The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement... Coleridge, BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA, PT. 14.
Coleridge's concept of art as a vast fusion of many different contrary aspects of life substantially agrees with my notion of the dialectic between "the unfamiliar" and "the familiar." In the previous two essays, I've defined a "primary familiarity" that applies principally to "life-as-we-live-in-every-day," and a "secondary familiarity" that is applied to the construction of abstract conceptual forms. I discussed the forms of science and of myth, connecting the latter to the practice of art by speaking of "mythology and its expression through art-works." By this I was not implying an absolute identity between myth and art. I believe that both forms strive for a fusion between the familiar and the unfamiliar, in contrast to science's quest for total familiarity of a quantifiable nature. However, regardless as to how deeply myths were believed by their adherents in pre-technological societies, the myth-tales were promulgated with the idea that the society OUGHT to believe them, at least to some degree. The stories of art and literature are promulgated with the idea that the listeners don't necessarily have to believe in them, particularly once the stories began to diverge from stories associated with religions concepts.
Myth by definition needs concepts that extend beyond familiar life, since myth is meant to explain the workings of the universe through gods or giants or spirits or whatever. Fiction, however, can represent states of existence that go beyond immediate phenomena ("metaphenomenal") or it can represent states of existence that strongly resemble immediate phenomena ("isophenomenal.") We don't know how sort of isophenomenal stories might have been related by early tribal humans, because most surviving narratives do have mythico-religious associations. Still, one may fairly assume that primitive humans had their versions of simple naturalistic stories even as we do-- fish stories about "the one that got away," or "Your mama is so fat that, etc." Still, for many centuries, metaphenomenal tropes seemed dominant, with the higher classes in, say, medieval Europe telling stories of knights chasing Grails while the lower classes told stories of talking wolves and horses. Centuries would go by before literature would to some extent embrace the POV of science, coming to focus more on stories of ordinary people moving around in a world without magic or miracles.
In reaction to this sense that the naturalistic world had become more dominant-- arguably showing "contempt" for the old religious myths-- one also sees artists in say, post-Renaissance Europe making more of a freestyle use of magic and miracles than one saw in medieval Europe. Certainly Shakespeare's MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM feels more like the playwright's personal and playful take on fairies than like any attempt to adhere to any mythic or folkloric concept of fairies. Roughly a century later Europe would begin to see the rise of what some call "proto-science-fiction," as seen in Swift's 1726 GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, while, about forty years after that, we see the invention of the first Gothic novel with Walpole's 1764 CASTLE OF OTRANTO. As different as these two eighteenth-century works are from one another, they both depend on challenging the familiarity of the average reader by opening them up to new worlds of unfamiliarity-- though it's axiomatic that no metaphenomenal work can be too totally divorced from the familiar world, or it would be impossible for readers to understand, to say nothing of failing to exercise what Coleridge calls art's "synthetic" power.
This is the sense in which I'm claiming that Aesopian contempt-- the sense that things can be taken for granted, including the predominance of a naturalistic phenomenality-- "bred" unfamiliarity. At a time when it was difficult if not impossible to put forth new mythico-religious concepts, due to the vested interests of established religions, literature develops a wide number of genres designed to perpetuate a sense of unfamiliarity within an apparently familiar world. Even many "high class" artists, particularly among the English and German Romantics, launched such experiments with metaphenomenal material, as we see with Hoffmann's GOLDEN POT and "The Sandman," Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, and Coleridge's own experiment with vampire-fiction, the unfinished ballad CHRISTABEL. From one viewpoint, if the prehistoric myth-maker was trying to counter the unfamiliarity of the physical world with images of the familiar (like making the sun into a godly charioteer), the authors of metaphenomenal fiction were challenged by the familiarity of science's reading of the physical world into generating new images of the unfamiliar.
Hmm, I believe I need at least one more essay to clarify the specifics of the differences between the uncanny-metaphenomenal and the marvelous-metaphenomenal. Possibly tomorrow.
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