CORRELATING COGITATIONS

I formulated the literary "word pair" of the ontocosm and the epicosm back in this May essay, and so far it's lasted. I have overturned a few neologisms in the space of a few days, while other formulations have lasted a few years before I abandoned them. So I may or may not keep these two terms in the distant future. However, for now I'm moved to correlate various past dichotomous cogitations under the aegis of each category, if only to keep them all straight in my head.

THE ONTOCOSM of a literary work includes:

All LATERAL meaning, relating to both the KINETIC and DRAMATIC elements of a narrative. These are the elements that tell the reader, "WHAT THINGS HAPPEN."

All FUNCTIONALITY, which appeals to the reader's need for a fictional analogue to real PERCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE.  

All PRE-EPISTEMIC ways of knowing, which are known through the process of "knowledge-by-acquaintance."

All modalities of THE DYNAMIC-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MIGHT.

THE EPICOSM of a literary work includes:

All VERTICAL meaning, relating to both the MYTHOPOEIC and DIDACTIC elements of a narrative. These are the elements that tell the reader, "HOW THINGS HAPPEN."

All SUPER-FUNCTIONALITY, which appeals to the reader's need for a fictional analogue to real CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE. 

All EPISTEMIC ways of knowing, which are known through the process of "knowledge-about."

All modalities of THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME, also synonymous with MYTH.

 

I may develop some or none of these correlations in future. But for the time being, I'll content myself with noting the essays in which each paired cogitation appeared.

I first mentioned "lateral meaning" in RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT, which contains one of those word pairs I abandoned ("underthought and overthought"). And later I perfected the application of both lateral and vertical meaning in THE LATERAL AND VERTICAL MEANINGS OF LIFE.    

The duality of "what things happen" and "how things happen" is discussed in WHAT VS. HOW.

"Functionality" and "super-functionality" are first discussed in the 2014 essay A QUICK ASIDE ON FUNCTIONALITY.

Perceptual knowledge and conceptual knowledge appear in the works of both Arthur Schopenhauer and William James.   

Assorted essays on William James discuss the Two Forms of Knowledge, while Alfred North Whitehead is my source of the terms "epistemic" and "pre-epistemic."

The terms "might and myth," a slight play on the standard phrase "might and main," appears in MIGHT AND MYTH. The somewhat more involved cogitations concerning the "dynamicity mode" and the "combinatory mode" of sublimity are explored in the series TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I, beginning here. 

ON POSTWAR MASCULINITY

 Another day, another messboard topic...

________

With respect to post-WWII gender roles, the first thing I think of is that when the war ended, the surviving American men returned home expecting to return to their status as family breadwinners, while women who had substituted for them in factories et al would return to being homemakers. Some contemporaneous women expressed the same sentiment. Some, like Betty Friedan, did not, and so we got the rise of second-wave feminism. 

How did that affect depictions of men and women in postwar movies? I agree with the general proposition that one major trope to come out of the changes was "men have become weak and there's nothing that can be done about it." That's where your example of INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (and the Matheson novel published the previous year) belongs, and there are surely others in the same vein.

However, we also get the trope "men have become weak but with the right approach they can re-assert themselves." I don't recall the specifics of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but it's strongly suggested that James Dean is messed up due to his mother, and near the end the father puts his foot down and reasserts his authority. HILDA CRANE (1950) spends most of the movie with Joan Crawford manipulating her husband, but then he walks out on her at the end. You can also see this type of trope in a fair number of stories predating America's entry into the second world war, not least the 1936 GONE WITH THE WIND novel.

The movie we're discussing, DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS, is a little different, and it's also not precisely "postwar" since it's based on a play performed the year before Britain entered the war against the Axis powers. It's not that the men in the DOD movie are weak, but they're unable to deal with the ways women think and interact, which constitute a separate social world. You see the same ethos in the 1939 Bette Davis weepie THE OLD MAID, which came out the same year as the GWTW adaptation. The world of men there just barely impacts on that of women, even though the story takes place against the backdrop of Civil War violence. 

ANGEL AND THE BADMAN is a different trope still. John Wayne's bandit character is never weak at any point in the story, but he's a creature that needs to be civilized by the gentle Quaker girl, who takes him off the path of doom. That too is a very "woman-centered" ethos, though it doesn't depend on nullifying masculinity, as does HILDA CRANE and maybe REBEL.

There probably are other movies, not least SF-genre films, that get into the trope of men falling victim to either too much or too little masculinity. You mention NEANDERTHAL MAN, and MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS might be another example of the latter. But I find it interesting that in the late forties and fifties we start seeing a fair sampling of low budget "action girl" (often swashbucklers) and "monster girl" films, far more than I think one can demonstrate from the beginning of sound films through the end of WWII-- and DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS is one of these. But whether that indicates a real shift in genuine gender roles would be food for a second discussion.                            

   

THE READING RHEUM: HELL'S SALES MANAGER (1940)

 

I could never attempt a "1001 myths" project with prose pulp magazines and their kindred, even though in many ways those periodicals primed the pump for superhero comics. In the time it takes me to read one book-length pulp novel, I can read (say) ten horror stories in search of the mythopoeic. In prose pulps, I can find particular authors who were great at bringing the touch of the mythic to their stories, such as Rohmer, Burroughs and Howard. But it takes too damn long to search for myths in the hero pulps. Still, I did locate one by sheer chance-- even though both its title and its cover illustration have nothing to do with the story inside. 

Norvell Page wrote the vast majority of SPIDER adventures credited to house-name "Grant Stockbridge," and ever since I first encountered pulp heroes in comics and paperback reprints, I've always favored Page's frenetic SPIDER over the faux-cerebral SHADOW. The SPIDER stories are justly mocked for being wildly over the top in terms of all the chaos and destruction the villains would unleash upon New York City, and all the violence the city's arachnid defender would commit to bring down said villains. But MANAGER shows Norvell Page being a bit more-- dare I say it-- "cerebral" in terms of bringing his myth-materials into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

This time the Spider's other self, heroic Richard Wentworth (as well as his aides, principally his valiant girlfriend Nita Van Sloan) encounter menaces on two fronts. On the mundane front, Wentworth's police commissioner buddy Kirkpatrick has been assigned to help a deputy from the French Surete, Raoul Chartres, who's been instructed to bring down The Spider. Of course, this late in the game-- MANAGER was the seventy-seventh novel in the series-- Kirkpatrick had frequently suspected Wentworth's double identity but has arguably let his long friendship with Wentworth cloud his judgment, even though he firmly believes that the Spider should be jailed for his reckless vigilantism. Page may have brought Chartres in to freshen up the old formula with a new face. In addition, though the United States would not enter World War II for two more years, the spread of fascism on the European continent would have a French copper like Chartres sympathetic by reason of his allegiance to his embattled country-- even though the events of the war are only briefly touched upon in MANAGER.

In any case, Chartres is given a feisty, demanding character, and he has no doubt from his studies of the case that Wentworth is the Spider. There are a lot of good tense scenes between Chartres and Wentworth, and even between supposed allies Chartres and Kirkpatrick. But the primary menace is yet another dire super-villain determined to wreak chaos on New York for the sake of profit. I'm not entirely sure why Page named this fiend "The Brand." At first I thought it was because the red-clad evildoer initially bites the Spider's style by leaving sigils of his deeds on the bodies of his victims, the same way the Spider does to conquered criminals. But this brand-motif is quickly dropped. Once or twice the Spider thinks of his foe as a "firebrand" he means to extinguish, and I guess that's the most likely association, since the Brand's distinguishing gimmick is a special weapon, "the Bolt," that can spew forth lightning-like effects. But this power doesn't operate like conventional lightning, but has more the effect of a super-hurricane, inducing "implosions" that can devastate physical objects and kill people by exploding their heads. The descriptions of the weapon's devastation are much better than Page's logic as to how the Brand got hold of such a device. As pulp-scholar Will Murray has warned, no one should expect an ingenious surprise at the revelation of any SPIDER master villain's true ID. 

The super-science of the Bolt doesn't resemble anything in real science, but Page's imaginative extrapolation of the way implosions work in his world endow MANAGER with its most potent mythicity. It's also of interest that the Spider also tries to bite the Brand's style by joining his gang under his underworld alias of "Blinky McQuade, safecracker." This leads to a scene in which "McQuade," along with several thugs, must don imitation Brand robes to join his gang, and this leads to a tense scene when the Brand detects the Spider among his auditioning minions. Eventually, the Brand imprisons Wentworth and sends out thugs dressed as the Spider, so that the hero will die with the reputation of being a cop-killing crook like those on whom the hero preyed. So I assign some mythicity to the trope of hero and villain assuming one another's guises for this or that advantage.

Girlfriend Nita acquits herself well here, dressing up as the Spider when he's caught, and shooting it out with the phony Spiders, even though Page is careful to note that this level of violence does not come naturally to the heroine. I also give Page props for some very cinematic writing that goes a little beyond simple purple prose. Here's a scene told from Nita's POV, one that explains much of the perennial appeal of the superhero:

"Wentworth looked so small against the bulk of the building-- small, yet the dance of his shadow stretched out hugely across the barren field. It was enormous, dominant, a black silhouette of unconquerable power-- the will of The Spider!"

                    

UP AND DOWN THE PATHOS PATH

 I proposed the theory of "gravity" and "levity" in 2012's GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW. This was one of my many attempts to suss out how categories of "the serious" and "the ludicrous," as Schopenhauer called them, impacted the NUM system that I extrapolated from Northrop Frye's theory of mythoi and finessed with considerations of phenomenality with which Frye was not concerned. 

In my previous post I decided that speaking of these categories as "tonal" in nature was too vague. My new solution for this problem was to import two terms I recorded here in 2013: "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects," my substitution for Aristotle's (inadequate in my view) terms "pity" and "terror." Further, these can also be dovetailed with the assertions I made in the four-part FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS, concluding here. I emphasize the conclusion of that series because that's close to being the only other time, outside of the CROSSBOW series, that I applied the levity/gravity idea to another domain within my theoretical universe. I sorted out the relations of the two "literary forces" to the four mythoi thusly:

COMEDY-- plerotic and oriented on light levity
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and oriented on light gravity
DRAMA-- kenotic and oriented on high gravity
IRONY-- kenotic and oriented on high levity

At the time I couldn't think of any better way to characterize the variations in levity and gravity than with a faux-quantitative metaphor. But I should have been focused on the qualitative difference that are served by the two forces as they meld with the two forms of affect. Putting aside the plerosis/kenosis dyad as having been adequately defined by Theodor Gaster, now the four mythoi look like this:

COMEDY-- the emphasis upon "the jubilative," on things that seem funny because of their positive incongruity, results in a surfeit of *sympathetic levity* 

ADVENTURE-- the emphasis upon "the invigorative," on things that portray positive success in the battles of sex and violence, results in a surfeit of *sympathetic gravity* 

DRAMA-- the emphasis upon "the purgative," on things that connote the expulsion of negative elements, results in a surfeit of *antipathetic gravity*  

IRONY-- the emphasis upon "the mortificative," on things that demonstrate a general state of increasing degradation, results in a surfeit of *antipathetic levity"

This formulation means that I have to dump all the Schopenhauerean arguments I made in DYNAMIS PT 4, wherein I was trying to meld his observations with those of Gaster re: plerosis and kenosis. Now I forswear the idea that "levity" lifts one away from being invested in the fictional characters in comedy as it does in irony, and that "gravity" causes one to be just as invested in the characters of drama as one is in those of adventure. Since ancient times comedy and adventure have been more broadly popular than the other two mythoi because they encourage audiences to identify with the characters, promising for the most part that the sympathetic characters will be vindicated. This makes those mythoi "plerotic" because they're all about incorporating positive energies into the lives of favored characters. In contrast, drama and irony discourage direct identification with the characters as they struggle with, and often lose to, forces antipathetic to them or even to the audience members. They are both "kenotic," as they are focused upon expelling or sublimating negative energies from characters who are not so much "identified with" as "studied" from a distanced view of things. "Levity" encourages positive energy and rising upward, "gravity" encourages negative energy and falling downward.   

There's a bit more to come, but that's a good stopping place.               

TONE POETICS

 In the first installment of 2012's GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW, I sought to find some way to categorize the four literary mythoi of Northrop Frye according to how each related to dominant modes of "being serious" or "being ludicrous," more or less following Schopenhauer's distinctions between the two. I was also involved in sussing out the manifestation of "the sublime" in all four mythoi, but that's not germane to this issue. My terminological conclusion for the categorization was as follows:

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of *tonal gravity* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

Since I have a new concept for levity and gravity now, I decided to expend some time figuring out why I focused upon "tone." I don't think I'd written much about tone before, but I feel sure that even in 2012 I'd seen dozens of film reviews in which critics either praised or slammed a filmmaker's ability to control the emotional tone of the story. This spoke to my concept of literary activity as a constant battle to prioritize different human affects as they relate to the narrative. HAMLET is not a comedy, but it can use a few moments of comedy in the "gravedigger scene" to give the audience temporary relief from all the heavy dramatics.

Now I think "tone" is too vague to lay out my current thoughts on levity and gravity. My next essay will put forth the revised terms. However, I don't plan to rework or eliminate the current terms, "tonal levity" and "tonal gravity," in my subject headings here, because I'm hoping that the next essay will be my last word on this abstruse matter.     

THE READING RHEUM: THE MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES (1936)

 

Though I'm a fan of (and maybe an apologist for) Sax Rohmer's works, I'd never visited either of the two "Yellow Peril pulps" produced by Popular Publications. In 1935 Popular launched THE MYSTERIOUS WU FANG, and the magazine lasted into 1936 for a total of seven issues. Popular pulled the FANG (sorry) and almost immediately issued another Yellow Peril series, DOCTOR YEN SIN. But the SIN came to an end that same year after just three issues. An essay on Pulp.Net alleges that Sax Rohmer's lawyers may have sent Popular a letter of restraint for both serials, claiming that the pulp publisher was stepping on the Fu Manchu brand.

It should be kept in mind that Rohmer's Devil Doctor was doing pretty well in the 1930s. Rohmer revived the Fu series in 1931 and prior to the publication of WU FANG, the British author had produced the seventh in the series, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, which first saw serialization in 1934 within the "slick" upscale magazine COLLIER'S. I've no information about how well either FANG or SIN sold, but if FANG had been selling badly, why bring in a second Asian villain to take his place? One Wiki quote asserts that SIN might have been less "juvenile" than FANG, but without reading the source material I can only note in passing that FANG's heroic opponents included one teenaged boy, whereas there are no juvenile characters in the third and last SIN novel, MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES.

Arguably the title is the best thing about the story. Like a lot of pulp titles, the creator seems to be jamming together disparate subjects to make the reader curious enough to wonder, "How the heck can mummies sing?" The explanation for the phenomenon that causes living human beings into mummified creatures, and the auditory sound associated with the phenomenon, is pretty inventive.

Not so much the title character. Author Donald Keyhoe (best known today for UFOlogy books) copies all the dominant surface characteristics of Fu Manchu. He's a polymath who can speak several languages, can master all of the sciences, and can hypnotize almost anyone. According to an article by a Wold Newton writer, the other two issues don't seem to have given Yen Sin any background at all, and he barely has any character beyond being an Asian mastermind. He commands a criminal organization called the "Invisible Empire" (though the cover uses the term "Invisible Peril").Which begs the question-- how "invisible" can your empire be when most of your henchmen are savage "Yellow" brutes, who might find it hard to blend into even a big metropolis in the US.

Possibly Yen Sin gets short shrift because Keyhoe put his greatest effort into the doctor's opponent Michael Traile, "the Man Who Never Sleeps." Due to a failed brain operation, Traile loses the capacity to sleep normally. Only a special yoga technique of relaxation allows Traile to keep from going mad, and not sleeping makes him something of a polymath who fills the late hours with esoteric studies. That said, he's just as flat a character as Yen Sin, and so are all of the supporting characters.       

Keyhoe certainly does not stint on the action; everywhere Traile goes he gets into some running gun-battle. But his crisp prose is somewhat mechanical. I wasn't expecting any of the moodiness of Sax Rohmer here, but I also didn't get the sort of fervid verbal poetry one finds in the purple pen of Norvell "The Spider" Page. In true Fu Manchu fashion Yen Sin gets away in the pages of his final adventure, though probably Keyhoe wrote the story long in advance of the decision to cancel the magazine.

The pulps also had a genius for capturing the uncensored attitudes of the writers and the readers at whom they aimed. But there are no insights here about why there's an eternal race war between Occidental and Oriental-- though Yen Sin's only moment of individuality Yen Sin is a claim that he hates the Japanese as much as the Caucasians. Japanese fifth-columnists play a minor role in MUMMIES, and there are nodding references to the activities of the Axis powers. For what it's worth MUMMIES' antipathy to Germany and Japan is one of the earliest expressions of anti-Axis feeling I've come across in American pop culture. I wasn't really expecting anything on a par with the best of Sax Rohmer, and in a way I'm kind of glad that he's not as easy to emulate as a lot of critics might suppose.                          

THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS PT. 3

 

I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. -- MY SHORTEST POST YET.

...I don't even expect plots to be fresh.  They are like skeletons.  I think one skeleton looks more or less like the others, but when they are fleshed out, you get a unique person.  So with movie plots. -- poster "atenotol" on Classic Horror Film Board (quoted with permission) 

 I doubt that I'll ever again use the terms "obvious" and "unobvious," given that I only did so in response to my having read George Orwell's 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling. Though in part 2 I disagreed with many of Orwell's criteria for evaluating Kipling, I must admit that his calling Kipling's works "a monument to the obvious" is almost as quote-worthy as many of the familiar phrases of Kipling. Indeed, the fact that Kipling's "gnomic" utterances were so eminently quotable was the main reason for Orwell to call him "monumental"-- though if familiarity of quotes were the sole measure of one's obviousness, then Shakespeare would outdo Kipling there by that appeal to across-the-intellectual-spectrum familiarity.      

It was also mostly a coincidence that I happened to have read Orwell's online essay a few days before the end of October, which is also when I re-screened, for the first time in perhaps 30 years, the famous "bad movie" BLOODY PIT OF HORROR. Thus I began thinking about what elements of PIT were or were not "obvious," not so much in the specific way Orwell used the word but in the general sense. I noted how much PIT owed to many other Gothic narratives before it, stating, "BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein." The unobvious element, though, was the idea that said entity "looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie." I was of two minds on the effects of the scripters' plunge into unpredictability. On one hand, it caused a lot of viewers to make fun of the film, though on the whole PIT has more mythopoeic content than the average "so bad it's good" flick. On the other hand, PIT's foray into a very unobvious type of menace made a lot of people watch the film who would not have watched the similarly themed PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE. 

Now, in the terms I've established in my above definitions of the terms "trope" and "icon," the basic setup for PIT would be the master trope of the story. But no audience can relate just to a trope, which is just a base description of plot, sometimes with a smattering of a character-arc. Tropes must be "solidified" into icons to make them relatable. If one boiled Orwell's screed down into a trope-icon argument, then Orwell would be saying that Kipling was popular because his tropes were so simple and direct that anyone, no matter how intellectual or non-intellectual, could relate emotionally to them, so in that sense, Kipling's tropes would be appeals to the obvious.

But in my disagreement with Orwell in Part 2, I stressed that emotional appeal was not enough; that Kipling was celebrated because he was a master of literary myth. No matter how improbable intellectuals might deem the author's Cockney soldiers or talking animals, they succeeded because Kipling had an "unobvious" approach to such material. If there was an "obvious" appeal to one of his tropes, like that of a common British soldier seeking to profit from the Raj's presence in India, Kipling was capable of "fleshing out" that trope. His fiction, then, might be considered more of a "monument to the unobvious," since he radically reinterprets the basic structure of the trope he emulates and puts a personal spin of some sort upon it. The same is true of the writers behind BLOODY PIT OF HORROR, though they did not receive, and probably will never receive, much credit for their relative innovation. (I add that being innovative alone is not my sole criterion for distinction. BLOODY PIT and TROLL 2 are both "unobvious" transformations of familiar tropes, but PIT carries an abstract meaning and TROLL 2 does not.)

I also find the poster atenotol's metaphor of skeletons and flesh persuasive. Tropes may not all be alike in design-- and indeed, all human skeletons aren't exactly the same, either. But tropes are always structuring principles, just as skeletons provide scaffolding for all the rest of the human body's organs. Human flesh, particularly with respect to countenances, provides social relatability in the real world, while in the literary world, we need icons-- even when they may be as far from flesh as Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space"-- in order to make the power of the trope come alive.

     

                 

THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS PT. 2

 I didn't mention, in the course of Part 1, that my use of the word "unobvious" was derived from a famous essay by George Orwell, in which he defended Rudyard Kipling from a scathing critique from T.S. Eliot. To be sure, the way Orwell defended Kipling might be deemed a "left-handed compliment," since Orwell defined the author's work as a "graceful monument to the obvious."

The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a
sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary
man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in
certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But
what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful
monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form--for verse is a
mnemonic device, among other things--some emotion which very nearly
every human being can share. The merit of a poem like 'When all the world
is young, lad' is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is
'true' sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself
thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you
happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better
than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a
fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious.

Orwell's 1942 essay may not be the earliest example of someone bracketing the words "good" and "bad" as if they were strangely complementary rather than exact opposites, but it's the earliest known to me. Therefore, I deem Orwell the unintentional ancestor of the whole idea of "good bad" entertainment, probably most popularized by the 1978 book FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME.

Now, Orwell's criterion hinges entirely upon the distinction he makes between the tastes of "the intellectual" and "the ordinary man," though the essayist is not entirely clear about what that distinction entails. Clearly Orwell deems himself to be an intellectual, and from that the closest thing one can come to a definition from this essay alone is the idea that intellectuals alone are discriminating enough to know when poetry (which I assume should include all fiction-making endeavors, not just verse) is "sentimental" or "sententious." The ordinary man implicitly does not possess such discrimination, and yet, because both ordinary man and intellectual are human beings, they can share an "emotional overlap." At the same time, in other sections of the essay, Orwell seems to admit that having artistic discrimination can deceive its owner as to aesthetic perspicacity.

Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and
aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and
then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined
people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And yet, having said this, Orwell also criticizes those who jump to erroneous conclusions:

And yet the 'Fascist' charge has to be answered, because the first clue
to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that
he was NOT a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane or the most 'progressive' person is able to be nowadays.  

It would appear from this essay that Orwell serves two masters. On one hand, he tends to judge Kipling in terms of intellectual verisimilitude, as to whether the author has, say, correctly reported on the power politics of the British Raj. Yet he appreciates Kipling's ability to come up with highly memorable "gnomic" assertions, which is something not all artists can do.

So Orwell offers, as a left-handed compliment to Kipling, the observation that Kipling could speak to the emotions shared by both intellectuals and ordinary people. This is a familiar contrast between intellect and emotion-- one might almost call it a standard "trope" of basic philosophy. But I don't think it helps to see Kipling's genius-- even if it was confined to gnomic assertions, which I don't think to be the case-- as purely "emotional" in nature.

Without going into a diatribe about my formulation of "the four potentialities," I certainly think that Kipling is more important for his skills with mythopoesis than with purely dramatic emotion. Orwell barely discusses anything but verse poetry in the essay, and that's to be expected as Orwell was reacting against the Eliot polemic on Kipling's verse. But of course, everything Kipling wrote-- verse, novels, short stories, and non-fiction essays-- proceeded from the same source. Thus he's tapping into deeper sources than simple emotional oppositions when he imagines how animals might speak to one another if they were capable of so doing, as in THE JUNGLE BOOK, or imagining the entire history of "The Female of the Species."

But it's perhaps pointless to critique Orwell for not being aware of mythopoetic dimension of art, for he was, in keeping with his own self-identification as an intellectual, his primary concern was with didactic thought, and this shows in the two books for which he's most remembered: ANIMAL FARM and 1984. These are largely didactic presentations of ideas, while THE JUNGLE BOOK, though it like ANIMAL FARM personifies lower animals, is far more about understanding what each animal means as a mythic presence.

So, since I disagree with Orwell defining "the obvious" purely in terms of some common "emotional overlap" between ordinary people and intellectuals, I have a different take on what is "obvious" in literature vs. what is "unobvious"-- which I'll address in Part 3.           

  

  

MYTHCOMICS: ["KAGOME'S HEART"] INU-YASHA (1998?)

 I won't devote any time in this essay to detailing the basic setup of Rumiko Takahashi's INU-YASHA serial. I outlined those basics in both of the other essays on this property: THE BLACK PEARL and SECRET OF THE TRANSFORMATION. Further, the long arc I've chosen to label as "KAGOME'S HEART" commences only a handful of installments after TRANSFORMATION, so the INU-YASHA status quo remains largely the same, at least in terms of who's chasing who and the stakes of the seesaw battles of good and evil. 

In my analysis of TRANSFORMATION, I noted that it was made up of two long arcs-- each labeled according to one of the story-titles (according to the Viz translated editions), "The Third Demon" and "Secret of the Transformation." These two had in common Inu-Yasha's progress toward mastery of the magical sword Tetsusaiga, though they were interrupted by three other story-arcs only tangentially related to that theme. I simply chose to use the title of the concluding arc as an umbrella-title for both.

An additional complication is that the story translated "Kagome's Heart" is one of the installments present in the intervening arc "Kikyo's Crisis," in which, to repeat myself, concerns how "Kagome is tormented by seeing Inu-Yasha's feelings for his former lover," i.e., the dead priestess Kikyo, restored to a semblance of life by magic. Takahashi does not devote a lot of space to this "Crisis" arc, for she chose to let the emotions invoked in "Heart" simmer for quite some time, coming to a boil a little while after Inu-Yasha passed one trial by fire, only to face another with regard to the human girl he loves. Below are three illustrative pages from the "Heart" story:

The culmination of the "Crisis" arc is that Kagome tries to resign herself to Inu-Yasha's divided heart, obliging him to love both a living woman and a dead one. HEART-the-long-arc then comes back to this psychological conflict and combines it with the five heroes' efforts to destroy their nemesis Naraku and to gather together all of the shards of the Shikon Jewel. The group's sometimes allies-- Sesshomaru, the wolf-demon Koga, and Kikyo-- also have reasons for pursuing Naraku, though predictably enough Kikyo's entrance will unleash emotions that Kagome has tried to tamp down. As the arc begins, however, the five heroes only know that Naraku has somehow secreted himself so that they cannot find him, either to kill him or to take possession of his stolen Shikon shards. Their only clue seems to lead them to the legendary Mount Hakurei, alleged to have been the dwelling-place by a great monk, Hakushin. But Hakurei is so pervaded with spiritual energy that both Inu-Yasha and Shippo are adversely affected when they come close. So how can the evil Naraku be concealed therein?    

In addition, it's quite evident that Naraku has been busy, for seven dead mortal mercenaries have been restored (via Shikon shards) to undead status, implicitly to run interference for Naraku. Though Takahashi devotes a lot of space to Inu-Yasha's group battling the seven revenants-- each of whom has a deadly specialty-- I'll pass over them quickly, since the warriors are just there to keep up the needed level of spectacle for a shonen series. The revenant who has the most personality is the perverted Jyakotsu, who forms a homoerotic desire for Inu-Yasha, a desire that will only be satisfied when he cuts off the dog-demon's head. However, arguably the dog-demon really gets curbed by Kagome.

For some readers, it might be easy to mistake this scene for just another of Takahashi's many "irate-female-clobbers-insensitive-male" schticks. But there's a deeper dynamic here. In the short tale "Heart," Kagome confesses that she'll try to put aside her negative feelings toward her competition just to remain in Inu-Yasha's presence. But the rash hero wants to be held blameless for any pain he causes her, and that's what unleashes Kagome's ire. She's a woman in love who wants her loved one to be true only to her, and when he reacts to her sublimated resentments as if she had found fault with him, she uses her "sit command" power to punish him.     

 

 Takahashi eventually parallels Kagome's attempts at self-sacrifice with those of the Buddhist monk Hakushin. Once Kikyo manages to access Mount Hakurei, she meets Hakushin, who sought to become a "living Buddha" in order to help others after death. However, self-doubt infected the monk's resolve, and later Naraku suborned him, persuading him to let Naraku stay within the holy mountain. But Kikyo is able to assuage the monk's weakness, so that he's able to find peace.   

However, though the spiritual shield around Hakurai dissolved, Naraku accomplishes his purpose there: splitting off a part of himself, a sort of demon-baby. The baby, later named Hakudoshi, then seeks to take control of Kagome in order to utilize her ability to sense Shikon shards. The evil infant at first can't find darkness within the young girl's heart, until Kagome's negative feelings toward Kikyo come forth. However, even though Kagome feels resentment that Inu-Yasha left her side to search for a missing Kikyo, she successfully resists the demon-baby's spell with her love for Inu-Yasha, moments before he arrives on the scene. 

The spawn of Naraku escapes the hero's retribution, and once he's alone with Kagome, Inu-Yasha swears to never again leave Kagome for Kikyo. However, she realistically judges him to be incapable of deserting his former love-- who of course has further appearances to make in the ongoing series-- but the heroine manages to negate her natural irritation with her complete conviction in her own love. 

The INU-YASHA series takes place in a fantasy-version of Sengoku Japan, where Shinto gods and demons (or fictional versions thereof) intermingle with Buddhist monks seeking to transcend the physical world. I suspect that Takahashi's primary interest was the conflicts of the human heart. This is why, though she's respectful to Buddhist precepts, the artist is more concerned with Hakushin's failure than with his ascension to nirvana. But this is the core of her art, for in the words of G.K. Chesterton, Takahashi is, first and foremost, a poet who's in love with the finite, rather than a philosopher, whose abiding love is the infinite.   

    

THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS

 I recently re-screened the 1965 Italian horror-film BLOODY PIT OF HORROR but have not yet reviewed the movie on my film-blog. What I found interesting was the way many IMDB reviews treated PIT as comically overstated, though it's not nearly as overbaked as many other "so bad they're good" flicks like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE or TROLL 2. In terms of the general plot, BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein. In fact, BLOODY PIT was filmed at the same castle, Palazzo Borghese, as two previous Euro-horror movies, THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA. The fact that BLOODY PIT comes in for so much disproportionate hilarity suggests to me that something in the way it was filmed, more than the story per se, tickles many viewers' ideas about the fragility of fantasies.

Now, in this essay, I quoted Jung as asserting that all creative work is entirely dependent on "fantasy thinking," a position with which I wholly concur:

Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." (Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, 1921, page 63.)

Now, the examples of PLAN 9 and TROLL indicate that the free play of fantasy is not an unalloyed virtue. Games need rules to impose limits on the limitlessness of the imagination, and neither Ed Wood nor Claudio Fragasso were able to formulate rule-systems that made sense for their respective monsters.   

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is directly efficiently if unenthusiastically by Massimo Pupillo, whose disinterest in the horror genre has been widely reported. There are no "Ed Wood" moments that call attention to directorial blunders or FX-shortcomings, so I assume that most of the hilarity stems from something closer to the realm of TROLL 2. Yet the core idea of PIT is no different than that of the celebrated Roger Corman Poe-film PIT AND THE PENDULUM. In Richard Matheson's adaptation of Poe, some innocents-- albeit far fewer in number than those in the 1965 film-- suffer torments by a man who believes himself to be identical with a famous torturer who in reality died years ago. But without looking, I don't think that if I check the IMDB comments for PENDULUM, I will find viewers bagging on that movie for its supposed absurdities, as this viewer did for Pupillo's movie.

The film is filled with lots of sadistic torture and is reminiscent of the German film, THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (talk about a great title). However, unlike the German film, this one is much sillier and the horrible punishments really don't look all that realistic--just cheesy. But, because it is made so poorly (with horrible dialog and action throughout), it is worth seeing to have a few laughs.

I, however, don't find fault with the execution of BLOODY PIT's torture-scenes as that reviewer did. Here's the central visual trope that makes modern viewers take the menace of PENDULUM seriously:

The menace in PENDULUM looks like a respectable Gothic malefactor; he's dressed in dark colors and looks like he means business. Now here's the not dissimilar torture-happy menace in BLOODY PIT.

Because the evil "Crimson Executioner" looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie, I suggest that's the real, and maybe the sole, reason that so many viewers think that BLOODY PIT is so hilarious. Other films are structurally similar, and many may be more badly directed than this one, like the two vampire flicks mentioned above. But they lack such a vivid visual trope.

I don't know exactly why someone chose to juxtapose the masked-wrestler image with that of a Gothic torturer. I'll explore some possibilities in my formal review of the movie, but in this essay, I wanted to spotlight the notion that one or more of the scripters had an agenda. Any agenda probably did not come from Pupillo, who was hoping to move on from horror films to more reputable genres. I think one or more of the writers made some chance correlation between the violence of Gothic films and that of the "muscleman" films. Yet none of the six scripters credited on IMDB have any huge number of outstanding accomplishments in the writing department:

RALPH ZUCKER-- Besides PIT, Zucker did one obscure western, another Gothic horror from 1973, THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT, that I for one found blah, and KONG ISLAND, which is a fairly stupid mad-science jungle flick.

FRANCESCO MERLI-- four other writing credits, but none of the productions are known to me

RUTH CARTER-- aside from PIT, Carter's only other credit is as one of four writers who "adapted" Edgar Allan Poe to produce Pupillo's other major horror flick, TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE, which was a Barbara Steele vehicle.

CESARE MANCINI-- same as Carter except that he also contributed to some romance movie.  

ROMANO MIGLORINI and ROBERTO NATALE-- And here we finally find a couple of guys who racked up a respectable number of writing credits-- 16 for the first guy, 29 for the second-- though the only outstanding credits they garnered, for a couple of Bava films, came after PIT and TERROR CREATURES, on which they worked alongside Carter and Mancini.

So, in the absence of anyone who looks like an "auteur," I'm going to guess that some or all of the writers convened to figure out what to do with yet another film set in a Gothic castle-- and that instead of going with something obvious like another demented follower of Torquemada or another vampire, just decided that their fiend would be the furthest thing possible from those sort of menaces: a torture who put his chiseled musculature on display more than his torture-devices. That nod to the least obvious sort of menace-- much like Claudio Fragasso's vegetarian goblins-- had no chance of being taken seriously, at least to the extent that audiences responded to obvious menaces like vampires. 

And yet the virtue of that appeal to the unobvious got BLOODY PIT a lot more attention than it would have garnered otherwise, even though it was attention of the "so bad it's good" ilk. In my review I'll hold forth on a few things that make BLOODY PIT a more mythic film than simple goofs like TROLL 2 and PLAN 9, so I'll sum up by saying that sometimes flights of fancy can flout the rules in such a way as to create new games, as good or better than the old ones.