UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 2

If anything good came of my reading Jack Zipes' THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, it is that my take on the author's use of the psychological term "the uncanny" spurred me to look for the first time both at Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny" and at the 1906 essay by Ernst Jentsch, which Freud credited as a partial inspiration for his more famous work.

In the aforementioned take, I stated:

Freud came up with his term "the uncanny" in order to distinguish the questionable nature of a story like Hoffman's "The Sandman" from, say, the world of fairy tales, in which Freud says that "the world of reality is left behind" by a constant stream of marvelous things and beings.

Since Freud's remarks on literary phenomenology are crude and undeveloped, I wondered whether or not he had taken any cues from Jentsch in this regard. 

Jentsch, however, is concerned only with one psychological motif, which for him brings about the experience of "the uncanny:" 

Among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate – and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness. The mood lasts until these doubts are resolved and then usually makes way for another kind of feeling. 

Throughout the rest of the essay, Jentsch's examples are all over the phenomenological map. He mentions, albeit briefly, the E.T.A. Hoffman short story, THE SAND-MAN in which Freud finds his own version of this "feeling of trepidation." Yet Jentsch also finds the uncanny in the thoroughly naturalistic ROBINSON CRUSOE:

The episode in the Robinsonade, where Friday, not yet familiar with the boiling of water, reaches into simmering water in order to pull out the animal that seems to be in it, is also based on an inspiration of the writer that is psychologically very apposite. 

Jentsch also finds the "animate/non-animate" quandary in vague daydreams, like those in which one sees in "the outline of a cloud... a threatening Satanic face," or in organized literary works, which engage an audience's empathy "with all the emotional excitements to which the characters of the play, or novel, ballad, and so forth, are subject." Sometimes Jentsch emphasizes phenomena that are more specifically "strange," like dryads in trees, and sometimes they're somewhat macabre, like the spectacle of dead bodies and skeletons. It can certainly be concluded that in this concept of "the uncanny" Jentsch casts his net far too widely.

According to online biographical material, Freud did not write "The Uncanny" in direct response to Jentsch, but chose to rewrite an earlier, unpublished essay-- no longer extant-- in order to frame his concepts. Freud  acknowledges some indebtedness to Jentsch, but clearly diverges from Jentsch's opinion that the most important source of "the uncanny" in THE SAND-MAN is that of a non-animate artiface, the life-size doll Olympia, becoming :animated." Rather, Freud rather conveniently finds the trepidation of the uncanny in all those motifs of the story that reinforce Freudian concepts of castration and the repetition-compulsion. 

This short summary leaves, I think, no doubt that the feeling of something uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand-Man, that is, to the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes; and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual uncertainty has nothing to do with this effect.

Freud also concludes-- in contrast to his later quasi-follower Tzvetan Todorov, for whose system "intellectual uncertainty" is critical-- that once Hoffmann has completed his story, the author has made clear that this is clearly "a purely fantastic one of his own creation," at least partly because Hoffmann makes such an indubitable identification between "Coppola the optician" and "Coppelius the lawyer," both of whom are the "secret identities" of the Sand-Man.

Yet, having claimed that Hoffmann created a "fantastic" world rather than one based in reality, later in the essay Freud makes clear that he's not extending his special interpretation to just any old fantasy, which is one of the section with which Jack Zipes so fervently disagrees. 

Fairy-tales quite frankly adopt the animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy-story which has anything uncanny about it. We have heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when inanimate objects—a picture or a doll—come to life; nevertheless in Hans Andersen’s stories the household utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive and nothing could perhaps be more remote from the uncanny. And we should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to life. 

And later:.

The story-teller can also choose a setting which, though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual entities such as daemonic influences or departed spirits. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality their usual attribute of uncanniness fails to attach to such beings. The souls in Dante’s Inferno, or the ghostly apparitions in Hamlet, Macbeth or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more really uncanny than is Homer’s jovial world of gods. We order our judgement to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and spectres as though their existence had the same validity in their world as our own has in the external world. And then in this case too we are spared all trace of the uncanny. The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality. In this case he accepts all the conditions operating to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case, too, he can increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact.

So it's clear that even though Jentsch has cast his net too widely, Freud casts his own within a quite narrow range: that is, "the uncanny" applies only to fantasies, whether psychological or literary, that reflect Freudian concepts. 

For me, one of the most interesting revelations of this comparison is that it shows that Tzvetan Todorov, though he only quotes Freud's "The Uncanny" in his book THE FANTASTIC, seems to have far more in common with Ernst Jentsch in terms of identifying the idea of the uncanny with what Freud calls "intellectual uncertainty." Here's Todorov defining his category of "the fantastic," within which "the uncanny" forms a subcategory:

The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and [viewpoint] character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from ‘reality’ as it exists in the common opinion” (p. 41).

UNCANNY GENESIS PT. 1

Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.

It's recently occurred to me to pose the question, "When did human works of art and/or religion manifest the phenomenality of the uncanny?"

After all, as the above passage from Cassirer indicates, most if not all early religion concerned itself with marvelous magical transformations. This is not to say that early humans did not have their share of mundane stories along the lines of "the one that got away" or "who's so-and-so's wife is sleeping with," much of which would approximate what we now deem naturalistic narrative. At the same time, it should be considered a given that in archaic times, even the most skeptical disbeliever lived in a culture dominated by conceptions of the marvelous. Thus a story like Homer's ILIAD, a tale of human beings going to war, is continuously entangled with the narratives of the gods behind the scenes.

But what about the interstitial category of the uncanny? This phenomenality, as I've often mentioned, shares with the naturalistic the characteristic of casual coherence, yet also shares with the marvelous the characteristic of anti-intelligibility-- though most of the artifacts I've identified with this phenomenality are of comparatively recent creation.

Is it possible to find this phenomenality within the earliest myths and tales of humankind? Rudolf Otto, one of the key philosophers to employ the term "uncanny," thought so. However, he applied the term largely to pre-Christian religions, rather than analyzing a variety of religious and literary works across the span of human history. Here's Otto's most concise judgment on the matter, from Chapter 4 of THE IDEA OF THE HOLY:


let us give a little further consideration
to the first crude, primitive forms in which this numinous
dread or awe shows itself. It is the mark which really
characterizes the so-called Religion of Primitive Man , and
there it appears as daemonic dread . This crudely naive and
primordial emotional disturbance, and the fantastic images to
which it gives rise, are later overborne and ousted by more
highly-developed forms of the numinous emotion, with all its
mysteriously impelling power. But even when this has long
attained its higher and purer mode of expression it is possible
for the primitive types of excitation that were formerly a part
of it to break out in the soul in all their original naivete and
so to be experienced afresh.

So for Otto, "the uncanny" was essentially an early if crude form of "the mysteriously impelling power" that he calls "the numinous." Man's capacity for experiencing the numinous stands as an ideal function of the human mind, one that is best developed by the higher religions, though the numinous experience cannot, he says, be boiled down to anything like Kant's notion of "the sublime." Otto clearly deems "the so-called Religion of Primitive Man" to be an illusion born of "naivete," but this has nothing to do with the actual content of most primitive religious narratives, which are implicitly dominated by the marvelous.

If the tropes of the uncanny exist in early literature, presumably they would exist with the same status as naturalistic tropes, within the greater scope of a marvelous phenomenality. For instance, all three phenomenality-tropes appear in the non-canonical Hebrew text "Bel and the Dragon:"

The NATURALISTIC part appears when the prophet Daniel exposes the way the priests of Bel sneak into the temple to eat the sacrifices, the better to convince the naive that the gods are real.

The UNCANNY would be Daniel's investigation of yet another hoax, but one with a greater degree of mystery to it, when he finds that some colossal animal inhabits (presumably) another temple, which the local priests consider a "living god." Apparently the "dragon" is not a common animal that anyone in town might recognize as a simple creature, so within my system I would deem it an "astounding animal." Daniel's method of slaying the creature I might further deem a "bizarre crime." The thrust of the story is that the "dragon" dies specifically because it is does not share the marvelous nature of a god, so that it is strange enough to be anti-intelligible but not something outside the bounds of causal coherence.

The MARVELOUS phenomenality, however, dominates the story as a whole, in that Daniel is thrown into the lion's den and succored by angels. This section of the story provides beings whose nature exceeds both intelligibility and causal coherence-- not to mention being the best-known part of the story for most people today.

Just as a guess, I would imagine that oral culture may have produced assorted stand-alone stories that would conform to my definition of the uncanny phenomenality, wherein which the tropes of the naturalistic or the marvelous did not hold sway. But most such stand-alone stories were not written down until the dawn of European rationalism, and if we have them in any form, they were probably incorporated into longer tale-cycles, like the Six Labors of Theseus that precede his encounter with the marvelous Minotaur.

More to come.

MYTHCOMICS: "PLANET STORY" (MARVEL PREMIERE #61, 1980)

The Bronze Age of Comics-- which I would peg as the period from 1970-1986-- was the last era in which Marvel and DC published a significant number of new characters in their own features but not derived from earlier features. Year 1986 seems like a good cut-off point, given that the profitability of two works then published-- WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- encouraged many creators to quit automatically contributing to "the Big Two."

To be sure, many of these characters proved no more than minor players, and Marvel's Star-Lord-- despite an impressive translation to the cinema in recent years-- couldn't even be said to be one of the sales-failures that remained a fan-favorite for years later, such as Killraven and the Man-Thing.

The base-concept of Star-Lord was essentially "Green Lantern without the Green Lantern Corps." His origin involved an alien giving Earthman Peter Quill cosmic powers, with an eye to creating more space-supermen later. But Quill/Star-Lord was the only one created, and despite his ties to Earth, his few adventures didn't involve his home planet, also in contradistinction to DC's Green Lantern. Given an "element-gun" for self-defense and an intelligent ship named "Ship" for transport, Star-Lord tooled around various galaxies for about a half dozen stories, before disappearing for the remainder of the Bronze Age.

The title "Planet Story" does concern a planet, though it's likely that either writer Doug Moench or artist Tom Sutton also had in mind the famous pulp-magazine PLANET STORIES, which specialized in adventurous space-opera. If so, it's an ironic title, because the script bears less resemblance to space opera than to more involved science fiction meditations on quasi-sentient planets, like Harry Harrison's DEATHWORLD. Moench does not give the planet in his story a name, but for convenience I will call it "the Sharing World."

Star-Lord and "Ship" have no particular agenda, save curiosity, when they happen across the Sharing-World. Their survey indicates that the world is replete with lush vegetation but no "higher fauna." Yet Star-Lord also observes a ruined city, indicating that at some point intelligent beings occupied the planet. Under his own flight-power, Star-Lord leaves his vehicle in orbit and descends. As soon as he does, various phenomena-- a volcano, an earthquake, and a bunch of tentacled plants-- assail the hero. He makes his way to the ruined city but finds no clue to explain the absence of the city's makers, though Star-Lord suspects that the populace may have been exterminated by the hostile environment.

Once Star-Lord leaves the city, again he's attacked by planetary phenomena, such as wind and lightning, but this time, the phenomena are driving him toward a destination. The hero is precipitated into the "organic cavern" of a huge tree, and the entrance seals up when Star-Lord tries to leave. The only thing inside the tree are various honeycombed chambers, which Star-Lord mentally compares to "cadaver-drawers" with no contents. Then he learns that they do have contents: groping plant-tendrils that try to grab him, though he's able to keep his distance from them.

Suddenly, the planet itself communicates with Star-Lord through the medium of dust that arranges itself into holograms (no, there's no explanation of how this could be accomplished). Through these images the Sharing-World informs its guest of its history with its sentient inhabitants, through the vehicle of the giant tree (and possibly other trees elsewhere on the planet).

Long ago, an intelligent race of parrot-headed creatures existed alongside the glories of the sentient planet, living as "noble savages in an alien Garden of Eden" (which is implicitly Star-Lord's interpretation of things). However, the parrot-people, whom the planet calls "the Sharers of Old," begin to dislike the planet's tendency to interact with them through the tree-tendrils. (Moench's script is unclear on some points: at first it sounds like some of the Sharers are killed by having their energies drained by the "vampire tendrils," but later it sounds like a symbiotic relationship that injures no one.)

In any case, the relationship is in later sections deemed as important by the Sharing-World, because intelligent beings, unlike lower animals, can choose whether or not to participate in the sharing-ritual. However, the parrot-people choose to leave this 'garden" and build their own cities. Then they follow the usual course of tool-using sentients, exploiting the planet and giving nothing back. In response the planet begins to die, and finally the Sharers give up and desert the Sharing-World via spaceship.

Then, as soon as Star-Lord has been given a Cook's Tour of the world's history, the feeding-tendrils latch onto him. At this point Moench and Sutton shift the narrative viewpoint to that of the Sharing-World, which describes its quasi-erotic attachment to the long vanished Sharers, and its desire to have Star-Lord take up the same role. The planet's attacks were caused by its eagerness to take on a new "lover," but though the reader learns these facts, but Star-Lord isn't tapped into the planet's ruminations. He breaks free of the tendrils and returns to his orbiting vessel. Once there, he confers with his intelligent ship, wondering if he ought to use the ship's weapons to destroy this menacing world. However, "Ship" talks the hero out of doing so, and the two of them leave-- which proves a final irony, since by that point the Sharing-World wants to die for its lack of loving symbiosis.

(The entire story can be read here.)


Even without Moench's early Eden-reference, one could hardly miss the tale's indebtedness to the Old Testament narrative of Adam and Eve. In said story, God gave the first humans the choice of whether or not to obey God's commandment not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Moench neatly inverts this myth, for here it's a tree, through which the planet manifests its will, that's more or less "feeding" on the inhabitants of the "garden." There's no tempter that moves the parrot-people to leave; they do so of their own volition, and Moench largely implies that their motives are more selfish than self-protective, and they're rejecting their quasi-sexual union with the planet rather than coming to a new knowledge of male-female sexuality. Christian philosophers have opined that humankind's exile from Eden was a "fortunate fall," but in Moench's story, strongly suggestive of ecological ideals like the "Gaea theory," the Fall is unfortunate for both the world and its intelligent denizens.

The element of "choice" is also less metaphysical and more sensual: the planet wants to share only with those who have the power to choose. Tom Sutton's art emphasizes the chaotic curves of natural life as against the hard lines of sentient dwelling-laces, and Star-Lord's brief captivity by the tendrils suggests a sort of human-alien sex along the lines of Philip Jose Farmer's 1953 story THE LOVERS, though Sutton's imagery suggests rape, as does one of Moench's lines:

"...the exit irised shut with a sloppy, wet sound that made me think of ripeness and guilt."

MYTHCOMICS: NOSFERATU (1989)

Phillippe Druillet's NOSFERATU, given that it's a hymn to irony and solipsism, is in some ways the Frenchiest of French comics. In this it diverges from the works that popularized the word "Nosferatu" for modern audiences-- both Bram Stoker's DRACULA and F.W. Murnau's arty knockoff-adaptation NOSFERATU-- for both of these are melodramas in which an evil undead preys upon the living, only to be defeated and destroyed by the righteous actions of good people.

Druillet's narrative takes place in an unexplained post-apocalyptic world, implicitly Earth, though the word "Nosferatu"-- applied to the main character by persons unknown-- is one of the few touchstones with Earth's real-world history. This Nosferatu was apparently an ordinary human at some time, but the catastrophe mutated him into a science-fiction vampire, with the ability to fly and to feed off the living (although Druillet shows him eating flesh as often as drinking blood). From what the reader sees in the story, all other humans have also been mutated into weird non-human creatures.

For several pages, Nosferatu-- who has only a nodding resemblance to the vampire in Murnau's film-- wanders his wreck-of-a-world, looking for prey. He makes brief reference to how he and others escaped the brunt of the catastrophe by hiding underground, but the reader never sees any of Nosferatu's companions. At first he's also hunting for a female companion named Imma, making plans to carry food back to her, since she's immobilized by gangrene. But since he seems to forget her rather quickly, it's possible that she's either dead from the start of the narrative, or that she exists only in his imagination. Indeed, no explicitly female humanoids are seen in the story.

Nosferatu does find a little prey among a tribe of mutants he calls "the Cripples." These characters look like hairy dwarves, but the only thing "crippled" about them is that some of them have spikes in place of hands, while the others have just one spike and one human-looking hand. The Cripples are as eager to devour Nosferatu as he is to prey on them, but he manages to chomp off one dwarf's human-looking hand, which sustains him for the next few pages.

Nosferatu continues to roam the world, moaning about his solitary status as "the last vampire." He muses that "the important thing in life" for an individual  is to conform to the image that one's society has of said individual, but that even this doleful conformity is beyond Nosferatu, because "I'm both individual and society." He then stumbles across what he mistakes for a living female, but which turns out to be a metal dummy used for some advertising display. Despite this, he carried the dummy around with him for a while, talking to it, naming it "Lilit" (after Lilith, the reputed first wife of Adam), and wondering, "What were you selling, Lilit? Toothpaste? Shoes? Food?" He conceives the notion that, given his status as the sole intelligent life on the planet, he ought to become a poet, so he spontaneously spouts assorted free-verse from the works of Baudelaire (whose translators are duly credited in the comic). He comes across another tribe of mutated humanoids, but they show no intelligence, and one of them displays its lack of social skills by biting off the dummy's head, ending Nosferatu's amour fou.

Deprived of even this pitiable companionship, Nosferatu remarks that he's "tired of life." He "aspires to purity, with no hunger, no thirst, no breathing." However, after a little more soliloquizing, he does stumble across something that tests his alleged desire for fellowship. He falls in with a tribe of carrion-eaters that he conceives to be his kindred, and though most of them look more like werewolves than vampires, at least some of them can speak. However, the werewolves have their own problems, like a big serpent-creature that perpetually preys on them. (In an odd choice of real-world references, the creature is named for the San Andreas Fault, apparently just because the beast comes out of the ground.) Nosferatu devises a weapon to kill the beast. However, the stratagem fails and Nosferatu runs away from the conflict, so that he becomes an object of scorn to the werewolves.

Disgusted with his lot, Nosferatu decides to build a space-ark and depart the corrupt world for the stars,. He does so within the sight of the werewolves, which has the effect of making them his audience, even if they're cast in the role of "Noah's scoffers." During the construction of the ark, Nosferatu's single-mindedness has a salutary effect on his biology: he mutates further, becoming a being who derives nourishment from the air. However, when he finds he can't power his ship, all of the werewolves laugh at him. This puts the nail in the coffin, so to speak, of the last vampire's desire for society. He transforms into a mutant with mental powers, destroys both the werewolves and his own ship, and then flies off to the stars under his own power, though he continues to make ironic remarks to the readers like "Closing credits. Fade to black"-- which I suppose serve the same purpose as Baudelaire's famous address to his "hypocrite lecteurs."

NOSFERATU shares with other Druillet works its creator's imaginative prolificity, but this one-shot work is much better organized (and hence hyperconcrescent!) than most other Druillet works I've encountered. And, unlike a lot of French comedic works, it's actually funny. I think it was Durgnat who said that watching French comedy films was like watching a bear trained to dance: the pleasure of the spectacle is not that the bear dances well, it's that he can do it at all.

CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE

If there's one shortcoming in my Nietzschean-Bataillean "excess theory"-- aside from the fact that anyone reading about it would have to know both Nietzsche and Bataille to gauge its validity-- is that all too often I've focused on the end rather than the means, the product rather than the process, From the beginnings of this blog I've tossed out such parallel terms as "symbolic complexity," "peak amplitude," "high mythicity," "super-functionality," and "the combinatory-sublime," all of which address the symbolic qualities of the finished literary work. But assume that a reader agrees with me that some works are simply more "ample" than others, whether in terms of symbolic discourse or one of the other three possible discourses. What process, then, explains  how one work reaches "peak amplitude," while other works don't climb that high?

I have yet to read any of the works of Alfred North Whitehead, not even his best-regarded work, PROCESS AND REALITY. However, knowing that Whitehead's philosophy was in part concerned with the ways in which humans construct value, I looked through the index of PROCESS, and wonder of wonders, the unfamiliar word "concrescence" leaped out at me.

Whitehead does not seem to have been adapted for purposes of literary studies much if at all, and most of his concerns seem entirely metaphysical in nature, as seen from this passage from THE INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY:

This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.

Eventually I may read enough Whitehead to learn whether or not his overall system coheres with those that have inspired me, ranging from Nietzsche and Bataille to Frye and Jung. But /happily
the word "concrescence" has a meaning independent of Whitehead. From the online Merriam-Webster:

1: increase by the addition of particles

2: a growing together : COALESCENCE

The term is used in both biology and medicine to signify organs that have grown together improperly. However, there's nothing improper in the process concrescence would connote in my system.

The Latin root of "conscrecense" connoted the ideas of "coagulation" and "solidification," but if the Encyclopedia is accurate, then Whitehead uses this physical process as a metaphor for the way "an occasion" expresses "its concreteness to the rest of the world." If we put aside the philosopher's specialized term "occasion" and replace it with any sort of phenomenal presence within the world of art and literature, then it would seem to aptly describe the intense interrelatedness of such phenomena to one another, much along the lines of Denny O'Neil's description of Hinduism's "Net of Indra," last referenced here:

We're looking at a net.  It has to be a largish one, though exactly how big is up to you... Now, imagine that at each juncture of your net there is a jewel, cunningly hung so it reflects all the other jewels... It's called the Net of Indra and scholars say it was conceived of by a Buddhist monk named Tu Shun about  2640 years ago. It was originally meant as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of everything that exists...

Conscresence, more than its roughly equivalent term "coagulation," suggests the process by which seemingly unrelated phenomena "concretize" into a greater whole. Thus images, symbols and story-tropes which can only have a very limited meaning by themselves take on greater depth when associated with others that have a reinforcing effect.

Further, the word is probably better for describing the intensification of any given discourse than the Aristotelian term I used in the two LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD that I employed here and here. Aristotle's "unity of action"-- which, when applied to the actual process of art, might be better termed "unity of effect"-- does not adequately represent the way artists bring together the representations of discourse within the four potentialities (even though for the most part I've devoted myself to the discourse of symbols alone). I will in future re-examine the few essays I've written on "unity of action" to determine whether or not "concrescence" proves a better fit, as it does for the LINE essays.

In addition, I'm considering the even more specialized term "hyperconscresence" to denote those works that "concrese" (not a real word, BTW) much better than any others.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 4

Here I'll cite a couple more categorizations with respect to classifying environments as potential focal presences. In ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2 I wrote:

...though much of LOVE IN HELL's narrative is devoted to describing the infernal domain, I would not go so far as to say that Hell is the"main character" of the story, in the manner that I've said that Wonderland is the "main character" of Carroll's Alice books. In this essay I said that the Alice books were *exothelic,* meaning that 'the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.' LOVE IN HELL comes very close to this, but in the final analysis it's still more focused upon the evolving relationship of Rintaro and Koyori as they interact both with each other and the strange requirements of their domain-- so that LOVE IN HELL is as *endothelic,* wherein "the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests."

The same designation applies to last week's mythcomic, LUCIFER RISING. In this 1985 manga story, the mysterious tenth planet Lucifer is a phenomenon that the two main characters, Father Chavez and Doctor Cleaver, must investigate in order to learn its nature, both in its cosmological and metaphysical. There are any number of science fiction stories in which the narrative focuses upon the viewpoint characters sussing out the nature of a star or planet, so that in effect the phenomenon is "the star." However, LUCIFER RISING is endothelic, since the story focuses on the human conflict of faith and science, as represented by the initial outlooks of, respectively, Father Chavez and Doctor Cleaver.

A narrative may also focus upon an environment as the concatenation of the sentient culture. This is the case with the Byrne-Mignola WORLD OF KRYPTON. In my review I noted that writer Byrne had failed to invest his characters with much in the way of "dramatic heft:"

Given Byrne's tendency to rewrite earlier stories. it's not hard for me to believe that he caught onto the way Jerry Siegel concealed the quasi-incestuous theme of his story by giving Superman's Kryptonian lover the name "Lyla Lerrol," a shuffling of the name "Lara," Byrne thus creates both a bad mother and a not-so-good girlfriend, Nyra and Vara, before introducing the "good mother" who will make possible the birth of a "savior" of sorts. Byrne doesn't devote nearly as much attention to the two main male characters, dramatically or symbolically. Van-L's name doesn't seem to hold any strong associations, though an old SUPERBOY story does state that one of Superboy's ancestors is named "Val-El." As for "Kan-Z," I can't help but note that his name resembles that of the American heartland where the infant Kal-El ends up; i.e., "Kansas." But the latter confluence may not have been consciously intended.

Yet none of these characters looms larger than the world they inhabit, although the perverse mother Nyra, a sort of "anti-Lara," has the greatest mythicity. Rather, Krypton is the exothelic focus of the narrative, as I showed in this passage:

 I will give props to the schematic sociological myth he devises for Krypton: first too sensuous, then too abstemious. This stratagem succeeds in characterizing the homeworld of DC:s pre-eminent hero in terms of unpleasant extremes, as against the "divine middle" embodied by the Planet Earth.

THE MAHERS-MALLOW CHALLENGE

I confess that I'd never heard of the "Marshmallow Challenge" until I decided to construct a pun combining "marshmallow" with the name of Stan Lee's recent assailant Bill Maher. The "challenge" phrase suits the pun, though, since Bill Maher's comments were intended, however stupidly, to challenge the idea that a comic-book creator could be of any importance to American culture.

Here's Maher's screed from November 17, 2018:

The guy who created Spider-Man and the Hulk has died, and America is in mourning. Deep, deep mourning for a man who inspired millions to, I don’t know, watch a movie, I guess. Someone on Reddit posted, “I'm so incredibly grateful I lived in a world that included Stan Lee.” Personally, I’m grateful I lived in a world that included oxygen and trees, but to each his own. Now, I have nothing against comic books – I read them now and then when I was a kid and I was all out of Hardy Boys. But the assumption everyone had back then, both the adults and the kids, was that comics were for kids, and when you grew up you moved on to big-boy books without the pictures. 
But then twenty years or so ago, something happened – adults decided they didn’t have to give up kid stuff. And so they pretended comic books were actually sophisticated literature. And because America has over 4,500 colleges – which means we need more professors than we have smart people – some dumb people got to be professors by writing theses with titles like Otherness and Heterodoxy in the Silver Surfer. And now when adults are forced to do grown-up things like buy auto insurance, they call it “adulting,” and act like it’s some giant struggle. 
I’m not saying we’ve necessarily gotten stupider. The average Joe is smarter in a lot of ways than he was in, say, the 1940s, when a big night out was a Three Stooges short and a Carmen Miranda musical. The problem is, we’re using our smarts on stupid stuff. I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to suggest that Donald Trump could only get elected in a country that thinks comic books are important. 

Many, many fans leaped to Lee's defense, and in the last week Maher simply reiterated his comments, adding the rather wimpy clarification that he wasn't attacking Stan Lee, only his fans. Of course, if you're stating that the recently deceased celebrity under discussion produced nothing but juvenile trash, I think that might be deemed something of an intentional burn.

The thing I find most interesting about Maher's attack is how OLD it sounds. Maher sounds like a lot of the modernist writers of the early 20th century-- such as Nathaniel West and Joseph Conrad-- and the equally modernist critics of that period, such as Theodor Adorno. Yet Maher is a baby-boomer like myself, having been born in 1956, one year after I was. His obvious prejudice toward books that don't have pictures similarly sounds like the tendency of early modernists to privilege words, words, and more words over any medium that used visual elements.

Of course, Maher isn't unique among baby-boomers in choosing to chastise popular culture for not getting across the elitist message. I've frequently castigated the fallacies promoted by similarly aged critics like Gary Groth and Noah Berlatsky. But, whatever their mistakes, these critics at least know something about popular culture.

Maher, for all his pretensions to intellectual superiority, apparently did zero research as to how comic books attained a measure of cultural acceptance, as opposed to remaining, as Maher thinks they should, a marginal medium meant only for kids. Since he doesn't think he needs to provide historical context, he's free to claim that the sea-change in which adults chose not to give up kid stuff happened twenty years previous to 2018.

So that's 1998, in which happened-- what exactly? It's long after the first flowerings of the "graphic novel" in the mid-1980s. Even the debut of Image Comics was old news by 1998, while in that year Hollywood had yet to invest heavily in more than a handful of comics-characters. Perhaps the late nineties are supposed to be the period in which college professors are supposed to have started writing essays on comic book characters. But even if Maher has some specific thesis in mind-- I for one have no idea if his "Silver Surfer" essay-title is supposed to be real or not-- college professors certainly don't write their high-falutin' essays in isolation from the rest of their culture.

Better informed histories of popular culture generally peg the sea-change as beginning over forty years earlier, in the 1960s-- though even this assessment overlooks the slow process by which academia began showing tentative acceptance of pop culture in the forties and fifties, as per critics like Gilbert Seldes and Robert Warshow. But three events in the 1960s provide watershed moments: the growth of comics-fandom in the form of adults collecting old funnybooks in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the debut of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries, and Stan Lee's development of Marvel Comics in 1961.

I doubt that in 1961 Lee had any idea that persons older than middle school would take a fancy to his new take on superheroes. But when he started getting letters from college students, he surely played up the "greater respectability" angle for all that it was worth. By the middle 1960s, it's possible to discern him seeking to invest his stories-- usually superheroes, though he'd written many other genres over the years-- with social content that was at least somewhat more sophisticated than that of his competition.

Now, one does not have to be using one's smarts on "stupid stuff" to suss out that Lee was doing something different, and that the "stuff" had a peculiar hold on not just his then-current audience, but upon later comics-audiences as well. But even if one chose to dismiss all of Stan Lee's contributions as trash-- an opinion which a few comics-critics have indeed advanced-- it seems strange that Maher seems utterly unaware of the more ambitious forms of comics that appeared, not during the 1960s, but in the 1980s. During this period, the innovation of the direct market made it feasible to market more ambitious works to adult buyers, be the works some sort of "adult superheroes," like the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN, or "art-comics" along the lines of CEREBUS and LOVE AND ROCKETS.

Now, in one respect Maher is correct. To the extent that Stan Lee made it possible for young comics-buyers of the 1960s to think that the medium was not necessarily meant to be outgrown, then one might indeed say that he was responsible for "dumbing-down" American adults. But patently Maher knows nothing about the comics except for what he sees in the movies-- like IRON MAN 3, in which the somewhat hypocritical comedian has a cameo-- and in this sense, his understanding of the "sea-change" proves inferior even to that of comics-bashers like Frederick Wertham.

Side-note: since the majority of comics-fans tend to skew liberal, I have no idea why it would occur to Maher to blame comics for the ascendance of Donald Trump. But it's likely that he just pulled this nugget from the same place as the rest of his screed: his ass.