I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.
Naturally, since I'm concerned with the themes of literary works rather than myths as such, I'm not concerned with Jung's idea about an unconscious "counterposition" arising in reaction to a "one-sided tendency" that "dominates conscious life." The writer of fiction may be drawing on both conscious and unconscious factors in his own mind, but the work he presents to the reader depends on a conflict between at least two opposed principles, usually personified into characters. Levi-Strauss implied such a conflict in his binary oppositions, though he does not seem nearly as interested in Aristotle's idea of the *agon,* the idea that conflict is fundamental to "poetry." If anything, Levi-Strauss's approach to the way a myth-tale approaches opposed forces resembles Tzvetan Todorov's model for an aesthetics that "just happens,' based not in conflict but in changing equilibriums.
…we must inquire into the very nature of narrative. Let us begin by constructing an image of the minimum narrative, not the kind we usually find in contemporary texts, but that nucleus without which we cannot say there is any narrative at all. The image will be as follows: All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.
I suppose Todorov may have de-emphasized the radical of conflict because he was aware of literary works that appeared to dispense with overt conflict. However, in my analysis of the Ray Bradbury story "The Last Night of the World," I found that even in a story with no apparent intrinsic conflict, there existed a conflict between what the story portrayed and the audience's expectations:
In the minds of some if not all readers of the story, there will be the expectation that if humanity were faced with an "end of days," it would be an occasion of great tumult, of "raging against the dying of the light." What Bradbury's story offers is, in keeping with the literary audience to which it is directed, is a triumph of the "will to nothingness" against all the audience's expectations.
In Part 2, I gave my "binary opposition" to describe the potential underthought in a Jack Kirby story: "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story was equally weak in terms of having a discursive overthought, which came down to nothing more than "good must triumph over evil." So what would a strong underthought on the same theme look like?
The Golden Age Origin of Hawkman might be seen as following roughly the same paltry "good vs. evil" overthought, though its development of its underthought is one of the strongest in the comics medium.
In Fox's Hawkman story, as in Kirby's Challengers story, the heroes are tough guys who prove skillful with weapons, while their respective enemies more or less align with the archetype of the evil sorcerer. So the opposition here would be not unlike that of "sword versus sorcery."
To move on to a different underthought which keeps to the same good-vs.-evil overthought, I'll cite Kanigher's 1947 "The Injustice Society of the World." In this story the underthought is more like "law vs. crime," perhaps best represented by the scene where the villains put the heroes on trial for their deeds against crime. This underthought is not nearly as well developed as Fox's Hawkman story. However, the Kanigher story is one of many that I've considered as mythcomics simply because the stories had one "binary opposition" devoted to giving readers a discourse regarding the opposed elements.
Similarly, I have at times given the mythcomics designation to works in which the overthought and underthought are both strong, though not necessarily forming a unity.
The 1982 graphic novel "God Loves, Man Kills" does provide such unity, though. This time the overthought isn't just a vague opposition of good and evil, but that of "religious doctrine versus biological reality." Various earlier X-Men stories had opposed the biological reality of mutantkind to human beliefs regarding normality. However, those earlier stories didn't reference the more controversial topic of religion, as Chris Claremont's story does.
Cyclops's speech depicts the positive opposition of the overthought, using logic to assert that mutants are part of humankind. In contrast, Reverend Stryker fulfills the negative function, anathematizing the abnormal and stressing the need for purification.
Since both of these philosophical postures relate to the history of ideas, they belong to the story's overthought. The underthought, however, is concerned more with the opposition of images and the numinous associations they carry. Elsewhere in the story, the sometime villain Magneto makes what I've termed the "separatist argument," that humans and mutants should be separated from one another. But his appearance in this panel gives Magneto a less rational appearance, making of him a sympathetic "devil"-- born up by magnetic waves rather than wings-- who storms the church-like meeting-hall of the obsessed preacher.
"God Loves" is not as rich in images and symbols as other stories, particularly the Hawkman-origin. Clearly Claremont's story functions primarily as a dramatic exploration of ideas, while the symbols are less important. However, "God Loves" is one of the better stories in which overthought and underthought form a significant unity.
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