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.                     

  

A COUPLE OF EXCEPTIONAL MONSTERS

 In 2020's OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD PT. 3, I formulated an assortment of tropes that described ways in which the four persona-types diverged from their dominant configurations: that "heroes" and "demiheroes" are usually good (that is, beneficial to the society) while "villains" and "monsters" are usually evil (detrimental to the society). Here are a couple more examples of exceptions to the dominant rule.             

   Most of the characters in Ray Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and its film adaptation are easily aligned: all of the denizens of Green Town are demiheroes, while all of the creatures from Mister Dark's carnival are monsters. The one character who's a little difficult to place is that of Tom Fury, the lightning-rod salesman. In the early chapters of WICKED, Bradbury's early chapters don't make Fury seem as mundane as the Green Town citizens; if anything, he talks like some sort of mad prophet when he first addresses Will and Jim. Mad prophets, who represent some order outside the bubble of the society, often if not always align with the tonality of the monster, albeit one that expouses some ideal higher or more unique than the society's dominant moral order. In the book Bradbury disperses Fury's supernatural aura and has him neutralized. Fury succumbs to the carnival's temptations and becomes a dwarf, sort of a lesser monster, and plays no further role in the narrative. But the movie makes Fury the representative of some uncanny power that's never defined, as shown by Dark's attempt to torture him into compliance. The film concludes Fury's arc by having him break free of his bondage and destroy Dark's chief henchwoman the Dust Witch. Even in this arc, Fury is too erratic to register as a hero and too unusual to register as a demihero, and so I list him among my "beneficent monsters."                                             

    Melville's Captain Ahab proves even more difficult to categorize. Like Tom Fury, Ahab's certainly set apart from ordinary whalers who are simply pursuing profit. He's given an "evil" aura merely by sharing the name of a Biblical king who's supposedly one of the foes of God, but his action of hunting the particular whale who maimed Ahab is not "villainous" as such. Melville sometimes confers a certain heroic aura upon Ahab, but if Ahab's quest doesn't have an evil influence upon society, it doesn't have any good impact either. Thus I find that Ahab has become a monster as a result of questing after a monster. Moby Dick's godlike indifference to the suffering he inflicts upon Ahab is mirrored by the whale's hunter (and co-star in the novel). Ahab brings about the deaths of almost everyone on board the Pequod, not least the cabin-boy Pip, with whom Ahab almost regains some of his natural human feeling. He isn't therefore a "good monster" like Tom Fury, though Ahab's aura of tragic waste ennobles him somewhat. At the very least, that aura keeps Ahab from being consigned to the same circle of Hell that contains Doctor Moreau, the Invisible Man and the Baron Frankenstein of the Hammer "Frankenstein" series.                             

A DEMIHERO DISTINCTION

This post follows up on one made about a year and a half ago, wherein I made a point with which I no longer agree.

 Shortly after I re-defined "focal presences" as "icons" in the 2022 essay I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, I stated that in PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS that I didn't think "charisma-crossovers" occurred at all when, in a given open-ended series, subordinate icons belonging to one persona-type encountered subordinate icons belonging to another persona-type. Here was one of my examples:

...within the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon and the Joker have existed almost the same number of years, and have frequently appeared in the same stories. Both characters are Subordinate Icons to Batman, but there's no charisma-crossover between the two Subs as there is when the Joker appears in a story alongside another villain, such as the Penguin or Two-Face.

One flaw in this statement, though, is that as an often-seen support character, Commissioner Gordon is as familiar a sight in the BATMAN comics as an object like the Batmobile. He belongs to what I've called "the subordinate ensemble," so naturally he does not "cross over" with subordinate icons who are only seen in a more irregular fashion. Gordon, like Alfred the Butler, might be seen as moons circling a planet called Batman-- or sometimes "Batman-and-Robin." Non-regular subordinates are more like celestial bodies that might not be big enough to be planets, but they too respond to the gravitic influence of the Bat-planet. But even if the Joker and the Penguin are seen as separate celestial bodies, when they come near one another they also issue a gravitic influence on one another-- and that intermingling of energies does qualify as a charisma-crossover.

Side-note: arguably some of these celestial bodies may increase their mass, enough to become "planets" in their own right, then they may start generating their own gravity-power on the Bat-planet as well as upon lesser celestial bodies. Catwoman, for instance, remained a "Charisma Dominant Sub" for the first fifty years of her existence, and her very rare forays into stature-territory did not change her, any more than the JOKER series made the Clown Prince into a "Stature Dominant Prime." But in 1993 Princess of Plunder acquired strong stature from a series that lasted roughly eight years, and continued to headline various projects over the past twenty-plus years. All that stature bulked her up into a "planet" with "Stature Dominant" mass, and she would be stature-dominant even when appearing as a guest-star in some other feature. End side-note.

Another inaccurate statement I made in CALLINGS was the following:

When dealing with icons who originate within the cosmos of a given series, there can be no charisma-crossovers except between icons belonging to the same persona.

In saying this, I was trying to suss out why demiheroes in a given series did not have "crossovers" with one another, just because, say, Flash Thompson crossed paths with J. Jonah Jameson (which I believe was a minor event that only happened one time in the Lee-Ditko years). But there was no necessity for this statement, since characters like Thompson and Jameson were already part of Spider-Man's subordinate ensemble.

Further, if it ever made sense to me to say that "monsters" and "villains" could not cross over their charisma-filled gravity-wells, that now seems entirely unnecessary. Monsters and villains are indeed very different personas, but as long as they are subordinate icons who are NOT part of the subordinate ensemble, then there's no reason that, say, if Batman crosses paths with both The Mad Hatter and Solomon Grundy, that's not a charisma-crossover. The reader recognizes both icons as "adversaries of Batman" and so their gravity-waves play off one another. Equally, in one Superman tale he encountered a "villain" of his own rogues' gallery, the Atomic Skull, and teamed up with a "monster" from the Dark Knight's domain, The Man-Bat. I would deem both Skull and Man-Bat Charisma Dominant Subs, since Man-Bat never enjoyed more than fleeting stature-roles. So the two charisma-icons definitely cross over, just as if they'd both been Superman-foes-- or even two foes belonging to some third hero's cosmos.

Now, is it possible for a "non-regular" demihero "foe" of a hero to cross over with a monster or villain? Possibly. A character from the Frank Miller series BATMAN YEAR ONE, Commissioner Loeb, only made rare appearances in the comics. But he did make recurring appearances in the first two seasons of GOTHAM. There Loeb was a menace to James Gordon but not one regular enough to belong to that show's subordinate ensemble. He would have to have had some "dynamic" relationship to a monster or villain for that to sustain any crossover-vibe, not to simply be in the same room with Riddler or that sort of thing. A brief scene from THE LONG HALLOWEEN, in which Harvey "Not Yet Two Face" Dent crosses paths with Solomon Grundy for a chapter or so could have been reworked as a stand-alone arc with such a crossover-vibe with a demihero-type. I already alluded to a "monster-demihero" crossover in CALLINGS, where Brother Power crossed paths with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters.

And that's probably enough noodling on that for now.

 

ICONIC BONDING PT. 3

 In ICONIC BONDING PT. 1 I formulated three types of bonded ensembles using the Dick Grayson Robin as an example of a character who had participated in all three, to wit:

--the "unbonded" ensemble in which he has brief, semi-regular teamups with Batgirl II--

--the semi-bonded ensemble, in which he gravitates to two different iterations of the TEEN TITANS (after leaving the Batman-and-Robin ensemble)--

--and the fully bonded ensemble, such as the Dick Grayson version of Robin enjoyed with Batman roughly from 1940 to 1970.

In all of these examples, Robin is a superordinate icon, as are the majority of fictional heroes. In contrast, most fictional villains function as subordinate icons. So when villains appear in ensembles, they usually do not possess the quality of stature, only charisma. But this charisma-action also manifests in line with the three models seen above.

"Unbonded ensembles" would be any sort of short-term teams, or teamups that prove loose at best over time. For instance, there have been many gatherings of Bat-villains in the Bat-verse, ranging from RESURRECTION NIGHT to HUSH. No reader expects these peripatetic assemblages to have any durative value. The same applies to teamups that may last a few issues before dissolving, such as the alliance of Daredevil's foes the Gladiator and the Masked Marauder. However, in the above cases the charisma-crossover action depends on the fact that the villains have been previously established. So when both the Enforcers and their boss the Big Man first appear in SPIDER-MAN #10, they had no crossover-charisma because they had no previous iterations. Further, their ensemble expires with that issue, for the Big Man never returns. When the Enforcers make their second appearance, which is also the first appearance of the Green Goblin, the "familiarity" of the Enforcers sustains a "proto-crossover" with the "novelty" of the Goblin, but only because the Goblin himself will go on to future appearances.

"Semi-bonded ensembles" are those that have some impressive duration, even when the icons aren't joined at the hip. I've written a couple of times about how Stan Lee took two THOR villains who no longer fit that feature, the Cobra and Mister Hyde, and made them a semi-regular team. However, even in the period when the two malcontents were most often allied, one would occasionally appeared independently of the other, or in alliance with some other super-fiend. In the 1980s Cobra severed his alliance with Hyde and his short-lived 1970s group of serpent-themed villains, the Serpent Squad, became reworked by later hands into the Serpent Society. I can't speak about Cobra's status in current Marvel comics, but up until the end of the 20th century he became much more prominent as the member of the Society than he was as a solo player, or as the partner to Mister Hyde.

"Bonded ensembles" are those in which the durative value is even more noteworthy, and may involve qualitative escalation as well as the quantitative kind. The Enchantress and the Executioner appeared together in their first appearance, and tended to appear together more often than not, with a slightly different angle: that the Executioner desired Enchantress as a bed-partner. There's a hint that this finally came to pass in a 1970 AVENGERS story, and future stories built on that development. None of the THOR stories in which Enchantress and Executioner are the only villains are charisma-crossovers, any more than Batman and Robin are stature-crossovers when they're the only heroes in a given story. And if the renegade Asgardians appear together in a non-aligned feature like THE HULK, it's not any more a charisma-crossover than Greenskin squaring off against a single non-aligned villain like Maximus the Mad.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there, any more than Sergeant Rock being separate from the grunts under his command. An exception was the Apokolips-Lord's brief role as the organizer of the first "Secret Society of Super Villains." But even there, the charisma-crossover would be between (a) Darkseid and any minions, such as the pictured Kalibak, and (b) the Secret Society as a whole, which functions as a semi-inclusive team. 

Heroes and villains may be the only two of the four personas that regularly appear in all these configurations. Even I, the author of said personas, will probably not bother trying to suss out if my models to apply to the other two, the "monster" and the "demihero."

 

PERSONA-TO-PERSONA CALLINGS

 In ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA), published on 7-27-22 I made the following inexact statement: 

Lee had Foswell return to crime as an ally to the newly minted Kingpin-- only to be killed by the Kingpin's thugs for trying to protect Jameson. This might be deemed a demi-crossover of the charismatic kind, since Foswell had some escalation-charisma even as a support-figure, and the Kingpin had none until he appeared often enough to become a familiar figure.

I added a note to the blogpost to the effect that I would trash this opinion in another essay, and this is it.

The problem with my previous formulation is related to my ongoing theory of personas, given its final form in 2012's DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 1. I feel as if I've implied, though never stated outright, this necessary rule:

"When dealing with icons who originate within the cosmos of a given series, there can be no charisma-crossovers except between icons belonging to the same persona."

An example: within the Batman series, Commissioner Gordon and the Joker have existed almost the same number of years, and have frequently appeared in the same stories. Both characters are Subordinate Icons to Batman, but there's no charisma-crossover between the two Subs as there is when the Joker appears in a story alongside another villain, such as the Penguin or Two-Face.

 

To return to the Spider-Man cosmos once more, Fred Foswell may have started out as a super-villain, but he spends the majority of his career as a demihero in the Lee-Ditko stories, wherein he's reformed and become a crusading reporter, generally being of aid to Spider-Man or the police but only with the limited actions of a demihero. Lee and Romita change him back to a villain who conspires with the Kingpin, probably because neither creator cared anything about Foswell and simply wanted to be rid of him. Nevertheless, Foswell's gratitude toward J. Jonah Jameson causes him to betray the Kingpin to save Jameson, which means that his brief conversion back to villainy was less than consequential in summing up his character arc. So Foswell dies, according to my system, a demihero.

So by my newly stated rule, Foswell might in theory interact with another demihero in the SPIDER-MAN cosmos, and that might be a charisma-crossover. Nevertheless, such a crossover would have to have something unusual about it, rather than just Fred Foswell bumping into Betty Brant or Jonah Jameson in the news room. For that matter, Foswell bumping into any of Peter Parker's college-chums-- which I don't believe ever happened-- would also prove inadequate to sustain any charisma. Now, if Stan Lee had written a bizarre story in which Fred Foswell was revealed to be the real father of Flash Thompson, then THAT might be a charisma-crossover, but even then it would be largely because the two characters had spent a long time in the Spider-cosmos acting independently of one another. 

In some of my earliest writings on crossovers, I distinguished between "static crossovers" and "dynamic crossovers." I won't repeat those particular observations, but the salient aspect of that theory was that the static crossovers were those that were fairly regularized, like Donald Duck appearing in Uncle Scrooge's feature, while dynamic crossovers were those that spotlighted a more unusual meeting, say, of Spider-Man and Daredevil. I would now tend to state that, in contrast to the crossovers of the other three persona-types-- of heroes, villains, or monsters-- demiheroes only sustain crossovers of a dynamic kind, because most of them function as support-characters. Returning to the Batman cosmos, a story in which Alfred simply met police detective Harvey Bullock would not be a dynamic crossover. But if the two of them joined forces to accomplish some mission, as the characters did in an episode of "Gotham," I would consider that a charisma-crossover. This principle builds on what I said here about viewing the meeting of two URUSEI YATSURA support-types as a charisma-crossover, because they immediately challenge one another.

Now crossovers of demiheroes from different universes are a different matter, since those are dynamic by definition. On my blog OUROBOROS DREAMS I devoted a post to a multi-demihero crossover, a TV-cartoon entitled POPEYE MEETS THE MAN WHO HATED LAUGHTER. Although the humorous hero Popeye is the star of the show, he's conned into bringing together a few dozen characters from funny comic strips, all under the aegis of King Features Syndicate, and including both famous types like Blondie and Dagwood and near-forgotten types like Snuffy Smith. Some "serious" heroes are mixed in as well, but almost all of the crossover-characters are of the demiheroic persona.

Similarly, there's no problem crossing over demiheroes with other persona who originate in separate conceptual universes. When DC Comics finally brought back their late sixties character Brother Power, who belongs to the "monster" persona, they did so in 1989's SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5. But the Brother didn't cross paths with the monster-protagonist of the feature, but with two of Swamp Thing's support-characters, Abby Arcane and Chester Williams. A crossover with Swamp Thing would have been a stature-crossover, but Brother Power meeting Swamp Thing's friends only works on the level of cosmic charisma.

 

CROSSOVERS VS. MASHUPS

 In this essay I wrote:

MONSTERS VS. ALIENS does not qualify as any kind of crossover, though it is a "mashup," in which diverse characters with some similar aspects but also with different backgrounds are jammed together in one narrative. It might be fairly argued that all crossovers may be called mashups, but that all mashups are not crossovers.

I'm not going to advance a "theory of mashups" to go with the crossover-theory advanced in the CONVOCATION series. But for the purpose of this essay, I'll formulate a rough definition: that, unlike crossovers, mashups don't always have to feature at least one character with some established story-history. For instance, the cited example, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, is a monster-mashup even though all four of the starring monsters appear for the first time in the movie. But it's not a monster-crossover because none of the featured characters had any established history in a previous narrative.

I reviewed the two WAXWORK films back in December 2014, but that was long before I was thinking much about crossover-theory. Whereas the heroes of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS only indirectly reference the movie-characters on which they're based, both WAXWORK films provide various incarnations of "famous monsters of filmland." What's interesting is that some of the incarnations are very generic, and would hardly count in a mashup except for the sheer diversity of their types, while a comparative few are specific enough in their references that they could be considered at least high-charisma crossovers.

In the first WAXWORK, the protagonists are menaced by assorted doppelgangers of evil entities. Two segments are devoted to generic versions of a werewolf and a mummy, and there's a climactic fight-scene in which the good guys contend with a small army of freaks, also mostly generic like zombies and vampires, though there are some very loose visual references to figures like The Invisible Man and Audrey II of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. Yet there are two extended sequences devoted to the protagonists contending with both the canonical Dracula and a very fictionalized version of the Marquis de Sade-- both of whom count as "monsters" in my system. So by the terms I've used earlier, WAXWORK qualifies as a "high-charisma" crossover, even though none of the evil entities are "real."

The second WAXWORK, which includes a markedly different origin for the doppelgangers, also includes lots of generic types: more zombies (with an obvious hat-tip to DAWN OF THE DEAD), a disembodied hand, various aliens (including The Aliens), and a "ghost girl" possibly patterned on the spirit from THE HAUNTING. However, this time the "high-charisma" entities include versions of Doctor Frankenstein and his Monster, Mister Hyde, Jack the Ripper, Godzilla, Nosferatu, and a sorcerer based on the villain from Roger Corman's 1965 film THE RAVEN. To be sure, the sorcerer fits the persona of a "villain" rather than a "monster," but the others all register as monstrous presences, even though all of them, except for Frankenstein and his creation, only appear for a minute or so. 

Still, it's not hard to imagine the WAXWORK concept being done with no strong references to any established characters. Had this been done, the movies would not be crossovers, only mashups, like the one seen in the Mexican kiddie-film TOM THUMB AND LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD-- though that film is a "hero-crossover" because of the teamup of the titular fairy-tale protagonists.

PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2

I may be dovetailing two subjects with only a loose relationship, since my acceptance of the Whitehead term "prehension" (as explained here) came into being about the same time that I started meditating on the hypothetical evolution of what I've labeled as the four literary personas. Nevertheless, I'm going with the conceit.

A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.

In contrast, though, I can imagine-- just as part of a large thought-experiment-- ways in which the four personas might develop diachronically. 

From 2015's COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, here's my last summary definition of how the four personas play off one another in terms of the abstractions they represent, the positive and negative forms of "glory" and "persistence":

The model I've established is one in which heroes and villains alike align themselves with *glory* by championing either the positive or the negative forms of the "idealizing will," while monsters and demiheroes align themselves with *persistence* by pursuing the negative or positive forms of the "existential will."

Prehension may be relevant here as the process by which the two forms of will distinguish themselves, in terms of how such forms of will manifest themselves, first as real human activity and secondarily as the "gestural" literary abstraction of human activity.

Assuming the usual schema for the development of early protohumans-- living in small hunter-gatherer tribes once they've come down from the trees-- then the persona of the *demihero* would have "pride of place." The demihero embodies "positive persistence" insofar as he/she is in essence the persona most concerned with immediate survival. The same need for persistence also determines that the demihero is the figure that is, or at least appears to be, the most thoroughly socialized, because in prehistoric times the tribe is the means by which the individual survives.

The next in line of development then would be "the monster," whatever figure becomes outcast from society. There's no knowing what form of rebellion would give rise to the monster, but it could be anything from an individual rebelling against codes of exogamic marriage to a victim selected as a sacrificial *pharmakon.* The monster is defined by his exclusion from society, and in most if not all his/her forms, he's always "out of place" or "out of step" in some manner.

It's not impossible that other tribes might also contribute to the idea of the monster-persona, but given that a particular tribe cannot really designate a separate tribe as being "outcasts," it's more likely that rival tribes would be the source of the "villain-persona." A given tribe may have to trade with other tribes, particularly in terms of gaining exogamous marital partners, but as long as other tribes can be perceived as a threat, they-- or more probably, their overlords-- would be the ancestors of the villain. 

When a given society faces entities too powerful to be simply cast out after the fashion of the rejected monster, the notion of the hero, the individual able to conquer the most powerful representative of the enemy tribe, is born. The hero may also take partial shape from human being's battles against non-human animals, but in a social sense, the hero is most reified by his rivalry with the villain, where both represent the tribe's greater self-expression to goals of "glory" rather than mere "persistence."

 

 

PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 1

 In NOTES ON WHITEHEAD PT. 3, I expressed my regrets that the philosopher had not chosen to define many of his terms more precisely in his most famous book, PROCESS AND REALITY. I wasn't even able to get a concise sense of what a "prehension" was, even in the chapter "Theory of Prehensions."

However, by sheer chance I found a definition without even looking for it. I happened to pick up an old book I'd not read through despite owning it some twenty years: COLIN WILSON, a literary study by one John A. Weigel, devoted to examining Wilson's works up to the year 1975. I have only read two of Wilson's philosophy books, none of which include RELIGION AND THE REBEL. It's from this book that Weigel alternately quotes and paraphrases Wilson's take on Whitehead's concept of the prehension, which is far clearer than anything Whitehead wrote in PROCESS AND REALITY.

Of central importance is Whitehead's idea of "prehension," which is dramatically defined, following Whitehead's specifications, "as that act of the soul, reaching out like an octopus to digest its experience." Fixing on "prehension" as the basic act in existentialism, an act carefully to be distinguished from "apprehension," which is based on intellectual rather than soulful understanding, Wilson rests his own case.

Wilson's "octopus" metaphor brings to mind a more primitive form of organic life: that of the one-celled amoeba, which has no perceptual organs and so assesses its contact with the "outside universe" purely by touch. I feel like I've resorted to the amoeba once or twice to suggest the base process of perception somewhere, but even if I haven't, I.A. Richards did, as I noted in my summation of his book PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC here:

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Richards doesn't specifically link his notion of conceptual "sorting" to Whitehead, though as I also noted, the author does mention Whitehead elsewhere in RHETORIC. Both Wilson's octopus metaphor and Richards' amoeba metaphor stress the faculty of perception through non-intellectual methods, which I would broadly compare to Jung's concept of the organism reacting to the world through the irrational functions of sensation and of intuition. Moreover, such metaphors cohere well with what I have labeled Whitehead's "theme statement" for the whole of PROCESS AND REALITY:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.

Since I discontinued my reading of PROCESS, I cannot say whether or not Wilson's use of the term "soulful" is accurate with respect to Whitehead's heuristics. But for me, "soulful" embodies a "concrescence" of all four of the potentialities, acting in unison to sort experience in all its multi-faceted variety. And it's with this covalence in mind that I'll examine the idea of prehensions in line with my concept of the four literary personas in my next post.

 

OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD PT. 3

 

Most of my considerations on “persona-types” follow the broad patterns laid down in archaic societies, where a character is “good” if his actions enhance society and “bad” if they do not. Fiction, not being more than an analogue to real life, had no problem in promulgating heroes who are all good, and villains who are all bad.

At the same time, if one surveys the various personae of art, one sees some interesting admixtures of good and bad not only in the personas of “hero” and “villain,” but also those complementary types I call “the monster” and “the demihero.” In a purely statistical sense, most heroes and demiheroes are aligned with “goodness,’ and most villains and monsters are aligned with “badness.” In the following sections, I’ll outline various exceptions to these rules. I have categories for various types of exceptions, though these are only meant to be broad trope-types rather than critical formulations as such.

BAD HEROES include…

OUT FOR BLOOD—these are the heroes who serve the public good but are really in it more for personal gratification of bloodlust than for moral reasons. Examples include the Punisher and Marv of SIN CITY.

OBSESSED BY IDEALS—this type is the opposite of the previous category, in that the hero does good despite the fact that he’s overly rigorous in his pursuit of justice. These include Itto Ogami of LONE WOLF AND CUB with his devotion to being a pitiless assassin, Hugo Drummond of BLACK DOSSIER. A somewhat offbeat idealist is the half-insane Badger, as seen in the story “SnakeBile Cognac.”

HEROISM CORRUPTED—the will to do good has been soured by bad experiences, so that the hero no longer has a strong moral compass, as seen in Rorschach and the Comedian in WATCHMEN.

GOOD VILLAINS include…

GENTEEL THIEVES—professional burglars like Catwoman and Lupin III never really cause society any harm with their ripoffs, and thus give readers all sorts of fun diversions from the moral order.

THEY MIGHT GOT A POINT—these are villains who embody ideals that society might use a little more of. The prisoners of DEADMAN WONDERLAND are villains until they’re given heroic inspiration by lead character Ganta, while in TALES OFHOFMANN Mister Nobody and his Brotherhood of Dada embody capricious chaos as an anodyne to normalcy.

THEY DIDN’T MEAN TO DO GOOD—but authors work in mysterious ways, as seen with the plutocrat General Bullmoose in LI'L ABNER and with Judge Dredd’s reluctant ally Spikes HarveyRotten.

CONVERTS TO GOODNESS—Sometimes villains turn to the non-dark side just because they’re attracted to the good guys, though this may be more understandable with Kree-Nal being swayed by the Jaguar, and less so with “the StarCreatures” getting starry-eyed over two Earth-schmucks. Sesshomaru of INU-YASHA, however, loses his villainy due to adopting a cute little girl. The Providers of THE GAMESTERS OF TRISKELION are reluctant converts in that they become benevolent overlords due to losing a bet.

GOOD MONSTERS include…

VENGEANCE-SAVIORS—the monsters are out to avenge themselves and end up helping good people, as happens with Black Jubal in THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT DIE. Janus, the son ofMarvel’s Dracula,  appears to get empowered by angelic forces to slay his unregenerate father, though Janus never seems all that “angelic.”

MONSTERS WANT LOVE TOO—sometimes these are just domesticized monsters like Dick Briefer’s comedy version of FRANKENSTEIN, or the grotesque romance seen in “LowerBerth.” Brother Power believes in peace and love like his hippie brethren though he tends to hit as hard as his nastier opponents.

ACCIDENTAL TERRORS—ah, the Tribbles are so cute, and the Shmoos so useful, until they get in the way of normal operations.

IRREGULAR HEROES—Both of the best-known swamp creatures, Man-Thing and Swamp Thing, possess a “thing” for fighting evil, but not on a regular basis. Monsters who commit to full-time heroism, like the Thing and Vlad from HACK/SLASH, are just plain heroes.

BAD DEMIHEROES include…

IDEALISTS UNLEASH EVIL—Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll are the best known examples, but types like Gustav Weil and Joy Eden are cut from the same cloth.

RACING LIKE THE RATS—these are conniving types who often seem to meld with the regular ranks of society but are always on the lookout to swindle or steal. Some of them have irregular moments of heroism, like Cerebus the Aardvark, but they usually revert to type in the end. Simon Stagg of METAMORPHO sometimes helps the Element Man, but is just as likely to undercut the hero. Dynamo City presents a whole society devoted to ruthless acquisition.

THE EVIL OF BANALITY—Wally Wood’s New York in “My Word” might be better named “No Fun City.” THE CABBIE has Christian visions but money’s his real god, though unlike the rat-racers he’s not honest about it. In “A Taste ofArmageddon,” all the inhabitants of Eminiar-7 line up to surrender their lives to automated extinction.

PUFFED UP WITH NO PLACE TO GO—the category of the braggarts. A few, like J. Jonah Jameson, are dimly aware of their own failings and so have their enormous egos threatened by persons of superior attainments. Most are like Rudy Crane of EYE EYESIR and Doctor Pritchard of HANDS OF THE RIPPER, seeking to demonstrate their braggadocio and ending up deflated.

FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE PT. 5

Today I finished a review of the 1964 Hammer psycho-thriller NIGHTMARE, one of five such films written by long-time Hammer scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster.

In other essays in my FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE series, I've talked about how various films alternate between focusing either on a disruptive "monster," such as a madman or a criminal schemer, or on the person who investigates the monster's crime. In Part Four, I expatiated upon on the British horror-thriller THE BLACK TORMENT, reversing an earlier position when I decided that the accused "monster" of the story was not the star, but rather the person who uncovers the plot against the innocent man.

Of the two Sangster psycho-thrillers I've thus far reviewed, the investigator was the focal presence of 1961's SCREAM OF FEAR, while in PARANOIAC, it's an evildoer who's "paranoid" because of his guilt over a horrible act. In contrast to both films, 1964's NIGHTMARE is focused upon an innocent whom a pair of schemers seek to drive mad. Indeed, the film is roughly cut in two, first showing the travails of young Janet Freeman as she seeks to fend off her fear of maternal madness, and then focusing upon the fate of the schemers, who appear to get away with driving Janet mad but are thereafter destroyed by Janet's friends. As I point out in my examination of the film's quasi-Freudian symbolism, I said:

We don't know if Child-Janet, on the day of her eleventh birthday, nurtured any jealousy of her mother's relationship with her father. Still, the mother's murder of the father has the effect of taking away the most important man in Janet's young life. There are no suggestion that teenaged Janet has ever considered boys her own age, and, had Sangster been forced to address the issue, he could have argued that her fear about inheriting her mother's insanity would have kept her isolated from the opposite sex. The one man for whom she shows regard is Baxter, who like her late father is another older married man, though this doesn't keep her from being interested in him. Baxter and Grace apparently believe that Janet's fear of her negative maternal image is so strong that it can be transferred to another target, simply by having Grace waltz around the family abode in a mask of Mrs. Baxter.

Even though the film is structurally bifurcated, though, I'd argue that Janet is still the focal presence, even though the actress playing the character is never seen once she's consigned to the nuthouse. I pointed out that even though the schemers stage-manage Janet into committing a murder for them, the female schemer Grace becomes agitated when she's told (falsely) that Janet has escaped the asylum. She instantly fears that her male partner Baxter is seeing Janet on the side, even though there's never been any indication that Baxter holds any regard for the teenager; rather, the viewer has only seen Janet becoming slightly moony over Baxter.

Still, even though Janet does nothing explicit to save herself, the friends who "gaslight the gaslighters" are all in her service, and so in a symbolic sense they are an extension of Janet. Janet's fears of inheriting her mother's madness is the element most central to the entire story, and the villains are made to plot their plot in line with Janet's "Electra Complex" (actually a term from Jung rather than Freud). In my analysis, I even argued that in Janet's absence from the second half, Grace is stage-managed into imitating the insane husband-murder committed by Janet's mother, and thus the madness Janet feared is visited upon Grace.

 Indeed, even though Janet is entirely absent from the latter half of the film, one could view the entire denouement of NIGHTMARE as a transference of Janet's psychic fear to her victimizer Grace. Janet's helpers stage-manage things so that Grace believes Janet has escaped the asylum, and that Baxter is meeting some other woman even after having married Grace. But Grace jumps to the conclusion that Janet is the other woman, and though the conclusion makes no logical sense, it makes symbolic sense. Grace, by exploiting Janet's fear of insanity, has in essence engendered her own madness, even to the point where she, unlike Janet, duplicates the husband-killing deed of the institutionalized Mrs. Freeman.

Within my persona-terminology, Janet is entirely a demihero, and she does even less to redeem herself than the character of Angela in the 1944 CLIMAX, whose demihero-persona I analyzed in this essay. Angela at least triumphs over her opponent-- an antagonist whose influence she doesn't even suspect-- through her devotion to her love of singing. Janet's protectors insure that the schemers' plot fails, but as characters the protectors are all nugatory. They are in essence a medium through which Janet's feared madness is transferred to those who deserve it-- which arguably frees Janet from the weight of her imposed Electra Complex, though Sangster is admittedly more fascinated with making all of his plot-complications seem halfway convincing. Thus, of all the Gothic innocents redeemed in thousands of books and films, Janet may be one of the few whose writer didn't even bother showing her final redemption, devoting but a single sentence to the fate of what may be Sangster's most interesting original character.

A FINAGLING FOLLOW-UP

About two years ago, in this essay, I rendered this judgment on the A&E series BATES MOTEL:

Not until 2013, with the premiere of the BATES MOTEL teleseries, did some raconteur develop the Norma character. Yet although Norma overrides Norman's character in the story proper, extrinsically Norman is still more important than Norma, even in BATES MOTEL.

At the time I wrote this, I hadn't actually finished the series, though it was wrapped in 2017, the same year I wrote the essay. I wasn't overly enamored of the series, though I respected the performances of the lead actors Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga. However, now that I finally worked my way through all five seasons, I would say that Norman and Norma comprise a two-person ensemble. Indeed, one of the last shots in the fifth season concludes with a dying Norman imagining himself reunited with Norma as if the two of them have passed on to some heavenly reward beyond the ugly toils of life.

Further, though Norman's persona is, as in all other iterations, that of a "monster," Norma Bates is more of a "demihero." She commits a couple of murders, but generally in situations of self-defense, and her crimes are outgrowths of her desire to make a better life for herself in the motel business. She has some strange vibes with Norman, but not as strange as his toward her, and so her nature aligns with the quality of "positive persistence" I described here.

ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT. 2

Until recently, all of my remarks on ROBINSON CRUSOE have been based on summations and adaptations, for I had not read either Defoe’s famous novel or its four-months-later sequel. In July 2009 I corrected myself on the question as to whether there could be a subcombative (I used the term "noncombative" then) form of the adventure-mythos. From ADDENDA EST:

...on further consideration I did think of a type of adventure-story that could take place in a "noncombative mode:" namely, the so-called "Robinsonade," the subgenre of lost-on-a-desert-island stories that were spawned by the considerable influence of Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE.

I also wrote that there was some "man vs. man" conflict in the first novel, which was correct, though the combat-scenes are rather niggling compared to the novel's emphasis upon Crusoe's efforts to survive and make a comfortable haven on his deserted isle. Today I would still say that it is a novel that aligns largely with the invigorative mode of the adventure-mythos, though the invigorative elements spring from the protagonist's struggles to survive rather than his fairly brief conflicts with cannibals and mutineers.

In 2013's A SHORT HISTORY OF HEROIC FANTASY-ADVENTURE, I touched upon another Defoe work-- which I still have not read today-- as an example of naturalistic adventure.

Examples of such naturalistic adventures include Defoe's 1720 novel CAPTAIN SINGLETON, Walter Scott's breakthrough 1814 historical epic WAVERLY and Schiller's 1781 play THE ROBBERS.  Even some poets began to emulate these more or less naturalistic "swashbuckling" themes, discernible in some of Byron's long poems of the early 19th century, like CHILDE HAROLD (1812) and THE CORSAIR (1814).  And undoubtedly there were many forgotten novels that trod the same basic territory, particularly the anonymously written "highwayman stories" popular in the 1700s. 

In 2014's ADDRESSING DISTRESS PT. 3, I advanced this hypothesis:

....I think 1719 brings a far more credible progenitor for pop culture: Daniel Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE.  In contrast to many of the novels aimed at more educated readers-- those of Swift, Fielding, and Voltaire, for three-- CRUSOE can be read for nothing more than visceral entertainment.  True, the novel has its deeper themes, but I don't think that its perennial popularity rests on them.

To date I have not found a better example of a "progenitor for pop culture" than ROBINSON CRUSOE. It's a little harder, though, to suss out its place in the history of adventure-fiction.

In SHORT HISTORY I cited a Wiki-quote to the effect that the genre of the chivalric romance had fallen out of fashion by 1600. I've heard it said that Edmund Spenser's 1590-96 poetic epic THE FAERIE QUEENE was not popular with contemporaneous reviewers, and this stands in strong contrast to the overwhelming success of Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE in 1605, a work often credited with demolishing the reputation of the chivalric romance. As I look at this list of 17th-century works of repute, I see nothing that does not shout "elite culture," even if certain works, such as the plays of Shakespeare, were apparently popular with the masses. Most of these works, IMO, would align with the other three Fryean mythoi-- drama, irony, or comedy-- but not with adventure. Even Milton's SAMSON AGONISTES, which like the Biblical story ends with Samson exacting a pyrrhic victory over the Philistines, aligns more with drama than with adventure.

 So is ROBINSON CRUSOE not only the first pop-culture novel with broad appeal to the increasingly literate masses, but also the 18th-century's first articulations of the adventure-mythos? It would seem so at present, though both the first book and its sequel are clearly subcombative works, in which some violence takes place but is not arranged to center upon the act of combat. From what I can tell, the 18th century's intellectual currents-- often represented as the "Age of Enlightenment" (1715-89)-- were still too allied to elite culture in order to allow for the invigorative mood of the fully combative adventure.

ROBINSON CRUSOE, in contrast, presents its contemporaneous readers with a picture of a European who has many lesser adventures in which he largely wins out over cannibals, mutineers, and Tartar raiders with his superior firepower, as I attempted to show in the first part of this two-part essay. Based on the way Defoe arranges his scenes of violence, I would say they are characterized more by "struggle" than by "combat." I''m not sure that any single literary work, whether of elite or popular culture, captures the attractions of the combative mode until Walter Scott makes his great breakthrough in the early 19th century with novels like ROB ROY and IVANHOE.

In the first part of CRUSADER I've detailed my problems with Crusoe's character: his priggish piety, his mental isolation from both his pets and fellow humans like Xury and Friday, and his questionable courage. But many of these traits are somewhat more forgivable in a character more defined by "persistence" than by "glory:" that is, a demihero rather than a hero.

In one of my early essays on the distinctions between these personas, I wrote this of the characters of the LOST IN SPACE series, which was perhaps only indirectly modeled on ROBINSON CRUSOE, through the later work SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON:

Despite the family's original purpose of space-exploration, the majority of the castaways-- mother Maureen Robinson, children Judy, Penny, and Will, and the cowardly stowaway Doctor Sniith-- are presented as being far from inclined to fight under most circumstances.  Only two of the male protagonists-- "alpha male" John Robinson and "beta male" Major Don West-- show much competence in the combat department, and even then, Major West only rarely shines as being more than just a "good" fighter.  John Robinson-- played by Guy Williams, the former TV "Zorro"-- is more frequently positioned as an above-average combatant, occasionally even displaying Zorro-style swordfighting skills. Though the Robinsons are portrayed as being willing to go to the wall to save persecuted or put-upon victims from aggressors, they only do so as a last resort, which makes them very different from the concept of the hero as a more active defender of right.

As discussed elsewhere, there is no reason a demihero cannot be a competent combatant, as was certainly the case with John Robinson. But this indirect namesake of Defoe's character is closer in spirit to Crusoe, in that both of them are largely concerned with day-to-day survival rather than with remaking the world.

ETHICS AMONG THE SUBCOMBATIVES PT. 4

In previous installments I've attempted to examine various subcombative works in terms of their relation to the overall concept of heroism. In brief, my previous estimations have been as follows:

(1) JUDEX the film is not only subcombative, but its titular character also bears little relation to the model of heroism I have constructed in essays such as 2013's RETURN OF THE MASTERY MASTER PT. 3. 

(2) MOANA is subcombative but the characters show heroism despite their inability to meet their foe in equal combat.

(3) Mark Twain's PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC, though a subcombative drama focused on the purgative sacrifice of the main character, shows a fascination with her ability to inspire men to "exalting activities," which Twain describes with a passion for their invigorating qualities ("the soul is overflowing with life and energy," et al).

(4) Parenthetically, I mentioned that even though Shakespere's TROILUS AND CRESSIDA centered on struggles of physical combat, just like Twain's JOAN, there's no sense in TROILUS that warfare brings forth any invigorating qualities. I did not say so previously, but I tend to view the two main characters of TROILUS to be demiheroes for the same reason that Judex is: their acts reflect no more than the "existential will" of persistence, rather than the "idealizing will" of glory.

The film I'll now discuss, 1955's THE COURT JESTER, is closest in structure to MOANA. The VHS cover seen above, whether it's original or derived from earlier art, capsulizes the inner conflict of the title character. Hubert Hawkins desires to be a hero, and for that reason, he joins a revolutionary movement led by an older crusader, "the Black Fox," who seeks to unseat the current usurper of the English throne. The rebels' ace in the hole is that they have custody of an infant whose proper legitimacy is a birthmark: a purple pimpernel on the baby's tush. The movie's opening number shows Hubert staging a complicated dance-scenario in which he appears to be the masked, Robin Hood-like leader of the rebels.

However, the viewer is quickly disabused of this illusion when the real Black Fox shows up. It's established that Hubert is not a fighter, only a performer, and that his main duty is that of caring for the infant heir to the throne. Not only is Hubert not the equal of the Fox, even the rebels' sole female member, Maid Jean, is given more trust than Hubert as a respected soldier in the cause.

Hubert's one compensation is that this female crusader (played by Glynis Johns) is not the inamorata of the Fox, the way that Maid Marian was to Robin Hood, and it turns out that she rather likes Hubert in spite of his lack of demonstrable manliness. For reasons too complicated to explain, the two of them end up forced to take the infant heir into the castle of the usurper-king, while Hubert poses as the king's new court jester. Thus, the protagonist who wants to be a hero ends up "playing the fool" for his enemies.

Hubert does get a shot at megadynamic heroism. The king's daughter takes a fancy to Hubert, and demands of her witchy servant to give Hubert protection. The witch uses hypnotism to convince Hubert that he's a great swordsman. Thus the witch, though she knows nothing of Hubert's desire for heroism, gives him the very persona he desires, even though, as I've observed elsewhere, Hubert remains subcombative because he never gains "mastery" of his other self, and only wins against his enemies by dumb luck and trickery.

However, jumping ahead to the film's end, it's interesting that when Hubert does save the day-- averting combat between the Fox and loyal supporters of the usurper-- it's through a manipulation of psychological factors. In short, Hubert figures out that the supporters will turn on the usurper if it can be proven that the rightful heir still exists-- and Hubert wins them over by showing them the "purple pimpernel" on the baby's butt.

Clearly, though the filmmakers could have allowed Hubert the opportunity to become conscious of his buried sword-skill, they probably felt that giving Hubert real fighting-skill obviated the comic persona of star Danny Kaye, the good-hearted bumbler, one who is almost likable here for his "feminine" qualities. However, even though Hubert is a bumbler for much of the film, he's still a protagonist struggling for a higher ideal, and so he, like the starring characters of Moana, qualifies for the status of the subcombative hero.

OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER, PT. 3

I've just written a very brief exploration of Poe's PIT AND THE PENDULUM, but wanted to expand on the subject on my theory-blog to further explore the remarks made in OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER PT. 2., where I said:

...I briefly touched on Rene Clair's silent film THE CRAZY RAY for purpose of contrast, saying that, unlike the Destroyed Earth, the focal presence of the Crazy Ray really was the source of "chaos on a global scale," and that in itself would argue a similitude with the persona of the monster. This also applies to other non-sentient phenomena that get out of control, whether they are objects created by man...or have come into being through geologic processes...

In my Poe-fragment I noted:

 ...whereas a setting like the House of Usher has become monstrous simply by dint of absorbing the nature of the corrupt Usher family, the prison-cell that encloses both the Pit and the Pendulum has been designed to be monstrous by its creators, the torturers of the Inquisition.

That said, I don't think of the Cell with the Pit and the Pendulum as a focal presence. Rather, the story's focal presences are the Inquisitors, the conscious architects of the cleverly designed torture-device, just as the Ushers, the unconscious architects of the titular House of Usher, are the focal presences of their story.

There are, however, other Poe stories in which a "non-sentient phenomenon" is the star of the show. The great storm of A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM, which is uncanny only in terms of the "natural science" Poe attributes to it, rates in my system as a "monster." The naturalistic sketch-story THE ISLAND OF THE FAY, however, presents a "demiheroic" physical setting upon which the unnamed narrator projects both his desires for innocent happiness and his fears of doleful death.