ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 3

 

Arguably a lot more uncanny narratives invoke passive potency than do marvelous ones...-- ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 2.

Aesop's famous tale, "The North Wind and the Sun," has often been used to describe the difference between "active power" and "passive potency"-- more typically known as "force and persuasion." The titular wind and sun make a bet as to who can make a certain mortal man take off his coat. The wind bombards the man with chilly gales, but that manifestation of force only makes the fellow clutch his coat around him more tightly. Then the sun slowly increases his heat-- and in due time, the man removes his coat of his own volition.

I just lied a bit, for effect. Both of the sky-entities are exerting force/active power; the sun's exertions are just subtler. A true illustration of passive persuasion might involve the sun assuming the appearance of another mortal, and in that form, he could mess with the coated man's head, suggesting how hot it was, until the power of suggestion caused the guy to remove his garment. Since the folktale-sun would not be exerting direct force, only indirect persuasion, my ad hoc revision of Aesop would fit the category I've termed "passive potency." The example loosely parallels that of Mulan's supernormal allies cited in ANOMALIES PT 1, who don't give the heroine any active aid, only bits of information or (often unhelpful) advice.      

In the quote above I mentioned the generalization that "the marvelous" most often deals with "power" and "the uncanny" with "potency," and in many past essays, I've drawn the distinction between marvelous and uncanny as that of "reality" and "fantasy," as in this statement from 2015's OUTRE OUTFITS OVERVIEW: 

When attire is not actually marvelous-- that is, when it does not confer marvelous power on a character, like Iron Man's armor-- it must conform to the rules of causal coherence. However, it can still be "uncanny" rather than "naturalistic" on the terms cited in POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2.  It's not that clothes "make the superman," as they do with Iron Man. But if they are uncanny, they can make the man SEEM LIKE a superman.

 

This is not so much a rule, though, as a broad generalization with respect to all twelve of the "uncanny trope" categories I devised.  (Tangentially, it doesn't look like I've done any surveys of all twelve categories here since 2014's THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2 -- and that was written before I severed the "outre outfits" category from those of "superlative skills" and "diabolical devices.") At present I can't think of any uncanny costumes that confer "passive power." They only confer "passive potency," in that they persuade witnesses to deem the wearers to be larger-than-life representations of justice or of corruption. 

However, in Part 2 I briefly referenced Tarzan. He doesn't "seem" like a superman within the uncanny domain; he would only "seem" like a superman if compared to a superman from the marvelous domain. But Tarzan possessing the utmost strength and speed attainable to a human makes his skill "superlative." Both Tarzan and Superman possess "active power" despite their disparate phenomenalities, while the previously mentioned Major Victory has only "passive power" by virtue of having been restored to life after his death. "Passive potency" applies to beings that may be marvelous or uncanny, but who operate more on the level of suggestion. Mulan's dragon is marvelous but cannot do anything beyond the level of "persuasion," and every hero who dresses up in a non-powered uncanny costume is using the art of persuasion to make himself seem more than normal. 

Finally, the best examples of "passive power" would seem to be in the category of "diabolical devices." As originally conceived, the Batarang was just a fancy version of a naturalistic boomerang, and so it possesses the same level of power when used. Aside from that usage, the Batarang can't do anything but look a little cooler than a regular 'rang.

However, if Batman attaches any sort of specialized tech to his Batarang-- even something as relatively simple as a smoke-bomb-- then it's no longer functioning as a boomerang, and the tech-addition registers as "active power" once more. Fin ally, examples of "active potency" are rare by my reckoning, with the most fruitful category being that of "enthralling hypnotism," since hypnotists are using specialized skills of persuasion. Somewhat similarly, the metaphenomenon that started these ruminations-- a Chinese doctor's use of weird acupuncture in LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING-- coheres with active potency, since the doctor was working with his patient's "chi meridians" to produce a curious metaphenomenal effect.

ADDENDUM 5/28/2026: I just rewatched and reviewed MULAN, and I have to amend my above statement a bit. Mulan's ally, the dinky dragon Mushu, does render a little real physical assistance, but only because Mulan is smart enough to use his tiny flame-breath to light and fire her mini-cannon. But whether Mushu's minor power is active or passive in nature, his presence still places her within the superhero idiom. 

                  

AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 3

 If, in my previous writings on the rationales for metaphenomenal fantasy, I've given the impression that nonsense-fantasy was a new creation, I should correct that by mentioning that a fair number of archaic tales invoke the rationale of "just because." In fact, in Chapter 7 of Susanne Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY (which I referenced in yesterday's post), Langer begins her generally unflattering description of simple folktales with some examples from Melanesian lore. Her first example, for instance, involves a buffalo and a crocodile having a dispute, whereon they ask various other animals, or even inanimate objects like a mortar and a floor-mat, to judge the quarrel. The idea of attributing life even to clearly nonliving things seems to me more extreme than that of talking animals who behave like people, though both are examples of nonsense-fantasy. Another example of non-living things being given life appears in the (presumably much later) Japanese conception of tsukumogami.                                                       

The Aesop's fables offer a lesser range of nonsense-fantasy. Sometimes the animals therein are shown only doing regular animal activities, as in "The Dog and the Bone," with the exception that the animal may be given some degree of human intelligence. Other stories show such creatures like the Fox and the Stork dining together and using human utensils.                                                              

In the annals of literature, the example of Lewis Carroll's Alice-verse stands as one of the most sustained examples of pure nonsense-fantasy. However, L. Frank Baum's later Oz books might be termed "impure nonsense-fantasies." Sometimes Baum's world follows rough rules about what its system of magic can accomplish, with its witches and flying monkeys and prophetic hats. Other times, though, the world stretches to include a number of entities I'd consider "just because" fantasies, like the Hammerheads and the porcelain-people of China Country. I'd have to read more of the Oz books to judge whether the logic of magic or that of "just because" holds greater sway overall.                                                                               

As impressive as some of the nonsense-fantasies of both oral and written stories might be, those that appeared in early American cartoons might outdo them both by sheer preponderance. Felix the Cat, rated as the first major continuing character of those early short cartoons, might be exemplary here. I don't know if he's the first character in all fantasy who could break off a part of himself-- almost always his tail-- and just will it to become some other object, like a fishhook or a question-mark. But thanks to the popularity of Felix, animated cartoons became increasingly associated with the ability to transform themselves, or aspects of their universe, into anything they pleased.           

That acceptance of the "anything goes" propensity of cartoons of course didn't keep some animators from following the more circumscribed pathways of Aesop. Donald Duck debuts in the 1934 cartoon "The Wise Little Hen," which like its source material simply depicts its anthropomorphic creatures dressing like humans and doing human things.                                                                                   

 I tend to believe that the majority of Disney's stories about anthropomorphic creatures follow the Aesopian pattern, in which clothes-wearing ducks and mice and dogs go around doing all sorts of human things, not least the mouse named Mickey owning a non-anthropomorphic dog. Carl Barks is justly celebrated for creating scores of stories about Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge having adventures indistinguishable from what humans might do in similar circumstances, with the protagonists' ducky nature being the only "nonsense" element. Once in a while, though, Barks did apprise himself of random nonsense elements, such as "Lost in the Andes," wherein Donald and his nephews encounter square chickens that lay corresponding square eggs. Some of Barks' stories might be considered another breed of "impure nonsense," in that they combine the base nonsense-fantasy of human-like animals with either scientific or magical rationales. Here's what I wrote about Barks' use of a particular type of magic in his story "Oddball Odyssey:"                                                                                                                                                                                                                       'For her part, Magica provides exposition for the reader about her great new powers, about having "scrounged secrets" from old temples and caves that have given her control over the elements. Most interestingly, Magica advances a fairly sophisticated theory for the origin of the Greek pantheon: "those gods were more likely live sorcerers than figments of ancient dreams." This theory allowed Barks to have his cake and eat it too: he doesn't have to show his witchy villain garnering power from either old gods or, for that matter, Satanic sources. Instead, it's implied that ordinary mortals can generate magic powers from study of the universe's secrets, which is certainly an odd thing to find in a Disney comic book of the period.'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Thus endeth my short history lesson, though I expect to reference some of these observations in related essays,

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 2

"Primary familiarity," as I've defined it in Part 1, is essentially the same as Aesopian contempt, the passive tendency to take aspects of experience for granted, whether or not one is justified in so doing. This species of familiarity is expressed largely by a sense of being comfortable with accepted realities-- though the downside of this comfort is that in some ways it can become boring. The person who experiences this boredom may seek some way to escape his dull round-- going on vacation, having an affair-- but in so doing the individual is not really assessing the things in his regular life that might suggest unfamiliarity.

"Secondary familiarity" is active in the sense that it seeks to reduce perceived unfamiliarity through one of two major methods, both of which involve the amassing of abstract conceptions about the world. This impulse relates to the famous statement by Aristotle at the opening of his Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know." There's a sense that the person seeking to familiarize the unfamiliar relates to the unknown thing as a challenge to his intellect and/or imagination.

Take as example the aspect of human experience most associated with life's "dull rounds:" the generally steady rising and setting of the sun. Now, in pre-industrial societies, humans lacked any instruments capable of assessing the physical nature of the sun. Proto-scientists of the period, particularly those in hierarchical cultures like those of Egypt and Sumer, certainly amassed a certain amount of data about the movement of the planets they could perceive, and some may have even realized that Earth and the other planets moved around the sun. This close study of the patterns of particular aspects of experience is one of the two major methods, and can be lined up with Ernst Cassirer's idea of theoretical science. In our own time, of course, science has progressed to the point that the sun's nature is not especially unfamiliar to our culture. As a part of rote learning, schoolchildren assimilate such facts as the composition of the solar orb and how far it is from Planet Earth. Ironically, all of the findings of this type of "secondary familiarity" may devolve back into a form of primary familiarity for non-scientists: people know these facts and they may appreciate having a greater sense of the coherence of the physical world. Yet, for non-specialists, the data doesn't possess any special resonance. Presumably there are still scientists who regularly examine Old Sol looking for more mysteries to solve. But I would think that their quest to familiarize the unfamiliar would be rather limited these days.

The other major method of seeking secondary familiarity is, as any regular readers of this blog ought to expect, that of mythology and its expression through art-works. A primitive poet may have neither scientific knowledge nor perhaps any inclination to follow that discipline. So he formulates a story that familiarizes the unfamiliar nature of the glowing fireball that circles Planet Earth by saying that it's the flaming chariot of the sun-god Helios, who flies across the sky daily to bring warmth to living things. This assertion does not attempt to reduce unfamiliarity by accreting data about what causes underlie what effects. The storyteller presents what Cassirer calls a "free selection of causes," meaning in this context that the author selects the cause most appropriate to the artistic effect he wants to have on his listeners, rather than seeking the physical nature of the phenomenon in itself. The storyteller does not seek to explain-- few if any people believe the old "myth-was-primitive-science" canard-- but rather, he seeks to imbue an unfamiliar phenomenon with familiar associations, by surrounding the phenomenon with human-like trappings of chariots and horses.

Now, as scientific knowledge advances, the Helios assertion loses some though not all of its cultural force. By the time a Greek thinker like Aristarchus advanced the idea of heliocentrism, most intellectuals probably did not accept the mythic rationale for the sun's existence and purpose. By modern times, the story of Helios can be derided by scientific proselytizers as evidence of the gullibility of non-scientific primitives, and many persons with no interest in the subject will accept that verdict. Nevertheless, once the Helios story is a known facet within the vast history of both myth and literature, it never totally loses the charm of its aspirations to familiarize the unfamiliar. And thus a modern author like Madeline Miller may choose to place new wine in the old bottle labeled "the Helios myth," even if her story is more about the sun-god's famous daughter Circe. In contrast to the findings of theoretical science, the stories told by myth and art, in order to bestow familiarity upon the chaos of experience, can be take almost infinite permutations depending on what cause an author selects to achieve his desired effect.

More in Part 3, where I'll get back to the topic of the NUM formula.

 

HOW CONTEMPT BREEDS UNFAMILIARITY PT. 1

 

A very young Fox, who had never before seen a Lion, happened to meet one in the forest. A single look was enough to send the Fox off at top speed for the nearest hiding place.

The second time the Fox saw the Lion he stopped behind a tree to look at him a moment before slinking away. But the third time, the Fox went boldly up to the Lion and, without turning a hair, said, “Hello, there, old top.”

This is a standard retelling of the Aesop fable "The Fox and the Lion." for which the moral is always, "Familiarity breeds contempt" (which word connotes not a negative feeling for another person but simply taking for granted that the other means you no harm). 

The fable came to mind after I received some input to the effect that I ought to try writing a new summation of my "NUM Theory." This appealed to me because I know that some fine points of the theory have changed since I first started devoting essays to the subject of fictional phenomenality, even though the essentials are the same. With this project in mind, I reread all ARCHIVE posts on the subject of "NUM formula," and came across this interesting sentence I quoted from Rudolf Otto, whose musings on "the uncanny" influenced me through a mention in a C.S. Lewis essay.

 "...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."

-- THE IDEA OF THE HOLY (1917), p. 197.

As it happens, I have written a number of essays on the subject of "strangeness," a quality I find universally in works of "the uncanny" and "the marvelous," but not in works of "the naturalistic." I've tended to focus on the nature of the work's relationship to the notion of causal coherence, i.e., the idea that the physical world and everything in it is fully explicable by the laws of cause and effect. In such a world, "strangeness" has no place. When in fiction an author chooses to depict something that does not conform to the proposition of causal coherence, he produces something that seems "strange," and often (to use a related term) "unintelligible" to the reader's experience. 

Now, to speak of "familiarity" focuses the conundrum more upon the writer's expectations of the reader's affective world, rather than  his cognitive apprehensions. Now, in the real world, from which all readers draw their conclusions about what is or is not strange or unintelligible, what creates the impression of familiarity and its opposite?

First, familiarity arises from the expectation that aspects of the causal universe will work in a predictable fashion. In the Aesop fable, the fox does not KNOW that the lion will not attack him the third time. He makes a supposition on the fact that in the first two encounters, the lion did not choose to attack him, and so the fox allowed himself to act in a familiar manner toward the King of Beasts. 

This would be what I will term "primary familiarity," which is essentially the same as the Aesopian "contempt." This can range from all presumptions about physical predictability-- the expectation that gravity will continue to keep us attached to the earth-- to predictions about the way we expect other sentient persons to react. It's easy to imagine a version of "the Fox and the Lion" in which things don't turn out well for the Fox because the Lion happens to be hungry on the third occasion of their meeting. Yet the fable is accurate enough in describing how sentient persons calculate the reactions of other sentients. The psychology of this familiarity does not diminish just because a particular expectation does not bear fruit; it will just make the perceiving person more militant about a particular entity.

More on "secondary familiarity" in a future post.

 

COMBINATORY-GLORY + DYNAMICITY-POWER= KINGDOM OF THE SUBLIME

...combinatory sublime... a sublime affect brought about by the potentially dazzling array of "changing forms"-- COMBINATORY CONSIDERATIONS.

In the case of religious myth-figures, some sort of extra-human power would seem to be implied in the very idea of religion.  Mircea Eliade once commented that the hierophany (manifestation of a god) was always also a kratophany (manifestation of power), be it the strength of Heracles, the ability of Aphrodite to make mortals fall in love, or even the power to become a holy sacrifice, as with Dionysus in his form of Zagreus.  Folklore proper, perhaps because it often stems from oral and/or rural roots, tends to deal more with clever if powerless trickster-heroes as well as types who possess superior power: types like the "Jack" of beanstalk-fame would seem to outnumber types like the German "Strong Hans."-- THE UBERMENSCH AND THE PRINTING PRESS.

In the second quote, I noted that "extra-human power" was a fundamental aspect of religious myth-figures. But I do not find it to be so fundamental in the form usually called the "folktale."

In this essay I commented on the distribution of the levels of dynamicity between three tales from the collection of the Brothers Grimm. The last-analyzed tale, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was," sports the protagonist with the greatest dynamicity, in that he overcomes threats almost as powerful as himself, so that the tale also sports the greatest potential for the "dynamic-sublime."  The tale "Hansel and Gretel" deals with protagonists who have no spectacular dynamicity themselves, but who do overcome a menace of such high dynamicity, an evil cannibal-witch.  And "The Bremen Town Musicians" deals with only a functional level of dynamicity, as a group of intelligent animals take over a house from a gang of easily routed thieves.

Having rated these stories in terms of their potential for the dynamic-sublime, do they show the same dispersion with regard to the combinatory-sublime, a response to the "dazzling array of changing forms?"

As I noted in the last essay, not all works in the marvelous phenomenality are equally able to inspire the affect of the combinatory-sublime.  Though the protagonist in the "Youth" story encounters more menaces than Hansel and Gretel do, it might be argued that none of the young hero's menaces inspire a sublime affect equal to the primary menace presented in "Hansel and Gretel," that of a cottage of candy which conceals a cannibal witch: a crone who makes an appeal to the hunger of lost children in order to satisfy her own hunger on their flesh.  Certainly "Hansel and Gretel" has a fair greater popularity than "Youth," though this in itself does not demonstrate greater mythicity.

However, "Musicians" is still on the bottom level with respect to mythicity as it is in terms of dynamicity, and this returns me to the point I made at the outset.  The only marvelous element of the story is that the animals are intelligent and can communicate with one another, though as I recall not with human beings.  This seems to be the only marvelous element one can finds in most such animal-fables, like those for which Aesop became famous, and in general, as Tolkien observed in a different context, this form doesn't usually engender much in the way of the "sense of wonder." Further, though today Aesop's oeuvre is strongly associated with animal-fables, that oeuvre also includes joke-tales of a wholly naturalistic nature:

The joke involves a woman who asks a surgeon (in this case) to cure her from approaching blindness on the understanding that he would not be paid until she was cured. The surgeon applied salves but stole from the house anything moveable during the course of his visits. Once the cure was completed, the woman refused him payment on the grounds that now her sight was worse than ever, since she could not see any of her household effects.-- "The Old Woman and the Doctor."

So the folktale, unlike the religious myth, is able to be as marvelous both with or without involving "extra-human power," or simply naturalistic, or arguably uncanny, as in the case of the most well-known version of the Bluebeard tale. 

All of these observations are pertinent as proofs of my argument that the "two sublimities" are essentially independent of one another's operations, though those operations can become intricately intertangled, as I'll note in my next essay.