FINESSING FANTASY

I don't always elaborate on changes to my subject tags, but in this case, I want to record my line of thought for future use.

I noticed that two of my tags-- "fantasy" and "fantasy stories"-- seemed a little redundant, and in fact I had over the years sometimes applied them inconsistently. So, in line with the recent determinations I made in the MIND OUT OF TIME series, I changed anything that referred to particular stories of magical fantasy to "magical fantasy stories," while creating new categories for stories that didn't meet the magical fantasy criteria. For instance, Lewis Carroll's tales are now "nonsense fantasy stories," while THE SATANIC VERSES is "supernatural comedy." The rubric "supernatural" is one I plan to use for any with fantasy-content that's not either science fiction, nonsense, or some metaphenomenal hybrid and is set in more or less contemporary times. 

As a further example, the LEPRECHAUN horror-series would be mostly "supernatural drama" since it involves an archaic leprechaun killing off people in modern times-- though I guess LEPRECHAUN 4 IN SPACE is a hybrid between SF and supernatural drama.

The tag "fantasy (literary term)" deserves more explication. There is not a standard use of the term "fantasy" in academic literary criticism, but one particular critic does use it as I do: Kathleen Hume in her 1984 book FANTASY AND MIMESIS. She uses "fantasy" as a blanket term for everything in literature that deviates from commonplace, mimetic descriptions of the world, even deviations that might be classed as minor bits of nonsense. (For instance, she includes an incident where two characters in Voltaire's CANDIDE, seen to die explicit deaths "on stage," come back to life for no good reason.) My own category for the totality of all fantastic imaginings is "the metaphenomenal," while "the isophenomenal" describes everything that adheres to the principle of mimesis. But henceforth I'll also use "fantasy" to indicate the mental process by which authors create deviations from realism. This process, regardless of the rationalization used, thus engenders a principle opposite to that of mimesis, as in Hume: a principle which authors use to describe anything that goes beyond the bounds of realism.

THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 2

I've responded to the "anti-superhero" remarks of Martin Scorsese on this blog a couple of times. The first time, my basic conclusion was that Scorsese was most invested in what I'm pleased to term  "the mythos of the drama." This is why, in his 2019 remarks, he places such great emphasis on whether or not a given piece of cinema concerns "the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures." Elsewhere, while speaking of the enormous allure of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, he notes:

The set-pieces in NORTH BY NORTHWEST are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story and the absolute "lostness" of Cary Grant's character.

This quote relates well to the observation I made in my second essay, which didn't really examine Scorsese in depth, though I did reference my personally articulated concepts of artifice and verisimilitude:

...the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

 

Now, Hitchcock did not make "franchise films" in the sense the term is usually employed, in which the franchise offers the audience either continuing characters (Spider-Man, Antoine Doinel) or a series of roughly analogous stories linked by some umbrella concept or theme (Tales from the Crypt). But the Master of Suspense certainly used a situation beloved by espionage stories: that of "fugitive, while seeking to prove his innocence, must seek to prevent catastrophe." This situation can be fairly deemed a "trope" insofar as it has been used, and probably will continue to be used, by many authors to get audiences to invest in the fictional events.

Now, Scorsese says that without the "painful emotions" transmitted to the audience by the Cary Grant character, NORTH BY NORTHWEST would only be "a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts." There's no knowing that this would be the case, for all we can't "un-see" the version of NORTHWEST that we know. But one may fairly wonder if that less emotional version would have looked like Hitchcock's first major version of the aforementioned artifice-trope, 1935's THE 39 STEPS. 

I have not read, and am not likely to read, John Buchan's 1915 novel. Still, the summation I've read of the book makes it sound identical to the situation of Richard Hannay in the 1935 movie as embodied by Robert Donat: that Hannay is pretty close to being an emotional cipher in terms of dramatic intensity. 

And yet, it seems to me that Hitchcock's 39 STEPS is still a great movie, even without "painful emotions," and I also think it's more than the sum of its compositional shots.  It took a relatable, if artificial, situation and engrossed the audience in the outcome of the protagonist's seemingly insoluble dilemma-- often by adding elements foreign to the book, like the romantic angle. Near the movie's end Hannay has tracked the titular spy organization, the 39 Steps, to its base of operations at the London Palladium. There Hannay the ordinary man has an extraordinary insight: the spies plan to use a performer with exceptional memory (also a movie invention) to memorize vital state secrets for transportation elsewhere.

Trouble is, the London police are there too, and they're about to pull Hannay out of the crowd surrounding Mister Memory's stage. On all sides, audience-members are challenging the performer to answer any question put to him: fine details about atomic weights or historical dates and the like. Mister Memory meets every challenge, answers every question put to him, until Hannay, almost in the clutches of the cops, yells to the performer, "What are the 39 Steps!"

The crowd of fair-goers don't have any idea what Hannay is talking about, but they see Mister Memory hesitate at Hannay's inquiry, and they all take up the chant, "What are the 39 Steps?" The viewing audience doesn't know what goes through Mister Memory's mind, for he's even more of a cipher than Hannay. But as if the man can't help responding to a question to which he knows the answer, Mister Memory speaks the literally fatal words, "The 39 Steps is an organization of spies," just before his compatriots shoot him. And his death liberates Richard Hannay.

I've never seen Martin Scorsese say anything about THE 39 STEPS, but I think it impossible that a cineaste like him could avoid loving this scene. And if I am correct on that point, I argue that he wouldn't be loving the scene for its compositional rigor, and he certainly wouldn't be loving it for any character's "contradictory and paradoxical nature." 

He would be loving it because it's a vital part of a puzzle that makes the whole picture come clear. It's a picture that has nothing to do with verisimilitude, with the way people live their lives.

But it has everything to do with artifice, the way people wish they could live.

On a side-note: though Hitchcock did not make franchise-films by the definition I've used above, John Buchan's Richard Hannay enjoyed four more novels after the success of his debut, though as far as I can tell no one ever adapted any of the other Hannay-adventures. And the success of Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO eventuated in Bloch doing two sequels to his novel, neither of which were adapted for the other three movies (and teleseries) in Universal's "Norman Bates franchise."

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I noted that a lot of film critics have ample ways of authenticating the major developments both in general film history and with respect to particular film genres. When a cineaste like Martin Scorsese talks about a genre like film noir, he can draw upon a wealth of critical writings about the most important exemplars of the genre, and about the overall history of the genre's development. 

In Part 1 I also pointed out that comics-fans have over time generated both general histories of the comic book medium and of the particular genre of the superhero in comics. Yet none of these histories has any impact on the development of superheroes in the film medium, any more than a history of noir books would impact on noir films. And in essence, there is no strong developmental history of superheroes on the big screen, not even when one shows how that history intertwines with the history of superheroes on the small screen.

If one uses the term "superhero" only in its more restricted sense of "the costumed crusader," then in American cinema the genre starts in silent cinema with 1920's MARK OF ZORRO. But that film, and its 1940 remake, were one of a very small number of feature films spotlighting costumed crusaders prior to the 1950s. The main source of costumed crusader cinema were the serials, which also began in the silent era, but which did not make substantial adaptation of superhero (and superhero-adjacent) properties until the late 1930s, the beginning of the so-called "Golden Age of Serials." Zorro put in an appearance in the serial format in 1937's ZORRO RIDES AGAIN. while 1938 saw the cinematic debut of two other prose-derived superheroes, the Spider and the Lone Ranger. Many "superhero-adjacent" comic strips also were filmed around the same time, particularly those of FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS. Finally, in response to the burgeoning popularity of costumed heroes in comic books, ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL in 1941 provided the first adaptation of a particular comic book superhero. Comic book superheroes continued to be adapted until the studios quit making serials in 1956, resulting in a list of adaptations that includes Spy Smasher (1942), Batman (1943), Captain America (1944), The Vigilante (1947), and Superman (1948). Serials never indulged in the gory violence seen in many Golden Age superhero comics, but they shared the same basic aesthetic: action, action, and more action.

Serials, which made their money from kids regularly going to the movies to see the latest serial-chapter, were doomed as soon as television began offering serial-style entertainment for free. Yet television in that decade, and through the early 1960s, paid the superhero almost no attention, even as juvenile entertainment. Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. Slightly later, Disney produced in 1963 a three-part limited teleseries, THE SCARECROW OF ROMNEY MARSH.

The same basic dynamic informed the genre of animated theatrical shorts, which appeared alongside theatrical feature films. In the "golden age of cinema," two costumed-crusader cartoon-series predominated, resulting in seventeen SUPERMAN episodes and eighty-one MIGHTY MOUSE episodes. TV's competition with the movies meant the eventual doom of cinematic cartoon shorts and the rise of TV cartoons. On the small screen Mighty Mouse arguably gained a greater following than he ever had on the big screen, enjoying a long run as repackaged Saturday morning fare in the form of 1955's MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE.

There had been a very tiny number of costumed-crusader feature films in the 1940s, such as three SHADOW B-films from Columbia. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were only a smattering of mostly forgotten "masked swashbuckler" B-flicks and two LONE RANGER feature films, the latter issued by the same production company that made the TV show. 

The upshot of all these changes was that even though the Silver Age of Comics had brought new life to the superhero genre in the late 1950s, neither the big screen nor the small screen evinced any strong interest in the genre-- until 1966.

Was '66 BATMAN influenced first by a producer reading a BATMAN comic book, or by Hugh Hefner screening the old Bat-serials for a laugh, or by Pop Art usages of comic book art? Primacy does not really matter. But although "camp Batman" was opposed to the "straight" content of the more streamlined BATMAN comics of the Silver Age, the 1966 show was the first film/TV serial that successfully communicated the appeal of a superhero who continually battled a horde of repeating adversaries. Indeed, one could argue Silver Age Bat-comics began emphasizing the hero's colorful rogues a lot more than Golden Age Bat-comics ever had, and so the 1966 show was very much in tune with that sea-change.

 Later that same year, Hanna-Barbera's cartoon studio jumped into the costumed crusader business with galaxy-protecting superhero SPACE GHOST. The same company would present six other such TV cartoons, among them an adaptation of FANTASTIC FOUR, before concerned parents campaigned against this fancied increase in Saturday morning violence.

But neither the large screen nor the small screen did much else with the superheroes for the remainder of the decade. However, one could posit that most of the superheroes of the 1970s were in the same mold as BATMAN and SPACE GHOST, and at least some of the Silver Age comics: colorful, fairly intelligent adventures with light humor and none of the gory violence seen in Golden Age funnies. This aesthetic embraced not only moderately successful 1970s teleserials like WONDER WOMAN and INCREDIBLE HULK, but also misfires like the 1975 feature-film DOC SAVAGE. Roughly the same Silver Age aesthetic stayed in place for the four live-action SUPERMAN films and the considerably less noteworthy super-films of the eighties, such as LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. During this "late Silver Age" of film and TV, I tend to find most of the costumed crusaders from cartoon-land to be nugatory, with the possible exceptions of 1983's HE-MAN and 1987's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.

Now, one might say that cinema started exploiting the grittier nature of the comic-book Bronze Age with Tim Burton's first two BATMAN films in 1989 and 1992, and maybe even with the 1989 PUNISHER and the 1990 DARKMAN. However, if elements of the comic book Silver Age only appeared in very rough fashion in American comic books of the 1970s through the 1990s, such elements continued to appear alongside the edgier fare in movies and TV shows of the nineties. Thus the other two BATMAN films of the 1990s sought to hearken back to 1966 BATMAN, albeit in a very clumsy manner. Similarly, the hallmark superhero cartoon of the nineties, BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, emulates the tight plotting of Silver Age Bat-comics and, unlike the first two Burton Bat-films, eschews the transgressive violence found in Frank Miller's signature Bronze Age DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The live-action TURTLES films followed the lead of the eighties cartoon, choosing light humor over blood and guts.

As I see it, even in 2023 we remain in a sort of "superhero soup" in cinema and TV, constantly mixing together either the sunny Silver Age motifs (the MCU's ANT MAN) or the dark and transgressive tropes of the Bronze Age (ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE). It's like modern superhero movies and TV can't decide if they want to follow the lead of Stan Lee or of Alan Moore. 

In one respect, modern costumed-crusader films and TV shows have allied themselves with the comic-book "Iron Age." In PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS, I hypothesized that the 2009 "diversity hire" of the MS MARVEL creator marked the beginnings of hyper-politicized comic books. MCU films would not substantially begin following this storytelling model until roughly 2015, but to date the studio has not deviated significantly from said model. I don't know what it would take, in any of these media, to re-orient storytelling priorities enough to produce a "New Age" not entirely beholden to any of the others, but I suspect something's got to change eventually, even if its the extinction of the superhero genre in all its variegated forms.

HOW MANY WESTERN MYTHS HAVE I FOUND?

I stated in the previous essay that on my two main review-blogs I had not devoted much space to any isophenomenal westerns, mythic or otherwise. Despite this caveat, I did devote two long posts to two such non-fantastic western works:

RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE

DJANGO UNCHAINED

So of the all other westerns, or western-associated productions I will list here, they will all have some metaphenomenal content.

Not all of them take place, however, within the same era as the traditional western, or even as the so-called "Eastern western," which concerned the American Revolutionary era. I find that western iconography spans three broad periods:

THE PRE-WESTERN ERA

Stories fitting this heading take place prior to any major European incursions in any of the Americas, North or South. Typically this will concern only stories about Indian tribes who have not yet encountered any persons associated with the colonial efforts from the 16th century onward-- though I would have no problem with stories in which Indians met Viking travelers or even Phoenician sea-traders. In literature, there's really only major pre-western narrative.

THE SONG OF HIAWATHA

In theory, certain comic-book series like Gold Key's TUROK SON OF STONE and DC's SUPER CHIEF would qualify for this category, if they possesses the sort of mythopoeically rendered epistemological patterns that constitutes good mythicity.

Then at the other end of the temporal spectrum, there is--

THE POST-WESTERN ERA

This includes any narrative with western iconography taking place after the dawn of the twentieth century, whether or not the narratives takes place in the American West or even in any physical place corresponding to the North and South American continents. In addition to 20th-century stories with some major connection to western story-tropes or icons, this category can also embrace so-called "space westerns," though the significance of the trope or icon has to be very strong. I for one do NOT deem STAR WARS a "space western," even though the series used western tropes (like the "cantina scene") from western cinema. And I would not regard the entirety of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Mars series" of books to be space westerns either, though the first one counts, because its 20th-century protagonist starts out his narrative fighting wild Indians. So the first book qualified for high mythicity.

A PRINCESS OF MARS

And so does this Osamu Tezuka take on Western mythology:

CAPTAIN KEN

I also include here stories where some significant character uses western iconography, even if some other genre is dominant. Thus the story in SPIDER-MAN #10 is predominantly a superhero story, but it is "western-adjacent" because one of the villains wears a ten-gallon hat and twirls a lasso as his only weapon.

THE ENFORCERS

Finally, I come to the meatiest category, taking in all narratives centered within the domain of the Americas from the 16th through the 19th centuries, though obviously not all of these have western iconography. (For instance, stories about the Civil War take place in the same time-frame as the "winning of the West" stories, but only a few of these tales are likely to boast strong western tropes or icons.)  All of my other Mythic Westerns are as follows:

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER

INCIDENT OF THE PALE RIDER 

THE LONE RANGER AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD

THE NIGHT OF THE VICIOUS VALENTINE

PURGATORY

THE RANGERS VS. TOMAHAWK

RANGO

THE SHAMAN

SCALP HUNTER

Technically, SCALP HUNTER, one of the "Son of Tomahawk" stories, is not a metaphenomenal story, and might better be listed alongside Django and the Purple Sage Riders. I've also left off this list all of the individual "good" episodes of the teleseries KUNG FU. This program sported a high percentage of stories with either a "good" or a "fair" mythicity rating, and so I prefer to associate the series as a whole with my next category: all the "fair" westerns that weren't quite epistemologically complex enough to be good, but which at least included important myth-motifs.

THE LONE RANGER (1938)

MACKENNA'S GOLD

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1920)

THE MARK OF ZORRO (1940)

THE MASK OF ZORRO

THE WHITE BUFFALO

ZORRO'S FIGHTING LEGION

ZORRO THE GAY BLADE

And finally, I made brief reference to a very "post-Western" storyline in THE WEST COAST AVENGERS here.

I may add to this list over time, as I encounter new "good myths" or "fair myths" worth collating.

MYTHICITY ACCORDING TO GENRE-DISPERSAL

 In the American academic criticism of both prose literature and film, so-called "myth criticism" is fairly spotty, without a dominant theoretical voice. Not that I would want everyone to sound the same. But there were a better general understanding of what distinguishes mythopoeic discourse from didactic discourse, authors like the ones who assembled this travesty might have a harder time promoting their drivel.

I believe American film criticism has one important advantage over its prose kindred, though. Because of the way commercial films were and are marketed, film critics have paid more attention to the ways mythic content can be expressed according to genre-expectations. No one has to my knowledge ever attempted a myth-history even for American popular films, and thus every interested critic, be it Raymond Durgnat, Richard Slotkin, or Geoffrey Hill, simply focuses on whatever genres or genre-products each finds most rewarding.

As a generalization based on personal reading, I find that three genres have generally attracted the most attention from myth-critics: horror, science fiction, and westerns. There's considerably less focus upon war and crime/mystery/espionage, except where critics have concentrated a particular creator with a particular genre-specialization, as with Hitchcock. And although one might argue that even silent film employed characters one might call "superheroes," understandably this quintessential comic-book genre has remained out of favor with most critics.

In comics criticism, I would say the bulk of myth-criticism has focused upon particular characters, be it perennials like Superman and Wonder Woman or relative upstarts executed by a particular creator, as with Frank Miller's Daredevil. So when I state that the bulk of comic-book criticism focuses upon superheroes, I'm talking about such focused examinations, and not so much on seeing myth broadly, through examinations of overall genre expectations. At least I'm not aware of any parallels in comics criticism to Slotkin's 1992 GUNFIGHTER NATION, which embraced a wide variety of frontier/western narratives of the 20th century.

I'm not thumping my own tub to claim that my blog seems to be the only one that has searched through the majority of comic-book  genres In Quest of Myth; it is, as far as I know, simple unadorned truth. Despite my efforts to be open to all generic forms, though, there can be no doubt that I too have found myth-discourse most often in the comic-book genre of the superhero. Probably the superhero-tale's nearest rival on this blog is the horror comic, with considerably fewer exemplars in the domains of science fiction, teen humor, and westerns.

Now, this is not so much the case on the blog I've dedicated to metaphenomenal film. Movies and television episodes with a "good" mythicity rating may actually be stronger there for both "horror" and "science fiction" than they are for "superheroes," though again, I have not attempted a precise breakdown, nor do I tend to do one.

 Now, the very fact that the NUM blog focuses only metaphenomenal film means that I almost never examine in detail one of the film-genres that earns the widest plaudits from academics: the western. Whereas horror, science fiction, and superheroes all might be expected to have heavy mythicity thanks to their evocation of metaphenomena, western narratives, even relatively simple efforts by "non-auteurs," often generate complex symbolic discourses even within purely (or largely) isophenomenal worlds. And I would say, again without making any attempt at a statistical breakdown, that western films do so much more frequently than other genres that tend to be dominantly isophenomenal, such as crime and mystery, romance, teen humor, and war.

I may come up with a theory to explain this discrepancy after doing more research into western-myth criticism as it exists, but for now, this essay serves mostly as a lead-in to my next essay: How Many Western Myths Have I Found?

RADICAL CONFLICTS

It is true of the good man too that he does many acts for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary dies for them; for he will throw away both wealth and honours and in general the goods that are objects of competition, gaining for himself nobility;since he would prefer a short period of intense pleasure to a long one of mild enjoyment, a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of humdrum existence, and one great and noble action to many trivial ones. -- Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, tr. W.D Ross (from the Internet Archive) 

It's been quite a while since I descanted on the topic of Frye's myth-radicals, as my last listing for the topic was in AFFECT VS. MOOD in 2014. Of course I've continued, here and on the film-review blog, to label narratives as one of the four "mythoi," more or less following the line of thought I formulated in the first "51 percent rule" essay:

...most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

The proposed "51 percent rule" has been modified by the introduction of the "active share/ passive share" corollary put forth last November. But even in this blog's early history, it's clear to me that in essays like BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER and STATURE REQUIREMENTS were seeking for an "active share" solution to the problem of "which mythos is the most dominant." Later, I would ask the same questions with regard to a given narrative's dominant phenomenality or its participation in the "combative mode." A downside to the 51 percent rule as stated is that it was devised with serial concepts in mind. Of course, anyone who seeks to label to a narrative that gives "mixed signals" must attempt something in the nature of an "active share" solution as well, unless the person chooses the strategy of Polonius, adopting weird conflations like the "tragical-comical-historical-pastoral"-- or even the "dramedy," sometimes attributed to Steven Bochco in the 1980s.

As should be evident from my other essays on Aristotle, I don't subscribe to his observations on morality as such, but he was an unqualified genius in terms of seeking to glean what qualities make certain things better, or at least more elevated, than others. The quote above from the ETHICS makes clear that although Aristotle had his "realistic" aspects, he was not a realist in our sense of the word, since he values "a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of humdrum existence." His POETICS is just as informed by this process of sussing-out, and my STATURE REQUIREMENTS essay explores some of the ways in which the philosopher assigned differing values to the literary genres of his time.

Now, Frye's concept of mythoi from the ANATOMY OF CRITICISM took some inspiration from such 20th-century authors as Theodore Gaster and the considerably earlier myth-ritual school. But Frye's primary influence, as he himself admits, is the POETICS, and though Frye does not say so, he implicitly accepts Aristotle's valorization of "plot" over "character," as seen in Book 6 of THE POETICS:

Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.--Aristotle, POETICS, book 6. 

Aristotle's "artistically constructed incidents" are not as schematically laid out as Frye's four myth-radicals, though Frye primarily derives all of his terms from the POETICS: "agon," "pathos," "sparagmos," and what Frye calls "anagnorisis" or "cognitio"-- though, without raising a new issue, I've expressed some disagreement with Frye as to the applicability of this last term.

The interesting thing that Aristotle and Frye have in common is that both are trying to advance entirely secular explanations for the wide appeal of narrative actions that are certainly not "incidents" in the way that English speakers use the word. All of these radicals, around which the narrative action coalesces, are intended to produce "intense pleasure" rather than "mild enjoyment"-- though we don't precisely know what Aristotle made of the pleasures of comedy and other literary genres, as opposed to the tragedies to which he devotes so much attention.

Now, in the POETICS Aristotle clearly gives pride of place to the plot-function of "recognition," choosing to term plots without a revelation-scene as "simple" and those with one as "complex." I believe that his preference is rooted in his belief as a philosopher that all literary pleasure itself stemmed from the recognition of familiarity, brought about the author's successful imitation, or "mimesis," of the real world. Unlike Zola, Aristotle did not insist that imitation included only the documentary recording of familiar experiences, for he allowed that it also included things like familiar stories about the nature of the gods, and other sources of the "wonder" that he finds necessary for tragedies.

I myself would rate the familiarity of commonplace experiences as no more than a "mild enjoyment," while the familiarity of shared myths would line up better with "intense pleasure"-- and of course this is certainly the reason that I've chosen to write thousands of words on the topics of myths and myth-radicals. While as a pluralist I affirm the equal importance of all four radicals, I've clearly chosen to devote myself to the radical of the *agon,* even to the extent of analyzing its presence in narratives not aligned to the adventure-mythos best known for it. However, I've already attested to my probable reasons for focusing on the "great and noble action" of combative strife in essays like this one, so I won't repeat myself on that score. I will add, though, that conflict, albeit not combat, is implied by all of the other three radicals-- and that's one other reason as to why I find the *agon* to be the "first among equals" in this archetypal grouping.

MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS, AND STORIES TOO

In STRENGTH, IN NUMBERS  I made this generalization about the corpus of stories within the famous folktale-collection Grimms' Fairy Tales:

I would generalize that most of the Grimms' folktales fall into one of these two categories [i.e., having the plot-dynamicity labeled "basic strength" or the one labeled "might"].

In contrast, I only pegged one Grimms' tale which displayed the plot-pattern of "dominance," focused on two contending superior forces.

But that's just one story-collection.  How do these three deductively-extrapolated patterns disperse over the whole of literature?

I suppose my view may be influenced by a lifetime of genre-reading.  Nevertheless, genre-- and I consider folk literature to be a close relation to genre literature-- has been the dominant type of narrative (both in written and oral forms) favored by the majority of human beings in historical time.  And basing my view on everything I've read of what other people generally read, the "middle type"-- the one that Goldilocks pronounced as "just right" in another context-- is the one that I believe would rack up the highest statistics, were any kind of statistical evaluation feasible.

I hinted at the predominance of the "might" pattern in my QUICK SCHOPENHAUER POST: 

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

To make my meaning more explicit, I'm saying that the dominant type of story within genre narrative-- which narrative is the dominant narrative experience of historical mankind-- is one in which the characters who inhabit a normal, "typical" continuum-- characters usually possessed of no more than "basic strength"-- is confronted with an atypical anomaly-- be it a natural force or a character-- which impinges its "might" upon the continuum's static equilibrium. The anomaly may be any number of things within the scope of the Num Formula: a ruthless criminal (naturalistic), a bizarre psycho-killer (uncanny), or a blood-hungry vampire (marvelous).  As different as these three examples are in terms of phenomenality-- with one appealing to what I've called the "odd-sublime," the other two to the "strange-sublime"-- they are identical in terms of function in terms of how the plot-dynamicity works out.

If the "might" pattern is, as I assert, the dominant pattern in genre-literature-- thus supervening the patterns of non-genre literature as well-- then this would support H.P. Lovecraft's belief as expressed at the start of his critical history of the terror-tale, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Of course no one can be sure as to which emotion was the first to be kindled in the breast of nascent humanity.  But it's possible that the confrontation of mundane "basic strength" with the power of sublime "might" is the dominant pattern because it has the greatest appeal across all genre-types.

More on these matters in a forthcoming Part 2.

EXCLUSION CONCLUSION

In MORE GENRE-FENCES I took Peter Coogan to task for his practice of "exclusion by genre definition."  But does that mean that I am opposed to "exclusion" in principle?

Anyone who's read my own analyses of genre and mythos would certainly find that I've used the principle many times myself.  In this essay, I asserted that despite the presence of elements relevant to the adventure-mythos in both DOCTOR WHO and STARGATE, I thought that other elements dominated the tonal quality of each serial, so I did not define either series as falling within the "adventure mythos."

My method is not appreciably different from Coogan's.  In various essays I've stated my takes upon the Fryean mythoi, described those ways in which I differ from Frye, and assembled the dominant traits of each mythos just as Coogan puts forth what he deems the dominant traits of the superhero genre.  Then, just as Coogan does, I suss out whether or not a given work matches a given mythos.  Unquestionably a lot of this sussing-out process for both of us has a subjective aspect.  Another author, hip to the basic terminology of genres and mythoi, might demur from my conclusion and conclude that STARGATE is indeed a work of adventure.

My own "superhero idiom" list depends on this exclusionary process as well.  When I listed my 20 best "superhero idiom" films, I did list the initial STAR WARS trilogy as one of them, and got a complaint from one poster for calling STAR WARS a "superhero film," which was not quite the point.  I also got this response, which believe it or not I just noticed today:

If Star Wars is a superhero film, then so is Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or any movie where a character has fantastic powers, which are half the movies in the fantasy/sci-fi genre. Basically, your defining the superhero genre so widely as to make it near meaningness. You also forgot BATMAN BEGINS, the best live-action superhero movie in the past decade or two.

The poster obviously had not read anything else I wrote, since I think I've been clear as to why I don't consider "any movie where a character has fantastic powers" to be within the superhero idiom.  I'm not offended by that, but I find it interesting that I was accused of being too inclusionary.  In point of fact, in the above cited essay and elsewhere, I've excluded all sorts of works from being within said idiom, yet have included many works within it in which characters don't have "powers" but merely something like a costume, a special weapon, etc.

Yet I'm heartened by the poster's comment, because in my reading it may means that I'm not being too hidebound in assigning arbitrary boundaries to my conceptions of the mythoi.  Though I've met Peter Coogan and admire his work for comics scholarship, I do think that he's tried to hard to make it seem as if genre-constructions are objective facts, which is why he can so roundly dismiss Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a "superhero," not to mention many of the characters of the pulp-magazine era, regardless of whether or not they wore costumes or had powers.

In my view the advantage of the Fryean mythoi is that they are focused not upon narrative tropes, as are many discussions of genre, but on the emotive and expressive appeal underlying those tropes.  Too often in critical history this or that emotional tenor is ignored or set aside for being too "childish" or too "fascistic," with the result that, say, only the most ironic of ironies are esteemed by some critics.

So though I do use exclusion in my own way, I believe I balance it out with a pluralist's inclusive tendencies.

MORE GENRE-FENCES

“Superhero... a heroic character with a selfless, pro-social mission... who is generically distinct, i.e., can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions..."-- definition of "superhero" from Peter Coogan's SUPERHERO: THE SECRET ORIGIN OF A GENRE (2006), p. 30.

Coogan's book may be the first formal attempt to define the superhero in terms of its narrative construction, as opposed to fans' informal definitions: that the hero needs or does not need a costume, needs to exist in contemporary times or not, and so on.  Plainly Coogan's definition rests entirely upon the divisions made possible by "generic conventions", as did Scipio's attempt, scrutinized here, to confine characters like Batman or Superman within genre-rubrics like "detective fiction" or "science fiction."

(Minor point: given the prior associations given the word "generic," I would prefer "genre-conventions," though as I noted here, I don't like the word "conventions" at the best of times.)

I have no problem with mapping out the functions of genres in terms of their general practice, but I'm leery of seeing them used as "fences" that artificially divide works A, B and C from works X, Y and Z even though all of them share the expressive and tonal qualities one can find in the Fryean *mythoi.*  It's interesting that Coogan cites Northrop Frye in SUPERHERO, though only on one page, referencing Frye's "theory of modes."  Otherwise Coogan's approach seems closer to that of the structuralists, whom Frye did not endorse, as I recall, because they insisted only upon breaking genres down into their component parts and paid little attention to the "total vision" of a work.

Take, as an illustrative example of Coogan's book, his take on Joss Whedon's BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (p. 48), whom Coogan considers "a leading candidate" for "exclusion by genre distinction."  Coogan's reasons are summed up in this essay by Peter Sanderson, which disagrees with Coogan's specific conclusions but not with his concentration on "genre-conventions."  Sanderson does a good job summarizing the ways in which Coogan finds Buffy lacking as a "superhero," as well as registering his own objections to Coogan's substitute term "super hero."  However, the greatest problem I have with Coogan's Buffy-exclusion occurs here:

"...the Slayer is a hero-type that predates the superhero, fitting firmly within the larger horror-genre ... [Buffy's] hero-type descends from actual vampire hunters, including the dhampir... Thus, though the writers of BUFFY draw on superhero conventions, the stories are generically distinct from the superhero genre."

Coogan's literalist interpretation of genre is precisely in the mode of Scipio.  If Buffy's "hero-type" predates the superhero, then she cannot be a superhero, just as Superman cannot be an "actual superhero" because he inherits his dominant tropes from science fiction.

Sanderson also draws attention to many examples in which BUFFY's television scripts do suggest her identity as a "superhero," but his solution to the categorizational dilemna is not much better than Coogan's, as Sanderson terms Buffy a "displaced superhero" simply because she borrows conventions from other genres.

One reason that I choose to emphasize Frye's remarks on his four mythoi  is precisely because I believe it makes it possible to talk about the constitutive nature of popular fiction without getting quite so hamstrung as to what trope belongs to what genre.  For instance, Coogan would have his readers believe that there is a "horror genre" that is so constituted that it is fiercely indepedent of any other genre, be it that of the superhero or (presumably) any other.

And yet, what happens whenever the equally capacious genre of science fiction chooses to do its take on the horror-genre's vampire myths?  Be it Richard Matheson's I AM LEGEND, Curtis Harrington's 1966 QUEEN OF BLOOD, or the "Space Vampire" episode of the teleseries BUCK ROGERS, do these remain within the horror-genre, because they're about vampires?  If so, does that mean that of BUCK ROGERS' 32 episodes, only one is horror, leaving the other 31 to be "actual" science fiction?

This seems to me a messy and arbitrary approach to categorization.  I imagine that others may find my application of the Fryean mythos to pop fiction no more winsome.  But at least an emphasis upon the emotional and expressive core of any given work can avoid some of this tendency to "fence in" tropes that were "born free."

GENRE-FENCES MAKE BAD THEORY

"In the beginning was the word"-- John 1.1

"In the beginning was the act"-- Goethe, FAUST.

In CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST I stated:

I'm aware of no list that seeks to list any protagonists, superheroic or otherwise, according to the Fryean mythos to which they belong.

The lack of such a list isn't surprising; a list-maker has to be highly motivated to delve into the Fryean categories, particularly those of the mythoi Frye may or may not have derived from Theodor Gaster. 

What one usually gets, to extend the above parallel somewhat, is not meditations on "the word"-- the immense and imponderable potential principle that theoretically unites all manifestations of literature-- but on "the act," or rather the "acts" of individual genre-boundaries; the things that distinguish one hypothetical genre from another.  "Genre" is, as I also noted in the above essay, much "more limited" than the Fryean mythos.  To think upon genre is to meditate on limitations, on the fences that keep one genre apart from another, as will be the case with the online essay I'll be critiquing here.

First, though, what is genre?  Merriam-Webster says:

a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content

This is perfectly adequate, though when dealing with modern popular culture-- my sole concern in this essay-- I like my own definition best: "genre" is any category in which works are included on the basis of similarities in terms of (1) character, (2) setting, or (3) plot.

For instance, the "mystery-genre" is often spoken of as a thing separate from the "detective-genre."  The principal reason for this separation is that the former genre is based on a type of plot, but it can include the solution of a mystery even if there is no character who is a detective.  Thus any number of old-dark-house stories, in which protagonists merely stumble over the mystery's solution, are mysteries but not detective stories. By contrast, to be in the "detective genre" the story must have an actual detective.

Portmanteau genres present similar category-hopping opportunities.  If a work is labeled a "western," it has been principally characterized by its setting.  However, a "horror-western" merges the concern for setting with that of a horror-based plot.  It is of course possible to reverse the emphasis: perhaps transferring story-tropes of the western into some non-western setting and still using them for horrific plot-purposes-- but then no one would call said work a "horror-western."

As far as combining aspects of genres, that of the superhero-- which I view as not a thing in itself, but as one potential genre amid other related types-- is certainly marked by this kind of trope-transference. 

In an essay entitled "Flash is the only DC superhero," Scipio of the blog ABSORBASCON argues this assertion largely on the purity of Flash's generic nature:


"The Flash is an actual superhero. An otherwise regular guy who gains superpowers and fights crime with them. He fights villains who are mostly normal people with superpowers or the technological equivalent thereof. It’s cops and robbers but on the superheroic level."

In contrast, other DC heroes are defined by their alliances to other genres:

"Batman is a detective in a detective genre."

"Superman is a science fiction character."

"Wonder Woman is a fantasy character."

Scipio notes that the Flash, like Superman, has numerous "sci-fi elements," but argues that "... they aren’t the core of his world; they are just the added elements that take him and his world from the mundane to the “super.”

In keeping with my newly announced "51 percent rule," I decided that the only way to determine if Scipio was right in his determination that Flash's "sci-fi elements" weren't "the core of his world" would be to demonstrate this statistically.  So I used the first issue of SHOWCASE PRESENTS: THE FLASH as a starting-point. I made two columns: one for all Flash-adventures in which the hero faced any sort of "sci-fi" menace, ranging from aliens, cloud-monsters and talking gorillas (Grodd knows why), while the other column only included relatively mundane adventures, whether it was the hero fighting car thieves or costumed super-villains who only used science-fiction as a quick gimmick, rather than borrowing from the tropes of science-fiction in other media.

As it happens, Scipio's observation is borne out by the statistical method. In the first column, out of a total of 38 stories (including those of the backup "Kid Flash"), only fifteen are strongly determined by the tropes of science fiction, while twenty-three lack these or any other generic elements.  Thus it seems to be true that Flash's adventures, in this volume at least, are dominated by the sense of the hero as "an otherwise regular guy who gains superpowers and fights crime with them."

Nevertheless, while Scipio is right in this one specific respect, I don't take seriously the notion that "superhero" is defined by a lack of tropes from other genres, which seems Scipio's implicit definition.

Returning to my simplified definition of genre, "superhero" would seem to be a genre defined first and foremost by "character."  I have seen attempts (not Scipio's) in which a given fan tries to confine superheroes to modern-day cities, thus making it impossible for costumed cowboys like the Two-Gun Kid or the Black Rider to qualify. I reject these as mere fannish preference, not logical deduction, for the irrelevance of setting should be confirmed simply by the existence of a superhero feature set in the future, as evidenced by DC's "Legion of Super-Heroes."

Similarly, "plot" cannot be the determining factor, if only by Scipio's own reasoning, where he claims that Flash uses "sci-fi elements" but is not determined by them.  Scipio does not cite compelling evidence as to why, say, Superman is defined by such elements, and I believe that at differing periods, Superman's feature could be just as light on "sci-fi elements" as Flash's.

Therefore "character" would seem to be the determining factor in the superhero genre.  From this affiliation it would follow that a superhero is no less a superhero for having plot-elements borrowed from science fiction, detective stories or even westerns.  Scipio actually does argue that Aquaman is "a western character in a frontier setting," though I respond that no one is any more likely to term Aquaman a genuine western than, say, the sci-fi film OUTLAND.  On  a tangential note, I think a case could be made that Silver Age Aquaman was every bit as much of a "fantasy" as Wonder Woman in its Golden/Silver Age manifestations, though over time both of them became closer to being "regular superheroes."

The superhero genre, then, is a character-determined genre like that of the detective-genre mentioned above.  I note in passing that many fans think of "the detective" as a modern-day figure, going back in history no further than Sherlock Holmes but more often represented by Philip Marlowe and Miss Marple, a conception which parallels Scipio's conception of the regular-guy superhero.  However, detective prose fiction of recent years has undergone a positive mania for transferring the concept of the detective to a wide variety of historical periods: ancient Rome, medieval Europe, etc.  Thus for me, even a superhero in a different period-- whether an uncanny type like the original GHOST RIDER or marvelous types like the Ditko STARMAN-- still belongs to the superhero idiom no matter how many other genre-tropes may intrude.  Thus I certainly don't think modern-day superheroes with SF or fantasy tropes, like Superman or Wonder Woman, are any less "true" superheroes than the Flash.

ADDENDA: One of my correspondents seemed unclear on the applicability ot the Legion to this definition, so I wrote the following:


"To clarify a bit more, one of my points is that, given that "Legion of Super-Heroes" actually has the word "superhero" in its title. This suggests to me that, in a colloquial sense at least, DC Comics felt confident that their readership would recognize the feature as being about superheroes in the future, rather than thinking (along with my target Scipio) that the Legion's sci-fi aspects would detract from readers thiniking of it as a "superhero book.

Thus I deduce that from a marketing standpoint (whatever one thinks of the theoretical standpoint) a character's status as a "superhero" trumps the time-period or trappings of that character."

MONSTERS, HEROES, AND FOOLS

I'm currently playing around with the notion that all literary genres as we now know them could be extrapolated as coming from three major parent-genres that have theoretically existed since mankind first started telling stories.

This is on balance a heuristic assumption as none of us can know that much about the ways in which early humans developed his first version of what we now call "art/literature." But though the assumption's unproveable, it's not necessarily false.

The three parent-genres would then be:

THE TALE OF HORROR, where the star is the "Monster" who wins out by killing or otherwise defeating the human protagonist

THE TALE OF ADVENTURE, where the star is the Hero, who is presented as being capable of killing the monster even if he goes down the grave with the beastie (Beowulf).

THE TALE OF COMEDY, where the star is the Fool, who has none of the hero's fortitude but somehow, usually via dumb luck provided by the storyteller, manages to survive and win over monstrous threats with much the same outcome as the hero, except for the dying-in-battle thing.

An argument for these forms' history from antiquity to the present is not doable at this time, nor do I plan any time soon to address why I view some of the genres we now know (the "romance," the "drama") as being somewhat less antique. But here's the thought that struck me recently:

As long as the monster of the horror-tale remains just that-- the thing that either "gets you" or at least comes so close that you still feel "got"-- there's not much similarity to the other two parent-genres.

However, when modern serial stories are built around the figure of the monster as a quasi-hero, the writer has to resort to an awful lot of Incredible Good Luck to keep the monster from slaughtering all the sympathetic characters in sight, and keep him somehow focused only on victimizing muggers and rapists (a popular trope of comics and film in the 1970s).

This Incredible Good Luck actually has the effect of making the Serial Monster less of a hero and more like the Serial Fool, whose favorable destiny is carefully rigged by the author.

The Serial Hero also may have Incredible Good Luck at times, but in theory the author is supposed to set things up so that it at least LOOKS like the hero has won through grit and determination, and not by any deus ex machina of his creator.

More on this line of thought later.