THE READING RHEUM: SUNDIVER (1980)

 

David Brin enjoyed a pretty strong breakout in the early 80s. It's been said that his "Uplift Trilogy" conferred the fan-term "uplift" on a standard SF-trope: that of superior aliens using genetic manipulation and breeding techniques to transform non-sapient beings into fully sapient entities. The second book in the series, STARTIDE RISING, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The third. THE UPLIFT WAR, failed to win a Nebula but won awards from Hugo and Locus.

But the first book in the series, which was also Brin's first published novel? Well--

I must note that the Uplift Trilogy is a discontinuous series, sharing a common universe but no continuing characters, so far as I know. SUNDIVER is implicitly centuries in Earth's future, when humans have made contact with assorted aliens ("Eatees"), some of whom are "patron races" have uplifted "client races" into sapience. Earthpeople are something of a scandal to other Eatees, because humans evolved to sapience without a patron. However, Earth-tech did at some point advance to the point that humans could "uplift" semi-intelligent animals, mainly chimps and dolphins, to co-equal stature. SUNDIVER's main character is a scientist involved with uplift procedures, though we don't see him doing his specialty. 

Instead, Jacob Denwa, because of his relationship with some of the friendly Eatees. gets invited to join a crew of humans and Eatees on a ship, the Sundiver. This vessel journeys to the periphery of Sol itself, to study what seem to be sentient "Sun Ghosts" dwelling in the midst of the solar orb. Sounds like a "blazing" good time, right?

Sadly, SUNDIVER is not an enthralling investigation of a new form of life, but rather, what might best be called a "locked ship mystery." In this situation, a group of passengers on a vessel are confined in each other's company, only to find that there are one or more parties aboard who have insidious or ulterior motives. In fact, the novel even has a wrap-up chapter in which one of the "detectives" sums up, in the best Scooby Doo manner, how the culprit attempted to perpetrate "the hoax of the anthropomorphic Ghosts."    

Since I mildly enjoyed Brin's later novel THE POSTMAN and plan to read the second UPLIFT book, I think SUNDIVER was mostly just an excuse for Brin to set up his conceptual universe, not to tell a compelling story. The characters are two-dimensional and not all that consistent, and Brin injects some modern political content that dates the novel somewhat. Early in the novel, Denwa describes in glowing terms how Eatees on Earth have turned some humans out of their own cities, which is not universally a good thing in the 2020s. There's a political debate about whether or not Earthpeople might've been covertly uplifted by some unknown patron, but this has no resolution and is merely an excuse to motivate a couple of those parties with ulterior motives. 

SUNDIVER offered a quick and easy introduction to the Uplift universe, but it's pretty thin stuff overall. 

LOST, IN THE MAIL

 Posted on CHFB.

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So no one, including me, has added to this LOST TV show thread since the program went off the air. Similarly, the last time I blogged about LOST was also 2010. I've thought about doing a rewatch, but it has always seemed too daunting. I wonder if others here, who got something out of the show (albeit maybe not total satisfaction) have ever done partial rewatches (as I have), or if it's just too much trouble. 

Today I had the notion that the only way to approach LOST, lo these 15 years later, would be to go in armed with two instruments: (1) a profundity detector, and (2) a BS detector. Because whenever I think of the show, I think of some ideas that were incredibly profound, ad others that-- were just thrown into the narrative "fire" to keep the pot boiling. 

Now, I've done series-rewatches for whole shows before-- Classic TREK, BATMAN, KUNG FU. But in traditional episodic shows, it's usually easy to separate the good episodes from the bad episodes. In a show with a soap opera structure, it's a lot harder to separate good from bad, because everything in the narrative flows together.

Maybe before attempting the monster that is LOST, I need to find something roughly similar, but not as overwhelming in terms of the sheer number of characters and incidents. 

ADDENDUM: Here's a quickie example of detected BS. Many LOST characters are named for famed philosophers or scientists, but how often did the names signify anything beyond ntriguing nerd-viewers? The "immortal man" Richard Alpert was given the birth-name of the 20th-century yoga popularizer Ram Dass. Why? Possibly just because the Hindu name "Ram Dass" means "servant of God," and that's what fictional Alpert was to Jacob. But did the name mean anything else in Alpert's overall story-arc? No, so what small meaning it might have had devolves to relative bullshit.      

EXTREME UNCTION FOR FUNCTIONS

 A stereotype, or stereotypical device, is identical to what I called a "simple variable" in this essay. For my purposes a simple variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that is as close as one can conceive to a bare function; one that is static with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities.

An archetype is equivalent to what I have called a complex variable, following Northrop Frye's logic on this subject. A complex variable is any item, event or entity within a narrative that proves itself dynamic with respect to associative links to other items, events, or entities. -- A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY, 2014.

 

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. -- BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE, 2018.

I recently conjured forth the ideas of functionality and super-functionality from the vasty deeps of 2014 in my last essay. I then found myself cross-comparing those early thoughts to those more recently expressed this October, in both QUICK NUM NOTES and THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD. In the latter essay I opined that both the "metaphenomenalities" privilege tropes of artifice over those of verisimilitude, though works of "the uncanny" seek to create the impression of greater alliance to verisimilitude than one finds in works of "the marvelous." (Thus everything that falls into the pattern of "the uncanny Gothic" always comes up with some artifice to explain away phenomena that seem to be marvelous.) My "October surprise" was the insight that from one POV, the artifice of the uncanny may be just as "artificial" as that of the marvelous, even if the rationales are opposed to one another.

So, by the logic established in the 2014 essay, both the uncanny and the marvelous are defined by "super-functionality," at least in an ontological sense. This means a potential to take on multiple functions within the ontological structure of the narrative, which functions may align with the epistemological structure, or may not. But this "super-functionality" is also an "anti-functionality" insofar as pure functionality is being overshadowed in favor of things that track only in terms of literary artifice. To recapitulate one of the examples from QUICK NUM NOTES, when Ian Fleming has his crime-chief Blofeld execute a subordinate with an electric chair rather than with a pistol or baseball bat, it's because Fleming wants his readers to sit up and take notice of what a singular crime-boss Blofeld is-- that he's NOT a mundane criminal like Al Capone.                                

DOUBLING YOUR IDENTITY PLEASURES

A random turn of mind took me back to some of my ruminations in my 2012 post FINAGLING THE FOCAL PRESENCE.  In this essay-- in which I was still using "focal presence" rather than what I now call a "focal icon"-- I gave two examples of narratives in which "fake phenomena" outshone the actual characters in the two stories. One is the Headless Horseman, who, as any reader knows from reading the tale, may be a boogieman spawned entirely by the imagination of Brom Bones, trying to freak out his competitor in romance, timid Ichabod Crane. Yet despite the possibility that the alleged Hessian ghost might just be Brom in a costume, the Horseman has arguably transcended his origins, becoming a diegetically-real character in other narratives.

In the same essay I also discussed the 1935 film MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. In this film, a man is murdered by some blood-letting contrivance. A year later, two apparent vampires begin stalking the family of the murdered man. Unlike the Hessian ghost, these supposed bloodsuckers, Count Mora and his daughter Luna, are apparently a part of the region's established history. The narrative twist is that the haunting horrors are just actors, hired by a detective to expose the murderer from the previous year. Yet though the actors themselves are not important, any more than the detective or his quarry. The images of Mora and Luna, of a father-and-daughter clutch of vampires, are the icons that dominate the movie-- even though, like the Horseman, they're not diegetically real.

I then had the thought that most of the "double identities" throughout the history of fiction carry the same dynamic. Brom Bones doesn't get unmasked as the headless phantom, but a million other Gothic ghost-makers do. Yet even once the hoaxers' identities are revealed, who cares about them anymore? From reading Doyle's HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, I know that the phantom hound is an illusion created by a schemer named Stapleton, and I even dimly remember his motivation behind his scheme. But readers don't remember Stapleton. They remember the giant hound.

The same thing is generally true of both heroes and villains who assume costumed identities. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne sustain more interest than Stapleton, but still, not as much as their costumed identities. The Lee-Ditko Spider-Man might be the first superhero in which there was a strong concentration on the trials and vicissitudes in the life of the hero's private life. Still, Peter Parker is only important because he's Spider-Man.

Now, it's not impossible to have someone don a mask or costume in which no new identity is created. In the 2014 essay PURPLE SAGE OBSERVATIONS, I mentioned a minor masked rustler from Zane Grey's RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE. Yet this character, name of Bess, does not sustain a separate identity; she just goes about wearing a mask to conceal the fact that she's female. This sort of action I termed merely "functional" in the narrative; it doesn't carry any symbolic value beyond its base function in the story.

By extension, then, "super-functionality" applies to all those stories-- no matter how well or badly executed-- in which a schemer creates a phantasmal second identity. To be sure, I'm not sure there's ever been a masked western badman who was "mythic" in the full sense of my use of the word. In comics there seem to be dozens of these mediocre sagebrush malefactors, often based on animals-- the Fox, the Cougar, the Tarantula, The Masked Maverick. None of them are super-functional in an epicosmic sense, but they can be considered so in an ontocosmic sense. Similarly, most of the masked champions in all popular media aren't too much more memorable than their regular identities, except for Zorro, the Lone Ranger (and Tonto), and possibly the 1950s Ghost Rider.

Indeed, the act of a character donning what in my system is called "an outre outfit"-- whether or not the outfit is meant to mask his/her identity-- is an illusion that conveys the truth within the story-- and thus this trope becomes intimately associated with that of the "phantasmal figuration." 

ADDENDUM: For a lark I scanned through all the "outre outfit" entries on my movie-blog, to see how often such uncanny works had resulted in movies with epicosmic mythicity. Tarzan got the most entries, which is interesting because his "outfit" is his near-total lack of clothes, signifying not a calculated illusion but his linkage to his beast-patrons. The Phantom of the Opera does fit the "phantasm" category, since he does pretend to be a ghost, though his imposture is not the most compelling aspect of his mythos.

         

          

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 2

 in 1924, Freud elaborated on masochism, suggesting for the first time that it is quintessentially feminine to find pleasure in pain—indeed that masochism is “an expression of the feminine nature.” -- Freud quote from "The Economic Problem of Masochism."

Sublimation (psychology):  the diversion of the energy of a sexual or other biological impulse from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use. -- Dictionary.com

Freud located the etiology of masochism in personal guilt. I assert that the real source of true, syndromic masochism is that of a transpersonal manifestation of shame, arising from being physically or psychologically unable to protect oneself. 

Having never been a woman, I don't know how mothers talk to their daughters (or any parallel relationship) about their gender's getting the short end of the sexual dimorphism stick, at least in terms of self-defense. Mothers may tell their young ones that there's nothing they can do about the biological factors that make men stronger, except to figure out ways to get around the male of the species. But internally, there should be, in females as much as males, some distress at knowing that one's physical nature puts one in danger of humiliation and/or death. 

One coping mechanism-- termed "sublimation" by Freud and others -- might be for female humans to enhance their potential for reproductive security by feeling awe at superior male strength, which then serves the long-term biological purpose of benefitting their offspring's survival. This biological imperative may be the source for female preference for a male type that Leon Seltzer called a "caring caveman." The caveman part might not be strictly necessary once humans were no longer living in caves, but aesthetic programming is not easily superseded, even in an era where, in theory at least, money takes the place of muscle as a means of males protecting females from incursions.  

Sigmund Freud certainly understood that sublimation was necessary to allow any humans, males or females, to cope with uncomfortable social situations, judging from this quotation:

What we call the character of a person is built up to a great extent from the material of sexual excitations; it is composed of impulses fixed since infancy and won through sublimation...-- "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex."

 So I don't know why Big Sigmund had to characterize women alone as "masochistic" for embracing whatever aspects of pain and/or humiliation were involved with the act of coitus. It's possible that the first human to experience pleasurable pain was of the female persuasion, but if so, I suggest that the pleasure didn't stem from a uniquely feminine nature. And compared to the females of various lower species-- such as lionesses, who have to put up with barbed penises-- human females have it fairly easy in the copulation department.

At base sublimation might be best viewed as an endurance test, one that also applies to males. What did it mean to caveman males-- assuming that any of them figured out how much a role their primeval thrusts played, in the formation of progeny-- to know that for all their strength, only women could keep the race alive? Going on archaeological evidence, it seems that humankind's earliest human-form deities were the so-called "Venus figurines," embodiments of female procreative power. Did males sometimes feel irrelevant before that power? Did they sublimate that sense of powerlessness into other goddesses? That might explain the rise, in historical times, of war-goddesses like Athena, Anath and Ishtar' deities who broke down the normal categories of "men make war, women make babies." And maybe, in later eras, this sublimated sense of humiliation resulted in quotations like the following, from the pen of the man whose name was used to categorize the syndrome called "masochism."

I saw sensuality as sacred, indeed the only sacredness, I saw woman and her beauty as divine since her calling is the most important task of existence: the propagation of the species. I saw woman as the personification of nature, as Isis, and man as her priest, her slave; and I pictured her treating him as cruelly as Nature, who, when she no longer needs something that has served her, tosses it away, while her abuses, indeed her killing it, are its lascivious bliss.

My guess as to why Freud didn't intuit masochism in both genders as a sublimating activity is that for him, anything that wasn't normative heterosexual intercourse flew in the face of his idea of sublimation. For him, sublimation was all about adapting to reality, rather than indulging formulating elaborate fantasies, be they of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or of Margaret Mitchell. 

 

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 1

 In the history of humankind, the reasons for cultures to impute shame to their members are as varied as snowflakes-- failure to honor dead parents, marrying outside one's clan, and so on. However, I submit that there's a universal source of shame in all cultures: an individual's inability to protect oneself, or at least to try to protect oneself.

All human cultures have some form of marriage to ensure the promulgation of their offspring. Cultures surely vary as to how long the children are protected by the elders of their communities. But since all children must become adults in time, all kids in all cultures are given some imperatives about how to deal with conflicts as they progress toward that goal.   

In current American culture, kids very likely receive more cumulative oversight than they do in primitive cultures, due to the long years that juveniles endure in public school. Thus I'll skip over the more personal imperatives that are communicated to juveniles by their older family-members, and address how both male and female children develop systems of social validation while within the educational system.

While kids are in theory still protected by adults within that system, clearly school is where kids begin sorting themselves into mini-communities, primarily based on gender. Boys hang with boys, and girls with girls, and this inevitably leads to conflicts based on gender expectations. In these mini-communities of virtual strangers, it's easy for insecure kids to boost their egos by attempting to shame potential victims. This practice is termed bullying, and whether the groups use direct violence or indirect gossip to reduce victims to a state of abjection, the motive remains identical. Those who are singled out as victims by the aggressors usually have only two options for response: "fight" or "flight."

Now obviously there are even smaller communities-- clubs, for instance-- in which males and females interact-- but these are generally under close adult supervision. Except in incidents of extreme anger, bullying activities are frequently committed "on the sly," as there's also some ego-boost to be had, not just from shaming a fellow student, but also doing so without a teacher being aware of the act. Arguably, when males bully females, or vice versa-- more often through insults than through acts of force-- the bullies must be especially circumspect, to avoid accusations of sexual impropriety.

I should add, as I wind up this prelude, that I distinguish between simple social testing-- in which members of the kid-communities seek to suss out other members-- from bullying, which is a one-way street, in which the bully imposes shame for egoistic reasons. But there's also one source of shame that transcends all cultures-- that of female-male relations-- and it's the only type of shame that can be transformed into a source of pleasure. 

     

  

RAVISHMENT OVER RAPE PT. 2

 I concluded the first part of this "series" with this passage:

I like Seltzer's emphasis of the term "ravishment" over the inexact term "rape," and the former term takes in what I've loosely termed "fake-rape." But I will probably keep using the term as one of my subject-tags, since at times the term does take in the real-life, non-fantasy crime.

Today I decided to amend all of the tags reading "rape" into a word-pair, "rape/ravishment." This allows me to take in any discussion of the real-world crime, or its unambiguous representations in fiction, as well as "actions that look like rape but are better called ravishment." One famous ravishment discussed in the earlier essay was Margaret Mitchell's ambivalent climax (so to speak) of the Scarlett-Rhett relationship in GONE WITH THE WIND.

Of course all fictional representations of rape exist only as functions of particular stories. In TARZAN OF THE APES, the hero's rape-happy ape-brother Terkoz exists to threaten Jane Porter and give Tarzan the chance to rescue his lady love. Rape is an ordeal that heroines like Ghita of Alizarr and the Marvel Comics Red Sonja endure in order to become heroes. It can also be an ordeal for male heroes, though obviously the cultural connotations for males will be different than for females. 

"Ravishment," though, carries a distinct value which is related to, but not identical to, the real-world act of rape. Whether ravishment has a real-world counterpart is often difficult to ascertain, because it would depend not on a physical act but on the emotional motivation that facilitates the act. My next essay will explore some of those emotional nuances.