THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4

The last installment of THYMOS BE DE PLACE appeared in 2009, while the last time I wrote about Frank Fukuyama's magisterial application of Plato's "thymos" concept in a theoretical manner was 2015's MEETINGS WITH RECOGNIZABLE PRESENCES, which focused upon Fukuyama's extrapolation of "recognition" as the process by which human beings experience the abstract faculty of *thymos.*  

In contrast, the concept of literary sadism has continued to crop up fairly consistently over the years, but only in THYMOS Part 3 did I draw explicit parallels between the operations of thymos as described by Fukuyama (who does not address sadism in any way in END OF HISTORY) and George Bataille's formulation that the world of Sadean thrills belonged in the category of non-productive, esteem-related human activities.

Bataille's primary insight for literary criticism is the image he uses to present eroticism and violence as equivalent phenomena: "sensuous frenzy" (p. 192). Whether this adequately describes real-life sex and violence does not matter for the purposes of literary criticism, but I suggest that Bataillean "frenzy" does describe how fictional sex and violence impact upon the majority of readers. Bataille doesn't substantially address literature in EROTISM, except for the sensualized violence-scenarios presented by the Marquis de Sade, but elsewhere he makes the trope of "transgression against the norm" his hallmark, so I feel secure in adapting his terms for the purpose of literary criticism.

What EROTISM makes clear is that even though one may be experiencing fantasies of sex and/or violence through an intellectualized medium (Plato's "copy of a copy"), this is still the essence of a human (as opposed to animal) activity. He does not, as noted before, directly relate this to the subject of thymos, but because fiction is not the "real thing," it is not eros in the raw. Rather, it's closer to the nature of thymos in the same way that the sexual conqueror's boast, his tall tale of sexual conquest, represents thymotic rather than erotic stimulation.        

 

Most of my descriptions of sensual violence in literature have also taken the Bataillean POV. However, I have in various essays specified that there is a distinction between COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL. In short, the common form of evil is people doing bad things to another for the purpose of either gaining or protecting some concrete possession, even one's own bodily integrity, while the uncommon form is motivated primarily by the desire of esteem-based recognition. 

Thymos, as mentioned in previous essays, is one of the constituent parts of Plato's tripartite soul, which one Wiki essay sums up thusly:

• nous ("intellect", "reason"), which is or should be the controlling part which subjugates the appetites with the help of thumos.
• thumos ("passion"), the emotional element in virtue of which we feel joy, amusement, etc. (the Republic IV, 439e);
• epithumia ("appetite", "affection"), to which are ascribed bodily desires;

It now occurs to me that if the "uncommon form of evil" aligns with what Plato calls "spiritedness," then the "common form of evil" would align with the concept of "appetite." Further, though I'm in no way an expert on Greek language, I note that the word "epithumia" uses the same word-element found in "thumos," but qualified by the prefix "epi-." There are several contexts for the prefix "epi-" but here it seems to agree with this one:

1. Secondary: a consequence, by-product, additional, or lesser version.

   epilanguage is a second language used regularly for some purpose or purposes, epiphenomenon is an activity, process, or state that is the result of another, epitoxoid is a toxoid that generates less of an immune response than an original one

This would seem to accord with many if not all Greek oppositions between "appetite' and "passion," where the former is of lesser philosophical consequence than the latter.   

And now, with all these considerations in mind, I want to specify that only the "uncommon" operations of sadism are thymotic in nature, while the "common" ones are epithymotic.

This formulation may have a number of applications but I'll wrap up with just two, both from the manga URUSEI YATSURA, one of my "Domme Coms."   

Now, in URUSEI the male lead Ataru is the one who most often suffers comical outpourings of violence. However, some of these violent attacks are *epithymotic,* in that the attacker is retaliating in order to protect himself or herself. For instance, when Ataru is in full horndog mode, and seeks to grope a woman like Sakura, he gets slapped, punched, kicked or otherwise battered. Throughout the series Sakura has absolutely no romantic interest in Ataru, so whenever she hits him, it's for the "common" purpose of maintaining her bodily integrity by repelling unwanted attentions. This may not be exactly what Plato had in mind with respect to "appetite," but the correlation makes sense when seen through the lenses of Bataille and Fukuyama.

In contrast, the reigning champion for torturing Ataru is Lum, the alien wench who falls in love with him and demands that he reciprocate. As extreme as her actions are, they flow from a desire for thymotic recognition; that Ataru should recognize Lum as his one true love. Of course, if Ataru wasn't capable of feeling love for Lum, his continued tortures would just become dull, but author Takahashi is careful to keep hinting that on some level Ataru does reciprocate. However, he refuses to capitulate to Lum's attacks, and so continues to flirt with numerous other women, even though he has almost no chance with any of them and usually gets served just as Sakura serves him. So all of Lum's attacks, or her stratagems to otherwise manipulate her reluctant lover, flow from *thymotic* passion, which, while still comic, embodies the uncommon nature of love rather than common motivations like gain or self-protection.  

If and when I write further about these concepts, I'll probably cease to use any of Bataille's terms for these opposed operations and invoke "thymotic and epithymotic" instead. And as for what if any function Plato's concept of "reason" might play in these literary domains, that's a subject for some other essay.

    

VARIANT REVISIONS PT. 2

 Some of my current terminology re: "originary and variant propositions" was preceded by the two essay-series CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS, starting here. In those essays I more or less used "template" to stand in for the current "originary proposition," "template deviation" to stand in for "variant propositions," and "total deviation" to stand in for "null-variant propositions." All of these terms, though, are predicated on analyzing the propositions "from outside," seen from the POV of the "real" reader.

However, it's not impossible to see many if not all such variations "from inside," as if all of the propositions weren't just created by isolated raconteurs but were instead variations on archetypal tropes that precede even the first "originary proposition." 

It's true thar often the originary proposition is the strongest one in terms of evoking one or more of the four potentialities, which is why I previously compared such propositions to the sort of template used, say, in early printing technology. I mentioned in the CRYPTO series major icons like KING KONG and DRACULA, and it would be hard to argue that any of the variations on these figures, however entertaining, exceeded the originals in any way. 

      

  However, there are times that the originary proposition is not the most compelling, even on simpler levels. The durable Terrytoons stars "Heckle and Jeckle" are known by most viewers as a pair of wisecracking male magpies. However, the first cartoon in the series, 1946's "The Talking Magpies," posited them as a married male-and-female couple that caused no end of trouble for Farmer Al Falfa. Paul Terry then chose to issue a "rebooted" Heckle and Jeckle that same year with "The Uninvited Pests," and as two identical males with differing accents, the characters enjoyed another 51 theatrical cartoons. So in terms of popular success, the variant proposition was the more successful, not least because two obnoxious males could be used in many more slapstick situations than a married magpie pair.

Now, if one wanted to take the archetypal perspective I suggested above, one could imagine two parallel worlds, one in which Heckle and Jeckle were both male, and one in which they were a married couple. Most fictional propositions regarding parallel worlds are not much less chimerical. The parallel-world explanation for duplicate versions of DC characters such as Flash and Green Lantern sometimes verged on expressions of archetypal realities, though usually in fairly clumsy terms. The first Green Lantern begins very poorly-- I read the first volume of Golden Age reprints and could barely see any reasons for the success of the character beyond the base idea of a hero with a wonder-working "magic ring." Later in the series writers conceived a few subordinate characters-- Solomon Grundy, Vandal Savage-- evocative enough that DC Comics made them major figures in the company's later cosmology. But I'm not sure that, taken just on their Golden Age appearances, Grundy or Savage were as good IN THEIR TIME as the better villains of that era, from serials like Batman, Wonder Woman, or even Airboy and The Hangman. In contrast, the Silver Age Green Lantern, which crossbred the rudimentary Alan Scott concept with the "space ranger" ideas of the prose "Lensmen" series, displayed excellence in the kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities within a few years.

Even "soft reboots" within the same cosmos-- which make no use of "parallel worlds" as such-- are often treated as constituting variant propositions in, say, fandom-wikis like the DC Database. The 1988 ANIMAL MAN, reviewed here, dispenses with any idea that two separate Animal-Men co-exist in two distinct worlds. Rather, the first one knows that he was created by one author and rejected in favor of an updated hero with the same name by another author. Yet at the same time, Grant Morrison suggests that there's some loosely archetypal limbo where even the lamest characters ever created (hello, Ultra the Multi-Alien) continue to exist. And some soft reboots are performed not through intention but through error. In the first VARIANT REVISIONS, I took pains to analyze how Bob Haney first created a reasonably evocative mystery villain in one TEEN TITANS story. Yet when Haney later needed a make-work villain to plug into a hastily conceived scenario, the writer simply rewrote the established character's motivations to suit his current needs. As if to compound the error, George Perez constructed yet another ramshackle artifice on top of Haney's blunder and, to the extent that DC fans think of The Gargoyle at all, they probably defer to the Perez interpretation.

Some soft reboots even occur simply in response to changing tastes or priorities. Jerry Siegel's original Superman, while always devoted to justice, sometimes played fast and loose with legalities. DC editors didn't like that, possibly fearing a profitable character would get targeted by moral watchdogs-- which eventually happened anyway-- and so Silver Age Superman became an absolute stickler for obeying the law, even the law of made-up planets. Here too I would probably argue that Silver Age Superman surpassed the originary proposition in many though not all respects-- though the more creative Golden Age concepts of Siegel and his collaborators became the essential foundation for the Silver Age proposition.  

More to come.

        

MYTHCOMICS: "DEUS EX MACHINA," ANIMAL MAN #18-26 (1989-90)

 

  

The latter half of Grant Morrison's run on ANIMAL MAN wasn't originally given any particular title. However, by whatever contrivance, when DC issued its first softbound reprints of the title, they distributed the first half over two volumes, probably with supplemental material, while the latter half finished up in Volume 3, given the title of the last Morrison story, "Deus Ex Machina."

The first half of Morrison's ANIMAL MAN is a good basic reboot of the late sixties DC character, who in his original incarnation had never taken off. The first seventeen issues emphasize the attempts of Animal Man, who possesses the power to emulate the abilities of all animals, to fight for justice but also to care for the wife and children he maintains in his "Buddy Baker" identity. Morrison also invests Baker with a passionate protective feeling toward the many lower animals maltreated by uncaring human beings, and the author succeeds in making this moral point without becoming preachy. The early issues include a lot of guest appearances by familiar DC heroes and villains. Moore's SWAMP THING and Gaiman's SANDMAN had pursued a similar course to attract regular DC readers. However, the latter half of MACHINA is devoted to doing a deep dive into the DC cosmos rather than emphasizing the main hero's milieu-- and on top of that, a deep dive into the concept of metafiction.

Issue #18 foregrounds a storyline hinted at in the first half: the nature of Animal Man's powers. He meets academic James Highwater and the two seekers go to the desert and chew peyote to bring about a "vision quest." Highwater relates Animal Man's powers to the "morphogenetic fields" suggested by parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake (whose work, BTW, I also admire). From a vulpine oracle named "Foxy," the seekers also learn of an impending "crisis," which is Morrison's metafictional reference to the 1985 CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. This in itself is a form of metafiction, given that the CRISIS over-wrote established DC continuity so that almost no one remembers the events of that cataclysm. What Morrison plays with is something of an "anti-CRISIS" as he begins bringing back all the untidy fictional creations that the 1985 event sought to banish.

 

However, Buddy Baker's experience goes even farther than CRISIS. Not only does Buddy meet the 1960s incarnation of Animal Man, whose existence was rebooted to make Morrison's version, he also beholds the audience that's reading his comic book. Further, Original Animal Man's rants about how their creators "twist and torture" their fictional creations are borne out when Buddy gets home and finds his family slaughtered by an assassin.

     

For three issues, Buddy puts metaphysics on hold as he seeks out the men responsible for the killings, though later he'll conclude that the real murderer is his writer, Grant Morrison. Issue #23, entitled "Crisis," shows how the Psycho Pirate-- one of the few characters from the 1985 series who remembered how reality had been structured before-- begins summoning all the banished characters from whatever conceptual limbo they occupied. However, he also summons bizarre alternate forms of famous DC characters, all calculated to reflect the "grim and gritty" trend of eighties superhero comics. 

In issue #24-- graced by an evocative cover that celebrates the birth of DC continuity in the Silver Age-- Animal Man defeats the immediate menace of Overman and his purification bomb, satirizing current tastes for "realism." But the hero still wants to know what entity is responsible for the deaths of his family, so he's sent to the limbo of cancelled comics-characters.  

Unsurprisingly, in limbo Animal Man meets a lot of characters who simply ceased to be published, rather than being banished in the 1985 CRISIS, such as The Inferior Five, The Green Team, Hoppy the Marvel Bunny and (as seen above) The Gay Ghost. Though Morrison naturally only shows characters from DC or from companies DC acquired, he implies that the same limbo awaits other companies' failed icons, in his amusing line about "the great ruined cities of Atlas and Warren." (Atlas Comics ceased operation in the 1970s while Warren Comics went into bankruptcy in 1983-- though not all of Warren's characters were relegated to limbo.) 

 

As I've already stated, the architect of Animal Man's many torments is his writer on ANIMAL MAN the comic, and he only engineered the hero's sufferings for the sake of "drama." After spending the rest of the last issue outlining for the hero the absurdity of superheroes in the author's "real world," he concludes by expressing dismay at how reality has invaded fantasy. He vanishes and Buddy goes back home, where he's given one last gift by his author: a "reboot" in which Buddy's family never died at all. (I didn't regularly read the comic after Morrison left, but I suspect that this escapist fantasy probably ensured that subsequent authors left the Bakers unmurdered, since such a development would have been seen as thoroughly predictable.) 

And so ended one of the early runs that made Grant Morrison a popular comics-author. I don't agree with his implication that human beings create fictional characters solely to torture them, and I rather doubt Morrison really believes that himself. Indeed, everything that Real Author Morrison tells his readers may have exactly the same status as what Fictional Author Morrison tells his fictional hero-- that it's all done for the sake of a good story.   

BUFFY THE WOKENESS SLAYER

 If there's anything I got from my massive rewatch of all seven seasons (1997-2003) of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, it's a recollection of the days when it was fun to be Liberal.

Not that I think I was ever a hard-and-fast Lib. When I saw Spike Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING on DVD, probably shortly after its 1989 debut, I knew it was not genuine drama, but political agitprop. I don't know when I read Laura Mulvey's essay on "the male gaze," but I recognized it as ultra-feminist garbage. Though the essay came from the 1970s and the movie from the very late 1980s, both represented politicized myths that had a great deal of influence on American entertainment in terms of the depiction of race and sexual nature. Both were harbingers of the Progressive credo known as "wokeness," even though the term predated both works but did not become a mainstream concept until the 2010s. The metaphor of wokeness depended on a simple binary opposition: to be woke was to be vigilantly aware of the many abuses that mainstream American culture inflicted upon the marginalized, while, implicitly at least, to be asleep would mean passively (and foolishly) accepting the status quo.  

Similar metaphors of vigilance surely appeared throughout American history and other national histories. But the concept of eternal vigilance (paging JFK) does not capture what the appeal of Liberalism was for a baby-boomer like myself. Classical Liberalism wasn't just figuring out how to keep Evil Conservatives at bay, it seemed to be about an embrace of plurality across the board. And Liberalism of the Sixties was much sexier as well-- which brings me back to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, which might be the last great fictional proponent of Classical Liberalism of the 1990s. 

  Now, if I was being paid to write this essay, I'd probably research all the complex and varied ways that the TV show renounced the sort of simplistic concepts of good and evil beloved by both Far Left and Far Right. But since I'm not, I'll confine myself to a BUFFY episode that's one of the lighter stories, even though it concerns the near-extermination of a marginalized race: the Chumash Indians of California.  

"Pangs" (no idea what the title signifies) premiered in 1999, the eighth episode of the fourth season, which means that a lot of soap opera has gone down the pike at that point. I'm not breaking down any of the characters or their multifarious relationships; that's what the Buffy wikis are for. Some quick points though. Xander has just started dating former demon Anya, but Willow's first major love-interest departed for parts unknown. Buffy's mother has gone to a relative's place for the impending Thanksgiving holiday, and though there's a potential new romance in the Slayer's life, she's still fairly bummed about former Great Love Angel, who decamped from the show at the end of Season 3 for his own series. Buffy talks her friends and her sometime teacher Giles to put together their own Thanksgiving, which of course makes for lots of comic chaos. Angel, by the way, shows up for the first BUFFY-ANGEL crossover, while Buffy's perennial enemy Spike manages to intrude on the holiday cheer as well.

 The main threat to the Clan Scooby is a vengeful Chumash Indian spirit, name of Hus, accidentally released from a subterranean tomb by Xander. But even before Hus starts killing people for the wrongs done to his people, Willow's first scene includes her reading the riot act to her White ancestors, remarking upon the hypocrisy of Thanksgiving, the status quo's coverup of a racial holocaust. The scene notes that Willow is "channeling" her academician mother, but the script doesn't make fun of the actual evil deeds done to the Chumash by past ancestors. Most of the humor flows from Buffy's frenetic attempts to celebrate a favorite holiday, political implications be damned. She does sympathize with Hus more than most of the foes she fights, and she joins Willow in using the preferred term of "Native Americans" over "Indians"-- even when Hus and some other vengeful spirits show up to crash the Thanksgiving party for an old-fashioned massacre.

Had anyone tried to remake this episode in the 2010s, all the comedy elements would have been gone, and Willow would probably have become a Black Women's Studies major, dissing the Evil White Patriarchy. And there would have been no room at all for Spike, whose primary purpose in "Pangs" is to provide a discordant voice. He snidely laughs at the Scoobies' desire to find a peaceful solution, and he's entirely justified-- as Willow herself eventually affirms-- that the situation is one of "kill or be killed." He also remarks that "the history of the world is not people making friends," and even the most empathetic Liberal can recognize some truth in this statement, even if it's coming from a bloodsucking monster who boasts about his own murderous history at the drop of a hat.      

By itself "Pangs" does not prove my claim that the BUFFY show could be the last major Liberal work of the 1990s, or an additional claim that it's far superior to most Liberal works of the next two decades. Most Liberal entertainments became increasingly infected with the disease of Woke, full of a smug confidence that there were only two clear sides, and that the Wokesters were on the right one. There have been some setbacks to Wokism in pop culture during the last five years, but I've seen no indications that anyone's managed to get back to the humor and pluralism seen in the original BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. This suggests that the rumored reboot from (of all corporate entities) Disney will probably be a shit-show of the first order. But whatever the sins of Joss Whedon might be, they'll never even come close to the driveling banalities of the Disney Corporation.          

EMINENCE AND DURABILITY

 Following up on my observations in the essays of EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS, I'm moved to observe that eminence should be deemed a *structural metaphor* for the authorial process by which an icon or proposition assumes centricity. I also want to distinguish between eminence and the not dissimilar structural metaphor of "escalation," which serves to illustrate how durability operates for both stature-bearing and charisma-bearing icons. To do so I first have to revive my term for "stand-alone works" from this earlier essay-- that of "monads"-- as a counterpoint to the more familiar concept of "serials."

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.

Serial works can be subject to either Quantitative or Qualitative Escalation, as I've already established, and so can possess either kind of durability. Most, though, become famous from the Quantitative form only. The Golden Age hero "Blue Beetle" lasted from 1939 to 1948, but even I, a defender of mythopoeic motifs in obscure superheroes, could never argue Qualitative Escalation took place within this series. The specialized community of Golden Age comics patrons liked something about the original Beetle, but didn't like another azure avenger, The Blue Diamond, who only enjoyed two adventures. There's no way that the Diamond could exceed the Beetle in terms of durability based on quantity, and, as I've read the former's two adventures, there's no chance that the former possessed any durability based on quality either.    

Now, because most serials need several installments to establish the perception of quality in a given audience, it's rare for a short-lived serial to demonstrate durability based on quality. One aborted serial that certainly had more potential than the Blue Diamond was Steve Gerber's 1984 VOID INDIGO, consisting of one softbound graphic novel and two "regular-sized" comic books. I must admit that INDIGO does not have a stellar reputation as a great unfinished Gerber work. But because Gerber is considered one of the important American comics-artists, an ambitious if flawed work by him will inevitably rate higher for anyone seeking to understand his creative process, in contrast to gauging the quality of a tossed-off superhero who was merely all about keeping the pot boiling. So even though BLUE DIAMOND had only two installments and VOID INDIGO had three, the latter is essentially equal to the former in terms of quantitative durability but far superior in terms of quantitative durability.      

THE DAWN OF THE MAGICAL ERA

 To be more specific, it's the dawn of my term "magical-era stories," which takes the place of the former term "magical fantasy stories." I introduced that term in the essay-series MIND OUT OF TIME, which wrapped up here. In that essay I provided this rationale for reworking the term "fantasy" so that its dominant exemplars, like CONAN and LORD OF THE RINGS, fall into a more specific category of fantasies that take place in an era that validates magic over science:

Thus I am saying that magical fantasy stories recapitulate the sense of a space and time far from our own profane world, where all wonders spring from the loins of magic. This world can be entirely divorced from our own, as with Middle-Earth, or it may also be a very abstracted version of some distant historical era, like the unspecified Arabian setting of ALI BABA AND THE FORTY THIEVES. The world may display an author's scrupulous intent to center all the fictional events within a specific historical period, as Marion Zimmer Bradley does in THE MISTS OF AVALON, or it may utilize a hodgepodge of historical eras, like the teleseries XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS. The fidelity to history is only important according to the creative priorities of any given author, and often the religious sources of magical fantasy stories may also be a hodgepodge of material from different historical periods, as is said to be the case with both the Arthurian corpus and the Thousand and One Nights. 

  The more I thought about in the ensuing months, calling something a "magical fantasy" didn't speak specifically to my formulation: that certain fantasies are categorically different than others in that the former evoke an archaic era in which magic supervenes science. Thus, "magical-era stories" at least specifically references my main concept.  

The two types described above also broadly describe the way magical-era fantasies were structured. The narratives we commonly call "myths" tend to emphasize large-scale events, some of which take place largely in the worlds of the gods, of the heights of Olympus or the depths of Hades. In contrast, many folktales tend to be more limited in scope and deal with ordinary humans encountering supernatural presences. However, in keeping with today's review of Jack Vance's DYING EARTH, I should mention one other form of archaic fantasy that indirectly influenced many pop-cultural descendants: the apocalyptic fantasy that describes the final fate of the profane world, seen in both the Norse Ragnarok and the Christian Book of Revelations. To the best of my knowledge there were no archaic apocalypses that involved the concepts of science, because such concepts had yet to become systematized. Modern "futuristic" magical-era stories can't avoid being influenced by science-fiction tropes, which is the case with both DYING EARTH and its literary ancestor, Clark Ashton Smith's ZOTHIQUE. More on these matters later, perhaps.

THE READING RHEUM: THE DYING EARTH (1950)

 I did a semi-deep dive on the origins of this collection of interlinked stories taking place in the titular world. Apparently author Jack Vance was unable to sell the EARTH stories individually to SF magazines of the 1940s. However, in 1950 Vance convinced small-time paperback publisher Hillman (now remembered today mostly for their 1940s comics, AIRBOY and THE HEAP) to publish this all-original book of stories. I don't have any info on contemporaneous sales, but I theorize that Vance's exotic fantasy-stories grabbed readers in the relatively small SF/fantasy readership and so made possible the writer's long career from the 1950s through the 1980s.     

I have a rough theory that because Vance grew up reading magazines like WEIRD TALES in his youth (as he admitted in interviews), he wanted to do something like the "Big Three" of WT-- H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith-- by crafting fantasy-stories linked to one another. (Influence from the SF mags of the period is a definite possibility too.) In one interview Vance mentioned a probable (though not intentional) stylistic influence on him from Clark Ashton Smith. I don't know that Vance ever admitted that his Dying Earth stories were a reaction to the far-future domain of Smith's ZOTHIQUE. 

I probably read EARTH in the seventies or eighties, but the only story I remember really liking was "Mazirian the Magician." Oddly, Vance wanted to use that story-title as the book's title, which is odd given that Mazirian only appears in one story, while other characters appear in more than one tale-- though no single character appears in all six chapters. I like Thomas Monteleone's term "mosaic" for novels cobbled together from stories not related by a supervening plot. All that said, I didn't get much of a myth-vibe from Vance's stories. Mostly, I remembered that Vance isn't really very good with characterization. I've seen arguments that he's doing an "anti-heroic" type of fantasy opposed to the reigning American influence of Howard. But in these stories at least, Vance is not really any more firmly committed to irony than he is to adventure, so I suppose I would still consider these adventure-stories.      

TURJAN OF MIR-- This story introduces readers to the Dying Earth, a quasi-medieval domain which like Zothique exists millions of years removed from modern Earth, and one where magical entities and disciplines have returned to prominence, though there are still remnants of super-science. The titular Turjan is both sorcerer and scientist, first seen seeking to create artificial, intelligent life. He fails and decides to seek the help of Pandelume, a sorcerer in another dimension. Turjan accesses that dimension and is attacked by a swordswoman. This is T'sain, Pandelume's own failed experiment at creating life, for T'sais is mentally afflicted and views everything beautiful as hateful. T'sais runs off and Turjan solicits Pandelume's help. Pandelume requires Turjan to complete a dangerous errand for him, but once Turjan completes said task, the two wizards somehow have much better luck in creating another adult female, T'sain, the twin of T'sais. At story's end, T'sais meets her twin but cannot kill her despite the desire to do so. "Turjan" doesn't have much of a plot and largely exists to set up two other tales, which might be a big reason why it didn't sell as an independent magazine-story.

MAZIRIAN THE MAGICIAN-- The events here clearly take place after "Turjan," because the young sorcerer has been captured by evil sorcerer Mazirian and T'sain must come to Turjan's rescue. I think I liked the story on first reading because a large part of it contains what I'll term "the maiden's magical flight" trope, wherein a woman flees a male oppressor. In various myths and folktales, the woman either keeps changing shape, only to be matched by the pursuing male, or she throws magical objects into the hunter's path and he's delayed overcoming the obstacles. It's my recollection that I was aware of the myth-parallel when I first read "Mazirian."

T'SAIS-- This is the first emotionally satisfying of the collection, though it's not that deep. T'sais prevails upon Pandelume to send her to Turjan's Earth-like dimension, to see if she can find some way to overcome her alienation. She's able to conceive something like empathy when she meets Etarr, for he's been cursed with a hideous face by his ex-lover, the sorceress Javanne. Better delineation of the characters might have upgraded the story to something more than formula. I'll note that T'sais doesn't have outstanding sword-skills but owns a sword that kills her enemies independently of her will.

LIANE THE WAYFARER-- During the peregrinations of T'sais, she overcomes the brigand Liane but doesn't kill him despite his attempt to rape her. Liane then becomes the viewpoint character of a completely separate narrative. He hears about a beautiful witch named LIth (for "Lilith," no doubt), but when he tries to get cozy with her, she repels him with her magical arts. She swears to become his lover if he fetches for her a special item from the castle of a great wizard, but it's all a setup to make Liane the victim of both magicians. Liane is probably a dry run for Vance's amoral serial character Cugel the Clever, who became the main protagonist when the author executed his second "Dying Earth" story in 1965. 

ULAN DHOR (G)-- This story, whose title is the name of its protagonist, is the only one in the collection that I'd rate as having mythopoeic concrescence. Prince Khandive, who's mentioned in an earlier tale, assigns his nephew Ulan Dhor to travel to Ampridatvir. There, Ulan, who possesses skills in both swords and sorcery, will seek to recover the lost magicks of that city's former ruler, Rogol Domedonfors. Once he reaches the city, Ulan learns that two groups of residents who have been enspelled so that neither can see the other, apparently to prevent their fighting. Unlike a number of Vance protagonists, Ulan has a conscience, and he intervenes to prevent the needless execution of a young local woman named Elai. Togther Ulan and Elai plumb the mystery of the long vanished ruler Rogol, who rears a very ugly head to exterminate Ampridatvir. 

GUYAL OF SFERE-- This story had the most potential of all six, but Vance doesn't realize that potential. Young nobleman Guyal is an original idea in that he annoys his sire and others in the court by asking all sorts of ponderous, unanswerable questions. When Guyal learns of a legendary "curator" who possesses all knowledge, the young man seeks the curator out in order to become his disciple and to answer all questions. However, Guyal gets waylaid by a tribe and is forced to deliver Shierl, a sacrificial maiden, to the curator's door. I guess Shierl gives Guyal someone to talk to on the way, but she proves a distraction from the inventive premise. Similarly, the revelation of the Curator's nature and of his haunted domicile were merely boring standard fantasy-devices.       

None of these short stories are as evocative as the best tales in Smith's ZOTHIQUE. It's true that Vance isn't as obsessed with rotting corpses as Smith was, and that's a plus to those not looking for zombie action. But Smith had a much greater talent for mixing the pageantry of exotic worlds with the perversity of their inhabitants. Vance's style here is colorful, but not as poetic as I've seen in later stories by the author.  

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

 Before preceding to the discussion of the new category "eminence," which will connote "the organizational power of centric icons," I'll touch on another line of thought about centricity, though one that, unlike the resonance formulation, won't need to be discarded.

The 2020 essay EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL, PART 1 was my first attempt to apply Whitehead's concept of vectors to my Schopenhauer-influenced concept of authorial will, going back to 2009's SEVEN WAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER. The definition I cited for "vectors" is worth repeating.

A quantity that has magnitude and direction and that is commonly represented by a directional line segment whose length represents the magnitude and whose orientation in space represents the direction.

"Magnitude and direction" are still applicable in my system, but it's worth reiterating that, in contrast to the discrete forces we know from physics, these are vectors of the author's intentionality-- often conscious intention, sometimes subconscious as well. The author gives his centric icon or icons the magnitude and direction that makes its/their vector superordinate to those qualities in other icons. But he does so because the proposition he most wants to advance can best be organized around one icon rather than any of the others.  

I use the phrase "the proposition he most wants to advance" in keeping with my previous observations that a given work may advance many propositions as easily as one. In short narratives, there's usually only room for one proposition. However, longer works can incorporate a wide variety of propositions. In MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2, my main example was Melville's monolithic MOBY DICK, and I argued that the organizing proposition of the book-- what I called the "master thread," and later rechristened "the master trope"-- was that of the "myth of the Hunter and the Hunted." 

I'm not sure that, prior to this essay-series, I'd ever noticed that over the course of my investigations, I had attributed an organizing principle both to the abstract propositions put forth by a fictional narrative AND to the icons within that narrative, the icons which (as I mentioned here) make possible audience-identification. However, after discarding the unhelpful concept of resonance as a metaphor for the organizing principle, I found myself turning back to the thoughts expressed in the 2013 essay JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY.

Wherever Jung derived the term "sovereignty" from, he used in a manner apposite to my own: to suggest an organizing factor within the multiplicities of the human mind. His argument doesn't have any great relevance to literary criticism, but I did consider using his term for my principle of organization. However, the word "sovereign" suggests an uncompromising rulership, which is not quite in line with some of my literary concepts. Yet a trip to the synonym dictionary gave me "eminence," and that birthed my new term birthed my new term for all of a narrative's organizing factors, whether related to icons, propositions, or some combination thereof. It also didn't hurt the new term's appeal that Philip Wheelwright had used the term "eminent instances" in his book THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. Wheelwright's use of the phrase, appropriately derived from Melville's BILLY BUDD, is not identical to my evocation of the word here, but the base meaning still seems roughly parallel.

Lastly-- and there must be an ending, for the time being-- I prefer "eminence" to "sovereignty" because the former seems more malleable. In PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 3, I asserted that when Lois Lane stars in her own series, a "phase shift" occurs in which she and Superman reverse their respective subordinate/superordinate positions. This alteration in their respective centricities is elucidated by my formulation that Lois, a charisma-figure within SUPERMAN stories, shifts into a position of eminence while Superman's eminence recedes. This takes place for the purpose of relating propositions not possible in the SUPERMAN features-- propositions about what it might mean to be "Superman's girlfriend," which are also the sort of stories might have held particular appeal for young female readers. I added that Lois will probably always be considered "charisma-dominant" because Superman is, culturally speaking, a much more "eminent instance." But she does still have a low degree of stature thanks to having been in a position of organizational eminence.          

ADDENDUM: I must admit that the word "eminence" doesn't automatically connote the idea of an organizational principle. But a person who is "eminent" is, like a sovereign, often the person whose authority serves to organizes others into action, and thus the word works for me to denote how authors organize the elements of their stories/propositions to have a desired effect. An interesting coincidence: the day after writing this, I encountered the word "eminence" in its little-used geographical sense-- that of "a natural elevation"-- in a re-read of Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH.      

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS

 A random thought struck me the other day: that, if I was trying to convey what distinguished a story's centric icon (assuming there's just one) from all the other icons in the story, I might have said that all centric icons were "organizational matrices." As soon as I thought this thought, I realized that even to most literary pundits the phrase would be about as clear as the view from beneath the La Brea tar pits.

The thought did take me back to some of the various ways I'd attempted to think about centricity in terms of categorical abstractions, at least going back to this key essay, 2018's KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY, PT. 1. In that essay, I cited a remark by author Nancy Springer about her conviction that the true hero of Scott's IVANHOE was not Ivanhoe:

Who is the real hero of Ivanhoe? Certainly not Wilfred of Ivanhoe himself, for never was a title character more palely drawn. Even though he is the common thread that strings the novel together, he is all but invisible... He is a pawn, exercising no control of the events around him, a piece of plastic with almost no personality...

 I refuted this in part by comparing Ivanhoe, a monadic centric icon, with the example of The Spirit, a serial centric icon:

From all my statements on centricity, it should be plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own. For me Ivanhoe is as much the star of Scott's only story with the character as the Spirit is of his long-running serial adventures. Springer's metaphor of a "common thread" catches some of the sense of Ivanhoe's role in the narrative, but she apparently does not realize how often famous works may be organized around an essentially unremarkable character. The Spirit is not really any better-characterized than Ivanhoe-- Eisner tended to refer to his hero as something along the lines of a "big dumb Irishman"-- and as I mentioned above, most of the mythicity of the Spirit's serial adventures inhere in his supporting characters, just as figures like Rebecca, Richard and Robin Hood are more mythic than Ivanhoe himself. In both cases the under-characterized, under-mythicized character functions as an organizing factor.   

Later in the same essay, I admitted that there were times in which a viewpoint icon might be very dull and NOT be the center of the story, using the example of Lemuel Gulliver. But Gulliver does not provide an "organizing factor" as do Ivanhoe and The Spirit. That's because GULLIVER'S TRAVELS is not about Gulliver (which would have made the novel *endothelic,* but about the exotic places to which he travels, making it *exothelic.* I've discoursed about these structural distinctions elsewhere, but they're not germane to the problem under discussion here, which concerns defining the nature of centricity.

However I may choose to define centricity in light of the "organizing factor" thesis, this line of thought puts paid to my brief consideration of centricity as a form of resonance, which I advanced in this 2023 essay, and then barely used thereafter. The metaphor of resonance, as I expressed it there, was something like whatever voice in a narrative happened to be the loudest-- which is not unlike the poor logic I critiqued Nancy Springer for. In future, if I use resonance at all, I'll try to keep it closer to the cited definition by Northrop Frye, where resonance connotes a reader's ability to see the universal in the particular.  

So if centric icons within a narrative are "organizational matrices," is there a better term to assign to the organizing principle. Astute readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) will guess that the previously unused term of "eminence" will now assume that position, but the rationale must wait until Part 2.  

    

 

INDEPENDENCE DAZE

 Independence Day 2025 is long gone, but I found it still on the mind of one of my forum-opponents. Without bothering to lay out the general argument in which the Fourth came up, my opponent's attitude was definitely that of the "slavery is America's original sin" mindset, in that he expressed the view that modern Americans are being hypocritical to celebrate Independence Day, but things weren't so independent for slaves. 

I've already set forth some of my views on the phenomenon of slavery in a few posts here, such as the two-part SLAVE WAGES essay. But for amusement's sake, I decided to randomly flip through Frank Fukuyama's THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, which remains an important work in analyzing the role of the United States in creating what the author called "an ethic of emancipation." I came across the following paragraph in the chapter "The Universal and Homogenous State," and though I'm sure it won't have any impact on the stance of my opponent, I'll reprint the Fukuyama paragraph here as it may prove useful down the road.  

The second way in which economic development encourages 
liberal democracy is because it has a tremendous leveling effect 
through its need for universal education. Old class barriers are 
broken down in favor of a general condition of equality of op¬ 
portunity.

 While new classes arise based on economic status or education,  
there is an inherently greater mobility in society that 
promotes the spread of egalitarian ideas. The economy thus cre¬ 
ates a kind of de facto equality before such equality arises de jure.

GUNN SHOTS

 

"Our plot has nothing to do with All-Star Superman, but some of the aesthetics of what Grant wrote and what Frank drew were incredibly influential," he continues. "They also had that sort of science fiction, and the idea of Lex as a mad science sorcerer, almost. You know, science is his own sort of sorcery. And the giant, you know, the monsters and the threats and all of that the Silver Age look through a green lens. I think a lot of that was taken from All-Star Superman, and that was my biggest one, for sure. Also my favorite."-- Total Film.

This comment, made by James Gunn to various press-reps while publicizing a SUPERMAN LEGACY trailer, seems to be all that he ever said about the influence of the Morrison-Quitely ALL-STAR SUPERMAN on his film. The opening sentence, where he notes that he's not attempting anything like the ALL-STAR plot, didn't stop a lot of fans from speculating that the Morrison work would be a major thematic influence, rather than just influencing some aesthetic aspects of the movie. (I note that the Total Film essay specifies that some members of the cast took inspiration from the GN as well.)

Now that I've both reviewed the film and re-examined ALL-STAR, I don't even think Gunn took much from Morrison/Quitely in terms of aesthetics. Gunn and M/Q are both making use of the garish, larger-than-life imagery of Silver Age comic books. But Gunn takes those images at face value, while M/Q find ways to illuminate the symbolic potential of such images. For instance, Gunn's Fortress of Solitude carries no sense of wonder: it's just a repository of things Gunn needs to make the story work: a solar-ray healing machine for Superman's wounded body, and robots to attend his recovery. Interestingly, David Corenswet is quoted in this IGN piece as to how affected he was by the M/Q depiction of the Fortress, allowing him as a performer to have insight into the "gentle loneliness" of the Superman psyche. I think Corenswet conveyed in his performance the sense that, even with human friends and a few fellow Kryptonians, Superman is still terribly alone. In my ALL-STAR review I considered the possibility that the M/Q "vision of interconnectedness...makes Superman so devoted to helping others, and it may be the only thing about ALL-STAR to influence James Gunn, even though Gunn chose a totally different direction." But now I don't think Gunn, even though he may have comprehended what M/Q meant re: the connectedness of people, took any influence from ALL-STAR there. 

Gunn does want to convey a sense of Superman as being motivated by a deep and soulful caring for all living beings, even the kaiju-creature Luthor sends to tear up Metropolis. But the closest Gunn comes to articulating that motivation comes in the final scene between Superman and Luthor:

I'm as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human. And that's my greatest strength.

        

Now that's a vision of commonality, but not of interconnectedness. It doesn't really explain the hero's extraordinary reverence for life-- something not shared by his fellow superheroes. Hawkgirl cheerfully executes one of the villains, saying, "I'm not Superman," thus channeling the sentiments of many of the harsher comic-book vigilantes, some of whom Gunn has adapted, such as Peacemaker. This scene suggests that even though Gunn was trying to convince viewers that Superman's great kindness is the new "punk rock," he knew that the audience would want to see at least one villain pay the ultimate penalty, and Luthor was clearly not going to be knocked off. Barring new info from seeing the movie a second time, I think Gunn was just trying to find some way to rationalize Superman's dominant Boy Scout image. He might have built more upon a possible "savior complex" the hero had built up in reaction to his understanding of the "legacy" left him by his Kryptonian parents, but if Gunn meant something along those lines, the concept didn't make it into the finished movie.

More Gunn Shots to come, possibly.

    

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERMAN IN EXCELSIS" (ALL STAR SUPERMAN #1/ 10-12, 2007-08)

 

Even before I saw and reviewed SUPERMAN LEGACY, I'd heard somewhere that James Gunn might have been influenced by Grant Morrison's 2007-08 limited Superman series, ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. I don't intend to research what Gunn might have publicly said about the Morrison work, though I assume he did make some statement or other. My reaction to the assertion was that I thought Gunn might have borrowed this or that storytelling trope, but I highly doubted that he would have any interest in Morrison's predominant themes of archetypal realities and creative evolution. But now that LEGACY is a box-office success, that leads me to examine ALL-STAR through the lens of myth-explication.

Previously I reviewed just one two-part story in ALL-STAR, the Bizarro sequence, without saying anything definitive about all twelve issues. I will now state that even though the ALL-STAR series is almost certainly the best Superman story of the 21st century (and may continue to do so if the comic continues until 2099), its diverse stories don't all sustain my concept of symbolic concrescence. Morrison made a studied effort to bring all his concepts under his chosen theme, the aforementioned ideal of creative evolution, but I don't think he was successful across the board. He formulated a sort of "frame-story" in which the villainous Luthor finally manages to doom Superman, and this frame starts with issue 1, becomes a leitmotif throughout issues 2 through 9, and culminates in issues 10-12. The stories in 2-9 are many times better than what usually passes for a good Superman story in this century, but their purpose is not predominantly to illustrate the main theme. The "in-the-frame" stories are Morrison's attempt to isolate all the quintessential tropes of the Superman series up to that point-- mostly the tropes of the 1955-70 Silver Age-- though he works in references to other eras (Steve Lombard of the 1970s, Doomsday of the 1990s). For me, the frame-story, for which I've used the title Morrison gave to the last installment, is the only segment that thoroughly fulfills the theme of creative evolution.

         

 

"Excelsis" begins with daredevil billionaire Leo Quintero (note the possibly coincidental resemblance of the name to "quintessential"). He and a crew of androids fly a spacecraft to the periphery of the sun, ostensibly to map the solar body, though there's also a reference to taking fire from the sun in some Promethean endeavor, in line with a couple of references to the Ray Bradbury short story "The Golden Apples of the Sun." However, Lex Luthor, who's apparently aware that Superman is watching over this scientific project, smuggles on board an android timed to blow up the ship. Superman bursts in and expels the android, but in so doing, he like Icarus (not a Morrison reference) flies close to the sun. Even though the sun is the source of most or all of Superman's fantastic powers, the hero's not able to simply barrel his way his way through the solar mass here, as he did in so many other comics-tales. The Kryptonian's system is poisoned by too much solar "information," and Quintero informs Superman that he's likely to die soon. As something of a measured boon, Quintero also states that if he can't save Superman with his science, he'll try to create "replacement supermen."

While anticipating his death, Superman seeks to arrange his affairs for that contingency, though he still has to deal with continuous menaces to Metropolis. One of his most vital decisions is to reveal to Lois Lane the truth of his double identity, as well as giving her a guided tour of his Fortress of Solitude. Among the many wonders he shows off is a "baby Sun-Eater," which is Morrison's only reference to the history of Superboy's involvement with the Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes-- though the creature pops up later in a more essential role. Lois doesn't entirely believe the hero, and he isn't truthful about everything. Superman informs Lois that his recent visit to the sun "tripled my curiosity, my imagination, my creativity"-- which seems to be true in a general sense-- but the hero doesn't tell the girl reporter that too much sun has also killed him. (I wonder if there's a parallel to the psychotropic drugs that appear in many Morrison stories, though I don't know how often such substances result in death in his stories.)

   

Superman keeps busy despite the sword hanging over his head. As Clark Kent he interviews Luthor, who's been sentenced to execution, and the hero isn't entirely able to conceal his revulsion at the mad scientist's waste of his talents. He finds a new world for the Kandorians to inhabit. He visits the Kent farm, recollecting the circumstances of Pa Kent's passing, which in Morrison's world involves a meeting with "Supermen of the Future." And, to experiment with seeing how Earth would get along without him, he creates his own pocket-planet, "Earth-Q," which is essentially our own world (complete with an artist, implicitly Joe Shuster, creating the fictional Superman). Morrison presents this Superman as a modest god who constantly seeks the best for mortals, albeit a god with human limitations.   

   

Morrison's intra-frame stories are loosely united by a "twelve tasks of the hero" motif, but the final and most important feat is that Superman, unlike Captain Ahab, succeeds in "striking the sun itself." But this isn't the non-sentient solar orb that accidentally poisoned the hero. Rather, this surrogate sun is Solaris, a solar computer from the future, an entity who wants to usurp the position of the regular sun and become the object of Earth's veneration. Luthor's responsible for Solaris' presence as well, apparently because the villain didn't want Superman to go off and die in private. Instead, Solaris bombards Earth with red sun radiation, so that Luthor will be able to personally torment and execute a powerless Superman.      

However, in a moment of irony, Superman outthinks his enemy-- using "brain over brawn," a line which James Gunn more or less recycled for LEGACY. The hero uses a gravity gun that accelerates Luthor's metabolism, to burn out the super-powers the villain gave himself. And on top of that, Luthor is forced to see the universe through Superman's eyes: "this is how he sees all the time, every day. Like, it's all just us, in here, together. And we're all we've got." This is implicitly the vision of interconnectedness that makes Superman so devoted to helping others, and it may be the only thing about ALL-STAR to influence James Gunn, even though Gunn chose a totally different direction.      

So both Luthor and Solaris are defeated. But because Solaris poisoned the sun, Superman doesn't expire on mundane Earth, but ascends to the Heavens, becoming joined with the body that has slain him. Back on Earth Lois keeps the faith, telling Jimmy that the hero hasn't died, but is only seeking to heal the sun with a new "heart." Morrison suggests but does not affirm that this may be true, but clearly, in this sequence, the writer is using the trope of the hero's death to sum up, not simply his accomplishments, but all the creativity that gave him the status of a modern myth.    

Finally, the Latin phrase "in excelsis" translates to "in the highest," and appeared in a Christian hymn within the phrase "Glory to God in the highest." But within the context of the ALL-STAR stories, "in excelsis" connotes humanity's need to emulate its highest creative potential. This is underscored in issue 10, where Morrison and Quitely give the reader a glance at Earth-Q, where its version of the 15th-century philosopher Pico del Mirandola states the following.

“Let us not yield sovereignty even to them, the highest of the angelic hierarchies! Become instead like them in all their glory and dignity. Imitation is man’s nature, and if he but wills it, so shall he surpass even imagination’s greatest paragons.”

Morrison seems to be alone in drawing a connection between empathy for all beings and "imagination's greatest paragons," and that may be the thing that keeps ALL-STAR on a "higher plane" that most of what passes for "Superman mythology" in this era.