ADDENDA EST

While working on part 4 of GATE OF THE GODS I decided to get a couple of addenda-items out of the way.

First, in AGON IN SIXTY SECONDS I wrote:

"As far as I can think, the "noncombative" mode doesn't apply to the adventure/romance mythos at all, given the strong emphasis of the mythos upon physical striving."

But on further consideration I did think of a type of adventure-story that could take place in a "noncombative mode:" namely, the so-called "Robinsonade," the subgenre of lost-on-a-desert-island stories that were spawned by the considerable influence of Defoe's ROBINSON CRUSOE. The basic idea of CRUSOE that's become known to all those who've not read it (including me) is that a shipwrecked protagonist stuck on a desert island has to fight for his survival. Because "physical striving" is at the heart of this sort of story, this means that it would fit into the matrix of the adventure-mythos. Now, some "Robinsonades" may indeed include some "man vs. man" conflict as well as "man vs. nature," even as the original Defoe work does, but this would be enough to move them into either a "combative" or "subcombative" mode. Perhaps the purest example of a Robinsonade known to modern audiences would be the 2000 T0m Hanks film CAST AWAY, since the Hanks character's only struggles are to maintain both physical and psychological equilibrium.

There also certain adventure-stories in which the main hero is passive and noncombative, such as Poe's NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, but the Poe work is at least subcombative, since the titular character depends on his more active ally Dirk Peters to do most of the hard work of fighting mutineers and such.

My second addenda speaks to this excerpt from GATE OF THE GODS PART 2:

'Though I haven't seen the specific films that CRWM defends on the basis of their not needing a "higher purpose" to be interesting, I've certainly sampled many, many works whose only aim was to excite the audience n what I've called a "kinetic" manner. Some of these works fail even at that aim and so are both lame and dull: PUNISHER WAR ZONE comes to mind as one that failed to impress, despite its considerable production budget. While not the worst work of its kind ever produced, it was still less interesting than a lot of drive-in junk that on occasion had nothing more than a daring, exploitative idea to run with.'

Having written this, I wanted to come up with an example of a good trash-film which had no higher aim than PUNISHER: WAR ZONE in being focused wholly on martial conflict, to the exclusion of characterization, theme or interesting symbolism.

My choice is 1997's MEAN GUNS, directed by noted trashmeister Albert Pyun. It's by no means a good film except in the sense of being "good of its type," but it does put forth a wide variety of kinetic battles in its rough hour-and-a-half running time, and so should please the lover of pure action far more than the more expensive-- and more tedious-- WAR ZONE. In fact, it's almost the action-film parallel to the old Vaudeville adage: If you don't like one of MEAN GUNS' many gun-battles, wait a minute and there'll be another one from which to choose.

Also, where WAR ZONE is just another by-the-numbers hero-vs. villain tale, MEAN GUNS at least has a striking if absurd premise for an action-film, in which one hundred assassins are turned loose in an under-construction prison to kill one another, with the last three people left standing will get a fabulous prize, in addition to basic survival.

MEAN GUNS' direction looks like Pyun was trying to channel John Woo, without the latter direction's more admirable stylistics (though Woo too has his shortcomings). But in a purely-kinetic work, being derivative isn't so much a knock as a given.

And thus endeth the addenda.

THE GATE OF THE GODS, Part 3

"Delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy: instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only instructs as it delights."—John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

It may not be evident, given the sometimes dry intellectual tone of this blog, but like Dryden (who was almost certainly building on the dichotomy of delight and instruction put forth by Horace in ARS POETICA), I too favor a poetics that puts delight before instruction.

The above should be abundantly clear from this essay, where I rejected any dominantly ideological theory of art. Ideological concepts are always spun off from what Northrop Frye terms "secondary concerns," which are no more than the assorted mental strategies humankind devises whereby they get or secure the "primary concerns," which are humankind's primary conduit to both sustenance and its concomitant pleasures. I suggested that the "primary concerns" come down to what some pagans termed the "four F's"-- flags (housing), flax (clothing), fodder and frig. To take "frig" as an example, any theory that primarily defines, say, a fictional work's exhibition of feminine charms as "exploitation of women's bodies" is simply a theory conceived to stroke its user in an intellectual rather than a sensuous manner.

In itself the "primary/secondary" dichotomy is sufficient to refute the errors of ideological criticism, but the terms aren't descriptive enough to be used for art itself; to understand how "delight" and "instruction" operate within the spectrum of artistic endeavor. So the terms require further elaboration and cross-comparison.

I stated here that I had encountered "interesting" works whose only real appeal was to sensationalism. I termed these works "drive-in junk," though I didn't give examples (possibly in a future essay). It should be noted that all of Frye's "primary concerns" are oriented upon the satisfaction of bodily needs, whose need is ineluctably communicated to the brain through physical sensations. As a general rule Frye seems, unlike the ideological critics, "rooted" in his consciousness of the fact of human physicality and how it bears on humankind's need to produce art as a non-biological ritual that to some degree orients humans the way biological rituals orient "lower" animals. (This is enlarged upon in the essay "Archetypes of Literature," parts of which I quoted here.)

Naturally, as a highbrow critic (however pluralist) Frye did not explore the possibility that simple "junk" could serve as sources of cultural ritual as much, or perhaps more, than the more elevated forms of art. And I won't explore that possibility right now, though it does indirectly figure into my search for a deeper application of the primary/secondary dichotomy.

"Primary concerns," then, begin with sensation. But is it a straight step from there to "secondary concerns," to an instrumental mode of consciousness that says, "Here's to get and keep them?"

I don't believe so, and I don't think Frye's concept of ritual (as expressed in the "Archetypes" essay) is congruent with such a quick jump to an instrumental consciousness. Before humankind begins to think about ways to get and keep the things that convey pleasure, it had to see them as part of what Ernst Cassirer called the "symbolic universe" which human beings alone inhabit. Once again, let's take "frig" for example. We surmise that at some point early man began to codify customs that he thought would better control or maintain the practice of pleasurable intercourse with the least amount of friction (of the fatal kind, that is). But before those "secondary concerns" could be codified, we should also surmise that the existential fact of sexuality would have taken on symbolic resonance as a thing apart from the sensational stimulations of intercourse. We don't know if early man made associative links like those of later cultures, where, say, "man" became poetically associated with the sun and "woman" with the moon. (Not that the aforementioned was at all universal even in later cultures.) But it seems to me likely that a certain symbolic resonance was born from the stimulations of those primary concerns, to say nothing of a whole lotta physical progeny.

So, assuming that the other "primary concerns" give rise to the same sort of symbolic resonance, then we have a dichotomy within one half of the dichotomy. And, all things being equal, one might suppose that "secondary concerns" may not come down to just a broad instrumental consciousness; that it too will have a dual aspect--

Which is exactly what that little old Swiss psychologist Carl Jung found, whose concept of mental functions I'll explore more fully next time.

THE GATE OF THE GODS, Part 2

Repeating the Frye quote from part 2:

"The creative process is an end in itself, not to be judged by its power to illustrate something else, however true or good."

In one of those interesting cross-correspondences I sometimes encounter, the same week I read the Frye quote, I came across this fascinating post on the blog AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS.

Said post, by blogger CRWM, began in reaction to posts that are fully documented on this blogpost by Curt Purcell. Now as it happened, I've no dog in the specific fight that inspired CRWM's post, as I've not seen any of the films he references: INSIDE or the two HOSTEL films.
But I enjoyed CRWM's defense of the idea of meaning as being inherent in any narrative (which I *think* is implicit in his argument even though in the following quote he speaks only of the film medium:

"Every film, no matter what its final form, is the product of a creative process that inevitably leaves traces of interpretable clutter behind it. No matter how lame or great, no matter powerful or dull, there's always already something beyond the literal. Even if you could somehow remove all human agency from the creation of a film, the fact that you removed all human agency from the creation of the film introduces space for interpretation.You'll never make a perfectly flat film. To even try is to automatically fail."

Now, CWRM is also careful to emphasize that not all forms of meaning are equal by saying that some works can have such a low level of meaning that it's not incorrect to judge them to be "lame" or "dull." But CRWM's point is that it's a critical mistake to speak of any work as intrinsically "pointless."

In making these assertions, I think CRWM has broadly agreed with the above Frye quote, that one work is not automatically superior to another because the first seems to "illustrate something else, however true or good." This would apply just as much, I should think, to the appearance of a "higher purpose" in a horror film, even if that "higher purpose" may not illustrate anything particularly "true" or "good:"

'Again and again we get some sort riff on the idea that violence, even perhaps the most extreme violence, would be okay if it were somehow wedded to a higher purpose. Violence shouldn't be "the point" of violence, but should rather serve "weighty and serious in intent" or be, somehow, necessary.'

It's because I find meaning inherent in works that are not necessarily "wedded to a higher purpose" that I formulated my conceptions of Thematic Escapism, which I explored here and here. Though I haven't seen the specific films that CRWM defends on the basis of their not needing a "higher purpose" to be interesting, I've certainly sampled many, many works whose only aim was to excite the audience n what I've called a "kinetic" manner. Some of these works fail even at that aim and so are both lame and dull: PUNISHER WAR ZONE comes to mind as one that failed to impress, despite its considerable production budget. While not the worst work of its kind ever produced, it was still less interesting than a lot of drive-in junk that on occasion had nothing more than a daring, exploitative idea to run with. Frye in a less charitable moment would have called such works a "babble." But the word "babble" is an interesting one, for though it directly descends from a 13th century European word, it has a perhaps-coincidental resemblance to the words that gave rise to the city-name Babylon: "Bab-ilu," which despite sounding like a Desi Arnaz song connoted "the gate of the gods."

And how can that which seems to be without purpose or function be the gate of the gods?

More in part 3.

THE GATE OF THE GODS, part 1

"I will not Reason or Compare: my Business is to Create."-- William Blake

I was almost all Fryed out and ready to put away his FABLES OF IDENTITY when I happened to scan his essay, "Blake After Two Centuries" and decided to read it. This essay fortuitously gave me evidence to confirm my earlier opinion that Frye, though capable like many academics of evincing some degree of elitism, had pluralism at the heart of his theory.

The elitist remarks I mentioned elsewhere occured in his 1958 essay, "Nature and Homer:"

"All of us, even the most highbrow, spend much time in the sub-literary world; all of us derive many surreptitious pleasures from it; but this world is, from the point of view of actual literature, mainly a babbling chaos, waiting for the creative word to brood over it and bring it to literary life."

(nice visualization of Genesis imagery there)

And yet, roughly one year before this essay appeared Frye published the Blake essay, in which the aforecited "Reason & Compare" quote is followed by this observation:

"The creative process is an end in itself, not to be judged by its power to illustrate something else, however true or good."

So in the Blake essay, Frye is taking arms against a sea of critics who might prefer the sort of artistic works that I have labeled "thematically realistic," in that they are oriented on spelling out What Good Men Should Do and What the Real World is All About. Earlier in the same essay Frye also quotes another Blakism: "That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care." So in this essay, as well as others, Frye encapsulates the idea that Great Art must be something more than mere allegory, even if the work allegorizes some principle both "true and good."

And just one later Frye sees "subliterary" artworks are seen to be a "chaos" whose main relevance to literature is as a resource for art's transformative power. Frye is careful to state that such a POV is valid only from that of the true artist or the critic of art, but it's hard to parse out just what mysterious quintessence comes into existence to separate Great Art's use of ideas and/or formulas from the way the same ideas/formulas are used in the babbling chaos. I suspect, however, that on some level Frye valued Blake's intellectual powers as much as his poetic ones, and that much of that "mysterious quintessence" would have come down to the fact that Great Art does address "serious themes" about the real world where most popular art does not-- or if it does, does not do so in an intellectually-rigorous manner.

Of course, the main objection to Frye's elitist cant here is that "subliterary" art is not a chaos. If anything, most of its critics find popular art too structured, too ritualistically bound by the demands of its patrons. And of course even the patrons may eventually become bored with repeated permutations of ideas or formulas that they formerly enjoyed, and it's hard to tell whether those patrons have become bored with the ideas themselves or their reiteration. (Of course, it's arguable that the same patterns develop in the world of "highbrow" culture, where artists do repeat themselves whether they intend to or not, and patrons will grow bored with even too much novelty.)

Still, even popular works that originate as imitations of something else, as much as literary works that take fire from subliterary "waters," may have complexities that neither their original makers nor the original set of patrons may have appreciated.

In previous essays I've noted some of the reasons why I think my approach to symbolism-- indebted in large part to both Frye and Campbell-- throws light on the common ground between the literary and "subliterary" works. And just as I thought Campbell was perhaps a bit too imprecise regarding the dividing line between art and myth, so that I opined that Frye might serve to present a little more rigor in that department, Frye's dividing line between literary and subliterary is a bit too rigid and could benefit from some Campbellian input to show how even works that might be deemed "thematically escapist" possess their own orderly structure and communicate their own sort of messages, even if said messages *might* be fundamentally simpler. A good synoptic critic (which Frye was, even if he simply didn't have that much interest in popular fiction) would be one who can appreciate all meaning in both its simple and complex forms.

Interestingly, I also read Frye's essay in FABLES on Emily Dickinson,and found this quotation from her works more than a little relevant:

"To be alive-- is Power--

"Existence-- in itself--

"Without a further function--"

Is there meaning even in fictions that abrogate all claim to functionality, to relevance to realistic concerns? Stay tuned.

AGON IN SIXTY SECONDS

Though neither Rider Haggard's SHE or KING SOLOMON'S MINES are much-read today, they make a convenient example of my combative and subcombative modes.

As far as I can think, the "noncombative" mode doesn't apply to the adventure/romance mythos at all, given the strong emphasis of the mythos upon physical striving. When an author takes a genre with strong adventure-associations, such as the western, and seeks to de-emphasize the "man vs. man" pattern in favor of the "man vs. himself" approach, he's moved from one mythos to another. Peter Fonda's 1971 THE HIRED HAND would be an example of a western that (to the best of my recollection) falls more properly into the category of the drama, for example.

Both SHE and KSM were enormously influential on the development of European and American adventure-fiction, and, being works written in a popular idiom, both are usually given short shrift in the world of literary criticism. To be sure, KSM is a much simpler novel than SHE, and possesses far less mythicity as well, but neither can be understood properly without appreciating how well they capture the spirit of their mythos, for all that their modes are different.

The plot of KSM is clearly the more combative of the two. Allan Quatermain-- who if not for Alan Moore would now be remembered as "Richard Chamberlain's INDIANA JONES" by modern audiences-- is the archetypal great white hunter who leads his employers into the search for a missing white man in Africa and ends up both finding a fabulous treasure and making it possible for a noble black monarch to regain his throne from a usurper. For all the side-action of the missing European and the treasure, the novel builds to the climactic action of the battle, in which the Europeans help the noble African regain his throne.

There are, to be sure, important scenes of combat in SHE. However, there is no particular combat toward which the novel builds, no *agon* which decides the fates of all and sundry. Ayesha, the *She* of the title, is at times frustrated from reaching her goals by meddling fate, but despite her intentions of conquering the modern world once her lost love returns to her-- intentions which make her something of an early "super-villain"-- she is defeated not by any particular opponent but by another twist of fate: stepping into the Fire of Life a second time reverses her gift of immortality (making for a rather graphic illustration of Heraclitus' admonition that one may not step twice into the same river). Still, though there is no definitive battle in SHE, the efforts of the protagonists to survive in her world, as well as to avoid becoming the chattel of Ayesha, still mark SHE as belonging to the mythos of adventure, albeit in a subcombative mode.

Interestingly, for all that Alan Moore did an atrocious job realizing his version of She in BLACK DOSSIER, his method often reminds one more of the Haggard of SHE than that of KING SOLOMON'S MINES, as DOSSIER in particular is devoted less to perilous adventures and more toward windy woolgathering. But that's another essay.

COMBAT VS. CONFLICT

Dictionaries can't always be trusted. For most of the online ones cached at Onelook, the nouns "combat" and "conflict," going by their primary definitions, seem to be synonyms. For example, here's the primaries from American Heritage's:

COMBAT: "A state of open, often prolonged fighting; a battle or war."

CONFLICT: "Fighting, especially armed battle; strife."

Many of the other online sources give "conflict" the same primary definition, though Websters' observes, correctly, that it's "obsolete." I would certainly agree that AH's secondary definition is closer to representing the way the word is used colloquially today:

"A state of disharmony between incompatible or antithetical persons, ideas, or interests; a clash."

This is the way the word "conflict" is used in literary studies, particularly in the four modes of conflict I cited in my last essay. (I've abandoned the idea I expressed in that essay, of using "opposition" in place of the commonly-used term "conflict.") If one accepts the secondary definition, "conflict" is a category that includes not only "combat," generally defined as physical fighting, but also all manner of nonviolent strife. Of the four modes of conflict, the one that generates the least amount of physical strife would be that of the "man vs. himself" category. Perhaps the most striking example of a entirely internalized evocation of conflict would be Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT, wherein the two principal characters spend the entire play being conflicted about whether or not to act, and end by doing nothing.

This is probably not the sort of conflict to which the ancient Greek playwrights would have given the term I've used before: "agon." Though I'm in no way a specialist in archaic Greek, *agon* generally denotes "combat," which is certainly the way Frye uses it in his poetics. The *agon* is the radical of the romance/adventure mythos, though naturally this form of conflict can appear in any of the other three mythoi.

As John Fraser commented in his book VIOLENCE IN THE ARTS, there has rarely been much literary theorizing about the function of violence in literature. Naturally, the same is true of the principal means by which violence is dispensed: that of combat, be it between matched equals or between aggressor and victim. If anything, most critics avoid the topic as if it were a matter more taboo than sex (while Gershon Legman tried to assert that violence ought to be deemed a worse form of pornography than any form of sexual expression). Given that I've articulated a system of criticism based in part on Schopenhaurean will, and that the idea of "will" is a vital aspect of conflict, it should prove instructive to make for the neglect of the combat-element by earlier critics, by way of categorizing all of literature as to the degree to which combat does or does not figure into its manifestations.

Given my emphasis on opposites, I'll start my categories with one: what I term the noncombative. GODOT makes a representative example of a work that has a strong conflict but absolutely no combat, except perhaps by implication. And in this same category I place all works that imply some violence that never takes place, such as the unconsummated execution of Shakespeare's MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

Sticking with the Bard for further examples (given that his output was a *little* more varied than that of Beckett), there are also works in which combat does play some role that is indispensible, however major or minor, though naturally it is never as crucial in a drama, irony or comedy as it is in a romance/adventure. The duels of ROMEO AND JULIET are acts of combat that are important to the story as a whole, and yet their outcomes are not really what the story is about. Slightly more central is the form of combat that takes the shape of mortal enemies alternately undermining one another with devious forms of violence (though not outright combat-violence), as with the stratagems which Tamora and Titus employ against one another in TITUS ANDRONICUS. This category, in which some form of combat is present or implied but does not comprise the narrative linchpin, is one I dub the subcombative.

Finally, the category describing works in which the combat is both present and IS a narrative linchpin is one I designate as the combative. MACBETH is the best Shakespearean example of the combative conflict-mode, though again I emphasize that the play is certainly not "about" combat to the extent that THE ILIAD is. Yet a substantial portion of MACBETH's narrative progress is centered around the title character's expectation that the forces of fate and/or witchcraft have made him an insuperable conqueror, until he contends with the one foe who seems to have been designed by fate to become his nemesis.

Next essay: forms of the combative categories in works that are closer to our modern milieu.

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FOUR IF BY STRUCTURE, TWO IF BY TONE

The four modes to which I refer above are often incorrectly called "themes." I've been unable to track down where they first appeared, and they often get revised by this or that author, but the ones that I find most felicitous are:

1) Man vs. Man

2) Man vs. Nature (which includes Fate or Your Circumstances at Birth and so on)

3) Man vs. Society

4) Man vs. Himself

But none of these are not themes, as that word implies some form of didactic/discursive thought. They are modes, in accord with this earlier-quoted definition of "mode" from the WRITER'S WEB:

“MODE: an unspecific critical term usually identifying a broad but identifiable literary method, mood or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular form of genre.”

Because the word "mode" is so unspecific, though, one has to distinguish between different types of modes. During the essay in which I quoted the above definition, I discussed modes pertaining to *emotional tonality:" in particular comparing the *subtle* mode of Noel Coward's DESIGN FOR LIVING vs. the *gross* mode of Mike Myers' WAYNE'S WORLD. But there are structural modes as well, and the four modes of opposition may well be the most basic modes in all narrative, since it's a commonplace that all narratives must have opposition as an organizing principle.

Now, most web-resources not only call this foursome "themes," but "themes of conflict." I have a definite neologism-nurturing reason for wanting to refer to the modes in terms of "opposition," for I want to use the word "conflict" in its adjectival form, "conflictive," in contrast with another term, "combative," in order to distinguish two tonal modes I've discovered as a result of analyzing the way various narratives make use of the plot-element of opposed forces.

In other words, all narratives possess an equal need for some elements of opposition, but some narratives are "more equal than others."

More on this "combat and conflict" theme anon, probably in the essay I plan to title, "Combat vs. Conflict."