WHAT VS. HOW

 One key notion I argued in the cited essay was the importance of epistemological patterns to the process of concrescence in fiction. It's not that any work of fiction necessarily seeks to make definitive statements about epistemology. But in the process of any act of imitation, it's natural though not inevitable for authors to attempt buttressing their fictional works by drawing upon patterns that represent the "real world." Often these patterns are based upon propositions that the consensus-audience no longer accepts, or does not accept universally, ranging from the Oedipal theories of Freud to the 19th-century theories of "the Hollow Earth." To the audience, what's important is whether or not the author can make even the most absurd proposition "entertaining"-- and this, not real-world applicability, is what gives even the weakest of weak propositions a peculiar endurance, if not strength in the usual sense.-- THE FULL VALUE OF THE HALF-TRUTH.

Today I thought of a simpler way to distinguish "problems" from "conundrums" as I originally defined them in  2021's PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS, to wit:

A narrative's "problems," its lateral/literal virtues as expressed through either the kinetic potentiality, the dramatic potentiality, or a combination of the two, concern WHAT THINGS HAPPEN in the narrative.

A narrative's "conundrums," its vertical virtues as expressed through the either the didactic potentiality, the mythopoeic potentiality, or a combination of the two, concerns HOW THINGS HAPPEN in the narrative.

I gave a few examples of specific problems and conundrums in the 2021 essay, but rather than go over the same ground, I'll try to show how one of the examples I gave in FULL VALUE can apply across the "problem/conundrum" continuum. I haven't encountered a surfeit of stories about the Hollow Earth, but certainly there should be a number of ways in which Freud's Oedipal theory has been used for both lateral and vertical formulations.

In the interest of testing my theory on as broad a canvas as possible, I'll choose my examples from among the most recent analyses I made of Oedipal narratives on my movie blog, rather than choosing examples from famous franchises like DRACULA or PSYCHO.

The very last Oedipal narrative I examined happens to fall into the category of "what things happen." The cheapie sword-and-sorcery adventure EYES OF THE SERPENT uses what might be termed a feminine "Oedipal conflict," but it uses the pattern only for the dramatic potentiality. In the rambling narrative, young princess Fiona falls in love with roving (and somewhat kooky) swordsman Galen. Fiona enlists Galen to help Fiona's mother Neema fight Neema's enemies and regain control of the kingdom. However, Neema covertly puts the moves on the younger Galen. It's loosely implied that Neema does so in order to keep control of the warrior, rather than her doing so just because she's attracted to him. In this, Neema is the mirror image of her sister Corva, in that both are ruthless in their pursuit of power, and the movie's conclusion, in which the two sisters destroy one another in battle, indicates that the "lateral meaning" of EYES is to validate the more innocent Fiona as the royal figure who deserves to control the realm. I will happily admit that the story of EYES has only a fitful claim to the dramatic potentiality. However, the scene in which Galen tells Fiona about Neema's treachery, and Fiona refuses to believe him, does have the bare function of establishing that at some point Fiona must come to terms with Neema's corrupt nature and bind herself to the comparatively virtuous Galen.

In contrast, the last Oedipal narrative I examined which concerns "how things happen" is 2010's THE WOLFMAN. In my review, I contrasted the clear Freudian schema of this film in comparison to the 1941 classic.

There's no rational-minded, overbearing dad this time. Scripters Walker and Self wanted a Heavy Father straight out of Freud's TOTEM AND TABOO. The original Larry Talbot left the British Isles for America for reasons loosely associated with sibling rivalry. In contrast, Lawrence is sent to an asylum after he, as a child, claims to have witnessed Sir John's act of uxoricide, slaying Lawrence's mother during one of the lord's beast transformations. (Lawrence, unlike Larry, at least has a mother in his story.) After years of being treated by the barbaric alienists of the late 1800s, Lawrence recants his story and becomes an actor. (I'm convinced Walker and Self made this alteration to the protagonist's background simply so that they could reference HAMLET, which Freud famously associated with Oedipal urges.) 

One point I didn't cover in detail is that the film implies an equivalence between both violence and sex in the wolf-persona of Sir John, though I did address somewhat the Freudian concept of the "primal scene:"

Freud hypothesized that children who witnessed their parents having sex for the first time-- the so-called "primal scene"-- might believe that the mother was being attacked, or even murdered. Lawrence sees his mother murdered for real, and then his brother is slain because his father craves the brother's future wife. 

To expand on this formulation slightly, even though Sir John gets his werewolf curse from an outside source, his actions can only be explained by Freudian dynamics about sex and violence, which explain "how things happen" in the WOLFMAN world. Sir John's murder of his wife can logically be viewed as the beast's way of satisfying both a lust for sex and for violence, though the film does not make this proposition explicit. But if it is true that the beast slew Lawrence's mother to satisfy both bloodlust and sex-lust, then it follows that deep down Sir John intends to wreak the same violence upon Gwen, whom Sir John believes to have a resemblance to the unnamed mother of Lawrence and the late Ben. (Viewers don't see the mother, so the default assumption would be that Sir John is correct about the resemblance, and it certainly fits the Freudian paradigm that both of the mother's sons fixate upon Gwen for the same reason Sir John does.)

So the TOTEM AND TABOO paradigm of a father-son battle is carried out in a very different manner from a similar trope in 1941's WOLF MAN, meaning that Lawrence must defeat his vicious father in lycanthropic battle. In the review I mentioned in passing that Lawrence, unlike Fiona in EYES OF THE SERPENT, does not prosper after slaying the Heavy Father. I stated that Gwen shoots Beast-Lawrence with a silver bullet to spare him further suffering. However, Beast-Lawrence is by his nature as great a physical threat to Gwen as was his nasty dad, and so there's certainly an element of self-protection in Gwen's action as well. By her action Gwen alone is spared the holocaust of the Oedipal conflict, though of course the film has no interest in what happens to her once the story is over. 

I may conceive of other demonstrates between the pathways taken by "what" versus those of "how," but for now these two suffice for my purposes.