THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE

BACK TO BATAILLE PART 1

2012-01-27T16:10:00.001-06:00

“Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts. The first reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of the individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity. The second part is represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality) - all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves. Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production.”—Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure.”

I’ve recently finished a short biography of Georges Bataille by Stuart Kendall. Like most biographies, it’s most interesting in its first half, when it’s explicating how the subject of the bio came to articulate his particular set of beliefs, passions or skills, and then the second half falls off a little, descending into assorted details that pave the way to the grave, so to speak. Kendall’s most interesting observation is as follows:

Bataille’s sngle most significant essay, ‘The Notion of Expediture,’ inverts the classical—and hence, also the Marxist—economy model by insisting that consumption rather than production determines the nature and goals of culture.

I've recently completed a response for Sequart to the Bataillean concepts on a separate theme, so I'll quote myself from that forthcoming essay:

As seen in the opening quote, “expenditure” is Bataille’s term for one of two aspects of the cultural process of consuming things; elsewhere Bataille plainly distinguishes this aspect from anything related to “production and conservation.” Marx defined all aspects of culture through the consideration of who controlled the means of production, and proposed socialism as a solution to the problem of alienated labor. But if Bataille is right, then a more fundamental and inescapable alienation exists between the two aspects of consumption: the desire to conserve and the desire to expend.

And again:

Whether the creator is an archaic Icelandic skald or a modern purveyor of artcomics, he earns his daily bread by offering cultural experiences that “have no end beyond themselves.” A cash nexus supports the exchange between artist and audience, but as Bataille suggests, this “process of acquisition” has simply layered over a more fundamental form of exchange. No artist exists without influence from his real or potential audience, even as that audience changes in response to the more provocative attempts to find the audience’s favor. This egalitarian reading stands in stark contrast to the elitist vision of an avant-gardist like Clement Greenberg, propounding the romantic notion of unalloyed geniuses leading pliable audiences into the promised land of enlightenment.

In essays like this one I’ve made no bones about my antipathy for Marxist ideology, but I confess that I haven’t explored on this blog Bataille’s formulations as an alternative to Marx’s focus on the infamous “means of production.”

Elswhere in the biography Kendall applies the Bataillean ideal of consumption to the concept of identity as mediated through fictional constructs:

Consumption is, in short, a means by which individuals negotiate their identities through expenditure.

I don't recall that Bataille makes use of the contemporary-sounding term "negotiation," but I agree with Kendall's interpretation and extend it a little further into terrain that Bataille, given his anti-idealist influences (Freud, Marx, Sade), would never have contemplated.

Bataille would probably have deemed both Joseph Campbell and his chief influence Carl Jung as overly oriented upon idealism, which Bataille despised due to both his personal history and his reading of Marx. But Jung and Campbell were far from being the foursquare defenders of Platonic Idealism that detractors claim. Both were invested in dynamic psychological processes akin to what Kendall calls “negotiation.” The principal difference between Bataille and Campbell is that Bataille focuses on images of destruction for his concept of expenditure, emphasizing customs like animal/human sacrifice and the Amerindian potlatch. In contrast Campbell focuses on images of construction: on negotiating the identity of the world through piecing together its separable aspects: the cosmological, the metaphysical, the sociological and the psychological. Such images of construction are also a means by which both a storyteller seeks to negotiate identity for his audiences by situating them in a world governed not by reason and logic-- which I relate to the "desire to conserve," a.k.a. Freud's "reality principle" and Jung's "directed thinking." Instead, the worlds where mythic law pertains-- where the world is made out of the blood and bones of Ymir, or a hero who returns to his native realm ends up marrying his mother (or a semi-reasonable facsimile)-- are worlds of "unproductive expenditures."

Bataille's division of consumption into its useful and useless forms also suggests some interesting parallels with the work of Susanne Langer, which I plan to explore in Part 2.

JIM SHOOTER TAKES ON WONDER WOMAN

2012-01-25T11:02:00.001-06:00

Jim Shooter recently made some lengthy comments on the "New 52" version of WONDER WOMAN here:

http://www.jimshooter.com/2012/01/wonder-woman-4-review.html

Here's a telling excerpt:

OPEN MESSAGE TO AZZARELLO AND DC COMICS:

EVERY ISSUE SHOULD BE AN ENTRY POINT!

This one isn’t.

Azzarello, don’t you understand that you’re excluding people? Lots of people?

I know that your editors and their bosses don’t understand that or give a damn. They’re lazy and/or stupid. But you seem like a clever fellow, bright enough. Don’t you want to reach more people? Don’t you want to entertain more people? Don’t you want more of an audience than however many read your previous issues (assuming that those issues explain what the Hell is going on) plus the few remaining steeped-in-comics-lore people who might be able to pick it up on the fly?

Or are you really screwing over the periodicals buyers and writing for the trade paperback buyers. Hey, it worked for Moore on Watchmen. He gave barely a nod to the initial, serialized presentation, and it didn’t sell all that well. But it has done wonderfully well as a collection in various trade formats. Is that what you’re going for?

Really?

The only point that interests me here is his concept of "entry points..."

As a reader I'm turned off by tons of exposition, but I'm also turned off by lazy storytelling in which the writer is deliberately obscure and/or offers the excuse that it'll all make sense somewhere down the line.

For me Shooter's idea of "entry point" suggests not the attempt to explain everything so that any new reader can get it, but giving the reader some core appeal to the story, something that makes him want to know more as to what's gone before.

When I was about 12, I picked up FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5 off the stands. I barely knew who the main heroes were, having seen them in a few reprints, much less the complicated histories of the guest-stars Black Panther and Inhumans. But I loved getting into the story because it offered me a lot of "entry points," meaning things with which I could identify strongly (the villain's power to mess with heroes' minds, for example).

I didn't pick up the first issues of Priest's BLACK PANTHER, but I happened to be thumbing through an early issue-- seven or eight-- and read some of the dialogue he wrote for Queen Divine Justice. That dialogue was an "entry point" for me, pulling me into the story.

I saw absolutely nothing in the Azzarello WONDER WOMAN that worked on that level of appeal.

DEFINING PSUEDOFEMINISM PART II

2012-01-20T17:26:00.002-06:00

"It really does take a hollowed-out ventriloquist puppet husband to keep a straight face while agreeing that Drew Barrymore, by purchasing through her production company the film rights to Charlie’s Angels and building a brainless, action film franchise out of that “property,” really, really has built upon the feminist foundations of…whom? Farrah Fawcett-Majors? If I remember correctly, Farrah Fawcett-Majors in her day was considered to be the problem by Marxist-feminists. Has the stone rejected by the feminist builders become the head of the corner?

"Huh? Oh. Whatever." -- Dave Sim, CEREBUS 293.

"Betcha can't eat just one."-- Lays Potato Chip slogan.

To someone who loves to argue as much as I do, nearly any Dave Sim essay is not unlike a bag of potato chips. I quoted one example of Sim's anti-feminism philosophy in order to clarify the very different nature of my own quarrel with certain manifestations of feminism, regarded here as "pseudofeminism." And yet, having given the entire essay a cursory read, I found that the above quotation touches on some other aspects of pseudofeminism, which I now consider covalent with the "Wapsterism" described in this essay-- that is, the philosophy of feminism inspired by/descended from the 1970s group Women Against Pornography.

Now, as wrong as I think Dave Sim is about many things, I believe that he's fundamentally correct that most feminists in the 1970s looked down their noses at the CHARLIE'S ANGELS teleseries. This site alleges:

While viewers couldn't get enough of the three beautiful women, critics and feminists chewed it to pieces. Goldberg's idea to "inject some really stunning beauty into the genre" of crime shows was not appreciated by raging feminists. They accused CHARLIE'S ANGELS of setting women back one hundred years and were appalled by all the titillation and suggestiveness of Charlie's double entendres. One angry feminist saw the show as "a version of the pimp and his girls. Charlie dispatches his streetwise Angels to use their sexual wiles on the world while he reaps the profits!"

Surprisingly, I've seen this sort of oppositional complaint-- often founded in Marxist precepts, though possibly not in the manner Sim perceives-- applied to the action-heroine genre overall. I recall one academic essay-- its specifics lost in the mazes of my memory-- that went so far as to invert the meaning of action-heroines. This deconstruction went something like, "Yes, the heroine-film shows butt-kicking heroines defending themselves against rape, but the *real meaning* is that if a woman DOESN'T possess super-martial skills, then she's fair game for rapists!" If I can ever track down the comment I'd like to ask the writer if he or she had just come off a heavy reading of Roland Barthes prior to conceiving that masterpiece of dumbassed interpretation.

For sake of argument, I'll accept the assertion made by the Charlie's Angels site: that the main problem 1970s feminists had with the show was its depiction and alleged "fetishization" of female glamour, and not with the characters' propensity to unrealistically kick butt-- which I believe to be Dave Sim's main quarrel with all versions of the franchise.

What's interesting, though, is that though Sim and the 1970s feminists are philosophically opposed, they both scorn CHARLIE'S ANGELS because of its failure to conform to some aspect of reality: Sim because "real women" don't have the power or capacity to beat men, and the feminists because "real women" don't spend every hour of the day trying to fetishize themselves for the enjoyment of men.

Now, it should be obvious that Sim's biggest error in the quote above is to assume that feminism must be monolithic throughout the thirtysomething years that separate the ANGELS television show and the big-screen movie version thereof. Even though he himself doesn't validate feminism's objections to sexual fetishization, he views it as a major contradiction that modern feminists should cheer what earlier feminists did not cheer.

Yet as I noted in WAPSTERS VS. FACTSTERS, feminism was not even monolithic in its earlier manifestations, since the repressive philosophy of the WAP group and its fellow travelers brought forth the rather more liberal FACT and its offspring. I've not made a concerted study of the subject, but it seems to me that over the years a fair number of women-- whether hardline feminists or feminist-sympathizers-- have expressed an affection for the very thing Sim dislikes in the 1970s teleseries: a sense of female empowerment that to some extent trumps issues of sexual fetishization.

Admittedly, I'm not sure if the 2000s re-invention of the franchise at the hands of Barrymore and her crew struck quite as deep a chord. But the first film was at least profitable, even though the sequel and a very recent new teleseries both flopped. I don't see any contradiction in some liberal feminists appreciating Barrymore getting the chance to make a profitable score in the male-dominated world of Hollywood. Since it's a given that "brainless action films" are going to be made for an audience that wants them, why, they might think, shouldn't a female producer have the chance to attempt one, and to profit thereby if it does well?

And with that, I will try to go back to ignorning that tempting potato-chip bag, and concentrate on something new.

DEFINING "PSEUDOFEMINISM"

2012-01-17T17:46:00.001-06:00

For a man to win an LPGA tournament would be humiliating for the man. It would be like entering a children’s T-ball tournament and really tearing up the base-paths and smacking some major home runs. There isn’t enough money in the world to overcome the resulting humiliation of knowingly competing against…(pay attention, “ladies”)…

…inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings. -- Dave Sim, CEREBUS 293.

(Full essay here at CerebusFanGirl Site.)

I'm not the first to toss out the term "psuedofeminism," but I do have a specific meaning for it which requires elaboration.

In my last essay I assailed a review by Evie Nagy, a writer for the Los Angeles Review of Books with said term. What did Nagy say to invite this description? It doesn't necessarily apply to everything she said, right or wrong. The essence of my complaint with Nagy boils down to this paragraph:

The strongest superheroes, male or female, are those whose confidence, abilities, and sex appeal reveal themselves not through artificial projections of fantasy but through ideals that inspire creators, and therefore readers, to be better people.

A short review of a book-- in this case, a collection of Tarpe Mills' MISS FURY comic strip-- is not the best stage on which to discuss the issues Nagy raises, and she was IMO unwise to advance said issues just to flog a recommended book. Certainly her assumption that quasi-realistic heroes, "male or female," are better vehicles for inspiring ideals does not stand up to close scrutiny. In my youth as a male I can testify to having been inspired by ideals promulgated by any heroes I liked, regardless of whether they did or did not have super-powers. I'm not able to testify personally as to whether female fans think essentially the same way, but when I read a female-authored fan-resource like Trina Robbins' GREAT SUPERHERO WOMEN, I don't get any sense that Robbins is less inspired by Wonder Woman than by Sheena. Clearly Nagy should have qualified her statement as her own personal taste, and nothing more.

Far more serious than her characterization of the process of inspiration, however, is her dismissal of "artificial projections of fantasy." Nagy gives no reason for her dismissal, but I find it amusing that anyone professing feminism would argue that unadorned reality is the superior to the "projections of fantasy."

Just ask Dave Sim. As seen in the quote above, and elsewhere in the essay, he rails against the delusions of female athletes attempting to claim parity with male ones, as happened in 2003 when female golder Annika Sorenstam was invited to play in a Men's Open event. In Sim's view, the idea of women successfully competing with men is no more than a fantasy: he calls this fantasy "the Charlie's Angels Syndrome" and explicitly compares it to the "implausibility of fairy tales."

Now, Sim's notion of "reality" means no more to me than Nagy's. But Sim is basing his screed of female inferiority largely on one aspect of empirical reality-- that women are less strong than men-- just as did the very different philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, discussed here. Schopenhauer sounds much like Sim when he says of women:

They are dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; and hence their instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to say what is not true.

Given that so many anti-feminists have argued against female parity by extrapolating their arguments from empirical reality, it stuns me that any feminist would try the same gambit, or speak as if attentiveness to the ways of "the real world" were the essence of heroic nature, as Evie Nagy does here:

Even Marla’s physical victories are almost always made possible by a keen attention to detail that gives her the edge — she notices a fire hose that allows her to catch her fiancé’s assailants off guard; she fends off the evil scientist Diman Saraf with a hurled metal basin, but only after explicitly calculating and anticipating his movements in her mind; she thwarts a group of smugglers when the police are at a loss because she deduces key features of a building that clue her in to their escape plans.

A common theme for those attempting to hype their philosophical positions as true representations of "reality" is to claim that reality itself reflects the truth of their arguments. Sim "proves" that women are "inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings" by asserting that women cannot beat men on an equal footing. Hence fantasies of women kicking butt, in sports or in other forms of entertainment, are related to "the Charlie's Angels Syndrome," and further proof of women's inferiority.

Nagy's argument is less strident but she, too, is validating her concept of superiority as one rooted in the real world, and so she devalues fantasy as a mere "projection."

The amusing thing about both positions is that despite their attempt to align themselves with empirical and/or observable "reality," both Sim's antifeminism and Nagy's version of feminism are philosophical projections. By empiricism's judgment both are unreal, in that neither can be proven empirically.

I believe that a feminism that cannot value fantasy is a psuedofeminism. Such a philosophical position fails to realize how ideals work: that while ideals must be applied in "the real world," they too are fundamentally "unreal," in that they are "projections" through which human beings attempt to alter their circumstances.

Ideals, no matter whether they are of Nagy's or Sim's persuasion, are never demonstrable through "reality." Reality is, rather, the opponent with whom ideals must eternally struggle-- though which one is Jacob, and which is the angel, is a matter I leave to the reader's interpretation.

QUICK ANTI-PSUEDOFEMINISM POST

2012-01-12T16:59:00.002-06:00

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, one Evie Nagy wrote:

...contrary to common belief, Wonder Woman was not the first female superhero. She was preceded by more than half a year by Miss Fury, who starred in her own Sunday comic strip for 10 years beginning in April 1941. Miss Fury was created, written, and drawn by a woman, June Tarpé Mills, who published under the more sexually ambiguous Tarpé Mills. Had Miss Fury entered an enduring canon like DC’s, it’s possible that the template for female superheroes, as well as for superhero comic readership, would have depended more on the influence and perspective of actual women.

I deem this pie-in-the-sky reasoning. I see no way in which "actual women" would ever have influenced the development of superheroes, because the gender differences-- whether originating in biological forces, social conditioning, or a combination thereof-- preclude a lot of women being particularly interested in the action-oriented scenarios that are emblematic of the genre.

If you venture that it's possible that by some hard-to-imagine set of circumstances someone would have come up with a "kinder, gentler" genre of superheroes than the male-oriented breed we know-- sure, it's POSSIBLE. But the set of circumstances would have to be much more involved than Nagy's scenario of seeing female superheroes influenced by Miss Fury rather than Wonder Woman.

I also disagree with these statements:

...in Miss Fury, Marla’s primary “superpower” is human resourcefulness, aligning her less with Wonder Woman than with the nonpowered but formidable heroes of DC’s Bat-family and Marvel heroes such as Hawkeye, Nick Fury (no relation), and Misty Knight. It’s an approach that, even in often totally unrealistic comic book scenarios, tends to produce role models rather than marvels.

The strongest superheroes, male or female, are those whose confidence, abilities, and sex appeal reveal themselves not through artificial projections of fantasy but through ideals that inspire creators, and therefore readers, to be better people.

It's certainly Ms. Nagy's prerogative to LIKE less fantastic types of heroes. Nothing wrong with stating one's particular tastes. But the idea that the more "marvelous" heroes are somehow "artificial," rather than being natural conceptions of the human ability to fantasize, is nonsense. Both the "marvelous" and "uncanny" types of heroes are primarily oriented toward thematic escapism. Both do project some moral values, values that are vital to their narratives, but those values can only be understood within a framework that emphasizes their joint escapist nature. Having read quite a few Golden Age Superman stories, I'd say that the marvelous powers does not in any way preclude "ideals" that may inspire both creators and readers.

In conclusion, the only thing I like about Ms. Nagy's argument is that she appreciates the work of Tarpe Mills.

SIMCHRONICITY

2012-01-10T17:44:00.001-06:00

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some

competitive theater going on there; it makes a lot of psychological sense.

You also have this theme of betrayal, a fairy tale heroine, Snow White, who

became a victim of conspiracy by the evil queen. Or you’ve got the

“Portrait of a Lady” story — innocent young girl as victim of a shadowy

older woman in league with a male and so on. So our hearts went out to her

because we felt she was utterly out of her depth in trying to maneuver

against these two old-guard constellation of enemies — the House of

Windsor and this malign woman from Charles’ past.-- Camille Paglia, Salon.com

A few weeks ago I picked up a comic-shop copy of Dave Sim's GLAMOURPUSS #22. I hadn't looked at the title for some time, though I had probably sampled six or seven before I decided that Sim's main subjects therein didn't move me that much. I had some interest in his interpretation of the photorealist tradition in comic strips and books, but the purchase-killer was the book's parodies of fashion (or "glamour") magazines and the models that sell them. If there is such a thing as "bad good girl art," Sim's parodies were "bad dumb girl art." (To be sure, the art-part was fine; the writing sucked.)

There is, to be sure, nothing wrong (save to the politically correct) about humor built around the central concept of dumb-- and usually pretty-- girls. I've liked a lot of it, ranging from Bill Ward's seminal TORCHY to the Bridwell/Oksner ANGEL AND THE APE. (And fie, triple fie, upon Phil Foglio for the miniseries in which he "smartened up" Angel O'Day!) But I didn't think much of Sim's "DGA" was funny, so I let my attention to GLAMOUPUSS lapse.

The lead feature of GLAMOURPUSS #22-- "Secret Origin of Zootanapuss"-- did nothing to dispel my negative feelings toward Sim and DGA. However, I found that the photo-realistic section of the book had swerved from straightforward history into something Sim himself, in an intro, labels as "Based on a True Story." Much of what Sim relates and theorizes upon does, as I mentioned in A SYNCHRONICITY SAMPLING, strongly resemble the Jungian concept of synchronicity.

I hasten to state that Dave Sim doesn't endorse Jungian concepts anywhere in GP #22, and that for all I know, he may never have done so. To my recollection the only direct allusion to Jung in the late issues of CEREBUS was a negative one, so I don't have any reason to believe that Sim would be receptive to Jung's concept of a "psychoid archetype."

During the section seen in GP #22, Sim ruminates on certain obscure aspects in the life of artist Stan (HEART OF JULIET JONES) Drake-- what caused Drake and his family to relocate from New York to Connecticut, Drake's earlier nervous breakdown, and the fateful 1956 car-crash that injured Drake and killed his passenger, Alex (FLASH GORDON, RIP KIRBY) Raymond. Sim has evidently been writing on these matters since issue #14, so I'm coming late to the party.

But what a synchronicitous party it is! Sim correctly presents his speculations as essentially fictional in nature, yet he manages to weave together a tapestry of corresponding incidents and resonances between not only the worlds of Drake and Raymond but also those of Al Capp (whose brother wrote JULIET JONES), and Margaret Mitchell (whose name was used to launch the strip). Others, more distantly removed in time and space though not in theme, include Princess Diana and Dodi Feyed, Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, and (making a "crossover" appearance from their CEREBUS incarnations) F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

"There's a strange quality," asserts Sim on page 14, "to Stan Drake's life that seems to ... interweave... itself with reality and various forms of fiction." I relate this to the Paglia quote above, where the author sees the death of Diana as something more than straightforward reality, finding that the real event shares themes with two fictional creations, one folkloric and one high-literary. In contrast to Paglia, though, Sim focuses on a wealth of intriguing little details. It's like reading Samuel Rosenberg's NAKED IS THE BEST DISGUISE, where the intensive investigation is applied to real people.

Of course, in the empiricist worldview shared by most comics-critics-- whether as passionate conviction or default-- there can be no "interweaving" between fact and fiction. The knee-jerk reaction of many critics would be to assert that Sim was simply projecting on reality images that he personally wished to behold in them. This charge of "projection" comes even easier when a given writer endorses unpopular opinions, as Sim has been known to with regard to feminism.

I used to argue somewhat against Sim's anti-feminist positions in the lettercols of CEREBUS, but though I found him a stubborn and sometimes intransigent opponent, I would never do what many critics and forum-posters have done: to consider him "crazy" because his view verges far from my own. It's true that there are "crazy people" who look too hard through a particular emotionally-tinted lens and lose the ability to see anything else, but that's clearly not the case with Dave Sim.

However, in one sense Dave Sim and his critics are on the same page, insofar as they subscribe to the Platonic notion that emotion is epiphenomenal while reason, essentially its opposite in common parlance, is one's sole source of insight into the workings of the universe.

On page 23, in conversation with a supporter named Eddie Khanna, Sim says:

"'The Wedding of the Century' billing always seems to incite emotion-based psychosis in our society about what almost invarably prove to be ill-starred and short-lived unions... [list of four such marriages, including Diana and Charles]...And it seems obvious that you have to put the female names first in these 'marriages.'"

Sim's distate for mere emotion was made explicit long before this, as in this provocative quotation:

"Emotion, whatever the Female Void would have you believe, is not a more Exalted State than is Thought. In point of fact, I think Emotion is animalistic, serpent-brain stuff. Animals do not Think, but I am reasonably certain that they have Emotions. 'Eating this makes me Happy.' 'When my fur is all wet and I am cold, it makes me Sad." "Ooo! Puppies!' 'It makes me Excited to Chase the Ball!' Reason, as any husband can tell you, doesn't stand a chance in an argument with Emotion... this was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were denied the vote for so long."

Of course Sim's critics would simply turn the reason/emotion argument against him in response, seeking to prove that his judgments were flawed by his emotional responses and that they were using a truer species of reason than he.

Where the matter of synchronicity/interweaving is concerned, however, there can be no final appeal to a hypothetical reason. Just as individuals think that a supposed "psychic experience" is valid or invalid on the basis of personal experience, one's view of synchronicity is no less personally determined.

In agreement with Jung, I don't think that emotion is epiphenomenal. I don't know if psychic energy is a quantifiable influence upon real events, but such influence might be a reason-- if not the only reason--why discrete events in history seem to form parallels to one another. The lazy empiricist merely asserts that there can be no such influence or resonances, based on the materialist proposition that mind cannot affect matter. Said empiricist might rebut Sim's "interweavings" by asserting that Sim is seeing what he wants to see: ill-starred unions, in which women are more prominent than they should be, coming to bad endings.

Contrary to both Sim and the materialists, I believe that emotion, at the very least, provides a lens through which everything, including rational cogitation, is colored.

Sim looks at four disastrous marriages, one being that of Princess Diana, and sees a meaningful theme of "the haughty woman brought low," if I am not interpreting him too freely.

Paglia looks at the death of Diana and sees another meaningful theme, that of the maiden persecuted by society and the influence of an older and hostile female relative.

As I stated at the end of THE INTERSUBJECTIVITY SOLUTION, neither interpretation is wrong. Both are "true" in the sense that these are valid resonances that the historical events evoke, even though the respective themes are tangentially opposed.

In my view this is the crucial nature of Jung's archetype theory. It can't be channeled to reflect only ideas that a certain societal stratum considers good or proper or rational. It reflects everything, warts and all. Men trying to pretend that all women are dumb; women trying to pretend that all men are stupid. The collective unconscious preserves it all-- and if Jung's theory of psychic energy holds water, then it could be a reason why so many persons repeatedly attempt to follow the pattern of myths, even against their own rational best interest.

In conclusion, I can only say that I'll be checking out back issues of GLAMOURPUSS, intensely interested in the Stan Drake Universe, but maybe passing over the Dave Sim version of the "DGA" archetype.

SYNCHRONICITY SIDEBAR

2012-01-07T14:14:00.001-06:00

Before moving on to more theoretical matters re: synchronicity, I thought it might be appropriate to relate a couple of instances of my own quizzicial encounters with same.

One of them I mentioned on a 6-2-2003 post on the Forum that Deserves Not Mention:

...there aren't any appreciators of Jungian synchronicity here to my knowledge, but the way I found the above link is synchronicitous. Looking for a definition of "New Age," I typed in "definition of New Age," and the above link was about the second or third one I explored. As it happened, it's by Massimo Introvigne, whom I didn't know from Adam-12 before last week or so, when I read his article at the online SLAYAGE site. Since said article had a comics-connection, I posted a link to it here under "Vampires, superheroes and the Frankfurt School." And now a week later, I'm linking to something else Introvigne wrote on a wholly-different subject.

I just hope the Synchronicity Switchboard is just throwing this development my way to help convince you poor rationalist doubters, and not trying to tell me to quit my job and become a publicist for Massimo Introvigne. I have enough trouble trying to hype my own stuff.

Like most of my synchronous experiences, this was something less than a vision on the Road to Damascus (i.e., I probably never read anything else by Introvigne). But I thought then, and still think, that it's a little odd to stumble across two disparate works by the same (not especially famous) author within the course of a week or so. Others' mileage will vary on whether this example deserves to be filed under "more than coincidence."

Incidentally, eight years later the link to Introvigne's short historical writeup on the early hisory of the Frankfurt School is still good, and the essay's still recommended:

http://slayageonline.com/essays/slayage7/Introvigne.htm

An even less vision-worthy incident occured over the Xmas holidays. My 13-year-old nephew has become a fan of certain kinds of "so bad it's good" cinema, as well as being a big STAR WARS fan. Thus I took it upon myself to introduce him to the questionable joys of the 1980 FLASH GORDON, which I'd planned to watch anyway in order to review it here.

The movie was a big success with my nephew, though others in the household weren't nearly as enthusiastic. However, later that day my brother chose to bring up a favorite episode of SEINFELD on Netflix Streaming: "The Bubble Boy," which first aired on 10-7-92. The plot revolves around Jerry and his posse getting roped into visiting a "bubble boy," with the black-comic outcome that George gets into an argument with the kid and nearly causes his death. In a B-story, Jerry and Elaine get lost on the way and end up in a diner, where a waitress importunes Jerry to put his celebrity photo on the wall. And there on the diner-wall with various other celebrities (whom I did not note down) is none other than...

...Sam J. Jones, sporting his classically-bad FLASH GORDON haircut.

"What is Sam Jones to me, or me to Sam Jones?" Probably the real question should be who in the SEINFELD crew thought of sticking a photo of the not-terribly-successful actor on the diner-wall. Could it have been Seinfeld himself, known for peppering the show's sets with Superman trinkets? Or maybe it was just the luck of the draw; someone selecting stock photos at random, but only of actors who had no great reputation, to show that Jerry wasn't going to be joining any immortals on the wall.

I'm not sure if two Sam Joneses in one day trumps two Massimo Introvignes in the space of seven days. I wouldn't say that I was "guided" to those particular experiences in the rather egotistical "the universe revolves around me" manner of certain types of Christians. But I do think that whenever you encounter some particularly improbable set of apparent coincidences, it's worthwhile to do a little thinking about the nature of what we label "coincidence."

A SYNCHRONICITY SAMPLING

2012-01-05T17:46:00.003-06:00

"Natura non facit saltum" (nature does not make jumps) -- Latin proverb

As it happens, not long before I came across Denny O'Neil's reference to the "Net of Indra" metaphor, which stresses the connectedness of all things, I found a similar reference in an issue of Dave Sim's GLAMOURPUSS. I'll examine that reference in greater detail in another essay, but in essence, it started me thinking more about the concept of synchronicity.

Synchronicity is usually tagged with the definition "meaningful coincidence," as opposed to the many coincidences one encounters around which no discernible meaning accrues. In addition, Jung stresses in some writings that synchronicities take place due to an "acausal connecting principle."

Now, no matter how one tries to imagine such a principle, one can't help but do so with a mind conditioned by the actions and reactions of a cause-and-effect world. With that in mind, though, can one deduce by what properties such a connecting principle might operate?

The usual empiricist position toward such theorizing essentially takes the same attitude as the Latin proverb above: nature allows no jumps, no sidesteps, no free rides. But in a universe now informed by theories of quantum mechanics, does this position of naive realism hold water?

In "Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle," Jung wrote:

...since experience [i.e., Rhine's experimental work] has shown that under certain conditions space and time can be reduced almost to zero, causality disappears along with them, because causality is bound up with the existence of space and time and physical changes, and consists essentially in the succession of cause and effect. For this reason synchronistic phenomena cannot in principle be associated with any conceptions of causality. Hence the interconnection of meaningfully coincident factors must necessarily be thought of as acausal.

Joseph Cambray in his SYNCHRONICITY: NATURE AND PSYCHE IN AN INTERCONNECTED UNIVERSE, responds thusly:

...the collapse of space and time together with the disappearance of the principle of causality is remarkably congruent with the best theories in physics for the origins of the universe... It is as if at the deepest level [Jung] is finding a place for the psyche at the origins of the universe through the psychoid archetype."

Cambray is careful to emphasize that this does not connote the embrace of theism:

This is not an intelligent design argument but an indication that the universe is as permeated with psyche as it is with space, time, and matter; that synchronicities provide traces of an original undifferentiated state.

Now, in past essays I've always insisted that human culture does not obey the same logic that nature does: that it is more than a little possible for culture to "make jumps." It would be interesting, though, if the same principles that would seem to show a given culture working its way toward a given cultural archetype-- be it a positive or negative one-- were reflected in the world of physics.

After all, if as Stephen Hawking has argued, time did not exist within the universe's singularity-state, then it may not be correct to assume that time operates at all times on the physical principles valorized by empiricist thought.

Thus, if Dave Sim sees one set of meaningful coincidences in a given scenario, while Denny O'Neil sees another set elsewhere, one need not assume that either are connected through any linkage characteristic of time or space, but that they are rather connected through a medium of psychic intensity.

This in turn would have interesting ramifications for my notions of pluralism as expressed here. It would mean not just that a pluralistic credo of intersubjectivity was moral, but also natural.

For now, I'll wrap up by repeating the summary from the aforesaid essay:

Both interpretations would fit what I would call "the rule of intersubjective significance," which phrase I derive almost completely from Jonathan Culler in his 1975 STRUCTURALIST POETICS, except for my interpolation of "intersubjective." Both positions could be enjoyably argued although to little effect, for the comparison of the two stories, despite some similar features, would still hinge on each critic finding an intersubjective meaning that the other did not have-- which returns to the well-seasoned argument about "apples and oranges."
Nevertheless, the exercise remains worth the candle within a pluralist conception of literary hermeneutics. Each story resonates with some though not all readers precisely because each evokes a "significance" in those readers; a significance founded in the conventions of storytelling and in the expectations of readers looking to have those conventions both confirmed and denied.

COMPLEXITY AND CONNECTEDNESS

2012-01-03T17:10:00.002-06:00

"The harsh truth is, nothing in popular culture, and probably nothing in any other kind of culture, is ever wholly original. I don't like this any more than you do, maybe less. Everything is interconnected, sometimes in unlikely ways:-- Denny O'Neil, "Introduction," THE BATCAVE COMPANION.

O'Neil's short introduction to this book of essays on "both the Batman who lives in a fictional world as a hero and the Batman who lives in our world as a media phenomenon," which stories, O'Neil asserts, are "inseparable."

Interestingly, O'Neil eschews any reference to Jung, whom many pop-culture explicators (including me) regard as the "go-to" guy for the interconnectedness of personal lives and transpersonal culture. Instead, O'Neil references a much older metaphor for interconnectedness than Jung's collective unconscious:

"We're looking at a net. It has to be a largish one, though exactly how big is up to you... Now, imagine that at each juncture of your net there is a jewel, cunningly hung so it reflects all the other jewels... It's called the Net of Indra and scholars say it was conceived of by a Buddhist monk named Tu Shun about 2640 years ago. It was originally meant as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of everything that exists..."

O'Neil then goes on to "suggest that Batman is one of the gems in what we'll call, morphing the metaphor and cringing only a little, 'the net of popular culture.'" O'Neil doesn't pursue the metaphor any further, though, as he's concerned with laying out the origins of the character-- perhaps the one with whom his own comics-career is dominantly associated-- in terms of its prosaic origins.

Though I'd argue that the "Net of Indra" doesn't assert cultural interconnectedness any *better* than Jung's collective unconscious, I would imagine that the former metaphor has the advantage of simplicity. With a modern writer like Jung, one cannot quote him without feeling some need to establish all sorts of issues on which one may or may not agree with the Swiss psychologist. By contrast, Tu Shun's precise beliefs about the phenomenology of the "Net of Indra" are probably lost to mundane investigations, though they might be retrievable through some fantasy-version of the collective unconscious, such as Alan Moore's "Immateria."

Now, phenomenologically speaking, what does it mean to say that everything is connected?

In terms of everyday experience, human beings would be unable to function if they were aware, every waking minute of every day, that, say, the day's weather was being influenced by the flutter of a butterfly's wings in China. So our belief of separateness, even if it is a falsehood, would seem to be a falsehood necessary for sheer survival.
Literary experience is a different kettle of fish. I argued in JOCKEYING FOR JUXTAPOSITION that the essence of the literary crossover is that normatively it stresses the author's (and reader's) conscious comparison of the different mythologies of characters:

This opposition, in addition to providing the anticipated conflict of the two characters in this crossover, makes clear what resonance each character should possess in order to remain relatively consistent for the sake of the story. But clearly there are no "subconscious" themes that require amplification here. The juxaposition by the authors has been conscious all the way, and by and large the readers' appreciation of the authors' skill in making a meaningful juxtaposition is conscious as well.

In Jungian terms, this would be considered "directed thinking," while in Langerian terms it would be "discursive symbolism." But other, perhaps subtler forms of "meaningful juxtaposition" arise as the result of what Jung calls "fantasy thinking," which parallels roughly to Langer's concept of "presentational symbolism."

I introduce this notion in order to distinguish the different ways in which Batman is "connected" to other entities in the pop-culture universe, whether they antedate or postdate his presence. Fan research has established that elements of a pulp SHADOW prose-tale were used for Batman's first adventure, "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," so this bit of artistic swipery would be a "connectedness" born of conscious, directed thought.

On the other hand, the association of Batman with Gothic weirdness and uncanny menaces contravenes the influence of the Shadow, which was often if not always a fairly mundane pulp-adventure tale in the years preceding Batman's advent. So one might see Batman as "connecting," via the fantasy-thinking of his creators, with archetypal patterns that would produce more, shall we say, eclectic symbolism, as in this story from DETECTIVE COMICS #34:

To be sure, the idea of Batman as a investigator of Gothic mysteries did not last long, though it surfaced again in deference to both creators and fans who wanted a more mysterioso hero.

In contrast to the example of "directed thinking," in which one author simply cadges his "connections" from another (today Kane's swipe would probably be called an "homage"), this tendency would be an example of "fantasy thinking," which is one with the Jungian concept of *amplification,* of expanding on all possible connotations of a given literary figure or phenomenon.

So we have here two different species of connectedness: one produced through conscious thought-- whether it's imitating a forbear or comparing two distinct character-mythologies-- and one produced through dream-thinking and freeflowing associations.

Both are capable of generating the literary quality of *mythicity,* but the former may be closer in nature to what Kant calls the "reproductive imagination" while the latter compare better with the "productive imagination," in that they evince more of a sheer *leap* from one concept to another.

And in the final analysis, the beauty of the "Net of Indra" metaphor is that one cannot only see in one of its gems only the gems closest to it, but every gleam of every gem within the vastness of the net.

JOCKEYING FOR JUXTAPOSITION

2011-12-27T13:45:00.002-06:00

At the conclusion of INTERESTING FLEISCHER QUOTE I said:

"at present I'm trying more to work around to a response to Curt Purcell's thoughts on crossovers."

While I so meditated, Curt removed his crossover-essays from GROOVY AGE OF HORROR, so I can't respond to them. I can, however, respond to one of the sources he invoked: Scott McCloud's use of panel-to-panel transitions in the medium of comic books, as seen in UNDERSTANDING COMICS. I'm less concerned here with panel-t-panel transition itself, as McCloud is, than with the practice of juxtaposing images and concepts within a narrative, since this practice is vital to the understanding of crossovers.

In UC, McCloud identifies six types of transition, most of which depended on some direct association between the images denoted in each of the two panel-examples. The one exception to this proposition-- which Curt mentioned at one point in his essay-- was a type of juxtaposition which McCloud termed "the non-sequitur, which offers no logical relationship between panels whatsoever." Here's one example he used:

McCloud then poses the question: "Is it possible for any sequence of panels to be totally unrelated to each other?" He answers in the negative:

“No matter how dissimilar one image may be to another, there is a kind of alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring combinations.”

In Jungian terms, this form of "alchemy" would be one that could be expressed through the technique of *amplification," defined thusly in the online "Glossary of Jungian terms:"

Amplification: using imagery to create a meaningful context around a symbol needing examination. Also known as elaboration of the symbol. In subjective amplification, a dreamer, for example, uses active imagination to associate to a dream symbol in order to grasp it better. In objective amplification, the analyst collects themes from mythology, alchemy, religion, and other sources to illuminate, or amplify, archetypal symbols produced in dreams or fantasy.

Assuming that one sees the above images naively-- that is, not as examples of a visual/narrative theory but expecting that some "logical relationship" exists between the disparate images for some communicative purpose-- the reader must "amplify" what the images mean in order to figure out why the author thus juxatposted them. For instance, to a given reader the implied triumph of a politician who resembles Richard Nixon might be read as the triumph of a repressive force. In contrast, the panel showing a piece of abstract art might be amplified to mean freedom from repression, in that abstract art originated as an attempt to deviate from the emphasis on representationalism in the world of canonical art. Further, if a comics-narrative started with these above images and then continued to build on it with other non-sequitur images, the reader (assuming that he made the above correlation) would then attempt to build on that narrative by forming amplified associations of whatever "meaning or resonance" he detected in subsequent images.

Now, in this situation the reader would have to draw on his own subconscious associations in order to make sense of the randomly-juxtposed images (as well as words, if any were used). However, this is not how most narratives proceed.

Most narratives, both in canonical or non-canonical art, manipulate the "meaning and resonance" of words and images much more deliberately, along the lines of McCloud's first five examples of panel-to-panel transition. Further, in a whole work of art-- be it comics, prose, or music-- one is not limited only to horizontal transitions. Anthropologist Edmund Leach writes:

"So it is Levi-Strauss' bold proposition that the algebra of the brain can be represented as a rectangular matrix of at least two (but perhaps several) dimensions which can be read up and down or side to side like the words of a crossword puzzle."-- Leach, CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS, p. 55.

In most narratives, there is no need to evoke the subconscious to interpret the logical relationships: one can simply go "side to side" at all times, paying little attention to the vertical (or, as Levi-Strauss calls it, the "harmonic") relationship. Take this crossover as an example of juxtaposing not images but whole comic-character mythologies:

The first encounter of Batman and Judge Dredd, if one wanted to classify it roughly along the lines of McCloud-ian transitions, might be called "aspect-to-aspect." Even if a reader knows little or nothing about the mythologies of the two characters, the story by Grant and Wagner is explicit about making clear each hero's nature, particularly in terms of one aspect: relationship to the law. An online review sums it up nicely: "The Ultimate Law Enforcer vs. the Ultimate Vigilante!" Dredd recognizes no aspect of law enforcement save following the rules and convicting perpetrators; Batman incarnates the idea, as others before me have stated, that the law does not work and that a passionate yet judicious vigilantism is needed.

This opposition, in addition to providing the anticipated conflict of the two characters in this crossover, makes clear what resonance each character should possess in order to remain relatively consistent for the sake of the story. But clearly there are no "subconscious" themes that require amplification here. The juxaposition by the authors has been conscious all the way, and by and large the readers' appreciation of the authors' skill in making a meaningful juxtaposition is conscious as well.

On the whole, any kind of crossover-- of characters, universes, or what have you-- generally requires the author to give heavy thought to what qualities distinguish the respective focal presences who are being crossed over. In other words, any theory that stresses the function of the subconscious and/or amplification with respect to the nature of crossovers would seem to be gilding the lily. When dealing with full narratives (as opposed to panel transitions) one is more likely to get examples of Scott McCloud's alchemy in stories dealing with but one focal presence-- Batman in his early, somewhat delirious solo adventures, for example.
In the above essay, I wrote:

Now, given that I favor Jungian amplification over Freudian reductiveness, I think that all these European, Asian or Gothic-horror exoticisms *mean* something beyond just Bob Kane and Bill Finger copying every pulp device they could find. Clearly the creators thought there was some advantage of emphasizing so much exotica, or readers would have seen more tales in the DICK TRACY-like mold.

Given all my anti-Marx rants here, I would hope that any readers would know that said "meaning" has nothing to do with the usual Marxist blather. Contrary to Frederic Jameson, examined here, the unconscious/subconscious cannot be reduced to mere political figurations. McCloud's idea of "alchemy" is far more apposite, but the alchemy of the subconscious seems to flower best when the reader is merely wondering about how to interpret the juxtapositions within one mythos, rather than trying to forage his way through two or more at the same time.

More on crossovers in a follow-up essay, though maybe not before the New Year...

ANOTHER KIND OF FOXY GRANDPA

2011-12-20T16:08:00.005-06:00

I speak of Zorro, the fox, who in a real sense is one of the "grandfathers" of the superhero genre, even if many people don't deem him a "superhero" as such. In this essay I compared this "uncanny" figure to an "atypical" (now called "naturalistic") hero, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and a "marvelous" one, Batman:

In the many iterations of Johnston McCulley’s Zorro, most take place in a world that is essentially like that of the Pimpernel: a world which seems to have no metaphenomenal aspects. Zorro, however, is the exception. Where “Scarlet Pimpernel” is simply a code-name for a mysterious figure, Zorro’s costume confers on him a charisma that provides him with greater narrative charisma. The Zorro narratives, while insisting that Zorro is merely a skilled human, emphasize his presence as a spectre of fear to his opponents, and it is this which gives the black-clad avenger the charisma of “the uncanny.”

I stand by my assertion that Zorro possesses a "greater narrative charisma," if only by virtue of his uncanny costume, than a more mundane type like the Pimpernel. However, I must admit that until last week I'd never got round to reading the original Johnson McCully prose story that birthed Zorro-- or as McCully frequently calls him, "Senor Zorro." (Thus we see that Roald Dahl was not the first one to write about a "Mister Fox.")

I must admit that McCully doesn't write a lot of florid passages about Zorro's supernal appearance, as pulp authors would for characters like the Shadow and the Spider. As the above illustration shows, the original prose character wears a full face-mask, not the half-mask popularized in the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks adaptation. Only a small handful of cinematic Zorro-costumes followed the example of the novel's costume, but then, McCully himself reputedly borrowed ideas from the movie-- the tracing of the "Z" in the enemy's flesh, for example-- which were incorporated in later editions of the novel. The full-mask makes it more logical that no one would be able to connect Zorro and Don Diego. In contrast, when the hero wears the half-mask, one feels tempted to speak a line like the one from the 2011 GREEN LANTERN film:

"You don't think I would recognize you because I can't see your cheekbones?"

Compared to some of the great popular fictions of the time, McCully's novel is slight, and probably would have been forgotten had it not been adapted to the film-medium. A substantial portion of the novel deals with Don Diego's romance with Senorita Lolita Pulido: he romances her in his identity as the mysterious but manly thief Zorro, and then turns around, pretending to be too effete as Diego to bother with details like wooing. Superman's creators purportedly took strong influence from the Zorro model, but the Diego of the novel projects less weakness (though he does often speak of being fatigued) than the languidness of the bored aristocrat.

One interesting detail is that the novel is resolved when lone hero Zorro is joined in his efforts by The Avengers-- what is what, in just one line, a group of aristocratic young supporters call themselves when they rally to this Spanish Robin Hood. I haven't checked yet to see if they make it into the best-known film adaptations, though they may be the basis for the serial Zorro's Fighting Legion.

Though McCully doesn't spend a lot of time describing Zorro, toward the novel's end Diego relates an interesting take on how the very identity of Zorro empowered him:

"It is a peculiar thing to explain, senores. The moment I donnned cloak and mask, the Don Diego part of me fell away. My body straightened, new blood seemed to course through my veins, my voice grew strong and firm, fire came to me! And the moment I removed cloak and mask I was the languid Don Diego again. Is it not a peculiar thing?"

I hardly need point out (though I will) that this is the essence of "uncanny phenomenality," in which no marvelous phenomenon actually takes place but there is some phenomenon that suggests the breaking of reality's borders. This, more than the practical considerations of the costume, is what makes Zorro a hero of the uncanny.

EXEMPLARY STAN, EXCEPTIONAL JACK 'N' STEVE PART II

2011-12-17T15:35:00.001-06:00

To recap: fannish opinion usually considers that famed editor/writer Stan Lee didn't do anything of worth prior to Silver Age Marvel Comics; that he must have been coasting on the talents of his artists-- largely Kirby and Ditko, though sometimes the argument is extended to all the Marvel artists as a whole.

I for one find this argument may be a bit too pat. Whether one agrees with it or not, though, depends on whether one believes that the work Kirby and Ditko did prior to their collaborations with Lee was substantially like the work they did slightly later with Stan Lee. Many fans have seen no essential differences between the Kirby of CHALLENGES OF THE UNKNOWN and the Kirby of FANTASTIC FOUR. I take the position that there are considerable differences between these two phases of commerical creativity.

However, "Defending Stan Lee" in terms of his pre-Marvel creativity presents two large problems.

The first is that in many of his public statements following the success of the Marvel line, Stan himself dismissed his Golden Age work in the comic book medium. Of course, in so doing Lee was patently attempting to design a story of heroic proportions: in which his Marvel Comics work alone shone above the dreck he'd been creating for the previous twenty years. While it's quite likely that Lee had no deep and abiding regard for the work he'd done prior to Marvel, his judgment of it isn't centered in any critical process as such. One suspects that if an early comics-character like Lee's "Jack Frost" had become as extraordinarily popular as the Human Torch was in that era, and continued to be revived to good effect, Lee would probably not have minded linking his name to that chilly concept.

The second problem, though, is that unless one goes out and buys tons of hard-to-find Lee Timely-Atlas comics, there's no way to assess the quality of Lee's "dreck."  Recent years have seen a greater turnout of reprints of the Timely-Atlas line, but I suspect that we're not going to see omnibus editions devoted to goofy teen-comics like MARGIE, WILLIE and NELLIE THE NURSE-- even though it's arguable that it was in stories like these that Lee honed the brand of "insult humor" he used so well in his Silver Age superhero comics.

The expected riposte from Lee-loathers would probably be, "So what?" While Steve Ditko didn't enter the comics field until 1953 and didn't work for Timely/Atlas until 1955, Jack Kirby had been working in comics only a little longer than Stan Lee had. In contrast to Lee's middling record, Kirby, albeit in concert with Joe Simon, had turned out a plethora of conceptions. Not all of them were successful, but even co-creating only Captain America and the Boy Commandos would put him (in many fans' estimation) far ahead of Lee's co-creation of such minor figures as the Destroyer and Headline Harris.

For many fans, this ends the discussion. Early Kirby created more famous characters than early Lee did, so Kirby alone was the creative one, period.

However, that's not a viable measure of creativity as such.

Were Lee's Golden Age stories dreck? I've read only a smattering of his works, though it's not always easy to tell what Lee did or did not write, as demonstrated here by blogger Nick Caputo.  Some have been bad, and some have been good-- but only in a special way: the way I would term "exemplary," but never "exceptional."

I said in EXEMPLARY AND EXCEPTIONAL 2 that I felt a story could be very ordinary in some respects yet exemplary in just one, as was the first Batman story. The same is generally true of early Lee work like his war-comics, humor comics, and superhero comics.  A collaboration between Stan Lee and Dan deCarlo (Stan 'n' Dan, as they were then billed) might be, in terms of plot, a fairly ordinary cute-girl comic like MILLIE THE MODEL, but it would in my view be exemplary if it possessed some quality above the ordinary. I did perceive a sprightliness, an effervescence, in Lee's early humor work that I don't see in a lot of the humor comics of the period, which I do dismiss as entirely ordinary.

Kirby's work, however, also has its moments of badness and goodness, but when it was good, it was good in the "exceptional" sense, or, to gloss John Romita's remarks, once again, in its sense of "completeness." Even enjoyable Kirby works might present a number of narrative problems, as I argued in my analysis of the first CHALLENGERS story. But Kirby's narrative lapses never diminish that sense of artistic integrity.

I mentioned in Part 1 that one of my forum-foes dismissed not only Lee, but pretty much every comics-writer in the Silver Age. It seems puzzling to me that this opponent could see special qualities in everything Kirby did, and nothing in the work of his contemporaries, even though most if not all of them were engaged in addressing the same pre-teen audience, and were usually employing most of the same story-motifs.

I suggest, in my intersubjective way, that what this individual took for absolute quality was just one type of creative quality: the quality of the artist who brings "integrity" and "completeness" to his narrative world because almost everything in it constitutes something of significance to the artist. This is the world of the exceptional.

However, the world of the exemplary does not cease to exist in comparison to the exceptional, even though many fans have expressed such opinions. Stan Lee probably was never a visionary creator as Kirby was. He probably wasn't even as productive of new concepts as another non-artist writer like Gardner Fox was. But I find it amazing that many fans can view creativity in terms of absolutely nothing else than "new concepts"-- particularly since even "new concepts" are always derived in part from previous ones.

Lee's type of "exemplary" creativity was certainly not focused on blazing new trails, in contrast to the highly personal approaches of Kirby and Ditko. But fans who can dismiss twenty years of work as being uniformly bad just because earlier generations of fans never said much good about the work recalls the parable about how medieval doctors refused to investigate the nature of any disease not covered by the works of Galen.

In other words, the fannish narrative of Lee as dreck-producing drone-- even when it's been put forth by Lee himself!-- is just another example of "received wisdom."

Which, as we all should know--

Is no sort of wisdom whatsoever.

EXEMPLARY STAN, EXCEPTIONAL JACK 'N' STEVE

2011-12-17T14:32:00.003-06:00

"...there were a few guys who did what I would call a complete world on paper. If you looked at one panel of Jack Kirby, you knew where you were. You were in Jack Kirbyland. And when you were in Ditkoland, you knew where you were. The reason I called myself a generic illustrator [is] because my stuff, I could make you believe you were in anybody's land... whatever those guys do has an integrity, a completeness about it; they created an entire world." -- John Romita, Interview in COMICS JOURNAL #252, 2003.

As the essay's title should suggest, I'm referring back to the entwined critical concepts I introduced back in this 2010 essay.

My initial definition was as follows:

for me "exemplary" means principally "that which is a good example of something," while "exceptional" means "that which goes beyond what is expected."

A rough parallel can be made between my categories and the dichotomy suggested by Romita above, with "generic illustration" standing in for "that which serves as a good example," while his idea of a "complete world" parallels "that which goes beyond the expected."

In part two of that brief essay-series, I compared the first Batman story, which was exemplary purely in terms of its accomplishment of introducing the hero, and the Englehart-Rogers stint in DETECTIVE COMICS, in which the creators attempted to boil down the appeal of the Batman mythos into six exceptional issues.

But as the title also suggests, I think I've come up with a better example of the dichotomy: the Great Myth of Marvel Comics. American comics fandom knows no more vital myth: in the beginning there was chaos, until the Three Gods of Comics sorted Kosmos out of chaos, and trailblazed the way to the promised land of Adult Fandom.

But with the orderliness of Kosmos, each god had to be assigned his divine domain. To the God KIRBY, fandom assigned the heights of heaven, wherefrom he rules forever. To the God DITKO, fandom assigned the great seas of churning anxiety, where he too rules in great dignity. And finally, to the God LEE, fandom cast him into the Land of the Dead, because as we all know he never "created" anything and couldn't have done squat if it wasn't for Kirby and Ditko.

I would hope readers might detect a note of sarcasm in the last sentence. No, *I* don't believe the beloved fannish fiction that Stan Lee was nothing without the stellar presences of Ditko and Kirby, but if I had a quarter (inflation you know) for every time I've heard some fan make that statement, I'd probably be rich enough to publish my own line of comics (and not even miss the dough when the line went belly-up).

As I mentioned here, I'd recently been embroiled in yet another Lee-Kirby-Ditko argument in which not a few of my opponents argued in such terms. In fact, one participant not only dismissed everything Stan Lee had ever done, but also every other Silver Age comics writer: Broome, Fox, Binder, Kanigher. There was no attempt to offer any argument as to why they were bad, of course, or why Kirby and Ditko shone so brightly above the muck and mire.

In Part 2 I'll suggest some arguments as to why this perception came about, and why (keeping in line with my project of intersubjectivity) it's both right in some ways, and wrong in others.

INTERESTING FLEISCHER QUOTE

2011-12-14T17:43:00.001-06:00

From the Michael Fleischer interview in COMICS JOURNAL #56 (1980):
"A lot of people think that a story is the place to be a good citizen. The place to be a good citizen is not in your stories. The place to be a good citizen is in your life and in your behavior... a story is an arena for the expression of real feelings, and not for the expression of platitudes or the feelings you think people ought to have."

This is actually a pretty good statement as to why I validate a writer like Frank Miller, even though I wasn't entirely happy with the implications of his 300 graphic novel (as noted in my review of the film-adaptation) and can't begin to understand his perverse political take on the Occupy Movement.

Now, I will note briefly that what we consider "canonical literature" is often if not always informed by some meditation on moral nature. Such moral concern causes me to label it the literature of "thematic realism," while those forms leaning more toward kinetic concerns I designate in terms of "thematic escapism." I won't say that the dividing line between the two is hard and fast; it's more like an equator, approximated rather than physically locatable.

Yet I do feel that great literature is never purely defined by morality, as some critics, like John Gardner and Wayne C. Booth, have implied. Expressiveness in the Cassirerean sense remains at the heart of both forms of literature.

Food for future thought? We'll see, but at present I'm trying more to work around to a response to Curt Purcell's thoughts on crossovers. So morality will have to wait for later.

SHORT THOUGHTS ON DAREDEVIL AND SPIDER-MAN

2011-12-09T15:16:00.001-06:00

(For some reason all my posts with the word "quick" in the title get a lot of views. Let's see if the same thing happens with the word "short.")

The following is excerpted from a Yahoogroup argument, hence the exclusion of a person's name:

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I disagree with [Blank]'s comment that the early Daredevil stories are a "mess." The series doesn't show the dynamism of the Usual Marvel Suspects, but it seems to have started in a gimmicky vein, just as the Hulk did. However, Lee and Ditko found a way to make the Hulk more compelling, while Lee, Wood and Colan and others pretty much kept DD a standard superhero, who was perhaps more like a Golden Age character than any other Marvel hero. Throughout the Lee run there are strong issues, average issues, and weak issues. There aren't any brilliant issues, but IMO that's a long way from being a "mess." A mess is the first 6 issues of the Lee-Kirby HULK.

I think Lee's vision of the character followed the same arc as Spidey-- super-powers make it possible for a retiring/reticent character to bust out and do all sorts of wild id-indulging things. Frank Miller's id is all about unleashing copious quantities of violence, though, while for Lee, the id was all about having wacky fun while beating up no-goods. Still, Lee was pretty good about remembering that Matt Murdock's reticent identity had a different character than Spidey's did, and that MM was more consciously adult than PP.

FOXY GRANDPA STORIES

2011-12-05T15:15:00.001-06:00

As I've recently gotten involved in some ongoing arguments on the old Lee-Kirby credit thing, I've decided to post a few of my observations here as well, starting with this one:

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...none of the stories Stan Lee tells as to the origin of characters he originated are any more far-fetched than those of Kirby.

Remember how Kirby said he came up with the Hulk? Seeing some news story about a woman lift a car off her child, or somesuch. This is what I call a "foxy grandpa" story, because it makes gramps look really clever. Kirby doesn't mention any other factors in his creation of the Hulk-- not any suggestions from Stan about making the Hulk look like Frankenstein, nor whether he Kirby was aware of Dick Briefer's use of that character (I've heard someone claim JK knew of DB), or any influence from THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN.

Lee's spider-on-a-wall for me is not an insidious credit-hogging ploy. It's another "foxy grandpa" story, which we only know to be untrue because of the testimony of Ditko and a few others.

Consider too that by the time Spidey got popular, Stan probably didn't remember particulars as to who did what any more. Of course, even if you'd asked him at the time about Spidey's true genesis, he might not have cared to admit having derived any part of it from the Fly, given the reputation of litigious Archie Comics.

Did Lee hog credit at times? Probably, but you've also got to remember that in the 1960s nobody cared about the fine details of who did what but a handful of earnest fans.

Kirby's descriptions of how he came up with stuff are of a piece with Stan's; lots of generalized metaphors with very few details about corporate or cultural influences.

RISING AND FALLING STARS

2011-12-03T14:08:00.001-06:00

At the onset of this essay I wrote:

Q: When is a superhero not a superhero?

A: When the *dynamis* expressed by either the plot-functions or character-functions within the corpus of a given superhero's exploits is not commensurate with those characteristic of the pure adventure mythos, aligning rather with another mythos, such as that of irony, drama or comedy.

Many fans would not find that answer either funny (which it isn't supposed to be) or intriguing (which it is). Not a few would see no point in slicing and dicing the qualities of what makes superheroes run, much less superheroes across different mythoi (or as those fans would doubtless call them, "genres.")

I do have a point, of course. Having evolved my own definitions for what does and does not belong in the superhero idiom, I find it encumbent on me to formulate reasons as to why I assign a given work in one category or another. Anything else would be mere whim, assignable to Kant's notion of "agreeability" rather than rational judgment.

And then, of course, there's always the additional motivation of having made a wrong judgment in the past oneself.

In this essay I wrote near the conclusion:

...in my "Defining the Superhero" article for COMICS INTERPRETER, I toyed with the notion that Paul Atreides of DUNE might technically fall within the range of the superhero idiom, albeit one in the *mythos* of drama rather than the more normative adventure *mythos.*

The above recap is an oversimplification of what I wrote in the INTERPRETER article. I didn't actually bring up any of the complexities of the Fryean mythoi in that article, so I didn't differentiate him from, say, Superman in that respect. Back then I only focused on arriving at a fundamental definition of the superhero as a type of hero associated with the metaphenomenal, though back in 2002 I was still a long way from positing the NUM theory. Only later would I define DUNE as a drama, albeit a drama in an agonistic mode (term defined here).

Similar questions of categorization arose in the three-part essay series ADVENTURE-COMEDY VS. COMEDY-ADVENTURE, from which the above Q/A was taken. In all of these essays I contrasted an example of some superhero-ish work in which "elements" of either comedy or adventure predominated, though I usually didn't break down the elements specifically, as the first quote specifies, into those of either plot or character. I did do so in this essay, analyzing DOCTOR WHO and STARGATE, but those were both negative examples, works that did not fall into my category of the "pure adventure."

The usefulness of the plot/character dichotomy in that essay impacts on my intention to make my categorization process as rigorous as possible. For instance, if I wish to make a wiki-list of all superhero works that fall into the adventure mythos, that list would consist of:

All works of "pure adventure" (in which both plot and character clearly evoke adventurous *dynamis*

Works in which the plot alone conveys the adventurous *dynamis* and overrides the character-*dynamis*, which belongs to another mythos

Works in which the characters alone convey the adventurous *dynamis* and override the plot-*dynamis*, which belongs to another mythos

As per my remarks on DUNE, often two of the most easily intertwined mythoi are that of adventure and that of drama. Therefore I'll now cite five examples of works in which (a) adventure dominates plot and character, (b) drama dominates plot or character, and (c) adventure dominates plot or character. Since in KNOWNING THE DYNAMICS FROM THE DYNAMIC I used the TV franchise STARGATE as a negative example, it amused me to have all five examples "follow a star."

STAR WARS serves as an unreserved example of the "pure adventure," in which both plot and characters evoke the dynamis of adventure. One can certainly detect elements of drama, comedy and even irony in the film-series (much as I did with four other franchises in this essay). But few would debate that STAR WARS is first and foremost an adventure film-series, though naturally many would not agree with my assigning Luke Skywalker to the superheroic idiom.

As noted above I've already given a negative example, so I'll recapitulate what I said about STARGATE in KNOWING:

Over time the first serial and its epigoni took on an increasing resemblance to the "starship melodramas" of the STAR TREK franchise. I don't think STARGATE was ever as much about what Faulkner called "the human heart in conflict with itself," as all of the TREKshows have arguably been. But in the STARGATE franchise the adventure-mythos became somewhat dennatured. I view this as a lack of heroic *dynamis* within the overall plot-structure, rather than within the concept of the characters

So in STARGATE the mythos of drama pervades the plotting of the series, overshadowing characters who would otherwise fit adventure-archetypes.

Another negative example, but one in which the mythos of drama dominates the characters rather than the plot, would be the 1978-80 versions of BATTLESTAR: GALACTICA. The plot, in which noble humans repeatedly faced the menace of Cylon invaders, clearly takes inspiration from STAR WARS, but the characters lack the *dynamis* of the adventure-mythos, tending toward drama in its manifestation of "melodrama."

Thus neither STARGATE nor the first BATTLESTAR: GALACTICA make it onto my master list (one shouldn't even have to ask about the second GALACTICA, a "pure drama" in all respects).

On to positive examples that *would* make my hypothetical list:

DC Comics' STARMAN, in most of the iterations of the franchise, has usually been a "pure adventure." However, the Starman introduced by James Robinson, whose continuing series ran from 1994-2001, exemplifies the type in which the plot is the main source of the adventure-dynamis. Jack Knight, the serial's hero, is from the first framed as an eternally reluctant fighter, who ends the series by getting out of the superhero business and embracing family life. This *dynamis* fits the archetypal characters of drama more than adventure, but Robinson is largely successful in using the characters' dramatic arcs to ramp up the spirit of adventure, as opposed to its negative example, STARGATE, in which dramatic plots dominates adventurous characters.

My final example must be one in which characters with the adventure-*dynamis* override a plot with a dramatic emphasis. My choice here is the 1978 American STAR BLAZERS, adapted from the Japanese anime TV-series SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO (which I have not seen in its original form). Like GALACTICA, most of the story took place aboard a ship with a multitudinous crew, which of course was exploited for melodramatic plot-developments. However, in contrast to GALACTICA, the heroics of main characters Derek Wildstar and Mark Venture against the formidable "Leader Desslock" received far more emphasis than any of the melodramatic situations aboard ship. Like many Japanese anime of the period, STAR BLAZERS taps a vein of world-weariness that may stem from Japanese culture's reactions to postwar anomie. Nevertheless, even if the main heroes are not quite as uncompromised as Luke Skywalker, their *dynamis* is allied to that of those space-opera heroes who conform to the superheroic idiom.

I realize that these five examples by themselves would not be sufficient to prove my case. I believe that I could make a full-fledged textual analysis of plot and character motifs in all five works that would so prove it. But that would be an undertaking too complex for a blogpost, and detractors would simply disregard sustained critical analysis if it did not lead to some preformed conclusion, like the popular "Superheroes are fascist," which still comes up from time to time. Given those circumstances, I'm content to let this argument rest with no more than an outline of my methodology.

WHAT WOMEN WILL PT. 3

2011-11-29T14:57:00.001-06:00

"When animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction."-- Carl Jung, AION, pt. II.

First, one more go-round for the assertion made in an earlier essay that engendered this essay series:

The action-heroine is a better symbol of the Schopenhaurean Will than the male action-hero.

I'll amend one minor aspect of that statement: it should read "Schopenhaurean-Nietzschean Will." Reason being that although Schopenhauer may be the first great philosopher to expound upon a concept of The Will, Nietzsche's reconfiguration of the concept to suit his own priorities is no less significant. Indeed, one might hazard that the two men have given us the opposite sides of one coin, both of which suggest an emotional dynamization invovled, whether one is denying or celebrating the allure of The Will.

At the end of WHAT WOMEN WILL PT. 1, I wrote:

In the next installment of WHAT WOMEN WILL, I'll explore a little more as to the archetypal associations that arise when the woman is "Taker" rather than "Giver."

In point of fact Part II contained only intimations on this subject, as I deciced that a side-excursion into Nietzsche-Land would prove valuable. The above topic will now be addressed here in full.

I also said, at the end of Part II:

In part 3 I will examine more fully the two archetypes I find implicit in the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche-- the Compassionate Man and the Barbarous Woman-- and relate them further to the archetypes arising in modern popular fiction.

Note the word "implicit." I am not stating that these archetypes are consciously promulgated by the two philosophers, but that I find them implicit in certain of their writings. Schopenhauer, who exalts men over women because the former sex possesses both greater strength and greater reason, must be imagining his ideal in the Compassionate Man, who alone possesses the power to deny the life-force within the Will. Thus Schopenhauer should be viewed as a thinker aligned with "the ancient force that gives," though his ideal exemplars of this force are male. Nietzsche aligns himself with the virtues of "the ancient force that takes," and generally praises male qualities almost as much as Schopenhauer. However, he admires the feminine skills of "dissimulation" that Schopenhauer professes to despise, and goes so far as to say that:

Woman is indescribably more evil than man; also cleverer: a good nature is in a woman a form of degeneration." - Nietzsche

I suggest that Nietzsche was charmed, perhaps even titillated, by his own image of the Barbarous Woman, who might thus be seen as a better representative of his celebration of "the force that takes" than any male archetype in his repertoire. That said, I freely admit that Nietzsche's left-handed compliments to his idea of barbarous women sustain only a tenuous connection to the archetype to which I alluded in Part II with my citation of "the Bloodbath of the Goddess Anat," or earlier references to the "action-heroines" of popular fiction.

And yet, the connection is there, and can be glossed somewhat by the above quote from Carl Jung, whose psychological theories were influenced by both philosophers.

Like the two philosophers, Jung was a man of his time. In the essay "Woman in Europe" (1927) he devotes a modicum of respect toward the changes feminism was wreaking in the society of his time. He avers that feminism represents a "step toward social independence," even while he worries as to whether "woman is doing something not wholly in accord with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature."

Given that Jung did not believe in gross essentialism-- i.e., that women had a single nature any more than men did-- he evolved the theory of the anima/animus archetypes, "anima" being the feminine soul within man and "animus" the masculine soul within women. As shown in the quote above, he imagines the female's animus possessing a "sword of power," emblematic of physical strength, while the male's anima possesses a witchy power of "illusion and seduction," like Schopenhauer's "dissimulation."

From this idea, that women could have masculine portions of their souls and men could have the complementary feminine aspects, it's no great step to what I like to call the "reverse-archetypes" found throughout mythology and literature. Jung does not elaborate on these in AION, but mythology is certainly replete with "Males Who Give"-- Osiris, Orpheus, Jesus-- as well as "Women Who Take," ranging from female monsters like harpies and sirens and war-goddesses like Anat. These are, in my view, examples of what Schopenhauer calls "the more developed Idea resulting from this victory over several lower Ideas or objectifications of will."

Now, on the cultural level, these inversions of expected male and female propensities would be equally valid. But why o why (at long last) have I said that "the action-heroine is a better symbol of the Schopenhaurean Will than the male action-hero?"

Simplicity itself. Whereas the two reverse-archetypes are equal in cultural terms, they are different in terms of their contravention of natural law, as discussed here.

In the "real world" of experience, males, especially in their role of rulers, are capable of becoming cultural lawgivers or dispensers of wisdom. Some men may choose to emphasize "the force that takes," and become warlords of mythic proportions, and some may choose to emphasize compassion, "the force that gives." However, real women-- culturally known for representing "the force that gives"-- have a physical disadvantage in terms of attempting to act out the role of "the force that takes."

Given that fact of physical law, why then do we have mythologies that depict goddesses of battle? Why Anat, Athena, and Ishtar, among many others? And why should literature take any pleasure in presenting mortal women as winning battles against men, whether it be Britomart in THE FAERIE QUEENE, Mrs. Corney in OLIVER TWIST, or non-superpowered fighters like Batgirl and Black Canary?

Precisely because, as I discussed here:

'"the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people," even if it were sufficient for human beings politically, can never be sufficient in the world of literature.'

Thus, when fictional action-heroes do their kickass thing, they are in essence "going with the flow," conforming to an archetype of male behavior based in both culture and physical nature. When fictional action-heroines kick ass, they are in essence "swimming against the current." This current is best incarnated by the literary trope of "what women want," which in Chaucer and elsewhere is nothing less than "sovereignty over their husbands." In the real world this can only be done by manipulation of the "force that gives," by persuading the man to do her will through "dissimulation" or sexual attractiveness.

Action-heroines, however, work their own will. They align themselves with a reverse-archetype that describes not real experience but a gesture toward desired experience. That implies a greater level of conflict in this reverse-archetype in that it contravenes (albeit in fiction, where nothing is impossible) both physical law and cultural experience.

This manner of conflict, or "strife," is best described with one more quote from gloomy old Schopenhauer:

Thus from the strife of lower phenomena the higher arise, swallowing them all up, but yet realising in the higher grade the tendency of all the lower.

WHAT WOMEN WILL PART 2

2011-11-28T15:19:00.001-06:00

"Anat kills the people living in valleys, in cities and on the seashore and in the land of sunrise, until the cut off heads of soldiers were reaching to her belt and she was wading up to her waist in blood. Violently she smites and gloats, Anat cuts them down and gazes; her liver exhaults in mirth ... for she plunges her knees in the blood of soldiers, her loins in the gore of warriors, till she has had her fill of slaughtering in the house, of cleaving among the tables."-- "The Bloodbath of Anat," Ras Shamra texts, translator not credited.

"The perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, and also something much more rare."-- Friedrich Nietzsche, HUMAN ALL TOO HUMAN, pt. 377.

In Part 1 of WHAT WOMEN WILL I put forth the proposition that even though philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was something less than flattering in his comments upon women, his theory of the will remains useful for valorizing my concept of the "woman-as-willing-subject"-- which takes in, but certainly isn't limited to, the more well-known concept of the "willing woman." In the essay ON WOMEN, Schopenhauer himself values the "strength" and "reason" of men as against the "dissimulations" of women, so one would expect that his theory of the will would celebrate the masculine principle of *yang,* or what Frank Herbert calls "the ancient force that takes."

Such an expectation turns out not to be the case. Though Schopenhauer believes that the will is the only thing-in-itself that humankind can know, he also believes that happiness lies in one's being able to transcend or even abolish the will in oneself:

"...we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is - nothing."-- Schopenhauer, THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.

In Friedrich Nietzsche's early years he might be described as the most prominent disciple of the gloomy philosopher. In later years, however, Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer's interpretation of the will:

"Granted finally that one succeeded in explaining our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will—as the will to power, as my theory—; granted that one could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and could also find in it the solution to the problem of procreation and nourishment—they are one problem—one would have acquired the right to define all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world described and defined according to its `intelligible character’—it would be `will to power’ and nothing else."-- Nietzsche, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, part 36.

Where Schopenhauer desired to see the will "turn and deny itself," Nietzsche was more preoccupied in the subject's embrace of chaos. In this essay I found that the latter philosopher was concerned with a "deeper mental transformation" than anything found in Sade, a writer to whom Camille Paglia unwisely compared Nietzsche. Yet though my opening Nietzsche quote is one which sounds roughly complimentary toward females, the philosopher's other writings are replete with questionable pronouncements upon the fair sex.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche's position on the nature of femininity is more ambivalent than Schopenhauer's by far. Whereas Schopenhauer allows women no greater virtue than dissimulation, Nietzsche admires their talent for single-mindedness:

"In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man."-- BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, part 135.

Now, this concept of women being more "barbarous" may provide only the most tenuous similitude with the image evoked in my first quote: that of the war-goddess Anath. I am not stating that Nietzsche had any interest in this particular archetype, but I think his definition of will as "will-to-power" has interesting consequences in relation to the archetype.

I noted above that even though Schopenhauer champions the male sex for "strength and reason," he doesn't give us a vision of the will as being fulfilling because it empowers us. Rather, he champions a vision of men (implicitly only men, since women are bereft of reason) who abolish will. It's questionable as to what the philosopher thinks such transformed men will be like, but given the heavy emphasis in his writings upon the virtue of compassion, I would venture that Schopenhauer's subjects will be best aligned with "the ancient force that gives," to quote Frank Herbert once more.

Nietzsche allows for the possibility of compassionate acts in his philosophical universe as well, but for him kindness results from a "superfluity" of power emanating from his noble ubermensch. Nietzsche is therefore more aligned to "the ancient force that takes," and it is in this light that one may see that he values such *yang* energies in both sexes, even if he might prefer (as BGAE suggests) that women should not *overtly* compete with men. Thus, even while he would admit that women might be more barbarous, or even more "evil" than men, one can't turn to Nietzsche for a valorization of Anath or similar figures.

In part 3 I will examine more fully the two archetypes I find implicit in the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche-- the Compassionate Man and the Barbarous Woman-- and relate them further to the archetypes arising in modern popular fiction.

INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES (1962)

2011-11-23T13:55:00.001-06:00

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I usually don't reprint essays from my film-blog here, but I decided that I would do so with this one, inasmuch as its main topic-- sublimity and humor-- touches on some of the material covered in the CUTEY FUNNY posts.

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“From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step”-- Napoleon Bonaparte.

Rarely does one see the opposite assertion: that one can go to the ridiculous to the sublime in one step. This rarity probably relates to the dynamics of producing both effects, at least in fictional narrative. When a creator seeks to invoke the sublime—which in my view is essentially identical with sci-fi’s “sense of wonder”—the creator tries to invoke a sense of majesty or awesomeness to some phenomenon. When the creator fails to do so, the disconnect between intention and execution often has a comical effect. In cinema, many of the most popular “bad films” are those that suffer such a disconnect, as seen in Ed Wood’s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and Phil Tucker’s ROBOT MONSTER.

“Bad film” connoisseurs have shown little regard for Bruno VeSota’s 1962 sci-fi comedy, INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES. In all likelihood this is because INVASION is intended to be ridiculous from the start—literally, since the first credit of the film is the jokey “R.I Diculous Presents.” INVASION follows the tradition of broad comedy a la Abbott and Costello, focusing on frenetic slapstick and simple spoofs of “straight” genres. Such films usually show no insights into what makes the “straight” genre appealing. INVASION is an exception, for it does have such insights. Indeed, the aggressive stupidity of the film, whose humor shouldn’t be overly funny to anyone out of grade school, makes it a little easier to view said insights.

INVASION opens less like a sci-fi parody than a service comedy, focusing on the misadventures of Penn and Philbrick, two dim-witted army privates assigned to duty on a missile base. Penn is nominally the “straight man” of the duo, heaping Abbott-like abuse upon his Costello-like partner, a whining child-man who reads comic books. Specifically, Philbrick reads the space-opera comics of “Space Commander Connors,” who also has his own TV show and marketing campaign. Later, one of the film’s real aliens asks Philbrick what “comic books” are. He replies that “they’re our army tech manuals”—a lame joke that may contain more truth than humor.

In contrast to the service comedies of 1940s Hollywood, everyone in the army is as idiotic as the two protagonists, from a sergeant who converses in Beatnik-speak to a wacky, gun-waving colonel. The colonel whips the plot into motion by choosing Penn and Philbrick to be part of a detachment sent to inspect the site of a recent atom-bomb test. According to the colonel, seven days have gone by, which is adequate time for the “fallout” to disperse, but aerial reconnaissance spotted a strange natural cave opened up by the bomb. Later it’ll be disclosed that the “Star Creatures” of the title are camped out in the cave, and have been there for ten years, but said aliens never comment on having weathered any nuclear explosions. The old force-field trick, perhaps. At any rate the colonel sends the detachment off to investigate the cave for no particular reason.

Following a few more forgettable comic escapades, the detachment arrives at the cave. Most of the soldiers are captured and put into stasis by the Star Creatures, but the aliens allow Penn and Philbrick to remain conscious for interrogation. The aliens take two forms: super-strong mindless plant-creatures called “vege-men” (guys in silly-looking tree-suits) and their mistresses, two stacked space-amazons wearing tight-fitting one-piece swimsuits and high heels. Penn describes the girls as being “seven feet tall,” but this comment may just be a way of masking how short the two heroes really are. Jonathan Haze’s script sneaks a ribald reference into the names of the amazons, who are “Doctor Puna” and “Professor Tanga.” Someone liked the pun so much that those names also appear in the credits, though no other actor in the lead credits has a character-name so referenced.

The space amazons are, in essence, the element of Haze’s script that most pushes the crude humor from the ridiculous to the sublime. Sci-fi cinema of the 1950s sports a fair number of stories about alien worlds ruled by women, as seen in 1954’s CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON and 1958’s QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. In these films the females possess technology superior to that of Earth, but their feminine emotions make them vulnerable to the charms of hunky Earthmen. INVASION follows this basic pattern, but Tanga and Puna are scientists who are far more intelligent than any Earth-denizen in the story, rather than simply inheriting technology from their culture. Their ability to loom over the short soldiers is of course exploited for sex appeal—lots of shots of Philbrick looking straight up into Puna’s cleavage—but it also allows an interesting reversal, in that Puna and Tanga can and do frequently push or knock the two males about with impunity. To be sure, one line suggests that the males back home may be equally big, since Haze’s script devotes a few sentences to describing their culture as a “three-phase society,” in which men are the warriors, women are “the technicals” (implicitly the rulers?), and vege-men are the slaves. Haze says nothing further about the male natives of the alien world, but curiously takes the trouble to relate the history of how the women took control of the vege-men by killing off their leader (Che Gherkin, perhaps) and confining future vege-men to grow only from their “pastures.” To be sure, this mini-history is used as a cue for a lot of dopey vegetable jokes, as well as one of many witticisms about how much the vegetable slaves are treated like the army’s “yardbirds.” Still, the conquest and neutralization of the vege-men sounds a lot like standard tropes concerning amazon-societies conquering and neutralizing the male sex.

The “Star Creatures” originally came to Earth as scouts for possible invasion. As noted earlier they’ve been stuck down in this cave for ten years, stranded by damage their spaceship sustained on landing and unable to communicate with the home planet. That damage has just been repaired, however, and the amazons are making ready to blast off, taking Penn, Philbrick, and the rest of their detachment along as specimens into “the black voids of space.”

For some reason everything the space-babes say starts to sound dirty after a while. Maybe it’s those names…

The big girls have a chink in their armor, though: ten years is a long time without a man. Tanga doesn’t seem particularly charmed by their captives, and has issues with the male sex generally: “Stupid arrogant braggarts, all of them, with their illusions of superiority!” Her subordinate Puna, however, seems receptive to Philbrick’s attentions, and Tanga tells her that the Earth-man has merely stimulated her “maternal instincts.” This effectively turns the sci-fi trope of the “invading virile Earthman” on its head; in INVASION it’s the men who must “stoop to conquer,” seducing the superior females with their childlike weakness.

True, Penn does try one show of force: ambushing Puna to take her gun. She puts his lights out with a handy judo-toss, so Philbrick must fast-talk the amazon into receiving a cultural education on the human custom of kissing. In a schtick probably swiped from some Three Stooges short, the human-alien kiss creates electric-spark sounds and both of them are semi-paralyzed with ecstacy. Penn manages to drag Philbrick away from his conquest and the two escape.

Back at the army base, the two doofuses fail to convince their chicken colonel of the impending danger—that is, until Philbrick reveals that he is a member of “Space Commander Connors’ Secret Squadron.” The colonel is a member too—“Space pals forever!”—and so he and his two new buddies lead another (very small) detachment against the alien cave. This ersatz “cavalry” promptly gets detained by a group of roaming Native Americans who happen to be in the neighborhood. Philbrick explains their mission, only to once again invoke the name of Commander Connors, whereon the Indians’ leader reveals that he too is a member of the squadron. In fact, he has a superior rank to both Philbrick and the colonel. “Outranked by a savage,” grouses the colonel. The cavalry and the Indians both get drunk on firewater, leaving Penn and Philbrick once more alone to plumb the perilous papier-mache cavern.

By the only kind of luck such heroes ever have—the dumb kind—the soldiers not only sneak into the cave without being torn apart by vege-men, they manage to launch the amazons’ spaceship without anyone aboard, where it will be lost in space. Soon Puna and Tanga learn they’ve been marooned on Earth, and conclude that when they don’t return to their homeworld the invasion will be called off. Tanga doesn’t take it well, beating up both men and threatening to shoot them. Puna draws her own weapon and forces Tanga to surrender. She suggests that they throw themselves upon the Earthmen’s mercy. Penn gives Tanga the requisite electric lip-job and the two men propose marriage. “It sounds like slavery,” says the bemused Tanga. “That’s exactly what it is,” responds cagey Penn. INVASION then concludes with the two soldiers getting medals for their heroism. They go to their car, where their amazon wives-- now clad in Earth-garments-- are seated atop the rumble seat like two tremendous trophies. Off the two dopes drive with their prizes, and so ends the INVASION.

When I first viewed this film as a kid, I thought most of its humor was pretty lame, especially the parts where grown men were playing some sort of Buck Rogers-Captain Video space-opera games. I still think the humor itself is lame, but it’s interesting that writer Haze and director VeSota end up depicting all the patriarchal societies seen in the film as no better than a “secret squadron” based on a television show. For male juveniles of that time period, such merchandise-related “societies” functioned as “boys’ clubs” in which males could fantasize about performing the deeds of men. Such deeds included conquering alien princesses as a substitute for fraternizing with real girls. The two dunces do indeed conquer a pair of space-babes, but the way they do so undercuts the heroic element of such fantasies. Given that INVASION doesn’t work that well as a comedy, it’s surprising that it has such a comparatively high level of mythicity, mostly within the sociological and cosmological functions.

QUICK SCHOPENHAUER POST

2011-11-23T12:39:00.001-06:00

"For poetry differs from reality by the fact that in it life flows past us, interesting and yet painless ; while in reality, on the contrary, so long as it is painless it is uninteresting, and as soon as it becomes interesting, it does not remain without pain."-- Schopenhauer, Part 204. Supplements to the Third Book of THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.

I started re-reading Schopenhauer to follow up the issue of "feminine will" currently pursued in the WHAT WOMEN WILL essay-series, but the gloomy philosopher has application to other aspects of my lit-crit theory as well.

In the quote above, Schopenhauer speaks of the fact that for the reader of "poetry" (by which he means prose and plays as well as traditional poetry) the "life" depicted in the narrative is both "interesting and yet painless" for the reader. Of course Schopenhauer knows very well that those narrative events he deems "interesting" are for the fictional characters sources of conflict, and therefore sources of real or potential pain, but here he's concentrating on the irony that our real lives cannot become "interesting" and at the same time "remain without pain" (or again, at least the potential for pain). Schopenhauer suggests that in some sense this is much of the appeal of poetry inheres in this ability to watch others suffering terrible fates from afar. This description recalls Kant's identification that the affect of "the sublime" depended largely on the subject's knowledge that he himself was not threatened by the awesome source of sublimity:

“…consider bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky [and other examples of furious nature]... Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range..."-- Section 261.

Schopenhauer does pursue Kant's concept of sublimity elsewhere in WORLD, but not in this section. However, the above observation has even greater application to my notion, expressed here,

that the traditional notion of narrative conflict should be seen as coterminous with George Bataille's concept of "the transgressive," as detailed in his work LITERATURE AND EVIL. I've observed that even in isophenomenal works-- works wherein there is no challenge to reason as such; no manifestations of the uncanny or the marvelous-- there remains a tension between "typical reality" and "atypical reality," as schematized by Frank Cioffi in this resource:

The “classic detective story” (as defined by John G. Cawelti) takes a similar structure [to that of the status quo formula story]. Into a fairly conventional and familiar world a crime intrudes, and by the story’s conclusion, the crime is solved, and the integrity of society is reinforced (40).

As I've mentioned elsewhere I find Cioffi's term "anomaly" useful to describe the element or elements that provide the motive force of the narrative, so it would seem that the anomaly expresses the narrative's need for conflict/transgression.

However, one need not assume, as Schopenhauer gloomily does, that all that is "interesting" is entirely defined by "pain." It would be more useful to see pain linked to pleasure in a continuum of kinetic emotional affects which the narrative conjures forth to make possible both conflict and character identification. Paglia, indeed, speaks of "pleasure-pain" as being "the gross continuum of nature." In reality we always have this potential for pain or pleasure; in fiction our delectation of fictional conflicts is always somewhat removed from immediate experience, as I've covered in my extrapolations of Susanne Langer's concept of the gesture. This would apply even to a work would seem to offer pure pleasure rather than pain-- say, a simple pornographic tale in which the "anomaly" is that a pizza-boy goes to make a delivery to an apartment (uninteresting) but comes away after a sexual encounter with the apartment's hot-babe resident (interesting).

Interestingly, in a separate essay Schopenhauer seems to see fiction's diversions as distracting from one's knowledge of real pain (which elsewhere he regards as necessary for one's transcendence of the will):

we call drama or descriptive poetry interesting when it represents events and actions of a kind which necessarily arouse concern or sympathy, like that which we feel in real events involving our own person. The fate of the person represented in them is felt in just the same fashion as our own: we await the development of events with anxiety; we eagerly follow their course; our hearts quicken when the hero is threatened; our pulse falters as the danger reaches its acme, and throbs again when he is suddenly rescued. Until we reach the end of the story we cannot put the book aside; we lie away far into the night sympathising with our hero’s troubles as though they were our own. Nay, instead of finding pleasure and recreation in such representations, we should feel all the pain which real life often inflicts upon us, or at least the kind which pursues us in our uneasy dreams, if in the act of reading or looking at the stage we had not the firm ground of reality always beneath our feet. As it is, in the stress of a too violent feeling, we can find relief from the illusion of the moment, and then give way to it again at will. Moreover, we can gain this relief without any such violent transition as occurs in a dream, when we rid ourselves of its terrors only by the act of awaking.

However, in the very next section of this essay Schopenhauer anticipates Northrop Frye's distinction between the "narrative values" and "significant values" of a work, by distinguishing between its "interest" and its "beauty:"

It is obvious that what is affected by poetry of this character is our will , and not merely our intellectual powers pure and simple. The word interest means, therefore, that which arouses the concern of the individual will, quod nostrâ interest ; and here it is that beauty is clearly distinguished from interest. The one is an affair of the intellect, and that, too, of the purest and simplest kind. The other works upon the will. Beauty, then, consists in an apprehension of ideas; and knowledge of this character is beyond the range of the principle that nothing happens without a cause. Interest, on the other hand, has its origin nowhere but in the course of events; that is to say, in the complexities which are possible only through the action of this principle in its different forms.

The association here between beauty and Ideas in a quasi-Platonic sense may relate Kant's association between "the beautiful" and "boundedness:"

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded.-- CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, Section 245.

I've not yet finished re-reading Schopenhauer's reflections on the sublime, so this remains only a tenative conclusion. Still, Schopenhauer's distinction between "the concern of the individual will" and "an affair of the intellect" should yield interesting applications to an archetypal theory of art and literature.

WHAT WOMEN WILL PT. 1

2011-11-20T14:12:00.001-06:00

"There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed."-- Paul Atreides describing his own transformation in Frank Herbert's DUNE.

"The more developed Idea resulting from this victory over several lower Ideas or objectifications of will, gains an entirely new character by taking up into itself from every Idea over which it has prevailed a strengthened analogy. The will objectifies itself in a new, more distinct way. It originally appears in generatio aequivoca; afterwards in assimilation to the given germ, organic moisture, plant, animal, man. Thus from the strife of lower phenomena the higher arise, swallowing them all up, but yet realising in the higher grade the tendency of all the lower."-- Schopenhauer, Book 1, part 27, THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.

The above quotes both deal with concepts of transformation. Herbert's fictional protagonist describes a mental shift from one set of gender-oriented priorities to another; a shift brought after he imbibes the vision-inducing Water of Life. Schopenhauer's philosophical observation is far more abstract. He takes Plato's Ideas, which were both essential and eternal by nature, and gives them a post-Kantian spin, in which the Ideas can assume different "grades" of relative perfection, all of which are objectifications of the true "thing-in-itself," the Universal Will.

It will be noted that the Schopenhauer quote, unlike the Herbert quote, contains no reference to concepts of gender. However, the "gloomy philosopher" had some definite thoughts on the subject; thoughts that make comicdom's Dave Sim sound like Betty Friedan by comparison.

From the essay "On Women:"

Hence, it will be found that the fundamental fault of the female character is that it has no sense of justice . This is mainly due to the fact, already mentioned, that women are defective in the powers of reasoning and deliberation; but it is also traceable to the position which Nature has assigned to them as the weaker sex. They are dependent, not upon strength, but upon craft; and hence their instinctive capacity for cunning, and their ineradicable tendency to say what is not true. For as lions are provided with claws and teeth, and elephants and boars with tusks, bulls with horns, and cuttle fish with its clouds of inky fluid, so Nature has equipped woman, for her defence and protection, with the arts of dissimulation; and all the power which Nature has conferred upon man in the shape of physical strength and reason, has been bestowed upon women in this form.

I'm not inherently opposed to the notion that genders may be characterized according to what one observes to be statistically-dominant virtues or vices. The usual mush-headed responses to such characterizations-- "We're all individuals," "If you label me, you negate me"-- get no hearing in my court. But I think that even though at times Schopenhauer's characterizations may ring a bell of familiarity, on the whole said characterizations carry less explanatory value than the observations of the 20th-century author of DUNE. In addition, as presented here Schopenhauer's animadversions on the female sex are something of a betrayal of his post-Kantian project.

As I elaborated here, no post-Kantian project is viable unless it stresses the dual influence of natural and cultural influences. Schopenhauer, anticipating Freud, chooses to define women in terms of lack: women have "cunning" because they lack "physical strength and reason." The first is an aspect of demonstrable natural law. The second lack, if it exists, can only be demonstrated through manifestations within humankind's cultural cosmos, through a rigorous philosophical definiton of what reason is. Doubtless Schopenhauer felt he defined reason in other writings, but since he does not do so in respect to its purported differences between men and women, the assertion remains baseless. Most of what Schopenhauer "proves" about woman's natural inferiority is based in his proto-evolutionary meditations on natural law (ON WOMEN was published eight years before ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, incidentally). I suggest that natural law, both in Schopenhauer's time and our own, is about as much use in understanding culture as a hammer is for turning on a light-switch. This type of reductionism is unworthy of one of philosophy's paramount thinkers.

Further, by characterizing female nature as something as unchanging as one of Plato's Ideas, Schopenhauer betrays his concept of "grades" of ideation. Throughout "On Women" there is no sense that any woman's nature can be altered or subsumed by more "perfect" Ideas. By contrast, both Plato and Dave Sim allowed that some women were capable of raising themselves to a level of masculine competence and insight. One need not agree with those worthies on their definitions of same; it's enough to note that they, unlike Schopenhauer, recognized that such a transformation was possible. Frank Herbert's fictional meditations support this concept of transformation as well, though one must note that they are philosophical observations that grow out of a fictional structure.

It's just as possible for a mush-head to be insulted by Herbert's gender-characterizations as by Schopenhauer's: to be so obsessed with a purported individuality that one cannot recognize the broad mythic truth of Herbert's yang-like "ancient force that takes" and yin-like "ancient force that gives." But even without the sort of visionary transformation brought about by the Water of Life, Herbert's narrative tapestry is broad enough to depict any number of cultural transformations. Thus a male character like Liet-Kynes can function primarily as a nurturant force, attempting to bestow fecundity upon the desert-planet Arrakis. Similarly, his daughter Chani becomes (unlike the majority of Fremen women) a skilled fighter, and in one chapter she kills one of Paul Atreides' challengers to spare Paul the trouble.

Yet despite all the personal prejudices that tainted Schopenhauer's view of the Fair Sex, his concept of the Will and gradations of ideation remain vital, and can be fruitfully applied to notions of gender transformation even though the philosopher would have certainly disapproved of such applications. In 2-13-09 I wrote:

What is the cultural significance of action-heroines?

It's not that they make female readers feel more empowered, though there's not anything wrong with that.

It's not that they make male readers either more empathetic or more horny, though there's nothing wrong with either of those.

It's simply this:

The action-heroine is a better symbol of the Schopenhaurean Will than the male action-hero.

I let this particular field of investigation lie fallow for over two years, partly because I knew that re-reading Schopenhauer would take a fair amount of labor. It's fortuitous that when the topic came to my attention once more, it was right at a time I'd just finished re-reading DUNE, which glosses certain aspects of Schopenhauer's beliefs just as I found they did for the writings of Paglia in this essay.

In the next installment of WHAT WOMEN WILL, I'll explore a little more as to the archetypal associations that arise when the woman is "Taker" rather than "Giver."

ONE OF THESE IS MORE IMPOSSIBLE THAN THE OTHER

2011-11-19T15:02:00.005-06:00

For the purposes of this exercise, pretend that:

(1) You have no knowledge of the English language, and so cannot interpret any of the words on these two covers,

(2) You have a basic knowledge of science fiction concepts but have no familiarity with superheroes generally or anything specifically derived from the Superman mythology.

So, with those two stipulations in mind, what do you see when you gaze at the two images above? Both deal with some degree of "impossibility," since they seem to be violating physical law (though that may not be the only law so violated).

ACTION COMICS #1 at bottom should seem, at first glance, the more impossible picture. Even if you know nothing of Superman as a character, the sight of a man in a costume lifting a car over his head will be a clear violation of natural law. There may exist occasional prodigies that might attempt to stymie a car's progress (an old strongman routine) but there exist none able to lift a vehicle of such mass over his head with such cheerful abandon, not to mention chucking it forward to smash against a convenient rock.

Clearly, since the image on the left does not apply to anything "natural," you will conclude that whatever glosses or explains it resorts to the sort of explanation seen in science fiction or fantasy stories. If it has no explanation you may term it (as I have) a "fait accompli" fantasy, which presents a fantastic image with no attempt to make sense of the "nonsense," as one usually sees in animated cartoons.

ACTION COMICS #346 presents a lesser challenge to the laws of physics. If you have no acquaintance with Superman, Supergirl, or superheroes, then all you see is a girl in costume belting a man in a similar costume (as well as two men watching and laughing through some sci-fi viewscreen). There's nothing in the image to suggest that either character might or might not possess super-powers, and you certainly can't tell from the image what the labored dialogue tells you: that Supergirl has fantastic powers and the "fake Superman" does not. The only hint of fantasy in the scenario (aside from the sci-fi viewscreen) is that the Curt Swan drawing suggests that the male figure is being hit so hard that it's possible he's being lifted off his feet-- though since one can't see both feet, you may just think he's off balance.

Now, this is still something of a challenge to the laws of physics in that the Superman figure looks at least twice as massive as the Supergirl figure. Given this discrepancy it should seem unlikely that the latter could inflict that much distress to the former, though of course it's still not in the same bailiwick as lifting a car. You will be familiar with the general rule that most female humans are less strong than most male humans, so you may suspect some fantastic element, if only because the male in the picture looks like he's in considerable pain and may have even lost consciousness. But you can rationalize that maybe she caught him by surprise, though the girl's shocked expression might mitigate against that interpretation.

OK, now I wave my magic wand and you know everything about the provenance of these two images. Given that knowledge, then, it's perfectly obvious that the award for the greater impossibility goes to-- Number Two, ACTION COMICS #346!

What? You don't agree? Even now that you know all the super-entities involved, the image of a super-man lifting a car still seems more impossible than a super-girl punching out an ordinary man? I wave my magic wand again, bypassing a lot of argument, and we agree that since both scenarios incorporate marvelous elements, they are equally impossible--

On the plane of physical law, that is. At the last moment I re-quote my earlier quote of an anonymous interpreter of Cassirer:

...whereas intersubjective or objective validity in the natural sciences rests ultimately on universal laws of nature ranging over all (physical) places and times, an analogous type of intersubjective or objective validity arises in the cultural sciences quite independent of such universal laws.

So Cassirer's legacy says that "intersubjective validity" in the cultural sciences does not derive from the "universal laws of nature," as it does in the natural sciences. That validity depends upon having:

a trans-historical and trans-local cultural meaning that emerges precisely as it is continually and successively interpreted and reinterpreted at other such times and places.

This "cultural meaning," I argue to you, arises from the elements of conflict and/or transgression that make possible the narrative process. Thus, in the cultural sphere all fictional narrative is fantasy, no matter how much it accords with natural law, and in theory no phenonmenon is more "impossible" than anything else. The marvelous, the uncanny and the naturalistic are equally impossible, culturally speaking.

However, the critic claims the true validity of any cultural object depends upon its ability to transcend history and location. Are the two images equal in that respect?

I tell you, not quite. Superman's car-lifting feat is one of many Herculean accomplishments that participated in creating Superman's marvelous image in the early days of the character's iteration. However, the feat carries little transcendent cultural meaning in itself. Cars themselves possess a great deal of cultural meaning in modern society, but the act of lifting and hurling one does not evoke many transgressive elements.

An act of fictional violence between male and female, however, carries transgressive elements that transcend any particular history or location. These elements are certainly conditioned by the observation of natural law because culture is also partially conditioned by natural law, so the sight of a woman cold-cocking a man will always seem a little less possible than the other way round thanks to one's knowledge of natural law. But the scenario is also a cultural transgression, transgressing the cultural norm that girls are sugar and spice and everything nice. Image-wise Supergirl gets to enact a fantasy transgressing against this cultural norm while the diegesis supplied by the cover-copy quickly explains that she's not really outmatching the real Superman, just an impostor.

It may seem to you that I am conflating conflict/transgression with impossibility here, and I am. But in the cultural sphere, to be "impossible" is not to violate the law (as in the natural sciences) but to fulfill it. And that's why choice #2, being the more outrageous and culturally transcendent, is more "impossible" than Choice #1.

All of which will be elaborated somewhat more as I launch into yet another series of ruminations, tentatively titled "What Women Will." A clamoring horde of one (hi Pilot!) asked me about a topic I'd raised about the subject of the Will and the Fair Sex, so you should consider the above a prelude to my response.

TIGERS AND GHOSTS AND GODS, OH MY!, PART 3

2011-11-15T15:03:00.001-06:00

At the start of this three-part serial essay, I asked:

Philosophically speaking, what does it mean to be a metaphenomenalist? Or, for that matter, an isophenomenalist?

The short answer is that to be an isophenomenalist, you must believe that everything within the scope of human experience reduces down to natural experience of some sort. Even cultural experience is informed principally by whatever material factors provide the experiential root of a given culture.

However, with metaphenomenalism, one can choose one of two paths. One path, that of the Rationalist, asserts that there is some "essence" that is beyond all experience, and hence trumps the banal round of existence. The other path, which Cassirer called "critical idealism," follows the thought that Kant expressed at the start of CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON:

...though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.

In part 2 I also noted the problems Kant addressed with both Empiricist and Rationalist arguments, and that C.S. Lewis was essentially in the Rationalist camp, as one who tended, in Kant's words, to "intellectualize phenomena." Nevertheless, the schema Lewis depicts in THE PROBLEM OF PAIN-- the Fear/Dread/Awe affects that he invokes to explain the range of human responses to the Numinous, as well as what only seems like the Numinous (i.e., mundane danger)-- possesses an internal consistency not seen in most of his proselytizing arguments. I find it interesting that Lewis' argument, like many of his other insights, seems to apply better to literature than philosophy as such.

I've stated as far back as MYTHS WITHOUT FANTASY in 2007 that fantasy (the generally used term for all metaphenomenal concepts) is not, strictly speaking, necessary for myth to flourish. But as I said in that early essay, one does need, even in isophenomenal fiction, some sense of the "larger-than-life" in order that mythicity/symbolic complexity may function.

I extrapolated somewhat on similar themes in THRILLER KILLING:

The "suspense" genre, I said in a related post, was oriented not on seeking to scare the audience, but to "startle and disorient." In my own conception the pure horror film doesn't necessarily need the element of the supernatural, but it does need the element of the *mysterium,* which is my shortened form for the two Latin phrases invoked by Rudolf Otto is his classic IDEA OF THE HOLY, where he explains the numinous experience in terms of the *mysterium tremendum,* the overwhelming mystery that compels fear and trembling in the viewer, and the *mysterium fascinans,* which compels the viewer to be attracted to the fascinating mystery.

While it's quite possible for isophenomenal genres as far apart as the suspense thriller and the domestic comedy to be mythically complex, there may be a certain tendency against such complexity given the fact that many authors see their fictive worlds in terms of pure representationalism, and so lose track of the "larger-than-life" qualities. These are worlds where neither ghosts nor gods have any true symbolic presence. Here there be tigers, and nothing more than tigers.

The metaphenomal category of "the marvelous" is the exact opposite: however the author may choose to violate rationalism and causality for the sake of a marvelous story, some *deus ex machina* can be invoked. To be sure, many marvelous works merely imitate others, and it might be argued that often the "gods," the metaphenomal marvels of such works are what Ursula LeGuin conceived to be "false myths." However, the symbolic strength of gods is that for every worshipper they lose, they gain more converts down the line, and the "larger-than-life" qualities are brought forth in works that imitate in an inspired rather than perfunctory manner.

The metaphenomenal category of "the uncanny" is, in a structureal sense, midway between the two as critical realism stands between Rationalism and Empiricism. Like all or most neo-Kantian philosophies, the uncanny does not seek to usurp causal reality completely, as does the marvelous. Yet its metaphenomena, its "ghosts," remain outside the affective boundaries characreristic of the isophenomenal world.

Lewis' use of the term "ghosts" for his interstitial category of "Dread" takes on ironic context in my system. In said system any work that depicts a ghost as being unquestionably existential does of course fall into the category of the marvelous, not the uncanny. There are a few exceptions where the ghost's nature is so tentatively known that it does fall into the latter category (see my review of Laurence Olivier's HAMLET as an example). Still, the ten tropes of the uncanny-metaphenomenal evoked on my film-blog may resemble Lewis' ghost in that they too tend to inspire dread more than awe. Given that uncanny works also have a tendency toward pure representationalism-- best seen in the idea of the "phony ghost" Gothic-tale to which Tzvetan Todorov refers-- it may be argued that they too tend somewhat away from the higher degrees of symbolic complexity. Naturally, this is not to suggest any agreement with Todorov's fallacious statement that any version of "fantasy" is primarily defined through "the real."

Thus, though I am frequently vexed by Lewis' in terms of philosophy, I must admire the deductive logic at which he produced this schema, even if it does work less well in the sphere of philosophy than in that of literature. Northrop Frye expressed a similar phenomenological discontinuity in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM:

If men were compelled to make the melancholy choice between atheism and superstition, the scientist…would be compelled to choose atheism, but the poet would be compelled to choose superstition, for even superstition, by its very confusion of values, gives his imagination more scope than a dogmatic denial of imaginative infinity does. But the loftiest religion, no less than the grossest superstition, comes to the poet, qua poet, only as the spirits came to Yeats, to give him metaphors for poetry.

TIGERS AND GHOSTS AND GODS; OH MY! : PART 2

2011-11-09T17:10:00.002-06:00

“Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room,’ and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’ and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe.”

Technically, the three entities C.S. Lewis employs to describe the responses of Fear, Dread, and Awe-- the trinity of human responses which Lewis deems relevant to the matter of "the Numinous"-- are not (as in my title) tiger, ghost and god. For the last Lewis describes only a "mighty spirit." However, given that Lewis was, in his most significant works, an unstinting apologist for the Christian faith, I don't think I'm reaching to hazard that for Lewis, that "mighty spirit" could be only the Christian God. And in the PROBLEM OF PAIN essay from which the above quote stems, Lewis is far from shy about proclaiming his good news. Indeed, he shows a curious ambivalence about non-Judeo-Christian religions like unto that of early Christian polemicists. On one hand, when Lewis wants to show the universality of the concept of "the Numinous" (first named as such by Rudolf Otto), he has no problem quoting examples of awe-filled responses from Ovid and Virgil alongside examples from the Old Testament. Nevertheless, it's clear throughout his screed that no mere pagan religion can possess its own validity. There's only enough room in town for One Revelation.

Nevertheless, Lewis is insightful enough to invoke not only "virtuous pagans," but also modern philosophers like Otto in service of his creed. I have not read Otto's IDEA OF THE HOLY, and so can't comment fully on Lewis' use of him. Thanks to Google search, though, I can say that Lewis substantially uses the term "the Uncanny" substantially in accord with the way Otto uses it:

"...this expression [of unfamiliarity] is popularly used for a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes, and in whose presence we have the feeling of the uncanny."-- HOLY (1917), p. 197.

I'll note that this usage is entirely the opposite of Freud's use of "the Uncanny" in the 1919 essay of that title. As an empiricist Freud emphasized that what appeared to be unfamiliar, "umheimlich," was actually that which was too familiar, and could be glossed by the concept of the Oedipus complex, as opposed to being genuinely ineffable. As I pointed out here, Todorov is on the same page as Freud when he claims that his version of "the uncanny" is also all about glossing the Fantasy with the Real.

All that said, the main assertion in Lewis' essay-- entitled simply "Introductory," though the essay stands on its merits without depending on the other essays in the book-- can be summed up in these two quotes:

The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been ground for religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

There is no possibility of arguing from mere danger to the uncanny, still less to the fully Numinous. You may say that it seems to you very natural that early man, being surrounded by real dangers, and therefore frightened, should invent the uncanny and the Numinous. In a sense it is, but let us understand what we mean. You feel it to be natural because, sharing human nature with your remote ancestors, you can imagine yourself reacting to perilous solitudes in the same way; and this reaction is indeed ‘natural’ in the sense of being in accord with human nature. But it is not in the least ‘natural’ in the sense that the idea of the uncanny or the Numinous is already contained in the idea of the dangerous, or that any perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of ghostly dread or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already understand them. When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them.

As a neo-Kantian I part ways with both Empiricist Freud and Rationalist Lewis; I don't believe in the least that religion stems either from the purely materialistic causes Lewis is refuting, nor from the "different source" Lewis uses to explain religion's provenance. In THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON Kant contrasts and dismisses the problems with both Empiricism and Rationalism:

In one word, Leibnitz intellectualized phenomena, just as Locke, in his system of noogony (if I may be allowed to make use of such expressions), sensualized the conceptions of the understanding, that is to say, declared them to be nothing more than empirical or abstract conceptions of reflection. Instead of seeking in the understanding and sensibility two different sources of representations...-- CRITIQUE, p. 174.

Nevertheless, even though Lewis's principal project is to justify the Christian narrative of Revelation-- thus committing Leibnitz's fallacy of "intellectualizing phenomena"-- Lewis's logical deduction of a "sheer jump" that takes one from simple fear to more complex emotions of dread and awe is even more meaningful in neo-Kantian terms. Here's Cassirer once again, emphasizing the growth of the expressive function in human beings as the Great White Way to understanding existence in a manner far beyond that of "dogmatic sensationalism:"

"Whatever we call existence or reality, is given to us at the outset in forms of pure expression. Thus even here we are beyond the abstraction of sheer sensation, which dogmatic sensationalism takes as its starting point. For the content which the subject experiences as confronting him is no merely outward one, resembling Spinoza's 'mute picture on a slate.' It has a kind of transparency; an inner life shines through its very existence and facticity. The formation effected in language, art and myth starts from this original phenomenon of expression; indeed, both art and myth remain so close to it that one might be tempted to restrict them wholly to this sphere."-- Cassirer, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, p. 449.

Interestingly, another Google search using the terms "Cassirer" and "jump" yielded an essay asserting that Cassirer often regarded poetry as a case where "the spark jumped the gap" between real experience and cultural expression.

Having drawn Lewis into a neo-Kantian corpus which would probably have horrified him about as much as being associated with Freudians, in my next essay in this series I'll explore a few more aspects of the interaction of the Meta-Iso Wars as expressed by Lewis' figures of "tiger," "ghost," and "god."

TIGERS AND GHOSTS AND GODS; OH MY!: PART 1

2011-11-07T17:20:00.001-06:00

Philosophically speaking, what does it mean to be a metaphenomenalist? Or, for that matter, an isophenomenalist?

In my conclusion of the Metagodzilla-Isoghidrah Wars, I clarified that in terms of taste, anyone was free to prefer whatever phenomenality one might prefer. As a pluralist, I'm bound to recognize (to cite another of my old essay-titles) that "anything that can be done well is worth doing." If Joseph Conrad does his best work within an isophenomenal conceptual framework, where all the "marvels and mysteries" are only mankind's vain imaginings in the face of a materalistic universe, then that's worth doing. If J.R.R. Tolkien does his best work within a metaphenomenalist conceptual framework-- specifically dealing with metaphenomena within the "marvelous" category-- then that too is worth doing.

In my QUICK HAWTHONE POST I cited two longish quotes by Hawthorne in which he justified his practice of the form he called "the romance." In contrast to Tolkien's focus upon marvelous metaphenomena, Hawthorne showed a perennial fascination with metaphenomena in the "uncanny" category, though of course Hawthorne never used this term. Slightly after the lines I quoted from A THREEFOLD DESTINY, Hawthorne adds:

In the little tale which follows, a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown over a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped, without entirely obliterating the sober hues of nature.

Despite the fact that Hawthorne, as much as Conrad, values fidelity to "the sober hues of nature," I'd venture that his "tinge of the wild and wonderful" has a very different character than Conrad's "marvels and mysteries." In the quotes I provided from Conrad here, it's clear that those "marvels" are intrinsically derived from, and thus entirely dependent upon, the world of sensory experience: of "effects of the visible and tangible world." Hawthorne's statement above, though, never implies that "the sober hues of nature" are the sole source of his "wonderful tinge." At the same time most of his works avoid the outright presentation of either the marvelous or the naturalistic: Hawthorne always seeks the uncanny, the liminal space between the two opposed states.

That said, because Hawthorne gives the world of fantasy its own identity, I deem him closer to Tolkien than to Conrad. Many literary critics would dispute this, deeming Hawthorne and Conrad together within the corpus of canonical "literature" while Tolkien occupied a vague category of "paraliterature." Nevertheless, such allotments are usually made by critics given to focusing on the rendering of isophenomenal reality as paramount, and so would be opposed to my statement in the Meta-Iso Conclusion:

In both its "uncanny" and "marvelous" manifestations, however, the metaphenomenal stands free to delve into the depths of what Kant calls the "productive imagination."

The isophenomenalist is usually indifferent to any concept like that of the "productive imagination," in that he's already committed to the proposition that all that we imagine derives from sensory experience; what Kant calls "reproductive imagination" and what Conrad calls "my consciousness of the marvelous."

It's certainly a beguiling enough proposition. For me Freud was one of the great challenges. Because his theory seemed to work so well for some works of literature and so poorly for others, I concluded here that his theory was best seen as a example of "reproductive imagination." I added that such a theory could be adequately subsumed by a superior theory that took in both productive and reproductive forms of imagination, such as that of Kant, and to some extent the theory of Carl Jung. The same formulation applies to Todorov, whose Freudian underpinnings slanted him to state that fantasy could only be judged in terms of "the real."

In the next part of this series (which will at last explain the title) I'll consider in greater depth the tripartite theory of "fear, dread, and awe" that C.S. Lewis presented at the outset of his nonfictional work THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. I haven't explicitly written on Lewis since this 2010 essay, but though I part with him in terms of the "solution" he gives to his PROBLEM-- that of Christian hermeneutics-- Lewis is almost as important as Kant and Jung in having helped me formulate my entire NUMtheory.

QUICK HAWTHORNE POST

2011-11-03T17:37:00.003-05:00

I'm mulling over some further thoughts regarding the way the three categories in my NUMtheory relate to the idea of the sublime-- which I regard as essentially homologous to the sci-fi fan's "sense of wonder." More as a resource than anything, here are a couple of Hawthorne's quotes regarding the literary genre he called " the romance:"

""I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spirit and mechanism of the fairyland should be combined with the characters and manners of familiar life." -- Opening lines of short story THE THREEFOLD DESTINY.

"If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showcasing all its figures so distinctly, -- making every object so minute visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility, -- is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the picture on the wall,--all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of the intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse,-- whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside."-- THE CUSTOM-HOUSE.

I'll be saying more about "this quality of strangeness and remoteness" in relation to my take on the nature of "the uncanny," especially in comparison with Lewis's statement, "With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous," which I quoted in this essay.

SUPPORT CASTOFFS

2011-11-01T17:45:00.001-05:00

Given that I've stated of Ron Marz's decision to kill off his character Alex--

"I support his right to come up with a story in which a supporting cast-member is horribly killed simply to advance a particular plotline"

--but also stated that I didn't think his story was very good-- it behooves me to mention a couple of times when support-cast members were killed to reasonably good effect.

I've mentioned that I didn't like Gwen Stacy's death in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #121. That's not because I thought the character was indispensable to my enjoyment of the magazine, but because I felt that that the writers during that period-- not just Gerry Conway, but also Stan Lee in his last 10-20 Spidey-scripts-- made her death predictable by virtue of failing to expand on her character beyond the usual cliches. I think now that it made sense to kill her from an editorial standpoint, but still dislike Conway's hamhanded execution.

In contrast, Stan Lee himself "put a hit out" on one of the characters introduced in the early years of John Romita's tenure: Captain George Stacy, father of Gwen. Like Gwen, George dies in a senseless accident, but Lee gave him a heroic death. When a rooftop-fight between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus causes heavy bricks to plummet to the street below, Stacy perishes in shoving a small child out of the way of the debris.

Now, to some extent this is more palatable than Gwen Stacy's death because it is a heroic death. However, what I like best about the event is not just that the death was heroic, or even unexpected (certainly more so than daughter Gwen's), but that it became a new source of narrative avenues, allowing for a good amount of "my-sweetheart-hates-my-superher0-alterego" melodrama.

Another example-- perhaps more appropriate to the theme of senseless deaths-- would be Iron Man's 1960s girlfriend Janice Cord. Janice, introduced in IRON MAN #2, remained a regular support-cast member for the next 10 issues, only to meet an untimely end in IRON MAN #22, when she was caught in a crossfire between Iron Man and his enemy Titanium Man. Janice Cord hadn't been in that feature as long as Gwen Stacy had appeared in SPIDER-MAN, and thus it's quite possible that she, like Ron Marz's Alex, was intended from the start to be a sacrificial lamb. Scripter Archie Goodwin does allow her a Last Moment as she dies in Iron Man's arms, almost recognizing him as Tony Stark before she succumbs. Still, she was a pretty conventional character, having little identity apart from being Tony Stark's girlfriend, and so in a sense one might state that she most "came alive" in the intersubjective sense when she suffered the fate of a disposable support-cast member.

NEGATIVE I.D.

2011-10-29T16:11:00.002-05:00

"All that said, I can tell you Alex was a character destined to die from the moment she was first introduced in GL #48. I created her with the intention of having her be murdered at the hands of Major Force. I took a lot of care in building her as a character, because I wanted her to be liked and her death to mean something to the readers. I wanted readers to be horrified at the crime, and to empathize with Kyle's loss. Her death was meant to bring brutal realization to Kyle that being GL wasn't fun and games. It was also meant to sever his links with his old life, paving the way for his move to New York. And ultimately I wanted her death to be memorable and illustrate just how truly heinous Major Force was. Thus the fridge."-- Ron Marz, justifying the GREEN LANTERN incident that inspired the title WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS, from the WIP site.

"Naturally, this formula [of men beating women] is not popular with girls. Granting all the masochistic excitement of terror, it is difficult to identify yourself with a corpse."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), P. 47.

In the comments section for Part 3 of THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY, Curt Purcell commented thusly:

I certainly wouldn't say there's any encouragement to identify with the villains in the movies I discussed, if only because they tended to be repellently nonhuman--sometimes little more than a writhing mass of tentacles. How does one identify with that?

In that specific case, I can't say with certainty whether or not the particular audience for this particular type of thing does or doesn't regularly identify with something like a "writhing mass of tentacles." But I can venture a way in which they *might* do so, in keeping with one of the key essays on this site, my take on how Schopenhauer's theory of the will applies to literature:

Was Schopenhauer was right about “Will” inhering in every aspect of our reality? We do not know. However, we CAN be sure that “Will” inheres in every aspect of the various LITERARY realities we as humans create, for we KNOW for a fact that they are all “willed” into existence by their creators (and sometimes, however indirectly, by audiences as well).

Identification need not always connote one's sense of participation in a given character's bodily reality, although when speaking of erotica, that would be the natural assumption. It's equally possible to identify with a nonhuman creature, or even an inanimate phenomenon, by identifying it as an expression of a particular will to do something within the sphere of a narrative.

The other night I happened to rescreen Sam Raimi's 1981 THE EVIL DEAD. As many horrorphiles will know, the film's about as simple as a splatterpunk flick can get: five young people camp out in a remote cabin and come under attack by murderous Sumerian demons. Raimi's film shows particular influence by the "stalker vision" element, where the camera seems to assume the viewpoint of a murderous force stalking its prey-- a narrative element that inspired righteous condemnation from the team of Siskel and Ebert back in the day. The film-pundits were wrong, though, in thinking that the audience necessarily identified with the violence-happy desires of the murderous stalker. What's more probable is that the audience did identify with the *WILL* expressed by the stalker, be it a deformed human being like Jason Voorhees or an invisible discarnate force such as the demons in EVIL DEAD. To the extent that I as audience-member want to see the EVIL DEAD demons do demonic things, then I have (whether it gives me a particular fetishy thrill or not) identified with a thing I can't even see on-camera-- certainly a proposition no harder to credence than identifying with a malign mass of tentacles.

The same thing can even apply to phenomena that don't really have benign or malign intent, just some nature that comes into conflict with human agents. In AGAIN SUPERHEROIC VISIONS: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, I stipulated that the focus of a given story could be an insubstantial phenomenon, such as the titular force of Rene Clair's THE CRAZY RAY, or even a place, such as The Center of the Earth to which Jules Verne's protagonists journey.

Now the reason I titled this essay "Negative I.D." is twofold. I stated the law of identification earlier:

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character.

I do deem such identifications to be phenomenologically real within the sphere of literature and literary response. However, it should go without saying (which is the reason why I didn't explicit say it) that such moments of identification are fleeting. One moment the reader may identify with the slayer, and then in another, with the slain: with Captain America one moment and the Red Skull the next. The nature of the human imagination inclines toward such identificatory pluralism, proceeding from "flower to flower to flower" as per the monarch's advice to the bee in THE KING AND I.

So identification can be positive one moment, and negative the next, where "negative" simply meaning that the reader has ceased to identify with a given subject. Pundits such as Siskel, Ebert, and the above-quoted Gershon Legman understand identification only in terms of the aforementioned "bodily reality." For this reason Legman thinks he's been clever in claiming that "it's difficult to identify yourself with a corpse." But dozens of horror-stories written from the viewpoints of corpses-- whether said corpses are walking around or are just lying there mulling over their sad fates-- indicate that readers can indeed identify with what corpses symbolize in narrative terms: the extinguishment of a character's ability to participate in the world of living, willing activity. It's possible, of course, that a poorly executed story of anything-- be it a talking corpse or a discarnate spirit-- may also fail to inspire identification because a reader finds it stupid or tedious. In DAREDEVIL THE MAN W/O IDENTITY I noted that this was my own non-identificatory response to Clowes' DAVID BORING.

However, some readers reject identification for reasons extrinsic to the story's dynamics (or lack of dynamics. This is the second form of "negative I.D."

In PART 2 of MASTERY I refuted views expressed by both Heidi MacDonald and the "Women in Refrigerators" site. Of the two, however, Gail Simone's 1999-created site has had the greater influence over opinions in comic-book fandom. The tone of Simone's initial address on the site is quite measured:

This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really.

These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. I know I missed a bunch. Some have been revived, even improved -- although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.

I know I missed a bunch -- I just don't know my comics deaths the way I should. I'm not editorializing -- I'm just curious to find out what you guys think it means, if anything.

However, her criteria for inclusion on this list is horribly skewed, showing a tendency to negatively characterize any violence inflicted on a female character, no matter what justification the violence had within the context of the story. I attacked one example of this skewing tendency on a recent CBR board:

I do think it's historically valuable that WIR at least encapsulates an attitude characteristic of the time. And perhaps it does record some of the dominant cliches used by comics-creators during that period.

But one of the most objectionable things about the WIR list is that it doesn't provide context. For instance, it might be arguable that if one reads that a starring heroine like Amethyst gets put through the ringer:

"Amethyst (blinded, merged with Gemworld, destroyed in LSH; became a power-hungry witch in Book of Fate)"

That *might* be indicative of a tendency to downgrade or persecute heroines.

But the same can't be said of some other characters on the list:

"Carol Ferris/Star Sapphire (turned into a villain by the Zamarons, possessed by the Predator)"

That's not a fair representation. Star Sapphire was always, if not actively villainous, a somewhat ruthless figure depending on the writer handling her. That was the whole dramatic point of having her be the "Miss Hyde" to Carol's "Lady Doctor Jekyll." It wasn't something radically added at the time she transforms into the Predator, as the above line implies. Englehart's idea was simply an extrapolation of the original concept, regardless as to whether one thinks it was well executed. It didn't belong on a list devoted to female marginalization.

And it's certainly not the only ill-considered example on the list.

Even more damning is Ron Marz's response, in which he states that he developed the character of Alex (the victim killed and stuffed in a fridge) with the express intention of killing her. His response too is quite measured, and worth reading in full. I can't say that the original GREEN LANTERN story achieved its ends of making me "empathize with Kyle's loss;" I failed to experience any identification with the hero or his dead girlfriend, which I define as the first kind of "negativity." However, Simone rejected the trope of the "dead girlfriend" in terms of the second type of negativity: that it was emblematic of a questionable tendency in comics-crafting. Here's her summing-up from the WIR site following assorted reactions (no year date given):

I still think women are pretty unevenly portrayed in comics, but so are men, really. Ultimately, we speak most loudly with the choices we make at the cash register. And to future creators - we ARE out there reading. Please don't barbecue all the characters we like!

I have no problem with Simone-- whom I respect as a comics-creator-- questioning a given tendency. I do have a problem (as did others, whose responses are recorded on the site) with her lack of context. This lack expresses to me a deeper problem seen also in Ebert, Siskel, and Legman: the tendency to reject a creator's use of sex and/or violence against any figure perceived as "unevenly portrayed."

I didn't like Marz's "Alex in the fridge" story. However, I support his right to come up with a story in which a supporting cast-member is horribly killed simply to advance a particular plotline, just as I support the notion of the Marquis de Sade having his heroes torture and kill dozens of identical victims to advance his particular brand of narrative. I've certainly seen my share of poorly-executed executions (*cough* Gerry Conway *cough*). But one must distinguish between the artistic potential of a controversial trope like girlfriend-killing, and any particular negative example of same.

THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4

2011-10-24T17:20:00.003-05:00

"We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first."-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 3.

"A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and the people reverts to a mob."-- Frank Herbert's character Stilgar from DUNE, p. 285.

As far as I can tell, there isn't much "mystery" about "mastery" in the view of Paglia's PERSONAE. A sentence of two after the above quote, she states that "In nature, brute force is the law, a survival of the fittest." For Paglia, much of literature concerns exposing the elements of sex and aggression that dwell within even the most rarefied works of literature. I would argue that brute force is *a* law in the natural world, but not precisely the only law. Further, even if it *were* the only law for nonhuman sentients, one might argue that human beings by virtue of greater complexity have managed to come up with amendments to the original cosmic legality.

Frank Herbert's quote isn't concerned with nonhuman nature, but he does address a mystery about human nature in a more paradoxical fashion. When one thinks about hierarchical leadership, one does not generally think about a leader doing anything but enforcing his will; certainly not about his "maintaining the level of individuals." And yet Herbert is correct, and crosses paths with Paglia on this point: individuality is possible only within a hierarchical system that keeps the people from devolving into mob rule.

Drawing on the quasi-Hegelian terminology of Frank Fukuyama, discussed here, one might judge Paglia's view of this hierarchy to be "megalothymotic" and Herbert's to be "isothymotic," as per Fukuyama's definition:

"Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifstations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood." (The End of History and the Last Man, p. 182).

I extrapolated the following from Fukuyama's terminology re: the subject of "sex 'n' violence:"

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority.

I've devoted considerable passages to making comparisons and contrasts between these two physical activities and their literary expressions, so I won't repeat any of these here. But I would refine the passage above by noting how it applies to a phenomenon common to both, explicated here.
The phenomenon of sthenolagnia, of "strength-worship" in both real and literary worlds, could be said to abide in both of Fukuyama's categories. In "megalothymia" one worships a superior force which extends its power vertically downward. In "isothymia" one worships a commonality of interlinked and interdependent forces.

Put the two propositions side by side, and naive critics will almost always give the obligatory jerk of the knee (among other things) to the latter one. As a quick example, I've noted that such critics automatically laud Alan Moore over Frank Miller not purely in terms of formal qualities, but because Moore is more politically palatable. The sort of alleged anarchism Moore encodes in his works is automatically superior to any POV expressed in Miller's words, which for lazy critics always come down to the "F" word: "fascism."
Anything that suggests an advocacy of "mastery" in this megalothymic sense is verboten.

And yet, the true "mystery of mastery" is that it frequently shows up, as Paglia sometimes successfully demonstrates, even in forms that are thought to be subtle and refined. It shows up because "the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people," even if it were sufficient for human beings politically, can never be sufficient in the world of literature. I noted in Part 3 that in fetish-fantasies the reader may be at once "the slayer and the slain," the hero and the villain. Less extreme meditations on gender conflict, ranging from JANE EYRE to YOUNG ROMANCE, will of course emphasize the isothymic strength of shared experience, of compromise. But the essence of conflict remains the same, no matter which pathway a given work may take.

To believe that literature should mirror a desired form of experience, an "ought" rather than an "is," is Werthamism in its most obtuse manifestation. Whether or not one believes that extreme fantasies of sex and violence have value in themselves, at the very least they continually force readers and critics to avoid becoming entrenched in viewing the world purely through the limited lens of morality and highbrow aesthetics.

THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 3

2011-10-22T16:17:00.001-05:00

'We’ll set aside for a moment the question of whether seeing women “bloodied and bruised” is sick as fuck or not. No, what’s really interesting about this site is how similar so much of the imagery is to actual comic books.'-- Heidi MacDonald, "The One with All the Comments," THE BEAT, 1-31-08.

'If the red slayer thinks he has slain,
'And the slain think themselves slain,
They know not well my subtle ways,
I keep and turn, and hold again'--"Brahma," R.W. Emerson.

So. Back to the main topic of the GROOVY AGE post "Superheroines Lose:" given the nature of pornography in all its manifestations, is it as "sick as fuck" for a given consumer to indulge in images of women, whether superheroic or otherwise, being physically abused/degraded? Curt Purcell expresses some ambivalence:

Sometimes it worries me, the fantasy material that fascinates me most. I'd like to think I'm nice and "normal" in real life, but when it comes to imagining and looking at make-believe stuff . . . well, you'll see.-- "Superheroines Lose."

Curt promises to explore the matter in more depth in a future post, BTW.

Like Curt, I'm not entirely sanguine about this particular kind of spectacle, sometimes simplified in fetish-culture as "m/f," meaning "male over female ". Despite Heidi's blanket condemnation, I think it feasible that a majority of comic-book readers, and perhaps even a majority of men, are either repelled by or at least made queasy by images of women being abused. Not to say that any male protective instinct toward women-- whether hardwired by nature or input by society-- cannot be overruled; obviously it can. At the same time, however, the forced degradation of fictional figures of any gender cannot help but have a different tonality than any experience relating to real violence, be it Elizabethan bear-baiting or a fascination with serial killers.

In HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN W/O IDENTITY, I suggested a literary "law of identification" to complement Aristotle's real-world-oriented "law of identity:"

Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."

With this phenomenological law in mind, one may fairly ask, "How sure are we that the sick fucks who patronized the "Superheroines Lose" material are identifying only with the 'slayer,' and not with the 'slain?'"

At one point Curt Purcell suggests one item that might be viewed as such a proof. He notes that in all the Japanese materials he surveyed, he found almost nothing that had the jokey tone one can find in less fetish-y forms of pornography. That's a significant datum. All forms of entertainment, "mainstream" or "specialized," use comedy as a leveling-mechanism between fictional characters-- particularly those of opposing gender. Arguably comedic interchanges also bring about a leveling between the characters, who exist to be identified with, and the real-world customer, who is there to do the identifying. Comedy can be a powerful reminder that "hey, guys, what you're seeing isn't phenomenologically real in the positivist sense" (or words to that effect). In pornography, one may conjecture that a lack of comedic byplay might suggest that the identification is strictly one-way: the customer wants only to be the "red slayer," getting even with his bitch-boss or his wife or the girl who blew him off in high school.

However, simply because it's a logical conclusion, that doesn't make it correct.

I have encountered testimony from some patrons as to the "doubleness" of the identificatory process in related types of pornographic fiction: the experience of being both the slayer and the slain. However, I don't advocate the belief that, because some people have made this testimony, this process must be true of all fetish-fiction, either in the "m/f" category or in others. There's no survey one could ever devise that would show the truth of all human hearts, in this regard or in any other. All one can do is to state, "Some people have made Statement X. Is Statement X corroborated by a Statement Y in any related venue?"

Well, one could point to the fact that in mainstream comic books, many patrons do have what are commonly called "favorite villains." The villains, it will be remembered, are the characters who continually lose, at least in traditionally oriented superhero stories. If a contingent of comics-fans-- call them Contingent R-- consider the Red Skull a great villain, does that mean that they admire the villain and secretly want to be Nazis? Or does it mean that Contingent R, observing that the Skull gets pounded to a pulp every time he fights Captain America, is secretly getting off on the Skull's sufferings, as if they were Sade's readers enjoying the torments of Justine? Or does Contingent R, while identifying with the villain in some fashion, appreciate him largely in the function of a fictional creation that makes the stories more visceral, simply because "Everybody Hates Nazis?"

Readers of this blog will probably guess which of these three views I would tend to champion. In addition, this example may show that humor, while useful, isn't especially necessary to encourage free-flowing identification. There have been lame Red Skull stories that used him as nothing more than a stock opponent, and there have been superior Red Skull stories that gave him some consistency of character to explain why a figure of considerable talents turns into such a monster. But hardly any of the good stories used humor to get across that identificatory message: at least in the thirty-plus years that I read the CAPTAIN AMERICA feature, I knew it as Marvel's most humor-challenged series, eclipsed only by the Silver-Age SILVER SURFER.

So the identificatory process remains a mystery.

Though not necessarily the same as "the mystery of mastery."

More on which later.

THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 2

2011-10-19T17:48:00.001-05:00

Before further exploring the topic raised by Curt Purcell's post (see PT. 1), I feel it appropriate to point out this blog's previous encounter with the topic of violence and superheroines, in reaction to this 1-31-08 BEAT post. However, Heidi's post addressed a different manifestation of the same phenomenon. Whereas Curt addressed a subgenre of Japanese pornography, to which he gave the informal name "Superheroines Lose," Heidi alleged that similar violent material on the porn-website "Superheroines Demise" was uncomfortably close to imagery seen in mainstream superhero comics.

I didn't think then, and don't think now, that Heidi proved her case:

It seems to me that the jury is still out as to whether this dominance imagery “pervades” the superhero genre as Alexa claims. Heidi names three examples of similar-looking image but doesn’t (at least in this post) claim that it’s pervasive. Steven Stahl cites one other example that may be the only one I’ve read, too long ago to remember anything except a general impression that MS. MARVEL was a really vanilla book.

I think you need more than four examples to prove pervasiveness. Should I check out WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS?

Another general impression I’ve had is that there are more triumphant, kickass female characters in comic books than at any other time in comic-book history. But maybe that’s just me.

Now, here's a new thought::

Suppose I am right, and there exist within any given year, contrary to Heidi and WIR, far more depictions of triumphant rather than trounced heroines in U.S. comics books specifically and in U.S. media generally. Admittedly, to assert this, one cannot define a "heroine" simply as any lead female character: it would have to be a character possessed of ample power to defend herself in a violent situation-- which would certainly be the principal context for costumed superheroines, though not for the Lifetime Channel's treasure-trove of endlessly imperilled female leads.

IF that were indeed the case, then it could be that "Superheroines Demise," if its organizers and contributors are dominantly U.S. citizens/residents, might be a reaction AGAINST the valorization of superheroes in mainstream media, as opposed to being an outgrowth of a general male audience's imperfectly-concealed desire to torment the female figure. ("Not that there's anything wrong with that"-- at least, AS LONG AS IT'S A FRICKING FICTIONAL CHARACTER!)

Naturally, I'm not interested enough in the answer to go out and buy every mainstream comic book that features a (super)heroine and count the number of times she kicks ass as opposed to the number of times she's slammed silly. Even if I did, statistics alone would never prove the matter. People on either side of the question would believe what they want to believe.

But here's the point to which my series-title, "Mystery of Mastery," refers:

Is there as radical a disconnect as some would believe between the triumphant and trounced modes?

Do not both depend on the arousal of sensation, in reaction against ideas transmitted through cultural matrices (such as fiction)?

I'll go into more detail in future essays. But in parting I'll point out that where the Japanese are concerned, they pretty much corner the market on every type of fetish imagineable-- and that I may be able to find at least one "triumphant" Japanese superheroine for every "trounced" one in Curt's survey.

More later.

THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY, PT. 1

2011-10-17T17:25:00.001-05:00

To what extent, and in what circumstances, is it possible for a man to make use of the descending road as a way to spiritual self-transcendence? At first sight it would seem obvious that the way down is not and can never be the way up. But in the realm of existence matters are not quite so simple as they are in our beautifully tidy world of words. In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent. -- Aldous Huxely on Self-Transcendence.

So rape, a heinous crime, becomes in fiction a source of titillation, at least when it's being perpetrated by a handsome swain. In itself this is no different than a host of similar dynamizations which fictional narrative makes possible. But having said that, is titillation all there is to the matter?...

...the power to rape, if it does signify potency in these stories, also signifies that the rakish hero is worth the heroine's trouble. She would hardly want to bother "stooping to conquer" him otherwise-- me, FROM ROMANCE TO THE RITUAL OF RAPE.

This essay is a prelude to an essay-series responding in part to Curt Purcell's recent GROOVY AGE post, entitled "Superheroines Lose."

I have not yet decided how many essays will comprise the series. I've written more than a little here about the intertwined cultural subjects of sexuality and violence. Because I don't get a lot of commentary, I'm not certain to what extent I'm talking to myself. This in itself isn't necessarily a problem, as the blog was essentially conceived as a method of working out various aspects of my theories. However, lack of input makes it tougher to avoid duplicating points.

The bracketed quotes above have in common a refusal to consider even the most physical aspects of human culture-- which in Huxley's essay involves an assortment of practices that he terms "downward transcendence"-- to be no more than physical. This may be harder to demonstrate, though, with the subject matter of Curt's essay than with, say, romance-novels.

Time will tell.

METAGODZILLA VS. ISOGHIDRAH: CONCLUSION

2011-10-13T17:45:00.002-05:00

At the end of the first essay in this essay-series, I said:

...I'll wind up by describing the relevance of their respective intersubjectivities for the literary analyst.

"Their" refers to the two authors I've now compared and contrasted: Joseph Conrad, who championed the "marvels and mysteries" found in isophenomenal fiction, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who defended the more "arresting" wonders of faerie and fantasy, which is at least one major aspect of the metaphenomenal expanses of humanity's ongoing narrative universe.

Now, it must be said first of all that from the standpoint of taste, or what Kant calls "the agreeable," there can be no particular logical valuation placed on either the preference for realistic or fantastic wonders. In the realm of the agreeable, Conrad is justified in finding the former marvels fascinating, and Tolkien is equally justified in "desiring dragons," as he once put it.

However, both of these paradigms of wonder-production are not confined only to these particular authors. Both of them, in exploring their own creative preferences, translated their particular tastes into intersubjective literary myths, and so expanded the potentials of both paradigms by instilling such wonders, be they of natural typhoons or unnatural dragons, in the hearts of their readers. Some readers preferred only realistic wonders, as Conrad apparently did, some readers bowed down exclusively at the fane of Tolkien, and some learned to appreciate both intersubjective wonders. Since I have written with appreciation of both writers here, obviously I'll be disposed to use myself as a representative of the last type of reader.

That said, though I respect the party of Conrad, I hold more regard for Tolkien's POV despite the fact that I disagree with a number of his specific opinions. For Conrad, taking a naturalistic stance, tends to treat fiction as if it had to be based upon one's view of the "real world." But for me this is the domain of nonfiction. Fiction will always be more about the hypothetically possible than the actual: more about "becoming" than "being" as it were.

Kant also believed that qualities such the beautiful and the sublime were not purely products of pure association, which he labeled as "reproductive imagination" and which seems to deal, like Coleridge's concept of "fancy," with what Samuel Taylor called "Fixities and Definites." Conrad's type of "marvels and mysteries" are clearly of this nature, since Conrad takes pains to tell us that all such enchantments are simply impressions made upon our minds by the "visual and tangible world." This is the limitation of all isophenomenal fiction. Within those limits great work can and has been done. But often the greatness of the work comes of exploiting the tension between the limitations of the real and human expectations of illimitability.

In both its "uncanny" and "marvelous" manifestations, however, the metaphenomenal stands free to delve into the depths of what Kant calls the "productive imagination." Kant's remarks, cited earlier in my "Finding Sigmund" essays, bear repeating:

“For the imagination… is very mighty when it creates, as it were, another nature out of the material that actual nature gives it… We may even restructure experience; and though in doing so we continue to follow analogical laws, yet we also follow principles which reside higher up, namely, in reason (and which are just as natural to us as those which the understanding follows in apprehending empirical nature. In this process we feel our freedom from the law of association…”—Kant, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, Section 314, tr. Pluhar).

Cassirer, whom I troubled to introduce in the INTERSUBJECTIVITY INTERLUDE, reifies Kant in such a way as to clarify that these "principles which reside higher up" are at once grounded in human subjective responses to the world and yet possess an objective nature by virtue not just of reason, but of their function within the overall human community. Cassirer's concept of "magical efficacy" makes clear that the particular charm of metaphenomenal fantasy resides in one's embracing of that sense of infinitude and illimitability, even if it is something we can only know through the interrelated forms of myth and literature.

And that's why, even though the fight between Metagodzilla and Isoghidrah never truly concludes, the former, by the nature of the "homeground" advantage, will always be the victor.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY INTERLUDE

2011-10-12T18:30:00.002-05:00

Before proceeding to the conclusion of the METAGODZILLA VS ISOGHIDRAH essay-series, I'll divert to the subject of Cassirer once more to explore the interrelation of intersubjectivity and myth.

Ernst Cassirer never formulated a poetics of art and/or literature. His principal significance to literary theory is his conceptualization of irreducible cultural forms, including not only art/literature but also mythology (covalent with religion), science and philosophy. Cassirer's conception is fundamentally pluralistic, in that no form subsumes any other, in contradistinction with the way a figure such as Sigmund Freud viewed both art and mythology as extensions of his (alleged) scientific paradigm.

Now when conceptualizing the above forms, particularly "myth," Cassirer focused almost exclusively upon the evolution of archaic mythico-religious systems.  He seems to have been aware that some thinkers believed that myth survived into his contemporary times in one guise or another, but in his writings on art he did not strongly expouse myth as a principle overlapping with literature, as was the case with Northrop Frye, the best-known proponent of "myth criticism" as well as a critic strongly influenced by Cassirer in other ways. Cassirer's work explored the ways in which archaic cultures, dominated by mythico-religious systems, gave birth to the discursive theoretical forms of science and philosophy.  Thus whenever Cassirer speaks of myth, as in his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT, he primarily refers to the state of myth in archaic human societies, prior to the rise of the theoretical forms.

Nevertheless, some of Cassirer's formulations certainly influenced Frye. I've mentioned in other essays Frye's conception of literature as a spectrum with naturalistic "verisimilitude" at one extreme and what Frye termed "myth" at the other-- by which, of course, Frye did mean a form of myth-like complexity present in formal literature.  This parallels Cassirer's opposition between the world of causality, over which science comes to hold dominion, and the world of internal expressivity, which is first communicated among humans through myth and mythic rituals.  Indeed, though "intersubjectivity" as a term does not appear in Cassirer, his analysis of archaic myth makes clear that it can be easily regarded as mankind's first attempt at intersubjective communication.

In MYTHICAL THOUGHT Cassirer defines causality as "the general concept of force" (p. 14). Cassirer knew that primitive peoples were as aware of causal forces as was Isaac Newton; otherwise, they could hardly have constructed those objects that take advantage of Newtonian forces, such as clubs and boats and pyramids.  However, in addition to their awareness of such forces, Cassirer asserts that primitives also believed in what I would term an "acausal force," though Cassirer's term is "magical efficacy."

"Magical efficacy" almost certainly traces from the "mana" theory of Robert Codrington's book THE MELANESIANS (1891), to which Cassirer refers in other works. However, in keeping with Cassirer's post-Kantian project, he's concerned with the application of this "efficacy" as a prelude to religion:

"More and more clearly we see the beginnings of a mythological view which assumes a distinct concept, neither of God nor of the psyche and personality, but starts from a still entirely undifferentiated intuition of magical efficacy, of a magical force inherent in things." (p. 16)

This force approaches ontology from a different perspective than that of commonplace causal reality, in part because space itself is transformed by internal sensation:

"For myth all difference of spatial aspect involutarily changes into a difference of expressive features, of physiognomic characters. Thus [myth's] spatial view, in spite of its tendencies toward objective formation, remain bathed in the color of feeling and subjective sensation" (p. 152).

Given that myth "appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy," the two of them together comprise "a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence."

To be sure, Cassirer does not emphasize that this objectivity is dependent upon its transmission through culture, in contradistiction to scientific law, which science assumes to be true independent of any human opinion on the subject. But in my view it's only a short step from Cassirer's "expressive features" and "physiognomic characters" to the archetypes of Jung, which, as past essays have demonstrated, provide clues to a phenomenology capable of putting both causal and mythical worlds into their proper perspective.
And in the conclusion to the METAGODZILLA series, I'll go into more detail as to how the antithesis of the causal and the intersubjective throws light on the valuation of different literary phenomenalities.

METAGODZILLA VS. ISOGHIDRAH, PART 2

2011-10-11T17:27:00.000-05:00

Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness. But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its disrepute. Many people dislike being “arrested.” They dislike any meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and hallucination.

And in this corner we have the "Godzilla" whose 1939 essay "On Fairy Stories" has repeatedly been invoked to battle "Primary World" champions like Joseph Conrad/"Isoghidrah." "Metagodzilla" is of course J.R.R. Tolkien, who may start rolling in his grave if his ghost ever hears that I've just compared him with a giant radioactive lizard. It's meant to be a compliment, of course, not least in that the big lizard almost always wins the fight.

OTOH, this isn't a "winner take all" fight: more like an inevitable conflict between world-views. Tolkien proclaims that:

Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.

Compared to Conrad's sneer at the mental "elasticity" of those who believe in the supernatural-- which as noted in Part 1, doesn't even differentiate between literal belief and fictional credence-- this statement shows a far broader conception of the nature of literature as a whole, not merely those particular departments of it that one may term "ghost stories," "fairy stories," or even my "metaphenomenal fiction." One can question some of Tolkien's conclusions here, but there's no question that he's looking at literature from a much more pluralistic stance than Conrad. For me this statement wins Tolkien the fight "on points" as it were.

Of course it must be noted that both authors were writing about those aforementioned departments only, so neither is making a blanket condemnation or defense of all metaphenomenal fictions. Indeed, at one point in the essay Tolkien, not content with taking swipes at the Conrad-like modernists who condemn fantasy as "unreal," also takes a jab at science fiction:

The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant's bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) “in a very real sense” a great deal more real. Why should we not escape from or condemn the “grim Assyrian” absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories? They are condemned even by the writers of that most escapist form of all literature, stories of Science fiction.

To be sure, there have been a lot of SF-writers and SF-critics who defend science fiction over fantasy as supposedly being more "realistic," by which they really mean "more tied to the naturalistic world of cause and effect." But the dichotomy doesn't really hold. While there are assorted science fiction stories that are scrupulous about translating real-world science into fiction, many of the best-known SF-concepts are not any more supportable than a Gaelic giant's-bag. I appreciate that the late Isaac Asimov could write rings around me in terms of real-world scientific knowledge. But he didn't draw on such knowledge to posit his "Three Laws of Robotics." These "laws" are no more than concepts designed to make his robot-narratives function as he the author chooses, and those narratives depict not naturalitic "reality" but a far-flung fantasy-corpus tenuously bound together with strands of real-world scientific data.
Of course, were Conrad actually battling Tolkien, if only in debate, Conrad might well stick to his guns that fantasy does indeed insult reason. And since Conrad states that he considers that fantasies of life-after-death are nothing more than "a desecration of our tenderest memories," one would expect that he would have little interest in the Christian underpinnings of Tolkien's arguments, particularly his view of "consolation:"

And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness. But our stories cannot be expected always to rise above our common level. They often do. Few lessons are taught more clearly in them than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial living, to which the “fugitive” would fly. For the fairy-story is specially apt to teach such things, of old and still today. Death is the theme that most inspired George MacDonald.

Yet in his next few paragraphs, Tolkien emphasizes that this consolation is more than just "the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires." Its principal purpose is the Eucatastrophe, or "happy ending."

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale) : this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

I omit here the parallels Tolkien draws to his own Christian belief, which I as a pluralist see as part of a more widespread cultural pattern, best summed up by Theodor Gaster in his book THESPIS. I in turn summarized his concepts of *plerosis* and *kenosis* with respect to their applicability in literary terms in AN OPEN QUEST PART 2.

But even though I find Tolkien's literary view to be immensely more well-reasoned than Conrad's, I must add that it is not insignificant that Conrad believes that he sees "marvels and mysteries" in the "visible and tangible world."

Does one necessarily *need* "arresting strangeness" to convey a sense of the marvelous? It would seem not, but at the same time there must logically be a coherent asesthetic governing these very different approaches to enchantment-- which I'll discuss in the last part of this essay-series.

METAGODZILLA VS. ISOGHIDRAH, PART 1

2011-10-04T16:37:00.000-05:00

Weighing in as the "Isoghidrah" of my title, we have the esteemed modernist author Joseph Conrad (1857-1924).

In 1915, Conrad wrote a story entitled "The Shadow-Line," which like many of his tales involved a psychological study of men at sea. To Conrad's immense displeasure, a few critics interpreted the tale as some sort of ghost story. This prompted Conrad to write a long "author's note" which not only disparages the verdict of those critics but seemingly of the entire concept of what he calls "the supernatural," whether in real life or fiction. In so doing Conrad put forth a doctrine of what I term "the isophenomenal," a doctrine asserting that there are no phenomenon outside those that we commonly call "natural:"

This story, which I admit to be in its brevity a fairly complex piece of

work, was not intended to touch on the supernatural. Yet more than one

critic has been inclined to take it in that way, seeing in it an attempt

on my part to give the fullest scope to my imagination by taking it

beyond the confines of the world of the living, suffering humanity. But

as a matter of fact my imagination is not made of stuff so elastic as

all that. I believe that if I attempted to put the strain of the

Supernatural on it it would fail deplorably and exhibit an unlovely gap.

But I could never have attempted such a thing, because all my moral and

intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that

whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and,

however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other

effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a

self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and

mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and

intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the

conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my

consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere

supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured

article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies

of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless

multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our

dignity.

Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend so low as to

seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all

ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind

with unutterable sadness. As to the effect of a mental or moral shock on

a common mind that is quite a legitimate subject for study and

description. Mr. Burns' moral being receives a severe shock in his

relations with his late captain, and this in his diseased state turns

into a mere superstitious fancy compounded of fear and animosity. This

fact is one of the elements of the story, but there is nothing

supernatural in it, nothing so to speak from beyond the confines of this

world, which in all conscience holds enough mystery and terror in

itself.

The rest of the essay deals solely with Conrad's conception of the story and does not concern me.

I don't recall whether or not academics consider Conrad to belong to the literary movement called "Naturalism." However, in the sense that I am using the term "naturalism," which is denote a particular type of literary phenomenality, Conrad speaks not just for his own particular tastes here, but for the whole literary tradition of isophenomenal naturalism, which explicitly rejects anything suggesting "fantasy" or "supernaturalism" as being very like what Conrad calls "vain imaginings."

Conrad, having taken umbrage at the slight that anyone should deem his "complex" work to be a mere ghost story, spends no time considering what the appeal of ghost stories or any other "supernatural" works might be for those readers that like that sort of thing. Instead, the author vaults over the distinctions between a ficitonal consideration of the supernatural and a real-life belief in it. Conrad places himself above any whose minds are "elastic" enough to credence the supernatural, which is "but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living." Conrad may have had similar thoughts about other aspects of the alleged "real supernatural," but here he centers his polemic on the idea of its existence as a "fabrication" originating purely from human beings' "relation to the dead and to the living." This part of Conrad's polemic seems much like an overcompensating reaction to the "ghost story" accusation and doesn't merit much discussion.

What is most interesting about Conrad's essay, however, is his assertion that even without the fabrication of the supernatural, the world is still a place of "marvels and mysteries," whose interaction upon human minds would "almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state."

That "almost" neatly sums up not just Conrad's skepticism on things enchanted, but that of all or most works in the naturalistic-phenomenalist tradition. In such works enchantment is not impossible, but author and reader must always remain aware that it does not arise from any link to supernatural realms or beings. Rather, such human moods are generated only by the "inexplicable" ways that wholly natural "marvel and mysteries" act upon "our emotions and intelligence."

Within the corpus of this essay Conrad does not give any examples of these enchantment-inducing "marvels and mysteries," and frankly, if he meant to put any in "The Shadow-Line," they failed to have any enchanting effect upon this reader. However, other Conrad works, such as his story "Typhoon" (1902), proved far more successful. Here's a section from the viewpoint of two sailing-men caught within the toils of a gigantic storm at sea:

The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her lurches had an appalling helplessness: she pitched as if taking a header into a void, and seemed to find a wall to hit every time. When she rolled she fell on her side headlong, and she would be righted back by such a demolishing blow that Jukes felt her reeling as a clubbed man reels before he collapses. The gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire world were one black gully. At certain moments the air streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end. And then she would begin her tumbling again as if dropped back into a boiling cauldron. Jukes tried hard to compose his mind and judge things coolly.

The sea, flattened down in the heavier gusts, would uprise and overwhelm both ends of the Nan-Shan in snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide, beyond both rails, into the night. And on this dazzling sheet, spread under the blackness of the clouds and emitting a bluish glow, Captain MacWhirr could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny specks black as ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the heads of the covered winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of his ship. Her middle structure, covered by the bridge which bore him, his mate, the closed wheelhouse where a man was steering shut up with the fear of being swept overboard together with the whole thing in one great crash -- her middle structure was like a half-tide rock awash upon a coast. It was like an outlying rock with the water boiling up, streaming over, pouring off, beating round -- like a rock in the surf to which shipwrecked people cling before they let go--only it rose, it sank, it rolled continuously, without respite and rest, like a rock that should have miraculously struck adrift from a coast and gone wallowing upon the sea.

"As if taking a header into a void"... "as though the entire world were one black gully"... "this dazzling sheet"..."tiny specks black as ebony." I can't be sure that these are the sort of sensory experiences that Conrad would have deemed properly "enchanting," but I think it likely. Indeed, I can see how such descriptions capture, even in isophenomenal vesture, much of the same emotion science fiction has come to call "the sense of wonder," even if the "wonder" is confined in Conradian hermeneutics to the here-and-now.

Conrad's existential position reminds me of the empiricist philosopher Burke's postiion on the emotion of "the sublime," which similarly arose from naturally-inspired associations. Yet the aforequoted section from "Typhoon" most resembles this citation from Burke's opponent Immanuel Kant:

“…consider bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky [and other examples of furious nature]... Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range..."-- Section 261.

Kant's theory of the sublime was designed to demonstrate that sublimity-- which also bears some resemblance to sci-fi's "sense of wonder"-- did not arise purely from naturalistic associations. However, Kant wrote too little on the subject of literature as such to be useful in combatting the naturalistic ethic of Conrad.

Next essay: Conrad Meets His Metagodzilla.

METAGODZILLA VS. ISOGHIDRAH; THE PRELUDE

2011-10-03T17:36:00.002-05:00

In my POETRY IN MOTION essays I agreed with Northrop Frye's analysis that all fictional narrative can be seen to contain both "narrative values," the elements which allow the "body" of the story to function properly, and "signficant values," the elements that endow the narrative as a whole with significance.

Nonfictional narratives, such as my essays here, cannot be fully reducible to the same dynamics as those of fictional narrative. Nevertheless, there are rough parallels to these two types of values in nonfictional narrative.

It might be asserted that most of my essays on the subject of literary phenomenality (beginning with this May 2008 post) have concentrated upon building up the "body" of my own critical narrative. First I sectioned the body off into two distinct portions, the isophenomenal (those phenomena which are "the same" as what we know in consensual reality) and the metaphenomenal (those phenomena that go "beyond" the bounds of what we know or accept as "the real.") The metaphenomenal side has received much more attention than the isophenomenal side, in that I continued to analyze the former in terms of literary tropes that may be categorized as either "uncanny" or "marvelous." By contrast, all the tropes of the isophenomenal fall within the realm of "the naturalistic," though one could mount an argument that even within a naturalistic framework some tropes may seem more "natural" than others.

All that recapitulated, one may fairly ask-- what are the "significant values" of this critical narrative?

The answer, insofar as one can be set in stone (or cyber-characters), is that however authors or their readers may conceive the phenomena of their experiental worlds, in fiction phenomenality is what I call (after Susanne Langer) a "gesture." It does not assert reality, as nonfictional narrative does, but an abstracted gesture toward reality. Thus, whether a fictional narrative portrays a world within a naturalistic, uncanny or marvelous mode, it does not do so purely to mirror the author's own convictions on the subject. In fiction authors inherit and continue a wealth of cultural motifs that can be fairly called intersubjective, in that they communicate to readers a set of shared meanings that go beyond simple societal functionalism.

At the end of Part 2 of THE INTERSUBJECTIVITY SOLUTION, I wrote:

Each story resonates with some though not all readers precisely because each evokes a "significance" in those readers; a significance founded in the conventions of storytelling and in the expectations of readers looking to have those conventions both confirmed and denied.

In the next two parts of this essay-serial, I'll look at how two different authors have described the phenomenality behind their literary universes. Then I'll wind up by describing the relevance of their respective intersubjectivities for the literary analyst.

TERM LIMITATIONS

2011-09-30T16:27:00.001-05:00

I've changed the name of my movie blog and my AUM theory for a couple of reasons.

One is that I've become aware that there's actually another "AUM Theory" out there, some psychological dingus called "Anxiety/Uncertainty Management." I'm sure there would never be a literal conflict between them and me in the best/worst of worlds, but I just don't want the duplication, even if I never publish my theory anywhere else.

Two is that about a year after I formulated the basic parameters of my theory, I found myself displeased with the term "atypical" that I explained in TALES OF THE ATYPICAL, UNCANNY AND MARVELOUS. I specified that the concept of "the atypical" could well apply to the type of narrative disequilibrium that pertained within what might loosely be called a "realistic" or "naturalistic" discourse, for which my first-chosen example was the novel THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL. I felt the need for a particular term to denote what Tzvetan Todorov called "the real" in his book THE FANTASTIC, but one which would not privilege consensual accounts of "the real" as did Todorov's book.

Recently, however, I tried to see if the term "atypical" applied very well to elements of stories aside from the movement of disequlibrium that Frank Cioffi called "the anomaly." "Uncanny" and "marvelous" (which I swiped from Todorov, though I know he took the first one from Freud and think it likely he picked up the latter from other fantasy-critics) worked fine. But "atypical" didn't work across the board. When I look back at one of my few reviews of an "atypical" film like HAWK OF THE WILDERNESS, I don't think "atypical" aptly describes what narrative forces make the film closer in spirit to realistic fiction than its "uncanny" near-cousin, TARZAN OF THE APES.

I'm not going back to change the text of old essays here or on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, though I will change the labels for "the atypical" to "the naturalistic."

From now on, my specialized use of "naturalistic" will connote those things that are, as the earlier essay says, "not fantastic" in any way. Moreover, since some of my cited definitions of fantasy stress how the natural order is broken or compromised within fictions of the uncanny or marvelous, it seems appropriate to have one category that remains "naturalistic" in all respects.

WALLER NOISE

2011-09-29T17:47:00.001-05:00

A week or so ago I first read of DC Comics' "Amanda Waller Weight Loss Program" on THE BEAT. I was initially torqued.

However, then I saw that Tom Spurgeon was against it, so I was tempted to be in favor of the de-fattinization.

I can't quite go that far, unfortunately. However, I will say that my reasons for being against the transformation are different from his (and, of course, better).

Tom said:

...there’s an interesting phenomenon in funnybooks in that the latest version of the character matters more than the majority of their appearances — so while super-hot Amanda Waller doesn’t mean all those issues of Suicide Squad burst into flame, the way fans and company create meaning out of these non-realities this is the version that in many ways matters. It’s not as easy for comics fans, for whatever reason, to go back to a previous iteration of a character the way it was for say, James Bond fans underwhelmed by Pierce Brosnan to fire up the Sean Connery flicks. Not sure why that is, especially since in comics those old books are probably way cheaper.

I find it "interesting" that he manages to spend less time focusing on the identity politics involved in DC's decision and more time sniping at the conservatism of mainstream fans : "this is the version that in many ways matters." I find it fascinating that Spurgeon emphasizes their conservatism rather than their moral dudgeon. He does admit that some alt-comics fans didn't like it when Maggie Chascarillo gained weight, for what that's worth.

However, I don't agree with his conclusion: "People are fucked up." If anything mainstream fans are more justified in wanting images of hottitude in their entertainment than alt-readers of LOVE AND ROCKETS, in that the genre of adventure comics is centered around the idea of enjoying mass quantities of sex and violence.

To that end, standard images of hottitude are entirely justified to pursue that kind of narrative, as I addressed more fully in my essay THAT OBSCURE OBJECTIVIZATION.

Thus it's not wrong to de-fattinize Amanda Waller because it encroaches upon false ideas of diversity in an escapist genre.

It's wrong simply because Amanda was so much more awesome as a fattie.

KIRBY KONCLUSIONS

2011-09-24T16:47:00.001-05:00

As I've been writing a lot about Jack Kirby's work in both CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN and FANTASTIC FOUR of late, it seemed appropriate to wrap up with a general overview. Here's how I rate what I deem four loosely-designated "periods" of Kirby work in terms of aesthetic successfulness.

(1) Kirby's collaborations at Marvel, mostly with Stan Lee.
(2) The "Fourth World" books, which remain in a class by themselves due to the ambitiousness of Kirby's theme and content.
(3) The Simon-Kirby years, roughly from 1939 or 1940 to 1955.
(4) Pretty much everything after the "Fourth World."
(5) Kirby in the late 1950s, excluding his Marvel work.

At the end of CONSUMMATELY CHALLENGED I reflected:

None of the Kirby CHALLENGERS stories, whatever their behind-the-scenes origins, ever score very high on the mythicity scale. That's why it's equally puzzling that he should have experienced such a comparative creative ferment for the early Marvel stories. But that's another essay.

There's no way that this essay can prove that Kirby experienced a "comparative creative ferment" at Marvel, in comparison to his level of activity at DC and other companies in the late 1950s, which, as readers will note, I find to be Kirby at his creative low point. All one can do is to draw comparisons at the comparative levels of complexity in Kirby works produced within a few years of each other, as I did in CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES PART 3. At the end of that essay I asserted the possibility that on some level Stan Lee had "challenged" Kirby, perhaps not so much in terms of providing Kirby with raw ideas (of which the artist never seemed to run short) but in terms of shaping them for maximum dramatic impact. In dramatic terms Kirby's Marvel work bears more resemblance to his collaborations with Joe Simon, particularly in the 1940s more than the downsliding 1950s, than it does to most of the work he'd been producing in the 1950s.

And although I give the "Fourth World" books a high rating, I think it significant that these were the books Kirby produced immediately after his last collaborations with Stan Lee (disincluding their one reunion later); the books in which Kirby may've been riffing on ideas and techniques he'd developed with Lee and, at the same time, trying to distance himself from Lee's ideas and techniques to prove himself to assembled fandom.

Even while keeping in mind that my ratings are in no way universally representative-- though I think there are many fans who would feel roughly the same way-- I think the general high opinion of the Marvel work says something interesting about the nature of creativity.

In my essay on Jerry Siegel, OCD ON A HOTPLATE, I wrote:

Interestingly, of all the Siegel stories I've read, the ones with the greatest mythicity are the ones he did for the 1960s SUPERMAN titles under legendary tough-editor Mort Weisinger. A story like "Superman's Return to Krypton" shows a far greater organization of story elements-- including symbolism-- than anything Siegel had done in earlier eras. Yet it doesn't seem that this was Siegel's normal mode of operation, for after he severed relations with DC in the mid-60s, his scripts became pretty wild-and-woolly once more, as one can observe from his output at the Archie imprint Mighty Comics.

This apparent process, by which Siegel wrote with greater restraint under the strong editorship of Mort Weisinger, yet went back to a "wild-and-woolly" mode of scripting, seems no less applicable to the development of Kirby after he determined that he would no longer work with other writers.

What I suspect happened both times is that Kirby and Siegel-- both of whom had been in the comics-business many years-- benefitted from strong editors Mort Weisinger and Stan Lee in a *creative* sense, in spite of all indications that both editors probably abused their authority to differing extents. This is not a logical development, but I believe there's some truth, even if it's only that Kirby and Siegel did some of their best work for exigent business-reasons; because they knew they'd lose valuable time and money if they didn't do their best each time out, or at least what those editors deemed to be their best.

One might imagine Lee and Weisinger functioning in the two creators' heads as little representations of the "ego," attempting to dominate and control the "id" of wild creativity that stemmed from Kirby and Siegel respectively.

Can I prove that Jack Kirby designed more organized, aesthetically-pleasing scenarios for THOR and FANTASTIC FOUR than he did in THE ETERNALS because in the former he had a little "Stan Lee" in his head? Of course not; no more than I can prove my above ratings to be objective truth.

But for me personally, it goes a long way for explaining how Kirby went from his DC work to his Marvel work with a "zero to sixty" rapidity.

QUICK BAT-HISTORY POST

2011-09-24T15:22:00.001-05:00

I started commenting on a CBR forum about the alleged near-cancellation of the Batman comic book in the early 1960s, and it turned into a mini-essay on Bat-history. Hence, with some adjustments, I'm printing it here too.

______

There's a big problem with a lot of the out-of-context quotes we as fans encounter. I can believe someone may've told Bob Kane that DC was considering cancelling Batman, but was it someone making an accurate appraisal? Since we don't know who it was, maybe it was some DC employee trying to bring Bob Kane down a peg ("Hah, you think you're all that but your character's sales are in the toilet").

This page from the COMICS CHRONICLES demonstrates the fact that the sales weren't all that bad, and even if they were, it seems unlikely that even in '62 DC would have dumped a character with any potential for licensing. Note on the same site that WONDER WOMAN's sales are lower than either Bat-book. These days it's axiomatic that WW has often been kept around for her merchandising potential-- and Batman, unlike WW, had had two serials spun off from his comic (though I don't know how much merchandise either character generated in 1962).

I find it probable that though sales of the Bat-books weren't that good, DC editors probably focused first on discussions as to how to make them better, before anyone seriously considered dumping the titles. Such cancellation *might* have allowed Bob Kane to take the property elsewhere, depending on the terms of his contract at the time.

I don't remember if Julie Schwartz ever said that he actively campaigned for the Batman assignment or not, but I can imagine him going after it, maybe not so much because he liked the character (JS often exhibited veiled contempt for comics-characters in later years) but simply to solidify his position in the company. Previous editor Jack Schiff probably didn't care one way or another about editing Batman, though he's been quoted as claiming that the aliens and such were forced on him and that he would rather have done more Earth-style villains. Interestingly, Schwartz, who was more of a SF-guy personally than Schiff, is the one who ends up doing what Schiff wanted to do; getting rid of (most) of the aliens and concentrating on villains, often reviving characters from earlier times as Schiff had (Schiff did new versions of Mad Hatter and Clayface; Schwartz updated the Scarecrow and the Riddler).

AN ODD JOHN

2011-09-20T15:59:00.001-05:00

In MADNESS TO OUR METHODS I addressed some of the questions about the applicability of different types of criticism to different types of works, even by the same author. Since the essay was inspired by critical debtate over the proper way to approach Chester Brown's graphic novel PAYING FOR IT, I showed how Brown himself had produced works that had strongest affiliations to three critical persuasions-- YUMMY FUR to archetypal criticism, THE PLAYBOY to aesthetic criticism, and LOUIS RIEL to ethical criticism. At the time I wrote the essay, I hadn't read PAYING FOR IT, whose descriptive subtitle, for anyone who's not heard, proclaims the work "a comic-strip memoir about being a john."

Now that I've read PFI, this essay will follow up some of the ideas expressed there. I wrote:

If as I suggest Spurgeon's review is in essence an aesthetic one, then one may conveniently label the type of criticism Heer and Berlatsky stump for to be "ethical criticism." Based on descriptions of PAYING's subject matter, and on my acquaintance with earlier Brown work, I can see some validity in either approach. However, given that the work's content is both biographical and hortatory, in all likelihood the third-named critical orientation, that of "archetypal criticism," would probably be a bad way to analyze PAYING in that such narratives tend to put forth a very low level of symbolic discourse.

That said, if PAYING is indeed amenable to both ethical and aesthetic criticism, not all such works, even by Chester Brown, are so well-balanced.

Back then I was giving PFI the benefit of the doubt in saying that it might be equally amenable to both forms of criticism, though given that it was one of Brown's autobiographical efforts, I doubted that the archetypal form would be espeically applicable. Now that I've read it, I think the aesthetic approach advocated by Tom Spurgeon has nearly no application whatever. I've certainly seen examples of Chester Brown work which possess the quality Spurgeon calls "quiet insistence." But I don't see any of that in PFI. It's possible that Spurgeon sees something there that I don't. It's also possible that he's allowing for some "carry-over" from other Brown works to affect his judgment. Neither verdict matters all that much, to be sure.

My reason for not seeing this "quiet insistence" is chiefly due to Brown's choice of format, in which all or most panels in PFI are about 1 1/2 inches by 1 inch. I found this to be an effective size for communicating the discursive ideas of his topic but not for communicating anything pertaining to mood or tonality. I've only read one Brown interview given to MOTHER JONES on the subject of PFI, which doesn't comment on his format-choice. However, the interviewer does ask:

MJ: Why did you choose to depict the sex instead of fading to black or doing one of any other artistic sleights of hand?

And Brown responds:

CB: I suppose I could have. There were a couple of instances where what I'm thinking during sex was relevant, so I might as well show myself having sex. I could have gone from a shot of the bed to just showing the ceiling and my thought bubble. Or maybe just show the feet. It just seemed, sex was taking place—why drag the camera someplace else in the room?

The thought struck me that in a sense, by choosing such tiny panels for PFI, Brown had not so much dragged the camera to another part of the room as he had changed the lens-size. I can't be sure until I come across Brown commenting on the matter, but the tiny size strikes me as an ideal way to literally "reduce" the subject matter so that it becomes ipso facto less prurient in presentation. (Brown does comment that while it wasn't odd for him to draw himself having sexual encounters, he does get some interesting reactions showing the pages blown-up for slideshow displays.)

Now, while I think PFI proves fruitless to analyze from both archetypal and aesthetic approaches, the ethical approach is a different animal. As far as I can tell, most of the critical reactions to PFI do take the ethical approach, frequently slamming Brown's ideas as unworkable and the like. Brown has anticipated all or most of these reactions, for the appendices to his memoir assails most if not all of the familiar arguments against the decrimininalization of prostitution. For the record, Brown, a libertarian, is also against the legalization of prositution, arguing that this would simply create a "black market" for sex workers, which would in turn maintain the associations between prostitution and criminality.

I'm not going to debate any of Brown's theories of decriminalized prostitution here. As a critic I defend Brown's intellectual discourse on the same terms that I defend Dave Sim's. Whether or not an artist succeeds in proposing an ethical schema that has real application to society or not-- a goal which more noted authors, such as Ezra Pound, failed to do-- the work may remain significant purely in terms of the technique the artist uses to make his salient points. As a pluralist I can condemn any number of ethical opinions on an individual basis, while maintaining the POV that even bad ethics can make for great storytelling.

I wouldn't precisely call PFI "great," even within the confines of autobiographical comic books. But even recognizing some of the default errors of libertarianism, it's still a work that demands one's full attention in debating/refuting it.

ADDENDA: I will note in passing that according to Brown's memoirs his encounters with prostitutes in Canada were amazingly restraind and-- to resort to that old Canadian stereotype-- unfailingly *polite.*

And on the purely practical side of things, that's probably why, even if decriminalized prostitution *could* work in Canada, it would probably never work that well in the United States of America-- for one simple reason:

Americans are thoroughly addicted to the art of screwing each other over for a buck.

CONSUMMATELY CHALLENGED

2011-09-19T18:20:00.002-05:00

In CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES PART 3 I said:

There is one mythopoeic element that may have some significance in the story as a whole—an element I’ll treat in a separate essay—but within the origin-sequence, it carries no plurisignative value.

The page, from SHOWCASE #6 (1957), shows that element:

One might be forgiven for thinking that the element I reference is the lead splash-panel, in which the four uniformed heroes are seen against a backdrop of flames and a devilish-looking figure-- who, incidentally, bears no strong resemblance to anyone in the story.

But no, the element to which I refer is the puzzling way that collaborators Jack Kirby and Dave Wood chose to characterize the "Heroes" radio program on which the future Challengers plan to guest. At a time when female adventurers were rare birds in American media, the radio program chooses to focus not on one, but *four* nameless women who, the announcer claims, "have earned the right to the title 'hero!'" The women are not named and never appear in the Kirby CHALLENGERS again. So why four women, rather than, say, a big-game hunter along the lines of Clyde Beatty?

It's at this point I return to my earlier-expressed notion, in CONSUMMATING PASSIONS, of an "inconsummate symbolic discourse." This is functionally the same as my notion of "presentational incoherence" as expressed in GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 3, but the former term skirts around the necessity of going into Langer's complex definitions of the "presentational" and the "discursive" to explain the terminology.

To this sort of peculiar creative quirk, the default response of the Bloody Comic Book Elitists is usually that if something in the story isn't well done, it can't be important. Obviously I don't agree, and do agree with Suzanne Langer that such works can possess "diffuse meaning" at the very least. Four unnamed heroic females are used to introduce four starring heroic males. If the story as a whole had something to do with the roles of masculinity and femininity, the unnamed females might at least function as a counterpoint to whatever discursive point the author sought to make.

But though one could view the book-length story of SHOWCASE #6 as something of a weighing of the nature of masculinity, the only other appearances of femininity are also inconsummate.

The story in brief: some time after the Challengers have become established as a four-man team of daredevils, they receive an offer to do a job for one million dollars: "a job for men who fear neither devil nor death." This is interesting wording given the devilish figure in the splash panel, though it too doesn't lead to any plurisignative pay-off.

The Challengers fly to Canada to meet their new employer, a mystic named Morelian. Morelian wants the four men to be his "guinea pigs" by opening the four chambers of a giant box "constructed in an age long forgotten." Twice Morelian references the most dominant feminine myth-reference, "Pandora's Box." Sure enough, each time the heroes open one of the first three chambers of the box, that chamber releases some incredible menace. Whereas Pandora's Box famously releases various incarnate evils to plague mankind evermore, the sorcerer's box is a grab-bag that releases entities with no obvious connection. One is a remote-controlled machine. Another seems to be a living entity, called a "freezing sun." And the last (actually first in presentation) is a big egg which hatches a titanic Greek-looking stone warrior. This menace, unlike the others, actually gets a second mythological reference, as an inscription on the box calls the egg a "dragon seed," prompting Red Ryan to remember the legend of Cadmus, "the guy who planed a field of seeds and grew a crop of fighting men." The bulk of the story deals with the heroes finding ways to quell each menace, though the defeat of the giant warrior is the most like a cop-out: after the Challengers see him survive an atomic explosion, they figure out that he's just a mental projection, and they "think" him out of existence.

When the three menaces have all been neutralized, the Challengers get back to the box, only to find that Morelian has opened the box's fourth and last chamber. Morelian wanted the heroes to deal with the creatures so that by process of elimination he would find the treasure in the last chamber: a ring whose inscription seems to promise immortality. The Challengers, despite having gone into the deal with their eyes open, scorn Morelian's "selfish reason" for exploring the box, but Morelian simply shrugs and leaves in his private plane. The plane summarily crashes, destroying the box in its fall, and Morelian dies, leading the heroes to deduce that he misread the inscription: that it was the box containing the ring that promised immortality, not the ring itself. The Challengers then depart with the observation that "we're still living on borrowed time-- which is more than you can say about Morelian!"

Many later CHALLENGERS stories, by Kirby and others, follow this basic pattern: the heroes find some strange artifact which unleashes various fantastic menaces that they the heroes must then fight or corral.  But this version of Pandora's Box doesn't attain any great mythicity simply by referring to the Greek myth, or even by invoking a few other images with feminine subtext (both the egg that hatches the giant warrior and the mythic "dragon seeds" to which it's compared).  Therefore, because it seems that Kirby was playing around with mythic elements but not really bringing them into any sort of narrative control, the feminine elements-- the four women, the egg (which also appears on the book's cover) and the two Greek myths-- are of an inconsummate nature. One can imagine an interesting narrative that used them all with greater intensity, but "Secrets" is not such a story.

Similarly, the "villain" of the story, whose name so obviously references "Merlin," is a rather half-assed version of the Faustian over-reacher.  I noted earlier that the story does touch upon the nature of masculinity, and it does, in the sense of evoking pleasure in the heroic acts of the Challengers. But the story doesn't work well as far as positing Morelian as the obverse of the heroes, simply because he pays them to do a dangerous job. Is Morelian in some sense "anti-masculine" for having done so? This is a possibility, but Kirby's story (and Dave Wood's dialogue) offer little to explain why the heroes suddenly take a dislike to Morelian at the end.  An extrinsic reason, not actually alluded to in the text, might be that Morelian's quest to escape death is morally dubious; that opening the box to gain immortality is tantamount to making a deal with the devil.  In Morelian, Kirby presents an inconsummate symbol of Faustian ambition, which is puzzling since it was the sort of story he'd done well in earlier venues, as in his collaborations with Joe Simon for features like SANDMAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA.

None of the Kirby CHALLENGERS stories, whatever their behind-the-scenes origins, ever score very high on the mythicity scale. That's why it's equally puzzling that he should have experienced such a comparative creative ferment for the early Marvel stories. But that's another essay.

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES PART 3

2011-09-17T15:00:00.003-05:00

I’ve stated in Part 1 of this essay-series that I concede the *possibility* that the FANTASTIC FOUR may have come about, as fervent Kirby-supporters claim, as having been mostly conceived by Jack Kirby, aside from perhaps the addition of a new Human Torch to the mix (as Kirby would have been unlikely to have revived that particular character). However, I’ve been comparing the type of narratives found in the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR against the prior Kirby work most often compared with the FF: the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, originated by Kirby and writer Dave Wood. Based on those comparisons, I think it’s more likely that Stan Lee gave Kirby much more substantial storytelling input than had Dave Wood. I don’t credit Lee’s courtroom claim to have originated nearly everything in the Lee-Kirby collaboration. But I also don’t believe a similar claim from Kirby, nor do I favor the opinions of fans who believe Stan’s greatest contribution was stepping back to let Kirby “do his thing.”

The twelve Kirby issues of COTU are perhaps close to equaling the first 12 issues of FANTASTIC FOUR in respect to the kinetic qualities of both: both are high-energy juvenile adventures with a lot of sensational action. Yet in my Jungian-influenced literary system I recognize three other aspects of literature beyond the kinetic: the thematic (dealing with discursive concepts), the dramatic (dealing with character interactions), and the mythopoeic (dealing with symbolic complexity). And in all of these, COTU is as night to the FF’s bright sunshiny day.

It is, again, possible that *if* Jack Kirby solely originated FANTASTIC FOUR in 1961, he simply experienced a quantum leap in creativity as he went from COTU and SKY MASTERS to FANTASTIC FOUR, INCREDIBLE HULK, et al. After all, many authors vacillate, for any number of reasons, in terms of their quality over the course of years. However, during the years between 1957 and 1961, during which Jack Kirby began getting most of his work from Stan Lee’s company, he collaborated most often with Lee, either directly or with the additional collaboration of Larry Lieber as dialogue-writer to the Lee-Kirby plots. I think it’s likely that as the two collaborators learned one another’s skills, they played off one another in creative ways that were not possible with earlier collaborators like Dave Wood, leading to a gestalt of complementary creativity.

We have few relics of the Lee-Kirby collaborative process, and fans tend to interpret what we have according to their respective prejudices. Therefore, critics can only compare the narrative themselves. And since FANTASTIC FOUR is most often compared to the CHALLENGERS because the two features have roughly similar origins, a comparison of those origin-sequences is necessary.

The COTU origin is two-and-a-half pages, not counting an unrelated first-page splash-panel. It begins as an announcer for a radio program called “Heroes” tells his listeners that next week the program will feature four men “famous in their own fields.” These four all have their own adventurous specialties: Ace Morgan is a pilot, Prof Haley a diver, Red Ryan a mountain-climber, and Rocky Davis a wrestler. At the same time the announcer is speaking, Ace Morgan is flying the other three to wherever the radio program is scheduled for broadcast (even though it’s not to take place until “next week.”) A storm hits the plane, and when Ace tries to steer the plane out of the storm, the plane’s controls jam. The plane crashes but all four men survive, though it seems like a miracle to them given the plane’s devastation. They decide that they are now living on “borrowed time” and that their destiny is to form a team of daredevils willing to “challenge the unknown.”

The FF origin is five pages, beginning as scientist Reed Richards, his fiancée Sue and her brother Johnny seek to persuade Ben Grimm to pilot a ship, constructed by Reed, into outer space. Ben objects that the cosmic rays surrounding Earth “might kill us all out in space.” Sue accuses Ben of cowardice, and he angrily takes her implicit dare. Later the foursome (none of whom seem to need astronaut training) blast off in Reed’s ship. Just as Ben predicts, cosmic rays strike the ship, affecting all those aboard and causing the ship to crash. The four would-be astronauts survive, but Ben becomes irate with Reed once they see that Sue has gained the power of invisibility. As Ben tries to attack Reed (his words suggesting a hidden desire for Reed’s girlfriend), both exhibit super-powers as they fight, as does Johnny. Reed persuades his companions to use their powers for the good of humanity as the Fantastic Four.

Since the purpose of both stories is to assemble a heroic team, neither can be judged on pure verisimilitude, on whether the characters are likely to become altruistic teams in response to their traumas. But in the case of COTU, everything in the brief origin is purely functional. The motive for bringing the heroes together is a mundane radio program, and there are no significant aspects to the plane the heroes fly in or the storm that causes them to crash. Even the metaphor of “borrowed time” isn’t particularly compelling. There are no discursive elements introduced, and the characters are too similar to generate any interpersonal drama. There is one mythopoeic element that may have some significance in the story as a whole—an element I’ll treat in a separate essay—but within the origin-sequence, it carries no plurisignative value.

In the FF origin-sequence, however, Lee and Kirby provide what I’ve called a “super-functional” narrative. Through the central character of Reed Richards, the creators channel the early sixties’ fascination with the wonder of space-flight in all its thematic, dramatic, and mythopoeic aspects. Richards is given just one dominant character-aspect—a devotion to exploring the frontier of space that borders on the fanatical (“We had to be first!” he cries as the ship leaves Earth). In most SF-movies of the time this would make Reed the over-reacher doomed to suffer the consequences of risk-taking. Here, Ben Grimm, who in an archaic Greek drama would be the warning-voice of the chorus, is the one to suffer the doom of the over-reacher, becoming a monster outside humanity. The bare suggestion of his concealed feelings for Sue would have rich implications for later stories, especially once the team developed into more of a quarreling family than a businesslike team. The seeds of all the thematic, dramatic and mythopoeic elements of the ensuing series are found in this five-page sequence, and even though Lee and Kirby often rewrote specifics of the origin, the FF origin-sequence established a super-functional mythos for the feature’s characters, whereas the origin of the Challengers is merely a set-up that has little if any future impact on stories.

There is no knowing which if any specific ideas Stan Lee contributed to the collaboration. But at the very least I think that Lee did more than simply “let Kirby loose.” I believe that on some level Lee “challenged the unknown” limits of what comic-book superheroes could do, and by example encouraged Kirby to do the same. And therefore, no matter how much work Stan Lee did in the collaboration, the work they produced was more than Jack Kirby ever could have done, unaided.

I

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES PT. 2

2011-09-16T17:48:00.000-05:00

In PART 1 of CHALLENGE I said:

The Kirby COTU stories-- some or all of which may've started from full scripts by other writers, though Mark Evanier asserts that Kirby usually rewrote any scripts he was given-- resemble the kind of stuff Kirby did in his mid-to-late 1970s Marvel works. The narratives usually begin with the Challengers being summoned to investigate or eludicate some mystery, usually one with strong SF-aspects, and thereafter the heroes fights aliens or robots or whatever in fast-action stories with no great emotional resonance.

Expanding on this somewhat:

Starting in 1957, Jack Kirby worked on the feature CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN over the course of four appearances in SHOWCASE (issues #6, 7, 11, and 12) and eight issues of the heroes' own feature. In all of these issues the Challengers shared no space with any co-features, though on occasion a given issue might have two short COTU stories rather than a full-length tale. In the recent b&w reprint of the early issues credit for writing issues is given either to Dave Wood or to Kirby himself, though there's no preface to explain by what process DC Comics allocated these credits.

COTU can be fairly regarded as Kirby's first solid-selling series following the end of his business partnership with Joe Simon in 1955. But as I noted above, most of the COTU stories are pretty formulaic despite the Kirby touch. In the shorter stories, Kirby's works seems constrained by what may have been attempts to fit a conservative DC "house style" (which Gil Kane asserted to be most influenced by the example of comic-strip artist Dan Barry). The full-length stories-- in particular a wild time-travel story in COTU #4-- often show Kirby returning to a style of "epic" storytelling that recalls his most successful Golden Age work. However, the plotting of these stories lacks the relatively-strong characterization seen in the Golden Age work Kirby produced in partnership with Simon. The four heroes-- Ace, Prof, Rocky, and Red-- are largely interchangeable aside from their particular talents (diving, piloting, etc.) Often the plots, while reasonably efficient for this type of helter-skelter adventure, have a "fly-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants" quality; one that reminds me of the pace Kirby employed on most if not all of his solo works of the 1970s and thereafter. The dialogue is never as eccentric as one finds in the 1970s solo works, but one presumes that credited co-writers like Wood were responsible in some instances, while in others Kirby himself kept to the then-current writing-standards of his employers.

To be sure, about a year after the debut of COTU Kirby collaborated with both Dave Wood and his brother Dick on the comic strip SKY MASTERS, which prefigures a return to more nuanced characterizations than one sees in COTU; again, more in tune with the Simon/Kirby level of storytelling. The SKY MASTERS strips I've seen have a rather Caniff-like quality in respect to characterization; nevertheless, the short-lived strip (58-61) is at best an interesting experiment.

One of the oddest aspects of the COTU is that while Kirby was working on the title, the characterization of the main heroes had none of the individual development of even some of the one-shot characters Kirby portrayed in his anthology monster-stories in the adjoining years, for such "Marvel" magazines as TALES OF SUSPENSE and TALES TO ASTONISH. However, almost immediately after Kirby left COTU, two stories by one DC writer, France Herron, suddenly played around with the notion that two of the Challengers, Rocky and Red, quarreled a lot. The two stories-- "The Cave-Man Beast" and "Creatures of the Forbidden World"-- aren't especially well characterized beyond this schtick, probably borrowed from a similar one in the DOC SAVAGE pulps. But it's interesting that as soon as Kirby left the title, someone started a "meme" which Kirby and Lee would realize more fully in FANTASTIC FOUR's constant quarrels between the Torch and the Thing.

QUICK TAKE ON MICKEY MARX

2011-09-16T16:20:00.002-05:00

I posted this today on THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION:

I have a simple motto as regards all political systems:

"Any political system will work if its people do."

By which I mean not every single person in a society but those responsible for shaping it.

I disagree with Marx's claim that capitalism is inherently flawed. Like any system it works well as long as it gets proper maintenance. Our financial troubles result from an oligarchy within capitalism, not capitalism itself. The oligarchy has campaigned for the last thirty years to remove all regulatory controls in the short-sighted belief that they could keep all their capital to themselves because they were "job creators," i.e. the new aristocracy.

Did they plunder the middle class? Yes, without a doubt. But in a capitalistic democracy it was at least theoretically possible that the oligarchy could have been defeated. That they were not speaks to the lack of will on the part of that perhaps overly-comfortable middle class (to which, sadly, I'm no exception).

I understand why Northrop Frye would recognize Marx's sterling ability to see new mythic shapes in socioeconomic developments, but I would think he'd be put off by Marx's extreme utilitarianism.

CONSUMMATING PASSIONS

2011-09-13T16:43:00.001-05:00

"[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol. Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression. The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.

Definition of CONSUMMATE

1: complete in every detail : perfect

2: extremely skilled and accomplished
3: of the highest degree

-- Merriam Webster online.

In order to talk further about the question I've raised re: the nature of Jack Kirby's creativity, I find myself drawn back to Langer's use of this term, "unconsummated symbol," in order to suss out some of the different levels of expressive power found in his work.

My first approach with the brilliant philosopher Langer is, unfortunately, to correct her terminology. On a minor note first, I would not call music itself a "symbolic form." The philospher most associated with that term, under whom Langer studied in the 1930s, was Ernst Cassirer, and he tended to use the term "form" only for those large-scale phenomena of human culture that could not profitably reduce into one another, such as Art, Science, and Philosophy. "Music," being a subdivision of Art, would be better considered as a "symbolic discourse."

Langer is entirely correct, however, that pure music, unalloyed with lyrics or other forms of artistic expression, has no "permanent contents," and that it expresses emotion but cannot assert thought as such, even to the extent that a wordless comics sequence may. Yet her use of the term "unconsummated" is badly chosen because it suggests transience, as if music had not yet reached its consummation (devoutly to be wished, surely!) but that it might do so at some future date.

There is no official dictionary term for a state in which it is impossible for a person or thing to become "complete in every detail." However, I experimented with the neologism "inconsummatable," and found that a few Internet sites had also used it to mean pretty much what I meant. Thus it is proper to say that music is an "inconsummatable symbolic discourse," in that, *if* one accepts that Art should be capable of both articulation and assertion, expressiveness and expression, then music can never be "complete" in the sense that other art-forms can. This takes absolutely nothing away from music, for it's a judgment that can only be made within the cited definition of art's completeness. Viewing art as having this dual capacity for assertion and expressiveness makes for a convenient heuristic tool in terms of judging other forms of symbolic discourse which *do* have the capacity for consummation on both levels.

Now, dictionaries do recognize that the opposite of the adjectival "consummate" is "inconsummate," which means precisely the same as "unconsummated." Both mean that a given object has not reached a state of completeness.

In earlier essays I've spoken in symbolic discourse in terms of *mythicity,* through which concept it's possible to detect differing degrees of symbolic complexity within a range of literary works. This remains the cornerstone of my theory, but Langer's terms are useful for determining the processes behind the articulation of complexity. In this essay I formulated the term "null-myth" for a given element in a narrative that did not happen to be complex in a particular iteration, with the explicit statement that no such element was beyond a high-mythic transformation elsewhere. In yet another essay I conjoined my Frye-influenced theories of symbolic complexity with those of Philip Wheelwright, who employed the terms *plurisignative* and *monosignative* for differing levels of symbolic expression.

In a future essay I plan to develop distinctions between a *consummate* symbolic discourse and an *inconsummate* one, probably with reference to the work of Jack Kirby.

DISTANCED RELATIONS

2011-09-12T18:06:00.000-05:00

"So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like profiteers. It had not been a battle, but a sale. You give me this and I'll give you that. Refuse me and I'll refuse you. Sold? Sold! Shevek's career, like the existence of his society,depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?"-- the character of Shevek in Ursula K. LeGuin's THE DISPOSSESSED.

I've not quite finished my rereading of the LeGuin book, in which the author posits two cultures that substantially reproduce the ideological oppositions of capitalism (represented by the planet "Urras") and socialism (embodied by "Anarres.") The latter planet is the homeworld to Shevek, and in the quote above he meditates on the incongruity that on his world, despite its ideals of "mutual aid and solidarity," the "exploitative relationships" characteristic of capitalism pervade his society in camoflagued form, as per the one he shares with his academic superior Sabul. Later, when Shevek journeys to Urras, he's often surprised as how well the society functions despite the "basic dysfunction" of its capitalistic orientation. LeGuin carefully structures her two worlds so that no thinking critic could accuse her of simply finding one system superior to the other; rather, it's evident that each society has its weaknesses, and that those weaknesses are an expression of the weakness in human nature rather than in the systems as such.

Nevertheless, the answer to Shevek's puzzled question-- particularly with regard to the subject of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby collaboration of the 1960s-- would seem to be "yes," with very few qualifiers. Over and over Lee's editorial control over Jack Kirby's art and story has been critiqued as inequitable, unfair, injurious to the superior artistic talents of Kirby, etc.

And yet, out of this dysfunctional relationship, we have "true function" in the form of a host of comic-book features that even most bloody comic book elitists validate. There are a number of Kirby fans who believe that his non-collaborative work exceeds any work he did with Stan Lee or anyone else. Such is their privilege, but I've rarely seen a critical defense that went beyond the Kantian level of "the agreeable" (i.e., I like this and no one can tell me differently).

As I noted in INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 2, Marguerite Van Cook quoted Louis Althusser:

Ideologies are perceived-accepted–suffered cultural objects, which work fundamentally on men through a process they do not understand. What men express in their ideologies is not their true relation to their conditions of existence, but how they react to their conditions of existence; which presupposes a real relationship and an imaginary relationship.

Van Cook follows Althusser's Marxmallow logic by asserting again and again that in producing professional comic books for their audience, Lee and Kirby did not have a "true relation to their conditions of existence." Rather, they merely "reacted" to the ideological underpinnings of their society.

The first objection to Van Cook's restatement of Althusser is that while Althusser may or may not have given an example of an author with such a "true relation" somewhere in his writings, Van Cook merely accepts his statement as a given and does not choose to present her take on such a "true relation." But without such a positive counter-example, Van Cook's negative analyses of Lee and Kirby are utterly meaningless.

How might Van Cook had chosen an example of a "true relation?" Given the rigidity of Marxmallow dialectic, the only possible "true relation" to an artist's "conditions of existence" will inevitably reflect Marxmallow views of truth. Thus an artist who references, or seems to reference, such concepts as "commodification"-- Daniel Clowes, perhaps-- would be assumed to have such a "true relation" while Lee and Kirby were mere cogs in the ideological machine.

Even with a positive counter-example, however, Lee and Kirby make poor examples of the monolith-like nature of American mass culture, with which Van Cook implicitly agrees as she quotes Terry Eagleton on the subject:

‘Mass’ culture is not the inevitable product of ‘industrial’ society, but the offspring of a particular form of industrialism which organizes production for profit rather than for use, which concerns itself with what will sell rather than with what is valuable.

In PART 2 I pointed out that Lee and Kirby were responsible for originating one of the first black featured heroes in a commercial American comic book. I do not know if either Eagleton, Althusser or Van Cook would find this a "valuable" contribution to society. However, even if they all considered American pop cultrue to be insignificant by virtue of its inadherence to Marxist truth, I should imagine that the debut of a character such as Gabriel Jones would have to be considered marginally more progressive than the many times both Lee and Kirby attacked Communist societies as "evil" in the early 1960s.

One might agree that anti-Communist rhetoric, especially as simplistic as it appeared in such Lee-Kirby comic books as FANTASTIC FOUR #13, may have been put there to sell the books:

And yet-- was it "true" or not, that in some Communist countries, citizens were "enslaved" by their leaders? As in LeGuin's novel, the real sins of capitalism don't negate the real sins of socialism; both spring from human weakness. Moreover, can one be certain that Lee and Kirby merely "reacted" in making this negative characterization of 1960s Communism? That neither man ever read anything about real abuses in real places, and that therefore they characterized Commies as the enemy just to make a buck?

Conversely, there is one thing about the "progressive" introduction of a black character like Lee & Kirby's Gabe Jones that is manifestly "untrue:" American troops in World War II were segregated. Thus Lee and Kirby distorted real history for the purpose of making a progressive point: that loyal black Americans *should* have been able to serve their country without having to observe the "color line." And yet, this willful distortion might have backfired on the company's ability to "make a buck" had there been some conservative backlash against the Gabe Jones character.

I've pursued this line of reasoning purely to expose the superficiality of Van Cook's adherence to Marxist views of monolithic mass culture. I don't want to give the impression that I personally would define any narrative work as having a "true relation" to an author's "conditions of existence" purely in terms of whether or not it contains progressive concepts, or even a mix of progressive and conservative concepts. Literary truth cannot be defined by politics, for no form of literature, no matter how "high" or "low," is ever purely about politics. All art, as Suzanne Langer observed, is inherently "gestural:" it reminds us of things in our real lives but is quite obviously not "real life," even in the most "kitchen-sink" types of art.

LeGuin's hero Shevek has to grant the capitalist devil his due by admitting that "mechanical"
contracts may lead to "true function" as readily as do "organic ones." However, in art the oppositions of "organic" and "mechanical" become much more multifaceted than they can ever be in sociopolitical discourse. The fact that Marxists remain so unaware of the plurisignative nature of literature remains one of the great marvels of the last century, given that said Marxists are so sedulous about ferreting out Other People's Myths.

A PAGE RIGHT OUT OF PREHISTORY

2011-09-08T17:50:00.002-05:00

At the end of INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 2 I said:

Next essay: why the bourgeoise productions of Lee and Kirby do indeed contain "a true relation to the conditions of their existence," albeit not one of which Althusser would approve.

The more I thought about this, the more daunting the project seemed. How could one hope to make clear to any Marxist the terms of my argument, when so many Marxists lack any broad historical perspective with regard to the many-faceted nature of human language and literature? After all, to this day Roland Barthes is still a name to conjure with, with barely anyone pointing out that l'empereur is missing his vetements:

"...myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth. Myth sees in them only the same raw material; their unity is that they all come down to the status of a mere language."-- Barthes, "Myth Today."

Marguerite Van Cook's essay, which prompted the INVADERS series from me, never mentions Barthes, but whether she's read him or not her own Marxist argument reproduces the same hegemonic argument with respect to how the "signifying" diction of Stan Lee establishes authority over the "raw material" of Jack Kirby's art. These are Barthes' terms, not Van Cook's, but a similarity of theme can be observed in Van Cook's essay:

Implicitly, art is produced in a strangely abased position in the social hierarchy of production. Art appears to be the tool of the intuitive, untamed mind, while writing evidences intellectual precision and authority.

Later in INVADERS PT. 3 I pointed out that if Stan Lee had "abased" the "intuitive" and "untamed" mind of Jack Kirby with his "elevated diction," then it was an abasement to which Kirby also submitted himself, by conferring "elevated diction" upon characters like Orion and Darkseid.

There are, it happens, various correctives to this Marxist overemphasis on hegemonic oppression in the world of literary narrative. One is Philip Wheelwright, who points out that language is not merely one unitary phenomenon, and that it can be productively separated into two broad "complementary uses:"

"...to designate clearly for the sake of efficient and widespread comunication, and to express with humanly significant fullness."-- Wheelwright, THE BURNING FOUNTAIN.

Where Barthes imagines a conflict between denotation and connotation (though he manages to bollix up his concept of denotation). Wheelwright sees the two "strategeies" of language as not only complementary, but necessarily intertwined throughout history. "Steno-language" (the language of plain sense) is, he tells us, the "negative limit" of language in its more expansive form, "expressive" or "poeto-language."

Ernst Cassirer, in books like his MYTHICAL THOUGHT, goes so far as to figure his version of "expressive language" as the means by which early man formulated his first abstract thoughts, in the forms of myth, folklore and religion. Of course, it should be said that even early man surely had his own version of "steno-language," in which one caveperson might tell another, "Go fetch me that rock," or "Watch out for that woolly mammoth." It's a leap of poor logic to imagine that one came before the other, and Cassirer does not, unlike Barthes, make the mistake of asserting one linguistic form's primacy over the other.

Through what remnants we have of early literature we can see the two strategies being carried out, even in the earliest civilizations. Take as example the myth sometimes called "Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld." This is a great example of mythic discourse at its most expressive in that, even putting aside specific terms for which we moderns don't know the meanings, the story's logic is entirely governed by such mysterious cosmic presences as Inanna, the huluppu-tree, the Anzu-bird, and of course Gilgamesh and Enkidu themselves. In contrast, although the better-known EPIC OF GILGAMESH is replete with such presences, they have been made somewhat less mysterious in that the epic places greater realistic emphasis on understanding why Gilgamesh takes this or that action. Though the Gilgamesh Epic is certainly not an example of Wheelwright's "steno-language," one may imagine its composer-- almost certainly some anonymous court poet working with raw mythic materials as did the better-known Homer-- using the type of "plain sense" reasoning found in steno-language to figure out, for example,why Gilgamesh might decide to reject Ishtar's offer of love, which would then lead dramatically to the death of Enkidu.

The contrast between these two mythic stories is but one of many I might use to portrary the interweavings of Wheelwright's two linguistic strategies, one which, I must repeat, depends more upon the nature of what is being communicated than on some imagined hegemonic incursion of a "signifier" over a "sign," or a wordy editor over an "intuitive" artist.

With this linguistic schema as a propositional aesthetic foundation, my next essay on this subject should at last address the matter of how the works of Lee and Kirby could indeed have a "true relation to the conditions of their existence," whether that relation is anything a Marxist could relate to or not.

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER FOURSOMES

2011-09-06T17:48:00.001-05:00

Recently I had the chance to read DC's SHOWCASE reprints of the earliest issues of CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which includes all of the issues on which Jack Kirby worked. COTU, as the heroic team's name is often abbreviated, is often considered by many Kirby fans to be evidence that Jack Kirby probably brought some work very like the Challengers to Marvel in the early 60s, and that this was eventually altered to become the company's flagship superhero title, 1961's THE FANTASTIC FOUR.

The proposition is certainly a fair one. All artists tend to recycle work that either interests them or their audience (in terms of selling well), so it's logical to assume that one heroic team might beget another.
In addition, for many fans the most salient similarity between the two hero-teams is that they bond after a crash landing. In the origin of the Challengers from 1957's SHOWCASE #6, the four heroes are unrelated adventure-seekers who happen to share a plane on the way to a mutual rendezvous. When all four men survive their plane's crash, they decide that they now live on "borrowed time" and to band together in order to perform feats of derring-do.

As most fans know, this has some resemblance to the origin of the Fantastic Four as told in the premiere issue of their magazine (though details were often changed in later retellings). The most salient difference is that all four of the heroes in FF #1 know one another quite well when they agree to Reed Richards' idea that they should steal the rocket he worked on from the government and use it to fly to the moon. In addition, whereas the crash in SHOWCASE #6 happens by sheer chance, the cause of the FF's rocket-crash stems from a peril that Reed and his allies foresee: a barrier of cosmic radiation on the outskirts of Earth's atmosphere. All four would-be astronauts find themselves transformed into cosmically-powered beings, with the result that, even though one of them has become a rock-skinned monster as a result, all four agree to start using their powers to defend the world from evil.

I can well believe that Jack Kirby might have used COTU as a base idea from which to propose some concept that became the Fantastic Four. Perhaps he did this on his own, perhaps it came together in response to the now-legendary order from Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, in which he allegedly commanded Stan Lee to come up with a book like DC's JUSTICE LEAGUE. Other fans have noted the fact that Marvel had no individual superhero features in 1961, so that at that time a duplication of DC's JUSTICE LEAGUE scheme could not have worked. Logically, an original hero-team along the lines of COTU-- and its two or three DC-imitators, like SEA DEVILS and CAVE CARSON-- probably seemed the ideal solution to the problem.

However, there's one big problem with seeing the FANTASTIC FOUR as entirely the spawn of Kirby's CHALLENGERS work: in terms of mythicity, of symbolic resonance, COTU is like an artist's sketch of a fully formed idea, while even in the early, somewhat crude FANTASTIC FOUR stories, the idea has been developed.

The Kirby COTU stories-- some or all of which may've started from full scripts by other writers, though Mark Evanier asserts that Kirby usually rewrote any scripts he was given-- resemble the kind of stuff Kirby did in his mid-to-late 1970s Marvel works. The narratives usually begin with the Challengers being summoned to investigate or eludicate some mystery, usually one with strong SF-aspects, and thereafter the heroes fights aliens or robots or whatever in fast-action stories with no great emotional resonance.

In contrast, even the weakest of the early FANTASTIC FOUR stories show a concern for dramatic storytelling, in which the individual characters have distinct personalities and relationships with one another. Because of such distinctions, the first ten FF stories sustain a mythology of characters, each with his or her archetypal nature: even a pallid villain like the Miracle Man from FF #3 carries some of the resonance of the Faustian deceiver. In contrast, one Kirby robot or alien is pretty much like every other Kirby robot or alien in COTU.

I can't say with certainty that Stan Lee made all the difference. It's certainly possible that Kirby simply had a creative breakthrough with FANTASTIC FOUR like nothing since his 1940s work, and that Stan simply abetted that breakthrough.

But something about that partnership changed the stakes for comic books from then on. I hope in future essays to say something more about it.

MYTHIC MONDAY'S MOVING DAY

2011-09-03T15:40:00.004-05:00

In JUST THE FIRST MYTHIC MONDAY I announced my "1001 myths" project, which I hoped to do on a weekly basis.

I've decided to cut back from weekly installments to "whenever I feel so moved."

One reason is that in addition to other projects I don't choose to mention here, I'm submitting weekly essays to the SEQUART site, and that cuts into my time for this project. Two essays are online at the time of this posting:

"The Future of a Re-Fusion": this essay endeavors to place the current division between "mainstream" and "artcomics" in historical context.

"The Linking Myth:" this one concerns the dominant meanings of "myth" in contemporary fan-culture and chooses the best meaning as most relevant to the criticism of fiction/literature.

I still like the idea of doing 1001 myth-adventures, of course, but I must admit that if my 26 alphabetically-chosen entries don't convince a given reader of the viability of archetypal criticism, then 975 more won't move said reader any closer to conversion.

Though I'm not precisely wrapping up the project now, a quick look back seems justified. One thing is certain: that I will never again do this in alphabetical arrangement. Some letters, like "S," offer an embarassment of riches ranging from SUPERMAN and THE SPIRIT to STINZ and SIN CITY. Others, like "K" and "V," are pain-in-the-ass letters; letters few people in comics-publishing liked, to judge from the dearth of such books listed in Overstreet.

I specified that I'd try to meliorate an inevitable emphasis on superhero myths by providing at least one "non-superhero" myth for each super-myth. However, if I examine my selections according to how they fall into Northrop Frye's four literary mythoi, there's still a related but not identical emphasis:

ADVENTURE-- ACTION COMICS, DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, ELFQUEST, FANTASTIC FOUR, GREEN LANTERN, INCREDIBLE HULK, KAMANDI, LADY SNOWBLOOD, NEW MUTANTS, PLASTIC MAN, QUESTION, RED SONJA, SPIRIT, VOID INDIGO, WONDER WOMAN, XENOZOIC TALES, ZATANNA

DRAMA-- JAR OF FOOLS

IRONY-- CEREBUS, HEAVY METAL, MAD, YUMMY FUR

COMEDY-- BLONDIE, ONE POUND GOSPEL, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, URUSEI YATSURA

Some judgment calls here: ELFQUEST is a work I'd term an "adventure-drama" in that its dramatic elements are very strong even though I feel that the mythos of adventure dominates, in contrast to, say, a related work of otherworldly fantasy like C.S. Lewis' NARNIA series. Most EC horror stories I would regard as essentially dramatic, so that had I made a different selection, there would be one more entry in the "drama" category. As it happened, I chose "Lower Berth," in which the love story between two corpses is clearly a comic jape, but not one with the ironic tone of Kurtzman's Walt Disney satire from the same general EC milieu.

Will I ever search out more examples of plurisignative comic-book drama to keep JAR OF FOOLS from getting lonely? Will I ever explain my arcane reference to a possible incest-motif in Lee and Ditko's AMAZING SPIDER-MAN?

Once again-- stay following.

INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 3

2011-08-31T17:25:00.002-05:00

Since I don't regard Marguerite Van Cook's "Sublime Capital" essay as particularly well-organized, I decided I should simply go down the list of objections in bullet-point format. Here goes:

Kirby perhaps presupposed himself a participant in a post WW2 America that had fought and earned the right to play fair. He imagined that a handshake would suffice as he saw himself a part of an institution that in reality would later belittle his role.

From what source does Van Cook derive this handshake motif? I've read a considerable number of Kirby interviews and don't remember him describing any "handshake deals." In the interviews I recall, Kirby consistently cavilled against the fact that the publisher held all the aces and could refuse to give artists work if they wanted contracts. But when he joined Goodman's company in the late 1950s, Kirby was no dewey-eyed innocent, as Van Cook implied in this segment. Indeed, since Kirby and Joe Simon had allegedly experienced ill treatment by Martin Goodman over the CAPTAIN AMERICA property, Kirby certainly had no reason to believe that Goodman would "play fair" fifteen years later.

Lee working in a family business, saw himself as management rather than worker and this self-elevation transferred to how he interpreted his creative relationship, which gave more import to words, as though they signified his class and its rights and its sanction.

This is an absurdly broad characterization of Lee's frequent statements that he believed that the person who conceptualized a given work was the creator. I've never read anything by Lee that even slightly resembles this Derrida-ized emphasis on words alone. In fact, if one examines side-by-side the Lee and Kirby accounts of almost any given character's creation, each always emphasizes the "original germ" concept in order to take credit as the true "original creator." Thus Kirby as much as Lee has denied the viability of Van Cook's concept of "reified creativity."
Van Cook then quotes a passage from Terry Eagleton:

‘Mass’ culture is not the inevitable product of ‘industrial’ society, but the offspring of a particular form of industrialism which organizes production for profit rather than for use, which concerns itself with what will sell rather than with what is valuable.

This is typical Marx-mallow reasoning: if a product sells well within mass culture, those sales are immediately suspect and cannot be part of that vague canon of "what is valuable." Possibly Eagleton defines value somewhere better than Van Cook does in her essay, but the section Van Cook quotes is meaningless precisely because it opposes cultural value to sales-value in a laughable dualism. That doesn't stop Van Cook from accepting the duality as a given, though.

Kirby and Lee became engaged in a culture that conflated their cultural output with their commercial product. Their value as artists was secondary to their commercial potential.

Secondary to whom, Van Cook? Martin Goodman probably cared about nothing but the bottom line of good sales. But the subculture of fans who continue to talk fifty years later about the Lee-Kirby books, books intended for an ephemeral juvenile audience, are certainly no longer regarding the works in terms of their "commerical potential," except when engaged in the actual buying or selling a particular comic-book issue. To speak of art and commerce as "conflated" implies the existence of some time and place where the two were not so intertwined. At least when Theodor Adorno asserts the existence of some originary Pure Land of Art Untainted by Commerce, he puts his cockeyed premise on the table for all to behold, as Van Cook does not.

Then Van Cook decides that the Classical rhetorician Longinus can be used in her quest to prove the Logocentrism of Stan Lee:

Longinus further says the sublime rhetoric of the speech-writer resides in “great thoughts, strong emotions, certain figures of thought and speech, noble diction, and dignified word arrangement,” which might also begin to expose possibilities in the interactions between words and ideas in comics. All of these elements one would hope to discover in the pages of a heroic narrative of the superhero comics, but might be particularly explicit in a production such as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s “Thor.”

Van Cook's argument boils down to claiming that because Stan Lee wrote with "noble diction and dignified word arrangement" in THOR, in contrast to the way the Thunder-god's adventures might have sounded had they followed the shorthand notes Kirby placed on the margins of his art:

The effect would be comical beyond its acceptable level of dramatic kitsch if the entire comic were to be spoken in Kirby’s New York slang circa the Bowery Boys. As the language is transformed by Lee it is able to support its authority within the ideological tenor of received historicity.

And then later:

Both men recognize their own class in relation to the content. Kirby, who remained proud of his heritage as the son of a Lower East Side immigrant, does not write his text in “Thor-speak” but uses his working class action voice to express his ideas. This forces questions about how class operated between the men. Implicitly, art is produced in a strangely abased position in the social hierarchy of production. Art appears to be the tool of the intuitive, untamed mind, while writing evidences intellectual precision and authority. Logocentrism is bound to class structures and it seems Thor-speak claims the authority of the noble class and that its writer represents a conduit to this class with its values of duty and honor. Remember as Longinus says: “The great speech maker speaks great thoughts.”

So--

Does this mean that when Jack Kirby himself chose to use "noble diction and dignified word-arrangement" when he wrote his own dialogue for THE NEW GODS, that Kirby "abased" his own artwork by having Orion say grandiloquent things like, "I have heard the word-- and the word is battle!"

What a horrible man you were, Writer Jack Kirby, for abasing the work of Artist Jack Kirby!!!

Van Cook does address Jack Kirby, writer, but significantly, she does not choose to explore NEW GODS, the Fourth World title closest in tone and content to Marvel's THOR, but a sequence from MISTER MIRACLE, in which Kirby spoofed Stan Lee as the flamboyant agent Funky Flashman. But to hear Van Cook tell it, even this japery remains within the sphere of false consciousness:

But his mockery does not release either from the cycle of production. Althusser states that free will is essential for this continual state of self-delusion (false consciousness) to persist. The subject must feel that he is free to act as he chooses, but his self recognition within the social structure ensures that he will continue to be productive and remain within an ideology that he believes he has created and sanctioned.

Because Kirby's character Mister Miracle-- who is more or less coeval with "labor" even as Flashman symbolized "management"-- shows amused tolerance of Flashman's absurdity, Van Cook tells us :

Scott Free promotes a silent acceptance of the workingman’s role, while the entitled Flashman proclaims about the difficulties of creative work.

Van Cook's interpretation-- that Flashman represents the reinforcement of the "stratifications of class and labor"-- does not hold under close scrutiny. There is a shadow of truth in the fact that Scott Free is an actual producer of a commodity, in the form of a performance (which Eagleton might or might not find "valuable") while Flashman is merely one who claims he can facillitate the commodity's dispersal to audiences. In Steve Ditko's Randian terminology he might be called a "looter." But Flashman, unlike Stan Lee in Kirby's actual life, never becomes a permanent influence on Scott Free; indeed, he never appears in any Jack Kirby work following MISTER MIRACLE #6. That's not much of a "reinforcement," Van Cook!

Finally, "Sublime Capital" veers off from its original topic of the ideologies of Lee and Kirby, and chooses to go after the generalized ideologies of the American military, touched on briefly (and irrelevantly) with respect to the service records of Lee and Kirby. After detailing how a U.S. Congressman expressed his regard in a Congressional session for a particularly affecting TERRY AND THE PIRATES sequence by Milt Caniff, Van Cook tells the reader how this was her original context for her discussion of the Longinian sublime:

Originally, before the Kirby /Marvel result, I had intended to offer this passage about “Terry and the Pirates” as evidence of the power of the sublime as a political tool and to discuss the slippery parameters of cultural institutions and government bodies. I wanted to interrogate how diction in comics elevates or otherwise shapes response and meaning. In the end, the colonization of the Colonel Corkin speech by a government representative suggests that elevated diction is recouped by the ruling class, even in the ambigous guise of applause.

In other words, if there exists even circumstantial evidence that sublimity, in the form of "elevated diction," is something that a "ruling class" might use against the disenfranchised, then one must look askance at rhetoric-- "especially sublime rhetoric"-- as being yet another commodity.

Yet once again, the one-sided duality persists. If "rhetoric" is determined by Eagleton's implicit concept of "sales-value," then real "cultural value" must be somehow outside the sphere of commodification; must be the opposite of "noble diction."

Well, the most logical opposite of "noble diction" would be "plain speech."

Therefore, I submit to my readers the true face of a Cultural Value Beyond Commodification.

(Yeah, I gotcher Logocentrism Rat Cheer, ya hippie.)

SON OF QUICKIE GROTH POST

2011-08-29T16:12:00.015-05:00

I'm aware whenever I look at Google stats for THE ARCHIVE, those stats may not represent how many actual human eyes have perused my posts. The all-time champion, QUICK TAKE ON 'THE BEAT' BIN-LADIN POST, almost certainly received some boost simply because it had the hot topic "Bin Ladin" in the title. I imagine its stat-status has simply been the result of automatic 'net programs that pick up on anything that mentions such high-profile topics.

The second-place winner, though, is more puzzling: QUICKIE GROTH POST. I don't see why the 'net programs would pay any special attention to Gary Groth's name, much less the opinion expressed in the essay: that the COMICS JOURNAL's coverage of the mainstream probably stemmed less from duty than from expedience. I've certainly written opinions on both Groth and the JOURNAL that are more substantive. Could the high numbers have something to do with both essays being short?

In any case, by way of follow-up I want to amend some of my statements in the essay and its comments-section. I originally wrote:

I’d certainly admit that by the late 80s the JOURNAL had started to avoid emphasizing the mainstream, even though the mainstream/indie scene had not fragmented as much as it has today. That’s the period when covers started featuring people like Ralph Steadman rather than Wolfman and Perez.

Richard Bensam stated that he remembered the shift in the JOURNAL's mainstream coverage as earlier, around 1981, when the company Fantagraphics began publishing AMAZING HEROES:

Doesn't that shift in the Journal also coincide with the launch of Amazing Heroes?

I reiterated my recollection that the true shift into what I termed "full-tilt elitism" was more toward the late 1980s:

One could certainly see AH's 1981 debut as a harbinger of things to come, but my memory is that if nothing else TCJ was still heavily cover-featuring mainstream guys.

However, though it's true that in the late 1980s the JOURNAL became a bit more adventurous about featuring cartoonists utterly outside the domain of any comics-fandom, such as Ralph Steadman, I was wrong, and--

(cue Kermit the Frog yelling "Yaayyyy--")

RICHARD BENSAM WAS RIGHT!!!!!!

Today I did a systematic examination of what images or concepts had been featured on JOURNAL covers since the magazine was formed from the ashes of its previous incarnation, THE NOSTALGIA JOURNAL. Almost without exception, up till 1983 JOURNAL covers focused on characters or imagery with a strong fantasy content (one such exception being a Kurtzman cover featuring a military battle). The flashpoint for "the Big Change" is signalled on the cover of COMICS JOURNAL #80 (March 1983), in that the main focus featured a critic's polemic rather than a character or concept.

The feature article for #80 was Carter Scholz's "Seduction of the Ignorant." It was not the first lugubrious, teeth-gnashing screed ever to appear in the JOURNAL, but if I'm not mistaken (I do have one or two gaps in my collection) it was the first to have the cover's central image built around it. Two other oddities:

(1) Though it may not have been the first time a JOURNAL-essay tossed out that witless Marxist concept "commodification," it's surely the first time the concept was featured on a cover.

(2) Oddly, given my remark above about how the early 1980s still featured interviews with mainstreamers like Wolfman and Perez, TCJ #80 contains the second part of an interview-diptych with those two stalwarts.

Why did Scholz's essay get the cover? Was it just that the JOURNAL didn't have any art relating to the mainstreamers or their titles? Or did the editors deem that Scholz's essay was of greater moment than a couple of superhero raconteurs?

Whatever the behind-the-scenes drama, 1983 supplies the ideal flashpoint, not least because immediately thereafter the magazine's covers strayed ever farther from the earlier business-model of heavy mainstream representation. Over the next ten issues, covers featured the following:

#81-- William Gaines
#82-83-- Dave and Deni Sim
#84-- Michael T. Gilbert
#85-- Robert Kanigher
#86-- Tintin
#87-- Heidi McDonald's anti-"fight-scenes" essay
#88-- "rating comics" essay
#89-- Eisner
#90-- Al Williamson

The only trend not shown in this breakdown is that over time the JOURNAL did feature mainstream talents on their covers *if* they were deemed either especially talented, especially popular, or both. Such figures included Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Mike Baron, Bill Sienkiewicz and the never-repressible Gil Kane. However, the die was cut, so to speak. From then on, the JOURNAL's covers emphasized current mainstream figures only if they possessed some particular stature in the eyes of the editors. Failing that, covers featured either the talents that one might call variously "artcomics" or "altcomics," or talents who had belonged to the mainstream of long ago, such as issue #95, with a Captain Marvel cover heralding a C.C. Beck interview.

I probably didn't note the flashpoint at the time because it seemed to me that the pages inside did feature a good amount of dialogue about the Importance of Being Genre (which unfortunately usually devolved to discussions about superheroes alone). The JOURNAL still printed a healthy number of mainstream reviews in the early to middle 1980s. The late 1980s would draw back from that practice, however, and as distant as I was from the Halls of Power, I got distinct impressions that Gary regarded even negative reviews of mainstream comics as giving too much attention to The Enemy. TCJ never completely stopped reviewing mainstream titles, but by 1989-- which was the last year in which I submitted anything-- it was evident that the editors had no sustained interest in the genre-analysis that fascinated me. Following my departure, I did notice one critic, name of Leon Hunt, who made some insightful comments in the early 1990s. Not surprisingly Hunt was attacked in the lettercol by one of the magazine's foremost "know-nothing" elitists, Harvey Pekar. I don't imagine Hunt quit contributing to the JOURNAL purely because of Pekar's needling but I assume the guy simply found better things to do with his time. Why bother talking to a brick wall?

I used to feel that the JOURNAL missed a chance to be a great uniter of fandom; a forum through which one might understand all forms of comics art. But over time I realized that was a naive projection. Groth wanted division, not unification: his aesthetic stance depended on the absolute separability of good art and bad trash.
Love it or hate it, the JOURNAL's turning toward greater elitism in the 1980s was far more representative of its true nature than the early genre-friendly years.

But the memory of the "brief shining moment" abides with me nonetheless...

MYTHCOMICS #26: ZATANNA #1-4

2011-08-29T15:10:00.012-05:00

PLOT-SUMMARY (script: Morrison; art: Sook): During a visit to her superhero support-group Zatanna confesses that despite her vaunted Justice League status, she’s a “spellaholic” with severe self-esteem issues, and that she may have helped bring about a new apocalypse. Prior to making a journey with some fellow mystics into a magical dimension, searching for the magical books of her late father Zatara, Zatanna casts a spell to conjure forth her ideal man. Zatanna’s allies die because of her recklessness, but she gains a new ally, runaway teenage girl Misty Kilgore, who wants to become Zatanna’s apprentice. Zatanna, seeking to control the conjured entity (aka “Gwydion”), seeks advice from occult expert Cassanadra Craft. Cassandra reveals that she was visited by a strange male magician who left behind a top hat for Zatanna and makes a mysterious reference to Zatara’s books: his image suggests that Zatara himself may have returned from death. After Zatanna uses her powers (as well as the top hat) to subdue Gwydion, she and Misty go on the road to train Misty. They encounter the ghost of Ali-ka-Zoom, a magician who in life was a member of a gang of heroic kids, the Newsboy Army. Ali-ka-Zoom persuades Zatanna and Misty to transport him to the estate of the magician’s old team-mate Kid Scarface, but by the time they all arrive, the “Kid” has been killed by the faery-folk known as the Sheeda. The magician conducts the spirit of his old friend to the afterlife while Zatanna grapples with two revelations: (1) that the Sheeda are one of the forces threatening to doom Earth, and (2) that Misty is destined to be the Sheeda’s new queen if the current ruler Gloriana is ever deposed. Zatanna then goes looking for more answers, and learns that the mysterious top-hatted man was not her father, but a lookalike magician: Zor, a renegade member of the “Time Tailors” who decided to change the cosmic design by helping the Sheeda. Zor tries to conquer Zatanna by transforming her into “Zorina,” an image of what she would’ve been like as his daughter, but she throws off his influence and uses the shapechanger Gwydion to fight Zor’s magic. Zatanna manages to subdue Zor long enough to break into the mystic dimension of the Time Tailors, who take Zor prisoner. Zatanna meets the spirit of Zatara, who reveals to her that she herself is the incarnation of his so-called “magical books.” Back in the real world Zatanna puzzles over the encounter until she is summoned to the final battle with the forces of Gloriana.

MYTH-ANALYSIS: Zatanna’s four-issue series isn’t a stand-alone narrative, but a narrative arc that participates with other arcs to make up Grant Morrison’s “Seven Soldies of Victory” mega-event. Therefore some of the myth-motifs referenced in the ZATANNA arc are more fully developed elsewhere: Ali-ka-Zoom and the Newsboy Army, who recapitulate the fantasies of heroic kid gangs of the Golden Age, are given greater attention in the arc of MANHATTAN GUARDIAN, while the Arthurian mythology of the Sheeda is glossed by the SHINING KNIGHT arc. Here I’ll concentrate on the mythos of the title character Zatanna, though I will confess some curiosity as to how Morrison happened to name his newsboy magician after a catchphrase used in Hanna-Barbera's FRANKENSTEIN JUNIOR cartoon.

Like many heroes who originated during DC Comics’ Silver Age, Zatanna continues the “legacy” of a Golden Age character: the aforementioned Zatara the Magician. Zatara was one of many Golden Age figures who were practicing stage magicians who fought crime as a “side-act.” Most if not all followed the example of the comic-strip magician-hero Mandrake, though in comic books the magicians often wielded powers more extraordinary than Mandrake’s hypnotic skills. Zatanna, introduced in the 1960s as the fullgrown daughter of Zatara, continued in that tradition to some extent, though by the 1980s she had been given a quasi-tragic dimension by the death of her father and her sexual dalliances with less than admirable lovers like John Constantine. Morrison’s version of Zatanna builds upon these realistic tropes but does so to provide a grounding for a hyper-real world of magic, where “every thought leaves a chalk-trace on the walls of the imaginal world.”

“I have a fatal flaw,” Zatanna tells her support group, “that makes me fall for losers.” In orthodox Freudianism, this would be seen as a deferral of an incestuous cathexis toward her super-capable father, while her attempt to summon an ideal man—whom she thinks will be “a great wizard or an ace crime-fighting dude”—are both confirmations of that hidden desire. The villain Zor seems to pursue the same Freudian logic. First he tantalizes Zatanna with the possibility of her father’s return. Then, when he has her in his power, he transforms the heroine into “Zorina,” a villain’s version of a “legacy continuation,” a perverse B&D temptress, to show Zatanna what she would have been “under my sadistic tutelage.” Morrison’s use of the word “sadistic” is not incidental, for in designing “Zorina” Morrison seems to draw upon the pattern established by such Sadean heroines as Juliette and Eugenie, who become master sadists under some quasi-paternal instruction.

However, many facets of Morrison’s story suggest that, just as Carl Jung’s theory attempted to encompass and supersede Freud’s insights, Zatanna’s mental cosmos can supersede any reductive forces. Zatanna only remains in the form of “Zorina” for two panels, for she quickly overrides Zor’s transformation by following it to its logical conclusion: since she’s a perverse daddy’s girl, she restores her own personality as a gambit to “annoy” her “daddy.”

Jung asserted that Freud’s idea of a purely sexual human libido was far too reductive. Similarly, Morrison seems to bring forth sexual demons largely to show the ability of the human will to transcend them. When the real Zatara reveals that Zatanna herself incarnates all the wisdom of his “magic books,” he describes her in terms of two abstract aspects (“mind” and “spirit”), a concrete one (“body”), and a concrete image given metaphorical meaning (“heart”). Conversely, whereas many comics-writers deal with magicians purely in terms of highflown thaumaturgies, Morrison continually makes references to the mundanities of stage magic, which seem to inform Zatanna’s consciousness as much as “imaginal worlds” and “brane universes.” Morrison’s own “imaginal world,” then, combines the concrete and abstract in a rare artful balance, a *coincidentia oppositorum” of which Jung himself might approve.

INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 2

2011-08-24T17:06:00.005-05:00

The first Marx-munchkin quote in the Van Cook essay comes from Louis Althusser:

Ideologies are perceived-accepted–suffered cultural objects, which work fundamentally on men through a process they do not understand. What men express in their ideologies is not their true relation to their conditions of existence, but how they react to their conditions of existence; which presupposes a real relationship and an imaginary relationship.

Buried in this jargon-heavy twaddle is the standard Marxist take on the notion of *ideology.* Coined during the French Revolution, the word originally connoted any system of ideas regardless as to whether it was philosophically elaborated or not. Marx and his followers appropriated the word and applied it purely to the ideations of the bourgeoise, who by virtue of their exploitative culture are defined as incapable of any "true relation to their conditions of existence." Bourgeoise productions, whether they address themselves to "high" or "low" segments of the culture, are necessarily informed by "ideology," which is another way of saying "false consciousness." Said falsehood stands in contrast to the ideations of Marxism, which are alleged to be non-ideological because they are Really Really Real.

Thus Althusser is clearly within the tradition I have termed "ratiocentric," in that no matter whether one is writing of Balzac or Jack Kirby, the ratiocentric analyst assumes that there is nothing "true" within the work of the bourgeois artist, only patterns that prove the validity of Marxist thought. Van Cook is entirely in this tradition as well when she characterizes both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as pawns of a capitalistic puppet master:

I wish to affirm that both Kirby and Lee were proud to work within the ideology of American capitalism. In the legal case, neither side stands or challenges American capitalism on ideological grounds overtly, despite a strong undertow of class and labor issues that largely go unspoken. And while I have framed many of the issues within the sphere of artistic production, certainly both Kirby and Lee saw themselves in the business of selling comics. Elsewhere, Althusser helpfully casts light how problems might arise undetected by two men who had not only served in the military as a system of American ideology, but had become a part of the means of production for that ideology.

I'm not surprised that Van Cook rushes to mention the irrelevant fact that both Lee and Kirby served in the U.S. military. In the fundamentally-elitist view of a ratiocentrist, this is more proof that the subjects named have been hornswoggled by a repressive cultural hierarchy. However, the reference actually weakens her case, for one must then ask whether or not those producers of bourgeois art who DON'T serve in the military are somehow less enslaved by the system. Thus, since Julie Schwartz didn't (so far as I can tell) serve in the repressive U.S. military system, it would be logical if he were the first comics-editor to, say, go against his culture's ideology by including a black character as the regular member of a heroic team.

Except of course-- it wasn't Schwartz, but Stan Lee.

Next essay: why the bourgeoise productions of Lee and Kirby do indeed contain "a true relation to the conditions of their existence," albeit not one of which Althusser would approve.

INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 1

2011-08-23T17:11:00.005-05:00

"...none other than Kapital-Hatin' Karl Marx, whose ideology has propounded more subintellectual drivel in literary studies than any other one-note-singer can claim."-- THE POOREST JOHNNY ONE-NOTE, June 2010.

I haven't had the occasion to attack any maundering Marxist diatribes lately, but thanks to this HOODED UTILITARIAN post by Marguerite Van Cook, I've finally some new grist for this particular mill.

There are, to be sure, points where I agree with Van Cook. Here's one:

Even the most ardent Kirby fan acknowledges that for a while the two men, Kirby and Lee, collaborated comfortably to produce seminal comics in the American canon and all but a few claim that to make Kirby the sole creator across the board is not defensible. The Kirby lawyers overstepped the mark in the attempt to regain control of early copyright and collect remuneration for the proceeds from early works that were subsequently developed. For those of us on the sidelines, perhaps more painfully the result legally diminishes Kirby’s place in history.

As others before me have commented, there was from the start precious little evidence that Kirby created the majority of his Marvel Comics projects independently of Stan Lee. I've seen Kirby-fans on the 'net desperate to believe that, say, the Fantastic Four *must* have been created as a original "pitch-page"-- one altered, perhaps, to include the company-owned character of the Human Torch. But while this remains an interesting speculation, it didn't constitute evidence that any court would validate.

The "legal diminshment" to which Van Cook refers means the court's embracing of the theory that "the idea is the only criteria for original creation." Such has been the position assumed-- perhaps with some degree of sincerity-- by Stan Lee, who has stated time and again that any time he had the basic idea for any character, he Lee was *the* sole creator. And since he was on staff for Marvel, the creative "primacy" thus belonged to the corporation that took over the original Marvel company. I agree with Van Cook's well-phrased defense of even those creators who *might* be secondary in terms of conception:

Even if hypothetically Lee originated characters, I would argue that where there is no previous model then the artist creates the image and reifies a concept. If there is no model to work from, then one must create the original figure, which henceforth will become that model.

I don't know by what methods a lawyer might have argued for this concept of "reified" creation, though I would think that Neil Gaiman's successful suit against Todd McFarlane might constitute some sort of precedent. Be that as it may, long before Monday morning I "quarterbacked" the Toberoff maneuver as a ego-driven grandstand play.

And those will probably be the last points on which I agree with Van Cook, for after that she starts quoting Marx-munchkins like Louis Althusser and Terry Eagleton while misappropriating my old favorite Longinus for purposes of (gah!) logocentrism.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

MYTHCOMICS #25: YUMMY FUR #1-18 (1986-89)

2011-08-22T16:45:00.005-05:00

PLOT-SUMMARY: Ed the Clown lives in a city overrun with cannibalistic pygmies. He has the misfortune to receive an interdimensional transplant from an alternate-Earth dimension, in that the head of his normal penis is replaced by the miniature head of President Ronald Reagan. While the inhabitants of the other dimension strive to retrieve the head of their president-- which remains able to talk even while it’s a part of Ed’s anatomy-- Ed is pursued by police and pygmies. He’s succored from time to time by a few allies: Christian, a ghoul-like alien, and Josie, a young woman who becomes a vampire after she’s murdered by a serial killer. Josie kills her murderer but a ghost tells her that her killer’s spirit will go to heaven because he repented his act, while Josie’s spirit will go to hell because she didn’t have time to repent of evil. Eventually, after Ed’s story has hosted a menagerie of bizarre characters-- cow-stealing aliens, Jack’s beanstalk, vampire hunters and the Frankenstein Monster-- Ed regains a normal penis. However, Josie is killed by the disembodied hand of her killer, which causes her vampiric form to be exposed to sunlight.

MYTH-SUMMARY: I haven’t attempted to trace in great detail this YUMMY FUR continuity-- later collected under the title “Ed the Happy Clown”-- in the same detail that I have in other “1001 comics” posts. Here a full plot-summation would be gilding the lily, in that plot is not really very important in Chester Brown’s surrealistic opus. In this story characters come and go with no more causality than one sees in “Waiting for Godot,” thus rendering the idea of plot-mechanics nugatory. At a convention I asked Chester Brown if he had any particular reason for using the Frankenstein Monster in issue #16, whose cover shows the creature skydiving. As I remember, he said he just happened to want to draw Frankenstein at the time, so he worked that desire into the narrative.

“Life sure can be ironic sometimes” states a minor character in YUMMY FUR #2 (albeit in a side-story not connected to the “Ed” continuity). Ed the Clown is one of the most perfect examples of a protagonist that works within the literary mythos Northrop Frye calls an “irony,” for ironies concern characters stuck in a world where human action can have no meaningful effect. Ed’s first six-page story in YUMMY FUR #1 depicts him on his way to a hospital to entertain sick kids, only to learn from a doctor that “the hospital burned down and everyone died except us doctors.” One page later Ed breaks his leg in two places purely from the action of walking down the street, suggesting that his pipestem limbs are always in danger of shattering. He’s almost eaten by a horde of rats, and he’s only saved because city authorities turn loose a tribe of pygmies to fight the rats. However, the authorities blunder by air-dropping the pygmies, who go splat on the city-concrete and are apparently eaten by the rats. Ed is simply “saved” because the rats overlook him for their new prey.

Ed’s penis is victimized in the course of a very involved storyline. The scientists of another dimension invent a device with which they can use our world as a “dump” for all of their “dumps”-- i.e., a place to deposit unwanted tons of fecal matter. Initially the fecal matter comes through one man’s anus, but he dies and the “hole” to the other dimension is blocked when President Reagan (who looks nothing like the real article) falls into the machine. Somehow this causes his head to be plucked from his body and exchanged with the head of Ed’s penis. Presumably Brown enjoyed the prospect of debasing President Reagan, turning a figurative dick into a literal one, but to say the least it “unmans” Ed as well. In issue #8 he breaks down weeping, telling his talking penis, “My life is always like this. Everything’s always awful. Even my own penis hates me.” The Reagan-penis, after raging at Ed a little more, tries to calm him by telling him that it’s not his fault that “awful things happen to you,” which is quite true: Ed is the victim of both his author and his literary mythos. He does get a normal penis again, but Ed only survives all of his ordeals by dumb luck.

Josie, thanks to having become a vampire, seems at first glance the obverse of her friend Ed. She’s killed by her crazed lover, and becomes a vampire because she was “actively engaged in a grievous sin.” As a vampire Josie is immensely strong and cannot be killed by conventional weapons, and she conceives a sisterly protectiveness toward the helpless clown. But in Brown’s chaotic world none of her heroic actions can save her, for she’s condemned to hell as her killer apparently is not. In addition to being fated to go to hell once her undead life ends, some quirk of fate allows her killer’s disembodied hand to prematurely end that life.

In the novel MANHATTAN TRANSFER, author John Dos Passos shows fires continually breaking out all over New York, a leitmotif that suggests that the city is falling into apocalyptic disorder. Brown’s use of fire isn’t quite a leitmotif, but it’s certainly significant that the ED story starts with a hospital burning down (except for the savvy professional men) and ends with the conflagration of an apartment building, in which only Josie the Vampire dies. Fire is irregularly seen throughout the storyline-- Ed dreams of a fiery void, aliens speak out in space amid flaming bodies-- and the last panel of YUMMY FUR #18 is just one big panel of flames, suggesting the fires of hell to which Josie stands condemned. But surely it’s not just Josie that stands condemned. Her sacrifice saves Ed for a little while, as the sacrifice of Pirithous saves Theseus from death. But Ed and his world remain well and truly doomed.

WITCH SLAP PT. 2

2011-08-21T14:25:00.007-05:00

OK, on to my reaction to Curt Purcell's reaction to the TRUE BLOOD mini-controversy.

Curt advised me to be cautious as to how I represented his views here, which is certainly his prerogative. I can't think of any better way to do that then to do a line-by-line refutation.

From this 8-18-11 post:

Is there anything more stupid than "Wiccans" getting all pissy and offended at fictional depictions of witches?

Actually I can think of several thousand things. The first thousand all belong to the American Republic Party.

In WITCH SLAP PT. 1 I stated that there were sound and unsound ways to protest fictional depictions of any group, religious or otherwise. The particular complaint that started this-- a modern Wiccan/witch's complaint that TRUE BLOOD misrepresented the way witches do magic-- was one about which I have reservations, though it rated a little higher with me that the guy who got torqued at Charlie Sheen's use of the word "warlock."

Nevertheless, I also asserted that there were some fictional depictions whose negativity deserved sanction. Except under the cover of satire, no contemporary television show could get away with asserting that the old medieval canard that Jews eat Christian children. In essence society regards this sort of misrepresentation as the equivalent of "hate speech," in large part because the representation may incite violence against the minority.

Now, no one is going to go on a literal witch-hunt because of a warlock who curses Charlie Sheen. However, not a few Christians still abide by the fallacy (also medieval in origin) that witches are Satanists, a common motif found in fiction. I certainly don't think Wiccans are incorrect, much less stupid, to protest such depictions, because they have just as potential to incite violence against a minority.

If I understand correctly, the term and concept have traditionally been employed as attempts to explain misfortunes like disease, infertility, crops not growing, etc., by blaming/scapegoating someone, and as pretexts for persecution.

This is a partial truth. Many tribal societies, even those outside the mainstream of Judeo-Christian-Islamic influence, fear witches for this reason. However, most of the proselytizing religions persecute witches purely because they don't adhere to the outlooks of said religions. In Exodus 22, we encounter at verse 18 the famous:

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"

And two verses down, we have:

“Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the LORD must be destroyed."

So depictions of someone using magical powers malignantly would be correct usage, since that's how this mythical figure was imagined.

First of all, the TRUE BLOOD complaint is not about the depiction of witchcraft as so much "malignant" as "irresponsible," a point one can only validate if one subscribes to the complainant's beliefs about magic. Second, it's debatable as to whether ALL archaic depictions of witches come down to pure malignancy, and even if they were, most if not all of these depictions would be informed by the animus of a dominant, opposed ethos. Therefore, there's no viable rationale for saying that modern witches should be defined by this negative archetype, any more than saying that real Jews must be baby-eaters.

It's not like there was, historically, some actual oppressed religious minority corresponding to the term.

Also debatable. In 1921 Margaret Murray's THE WITCH-CULT IN WESTERN EUROPE posited that the "Satanist witches" persecuted during the medieval era were actually the underground remnants of the European paganism displaced by organized Christianity. And although Murray's evidence was widely criticized, some researchers have found support for Murray's basic thesis through more rigorous investigation, notably Carlo Ginzburg in his 1989 book ECSTACIES.

Now, as I stated on GROOVY HORROR, one may posit that all or most of this authentic pagan tradition was gone by the 20th century, and that no modern witches have any *literal/historical* connection to that "oppressed religious minority." However, even if one agrees to this view, I still have problems with Curt's final summation:

So it's not like this silly New Age "spirituality" that got made up within the last half-century is actually carrying on any such tradition. The fact that these people decided to call themselves that doesn't give them any real standing to dictate how witches should be portrayed in fiction, nor to be offended by portrayals that don't meet their approval.

Do silly witches and New Agers exist? I've affirmed as much above. However, one can find fools in any belief-system, including the sort of intransigent materialism I've criticized in PSYCHIC, FAIRLY. It's quite possible that every modern witch today is entirely the result of a faux Romantic-style revival, on a par with William Morris' attempt to revive medievalism.

But that in itself does not invalidate the religion. I said that there might be no literal/historical connection, but that does not mean that there can be no spiritual connection. Curt suggests that it may be considered "correct usage" for fiction to subscribe to the negative "mythical figure" of the witch. I don't deny the existence of this negative archetype but I think that even had there never been a single recorded positive archetype of the figure, modern witches would still be justified to come up with their own take on the figure, to make a positive archetype of their own.

WITCH SLAP PT. 1

2011-08-20T15:38:00.004-05:00

Curt Purcell recently did a blogpost reacting to this news-item,
"Wiccans are Displeased with TRUE BLOOD." I'll probably react to his reaction in another post, but for now I'll confine myself to the substance of this complaint, in which one practicing Wiccan is quoted as disliking the HBO show's depiction of a fictional witch, Marnie Stonebrook:

I'm absolutely disappointed with the portrayal of Marnie. When Marnie gives up her 'power within,' which is a witch's ability to practice the craft without harming others, it allows possession by Antonia who becomes the controlling entity. Marnie lets it happen. It's unconscionable a witch would act this way.

And also:

Since the new season of 'True Blood' began, I've seen an increase in new members who are in their teens and may be easily impressed by Marnie's display of power. It's dangerous when viewers think witchcraft, as Marnie does it, is so easy. For this reason she's a bad example.

Before analyzing the substance of this complaint, I'll state that I'm not acquainted with how this particular fictional witch is or isn't portrayed. I've watched the first season of TRUE BLOOD on disc and was so under-impressed that I thought of writing a blogpost entitled "True Blah." I don't think there was a witch in the episodes I watched, unless she was so unmemorable that I forgot her.

It goes without saying that there exist both sound and unsound ways to critique fiction's depiction of factions, whether of race, creed or religion-- though I'll confine myself to religion here.

The most reputable complaint is the argument from consensual fact. If a TV show depicts a Buddhist ritual in which the high priest pounds on a tom-tom, and a verifiable Buddhist high priest calls in to say, "We don't do that," then the TV show is at fault for sloppy research. In this particular example the fallacious portrait probably doesn't cause any literal harm, especially given that the viewers of the TV show probably don't take the program as a depiction of reality in the first place.

It is certainly possible to imagine, though, to imagine more offensive representations that would earn the program a lot more censure-- say, showing a synagogue holding a barbecue whose featured delicacy is "Christian baby-back ribs." The producer who allowed this level of distortion probably wouldn't work in that town again (one hopes).

The complainant here (who seems to have taken her witch-name from the HEAVY METAL movie, incidentally) doesn't quite have this level of consensual fact on which to draw. She claims that TRUE BLOOD's Marnie Stonebrook is practicing her magic in a way that is dangerous for young up-and-coming adepts. The immediate objection-- necessarily assuming that the complainant is absolutely sincere in her protest-- is that witch-cults in the U.S. are something less than centrally organized. Even if one had the utmost sympathy for the stereotyping and/or victimization of witches in modern American culture, it strains all credulity that any single witch could speak for all witches, or even all American witches.

I like to think I can understand why a modern witch would be no less aggrieved than the imagined Buddhist high priest to see a religious ritual misrepresented. Nevertheless, despite the complainant's declaration of serious consequences, she might have considered that to the vast majority of TRUE BLOOD's audience, the inaccuracy doesn't even register, or affect anyone's beliefs for or against Wiccans.

Similarly, the fear that The Kids Might Get the Wrong Ideas from any fictional production is a reactionary notion dating back to Plato's REPUBLIC. It remains wrong in most if not all applications-- see the "baby-back ribs" scenario for a counter-example-- whether the subject addressed is magical rituals or interracial dating.

The complainant may be utterly sincere in believing that somewhere, some young ritualist is going to fuck up his life by doing Bad Mojo. But regardless as to the reality of magic per se-- anyone who patterns any aspect of his or her life after a television show is looking to get kicked in the teeth by SOME aspect of reality.

PSYCHIC, FAIRLY

2011-08-20T13:59:00.008-05:00

I'm about to launch into a series of posts prompted by a blogpiece on Curt Purcell's GROOVY AGE, but I'll start by referencing something I said out of that context.

I don't know that I believe in magic as such, but I have seen some evidence for psychic abilities.

In some quarters this would be a fairly innocuous statement. On one forum of my acquaintance, however, I've seen even the most cautious engagement with the idea of psychism excoriated by skeptics who worship at the feet of James Randi. I've seen one comic-book writer equate any degree of psychic-concept acceptance with backsliding into the horrors of organized religion.

It seems obvious to me that the two are not logically related, as there is no necessary association between psychic concepts and concepts of deities. A world in which some psychic talents exist does not automatically imply the existence of gods, ghosts, fairies, selkies, leprechauns, or vampires. Such a world doesn't even imply the existence of Kant's categorical imperative. There are, to be sure, people who believe in both telepathy and fairies. But in contrast to these believers, parapsychologists generally argue that what they study is an aspect of the material world, albeit an aspect subtler than most. It is quite possible that parapsychology will never be validated; that it will never be able to demonstrate the desired repeatability prized by the "hard sciences." But if the discipline does over time fail that test, it won't fail because of some illogical misassociation between telepathy and miracle-making deities.

In lieu of quantifiable evidence, those who claim psychic experiences have only anecdotes. Without question, anecdotes are useless within the sphere of science. I don't decry this exclusionary perspective in the least; there's absolutely nothing science can investigate in an anecdote. However, anecdotes, psychic or otherwise, are not irrelevant to the totality of human experience. The false notion that science *alone* can analyze that totality is nothing more than the posturing of pseudo-intellectuals who have deluded themselves into believing that they are being rigorously "tough-minded" (in the Jamesian sense) to regard telepathy and fairies as co-equal considerations.

And so we come at last to the matter of My Psychic Anecdote (which title I should maybe copyright in case "Scrubs" ever gets revived).

Four years ago, I'm driving home on a street I've driven on a hundred or so times. I'm coming back from my book club, which I've attended more or less monthly since 1993. Never had anything remotely psychic happen to me there before or since.

I pull up to a red light in the middle lane of the three-lane street. There's one car on my left. I remember nothing about the car itself; I don't think I exchanged glances with the driver or anything of the kind. It's early evening, but not dark yet.

As I'm sitting waiting for the light to change, it suddenly occurs to me that even though it's not dark, the two lanes might seem to merge into one into one if one isn't looking carefully. No fairies, no heavenly hosannahs. Just the sense that the guy next to me might *think* that my lane is his lane.

The light changes. I hang back.

Car number two barrels right into my lane, and would've hit me if I'd continued on my merry way.

I've looked at the same intersection many times since. The two lanes never again appeared to be blending into one lane.

I'm familiar with the skeptic's counter-arguments. The apparent "blending" could have been a trick of light that affected both me and Driver Two purely on the visual level, causing the other guy to cross into the wrong lane. If so, then it was a rare trick indeed, not duplicated in the dozens of times I've driven the same route at roughly the same time.

I would hope no sedulous skeptic would try the old "subvocalization" theory to explain away apparent psychic insight. When two drivers are idling in their cars, I think one would have to be Daredevil to pick up on another person's subvocal intentions-- not that the other fellow would be thinking to himself, "I'm going to drive into the wrong lane now."

After that, the skeptic's last defense is always: you're misremembering or lying.

As I said above, my anecdote won't-- and probably shouldn't-- convince anyone but me. I can't make anyone else see as through my eyes, can't communicate to anyone that the impression of blending simply was not a light-distortion, but was rather the other driver's mental image of what he saw ahead of him.

But my anecdote, like many aspects of life, aren't irrelevant to life simply because they can't be reduced to "patients etherized upon a table."

I wouldn't deride who chose not to believe the above anecdote, especially if that person had (or remembers) nothing remotely psychic occur in his own life.

But if that person had a comparable experience, and refused to believe he'd had it because it flew in the face of established science--

That person would be, like the unnamed comics-writer mentioned above, an unmitigated idiot.

ADVENTURE-COMEDY VS. COMEDY-ADVENTURE PT. 3

2011-08-17T17:25:00.005-05:00

This time my targets for myth-radical comparison will be Jack Cole’s PLASTIC MAN-- and by extension, all versions of Plastic Man thereafter-- and the Golden Age JOHNNY THUNDER, a feature that didn’t survive the Golden Age, though the title character continued to make semi-regular appearances in various DC titles.

PLASTIC MAN fits my criterion for a series in which the adventure elements dominate and the comic elements, though extremely important, should be considered subordinate. Indeed, a better word than “subordinate” might be one I coined in an earlier essay, “subdominant,” in that the comic elements in PLASTIC MAN predominate far more than they do in a “straighter” feature like BATMAN, where comic elements are more sporadic. “Subdominant” indicates that a given narrative makes extensive use of the elements of one mythos even though the narrative as a whole fits another mythos better.

Though some critics have chosen to find Cole’s PLASTIC MAN “subversive” of the normative heroic-adventure mythos, close study reveals that it’s nothing of the kind. The earliest stories in the series, twenty of which are collected in volume 1 of DC’s PLASTIC MAN ARCHIVES, follow a consistent pattern. The hero’s opponents take any number of forms—racketeers, freaky mad scientists, Nazi agents—but at no point does Cole ironize his chosen mythos by sympathizing with society’s malcontents. Issue #16 is particularly noteworthy in that Plastic Man goes out of his way to break up a small group of American Indians advocating revolt against the United States. To accomplish this, the hero masquerades as their totem-spirit. The leader of the proposed insurrection then kills himself and comes back as a real spirit. He mesmerizes Plastic Man and incites the hero to wreck the city, and all that saves Plastic Man from prosecution is that the Indian leader’s son beseeches the spirit to lay off. Odd though the story is, nothing in it invalidates Plastic Man’s actions at the outset, or the hero’s general quest for justice.

JOHNNY THUNDER, on the other hand, frequently shows the titular hero falling afoul of hoods and gunmen, whom he usually vanquishes with the help of his magical powers. However, in his first adventure he’s unaware of the power, which is conferred on him for an hour’s time when he pronounces the holy word “Cei-U” (which Johnny only does when he accidentally uses the words “say” and “you” consecutively). The same “origin story” establishes that Johnny, though moderately skilled as a fighter, is “just an ordinary guy trying to lead an ordinary life,” which aligns him less with heroic magicians like Mandrake than with the comic protagonists of Thorne Smith.

I would grant that within the comic mythos, Johnny Thunder is, like the Inferior Five analyzed earlier, a hero who gets into a fair number of fights. But these agonic elements are subdominant to the comic elements, such as the scene where Johnny, unaware of his power, tells a man to “go jump at a duck,” which of course the fellow does. In later stories, Johnny’s power becomes embodied in a separate character, a genie called “Thunderbolt,” but the presence of this super-being never takes the focus away from Johnny’s status as a good-hearted bumbler. Even as a member of the heroic Justice Society, Johnny plays the funny sidekick to the “serious” superheroes. Thus even in this adventure-oriented feature Johnny Thunder remained a visitor from a strangely comical domain.