps and commented in their writings of the horrors and harmony of the experience, expressing a contrast of aesthetic qualities.^[3]

I find it fascinating that the three authors cited in the passage cited the Longinian idea of "the sublime" in relation to their sightseeing tours of the Alps. The article discusses, as I will not, some of the differences in their interpretations of their separate experiences, and I will take Wiki at its word since I've read nothing of Addison, Dennis, or Ashley-Cooper (the last of whom-- fun fact-- got a shout-out in the teleseries LOST). I suspect that all three invoked the sublime in reaction to some anterior observation about the concept, possibly from one of those persons who translated Longinus into English in either the late 17th or early 18th century. Is it possible that all three authors journeyed to the Alps with the advance suspicion that the Alpine sights would give them the elevated experience Longinus wrote about? Impossible to know, but it has been said (by sources I forget) that pre-Renaissance Europeans of sufficient means simply did not mess about in the mountains for any such gratifications.

So Longinus was one of many Classical authors, including Aristotle, whose original works became available to Europeans, for the first time in centuries, during the Renaissance. The first distinct era of the post-Renaissance is usually dubbed "The Age of Enlightenment," and I observed here that it was particularly marked by an embrace of heavily rationalized philosophy and literature.

Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.  

In an essay I've not placed on The Archive, I similarly observed that critics of the period began using Aristotle's term "mimesis" (imitation) to connote the reproduction of observed reality with absolute fidelity-- though that was not the way Aristotle had used the term. 

So the Age of Enlightenment began, at least in part, by an act of rejecting fantasy. But since human beings as a whole are as much attracted to the limitless as to the limited, fantasy literature came back in a relatively short time. The 1600s concluded with the rise of the literary fairy tale, closely followed by the recording of popular oral folktales. The first European translation of the ARABIAN NIGHTS appeared in 1704, and despite the concurrent rise of naturalistic literature, European literature began a perhaps illicit love affair with genies and elephant-stealing birds. The late 1700s birthed both the first Gothic novel (1765) and the first important magical-era fantasy novel (1785's VATHEK) of the post-Renaissance period. For good measure, the year 1785 also hosts the last pure manifestation of the pre-Renaissance genre of "the fantastic travelers' tales," embodied by Raspe's BARON MUNCHAUSEN. These works and others laid the groundwork for the various works in the Gothic and Romantic movements throughout the 19th century, not least Walter Scott's sadly neglected LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, the first important post-Renaissance fantasy in the combative mode. I am not saying that any contemporary readers of any of these works necessarily called them "sublime." But I am saying that even as various European countries got themselves engaged to the rational, they kept getting drawn back to the charms of the non-rational, which some called "the sublime" while others would come to call it "the sense of wonder." In this essay I endorsed an equivalence of the two affective terms, summed up adeptly by this passage.

The affinities of science fiction and Gothic literature also reveal a common quest for those varieties of pleasing terror induced by awe-inspiring events or settings that Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century critics call the sublime. A looming problem for writers in the nineteenth century was how to achieve sublimity without recourse to the supernatural. ... The supernatural marvels that had been a staple of epic and lesser forms from Homeric times would no longer do as the best sources of sublimity. ... writers sought new forms that could better accommodate the impact of science.-- Paul K. Alkon, SCIENCE FICTION BEFORE 1900.

                          

THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 3

 Following my earlier ruminations on Sir Walter Scott and the titular idiom, I decided to go through the index of Leslie Fiedler's magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL--which, though centered upon American authors, contains a lot about their European forbears-- and reread everything the critic had to say about the inventor of the historical novel. I knew from previous readings that nearly everything Fiedler had to say about Scott was virulently negative, with the exception of crediting Scott with being able to create literary myths that appealed to wide audiences. In Fiedler's demi-Marxist views from that era-- late fifties to early sixties-- Scott's greatest offense was that (according to Fiedler) all or most of the author's works allowed the viewpoint characters to give up ideas of revolting against authority and accepting the bourgeois lifestyle. I'm sure even back then Fiedler had read more of Scott than I have now-- though to be sure, Fiedler doesn't cite a lot of Scott works, saying nearly nothing about the classic IVANHOE and (quite naturally) not mentioning the work that recently engaged me, THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. But I still find this a very superficial pronouncement.

In previous readings I highlighted a lot of Fiedler's remarks in LOVE. But I missed an important insight, and it's a strange oversight on my part, given all of my earlier commentary about the intertwined literary categories of "the metaphenomenal" and "the heroic." In the overlooked insight, Fiedler brilliantly links the rise of the gothic novel in Europe (beginning with Horace Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) with Scott's invention of the historical novel with WAVERLY in 1814.

...behind the Gothic there lies a theory of history, a particular sense of the past. The tale of terror is a kind of historical novel which existed before the historical novel (the invention of Walter Scott) came into being.

Fiedler then credits Samuel Richardson with having essentially invented the naturalistic novel's sense of "the present," beginning with 1740's CLARISSA. I'm not sure why Defoe's 1722 MOLL FLANDERS is out of the running in that department, or why Defoe doesn't even rate a mention in the whole of LOVE. But I agree with Fiedler's next point, that "the Gothic felt for the first time the pastness of the past." Long before Walpole subtitled OTRANTO as "a Gothic Story," the word "gothic" had been used since the Renaissance to indicate that which was medieval and therefore barbaric. Following the Renaissance, the literary lights rejected, particularly by embracing the naturalistic novel, all or most of those "improbable and marvelous" elements that culminated in the late 1500s with Spenser's FAERIE QUEENE. Wikipedia pegs the beginnings of the Enlightenment with Descartes, but I prefer 1603, the publication-year of the first book of DON QUIXOTE, which essentially ended the chivalric romance for the next two centuries.          

What is "the pastness of the past" in OTRANTO? Though of course Walpole wrote the novel in 1764, he published the book anonymously, claimed he had translated a manuscript from the 1500s, retelling a story from the era of the Crusades. Walpole fooled some contemporary reviewers into believing that OTRANTO was an authentic work penned between the 9th and 11th centuries, and after he eventually admitted authorship, many scholars of his time regarded the novel as meretricious. However, setting the story in the medieval past allowed the author to represent wild fantasies of his own creation, much like the metaphenomena of chivalric romances.

During the early 1700s there had arisen a passion in Europe for both original literary fairy tales and reworkings of oral stories, the last including a craze for the newly translated THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. There existed a few broad fantasies like GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and proto-SF works like Voltaire's MICROMEGAS. But OTRANTO inspired imitators to delve into the historical past, and to threaten the commonplace natural world with such horrors-- ghosts (real or fake), deals with the devil, and even the "occult science" of alchemy that infuses Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The idiom of the Gothic even inspired an inventive hybrid of the European Gothic and the Arabian Nights fantasy in William Beckford's 1786 VATHEK.         

WAVERLY, the first of Scott's historical novels, doesn't delve very far into the past. Only about sixty years separate the novel's action during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and 1814, when Scott published the story. Then in 1820 Scott published IVANHOE, which, though it was a naturalistic story set in England's 12th century, nevertheless revived the genre of the chivalric romance. Further, even before the down-to-earth WAVERLY, it's also worth remembering that in 1805 Scott wrote his first original narrative poem, the aforementioned MINSTREL. And though it's not as imaginative as VATHEK, it certainly presents more wonders than did the average Gothic, such as a goblin, river-spirits, a book of magic spells, and a magician who comes back from death to reclaim his property. A case could made that just as Walpole gave birth the Modern Horror Story, Scott-- rather than usual nominees like George MacDonald or William Morris-- gave birth to the Modern Magical-Era Fantasy Tale. I now credit Leslie Fiedler with supplying me with a crucial conception for both of these modernized forms of older genres: that they are modern because they, unlike their predecessors, could not help but engage with modernity-- even when the authors might be seeking with might and main to forswear the heavy hand of history.                  

ADDENDUM 4/12/2026-- I chanced across this abstract, suggesting that the critical acceptance of "romance" began to shift back to acceptance, after the form's long absence during the Age of Reason, slightly before the 1764 publication of OTRANTO. 

In 1762, when Richard Hurd (1720–1808) published a small work of historical-literary criticism, this was for him not the start of a long career in literary endeavor or scholarship. While not seeking a career in literary scholarship, Hurd’s two volumes of commentary were hugely successful, going through six editions in just a few years. Thomas Warton (1728–1790) revised his influential Observations on the Fearie Queene of Spenser (1754) after reading Hurd’s third Dialogue, on the Age of Queen Elizabeth. This chapter examines Hurd’s Elizabethan past, in which the monarchy, in the person of Elizabeth, and the nobility were in a balance of political power, while chivalry and romance formed the cultural and literary norms.

 

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT. 2

 I decided to supplement last year's WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES with further details, but realized that the original essay supplied only the rationale of distinguishing "weirdie" metaphenomenal fictions from the "worldie" type, as per the Brian Aldiss history mentioned, and then I jumped to a particular late manifestation of "weirdies at DC." So to bridge that gap, here's my essay from OUROBOROS DREAMS where I dealt with the importance of Carmine Infantino to my schema. ___________________________

DC jumped feet first into the supernatural/Gothic thing after having generally avoided that type of story for over 20 years, and it seems likely that Carmine Infantino was the biggest influence, as he himself claims in a JOURNAL interview:

I was trying to prepare for the inevitable. In my mind, “What if these things die? What if we’re back in the old days and suddenly superheroes drop off?” The reason I threw out a mess of different titles was, I wanted to sneak in The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets without people much realizing what was going on. Which I did. And also we had a chain of them out there, if you remember, and they were all successful before anyone at Marvel realized what was going on. So we had those going for us, and the superheroes going for us. Meanwhile I kept experimenting with different things.

So in Evanier's book KIRBY, ME claims, maybe a little dubiously, that when Kinney Corp bought DC in 1967, they thought they were getting the top company, only to become displeased when they learned that Marvel was such a strong second. (I think Roy Thomas claimed Marvel didn't obtain the majority market share until the early seventies though.) Still, that story isn't absolutely necessary to put across the notion that someone in management thought it was time for some changes. Infantino was made first art director and then editorial director in 1966 and 1967, and it looks like promoting horror and the Gothic was his major "experiment." Not only did he get rid of the superheroes in HOUSE OF MYSTERY in '67, he also debuted DEADMAN in the failing book STRANGE ADVENTURES. The Spectre had been revived earlier under the tutelage of Julie Schwartz, but the initial format was so rationalized that any "weirdie" appeal of the hero was nullified. Spectre also got his own title in 1967, and though it didn't last long it soon converted into spookier stories before it died. In the late sixties and early seventies, even some of the "mainstream" DC superheroes began exploiting Gothic/horror themes on their covers, such as (obviously) BATMAN but also less obvious types like FLASH and TEEN TITANS. 

One fan attributed the big change to the influence of DARK SHADOWS in '66, but I think it was more likely that DC saw that the Warren magazines had been doing well since 1964 (EERIE) and 1966 (CREEPY) respectively, and that they hired guys like EC stalwart Joe Orlando to cut into that action. That also probably led to the revival of The Phantom Stranger in 1969, as well as another fifties character, Doctor Thirteen. The intersection of the two seems to be the first regular convocation of two "weirdies" at DC Comics, in 1969's SHOWCASE #80-- though the good doctor was dropped from the Stranger's adventures pretty quickly.

 

THOUGHTS ON THE DUNE MYTHOS

I don't know when I'll get the time to reread Frank Herbert's original DUNE and thus do an "official" Reading Rheum review of it. But since I have read the book three times, I have a reasonably good recollection of its major tropes and conceptual scope. My main aim here is to set down some general ideas about the novel so that I don't repeat myself when I cover the David Lynch film on my movie blog.   

  I've also read a pretty fair sampling of Herbert's other science-fiction novels, and though I've not looked at any of them in the last twenty years, my overall recollection is that none of them exhibit the mythic imagination of DUNE. But most of them follow the pattern of good didactic science fiction: they set up some intellectual problem, based on some metaphenomenon predicated upon sci-fi's famous "one gimme" rule, and proceed to discuss the societal or psychological ramifications resulting from the phenomenon. But there's usually not a lot of symbolic depth in purely didactic arguments, though, as I've argued frequently on this blog, sometimes the didactic and mythopoeic forms of discourse can work together to good effect.  But this didn't happen with most Frank Herbert books, which are mostly concerned with didacticism-- much like the majority of the DUNE sequels, though I admit I've not reread any of these in twenty years either.                                                                                                    

I haven't taken any surveys of science fiction fandom, but the dominant impression I've gained from both personal conversation and message boards is that almost no one likes any of the sequels better than Original DUNE. One can find fans who like BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN a great deal more than the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN, or THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK more than the 1977 STAR WARS. But in a statistically dominant sense, DUNE is the "first child" that everyone likes, and all the sequels are the equivalent of red-headed stepchildren.                                                         

My perhaps-superficial, definitely-not-researched impression is that when Herbert conceived DUNE he drew upon a number of intellectual interests-- the ecology of sand-dunes, the effects of psychotropics on human perception, and perhaps most of all, the mystique of the savior-- and allowed himself to build on all of these concepts in a manner more mythopoeic than didactic. The didactic impulse was certainly there, though. Herbert stated in interviews that he set up the Campbellian heroic structure of DUNE with the long-range intention of undermining the savior-mythology behind the rise of the heroic Paul Atreides. This authorial intent is particularly strong in GOD EMPEROR OF DUNE, where the great Messiah of the Spice mutates into something akin to a sandworm. And yet, Herbert sold his myth-world so thoroughly that most readers were as immersed in that world as Herbert himself was when he created it. The author created a beautiful dream just so that he'd be able to wake the dreamers from their illusion and reveal, "see, you shouldn't have fallen for my glamorous hoax." Instead, many if not most readers saw Herbert's deconstruction of his original dream as the real illusion-- again, judging purely by the general fannish opinion that the later books were inferior to the original. (I will add that I found a few of the early sequels at least interesting in their own right, including GOD EMPEROR, but some of the later books are entirely forgettable.)                                                                  

    
  Speaking as I was of influences, some critic, whose name I did not preserve, remarked that the sandy wasteland of the planet Dune had an interesting predecessor in science fiction literature: "the sands of Mars," as Arthur C Clarke called them. And the foremost mythographer of Mars in early science fiction also dealt in a lot of the same elements of combative adventure and medieval intrigue as Herbert: the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs. Now, the Mars books of Burroughs are as bereft of didactic insights as the majority of Herbert books are lacking in mythopoeic power. The unremembered critic argued that Herbert had to some extent built upon Burroughs' high-adventure mythos and imbued it with far greater subtlety and intellectual heft, and I agree that this is certainly possible, even if Herbert only knew the John Carter series by reputation. But I'd argue that there's another Burroughs series that may have had more structural impact on Herbert, and that's the Tarzan series, which, more than the Mars books, Herbert could have known from cinema had he never cracked one of the original stories. The trope common to both Tarzan novels and Tarzan movies might be boiled down to "good colonists fighting bad colonists for the control of tribal resources." Tarzan, the scion of good colonists, doesn't "go native" like various Joseph Conrad protagonists, but rather "goes ape," which contingency makes the ape-man into a superhuman figure. (A drug-free one, by the way.) The morality of Tarzan's interactions with Black Africans, corrupt Europeans and ruthless Arab slavers was not something Burroughs could have addressed intellectually, even had he wished to do so. But when in DUNE we see two great Renaissance-style families vying to take control of Planet Dune's spice-commodity-- the noble family Atreides and the decadent Harkonnens-- what we're seeing is an old wine decanted into a new, and perhaps more elaborate, bottle. It's to Herbert's credit that in the early novels he doesn't ever reduce the entire three-way struggle to pure politics-- though I can't speak to the later ones.       

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 4

 In my essay MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3 I made this statement:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important to a given author's creative priorities, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

In this essay I established that, although I specified that the category of fantasy stories I call "magical fantasy stories" are not intrinsically better than other metaphenomenal fictions, they are better with respect to one literary goal. That goal consists of transporting the readers of our various post-industrial cultures back into worlds where magic is the primary instrumentality through which the denizens of said worlds understand existence. I explicated this idea with the formulations of Mircea Eliade, with some caveats that I didn't think Eliade was always very clear about his distinctions between "the sacred" and "the profane." Having lodged that complaint, I thought I ought to try to be equally clear about how "far" magical fantasy stories can get from our profane world.

The answer is that they can never escape the shadow of the profane entirely, at least partly because they're being written by authors who have lived in profane worlds. But more than that, there's often a "domain of impurity" within the fantasy-worlds that calls the magical domain into question.

For instance, few fantasy-tales take place at the real "beginning times," when God has (or the gods have) just made the world. One of the few exceptions that comes to mind is C.L. Moore's 1940 short story "Fruit of Knowledge," which relates the story of the Garden of Eden from the POV of Adam's first wife Lilith. But it's far more frequent for the magical-fantasy author to set his stories in a world where humankind has acquired some level of advancement short of what we call "the industrial age." And as soon as humankind attains such a level, a certain amount of life's profane nature assumes its own domain within even worlds where magic rules.

The simplest form of profanity is one in which everyone in the world is aware that magic exists or has existed, but individuals believe that for various reasons that the power of magic cannot affect them. Clark Ashton Smith often created characters living in utterly magical worlds who nevertheless had some blindness on that matter. In the masterful "Voyage of King Euvoran," the monarch witnesses a mage challenge his power, and then foolishly pursues the wizard for vengeance, leading to his undoing. In many ways, such stories parallel the dynamics of the modern-day supernatural story, in which, say, unbelievers trespass on a mummy's tomb and suffer a magical revenge.

Sometimes magical fantasy narratives include characters who are either of a materialistic bent or take actions that have the effect of post-industrial materialism. THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE, set in medieval Russia, depicts a village of people who are overtly Christians but who still covertly observe the old pagan ways of propitiating the spirits of houses and forests. A fanatical Christian monk enters the village and belabors the citizens until they put aside their pagan practices-- which brings about a major conflict for the heroine to cope with.

There also may be an inbuilt sense that the world of magical phenomena is doomed to be superseded by a profane one. Every "fall of Camelot" story implies that ordinary history will take over once the wonders of Arthurian Britain are no more. Patently, J.R.R. Tolkien followed the same pattern at the end of LORD OF THE RINGS, by implying that "The Time of Men" will succeed the era in which Men mingle with Elves, Dwarves and Hobbits. 

A. Merritt's SHIP OF ISHTAR provides a variation on the above theme. Modern archeologist John Kenton, despite knowing that Babylon has long been superseded by more mundane historical cultures, plunges into a cosmos where the Babylonian gods still exist-- though they rule a very limited cynosure, limited to one island and the titular Ship of Ishtar. The author never explains how this sub-cosmos comes into being, but one may fairly assume the deities created the world, probably so that they could continue to enjoy mortal worship.

All of the forces that countervail against the total efficacy of magic and the sacred within a "secondary universe" can be viewed as "agents of the profane," and thus of the author's awareness that he or she exists in a time when magic has been diminished if not extirpated. Because all such authors have themselves have lived in cultures where magic and the sacred are continually called into question, that may be a prime reason as to why most magical fantasies take place in worlds with a medieval, but pre-industrial, level of advancement. A qualified exception may be made for stories patterned after rural folktales. PINOCCHIO probably takes place in post-industrial times, based on a very tiny number of internal references. But the novel remains steadfastly in a rural, small-town universe, never letting the reader see any phenomenon that suggests the heavy industry that existed in the 19th century. Further, the author reinforces the sense of a folktale universe by showing humanoid animals who can talk and wear clothes, as well as numinous entities not strictly allied with any established religion.

 

PICKING ATTEBERRIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

FINESSING FANTASY

I don't always elaborate on changes to my subject tags, but in this case, I want to record my line of thought for future use.

I noticed that two of my tags-- "fantasy" and "fantasy stories"-- seemed a little redundant, and in fact I had over the years sometimes applied them inconsistently. So, in line with the recent determinations I made in the MIND OUT OF TIME series, I changed anything that referred to particular stories of magical fantasy to "magical fantasy stories," while creating new categories for stories that didn't meet the magical fantasy criteria. For instance, Lewis Carroll's tales are now "nonsense fantasy stories," while THE SATANIC VERSES is "supernatural comedy." The rubric "supernatural" is one I plan to use for any with fantasy-content that's not either science fiction, nonsense, or some metaphenomenal hybrid and is set in more or less contemporary times. 

As a further example, the LEPRECHAUN horror-series would be mostly "supernatural drama" since it involves an archaic leprechaun killing off people in modern times-- though I guess LEPRECHAUN 4 IN SPACE is a hybrid between SF and supernatural drama.

The tag "fantasy (literary term)" deserves more explication. There is not a standard use of the term "fantasy" in academic literary criticism, but one particular critic does use it as I do: Kathleen Hume in her 1984 book FANTASY AND MIMESIS. She uses "fantasy" as a blanket term for everything in literature that deviates from commonplace, mimetic descriptions of the world, even deviations that might be classed as minor bits of nonsense. (For instance, she includes an incident where two characters in Voltaire's CANDIDE, seen to die explicit deaths "on stage," come back to life for no good reason.) My own category for the totality of all fantastic imaginings is "the metaphenomenal," while "the isophenomenal" describes everything that adheres to the principle of mimesis. But henceforth I'll also use "fantasy" to indicate the mental process by which authors create deviations from realism. This process, regardless of the rationalization used, thus engenders a principle opposite to that of mimesis, as in Hume: a principle which authors use to describe anything that goes beyond the bounds of realism.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3

 At the end of MIND 2.5 I wrote:

But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

I started this essay-series with the question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?" I established that I believed that the dominant colloquial usage of "fantasy" concerned a particular subgroup of metaphenomenal narratives I have now dubbed "magical fantasy stories." From this category I have excluded narratives which are complicated by the presence of competing forms of wonder-rationale (as discussed in Part 2.5), OR by the absence of the proper kind of magic-welcoming society. I also mentioned that my desire to set aside the unique appeal of "magical fantasy stories" due to my own personal response to the fantasy-genre. I do not automatically assume that my response is characteristic of all fantasy-readers. But I also do not automatically assume that there is no relevance even if no other person has ever made the correlation I will now make.

I have reviewed, in three linked essays, one of the earliest breakthrough works of religious historian Mircea Eliade, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. My second essay provides the most detailed look at what Eliade sought to say in that book, though I should stress that he wrote only of religion, and not, as I do, of literature and folklore.

The first chapter, "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred," explores many of the ways that religious people around the world have sought to endow specific objects or locales-- trees, stones, temples, or entire cities-- with a sacred quality that transcends the everyday interactions of the profane world. Given the chapter's concern with space, it's logical enough that Eliade leads off with a quote from Exodus: "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Eliade cites numerous other cultures-- Vedic Indian, Algonquin, Australian aborgine, Roman, Egyptian-- in order to support his claim: that "homo religiosus" shows a supervening tendency to formulate spaces in which the sacred can enter to banish the profane, which Eliade defines, albeit only briefly, as all those contingent factors involving "man's vital functions (food, sex, work and so on."

Now on this blog I've repeatedly discussed both the similarities and differences between the dynamics of religion and the dynamics of art. And I've always concluded that the differences are less significant than the similarities. The sense of constricting, "profane" ordinariness that religion banishes for the believer can also be banished by the "shadows of imagination" that audiences enjoy through art. The stories I deem "magical fantasies"are not any better or worse than any other stories in terms of potential ability to dispel dull care. But because magical fantasies create the feeling of a world imbued with magic, the worlds in those fantasies come closest to duplicating the dynamic Eliade describes:

...the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator's hands.

But such a cosmos is not defined only by space, but also by time. So quite logically, Eliade follows up his chapter on "sacred space" with one entitled "Sacred Time and Myths." Profane time, Eliade says, is "ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting." In contrast, sacred time "represents the re-actualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past."

Now, I have not implied that magical fantasy stories, which belong to literature rather than religion, share religion's purpose of recapitulating the sacred stories of any particular culture-- though some stories do draw upon such established stories. Kelly Cipera, the essayist cited in Part 2.5, mentions that the Arthurian myths, which are not technically religious narratives, have their appeal in what *I* consider depicting events outside the scope of "profane time."

We recognize all of the ingredients of high fantasy is stories such as Le Morte d’Arthur, or the story of Arthur, Camelot and the search for the Holy Grail, a legend of Welsh origin. It is a hero’s tale — Arthur, who has no control over whether or not he can pull a sword from a stone or not, does, and suddenly kingship is thrust upon him. Matters beyond him and magic turn his life, which would have been otherwise dull and ordinary, into the stuff of legend.

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

And that, for now, is my conclusion as to the special appeal of what I term "magical fantasy stories." I imagine that in future weeks I might be able to write as much as I have over these two days on all of the stories that don't convey this Eliadean sense of sacred exoticism.

ADDENDA: I will note that what Eliade calls a "pure and holy cosmos" often includes, in many religious cosmologies, all sorts of significant transgressive actions-- Odin slaying Ymir to make the world out of the giant's bones, or Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise. So the nature of religious purity and holiness does require some meditation to account for the significance of transgressive actions in molding a cosmos.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2.5

Before proceeding to the conclusions suggested at the end of Part 2, I'll make some generalizations as to some types of narratives that belong in my category of "magical fantasy stories," always with the caveat that I may make additions or alterations in future.

While as I've said "fantasy" by itself has often been a rubric that can cover everything from Tolkien to Roger Rabbit, the great reputation of Tolkien has resulted in the popularization of the term "high fantasy" for the more Tolkienian forms of fantasy. Wikipedia cites this definition: 

High fantasy, or epic fantasy, is a subgenre of fantasy^[1] defined by the epic nature of its setting or by the epic stature of its characters, themes, or plot.^[2] High fantasy is set in an alternative, fictional ("secondary") world, rather than the "real" or "primary" world.^[2] This secondary world is usually internally consistent, but its rules differ from those of the primary world. By contrast, low fantasy is characterized by being set on Earth, the primary or real world, or a rational and familiar fictional world with the inclusion of magical elements.^[3][4][5][6]

The careless writing of this essay implies agreement between all the sources cited, but this is not the case. The first source, a 2011 article on the site Fandomania, not only does not use the high/low distinction-- attributed, with whatever accuracy, to a Brian Stableford book-- but cites two forms of high fantasy that the maybe-Stableford definition would term "low fantasies."

The settings for these quests are generally in one of three varieties: a world separate unto our world, one where our world for all intents and purposes doesn’t even exist; a secondary world that is reached from our world through a portal; or, lastly, a secondary world within our own world. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings and Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series are examples of the first variety. They both exist in a completely developed secondary world that is not Earth — Earth doesn’t even exist in their minds. The Chronicles of Narnia is a classic example of a portal into another world variety and the Harry Potter series is a contemporary example of the “world within a world” type of high fantasy.

I'm glad, though, that the uncredited Wiki-writer linked to the Fandomania essay, because Cipera's broader definition is better than the very artificial high/low distinction. Cipera clearly feels that all three forms of fantasy can be associated because they are all drawing on the same wellsprings of myth and folktale to tell similar stories of high romance and adventure. 

So, all three of Cipera's categories would make it into my category of "magical fantasy stories." However, as Part 2 specified, my wider category also includes a folktale like ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. This story includes an element of magic and does not use the competing rationales of either "science" or "just because" to justify the story's wonders. But it also qualifies as a "magical fantasy story" because it takes place in a pre-industrial society that considers magic more important than any other rationale.

In a separate essay I plan to address various examples of stories-- whether from literature or folktales-- that don't fall into my category because they meet only one of the two criteria cited, or explain their wonders with two or even three co-existing rationales. I've already cited one such exception in POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, which is the latter type of "hybrid story," mixing "magic" with "just because." But for now it's more important to move on to the matter of why the presence of the magic-accepting society is as important to the category as the magic itself-- as I shall convey in Part 3.

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2

Here's the statement I made at the end of Part 1:

...despite the strong association of the colloquial use of the term "fantasy" and the "magic rationale," I think there's a more fundamental appeal to "magical fantasy" than the use of said rationale...

One reason I eliminated "the magic rationale" as the main attraction is that some extremely popular "magical fantasies" make only very minor usages of magic.

Case in point: the ARABIAN NIGHTS folktale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." In the standardized version of the story-- which is the one most often adapted for modern narratives-- poor woodcutter Ali Baba witnesses a gang of thieves using a magical cave to conceal their ill-gotten treasures. The cave-door, which opens or closes in obedience to certain magic words, is the only magical item in the story. Everything else in the narrative, however improbable or melodramatic, would be deemed isophenomenal, governed by naturalistic laws. We don't know if the "open sesame" cave is the result of active or passive magic-- though I tend to favor the former, that some individual placed a spell on the cave-mouth to act as cave-mouths don't usually operate. But there's a sense of a regular magical procedure involved in the treasure-cave's makeup. The cave doesn't open "just because," say, it's funny for the purpose of a gag, a la my earlier example of ROGER RABBIT. That nonsense-rationale would imply the cave might open some times and not others.

The appeal of magical fantasies, whether they use a lot of magic or very little, inheres more in the fact that they reproduce a society that is fully or mostly "pre-industrial," in which it's possible for the characters to invest in magic because there is no competing rationale of "science." That does not mean that there is no science as such in the world, such as (say) the engineering principles needed for Ancient Egypt to build the pyramids. But in an archaic world, science simply is not as IMPORTANT as magic.

So, I'm admitting that "magical fantasies" have a vital appeal because they invest in the magic-rationale and not the other two rationales-- but there's also a greater, supervening appeal in that the contemporary reader/audience is transported back to a time when science had less influence than magic. And I'll look at some possible reasons for that appeal in Part 3.

Parenthetically, Ali Baba got the "just because" treatment in 1937's POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, and in that cartoon short it's clear that gags like "Abu Hassan got 'em anymore" overshadow any investment in even the minor magic of the "open sesame" cave.