NEAR-MYTHS: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS,THE LAST CRUSADE (2016)

LAST CRUSADE was a one-shot comic from some of the same collaborators that produced the previous year's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: MASTER RACE. This time out, co-creators Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello partner with John Romita Jr to produce a much shorter take on one aspect of the Dark Knight universe: the events leading up to the Joker's capture and murder of The Jason Todd Robin.

To be sure, the creators aren't bothering to synch up their story with the well-known "Death in the Family" events, but instead produced a new narrative spun off from a brief reference to Jason's death in the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The Joker's act of slaying Todd-Robin was not mentioned in DKR, but not surprisingly in CRUSADE the Clown Prince is still the culprit, albeit under different circumstances.

The Joker and Batman actually don't square off at all here, for the villain spends most of his time in Arkham Asylum, telling quixotic stories and eventually breaking free. Batman and Todd-Robin spend most of their time investigating a plot set up by Poison Ivy and abetted by Killer Croc. Oh, and a de-costumed Catwoman has a few scenes. (Guess one could take that two ways.)

CRUSADE's only notable element is how Miller and Azzarello address that frequent that bete noir of realistically-minded comics-fans, the moral queasiness over under-age kids becoming the sidekicks of adult heroes. Of course when the kid-sidekick trope began in comics' Golden Age, it was nothing more than a transparent attempt to appeal to kids who wanted to fantasize about being heroes close to their own ages, rather than identifying only with adult crusaders. It's therefore ridiculous to treat a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy as if it were subject to moralistic evaluations.

To be sure, Miller et al don't pursue the "black beast" all that much. Rather, because Batman is getting old, he begins to worry about Jason Todd taking chances-- and, in addition, whether or not he's become increasingly ruthless. The problem with these two intertwined elements is that they work against one another, and against the expressed idea that kids in general shouldn't be exposed to dangerous activities. I suppose the authors might have formulated the argument that Jason's faults, as seen through Batman's eyes, were tied to his youth, but they didn't precisely do so. 

In fact, I speculate that the main reason Miller et al build up Jason Todd's penchant for violence is not because of anything in Todd-Robin's original career. IMO it's more likely that the authors were responding to the developments of "Reborn Robin" in 2005, in which Jason re-appeared as a bloodthirsty vigilante, The Red Hood. Later narratives redeemed the Hood so that he became a virtuous hero again. But CRUSADE suggests that even in his "innocent youth" Todd-Robin had somewhat sadistic tendencies-- which is ironic, since this was a mental quirk Miller imputed to his version of Batman in the classic DARK KNIGHT RETURNS.

SUPERNORMAL POETICS REVISITED

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous.-- READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART.

The fatuity of Hoffman's claim doesn't need much elaboration. Without even looking at his footnoted source, I surmise that its "proof" of male preference is derived from purely visual tests, where male subjects look at photos, possibly subliminal, of the different types of feminine breasts. This of course would be a thoroughly incomplete study without invoking tactile sensations as well. But try to persuade some research center to give the go-ahead on a study in which a set number of male subjects grope a set number of both real and fake boobies.

But I will elaborate upon Campbell. In this blog's infancy I examined in detail Campbell's supernormal poetics (my term), in this 2009 blogpost. Whereas Hoffman rejects the "existence claims" of myth and religion, Campbell embraces them in the following terms:

[Campbell]  suggests that though mythology cannot be rationally understood, it may be "viewed in the light of biological psychology as a function of the human nervous system, precisely homologous to the innate and learned sign stimuli that release and direct the energies of nature." Campbell, building largely on the ethological researches of Lorenz and Tinbergen, calls this psychobiological system "the supernormal sign stimulus," and implies that it is through such stimuli that both myth and art work their wiles on audiences.

There was a time when I was very invested in Campbell's theory. When I was writing my as-yet-unpublished book on the superhero phenomenon, I initially devoted a chapter to the supernormal sign theory. However, I soon realized, through close analysis of that chapter of PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, that an awful lot of Campbell's heuristic conjectures proved shaky. For instance, later in my 2009 essay, I extrapolated from Campbell the idea of "normal sign stimuli," but Campbell never actually renders such a conception. It's possible that the author was exposed to the semiotics of his time, but if so, he's too caught up in explicating supernormal signs to worry about their opposite. Further, though in the essay I agreed with Campbell's quoted poet A.E. Houseman that "intellect is not the fount of poetry," I caviled that Houseman had not given intellect its due in the process of making art.

Much later I expanded upon the intertwining of intellect and imagination, under the more general terms "cognitive restraint" and "affective freedom," in this appropriately titled essay. And though I favor the poetics of Campbell and Houseman far more than those of Hoffman and Richard Dawkins, I tried in this and other essays to strike a balance with respect to how these two aspects of human existence affect creativity:

Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES, LAST PART

 In the last couple of days I was able to finish the remaining portion of Donald Hoffman's CASE AGAINST REALITY. One reason is that it's both an easy read and just a little over 200 pages. But the other reason is that I could skip over a lot of Hoffman's fine points about tests of perception. This sort of slow case-building is necessary in science. But it wasn't strictly necessary for me to grasp his main thesis: the idea that all human perception is seen through the matrix he calls an "interface," as opposed to the common notion that "what we see is what there is." Hoffman's main concern is to demonstrate the superiority of his interface model, and for most of the book it appears he has no interest in inquiring into whatever aspects of reality that we, as products of evolution, are not privy to.

In the next to last chapter, "Scrutiny," Hoffman repeats examples from earlier chapters regarding creatures whose evolutionary instincts, which should promote fitness, may lead them down blind alleys. One prominent example is that of the Australian jewel beetle, which came near extinction because the males kept trying to mate with beer-bottles which resembled the markings of female jewel beetles. However, in an earlier chapter this was presented as no more than a comedy of mating errors. In "Scrutiny" the author goes a little further, claiming that fitness-conditioned entities as a whole cannot help but prefer "extreme" versions of normative stimuli, termed "supernormal stimuli."

Astute readers of this blog (or, more likely, of the works of Joseph Campbell) should recognize these two words. I believe Campbell first used the term in his 1959 book PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, and he derived the phrase from ethological writings of his time. I printed a representative excerpt from said tome in my 2012 essay VERTICALLY CHALLENING. I'm not surprised that Hoffman doesn't mention Campbell, but his only footnote on the stimuli-subject is for a 2010 book that uses that very phrase for its title, SUPERNORMAL STIMULI. Maybe that book properly credits the ethologists of the 1950s. 

Now, Campbell did make a somewhat similar argument, that on some occasions certain creatures seemed to prefer the more "unnatural" stimulus. Hoffman, perhaps in line with his 2010 source, goes so far as to claim that ALL creatures do, including humans. "A male Homo sapiens doesn't just like a female with breast implants as much as a female au natural: he likes it far more." His footnote for this and similar assertions also cite the 2010 book, but whatever that work's data, I find the conclusion fatuous. I have no doubt that Hoffman embraces the notion because it supports his general theory regarding the limitations of fitness-based perception.

Only in the last chapter does Hoffman venture some thoughts about the excluded perceptions. I was sure that, even though he makes a brief reference to Kant, that Hoffman had no interest in either Kant's philosophical project or any of the religious systems to which Kant was somewhat indebted. What I did not expect was that his version of excluded perceptions would sound not unlike the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

The claim of conscious realism is better understood by looking in a mirror. There you see the familiar-- your eyes, hair, skin and teeth. What you don't see is infinitely richer, and equally familiar-- the world of your conscious experiences. It includes your dreams, fears, aspirations... the vibrant world of your conscious experiences that transcends three dimensions.-- p. 186.

And here's Whitehead writing about his version of "conscious experiences," almost a hundred years ago:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.-- PROCESS AND REALITY.

However, philosophy is not Hoffman's metier, and he proves it later in the same chapter, when he cites this statement by Richard Dawkins:

Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.

Immediately after, Hoffman says:

I agree with Dawkins. If a system of thought, religious or otherwise, offers a claim that it wants taken seriously, then we should examine it with our best method of inquiry, the scientific method.

A little later, Hoffman claims that his "conscious realism" system might effect a "rapprochement" between the worlds of science and spirituality. But how could any detente be forged if science alone, even one based in Hoffman's "case against reality," is in the driver's seat? 

I understand that for scientists, religion's history of infringement upon "existence claims" like those of Galileo cast a long shadow. But if Hoffman really valued what he terms "conscious experiences," the hallmarks of a consciousness not yet explained by current science, then he might have seen that a religious "existence claim" is substantially different in nature from one of science. A story about humanity's origins in the Garden of Eden does not compete as an "existence claim" with the story of evolution. The latter is about viewing the universe as what Whitehead called "inert facts," allegedly objective evidence. The former is about the full range of subjective human feelings, extrapolated into a system of mythopoeic correlations.

And so Hoffman's case fails in the light of superior testimony by Alfred North Whitehead. But Hoffman's argument is at least less polarizing than that of science-worshipper Dawkins, and so the court of public opinion may see a better thinker come forth to forge the desired rapprochement.

MYTHCOMICS: "EVOLUTION GOES HAYWIRE" (WONDER WOMAN #9, 1944)

 

For my second "March to Womanhood" post, I return to the well of Classic WONDER WOMAN. To be sure, this one is a good bit wackier than the last time I looked at a Marston WW story, the highly imaginative ICEBOUND MAIDENS. This time Marston, instead of producing a free flow of mythic and religious images, chose to riff on a "haywire" vision of evolution.

Kicking off the adventure is a mama gorilla who's lost her baby and decides not to go through the usual adoption process to obtain new offspring. Wonder Woman, in her Diana Prince ID, happens to witness the child-napping and pursues the angry anthropoid, who just happens to make tracks for nearby Holliday College.

The gorilla barges into the classroom of Professor Zool (short for zoology, apparently), who just happens to be giving the Holliday Girls a lecture on evolution, and about his new invention. The gorilla breaks in and tosses some students around, but the Amazon Princess outwrestles the beast with the help of the girls, who just happen to have lots of ropes lying around in the classroom. (Hey-- it could happen!) Steve Trevor, whose niece was abducted, wants to put down the damn dirty ape. Zool suggests an alternative: he can use his "electronic evolutionizer" to change the unruly critter into a human being. Presumably Zool has been waiting to come across just the right test case. Everyone's okay with it, including the zoo people, even though they stand to lose an expensive attraction.

And so we get the origin of long-lived WW foe Giganta. Though she attains a human physique, she pretty much forgets about having lost an ape-child but retains an unreasoning hatred of Princess Diana. They fight, and in the scuffle the evolutionizer is damaged, and we get William Marston's "magic wand" theory of evolution in detail.

I jest, for I'm sure Marston didn't think any evolutionary process could be turned backward, nor did he think he was infecting young minds with any such beliefs. Turning back time was just a fun way to illustrate said process, with crocodiles becoming dinosaurs and so on. Wonder Woman and her buddies, who look about the same but have supposedly devolved to cave-people, flee one of the dinos. They run into Giganta again, but the she-ape has no use for Women's Lib, and won't live with a "tribe led by a she." She seeks out a patriarchal tribe and immediately finds one in the "Tree People," so I guess the evolutionizer threw everyone back to a period when human ancestors were just starting to leave the trees for the ground, and these Tree People are the holdouts. Of course in no real-world model of ancient times were those tree-dwellers any sort of humanoids, not even "Missing Links" like the ones shown here. Apparently the Tree People, whom I presume to be modern citizens devolved by the machine, acquire a race-memory of antagonism toward "Cave People," even though the only cave-tribe they ever see is Wonder Woman's little band.

The Tree Men capture the 20th-century cave-dwellers and threaten to sacrifice them. Wondcr Woman once more demonstrates female agency by defeating a devouring dino, and that's pretty much it for the caveman fantasia.

After a few more challenging incidents, Zool gets his machine running again with a little help from Ben Franklin-style science. But with the next jaunt forward,  the time-travelers appear in a period of Greek history that most moderns consider purely mythical: "The Golden Age, when the world was perfect." Naturally, for Marston this is a time when there are no hierarchies between the sexes, and one that discourages the acquisition of wealth. 

Giganta, the savage who reflects the aspects of modernity Marston dislikes, allies herself to the "lower classes," who are individuals who like to accrue wealth. Giganta seduces them into wanting rulership as well, and though the Golden Age is not meant to be identical to the Garden of Eden, it's no coincidence that the rebels speak of gaining "the knowledge of good and evil." Wonder Woman eventually quells the rebellion but the queen sadly observes that, "The Golden Age is over-- people now know they can be wicked if they choose."

Moving into a new phase, but without another time-jaunt, Queen Darla's peaceful rule is challenged by male subjects who think that their superior strength entitles them to supremacy. Wonder Woman easily defeats the lead challenger, and for good measure the heroine scoffs at the man's wife for wanting to take pride in her man's might. However, the woman's perspective shows a chink in Marston's system. The author perhaps couldn't conceive that some women, not being aggressive or martially inclined, might want men to be dominant on the assumption that this made a tribe stronger-- which in a broad sense was true for most of human history.

In any case, this sort of negative "woman power" unseats Queen Darla. She and a small coterie join Wonder Woman and friends in seeking to found a new kingdom. Since they end up in a location geographically comparable to that of the Amazon kingdom, Marston probably meant Darla's voyage to be comparable to the later journey Queen Hippolyta takes to found Paradise Island. This would make Darla's group the ancestors of the Greek Amazons, despite the former's lack of martial tendencies. This is illustrated when Giganta once more activates the evolutionizer, flinging Wonder Woman's group into Greek Amazon times. In due time the heroine comes face to face with her own mother, thousands of years before Diana has been "born." Hippolyta explains that the city of Amazonia faces attack by the army of Achilles, at least partly because the Amazons sided with Troy against Greece. 

Most of the Amazons are off hunting husbands-- one of the few times Marston drew on the family-making customs of the warrior women-- so Diana suggests that Hippolyta send runners to bring the fighters back to Amazonia. In the meantime Wonder Woman challenges Achilles, another representative of patriarchal rule, to single combat. She wins, the other Amazons arrive to drive off the Greek army, and the adventure gets a quick wrap up, implying that the 20th century is freed from the evolutionary backstep and that everything goes back to normal. 

For some reason, though, the evolutionary erasure does not apply to Giganta, though her actual fate is left up in the air at story's end. The gorilla-girl only made one other Golden Age appearance. In that tale, it's disclosed that Giganta, like other WONDER WOMAN rogues, was sentenced to an Amazon reformatory-- until a group of lethal ladies break free to menace Princess Diana as "Villainy Inc." Given that she's a gorilla, in this story Giganta takes on an interesting "serpent in Eden" persona as Marston guided his readers through his narrative of the "rise and fall of sexual equality."

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES PT 2

 I've finished Chapters 3 and 4 of Hoffman's CASE. I'm getting very strong indications that he's not concerned with disclosing aspects of the reality that human, fitness-oriented senses cannot disclose. His main concern seems to be for countering the dominant opinion that human senses endow their owners with a selective advantage. Future chapters may address what this does or does not alter about humans' place in the evolutionary chain of being.

Two interesting quotes I may use in the future:

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual world as in the physical. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.-- Thomas Henry Huxley.

This accords with some of my perspectivist essays regarding the freedom to make choices depending on particular circumstances.

There is, as we have discussed, genetic drift -- the chance spreading of a neutral allele, which has no effect on fitness, throughout a population. This is more likely in smaller populations. Such drift, some claim, accounts for most of molecular evolution. It is possible that today's neutral drift might, as niches change, become tomorrow's game changer. -- Hoffman, p.71.

If one extends the principle of the "unexpectedly useful allele" to that of the "unpopular philosophical concept" or "obscure literary trope," one could make a good case for a scientifically supported take on "the stone the builders rejected."

 

 

READING AGAINST REALITY: NOTES

Though a lot of my philosophy-oriented posts read against simplistic conceptions of reality, whatever notes I make in this possible series are my responses to a 2019 book by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, THE CASE AGAINST REALITY. I don't know that I will finish the book, but after two chapters I already have some comments to record.

Roughly three centuries ago Immanuel Kant argued that human beings do not see reality "as it is," that they only see a series of "phenomena" which do not represent the conceptually known "noumenon" beyond human sense. Hoffman uses evolution to argue a theory that our perceptions are in large part an "interface," and that this interface came about in order to promote the fitness of the human subject.

Hoffman defends his thesis fairly well in the opening chapter, though of course I can't yet judge the full extent of his logic. But in Chapter 2, "Beauty," Hoffman seems to lose track of his own argument.

So there's nothing new about the idea that human genetics are responsive to socially and biologically determined perceptions of beauty. Like many lower animals, the humans in which all those genes reside often privilege various physical attributes, considering them indicators of good health and thus worthy candidates for mating. In Chapter 2, Hoffman focuses on just one indicator of both youth and good health: that of the eye. Apparently he either did detailed research on this attraction-factor himself or chose to focus only upon this single factor. But, given that in human culture there are a fair number of artifacts celebrating the beauties of the eye, it's a fair example.

However, though CASE is Hoffman's fourth published book, he throws out some unjustified statements. On page 30, he states that "a woman's fertility is not the same as her reproductive value." They certainly sound like the same thing to my ears, but Hoffman doesn't offer a solid distinction. He further remarks that a woman at 25 may be more fertile than she was at 20, but that at 20 her reproductive value was greater. What? Why? Is he assuming that the 25-year-old is simply going to turn out a few less offspring because she's five years older? That seems a reach.

On the same page he states the truism that older males who want offspring are more likely to seek younger females, rather than older ones, because of the former's superior fertility. So far, so expected. But then he makes the unsubstantiated claim, which he claims has been supported by "experiments," that "Men over twenty prefer younger woman. No surprise. But teen males prefer women who are slightly older." Hoffman supplies a footnote to a study that presumably supports this conclusion. But he himself does not explain the conclusion, or why he believes the purported evidence is relevant to his primary assertion that males select mates based on physical markers indicating fertility and fitness.

I can think of social and/or psychological reasons that "teen males" might seek older female sex-partners, and I assume anyone else can do the same. But Hoffman's trying to prove that sexual selection is determined by physical indicators, to support the genetic interpretation of how beauty is reckoned. He didn't even need to speak of what teen boys like to make his main point. My impression is that he knew of the cited research and wanted to reference it, but didn't realize that it was an unnecessary side-point.

That's my only note so far. More may be coming.

VERY NEXT DAY ADDENDUM: Though Hoffman does not mention Kant or his "noumenon" thesis anywhere in the first two chapters, the subject comes up in Chapter Three. There Hoffman quotes from correspondence he maintained with the famous biologist Francis Crick of "double helix" fame. Crick brings up the Kant conception as a way of illustrating the difference between what humans perceive, and the reality that may be beyond their ken. Not sure if Hoffman will pursue the comparison except to illustrate various scientific positions re: perception.

MYTHCOMICS: "DEATH BY WITCHCRAFT" (WITCHES TALES #4, 1951)

 Once more it's March, so it's time for another "Women's History Month" post-- though that doesn't necessarily mean finding only stories that would please feminists. Myths about negative aspects of femininity are as vital as those about positive aspects. As it happens, the horror story featured here accentuates the negative for both of the sexes.

As if so often the case with anthology horror stories of the Golden Age of Comics, there's no writer-attribution, though the artist has been identified as Rudy Palais, who was known in his time for an above-average ability to convey a creepy mood.

The story of Dora Mayberry, by her own account scarred with the lines and wrinkles of age, is book-ended on both sides by her relating her tale to an "inner circle" of evildoers made up of one traditional-looking witch, an equally traditional black cat, and several ghoulish-looking males. After showing her listeners the beauty she once possessed, she begins the story in what looks like the 1920s at latest. Dora receives visits from high-class Arnold Cavendish, but Dora's only interested in Arnold because he's rich-- or, more precisely, in the line to become rich when his sick, rich uncle goes to meet his maker. In fact, Arnold's just as greedy to get his inheritance as Dora is, and when the old boy has a heart attack, Arnold makes sure his uncle doesn't get a chance to recover.

However, once Arnold has all the money he'll ever need, he shows his true colors. He wants to live it up with every woman in town, and he refuses to marry Dora as promised. Dora alludes to the possibility of revealing some "secret" they hold in common, but once she's been well and truly spurned, the idea of revealing the secret never comes up again. Instead, Dora decides to sell her soul to Satan for the power to redress her injury, telling her tutor, "Some say women are weak-- but we CAN do evil!"

Up to this point the story has followed a fairly predictable course. However, the unknown writer takes a new turn by revealing that Arnold has a neurotic fear of growing old like his late uncle. He's so deranged on the subject that he makes a contract with two killers, saying that if they kill him painlessly in twenty years, he'll leave them a sum of money in his will. Clearly, Arnold wants to feel like he can burn the candle at both ends and then trust to someone else to keep him from getting old. (The possibility of self-execution apparently never occurs to him.)

Dora then studies the black arts for "long days and nights," which erode both her youth and her good looks. But she hasn't got in mind some mundane death-curse, as the story's title would suggest; she wants to use Arnold's own fears as the means of his undoing. Seven years later, she approaches Arnold, representing herself as his new housekeeper, and since she's no longer beautiful Arnold doesn't recognize her. The rich narcissist has lost none of his mania, complaining that elderly beggars are "people squeezed dry by time." (One might guess that he conflates advanced age with penury, since implicitly he wants to waste the family fortune and then perish before he has to live with the consequences of being a high-living grasshopper.)

Dora's gambit is to spook Arnold with the possibility that the thugs he hired are going to come early for their payoff and so deprive the rich wastrel of twenty years of self-indulgence. To sell Arnold on this possibility, Dora not only sends her victim minatory dreams, she seeks out the two thugs, arranges their deaths, and then turns them into her spectral henchmen. Not only does she panic the fool into committing suicide, she cons him into signing over all his wealth to his faithful housekeeper. Dora ends up becoming a rich old crone who then abets other wronged women into choosing a dark path to vengeance.

Arnold and Dora are practically living symbols of masculine and feminine negativity. Though horror stories harbor any number of male warlocks or magicians who use mystic powers for vengeance, there is in my opinion there is something uniquely feminine about the idea of a "sisterhood" of malefic witches (even though, as I admitted, most of the ghouls at the convocation are male). And although actual sex is not mentioned in "Death," the writer strongly implies that what Arnold wants, once he has money, is a life of "love 'em and leave 'em." Ironically, both of them would have been well suited to each other in terms of selfish greed, and Dora probably would have been an adequate match for Arnold if he didn't have his mania about "hoping he dies before he gets old," to misquote the song.

One half of Dora Mayberry's name sustains some symbolic interest. "Dora" is just a standard wish-fulfillment cognomen, usually translated as "God's gift." However, "mayberry" is one of many names attributed to the plant known as the "common hawthorn" (a specification necessary because various other plants are also called hawthorns). Hawthorn has strong witchy associations, being both used by actual witches in their rituals and employed by ordinary people to avert witchery.

CROSSING T'S, DOTTING I'S

 Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions.-- STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2.

 

In STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS, I announced that I would retire the barely used term "postulate" in term of "proposition." But my saying this means that I must transfer everything I said about the two forms of postulates, especially in FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, to a "formal proposition" that represents the didactic form of vertical meaning, and to "informal proposition," that represents the mythopoeic form of vertical meaning.

The one potential problem with these determinations is that way back in 2018's three-essay series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, I stated that I considered both the lateral and vertical meanings of a given work were propositional in nature.

But the solution is easily solved by a quick visit to Schopenhauer. In his principal work THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, the gloomy philosopher created a lot of dualisms, but one of the simplest is to contrast "the concrete" of our physical experience and "the abstract" of our mental experience. 

So, since I've already assigned (as in the quote above) abstractions to the world of vertical meaning, then by default (as well as the PROPOSITIONS series) the world of lateral meaning is aligned with the concrete, because the lateral is also the "literal" record of what happens to characters in the narrative and how they feel about it. 

So, to apply full symmetry to the formulations of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE, all four potentialities line up like so:

THE KINETIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete excitations 

THE DRAMATIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete emotions

THE MYTHOPOEIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract correlations

THE DIDACTIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract cogitations

THE READING RHEUM: "CARMILLA" (1872)

 

 The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.--Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS 

After not having read Sheridan Le Fanu's CARMILLA in many years, I gave it a shot again last year, and found the novella underwhelming. Its status as "the first major lesbian vampire story" seemed dubious, though there's no doubt that exploitative film adaptations pursued that angle. In the story proper, though, the relationship between the vampiress and her victim Laura is strictly one-way. Laura doesn't even know what to make of Carmilla's weird claims of some shared destiny between the two of them. The closest the young woman comes to acknowledging some erotic fixation on Carmilla's part is that she briefly thinks about book-romances (possibly Byron's DON JUAN?) in which a "boyish lover" pretends to be female to gain access to a beloved. Yet Laura quickly dismisses that possibility, rationalizing that Carmilla's constant "languor" is "quite incompatible with a masculine system." Laura can hardly be a consenting partner in a lesbian affair if she can't even conceive of the possibility of girl-on-girl love. At most CARMILLA might rank as the first vampire story about lesbian rape.

However, on a more recent re-reading. I found myself interpreting the novella along lines similar to Melville's cited quote about "unfinished narration." In marked contrast to the more melodramatic vampire-novels, ranging from the 1847 VARNEY THE VAMPIRE to the 1897 DRACULA, CARMILLA feels very like a 20th-century modernist work, in love with ambiguity and "ragged edges."

One great ambiguity in the novella is that Carmilla seems to be a member of some strange network that has insinuated itself into human circles. This stands in contrast to both Varney and Dracula, who operate alone except for a few minions. But one never knows the nature of the vampire network. Numerous clues lead the reader to the discovery that Carmilla, languorous guest of Laura and her unnamed father, is Mircalla Karnstein, who has existed as an unholy bloodsucker since her death a hundred years earlier. But what about the other unnamed associates? One, the "Comtesse" who claims to be the mother of Carmilla in her various incarnations, may be a vampire herself, and may also be one of the vanished Karnsteins, whose castle stands in ruins at the start of the novella. Whoever the Comtesse is, she has resources enough to arrange the carriage that brings Carmilla to the estate where Laura lives. But who is the "hideous black man" in a turban whom Laura's governess sees inside the carriage? Similarly, when General Spielsdorf narrates the story as to how he lost his precious ward to the girlish-looking vampire-- at that time, using the name "Millarca"-- he mentions a "deathly pale" carriage driver working for the Comtesse. The later example of DRACULA invites the idea of human servants to a clutch of vampires. Yet Le Fanu proffers none of the copious explanations seen in Stoker.

How does Carmilla operate as an undead spirit? She first appears in Laura's bedroom when the latter is a girl of six. Little Laura sees the full-grown Carmilla, and feels something pierce her breast, though no wound eventuates. Then apparently Carmilla makes some chimerical decision not to trouble Laura again until the latter turns sixteen. Near the novella's conclusion, Baron Vordenburg-- Le Fanu's anticipation of Doctor Van Helsing-- claims that though vampires usually exsanguinate their victims right away, sometimes they make continued visits to a victim, as with "the gradual approaches of an artful courtship." All of the victims who are quickly slain by the vampiress are described as female. So was Le Fanu implying, very covertly, that Carmilla was a lesbian who only liked female prey? That would be a logical conclusion. But Le Fanu's characters never comment on the apparent preference, and Carmilla herself doesn't make even a passing comment on the male of the species. To be sure, Laura, living in a pre-lapsarian isolation from society, makes no comments on masculine charms either, aside from displaying a basic knowledge as to how men usually differ from women. But though Laura escapes either losing her life or becoming an undead herself, the novella certainly does not end with any ringing endorsement of the Daughters of Lesbos, and one never knows what Le Fanu thinks about the subject.

There are a lot of other "ragged edges" in CARMILLA, but I'll wind up with the matter of Carmilla's powers, contrasting Le Fanu's approach to Stoker's. DRACULA's opening chapters make the vampire's powers seem endless, but roughly halfway through the book, Van Helsing codifies all of the things vampires can and cannot do. The explications in the last couple of chapters of CARMILLA leave most questions unanswered. Why, when preying on Laura and on Spielsdorf's ward, does Carmilla manifests as a "sooty black thing," and yet as herself as well? Why does Laura manifest a wound from Carmilla's attentions when she's sixteen, but not when she's six? Carmilla is seen in her grave at the Karnstein ruins at the novel's end, but how did she get there? When Laura and her father leave their home, the father makes an excuse to Carmilla that they plan to go an errand. and he invites Carmilla to join them later for a picnic "in the ruined castle." The reader doesn't know how much the father knows at that point-- only that he's held some unreported conversations with the local doctor-- but one would think that any mention of the Karnstein ruins would keep Carmilla away from there. Instead, she makes a flagrant appearance there, before the eyes of Laura, her father and Spielsdorf. She easily thwarts Spielsdorf when he attacks her with an axe, but then, instead of attacking the three people capable of killing her, she simply vanishes. Does she take refuge in her grave because she thinks they can't find her there? Or-- is it possible that she practices bilocation? Perhaps the Carmilla at Laura's home is a magical double of the body that's confined to the grave, and only the spirit can leave, not the actual body-- which might one reason the non-physical form morphs into a shadow-creature.

So my verdict is that as a lesbian novel, CARMILLA is no great shakes. But as a horror story devoted to the utter unknowability of the twilight domain beyond the world of the living, it outstrips most if not all other vampire novels.

\\\ 

TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

           --STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES

          

So I've just finished reviewing the 1968 French thriller TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS,only to find that the movie's diegesis contained more material than I could fit into a film-review. It's a shame I'm not a Freudian, because the film is really a treasure trove of Freudian tropes, for all that the narrative was based on a story written some twenty years before Freud was born. I judged that the film has only "fair" mythicity because it was not as interested in what I have called "correlation-quanta" as on "emotion-quanta." 

Here's the setup material I wrote the review.

This English-dubbed French thriller, despite its exploitative title, boasts a distinguished lineage. The source material is partly from a legend from French history: that, in the 14th century, Margaret of Burgundy, wife to King Louis X, committed adultery within a Parisian guard-tower, the Tower of Nesle, for which offense the unhappy French queen was imprisoned for the remainder of her life. A writer named Frederic Gaillardet dramatized the incident, though Alexander Dumas rewrote the play, possibly because he'd become famous for a stage-success in 1829, prior to his later fame as a novelist. However, the Gaillardet-Dumas story only takes various names and places from the historical account, concocting a wild hybrid story I'm tempted to call a "psycho-swashbuckler." I have not read any version of the prose source material. But I theorize that one of the authors borrowed a folklore-tale about Cleopatra, which asserted that the Egyptian queen had the habit of taking male lovers into her boudoir for one night of passion, only to have them executed afterward. 

TOWER, like the play on which it's based, spins out the idea that Queen Margaret-- who, according to the story's dynamics, ought to be in her middle thirties-- uses the deserted Tower of Nesle for a series of one-night stands with young Frenchmen, whether they are or aren't "virgins" like the title says . In fact, there are usually three such encounters each night, since Margaret (Teri Tordai) sets up liaisons for her two handmaidens as well. Then comes the "screaming," as Margaret's main henchman Orsini and various hooded thugs slay the male victims and toss them into the Seine River. I don't know why any of the henchmen, or Margaret and her ladies for that matter, affect any sort of masks, since they expect all to be killing off any and all visitors. The attempts at secrecy don't keep the locals from getting the sense that nasty things are happening at the "Tower of Sin," as they call it.

Like a lot of psycho-dramas, TOWER depends on a crapload of big revelations about things that happened prior to the film's diegesis. So for purpose of deeper analysis, I'm citing the actual events of the film in order that they are said to have happened, to get a handle on the psychological constructs the adapters used, which may or may not all be in the original play, or any book adaptation thereof.

1) Some time before Margaret of Burgundy becomes Queen of 14th-century France by marrying Louis X, she's just a young noblewoman living with her father. Margaret has some conflict with her father that will lead her to plot his murder. She then has intimate relations with two young pages, hypothetically when she's in her teens or twenties, though there's no testimony as to how old the pages were. One of the pages, Orsini, she gets to poison her father, which may help her rise to power in some way. But by the other page, who later goes by the name Bouridan, plants a bun in her oven. That bun results in two non-identical twin boys, and either Margaret or Orsini gives the order to have the incriminating children killed. This apparently happens without the knowledge of Bouridan, though it's not clear what he knew and when. But the henchman (or huntsman?) in charge of the killing leaves the two infants with a church, and they're raised to manhood. They both look about twenty when they arrive in Paris, which would make Margaret at least 35 by that time (though actress Teri Tordai was in her twenties). 

2) Bouridan presumably has various adventures before he becomes celebrated for military valor in the service of Louis X, and he too should be at least in his middle thirties, though the actor playing Bouridan was in his forties. He's first seen on his way to Paris, but he takes time to chat up Blanche, who's both implicitly in her innocent twenties and played by an actress of the same age.

3) Bouridan encounters the twins, Philippe and Gautier, in Paris. He thinks it's odd because they both have old scars on their forearms, which reminds of a similar scar on the arm of his former lover, though he does not say as much. Both Bouridan and Philippe get invited to party at The Tower, and though Bouridan seems to be familiar with the place's bad rep, he doesn't try to talk Philippe out of going.

4) Bouridan is set up to have sex with one of the Queen's handmaidens and then be killed, but he avoids both fates and escapes the Tower. Philippe has sex with the Queen, all the Oedipal innocent who doesn't know he's shagging his mom. Margaret, who's sacrificed numerous victims to her lust and that of her two handmaidens, feels a little tender about Philippe and almost spares him. But the enthralled young man tries to see the face under her mask, and Margaret has Orsini kill him and dispose of the body.

5) Around the same time, Orsini-- also played by an actor in his forties-- takes a fancy to Blanche when she arrives at court. He strongarms her into becoming a handmaiden to Margaret. Later he gets her alone and tries to rape her, but he's interrupted and Blanche gets away.

6) Bouridan seems to nurture an old rivalry with Orsini, since his main concern is to blackmail the Queen, threatening to reveal her ilicit activities to King Louis X, newly returned from a foreign campaign-- though later in the film it's implied that the King suspects Margaret's doing something not quite right. However, Bouridan gets a chance to question one of Orsini's henchmen, whom they both knew from their time as pages. The henchman reveals that he spared the lives of the twins and marked them with scars, though he doesn't say why. 

7) So now Bouridan knows that the two children he sired with Margaret lived, even though Philippe died after getting sexed up by his mother. The captain doesn't seem too broken up by this revelation, and he's still more interested in forcing Margaret into giving him a special position at court, even going to the extent of confronting her with the dead body of Philippe. Bouridan also doesn't seek out his surviving son Gautier, though Gautier tries to kill the older man, thanks to Orsini telling the young fellow that Bouridan killed Philippe. 

8) Bouridan does not reveal his filial relationship to Gautier, but somehow talks him into helping Bouridan assault on the Tower while the Queen intends to have one of her orgies. The end result is that Gautier is killed by the Queen's men, though she's belatedly horrified to see her other son slain (though apparently it was okay when they were infants). Bouridan duels Orsini but it's Margaret who stabs Orsini, her former favorite, to death. Then, since the Tower has conveniently caught on fire, she consigns herself to the flames. The King, summoned by Blanche's efforts, shows up mostly to give Bouridan the commission he wants, and the hero cleaves to his (much younger) beloved.

So none of these Freud-tropes are brought together in the service of either a didactic or mythopoeic discourse, only to exploit an array of emotional responses. The Oedipal drama of a son accidentally sleeping with his mother isn't even the main focus here, though. If anything, the main plot resembles Freud's scenario from TOTEM AND TABOO, in which a male tries to keep all the nubile women to himself. Obviously, in his youth Bouridan is not able to do this, because Margaret forms an alliance with his rival Orsini. Still, she later says that she felt a deeper relationship to Bouridan than anyone else, so there's a strong implication that he was such a good lover that for years Margaret's been trying to satisfy herself with lesser (read: younger) peccadillos. 

Bouridan, though, doesn't display any longing for Margaret; he doesn't even try to kiss her at any time. The implication I take from this series of tropes is that he was betrayed by her taking up with his rival Orsini. He doesn't really care about his two sons any more than he does about Margaret. He's dominated by a "will to power," and he prospers as a result of infiltrating Margaret's murderous operation. Also of Oedipal interest is that he ends up with a woman young enough to be his daughter, though to be sure actor Jean Piat did not look to be in his forties for this role. It's also interesting that both Bouridan and Orsini desire Blanche, just as they presumably both desired Margaret as well. I might even theorize that, to Bouridan's ego, both of his sons can be easily sacrificed in his quest for power, and for sex with a younger woman. I'd call it a double standard, but of course Margaret is still the greater sinner, since she kills for her thrills.

Interestingly, I did some additional writing on another film with strong age-inappropriate clansgression. In TUTELARY SPIRITS I mostly addressed the question as to which characters were the superordinate icons of the schlock-film MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO. There the writer showed little attentiveness to anything like emotional tenor. But he did succeed in using fairytales as a means of creating a mythic discourse around a quaternity of taboos concerning age and blood-- and no such discourse appeared in TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS.