MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 5

 To cut to the chase, my answer to the question "why is heroic Reiko Mikami such a greedhead sadist" boils down to compensation for daddy issues. 

Given how little information artist Takashi Shiina offers about Mikami's developmental years, it's likely that he never meant to lay bare his character's soul. Though he wasn't unique in concocting a shonen heroine with both positive and negative traits, Shiina may not have wanted to kill his golden goose by dissecting its innards. But that doesn't mean he didn't contrive a working psychological concept of his heroine.  

Mikami's passion for the ghost sweeping profession is first highlighted in the arc "Message from Mother," in a flashback showing Little Reiko with her mother Michie. In present times, though, Adult Mikami believes that her mother has died some years back. Thus it's a considerable shock when Michie time-travels to Adult Mikami's era to ask Mikami and her team to guard over Mikami's younger self, Little Reiko. Then Michie disappears, and Mikami mentions that she was in middle school when Michie died. Mikami tries to contact her still living father Kimihiko Mikami, but he's out of the country, and the incident only reveals to the reader the existence of some emotional rift between daughter and father. Then Mikami and her allies must confront a demon trying to kill Little Reiko for reasons that remain somewhat obscure by the story's end. In any case, Michie returns, so that mother and daughter vanquish the demon, after which Michie and Little Reiko return to their own time.

Shiina later follows up with an arc named "Someday, Somewhere." Though nothing much has been said about Mikami possessing the same time-travel power as her mother, both Mikami and Yokoshima experience premonitory dreams about Mikami's mother. Then a convenient "accident" propels both of them through time back to Japan's medieval era. During a battle with a demon, Yokoshima is killed, and a rage-filled Mikami attacks the demon. However, the fiend hits her with lightning, and this triggers her power, bumping her back a few minutes, so that she's able to save Yokoshima and defeat her enemy. They then return to the 20th century, and the story ends just before "The Man Who Can Summon a Storm." 

Having seen Yokoshima perish doesn't make Mikami any more generous to him, but in "Storm," she does soften when she encounters her childhood crush Saijou. Michie Mikami is still alive at this time, but though we don't know anything about ten-year-old Reiko's relationship with her still unseen father, a much later story will establish that Kimihiko's an absentee father. There's no way to prove that Shiina had fully planned out his intentions with Kimihiko, but on the hypothesis that he always had something sketched out, then Ten-Year-Old Reiko could be compensating for an inattentive father by crushing on an older, and not much less inappropriate, male figure. The conclusion of "Storm," however, suggests that Mikami has become totally invested in making money as self-validation, as opposed to Saijou's selfless altruism.  

I've stated that the earliest "internal chronology" mention of Mikami's fierce desire to make money appeared in an early story, where a middle-school-aged Mikami finds herself at odds with her sensei's desire to exorcise demons without making any profit. This early tale, "Love Needs Its Time," doesn't mention either of Mikami's parents, but it would be interesting to speculate that by this time Michie has passed (or rather, Mikami believes that she's dead). In such circumstances, even a middle-school-aged girl might have needed her father, and if he was still unavailable, that might have caused Mikami to believe that she was totally on her own as a ghost sweeper. Thus the desire to amass wealth becomes the lady exorcist's sole source of validation, which is why in "Storm" she goes catatonic from stress after trying to pursue Saijou's altruistic standards. 

Several episodes later, the arc "Death Zone" starts off with Mikami diverging from her usual habit of disparaging her junior assistant, by showing appreciation of his efforts with a salary increase. That it makes her uncomfortable to think about treating Yokoshima as a human being, rather than as a tool for her profit, is significant. Then another time-travel trip to medieval Japan ensues. Mikami and Yokoshima encounter their "reincarnation ancestors," respectively a demoness named Mephisto and a young exorcist of the medieval era. This is followed, after various interceding arcs, by the previously discussed "Mom's Here," which goes even further in demolishing Mikami's assurance that she won't ever succumb to Yokoshima's dubious charms. 

"Zone" loosely sets up a later series of arcs, over 60 episodes in number, that pits Mikami against Ashtaroth, the "Big Bad" of her entire series. In the arc "Merciless War," Ashtaroth, a demon obsessed with destroying humanity, sends three emissaries to launch hostilities, demonesses whom he spawned, much the same way he earlier spawned Mephisto, Mikami's "reincarnation ancestor." In the arc "The Longest Day," Ashtaroth seeks to subvert Mikami's will by speaking to her as if she were his daughter, making him the first real Mikami "father figure" the readers have seen "on-panel." Little does Ashtaroth know that Mikami is already somewhat father-alienated, so she head-butts him. Unwittingly, Ashtaroth scores more of a point against Mikami in that one of his new "daughters," Luciola, falls in love with Yokoshima. Luciola becomes Mikami's first real rival for Yokoshima's affections, and this state of affairs will eventually lead to Luciola's extinction.

It's in one of these "endless arcs" that Mikami's time-traveling mother Michie returns, taking command of the operation to defeat Ashtaroth. Not till the end of the 60-something episodes does Mikami learn the truth: her mother actually did not die during Mikami's middle-school years but has remained in hiding ever since faking her death. Why? Frankly, I didn't follow the author's logic, but it does make one wonder if Mikami didn't get her manipulative streak from her mother.

Only in a very late sequence did the readers finally encounter Mikami's actual mortal father Kimihiko Mikami-- but in flashback for the most part. Mikami seeks out her trainer Father Karasu and he relates to her, and other members of the Mikami posse, the story of how Michie and Kimihiko met, fell in love and got married. In many ways Kimihiko is the opposite of Yokoshima. Kimihiko possesses a freakish level of super-telepathy, a talent which he cannot control and which causes him to read people's minds and know all their secrets. In fact, after the spirited Michie proposes to him, Kimihiko tries to run away from her, but she tracks him down and compels him, with the intensity of her affection, to marry her. Nevertheless, Kimihiko remains aloof from his daughter throughout her childhood for fear of having a bad effect on her due to his telepathic influence. Ultimately, adult Mikami is able to transcend the disappointments of her childhood, by promising her father-- seen only from a distance-- to mend fences.

That's the last word of the series on fatherhood, both from Mikami's true father Kimihiko and from her "false father" Ashtaroth. Mikami's greediness doesn't play a big role in either of these scenarios, so my critical analysis remains only a weak correlation, since Shiina does not expressly connect Mikami's greed to her paternal issues. Further, by the technical end of the series-- not counting the "earthquake relief" story Shiina produced in 2011, which I'll address in my next essay-- Mikami is still expousing her gospel of profit. 

The story *appears* to commence in the far future, when Mikami, Yokoshima and Okinu have all died, leaving behind their spirits, or possibly just approximations of themselves, to haunt their old agency-building in year 2199. Two modern ghostbusters, a robot and a cyborg, intrude on the "ghosts" not to send them to paradise but to capture their spirits for profit-- but Mikami's superior GS skill defeats her enemies. 

Then Mikami and Yokoshima wake up in present times, having experienced the same futuristic dream. They and their colleague Okinu are then drawn into yet another of many battles with supernatural foes, and Mikami's last words are her motto, "Present profit comes first." The connotation I take from this is that even though Mikami sometimes looks gauche or foolish for wanting money so much, at base her desire for profit is an excuse, a motivation to drive herself to heights of excellence in ghost-sweeping. Her wish to emulate her mother may have engendered that ideal, but there's a reality of running a business that goes with that idealism, and the conclusion suggests that Mikami has reached a perfect balance between idealism and realism. To be sure, the final stories in the series don't provide closure for the 1991-99 series with regard to the Mikami-Yokoshima bond. But the "really final" 2011 story does provide the best of all possible conclusions to GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI.

                              

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 4

 In this essay-series I've written a fair amount about Ghost Sweeper Reiko Mikami, but very little about her male co-star Tadao Yokoshima, who's integral to the series' concept. He unlike Mikami does not have a consistent "literary psychology," but is composed of a congeries of humor and heroism tropes, fluctuating between one set of tropes to another however it suits author Takashi Shiina.

    The first two-part adventure clearly establishes Yokoshima as the butt of most of the series' jokes. He's a horndog teenager who works as an assistant to the gorgeous ghost sweeper, risking his life for little remuneration, just because he lusts after Mikami. In the earliest adventure Mikami appears more flirtatious than in later episodes, seeming to offer Yokoshima the possibility for a future hookup, just to keep the teen working for chump change. 

Only one incident in the two-parter suggests that Yokoshima may be more than just a miserable lust-monkey. Both Mikami and Yokoshima are menaced by a deadly ghost, and Mikami is ready to go down fighting. Craven Yokoshima wants his last memory to be pleasurable, so he grabs Mikami's breasts. This action, for no explicit reason, allows the horny teen to release some magical/psychic power that amps up Mikami's abilities and exorcises the ghost. Despite the fact that Yokoshima's lustfulness saved their lives, Mikami beats the hell out of the teenager for taking liberties. To his credit, the threat of future beatings never permanently breaks Yokoshima's spirit. 

The matter of Yokoshima's lust-power finally becomes an ongoing story-element with the 20-part arc "For Whom the Bell Tolls." The dragon-goddess Shoryuki approaches the Mikami agency, fearing that a demonic power has compromised the testing-ground of the Ghost Sweeper Academy, and wanting Mikami to investigate. Shoryuki has already noticed that Yokoshima possesses an untapped spiritual power and suggests that it would be easy for the teenager to enter the Ghost Sweeper trials alongside other students. Though Mikami goes along with the plan, the lady exorcist has no faith in Yokoshima's potential and mocks him ruthlessly. However, when Shoryuki bestows a blessing on Yokoshima in the form of a kiss on the youth's forehead, Mikami is seen to be annoyed, even though she knows intellectually that the goddess isn't making any sort of romantic overture.

Yokoshima does pass his Ghost Sweeper tests, but there's little to indicate that he possesses the passion Mikami has for the profession. He oscillates between taking on heroic stature and devolving back into all-too-human cowardice, but I'd probably still deem him to belong to the persona-category of "hero," albeit of a very flawed nature. If anything, his "assistant ghost-sweeper" status binds him even more closely to Mikami's orbit, as she becomes "sensei" to his "student." And since he still screws up, this gives Mikami additional reasons to yell at him and beat him up. However, though Yokoshima does not intend to "stoop to conquer," the more Mikami works with the teen, the more she comes to want him around all the time, even though she consciously denies any such feelings.

Author Shiina also teased his readers with the possibility of a future Mikami-Yokoshima hookup in the time-travel arc "Stranger Than Paradise." Yokoshima meets a stranger who turns to be out the Yokoshima of ten years in the future, who reveals that by that time he and Mikami have become man and wife. More crucially, Future-Tadao has made the time-jaunt because in his time Future-Reiko is dying of an untended wound she took in the "present" era. Future-Tadao accompanies Yokoshima and the unwitting Mikami when they seek the demon who poisoned Future-Reiko. Future-Tadao hopes to use the monster's venom to concoct a counteragent to his wife's poison and take it back to his time to cure Future-Reiko.   

Naturally, this mission is successful as far as the reader knows, though Shiina throws in some plausible denials, having two characters state that Yokoshima and Mikami of this time may not be fully identical with their counterparts. When Mikami learns the nature of Future-Tadao, she uses magic so as to erase, from both Yokoshima's mind and her own, all knowledge of their rumored entanglement. 

Shiina never brings up the maybe-alternate future again. However, it's likely that many SWEEPER readers of the time shipped the two leads, and so the author gave them a "Tadreiko" to keep them happy. For good measure, Shiina does note that the two future-versions of the heroes remain on fractious terms, with Mikami dominating her husband while Yokoshima still hits on other women. In fact, in a scene paralleling a similar event in "The Man Who Can Summon a Storm," the ailing Future-Reiko experiences a surge of her will to live when she's told that her husband's been macking on the hospital nurses-- quite possibly because she anticipates punishing him again. 

Though Shiina devotes a couple of arcs to stories about Yokoshima's parents, neither of the teen's progenitors shape his personality the way Mikami is shaped by her parents-- which shaping I'll explore in another post. The dominant impression Shiina wants readers to reach is that Yokoshima remakes himself partly in response to Mikami's high expectations, and partly to his hormonal intensity. 

In two late stories, Shiina tells the story of the couple's first encounter. In the first, it's Mikami reflecting back on her low opinion of Yokoshima when they first met.

A later flashback, though, focuses more on the original concept. Even though Mikami gets irritated when Yokoshima molests her the moment he sees her, he's so eager to work with such a "gorgeous lady" that she realizes that she can save a lot of money on such an over-eager goof. 

Re: the comment about her finding Yokoshima "funny"-- Mikami never seems the least bit amused by either his blunders or his continued pursuit of her body. The most one can say is that there have been occasions where Mikami, like some femdom mistress (to which she's compared in one story), puts her subordinate through some grueling activity, which may or may not give her sadistic thrills. Yokoshima responds to all of these rigors by importuning Mikami to either give him sex or more money, and she, being both a virago and a capitalist, contrives to withhold both. Arguably Yokoshima's pertinacity does eventually wear Mikami down to the extent that she stops thinking of him purely as a tool-- though being placed in the position of a "sub" to her "domme" may not seem too much of an improvement to the beleagured youth.   

Yokoshima has a few arcs that test his devotion to his sensei/mistress, to be sure. But it's Mikami's personality that undergoes the most significant changes in the series as a whole, as I'll show in the next essay in this series.  
            

ADDENDUM: When I wrote about Mikami using magic to erase her knowledge, and that of Yokoshima, regarding their future marriage, I didn't make any comment as to her motive, but at the time I just thought she was doing so to (a) keep Yokoshima subservient, and (b) keep herself from conceiving any soft feelings toward her assistant. But TV Tropes had an interesting take: Mikami, by erasing her own memory, has put her control-freak self at a disadvantage, for in the absence of knowing the future she SAYS she finds disgusting, there's every possibility that her feelings for Yokoshima will morph over time and the future union will indeed transpire.         

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 2

 in 1924, Freud elaborated on masochism, suggesting for the first time that it is quintessentially feminine to find pleasure in pain—indeed that masochism is “an expression of the feminine nature.” -- Freud quote from "The Economic Problem of Masochism."

Sublimation (psychology):  the diversion of the energy of a sexual or other biological impulse from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use. -- Dictionary.com

Freud located the etiology of masochism in personal guilt. I assert that the real source of true, syndromic masochism is that of a transpersonal manifestation of shame, arising from being physically or psychologically unable to protect oneself. 

Having never been a woman, I don't know how mothers talk to their daughters (or any parallel relationship) about their gender's getting the short end of the sexual dimorphism stick, at least in terms of self-defense. Mothers may tell their young ones that there's nothing they can do about the biological factors that make men stronger, except to figure out ways to get around the male of the species. But internally, there should be, in females as much as males, some distress at knowing that one's physical nature puts one in danger of humiliation and/or death. 

One coping mechanism-- termed "sublimation" by Freud and others -- might be for female humans to enhance their potential for reproductive security by feeling awe at superior male strength, which then serves the long-term biological purpose of benefitting their offspring's survival. This biological imperative may be the source for female preference for a male type that Leon Seltzer called a "caring caveman." The caveman part might not be strictly necessary once humans were no longer living in caves, but aesthetic programming is not easily superseded, even in an era where, in theory at least, money takes the place of muscle as a means of males protecting females from incursions.  

Sigmund Freud certainly understood that sublimation was necessary to allow any humans, males or females, to cope with uncomfortable social situations, judging from this quotation:

What we call the character of a person is built up to a great extent from the material of sexual excitations; it is composed of impulses fixed since infancy and won through sublimation...-- "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex."

 So I don't know why Big Sigmund had to characterize women alone as "masochistic" for embracing whatever aspects of pain and/or humiliation were involved with the act of coitus. It's possible that the first human to experience pleasurable pain was of the female persuasion, but if so, I suggest that the pleasure didn't stem from a uniquely feminine nature. And compared to the females of various lower species-- such as lionesses, who have to put up with barbed penises-- human females have it fairly easy in the copulation department.

At base sublimation might be best viewed as an endurance test, one that also applies to males. What did it mean to caveman males-- assuming that any of them figured out how much a role their primeval thrusts played, in the formation of progeny-- to know that for all their strength, only women could keep the race alive? Going on archaeological evidence, it seems that humankind's earliest human-form deities were the so-called "Venus figurines," embodiments of female procreative power. Did males sometimes feel irrelevant before that power? Did they sublimate that sense of powerlessness into other goddesses? That might explain the rise, in historical times, of war-goddesses like Athena, Anath and Ishtar' deities who broke down the normal categories of "men make war, women make babies." And maybe, in later eras, this sublimated sense of humiliation resulted in quotations like the following, from the pen of the man whose name was used to categorize the syndrome called "masochism."

I saw sensuality as sacred, indeed the only sacredness, I saw woman and her beauty as divine since her calling is the most important task of existence: the propagation of the species. I saw woman as the personification of nature, as Isis, and man as her priest, her slave; and I pictured her treating him as cruelly as Nature, who, when she no longer needs something that has served her, tosses it away, while her abuses, indeed her killing it, are its lascivious bliss.

My guess as to why Freud didn't intuit masochism in both genders as a sublimating activity is that for him, anything that wasn't normative heterosexual intercourse flew in the face of his idea of sublimation. For him, sublimation was all about adapting to reality, rather than indulging formulating elaborate fantasies, be they of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or of Margaret Mitchell. 

 

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 1

 In the history of humankind, the reasons for cultures to impute shame to their members are as varied as snowflakes-- failure to honor dead parents, marrying outside one's clan, and so on. However, I submit that there's a universal source of shame in all cultures: an individual's inability to protect oneself, or at least to try to protect oneself.

All human cultures have some form of marriage to ensure the promulgation of their offspring. Cultures surely vary as to how long the children are protected by the elders of their communities. But since all children must become adults in time, all kids in all cultures are given some imperatives about how to deal with conflicts as they progress toward that goal.   

In current American culture, kids very likely receive more cumulative oversight than they do in primitive cultures, due to the long years that juveniles endure in public school. Thus I'll skip over the more personal imperatives that are communicated to juveniles by their older family-members, and address how both male and female children develop systems of social validation while within the educational system.

While kids are in theory still protected by adults within that system, clearly school is where kids begin sorting themselves into mini-communities, primarily based on gender. Boys hang with boys, and girls with girls, and this inevitably leads to conflicts based on gender expectations. In these mini-communities of virtual strangers, it's easy for insecure kids to boost their egos by attempting to shame potential victims. This practice is termed bullying, and whether the groups use direct violence or indirect gossip to reduce victims to a state of abjection, the motive remains identical. Those who are singled out as victims by the aggressors usually have only two options for response: "fight" or "flight."

Now obviously there are even smaller communities-- clubs, for instance-- in which males and females interact-- but these are generally under close adult supervision. Except in incidents of extreme anger, bullying activities are frequently committed "on the sly," as there's also some ego-boost to be had, not just from shaming a fellow student, but also doing so without a teacher being aware of the act. Arguably, when males bully females, or vice versa-- more often through insults than through acts of force-- the bullies must be especially circumspect, to avoid accusations of sexual impropriety.

I should add, as I wind up this prelude, that I distinguish between simple social testing-- in which members of the kid-communities seek to suss out other members-- from bullying, which is a one-way street, in which the bully imposes shame for egoistic reasons. But there's also one source of shame that transcends all cultures-- that of female-male relations-- and it's the only type of shame that can be transformed into a source of pleasure. 

     

  

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 2

 Now that I've specified in Part 1 my reasons for taking exception to Jung's characterization of what he termed "perception" and "judging" functions, I want to throw out a speculation as to why that particular duality might have been important to Jung, beyond the reasons cited in his 1912 PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES-- a speculation pertaining to what I've termed "the two forms of knowledge." In William James' THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHOLOGY, James stated:                                                                                                                            "There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about."                                              

I went into detail as to the history preceding and following this conception in my essay WHITE NOISE, so I won't duplicate that explanation here. What I find interesting, though, is how much the input from what Jung calls the "perceiving functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge by acquaintance," while the "judging functions" resemble the idea of "knowledge-about" (which Bertrand Russell gave the superior term of "knowledge by description.")                         

 Now, I haven't reread PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES in many years, nor, prior to writing this essay, did I even go over the notes I made from my first reading. I doubt that Jung said anything, directly or indirectly, about the parallel I'm suggesting, for the very good reason that TYPES doesn't concern the nature of knowledge. Jung wrote that book to give his detailed analysis of the two types of people he termed "introverts" and "extroverts," and how such psychological types manifest in reaction to the four functions coded in the overall makeup of human beings. It's one of Jung's great books, but inevitably it was influenced by the intellectual currents surrounding it-- which included James, Jung's senior by thirty years, and whom Jung visited twice just before James' passing in 1910. Jung admired James' 1902 VARITIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. and the psychologist devotes twenty pages of TYPES comparing his concept of two types of people to James' two types of philosophers. So, though I didn't reread TYPES, I did check to see everything Jung wrote about James in that particular book.                                           

 Now, one interesting datum is that though Jung claims to have "limited" knowledge of James' corpus of writings, and almost everything Jung cites in his tome about James' "two types" comes from James' 1907 book PRAGMATISM, Jung has one citation from the 1890 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY-- which, as noted above, is the book from which the "two forms of knowledge" is put forth. I don't know that Jung never commented on the two forms elsewhere in his works, but IMO he was too good a scholar to quote from a book he cited in an appendix. And for that matter, had he never encountered James' 1890 formulation and had never been influenced by James in his "perceiving/judging" categories, Jung also could have got something not dissimilar from Schopenhauer's dichotomy of "percepts and concepts." But James is still the best bet for influence-- and even though Jung didn't agree with everything James wrote, he paid the older man an exceeding compliment by being influenced by him-- just as I've sought to compliment Jung in my own small way.               

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 1

 I suppose I must have been at least partly converted by Alfred North Whitehead's PROCESS AND REALITY when I read it in 2020, since over four years later I'm still thinking about ways I might compare and contrast his Kant-rejecting system with the heavily-Kantian conceptions of Carl Jung. Take one of the Jungian formulations to which I'm most indebted, that of the "four functions:"                                                                                                                                                                                                          "Thinking and feeling are rational functions in so far as they are decisively influenced by the motive of reflection. They attain their fullest significance when in fullest possible accord with the laws of reason. The irrational functions, on the contrary, are such as aim at pure perception, e.g. intuition and sensation; because, as far as possible, they are forced to dispense with the rational (which presupposes the exclusion of everything that is outside reason) in order to be able to reach the most complete perception of the whole course of events."-- PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.                                                                                                                                              But despite my "loyalty" to Jung, I departed from the Swiss psychologist on various occasions. In the third part of the 2015 essay-series REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, I said that Jung's psychology-oriented view of the functions contrasted with my literary view:                                                                                         

'Jung calls intuition an "irrational, perceiving function" while thinking is a "rational function of judgment." Despite this difference, both of them seem to be secondary processes for purposes of literary identification.'                                                                                                                                                                                                     In fact, Whitehead may have influenced me when I began thinking about the "lateral meaning" of a literary work as being its "ontology," while its "vertical meaning" as its "epistemology," I began to poke at some of Jung's correlations. For instance, Jung says that the functions of sensation and intuition are both "irrational" and "perception-oriented," while those of feeling and thinking are both "rational" and "judgment-oriented." I think my readings of Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES was thorough enough that I comprehend why he made these correlations. But was he correct?                                     

I have no problem with Jung's "rational/irrational" categories with respect to all four functions, though my approach is entirely literary in nature, rather than psychological. But Jung also makes a distinction based on whether a function is rooted in "pure perception" or in "reflection," while I believe there are strong aspects of both "perception" and "reflection" intermixed in all four functions. Rather, I use a distinction between "more discursive" and "less discursive." "I believe that the functions of "feeling" and "thinking" lend themselves to discursive exploration, and that this is why the vast majority of literary criticism is devoted to sussing out (a) what thoughts an author has about a given topic, and (b) how the author conveys his thoughts through the way his characters feel about the topic. That author may use just as much "reflection" in setting up how the characters interact with respect to the things they experience in sensation, or in terms of symbolic constructs. But the elements of those two functions are more "presentational," to use Susan Langer's term; one reflects on their nature less through reason than through instinct. As a critical thinker, I can write hundreds of words as to why I think one work by Osamu Tezuka makes better use of symbolism than another, possibly even dealing with works written around the same time and with a common set of characters. But many of my arguments will proceed from my instinctive appreciation of the way various symbols play off one another, in contrast to the strongly discursive way that discrete ideas play off one another. I can (and did) write an essay about why an action-sequence masterminded by Jack Kirby is superior kinetically than a sequence constructed by Jim Shooter, but I cannot prove that superiority in the same discursive way I can discursively argue that Stan Lee dealt with "characters' feelings" better than Jack Kirby did. So for me, the categories of "perception" and "judgment" are useless for my project, even though I'm sure a few of my earlier essays probably reproduced Jung's terms "uncritically."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

WHERE VICTIM AND SADIST MEET

It was only coincidence that I finished writing my analysis of the 2004 manga ZEBRAMAN a few days after two parallel, but apparently unrelated, mass murder rampages in New Orleans and Las Vegas respectively. I don't have any expertise in the typology of mass murderers, but I can look up such things on the Net as well as anyone, and it got me thinking about the three types of mass murderers that others have identified, and how those formulations compare with artist Yamada Reiji's puzzling evocation of famous killers' names in his entirely fictional story.                                                                                                                                                                                     The salient distinctions between types of mass murderers rely on categories of time. Serial killers, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, generally pick individual victims and commit their murders over a significant span of time. Spree killers, such as Charlie Starkweather, commit a series of murders in a short span of time, often in a particular area. Rampage killers (whom some sources also call "mass murderers") execute (or try to execute) a group of victims in one place and all at one time, as did both of the New Years' Day killers, Matthew Livelsberger (Las Vegas) and Shamsud-din Jabbar (New Orleans).                                                                                                                                                                                                      Rampage killers are often slain at the scene of their crimes, though sometimes they leave behind manifestos, as did the deceased Jabbar and Livelsberger. (Technically Livelsberger did not succeed in killing innocents, but he injured enough people that his intent seems clear.) The precise reasons each gave for their actions are not important to this essay, though both subscribed to a type of mentality I've labeled "victimology," by which I meant "the politics of victimization." Their idea seems to be that they can emancipate themselves from their own sufferings by reducing others, usually complete strangers, to dead or injured victims, and this crime gives the victim-types some perverse status in their own minds.                                                                                                       

  Now, Yamada's ZEBRAMAN is not principally about mass murderers, but it does make an odd usage of the names of three real-life killers for three of its villains. The 2004 movie from which Yamada derived the manga's loose structure included a costumed maniac named "Crab Man," who was supposed to be an analogue of the many bizarre villains from Japan's superhero TV shows, but one brought into real existence by alien influences. Yamada eliminated the movie's aliens from his story and also altered "Crab Man's" name to "Crabjack the Ripper." He then introduced new opponents for his hero: both named after mass murderers: "Scorpio-Dahmer" (who is seen in all the pages I reproduce here) and "Shrike-Manson."             

I don't think Yamada had any particular insights about the social or psychological phenomena associated with mass murderers, and his use of particular historical names is questionable. But I believe Yamada wanted to contrast the sort of "dead-end ideologies" represented by such callous lust for multiple victims. In the sequence I reprint here, Zebraman refutes ScorpioDahmer's belief that the sins of his victims justify him taking their lives.                                         

In contrast, Zebraman proposes an ethic of forgiveness over that of punishment. The dialogue implies that the fictional killer subscribes to the ideology of "the victim who wants to create more victims." However, it's strange that Yamada would use the name "Dahmer" for such a fictional figure. In my view of the mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, he didn't kill to quell his own past tragedy. Real Dahmer was a sociopath who took sadistic pleasure in the suffering of others, and so in my own private typology, he's a "sadist type" of mass murderer-- as well as being the type of serial killer who elaborately plans his killings.                                                                                   

One can't speculate on the typology of Jack the Ripper, since that mass murderer was never identified. But as it happens, the third ZEBRAMAN villain with a mass murderer's name goes to the other extreme. This character, Shrike-Manson, wears a bird costume and emulates Charles Manson in that, instead of committing crimes himself, he brainwashes younger persons to do the dirty work. Ironically, though, Charles Manson was a far closer match to the "victim ideology" I'm propounding than was Jeffrey Dahmer. That doesn't mean that Real Manson wasn't capable of sadism. Yet sadism doesn't seem to have been his main motive in inspiring/directing the Tate-LoBianco slayings. Everything I've read by Manson seems infused with the idea of his being the victim who's getting back at people who wouldn't give him the things he deserved, like a studio recording contract, or leadership of a post-apocalyptic social order. Though his modus operandi was obviously different than that of other rampage killers, the effect was the same: a group of innocents killed in a single place at a single time.                                                                   

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Though all mass murderers wreak violence mostly on innocents, often on strangers who have no personal associations with their killers, the rampage killers prove particularly difficult to cope with. Most strike without signaling their actions in any way, as seems to have been the case with both Jabbar and Livelsberger, neither of whom was on any watchlist. Again, I emphasize that I'm not drawing direct comparisons between real criminals and fantasy-villains from a manga. But I was intrigued by the dichotomy Zebraman offers to persuade ScorpioDahmer. In essence, this victim-type of killer is imprisoned by his past, forced to keep killing to assuage his pain. Both the hero and his allies suggest that the true orientation should be the future, because, as Kana says above, "You only have this life." (Though to be sure, that sort of logic refutes only the victim-ideologue: the sadism-ideologue may be perfectly fine, consecrating his life to the suffering of innocents.)              

RAVISHMENT OVER RAPE

 In the third part of my essay-series THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE, I wrote the following:

Commercial films-- which were, it should be said, aimed equally at both male and female adult audiences-- are replete with such forceful displays of passion, in which the male protagonist forces his attentions-- usually not to the extent Rhett Butler does-- upon a female. It's generally understood that the female protagonist is a stand-in for the female audience that is presumed to want to see sex happen between the lead characters. Ergo, the protagonist's show of reluctance is meant to be broken down in the face of passion; i.e., it is a "no" that really does not mean "no." I do not think that female audiences would have partaken of such scenes in novels and films unless they could relate to them as fantasies. This gives the audiences credit for realizing that such scenarios did not represent real experience, and that they did not represent rape as such.

Were all members of the male audiences aware of "forced attentions" as being in the domain of fantasy, and hence, not justifications of real rape? Here too I think that we must assume that the majority of males knew that they were watching a staged fantasy, though I would admit that there is more potential for misunderstanding from the male point of view.  Still, the male protagonists of novels and films usually were not represented as literally overpowering the female as Rhett Butler did. The more standard scenario was that the reluctant female would finally respond and the curtains would close upon what was then consensual, if only implied, sex.

I just finished reviewing one of the more interesting Golden Age films, Henry King's 1942 THE BLACK SWAN, which features a hero who implies that he takes feminine resistance as a signal to ravish-- but not specifically to rape-- the heroine. Here's the roguish Jamie Waring's response to getting slapped by the irritable Lady Margaret:

 In Tortuga when a woman slaps a man's face, it means she wants him to grab her, overpower her, and smother her with kisses. I understand in Jamaica a gentleman must refuse such overtures.

As I mentioned in my review, at no time in SWAN does Margaret convey the sense of coming on to Waring, nor does she ever admit that she appreciates his attractiveness or forcefulness. Only when he's shown that he's willing to fight against other pirates, and therefore on the side of civilization, does she become interested in Waring as a potential mate. So, even though Waring subdues Margaret twice-- first knocking her out and then wrapping her in a sheet and kidnapping her-- she keeps a certain amount of power in their negotiation of status. Of course, this is only possible because the film shows that the hero has fallen in love only with Margaret, in contrast to his buddy's claim that there are lots of other fish in the sea.

The cinematic situation reflects the opinion in a 2014 PSYCHOLOGY TODAY essay by one Leon Seltzer:

The multiple ironies that emerge from such a depiction can hardly be missed. To Meana, “What women want is a real dilemma.” For, relationally, the female’s paramount need (and this is consonant with evolutionary biology) may be to have a strong, dominant male care for and protect her. So we end up with the eroticized image of her being thrown up against a wall yet, as imagined, not in any real danger. In short, on a very deep level that women might well wish to take exception to—though research strongly supports the idea— it may be a kind of biological imperative that, deep within their psyche, they can’t help but crave a “caring caveman” to whom they must submit.

And the SWAN scenario also parallels that of GONE WITH THE WIND, as I explicated here. The example is complicated in that when the crucial "spousal rape" takes place by that novel's "caring caveman," the male and female protagonist have already had consensual sex. This may not have been all that exciting for Scarlett, since at the time of the caveman-assault, she has banished Rhett from her bed to keep from her bearing any more children.

I like Seltzer's emphasis of the term "ravishment" over the inexact term "rape," and the former term takes in what I've loosely termed "fake-rape." But I will probably keep using the term as one of my subject-tags, since at times the term does take in the real-life, non-fantasy crime.

   

TUTELARY SPIRITS

In DOWNGRADING (OR DEGRADING) ON A CURVE, I discussed the dynamics of the BEWITCHED teleseries. I stated that even though the characters of Samantha and Darrin were the superordinate icons of the ongoing narrative, the subordinate character of Endora was the one most often used to generate stories, often by her desire to "teach Darrin a lesson," whether her reasoning was good or bad.

Though on this blog I've mostly discussed accomodation narratives featuring romantic ensembles, another frequently seen trope is that of two characters linked by some tutelary activity. These may be entirely distanced from anything resembling romantic pairing, as seen in both GOOD WILL HUNTING and the more recent HOLDOVERS, where the give-and-take relationship of a teacher and a student makes them both superordinate characters. Another variation appears in the 1956 TEA AND SYMPATHY play-adaptation. In this story, an older woman, not a teacher but connected to a school through her husband, perceives a young man's confusion about his sexuality and dispels his fears by initiating him into manhood. Somewhat related are narratives focusing upon a psychologist and his patient, such as Peter Schaffer's EQUUS, wherein the former must play detective to comprehend the latter's malady, and in so doing experiences some insight about himself.

So, after all those examples of highbrow theater and cinema, my main illustration of a tutleary superordinate ensemble in this essay will be-- the completely lowbrow hijinks of Jack H. Harris' MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO.

Though Darrin Stevens never learns any lessons, Tom Hastings of MOTHER desperately wants to find out what's causing him to freeze up when he tried to have marital relations with his newlywed bride. But I wondered, "Is that enough to make him the main character?" He's a mystery to be solved, but his neglected wife certainly does not function in the narrative as the Samantha to his Darrin. Rather, only psychotherapist Marilyn Richards can unlock the secrets of Ted's impotence and its goofy association with Mother Goose imagery.

Now, whereas both EQUUS and TEA AND SYMPATHY seek to produce reasonable, rational propositions about human behavior, all of MOTHER's propositions are, to use an earlier phrase, "informal." Writer Harris wasn't concerned with probability: he wanted a smarmy sex-comedy. So the script has Marilyn's sexy professional woman, whom I term a "mother-imago," ends up liberating Ted from a subconsciously prohibition accidentally laid upon him during his childhood by his real mother. Toward the end of the movie, Marilyn kinda-sorta makes an erotic move on Ted, justifying the move as "therapy." But long before any such move has been made, Ted has a fairytale-dream-- the second in the story-- wherein he imagines Marilyn as the Evil Queen in "Snow White," who seeks to keep Snow, "played" by Ted's wife, from uniting with Kirk's Prince Charming. 

At the climax, when Marilyn has managed to call forth the nature of Ted's prohibition from his buried memories. she discourages Ted from seeking out his wife, claiming that he ought to use her as a test-case for his restored virility. Then the script has Marilyn change her mind for no good reason and fend Ted off, probably because Harris guessed that his target audience wouldn't like seeing the male lead cheat on his loving wife. So even though Marilyn and Ted don't end up in bed together, they provide a fascinating example of a tutelary ensemble with a strange mother-and-son dynamic, though it stops short of a TEA AND SYMPATHY resolution.

THE READING RHEUM: TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING (1968/1999)

My reading of a book on the early works of Colin Wilson, referenced here, moved me to check out one of Wilson's influences, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, in the third edition of the title noted above. 

Of course I'd probably heard of Maslow's basic concept of "peak experiences" roughly since the 1970s, and the author may even have been mentioned in some of the Wilson books I did read, given that the two of them corresponded for some time. I'd also heard bits and pieces about "Maslow's hierarchy of needs," but I simply didn't get around to reading as much of his work as I did with both Freud and Jung.

The above book-- BEING, for short-- might not be the best introduction to Maslow's work, since its chapters are all rewritten lectures that Maslow gave before various audiences. Nevertheless, I got the general schema. Maslow argues that human beings are doubly motivated by their responses to "deficiency" or to "growth" (which Maslow later terms "being," though this term is actually less clear than the earlier one IMO). Deficiency motivations are fueled by the perception that one can only be happy if one can satisfy one's appetite for wealth, food, love, or some similar commodity. Growth motivations are fueled by the perception that one can overcome all boundaries through a process that Maslow termed "self-actualization." Maslow often drew comparisons between his work and that of his predecessor Freud, finding that Freud's entire system was built on the idea of deficiency, with which point I agree.

Now, despite my agreeing with Maslow on all of his main points, I did find the essays in BEING somewhat unexciting. Freud, Jung, and Colin Wilson are all much better at communicating abstruse concepts so as to make the reader excited by said concepts. At present I don't know if Maslow's schema has much application to my overall lit-crit project-- except for this section from Chapter 11, "Psychological Data and Human Values."

The various chapters in BEING don't explore the peak-experience in as much detail as I would have liked, but in Chapter 11, he contrasts the idea of a subject's "great" peak-experiences vs. his "lesser" ones.

...the process of moment-to-moment growth is itself intrinsically rewarding and delightful in an absolute sense. If [these experiences] are not mountain-peak experiences, at least they are foothill-experiences, little glimpses of absolute, self-validative delight, little moments of Being.

What Maslow calls "foothill-experiences" may be somewhat covalent with what he later calls "plateau-experiences." In any case, this has intrinsic appeal to me for its relevance to literary values.

If I were an elitist like the majority of comics-critics, I would value only the peak-experiences, however I chose to define the content that engendered those experiences. Instead, I am (though I've not advanced the term in a long time) a pluralist, and in this context this means that I value even imperfect works when they have at least the SUGGESTION of reaching concrescence with respect to one or more of the four potentialities.

As indicative of my ceaseless pursuit of even the humble "foothill-experiences" as well as those at the peak, in recent months I've been reviewing a large number of the Italian fantasy-films usually called peplum, first for NATURALISTIC UNCANNY MARVELOUS and secondarily for THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA. The more I see of these formulaic productions, the less chance there seems to find any works that hit on all cylinders. When I did find two that developed their mythopoeic ideas-- respectively the 1962 FURY OF ACHILLES  and the 1964 TRIUMPH OF HERCULES. If I wanted nothing but the most well-executed works, then I could stop looking at the subgenre right now, with the conviction that these might well be the only ones that offered "peak experiences."

Nevertheless, even though there are a lot of peplum-films that don't offer even the milder foothill-experiences, there are enough of these to keep the hunt going. For example, a film like the 1962 VULCAN SON OF JUPITER has one good undeveloped mythopoeic idea, that of asserting that if mortals manage to trespass on the domain of Zeus, they can actually diminish the god's power, mirroring the magic by which the ruler of Olympus changes three gods-- Vulcan, Ares and Aphrodite-- into mere mortals. The script doesn't use the idea for anything more than a throwaway rationalization, but I like exploring the potential of even insufficiently-developed ideas.

In Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE, the author suggested than hardcore fans of the metaphenomenal genres (not the word he uses, of course) must be the most optimistic people around, since on a regular basis they plow through reams of badly done junk in search of the proverbial "diamonds in the garbage." But if Maslow's concept is true-- that all human beings have some potential for peak experiences, or at least the related foothill-types-- then the fans' optimism is justified in searching for diamonds wherever one can find them-- and that said diamonds can appear at any level of creative accomplishment.

FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY

 

I mentioned here that I recently decided to import the concept of intentionality into my system. One reason for this change of mind was a recent re-read of Roger Brooke’s 1991 tome JUNG AND PHENOMENOLOGY.

Though I’ve devoted several thousand words to the subject of literary phenomenality, I’ve had only a mild interest in the philosophy of phenomenology. One reason is that, even though I believe my Fryean-Jungian-Campbellian system is basically in sympathy with the project founded by Edmund Husserl, I found Husserl’s writing less than compelling, though at least he wasn’t as abominable as Hegel.

For me Brooke offers an easier introduction to phenomenology than did Husserl, precisely because Brooke is making an extended compare-and-contrast between the familiar conceptual terrain of Jung and the schemas of phenomenology. Brooke marshals ample evidence to demonstrate his thesis: that Carl Jung’s depth psychology was at heart in tune with phenomenology, despite assorted inconsistencies. Those problematic areas of Jung’s thought, according to Brooke, arose whenever Jung attempted to line up his psychology with hard science; what Brooke incisively calls “the bland positivist categorization of observables.”

Despite this backsliding, Jung’s core philosophical concept, that the psyche provided the core of human experience, mirrors Brooke’s chosen definition of the phenomenological concept of intentionality: “Intentionality means that consciousness is always and necessarily directed toward an object that is other than consciousness itself.” To be sure, Brooke finds some fault with Jung’s tendency to become almost solipsistic in his attempts to advocate the psyche’s centrality in human experience. Yet as it happens, in my early reading of Husserl I detected a possible current of solipsism, though Brooke does not signal any awareness of such vulnerabilities in his chosen philosophy. For instance, Brooke writes:

For Husserl the essence of a thing is not to be confused with its factically given properties (weight, extension, and so on). Rather, the essence of a thing is given within the imaginative intuition of the consciousness which discriminates that essence from its empirical contingencies.

A few pages later, Brooke writes that Jung’s concept of “amplification is essentially similar to Husserl’s method of free imaginative variation.” I certainly agree with Brooke and with anyone else who downgrades the sort of “empirical contingencies” that thinkers ranging from Comte to Freud have advocated. Still, Brooke doesn’t elucidate any phenomenological concepts that firmly avoid the critique he makes of Jung, that of being too enfolded in the solipsism of the psyche. That does not mean that there aren’t such concepts, merely that Brooke doesn’t map them out.

My own solution to this conundrum is probably nothing like whatever Brooke might present. In my essay AND THE HALF TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE I drew an extended comparison between two of my inspirations, Jung and Joseph Campbell. I found that precisely because Jung was so focused upon viewing every human experience as reflective of a shared, sometimes “collective” psyche, Campbell is more relevant to the study of literature because of the latter’s concentration upon what I call “epistemological patterns.”

Jung possibly followed Kant in the belief that observations about the “outer world” in which human beings live do not demonstrate any ultimate truth about that world. This may be true, and it’s possible that philosophy’s long preoccupation with “pure reason” was a mistake, except in a purely utilitarian sense. However, reason plays a vital (though not central) role in allowing humans to discern patterns in the world, whether cosmological or sociological, metaphysical or psychological. No humans share exactly the same perceptions of the world, and therefore every philosopher—and every creative writer—will see significance in different patterns, or combinations of patterns.

Neither Jung nor Campbell were as intensely focused upon art and literature as was Northrop Frye, and I would guess that neither Brooke nor any of his fellow phenomenologists concentrated on that discipline either. But all of them would seem to agree on valuing “free imaginative variation” as opposed to “empirical contingencies.” The role of reason is not to determine the forms produced by the imagination, but to provide something akin to a medium in which the forms may flourish. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, but one needs water and the other air to do so.

It's arguable that for centuries art and literature have performed the task of searching for “essences” via the imagination. Brooke cites a commentator who summarizes Husserl’s process by saying “we carefully investigate what changes can be made in a sample without making it cease to be the thing it is. Through the most arbitrary changes, which wholly disregard reality as it is and which therefore are best made in our phantasy, the immutable and necessary complex of characteristics without which the thing cannot be conceived manifest themselves…”

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.