AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 2

In THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1, I outlined the three principal ways authors rationalize their fictional departures from consensual reality:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."                                                                                                                                                                             

 I also wrote of a major distinction between the first two rationales and the third:

 

Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd.

                                                                                                  In essence, the first two rationales are "quasi-rational," because they are patterned after rationales, both magical and scientific, that can be and have been used to justify the nature of phenomena in this our "real world." "Just because," however, is "non-rational," in that there are really no rules but those the author arbitrarily declares, like Roger Rabbit claiming that he cannot perform certain actions unless they're funny-- presumably, funny to whatever audience Roger is playing to.

But just because a nonsense-world is thoroughly without rational content, that does make it without relevance to the human condition. In my review of Lewis Carroll's "Alice books," I listed five types of tropes Carroll used to give the mad, anything-goes phenomena of Wonderland and of Looking-Glass Land their own "internal logic." Whatever efforts, conscious or subconscious, Carroll took to make his mad fantasies have human relevance provide a loose parallel to the "labour and thought" which Tolkien felt should inhere in a consistent "secondary world." I plan to put these observations to a test in a forthcoming mythcomics post, in which I will endeavor to show how a particular "nonsense fantasy" author managed to encode internal logic into his freewheeling descents into lunacy.

 

                                                                                                                                                                

AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 1

I'll commence this assault upon the Domain of Nonsense, this attempt to make nonsense make sense, with a contrasting example drawn from J.R.R. Tolkien's signature effort to defend his conception of fantasy from all those who have sought to downgrade that uber-genre. I will build upon my discussion partly on the points I made in the COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS essay-series, beginning here, though that series did not address the concept of nonsense fiction. But instead of rehashing those essays, I'll confine this essay to a quick re-examination of Tolkien's illustration of the way authors create what he called "arresting strangeness."                                                                                                                             "Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough—though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise.  To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode."-- ON FAIRY-STORIES.                                                                                                                                                Okay, fair enough. It takes special effort to imagine a world where a phenomenon of our "Primary World," the sun that appears to most persons on Earth as yellow, is actually green. No argument there. But what if you have--                                                                                       

                                                                                                                Can one make a world with a polka-dot sun credible? If such a sun is depicted, particularly in a medium that can show rather than describe it, it will certainly seem strange to the reader and arrest any expectations that this is a world like our own. But a sun with a precise polka-dot pattern-- or even something more random, like the spots on a leopard-- is unlikely to seem credible in any way. The polka-dot sun is strange, but it departs from a causally coherent world so radically that one cannot make it credible in itself. At most, an author can posit that the world with a polka-dot sun is one where anything can come into existence "just because"-- which will lead me into Part 2 of this aesthetic endeavor.                                                                                                        

LOVE, DENSITY AND CONCRESCENCE

I haven't written much if anything since 2017 about "density," when in the essay GOOD WILL QUANTUMS, I extrapolated a brief remark by Raymond Durgnat into a general principle, one applicable to all four of the potentialities. In that essay I wrote:

density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."'                                                                                                                                                                                Elsewhere in the essay and its follow-up, I qualified this statement by noting that all literary works, whatever potentiality they favored, were all *gestural" in nature, just to distance myself from associations with any criteria about fidelity to actual "lived experience." However, in due time I felt the need of a term that described the process by which such "potentiality density" came about, and for that purpose I freely adapted the term "concrescence" from Alfred North Whitehead.    

All that said, because density has a stronger association than does concrescence with the quality of some physical substance, it also proves somewhat better for describing the finished product. I might say, using my most recent emendations of my potentiality terminology, that "Dave Sim's work excels at dealing with didactic cogitations, while Grant Morrison's work excels at dealing with mythopoeic correlations." That quality of excellence can be metaphorically expressed as a given work's density, in that such density shows how thoroughly the author was invested in a given set of fictional representations (sometimes, though not usually, on a subconscious level).

Now, knowing that level of authorial involvement doesn't intrinsically make a given work, or set of works, engrossing to all members of a potential audience. In fact, tastes are so variable that one can practically guarantee that no works will be all things to all people, if only because we esteem (or do not esteem) all phenomena according to our respective abilities to relate to those phenomena in some way. And my carefully considered positioning of the word "esteem" brings me to the "love" part of the title.

Some setup: in chapter 40 of the romance-manga NAGATORO, main character Naoto, a high-school student, aspires to create good art. His senior Sana (the one clad in a towel) delivers the following critique of his recent effort, followed by her criterion for good art.                                                               

                                            

In the story the discussion is interrupted, and at no point in the series does this aesthetic credo get further articulated. Given that the author Nanashi devotes the bulk of NAGATORO to the dramatic potentiality, his main reason for having the Sana character make this statement is to imply a correspondence between the way a good artist is "in love" with his material, and the way Naoto specifically needs to invest himself in life, whether it's drawing his subject matter with passion, rather than with mere polished technique, or in his romantic relationship to the titular Nagatoro. I would tend to think that Raymond Durgnat, who was my original guide to the density-metaphor, probably would not have disapproved of Nanashi's use of "love" as a metaphor for artistic investment, for wanting to "know" a subject intensely (if not actually romantically).    

THE READING RHEUM: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

 I'm reasonably sure I never reread Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of the movie he scripted with Stanley Kubrick. I don't even remember noticing the various differences between book and movie, though I imagine that I twigged to the obvious fact that Clarke rendered highly specific explications of all the things that Kubrick left implicit in the cinematic 2001. In fact, I recall that one book reviewer for a SF-magazine back in The Day was so enamored of Clarke's version of the book that he regretted that it hadn't been followed for the movie.                     

I was not so entranced. Frankly, after coming off the high of watching the completed Kubrick film, I was mostly bored out of my skull. Now I say that with the caveat that I've long been a Clarke fan, though I divide his novels into two categories (leaving aside the short stories for separate consideration). One category includes his most ambitious, visionary works, mainly (assuming I haven't forgotten something) CHILDHOOD'S END and THE CITY AND THE STARS. The other group takes in books which are more blandly informational about whatever scientific subject they explore -- the ecology of the sea for THE DEEP RANGE, the lunar surface for A FALL OF MOONDUST. Clarke's ODYSSEY, despite reproducing many of the narrative tropes of the finished movie, proves not visionary in the least. It delivers lots and lots of dry information about the world of ODYSSEY but would have made a very dull movie.                                                                                           

  Divergences between book and movie came about because, even though the book wasn't in circulation until after the finished movie came out, Clarke wrote the novel from a treatment he and Kubrick had completed, as well as from some incomplete rushes from the movie. However, everything I've heard about Kubrick's directorial process indicates that he frequently changed his mind on various elements while still in the process of filming, and there's no way Clarke could have incorporated any of those changes. Yet as a reader I still find Clarke culpable for some of his choices-- for instance, dragging out the cavepeople sequence far beyond its function within the greater whole. The oddest divergence is the ending, after astronaut Dave Bowman has passed through the Stargate and finds himself stuck, for the rest of his life, in a replica of a human hotel room. In one of Kubrick's few commentaries on his enigmatic masterpiece, he admitted that the monolith-making aliens were keeping Bowman in a zoo-like captivity in order to study him. The nature of the replicated room suggests no other feasible purpose, so I tend to reject any idea that some alternate function appeared in the treatment from which Clarke was working. I think it more likely that Clarke simply did not, for whatever reason, like the idea of Bowman passing his whole life in the room until he's transfigured. So in the book, Bowman spends one "evening" in the room, has a meal, goes to bed-- and is immediately transfigured.                                                   

  I hadn't reread the book when I reviewed the movie in January, but I did glance at the book's transfiguration sequence and the subsequent birth of the Star-Child. Clarke doesn't provide any more rationale for the aliens to transform Bowman than the movie did, though in one chapter Clarke asserts that at some point the ETs became fascinated with other life-forms out of an existential loneliness. In that film-review, and in this essay touching on Jack Kirby's comics-adaptation of the story, I raised the question as to whether Kubrick or Kirby reproduced any narrative tropes relating to Nietzsche's concept of "self-mastery," which to him was essential to the formation of the ubermensch. I did find one (possibly accidental) trope in the Kirby work, but I couldn't demonstrate anything definite in Kubrick's movie, and I didn't find (or expect to find) anything of that nature in Clarke. From the smattering of accounts I've read/heard about Kubrick's creative process, I don't think he was all that devoted to Nietzsche's philosophy. I think he intuited some similitudes between that philosophy and the themes of "transhumanism" in certain science-fiction works, though when he first started working with Clarke, it doesn't sound like Kubrick had even read any of the author's works. I don't see the theme of self-mastery in most of the director's other famous movies, so it may be that he only embraced the German thinker for the sake of that one movie, much as Federico Fellini directed a passion for Carl Jung into one film, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, but did not explore Jungian themes in his later movies.                                                        

THE READING RHEUM: A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA (1968)

 I probably first read A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA and its two sequels no later than the 1970s. Within the last ten years I re-read them all for a book-group. I confess that despite that re-read I remember little about the sequels. I emphasize this reading history to underscore the fact that even though I seem to remember liking Ursula Le Guin's ambitious, arguably anti-Tolkienian trilogy, I don't think I tended to re-read the series, as I did with similar serials by Frank Herbert and the aforementioned Tolkien.                                                                                       

 I won't chart the loose plot of the novel here. What LeGuin presents to the reader are a loose series of incidents in the life of an islander in the fantasy-world of Earthsea: Ged, who comes from humble origins but who advances, sometimes in spite of himself. to become one of the foremost wizards in the world. I'm more concerned with pinpointing the major themes and tropes found in EARTHSEA. I find these to be "anti-Tolkienian" in that LeGuin is not concerned with the major good-vs-evil conflicts characteristic of most epic fantasy, but with an exploration of interiority, of what some call "the self."                                                                                                             

The defining problem Ged faces in his youth, and in his early years mastering the skills of wizardry, is that of his own pride. His pride leads him to unleash upon himself a pursuing Shadow, a form of "second self" which provides much of EARTHSEA's narrative drive. Roughly halfway through the book, while Ged is fleeing his personal demon, he takes refuge with his teacher Ogion, who tells him:                                                                                                                          

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”                                       

     Passages like this one demonstrate that LeGuin, in contrast to the Judeo-Christian focus found in Tolkein and Lewis, advocated the monistic approach of Taoism, at least as she understood it. This is not to say that Ged is a non-combative protagonist. EARTHSEA includes fascinating sections where the young wizard, once he's gained greater control of his own psyche, forces a powerful (and intelligent) dragon to yield to Ged's will, and overcomes the temptation of an archaic evil spirit. (To be sure, there's the suggestion of a Faustian trope, but by this time in the novel Ged, unlike Faust, has advanced beyond worldly temptation.)                                               

While I enjoyed my third reading of EARTHSEA, I concluded that I find the morality of LeGuin too arid. I noticed on this reading that although two or three of Ged's teachers seem to intuit the great mistakes he's going to make, none of them ever proffers any advice to guide him away from those errors. Had any of them done so, of course, that might have prevented Ged from bringing about the book's central conflict, which could have been a major problem for LeGuin. But I still find her actual approach overly schematic, as if she wants to put Ged under a microscope to observe the things he does. Though EARTHSEA probably has a much better literary reputation than the 1970s teleseries KUNG FU, I find that the better scripts of that program more involving that this fantasy-novel, particularly with respect to how the hero Caine is advised by his perceptors. The hero's Shaolin teachers are always seen in flashback, rendering bits of abstruse philosophy to Young Caine, which insights Modern Caine reflects upon in order to draw current conclusions about how to act in a current situation. Caine's absent teachers don't do his thinking for him, but they pass on their knowledge so that he can take advantage of it later. Ged is like one of the many islands that make up the world of Earthsea, isolated from his fellow humans even though he chooses to perform good deeds on their behalf. In both her non-fiction and her fiction, LeGuin abjures the visceral in favor of the intellectual-- which doesn't always make for the ideal re-reading experience. Incidentally, the first EARTHSEA book is definitely a candidate for a category of proposition/postulate I discussed here: one which "includes a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates."        

CURIOSITIES #46: A TALE OF TWO MATTS

 I happened to read a scanned copy of TWO GUN KID online and noticed that about five times in the text, the Kid's secret identity of "Matt Hawk" is addressed as "Matt Murdock." DAREDEVIL #6 was out at the time, so I don't find it hard to believe that Stan Lee was quickly typing the script and forget which Matt he was writing about. Presumably all was corrected in reprints.                                                          

MYTHCOMICS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SCROOGE MCDUCK (1994-96)

 There's a certain irony that for many decades the Disney Corporation invested heavily in promulgating its version of "Americana" to the American public, through adaptations of historical events like "Davy Crockett at the Alamo" and theme-park attractions like "Frontierland." Yet, when their widespread commercial interests resulted in producing their own genuine Americana-- something with arguably deeper roots than Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck-- the corporate gatekeepers treated both the creator of the work, and the creator's most ardent disciple, with something less than approbation.                                           

 I confess that though I read most of the important Carl Barks "duck books" when they were just comics that cost a dime or so, I recognized their special quality. Yet I did not become passionately devoted to the duck-world as did my rough contemporary Don Rosa. He started out simply doing fannish pastiches of Barks, but over time Rosa graduated to submitting his own art and scripts to publishers-- not to Disney, which didn't allow artists to keep original art, but to the European publisher Egmont, who kept the Disney funny-animal brand circulating overseas even when such "kids' comics" were fading from American comics shops. And his grand project, "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," was Rosa's ultimate homage to Barks. Barks had taken the originally rough character of Scrooge, in large part the epitome of the Skinflint Scot, and made him into a paean to the American success story. Rosa took the next logical step: to assemble all the data that Barks had conveyed about Scrooge in a panoply of largely discontinuous stories-- and make it into a biography that was a more organized portrait of American capitalistic triumph.                                                    

All twelve of the stories in LIFE are stand-alone stories, beginning with Scrooge's childhood in late 1800s Scotland. During these formative years, the boy becomes obsessed with making his fortune, and he keeps the first dime he ever made-- his "lucky dime," as some Barks stories called it-- as a marker of his intention to amass wealth rather than spending it.                                                                                            

One thing that distinguishes Rosa's project from simple continuity-building is that once Scrooges makes his inevitable journey to the United States to seek his fortune, Rosa exerted himself to research each historical situation in search of unique factoids, like the perils of navigating steamboats on the Great Mississippi, or a unique law about laying claims to mining property.                                                   

   

 Just like Barks, Rosa also points out both the dramatic and comedic consequences of making money, as when Young Man Scrooge finds his fair-weather friends turning away from him once he's become a man of means.                                                                                               
 

Like many fortune-hunters, Scrooge's primary relationship to the many exotic lands he visits is that of hunting for precious metals in the earth. However, on occasion the young adventurer encounters some of the metaphysical mysteries of older cultures in spite of himself, as with this Close Encounter of the Dreamtime Kind.                              

Now, in general Scrooge deals fairly with those who deal fairly with him and wreaks vengeance on those who seek to rob or swindle him. He's not the typical capitalist exploiter of the land and native cultures-- except once, when it's funny.                                                        

Rosa continues his trope of "money makes no one friends" when Scrooge returns to his native Scotland, now a millionaire. He's unquestionably arrogant about his success, but the humbler denizens of Scrooge's burg are something less than charitable. And though the above exchange was written in the early 1990s, it sounds very contemporary, with one Scot insulting the rich duck, getting insulted in turn by Scrooge, and then complaining that Scrooge is "repressin'" him.                                                                                                         

Scrooge soon returns to his adventuring ways, with his two sisters in tow (since none of his future wage-slaves, nephew Donald and Donald's own nephews, have been born yet). This time the arrogant billionaire, still focused on making more money but only through his own personal efforts, runs up against a fearsome native who's fully aware of how Scrooge means to exploit him.                                                  

This tale is also Rosa's partial rewrite of a famous Barks story, "Voodoo Hoodoo," in which the billionaire duck cheats the above-shown native chief Foola Zoola. In the Barks story, Scrooge shows no regret for his actions, but Rosa attempts to make his deviation from honest if hard-dealing labor to be a lapse in judgment-- one that Scrooge briefly regrets, only to conveniently forget about making things right.                                                                                                       

 In the final story Rosa retells the story in which the elderly, reclusive billionaire at last meets his nephew Donald and his three grandnephews, with whom he will go on to a new series of world-spanning adventures. In his notes for this story, Rosa attributes to Barks the central idea: that Scrooge's real reason for holding on to all his self-earned wealth is that every dollar, every coin is a memento of the uncompromising life he's lived. I leave it to Duckworld scholars to determine if Rosa is being overly modest on the subject. I think it's possible that Rosa is more deeply in historiography than Barks was, not least because Barks's editors may have encouraged him to avoid any topics not appropriate to children's comics-- though, because Barks was a genius, such topics made their way into the mix anyway. Incidentally, Rosa's passion for real-world history leads to the only crossover aspect of the work, apart from the final-story appearance of Donald and the nephews. As I said, all of the stories in the volume are fundamentally stand-alones, so that none of the Scottish mallard's famous foes-- Flintheart Glomgold, Soapy Slick, and the Beagle Boys-- "cross over" with one another in a given story. However, in one story Scrooge has a brief encounter with none other than the legendary Wyatt Earp. True, it's Wyatt Earp depicted as a funny animal-- but it's a charisma-type crossover all the same.