MYTHOS AND MODE PART 2

What valiant foemen, like to autumn's corn,

Have we mow'd down, in tops of all their pride!--

HENRY VI, Part III, Act 5, Scene 7. 

In my initial meditations on the nature of combative and subcombative modes, I treated them in terms of narrative values.  In those early essays my sole consideration was whether or not the narrative centered around a literal combat. This consideration speaks to narrative structure but not its reception by the audience partaking of the narrative.

Later I realized that Kant’s two categories of “the sublime”—that is, “might” and “dominance”-- possessed broad applicability to the audience’s responses to the narrative; responses in which audience-members felt emotions of awe or wonder in the presence of exceptional dynamicity.  I will now label these experiences of sublimity “significant values.” They do not come about by accident, but because the artist of the work hopes to draw forth such emotions in his audience.  Both “might” and “dominance” encourage the audience to identify with entities or conditions of exceptional dynamicity.  In most of my examples I’ve cited entities or conditions whose dynamicity is of a metaphenomenal nature, but the same operations of sublimity pertain to isophenomenal narratives, as I demonstrated in the NUM-INOUS CONFRONTATIONS essays.

My first example of a combative narrative was William Shakespeare’s MACBETH, where the entire narrative tension builds to the climactic combat of Macbeth and Macduff.  I still assert that MACBETH is a combative work, in terms of its narrative values.

But does the play possess a combative significant value? Most of Macbeth’s murders are committed in stealth, not in battle, whether by him or by proxies.  It’s true that Macbeth and his fated enemy Macduff are both presented as courageous, doughty warriors. Minutes before encountering Macduff, Macbeth slays a young soldier named Siward.  When Macbeth fights Macduff and finally learns that the latter is his destined bane, Macbeth still refuses surrender.

Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,

And thou opposed, being of no woman born,

Yet I will try the last. Before my body

I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,

And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!

--MACBETH, Act 5, Scene 8.

However, I can find nothing in the play that makes the two characters “exceptional” in their dynamicity.  They are good fighters, without a doubt, but not necessarily exceptional.  Lacking that dynamicity, both the characters and and the play lack the significant value of combative sublimity.  If there is sublimity in MACBETH, it arises not from the audience's watching the characters locked in combat, but from beholding the pitiless fate that raises Macbeth up and then casts him down.

MACBETH is a play with what I term “marginal metaphenomenality,” due to the prophecies of the witches.  However, no such metaphenomenal content appears in CORIOLANUS.  At its outset this play seems to be building to a climactic combat between Roman general Caius Marcius Coriolanus and Volscian general Aufidius, who have fought on the battlefield so often that they go out of their way to best one another whenever possible.  In Act I, scene 6, Coriolanus praises his enemy’s might as being beyond the pale of his own common soldiers:

 none of you but is

Able to bear against the great Aufidius

A shield as hard as his.

One scene later, the two generals fight.  To Coriolanus’ demand that the Volscian “wrench up thy power to the highest,” Aufidius shoots back:

Wert thou the Hector

That was the whip of your bragg'd progeny,

Thou shouldst not scape me here.

Can one view these allusions to superhuman status as indicators that either opponent is superhuman? Certainly not. But the utterance of such allusions—coupled with the fact that these two have repeatedly fought before, with neither man prevailing—suggests that they are, within an isophenomenal context, exceptional.  Thus the significant value of combative dominance does appear within the sphere of CORIOLANUS.

However, there is no narrative combative value here.  Despite the suggestions that these enemies may finally sort out the question of superiority by play’s end, CORIOLANUS is, unlike MACBETH, not centered around a combat.  Instead, Coriolanus’ arrogance brings about his disaffection from his fellow Romans, leading to a temporary alliance with Aufidius and the Volscians, and finally to an ignomious demise rather than a heroic confrontation.

So, to recap:

MACBETH= narrative combative value YES significant combative value NO

CORIOLANUS= narrative combative value NO significant combative value YES

Though there’s a great deal of violence and vengeance in Shakespeare, most of it does not pursue the combative mode with respect to either narrative or subjective values.  If one should desire (for symmetry’s sake) a canonical literary work that contains both a narrative and a significant combative value, one would probably have to settle for one of the most Shakespeare-influenced works in the canon, Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK.  Melville’s novel takes place within the realm of the uncanny, where the characters exist in what purports to be a naturalistic environment, yet everyone partcipates in weird rites, strange portents, and so on.  On one level Ahab and the White Whale are merely mortal beings; on another, they are sublime presences, with Ahab taking the persona of the Satanic over-reacher attempting to “break through the mask” of inscrutable Deity, represented by the cetacean, who remains unfathomable even after Ishmael has attempted to break him down into his species down into its constituent parts.

In RISING AND FALLING STARS I established that it was possible for a work to fall into a given mythoi-category (say, “adventure”) even if one of its two major aspects—“plot” or “character” aligned better with another mythos.  This would only be the case when the “adventure-plot” dominated over the “drama-characters,” my chosen example being that of the James Robinson STARMAN.

In a similar manner, narrative values can trump significant values in terms of determining whether or not a work is combative.  Based on that assertion, I would say that MACBETH remains a “combative drama” even though it lacks the significant value of sublime dominance between two contending forces. In contrast, I would not consider CORIOLANUS combative in that I feel the subcombative narrative values predominate.  As I continue to consider other cases I will probably come across examples where the reverse verdict proves true for each example.

In conclusion (of this series), I’ll note that I’ve not yet applied this distinction to any of the movies I labeled as “combative” on my movie-theory blog NATURALISTIC UNCANNY MARVELOUS.  Off the top of my head I would guess that most of those thus far cited share both narrative and significant combative values.  Possibly I’ll review my past estimations further in light of these new formulations.

MYTHOS AND MODE

Back in 2009, as evidenced by this post, I started writing about "the combative" and "the subcombative," though I spoke of them as "elements" at that time.  In that post I temporarily cast those terms aside, but reclaimed them again in this essay.  In 2012 I also started referring to "the combative" not as an "element" but as a "mode," according to the definition I formulated earlier:

"Mode” is a somewhat fluid term, applying to anything about the method by which the artist accomplishes his aims.-- NOTES TOWARD A SUPERHERO IDIOM.

 

By my current reasoning, all possible varieties of the “subcombative”—whether they exclude literal violence altogether or simply de-emphasize it in comparison with other story-elements—would also qualify as “modes.”

However, the sum total of all narrative forms of conflict—“the conflictive,” as I've termed it—is not a mode, but a fundamental requirement of narrative. 

As conflict of some sort is necessary for narrative to proceed, it follows that it’s primarily associated with plot.  This stands in contrast to the term “mythos,” which is the organizing principle which determines the emotional tonality dominating a given narrative. It’s because all four Fryean mythoi convey typological tonalities for both plot and character that I’ve spoken of a “plot-character schism.”  The essay RISING AND FALLING STARS puts forth examples of works in which the radical of adventure can dominate over other elements in the work through the tone of the plot alone, or through the tone of character alone, or through a combination of the two.

Yet, though no equivalent of a “plot-character schism” applies to the combative and subcombative modes, Frye’s concept of the “narrative value / significant value schism” would seem to apply quite well.

To blend a foursome of terms derived from disparate Frye essays, narrative values are those that are “centripetal,” applying to values within the structure of the narrative; the values that make the narrative work.  Significant values are “centrifugal,” in that they apply to the values that make it possible for audiences to relate to the actions of the characters within the narrative structure.

Though I didn’t invoke the narrative /significant schism in RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, my series of essays on the function of rules in narrartive-- which begin here--these essays touch on one of these distinctions. 

In the first essay, I agreed with Grant Morrison that even though Batman is supposed to be a mortal who can live and die as can mortals in the world of the people reading Batman’s adventures, Batman cannot age as mortals do.  The average reader realizes that this is a structuring value of Batman’s world, introduced as a narrative strategy so that the franchise can remain open-ended for an indeterminate amount of time, in a state which Frye called “refrigerated deathlessness.” 

To cite my argument in full:

I'll say up front that Morrison's attitude on the ageing of serial characters is one with which I entirely agree. It remains a study in futility for any fan to attempt to ground serial characters in the real world in terms of how slowly or quickly they age. Umberto Eco touches on some of the narrative consequences of this deathless status quo in his "Myth of Superman," though he doesn't ever quite get to the heart of what makes such a deathless fantasy appealing. However, purely from the standpoint of anyone interested in writing such characters, Morrison's statement shows that the fantasy is clearly one that has strong appeal and that therefore attempts to deal with the anomalies in terms of real-world verisimilitude are doomed to perish of their own fatuity.

The structuring value of Batman's inability to age, then, is one of the best examples of a centripetal narrative value.  Readers who choose to abide by it can identify with the fantasy of Batman; readers who want characters who both age and die must look outside the regular franchise, perhaps to one-shot "imaginary tales" like Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- or, more likely, beyond the pale of anything resembling Batman's artificial continuity.

In contrast to this internal value, we have the values that Batman incarnates for his readers—despite their awareness that he is a literary construct, who exists not to have a static identity but to be identified with, as per my “law of identification.” 

The significant values within Batman’s adventures are highly fluctuant.  Many authors of the character’s adventures insist that Batman has a moral antipathy against firearms, which at the very least implies a significant value through which the hero’s athletic skill is exalted over such mechanical appurtenances. 

 However, some authors may choose to show Batman making limited use of firearms, tacitly endorsing a different, more realistic value: that a hero’s facility with such weapons marks him as a serious badass. 

The two values, different as they are, are alike in that they can be best pictured as springing from the implications of the narrative in a “centrifugal” fashion.   

 Whether or not the "narrarive/subjective" schism between meaning within and meaning without can influence the modes of the combative and subcombative will be seen in future installments of MYTHOS AND MODE.

TALES FROM THE WOMB PT. 2

As noted in Part 1, Carl Jung's ruminations on child development in the womb would never have satisfied an empiricist.  His description of the psychological functions-- sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking-- is deductive, not inductive, in nature.   Jung consistently calls for psychology to make all possible use of empirical sources of information, but notes in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES that the best one can hope, when dealing with the subjective subject matter of internal psyches, is that one should not be "too subjective" in making one's conclusions.  I take this as an up-front admission that such judgments will always be colored by the subjective state of the analyst-- a subjectivity that Thomas Kuhn finds even in the work of those who labor in the fields of the physical sciences, as noted in passing here.


Jung states that the first two named functions appear in the fetus while still in the womb, which makes sense to me as a working hypothesis though there may be no way to prove that the fetus, while certainly capable of sensation in the womb, is also capable of intuition at that early stage.  In fact, the author of the Jung site to which I referred in Part 1 feels that intiution might be prior even to sensation:

This, I believe, describes the thinking function as the fourth function (when intuition is seen as the first, in the womb), a total conscious orientation that is a result of the number three, the creative flow of the feeling function. Thinking appears as the last in the evolution of the functions as they turn, and appears to be the picture of what has previously taken place in the other functions, via the archetype which is later expressed as images, ideas, or language. Thinking is not the experience, but the copy, stamp, imprint, or image of the experience.

I'd prefer a more Kantian take, in which we posit that sensation is the first thing the gestating subject experiences, though intuition may pre-exist in that subject as an "a priori" potential.  This would seem to follow from Jung's primary definition of intuition within his system as "perception via the unconscious."

As I said in Part 1, it's important for any literary criticism-system to make a determination as to whether or not there exists " meaning within the chaos of sensation," whether one is speaking of a fetus becoming slowly aware of its surroundings but lacking any context for them, or a fully developed subject within what Cassirer calls the "symbolic universe."  Though I think critics of an empiricial stripe dismiss this level of unconscious meaning too quickly, at least those that ground their opinions in some discipline, such as cognitive science, are better off than those who simply don't even consider the question.

YEAR-END ASSESSMENTS

Believe it or don't, but I really didn't exhume the remarks of Charles Reece in this preceding essay simply because those specific remarks had been plaguing me over the course of six months.  They just came to mind as relevant to my general theme of self-assessment as to where my lit-crit theory stands.

The core of the theory remains indebted to the myth-critical work of Northrop Frye and Theodor Gaster, who had the misfortune to produce their works at the sunset of the "literatute-as-myth" meme that dominated the first half of the 20th century.  I say "misfortune" because the countervailing tendency of the 1960s and later, while not barren of worthwhile work, became, as I noted with respect to comics-critics here, tied to "those well-traveled titans of tedium, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx," as well as their equally tedious derivations.  But as I said at the end of TERMINOLOGY OF ENDEARMENT, there's nothing I can do, or would do, about judgments founded in taste.

All things considered, 2012 stands out for less for my contretemps with Reece or Kelly Thompson or Old Chickenheart than for my formulation of the Mode of the Combative and the Persona of the Demihero.  Contra Reece's remarks about the supposed defects of a "private lexicon," it's only with such a lexicon-- whether one approves of mine or not-- that one can make any useful formulations about the structure and meaning of fictional narrative, while still resisting the understandable temptation to overintellectualize phenomena.

I remarked here I didn't have Kant on my mind when I started attempting to analyze the nature of combat as a special mode within the sphere of general conflict.  When I made some of my earliest attempts at comparing-and-contrasting characters within a "superhero idiom," as in the 2009 BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER, I could only speak in terms of "elements:"

A given work may share elements of all four myth-themes in varying proportions—may include elements suggestive of conflict, of catastrophe, of abjection, and of rebirth—and yet still have be more strongly oriented toward one theme rather than to any of the other three.

Nothing about that statement is wrong in terms of basic narrative analysis.  But thanks to a lexicon able to deal with the differing manifestations of conflict/combat within literature, it's much easier to address the archetypal elements and motifs that inform a work in the mythos of adventure-- such as BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER-- and then see how those elements are given different structural emphases within the mythoi of irony, drama and comedy.

I won't discuss the potential usefulness of the Demihero concept at present; it's a little too new at present.  I'll just note in passing that for some time I've been thinking about the difficulties of the multiple meanings of the word "hero" in fictional narrative (one of those words that means more than one thing under different circumstances, CR!!)  But this is the first time I've felt I had a means by which I might talk about the very different contexts in which heroes might be ruled more by "courage" or by "endurance," or better yet, by "glory" rather than "safety."

Thanks to these breakthroughs, I feel I finally have the underpinnings of a work that might in part supply a Theory of the Superhero Idiom-- which, within the context of a will-based hermeneutics, would be no less a key to every other literary idiom, though I don't expect those of divergent taste to concur.

I predict that 2013 may prove an interesting year for those who find this blog interesting, few though they may be.  Further, the affiant sayeth not.

 

 

TERMINOLOGY OF ENDEARMENT

I'll read your response as long as it's not just a series of definitions for your private lexicon.-- Charles Reece in this comments-thread.
 

Clover refuses to call identification with the Final Girl feminist, because of the many reductive psychoanalytic assumptions that have been a hallmark of feminist film theory: she is “a male surrogate in things oedipal, a homoerotic stand-in, the audience incorporate; to the extent she ‘means’ girl at all, it is only for purposes of signifying phallic lack, and even that meaning is nullified in the final scenes [where she picks up a ‘phallic tool’ and inserts it into the killer].” -- Charles Reece quoting Carol Clover here.
 

I refuted the particulars of Reece's accusation of my so-called "private lexicon" in the above comments-thread.  However, I didn't explore the irony that the same guy who was criticizing me for being in a "private language bubble" and claiming that he only utilized "common definitions unless specifying a definition."  I would assume that Reece's own bubble allows for such private-lexicon wonders as the "homoerotic stand-in" and "phallic lack" seen above-- to say nothing of elsewhere applying "Jeremy Bentham's panopticon" to a fictional situation that does not literally reproduce anything like a panopticon.

The point here is that Reece's claim above, like most of those who abjure anything but "common definitions," are practically meaningless in the world of literary criticism, which really does require a "private language bubble" of terms and specifications-- though obviously not in the negative sense Reece gives the "bubble."

Just as I noted in my refutation that words mean different things to different people, different critics will build their terminological topologies around whatever they find meaningful.  I can argue against the Freudian dependence of a theory like Carol Clover's, as I did here. But there's nothing I can do to dispel whatever emotional attachment Clover or anyone else has to the terms they find endearing. 

Indeed, I would be hypocritical to argue against the endearment itself, as opposed to arguing against the fallacious logic used to support it.  I'm aware that my lexicon of terms on this blog has been and probably will remain daunting to most readers.  But I believe that no critic worth his salt is ever comfortable with passively receiving terms set down by other analysts, whether lit-critics like Frye or persons from other disciplines like Big Sigmund.

QUICK COMPENSATION COMPARISON

Though I've only recently chanced across a reference to the pioneering work of endocrinologist Hans Selye-- a Nobel-Prize winner credited with formulating the 20th century concept of "stress"-- even a quick Wikipedia reference points out a useful comparison with the compensation theory of Alfred Adler, first examined on this blog here.

Here's a Wikiquote I've cited before re: positive and negative compensation-- a concept I've found useful in refuting critics like Julian Darius:

Positive compensations may help one to overcome one’s difficulties. On the other hand, negative compensations do not, which results in a reinforced feeling of inferiority.
 

In 1975 Hans Selye pioneered a roughly similar "positive/negative" classification of glandular excitement states.  Again quoting from Wiki's essay on stress:

Selye published in 1975 a model dividing stress into eustress and distress.^[16] Where stress enhances function (physical or mental, such as through strength training or challenging work), it may be considered eustress. Persistent stress that is not resolved through coping or adaptation, deemed distress, may lead to anxiety or withdrawal (depression) behavior.
 

Neither psychologist Adler nor biologist Selye applied their insights to literary criticism.  On occasion lit-critics have looked at fiction through Adler's lens, though Adlerian examinations are far outnumbered by those following the lead of Sigmund Freud, the past master of explaining psychology purely through acts of "negative compensation."

While Selye's biological research in itself probably would not lend itself to the analysis of literary constructs, its central conceit-- that of "stress" having both negative and positive connotations-- proves useful to a literary hermeneutics based in notions of conflict and will, as my own is.  The notions of "eustress" and "distress" may also prove an interesting gloss on Theodor Gaster's division of the emotional tones evoked by ritualized endeavors into tones of "plerosis" or of "kenosis."

PLAYING MERRY HOBBES WITH HEROES AND DEMIHEROES

IIn this essay I commented on my use of the terms "courage" and "endurance" to distinguish the persona-types of "hero" and "demihero:"

I still believe that Reeve's opposed categories of "courage" and "endurance" have strong applicability, though I never meant to imply that these categories summarized all distinctions between hero and demihero.
 

I'm glad I said that, given that the Hobbes comment I recently employed for the posts on goal-affects also seems to have broad applicability to personas.

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
 

These three motives-for-violence-- which I usually summarized as "gain," "safety,"  and "passion" of a specifically thymotic type-- also apply well to the motives of heroes in fictional narratives.  Or at least the second two do; more often than not, the motive of "gain/competition" is the motive assigned to the villain.

Thus, without dismissing the applicability of the "courage/endurance" reading, I'll offer a quick look at my proposed hero/demihero distinctions using "diffidence" (aka "safety") and "glory" (aka "passion").

As an example for a hero who evinces "glory," I'll use an example of one of the most microdynamic heroes known to me.

MIGHTY MAX, a character devised to promote a toy line in a 1993 tv cartoon, was one of the oddest "heroes" I've encountered in terms of his dynamicity. Though this simple Earth-boy was frequently referred to as "the Mighty One," he had no powers whatsoever, except a magical cap that could transport him to other realms.  In the company of a chicken-like entity ("fowl, actually") who supplied information on the threat of the week and a big warrior named Norman who provided the heavy lifting, Max foiled dozens of vile villains over the course of 40 episodes.  He did so largely through neither power nor skill, but just by having the dumb luck to constantly avoid being squashed by werewolves or dragons or whatever.

And yet, weakling though he was, he was still a hero squarely in the genre of adventure, in that the stories were all about his invigorating victories over evil.  He may prove a better example of a microdynamic hero than some of those I've used before, such as Brenda Starr and Doctor Who.

In contrast, there's the character of Mrs. Brisby from Don Bluth's dramatic cartoon THE SECRET OF NIMH.  As I mention in my review of the film, I have not read the juvenile book on which the film is based, so I confine myself to the character as depicted in the Bluth film.  From what I understand, only in the film does this mouse-character demonstrate what might termed "super-powers."

These powers are entirely the gift of a magical talisman, which Mrs. Brisby can summon only because, despite her humble appearance, she possesses the necessary virtue of "courage"--which characterization is ironic to me because I would have assigned her persona the quality of "endurance."  The magic she summons isn't used in any combative scenario, but to solve a non-violent conflict: how to transport her home to a place of safety.  But even if this mousey protagonist had used her power offensively-- as does Doctor Craven, an equally mousey protagonist whom I used as one of my first examples of a "demihero" -- would she have qualified as a hero?

By my current reasoning, no.  Brisby is a good example of "instinctive will" in that although she possesses courage, as the script says, it isn't the sort of courage that distinguishes the "intellectual will"-- a will which I link to the Hobbesian concept of "glory."  Everything Brisby does in the film is motivated by the Hobbesian concept of "diffidence/ safety," which might be characterized as more "reactive" than "proactive."

I've not advanced a "proactive/reactive" dichotomy here in so many words, but it does have applicability to what I wrote here about folklorist Vladimir Propp's opposition of the "seeker" and the "victimized hero."

I would say that the qualities of "glory" and "diffidence" also seem better matches for the characters discussed in that earlier essay, with Johnny Thunder following a pattern of "glory" while Jimmy Olsen follows one of "safety" (which I find that I prefer to "diffidence," as that seems to imply a trait of the character rather than a plot-action).

More explorations of glory and safety will probably follow, though probably not until next year.