RULES OF RE-ENGAGEMENT

Partly in response to my current line of thought expressed in QUICK NUM NOTES, I re-examined the five essays I wrote about "the suspension of disbelief" as formulated by Samuel Coleridge and responded to by Stephen King. I concluded that quasi-series with the 2023 post STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT, but now I have some new refinements.

First of all, I failed to account for two different levels of engagement: one primary and "unearned," the other secondary and "earned." I pointed out in the course of the essays that a reader's receptiveness to the genres of fantasy does not depend exactly on "suspending disbelief." Some readers may be so invested in naive realism that they can never accept metaphenomenal subject matter in any way; they find it childish and would never, in line with Stephen King's dictum, even trouble to exert their mental muscles to engage. Yet I've encountered fans of the metaphenomenal who are just as naively realistic as any fantasy-hater, but who view their reading material as simple escapism from the rigors of real life. Other fantasy-readers may believe in one or more forms of the metaphenomenal in real life, ranging from psychic phenomena or the return of the Messiah, or they may be agnostic about such matters but open to real-world possibilities. Some may place credence in science fiction but not in magical fantasy, and so on. All of these forms of engagement proceed from individual taste, and so as far as the author of any given "meta" work is concerned, a given reader's willingness to engage is unearned, because the reader approaches the work with a certain degree of receptivity no matter how good or bad the work is.  

The secondary level of engagement, though, is one that the author does have to earn. In QUICK NUM NOTES I asked the question, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" The question was directed to those Gothic authors who thought they were being more "realistic" by revealing that a purported ghost was just a guy in a bedsheet, when in truth there's not much (if any) real-world evidence for swindlers who dress up in bedsheets (and maybe more for real ghosts). A good storyteller like Conan Doyle can cobble together enough suggestive details as to make it seem logical that the villain of HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES would go through the trouble of painting a dog with phosphorescent paint to get across the effect of a ghost-hound. When an author manages to take the reader to the second level of engagement, the reader feels validated in investing in the far-fetched events of the narrative. A contrary example-- just to name the first that comes to mind-- is a dopey "weird western," HAUNTED RANCH, in which the plotters, as unimaginative as their creators, try to create the illusion of a haunting by simply projecting spooky sounds into the ranch-house. 

The same basic rule pertains to marvelous phenomena. In this month's essay AMAZON ATROCITY, which offered an overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN tenure, I called attention to one story in which a fiery giant arises from the ground beneath Paradise Island-- yet the author neglects to give any rationale for the creature's appearance. I know that had I read this particular tale at age 10 I would have been offended by the author's implication that the kids reading this comic were too stupid to need explanations-- and I say this with a clear memory of another Kanigher story of the same period in which he pissed me off with his cavalier attitude toward storytelling.       

Further, I gave a couple of examples of the barest justifications Kanigher might have employed to gain his readers' secondary engagement: "Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians?" Both of these conceits could have been further expanded upon in line with either didactic or mythopoeic abstractions, and such abstractions might have made the story more interesting, thus encouraging readers to continue reading the heroine's adventures.

This idea of an author having to earn the reader's secondary engagement will play into a future essay on related matters.  

STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT

In STRENGTH TO DREAM, THE SEQUEL, I summed up some previous arguments thusly:

I applied some of my observations to King's comments in his 1981 book DANSE MACABRE, concluding that what he and Coleridge called "disbelief" was more like "disengagement." 

Having made that fine point, though, I didn't follow through on the question of whether Stephen King's extrapolations from Coleridge re: the "muscular" nature of disbelief might apply equally to disengagement. Once more, just to keep track of what Coleridge originally said:

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. 

Again I note that Coleridge does not define what he means by "suspension," though he certainly doesn't use any of King's muscular metaphors. If anything, when he speaks of "transferring from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth" in order to overcome some state of "disbelief," it sounds more like he's saying that he the author has to "charm" the disbeliever into putting aside his disbelief in favor of "poetic faith." It's not impossible that, since he's comparing his "endeavors" to those of his partner-in-poesy Wordsworth in a general way, Samuel T. may be covertly implying that Wordsworth's more grounded ruminations aren't capable of delving into "our inward nature," that they are only capable of giving "the charm of novelty to the things of every day."

Though both Coleridge and Stephen King were somewhat at odds with literary trends toward naturalism in their respective times, the kind of literature that Coleridge above calls "romantic" had made a modest comeback, and this is at least part of the reason that later critics lumped Coleridge, Wordsworth, and others into the category called "Romantic poets." In contrast, both during King's youth and his writing career, the general consensus in American literary culture was that Naturalism had essentially won the battle against Romanticism. This culture might admit to the existence of a handful of post-Renaissance literary works worthy of being called "good literature." But most "romantic" works, particularly those that involved metaphenomenal fantasy-content, were considered trash, and they generally appeared in such trashy media as pulp magazines, comic books, and kiddie television. (Fantasy-films arguably gained a greater stature than fantasy-works in other media during Stephen King's youth, but the possible reasons for this would comprise a separate essay.)

King's statements in DANSE MACABRE and the essay "Why I Chose Batman" show that he was fully invested in fantasy-fandom, though he, like many fans, formed his own non-academic criteria for what was good and what was bad. Yet I suggest that he was always conscious of the scorn of majority culture for many if not all of the fantasy-stories he favored. I also suggest that King didn't really have much of a rebuttal to naturalism except the idea that one's imagination might possess something like "muscles" that fantasy-fans regularly exercised while realism-fans did not. It's a stimulating idea but does not really speak to a deeper issue. It's true that realism-fans may dislike metaphenomenal fiction because they think it important that all fiction should emulate "the things of every day." But I've pointed out that most fantasy-fans don't literally "believe" that the fantastic content in their favored stories is real. Rather, they choose to engage with such content for reasons of aesthetic taste, not cognitive assessment. 

I think that when Coleridge speaks of how "suspension of disbelief" can foster "poetic faith" by way of the aforementioned "inward truth," he's a lot closer to stating that the human psyche draws equally upon both "inward truth" and what might as well be called "outward truth." In the second part of 2022's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS, I related these categories to the Greek ideas of "the limitless and the limited."

I've already stated my own allegiance, but not without having noted that myth and literature are all about propounding "half-truths," responsive to both the truths we encounter through physical experience and truths we encounter through abstract contemplation.

Since both categories have relevance to the human condition as a whole, it is not so much that "realism-fans" disbelieve in fantasy-content as they do not engage with it as strongly as they do with realism-content, and the reverse formula would apply to "fantasy-fans." And of course there are those who can engage strongly with works in either category. Though I have a fascination with the complicated dynamics of how fantasy-content is expressed, I appreciate the rigor of a well-conceived "realism-work."

My theory of aesthetic engagement also speaks to reader-preference in terms of the two major categories of the uncanny and the marvelous. Possibly for the last time, here's King's statement as to why he "chose" Batman over Superman.

I remember the ads for the first SUPERMAN movie...the ones that said YOU'LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY. Well, I didn't... But when Batman swung down into the Joker's hideout on a rope or stopped the Penguin from dropping Robin into a bucket of boiling hog-fat with a well-thrown Batarang, I believed. These were not likely things, I freely grant you that, but they were possible things.

I don't really credit that Young Stephen King liked these uncanny Bat-feats simply because they were more believable, and in part I dismiss this recollection because King had almost certainly allowed himself to "believe" in marvelous phenomena no more extraordinary than Superman in many other fantasy-works mentioned in DANSE MACABRE. I think the dynamic of the uncanny engaged him more than that did the dynamic of the marvelous, possibly because the former seemed to have a greater supply of what I've called "rigor." And given that King also WROTE quite a few stories with marvelous content-- some of which, rather improbably, tried to compete with the secondary-world mastery of J.R.R. Tolkien-- I think he could engage with the marvelous whenever he pleased, irrespective of his "belief" systems.

ADDENDUM: I may as well note that the reason I've gone so long about the use of the word "disbelief" is that I don't think anyone who knows what fiction is comes to it with the idea of "believing" in it, since the essence of fiction is that it is not factually true. One can accept a lot of fictional propositions and reject others, but always in the context of what I once called "relative meta-beliefs." Engagement or its lack, however, is crucial for anyone's appreciation of fictional narrative-- and it's anyone's guess whether I'll leave things at that pass for the near future.

 

STRENGTH TO DREAM, THE SEQUEL

 In the first two parts of STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN, respectively here and here, I pursued a comparison between Samuel T. Coleridge's comment about "the suspension of disbelief" and Stephen King's response to that concept. I then followed up with a third essay based on my two categories of the metaphenomenal. I applied some of my observations to King's comments in his 1981 book DANSE MACABRE, concluding that what he and Coleridge called "disbelief" was more like "disengagement." Naturally, since King only talked about the metaphenomenal in general terms, there were no explicit comparisons between what he wrote in DANCE MACABRE and my NUM theory.

However, when I reread BATMAN #400, reviewed here, I was reminded that this very special anniversary issue included an essay by King, entitled "Why I Chose Batman." In this essay, King explains that as a comic-reading kid he far preferred Batman to Superman, and the reason he gives for that preference seems to be rooted in his personal sense of disbelief-- even though the way he frames that disbelief would seem to contradict everything he wrote in his DANSE essay. In that essay, King seems to disparage those who can't allow themselves to roll with a good fantasy-yarn:

They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

Now, in the following segment of the 1986 essay, King seems to be endorsing a lack of imaginative muscle.

I remember the ads for the first SUPERMAN movie...the ones that said YOU'LL BELIEVE A MAN CAN FLY. Well, I didn't... But when Batman swung down into the Joker's hideout on a rope or stopped the Penguin from dropping Robin into a bucket of boiling hog-fat with a well-thrown Batarang, I believed. These were not likely things, I freely grant you that, but they were possible things.

Now, King probably did not know anything about any theories about fantasy-fiction, least of all those of Tzvetan Todorov and his theory of the uncanny, which I've refuted here numerous times. But he-- or at least his younger self-- is validating his Batman preference over Superman (though he says he did like the Man of Steel somewhat) simply because he didn't think Batman violated Young King's sense of what was possible in the real world. And nowhere in "Chose" does Older King invalidate what Young King thought about these matters, even though five years earlier he'd turned a pitying eye on audiences who couldn't place credence in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One.

Of course, everyone has blind spots, and I'm reasonably sure that King, having been asked to celebrate the Caped Crusader for an anniversary special, just reeled off his kid-memories to serve that purpose. He certainly wasn't making an aesthetic statement. However, what he said is not unique, since a lot of comics-fans have expressed a similar preference for the Bat-dude over the Super-dude. And often the criteria of these fans is similar: Batman seems possible, Superman impossible. 

Of course, in fiction nothing is impossible; readers only make that judgment if they are of the belief that fiction MUST reflect the reality of everyday experience. Years ago I played around with the idea that I might define the marvelous and the uncanny in terms of probability. But as I recall, I abandoned this notion, because I don't think fiction must reflect everyday experience, and indeed, fiction is attractive specifically because it is not tied to external reality, the reality of "one cause=one effect." Some people don't want fiction to indulge in impossibilities, and that's their prerogative, but by King's own 1981 standards, their disengagement from overt fantasies might be deemed a sign of imaginative underdevelopment.

Lastly, just to pick at King's analysis on one more point, I don't know exactly what Batman comics he read. But I don't think that there was ever a time when Batman didn't have substantial encounters with marvelous, "impossible" phenomena. King cites examples of bizarre criminals that in themselves conform to the domain of the uncanny. Since he was born in 1947, he wouldn't have seen the hero's contentions with vampires or mad scientists who change people into destructive giants. But if he was reading comics in the 1950s, then he certainly would have seen Batman contending with super-crooks who used freeze-rays and force-fields, even if he King made it a point not to buy any of the "Batman vs. aliens" entries.

On a side-note, King's essay also mentions in passing the same-year success of Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. In 1986, this only meant a new validation for Batman after years of being deemed the Number Two DC hero after the company's Kryptonian mascot. But neither King nor anyone else could have guessed how sweeping the influence of Miller, and after him Tim Burton, would prove, so that today, more often than not, the Gotham Guardian gets top billing over the Metropolis Marvel. And so King's essay seems slightly prescient, even if I don't think people prefer Batman for exactly the same reasons he specified. 

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this series, I established that one can imagine, in keeping with Stephen King's reading of Samuel Coleridge, a special "muscular effort" the reader must make in order to entertain metaphemomena in fiction, given that metaphenomena go against what most readers "deem the expected phenomena of this world." But was King right about the nature of said effort? Once more, here's how King interpreted Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief:"

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

One problem with this extrapolation is that Coleridge did not say much about the nature of the "disbelief" that must be "suspended" in order for a reader to entertain "shadows of imagination." I hypothesized that one might compare this disbelief with Cassirer's "naive realism," the human tendency to believe only in what one can perceive through the senses. But though it's possible to read that in King, Coleridge doesn't generalize so much. It's possible he meant this "disbelief" to be something purely characteristic of his historical era.

So is King right that disbelief that "has to be hoisted, and held up by main force?" That might be the case with individuals' disbelief in metaphenoma occurring in the real world, and indeed, King's dichotomy about belief and disbelief takes places in a chapter where he narrates an experience in which a relative demonstrated the apparent reality of dowsing to Young King. But is the same effort necessary when an individual faces fictional phenomena that don't accord with what he expects?

Many individuals who don't believe in the existence of anything but material objects will prefer fiction that coheres with their beliefs; fiction which does not portray any "shadows of imagination" as real. But many readers may share that materialist philosophy, and yet they indulge in metaphenomenal fiction precisely because it does not resemble the real world, and so affords them an escape from reality's demands. Further, whereas as some people may earnestly believe in such rural fantasies as sprites and brownies, no one truly believes in hobbits, because hobbits are self-evidently the fictional creations of a particular author.

Given all these contingencies, I think that what Coleridge and King call "disbelief" is really "disengagement." 

As I observed previously, isophenomenal fiction does not have to establish ground rules for its phenomena, but both forms of the metaphenomenal, the marvelous and the uncanny, must do so, however implicitly. 

The marvelous, as I established in CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN, rebels against the isophenomenal formula of "one cause yields one definite effect." For example, in the real world, there are no chemicals that can cause a person to turn invisible, but in H.G. Wells' INVISIBLE MAN, such chemicals are imagined into existence, and so Griffin's "invisibility formula" is a "shadow of imagination" given reality. A reader may choose either to engage with that shadow on its own terms or not, but the reader's credence in the concept does not affect the work's ground rules. The uncanny does not overtly challenge the causal order, but its creations carry the semblance of multicausality (is the House of Usher really alive in some fashion, or is it just a non-sentient building upon which people project their delusions?)

Historically, some readers have found it easier to engage with works of the uncanny than with marvelous ones. Early Gothic fiction, such as VATHEK and CASTLE OF OTRANTO, traded heavily in marvelous content, patently following models supplied by Arabian Nights fables and European knight-romances. But though Ann Radcliffe might not be the very first author to invent the "supernatural rationally explained," she supplied a new paradigm for those who didn't want to credence, even in fiction, the more outrageous imaginative shadows. Yet it's a major error on the part of many critics (not least Tzvetan Todorov) to believe that Radcliffe's "rational Gothics" had anything to do with realistic fiction, in which the possibility of ghosts and demons can't even be entertained for a moment.

Most uncanny fictions require a lesser "muscular intellectual act" for a reader to engage with their content, simply because the uncanny conveys the superficial appearance of adhering to rules of casual coherence. By contrast, overtly marvelous fictions usually formulate their own multicausal ground rules, ranging from a Tolkien, who imagines a world full of elves and trolls and angel-like entities, to an animated cartoon that can depict any bizarre transformation, "as long as it's funny." However, Herman Melville's MOBY DICK stands as an example of an uncanny work that requires just as much intellectual musculature as the most sophisticated marvelous fiction in order for a reader to fully engage with its ground rules. So, in essence, both the uncanny and the marvelous are equally capable of providing heavy-lifting exercise for a reader's imaginative muscles.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN PT. 2

I have to backtrack a little with regard to my statements here about Stephen King's take on Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief."

I wrote in part:

I agree [with King] that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories.

I thought King was slanting his argument a bit by comparing a highly complex metaphenomenal writer like HPL with an isophenomenal writer with a reputation for very simple bestseller fiction. (I think King was playing to that reputation, whether he had read any Hailey books back then or not, though I never have and so can only go on general allegations.) That's why I said the materialist literary author Joseph Conrad would have been a nearer match in terms of literary complexity.

However, though I still believe King's comparison of HPL and Hailey was off-kilter, King's standard would be true in terms of the ways in which isophenomenal authors of any complexity-level approach the phenomenality of their fictional worlds, in contradistinction to the way metaphenomenal authors face those same considerations.

Isophenomenal works, whether they are as complex as a Conrad novel or as simple as a Franklin Dixon HARDY BOYS (just to name something I did read in great quantity), are alike in that they utilize the same range of phenomena. I say that this range is "isophenmenal" because, even though nothing in Conrad or Dixon is actually "real," it is supposed to be "the same as" (Greek "iso") what a majority of readers would deem the expected phenomena of this world. That's not to say that there aren't potential readers who believe in their heart of hearts that everything that seems solid and dependable could vapor away if some god or computer-network sent the message. But they will always be outnumbered by the majority of readers, who are governed by what Cassirer called "naive realism, which regards the reality of objects as something and unequivocally given" (LANGUAGE AND MYTH, p. 6). An isophenomenal author cannot vary from what is known about the real world. At most he might introduce some little-known fact of nature that might have some of the charm of novelty, simply because the reader had not heard of said fact.

Every metaphenomenal work, though, whether as complex as a Lovecraft story or a simple as a Gerry Conway SPIDER-MAN tale, goes "beyond" (Greek "meta") what we expect of real-world phenomena. Further, even writers who pick up serial fantasy-concepts created by other authors are usually obliged to add new fantasy-concepts to the series-- Conway's most famous contribution being The Punisher. King is right that in order to formulate the ground rules for any fantasy-cosmos, however complex or simple, do require a special "muscular" effort for one to engage with whatever type or types of metaphenomena the author chooses to depict. This "muscular effort" has nothing to do with the parallel "muscular effort" that determines whether or not the work is complex or simple.

In Part 3, I anticipate expanding these thoughts with respect to the two complementary forms of the metaphenomenal, the uncanny and the marvelous.

STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN

 I borrowed the phrase "Strength to Dream" from Colin Wilson's book of that title, but only for the basic felicity of the phrase, not because I'm discussing any of Wilson's themes here. (I'm fairly sure I read it many years ago and have placed it on my to-be-reread list.)

I began thinking about the association of "strength" with "dreaming" thanks to the works of two famous writers who discussed how readers accept what I call metaphenomenal fiction. The first writer is Samuel T. Coleridge, whose most famous phrase in common parlance may not be anything from his poems, but from his autobiography, wherein he coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief." 

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

I confess that I have never read the full text of the bio, but I doubt that Coleridge uses the phrase again since none of the online references mention more than the one quote. The book concerns Coleridge's far-ranging theory of poetry, and so is not primarily about the ways fantasy-loving readers justify their preferences. In fact, the full context of "suspension of disbelief" is that Coleridge and William Wordsworth, in collaborating to produce various poems for their 1798 collection LYRICAL BALLADS, took two differing approaches to poetry, with Wordsworth favoring "things of every day" while Coleridge concentrated upon "shadows of imagination" that necessitated "poetic faith." Early in the history of this blog I described this literary dichotomy as one between works of "thematic realism" (Wordsworth) and "thematic escapism" (Coleridge), though in recent years I've inclined more toward an opposition between "verisimilitude" and "artifice," as in the last year's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2:

"Verisimilitude" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limits of the physical continuum, while "artifice" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limitless nature of the continuum of abstract concepts. 

 

Coleridge did not develop the "suspension of disbelief" concept, but many later writers quoted it and gave their takes on the idea, among them the second writer I mentioned above: Stephen King. King's 1981 book DANSE MACABRE largely concerns his theories about the horror genre, just as Coleridge's biography concerned poetry. King mentions "suspension of disbelief" in Chapter 4, where he extrapolates a meaning of "strength" from Coleridge's "suspension" metaphor.

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

And then he validates many fantasy-fans by turning a pitying eye upon those persons who reject all metaphenomenal content as being unreal in terms of real experience:

They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

Though I like King's extrapolation of Coleridge, ultimately it's a little too simple. I agree that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories. In Part 2 of 2015's THE DOMAIN GAME, I contrasted Conrad with Tolkien:

What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns.

Coleridge's contrast between his chosen form of poetry and that of his colleague Wordsworth is also a much fairer one, and I find it interesting when he says that Wordsworth does not just sedulously reproduce the everyday things he sees, but that he gives them "the charm of novelty." It does take a "muscular intellectual act" to re-organize the things of common experience to make them into art, even art that may argue that it's silly to read fantasy-stories (say, Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY). To pursue an opposition for the dream-metaphor I've introduced, the advocate of realism may often believe that he's "awakened" from the delusional dreams of religion or superstition. I of course relate these modes further to the categories of cognitive restraint and affective freedom, but at present these do not need further elaboration in this new context.

On a small side-note, the decade in which Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on the LYRICAL BALLADS-- said by some to have launched the English Romantic movement-- is also the decade in which the Gothic novel enjoyed its first major flowering with such authors as Radcliffe and Lewis, with a second but distinct outgrowth evolving in the next twenty-odd years with Mary Shelley, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Allan Poe. Though there had been scattered important metaphenomenal works throughout the 18th century, the 19th century would be conceived in the midst of ongoing arguments about the virtues of naturalistic fiction as against stories of fantasy, many of which are still argued about today, and which inform the warp and woof of modern fiction.

THE READING RHEUM: TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING (1968/1999)

My reading of a book on the early works of Colin Wilson, referenced here, moved me to check out one of Wilson's influences, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, in the third edition of the title noted above. 

Of course I'd probably heard of Maslow's basic concept of "peak experiences" roughly since the 1970s, and the author may even have been mentioned in some of the Wilson books I did read, given that the two of them corresponded for some time. I'd also heard bits and pieces about "Maslow's hierarchy of needs," but I simply didn't get around to reading as much of his work as I did with both Freud and Jung.

The above book-- BEING, for short-- might not be the best introduction to Maslow's work, since its chapters are all rewritten lectures that Maslow gave before various audiences. Nevertheless, I got the general schema. Maslow argues that human beings are doubly motivated by their responses to "deficiency" or to "growth" (which Maslow later terms "being," though this term is actually less clear than the earlier one IMO). Deficiency motivations are fueled by the perception that one can only be happy if one can satisfy one's appetite for wealth, food, love, or some similar commodity. Growth motivations are fueled by the perception that one can overcome all boundaries through a process that Maslow termed "self-actualization." Maslow often drew comparisons between his work and that of his predecessor Freud, finding that Freud's entire system was built on the idea of deficiency, with which point I agree.

Now, despite my agreeing with Maslow on all of his main points, I did find the essays in BEING somewhat unexciting. Freud, Jung, and Colin Wilson are all much better at communicating abstruse concepts so as to make the reader excited by said concepts. At present I don't know if Maslow's schema has much application to my overall lit-crit project-- except for this section from Chapter 11, "Psychological Data and Human Values."

The various chapters in BEING don't explore the peak-experience in as much detail as I would have liked, but in Chapter 11, he contrasts the idea of a subject's "great" peak-experiences vs. his "lesser" ones.

...the process of moment-to-moment growth is itself intrinsically rewarding and delightful in an absolute sense. If [these experiences] are not mountain-peak experiences, at least they are foothill-experiences, little glimpses of absolute, self-validative delight, little moments of Being.

What Maslow calls "foothill-experiences" may be somewhat covalent with what he later calls "plateau-experiences." In any case, this has intrinsic appeal to me for its relevance to literary values.

If I were an elitist like the majority of comics-critics, I would value only the peak-experiences, however I chose to define the content that engendered those experiences. Instead, I am (though I've not advanced the term in a long time) a pluralist, and in this context this means that I value even imperfect works when they have at least the SUGGESTION of reaching concrescence with respect to one or more of the four potentialities.

As indicative of my ceaseless pursuit of even the humble "foothill-experiences" as well as those at the peak, in recent months I've been reviewing a large number of the Italian fantasy-films usually called peplum, first for NATURALISTIC UNCANNY MARVELOUS and secondarily for THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA. The more I see of these formulaic productions, the less chance there seems to find any works that hit on all cylinders. When I did find two that developed their mythopoeic ideas-- respectively the 1962 FURY OF ACHILLES  and the 1964 TRIUMPH OF HERCULES. If I wanted nothing but the most well-executed works, then I could stop looking at the subgenre right now, with the conviction that these might well be the only ones that offered "peak experiences."

Nevertheless, even though there are a lot of peplum-films that don't offer even the milder foothill-experiences, there are enough of these to keep the hunt going. For example, a film like the 1962 VULCAN SON OF JUPITER has one good undeveloped mythopoeic idea, that of asserting that if mortals manage to trespass on the domain of Zeus, they can actually diminish the god's power, mirroring the magic by which the ruler of Olympus changes three gods-- Vulcan, Ares and Aphrodite-- into mere mortals. The script doesn't use the idea for anything more than a throwaway rationalization, but I like exploring the potential of even insufficiently-developed ideas.

In Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE, the author suggested than hardcore fans of the metaphenomenal genres (not the word he uses, of course) must be the most optimistic people around, since on a regular basis they plow through reams of badly done junk in search of the proverbial "diamonds in the garbage." But if Maslow's concept is true-- that all human beings have some potential for peak experiences, or at least the related foothill-types-- then the fans' optimism is justified in searching for diamonds wherever one can find them-- and that said diamonds can appear at any level of creative accomplishment.

WORK PLAY ACT PT. 2

At the conclusion of the first WORK PLAY ACT essay I wrote:

How does "play" manifest in a performance, be it live or preserved on celluloid? It may be through innumerable bits of physical "business" that convey to the audience a more organic sense of the character's actuality, or it may be something more sweeping, a mental concept of the character that assembles all of the disparate "parts" of the performance into a whole greater than the sum of those parts. But in any case, the profession of the actor seems particularly apt as a means of distinguishing the interacting forms of work and play.

In the essay I cited Humphrey Bogart as an example of an actor renowned for his performances in many films, not least the 1941 flicks HIGH SIERRA and MALTESE FALCON. I focused on those two films because it was rumored that both lead roles were originally offered to George Raft, an actor of more limited abilities. The likelihood that Raft would have done little for either of these roles does not, of course, mean that Bogart alone could have depicted the characters well. Without doubt, many actors existed then, and still exist now, who could've brought the same level of acting-imagination to those lead characters that Bogart did.

Now, the scripts for both films were above-average as well, so any actor embodying those characters might be said to have "a leg up." In the majority of my movie-reviews I've tended to credit any mythicity films may possess to their writers or their directors. Understandably, the primary aspect of the acting craft relates to the dramatic potentiality: the art of showing how a given character interacts with other characters. The actor can also put across aspects of the other three potentialities-- the kinetic, the didactic, and the mythopoeic-- but in most cases, I would tend to think that the actor translates these from the script he or she works with.

Having conceived of this general rule, I considered possible exceptions. George Raft in MALTESE FALCON would not have been able to bring many of the potentialities of the script to life, even as, arguably, Ricardo Cortez failed to do playing Sam Spade in the 1931 adaptation. But what about actors who realize potentialities that the script does not?

In this review I gave the 1992 SLEEPWALKERS, directed by Mick Garris from an original script by Stephen King, a "poor" rating for its mythicity. If I were rating the film on its other three potentialities, it would prove equally dismal on the didactic level, but might get a "fair" in terms of kinetics (lots of sex and violence). "Dramatic" is a little dicier, since most of the main actors-- Brian Krause, Madchen Amick, Ron Perlman-- turned in no more than serviceable performances for the undercooked, inane script. But I had to give special credit to Alice Krige:

King may have been thinking of Egyptian myths involving incestuous content when he conceived Mary and Charles, for like Horus and Isis in certain tales, the mother and son are sleeping together. As a plot-point this doesn't add much to the story. But it does allow for the film's one source of merit. Though the other actors put across competent performances, only Alice Krige, playing Mary, distinguishes herself. She brings to the under-scripted role a heady ambivalence, in that she's simultaneously a woman jealous of her young lover's possible affections for their targets, and yet also a mother who cherishes her son and perhaps, on some level, wishes he could have a normal life with someone other than her. But as I said, this is only suggested by Krige's performance, for the thud-and-blunder script gives her no help at all. 

Given that I've not seen the script used for the 1992 film, it's not impossible that Krige was given some cues by it, or by director Garris, that enhanced her performance. However, I think it's more likely that she showed the same quality of acting-imagination that I imputed to Bogart in the earlier essay. Much of this imagination was dramatic in nature, just as I've described it in the excerpt. At the same time, Krige's acting shades into the mythopoeic, insofar as one can see in her attitude a complex of emotions comparable to, say, Isis linking up with her son-lover Horus. I doubt that Krige got any help at all from the script, but in a really good script on this mythic theme, Krige's performance would have enhanced by the narrative of such a film. To see how such a film on that theme might be done right, one might look at Stephen Frears' 1990 adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel THE GRIFTERS. Even though the Frears film takes place in a dark and seedy reality, with no metaphenomenal presences whatever, the interaction between son John Cusack and mother Angelica Huston is actually closer to both the dramatic and mythopoeic potentialities of the Isis-Horus myth.

ANATOMY OF A PSYCHO KILLER NARRATIVE PT .3

In Part 2, I attempted to better define the psycho-killer subgenre by contrasting two classes of monster: one whose roots are in psychological processes as modern culture understands them, and one in which the monster originates from processes allied with either archaic folklore and magic, or with innovations in science. However, it belatedly occurred to me that my distinction drew on one made by Stephen King in his 1981 essay-book DANSE MACABRE. Having realized this, I chose not to go back and reread the King passages on this subject, since it's probable that I'd deviate from his theory in any case. In this 2013 review of several CHILDREN OF THE CORN films, I said:

In his nonfiction work DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King made a distinction between "inside horror," dealing with the sort of horror stemming from human motivations, and "outside horror," dealing with horror stemming from the nonhuman.  

Without implicating Stephen King further in my own theorizing, suffice to say that for me, "outside horror"-- or any comparable fictional affect, for that matter-- is based on human perceptions of nonhuman forces or entities. These perceptions include discovering the nature of the nonhuman, which can only be comprehended through one of two cultural concepts. If it's something that seems to hearken back to the earliest times of humankind, it's "magic." If it's something that is better allied to the advance of current human knowledge, then it aligns with the cultural concept of "science." In fiction the concept of magic give rise to such forms as "high fantasy" and 'supernatural fiction," for which there is no handy portmanteau term, while the concept of science has given rise to two non-identical portmanteaus: "science fiction" and "speculative fiction."

Now, based on these brief descriptions, one might expect everything in the latter cultural concept, "science," to also align with the concept of modernity. However, in the history of literature both "fantasy" and "science fiction" have been traditionally rejected by critics who claimed to represent the spirit of modernity, ranging from Edmund Wilson to Theodor Adorno. My interpretation of this phenomenon is that the apostles of modernity emphasize the status quo of current existence to such an extent that anything that either "goes back" or "goes forward" is often rejected out of hand. Thus, even though the concept of science has proven vital in modernity's rejection of the concept of magic, the apostles must reject fiction about science that has not happened yet just as much as they reject fiction about magical forces and entities.

I mentioned in Part 2 that in the domain of cinema, the most common iteration of the psycho-killer monster is a human being whose evil stems from his psychological motivations. Further, I asserted that most films about such monsters generally pursued either a naturalistic or an uncanny phenomenality. However, there are a few monsters who have marvelous aspects, even though I find that these do not explain their evil, as Dracula's evil is explained by the folkloric tradition of vampirism. The most common form of the marvelous psycho-killer is usually a revenant of some kind. Freddy Krueger is the most famous ghostly killer, though sometimes one sees the body rather than the soul survive death, as with the Maniac Cop--

And "Uncle Sam" from the 1996 video of the same name.

And then there are also psycho-killers whose spirits become embodied in nonhuman objects, like the celebrated Chucky.

Occasionally marvelous psycho-killers don't technically die, but are possessed by unfathomable forces that make it impossible to kill them, as with Michael Myers--

While Jason Voorhees is noteworthy for starting out as an uncanny psycho-killer who graduated to marvelous status once his producers decided it was just too complicated to revive him the old way.

What all of these marvelous psychos have in common is that there's usually very little expatiation on the "rules" that make their existence possible, in contradistinction to the type of rule-based narratives one finds in fantasy and science fiction. Again, the aberrant psychology of the psycho-killer, the thing that makes him kill and kill again, is the main feature of these films. I would say this probably applies to psycho-killer fiction in general, but can't claim to be deeply read in the history of prose psychos.

It's also noteworthy that when ordinary humans have to battle marvelous psycho-killers, only rarely do they use any rule-based strategy. The Dream Warriors of the third Freddy Krueger film articulate some very vague rules about forming "dream bodies," but one simply doesn't see a strong emphasis on such abstractions.

Part 4 coming up next.

A FURIOUS ENSEMBLE

Long ago, when I first saw Brian dePalma's 1978 adapation of John Farris's 1976 novel THE FURY, I took note of its extensive violence but gave no thoughts as to whether it qualified as a combative horror-film. Farris' book, like Stephen King's 1980 FIRESTARTER, concerned a secret government project oriented upon capturing and weaponizing persons with strong psychic power. King provided enough of a "combative contest" between his titular "monster" and the evil agency that his book qualifies as combative, as does the 1984 film. But what about THE FURY?

Before re-screening the film, I decided to read Farris's novel for the first time. Like the dePalma film, the book is very violent but ultimately not a work in the combative mode. However, Farris gave me far more pause in determining who the "centric" characters were.

SPOILERS FOR ANYONE ACTUALLY READING

Three characters get the majority of Farris's attention, although he devotes a lot of characterization (more than King does) to his villains, a research group with the fitting acronym MORG. Two of the characters, Gillian Bellaver and Robin Szandza, are teenaged psychics who were once bonded through reincarnation. The third is Peter Szandza, father of Robin, who once worked for MORG but turned on his bosses, largely because they learned of his son's fabulous powers and wanted to enslave him. Robin is not initially in MORG's clutches at the start of the book, but Peter, whom Robin believes to be dead, is looking for the fourteen-year-old, and so are the villains. Robin is in psychic contact with Gillian but she considers him an "imaginary friend" and doesn't have any conscious awareness of her special abilities. Eventually, after a lot of spy-type shooting and masquerades, MORG manages to lure Robin into their clutches, where they attempt, in a roundabout way, to brainwash him. Peter learns about Gillian and enlists her help in trying to free his son. Unfortunately it all ends up badly. Robin's exercise of his talents makes him into a "bad monster," as against "good monster" Gillian. Both Peter and Robin end up dead. Gillian kills the nasty head of MORG and waits to be rescued by her parents. Farris wrote three sequels to the FURY storyline, none of which I've read, but he didn't commence this series of novels until 2001.

So my critical question becomes: just because Farris spent roughly equal amounts of time on these three characters-- are they all centric characters? Certainly I can have no objection to presenting characters who have opposed interests as belonging to a fictional work's ensemble, since in my last sizable essay on the subject,  I cited types like King Kong and Godzilla as belonging to the two-monster ensemble of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA.

My purely subjective verdict, though, is to say that only Peter Szandza and Gillian Bellaver are really centric characters. Even when an ensemble includes a character with whom the audience is not supposed to like-- such as Godzilla-- there must be some sense that the character, while destructive or evil, is still in some way fascinating.

Robin Szandza doesn't quite reach this level, because his transition from innocent boy to destructive monster seems constructed less as its own self-sustaining arc than as a means of providing a problem for Peter and Gillian. Further, after Robin dies, his last act is to more or less spark Gillian into using her powers offensively-- so that even his one good act is all about empowering another character.

I would assume that Gillian is also a major character in the sequels, but am not sure at this point if I'll invest further time in the FURY universe, despite having basically enjoyed the first novel.

ADDENDUM: I assumed wrongly: for the 2001 book, Robin is revealed to be alive after all, but many years have gone by and Gillian has passed on, though she's left behind a psychic daughter to get into lots more trouble.

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."

PROPPIAN PONDERINGS PT. 2

"I don't like brutality.  I like heroics. I like the blood of heroes."-- THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989)


In this essay I review-compared the 1987 film THE RUNNING MAN with the 1989 film THE BLOOD OF HEROES.  Both are films about violent futuristic sports. The first story is literally a "bloodsport"-- one in which the main player is supposed to be killed by the game-- while the second tale is more comparable to modern-day sports stories, in which players may be expected to wreak great violence upon one another in order to win, but not to kill one another.  The first is centered upon one centric hero, a "Ben Richards" (Arnold Schwarzenegger), whose few allies do not share the main stage with him.  The second revolves more around the fortunes of a team that plays the futuristic "Game," which I described as "a combination of football, hockey, and gladiatorial combat."  However, only two of the players, "Kidda" (Joan Chen) and "Sallow" (Rutger Hauer) are centric characters, with their fellow players functioning as support-cast.

Neither the solo-hero Richards nor the ensemble-team of Kidda and Sallow are unambiguous examples of Vladmir Propp's "seeker" function, which Propp defined along these lines: "if a young girl is kidnapped,,,, and if Ivan goes off in search of her, then the hero of the tale is Ivan and not the kidnapped girl.  Heroes of this type may be termed seekers." 

With respect to RUNNING MAN's Richards, the hero is initially not "seeking" to overthrow the corrupt government of his future world.  I've commented that, in contrast to Stephen King's novel, Richards' "light bulb" realization that The Repressive Government Is Bad does not prove credible and seems to be just a tired device to make film-audiences identify with Richards.  Though Richards has risen to the position as the pilot of the police department's helicopter, he's genuinely shocked when his bosses tell him to shoot down civilians.  One might observe that Richards is "victimized" for this action by being sentenced to prison-- which sentence eventually leads him to be recruited by the "Running Man" game-show.  Still, the character's act of disobedience is meant to signal his innate heroism.  In prison, prior to being recruited by the game-show, Richards encounters some members of a resistance group that does wish to overthrow the evil government.  At first he sneers at the rebels, and his words sound like those of a demihero: "I'm not into politics. I'm into survival."  But his actions bely these words: the villain Killian is only able to coerce Richards into entering the game by threatening the lives of the rebels.  And of course Richards' triumphant conquests of the various "Running Man" executioners are part and parcel of the normative image of the adventure-hero.  Thus, though RUNNING MAN is far from being the best example of this hero-type-- in fact, it's pretty crappy next to inspired efforts like Schwarzenegger's TOTAL RECALL-- it still displays the pattern of a "seeker" type of hero, who in turn represents the "idealizing will."

The team of "juggers" in BLOOD OF HEROES really are primarily concerned with survival, at least at the outset.  And also in contrast to RUNNING MAN, there's never any suggestion that they can do anything to alter the political status quo of their futuristic world.  Rutger Hauer's character Sallow is, as I note in my review, the old pro with the tragic past. Long ago he was feted in the big cities, but he offended the aristocrats and so found himself playing his game in rude "dog-towns."  In contrast, the considerably younger character Kidda covets what Sallow lost.  Once she manages to join Sallow's team, she convinces him to return to one of the cities that exiled him, to challenge the professional players in the "Big Leagues."  Kidda hopes to be noticed by League scouts so that she can reap the financial rewards of professionalism.  Sallow, however, is motivated more by his own past grievances, not any practical considerations.  Not only does he not expect to overthrow the aristocracy, he also has no illusions of regaining his lost social status.  But when the professionals accept the challenge, the Game, not its financial rewards, becomes paramount in their minds. Kidda becomes the focus of the game at its climax, since her function is to make the equivalent of a dramatic "touchdown."  Though Kidda has no dialogue during this sequence, the tension of the scene suggests that even in her the spirit of the sport has triumphed over motives of financial advancement.

That said, even if I find Sallow and Kidda to conform to Propp's notion of "the seeker"-- since they certainly aren't forced to challenge the establishment-- they remain representations of "the existential will."  The same admixture of "idealizing will" and "existential will" also appears in my earlier examples LOST IN SPACE and LOST WORLD, and this is consistent with what I wrote on this theory in APES AND ANGELS 2:

I should have said earlier that these two forms of will, these "two souls" that seem to dwell in every human's breast, only appear in fictional characters to the extent that their creators choose to emphasize one or both.  It is possible to have characters who are purely devoted to glorious ideals, or purely devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence.  It is also possible to have combinations of the two, but one form of will must dominate over the other, by the same logic I pursued in JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY and other essays with regard to the admixture of mythos-elements in a given work.

This will probably be all that I have to say for the present on Propp's categories, though I anticipate at least one more essay on the topic of "sports heroes" and "sports demiheroes."