In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here, owes someth...
I'm aware of no fully mythic Thanksgiving stories. But Will Eisner managed a cute near-myth with a tale of a turkey who is seemingly spared his grisly holiday fate, but who ends up sacrificing his life to save his fellow birds (sort of). Strangely, Eisner does not make the predictable comparison to the Nazarene, but to-- that gloomy Dane, Hamlet?
So in the previous two installments of this essay-series, I've addressed AT-AT Pilot's essential question. "Is it possible for literature to be evil?" Dominantly my response has been, "most if not all evil is to be found in the parts of literature that encourage 'work,' a concerted effort toward a real-world goal." And even then, one must analyze a work's explicit or implicit polemic in order to determine if the goal advocated is evil.
An obvious example of explicit polemic can be found in the 1915 BIRTH OF A NATION film, which adapted Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel THE CLANSMAN. The film (and, I assume, the source novel) makes no bones about its message: that liberated Black slaves must be kept down by the Ku Klux Klan. Implicit polemic is harder to identify, because so many critics project polemic where none is intended. However, such identification is not impossible and can usually be pegged by the way the implicit type mimics the irrational propositions of the explicit type.
I have judged J.M. Coetzee's anti-colonialist novel DISGRACE as implicitly polemical due to the mirroring of two major events in the story. In Event One, the viewpoint character, a White South African professor teaching at the collegiate level, is condemned for allegedly manipulating a female student-- possibly but not definitely Black African-- into an affair. In Event Two, the professor's daughter, who runs a farm in South Africa, is raped by Black African trespassers, one of whom impregnates her. But because the rape took place against a scion of colonizers, it's asserted that the woman will eventually marry her rapist and that the land she owns will return to a Black African family. Obviously, some readers did not judge this disproportionate "tit for tat" as evil, in the same way that most readers today would judge the Dixon work and the Griffith film as evil. Clearly, I find them all morally noxious.
But none of the above works fall into the category I've called "play for play's sake," which takes in generally the majority of popular culture, and specifically the KAMASUTRA manga of Go Nagai, with which this discussion began. So far, most of the Nagai works I've surveyed are wild outpourings of sex and violence, with almost no attempts to impose any moral order on the chaos. The closest thing Nagai himself offers as a key to his works is an "ethic of transgression," insofar as he believes human nature is truly one big playground for a bunch of Freudian Id-Monsters. But he never expouses any sort of polemic-- though even in the more permissive country of his birth, Nagai was often criticized for his explicitness.
The majority of censorious critics don't bother to establish even an implicit polemic as I did with DISGRACE above. These critics usually follow one of two approaches-- the "monkey see monkey do" approach and the "projected polemic" approach-- and it just so happens that the two most prominent enemies of popular comics in the postwar years broke down along those respective lines. Frederic Wertham begins with the supposition that children were as twigs that would be inevitably bent by the wrong influences, and that any time one of them did wrong, an evil comic book done made them do it. Gershon Legman had the idee fixe that American culture nursed a vast conspiracy to substitute healthy sexuality with sadistic violence, and he repeatedly "proved" his thesis with endless facile projections. Neither they nor most of their descendants showed any capacity to define evil except in terms of personal self-interest-- which, some may recall, is explicitly rejected in the Bataille excerpt I cited in Part 2.
Oddly, "projected polemic" works both to champion and denigrate works that don't show either explicit or implicit polemic. Many will be familiar with news stories about evangelical groups criticizing J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER series, claiming that its magical content encourages young people to explore witchcraft and/or Satanism. This Wikipedia article chronicles many of those evangelical denigrations. However, the same article also mentions a number of defenses of the Potter series on the grounds of its encouragement of Christian values-- and even though I like the series, I view these positive characterizations to be projections. It's not that there's no moral content in POTTER. But at base I think that Rowling's series is essentially "play for play's sake" as much as most Go Nagai works, even though POTTER lacks the extreme sex and violence of Nagai.
Francois Truffaut said, "Taste is the result of a thousand distastes," and what many critics label as evil is often more a reaction against something they find unpleasurable. They often impugn the artist, as if he were showing them unpleasant things for some sadistic or politically motivated reason but have little appreciation for another Truffaut observation: that artists are not endorsing everything that appears in their works. All art is founded on conflict-- Bataille would say "transgression"-- and every fictional conflict conceivable can potentially trigger someone in terms of a taste-reaction. I try as much as possible to frame all of my critical downgrades in terms of analyzing a work's explicit or implicit polemic. But I'm sure there are some works I just don't like for reasons of taste, too, as with my generally unfavorable critiques of Mark Millar's comics. I certainly don't think he's guilty of any more polemic than is Go Nagai-- but I find Nagai creative and Millar boring in terms of their violently transgressive content. So even a critic who refutes taste-based criticism can't help but be influenced his own "thousand distastes." Probably the only time I'd denounce "play for play's sake" as evil would be when I think it's boring.
I'm putting a short hold on the next EVIL post, to respond to a comment by AT-AT Pilot in the comments to Part 2. One of his two references included a link to a post on the EDUCATED IMAGINATION blog, excepting a section from one of Northrop Frye's essays, albeit one devoted entirely to the Christian religion he practiced, and not to the literary works he more often analyzed.
In an argument against the social tendencies toward literal readings of Biblical passages, Frye says in part:
In short, the Bible is explicitly antireferential in structure, and deliberately blocks off any world of presence behind itself. In Christianity, everything in the Old Testament is a “type” of which the “antitype” or existential reality is in the New Testament. This turns the Bible into a double mirror reflecting only itself to itself. How do we know the Gospel is true? Because it fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament. But how do we know that the prophecies of the Old Testament are true? Because they are fulfilled by the Gospel. Is there any evidence for the existence of Jesus as a major historical figure outside the New Testament? None really, and the writers of the New Testament obviously preferred it that way. As long as we assume a historical presence behind the Bible to which it points, the phrase “word of God,” as applied both to the Bible and the person of Christ, is only a dubious syllepsis. In proportion as the presence behind disappears, it becomes identified with the book, and the phrase begins to make sense. As we continue to study the significance of the fact that the Bible is a book, the sense of presence shifts from what is behind the book to what is in front of it. (CW 4, 82-6)
I like to think I fully understand Frye's point in stressing the circular nature of the Bible-- and possibly, by extension, of most or all other religions. However, Christianity in particular has encouraged some degree of literalism in its discourse, not least as a result of grounding many events of Scripture in the perspective of a linear history. True, the Bible does not offer the sort of close chronicling of minutiae that readers today expect of "history." Further, many narratives in the Bible that purport to relate historical events are disputed by the evidence assembled by modern historiography. Yet it's unquestionable that Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, centered all narratives within a *simulacrum* of linear history.
Thus, certain key events happen in a straight line; the Jewish captivity in Egypt always precedes Rome's dominance of Judaea, for example. The Biblical writers tie all these events together with the repetition of religious images or tropes, as Frye says-- but the use of history is meant to convince the unconverted of the vastness of God's scheme for humankind. All three "religions of the Book" profited enormously from grounding their religious narratives within the sphere of "real" history.
Reading the Frye excerpt coincides with my having read another chapter of Bataille's LITERATURE AND EVIL-- and, as in Part 2 of my essay-series, I find myself again endorsing Bataille's view over Frye's. In a chapter devoted to William Blake, Bataille agrees with Blake's idea that "Poetic Genius is the true Man," Bataille extended that statement, contending that "there is nothing in religion that cannot be found in poetry." The chapter's main point concerns Bataille taking issue with a particular Jungian scholar who, in Bataille's opinion, sought to reduce Blake's narratives to Jungian paradigms. Blake, who disputed any philosophy that smacked of idealism, concocted an interesting take on how Poetry "destroys immediate reality" yet "admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego."
Though poetry does not accept sense-data in their naked state, it is by no means always contemptuous of the outer world. Rather, it challenges the precise limitations of objects between themselves, while admitting their external nature. It denies and it destroys immediate reality because it sees in it the screen which conceals the true face of the world from us. Nevertheless poetry admits the exteriority of tools or of walls in relation to the ego. Blake’s lesson is founded on the value in itself, extrinsic to the ego, of poetry. -- LITERATURE AND EVIL.
For Bataille, then, Poetry subordinates but does not negate all "real-world referentiality." I would say that, even though I don't concur with Bataille that Poetry and Religion are consubstantial, Religion follows the same dynamic, in which even linear history is subsumed by the vision of godhood continually interacting with mortals confined within, but not limited to, that history. If I wanted this essay to go on forever, I'd bring in the ways "real-world referentiality" also takes in the endorsement of specific, work-oriented goals, found in both religion and literature.
Next, back to considerations about taste, sadism, and perceptions of evil.
In Part 1, I stated that Northrop Frye wasn't an influence on my own literary theories of "work and play," but George Bataille certainly was, even though most of what he wrote on that pair of concepts concerned his view of anthropology and religion, not literature. Yet he certainly transferred his concept of "religious transgression" to the world of literature. In 1957 that he wrote in EROTISM that "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it," and an analogous idea appears in LITERATURE AND EVIL, published the same year:
Evil, therefore, if we examine it closely, is not only the dream of the wicked: it is to some extent the dream of Good. Death is the punishment, sought and accepted for this mad dream, but nothing can prevent the dream from having been dreamt." -- p. 21.
Though I don't consider LITERATURE AND EVIL one of the better books on literature-- it compiles eight essays on particular authors Bataille admired for incarnating his ideas on "literary evil"-- EVIL did greatly influence me to consider that every conflict in a fictional story involved a transgression against someone or something, and that's as good a reason to use Bataille to approach the question posed to me, "Is it possible for literature to be 'evil?'" (And by the bye, Bataille's sense of an interpenetration between Good and Evil is what conjured forth my Miltonian essay-title.)
I don't believe that anyone ever has, or ever will, formulate a definition of evil as such, which any tenable theory of "literary evil" would require. But Bataille's definition is at least a good starting-point. In his very short preface, he states:
These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'
Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.
His idea of "hypermorality" probably explains why he's not overly concerned with many of the lesser forms of evil that ordinary morality inveighs against: specifically, those centered in self-interest. In his initial essay, whose main subject is Emily Bronte (and her sublime evildoer Heathcliff), Bataille privileges Evil as the deliberate enjoyment of suffering beyond the considerations of personal advantage.
We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it.
Obviously, a lot of literature engages in moralistic polemic against the evils of self-interest in all its forms-- though polemicists like Frederic Wertham are well-versed in dismissing any such moralizing as being no more than a protective cover, the better for those pundits to attack literature they deem "morally noxious." So Bataille is in the end not offering a general definition of evil, but of a specifically form of Evil that he associated with the sovereign values of literature as a whole.
Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature, and therefore it serves as a counterbalance to the views of the pundits. For them, all evil is defined by self-interest, and sadistic thrills are just part of that package-- which is why Wertham constantly conflated readers wanting sadistic thrills and publishers wanting to make money off those customers. For Wertham, the taboo exists only to prevent the transgression, and Good never dreams of Evil in any fashion. Yet Wertham's own altruism is compromised and implicated in self-interest when he's caught cooking his casebooks, or even just making insubstantial arguments.
Bataille's idea that "Sadism is Evil" requires separate consideration from his overall definition of Evil in Literature, and Part 3 will touch on that topic, as well as the age-old question, "When an artist shows a thing, is he endorsing it?"
As I begin this post, I'm not sure how many parts this essay-series will run. Meditations on the nature of evil tend to lead anyone down a lot of unusual, if not perilous, alleyways, though I have a few directions in mind. The subject came up in a comment by AT-AT Pilot, which I reprint here so that it will be clear what I'm responding to.
Is it possible for literature to be "evil"? I understand that there have always been critics who consider some book or other to be morally grotesque. But they are approaching art in the wrong way, I presume? In the MYTHCOMICS: ["RINGSIDE BLONDIE"] BLONDIE #169 (1963) entry, you mentioned Frye's "protective wall of play." Does it encircle all fiction? From your writings and those of Frye, I would guess that such a barrier does exist and makes all fiction inherently "good." Is that correct? I imagine that controversial literature is allowed to be in print because readers are sophisticated enough to restrain the realm of fantasy and keep some distance away from it, preventing the possibility of negative influence within themselves.
I ask because I find it difficult to effectively defend a work that is deemed to be morally noxious. How would someone, for example, be able to defend a work like Kamasutra (or other manga like Berserk) from accusations of perversion and misogyny?
Now, I already wrote, in the same comments-section, a short answer to the questions, but I think they deserve extended commentary as well. My present plan is to break down some of my short answers and expand upon them in piecemeal fashion and bring in some new commentary as well (some of which should justify my title, a deliberate misquote of the line Milton gives Satan in PARADISE LOST).
What I want to expand on first is my statement about how literary works encompass both "play" and "work:"
My first (short) answer is that *potentially* the wall of play might encircle all fiction. However, it's also axiomatic that fiction always has an equal potential to be used for "work"-- that is, to achieve specific ends-- and using that potential reduces the potential to see the work only in terms of play. Whenever a specific goal is advocated in a fictional work-- Upton Sinclair using THE JUNGLE to persuade Americans that socialism was better than capitalism, or Superman trying to convince young readers to exercise more in line with the health programs of President Kennedy-- that's "play being used for the ends of work."
I should also give the context for my quotation of Frye from his ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, though I may have already done so in previous posts. I also want to clarify that he's in no way responsible for my dichotomy of "play" and "work."
We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there.
Probably my most specific attempt to break down categories of "fiction used for play" and "fiction used for work" appeared in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4. In this essay, I cited two works in each category, one of which was of superior literary quality and one which was inferior: Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND and Dixon's CLANSMAN for "play-fiction," and Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST and Coetzee's DISGRACE for "work-fiction."
In line with my remarks above, I would now kick Dixon's CLANSMAN out of consideration, because even though it was "popular fiction" like GONE WITH THE WIND, Dixon's books were polemical, trying to convince readers that Negro slaves should never have been emancipated. The best substitute that occurs to me now-- and one that was short enough to give a quick read online-- is Florence Kate Upton's TWO DUTCH DOLLS AND A GOLLIWOG. This is admittedly a children's book in verse, but it was phenomenally popular in England and America and spawned twelve sequels-- which I imagine were probably as unserious in their chauvinism as the first book. A pertinent image from the first book follows...
But now, with all those reconsiderations out of the way, the TRIP essay was focused only upon my estimation of literary quality. I would still maintain that both Coetzee's DISGRACE and Upton's DUTCH DOLLS lack the better qualities of both the Faulkner and Mitchell books. But even though both Mitchell and Upton have often been attacked for racial content, I would probably still find Coetzee's book the most morally objectionable, if not "evil" as such, partly because the author was "working" with didactic ideas but did a much poorer, less subtle job of handling them than did Faulkner.
Next up: some possible definitions of "evil."
If people say you can’t do something, then you want to do it even more. Things that are considered forbidden, means other people aren’t doing them yet! -- Go Nagai, interview.
I'm nowhere near having a satisfactory overview of the works of manga artist Go Nagai, but I have made an effort to read a fair sampling of the ones for which he's celebrated: the first ecchi manga (1968's Harenchi Gakuen ("Shameless School"). the first piloted mecha (Mazinger Z), and the first "magical girl" manga (Cutey Honey). And while not everything Nagai wrote and/or drew was obsessed with depicting "forbidden things," there's no question that most of the time he depicted transgressive, highly kinetic levels of sex and violence. This penchant is clearly tied into his protean creativity, but his heavy concentration on the kinetic potentiality may have stunted his ability to depict things mythopoeic. As yet I haven't delved into his first DEVILMAN series, which is rumored to be one of Nagai's more ambitious undertakings. But I did investigate the four-volume series KAMASUTRA. Nagai drew this series and co-wrote it with Kunio Nagatani, who also has a substantial catalog of works, many of which have generated controversies similar to those of Nagai.
Since the actual Kamasutra sex-manual from the 2nd century CE is just a collection of instructions about the many methods of human intercourse, the manga is not a straight adaptation of that work. If it was, this manga would not be admissible to my mythcomics project, which is all about original (or mostly original) comics-stories. Nagai (and I'm going to use his name as shorthand for Nagai-Nagatani) structures KAMASUTRA as unrestrained pulp adventure with a metaphysical theme. Some indebtedness to Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is signaled through one of the story's support-characters: a Japanese comedy relief who dresses like Indiana Jones, complete with whip, and who calls himself "Indy Yakko."
Like RAIDERS and its sequels, KAMASUTRA depicts a struggle between good guys and bad guys for possession of some arcane artifact from ancient times. But whereas in the Spielberg-Lucas films, possession of the artifacts gives one side temporal power, Nagai is more focused on a pulpish version of the Greek hieros gamos, often if not always defined as a "sacred marriage between a mortal and a god or godlike entity." The Greek term lines up well with the Hindu/Buddhist religious variant sometimes called "Shaktism," which focuses on rituals symbolizing the union of male (Shiva) and female (Shakti) principles. Illustrated passages from the Kamasutra are interspersed throughout the manga-narrative, serving to gloss the events.
Some such transcendent union is suggested by the opening chapter of KAMASUTRA. Ordinary Japanese teen Ryuu Aikawa tells his randy girlfriend Yukari Tsuji that he Ryuu can't have sex because his grandfather Isamu, a famed archaeologist, predicted that someday Ryuu would marry Surya, a fourth-century Hindu princess. Yukari is more than a little pissed off by Ryuu's credulity, not least because this Surya ought to have been dead for centuries. Then Ryuu receives a message that Grandpa Isamu has gone missing in India, where he's been seeking an artifact called the Sex Grail. Ryuu drops everything and takes a flight to Calcutta-- though not without an opening encounter with some agents of an evil power.
In Calcutta Ryuu meets two of his grandpa's assistants, the aforementioned Indy and the lissome female known as "Shakti." Shakti seems less concerned with locating the missing archaeologist and more with following his instructions, that she should take Ryuu's virginity to give him experience for his impending nuptials with Princess Surya. (This sort of things happens so often in the course of the story, I won't bother to note each separate interaction.) Once the cherry's been popped, it's off to Khajuraho, a series of 12th-century temples west of Calcutta, temples well known for depicting sexual postures of male and female statues.
On the way Shakti gives Ryuu the basics about Isamu's quest for the Sex Grail, and the artifact's power to confer immortality. But during this flight, the agents of the evil "Naga Cult" hijack the plane, with some very gratuitous use of "snakes on a plane" (yes, sixteen years before the American movie). The Nagas (named for a mythical species of Indian snake-demons) force the plane to land and then bus most of the passengers away, except for Ryuu and Shakti. The two youths are interrogated by "The Sage," master of the Naga Cult, a man whose extreme age makes him look like he possesses reptilian scales. Then both Ryuu and Shakti are imprisoned. This section also introduces the heroes to the Sage's henchman "Bearded Godzilla," a doppelganger of a goofy Nagai character seen in his "Harenchi Gakuen" manga.
I won't cover every twist and turn of the adventure. Suffice to say that not only do Ryuu and Shakti win free, they liberate Grandpa Isamu from his prison at the Naga hideout. Isamu takes his young helpers to Khajuraho, where they find the Sex Grail with ridiculous ease. In the ensuing chapter, Isamu and friends are also able to unearth the immortally-preserved body of Princess Surya from an icy tomb beneath a Himalayan mountain and to bring her back to Calcutta for treatment. There's also a reference to the Grail having been forged in the legendary otherworld of "Shambala," which reference pays off later.
At this point Nagai decided that the story required a more virile villain. The Sage's son Rudra is summoned to the Naga hideout, just in time to watch his aged patriarch succumb to old age, due to the Nagas' failure to acquire the Sex Grail's power of immortality. Rudra-- whose name is derived from a Vedic god, believed by some to have been an early version of Shiva-- lays his plans to acquire both the Grail and Princess Surya, so that he can become absolute ruler of Earth. Not only does Rudra manage to abduct Surya single-handedly, Bearded Godzilla witnesses the advent of Ryuu's girlfriend Yukari showing up in Calcutta, trying to track down her fugitive boyfriend. In a subsequent chapter, Yukari's used as a pawn by the Nagas, though none of the good guys ever hold this against her afterward.
Rudra not only gets both Surya and the Grail in his power, he consigns Ryuu and Yukari to that most venerable of cliffhanger-perils, the "closing walls"-- which, like most other situations here, leads to yet another sexual encounter. Indy Yakko sets the young lovers free, but before the three of them can escape the Naga stronghold, Rudra uses his supernatural powers to manifest energy-snakes, which form themselves into a huge rolling ball, so that the heroes can emulate "Indiana Jones running from the big boulder."
Rudra then attempts to marry Surya in a ceremonial "Garuda boat." (This may have been a mistake by Nagai, since in Hindu lore "Garuda" was a bird-spirit who was generally opposed to all snake-spirits.) Enemy forces interrupt these nuptials, but Rudra, nothing daunted, managed to use the Grail to propel himself and Surya into the land of Shambala. Ryuu and Indy follow, and though they eventually find that Shambala is no longer inhabited save for temple ruins, there's a mysterious "space egg" hanging in the sky. Nagai does not articulate the egg's full nature, but it's likely that the idea stemmed from the Vedic concept of the Hiranyagarbha, the cosmic womb from which creation proceeded. The Wiki article notes that the "golden womb" was sometimes associated with Surya, the (male) Hindu god of the sun.
Isamu then shows off his archaeological chops (and his perversion, as he belongs to Japan's inexhaustible supply of dirty old men) by coming up with a sexy way to follow Ryuu and Indy into Shambala-- though it only proves possible when Bearded Godzilla goes along for the ride.
Rudra plans to enter the space egg and use it as a wedding-chamber for his first impregnation of Surya, but Ryuu horns in. Thus the two men find themselves in the position of rival sperm seeking to fructify the same ovum, which is at once Surya and the "space egg." In addition, the space egg launches into space, leaving Isamu and Company to find their way out of Shambala by their own resources.
Out in space, both Ryuu and Rudra are tested by phantom sex-workers called "egg angels," who all look a lot like Shakti. Initially the contestants are told that the one who lasts the longest in these sex games will win Surya. However, Nagai evidently decided that wasn't dramatic enough, so a giant snake manifests inside the egg, ostensibly "the snake god Naga" himself, turning on the man who claims to be his worshipper and dragging him outside the egg into deep space.
Then at last Ryuu and Surya have sex-- but not the sort of marriage Ryuu imagined, for it's purely a hieros gamos, a cosmic marriage to bring together mortality and immortality. The space egg separates into two halves, one taking Ryuu back to Earth, while in the other, Surya enters another long sleep, planning to awaken only when life on Earth goes extinct and she gives birth to Ryuu's child as the father of a new race. And things go back to normal on Earth, as Yukari starts bugging Ryuu about having slept with another woman, but with the clear implication that they'll remain together for a happy ending.
This is the first mythcomic I've personally encountered that makes fruitful use of the complexities of Hindu myth for a fictional story (as opposed, say, to non-fictional retellings of traditional myths, which have apparently shown up in Indian comic books.) In fact, I'm not aware of any prose fantasies that excel KAMASUTRA in this respect--and yes, that includes Roger Zelazny's LORD OF LIGHT. So it's rather remarkable that two Japanese manga-artists-- both of whom coincidentally have something like the Sanskrit word "naga" in their names-- should be able to accomplish such an impressive level of mythopoeic insight. Whether I can find any similar works by Go Nagai alone remains to be seen.
In Part 4 I discussed a couple of modern pop-fiction films that used phase shifts to re-arrange the position of Biblical figures so that a given superordinate character became subordinate, etc.
I found myself recently applying the same logic to the traditional story of Little Red Riding Hood, or, as the story is named by Charles Perrault in the first recorded written version, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Various authorities aver that Perrault built up the element of the red cape, for reasons one can only imagine. I suspect that when the story opens, he also provided a touch of verisimilitude that oral stories usually don't bother with:
As she was going through the wood, she met with a wolf, who had a very great mind to eat her up, but he dared not, because of some woodcutters working nearby in the forest.
This is probably an implicit answer to any skeptic who might wonder why the wolf didn't just eat Little Red on the spot. An oral taleteller probably would not have bothered to provide a reason for the wolf's motives but instead would have simply emphasized the ritual nature of the setup and the resolution. Such storytellers also might not have bothered with the moral Perrault applies to the story's conclusion, which ends with the wolf simply devouring Red after having eaten her grandma.
Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.
Moral or no moral, I think most of the traditional versions emphasize Little Red as the superordinate icon, while the Wolf is a subordinate one. Little Red is meant to be the sacrificial innocent, whether she's slain or saved, and the whole setup of the Wolf-in-Grandma's clothing argues against the story originally being very responsive to verisimilitude. If we were dealing with a tale where things made sense-- even allowing for a world where beasts can talk and put on clothes when they please-- then Little Red ought to run out of the door of Grandma's house the moment she sees the Wolf dressed as an old woman. But she doesn't run: she puts forth one question after another, and the Wolf responds with a repetitive litany. The litany is certainly meant to build suspense at the very least, but it also creates the sense of Red being an innocent who's powerless against the forces of evil-- possibly masculine evil, if one reads the story in those terms.
Popular retellings, many of which are comedies, can go either way. In one of the Jay Ward FRACTURED FAIRY TALES, Red is still the star, but she's a conniving jezebel who's seeking to skin an innocent wolf.
However, the 1947 Terrytoons short "The Wolf's Pardon" focuses purely on the Wolf. He gets out of prison for his persecutions of both the Three Little Pigs and Little Red. He quickly finds that things have changed, for the Pigs kick the Wolf's ass and he learns that Red, though mature now, is a man-hungry "uggo."
An ever weirder phase shift appears in both of the HOODWINKED animated comedies. The original Riding Hood narrative gets tossed out the window, and in both films Red, Grandma and the Wolf all end up as allies against a common foe.
I had not planned to honor Veterans' Day with a post on an old war comic-- assuming "honor" is the proper word-- but it just so happened that a few days before Vets' Day, I came across a comics-essay mentioned that one of the first, if not the first, comics titles to take place during the Vietnam War was this very short-lived feature. So, after I read all seven appearances of this feature, I decided to devote a post to DC Comics' first Vietnam-based feature.
I don't think the Vietnam conflict had become hugely unpopular with the American public in 1966. Nevertheless, this feature seems to have taken an odd path compared to DC's other war-books featuring continuing characters. For one thing, the hero, Green Beret Phil Hunter, is almost entirely a loner, one who comes to the aid of other American soldiers but is no longer a member of the armed forces. Though Hunter's tour of duty is up and he has refused to re-enlist, he declines to return to the U.S. Captain Hunter has a Rambo-like mission: to find his lost twin brother Nick, a serviceman who went missing in Vietnam. The U.S. government seems totally okay with Hunter not only retaining custody of his uniform and combat gear, but with pursuing his lone-wolf mission with no oversight. Inevitably he ends up fighting endless supplies of hostile Vietnamese, generally termed "Charlies."
Some war comics have reflected on the ethics and politics of wartime encounters, but even if HUNTER had lasted three times its seven issues, I don't think its creators would have had anything to say about Vietnam. Robert Kanigher, who's credited with scripting all but two stories, probably conceived the basic setup, since it's marked with his over-the-top sentimentality and formulaic tendencies. Hunter is largely a superman, more often seen wading into a half-dozen opponents and thrashing them with his fists, rather than simply shooing them down. Kanigher was sometimes capable of conjuring up some decent pulp poetry, but HUNTER is one of his hack-serials, driven by the very mediocre gimmick that Phil Hunter believes that he has a psychic link with his twin, guiding him to his lost brother. I don't get the sense that Kanigher was very invested in the narrative, which may be the reason why he wrapped up the series in issue #105, wherein Phil does find and rescue his brother Nick. But just in case Hunter's adventures grabbed a few readers, the last story also promotes the exploits of the twins' WWII-serving father Lieutenant Hunter-- and this Hunter's Nazi-busting activities with his team, "Hunter's Hellcats," enjoyed a much longer run than HUNTER.
While Kanigher had no interest in engaging with the politics or culture of Vietnam, he did include one support-character who qualifies as a near-myth. This was Lu Lin, a curvaceous Vietnamese femme who volunteered to lead Hunter wherever he wished to go in Vietnam, to repay him for having saved her life. For most of the narrative, Hunter is suspicious of this inscrutable Oriental, and constantly wonders if she's an agent of the Vietcong, planning to lead him into a fatal trap. Hunter also forms the annoying habit of referring to Lu Lin as a "kewpie doll," and I suspect that this was his deflection from the expression "china doll"-- which even Kanigher may've realized would not track with an Asian who was not Chinese.
Lu Lin's lack of emotion and fatalism really bug Hunter, and a few times he kisses her just to see if he'll get a reaction-- which he does not. Lu Lin is thus of a piece with many pop-cultural depictions of Asians, at once half-condescending and half-admiring, and I would not be surprised if Kanigher modeled the character on figures like Milt Caniff's Dragon Lady. There's also a slight vibe of the conqueror-trope-- kill the male soldiers and then sleep with their women-- though neither romance nor genuine sexual actions are even implied. Indeed, in the final story, Lu Lin-- though she proves herself loyal to Hunter in every tale-- simply disappears from the story with no farewell, remaining as unknowable as in her first appearance. Because I think Kanigher liked the trope of "the woman whose nature is her mystery," I think Lu Lin taps ever so slightly into that myth-trope, and gives the HUNTER strip a slight distinction beyond being DC's first serial venture into the Vietnam Conflict.
If I had a continuous run of the BLONDIE comic books, to say nothing of the strips, both would prove valuable in illuminating the interdependent mythos of male masochism and female sadism.-- MYTHCOMICS #2: BLONDIE #150 (1962)
Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals...-- SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2.
In an earlier essay today, I mentioned that as a kid reading newspaper comics in the 1960s I took notice as to how violent Chic Young's BLONDIE strip was. I also observed a concomitant level of mayhem in original comic-book stories of the time-- with almost all of the brutality aimed at Dagwood, the Goat of the World. Over fifty years later, I've continued to touch on the strip's unusual psychology on blog-pieces here, despite being fully aware that BLONDIE is far from one of the great comic strips. But I haven't had occasion to mention that I might have got a little help from the "devil" in my title, Gershon Legman.
In or near 1965, a family member, knowing that I liked the strip PEANUTS, gave me an issue of Time Magazine because it contained an uncredited article about Charles Schulz and his creation. Oddly enough, though nothing the author wrote about Schulz was all that illuminating, he decided to contrast the good-heartedness of PEANUTS with the darker manifestations of early comic strips, and with that in mind the writer quoted a passage from Legman's 1949 LOVE AND DEATH. From 1949 until his death in 1999, I don't believe Legman ever again turned his attention to comic books or strips, but the unbilled writer was evidently a fan of those 1949 observations.
Fun Without Flagellation. For the perennial critics of the comics, the new strips like Peanuts should come as a welcome relief. Taking the comics, in their own way, as seriously as Europeans, some Americans have castigated the funnies for offering a distorted, often brutalized view of life. In Love & Death, a brilliant indictment of the medium, Folklorist Gershon Legman writes: "Children are not allowed to fantasy themselves as actually revolting against authority—as actually killing their fathers. A literature frankly offering such fantasies would be outlawed overnight. But in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily. Lulled by these halfway aggressions—that is to say, halfway to murder—the censorship demands only that in the final sequence Hans & Fritz must submit to flagellation for their 'naughtiness,' Blondie to the inferior position of being, after all, merely a wife."-- THE COMICS: GOOD GRIEF.
I won't dwell long on arguments that Legman himself tossed out in a willy-nilly fashion, but I want to establish that when he made these remarks, Legman was not stating that early comics like BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS were what the Time author called "offering a distorted, often brutalized form of life." Since Legman was in those days at least a nominal Freudian, he would have found it inevitable that the adults reading the comic strips-- and Legman does explicitly state that the comic strips are aimed only at adults-- should project "fantasy attacks" on "real frustrations," the latter being the "hell of other people." Legman only goes into all this detail about Young's BLONDIE and Dirks' KIDS, which supposedly conclude by returning the adult reader to the status quo for one reason. Legman wants to contrast such "status quo" entertainments with the overweening sadistic content of children's comic books, which as far as he's concerned do NOT return the reader to the status quo of relative realism but allow the kids to indulge in "the Oedipean dream of strength."
Legman's argument is littered with dopey ad hominem arguments and logical inconsistencies, and his contrast of comic strips and comic books is nonsense. (Despite his having excoriated teen humor books in the same essay, he somehow managed not to notice how often such stories also returned their protagonists to the same "status quo" experienced by the Katzenjammer Kids.)
I like to imagine that even the ten-year-old me would have perceived how nonsensical his argument about BLONDIE was, because in the actual Young strip Blondie was never subservient to Dagwood. After he got beat up by his boss or his neighbor, or even (very rarely) by Blondie herself, she would tend his wounds, but one could rationalize that this was necessary because Dagwood was the breadwinner. She was almost always the boss in the relationship, with only occasional exceptions where Dagwood got his way by yelling and stomping his feet. So Legman clearly did not read BLONDIE very closely. And yet, he did home in on the fact that Dagwood was "degraded daily," and I never forgot that he had shown me one hidden cultural aspect of what most readers dismissed as forgettable trash.
Parenthetically, in the same article where he favors BLONDIE's relative realism over the unrestricted fantasy of the superheroes, Legman nevertheless conflates the two, stating, "[Wonder Woman] is straight Wunschprojektion for the envious female-- Blondie with a bullwhip..." In the next paragraph Legman claims that the Amazon "lynches her spate of criminals" (even though Wonder Woman's villains were rarely even slain, as was the case with many other comic book features) and that she "humiliates and big-sisters all the other males in the strip" (which overlooks the fact that the heroine was not indulging in humiliation for its own sake, but attempting to convert recalcitrant men to her doctrine of feminine "loving-kindness.") If anything, Blondie has far more claim to being in the mode of Sade than Wonder Woman and her lasso ever has had.
But still, I give Legman his due for having a good instinct-- once in a while.
In my overview of Chic Young's BLONDIE comic strip series-- parts of which were sometimes reworked for newsstand comic books-- I took pains to emphasize that Young had a special talent for formulating certain repeated gags that took on almost folkloric status. I observed that most of these gags were articulated in the BLONDIE strip after 1933, when the feature changed its focus from "young rich guy pursuing flighty young girl" to "middle-class husband constantly suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous matrimony." However, one humor-trope appeared even in the pre-matrimonial years, and that was the trope I termed "the Peacemans and the Bickersons."
This trope isn't exclusive to married couples. One can find the Bard himself plowing that particular field with the two couples in 1599's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, which follows the travails of two non-married couples are depicted. Hero and Leander fit the bill as "Peacemans," for under normal circumstances they appear to be entirely lovey-dovey. Benedick and Beatrice, though, are "the Bickersons," expressing their deep affection by sniping at each other. It's a fair assumption that for Elizabethan audiences, the Peacemans supplied an idealized vision of romantic love, but the Bickersons were the fun couple to watch, even though they only battled verbally.
This dynamic continued through most popular romantic comedies throughout the 20th century, with a secondary romantic couple being contentious with each other while the primary couple was depicted more "seriously." And as I also observed in the overview, Blondie and Dagwood were, on the face of things, "the Peacemans," because they weren't repeatedly shown fighting with one another, verbally or physically, while other couples filled the role of "the Bickersons." Further, one reason it wasn't necessary for Chic Young to focus on fights between Blondie and Dagwood was because Dagwood was constantly being tormented in one way or another by almost everyone he encountered. Young's infusion of frequent slapstick into the Bumsteads' middle-class world ensured that Dagwood was almost always the Goat. His endless sufferings-- mostly from sources outside the home, but occasionally also from Blondie, his kids or his pets-- were the source of the strip's successful humor.
That's what gives the strip I call "Ringside Blondie" the heft of a psychological myth; that of Chic Young expanding on the context of a familiar repeated gag by taking it in a relatively new direction. "Ringside" is almost certainly an earlier twelve-panel Sunday comic strip by Young, reworked for Harvey's publication in a comic book format, so I'm glad to have found an example of Young himself playing with his tropes, in contrast to the earlier BLONDIE mythcomic I examined here.
In effect, "Ringside" gives Dagwood the chance to be the chance to be on the inside looking out, enjoying the spectacle of another male being tormented. In the first four panels, Blondie scolds Dagwood for openly watching a neighbor-couple, the Flizbys, having a "battle royale." Dagwood notices that Blondie herself peeks at the ongoing fracas before pulling down the window-shade, but she makes a lame excuse that doesn't fool the reader. She'll shortly show herself to be a hypocrite, for she takes just as much pleasure as Dagwood viewing someone else's marital troubles despite saying that it's wrong.
I'll note at this point that no one reading this strip would confuse any of these married martial battles with real spousal abuse. That's why, on the second page, Dagwood keeps remarking on how hard Mrs. Flizby is hitting her husband: "She must've taking boxing lessons when she was young." This sort of remark adds what Northrop Frye called "the protective wall of play," making clear that this is a comedic setup, in which no one is really harmed.
Anyway, Dagwood just goes back to scoping out the neighbors' fight. Once again, Blondie makes moralistic pronouncements while sneaking more than a peek this time. Dagwood acquires binoculars from his son Alexander and stations himself on a balcony to get a better look. Blondie shows up, scolds him again, but somehow ends up using the binocs herself. (Even Daisy the dog gets in on the scopophilia.) Then the pugilistic Mrs. Flizby shows up and sarcastically suggests that both nosy neighbors ought to come over and watch the fight close up. Blondie refuses, claiming she's "insulted," while Dagwood is only too happy to have a ringside seat, peacefully smoking a pipe as if he were watching a TV show.
This is a rare departure for Chic Young in that Dagwood isn't the Goat for once, except in a very minor way: his son charges him for renting the binocs, and Dagwood accepts the condition. Blondie scolds Dagwood, but she's the main source of humor since she won't admit her nosiness as Dagwood does, and even pretends to be offended when she's correctly called out for her intrusive curiosity. Dagwood pays no real price for satisfying his curiosity, though the spectacle he gets to watch is still that of a male humiliation, as the beleaguered Mr. Flizby is clearly getting the worst of it. But in the more frequent altercations in which Herb Woodley or Mr. Dithers get clobbered by their termagant wives, sometimes the violence would spill over onto Dagwood-- but never, significantly, onto Blondie. This time Dagwood is as insulated from the violence as the readers of the comic strip.
I'm entitling "some basics" rather than "The Basics" because I'm not writing a distanced, Wikipedia-style article about the comic strip/comic book BLONDIE, but about particular aspects of it that are relevant to my critical system. And if I weren't setting up a mythcomics-essay on the subject, I might not delve into all this ancient comics-history.
I'll start out by stating that I'm aware that even to younger comics-fans with some interest in the medium's history, BLONDIE isn't exactly a hot topic. For at least the past 20 years, the daily strip has been exceedingly dull, with gags as mediocre as the worst sitcoms. And I can't claim that the original run of creator Chic Young, from 1930 to 1973 (when Young passed away), made his most successful strip into any sort of major breakthrough in American humor.
BLONDIE's significance is that though Young wasn't doing anything transformative within his limited sphere of domestic comedy, he built up a trove of running jokes that, over time, illuminated some interesting aspects of American culture. He did so in contrast to newspaper strips that some critics would find superior in artistry, like Cliff Sterrett's POLLY AND HER PALS or Frank King's GASOLINE ALLEY. It wasn't that there was anything startlingly original about the couple dozen running gags that became associated with Young's BLONDIE in its heyday-- Dagwood crashes into the mailman on his way to work, Dagwood makes himself colossal sandwiches. It was that Young kept variations of these jokes running for so long that they assumed an almost folkloric status, a shorthand for the ordeals of married, middle-class life.
Yet for the first four years of the BLONDIE strip's existence-- collected in the hardbound book seen above-- the narrative barely touched on any of the tropes that made the later version of the strip world-renowned.
Young broke into the world of syndicated comics in the 1920s. He specialized in what some have called "pretty girl strips." It may not be total coincidence that Young's first strip premiered in 1921, one year after the United States instituted universal suffrage-- though there had been many manifestations of the phenomenon of "The New Woman" during the previous twenty years. One of the most famous was that of "the flapper," usually seen as an independent young woman of means, and one who felt free to date men without making firm commitments. Some flappers were even known for adopting quasi-masculine fashion statements, like mannish clothes or bobbed hairstyles. This description seems appropriate to Young's third pretty-girl strip, DUMB DORA, which was his greatest success up to that point. Young used the relative success of DORA to launch BLONDIE, of which he had some if not total ownership.
BLONDIE began in September 1930. In some ways it was much like DORA, being dependent on gags in which the female protagonist would stun her listeners with some display of quixotic feminine logic. However, the above collection notes in its intro that Young expressly distanced his new heroine Blondie from the earlier flappers by making her more hyper-feminine in her attire. His most constant beau was also introduced in the first strip: Dagwood, an empty-headed young heir to a wealthy family. The two were passionately in love but their marriage was opposed by Dagwood's rich parents, who deemed Blondie a gold digger.
For four years the strip followed this rather tepid pattern, without becoming more than a modest success. I surveyed all of the daily strips collected in the cited tome, and less than twenty of the nine hundred or so entries ended with any sort of slapstick, in contrast to the dominant pattern of verbal jokes.
One of the few interesting exceptions-- for which I have no illustrations-- was a pair of strips from June 19 and 20, 1931. In these strips, Blondie and Dagwood are considering how they will survive on a limited income if they marry. So, executing a trope I'll call "the Peacemans vs. the Bickersons," they seek out other couples, only to find all of them violently quarreling with one another. The first strip shows a married couple arguing about money in front of the young lovers, and as the latter couple leave, the reader sees the husband getting clubbed by his wife. The second strip shows two more encounters in which the couples are verbally arguing all the time. Blondie tells Dagwood that not all married people fight, and she uses Dagwood's own parents as an example of marital bliss. Naturally, the young lovers then walk in on a scene in which the elder Mrs. Bumstead is threatening to crown her hubby with a vase, while he's haplessly climbing a curtain to get away from her. This "Peacemans vs. Bickersons" trope would be one Young returned to again and again. On the face of things, Blondie and Dagwood were "Peacemans" who did not physically fight each other, while others-- their neighbors the Woodleys, and Dagwood's boss and his wife-- were "Bickersons" constantly having violent quarrels, usually with the wife hitting her husband with vases or other bludgeons. More on this trope in my mythcomic-post.
In 1933, Young was encouraged by his syndicate editor to make over the strip into a middle-class marriage strip, jettisoning the whole format of "young rich guy dating a lower-class girl." Dagwood's parents disinherited him and never to my knowledge appeared again, even in comic book originals not produced by Young. And as others before me have observed, Blondie morphed away from an air-headed young woman. She became a sensible homemaker, able to manage a household of kids and dogs-- though she still showed some of her old frivolousness in yet another repeated joke-trope: constantly spending Dagwood's hard-earned money on new apparel.
Dagwood, who wasn't the brightest bulb to begin with, became the Goat of the World. This was one of the psychologically significant tropes that I believe made BLONDIE widely popular in many countries: the trope of the wage-earning male as the constant target of abuse from everyone. When he wasn't under physical attack by his most familiar nemeses-- neighbor Herb Woodley and boss Julius Dithers-- he was frequently assaulted by total strangers. As I pointed out above, slapstick was rarely a big feature of the first four years of the strip, and there wasn't even a lot of verbal humiliation for Dagwood in particular,
Amusingly, when Blondie and Dagwood did marry, the wedding sequence contained the following humiliation for Dagwood:
However, a few strips later-- for which I have no illustration-- is even more apposite. Immediately after the wedding vows, Blondie warns Dagwood that they ought not to leave the church through the front door, as well-wishers will pelt them with rice and old shoes. Dagwood scoffs at this warning and opens the front door, only to get hit in the face with a thrown shoe. I don't imagine Chic Young immediately shifted into slapstick gags right away, and even in the BLONDIE in the 1960s-- the period with which I grew up-- there was never a total absence of verbal humor, wherein Blondie would confound Dagwood with feminine anti-logic. But the BLONDIE comic books-- which included both original stories and reworkings of comic strips-- are replete with images of Dagwood's physical torments. For instance:
Even when I was reading BLONDIE as a kid, I didn't think it was an exceptional strip. But I was impressed by the intensity of the slapstick violence in the series, whether the violence resulted from Dagwood doing stupid things or other people putting him in dangerous situations. In contrast to fans who represent BLONDIE as being a success for depicting the stalwart love between the titular wife and her spouse, I think that the strip retained its popularity for most of its history because it allowed its audience to dally in "sadism of the casual kind."
But that's a separate essay in itself.
