COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL

The overall conclusion of last month's EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series was my affirmation that the elements of "play for play's sake" in literature were largely immune from accusations of "bad influence," while elements of "play for work's sake," which encourage audiences to take a particular real-world action, could be either a good or bad influence. In Part 2, in order to get across a distinction between types of literary evil, I cited this passage from Bataille:

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Now, I also said in Part 2 that "Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature..." Yet even though I've specified that Bataille was not offering a general non-literary definition of evil, his statement deserves some consideration as it might apply to all human experience, both "common and uncommon."

Take the proposition: "If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it." I see why Bataille would use the term "purely evil" for a literary reflection of a human action, but the statement is dubious at best regarding common human experience. The Menendez Brothers killed their parents, but the killers' act of gratuitously taking life does not in itself become less evil if informed only by self-interest. If anything, I would guess that the majority of human beings are most often victimized by acts of evil stemming from self-interest without any particular intent to inflict suffering for the criminal's Sadean pleasure. Grifts and robberies are some of the most common experiences that the average law-abiding adult copes with, and that's without even getting into the political realm, where legislators may commit evil acts as a result of "good intentions."  

With the possible exception of the crucible of middle school and high school, where many immature students indulge in overt sadism to gain the approbation of like-minded peers, most "First World" citizens at least aren't often subjected to any Sade-like forms of evil. Consider how absurd it sounds when the speaker in the following comics-panel prates about the "purity" of killing a victim for no reason.

Of course, this sort of purity does exist in the "uncommon" world of literature, and author Michael O'Donoghue is having fun with the notion that poor, imperiled Phoebe Zeitgeist is trapped in a world where no one who oppresses her is motivated by the "lackluster treadmill of goal-oriented drives." Thomas Hobbes may have distinguished between human motivations of gain and reputation. But when he also popularized the phrase "the war of all against all" to sum up the human condition, most persons involved in that war are worried about people with "goal-oriented drives" like theft, not about chimerical acts of gratuitous cruelty. And sometimes the "thieves" are protecting their own lookout, as with the doctor who makes a mistake in treating a patient and then fails to confess his wrongdoing because it would put him at a financial disadvantage.

Given that so much human evil in common experience is depressingly banal, I think it fair to state that self-interest causes more needless suffering than sadism ever has. Of course, in literature both forms of evil are "good" (as per my earlier essay title) because they are necessary to establish conflict and thus make storytelling possible. But it's peculiar that Bataille downplayed the evils of self-interest in the above quote. I've frequently cited him for his insights on the dynamic of work and play, where work is always oriented on achieving real-world goals, and play exists for its own sake, achieving nothing purposeful with its activity. It would be one thing to say that the Evils of Sadism trump the Evils of Self-Interest within the sphere of literature, because there, a fictional sadist like Heathcliffe or Hannibal Lecter knows how to play "the game of sadism" far better than even real sadists like Ted Bundy. But in this quote, Bataille is unusually generous toward the sins of the self-interested, of "goal-oriented drives"-- especially since it might be fairly said that indifference to the suffering of others is just the other side of the coin from reveling in said suffering.

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 3

 So in the previous two installments of this essay-series, I've addressed AT-AT Pilot's essential question. "Is it possible for literature to be evil?" Dominantly my response has been, "most if not all evil is to be found in the parts of literature that encourage 'work,' a concerted effort toward a real-world goal." And even then, one must analyze a work's explicit or implicit polemic in order to determine if the goal advocated is evil. 

An obvious example of explicit polemic can be found in the 1915 BIRTH OF A NATION film, which adapted Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel THE CLANSMAN. The film (and, I assume, the source novel) makes no bones about its message: that liberated Black slaves must be kept down by the Ku Klux Klan. Implicit polemic is harder to identify, because so many critics project polemic where none is intended. However, such identification is not impossible and can usually be pegged by the way the implicit type mimics the irrational propositions of the explicit type. 

I have judged J.M. Coetzee's anti-colonialist novel DISGRACE as implicitly polemical due to the mirroring of two major events in the story. In Event One, the viewpoint character, a White South African professor teaching at the collegiate level, is condemned for allegedly manipulating a female student-- possibly but not definitely Black African-- into an affair. In Event Two, the professor's daughter, who runs a farm in South Africa, is raped by Black African trespassers, one of whom impregnates her. But because the rape took place against a scion of colonizers, it's asserted that the woman will eventually marry her rapist and that the land she owns will return to a Black African family. Obviously, some readers did not judge this disproportionate "tit for tat" as evil, in the same way that most readers today would judge the Dixon work and the Griffith film as evil. Clearly, I find them all morally noxious.

But none of the above works fall into the category I've called "play for play's sake," which takes in generally the majority of popular culture, and specifically the KAMASUTRA manga of Go Nagai, with which this discussion began. So far, most of the Nagai works I've surveyed are wild outpourings of sex and violence, with almost no attempts to impose any moral order on the chaos. The closest thing Nagai himself offers as a key to his works is an "ethic of transgression," insofar as he believes human nature is truly one big playground for a bunch of Freudian Id-Monsters. But he never expouses any sort of polemic-- though even in the more permissive country of his birth, Nagai was often criticized for his explicitness.

The majority of censorious critics don't bother to establish even an implicit polemic as I did with DISGRACE above. These critics usually follow one of two approaches-- the "monkey see monkey do" approach and the "projected polemic" approach-- and it just so happens that the two most prominent enemies of popular comics in the postwar years broke down along those respective lines. Frederic Wertham begins with the supposition that children were as twigs that would be inevitably bent by the wrong influences, and that any time one of them did wrong, an evil comic book done made them do it. Gershon Legman had the idee fixe that American culture nursed a vast conspiracy to substitute healthy sexuality with sadistic violence, and he repeatedly "proved" his thesis with endless facile projections. Neither they nor most of their descendants showed any capacity to define evil except in terms of personal self-interest-- which, some may recall, is explicitly rejected in the Bataille excerpt I cited in Part 2.

Oddly, "projected polemic" works both to champion and denigrate works that don't show either explicit or implicit polemic. Many will be familiar with news stories about evangelical groups criticizing J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER series, claiming that its magical content encourages young people to explore witchcraft and/or Satanism. This Wikipedia article chronicles many of those evangelical denigrations. However, the same article also mentions a number of defenses of the Potter series on the grounds of its encouragement of Christian values-- and even though I like the series, I view these positive characterizations to be projections. It's not that there's no moral content in POTTER. But at base I think that Rowling's series is essentially "play for play's sake" as much as most Go Nagai works, even though POTTER lacks the extreme sex and violence of Nagai.

Francois Truffaut said, "Taste is the result of a thousand distastes," and what many critics label as evil is often more a reaction against something they find unpleasurable. They often impugn the artist, as if he were showing them unpleasant things for some sadistic or politically motivated reason but have little appreciation for another Truffaut observation: that artists are not endorsing everything that appears in their works. All art is founded on conflict-- Bataille would say "transgression"-- and every fictional conflict conceivable can potentially trigger someone in terms of a taste-reaction. I try as much as possible to frame all of my critical downgrades in terms of analyzing a work's explicit or implicit polemic. But I'm sure there are some works I just don't like for reasons of taste, too, as with my generally unfavorable critiques of Mark Millar's comics. I certainly don't think he's guilty of any more polemic than is Go Nagai-- but I find Nagai creative and Millar boring in terms of their violently transgressive content. So even a critic who refutes taste-based criticism can't help but be influenced his own "thousand distastes." Probably the only time I'd denounce "play for play's sake" as evil would be when I think it's boring.

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 2

In Part 1, I stated that Northrop Frye wasn't an influence on my own literary theories of "work and play," but George Bataille certainly was, even though most of what he wrote on that pair of concepts concerned his view of anthropology and religion, not literature. Yet he certainly transferred his concept of "religious transgression" to the world of literature. In 1957 that he wrote in EROTISM that "the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it," and an analogous idea appears in LITERATURE AND EVIL, published the same year:

Evil, therefore, if we examine it closely, is not only the dream of the wicked: it is to some extent the dream of Good. Death is the punishment, sought and accepted for this mad dream, but nothing can prevent the dream from having been dreamt." -- p. 21.

Though I don't consider LITERATURE AND EVIL one of the better books on literature-- it compiles eight essays on particular authors Bataille admired for incarnating his ideas on "literary evil"-- EVIL did greatly influence me to consider that every conflict in a fictional story involved a transgression against someone or something, and that's as good a reason to use Bataille to approach the question posed to me, "Is it possible for literature to be 'evil?'" (And by the bye, Bataille's sense of an interpenetration between Good and Evil is what conjured forth my Miltonian essay-title.)

I don't believe that anyone ever has, or ever will, formulate a definition of evil as such, which any tenable theory of "literary evil" would require. But Bataille's definition is at least a good starting-point. In his very short preface, he states:

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'

Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

His idea of "hypermorality" probably explains why he's not overly concerned with many of the lesser forms of evil that ordinary morality inveighs against: specifically, those centered in self-interest. In his initial essay, whose main subject is Emily Bronte (and her sublime evildoer Heathcliff), Bataille privileges Evil as the deliberate enjoyment of suffering beyond the considerations of personal advantage.

We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it. 

Obviously, a lot of literature engages in moralistic polemic against the evils of self-interest in all its forms-- though polemicists like Frederic Wertham are well-versed in dismissing any such moralizing as being no more than a protective cover, the better for those pundits to attack literature they deem "morally noxious." So Bataille is in the end not offering a general definition of evil, but of a specifically form of Evil that he associated with the sovereign values of literature as a whole. 

Bataille's definition of Evil and its relationship to Good may not be one that can be generally applied, but it does have partial explanatory power within literature, and therefore it serves as a counterbalance to the views of the pundits. For them, all evil is defined by self-interest, and sadistic thrills are just part of that package-- which is why Wertham constantly conflated readers wanting sadistic thrills and publishers wanting to make money off those customers. For Wertham, the taboo exists only to prevent the transgression, and Good never dreams of Evil in any fashion. Yet Wertham's own altruism is compromised and implicated in self-interest when he's caught cooking his casebooks, or even just making insubstantial arguments.

Bataille's idea that "Sadism is Evil" requires separate consideration from his overall definition of Evil in Literature, and Part 3 will touch on that topic, as well as the age-old question, "When an artist shows a thing, is he endorsing it?"

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 1

As I begin this post, I'm not sure how many parts this essay-series will run. Meditations on the nature of evil tend to lead anyone down a lot of unusual, if not perilous, alleyways, though I have a few directions in mind. The subject came up in a comment by AT-AT Pilot, which I reprint here so that it will be clear what I'm responding to.

Is it possible for literature to be "evil"? I understand that there have always been critics who consider some book or other to be morally grotesque. But they are approaching art in the wrong way, I presume? In the MYTHCOMICS: ["RINGSIDE BLONDIE"] BLONDIE #169 (1963) entry, you mentioned Frye's "protective wall of play." Does it encircle all fiction? From your writings and those of Frye, I would guess that such a barrier does exist and makes all fiction inherently "good." Is that correct? I imagine that controversial literature is allowed to be in print because readers are sophisticated enough to restrain the realm of fantasy and keep some distance away from it, preventing the possibility of negative influence within themselves.

I ask because I find it difficult to effectively defend a work that is deemed to be morally noxious. How would someone, for example, be able to defend a work like Kamasutra (or other manga like Berserk) from accusations of perversion and misogyny?

Now, I already wrote, in the same comments-section, a short answer to the questions, but I think they deserve extended commentary as well. My present plan is to break down some of my short answers and expand upon them in piecemeal fashion and bring in some new commentary as well (some of which should justify my title, a deliberate misquote of the line Milton gives Satan in PARADISE LOST).

What I want to expand on first is my statement about how literary works encompass both "play" and "work:"

My first (short) answer is that *potentially* the wall of play might encircle all fiction. However, it's also axiomatic that fiction always has an equal potential to be used for "work"-- that is, to achieve specific ends-- and using that potential reduces the potential to see the work only in terms of play. Whenever a specific goal is advocated in a fictional work-- Upton Sinclair using THE JUNGLE to persuade Americans that socialism was better than capitalism, or Superman trying to convince young readers to exercise more in line with the health programs of President Kennedy-- that's "play being used for the ends of work."

I should also give the context for my quotation of Frye from his ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, though I may have already done so in previous posts. I also want to clarify that he's in no way responsible for my dichotomy of "play" and "work."

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there.

Probably my most specific attempt to break down categories of "fiction used for play" and "fiction used for work" appeared in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4. In this essay, I cited two works in each category, one of which was of superior literary quality and one which was inferior: Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND and Dixon's CLANSMAN for "play-fiction," and Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST and Coetzee's DISGRACE for "work-fiction." 

In line with my remarks above, I would now kick Dixon's CLANSMAN out of consideration, because even though it was "popular fiction" like GONE WITH THE WIND, Dixon's books were polemical, trying to convince readers that Negro slaves should never have been emancipated. The best substitute that occurs to me now-- and one that was short enough to give a quick read online-- is Florence Kate Upton's TWO DUTCH DOLLS AND A GOLLIWOG. This is admittedly a children's book in verse, but it was phenomenally popular in England and America and spawned twelve sequels-- which I imagine were probably as unserious in their chauvinism as the first book. A pertinent image from the first book follows...

But now, with all those reconsiderations out of the way, the TRIP essay was focused only upon my estimation of literary quality. I would still maintain that both Coetzee's DISGRACE and Upton's DUTCH DOLLS lack the better qualities of both the Faulkner and Mitchell books. But even though both Mitchell and Upton have often been attacked for racial content, I would probably still find Coetzee's book the most morally objectionable, if not "evil" as such, partly because the author was "working" with didactic ideas but did a much poorer, less subtle job of handling them than did Faulkner.

Next up: some possible definitions of "evil."

LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 2

 The main deficiency of my "realism/escapism" dichotomy mentioned at the conclusion of Part One can be found in this sentence from THEMATIC REALISM PART ONE:

By contrast, a tale like Coleridge's MARINER, or (to give a superheroic parallel to the JLA tale) WATCHMEN, are clearly tales that are much concerned with analyzing the ways mortal men deal with the moral elements in life, no matter how fantastic their situations. 

I stressed the "moral elements" in that essay because I was following up on certain remarks by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was of course not attempting to define all of literary realism and escapism, just making a particular point. But although I don't reject the particular point I made in the context of the essay, "moral elements" are not the basis of "realism." I believe I came closer to the main distinction in my 2018 BOUNDED WITHIN INFINITE SPACE:

I always meant to draw some comparisons between Anaximander's apparent categories of apeiron ("the boundless") and "perata" (the limited) with my categories of freedom and restraint. Admittedly, Anaximander was addressing the origins of the physical universe, which has no direct bearing on my explanation of the universe of art and literature. For my system "the boundless" is not the physical universe-- "infinite space" though it may be-- but the universe of the human mind, as it stands in comparison to humanity's physical environment.

Morality, of course, is not a sufficient criterion, since there are any number of literary authors who scorn, or appear to scorn, any system of moral evaluation. Yet morality is part of the equation, for moral systems arise in response to the limitations of human beings and the societies into which they assemble. 

Morality can also be aligned with the concept of societal "work" as well, and in his book EROTISM Bataille explicitly contrasts productive work with all the extravagances of "play." But why do morality and societal work arise at all? Simply put, because humans are limited by what I called "physical environment," no matter how unlimited they may feel in their imaginations. The folkloric grasshopper dies because his brethren the ants buckle down and store up food for the winter. And pure mortality also renders all things mutable. "Time keeps movin' on, friends, they turn away," sings Janis, while Marilyn warbles that "we all lose our charms in the end." 

Now, what does all this have to do with the original question seen in Part One: whether or not "high art," which most persons would align with "realism" of some sort, is more or less mythic than "low art?" My basic feeling is that both literary forms have equal potential. In terms of execution, there are dozens of highly mythic examples of "high art"-- not least the greatest of them all, MOBY DICK, However, many people who attempt "high art" become preoccupied with emulating what I called (in PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS) the "elements of work," which I compared to the "rational thinking and feeling potentialities." In contrast, most persons working in so-called "low art" are more focused on the "irrational kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities," and so these raconteurs tend to produce a greater number of works with high mythicity-- though of course there's also a larger market for "escapism," so there are more "low art" works overall than those deemed "high art."

More on these matters later, perhaps.

 

INFINITELY REGRESSIVE UTILITARIANISM

One of the CBR threads informed me of this VOX article discussing the interactions of utilitarian philosophy and "deonotological philosophy" in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.

Frankly, I've yet to find any MCU movies, except possibly the original IRON MAN, which articulate a coherent philosophical stance. In any case, I responded to the essay twice in the CBR thread. First:

In the essay the writer associated "the greater good" with pure, unfettered utilitarianism. I think that's an overstatement, and the writer himself brings up an extreme case of real-world utilitarianism, as well as pointing out that sooner or later Thanos will just have to start killing again. It's pretty hard to regard either example as being truly "for the greater good," particularly since the result is a total acceptance of brutality as a means to an end. 

BTW, if there's one intellectually dishonest aspect of INFINITY, it's that it doesn't really specify why Thanos thinks that galactic overpopulation is a given. At least when Ra's Al Ghul excoriates the ecological chaos of Earth, it's something readers can see for themselves.

The "no-kill" policy is often framed as a preventive to unfettered utilitarianism. Sometimes the arguments in its defense are clever; sometimes not.  But the policy isn't quite as divorced from real-world consequences as the Kantian model suggests.

Second:

 I'm not convinced that utilitarianism applies to INFINITY WAR. I think it's a big weakness of the script that the heroes have access to two stones, the destruction of which will prevent Thanos from the specific goal of destroying half the people in the universe. But OK: say that in some alternate world, the heroes succeed in destroying one or both stones, whether it costs Vision his life or not. What happens then? Thanos just shrugs his shoulders and goes home? Hah, we're talking about someone who's already wiped out multiple worlds with his space-army. No, thwarted of his goal, Thanos takes revenge and obliterates Earth.

On another thread I saw someone complain that the Wakandans were being needlessly sacrificed to protect the Vision's life. I wasn't particularly fond of the "ticking clock" trope involving the Vision. But the Wakandans are not being used as cannon-fodder. It's their bloody world too, and they've just as much reason as anyone to defeat Thanos.  Suppose the movie starts out with a pure endorsement of utilitarianism: some hero who doesn't mind "trading lives" kills Vision right off, defeating his larger goal. The menace doesn't go away; Thanos just goes after the whole world, and Wakanda's isolationism doesn't help it one damn bit. So here's another case where, in contrast to the thrust of the online essay, pure utilitarianism leaves those involved no better off than they were before.

I didn't bother pointing it out on the thread, but this 1980 issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA, written by Mike Barr, plays Captain America and the Punisher off one another as representatives of what might be called "enlightened vigilantism" vs. "unenlightened vigilantism," or what I called "unfettered utilitarianism."

Morally, Barr's story does set up its oppositions better than INFINITY WAR does. In this scene, the Punisher takes the utilitarian POV, referring to his ethic of treating the war on crime in terms of real war, while Captain America holds to a vision of moral compass, stating that there's a moral code that the "good guys" should advocate.

The upshot of the story is clearly in Cap's favor, particularly when it's revealed that one of the Punisher's "hits" on a big mob-meeting would have killed  not only real criminals, but also an undercover police agent. The Punisher escapes Cap and, to the best of my knowledge, rarely encounters such challenges to his utilitarian POV in his own title-- much as, in my own experience, the critics of the HOODED UTILITARIAN website rarely responded well to having their regressive ethics challenged.

THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES PT. 2

Just another statement of general principles re: the Confederacy on some forum...

____________

Neither the Union nor the Confederacy was innocent of making profit from slavery, the South simply made more, to the extent that they didn't want to give up those profits when the North sought to marginalize them politically. And when I say "they," I mean not just "rich Southerners," but everyone who profited from Southern States enjoying prominence in politics. For that matter, the whole country profited from the industry of the South, and the same logic you use against the Confederacy could be turned against the Union. After all, the Union promoted emancipation as a war strategy, but what did it do for freedmen after the war? Allowed the South to institute Black Codes; allowed those "rich Southerners" to reclaim their property if they signed loyalty oaths. So, even though the Southern States  were "traitors," the "legitimate authority" of the Union can be seen as being no less opposed to the interests of black people. So your basic reducio ad absurdum would be that neither Union nor Confederate officers should be honored, because neither one did much to help black people.

The North did not fight the war, as Lincoln supposedly claimed, to free slaves. The serious abolitionists had moral reasons for wanting abolition, but the general indifference of the post-Civil War North to the fate of freedmen indicates that black people were just pawns that the North had employed against the South.

Given that neither side acted for dominantly moral reasons, neither side deserves monuments on that basis. But by the same token, since there is a "lack of morality" equivalence between them, one should not be denied while the other is allowed. Monuments may or may not be used at times for political reasons, but the dominant reason is that of a culture writing itself a Valentine that romanticizes the strengths and ignores the faults. You want to say "the South was nothing but a rotten cesspool," when the truth is that, judged from the position of the slavery issue, the whole country was a rotten cesspool. But there's no political advantage to be had from getting rid of all monuments in the U.S., so it all becomes about "Southern heritage is nothing but slavery" and making the South into a scapegoat for the sins of all.

THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES

Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that every thing in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an I as its Thou. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life.-- Martin Buber, I AND THOU.

Within the last week New Orleans removed its last Confederate statue, but the anti-Confederacy meme has been brewing at least since the 1990s. Because the Confederacy was based upon the "peculiar institution" of slavery, and because more than a few supporters of the southern states declared their absolute allegiance to that institution, many modern Americans have come to view any sympathy for the Confederacy as a similar allegiance to any and all forms of racism. Thus any modern displays of sympathy for the losing side of the American Civil War have been broadly interpreted as advocacy of racism. This might be logical if Rebel flags were largely being flown by members of the Klan or similar societies. However, the assumption of racism has become so endemic that it's caused retroactive condemnation of old TV shows like THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, simply for displaying the flag as a decoration on the car. Twice on the 2009-2013 animated TV show THE CLEVELAND SHOW, the title character was shown gaining minor victories over entrenched Confederate sympathies in the fictional city of Stoolbend, Virginia (allegedly patterned upon Richmond). Even though Cleveland was generally characterized as a fool, in this respect he was shown to be entirely justified in challenging this status quo. The scripts for both shows endorsed the idea that modern-day Confederate sympathies connoted modern-day anti-black prejudice.

If I were a black person, I suppose I too might take at face value all statements of historical Rebels, and thus conclude the principal question of the American Civil War was whether or not black people were foreordained by God to be slaves. But as a white person who may know a bit more about the way white people think than a lot of non-whites, I'd say that the Civil War was predominantly a war between two groups of white people, and the fate of black slaves was simply the "bone" over which the two dogs were fighting.

One can find innumerable justifications for slavery. often religious in nature, in the records of Confederacy advocates. But the primary justification, since slavery became an American institution around 1620, was economic. In addition to the perks of free labor for landowners, the 3/5 compromise of 1783 ensured that even a partial count of the slaves in southern states would result in a greater allotment of delegates in the federal government. While many reformers objected to slavery on moral grounds, it seems likely to me that the Republican legislators who introduced the ban on slavery in U.S. territories were more concerned with breaking the hold that Southerners had on the government. (Notably, seven presidents prior to the Civil War were born in the above-mentioned Virginia.) The fact that the northern states had few if any laws against slavery suggests that had it been economically advantageous for those states to harbor as many slaves as the south did, there might never have been a Civil War at all.

In another essay I applied Buber's above remarks to the "peculiar institution," noting that:

It would seem obvious to me that the real-world injustice of slavery is all about what Buber calls the "I-it" relationship, of an "I" (the slaver or slaveholder) reducing a sentient being (the slave) to the status of an object.

And yet, in the above quote Buber stipulates that every Thou is fated to "continually enter into the condition of things." Human beings have been enslaving other human beings for centuries, and while not all institutions of slavery are equally motivated by profit, it would be naive to assume no economic advantage, particularly in the case of African slaves. One online writer, whom I've not been able to locate again, remarked that sub-Saharan Africa was virtually a "one-stop shopping" for the slave trade. For whatever reason, black people were one of the favorite targets of the Arab slavers since the ninth century. African slaves were commonly employed throughout the Middle East and were even traded as far abroad as China.

The fact that "everybody did it" doesn't make it right, of course, and the making of people into things, no matter who does it-- is fundamentally immoral. However, it is also very nearly inevitable, given the tendency of human beings to judge the morality of their ingroups in terms of self-interest; and to efface the fact that said ingroups have usually attained their position by debasing or marginalizing other peoples. American Southerners were indubitably dishonest about not admitting that they wanted slaves because slaves were profitable. But I don't think that they were dishonest in interpreting the Civil War in terms of a battle between the interests of two groups of white people. This interpretation became encoded in culture and literature as the "brother against brother" trope, and this had made it possible for the re-united culture to tolerate the honoring of war heroes of the Confederacy, even in some northern states.

In modern times, however, Confederate monuments, and any and all paraphernalia associated with honoring the famed "Lost Cause" (Rebel flags, names on public schools) are charged with sending the wrong message. The mayor of New Orleans endorsed this interpretation, stating categorically that Civil War monuments contributed to the city's "exclusionary attitudes." He further stated that "now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history."

Many defenses of the monuments assert that they want to see history preserved. This is not precisely my defense, for I'm quite aware that monuments and paraphernalia for any cause cannot present a sophisticated view of history. In my opinion the main reason that the descendants of the Confederacy insurrection want the monuments is one of ego-gratification. I can't say that none of them have any desire to use Southern memorabilia as a means, say, to rally against the supposed evils of multiculturalism. But I find it unlikely that all of them do, and to those that simply want the pleasant illusion of the "brother vs. brother" theme, the insistence that Black Americans' feelings should be honored above their own is not likely to lead to greater collegiality. Indeed, I suspect that these sort of demands only foster more "exclusionary attitudes," rather than supporting the cause of diversity.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "Our ancestors pay the price for who we are." If there are any people on this planet who possess absolutely no interest in validating their ancestors, I'm not aware of them, and I don't agree with the mayor that a given ingroup can simply "move past" their history. Ideally the ingroup should be cognizant of the ways in which their ancestors debased or marginalized other peoples, but the idea of defining any ingroup's heritage purely in terms of those acts is mere rhetoric that springs only from-- guess what-- self-interest. I suppose it might be empowering for Black Americans to imagine White Southerners going around, for the rest of their lives, wearing sackcloth and ashes for the sins of their ancestors.

But it's not going to happen. And any rhetoric that seeks that end is also-- a Lost Cause.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DESTROYER OF HEROES" (BLUE BEETLE #5, 1968)

A few years back I did an overview on all of the Charlton BLUE BEETLE stories created by Steve Ditko for the fan-magazine CHARLTON SPOTLIGHT #5, which one can order here. While all of these stories were of interest with regard to Ditko history, only issue #5-- whose full title is closer to "Blue Beetle Faces the Destroyer of Heroes"-- meets my criteria for being a "mythcomic." Specifically, "Destroyer" is a sociological myth, in that it's devoted to Ditko's attempt to analyze humanity's social contract in terms of his Objectivist philosophy.  "Destroyer" has the distinction of being one of the first comic book stories devoted more to the elucidation of a philosophy than to the more basic "good vs. evil" scenario, even if Ditko's philosophy has its problematic aspects.

As I did with my essay on FANTASTIC FOUR #13, I'm going to recycle parts of the SPOTLIGHT essay for this "mythcomics" series, albeit not without some contemporary tweaks and expansion.

I should note first that "Destroyer" is so focused upon its polemic that a contemporary reader who'd never read the BLUE BEETLE title before would just barely get any sense of the hero's identity or raison d'etre, and might not perceive that the story's guest-star Vic Sage was actually the star of BLUE BEETLE's back-up strip-- not up for discussion in this essay-- and that this may go down in history as one of the world's most low-key crossovers of all time.  The more mythic aspect of "Destroyer," though, is that it opposes its blue-clad superhero to-- the Menace of Modern Art!

On a visit to a museum with [girl Friday] Tracey, Kord [aka the Blue Beetle] listens impatiently to a snotty art-critic extolling the virtues of all modern art “symbolizing man’s inability to solve or control the illusion we call existence.”  Kord and Tracey dislike this critical cant, and so does radio-announcer Vic Sage, who is the secret ID of the Beetle’s backup strip, the Question.   Although Sage appears in the Beetle story, and certain elements of that story appear in the Question backup, neither of the costumed heroes appears in the other hero’s story, making it appear as if Ditko were determined to frustrate fannish expectations of the usual costumed-hero crossover.   Certainly the “meeting of heroes” is less important to Ditko than the theme of this story, in which Ditko examines what heroism is.

The anti-heroic stance of the art-critic has its admirers: a bunch of scruffy beatniks who patently favor the idea that man is incapable of meaningful action because they themselves are lazy no-goods.   In particular, one beatnik named Hugo, himself an artist, identifies with the centerpiece of the modern-art exhibit, a lumpy, ill-proportioned human figure titled “Our Man.”  One presumes that the name signifies for Ditko the evils of collectivism, of failing to be a self-sufficient individual.   Tracey, Kord and Sage all turn their backs on the self-conscious hideousness of modern art and its demeaning message regarding human achievement, and move to the part of the museum which displays proper art: dominantly, heroic Greek sculpture, incarnating man’s ability to achieve great goals.  

Predictably, the beats abhor “this pretty stuff,” and Hugo makes an abortive attempt to destroy one of the statues, because “anything that shows [man] being better than he really is—is evil!”   Hugo then becomes obsessed with the “Our Man” statue, goes home to his own art-studio (naturally filled with grotesques), and constructs for himself an armored costume based on the “Our Man” image, in which he will attempt again to destroy the life-affirming art.  

Unlike most super-villains, Hugo cares nothing about looting banks or conquering the world.   He is in essence a reverse-image of the hero, single-mindedly dedicated to overthrowing what he perceives as “evil.”   This is not to say that Ditko approves of Hugo. For Ditko the beatnik’s belief in the purposelessness of life proceeds from a failure of nerve and an acceptance of mediocrity. Even so, these are comparatively “idealistic” motives compared to the common venality of most Ditko villains.

Kord, having briefly skirmished with Hugo when the beatnik tried to destroy a statue, intuits that the museum will be in danger that night. The Beetle happens across “Our Man” and fights him. The villain’s armor gives him a slight edge, but he’s still forced to flee to the neighboring park, where he comes across another heroic statue, and tries to destroy it.   The Beetle thwarts him again, though Hugo escapes.  But now his act of attempted destruction has been witnessed by his beatnik buddies, who immediately turn the grotesque vandal into their personal hero.  This clash of fundamental principles represented by hero and villain sparks a citywide debate on the virtues of life-affirmation versus life-denial.   Ditko certainly loads the dice toward his viewpoint, making most of the pessimists sound rather stupid, and at least one comment—“I dig a guy that makes mistakes; you know he’s human”—sounds like a dig at Marvel’s conception of “heroes with feet of clay.”

One final time Our Man appears, making another attempt on the museum.   Vic Sage is on the scene and makes an attempt to stop Hugo even before the Beetle arrives; later, when the Beetle is battling Our Man, Sage prevents a demented beatnik from shooting the Beetle (which is the closest one gets to a “teamup” here).   Our Man’s lack of belief in achievement works against him, for he quickly loses heart against the hero’s dogged opposition.    Only the gunfire from the beatnik saves Hugo’s hide, allowing him to escape once more, and this time he divests himself of the armor and leaves it behind.   It’s surprising on one level that Ditko allows Hugo to escape justice. But this was probably for the purpose of having one last laugh on the decadent beats, for they find the armor and fetishize it, looking forward to the day when Our Man will return to lead them.   Hugo, for his part, privately swears that he will never reclaim the armor, and the issue ends with what might be called a re-affirmation of affirmation.

In comparison to many similar Objectivist tracts in the Ditko oeuvre, the artist displays genuine imagination in his symbolic representation of collectivism, pessimism, and life-denial. I said in this essay that Ditko was one of the first three artists I think of who was guilty of letting his didactic tendencies overwhelm his art, but "Destroyer" is not one of those cases. While I doubt that many people would want to actually live in a world governed by Ditko's super-righteous Objectivist principles, the artist does strike a chord when he champions the desire to excel over the tendency toward mediocrity. At the same time "Our Man" remains one of the best villains Ditko ever created sans collaborators, precisely because even though Hugo is dominated by Nietzsche's "will to nothingness," even a negative form of will throws light on what Ditko considers will's positive form. Most of the Beetle's villains are simply unabashed self-seekers, but Hugo is a believer, devoted to his obsessive pessimism.

I would also note that the author's determination to create an "opposite number" for his heroic protagonist, much as Dave Sim did with his villain Cirin speaks to what I have called "the ethic of the combative." I won't attempt to summarize the full argument of the two ETHIC essays, seen here and here, but I will reprint a selected section of the concluding paragraph as an attempt to draw some possibly useful parallels.

The shaman deriving power from his numinous presences, the warrior gaining supernatural presents or guidance from his patron god, the bondsman studying the ways of the mortal lord in order to overthrow him-- all of these participate in the ethical dimensions of the combative mode.  Thus "might" exists to continually challenge others to partake of its nature...This potency, to challenge one's own will to greater acts of agency, is the essence of the ethic that springs from the combative mode.

CHOOSING FROM MANY MEANINGS

I've argued in JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 4 that the proper analysis of all literary stories, realistic or escapist, cannot be judged purely in terms of their ethical stance, which pertains to Jung's "principle of serious work," Thus, though Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND lacks the ethical gravitas of Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST, the two bear kinship in terms of their imaginative power and mythic resonance.

By saying this, I did not dismiss all criteria of moral-ethical judgment from consideration, and I would have no problem in stating that LIGHT IN AUGUST is a novel that is morally superior to GONE WITH THE WIND in terms of how each story deals with the topic they have in common; the American South's relationship to its African-American underclass. At the same time, this ethical judgment is not an absolute one, but one grounded in perspectivism. I've framed the perspectivist argument with respect to ethics in the LET FREEDOM RIDE series, concluding with this observation from PART 4:

Ergo, pluralist freedom is the free will to choose-- even when one makes the wrong choice-- with the knowledge that *the wrong choice always has the potential to be the right choice in another set of circumstances.*

Perspectivism is often confused with relativism. A relativist would say of the American slave tradition that it was only wrong to those who were oppressed by slavery, or to those who had personal reasons for opposing it; slavery would not be wrong for those who made an institution of it.  In other words, relativism says simply that there is no single meaning in any ethical statement.

A perspectivist, however, asserts multiple meanings, as Nietzsche does in THE WILL TO POWER:

In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable [emphasis in original] otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—"Perspectivism."

This emphasis on the many ways in which ethical meaning-statements are both multiple and "interpretable" offers some similarity with the modern notion of intersubjectivity, which I've defined elsewhere on this blog.

But I'll return to my earlier statement that "the wrong choice always has the potential to be the right choice in another set of circumstances."  Obviously, if I validate Faulkner's view of the wrongness of the institution of slavery and its heritage, while I reject Mitchell's validation of same, I'm taking the not-at-all-risky position that American slavery was the wrong choice in the original historical set of circumstances. But in what "other set of circumstances" might an institution like slavery have been justified?

One set of conditions might be the use of slavery as a retaliation for past infractions, rather than the exploitation of a weaker opponent.  Historically slavery seems to originate as a process of taking booty during military conflicts. One tribe makes war upon another, and the winning tribe takes members of the losing tribe as chattel. If the winner is the original aggressor in the military action, then the taking of slaves would not be retaliatory in nature. However, if the original aggressor is the one who is overthrown, the taking of slaves would be defensible in that the winner may need to impress on the original aggressor-tribe the message "don't mess with us." Of course this rationale would be cold comfort if a given person were enslaved yet held no active responsibility for the aggression.  But at that level of cultural development, those are the breaks.

In recent times, the infamous "Charlie Hebdo" incident illustrates another instance of "multiple meanings."  For the magazine's editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier, the purpose of satirizing Muhammad-- a satire that included portraying the religious leader's appearance-- his purpose was to remove power from Muslim terrorists by rendering their religious extremism banal, saying that, "We have to carry on until Islam has been rendered as banal as Catholicism."

Obviously terrorists were not about to tolerate this strategic dismantling of their religiously cloaked ideology. Yet for many Muslims not involved in terrorism, they still regarded the satire as an insult to their religion, and some have come close to intimating that the cartoonists got what they asked for. It's likely that this defensiveness springs from a sense of cultural marginalization.

Now, whereas slavery-- whether racially based or not-- is rooted in economic exploitation, both of these positions are more in the nature of a "clash of cultural priorities."  I favor the notion that all forms of artistic expression deserve to be given complete freedom to tear down idols and ideologies, though naturally I have my own opinions as to what is or is not good satire.  I speculate that the proponents of "they asked for it" are not just defensive, they are culturally "on the defensive" and that their defense of the non-representation of Muhammad's image-- which I'm told is not unilaterally observed even in Muslim lands-- will not persevere in the face of advancing secularism.

Nevertheless, a perspectivist orientation might be able to appreciate the origins of the conflicting positions. Even though I can appreciate Charbonnier's ideology up to a point, I have my doubts that his project of banalizing any religion will yield the fullest understanding of the many meanings behind human culture.  






 

BOOLA, BOOLA, BOULEVERSEMENT PT. 3

Whenever you hear a public discussion of comic books, you will hear sooner or later an advocate of the industry say with a triumphant smile, "Comic books are here to stay." I do not believe it. Someday parents will realize that comic books are not a necessary evil "which, but their children's end, naught can remove." I am convinced that in some way or other the democratic process will assert itself and crime comic books will go, and with them all they stand for and all that sustains them. But before they can tackle Superman, Dr. Payn, and all their myriad incarnations, people will have to learn that it is a distorted idea to think that democracy means giving good and evil an equal chance at expression. We must learn that freedom is not something that one can have, but is something that one must do.-- Frederic Wertham, SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, p. 395.


"I held the plane long enough for the crime leader to jump. He chose to die rather than submit!"-- Wonder Woman, SENSATION COMICS #21.

I've answered Noah Berlatsky's offhand condemnations of the Superman character in respect to two of his three objections. I've pointed out that Lois Lane treats the hero like crap more often than the reverse, and that Berlatsky's "bullying" charge only works if one ignores the text completely, to say nothing of giving Wonder Woman a pass for the same behavior.  I haven't dealt with the third charge: that Superman "occasionally engages in extra-judicial killing."

I'm aware of only one story in which the Man of Steel appears to have deliberately killed a couple of criminals, though the story-- which I mentioned in this essay-- doesn't decisively state that the characters involved have died. Just to give the apparent killing context:

Of course, Superman/Christ is not a perfect fit, if for no other reason than that Superman's adventures are a lot less about "turning the other cheek." Nevertheless, the dominant image one gets with Superman is that of a god striding among mortals, a god almost constantly forbearing to strike with full force even against the evil.
I say "almost" because at times even the creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster yielded to the temptation to let their hero be as wildly violent as the Greek Heracles. In ACTION COMICS #25 (1940), the hero is rushed by two men-- one of whom, admittedly, has the power to freeze the Man of Tomorrow via hypnotism-- and Superman throws a plane at them.
Yes, that's right. THROWS A ****ING PLANE AT THEM! (You don't see the bodies get mangled by the impact but the villains aren't mentioned as having survived, either.)

Wonder Woman is also acting both in self-defense and the defense of others in SENSATION #21 when she too commits plane-icide, holding the propeller of the villain's plane so that the plane-body spins in a circle and finally crashes.  Wonder Woman's villain-murdering is accompanied by a little more rationalization, but at base the two feats are covalent.  Both are "extra-judicial" insofar as neither hero is legally empowered by any real-world government. Berlatsky claims that Wonder Woman is more responsive to authority-- albeit one of a religious nature-- because the Amazon is occasionally seen talking to Aphrodite.  But would he validate another of Jerry Siegel's creations, the Spectre, because that hero also had his "talking to God" moments? I sincerely doubt that the Grim Guardian would get the same benefit of the doubt.

In the end, while rationalizations both intrinsic and extrinsic to the narrative are natural enough, they're beside the point. Adventure-tales frequently conclude with a villain's violent death not because the stories are coded to incite vigilante violence, as Wertham clearly believed, and as Berlatsky may or may not believe-- but because the villain's death provides closure. For serial entertainments it must be a temporary closure, of course, for another threat must appear on the horizon with the serial's next installment-- and of course, the more popular villains have a habit of bouncing back from their apparent deaths. This supports my frequent assertion that escapist works are understood by their audiences to be "vacations from morals," where villains either die, so that they're never thought about again, *or* they simply appear to die and then pop back up with some piddling excuse.

For an extreme moralist like Wertham, there could be no such vacations into the world of fantasy. The above paragraph from SEDUCTION's last chapter-- not far from his famous closing lines, in which he hypocritically exculpates inattentive parents from blame re: their children's corruptive reading-choices.  I am still amazed that the good doctor justifies his recommendation for not just censorship, but the eradication of an entire genre, as part and parcel of "the democratic process." But then, Wertham has unilaterally decided that all depictions of violence are indicators of a bent toward fascism-- and though he harps most on comics due to their largely juvenile readership, he makes the same objection with regard to other media. He may have sincerely believed that he was able to parse out "good and evil" so completely that he need not extend to "evil" the courtesy of "an equal chance at expression."  SEDUCTION certainly does not manage to solve the problems of identifying good and evil; philosophically it's exactly on the level of a SUPERMAN comic book.

For me, the definitive statement on society's need to provide that "equal chance" appears in the works of John  Stuart Mill, as per this famous quote:


“...the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.” 

I can't be positive as to just what Mill meant by "character of mind," but I would gamble that it means looking at a given subject from more than one mental angle.  Thus, if one looks at SUPERMAN, WONDER WOMAN, and THE SPECTRE expecting to encounter incisive thoughts about the nature of good and evil, one is bound to view them as deficient while one is in this "character of mind." However, if one can move one's mind into the "character" of the purely visceral, then it seems obvious that these "crime comics" were meant to satisfy this type of entertainment. And the radical element of the mythos of adventure is that of the *agon,* a crucial battle in which the stakes are often those of life and death.  And the most visceral way of expressing such a combat is one in which the hero not only thwarts the villain but kills the evildoer, whether in defense of self or in the defense of others.

Yet even within the bailiwick of those who provide the visceral entertainments, we see instances in which real-world morality asserts itself.   Experienced comics-fans will know that the Golden Age Batman used a gun once or twice in his earliest years, and that later DC's editors forbade their popular hero from carrying firearms. I can imagine a scenario in which 1940s DC editors "had kittens" when they saw Superman apparently slay two crooks by hitting them with a plane. It seems unlikely that the editors of that time-frame would think the incident would harm young minds, but they may have been afraid of catching crap from kids' parents about such incidents. I'm not sure when DC Comics began to promote the idea that "Superman never kills," but this trope was very likely an attempt to make Superman seem safe for kids.

Of course, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were all pikers in terms of dispensing lethal retributive violence. That's why I find it so comical that Berlatsky would object to Superman's "extra-judicial killing" as if these few deviations from the hero's more societally responsible exploits were an indicator of the character's capacity for "bullying." Such minor sorties into extreme retribution cannot begin to match the body-counts racked up by characters like the Punisher and Deathstroke, or even some of the more violent heroes of the pulps, like the Spider.

I have no idea whether or not John Stuart Mill would extended his antipathy for censorship to comic books, had they existed in his time.  But the logic of his argument should extend to even the most violent modern media. Violent comics, movies and video-games are meant to give their audiences a vacation from the workaday world- a world where most people are aware that things don't work out as neatly as they do in fiction.

THEORETICAL GOODNESS, PRACTICAL VIOLENCE

I've noticed, in my process of responding to Noah Berlatsky, that in several essays he has asserted that superhero narratives conflate goodness with violence.

I won't say that they never do.  But I don't think that this is the representative intent behind even the simplest of them.

Rather, in superhero narratives specifically, and combative narratives generally, the intent is not that the two are identical, but that they are linked.

In always-handy Wikipedia I read:

In Ancient Greek the word praxis (πρᾶξις) referred to activity engaged in by free men. Aristotle held that there were three basic activities of man: theoria, poiesis and praxis. There corresponded to these kinds of activity three types of knowledge: theoretical, to which the end goal was truth; poietical, to which the end goal was production; and practical, to which the end goal was action.

Many later philosophers put aside "poiesis" and focuses upon what we have come to call "theoria and praxis," or "theory and practice."

It seems obvious to me that this is the vital linkage one sees in combative narratives that focus upon a hero winning over various menaces is also one of "theory and practice."

For example, regard this page from a war-era issue of the Golden Age Captain America:

At no time does the page stress that Captain America and Bucky are good because they are powerful.  Rather, after they have beaten the evil members of a criminal Bund, they conflate the worship of pure power with Nazism, and scorn the idea of hitting "men who are licked."

Does the authors-- presumably Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for the most part-- affirm that violence is a practical necessity?  Obviously so.  But the "theory" is goodness, and its superiority is borne out by the willingness of good men to fight for it in practice.

Thus, in contrast to Adin Bellou's famous aphorism "might makes right," what this page best illustrates is Abraham Lincoln's reversal on Bellou's formula:

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE, PT. 2

In speaking of an "ethic" with respect to any literary formulation, as with my "mode of the combative," it's necessary to re-state the obvious: human ethics as they apply to the world of art can never be coterminous with human ethics as they apply to life.  Though I've stated some of my disagreements with Camille Paglia here, her statement opposing life and art remains appropriate:

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.-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 39.

I will not repeat my many statements distinguishing the properties that separate "works of thematic realism" from "works of thematic escapism."  I'll simply point out that the former type often grapple with matters that the other type does not address, matters which are not limited to, but often deal with, the ethical dimension of real life.  One author, be he Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, or Jack London, may have full-fledged propositions about how to make life better, which he encodes in his works.  Another, like Shakespeare, may use his work to imply an ethical dimension without stating it outright.  A third type, like Voltaire, may propose no solutions whatever but still imply that somehow or other, things could be better than they are, and then expresses that conviction through his work.  

Because all such works suggest that they provide utilitarian value-- not because they can actually foster new systems of morality but for providing "thought experiments"-- elitists often presume that these favored few works are as the rare diamonds scattered through a mountainous heap of trash.  I have maintained, however, that the relationship between "realistic works" and "escapist works" is closer to that of conjoined siblings, dependent on one another for life.  This parallels my conclusions in the final LET FREEDOM RIDE essay, that "right choice" and "wrong choice" are inextricably intertwined within a perspectivist concept of free will.  However, perspective plays a greater role in sussing out the ethical nature of real-life events than it does in literary matters, for the simple reason that in real life human beings gamble their own lives rather than participating in gestural re-creations of ideas and emotions.

A minor example would be the ethical disagreement of American citizens circa World War Two, in which some citizens wished to intervene directly against the Axis while others wished to pursue a course of non-involvement.  Today the consensus was that the former choice was "the right choice," but some would claim that it is validated only because "history is written by the victors," and still others might aver to this day that things might have turned out better had the U.S. left Europe and Asia alone. Though I agree that non-involvement was the "wrong choice," that does not dispel all aspects of the rational process by which some citizens thought it the right choice. 

No lives hang in the balance within the ethical scope of the literary process, though in the real world people have suffered or died to have the right to participate in that process.  Yet the nature of merit, including that of ethical consensus, is far more fluid: authors' works may be esteemed in a minor way, forgotten for a time, and then re-discovered in some new perspective, as occurred with the oeuvres of Herman Melville, H.P. Lovecraft, and Fletcher Hanks. Some elitist fans of science fiction have imagined that the genre would have been finer and more literary had the American and European tradition of science-fiction magazines-- particularly those of a pulpish nature-- never existed.  There is of course no way to prove this, but this does not extinguish the reasoning by which those proponents choose to believe that in their scenario the market would have spawned more types like H.G. Wells and fewer like Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I assert, though, that the reasoning is over-simple: another example of over-privileging those works that purport to have thematic-- and thus ethical-- depth, over those that make few if any such claims.  It overlooks the fundamental interactivity of thematic and escapist works in the literary continuum, as well as failing to understand the deeper symbolic nature of the escapist works.

In my previous essay I chose three stories from Grimm's Fairy Tales.  None of them are works of "thematic realism:" like the great majority of stories overall,  I define all three stories as "genre," meaning that they belong to categories governed by reader-expectations far more than by authorial intentions.  I used the three stories as exemplars of differing combinations of dynamicity-conflict.

The first story, "Bremen Town Musicians," portrays a conflict with no spectacular or sublime aspects.

The second story, "Hansel and Gretel," portrays a conflict in which there exists a conflict between one character, who possesses "might," and two other characters who do not possess might but who are able to trick the first character into defeat.

The third story, "The Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was," portrays a conflict between one character who possesses enough "might" to overcome several other mighty opponents.

Of these three patterns, I've hypothesized that the middle one, labeled "Might vs. Non-Might," is the most popular in the totality of literature (by which I mean, the "bad stuff" as well as the "good stuff.")
Now, assuming the truth of this, what would this pattern mean?

It might mean that the surest way to appeal to a human audience is to play upon their fear that they-- represented by the viewpoint characters of their stories-- are always on the verge of being overwhelmed by powers greater than themselves.  As noted in this essay, the aforementioned H.P. Lovecraft felt that fear was the most primal emotion:

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

Though there are a lot of stories in which ordinary humans are menaced by the forces of "the unknown," the basic pattern is not confined to supernatural stories: a story like the 1962 film CAPE FEAR sports only a "known" fear, that of a ruthless criminal who impinges on an almost-helpless family.  It is also the same pattern we see in Hegel's opposition of the "bondsman"-- who in my system would represent "non-might"-- and the "lord," who of course represents "might."


I cannot speak to all of Hegel's subtleties on this point, but I find it interesting that, for all that the philosopher emphasizes 'the effects of the "fear of death" on "being-for-self,"' he doesn't show much interest in one other consequence of the lord-bondsman conflict: that the bondsman inevitably seeks to become a lord, to take on the lord's power and privilege.

One cannot do this, however, through the evasive maneuvers of trickster-heroes like Hansel and Gretel.  One only proceeds away from the condition of "non-might" by acquiring "might" oneself. 

In fairy tales as in superhero stories, "might" can be thrust upon a story's protagonist, as it is with characters ranging from Aladdin to the original Captain Marvel.  However, though the story about the Youth Who Sought Fear doesn't inform us as to how he got so mighty, one may speculate that he could have acquired his might by the Batman method: training and effort.

In either case, there is a change in the ethos of the "might vs. might" stories, as opposed to the more popular "might vs. non-might" type.  Suddenly, might is not an overwhelming force that exists outside the human subject, imposing fear as the lord does to the bondsman.  Might is something that can be summoned from within oneself, and is thus available to all human subjects who manifest the necessary will.  In addition, might is plural in nature: it has many faces, and in folktales and fairytales this many-sidedness often appears when a beleaguered viewpoint character receives supernatural help from some benign donor to "even the odds" against a powerful enemy.

Thus, within stories that emphasize "might vs. might"-- which is to say, combative stories-- the plurality of might implies that no lord is ever so mighty that a bondsman cannot assume his power and knock him from his lofty position. Of course, in real life this often means "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  But in fiction we can indulge in the possibility that the new lord will make better choices than the old one. 

Kant repeatedly stresses that all of his observations upon the sublime affects are that they arise spontaneously from humans, themselves in positions of safety, observing the potent forces of nature expending themselves with their own version of "might."  He does not attribute to these affects any ethical consequence in themselves, though as noted before he did assert that all aesthetic emotions did lead to ethical application.  When he introduces the concept of "dominance," which is his terms for the conflict I call "might vs. might," it too is intended to have only indirect ethical application

I suggest that one such application is this appreciation of the plural manifestations of might.  Nearly every schoolchild is exposed to some approximation of the "caveman looking up in wonder" as he espies the birds in flight and wishes to imitate them, which becomes a symbolic representation of human progress as a whole.  But no single act of wonder exists by itself, and from what we know of early man, it does seem that many of them viewed the world as a concatenation of powerful presences, from which the earliest versions of "shamans" could derive power. In later years such presences would codified into polytheistic mythologies, and there too, though men were always inferior to the gods, there remained a conviction that they were worthy to stand with the gods in terms of the will-to-power if not sheer power itself.

The shaman deriving power from his numinous presences, the warrior gaining supernatural presents or guidance from his patron god, the bondsman studying the ways of the mortal lord in order to overthrow him-- all of these participate in the ethical dimensions of the combative mode.  Thus "might" exists to continually challenge others to partake of its nature, rather than being utterly inaccessible, as it is to the humble creatures of "Bremen Town," or being something that can only be overcome through trickery, as in "Hansel and Gretel." This potency, to challenge one's own will to greater acts of agency, is the essence of the ethic that springs from the combative mode.

OUTCAST OF THE COMICS-ISLANDS PT. 2

The title of this 2-part essay, obviously indebted to the Conrad novel, should put a particular complexion on the word "outcast."  In common usage the word implies a person who has been cast out by others.  But Conrad's outcasts-- Lord Jim, Kurtz, Nostromo-- effectively cast themselves from the mainstream of life.  In the world of America comics fans are more used to the image of protagonists being outcasts through no fault of their own, as with most of the X-Men. 

So to the extent "outcast" applies to me, I'm of the Conradian type, having veered off the well-beaten path followed by most of the comics-intelligentsia.  I'm currently planning a series of essays which "crosses over" the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer with the academic analyses of myth-ritualist Theodor Gaster.  In contrast, most of the intelligentsia stick with those well-traveled titans of tedium, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. 

This is rather ironic for those critics who have gathered a reputation for telling superhero fans to be more venturesome; to read other things than superheroes.  I can't object to the advice, but one wonders how seriously one should take it, when a writer like Chicken Colin browbeats readers to read an allegedly subversive LGBT superhero title, but in another essay sneers at Friedrich Nietzsche as a "19th century syphilitic sexist."  With the possible exception of Kenneth Smith, known for rambling at great length on an assortment of philosophers, most critics stick close to the "intellectual comfort zone" provided by Little Karl and Big Sigmund.

Many critics don't invoke Marx or Freud outright.  Nevertheless, one can usually discern some indebtedness to the tedium-twins wherever one finds an attempt to marginalize a given reading-preference with some form of "negative compensation," as formulated by onetime Freud-acolyte Alfred Adler.  Wiki says in part:

Compensation can cover up either real or imagined deficiencies and personal or physical inferiority. The compensation strategy, however does not truly address the source of this inferiority. Positive compensations may help one to overcome one’s difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority.

Because I'm working on the aforementioned series I'll try to keep my criticism of one such essay to a minimum, addressing for the time being just one section of Julian Darius's ON BODY TYPING IN COMICS.  The section entitled "What Male Readers Aren't Saying" begins with this assertion:

This cultural failing to address gender difference is part of what I hear, when a man says he faces body typing too and doesn’t whine about it. His statement translates roughly as, Hey, you wanted equality. How is it fair for you to complain about this but not me? But underneath even that is the deeper, underlying truth: I’m aroused by these pictures, and you’re saying they’re wrong.

This assertion would be stronger had it been built upon some fan's literal comment, but let's assume that such opinions have been expressed, possibly even in the comments-sections of Kelly Thompson essays.  I'm suspicious of the claim to boil down a "deeper, underlying truth," particularly when it takes the form of "methinks the fanboy protests too much" (a favorite Freud-strategy, by the way).  But at least there's a chain of logic here: if it doesn't apply to all, surely it applies to some.

The next decisive statement is more dubious:

I can’t recall a single man who’s dared to make the simple and obvious confession that these images make me horny.

Since Darius quotes from Thompson's essay, I wondered if he had read any of the comments on the essay as a resource.  It would seem not, as the very first post reads:

I like a certain amount of sexiness in comics, but the industry has taken that to an untenable point.

This is, to be sure, not a general defense of sexiness in comics, and the same is true in the ninth post:

 Very much agree. As a ten year old my Vampirella comic was kept hidden from my folks, and I thought it was great. But it was really one step away from action porn. Since I’m all “grown up” that shit just seems gratuitous and is laughable. Sexiest shot of a woman I have seen recently, is in the recent Batwoman, a super tight shot where she grins after realizing she is bullet proof. It was both bad ass, and hot.

I'll concede that Darius may've only been saying that people making unalloyed defenses of "sexism in comics" don't admit that the "images make them horny." I imagine that some defender somewhere has probably made the admission, though, and possibly along the same lines I have: that art should have the capacity to bring to life any fantasies whatever.  If it helps, I'll be happy to say that some comics-images make me horny.  However, I'm not a regular patron of comics these days, so I'm not precisely the best defender of the modern stuff, my liking for the Winick-March CATWOMAN notwithstanding.

 However, the following Darius quote allows for no equivocation about particular defenders:

 True, men might say that a woman (or a representation thereof) is “hot,” or even that they’d “do her.” But that’s an evaluation of a body, or a statement of what one would be willing to do to it, not a statement about the internal experience of the male in question. Despite these words’ aggression, they are a defensive way of speaking about a primal experience so strong that it alters even the way our brains process information. “I’d fuck her” usually really means “I want to fuck her but know I can’t.”

Now we're in the heart of the Negative Compensation Thicket.  Darius makes a major mistake by applying the same theory of defensiveness to the male gazer's target, irrespective as to whether it's a real "woman" or a "representation thereof."  Everything Darius then says about the male gazer's reasons for not believing that he can succeed at fucking said target-- that the gazer has pent-up doubts about his own manliness, because he's not wealthy or successful enough-- all of this is Pure Unalloyed Compensation Theory.

I'll pass quickly over the confusion between real and represented women, making the obvious jab that "I know I can't" means something very different with representations of women, simply because they aren't real.  Comics-drawings, photographs, movies on big or small screens-- not one of them has a vagina, penis, or any other sexual organ.  With that out of the way, the question becomes: does compensation theory apply if one is talking only about a flesh-and-blood object of desire?

I doubt it, particularly in terms of "wealth" and "success."  In my belief most men who fantasize about sex with (say) hot movie stars aren't compensating for anything in so doing.  Given that Darius admits that "male brains are visually aroused at much higher rates than women," why is it even necessary to posit some secondary reason behind the primary one of creating the aroused state?  If the real thing is not available for whatever reason, is there any reason not to take pleasure in the fantasy of arousal?

I presume that the real target here is not just the casual male gazer macking on some strange woman he sees on the street, but comics-buyers who validate so-called "objectification" by buying comics with lots of sexy imagery.  In contrast to Darius, I would jump to no conclusions about their motives in a universal sense, though yes, it's likely a lot of male readers buy them to masturbate.  I suppose it's possible that the upper 1% has access to hot and cold running vaginas, so that the wealthy and successful-- those that the rank-and-file male gazer supposedly envies-- never never never never bother with simple fantasies.  I suppose it's possible-- but I don't think it's likely.

 More on these matters when I have more time.