QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM

As a prequel to a longer formulation, I’m recapitulating my “quantum literary theory” with some refinements.

The foundation of the theory remains indebted to Gloomy Schopenhauer’s concept of The Will. In SEVENWAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER, I adapted his theory to literary purposes by asserting that even if we can’t verify the idea of a Will that permeates human existence, it’s axiomatic that authorial Will permeates all narrative phenomena.

A secondary foundation is derived from Jung’s theory of four psychological functions through which all human subjects perceive the world, though Jung makes clear that not every individual will draw upon the functions to the same degree. From Jung’s functions I have extrapolated four potentialities that human beings use in creating any sort of narrative, be it fictional or non-fictional.

My four potentialities are the kinetic, the dramatic, the didactic and the mythopoeic, and in keeping with the meaning “potentiality” is said to carry in quantum physics, all four are modes through which the human subject organizes information.

Units of information are what I call “quanta,” named for the building-blocks of matter, i.e., both atomic and subatomic particles. But in the narratological world, the “energies” of each quantum are representations drawn both from human experience and from human imagination (which may not be entirely dependent upon experience). All quanta are generalized rather than particularized representations, loosely after the fashion of Plato’s Forms. No author makes a representation of a particular lion from a particular time and place; a quantum representing a lion communicates only “lion-ness.” A similar dynamic governs representations of action. A quantum that communicates “falling” cannot assess quantifiable distance, but only rough approximations, so that a quantum representation can only communicate falling either a short distance or a great distance.

Now for something moderately different: just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”

Whatever the word “trope” meant in ancient Greece, today it has assumed the idea of a standardized scenario, usually applied to fiction, though it’s not without relevance to non-fiction. The statement “the lion is the king of beasts” combines a quantum derived from physical experience, the creature we call a “lion,” with a second quantum, an imagined status of kingship imputed to the creature. To continue the parallel with the action of falling, a fall from a great distance often suggests danger while a fall from a short distance does not. This often translates into such tropes as “man and woman fall in love,” representing a non-perilous and even “fortunate” fall, as well as “angels falling from heaven,” which represents catastrophe if not literal physical harm.

My title for this essay plays upon the title of an Ian Fleming James Bond short story, and while many of my puns are just toss-offs, there’s a little more method to my punny madness here. I chose to reference “solipsism” not as an actual defense of that philosophical position—that one can only be certain of one’s own mental existence—but because the making of a narrative can be seen as an elaboration of one’s own mental universe. Non-fictional narratives are, at least in theory, all about relating a series of experiential facts, though arguably the most popular non-fictional discourses are those that impose a desirable interpretation on said facts. But as I’ve previously argued, fiction is less about reporting “truths” than formulating “half-truths:” narratives in which it’s obvious that the author has arranged all elements in the story to achieve certain effects. Even where a fiction-author fails to achieve those effects, an experienced reader can often intuit more or less what sort of “universe” the author sought to create.

Though some tropes may be roughly composed of the same quanta, they can have vastly different effects because authors will inevitably choose to focus more on one potentiality than another. For instance, the trope “the lion is the king of beasts” can take such many differing forms.

A KINETIC utilization of the trope appears with respect to the Gardner Fox villain “Lion-Mane,” a human who becomes transformed into a lion-humanoid in order to challenge Hawkman and Hawkgirl, with the overall scheme of achieving dominance over all the denizens of Planet Earth.

A DRAMATIC utilization appears in the imitation “Tarzan” novel KING OF THE JUNGLE and its cinematic adaptation, insofar as Kaspa, a foundling human, is adopted by a pride of jungle-dwelling lions, with the result that he becomes their “king” and uses both his animal-like skills and his human intelligence to save his fellow beasts.

A DIDACTIC utilization appears in Roland Barthes’ philosophical tome MYTHOLOGIES, in which Barthes attempts to prove that the very idea of imputing kingliness to the animal we call a “lion” is an indulgence in what he terms (with scant justification) mythological thinking.

A MYTHOPOEIC utilization appears in C.S. Lewis’s THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, wherein the kingliness of the lion is given religious connotations, so that Lord Aslan symbolizes both the power and lordliness of Lewis’s concept of Jesus Christ.

Having established the interactions of will, quantum representations, and tropes, I’ll next proceed to more involved meditations upon two particular tropes of significance to my project.

MYTHS OF PLEASURE AND PATTERNS

 

I had an additional reason for LEVERAGING LEVI-STRAUSS recently. For some time I’ve been meaning to get around to reading THE POETICS OF MYTH by Russian scholar Eleazar Meletinsky. I purchased the book purely because I was intrigued by the title, not knowing anything about the genesis of the project or the author’s background. The title suggests that the author means to produce a poetics for mythology, arguably humankind’s first literature, in a manner analogous to Aristotle formulating his Poetics for Greek art.

I had scanned a few sections of POETICS, though, and I noted that the author expressed an uncritical admiration for Claude Levi-Strauss. This did not in my opinion bode well, but before delving into Meletinsky I wanted to be as grounded as possible—or at least as grounded as I could tolerate—in Levi-Strauss’s work. Now that I have a solid grasp of the French anthropologist’s methodology, I can better understand why this Russian theorist admires him, and how I think that predilection hurts his theory.

Meletinsky’s project is to provide a broad overview of the many ways in which scholars have sought to explain the nature of archaic myth, with some additional material discussing the use of myth in modern literature. (This justifies the inclusion of scholars who are literary rather than religious scholars, such as Northrop Frye.) Meletinsky provides a substantially accurate timeline of the development of myth-analysis, beginning, as do similar timelines, with the 15^th-century writer Giambattista Vico. Meletinsky even makes Vico into a sort of “founding figure” for myth-studies:

Vico’s philosophy of myth also contains in embryo … almost all of the main tendencies of later mythological studies… Herder and the Romantic poeticization of myth and folklore; the link between myth and poetic language analyzed by Max Muller, A.A. Potebnja, and Ernst Cassirer; the theory of survivals associated with English anthropology; the work of the folklore historians; and even distant allusions to Durkheim’s collective representations and Levy-Bruhl’s notion of primitive rationality—p. 7.

This is an appealing “cultural myth” on its own, even if Meletinsky expresses the vaguely Marxist idea that Vico had these vital insights because his native land of Italy was “undergoing a general and political decline” in that historical era. The “main tendencies” that the author finds in Vico divide into “two contrasting schools of myth interpretation” in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of these schools Meletinsky calls “the anthropological school,” whose method inheres in “comparative ethnography.” He doesn’t apply a specific name to the other school but aligns it with Romanticism and linguistic analyses. For my own convenience I will rename them as the Synchronic School and the Diachronic School.

Followers of the Synchronic School are focused upon studying material in a particular time frame. They either collect data about traditional tribal-style societies “in the field” or collate data derived from such anthropological investigations. The “field” types would include such thinkers as Tylor, Malinowski, Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss, while the armchair analysts would include Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualist School.

The Diachronic School is more concerned with taking the long view of myth in many different and often contrasting cultures, seeking to come to grips with the essence of myth as a human activity. Of the figures Meletinsky names, this school includes Herder, Schegel, Nietzsche, Cassirer, Langer, Frye, Jung and Eliade.

A foreword remarks that the author may have received some hostile scrutiny from Soviet authorities because “any book or theory that privileged thought—the “superstructure” in Marxist jargon—at the experience of empirical contingencies and economic infrastructure was not readily welcomed in Soviet ideology.” I admit that Meletinsky doesn’t come off like a driveling Marxmallow, but some of his remarks suggest that he still had more concern with “empirical contingencies” than with the “poetry” that his book is supposedly concerned with. For instance, he faults Frye for an “anti-historical undercurrent’ (p. 87). Yet he has no problem with Roland Barthes for diminishing myth in favor of “acknowledging the primacy of history” (p. 69). When he began claiming, erroneously, that Cassirer had failed to logically distinguish the form of myth from the forms of literature and philosophy, I quit reading the book.

Meletinsky’s bias toward historicism and the Synchronic School reveal a critical inability to think of myth as a poetic activity, which inability renders his book’s title fatuous. He has almost zero interest in the ways in which myths appeared in the literature of Greeks and Romans, Babylonians and Egyptians, and pole-vaults over centuries of art so that he can address the use of myth in Modenist literature. (He does work in some desultory comments on Defoe and various Romantics.) But even Aristotle’s offhand comparison between the tragedies of his time and old traditions of “goat-songs” is more poetically insightful than anything Meletinsky writes.

Given my voluminous postings on writers like Jung, Frye and Cassirer, plainly I’m as much of the Diachronic Party as Meletinsky is of the Synchronic one. I’m not for a moment claiming that everything those worthies wrote was flawless, and at the very least the approach of the more data-oriented writers might serve as a check on over-Romantic tendencies. But it takes an extreme narrowness of vision to imagine that one can speak meaningfully of the link between myth and poetry without writing SOMETHING about the archaic origins of both.

Of course, one can only approach such origins diachronically, synthesizing general tendencies from such fragmented data as cave paintings and early hieroglyphs. But even if by some miracle we knew more about the general origins of myth and art, such knowledge does not change the fact that myth is not determined by history. Yes, one must presume that every story has come into being within historical time, even when we do not know just when. But the elements making up the stories—elements I’ll call “tropes” for simplicity’s sake—are ahistorical, arising and combining in endless chimerical ways according to the needs of a given audience. Even Levi-Strauss’s tedious anatomical dissections of countless archaic tales don’t testify to the abstruse “mathematics” that Levi-Strauss hypothesizes. Rather, such tales reveal the actions of innumerable nameless storytellers, seeking to please their audiences with patterns and pleasures.

I won’t repeat in detail my conviction that mythology depends upon the evocation of epistemological patterns. But I will add that for tribal humans, these patterns would be the essence of poetry; the fusion of the objective and subjective worlds in which those humans lived. Stories that relate that the sun is really a boat traversing the sky, or that the world was made from the bones of a giant, don’t serve any scientific purpose, nor at base do they serve the purpose of Malinowski’s functionalism (to which Meletinsky seems strongly allied). While myth-stories may eventually be used to support a given culture’s social order, no teller of tales thinks to himself, “Hmm, I think I’ll make up a story about that ball of light in the sky so that this generation and those that follow will have a sense of societal unity.” Nor would any audience listen to such stories for any reason save that imaginative sojourns give them pleasure. One of those pleasures includes the listeners imagining that the mysterious non-human world is at least tinged with human sentiments and priorities—and that may be the base origin of all of the tropes of art and religion, which may precede those stories we moderns would term “myths.” Meletinsky has a long section in POETICS. “The Classic Forms of Myth,” which seems to be nothing but a haphazard list of assorted mythological characters and situations, grounded in the aforementioned functionalism. I suppose this may be his idea of a diachronic overview, but even the most self-indulgent myth-commentaries by Jung and Joseph Campbell are better thematically organized. The author’s inability to discern the pleasurable element in mythic stories keeps his book as distant from being a “poetics of myth” as it’s possible for any single work to be.

NOTHING NEW HERE: MORE COMMENT-PRESERVATION

A response to the usual cant on THE SUPERHERO HYPE FORUM.

______________________

You say "white patriarchal SYSTEM" and my response is that the cultural response of POC has been to propound yet another SYSTEM, one in which both whiteness and patriarchy are eternally demonized. Marxist thinkers like Sartre and Barthes are arguably two of the main proponents of this outlook, and they produced this idea of a system with no intention of suggesting any way to bring about a rapprochement between white culture and the various forms of POC culture. They wanted a demon that could be ceaselessly attacked on all fronts, and in this they are unconsciously aping the ways in which white cultures of the 1800s demonized blacks, Asians, and even unacceptable Caucasians like Slavs, for the crime of not being Anglo-Saxon.

Your idea of "benefit" casts too wide and tries to take in too many forms of injustice. There is no immediate "benefit" to me or any other white person if a black guy is chary about coming in contact with a white child {note: my opponent cited an episode of BLACK-ISH featuring this scenario].. It can only be a benefit to specific groups who like to feel like they still hold a club over the heads of colored peoples.

It *would* be a benefit to me if I was seeking the same job that a black person was, and I got the job because the employer had some racially based reason for hiring me over the other guy. I would get the benefit, but I would still not be responsible for the employer's motivations, nor do I necessarily agree that those motivations would be systemic in nature.

Suppose then that the reverse were true, and the black guy got the job in order to fill a quota, or even because the employer personally felt that black people deserved a break. That would be a benefit to the black guy, but he too would not be responsible for the employer's motivations. The other way either of us would bear responsibility is if either had threatened the employer with repercussions for not hiring one of us-- sort of like the way the "Oscar So White" people decided that the only reason more black people weren't getting nominated for the awards was racism. That was a club held over the heads of the Academy, aimed at making the industry fear a possible monetary boycott. Thus so everyone who sought to force diversity upon the Academy is culpable in a form of extortion, just as *I* would be, *if* I had told the employer that he'd get in trouble with the Klan if he hired a black guy.

The idea that all POC are just helpless individuals constantly being preyed upon by the Big Bad System is also a favorite theme in Barthes, BTW.

THE APPROPRIATION HUSTLE

On this BEAT post, I corrected Heidi for referencing "whitewashing" on the Netflix IRON FIST series, which I have not yet seen. Then I added a slight amendment of my position:

I will note that I've seen the IRON FIST show accused of "whitewashing Asian themes" to get around the fact that the central character was always white, and maybe that's what Heidi referenced. Still, it's dubious as to how much the trope of the "lost Asian land where people learn great secrets" is an actual creation of Asians.  I assume the trope existed in Asian culture, whether it was rooted in fiction or in legend, but was James Hilton referencing any of these when he wrote LOST HORIZON in 1933? Or was he just making up his lost land out of whole cloth, and grafting it onto Tibet because Tibet was conveniently out of the way?

Since this thread may get closed any moment as did the one I referenced here, I don't expect to discuss cultural appropriation there, so I'll give it a stab here.

It's been some time since I attacked the inadequacies of Roland Barthes, but the linked essay ought to outline my general problems with his oversimplification, particularly the idea of appropriation, which he touted in paragraphs like this one:

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self- indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.

I critiqued Barthes' narrow notion of "consumption" as an attempt "to reflect a doctrinaire Marxist imperative," one depending upon a supposed pure experience and one that has been tainted by "consumption." Elsewhere in MYTHOLOGIES, though, Barthes contradicts his words above by treating the products of a given culture-- specifically, the architecture favored by the Basque people-- as if they were "pure" in their original state but were "tainted" by the evil of modern Parisian appropriation.

Of course, as I've mentioned elsewhere, one can't assume that the Basque architectural style was conceived by Basques and Basques alone: they may have borrowed some or all of their design-motifs from other contiguous peoples. But I don't for a moment believe that Barthes cared about real-world influence: only about castigating French bourgeoisie for the sin of appropriation. This is essentially the argument advanced by the proponents of the "White Privilege" theory: it doesn't matter if Asian creators borrow motifs from so-called "western culture," like the well-documented fact that Bruce Lee "appropriated" western boxing-styles for his martial art-- it's only a bad thing when White People do it, even if the general idea of "mysterious Asian lands" was probably primarily the creation of White Creators, at least as we have them in Euro-American culture.

In addition to my Hilton remark above, the pulp Shadow probably started the "heroes' Asian journeys" during the 1930s. Here's the 1939 Bill Everett character who inspired the Thomas-Kane "Iron Fist:" Amazing-Man.

Here's a much less celebrated Tibetan "white crusader," Thundohr:

And, just to show that the same hustle can be applied in other circumstances, here's a page from Jaime Hernandez's LOCAS, in which the artist has a character lecture the audience about the inappropriateness of modern white people affecting Native American hair-styles.

ADDENDUM from the BEAT thread:

Since no one's going to speak to the question of "Who If Anyone Owns the Tropes," I'll confine my remarks to saying, contra Seth, that I don't think I'm worried about whites being underrepresented.

I worry more about creators being told what they have to do by the Diversity Police.

SECOND ADDENDUM:

I'd heard of the K'un Lun legend, and I assume that Thomas and Kane knew it as well. But that doesn't get to the heart of the matter about whether these tropes belong to just one culture or not.

Same thing with the system of kung fu. If it's inauthentic for Caucasians to be martial arts masters, why isn't it inauthentic for every non-East Asian to be one? Is this a rule that applies only to Caucasians as payback for imperialism and related sins? Well, OK, if an artist feels that way, it's his right to reflect that in his work.

But if an artist doesn't feel that way-- what then?

THE BAD APPLE DEFENSE PT. 1

It was [Sax] Rohmer's contention that he based Fu Manchu and other "Yellow Peril" mysteries, and real Chinese crime figures he met as a newspaper reporter covering Limehouse activities.-- Wikipedia essay on Fu Manchu.

I vaguely recall that during one of my arguments on HU, someone, possibly Berlatsky, attempted to distort my position on racial myths by saying something along the line of "well, of course it's OK to say denigrating things about other races, as long as they're *true.*" I add the asterisks to indicate the tone of sarcasm suggested, for clearly the speaker meant that it was not OK.

Thanks to the sanctimonious moralizing of many such Social Justice Warriors, it's impossible to show negative traits in any character of a non-WASP race or ethnicity without being accused of racism, as I've demonstrated in various essays, particularly INCORRECTLY CORRECT, which referred to the character Connie of TERRY AND THE PIRATES as a "racist caricature" without providing any justification for the accusation.

To attack the over-zealousness of the ultraliberal ideologues is not to state that there are no actual racist caricatures. In REDEFINING THE RACIAL OTHER PT 2  I expatiated on the ideological idea that all characterizations of outgroups by a dominant ingroup are rooted in the ingroup-subject's projecting onto the outgroup qualities that aren't really there-- irrespective as to whether the qualities are good ("the noble red man") or bad ("the lazy shiftless Negro.")

I am not saying that no projection takes place. Though it's become de rigueur to view the character of Fu Manchu as nothing but a projection of British fears of "the Yellow Peril," I certainly wouldn't deny that such projection is an element of Sax Rohmer's creation, particularly since according to his biography, Rohmer didn't really know much about Chinese culture when he created the character. At the same time, that doesn't mean that every observation Rohmer was automatically incorrect, even if he lacked in-depth knowledge. 

In other words, although Fu Manchu was a fictional creation, he is at last partly indebted to Rohmer's encounter with real-life Chinatown criminals in London-- particularly a man whom Rohmer identified as "Mister King," whose physical features the author ostensibly used as a model for the Master of the Si-Fan.

Now, though ultraliberal ideologues automatically assume that every negative characterization of an outgroup must be an attempt at social control, it's impossible to prove that most creators of fiction are significantly concerned keeping the minorities down, as opposed to those writers who wear their ultraconservative ideology openly, like Thomas Dixon, Jr.  The ultraliberals' solution to this difficulty is to resort to secondhand Freud, as recycled via Barthes: even creators who have no axe to grind subconsciously absorb racist stereotypes, viewing them as "natural" rather than as social constructs.

Sax Rohmer, as I've stated before, was certainly guilty of making racist statements at times. This 2011 blogpost  summarizes a scene from the second Fu Manchu novel in which Nayland Smith speaks of "the national childishness of the Chinese." That this is a racist caricature, there can be no doubt.

However, I mentioned in RACIAL OTHER 2 that at times Rohmer had characterized Fu Manchu as something of a torture-happy fiend, and this is not necessarily racist-- particularly as we see in a scene from THE DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, where the devil-doctor is lecturing Nayland Smith and a companion within a room filled with European torture-devices.

Slowly he extended a gaunt hand in the direction of the torture room:

"Medieval devices designed to stimulate reluctant memories."

He stepped aside and took up a pair of long-handled tongs.

"Forceps used to tear sinews."

He spoke softly, then dropped those instruments of agony. The clang of their fall made my soul sick.

"Primitive and clumsy. China has done better. No doubt you recall the Seven Gates? However, these forms of questions are no longer necessary. I can learn all that I wish to know by the mere exercise of that neglected implement, the human will. 

Though the subject matter might seem offensive to many, particularly to persons of Asian ancestry, it should be noted that there's a touch of sly humor here: of Fu Manchu calling attention to the Western world's own history of torture and then dismissing it as inferior to his people's mastery of the arts of pain. At the same time, the narrator adds a qualification to Fu Manchu's behavior that doesn't appear in the earlier scene referenced: that Fu "had the majesty which belongs to great genius, or, and there was a new horror in the afterthought, to insanity. He was perhaps a brilliant madman!"

Though it's been some time since I read all of the Fu Manchu prose novels, I would say that the devil-doctor is more often a racial caricature than a racist one-- in part because Rohmer makes his focal villain so much more interesting than any of the author's other characters. I assume a liberal ideologue would view the imputations of the doctor's "genius" and "majesty" as stereotypical positive qualities that are at base no better than stereotypical negative qualities.

Rohmer's "bad apple defense"-- that Chinese criminals are not representative of the Chinese people as a whole-- is the dominant strategy used by professional fiction-writers who choose to utilize negative characters from stigmatized or marginalized outgroups. Like anything else, the strategy can be used very well or very badly. In my review of the 1935 serial THE MIRACLE RIDER, I called attention to the political implications of the "Vanishing American" trope in that serial and other westerns. My sociological reading bears a slight resemblance to the ideological readings of the ultraliberals, but with the important difference that I, being a more centrist liberal, am not willing to view every portrait of a Native American, good or bad, as some absurd subconscious method of social dominance.

I'll address some other complications of the Bad Apple Defense in Part 2.

BLACK LIKE HIM (HE SAYS)

I try not to comment often if at all on the HOODED UTILITARIAN site. If I responded to everything said there, I'd never have time for my own stuff, and I'm almost certain my efforts to score points there would prove futile. Thus from my POV the site would be more appropriately named FUTILITARIAN.

Still, every once in a while I get the itch to argue. And on occasion, I happen across some post that illustrates the huge philosophical gulf between the speculative mode of philosophy (that's me) and the reflective mode (that's them), first discussed here in this 2013 essay.  As a result of my latest UTE-post, I gained new evidence for the theory that the biggest gulf between the two modes is that the former is based in a long-term investigation of human nature, while the latter is strictly concerned with the short-term effectiveness of rhetoric regarding current issues.

The remark that moved me to argument wasn't even by the author of the main essay, but by a commentator associated with the site (NB helpfully provides copious links for anyone who cares to investigate said history, but I'm not obliged to follow their careers any more than they are mine.) I choose not to comment on any other position taken by commentator J. Lamb, only upon what I consider the absurdity of Lamb's remark in the comments-section.

Noah and I participated in a Twitter discussion yesterday where fans of increased race diversity among superheroes lamented my idea that the superhero concept is inherently White, and therefore inappropriate for substantive, authentic non-White characterizations. The conversation reminded me that many superhero comic fans could care less about substantive, authentic Blackness when reading or watching superhero media — they just want someone who looks like them in the role of the Hero. They want to appropriate the fantasy, without questioning it’s logic.

Though I knew that it would be pointless to challenge someone so enchanted with his own empty rhetoric, I posted in response:

Alternately, they [these fans Lamb references, who are implicitly "people of color"] want to claim a fantasy that belongs to them as much as to white people, just as black hero-myths belonged to pre-European African tribes as much they did to Europeans.
But if you think, along with Barthes, that the only type of stories you think “people of color” can tell are about their being stigmatized as “people of color,” then I guess you’re welcome to that belief.

Not surprisingly, Lamb would not acknowledge that his essential argument was voiced by Barthes. That may be because he doesn't know Barthes but has picked up the same basic idea from another source, or it may be that he just didn't want to detract from his own rhetoric. Anyone who cares to delve into this farrago can read his three responses-- I'll deal with Noah Bertlatsky's in a separate essay-- but the closest Lamb gets to responding to my original point is this:

The appeal of the superhero concept is not relevant when discerning the racial nature of the superhero concept. People of color far and wide enjoy media that lampoons and denigrates them; corporate hip hop would not exist if rappers who used anti-Black racial epithets in their music faced boycotts from the Black community.

I note also in this post that he repeats his pet theory that "Superheroes require Whiteness to operate," which he might believe that he has justified elsewhere, but which remains little more than special pleading here.

I note in passing that in these posts Lamb consistently denigrates those who don't buy into his concept of Blackness. These fans, he tells us, "could care less about substantive, authentic Blackness" and are willing to "enjoy media that lampoons and denigrates them." In simpler terms, they are sell-outs for wanting to "appropriate the fantasy." To care about "substantive, authentic Blackness," then, would be signaled by a refusal to be implicated in White Fantasies, whatever one conceives them to be, in an act of cognitive albeit not literal separatism.

This line of reasoning perfectly illustrates the mode of short-term rhetorical orientation. If persons from your own ingroup aren't on board with your separatist "logic," then it's because they're "inauthentic." Lamb doesn't use the term "brainwashed," but he would entirely in line with related Marxist arguments about authenticity if he did.

Now, my view of Blackness is that it is secondary to Black People, much in the way that the Sabbath was made for Man, rather than the other way round. I define myself as a true Liberal, and for me the mark of a white Liberal is that if he has had any Black Friends, he'll never tell you about them-- unlike both Ultraliberals and Ultraconservatives, who can't shut up about their supposed racial validation. I will say that I have had Black Acquaintances, and that I don't think them "inauthentic" because they buy into the superhero fantasy-- which, as I copiously pointed out in the discussion, is not some sort of germ that can be isolated from other germs upon the plate of a microscope slide. The chance to have one's own race, religion or ethnicity represented within the sphere of popular entertainment should be deemed as much a fundamental right as the right to vote.

Lamb, like Berlatsky, chooses to define the superhero genre narrowly, not only by separating it from all other genres in a wholly artificial fashion, but as a White Fantasy. This must be why "the appeal of the superhero concept is not relevant when discerning the racial nature of the superhero concept." By implication this is because such discernment can only be done by someone who has accepted Lamb's "logic" on "racial nature," and those persons of color who find the concept appealing are inauthentic and illogical because they don't appreciate just how goddamned White their Fantasy is. If they did, they would presumably be as hip as Lamb about how the media "lampoons and denigrates them"-- a conclusion Lamb supports with a scattered selection of comics stories he didn't like, mostly involving Luke Cage. I'm tempted to explore the early 1970s run of the title to see if there's any justification for these complaints, but I feel sure that even if Cage were a more positive role model in those years, Lamb would not see that as a negation of all the lampoons and denigrations he perceives.


As I said in the comments, my mention of tribal myths was advanced only to provide a grounding for my hypothesis regarding universal right. Few persons, if any, would assert that Black Africans don't have the right to articulate their own myths at the tribal level, as much as do tribal Europeans.  It follows, then, that when a nation evolves into a plurality of ethnicities, then every ethnicity still has the right to elaborate hero-myths of a modern commercial nature, whether those myths take "literary" or "subliterary" forms. If such a nation evolves so that one ethnicity (narrowly defined though terms like "White" and "Black" may be) is numerically ascendant, creators can either seek to formulate heroes that speak only to their own ethnicity, and thus sacrifice any shot at the "appeal" Lamb scorns, or they can formulate heroes who appeal across racial and ethnic divides.  Either is a choice that may come with undesirable consequences.

Unlike J, Lamb, I won't claim that only one of the choices can be right.

THE CULLING OF CULLER

the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle... Franz Rottensteiner, THE FANTASY BOOK, quoted here. 

But perhaps one should go a step farther than Barthes [in THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT] and say that the facts that lead him to propose these two views [of "joissance" and "plaisir"] indicate that we are dealing not so much with a historical process in which one kind of novel replaces another as with a kind of opposition which has always existed within the novel: a tension between the intelligible and the problematic.-- Jonathan Culler, STRUCTURALIST POETICS, p. 191.

Culler's opposition-- which is to my knowledge original with him, at least in that phrasing-- is probably useless to my phenomenological project in terms of Culler's philosophical underpinnings.  As I've noted earlier, structuralism as a discipline is largely predicated on empiricism, and though Culler's book puts forth some trenchant criticisms of Roland Barthes, I see nothing in Culler's book that departs from the empiricist philosophy behind Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss.

Culler doesn't explicitly define his two terms, "intelligible" and "problematic," but I would assume from the tenor of his remarks that he's concerned only with how intelligibility registers within a structuralist framework: in relation to how human beings regard some aspects of existence as solid and dependable: "naturalized," to borrow Barthes' term, and therefore perceived as the principal subject matter of the "classic novel."  The "problematic," then, would cover aspects of reality that are more dubious, which essentially becomes the subject matter of the "experimental novel."

Nevertheless, even though Culler's dichotomy's arises from a limited and hyper-literary classic novel/experimental novel comparion, Culler's statement is accurate in saying that his opposition originates in the textual nature of fiction itself, rather than in some historical contingency.

The Rottensteiner quote above, which relates to his restatment of another critic, emphasizes that fantasy is "inaccessible to reason on principle."  For me this statement captures much of the appeal of fantasy; not to simply recapitulate the aspects of life with which everyone is familiar, but in slightly altered form.  The central appeal of fantasy is to *actively* transgress consensual reality; to render it-- in Culler's word-- "problematic."  This applies even to works that only transgress within the "affective order," as I have argued with respect to works I label "uncanny."

Thus, to invoke once again the C.S. Lewis trinity referenced here: the "tigers of fear" belong entirely the world of Cullers "intelligible," in that they may cause one to fear for one's physical safety but nothing more.  In contrast, both the "ghosts of dread" and the "gods of awe" belong in the world of the "problematic," if one defines the problematic as the human desire to exceed the limits of the merely intelligible.

In a future essay I'll be expanding on these thoughts in what I hope will prove to be a general phenomenlogical definition of "fantasy" and "reality" in art, with particular attention to an essay by Aldous Huxley, last referenced here.

A PAGE RIGHT OUT OF PREHISTORY

At the end of INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 2 I said:

Next essay: why the bourgeoise productions of Lee and Kirby do indeed contain "a true relation to the conditions of their existence," albeit not one of which Althusser would approve.

The more I thought about this, the more daunting the project seemed. How could one hope to make clear to any Marxist the terms of my argument, when so many Marxists lack any broad historical perspective with regard to the many-faceted nature of human language and literature? After all, to this day Roland Barthes is still a name to conjure with, with barely anyone pointing out that l'empereur is missing his vetements:

"...myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth. Myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language."-- Barthes, "Myth Today."

Marguerite Van Cook's essay, which prompted the INVADERS series from me, never mentions Barthes, but whether she's read him or not her own Marxist argument reproduces the same hegemonic argument with respect to how the "signifying" diction of Stan Lee establishes authority over the "raw material" of Jack Kirby's art. These are Barthes' terms, not Van Cook's, but a similarity of theme can be observed in Van Cook's essay:

Implicitly, art is produced in a strangely abased position in the social hierarchy of production. Art appears to be the tool of the intuitive, untamed mind, while writing evidences intellectual precision and authority.

Later in INVADERS PT. 3 I pointed out that if Stan Lee had "abased" the "intuitive" and "untamed" mind of Jack Kirby with his "elevated diction," then it was an abasement to which Kirby also submitted himself, by conferring "elevated diction" upon characters like Orion and Darkseid.

There are, it happens, various correctives to this Marxist overemphasis on hegemonic oppression in the world of literary narrative. One is Philip Wheelwright, who points out that language is not merely one unitary phenomenon, and that it can be productively separated into two broad "complementary uses:"

"...to designate clearly for the sake of efficient and widespread comunication, and to express with humanly significant fullness."-- Wheelwright, THE BURNING FOUNTAIN.

Where Barthes imagines a conflict between denotation and connotation (though he manages to bollix up his concept of denotation). Wheelwright sees the two "strategeies" of language as not only complementary, but necessarily intertwined throughout history. "Steno-language" (the language of plain sense) is, he tells us, the "negative limit" of language in its more expansive form, "expressive" or "poeto-language."

Ernst Cassirer, in books like his MYTHICAL THOUGHT, goes so far as to figure his version of "expressive language" as the means by which early man formulated his first abstract thoughts, in the forms of myth, folklore and religion. Of course, it should be said that even early man surely had his own version of "steno-language," in which one caveperson might tell another, "Go fetch me that rock," or "Watch out for that woolly mammoth." It's a leap of poor logic to imagine that one came before the other, and Cassirer does not, unlike Barthes, make the mistake of asserting one linguistic form's primacy over the other.

Through what remnants we have of early literature we can see the two strategies being carried out, even in the earliest civilizations. Take as example the myth sometimes called "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld." This is a great example of mythic discourse at its most expressive in that, even putting aside specific terms for which we moderns don't know the meanings, the story's logic is entirely governed by such mysterious cosmic presences as Inanna, the huluppu-tree, the Anzu-bird, and of course Gilgamesh and Enkidu themselves. In contrast, although the better-known EPIC OF GILGAMESH is replete with such presences, they have been made somewhat less mysterious in that the epic places greater realistic emphasis on understanding why Gilgamesh takes this or that action. Though the Gilgamesh Epic is certainly not an example of Wheelwright's "steno-language," one may imagine its composer-- almost certainly some anonymous court poet working with raw mythic materials as did the better-known Homer-- using the type of "plain sense" reasoning found in steno-language to figure out, for example,why Gilgamesh might decide to reject Ishtar's offer of love, which would then lead dramatically to the death of Enkidu.

The contrast between these two mythic stories is but one of many I might use to portrary the interweavings of Wheelwright's two linguistic strategies, one which, I must repeat, depends more upon the nature of what is being communicated than on some imagined hegemonic incursion of a "signifier" over a "sign," or a wordy editor over an "intuitive" artist.

With this linguistic schema as a propositional aesthetic foundation, my next essay on this subject should at last address the matter of how the works of Lee and Kirby could indeed have a "true relation to the conditions of their existence," whether that relation is anything a Marxist could relate to or not.

HARK, HARK! A DOG WAS BARTHES, PT. 2

Roland Barthes devoted his MYTHOLOGIES to showing how people (particularly the "bourgeoise") took various social "myths" for granted. One essay in the book, entitled "Myth Today," justifies his thesis through the use and extension of Saussurean semiology. I consider it a distortion myself, and though I've encountered hints that Barthes may have revised the theory behind the essay in later years, I'll deal with the "Myth Today" essay as a work apart from any later theoretical modifications.

In his groundbreaking work COURSE IN GENERAL LINGUISTICS (1915), Saussure divides the entirety of human linguistic communication into two categories: the syntagmatic, and the paradigmatic or associative, as seen in the passages below, derived from this site's translation:

In discourse, on the one hand, words acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together. This rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously (see p. 70). The elements are arranged in sequence on the chain of speaking. Combinations supported by linearity are syntagms. The syntagm is always composed of two or more consecutive units (e.g. French re-lire [reread], contre tous [against everyone], la vie humaine [human life], Dieu est bon [God is good], s'il fait beau temps, nous sortirons [if the weather is nice, we'll go out] etc.). In the syntagm a term acquires its value only because it stands in opposition to everything that precedes or follows it, or to both.

Outside discourse, on the other hand, words acquire relations of a different kind. Those that have something in common are associated in the memory, resulting in groups marked by diverse relations. For instance, the French word enseignement [teaching] will unconsciously call to mind a host of other words (enseigner [teach], renseigner [acquaint] etc.; or armement [armament], changement [amendment] etc.; or education [education] apprentissage [apprenticeship] etc.). All those words are related in some way.

This is a pellucid and unproblematic statement of a sound theory of linguistics. However, Barthes, while complimenting Saussure on his "methodologically exemplary semiotics system," has concerns beyond "just the facts, mam:"

For mythology, since it is the study of a type of speech, is but one fragment of this vast science of signs which Saussure postulated some forty years ago under the name of semiology. Semiology has not yet come into being. But since Saussure himself, and sometimes independently of him, a whole section of contemporary research has constantly been referred to the problem of meaning: psycho-analysis, structuralism, eidetic psychology, some new types of literary criticism of which Bachelard has given the first examples, are no longer concerned with facts except inasmuch as they are endowed with significance. Now to postulate a signification is to have recourse to semiology. I do not mean that semiology could account for all these aspects of research equally well: they have different contents. But they have a common status: they are all sciences dealing with values. They are not content with meeting the facts: they define and explore them as tokens for something else.

On the face of it, this is fair enough. Neither Barthes nor anyone else should have to blindly anyone else's system, be it that of Saussure, Karl Marx or the Emperor of California. But in truth Barthes' "science of values" distorts the clarity of Saussure's analysis without bothering to say just where he Barthes chooses to depart from the pioneer of semiology. I speculate that he did so in order to coast on Saussure's reputation for empirical validity while masking the fact that the so-called "values" Barthes champions are extrapolated from Comrade Karl Marx. And these opinions, be they about myth, materialism or the bourgeoise, Barthes does follow with a sort of blind doggy faithfulness.

Once again, for Saussure, there's the syntagmatic and the associative. But somehow, when Barthes tells the story, somebow aspects that Saussure would've considered "associative" are validated as belonging to Barthes' category of "first-order language:"

Take a bunch of roses: I use it to signify my passion. Do we have here, then, only a signifier and a signified, the roses and my passion? Not even that: to put it accurately, there are here only 'passionified' roses. But on the plane of analysis, we do have three terms; for these roses weighted with passion perfectly and correctly allow themselves to be decomposed into roses and passion: the former and the latter existed before uniting and forming this third object, which is the sign. It is as true to say that on the plane of experience I cannot dissociate the roses from the message they carry, as to say that on the plane of analysis I cannot confuse the roses as signifier and the roses as sign: the signifier is empty, the sign is full, it is a meaning. Or take a black pebble: I can make it signify in several ways, it is a mere signifier; but if I weigh it with a definite signified (a death sentence, for instance, in an anonymous vote), it will become a sign.

Barthes makes one small but salient point here; though Saussure's schema attempts to separate the syntagmatic's ability to denote reality from the paradigmatic's ability to connote reality, the two are never operationally separate, and one can ask, as Barthes does in an essay on photography, how much connotation "arranges" human impressions as to what is being denoted to our eyes in an apparently "naturalistic" fashion. However, at no time does Barthes show any ability to cognize that his own "definition and exploration" of the reputed facts is any less a manipulation that the various social myths he attacks.

Shortly after the "roses" passage, we get one of Barthes' opening volleys against another level of what Saussure would call associative relations. He calls this "myth:"

...myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth. Myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language.

Now, though throughout Barthes continues to use Saussrean terminology, he departs-- without saying outright that he does so-- from Saussure's methodology. He tells us that the association "roses=passion" is of the first-order. But how did the association come about? Did Barthes or any other single person think of it? Obviously not. Obviously the concept "roses=passion" is transmitted through a given culture-- call it Culture A-- whose members agree to accept the arbitrary association of this trope. Another culture, "Culture B," may not agree to validate the trope on its own terms, but to the extent that any one culture understands another, B can certainly understand A's arbitrary cultural construction since B has its own set of such meaning-tropes.

However, at no point in "Myth Today" does Barthes give an adequate reason as to why what he calls "second-order language," or "myth," is so radically set apart from the associational aspect, "roses=passion." He gives various other examples-- using real lions as symbols for people's names, or the famous PARIS MATCH magazine cover that supposedly reveals the magazine's use of French cultural symbolism to validate French imperialism. But at what point would the association "roses=passion" go from being a first-order signification to a second-order one?

I suspect, given the way Barthes' nose remains centered on Karl Marx's literary butt, that the transformation would take place as soon as the passionate roses were used by some authoritarian entity. Yet the very idea that the roses are made passionate would seem to be an idea that is mythic, by the terms Barthes lays out much earlier in the essay, in his fourth paragraph no less:

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self- indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.

In what way does the Barthesian formula "roses=passion" leave roses alone to their "closed, silent existence?" Moreover, even assuming that somehow early man might have conceived the formula "roses=passion" in such a way as to isolate that conception from any other symbolic association-- thus privileging that formula as a "semiological chain" that pre-exists the depredations of the myth-language, does not the formula lend itself to "consumption" and "social usage?" If Caveman Unk gives Cavegirl Unka-a a present of roses as a "sign" of his passion for her, is this not social usage? And doesn't Unk hope he'll get some "exchange-value" for his gift, and that he'll be able to "consume" said value?

But of course Barthes' whole notion of the secondariness of mythic language has no basis in either Saussurean semiotics or in anthropological data, so the idea of isolating one category of associations from another category of associations is merely Barthes trying to "define" the facts in order to reflect a doctrinaire Marxist imperative. It's all about the hegemony, stupid, though Barthes doesn't use that specific Marxian term. He also doesn't stick with the passionate roses very long, preferring to focus on how mythic language robs everything it touches, be it people within human culture or animals outside of it. In MYTH TODAY the two examples he re-visits most are those of a lion, used to illustrate the hegemony of linguistic relations while a "Negro" in French uniform is used to illustrate the hegemony of imperial culture, both of which can somehow be blamed on "myth:"

"...the lion and the Negro are deprived of their history, changed into gestures."


Barthes' use of the term "gesture" is ironic to me given that roughly ten years before MYTHOLOGIES Susanne Langer had used the term to signify any motif or trope that summoned an emotional response from memory, as opposed to prompting an emotion from an event in real-time. Thus, for Langer, the emotion one calls forth by, say, naming a child after a lion connotes something very different from the emotion called forth from one's being in the presence of an actual lion. But why is the association attributed to the lion something that deprived the beast of history, but the roses are not so deprived? It may have something to do with Barthes' attempt to distinguish poetry and the poetic impulse from the cruel sway of myth, though his logic for this separation is no less strained than the rest of the essay.

I can think of few things less interesting than a Barthes biography, but thanks to the Internet, I am duly informed that he may have eventually seen some of the flaws in his own system. From David Chandler's SEMIOTICS FOR BEGINNERS:

Related to connotation is what Roland Barthes refers to as myth. We usually associate myths with classical fables about the exploits of gods and heroes. But for Barthes myths were the dominant ideologies of our time. In a departure from Hjelmslev's model Barthes argues that the orders of signification called denotation and connotation combine to produce ideology - which has been described (though not by Barthes) as a third order of signification

Now, this hypothetical "third order" would have been a slight improvement over Barthes' two orders, since he isn't really able to present any human associations for "roses" that don't act to "deprive them of their history." At least then he might have claimed, with some degeee of plausibility, that the "third order" represented by myth was something more articulated and pernicious than incidental cultural associations.

But he doesn't, and my own sign-reading tells me that it's because Barthes, following in the wake of Marx, was too much in love with a Manichean good-vs-evil dichotomy. Barthes knew that a duality was better suited to portray a radical opposition, especially to other Marxist intellectuals.

Susanne Langer doesn't reference Saussure in the NEW KEY work from which I've been quoting, but I believe the two of them could have found some agreement on her notion that the associative symbol has only a "logical analogy" to its source material. This should be true whether one is describing roses as a symbol for passion, as a symbol of life and/or rebirth (as seen in flowers being placed in Neanderthal graves), or as a symbol of the great flower-god Roseata. Were one to go against Saussure and Langer, and join Barthes in saying that some "significant" connotations always attach themselves to the material denoted, one would have no way of proving, via Barthes' flawed reasoning, that any of the latter two associations has any better claim to Barthes' "first-order" status than the one he does favor.

The most famous dog Barthes reminds me of is the one in a certain Aesop's fable. Walking beside a river with a bone in his mouth, the dog spies his reflection and mistakes it for another dog with another bone. Greedy for the second bone, the canine opens his mouth to bark at the strange dog, and promptly loses his real bone to the waters.

That's Barthes all over; hungry to grasp reality and falling victim to his own illusion. The main difference is that the dog didn't busy himself trying to correct other people's illusions while showing no propensity to correct his own.

HARK, HARK! A DOG WAS BARTHES, PART 1

In the August essay PRESENCE-AND-ABSENCE-MINDED PROFESSOR I referenced an ongoing online forum-argument in which my opponent, in the course of making some arcane point, made what seems to have been an unattributed reference to Derrida's "theology of presence." I didn't recognize the concept being referenced, which apparently also goes by the name "metaphysics of presence," but either phrasing probably would've have missed the boat as I've next to no interest in Derrida. So in PROFESSOR I simply discussed the topic of presence and absence from a myth-critical POV.

After that, in the comments-thread to this post, sometime correspondent Charles Reece sought out said online argument, whose main topic thread (if you can call it that) revolved around not Derrida but rather, that Maven of Marxist Mendacity himself, Roland Barthes. Charles used the word "hatred" to describe my contempt for Barthes, described in this earlier essay. Be that as it may, I like to think that I hate the icon of the sinner, not the sinner personally (who's worm food now, anyway, as we all shall be one fine day). I hate that Barthes is respected as a first-rate thinker when in fact (as the subsequent installment of this essay will show) he's so unremittingly sloppy and ideologically polluted that I'm not sure he even deserves "third-rate" status.

In the comments-thread, Charles references no particular remark by myself or my opponent. Charles merely says that I am "wrong" about something or other. This blog's few readers will be better informed (though probably not much enlightened) to know that Charles and I have argued about Rollicking Roland Barthes before this in another time and clime. I don't intend to reference the particulars of that past argument any more than I will those of the current forum-fight. All I'll say of Forumfight #1 is that neither of us convinced the other of anything, but I did garner a pretty good idea as to why Charles validates Barthes, even if I don't know specifically what he's talking about re: Forumfight #2.

As it happens, I was already thinking about doing a summing-up of Barthes' shortcomings for both this blog and Forumfight #2, but I'll make it a separate post from this, which stands as something of a prelude.

In the aforesaid comments-thread Charles remarked that Barthes was not an "empiricist." Maybe, maybe not, but Barthes certainly wanted to make his interpretations seem as if they had a firm basis in the then-as-now still-evolving science of semiology. The summing-up will specifically address his problematic debt to the pioneering semiotic work of Ferdinand de Saussure.

ROLAND ZEE LEEPAIR

On a couple of previous blogposts (here and here), I've tossed out brief references to Roland Barthes, as well as talking about his work on Some Damn Messboard, though always with the caveat that I'd only read two of his works: the execrable MYTHOLOGIES (1957) and the somewhat more thoughtful PLEASURE OF THE TEXT (1975).


In one of my Messboard posts from 9/30/99, I stated:


"both [Jung and Campbell] are a good deal more concerned with scientific process than Roland Barthes, who at times seems to be making it up as he goes along. I've read but two works of his, MYTHOLOGIES and THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT, and the only science he cares about is his version of semiology, which can pretty much mean whatever he wants it to mean, the very objection that's often tossed at Jung and Campbell. I also have my doubts as to how many of his historical readings are supported by experts in history, and how many are just disguised ideological rants."


As the first of my blog-essays shows, the Barthes concept I found most interesting was his dichotomy of the "readerly" and "writerly," which are referenced in PLEASURE but were first introduced in 1970's S/Z. I happened to come across a cheap bookstore copy of S/Z and finally decided to see what all the fuss was about.


What I read convinced me that Barthes should be considered as being about as profound as that other French guy famous for taking mammoth leaps (albeit not of logic): Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's BATROC THE LEAPER. (I considered making a MAD-style pun out of Barthes' name but it just didn't work.)





The book S/Z was Barthes' attempt to formulate his own system of interpretative codes by taking a single short story-- Balzac's SARRASINE-- and breaking it down into narrative units he called "lexias," each of which he then interpreted according his system.


I have no problem with such in-depth interpretations. But I read nothing in S/Z to contradict my earlier-voiced impression that Barthes was often guilty of making massive logical leaps that make one of his main influences, Big Sigmund Freud, seem a model of restraint by comparison. I have to admit that, as little as I like Frankfurt-School critics like Theodor Adorno and Frederic Jackson, their arguments are coherent even if they argue from false premises. Half the time Barthes seems to argue not from premises but from his impressions about art and culture. In this his writing-style resembles that of philosopher Henri Bergson. But whereas Bergson would sometimes throw out a subjective statement or apparent non-sequitur, he usually developed the notion into some more refined concept.


Not so Roland the Leaper. On occasion certain of his observations about the Balzac story-- which is a good deal more enjoyable than Barthes' analysis of it-- seem on target.


And then, even putting aside the doctrinaire Freudianism, you get howlers like this on page 49:


"What is amazing in the myth of Minerva is not that the goddess sprang from her father's head but that she emerged 'tall and strong,' already fully armed and fully developed."


This is a response to Balzac's use of the classical Minerva-image to describe the appearance of a young woman whom the narrator thinks of as being "at once a hundred years old and twenty-two years old." While it's true that Balzac is conflating impressions of contradictory ages to get across the narrator's weird mental mood, it is certainly not experientially the case for any reader-- save perhaps Barthes-- that there's nothing "amazing" about any sort of offspring proceeding from the head of a male entity, be it the god Zeus or the imaginative narrator. Thus Barthes has given his readers a highly-overdetermined interpretation that is meant to emphasize not what Balzac has written but Barthes' own hierarchy of impressions.


Similarly, his other hierarchies-- the readerly and the writerly, joissance and plaisir-- are also overdetermined by Barthes' haphazard reasoning and highly-personalized methodology.


What I find "amazing" is that this erratic thinker became such a name to conjure with, for all that he's been far less imitated than the Frankfurters. I have to put it down to his appeal for those who like ideological correctness: who prefer to see complex myth and symbol boiled down to some refined-sounding concept like "the writerly," which purports to be above the ordinary processes of reading but represents nothing more a quasi-intellectual's attempt to exalt his own intellect above all else.


So while I may not have been fair in calling him a "moron" earlier, I do think he's not far removed from the colorful insult bestowed on Batroc by Captain America, courtesy of Stan Lee:


"You Gallic, granite-skulled gorilla!"