UNCANNY ARTIFICE

In response to some comments on this post on my movie-blog, I started thinking about Rudolf Otto again. Some time back I devoted over half a dozen posts to my reading of Otto’s most famed book, THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, which originally I knew only through a C.S. Lewis essay. Though I believe these posts show how Otto’s thinking informed his concept of “the uncanny,” I wrote them before I had fully formulated my literary concept of “artifice,” influenced by but not determined by some of Northrop Frye’s formulations.

When Rudolph Otto published IDEA OF THE HOLY in 1923, he was in effect challenging an intellectual tendency in his time to define religion purely in terms of either “naturalistic” or “marvelous” phenomenologies. Religion, of course, was in every clime and time justified in terms of a phenomenology that transcended the strictures of space and time. Creation-myths show this transcendence of natural law most clearly. The world is created from some marvelous series of events, whether it springs from the bones of fallen giants or from God moving on the face of chaotic waters. A few scattered skeptical accounts of universal genesis did appear during certain archaic periods. Still, it’s fair to state that the assertion of purely naturalistic explanations didn’t really gain ground until the growth of non-religious or even anti-religious philosophies in Europe’s post-Renaissance eras.

Otto, being a Lutheran theologian, was inevitably allied to the notion of a marvelous Christian theology, in which God had sent his only begotten son to be sacrificed by and for humanity. He was, as IDEA makes clear, quite aware of the intellectual currents of the preceding centuries, which tended to view not only the world, but religion itself, as reducible to natural causes. For instance, in 1902 William James had in essence taken an empiricist attitude in analyzing THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. And while James’s catholic approach to world religions may have influenced Otto, the theologian rejected James’s emphasis on naturalistic explanations of religious practice.

As I commented in HOLY NUMINOSITY PART5, Otto held to the Christian belief that other religions were not valid in terms of revelation. Yet he also advocated what might called an Aristotelian sense that the “crude, primitive forms” of early religion had at least foreshadowed “the more highly developed forms of the numinous emotion,” that is, the ability to experience the awe and dread lurking beneath the naturalistic appearance of the universe. I don’t believe that Otto says all that much in IDEA about the reality of Christian metaphysics, but only because he’s more concerned with showing how his notion of “the numinous” pervades all religions, crude and advanced alike.

What makes the early religions crude by Otto’s lights is that they derive their “daemonic dread” from entities that Otto considers unreal in terms of phenomenology—ghosts, abstract forces like mana. An advocate of naturalistic phenomenology would of course argue that the entities of the higher religions, such as heaven-sent saviors, were just as unreal, but Otto does not argue this point. His concern is to show that human beings have a special capacity for transcendent emotions which are not reducible to naturalistic affects like fear or lust, and that this capacity appears in both the lesser and the greater religions.

Though Otto does not systematize his use of the term “the uncanny,” he applies it largely to the crude religions of daemonic dread. Modern readers of any persuasion might tend to view a ghost-story as a concept belonging to a marvelous phenomenology, but Otto does not believe primitives to be capable of such advanced concepts. The ghosts of early pagan stories are mere fancies, having no more reality than a ghost in a Sherlock Holmes tale—my comparison, not Otto’s. But in Otto’s paradigm, even a crude concept of ghosts still invokes the numinous capacity, which makes the early pagan fancies relevant to Otto’s project of defining all religious activity as rooted in something other than naturalistic causes. Otto does not use the term “artifice” at all, certainly not as I am using it. However, in effect he has stated that made-up stories, stories that have no real relevance to the phenomenological nature of the universe, stimulate emotions that exceed the limits of naturalistic phenomenology.

In this essay I revised Northrop Frye’s opposition of “myth” and “verisimilitude,” suggesting that, because “myth” had so many divergent meanings, “artifice” was a better term for the totality of the fictional (and religious) tropes through which human beings create coherent narratives. “Artifice” always draws upon this imagined totality to give narratives structure, just as “verisimilitude” draws upon the totality of lived experience to give narratives credibility.

Since I am not a materialist, I do not argue against phenomenologies that explain the visible world in marvelous terms, as proving-grounds for the war of Good and Evil or as a meaningless mote in the eye of an indifferent god. I only state that as soon as human beings translate their concepts of the marvelous—no matter how those concepts are obtained—into narrative, then they must structure concepts of the marvelous by the use of artifice; the use of elaborate tropes. In Jesus’s time, the Romans used real crosses for the mundane purpose of punishing thieves and rebels. But although Christian religion asserts that Jesus died on a real cross made of real wood, the real substance of the Christian cross is composed of earlier story-tropes about sacrificial victims perishing in or around trees. Eventually such tropes become so elaborate that the cross, rising from a hill called Golgotha, becomes covalent with the Tree of Knowledge, and the hill with the skull of the long dead Adam.

Now, uncanny phenomenologies do not diverge this much from verisimilitude. Causality remains naturalistic, but the events depicted suggest the presence of the numinous through the heightened emotions possible only through the appropriate tropes. Though the story of King David is often seen as a precursor to the meta-narrative of the Messiah, not that much of David’s story is marvelous in nature. If one discounts from the narrative the implicit will of God in David’s exploits, David’s closest encounter to anything that even seems marvelous is the story of the giant Goliath. Yet Goliath is not a mythic giant, but a mortal who happens to be about ten feet tall—an unlikely, but not indubitably marvelous, stature. Verisimilitude is much more of an influence upon the narrative of King David than upon that of the King of the Jews, but in the end, David’s story is also meant to stimulate, through artifice, the sense of what Otto calls “the numinous.”

In my writings I’ve usually referenced the Kantian concept of the sublime in place of the numinous, an association Otto explicitly denied, for reasons relating to Otto’s concept of his own religion. In essence, my long and winding exploration of the different phenomenological categories of fiction exists to refute Tzvetan Todorov’s purely empiricist formulation of those categories I call “uncanny” and “marvelous,” which he viewed as subsumed by “the Real.” Otto would probably not endorse any of my conclusions. But I like to think he would prefer them over the dreary materialism of either Todorov or any similar Marxmallow pundit.