TIGERS AND GHOSTS AND GODS; OH MY! : PART 2

“Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room,’ and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply ‘There is a mighty spirit in the room’ and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe.”

Technically, the three entities C.S. Lewis employs to describe the responses of Fear, Dread, and Awe-- the trinity of human responses which Lewis deems relevant to the matter of "the Numinous"-- are not (as in my title) tiger, ghost and god.  For the last Lewis describes only a "mighty spirit."  However, given that Lewis was, in his most significant works, an unstinting apologist for the Christian faith, I don't think I'm reaching to hazard that for Lewis, that "mighty spirit" could be only the Christian God.  And in the PROBLEM OF PAIN essay from which the above quote stems, Lewis is far from shy about proclaiming his good news.  Indeed, he shows a curious ambivalence about non-Judeo-Christian religions like unto that of early Christian polemicists.  When Lewis wants to show the universality of the concept of "the Numinous" (first named as such by Rudolf Otto), he has no problem quoting examples of awe-filled responses from Ovid and Virgil alongside examples from the Old Testament. Nevertheless, it's clear throughout his screed that no mere pagan religion can possess its own validity.  There's only enough room in town for One Revelation.

Nevertheless, Lewis is insightful enough to invoke not only "virtuous pagans," but also modern philosophers like Otto in service of his creed.  I have not read Otto's IDEA OF THE HOLY, and so can't comment fully on Lewis' use of him.  Thanks to Google search, though, I can say that Lewis substantially uses the term "the Uncanny" substantially in accord with the way Otto uses it:

"...this expression [of unfamiliarity] is popularly used for a thing of which no one can say what it is or whence it comes, and in whose presence we have the feeling of the uncanny."-- HOLY (1917), p. 197.

I'll note that this usage is entirely the opposite of Freud's use of "the Uncanny" in the 1919 essay of that title.  As an empiricist Freud emphasized that what appeared to be unfamiliar, "umheimlich," was actually that which was too familiar, and could be glossed by the concept of the Oedipus complex, as opposed to being genuinely ineffable.  As I pointed out here, Todorov is on the same page as Freud when he claims that his version of "the uncanny" is also all about glossing the Fantasy with the Real.

All that said, the main assertion in Lewis' essay-- entitled simply "Introductory," though the essay stands on its merits without depending on the other essays in the book-- can be summed up in these two quotes:

The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been ground for religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

There is no possibility of arguing from mere danger to the uncanny, still less to the fully Numinous. You may say that it seems to you very natural that early man, being surrounded by real dangers, and therefore frightened, should invent the uncanny and the Numinous. In a sense it is, but let us understand what we mean. You feel it to be natural because, sharing human nature with your remote ancestors, you can imagine yourself reacting to perilous solitudes in the same way; and this reaction is indeed ‘natural’ in the sense of being in accord with human nature. But it is not in the least ‘natural’ in the sense that the idea of the uncanny or the Numinous is already contained in the idea of the dangerous, or that any perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of ghostly dread or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already understand them. When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be given, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from them.

 As a neo-Kantian I part ways with both Empiricist Freud and Rationalist Lewis; I don't believe in the least that religion stems either from the purely materialistic causes Lewis is refuting, nor from the "different source" Lewis uses to explain religion's provenance.  In THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON Kant contrasts and dismisses the problems with both Empiricism and Rationalism:

In one word, Leibnitz intellectualized phenomena, just as Locke, in his system of noogony (if I may be allowed to make use of such expressions), sensualized the conceptions of the understanding, that is to say, declared them to be nothing more than empirical or abstract conceptions of reflection. Instead of seeking in the understanding and sensibility two different sources of representations...--   CRITIQUE, p. 174.

Nevertheless, even though Lewis's principal project is to justify the Christian narrative of Revelation-- thus committing Leibnitz's fallacy of "intellectualizing phenomena"-- Lewis's logical deduction of a "sheer jump" that takes one from simple fear to more complex emotions of dread and awe is even more meaningful in neo-Kantian terms.  Here's Cassirer once again, emphasizing the growth of the expressive function in human beings as the Great White Way to understanding existence in a manner far beyond that of "dogmatic sensationalism:"

"Whatever we call existence or reality, is given to us at the outset in forms of pure expression. Thus even here we are beyond the abstraction of sheer sensation, which dogmatic sensationalism takes as its starting point. For the content which the subject experiences as confronting him is no merely outward one, resembling Spinoza's 'mute picture on a slate.' It has a kind of transparency; an inner life shines through its very existence and facticity. The formation effected in language, art and myth starts from this original phenomenon of expression; indeed, both art and myth remain so close to it that one might be tempted to restrict them wholly to this sphere."-- Cassirer, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, p. 449.

Interestingly, another Google search using the terms "Cassirer" and "jump" yielded an essay asserting that Cassirer often regarded poetry as a case where "the spark jumped the gap" between real experience and cultural expression. 

Having drawn Lewis into a neo-Kantian corpus which would probably have horrified him about as much as being associated with Freudians, in my next essay in this series I'll explore a few more aspects of the interaction of the Meta-Iso Wars as expressed by Lewis' figures of "tiger," "ghost," and "god."

TIGERS AND GHOSTS AND GODS; OH MY!: PART 1

Philosophically speaking, what does it mean to be a metaphenomenalist?  Or, for that matter, an isophenomenalist?

In my conclusion of the Metagodzilla-Isoghidrah Wars, I clarified that in terms of taste, anyone was free to prefer whatever phenomenality one might prefer.  As a pluralist, I'm bound to recognize (to cite another of my old essay-titles) that "anything that can be done well is worth doing."  If Joseph Conrad does his best work within an isophenomenal conceptual framework, where all the "marvels and mysteries" are only mankind's vain imaginings in the face of a materalistic universe, then that's worth doing.  If J.R.R. Tolkien does his best work within a metaphenomenalist conceptual framework-- specifically dealing with metaphenomena within the "marvelous" category-- then that too is worth doing.

In my QUICK HAWTHONE POST I cited two longish quotes by Hawthorne in which he justified his practice of the form he called "the romance."  In contrast to Tolkien's focus upon marvelous metaphenomena, Hawthorne showed a perennial fascination with metaphenomena in the "uncanny" category, though of course Hawthorne never used this term.  Slightly after the lines I quoted from A THREEFOLD DESTINY, Hawthorne adds:

In the little tale which follows, a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown over a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped, without entirely obliterating the sober hues of nature.

Despite the fact that Hawthorne, as much as Conrad, values fidelity to "the sober hues of nature," I'd venture that his "tinge of the wild and wonderful" has a very different character than Conrad's "marvels and mysteries."  In the quotes I provided from Conrad here, it's clear that those "marvels" are intrinsically derived from, and thus entirely dependent upon, the world of sensory experience: of "effects of the visible and tangible world."  Hawthorne's statement above, though, never implies that "the sober hues of nature" are the sole source of his "wonderful tinge."  At the same time most of his works avoid the outright presentation of either the marvelous or the naturalistic: Hawthorne always seeks the uncanny, the liminal space between the two opposed states.

That said, because Hawthorne gives the world of fantasy its own identity, I deem him closer to Tolkien than to Conrad.  Many literary critics would dispute this, deeming Hawthorne and Conrad together within the corpus of canonical "literature" while Tolkien occupied a vague category of "paraliterature."  Nevertheless, such allotments are usually made by critics given to focusing on the rendering of isophenomenal reality as paramount, and so would be opposed to my statement in the Meta-Iso Conclusion:

In both its "uncanny" and "marvelous" manifestations, however, the metaphenomenal stands free to delve into the depths of what Kant calls the "productive imagination."

The isophenomenalist is usually indifferent to any concept like that of the "productive imagination," in that he's already committed to the proposition that all that we imagine derives from sensory experience; what Kant calls "reproductive imagination" and what Conrad calls "my consciousness of the marvelous."

It's certainly a beguiling enough proposition.  For me Freud was one of the great challenges.  Because his theory seemed to work so well for some works of literature and so poorly for others, I concluded here  that his theory was best seen as a example of "reproductive imagination." I added that such a theory could be adequately subsumed by a superior theory that took in both productive and reproductive forms of imagination, such as that of Kant, and to some extent the theory of Carl Jung.  The same formulation applies to Todorov, whose Freudian underpinnings slanted him to state that fantasy could only be judged in terms of "the real."

In the next part of this series (which will at last explain the title) I'll consider in greater depth the tripartite theory of "fear, dread, and awe" that C.S. Lewis presented at the outset of his nonfictional work THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.  I haven't explicitly written on Lewis since this 2010 essay, but though I part with him in terms of the "solution" he gives to his PROBLEM-- that of Christian hermeneutics-- Lewis is almost as important as Kant and Jung in having helped me formulate my entire NUMtheory.

  

QUICK HAWTHORNE POST

I'm mulling over some further thoughts regarding the way the three categories in my NUMtheory relate to the idea of the sublime-- which I regard as essentially homologous to the sci-fi fan's "sense of wonder." More as a resource than anything, here are a couple of Hawthorne's quotes regarding the literary genre he called " the romance:"

""I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spirit and mechanism of the fairyland should be combined with the characters and manners of familiar life." -- Opening lines of short story THE THREEFOLD DESTINY.

"If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showcasing all its figures so distinctly, -- making every object so minute visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility, -- is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the picture on the wall,--all these details, so completely seen, are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of the intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll, seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse,-- whatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside."-- THE CUSTOM-HOUSE.

I'll be saying more about "this quality of strangeness and remoteness" in relation to my take on the nature of "the uncanny," especially in comparison with Lewis's statement, "With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous," which I quoted in this essay.

SUPPORT CASTOFFS

Given that I've stated of Ron Marz's decision to kill off his character Alex--

"I support his right to come up with a story in which a supporting cast-member is horribly killed simply to advance a particular plotline"

--but also stated that I didn't think his story was very good-- it behooves me to mention a couple of times when support-cast members were killed to reasonably good effect.

I've mentioned that I didn't like Gwen Stacy's death in AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #121. That's not because I thought the character was indispensable to my enjoyment of the magazine, but because I felt that that the writers during that period-- not just Gerry Conway, but also Stan Lee in his last 10-20 Spidey-scripts-- made her death predictable by virtue of failing to expand on her character beyond the usual cliches. I think now that it made sense to kill her from an editorial standpoint, but still dislike Conway's hamhanded execution.

In contrast, Stan Lee himself "put a hit out" on one of the characters introduced in the early years of John Romita's tenure: Captain George Stacy, father of Gwen. Like Gwen, George dies in a senseless accident, but Lee gave him a heroic death. When a rooftop-fight between Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus causes heavy bricks to plummet to the street below, Stacy perishes in shoving a small child out of the way of the debris.

Now, to some extent this is more palatable than Gwen Stacy's death because it is a heroic death. However, what I like best about the event is not just that the death was heroic, or even unexpected (certainly more so than daughter Gwen's), but that it became a new source of narrative avenues, allowing for a good amount of "my-sweetheart-hates-my-superher0-alterego" melodrama.

Another example-- perhaps more appropriate to the theme of senseless deaths-- would be Iron Man's 1960s girlfriend Janice Cord. Janice, introduced in IRON MAN #2, remained a regular support-cast member for the next 10 issues, only to meet an untimely end in IRON MAN #22, when she was caught in a crossfire between Iron Man and his enemy Titanium Man. Janice Cord hadn't been in that feature as long as Gwen Stacy had appeared in SPIDER-MAN, and thus it's quite possible that she, like Ron Marz's Alex, was intended from the start to be a sacrificial lamb. Scripter Archie Goodwin does allow her a Last Moment as she dies in Iron Man's arms, almost recognizing him as Tony Stark before she succumbs. Still, she was a pretty conventional character, having little identity apart from being Tony Stark's girlfriend, and so in a sense one might state that she most "came alive" in the intersubjective sense when she suffered the fate of a disposable support-cast member.

NEGATIVE I.D.

"All that said, I can tell you Alex was a character destined to die from the moment she was first introduced in GL #48. I created her with the intention of having her be murdered at the hands of Major Force. I took a lot of care in building her as a character, because I wanted her to be liked and her death to mean something to the readers. I wanted readers to be horrified at the crime, and to empathize with Kyle's loss. Her death was meant to bring brutal realization to Kyle that being GL wasn't fun and games. It was also meant to sever his links with his old life, paving the way for his move to New York. And ultimately I wanted her death to be memorable and illustrate just how truly heinous Major Force was. Thus the fridge."-- Ron Marz, justifying the GREEN LANTERN incident that inspired the title WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS, from the WIP site.

"Naturally, this formula [of men beating women] is not popular with girls. Granting all the masochistic excitement of terror, it is difficult to identify yourself with a corpse."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), P. 47.

In the comments section for Part 3 of THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY, Curt Purcell commented thusly:

I certainly wouldn't say there's any encouragement to identify with the villains in the movies I discussed, if only because they tended to be repellently nonhuman--sometimes little more than a writhing mass of tentacles. How does one identify with that?

In that specific case, I can't say with certainty whether or not the particular audience for this particular type of thing does or doesn't regularly identify with something like a "writhing mass of tentacles."  But I can venture a way in which they *might* do so, in keeping with one of the key essays on this site, my take on how Schopenhauer's theory of the will applies to literature:

Was Schopenhauer was right about “Will” inhering in every aspect of our reality? We do not know. However, we CAN be sure that “Will” inheres in every aspect of the various LITERARY realities we as humans create, for we KNOW for a fact that they are all “willed” into existence by their creators (and sometimes, however indirectly, by audiences as well).

Identification need not always connote one's sense of participation in a given character's bodily reality, although when speaking of erotica, that would be the natural assumption.  It's equally possible to identify with a nonhuman creature, or even an inanimate phenomenon, by identifying it as an expression of a particular will to do something within the sphere of a narrative.

The other night I happened to rescreen Sam Raimi's 1981 THE EVIL DEAD.  As many horrorphiles will know, the film's about as simple as a splatterpunk flick can get: five young people camp out in a remote cabin and come under attack by murderous Sumerian demons.  Raimi's film shows particular influence by the "stalker vision" element, where the camera seems to assume the viewpoint of a murderous force stalking its prey-- a narrative element that inspired righteous condemnation from the team of Siskel and Ebert back in the day.  The film-pundits were wrong, though, in thinking that the audience necessarily identified with the violence-happy desires of the murderous stalker. What's more probable is that the audience did identify with the *WILL* expressed by the stalker, be it a deformed human being like Jason Voorhees or an invisible discarnate force such as the demons in EVIL DEAD.  To the extent that I as audience-member want to see the EVIL DEAD demons do demonic things, then I have (whether it gives me a particular fetishy thrill or not) identified with a thing I can't even see on-camera-- certainly a proposition no harder to credence than identifying with a malign mass of tentacles.

The same thing can even apply to phenomena that don't really have benign or malign intent, just some nature that comes into conflict with human agents.  In AGAIN SUPERHEROIC VISIONS: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE, I stipulated that the focus of a given story could be an insubstantial phenomenon, such as the titular force of Rene Clair's THE CRAZY RAY, or even a place, such as The Center of the Earth to which Jules Verne's protagonists journey. 

Now the reason I titled this essay "Negative I.D."  is twofold.  I stated the law of identification earlier:

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character.

I do deem such identifications to be phenomenologically real within the sphere of literature and literary response.  However, it should go without saying (which is the reason why I didn't explicit say it) that such moments of identification are fleeting.  One moment the reader may identify with the slayer, and then in another, with the slain: with Captain America one moment and the Red Skull the next.  The nature of the human imagination inclines toward such identificatory pluralism, proceeding from "flower to flower to flower" as per the monarch's advice to the bee in THE KING AND I.

So identification can be positive one moment, and negative the next, where "negative" simply meaning that the reader has ceased to identify with a given subject.  Pundits such as Siskel, Ebert, and the above-quoted Gershon Legman understand identification only in terms of the aforementioned "bodily reality." For this reason Legman thinks he's been clever in claiming that "it's difficult to identify yourself with a corpse."  But dozens of horror-stories written from the viewpoints of corpses-- whether said corpses are walking around or are just lying there mulling over their sad fates-- indicate that readers can indeed identify with what corpses symbolize in narrative terms: the extinguishment of a character's ability to participate in the world of living, willing activity.  It's possible, of course, that a poorly executed story of anything-- be it a talking corpse or a discarnate spirit-- may also fail to inspire identification because a reader finds it stupid or tedious.  In DAREDEVIL THE MAN W/O IDENTITY I noted that this was my own non-identificatory response to Clowes' DAVID BORING.

However, some readers reject identification for reasons extrinsic to the story's dynamics (or lack of dynamics.  This is the second form of "negative I.D."

In PART 2 of MASTERY I refuted views expressed by both Heidi MacDonald and the "Women in Refrigerators" site.  Of the two, however, Gail Simone's 1999-created site has had the greater influence over opinions in comic-book fandom. The tone of Simone's initial address on the site is quite measured:

This is a list I made when it occurred to me that it's not that healthy to be a female character in comics. I'm curious to find out if this list seems somewhat disproportionate, and if so, what it means, really.

These are superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator. I know I missed a bunch. Some have been revived, even improved -- although the question remains as to why they were thrown in the wood chipper in the first place.

I know I missed a bunch -- I just don't know my comics deaths the way I should. I'm not editorializing -- I'm just curious to find out what you guys think it means, if anything.

However, her criteria for inclusion on this list is horribly skewed, showing a tendency to negatively characterize any violence inflicted on a female character, no matter what justification the violence had within the context of the story.  I attacked one example of this skewing tendency on a recent CBR board:

I do think it's historically valuable that WIR at least encapsulates an attitude characteristic of the time. And perhaps it does record some of the dominant cliches used by comics-creators during that period.

But one of the most objectionable things about the WIR list is that it doesn't provide context. For instance, it might be arguable that if one reads that a starring heroine like Amethyst gets put through the ringer:

"Amethyst (blinded, merged with Gemworld, destroyed in LSH; became a power-hungry witch in Book of Fate)"

That *might* be indicative of a tendency to downgrade or persecute heroines.

But the same can't be said of some other characters on the list:

"Carol Ferris/Star Sapphire (turned into a villain by the Zamarons, possessed by the Predator)"

That's not a fair representation. Star Sapphire was always, if not actively villainous, a somewhat ruthless figure depending on the writer handling her. That was the whole dramatic point of having her be the "Miss Hyde" to Carol's "Lady Doctor Jekyll." It wasn't something radically added at the time she transforms into the Predator, as the above line implies. Englehart's idea was simply an extrapolation of the original concept, regardless as to whether one thinks it was well executed. It didn't belong on a list devoted to female marginalization.

And it's certainly not the only ill-considered example on the list.

 Even more damning is Ron Marz's response, in which he states that he developed the character of Alex (the victim killed and stuffed in a fridge) with the express intention of killing her.  His response too is quite measured, and worth reading in full.  I can't say that the original GREEN LANTERN story achieved its ends of making me "empathize with Kyle's loss;" I failed to experience any identification with the hero or his dead girlfriend, which I define as the first kind of "negativity."  However, Simone rejected the trope of the "dead girlfriend" in terms of the second type of negativity: that it was emblematic of a questionable tendency in comics-crafting.  Here's her summing-up from the WIR site following assorted reactions (no year date given):

I still think women are pretty unevenly portrayed in comics, but so are men, really. Ultimately, we speak most loudly with the choices we make at the cash register. And to future creators - we ARE out there reading. Please don't barbecue all the characters we like!

I have no problem with Simone-- whom I respect as a comics-creator-- questioning a given tendency.  I do have a problem (as did others, whose responses are recorded on the site) with her lack of context.  This lack expresses to me a deeper problem seen also in Ebert, Siskel, and Legman: the tendency to reject a creator's use of sex and/or violence against any figure perceived as "unevenly portrayed."

I didn't like Marz's "Alex in the fridge" story.  However, I support his right to come up with a story in which a supporting cast-member is horribly killed simply to advance a particular plotline, just as I support the notion of the Marquis de Sade having his heroes torture and kill dozens of identical victims to advance his particular brand of narrative.  I've certainly seen my share of poorly-executed executions (*cough* Gerry Conway *cough*).  But one must distinguish between the artistic potential of a controversial trope like girlfriend-killing, and any particular negative example of same.

THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4

"We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first."-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 3.

"A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and the people reverts to a mob."-- Frank Herbert's character Stilgar from DUNE, p. 285.

As far as I can tell, there isn't much "mystery" about "mastery" in the view of Paglia's PERSONAE.  A sentence of two after the above quote, she states that "In nature, brute force is the law, a survival of the fittest."  For Paglia, much of literature concerns exposing the elements of sex and aggression that dwell within even the most rarefied works of literature.  I would argue that brute force is *a* law in the natural world, but not precisely the only law.  Further, even if it *were* the only law for nonhuman sentients, one might argue that human beings by virtue of greater complexity have managed to come up with amendments to the original cosmic legality.

Frank Herbert's quote isn't concerned with nonhuman nature, but he does address a mystery about human nature in a more paradoxical fashion.  When one thinks about hierarchical leadership, one does not generally think about a leader doing anything but enforcing his will; certainly not about his "maintaining the level of individuals."  And yet Herbert is correct, and crosses paths with Paglia on this point: individuality is possible only within a hierarchical system that keeps the people from devolving into mob rule.

Drawing on the quasi-Hegelian terminology of Frank Fukuyama, discussed here, one might judge Paglia's view of this hierarchy to be "megalothymotic" and Herbert's to be "isothymotic," as per Fukuyama's definition:

"Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifstations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood." (The End of History and the Last Man, p. 182).

I extrapolated the following from Fukuyama's terminology re: the subject of "sex 'n' violence:"

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority.

I've devoted considerable passages to making comparisons and contrasts between these two physical activities and their literary expressions, so I won't repeat any of these here.  But I would refine the passage above by noting how it applies to a phenomenon common to both, explicated here.
The phenomenon of sthenolagnia, of "strength-worship" in both real and literary worlds, could be said to abide in both of Fukuyama's categories.  In "megalothymia" one worships a superior force which extends its power vertically downward.  In "isothymia" one worships a commonality of interlinked and interdependent forces.

Put the two propositions side by side, and naive critics will almost always give the obligatory jerk of the knee (among other things) to the latter one.  As a quick example, I've noted that such critics automatically laud Alan Moore over Frank Miller not purely in terms of formal qualities, but because Moore is more politically palatable.  The sort of alleged anarchism Moore encodes in his works is automatically superior to any POV expressed in Miller's words, which for lazy critics always come down to the "F" word: "fascism."
Anything that suggests an advocacy of "mastery" in this megalothymic sense is verboten.

And yet, the true "mystery of mastery" is that it frequently shows up, as Paglia sometimes successfully demonstrates, even in forms that are thought to be subtle and refined.  It shows up because "the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people," even if it were sufficient for human beings politically, can never be sufficient in the world of literature.  I noted in Part 3 that in fetish-fantasies the reader may be at once "the slayer and the slain," the hero and the villain.  Less extreme meditations on gender conflict, ranging from JANE EYRE to YOUNG ROMANCE, will of course emphasize the isothymic strength of shared experience, of compromise.  But the essence of conflict remains the same, no matter which pathway a given work may take.

To believe that literature should mirror a desired form of experience, an "ought" rather than an "is," is Werthamism in its most obtuse manifestation.  Whether or not one believes that extreme fantasies of sex and violence have value in themselves, at the very least they continually force readers and critics to avoid becoming entrenched in viewing the world purely through the limited lens of morality and highbrow aesthetics.

  

THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 3

'We’ll set aside for a moment the question of whether seeing women “bloodied and bruised” is sick as fuck or not. No, what’s really interesting about this site is how similar so much of the imagery is to actual comic books.'-- Heidi MacDonald, "The One with All the Comments," THE BEAT, 1-31-08.

'If the red slayer thinks he has slain,
'And the slain think themselves slain,
They know not well my subtle ways,
I keep and turn, and hold again'--"Brahma," R.W. Emerson.

So. Back to the main topic of the GROOVY AGE post "Superheroines Lose:" given the nature of pornography in all its manifestations, is it as "sick as fuck" for a given consumer to indulge in images of women, whether superheroic or otherwise, being physically abused/degraded?  Curt Purcell expresses some ambivalence:

Sometimes it worries me, the fantasy material that fascinates me most.  I'd like to think I'm nice and "normal" in real life, but when it comes to imagining and looking at make-believe stuff . . . well, you'll see.-- "Superheroines Lose."

Curt promises to explore the matter in more depth in a future post, BTW.

Like Curt, I'm not entirely sanguine about this particular kind of spectacle, sometimes simplified in fetish-culture as "m/f," meaning "male over female ".  Despite Heidi's blanket condemnation, I think it feasible that a majority of comic-book readers, and perhaps even a majority of men, are either repelled by or at least made queasy by images of women being abused.  Not to say that any male protective instinct toward women-- whether hardwired by nature or input by society-- cannot be overruled; obviously it can.  At the same time, however, the forced degradation of fictional figures of any gender cannot help but have a different tonality than any experience relating to real violence, be it Elizabethan bear-baiting or a fascination with serial killers.

In HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN W/O IDENTITY,  I suggested a literary "law of identification" to complement Aristotle's real-world-oriented "law of identity:"

Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."

With this phenomenological law in mind, one may fairly ask, "How sure are we that the sick fucks who patronized the "Superheroines Lose" material are identifying only with the 'slayer,' and not with the 'slain?'"

At one point Curt Purcell suggests one item that might be viewed as such a proof.  He notes that in all the Japanese materials he surveyed, he found almost nothing that had the jokey tone one can find in less fetish-y forms of pornography.  That's a significant datum.  All forms of entertainment, "mainstream" or "specialized," use comedy as a leveling-mechanism between fictional characters-- particularly those of opposing gender.  Arguably comedic interchanges also bring about a leveling between the characters, who exist to be identified with, and the real-world customer, who is there to do the identifying.  Comedy can be a powerful reminder that "hey, guys, what you're seeing isn't phenomenologically real in the positivist sense" (or words to that effect).  In pornography, one may conjecture that a lack of comedic byplay might suggest that the identification is strictly one-way: the customer wants only to be the "red slayer," getting even with his bitch-boss or his wife or the girl who blew him off in high school.

However, simply because it's a logical conclusion, that doesn't make it correct.

I have encountered testimony from some patrons as to the "doubleness" of the identificatory process in related types of pornographic fiction: the experience of being both the slayer and the slain.  However, I don't advocate the belief that, because some people have made this testimony, this process must be true of all fetish-fiction, either in the "m/f" category or in others.  There's no survey one could ever devise that would show the truth of all human hearts, in this regard or in any other. All one can do is to state, "Some people have made Statement X.  Is Statement X corroborated by a Statement Y in any related venue?"


Well, one could point to the fact that in mainstream comic books, many patrons do have what are commonly called "favorite villains."  The villains, it will be remembered, are the characters who continually lose, at least in traditionally oriented superhero stories.  If a contingent of comics-fans-- call them Contingent R-- consider the Red Skull a great villain, does that mean that they admire the villain and secretly want to be Nazis?  Or does it mean that Contingent R, observing that the Skull gets pounded to a pulp every time he fights Captain America, is secretly getting off on the Skull's sufferings, as if they were Sade's readers enjoying the torments of Justine?  Or does Contingent R, while identifying with the villain in some fashion, appreciate him largely in the function of a fictional creation that makes the stories more visceral, simply because "Everybody Hates Nazis?"

Readers of this blog will probably guess which of these three views I would tend to champion. In addition, this example may show that humor, while useful, isn't especially necessary to encourage free-flowing identification.  There have been lame Red Skull stories that used him as nothing more than a stock opponent, and there have been superior Red Skull stories that gave him some consistency of character to explain why a figure of considerable talents turns into such a monster.  But hardly any of the good stories used humor to get across that identificatory message: at least in the thirty-plus years that I read the CAPTAIN AMERICA feature, I knew it as Marvel's most humor-challenged series, eclipsed only by the Silver-Age SILVER SURFER. 

So the identificatory process remains a mystery.

Though not necessarily the same as "the mystery of mastery."

More on which later.