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"literature, as it develops from the primitive to the self-conscious, shows a gradual shift of the poet's attention from narrative to significant values, the shift of attention being the basis of Schiller's distinction between naive and sentimental poetry."-- Frye, Fables of Identity.

"Frye uses the terms 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' to describe his critical method. Criticism, Frye explains, is essentially centripetal when it moves inwardly, towards the structure of a text; it is centrifugal when it moves outwardly, away from the text and towards society and the outer world."-- Wikipedia, "Northrop Frye."

The parallels between the dyad of terms used in the first quote, from a 1951 essay, and the dyad used in 1957's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, should be obvious, so I won't dwell on them. But the emphasis on the physical image of movement within, or away from, the center of a circle also offers a fair parallel between Kant's opposition of "the beautiful" and "the sublime:"

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness..."-- Section 245.

The parallel is not exact, but on one level the idea of literary 'centripetal action,' which parallels 'narrative values,' suggests staying within the limits of the imagined circle, while 'centrifugal action' suggests surpassing those limits.

In terms of literary criticism, is there anything to be gained by showing an parallel of "the beautiful" with the narrative values of a story, those elements that make a story work on its own terms, and also one between "the sublime" with the significant values of a story, those elements that refer the reader to a universe of experiences, personal and transpersonal, outside the story?

Possibly so, if one can view the parallel without taking it for the assertion of identicality.

I've argued that "Superman's Return to Krypton" may be seen to have aspects of "the beautiful" and "the sublime" in it.

With respect to the first, I said:

If a disinterested appraisal of beauty stems from the human animal's ability to see the semblance of purpose in aspects of nature that have none, then the story that has a greater refinement of structure-- even within the boundaries of juvenile pop-fiction-- must be viewed as the "fairest of the two."

By this I mean that the story's narrative values have a "beautiful" structure. I don't claim that anyone will forget Homer in favor of Jerry Siegel, but all of the story's narrative values fall into line with a strong logical sequence that was by no means typical of Superman stories in the Mort Weisinger era.

The adventure that causes Superman to leave Earth and fall through a temporal rift that puts him back on Krypton--

The means by which he and his romantic partner Lyla Lerrol encounter one another and fall in love--

Superman's encounter with his parents, during which he must keep his identity secret once more--

And even the ending, which begs one's suspension of disbelief somewhat, even though the reader knows some far-fetched method must be used to get the hero back to Earth--

All of these are narrative values. They are "beautiful" because when joined in a proper order they confer the sense of "purposiveness" to a literary story without allowing one to see the controlling hand of the author at work.

In contrast, any "significant value" in the story would be one that escapes that orderly circumference and takes one into another world of experience. As I'm dealing with a mythopoeic story, that world will be that of the Jungian archetypes. If "SRtK" possesses mythicity to a sufficient degree, it will impress the knowledgeable reader as "sublime."

More on this analysis in Part 2.

AGREEABLE YOU

"I find it disturbing that Lois is so incredibly hot as a villainess."-- Tony Isabella, 1000 COMICS YOU SHOULD READ.









While thumbing through 1000 COMICS for a separate project from my current Kantian considerations, I came across the above quote from Tony Isabella, and immediately thought, "Is he kidding?" I've seen a lot of "incredibly hot" drawings of sexy women in comics, but few things seem less sexy to me than a drawing of Lois Lane by Wayne Boring.

Not that Boring was incapable of drawing a sexy woman: as I'll touch on later, he had such ability. But his renderings of Lois Lane are usually pretty "boring," eyepatch or no eyepatch.

However, Isabella's statement is an ideal illustration of Kant's concept of "agreeability." If the image of a villainous Lois Lane seemed sexy to Isabella when he encountered it, then he wasn't wrong, just as I am not wrong to find it uninteresting.

Such is the domain of Kant's category of "the agreeable," which is governed entirely by one's personal response to sensations, whether those sensations are real or conjured forth by the gestures of arts and entertainment.

Kant doesn't address the question in CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT as to whether or not there exist some raconteurs better able to evoke sensations of agreeability in large audiences. For instance, since Bill Ward was much better known for sexy drawings than Wayne Boring, it should follow that Ward was better able to evoke the kinesis of sexuality than Boring was, at least on a statistical basis. Possibly Boring could have done the same things Ward did had he wished to; perhaps his DC editors encouraged him to draw Lois Lane a certain way. All critics can judge, of course, is the final result.

Now Kant states that one's opinions on the "agreeable" (as well as the "absolutely good," which I'll put aside for this essay) do not carry the same forcefulness, the same insistence that others should acquiesce to that opinion, as do opinions relating to "the beautiful" and "the sublime."

I think Kant is somewhat refuted, in practice, by any number of Internet forums where individuals do indeed propound their personal likings with the same force as any "pure judgment of taste," and do indeed want all to acquiesce. However, Kant's theory is still good as a means for judging whether or not there is a species of reflective taste-judgment that rises above the level of personal interest.

I agree with Kant that such judgments do exist, though I note that he probably wouldn't have agreed with my belief that they can apply to popular fiction. Nevertheless, as my example of such a judgment (as well as demonstrating that Wayne Boring could draw sexy women when he so wished), I present this scene from the Jerry Siegel-Boring tale "Superman's Return to Krypton" (SUPERMAN #141, Nov 1960).









Once more I'll repeat the adumbrated quote that best sums up Kant's attitude toward the beautiful and the sublime:

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness..."-- Section 245.

Now, I don't agree with Kant that the only way one can judge something beautiful in his "disinterested" state is if the judgment can be proved (via logic) "universally valid." For me, dominant patterns alone demonstrate valid, though it's unlikely they could ever be deemed "universal."

Interestingly, Douglas Wolk, in trying to demonstrate the beauty in the images from "ugly" comics, asserts their value (in part) by "the way they function as part of a narrative."

By this criterion (which may or may not correctly represent Kant's rather convoluted take on "purposiveness in that which has no real purpose"), "Superman's Return to Krypton" would be more beautiful than "Lois Lane-- Outlaw" if one could demonstrate that the audience that experienced both stories found the former more dominantly "purposive" than the latter.

Obviously one cannot ask every comics-reader of that time period which story they found more "beautiful." However, a close structural reading of the former story will reveal a greater complexity than that of the latter story. If a disinterested appraisal of beauty stems from the human animal's ability to see the semblance of purpose in aspects of nature that have none, then the story that has a greater refinement of structure-- even within the boundaries of juvenile pop-fiction-- must be viewed as the "fairest of the two."

As for the sublime, in Kant's quote above he connects it with one's experience of the presentation of "boundlessness." The 1960 SUPERMAN story is certainly not primarily about "boundlessness," and yet in the romantic scene I show above, the hero and his new (and doomed) Kryptonian girlfriend is played out against a riot of elemental forces-- rainbows, lava-surges-- which mirror not only the passion of the lovers (in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY fashion) but also the unstable forces that will destroy Krypton.

There's another sense in which pop-culture stories can be sublime, beyond their actual depiction of "boundlessness." But I'll save that for a future essay.

WOLK HARD

In this essay I mentioned that I had not yet watched Douglas Wolk's 5-minute condensation of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, which has apparently been bopping around since early 2009. I wanted to reread that part of the JUDGMENT myself first, but now I've done both, and I have to admit that, despite my earlier dismissive review of Wolk's book READING COMICS, the video doesn't suck.

But before I can say anything about the video, I have to address Wolk's problematic reading of Kant from the 2007 book. Fortunately, Wolk's brevity, whatever it does to his argument, makes him easy to quick-critique; he only quotes Kant on four pages of the book and only two of those pages deal with all four of Kant's categories of "reflective judgments" regarding how the power of art affects audiences.

To a pluralist like myself Wolk's greatest sin is that he takes Immanuel Kant-- who, as I've remarked in the KANT STOPS THE MUSIC essays, was probably no lover of simple pleasures-- and presses Kantian elitism into the questionable of service of artcomics.

To some extent I suppose this is an understandable marketing strategy. READING COMICS directs itself to an audience outside the hardcore comic-book readership, and chooses, not surprisingly, the strategy of "these ain't your father's silly old comics," a strategy beloved by hundreds of Sunday-supplement newspaper articles. Still, though Wolk doesn't go on any Grothian rants against mainstream comics, and occasionally points out a few of their virtues, he does mainstream creators no favors in attempting to use Kant as a bully pulpit in favor of artcomics.

Wolk addresses each of Kant's affective categories in the same order Kant does, so the section on Kant begins with "the agreeable." For Kant this affect is one spawned by a subject's response to the sensations communicated by a work. Wolk aligns this category with the mainstream comics-artist's attempt to make his work seem "sexy or exciting" to the audience by gratifying "desires and specific tastes."
Wolk asserts that because artcomics don't attempt "somatically effective" artwork, they are largely outside this category. Underground comics and the artcomics that followed them offered the reader an "embrace of ugliness" as against the slickly beautiful styles of mainstream comics.

The problem here is that Kant does not validate ugliness in itself as an alternative to slick beauty. He does say that fine art can make ugly things seem pleasant, but not simply by "embracing ugliness." He does tend in Section 207 to speak of agreeable art in terms of pleasurable sensations in that its audiences may call the art "lovely" or "gladdening." However, his base definition is that "we say of the agreeable not merely that we like it but that it gratifies us."

Based on that criterion, then, when Robert Crumb evinces his real-life taste for women with big asses, that is a reflective judgment based on his finding big-assed women agreeable. And from that it follows that the reader of Crumb comics *may* have a similar gratificatory feeling for big-assed women. The reader also *may* have no such natural inclinations himself and *may* be approaching the art in the more disinterested sense that Wolk advocates. But it's plain that many practitioners of artcomics, not just Crumb, are far from offering purely disinterested pleasures.

The second category is "the good." Wolk botches this by saying that works in this category "refer to something besides themselves that we find valuable or laudable." Kant himself makes much clearer that he's talking about a specific type of art that evinces a *concept* with which the reader agrees. Wolk's example of "political art" is appropriate, though here too, it's impossible to exonerate artcomics from this type of personal interest, be it as broad as Crumb's excoriation of capitalist culture or as simple as Gilbert Shelton portraying all the cops in FREAK BROTHERS as fools and bullies. Obviously a negative portrait of law enforcement would appeal to the personal "interest" of any of Shelton's doper readers.

Wolk doesn't do much with Kant's third category of "the beautiful," which, as I mentioned earlier, deals with one's disinterested appreciation of the "boundedness" of certain physical forms. Wolk only observes that he doesn't consider superheroic beauty to fall into the category of Kantian beauty, but merely agreeability. I'll note here that it may depend greatly on the nature of the superhero artist. Wolk strains to find "beauty" in the artcomics images he's expressly called "ugly," and ends up claiming that it's the artcomics-artist's ability to direct his reader to "the intentionality of the cartoonist's style." Kant's concept of "intentionality," which my edition translates as "purposiveness," is important in the CRITIQUE, but I question to what extent it applies to artists attempting to break with established forms, given that at the end of Section 326 Kant advises that "it is generally the beauties of nature that are most beneficial, if we are habituated early to observe, judge and admire them."

Finally, Wolk tackles Kant's category of "the sublime." I noted earlier that Kant treats the sublime as an affect arising from exposure to that which seems boundless, particularly in nature. This natural "might" at once awes the subject with the sense that it is irresistable, and yet simultaneously boosts the subject's own feeling of his capacity to stand in the midst of such awesomeness, as long as said subject feels himself "in a safe place."

Surprisingly, here alone Wolk does seem to appreciate how a given category can apply to both mainstream comics and artcomics, for though he gives three examples of "sublime" artcomics, he allows that the Human Torch's journey through infinity in FANTASTIC FOUR #50 may carry aspects of the sublime. And the aforementioned video seems to follow through on this notion, for in it Wolk illustrates all four categories of reflective judgment with examples from mainstream comics; mostly using Marvel's Wolverine. I don't agree with Wolk's examples so much as his later, less polarizing attitude.

My own ideas on Kant's sublime take a very different course from Wolk's, but I won't expand on them here. I will note that his lecture-video may actually take advantage of mythopoeic comics-images for precisely the same idea they don't work as well for him in a print-book: a live lecture-audience responds more quickly to the sensual imagery of mainstream comics. It is difficult, though not impossible, to apply post-Kantian aesthetics so as to improve our understanding as to how the comics-medium works upon all audiences, "high" and "low."

Wolk isn't the guy who will do that, but I give him a grudging tip of the hat for having broached the matter first.

THE QUICK JUNG FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY LAKOFF

More for my own reference than anything else, I happened across this Google.docs essay and decided to link to it because of the following observation about Jung by Arielle Emmett:

"Post-modern critics have more or less dispatched Jung. At the same time his archetype concept has morphed into the more empirically testable prototype theories of cognitive linguistics and visual arts. Developed in the 1970s and 1980s largely by Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff, prototypes reinterpret Wittgenstein's 'family resemblances' and basic-level categories, arguing that cognition produces a set of canonical categories (mental schema) that aid memory by producing somewhat abstracted or idealized feature sets of an object or object class (birds, for example) (Lakoff 1987)."

Inasmuch as Emmett's purpose is to sum up the POV of cognitive scientists like Lakoff, the purpose of this cerebral abstraction is to "conserve billions of cortical neurons in long-term memory while efficiently accessing the category schema requird to make matches between the prototypes and new images/word-concepts." In this elegantly worded statement, Emmett does an excellent job of conveying the appeal of cognitive science to modern thinkers.

Of course, even without disavowing the existence of the objective data to which Lakoff, Rosch, Solso and others make reference, I am still not convinced that of Emmett's assertion that Jung has been made irrelevant by Lakoff and his hard-science homeys.

In any comparison it should be kept in mind that though Jung wrote a great deal on philosophical and scientific matters, at base his orientation was toward the healing of troubled human spirits. To that end he practiced psychology not as "hard science" but as an art of communication.

I believe I understand the appeal of this sort of science, particularly where its adherents believe it gives them weapons to knock down the idols of superstition and religion. But even if all of humankind's abilities to abstract and conceptualize *may* have arisen from cerebral attempts to conserve energy, that base fact does not define what the power of abstraction finally means, any more than the seed of an oak tress "means" the birds that nest within the tree.

All of which probably has a lot to do with my current rereading of Kant, as much as finding this particular essay...

DOWN BY THE OLD INDIE-STREAM

Just to declare myself on neither side of the "coming war" between mainstream and indies that BEAT-people have predicted in glowingly apocalyptic terms, here's something I wrote on this posting:

Though Van Jensen may have overstated things here:

"Marvel and DC haven’t done anything to limit the proliferation of creator-owned books in the past 20 years"

his essential point is a good one, for there have certainly been employees of the Big Two who sought "diversity" as much as there have been those who stuck with proven sellers. And in all cases all involved did what they did to advance their own fortunes, not for some abstract goal.

One problem not addressed, though, is whether it's possible to expand meaningfully beyond the core audience. AACRO faults the industry for not having produced "evergreen products," but can anyone, be it Stan Lee or Art Spiegelman, arbitrarily decide, "Today I'm going to bring into being (whether by direct or indirect influence) an 'evergreen product.'" As other posters have pointed out damn few "indie" creators have done so; they too more often than not appeal to "niche interests" (satire-comics, anthropomorphics,autobio). Are the bulk of indie-people failing because they share the incompetence of the mainstream people, or because there's something deeper than simple incompetence at work here?

PARALLEL PATHS: THE SUBLIME AND THE UNCANNY

In Kant’s preface to the first edition of CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, he makes a distinction regarding those things that can be the proper subjects of “cognition” and those that cannot. This distinction largely parallels the modern terms I’ve been using in my discussions of phenomenality: the “cognitive” and the “affective.” In essence the JUDGMENT is devoted to showing the extent to which humanity’s affective propensities have universal philosophical relevance, despite the fact that said propensities are not subjects of cognition . The first half of the book deals with how human affects apply to the idea of universal taste regarding “the fine arts.”

Section 210 of JUDGMENT is the first time Kant schematizes three of these affects (my word), which he calls “the three sorts of liking.” They are the “agreeable,” the “good,” and the “beautiful.” Later, however, Kant also distinguishes the “sublime” as something of a development from the beautiful. Kant was far from the first to theorize on “sublimity,” as will be seen from this essay on Longinus. But Kant’s cogitations on the matter have become among the most influential on literary studies.

The world that Kant presents as a subject for cognition is one I have termed “isophenomenal,” in that everything in it is subject to laws of reason and causality. To an extent this sounds much like Tzvetan Todorov’s “category of the real,” of which he writes in THE FANTASTIC:

“It is therefore the category of the real which has furnished a basis for our definition of the fantastic.”

But there’s actually a substantial difference between the ways in which Kant and the Freudian-influenced Todorov view this “reality,” and it inheres in their handling of affects. Todorov explicitly rejects theories of fantastic fiction that embrace subjective feeling, while Kant attempts to deduce which if any universal laws may be found in or suggested by the affects.

As an example, here are Todorov’s remarks on Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” from “The Uncanny and the Marvelous,” a key chapter of his book:

“Although the resurrection of Usher’s sister and the fall of the house after the death of its inhabitants may appear supernatural, Poe has not failed to supply quite rational explanations for both events.”

Because these explanations are within the limits of the rational, Todorov calls “Usher” an example of “the uncanny bordering on the fantastic,” the latter being his term for fiction that seems to leave unresolved the question of whether the events of the story are marvelous or not. However, a Kantian system might have more to say about the affective aspects of “House of Usher” than Todorov cares to.

It’s interesting that in Todorov's brief examination of “Usher,” he does touch on its affective nature, as he notes: “the sense of the uncanny [in the story] is not linked to the fantastic but to what we might call ‘an experience of limits.’” Todorov takes this observation no further than the bounds of doctrinaire Freudianism, saying that “The sentiment of the uncanny originates, then, in certain themes linked to more or less ancient taboos.”

Kant also deals with limits in his description of the affects he calls “the beautiful” and “the sublime,” but in a more thoroughgoing philosophical manner. Unlike the categories of “the agreeable” and the good,” the other two are relevant to judgments of universal taste:

"The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in its being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness..."-- Section 245.

Though this and similair statements demonstrate that Kant understood that boundaries or the lack of them could be crucial to an understanding of aesthetics, Kant does not give specific examples of artworks that incarnate either the beautiful or the sublime. He does devote considerable space to how nature, even though it is not truly unlimited, can create the effect of illimitability, which in turn invokes in the human mind the experience of sublimity:

“…consider bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky [and other examples of furious nature]... Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range..."-- Section 261.

This, far more than predictable twaddle about Freudian taboos, explains why generations of Poe’s readers have taken pleasure in the macabre events of the story. The facelike façade of the Usher House, the brooding tarn, and Madeleine rising from “death” to strangle her brother with supernormal strength—all of these are perilous presences which readers can contemplate from afar, with mingled pleasure and displeasure, because they do not threaten us directly.

Todorov thinks that the rational order, Freud’s “reality principle,” has won out in the Poe tale because Poe does not literally have the house smitten by the hand of God, after the fashion of more marvelously-oriented Gothics like THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO. But I believe Poe only includes these realistic devices as a means of showing that even with those sops to rationality, the affect of sublime terror remains undiminished.

I titled this essay “parallel paths” to make it clear that I am not suggesting a one-to-one correspondence between Kant’s “sublime” and the "Phillipsian" version of “the uncanny.” I’m simply demonstrating that Kant’s concept is a fit vehicle through which one may understand the process by which uncanny works can be cognitively isophenomenal yet affectively metaphenomenal. It’s certainly no less possible to experience the sublime in works that are overtly marvelous, like OTRANTO, or even in works that simply evoke the sublime against an isophenomenal background, such as Maugham's novel THE RAZOR'S EDGE. But a work like the Maugham novel is merely "atypical" in that the sublime mental states of the character do not override the realistic concerns of the narrative, as I believe they do in "Usher" and in other true works of the uncanny. Thus RAZOR'S EDGE is both cognitively and affectively isophenomenal at the core, making it the obverse of a marvelous work like CASTLE OF OTRANTO.

SO MUCH WRONG, SO LITTLE TIME

I know that I should ignore Tom Spurgeon's posts on this BEAT post of some days back. Thoth knows, everyone else on the thread pretty much ignored his remarks, which were just one of many pointless elitist rants against superhero fans. But I find Spurgeon's weird tangent on Art Spiegelman at once baffling and fascinating, so here it is, in its entirety:

One interesting right-now litmus test for the industry’s obsession with superheroes: today Art Spiegelman won western comics’ biggest and coolest award: the Grand Prix at Angolueme. Today they also named the new movie Superman.

One is a comics news story, while one is a superhero movie news story tangentially related to comics. Which will get more industry press and the bulk of fan attention? I think we’d all agree it’s probably going to be the Superman story, although Art will do better than he would have 12 years ago, when Crumb winning the same award was I’m guessing mentioned by 1 US magazine three months after the fact.

You can work your tongue into knows lecturing *why* this is the case; it’s much, much harder to point out why it should be, at least in a way that’s not depressing. There is a bit of the reverse, in that people wrote me letters why I wasn’t covering Dan Clowes selling a movie version of his Wilson with more emphasis, and together both impulses represent the culture-wide obsession with the movies, but it’s certainly not as thoroughly conflated as movies and comics are with the superhero-centric stuff. Art Spiegelman just won comics for this year!

Point by point, pretty much in order:

(1) I'm not sure why anyone needs a "litmus test" for the American industry's "obsession" (though I wouldn't call it that) with superheroes. It's a foregone conclusion that most if not all direct-market comics-shops are dominated by superheroes because they have become (if I'm quoting Kurt Busiek accurately) "destination stores," where the customer seeks out a commodity in the place he expects to find it.

(2) "Biggest and coolest award?" HAH! Art Spiegelman never got his name on a bubble gum card, did he? You just can't get cooler than having your name on a bubble gum card.

(3) I would be more convinced that the announcement of the new movie Superman was not a comics-story if other-media adaptations never had any effect whatever upon the comics-medium. One can argue that they do not have as much effect as some have desired-- remember the days when eighties fans thought that the perfect BATMAN film would make "normals" respect fans? But fans have sseen I suspect PUBLISHERS' WEEKLY makes a fuss about it when a famous novel gets slated for A-list adaptation too, though I confess I haven't checked it out yet.

(4)It's nice to know that no matter what "Nerd Court" explanation for the situation might be offered, Tom Spurgeon's there to tell you it's irrelevant because It Ain't the Way Things "Should Be."

(5) Art Spiegelman did not "win comics for the year." He won for the sort of comics that the Angolueme judges happen to like; nothing more, nothing less. It's an admirable accomplishment but it doesn't define comics any more than the superhero books do.

(6) I find this a really weird argument from the guy who was (I think) the first one to make fun of the idea of "Team Comics."