STRENGTH TO DREAM, STRENGTH TO AWAKEN

 I borrowed the phrase "Strength to Dream" from Colin Wilson's book of that title, but only for the basic felicity of the phrase, not because I'm discussing any of Wilson's themes here. (I'm fairly sure I read it many years ago and have placed it on my to-be-reread list.)

I began thinking about the association of "strength" with "dreaming" thanks to the works of two famous writers who discussed how readers accept what I call metaphenomenal fiction. The first writer is Samuel T. Coleridge, whose most famous phrase in common parlance may not be anything from his poems, but from his autobiography, wherein he coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief." 

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

I confess that I have never read the full text of the bio, but I doubt that Coleridge uses the phrase again since none of the online references mention more than the one quote. The book concerns Coleridge's far-ranging theory of poetry, and so is not primarily about the ways fantasy-loving readers justify their preferences. In fact, the full context of "suspension of disbelief" is that Coleridge and William Wordsworth, in collaborating to produce various poems for their 1798 collection LYRICAL BALLADS, took two differing approaches to poetry, with Wordsworth favoring "things of every day" while Coleridge concentrated upon "shadows of imagination" that necessitated "poetic faith." Early in the history of this blog I described this literary dichotomy as one between works of "thematic realism" (Wordsworth) and "thematic escapism" (Coleridge), though in recent years I've inclined more toward an opposition between "verisimilitude" and "artifice," as in the last year's THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2:

"Verisimilitude" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limits of the physical continuum, while "artifice" includes everything in a narrative allied to the limitless nature of the continuum of abstract concepts. 

 

Coleridge did not develop the "suspension of disbelief" concept, but many later writers quoted it and gave their takes on the idea, among them the second writer I mentioned above: Stephen King. King's 1981 book DANSE MACABRE largely concerns his theories about the horror genre, just as Coleridge's biography concerned poetry. King mentions "suspension of disbelief" in Chapter 4, where he extrapolates a meaning of "strength" from Coleridge's "suspension" metaphor.

...I believe [Coleridge] knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted... and held up by main force...it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.

And then he validates many fantasy-fans by turning a pitying eye upon those persons who reject all metaphenomenal content as being unreal in terms of real experience:

They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.

Though I like King's extrapolation of Coleridge, ultimately it's a little too simple. I agree that it can take a "muscular intellectual act" to engage with stories that represent, not "the things of every day," but "shadows of imagination" that rule our dreaming selves. It does take "strength to dream," though not all dreams are equal. It takes a muscular intellect to imagine Nyarlathotep, but not so much to imagine the Children of the Corn (just to take a shot at one of King's less fruitful dream-shadows). On the same page from which I've quoted, King cheats a little by bracketing Lovecraft the "Escapist" with "Realist" Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers like AIRPORT. A fairer comparison to Lovecraft would be a Realist of some depth, like Joseph Conrad, who famously sneered at ghost stories. In Part 2 of 2015's THE DOMAIN GAME, I contrasted Conrad with Tolkien:

What Joseph Conrad deems to be artistic freedom relates to the perceived rigor of the naturalistic, while J.R.R. Tolkien associates freedom with marvelous creations like green suns.

Coleridge's contrast between his chosen form of poetry and that of his colleague Wordsworth is also a much fairer one, and I find it interesting when he says that Wordsworth does not just sedulously reproduce the everyday things he sees, but that he gives them "the charm of novelty." It does take a "muscular intellectual act" to re-organize the things of common experience to make them into art, even art that may argue that it's silly to read fantasy-stories (say, Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY). To pursue an opposition for the dream-metaphor I've introduced, the advocate of realism may often believe that he's "awakened" from the delusional dreams of religion or superstition. I of course relate these modes further to the categories of cognitive restraint and affective freedom, but at present these do not need further elaboration in this new context.

On a small side-note, the decade in which Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on the LYRICAL BALLADS-- said by some to have launched the English Romantic movement-- is also the decade in which the Gothic novel enjoyed its first major flowering with such authors as Radcliffe and Lewis, with a second but distinct outgrowth evolving in the next twenty-odd years with Mary Shelley, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Allan Poe. Though there had been scattered important metaphenomenal works throughout the 18th century, the 19th century would be conceived in the midst of ongoing arguments about the virtues of naturalistic fiction as against stories of fantasy, many of which are still argued about today, and which inform the warp and woof of modern fiction.

MYTHCOMICS: AVENGING WORLD (1973)

Wally Wood devoted a 1975 story, "My Word," to a scathingly ironic demolition of the city of New York, which metropolis was technically the star of the show. But two years previous, Wood's sometime collaborator Steve Ditko allowed the Whole World to speak for itself, putting humanity on trial for the World's many unnecessary tribulations. But Ditko, being a lifelong disciple of Ayn Rand, was not content to take Wood's ironic stance, and what he presents better fits the mythos of drama. Though in many interior scenes The World is shown as having been beat-to-crap by the misdeeds of the planet's human occupants, the cover depicts The World emitting a brilliant spotlight on the cowed throngs of evil-- mostly various thug-types, though prominent space is given to a dictator-type and what looks like a Catholic bishop. One can almost imagine Ditko thinking something along the lines of the old Green Lantern oath, perhaps revised to "the dark things cannot stand the light of the World with a Slight Sneer on His Face."

On the opening page the interlocutor makes clear that even though we're seeing a World battered and supported by crutches, "The World isn't in a mess; people are in a mess." Interlocutor Ditko further claims that no catchphrases or easy solutions will fix the problems, for they originate from the way human beings are willing to act irrationally for gain: "Man-- who is defined as a rational being-- chooses to act on his own behalf as an irrational being." The World himself glosses this assertion by claiming that many such irrational persons are working hard to make "my condition" worse, with the interesting phrase that they can do so both "knowingly and unknowingly."

It would be far too time-consuming to anatomize all seven of Ditko's philosophical banes, all of which read pretty much the same anyway. The second bane, "The Skeptical Intellectual," sustains some special interest in that he opposes the logical cornerstone of Ditko's Randian universe: Aristotle's law of identity, or "A=A." But the last of the banes, "The Neutralist," may have been the hobbyhorse who most aroused Ditko's ire, because immediately afterward he uses the character's inability to take a stand to show how wishy-washiness supports evil.

Further, though the Neutralist claims not to take sides, he shows immense disgust with the "Man is Rational Being" party because its members implicitly or explicitly demand that people should make choices between good and evil. Meanwhile, he sympathizes with the "Man is Irrational Being" because its proponents, whether they expouse violence or self-pity, make no demands upon the Neutralist's ethical system. In the four-page vignette "The Neutralist Settles a Dispute," the character, wearing some sort of "compromise cop" uniform, settles a dispute between a holdup man and his victim by giving half the honest man's wages to the thief. The vision of the hordes of "have nots" who then arise to pillage the honest worker of his wages is one of Ditko's most mythic meditations on the victimization-tropes favored by the American Left, particularly in the form of Socialism (also a very big bug up the rear of Ditko's mentor Ayn Rand). The most one can say in the Neutralist's favor is that he may be one of those who is "unknowingly" working to benefit evil, even though he thinks himself above the controversies.

Ditko then introduces one more type, the "Power Luster," and he seems to pull all of the banes together to reign over those who have surrendered their individuality, and who as a result occupy a Dantean hell, under the thumbs of "the Mystic," "the Humanitarian," and so on.

On page 19 Ditko announces that he's on "Part 2" (though no "Part 1" was established earlier). After some more shots at the immorality of compromise, Ditko depicts one of the many "everyman" types he used to depict in all of his horror-stories, both previous to and following the artist's famous Marvel works. Whereas the horror-protagonists were forever enmeshed in suffering terrible occult dooms, this poor sap suffers for his own irrationality: his desire to "satisfy his emotions, to do whatever he feels like doing." For Ditko this philosophical step takes the poor sap into the abyss of non-meaning, while a supercilious World claims that, "Every man must be the protector of his own rationality!" There follows another Dantean image of doomed souls moving along pathways leading nowhere, including one with the swastika and one with the hammer-and-sickle.

The best stand-alone page in AVENGING WORLD reduces all the participants to geometrical circles, in which a collective of hostile spheres try to prevent Circle A and Circle B from doing something of which the collective does not approve. As to what the activity is-- yes, my mind went there too, but the activity could be a lot of things, including a few things that most people would agree should be prohibited by law. But though Ditko's screed might not apply to many practices-- one of which involves a partner without the "age of consent" that would make "mutual consent" possible-- the artist is indubitably correct about the hypocrisy of the collective" We have rights! But you have no right to X!"

AVENGING WORLD then concludes with a three-page vignette, "The Deadly Alien," in which a whole community rouses itself into a lynching mood because a new child is born, a child who may someday threaten their way of life. (I note in passing that the mother is holding up one hand with upturned thumb, which looks like a reference to the "thumbs up/thumbs down" verdicts seen when fictional Roman emperors preside over fictional gladiator-games.) This sequence too is another jeremiad against collectivism, but it does allow Ditko to come full circle to his original statement; that people are responsible for the sad state of The World. This assault on irrationality, though, ignores the paradigm of persons committing irrational acts for sheer gain, the way thieves, dictators and religious pundits do: knowingly. Ditko would seem to be saying that the most insidious form of collectivism stems from an unknowing violation of other persons' rights simply to make certain that one's own priorities get first consideration. Ditko even asks the reader about his own process of socialization: "How well did they succeed with you?" All that said, though, if The World actually contains the Light of Rationality as Ditko depicts on the cover, the author doesn't succeed in making his case. Often Ditko's ideals are negatively defined. He rails against the use of violence to gain one's ends, and such offenses are an affront to Rationality, the essence of man. So far so good. But is not the same law enforcement brought into being to restrict acts of knowing violence extremely vulnerable to being manipulated by the proponents of irrationality who "know not what they do?" And does that not make the law enforcement just as vulnerable to the accusation of Irrational, Collective Rule as any group of individuals who let others do their thinking for them.

But if Ditko's screed fails as rigorous philosophy as to how one should live one's life, WORLD is nonetheless valuable for its very qualities of expressiveness-- which Ditko ironically opposes to the Rationality he favors.

NEAR-MYTHS: "AND BE A BRIDE OF CHAOS" (VAMPIRELLA #16, 1971)

The iconic character of Vampirella was launched in the first issue of her titular (heh) magazine in 1969. Visually conceived by Trina Robbins, her first two adventures were written by FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND editor Forrest J. Ackerman and penciled respectively by Tom Sutton and Mike Royer. In keeping with Ackerman's reputation in FMOF for ghastly puns, the first two stories were very silly comedies with lots of adolescent titillation. The second story shows what would have become of the series had Ackerman been its regular scribe, depicting Vampirella auditioning for a "monster beauty contest" and being flown to Hollywood for a screen test.

But I give Ackerman (and any unbilled collaborators) for one strong mythic concept; Vampirella's origin. In keeping with increasing numbers of science-fictional vampires in pop culture, the bloodsucking heroine was an alien, born on the planet "Drakulon." The inhabitants of the planet were not undead, but they had many characteristics of Earth-vamps: superior strength, the ability to change into bats, and hypnosis. But instead of feeding on other beings, they were sustained by the literal life's blood of their planet. Instead of "flowing with milk and honey" as in the metaphor for Israel in the Bible, Drakulon flows with rivers of blood, and all Drakulonians can nurture themselves from this fluid. (If I thought Ackerman was a close reader I'd be tempted to think he remembered a remark from Stoker's Count about the soil of Transylvania has been "enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders.") At any rate, the rivers dry up from a blistering drought, though Ackerman never says that this is a permanent situation. Vampirella is alerted that an alien spaceship has crashed in the area of "Gosi-Bram" (guess where FJA got that name) so she checks it out. She then cheerily slaughters the Earth astronauts to drink their blood and implicitly pilots the ship back to Earth for her second and last Acker-adventure.

Concurrently with these two adventures, Vampirella also played "horror-host" to all of the anthology-stories in the title. The fact that publisher James Warren didn't use her anything but a horror-host in issues #3-7 suggests that he didn't really think of her as a continuing protagonist. Possibly fan-reaction prompted him to enlist writer Archie Goodwin and artist Tom Sutton to reboot the extraterrestrial bloodsucker for a series (though she continued to double as a horror-host, ushering in and concluding terror-tales with EC-esque bad puns.)

In VAMPIRELLA #8 (1970) Goodwin reshuffled the events of the origin-story to assert that "Vampi," as she was sometimes called, was the only survivor of Drakulon's deadly drought, and that she escaped to Earth for sheer survival. (The parallels to Superman's origin should be self-evident.) Since Vampi had no raison d'etre, Goodwin had her pursued by two sets of opponents. Picking up a tossed-off plot-thread from VAMPIRELLA #2, Goodwin imagined that Vampi, said in issue #2 to have drunk the blood of some plane-crash victims, just happened to fang the body of a man who was a descendant of Stoker's vampire-hunter Doctor Van Helsing. Conrad Van Helsing, brother of the contemporary fellow, swore to hunt down the vamp who defiled his brother's corpse, and brought along his handsome son Adam. Eventually the hunters become Vampi's allies when convinced of her relative virtuousness. Not so the other set of opponents: a demon-worshiping sect called the Cult of Chaos.

VAMPIRELLA #16 links the premiere pop-culture vampire to the Cult, when Vampirella is abducted by Dracula himself. The story reveals that centuries ago Dracula, actually an inhabitant of Drakulon, was sentenced to death for having preyed upon his fellow citizens' blood rather than simply drinking from the rivers. 

However, by chance the authorities' attempt to disintegrate Dracula cause him to be flung into the dimension of the Mad God Chaos, who enlists the alien as a servant. Dracula is sent to Earth's medieval era, where his alien nature is changed by the new world's atmosphere, so that he becomes vulnerable to sunlight. He eventually recapitulates the broad outlines of the Stoker story and is slain by Van Helsing. Eventually revived, he immediately goes looking to find a "Bride of Chaos" to sacrifice to his demon lord.

The revision of Dracula's origin, particularly the part in which he's exiled for transgressing against his people's laws, is the only mythic part of the story. It's a very weak effort from the usually dependable Goodwin, with Vampi only escaping the sacrificial altar because another Chaos-cultist wants the "honor" of being the bride. However, the tale does establish a pattern of conflict between the famed vampire-lord and the Last Daughter of Drakulon, a pattern that would appear in other reboots and adaptations.

THE READING RHEUM: THE LOST WORLD (1912)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Where the real sex feeling begins, timidity and distrust are its companions, heritage from old wicked days when love and violence went often hand in hand.-- THE LOST WORLD, p, 7

I've made a few random comments about Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD on this blog over the years. I recognized how Doyle had produced a seminal SF-idea-- that of prehistoric beasts surviving into modern times, even though a few earlier authors, such as Verne and Haggard, had contributed related notions. At the same time, I was rather conflicted about the novel's conclusion. I've frequently said that I don't reject out of hand stories that express controversial opinions on race and sexuality; these can be as "mythic," and sometimes more so, than stories that express "correct," theoretically more humane sentiments. But since LOST WORLD concludes with the modern-day explorers helping a tribe of Indian settlers in the Lost World wipe out a tribe of ape-men, I had to wonder whether or not Doyle's story reflected his real-life opinions on racial politics. I'd read a few accounts claiming that Doyle was ultra-conservative, and I'd seen occasional glimpses of such political leanings in his fiction. Was LOST WORLD meant to be a defense of imperialistic aggression? 

I have glimpsed one online essay that makes the opposite claim, but I only spot-read a few sections of that article so that I wouldn't be unduly influenced. That caveat made, I'd already noticed a number of discontinuities in WORLD that argued that Doyle was playing a larger game than simply validating the status quo of his time. One such discontinuity is the opening quote, though I'll come back to that a little while after providing a quick summary of the novel's action.

The line about "real sex feeling" goes through the mind of young Irish reporter Ned Malone when he attempts to propose marriage to a woman named Gladys. Gladys refuses Ned, expressing the desire for a mate with some glorious record of accomplishments. Fortuitously, Ned's job causes him to cross paths with eccentric (and pugnacious) biologist George Challenger, who suggests that prehistoric creatures may still exist on a remote plateau in Bolivia. When Challenger gathers an expedition, he allows Ned to come along, as well as a rival scientist, Summerlee, and a far more experienced adventurer, Lord John Roxton, who in many ways exemplifies the pattern of male courage and fortitude to which Malone aspires. Suffice to say that the expedition finds the plateau, but they're marooned atop it by conniving guides. While trying to find a way off the escarpment, the Englishmen confirm that assorted prehistoric animals have indeed migrated here, particularly saurians and pterodactyls. The explorers also encounter two humanoid species, though contrary to later "caveman films," no one implies that the primitives evolved alongside the dinos; rather, both sets of humanoids migrated to the plateau at very different times. One group are simply a branch of an Indian populace native to South America, but the other tribe consists of "ape-men," who are explicitly compared to the evolutionary notion of "the missing link" between apes and men. When war breaks out between the two tribes, the Englishmen side with the Indians, and with their superior weapons they all but massacre the ape-men. That done, the heroes escape the Lost World and return to London, exhibiting to fascinated Londoners the proof of their findings: a live pterodactyl. However, during the time of Malone's long absence, the changeable Gladys has married another suitor, a solicitor's clerk with absolutely no claims to adventurous stature.

Though WORLD is not a comedy, it means something that Doyle frames its story of high adventure between a woman's capricious challenge and her equally capricious renunciation of her supposed standards for a mate. Moreover, even the early sections include some japes at the idea of racial purity. During Malone's first interview with Challenger, the irascible scientist claims to see a "suggestion of the Negroid" in Malone's skull. A page later, when Challenger speaks of a previous South American trip where he conferred with a tribe of Indians near the disputed territory, Challenger says that their mental powers had degenerated. Racial animus, right? Except that in the same sentence Challenger says that the Indians' mental acuity was "hardly superior to that of the average Londoner." 

Somewhat later, Malone learns something of Roxton's history. The nobleman volunteered for the expedition because he's passionate about everything about South America, except one custom partly furthered by colonial Spaniards: that of slavery. Roxton has carried out a jeremiad against slavers, who according to him are all "half-breeds." Many racist authors have used the figure of the half-breed ti signify the evils of miscegenation, but Doyle doesn't seem concerned with that possibility, as he's focused purely upon the evil of Indians being enslaved. It's possible Doyle knew his readers might not accept all-white villains, and so used half-white, half-red ones instead. Still, the people being maltreated are full "red men," though it's true that many modern readers would be averse to Roxton performing the function of "white savior." Roxton's past crusade, by the bye, is responsible for getting the explorers stranded on the plateau, in that one of the bearers joins the expedition looking for a chance to avenge himself on Roxton for the latter having executed his relative.

To say the least, once Malone is stuck on the plateau with his three companions, he gets his "baptism of fire" in spades. Doyle keeps his tone varied, including some superb "sense of wonder" scenes as the explorers take in the Edenic wonders of the primitive domain, as well as many moments of comedy. But the Lost World is a land of almost constant danger, where the strong devour the weak with no reservations. Fittingly, Malone is the first to encounter one of the ape-men while climbing a tree for scouting purposes. Though the single ape-man flees, he brings his people later while Malone is off exploring, and the brutes make an unprovoked attack, capturing Challenger, Summerlee, and Roxton. Roxton escapes, finds Malone, and the two of them use their firearms to assault the ape-tribe in order to free the two remaining prisoners. 

This escapade is also not without comedy, given that Challenger, who has a hirsute, apelike appearance for an Englishman, is seen to be the spitting image of the ape-men's ruler. However, Roxton's crusade against injustice has been ignited once again, for during captivity he witnessed the true degeneracy of the anthropoids, as they amused themselves flinging Indians off a nearby cliff. And thus the Englishmen lead the Indians in a major assault upon the missing links, with only a few women and children surviving the violence. Challenger celebrates the victory, saying that "upon this plateau the future must ever be for man." Malone, detailing the many horrors he witnesses on both sides of the conflict, thinks to himself, "It needed a robust faith in the end to justify such tragic means." This is the climax of the novel and everything that follows is just a long coda.

With all this plot-action explicated, I can return to Malone's curious expression at the book's opening. Long before he meets Challenger, much less any of the missing links the scientist resembles, the reporter is aware of what happened in the "old wicked days." Malone is of course not directly referencing the clash of civilizations as Challenger is. Yet what does he mean by saying that "love and violence went often hand in hand?" He *might* be thinking that in the wicked days men just took women as they pleased and the women had nothing to say about it. Then again, men competed with other men over women, and so that may be the real "violence" being associated with "love"-- which could well mean more like not romantic love, but the consummation of sexual union predicated on the rule of the strong, which primitive women may have accepted for the same reasons Gladys expresses. Gladys does not ask Malone to fight any other suitors for her favor, but arguably her whole fantasy of his winning some great glory translates into the same thing: she'll yield him sex if he distinguishes himself with acts of bravery-- which usually must be backed by violence. Of course, she's playing with Malone because she doesn't really want him, and the actual denouement suggests that she might have wanted a mild-mannered type all the time, and she gave Malone a formidable task to get rid of him. 

Thus, my verdict is that, even if Doyle's characters may make remarks moderns would deem problematic, the writer has given those characters a lot more "wiggle room" than any doctrinaire racist would. Doyle is at least partly serious about stating that all human endeavor comes down to these ongoing civilization-clashes. Yet the unison of love and violence in human nature is not limited to any particular subdivision of humankind. Doyle's constant comparisons between his contemporaries and primitive peoples establish that he believes that all humankind is implicated in the struggles of Eros and Thanatos, and that recognizing this is the true "challenge" one derives from a visit to the Lost World.

SO, A THREAD-PULLING VECTOR

 My title for this essay spoofs a title I used for two essays way back in 2011, SO, A THREAD-PULLING NEEDLE, Part 1 and Part 2, which in their turn had punned on one of the lyrics from THE SOUND OF MUSIC. I confess I didn't even remember what those essays were about. I just wanted to create a title for this essay that brought the terms "thread" and "vector" together in some halfway-felicitous manner. As it happens, I did find some relevant content in those 2011 essays-- more on which at this essay's conclusion.

This essay sprung into being the way a lot of them do: taking a morning walk for exercise and letting my mind ruminate over the various categories I've created like the proverbial cow chewing her cud. This time, I randomly started associating my idea of "the master thread"-- which usurped all my old conceptions of "theme statements" in this April 2020 essay-- with the Whitehead-ian idea of "vectors" that I first broached in August 2020. Whereas the master thread concept was oriented only upon the way the author organized the "vertical meaning" of his narrative, vectors were designed to describe all category-domains in my system.

...all aspects of art—characters, settings, plot-tropes—derive from authorial will. Similarly, all of the multifarious literary categories I’ve introduced on this blog—dynamicity, mythicity, the combinatory-sublime and so on—are the prisms I use to view patterns of authorial will, patterns formed by the unceasing interactions of authors swiping from each other, competing with each other, and writing love letters to each other.

So far, I have applied the vector-term to such domains as centricity and phenomenality, but not to the differing emphases of a narrative's vertical meaning. However, something akin to vectors is implicit within the first example I offered of those differing emphases, in the essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2.

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

So what, aside from my bare assertion, determines that the trope of "The Hunter and the Hunted" is the "master thread" of MOBY DICK, and not one of the subordinate threads (which I later dubbed "bachelor threads")? When I state that removing the putative master thread would "unravel the whole kit and kaboodle," that should imply that it's too big and complicated to be removed without damaging the whole. And the master thread got big and complicated because Herman Melville concentrated the greatest vector of his authorial will upon that theme, while the bachelor-threads, while important, might be removed without necessarily damaging the whole. 

The idea of removing such a master-thread is not mere theory; it's the sort of thing that often takes place with adaptations of famous works. I have not yet reviewed the 1956 film adaptation of Melville's nautical novel, nor have I seen it in several years. But my recollection is that scripter Ray Bradbury decided to elide most of the religious content of the novel, except for a puerile "Ahab overstepped the bounds of a reasonable mortal" that sounds more like FRANKENSTEIN than MOBY DICK. Banal as this vertical meaning is, though, it's still the master-thread for the 1956 movie because it shows the greatest vector of Bradbury's authorial intent. I should note in passing that my conception of vertical meaning-- in which there is one superordinate thread amidst one or more subordinate threads-- mirrors my conception of centricity, in which one icon, or group of icons, proves superordinate and everything else in the narrative is subordinate in nature. The subordinate threads, like subordinate icons, just don't have that much authorial attention given to them, resulting in lesser will-vectors.

Jumping back eleven years, the first part of SO A THREAD PULLING NEEDLE came about when AT-AT Pilot asked me to provide some guidance on the subject of what I'd called "myth criticism." I responded in part with a perhaps labored metaphor in which I would seek to provide an "Ariadne's thread" through the "labyrinth" of modern discourse about mythology. It didn't occur to me back then that the usual interaction of threads and needles, that of binding cloth together, was the exact opposite of the use of thread in the Minotaur story. However, Part 1 at least shows that the thread-metaphor was one I liked then as much as I do now.

Part 2, though, is the essay with the aforementioned "relevant content" with respect to more recent writings. Riffing on a famous misquote of Heidegger, I wondered whether one could discern a "unifying thread" in all of my ruminations on this blog, and I came up with the quest for an answer to the question:

"Why is there complexity where there doesn't need to be any?"

And my answer, seeking to get away from the more abstract explanations, was to posit that mythic complexity is simply a fun thing for authors to put in their stories, even when they don't expect anyone to find that particular Easter-egg. I still believe this, that all the factors that go into making fiction come about because authors like best the play-element in fiction. Thus in fiction the sense of play has the greatest force-- the greatest vector, one might say-- than even the most sedulous desire to convert others to some moral message. 

PUPPETS GOTTA DO THE LIMBO ROCK

Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when [the authors] failed to find a suitable existing puppet.-- Flann O'Brien, AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, 1939. 

I didn't get much out of O'Brien's metatextual novel, which concerns, in very loose fashion, an author who apparently starts hanging out with his characters. But the above passage is interesting partly because it resonates with the rise of postmodern fiction as a reaction against the predominant realism of literary modernism. For the most part modernist authors maintain a strict distance between the domain of the "real" world of the author/creator and the "unreal" world of the author's creations.

O'Brien wasn't saying anything all that original in 1939. In the years before the rise of copyright law, an author like Shakespeare could swipe characters and plotlines from pretty much anywhere. And even after copyright became the law of the land, authors like Mark Twain and John Kendrick Bangs worked Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes into their stories, arguably using the rubric of parody to get away with a little literary larceny. In 1916, psychologist Carl Jung began writing the first of many essays on a concept he'd eventually name "the collective unconscious," which may the closest human culture ever came to imagining a "limbo" in which all fictional and legendary characters might exist, if only as symbolic patterns. Authors as diverse as Philip Jose Farmer and Alan Moore have entertained themselves and others by imagining wonderlands in which a panoply of independently created literary characters rub shoulders with one another.

I'm sure that when O'Brien wrote the lines above, he knew good and well most authors would not want to make their copyrighted works open to public plundering, not least because popular characters can be an author's meal ticket. O'Brien was probably just spoofing the modernist idea of "originality" by claiming that writers should just take whatever they needed from other writers, rather than just making pale copies of characters they admired. 

The quote is also apposite in a small way to my own theory of literary emulation as laid forth in last August's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2. For most of human history, oral literature was created by mostly unknown authors picking up and transmitting traditional stories about familiar figures of history and folklore. This is the pattern I call "icon emulation," in which icons like Heracles or King Arthur might have any number of new adventures appended to their histories. At the same time, sometimes later authors did not emulate a particular icon, but a set of tropes associated with that icon. Supposing, for instance, that, as Wikipedia suggests, the Greek tale of Rhodopis is the earliest extant "Cinderella story." Later authors did not, so far as we know, keep the name "Rhodopis." Instead they utilized "trope emulation," borrowing tropes from the generating first story and reworking the Rhodopis persona to take on whatever name or background would best please a particular audience, including the name and background of the medieval Cinderella of Europe. Ironically, for exigent reasons the late name of Cinderella came to subsume all versions before and after her official creation.

Whether or not O'Brien was being funny about claiming that all of literature should become a "collective commons" as needed, in a real sense, this is how literature really functions. There's nothing new under the sun, except for the way an old wine looks when displayed in a new bottle.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2

In the previous post on this subject, I specified that whenever two or more icons with their own stature, a stature resulting from their appearances in featured serials, appeared together in Inclusive Ensembles, all such team-appearances would be crossovers. By contrast, though, when icons possessed a single or combined stature-icon and one or more charisma-icons-- that is, icons who had only been Subs in in the universe of a Prime icon-- only the first encounter of the stature-icon and the charisma-icon(s) would rate as a crossover. My example in the essay was that of an early Avengers ensemble, combining stature-icon Captain America with three charisma-types. Another example that I've cited in a previous essay is the title Femforce, which teamed a bunch of neophyte heroes with "Ms. Victory," a reworking of a forties heroine named "Miss Victory." 

Successful spinoffs, in contrast, usually take a path opposed to that of funneling charisma-characters into ensembles, where they have collective stature. Usually a given icon is introduced in a Subordinate relationship to a Prime icon or icons, and then the Sub icon gets a separate serial, thus accruing some degree of stature, depending on how the serial fares in terms of either quantitative or qualitative escalation. 

One of the more convoluted ascents to Prime stature, though, is the "Barbara Gordon Batgirl." As a distaff version of Batman, she followed in the wake of two previous Sub Icons, the "Kathy Kane Batwoman" and the "Bette Kane Bargirl." There's no indication that either of these Bat-dames were considered for any sort of starring status. But although Batgirl Two debuted as a Sub as well, she had from the beginning a better shot at Prime stardom.

Barbara Gordon came into being thanks to the ABC BATMAN teleseries that lasted from Spring 1966 to Spring 1968. Sometime in 1966, ABC asked the editors at DC Comics to conceptualize some new female characters for the TV show to adapt. The show's writers particularly wanted to add a female crimefighter to aid the Dynamic Duo, and the result was that the second Batgirl appeared in DETECTIVE COMICS #359 (dated January 1967 but probably distributed at least two months previous). A few months later, Commissioner Gordon's daughter Barbara was mentioned in a BATMAN episode broadcast in March 1967, paving the way for ABC's version of the heroine to officially appear in September 1967.

For the next two years following Batgirl's first comic-book appearance, she made guest appearances in various BATMAN stories, as well as one in JUSTICE LEAGUE. However, while in comics she didn't immediately ascend to Prime status, in the BATMAN teleseries she was immediately a full member of the Bat-team. This ensemble I would judge to be Semi-Inclusive because in it Batman and Robin, though separate characters, functioned as a unit and thus as a "combined icon," while Batgirl was a new member inducted, however unofficially, into the ensemble. By the rules I advocated in the previous essay, only the first episode in which Batgirl became a regular Prime within the ensemble would be a crossover-episode.

The same basic principle applies to the cartoon series that quickly followed the demise of the live-action show. Although ADVENTURES OF BATMAN displayed some indebtedness to the West-Ward-Craig ensemble, Batgirl only appeared in 12 out of a total of 17 episodes. However, that's enough of a majority to make her at least a semi-regular rather than just a guest star, with the result that Batgirl's first episode on the cartoon, name of "The Joke's On Robin," counts as a crossover.

The year after the cartoon Batgirl started appearing on TV, comic-book Barbara Gordon received a long-term berth, starting in DETECTIVE COMICS #384 (1969). Thus, all of Batgirl Two's previous comics-appearances qualify as "proto-crossovers," and every time she guest-starred with another hero AFTER getting her own series, that was a crossover. This also includes the short-lived "Batgirl-and-Robin-Team" in BATMAN FAMILY, which became Gordon's first-- but not last-- Inclusive Ensemble.

MYTHCOMICS: DARK TRINITY (RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS #1-6, 2017-18)

When I picked up this compilation of the first six issues of the "Rebirth" version of DC's RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS, a lot of things mitigated against my finding anything beyond basic formula entertainment (if that). As I stated in these reviews, I've devoted only slight attention to the creation of the Red Hood, a.k.a. reborn former Robin Jason Todd. I didn't care that much about any of the early iterations of Jason, and hadn't followed the 2011 OUTLAWS title, though I remember being pleasing that it had ticked off various moral guardians with its sexploitation elements. The new version of the "Outlaws" teamed up Jason-Hood with a brand-new version of Bizarro and some Rebirth iteration of Artemis, a would-be Wonder Woman, with whom I was never particularly impressed. The title of the compilation told me that this tortured trio were meant to parody the "Trinity" of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, but I've found a number of Trinity-projects tedious. Frankly, the main reason I selected this TRINITY was because I'd found writer Scott Lobdell had a talent for humor, so even if it was formula, it might be funny.

Like a lot of Lobdell stories, TRINITY is full of cute one-liners, some good, some overkill. What I didn't expect to find was a really thoughtful dramatization of the perils of being a DC "legacy character" of one kind or another. Bizarro was conceived to be Superman's "imperfect duplicate," while both Red Hood and Artemis tried and failed to take over previously established identities. Artemis's relationship with Wonder Woman was entirely acrimonious, while Jason Todd was at least chosen to be the second Robin by the Big Bat himself. But Lobdell extends the notion of the "legacy character"-- often no more than a feeble reprise of some original character-- into a metaphor for the struggles between child and parent. For Red Hood, the struggle is about gaining respect from his Bat-dad and forging his own identity. Artemis's conflict has less to do with Wonder Woman than with the separate Amazon culture in which she was raised. This version of Bizarro has no previous history with anyone, but he is raised knowing that he was designed to be a knock-off, which doesn't do a lot for his ego.

Lobdell also cranks up the parental metaphor by choosing Black Mask as the villain of TRINITY. Though the character was conceived as something of a small-potatoes schemer, subsequent treatments, including that of Judd Winick in the RED HOOD stories, made the character into a ruthless gang-boss constantly seeking not only to kill Batman and his allies but also to eliminate all criminal competition. Without contradicting anything in the origin of the Doug Moench character, this Black Mask is given a Batman-like obsession with Gotham City. In his newest scheme to become the city's new lord and master, he reaches out to Red Hood, whose relationship to Batman many consider ambivalent. The Hood hopes to get into the villain's good graces in order to build a case against him, and so agrees to help Black Mask rip off a shipment of arcane weapons. Artemis, looking for one of those weapons, crosses swords (in a purely metaphorical way) with Red Hood. Despite lots of trash-talk, both are horrified to learn that the weapon Black Mask most desires is a clone of Superman. 

The whole "allies of convenience" is nothing special, but both Red Hood and Artemis are placed in a sticky situation in attempting to liberate a mentally-impaired Superman-clone from the control of a vicious crime-lord. Red Hood, having been reborn under circumstances not unlike Bizarro's genesis, forges a particular bond with the artificial super-being, as illustrated above. This is one of the few times that Kryptonian super-hearing is utilized in order to make the hearer relate to the chaos of the city he inhabits, as well as giving perspective on the relationship of both characters within the overall matrix of common humanity.

But Black Mask, despite his having sometimes appealed to Red Hood to become his new heir (and surrogate son), has been fully aware of the hero's hero-ness the whole time, and uses a techno-organic virus to take control of Bizarro. (Said virus is seen in the first chapter, and then ignored until the writer works it into the main plot. Wow, an actual PLOT-DEVELOPMENT in a modern comic!) Artemis, despite having no real reason to involve herself in Red Hood's battle, does the right thing and delays Bizarro until the Hood can manage to destroy the Mask's control. This includes an inventive sequence, possibly a reprise of a Grant Morrison conceit, in which the villain experiences the enhanced sight of a Kryptonian.

So Black Mask is defeated and almost left to die by Red Hood, though a joke coda gives the villain a fate worse than death, again invoking parental metaphors. For every overkill-joke, there are probably three good ones, and for a modern comic that's a pretty good average. And to top it all off is this cover, in which artist Dexter Soy riffs on the Max Allan Collins version of Jason Todd, first seen stealing the tires off the Batmobile.

 I don't imagine the regular series, which in one form or another ended in 2020, kept up this level of mythic engagement. Still, there are so many lame treatments of DC legacy characters that this arc gives me hope that the company hasn't been entirely ruined by constant reboots and political correctness.

NULL-MYTHS: INJUSTICE, GODS AMONG US YEAR FOUR (2018)

I don't know if I'll ever get around to reviewing the animated movie INJUSTICE, based on an alternate-world scenario for DC superheroes as propounded by both a licensed video game of that title and an extensive series of comics-prequels to the video-narrative. But having randomly sampled one such prequel, I think it's pretty unlikely I'll revisit the comics-franchise.

I won't spend a lot of time on YEAR FOUR. Like IDENTITY CRISIS and FLASHPOINT PARADOX, the series as a whole predicates one inciting incident that changes the status quo of the superhero setup. In this case, the incident is that the Joker kills a pregnant Lois Lane as well as all of Metropolis, and this tragedy causes Superman to end his never-ending struggle against evil by taking control of Planet Earth. In this endeavor he's aided by several of his fellow heroes-- some of whom are radically changed for whatever reasons, like "Yellow Lantern." However, other heroic types, notably a certain Cowled Crusader, don't like the Man of Steel becoming the Man In Charge. So it's Civil War All Over Again. But a few segments of Marvel's near-interminable hero-fracas touched on relevant moral issues, and here the writers are just pitting various characters against each other in a series of clumsy melodramatic conflicts.

The whole series is subtitled "Gods Among Us." I don't know how often the gods of the DC Mount Olympus figure into the grand scheme, but Part Four focuses on Batman involving the Olympians in the struggle for Earth's fate. The deities' motives for so doing are confused at best, though one cited motive is envy over being displaced in the eyes of mortals by costumed heroes, a premise that was much more concisely expressed in the 1967 Superman tale "Battle of the Gods." A lot of DC raconteurs portray the Greek deities as a bunch of pig-headed, quarrelsome oafs with super-powers, and the writers of INJUSTICE stick close to that superficial depiction.

While none of the melodramatic encounters of Part Four are insightful, I can damn the project with faint praise by saying that at least it wasn't as egregiously stupid as FLASHPOINT. And while the action set-pieces are undistinguished, I did notice that the artists produced some of the "punchiest" art I've seen in a DC multi-crossover. Superman and Wonder Woman punch each other several times, and they both punch Hercules. Shazam punches both Hercules and Apollo. Mera punches Poseidon. Damian Wayne punches Batman but Batman changes things up by hitting his son in the balls. At least no one could accuse the story of sanctimoniously avoiding the violence crucial to the superhero genre.

OUTSTANDING EPIC FANTASY COMICS

 I've been thinking about the appeal of epic fantasy-- which usually includes the subgenre of sword and sorcery, and includes at least mystical marvels even if some version of science fiction may also be present-- and then wondering about the best examples of this super-genre in comic books and comic strips (not that there are a lot in the latter medium). 

My main criterion is an epic sweep showing either a made-up world or some version of Earth's archaic past, but magic does need to be present to make it fantasy, so "sword and planet" stories like the John Carter series are out, unless magic is evoked alongside science. Mike Grell's WARLORD, which is an "inner Earth" SF-world in which magicians and demons run around, would qualify if I thought any of its arcs were outstanding in some way. For my purposes I'm also thinking only of long comics runs or arcs; no one-off short stories set in fantasy-worlds. I tend to rule out serials in which characters are too jokey or too homey, which would probably let out CEREBUS in addition to its being a domain where magic is only occasionally important to the story. Ditto ASTERIX. If someone had done original-to-comics versions of Peter Pan or the Oz books I might tend to exclude those too. I'd like to have included ELFQUEST but I'm pretty sure all of its miracles fall under the rubric of science fiction, even with all the archaisms.

So far I've come up with:

PRINCE VALIANT-- I've only read a smattering of these reprints, but I would say Hal Foster may be the only guy in newspaper comics to master the form, though I've read that the only usages of magic occur early in the strip's history

THE WIZARD KING-- technically only the first part of Wally Wood's opus is really good; he was pretty ill when he rushed out a quickie second part

CONAN-- maybe the first fifty Marvel issues. Barry Smith was the best exemplar of Conan art though John Buscema did a lot of impressive work up to that point.

KULL-- more scattershot in its first Marvel incarnation, but the second one, titled KULL THE DESTROYER at times, included some imaginative Doug Moench scenarios

CLAW THE UNCONQUERED-- a Conan ripoff, but with more emphasis on magical fantasy, with some cool Keith GIffen artwork

BEOWULF-- DC only did six issues of this character, who was a little jokey at times but still had some epic sequences

RED SONJA-- most if not all of Frank Thorne's work with the character

GHITA OF ALIZARR-- Thorne again, and the first of two albums is very good while the second is still pretty good

INU-YASHA-- medieval Japanese fantasy with an epic sweep

VIKING PRINCE-- gorgeous Kubert art in the feature's more fantastic incarnation

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE

 In A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 5 I formulated three types of ensemble features. One is the Exclusive Ensemble, in which all members of the team are original with the feature, which means that this type by itself does not sustain any qualities of a crossover-narrative. The other two, however, will display such qualities. albeit in differing configurations. 

The Inclusive Ensemble is one in which the members of the team all originate in other features, and thus all of the starring characters have some degree of stature when they appear in the team feature, a stature independent of the ensemble feature. DC Comics' Justice Society of America in its original run was devoted entirely to characters who all had their own features independent of the team. Because the Inclusive Ensemble is meant to cross over all these independent characters on a regular basis, all episodes of such features are crossover-stories.

The Semi-Inclusive Ensemble may include entirely new characters or not, but it must include at least one character that either earned stature or charisma in another feature before joining the team. Marvel's feature The Avengers started out using the Inclusive template, in that the charter members-- Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Giant-Man, and the Wasp-- had all enjoyed the stature of featured heroes, and so all of these Avengers-stories are crossover-tales, as are those which added Captain America to the mix. However, AVENGERS #16 changed the template to that of the Semi-Inclusive when the new lineup consisted of one Prime with strong stature, Captain America, and three that had only been charismatic Subs within the universes of other featured heroes. Since Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch only accrued stature once they'd been in one AVENGERS story, the first appearance *alone* is a charisma-crossover. From then on, they all possess "collective stature" due to their continued membership in the team, and the more they appear in the team, by the principle of escalation they progress from being Charisma Dominant Primes to Stature Dominant Primes. The three new Avengers have never accrued as much stature in the comic-book medium as Captain America, but the captain, who also maintained his own feature at the time, was no longer crossing over with other characters with their own separate features, and so no crossover-mojo appeared in that configuration.

Slightly later, Giant-Man (renamed Goliath) and The Wasp rejoined the feature. However, they no longer had their own feature, as did Thor, Iron Man and Captain America, and so, even though they came to AVENGERS with separate stature, over time the stature they had as Avengers team-members excelled the stature they'd earned from their own (essentially failed) series. As with the team-debuts of Hawkeye et al, the first story in which Goliath and Wasp rejoined would count as a crossover, but not others, because from then on those two heroes would be on roughly the same level as the neophytes who never had their own features. 

However, any time that such a team-- with only one or two members possessed of high stature-- harbored a temporary guest-star, such as Thor or Iron Man, this too would be a crossover of the "guest star" variety.

More to come.