My last post (for now) on the subject of the limited/limitless dichotomy concerns a certain irony about the many concepts of archaic myth. On one hand, this sort of authorless myth is the essence of literature's combinatory mode, in that its unknown creators allowed their imaginations to roam freely in spawning stories about the Earth being formed from the bones of giants or giant bird's-eggs. And yet, the most developed forms of myth are also grounded in the world of limitations, as the mythmakers often invoke what I call "epistemological patterns," which are based in observations about the ways of human psychology and sociology, and of the ways of nature both in cosmological and metaphysical aspects.
As seen in my paraphrase of passages in Susanne Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, the author disparaged the humbler forms of folklore in favor of her idea of myth-stories:
...the psychological basis of this remarkable form of nonsense [the fairy tale] lies in the fact that the story is a fabrication out of subjective symbols, not out of observed folkways and nature-ways [in "myth," with which Langer contrasts fairy tales].-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 173.
In subsequent essays I've remarked that I have found a great deal of mythicity-- i.e., storytelling tropes linked with epistemological patterns-- in folktales and fairytales as well. Langer's not totally wrong, though, because full-fledged myths tend to develop their myth-ideas more thoroughly than do folk-stories. In a strange anticipation of the "high art/low art" dichotomy mentioned in this essay-series' first installment, myths were canonical "high art" and the tales were the "low art" that few cultures sought to preserve.
Yet while modern "high art" does reference epistemological patterns as well, it does so with what Frye calls "high seriousness" as well, which often (though not always) obstructs the free flow of the imagination. In contrast, modern "low art," even though its basic form is comparable to that of simple-constructed folktales, demonstrates a greater tendency to develop its myth-ideas freely. This probably comes about because modern low-art stories are no longer being crafted for an oral audience, and so the raconteurs are more likely to weave together simple plots with involved myth-ideas-- one example being the delirious Origin of the Golden Age Hawkman.
Excellent. This also works great as an intro to the subject.
ReplyDeleteIn comics, there has been that desire by some critics to find a work's value in its morality. I wonder if The Comics Journal crowd still does it that way. I recall even fans of superheroes attempting to promote the genre as "the literature of morality" some time ago, which was a decent way to push back against the elitists with their own framework. I would guess that, due to the rise of the ultraliberalism, as you've termed it, there's a good number of exclusively moralism-based comics critics around now.
At times some members of the Old TCJ Guard were, in my opinion, capable of embracing artists whose work had no EXPLICIT moral value, such as (to pull an example out of the air) Gilbert Shelton. But Gary Groth definitely favored Crumb over Eisner because he thought Crumb was more morally resonant than Eisner's "Hollywood" approach.
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