And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best
Neighbour'd by fruit of baser quality"--
HENRY V, Act 1, Sc. 1, lines 60-62.
The churchman Ely makes the above statement as explanation to his fellows (as well as to the play's audience) as to why newly-crowned King Henry V has transformed himself from a royal reprobate, given to hanging out with lowlifes ("fruit of baser quality"),into a wise and "wholesome" ruler of his people. We do not know if Shakespeare believed this sentiment about the felicitous association between what I'll call "the base" and "the noble;" he may have merely thought it an appropriate allusion to come from the mouth of a learned pedant. In any case the Bard of Avon reverses the horticultural metaphor employed much later by Frederic Wertham at the start of SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, where a well-protected child is made analogous to a well-kept (if overly antiseptic) garden. Shakespeare doesn't tell why nobility might benefit from contact with "baser quality," for the metaphor isn't pursed in the play, but it seems a rough evocation of the idea of "hybrid vigor," even though said vigor is achieved through sheer propinquity rather than some more mundane interaction.
A parallel to this notion of felicitous interactions between noble and base-- albeit one focused entirely on literature-- can be seen in GATE OF THE GODS 1, wherein I quote Northrop Frye's early elitist-sounding pronouncement on the "babbling chaos" of popular fiction, which he viewed as worthless in itself though it did sometimes give rise to the orderly arrangements of Great Art. BREAKING OPEN MOULDY TALES notes how in later years Frye refined this early position into a more pluralist stance that recognized the validity of conventionalized fictions for their own sake, rather than validating them in terms of some superior art to which they contributed.
Though I'm a pluralist, I confess that a part of me does find some appeal in the image of popular fiction as a reservoir of pure expressive power from which Great Art draws a "vigor" that it loses when it becomes too stuffed with pretentious maunderings. Nevertheless, I do have to reject this concept as another form of elitism, one which I do find loosely suggested in Jules Feiffer's GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES essay (yes, I'm getting to him).
At present, I recognize two forms of elitism: "content-centered elitism" and "style-centered elitism."
"Content elitism" takes the view that popular art's base content-- usually appeals to kinetic effects like sex and violence, though not only those-- utterly distances it from Great Art. This position has been asserted in one context or another not only by Frederic Wertham but also by moderns like Gary Groth and Dirk Deppey. Priorities, of course, differ according to period and culture. Wertham objected to letting children be exposed to bad popular art, but was allegedly willing to allow what he termed "crime comics" to be perused by juveniles over 15. Dirk Deppey takes a roughly opposite tack: the superhero comic is inherently juvenile and so cannot bear the weight of any attempts to render it in a more "mature" mode, and fans who stick with the genre are merely revealing their own inherent childishness. Deppey is less militant than Wertham, but in essence their approaches take the same "let's consign this stuff to the outer darkness" attitude.
"Style elitism" is closer to Northrop Frye's early elitist phase. This position argues that popular fiction has no value in itself, but that it can formulate crude ideas that real artists can reformulate (or even just steal), yet transform through attention to literary style and theme. Thus a "Race Williams" detective tale by Carroll John Daly is of no value in itself, but a Dashiell Hammett detective story transforms the same basic material into something finer and more meritorious. In SPIRIT A LA MODE I noted how Mickey Spillane's trashy detective novel KISS ME DEADLY was rendered into a film by Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezerides, which film was then celebrated by assorted critics as superior to the original novel. I argued that both forms were good for the type of work each was, but two of my respondents argued the position of the "style elitist:" that KMD was not a worthwhile work in itself but that Mickey Spillane was "lucky" to have the privilege of seeing his tough action-opus travestied and converted into a tony satire.
Jules Feiffer was, as I've said earlier, far more in line with pluralist rather than elitist thought by virtue of his arguing that the popular works of the comics-medium-- which he labeled as "junk"-- had its own valid purpose within human culture. He certainly did not argue that it had no relevance, as does the "content elitist," for he asserted that its very value was being able to "say or do anything" and to be "the least middle-class of all the mass media." And he did not argue that greater works were spawned thanks to great artists having crummy pop art to use as a chaotic reservor of ideas from which to swipe and/or reformulate.
Where Feiffer's pluralism needs some fine-tuning, though, is that he subscribed a little too uncritically to the Freudian "pleasure principle/reality principle" dichotomy. I've used said dichotomy myself here and there for the purposes of broad illustration, though I'd disagree in more specific terms as to how Freud characterizes both "pleasure" and "reality." In Feiffer's characterization, though, "junk comics" serve the sole purpose of being a retreat from pressures and responsibilities for most readers, particularly juveniles: "a place to hide where he cannot be got at by grownups." Because Feiffer's only subject is the comic books of his childhood, he doesn't address other questions about those "mass media" not solely directed at children. It should be evident that when Mickey Spillane (a onetime comics writer) broke into the adult market with KISS ME DEADLY, he was offering adults a similar retreat from pressures and responsibilities.
But is "escape" all there is to "the pleasure principle?" As one influenced more by Jung than by Freud, I have to take a different position, albeit one that subsumes aspects of Feiffer's Freudian stance.
In my earliest piece on Feiffer I quoted his definition of "junk" as being "there to entertain on the basest, most compromised of levels." I do not differ with Feiffer on this. Popular art is what Joyce calls "improper art" because it functions only the kinetic level, evoking responses of pure attraction or repulsion (even if the two are sometimes mixed, a matter Joyce didn't explore).
However, I disagree with Feiffer's next sentence, which I neglected to quote earlier:
"[Junk] finds the lowest fantasmal common denominator and proceeds from there."
"Fantasmal" is an odd choice of words, particularly in that it's not a much-used word, and its context isn't clear in HEROES. The word derives from "phantasm," meaning a ghost or spectre, but the dominant definitions of "phantasmal" stress that it means "delusory" or "illusive."
Did Feiffer mean that of all the escapist power-fantasies one might have, those presented by the likes of Superman and Batman are the closest to this "lowest common denominator" taking in, one presumes, everything from Nick Carter (whom Feiffer does mention, if obliquely) to Mike Hammer (whom Feiffer doesn't reference). I suspect that was his meaning, but if so, that position flirts with the position of "style elitism." I enjoy, on a purely kinetic level, both Mike Hammer and his distant ancestors (including not only Race Williams but also Siegel and Schuster's "Slam Bradley"). But I don't see Hammer as being less escapist/illusive than Slam Bradley. The only thing that seems to separate Mickey Spillane from Jerry Siegel is superior hardboiled style, although both men are a long way from being "up there" with Dashiell Hammett.
Interestingly, Wiktionary lists a tertiary definition for "phantasmal:" "expresses qualities of or produced from fantasy." This meaning was probably not on Feiffer's mind but it fits about as well as the "illusive" usage. But how would one judge whether or not one escapist concept was a better fantasy than another?
As noted earlier, I favor a Jungian approach to such matters over a Freudian one, but the precise system is not as important as asking the question, "By what method could one judge one fantasy as better than another?" It's a question that Jules Feiffer doesn't really answer even though he raises the topic of "low vs. high" in this indirect manner.
Is Mike Hammer a better fantasy than Slam Bradley, I ask? Probably.
Is Mike Hammer a better fantasy than Superman, Batman, or the Spirit?
Let's just say that even to try answering the question would require tools more finely-tuned than the blunt instruments Feiffer inherits from Big Sigmund Freud...
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