SHORTCHANGING THE SECOND MASTER

In this essay I noted that I was currently re-reading Wagner and Lundeen's analysis of the STAR TREK franchise, DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. I also noted that I felt a little reluctant to blog further about it, though I only referred to the "chimera" of rebutting points made in a book published over twenty years ago. It's a little different when a critic breaks down an earlier work that still has a following, like Ursula Le Guin's THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT, which I assailed in this essay and the two subsequent posts. Even if I had a larger following, would all that many fans, be it of STAR TREK specifically or of metaphenomenal criticism generally, even care about what Wagner and Lundeen said about "Star Trek in the American Mythos?"

However, one interesting aspect of the authors is their attempt to "serve two masters," as per the Matthew 6:24 quote. In HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PART 2 I attempted to give the authors the benefit of the doubt because they claimed that they were pursuing the course of pluralism, even if they do not do so in the same ways I do. But now that I'm about halfway through the book, I think that the authors' claim to appreciate different paths was just them talking out of both sides of their mouths.

Wagner and Lundeen's claim to pluralism appears in the first chapter, following a generalized history of the many intellectual and academic interpretations of myth. In the concluding section, entitled "Plural Vision," Wagner and Lundeen write:

It is possible, when writing about myth, to be so driven toward a preconceived goal that one may select only the material that fits the chosen approach or stretch and whittle it until it does fit. Those who read myth in order to interrogate its hegemonic messages, are likely to write about such subjects as gender, race, ethnicity... [while] those inclined toward the veneration of myth are more likely to focus on heroism, self-transcendence, the achievement of inner wholeness and illumination...

Now that I've read more of the book, it's quite evident that there's a reason why Wagner and Lundeen first listed the critical, reductive analysis of "hegemonic messages," and gave short shrift to the view, expressed by such authorities as Jung and Frye, that myth has its own integral logic that cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations. Though I intend to keep reading, in the first six chapters I've found nothing to justify the book's title. DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME. The title sounds like a response to one of mythographer Mircea Eliade's more "transcendental" books on mythology, such as THE MYTH OF THE ETERNAL RETURN or THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. But Eliade is only cited three times in the index, just like Carl Jung-- which indicates that the authors were just bullshitting about their supposed respect for the non-reductive views of myth.

Since this is just a blogpost, I'll confine myself to one example of the authors' reductive proclivities. Chapter 5, subtitled "Gender in the STAR TREK Cosmos," concludes with a section with the bumptious title "Tinfoil Bikinis and Political Correctness." The authors assert that in the fourth season of STAR TREK VOYAGER, the producers introduced the svelte character "Seven of Nine" to add sex appeal to the series, with the clear implication that for the show's past three seasons not that many fans. hetero or otherwise, were enthralled with the existing female cast-members. Wagner and Lundeen paraphrase a quote by Berman from a 1997 article in which he made some comment about the show having become too "politically correct." The bias of the authors toward the feminist agenda is clearly shown by their response:

If "political correctness" means a sensitivity to feminism and other left-liberal political views, it is probably too simplistic to blame it for the decline of the "sexy" STAR TREK female.

Wagner and Lundeen then veer off any actual estimation of the "correctness" accusation by accusing the Original Series-- the souce of the "tinfoil bikinis"-- of focusing on "women as the sole object of the sexual gaze, with men doing all the gazing." This is not sustainable, not least because Mister Spock managed to attract a sizeable female fandom-- but he did so as men usually do in the real world, through his actions rather than through the use of makeup and attire. One need not be a Jungian essentialist to notice that hetero men and women have different orientations with respect to the opposite sex, and one cannot glibly downgrade any of the TREKs if they reflect that basic experiential truth. In fact, the "sexual gazes" directed at Seven of Nine's smoking body in her skin-tight attire apparently included a number of lesbians, since during the run of VOAYGER, a petition was circulated to declare Seven as having a lesbian relationship with the ship's female captain, as reported in this Wikipedia article.

I've often made fun of overly politicized critics, such as Noah Berlatsky, who blathered about my myth-critical approach without the slightest understanding of the issues involved. But at least he only served one master, unlike the hypocritical authors of this not-so-deep analysis.

ADDENDUM 12-15-21: I considered devoting a separate post to  the remainder of this book now that I've finished it, but I found it such a mixed bag that I don't think it's worth it. There are some okay insights here and there, but in large point this is a "proto-woke" work, continuously complaining about the STAR TREK franchise's lack of proper intersectionality. Even after admitting that the shows are all television programs that must use human actors for the majority of their players, the authors STILL fault the shows for being too anthropocentric, and so they are guilty of a fundamental dishonesty, throwing out valid reasons for production procedures and then dismissing those reasons out of hand. 

Though there have been Far Left studies with inventive points of view, Wagner and Lundeen are largely derivative and unoriginal in their analyses. The only puzzling aspect of their work is that I don't know why they stuck the phrase "sacred time" in their title. They correctly attribute the phrase to Mircea Eliade, and even quote the context correctly. But given that the authors are mildly hostile toward the claims of any religious hegemonies-- as was, BTW, Gene Roddenberry-- it's clear that they aren't the least bit concerned with the philosophical aspects of Eliade's idea. Maybe in some fashion they viewed Eliade's concept of a originary time before time itself started as some sort of "modernism," which they incorrectly associate with cultural traditionalism. But if so, they failed to make that association clear, and so their whole project shortchanges their readers as well as their "two masters."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE SEARCH FOR GOD" (THE SPECTRE #57-62, 1997-98)

The DC character The Spectre, despite being one of the more interesting characters originated by Jerry Siegel after his breakthrough conception of Superman, has never been particularly successful in any of his incarnations. This may be because the character extended the superhero's devotion to justice-- with its concomitant eschewing of domestic commitments-- into the realm of a perpetually vengeful spirit. Other Golden Age heroes occasionally took the lives of their enemies in the heat of battle, but the Spectre never had that excuse, being almost omnipotent and given to smiting evildoers with extreme prejudice. The fact that Spectre had died by criminal violence, and that he was given such powers by some entity in the Judeo-Christian heaven, may have made both him and his mission unrelatable for the average reader. It remains a minor mystery as to why this basically unsuccessful character was revived by DC in the mid-1960s, without any of the focus on divine vengeance. A 1970s series by Michael Fleischer and Jim Aparo took the opposing tack, but this still did not succeed, though the grotesque EC-style executions of crooks made the stories popular with the fan contingent.

I have not read the entire sixty-two issues of the character's nineties revival by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, but I perused enough individual issues to get the general sense of the creators' take on the franchise. I debated whether or not to read all of the online stories before devoting a post to the concluding six-part arc. I decided not to do so, since in theory the arc should be able to stand as a mythcomic whatever else the authors did in the course of the series.

Ostrander was probably dominantly responsible for seeking ways to "justify the ways of the Spectre to fans." He formulated the notion that Spectre was the incarnation of "the Wrath of God," or specifically that of the Judeo-Christian God Spectre's alter ego Jim Corrigan had grown up with. However, unlike Siegel and Fleischer Ostrander also sought to place the avenging apparition in situations where a clear-cut choice between good and evil was not available. One such conundrum crops up at the end of issue #56 sparks a conflict between the persona of the Spectre and that of his "vessel" Jim Corrigan. Spectre seeks out adjudication with the powers of Heaven, only to find the Pearly Gates wide open and all of Heaven's inhabitants, including the reigning deity, gone.

Spectre plays detective, trying to find God in all of his "usual haunts." The unquiet spirit Deadman provides the first inkling that God's presence may be a matter of perspective, since Deadman believes that his own deity Rama Kushna is the actual being in charge of things. Spectre then seeks out the mythological domains of two pagan belief-systems, and gets no answer. He gets a better clue, though, from Jack Kirby-- or, more specifically, from an ambiguous deific force, "the Source," invented by Kirby for his NEW GODS series.

The Source only gives the Spectre a vague oracle, which leads the Ghostly Guardian into ambivalent contacts with a race of aliens who deem their "hive-mind" to be their deity, and with the spirit of the Earth-Goddess, who complains a lot about mortals murdering the biosphere. But Gaea directs Spectre to seek the answer in the history of Jim Corrigan. 

The Spectre learns assorted new aspects of Jim Corrigan's early existence, all of which culminate in both Spectre and Corrigan experiencing a "Job moment."

In answer to this demand for justice from God, the hero and his alter ego get a very different answer than did the postulant from the Book of Job. A being claiming to be God manifests, looking for all the world like a moronic version of the Greco-Roman Cronos/Saturn, claiming that he simply ate everyone in Heaven. After Corrigan defies God, the demented deity sends him on another voyage of discovery. Corrigan sees yet more sinfulness in his lineage, such as a grandfather who participated in a murderous rage upon Cherokee Indians (not exempted from their own sinfulness, since Ostrander specifies that these were slave-holding Indians). 

This second katabasis actually allows Corrigan an "aha" realization about the nature of evil, which allows him to banish the vision of the imbecile God and to return to the side of his sometimes confessor Father Craemer. Craemer supplies Corrigan with the gloss to the Search for God: "What you have done is confront your image of God and found your old beliefs are not enough." However, because the magazine was on DC's chopping block-- which Ostrander and Mandrake certainly knew when beginning this arc-- there's no time for Corrigan to embrace any new visions of deity. The detective decides it's finally time to "give up the ghost"-- that is, separating himself from the Spectre in order that Corrigan can go to his eternal rest-- assuming, of course, that the perception of Heaven's non-existence was just a bump in the road of the Ghostly Guardian and his alter ego.

It's bracing to behold the DC version of the God of Abraham depicted as something like Twain's "malevolent thug." Of course Ostrander and Mandrake must supply a mitigation of this vision, because they're playing with DC's toys, and therefore must leave the doors open for whatever the next author wants to do with God, Heaven, the Spectre or Jim Corrigan. For all I know, Corrigan may have been revived one or more times by now. So "The Search for God" must be an exploration not of any final vision of deity but of all the contingent factors that may go into forming that vision. Nevertheless, this "Search" is a pretty good metaphysical primer on religious relativism and moral ambivalence-- certainly not the sort of thing the Golden Age character was intended to explore.

THE READING RHEUM: TOWARD A PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING (1968/1999)

My reading of a book on the early works of Colin Wilson, referenced here, moved me to check out one of Wilson's influences, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, in the third edition of the title noted above. 

Of course I'd probably heard of Maslow's basic concept of "peak experiences" roughly since the 1970s, and the author may even have been mentioned in some of the Wilson books I did read, given that the two of them corresponded for some time. I'd also heard bits and pieces about "Maslow's hierarchy of needs," but I simply didn't get around to reading as much of his work as I did with both Freud and Jung.

The above book-- BEING, for short-- might not be the best introduction to Maslow's work, since its chapters are all rewritten lectures that Maslow gave before various audiences. Nevertheless, I got the general schema. Maslow argues that human beings are doubly motivated by their responses to "deficiency" or to "growth" (which Maslow later terms "being," though this term is actually less clear than the earlier one IMO). Deficiency motivations are fueled by the perception that one can only be happy if one can satisfy one's appetite for wealth, food, love, or some similar commodity. Growth motivations are fueled by the perception that one can overcome all boundaries through a process that Maslow termed "self-actualization." Maslow often drew comparisons between his work and that of his predecessor Freud, finding that Freud's entire system was built on the idea of deficiency, with which point I agree.

Now, despite my agreeing with Maslow on all of his main points, I did find the essays in BEING somewhat unexciting. Freud, Jung, and Colin Wilson are all much better at communicating abstruse concepts so as to make the reader excited by said concepts. At present I don't know if Maslow's schema has much application to my overall lit-crit project-- except for this section from Chapter 11, "Psychological Data and Human Values."

The various chapters in BEING don't explore the peak-experience in as much detail as I would have liked, but in Chapter 11, he contrasts the idea of a subject's "great" peak-experiences vs. his "lesser" ones.

...the process of moment-to-moment growth is itself intrinsically rewarding and delightful in an absolute sense. If [these experiences] are not mountain-peak experiences, at least they are foothill-experiences, little glimpses of absolute, self-validative delight, little moments of Being.

What Maslow calls "foothill-experiences" may be somewhat covalent with what he later calls "plateau-experiences." In any case, this has intrinsic appeal to me for its relevance to literary values.

If I were an elitist like the majority of comics-critics, I would value only the peak-experiences, however I chose to define the content that engendered those experiences. Instead, I am (though I've not advanced the term in a long time) a pluralist, and in this context this means that I value even imperfect works when they have at least the SUGGESTION of reaching concrescence with respect to one or more of the four potentialities.

As indicative of my ceaseless pursuit of even the humble "foothill-experiences" as well as those at the peak, in recent months I've been reviewing a large number of the Italian fantasy-films usually called peplum, first for NATURALISTIC UNCANNY MARVELOUS and secondarily for THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA. The more I see of these formulaic productions, the less chance there seems to find any works that hit on all cylinders. When I did find two that developed their mythopoeic ideas-- respectively the 1962 FURY OF ACHILLES  and the 1964 TRIUMPH OF HERCULES. If I wanted nothing but the most well-executed works, then I could stop looking at the subgenre right now, with the conviction that these might well be the only ones that offered "peak experiences."

Nevertheless, even though there are a lot of peplum-films that don't offer even the milder foothill-experiences, there are enough of these to keep the hunt going. For example, a film like the 1962 VULCAN SON OF JUPITER has one good undeveloped mythopoeic idea, that of asserting that if mortals manage to trespass on the domain of Zeus, they can actually diminish the god's power, mirroring the magic by which the ruler of Olympus changes three gods-- Vulcan, Ares and Aphrodite-- into mere mortals. The script doesn't use the idea for anything more than a throwaway rationalization, but I like exploring the potential of even insufficiently-developed ideas.

In Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE, the author suggested than hardcore fans of the metaphenomenal genres (not the word he uses, of course) must be the most optimistic people around, since on a regular basis they plow through reams of badly done junk in search of the proverbial "diamonds in the garbage." But if Maslow's concept is true-- that all human beings have some potential for peak experiences, or at least the related foothill-types-- then the fans' optimism is justified in searching for diamonds wherever one can find them-- and that said diamonds can appear at any level of creative accomplishment.

NEAR-MYTHS: SUPERMAN RED SON (2003)

 

I finally read the TPB of SUPERMAN RED SON on a friend's recommendation. I didn't like it nearly as much as he did, but I must admit that it showed me a side of writer Mark Millar that I hadn't hitherto seen: a degree of simple competence.

This ELSEWORLDS project, originally appearing in three installments and penciled by four separate artists, follows the premise, "What if Superman had been raised in the culture of Soviet Russia?" Unlike the canonical Superman, whose historical era varies according to his audience, this alternate version specifically grows to manhood during the Cold War, so that he's poised to take the place of the atom bomb as the objective correlative of the struggle between the capitalistic U.S. and Communist Russia. Prior to this period, the Soviet Superman apparently foregoes any Superboy-like career, and it's only as an adult that he dons a costume and offers his services to Joseph Stalin. 

Nevertheless, Soviet-Man doesn't go around grinding the free world into mulch, as one suspects would have happened had someone given Stalin a weapon of ultimate power. That's because Millar, playing to DC Comics' "Bible of Superman," makes certain that even though he's not farm-bred Clark Kent this time out, Superman is still the same inveterate do-gooder as always. Thus even the Soviet leader can't tell this other "man of steel" what to do, but has to mask his lust for power in seeming benevolence. 

To be sure, the narrative is largely free from explicit period politics. The gist of Millar's myth-idea is that Superman acts as a talisman to the fortunes of his adopted country. Without a Kryptonian hero to represent "truth, justice and the American way," the United States falls into disarray, while most of the civilized world falls into step with Russia's designs. The role of the U.S. in Soviet-Man's story is that of military escalation, for they seek to manufacture superhumans as a means of negating Russia's ace in the hole. Lex Luthor, portrayed as a polymath genius in the service of the CIA, is the primary source of super-powered opponents, mostly alternate versions of established Superman-foes, though Millar works in an alternate version of Green Lantern as well. An alternate version of Wonder Woman becomes Superman's ally when he assumes the role of Russia's leader following Stalin's death, while a Russia-born version of Batman becomes one of the hero's most formidable enemies.

Lois Lane is also worked into the mix. She and Superman only meet some time after the intrepid reporter has become the wife of Luthor, and consequently, even though Lois and Luthor eventually divorce, no romance between Lois and Soviet-Man ever transpires. Millar seems to have settled on making his version of DC's iconic hero such a goody-goody that, with Lois out of the picture, he never hooks up with anyone else-- not Wonder Woman, whom he treats like "one of the boys" despite her obvious feelings for him, nor "Lana Lazarenko," Russia's version of Lana Lang. Eventually Millar finds a way to divorce Soviet-Man from his ties to the Communist regime, but he does so in such a way as to make it all about the hero's devotion to doing right in the long view, rather than any particular disenchantment with said regime.

Romance is relegated to a secondary consideration here because Millar's playing to the "Elseworlds" fan who basically wants to see old wine in new bottles, including, besides those already mentioned, revisions of Brainiac, Jimmy Olsen, "Superman robots," and the Phantom Zone. Yet I never got the feeling that Millar or his collaborative artists had any particular feeling for any of the Superman mythology. When Millar's sometime collaborator Grant Morrison did ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, he clearly shared similar motivations in re-fashioning the established myths to please experienced fan-readers. Yet Morrison conveyed a genuine fascination with the power of those myths. With Millar, I don't get any sense that he's doing anything but completing a job.

Still, he certainly does that job, limited as it is, much better than his more uninhibited, but less coherent, works, such as OLD MAN LOGAN and WANTED. Thus I must admit he's not a total incompetent.

HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PT. 2

Around the same time I began turning my thoughts to the topic of half-truths, problems and conundrums, as seen in Part 1, I started re-reading the 1998 critical work DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME: STAR TREK IN THE AMERICAN MYTHOS, by Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen. I consider this a felicitous, given that "Classic Trek" was the source of some examples as to how both problems and conundrums function in narrative within the originating essay. In an earlier formulation I had also used Classic Trek and one of its many epigoni as illustrations of the more specific notions of "moira" and "themis" in this essay, which probably sustains some parallels with my current opposition of problems and conundrums.

I remember enjoying MYTHOS, though I'm reasonably sure I haven't revisited it in ten years. But the opening chapter by Wagner and Lundeen does state some views on the idea of "myth in popular fiction" with which I'll take issue.

The first passage presents no serious problems:

Because the bare physical universe offers so little comfort to the mind, people strive through the medium of myth to center themselves and to make cosmological sense of their experiences.

I would not personally favor the term "comfort," even though it bears comparison with Tolkien's concept of "consolation," and at present I have greater liking for Whitehead's concept of *concrescence,* which has more to do with a perceiving entity sussing out the values that other entities have for him and for his culture. But this is a viable and popular interpretation of myth's function, and the authors bend over backwards not to get caught on the proverbial "Procrustean bed" of any single interpretation. 

On the same page, though, the question of a given narrative's truth-value comes up. The authors admit that "fantasy fiction and science fiction" are the two "narrative realms" that most often invite comparison with archaic myth, but then, as if signaling their own Procrustean preferences, they state that "While fantasy may bear a superficial resemblance to traditional myth in its rustic and magical character, science fiction has a stronger functional parallel with older myths, because its futuristic setting can entail a more serious truth claim." A bit later the authors claim that "Like the primal past but unlike overtly fictional settings, the future can be thought of as potentially real and true."

I won't launch into a detailed defense of fantasy fiction's equal claim to "truth" in the sense I've discussed it here. It's clear to me that even though cutting fantasy fiction out of the picture is a pretty large process of logic-chopping, I understand that the authors' prime consideration was to provide support for the position that science fiction generally had a superior "truth claim" because this argument allows them to concentrate on the superior capacity of the STAR TREK franchise to reflect truth. They also admit that "all literature is thought experiment," with which I partly agree, though with the caveat that mythopoeic thought tickles a different part of the human psyche than does didactic thought-- and that Classic Trek in particular is an ideal modern narrative which can show each form working separately or in tandem. 

To admit that "all literature is thought experiment," even without a well formulated theory of mythopoesis, is tantamount to making the same purpose I've identified in both archaic myth and in literature: that of "exposing audiences to pure possibilities." I assume that like many other modern authors, Wagner and Lundeen attempt to promote the idea of those possibilities as having a "truth claim" because the majority of readers have been trained via public school to view literature as fiction whose real purpose is to communicate enlightening messages. This is one of those bromides that sounds so logical on the surface that it's practically impossible to eradicate without a book-long argument to that effect. Naturally, Wagner and Lundeen are mostly concerned with simply validating the linked narratives of one overarcing fiction-franchise, not seeking to stem the tide of functionalism, so they can't be criticized for not doing something they didn't purpose to do. I don't know if I will blog about other aspects of their study in future, but if I do, I imagine I will continue to pursue the chimera of, "Now here's what *I* would say about the matter..."

 

HALF-TRUTHS AND CONUNDRUMS PT. 1

So if philosophical epistemology is concerned with the nature of absolute truth-- even if it might be, as in William James, to disprove its existence-- then mythico-literary epistemology is concerned only with "half-truths," with exposing its audience to pure possibilities.-- AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

Given this statement of the nature of "truth" in myth and literature, I want to bring it into line with my newly formed dichotomy between "problems" and "conundrums" as delineated in this recent essay. 

Though I didn't make any comment on the four potentialities in the first HALF-TRUTH essay, the subject did come up in the second essay. 

As I reconsidered this in greater depth, I feel it necessary to explain that though the kinetic and the dramatic potentialities certainly do draw upon "patterns" derived from sense experience, those two potentialities don't make substantial use of what I've called "epistemological patterns." I suppose I might term the first type of patterns "existential," since these two potentialities are more concerned with translating existence as the fictional characters *seem* to experience it. The other two potentialities, however, are rooted in a fictional form of epistemology, because the forms they deal with depend on abstract constructions. 

My more recent formulation was an attempt to identify the types of propositions involved with each potentiality, after making the determination that the "existential" types of propositions were short-range in nature and followed the paradigm of the idea of the "problem that can solved" (even if said solution is a negative one, as one often sees in horror stories), while the "epistemological" types were long-range and followed the paradigm of the "conundrum that may not be entirely soluble." From this line of thought I formulated this schema:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."

On a side note, in keeping with my observations in KNOWING THE IDEA FROM THE CONCEPT, from now on I'll attempt to term all "symbolic embodiments" as either "ideas" or "idea-tropes," while "didactic assessments" will be termed either "concepts" or 'concept-tropes."

Now, as I've conceived the relationship of problems and conundrums, they exist to complement one another. A reader doesn't necessarily find both a problem and a conundrum in every narrative, but the potential is always there, in keeping with Northrop Frye's observations about the distinction between narrative and significant values  (a set of paired terms that I used for some time before gravitating to others.) But since I stated at the outset that the purpose of mythico-literary epistemology was to create "half-truths," the following question arises, at least for me: "What is the half of the narrative that is MORE true than the other?"

And my answer is, inevitably, "the conundrum, not the problem." The PROBLEM is rooted in the existential nature of entities who never truly existed, even when an author has scrupulously sought to base a given fictional entity on a real person, as William Styron did in his CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER. The CONUNDRUM, because it is based in an epistemological idea or concept, has a degree of truth-value, even if the idea or concept is itself untenable as a source of philosophical epistemology. (One earlier example of such an untenable concept was that of Freudian psychology.) Again, the main purpose of narrative epistemology is to "expose... audiences to pure possibilities," which in turn can be aligned with Cassirer's notion of "a free selection of causes."

ADDENDUM: The above terms "ideas" and "concepts" have been replaced by the more arcane "correlations" and "cogitations."

THE READING RHEUM: THE SONG OF HIAWATHA (1855)

 Given my keen interest in charting the course of adventure-fiction within the greater context of prose and poetic literature, I took considerable time getting around to Longfellow's famous narrative poem.

The bulk of Longfellow's work is not well regarded with younger audiences today, although older connoisseurs of poetry are likely to remember the engrossing rhythms of "The Children's Hour," "Paul Revere's Ride," and the epic of a figure who began as a historically verifiable 16th-century chief but was transformed by the poet into a catch-all demigod amalgamating assorted Native American stories. By the time Longfellow wrote the SONG, the entire tradition of the epic poem, which could trace its heritage back to many of the earliest civilizations, was clearly on the decline, and I would say that the SONG was probably the last specifically "heroic" epic of any consequence (including such latter-day efforts as Yeats' "Wanderings of Oisin.") After the SONG, almos all adventure-related narratives, whether as high-toned as IVANHOE or as trashy as THE BLACK MONK, became dominated by the medium of prose.

Archaic heroic epics served many purposes: to celebrate a nation's founding (the Aeneid), to dramatize a great martial conflict (the Iliad), or to bring a warrior back to his homeland (the Odyssey). The SONG is probably closest in spirit to the Iliad, which alludes to, but does not chronicle, the fall of Troy. The SONG describes the way of life of the Iroquois tribes that lived in the Northeastern United States, at a time before that way of life ended due to the incursions of European colonists. But even though by 1855 not all Native American tribes had been fully subdued by the U.S. government, the decline of the Iroquois stands for the eventual decline of all Native Americans within the U.S. borders (and to some extent to all such colonial endeavors). which I would imagine Longfellow foresaw. 

Experts on myth and folklore have declare that Longfellow's mixing and matching of Native American stories is far from faithful, even to the few written records of the oral tales in the poet's own time. Nevertheless, I don't judge literary myths primarily by accuracy to source, and so I found the SONG replete with many fascinating myth-tropes. Some of them are etiological in nature, like describing the invention of pictographic writing or the formulation of rituals to banish the spirits of the deceased. And many tales reflect the Indians' focus on all non-human creatures as "people" in their own right, capable of helping or harming the principal hero in his adventures. But for me I was frankly surprised at how many combative stories Longfellow works into his epic. 

Longfellow's Hiawatha is a demigod. A divine being, the West Wind, sires the future hero on a mortal woman (albeit with her own deific background), and then deserts her, patently competing with the Greek gods for the place of "worst deadbeat dad." As an adult Hiawatha takes his magical weapons and engages his heavenly father in combat to avenge his mother, who dies lovelorn-- but the West Wind can't be killed, so that Hiawatha must return to Earth and become a culture hero to the Iroquois. Aside from the etiological myths mentioned above, most of Hiawatha's activities are martial in nature, as he subdues the great sturgeon that swallows him whole, and conquers the immortal magician Meggisogwon, who has one vulnerable point (helpfully revealed to the hero by a clever woodpecker). Hiawatha also has a couple of larger-than-life friends-- Chiababos the minstrel and Kwasind the Strong Man-- but they end up meeting untimely ends, arguably signaling the decline of the fantasy-world in which Hiawatha dwells, even before the European colonists arrive to plunge the timeless wilderness into "real time." Most of the major characters are male, and so there's not much focus upon the lives of Native American females. The only time a female character is especially significant involves a magical ritual of corn-protection performed by the hero's famous wife Minnehaha, who performs the ritual by walking around a cornfield nude. Yet Minnehaha also dies during famine, underscoring that even in the fantasy-land Death still held its dominion.

Since the founding of the United States changed so much about the world, both in its "New" and "Old" incarnations, it's somewhat appropriate that an epic about the decline of the "noble savages" occupying that land should also stand as the last of the great heroic epics.

KNOWING THE IDEA FROM THE CONCEPT

I am as guilty as anyone of having used the two terms almost interchangeably-- and by "anyone," I mean a number of philosophers, ranging from Hume to Cassirer, who use either one or both terms inconsistently. Yet, the root associations for each word still continue in demotic usage. The archaic Greek etymology stresses that an "idea" is something one sees, and in demotic use this is reflected by the proverbial trope of a "light bulb" blinking on when one gets a new idea. Indeed, comics-creator Carl Barks played with this common visual trope by giving his genius-inventor character Gyro Gearloose a little robot "helper" who had a light-bulb for a head.

In contrast, though there's no standard sensory trope associated with "concept," said word does trace its lineage back to Latin, where the word connoted the physical conception of every human being within the womb. And for human beings, the birth of a new living thing is by no means as quick a thing as the act of seeing, so I tend to think of "ideas" as simple notions that may or may not prove useful, while "concepts" are ideas that have been worked out more thoroughly in terms of real-world applications. I would not be surprised to find that this or that philosopher has used these two terms in ways opposed to the way I choose to use them, but that's my choice nonetheless. At least part of my preference stems from my readings of Cassirer. particularly the frequently raised topic of how "theoretical thought" descends from the earlier and more expressive form of "mythical thought." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides this handy summation:

Characteristic of the philosophy of symbolic forms is a concern for the more “primitive” forms of world-presentation underlying the “higher” and more sophisticated cultural forms – a concern for the ordinary perceptual awareness of the world expressed primarily in natural language, and, above all, for the mythical view of the world lying at the most primitive level of all. For Cassirer, these more primitive manifestations of “symbolic meaning” now have an independent status and foundational role that is quite incompatible with both Marburg neo-Kantianism and Kant’s original philosophical conception. In particular, they lie at a deeper, autonomous level of spiritual life which then gives rise to the more sophisticated forms by a dialectical developmental process. From mythical thought, religion and art develop; from natural language, theoretical science develops. It is precisely here that Cassirer appeals to “romantic” philosophical tendencies lying outside the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition, deploys an historical dialectic self-consciously derived from Hegel, and comes to terms with the contemporary Lebensphilosophie of Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Max Scheler, and Georg Simmel – as well as with the closely related philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

As an example of my own imperfect use of at least the term "idea," in one April 2021 essay I attempted to identify the different types of tropes underlying the two abstractive potentialities:

In literature as in other cultural forms, all potentialities express themselves through processes of discourse. The discourses of “lateral meanings” deal with concrete subject matter—that of what sensations the subject experiences, and of the subject’s emotional reactions to those sensations. In contrast, the discourses of “vertical meanings” concern themselves with abstractions, with the didactic making use of “ideas” while the mythopoeic makes use of “symbols.” For the sake of argument, I will treat both ideas and symbols as if they existed as discrete monads, which is not the way either are experienced. Both ideas and symbols are best expressed in the form of typical story-tropes. Levi-Strauss was pleased to term these tropes “mythemes,” conveniently ignoring how such monadic forms were dispersed throughout all forms of human communication, not just myth.

Whenever I thought about the matter, I wasn't entirely comfortable with my opposition between mythopoeic "symbols" and didactic "ideas," particularly when I'd specified that neither of them were experienced as any sort of monadic entities. I'm now specifying that any "idea," as I use the term, is primarily a symbolic construct, given that it functions to describe a base relation between one or more symbols. In contrast, a "concept" is primarily a didactic construct, since the one who conceives it is attempting to give it a more developed form, with one's own mind providing the analogue to fetal development within the womb. So in future, whenever I refer to the types of tropes favored by either the mythopoeic or the didactic potentiality, I will speak of the former as "idea-tropes" and the latter as "concept-tropes."

I can't over-stress the importance of "the idea" as a mental construct that is first and foremost expressive rather than rigorously logical. Some ideas, as noted above, form the basis of developed conceptual systems, a familiar example being the mutation of the Judeo-Christian "idea" of "the believing elect" into a more didactic form, such as the socialist "concept" of the rise of the proletariat, which is, at least in theory, more responsive to real-world considerations.

I will conclude with an example of the sort of impractical symbol-play one encounters with pure ideas taken from my recent review of SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE. I wrote:

As poor as the script is, I can see some potential in the basic imagery here, which is the only reason I gave QUEST a "fair" mythicity rating. Superman attempts to get rid of Earth's nuclear weapons by tossing them into the sun. In rude poetic terms, the weapons "get even" by spawning their own champion who journeys to Earth and almost kills the hero. 

I assumed that I should credit writers Konnor and Rosenthal for the final form of the script, and that Chris Reeve was only responsible for the base idea of tossing nuclear weapons into the sun. Reeve's initial notion would be a fragmentary idea-trope by itself, probably derived from the opinion that a hero from a destroyed world might be proactive about preventing the destruction of his adopted world. Konnor and Rosenthal may have been given the basic idea of providing a framework for an "imperfect duplicate" of Superman by someone else, but I speculate that they would have elaborated Reeve's one-note idea into a slightly more elaborate framework of idea-tropes. It's not a didactic concept, given that at no point do the writers claim that the weapons are "angry" at Superman for "killing" them, and since they cannot act, the villain Luthor must be responsible for spawning Nuclear Man. Another didactic development of the idea-framework might have also intimated that the sun was pissed off at the hero from dumping all of these weapons in its maw, and thus the solar body is also complicit in spawning Superman's nemesis-- though once again, Luthor has to provide all the heavy lifting for any inanimate objects. Even Luthor's mode of creating Nuclear Man, that of using a hair from the hero's head to make the duplicate, embodies a symbolic idea, though as I recall Konnor and Rosenthal don't even attempt to invoke the still-nascent science of cloning to make the genesis of Nuclear Man more "logical." Frankly, the original comics-method by which Luthor birthed Bizarro was more forthright. But I can't claim that the method itself displayed any mythic idea-tropes, even though Bizarro himself did, as discussed here.

I will probably explore the process of concept-formation, as opposed to idea-formation, in a future post.

ADDENDUM 1-28-2022: Roughly six years prior to this essay I addressed some similar developmental formulations in A PAUSE FOR POTENTIALITIES, where I said:

Now, I agree with Jung's comment that "ideas" are developed out of what might as well be called "images" (Kant called these lesser elements "notions.") 

MYTHCOMICS: “ORIGIN OF THE FANTASTIC FOUR” (FANTASTIC FOUR #1, 1961)

 

The following analysis was originally part of a larger essay analyzing the first FANTASTIC FOUR story in terms of its symbolic discourse. I found that the main story—the narrative in which the four heroes contend for the first time with the Mole Man and his subterranean creatures—did not meet my standards for a mythcomic, unlike several other FF stories. However, in more recent years I’ve decided that certain vignettes within full-fledged stories may be more mythic than the story as a whole, examples being “The Origin of the Batman” and “The Heart of Gold.” I’ve decided that, for my 300^th post mythcomics post, that the Origin of the Fantastic Four deserves the pride of place. Readers may observe that my writing-style for this overall project proves a little different here than my usual blogposts. _________________________________________________

At the conclusion of the main story’s 8-page “teaser,” in which nothing substantial is revealed about the foursome, there ensues a five-page explanatory flashback that establishes that the heroes are not aliens, but began as ordinary-- if quarrelsome-- human beings. Indeed, the first panel of the flashback begins with a quarrel between Ben and Reed. The substance of that quarrel is almost all we readers ever know of the characters in the introductory story.

The four characters speak to one another as if they have been acquainted over a long period, though readers don’t get any of the backstories circulated in later retellings of the origin. Readers are told that Reed is a scientist who has designed a moon-rocket and that he wants Ben, an experienced pilot, to fly the ship to the moon, with Reed along for the ride. Ben refuses. He asserts that the venture is too dangerous because humans don’t know enough about possible peril from “cosmic rays” in outer space.

About Sue and Johnny, we know even less. Sue is Reed’s fiancée, Johnny is her younger brother, and both of them enthusiastically support Reed’s moon-jaunt without hesitation. Ironically Ben, later seen to be the most caustic and reckless of the foursome, is the sole voice of caution. At this point Reed, Sue and Johnny are little more than living personifications of the “space race” that dominated American feelings in the early 1960s, for Sue emphasizes that they must reach the moon “unless we want the Commies to beat us to it.” The political rationale is merely a cover for the real motives behind the trip-- more on which later-- but what persuades Ben to join the team is not patriotism but a challenge to his manhood. Sue implies that Ben’s caution is rooted in cowardice. Ben’s reaction—in which he agrees to pilot the moon-rocket after all—is perhaps unusually intense, suggesting that he may have ulterior motives for overvaluing the opinion of another man’s fiancée. Later events bear out this supposition.

With the conversion of the “doubting Benjamin,” the foursome’s next act is to commit what looks like high treason. The rocket designed by Reed Richards is being kept launch-ready at a nearby “spaceport,” which is guarded by a man wearing an American army uniform. No military organization is ever mentioned by name, but since Richards does not want to wait for “official clearance” before mounting his lunar expedition, one can only assume that Richards constructed the ship for American authorities and then had a falling-out with them over the best time to launch. In later retellings the military is no longer involved: Reed uses his own resources to construct the rocket. In short order the four adventurers—whose qualifications for space travel remain anyone’s guess-- sneak aboard Reed’s ship and successfully launch the rocket, unaided by any ground crew.

During the flight, we finally get the real motive for Reed’s wish to undertake the forbidden flight. In the first panel of the story’s tenth page, a voice from within the rocket—not attributed, but probably Reed’s—asserts, “We had to do it! We had to be first!” This is the true motive for Reed’s desire to make the flight as soon as possible: the desire to win the race against all comers, to have the glory of being “first.” Such Promethean endeavors have been undertaken by hordes of “mad scientists” since the type came into being. In most “creature features,” the act of overreaching results in the scientist himself being cursed with some evil fate or fantastic transformation. But here it is not Reed, the overreacher, who is punished for his hubris. He, Sue and Johnny—the three who believe in their doomed cause-- are transformed, but not in a truly undesirable manner. It is Ben, the doubter, who reaps the bad fortune that would usually devolve to the hubristic scientist. Is it because he knew better than the others the potential peril of the journey, and went anyway, with a divided heart? Or is it because he coveted the fiancée of another man—the man who “got there first” in an affair of the heart?

The creators provide no details about the mysterious cosmic rays suffusing Earth’s atmosphere; rays which in the next issue they will portray as a “belt” surrounding the Earth, like the authentic “Van Allen radiation belt.” In 1912 cosmic rays were identified, as well as being misnamed, since these “rays” were actually super-charged particles, called “cosmic” because they were supposedly generated from the depths of space. Other Marvel Comics heroes would also become empowered as a result of encountering radiation—the Hulk, Spider-Man, Daredevil—but these other early heroes gained their powers from man-made ventures into the world of radiation. Only the Fantastic Four gain their powers from venturing into forbidding—though not literally forbidden—territory, and only in their case is the radiation that affects spawned by the universe itself. Given that their powers make it easier for the foursome to explore many aspects of that universe, one might view the failure of Reed’s original mission as a blessing in disguise—at least for three out of the four explorers.

Ben’s earlier fears are justified. Reed’s brainchild does not have shielding adequate to screen out the radiation of the “cosmic storm area” through which the ship must pass when it tries to leave the Earth’s atmosphere. The would-be astronauts lose control and the ship crashes back to Earth. All four survive the crash, but in a sense, they are “reborn” from their brush with the mysteries beyond the familiar realm of Earth. Sue’s mutation is the first to manifest. This seems fitting, given that she’s the reason that both Ben and Johnny undertake the flight, and the factor that makes it possible for Reed to have his pilot. The sole female, in one way or other the focus of attention by all three men, disappears from their sight just long enough for Johnny to worry that she may never come back. A Kleinian psychologist might read this scene in terms of the primal fear of infant life: that the mother, the primary female in an infant’s life, may leave and never return. Then Sue’s invisibility wears off. This cues a new outbreak of hostility between Reed and Ben. Moments after Reed embraces Sue, Ben criticizes Reed for having possibly cursed them all with even stranger powers.

In later issues, Reed will become the very epitome of the hand-wringing Marvel hero, tormented with the memory of how his actions turned his friend into a misshapen freak. But in this origin story, Reed never expresses a single regret, before or after Ben loses his humanity. The great scientist is on the whole arrogant and self-absorbed, at most irritated that Ben should challenge the purity of his motives. “I didn’t purposely cause our flight to fail,” he rationalizes, tacitly refusing any responsibility for the inadequacy of the ship’s shielding. Though Reed never shows any awareness of Ben’s unvoiced affection for Sue, obviously the creators knew all about it, and may have chosen to “punish” Ben as Reed might have wanted to punish a potential rival.

Ben threatens to attack Reed, at which point he transforms into the rock-bodied Thing. His true feelings also spring forth as he rants, “I’ll prove to you that you love the wrong man, Susan!” Reed transforms as well, becoming the rubber-limbed Mr. Fantastic, and he subdues the Thing, though not without an expression of horror at his own transformation. Immediately thereafter, the excited Johnny displays his newfound power of turning into a man of fire. As the flashback draws to a close, all four of them are so sobered by their sudden acquisition of super-powers that Ben’s coveting of Sue is dropped and never mentioned again in the story, though his unrequited feelings do crop up later in other stories. Even the emotional consequences of Ben’s grotesque transformation are put on hold, and the four adventurers swear to dedicate their powers to becoming the “Fantastic Four.” _________________________________________________

Few if any of the myth-tropes from the vignette are reflected in the main story about the Mole Man. However, I will note that even though creators Lee and Kirby never made any further direct references to Ben’s hidden passion for Sue Storm, they found a way to compensate for their monster-hero’s amour by giving him a consolation prize: Alicia Masters, a near-lookalike for Sue who showed up seven issues later in “Prisoner of the Puppet Master” and remained the Thing’s inamorata for the remainder of the Lee-Kirby years.

NEAR MYTHS: JSA THE GOLDEN AGE (1993-94)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

GOLDEN AGE, written by James Robinson and penciled by Paul Smith, is an Elseworlds take on some of the many latter-day interpretations of the Justice Society heroes, crossbred with an assortment of characters who had nothing to do with the Society or, sometimes, even with DC Comics (such as Captain Triumph from Quality Comics, whose company's heroes were belatedly acquired by the Superman people). 

I reread GOLDEN for the first time in many years, in part because I was so pleased with the second season of STARGIRL, on which teleseries Robinson serves as producer and occasional writer. STARGIRL is much like GOLDEN in being a virtual love letter to the Justice Society, directed to all other such fans. Yet STARGIRL has a crucial advantage in that it's all about legacy characters who inherit the mantles of the WWII crusaders. In contrast, GOLDEN is set in the America of the postwar 1940s, which in the real world would herald the cancellation of all but a smattering of DC's costumed heroes. Since the Golden Age characters were not revived, but were instead temporarily replaced by the legacy figures of the Silver Age, Robinson was obliged to follow the established game-plan followed by such earlier writers as Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz, who set up the notion that in the DC-cosmos the various luminaries simply retired for about ten years until they got back into action-- occasionally in the Silver Age, and then with greater frequency in the Bronze.

In addition, GOLDEN could not help but take considerable influence from the fan-culture of the eighties and nineties, when comics-makers began playing to the adult readers with "grim and gritty" versions of established heroes, as per the usual suspects of WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Robinson's version of the Justice Society is not as boldly transgressive as either of these, as the peoject includes little in the way of sexuality and was only slightly more violent than the average issue of NEW TEEN TITANS. The most interesting thing about GOLDEN is that for all of the characters involved, they become divorced from the trauma-free lives they led as costumed crusaders, where the most emotional conflict came down to not being able to marry their lovers due to fighting crime. In the opening scenes of GOLDEN, Robinson is explicit about the way the conclusion of the war signals "the end of innocence."

I don't find Robinson's concept of innocence very persuasive: for the most part, it comes down to all the main characters having really bad days in one way or another.  Many of the plot-points were established by earlier writers: Hourman is now addicted to the drug that makes him super-strong, while Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle, two heroes who became romantic in an 1980s continuity, divorce. The death of innocence is also signaled on the social level: the atom bomb has changed the nature of national conflict, and competition from Russia makes average Americans eager to condemn anyone suspected of ties to Communism. (It's possibly a mark of Robinson's extreme liberalism that he brings up both of these topics but never remembers that Russia became a major competitor in part through the act of stealing the American plans for The Bomb.) It's not precisely that Robinson ever sings any sad songs for the USSR, but it is interesting that the main villain turns out to be the embodiment of allegedly-Right-leaning fascism: a recrudescent Nazi.

GOLDEN's basic plot-pattern probably owes something to WATCHMEN, insofar as various heroes pursue separate life-courses, all of which, in one way or another, end up dovetailing. The obscure DC character "Mister America" is the uniting factor: whereas many other heroes were unable to go to war for complicated reasons, this super-athlete was able to fight the Nazis behind enemy lines. Under his regular name "Tex Thompson," the former mystery-man returns to the U.S., rises to great political power, and begins a new project to create an invincible superhero as a bulwark against the threat of Russia. Since anti-Communism led to bad things like the Red Scare, no one will be surprised that Thompson turns out to be a traitor in patriot's clothing-- as well as a recrudescent super-villain.

The main plot is never much more than an excuse for the various scenes of regret and recriminations, which, to be sure, are kept to a minimum in comparison to the predominant Marvel soap-opera emotive style. The most persuasive plot-thread involves Liberty Belle's re-marriage to another hero, Tarantula, who just happens to resemble her former hubby Johnny Quick. Others are badly underdeveloped. The Golden Age Robotman becomes a stone killer for no explicit reason, and the aforementioned Captain Triumph only appears in his civilian identity, rejecting (with questionable judgment) his superhero nature and losing his life in combat with the evildoers. A subplot involves an amnesiac hero, Manhunter, who eventually fills in a lot of the blank spaces for the heroes (and the readers) about what really happened to Thompson overseas and the nature of his pet superman. Paul Smith, never one of the best delineators of superhero action, is out of his depth with the numerous battle-scenes, but he does a better than average job keeping the faces and their emotional reactions distinct from one another.

GOLDEN is at best diverting, but I certainly wouldn't rank it as one of the better homages to the Golden Age of American superheroes-. Indeed, some of Robinson's issues of STARMAN come much closer to that mark. To wrap up, I'll note that, despite the many characters in the four-issue tale, GOLDEN is yet another example, like CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, where the dramatic personae divide into a "very significant" superordinate ensemble and a "not so important" subordinate ensemble. 

SUPERORDINATE-- Johnny Quick, Liberty Belle, Manhunter, Green Lantern, the Atom, Hourman, Starman

SUBORDINATE-- Tarantula, Bob Daley aka "Fatman," Hawkman, Johnny Thunder and his Thunderbolt, Captain Triumph, Miss America (another Quality character BTW), and the Tigress. Three characters with heroic pasts-- Tex Thompson, Dan the Dyna-Mite and Robotman-- are essentially retconned into villainous presences. There are also a huge number of cameos in the final section, including the 1950s stalwart Captain Comet and a large sampling of more Quality protagonists, such as Plastic Man, Doll Man, the Jester, Phantom Lady and the Red Bee.