AN ANCESTOR TO THE "MARVEL METHOD"

I didn't get much satisfaction out of my recent reading of THE BLACK TULIP, one of the last novels of adventure-writer Alexandre Dumas, as the book was bereft of the adventurous qualities one expects from the author.  However, my reading did lead me to this interesting statement on Dumas' practice of authorship, put forth by one David Coward in his introduction to TULIP:

"[Dumas] left much of the historical spadework to his collaborators.  Under his direction they furnished substantial plot outlines which it was his practice to rewrite completely, adding the 'Dumas touch' with which he stamped his personal, unique mark on the published product.  It is in this sense that he claimed, rightly, to have been the author of all the books he signed."

Coward does add that at times Dumas let manuscripts pass without revision to every section, which means that not everything in every Dumas book did receive the "Dumas touch."  Nevertheless, Coward adds that no one ever succeeded in proving any charge of plagiarism against the author, though some of his collaborators made the attempt.

I shouldn't need to dwell much on the immediate likeness between this scenario and the one that describes the "Marvel Method" supposedly originated by Stan Lee in the early 1960s.  The main difference is that in recent years Stan Lee took the position that he was the primary creator of all his collaborative works because he was the editor who had authority over his collaborators, and that he had ordered the creation of every single character copyrighted by Marvel Comics.

Many fans resent Lee for having made this assertion, particularly when some artists have testified that Lee's input on a given character could be little more than a name or a sentence. In this TWOMORROWS interview John Romita Sr. describes the paucity of his input at times:

The only thing he used to do from 1966-72 was come in and leave a note on my drawing table saying "Next month, the Rhino." That's all; he wouldn't tell me anything; how to handle it. Then he would say "The Kingpin." I would then take it upon myself to put some kind of distinctive look to the guy.
 

And yet, in the same interview, Romita also seems to subscribe to the same  principle of a "Stan Lee touch" that Coward attributes to Alexandre Dumas.

Well, we joked about it. I would kid him about it. Originally nobody thought about plotting credits, except Ditko. Ditko got plotting credits, then Jack Kirby got plotting credits immediately. I got no credits at all during the first run; I got them in retrospect. Later on, he would tell people we co-plotted. I never was offended by it, and I always assumed it was his right, because it was thought these characters really came from him. Even the ones Jack Kirby created with him, I felt were full of the Stan Lee stamp.
 

Of couse, Lee wasn't literally imitating the pattern of Dumas. If anything he may have been patterning his writer-editor duties after the more prominant comic-strip artists of the time.  There had certainly been earlier comic-book editors who imposed a "stamp" of some sort on their lines, but comic strip artists like Al Capp and Chester Gould are better known for subsuming the contributions of unbilled assistants like Frank Frazetta or Russell Stamm (respectively) under their own respective creative umbrellas. In essence, this is also what Stan Lee did when he collaborated with Marvel stalwarts like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby-- though no one will ever know how much which collaborator created, and how much Lee contributed in terms of rewriting others' concepts.

ELICITING ELITISM

Ng Suat Tong (henceforth NST) said:

'A few decades later, the EC line occupies no less than 4 spaces in The Comics Journal’s Top 100 comics of the century list, a ranking exercise which should put paid to any claims that this magazine has an elitist stance. The question for today’s readers is why a line consisting of “the best pulp fiction” and sometimes “a good deal better” is still considered among the best comics ever made.'


Since I've repeatedly called the Journal elitist and still do, I'll challenge NST on his terminology.

The only thing demonstrated by the presence of EC Comics on the Journal canon-list is that their brand of elitism is not the same as that of NST.

Once again, elitism, whose root-word means "to choose," is defined by one online dictionary as:

1. The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.

2.

a. The sense of entitlement enjoyed by such a group or class.

b. Control, rule, or domination by such a group or class.
 

In literary criticism this "perceived superiority" manifests as a subject's devotion to a unitary set of standards, as opposed to a multivalent set of standards, which is the hallmark of pluralism.  The elitist measures all things by one ruler. However, instead of choosing to measure objects in terms of the side of the ruler with "feet," or or the side with "meters," the elitist lit-critic dominantly measures in terms of either "form" (Aristotle's "katholou") or "content" ("hupothenta.")

 

NST's quote above demonstrates that here he is a "form elitist."

 

The "form elitist" is concerned with whether all works meet the criterion of being excellent by virtue of their form.  Naive forms of narrative-- that is, narratives that simply tell an entertaining story, be they "pulp" or some related popular form-- cannot pass the gate at all.  Whether or not NST practices "form elitism" in every one of his essays I neither know nor care.  But in the quote above he makes it clear that the form he and others call "pulp fiction" cannot under any circumstances pass through the restricted gates that should keep out everything but NST's choice of "the best comics ever made."

 

Here's NST again, showing that the very qualities that many critics find engaging in EC war comics are the pulp-born qualities whose basic form excludes them from the vale of serious literature:

 

Once we recognize this, we must begin to wonder why some of the most esteemed critics in the field so often choose to place these comics over any other series of adult war comics. Do we find Joe Sacco’s truthful and engaging writings concerning Palestine and Yugoslavia hampered by his lack of exciting narrative technique and close-ups? Do our healthy appetites for dramatic, swanky portrayals of death betray our immature desires? This is the corrupting influence of the EC War line: artfulness and dexterity in place of truth; voyeurism without horror; content in the service of style instead of the reverse.

 

 

In contrast we have Gary Groth's essay defending the EC books from a dissenting review by Chris Mautner.  I have considered Groth's essay more fully here, but here I only intend to show that Groth's essay is also a demonstration of the opposite type of elitism, "content elitism."

 

Once more, here is Groth's working definition of literary values:

 

What constitutes “literary” values won’t be disposed of in this paragraph, but maybe we can agree that form and content have to be successfully married to create something of human relevance, depth, and substance, or otherwise offer the play of pure aesthetic pleasure.

 

Groth references a marriage of "form and content," but in comparison with NST's exclusionism, Groth is willing to cede some ground to the kinetic effects of the art elevating the content of the stories, whose style he deems less outstanding. 

 

The stories occasionally rose to the level of a decent noir movie — never at the level of, say, Night and the City, but closer to a programmer or B-movie such as Somewhere in the Night; Bill Mason likened one of Wood’s short stories in Came The Dawn And Other Stories to Storm Warning, a 1951 “preachy” starring Ronald Reagan and Ginger Rogers (and an almost unrecognizable Doris Day), which I thought was on target. Many of EC’s suspense stories were roughly coterminous with an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or one of TV’s 1950s dramatic anthologies like Four Star Playhouse (aired the same time as EC was publishing) — not literary by any means, but not too shabby, either.
 

I take it from this section that Groth allows for some merit in the content of a "preachy" like STORM WARNING.  Since the film is also not noteworthy in terms of forging a new artistic form, I conclude that what he finds substantial is the content, the subject matter.  Similarly, his defense of EC Comics hangs not on trumpeting its mastery of artistic form, but on placing it in a historical context with regard to the depiction of "straight drama"-- or, in some cases, "melodrama."

"Content elitism" is certainly a little more palatable than "form elitism," where a critic like NST can get by on standards even less rigorous than those Groth offers.  But in the end, both are more closely related than one finds in pluralist criticism, which can make its choices without privileging either form or content alone.

 

RACIAL NON-POLITICS IN FLEMING'S "LIVE AND LET DIE," PART 3

To paraphrase Kanye West, did Ian Fleming care about black people?

If one depends entirely on a reading of 1954's LIVE AND LET DIE, the only answer one can surmise is that he didn't particularly care about the sociopolitical struggles for the cause of "Negro emanicipation" (as Mister Big calls it).  Yet even that observation is qualified by the fact that LIVE is intended primarily as an escapist thriller.  Such a work, as I've argued in my other two Fleming essays, is not defined by its realistic political content.

When 007 first arrives in America to seek out contacts for his mission, he reflects upon the fact that all the American authorities will know him, so that he must sacrifice his spy's anonymity, making Bond feel "like a Negro whose shadow has been stolen by the witch-doctor."  This reflection foregrounds Fleming's need to convince his readers that the majority of black people are inherently superstitious, the better to make Mister Big's voodoo empire seem somewhat probable.  Given the amount of research Fleming did on contemporaneous American culture, I think it very unlikely that he seriously believed that most American blacks were regular practitioners of voodoo rituals, or even conversant with the basic concepts of the Haitian religion.  It's more believable that Fleming simply posited this misinformation as a "one gimme," by which he could unify Mister Big's spy network through a religious ideology.

Further, black characters are not the only ones who believe in voodoo.  The Caucasian Solitaire believes in her own psychic talents, and though the novel doesn't provide irrefutable proof of their reality, once or twice she does seem on target.  Even Bond, though not a believer, does not scoff at the immense persuasiveness of the religion-- and more, he does so without the usual recriminations.  Voodoo is exotic and fearsome, but Fleming doesn't characterize it as a creation of a "savage race," as so many pulp fiction works had done.

Admittedly Bond is not particularly sensitive to the marginalization of black people in America, though to be fair Bond tends not to be sensitive to anyone's suffering unless he witnesses it personally.  Still, a modern reader may take Bond's silence for agreement when he listens to two cops in Chapter 4 discuss what might be done about Mister Big.  One cop wants to "take [Big] down to the Tombs and give him the works."  The other denies this possibility, not out of any ethical objections but because he thinks Mister Big's influence is so pronounced that his mistreatment could bring about another race riot like the ones "in '35 and '43."

But here too, Fleming's main concern is probably to establish a level of verisimilitude appropriate to an action-thriller.  If the reader should question why local American cops can't rein in Mister Big themselves, this sequence provides the answer, and shows why a heroic outsider is needed-- one who ends up conquering the villain not on American soil, but in the vicinity of the British possession Jamaica. 

On a side-note, I find it interesting that Fleming relates in such casual fashion the idea that the New York cops routinely resort to inquisitorial torture, whether of blacks or any other suspects.  There's a slight possibility that Fleming might have read James Baldwin's GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, in which one of the minor black characters is subjected to such police brutality despite being completely innocent.  The timing is rather close-- MOUNTAIN's publication date is 1953, while that of LIVE is 1954.  Still, I don't think it's entirely coincidental that when Bond and Solitaire flee New York on a train bound for Florida, their porter is named "Baldwin."

Bond himself makes no untoward remarks about black people, American or otherwise, aside from those dealing with superstition, which as noted are rooted in the author's story necessities.  Responding to M's imputation that Big is the first black supercriminal, Bond says that it's his impression black Americans are "pretty law-abiding chaps on the whole."  When he and Leiter are captured in New York, he naturally fights the gangsters ferociously-- indeed, 007's hard-hitting escape from Big's goons is the hero's first spectacular action-exploit, given that he doesn't acquit himself all that well in CASINO ROYALE.  Yet Bond resorts to no racial calumnies.  The first American edition did eliminate one use of the n-word, though it appeared in the form of a place-name, not an epithet as such.  If 007 is not particularly sympathetic to the plight of black people, he doesn't practice racism himself.

It may be argued that Fleming was hedging his bets: crafting a novel that might appeal equally to bigots, who wanted to believe in a black uprising, and liberals, who wanted to imagine black people as fully capable in any walk of life-- be it medicine, science, or crime (though Mister Big insists that he is an "artist," not a mere criminal).  There's probably some truth in this.  However, even if Bond evinces no "white guilt" over the history of slavery, he's fully capable of understanding racial loyalty and the burdens of history.

In Chapter 20, Bond imagines how Captain Morgan might have arranged the burial-site for his treasure by commanding a group of black slaves to dig a cave, after which Morgan then killed all the slaves to keep his secret.  Then he thinks upon what might have happened when a modern black Jamaican discovered the treasure:

The Shark Bay fisherman who suddenly disappeared six months before must have one day found it rolled away by a storrn or by the tidal wave following a hurricane. Then he had found the treasure and had known he would need help to dispose of it. A white man would cheat him. Better go to the great negro gangster in Harlem and make the best terms he could. The gold belonged to the black men who had died to hide it. It should go back to the black men.

The disappearance of the treasure-finder may suggest that "the great negro gangster in Harlem" may have rewarded the fisherman with death, but the principle of race-loyalty remains important both in LIVE AND LET DIE and in other Fleming works. 

So to come back to the original question I posed, though I speculate that Fleming cared nothing about the sociopolitical success of black people-- for him, loyalty to his own race would have taken pride of place-- he felt that one ought to be able to care about "people of color" as much as anyone, on a one-on-one basis.  I haven't touched on Bond's friendly relationship with Quarrel, the black Cayman Islander who trains him in snorkeling and whose life Bond saves, for one might argue that this is a friendship of convenience.

However, to reach outside this novel briefly-- two or three years later, during which time Fleming wrote his fourth Bond book, DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER-- Bond again showed that he could relate to suffering on a one-on-one basis.  In that novel Bond, visiting a spa, is forced to stand helplessly by while two armed thugs punish a disobedient jockey by pouring hot mud in the man's eyes.  Yet Bond is strangely less moved by the white jockey's sufferings than the pistol-whipping injury one thug commits upon a spa-attendant-- an attendant who happens to be old, fat, and-- black.

RACIAL NON-POLITICS IN FLEMING'S "LIVE AND LET DIE," PART 2

At the end of Part 1 I wrote:

I assert that even though LIVE AND LET DIE does incarnate some genuine political content-- which would be its only defining content to a Marxist-- what we have here is a hero looking for a dragon to slay, one who reminds him of earlier dragons who wounded him and then disappeared. At base one should view this as a manifestation of an archetypal, rather than a political, unconscious. 

To be sure, there are no explicit mentions of dragons in LIVE AND LET DIE.  However, Mister Big, in addition to being foregrounded as a major nemesis for Bond—one who announces his advent to the reader by personally overseeing the first assassination attempt on the British agent— can be read as the mythic incarnation of a dragon. European dragon-myths usually picture dragons as either guarding vast treasures or requiring maidens to be sacrificed to them. Mister Big fulfills both roles.

I’ve mentioned earlier that Mister Big’s scheme is a more romanticized version of Le Chiffre’s mundane paymaster-duties.  Thanks to Mister Big's ties to the Caribbean, the villain has gained access to the fabulous treasure of Captain Morgan, which Big smuggles into America through working-class proxies.

This dragon, in fact, has both a treasure and a maiden.  After the failure of the assassination attempt—largely an attempt to scare Bond off—Bond and his FBI ally Felix Leiter are abducted by Big’s goons.  While Leiter is sequestered elsewhere, Bond meets not only Mister Big, but also Solitaire, Big's “psychic reader.”  Mister Big believes in her powers, though the novel never decisively shows more than circumstantial evidence of Solitaire’s psychic abilities.  As soon as Bond and Solitaire meet, electricity passes between them.  Mister Big senses the attraction, and punishes both of them.  First Big lashes Solitaire across the shoulders with a small whip.  Then he orders his goon Tee Hee to break Bond’s little finger.

Solitaire’s punishment carries a minor vibe of the black slave turning the tables on a former white master (Solitaire’s family were Caribbean colonials).  Bond’s injury is more complex.  First, the injury to a finger can be interpreted as an injury to the phallus, which certainly applies to the specific situation, where Bond is caught desiring another man’s possession.  It’s also interesting that the prior novel CASINO ROYALE dealt with the explicit torture of Bond’s genitals—though purely as an act of torture, not having anything to do with any sexual transgression.  As noted in Part 1, nowhere in LIVE does Bond recall either his torture by Le Chiffre or his betrayal by Vesper Lynd.  However, as if to substitute for these painful memories, he does obsess about the injury a SMERSH agent dealt to his hand.  Now, as if in mimicry, this Haitian-born SMERSH servant also visits violence on one of Bond’s hands.  Later, when Solitaire escapes Big and joins Bond on a train, there’s explicit mention of Bond’s inability to “perform” with the virgin girl due to his injured hand.

In contrast to Le Chiffre, who is just a cog in the Communist machine, Mister Big-- who becomes known to all by this cognomen because his three initials fortuitiously spell out "big"--is the heart of a formidable spy network.  This network is comprised of dozens-- perhaps hundreds-- of lower-class black workers who make excellent spies because of what Ralph Ellison might call their "invisibility." Fleming also stresses Big's imposing size and endows him with the uncanny-trope I've called "freakish flesh," because Big is repeatedly described as having "grey-black flesh" and a "football-shaped" head.  Big is repeatedly seen as a world-beater: one British agent remarks that he's glad the Americans are stuck with him.  

I've called Big a "supervillain" earlier, though this has nothing to do with the sort of super-science gimmicks one sees in the Bond movies.  Neither Big nor Bond display much in the way of gimmicks here-- Bond uses steel-toed shoes once or twice, while Big has a desk with a gun built into it.  Big’s claim to supervillain-hood is his ability to convince Negroes from New York to Jamaica that he Big is the voodoo god of death, Baron Samedi.  This also renders him an "uncanny" figure in terms of my trope “phantasmal figurations.”  Big also professes a quasi-Nietzschean philosophy, to make it clear that though he speaks of “black emancipation” once, he’s actually a “wolf”out to shear as many “sheep” as possible, regardless of their color.

But it’s the beasts of the sea, not the land, with which Big is most frequently associated.  Joseph Fontenrose's 1959 myth-study PYTHON exhaustively catalogues many instances in which dragon-like beings are associated with both the sea and with death.  With the exception of one specific Fleming-metaphor—which I’ll address shortly—there’s no way to determine whether or not Fleming made any conscious identification between the dragonish actions of his villain—both hoarding a treasure and guarding a maiden—and said villain’s closeness to the sea.

Most of those associations seem rooted in mundane realities.  Big’s treasure is a pirate treasure, originally culled by pirates from their raids on ocean-going ships.  In order to smuggle the illegal tender into the United States, Big builds up a business that engages in the shipping of rare fish—including some fish so poisonous that customs officials will not examine them closely.  When Bond and Leiter seek out Big’s concern, Leiter is caught alone and is fed to a shark in a tank—a grisly fate omitted from the film of LIVE AND LET DIE but recycled for a later Bond-film, LICENSE TO KILL.  Leiter survives the ordeal, but his suffering intensifies Bond's desire to bring Big down, far beyond the agent's comparatively mild and nearly business-like wish to discomfit SMERSH.  Bond investigates the Florida worm-and-bait factory Big uses for his smuggling activities and wins a literal shootout with the very henchman who maimed Leiter.  Bond makes sure that the biter gets bit by feeding the henchman to a shark in a tank, possibly the same one that tore up Leiter.

Later 007 pursues Big to Jamaica, and the agent takes a prolonged period to train himself in the ways of snorkeling with the help of a black Jamaican ally named Quarrel.  Bond’s underwater training allows him to plant a time bomb aboard Mister Big’s boat, but he himself is taken prisoner.  Big, having also re-captured the traitorous Solitaire, wishes to execute 007 and the woman together. But instead of performing the sort of voodoo sacrifice a reader might expect-- especially given how much detail Fleming devotes to this exotic religion-- Big decides that the best way to kill his enemies is to drag them to death behind his boat.  Thus the local sharks and barracuda-- creatures who have become emblems of Big's voodoo rites-- will finish them off.  However, before Bond and Solitaire meet their end as fish-food, 007's time bomb destroys the boat, freeing the heroine and his lady.  Big survives the explosion but meets the demise he meant for his nemesis; the figurative dragon of the sea is devoured by the real monsters of the vasty deep.

I mentioned one interesting metaphor that suggests that Fleming had some knowledge, conscious or not, of his mythic material.  The same concern that deals in rare fish also deals in supplies of “worms and bait,” and the business’ name is “Ouroboros.” Bond provides the only definition given of the name: he calls Ouroboros as “the Great Worm of mythology.”  Presumably Fleming felt he had to say “worm” rather than the dragon’s ancestor the snake, given that he was dealing with a worm-and-bait factory.

In point of fact, though, most references I've seen speak of Ouroboros not as a worm, but as a snake-- or a dragon!-- with its tail in its mouth, like so:

Fleming takes this mythic wordplay even further, for the name of the henchman who manages the worm-and-bait factory-- as well as the one who almost kills Leiter and duels with Bond-- is "the Robber," which Bond and Leiter realize is merely a distortion of the name "Ouroboros."

Fleming doesn't devote much detail to any of Mister Big's colorfully named henchmen.  The henchman called "Whisper," who functions in the novel as a communications expert, has his whispery voice explained as the result of having lost a lung to tuberculosis, but aside from that he gets no more biographical background than the aforementioned Tee Hee.  Therefore it's not unusual that Fleming doesn't give the reader any biographical background on "the Robber," and allows the agents' explanation of his nickname to go unchallenged. 

Still, I'd argue that in mythic terms the Robber is to Mister Big as one of Vishnu's avatars is to Vishnu: a lesser expression of the main 'deity." Though the Robber is an expert marksman, he goes out of his way to punish Leiter by consigning him to the teeth of a sea-beast, just as Big tries to execute Bond and Solitaire by feeding them to the Jamaican sea-life.  Both men, having used or tried to use ocean-creatures for their executioners, are later devoured by the same creatures. 

And finally, they would both seem to be products of racial admixture. The Robber is the only Big-henchman not explicitly identified as Negro, though Fleming doesn't supply the same racial breakdown on him that the author does with the main villain.  However, the Robber's skin-color is described as “yellowish-beige.” Perhaps Fleming only meant that the character was "sallow."  However, in a novel so strongly about race, it's equally possible that Fleming meant the Rober to be a “high yellow,” meaning either a light-skinned Negro or a hybrid.  It's possible that this detail was inserted purely for verisimilitude, for in 1954 Fleming may have believed, correctly or not, that a person of color could not have overseen the operation of a major concern like Big's warehouse-- unless that person of color were able to “pass” as white so as to avoid raising the eyebrows of local white authorities.  It's also interesting that both characters are described as mixes of colors: "yellowish-beige" for the Robber, "grey-black" for Mister Big.

  

        In Part 3 I'll discuss in part those aspects of Fleming's novel that some might see, rightly or wrongly, as entirely political, though even here, I intend to show that things are not always what they seem.

THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, PT. 3

The promised definition of "art" has to be a two-part one, given that the word "art" has two different meanings in this context-- said context being apart from art as "representations through drawing, sculpture, etc." and everything that flows from this representational activity.

The word can mean the totality of all forms of art, which I've stated can be subsumed by Jung's concept of play. 

It can also mean only High Art, which as I argued in Part 2, cannot be properly described as "play" alone.

I considered putting forth a longer definition with special reference to Bataille's "two types of economic consumption," lining up "the reality-oriented aspect of consumption, "production and acquisition" with the dynamic of work and "the desire to pointlessly but satisfyingly expend one's energies" with the dynamic of play.  But as I reread the BACK TO BATAILLE essay, the comparisons seem obvious to me given my further parallels between "the two types" and my Wheelwright-derived concepts of "assertorial gravity" and "assertorial levity."  By now, anyone who's read this blog with any attention ought to be able to draw the applicable parallels.

Therefore, the second definition is as follows:

"Art is play for work's sake."

While the first, more inclusive definition would be:

"Art is play for work's sake and play for play's sake."

To quote John Keats:

"that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"

THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, PT. 2

In this essay I provided a definition of "play" from Johann Huizinga:

Summing up the formal characteristic of play, we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings that tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress the difference from the common world by disguise or other means.

Elsewhere in the essay I didn't see the need to provide a definition of "work."  However, it now occurs to me that "work" does require some definition when one is speaking of how its dynamic appears in the criticism of art-- with special attention here to literature as such.

In a series of 2008 essays beginning with MERIT RAISED, I sought to show the differences between three Frye-derived critical methodologies, applying all three-- "ethical criticism," "aesthetic criticism," and "archetypal criticism"-- in a compare-and-contrast of two thematically related works.  Of these three methodologies, I've stated elsewhere that "ethical criticism" and "aesthetic criticism" are the dominant approaches in academia.  Certainly one can see both approaches implied in Gary Groth's statement of standards in his January 2013 essay, examined at length here:

What constitutes “literary” values won’t be disposed of in this paragraph, but maybe we can agree that form and content have to be successfully married to create something of human relevance, depth, and substance, or otherwise offer the play of pure aesthetic pleasure.

The phrase "play of pure aesthetic pleasure" can hardly be separated from the general concept of aesthetic criticism, however the speaker might define said "play."  As for Groth's values of "human relevance, depth, and substance," I think, based on his many jeremiads against authors he has regarded as less than moral, I believe that the vague terms "relevance" and "substance" are simply stand-ins for his take on ethical criticism. (And indeed, most of the evaluations he makes of EC comics in the January essay deal with ethical rather than aesthetic concerns.)  Historically Groth, like the majority of comics-critics, has dominantly pursued ethical criticism, while only a smattering of these critics, such as R.C. Harvey, tend to examine aesthetic matters. 

Despite Gary Groth's inappropriate use of the word "play," I believe that both of these disciplines are focused not on "play" but on "work." As evidence of the real attitude underlying both disciplines, here, I cite Leslie Fiedler, who in his 1982 work WHAT WAS LITERATURE took a contrarian attitude toward the priorities of academic literary criticism.  Here he describes the dominant attitude of the hidebound academic to "junk literature:"

"...such 'trash' is available to almost anyone, requiring neither subtlety of perception, 'education,' or anything resembling good old true-blue Protestant Hard Work."

Slightly later in the same chapter, Fiedler proposes to "drastically downgrade both ethics and aesthetics" in favor of what he terms "ecstatics"-- a concept that deserves a future essay here.  Putting that concept aside for now, it's enough to see that Fiedler conflates both ethical and aesthetic criticism with what Max Weber defined as the dominant value of American culture:"hard work," the basis of the Protestant Ethic.

Is this conflation accurate?

There can be little question that ethical criticism is concerned with having a utilitarian effect on culture and/or society. In Part 1 of this essay-series I asserted:

"Serious work," in my view, includes the idea of using art to instruct, to inform, to render judgments upon "the selfish, the foolish, and the cruel," to make readers aware of the old homily "actions have consequences"

Now, in that same essay I mentioned the "art for art's sake" movement as one that opposed any ethical orientation in literature, citing Ortega y Gasset as a representative of that opposition:

...preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper.

I further noted that the proponents of a purely aesthetic justicification of high art used an approach similar to my concept of "thematic escapism:"

It's ironic that the "art for art's sake" ethos, in claiming that that art's technical excellence exempts it from moral considerations, employs a basic logic not far from my exculpation of popular literature from the expectation that it must be moral.

That said, "basic logic" does not imply identity, for the proponents of aesthetic criticism are in their own way advocating a different form of "hard work," the work that a skillful author produces when he goes beyond the formulas of  what Clement Greenberg chose to call "kitsch," and succeeds in producing "ambitious art and literature."  Greenberg cites the "art for art's sake" movement:

Retiring from public altogether, the avant-garde poet or artist sought to maintain the high level of his art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute in which all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point. "Art for art's sake" and "pure poetry" appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague.

In the end, though Greenberg evinces the usual Marxist fustiness toward the  "ruling class," he still validates the avant-garde artist in terms of the "high order" of the work produced:

That avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating -- the fact itself -- calls for neither approval nor disapproval. It is true that this culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome. The lines quoted from Yeats referred to Byzantium, which is very close to Alexandria; and in a sense this imitation of imitating is a superior sort of Alexandrianism. But there is one most important difference: the avant-garde moves, while Alexandrianism stands still. And this, precisely, is what justifies the avant-garde's methods and makes them necessary. The necessity lies in the fact that by no other means is it possible today to create art and literature of a high order. To quarrel with necessity by throwing about terms like "formalism," "purism," "ivory tower" and so forth is either dull or dishonest.

This stress upon constant reinvention, rather than the rehashing of familiar motifs seen in  kitsch, implies "hard work" just as much as ethical criticism does.  The only difference is that whereas the ethical critic advocates the utilitarian "work" that art and literature can perform upon culture and society, the aesthetic critic advocates what might best be called "work for work's sake."

But neither species of work is covalent with "play," and as Fiedler observes, both are inadequate to describe the nature of art. 

More in a forthcoming final section.

THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, PT. 1

Every good idea and all creative work are the offspring of the imagination, and have their source in what one is pleased to call infantile fantasy.

Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." (Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, 1921, page 63.)

Is [Flaubert] right when he claims that we do not know what Shakespeare loved or hated?... the statement is most definitely mistaken if it means that the implied author of Shakespeare's plays is neutral toward all values... the implied Shakespeare is thoroughly engaged with life, and he does not conceal his judgment on the selfish, the foolish and the cruel." (Wayne C. Booth, THE RHETORIC OF FICTION, 1961, p. 76.)

As always, when one juxtaposes quotes from scholars, one should note differences in the specialties of the scholars quoted. 

Carl Jung was a psychologist, not a literary theorist.  His remarks on the foundational nature of "fantasy" and its "dynamic principle" of "play" is therefore not presented as a formal literary theory.  Nevertheless the concept expressed-- that fantasy is integral to the nature of human art-- is far from foreign to literary studies, and finds echoes in varying fashions in the theories of Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke and Rene Wellek-- not to mention the archaic opposition of "delight" and "instruction" posited by Horace.  John Dryden even went so far as to say that "poetry only instructs as it delights." 

Dryden's assertion will certainly resonate with most if not all readers.  When one wants pure instruction, one does not look toward art, narrative or otherwise, but to didactic works, most of which will be non-fiction, with occasional exceptions in the fiction category.  Thus Wayne Booth is careful to frame his theory around what he terms "non-didactic fiction."  I understand this to apply to all works works whose main purpose is to cause audieces to identify with either utterly fictional characters, or characters drawn from reality but made over to be in some way charming or "delightful."  Even the late Harvey Pekar, who sought to create art from the generally mundane circumstances of his life in AMERICAN SPLENDOR, chose events that he could make interesting, the "delight" in this case stemming from the attention to mimetic detail.

The "art for art's sake" movement of the 19th century-- which arguably still has its own resonances in modern work-- might be viewed through the Jungian lens as a condition of pure play, in which, as Booth argues, art is emancipated from any moral or utilitarian considerations.  Often this manifests in the attitude that the ideal creator of art should be above those considerations, that he should always refuse to render any judgment upon his characters.  Booth quotes Jose Ortega y Gasset:

"...preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper."

I agree with Jung that the principle of play is the basis of all forms of what humans choose to call "art."  At the same time, Booth is correct in stating that values, which are rooted in "human content," are a significant aspect of literature.  What does "human content" connote?

 Booth's RHETORIC OF FICTION takes issue with the notion of author immunity to moral and social considerations. The book demonstrates in great detail how many authors-- or at least, "implied authors," which signifies the public faces of those authors-- encode their values in their works.  This proves the case whether authors simply step back from their works, as we see in Shakespeare's plays, or whether they choose content that seemed to flout human morality, as with Booth's examples of Andre Gide and Robbe-Grillet. 

I'll advance the view that although Jung's "principle of play" is the foundation of all art, Jung's corresponding "principle of serious work" has been so long associated with human artforms that the two have become thoroughly imbricated.  "Serious work," in my view, includes the idea of using art to instruct, to inform, to render judgments upon "the selfish, the foolish, and the cruel," to make readers aware of the old homily "actions have consequences"-- a homily repeated by Howard Le Canard in the issue seen above.

It's ironic that the "art for art's sake" ethos, in claiming that that art's technical excellence exempts it from moral considerations, employs a basic logic not far from my exculpation of popular literature from the expectation that it must be moral.  In THEMATIC REALISM PART I I stated that works of "thematic escapism" were in effect "vacations from morals," while works of "thematic realism" are defined by being grounded in considerations of moral nature and/or behavior.  Fortunately, for me to say that the latter form is or has become "grounded" is not quite the same as saying that its intrinsic nature is realistic. 

As yet I haven't applied these matters of "play" and "work" to the subject of so-called High and Low Art, which has become integral to the modern understanding of art.  More on this in Part II.