ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE, AND MAYBE THE NEGATIVE TOO

Toward the end of old PU, FJ gives readers a lengthy quote from Paul Ricoeur, of which I'll copy only the essential bits:

"At one pole, hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message... according to the other pole, it is understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion... Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen..."

In the next paragraph Jameson cavils at the religious rhetoric of Ricoeur (which I've left out, and which gives me some problems as well, though they're not the same as Jameson's). Jameson asserts that because Ricoeur's "conception of 'positive' meaning" is "modeled on the act of communication between individual subjects," it's useless to the anti-individualistic Political Unconscious except as a rough model from which to conceive some sort of "positive hermeneutic" that *does* fall in line with Marxist dialectic (which conception Jameson doesn't pull off, IMO).

Not surprisingly, all this talk about positive and negative hermeneutics (last mention for that fifty-dollar word) brings to mind what I quoted from David Sandner here, on the different perspectives of fantasy-world creation as practiced by Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien. Sandner called these artistic approaches "emptiness" and "fullness" respectively, but he could just as well have spoken of "absence" and "presence" as Jameson does in his critique of Frye.

Archaic myth, even more than literature, concerns the presence of the phenomena early man witnessed, as well as accounting for the absence of things early man could only imagine (a time when mankind was not subject to death, for example). The former schema may well be seen as a "positive" conception of phenomena-- "this river is here because God X did thus and so"-- while the latter schema is negative in its structure; "man is no longer immortal because God X didn't do what he was supposed to do." Literature doesn't approach questions of presence and absence in the same fashion as myth does, but the Sandner example suggests considerable overlap between the two forms.

Underlying both of these schemas are emotional *dynamizations.* Human beings are perhaps just as equally dynamized by breaking things down as by building them up: of showing the will to suspect as much (or more) than the will to listen. I hinted at the dichotomy here:

"...if one looks one can find both tendencies in the works of both authors, as I'm sure Sandner knew. I think Sandner's correct in seeing that both authors tended to dwell on one tendency more than the other, and it may be that much of what any reader favors tends more toward one tendency than the other-- be it the Beatles vs. the Stones or (to name a personal preference) the Hernandez Brothers vs. Daniel Clowes."

To illustrate how these distinct dynamizations play out with comics-authors as distinct in their ways as were Carroll and Tolkien, here's how Daniel Clowes views the topic of nostalgia in this 1999 interview with the online magazine HERMENAUT:

'Actually, although I think about stuff from my own childhood a lot, things I haven't seen in years, all I have to do is see the thing once and I'm cured of it. I've recently bought video tapes of cartoons I hadn't seen since I was four or five years old, and I'm enthralled by them exactly one time, by this feeling of "Wow, this is what I was so interested in?" My memory had turned them into something much more fascinating than they actually were.'

The dynamization here, of being "cured" of a nostalgic impulse, falls in line with the schema suggesting absence: the remembered thing is shown to be emptier than one thought, and it may be that there is a certain dynamization gleaned from this "is that all there is" reaction.

Contrast this to a nostalgic reverie from the three Brothers Hernandez v.2, #10 (2004), wherein Jaime, Mario and Gilbert all celebrate the fullness of their recollections of the trash and treasures of their early comics-collecting days. Remarks include:

JAIME on ZAP COMICS 0: ""Crumb covered every form of comic storytelling in one issue."

GILBERT on Elias' BLACK CAT: "sexy superheroics from a student of the Caniff school."

MARIO on LOIS LANE #48: "A book-length masterpiece."

Plainly, whatever flaws the Hernandezes (probably) see in these mementoes of their childhoods, the works don't lose the dynamizing qualities they formerly possessed, as Clowes' mementoes apparently do for him.

Neither POV is "wrong," naturally. Tastes are what they are, and as the Ricoeur quote asserts, human beings do need both mental approaches at varying times in both life and literary criticism.

The eternal problem, of course, is knowing--

Which times are the right times for suspicion--

And which are the right ones for listening.