A MORAL FIXATION

I never cease to be amazed as to how many people, intelligent and otherwise, allow themselves to be seduced by the fallacy that morality applies to everything in life and art.

That it plays a large part in human life, no one could doubt. But there are any number of aspects of life not reducible to moral dimensions, and so it should follow that art is similarly capable of being separated into works of "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism," to reiterate my own terms for the distinctions.

On a related topic, while I was answering objections to my "superhero decadence" posts, I remarked that Curt Purcell might well get sick of all the "comic book crapola." I was a little unspecific as to why I thought arguments between comic-book people tended to become excessively crapulous, though.

The reason is this: comic-book people, whether elitist or populist, tend to make extremely-moral arguments against any position they don't like, often taking facile straw-man arguments to save themselves the trouble of engaging with said position in detail.

The two "Noah's Arghs" posts, here and here, exemplify this trend. Not only did poster Noah Berlatsky respond to my "decadence" posts by making some obscure remark about cultural studies-- which had no applicability to my posts-- but also tossed off a snide remark about the "Torture Guardin'" essay, which did no more than observe that in some fictional works torture (albeit broadly defined) simply doesn't have any moral resonance.

I don't doubt that the Spectre of the Straw Man sometimes haunts the blogs and messageboards devoted to non-comics fandoms, but comic-book people certainly seem to invoke its spirit with annoying regularity. Usually at Curt's blog, proponents of various ideas discuss them in mature fashion, without attempting to make up anything about an opponent's position. But often it seems that comic-book people, whether they do or don't read superheroes, tend to fashion their moral universes into Manichean cosmologies.

(Spoiler warning about the movie discussed below)

Admittedly, by the time the comics-people got ahold of Moral Manicheanism, it had already applied to just about every other artform and medium, and it still crops up. For instance, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS has recently come under fire for having supposedly trivialized the subject matter of the Holocaust by allowing a fictional commando unit the liberty not only to kick a lot of Nazi ass (as Simon and Kirby's BOY COMMANDOS did much earlier), but to actually rewrite WWII history by letting its heroes kill off Hitler.

This was pretty audacious for a contemporary film. Of course Hitler was revived in fantasy-tales in just about every pop-cultural medium extant, which could be viewed as a similar distortion of history, but most such stories only altered events taking place after Hitler's historical demise. Even in certain comic books, which asserted that Hitler was burned to death by the Human Torch, hewed close to the historical record by having the event take place in the same locale where Adolf reputedly perished with Eva Braun.

But the claim that such a rewriting of history endangers the ability of viewers to engage with the Holocaust is just more manic Moral Manicheanism.

In this post Brights Lights After Dark treated this question more seriously than I would have. I won't go into a lot of the specific ways I both agree and disagree with Joseph Lanthier-- at least, not in this post-- but I will point out that the originator of the Moral Manicheanism, one Jonathan Rosenbaum, does himself no favors in my book by quoting Roland Barthes:

'Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I’ll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong.'

Equating a work by a thematically-escapist artists like Quentin Tarantino with "Holocaust denial" is one of the most egregious Straw Men I've encountered in many years. One would hope that Rosenbaum's argument doesn't stand upon the reputation of Roland Barthes, that ingenious but superficial Marxist moron, but I've no faith that anyone who would even put forth such a cocked-up argument, with or without Barthes, would be able to judge what is or isn't "unreal" in the world of artistic endeavor.

So I guess, even if comic-book fandom plays host to countless hordes of Manicheans and their moral fixations, our little peccadillos-- "Superman's a Fascist; Vampirella's sexist"-- don't even compare with the dopiness that sometimes passes in other fandoms for intellectual discourse.

FINALLY, CRISIS

As some sort of cosmic coincidence, it just happens to be "Kirby Day" (on which the King would have been 92 years old) on the day I get around to doing a review of FINAL CRISIS, the book in which Grant Morrison most thoroughly explores the ideas of Jack Kirby's Fourth World.

Since FC is old news, I'm not delving into the work in detail. My chief interest is to examine whether or not Morrison's work is "mythic" in the sense I define literary myths. Steven Grant wrote an essay partly reviewing FINAL CRISIS but also asserting that no pop-cultural story, be it by Kirby or Morrison or Steven Grant, could even be "myth." I then wrote an answering essay in which, frankly, I tore apart Grant's logic as through so much tissue paper, but I admitted at the end of the essay that I couldn't refute Grant's opinion on FC, as I hadn't finished it.

Now I have, and as a literary myth it is-- to say the least-- flawed.

It has virtues, of course. It's largely an adrenaline-pumping thrill-ride, and if the Big Two are financially bound to the concept of doing such mega-crossovers, then it's better than they shoot for wild thrills than static setups in which superheroes See a Lot of Dead People.

But is it mythic? I've defined a work's mythicity as its ability to structure its symbolic elements in a complex, interweaving manner, and in this blog's initial essay I quoted Yeats in this regard, who noted that "mythic narrative... cannot tell one story without telling a hundred others."

Given that the mega-crossovers of Marvel and DC are stories that at least evoke hundreds of previous stories in each company's respective continuities, the mega-crossover sounds like an ideal place where a creator like Morrison-- known for celebrating the "metanarrative" aspects of stories in several of his works, not least being the ANIMAL-MAN series-- should be able to shine.

In practice, FINAL CRISIS merely proves the rule about mega-crossovers: with great numbers of powerhouses come diminishing returns. I'm not one of those fans who insists that the "story" is no good unless it's heavily plotted, for by its nature the mega-crossover has the structure of a vaudeville show, where each performer comes out and does his/her thing before being quickly followed by someone else.

That said, although Morrison uses a structure for FC much like that of his previous (and more aesthetically successful) SEVEN SOLDIERS crossover-project, the choppiness of the various DC superhero segments works against most of the characters really getting across the essence of their mythic "talents." Morrison provided a much better mirror for superhero myths in his JUSTICE LEAGUE run, where even C-list characters like Steel took on greater symbolic significance.

The most interesting thing about FINAL CRISIS is Morrison's elaboration of one of Jack Kirby's key mythic constructs, "the Anti-Life Equation," itself somewhat derivative of the One Ring from Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS. Equation and Ring are both explicitly-modern forms of myth insofar as they resemble none of the threats one finds in archaic myth-epics, where the threats to the heroes are generally physical in nature. Only in modern fantasies does one find the idea of using some device to bind all of humanity to one will, which seems a symbolic translation of contemporary human fears about the ease with which human will can be subverted. Morrison's take on such subversion is of course not informed with the same symbolic resonances as Kirby's was, but there's a good deal of interplay between their creative "universes." Thus when Morrison revives Kirby's "Justifiers"-- humans who place themselves in the role of total obedience to The Cause, even without the impetus of anti-life controlling them-- he's more than able to evoke the abnegation of personal will with quite as much horror as Kirby himself essayed.

Thus, even if the whole of FINAL CRISIS is less than the sum of its parts, I do find that some of those parts still make for damned good myth.

CARICATURE ANALYSIS

I started thinking about the matter of visual caricature while reading a messageboard topic which initially concerned sexual stereotypes but which veered off into the topic of racial caricature. At this point Ebony White, Afro-American sidekick to Will Eisner's classic crimefighter The Spirit, was described by two posters (one of them Gail Simone) as "racist." Another poster wondered why Eisner, who had apparently received some sort of complaints about Ebony's appearance sometime during THE SPIRIT's run (1940-1952), had not simply modified the character to eliminate Ebony's more egregious minstrel-show features-- saucer-eyes, blubbery lips, and a Southern-fried, English-mangling dialect.

To my knowledge Ebony's creator never accepted the "racist" accusation, and he always defended Ebony's appearance as appropriate to the art of visual caricature. For instance, the following quotes from a 2003 interview may not be Eisner's last published word on the matter, but they do seem reasonably representative. He begins by discussing his then-current project, FAGIN THE JEW, his re-interpretation of the Charles Dickens character, in terms of using caricature as communicatory device:

"Stereotype has been made a bad word. But it's not a bad [thing] unless it's used badly-- for evil purposes. But [sometimes] it's the only way you can communicate, visually."

Eisner elaborates that though he felt that Dickens did an "evil thing" by constantly referring to Fagin as "the Jew" in OLIVER TWIST, his research showed that Dickens himself was not anti-Semitic and that the author attempted to ameliorate the invidious characterization once he realized it was offensive-- not unlike certain of Eisner's experiences in the wake of creating the Spirit's minstrel-show minion. But of course, as Fagin was created by Dickens' putting words on paper (with any illustrations being ancillary to those words), Dickens would not have defended caricature on the basis of a need for visual shorthand.

The TIME interviewer goes on to ask Eisner about Ebony. Eisner maintains that a crucial difference exists between what he Eisner did and what Dickens did, in that Dickens promulgated a "negative stereotype" which "capitalized" on the "presumed characteristics of the Jew." Clearly, Eisner does not deem Ebony a "negative stereotype" of the same "evil" stripe as Fagin, though one cannot help but suspect that Eisner's sensitivities depended on whose ox was being gored. Eisner does allow that since some people actually were offended, his only "excuse" was being a man of his times, which meant that he used caricature to make fun of "bad English and physical difference in identity."

But this "it-was-the-times" defense is far less interesting than the defense of using caricature as a tool of quick communication, which may go toward answering the second fan quoted above, as to why Eisner did not try to remodel Ebony in order to answer the complaints.

To get one obvious objection out of the way, there probably were not very many complaints back in the 1940s, when minstrel-show tropes still made frequent appearances in mainstream films. Today we've grown used to creators quickly remodeling this or that character based on objections from pressure groups, but in cases where the objections are just a matter of readers' personal tastes, most creators would not instantly jump to refashion their characters to suit a minority opinion. That's one factor that might explain Eisner's disinclination to restructure Ebony.

In addition, artists-- or even artists who employ other artists in a "shop" situation-- value any tool that makes the work both accessible and recognizeable to potential buyers. Caricature is one such tool, but of course it's primarily valuable to artists who have a propensity for that artistic tool. Eisner was one such, and so he clearly valued his ability to do good caricature of a wide variety of ethnic and social "stereotypes." An artist with a more "realistic" take, such as Phil Davis on the early MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN, did not resort to physical caricature in drawing Mandrake's African sidekick Lothar, but he did resort to other visual devices to signal to readers that Lothar was African, such as garments (a fez, a leopard-skin tunic).

Eisner's work certainly testifies to his even-handedness in rendering nearly every ethnic stereotype favored by his contemporaries: dumb Swedes, sentimental Russians, cutthroat Arabs, stiff-upper-lip Brits, and fulsomely-romantic Frenchies are all on display in the Eisner corpus. It's clear that Eisner did not single out Afro-Americans for special treatment, and that he did, as he notes in the TIME interview, render some black characters in an un-stereotypical fashion, even though Ebony remained the most conspicuous black character in THE SPIRIT.

It goes without saying that Ebony is much more offensive today than he was in "his" time, though one imagines that if THE SPIRIT's contemporaneous black readers weren't especially offended by Ebony, it would be because other negative stereotypes, particularly those of the movies, were far more pervasive.

But-- is Ebony White "racist" as such?

I would answer "Yes" only with qualifications. Clearly Eisner did not realize, or chose not to realize, that the minstrel-show visual devices he perpetuated "capitalized" on the "presumed characteristics" of black people, where big eyes and big lips conveyed such characteristics as stupidity and childishness, just as Fagin embodied supposed Jewish traits of criminality and miserliness. Eisner probably only saw that he had given Ebony a lot more wit and personality than one saw in many black characters in the pop culture of the time, and that would be true as far as it went.

Yet, having admitted that Eisner used a racist visual trope, I am still uncomfortable with unreservedly calling Ebony a racist creation. Eisner's case is certainly weakened by his inability to consider how the "negative stereotype" of blacks was used as an indirect rhetorical tool by which real people were consigned to second-class citizenship. And yet, his point about caricature cannot be so easily dismissed.

Caricature is not meant to be fair. Even if I admit that the particular manifestation of the minstrel-show image of blacks is "evil," I'm conscious that no group ever likes the way it's portrayed by another group, unless the portrait is unreservedly noble and heroic. When caricature makes fun of individual or ethnic differences, it can only do so by provoking unconscious associations about How Things Should Be. Mentally it's a short step from "this one person's ears are bigger than ears should be" to "this ethnic group's eyes are smaller and sneakier-looking than eyes should be."

One may reply that one ought not to caricature individuals, real or fictional, on the basis of their race, and in current times there has been a great effort to damp down this tendency. And though I'm sure to be misunderstood by dunce-capped elitists ("Gene Phillips Advocates Racism!"), I do approve of society making such efforts, insofar as the activity makes all peoples more conscious of their incipient prejudices, at least up to a point.

However, I am pessimistic as to whether human beings can completely eliminate this tendency to stereotype, and I'm not entirely certain that we should.

Bill Russell once said, "Show me a man without prejudice and I'll show you a man without taste." Everyone has prejudices: it's just the nature of being an individual. Bigotry comes in when that individual thinks his prejudices should become applicable across the board, rather than being the particular expression of one's own consciousness. And, like it or not, one's taste includes how one feels about cultures not one's own-- whether they seem funny or weird or taboo-breaking, perhaps even AFTER one has made some effort to learn what makes that culture tick.

Perhaps no less appropriately, Dave Barry, before taking his trip to Japan, worried that he wouldn't be able to relate to the people. He then set up his readers with a homily about how he realized that the Japanese were just like everyone else-- and finished with the punchline, "They're all CRAZY!"

By which, of course, he meant that all of us are crazy, no matter how sane we may construe our own cultures to be. And the art of caricature is certainly, in its less poltically-motivated manifestations, one way of showing that comedic absurdity.

I'd like to believe that even if as a person Will Eisner wasn't sensitive to *all* of the ways in which some caricatures have been used in the service of bigotry, as an artist he had, not unlike both Dickens and Shakespeare, a wide-ranging, almost *disinterested* sense of What Made People So Damn Funny. And that's the main factor, far more than the defense that "everybody was doing it," that most mitigates the case for racism in the Analysis of Ebony White, Caricature.

CHARACTER VS. ARCHETYPE

On July 24, 2009 Sean T. Collins wrote:

'[Curt Purcell] articulates a problem with serialized superhero comics that not even Jim Shooter-style "new-reader friendliness" can overcome, namely that even if a superhero comic uses exposition to provide you with all the information you need to make sense it, it still "presuppose[s] a history of emotional attachment to these characters" to connect with it. And frankly there's no more of a way around that than there would be to make latecomers to The Sopranos instantly connect with the plight of Christopher Moltisanti. It's just the nature of long-form serialized storytelling. The key is to avoid plot points that are simply "Hey look, it's That Guy!" in favor of "Hey, look what that guy is doing!"'

I agree with this-- in part.

IMO, the sort of archetypal characters favored by popular fiction are less independent from their functions in the plot than characters in canonical literature, or at least the literature of what I've called "thematic realism." This means that the "emotional attachment"one gets from popfiction characters like Sherlock Holmes and the Fantastic Four is very different from that of those literary characters who have enjoyed wide popularity, such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.

Personal aside: one of my first Marvel comics was FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5. At that time I believe I might have gotten the sketchiest idea of what the FF were about from a MARVEL TALES reprinting a Human Torch tale, wherein the other three members guest-starred with their fiery partner. For those not acquainted with FF ANNUAL #5, it could almost be retitled FF GUEST STARS ANNUAL #5, since it not only intro'd me to support characters like Alicia and Crystal, but also to Black Panther and the Inhumans, who joined the FF in battling Psycho-Man and three supervillain flunkies.

It was a heady mix, to be sure, considering how little I knew about the various characters' backstories. But I would say that my desire to know more about those backstories proceeded not just from intrigue as to the characters themselves, but also as to their function in exciting, imaginative stories of super-powered conflict.

Sean points out that the problems of "long-form serialized storytelling" are not unique to superhero comics, and I agree. If one tried to pick up an ANITA BLAKE book late in the continuity, I believe one would find oneself deluged in backstory summations no less onerous than any of those of most superhero comics, and probably a good deal less immediately engaging than Lee and Kirby's FF ANNUAL #5.

But, if a reader were sufficiently motivated to read a book about a sexy paranormal adventurer, I think that reader would manage to overcome those barriers for the sake of ENJOYING the GENRE itself, where the characters are far less distinguished from the genre's plot-functions than one finds in thematically-realistic works.

So for me, and possibly others, the primary "emotional attachment" is to the archetypal forms of the genre, and attachments to the characters is of secondary importance-- which is why "new-reader friendliness" may not be as important as some have supposed.

SHORT POST ON DAMN LONG BASTERDS

I saw INGLORIOUS BASTERDS last weekend. There are a number of standout scenes, but for every good scene, there's one where Tarantino just drags the "suspense" out so tediously that I was begging for the "Jew Bear" to bash out my brains so I wouldn't feel compelled to watch any more.

And I seem to be one of the few who garnered some enjoyment out of the overly-long talky-talk scenes in DEATH PROOF, which many found excruciating.

I may be able to enjoy IB better on DVD, where I can fast-forward past these clunkers.

("Jew Bear" is a character in the film, BTW.)

SECRET ORIGINS OF SUPERHERO DECADENCE

In this post Curt Purcell dispels the misconception that Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and Moore's WATCHMEN started superhero comics down the road to "decadence." He argues that "market forces and pressures internal to the genre" would have led superhero comics to that path in due time anyway, and demonstrates that two direct-market features, OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE, did descend into decadence a good three years before Miller and Moore produced their aforesaid works. It must be added that both creators had been working in comics regularly for some years, although Moore wasn't significantly known to American readers until he debuted on SWAMP THING in the same year OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE appeared.

In "Aiming the Canon" I presented a mini-history as to how the changes to the comic-book market in the early 1970s led Marvel and DC to inject "adult concerns" into some of their product, though their intended market was almost certainly older adolescents rather than the thirty-to-fifty-somethings who support the current incarnation of the Direct Market. Since the DM was barely getting started in the 1970s, older adolescents were pretty much the only new market that comic books could have pursued with the resources available to them in those days. For this reason, even though the newstand-distributed color comics did become more daring in terms of content, I still regard them most of them as "juvenile pulp." There was at that time no paradigm for tapping into adult readers who made popular such paperback serials as THE EXECUTIONER-- not even when Marvel Comics unveiled their own copycat version of same.


I specified "color comics" above in order to single out those periodicals markted primarily to the less-than-adolescent audience, which category logically cannot include either underground comics or the Warren black-and-white magazines. Both of the latter did contain higher levels of verboten material than the color mags, and certainly both had some effect on the ways Bronze Age creators chose to push the envelope. But I can't speculate on that effect here, as my intent is mainly to touch on the flashpoints that led from "juvenile decadence" to its adult manifestations.

One such flashpoint that precedes the Bronze Age as such was Neal Adams. Technically speaking, Adams' work for the color comics was "clean" insofar as it didn't generally show decapitated heads or spewing blood. Nevertheless, Adams was instrumental in cultivating in some fans a taste for the "grim and gritty," and much of his appeal lay in his ability to suggest violence. In STRANGE ADVENTURES #208 (Jan 68) the hero Deadman (not yet a discarnate spirit) threatens to break the arm of his enemy Eagle. No ruptured flesh or broken bone is seen. But the reader feels the real possibility of the bone being snapped. This was heady stuff to a generation growing up on Batman-and-Robin fisticuffs, or even antiseptic Jack Kirby brawls.

As mentioned before CONAN THE BARBARIAN #1 (Oct 70) set a new standard for the depiction of both sex and violence in color comics. I'm still impressed that CONAN got away with as much "dirty" violence as it did in its first year-- noses bloodied, men devoured alive by monsters, the hero punching an enemy in the testicles. This is pure speculation, but perhaps Marvel got the feature past the Comics Code as a sort of test-case, to see if the market justified getting down-and-dirty again. CONAN's financial success may've paved the way for the 1971 revisions to the Code that, among other things, made possible the widespread marketing of horror and monster titles once more.

Interestingly, one of the first monsters to anticipate the wave of color-comics bogies was not a traditional Hollywood type like Dracula, but Marvel's Man-Thing, appearing just once in the b&w SAVAGE TALES #1 (May 71) before being transferred to color comics shortly thereafter. As SAVAGE TALES was an incursion on the non-Code market dominated by the Warren books, perhaps it's no accident that one of Conan's co-features in the first issue starred a monster intended for a continuing feature, in contrast to the slightly-earlier appearance of Swamp Thing in a non-continuing horror-tale. In any case, with the revision of the Code Marvel and DC were at last willing to unleash a new world of monsters to counter the world of superheroic gods they'd unleashed in the previous decade.

One narrative advantage of having monsters as stars was that, like the barbaric Conan, they could get away with greater levels of violence than the average superhero could. That said, superheroes too began to lose a lot of their Silver Age innocence, and probably no event of the early 70s captures that slow progress toward increased violence than The Death of Gwen Stacy in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #121 (Feb 1973). And even though the event itself was approved by SPIDER-MAN's two previous scripters, editors Lee and Thomas, the execution, as carried out by writer Gerry Conway and artist Ross Andru, exemplified a darker, more disruptive approach to the Marvel Universe. The subsequent introduction of that aforementioned Executioner imitator added yet more fuel to the shadow (so to speak).

The Punisher wouldn't become a superstar for several years, but the Marvel-DC superhero universe grew darker from yet other incursions. The burgeoning monster-stars began to cross over into the superhero worlds, but a more significant effect may've arisen from "straight" superheroes who incorporated far more grotesquerie and violence than, say, the generally-sanitized adventures of Marvel's Incredible Hulk. ADVENTURE COMICS #431 (Jan-Feb 74) exhumed a Spectre who outstripped the juvenile ghoulishness of his Golden Age template, while GIANT-SIZED X-MEN #1 (May 75) provided a certain claw-handed hero with a regular berth for mayhem-to-come. It may be argued, though, that Wolverine does not reach his true potential as a "savage hero" until X-MEN #98 (April 76) revealed that the character's deadly claws were part of his anatomy, which gave him a little more gravitas than just another costumed schmoe with blades attached to his hands.

Arguably DC Comics, though providing a home to the Spectre (in one incarnation) and Swamp Thing (in two), reveled a little less in "juvenile decadence" than Marvel did. Still, the die was cast right up against the handwriting on the wall, as is best seen by the way the Death of Gwen Stacy begat the Death of Iris Allen. Ross Andru, perhaps bringing with him lessons learned alongside Gerry Conway at Marvel, took over the editorship of the FLASH feature with issue #270 (Feb 79), and by July of the same year Iris was dead under quite grotesque circumstances that anticipated the death of Sue Dibny in 2004's IDENTITY CRISIS. And though Andru didn't remain editor for an exceedingly long period, allegedly sales on THE FLASH did go up during its "grim and gritty" period, which factor may well have contributed to DC's increasing investment in "decadent" material, such as the two 1983 features Curt Purcell references, OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE. Though I liked neither of them, both were significant marketing breakthroughs as they were designed to appeal to the burgeoning Direct Market, and so are ancestors to the "superhero decadence" of current days.

I would not categorize either OMEGA MEN or VIGILANTE as "adult pulp," though, for their narratives are still adolescent in tone, as is Andru's FLASH. But in the same year Andru revised DC's stalwart speedster, Frank Miller became the resident artist on one of Marvel's not-so-stalwart mainstays, beginning with DAREDEVIL #158 (May 79). Neither he nor Moore is "to blame" for any increase in decadence, adult or juvenile, but Miller has the distinction of bringing forth the Adult Pulp paradigm to comic books four years before most Americans knew Alan Moore from a hole in Blackburn, Lancaster.

Whatever one thinks of Frank Miller, no one can argue that, historically, Miller began to influence American comics before Moore. The linkage of these two creators in the public mind through their 1986 projects does have some interesting repercussions I won't address here, just as I won't deal with the question of why Miller's DAREDEVIL does qualify as adult pulp but Wolfman's VIGILANTE does not. As to whether either of those topics will be the next I address-- that too remains a secret, even to me.

COGNITIO/ DISSONANCE

Once again I return to Northrop Frye's concept of the four "archetypal themes" or "radical roots" of his four mythoi: for romance/adventure, the agon, for tragedy/drama, the pathos, for irony, the sparagmos, and for comedy the anagnorisis, which he asserts is more or less equivalent to the Latin cognitio.

Back in this essay I expressed more than a little discomfort with Frye's analysis of the comedy mythos, in which he tended to overemphasize, in keeping with Greek New Comedy, comedy's power to join together disparate parts of society, often through a climactic banquet or wedding-scene. It's true that there are some indications that the tradition of the "happy ending" climax might even go back to Greek Old Comedy, so that aspect of comedy may predate New Comedy's concentration of romantic plot-devices.

That said, when Frye writes something like this--

"These five phases of comedy may be seen as a sequence of stages in the life of a redeemed society."

-- I can't help but feel that something's being left out of the equation, like the question of whether the archetypal theme of comedy should relate to aspects of life we find funny, not redeeming as such. Surely one can find aspects of redemptive value in the other three mythoi as well.

Here's the longest thing Frye writes on the question of why we find things funny:

"The principle of the humor is the principle that unincremental repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny...Repetition overdone or not going anywhere belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern... The principle of repetition... is well known to the creators of comic strips, in which a character is established as a parasite, a glutton... or a shrew, and who begins to be funny after the point has been made every day for several months."

This passage, whose theory of humor sounds strikingly like that of Henri Bergson's, demonstrates that Frye was well acquainted with modern forms of repetitive comedy. Indeed, his description of the glutton sounds a lot like Dagwood Bumstead.

The problem, however, is that a comic strip like BLONDIE is so repetitive that it's hard to imagine it being one of the "stages in the life of a redeemed society." Rather, BLONDIE seems a New Comedy in reverse, where the romantic plot that originally drove the feature was concluded, so that from then on all the humor stemmed not from a young man overcoming opposition to his romance but from an older man finding himself trapped in what Marshal McLuhan called the strip's "mothering-wedlock."

So anagnorisis does not really seem to apply to a work as fiercely repetitive as BLONDIE, which makes one wonder if the term really serves for the archetypal theme of comedy. In that earlier essay I noted that I might use Frye's term with the caveat that I really referenced not his notion of "comedy as redemption" but something more like Kant's "comedy as incongruity," but since that's an easy point to fall by the wayside, I'm now planning to use the Latin cognitio in place of the Greek one. And I seem not to be the first to need something more expansive than the Aristotelian term: according to Terence Cave's study of the concept of literary recognition, Renaissance critics (covered in Chapter 2) also used cognitio to denote a wider concept of recognition that the one favored by Aristotle, which Frye channels into his interpretation of characters experiencing some epiphanic redemption.

I mentioned in the Comedy-and-Irony essay that I thought the archetypal theme of comedy should be capable of embracing every form of incongruity from the philosophical ruminations of Woody Allen to the slapstick of the Three Stooges. I still believe that, but if one believes that the essence of humor is not repetition but incongruity, then it implies that the pleasure we get from humor is not in cognitive knowledge but in knowing nothing in life ever quite coheres the way we think it ought to, as in Milton's encomium on Socrates:

“The first and wisest of them all professed
To know this only, that he nothing knew.”

Thus my theme of cognitio is fundamentally about knowing that humans don't really know anything, but whereas this "discovery" is often a cause for despair or deep reflection in the other three mythoi, in comedy such knowledge is the source of the pleasure itself.

This attempt to refine aspects of Frye's archetypal themes will tie in with a later essay that will cover my earlier-mentioned reading of Theodor Gaster's THESPIS, and why its influence on Frye's ANATOMY might be extended into new territory.