RIDDLE, MYSTERY, ENIGMA

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...-- Winston Churchill (or maybe his speech-writer(s), BBC broadcast, 1939.

The primary definitions of Churchill's three metaphors for Russia from Dictionary.com are as follows:

RIDDLE: "a question or statement so framed as to exercise one's ingenuity in answering it or discovering its meaning; conundrum."

MYSTERY: "anything that is kept secret or remains unexplained or unknown."

ENIGMA: "a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation."

Macmillan Online has the following:

RIDDLE:  " a question that seems impossible or silly but has a clever or funny answer"

MYSTERY: " something that you are not able to understand, explain, or get information about"

ENIGMA: "someone or something that is mysterious and difficult to understand"


With infinite time and patience I could probably list out all cited definitions to these three overlapping yet different words.  But even if I did so, and determined that there is a statistically dominant definition for each, I don't think those statistically-arrived-at definitions would cancel out my conviction that Churchill's three words have a particular function in that speech about Russia.  In short, in order to make his point about the unfathomability of Russia, Churchill chooses three words that all connote unfathomability in increasingly greater degrees.  And this becomes important to my theory of literary causality in that each of the three phenomenalities the degree of intelligibility becomes greater.  

Just as a "riddle" is a perplexing arrangement of words that does (as Macmillan says) does finally have some rational or quasi-rational answer, the domain of the naturalistic is one in which all objects and situations, however perplexing they may be at a given time, are ultimately intelligible to reason.

A "mystery," as both cited definitions note, does not automatically have an answer-- which might mean that the majority of the ratiocinative works generally called "mysteries" perhaps ought to have been called "riddles," since almost all of them have answers of some sort.  The two cited definitions place an emphasis on the attempt of a subject to gain knowledge or information that is hard of access.  There is no guarantee, as with a literal riddle, that the mystery will be unveiled, though I would argue that this does not mean it cannot be.  Further, not all mysteries are revealed as plays upon rational understanding, as with the set of initiation ceremonies known as the Eleusianian Mysteries.

Of the two cited definitions for "enigma," I believe that Macmillan's is essentially identical to its definition for "mystery," so I disagree with it. Dictionary.com's suits me more in that it suggests that the "occurrence or situation" referenced may be not just temporarily unknowable, but may be permanently "puzzling or inexplicable."

Now, the best way to show how this eventuates in the world of literature is to focus on how intelligibility is reflected in the narrative function of "the anomaly."  Once again, I draw upon the definition supplied by academic Frank Cioffi:

This reality [of a traditional narrative] is disrupted by some anomaly or change--invasion, invention, or atmospheric disturbance, for example--and most of the story involves combating or otherwise dealing with this disruption.

Unlike Cioffi-- who does note that anomalies can stem from such mundane factors "such as family, the love ethic, manly heroism, the American Way, and the like"-- I link the nature of the anomaly to its function within a bifurcated causality, one comprised of both a regularity aspect and an intelligibility aspect.  In recent essays I've given copious examples as to how narratives conform to, bend, or break with the regularity aspect, but the "riddle, mystery, enigma" progression suggests to me a way to provide a structure for the differing degrees of intelligibility. 

In this essay, I attempted to assess to employ an argument about "degrees of probability" the same way I now advocate "degrees of intelligibility." I don't dismiss the arguments re: evidential probability, but they are not as useful as I had hoped to catch the affective distinctions between the three phenomenalities.  But the examples I provided work just as well for this current argument:

Sticking only with the Doyle stories this time:

THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS is a naturalistic RIDDLE. The conspiracy Holmes unmasks is one that is fully intelligible to reason, and once the answer is known, it has no further repercussions.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES is an uncanny MYSTERY. In the earlier essay I argued then, and still argue, that "the explanation of the Hound via the rules of ordinary causality, while it serves a valid narrative purpose, does not dismiss the affective sense of strangeness from the narrative."

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN is a marvelous ENIGMA, because the anomaly around which the plot is structured is something outside the rules of "causality's regularity aspect," i.e., "a special drug that can somehow transfer the attributes of an animal to a man."  This level of intelligibility is enigmatic and insoluble specifically because the author must introduce some "fudge factor" that allows him to justify the appearance and/or behavior of the anomaly. 


I should note that the sheer number of "fudge factors" is irrelevant to the degree of enigmatic intelligibility.  It's quite true that Jules Verne did not need to provide as many "fudge-factors" in justifying the existence of his imagined submarine as H.G. Wells did in justifying the existence of gravity-nullifying Cavorite in FIRST MEN IN THE MOON-- nor does it matter, contrary to Verne's opinion, that in real life human beings could and did create real submarines, while no one has come close to synthesizing anything like Cavorite.  Both devices are equally marvelous, and equally enigmatic, within the sphere of the fictional universe their authors create.

I should also note that in some narratives it's possible that an uncanny or marvelous situation or entity may appear as a "throwaway," rather than being as central to the narrative as Cioffi's anomalies are. In this essay I reviewed two films in which marvelous occurrences or entities appear within the scope of comparatively mundane storylines.  But I tend to think that even when an uncanny or marvelous item intrudes upon a naturalistic framework in this marginal manner, they still transfer their qualities to the whole, as much as if they were central to the narrative.

TAKING A SHOT AT SIMPLIFICATION

Earlier today I tried to boil down my ideas re: Bhaskar on a forum, more than anything else to challenge myself and see if I could simplify my views for general consumption.  I don't think that I succeeded, but I'm reprinting it here for my own possible future use.

____________________

I've recently finished reading a book on philosophical views relating to science, Roy Bhaskar's A REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE.  Bhaskar is only concerned with science, but as I read it I wondered if his ideas could have some application to my literary theory.


As I said above, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why some tropes belong to "horror" and some don't. To repeat three of my earlier examples, some persons might not feel that Victor Hugo's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME qualifies as horror, or anything else remotely belonging to "fantasy."  But almost everyone would agree that THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is horror and MASK is not, even though all three deal with physically deformed characters.

Roy Bhaskar argues for his view of science against two other prominent views.  According to him, the main way that empirical science judges the nature of the world is in terms of "regularity determinism;" i.e., phenomena can be judged by their regular, repeatable nature.  According to him, Kant and the neo-Kantians judged the nature of the world in terms of "intelligibility determinism," which is to say phenomena can be judged by their accessibility to human understanding.


I see the paradigm of empirical science differently from Bhaskar. I agree that when humans begin to look at physical phenomena in terms of their regularity, and then find empirical reasons for the regularity in terms, of, say, the movements of heavenly bodies, this gives rise to a concentration on regularity.  But at the same time, this generates its own form of "intelligibility determinism," because the budding young empiricists believe that the world is fully intelligible-- that is, things need not be explained by supernatural forces-- because humans can understand the world's regularity aspects.

Now, my arguments from all this goes like this:

Whenever authors create a fictional world, they draw on the idea that the empiricist idea that the world is both regular and intelligible.  


If they create a naturalistic world, then it's like the world of MASK: nothing in that world violates the regular functions of the cosmos, and all things are basically intelligible as well.


If they create a marvelous world, even if it just has one marvelous item in it, like a deformed killer who rises from the dead (paging JASON VOORHEES), then it is a world that is no longer regular in the empiricist sense, and so also cannot be intelligible to empiricist reason.


But some worlds are "uncanny" in that even though there is nothing in them that violates the laws of a regular cosmos-- like PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and EYES OF A STRANGER, for two-- there remains something "unintelligible" about them.  Even the killer of EYES OF A STRANGER, who is in no way as bizarre in his appearance as the Phantom, conjures up a similar emotion of "dread" and so is not easily reducible to natural forces, which should conjure primarily "fear."


Hmm, I started this post, like the last one, with the idea of avoiding "proposition-based language," but I gave up halfway through.  Oh well.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 3

Part 1 provided a grounding in theory for my "bifurcated fictive causality," and Part 2 applied the two aspects to the naturalistic and uncanny phenomenalities.  In this essay I'll address the necessity for this system in terms of exploring certain radically opposed, yet intersubjective, authorial approaches to defining that domain which I call "the metaphenomenal."

In my first review of a Tarzan film on my film-review blog, I compared the divergent ways in which two authors viewed the Tarzan character:

Many fantasy-film reference works are divided as to whether or not Tarzan films belong under their rubric. I believe R.G. Young includes them all, but John Stanley's CREATURE FEATURES guide only mentions those that have some strong fantasy-content. But in my view Tarzan by himself is a metaphenomenal figure, even putting aside the facts that the "great apes" that raise him in Burroughs don't exist in the real world and that Burroughs' common language for all his creatures does not exist either. Tarzan is a fantasy-figure who may appear at times to conform to the demands of real-world causality, particularly in the more "realistic" films like TARZAN'S GREATEST ADVENTURE (1959). But affectively he is a fantasy no matter how cognitively realistic he may appear to be, though 1984's GREYSTOKE comes pretty close to banishing most of the fantastic affects of the original concept.

Tarzan, as I asserted in Part 2, is a prime example of a character whose adventures do not seem to challenge the "regularity aspect" of fictive causality,  except in those cases when he encounters tropes out of fantasy or science fiction, such as ant-sized humans, man-eating plants, or John Carter of Mars. 

 I can't precisely use the encyclopedia-author R.G. Young as support for my theory of the uncanny phenomenality, for I've noted that he also includes many works that I deem "naturalistic," such as CUTTHROAT ISLAND.  Nevertheless, though Young includes such genres as swashbucklers and what he calls "heavy melodramas," he never includes anything that smacks of down-to-earth "reality."  Thus he includes certain crime melodramas, possibly because crime suggests mystery and mystery suggests horror.  But he does not include anything comparable to a melodrama about union politics (NORMA RAE) or environmental pollution (ERIN BROCKOVICH), even though certain types of "crime" do appear in these films as well.

In contrast, though John Stanley cites many horror-themed films in his CREATURE FEATURES in which the regularity aspect of causality is not violated, like the 1960 PSYCHO, he wasn't willing to cite any Tarzan films except those that contain the aforesaid fantasy/science-fiction tropes, like the man-eating plant in TARZAN'S DESERT MYSTERY.

Now, from an absolutist POV, the divergent views of Young and Stanley re: Tarzan cannot be reconciled.  Either Tarzan is a "fantasy-hero" or he is not.  But I argue that the two authors may be responding to Tarzan in different ways. 

Stanley, though he is happy to include Norman Bates in CREATURE FEATURES, clearly would not include Tarzan at all if the ape-man had confined himself to fighting exotic native tribes or locating lost cities --that is, as long as the cities possessed no magical or super-technological people or objects.  This argues that in Tarzan's case, Stanley recognizes Tarzan as "fantasy" only when a Tarzan story violates "regularity causation."

Young, in contrast, lets in both Tarzan films and Boston Blackie films, but not Norma Rae. Why?

To the extent that any solution to the problem can be imagined when dealing with internal responses, it may be possible that Stanley is more influenced than Young by the appearance of genre-tropes.  Thus Stanley is willing to include many "psycho-films" in his compendium that I personally would not include, simply because there is a well-documented tradition to the effect that, "Psycho films are also horror films."  But there is no strong tradition that "heroes raised by animals" are either fantasy or science fiction, so that in the absence of such a tradition, Tarzan films enter his encyclopedia only if they have things like giant man-eating plants.

I theorize that in contrast Young's selection is more informed by the search for that quality I have called "violent sublimity."  Sublimity, as I have defined it in many essays on this blog, does not depend upon violence as such, only on a sensation of overwhelming forces.  Yet it's axiomatic that many if not all works predicated upon violent conflict should create a sublime affect. I have argued, in essays like this one, that sublimity is only clearly demonstrable with works that demonstrate "spectacular violence," and that in each phenomenality the sublime manifests in a specific manner given the nature of power in that domain. 

I might probably not find a sublime level of violence in a naturalistic "Boston Blackie" film, but I would, and do, in a Dirty Harry film.  Possibly Young does derive such a sublime affect from a less spectacular level of violence, but if so, that does not mean that either of us is wrong about the way in which we achieve that affect.  I advocate mine, and explore mine, purely because it is mine.

I argue, then, that many persons who have attempted to define the boundaries of "the fantastic" have in some way responded to the aspects of regularity and intelligibility.  To put it another way, the fans who don't want to view Batman as a superhero-- referenced here-- would be of the party that must have specific fantasy/SF tropes present before they can deem Batman a superhero.  In contrast, those who accept Batman-- and Zorro, and the Lone Ranger-- to be relevant to the superhero idiom are those who are willing to cross "genre-fences," and comprehend the way in which heroes with "realistic" powers may have "unrealistic" tonalities.


The confusion stems from the fact that what English-speakers call "horror, fantasy, and science fiction" have become the three most-referenced "super-genres" of the metaphenomenal, and from the fact that these super-genres have been ceaselessly interbred throughout the twentieth century-- principally, though not exclusively, by authors of popular fiction.  I may explore some of these combinations in a future essay.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2

Empirical realism is underpinned by a metaphysical dogma, which I shall
call the epistemic fallacy, that statements about being can always be
transposed into statements about our knowledge of being. -- Bhaskar, p. 16.

 

Given that I have recently proposed the bifurcation of fictive causality into two intertwining but separable aspects, it behooves me to look back at some of the examples I've given in earlier essays to see if they support my conception of those aspects: "regularity" and "intelligibility."  I should note that of the two "regularity" is the primary aspect, given that the human conviction that the world is intelligible to cognition arises from the fact that some if not all phenomena demonstrate patterns of regularity, thus allowing human beings to create empirical hypotheses as to what forces make those phenomena act in a regular manner. Still, as Bhaskar points out above, it's a fallacy to assume that a statement about (physical) being can be transposed into a definitive statement about our knowledge.


In the INTERSECTING AXES essay, I pointed out that both the "naturalistic" and "marvelous" phenomenalities are unitary in terms of what I chose at that time to call the aspects of "body" and "non-body"-- also roughly comparable to Cassirer's "causality" and "efficacy." In contrast, the phenomenenality of "the uncanny" was one in which "body" was at odds with "non-body." I  surveyed examples of my "ten tropes" in search of the way that they could "reveal the uncanny affects in terms of the ambivalence between body and non-body." Now I would say that the ambivalence is one between the aspect of regularity-- that is, the statement that all physical aspects are regular and unchanging, at least in comparison to the irregularities found in the domain of the marvelous-- and the aspect of intelligibility.  In the sphere of the naturalistic it's impossible for anything to be truly unintelligible, but within the sphere of the uncanny it's quite possible to see the same forces of "regularity causation" at work, and yet to see them result in something mysterious; a.k.a. Rudolf Otto's "overplus."
Going trope by trope:

ASTOUNDING ANIMALS-- In the AXES essay I mentioned both Melville's Moby Dick and Steven Spielberg's Jaws as examples of this trope in its uncanny phase, but did not supply an example of the naturalistic phase. Since I've not read Peter Benchley's original JAWS novel, I've no idea whether or not he made his shark "astounding" in spite of the creature's naturalistic limitations. However, I have seen the 1956 film adaptation of MOBY DICK, and would say without question that its prime creators, John Huston and Ray Bradbury, were completely innocent of any intimation that the whale might be something other than a big dumb brute.  In contrast to Melville's leviathan, the whale is purely "intelligible." 

BIZARRE CRIMES-- I commented on three literary or cinematic examples of characters-- Sade's Juliette, Fleming's Blofeld, and Lew Landers' Doctor Vollin-- who committed crimes "for motives that go beyond the ordinary ends of 'acquisition,'" which was simply a very Bataillean way of speaking of the motives appropriate to naturalism.  I supplied no counter-examples in which "body" and "non-body" were in a naturalistic equilibrium, but in this essay I studied two Tod Slaughter films side by side. Whereas Slaughter's villain in CRIMES OF THE DARK HOUSE might be atypical in comparison to your run-of-the-mill naturalistic criminal, everything he does is characterized by nothing but simple "acquisition." In contrast, Sweeney Todd, like the three evildoers cited above, has become a pop-fiction boogieman, and his motives come down to "the psychopathic love of killing"-- which, being a very Sadean mindset, lines up with Bataille's concept of expenditure.

DELIRIOUS DREAMS AND FALLACIOUS FRAGMENTS-- For this trope I supplied no examples at all in the AXES essay.  This one, though, seems unproblematic given that every sentient human being has experienced dreams, and rarely do people ever dream things comparable to Alice's extended dream of Wonderland, or the peripatetic dreams of this fictionalized version of Hans Christian Andersen. Within the sphere of the naturalistic, such highly constructed dream-voyages are very unlikely if not impossible; real dreams are too chaotic to produce such narratives.  Thus a film like 1952's HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN subscribes to a more "intelligible" view of the dreaming process, for this version of Hans does not dream his great fairy-tales.  Rather, they spring out of the function of half-conscious day-dreaming, which in this film is explainable by virtue of the Adlerian theory of compensation.

ENTHRALLING HYPNOTISM AND ILLUSIONISM-- Here I cited the famous hypnotist Svengali as an example of a hypnotist/illusionist whose abilities went beyond the intelligible limits of real practioners of this art.  The 2011 HUGO, with its fascination with showing how a particular form of illusionism works-- that of George Melies' early cinema-FX-- provides a decent enough counter-example. Whereas Svengali's masterful hypnotism can create a silk purse out of the sow's ear that is Trilby, the fictionalized Melies is a brilliant showman, but his talent is still fundamentally intelligible.

EXOTIC LANDS AND CUSTOMS-- Again I cited only an "uncanny" example of this trope, citing how the 1941 serial JUNGLE GIRL took the real-life African tribe of the Masai and created a fictional lion-worshipping tribe.  But a better contrast between "intelligible" and "anti-intelligible" versions of the same concept is featured in this review of two versions of Wilkie Collins' famous mystery novel THE MOONSTONE, which concerns an exotic clique of Hindus who come to England to recover a stolen sacred diamond.  The 1934 film is so uninterested in the exoticism of the Hindu characters that their role is reconfigured into just one Hindu servant, who is innocent of any crime.

FREAKISH FLESH-- In AXES I mentioned one of the most famous literary "freaks" in the Hunchback of Notre Dame as an example of an "uncanny" freak, while in this earlier essay I cited a counter-example: the fictionalized version of "the Elephant Man" in David Lynch's 1980 film. I also mentioned that "phenomena like twins or dwarves" could "convey a sense of supernatural 'strangeness' under the correct conditions," and on my film-blog gave an example of such a contrast with these two films about twinship.  These remarks I find illustrative of the ways in which a creator can suggest the nature of the "anti-intelligible" even while the forces of regularity are constant:

But even without this [prophetic] aspect of the film, Neill confers a sense of  "strangeness" to the proceedings.  It's certainly possible that another filmmakers might have taken the same plot-elements and rendered something more naturalistic, along the lines of Joseph Mankiewicz's DRAGONWYCK.  But in BLACK ROOM the twins by themselves make a very strange pair, at once (as the myth-quotation above has it)  capable of bestowing both beneficence and malevolence equally-- while in RINGER, both twins are just two eccentric human beings.

OUTRE OUTFITS SKILLS AND DEVICES-- In AXES I mention both Tarzan and the Lone Ranger as heroes possessed of, respectively, "outré skills" and "outré outfits."  I've mentioned elsewhere that in western films with masked crimefighters, those crimefighters are usually the only uncanny thing in those films, and certainly the Lone Ranger is one of the most anti-intelligible, given that a majority of the stories must deal with him explaining that his mask "represents justice" rather than connoting the more common (and intelligible) meaning of a face-mask. There aren't too many characters who parallel Tarzan's origins without delving into the realm of the uncanny, but one of the few is this serial-hero HAWK OF THE WILDERNESS.

PERILOUS PSYCHOS-- Again I mentioned only uncanny psycho-characters: Norman Bates, Jason Voorhees and Leatherface.  For a time I debated with myself as to whether Hannibal Lecter of the cinematic SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was truly "uncanny" in the tradition of Norman Bates, beginning here with a somewhat negative appraisal, but much later deciding here that Lecter's madness did possess the same "mysterioso" qualities I sought in the earlier essay. In contrast, the film with which I compare LAMBS in this essay, 1999's EYE OF THE BEHOLDER, is satisfied to stick with a very doctrinaire psychological program for its psycho's evolution.  Both Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter are subjected to psychological paradigms, but they exceed the limits of the intelligible, even though they are subject to the same forces of "regularity" as the character from BEHOLDER.

 PHANTASMAL FIGURATIONS-- In TEN DYNAMIC DEMONS I mentioned the Phantom of the Opera as an example of this trope, but in AXES I switched to Conan Doyle's novel HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES because there's far more suspense in that novel as to whether the titular beast is really a spectre or not.  Of the Hound I wrote: "even after it has been revealed to be a phosphorescent dog, one cannot claim that reality has entirely won the game."  Thus far the only counter-example I have offered on my film-blog is producer Val Lewton's 1943 LEOPARD MAN, because though it attempts a hoax even as HOUND does, the hoaxer draws not upon phantasms of spectres or even of madmen, but only of a mundane killer leopard-- in other words, an entirely intelligible menace.

WEIRD FAMILIES AND SOCIETIES-- My only example here was that another "uncanny" version, 1943's THE SEVENTH VICTIM, whose Satanist cult maintains an aura of the mysterious even when its members are revealed to be nothing more than jaded human beings.  Off the top of my head I don't know if it's possible to make a purely naturalistic work about a Satanist or occult society. The closest parallel that occurs to me is a society or family existing in a milieu that is potentially uncanny, but which works against those associations. For instance, the appeal of most "old dark house" films-- including the original 1932 OLD DARK HOUSE-- inheres in the viewpoint character(s) interacting with some weird family or society within that house. But 1945's HOUSE OF FEAR
avoids this approach entirely, as I observed in my review:

The "fear" conjured forth by this work is purely naturalistic in nature, as in the fear of an entirely human killer.  Even though FEAR centers upon events in an "old dark house," the film could almost stand as an example of how to make the least spooky "old dark house" film possible, since familiar Holmes director Roy William Neill eschews most of the usual ghostly goings-on.  Even a stern-faced housekeeper doesn't provide any spook-juice.

In closing, I'll note that since I over-emphasized the "uncanny" versions of each trope in AXES, this time I'll provide illustrations drawn only from the "naturalistic" domain.

THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 1

My reading of Bhaskar's REALIST THEORY OF SCIENCE led me to advocate a bifurcated conception of fictive causality, characterized by "regularity" and "intelligibility." However, as it happens I had encountered a less persuasive use of the latter term, referenced in this 2012 essay.

But perhaps one should go a step farther than Barthes [in THE PLEASURE OF THE TEXT] and say that the facts that lead him to propose these two views [of "joissance" and "plaisir"] indicate that we are dealing not so much with a historical process in which one kind of novel replaces another as with a kind of opposition which has always existed within the novel: a tension between the intelligible and the problematic.-- Jonathan Culler, STRUCTURALIST POETICS, p. 191.

I specified that Culler's dichotomy was "probably useless to my phenomenological project" because it arose "from a limited and hyper-literary classic novel/experimental novel comparison." But I did draw a limited parallel between Culler's terms and those of C.S. Lewis' reading of Rudolf Otto:

Thus, to invoke once again the C.S. Lewis trinity referenced here: the "tigers of fear" belong entirely the world of Cullers "intelligible," in that they may cause one to fear for one's physical safety but nothing more.  In contrast, both the "ghosts of dread" and the "gods of awe" belong in the world of the "problematic," if one defines the problematic as the human desire to exceed the limits of the merely intelligible.

Despite the provisional definition above, I didn't use "the problematic" as a literary term, since it was a little too-- problematic, and "the intelligible" wasn't much better in this context.  At one point I advocated viewing the two levels of the metaphenomenal as united by their common trait of their "strangeness," while the single level of the isophenomenal was characterized by what I called "oddity." I later moved away from this view in favor of one in which each phenomenality was characterized by the type of sublimity potentially possible in that phenomenality, detailed in this essay.

This tripartite concept of sublimity, though, was at the time dependent upon the traditional Thomist opposition of the "cognitive" and the "affective."  I tried to finesse these concepts with reference to the notions of probability derived from Aristotle and Lewis:

All three phenomenalities-- naturalistic, uncanny, and marvelous-- are established by the ways in which the authors of works in each division choose to present "evidence" for the nature of their worlds.  For a critic like Tzvetan Todorov, this means establishing whether or not a "fantastic" event is "real" or "unreal."  But as I've demonstrated in my formulation of the NUM theory, even the most 'realistic' narrative merely reproduces gestures suggestive of a reality dominated by causality.

Now, in keeping with my readings of Bhaskar, I would revise this to read that a naturalistic narrative would be "suggestive of a reality dominated by both regularity and intelligibility." Roughly four months after writing PROBABILITY SHIFTS, I determined here that my usages of "probability" were no longer viable, drawing as they did on 'the now untenable, Aristotle-derived association of "the impossible and improbable."' 

Thus I rejected the idea of a "probability factor," which would fluctuate depending on the "evidence" presented by a given author regarding the world he portrays. I then returned to Cassirer's concept of magical efficacy as a counterpart to traditional causality in the three-part AFFECTIVE FREEDOM series, here, here, and here. Basically, I sought to unify Cassirer's opposition between causality and efficacy-- the latter representing a "free selection of causes" rather than classical "cause-and-effect"-- with the "affective freedom" I found in the literary phenomenalities of the uncanny and the marvelous.  Within these phenomenalities, a reader could experience the intertwined affects of either "dread/fascination" or "awe/exaltation" without necessarily believing them to be reducible to the affects that dominate the naturalistic: i.e., "fear/admiration." 

I don't reject Cassirer's concept of magical efficacy, in that I still believe what I said here:

Eventually I discerned that the “free selection of causes” Cassirer identified in archaic mythologies was identical in mode to the “fudge factors” writers use whenever they describe all manner of marvelous beings and devices.

But Cassirer was only interested in a dichotomy between the views of "theoretical thinking," represented by traditional causality, and "mythic thinking," represented by the multicausal nature of efficacy.  Ironically this allows for a conceptual divide between the two-- a divide suggestive of Tzvetan Todorov's dichotomy between "the real" and "the unreal," which I rejected in my earliest essays on his theory:

 It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.-- Todorov, THE FANTASTIC.

I believe "critical realist" Cassirer sought to avoid this sort of empiricist reduction, as did rationalists Rudolf Otto and C.S. Lewis.  I might have expected a post-Kantian, more than a rationalist, to have ferreted out the need for an interstitial category between traditional causality and multicausality.  But for whatever reasons, Otto and Lewis managed to supply the rationale for this category, as well as some of the clues as to its relationship to traditional causality. 

 It's a further irony that Roy Bhaskar, concerned in REALIST THEORY with the phenomenology of scientific investigation, should suggest my current-- and hopefully permanent-- solution to the problems of causal relations in fiction.  Prior to reading Bhaskar, I would have thought it no more possible to split causality's aspects than to follow King Solomon's advice about splitting a child down the middle to satisfy both of the child's putative parents.  Now I perceive that causality is not unitary, at least not in fiction.  Therefore the splitting of fictive causality is more comparable to a separation of conjoined twins-- twins who can live either together or apart, depending on what effects a given author wants to achieve.

OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 3

In CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN PT. 2 I wrote:

I'm now asserting that causality in a literary context-- which, contra Todorov, is not homologous with the causality human beings experience in life-- has both a cognitive aspect and an affective aspect, summed up as "regularity" and "intelligibility." 

And in the first installment of OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS I defined the uncanny aspect of the film as inherent in Sherlock Holmes' foe Jack the Ripper:

 ...in what qualities does Jack the Ripper's metaphenomenality inhere?  As his only qualification for the metaphenomenal is his status as a "perilous psycho," that metaphenomenality must inhere in a mental, "non-body" quality.  His madness is his method, and therefore his metaphenomenality.

I then debated whether or not Sherlock Holmes' "polymath" qualities might qualify him for as a "mental metaphenomenality," but decided that I would have to re-view STUDY IN TERROR to see whether or not Holmes showed such uncanny qualities himself.  However, in OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 2 I acknowledged that the Holmes of the 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES film definitely did use his special deductive powers in an "uncanny" fashion:

What I did not then note is that in this scene Holmes-- who is obviously less heavily muscled than his opponent-- is utilizing his deductive skills as Doyle never did and probably would not have: to suss out his opponent's weaknesses and to plan his attack with machine-like efficiency.  Thus this film, which I have not yet reviewed, would fit the uncanny version of my trope for "uncanny skills." The film's use of graphics to depict the way Holmes thinks-- projecting words or images onto the screen, to share diegetic space with the actors-- also imparts an aura of "strangeness" to Holmes' computer-like cogitations.

I have no problem in stating that this sort of mental acuity, while it does not violate the regularity aspect of causality, does defy its intelligibility aspect, even as does Jack the Ripper's madness. And though I explored a couple of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories briefly, I have not yet decided whether or not Holmes' unusual command of arcane knowledge can be termed "anti-intelligible." I am tending currently to think not.

Fictional reiterations of Jack the Ripper, though, do not show the same ambivalence. 

I do not render any final verdict here as to whether "the causality human beings experience in life" is entirely naturalistic or not.  But it is certainly of a different order than anything we experience through fiction, and so the two are not homologous.  That said, when I think of the historical figure of Jack the Ripper, I opt for the default characterization that almost everyone does: that he was a real human being who killed out of some lunacy and eluded the law.

I have yet to encounter a fictionalized Jack the Ripper, however, whose spectre does not suggest either "the uncanny" or "the marvelous."  This is in contrast to many other perilous psychos. 


In this essay I showed how Norman Bates, though his character was based on the real-life aberration Ed Gein, exceeded what I now call the intelligibility aspect of causality.  Despite attempts by writer Bloch and director Hitchcock to inject standardized psychological readings of Norman Bates, Norman is not reduced by these readings.  He remains a figure who dominantly suggests the antipathetic affect of dread, as signified by the famous shot of Anthony Perkins at the film's conclusion, which I like to call the "Mona Lisa Death's Head."

Ironically, the A&E BATES MOTEL teleseries manages to reduce Norman to the more mundane level of "fear"-- although to be sure, the opening episodes focus more on the fearful nature of his mother, Norma Bates, and softening Norman as the series works toward its "evolution of a psycho."


I admit that I have not seen or read every fictional portrayal of Jack the Ripper, which this Wikipedia list purports to cover.  There may be renditions of the Ripper that do to him what A&E did to Norman.  Yet because the real Ripper was never apprehended, his figure resists the naturalistic straight-jacket.  Of course, many "imitation Rippers" may fall into this category.

 This 1927 Hitchcock film departs from its source by renaming the serial killer "the Avenger." Further, though Hitchcock had wanted to keep some ambivalence as to the guilt or innocence of the man suspected of being the killer, he was overruled, with the result that the accused man is proved innocent and the real killer, though his capture is mentioned, is never seen on-screen.  Without question Hitchcock introduces visual motifs to suggest the dread associated with a serial-killer boogieman, but one may argue that these are overpowered by the film's naturalistic focus.

And of course, Hitchcock himself did a seventies-era version of this type of serial murderer in 1972's FRENZY, reviewed here.  I noted in the review that despite an early comparison between the film's "Necktie Killer" and the legendary "Jack the Ripper," there was no "strangeness" in Hitchcock's handling of FRENZY's strangler, in contrast to his handling of Norman Bates.

By contrasting Hitchcock's approach to the serial killer in this and a genuinely uncanny film like PSYCHO,  I find that Hitchcock's approach with FRENZY has more in common with his 1943 film SHADOW OF A DOUBT.  In my earlier essay I asserted that the psycho-killer of SHADOW lacked any of the "strange or unworldly aspects" I find in Norman Bates, and the same is true of the "Necktie Killer" in FRENZY, even though he's compared to Jack the Ripper in the film's first ten minutes.

To my knowledge, though, whenever a modern writer attempts to write of the actual Jack the Ripper-- the tendency is to see him through the lens of the uncanny affect of dread, whether he is seen as a man hiding a psychotic secret (A STUDY IN TERROR),  a delver into supernatural secrets (Moore and Campbell's FROM HELL), or even-- as in one novel I won't name to avoid giving away the "big reveal"-- Sherlock Holmes himself.  There are, as I said above, also versions in which Jack the Ripper is some marvelous being, as in Robert Bloch's short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper." But more than any other famous madman of reality or fiction, the Ripper seems to work best as an image of dread--one that bends, but does not break, the normal configurations of the causal world.

 

CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN PT. 2

For this essay I'll just tie together the observations between the previous essay and my last general-theory essay on the NUM formula.

In the former essay, I'm now asserting that causality in a literary context-- which, contra Todorov, is not homologous with the causality human beings experience in life-- has both a cognitive aspect and an affective aspect, summed up as "regularity" and "intelligibility."  Though I have not stated it in so many words, the same would be true of the Cassirer-esque parallel to causality, "efficacy," whose cognitive and affective aspects would be "anti-" versions of both concepts above.

In THE INTERSECTING AXES essay, I was still regarding causality as unitary in this statement:

It occurs to me that with both my categories of "the naturalistic" and "the marvelous," all of the "intangible shit" is highly dependent on whether or not the diegetic world depicted is one in which causality can or cannot be disrupted.

Now, I would say that it is only the regularity aspect of causality that has been violated in the domain of the marvelous.  Works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous" both violate the "intelligibility" aspect of causality, and the affects associated with the over-ruling quality of "strangeness"-- a quality Rudolf Otto insightfully termed an "overplus."  But many audience-members, when looking at works in the domain of the uncanny, tend to ally such works with the domain of the naturalistic simply because all they can see is that the author has not violated the cosmos' appearance of regularity.

For instance, take the case of the Batman, whom I used here as an example to demonstrate the problematic status of such an alliance:

Like the Todorov book I’ve recently critiqued, the naïve critic’s assertion, “Batman isn’t a superhero because he doesn’t have superpowers,” contains a fundamental insight despite being essentially wrong. The latter also takes a lot less time to refute. The naïve critic has chosen to view the adjective “super” in “superhero” as meaning one thing and one thing only: the possession of powers, giving one the ability to perform “super” feats that human heroes cannot perform. However, “super” clearly does not connote this, either in dictionaries or in the opinions of many readers who do consider Batman a superhero—usually for an equally simple reason, because he wears a costume.

It's clear to me that even if Batman never encountered any marvelous entities or used any marvelous weapons, he would have a stronger alliance with the domain of "the marvelous" than that of "the naturalistic." His case would be the same as Zorro, the Lone Ranger, and many other costumed types who had no powers and dominantly opposed only naturalistic menaces.

The only affects appropriate to the domain of the naturalistic, then, are those governed by what I have called "the atypical," which combines the regularity and intelligibility aspects of causality.  Those affects were described in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM AND THE UNCANNY PT. 1:

In a fictive world where affectivity is defined by the causal order, the dominant sympathetic affect is "admiration" of things characteristic of the causal order, particularly what Jung called Freud's "physiological factors," while the dominant antipathetic affect is "fear" of aspects of the causal/physical order.

Now, I have chosen in other essays to make clear distinctions between the two different types of "strangeness," types I labeled by the relation of their sublimity-potential to the depiction of "reality" in the narrative.  But though I still feel those distinctions are important to a discussion of how sublimity occurs across the three domains, those distinctions do not bear on analyzing the maintenance of fictive causality.

Thus, I would now revise this sentence from the AFFECTIVE FREEDOM essay:

the uncanny flourishes precisely in the contrast between the monocausal nature of cognitive reality in a given work, while affectivity "symbolically exceeds the cognitive order," taking the dominant forms of "fascination" for the sympathetic affect and "dread" for the antipathetic affect.

It is not a "cognitive order" that has been exceeded, but the "affective aspect" of fictive causality.

The statement I make in that essay regarding "the marvelous" regarding its affects also requires some revision:

Where affectivity exceeds the causal order in accordance with the multicausal nature of the world's cognitivity, the dominant sympathetic affect is "exaltation" toward the multicausal, and the dominant antipathetic affect is "awe" toward it.

The affectivity alluded to above is in effect the same "anti-intelligibility" that makes a more muted appearance in works of the uncanny, but now it is allied to an "anti-regularity" that dominates the causal order of works of the marvelous.