LOVE, DENSITY AND CONCRESCENCE

I haven't written much if anything since 2017 about "density," when in the essay GOOD WILL QUANTUMS, I extrapolated a brief remark by Raymond Durgnat into a general principle, one applicable to all four of the potentialities. In that essay I wrote:                                                                                                                                                                                                   'density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Elsewhere in the essay and its follow-up, I qualified this statement by noting that all literary works, whatever potentiality they favored, were all *gestural" in nature, just to distance myself from associations with any criteria about fidelity to actual "lived experience." However, in due time I felt the need of a term that described the process by which such "potentiality density" came about, and for that purpose I freely adapted the term "concrescence" from Alfred North Whitehead.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 All that said, because density has a stronger association than does concrescence with the quality of some physical substance, it also proves somewhat better for describing the finished product. I might say, using my most recent emendations of my potentiality terminology, that "Dave Sim's work excels at dealing with didactic cogitations, while Grant Morrison's work excels at dealing with mythopoeic correlations." That quality of excellence can be metaphorically expressed as a given work's density, in that such density shows how thoroughly the author was invested in a given set of fictional representations (sometimes, though not usually, on a subconscious level).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Now, knowing that level of authorial involvement doesn't intrinsically make a given work, or set of works, engrossing to all members of a potential audience. In fact, tastes are so variable that one can practically guarantee that no works will be all things to all people, if only because we esteem (or do not esteem) all phenomena according to our respective abilities to relate to those phenomena in some way. And my carefully considered positioning of the word "esteem" brings me to the "love" part of the title.                                                                                                                                                                            Some setup: in chapter 40 of the romance-manga NAGATORO, main character Naoto, a high-school student, aspires to create good art. His senior Sana (the one clad in a towel) delivers the following critique of his recent effort, followed by her criterion for good art.                                                               

                                            

In the story the discussion is interrupted, and at no point in the series does this aesthetic credo get further articulated. Given that the author Nanashi devotes the bulk of NAGATORO to the dramatic potentiality, his main reason for having the Sana character make this statement is to imply a correspondence between the way a good artist is "in love" with his material, and the way Naoto specifically needs to invest himself in life, whether it's drawing his subject matter with passion, rather than with mere polished technique, or in his romantic relationship to the titular Nagatoro. I would tend to think that Raymond Durgnat, who was my original guide to the density-metaphor, probably would not have disapproved of Nanashi's use of "love" as a metaphor for artistic investment, for wanting to "know" a subject intensely (if not actually romantically).    

THE INFORMAL POSTULATE

 As I started the prologue of the 2007 film criticism book HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY, I encountered this justification of the book's premise:

Many viewers have observed that Alfred Hitchcock focuses on ideas in the construction of his films. The French director-critics Claude Chabrol and Eric Roemer... claimed that each of his classic films is based on a sort of "formal postulate."

I wouldn't go so far as to say that all of Hitchcock's signature works are "idea-centered," but it's certainly fair to say that certain ones, particularly ROPE and VERTIGO, have a sort of ordered intellectual approach that I tend to line up with what I've termed "the didactic potentiality." However, I don't see so much focus on ideas in such films as 1943's SHADOW OF A DOUBT or 1960's PSYCHO. To invoke my own terminology once again, the latter two seem to belong to the mythopoeic potentiality, in that the films focus more on correlations than cogitations.

But I can understand the editors of the Hitchcock book seeking to draw parallels between the popular productions of the director and the high-toned cogitations of philosophy. In fact, even though I don't agree with Chabrol and Roemer, I'm glad that they advanced the term "formal postulate," because this fits in with the rational discursiveness of the didactic potentiality. In contrast, works heavily invested in the mythopoeic potentiality might be said to be more concerned with "informal postulates." This notion reminds me not only of my own notion of "half-truths," but also the way film-critic Raymond Durgnat summarized the appeal of the Frankenstein Monster terms of symbolic oppositions:

The Frankenstein Monster is brutal but pathetic; he's a creature who masters his creator; he's brute material capable of a lofty idealism that, turning sour, makes him a devil-- but a sympathetic one.

But when one wishes to convince others that a given work, medium or genre deserves respect, it's a lot easier to persuade an audience using the idea of formal postulates than informal ones. Informal postulates communicate, "I think this hidden complexity is there,"  while formal postulates make it sound as though the complexity is there for anyone to see. 

I also encountered this preference, possibly expressed on an unconscious level, when I finished Jess Nevins' interview with Alan Moore in the 2004 concordance A BLAZING WORLD. On page 254, one reads Moore claiming that his LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN series is predicated, at least in part, in "pulling down the barriers between High Literature and pulp literature and pornography and low literary forms like that." Makes Moore sound like he's kissing-cousins with Durgnat's advocacy of "the poetry in pulp," right? But then on page 267 he advances this lofty sentiment:

Art is not about reassuring people. We don't read Art to be reassured, we read Art to be challenged and to challenge our assumptions and to maybe extend our ideas in certain areas, which you really can't do without challenging them.

No poetry here, despite the fact that Moore has produced some of the most resonant poetic-pulp in the annals of the comics medium. This "formal postulate" rather sounds a lot like what Northrop Frye wrote of those critics he called "Iliad critics" with respect to their idea of literature's purpose:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience...

Without repeating myself too much, I've also noted that Frye's two breeds of critic, "Iliad critics" and "Odyssey critics," seem to line up, respectively. with the mythoi of drama and irony for the first and with comedy and adventure for the second. One might agree with Moore that the former mythoi emphasize the challenging of assumptions, but if so, that would only be because those mythoi depend on putting their characters in deeply conflicted situations. In contrast, it's evident that a great deal of comedy and adventure does offer a kind of "reassurance," though maybe not in the way Moore imagines that reaction. That reassurance might be better compared to Tolkien's concept of "consolation."

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

(I note in passing that in the course of the interview Moore expresses a distaste for Tolkien's signature work in the context of complaining about "big, stupid clashes between good and evil.")

In conclusion, I realize that to some extent the preference for intellectual directness over intuitional indirectness is an individual one. However, knowing that does not make me amend my preferences in any way.

ADDENDUM: I thought I might expand further on the "formal/informal" dichotomy accidentally implied by the editors of HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY. However, upon re-reading my own CORRELATIONS AND COGITATIONS, I see that I included a reference to Whitehead's concept of "prehensions and apprehensions," glossed by another writer's assertion that the former focuses upon "soulful understanding" (aligned in my system to the mythopoeic potentiality), while  the latter focuses "intellectual understanding" (aligned in my system to the didactic potentiality). That's probably enough expatiation on the "formal/informal" dichotomy for now.

GOOD WILL QUANTUMS

I preface the discussion referenced in the last post with another citation of my definition of the four potentialities:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

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

Merriam-Webster defines "potentiality" as "the ability to develop or to come into existence," and I chose it in accordance with my belief that all human creators of art are capable to drawing upon these potential matrices of relationships. Not all creators will use all four equally, for reasons I've already detailed, but all are potentially capable of invoking such intra-literary relationships because such relationships are the essence of all discourse. Naturally, I'm only interested in discourse that either falls within the rubric of "fiction" or has an ambiguous relationship to it (see my review of ED GEIN, which I termed a work of "fictionalized reality.")

Now, by certain criteria everything fictional is "unreal," as I demonstrated in my essay HERE COMES DAREDEVIL  THE MAN WITHOUT IDENTITY. Still, even though fictional characters exist only for readers to identity with them in some manner, characters may take on the appearance of reality because they repeatedly reproduce the relationships we as readers/audiences expect of them. This illusion of reality is primarily sustained by the readers' sense of what Raymond Durgnat called "density of specification." This was a slight misquote of a tossed-off term from Henry James, and in Durgnat's original essay he seems to apply it largely to the potentiality that I have called The Dramatic:

English masters instructed us all in the necessity for realistic and deep characterization, logically consistent behavior, penetrating studies of motive, and that proliferation of vivid detail suggested by Henry James' phrase, "density of specification." 

In certain circumstances one might argue that the last of Durgnat's phrases, "the proliferation of vivid detail," could signify the world of The Kinetic, but it's impossible to know what Durgnat had in mind, and I would speculate that in the type of realistic fiction he referenced, such "vivid detail" usually serves more as backdrop from dramatic developments than as a source of varied sensations. But in this one germ from Durgnat's essay, I perceive a general principle: that density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience." Thus, using comics-creators as shorthand for these positions: abstract ideas take on great density in Dave Sim, sensations take on great density in Frank Miller, "discrete personalities" take on great density in (say) Gilbert Hernandez, and symbols take on great density in (say) Grant Morrison.

Such shorthand assignments are, of course, entirely unfair: Miller, Sim, Hernandez, and Morrison have all earned places in my mythcomics assessments, which indicates that all four possess some ability to work with the matrix of The Mythopoeic. But I would say that the dominant works by each artist show that one particular potentiality has what Jung called "sovereignty" over the others, as I detailed in JUNG AND CENTRICITY:

Jung does not invoke "sovereignty" as a specific term, in contrast to the way Bataille uses it to mean what I'd translate as "megalothymotic dominance."  What Jung is really addressing is the proposition that though a subject's psychological makeup may include influences from all four functions-- once again, sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking-- only one can be dominant.

Yet the question of centricity and/or "megalothymotic dominance" is not a vital one for me at this time. I'm more interested in exploring the consistency of unreality: the various types of non-existent fictional items that exist in assorted relationships within each respective potentiality. All of these items-- sensations, discrete personalities, symbols and ideas-- derive from things that people feel and/or do in the real world. But in fiction, they have their own reality, one that I have called, following Susanne Langer, gestural.

And in the next essay I'll finally draw, as promised, upon my essay THE QUANTUM THEORY OF DYNAMICITY, if only to come up with a better term than "items" for these intangible whatyacallems.

MERCURIAL RISINGS

My current contemplation of the four potentialities leads me to return to the 2015 essay-series REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE. I wrote this series one month before I started using the terms "overthought," "underthought" and "lateral meaning" to describe my conception of the literary process.  In Part 3 I drew some general comparisons between Jung's ideas about his "four functions" and what parallels these did or did not have with said literary process.

Drawing on Jung's comment about the purpose of each function... in literature [I consider that]"sensation" refers to the readers' identification with the physical sensations of fictional characters, while "feeling" refers to the extrinsic value that the readers place upon the characters' actions.

By contrast, in the previous passage, I said that these were the functions through which the majority of audiences interact with fictional narrative, as opposed to the functions that concern either images and symbols (intuition) or discursive ideas (thinking). This prioritization is at odds with the ontogenesis Jung presents in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, where the two irrational /perceptual functions, sensation and intuition, develop first in the human organism, and are only later followed by the rational / judgment-making functions, thinking and feeling.

In REFLECTIONS I did not so much dispute Jung's prioritization as declare it irrelevant to the literary process:

Now 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.

The obvious reason for this-- though I didn't state it at the time-- is that while the human organism may have one ontogenetic order, a given literary narrative has another. In fact, it must have a different ontogenetic order, given that while humans are born as children and progress to adulthood, literary works are presented to their audiences in "adult" form. That is, not only are they supposed to have refined away all the confusions of their early conceptions, they are by and large produced by adults who have lived with all four functions since their own childhoods. It is for this fundamental reason that the functions of sensation and feeling are primary in both the artist's creation of his works and his audience's interactions with them, while the functions of thinking and intuition become secondary, requiring a great deal of education before one can navigate their more abstract depths.

In Part 3 I also said:

...I cited a Jung passage in which he spoke of the intuition's "mythological images" as "the precursors of ideas." Given Jung's love of symmetry, he probably contemplated a similar indebtedness between the other two functions, given that the base input of sensations-- as to whether they were agreeable or disagreeable-- can be easily seen as the basis of the feeling-function's more sophisticated decisions about what people and things ought to be accepted or rejected.

Leaving Jung's love of symmetry out of the matter, my own similar love prompts me to observe that I can see how narrative in its most elementary states-- say, stories in Golden Age comic books-- often seem to have nothing on their respective minds than establishing (1) the range of sensations possible and (2) basic (i.e., not "more sophisticated") judgments on whether people or things thus perceived should be accepted or rejected. Thus sensation retains its status as being a function both irrational and perceptual, and feeling keeps its nature as being a function both rational and judgment-oriented.

In my recent meditations on "complexity" and "density," I've come to the conclusion that all four functions, as they manifest in literature, must depend on complexity as a measure of merit. In COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1  I rejected Raymond Durgnat's 'aesthetic of simplicity," in part because I think his notion of symmetry-- i.e., elementary myth-motifs must be opposed to more finely rendered renditions of verisimilitude-- was, ironically enough, too simple. Certainly I don't think of the free flow of images and symbols, as expressed by the function of intuition, is in any way less complex than any mimesis produced by any representative of realism, be it Henry James or Ben Katchor. Maybe if Durgnat had read more of Jung than of Levi-Strauss, he might have modified his stance.

I've already devoted many words to the ways in which the products of the human intuition provide the groundwork for the conceptualizations of the thinking-function. But only in this essay, THE QUANTUM THEORY OF DYNAMICITY, did I come close to verbalizing the potential connections between the sensation-function and the feeling-function as seen through my lit-crit lens. More on this in a separate essay.

COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 2

For the most part, whenever I've used the term "complexity" on this blog since its beginning in 2007, I've been referring to "symbolic complexity," a.k.a. "mythicity." As I recall my earlier writings for THE JOURNAL and AMAZING HEROES on myth-criticism didn't define the potential of literature to be "myth-like" in terms of a level of symbolic activity, or, if I did, I may have followed the lead of Joseph Campbell in declaring narratives to be "myth-like" if they closely followed a template derived from authentic myth. Over time, though, I've tended to view narratives in terms of Jung's idea of phenomenology, which emphasized the multifarious nature of the human personality. This was the type of "complexity" with which Jung dealt, and of his many dissections of the human soul, the one that I find most persuasive is his concept of the four functions, which he boils down thusly:

The essential function of sensation is to establish that something exists, thinking tells us what it means, feeling what its value is, and intuition surmises whence it comes and whither it goes. 

Jung did not apply the functions to literature at all so far as I know, so I did so, extrapolating from the four psychological functions four potentialities, as described in FOUR BY FOUR. The potentialities don't follow the same ontogeny as the functions, because the former apply not to general perception but to the application of the functions in human art, which result in four potential modes of literary action:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

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

In Jung's schema every human psyche must include all four functions, though inevitably individuals will favor one over all the others. However, not every work of art is designed to reflect all four potentialities. An artwork can favor one potentiality and display no direct reference to any other, as I also said in FOUR BY FOUR:

I might attempt to use Jung's function-terms to assert that Dave Sim's cerebral CEREBUS privileges the function of "thinking" more than any other, and that Frank Miller's SIN CITY privileges the function of "sensation." 

Naturally, even authors who may be fixated upon a particular function always have the potential, so to speak, to try their hands at the other three.

Now, throughout this blog I've largely been analyzing works from the standpoint of the mythopoeic potentiality. This concentration stems from my rejection of ideological criticism, which centers principally upon the the didactic. I've distinguished between "functional" and "super-functional" uses of symbolism, in which "super-functional" implies largely the same as "high symbolic complexity," as well as Wheelwright's notion of "the plurisignative." But in previous essays I had not evolved a symmetrical approach to the other three functions, which is what I seek to do at this point.

For instance, here's Dave Sim, with his focus on "thinking," providing a complex (though not irrefutable) take on the philosophy of one particular character:

In contrast, Miller doesn't tend to give his character particularly complex didactic outlooks:

I could muster other examples of "complex vs. simple" applications of the other two potentialities as well, perhaps one that would be more to Miller's advantage than to Sim's. But the point is that any excellence within a particular potentiality stems from a given author's mastery of the narrative complexity relative to that potentiality. Raymond Durgnat's term "density" has some application as well, for it is through the density of details that even sensational fictional effects have the greatest impact upon readers.

For instance, these three DAREDEVIL action-panels by Miller--

Are innately more complex than these two rather static DAREDEVIL panels from Bob Brown.

I don't plan to continue tracing the different forms of complexity/density within each of the four potentialities: the mythopoeic is still my particular obsession. However, I have a bit more to say in future essays on the general theory of the four potentialities.

COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1

In order to explain why I'm choosing to devote a lot of space to one essay in Raymond Durgnat's 1967 collection in FILMS AND FEELINGS, as I said that I would in this essay, some personal reflections by an amateur literary theorist may provide some context.

I'm not certain as to when I read the Durgnat book, but since I was exposed to a lot of esoteric materials while working for a college library in the early 1980s, that's as likely a time as ever. I already had quite a bit of grounding in Jung and Campbell, and I probably discovered Frye around the same time as Durgnat. Durgnat didn't offer a lot of heavy theory in his essays, but in one essay, "Tales Versus Novels," he propounded a theory with which I both agreed and disagreed.

I lacked a certain amount of context to Durgnat's argument when I first read it, for the essay was in part a response to a type of literary elitism the writer found in a 1884 Henry James essay, "The Art of Fiction."  To my consternation Durgnat did not cite the source of James' remarks, which I later tracked down thanks to the wonders of the Internet. "Art of Fiction" itself was written in response to a diatribe by a more obscure writer of James' time, whom I chose not to seek out. In brief, James sought to set forth his parameters for excellence in literary fiction, and in the excerpt from "Tales Versus Novels" I'll print below, it should be evident that Durgnat is arguing that James' standards are based purely upon the art of the novel, not of fiction generally. Thus, Durgnat contrasts the virtues of "tales," meaning not only bonafide folktales but also pop-fictional creations like "Li'l Abner and James Bond," with the more celebrated virtues of largely naturalistic novels.

To the aesthetic of the "tale" academic culture has, by and large, turned a blind eye. As recently as my grammar school days, English masters instructed us all in the necessity for realistic and deep characterization, logically consistent behavior, penetrating studies of motive, and that proliferation of vivid detail suggested by Henry James' phrase, "density of specification." We were besought to insist upon the "texture of lived experience," and many of the exegeses we studied had strained to detect such "density" in such improbable places as folk ballads, or Chaucer's tale of Patient Griselda. Yet it was curious that, rich and complex as was the showpiece of the "complexity" school, HAMLET, each critic struggled to isolate its hero's "real" motives, to simplify, to synopsize, him into a figure almost as systematic and simple as another famous procrastinator, Li'l Abner. For, as Erich Auerbach remarked in his study of the development of European literary realism, "To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend."

A minor point first: in the essay to which I linked, James actually speaks of "solidity of specification" when he extols the ability of modern fiction to bring forth that texture of lived experience.  However, Durgnat's inaccurate memory is more inspired than the original, for the ideal of literary realism is based not so much in how "solid" things are-- which is "not at all" since fiction is not real-- but rather, in how "densely" an author provides all the details that produce the illusion of reality.

Now to a more substantial point: Durgnat is suggesting is that academic culture ought to appreciate not just the aesthetic of complex specification, but also the aesthetic of simplicity that one finds in folktales and popular fiction, and even in "high art" (like HAMLET), whose complexities ultimately reduce down into many of the same simple oppositions one finds in "low art." Here's Durgnat celebrating the symbolic oppositions one finds in Mary Shelley's famous creation:

The Frankenstein Monster is brutal but pathetic; he's a creature who masters his creator; he's brute material capable of a lofty idealism that, turning sour, makes him a devil-- but a sympathetic one.

I agree with Durgnat's readings of folk-lit and pop-lit in general, but the "disagreement" I mentioned above comes in when he tries to make these rather Levi-Straussian oppositions emblematic of his "aesthetic of simplicity." I don't think that, say, his Frankensteinian oppositions are simple; I think that they're just as "dense" as all the verisimilitude that Henry James ladles into his novels. I think I understand fairly well why Durgnat sought to create a contrast between his notion of tale-like simplicity versus academia's received opinion that "proliferation of vivid detail" was the defining virtue of all fiction, with the prose novel standing in as the best representation of that aesthetic. But I also think it was a mistake, because the academic community flourishes on the demonstration of hidden complexity beneath the surface of any narrative. As far as I can tell, Durgnat's aesthetic of simplicity had little effect on academia, be it concerned with the critique of prose or of cinema. In contrast, while the influence of Carl Jung's analytical psychology proves less popular than the pseudo-scientific formulations of Freud and Marx, there are still assorted critics who advocate the exploration of symbols through a Jungian lens-- in large part because Jung, like literary critics, was all about finding complexity amid apparent simplicity.

In future essays within this series, "density" will prove useful in further identifying the virtues of what I've termed, with due reference to Jung, the four potentialities.

DWELLING ON DURGNAT

I've mentioned Raymond Durgnat (1932-2002) in passing a few times on this blog, but in the coming days I plan to analyze one of his pieces in depth, the better to amplify some of the aspects of my own theory.

The details of Durgnat's significance as a film-critic can be found on this Wikipedia page. As the bibliography shows, the majority of his works focused on particular film-makers or particular films, but there are some general-theory works. I assume that most of these tomes were, as is traditional in the world of academic publishing, cobbled together from separate essays written for magazines like FILM COMMENT or SIGHT AND SOUND. The Wikipedia page mentions at least one essay that he worked into the book that most resembles a "general theory of film aesthetics," the 1967 FILMS AND FEELINGS. I can well believe it that this book originated as an assortment of essays on related themes, for most if not all chapters are just a few pages long.

Doing a variety of searches on the web for Durgnat and related topics, I don't get the sense that the legacy of this once influential critic has had much impact on current Internet film-writings. Nor did I get any sense that the worlds of elitist comics-criticism were even slightly acquainted with the man; combined searches of Durgnat's name with those of THE COMICS JOURNAL or THE HOODED UTILITARIAN yielded nothing of substance. (As I opined in an earlier piece, I was surprised when I learned that some HUddite even knew who Northrop Frye was.)

There are probably more differences than similarities between the myth-critic Frye and Durgnat the "radical populist" (as the Wiki essay calls him). Still, they share a concern with the idea that popular art is not radically estranged from "high art." On the first page of FILMS AND FEELINGS, Durgnat asks rhetorically:

To what extent does criticism habitually dismiss as "bad art" films which are "coarse-grained"-- but authentic and rewarding-- and so falsify its view of the medium?

Durgnat does not quite explain what he means by "coarse-grained," but I think it likely that he was contrasting "coarse arts" with "fine arts." Chapters in the book defend such "coarse art" as 1945's THE WICKED LADY (about a female highwayman) and 1955's THIS ISLAND EARTH (Earthmen dealing with alien imperialism). The first film Durgnat mentions in the book is Nicholas Ray's 1954 western JOHNNY GUITAR, and though he freely admits that he doesn't claim that the film "is a masterpiece," but he does say that it "typifies the interesting dramatic and moral points, and 'resonance,' of a competently made film." His aestheticized populism is also displayed in the first chapter, where he emphasizes his ambition to "find not only some 'lowest common denominators,' but also some 'highest common factors' of taste, and to do so, less by theory, than by exploring specific films."

As the previous sentence attests, FILMS AND FEELINGS does not dwell on pure theory. I imagine that like most writers of the period, Dirrgnat took some influence from the Marxists film-theorists of the day, though he seems to me far less agenda-driven than a contemporary like Robin Wood. It may be that his type of criticism has been pushed off the stage by the extreme ideologues, though I imagine that some modern readers may still yearn, as I do, to see what the critic called "the wedding of poetry and pulp."

More on Durgnat anon.