THE GATE OF THE GODS Part 4

In the last essay devoted to this topic I was looking for some terminology to substitute for the rather unspecific "primary and secondary concerns" employed by Frye, and suggested that one might find such terms through the help of Professor Jung and his fantastic four functions. But given a blog isn't the best place to examine Jung's mental phenomenology in depth, I'll content myself with linking to one of the sites that examines the subject in depth:

Here one can read loads of insights about the various ways in which Jung conceived his rather Kantian four functions: what he called the "irrational" functions (sensation, intuition) and the "rational" functions (thinking, feeling). For the purposes of this essay I'll confine myself to one quote of Jung's on the subject of the functions:

"I regard sensation as conscious, and intuition as unconscious, perception. For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling as independent functions are developed, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation (and equally, of course from intuition as the necessary counterpart of sensation)."

I then relate this concept of "mutually compensating functions"-- specifically, those of sensation and intuition at this point, to what I wrote here:

'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.'

By now it should be obvious that I'm splitting up Frye's "primary concerns" into the pair of "irrational functions" asserted by Jung, with "sensation" being the concern of the body-- does this thing feel good or bad-- while "intuition" associates the sensory input with other mental constructs, such as idealized elements, astral bodies, etc.

By the same token Frye's "secondary concerns" are relatable to the two rational functions of thinking and feeling.

But is this any simpler to talk about than the Fryean schema? Probably not, so for the terminology needed I move to a Jungian theorist named J.L. Henderson. At this time I have not read THRESHOLDS OF INITIATION, the book from which the quote below originally derives, but the segment reproduced in Slotkin's REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE would seem to fill the bill, for me at least:

'...Henderson (developing a Jungian thesis) characterizes the basic psychological tension [of archetypal myths] as a conflict between "Moira" and "Themis"-- between the unconscious and the conscious, the dream or impulse and the rational idea, the inchoate desire and the knowledge of responsibility, the gratification-world presided over by the mother and the world of laws and reasons ruled by the father.'

Since Henderson's "Moira" incarnates the "unconscious" part of the human mind, it doesn't seem a stretch to see it as encompassing both of Jung's irrational funcitons: sensation and intuition, while Themis, which Slotkin explicitly sees as "rational," encompasses both thinking and feeling. Ergo, for me at least, "Moira" also = "primary concerns" and "Themis"= "secondary concerns."

A quick example of how this terminology might be used goes like this:

'When Gary Groth wrote that Frank Miller's DAREDEVIL work "was not about violence, it was just violent," he obviously had no appreciation for how qualitatively different Miller's dynamics of violence were from the commonplace kinetics seen in most superhero comics of the time (including most of the ones being drawn at that time by some of Miller's inspirations, like Ditko and Gil Kane). Given that Gary Groth was not stupid, or unversed in reading comics, one may speculate that the only way he would have seen Miller's work to be "about violence" would be if it appealed to the rational functions of **THEMIS,** perhaps after the examples of Kurtzman and his ilk. What Groth apparently could not appreciate was that the violence in Miller's DAREDEVIL was not just an appeal to sensation alone--which is how I interpret the words "just violent"-- but that there were also symbolic ramifications to the violence-- that is, to the other side of **MOIRA**-- which may have played a greater role in Miller's rise to popularity than simply the appeal to sensation.'

While I do believe what I just wrote about Gary Groth's critical blindspots, the more important aspect of this essay, for me, is attempting to deal with art in terms of both its irrational and rational functions, of both MOIRA and THEMIS. Hitherto most comics-critics wouldn't know a poetic association if it were crammed down their throats, as most of them are far more concerned with projecting the image of themselves as being the intellectual version of "king-of-the-mountain."

New terminology, of course, is not likely to change this state of affairs.

But--

It couldn't hurt, either.