THE WILL AS REPRESENTATION OF THE (FICTIONAL) WORLD

 In this essay (and any follow-ups) I want to develop the line of thought in QUICK NUM NOTES. 

As I said in NOTES, I'm not disavowing the assorted analyses I advanced with respect to looking at how fictional realities are governed by different combinations of (1) intelligibility and (2) casual coherence-- at least not in the way I disavowed Aristotle's criteria (as I understood them) regarding "impossibility" and "improbability"). HOWEVER, it has occurred to me that there could be a problem in talking only about the ways in which an author models the phenomenality of his fictional world after the way he perceives the real world to work. The author of fiction is not creating something that's ever totally faithful to the real world, even if the elements of artifice he may use are simply invisible structuring principles. Here's Herman Melville on the unrealistic "symmetry" of fiction as compared to really real reality:

The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.

In the same essay in which I quoted this Melville passage, I also compared Melville's "symmetry" to my concept of artifice. But one can see the function of symmetry/artifice as being just as present in naturalistic works as in the other two forms, the uncanny (where BILLY BUDD belongs) and the marvelous (where one might place Melville's MARDI, for what little that's worth). I'm not sure that any of Melville's works are purely naturalistic, but just to venture an example with another nautical theme, Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND has no metaphenomena at all, but it's certainly just as determined by artifice. What many critics have missed that this use of artifice is no less present in naturalistic works which seem to be based on "real" events. Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY may appear to the naive eye to be more "realistic" than TREASURE ISLAND, but Flaubert has to use the same range of tropes Stevenson did, in order to create the emotional effects he desired. Neither BOVARY nor ISLAND possesses the "ragged edges" of reality. 

Yet Stevenson and Flaubert use artifice invisibly, somewhat like the "invisible style" attributed to the majority of movies in Classic American cinema. However, I posit that whenever an artist in any medium invokes metaphenomenal tropes to get his desired effects, I believe that he has to exert a new level of "authorial will" as I defined it way back in 2009. That's why I'm now seeking to look at the amount of work-- which I also called "crap"-- that an author has to put across to sell his metaphenomena:

But my current line of thought is more like, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" (like that of The Hound of the Baskervilles)... The opposition I'm currently playing with is that we're used to thinking of "marvelous things" are total inventions while "uncanny things" are supposed to be in line with the way the natural universe works. But the latter are arguably just as much inventions as the former. if you can't observe a real Pit and Pendulum in human history, or a real crime in which someone pretends to be a ghost to get rid of all the heirs to a fortune, then the phenomenon described is still a creation of the imagination-- just not one that requires as much imaginative effort as something overtly marvelous.

What further developments might be fostered from this line of thought, I cannot at this time predict.   

CURIOSITIES: PRETENTIOUSNESS, THY NAME IS MARVEL!

 I've been re-reading a fair number of 1970s HULK comics lately, mostly written by Roy Thomas or Steve Englehart. There aren't any great breakthroughs except for (as I critiqued a long time back) the debut of Marvel's "Valkyrie" as a character independent of her creatrix The Enchantress. But I did find myself more attentive now than I was then to weird minutiae-- like the attempts of writers to associate their kids' comics with adult literature. 

In fact, the title of that 1971 Hulk-Valkyrie yarn, "They Shoot Hulks, Don't They?" is a good example of such pretentiousness. The story has nothing to do with either the 1935 Horace McCoy novel or the 1969 Sydney Pollak film, though author Roy Thomas certainly counted on readers to be somewhat aware of the Pollak movie of two years previous. Rather, "Hulks" is a play on a topic raised in a 1970 Tom Wolfe story, "Radical Chic," in which wealthy white people dabbled in "radical" causes in order to seem fashionable. The HULK tale involves similar superficial Richie Riches taking up the "cause" of the Green Goliath, which turns violent when the Enchantress projects the power of The Valkyrie into a young and somewhat obnoxious feminist. I don't know if in 1971 I learned about the Wolfe story in Marvel's own letters-page, but it seems likely. But the references both to Pollak and to Wolfe were all in good fun; I doubt anyone thought them overly pretentious-- unlike the following reference from the very next issue, HULK #143.

Back in 1971 I don't remember thinking anything of Thomas's VERY pretentious reference to William Faulkner for a very logical reason: I hadn't read the novel SANCTUARY then and did not do so until at least the 1990s. But now that I reread this throwaway "apology to Faulkner," my main thought was-- "Really, Roy? Did you want to impress readers who also had not read SANCTUARY all that badly?" Without driving the topic into the ground, there are no similarities between the two "Sanctuaries."   

It would have been far more appropriate to write, "With apologies to Victor Hugo." To the extent 20th-century readers ever thought about the Christian custom of persons seeking "sanctuary" in Catholic churches, most if not all probably would have recalled the expression of said custom in various movie adaptations of Victor Hugo's NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Not that there's a huge likeness between that novel and the story in HULK #143. Bruce Banner, on the run from the military, accepts the "sanctuary" of diplomatic immunity extended to him by the ever affable Victor Von Doom. The "sanctuary" plays a very tiny role in the two-part story, which is mostly another tale in which a noxious supervillain seeks to co-opt the Jade Giant's power; no better or worse than a hundred like it. 

But still, Roy-- if you were going to make a pretentious literary quote, quote the right author! 

     

NEAR-MYTHS: JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. GODZILLA VS. KONG (2023-24)

 

Now THIS is what JLA cluster-crossovers should be: valiant superheroes battling colossal monsters, and monsters battling other monsters, and villains trying to control the monsters before being taken down by the heroes. 

One thing I like about JL/G/K is that even though the DC-verse depicted here is not entirely congruent with the mainstream one-- for one thing, three regular villains and two regular heroes take the dirty nap-- there's no pretense by writer Brian Bucccelato that this is some amalgam universe where the Justice League and the Legion of Doom occupies the same world as the cinematic "Monsterverse." Buccelato possibly realized that it provided more opportunities for exposition if the Legion stumbled into the Monsterverse and brought back its progeny to menace this version of DC-Earth. 

The only icons directly imported from the Monsterverse are Godzilla, Kong, Mechagodzilla, and the Skull-Crawlers, though some new ones are invented to take the place of various Toho-titans. There were no such restrictions on the use of DC characters, so this is not a story for noobs, who really won't be able to tell the players without a scorecard. There's even a scene with some heroes breaking up a supervillain jailbreak in which I, expert though I usually am, strained to figure out some of the obscurities given a few panels here and there.

Characterization is understandably simple since the primary story is about stopping giant monsters, but Buccellato works in some pleasant dialogue nonetheless, and Christian Duce does a fine job of imparting the sense of monolithic hugeness to the big beasts. Sometimes there are continuity goofs because everything's so rushed. When in the story did someone bring the Teen Titans into the mix, and why is the Big S almost killed by Godzilla's atomic fire? If the Legion contacts Deathstroke to employ the League of Assassins, why does Ra's Al Ghul get into the thick of things? But since it's a one-off universe, the blips don't get in the way of all the looney hero/monster/villain fun.          

MYTHCOMICS: "THE LAST DAY OF THE AMAZONS" (WONDER WOMAN #149, 1964)

 

In my overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN comics of the 1960s, I asserted that the writer hardly ever made much use of the mythical elements present in the mythos bequeathed to DC by creator William Marston. In contrast to Kanigher's contemporaneous METAL MEN, wherein the author sometimes managed to imbed his juvenile formulas with the substance of epistemological myths, Kanigher wrote as if he thought his readers too simple-minded to care about consistency or elucidation of fantasy-concepts. However, at the end of the essay I added that I found one story that achieved mythopoeic concrescence. True, it's flawed. A lot of time is wasted with a side-plot showing Wonder Woman in her Diana Prince ID, where she has to rescue a rocket crew from disaster without revealing her identity to Steve Trevor. However, one of the corniest elements found in many WW stories of the time actually works to the advantage of LAST DAY OF THE AMAZONS. 

I noted in the overview that I was no fan of Kanigher's "Wonder Woman family." a sterile emulation of the Weisinger "Superman family." Back in the Golden Age Wonder Woman was always an adult. Her only family member was Hippolyta, the immortal queen of Paradise Isle, who created her daughter Diana from clay with the help of the Amazons' patron deities Athena and Aphrodite. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, though, Kanigher added to Hippolyta's brood two time-tossed incarnations of Diana, one the teenaged Wonder Girl, the other the toddler Wonder Tot. By 1964, the time of DAY, Hippolyta has evidently grown contemptuous of the perils of time-paradoxes, for all three versions of Diana co-exist on Paradise Isle and have adventures together. They begin DAY with all four Amazons asleep, though all the later scenes are in daytime, so apparently the catastrophe waits until dawn to strike. A massive earthquake strikes the island, and the Amazons have to form a "human chain"-- a favorite Kanigher trope-- to keep Wonder Tot from falling into a chasm.

            

The Amazonian quartet goes outside. Their two patron deities materialize and tell them that Paradise Island is falling apart due to Hippolyta's transgression against Athena's law, that no man may be allowed to tread upon a sanctuary meant only for the immortal Amazons. The presence of a man in Greek armor, "The Prince," is at the root of the trouble, but since Hippolyta insists on explaining how things came to this pass, even juvenile readers would have figured out that DAY is a tale beginning "in media res," which gives Kanigher the chance to start things off with a bang before settling in for a big explanation.

Hippolyta briefly mentions that her unnamed Prince was her consort, if not husband, back in the days before she was granted immortality. However, he was lost at sea and presumed dead. However, because Kanigher also wants to acquaint his readers with the lives of Hippolyta's daughters, the exegesis is delayed so that the reader can see a lot of incidents in the lives of the three Wonders. Eleven pages go by before Kanigher tips his hand. In contrast to all the other stories in which Hippolyta sends her children off to have heady adventures, this time she's haunted by the memory of her lost love. In a nice bit of irony, Wonder Tot swears to stay with her lonely old mother, but then in a short time the child ventures forth to have a one-page exploit with her wacky buddy Mister Genie. 

While Hippolyta's lost prince was never mentioned before this story or afterward, at this time the amazon queen feels her lovelorn state exacerbated by the fact that all of her daughters have interesting, vital lives. So to anneal her sorrow, Hippolyta creates a stone statue of her beloved. But as she goes to sleep-- presumably the night immediately before the earthquake-- she makes the mistake of praising only the sculpting skill lent her by Athena for giving her a semblance of her lost love. By doing this, Hippolyta emulates the act by which she brought her child Diana to life from clay, though without any intention of making the stone come to life.

According to Kanigher's cosmos, though, Aphrodite was responsible for imbuing the clay statue of Diana with life. The love-goddess is affronted that her worshipper Hippolyta would credit Athena with anything concerning love. There's some justice in this. Athena, the virgin war-goddess, is the image on which all of the Amazons have modeled their (presumably celibate) lives. They seem to evoke Aphrodite not with respect to forging romantic alliances-- although both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl are pursued by attentive males-- but with respect to invoking Aphrodite in a vague spirit of beneficence, one that Marston tended to call "lovingkindness." This arrangement seems to have been okay with Aphrodite until Hippolyta credits Athena with anything pertaining to the exigencies of romantic love. This is probably the only time in Kanigher's career that he portrays the Greek gods of the WONDER WOMAN cosmos as being as fractious and petty as they often are in traditional stories.

    

A massive fire-creature sticks his head out of a crevasse, and wonder of wonders, Kanigher actually explains that this is "the God of Earthquakes," whom Athena presumably summoned to devastate Paradise Island. All of the Wonder Family members try to sacrifice themselves to save the other (barely seen) Amazons, and once again they form a human chain to support one another. Aphrodite is not impressed by acts of heroism; she only wants to see a sacrifice rooted in romantic love. The animated statue-- which for all we know might incorporate the long-dead spirit of the Prince-- then gives the love-goddess the sacrifice she wants. Once his intrusive male presence has vanished from the island, Athena is free to cancel the execution, and the goddess leave.

Given that almost every bit of characterization in Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN is annoyingly flat, the conclusion proves eyebrow-raising. The three daughters realize that their mother has lost her only love a second time, and they try to soothe Hippolyta by telling her that they'll devote more time to her. But Hippolyta's last words are those of an aging (and not immortal) parent ceding power to the younger generation, giving them permission to live their own lives, no matter how it isolates her. Perhaps Kanigher allowed himself this isolated moment of sensitivity because mortal men, as much as mortal women, feel time's winged chariot hurrying near. And even an immortal queen, devoted to the battle-ethos of Athena, must satisfy all forms of erotic romance, even in the form of memories, to the exclusive claims of the Goddess of Love.                

THE READING RHEUM: THE BRIDE OF LAMMERMOOR (1819)

 

Though I'm acquainted with various Walter Scott works through adaptation, until reading BRIDE the only things in his oeuvre I'd read were THE TALISMAN (over thirty years ago), IVANHOE, and THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL, the latter two having been blog-reviewed here.  LAMMERMOOR is one of the better-known Scott titles, partly due to being translated into a famous opera, and it was written immediately previous to the classic IVANHOE. Therefore, it ought to stand as a novel produced by Scott at the very peak of his powers.

Well, it's not terrible, but it's a large disappointment, and it certainly fails my mythicity smell-test. Going on what historical knowledge I have of LAMMERMOOR's composition, two big problems arise. One is that at the time of composition, Scott suffered a severe attack of gallstones, so he was in a great deal of pain while he sought to keep the pot boiling. (He also made some problematic claims about what he thought of the finished work, but these don't affect my judgment.) The second difficulty is that Scott sought to take an old legend of a Scottish family tragedy and turn it into his ROMEO AND JULIET, with various touches of Shakespearean supernaturalism. Intent on following the outlines of the legend, Scott forgot the bring the characters to life.

Set in the years just before England and Scotland united, the clan of Ravenswood is stripped of its title thanks to the patriarch's alliance to deposed King James VII. The clan loses Ravenswood Estate, which is then bought by a minor Scottish lord, Sir William Ashton, a lawyer. The Ravenswood patriarch dies soon after this humiliating event, and his only son Edgar-- who inherits only a dilapidated castle known as Wolfscrag--swears to avenge his father. Armed with a pistol, Edgar seeks out Ashton on the estate. However, Ashton happens to be out and about with his sole daughter Lucy, and both are attacked by a wild bull. Edgar shoots the bull, succors Lucy, and falls in love with her, as she does with him.

So far, the setup sounds like a lot of "unite the clans through marriage" plots, including that of Scott's first original publication, LAST MINSTREL. However, since Scott was following the template of ROMEO AND JULIET, all the emphasis falls upon the forces that keep the lovers apart. This might have been fine had the lovers been interesting characters for whom one might root. But Lucy is just a simpering damsel, with none of the intensity of Ivanhoe's beloved Rowena. Edgar gets more scenes in which Scott might have built him up. Yet he still seems one-note: eternally mordant and pessimistic.

In the Shakespeare play Juliet's father wants her to make a better marriage than with Romeo, but William Ashton, somewhat guilty over the death of the Ravenswood patriarch, encourages the relationship. However, his wife Margaret Ashton, who left her own clan to marry Ashton, is the proverbial iron fist in the velvet glove, and like her model, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, her devotion to power politics will spell the doom of both clans. Yet though she provides a hissable villain, she too seems a stereotype. The same is true of two adventurers who try to insinuate themselves into Lucy's life, and Scott's unfunny comedy-relief, Edgar's seneschal Caleb, whose heavy dialect would challenge even the most devoted defender of Scottish culture.

As noted, Scott throws in a lot of portents, and even a trio of beldames clearly intended to evoke the witches of MACBETH. But LAMMERMOOR contains one definite metaphenomenal presence, though the oracle she gives is as useless as those of Macbeth's hags or of Hamlet's father. Alice, a former retainer of the Ravenswood clan, lives in a hut in the forest, and despite her blindness seems to possess a witchy second sight. She repeatedly warns of an evil fate if Edgar marries Lucy, and Alice apparently believes this so deeply that after her death-- of which Edgar is not aware-- her unspeaking specter appears to warn Edgar again. And yet the novel ends with both of the lovers dead, neither getting the sort of evocative death scene accorded to the doomed Montague and Capulet. It's hard to imagine the fate Alice foresaw as being much worse than this. So her status as an oracle is probably just as informed by her prejudices as are the actions of Lucy's mother, who brings about the doom of the daughter she seeks to control.         

On the (slight) plus side, Scott's scene-painting talents are as cinematic before there was cinema. One scene involving a bleeding raven, slain by Lucy's dipstick younger brother, betokens the evil that will befall Lucy when later she's forced to enter the wrong marriage-bed. Scott might even have intended some hymen-symbolism there, though there's not much sexuality, healthy or otherwise, in LAMMERMOOR. In contrast to IVANHOE, which boasts two memorable female leads, LAMMERMOOR is drowned in negative femininity, and the combative struggles of (some of) the males can't escape the morass (which is more or less the evil fate of Edgar, self-immolated in quicksand). LAMMERMOOR seems in most ways a repudiation of the adventurous spirits Scott had summoned forth in 1817's ROB ROY and would summon again in IVANHOE. LAMMERMOOR was popular in its day-- Wiki says it gave new popularity to the mostly dormant name "Edgar"-- but anyone seeking to learn the essence of Scott's importance to literature would do better to look elsewhere.         

RULES OF RE-ENGAGEMENT

Partly in response to my current line of thought expressed in QUICK NUM NOTES, I re-examined the five essays I wrote about "the suspension of disbelief" as formulated by Samuel Coleridge and responded to by Stephen King. I concluded that quasi-series with the 2023 post STRENGTH TO ENGAGEMENT, but now I have some new refinements.

First of all, I failed to account for two different levels of engagement: one primary and "unearned," the other secondary and "earned." I pointed out in the course of the essays that a reader's receptiveness to the genres of fantasy does not depend exactly on "suspending disbelief." Some readers may be so invested in naive realism that they can never accept metaphenomenal subject matter in any way; they find it childish and would never, in line with Stephen King's dictum, even trouble to exert their mental muscles to engage. Yet I've encountered fans of the metaphenomenal who are just as naively realistic as any fantasy-hater, but who view their reading material as simple escapism from the rigors of real life. Other fantasy-readers may believe in one or more forms of the metaphenomenal in real life, ranging from psychic phenomena or the return of the Messiah, or they may be agnostic about such matters but open to real-world possibilities. Some may place credence in science fiction but not in magical fantasy, and so on. All of these forms of engagement proceed from individual taste, and so as far as the author of any given "meta" work is concerned, a given reader's willingness to engage is unearned, because the reader approaches the work with a certain degree of receptivity no matter how good or bad the work is.  

The secondary level of engagement, though, is one that the author does have to earn. In QUICK NUM NOTES I asked the question, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" The question was directed to those Gothic authors who thought they were being more "realistic" by revealing that a purported ghost was just a guy in a bedsheet, when in truth there's not much (if any) real-world evidence for swindlers who dress up in bedsheets (and maybe more for real ghosts). A good storyteller like Conan Doyle can cobble together enough suggestive details as to make it seem logical that the villain of HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES would go through the trouble of painting a dog with phosphorescent paint to get across the effect of a ghost-hound. When an author manages to take the reader to the second level of engagement, the reader feels validated in investing in the far-fetched events of the narrative. A contrary example-- just to name the first that comes to mind-- is a dopey "weird western," HAUNTED RANCH, in which the plotters, as unimaginative as their creators, try to create the illusion of a haunting by simply projecting spooky sounds into the ranch-house. 

The same basic rule pertains to marvelous phenomena. In this month's essay AMAZON ATROCITY, which offered an overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN tenure, I called attention to one story in which a fiery giant arises from the ground beneath Paradise Island-- yet the author neglects to give any rationale for the creature's appearance. I know that had I read this particular tale at age 10 I would have been offended by the author's implication that the kids reading this comic were too stupid to need explanations-- and I say this with a clear memory of another Kanigher story of the same period in which he pissed me off with his cavalier attitude toward storytelling.       

Further, I gave a couple of examples of the barest justifications Kanigher might have employed to gain his readers' secondary engagement: "Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians?" Both of these conceits could have been further expanded upon in line with either didactic or mythopoeic abstractions, and such abstractions might have made the story more interesting, thus encouraging readers to continue reading the heroine's adventures.

This idea of an author having to earn the reader's secondary engagement will play into a future essay on related matters.  

DUELING DUALITIES PT. 3

 In January I wrote two essays under the heading DUELING DUALITIES, here and here, regarding how William James' "two forms of knowledge" probably influenced Carl Jung's four functions. The first essay is also one of those incidents where I used the words "ontology" and "epistemology" a bit incorrectly. I corrected that oversight in May of this year with A TALE OF TWO COSMS, substituting the terms "ontocosm" as "the totality of lateral values" in a work and "epicosm" as "the totality of vertical values." 

In TALE, I gave an example of two classic comics-serials in which one showed a stronger epicosm than an ontocosm, and vice versa:

Now I would say that said iteration of SPIDER-MAN had a more developed ontocosm, while said iteration of FANTASTIC FOUR had a more developed epicosm.  

I should qualify this, though, by stating that FANTASTIC FOUR still had a very strong ontocosm with respect to developing the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, in comparison with even the best of the other contemporary Marvel offerings from the Silver Age (particularly Stan Lee's red-headed stepchild, the Pym of a Thousand Names). In fact, the kinetic qualities of the Lee-Kirby FF are at least equal to those of the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN. However, with respect to the dramatic potentialities, the L/D SPIDER-MAN is more fully devoted to the soap opera model, generating a superior level of melodramatic intensity with what must have been comics' largest-ever ensemble of regular support-characters. By comparison. the L/K FANTASTIC FOUR concentrated most of its energies on the four principals, and the most-used group of support-characters in the series-- The Inhumans -- didn't so much mesh with the four principals as randomly bounce off them. This may be because, IMO, The Inhumans were primarily Jack Kirby's concept, and Stan Lee never really "got" them. So, taking in the totality of lateral elements-- which are, I should reiterate, the elements through which readers most directly relate to the characters' exploits-- the FF-ontocosm is weaker than that of SPIDER-MAN. These factors may also relate to the reasons why SPIDER-MAN quickly overtook FANTASTIC FOUR as the flagship of the Marvel line, while the FF often struggled to remain relevant in the decades following the Silver Age.  

Possibly because Lee and Ditko were so focused upon melodramatic exigencies, though, there wasn't much room to focus on dialectical and mythopoeic values. Ditko's villains are "marvels" of costume design, but they don't arouse many abstract associations in comparison to Galactus, the Puppet Master, The Red Ghost, Klaw and Doctor Doom. This contrast raises the possibility that, to borrow from another set of Jamesian terms, SPIDER-MAN was focused more on "the perceptual" while FANTASTIC FOUR was focused more on "the conceptual."  More on these matters later, perhaps.