THE LARGE AND THE SMALL PT. 2

 Neologism Neurosis time again-- 

In Part 1, I discussed the way "scale," with respect to the number of pivotal icons in a narrative, affected the tenor of different literary genres. I was talking specifically about the disparate ways readers and critics react to the polarized fantasy-subgenres of J.R.R. Tolkien's "epic fantasy" and Robert E. Howard's "sword-and-sorcery." Some poking around revealed that there are actually jargonistic ways of talking about scale in the sciences, where "macroscale" means "large scale" and "microscale" means "small scale." But coinages like "macroscale-icons" and the opposing neologism are both cumbersome.

I'll note in passing that Tolkienian "epic fantasy" has sometimes been marketed as "high fantasy," though I'll bet nothing has ever been marketed as "low fantasy" even though critics have bent their brains about what the "high/low" distinction ought to connote. I won't endorse the dichotomy here in any way. "Low" carries irrelevant negative connotations, just as I mentioned in Part 1 that antonyms for words like "epic" and "expansive" usually have negative connotations. But going back to the contrasted examples of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, there's nothing intrinsically negative about the latter narrative following the destinies of one main character and a couple of pivotal support-characters, rather than charting a huge panoply of pivotal characters as does the former. The humbler "microscale" endeavors of Sir Gawain in GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT possess what I'll call an "intensive" quality, a quality not possible for any single story in the macroscale world of Malory's MORTE D'ARTHUR-- "intensive" being more or less opposed in my mind to "expansive."

I may as well mention that these distinctions about "large scale/expansive" vs. "small scale/intensive" certainly don't apply only to magical fantasy stories. The first literary opposition that occurred to me was that of the "expansive" MOBY DICK of Melville and the "intensive" LIGHT IN AUGUST of Faulkner, and I'm sure that there are thousands of other potential examples. 

So "expansive/intensive" is a possible jargonistic application, which I may or may not keep exploring. I will note that when I was looking at other words that carried the tonality of "epic," I was very attracted to both the words "panoramic" and "panoptic." Both certainly characterize Tolkien and his emulators, and "panoptic" is likeable because the essence of expansive narratives is that they give the reader the sense of participating in a huge number of viewpoints, i.e., lots of "eyes" with their own interpretations. By comparison, Howard and his emulators offer readers a more circumscribed number of eyes-- but here too, there's no good antonym for "panoptic." If I wanted to bring that word into my jargon-verse, I'd have to make up another neologism, such as "oligoptic," based on the Greek word-element "oligo" for "a few." So for the time being, if I use any terms at all, I'll describe "macroscale iconicity" as "expansive" and "microscale iconicity" as "intensive."

Of course the actual readership of fantasies will inevitably keep using the familiar terms of "epic fantasy" and "sword-and-sorcery." Yet even while I admit that fact, I'll still maintain that sword-and-sorcery holds "intensive narrative tendencies" with other subgenres that focus on small casts of characters, like PINOCCHIO, GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, and the majority of both rural "folktales" and citified "literary fairy tales."        

Yet if I wanted to change all the marketing terms to suit me, what would I choose? It would have to be something straightforward, and the first thing that comes to mind is the way 20th-century pop fiction was given shorthand terms based on elements widely common to the genres involved: "horse operas" for westerns, "space operas" for science fiction. So what would be the dominant elements that I would use, not only to distinguish expansive fantasy from the intensive type, but also to bring together all those subgenres I thought fell under the aegis of the intensive type?

Two words, sometimes used to mean the same thing, occur to me: "quest" and "journey." But in my view, a "quest" is intrinsically an organized endeavor, often by several people as in MORTE D'ARTHUR and LORD OF THE RINGS, to accomplish a specific end. In contrast, a "journey" need not have a specific end. It can have such, as when Gawain wanders about trying to figure out how to avoid falling victim to the Green Knight's ax. But the prose versions of both Conan and Pinocchio travel from adventure to adventure, often giving their readers a sort of guided tour of a particular world's weird wonders. A "journey" can also be performed by an ensemble-- the two heroes of Fritz Leiber's, the four kids of Lewis's first Narnia book-- but I'd generalize that if an author goes over six pivotal characters in his ensemble, he loses his ability to "intensely" focus on the fortunes of a handful of characters.    

So "quest operas" would be my preferred term for both LORD OF THE RINGS and THE ILIAD, though in the latter, the quest is for the Greeks to find a way to conquer Troy, which is possible through both the reclamation of Achilles (in Homer) and the invention of the Trojan Horse (in other works of the so-called "Epic Cycle").     

And "journey operas" take in CONAN THE CONQUEROR, THE ODYSSEY, PINOCCHIO and "Jack the Giant Killer."    

THE LARGE AND THE SMALL

 Responding to an online comment to my reprinting CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY on a forum:

_______________

 I'd agree that there's no way to know what subgenre has intrinsically greater variety-- one can always imagine infinite variations on any theme-- so I might modify my statement to say that there was the *perception* of epic fantasy having greater variety, just because of the difference in *scale* between the oeuvre of Tolkien and that of Howard.  

"Scale" is a tough thing to define, but it might be more accurate overall. I did an antonym-check on both the word "epic" and the emotional tonality it usually carries for me, that of being "expansive," and almost all the antonyms to both make the thing opposite look rather crappy, with the most value-free ones being things like "humble" or "restrictive." 

We know, though, people started calling Tolkien "epic" simply because the RINGS story involves a ton of characters and moving parts in comparison with less "expansive" fare like Conan. But one has to be cautious about implying that there's nothing "epic" about Conan. The REH story "People of the Black Circle" sets up the Cimmerian to defeat a circle of evil mystics out to conquer the world. I'm re-reading DC's 1970s barbarian-comic CLAW, and after three or four episodic stories someone unleashes a destructive demon on the world, and it's up to hero Claw and his sidekick to find the mystic items that can expel the critter. So really the only thing "small-scale" about a S&S story is usually that it involves fewer starring and supporting characters than the "large-scale" kind. At the same time, being "small-scale" allows a hero, or pair of heroes, to get involved in comparatively small-scale conflicts, like Good Ol' Conan Brown trying to plunder a great tower and releasing an enslaved entity in "Tower of the Elephant." Is an "epic fantasy" short story even possible?

In FLAME Murphy quotes from the prologue of an S&S collection, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editors made a very limited comparison to the two famous epics of Homer, saying simply, "If high fantasy is a child of THE ILIAD, then sword-and-sorcery is the product of THE ODYSSEY." This is a fine insight because even though we call both Homeric poems "epic," clearly ODYSSEY is just dealing with the struggles of one man and some supporting characters (the family back on Ithaca) facing an epic array of entities, while in ILIAD one might call Achilles the central character but the story devotes almost equal space to twenty or so "support characters," including Odysseus. Murphy then takes the editors' insight in some untenable directions, but nothing that demolishes the validity of the original idea.

Of course, even calling S&S "small-scale" doesn't define that much. As you point out, Jack Vance's Cugel books, which I haven't read for many years and which Murphy also cites, don't contain much swordplay, focusing on a "hero" who often outwits enemies rather than outfighting them. For that matter, there are a lot of fantasies that no one would term "S&S" that are also "small-scale," like literary fairy tales: PINOCCHIO, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Yet a few folktales involve pitched combat, like the folkloric "Jack the Giant Killer." A lot of knights-in-armor fantasies of the medieval era have the same plot structure as barbarian stories-- solitary hero rides around getting into trouble-- and don't involve major "epic" actions like finding the Holy Grail, and I wondered which if any of these Howard might have read, even in bowdlerized forms. 

On top of all that, having lots of characters doesn't mean a story is more complex. I read the first three SHANNARA books over 20 years ago, and I remember nearly nothing about them, while by comparison I recall a lot more incidents even from simple "Clonan" books by writers like Jakes and Fox, not because those books were great but because this or that incident held visceral appeal.

I may amuse myself trying to think of neologisms for "stories with many pivotal characters" and stories with few pivotal characters," but there's probably no new term that will ever change the status quo.

 

          

 

NEAR-MYTHS: "SEALED IN BLOOD" (SGT. ROCK ANNUAL #2, 1982)

For the last Memorial Day, I decided to read some random war comics from DC, few of which I ever sampled previously. I was aware that in the late 1950s, DC's war titles, generally under the editorship of Robert Kanigher, began to evolve a regular lineup of featured characters, some of whom then began to cross over frequently in the sixties, seventies and eighties. The particular 1980s crossover I encountered was not surprising for its crossover of heroes, but for the way that Kanigher-- who certainly was not given to the Stan Lee method of endlessly recycling even the most obscure antagonists-- decided to exhume a "bad guy" so obscure, she isn't even indexed in Grand Comics Database.

So far as I can tell, the one and only time Nazi officer Helga Voss appeared in a comic was SGT. ROCK #322 (1978.)

 Lieutenant Helga Voss introduces herself to the redoubtable Rock by machine-gunning a small squad of Brit soldiers, fighting with the sergeant, and then trying to get him killed by a patrol of her countrymen, all of whom Rock kills. All the backstory we get is that Helga's father and brothers died in the field, so she took their place. Rock takes Helga prisoner and returns with her to his unit.

 

Once Helga encounters Easy Company, she finds it "easy" to make all the grunts drool over her, except for Rock-- and according to Kanigher's hints and Frank Redondo's art, even Rock is not insensible to her charms. Despite his refusal to let her cozy up, she still takes him by surprise, steals a gun and kills one of Rock's men. (Not one of the well-known ones, of course.) She leads the "feldwebel," as she repeatedly calls him, into a German ambush, but Rock triumphs even though Helga escapes. Though she swears to make another run at Rock, Kanigher apparently dropped her as a potential menace.

     Four years later, Kanigher and artist Dan Speigle launched SGT ROCK ANNUAL #2-- which I assume had a #1 under some other title. In the story proper, a flashforward scene shows Rock in the same situation seen on the cover-- Rock hanging from a cable-car while being menaced by a man with a gun-- but now we learn that that the would-be killer is Frank Rock's only brother Larry, who's fighting in the same war, but in the Philippines.

A montage, apparently in Rock's mind, rehearses how Larry, despite grievous wounds, saves the famed General MacArthur from an assassination attempt. Larry later saves MacArthur from a second attempt, and the creator of "Enemy Ace" gets into heavy poetry, using fraternal imagery to describe  Larry and the pilot of a zero plane as "murderous twins," until their bond is severed by the breaking of an "umbilical cord of madness."

Back in Rock's terrain, he gets two sets of orders (one open, one sealed) from fellow warcomics-star Lieutenant JEB Stuart and his "Haunted Tank," complete with the tank's resident Civil War ghost.  
   

When a battle temporarily incapacitates the Haunted Tank, Easy Company proceeds to follow the already opened orders, to seek out a German castle and to liberate a prisoner there. They encounter a ten-foot-tall Kraut robot whom the soldiers nickname "Goliath" before eventually taking him out with their guns. 

After the robot's demise, another pitched battle erupts, but this time Easy gets help from frequent guest-star Mademoiselle Marie, as well as returning evildoer Helga Voss. Given that Kanigher and others had already established an ongoing relationship between Rock and Marie, it's tempting to think that the only reason Kanigher revived Helga for just a few pages was to portray a machine-gun "catfight" between the French brunette and the ice-blonde Nazi.

    In order to justify the third hero-crossover, Rock gets an air-lift to the German castle by "Navajo air ace Johnny Cloud," while the rest of Easy keeps footing it overland. Somehow Marie and Cloud both know that Rock carries sealed orders that he can't open till he reaches the castle. Once Rock infiltrates the castle, he makes two discoveries. One is that Rock's frequent sparring partner The Iron Major is present in the schloss. The other is that the orders tell him to kill the prisoner if he can't rescue him. A page or so later, Rock makes a third discovery-- the identity of the prisoner-- but the more astute readers will probably have figured that Kanigher didn't keep bringing up Larry Rock for no reason.

          

As a minor twist, Kanigher reveals that the Iron Major is of an older German echelon and so doesn't approve of Nazi depravity. The depraved Nazi colonel orders the Major executed, so Rock has to save his enemy from his other enemies, and then clobber the Major when the more cultured villain gets in the hero's way. Surprisingly, Kanigher rushes past the revelation that the prisoner is Larry Rock-- maybe he thought it was so obvious, everyone would have seen the handwriting on the wall. The two Rocks escape the Germans by cable-car, but Larry's old wound makes him irrational. He demands his brother kill him to keep Larry from falling into enemy hands and being tortured to reveal vital information.  
   

   

For the big dramatic finish, Larry vanishes into the icy mountain wastes, sparing Brother Frank from having to execute the prisoner as his orders demanded. So even if the orders were "sealed in blood"-- that of fraternal blood, blood-ties that couldn't be allowed to trump the needs of the military-- Frank Rock actually defies those orders for sake of brotherly love. Larry actually has no good reason to tell Frank to kill him-- once they're on the cable-car, they're no longer in danger of recapture-- but I guess Kanigher used Larry's head-wound to justify the big sacrificial moment. Yet though it's a very contrived tale, there's just a few myth-tropes here worth preserving. And from what I've heard, I believe Larry Rock comes back later, so the big sacrifice gets overturned for the sake of another story in the Rock mythos. 

 

THE READING RHEUM: FLAME AND CRIMSON (2019)

Since this essay allowed me to deal with the questions of "escapism in entertainment" raised in Brian Murphy's FLAME AND CRIMSON, here I can concentrate on more of a straight review of the book. 

To my knowledge FLAME probably stands as the first substantive history of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre in prose, with only moderate attention to developments in other media. The author not only shows a strong familiarity with all of the major authors in the subgenre-- even the bad ones-- he took pains to read most or all of the AMRA fanzines (1959-1982) in order to get a sense of how the magazine endeavored to keep alive a very niche type of entertainment, particularly in the days before the Lancer paperbacks of the middle sixties revived the subgenre and made it widely popular for roughly the next fifteen years or so. As I said in the previous essay, I don't necessarily think the subgenre fell out of favor due to "the bad driving out the good." It may just be that the competing subgenre of epic fantasy offered a lot more variety to the fantasy-oriented reader than even the best exemplars of sword-and-sorcery.

In any case, Murphy's research includes many topics of interest, such as the role of Sprague de Camp in launching the sixties Lancer reprints, apart from the work de Camp and Lin Carter did in adding to the saga of REH's most popular barbarian. Murphy provides a lot of detail about the possible influences upon Howard's almost "sui generis" development of sword-and-sorcery-- influences such as Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and A. Merritt. However, Murphy seems laser-focused upon positioning sword-and-sorcery within the tradition of what I call "magical fantasy stories," even though Murphy himself runs down a list of Howard's favorite authors and concludes that "Howard favored historical fiction authors and adventure stories largely absent fantastic elements." To support this claim, Murphy runs down a list of seventeen authors whom Howard is known to have read (and sometimes overtly imitated) and claims that only four of those on the list-- Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft were "fantasy authors." However, there were certainly well-known fantastic works in the oeuvres of such figures as Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard, while the majority of Sax Rohmer works-- works which Howard emulated in his "Skull-Face stories"-- have almost as much focus on "real-world fantasy" as the works of EA Poe.

I won't rate Murphy's opinions of other, non-Howard prose authors of S&S or on S&S cinema; such things boil down to individual opinion. The only estimation I found hard to swallow was his overly politicized reading of CL Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" stories, which were the only female-centric S&S stories produced during Howard's lifetime." When Murphy writes that "the dreamy, out of body sequences typical of the Jirel stories are battlegrounds of traditional gender roles," he not only sounds like he's parroting feminist academic scholarship, he also fails to make a good case for his interpretation.   

Lastly, Murphy tries a little too hard to create a radical opposition between S&S and the epic fantasy of Tolkien. He's somewhat on an interesting track when he quotes from the prologue to an anthology, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editor briefly ventures a comparison between the large scale of the epic fantasy subgenre and the similar scale of Homer's ILIAD, and also between the more limited scale of the S&S tale and the events of Homer's ODYSSEY. But Murphy tries to improve on what the anthology-editor wrote. For Murphy the iconic epic-fantasy hero traces from Hector, the noble antagonist, while the iconic S&S hero is embodied by-- Achilles, the ILIAD'S protagonist? I can only guess why Achilles appealed to Murphy more than Odysseus. But whatever the reason, his idea just obscured the more promising comparison: comparing the concerted, large-scale conflicts of the Trojan War to epic fantasy and comparing the generally peripatetic, small-scale adventures of the S&S heroes to the wanderings of Odysseus. But whatever my technical disagreements with Murphy, I never thought he was a phony, which was my reading of the authors of the proto-woke tome DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME.      

A TALE OF TWO COSMS

 Though the terminology introduced here may not stand the test of (my) time, I felt like better organizing my thoughts on "ontology and epistemology." I'm fairly sure that nothing I write here will supersede my literary definition of both, I formulated in 2023's WHAT VS. HOW. But the proposed terminology might be better than trying to repurpose the standard "tenor/vehicle" terms I put forth in 2024's VERTICAL VIRTUES.

My current difficulty stems from my realization that in essays like A NOSE FOR GNOSIS I've frequently been using "ontology" and "epistemology" as if they could stand for all the ontological or epistemological elements in a narrative, when in fact the words signify the disciplines involved in thinking about what things exist or how we have knowledge of their existence. "Tenor and vehicle" also don't work that well because each word sounds like a single unitary thing, rather than a combination of elements that comprise a greater whole. Since the connotation for Greek *cosmos* is that of an ordered whole, my new terms are *ontocosm* for the totality of lateral elements (relating to the kinetic and dramatic potentialities) and *epicosm* for the totality of vertical elements (relating to the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities). Whether I'll use the terms a lot depends on my future sensibilities. But at this point it seems easier to reword my statement in NOSE FOR GNOSIS re the respective potentialities of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN and the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm. 

On a related note, while I was looking at my "greatest crossovers" series on OUROBOROS DREAMS, it occurred to me that my criteria for greatness were certainly not primarily epicosmic. There were some crossover-stories with strong vertical elements, like JIHAD and THE BOOKS OF MAGIC. But for the majority of my choices, I believe I responded to the elements of lateral storytelling. Thus I included Spider-Man's first encounter with The Avengers on the basis of both kinetic and dramatic elements, while the wall-crawler's first meeting with the Fantastic Four was, in a word, forgettable in ontocosmic terms. Other times, I might not think the lateral story was all that good in itself, but that it comprised some landmark crossover-event-- the first time the Avengers met the cowboy-heroes of Marvel's Old West, or that GAMBLER movie that brought together a dozen or so actors to play either real or simulated versions of their TV-characters. In these stories, it wasn't so much the actual execution of the concept but its potential that I found intriguing.        

STIMULATING RESPONSES PT. 3

 More fun with geometrical approximations as in Part 2, but this time, a little shorter.

In that essay, I gave visual examples as to how the concrescence of vertical meaning in a narrative could be represented as an increasing amplitude of the up-and-down variations in a straight line, which represented the forward progress of lateral meaning. Now, the only complication to this illustration is that my previous essays have established is that such concrescence also appears in the elements of lateral meaning, the potentialities I've labeled "the kinetic" and "the dramatic." However, whereas the increasing concrescence of vertical values can be shown as greater amplitude, concrescence of lateral meaning is geometrically expresssed by the relative thickness of the line, as per these three examples:

 

 The thinnest, and thus least dense, of the lines represents the "poor" state of either kinetic or dramatic potentiality. the next thickest represents a "fair" state, and the thickest represents a "good" state.

Just to give three examples applicable only to the dramatic potentiality:

A story with possibly the least dense drama-- for instance, a Roy Rogers Z-western-- would be represented by the thinnest line.

A Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR would usually be in the middle, representing a fairly dense dramatic potentiality.

And something like Faulkner's A LIGHT IN AUGUST would merit the thickest line of good drama. Of course, the lines would also be more or less jagged depending upon the intensity of the vertical amplitude. The mythopoeic amplitude for particular FANTASTIC FOUR stories might vary according to each story's content, even though the thickness of the lateral representation might stay the same. Thus "The Impossible Man" and "The Galactus Trilogy" might have the same level of emotional drama (even though one is expressed through comedy) but very different levels of mythopoeic amplitude.    

CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY

 I've been trying to find time to review Brian Murphy's 2019 book FLAME AND CRIMSON: A HISTORY OF SWORD-AND-SORCERY, which I basically liked. with reservations. But I happened to make a remark about the book on one online forum, and it occurred to me that I might justify it in advance of a formal review, since the crux of the book is the question as to how to define "sword-and-sorcery" as a genre, as well as its place in history.

FLAME, in addition to charting the predecessors of S&S and its provenance within pulp magazines, also advances a theory as to the subgenre's relative downturn after a surge in mass popularity in 1960s magazines and paperbacks. That theory is loosely a restatement of Gresham's Law-- "bad money drives out good"-- but substituting "bad product/good product." I'm not entirely opposed to that interpretation, though I think the matter might be more involved. The crux of the interpretation depends heavily on what one defines as "escapism" and what different people expect from it. The remark I made was as follows:

"At one point Murphy twitted Lin Carter for his view of S&S as escapist, yet Murphy said something similar at the end of CRIMSON."

To provide a little more context to the statement, Murphy extolls the essential creator of the subgenre, Robert E Howard, as a rare voice of genius within pulp fiction, and he has similar glowing praise for such innovators in the subgenre as Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber. But he considers that much of the less innovative works of the 1960s, by such authors as Lin Carter, John Jakes and Gardner F. Fox, to be generally responsible for the subgenre's downturn in the 1980s. Carter, for those not in the know, was a lifelong devotee of fantasy, though he wrote work in other genres. I have not read or reread any of Carter's books in many years, but I recall only liking a handful of works. I wouldn't credit Carter with much more innovation than Murphy does, and indeed, Carter's statements as Murphy reprints them indicate that Carter sincerely believed that S&S was meant to be "completely derivative" and thus not really defined by innovation. And one must admit that Murphy was hardly unique in denigrating the Conan-imitations of the 1960s, the various works by Carter, Jakes and Fox, as "escapist and wish-fulfillment" (p. 171).

Yet Murphy, as I said above, attempts to define "escapism" in such a way as to validate REH and other esteemed S&S writers-- who to this day are still not really embraced as "real literature"-- as being a cut above the rest. In the last chapter, Murphy says:

"Fantasy is the literature of escape, and sword-and-sorcery falls squarely into this tradition. It offers a glimpse at existence beyond our ordinary round, awakening world-weary hearts to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion." 

Murphy cites Tolkien and a couple of others as champions of this interpretation of fantasy and thus of all its subgenres. However, the author never quite defines what makes "good escape," as opposed to "bad escape." If a given story depicts any sort of fantastic entity or contrivance, doesn't it possess a power to take readers "beyond our ordinary round?" Or is there some special level of communication that a story in any genre should have, to open hearts "to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion?" In the "escapist and wish fulfillment" remark Murphy makes on page 171, he ventures a comparison between paperback sword-and-sorcery and the similar light women's entertainment known as "bodice-rippers." My impression is that the majority of these-- not counting offshoots like Gothics and supernatural romance-- are without fantastic entities or contrivances. But if those stories lack the power to bring forth "good escape," is it because they lack fantastic elements, or do the stories lack something else, something that can also be found in non-fantasy books by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, as much as in the greatest fantasy-authors?

I have my own solutions to these conundrums, of course, and maybe Murphy does too. His purpose in writing FLAME was obviously not to propound a synoptic definition of "fantasy literature vs. realistic literature." Still, any time one uses the word "escapism," it opens some of these pitfalls, into which anybody, even with the best intentions, can fall.