A FINAL PARTING OTTO-SHOT

In HOLY NUMINOSITY -- PART 4 I said:

I seem to remember that at some point Otto mentions his awareness that one response to the numinous is a desire to become "godlike" oneself, but as yet I can't locate the passage. 
 

I would have expected that a doctrinaire Christian would have little regard for the idea of any mortal undergoing apotheosis, and when I scanned my collection of Otto-quotes, I found that this one came the closest to what I seemed to remember:

The daemonic-divine object may appear
to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same
time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm,
and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and
cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to
it, nay even to make it somehow his own.
 

Here the "potent charm" stems from the aspect of the numinous which Otto terms the *mysterium fascinans.*  I've argued in this series of essays that one might take the desire of a subject to "become like God" to be a natural extension of the numen-aspect, in contradistinction to the "fear and trembling" next to a force one cannot oppose.  In Part 4 I said:

This [desire to become godlike] would seem to be a natural extension of the idea of celebrating numinous "worth," however: not just feeling that Zeus is the mysterious creator of the universe, but that Heracles, begotten on a mortal by the Father of the Gods, can provide a conduit by which mortals can participate in that divine mystery.

On reviewing other relevant sections of THE IDEA OF THE HOLY, though, I see that the only way in which Otto can see a subject legitimately trying to become one with the divine is through the process of conferring praise upon the source of the numinous, not by any actual physical or mental transformation. 

Here's Otto taking snipe shots at the different types of mystics who identify themselves with the numinous power:

A characteristic common to all types of Mysticism is the
Identification, in different degrees of completeness, of the
personal self with the transcendent Reality. This identifi-
cation has a source of its own, with which we are not here
concerned, and springs from moments of religious experience
which would require separate treatment.
 

This has a peculiar vagueness to it.  Does Otto mean, by speaking of a "source of its own," to imply that the Devil Made Them Do It?  But it's not likely: the rest of the book doesn't show any passion for demon-hunting.  Going by a later section, it seems likely that Otto's putting the pretensions of mystics into the same category as the "weird" beliefs of superstitious natives: as religious practices that are explained in part by anthropological findings, in part by Otto's conviction that the religious beliefs have not been "developed" enough:

...there is a series
of strange proceedings which are constantly attracting greater
and greater attention, and in which it is claimed that we may
recognize, besides mere religion in general, the particular roots
of Mysticism. I refer to those numerous curious modes of
behaviour and fantastic forms of mediation, by means of
which the primitive religious man attempts to master the
mysterious , and to fill himself and even to identify himself
with it. These modes of behaviour fall apart into two
classes. On the one hand the magical identification of the
self with the numen proceeds by means of various transactions,
at once magical and devotional in character by formula, ordination,
adjuration, consecration, exorcism, &c. : on the other hand
are the shamanistic ways of procedure, possession, indwelling,
self-imbuement with the numen in exaltation and ecstasy. All
these have, indeed, their starting-points simply in magic, and
their intention at first was certainly simply to appropriate the
prodigious force of the numen for the natural ends of man.
 

Though Otto turns up his nose at both of these "strange proceedings," he's roughly on track in making a valid distinction between the pratice of the primitive magician, who seeks to compel the gods or to assimilate their powers through "formula, ordination, etc.," and the primitive "shaman," who seeks to commune with the numinous through "exaltation and ecstacy."  What Otto fails to appreciate, of course, is that within all species of Christian worship one finds just as many appeals to the "numen of Christianity" for "the natural ends" of its worshippers.  One can find a few Christian credos that have attempted to place an insuperable wall between Deity and the needs of worshippers, but in a statistical sense these must be judged as "rare birds" that do not represent the prevalent norms of Christian worship.

To put a final point on the matter, Otto is so opposed to the idea of impinging on the numinous source that he similarly conflates the systematic approach of the medieval Scholastics with he views as a similar "rationalization" in archaic myth:

Representations of spirits and similar conceptions
are rather one and all early modes of rationalizing
a precedent experience, to which they are subsidiary. They
are attempts in some way or other, it little matters how, to guess
the riddle it propounds, and their effect is at the same time
always to weaken and deaden the experience itself. They are
the source from which springs, not religion, but the rationalization
of religion, which often ends by constructing such a
massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of
interpretation, that the mystery is frankly excluded. Both
imaginative Myth, when developed into a system, and intel-
lectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion,
are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious
experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat
as to be finally eliminated altogether.

I submit that Otto's real objection is to any system that does not validate the experience of the numinous as it is asserted by the "higher religions."  There is, to be sure, an element of the rational in the formation of archaic myths, as I argued here, but Otto is simply mistaken as to how much the rational elements exclude the non-rational.  Building on Jung's infinitely more latitudinarian understanding of the religious consciousness, I wrote in this essay:

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky. However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- became for the primitive sacred clues to the nature of divine power. The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated. For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.
 

Nevertheless, I maintain that though Rudolf Otto may have looked askance at the claims of magicians and shamans, their concepts of assimilating the numinous are archetypally identical with Otto's description of the *mysterium fascinans,* even though Otto himself saw the proper response as awestruck praise of the numen. 

Further, what the magician/shaman seeks from a numen-source in his theoretical reality is archetypally identical with what the typical subject of a reading-or-viewing "audience" desires from his experience of a fictional narrative: an identification with (1) various levels of meaning from the simple to the complex (comparable to the experience of the "combinatory-sublime") and/or with (2) various levels of dynamicity from the paltry to the exceptional (comparable to the experience of the "dynamic-sublime.") 

I should say that nothing in Otto's book supports my own personal deduction of "sympathetic affects" that I outlined in TRIPLE THE TREMENDUM AND THE FASCINANS.  But to be sure, though Otto does use all three of the terms that appeared in Lewis' PROBLEM OF PAIN essay, he never brings them into the same schema that Lewis uses in that essay.  Thus my formulation of three "sympathetic affects"-- "admiration" as a parallel to "fear," "fascination" as a parallel to "dread," and "ecstasis" as a parallel to "awe"-- is more properly a response to Lewis than to Otto.  But in my final anslysis both scholars' formulations suffer due to a mutual overemphasis of the antipathetic affects.

 

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING DYNAMICALLY DIFFERENT

Kelly Thompson's stalking that damn male gaze again.


I'm now anxiously awaiting another set of redesigns in line with one of Kelly Thompson's documented pet peeves: the idea that hot villainesses pander to the male gaze.  This will undoubtedly result in some masterful re-imaginings.

SEE-- The Viper, with her brand-new harelip and bald spot!

SEE-- The Norn Queen, with her smart new needle-nose and jutting chin!

SEE-- Granny Goodness and Ugly Meg, with their...
...uh...

...I know there has to be some change, but I can't...

Ah yes!  With one brand-new nose-wart apiece!

Yes, these are great times for feminism, comics-fans!

SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PART 3

Though it may not be evident from the argument in Part 2, I am oriented on finding a rapprochement between my earlier statements, to the effect that "mythicity" and what I now call "dynamic sublimity" were independent of the phenomenality involved, and my current statement here, where I've said that the nature of the phenomenality does make a difference to the "combinatory sublime."

My solution, then, is that the earlier statements were not adequately worked out with regard to the "narrative value-significant value" schism.

Both "mythicity" and "dynamicity," to the extent that they have particular functions in making a narrative work, comprise "narrative values."

The sublime affects associated with them, "the combinatory sublime" and the "dynamic sublime," are inevitably "significant values."

Nevertheless, there is a slight skewing in purpose between each of the two interrelated categories.

I conjure forth once more the three pop-fiction films I used to illustrate "violent sublimity," aka "dynamic sublimity."

Within each of these worlds, the phenomenality makes no difference to the narrative function of the "focal presence" involved.  As far as the film DIRTY HARRY is concerned, there is no being more powerful than Harry Callahan, though some of his foes, particularly Scorpio, are capable of challenging the hero.  The same holds true for Lee and his foe Han in ENTER THE DRAGON, and for Luke Skywalker and his opponent Darth Vader in the first three STAR WARS films. 

These diegetic dynamicities inevitably call forth significant values, of course.  But viewers do not often think of the "dancers" of violent conflict-- the presences of the narrative-- as being separate from the energy of their "dance," which is the significant value experienced by those who watch.  Thus the narrative value of *dynamicity* often takes precedence over the significant value of the *dynamic sublime* evoked by it.

Mythicity, however, is much more referential in nature.  As soon as one descries the presence of symbolic discourse, one tends to think less of its function within the story and more about what it means to the person experiencing the story.  Say, for sake of argument, that the symbolic discourse in all three of the cited films is equally complex.

DIRTY HARRY-- symbolizes the psychology of the (fictional) Old West, reborn in a modern urban environment
ENTER THE DRAGON-- symbolizes the psychology of the peerless martial artist, whose power lies not only in physical strength but also in his ability to "see" the weaknesses of his enemies
STAR WARS-- symbolizes the psychology of the archetypal orphan-hero, seeking to prove himself in a cruel world and finding his strength in opposition to a father (and a grandfather) archetype

On the level of the narrative value, all of these myth-functions are equal.  HOWEVER-- the potential of myth-combination is inevitably limited in Dirty Harry's world, since a naturalistic world always values verisimilitude over myth's improbabilities.  Works in an uncanny world have more leeway to be improbable, and thus greater combinatory power-- while marvelous works, able to present various levels of "the impossible," can present more combinations of elements than either.  Thus it seems demonstrable that because mythic/symbolic aspects are so highly referential in nature, this principle skews more toward the significant value of the "combinatory sublime," toward calling attention to the difference between the dancers and the dance.

On a somewhat conclusive note, I probably will not attempt to introduce the term "dynamic-sublime" into my tags.  Since as I explained in Part 1, almost all of my references to "sublimity" have been predicated on the Kantian concept of might.  So for the future I will continue to use "sublimity" as a tag to denote only "dynamic sublimity."

SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PART 2

Usually there's not over a year's time between a "Part 1" and a "Part 2" in my postings. This one was brought on, however, by my recent elaboration of the concept of the combinatory-sublime and its possible effect on my earlier statements on the sublime affect.

The first SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY was primarily oriented on making a distinction between the possible validation of each of these literary qualities.  I suggested that the manifestation of the sublime was dependent to some degree on public reception:

I am toying with-- though not completely committed to-- the idea that the sublime affect can be perceived best through works that have proved popular with a majority of their audience, be it a "high-art" or "low-art" audience. With works that have not proved popular with some audience at some time, it's harder to divine this specific affect.

On the other hand, mythicity, I asserted, was not dependent on popular acclaim, but on a critic's ability to reconstruct a symbolic discourse within a given narrative:

This [status of the literary sublime] is in strong contradistinction with [that of] the mythic, which... is properly a discourse rather than an affect...

In this essay I'll be revising this distinction somewhat, by invoking Northrop Frye's dichotomy of "narrative values" and "significant values."  I summed up the dichotomy in this essay:

To blend a foursome of terms derived from disparate Frye essays, narrative values are those that are “centripetal,” applying to values within the structure of the narrative; the values that make the narrative work. Significant values are“centrifugal,” in that they apply to the values that make it possible for audiences to relate to the actions of the characters within the narrative structure.

The dichotomy proposed in the March 2012 essay borders on constituting "mythicity" as a "narrative value" alone and "sublimity" as a "significant value" alone.  This does not stand now that I've articulated two aspects of sublimity-- one of which, the "combinatory-sublime," is implicated in the condition of "mythicity," while the other, the "dynamically sublime," is implicated in the condition of *dynamicity.*  Further, both "mythicity" and "dynamicity" must be seen as having both narrative and significant values, with the sublimity each generates being the primary significant value.  To word it in a schematic sense:


MYTHICITY
is to
THE COMBINATORY-SUBLIME
as
DYNAMICITY
is to
THE DYNAMICALLY SUBLIME

I will illustrate all four principles by drawing on one passage from one of the foremonst literary myths, Herman Melville's MOBY DICK:

"Hark ye yet again – the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me."-- Chapter 36.

Beginning with the principle of mythicity:

Narratively at this point in the novel, Melville chooses to introduce the full extent of Ahab's obsession, which goes beyond personal revenge and becomes a credo of protest against the inscrutable reality behind all of the masks.  This credo is a "narrative value" in that it provides Ahab with a fanatical motivation, making it probable that he will continue his quest until its very bitter end. 

At the same time, Melville knows that his "ideal reader" should experience a fascination with Ahab's demonic philosophy, beyond its function in the story proper.  This philosophy goes beyond its statement in this one passage, including many other mythic manifestations, not least being Ahab's baptism of the whale-spears "in the name of the devil" in Chapter 113.  Since Ahab's belief-system must appear to be coherent, no matter how improbable it may seem, Melville constantly builds that belief-system out of a dizzying (and hence potentially sublime) combination of elements: Zoroastrian fire-worship, the Old Testament Leviathan-myths, the Greek Zodiac, and many other myth-elements besides.  This is the "significant value" of Ahab's credo in every instance of the novel where Ahab holds forth on it.


At the same, Ahab is not some airy scholar spinning webs of mythological comparison; he is an experienced whale-hunter who kills other beasts of Moby Dick's species during the novel and renders them down into their constituent parts. By this speech and others like it, he makes himself a fit opponent for Moby Dick, a creature typified by "outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it."  In terms of narrative values, Ahab conjures forth this vision of the White Whale's dynamicity in order to suggest the magnitude of the task he sets himself by attempting the beast's death.  The degree of Ahab's passion, together with his real experience as a whale-hunter, suggests the possibility that he may be able to do what he intends.  Without the possibility that Moby Dick may lose the climactic conflict, the novel would lack the tragic power Melville intends.

At the same time all of Ahab's pronouncements about the whale-- that it may be an "agent" of the "inscrutable thing" behind the masks, that fighting it is comparable to "striking the sun"-- function to imbue the White Whale with a sublime dynamicity that goes beyond the mere power of an ordinary whale; goes beyond the domain of natural fear and into the realm of "daemonic dread," to quote Rudolf Otto.  This dread of a power beyond the natural gives both Moby Dick and his pursuer the significant value of the dynamically sublime.

Having provided this schematic analysis, showing how each principle can have either a narrative or subjective value, I'll proceed in Part 3 to explain how each of them tends more toward one value than the other.

TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I -- PART 5

“The fantastic in literature doesn’t exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle.”-- Lars Gustaffson, cited in Franz Rottensteiner's THE FANTASY BOOK.

Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss. Humility is enough. And there is (especially for the humble) Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle. That kind of “fantasy” most people would allow to be wholesome enough; and it can never lack for material. But it has, I think, only a limited power; for the reason that recovery of freshness of vision is its only virtue. The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realize that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits; but it cannot do more than that: act as a time-telescope focused on one spot. Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds. The gems all turn into flowers or flames, and you will be warned that all you had (or knew) was dangerous and potent, not really effectively chained, free and wild; no more yours than they were you.-- Tolkien, ON FAIRY-STORIES.

There are fictional works that come as close to pure verisimilitude (as defined by Frye here) as is humanly possible, and many writers follow Zola's dictum that the best fiction is that which adheres to observed reality.  Still, fidelity to nature can be in the eye of the beholder. When I read GERMINAL, I found it incredible that Zola's brutish peasants apparently subsisted on nearly no food at all.  This would be, in the terms I introduced in the above essay, an "incoherent improbability."

In all naturalistic works, both improbability and impossibility can only be sources of incoherence, even in works from a period less demanding than that of Zola's era.  At the climax of THE WINTER'S TALE, the audience is asked to believe that Queen Hermoine, supposedly dead for the last sixteen years,can fool her husband Leontes into thinking she is a statue of herself simply by standing very still. And Leontes seems to be convinced, though he does express curiosity that the sculptor has made Hermoine look the same age she would be in the present, rather than the age she was at her "death."  Some audience-members might jeer at the improbability, while others might cheer.  But in neither case has the improbability served any function comparable to the one Lars Gustaffson assigns to "the fantastic:" that of forming a "challenge to reason" itself.

 This "challenge" is the foremost element which gives rise to the affect of "strangeness" in a fictional work, irrespective of whether or not the work abides by the rules of causality (at least on the "cognitive" level) or thwarts those rules.  In works like GERMINAL and WINTER'S TALE, the "incoherent improbability" cannot challenge causality either in its cognitive or affective senses.  The audience simply passes over these moments of improbability like a fleet of trucks trundling over low speed-bumps.  Such moments have no positive value in themselves: they're nothing but minor instances of "the atypical," instantly subsumed by the straight road of naturalistic typicality.  Because naturalistic works seek to be "iso-real," to imitate consensual reality, their ability to produce the affect of sublimity-- of feeling as if the boundaries of experience have been dizzyingly extended-- is necessarily, as Tolkien observes in the above quote, "only a limited power."

In Tzvetan Todorov's formulation of his Freud-influenced version of "the uncanny" in THE FANTASTIC, a work that even takes an ambivalent stance toward the marvelous has all but capitulated to the forces of causality and reason:

“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.”

What Todorov fails to comprehend here is that the "quite rational explanations" in USHER do not dispel the sense of something bizarre taking place, as is seen when the "statue" in WINTER'S TALE seems, ever so briefly, to have come to life.  The slight nods to possible rational explanations in USHER do not the banish the strangeness of the House, with its face-like facade, its doomed occupants and its cataclysmic descent into the tarn.  This is the common element of all of my ten uncanny-tropes.  In each case the uncanny-author plays a game that resembles the game of the advocate of naturalism, in that he does not violate causality.  But he does so not to reify "the real," as Todorov suggests.  He does so to create a "supra-real world," one in which there is a far greater potential for combinatory sublimity than in any naturalistic work. 

I suspect that if any current comics-critics read the above statement, their collective panties would become as twisted as tourniquets.  "How dare you say," they might protest, "say that any of the works you cite as "uncanny" are in any way "better" than any naturalistic work!  Even if THE WINTER'S TALE is not the greatest Shakespeare, it's still greater in every way than all those things you list in TEN DYNAMIC DAEMONS, except maybe the approved canonical literary works by Carroll, Hugo and Melville."  (Current comics-scholars tend to suck on the tits of High Literature without about as much comprehension of the juice of their sustenance than a swaddling infant has.)

Of course, what I've stated is that the potential is always greater, not that every work in the "uncanny" category fulfills that potential.  I've experienced a considerable number of "Lone Ranger" comics and television shows, but with very few exceptions the franchise has only rarely fulfilled the potential of the "supra-real sublime."  However, I have no scruples against asserting that a pop-fiction work like Sax Rohmer's MYSTERY OF FU-MANCHU does tap into a higher level of combinatory power.  Whether or not it's as great or greater than the sublimity-quotient of Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS scarcely matters to me.  Once a work partakes of  the uncanny phenomenality, that work is dealing with far more than mere "freshness of vision."  Such works are "coherent improbabilities," in which the source of the "strangeness"-- be it a weird house or a weird society, a wildly improbable hero or criminal-- circumvents the causal reality in which that element exists.  I don't know if this will be any easier to understand that my having said that "affectivity exceeds causality," though.

Obviously the "marvelous" phenomenality is one where both the cognitive and affective worlds of the work break with consensual reality, so that the combinatory sublimity here is of an "anti-real" nature.  Sometimes the marvelous phenomenon is relatively minor in its combinatory power: I recently reviewed a 1940 B-horror film called THE APE, in which the only marvelous element was a mad doctor's rather grotesque cure for polio.  But the potential of "anti-real" worlds for combinatory power is always greater than the execution, as Tolkien analyzes in his hypothetical example of a fiction about a "green sun:"

To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

I've stated before that the three phenomalities are absolutely equal in terms of their potential for mythicity-- defined as the complexity of symbolic discourse-- and in terms of their potential for what I now define as "dynamic sublimity."  But I'm reversing myself on the first of these. The sublimity of combinatory power is not one where equality reigns.  The marvelous possesses the greatest power of this kind, followed by the uncanny, with the naturalistic possessing nothing more than the power to  recover "the freshness of vision."

TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I -- PART 4

At the conclusion of Part 3 I said:

...the further a given work ventures into the domains of the metaphenomenal, the greater its capacity for "endless combinations in living shapes that move from mind to mind."

To put it another way within my terminological terrain, the capacity for "endless combinations"-- what I call the "combinatory-sublime"-- is at its lowest ebb in all works that possess a naturalistic phenomenality. This capacity stands independent of any other standards of merit that might separate, say, some low-rent romance-melodrama from Shakespeare's HENRY IV-- which happens to be the play from which Edmund Burke derives one of his definitions of the sublime: "richness and profusion of images."

In my early writings on the subject of sublimity, I tended to try to see this image-profusion as simply one of many manifestations of a general idea of the sublime, one which depended on a quality of being "overwhelming."  As I noted earlier, since I was primarily influenced by Kant's writings on the "dynamically sublime," at times I attempted to subsume all aspects of "infinitude" under the rubric of "might," as I did in the 2012 essay SUBLIMELY SUPER. Analyzing the story "Superman's Return to Krypton" from SUPERMAN #141 (1960>


Within my then-current formulation of "the sublime," I reprinted this panel:

And in a subsequent essay, I wrote of this scene:

...the scene in which Superman and Lyla culminate their romance (in terms of Silver Age kid-comics, at least) displays a propensity for the sublime, using churning magma and a vaulting rainbow as objective correlatives for the unleashed passion. This indirect depiction of physical passion not only displays Burke's "profusion of images," but also explicitly (thanks to Siegel's caption) associates their passion with might:

"But the flames of the planet are like cold glaciers compared to the mighty love blazing between Superman of Earth and Lyla Lerrol of Krypton!"

 I don't withdraw that insight re: "might."  However, I will note that the scene could be equally sublime-- in a combinatory sense-- if it took place against any other strange Kryptonian background, such as the "Living Jewel Mountains" or "the Scarlet Jungle." 

The Krypton of the "Silver Age" period of Superman comic books is, in contrast to the barely described setting seen in Jerry Siegel's first Superman stories, portrayed as a cornucopia of wonders, many of which are pleasing re-combinations of phenomena known to us on Earth, such as J.R.R. Tolkien described in the essay "On Fairy Stories:"

Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough—though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise.  To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.

Tolkien is of course not concerned with any formulations about "the sublime" here, but he does speak of an affect that he calls "enchantment."

Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World.

Tolkien probably would not have cared to see this quality of "enchantment" as a subspecies of what I call "strangeness," which appears not only in the sort of fantasy Tolkien means, but in all manner of "marvelous" and "uncanny" metaphenomenal works.

In Part 5 I will deal more fully with the combinatory capacity as it occurs in both phenomenalities.

TEN DYNAMIC DAEMONS

Having put forth the idea of "coherent improbabilities" here, it occured to me that though I've given examples of particular tropes or literary works that fit this category, characters are probably more accessible as exemplars.  Thus here are ten characters to match each of the ten tropes with which I've illustrated the manifestation of the "uncanny" phenomenality.

In all but one case, I chose an exemplar who appeared during the period that gave birth to the phenomenon of popular fiction, though a few of my choices come from canonical literary works.

ASTOUNDING ANIMALS-- Moby Dick, from Herman Melville's MOBY DICK.  Melville's book technically remains within the causal realm in a cognitive sense-- that is, the colossal cetacean is constantly compared with godlike beings, but there's no evidence that he's anything but a formidable animal.  But the Great White Whale, like his obsessed co-star Ahab, dwell in a world that constantly pushes into the metaphenomenal in a purely affective sense.

BIZARRE CRIMES-- Juliette, from the novel of the same name by the Marquis deSade. Sade is, in his way, something of an apostle of naturalism to the extent that he constantly denies the ideas of divinity.  Nevertheless, for Sade as for Goethe the motto is, "In the Beginning was the Act!"  But for Sade the act is not creation, but the obsessive need to find new and more exotic ways to destroy human beings-- a need which seems embodied most strongly in the character of Juliette, the blood-hungry sister of the innocent Justine.

DELIRIOUS DREAMS AND FALLACIOUS FIGMENTS-- Alice, from Lewis Carroll's two books starring that prodigious dreamer.  Within this trope, even though causality seems to win the game when Alice wakes from her descent into meaningful nonsense, it's the dreams that become more real to us than the reality.

ENTHRALLING HYPNOTISM AND ILLUSIONISM-- Svengali, from the 1894 TRILBY by George DuMaurier.  As yet I haven't reviewed any of the films starring literature's most famous
hypnotist, though most moderns know the Svengali of the movies if they know him at all.  As noted elsewhere, both "hypnotism" and "illusionism" have the effect of waking persons that dreams do upon the dreamer; making the impossible and improbable become real for the subjects.

EXOTIC LANDS AND CUSTOMS-- Allen Quatermain, from H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel KING SOLOMON'S MINES.  The novel is famous for launching the genre of the "Lost World story," in which an archaic civilization has managed to survive in some remote corner of the world without contact with the onrush of history.  I have not read any of the "Allen" books aside from the one in which Haggard encountered Haggard's other great character, "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed," but have gained the impression that most of the other Allen books possess an uncanny phenomenality, rather than a marvelous or naturalistic one.

FREAKISH FLESH-- Quasimodo,from Victor Hugo's 1831.  Though Hugo's original novel hews closer to the genre of the "historical novel" than that of horror, the image of the hunchback-- be it Quasimodo's or that of some lesser epigone-- has become a familiar icon of horror.  In contrast to a naturalistic exhibition of a "freak of nature," as one sees in the 1980 David Lynch film THE ELEPHANT MAN, Quasimodo's physical freakishness in the novel is constantly tied to the dark nature of humankind as a whole.

OUTRE OUTFITS, SKILLS, AND DEVICES-- These three aspects do not always occur together in a given character, though I group them together because weapons and costumes, as much as a character's physical skills, are extensions of his persona as an uncanny spectre.  One character who combines all three in significant fashion is The Lone Ranger, spawned by a 1933 radio series.  Although the hero moves through a largely naturalistic world in most of his incarnations, the very notion of an Old West champion able to dispense justice despite wearing a bandit's mask and firing silver bullets with flawless accuracy, is a figure who resides only in an uncanny domain.

PERILOUS PSYCHOS-- Norman Bates, from Robert Bloch's 1959 novel PSYCHO.  Though Jack the Ripper is a more famous psycho-killer, he's disallowed here by virtue of being a real character, however mysterious.  The Norman birthed by Bloch and midwifed by Hitchcock seems to have the fictional psycho who, directly or indirectly, spawned the greatest number of imitators.  Some of these may be considered merely naturalistic versions of the original, as with the current BATES MOTEL teleseries.  But an uncanny psycho is always discernible by his ability to invoke more "dread" than simple physical "fear."

 PHANTASMAL FIGURATIONS-- The Phantom of the Opera, from Gaston Leroux's 1909 serial novel of that name.  Leroux also employs the trope "freakish flesh" for this famed monstrous presence, but the trope that most informs the novel is the character's ability to lurk beneath the Paris Opera House, pretending to be "the Opera Ghost."  Regardless as to whether readers believed or did not believe in the existence of this particular ghost at the outset, the Phantom remains far more than the sum of his impostures.

WEIRD SOCIETIES AND FAMILIES-- Fu Manchu, first appearing in Sax Rohmer's 1913 MYSTERY OF FU-MANCHU.  Admittedly, even in that first novel, Fu Manchu displayed more "marvelous" characteristics than any of the other characters cited here, in that he often controlled assorted weapons of "mad science." At base, though, Fu Manchu's greatest appeal to readers was one that did not depend on the marvelous elements of the series: his status as a sort of "Alexander the Great" of Oriental Evil, in that his "Si-Fan" organization embraced a wildly diverse group of Asian fiends-- Indian thuggee, Burmese dacoits, the Sea-Dyaks of Borneo, and so on.  This vast conspiracy by itself stands as one of the period's best evocations of a "weird society" that goes beyond the bounds of a mere criminal organization, and sometimes seems more like a "Pandemonium" presided over by the Satanic genius.