PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS

                     

 I’ve been meditating on the familiar opposition of “problem and dilemma” for possible application to my theories regarding the narrative interactions of lateral meaning and vertical meaning. The regular opposition goes as follows:

 

A problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while a dilemma is a choice that must be made between two or more equally undesirable alternatives.

 

For reasons I’ll discuss shortly, the idea of the “problem” aptly sums up the literary appeal of a text’s lateral meaning, because this is the part of the story in which the reader primarily invests himself, to see how the main character deals with the difficulties he faces, even if said character’s solution may be to avoid said difficulties.

 

However, “dilemma” in no way sums up the appeal of a text’s vertical meaning for readers. So, as my title suggests, I’m substituting the concept of the “conundrum,” variously defined as “an intricate and difficult problem” or “a difficult problem, one that is almost impossible to solve.”

 

My last major statement regarding the lateral and vertical forms of meaning appeared in 2016’s THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL. In the passage that follows, I didn’t utilize the term “vertical meaning,” since at the time I was preoccupied with seeing how that meaning could expressed by the joint terms “overthoughts and underthoughts,” but both of these together were always intended to make up my concept of vertical meaning.

 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking"finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

 

Nowadays I would reword this statement to elide the reference to overthoughts and underthoughts, because over time I have began to find these terms cumbersome. From my current position it’s easier to speak of all these narrative meanings in terms of their potentiality-alignments: “lateral meaning,” which is comprised of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, and “vertical meaning,” which is comprised of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities.

 

As for the essay’s observations on the concepts of “close sight” and “far sight,” these remained unchanged, and the notions of “the problem” and “the conundrum” can be used to symbolize the different ways each of the meaning-formations appeal to readers.

 

As stated above, the lateral meaning is that which presents the reader with the immediate, close-range difficulties in the lives of one or more characters, difficulties which must be solved in some fashion, just as difficulties in the reader’s real life must be solved in some way (even if the reader, like the fictional characters, may make the wrong choice).

 

Vertical meaning, however, is the part of the story that allows the reader to contemplate the character’s conflicts from the long-range view, with the understanding that those difficulties metaphorically embody some “conundrum” regarding the nature of human life. The conundrum exists alongside the problem, and since it’s more abstract in nature, the reader doesn’t necessarily expect to see the conundrum solved, even badly, because it embodies some intellectual or imaginative conflict inherent in human life.

 

Rather than starting with an example drawn from high culture, like HAMLET or LIGHT IN AUGUST, I will begin with applying the conundrum-concept to the two examples of mythopoeic and sub-mythopoeic meanings seen in my essay regarding two Silver Age ATOM stories. Both stories dealt with the Tiny Titan's battles against an insect-themed villain, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, produced by the same creative team and within months of one another. Though I was primarily oriented on the second of the two stories to show its qualifications as a mythcomic, I also included a rationale as to why the earlier story did not qualify as a mythcomic. I argued that the first “Bug-Eyed” story did not have a strong cosmological meaning, because the villain used generic robot-insects against the hero. However, in the second “Bug-Eyed” story, author Gardner Fox more strongly patterned the robot-insects on the capabilities of real insects. This narrative strategy produced a fictional “simulacrum of knowledge” and thus gave the story a stronger mythopoeic meaning. In both stories, the hero's problem is identical; to defeat the villain, primarily through the use of kinetic displays of force. (One story also has a very minor dramatic problem, to keep the villain from kidnapping an old flame, but the kinetic problem is paramount.) There is no didactic conundrum, but the amplification of the villain's insect-theme provides a mythopoeic conundrum; one best summed up as a fascination with biological adaptations in real animals.  

Now, neither of these comic-book stories makes any pretension toward the didactic form of virtual meaning, so a more complex example is needed to show how didactic and mythopoeic conundrums may exist separately or work in tandem.

 One of the most familiar master-threads found in “Classic” STAR TREK pertains to the crew of the Enterprise seeking to interact with more primitive peoples without violating the “Prime Directive” by interfering with the primitives’ cultures. The second-season episodes “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both deal with the same range of kinetic and dramatic problems that arise when the Federation’s political rivals, the Klingons, attempt to gain favor with primitive peoples without showing the Federation’s high-minded restraint. In “Child,” a Klingon agent abets an ambitious warlord to overthrow a ruler who is friendly toward the Federation. In “War,” Klingons give relatively advanced weapons to one tribe of planetary primitives to use against another tribe.

In both stories, the Enterprise-crew must seek to mitigate the Klingons’ influence, and so the “problems” that involves the lateral meaning are virtually identical, even if the solutions are not. “Child” is more of a straight thriller, with no deep reflections about the effects of both Klingon Empire and Federation upon the lives of the primitives. “War,” on the other hand presents the viewer with conundrums that invoke both the didactic and the mythopoeic potentialties. The didactic conundrum is the more obvious, since most viewers would have noted the direct parallels to the then-current Vietnam War, in which Americans had to continually arm their allies in order to offset the forces empowered by the rival superpower of Red China. Allegedly the original script was far more caustic regarding the activities of the “Americans,” i.e., the representatives of the Federation, and series showrunner Gene Roddenberry reworked the didactic conundrum so that it implied that the heroes had to do what they did to prevent the spread of Klingon influence. Not having seen the original script, I can’t say whether or not its author utilized the same mythopoeic tropes that appeared in the finished, Roddenberry-edited script. However, because of the way Roddenberry changed the didactic meaning, the mythopoeic meaning changes somewhat as well. When at the climax Kirk muses that they must introduce “serpents” into this planetary “Eden,” the meaning carries a sense of a less didactic, more mythopoeic conundrum. The implication is that, even as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden provided humankind with a chance for self-determination, Kirk’s ambivalent gift, putting more advanced weapons in the hands of the planetary primitives, may also be a rough but necessary means of setting the natives on their own course of self-determination.

 

As with the two ATOM stories, the problems in the two TREK stories are the same as far as involving the viewer in the travails of the main characters. However, “Private Little War” suggests an enduring conundrum that supervenes the particular problems of the particular situation. “Friday’s Child” implies a possible conundrum but does not seek in articulating it in terms of either the didactic or mythopoeic potentialities.

It's worth mentioning a couple of TREK examples which register only in terms of either a didactic or a mythopoeic conundrum. The third-season episode "The Savage Curtain" places Kirk and Spock in the position of "acting out" the struggle between good and evil for the education of some very literal-minded aliens, the Excalbians. The didactic conundrum implies that the struggle between good and evil-- essentially defined as altruism and selfishness-- is a difficulty that never ceases to confront mankind, no matter what happens to any particular heroic protagonists. But despite the evocation of legendary figures from Earth and from Vulcan-- whether historical like Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan, or made-up types like Sarek and Colonel Green-- none of these characters make strong use of any symbol-tropes. Even the appearance of a vaguely witchy villainess named "Zora" is given no stature as an incarnation of female evil, in marked to comparison to the "Lady Macbeth"-styled villainy of Nona from "Private Little War."

In my reviews of the first four STAR TREK theatrical films, though, I was rather surprised that the one with the weakest dramatic problem was also the one with the strongest mythopoeic conundrum: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The closest thing the film comes to a didactic conundrum is its attempt to show Mister Spock's vaunted logic as inferior to human emotion, but this is underdeveloped in contrast to the predominant mythopoeic conundrum: that of depicting a newly-born machine intelligence recapitulating its creators' need for emotional connection, and enacting a hieros gamos with a human being in order to gain said connection.

I indicated above that I was cycling out the terminology of "overthought and underthought," originally derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of Northrop Frye. I think the terms had a certain usefulness to me, indicating that the "overthought" springs from conscious, often utilitarian forms of thought while the "underthought" springs from subconscious, more playful cogitations. But I value symmetry above everything, and so in future I may start using the following terms:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."

PATTERNS AND POTENTIALITIES

...I agree with Jung's comment that "ideas" are developed out of what might as well be called "images" (Kant called these lesser elements "notions.") However, I want to specify that one need not buy into Jung's specific concept of inherited mythological images in order to validate his basic schema. Jung's predecessor-and-influence Cassirer said much the same thing, sans the inherited images.-- A PAUSE FOR POTENTIALITIES, 2015.

In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts."  But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts."  I will use this basic opposition here, though I'll substitute "intellectual" for "abstract" purely for euphony.-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3, 2012.

The first quote lists some of the predecessors that influenced me in my formulation of the four potentialities, though only two potentialities concern me in this essay:

The DIDACTIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.

I've also lined up these potentialities with my terms "overthought" (for the didactic) and "underthought" (for the the mythopoeic). The primary function of the "over" and "under" terms is illustrative, using a spatial metaphor to show how these discourses were functionally separated from the discourses spawned by the other potentialities, "the kinetic" and "the dramatic." I've lumped these two discourses together as "the lateral meaning," because I believe this represents the base experience that all audiences experience fictional constructs. And while I derived this line of thought largely from one of Frye's essays, there's also a possible influence from Schopenhauer. The discourses of "the kinetic" and "the dramatic" are theoretically comparable to the "intuitive representations" available not only to humans but also to the lower animals, since those discourses, whether simple or complex, may be reduced down to "does this 'other' cause me pain or pleasure," and "does this 'other' give help or hindrance?" Similarly, the didactic and the mythopoeic line up with what Schopenhauer called "abstract representations," because their subject matter is not concrete but abstract. Arguably, though, the very abstraction of the abstract potentialities may cause them to overlap much more than the "intuitive" pair.

In last year's essay AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE PART 2 I wrote:

Both "symbols" and "ideas" are abstract constructions, but symbols offer the artist "a free selection of causes"-- which I have aligned with my concept of "affective freedom"-- while ideas depend more upon establishing a chain of cause and effect, which I have aligned with "cognitive restraint." But both abstract constructions depend upon the use of fictive epistemology.

It was in my two HALF-TRUTH essays that I introduced the term "epistemological patterns." Though the term was new, I'd been writing about this particular abstract concept since the blog's beginnings, probably the first time I brought up Joseph Campbell. But because so much of the blog's content is devoted to sussing out the nature of mythopoeic discourse, I've neglected to give specific examples of the very different way in which the didactic phenomenality makes use of epistemological patterns.

The word "didactic" is derived from a Greek term meaning "apt at teaching." Thus any use of the didactic phenomenality must rely upon using rhetoric to teach audiences something. I suspect most if not all of the ancient Greeks would have viewed a literary's work meaning as one that was both rhetorical and discursive, and the later notions regarding "poetic intuition" would have been outside their wheelhouse. For me, writing in the shadow of Jung and others, I see that the didactic and the mythopoeic sometimes reinforce one another, sometimes conflict with one another, and at other times barely seem to exist in the same narrative-- as one can see in the 1984 Steve Ditko story ""AM I MARO, ROMA, OR RAEM?"

Because the philosophy of Ayn Rand has such a profound effect on Ditko, his greatest passion seems to have been to codify his Aristotelian/Randian beliefs into narrative entertainment. Ditko certainly knew that he could not make a living thumping this particular tub, and so many of his works don't overtly address his didactic concerns. Ditko also had considerable skill in rendering the discourses of the kinetic, the dramatic and the mythopoeic, but a story like "Raem" shows how intensely Ditko sought his version of epistemological patterns in the world of abstract ideas. One character in this story, featuring Ditko's short-lived hero "the Missing Man," voices Ditko's theme as explicitly as possible:

We're starting with reality and the law of identity, Syd. A is what it is, A. We intend to establish definition by essentials, root out false axioms, invalid anti-concepts and all the fallacies that permit the irrational to be treated as anything other than what it is: the inhuman.

The story's embodiment of "the irrational" is the villain of Raem Lanet, the Missing Man's opponent. This scientist, out of a desire for "prestige," transforms himself into a half-man, half-robot creature, in which form he attacks employers who have actually done him no wrong. Despite this overriding purpose, Raem experiences a conflict between his human half and his robot half, and this stands not as a mythopoeic discourse but a didactic one, since Ditko is trying to "teach" his readers that one side of Raem's personality is flawed and irrational, while the other is somewhat more rational and thus closer to the Randian truth. The "epistemological pattern" in this narrative would be predominantly psychological in nature, probably more than a little beholden to Freud's :"ego"  and "id" conceptions.

Now, though Ditko's principle discourse is didactic in nature, the ego-id pattern has a mythopoeic potential as well, and can be found in literary works that precede Freud's rise to prominence, such as Stevenson's 1886 DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE. A given artist might be able to utterly ignore that potential, for the sake of making a rhetorical point, and something like this transpires in STAR TREK's version of the Stevenson story, "The Enemy Within."

"Raem," however, shows instances where Ditko's instinct for the mythopoeic interferes with his rhetorical purpose, as I pointed out in the review:

...in "Raem," Ditko is close to invalidating his own philosophy. If the irrational is "inhuman," as Wrds says, than why isn't it incarnate in Raem's robot half? There have been any number of SF-stories in which a robotized human regained his humanity through empathizing with other humans, but though Ditko' does use the same basic trope, his focus is squarely upon the Randian choice between the true and the untrue. Ditko may have intuited that there was no way to attribute irrational bitterness and violent intent to the robot half, so he ends up with a final scenario in which the rational renunciation of such "anti-concepts" comes from either the robot half alone, or from some belated interface of human and robot. Either way, "Raem" may be Ditko's most passionate defense of Randism-- and as such, may also be a back-door admission of the significance of emotional value.

To enlarge on this a little more, the same psychological patterns that Ditko uses in a didactic way, to get across a certain message, also have symbolic values, wherein "robot" usually connotes the antithesis of human empathy. Ditko doesn't want to default to that symbolic value, because he wants to critique the selfishness of human beings, so he tries-- with equivocal success-- to make Raem's robot-half more empathetic than his human half. The idea of human feelings arising from an inhuman imitation of humanity is at least as old as Collodi's "Pinocchio," and as Ditko uses the trope it's more of a mythic than a didactic concept given that Ditko doesn't succeed in giving Raem's robot half in a rational cause-and-effect origin.

So in "Raem," we see Ditko drawing upon psychological patterns for both the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities, even though his usages of each may contradict one another.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES PT. 2

It may be that my revised versions of overthought and underthought will in future serve me as shortened forms for the respective effects that "the function of thinking" and "the function of intuition" have upon literary narrative.  I concluded in REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PART 3   that both myth-critics and ideological critics were in a similar unenviable position as far as converting the majority of readers to pursue more abstract readings of texts. Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience.-- RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT, 2015.

In my essay POETRY IN MOTION PART 3 I noted how Frye made a distinction between the narrative and significant values of literary narratives. To boil Frye’s argument down to its essentials, he regarded a given element as having a “narrative value” to the extent that it functioned to play a role in the way the narrative was constructed, while a “significant value” applied to an element which was meant to serve the purpose of a pattern hypothetically extrinsic to the narrative, what is usually called “theme” or “meaning.”-- NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES, 2017.

Northrop Frye is the direct source of one "word pair" of terms that I've frequently used, that of "the narrative-significant schism," and the indirect source of another pairing: "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning," with the former encompassing the Jungian functions of sensation and feeling and the latter encompassing the functions of thinking and intuition (which IN TURN beget the narrative's "overthought" and "underthought"). It's sometimes occurred to me that I could simplify things for myself to abandon one set of terms for the other, and that, if I did so, it would be a truly Fryean action, since I don't believe the critic himself made much use of any of these jargonistic terms. He probably refrained from regular use of the terms simply because jargon always needs a lot of explanation to potential newcomers.

But I knew from the first that this literary-theory blog would not be read by many newcomers, and so I've made much heavier use of Frye's jargon than he did. I've found over the years that the terms "narrative and significant" work best for describing just the bare functions of literary dynamics, while the terms "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning" are efficacious to break down the dynamic of the reader's response to the narrative. Thus, in VERTICAL VIRTUES (2014), I aligned lateral meaning with Aldous Huxley's concept of "horizontal transcendence," and vertical meaning with his concept of "upward and downward transcendence." On occasion I've probably used "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning" to mean almost the same thing as "narrative" and 'significant," though the first pair were designed to describe the process of readerly transcendence.

MYTHCOMICS: "A CURE FOR THE WORLD" (ALL-STAR COMICS #22, 1944)

Just as I've occasionally expressed disappointment that Jerry Siegel's earliest SUPERMAN stories were underwhelming even for pulp-action fodder, I'm usually just as underwhelmed with Gardner Fox's stories for the Justice Society, even though by 1944 Fox had already produced a fair quantity of mythically interesting Batman and Hawkman stories.

"A Cure for the World" appeared on stands about a year before the end of World War Two, but does not, unlike a lot of wartime stories, concentrate on anti-Axis propaganda. It is a "message" story, though it provides a fascinating example of a story in which its subconscious *underthought* is somewhat out of sync with its conscious *overthought.* The latter, the overt message of the story, is the quest for understanding between individuals and groups of different backgrounds. However, the former, the underthought, emphasizes a slightly different theme: that understanding comes about better when the apparent alien offers some good or service useful to the greater culture.

The adventure begins as Doctor Mid-Nite sees a young boy being whaled on by two other boys. When the hero breaks things up, he's told that the one kid doesn't attend the same church as the other two, and they wanted to assert that their allegiance to their church made them better. (No difference between the creeds is mentioned: such explicitness would probably have been against DC company policy at the time.) Mid-Nite reminds the bullies what their country is supposed to be fighting for.

However, Mid-Nite is troubled enough by the incident to take the unnamed victim to visit the other members of the Justice Society. He seems to want his fellow heroes to explain-- to him as well as to the kid-- how persecution, a "crime of humanity," can still exist today. The other heroes don't seem to have any answers, and Starman particularly finds the conundrum "hopeless."

Then an ethereal winged woman, looking much like the Blue Fairy in 1940's PINOCCHIO, appears in the group's meeting-room. She offers the heroes the chance to travel back to critical points in history, so that they can see how, as Johnny Thunder puts it, "folks would learn to like each other." The winged woman agrees with this overt statement of the story's purpose, though the actual experiences of the heroes doesn't exactly bear this moral out. The woman tells the heroes that although they will keep all their costumes and powers, they will forget who they were in the 20th century, so that they'll have to dope out the problems of tolerance as if they were real inhabitants of these past worlds.

So with this setup in mind, a reader would be justified in expecting some bromide in which all of the heroes would encounter alienated people who would just want to live ordinary lives like everyone else, if only people would "like" them. However, that's not precisely what the various segments of the story illustrate.

Hawkman rather fittingly finds himself in the "early Stone Age, when man was a hunter and a fighter, and looked on anything different from himself as something to kill immediately, lest it kill him first." Compared to other bromide-stories of the period, this is a pretty bold formulation, to assert that xenophobia is rooted in the centuries-old desire to protect oneself from "nature red in tooth and claw." Hawkman believes himself to be a caveman named Ga, and after fighting off some unruly Stone Agers, he's invited to their community. There "Ga" meets "Tow," the prototype of all future nerds, and of comic-artists as well. Because Tow is "thin and weak," he tends to stay home with "the women and children" while the bigger men are out hunting. As a result he uses his leisure time to become the world's first artist, painting the image of a mastodon he's seen on a cave-wall. However, since the other members of his tribe have never seen a mastodon as Tow has, they think he's made some real monster that can kill them. Hawkman saves the youth and flies him away, at which point they observe that a real throng of mastodons is about to stampede over the cave-community. Tow and Hawkman return to warn the people, and once again, Hawkman has to punch out a bigoted caveman to make everyone listen. The cavepeople clear out and avoid the stampede, after which the group begins valuing the proto-artist's ability to capture nature in his images, and Hawkman's visit ends.

Note: the "Tow" adventure is an example of an individual being persecuted for being different, not for his membership in an alien group. This trope will show up again.

Part Two focuses upon Starman, who finds himself incarnated in the body of Theodoratus, a noble slave-owner/military commander in Athens in the opening years of the Persian War. Although in real life Athens used slaves more than any other Hellenic nation-state, Starman's modern consciousness apparently impinges upon the Athenian commander, for he instantly tries to convince his fellows that "slaves are men, even as you and I." (Note: all of the slaves depicted are white despite supposedly coming from "Africa," which presumably means that they are captives from Greek-dominated areas of North Africa.) When the first assaults of the Persians cause the Greeks to retreat, Starman and his trained slaves usurp the position of Leonidas at Thermopylae. True, at one point Starman is able to repel the invaders with his gravity rod:

But the hero's real weapon is shame: the noble actions of the slave-soldiers, whom Athenians deem animals, force the Spartan king Leonidas to return and assume his historical (and doomed) role at Thermopylae. Starman vanishes, having insured that Greece, the cradle of democracy, will begin emancipating its slaves, now that they're proven their manliness and worth to the greater culture.

The next segment also deals with the liberation of an underclass, as comedy-relief hero Johnny Thunder visits medieval England. Unlike Starman, who gets to become an aristocrat, Johnny joins the mass of English serfs whom the local lords tyrannize. Plucky Johnny seeks out the local lord and wins him over by becoming his jester (albeit with a lot of help from Johnny's magical Thunderbolt-genie). Having found an "in," Johnny claims that serfs can defend the country as well as knights can, and he proves his point with a lance, albeit very comically (and with more help from Thunderbolt).

The Atom actually may meld with his own ancestor in 17th-century America, since "Nathaniel Pratt" bears the same surname as the hero. This time it's another individual who's being persecuted, an old woman unfairly accused of being a witch in the town of Salem. Perhaps because of Salem's notoriety, this is the only story in which the hero doesn't manage to convince anyone of the individual's rightness, that she's only an old woman who knows some home-grown medical tricks. But he does get to beat up a lot of Puritans.

Doctor Mid-Nite journeys to an even more tempestuous crucible of future democracy, Revolutionary France. becoming another theoretical ancestor, a "Doctor DeNider." Although Mid-Nite agrees with the basic principles of the Revolution and its overthrow of crowned heads, he succors a French noble who rendered aid to the rebels but has now been stigmatized for his aristocratic birth.

The Spectre, for his part, appears in the last story, in which he appears in 19th-century America at the time of Robert Fulton's invention of the steamboat. The hero-- who, unlike most of the others, doesn't attempt to cover up his bizarre appearance-- comes to the aid of a fictional inventor, Stephen Hare, against thugs who think he's either (as Spectre says below) crazy or a threat to the status quo.

This one ends on a peculiar anti-climax, in that after the hero beats off the hoods, he introduces Hare to Robert Fulton, though apparently for no reason but to give Hare the courage to persist.

Oddly, during this final story Spectre thinks to himself as to "how futile force is," because he can't make the people of this time accept Hare, any more than Atom can make the witch-haters accept the old woman. But the real purpose of the heroes' temporal battles with intolerance, successful or not, is to make readers invest themselves in the heroes's symbolic struggles. The story ends as they affirm the American principles of tolerance to a crowd of "boys and girls" who are patently their target audience.

The fairy-woman, incidentally, reveals that she is "the Conscience of Man," and it's of slight interest that said conscience is supposed to be female, given that all of the other heroes are men (except Wonder Woman, exiled to the status of secretary thanks to ongoing battles between her creator and the DC editors). Still, all of the villains are men as well, so that's something.

The common thread of all of the time-voyages is that the objects of persecution, whether individuals or groups, are outsiders who can show their greater-than-average worth to those who discriminate against them. This illustrates a point I extrapolated from Frank Fukuyama in this essay:

In "megalothymia" one worships a superior force which extends its power vertically downward.  In "isothymia" one worships a commonality of interlinked and interdependent forces.

So what is the "cure for the world?" Oddly, it seems to be the recognition not simply of the "commonality" of people who all want to be "liked," but of the ability of special persons or groups to excel in some way, to come up with inventions that no one else has, or to perform well in battle. I doubt that Fox conceived this theme consciously, but it may be that, since the story appeared during wartime, it's possible that someone didn't care for the implicit criticism of failings in America and some of its current allies. Two issues later, in ALL-STAR #24, the Conscience of Man appears for the second and last time, so that the heroes of that story can illustrate the evils of Germany's martial spirit. Perhaps Fox himself thought he might be misunderstood, and wanted to make clear that whatever sins the incipient democracies had committed, those of Germany were far, far worse.

MYTHCOMICS: "CLOUD OF WITNESS" (SON OF SATAN #4-7, 1976)

NOTE: I'm using "Cloud of Witness," the title of the first story in this four-issue arc, to denote the whole arc. I'm not sure why writer John Warner chose this title. Curiously enough, "Cloud of Witness" is the title of a 1891 compilation of devotional prayers, but this would seem to have nothing to do with the content of the arc. If anything, "Cloud" seems to be moving away from the Judeo-Christian basis of the "Son of Satan" mythos.

The brief run of the "Son of Satan" feature in two Marvel magazines, MARVEL SPOTLIGHT and THE SON OF SATAN, followed the pattern of Satanic films that became more popular following the success of 1968's ROSEMARY'S BABY. Daimon Hellstrom, the son of the Devil and a mortal woman, is first seen as an adult who has renounced his paternal heritage but undergoes periodic werewolf-like transformations from a super-powered devil's spawn to a Catholic priest. The priest angle was quickly dropped, and when writer Steve Gerber took over the series, Hellstrom became sort of a combination superhero/exorcist. Gerber also brought in some non-Christian elements into the mix, but during the MARVEL SPOTLIGHT run the whole never exceeded the sum of its parts.

John Warner became the writer for the series when SON OF SATAN became a solo title. The first three issues delve heavily into the opposition of Hellstrom and his father, but this sequence ends with Satan foreswearing any more involvement with his son's life. Warner almost certainly took this tack in order to ground the feature within the Western tradition of ceremonial magic. The arc from issues #4-7, however, were Warner's last hurrah on the series, and the title was cancelled following the publication of an inventory story, reviewed here.

In this essay, I observed that certain stories, such as the Golden Age HAWKMAN origin, might be fairly simple with respect to their dialectic overthoughts, but complex with respect to their symbolic underthoughts. "Cloud of Witness" follows the same pattern. Starting with issue #3, Warner and his assorted artists (mostly Craig Russell and Sonny Trinidad) set up a new direction for Hellstrom, including a new job (occult instructor at Georgetown University) and a new support-cast. The first new addition to the Hellstrom cast is a fellow teacher (and inevitably romantic interest), Saripha Thames. She's later revealed to be a practicing witch who doesn't believe in Hellstrom's father, thus refuting the common conflation of witches and Satanists in American pop culture. To some extent Hellstrom finds himself alienated from this hotbed of occultism, since in his earlier exploits he rarely interacted with large groups, as he does when he's obliged to teach a course to a roomful of students. Thus Warner uses the standard revising of a serial character's setup to delve somewhat into the character's lack of socialization.

But since he's also a superhero as well as an occultist, he has to meet a new villain. although his introduction to this foe comes through a hieratic dream. Once he arrives at his university apartment, the hero falls asleep and finds himself beholding a procession of Egyptian votaries. There's also a "cloud" of incense-vapor that the dreaming Hellstrom likens to "ambrosia," the food of the Greek gods, and inhaling this shifts him to another dreamscape. He meets the image of his mother, who claims that she's about to enter a convent. Hellstrom is never less than aware than he's in a dream, not least because in life his late mother only talked about becoming a nun.

However, the Christian piety is immediately undercut when this "bride of God" greets and embraces her "demon lover" Satan, and Hellstrom is repulsed by his mother's acceptance of this unholy union.

As the dream-parents fade, Hellstrom encounters the puppet-master of the dream: an androgynous, satyr-horned being named Proffet, who claims to be an oracle. Despite the satan-son's attempt to escape the dream, Proffet keeps propelling the hero into more dreamscapes, not least being a confrontation with the two parts of his own soul, the destructive "darksoul" and a normal-seeming Hellstrom who's able to wield a cross to subdue the evil "dark half." Finally the dream ends and Hellstrom wakes up in his apartment, but his next conflict is signaled by a mysterious explosion from the apartment neighboring his own.

Though Hellstrom never met the other apartment's occupant, it's plain that the latter was involved in occultism, because the explosion throws his corpse against a wall in the posture of the Tarot "Hanged Man." Hellstrom reads the "symbolic allegory" of this supernatural manifestation, interpreting the body's posture as that of "a pyramid surmounted by a cross-- or an ankh." Warner does not mention that this opposition of images duplicates that of the dream-fight between the two Hellstroms, where a symbol of life (an Egyptian ankh) transcends an image of death (a pyramid, which is, of course, a glorified tomb, and thus reflective of all the death-imagery in the dream).

To be sure, Warner's beginning is more mythic than his resolution. The villain who caused the occult student's death is a megalomaniac who's taken the supervillain name "Mindstar," and he was attempting to capture the student, for very involved reasons, to turn him over to his divine perceptor, the Egyptian god Anubis. Because Mindstar screws up his mission, he attempts to confuse the issue by convincing the god that the Son of Satan is Anubis's quarry. This proves a rather weak plotline, largely setting up Hellstrom's superheroic battles with Mindstar. Still, at least Anubis conforms to the representation of both death and destruction, the negative elements with which Hellstrom regularly contends. Indeed, Saripha, though not yet romantically involved with Hellstrom, invokes the pagan powers of life to help Hellstrom against the Egyptian god of death.

Had the series continued for a time, Warner probably would have come up with some inventive takes on Marvel characters with an esoteric edge. As things stand, the short run of the SON OF SATAN comic merely hints at some tantalizing possibilities.

MYTHCOMICS: FROM HELL (1989-96)

A graphic novel as dense as FROM HELL might seem to challenge my assertion that any work with a significant underthought can be boiled down to a concise “myth-theme statement.” Here’s what I came up with:

Royal surgeon Doctor Gull, the epitome of Victorian erudition and respectability, comes to embody the principle of male-over-female ascendance when he takes on the mantle of Jack the Ripper, at once serving the British Crown and his own personal project, that of ascending to mystical supremacy through the killing of women.

As I’ve frequently done in analyzing other collaborative works, I’ll focus on the creative partner whom I consider the dominant influence. Thus, regardless of what artist Eddie Campbell brought to the table in creating this graphic novel, I’ll only discuss Alan Moore here—not least because FROM HELL reflects one of Moore’s most interesting facets. I’ve often recounted how Moore himself has frequently taken on “politically correct” positions in his work, as seen here—and yet, he’s also been attacked for any number of supposed literary sins, often from pundits whose idea of art comes down to being “more politically correct than thou.” It may be significant, as a bellwether of Moore’s artistic impulses, that FROM HELL includes copious references to the non-conformist English poet William Blake, who is not exactly a familiar figure in Ripper-fiction. It was Blake, in one of his most quotable quotes, who said that in writing PARADISE LOST John Milton did better with Satan than with God because Milton was “of the devil’s party” without knowing it. I will show that some of the overthoughts of Moore’s works may “talk the talk” of ultraliberal politics, while the underthoughts don’t always show the author “walking the ultraliberal walk.”

Consider the graphic novel’s title. The proximate relevance of “From Hell” is that the phrase appeared in one of the various letters purportedly written by the Ripper during the killer’s reign of terror. Since in real life “Saucy Jack” was never identified, no one can know with certainty that the real murderer wrote that particular letter. Yet whoever did write it, regardless of his or her reasons for so doing, was clearly conjuring with the idea that Jack the Ripper was akin to a demon from the “bad place.” In Moore’s Ripper-cosmology, the very first letter to coin the name “Jack the Ripper” is a journalistic fraud, born from a capitalistic desire to sell newspapers. However, the “From Hell” letter, which is sent to police some time later, does come from the killer, and mad William Gull has an even more complex reason for invoking the spectre of the devil’s domain, as he confesses to his uncomprehending partner-in-crime Netley:

…in [Dante’s] INFERNO he suggests that the only true path from hell lies at its very heart—and that, in order to escape, we must go further in.

Given the thoroughness with which Moore cites his many references in the back of the novel—including not just other fictional and non-fictional takes on the Ripper, but also copious other aspects of British culture or history that Moore finds relevant—it’s fair to say that he’s sought to synthesize all of the major treatments of Jack the Ripper. One view of the Ripper, that he was a sexual deviate titillated by the killing of women, finds some representation in FROM HELL, as does a more politicized reading, in which the Ripper is a murderer sanctioned by the ruling class to eliminate enemies of the British Empire.  Further, Moore builds upon the historical suggestion that the real Gull was a Freemason to make the fictional Gull a practitioner in the English tradition of High Magick. Gull’s idea of escaping hell—which I understand to be the grubby “real world” of death, endless suffering, and frustrated sex—is to “derange his senses” through the act of brutal murder.

 It’s true that the repressive British government—the incarnation of male rule, despite the sovereignty of Queen Victoria-- begins the career of Jack the Ripper. First, an illicit romance and marriage takes place between Crown Prince Edward and a shop-girl. After the relationship is quashed by those in power, four prostitutes, made desperate by the crushing poverty of their lives, attempt to blackmail the throne with their knowledge of the scandal. This causes Victoria herself to call upon her surgeon—who has somehow become something of a royal hitman—to solve the problem. Gull’s murders of his victims, however, are far more brutal than necessary for the British Crown’s purpose. Gull's purpose is to “derange” himself out of his own intellectual sphere, in order that he can achieve some sort of mystical attainment. Thus Gull is akin to a demon unleashed by an unwise conjurer, one who brings forth the worst in all of London’s inhabitants.

Even Moore’s viewpoint character, Inspector Abberline of Scotland Yard, finds his life compromised by the Ripper’s activities. Though Moore’s Abberline is a stolid, unimaginative man unaware of Gull’s magical aspirations, he’s unknowingly pulled into Gull’s greater project via an attempted extra-martial (on his part) affair with one of Gull’s intended victims. Abberline, like the victimized prostitutes, is also a lens through which Moore allows the reader to see the hellish sufferings visited by the upper classes on all the lower ones—though ironically Abberline, in one of his first lines, states that he’s unimpressed with socialists, who are all “middle class”types.

I won’t attempt to explicate Gull’s “Mystic History of Great Britain” and how that discourse fits into the greater history of worldwide patriarchal dominion.  But even though Gull is unquestionably a devil, he is, like Milton’s Satan, a fascinating one. He sums up the copious mythological altercations of males and females thusly:

‘Tis in the war of Sun and Moon that man steals woman’s power, that Left Brain conquers Right—

While Gull’s employers may be concerned with keeping their reign over unruly women, as well as other outsiders like Jews and revolutionaries, Gull is not defined by their political motives. Though I find Moore’s use of the “left brain-right brain” paradigm anachronistic, the writer makes it explicit that Gull kills women so that he can gain access to their mysterious, irrational “right brain” power. This hyper-intellectual version of the Ripper is validated insofar as his murders do vouchsafe him visions of other times and places, so that FROM HELL, unlike many Ripper-stories, enters the domain of the marvelous. Yet, despite Moore’s condemnation of Gull’s brutality and masculinism, the author can’t help but make Gull a “sacred monster” whose evil outstrips that of his contemporaries. When his fellow Masons call Gull to account, he tells them frankly that he does not deem any of them his peers.  Following his final whore-murder, Gull has a vision of the 20^th century’s marvels, and he excoriates the dwellers of the future for their shallowness:

With all your shimmering numbers and your lights, think not to be inured to history. Its black root succors you. It is inside you… See me! Wake up and look upon me! I am come amongst you! I am with you always!

Naturally, the idea of Jack the Ripper equating himself with Jesus Christ can’t help but carry a satirical tone. Yet Moore seems altogether serious about seeing the Ripper as a “black root” at the heart of all mankind.  This “root” seems more or less akin to Jung’s “Shadow,” which for Jung remains part of human psychology no matter how advanced humans may become. Because of such moments, in which Moore seems to have become fascinated with his incarnation of evil, he escapes the banality of merely political creators, who ceaselessly promote the idea that all darkness will give way to some intellectual light.

In keeping with its title, FROM HELL is a profoundly pessimistic novel, drenched in a Spengleresque mood of historical futility. Perhaps its most depressing—albeit bracing—aspect is even though no reader is likely to believe that Gull can escape hell through his techniques of derangement, Moore offers no light at the end of the tunnel for anyone else, either.   

CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

In Part 1, I wrote:

Conscresence, more than its roughly equivalent term "coagulation," suggests the process by which seemingly unrelated phenomena "concretize" into a greater whole. Thus images, symbols and story-tropes which can only have a very limited meaning by themselves, take on greater depth when associated with others that have a reinforcing effect.

What causes this "reinforcing effect," though? Upon rereading August's FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3, it occurred to me that most of the mythcomics essays I've printed here depend on the authors having organized their symbolic constructs around what I called "aspects of discursive symbolism." The full context is as follows:

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

In other words, in order for a narrative to manifest the strongest form of symbolic concrescence-- a.k.a. "hyperconcrescence," as I currently like to call it-- the author(s) must first draw upon what they know of the real world, the world which can be represented by discursive symbolism (or "work"). Then, to make this knowledge function in a fictive world, the kernels of information must be transformed into the tropes of presentational (also called "expressive") symbolism (or "play"). Thus the mind's ability to "work hard" proves essential to the process of "playing hard," and therefore, "playing well."

I have to reiterate that it's always possible for an author to "dumb down" the expressive symbolism in a narrative in order to get across some limited didactic message. When an author does so, he has to some extent sacrificed "play" on the altar of pure "work" by making the narrative function as persuasive rhetoric. That said, creators who have deep reservoirs of imagination may still at times produce narratives that have the qualities of mythic play even though the authors are trying to convert an audience to some position.

Case in point: Dave Sim's CEREBUS. Most of the time, particularly in the later issues, Sim is seeking to persuade readers of his philosophical positions, and this is probably no less true in the narratives I've deemed mythcomics (the last part of LAST DAYS here, and the first part of GUYS here) as in a narrative I deemed a "null-myth" (the horror of CHASING YHWH). But irrespective of Sim's conscious intentions, his imagination is "working" full blast at the same time his conscious intellect is formulating the didactic schemes of the prior two works, while in YHWH, his imagination has sort of given up the game. So, although discursive symbolism is at work in all three, in CHASING YHWH there is no such transformation of Sim's rhetorical stance into the playful discourse of art. Thus, even though I personally disagree with Sim's position re: "fanboys" as he expresses them in GUYS, I had to give him some props for "promoting a satiric version of Spider-Man to make his points about creeping emotionalism." Thus there's an expressive underthought to complement the rhetorical overthought.

I will expand on the final paragraph from FOUNTS PT. 3:

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

In similar fashion, I regard Sim's sociological connections between comic book people and "creeping emotionalism" to be incorrect on two counts: one, because there's no way to prove such a connection, and two, because even if there was one, how would it be categorically different from the "creeping emotionalism" present in any other ingroup-- say, Canadian hockey fans?

Hyperconcrescence, then, most often takes place when the discursive mode of work, the overthought, reinforces the expressive underthought. The main exceptions are those narratives that seem to have no strong discursive overthought, like the origin of the Golden Age Hawkman. Yet even here, author Gardner Fox is conjuring with metaphysical tropes that were discursively organized by their pagan proponents. And thus familiar tropes, such as the one regarding the soul's fate after death, still exhibit the modern author's understanding of the original structuring principles, even within the venue of a superhero comic book.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 3

In Part 2, I enlisted Jung's idea about function-sovereignty to champion Aristotle's preference for "unity of action" over Levi-Strauss's structuralist, "nothing-is-more-important-than-anything-else" approach to analyzing the themes of archaic myth. Yet the Jungian concept that most resembles Levi-Strauss's formulation of binary oppositions is that of enantiodromia. From PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES:

I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.

Naturally, since I'm concerned with the themes of literary works rather than myths as such, I'm not concerned with Jung's idea about an unconscious "counterposition" arising in reaction to a "one-sided tendency" that "dominates conscious life." The writer of fiction may be drawing on both conscious and unconscious factors in his own mind, but the work he presents to the reader depends on a conflict between at least two opposed principles, usually personified into characters. Levi-Strauss implied such a conflict in his binary oppositions, though he does not seem nearly as interested in Aristotle's idea of the *agon,* the idea that conflict is fundamental to "poetry." If anything, Levi-Strauss's approach to the way a myth-tale approaches opposed forces resembles Tzvetan Todorov's model for an aesthetics that "just happens,' based not in conflict but in changing equilibriums.

…we must inquire into the very nature of narrative. Let us begin by constructing an image of the minimum narrative, not the kind we usually find in contemporary texts, but that nucleus without which we cannot say there is any narrative at all. The image will be as follows: All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.

I suppose Todorov may have de-emphasized the radical of conflict because he was aware of literary works that appeared to dispense with overt conflict. However, in my analysis of the Ray Bradbury story "The Last Night of the World," I found that even in a story with no apparent intrinsic conflict, there existed a conflict between what the story portrayed and the audience's expectations:

In the minds of some if not all readers of the story, there will be the expectation that if humanity were faced with an "end of days," it would be an occasion of great tumult, of "raging against the dying of the light."  What Bradbury's story offers is, in keeping with the literary audience to which it is directed, is a triumph of the "will to nothingness" against all the audience's expectations.

In Part 2, I gave my "binary opposition" to describe the potential underthought in a Jack Kirby story: "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story was equally weak in terms of having a discursive overthought, which came down to nothing more than "good must triumph over evil." So what would a strong underthought on the same theme look like?

The Golden Age Origin of Hawkman might be seen as following roughly the same paltry "good vs. evil" overthought, though its development of its underthought is one of the strongest in the comics medium.

In Fox's Hawkman story, as in Kirby's Challengers story, the heroes are tough guys who prove skillful with weapons, while their respective enemies more or less align with the archetype of the evil sorcerer. So the opposition here would be not unlike that of "sword versus sorcery."

To move on to a different underthought which keeps to the same good-vs.-evil overthought, I'll cite Kanigher's 1947 "The Injustice Society of the World." In this story the underthought is more like "law vs. crime," perhaps best represented by the scene where the villains put the heroes on trial for their deeds against crime. This underthought is not nearly as well developed as Fox's Hawkman story. However, the Kanigher story is one of many that I've considered as mythcomics simply because the stories had one "binary opposition" devoted to giving readers a discourse regarding the opposed elements.

Similarly, I have at times given the mythcomics designation to works in which the overthought and underthought are both strong, though not necessarily forming a unity.

The 1982 graphic novel "God Loves, Man Kills" does provide such unity, though. This time the overthought isn't just a vague opposition of good and evil, but that of "religious doctrine versus biological reality." Various earlier X-Men stories had opposed the biological reality of mutantkind to human beliefs regarding normality. However, those earlier stories didn't reference the more controversial topic of religion, as Chris Claremont's story does.

Cyclops's speech depicts the positive opposition of the overthought, using logic to assert that mutants are part of humankind. In contrast, Reverend Stryker fulfills the negative function, anathematizing the abnormal and stressing the need for purification.

Since both of these philosophical postures relate to the history of ideas, they belong to the story's overthought. The underthought, however, is concerned more with the opposition of images and the numinous associations they carry. Elsewhere in the story, the sometime villain Magneto makes what I've termed the "separatist argument," that humans and mutants should be separated from one another. But his appearance in this panel gives Magneto a less rational appearance, making of him a sympathetic "devil"-- born up by magnetic waves rather than wings-- who storms the church-like meeting-hall of the obsessed preacher.

"God Loves" is not as rich in images and symbols as other stories, particularly the Hawkman-origin. Clearly Claremont's story functions primarily as a dramatic exploration of ideas, while the symbols are less important. However, "God Loves" is one of the better stories in which overthought and underthought form a significant unity.

OVERTHINKING THEMIS, UNDERTHINKING MOIRA

Followers of Zeus claimed that it was with him that Themis produced the Moirai, three Fates.^[10] A fragment of Pindar,^[11] however, tells that the Moirai were already present at the nuptials of Zeus and Themis; that in fact the Moirai rose with Themis from the springs of Okeanos the encircling world-ocean and accompanied her up the bright sun-path to meet Zeus at Mount Olympus.-- Wikipedia entry on Themis.

I have to assume that the academics I've quoted on the subject of Moira's co-existence with Themis were influenced by something like the Pindar fragment cited above. In 2010's LURKERS ON THE THRESHOLDS, I wrote:

Just as [F.M.] Cornford had shown that Moira, a sanctity older than the gods, was identical with the origin of social order, so Miss [Jane Ellen] Harrison pointed to the ensuing process of social evolution, where Themis represents the behavior dictated by social conscience... Above all, Themis was "Justice in the realm of Zeus," which checked the primitive law of sacrifice and atonement, symbolized in a Mother Goddess who suffered a yearly death and rebirth through her son.-- Henderson, THRESHOLDS OF INITIATION, PP. 10-11.

I haven't read Harrison's THEMIS and so can't be sure if Henderson has correctly represented her views. Still, I also pointed out in LURKERS that Ernst Cassirer entertained similar views,  so to some extent the opposition of Moira and Themis has become independent of Harrison's specific views. For Cassirer, Moira represents human governance by a god-centered, "mythical" mode while Themis represents a man-centered "ethical" mode.

I've devoted considerable space to the difference between the Frye-derived concepts of "the overthought" and "the underthought," which I've aligned with the literary modes of "realism" and "escapism" respectively. Further, I would add that the "overthought," the more logical and discursive function of literature has displaced the function of the symbolically associative "underthought" in the world of criticism much as the ideal of Themis supposedly replaced that of Moira.

And yet, even though there's a place for works dominated by rational overthought or by "irrational" underthought, my concept of pluralistic tolerance doesn't keep me from finding superior those works in which overthought and underthought are balanced. In such works, the artist has access to what Jung called "the collective  unconscious" and the many archetypes found therein, rather than his simply using discrete symbols for the sake of allegorical illustration.

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference might be the various iterations of the STAR TREK franchise. Though there are certainly some inferior episodes within the three seasons of "Classic Trek," Roddenberry in his capacity as head producer (for the first two seasons, at least) infused the show with a substructure of mythical ideas that balanced the show's apparent enshrinement of sweet reason.

In my commentary on the second-season episode "Amok Time," I mentioned that even though the writer was Theodore Sturgeon, I suspect that Sturgeon came up with the idea for the story as one he hoped that a producer with Roddenberry's tastes would purchase: one focused on the struggle of two males over a female. Even the caveat that one of the two doesn't actually want the female-- that Kirk is actually fighting Spock with the object of saving Spock from a more dangerous antagonist-- does not banish the archetype that I've termed "Savage Masculinity." This archetype of "men gone wild" persists in many episodes penned by many authors-- all of whom, it's been alleged, Roddenberry re-wrote for his own purposes-- and helps keep the TREK universe from being too antiseptic.

Years ago I engaged in a mammoth re-watch of most of the TREK epigoni, all except for NEXT GENERATION. I searched in vain for any sustained use of an archetype with the mythic power I've associated with "Moira." But even though a lot of these episodes were entertaining, the writers of the epigoni had next to no understanding as to how to invoke the deep level of the underthought. Rational overthought dominates almost everything, and for the most part there's no sense that any other mode of thought can even exist.

Vulcans were not very popular with the executive producers of the epigoni up until the last series, ENTERPRISE. Even in that series, the series-makers were not able to grasp the dramatic contrast of Vulcan culture's conflict between impulse and rationality. But if there was any episode that best shows the producers' incompetence in the realm of Moira, it would be the 1997 VOYAGER episode, "Blood Fever."

Here the purely rational drama dwells upon regular character B'Eleanna Torres and her interaction with a minor crewperson, a Vulcan male named Vorik. Because the starship Voyager is far from the parent Federation and its planets, Vorik experienced a "pon farr" just as Spock did in "Amok Time." Like Spock, Vorik desires to get back to his homeworld to marry and spawn a designated fiancee. However, when circumstances seem to frustrate Spock in this goal, he at least contemplates having sex with a female crewperson to defuse his sexual torment. Captain Kirk makes it possible for Spock to carry out his ancient rituals of "marriage or challenge," but no one aboard Voyager can do this for Vorik. He works a Vulcan whammy on Torres, almost causing her to desire to mate with him. However, because such forced nuptials would be condemned as immortal by the show's audience, Torres is able to resist the Vulcan mind-magic. Finally Vorik initiates the "marriage or challenge" ritual, but this time, "the bone gets to fight." Torres roundly defeats Vorik in unarmed combat and defuses both his sexual desire and her own.

Now, the basic idea of a female character standing against a male aggressor CAN be archetypal. But here the writer of "Blood Fever," one Lisa Klink, merely uses both Vorik and Torres as flat representations of male desire and female resistance respectively. "Blood Fever" is by no means the worst example of a latter-day TREK-tale that has "too much Themis on its mind." Nowhere in the episode is there the sense that the "pon farr" is rooted in a centuries-old ritual designed to organize the interactions of males and females. Instead, it's just an inconvenient alien quirk that has to be defused so that Vorik can go back to being a useful member of the crew. (Not surprisingly, he never has a major plot devoted to him afterward.)

This suggests to me that the author's ability to make free associations with symbols has to be to some extent independent of moral considerations. Authors who are too concerned with framing moral messages cut themselves off from the depths of their own creativity. Thus the concept of Moira underlying Themis gives literary support to the philosophical opinion of Friedrich Nietzsche:

“Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.”

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

Just a minute ago, I concluded Part 1 by saying:

In the upcoming Part 2, I'll justify the connection of the two types of meaning with my title regarding the nature of strong and weak propositions.

I'll try to set down my theme statement as succinctly as I can, but some grounding for my use of the word "proposition" is necessary. 

It's widely stated that of the usual "parts of language"-- declarative, interrogative, imperative or exclamatory-- propositions are filed under the heading of declarations. This means that the speaker is declaring his statement to have "truth-value," whether he's saying "it looks like it's going to rain" or "Sequence X of LI'L ABNER is better than Sequence Y."

Now, this is surely true when one is speaking of language as it is used in one-on-one discourse, or even in discourse between one and a multitude. However, literature is not concerned with outright declarations as such. Sir Philip Sidney argued that "the poet never affirmeth, and therefore never lieth." This is tantamount to Sidney's stating that the poet's declarations are structured more as possibilities than absolute truths. 

Obviously, there are some poets who do "affirm" more than others, but Sidney's analysis is on target. Commonplace language deals with strong propositions, but literature favors weaker propositions.

Further, even within literature, there's a hierarchy of strength between the concrete, lateral/literal meaning, and the abstract, vertical meaning of both overthought and underthought.

To return to the two LI'L ABNER sequences referenced in Part 1, it's evident from the way Al Capp works that his cycles-- usually running from four to six months-- could be unified in terms of their action, like "D. Yokum Visits," or simply a motley group of episodes, like "General Bullmoose Debuts." 

The propositional strength of the lateral meaning in both is equally strong, for the lateral meaning is identical with "everything that happens in the stories." Disgustin' Yokum using his unearthly ugliness to turn Wild Bill Hickup into a stone statue and Li'l Abner letting the Slobbovians legally change him into a female are equally strong propositions, in terms of the reader's engagements with them-- though obviously, neither story-structure possesses any "truth-value" for reality as such.

Yet the abstract vertical meaning is even weaker than the assorted vicissitudes associated with "the stories." Many readers can read past the symbolic discourses in LI'L ABNER without noticing their existence, while others will read them purely in terms of their alliance to didactic discourse, as in "Capp is a great satirist, because he makes fun of rich people").

Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions. 

At the same time, even though "Visits" is like a well-constructed brick kiln, while "Debuts" is sort of a tumble-down brick house, it's the latter, less organized work that gave birth to one of the strip's more recognizable characters, General Bullmoose, while Disgustin' Yokum is most probably barely remembered even by Capp's remaining fans.

Thus the weakness of weak propositions can be both a strength and a weakness at the same time.