SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 3

   "I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you."-- God to Eve, Genesis 3:16.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          This familiar Biblical phrase testifies to the ease with which many men and women in traditional cultures validated the discrepancy of power between male and female. Genesis never says anything about the possibility of men ruling simply because they have more physical power, or even that they should rule because they're the ones who sally forth to defend home and family from dinos and dragons and the like. Eve allowed the serpent to beguile her, and Adam transgressed as well because of her, so Eve's female children must defer to their husbands while her male ones will labor to "till the soil." After that the question of male and female power is dropped to get into the Cain story in Genesis 4. We don't read about any particular "contrary desires" on the part of wives-- who function mostly to breed-- until Genesis 21:10. There Sarah more or less orders her husband Abraham to kick out the bondswoman Hagar and her son by Abraham, so that Sarah's child will occupy the catbird seat. So Sarah takes primacy as the first post-Eden female to master the Power of the Nag.                                                                                       

                                                                                                               Of course, there will be various other conflicts of "contrary desires" in various parts of the Bible, and I think it a fair generalization to say that a lot of them come about because of the conflict between "men of violence" and "women of sex," for which the narrative of Samson and Delilah stands as an archetypal example. On occasion, as with the tale of Jael and Sisera, the woman is able to use sex to once more beguile the violent male into lowering his guard. So at long last, I'm making the claims that from these "contrary desires" are the source of "the blues" I see rising from the exigencies of sexual dimorphism.                                                                               

  Even for those with a strong religious belief, the dimorphism of the sexes must seem a very arbitrary decree by God, especially since said decree is not expressly recorded in the Bible. It's even more so from the POV of the evolutionist, who can only argue that in their archaic development into homo sapiens, women remained smaller and less able to defend themselves because (say) their function of raising children remained paramount. Either way, archaic or modern, the physical inequity remains a foundational fact of life. This leads to psychological inequities rooted in compensation, with the woman being a nag to the man and the man being a bully to the woman. And yet, the history of religions does indicate-- as I argued in the SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE series-- that human beings have sometimes been able to invert the expected roles, imagining the archetypes I termed "the Barbarous Woman" and "the Compassionate Man." I don't have any solution to any of the grievances that arise from the embodied inequities of the two sexes. But I will repeat, just to be clear, that mere representation and opposition to the "status quo" functions more to exacerbate the suffering than to alleviate it.                                                        

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 2

 "Oh, God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place!"-- Beatrice lamenting the limitations of her not very muscular gender, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.                                                                                                                                                                                                     "No one wants to be born a woman."-- Dave Sim, long before anyone knew what trans ideology was.                                                                                                                                                                       Obviously, Shakespeare's audience did not think that Beatrice really wanted to be a man, just because she fantasized about becoming one so that she could go toe-to-toe with Claudio-- who, admittedly, is something of an asshole. But since she knows she can't change her sex, she's okay with using her sexual favors to motivate Benedick into assaulting the target of Beatrice's wrath. As for Dave Sim's infamous statement-- which may have been made with an eye to being provocative-- it goes without saying that some men do wish they had been born women, whether or not one credits the diagnoses of gender dysphoria as an illness. In fact, some statistics suggest that trans women outnumber trans men two-to-one.                                                                   

I've no use for the ideology-based pseudoscience of imagining endless genetic blueprints for whatever gender-combinations can be imagined.  I consider it more logical to see even the syndromic desires to be the opposite sex to exist in a continuum that includes non-syndromic fantasies about possessing the characteristics of the sex opposite to one's birth-sex. Even the syndromic compulsions share much of the "grass is greener on the other side" mentality. I don't agree with the sexual determinism of conservative thought, but neither do I agree with the liberals' falsehood that biology can be (or should be) entirely circumvented.                                                                 

Fiction, as I've said many times, is a world where anyone can indulge any number of fantasies as to the true nature of the world, and those that challenge an alleged "status quo" are not perforce more imaginative than those that do not. For example, Dave Sim made many snide remarks (with which I have disagreed) about the fantasy of the heroic female because he thought the archetype ran contrary to "real life," even within the context of his own independent fantasy-world-- which was, of course, responsive to his own fantasies. But most of the ultraliberal feminists (which includes male feminists like Kevin Feige) wanted more female heroes not out of a deep passion for the archetype and all its possible permutations. but for an artistically barren concept of ideological representation. In my mind at least, there's no doubt that Sim is an artist and Feige is just a lucky hack, possibly one whose greatest accomplishments were entirely collaborative in nature.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    That'll teach me to bring up Dave Sim here; I totally got off the subject of the dimorphism blues. Maybe I'll make it there in Part 3.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 1

I style this essay "again" because it's not a "Part 2" to the original SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, which was simply a review of a non-fiction book based in bad pseudo-feminist ideology. It recently occurred to me that the same phrase would apply much better to the cultural "blues" that come about as a result of real and perceived issues stemming from sexual dimorphism. If anything, this post might be a loose sequel to the following statements from SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE, PART 2.                                                                                    

   

My re-interpretation of Nietzsche's "will and willingness" would not quite fall into the trap of viewing men as entirely active and women as entirely passive. Yet Nietzsche's dichotomy does apply in a more specific biological sense: male humans are biologically positioned to specialize in violence (a rough analogue to Nietzsche's "will") , and female humans are biological positioned to specialize in sexuality (an analogue to "willingness," up to a point).

I specify "humans" here since my main concern is human expression of its own propensities and limitations. Yet the biology doesn't start with human beings, but applies to the majority of humankind's nearest simian relations. With some exceptions, the so-called "great apes" follow the example set by a majority of birds and other mammals in that most male apes possess greater size, about 25 percent larger than the females. This gives the biggest ones a generally greater capacity for imposing their will, either on females or on other males. Meanwhile our nearest DNA-relations, the common chimpanzees, seem to have stolen a march on their earlier relatives by becoming experts in sexual promiscuity, in a "willingness" to indulge in sex for purposes not entirely defined by procreation.                                                     

Now, the purpose of the SACRED AND PROFANE series was to explore male and female archetypes rather than the sociological stresses of culture, but I'm still seeking to build on the dissonance created between the sexes when one of the two incarnates "will" and the other "willingness." At least this Nietzschean metaphor applies to all species in which the male is bigger and the female smaller, thus excluding outliers like the black widow spider and the blue whale. To be more specific, though, only human females, with their control of the estrus cycle, can be deemed "masters of sex" as all the big male creatures are "masters of violence." These metaphors for evolutionary abundance are, I admit, not in line with the dominant evolutionary dogma. As I am a Gene myself, I do not approve of Richard Dawkins' theory of a bunch of selfish genes that just want to keep making copies of themselves. I much prefer the Stuart Kauffman concept of coevolution.                                                 

   "...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world."-- Stuart Kauffman, INVESTIGATIONS, p. 150.                                                                                                                                                            Kauffman here is speaking only of evolutionary alterations at the cellular level, and so I do not know if he endorsed the notion I'm loosely stumping for here: that fully formed organisms might "prehend" the need to change to suit a particular physical challenge. The relevant challenge here would be the response of both males and females to females' diminishing outward signs of the estrus cycle, which in turn came about once human females needed to bond males to them for the purpose of nursing children, which in turn became more neotenous than many mammalian offspring in reaction to bipedal evolution. Males' greater propensity for body mass might have been genetically encoded by their anthropoid precursors, but said propensity may also have been reinforced once males were more regularly competing with one another for sexual opportunities.                                                                                                                                                                                                                     And that's enough on sexual dimorphism theory. Part 2 gets into the "Blues" part.                                                                                             

STIMULATING RESPONSES

 Possibly my dissatisfaction with Whitehead's take on symbolism in the two previous posts led me to a formulation on symbolism owing much to Ernst Cassirer, though not only to him.                                       

In the second chapter of AN ESSAY ON MAN, Cassirer attempts to place the human creation of symbolism within the general context of animal biology: "Every organism, even the lowest... [possesses] a receptor system and an effector system... The receptor system by which a biological species receives outward stimuli and the effector system by which it reacts to them are in all cases closely interwoven... Man has... discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link we may describe as the symbolic system." I've covered in diverse other posts how Cassirer distinguished human use of symbolic abstractions into those of "mythical thinking" and "discursive/dialectical thinking."                                                                    

Parenthetically, I'll note that in I.A. Richards' 1936 PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC, reviewed here, he also put forth a similar proposition regarding the origin of organic creatures' ability to "sort," using an amoeba-like creature as his baseline. But Cassirer's model is more constitutive, having some bearing on my theory of the four potentialities, which started with Jung's four functions but diverged from the Swiss psychologist as to what function belonged where. For me, the receptor system lines up with the kinetic potentiality, and the effector with the dramatic potentiality- which means that the "lateral meaning" associated with both is available to many if not all organic creatures. "Vertical meaning," however, is born from the human ability to form complex abstractions, and any parallels that might be found in non-human animals are very limited in nature.                                                                                                                       

 On a somewhat newer tack, it's recently occurred to me that Aristotle's famous definition of narrative from the Poetics bears strong comparison with Cassirer's base level of "stimulus-and-response" for all organic life-forms. Despite his biological acumen, the philosopher chose what I consider a rather unwieldy metaphor for said narrative: 'Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")' Aristotle like Plato used the word "dianoia" for a narrative's "thought" or "theme," but so far as I know no Greek thinker ever elaborated a theory of the mythopoeic elements of narrative that even touches upon the dimensions of Cassirer's schema-- though I believe Frye argued that the Roman-era author "Pseudo-Longinus" might have offered a counter-agent to Aristotle's emphasis upon discursive thought. More on these matters later, possibly.                                                                    

THE READING RHEUM: CHILDREN OF TIME (2015)

 

Unlike the majority of 21st century science fiction and fantasy, Adrian Tchaikovsky's CHILDREN OF TIME is a very good read, which always keeps readers intrigued in terms of what's at stake for all of the characters and for the imperiled sets of species they represent. The book was popular enough to spawn two sequels, though I don't plan to read them, as I think more "children" wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     In the far future, though humankind has pioneered space and established a small handful of colonies on terraformed worlds, factional differences between political groups have almost decimated the population. This exigency breeds two separate but intersecting reactions. The first reaction is a scientific project is established orbiting a terraformed planet, with the intention of breeding a new race of human beings. The project-head, Doctor Avrana Kern, essentially wants to play "God of Evolution" by sending to the planet a nanovirus that will promote rapid evolutionary advancement in the subjects of Kern's experiment, a troop of monkeys that will become a new race, one able to facilitate human colonization. (To be sure, Kern has a god-complex and becomes more invested in her creations than in any plans for colonization.) Much later in Earth-history, a spaceship departs from Earth. The ship and its cargo of mostly coldsleeping passengers plans to colonize that same terraformed world, unaware of Kern's project.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Bad things happen aboard the satellite: everyone dies and so do the payload of monkeys as they're sent to "Kern's World." But Kern herself survives in the form of a computer simulation, albeit one with mangled memories. And the nanovirus finds other species in which to flourish-- mostly arthropods for whatever reasons. And the foremost advanced beings are a race of intelligent spiders. Inevitably, the book leads to a face-off between the humans, desperate for survival on a new world, and the spiders, intent on protecting their own territory-- though Tchaikovsky works things so as to promote a non-combative rapprochement.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          The mythicity here is entirely cosmological in nature, as Tchaikovsky extrapolates the biology of Earth-spiders to describe the way these ET-spiders progress to a state of high intelligence and culture-- even working in a small sociological motif with regard to "male liberation" within the arachnids' matriarchal background. In fact, aside from Doctor Kern, none of the humans are any more mythic than the spiders, except as collective groups. I might even designate the two groups as subsumed by the world they inhabit, the same way that (in my system) "The Planet of the Apes" connotes the totality of apes and humans who occupy that domain.                                                                                                                                                                                   

ETHOLOGICAL ASIDE

Here's a section of an online argument I had with an atheist poster who, as the final section explains, attempted to claim that early humans evolved "ethics" without any input from the abstractions of religion. Hope it makes sense on its own, which I preserve here for the possibility of further development. ______________________________________                                                        Animals of many species have demonstrated at least the possibility of very elementary reasoning processes. We know that ants use tools, as with transporting liquids. Did they reason, "if I do this thing with this thing X will happen," or did they just stumble across something that worked? We don't know. But in that case, as with the case of male lions murdering other lions' offspring, we're talking about observing possible consequences in the near future. Lions might not be able to articulate: "if I leave the lioness' other cubs alive, the lioness won't have milk for my cubs." But it's a zero sum game that a lion might observe, not any more abstract that making plans to find food. We know that cougars cache their excess of food, which also indicates some sense of future outcomes, though some have argued that the animals don't retain the memory of their caches very long. My earlier example of large rats giving in to smaller rats while in wrestling-play applies here too: it doesn't take abstraction for the big rat to figure out that he has to give a little to get a little. ALL of these examples depend on time-sensitive observations imbued with self-interest. But it takes abstract correlation of many factors to make the conclusion, "Hey, my cubs with a strange lion came out good and the cubs with my sister didn't; ergo, better avoid incest." It's particularly counter-intuitive because offspring with relations don't ALWAYS show immediate physical flaws. Maybe some primates *might* make some such connections, but if so we're getting back into the deep end of the brain-pool. Your concept of animals forming societies through an "ethics" based on acceptable/non-acceptable behavior is also predicated with pre-cognitive reasoning processes. I brought up the lack of strong incest avoidance in lower animals to show one of the places where humans diverged from animals, to give an example of an ethical conclusion founded in abstract conceptualizing. We know that in modern times tribal-level humans correlate their incest injunctions with their religious beliefs, so it's not a giant leap to theorize a parallel development in prehistoric eras. So again, your attempt to segregate "ethics" from "religion" is a dogmatic belief that isn't even justified by available anthropological and ethological evidence.    

ABUNDANT EXCHANGES

I've now finished the remainder of Stuart A. Kaufman's INVESTIGATIONS. To be sure, I had to skip most of the heavily statistical stuff, but I flatter myself that I understood most if not all of Kauffman's abstruse concepts. 

In THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 1, I primarily contemplated Kauffman's response to Wittgenstein's philosophy vis-a-vis "codefinition," which parallels Kauffman's concept of "coevolution." Briefly summarized, Kauffman believes that evolution is not always, as in the popular paradigm, a matter of each individual organism blindly chancing upon whatever adaptations help that organism survive. Survival is still paramount in Kauffman's universe, but in some situations evolution may have taken place due to an exchange between two separate entities-- for instance, as may have happened when some prokaryotic cells bonded with others in order to produce eukaryotic cells. which unlike the earlier type of cell possess a nucleus and mitochondria. I note in passing that in 1967 Lynn Sagan/Margulis termed this process "endosymbiosis," but for whatever reason Kauffman does not use this term or mention Margulis in the bibliography to INVESTIGATIONS. 

Kauffman devotes most of the book to coevolution. This doctrine hinges on the concept that organisms co-evolve not by blind chance alone-- though Kauffman does not deny the chance-factor of mutations-- but out of some prehension (as Whitehead would term it) of a need for greater diversity and therefore abundance. From page 150:

...at the high risk of saying something that might be related to the subject of consciousness, the persistent decoherence of persistently propagating superpositions of quantum possibility amplitudes such that the decoherent alternative becomes actualized as the now classical choice does have at least the feel of mind acting on matter. Perhaps cells "prehend" their adjacent possible quantum mechanically, decohere, and act classically. Perhaps there is an internal perspective from which cells know their world.

The idea of such a "knowing" is of course anathema to reductive science, which cannot imagine organisms without brains as manifesting anything like consciousness, much less a desire for abundance. I interpose that word, which is not in INVESTIGATIONS, in keeping with my one use of it in the essay ABUNDANCE AND EXPRESSIVITY, just to keep myself on track about relating Kauffman's biological theories to my cultural/literary theories.

Kauffman devotes his next to last chapter, "The Persistently Innovative Econosphere," to a sustained comparison of biological exchange (in the "biosphere") with the human custom of trade (in the "econosphere," saying:

The advantages of trade predate the human condition among autonomous agents. Advantages of trade are found in the metabolic exchange of legume root nodule and fungi, sugar for fixed nitrogen carried in amino acids. Advantages of trade were found among the mixed microbial and algal communities along the littoral of the earth's oceans four billion years ago. The trading of the econosphere is an outgrowth of the trading of the biosphere.

Kauffman also disputes the definition of exchange as based in the scarcity of goods, and instead champions an aesthetic of diversity/abundance, saying on page 227: 

Think of the Wright Brothers' airplane. It was a recombination between an airfoil, a light gasoline engine, bicycle wheels, and a propeller. The more objects an economy has, the more novel objects can be constructed.

This statement bears on what I deem the "narratosphere"s" need for novel objects, which also depends on the recombination of elements taken from the co-defined spheres of "affective freedom" and "cognitive restraint," as discussed in WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PART 2.  This is why, throughout the history of this blog, I have disputed "Iliad critics" who interpret fictional narrative as comprising a vast series of moral or rational lectures. While the cogitations of cognitive restraint are indispensable to fiction, said cogitations cannot produce novel objects in themselves. The correlations of affective freedom are necessary to break through habitual patterns of thought. (I note in passing a possible comparison between Kant's distinctions between productive and reproductive imagination, explored in 2011's FINDING SIGMUND PART 1.)

The belief that literature can and should pursue all imaginative linkages-- even those that some may find tainted by racial or sexual chauvinism-- lies at the heart of my devotion to the practice of archetypal criticism.

THE WHOLENESS OF HALF-TRUTHS PT. 1

It's been nine years since I dove into the deep waters of a Stuart A. Kauffman book, which I examined somewhat in the NATURAL LAWBREAKING posts, all of which appeared in 2013, beginning here. That book, REINVENTING THE SACRED, came out in 2006, and the one I'm now slowly working through, INVESTIGATIONS, was written six years earlier. Both books are concerned with defining the processes by which life evolved on Earth, with Kauffman taking a less reductive (and thus more holistic) view of how a myriad of factors combine to bring about organisms capable of sexual generation. 

Not having ventured back into SACRED since that first reading, I don't remember if Kauffman had anything to say about the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, Kauffman has much to say in INVESTIGATIONS, noting that he derived the title of this 2000 book from the thinker's 1953 book PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS. 

Now, my only direct contact with Wittgenstein was an unfavorable one, as I remarked in the 2014 essay WITLESS IN VIENNA-- in which, by an odd coincidence, I critiqued Edward Skidelsky's preference for Wittgenstein over Ernst Cassirer by comparing Cassirer's perspective to that of... Stuart A, Kauffman! The following quotes from the WITLESS essay accurately represents all I knew then about Wittgenstein as well as everything up until beginning Kauffman's 2000 tome--

It's been at least ten years since I plowed my way through Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS.  I found it thoroughly uninteresting and couldn't understand why this logic-chopper had become such a major voice in modern philosophy.

And--

I cannot speak to the veracity of Skidelsky's findings on Wittgenstein's motives.  I will note that my principal response to the TRACTATUS was that I too assumed that the author shared the purpose of the positivists: to devalue "sentences of metaphysics or pseudoscience." 

And finally--

I cannot deny that Wittgenstein, even today, is viewed with more approval than Cassirer.  Yet I must ask: how many persons interested in philosophy are even aware of Wittgenstein's "mystical vision," or his critique of scientism, and how many have made the same assumptions that the Vienna Circle did, translating pure logic into empiricist epistemology?  Cassirer may not be understood by the average readers of philosophy today; he may well be regarded as "old hat." But do these readers understand that Wittgenstein opposed empiricist scientism?

I tend to doubt it, and I'm tempted to make a survey of philosophy blogs to determine how many people today write of "Wittgenstein, anti-empiricist."  Wittgenstein's focus upon a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content is at base allied to the language used by science

Now, without double checking I assume that everything Skidelsky wrote was based upon his admiration for the 1921 TRACTATUS, which bored the hell out of me. I don't think Skidelsky has much if anything to say about the closing works of Wittengenstein's life, which are the very works that Kauffman champions over the early ones.

In Chapter 3, Kauffman wrote:

In his early TRACTATUS, Wittgenstein had brought to conclusion the mandate of logical atomism from Russell. Logical atomism sought a firm epistemological foundation for all knowledge in terms of privileged "atomic statements" about "sense data"... One might be mistaken in saying that a chair is in the room, but one could hardly be mistaken in reporting bits and pieces of one's own awareness... Logical atomism sought to reconstruct statements about the external world from logical combinations of atomic statements about sense data.

So this is the only Wittgenstein I knew, the one I remarked as having favored "a logic denuded of and distanced from all sensuous content"-- by which I did NOT mean "sense data," but the content of the perceiver's personal reaction to the data. Kauffman, having outlined the position of 1921 Wittgenstein, then says:

It was Wittgenstein himself who, twenty years later, junked the entire enterprise. PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS was his later-life revolution. His revolution has done much to destroy the concept of a privilege level of description and paved the way to an understanding that concepts at any level typically are formed in codefinitional circles.

What's "codefinitional?"

Wittgenstein's point is that one cannot, in general, reduce statements at a higher level to a finitely specified set of necessary and sufficient statements at a lower level, Instead, the concepts at the higher level are codefined.

These concepts are meant to serve Kauffman's long-range purpose of envisioning a biology not defined simply by mindless reproduction of templates, but holistic interaction of systems-- and that's all that I can say about Kauffman's biological agenda, having not finished the book yet. 

But the idea of codefinition has some interesting permutations for my notions of literature as a place where truth and non-truth, perata and apeiron, continually co-exist and play off one another.

 

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1929)

 

SPOILERS (for a novel printed back in 1929, HAH)

Within two years in the early nineteen-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs had authored what most of his fans regard as his three seminal serial concepts: TARZAN and JOHN CARTER OF MARS in 1912, and the PELLUCIDAR series, beginning with AT THE EARTH'S CORE, in 1914. Roughly fifteen years later, ERB then made an ambitious attempt to correlate all three concepts within a series of novels written from 1929 to 1930. Slightly later, he also provided a link to his "Venus" books, which are usually regarded as a concept distinctly inferior to the other three. This didn't happen until 1932, so it was probably just an afterthought for ERB.

AT THE EARTH'S CORE, like other books in the ERB canon, opens with the conceit that its narrative-- the story of how David Innes and his colleague Abner Perry found a huge primitive environment at the center of the earth-- is actually a true story related by Innes to Burroughs himself. However, for the crossover project ERB decided to create a fictional character, Jason Gridley, to serve as a linking element between his disparate fictional worlds. In two crossover novels, radio-technician Gridley is just an onlooker. First, in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (the third in that series, and the first to center on a hero other than David Innes), Gridley uses his advanced radio to receive a transmission from Abner Perry, which tells the story of the titular Tanar and his adventure. Later, Gridley also receives a similar transmission from Mars, which allows him to relate the story of 1930's A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the seventh of the "Mars" series, but there too Gridley merely relays information. 

The TANAR narrative ends with the revelation that Innes has been imprisoned by evildoers, so Gridley makes the promise to come to Innes' rescue. The story of the rescue-mission makes up the narrative of TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. Gridley seeks out Tarzan in his African jungle and convinces the ape-man to help save Innes, even though neither Gridley nor Tarzan has ever encountered the Pellucidaran adventurer. Tarzan uses his personal wealth and contacts with some characters from an earlier TARZAN novel to bring about the construction of a unique dirigible, with which the heroes plan to journey to the earth's core via a polar entranceway. Most of the technicians manning the dirigible are Germans, which may be ERB channeling memories of the German use of zeppelins in World War One. Tarzan also brings along a small group of his Waziri warriors and an American Negro cook (more on whom later).

Anyone hoping for a major encounter between two of ERB's creations, Tarzan and David Innes, is doomed to disappointment. Innes is not rescued until CORE's final pages, and the character rates only a couple of paragraphs-- which is more than we see for other Pellucidaran support-characters (including the aforementioned "Tanar"), who get the equivalent of footnotes. The only substantive crossover is the one between the hero Tarzan and the setting of Pellucidar. Since the latter is not the star of the Pellucidaran novels, CORE is in essence what I've called in this essay a "high-charisma crossover," since only one of the crossover-presences possesses centric stature. 

Gridley, though he debuts in a Pellucidar novel, is only weakly correlated with the Pellucidar mythos, and even less so with the Mars series. He's allowed to shine as a secondary, support-cast hero in CORE for reasons of romance. ERB always worked a romantic subplot into his adventure-stories, and since Tarzan like David Innes had already become "an old married man," Gridley was elected to play the role of the Earnest Young Man who completes a romance-arc with a comely savage girl of Pellucidar, the amply-named Jana, Red Flower of Zoram.

The structure of CORE amounts to a series of search-and-rescue missions. Both Tarzan and Gridley get separated from the crew of the dirigible, so that both are able to pursue distinct story-arcs. Tarzan gets stuck with the non-erotic duty of befriending some of Pellucidar's noble warriors-- a gorilla-man and the brother of Jana-- while Gridley saves the lissome Jana from both human and animal marauders. Love is swiftly kindled between Gridley and the primitive naif, but like one of ERB's earlier heroes, Billings of the 1918 PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, the civilized Gridley becomes a trifle snobbish in the presence of the uneducated girl. Jana, possessing the full array of feminine intuitions, senses his diffidence and "catches him by running away." This strategy leads to more arduous treks and more battles with the denizens, animal and human, of Pellucidar. Thus both Gridley and Tarzan burn up most of the book's continuity until all the good-guy protagonists are united so as to bring about the anti-climactic rescue of David Innes and the plighting of troths between Gridley and Jana.

Gridley is little more than a stereotypical earnest adventurer, the image of the reader's identificatory figure. Jana is slightly more complex. Her fulsome nickname establishes both that she's beautiful and she knows it, but unlike many of ERB's savage heroines Jana can at least attempt to defend herself, using a spear to slay a primitive hyenadon, much like the character of Meriem in THE SON OF TARZAN. She's extremely proud and doesn't allow Gridley the luxury of pretending that they're "just friends," and her determination to make him confess his feelings in spite of his upbringing drives the romantic subplot. As for other characters, Tarzan is just Tarzan, though as in earlier novels he tends to shift into an animal-like affinity with the natural world whenever that suits ERB's purposes. The rest of the support-characters, good and bad, are all stock figures, though the Negro cook Robert Jones requires a little extra comment. It may be that the commercial reprint of CORE I read expunged some "pickaninny" humor, for Jones doesn't really do much in the story, though he does speak in the mushmouthed Southern dialect usually reserved for Negro characters. His backstory is curious. Though he was captured in Germany while serving as a cook for the American forces during World War One, Jones got along well enough with his captors that he never went back to America and simply continued working for German employers until being hired for the dirigible-adventure. The temptation is to believe that Jones is one of ERB's "cheerful Negroes," though at least he's never as pusillanimous as the maid Esmerelda from TARZAN OF THE APES. 

Yet just as Esmerelda was unfavorably contrasted with the noble Black Africans of the first Tarzan novel, it may be that Jones is meant to be an unfavorable contrast with the fighting Waziris on the expedition, who are clearly shown to be capable of learning the operation of the dirigible from the German crew. This interpretation would cohere with ERB's overall program of critiquing civilized life in contrast to the lives of noble savages, a prevailing theme in the majority of the author's works. CORE is full of such trenchant observations, most often lobbed against pampered Europeans, and even against the American Gridley and his circle of friends. Because Pellucidar is a place where the perception of time is somewhat erratic, ERB also scores some points against the workaday world experienced by his readers, the world of punching time-clocks and societal demands. 

Of course, it must be said that ERB's critique of modernity is a shallow one, rooted in the escapism of noble savages who are just wholly good or wholly bad. ERB actually seems less interested in the Pellucidaran people than in the multifarious prehistoric animals. ERB gives a lot of attention to describing all the exotic biological features of the fauna: cave-bears, pterodactyls, even a quasi-stegosaur capable of limited glider-flight. There are also a few animal-human hybrids, such as the aforementioned gorilla-men, the Sagoths, and reptile-men, the Horibs, the latter proving to be among ERB's best villains. ERB fills these descriptions with considerable verve and thus gives Tarzan one of his best settings for adventure.

On a minor note, the novel ends with one member of the dirigible-crew still missing, but this contrivance takes place simply to set up that character's own debut as a starring hero in the 1937 Pellucidar book BACK TO THE STONE AGE, also a very minor crossover since David Innes makes a token appearance therein. Gridley did not appear in this story, but he has another introductory role in the 1932 PIRATES OF VENUS, the first in the "Carson Napier of Venus" series. 

ERB didn't seem to pursue crossovers much after this period from 1929 to 1932. But TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE is certainly the best of his crossover works, as well as one of the best of the Tarzan novels.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 4

At the end of Part 1, I wrote:

To re-state: even though I don't believe that biology is the sole determinant of gender differentiation, I categorically do believe that the biological potential of males to develop greater strength and body-mass makes a crucial difference in their tastes in fiction. The next logical questions, then, would be:

(1) What tendency of females can be seen as the "objective correlative" (borrowed from T.S. Eliot, even if I don't agree with his application of it) for the female preference for "love and domestic situations?"

(2) Assuming that I find such an objective correlative, in what way do fictional love-narratives express "high spirits," paralleling the expression of similar spirits in fictional war-narratives?

I decided to answer the second question first, and so devoted Part 3 to giving examples of "love-narratives" in which two characters found some method of accomodation to one another, whether fully or partly successful. All five of the narratives I chose used some tropes that suggested a negotiation of non-martial power between two individuals, though in the case of THE FALL, the trope-- female temptress manipulates aimless male-- did not eventuate in megadynamic sexuality.  In the case of SWAMP THING, I didn't think the story exhibited evidence that both of the principals engaged in "mind-sex" were equally dynamic, which means that the encounter couldn't register as a parallel to the combative mode. In the other three accomodation narratives, the principals in each couple, whether they had literal sex or not, displayed some form of megadynamic might which could metaphorically translate into evidence of sexual potency.

In real life, males and females of the human species also possess differing forms of "might" in terms of their biological proclivities. For males, the tendency to "develop greater strength and body-mass" than females is their form of "might," and influences the male's taste in entertainment. A frivolous answer to the question of "what do women have" might involve the ability to bear children. However, this is not an ability that females possess independently of males, since fertilization is necessary for pregnancy to take place. So this ability does not represent a true parallel to the male tendency toward muscular development.

However, the female's ability to produce multiple orgasms, irrespective of whether her stimulation comes from a male partner or not, would seem to be the "objective correlative" I'm looking for. Some references attribute the female's capacity for orgasms within a regulated time-frame is about ten to one, though some of these references caution that not all multiple orgasms are equally satisfying, for women any more than for men. Nevertheless, the potential seems intrinsic to the human female, even if the potential comes about due to the male's great refractory period after sex.

The respective bodily propensities of males and females might be seen as a rough parallel to the Yang and the Yin of Chinese Taoism, given that "Yang" is seen as an active principle and "Yin" as a passive one. Of course, in this case "activity" is a matter of perspective, since a body that can orgasm many times exhibits more activity than one that only does it once. So maybe a better parallel would be between "extroversive activity," in which the subject seeks to use bodily strength to acquire other objects, and "introversive activity," in which the subject seeks to experiences the body's deeper ability to produce pleasure not necessarily tied to external objects.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 2

My essay THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS was the primary argument in which I connected Nietzsche's specific idea of "high spirits" with my concept of megadynamicity, extrapolated from Kant's considerations of "might" in CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. In EXCESS I argued that Nietzsche's philosophical championing of the "excess of strength" had a parallel within literary narratives, where "excess of strength" manifests as the megadynamic power of one or more characters.

Now, for the majority of my posts on the "conflict and combat" subject, I have analyzed the appearances of megadynamic power within what I termed, in ACCOMODATING ACCOMODATION, "confrontation narratives." Historically, such narratives have been devalued by critics, who disparaged violence-based narratives as being either vulgar or counter-progressive. I still value confrontation narratives as much as I ever did, and I focus upon accomodation narratives merely for the purpose of exploring other aspects of the dynamicity theory. I hope I will never be accused of sharing the views of those jejune critics have often championed accomodation narratives for idiotic reasons like "they're more like real life."

Now, I've specified in various essays that Kantian "might" did not necessarily manifest only in violent forms. The three-part essay A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE, beginning here, cites how a non-violent form of might informs the ending of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN. I would deem this graphic novel a "confrontation narrative" even though it's one in which the "good guys" essentially lose. Yet although the heroes are forced to cover up the villain's perfidy for a perceived public good, it's the journal of the slain crusader Rorschach that *may* have the power to defeat the villain's long-term aims. I would not call the journal "megadynamic," of course. It serves as an objective correlative for the power of the people, who will presumably rise up against the villain's hoax *if* they are given the knowledge to do so.

The journal also has nothing to do with Nietzsche's "high spirits," which is appropriate, since Moore makes poor usage of Nietzsche in "The Abyss Gazes Also." I bring it up, though, to show that "forms of might" can inhere in a variety of situations that do not involve violent confrontation.

So I began to ask myself: what would "high-spirited," megadynamic might look like within the context of that subset of "accomodation narratives" known as "love stories?" And here's one of the first examples that came to mind, provided by Yeats in his 1921 poem "Solomon and the Witch:"

'A cockerel 
Crew from a blossoming apple bough 
Three hundred years before the Fall, 
And never crew again till now, 
And would not now but that he thought, 
Chance being at one with Choice at last, 
All that the brigand apple brought 
And this foul world were dead at last. 
He that crowed out eternity 
Thought to have crowed it in again. "

Some critics aver  that this is a reference to the idea that Solomon and Sheba had such great, mutually-satisfying intercourse that the cock that had crowed when the world started crowed again because the bird thought the end of the world had come. This is probably as "megadynamic" as sex can get, and provides an illustration of the theoretical upward limit of sexual ecstasy in its fullest sense of "high spirits."

Part 3 will explore other, less cosmic examples.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 1

Nietzsche's "high spirits" line from TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS prompted this current line of thought. Once more, with (high) feeling:

"Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part."

I last used the "high spirits" in M FOR EFFORT to assert that such spirited-ness was a necessary component to both of my "big M's," megadynamicity and metaphenomenality. I won't be addressing the latter, because I've decided to focus on a (comparatively) new concept: viewing the mode of the combative through the lens of sex rather than violence.

The combative mode, as I've generally defined it, comes about only when two or more megadynamic agents in a narrative contend with one another. Combative works are, I've specified, a subset of the total set of works dealing with any form of conflict, be it physical, moral, psychological, etc. Over the years I've tended to compare combative works with works that included some form of violence that was not combative, though I've also frequently written about works that have no violence, or works in which the conflict is extrinsic to the narrative.

So in recent weeks I've been meditating on the following topic: if in combative works "high spirits" are best shown by the act of combat between near-equals-- the quintessential "male" theme of war-- then what do "high spirits" look like in works in which the conflict-emphasis is more oriented upon the "female" theme of love?

It's axiomatic that male audiences generally like violence and contentious situations, and female audiences generally like love and domestic situations. There are basically just two extant explanations for this differentiation of gender-taste: either the tastes are expressive of the physical natures of the respective genders, or the tastes have been manipulated into existence by the Evil Culture Industry. Anyone who reads this should be able to guess which explanation I find more credible, but even though I agree that physical nature is a primary influence, I don't agree with those who consider it determinative.

I'm aware, of course, that the latter explanation is the one most favored, possibly because it gives its adherents the chance to wallow in victimhood. To them, absolute equity between the genders is the only possible ideal. In this essay I took issue with Heidi McDonald's ideal of equity by saying:

The whole "who's exposed more" question should never have been one of pure equity.  Equity is something to be observed in the workplace or the boardroom, but not in fiction.  Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.  I tend to think that this is because in general men are hornier bastards than women, but others' mileage may vary.

A couple of years previous, I wrote DEFINING PSUEDOFEMINISM, in which I contrasted remarks by a writer I considered a "pseudo-feminist" with remarks by noted "anti-feminist" Dave Sim. Both, I pointed out, attempted to shore up their opinions with appeals to what each of them considered empirical fact. Sim's views about female athletes dispensed with any considerations of equity whatever. I observed:

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 so stand as further proof of women's inferiority.

In addition to disproving Sim's view in that essay, I championed the concept of the "fighting woman" archetype in several essays, and showed in NON-ADDICTIVE VICTIMAGE that I was not allied to the "biology is destiny" crowd.

I wouldn't have written as much as I have on the subject of "the Fighting Woman Archetype" if I believed that the greater body mass of the human male decided all questions of supremacy. But if it's almost inevitable that most men are stronger than most women, then this physical factor inevitably will be reflected in fiction. This inequity will at all times comprise an "is" that cannot be negated by any *ought.*  Even comic books, which have arguably been a greater haven for the Femme Formidable than any other medium, can't refute the basics of physical law. 

To re-state: even though I don't believe that biology is the sole determinant of gender differentiation, I categorically do believe that the biological potential of males to develop greater strength and body-mass makes a crucial difference in their tastes in fiction. The next logical questions, then, would be:

(1) What tendency of females can be seen as the "objective correlative" (borrowed from T.S. Eliot, even if I don't agree with his application of it) for the female preference for "love and domestic situations?"

(2) Assuming that I find such an objective correlative, in what way do fictional love-narratives express "high spirits," paralleling the expression of similar spirits in fictional war-narratives?

More in Part 2.

SIX KEYS TO A LITERARY GENETIC CODE

In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here, owes something to statements by literary critic Northrop Frye. Frye chose this metaphor because he imagined a given literary work as having both an inward and outward motion. The former motion determines how the elements within the narrative interact with one another, while the latter determines how the "total vision" of the narrative relates to its readers.

The circle metaphor remains useful, but its invocation of centrifugal and centripetal motion may be a little too rooted in the domain of physics. The making of a work of art involves at least one creator-- let's assume just one, for convenience-- who may be seen as one part God and two parts Frankenstein. His artwork is akin to a living creature, and if it's anything like the ones we know, then the creature's biological nature is determined by its DNA sequences. The standard illustration of the DNA sequences is usually rendered as the familiar double helix. Yet some online sources have chosen to render the genetic code in circular form for purposes of illustration.

The reason for this, I assume, is that for purposes of illustration the circle still offers a strong image as to how the dominant influences on the organism's genetic code-- what I have called "centric will" in my "literary genetics"-- assume the centermost position. Consequently, the recessive influences on the organism's genetic code revolve outward from the center, akin to my "eccentric will."

The creator may use only "intelligent design" to bring forth his work, or he may create it, so to speak, by the seat of his pants. But whether in a given work conscious design plays a larger part than the subconscious variety, or vice versa, the work always evolves its own code, consisting of both the way the narrative elements interact and the way they impact upon readers.

Since this blog began, I've practiced my own study of "literary genetics," even though I only used this label a few times. It's occurred to me that the majority of my ruminations have been devoted to sussing out what elements in any narrative are the most centric, and thus dominate the work's character, and what role, if any, all the "eccentric" elements play. These ruminations have been complicated by the fact that sometimes the patterns assumed by all of these elements relates to the way they work inside the narrative-- what I'll call "intra-diegetical" in this essay-- while others relate to the way the elements work upon their readers, and perhaps even the creator himself, since he is, after all, "the first reader."

After scanning over my blog-entries for some time, I've determined six categories of "artistic alleles" I've been examining, in one form or another, since the blog began in 2007. The six are as follows:


(1) FOUR MYTH-RADICALS-- first addressed in detail in NOTES TOWARD A SUPERHERO IDIOM. I view these plot-and-character radicals underlying four corresponding literary mythoi as "Extra-Diegetical" because over time the literary mythoi have arisen from the four "ritual moods" identified by Theodore Gaster, whose work I last referenced here.

(2) THREE PHENOMENALITIES-- first codified as the AUM theory here, though I soon altered this into the preferred acronym NUM here. I should add that my phenomenology has been guided by Aristotle's original concept of "pity and terror," which with the help of C.S. Lewis I finessed these broad categories into the more precise ones of the sympathetic and affective affects, which in turn reflect the affective potentials of the phenomenalities. All three phenomenalities are created by patterns within narratives, and so are "Intra-Diegetical."

(3) TWO MODES, THE COMBATIVE AND THE SUBCOMBATIVE, first explored in detail in STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: THE COMBATIVE.  The exploration of the differences between combative and subcombative characters led me to distinguish three levels of dynamicity. as explained in MEGA, MESO, MICRO. This category is also "Intra-diegetical" in that it pertains only to how the dynamicity of fictional characters can be sorted out. I've devoted a fair amount of space to the thematic consequences to the work as a whole when it creates opposed characters with combative potential but then chooses not to resolve the conflict in a combative manner, cf. Wells' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.

(4) FOUR PERSONA-TYPES, which originally started out as two "word-pairs," "hero-villain" and "monster-victim." I soon determined that "victim" was too limiting a term and modified it to "demihero." Persona-types follow patterns that descend, like Gaster's four moods, from ritual and religious sources, not to mention being influenced by my readings of Hobbes and Schopenhauer. Similarly, the deternination as to whether the central persona is *exothelic* or *endothelic* depends on "Extra-Diegetical" considerations.

(5) FOUR INFORMATION-BEARING FUNCTIONS: These functions, last elaborated here, are largely extensions of Joseph Campbell's four functions. Since they deal with information from the real world being translated into fictional terms, these are "Intra-Diegetical."

(6) The most recent-- and probably the last-- of my code-categories is the four potentialities, introduced in FOUR BY FOUR, though I'd been cogitating on the subject for many years previous. Since these all deal with the creative propensities of the authors themselves-- whether favoring Jung's concepts of sensation, intuition, thinking or feeling-- this category is clearly "Extra-Diegetical."

For good measure, I'll toss in that the terms "Intra-Diegetical" and "Extra-Diegetical" line up with Northrop Frye's "narrative values / significant values" distinction. but I chose not to use Frye's terms this time, since they don't adapt well to adjectival form.

I mentioned in CLEANING AROUND THE CENTER that I considered relating these various conceptions of centric and eccentric will to my rules for sussing out centricity, the 51 percent rule and the "active share/passive share" corollary. However, that will have to wait for another essay.

ROYSTERING IN THE CLOISTER

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary-- John Milton, AREOPAGITICA (1644)

Back in November I wrote Noah Berlatsky that as long as he and his fellow travelers continued to be "addicted to victimage," they would continue to provide grist for my critical mill.

I was perhaps giving the HUddites too much credit, since for the past couple of months I've found whatever posts I've scanned to be both timorous and tedious. Ng Suat Tong's essay on Frazetta, which brought about my ban from the HU comment-threads, was poorly researched and badly reasoned. But at least the essay's intemperate foolishness grabbed my attention. Unlike a lot of the HU dreck, it afforded me a "trial by what is contrary."

The other week I scanned through the last two months. I had avoided two of the posts that had a lot of comments, one relating to the coming BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN movie, and one on James Bond,because I felt that I could pretty much predict all the ultraliberal, over-ideological sentiments that I would find there. The fact that the superheroes still attract the most energy at HU, as opposed to lofty noodlings about artistic perspective, speaks volumes.

So I was bored with the current cant, but I wanted to deliver on my earlier promise. I wandered through HU's topic list and checked out the "Batman TV Show" topic that has afforded me some good material ion past. Somehow this led me to a 2014 post by Chris Gavaler, TV SUPERHEROINES OF MY LOVELORN YOUTH.

The essay's trip down memory lane is unremarkable enough, and I wouldn't have called attention to it-- particularly not with the high-faluting Milton quote in mind-- had I not chanced upon a couple of remarks by Gavaler in the comment-thread. I'll preface my remarks by noting that I've no particular animus toward Gavaler as I have toward some HUddites. It's his lack of philosophical acuity I'm criticizing; not his personal life.

The first one once more sings that old familiar song of victimage. Imagine Ronstadt warbling "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" as you read:

A part of me flinches though at my own categorizing of women as sexy, non-sexy, etc. Although I experience myself as inevitably straight, I do wonder what would have happened if my culture hadn’t been through images of scantily-clad women at me as a child. 

In this song we hear the strains of the staunch Adornite. One's sexuality is not under one's own aegis; it's yet another aspect of the soul being ruled by that horrible Culture Industry (my words, obviously). By my lights this attitude is comparable to Milton's metaphor of "slinking out of the race." The implication seems to be that "TV and Hollywood," linked by Gavaler in the preceding sentence, are doing something morally culpable by playing up to male heterosexual desire. There's not even the usual demand for balance-- that it would be OK to depict hetero desire as long as there's total equity (whatever that might look like) for whatever marginalized sexual orientations the ideologue may choose to validate. Based on what Gavaler writes here, TV's portrayal of sexy women is A Bad Thing in itself.

But what amazes me about this passage is that Gavaler feels guilty about having indulged in the "categorizing of women as sexy, non-sexy, etc." This isn't just slinking out of a particular race; it's opting out of the human race.

One may argue that adolescents, flush with fresh hormones, can become consumed with sexual fantasies, which may or may not have unpleasant consequences. But there's no sentient human being who doesn't practice some form of "categorizing." For that matter, a sizable quantity of nonhuman creatures practice a form of categorization called "sexual selection." Humans cannot know if the aesthetic priorities of the female fiddler crab, and why she chooses one male crab over another. But even if nonhuman creatures *may* be thinking more about survival potential than pure sexiness-- though of course no one can know that either-- the result is the same. Crab A gets his ashes hauled and Crab B does not.

Suppose that somehow Evil Hollywood had never managed to sink its hooks into the American psyche as it did. Suppose that some Marxist regime enforced the standards that the HUddites claim to desire, so that at the very least there was equity in all representations of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and whatever else gets the inside track. This still would not mean (pause for change to shouting all caps)--

THIS STILL WOULD NOT MEAN THAT THE CATEGORIES OF "SEXY" AND "NON-SEXY" WOULD CEASE TO EXIST!

Not having been a homosexual, I cannot speak for that marginalized faction. However, I strongly suspect that they too prefer to sleep with bedmates that they find to be sexy, and that they avoid the "non-sexy" except when they're (so to speak) hard up.

But I suspect that Gavaler doesn't really want to place all sexual desire in question: only male hetero desire, as is indicated by a question he addresses to a poster who fails to respond further:

Are all these women just items of exchange in superheroes’ homosocial universe? 

So what Gavaler is really distancing himself from is not the whole of sexual selection, but from being implicated in the "homosocial universe" of Hollywood, which is just academic-speak for "the old boys' club."

Nothing I could write would alter the writer's notion that this is a virtuous stance. I can argue, though, that it is a "fugitive and cloistered virtue," Milton's essay was concerned with a somewhat different form of censorious attitude, but he keenly saw that the censor harbored the deluded idea that he might promote a beneficial "innocence," but that said censor would instead bring about "impurity." This brings to mind my earlier comment that the ideologues' dominant attitude is pre-lapsarian in nature. They look back at the abuses of history-- though always with one eye closed-- and want to wish them away, rather than considering that there is something in humankind that can only be brought out only through contention. Milton spoke of "purity," while Nietzsche, in many ways Milton's opposite, spoke of the virtue of "courage over fear."  Yet both of them were at base protesting against people who tried to opt out of struggle because of a mistaken desire for safety and innocence. In the terms I've adopted from Fukuyama, this is characteristic of the *isothymic* attitude:

*Isothymia* can manifest as Nelson Mandela going to jail for years to promote equal standards for Black Africans, but it can also manifest in "men without chests," endlessly prating about "equity" regardless of any other considerations.

Nietzsche feared the rise of the "Ultimate Men," defined by mediocrity. "Men without chests" was his metaphor. I, having been born in a more graphic era, tend to think of the Ultimate Men as being without something else-- and given the subject, I shouldn't even need to say what the "something" is.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PT. 3

Returning to the subject of comic strips:

I stated in Part 1 that I had in past found mythic material in such comic strips as Windsor McCay's DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND and Gary Larson's THE FAR SIDE. However, both of these were "gag-strips" rather than 'story-strips." Given my contention that a "literary myth" should be an actual story with a beginning, middle, and end, it behooves me to consider to what extent a "gag" is or isn't an actual story. Certainly a gag can at least convey a "myth-motif," but even so, not all "short myths" are equal-- hence, the possible use of Wheelwright's concept of *amplitude* (see Part 2) to sort out the mythic from the not-very-mythic.

I've not read all of McCay's FIEND strips, but I have the strong impression that they all follow the same structure. They all begin within someone's psychedelic dream, which runs its course until the dreamer awakens and groans about the folly of having eaten a Welsh rarebit. The strip depended on fulfilling this base function, regardless of whether the dream had or did not have "more to say." Thus, by the rules of *functionality* that I defined here, the strip would be "stereotypical" or monosignative when it did no more than fulfill its base function, yet "archetypal" or plurisignative if it went beyond the base function, and became in some way "super-functional." (The Campbellian part of me sees this "going beyond" as encoding one of Campbell's four functions, but others' mileage will vary.)

For my first example, here's one McCay strip that I consider merely monosignative:

The idea of a dreamer being chased and/or devoured by dream-monsters is fairly typical, and the motif of a dreamer extrapolating his bath into a river with a devouring hippopotamus seems to lack any special characteristic. Thus the cartoon also lacks what Wheelwright calls *amplitude.*

On the other hand, here's another strip:

This is a little more psychologically interesting because it deals with two older persons taking in a small dog that grows to monstrous size, to the point that they try, without success, to destroy the canine. Even though the overall situation satisfies the same base function as we see in the "hippo cartoon," McCay has invested more imagination to this cartoon-- not least because the monster dog never responds to the couple's attempted executions, but simply endures them stoically. Within the cartoon there are no diegetic parallels drawn between the dog and a human child. And yet this McCay scenario cannot help but beg such parallels. Because the second cartoon can call forth deeper associations, it possesses a greater amplitude, defined in physics as "the maximum extent of a vibration or oscillation, measured from the position of equilibrium."

Now here's a monosignative FAR SIDE cartoon:

The cartoon is amusing enough, but it depends entirely on the reader's recognition of the story-trope, "wolf in sheep's clothing."  Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be anything else going on.

This Larson gag also plays upon a reversal of biological norms:

However, this is the sort of cartoon I considered when I assigned symbolic complexity to the FAR SIDE strip. Larson is known to be a nerd about matters biological, and here he's having fun with the notion that a given biological adaptation-- in this case, sharks' dorsal fins-- might be more of a stumbling-block than an advantage within the shark's environmental niche. It's perhaps even more amusing when one considers the situation of real creatures who are victims of their own biologies, such as the peacock.

Larson's cartoons were always one panel, though on occasion he subdivided that space for the sake of telling a joke with some sort of progression. In contrast, the McCay FIENDs were usually either a quarter-page or a half-page, so McCay could do as many panels as he could fit into the designated space given him. Nevertheless, I would not consider either "McCay's dog" or "Larson's shark" to be mythic narratives simply because they possess an amplitude beyond the merely functional. They tell gags that can reduced down to simple motifs, rather than having the "tying-untying" progression of a genuine narrative.

Chic Young's BLONDIE, although its Sunday pages had as much space to work in as did McCay's FIEND entries, tended to construct mini-stories that conform more to Aristotle's narratology. I've observed in earlier posts that the "base function" of BLONDIE was generally to show Dagwood as "the Goat of the World," constantly being victimized by his wife, his kids, his boss, his neighbors, and almost everyone else. But again, some cartoons merely fulfill the function, and others go beyond it.  Here's a stereotypical example:

The "complication" is that Dagwood proposes that he might grow a beard, and everyone in his family goes postal in exaggerated reaction: the resolution comes when he gives in and promises not to become a "beatnik." This is typical "family-comedy" schtick, but nothing more.

On the other hand, there's this Sunday page:

Again, the base goal is realized; Dagwood is made the Goat. But there's a deeper psychological angle here. Alone, Dagwood tries to relax in the bathtub, but "his master's voice" intrudes even the privacy of his home. Rushing to answer the phone, he trips and injures himself-- all for nothing, because it's just Blondie calling for no particular reason. As a final irony, Blondie's friend avers that Blondie's gesture is the sort of thing that that makes for good marriages. I've argued that the comic-book BLONDIE story that I analyzed here shares a similar idea of inflicting pain on Dagwood through the supposedly "innocent" acts of Blondie, resulting in something of a "domme-sub" relationship-- although the camouflage of slapstick comedy concealed this from the strip's mass audience.

As I said, the two BLONDIE strips are closer to real stories than the other strips, regardless of the presence or absence of plurisignificance. Still, they would best be labeled "sketches" or "vignettes," which means that even when they do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes. For this reason, I doubt that I'll include many of these type of "gag strips" within the corpus of the "1001 myths project:" at present the aforementioned "Linus the Rain King" continuity is the only one that seems worthy.Ideally, the stories chosen for this project show the mythopoeic potentiality at its highest possible potential. And just as we judge the best dramas as being those that convince us that we're seeing simulacra of real people talk believably to one another, the best myth-stories are those that establish a believable "dialogue" between a variety of symbolic representations.