SACRED PROFANITIES

Though I've only mentioned Mircea Eliade once or twice here, I've read most of his works over the years, and I was probably an Eliade fan in college before I knew anything about Northrop Frye, since I remember discovering Frye after graduating.

Most of Eliade's key works were published in the 1950s and 1960s, and recently I happened to pick up a copy of one of the most influential, 1957's THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE (the source of my punny title). This will be the first Eliade book I've reread since beginning this blog, so I don't yet know if I will write more than one post on it.

Whenever I first read the book, I surely didn't know Rudolf Otto from a hole in the ground. So I found it interesting that Eliade's opening chapter names Otto's 1917 IDEA OF THE HOLY as an influence upon Eliade's theories of the sacred, particularly since I myself ultimately wrote a series of analyses on Otto's book, starting here. The Romanian myth-critic claims that while most historians of religion concerned themselves with "the ideas of God and religion," Otto focused on "the modalities of the religious experience." 

Eliade then segues to his own definition of those modalities, which are dominated by the perception that the sacred "is the opposite of the profane." That said, he admits that the sacred often manifests through objects in profane reality, through "some ordinary object, a stone or a tree." In this chapter Eliade does not distinguish what are the sacred qualities that distinguish a profane object that has been "sacralized," though I presume other chapters will expand on this assertion.

He may also expand later on this passage:

The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of his history.

But before I read further, I will say that I've also frequently emphasized "two existential situations" in human culture, though my inspirations there have more often been Schopenhauer, Frye and Cassirer. My 2016 essay THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL posits that one may view the metaphors of "close-sightedness" and "far-sightedness" as they might apply to the two types of will identified by Schopenhauer. I did not specifically relate these types of will to the sacred/profane duality, though I can see ways in which it would apply, with "close-sightedness" aligning with "the profane" and "far-sightedness" aligning with "the sacred."

Take as a quick example the exogamy restrictions of primitive tribes. Claude Levi-Strauss was quick to point out that contiguous tribes may have totally opposite customs, with one tribe forbidding marriage between cousins in the maternal line while another tribe restricts marriage between cousins in the paternal line. An advocate of the profane, "close-sighted" view might find these customs pointless, since the tribal citizens had no real way of knowing that either form of consanguineal marriage had any ill effects on either the spouses or their offspring. But a "far-sighted" view might argue that total lack of restriction is not beneficial to the tribe's sense of identity. Thus taboos may, in a short-term sense, seem arbitrary. However, in the long-term sense of defining the tribe's identity, the sense that some behaviors are restricted is a necessary evil, even when there is no rational justification.

And that is where I'll leave things for now.

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 4

 I ended the previous essay in the series on this observation:

From one viewpoint, if the prehistoric myth-maker was trying to counter the unfamiliarity of the physical world with images of the familiar (like making the sun into a godly charioteer), the authors of metaphenomenal fiction were challenged by the familiarity of science's reading of the physical world into generating new images of the unfamiliar.

By "new" I meant images that were not wholly rooted in traditional mythico-religious concepts of unfamiliar presences or activities. Given my Jungian outlook, I don't believe that any such images are ever completely novel. The renascent dinosaurs of THE LOST WORLD are functionally identical with the dragons of knightly romance, even though each carries its own specific mystique. But because of the influence of science-based naturalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, both dinosaurs and dragons had to be justified as never before. So even a magical dragon has to explained as having originated in some special locale, like Oz, Middle Earth, or some period of Earth-history not yet governed by science, like Howard's Hyboria.

In fact, all marvelous things or entities, being a contradiction of naturalistic law, are implicitly separated from the naturalistic order by some *estrangement* from either the laws of time, space, or both. This deduction underscores the one of the flaws in Rudolf Otto's system. In the quote I cited in Part 1 of this series, Otto speaks of "the uncanny" as "a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes." This raises the question as to what if any term the Lutheran Otto would apply to such Biblical marvels as the Ark of the Covenant or the burning bush. 

With the literary forms of uncanny phenomena, there's much more of an attempt to conform to the rules of naturalistic law. To my knowledge the term "uncanny"-- which debuted in the 18th century-- doesn't take on any literary significance until it appears in the works of Otto, Ernst Jentsch, and Sigmund Freud. None of them focus on the exact same interpretation of the world, but it can be argued that they all have in common is what Jentsch calls "psychical uncertainties." 

The Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe, most of which appeared at the end of the 18th century, may or may not ever use "uncanny," but they became famous for setting up supposed supernatural occurrence, only to explain it away with some contrivance. What is often overlooked, though, is that the feeling of the "uncanny uncertainty" is not necessarily dispelled by the revelation of the contrivance. Indeed, the contrivance itself, while not usually extravagant enough to contravene laws of time or space, may be sufficiently imaginative that it *seems* to depart from the naturalistic world. In Sherlock Holmes' world, no real demon-hounds can exist. Yet how realistic is a world in which murderers plot to kill their victims with trained dogs covered in phosphorescent paint?

In order to create strangeness of either phenomenality, the author must take a temporary holiday from verisimilitude, and draw upon tropes that exist not in the real world, or in our perceptions of it, but exist purely within the corpus of literature. Such tropes are fiction's conduits to the unfamiliar-- though, after a time, they too can become overly familiar, and can only be rejuvenated by seeking to put new wine in old bottles.

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 1

 

A very young Fox, who had never before seen a Lion, happened to meet one in the forest. A single look was enough to send the Fox off at top speed for the nearest hiding place.

The second time the Fox saw the Lion he stopped behind a tree to look at him a moment before slinking away. But the third time, the Fox went boldly up to the Lion and, without turning a hair, said, “Hello, there, old top.”

This is a standard retelling of the Aesop fable "The Fox and the Lion." for which the moral is always, "Familiarity breeds contempt" (which word connotes not a negative feeling for another person but simply taking for granted that the other means you no harm). 

The fable came to mind after I received some input to the effect that I ought to try writing a new summation of my "NUM Theory." This appealed to me because I know that some fine points of the theory have changed since I first started devoting essays to the subject of fictional phenomenality, even though the essentials are the same. With this project in mind, I reread all ARCHIVE posts on the subject of "NUM formula," and came across this interesting sentence I quoted from Rudolf Otto, whose musings on "the uncanny" influenced me through a mention in a C.S. Lewis essay.

 "...this expression [of unfamiliarity] is popularly used for a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes, and in whose presence we have the feeling of the uncanny."

-- THE IDEA OF THE HOLY (1917), p. 197.

As it happens, I have written a number of essays on the subject of "strangeness," a quality I find universally in works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous," but not in works of "the naturalistic." I've tended to focus on the nature of the work's relationship to the notion of causal coherence, i.e., the idea that the physical world and everything in it is fully explicable by the laws of cause and effect. In such a world, "strangeness" has no place. When in fiction an author chooses to depict something that does not conform to the proposition of causal coherence, he produces something that seems "strange," and often (to use a related term) "unintelligible" to the reader's experience. 

Now, to speak of "familiarity" focuses the conundrum more upon the writer's expectations of the reader's affective world, rather than  his cognitive apprehensions. Now, in the real world, from which all readers draw their conclusions about what is or is not strange or unintelligible, what creates the impression of familiarity and its opposite?

First, familiarity arises from the expectation that aspects of the causal universe will work in a predictable fashion. In the Aesop fable, the fox does not KNOW that the lion will not attack him the third time. He makes a supposition on the fact that in the first two encounters, the lion did not choose to attack him, and so the fox allowed himself to act in a familiar manner toward the King of Beasts. 

This would be what I will term "primary familiarity," which is essentially the same as the Aesopian "contempt." This can range from all presumptions about physical predictability-- the expectation that gravity will continue to keep us attached to the earth-- to predictions about the way we expect other sentient persons to react. It's easy to imagine a version of "the Fox and the Lion" in which things don't turn out well for the Fox because the Lion happens to be hungry on the third occasion of their meeting. Yet the fable is accurate enough in describing how sentient persons calculate the reactions of other sentients. The psychology of this familiarity does not diminish just because a particular expectation does not bear fruit; it will just make the perceiving person more militant about a particular entity.

More on "secondary familiarity" in a future post.

 

UNCANNY ARTIFICE

In response to some comments on this post on my movie-blog, I started thinking about Rudolf Otto again. Some time back I devoted over half a dozen posts to my reading of Otto’s most famed book, THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, which originally I knew only through a C.S. Lewis essay. Though I believe these posts show how Otto’s thinking informed his concept of “the uncanny,” I wrote them before I had fully formulated my literary concept of “artifice,” influenced by but not determined by some of Northrop Frye’s formulations.

When Rudolph Otto published IDEA OF THE HOLY in 1923, he was in effect challenging an intellectual tendency in his time to define religion purely in terms of either “naturalistic” or “marvelous” phenomenologies. Religion, of course, was in every clime and time justified in terms of a phenomenology that transcended the strictures of space and time. Creation-myths show this transcendence of natural law most clearly. The world is created from some marvelous series of events, whether it springs from the bones of fallen giants or from God moving on the face of chaotic waters. A few scattered skeptical accounts of universal genesis did appear during certain archaic periods. Still, it’s fair to state that the assertion of purely naturalistic explanations didn’t really gain ground until the growth of non-religious or even anti-religious philosophies in Europe’s post-Renaissance eras.

Otto, being a Lutheran theologian, was inevitably allied to the notion of a marvelous Christian theology, in which God had sent his only begotten son to be sacrificed by and for humanity. He was, as IDEA makes clear, quite aware of the intellectual currents of the preceding centuries, which tended to view not only the world, but religion itself, as reducible to natural causes. For instance, in 1902 William James had in essence taken an empiricist attitude in analyzing THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. And while James’s catholic approach to world religions may have influenced Otto, the theologian rejected James’s emphasis on naturalistic explanations of religious practice.

As I commented in HOLY NUMINOSITY PART5, Otto held to the Christian belief that other religions were not valid in terms of revelation. Yet he also advocated what might called an Aristotelian sense that the “crude, primitive forms” of early religion had at least foreshadowed “the more highly developed forms of the numinous emotion,” that is, the ability to experience the awe and dread lurking beneath the naturalistic appearance of the universe. I don’t believe that Otto says all that much in IDEA about the reality of Christian metaphysics, but only because he’s more concerned with showing how his notion of “the numinous” pervades all religions, crude and advanced alike.

What makes the early religions crude by Otto’s lights is that they derive their “daemonic dread” from entities that Otto considers unreal in terms of phenomenology—ghosts, abstract forces like mana. An advocate of naturalistic phenomenology would of course argue that the entities of the higher religions, such as heaven-sent saviors, were just as unreal, but Otto does not argue this point. His concern is to show that human beings have a special capacity for transcendent emotions which are not reducible to naturalistic affects like fear or lust, and that this capacity appears in both the lesser and the greater religions.

Though Otto does not systematize his use of the term “the uncanny,” he applies it largely to the crude religions of daemonic dread. Modern readers of any persuasion might tend to view a ghost-story as a concept belonging to a marvelous phenomenology, but Otto does not believe primitives to be capable of such advanced concepts. The ghosts of early pagan stories are mere fancies, having no more reality than a ghost in a Sherlock Holmes tale—my comparison, not Otto’s. But in Otto’s paradigm, even a crude concept of ghosts still invokes the numinous capacity, which makes the early pagan fancies relevant to Otto’s project of defining all religious activity as rooted in something other than naturalistic causes. Otto does not use the term “artifice” at all, certainly not as I am using it. However, in effect he has stated that made-up stories, stories that have no real relevance to the phenomenological nature of the universe, stimulate emotions that exceed the limits of naturalistic phenomenology.

In this essay I revised Northrop Frye’s opposition of “myth” and “verisimilitude,” suggesting that, because “myth” had so many divergent meanings, “artifice” was a better term for the totality of the fictional (and religious) tropes through which human beings create coherent narratives. “Artifice” always draws upon this imagined totality to give narratives structure, just as “verisimilitude” draws upon the totality of lived experience to give narratives credibility.

Since I am not a materialist, I do not argue against phenomenologies that explain the visible world in marvelous terms, as proving-grounds for the war of Good and Evil or as a meaningless mote in the eye of an indifferent god. I only state that as soon as human beings translate their concepts of the marvelous—no matter how those concepts are obtained—into narrative, then they must structure concepts of the marvelous by the use of artifice; the use of elaborate tropes. In Jesus’s time, the Romans used real crosses for the mundane purpose of punishing thieves and rebels. But although Christian religion asserts that Jesus died on a real cross made of real wood, the real substance of the Christian cross is composed of earlier story-tropes about sacrificial victims perishing in or around trees. Eventually such tropes become so elaborate that the cross, rising from a hill called Golgotha, becomes covalent with the Tree of Knowledge, and the hill with the skull of the long dead Adam.

Now, uncanny phenomenologies do not diverge this much from verisimilitude. Causality remains naturalistic, but the events depicted suggest the presence of the numinous through the heightened emotions possible only through the appropriate tropes. Though the story of King David is often seen as a precursor to the meta-narrative of the Messiah, not that much of David’s story is marvelous in nature. If one discounts from the narrative the implicit will of God in David’s exploits, David’s closest encounter to anything that even seems marvelous is the story of the giant Goliath. Yet Goliath is not a mythic giant, but a mortal who happens to be about ten feet tall—an unlikely, but not indubitably marvelous, stature. Verisimilitude is much more of an influence upon the narrative of King David than upon that of the King of the Jews, but in the end, David’s story is also meant to stimulate, through artifice, the sense of what Otto calls “the numinous.”

In my writings I’ve usually referenced the Kantian concept of the sublime in place of the numinous, an association Otto explicitly denied, for reasons relating to Otto’s concept of his own religion. In essence, my long and winding exploration of the different phenomenological categories of fiction exists to refute Tzvetan Todorov’s purely empiricist formulation of those categories I call “uncanny” and “marvelous,” which he viewed as subsumed by “the Real.” Otto would probably not endorse any of my conclusions. But I like to think he would prefer them over the dreary materialism of either Todorov or any similar Marxmallow pundit.

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 1

Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

It's recently occurred to me to pose the question, "When did human works of art and/or religion manifest the phenomenality of the uncanny?"

After all, as the above passage from Cassirer indicates, most if not all early religion concerned itself with marvelous magical transformations. This is not to say that early humans did not have their share of mundane stories along the lines of "the one that got away" or "who's so-and-so's wife is sleeping with," much of which would approximate what we now deem naturalistic narrative. At the same time, it should be considered a given that in archaic times, even the most skeptical disbeliever lived in a culture dominated by conceptions of the marvelous. Thus a story like Homer's ILIAD, a tale of human beings going to war, is continuously entangled with the narratives of the gods behind the scenes.

But what about the interstitial category of the uncanny? This phenomenality, as I've often mentioned, shares with the naturalistic the characteristic of casual coherence, yet also shares with the marvelous the characteristic of anti-intelligibility-- though most of the artifacts I've identified with this phenomenality are of comparatively recent creation.

Is it possible to find this phenomenality within the earliest myths and tales of humankind? Rudolf Otto, one of the key philosophers to employ the term "uncanny," thought so. However, he applied the term largely to pre-Christian religions, rather than analyzing a variety of religious and literary works across the span of human history. Here's Otto's most concise judgment on the matter, from Chapter 4 of THE IDEA OF THE HOLY:


let us give a little further consideration
to the first crude, primitive forms in which this numinous
dread or awe shows itself. It is the mark which really
characterizes the so-called Religion of Primitive Man , and
there it appears as daemonic dread . This crudely naive and
primordial emotional disturbance, and the fantastic images to
which it gives rise, are later overborne and ousted by more
highly-developed forms of the numinous emotion, with all its
mysteriously impelling power. But even when this has long
attained its higher and purer mode of expression it is possible
for the primitive types of excitation that were formerly a part
of it to break out in the soul in all their original naivete and
so to be experienced afresh.

So for Otto, "the uncanny" was essentially an early if crude form of "the mysteriously impelling power" that he calls "the numinous." Man's capacity for experiencing the numinous stands as an ideal function of the human mind, one that is best developed by the higher religions, though the numinous experience cannot, he says, be boiled down to anything like Kant's notion of "the sublime." Otto clearly deems "the so-called Religion of Primitive Man" to be an illusion born of "naivete," but this has nothing to do with the actual content of most primitive religious narratives, which are implicitly dominated by the marvelous.

If the tropes of the uncanny exist in early literature, presumably they would exist with the same status as naturalistic tropes, within the greater scope of a marvelous phenomenality. For instance, all three phenomenality-tropes appear in the non-canonical Hebrew text "Bel and the Dragon:"

The NATURALISTIC part appears when the prophet Daniel exposes the way the priests of Bel sneak into the temple to eat the sacrifices, the better to convince the naive that the gods are real.

The UNCANNY would be Daniel's investigation of yet another hoax, but one with a greater degree of mystery to it, when he finds that some colossal animal inhabits (presumably) another temple, which the local priests consider a "living god." Apparently the "dragon" is not a common animal that anyone in town might recognize as a simple creature, so within my system I would deem it an "astounding animal." Daniel's method of slaying the creature I might further deem a "bizarre crime." The thrust of the story is that the "dragon" dies specifically because it is does not share the marvelous nature of a god, so that it is strange enough to be anti-intelligible but not something outside the bounds of causal coherence.

The MARVELOUS phenomenality, however, dominates the story as a whole, in that Daniel is thrown into the lion's den and succored by angels. This section of the story provides beings whose nature exceeds both intelligibility and causal coherence-- not to mention being the best-known part of the story for most people today.

Just as a guess, I would imagine that oral culture may have produced assorted stand-alone stories that would conform to my definition of the uncanny phenomenality, wherein which the tropes of the naturalistic or the marvelous did not hold sway. But most such stand-alone stories were not written down until the dawn of European rationalism, and if we have them in any form, they were probably incorporated into longer tale-cycles, like the Six Labors of Theseus that precede his encounter with the marvelous Minotaur.

More to come.

ANCESTORS OF FEAR AND DREAD

C.S. Lewis's analysis from AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM remains my touchstone for the distinction between fear and dread:

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room’, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost.

Lewis formulated this opposition by drawing on Rudolf Otto's 1917 THE IDEA OF THE HOLY. However, a much earlier distinction appeared in a 1826 analysis by Gothicist Ann Radcliffe, where she distinguished between "terror" and "horror." This analysis, later given the title "On the Supernatural in Poetry" by an editor, isn't particularly well-organized. In essence, Radcliffe-- whose Gothic novels depended on suggestion rather than explicit gore and gruesomeness-- has her principal character argue that "terror" is a much subtler and finer emotion than "horror," which is all about the explicitness. Here's her most definite statement on the difference:

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.

This doesn't really clarify the matter all that much, but a later section makes clear that Radcliffe equates the sublimity of terror with that of the merely suggested, the merely imagined. When an interlocutor asks the speaker what he thinks about Milton's line, "On his brow sat horror plumed," the speaker essentially co-opts MIlton's use of the word "horror" for the speaker's (and Radcliffe's) idea of "terror:"

As an image, it certainly is sublime; it fills the mind with an idea of power, but it does not follow that Milton intended to declare the feeling of horror to be sublime; and after all, his image imparts more of terror than of horror; for it is not distinctly pictured forth, but is seen in glimpses through obscuring shades, the great outlines only appearing, which excite the imagination to complete the rest; he only says, ‘sat horror plumed ;' you will observe, that the look of horror and the other characteristics are left to the imagination of the reader; and according to the strength of that, he will feel Milton's image to be either sublime or otherwise. 

According to this site, Radcliffe was not a fan of explicit gore, and wrote her book THE ITALIAN (which I have not read) as a pointed response to the excesses of Matthew Lewis's 1796 Gothic novel THE MONK. I have read the Lewis book, and I can confirm that it does not hold back in "distinctly picturing forth" its ghastlier scenes).

If there are any significant parallels between the formulations of Ann Radcliffe and of C.S. Lewis (by way of Otto), it would seem to be the mutual attempt to define the nature of fear based in purely physical causes. Lewis' tiger can only inspire fear because there's no deeper concept to be understood about it, save that it's an animal capable of killing a human being. This is only a partial parallel to Radcliffe's use of "horror," which "contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates" both the soul and the faculties. But her contrast to "terror," like Lewis' contrast to the "uncanny" feeling of seeing a "ghost," is pretty clearly based upon the familiar body/mind duality, which poet Octavio Paz more aptly rendered into a duality between "body" and "non-body" (or as I once called them, "corporeal" and "non-corporeal.")

To further complicate the matter, although Lewis is to some extent addressing the question of different phenomenal presences in different situations, Radcliffe apparently has no interest at all in aligning either "terror" or "horror" with any type of phenomena. Though she doesn't mention THE MONK in the above essay, it's plain that she would class it as a work of "horror" simply because it "distinctly pictures forth" all of the unseemly situations it includes-- ranging from the monk Ambrosio's (naturalistic) incestuous union with his own sister, to his (marvelous) doom at the hands of a demon, who flings Ambrosio's body from a great height and allows the monk to perish in agony. If anything, Radcliffe's distinction of "distinct" and "indistinct" is closer to my distinction between "clean" and "dirty violence" in this essay:

I said in an earlier essay that I would address the differing "intensities" of violence in fiction, by which I meant what I called "clean violence" vs. "dirty violence." These are NOT meant to be covalent with my versions of Twitchell's preposterous violence and its unnamed opposite. I refer to the "intensities" of clean and dirty because they are determined purely by how intensely the work does or does not present scenes of violence. As I see it preposterous violence and its opposite are not determined by intensity of effect but by narrative function.

Again, the parallel is still not exact. Still, just as the proponent of "suggestive terror" does not want to "freeze the soul/faculties" of the reader by bringing in gross effects, the proponent of "clean violence"-- my principal example being the 1977 STAR WARS-- is also seeking to avoid grossing out the audience, albeit for a very different aesthetic purpose.

Now, my own definition of "dread" moves away from Lewis's example of a "ghost:" to anything covered by my Ten Tropes, which occur in both naturalistic and uncanny forms-- the first forms inspiring only "fear," while the second may inspire fear but more importantly inspires "dread" as well. The latter comes about because even though both forms obey the laws of causal coherence, the uncanny forms violate the law of intelligibility. In the interest of further defining the process through which intelligibility is violated, I'll devote the upcoming essay JUDGING DREAD PART 2.

JUDGING DREAD

During 2013 I devoted a great deal of blog-space to investigating the source of C.S. Lewis' trinity of "fear, dread, and awe" as he expressed them in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. These terms, in less organized form, stemmed from Rudolf Otto's 1917 THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, which Lewis had read and appreciated. Both writers fall into the philosophical category of "Rationalists," whom Kant defines as those who "intellectualize experience."

I also wrote, in HOLY NUMINOSITY PART 2, that I believed Sigmund Freud may have encountered Otto's book and the author's use of the term "the uncanny" to describe a Rationalist's conception of religon, and that Freud then hijacked the term for his own Empiricist project. However, on reconsideration it's more likely that Freud derived the term from a 1906 essay by fellow psychologist Ernst Jentsch, especially since he's mentioned in the text on Freud's work. I don't imagine there's any way to prove that Rudolf Otto did or did not read the Jentsch essay, and in any case it's perhaps more likely that he was drawing upon the way the word was used in demotic speech.

Otto's religious conception of the word is central to his argument, as he argues that tribal cultures were governed by what he called "daemonic dread," the fear and fascination of imagined spirits. Otto didn't argue for any one-on-one equivalence between this form of worship and later forms, particularly the author's own Christianity. Yet he suggested something of a teleological relationship, in which the greater form more or less grew from the latter, even as Aristotle imagined great tragedies growing from the crudities of satyr-plays. This was plainly a different approach to the idea of "superstitious dread" than that of Freud, who would largely consign all religious to the dustbin of failed ideas.

These Empiricist-Rationalist intellectual arguments have not died out in these later decades: they simply found new expression, such as that of James Twitchell's 1987 DREADFUL PLEASURES. I'm in the process of rereading this book, but I'm not so much concerned with tracking its highly Freudian interpretation of the horror-genre, as I am with Twitchell's attempt to reduce the genre's appeal to the "physiological factors" that Freud used as the bedrock of his system.

Freud's disaffected disciple Carl Jung was perhaps the first major voice to detract from Freud's emphasis on the physiological. In my essay WAKE ME UP BEFORE I IMAGO-GO,  I featured this segment from Jung's 1936 essay outlining his opposition to Freud:

Now religious ideas, as history shows, are charged with an extremely suggestive, emotional power. Among them I naturally reckon all "representations collectives," everything that we learn from the history of religion, and anything that has an "ism" attached to it. The latter is only a modern variant of the denominational religions. A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating "representation collective." His very materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism, or what not, testifies against his innocence. Somewhere or other, overtly or covertly, he is possessed by a supraordinate idea.

I tend to think that Jung's "superordinate ideas" probably come closer to what Otto was trying to say about the relation of "the uncanny" to "the numinous," even though as a religious man Otto would have opposed Jung's tendency to subsume religion into pure psychology.

Just in reading the first chapter of DREADFUL PLEASURES, I'm impressed by Twitchell's foursquare effort to define the horror-genre through "physiological factors." He quotes Otto just once in the first chapter, clearly doing so in order to distance himself from Otto's concept of "dread." (After a quick summary of Otto's project, Twitchell avers that "My concerns are thankfully less transcendental.")

I don't for a moment believe that Twitchell's project as a whole has broad applicability to either the specific genre of horror or metaphenomenality in general. However, I think that some of his observations may impact upon the concept of *artifice* that I broached here, and in future essays, I'll be investigating these matters more fully.

EGO, MEET OBJECT

In this June 2013 essay I ruminated for a while on the way in which the focal presences of various works might be considered "ego-oriented" or "affect-oriented," using two Rider Haggard novels as my examples. I derived these terms from Carl Jung, but I've only used them a few times on my various blogs-- in contrast to my other principal use of the term "affect."  Also in 2013 I formulated the concept of "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects" as a logical extension of Rudolf Otto's incomplete (in my opinion) schema.


Thus I'm retiring the term "affect-oriented."  The Jung quotes cited in the above essay don't consistently use "affect" as the only counterpoint, but also provide use the words "ego" and "object" as the consuming passions, respectively, of the introvert and the extrovert.

the idea of the ego [for the introvert] is the continuous and dominant note of consciousness, and its antithesis for him is relatedness or proneness to affect.

For the extravert, on the contrary, the accent lies more on the continuity of his relation to the object and less on the idea of the ego.

My substitute term, "object-oriented," is a little dicey simply because the focal presence it describes may be, more often than not, not a thing but a character: a "Dracula" rather than a "Wonderland." But it should signify only the basic fact behind object relations theory: that everything that is outside the intrapsychic world of the ego is experienced as an "object," regardless of its level of intentionality.

I've re-styled this terminology for the next essay in line. In passing I'll note that Stephen King has some inkling of the same distinction in his 1982 book DANSE MACABRE, where he distinguishes between "inside horror" and "outside horror."

AFFECT VS. MOOD

In recent essays I've re-examined Edmund Burke's work with regard to the ways subjects experience sublimity, either with an affect of sympathy or one of antipathy.  Because of those essays, I find myself looking at how both the sympathetic affects and the antipathetic affects appear in works of popular fiction-- specifically, how narratives tend to center around either one set of affects than the other, though both may easily appear in both. 

This, however, suggested to me a parallel with my writings on centricity with regard to myth-radicals, probably best summed up in JUNG AND CENTRICITY.  Jung specified in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES that each individual had within him four psychological functions, but that only one of these would have "absolute sovereignty" as against the others. I asserted that the same logic could also be applied to Frye's four mythoi, using as example the teleseries BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which I regard as falling properly into the category of adventure, even though the series regularly also calls upon elements common to the comedy, the irony, and the drama.

However, to complicate the matter further, I also linked Frye's four functions with the four "moods," as I called them, that Theodor Gaster listed for the dominant functions of his categories of religious ritual. REFINING THE DEFINING was one of the relevant essays on this topic:

ADVENTURE conveys the INVIGORATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how protagonists who defend life and/or goodness from whatever forces are inimical to them. The protagonists' power of action is at its highest here.
COMEDY conveys the JUBILATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how the heroes seek happiness/contentment in a world that has some element of craziness to it (what I've termed the "incognitive" myth-radical), yet does not deny the heroes some power of action.
IRONY conveys the MORTIFICATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon characters in a world where the "power of action" is fundamentally lacking.
DRAMA conveys the PURGATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon "individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society." Power of action here is more ambivalent than that of the adventure-mythos but seems more crucial to the individual's problem than it does for that of the comic hero.

But this raised in my mind the question: what difference is there, if any, between an "affect" and a "mood?"

The best conclusion I've come to, for the time being, is that the Gasterian moods are functions of plot: he and Frye both speak primarily of the *actions* characters take in order to facillitate one dominant literary or religious mood. In contrast, "affects" spring from the main characters, the focal presences, with whom the readers identify. In this formulation, then, "affects" spring from "character," even though the focal 'character" may not be a human being, since the cathexis of emotional affects can focus upon any number of phenomena, ranging from the will-less robot hero of GIGANTOR to the amorphous spirits of THE EVIL DEAD. For the time being, then, I will allot the Gasterian moods to the domain of "narrative values," while the affects-- indebted, as I've said many times to the thinkers Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis-- would be "significant values," in keeping with my first essay on this Fryean distinction.

Obviously the two sets of emotional reactions overlap, just as plot and character must, and here's one example. One further complication to my system is that in this essay I have also formulated four persona-types-- the hero, the villain, the monster, and the demihero-- with respect to the ways in which they incarnate a given story's "life-affirming" (or plerotic) forces or its "life-denying" (kenotic) forces. I have also related these types to my own concepts of the *idealizing will* and the *existential will.*   So my persona-types are also narrative rather than significant values. Gigantor, even though diegetically the character has no will as such, incarnates both "the idealizing will" in combination with a plerotic attitude. The "Evil Dead spirits" are monsters, and they incarnate the "existential will" in combination with a kenotic attitude. And just to complete the quaternity, Fu Manchu incarnates the idealizing will as much as Gigantor, but with a kenotic, life-denying attitude, while the demihero Doctor John Robinson incarnates the "existential will" in tandem with a plerotic, life-affirming attitude.  Of course I've specified elsewhere that none of the persona-types are locked into these relationships at all times-- that they are "plerotic" monsters and "kenotic" demiheroes-- but these four are the dominant ways in which the four types are employed in human art and literature.

Having crossed all these critical "t's," I'll return to the question of affects again in the next essay.

AN ENQUIRY INTO EDMUND BURKE PT. 3

My re-reading of Burke's ENQUIRY INTO THE SUBLIME AND BEATIFUL sparks a reminiscence of something I wrote about C.S. Lewis with regard to his evocation of a trinity of antipathetic affects, borrowed from Rudolf Otto, through which both philosophers viewed humankind's development:

I accept the deduction of C.S. Lewis as to the tripartite nature of antipathetic reactions to the powerful and/or the unknown, which he describes as "fear," "dread," and "awe"...However, antipathy is only half the story. 

Otto's book-long work THE IDEA OF THE HOLY went into more detail than Lewis' short essay, and Otto did, as I noted in the above essay, evolve the notion of the "mysterium fascinans" to parallel his fear-based idea of the "mysterium tremendum." Still, I would have to say that Otto did not do any better than Lewis in defining the parameters of the sympathetic affects: both seem firmly focused on the antipathetic ones.

Edmund Burke is more aware of the sympathetic affects, but he chooses to view them under the rubric of "pleasure," and he considers them appropriate to the experience of "the beautiful" rather than that of "the sublime." In Section Seven of the ENQUIRY's first part, Burke explicitly aligns the sublime with the experience, or at least, the possibility, of pain.

WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasure which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy....When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience. The cause of this I shall endeavour to investigate hereafter.

Patently, as noted in my many essays on Kant's theory of the dynamic-sublime, the German philosopher accepted and recapitulated many of Burke's formulations-- though Kant proves less useful than Burke with respect to my project of formulating the combinatory-sublime.

Later, Part Two is devoted to the many stimuli that can bring on the sublime.  I'll pass over Burke's inclusion of discrete physical phenomena like "sounds and loudness" and "the cries of animals," valid as they might be on one level or another. I'm concerned here with the abstract qualities Burke invokes, which as are follows: Terror, Obscurity, Power, Privation, Vastness, Infinity, Difficulty, and Magnificence. "Difficulty," in fact, might have subsumed all of Burke's abstractions much better than "pain," for Burke is concerned with the ways in which the human subject responds to anything suggestive of resistance to human will, in marked contrast to the relaxation the subject experiences when one apprehends "the beautiful."

It is the last-named section, "Magnificence," from which I've quoted in this early meditation on the sublime, as well as the essay in which I defined the concept of the combinatory-sublime, also with reference to Burke's section on "magnificence."  In both of the above essays, I was struck by Burke's use of the term "richness and profusion of images" to describe the experience of the sublime with regard to his examples in "Magnificence." For me this described in large part the very appeal of marvelous imagery, as I noted with respect to Tolkien and his "endless combinations." But though I believe that I fully understand Burke's chain of associations, I can't agree that the profusion of images is primarily characterized by such antipathetic affects as "pain," or even "difficulty." It's true that the examples Burke names-- visionary passages from Shakespeare, Virgil and others-- are not characterized by ease of access: the subject who identifies with them will feel his own emotions overwhelmed-- but not in a way suggestive of pain. If anything, it is a pleasure closer to that of the "voluptuary" Burke mentions above; it is, as I said here, "wonder" more than "terror."

Burke, as I noted in ENQUIRY PART 2, was an early defender of the power of the human mind to formulate images that did not correspond to anything in common, observable reality. James T. Boulton, editor of my 1968 reprint from Notre Dame Press, credits Burke as being "in open revolt against neo-classical principles." Burke's opening section on the virtues of "novelty" is echoed by the section "Imitation" from Part One:

It is by imitation far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly...When the object represented in poetry or painting is such as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then I may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the power of imitation, and to no cause operating in the thing itself. So it is with most of the pieces which the painters call still-life. In these a cottage, a dunghill, the meanest and most ordinary utensils of the kitchen, are capable of giving us pleasure. But when the object of the painting or poem is such as we should run to see if real, let it affect us with what odd sort of sense it will, we may rely upon it, that the power of the poem or picture is more owing to the nature of the thing itself than to the mere effect of imitation, or to a consideration of the skill of the imitator, however excellent. 

 "We should run to see if real" threw me for a moment: at first I thought he meant that if the thing was real, those who beheld it would run from it. But to maintain the parallel with the subject's disinterest in the objects of still life, Burke must have meant that if the poetry or painting depicted something novel, perhaps even outside the realm of nature, then people would run to see that novel thing if they heard about it, just to see if it was real.

This dichotomy also expresses the double-sided significance of Joseph Campbell's "supernormal sign stimuli:" to have their sublime effects, the stimulating signs must be something uncommon, yet somehow they must also share the mundane existence of those who observe them-- an existential conundrum I referenced somewhat in my essay MIRACLE MILES.

Still, it may be that Burke, being of his time, could not entirely escape the neoclassical influence of the eighteenth century, which may be why he tends to think of profusions of colorful imagery as painful and difficult rather than entrancing, as Tolkien does.

Nevertheless, Burke remains, as Boulton correctly says, the first major prophet of the sublime experience:

[Burke was] the principal exponent of the sublime as [being] at once an irrational and a violent aesthetic experience... Whereas in the early stages [with Longinus] the sublime is essentially a style of writing, with Burke it becomes a mode of aesthetic experience found in literature and far beyond it.

 He himself could not picture his "magnificence" as a sympathetic affect, leaving such affects to the realm of the less overwhelming world of "the beautiful." But even though Immanuel Kant proved the superior logician with respect to the sublime, Burke may have been Kant's superior in terms of the aesthetic instincts needed to apprehend this "irrational and violent" experience.

STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: WONDER AND TERROR

I don't think my "Golden Age of Metaphenomenal Fiction" started at the age of 12, as the old joke more or less has it. My earliest memories attest to my liking fantastic works more than realistic works, even though I could see the appeal of both. But I will say that I probably became a *devotee,* rather than a casual consumer, of metaphenomenal works at least by the age of 12. I was 11 when the BATMAN teleseries hit the airwaves, and the accessibility of the Caped Crusader encouraged me to venture into the strange world of comics-that-weren't-primarily-funny, unlike "Archie," "Donald Duck," and the occasional funny superhero-type like "Mighty Mouse." I probably started reading paperback SF regularly a couple of years later; my first such purchase may have a used copy of Michael Moorcock's THE FIRECLOWN.

In this devotee-period I began to read whatever histories of SF. fantasy and horror were available at my local library. In one of those works-- I no longer remember which-- I encountered the assertion that the appeal of science fiction was its simultaneous capacity for "wonder and terror."  

I don't imagine that this work-- probably something published in the 1960s-- was the first to use these tandem terms. But I've never forgotten how the conjoined words resonated with me, though of course I did not feel that their appeal was confined only to one form of metaphenomenal fiction.

Fast-forward to the near present. In this 2013 essay I formulated my terms for the types of emotional affects that accompany the experience of the sublime. For all works of "the marvelous"-- that is, works that stimulate the "anti-real sublime"-- I said that henceforth I'd term the sympathetic affect "exaltation" and the antipathetic affect "awe"-- the latter derived from Rudolf Otto and the former from my reaction against Otto's one-sided hermeneutics.  But I have to admit that these two states of mind can shade into one another rather easily, and it's difficult to invoke Otto's hermeneutics every time I invoke the affects.

Thus, for this essay and at least the next few, I'm substituting "wonder" for "exaltation" and "terror" for "awe."

So for my trinity of sympathetic affects, each of which is responsive to the phenomenality of the work involved, are now FEAR // DREAD // TERROR.

And my trinity of antipathetic affects are now ADMIRATION // FASCINATION // WONDER.

On a quick side-note I'm moved to observe that at least one writer, Anne Radcliffe, viewed "terror" as a faculty which "expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life," as opposed to the contractive effect of "horror." Interestingly, in the passage from Radcliffe's work reprinted here, she makes a number of references to Edmund Burke's work on the sublime-- which I may attempt to address in more detail later on.

TWELVE PILLARS OF WISDOM

At the risk of getting this blog associated with an economics book sporting this title, I deciced to compile a list of the authors whose nonfiction works have had the greatest impact upon my critical theory.  I wanted to keep it down to the more traditional "ten" but I felt I'd be leaving out too many important figures.

Coincidentally I also recently finished reading Gary Lachman's book JUNG THE MYSTIC.  It's a well-researched corrective to overblown ultraliberal attacks on Jung, like Richard Noll's THE JUNG CULT, but it has only one point of relevance here.  In his book Lachman critiques, fairly enough, Jung's ponderous writing-style, and the fact that it's easy to lose track of Jung's thesis because he brings in dozens of quotes and references to earlier authors. 

However, I disagree with Lachman that Jung did this because he wanted to project what Lachman calls the "Herr Doktor Professor" attitude: to drown the prospective reader in so much erudition that he would be overwhelmed enough to agree with the implied thesis.  I won't say that this isn't an aspect of Jung's character, but when I delve into a heavy-going tome like Jung's PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, I sense a definite pleasure in the psychologist that I find in myself: the pleasure in making connections between authors who had no real-life connections but who participate in the symbolic space created for them in the author's mind.  In my opinion no one's going to go as far as Jung did with such activity purely for a rhetorical advantage.  In my own case only such a pleasure explains why I would devote considerable time to exploring similarities between figures as diverse as Schopenhauer and Gaster.

That said, here then are the "twelve titans" who have proved to be the shaping influences on my theoretical endeavors on this blog and elsewhere:

BATAILLE, GEORGE-- This French philosopher has been particularly valuable in terms of elucidating the common ground between those phenomena we commonly call "sex" and "violence."  In addition, he offers a brilliant critique of Marxist beliefs about consumption that deserves to be far better known than it is.

CAMPBELL, JOSEPH-- commonly regarded as a"popularizer of myth," Campbell may well be flawed in the scholastic sense but his theories on the notion of "supernormal sign stimuli" and his formulation of the "four functions" have set a heuristic challenge few academics have met.

CASSIRER, ERNST-- At the beginning of his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT this German-Jewish scholar credited the philosopher Schelling with having made the idea of myth intellectually respectable after centuries of disinterest from the intellectual elite.  However, Cassirer has become the most prominent of the "critical idealists" to deal with the topic, and his concept of "symbolic forms" deserves to be better appreciated.

FRYE, NORTHROP-- I hardly need point out that Frye has been the greatest influence on my idea of a synoptic theory uniting canonical and popular forms of literature.  His concept of "mythoi" has had the greatest impact on my theory but I flatter myself that I've found some interesting new applications for his theory of the dichotomy of narrative and significant values.

GASTER, THEODOR-- Gaster was a demi-acknowledged influence upon Frye. His most important contribution to my work has been his view of ritual dramas as signifiers of either "kenosis" or "plerosis," emptying or filling.

JUNG, CARL-- Jung's concept of the archetypes remains his best known contribution to culture, though he's been influential in many other respects, particularly in his commitment to the notion of "sovereignty," which I recast somewhat as "centricity."

KANT, IMMANUEL-- I've written more about Kant's concept of "the sublime" than on any other topic, but despite my disagreements with, say, his desire for "objective taste," Kant was the first philosopher of importance to show a "middle way" between the extremes of Empiricism and Rationalism.

LANGER, SUSANNE-- Langer, a fellow traveler of the aforementioned Cassirer, formulated a concept of  an opposition between "discursive" and "presentation" symbolisms, which has been useful though perhaps not central in my theory.  Far more central are her reminders that fictional narrative is always "gestural" in nature, to say nothing of her concept of "diffuse meaning."

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH-- His greatest impact in literary circles-- extending even to modern-day advocates like Camille Paglia-- would seem to be that of his Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy.  This hasn't had a marked effect on my theory; in general Nietzsche has affected me more in terms of his gnomic pronoucements on the nature of art and human psychology.  In the same way this very non-systematic philosopher had a considerable impact on Bataille.

OTTO, RUDOLF-- Of all the influences cited here, I probably agree the least with the rhetorical position advocated by Otto, as noted here.  That said, his concept of the "fear/dread/awe" trinity, somewhat indebted to Kant but filtered through a Rationalist lens, has been more than a little helpful in my attempt to define the sympathetic and antipathetic affects common to myth and literature.

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR-- Though Nietzsche is a lot more fun to read, Schopenhauer's dogged theorizing has its charms as well.  Through him I came to the concept that all literary narratives must necessarily be seen as embodiments of will in conflict, and his comparisons of the attitudes of "seriousness"and "the ludicrous" have proved stimulating as well.

TOLKIEN, J.R.R.-- Of all the twelve Tolkien is the only author better known for his fiction than his nonfiction.  However, the Oxford don's concept of the "secondary world," while admittedly designed with only "fairy stories" in mind, should have immense importance for anyone's theory of "fantasy in fiction."

Naturally, there are others who have had strong if more peripheral effects: Paglia, Fukuyama, Wheelwright-- and even some influence from those with whom I have sought to refute, such as Freud Marx and Todorov.  The fact that even one female philosopher made it into the top twelve hopefully says something favorable, though I don't know what.  In terms of cultural influence, the Germans win hands down (Kant, Schopenhauer, Otto, Nietzsche, and Cassirer), with American philosophers in a strong second place (Langer, Campbell and Gaster, though Gaster was born in Britain).  With just one apiece are the Swiss (Jung), the Canadians (Frye), the British (Tolkien), and the French (Bataille).

STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: EXALTATION

At the conclusion of A FINAL PARTING OTTO-SHOT I wrote:

... my formulation of three "sympathetic affects"-- "admiration" as a parallel to "fear," "fascination" as a parallel to "dread," and "ecstasis" as a parallel to "awe"-- is more properly a response to Lewis than to Otto. But in my final anslysis both scholars' formulations suffer due to a mutual overemphasis of the antipathetic affects.

As I've contemplated the term "ecstasis," I find that it doesn't make a good parallel to "admiration" and "fascination."  The latter two terms describe affects, but "ecstasis" can be deemed as much a cognitive as well as an affective state.  Whether one does or does not believe that there exists any sort of ecstatic state through which a human being can commune with a higher power-- a concept that seems to offend the Lutheran Rudolf Otto-- the word does connote that potential.


As it happens, though, Otto himself utilizes a word that fits the level of emotional engagement which befits those sympathetic to the marvelous-metaphenomenal, when he speaks of "the shamanistic ways of procedure, possession, indwelling, self-imbuement with the numen in exaltation and ecstasy."  Unlike "ecstasy," "exaltation" dominantly implies a purely affective state of mind.  Following my tendency to view "awe," then, as implying an antipathetic affect toward the marvelous-- one in which the subject feels himself abased by or otherwise separated from the marvelous-- "exaltation," in line with Otto's disapproving view of magicians and mystics, satisfying connotes the affect of sympathizing, and even taking part in, the marvelous.  Thus from now on it should be understood that the three categories of the NUM formula are thus distinguished in their affective aspects:

THE NATURALISTIC-- antipathetic aspect FEAR, sympathetic aspect ADMIRATION

THE UNCANNY-- antipathetic aspect DREAD, sympathetic aspect FASCINATION

THE MARVELOUS-- antipathetic aspect AWE, sympathetic aspect EXALTATION

SHEEP, SANS ELECTRICITY

Having finished my reread of Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS and judged it subcombative in terms of its narrative values, I promptly launched into a reread of Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?, which like the Heinlein book had been adapted into a film very much in the combative mode.  Going on memories of previous readings I suspected that the Dick book would also prove to be subcombative, and I was correct, but for the opposite reason.  Most of the book avoids much in the way of direct combat, pursuing instead the internal conflict of android hunter Rick Deckard as he agonizes about the interrelationships of humans and their android creations.  Only at the very end does Dick include a "shoot-out" in approved Old West fashion, even though opponents Deckard and his foe, rogue android Roy Batty, are both armed with "laser tubes."  However, Dick's approach to the fight eschews anything like the spectacle one might expect in such a duel.  Thus ANDROIDS possesses the  narrative value of the combative mode-- but not the significant value. It's not enough that there should be two megadynamic forces that appear within the same film.  In my NECESSITY OF SPECTACLE essays, here and here, I stated that "the spectacular mode of violence" was "necessary for the manifestation of combative sublimity."  But in Dick's ANDROIDS, the violence is purely in the functional mode, even if the combatants are dueling with laser tubes.  It's rare to find megadynamic forces handled in a humdrum functional manner, though Dick's motive for so doing may somewhat akin to Heinlein's reason for not winding up STARSHIP TROOPERS with a big colorful battle.  In both cases, however different their themes, the authors sought to make their protagonists seem more "ordinary" despite their marvelous surroundings and/or resources. 

Having made that determination, I ask: what about Philip K. Dick's anxiety-filled, vaguely schizophrenic works has made them so amenable to adaptation into huge, spectacular SF-adventure thrillers?  I also recently reread Dick's short story "Minority Report," and though I have yet to rescreen the Tom Cruise adaptation, it's my recollection that the Cruise film, like Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER, amps up the presence of spectacular violence by a factor of 12.  Indeed, the only violence in the short story is one man shooting another, albeit with a ray-weapon.  In future I'll probably reread the source stories for TOTAL RECALL, PAYCHECK and SCREAMERS, and see how the original prose pieces stack up against their cinematic manifestations.

So what makes Dick so attractive?  I don't get the impression that most Dick-derived films, aside from the original TOTAL RECALL, have been box-office winners-- and the first RECALL was also an Ahnold film during the height of his popularity.  BLADE RUNNER lost money on its first screening, though eventually it may have become profitable through the home-rental market, due to its fully deserved status as a "cult film." Dick may also impress filmmakers because of the fecundity of his ideas, or because BLADE RUNNER offers them a much-admired template to follow.  But in the end, the word I used earlier-- "anxiety-filled"-- may hold the key.   Dick himself, who was attempting to focus on the dramatic interactions of his characters, only used violence in a functional way, to punctuate crises in the lives of those characters.  But filmmakers-- who are known for resorting to all manners of spectacle to attract butts to stay in seats-- are able to use the paranoiac scenarios Dick invented, and then simply "add violence as needed."

That said, I want to reiterate, as I said in NECESSITY OF SPECTACLE, that the difference is not one of mere degree; it's one of narrative function.  A work in the subcombative mode, whose violence is merely functional, doesn't just change into a combative one purely through the injection of spectacular violence.  The spectacular violence is not epiphenomenal; it becomes part of the diegesis as soon as it's included, and it changes the nature of the narrative.  This distinction is comparable to a similar observation by Rudolf Otto. He opposes the idea that religious awe was simply different from ordinary fear in "degree."  For him it was clearly a difference "in kind." 

Thus, in NECESSITY OF SPECTACLE PART 2, I compare two monster-movies of roughly the same period: 1957's DEADLY MANTIS and 1961's REPTILICUS.  Both films include giant monsters that get shot at by soldiers, and even suffer attack by flamethrowers.  But the guns and flamethrower in MANTIS are different in "kind" from those in REPTILICUS, because of the way the filmmakers of each respective movie treats these human resources.  In REPTILICUS these naturalistic weapons become spectacular, megadynamic forces, but in MANTIS they remain functional and mundane because MANTIS as a film is less interested in sheer spectacle for its own sake.

A FINAL PARTING OTTO-SHOT

In HOLY NUMINOSITY -- PART 4 I said:

I seem to remember that at some point Otto mentions his awareness that one response to the numinous is a desire to become "godlike" oneself, but as yet I can't locate the passage. 
 

I would have expected that a doctrinaire Christian would have little regard for the idea of any mortal undergoing apotheosis, and when I scanned my collection of Otto-quotes, I found that this one came the closest to what I seemed to remember:

The daemonic-divine object may appear
to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same
time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm,
and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and
cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to
it, nay even to make it somehow his own.
 

Here the "potent charm" stems from the aspect of the numinous which Otto terms the *mysterium fascinans.*  I've argued in this series of essays that one might take the desire of a subject to "become like God" to be a natural extension of the numen-aspect, in contradistinction to the "fear and trembling" next to a force one cannot oppose.  In Part 4 I said:

This [desire to become godlike] would seem to be a natural extension of the idea of celebrating numinous "worth," however: not just feeling that Zeus is the mysterious creator of the universe, but that Heracles, begotten on a mortal by the Father of the Gods, can provide a conduit by which mortals can participate in that divine mystery.

On reviewing other relevant sections of THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, though, I see that the only way in which Otto can see a subject legitimately trying to become one with the divine is through the process of conferring praise upon the source of the numinous, not by any actual physical or mental transformation. 

Here's Otto taking snipe shots at the different types of mystics who identify themselves with the numinous power:

A characteristic common to all types of Mysticism is the
Identification, in different degrees of completeness, of the
personal self with the transcendent Reality. This identifi-
cation has a source of its own, with which we are not here
concerned, and springs from moments of religious experience
which would require separate treatment.
 

This has a peculiar vagueness to it.  Does Otto mean, by speaking of a "source of its own," to imply that the Devil Made Them Do It?  But it's not likely: the rest of the book doesn't show any passion for demon-hunting.  Going by a later section, it seems likely that Otto's putting the pretensions of mystics into the same category as the "weird" beliefs of superstitious natives: as religious practices that are explained in part by anthropological findings, in part by Otto's conviction that the religious beliefs have not been "developed" enough:

...there is a series
of strange proceedings which are constantly attracting greater
and greater attention, and in which it is claimed that we may
recognize, besides mere religion in general, the particular roots
of Mysticism. I refer to those numerous curious modes of
behaviour and fantastic forms of mediation, by means of
which the primitive religious man attempts to master the
mysterious , and to fill himself and even to identify himself
with it. These modes of behaviour fall apart into two
classes. On the one hand the magical identification of the
self with the numen proceeds by means of various transactions,
at once magical and devotional in character by formula, ordination,
adjuration, consecration, exorcism, &c. : on the other hand
are the shamanistic ways of procedure, possession, indwelling,
self-imbuement with the numen in exaltation and ecstasy. All
these have, indeed, their starting-points simply in magic, and
their intention at first was certainly simply to appropriate the
prodigious force of the numen for the natural ends of man.
 

Though Otto turns up his nose at both of these "strange proceedings," he's roughly on track in making a valid distinction between the pratice of the primitive magician, who seeks to compel the gods or to assimilate their powers through "formula, ordination, etc.," and the primitive "shaman," who seeks to commune with the numinous through "exaltation and ecstacy."  What Otto fails to appreciate, of course, is that within all species of Christian worship one finds just as many appeals to the "numen of Christianity" for "the natural ends" of its worshippers.  One can find a few Christian credos that have attempted to place an insuperable wall between Deity and the needs of worshippers, but in a statistical sense these must be judged as "rare birds" that do not represent the prevalent norms of Christian worship.

To put a final point on the matter, Otto is so opposed to the idea of impinging on the numinous source that he similarly conflates the systematic approach of the medieval Scholastics with he views as a similar "rationalization" in archaic myth:

Representations of spirits and similar conceptions
are rather one and all early modes of rationalizing
a precedent experience, to which they are subsidiary. They
are attempts in some way or other, it little matters how, to guess
the riddle it propounds, and their effect is at the same time
always to weaken and deaden the experience itself. They are
the source from which springs, not religion, but the rationalization
of religion, which often ends by constructing such a
massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of
interpretation, that the mystery is frankly excluded. Both
imaginative Myth, when developed into a system, and intel-
lectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion,
are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious
experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat
as to be finally eliminated altogether.

I submit that Otto's real objection is to any system that does not validate the experience of the numinous as it is asserted by the "higher religions."  There is, to be sure, an element of the rational in the formation of archaic myths, as I argued here, but Otto is simply mistaken as to how much the rational elements exclude the non-rational.  Building on Jung's infinitely more latitudinarian understanding of the religious consciousness, I wrote in this essay:

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky. However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- became for the primitive sacred clues to the nature of divine power. The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated. For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.
 

Nevertheless, I maintain that though Rudolf Otto may have looked askance at the claims of magicians and shamans, their concepts of assimilating the numinous are archetypally identical with Otto's description of the *mysterium fascinans,* even though Otto himself saw the proper response as awestruck praise of the numen. 

Further, what the magician/shaman seeks from a numen-source in his theoretical reality is archetypally identical with what the typical subject of a reading-or-viewing "audience" desires from his experience of a fictional narrative: an identification with (1) various levels of meaning from the simple to the complex (comparable to the experience of the "combinatory-sublime") and/or with (2) various levels of dynamicity from the paltry to the exceptional (comparable to the experience of the "dynamic-sublime.") 

I should say that nothing in Otto's book supports my own personal deduction of "sympathetic affects" that I outlined in TRIPLE THE TREMENDUM AND THE FASCINANS.  But to be sure, though Otto does use all three of the terms that appeared in Lewis' PROBLEM OF PAIN essay, he never brings them into the same schema that Lewis uses in that essay.  Thus my formulation of three "sympathetic affects"-- "admiration" as a parallel to "fear," "fascination" as a parallel to "dread," and "ecstasis" as a parallel to "awe"-- is more properly a response to Lewis than to Otto.  But in my final anslysis both scholars' formulations suffer due to a mutual overemphasis of the antipathetic affects.

 

GHOSTS AND DAEMONS

I've mentioned earlier that during my first re-readings of C.S. Lewis' introductory essay from THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, I found it curious that Lewis should have used the figure of the "ghost" for his figure of dread.  For many readers, the idea of a "ghost" may evoke the feeling of "awe" as much as "dread," since ghosts are no less marvelous entities than gods, if one views the marvelous as a breach in the nature of the causal order.

Lewis' use of the term "ghosts" for his interstitial category of "Dread" takes on ironic context in my system. In said system any work that depicts a ghost as being unquestionably existential does of course fall into the category of the marvelous, not the uncanny. 
 

However, as a result of reading THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, I realize now that for Lewis the phenomenon of the ghost was not a true marvel.  Lewis was almost certainly following the lead of Rudolf Otto, who views the ghost-fears of primitive cultures to be no more than gross superstition, informed by the numinous impulse but not possessed of any existential reality, as a ghost in a M.R. James story would have.

In fact, the passage I've previously quoted from Otto firmly sets all such superstitions within the sphere of "daemonic dread," a state clearly lower than that of "developed religions."

 The numinous only unfolds its full content by slow degrees, as
one by one the series of requisite stimuli or incitements becomes
operative. But where any whole is as yet incompletely
presented its earlier and partial constituent moments or elements,
aroused in isolation, have naturally something bizarre, un-
intelligible, and even grotesque about them...[Daemonic dread]
looks more like the opposite of religion than
religion itself. If it is singled out from the elements which form
its context, it appears rather to resemble a dreadful form of
auto-suggestion, a sort of psychological nightmare of the tribal
mind, than to have anything to do with religion ; and the
supernatural beings with whom men at this early stage profess
relations appear as phantoms, projected by a morbid, unde
veloped imagination afflicted by a sort of persecution-phobia.
One can understand how it is that not a few inquirers could
seriously imagine that * religion began with devil-worship,
and that at bottom the devil is more ancient than God.
 

What's fascinating about this passage is that in his dismissal of superstitious faiths-- sometimes characterized as "uncanny"-- he characterizes superstition in ways that resemble three of the fiction-tropes to which I attribute the phenomenality of my "uncanny" category.  Just as my category connotes the way "strangeness" can appear without violating the causal order in the cognitive sense, Otto is, for very different reasons, concerned with associating the uncanny with a level of religion which is explicable in terms of causality and contingency.

"Auto-suggestion" strongly resembles my trope "enthralling hypnotism and illusionism," which I have used to describe those works in which manipulative individuals can sway the wills of others with the art of suggestion and/or illusion-effects.

"Psychological nightmare" calls to mind my trope of the "perilous psycho," in which madness takes on uncanny status when it discloses a level of "strangeness" that goes beyond empirical concepts of simple insanity.

"Phantoms projected by a morbid, undeveloped imagination" bears comparison with the trope of "phantasmal figurations," in which a figure like a ghost is unreal in some way, either because it's an outright counterfeit projected by a human agent, or because it has some questionable origins.  In this recent essay I compared two films that used this trope, one of them not too well known-- REVENGE AT THE OLD DANISH CORRAL, or something like that.

I 'll note that if I were rewriting Lewis to fit my scheme, his "fear/dread/awe" trinity would be illustrated with the three examples of "tiger," "daemon," and "god"-- for even in archaic Greek tradition, the notion of the daemon was often ambivalent as to whether it was a real entity or not. 

Lastly, I noted here that though Otto does not formally propose that "the uncanny" as an interstitital category, it is a term that he often applies to the process of "daemonic dread"-- and this dread, which he states to be an *a priori* quality, does occupy an interstitial place between simple, natural fear and the awe of Abraham before his Maker. 

TASTE THE BLOOD OF IMMANUEL KANT

Though Rudolf Otto may disagree with Kant in terms of the application of *a priori* qualities, he registers complete agreement with Old Immanuel in terms of judgments of taste.

On the other hand, those judgements that spring from pure
contemplative feeling also resemble judgements of aesthetic
taste in claiming, like them, objective validity, universality,
and necessity. The apparently subjective and personal 
character of the judgement of taste, expressed in the maxim : "De
gustibus non disputandum," simply amounts to this, that
tastes of different degrees of culture and maturity are first
compared, then so opposed one to the other that agreement is
impossible. But unanimity, even in judgements of taste, grows
and strengthens in the measure in which the taste matures
with exercise ; so that even here, despite the proverb, there is
the possibility of taste being expounded and taught, the
possibility of a continually improving appreciation, of con-
vincement and conviction. And if this is true of the judgement
arising from aesthetic feeling in the narrower sense, it is at least
equally true of the judgement arising from contemplation.
Where, on the basis of a real talent in this direction, contemplation grows by
careful exercise in depth and inwardness, there
what one man feels can be expounded and brought to
consciousness in another : one man can both educate himself to
a genuine and true manner of feeling and be the means of
bringing others to the same point ; and that is what 
corresponds in the domain of contemplation to the part played
by argument and persuasion in that of logical conviction.
 

It's probably no coincidence that Otto speaks of taste in terms of "different degrees of culture and maturity" just a chapter or so after he has asserted that the the beliefs of primitives appear "bizarre" or "grotesque" because the whole experience of the numinous has been "incompletely presented" to them.

I won't spend a lot of time refuting this, since I've already asserted that the only "unanimity" of taste that I recognize is that of *intersubjectivity,* which does not see any particular taste-judgment as valid, but only the general psychic processes that lead human beings to make taste-judgments.

Similarly, I reject the idea that taste can radically shift due to "exercise," or being "expounded and taught," or "contemplation."  I am not saying people don't learn new things and alter old views in some respects. But those things that are altered would best be termed, "inconstant tastes," things that do not express the deepest core of a subject's personality, but are aroused by contingent factors.

"Constant tastes," however, are those experiences for which the subject continually seeks throughout his or her life.  A contingent factor such as the changes of a subject's age may cause the subject to seek the desired thing in new forms, but there will remain constant factors beneath the surface of each of those strong enthusiasms.

The practice of reading comic books is necessarily influenced, though not determined, by the subject's age-range. At the level of elementary school, kids read "kiddie comics."  At the secondary levels, one sees older kids graduate to less fanciful fare, including, but not limited to, superhero comics, which generally employ a greater degree of discursive logic than the "kiddie comics" do.  In Piaget's theory the superheroes and their ilk come in right on the cusp between the "concrete operational stage" and the "formal operational stage." 

However, when adolescent fans set aside the pleasures of youth-- an action which also can be influenced by external contingent factors-- it does not occur because there is some unanimous "adult taste" to which they are drawn.  It is because their liking for those pleasures has been an "inconstant taste," one that does not define them at the core.  It should be axiomatic that one cannot judge the "constant tastes" of those who remain fascinated by a given form by the "inconstant tastes" of others-- and certainly not by invoking the baleful spectres of "education" or studious "contemplation."

HOLY NUMINOSITY! PART 5

Happily this will be the last post wholly concentrated on Rudolf Otto's THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, though I plan to draw upon Otto to finesse aspects of my NUM formula in future posts.

I would be less than honest if I didn't say I was getting a little weary of Otto's book in the last few days, even though he's a breath of fresh air next to dogmatic positivists and Marxists.  The fact that I'd devoted a post to three individual chapters from THE IDEA OF THE HOLY made me worry that I might be giving Otto far more explication than he deserved; certainly far less than I've given the superior work of, say, Ernst Cassirer.

But Chapter 8 was something of a turning point, as I began to take the measure of Otto's argument.  Ultimately I realized that although he had rejected the empiricist interpretation of religion,  he was offering in its place a modified version of Aristotle's "teleological evolutionism," seen through the prism of an apologist for the Christian religion.  Just as Aristotle felt that tragedy was a superior form of art to its crude "goat song"plays that preceded it, Otto believes that "the cruder phases" (which phrase comprises the title of Chapter XVI)  of mankind's religious development were a necessary prelude to the growth of genuine religion.  This apparently includes Judaism, Islam and Buddhism as well as Christianity, though presumably the latter still outshines its rivals.  Otto expilicitly states the superiority of Christianity in Chapter 8, and he devotes several chapters to the special quality of numinosity in different branches of the Christian faith, ranging from particular parts of the Bible to exponents like Martin Luther.  Because I discerned that his investigations of Christian numinosity were all pretty much of a piece, I merely skimmed them, given that they're irrelevant to my more pluralist project. 

The most I can say of Otto's interpretation of "the cruder phases" of early religion is that I enjoyed seeing him reject empiricism's reductionist explanation of humankind's early religious practices.  Interestingly, this occurs only after Otto begins to apply sustained Kantian concepts to his basically Rationalist philosophical outlook:

To try, on the other hand, to understand and
deduce the human from the sub-human or brute mind is
to try to fit the lock to the key instead of vice versa ; it is to
seek to illuminate light by darkness.
 

And later, he gives "the cruder phases" of religion their due-- or what he deems their just desserts-- at the beginning of Chapter XVI, by way of demonstrating his conviction that religious feeling deserves the status of an *a priori* quality, even in its lower manifestations.

It is not only the more developed forms of religious experience
that must be counted underivable and a priori. The same
holds good throughout and is no less true of the primitive,
crude , and rudimentary emotions of daemonic dread which,
as we have seen, stand at the threshold of religious evolution.

Nevertheless, it's clear that Otto prefers the "more developed forms" of religion, and his description of the early religious manifestations shares the provincialism of many other writers of the period.

The numinous only unfolds its full content by slow degrees, as
one by one the series of requisite stimuli or incitements becomes
operative. But where any whole is as yet incompletely
presented its earlier and partial constituent moments or elements,
aroused in isolation, have naturally something bizarre, un-
intelligible, and even grotesque about them...[Daemonic dread]
looks more like the opposite of religion than
religion itself. If it is singled out from the elements which form
its context, it appears rather to resemble a dreadful form of
auto-suggestion, a sort of psychological nightmare of the tribal
mind, than to have anything to do with religion ; and the
supernatural beings with whom men at this early stage profess
relations appear as phantoms, projected by a morbid, unde
veloped imagination afflicted by a sort of persecution-phobia.
One can understand how it is that not a few inquirers could
seriously imagine that * religion began with devil-worship,
and that at bottom the devil is more ancient than God.

Compared to the sort of "inquirers" who believed that all pagan faiths were inspired by the Christian Devil, this is a fairly liberal outlook.  Of course it's also special pleading from a believer who must perforce to see archaic religions as stepping-stones to true religiosity.  Nevertheless, his take on the "uncanny" nature of early religion compares favorably with my usage of "the uncanny" as a category of literary phenomenality.  That's a separate essay, however.

In the final analysis, the most impressive aspect of Otto's "teleological evolutionism" is that it gives him the leeway to suggest that the Christian God may be the "end-result" toward which the numinous feeling strives, though Otto does not make his argument dependent on the reality of that deity.  Since as I noted earlier Otto does not draw comparisons in depth, he merely implies Judaism, Islam and Buddhism qualify as "developed religions" without stating that they are precisely equal of the one he considers "a more perfect religion."  No one will see in Otto anything comparable to Joseph Campbell's view that all religious paths lead to the same destination.

The chapter entitled "Its Earliest Manifestations" spotlights the contradictions of Otto's special pleading.  In this chapter Otto moves Heaven and Earth trying to prove that primitive man did not have any sort of belief in the supernatural as we moderns understand the concept.  I theorize that though he wants to give some degree of respect to primitive man's religious aspirations, he cannot allow even the slightest possibility that primitive gods were anything more than "psychological nightmares" or "phantoms... afflicted by a sort of persecution-phobia."  Although Otto is striving to place this gut reaction within a greater "context," he isn't precisely rejecting this aesthetic response to the "bizarre, unintelligble, and grotesque" elements of primitive religious belief.  Pagan religions are "bizarre" and "grotesque" because they're incomplete parts of a greater whole, or at best dead-end alleys on the pathway of proper teleological development.   In this he's identical to the Biblical prophets who define the heathen as "bowing down to idols of wood and stone."

In Part I of this series I said:

...I also reject Otto's tendency to group the religons of "primitive" man with the level of the merely "weird" and "eerie," particularly revolving about "the fear of ghosts."
 

Though I didn't mention it earlier, I was rather amazed that Otto would suggest that primitive religions were centered around a "fear of ghosts."  I've seen this opinion expressed by empiricists, but Otto is hardly that.  But the later comment-- that the "supernatural beings" seem "projected by a morbid, undeveloped imagination"-- illuminates this "fear of ghosts" in terms of Otto's Christian priorities.  As a monotheist, he must reject any notion of "the miraculous" that is not Heaven-sent, though instead of attributing the gods of other religions to Satan, as many early Christians did, Otto follows the lead of empiricism by attributing those gods to psychological and materialistic factors. 

In similar fashion Otto attempts to dismiss the idea that primitives recognized any sort of spirits or souls:

We consider next ideas of souls and spirits . It
would be possible to show, did not the subject lead us too far
afield, that these were not conceived by the fanciful processes
of which the animists tell us, but had a far simpler origin...
The essence of the soul lies
not in the imaginative or conceptual expression of it, but
first and foremost in the fact that it is a spectre , that it
arouses dread or awe , as described above.
 

And he also denies, with extremely poor logic, those anthropologists who attested to a primitive belief in "supernatural force" under such names as "mana" and "orenda."

 

We turn to the idea of power , the mana of the Pacific
Islands and the orenda of the North American Indians. It
can have its antecedents in very natural phenomena. To
notice power in plants, stones, and natural objects in general
and to appropriate it by gaining possession of them ; to eat the
heart or liver of an animal or a man in order to make his
power and strength one s own this is not religion but science.
Our science of medicine follows a similar prescription. If the
power of a calf s glands is good for goitre and imbecility,
we do not know what virtue we may not hope to find in frogs
brains or Jews livers.

By the transparent nonsensicality of this argument-- of arguing that a belief in a pervasive supernatural force must stem from observations from primitive "science"-- one can see how extremely important it was to Otto, to rationalize anything in primitive faith that smacked of God or the Spirit as dependent upon mere contingent factors, even if the primitive religious experience of "daemonic dread" itself was *a priori.*

In conclusion, though Otto's "Christianity is Number One" arguments became tiresome, I can appreciate the sheer ambition of his attempt to borrow both from both of the parties opposing Rationalism-- Empiricism and Kant's "transcendental idealism"-- and to use them to support his particular Rationalist agenda.  His reference to "slow degrees" of numinosity parallels a similar observation by Schopenhauer regarding sublimity, and I fully approve of his argument that religion has an *a priori* element, even though I see it, as did Jung, as an element that interpenetrates aesthetics, art, and philosophy as well, rather than being exclusive to religion.  Otto does make a few mentions of aesthetics and literature in the course of HOLY, and in this his book is somewhat the reverse of Todorov's THE FANTASTIC, which is concerned only with "the uncanny" and "the marvelous" in literature, with no appreciation of his categories' application to myth and religion.