NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART II

 I've now finished the last two chapters of Whitehead's SYMBOLISM lectures, and as it happens, all the best stuff is in the first chapter.                                                                                                                                                           Given that Whitehead only focuses on his particular take regarding symbolism in the last (and shortest) chapter, the title is a little misleading. And when I checked the index for his synoptic work PROCESS AND REALITY, which he began in 1929, I saw that Whitehead only had a few pages devoted to the topic of symbols as such. Given the brevity of this 88-page book, I wasn't expecting anything as comprehensive as Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY or Cassirer's MYTHICAL THOUGHT. But that final chapter doesn't do anything but talk a little about symbolism as one of the abstractions necessary to human culture. In fact, he sums up his opinion of its importance most adroitly in a sentence from PROCESS: "Symbolism is essential for the higher grades of life, and the errors of symbolism can never be wholly avoided." I don't think Whitehead succeeds in establishing a standard as to what constitutes "error" in symbolism, though.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The real concerns of his book manifest in the second chapter; that of advancing his concept of the relatedness of all aspects of reality to one another, rather than trying to see particular aspects in isolation, which he attributes to both the empiricist tradition of Hume and the idealist tradition of Kant. In the second chapter he says, "This Kantian doctrine accepts Hume's naive presupposition of 'simple occurrence' for the mere data... I directly deny this doctrine of 'simple occurrence'... Universality of truth arises from the universality of relativity, whereby every particular actual thing lays upon the universe the obligation of conforming to it." To sum up, the principal strength of SYMBOLISM is that it offers a very concise summation of some of Whitehead's concepts, which I confessed that I found hard to follow in the more ambitious PROCESS.                   

CONJUNCTION JUNCTION, MEET VIOLATION STATION PART II

I read USES [OF ENCHANTMENT] many years ago and thought it was a fair premise, albeit marked by a certain utilitarianism. While I would never deny that readers may internalize the subject matter of fiction so as to give the subject some personally-proactive theme, it's certainly not the principal quality of fiction, nor do I think most readers, children or adults, are thinking to themselves, even unconsciously, "How can I 'use' this?" Much of the charm of fiction, be it 'fantastic' or 'realistic,' resides in the way those elements most similar to everyday experience can be inverted, transvalued, or reinterpreted in assorted ways.-- me, BETTLEHEIM, BETTELHEIM, BETTELHEIM!

Mark Millar's remarks about rape, superficial though they were, stirred up what amounted to a pretty small hornet's nest, given that the swarm already seems to be settling down, to judge from the one or two comics news-sites I visit. 

Regarding Millar's original remarks, the only thing I had to add is that while he was correct to say that the act of rape could be used in fiction simply to denote "badness," he was incorrect to say that the act had no difference from (to use his example) a bad guy's decapitating a victim.  Various online critics, such as the one I cited in Part One, attacked Millar for not privileging the use of rape to connote the need for social and cultural reform.  This misses the point as to the universal-- i.e., non-political-- ways in which sex and violence overlap and yet remain distinct.  My own view, not reducible to pure utilitarian terms yet not irrelevant to those concerns, was expressed in the essays entitled VIOLENCE *AIN'T* NUTHIN' BUT SEX MISSPELLED:

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

I want to make clear, too, that my objections to a utilitarian reading of violence are not confined to the arguments of those who don't like violence in certain contexts.  My quotation re: Bettleheim  shows that I'm equally opposed to the views of an author who saw violence in a positive light, because he too professed a narrow utilitarianism that overlooked the broader context of fiction: 

Much of the charm of fiction, be it 'fantastic' or 'realistic,' resides in the way those elements most similar to everyday experience can be inverted, transvalued, or reinterpreted in assorted ways.

The battle of these two equally utilitarian viewpoints is highlighted in THE BEAT's new cause celebre, two posts-- one closed to comments, one designed to exclude them from the first-- on the subject of Avatar Comics' use of torture-porn comic book covers.

Here's the first, in which author Heidi McDonald vents her spleen against Avatar for marketing "torture porn."  From her opening remarks she's apparently not the first to do so, but her politicized views are made clear at the conclusion of what is a pretty civil thread overall, replete with many thoughtful remarks about the nature of the horror genre:

...I’ll leave you with this: why does so much “horror” involve sadistic misogyny against women? And are you okay with that?

I've already refuted similar McDonald views here, so I'll confine myself to mentioning that she never responds to one poster's claim that Avatar tortures quite a few male characters as well.  Heidi then offers a summation of the controversy on her newsblog and elsewhere, with a pertinent link to an essay by Warren Ellis.

Ellis' defense of violent stories frames its argument in equally utilitarian principles, not unlike Bruno Bettelheim's defense of violent fairy tales. 

The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as “radical empathy.” Fiction, like any other form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simple objective views can’t — from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal television series: For every three scary, strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to. The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.

I don't disagree that violence in fiction CAN be used for this "conversation on violence."  My objection is that Ellis-- and the book editor he quotes-- are extending this potential use of violence further than it deserves to be extended.  Basically, Ellis simply attempts to turn the "desensitization" view of violence on its head: instead of making readers/viewers less sensitive to violence, violent fiction makes them more empathetic.


The truth is that violence can have either effect, and that the effect on the audience can be totally at odds with respect to the intent of the author.   In the terminology of Hume, the only "is" one can state with certainty is that most if not all human cultures are fascinated with fictional violence.  To impose any "ought" upon it, as Ellis does above, is mere wishful thinking, as is his claim toward the essay's conclusion that "fiction is how we both study and de-fang our monsters."  Camille Paglia is more forthright in this famous quote from SEXUAL PERSONAE, which grounds human behavior as a ongoing struggle between a fantasy principle and a reality principle:

We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between art and reality, tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us what nature is up to.

MYTH MATTERS

“They’re very important, these comic book movies, because they’re our modern myths.”—Bryan Singer, SUPERMAN RETURNS: THE COMPLETE SHOOTING SCRIPT.

 

 

On this Comic Book Resources thread I found myself arguing against an overly rigid definition of myth.  Though the argument was short-lived, it reminded me somewhat of the more epic-in-scope tsunamis in which I took part on The Board of the Terminally Dense,  before said board descended into complete intellectual worthlessness.  I wasn’t able to make headway against the reign of rigidity there or on CBR, but the experience moved me to write a little on the question, “What is myth?”

 

As I’ve emphasized in earlier essays, those who claim flatly “superheroes aren’t myths” aren’t concerned with the applicability of myths to literature generally, as I am.  They simply wish to deprive the superhero genre of any such defense in order to knock the props out from its supporters, who range from the “insider” fans who support the comic books themselves to the “outsider” professionals like Singer, seeking to ratify the translation of comic-book fantasies into those of the cinema.

 

One of the hoariest anti-myth arguments depends upon defining myth in a functionalist manner.  In this definition a myth can only be a particular type of story, designed to provide stories of the gods or of archaic rituals, all of which have one purpose: to lend coherence to human tribes and societies.  A common corollary to this argument is that myths must be absolutely believed by those societies.  This imputation of complete and unwavering belief on the part of ancient societies sets myth apart from any form of literature, in which it's assumed that no one invests "belief."  This argument denies mythicity even those forms of literature that transmitted, in literary form, archaic myth-narratives otherwise lost to moderns, such as one finds in the works of Homer and Firdausi.

 

I myself have distinguished between religious myths and literary myths in this essay, defining the former as “closed rituals” and the latter as “open rituals.”  In the latter form, the author is often allowed the freedom to invent new stories from canonical myths, as when Euripides rewrote the sequence of events in the "labors of Hercules" to fit his play HERACLES.  Religious myths are thought of as “closed” by their more stern-minded proponents, who deny that they possess truth if they are changed.  But the senselessness of this attitude is shown in that many religious myths do change both their form and substance over time without losing their social function and effectiveness.

 

The question of “belief” isn’t one that deserves much refutation, in that no one can prove how deeply or intensely archaic societies believed in their societal myths.  Joseph Campbell devoted the chapter “The Lesson of the Mask” in PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY to the fallacy of absolute belief, demonstrating that even for ancient societies belief is a “game” first and foremost, and that religious literalism is mere “vulgarization” that goes against the essence of what myth is and what myth can do.

 

Once it is evident that the dividing-line between religious myths and literary myths is real only insofar as individuals “believe” in the distinction, one may be open to an interdisciplinary approach like that of Ernst Cassirer, who devoted his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT to the proposition that “mythical thinking” was a fundamental proclivity of humankind that was not confined those narratives which nominalists choose to call “myths.”  In essence “mythical thinking” is the counterpoint to what Cassirer calls variously “empirical” or “theoretical” thought.

 

In his opening chapter “Mythical Consciousness” Cassirer advances this oppositional argument.  After advancing the notion that both empirical thought and mythical thought have their own definitions of “causality” and of the nature of the perceived “object,” Cassirer says:

 

“According to Kant the principle of causality is a synthetic principle which enables us to spell out phenomena and so read them as experience.  But this causal synthesis… involves a very specific analysis…. It is a fundamental flaw in Hume’s psychology and his psychological critique of the concept of causality that he does not sufficiently recognize this analytical function… Mere local or temporal contiguity is transformed into causality by a simple mechanism of ‘association.’  But in truth, scientific knowledge gains its causal concepts and judgments through an exactly opposite process.”

 

That process, which depends on singling out “a specific factor in a total complex as a ‘condition,’ is alien to mythical thinking.”  Myth actually does depend on laws of association rather than analytical proof: “Animals which appear in a certain season are, for example, commonly looked upon as the bringers, the cause of this season; for the mythical view, it is the swallow that makes the summer.” Thus, Cassirer concludes: “Hume, in attempting to analyze the causal judgment of science, rather reveald a source of all mythical explanations of the world.”

 

To be sure, Cassirer does not address in this book the provenance of the mythical imagination in literature.  He does address in general terms the transition from “the mythicial image world and the world of religious meaning to the sphere of art and artistic expression.”  But it seems plain to me that literature functions far more through “association” than through “analysis,” and that it depends just as much as myth on creating “networks of fantastically arbitrary relations,” a phrase borrowed by Cassirer from one Hermann Oldenberg.

If one disproves the idea that myth can only be defined through its association with ratifying social structures, as I believe that I have, one is free to understand its essence as being true to what I called earlier “the free flow of associations,” a.k.a. “symbolic complexity,” and to see how it manifests in literature as readily as in religious myths or in pedagogical folklore.

 

Cassirer does not focus great attention to the imaginative process that spawns the “networks of arbitrary relations,” as does Campbell, and neither of them explicitly makes my point that such complexity arises as a “super-functional” quality from narrative tropes that, by themselves, are merely “functional.”  In this I take added influences from Northrop Frye and from Vladimir Propp, and I aver that their theories participate in an interrelated “network” of theories whose joint effect is to diminish the dogmatic stance of sociologically-oriented functionalism.