A TALE OF TWO COSMS

 Though the terminology introduced here may not stand the test of (my) time, I felt like better organizing my thoughts on "ontology and epistemology." I'm fairly sure that nothing I write here will supersede my literary definition of both, I formulated in 2023's WHAT VS, HOW. But the proposed terminology might be better than trying to repurpose the standard "tenor/vehicle" terms I put forth in 2024's VERTICAL VIRTUES.

My current difficulty stems from my realization that in essays like A NOSE FOR GNOSIS I've frequently been using "ontology" and "epistemology" as if they could stand for all the ontological or epistemological elements in a narrative, when in fact the words signify the disciplines involved in thinking about what things exist or how we have knowledge of their existence. "Tenor and vehicle" also don't work that well because each word sounds like a single unitary thing, rather than a combination of elements that comprise a greater whole. Since the connotation for Greek *cosmos* is that of an ordered whole, my new terms are *ontocosm* for the totality of lateral elements (relating to the kinetic and dramatic potentialities) and *epicosm* for the totality of vertical elements (relating to the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities). Whether I'll use the terms a lot depends on my future sensibilities. But at this point it seems easier to reword my statement in NOSE FOR GNOSIS re the respective potentialities of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN and the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm. 

On a related note, while I was looking at my "greatest crossovers" series on OUROBOROS DREAMS, it occurred to me that my criteria for greatness were certainly not primarily epicosmic. There were some crossover-stories with strong virtual elements, like JIHAD and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC. But for the majority of my choices, I believe I responded to the elements of lateral storytelling. Thus I included Spider-Man's first encounter with The Avengers on the basis of both kinetic and dramatic elements, while the wall-crawler's first meeting with the Fantastic Four was, in a word, forgettable in ontocosmic terms. Other times, I might not think the lateral story was all that good in itself, but that it comprised some landmark crossover-event-- the first time the Avengers met the western-heroes of Marvel's Old West, or that GAMBLER movie that brought together a dozen or so actors to play either real or simulated versions of their TV-characters. In these stories, it wasn't so much the actual execution of the concept but its potential that I found intriguing.        

STIMULATING RESPONSES PT. 3

 More fun with geometrical approximations as in Part 2, but this time, a little shorter.

In that essay, I gave visual examples as to how the concrescence of vertical meaning in a narrative could be represented as an increasing amplitude of the up-and-down variations in a straight line, which represented the forward progress of lateral meaning. Now, the only complication to this illustration is that my previous essays have established is that such concrescence also appears in the elements of lateral meaning, the potentialities I've labeled "the kinetic" and "the dramatic." However, whereas the increasing concrescence of vertical values can be shown as greater amplitude, concrescence of lateral meaning is geometrically expresssed by the relative thickness of the line, as per these three examples:

 

 The thinnest, and thus least dense, of the lines represents the "poor" state of either kinetic or dramatic potentiality. the next thickest represents a "fair" state, and the thickest represents a "good" state.

Just to give three examples applicable only to the dramatic potentiality:

A story with possibly the least dense drama-- for instance, a Roy Rogers Z-western-- would be represented by the thinnest line.

A Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR would usually be in the middle, representing a fairly dense dramatic potentiality.

And something like Faulkner's A LIGHT IN AUGUST would merit the thickest line of good drama. Of course, the lines would also be more or less jagged depending upon the intensity of the vertical amplitude. The mythopoeic amplitude for particular FANTASTIC FOUR stories might vary according to each story's content, even though the thickness of the lateral representation might stay the same. Thus "The Impossible Man" and "The Galactus Trilogy" might have the same level of emotional drama (even though one is expressed through comedy) but very different levels of mythopoeic amplitude.    

STIMULATING RESPONSES PT. 2

 Since absolutely no one asked for it, that means it's time for one of my "geometrical approximations" of an abstract principle. First off, here's what the lateral line of meaning looks like, the simple progression from stimulus to response, or, in Aristotelian terms, from complication to resolution.                                                                                                        

This progression also stands in for the mental activities of every non-human species, from amoebae to dolphins and chimps, which may have some inchoate potential for "higher," vertical mentation, but not anything comparable to the human level. I take the position that even the most incoherent human narrative represents an attempt to emulate more coherent narratives. Thus the progression of the lateral meaning is always static, since it's just about "what things happened," as I outlined in WHAT VS. HOW. However, the vertical meaning can vary greatly, depending thoroughly on how the author articulates the abstract values found in "correlations and cogitations." So the baseline for all human narrative mentation, at the level I've sometimes designated as "poor" in terms of complexity, looks like this:                                                                                 

  So the baseline for human mentation must progress both laterally and vertically, no matter how limited the "peaks and valleys." The up-and-down movement is not intended to represent increasing or decreasing amplitude, just a progression opposed to that of the lateral line. Next up is what I have termed "fair."                                       

 Here the peaks and valleys become more pronounced, indicating a greater concrescence of either the correlations, the cogitations, or both together. While the "good-to-superior" level I've articulated implicitly carries some variation between those two states, here's my third and last geometric approximation for that highest level of concrescence.                                                                                                     

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.                                                                    

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.2

In this 2022 post, I briefly described a few ways in which I differed from the statements Susanne Langer made in the section I quoted here. To sum up my main line of critique, I stated that I felt that the "unknown creators" of both archaic religious myths and folktales possessed the ability to allow "their imaginations to roam freely," but that both forms of narrative also channeled epistemological patterns, though myths tended to develop those patterns more "thoroughly." So I disagreed with Langer's essential claim: that tales were focused wholly upon "wish fulfillment" while myths encompassed "a world picture, an insight into life generally, not a personal imaginary biography." What I liked about her formulation is that she distinguished between the tales' supposed reliance upon "subjective symbols" and the myths' predilection for "observed folkways and nature-ways." Though I did not say so in the 2022 post, the subjectivity that Langer attributes to tales may be loosely comparable to my concept of a narrative's "lateral meaning," while her focus upon "folkways and nature-ways" parallels my criteria for "virtual meaning." That demonstration of an intersubjective pattern of thought between myself and a deceased scholar I never knew prompts me to indulge in this "compare-and-contrast" game.                                                                                          

But none of the above relates to the topic of emulation, which I've raised in my title. As it happens, 2022 was also the year I began writing a lot more about crossover, agency, and interordination, as in this August post. In that post, I used two iterations of Steve Ditko's originary character The Question to formulate the concepts of "trope emulation" and "icon emulation." To shorten the argument a bit, I said that when Alan Moore conceived Rorschach, his variation on The Question, he was in no way asserting any identity between his character and Ditko's character. Rather, what Moore did was to borrow tropes from Ditko's character and from other sources in order to create an independent icon. This, I asserted, was trope emulation. But when Denny O'Neil created his variation on the Ditko crusader, he attempted to assert an identity between his creation and that of Ditko, if only for the sake of impressing fans of the older creation. This, I asserted, was icon emulation.                                 

Since Langer was in no way attempting to form a general theory of literary narrative, naturally she started from a different place than I did. But I find it interesting that. rightly or wrongly, she characterizes all the figures of folktales as entities completely independent of one another, claiming that they are little more than the functions of various wish-fulfillment scenarios. This I regard as "trope emulation," though with the caveat that in my system characters like Cinderella are not just functions, but icons in their own right, no matter how much they fluctuate from one iteration to another. In the case of myth-figures, Langer regards that they are capable of merging with one another because "myth tends to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin enter into definite relations with one another." This I regard as "icon emulation," and there's even a loose parallel of purpose. Just as O'Neil promulgates his version of "a Question" but some but not all of the poetic tropes of the Ditko character, Irish Christians promoted a saint called Brigid in order to appeal to a laity familiar with a pagan goddess of the same name. There will probably be a few other points of comparison, because whatever my disagreements with Langer, I find her fertility of mind on matters mythopoeic to be equal to that of Jung and Campbell.

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

 I first started systematically speaking of fictional narratives as "propositions" in the 2018 essay-series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, beginning here. True, the main thrust of this series was to talk about the differing strengths of a given work's "lateral meaning," as against the more elusive "vertical meaning." But since both of these complementary elements of narrative have always been inextricably imbricated with one another, it would be correct to state that fictional narrative as a whole was proposition-based: "icons X, Y and Z interact in such a way as to produce results A, B and C."                   

In contrast, I began writing about "centric characters" and "focal presences" close to the beginnings of this blog, though it was only in the 2022 essay I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON that I settled on the current term "icon" for any individual or collective entity within a narrative that had any significant level of resonance, using "Primes" and "Subs" to distinguish their level of those icons' respective importance to the story. By this definition even an amorphous force could be an icon, like the one that engenders chaos on Earth in the 1924 film THE CRAZY RAY, or a collection of beings that comprise an environment, like The Planet of the Apes or Kern's World.                                                                 

 However, I'd never precisely brought together the interrelated concepts of icons and propositions, though obviously no one would pay attention to any fictional propositions if there were not fictional icons with whom the audience might identify. I will now draw upon my distinction between "trope emulation" and "icon emulation" as established in 2022's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2 by distinguishing between "originary propositions" and "variant propositions." A work like Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD would be an originary proposition because the narrative does not directly derive from an earlier narrative, even if the author uses tropes seen in other narratives: "fatherless boy endures privation," "fatherless boy finds protector," etc.                     

A "variant proposition," however, does follow some pre-existing iconic model. It might be a historical figure altered for fictional purposes, like Scott's ROB ROY--                                                         

--Or it could be a narrative based on a completely fictional figure, as with Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes pastiche SEVEN PER CENT SOLUTION. Both of these I would give a further distinction, the PURE variant proposition. The idea behind both propositions is that they are telling stories of established figures, whether historical or fictional, which vary in some way from whatever has been previously established about said figure.                                                   

The corollary category to the PURE type is of course the IMPURE type. This would be a narrative in which the main thrust of the narrative centers upon an originary icon, but the story also includes a variant take uoon some pre-established figure. Scott's IVANHOE is one I've returned to a number of times. The 12th century knight Ivanhoe is entirely fictitious, but his story is enmeshed with that of Robin Hood and some of the mythology derived from the Robin Hood cosmos. Hence, the latter example is IMPURE.

More on these matters in future.         

                                                                                                

CROSSING T'S, DOTTING I'S

 Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions.-- STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2.

 

In STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS, I announced that I would retire the barely used term "postulate" in term of "proposition." But my saying this means that I must transfer everything I said about the two forms of postulates, especially in FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, to a "formal proposition" that represents the didactic form of vertical meaning, and to "informal proposition," that represents the mythopoeic form of vertical meaning.

The one potential problem with these determinations is that way back in 2018's three-essay series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, I stated that I considered both the lateral and vertical meanings of a given work were propositional in nature.

But the solution is easily solved by a quick visit to Schopenhauer. In his principal work THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, the gloomy philosopher created a lot of dualisms, but one of the simplest is to contrast "the concrete" of our physical experience and "the abstract" of our mental experience. 

So, since I've already assigned (as in the quote above) abstractions to the world of vertical meaning, then by default (as well as the PROPOSITIONS series) the world of lateral meaning is aligned with the concrete, because the lateral is also the "literal" record of what happens to characters in the narrative and how they feel about it. 

So, to apply full symmetry to the formulations of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE, all four potentialities line up like so:

THE KINETIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete excitations 

THE DRAMATIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete emotions

THE MYTHOPOEIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract correlations

THE DIDACTIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract cogitations

COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE

 Though I'm sure I've made assorted comments on both the ARCHIVE and my movie-blog about the many difficulties in adapting prose works into other media, it seems I've not codified anything regarding how the process of cross-media adaptation affects mythicity. The 2023 essay MASTERING EPISTEMOLOGY probably comes closest to providing possible criteria.

I have been reasonably consistent about showing how different literary works display different levels of mythicity because their authors either do or do not render the four epistemological patterns with a sense of their complex possibilities. In 2018 I dubbed the process of mythic coalescence as "concrescence," and attempted to link it to the Aristotelian concept of "the unity of action," even though I almost immediately revised that standard phrase into a "unity of effects."

From this basis, a successful translation of a work's mythicity would have to maintain concrescence, though inevitably the second media effort must alter much of the first work's content. Often this means leaving out content that supports the original work's symbolic discourse, and so, while the media translation may reproduce the original's lateral meaning, it's unable to achieve the same vertical meaning.

Nevertheless, I have seen examples where a given secondary work must adumbrate a primary one, but still manages to achieve concrescence of the symbolic discourse, and thus realizing high mythicity. 

There are probably assorted examples, but the one that most comes to mind is the 1925 silent film adaptation of Rider Haggard's novel SHE. In my review I noted the impossibility of a film of standard feature length being able to deal with all the detail of the book. But I judged that the filmmakers had managed to keep ENOUGH details to keep a commensurate level of conscrescence. Of the 1925 film I wrote:

Though the film is only able to suggest bits and pieces of the novel’s romantic grandeur, on the whole its co-directors manage to suggest at least some of that grandiosity despite the lack of dialogue. They did so by resorting to silent cinema’s potential for suggesting more than it shows, and as a result the city of Kor, of which we see very little, comes alive through the bearing of the queenly Ayesha.

I speak of “bearing” rather than beauty, because actress Betty Blythe is only fair in the looks department, never seeming to be a truly bewitching figure. But the script does let this version of Ayesha be a true sorceress, rather than just a sexy white queen. For all the divergences between book and movie, I was impressed by the fact that the script kept a vital scene, When Ayesha curses a female rival, she does so by touching the other woman’s hair, so that the imprint of the queen’s fingers whitens the hair touched.

So where secondary adaptations are concerned, they may not be able to duplicate the concrescence of the primary work, but they CAN muster a lesser concrescence with its own integrity. For a forthcoming film adaptation review, I will use the term "secondary concrescence" unless something better comes to mind.

 

 

WHAT VS. HOW

 One key notion I argued in the cited essay was the importance of epistemological patterns to the process of concrescence in fiction. It's not that any work of fiction necessarily seeks to make definitive statements about epistemology. But in the process of any act of imitation, it's natural though not inevitable for authors to attempt buttressing their fictional works by drawing upon patterns that represent the "real world." Often these patterns are based upon propositions that the consensus-audience no longer accepts, or does not accept universally, ranging from the Oedipal theories of Freud to the 19th-century theories of "the Hollow Earth." To the audience, what's important is whether or not the author can make even the most absurd proposition "entertaining"-- and this, not real-world applicability, is what gives even the weakest of weak propositions a peculiar endurance, if not strength in the usual sense.-- THE FULL VALUE OF THE HALF-TRUTH.

Today I thought of a simpler way to distinguish "problems" from "conundrums" as I originally defined them in  2021's PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS, to wit:

A narrative's "problems," its lateral/literal virtues as expressed through either the kinetic potentiality, the dramatic potentiality, or a combination of the two, concern WHAT THINGS HAPPEN in the narrative.

A narrative's "conundrums," its vertical virtues as expressed through the either the didactic potentiality, the mythopoeic potentiality, or a combination of the two, concerns HOW THINGS HAPPEN in the narrative.

I gave a few examples of specific problems and conundrums in the 2021 essay, but rather than go over the same ground, I'll try to show how one of the examples I gave in FULL VALUE can apply across the "problem/conundrum" continuum. I haven't encountered a surfeit of stories about the Hollow Earth, but certainly there should be a number of ways in which Freud's Oedipal theory has been used for both lateral and vertical formulations.

In the interest of testing my theory on as broad a canvas as possible, I'll choose my examples from among the most recent analyses I made of Oedipal narratives on my movie blog, rather than choosing examples from famous franchises like DRACULA or PSYCHO.

The very last Oedipal narrative I examined happens to fall into the category of "what things happen." The cheapie sword-and-sorcery adventure EYES OF THE SERPENT uses what might be termed a feminine "Oedipal conflict," but it uses the pattern only for the dramatic potentiality. In the rambling narrative, young princess Fiona falls in love with roving (and somewhat kooky) swordsman Galen. Fiona enlists Galen to help Fiona's mother Neema fight Neema's enemies and regain control of the kingdom. However, Neema covertly puts the moves on the younger Galen. It's loosely implied that Neema does so in order to keep control of the warrior, rather than her doing so just because she's attracted to him. In this, Neema is the mirror image of her sister Corva, in that both are ruthless in their pursuit of power, and the movie's conclusion, in which the two sisters destroy one another in battle, indicates that the "lateral meaning" of EYES is to validate the more innocent Fiona as the royal figure who deserves to control the realm. I will happily admit that the story of EYES has only a fitful claim to the dramatic potentiality. However, the scene in which Galen tells Fiona about Neema's treachery, and Fiona refuses to believe him, does have the bare function of establishing that at some point Fiona must come to terms with Neema's corrupt nature and bind herself to the comparatively virtuous Galen.

In contrast, the last Oedipal narrative I examined which concerns "how things happen" is 2010's THE WOLFMAN. In my review, I contrasted the clear Freudian schema of this film in comparison to the 1941 classic.

There's no rational-minded, overbearing dad this time. Scripters Walker and Self wanted a Heavy Father straight out of Freud's TOTEM AND TABOO. The original Larry Talbot left the British Isles for America for reasons loosely associated with sibling rivalry. In contrast, Lawrence is sent to an asylum after he, as a child, claims to have witnessed Sir John's act of uxoricide, slaying Lawrence's mother during one of the lord's beast transformations. (Lawrence, unlike Larry, at least has a mother in his story.) After years of being treated by the barbaric alienists of the late 1800s, Lawrence recants his story and becomes an actor. (I'm convinced Walker and Self made this alteration to the protagonist's background simply so that they could reference HAMLET, which Freud famously associated with Oedipal urges.) 

One point I didn't cover in detail is that the film implies an equivalence between both violence and sex in the wolf-persona of Sir John, though I did address somewhat the Freudian concept of the "primal scene:"

Freud hypothesized that children who witnessed their parents having sex for the first time-- the so-called "primal scene"-- might believe that the mother was being attacked, or even murdered. Lawrence sees his mother murdered for real, and then his brother is slain because his father craves the brother's future wife. 

To expand on this formulation slightly, even though Sir John gets his werewolf curse from an outside source, his actions can only be explained by Freudian dynamics about sex and violence, which explain "how things happen" in the WOLFMAN world. Sir John's murder of his wife can logically be viewed as the beast's way of satisfying both a lust for sex and for violence, though the film does not make this proposition explicit. But if it is true that the beast slew Lawrence's mother to satisfy both bloodlust and sex-lust, then it follows that deep down Sir John intends to wreak the same violence upon Gwen, whom Sir John believes to have a resemblance to the unnamed mother of Lawrence and the late Ben. (Viewers don't see the mother, so the default assumption would be that Sir John is correct about the resemblance, and it certainly fits the Freudian paradigm that both of the mother's sons fixate upon Gwen for the same reason Sir John does.)

So the TOTEM AND TABOO paradigm of a father-son battle is carried out in a very different manner from a similar trope in 1941's WOLF MAN, meaning that Lawrence must defeat his vicious father in lycanthropic battle. In the review I mentioned in passing that Lawrence, unlike Fiona in EYES OF THE SERPENT, does not prosper after slaying the Heavy Father. I stated that Gwen shoots Beast-Lawrence with a silver bullet to spare him further suffering. However, Beast-Lawrence is by his nature as great a physical threat to Gwen as was his nasty dad, and so there's certainly an element of self-protection in Gwen's action as well. By her action Gwen alone is spared the holocaust of the Oedipal conflict, though of course the film has no interest in what happens to her once the story is over. 

I may conceive of other demonstrates between the pathways taken by "what" versus those of "how," but for now these two suffice for my purposes.

KNOWING THE KNOWLEDGE FROM THE EPISTEMOLOGY

 As I reconsidered this in greater depth, I feel it necessary to explain that though the kinetic and the dramatic potentialities certainly do draw upon "patterns" derived from sense experience, those two potentialities don't make substantial use of what I've called "epistemological patterns." I suppose I might term the first type of patterns "existential," since these two potentialities are more concerned with translating existence as the fictional characters *seem* to experience it.

The other two potentialities, however, are rooted in a fictional form of epistemology, because the forms they deal with depend on abstract constructions.-- AND THE HALF TRUTH WILL SET YOUR FREE, PT. 2.

This statement from my 2019 essay requires some modification thanks to my cross-comparison of three major thinkers here, though the modification depends on the accuracy of this online statement regarding Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy:

...the word “prehension,” which Whitehead defines as “uncognitive apprehension” (SMW 69) makes its first systematic appearance in Whitehead’s writings as he refines and develops the kinds and layers of relational connections between people and the surrounding world. As the “uncognitive” in the above is intended to show, these relations are not always or exclusively knowledge based, yet they are a form of “grasping” of aspects of the world. Our connection to the world begins with a “pre-epistemic” prehension of it, from which the process of abstraction is able to distill valid knowledge of the world. But that knowledge is abstract and only significant of the world; it does not stand in any simple one-to-one relation with the world. In particular, this pre-epistemic grasp of the world is the source of our quasi- a priori knowledge of space which enables us to know of those uniformities that make cosmological measurements, and the general conduct of science, possible.

I don't discard the general applicability of the statement I made; it's true that the two "vertical/abstract" potentialities make greater use of epistemological patterns than the two "lateral/existential" potentialities. But the Encylopedia makes the interesting analysis that Whitehead does not present his "prehension" operations as being "exclusively knowledge based." This suggests to me that prehension is not foreign to the activities of cognitive activity, but rather is called "pre-epistemic" because it's capable of including all forms of knowledge, cognitive and affective. 

In fact, since I started applying my concept of Whiteheadian concrescence to fictional works, I've already functionally contradicted the HALF TRUTH statement without intending to do so.

Roughly two months before I wrote the two-part HALF-TRUTH essay, I posted CONCRESCENCE AND THE KINETIC PHENOMENALITY. In this, I examined two comics-works in terms of their "kinetic discourses," showing why the Jack Kirby work was superior to the Mike Zeck work in terms of illustrating how a diversely powered group of beings would battle one another. (To repeat an earlier qualification, it was widely rumored that artist Zeck may have been obliged to follow layouts set down by his editor Jim Shooter.) In this essay I concentrated on Kirby's superior ability to depict the interactions of "disparate elements," but much of this ability stemmed from a form of non-epistemological knowledge; the knowledge of how human beings of different capacities interact in a fight.

Similarly, I applied concrescence purely to the dramatic potentiality in 2022's SO THE DRAMA, SO THE MYTH. Despite the sound of the title, I was taking the position that my subject, the rom-com manga NAGATORO, was concrescent within the dramatic potentiality even though the feature had few if any moments of "myth" in its more epistemological manifestations. I found that, upon surveying a particular trope in NAGATORO, the narrative also depended not on any elements with mythopoeic content, but was based in the reader's knowledge of Japanese customs about the use of personal names. This too might be termed a form of "non-epistemological knowledge," and that knowledge is also expressed through the interaction of two disparate elements in this particular story, though in the form of an "accomodation narrative" rather than a "confrontation narrative."

PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS

                     

 I’ve been meditating on the familiar opposition of “problem and dilemma” for possible application to my theories regarding the narrative interactions of lateral meaning and vertical meaning. The regular opposition goes as follows:

 

A problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while a dilemma is a choice that must be made between two or more equally undesirable alternatives.

 

For reasons I’ll discuss shortly, the idea of the “problem” aptly sums up the literary appeal of a text’s lateral meaning, because this is the part of the story in which the reader primarily invests himself, to see how the main character deals with the difficulties he faces, even if said character’s solution may be to avoid said difficulties.

 

However, “dilemma” in no way sums up the appeal of a text’s vertical meaning for readers. So, as my title suggests, I’m substituting the concept of the “conundrum,” variously defined as “an intricate and difficult problem” or “a difficult problem, one that is almost impossible to solve.”

 

My last major statement regarding the lateral and vertical forms of meaning appeared in 2016’s THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL. In the passage that follows, I didn’t utilize the term “vertical meaning,” since at the time I was preoccupied with seeing how that meaning could expressed by the joint terms “overthoughts and underthoughts,” but both of these together were always intended to make up my concept of vertical meaning.

 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking"finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

 

Nowadays I would reword this statement to elide the reference to overthoughts and underthoughts, because over time I have began to find these terms cumbersome. From my current position it’s easier to speak of all these narrative meanings in terms of their potentiality-alignments: “lateral meaning,” which is comprised of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, and “vertical meaning,” which is comprised of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities.

 

As for the essay’s observations on the concepts of “close sight” and “far sight,” these remained unchanged, and the notions of “the problem” and “the conundrum” can be used to symbolize the different ways each of the meaning-formations appeal to readers.

 

As stated above, the lateral meaning is that which presents the reader with the immediate, close-range difficulties in the lives of one or more characters, difficulties which must be solved in some fashion, just as difficulties in the reader’s real life must be solved in some way (even if the reader, like the fictional characters, may make the wrong choice).

 

Vertical meaning, however, is the part of the story that allows the reader to contemplate the character’s conflicts from the long-range view, with the understanding that those difficulties metaphorically embody some “conundrum” regarding the nature of human life. The conundrum exists alongside the problem, and since it’s more abstract in nature, the reader doesn’t necessarily expect to see the conundrum solved, even badly, because it embodies some intellectual or imaginative conflict inherent in human life.

 

Rather than starting with an example drawn from high culture, like HAMLET or LIGHT IN AUGUST, I will begin with applying the conundrum-concept to the two examples of mythopoeic and sub-mythopoeic meanings seen in my essay regarding two Silver Age ATOM stories. Both stories dealt with the Tiny Titan's battles against an insect-themed villain, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, produced by the same creative team and within months of one another. Though I was primarily oriented on the second of the two stories to show its qualifications as a mythcomic, I also included a rationale as to why the earlier story did not qualify as a mythcomic. I argued that the first “Bug-Eyed” story did not have a strong cosmological meaning, because the villain used generic robot-insects against the hero. However, in the second “Bug-Eyed” story, author Gardner Fox more strongly patterned the robot-insects on the capabilities of real insects. This narrative strategy produced a fictional “simulacrum of knowledge” and thus gave the story a stronger mythopoeic meaning. In both stories, the hero's problem is identical; to defeat the villain, primarily through the use of kinetic displays of force. (One story also has a very minor dramatic problem, to keep the villain from kidnapping an old flame, but the kinetic problem is paramount.) There is no didactic conundrum, but the amplification of the villain's insect-theme provides a mythopoeic conundrum; one best summed up as a fascination with biological adaptations in real animals.  

Now, neither of these comic-book stories makes any pretension toward the didactic form of virtual meaning, so a more complex example is needed to show how didactic and mythopoeic conundrums may exist separately or work in tandem.

 One of the most familiar master-threads found in “Classic” STAR TREK pertains to the crew of the Enterprise seeking to interact with more primitive peoples without violating the “Prime Directive” by interfering with the primitives’ cultures. The second-season episodes “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both deal with the same range of kinetic and dramatic problems that arise when the Federation’s political rivals, the Klingons, attempt to gain favor with primitive peoples without showing the Federation’s high-minded restraint. In “Child,” a Klingon agent abets an ambitious warlord to overthrow a ruler who is friendly toward the Federation. In “War,” Klingons give relatively advanced weapons to one tribe of planetary primitives to use against another tribe.

In both stories, the Enterprise-crew must seek to mitigate the Klingons’ influence, and so the “problems” that involves the lateral meaning are virtually identical, even if the solutions are not. “Child” is more of a straight thriller, with no deep reflections about the effects of both Klingon Empire and Federation upon the lives of the primitives. “War,” on the other hand presents the viewer with conundrums that invoke both the didactic and the mythopoeic potentialties. The didactic conundrum is the more obvious, since most viewers would have noted the direct parallels to the then-current Vietnam War, in which Americans had to continually arm their allies in order to offset the forces empowered by the rival superpower of Red China. Allegedly the original script was far more caustic regarding the activities of the “Americans,” i.e., the representatives of the Federation, and series showrunner Gene Roddenberry reworked the didactic conundrum so that it implied that the heroes had to do what they did to prevent the spread of Klingon influence. Not having seen the original script, I can’t say whether or not its author utilized the same mythopoeic tropes that appeared in the finished, Roddenberry-edited script. However, because of the way Roddenberry changed the didactic meaning, the mythopoeic meaning changes somewhat as well. When at the climax Kirk muses that they must introduce “serpents” into this planetary “Eden,” the meaning carries a sense of a less didactic, more mythopoeic conundrum. The implication is that, even as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden provided humankind with a chance for self-determination, Kirk’s ambivalent gift, putting more advanced weapons in the hands of the planetary primitives, may also be a rough but necessary means of setting the natives on their own course of self-determination.

 

As with the two ATOM stories, the problems in the two TREK stories are the same as far as involving the viewer in the travails of the main characters. However, “Private Little War” suggests an enduring conundrum that supervenes the particular problems of the particular situation. “Friday’s Child” implies a possible conundrum but does not seek in articulating it in terms of either the didactic or mythopoeic potentialities.

It's worth mentioning a couple of TREK examples which register only in terms of either a didactic or a mythopoeic conundrum. The third-season episode "The Savage Curtain" places Kirk and Spock in the position of "acting out" the struggle between good and evil for the education of some very literal-minded aliens, the Excalbians. The didactic conundrum implies that the struggle between good and evil-- essentially defined as altruism and selfishness-- is a difficulty that never ceases to confront mankind, no matter what happens to any particular heroic protagonists. But despite the evocation of legendary figures from Earth and from Vulcan-- whether historical like Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan, or made-up types like Sarek and Colonel Green-- none of these characters make strong use of any symbol-tropes. Even the appearance of a vaguely witchy villainess named "Zora" is given no stature as an incarnation of female evil, in marked to comparison to the "Lady Macbeth"-styled villainy of Nona from "Private Little War."

In my reviews of the first four STAR TREK theatrical films, though, I was rather surprised that the one with the weakest dramatic problem was also the one with the strongest mythopoeic conundrum: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The closest thing the film comes to a didactic conundrum is its attempt to show Mister Spock's vaunted logic as inferior to human emotion, but this is underdeveloped in contrast to the predominant mythopoeic conundrum: that of depicting a newly-born machine intelligence recapitulating its creators' need for emotional connection, and enacting a hieros gamos with a human being in order to gain said connection.

I indicated above that I was cycling out the terminology of "overthought and underthought," originally derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of Northrop Frye. I think the terms had a certain usefulness to me, indicating that the "overthought" springs from conscious, often utilitarian forms of thought while the "underthought" springs from subconscious, more playful cogitations. But I value symmetry above everything, and so in future I may start using the following terms:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."

RUNNING ON ABOUT DISCOURSE

In the 2016 essay AFFECTIVE FREEDOM,COGNITIVE RESTRAINT and in the two parts of 2019’s AND THE HALFTRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I aligned the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities with, respectively, my categories of “cognitive restraint” and “affective freedom.” I made heavy use of Ernst Cassirer in these essays, but for this one, I’ve decided to take a different path in order to dilate on the salient differences between the ways these potentialities operate.

In literature as in other cultural forms, all potentialities express themselves through processes of discourse. The discourses of “lateral meanings” deal with concrete subject matter—that of what sensations the subject experiences, and of the subject’s emotional reactions to those sensations. In contrast, the discourses of “vertical meanings” concern themselves with abstractions, with the didactic making use of “ideas” while the mythopoeic makes use of “symbols.” For the sake of argument, I will treat both ideas and symbols as if they existed as discrete monads, which is not the way either are experienced. Both ideas and symbols are best expressed in the form of typical story-tropes. Levi-Strauss was pleased to term these tropes “mythemes,” conveniently ignoring how such monadic forms were dispersed throughout all forms of human communication, not just myth.

Didactic discourse and mythopoeic discourse are not as intimately entwined as those of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. The discourses can appear independently of one another, or they may intertwine within a narrative to support one another, or they may conflict with one another so as to confuse the narrative. An example of the last-named would be Steve Ditko’s story “Am I Roma…,” which I explicated it in this post.

The word “discourse” stems from a Latin root meaning “to run around.” However, all four discourses run in different ways, though I’ll only discuss the two vertically aligned potentialities here.

The didactic discourse runs in the fashion of a single contestant in a one-on-one foot race. The course of the race may be winding or straight, but the contestant runs in as direct a line as possible from start to finish. Didactic discourses may employ idea-tropes as disparate as “Christ died for our sins” or “Capitalism is doomed by its own excesses,” but the discourses are always aimed at teaching some sort of linear lesson to listeners.

In contrast, a mythopoeic discourse is more akin to a team of runners in a relay race, opposed, naturally, by a corresponding team. There’s still a goal that a given team aspires to reach first, but achievement of the goal depends on the successful interaction of all players on the team. Symbols can be used to help convey linear lessons, but their primary potency is poetic and associative. In my first post on the ARCHIVE, I quoted William Butler Yeats, who asserted that “symbols are an endless inter-marrying family.” The interactions of members in a family is of course analogous to the concerted efforts of a relay-team, and symbol-tropes in a mythopoeic discourse only win their “race” when they work so as to reinforce one another.

As noted, the vertical discourses align respectively with the categories I’ve termed “cognitive restraint” and “affective freedom.” Didactic discourse aspires to teach, and while some teachers seek to help students learn how to think for themselves, it’s implicit that each student will still end up choosing to advocate favored ideas over non-favored ones—in essence, “restraining” any potential tendency to advocate the latter idea-group. Even writers who analyze myths, both religious and literary, must use didactic discourse to assign a particular set of values to the myths analyzed. In this essay I showed how Claude Levi-Strauss advocated a “scientific” approach to myth and stated that he believed that mythic activity was on its way out of human culture. By contrast, Ernst Cassirer championed myth as an irreducible element of human culture. But both had to use didactic discourse to explain their respective ideas and philosophies. The didactic discourse thus is at its strongest within the sphere of non-fiction but has a more tendentious hold in fiction.

The mythopoeic flourishes in fiction but only appears sporadically in non-fiction, and then usually only in commentaries on fictional constructs, such as Raymond Durgnat’s FILMS AND FEELINGS. Mythopoeic discourse doesn’t so much send a message as open up all lines of communication. In contrast to the old saw “If it feels good, do it,” the mythopoeic discourse says, “If it seems significant, symbolize it.”

Mythopoeic discourse aligns to the category of “affective freedom,” meaning that symbols can combine in any way a creator may please to arrange them, irrespective of logical amenities. To be sure, mythicity takes on greater value when an author relates the symbols to the epistemological patterns that the audience recognizes from the world of experience. But I’ve argued, as did Cassirer in MYTHICAL THOUGHT, that mythic symbols are not gain their power from simply copying what audiences see around them. Cassirer had a more Platonic emphasis than I do. On page 3, he speaks of how Plato valued myth as signifying “the world of becoming” in contrast to the adherents of the allegorical school, and throughout the book he emphasizes myth’s potential to dissolve the boundaries between inner reality and outer reality (particularly on page 156). I agree, but for me the dissolution comes about when myth and its near relative literature make use of “real” epistemological patterns for “unreal” purposes.

In mythopoeic discourse, “perfect freedom” not only doesn’t mean “perfect service,” said freedom can be free of any utilitarian purpose. Case in point: Robert E. Howard’s 1936 novelette BLACK CANAAN, recently reviewed here. I pointed out that although Howard placed his story of an aborted race-war in a real location-- an Arkansas town named Canaan-- the author showed no real interest in reproducing the realities of life in that time (post-Civil War) and place. I noted that the outcome of the Civil War made no difference to the novel, and that Howard had no interest in what inequities might have contributed to the mutual hatred between the whites of Canaan and the blacks of the neighboring swamplands, called Goshen. Going purely by the content of the existing story—while acknowledging that the author was forced to cut his original draft for publication—it’s apparent that Howard wanted a pure “clash of civilizations.” The only motivation for the strife is rooted in the tropes of fantasy-fiction, in that Howard imagines the blacks of Goshen as having made diabolical alliances with elder voodoo-deities. Yet this is certainly not a didactic argument, since Howard says absolutely nothing about the presumed Christian orientations of the Canaanites.

Indeed, the only references to Judeo-Christianity devolve also to the blacks of Goshen. Howard named his imaginary swampland after the Egyptian domain where the pre-Exodus Jews were kept in bondage, before they escaped the land of the Pharaohs into Canaan. This symbolic trope is reinforced by the history of the way blacks of pre-emancipation America identified with the pre-Exodus Jews, which I tend to believe a Southerner like Howard could not help but know of. Thus, in the story the minions of Saul Stark, by rising up against white Canaanites, duplicate the action of the archaic Jews who conquered archaic Canaan and transformed that land into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

But what message was Howard sending in the story? None, I would venture. While he certainly could have infused his story of a fictional uprising with his own political opinions, as did many other authors, here Howard only cares about a conflict of good and evil. And even Howard’s concept of “good” may be problematic, since the righteousness of protagonist Kirby becomes compromised by his unquestionable hunger for the “forbidden fruit” of the quadroon voodoo-priestess, the Bride of Damballah. If Howard had wanted only to denigrate the evil represented by Black People—whom, to be sure, he denotes with the customary Nasty Taboo Word of the period—he could have left out this tantalizing sorceress. From first to last, though, she has Kirby under her thrall, and she’s defeated only by the chance intervention of a minor support-character. The hero enjoys the final triumph over the evil Stark, but Kirby doesn’t win because he’s white, and in many ways Stark and Kirby are mirror-images of each other, each striving to make sure his own race holds the whip hand.

There’s no harm in admitting that such a story has no moral to offer, but it’s far from proven that a story with a moral is necessary superior. On a personal note, in my youth I probably liked a good number of preachy stories, since my own ethos was still being formed. But today I tend to find even the best “idea-tropes” in fiction to have less value than the best “symbol-tropes,” while in non-fiction I often fault authors who load their arguments with clumsy symbolism, as per Frederic Wertham’s tortuous comparison between children and garden-flowers. Both discourses have their strengths, but the races they run come off to best effect on level playing-fields.  

VECTORS OF INTENTIONALITY PT. 2

Toward the end of the first VECTORS OF INTENTIONALITY, I mentioned the propositional nature of fiction, and this reminded me of some of my meditations regarding "strong and weak propositions," beginning with this 2018 essay.

Now, my use of "propositions" in the earlier essay was somewhat different in that I was speaking more of how fictional propositions affected audiences in terms of what might called "audience-will" rather than "authorial will." I asserted that for audiences, the lateral meaning of a text usually has greater propositional strength than its vertical meaning, simply because the lateral meaning of any single reader's life generally arouses stronger conviction than any set of principles by which that reader might seek to interpret his life.

Authors, on the other hand, follow slightly different patterns. A few authors are so devoted to their principles that they produce works that are devoted to those vertical meanings. John Bunyan, for instance, wrote his allegory A PILGRIM'S PROGRESS to illustrate his Christian beliefs, showing little or no penchant for depicting his fictional characters as beings with lives parallel to those of real readers. 

On average, most authors who literally sing for their suppers know that they need to please readers with fictions that feel like "life as people live it." This can sometimes inhibit the author's devotion to the vertical values, but it's not exclusively a failing of commercial fiction. In canonical fiction as well, many authors simply find it harder to elaborate the abstract vertical concepts, given that from one standpoint it may be seen as harder work than producing the illusion of lateral perceptions. 

While the metaphors of "strong propositions" and "weak propositions" were oriented on describing "audience-will," they might also be descriptive of the different levels of concrescence in the four possible forms of discourse.

Some readers, obviously, desire to read some particular set of tropes with complete indifference to any complexity; one thinks of the stereotypical pictures of the "romance reader" and the "superhero addict." Yet even in hardcore fandoms, the "better works' in the genre are almost always those distinguished by some concrescence of either the kinetic, dramatic, didactic or mythopoeic potentiality. or by some combination of such concrescences. So, from the standpoint of authorial will, a work may be extremely concrescent in a particular poentiality, and may for that reason earn the love of an audience. However, not every audience is equally primed for every concrescence. Thus, Melville's MOBY DICK failed to charm the author's contemporaries, but gained classic status with later generations. That said, usually extreme popularity of a work does depend on some perceived concrescence by some audience at some time.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2

                               

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

All of the subordinate vertical threads of MOBY DICK are so well developed that the author could have made stand-alone stories out of any of them. This is not generally the case, however. Of the thousands of other narratives that possess strong mythopoeic meaning, most of them possess no more than a single strong master thread.

Case in point: CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. When I wrote my mythcomicsreview of CRISIS, I was more than a little aware of the serial’s numerous flaws, from the bland scripting of Marv Wolfman to the drably functional manner in which the story tossed together nearly every famous or semi-famous character in DC Comics history. Those subplots that even came close to vertical meaning were frequently botched, as with a maudlin encounter between Kamandi—Jack Kirby’s “Planet of the Apes” swipe—and Solovar, one of DC’s seemingly endless supply of intelligent gorillas. However—there was one master thread I discerned, one in which Wolfman built upon the “devilish” character of Krona, and contrasted this character’s impiety with a “holy trinity” of characters implicated in the death of the old cosmos and the birth of the new.

On the more positive side, some master-threads receive support in unpredictable ways. Jack Kirby’s NEW GODS saga, reviewed here, has one obvious master-thread: the prophecy of an eventual confrontation between the tyrant Darkseid and the hero Orion. I wasn’t entirely pleased with Kirby’s years-later wrap-up of his epic series. But even though the author went down a somewhat unsatisfying path, HUNGER DOGS wasn’t without mythopoeic meaning in itself.

But I’ve recently noticed one particular subordinate thread, one so subtle that one could barely even assign a didactic meaning. In my review I had no space to examine the curious relationship between Darkseid and his mother Heggra.

The reader only three things about the wizened queen: (1) that she rules Apokolips before Darkseid ascends to the throne, (2) that her influence obliges Darkseid, against his will, to wed a noblewoman named Tigra, who ends up being the mother of Orion, and (3) at some time, Darkseid has his mother killed, probably because she blocked his rise to power.

But in recent months, I noticed that the given names of Heggra and Tigra are not dissimilar, suggesting a symbolic identity between them. Visually, they’re opposites, for Tigra is lean and given to overt violence, while Heggra is sedate, like a brooding hen sitting on her “hegg.” But despite these differences they collude to create Orion, whom Darkseid will make the mistake of casting out. The result is that Orion becomes dedicated to his father’s defeat, and though Orion’s primary mission is to keep Darkseid from gaining the Anti-Life Equation, it would not be incorrect to say that the conflict of father and son ends up avenging the maltreatment of two maternal figures. It’s a subordinate vertical thread that in no way diminishes the master thread of the father-son conflict, but because of this mini-discourse, the master thread is made yet denser and richer.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 1

In essays such as THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD PART II, I’ve compared the organization of fictional narratives to the ways in which students are taught to structure their compositions around a “theme statement.” I never developed that line of thought, but of late it’s struck me that there’s a parallel between the general idea of a “theme statement” and my concept of the “focal presence,” insofar as both are organizing principles. But there is a salient distinction between the two.

According to my lit-crit system, the focal presence is allied to a narrative’s lateral meaning, the combination of the kinetic and the dramatic, of the things that physically happen to characters and how they feel about it. The focal presence denotes the narrative’s centricity, which in keeping with my observations in STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, does not require vertical meaning in order to engage a reader’s conviction.

In contrast, any “theme statement”—a term I will soon replace with one more apt for my purposes—must correlate principally with vertical meaning. This meaning, as I’ve mentioned earlier, can be represented by didactically presented ideas, mythopoeically presented symbols, or (in the words of Janis Joplin) a “combination of the two.” I’ve frequently pictured these vertical meanings as either being “over” or “under” a narrative’s lateral meaning, but for current purposes maybe it might be better to imagine them as many disparate threads running through the (potentially) labyrinthine structure of the narrative. A single narrative can incorporate more than one vertical meaning. However, to be coherent said narrative needs what I’ll henceforth call a “master thread.”

Since standard theme statements emphasize didactic meanings, I won’t spend a lot of time on that topic. I'll confine myself to stating that two given narratives can both possess the requisite master thread, but one can be better developed than the other (for instance, Upton Sinclair’s socialist diatribe in THE JUNGLE is far less compelling than Charles Dickens’ “anti-utilitarian argument” in HARD TIMES—not simply because I personally favor one over the other, but because the latter possessed greater intellectual elaboration than the former.

I have a great deal more to say about the ways mythopoeic master threads disport themselves, coming up in Part 2.

THE LATERAL AND VERTICAL MEANINGS OF LIFE

Over the years, I've hammered out a relatively simple (for me) definition of my terms "lateral meaning" and "vertical meaning." In my 2020 post PATTERNS AND POTENTIALITIES, I reviewed how I evolved the terms from my readings in both Schopenhauer and Northrop Frye. Heretofore, I've applied the conjoined terms only to literature. However, I recognize that Schopenhauer, unlike Frye, is not writing only about literature, and so it behooves me to see whether or not the terms apply in any way to the conditions of life on which the gloomy philosopher based his analyses.

In STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PART 2, I noted, with reference to a couple of LI'L ABNER continuities:

To return to the two LI'L ABNER sequences referenced in Part 1, it's evident from the way Al Capp works that his cycles-- usually running from four to six months-- could be unified in terms of their action, like "D. Yokum Visits," or simply a motley group of episodes, like "General Bullmoose Debuts." 

The propositional strength of the lateral meaning in both is equally strong, for the lateral meaning is identical with "everything that happens in the stories." Disgustin' Yokum using his unearthly ugliness to turn Wild Bill Hickup into a stone statue and Li'l Abner letting the Slobbovians legally change him into a female are equally strong propositions, in terms of the reader's engagements with them-- though obviously, neither story-structure possesses any "truth-value" for reality as such.

Yet the abstract vertical meaning is even weaker than the assorted vicissitudes associated with "the stories." Many readers can read past the symbolic discourses in LI'L ABNER without noticing their existence, while others will read them purely in terms of their alliance to didactic discourse, as in "Capp is a great satirist, because he makes fun of rich people").

If "lateral meaning" in a fictional story can be fairly defined as "everything that happens in the stories," then that term's application to an individual actual life would be "everything that happens to that individual in his life."

In contrast, no one lives one's life with any instinctive understanding of what that life means. A subject's definition of his life's "vertical meaning" depends on whatever set of abstract propositions he chooses to favor, whether those propositions make him a Christian, a Buddhist, an atheist, etc. Just as abstract ideas provide something of a counterpoint to a given narrative in literature, a person's ideas about himself provide the same counterpoint, even though the relation between the individual and his self-definition may not be as stable over time.

Just as I've argued with respect to literature, daily life furnishes individuals with a "strong proposition." Events A, B, and C ineluctably take place within a fictional LI'L ABNER story and cannot be argued away (though in theory another story might contradict those events). Similarly, Events X, Y, and Z in an individual's life also cannot be argued away (however much the individual may re-define the meaning of said events).

By comparison, one's own "vertical meanings" have a weaker propositional strength, and are much easier to change over time. Up until roughly the age of twelve, I was a Christian. I doubt that I thought about any alternative up to that point; it was simply a part of my cultural landscape that I accepted, though I'm sure there were examples of Scripture that left me scratching my head over how much, if at all, it applied to me and my culture. "Believing Christian" would have been my "vertical meaning" at age twelve, but at some point after that, I began to investigate, as much as was possible in those pre-Internet days, the ideas behind other religions. I don't dismiss the possibility that events in my "lateral life" may have affected my drift away from the Christian religion. but whatever the reason, by the time I attended college I considered myself a "philosophical pagan." (It was pretty easy to be this sort of worshiper: I created my own idea of sacrality a la Blake and didn't have to put any offerings in any plates.)

It might be argued that some psychological continuity existed between "Christian Gene" and "Pagan Gene," and that such a continuity might be an overall "vertical meaning" that subsumed both. The same idea of an overall "theme" would also hold true for individuals who drift away from any form of religion to the philosophical outlook of, say, atheism, though it might be impossible for any individual to have enough distance to judge the matter.

Of course, the events of one's life are not, even in a metaphorical sense, propositions as such. They compare with the pseudo-propositions of a literary text only in terms of their relative strength when compared to "vertical meanings," which are propositional in nature.

More on this later.