NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART II

 I've now finished the last two chapters of Whitehead's SYMBOLISM lectures, and as it happens, all the best stuff is in the first chapter.                                                                                                                                                           Given that Whitehead only focuses on his particular take regarding symbolism in the last (and shortest) chapter, the title is a little misleading. And when I checked the index for his synoptic work PROCESS AND REALITY, which he began in 1929, I saw that Whitehead only had a few pages devoted to the topic of symbols as such. Given the brevity of this 88-page book, I wasn't expecting anything as comprehensive as Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY or Cassirer's MYTHICAL THOUGHT. But that final chapter doesn't do anything but talk a little about symbolism as one of the abstractions necessary to human culture. In fact, he sums up his opinion of its importance most adroitly in a sentence from PROCESS: "Symbolism is essential for the higher grades of life, and the errors of symbolism can never be wholly avoided." I don't think Whitehead succeeds in establishing a standard as to what constitutes "error" in symbolism, though.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The real concerns of his book manifest in the second chapter; that of advancing his concept of the relatedness of all aspects of reality to one another, rather than trying to see particular aspects in isolation, which he attributes to both the empiricist tradition of Hume and the idealist tradition of Kant. In the second chapter he says, "This Kantian doctrine accepts Hume's naive presupposition of 'simple occurrence' for the mere data... I directly deny this doctrine of 'simple occurrence'... Universality of truth arises from the universality of relativity, whereby every particular actual thing lays upon the universe the obligation of conforming to it." To sum up, the principal strength of SYMBOLISM is that it offers a very concise summation of some of Whitehead's concepts, which I confessed that I found hard to follow in the more ambitious PROCESS.                   

NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART i

 Though I'll probably never gain a thorough knowledge of the Whitehead philosophy due to all my other irons in the Fire of My Philosophy, I did decide to invest some time in a slim book (88 pages) of lectures the author gave at the University of Virginia in 1927. This time, since it is so short, I'm not going to do a summary review as I did with his 1925 SCIENCE IN THE NEW WORLD. Here I'll just confine myself to some quick notes as I go along.                                                                                                                                                In his first lecture, Whitehead chooses to discuss the process of human symbol-making in two phases, "Presentational Immediacy" and "Causal Efficacy." I won't explore either of these concepts at this time. Here my only interest is in noting the similarity of the first term to Susanne Langer's dyad of "presentational" and "discursive" methods of symbolization as expressed in her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY. Since I've recently learned that Langer took some degree of influence from the earlier work of Whitehead, she may have borrowed one of her terms from him. Of course, when I first started writing about the Langer dyad on this blog, I confess I did not realize that her two terms in essence recapitulated a similar dyad in the late 1800s work of William James, that of "acquaintance" and "description," as I discussed in more detail here.                                                                                                                                                                  My only other gleaning from the first lecture is that though I was puzzled by Whitehead's jargonistic term "event" in PROCESS AND REALITY, the first lecture makes his concept clearer, though he does not use that term. Here he states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A."     

RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 2

 I begin by admitting that I'm going to apply I.A. Richards' "tenor and vehicle" categories for other purposes than simply the diagramming of isolated metaphors. Here I'm interested in the potential of the two-part construct to discuss the function of mythicity in literary work.

From the blog's beginnings I had defined "mythicity" as "symbolic complexity," and had frequently used Joseph Campbell's functions as a methodology for showing how different categories of knowledge played into the symbolic process. However, it was only in this 2019 essay that I began speaking of the things being recapitulated in symbolized forms as "epistemological patterns." To boil down a great deal of complicated verbiage, I decided that even though it had become fairly common to speak of modern literary products as "mythic," the elements of literary narratives that most nearly approximate the nature of archaic myths are those that break down the narrative's universe into epistemological patterns-- and that they are more "mythic" according to their sheer density of conception. 

Two years prior to that essay, I had rejected an insight from Northrop Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM that I had prized for years during the formation of my own myth-criticism: Frye's insight that "myth is one extreme of literary design; naturalism is the other." Most of my ruminations about "affective freedom" and "cognitive restraint" probably owe something to Frye's formulation, but in ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 3,  I pointed out that I didn't think Frye's use of the term "myth" cohered with my own. For him, myth was essentially a treasure-trove of literary tropes, which might or might not be complex in the epistemological sense (as per my negative example of OLIVER TWIST). 

Yet, I confess that it's impossible to speak of "myth" without speaking of "tropes." Even when a given narrative in a literary work fails to invoke a complex epistemological pattern, a given reader may often recognize mythic potential through a manipulation of tropes, even in a simplistic manner. I've frequently remarked that little if anything in the early SUPERMAN stories of Siegel and Shuster does one find anything I consider "mythicity." But juvenile readers of SUPERMAN comics recognized Superman as a breakthrough in the sense of bringing a super-powerful hero into a contemporary setting. Those young readers probably didn't think of the hero's alleged archaic models, such as Herakles and Samson, as being anything more than tough guys killing beasts and monsters, and so they would not have even apprehended the epistemological aspects of the archaic figures. 

So I began thinking: are not familiar tropes the only means by which archaic myths communicate their epistemological patterns? Stories of Herakles have nearly no verisimilitude to them; they involve familiar stories of the hero's feats, his humiliations, and his ultimate death. Say that one believes that Herakles' victory over the Hydra represents, say, the archetypal hero's struggle against chthonic nature. No one in the story will voice such an interpretation; only later rationalists of the myth might do so. Yet the metaphysical epistemological pattern is present even if it is not stated outright, being communicated only indirectly, through the familiar arrangement of events in the trope-scenario. It's on this same level that I believe Frye was thinking of "the birth-mystery plot" that he finds in OLIVER TWIST.

In Richards's essay, he claims that before his essay critics had to make clumsy formulations of the two parts of metaphor being "the underlying idea" and "the imagined nature," or "the principal subject" or "what is resembles." He offers a more precise set of terms, calling "the thing referred to" as "tenor" and "the thing compared to it" as "vehicle." As a more concrete example, Richards offers a poem which compares "the flow of the poet's mind" (tenor) to "a river" (vehicle), though he points out that in some constructions the tenor is the most important element, and in others, the vehicle assumes greater significance.

My current concept, then, is that the expanded metaphorical structure that I have called "the mythopoeic potentiality" in literature may also be broken down into these two conjoined elements, where the epistemological pattern is "the thing referred to," the "tenor," while the familiar tropes through which the pattern is expressed is "the thing compared to it," the "vehicle." 

And so, in a roundabout way, I end up validating one aspect of Frye's argument re: myth and naturalism, even if I do so in a way that allows me to also validate the very different insights of authors like Jung, Cassirer and Campbell.

RHETORICAL FLOURISHES PT. 1

 I've recently finished I.A. Richards' 1936 THE PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC, which, despite its imposing title, is a slim book consisting of six lectures the literary critic gave on the interrelated topics of rhetoric and metaphor. I don't believe I have read any of his work previous to this one, though in other essays I had encountered what may his most oft-quoted analysis: that of defining "metaphor" as a construct of two essential elements, which he labeled "the tenor" and "the vehicle." In Part 2 I will look at how these terms impact on my current concept of metaphorical meaning.

One of the odd things Richards says in Lecture is a self-comparison to the work of Alfred North Whitehead, whom I first discussed on this blog here.

It will have been noticed perhaps that the way I propose to treat meanings has its analogues with Mr, Whitehead's treatment of things.

Given that my reading of Whitehead was spotty at best, I'm no expert on him any more than I am on Richards. Still, I'm not seeing much resemblance between the advocate of process reality and the critic who became best known for the boosting of "close reading" and the New Criticism. It's possible, since Richards' next line is somewhat facetious, that this was an inside joke on his part.

In this short book Richards does address some other salient matters besides the "tenor and vehicle" subject. For one thing, he's comparable to Philip Wheelwright in assuring readers that the very richness of human language is an advantage, rather than a deficit, to the practice of rhetoric and its related usages of metaphor. But even more useful to me is his concept of conceptual thinking as "sorting."

A perception is never just of an *it;* perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to the highest-- whatever else it may be-- is sorting.

He further supports this by asserting that "...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker."

Any regular readers of this blog should be able to anticipate my attraction to this notion, given the considerable quantity of categories I've reeled out over the past thirteen years. And this influences me not only in terms of theory. In one of my introductory pieces to my newest blog, THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA, I remarked that I didn't feel particularly interested in reposting my "supercombative" film reviews by order of publication or alphabetically by title. What I found most challenging was to repost the essays by "sorting" them according to actors who had distinguished themselves in each of the items under review-- making it a little tougher on myself by establishing that each actor got only one post to his or her credit. (In a few cases I may expand this to include other creative personnel when I feel like it.) 

Oddly, it's in this section on "sorting" that Richards uses the ten-dollar word most associated with Alfred North Whitehead, which is also the word I have remorselessly appropriated for my own use.

A particular impression is already a product of concrescence. Behind, or in it, there has been a coming together of sortings.

I don't see in this statement anything that resembles Whitehead's concept of concrescence, but it's of minor importance, since Richards does propound a stimulating discussion of the ways in which human beings utilize the constructs of metaphor-- more on which in the subsequent post.

 

RUNNING ON ABOUT DISCOURSE

In the 2016 essay AFFECTIVE FREEDOM,COGNITIVE RESTRAINT and in the two parts of 2019’s AND THE HALFTRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I aligned the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities with, respectively, my categories of “cognitive restraint” and “affective freedom.” I made heavy use of Ernst Cassirer in these essays, but for this one, I’ve decided to take a different path in order to dilate on the salient differences between the ways these potentialities operate.

In literature as in other cultural forms, all potentialities express themselves through processes of discourse. The discourses of “lateral meanings” deal with concrete subject matter—that of what sensations the subject experiences, and of the subject’s emotional reactions to those sensations. In contrast, the discourses of “vertical meanings” concern themselves with abstractions, with the didactic making use of “ideas” while the mythopoeic makes use of “symbols.” For the sake of argument, I will treat both ideas and symbols as if they existed as discrete monads, which is not the way either are experienced. Both ideas and symbols are best expressed in the form of typical story-tropes. Levi-Strauss was pleased to term these tropes “mythemes,” conveniently ignoring how such monadic forms were dispersed throughout all forms of human communication, not just myth.

Didactic discourse and mythopoeic discourse are not as intimately entwined as those of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. The discourses can appear independently of one another, or they may intertwine within a narrative to support one another, or they may conflict with one another so as to confuse the narrative. An example of the last-named would be Steve Ditko’s story “Am I Roma…,” which I explicated it in this post.

The word “discourse” stems from a Latin root meaning “to run around.” However, all four discourses run in different ways, though I’ll only discuss the two vertically aligned potentialities here.

The didactic discourse runs in the fashion of a single contestant in a one-on-one foot race. The course of the race may be winding or straight, but the contestant runs in as direct a line as possible from start to finish. Didactic discourses may employ idea-tropes as disparate as “Christ died for our sins” or “Capitalism is doomed by its own excesses,” but the discourses are always aimed at teaching some sort of linear lesson to listeners.

In contrast, a mythopoeic discourse is more akin to a team of runners in a relay race, opposed, naturally, by a corresponding team. There’s still a goal that a given team aspires to reach first, but achievement of the goal depends on the successful interaction of all players on the team. Symbols can be used to help convey linear lessons, but their primary potency is poetic and associative. In my first post on the ARCHIVE, I quoted William Butler Yeats, who asserted that “symbols are an endless inter-marrying family.” The interactions of members in a family is of course analogous to the concerted efforts of a relay-team, and symbol-tropes in a mythopoeic discourse only win their “race” when they work so as to reinforce one another.

As noted, the vertical discourses align respectively with the categories I’ve termed “cognitive restraint” and “affective freedom.” Didactic discourse aspires to teach, and while some teachers seek to help students learn how to think for themselves, it’s implicit that each student will still end up choosing to advocate favored ideas over non-favored ones—in essence, “restraining” any potential tendency to advocate the latter idea-group. Even writers who analyze myths, both religious and literary, must use didactic discourse to assign a particular set of values to the myths analyzed. In this essay I showed how Claude Levi-Strauss advocated a “scientific” approach to myth and stated that he believed that mythic activity was on its way out of human culture. By contrast, Ernst Cassirer championed myth as an irreducible element of human culture. But both had to use didactic discourse to explain their respective ideas and philosophies. The didactic discourse thus is at its strongest within the sphere of non-fiction but has a more tendentious hold in fiction.

The mythopoeic flourishes in fiction but only appears sporadically in non-fiction, and then usually only in commentaries on fictional constructs, such as Raymond Durgnat’s FILMS AND FEELINGS. Mythopoeic discourse doesn’t so much send a message as open up all lines of communication. In contrast to the old saw “If it feels good, do it,” the mythopoeic discourse says, “If it seems significant, symbolize it.”

Mythopoeic discourse aligns to the category of “affective freedom,” meaning that symbols can combine in any way a creator may please to arrange them, irrespective of logical amenities. To be sure, mythicity takes on greater value when an author relates the symbols to the epistemological patterns that the audience recognizes from the world of experience. But I’ve argued, as did Cassirer in MYTHICAL THOUGHT, that mythic symbols are not gain their power from simply copying what audiences see around them. Cassirer had a more Platonic emphasis than I do. On page 3, he speaks of how Plato valued myth as signifying “the world of becoming” in contrast to the adherents of the allegorical school, and throughout the book he emphasizes myth’s potential to dissolve the boundaries between inner reality and outer reality (particularly on page 156). I agree, but for me the dissolution comes about when myth and its near relative literature make use of “real” epistemological patterns for “unreal” purposes.

In mythopoeic discourse, “perfect freedom” not only doesn’t mean “perfect service,” said freedom can be free of any utilitarian purpose. Case in point: Robert E. Howard’s 1936 novelette BLACK CANAAN, recently reviewed here. I pointed out that although Howard placed his story of an aborted race-war in a real location-- an Arkansas town named Canaan-- the author showed no real interest in reproducing the realities of life in that time (post-Civil War) and place. I noted that the outcome of the Civil War made no difference to the novel, and that Howard had no interest in what inequities might have contributed to the mutual hatred between the whites of Canaan and the blacks of the neighboring swamplands, called Goshen. Going purely by the content of the existing story—while acknowledging that the author was forced to cut his original draft for publication—it’s apparent that Howard wanted a pure “clash of civilizations.” The only motivation for the strife is rooted in the tropes of fantasy-fiction, in that Howard imagines the blacks of Goshen as having made diabolical alliances with elder voodoo-deities. Yet this is certainly not a didactic argument, since Howard says absolutely nothing about the presumed Christian orientations of the Canaanites.

Indeed, the only references to Judeo-Christianity devolve also to the blacks of Goshen. Howard named his imaginary swampland after the Egyptian domain where the pre-Exodus Jews were kept in bondage, before they escaped the land of the Pharaohs into Canaan. This symbolic trope is reinforced by the history of the way blacks of pre-emancipation America identified with the pre-Exodus Jews, which I tend to believe a Southerner like Howard could not help but know of. Thus, in the story the minions of Saul Stark, by rising up against white Canaanites, duplicate the action of the archaic Jews who conquered archaic Canaan and transformed that land into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

But what message was Howard sending in the story? None, I would venture. While he certainly could have infused his story of a fictional uprising with his own political opinions, as did many other authors, here Howard only cares about a conflict of good and evil. And even Howard’s concept of “good” may be problematic, since the righteousness of protagonist Kirby becomes compromised by his unquestionable hunger for the “forbidden fruit” of the quadroon voodoo-priestess, the Bride of Damballah. If Howard had wanted only to denigrate the evil represented by Black People—whom, to be sure, he denotes with the customary Nasty Taboo Word of the period—he could have left out this tantalizing sorceress. From first to last, though, she has Kirby under her thrall, and she’s defeated only by the chance intervention of a minor support-character. The hero enjoys the final triumph over the evil Stark, but Kirby doesn’t win because he’s white, and in many ways Stark and Kirby are mirror-images of each other, each striving to make sure his own race holds the whip hand.

There’s no harm in admitting that such a story has no moral to offer, but it’s far from proven that a story with a moral is necessary superior. On a personal note, in my youth I probably liked a good number of preachy stories, since my own ethos was still being formed. But today I tend to find even the best “idea-tropes” in fiction to have less value than the best “symbol-tropes,” while in non-fiction I often fault authors who load their arguments with clumsy symbolism, as per Frederic Wertham’s tortuous comparison between children and garden-flowers. Both discourses have their strengths, but the races they run come off to best effect on level playing-fields.  

CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

In Part 1, I wrote:

Conscresence, more than its roughly equivalent term "coagulation," suggests the process by which seemingly unrelated phenomena "concretize" into a greater whole. Thus images, symbols and story-tropes which can only have a very limited meaning by themselves, take on greater depth when associated with others that have a reinforcing effect.

What causes this "reinforcing effect," though? Upon rereading August's FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3, it occurred to me that most of the mythcomics essays I've printed here depend on the authors having organized their symbolic constructs around what I called "aspects of discursive symbolism." The full context is as follows:

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

In other words, in order for a narrative to manifest the strongest form of symbolic concrescence-- a.k.a. "hyperconcrescence," as I currently like to call it-- the author(s) must first draw upon what they know of the real world, the world which can be represented by discursive symbolism (or "work"). Then, to make this knowledge function in a fictive world, the kernels of information must be transformed into the tropes of presentational (also called "expressive") symbolism (or "play"). Thus the mind's ability to "work hard" proves essential to the process of "playing hard," and therefore, "playing well."

I have to reiterate that it's always possible for an author to "dumb down" the expressive symbolism in a narrative in order to get across some limited didactic message. When an author does so, he has to some extent sacrificed "play" on the altar of pure "work" by making the narrative function as persuasive rhetoric. That said, creators who have deep reservoirs of imagination may still at times produce narratives that have the qualities of mythic play even though the authors are trying to convert an audience to some position.

Case in point: Dave Sim's CEREBUS. Most of the time, particularly in the later issues, Sim is seeking to persuade readers of his philosophical positions, and this is probably no less true in the narratives I've deemed mythcomics (the last part of LAST DAYS here, and the first part of GUYS here) as in a narrative I deemed a "null-myth" (the horror of CHASING YHWH). But irrespective of Sim's conscious intentions, his imagination is "working" full blast at the same time his conscious intellect is formulating the didactic schemes of the prior two works, while in YHWH, his imagination has sort of given up the game. So, although discursive symbolism is at work in all three, in CHASING YHWH there is no such transformation of Sim's rhetorical stance into the playful discourse of art. Thus, even though I personally disagree with Sim's position re: "fanboys" as he expresses them in GUYS, I had to give him some props for "promoting a satiric version of Spider-Man to make his points about creeping emotionalism." Thus there's an expressive underthought to complement the rhetorical overthought.

I will expand on the final paragraph from FOUNTS PT. 3:

I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

In similar fashion, I regard Sim's sociological connections between comic book people and "creeping emotionalism" to be incorrect on two counts: one, because there's no way to prove such a connection, and two, because even if there was one, how would it be categorically different from the "creeping emotionalism" present in any other ingroup-- say, Canadian hockey fans?

Hyperconcrescence, then, most often takes place when the discursive mode of work, the overthought, reinforces the expressive underthought. The main exceptions are those narratives that seem to have no strong discursive overthought, like the origin of the Golden Age Hawkman. Yet even here, author Gardner Fox is conjuring with metaphysical tropes that were discursively organized by their pagan proponents. And thus familiar tropes, such as the one regarding the soul's fate after death, still exhibit the modern author's understanding of the original structuring principles, even within the venue of a superhero comic book.

BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE

...the first Greek philosophers were looking for the "origin" or "principle" (the Greek word "archê" has both meanings) of all things. Anaximander is said to have identified it with "the Boundless" or "the Unlimited" (Greek: "apeiron," that is, "that which has no boundaries")... some have pointed out that this use of "apeiron" is atypical for Greek thought, which was occupied with limit, symmetry and harmony. The Pythagoreans placed the boundless (the "apeiron") on the list of negative things, and for Aristotle, too, perfection became aligned with limit (Greek: "peras"), and thus "apeiron" with imperfection.-- INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.-- HAMLET, Act 2, Scene 2.

My plans for the third and last part of UNCANNY GENESIS involve my using certain linguistic terms to expand further on my concepts of artifice, affective freedom and cognitive restraint. So first I'm going to take a shot at clarifying how these concepts diverge from language and all the forms of symbolism underlying language.

I always meant to draw some comparisons between Anaximander's apparent categories of apeiron ("the boundless") and "perata" (the limited) with my categories of freedom and restraint. Admittedly, Anaximander was addressing the origins of the physical universe, which has no direct bearing on my explanation of the universe of art and literature. For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe-- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

However, the closest I came to systematizing these ideas of affective freedom and cognitive restraint is probably this passage from this essay:

One mythical idea to which Cassirer refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation, even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not.

Rational conceptions of causal relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C, resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.

Persons of a positivist slant might point out that one cannot truly call the human "ability to imagine" to be truly boundless. Still, as Hamlet points out, the imagination certainly makes it possible for one to escape the bondage of a nutshell-- even a nutshell called Denmark-- with the vision of being "a king of infinite space." True, the Dane is too melancholy to enjoy such fantasies, because he's also hemmed in by "bad dreams," presumably brought on by his knowledge of the real-world corruptions of his mother and uncle. But Hamlet is a character in a tragedy, doomed to perish along with most of the Danish court, and so his verdict on the imagination may not be the final word.

The tension between these two states-- of being able to imagine anything, yet being hemmed in by the physical world in which one necessarily exists-- is one that Northrop Frye attempted to define:

Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle's word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story. Myths of gods merge into legends of heroes; legends of heroes merge into plots of tragedies and comedies; plots of tragedies and comedies merge into plots of more or less realistic fiction. But these are change of social context rather than of literary form, and the constructive principles of story-telling remain constant through them...-- Northrop Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

My ARCHETYPE VS. ARTIFICE series, beginning here, was devoted to explaining why Frye's use of the term "myth" was not viable, and why I coined the term "artifice" to replace it. "Affective freedom," then, is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in artifice, while "cognitive restraint" is the principle underlying an author's use of tropes based in verisimilitude.

Further, an author's usage of tropes, whether it is dominated by artifice or by verisimilitude, creates a "literary universe" for each narrative universe, be it a stand-alone novel or a series of interconnected stories. Since I've asserted that no author of fiction ever fails to use tropes both from the domain of artifice and of verisimilitude, this has led me to distinguish three modes of literary "universe-building," which I have termed "the naturalistic," "the uncanny," and "the marvelous." I went into considerable detail about the definitions of each universe when viewed through a lens provided by science-philosopher Roy Bhaskar, but happily these deeper definitions do not pertain to the current argument.

All of the concepts relating to the phenomenality of fictional universes are communicated through language, but they are not linguistic concepts as such. Thus, when I attempt in UNCANNY GENESIS PT 3 to explicate the three phenomenalities with reference to linguistics, this must be seen as a illustration and not as an attempt to conflate the very different domains of language and of phenomenology.

COGNITIVE CHAINS

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.-- Rousseau.

I don't have any interest in visiting Rousseau's antiquated explanation of the disparity between freedom and its lack, but his aphorism does throw a little light on the acquaintance/discursive duality I've been investigating lately.

I re-read the relevant sections of Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, and her division of "presentational symbolism" and "discursive symbolism" are definitely structured in a similar fashion to the dualities propounded by James and Russell. The main difference between Langer's formula and earlier "a/d" formulations is that Langer has been heavily influenced by Cassirer's distinction between "mythical thinking" and "theoretical/discursive thinking." Thus, rather than conceiving of "acquaintance" in a generalized sense, Langer substitutes presentational symbolism as a way of conceiving how human beings separate the data of the senses into discrete, meaningful symbols that do not "describe" anything, but simply "present" themselves to the subject in terms of their emotional values.

I favor Langer's alteration, but as I noted in FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3, the two forms of symbolism interpenetrate one another, possibly more than Langer credited:

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind...

Earlier I expressed these two tendencies in a more opposed fashion in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

One mythical idea to which Cassirer refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation, even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not... Rational conceptions of causal relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C, resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.

This is where Rousseau becomes relevant. For me, man is "free" only in the sense that he can imagine any number of situations that may (or may not) contribute to his real freedom. The same man is "in chains" because he will always be faced with circumstances arising from simply being a corporeal entity subject to all sorts of realistic limitations.

More later.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3

I've frequently cited this passage from Jung on the combinatory nature of archetypes:

"[The archetype's] form, however ... might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited , only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts."-- Jung, THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, p. 79.

Pursuant to the current discussion, the aspect of the archetype that can be "inherited" is only a "possibility of representation," whereas the specific representations-- say, whether or not the sun is represented as the boat of Ra or the chariot of Helios-- are limited to whatever culture conceives them. So the pure form of the archetype may be compared to Langer's presentational symbolism, which simply discerns the role of a given archetypal trope in the culture. But given that Langer's other category, discursive symbolism, is focused on the pursuit of logic and rule-making, is there any way in which a culture's elaboration of specific representations aligns with that form?

In JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE, I wrote:

In Jung's view, myth, both in its archaic and modern manifestations, is a creative response to the archetypal experience.  He opposes the idea of "myth as primitive science" advanced by E.B. Tylor and James Frazer, claiming that primitive man possesses an "imperative need... to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events."  I agree, but with the caveat that in many instances primitive humans did look for aspects of "outer sense experiences" that were regularly replicated.  This is the sort of thing Tylor mistook for primitive science; the idea that, for instance, a story about a sun-god was an attempt to understand how the real sun worked. 

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

Now, Jung was a psychologist, not a theoretical anthropologist, so he never focused on the ways archaic cultures utilized myth. When he pursues the rituals of alchemy, he's not especially concerned with whether or not the ancient alchemists were alluding to real or imagined chemical processes: he's concerned with how alchemical processes parallel the experiences of patients undergoing visionary states. In contrast, Joseph Campbell was more focused on the social functions of archaic religion, and thus he's arguably been a better guide to me than Jung in terms of seeing how myths in all eras encode what I called "sacred clues." I stated as much in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR:

For the majority of my essays on both THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE and NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!, I have somewhat privileged Campbell's functions in terms of analyzing the mythical representations found in both canonical and popular fiction. That's because Campbell's functions deal with functions of information-- forms he earlier termed "metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological"-- rather than pure states of consciousness. 

I would now add that Campbell's four functions are intrinsically discursive in nature, and so he proves this in this passage from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, presented in greater context here:

... there is a third factor, furthermore, which has everywhere exerted a pervasive influence on the shaping of mythologies, a third range and context of specifically human experience, of which the developing individual becomes inevitably aware as his powers of thought and observation mature, the spectacle, namely, of the universe, the natural world in which he finds himself, and the enigma of its relation to his own existence: its magnitude, its changing forms, and yet, through these, an appearance of regularity. Mankind's understanding of the universe has greatly altered in the course of the millenniums -- particularly most recently, as our instruments of research have improved. But there were great changes also in the past: for example, in the time of the rise of the early Sumerian city-states, with their priestly observers of the heavenly courses; or in that of the Alexandrian physicists and astronomers, with their concept of an earthly globe enclosed within seven revolving celestial spheres.

However, even though discursive observations like the heavens' "appearance of regularity" appear in both religious and literary myths, they have a very different function than they do in the purely discursive discipline of science. Scientific investigations can be executed within what Wheelwright called a *monosignative* language, where every word used is intended to signify a discrete phenomenon. Myth and literature have an innate tendency toward the *plurisignative,* which, as I noted in a Cassirer-quote in Part 2, is also necessary to the formation of human language.

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

ADDENDUM: I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 1

In WHITE NOISE I addressed two types of knowledge. I'll continue to call these "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description" after Bertrand Russell, with the stipulation that I'm not following his system, given that I've barely read Russell's work. I have read quite a bit more William James, and admire his work above what I know of Russell's philosophy, but I also have not read the particular work I cited in NOISE, the 1895 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.

It stands to reason that even if James and Russell were among the first to frame the problem in these terms, many philosophers before them had grappled with similar questions. For instance, I quoted James's reference to perceptual and conceptual knowledge in PRINCIPLES, categories which appeared in Schopenhauer fifty years earlier (albeit in German).

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters:

....even the most avant-garde artists can't do without some representational functionality. If James Joyce wants a character to go through a door, and doesn't have it in mind to discourse on the doorness of doors everywhere, then the door through which the Joyce character steps will be no less functional-- or even "conventional"-- than the one through which a Poe or Doyle character steps.

Within the context of a purely fictional story, a merely functional representation of a door is no more real than, say, a door in another story that embodies "the doorness of doors." But the purely representational door is supposed to function within a story's diegesis as if the person seeing it knows it purely through "knowledge by acquaintance." A door that was "super-functional" would have to have its "Platonic qualities of door-ness" explicated via "knowledge by description."

In 2011 I glossed my Frye-derived remarks with my reading of Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. This book is also more concerned with evaluating literary works rather than epistemology, though I suspect that Wheelwright was familiar with the two forms of knowledge described by James and Russell-- not least because both of them are cited in FOUNTAIN, and one James reference is to PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. Without re-reading Wheelwright's book in toto, I can't be sure that it has no epistemological concerns. However, this passage from METAPHOR AND REALITY seems to imply such concerns in the author's formulations of "stheno-language" and "poeto-language:"

…meanings that can be shared in exactly the same way by a very large number of persons—in general, by all persons using the same language or the same group of inter-translatable languages. Examples are so obvious that they may be mentioned without explanation. Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

 In this paragraph, Wheelwright is not talking purely about functional representations within a poetical work, but about the way said representations are built up in human society. It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.

SIGNMAKING AND WORLDBUILDING

I concluded Part 3 of ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE  with this statement:

it stands to reason that artifice as a mode embraces both simple variables ("stereotypes") and complex variables ("archetypes.")

I followed up this distinction in Part 4:

I may have on occasion connected "affective freedom" with the author's ability to generate discourses of symbolic complexity, but if I have done so, this would be a mistake. "Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude, and that freedom can be found in any uncanny or marvelous work, regardless of its symbolic complexity, a.k.a. "mythicity." 

Although both of these are abstract conceptions, the best way to figure out how they work is to treat them as if they were physical objects, able to be broken down into their constituent parts.

Archetypes, both in their Jungian and Fryean conceptions, stand outside the realm of the semiotics disciplines of Saussure, Pierce and Morris. Yet clearly many ideas from semiotics coincide with those of archetypal psychology and "myth criticism." Frye's concept of simple and complex variables sounds a lot like Morris's distinction between straightforward "signals" and more involved "symbols," and they both also resemble Wheelwright's arguments for a spectrum of language ranging from the *monosignative,* or "denotative," to the *plurisignative,* or "connotative." So even though the term"archetype" may have special usages, it's not hard to see that it bears a strong relation to semiotics, the study of signs, even though Jung probably would not agree that an archetype reduces down to a linguistic sign.

"Artifice," however, cannot reduce down to something as elementary as a "sign." I said that it lined up with an author's intention to privilege tropes peculiar to literary expression than to "tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude." My use of "trope" is probably closest to the definition cited at Dictionary.com:

any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and
irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense.

Within a naturalistic phenomenality, the author must always privilege verisimilitude, though it's always possible to bend the rules of the strictly probable to suit the audience. The 'birth-mystery plot" from Dickens' OLIVER TWIST is an artifice designed to begin the main character's life without any of the familial support that most children receive in their upbringing. Nothing that happens in the early chapters of the novel is purely outside the domain of the naturalistic, in which, as I've said before, reality is both coherent and intelligible. Yet, once Dickens has generated the maximum pathos from his character's plight, the author bends the rules so that Oliver's first, Fagin-inspired attempt to burgle a house puts him in contact with the character of Rose, who just happens to be Oliver's long-lost aunt. At the same time, Dickens must use a certain amount of verisimilitude in setting up the situation-- for instance, Fagin's gang must have good reason to think that the house is worth robbing. There's some artifice in Oliver's deliverance from the hardships resulting from the mystery of his origins, but not enough to render it "anti-intelligible--" and further, all the "literary or rhetorical devices" Dickens uses, whether allied to artifice or to verisimilitude, should all be seen as tropes.

So, whereas archetypes can be seen as related to, or identical with, those atomistic entities we call "signs," both the artifice-mode and the verisimilitude-mode are related to those "molecular entities" built up from the sign-atoms. Jung probably did not use the term "trope" back in his day, but in some essays he did use "motif" as a more neutral term than archetype, and I imagine that for him "motif" carried the same meaning that "trope" does for readers today.

One scholar whom Jung influenced, Joseph Campbell, was attracted to the use of the term "signs," though his orientation seems more toward ethology than semiotics. In this early essay, I hazarded a parallel between Campbell's concept of supernormal signs and Frye's concept of complex variables:

For the purpose of this argument I'll assume that though Campbell's "supernormal sign stimuli" don't share the same philosophical etiology as Frye's "complex variables," the two writers are essentially talking about the same thing: the power of certain signs to evoke far stronger responses-- affective and perhaps cognitive as well-- than do their opposite numbers: "normal sign stimuli" and "simple variables." Both Campbell and Frye frequently addressed the interpenetration of art and myth, though naturally each man hewed to his specialty.

However, of late I've been doubting that "supernormal signs" are adequate for talking about either Fryean or Jungian archetypes. Ethologists evolved the notion of such signs for talking about the instincts of lower animals, to better understand how, to use one of Campbell's examples, a newborn chick might fear the image of a hawk even though the newborn has never seen a hawk before. But most lower animals are not able to respond to images or motifs beyond the level of the simple "sign." In contrast, as soon as human beings were able to formulate language, and to begin the long process of symbolic elaboration seen in culture, they took the step into the domain of the pure symbol. The images we see in early man's cave-paintings may vary between sign and symbol, but by the time we see an image as elaborate as "The Sorcerer" from Trois-Freres, we're probably not dealing with a simple sign, but with a "molecular" trope built up from many "atomistic" signs. Thus I would say that as a rule, there are no "supernormal signs" in human culture, only "supernormal tropes."

A partial exception is suggested by this passage from Philip Wheelwright, last printed here:

Certain particulars have more of an archetypal content than others; that is to say, they are 'eminent instances' which stand forth in a characteristic amplitude as representatives of many others; they enclose in themselves a certain totality, arranged in a certain way, stirring in the soul something at once familiar and strange, and thus outwardly as well as inwardly they lay claim to a certain unity and generality.-- FOUNTAIN, p. 54.

I gave my own example of both an "eminent instance" and its "non-eminent" relation:

It's true that one cannot say, in any meaningful context, that real eagles are more important, more significant, than real mudlarks. However, in any symbolic universe the symbolic (or gestural) eagle is worth more than the symbolic/gestural mudlark. 

And yet, by the end of the essay, I've noted that the richness of the symbolic eagle is still something that resulted from an ongoing process:

The concept of complexity, which suggests an "eminent instance" with a huge accretion of associations, not unlike the outer periphery of a black hole:

In short, then-- Tropes, good. Signs, not as good.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT DISCOURSES

In keeping with my observations in DISCOURSES WITH LIVING SYMBOLS, I've advanced the idea that when an author who is in touch with the mythopoeic potentiality-- even if only temporarily-- he displays the greatest ability to generate discourses of symbolic density. These discourses may exist either for the author's own delectation and illumination (Kafka) or, more typically, for the entertainment and/or enlightenment of his audience.

In my essay POETRY IN MOTION PART 3 I noted how Frye made a distinction between the narrative and significant values of literary narratives. To boil Frye’s argument down to its essentials, he regarded a given element as having a “narrative value” to the extent that it functioned to play a role in the way the narrative was constructed, while a “significant value” applied to an element which was meant to serve the purpose of a pattern hypothetically extrinsic to the narrative, what is usually called “theme” or “meaning.”

This week’s “near myth” essay analyzes MAYO CHIKI, a manga derived from a Japanese “light novel” series. My analysis identified a psychological pattern of clansgression, but this pattern was largely extrinsic to the narrative in which the characters are involved. This pattern can only be deduced by looking at Jirou’s psychological quirk-- that of desiring a love-partner who bears some resemblance to his younger sister—as if it were the hidden meaning toward which the story’s events point. This, then, would be dominantly a “significant discourse," since the narrative serves the primary purpose of piecing together the story's events, after the fashion of inductive reasoning, in order to reveal a meaning. 

However, it’s possible for an author to structure his narrative not to reflect a hidden significant value, but more as a commentary on other narratives. This reflects the "top-down" approach of deductive reasoning, and I term this form a “narrative discourse.”

I touched on an example of a “narrative discourse”—albeit without this terminology -- in my essay on “The InjusticeSociety of the World,” Robert Kanigher’s first story for the Justice Society of America series in ALL-STAR COMICS. Kanigher’s tale was not the first time a superhero feature had teamed up a group of villains to oppose a hero, or group of heroes, but it seems to be the first time a comics-writer used this narrative situation to create a Carroll-esque mood of inverted values. This too stands scrutiny as a psychological pattern in my quasi-Campbellian sense. However, the reader can only apprehend the particular qualities of Kanigher's narrative by comparing them to the broad patterns of other, similar narratives.

This distinction came to mind as a result of my mediations on this week's mythcomic, which will be immediately forthcoming.

DISCOURSES WITH LIVING SYMBOLS

In DISCOURSES WITH DEAD MEN, I said:

So any artistic narrative always has this dual potential: it can be produced for a wide audience, or for the author alone. Psychic mediums notwithstanding, artistic narrative-- which term here subsumes also music and the visual arts-- is almost the only way that artists can keep "talking" with people long after the artists themselves are dead. To some extent non-fictional narrative shares some of the power of the arts, but artistic narrative seems to hold much more power to remain relevant to audiences born long after the narrative was originated.

I also mentioned in the same essay that I began addressing the subject of "discourses" recently as a way of sussing out the function of the mythopoeic potentiality, whose content is sometimes hard to separate from that of the other three.

Yet, once one is able to isolate a work's symbolic discourse, it often provides much more of a meaningful connection to the author's work than any of the others. One may not care for an author's ability to transmit sensory experiences, personalities, or intellectual ideas, or if one grants that the author has some ability, one still may not like the world-picture he transmits. But there's something ineluctably persuasive about the symbolic process. One can reject whatever intellectual ideas may be attached to it, and yet still admire the author's ability to converse in the language of symbols.

I'll take as example C.S. Lewis, whose non-fiction I've frequently discussed on this blog. While I find Lewis's ruminations on literature stimulating, his remarks on religion have often struck me as narrow-minded and self-serving, particularly in MERE CHRISTIANITY. In this book, Lewis responded to questions about the Christian religion, originally propounded via radio. Here's the one I disliked the most.

“Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the 'Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.”

Intellectually, this is nonsense. Lewis is trying to distance religion from its involvement in the witch-hunts of the past by claiming that modern religionists are too educated to believe in such nonsense. Yet he can't completely condemn the fanatics of yesteryear, stating that if he could believe in people who made deals with the devil, he would regard them as "filthy quislings" deserving of death. His position also suggests that at the time he wrote this, whatever "wiccan" practices existed in England had gone so far underground that an educated man like Lewis could believe that no such persons existed in modern times. Lewis passed in 1963, so it's possible he never encountered the idea of modern witches worshiping archaic deities that were in no way affiliated with Satan. Even if Lewis had known of such cults, the writer would probably have given them no more respect than outright Satanists.

Yet, within his creative work, Lewis could entertain syncretic visions of religion. Narnia, despite being patterned on Christian belief, reproduces many of the images and icons of Greek paganism, and in THE LAST BATTLE, there is a dim suggestion that Aslan is not exclusively a "Christian" deity, but will give sanctuary even to righteous men who do not worship him.

The irony of my title is that, while I know that symbols are not alive apart from the role they play in the language of living persons, they can take on a "life" of their own, Indeed, the symbolic formulations of an author may seem much more "convivial" to a reader than the characters or the plot that serve as vehicles for symbolic events-- sacrificial dramas, world-saving conflicts, etc. Nor is there any symbolic formulation that is absolute. Lewis's Aslan embodies one among thousands of literary sacrificial dramas, and one may name others that share none of Lewis's particular themes, but which still possess the same "unity of action" I've identified with strong symbolic discourse in this essay.  The 1971 film THE OMEGA MAN is concerned with many intellectual subjects foreign to Lewis, not least being an American preoccupation with racial matters. However, it is an evocation of the sacrificial pattern no less valuable than that of NARNIA. I quite preferred the film to its prose source material. Yet even though I found Matheson's I AM LEGEND less formidable in its mythic "unity of action," there would have been no OMEGA MAN had the novel not suggested the theme to the film's scriptwriters.

Despite my usage of the established term "unity of action," the unity involved in plurisignative communication is far more about unifying a plurality of affects, both sympathetic and antipathetic. For myths of sacrificial figures, it's about transcending the death that we know all mortal entities must experience. Aslan literally transcends death, while Robert Neville's transubstantiation is more figurative, but symbolic constructs may be said to enjoy both literal and figurative transcendence, if only because, having never lived, they can never really die.

MERCURIAL RISINGS

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

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

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

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

Now Jung calls intuition an "irrational, perceiving function" while thinking is a "rational function of judgment." Despite this difference, both of them seem to be secondary processes for purposes of literary identification.

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

In Part 3 I also said:

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

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

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

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

COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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