SCOTT AND THE SUPERHERO IDIOM PT. 2

 Following on the heels of both my review of THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL and the first part of this two-part series, here's a longer exploration of the relevance of MINSTREL to my concept of the superhero idiom.

My criterion for both "de facto superheroes" (those that everyone agrees to be superheroes for whatever reasons) and those characters who are "superhero-adjacent" is that they must always satisfy the connotations of "super" and "hero" thusly:

For a character to be a hero, he or she must possess, or have access to, *megadynamic* combative abilities. This can mean abilities that go beyond those of ordinary mortals, or they can be an ordinary mortal's abilities taken to extraordinary heights. 

As indicated above, the character does not himself or herself have to be "super" in the common connotation of possessing either natural super-powers (Superman) or artificially enhanced powers (Iron Man). But the hero who possesses megadynamic capabilities must move within a world where "super" phenomena are possible, whether the hero opposes those phenomena or receives aid from them.

Now, to the latter category, there's no question that the world of Scott's MINSTREL is one where supernatural phenomena are readily accepted, even though the events take place in the late 16th century-- which, ironically, is about the time that stories of chivalric romance began to die out for the most part. In this respect, MINSTREL may resemble a lot of the literary fairy tales that proliferated in the late 17th century and throughout the 18th. I say "may" because I'm talking about only original literary creations by particular authors, not retellings of oral narratives, and I've not read many works in the former category, not even the best-known of them, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST from 1741. 

Still, because Walter Scott was a historian, he doesn't emulate the tendency of oral stories to take place in generic times and places. The 13th-century scholar Michael Scott is given an anachronistic makeover, so that he has perished only some years previous to the poem's main story, and here all the ahistorical legends about his having been a benign wizard are completely true. Lady Scott, who desires to possess Michael's magical book for unspecified reasons, is herself educated in magic, and the author even claims that she learned the skill from her father, himself educated in Padua-- which is generally more information than one gets about your generic bad witches and conniving faerie queens.

MINSTREL's main hero, loose though the poem's structture is, is the loyal bondsman William of Deloraine, whom Lady Scott sends to fetch the thaumaturgic tome from the warlock Michael's tomb. It's a spooky episode, though Deloraine doesn't end up fighting anyone or anything until he gets back from his mission. He crosses swords with Cranston, boyfriend of Lady Scott's daughter Margaret, and Deloraine is wounded. He loses the magical book to Gilpin, the goblin-servant of Cranston and Cranston's family, though Gilpin takes this action on his own recognizance, since no one in Cranston's clan even knows anything about the book. The book's only function in the story is that when the goblin gets a brief look at one page, it teaches him an illusion-spell that Gilpin is able to use later.

Clan-war breaks out while Deloraine is convalescing under Lady Scott's care, and one of the demands of the enemy clan is that they want Deloraine's life for his having previously killed the brother of an enemy lord. Deloraine has the choice of being tried for murder outright, or fighting in a one-on-one with Redgrave, the lord who lost his brother. So, will Deloraine be forced to drag himself from his sick-bed to prevent total clan-war? No, because Cranston-- who's such an insubstantial character, he almost seems like Deloraine's shadow -- gets Gilpin to cast an illusion-spell that makes Henry look like Deloraine, so that the unwounded young warrior can triumph over Redgrave.

It's not hard to imagine how a later melodrama would have jacked up the duel of mystic powers, maybe having Cranston's clan using the goblin's powers against Clan Scott, and Lady Scott retaliating by seeking the warlock's magic book. Assuming that everything in MINSTREL is original to Walter Scott and not borrowed from some unremembered oral source, Scott just wants Gilpin to be a mischievous imp instead of a major threat, and that does keep the poem's stakes on a low side. Deloraine doesn't get to shine in a final combat scene, any more than does his descendant Ivanhoe. But he is, by all indications, a doughty warrior, and he receives supernatural aid that saves him from being slain by another skilled fighter. Deloraine doesn't request the help, the way archaic Greek heroes would request weapons from their goddess-patrons. But structurally, Deloraine is a "hero" aided by a "super" phenomenon, even though his substitute is in reality an ordinary skilled man fighting another ordinary skilled man. But once all the goblin's business has been finished-- both petty pranks and benign actions-- his supernatural master arises from his tomb to reclaim him. This is not quite a moment akin to Shakespeare's "I'll drown my book," but it may not be a total coincidence that the main story is being related by an old minstrel, who appears to live in "our" world, a world in which magic has become only the stuff of literary fantasies.   

ADDENDUM 1/3/26: I later decided, as per my characterization of Cranston as Deloraine's "shadow," that LAY, the first post-Renaissance work in the superhero idiom, should be classified as having two complementary heroes, Deloraine and Cranston. Without Cranston's command of the goblin, he's not able to impersonate his comrade-in-chivalry Deloraine. However, without Deloraine's courageous theft of the magic book from Michael Scott's tomb, Gilpin would not have been able to make Cranston look like Deloraine.       

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 3

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement... Coleridge, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, PT. 14.

 

Coleridge's concept of art as a vast fusion of many different contrary aspects of life substantially agrees with my notion of the dialectic between "the unfamiliar" and "the familiar." In the previous two essays, I've defined a "primary familiarity" that applies principally to "life-as-we-live-in-every-day," and a "secondary familiarity" that is applied to the construction of abstract conceptual forms. I discussed the forms of science and of myth, connecting the latter to the practice of art by speaking of "mythology and its expression through art-works." By this I was not implying an absolute identity between myth and art. I believe that both forms strive for a fusion between the familiar and the unfamiliar, in contrast to science's quest for total familiarity of a quantifiable nature. However, regardless as to how deeply myths were believed by their adherents in pre-technological societies, the myth-tales were promulgated with the idea that the society OUGHT to believe them, at least to some degree. The stories of art and literature are promulgated with the idea that the listeners don't necessarily have to believe in them, particularly once the stories began to diverge from stories associated with religions concepts. 

Myth by definition needs concepts that extend beyond familiar life, since myth is meant to explain the workings of the universe through gods or giants or spirits or whatever. Fiction, however, can represent states of existence that go beyond immediate phenomena ("metaphenomenal") or it can represent states of existence that strongly resemble immediate phenomena ("isophenomenal.") We don't know how sort of isophenomenal  stories might have been related by early tribal humans, because most surviving narratives do have mythico-religious associations. Still, one may fairly assume that primitive humans had their versions of simple naturalistic stories even as we do-- fish stories about "the one that got away," or "Your mama is so fat that, etc." Still, for many centuries, metaphenomenal tropes seemed dominant, with the higher classes in, say, medieval Europe telling stories of knights chasing Grails while the lower classes told stories of talking wolves and horses. Centuries would go by before literature would to some extent embrace the POV of science, coming to focus more on stories of ordinary people moving around in a world without magic or miracles.

 In reaction to this sense that the naturalistic world had become more dominant-- arguably showing "contempt" for the old religious myths-- one also sees artists in say, post-Renaissance Europe making more of a freestyle use of magic and miracles than one saw in medieval Europe. Certainly Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM feels more like the playwright's personal and playful take on fairies than like any attempt to adhere to any mythic or folkloric concept of fairies. Roughly a century later Europe would begin to see the rise of what some call "proto-science-fiction," as seen in Swift's 1726 GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, while, about forty years after that, we see the invention of the first Gothic novel with Walpole's 1764 CASTLE OF OTRANTO. As different as these two eighteenth-century works are from one another, they both depend on challenging the familiarity of the average reader by opening them up to new worlds of unfamiliarity-- though it's axiomatic that no metaphenomenal work can be too totally divorced from the familiar world, or it would be impossible for readers to understand, to say nothing of failing to exercise what Coleridge calls art's "synthetic" power.

This is the sense in which I'm claiming that Aesopian contempt-- the sense that things can be taken for granted, including the predominance of a naturalistic phenomenality-- "bred" unfamiliarity. At a time when it was difficult if not impossible to put forth new mythico-religious concepts, due to the vested interests of established religions, literature develops a wide number of genres designed to perpetuate a sense of unfamiliarity within an apparently familiar world. Even many "high class" artists, particularly among the English and German Romantics, launched such experiments with metaphenomenal material, as we see with Hoffmann's GOLDEN POT and "The Sandman," Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, and Coleridge's own experiment with vampire-fiction, the unfinished ballad CHRISTABEL. 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.

Hmm, I believe I need at least one more essay to clarify the specifics of the differences between the uncanny-metaphenomenal and the marvelous-metaphenomenal. Possibly tomorrow. 

RACE TO THE END OF THE WORLD

In February 2016 I responded to that year’s Black History Month in a semi-ironic fashion, with the post RACIAL OTHER MYTHCOMICS MONTH, wherein I devoted four mythcomics posts to any sort of racial myths that involved non-white characters. I don’t entirely dismiss the desire of non-white peoples to venerate figures who made significant contributions to society, or even the desire of white people to feel good for knowing about such contributions. (I still remember being a grade-school white liberal, congratulating myself because I’d read a book about the accomplishments of George Washington Carver.) The problem with fetishizing contributions because they came from people of color is that in the nineties the liberal rationale shifted from “we’re all in it together” to “it’s all us marginalized peoples against straight white men.” Putting aside the obvious fact that often the various “colors” within each of these Rainbow Coalitions don’t blend as well as the ideologues claim, this attitude would diminish the accomplishments of a George Carver if one invalidates the history of Western science as the creation of evil white men.

I said “would diminish” because for the most part attacks on the idea of science have remained on the fringes of the political system, unlike, say, almost every other fringe-idea championed by the Left. Attacks on history and literature, however, are far more in vogue. I’ve already noted the insipidity of the 1619 Project and of the attempt to “cancel”dead actors  associated with the film BIRTH OF A NATION. But in recent weeks the "corpse-fighters"—I call them that because they show their great courage by fighting dead people—have taken Western society’s Biggest Dead Literary Guy, the Bard of Horrible Racism and Sexism. A librarian, Amanda McGregor, wrote:

“Shakespeare’s works are full of problematic, outdated ideas, with plenty of misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism, and misogynoir,” MacGregor wrote, with the final word meaning misogyny aimed at black women.

Granted, I haven’t read the whole essay. But it does seem problematic to say that Shakespeare gave offense to Black women, given that there are none in his plays (except maybe in the minds of ideologues who imagine Cleopatra as a Nubian Soul Sister). Possibly the Bard sinned against Black women simply by not even mentioning them, in the same way another ideologue claimed that William Moulton Marston sinned by setting a Wonder Womanstory in Africa and simply not showing any tribal women.

What the ultraliberals seem to desire from Shakespeare are rah-rah moments for marginalized peoples, roughly on the same level as all the rah-rah trivia one sees in any Marginalized Peoples’ Month. Ideologues are enraged that the Bard would dare to portray a Powerful Black Man like Othello as being in any way fallible. To ideologues, only one fallibility is permissible: a person of color may be fairly upbraided for being too “white,” though he or she can find redemption by casting off the poison of whiteness and wreaking indiscriminate violence. (See my review for the pestilential film US.) I wonder if any of these raving goofballs are even aware of TITUS ANDRONICUS, in which the Bard of Hideous Racism gave us the character of Aaron the Moor, who, for all of his moral failings, provides Western literature with its first three-dimensional black character. But, hey, Aaron’s a supporting character, so he’s the equivalent of the black guy who always gets killed in the horror movie. (Sarcasm alert.) So all these inequities will be solved once we boot out Shakespeare and study the deep subtleties of a diverse author like Ishmael Reed. (Quadruple sarcasm alert.)

In the final analysis, the Left’s tendency to take an oppositional stance in their celebrations—Accomplishment X is wonderful because it was accomplished against the background of an evil white male hegemony— serves to generate nothing more clickbait journalism. In terms of developing a more diverse culture, it’s the equivalent of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

ETHICS AMONG THE SUBCOMBATIVES PT. 4

In previous installments I've attempted to examine various subcombative works in terms of their relation to the overall concept of heroism. In brief, my previous estimations have been as follows:

(1) JUDEX the film is not only subcombative, but its titular character also bears little relation to the model of heroism I have constructed in essays such as 2013's RETURN OF THE MASTERY MASTER PT. 3. 

(2) MOANA is subcombative but the characters show heroism despite their inability to meet their foe in equal combat.

(3) Mark Twain's PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC, though a subcombative drama focused on the purgative sacrifice of the main character, shows a fascination with her ability to inspire men to "exalting activities," which Twain describes with a passion for their invigorating qualities ("the soul is overflowing with life and energy," et al).

(4) Parenthetically, I mentioned that even though Shakespere's TROILUS AND CRESSIDA centered on struggles of physical combat, just like Twain's JOAN, there's no sense in TROILUS that warfare brings forth any invigorating qualities. I did not say so previously, but I tend to view the two main characters of TROILUS to be demiheroes for the same reason that Judex is: their acts reflect no more than the "existential will" of persistence, rather than the "idealizing will" of glory.

The film I'll now discuss, 1955's THE COURT JESTER, is closest in structure to MOANA. The VHS cover seen above, whether it's original or derived from earlier art, capsulizes the inner conflict of the title character. Hubert Hawkins desires to be a hero, and for that reason, he joins a revolutionary movement led by an older crusader, "the Black Fox," who seeks to unseat the current usurper of the English throne. The rebels' ace in the hole is that they have custody of an infant whose proper legitimacy is a birthmark: a purple pimpernel on the baby's tush. The movie's opening number shows Hubert staging a complicated dance-scenario in which he appears to be the masked, Robin Hood-like leader of the rebels.

However, the viewer is quickly disabused of this illusion when the real Black Fox shows up. It's established that Hubert is not a fighter, only a performer, and that his main duty is that of caring for the infant heir to the throne. Not only is Hubert not the equal of the Fox, even the rebels' sole female member, Maid Jean, is given more trust than Hubert as a respected soldier in the cause.

Hubert's one compensation is that this female crusader (played by Glynis Johns) is not the inamorata of the Fox, the way that Maid Marian was to Robin Hood, and it turns out that she rather likes Hubert in spite of his lack of demonstrable manliness. For reasons too complicated to explain, the two of them end up forced to take the infant heir into the castle of the usurper-king, while Hubert poses as the king's new court jester. Thus, the protagonist who wants to be a hero ends up "playing the fool" for his enemies.

Hubert does get a shot at megadynamic heroism. The king's daughter takes a fancy to Hubert, and demands of her witchy servant to give Hubert protection. The witch uses hypnotism to convince Hubert that he's a great swordsman. Thus the witch, though she knows nothing of Hubert's desire for heroism, gives him the very persona he desires, even though, as I've observed elsewhere, Hubert remains subcombative because he never gains "mastery" of his other self, and only wins against his enemies by dumb luck and trickery.

However, jumping ahead to the film's end, it's interesting that when Hubert does save the day-- averting combat between the Fox and loyal supporters of the usurper-- it's through a manipulation of psychological factors. In short, Hubert figures out that the supporters will turn on the usurper if it can be proven that the rightful heir still exists-- and Hubert wins them over by showing them the "purple pimpernel" on the baby's butt.

Clearly, though the filmmakers could have allowed Hubert the opportunity to become conscious of his buried sword-skill, they probably felt that giving Hubert real fighting-skill obviated the comic persona of star Danny Kaye, the good-hearted bumbler, one who is almost likable here for his "feminine" qualities. However, even though Hubert is a bumbler for much of the film, he's still a protagonist struggling for a higher ideal, and so he, like the starring characters of Moana, qualifies for the status of the subcombative hero.

AN ILIADIC ODYSSEY

I'd been meaning to re-read Homer's ILIAD for some time, and it happened that I had the chance to do so following my re-reading of Shakespeare's TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, discussed here.

My first thought is that although I contrasted Homer's original account of the Achilles-Hector duel with Shakespeare's ironic rewriting of the event, the prose account I excerpted doesn't allude to one important aspect of the fight: that Hector loses in large part because Zeus wants Achilles to win. The two warriors exchange blows and fail to inflict telling wounds. According to translator Richard Lattimore, Hector, wearing the armor of Achilles stolen from Patroklus, charges the Greek warrior. Achilles, who knows the armor well, hits a weak point and wounds Hector. The Trojan pleads to have his body ransomed, but Achilles mercilessly kills him. Later the Greek degrades Hector's body for several days before the Trojan king Priam succeeds in ransoming the corpse from Achilles.

Throughout the conflict, the gods perform many tricks to keep the Greeks on the defensive, and even to keep any other Greek hero from performing Achilles' destined deed of slaying Hector. (At one point, it looks like the Greek Ajax might be able to take Hector, but since this would ruin the story, the gods intervene to save Hector's life.)

Now, from one standpoint the idea of the Greek deities rigging the fight might seem to be no different than Shakespeare's revision, in which Hector is caught without armor and slain by Achilles' troop of warriors. But there's a world of difference between an inequity between men-- which is what Shakespeare presents-- and one between men and gods. There's nothing equitable about the way the gods treat mortals, but to an archaic Greek, this would just be the nature of things. By the very nature of the gods, they send mortals both good and bad fortune, and when it's the latter, mortals can only face their fate with as much courage as possible. Hector's evil fate, of course, mirrors the prophecies of Achilles' own impending downfall, not seen in Homer's epic but repeatedly referenced through prophetic allusions.

Prior to the discovery of other, older heroic epics, the ILIAD seemed to be the oldest extant version of a legendary battle between destined opponents. Various myth-fragments referenced battles that took place long before the Trojan War, not least Zeus' combat with Typhon. The ILIAD mentions most of the most famous Greek heroes of olden days: Heracles, Jason, Bellerophon. But these fragments of religious myths can't be considered art as such, whereas Homer's epic is, like the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first flowerings of narrative art that is not purely religious in nature.

While discussing the book with friends, I was amazed that they had no real regard for the greatness of either Achilles' deed or those of other warriors, such as Ajax and Diomedes. Over and over, they insisted on reading the inequitable actions of the Greek gods as being no more than metaphors for human propaganda, of the tendency of human leaders to con young people into giving their lives in the name of glory. But this overlooks the fact that war is, as often as not, a response to the inequities of fate. Fate often gives one tribe riches and another impoverishment. and to the extent that the second tribe loves life as much as the first, the impoverished ones are thus more likely to risk their lives for gain and for glory-- which can be, but are not always, interdependent. I'm not saying here that human beings don't go to war for bad reasons; obviously they do. But the idea that war is always wrong-- or even always avoidable-- is one of the key mistakes of the Neopuritan liberal.

MESSING WITH MISTER IN-BETWEEN

At the end of KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2, I said:

Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

However, having re-read all of my posts that I tagged with the label "narrative-significant schism," I don't think any major modifications are necessary. Over the years I've tended to favor works to be combative if they satisfied both the narrative and significant values: that is, if they featured a major clash of spectacular forces toward the climax (narrative) which in turn the reader experienced with a sense of sublime satisfaction (significant). But I find that I didn't originally specify that this always had to be the case.

In early 2013 I posed this question at the end of MYTHOS AND MODE:

Whether or not the "narrarive/subjective" schism between meaning within and meaning without can influence the modes of the combative and subcombative will be seen in future installments of MYTHOS AND MODE.

I gave myself this answer in MYTHOS AND MODE 2:

In RISING AND FALLING STARS I established that it was possible for a work to fall into a given mythoi-category (say, “adventure”) even if one of its two major aspects—“plot” or “character” aligned better with another mythos.  This would only be the case when the “adventure-plot” dominated over the “drama-characters,” my chosen example being that of the James Robinson STARMAN. In a similar manner, narrative values can trump significant values in terms of determining whether or not a work is combative.  

So in my earliest meditations on the subject, I said that "narrative values can trump significant values," in contradistinction to the later notion that both had to be satisfied. My example in MYTHOS 2 was Shakespeare's MACBETH, which gives the reader a story which culminates in a battle between opposed figures (narrative value), even though the battle doesn't quite portray what I called "sublime dominance" (significant value) in that the reader/viewer doesn't see that both men are high-dynamicity figures.

That same year, I wrote TWICE THE MIGHT BUT LESS FILLING, and though I stressed examples where one of the two values was not satisfied, my wording doesn't make it inevitable that the failure of one value cancels the influence of the other.

...not every narrative that contains two opposed sources of "might" necessarily evokes the combative mode.  It's for that reason that I've distinguished the presence of both narrative and significant values within the combative mode.  The lack of one value or the other can cancel the narrative's potential for combative sublimity.

"Can"-- but not "will." Further, over the years I've cited a great number of combative works in which a final combat was mitigated by the presence of a hero's ally who actually delivered the killing blow: what I called "the triumph of the supporting ally" in this essay. In such cases, the narrative value is not quite fulfilled, in that the conflict is not directly resolved by the *agon* between protagonist and antagonist. However, there is at least a connection between the protagonist and his ally, and so the ally's actions are subsumed by the dynamicity of the protagonist, as long as said protagonist actually displays his/her own megadynamic power.

In essence, IVANHOE follows this pattern as well. Ivanhoe has the skill and power to thwart Bois-Guilbert, given that he has done so on previous occasions. His climactic victory over the villain is only put into question by wounds he sustained from a tournament-attack by all three of the book's principal evildoers. So the "significant value" is fulfilled, in that everything in the narrative sets up the potential for a clash between "two opposed sources of might." The "narrative value" is circumvented so that Scott can place emphasis on the internal conflict of Bois-Guilbert, who, over one hundred years before 1933's KING KONG, is another "beast" slain by a "beauty," since the knight dies of his "contending passions" rather than from Ivanhoe's weapons. Yet, Scott's novel, even though it critiques some of the problematic areas of medieval martial culture, still devotes so much space to other combative scenes that the reader can obtain the "narrative value" from other parts of the novel. I'd tend to think that this sort of "transitive effect" is only possible when it's been made quite clear that both protagonist and antagonist do possess the power to bring about a major combative clash in the narrative sense, even if that clash is forestalled for some reason. There's also a minor parallel in the 1956 FORBIDDEN PLANET, which I examined here, in that the protagonists, who possess megadynamic power but not as much as their enemy, must resort to strategy rather than force to win the war. In a sense, Walter Scott solves his hero's problem by giving the villain an "Achilles heel" that kills Bois-Guilbert-- though this wound would not have been fatal, if Ivanhoe had not shown up ready to fight.

ADDENDUM: I had intended to work in a reference to the title somewhere, but forgot it. FTR, "Mister In-Between" is just a metaphor for the intermediate state that a work falls into, when it satisfies an expected narrative value but not a similar significant one, and vice versa.

KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2

Though it's possible that I'll encounter some exceptions, there seems no way to demonstrate the persistence of the narrative combative value [in a given work] unless there is some sort of spectacle-oriented struggle at or very near the climax.-- PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX.

"Centricity" with respect to the Walter Scott novel IVANHOE, was addressed in Part 1, and in this section I'll be addressed the other subject in the post-title: combat-- or, more specifically, the way combat is handled at the climax of IVANHOE.

I wrote PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX in 2013, about a year after I settled on a definition of the combative mode in this essay. For the most part, I've been satisfied with the broad applicability of the statement seen above, but now that I've read Scott's most famous work, I'm glad that I hedged my bets somewhat with the statement about "exceptions." In this case, the exceptions don't "prove the rule," but they do make it necessary to expand the rule somewhat, to account for special cases.

For most of the novel, Scott arranges events that lead the reader to expect a major fight-scene at the novel's climax, between the title character and the principal villain, the Templar Knight Bois-Guilbert. It's established that the two of them previously clashed, with Ivanhoe coming out the victor. Their quarrel is not specified, but given that much of the story concerns the cultural tensions between English Saxons like Ivanhoe, and their Norman, French-speaking overlords, like Bois-Guilbert, it stands to reason that the knights probably quarreled for cultural reasons. Scott knows that by novel's end the truculent Saxons will be relatively placated when the righteous Norman Richard the Lion-Hearted ousts his bad Norman brother John. But even with that foreknowledge, Scott gives the reader every reason to want to see another "bad Norman," Bois-Guilbert, bested in direct combat.

Further, the two men are indirectly romantic rivals. Bois-Guilbert falls in love with the lovely Jewess Rebecca, and after taking her and her father prisoner for purposes of ransom, Bois-Guilbert is even willing to sacrifice his position with the Templars if Rebecca becomes his willing consort. However, Rebecca has conceived a "forbidden love" for Ivanhoe, though he is engaged to another woman, one of Christian upbringing. Ivanhoe's first encounter with Rebecca is marked by attraction on his part as well, but unlike Bois-Guilbert, Ivanhoe represses that attraction, obedient to the cultural laws forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Christians. (This is probably one reason a lot of readers don't like Ivanhoe, for not flouting those laws, though admittedly he's already defied his father earlier, by opposing that noble's intention to make a political marriage for Rowena.)

But later events oblige Ivanhoe to play the knightly rescuer to this "forbidden fruit." A group of Templars, having seen the extent of Bois-Guilbert's affection for the Jewess, accuse Rebecca of literal witchcraft, and plan to execute her. She can save herself only if a champion fights on her behalf, and Bois-Guilbert is assigned to oppose any champion she may summon. At this point Rebecca has once again rejected him, but he's still in love with her, and he tells himself that as long as he doesn't actually have to fight an opponent, her murder will be the fault of the Grand Templar. Then, Ivanhoe appears, and the two square off for a joust. The reader expects that Ivanhoe, even though he's taken wounds in a previous battle, will call upon inner reserves of strength and best his formidable enemy anyway. But that's not how Scott handles things.

The trumpets sounded, and the knights charged each other in full career. The wearied horse of Ivanhoe, and its no less exhausted rider, went down, as all had expected, before the well-aimed lance and vigorous steed of the Templar. This issue of the combat all had foreseen; but although the spear of Ivanhoe did but, in comparison, touch the shield of Bois-Guilbert, that champion, to the astonishment of all who beheld it reeled in his saddle, lost his stirrups, and fell in the lists.

Ivanhoe, extricating himself from his fallen horse, was soon on foot, hastening to mend his fortune with his sword; but his antagonist arose not. Wilfred, placing his foot on his breast, and the sword’s point to his throat, commanded him to yield him, or die on the spot. Bois-Guilbert returned no answer.

“Slay him not, Sir Knight,” cried the Grand Master, “unshriven and unabsolved—kill not body and soul! We allow him vanquished.”

He descended into the lists, and commanded them to unhelm the conquered champion. His eyes were closed—the dark red flush was still on his brow. As they looked on him in astonishment, the eyes opened—but they were fixed and glazed. The flush passed from his brow, and gave way to the pallid hue of death. Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.

“This is indeed the judgment of God,” said the Grand Master, looking upwards—“‘Fiat voluntas tua!’”

Scott does not enlarge upon the "contending passions" that cause Bois-Guilbert to expire without taking any real injury, though the author devotes a great deal of space before the death to showing that the Templar's desire for Rebecca torments him. He has the power to kill Ivanhoe, but if he does so, Rebecca also perishes-- and since he cannot simply surrender to Ivanhoe, his only alternative is apparently to "will himself to death." The mythopoeically inclined reader may choose to view Bois-Guilbert as the "negative image" of Ivanhoe, given that he can act on the desire that Ivanhoe will not countenance.

But what does the Templar's death mean, within the structure of the novel? There's no shortage of fight-scenes throughout the story, for IVANHOE is a novel aimed primarily at male readers. True, there are a number of scenes that take issue with the 13th-century code of honor, not only with respect to the treatment of Jews but also regarding the noblemen's nasty habit of raising money by ransoming people. Rebecca is every bit a spokesperson for the feminine penchant for peace as Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert are proponents of the masculine penchant for conflict.

And yet the central appeal of the novel is not really a critique of the knightly codes of honor and combat; it's more of a side-comment. In the past I've shown how certain works proved subcombative precisely because the author led readers to expect a major conflict, and then undermined that expectation. In MYTHOS AND MODE 2 I wrote this of Shakespeare's CORIOLANUS:

Despite the suggestions that [longtime enemies Coriolanus and Aufidius] may finally sort out the question of superiority by play’s end, CORIOLANUS is, unlike MACBETH, not centered around a combat.  Instead, Coriolanus’ arrogance brings about his disaffection from his fellow Romans, leading to a temporary alliance with Aufidius and the Volscians, and finally to an ignomious demise rather than a heroic confrontation.

Shakespeare goes after the "warrior code" in TROILUS AND CRESSISA with even greater vigor, as I suggested in THE TOILS OF TROILUS.

So, in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel [between Achilles and Hector]-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who orders his personal guards, the Myrmidons, to chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor. 

Clearly, in a narrative sense, Scott undercuts reader-expectations for a rousing final fight-scene in IVANHOE just as Shakespeare does in the cited plays. But-- does Scott do it for the same reasons that Shakespeare does it?

The answer is obviously no. The fact that Ivanhoe, even though he's not yet recovered from his wounds, is willing to risk his life for the gentle Rebecca clearly validates the better values of the knightly code; values which are entirely negative within both CORIOLANUS and TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. So how should my statement from PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX be amended?

Technically, I've already implied a solution in earlier essays. In KNIGHTS PART 1 I made a loose comparison between Scott's Ivanhoe and Will Eisner's Spirit only in terms of the relative simplicity of both starring characters. For the most part, it would be awkward to draw more extended comparisons, particularly because Ivanhoe was intended to be the star of one stand-alone work, while the Spirit was devised as a serial hero, intended to last over the course of potentially endless adventures.

However, it's often occurred to me that the Spirit himself might not be a combative hero, were I going purely by the 51 percent rule. Yet over the years I've refined this theory to take in the possibility that a series, such as that of the Spirit, may participate in the combative mode even if the majority of the character's individual adventures are not combat-oriented. In my final post on the LOST IN SPACE series, I mentioned that the series, despite various spectacle-oriented episodes, had a "dominant ethos" that was "directed away from combative resolutions." This is pretty much the same as saying that the dominant "significant value" of a series can overrule any disparate elements in the series. I have not yet applied this principle to stand-alone works like IVANHOE, but I have already implied that the subcombative significant value of TROILUS overrules the effect of any battle-scenes in the play. Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

BLAZING RATIOCENTRISM

Alan Moore's 2007 BLACK DOSSIER was the first time I'd ever heard of THE BLAZING WORLD, a utopian fiction published in 1666 by Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. From what I've read online, Cavendish's work has only been revived in the last decade or so by feminist scholars.

I've now read THE BLAZING WORLD, though not any of Cavendish's other works, most of which tended to fall into the format of Renaissance-era philosophical discourses. WORLD's level of philosophical thought feels fairly derivative of the Greek and Roman authors then being re-discovered in Europe, supplemented by a few tropes dear to the heart of English aristocrats, such as the topic of aristocratic rule. It's probably not fair to judge Cavendish by WORLD alone, since utopian novels are generally boring affairs, including the 1516 Thomas More work that started the whole thing. But though I can validate feminist academia's project to reclaim lost female voices from the days of a dominant patriarchy, I have my doubts, based on WORLD, that Cavendish ranks as more than a curiosity. Certainly it's silly to deem WORLD "the first science-fiction novel," just because Cavendish's utopian otherworld includes SF-tropes like hybrid animal-men. If you're going to judge a work as science fiction simply because of the presence of such tropes, then Cavendish is obviously still a long way from first, out-firsted by the classical author Lucian of Samosata. It's possible that the main reason Moore referenced Cavendish was because of the work of those aforesaid feminist scholars, because there's not a lot of common ground between the respective themes of Moore and Cavendish.

In short, Cavendish's WORLD is an example of what I've caused ratiocentrism. Her viewpoint character, a young noblewoman called "the Lady," is precipitated into what SF-authors now call a parallel world. The Lady is instantly married by the Emperor of the Blazing World. As Empress, she's in the position to learn about all the government and philosophy of her new realm, though there's never much of an explanation about the otherworld's most prominent feature: humanoids with animal aspects, such as "bird-men," "bear-men," and, perhaps most improbably, "lice-men." All of the animal-men have particular societal functions, which sounds like a simple restatement of the Great Chain of Being, as re-formulated by European Christian scholars. This is one of the things that seems least like Alan Moore's anarchic system of belief, and though he puts the animal-men into his version of the Blazing World, he doesn't assign them any particular thematic function. Either he or artist Kevin O'Neill did stick in a cameo shot of one moderately famous insect-man: "Turan," mentor to the Simon and Kirby Silver Age character "the Fly."

I believe that Moore's re-use of the Blazing World is in essence just another synonym for the occult concept of "the astral plane," on which Moore had already descanted in his 1999 PROMETHEA series for ABC Comics. But whereas Moore is fascinated with the influence of the irrational upon human thought and desire, Cavendish clearly falls into the category of reason-worship. In one section, the Empress rails against the abstruse syllogisms of the realm's logicians, who are satirically pictured as descended from magpies, jackdaws, and parrots. The Empress says:

I have enough, said she, of your chopped logic, and will hear no more of your syllogisms, for it disorders my reason, and puts my heart on the rack; your formal argumentations are able to spoil all natural wit; and I'll have you to consider: that art does not make reason, but reason makes art, and therefore as much as reason is above art, so much is a natural rational discourse to be preferred above an artificial: for art, is for the most part, irregular, and disorders men's understandings more than it rectifies them, and leads them into a labyrinth whence they'll never get out...

In the end, though the Empress does not forbid the bird-men to carry on their logic-chopping, she stresses that they need to keep these labyrinthine meditations to themselves, rather than letting them escape to cause societal unrest with the greater populace. I think I'm justified in seeing the long shadow of Plato-- or rather, of his own fictional utopia, the Republic-- as having provided the better part of Cavendish's ideas about reason's precedence over art.

I don't know exactly why Moore chose to allude to Cavendish's concept, though it may be largely because she's a female creator from the generation immediately after that of Shakespeare, whose influence is much more significant in DOSSIER. I strongly doubt that Moore worships reason as Plato' and Cavendish do, given that Moore concludes DOSSIER by talking about what I termed 'the opposition between "matter's mudyards" and the "radiant synthesis" of this multi-story mashup.' But then, no author ever really adapts another author with complete fidelity. Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of HAMLET is really Kenneth Branagh's HAMLET, not Shakespeare's, Steve Ditko's SPIDER-MAN is nothing like the raw Simon-Kirby concept with which Ditko started, and Alan Moore's idea of THE BLAZING WORLD is only minimally connected with that of Margaret Cavendish.

STRUGGLE VS. COMBAT PT. 2

Here's an illustration of the difference between "struggle" and "combat," one that doesn't invoke Kantian concepts like "dynamic-sublime."

Character A uses Force X to push character B backward.

At the same time, Character C uses the same amount of kinetic energy, Force X, to push character D backward.

The amount of power exercised by A and C is thus identical. However, the act as a whole is different when we learn that:

Character B is standing at the edge of a water-filled pool, and will fall into deep water if he loses his balance.

Character D is standing at the top of a long stairway, with many many steps to fall if he loses his balance.

In THE THREE PART HARMONY OF DYNAMICITY, I designated three separate terms for assigning a level of power to any given character. I'll arbitrarily cut these down to two for the purpose of this thought-experiment, and say that any demonstration of personal power that does not reach the highest level, "the megadynamic," automatically falls into one lower category, that of "the mesodynamic." Often, whenever I've parsed out the level of power a given character possesses, I've utilized close textual reading to decide whether or not there's any proof in the text that allows me to rate the personal power or, say, Hamlet in comparison to Coriolanus. I found, in other essays on dynamicity, that Coriolanus had a valid claim to megadynamicity while Hamlet's claim was not nearly as strong.

But in the parallel examples offered above, nothing is said about the power-level or even the skill-level of the persons performing the act of assault. They use the exact same force in both cases, so it's impossible to judge if one possesses more than the other. However, the person assaulted in the second situation is more likely to be seriously harmed than the person in the first situation. Granted, Character B may fall into the pool and hit his head on the concrete surrounding the pool, or there may be other complications that keep Character B from keeping afloat in the pool. But these are special cases, whereas when Character D goes off the top of the stairway, it's very likely he will be injured by that fall no matter what his particular circumstances (barring things like the power of invulnerability and so on).

So in this parallel situation we have someone exerting the same amount of force-- which may or may not indicate how strong the character doing the pushing is-- but the result of one shove is unlikely to result in serious injury, and the result of the other is extremely likely. So "intent" can have some effect upon the dynamicity of a given character's actions, even when the actual force may not be all that spectacular.

I addressed the question of "intent vs. execution" in this 2015 essay, where I considered two films in which the culminating fight-scene was not executed very well. Yet I judged that one of the two films conveyed the general sense of a battle between opposed megadynamic forces, because this seemed to be the general *intent* of the director, while the director of the other film did not provide even slight textual clues to indicate his protagonist's power. Using the current set of terms, I would say that the former film exhibited "combat" while the latter exhibited only "struggle," but here the subject of intent was extra-diegetical. In the parallel situations above, "intent" is intra-diegetical; each character providing the push-force is aware of how much potential damage will wreak on the person pushed. Character A is not likely to think that a fall in a pool will seriously harm Character B, while Character C knows that a fall down a stairwell will add enough kinetic force to the original Force X to seriously injure Character D.

Thus, in terms of the context of the respective acts, Character A's act is that of mesodynamic struggle, while Character C's act is that of megadynamic combat.

ETHICS AMONG THE SUBCOMBATIVES PT. 2

In Part 1 I noted that even though two unrelated films were both subcombative, they had widely divergent attitudes toward evoking the affect of courage.

I read Mark Twain's 1896 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF JOAN OF ARC for the first time this week, and I was rather surprised to find Twain, the master satirist, delivering the legend of "the Maid of Orleans" with complete seriousness. He only utilizes his trademark humor to delineate some of the side-characters in Joan's dramatic arc, but contrary to my expectations the book was surprisingly affecting.

In terms of the book's plot and main character, it rings in as a subcombative work. Joan herself does not fight, but simply leads her troops to victory up to the middle portion of the book, and the rest of the story is inevitably devoted to her martyrdom at the hands of her political and religious enemies. To be sure, however, there are a handful of strong fight-scenes in the book. Even more surprisingly, Twain endorses a view of Joan's glorious greatness that seems at odds with such down-to-earth Twain characters as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Here's how the POV character-- implicitly speaking for Twain himself, IMO-- sums up the greatness of Joan in Chapter 17, during the ardors of her accusation.

Consider. If you would realize how great Joan of Arc was, remember that it was out of such a place and such circumstances that she came week after week and month after month and confronted the master intellects of France single-handed, and baffled their cunningest schemes, defeated their ablest plans, detected and avoided their secretest traps and pitfalls, broke their lines, repelled their assaults, and camped on the field after every engagement; steadfast always, true to her faith and her ideals; defying torture, defying the stake, and answering threats of eternal death and the pains of hell with a simple "Let come what may, here I take my stand and will abide."

Yes, if you would realize how great was the soul, how profound the wisdom, and how luminous the intellect of Joan of Arc, you must study her there, where she fought out that long fight all alone—and not merely against the subtlest brains and deepest learning of France, but against the ignoble deceits, the meanest treacheries, and the hardest hearts to be found in any land, pagan or Christian.

She was great in battle—we all know that; great in foresight; great in loyalty and patriotism; great in persuading discontented chiefs and reconciling conflicting interests and passions; great in the ability to discover merit and genius wherever it lay hidden; great in picturesque and eloquent speech; supremely great in the gift of firing the hearts of hopeless men and noble enthusiasms, the gift of turning hares into heroes, slaves and skulkers into battalions that march to death with songs on their lips. But all these are exalting activities; they keep hand and heart and brain keyed up to their work; there is the joy of achievement, the inspiration of stir and movement, the applause which hails success; the soul is overflowing with life and energy, the faculties are at white heat; weariness, despondency, inertia—these do not exist.

Yes, Joan of Arc was great always, great everywhere, but she was greatest in the Rouen trials. There she rose above the limitations and infirmities of our human nature, and accomplished under blighting and unnerving and hopeless conditions all that her splendid equipment of moral and intellectual forces could have accomplished if they had been supplemented by the mighty helps of hope and cheer and light, the presence of friendly faces, and a fair and equal fight, with the great world looking on and wondering.

This subcombative work, which recognizes the importance of "exalting activities," makes a marked contrast with Shakespeare's 1602 TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. Like JOAN, TROILUS is a work which includes a handful of violent scenes which are not integral to the main arc of the plot. Troilus, unlike Twain's Joan, actually engages in one or two briefly described martial encounters on a battlefield. Yet Shakespeare, who sometimes emphasized the ethic of glory in earlier plays, rejects that ethic firmly in TROILUS, as I noted in my commentary here:

....in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who lets his personal guard the Myrmidons, chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor.

In Part 3 of this new series, I'll explore some of the ramifications involved when a subcombative work aligns itself with themes most often seen in combative works.

THE TOILS OF TROILUS

In MYTHOS AND MODE PT. 3, I spoke of three principal ways in which a given work failed to achieve the combative mode despite having some of the requisite elements, and I used one Shakespeare play as an example of each of the three. One way was exemplified by TITUS ANDRONICUS, which had both the necessary narrative and significant elements but simply chose not to resolve the conflict in a combative manner: I might call this the "diffuse type." Another path was exemplified by HAMLET, which had the narrative elements but not the significant ones relating to character-dynamicity, while the last was exemplified by CORIOLANUS, which had the significant elements but not the narrative ones. The third choice is one in which the main character and his enemy possess great dynamicity and seem to be building to a major combative resolution, but chose to frustrate that potential.

I recently reread TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, a play written about three to five years before CORIOLANUS. I remembered nothing about the play from whenever I last read it. Yet I decided, given my earlier statements on Shakespeare's proclivities for fictive violence, that I should re-read it, at least partly because the play's actions takes place during the action of the Trojan War. According to one source, the classic work most associated with that conflict, Homer's ILIAD, had not been fully translated into English when the Bard wrote his play. Thus it's hard to know if he knew more than generalities about parts of Homer's plot-action. Further, neither of the characters in the title-- two young Trojans in love (hmm, that sounds strange)-- appears in Homer. Both were born from medieval accretions to the main tale, accretions continued by authors ranging from Boccaccio to Chaucer, and since the story had proved popular in Shakespeare's time the Bard apparently chose to try his hand at the legend.

(Note: although Cressida does not appear in Homer, she's probably derived from the character Chryses, a prophet's daughter claimed by Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces battling Troy. When circumstances make it necessary for Agamemnon to return Chryses to her father, he then swipes another "spoils of war" female from his subordinate warrior Achilles, and this leads to Achilles' famous reluctance to continue pressing the fight against the warriors of Troy.)

TROILUS has two plot-threads. One, dealing with the Trojan lovers, demonstrates no more narrative potential for the combative mode than does ROMEO AND JULIET. The other is nothing less than the quintessential combative moment of THE ILIAD: the duel between Achilles and Hector that, in Homer, marks the beginning of the end for Troy.  Toward the end of the play, main character Troilus does take the field and fights a warrior or two,  but he really has nothing to do with Shakespeare's (probable) attempt to one-up Homer by destroying the integrity of the Achilles-Hector battle. Here's a prose translation of the relevant scene from Homer:

Now, the fine bronze armour he stripped from mighty Patroclus when he killed him covered all Hector’s flesh except for one opening at the throat, where the collarbones knit neck and shoulders, and violent death may come most swiftly. There, as Hector charged at him, noble Achilles aimed his ash spear, and drove its heavy bronze blade clean through the tender neck, though without cutting the windpipe or robbing Hector of the power of speech. Hector fell in the dust and Achilles shouted out in triumph: ‘While you were despoiling Patroclus, no doubt, in your folly, you thought yourself quite safe, Hector, and forgot all about me in my absence. Far from him, by the hollow ships, was a mightier man, who should have been his helper but stayed behind, and that was I, who now have brought you low. The dogs and carrion birds will tear apart your flesh, but him the Achaeans will bury.’

And now here's Shakespeare's reworking:

ACT V SCENE VIII	Another part of the plains.
[Enter HECTOR]
HECTOR	Most putrefied core, so fair without,
	Thy goodly armour thus hath cost thy life.
	Now is my day's work done; I'll take good breath:
	Rest, sword; thou hast thy fill of blood and death.
[ Puts off his helmet and hangs his shield behind him ]
[Enter ACHILLES and Myrmidons]
ACHILLES	Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set;	5
	How ugly night comes breathing at his heels:
	Even with the vail and darking of the sun,
	To close the day up, Hector's life is done.
HECTOR	I am unarm'd; forego this vantage, Greek.
ACHILLES	Strike, fellows, strike; this is the man I seek.	10
[HECTOR falls]
	So, Ilion, fall thou next! now, Troy, sink down!
	Here lies thy heart, thy sinews, and thy bone.
	On, Myrmidons, and cry you all amain,
	'Achilles hath the mighty Hector slain.'

So, in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who orders his personal guards, the Myrmidons, to chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor.

There's a lot of other support for the notion that Shakespeare meant to vilify the very idea of Classical Greece's idea of heroes and their heroic deeds, but I don't mean to explore that here. My main concern is to locate this Shakespeare play within the sphere of the playwright's handling of violent conflicts, and thus I find that TROILUS AND CRESSIDA follows the same pattern as CORIOLANUS, of which I wrote:

CORIOLANUS was my choice for a play that had the potential for the significant combative value, in that its opposed characters Coriolanus and Aufidius were both portrayed as exceptional warriors seen lusting to kill each other at the play's outset.  However, because the play's plot does not end with a combat between these two well-matched characters, CORIOLANUS is not combative in the narrative sense.

I'll forego further comment on the play, except to say that it strikes me as a play in which the writer's desire to satirize something he didn't like-- in this case, the general macho swaggering of the Greeks, and even Troilus's male chauvinism-- but without managing to bring any of his satirical characters to the semblance of life. By comparison, CORIOLANUS is much more successful on a roughly similar theme. The Roman general of the play's title is also something of an egotistical butthead, but he's a much more nuanced character than any of those in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA.

NEAR MYTHS: CAT-MAN AND THE KITTEN (1940-41)

Readers of Freud will be familiar with his theory of the "primal scene." In this scenario, a youngster, witnessing sexual activity between his or her parents, may misinterpret sex as violence, and so believe that one of the parents (usually Daddy, for obvious reasons) is hurting the other parent. For Freud, this was a primary step in the development of the Oedipus Complex, which he applied equally to kids of both genders. While the complex may have dubious application in psychology, it's certainly descriptive of many scenarios in literature, starting with mythological texts running the gamut from Agamemnon to Zeus. In literature, though, one wrinkle is that there may be an additional party who perpetrates violence upon one or both parents. Freud himself thought that Shakespeare's character Claudius, who covertly kills the father of Hamlet in order to gain access to Hamlet's mother Gertrude, stood in for Hamlet's own violent tendencies toward his father.

In a similar vein, Edgar Rice Burroughs also imagined a scene of primal violence that destroys a parental unity, that which gives birth to TARZAN OF THE APES. Tarzan's mother and father are figuratively slain by the jungle-lands in which they are stranded, for not long after the birth of the Boy Who Would Be an Ape, the mother dies of disease. Then "the jungle," in the form of the great ape Kerchak, intrudes and murders the boy's father. However, the female ape Kala adopts and protects the human child against both Kerchak, the ape who killed Tarzan's father, and Tublat, who is Kala's regular mate. One may apply the Freudian paradigm to see Kerchak and Tublat as a "splitting" of a figure like Claudius, who kills the father, while the mother is split into the human female and Kala. In the novel the ape-man eventually slays both of these "bad fathers."

The "raised by animals" trope was as old as the hills even when Burroughs used it, and he claimed he got it from the story of Romulus and Remus. However, it seems likely that whenever comics-artists of the Golden Age used the trope, they were probably thinking of Tarzan's immense success with the popular audience. Often the trope was used in a careless, unintentionally humorous manner, as when the Quality hero "The Black Condor" is raised by condors and somehow gains the power to fly like a bird-- well, just because. However, in the debut of the Holyoke Comics hero Catman (also written Cat-Man at times), the writer-- probably artist Charles Quinlan-- came closer to the Burroughs template, as seen in the opening panels.

Assuming one can get past the artist's picture of "jungle wild men," who look more like Black Africans than residents of any part of India, it's evident that Quinlan upped the ante of Burroughs' notion of "primal violence" by having the wild men slay a father, mother, and their little girl, leaving behind only an infant son. In jig-time a mother tiger finds its way to the scene of carnage and decides to adopt the infant.

Unlike Burroughs, though, Quinlan skips all of the youth's maturation, and picks up with the grown man, David Merryweather, living in a  big American city. For reasons unrevealed, David possesses a host of vaguely "cat-like" powers and has decided to dress up in a cat-costume to fight crime. The astute reader will notice that Catman's costume has a vaguely "savage" look in its first appearance, though later it will become a standard superhero "union suit."

Also of interest: that Catman has nine lives, and comes back to life after being killed because of some guardian-spirit. Quinlan only did this twice and then dropped the idea, apparently because he wanted the series to go on for more than nine issues.

The early Catman stories show similar inconsistencies about the hero's powers. Sometimes he carried a gun; sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he had "searchlight eyes," and sometimes he had super-strength, but most of the ancillary powers seem to have faded after a while.

Catman must have sold reasonably well, for about a year later, Quinlan gave his hero a sidekick, "The Kitten," one of the few female hero-partners in early comics. Quinlan was probably borrowing from DC's introduction of Robin the previous year, for twelve-year-old girl Katie Conn was a former circus acrobat like Dick Grayson. David Merryweather rescues Katie from an evil uncle who uses her talents for criminal purposes, and eventually he adopts her as his ward, with no apparent misgivings about child endangerment.

To my knowledge, the relationship between hero and sidekick, remained, like that of Batman and Robin, strictly paternal. However it's interesting that in the origin-tale, Quinlan gives David an older sister, who exists only to be killed along with the parents. Might Katie/Kitten might be deemed a substitute family-relation that springs from the primal murder of the parents? This may never have occurred to Quinlan, but something like that seems to be going on when Catman's origin was rebooted in CATMAN #27 by a new raconteur-- one who emphasized the potential Freudian elements more than ever, as I'll show in the ensuing essay.

All scans from Digital Comics Museum.

MYTHCOMICS: "WILD RICE" (THE SPIRIT, 1948)

This down-side of the "myth of money" appears the year after the more jovial P"Gell story, and this time Eisner is concerned with tragedy, not comedy.

The titular character's real name is Rice Wilder, though she garners the nickname "Wild Rice" because she rebels against her privileged life. Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, Rice-- whose image Eisner specifically modeled upon that of upper-crust film star Katharine Hepburn-- experiences a feeling of being "trapped in a world of gold and jewels that made an invisible cell around her." She runs away from her overprotective family a few times, and when she commits a few petty thefts, her family's wealth protects her from the consequences of these actions. She allows herself to participate in a "business-merger" type of marriage, but rejects her husband's embrace at the wedding reception. The unnamed husband is only seen in one panel and so does not stand as a character in his own right; he's merely another manifestation of the world of privilege that imprisons Rice.

However, as Rice flees to her room, she discovers a petty thief attempting to loot the place. He slaps her down before she can alert the partygoers, but the pain actually intrigues her. Presumably Eisner didn't wish to suggest that Rice was any sort of masochist, merely that the experience of being struck provided a huge contrast to the sterility of her rich girl's life.  Her very next words are to ask the thief is his life is "exciting," but he's only concerned with getting his loot and leaving, though he does evince a small attraction for the "society dame." This niggling validation inspires Rice to force him to take her away from her cloistered existence, particularly when she tells him that she recognizes him from wanted posters as "Mike Caliban."

Caliban reluctantly takes her along, but romance isn't on his mind; by the next day he's sent a ransom note to Mister Wilder (like the unnamed husband, barely a character at all). The Spirit promptly gets on the case, and his task is made easier by the fact that Rice decides to take up the role of a gun-moll for real, holding up a bank on her own. It's not clear whether or not Caliban allows her to do this. When Rice returns to Caliban's hideout, she hears him conversing with a confederate about the ransom-scheme. Rice rebels, and Caliban beats her down-- this time, with no suggestion of any sexy turn-ons. The Spirit, having traced Rice's path thanks to her careless clue-leaving, intrudes on the scene, and informs Rice and the two thugs that a squad of cops are waiting outside.

Caliban's crook-buddy tries to rush out of the hideout, and is shot down, though not killed. The Spirit tries to persuade Caliban to give up without violence, but he's concerned with being tried for ransom. He pathetically asks Rice to intercede; to admit that she went along of her own free will-- and though she's seen him for what he is, she agrees to testify to the truth. After Caliban gives up-- though his buddy remains wounded and defensive-- Rice tries to make a break for it herself, less because she fears prison than because she's never been able to attain the freedom she's desired. She bursts out of the hideout, only to be shot dead by the wounded hoodlum. Yet she dies with a smile on her lips, regarding death as the freedom she's always sought.

I don't want to over-interpret Eisner's unquestionable Shakespearean reference, but I don't think it's sheer chance that he appropriates the name "Caliban." The Bard's character is a brute whom the play's leading-lady rejects outright, and his sexual attempt on Miranda is a classic example of "lower class" trying to infringe on an "upper class" specimen of femininity. Though Eisner provides no other references to "The Tempest," it seems probable that the comics artist is reversing the playwright's meaning: this time it's the privileged upper-class female who foolishly seeks freedom with a brutish lower-class crook. Given the limitations of story-length, Eisner provides no details as to why Rice felt so restricted by upper-class life, but her unhappy fate may be glossed by the more eventful lives of characters like P'Gell and Silk Satin. The "femmes fatales" of the Spirit don't depend on men or other women to give them what they need; they learn how to employ womanly wiles to achieve their ends. Rice, for all of her rebelliousness, still wants someone to extend to her the "silver spoon" of happiness-- and in Eisner's world, total dependence on others, even if it doesn't lead to actual death, comprises an ineluctable dead end.

STORMING THE THRESHOLD PT. 2

In Part 1 I referenced a trio of scenarios that I'll henceforth call the "Anti-heroic Trio," with reference to this 1992 Hong Kong superhero film. The Anti-Heroic Trio lists the three most common scenarios by which a given work might appear to be combative when it is not, using as examples plays from the pen of the Bard of Violence.

If I belabor these matters, it's because I myself have so frequently found myself re-thinking my categorizations. I chronicled here some of the difficulties I've had in isolating the special character of the combative mode from other modes that are proved conflictive in nature. Aside from the difficulties mentioned in this essay and its links, I'll note that sometimes I've looked back at certain reviews on my film-blog and realized that I incorrectly categorized them. When I originally typed my 2011 review for DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and my 2012 review for DOCTOR GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS, I classed both of them as combative simply because there was some sort of "fight-scene" at the conclusion. I amended both reviews later on, but the lesson is clear. If I, the person attempting to promote the concept of the combative mode, could get misled by the presence of a fight-scene, then it would be all the harder for anyone else to see the difference between a subcombative fight and a combative one. This is a concern to me not so much for what I write on this blog, which as I've said is principally pure theory, but for what I might write in future. I'm meditating how I might,  if I so chose, approach these subjects in the form of a book, but without invoking the heavy-duty philosophical thinkers that would scare away not only the average reader of superhero comics, but also the critics, so many of whom flatter themselves as educated but are content to dismiss thinkers like Nietzsche as irrelevant.

My November essay ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE contributed to my recent attempt to imagine domains as having thresholds, principally as a way of characterizing the different ways that megadynamicity can manifest in the "dynamic-sublime domains." I said in STORMING PART 1 that "HAMLET does not cross [the threshold] at all, while TITUS and CORIOLANUS do" -- reason being the way in which the latter two create at least one megadynamic presence of a naturalistic nature. An example of a Shakespeare work that "storms" across the threshold because it does possess all the aspects of the combative mode would be HENRY IV PART 1, given that the playwright fudges with history in order to give the audience a stimulating confrontation between Henry IV and his rival Hotspur.

Without resorting to this sort of conceptual illustration, I can see why even a fair-minded skeptic might have a difficulty with my reasons for saying that the 1976 KING KONG is subcombative even though it utilizes some though not all of the narrative tropes that make the 1933 classic combative. I could well understand such a skeptic saying, "So what if the later film only uses copters to attack Kong, while the earlier one uses biplanes? So what if '76 Kong doesn't fight as many big beasties as the '33 original? It still has roughly the same type of fights, so why isn't it 'combative?'"

Similarly, the same skeptical argument could be raised with regard to the giant-monster films of Eugene Lourie, both his BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and THE GIANT BEHEMOTH. As much as their cinematic progenitor, the 1933 King Kong, both depend on giant critters wreaking havoc in big cities and then being defeated by whatever forces human beings can muster against them. In the end, no matter what specific arguments I put forth, they boil down to the subjective feeling that BEAST only tromps its way over the megadynamicity threshold, while BEHEMOTH "storms" across, in part because it shows a greater propensity toward the "dynamic-sublime."

On a less monumental level, most of the "invisible man" films I've reviewed merely step across the threshhold, such as the 1933 INVISIBLE MAN, its first sequel, and the franchise's one distaff iteration.  Only one film in the Universal series, INVISIBLE AGENT, conveys a sense that the invisible individual is truly challenged by the "might" of his adversaries, and so I can only picture that film as making the threshold-passage a "stormy" one.

Only time will tell if this tempestuous line of thought proves useful in my attempts at simplifying my formulations for a more general audience.

STORMING THE THRESHOLD PT. 1

Recently I've been making a number of attempts to illustrate my various conceptual principles as "domains," in posts like this one and this one. This returned me to a line of thought dealing with the idea of "threshold experiences." I haven't dealt with the topic on this blog very often, the most pertinent post being my meditations on Philip Wheelwright's theories in the 2011 essay FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, BURNING BRIGHT.

Another significant theme Wheelwright explores throughout FOUNTAIN is what he calls "the intrinsically threshold character of experience"... in a sense a tremendous amount of my theory involves movements from one phenomenolgical threshold to another.

In that essay, I addressed the ways the concepts of the NUM theory shade into one another, but I could also have spoken of the three dynamicities I formed in this 2012 essay. During this period I drew heavily upon Kant's concepts of "might" and "dominance" to describe two opposed types of narrative use of power/ dynamicity:

"Might," as situated in Kant's argument, is simply a superior force amid inferior ones.  This would parallel the type of story in which there exists an anomalous force (say, the vampire Dracula) with which a group of ordinary people must contend.

"Dominance" generates a very different type of plotline, in which at least two superior forces are arrayed against one another.  

During the following year I invoked this Kantian opposition in THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS, but I gave it a Nietzchean spin with regard to its ethical significance (with the usual caveat that unlike me, neither philosopher was writing primarily about art/literature):

(1) Megadynamicity, the level of extraordinary strength, is the narrative "proof of strength" in that its very excessiveness suggests a propensity to transcend ordinary limits.

(2) Mesodynamicity and microdynamicity, the levels of "good" and "poor" strength, cannot be used in narrative to prove the nature of strength because by their respective natures they are determined by limitation.

The above statement regarding "might" focuses upon the disparity of dynamicites: "a superior force amid inferior ones," while the statement regarding "dominance" posits "at least two superior forces." Both of these forms of literature can be indicative of what I called "the proof of strength," as opposed to those types in which no forms of superior strength are seen, as with, say, JANE EYRE-- to my mind a fair comparison to DRACULA, given that it mentions the superstition of vampires but there is no invocation of any form of megadynamic presence, not even in the novel's "madwoman in the attic" character. Thus whereas any reasonably faithful iteration of DRACULA can be explored for its relevance to Nietzsche's concept of the "proof of strength through excessiveness," no form of JANE EYRE can be, unless an unfaithful adaptation chose to upgrade one or more of the characters to such a status.

Thus any work of art which depicts even one megadynamic presence has crossed a threshold that separates one from the experience of limitation.

Keeping in mind this extrapolation from the aforementioned "narrative rule of excess," I'll now examine the three examples of subcombative manifestations I listed in MYTHOS AND MODE PART 3. All of my chosen examples-- CORIOLANUS, TITUS ANDRONICUS, and HAMLET-- contain scenes of violence, for as I've stated before, Shakespeare was a playwright with a particular penchant for such scenes. But do they any of them, even given that they are subcombative works, cross out of the threshold of limited violence, where only the "mesodynamic" and the "microdynamic" reign?

CORIOLANUS creates two superior (albeit entirely naturalistic) forces, embodied by its martial title hero and his frequent battle-opponent Aufidius. Thus it does passes the imagined threshold. Because these two superior forces do not extend their initial contention through to the climax, I don't find that the play satisfies my criteria for the combative mode. But it does at least pass the threshold by virtue of showing two such superior forces to have a real existence.

TITUS ANDRONICUS is similar in that the opponents, Titus and Tamora, are masters of the trope I call the "bizarre crime," though the execution of the trope falls into the naturalistic domain.  There's something closer to a "fight" in the way that Titus manages to trump Tamora's abomination with his own Sadean sortie, though again I judged their conflict to be subcombative. Still, even if Titus were purely a Sadean schemer rather than a physically proficient general, that ability to imagine and execute excessive scenarios of slaughter would still cross the threshold, for the idea of dynamicity doesn't connote only physical strength, but also what I've called "potency."

HAMLET, on the other hand, does not really satisfy either criterion. Hamlet and Laertes have a fight at the play's climax, but it's difficult to say for certain whether or not either combatant displays "superior force," which is my reason for deeming it subcombative.

So HAMLET does not cross at all, while TITUS and CORIOLANUS do. How then is their crossing any different from the way a fully combative work makes the transition?

I've chosen the metaphor "storming the threshold"-- as in "storming the heavens"-- to describe the difference. Any subcombative work that creates a megadynamic presence simply steps across the threshold, but a combative work cascades over the threshold like a wind-driven thunderhead. It's because the combative mode gives megadynamic violence this quality that I claimed it has the greatest capacity to evoke the feeling of the dynamic-sublime in this essay:

...what I've called the "combative mode" is an academic way of speaking about an archetypal construct, one that, in my view, is capable of stirring from at least some readers the response of a "hard, gemlike flame" of ecstasy. 

More later.