LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 2

 The main deficiency of my "realism/escapism" dichotomy mentioned at the conclusion of Part One can be found in this sentence from THEMATIC REALISM PART ONE:

By contrast, a tale like Coleridge's MARINER, or (to give a superheroic parallel to the JLA tale) WATCHMEN, are clearly tales that are much concerned with analyzing the ways mortal men deal with the moral elements in life, no matter how fantastic their situations. 

I stressed the "moral elements" in that essay because I was following up on certain remarks by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was of course not attempting to define all of literary realism and escapism, just making a particular point. But although I don't reject the particular point I made in the context of the essay, "moral elements" are not the basis of "realism." I believe I came closer to the main distinction in my 2018 BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE:

I always meant to draw some comparisons between Anaximander's apparent categories of apeiron ("the boundless") and "perata" (the limited) with my categories of freedom and restraint. Admittedly, Anaximander was addressing the origins of the physical universe, which has no direct bearing on my explanation of the universe of art and literature. For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe-- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

Morality, of course, is not a sufficient criterion, since there are any number of literary authors who scorn, or appear to scorn, any system of moral evaluation. Yet morality is part of the equation, for moral systems arise in response to the limitations of human beings and the societies into which they assemble. 

Morality can also be aligned with the concept of societal "work" as well, and in his book EROTISM Bataille explicitly contrasts productive work with all the extravagances of "play." But why do morality and societal work arise at all? Simply put, because humans are limited by what I called "physical environment," no matter how unlimited they may feel in their imaginations. The folkloric grasshopper dies because his brethren the ants buckle down and store up food for the winter. And pure mortality also renders all things mutable. "Time keeps movin' on, friends, they turn away," sings Janis, while Marilyn warbles that "we all lose our charms in the end." 

Now, what does all this have to do with the original question seen in Part One: whether or not "high art," which most persons would align with "realism" of some sort, is more or less mythic than "low art?" My basic feeling is that both literary forms have equal potential. In terms of execution, there are dozens of highly mythic examples of "high art"-- not least the greatest of them all, MOBY DICK, However, many people who attempt "high art" become preoccupied with emulating what I called (in PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS) the "elements of work," which I compared to the "rational thinking and feeling potentialities." In contrast, most persons working in so-called "low art" are more focused on the "irrational kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities," and so these raconteurs tend to produce a greater number of works with high mythicity-- though of course there's also a larger market for "escapism," so there are more "low art" works overall than those deemed "high art."

More on these matters later, perhaps.