FIEDLER NABBED

I've recently finished THE DEVIL GETS HIS DUE, a 2008 collection of largely un-anthologized essays by Leslie Fiedler, an academic critic I've cited occasionally on this blog.  Most of the essays repeat opinions and insights that will be familiar from his earlier writings, but my chosen subject is the misprision of Fiedler's work that appears in an introduction written by one Samuele Pardini.

In this introduction Pardini cites Umberto Eco-- whose views on comics I found problematic here-- as an authority to "prove" that the only reason Fiedler ever asserted an aesthetic equivalence between "art" and "junk" was because he Fiedler was being "criticially avant-garde." Eco claims that Fiedler did not really believe that there could be aesthetic equality between the two, that he simply wanted "to break down the barrier that has been erected between art and enjoyability." Pardini enthusiastically echoes this sentiment. It somehow escapes him to prove his case by citing even a single word that Fiedler-- who passed away in 2003-- wrote about popular art or culture, not even from the essays included in DEVIL, which include meditations on the RAMBO film-series and the cinematic persona of Jerry Lewis.

While it's not impossible that Fiedler may have made some statement along these lines-- I haven't read everything the man ever wrote-- it's clear to me that Eco and Pardini are "nabbing" Leslie Fiedler in service of their own elitism. In Fiedler's 1982 work WHAT WAS LITERATURE, he decisively turned his back on the elitism of academia, though without, to my knowledge, ever stating that "art" and "junk" were works in the same mode. In this essay I boiled down Fiedler's 1982 attitude toward the "ecstatic" qualities that the two forms of communication hold in common:

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.

I never got around to writing another essay on Fiedler's concept of "ecstatics," partly because he gives one so little to go on.  It's evident from WHAT WAS LITERATURE that Fiedler could derive some profound pleasure from both Faulkner's SANCTUARY and Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND, even knowing that the latter work could not compared with the former on either ethical or aesthetic grounds. Regrettably, Fiedler never formulated a "poetics of ecstacy."

Pardini notes that Fiedler believed in trying to keep his critical essays straightforward and free of critical jargon. This style made Fiedler one of the most eminently readable literary critics of the 20th century. The down side of this strategy, however, was although he could point the way to a deeper understanding of the mythopoeic roots shared by canonical art and popular culture, Fiedler's anti-jargon posture meant that he could not write in depth about these roots. His magisterial LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL (1960) touches on matters of popular art at times, but only as a means of outlining the history of influences upon the American literary canon.  It's clear that he's aware that there are significant figures in that canon whose significance cannot be explained by ethics or aesthetics, and even in the DEVIL collection he continues to expatiate on the "problem of the bad good writer" as represented by Fenimore Cooper. However, perhaps because his earliest academic outlook was staunchly elitist, Fiedler was never able to grapple with the issues of what might called "the good bad writer," which might in theory take in both his beloved Margaret Mitchell and Jack Kirby, whom Fiedler confused with Stan Lee in a 1970s essay about Kirby's "New Gods" comics.

I realize that my own love of jargon is one major aspect of this blog that makes it less than hugely popular. Still, in essays like the recent FOUR BY FOUR, I hope to provide a deeper explication of the sort of "ecstatics" I believe Leslie Fiedler was responding to. At the very least, even if he did not wish to invest very deeply in abstract arguments, his openness to the charms of the popular puts him far ahead of the fatuous positions taken by both Umberto Eco and Samuele Pardini.

FOUR BY FOUR

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.-- JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE.

I regard sensation as conscious, and intuition as unconscious, perception. For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling as independent functions are developed, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation (and equally, of course from intuition as the necessary counterpart of sensation).-- Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.

Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function,... realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery....The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.... The third function is the sociological one – supporting and validating a certain social order.... It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date.... But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to – and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.-- Campbell, THE POWER OF MYTH.

It's long been of interest to me that both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell emphasized a quaternity of functions, though to very different ends.

Jung's four functions are quasi-Kantian deductions about the nature of consciousness, which I consider identical to the "organizing power" of archetypal potentiality.  One might say that through the lens of these functions one views mythical representations from "the inside out."

Campbell's, however, belong to the world of the actual than of the potential. Myths leave "clues" about the "ions and molecules" that make up human experience, and from which the structures of mythical representation are assembled. Through the lens of these functions one views these representations from the "outside in."

For the majority of my essays on both THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE and NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!, I have somewhat privileged Campbell's functions in terms of analyzing the mythical representations found in both canonical and popular fiction. That's because Campbell's functions deal with functions of information-- forms he earlier termed "metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological"-- rather than pure states of consciousness.  I might attempt to use Jung's function-terms to assert that Dave Sim's cerebral CEREBUS privileges the function of "thinking" more than any other, and that Frank Miller's SIN CITY privileges the function of "sensation." But though it's easy to make such an assertion, it's less easy to demonstrate its truth through textual examples.

In contrast, if I wish to state that CEREBUS' psychological content is more complex than that of SIN CITY, I could examine both works in term of some common psychologically-informed archetype and sort out which of them provided more elaborations of the archetype.

Still, there is value in viewing Jung's functions of consciousness as potentialities of a fourfold "axial system," to evoke Jung's own metaphor.  I have not attempted to elucidate this system in detail, but I do view Jung's functions as expressing the fourfold ways in which relationships between facets of consciousness are implemented; to wit:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.

The THEMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.


In addition to calling attention to the polysemic nature of the human mind's "organizing powers," all four Jung-functions will also prove signficant to my continuing description of that form of sublimity I term "the combinatory-sublime," which in turn may provide a holistic concept of the nature of creativity.

 

 

TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME PT. 2

In Part 1 I asserted that "most comics-critics are of the view that the realm of the reasonable and agreeable is the one to which all other forms of transcendence should be reduced." The proof of this particular pudding can be best observed in the critical dialogue that came about in response to Noah Berlatsky's essay SUPERHEROES ARE ABOUT FASCISM, which I analyzed in a series of essays on the nature of violence, real and fictional, beginning here. Remembering that what I call "reasonable and agreeable" is also known as Huxley's "horizontal self-transcendence," I'll quickly repeat one of Huxley's examples of this form of reasonable transcendence:

most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. 

For Berlatsky and most of his respondents, the trope of "the hero battling evil" is entirely reducible to sociological factors. If the hero aims to defend the status quo, this is "bad;" if the hero seeks to change it on some level-- as with Wonder Woman's campaign to reform male-dominated society even while beating back Nazis-- then this is "good." In the course of the thread I mentioned Marvel's Doctor Strange as an example of a world-saving hero whose adventures tended to focus on the metaphysical rather than the sociological. Berlatsky allowed that Doctor Strange was not as good a fit as the majority of superheroes but did not choose to modify any aspect of his ideologically-based critical view.

My use of the words "sociological" and "metaphysical" are by no means accidental: they are two of the categories devised by Joseph Campbell in his 1964 work OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY, along with "the psychological" and "the cosmological." I've quoted Campbell at length on these conceptual categories here, so I won't spend time on further definitions. The relevance of Campbell's four functions in this essay is that it shows how each of these concepts for the organization of knowledge and/or insight can be viewed in a manner that is not "reasonable and agreeable."

Here's Campbell on Berlatsky's favorite if not exclusive category, "the sociological:"

Third is the sociological function. Myth supports and validates the specific moral order of the society out of which it arose. Particular life-customs of this social dimension, such as ethical laws and social roles, evolve dramatically. This function, and the rites by which it is rendered, establishes in members of the group concerned a system of sentiments that can be depended upon to link that person spontaneously to its ends.

It should be obvious that this definition is more comprehensive than Berlatsky's in that Campbell does not define the sociological function in terms of what he personally considers liberating or repressive.

Campbell, being human, is certainly not immune to the temptations of ideology: in this essay I pointed out a section of Campbell's HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES wherein the author's ideology does influence what he deems the "best" explanation for the ritual of the Paschal candle. Nevertheless, I also noted that HERO was written in 1949, while Campbell's more latitudinarian concept of the four functions first appears in 1964, so I for one have no difficulty in seeing the later insight as the flowering of Campbell's more mature thought.

It may be correctly pointed out that Berlatsky is only one comics-critic. But I could cite any number of other critics I've disputed on this blog, most of whom have also been guilty of similar "reasonable" reductionism, ranging from Gary Groth and Bart Beaty to the simpletons of Sequart.  Whatever their individual differences, in general all display the desire not to regard the productions of fantasy as significant in themselves, but only as signifiers of "reality" that can be viewed as either ideologically pure or ideologically suspect.

Campbell, though not a literary critic, supplies a corrective to the overemphasis on reasonableness and ideological correctness. In a future essay I will also draw comparisons between Campbell's heuristic system and the forms of transcendence that are not reasonable; that can mount to the heavens or descend into the darkness of Hades-- and in either form, are covalent with what I have termed the combinatory-sublime.

TRANSCENDENCE WHAT AIN'T SUBLIME

Having now devoted over 50 posts to the topic of "the sublime" in one form or another, I find myself giving thought as to whether or not other comics-critics would have any takes on these matters.  I tend to doubt it, though, and the least self-aggrandizing reason I can concoct for said critics' general disinterest in the sublime comes down to their affection for a type of transcendence that I find to be of lesser interest.

Sublimity, as coiner-of-the-term Longinus pointed out, is not something that takes part in the everyday or the "agreeable"-- a term which Kant may have borrowed for his own theories of art and the sublime.  This translation of Longinus says:

A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgment, and eclipses that which is merely reasonable or agreeable. To believe or not is usually in our own power; but the Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no. Skill in invention, lucid arrangement and disposition of facts, are appreciated not by one passage, or by two, but gradually manifest themselves in the general structure of a work; but a sublime thought, if happily timed, illumines an entire subject with the vividness of a lightning-flash, and exhibits the whole power of the orator in a moment of time.


Though all of Longinus' statements on the sublime are significant, they are not all necessarily correct. I believe that all of art exists to "take [a reader/listener] out of himself," but not that every effect that does so is sublime.  In this essay I quoted and/or paraphrased a great deal of Aldous Huxley's 1953 essay "On Self-Transcendence, comparing and contrasting Huxley's concepts of "downward transcendence" and "upward transcendence" with cognate concepts in Carl Jung's system.  In the middle of these two forms of transcendence, Huxley describes "horizontal transcendence" in terms that may compare with Longinus' idea of the "that which is merely reasonable or agreeable."

In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal, self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby, or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through self-identification with any human activity, from running a business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to educating children or studying the mating habits of birds. Horizontal self- transcendence is of the utmost importance. Without it, there would be no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, indeed no civilization.

Why does Huxley say that horizontal self-transcendence is "of the utmost importance?" I presume that it is because "self-identification with any human activity" may be deemed the bedrock of cognitive experience. It is the way every human being learns his or her individual propensities: what one likes to do, what one does not like to do, what one is good at doing, and so on. I'm enough of a Bataillean to state a slight disagreement, to the effect that there will always be the temptation to transcend the horizontal plane of the "reasonable and agreeable."  But I take the point-- assuming that I have read Huxley's point correctly-- that there is a primacy to the horizontal plane, albeit not a supremacy.

Unfortnately, most comics-critics are of the view that the realm of the reasonable and agreeable is the one to which all other forms of transcendence should be reduced.  Not that the practice is confined to critics, whom I'll explore a little more in Part 2.  Often it's a prime source for humor.

Harvey Kurtzman's story "Man and Superman" (WEIRD SCIENCE #6, 1951)  is a spoof not of the Man of Steel on that character's own terms-- Kurtzman would produce such a spoof two years later in MAD, with the famous "Superduperman." Rather, "Man and Superman" spoofs the comics medium's happy ignorance of basic scientific principles. Charlemagne, a thick-headed "muscle culture" nut, exposes himself to a physicist's ray, which increases his density to fantastic proportions, just as one sees in countless superhero origins.

However, the upshot of the satire is that Charlemagne ignores the scientist's warnings about how his "expenditures of energy" will cause him to "wilt away."  Not only does his mass constantly cause him to fall through walls and floors-- a consequence of greater mass that Superman never had to deal with-- he, the massive muscleman, ends up evaporating into "rapidly dispersing neutral mesons."

Of course Kurtzman's made-up science is no more probable than that of Superman. What's significant in the aesthetic sense is that Charlemagne's admittedly lunk-headed attempt to transcend the limits of normality is shot down by the author's all-knowing appeal to reason and logic.

In the next essay I'll show how this paradigm informs the reductive principles of certain critics of fantasy-literature, both within and without the medium of comic books.

HOW TO SHAME A BIG GREEN SLUT PT. 2

Upon re-examining Part 1, I don't think that I made my concluding points clear enough.

Having established Craig Mazin's implied criteria for his act of "slut-shaming"-- or maybe "slut-concept shaming"-- I gave this example of a species of comic-book heroines who did not display the "exaggerated images" he found so objectionable: heroines who were conventionally pretty but not "exaggerated:"

So, by Mazin's logic, none of these characters could be "slut-concepts" because none of them display the exaggerated aspects he finds to be characteristic of evil sexist marketing.

Yet what's the appeal of a scene like this, in which three cute-although-not-exaggerated girls vie for the affections of one male character? Is there no possible element of titillation here?

For that matter, its interesting that the Legion of Super-Heroes was one of the few hero-teams in comic books to sport more than one female. I will admit that the reasons for this can only be a source of speculation, since comics-fandom has no reliable testimony from writers, artists or editors of the Legion's early period as to motivations for this unusual state of affairs.  Did the creators simply want to feature more female characters in order to draw in female readers?  That's not impossible, but based on the way most superhero comics of the period were written, the professionals behind the comics would have regarded the reactions of male readers as their primary measure of financial success.

So it's feasible that Mort Weisinger-- the editor who liked to have Superman play pranks on Lois Lane to "teach her a lesson"-- might have decided to allow more females in the Legion not because he was a great defender of burgeoning feminism, but because an increase of even limited pulchritude might make the series more appealing to that male readership.

IF that is the case-- and I admit there is no defiinitive proof one way or another-- then Mort Weisinger would be using female sexuality as a marketing-tool. So if one pursued the logic of Craig Mazin's accusations without heeding his shallow justifications, the Legion females would be sluts too. In fact, any female character could be a slut if she was used in any way to market anything-- and yes, that includes Vladimir Nabokov's underdeveloped LOLITA, a book which became a best-seller not because of literary merit but because it popularized a covert paraphilia.

Plainly it will not do to simply point fingers as Mazin does. It should be admitted that the evocation of sexual attractiveness is a key appeal in all forms of literature, just as it plays a comparable-- but not at all identical-- role in real life.  Only from such a position can one speak intelligently about the question of good or bad representations of sexuality.

HOW TO SHAME A BIG GREEN SLUT

Just to finish up my comments on the already waning "She-Hulk controversy:"

I shouldn't have focused so exclusively on the dopiness of the David Goyer remarks w/o commenting equally on those of host Craig Mazin, who started the ball rolling thusly:

The real name for She-Hulk was Slut-Hulk. That was the whole point. Let’s just make this green chick with enormous boobs. And she’s Hulk strong but not Hulk massive, right? … She’s real lean, stringy…
The whole point of She-Hulk was just to appeal sexistly to ten-year-old boys. Worked on me.

Later he wrote the following here:

First off, my point wasn’t that I think She-Hulk is a slut. I don’t. I don’t think anyone is a slut. I don’t think there’s anything shameful about female sexuality or the female body.

What I don’t like is the practice of pushing exaggerated images of female bodies to boys because it sells comic books or video games. Women in comics and video games aren’t accidentally drawn over and over and over again with outsized breasts, long legs and narrow waists. It’s marketing. Having a character remark recursively on that marketing doesn’t negate the marketing, of course. It’s a clever way to defuse criticism with grownups while selling issues to hormone-addled boys. 

I need not repeat my basic defense of She-Hulk from HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2, but I will point out that Mazin wants to have things both ways. He basically says, "Yeah, when I was a hormone-addled boy, I got pleasure out of sexist images." Now, he doesn't say anything about the wrongness of sexist stereotyping in that segment, because no one would have respected a male who didn't admit to some susceptibility to sexual stimulation at that age. To state the converse-- "Oh, I saw others taking forbidden pleasure in nasty She-Hulk comics, but I was too pure for that"-- would be to label himself a wimp, if not a sexual neuter.

His latter-day contempt for "exaggerated images of female bodies," though, allows him to label the She-Hulk concept-- not, as he repeatedly states, the actual character-- as a "sluttish" concept. The equivalence he voices is confused, but I have to presume that he's saying that any such "exaggerated image" qualifies for "slut-dom."

What is a slut? Predominantly, it means a person-- usually, though not always, female-- who is sexually promiscuous.

Yet the two definitions are at odds. Being sexually promiscuous is a pattern of activity, not a collection of physical attributes.

Since the 1980s She-Hulk-- the one on which Mazin claims to base his original statement-- was not sexually promiscuous, though, it stands to reason that her promiscuity is defined, in Mazin's terms, by the fact that she's a "green chick with enormous boobs."  Thus any character with any "exaggerated" attributes-- be they breasts, legs, or waists-- is just a contrivance of marketing, an attempt to get young readers to purchase periodicals and wank off to them.

But then, if a given work features female characters who conform to no more than a basic standard of prettiness, then by Mazin's logic these character-concepts cannot be sluts because they are not "exaggerated."

Like these, from THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES:

Or for that matter, a literary character who is entirely underdeveloped:

At the end of his defensive statement, Mazin claims he intends never to write another word on She-Hulk again.

I could hope that he might extend that principle to anything regarding the phenomenon of human sexuality, just to keep a little more garbage off the already littered byways of the Internet.

SOMETIMES HE FEELS LIKE A NUT; OTHER TIMES, HE JUST IS

To David Goyer's suggestion that the She-Hulk was created as an implicit sex-fantasy for all male readers; i.e., " the chick you could fuck if you were Hulk." Stan Lee responded in this Washington Post piece by saying, “Only a nut would even think of that.”

As I detailed in HIGHLIGHTING ANXIETY PT. 2, Goyer's actual comment is lame and smacks of facile attention-whoring-- a verb I find appropriate, given how free Goyer and Craig Mazin with their use of the term "slut." That said, though the specific accusations are all but worthless, they do raise the spectre of unfair sexual representation once more. Note this passage from the "Comic Riffs" section:

So, how about She-Hulk’s tremendous physique, Stan the Man? “As for her looking beautiful and curvy,” Lee tells Comic Riffs, “show me the superheroine who isn’t.”

From a hardcore ultraliberal standpoint, this light-hearted statement would confirm the Goyer allegation that She-Hulk was designed as a "wank fantasy." I don't think Stan Lee would ever admit to having written "wank fantasies," nor that he would ever fully understand modern objections to them. But though I've argued earlier than SHE-HULK was not poised as an especially "sexy" comics feature, there can be no doubt that Stan Lee has edited and created many comic books that fit that bill.

I've previously cited this MY FRIEND IRMA panel as one of the few overt boob-jokes I've found in a commercial comic book of the period.

And of course prior to the Marvel era Stan edited and/or wrote a vast number of "working girl" comics-- none of whom were about the type of "working girls" Goyer and Mazin would've referenced.

And then there were the curvaceous jungle-queens, like the 1950s LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL, written for the most part by Don Rico.

No one would doubt that all of these female characters are drawn to be ostentatiously sexy-- certainly more so than the 1980s She-Hulk, IMO.  And I for one don't blush to admit that any time a female character was drawn to be ostentatiously sexy, there's a better than even chance that publishers knew that a lot of young horndogs would indeed use such comics for "wank fantasies."

At the same time, overt sexiness was not the only avenue through which young horndogs fulfilled themselves.
I admitted in the previous essay that it's quite possible that the Vosburg-Springer She-Hulk met with approval with some fans, even though the artists did not strive to be extremely titillating. Perhaps the semi-ripped clothing did it for some people-- possibly including the estimable Kurt Busiek-- even though I for one found She-Hulk's attire about as sexy as the Hulk's pants, since it was evident that the clothing was never going to get torn any further, no matter how much physical punishment the character endured.  But there's no accounting for taste, and it's easy to imagine male comics-readers being turned by any number of relatively unexceptional images. As problematic as Frederic Wertham is, his testimony that some readers were turned on by nothing more than high heels seems to be a typical enough phenomenon-- and certainly not one confined to comic books.

Having established that sexual titillation can take place whether or not an image is structured to be titillating, we're back to the Square One established by Goyer. Even if he's wrong, wrong, wrong about the motives behind She-Hulk's creation, there can be no doubt that some comics have been created to be "wank fantasies."

But even when they are created with the conscious intent to have such an appeal-- are they all the same?

Some comics aren't much more than this. Stan Lee features like SHOWGIRLS and MY FRIEND IRMA had occasional moments of snappy dialogue, but I doubt anyone bought the titles for the dialogue.

On the other hand, the example of LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL presents a different paradigm. I didn't choose the panel above at random; while LORNA certainly is a comic book featuring a pneumatic jungle-princess, it rises above the mediocrity of most jungle-comics with its ongoing gender-humor. LORNA had just one basic gag: the protagonist's boyfriend keeps telling her to quit playing jungle-heroine because women can't hack the adventure-game, and she proves him wrong every time. No one would claim LORNA to be the comics-version of Noel Coward, but there's obviously more than just titillation at work here.

More on these matters in a future essay.