ASSERTORIAL ASIDE

Just a quick preface to the promised sequel to HERO AND VILLAIN, MONSTER AND VICTIM:

At the end of Part 2 of WHEN TITANS GET CROSS-COMPARED I assigned to each Fryean mythos a trinity of Schopenhauer-derived qualities:

ADVENTURE // "subjective" // "pleasure principle" // homogeneity of percept and concept, so "serious"
DRAMA // "objective" // "reality principle" // homogeneity of percept and concept, so "serious"
IRONY // "objective" // "reality principle" // heterogenity of percept and concept, so "humorous"
COMEDY // "subjective" // "pleasure principle" // heterogeneity of percept and concept, so "humorous"

In Part 2 I'll be exploring how comedy is heterogenous to its dominant pleasure principle whereas adventure is homogenous toward the same principle, as well as irony in comparison with drama in the same constellation.

But given the fact that Freud's famous two principles include a reference to "reality," I first want to make clear that when I say that "reality" dominates the drama and the irony, I'm talking about a principle that overarcs two other principles introduced earlier: those of "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism."  I explored these two concepts with some attention to their effects in BACK TO BATAILLE 2:

... my "works of thematic realism" are characterized by a greater degree of *assertorial gravity* than the opposing kind, while "works of thematic escapism" are characterized by a greater degree of *assertorial levity.* 

Keeping that in mind, I want to specify that this applies to thematic concerns only, and not to their opppsite, the *narrative* concerns, the question as to how the narrative itself works.

It should be clear that even though popular fiction's thematic values are closer to escapism, in a narrative sense they still follow the same patterns as works of thematic realism. 

Thus, when I say that HARRY POTTER, being a drama, is dominated by the reality principle, this means in terms of its narrative values.  One might decide that another drama involving magical characters-- let us say Shakespeare's TEMPEST-- is more devoted to thematic concerns of the realistic, rather than the escapist, variety.

*Even saying that,* it's quite possible that in a *narrative* sense, POTTER and TEMPEST can be equals no matter how they diverge in thematic terms. Narratively both Potter and Prospero follow the purgative processes of the drama, in which they survive peril but are somewhat compromised by their efforts. 

Naturally, the same principles apply across the board to the other mythoi; my other earlier examples-- BUFFY, MARSHAL LAW, and RANMA 1/2-- belong like POTTER to the world of thematic escapism.  I emphasize that narrative concerns and thematic concerns are not identical because so many critics over the last century have misunderstood this basic facet of literature.

WHEN TITANS GET CROSS-COMPARED PART 2

When Schopenhauer addresses the question of "serious discourse," he does not recognize, as I do, two separate species of said discourse.  I am not surprised that WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION holds no insights as to the distinctions between what I call "adventure" and "drama."

However, it is interesting that in Chapter 8, "On the Theory of the Ludicrous," Schopenhauer does distinguish two species of ludicrous discourse, though again, he does not focus on them in terms of literature alone.  If anything, his examples stem mostly from everyday discourse between real people, rather than discourse within a literary setting.  As it happens, the philosopher does use one of the same terms Frye uses-- "irony"-- for one species, while his other species he names "humour," but describes it in terms that are recognizably those of jubilative comedy.

For Schopenhauer, irony is what is conveyed in a serious manner, but arouses the sense of ludicrous:

"...if  during heavy rain we say: "It is pleasant weather today"; or, of an ugly bride it is said: "He has found himself a treasure."

Against this species is the species of humour in which something is conveyed that seems ludicrous on the face of it, which one has to think through to conceive its absurdity compared to normal perceptual representation:

"When someone had stated that he was fond of walking alone, an Austrian said to him, 'You like to walk alone; so do I; then we can walk together."

Continuing my Gaster-comparisons here, the first examples conform to the mortificative aspect I assign to irony; it's no coincidence that his chosen examples focus on someone putting a false face upon an example of ill fortune.  This principle should even extend to those rare examples of irony that do the opposite-- make something good out to seem bad-- as in the husband who claims that his wife is "terrible" in some manner calculated that his listeners will not believe him, but will think him fortunate instead. A pleasant false face is still false, and in narrative literature there are no shortage of ironies in which the ironic circumstances seem more in line with Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD than with Orwell's 1984.

Schopenhauer's example of humor, in contrast, contains a jubilative mood, taking pleasure in the way logic can be twisted about to produce something utterly illogical: the myth-radical I term the *incognitio,* in that it defies cognition.

Schopenhauer maintains that both species of the ludicrous contain an incongruence between the perceived and the conceived, and explains this by resorting to the much-traveled distinction between the "objective" and the "subjective:"

"Irony is objective, and so is aimed at another; but humour is subjective, and thus exists primarily for one's own self."

The objective-subjective dichotomy is of course a familiar one in literary studies, and can be used profitably to comment upon both the "perceptual representations" within a work (the characters and their mythos-determined fates) and the "conceptual representations" outside a work (what the audience makes of the characters with whom it identifies).  For both they often take the form of Freud's famous "reality principle" (comparable to "the objective" in that it's responding to the outer world's objective demands), and his somewhat infamous "pleasure principle" (comparable to "the subjective" in that it's responding to the inner world's subjective demands).

But even though Schopenhauer may never have intuited two species of "serious discourse," do the other two Freyan mythoi conform to this dichotomy?

It would seem a slam-dunk. Back in BREAKING OPEN MOULDY TALES, I made these observations from one of Frye's essays:

Frye goes on to point out that because the more "realistic" forms of literature foreground what he terms (following Freud) "the reality principle." Thus even though tragedies like MACBETH and ironies like THE CASTLE (my examples) have a certain storytelling verve to them as well, there's a sort of proto-critical experience one generally has while experiencing them. To use a set of terms introduced in a separate Frye essay, the audience is oriented upon discovering what "significant values" are allegorized in the narrative, thereby to learn what meaning the work has for "reality." In contrast, comedy and romance, being oriented upon the "pleasure principle" (one presumes), lend themselves more to the enjoyment of "narrative values,"and of the "variety" one finds in the story's conventions.

So Schopenhauer's dichotomy for irony and "humour" can be easily applies to the other two mythoi as well, with no loss of meaning:

"Drama is objective, and so is aimed at another; but adventure is subjective, and thus exists primarily for one's own self."

In passing I'll note that Frye's MOULDY TALES essay was influential upon my conception of the principle of conviction, given Frye's observations on what I termed a "proto-critical reading experience."  But in any case, what qualities can be thus far ascribed to the four mythoi by virtue of these extensions of Schopenhauer's arguments?

ADVENTURE // "subjective" // "pleasure principle" // homogeneity of percept and concept, so "serious"
DRAMA // "objective" // "reality principle" // homogeneity of percept and concept, so "serious"
IRONY // "objective" // "reality principle" // heterogenity of percept and concept, so "humorous"
COMEDY // "subjective" // "pleasure principle" // heterogeneity of percept and concept, so "humorous"


I plan to go into more detail as to proving the postulated "homogeneity" and "heterogeneity" of these respective mythoi whenever I get around to writing my long-postponed (from May) Part 2 of the projected essay-series HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM.

WHEN TITANS GET CROSS-COMPARED! PART 1

Finding common ground between two scholars one admires-- as I've noted I planned to do with Arthur Schopenhauer and Theodor Gaster-- offers a certain challenge.  On one hand, one certainly doesn't want to paper over all the differences between the scholars just for the sake of some (hopefully) artful theoretical cross-comparisons.  On the other, if one can demonstrate parallel developments of thought between scholars whose concerns would not seem to overlap, this might attest to the existence of an intersubjective ethos that surpasses direct influence.  For instance, Theodor Gaster, having lived long after Schopenhauer, could have read the philosopher, but I for one don't find that Gaster's work reflects any of the earlier author's particular concerns.  So any patterns they would share are either (1) part of that ethos, brought about by the nature of the human mind attempting to order perceived existence, or (2) totally within the mind of the person making the argument.

The gross similarity between the two scholars is that both tried to make sense, albeit from very different perspectives, of the human capacity for seriousness and for humor.  Theodor Gaster confines his analysis to the way this capacity had appeared in archaic myths and rituals, at least according to the evidence remaining to contemporary times.  Schopenhauer cast a much wider net in his investigations of human nature, though his mammoth WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION says very little of myth. Building on the old saw that all philosophy comes down to the quarrels between Plato and Aristotle,  I'd opine that where Aristotle might have cared, roughly like Gaster, about his literature's indebtedness to archaic "goat-songs" and the like, Plato cared more about art's relation to the infinite, and that Schopenhauer followed Plato in this regard.   In addition, as I've noted elsewhere, Schopenhauer was definitely an elitist with little or no interest in "lower" forms of art, as he considered that only "genius" could generate the quality of sublimity.

Another similarity is that neither scholar sought to deal with the aforesaid capacity in terms of literary concerns.  Schopenhauer's theory of art is just one aspect of his overall philosophy, while Gaster is careful to assert that the mythology he surveys does not belong to "the department of literature or art; the latter are merely [mythology's] vehicles or instruments."

In other essays I've noted how Northrop Frye most likely derived some aspects of his quaternary theory of the literary mythoi from Gaster's quaternary theory of seasonal rituals. In still other essays, especially the GRAVITY'S  CROSSBOW series, I cross-compared the Fryean mythoi with certain Schopenhauer concepts, thus leading to my formulation of the notion of "conviction."  But though I no longer use that concept in quite the same way that I did earlier, I want to set down just what aspects of the theory are similar to or different from Schopenhauer's writings.

I've quoted a few times Schopenhauer's remarks on his distinctions between "seriousness" and "laughter and joking," which come from Chapter 8 in Part Two of THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION.  Chapter 8 builds on previous assertions, particularly in Chapter 7, regarding the interdependence of two types of human representations: "representations of perception and abstract representations."  He does not address humorous discourse in Chapter 7, but gives various examples of serious discourse wherein perception and abstract principle agree.  The easier of these examples is probably the one from Cervantes, where the author wishes to illustrate the abstract mood Schopenhauer calls "profound contemplation" with an accurate perceptual representation:

"...like a draped statue, for the wind moved his garments"

But though Schopenhauer uses literature for some of his illustrations, he doesn't distinguish between serious discourse of the sort he's doing, where he's expounding directly on his personal philosophy, and the serious discourse in literature itself, which is founded more on indirect propositions conveyed through the audience's identification with the characters.  This doesn't hurt Schopenhauer's argument, but it makes it a little harder to apply in a one-on-one manner with literature.

In literature (and I'm concentrating on narrative literature here, though I think the same principles may apply to much if not all forms of art), all of the "representations of perception" within a given narrative are constructs; something I expounded upon in HERE COMES DAREDEVIL THE MAN WITHOUT IDENTITY. All such representations remain constructs, no matter how much or how little fidelity they may show to our world of real-life perceptions.

This fidelity is what we usually call "verisimilitude" in literature, and covers everything from Upton Sinclair's reproduction of Chicago  in THE JUNGLE to  J.R.R. Tolkein's involved history of the Elves and their relations in LORD OF THE RINGS.  It also includes the logic by which all characters within a given work-- with special focus on the viewpoint characters-- pursue their own interests and their own fates, in line with what I wrote in GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 1:

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of *tonal gravity,* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity,* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

I've subsumed the terms of "tonal levity" and "tonal gravity" under the concept of "conviction."  In Schopenhauerean terms conviction is the "abstract representation" that arises from the "perceptual representation," as well as being comparable, in my much-used Fryean terms, to the dyad of "narrative values" and "significant values"-- though I'll try not to bring this latter comparison in any more than necessary.

Further, the conviction that the audience places upon the narrative situations of the identificatory characters is determined by sets of literary expectations that Frye calls "mythoi." Assuming that one is able to identify both with an adventure-heroine like Buffy Summers and with a drama-hero like Harry Potter, one cannot help but have different expectations of them.  Both suffer, and both triumph, but for Harry Potter, the possibility for failure within his dramatic mythos is somewhat stronger, and causes (I assert) a degree of pulling-back from the character on the part of the audience.  To insert Gaster's terms once again, Buffy's struggles are meant to invoke invigorating emotions, while Potter's are meant to invoke those of purgation, even if Potter's pathos comes with a reprieve.

Similarly, it is because of culturally learned expectations that if the audience does have a "humorous or at least distanced response" to both Marshal Law, representative of irony, and to Ranma Saotome, representative of comedy, then the distinctions within this spectrum of responses is determined by what the audience expects of them.  Only in a spoof could one imagine a jubilative character like Ranma freighted with the heavy satirical content of MARSHAL LAW, or a mortificative character like Law having happy-go-lucky sitcom-style exploits.

Having established at least that the rules for literature are in some ways not like those of the real world Schopenhauer was describing, Part 2 will pursue in more depth the comparisons I've already made between the gloomy philosopher's theory and the functions of literary mythoi.

STATURE REQUIREMENTS

In the second paragraph of the Poetics Aristotle speaks of the differences in works of fiction which are caused by the different elevations of the characters in them. In some fictions, he says, the characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others on the same level. This passage has not received much attention from modern critics, as the importance Aristotle assigns to goodness and badness seems to indicate a somewhat narrowly moralistic view of literature. Aristotle's words for good and bad, however, are spouddos and phaulos, which have a figurative sense of weighty and light. In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, there fore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero's power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same. -- opening paragraph of Frye's "Theory of Modes" in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

 Definitions of "stature":
1 : natural height (as of a person) in an upright position
2 : quality or status gained by growth, development, or achievement--
Merriam-Webster online.

It now seems to me that although the significant value of "conviction" provides an ancillary function in terms of how readers apportion value to different characters in different mythoi, the central value is best covered by the word "stature."  I note that in Frye's paragraph he speaks of the "different elevations" of the characters, which may be fairly considered an assignment of their "stature," whether it's within the quasi-aristocratic schema of Aristotle or within Frye's Spenglerian conception.

Further, "stature." unlike "conviction," has a more direct connection with the concept of *dynamis.*  As the dictionary says, stature is a positive quality resulting from "growth, development, or achievement"-- an abstract quality based upon the physical nature of human growth-patterns. One may consider the aforesaid achievement as the result of exercising one's energies-- or *dynamis*-- to their fullest as per Nietzsche's dictum on the "will-to-power." 

Yet, within the vagaries of literature, great power doesn't always convey great stature (or contrary to Stan Lee, "great responsibility").  Or, to be more precise, the four mythoi each bestow a different type of *stature* upon their focal presences.  Given my pluralistic stance, it would be incorrect to assume that a comic hero has *less* stature than a serious hero.  The comic hero fulfills the stature appropriate to an unserious character, just as the serious hero does for his endeavors.

At the end of PARADIGM SHIFTING I chose four series-characters who were similar in that all four possessed a high level of *dynamis* within a *marvelous* metaphenomenality-- meaning that all can do fantastic things like breaking brick walls, casting magic spells, etc. I broke down their affinites with the Fryean mythoi as follows:

BUFFY SUMMERS-- Adventure
HARRY POTTER-- Drama
MARSHAL LAW-- Irony
RANMA SAOTOME-- Comedy


I should note that the scheme I propose does not depend on focal presences who possess marvelous powers.  It could be illustrated just as easily with protagonists who fell into either the "uncanny" or "naturalistic" phenomenalities that I've described in great detail elsewhere.  I did wish, however, to choose only characters with a high level of *dynamis* appropriate to a particular phenomenality, as well as characters who all tended to win their serial victories, since that uniformity helps me illustrate the different *stature* that accrues to each character, despite the similarities in terms of narrative values.

"I always win," Buffy Summers says as she squares off against a demonic Ubervamp in the seventh-season episode "Showtime."  To be sure, the super-vampire has beaten her on a previous occasion, but like most if not all adventure-heroes, Buffy's ultimate triumph is guaranteed by her mythos.  Adventure-heroes are meant to overcome the forces of evil, and in general the worst they can do is to die with their opponents, as the medieval Beowulf does while slaying a fearsome dragon at the same time.  To reference the terminology of myth-ritualist Theodor Gaster, the entire point of this mythos is to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat."

In contrast, the heroes of the dramatic mythos don't necessarily always win, although it's significant that when Aristotle speaks of tragedy he includes an example of a "happy-ending tragedy," Euripides' IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS.  J.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter series  is a series which focuses far less on the thrill of victory than on what Frye calls the heroic "pathos" and what Gaster deems the "purgative" quality of ritual myth.  The presence of pathos implies the strong possibility that the hero may, like Orestes in the aforementioned Euripides play, become a sacrifice rather than a victor.  Throughout the Potter book-series, the central character wins most of his significant battles either singly or with the help of his retinue, but he's constantly stalked by the threat of the evil Voldemort and by prophecies that suggest, however ambivalently, that Voldemort will eventually kill him.  Harry Potter survives his trip to Calvary, but the series' emotional tone focuses upon the all-too-human pathos of its teenaged characters, and their need to control and/or purge their emotions in order to win out.

Now, I've noted in other essays that the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction, as I noted in respect to Paul Verhoeven's ironic SF-film STARSHIP TROOPERS.  The Mills/O'Neill character Marshal Law conforms to this pattern, as shown by this Wikipedia entry:

 The title character, Marshal Law, is the government-sanctioned "super hero hunter" (aka law enforcement officer, or “cape killer”) with superpowers in the city of San Futuro, the near-future metropolis built from the ruins of San Francisco following a massive earthquake. Law's job is to take down other superheroes who have gone rogue, which he does with maximum force and great pleasure. Aided by the wheelchair-using “Danny” and his physically imposing (but extremely polite) partner “Kiloton”, the Marshal operates from a secret police precinct hidden below the city, dispensing just enough brutal justice to keep the city’s many super-powered gangs in a balanced détente while safeguarding the ordinary citizenry.

Although Marshal Law wins all of his battles against the superheroes-- who are seen as being stupid and venal even when they are not lawbreakers-- he generally exists in a world to which no redemption is possible.  Whereas it matters a great deal whether or not Buffy Summers triumphs over the monsters menacing her world, the Marshal's victories merely illustrate that he shares the venality of his enemies in no small part.  Thus the stature that accrues to Marshal Law is "mortificative" in Gaster's terms: the hero takes pleasure in scoring satiric points off the creators' targets, the superheroes, but the world he exists in has no positive aspects worth speaking of.

Adventure-heroes always win, or at least lose so rarely that most audiences take no account of the losses.  Ironic heroes rarely win, and when they do, the victories mean nothing.  Dramatic heroes occasionally win but they go through such pathos-inducing straits that they don't get much of a thrill out of it.  What's left for the comic heroes?

Comic heroes, whether they are as powerful as Ranma Saotome or as bumbling as Johnny Thunder, tend to win out, though they tend to do so less by superlative skill than by dumb luck.  Ranma usually displays superlative fighting-skills, and he does win most of his assorted battles with other comedic kung-fu opponents, but the emphasis is clearly upon finding ways to amuse the audience by undercutting the hero's triumph with silly pratfalls, comic embarassments and the like.  Thus his stature within his mythos exists to be a vehicle not for thrills but for the jubilative mood of the *incognitio,* the comic incongruity-- which, in Ranma's series, often takes the form of his transforming from a young guy to a big-breasted young girl.

I have not yet decided on a means of labelling the respective types of mythos-stature.  This will probably appear in a forthcoming essay, however.

PARADIGM SHIFTING

At the beginning of the final section of GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW, I said that I had "discerned only two (though there may be more) universally applicable significant values" within the sphere of literature-- "signficant values" that in theory should apply to any characters in any literary genre thus far conceived.  As in Frye's formulation, "significant values" go hand-in-glove with the "narrative values" that determine what elements function within the narrative to erect the framework of that narrative, as opposed to the way they work to create a sense of extrinsic meaning.

One of the values I cited was *centricity.*  This functions as both values: a narrative must center around some "focal presence," or a group of presences-- usually characters who are human or have human-like responses, though on some occasions this function can be filled by simple "viewpoint characters" who react to a focal presence that is nothing more than a discrete phenomenon-- for instance, a bizarre environment like Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, within which viewpoint-character Alice can only stand as flummoxed witness.  This value does not require modification.

The other value was *dynamis.*  In NOTES ON NORTHROP FRYE AND THE NUM-THEORY I summed up the way Frye had assigned characters in terms of their "power of action" based on the schema from Aristotle's POETICS:

Whereas Aristotle’s division of *dynamis* has the fixed arrangement of an aristocratic pecking-order—noble / less noble / ignoble—Frye’s reformulation suggests a more Spenglerian vision of *dynamis*, in which human power of action becomes less and less efficacious as each mythos in its turn becomes less “romantic” and more “realistic.” 

Later in that essay I critiqued Frye's Spenglerian vision in terms of its applicability:

The most problematic aspect of Frye’s *dynamis* schema is that in its attempt to cohere with Aristotle’s pattern, it implies that “the marvelous” is located purely within the mythoi of myth and romance. I’m sure that, even staying within the confines of the canonical “high” literature with which Frye concerns himself, the scholar was quite cognizant that there exist many literary works which have marvelous content but which are not adventure-romances as Frye himself defines that mythos.

I concluded by saying, in part:

The real strength of Frye’s schema is to be found not in the implied “narrative values”— how each *dynamis* manifests in physical terms—but in terms of one “significant value” that more neatly characterizes each mythos, irrespective of whether its phenomenality is marvelous, uncanny, or naturalistic...

I went on to expatiate in GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4 that I felt that whenever *dynamis* was expressed through a particular mythos, it took on a characteristic "significant value" I called *conviction,* meaning that the narrative value of a focal *dynamis* took on significance in terms of the dominant mythos with which it was associated. 

To be as forthright as one can be in this sort of philosophical exploration, I've determined that "conviction" does not sufficiently serve to differentiate the signficance of a given focal presence within a given mythos.   I don't repudiate what I wrote on the subject, but now it seems to be that "conviction" must serve as an ancillary term, not a central one. By itself the term doesn't serve well enough to describe the significant tonality that separates, say, an adventure-comedy from a comedy-adventure. 

My revised term for the significant value corresponding to the narrative value "dynamis" will be covered in the next essay, which will describe more fully the philosophical underpinnings of this concept.

To illustrate the value across the four mythoi, I'll make use of *almost* the same four examples that I used early on in my mythos-investigations, in the essay BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER.  In that essay I contrasted four serial conceptions in terms of their mythos-alignments.  Of those four, three concern single protagonists (Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, and Ranma Saotome), while the fourth concerned a team (the "masks" of the Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN).  I've decided that this time around I'd prefer to compare single-protagonist conceptions straight across, so in place of WATCHMEN as my example of the irony-mythos, I'll substitute the Pat Mills/Kevin O'Neill comic book MARSHAL LAW.

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.

OUTCAST OF THE COMICS-ISLANDS PT 1

In previous essays I've applied the concept of "socialization" to some of the critics with whom I disagree, using the following definition:

a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position.

Now, because I've applied that concept to those I consider bad critics, does that mean that it's inapplicable to good critics? Or even to my favorite critic, who is (inevitably) myself?

Of course, it's entirely applicable. Socialization values stem from ideology, and as Northrop Frye (among others) has noted, ideology arises from any nexus of needs and priorities. In my recent arguments with Charles Reece I called his position "ideological" and he returned the designation.  Naturally each of us will consider that our personal ideologies are as a mote in our respective eyes, while the opponent's walking around with the proverbial beam sticking out.

The distinction I have made between us (with which I also don't expect Reece to agree) is that it makes a difference as to whether one considers ideology a primary orientation in itself, or whether it is secondary to the aforesaid nexus, which may be regarded as coterminous with "myth," or at least "mythicity." I've addressed this distinction at length elsewhere and won't explore it further here.

So, yes, when I advocate Camille Paglia's ethical cleavage between art and reality, it's a given that I would like to "socialize" others into accepting as significant some of the conclusions I've made, or have extrapolated from those of other writers.  It's probable that even if this took place, I would not be aware of the extent of any effect I had.  In any case, nothing separates me from bad critics Kelly Thompson and Chicken Colin in terms of the *desire* to have such an effect.  They do have, however, somewhat more of a "network" than I do, though in fairness quite a few respondents to Thompson's "No, It's Not Equal" essay disagreed with her assertions.

One of the cardinal aspects of my critical work is the assertion, based roughly on Jungian hermeneutics, that the experience of life begins with the infant's first sensations in the womb, and that everything else is built upon that bedrock-- though not after the fashion that the empiricists would argue.  Similarly, art is built upon a sensational foundation, though with the caveat that everything in art is a "gesture" in the Langerian sense-- an attempt to capture experience which is necessarily less immediate than experience.

To that end, I devoted a good many essays on Sequart to the topic of "adult pulp." I did so because I considered that much of the online comics-criticism still tended to regard the sensational elements of the medium as the opposite of what was considered "good art." Thanks to this demonstrably false belief, most "artcomics" rhetoric has been devoted to assailing the DM-dominant genre of the superhero, though it's axiomatic that if horror or westerns were dominant, those genres would be assailed in the same manner.

To say the least, the "network" of Sequart readers didn't get the significance of the "adult pulp" conception.This could be put down to my expression of the concept, though I saw no indications of any willingness to deal with these matters in anything but the ideological terms of the ultraliberal mindset. Chicken Colin remains the reductio ad absurdum of this lack of understanding, as in the section of his essay where he complains that I have not used the socially-approved terms like "gender" and "obectification" in my discussion of the Thompson essay:

instead of “sexism”, we appear to have “sensationalism”, and so on.

Whatever my failings as a writer, its clear to me that no one-- not Leslie Feidler, not Georges Bataille-- could have penetrated this sort of thick fog of know-nothingness  "Duh, a'course 'sexism' don't got nuthin' to do with sensations, George.  Now tell me about dah bourgeoise rabbits, George."

I confess that it's indulgent of me to keep attacking the Chicken. Gary Groth once complained that he hated to think that Harlan Ellison had become his "arch-enemy" (I paraphrase), since Groth did not consider Ellison worthy of that honor.  To each his own, but I'd love to have Ellison for an enemy.  Whatever his faults as an arch-enemy, at least he wouldn't be chickenshit.

More to come in part 2.