AN ILIADIC ODYSSEY

I'd been meaning to re-read Homer's ILIAD for some time, and it happened that I had the chance to do so following my re-reading of Shakespeare's TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, discussed here.

My first thought is that although I contrasted Homer's original account of the Achilles-Hector duel with Shakespeare's ironic rewriting of the event, the prose account I excerpted doesn't allude to one important aspect of the fight: that Hector loses in large part because Zeus wants Achilles to win. The two warriors exchange blows and fail to inflict telling wounds. According to translator Richard Lattimore, Hector, wearing the armor of Achilles stolen from Patroklus, charges the Greek warrior. Achilles, who knows the armor well, hits a weak point and wounds Hector. The Trojan pleads to have his body ransomed, but Achilles mercilessly kills him. Later the Greek degrades Hector's body for several days before the Trojan king Priam succeeds in ransoming the corpse from Achilles.

Throughout the conflict, the gods perform many tricks to keep the Greeks on the defensive, and even to keep any other Greek hero from performing Achilles' destined deed of slaying Hector. (At one point, it looks like the Greek Ajax might be able to take Hector, but since this would ruin the story, the gods intervene to save Hector's life.)

Now, from one standpoint the idea of the Greek deities rigging the fight might seem to be no different than Shakespeare's revision, in which Hector is caught without armor and slain by Achilles' troop of warriors. But there's a world of difference between an inequity between men-- which is what Shakespeare presents-- and one between men and gods. There's nothing equitable about the way the gods treat mortals, but to an archaic Greek, this would just be the nature of things. By the very nature of the gods, they send mortals both good and bad fortune, and when it's the latter, mortals can only face their fate with as much courage as possible. Hector's evil fate, of course, mirrors the prophecies of Achilles' own impending downfall, not seen in Homer's epic but repeatedly referenced through prophetic allusions.

Prior to the discovery of other, older heroic epics, the ILIAD seemed to be the oldest extant version of a legendary battle between destined opponents. Various myth-fragments referenced battles that took place long before the Trojan War, not least Zeus' combat with Typhon. The ILIAD mentions most of the most famous Greek heroes of olden days: Heracles, Jason, Bellerophon. But these fragments of religious myths can't be considered art as such, whereas Homer's epic is, like the earlier Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first flowerings of narrative art that is not purely religious in nature.

While discussing the book with friends, I was amazed that they had no real regard for the greatness of either Achilles' deed or those of other warriors, such as Ajax and Diomedes. Over and over, they insisted on reading the inequitable actions of the Greek gods as being no more than metaphors for human propaganda, of the tendency of human leaders to con young people into giving their lives in the name of glory. But this overlooks the fact that war is, as often as not, a response to the inequities of fate. Fate often gives one tribe riches and another impoverishment. and to the extent that the second tribe loves life as much as the first, the impoverished ones are thus more likely to risk their lives for gain and for glory-- which can be, but are not always, interdependent. I'm not saying here that human beings don't go to war for bad reasons; obviously they do. But the idea that war is always wrong-- or even always avoidable-- is one of the key mistakes of the Neopuritan liberal.

QUICK BEAT COMMENT #672

I don't think it was "unfortunate" for the comics-subculture as a whole that early DM fans were superhero-centric. Of course, it was unfortunate for individual artists and publishers who didn't want to do superheroes.

I said earlier that many fans at the time-- though of course, not all-- had a sense that the superhero genre concealed an untapped potential. They started getting the first sense of that potential developing with the breakthrough works like WATCHMEN and DKR, and these are still keystone works to later comics-afficianados for that reason. They also provided a business model for later, non-superhero works in terms of publicity and monetization, if nothing else.

If a comic like LUMBERJANES enjoys fiscal success today, it's because of those early, faltering steps.

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

Today I looked at Part 2, and added a sentence to describe how declarations are supposed to carry truth-value. The affected paragraph now reads:

It's widely stated that of the usual "parts of language"-- declarative, interrogative, imperative or exclamatory-- propositions are filed under the heading of declarations. This means that the speaker is declaring his statement to have "truth-value," whether he's saying "it looks like it's going to rain" or "Sequence X of LI'L ABNER is better than Sequence Y."

This was necessary because I later stated the equivocal relationship of literary declarations to the truth of experiential reality.

Disgustin' Yokum using his unearthly ugliness to turn Wild Bill Hickup into a stone statue and Li'l Abner letting the Slobbovians legally change him into a female are equally strong propositions, in terms of the reader's engagements with them-- though obviously, neither story-structure possesses any "truth-value" for reality as such.

In the play-religion of the Discordians, their Principia Discordia asserts that the worshipers of the Goddess Eris do not have dogmas, but "catmas," which are defined by the felicitous phrase "relative meta-beliefs." Be this as it may for the Discordians, literature has always been about "relative meta-beliefs," as per my earlier citation of Sir Philip Sidney. Much later, Northrop Frye would speak of a "protecting wall of play" that insured that the reader's investment in stories was less than 100%.

That said, some "relative meta-beliefs" are better justified than others. That's why I borrowed Susanne Langer's term "consummation." I don't think that Al Capp consciously planned out the themes I find in his stories, but I find the ones in "D. Yokum's Visit" to be consummately worked out on the symbolic level. In contrast, in the subsequent storyline, only the sequence directly pertaining to General Bullmoose, his son and the lady wrestler Tara Legoff rises to a high level of symbolic density. Partisans of gender politics would probably decry a perceived reactionary attitude in the sections pertaining to Li'l Abner dressing up like a girl, because at no time does he embrace his "feminine side." For me, though, the sections misfire because they don't really play with any of the symbolic qualities of being male, female, or even something in between. Even worse is a section that takes place merely to delay Abner's return to Dopatch for a few more weeks. He gets trapped on New York's "Floogle Street" by a curse from Evil-Eye Fleegle, and Mammy Yokum has to intervene to disperse the curse. This could have been a cool sequence all by itself had Capp chosen to use it as more than a gimmick to keep his narrative pot boiling, but such are the vagaries of deadline creativity.

FTR (if any), the way in which the "Bullmoose" sequence retains its symbolic integrity despite being part of a greater whole is comparable to the way a given story in a greater continuity may be set apart from that continuity, as I considered when I analyzed "The God Killer" separate from Don McGregor's rambling "Panther's Rage" narrative.

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

Just a minute ago, I concluded Part 1 by saying:

In the upcoming Part 2, I'll justify the connection of the two types of meaning with my title regarding the nature of strong and weak propositions.

I'll try to set down my theme statement as succinctly as I can, but some grounding for my use of the word "proposition" is necessary. 

It's widely stated that of the usual "parts of language"-- declarative, interrogative, imperative or exclamatory-- propositions are filed under the heading of declarations. This means that the speaker is declaring his statement to have "truth-value," whether he's saying "it looks like it's going to rain" or "Sequence X of LI'L ABNER is better than Sequence Y."

Now, this is surely true when one is speaking of language as it is used in one-on-one discourse, or even in discourse between one and a multitude. However, literature is not concerned with outright declarations as such. Sir Philip Sidney argued that "the poet never affirmeth, and therefore never lieth." This is tantamount to Sidney's stating that the poet's declarations are structured more as possibilities than absolute truths. 

Obviously, there are some poets who do "affirm" more than others, but Sidney's analysis is on target. Commonplace language deals with strong propositions, but literature favors weaker propositions.

Further, even within literature, there's a hierarchy of strength between the concrete, lateral/literal meaning, and the abstract, vertical meaning of both overthought and underthought.

To return to the two LI'L ABNER sequences referenced in Part 1, it's evident from the way Al Capp works that his cycles-- usually running from four to six months-- could be unified in terms of their action, like "D. Yokum Visits," or simply a motley group of episodes, like "General Bullmoose Debuts." 

The propositional strength of the lateral meaning in both is equally strong, for the lateral meaning is identical with "everything that happens in the stories." Disgustin' Yokum using his unearthly ugliness to turn Wild Bill Hickup into a stone statue and Li'l Abner letting the Slobbovians legally change him into a female are equally strong propositions, in terms of the reader's engagements with them-- though obviously, neither story-structure possesses any "truth-value" for reality as such.

Yet the abstract vertical meaning is even weaker than the assorted vicissitudes associated with "the stories." Many readers can read past the symbolic discourses in LI'L ABNER without noticing their existence, while others will read them purely in terms of their alliance to didactic discourse, as in "Capp is a great satirist, because he makes fun of rich people").

Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions. 

At the same time, even though "Visits" is like a well-constructed brick kiln, while "Debuts" is sort of a tumble-down brick house, it's the latter, less organized work that gave birth to one of the strip's more recognizable characters, General Bullmoose, while Disgustin' Yokum is most probably barely remembered even by Capp's remaining fans.

Thus the weakness of weak propositions can be both a strength and a weakness at the same time.

STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 1

In short, ODKIN SON OF ODKIN is an assortment of odds and ends, lacking the relative unity of KING OF THE WORLD. But certainly many of those conceptual "bricks" possess considerable mythic power by themselves, even if they aren't assembled into a satisfying structure. In contrast to the works I've labeled inconsummate, the symbolic value of the building-blocks has not been distorted. The value merely "lies in state," like one of Atlan's bodies, and fails to come alive.-- NEAR MYTHS: ODKIN, SON OF ODKIN.

This 2016 essay is the only one in which I adapted Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage to literature. I'm sure other critics have ventured the comparison, though I also tried to tie it to the Aristotelian concept of the "unity of action," which in two essays, here and here, provides my "line between fair and good." In the second essay I compared different examples of Jack Kirby's work, just as in ODKIN I had opposed two examples of Wally Wood's work. It occurred to me, though, that two of my essays on Al Capp's LI'L ABNER might better illustrate both bricolage and unity of action, not least because the two story-cycles-- ["D. Yokum's Visit"] and ["General Bullmoose's Debuts"]-- were produced right on top of one another, at a time when the artist's powers of expression were undiminished (in contrast, say, to Wood's debilitating condition at the time he completed ODKIN).

"Visit," starting in late December 1952 and lasting through March of the next year, is shorter than "Debuts," lasting from March to August 1953. Brevity sounds like it might be conducive to Aristotle's unity of action, since the philosopher argued that the most unified works should focus on one primary action, though not without the potential for assorted subplots. (For instance, the primary action of THE ILIAD is "the wrath of Achilles," though there's room for quite a few subplots about Paris and Helen, Hector and his family, et al.) However, in modern fiction brevity does not necessarily confer unity.

In the second part of THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, I mentioned that the superior works were those that seemed to articulate a sort of "theme statement," though I was careful to distinguish between themes associated with discursive thinking, or "the overthought," from those associated with symbolic discourse, or "the underthought." I also specified that these themes could reinforce one another, though they did not necessarily have to do so. In the case of both Capp story-cycles, Capp succeeded in having them reinforce each other for the most part, though I consider the overthought and underthought weaker in "Debuts" as opposed to "Visits." Thus, since Capp's powers of expression had to be roughly equal when he produced the two sequences, I had to decide what if any factors led him to de-emphasize what I've started calling the "vertical meaning" of "Debuts." And back in RETHINKING THE OVERTHOUGHT, I identified the somewhat competitive partner of vertical meaning, "lateral meaning:"

The literal meaning is, amusingly enough, also the "lateral meaning;" one arrives at it by following the progression of events and expressed feelings from point A to point Z, and that is "what happened"...Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- and in truth, the abstractions of both overthoughts and underthoughts are only possible when constructed on the foundation of concrete experience. Thus, I personally can still enjoy many narratives that don't have much in the way of abstract meaning, as long as they excel in terms of sensation, feeling, or some combination thereof. 

Thus it seems to me that Capp's approach to ABNER, from its genesis in 1934 to its conclusion in 1977, was one which, like most comic strips, privileged lateral over vertical meaning, as I mentioned in 2015's STRIP NO-SHOW:

What the elitists missed, however, was that comic strips, even at their greatest levels of excellence, were always hampered by the factors of serial progression. Certainly Sunday pages like NEMO and PRINCE VALIANT could get away with a somewhat "painterly" approach to comics-narrative, but they were the exceptions. Most story-strips, whether they appeared only on weekdays, on Sundays, or in a combined form, chose to pursue a straightforward linear narrative-- again, one designed to seduce the readers into regularly partaking of the newspaper that carried the comic. Caniff may have been the paradigmatic figure here, in part because one can see him channeling the "invisible style" of most Hollywood films of his time.... This linear narrative, in essence, followed the same association I've outlined for the sensation and feeling functions. The visual part of a given strip communicates what kinds of sensations that the characters are experiencing, and the verbal part gives it feeling-context: whether the reader is supposed to be happy or sad when a given character is killed.

While there's no inevitable conflict between vertical and linear meaning, any more than there is between overthought and underthought, such conflict can take place when the artist becomes a little too "workmanlike" in terms of how he assembles the "bricks" of his storylines. This is particularly true of Capp, who shows a particular fondness for piling one story-trope atop another, with no detectable concern for Aristotelian unities.

In the upcoming Part 2, I'll justify the connection of the two types of meaning with my title regarding the nature of strong and weak propositions.

ANOTHER POLITICAL RANT

This one I decided to preserve in case it gets removed from CBR, though the incident that provoked it is pretty nugatory. After I expressed the opinion that the two guys in the Philadelphia Starbucks incident were "troublemakers," one poster asked me my reasons:

___________

they came into the shop, asked to use the restroom, and were told they couldn't without being customers.

You would think that if they REALLY needed to use the restroom, and REALLY planned in advance to wait for a friend as they later claimed, they would have bought some lousy low-priced item so that they could wait in comfort. Instead, they decided to sit around and buy nothing, which indicates that they got their dander up because the manager didn't defer to their sense of entitlement.

Some little details I bet none of the esteemed news media will cover: did the friend of these poor, offended individuals ever show up to verify their story?

Did they really just sit them holding their water for the entire time that it took for (a) the manager to ask them to leave, (b) for her to get through to the cops, (c) and for the cops to arrive? Wow, such a testament to fortitude. Right up there with Rosa Parks.:p

edit: Okay, now I've come across a news item in which the guys' names are given, and they said they were there to keep a meeting for a "real deal"-- and in THIS item, the "friend"/investor IS named-- but the early versions of the news items were negligent with these details, and I doubt most readers cared anyway. Then the question once more becomes, "If you're going to meet at a public place for a business deal, why the hell wouldn't you buy a damn cuppa coffee to smooth things over?"

No mention in the above CBS news piece of the allegation that they asked to use the bathroom first, but until I see something further, I tend to suspect CBS elided that detail to make a better story.

SECOND EDIT:

Yeah, TIME does mention the bathroom allegation here, so CBS is crap.


ADDENDUM, addressing to a CBR guy:

I didn't bother to respond to [your post] at the time, but an interesting detail caught my eye when I looked at several of the news summaries:

[QUOTE]Nelson and Robinson, black men who became best friends in the fourth grade, were taken in handcuffs from the Starbucks in Philadelphia's tony Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, where Robinson has been a customer since he was 15.[/QUOTE]

So one has to presume that Robinson was the source for this indirect quote, and also that he's telling the absolute truth, due to the principle of AVANTAL: Alleged Victims Absolutely Never Tell Any Lies.

But the question then becomes, for me at least:

If Robinson had been frequenting that Starbucks shop during the year or so that the alleged racist served as manager--

Does that mean that he was a PAYING customer?

Or was he just a THEORETICAL customer. who has been observed by said manager on other occasions to sit around and not buy anything?

But no, such a scenario is clearly impossible, since we all known that only white people commit so-called "racial microaggressions."

MYTHCOMICS: [GENERAL BULLMOOSE DEBUTS], LI'L ABNER (1953)

There are almost no scans online for me to pirate for this week's essay, except this one:

And it happens to be the same scan I used in an earlier essay: the cover of Kitchen Sink's nineteenth collection of LI'L ABNER strips, where I reviewed the continuity I entitled "D. Yokum's Visit." In contrast to the relative unity of "Visit," the next six months is something of a motley group of loosely associated plotlines, of which the most important one is the introduction of Capp's menacing magnate, General Bullmoose. There also aren't many scans of him, which seems odd given that he's one of the few support characters whom an earlier generation knew pretty well, if only thanks to the 1959 film.  Here's one not from the "Debuts" continuity:

Most of the plotlines are exemplars of what I've called "lateral meaning," for they have no point except to engage the reader in terms of both kinetic and dramatic potentialities: "If the Reader Likes Character D, he'll be interested in seeing how Challenge K affects him." They go like this:

(1) Shortly before the birth of the first child of Abner and Daisy Mae, perennial jinx Joe Btfsplk wanders back into Dogpatch. He's warned to keep away from the expecting parents, lest he jinx their unborn child. He descends into an underground cave, but the cave happens to tunnel down under Abner's house, so that bad things start happening to the Yokums anyway.

(2) To better support his future offspring, Abner tries to find work, without success. However, perhaps due to the jinx, two strangers from the quasi-Russian realm of Slobbovia show up in Dogpatch. One is female wrestler Tara Legoff-- one of Capp's many statuesque beauties-- and her manager-father, Rip Von Legoff. They want to find a quintessentially American female sparring partner for Tara, but for some damn reason, the only one who meets their requirements is Li'l Abner. So Abner dresses up in drag and goes on the road, and Rip helps him fake his death so that Daisy Mae won't miss him, or something like that.

(3) Thanks to the newspapers covering the gorgeous lady of wrestling and her dolled-up sparring partner, the great financier General Bullmoose decides that he wants his puny son Weakfish to marry whoever wins in a bout between Tara and "Li'l Anya." The Slobbovians, hot to marry into money, decide to have Tara use a killer-move on Abner, and though he doesn't die, he does lose. 

(4) His job terminated, the big lummox decides to go back to Dogpatch, only to find out that his bereaved wife has chosen to remarry, in order to give Baby Yokum a father. Abner faces assorted delays that keep him from Daisy Mae's side-- not least an encounter with Capp's zoot-suited evildoer Evil-Eye Fleegle-- but in the end, Abner returns and stops the wedding. Daisy Mae then gives birth without ever showing any visible evidence of being pregnant.

Now, all four of these plot-threads satisfy the reader's need for lateral meaning, but only in Plot #3 does Capp "go vertical." Some of his vertical meaning consists of discursive "overthoughts," like naming the manipulative multi-millionaire after the Bull Moose Party, which ran Theodore Roosevelt for president in 1912, and having the character use a motto based on a saying attributed to General Motors: "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the country." But there's a deeper level of "underthought."

The Roosevelt reference is actually more meaningful than the motto, for Capp draws Bullmoose as a huge, muscular old man with a walrus-mustache. He's intensely turned on by the photos of Tara and Li'l Anya, but knows he can't mate with them anymore ("If only I were eighty again"). He chooses to defer his lust to his son Weakfish, a puny fellow who protests, "But father-- I'm only 52." What we have here, then, is a literary myth with both psychological and sociological ramifications: one in which a powerful father somehow gives birth to a sickly son. Oddly, Bullmoose never brings up the most logical motivation-- that he wants Weakfish to marry a "wild beast of a woman" so that he'll sire a son better than he is. The only motivation he gives is that such a marriage will supposedly make Weakfish capable of running Bullmoose's empire if Bullmoose should ever drop dead. Weakfish, however, is in love with a specimen of femininity as puny as he is: "Olivia de Backache." (Possibly this was Capp's little shot at Olivia de Havilland's portrait of Melanie Wilkes, the dishrag-like character from 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND.) Weakfish musters just enough courage to try eloping with Olivia. However, Bullmoose finds out, and with "two phone calls" he reduces Olivia's father to penury. Weakfish, agreeing with his father that the Bullmooses cannot "have a pauper's blood in our family." jilts Olivia-- though no one brings up the fact that neither of the "lady wrestlers" are of the moneyed classes.

While Abner/Anya has no desire to marry Weakfish, Tara is clearly interested in Weakfish's money. Thus the outcome of the match works out well for the two contenders, though not for Bullmoose's shrimpy son. He's last seen running out of the wrestling-hall as Tara chases after him. That's how Capp leaves them, the picture of an unmasculine man being pursued by a super-feminine woman. The only good thing in Weakfish's future is that, unlike the Dogpatch males who get ambushed and married by predacious women during Sadie Hawkins' Day, the scion of the Bullmoose line will probably get killed on his wedding-night.

addendum 6-14-2026: Upon recently re-reading this arc, I noticed that although the non-mythic Daisy Mae subplot appears within the corpus of the Bullmoose story, that story concludes once Bullmoose, his son and the lady wrestler are gone. The Evil Eye Fleegle arc does not start until the Bullmooses are gone, and its only purpose is to delay Abner while his wife stands in danger of remarrying. So the Fleegle storyline can be regarded as Capp dialing down the mythic material in favor of plain old melodrama.