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.                             

SO, A THREAD-PULLING VECTOR

 My title for this essay spoofs a title I used for two essays way back in 2011, SO, A THREAD-PULLING NEEDLE, Part 1 and Part 2, which in their turn had punned on one of the lyrics from THE SOUND OF MUSIC. I confess I didn't even remember what those essays were about. I just wanted to create a title for this essay that brought the terms "thread" and "vector" together in some halfway-felicitous manner. As it happens, I did find some relevant content in those 2011 essays-- more on which at this essay's conclusion.

This essay sprung into being the way a lot of them do: taking a morning walk for exercise and letting my mind ruminate over the various categories I've created like the proverbial cow chewing her cud. This time, I randomly started associating my idea of "the master thread"-- which usurped all my old conceptions of "theme statements" in this April 2020 essay-- with the Whitehead-ian idea of "vectors" that I first broached in August 2020. Whereas the master thread concept was oriented only upon the way the author organized the "vertical meaning" of his narrative, vectors were designed to describe all category-domains in my system.

...all aspects of art—characters, settings, plot-tropes—derive from authorial will. Similarly, all of the multifarious literary categories I’ve introduced on this blog—dynamicity, mythicity, the combinatory-sublime and so on—are the prisms I use to view patterns of authorial will, patterns formed by the unceasing interactions of authors swiping from each other, competing with each other, and writing love letters to each other.

So far, I have applied the vector-term to such domains as centricity and phenomenality, but not to the differing emphases of a narrative's vertical meaning. However, something akin to vectors is implicit within the first example I offered of those differing emphases, in the essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2.

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

So what, aside from my bare assertion, determines that the trope of "The Hunter and the Hunted" is the "master thread" of MOBY DICK, and not one of the subordinate threads (which I later dubbed "bachelor threads")? When I state that removing the putative master thread would "unravel the whole kit and kaboodle," that should imply that it's too big and complicated to be removed without damaging the whole. And the master thread got big and complicated because Herman Melville concentrated the greatest vector of his authorial will upon that theme, while the bachelor-threads, while important, might be removed without necessarily damaging the whole. 

The idea of removing such a master-thread is not mere theory; it's the sort of thing that often takes place with adaptations of famous works. I have not yet reviewed the 1956 film adaptation of Melville's nautical novel, nor have I seen it in several years. But my recollection is that scripter Ray Bradbury decided to elide most of the religious content of the novel, except for a puerile "Ahab overstepped the bounds of a reasonable mortal" that sounds more like FRANKENSTEIN than MOBY DICK. Banal as this vertical meaning is, though, it's still the master-thread for the 1956 movie because it shows the greatest vector of Bradbury's authorial intent. I should note in passing that my conception of vertical meaning-- in which there is one superordinate thread amidst one or more subordinate threads-- mirrors my conception of centricity, in which one icon, or group of icons, proves superordinate and everything else in the narrative is subordinate in nature. The subordinate threads, like subordinate icons, just don't have that much authorial attention given to them, resulting in lesser will-vectors.

Jumping back eleven years, the first part of SO A THREAD PULLING NEEDLE came about when AT-AT Pilot asked me to provide some guidance on the subject of what I'd called "myth criticism." I responded in part with a perhaps labored metaphor in which I would seek to provide an "Ariadne's thread" through the "labyrinth" of modern discourse about mythology. It didn't occur to me back then that the usual interaction of threads and needles, that of binding cloth together, was the exact opposite of the use of thread in the Minotaur story. However, Part 1 at least shows that the thread-metaphor was one I liked then as much as I do now.

Part 2, though, is the essay with the aforementioned "relevant content" with respect to more recent writings. Riffing on a famous misquote of Heidegger, I wondered whether one could discern a "unifying thread" in all of my ruminations on this blog, and I came up with the quest for an answer to the question:

"Why is there complexity where there doesn't need to be any?"

And my answer, seeking to get away from the more abstract explanations, was to posit that mythic complexity is simply a fun thing for authors to put in their stories, even when they don't expect anyone to find that particular Easter-egg. I still believe this, that all the factors that go into making fiction come about because authors like best the play-element in fiction. Thus in fiction the sense of play has the greatest force-- the greatest vector, one might say-- than even the most sedulous desire to convert others to some moral message. 

CHALLENGER VS. DEFENDER PT.2

Though the terms “challenger and defender” are patterned on the idea of physical conflict, they can be applied to any number of narrative forms, such as those involving a conflict of expectations.

In THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT I observed that Bradbury’s short story “The Last Night of the World” as one that has nearly no conflict in the “X vs. Y” sense. A man and wife, the only characters in the story, become privy to the fact that the world is about to come to an end. Yet instead of their registering emotions of fear or frustration, the couple is totally okay with such a transcendent doom, implicitly because it’s better than the fate of nuclear annihilation. I noted in the essay that because the story focuses on the characters’ mental turnabout rather than on the phenomenon of the world’s death, so that in my current terminology, the world’s doom is the thing that challenges the select couple, and they are defenders not in the sense of rising to the challenge, albeit only in the sense of professing their total acceptance of their fate. Indeed, during my reading of Poe’s complete prose works, I became aware that in some of his vignettes—“Island of the Fay,” “The Oval Portrait”—the viewpoint characters have even less internal conflict. In both vignettes, the “defenders” are just windows into the author’s perspective, as he illustrates how something fair devolves into something foul.

The “conflict of expectations” feeds into a trope I discussed in CHANGING PARTNERS IN THE MONSTER-DEMIHERO DANCE, where I surveyed the use of the focal presence in a number of comic-book horror stories. I remarked that there’s a dominant tendency for the “monster”—what Frank Cioffi calls “the anomaly”—to be the star of the story. “The Gentle Old Man” overtly follows this tendency, while both “Grave Rehearsal” and “Bridal Night” do so in more covert fashion. At the beginning of each story, there’s an evil presence—respectively, Madame Satin and Count Von Roemer— both of whom take the role of “the challenger” and who seem more than able to overpower each of the viewpoint characters, respectively B.S. Fitts and Helena Ayres. But Ayres, though she is a defender, has greater power than Von Roemer and easily defeats him. B.S. Fitts does the same to Madame Satin, though Fitts only gains power after Satin has killed him.

Some defenders are the stars precisely because the evil in their nature calls up some sort of reciprocal evil, and this pattern is seen in both “The Speed Demon” and “Den of Horror.” The evils that doom both defenders fit the role of challengers, but they have a subordinate role, not least because they seem to evolve from the defender’s own nature, not unlike the doppelganger in Poe’s “William Wilson.” At the same time, irony doesn't always imply consubstantiality, for Prince Prospero, despite the way he perishes while defending himself from the Red Death, is not the personified plague's sole victim.

OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD

On this blog I've written a good deal about the theories of "will" expoused by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and have formulated a literary "theory of two wills," influenced by Schopenhauer, in which literary characters are dominated either by the "idealizing will" or the "existential will." However, the English word "will" doesn't adapt well to the adjectival form, which is what I need in reconsidering the arguments stated in 2014's EGO, MEET OBJECT.

In that essay, I meditated on Jung's distinctions between "extrovert and introvert" in his book PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, also classified as "object-oriented" and "ego-oriented." I've sometimes considered applying the former set of terms to the two different ways focal presences resolve themselves in fiction. However, the informal meanings of "extrovert and introvert" are far too limiting, while the terms "ego-oriented" and "object-oriented," while closer to my needs, are cumbersome.

Now, in 2009's SEVEN WAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER, I defined the philosopher's idea of "Will" as "the radical root of all literary activity." This means that, no matter what sort of viewpoint character the author may choose, he may focus as easily upon the "will" within the viewpoint character (or on some figure allied to him, or an ensemble of such characters), OR upon things, people, or phenomena that are perceived as "the other" to the viewpoint character's will.

The Greek word for will is (more or less) *thel.* Thanks to the wonders of search-engines, I've discovered that one author has coined the term "thelic" as an adjective for will, and also that he's using that term for a purpose quite unlike my own. Therefore I will appropriate the term for fiction only, and apply it only to the orientation of the focal presence in narrative.

In place of "ego-oriented," I'll speak of the *endothelic,* meaning that the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests.

In place of "object-oriented," I'll speak of the *exothelic,* meaning that the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.

This adjectival terminology solves the clumsiness I mentioned in EGO, MEET OBJECT in that a term like "exothelic" applies as well to a place like Wonderland or a character like Dracula. In addition, since I allow for the association between the ego of the viewpoint character and any representative affiliated figure within the same "endothelic" constellation, that not only subsumes narratives like Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" prose tales-- where the star of the show only rarely becomes the viewpoint character-- but also for examples of *exteriorization,* as seen in the essay DJINN WITH SUMMONER. By this logic, the non-sentient Gigantor-- the star of the teleseries and of (presumably) the manga series as well-- is *endothelic* even though he has no diegetic "will" of his own, because Gigantor is associated with a sentient will through his controller Jimmy Sparks. In contrast, a cognate robot-hero like Astro Boy displays sentience, and therefore does not actually need an interaction with humans to be his "summoners," although the associations don't hurt the robot-boy's claims to human sympathy.

I mentioned Wonderland above, which is clearly the focus of Lewis Carroll's books, which would be *exothelic,* as are most film-adaptations, with the exception of the 2010 Tim Burton film, which becomes *endothelic* by virtue of emphasizing the will of Alice rather than of Wonderland.

Keeping to the context of environments, in OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER. I used the example of the 1950 WEIRD SCIENCE story "The Destruction of the Earth" in order to demonstrate that the narrative's focus was not upon any of the niggling human characters, but upon the Destroyed Earth itself, whose death-throes are given the most attention. I called it "object-oriented" before, but now it is *exothelic.*

In contrast, there are hundreds of stories dealing with the world's destruction that focus upon the aggrieved reactions of the viewpoint characters, all of which would be *endothelic.* Yet aggrieved reactions are not necessary, as I noted in my examinations of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Last Night of the World." In my first consideration of the story, I averred that the viewpoint characters' sanguinity about the world's end might be viewed as a form of negative will, akin to Nietzsche's "will to nothingness." But in my revised outlook here, I decided that even though the nameless viewpoint characters do nothing to bring about the cataclysm, they are stand-ins for the author's POV.

Thus Bradbury's strategy for giving "new life and force" to the overly familiar threat of nuclear war was to undercut its power by invoking a greater power, one that simply chooses to end the story of mankind in the manner of "the closing of a book"-- an apt metaphor for a writer frustrated with the follies of mankind.

Therefore in this case, although the narrative still concerns the world's end, the focal presences are the two nearly anonymous "husband and wife" who calmly observe that ending with a dignity that the author finds appropriate-- while the nature of the world's end is at best a subsidiary phenomenon.

MYTHCOMICS: "LOST IN THE MICROCOSM" (WEIRD SCIENCE #12, 1950)

My first choice for a "mythcomic" from the House of Entertaining Comics creates some problems. Though I didn't say so when I began this series, it's generally been my intention not to count anything that was a direct adaptation of a story published in another medium. For instance, I consider Robert E. Howard's short Conan story "The Tower of the Elephant" to be one of the great myth-stories of popular fiction. But I would never cite the Thomas-Smith adaptation of the story, published in Marvel's CONAN THE BARBARIAN #4. It's arguable that Thomas and Smith may have added their own mythopeic elements to the mix, but nevertheless, the source of the mythic structure is a prose story, not a comics-story.

Similarly, I would never include any of EC's famous adaptations of Ray Bradbury's work. Yet what about "swipes?" As this Wikipedia entry makes abundantly clear, publisher William Gaines had the habit of delving through published SF-stories and "lifting" ideas, which were then redone as "new" stories by raconteurs like Al Feldstein. The story goes that Gaines lifted one of Bradbury's stories, and that Bradbury wrote him, politely asking for payment for said adaptation-- a bit of indirect dickering that led to several fully approved Bradbury adaptations by E.C.

Yet a swipe doesn't have to be an exact reproduction of the original story. I have not to my recollection read the 1936 Henry Haase prose tale "He Who Shrank," but this blog-summation of the story suggests to me that writer Feldstein and artist Kurtzman only swiped the basic idea of a protagonist who is (a) exposed to a element that causes him to shrink endlessly, and (b) because of this, finds himself plummeting through a host of recursive micro-universes.

The dominant Campbellian function evoked here is the *cosmological,* in that Feldstein's protagonist Karl is constantly witness to all the wonders of the microscopic world, seen for the first time on an equal footing. I can't prove it, but when he shrinks into the "sweat ducts" of his mentor and learns that the older man has tuberculosis, that sounds a bit more like Kurtzman's wry sense of humor than Feldstein's-- though for all I know it might appear in the Haase story.

In addition, the story is particularly accomplished in the psychological arena, in that Karl is constantly shifting from being a godlike giant, able to cause havoc to lesser beings with no more than a sneeze, to dwindling into relative nothingness-- which is perhaps a little further than even Jonathan Swift went with the basic "relative size" trope.

Interestingly, the story's conclusion holds out some meager hope that someday Karl may shrink into some super-advanced cosmos where he can be cured of his affliction-- though the dominant effect of the story is to remind the story's interlocutor (who listens to Karl's story) that even Earth's advancements may pale before "what exists in the infinite cosmos."

COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PT. 4

In SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 1, I outlined a way in which both fictional sex and violence, although ultimately distinct in their various applications, could be subsumed as a sort of narrative "violence" that brought about the transformation from the outset of the narrative to its resolution.  My future discussions of sex and violence in this essay-series, however, aren't meant to be focused on the abstraction of pure narrative, so I've decided to continue this aspect of my ruminations under the rubric COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS. This 2014 essay-series was the first time I considered that both the combinatory mode and the dynamicity mode might be applied to my adaptation of Adler's theory of positive and negative compensation.

The terms "combinatory mode" and "dynamicity mode" are new extrapolations from the established terms "combinatory-sublime" and "dynamic-sublime." The latter terms were appropriate to the particular types of fantasy-narrative I was analyzing in the earlier essays. However, now that I'm speaking of narrative as a whole, I'm forced to apply the concepts across the board. After all, in VERTICAL VIRTUES  and its second part, I took the Huxley-derived position that all fiction is concerned in some way with transcendence, be it "horizontal," "upward," or "downward." The first form of transcendence is defined by its lack of the sublime affects present in the other two forms. But narratives of "horizontal transcendence," while not constituted to deliver the major emotional upsurges seen in the other forms, must be rooted in the same matrix of will and desire that informs the others.  So it follows within my system that a work of horizontal transcendence-- Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND being my chosen example in the VIRTUES essays-- must conform to the same pattern as the two sublime forms. WIND's main theme relates to dynamicity, in that it addresses the regulation of power in its society is negotiated: the death of the Old South and its resistance to the victorious North, even while the North is subtly changing the old values. However, the mode of the combinatory appears as well. Tolkien, whose seminal essay "On Fairy Stories" was a key influence on my refinement of my sublimity-theory, discusses this form of the non-sublime combinatory mode:

Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue.

And in this regard Mitchell's "freshness of vision." her invocation of the combinatory mode in its non-sublime form, appears in WIND's highly variegated characters. In this essay I mentioned that "GONE WITH THE WIND lacks the affects of the sublime, but that lack doesn't take anything from Mitchell's amazing ability to create characters who can seem well-rounded even though they may appear for no more than a paragraph or two." I'm not an expert on historical fiction of Mitchell's period, or of any period, but I would venture to guess that most popular writers working in Mitchell's idiom did not work as hard as she did rendering all of these characters, both major and minor. For that matter, there are quite a few authors of canonical literature who are must weaker on minor characters than Mitchell, including "big guns" like Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Turning back to a topic raised in SACRED AND PROFANE, I sought to bring my Bataillean concept of narrative "violence" in line with what I'd written in the essay THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT. I hadn't noticed until recently that I wrote the BASE LEVEL essay a couple of weeks before I made my breakthrough in deducing two forms of sublimity. Prior to the TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I series, I had only defined sublimity in terms of dynamicity. Thus, when I tried to analyze Bradbury's story "The Last Night of the World," I was on some level seeking to express the nature of conflict in terms that would make sense within the dynamic-sublime, and so I asserted that the story was an example of Nietzsche's "will to nothingness." This isn't so much wrong as incomplete, for the "conflict" I was seeking is not one of dynamicity, but of the combinatory mode.

In the past couple of years I've identified instances of "combinatory thinking" in authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Campbell and Grant Morrison, but the unintentional father of this concept must be, in a historical sense, Edmund Burke, who emphasized its power in this passage:

Thirdly, by words we have it in our power to make such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By this power of combining, we are able, by the addition of well-chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the simple object. In painting we may represent any fine figure we please; but we never can give it those enlivening touches which it may receive from words.

I still assert that the predominant appeal of "The Last Night of the World" is its defiance of audience-expectations re: the equanimity with which the viewpoint-characters-- and implicitly, all other people in the world except the children-- meet the world's irrevocable end. But this conflict arises from the combination of a dire situation with reactions which do not seem to fit that situation, as seen by this exchange:

"Do you know, I won't miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or autos or factories or my work or anything except you three. I won't miss a thing except my family and perhaps the change in the weather and a glass of cool water when the weather's hot, or the luxury of sleeping. Just little things, really. How can we sit here and talk this way?"
"Because there's nothing else to do."

I should note that this was one of several 1950s stories Bradbury wrote that referenced the possibility of nuclear devastation. "Last Night" hints that the peaceful ending of the world takes the place of such a devastation, and that it comes about specifically because nuclear death is so close to reality:

"There are bombers on their course both ways across the ocean tonight that'll never see land again."
"That's part of the reason why."

Thus Bradbury's strategy for giving "new life and force" to the overly familiar threat of nuclear war was to undercut its power by invoking a greater power, one that simply chooses to end the story of mankind in the manner of "the closing of a book"-- an apt metaphor for a writer frustrated with the follies of mankind.

Thus the conflict of Bradbury's story is expressed through the combination of things that don't quite seem to match, much like the images I reproduced in COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS PART 3.  Of course, these images, like the Bradbury story, seek to evoke the "strangeness" of the sublime, and this provides a contrasting employment of the combinatory mode to what we see in Margaret Mitchell's purely horizontal, representational cast of characters. Yet even the horizontal manifestations serve to illustrate the incredible fecundity of the combinatory mode.

SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 1

“Status quo” science fiction. . . . opens with a conventional picture of social reality. . . . This reality is disrupted by some anomaly or change--invasion, invention, or atmospheric disturbance, for example--and most of the story involves combating or otherwise dealing with this disruption. At the story’s conclusion, the initial reality (the status quo) reasserts itself (ix).-- Frank Cioffi, cited here.

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

I've mentioned many times that the philosophy of Georges Bataille is key to my project of analyzing the affects of fictional sex and violence in rigorous narratological terms. At the same time, I've gone to great pains to refute this Bataille statement:

In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation.

This 2010 essay states the argument succinctly, but it has recently occurred to me that when Bataille says "in essence," he might have been thinking of the similitudes of sex and violence in terms other than as "the sensuous frenzy" that he claimed was the link between both activities. Now it seems possible to me that Bataille-- though he does not expressly say so-- may have been thinking about the function of both activities in human society, to which topic he also devotes considerable space in EROTISM:

In the domain of our life [the principle of] excess manifests in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behavior where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome [these impulses] a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment.

In this societal sense, the "domains" of sex and violence are indeed homologous given that they so frequently conflict with the world of useful work.  Yet even given this paradigm, one cannot overlook that both practices admit of being used to support "productive efficiency," channeling the violent impulses of the young into warfare that brings more resources into a given society, or making advantageous marriages in order to create social bonds between separate groups. Nor should one make the Mickey Marx mistake of assuming that these stratagems are imposed upon innocent members of society by their devious rulers. There's nothing that a group's ruler has ever conceived that did not have its genesis in the stratagems used by "ordinary people" in their dealings with one another.

Now, since one of the main concerns of this blog is "fictional sex and violence," how if at all does Bataille's linkage of the domains of sex and violence apply to fictional narrative?

For clarity I return to the two complementary analyses cited above, by Frank Cioffi and Tzvetan Todorov, as to the nature of narrative. It's a well-worn truism that all fiction must revolve around some form of "conflict," but that truism doesn't say anything about the various ways in which conflict operates.

Of the two scholars, Cioffi employs a violent term-- "disrupted"-- to describe the way the "reality" at a story's beginning is transformed into another reality by the story's conclusion. (See the fuller quote in the cited essay for Cioffi's thoughts about the ways in which the "status quo" may be upset, or how the same dynamics apply no less to other genres than to the science-fiction genre with which he's concerned.)

Typically enough, Todorov-- a more elitist critic who barely takes notice of the permutations of popular literature-- avoids any such violent metaphors. Yet it's difficult to imagine what brings about his "movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical" except by some kinetic activity. Of course, not all activity is violent activity, and I myself have examined a particular Ray Bradbury story as providing a "base level of conflict." This might be an apt example of Todorov's minimal requirements for narrative movement: the Bradbury story begins with a couple that wakes in the night (initial equilibirum, or Cioffi's "status quo"), discuss between themselves their mutual vision that the world is about to end (movement), and are quickly reconciled to the world ending in a whimper (new equilibrium).

I took the position that the "conflict" in the Bradbury story was not intrinsic, since the tale only has two characters who immediately agree as to their new situation-- but extrinsic, in that their reaction conflicts with the expectations of the story's readers, who are likely to expect a bit more wailing and gnashing of teeth. I termed the characters' acceptance of their lot a "will to nothingness," But the matter may go deeper than that, as I will explore in more detail in the forthcoming Part 2.

[correction: since the essay mentioned above doesn't pertain directly to the matter of fictive violence, I've decided that it fits better as a follow-up to the two COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS essay.]

THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT

God degenerated into the contradiction of life . Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the "here and now," and for every lie about the "beyond"! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!-- Nietzsche, THE ANTICHRIST.
 

I've often stated that the "combative mode" is one that must be situated within the total spectrum of all possible permutations of the principle of conflict, which is, in turn, congruent with the nature of the Schopenhaurean will.  That said, some expressions of conflict in the *microdynamic* level of dynamicity are so adumbrated that something like Harvey Pekar drinking lemonade is practically a Kirbyesque battle-scene.

Case in point: Ray Bradbury's 1951 short story for ESQUIRE magazine, "The Last Night of the World,"  reprinted in the paperback collection THE ILLUSTRATED MAN as well as being one of the tales adapted for a 1969 film of the same title.  In this very short tale, a man and wife have a conversation in which they realize that not only have both of them have dreamt that the world will soon end, but that everyone else in the world has had the same dream.  Neither they nor anyone else panics at the impending and inexplicable onset of extinction; it's simply something everyone in the world accepts.

Wherein, then, lies the conflict?

Though Nietzsche's invocation of a "will to nothingness" has a very different context, the "base level of conflict" here invokes a similar willed acceptance of extinction.  In the minds of some if not all readers of the story, there will be the expectation that if humanity were faced with an "end of days," it would be an occasion of great tumult, of "raging against the dying of the light."  What Bradbury's story offers is, in keeping with the literary audience to which it is directed, is a triumph of the "will to nothingness" against all the audience's expectations.

I will further note that this essential approach is one of the commonest bag of tricks in the history of "canonical art" fiction.  Non-artistic approaches to momentous occurences-- be it as great as the end of the world or as private as an ilicit love-affair-- focus principally upon what I have called *the kinetic,* which is oriented on reproducing strong sensations in various combinations. In response to this tendency, aspiring "artists"-- both good and bad-- tend to take the opposite approach.  If the reader expects a bang, give him a whimper.

This is a natural enough evolution.  It only becomes problematic when art is defined by this ironic device, rather than considering it to be merely one of many arrows in art's quiver.