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SIX KEYS TO A LITERARY GENETIC CODE

In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here,  owes someth...

Thursday, March 14, 2024

MYTHCOMICS: "DEATH BY WITCHCRAFT" (WITCHES TALES #4, 1951)

 Once more it's March, so it's time for another "Women's History Month" post-- though that doesn't necessarily mean finding only stories that would please feminists. Myths about negative aspects of femininity are as vital as those about positive aspects. As it happens, the horror story featured here accentuates the negative for both of the sexes.



As if so often the case with anthology horror stories of the Golden Age of Comics, there's no writer-attribution, though the artist has been identified as Rudy Palais, who was known in his time for an above-average ability to convey a creepy mood.




The story of Dora Mayberry, by her own account scarred with the lines and wrinkles of age, is book-ended on both sides by her relating her tale to an "inner circle" of evildoers made up of one traditional-looking witch, an equally traditional black cat, and several ghoulish-looking males. After showing her listeners the beauty she once possessed, she begins the story in what looks like the 1920s at latest. Dora receives visits from high-class Arnold Cavendish, but Dora's only interested in Arnold because he's rich-- or, more precisely, in the line to become rich when his sick, rich uncle goes to meet his maker. In fact, Arnold's just as greedy to get his inheritance as Dora is, and when the old boy has a heart attack, Arnold makes sure his uncle doesn't get a chance to recover.


However, once Arnold has all the money he'll ever need, he shows his true colors. He wants to live it up with every woman in town, and he refuses to marry Dora as promised. Dora alludes to the possibility of revealing some "secret" they hold in common, but once she's been well and truly spurned, the idea of revealing the secret never comes up again. Instead, Dora decides to sell her soul to Satan for the power to redress her injury, telling her tutor, "Some say women are weak-- but we CAN do evil!"




Up to this point the story has followed a fairly predictable course. However, the unknown writer takes a new turn by revealing that Arnold has a neurotic fear of growing old like his late uncle. He's so deranged on the subject that he makes a contract with two killers, saying that if they kill him painlessly in twenty years, he'll leave them a sum of money in his will. Clearly, Arnold wants to feel like he can burn the candle at both ends and then trust to someone else to keep him from getting old. (The possibility of self-execution apparently never occurs to him.)



Dora then studies the black arts for "long days and nights," which erode both her youth and her good looks. But she hasn't got in mind some mundane death-curse, as the story's title would suggest; she wants to use Arnold's own fears as the means of his undoing. Seven years later, she approaches Arnold, representing herself as his new housekeeper, and since she's no longer beautiful Arnold doesn't recognize her. The rich narcissist has lost none of his mania, complaining that elderly beggars are "people squeezed dry by time." (One might guess that he conflates advanced age with penury, since implicitly he wants to waste the family fortune and then perish before he has to live with the consequences of being a high-living grasshopper.)





Dora's gambit is to spook Arnold with the possibility that the thugs he hired are going to come early for their payoff and so deprive the rich wastrel of twenty years of self-indulgence. To sell Arnold on this possibility, Dora not only sends her victim minatory dreams, she seeks out the two thugs, arranges their deaths, and then turns them into her spectral henchmen. Not only does she panic the fool into committing suicide, she cons him into signing over all his wealth to his faithful housekeeper. Dora ends up becoming a rich old crone who then abets other wronged women into choosing a dark path to vengeance.

Arnold and Dora are practically living symbols of masculine and feminine negativity. Though horror stories harbor any number of male warlocks or magicians who use mystic powers for vengeance, there is in my opinion there is something uniquely feminine about the idea of a "sisterhood" of malefic witches (even though, as I admitted, most of the ghouls at the convocation are male). And although actual sex is not mentioned in "Death," the writer strongly implies that what Arnold wants, once he has money, is a life of "love 'em and leave 'em." Ironically, both of them would have been well suited to each other in terms of selfish greed, and Dora probably would have been an adequate match for Arnold if he didn't have his mania about "hoping he dies before he gets old," to misquote the song.

One half of Dora Mayberry's name sustains some symbolic interest. "Dora" is just a standard wish-fulfillment cognomen, usually translated as "God's gift." However, "mayberry" is one of many names attributed to the plant known as the "common hawthorn" (a specification necessary because various other plants are also called hawthorns). Hawthorn has strong witchy associations, being both used by actual witches in their rituals and employed by ordinary people to avert witchery.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

CROSSING T'S, DOTTING I'S

 Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions.-- STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2.

 

In STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS, I announced that I would retire the barely used term "postulate" in term of "proposition." But my saying this means that I must transfer everything I said about the two forms of postulates, especially in FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, to a "formal proposition" that represents the didactic form of vertical meaning, and to "informal proposition," that represents the mythopoeic form of vertical meaning.

The one potential problem with these determinations is that way back in 2018's three-essay series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, I stated that I considered both the lateral and vertical meanings of a given work were propositional in nature.

But the solution is easily solved by a quick visit to Schopenhauer. In his principal work THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, the gloomy philosopher created a lot of dualisms, but one of the simplest is to contrast "the concrete" of our physical experience and "the abstract" of our mental experience. 

So, since I've already assigned (as in the quote above) abstractions to the world of vertical meaning, then by default (as well as the PROPOSITIONS series) the world of lateral meaning is aligned with the concrete, because the lateral is also the "literal" record of what happens to characters in the narrative and how they feel about it. 

So, to apply full symmetry to the formulations of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE, all four potentialities line up like so:

THE KINETIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete excitations 

THE DRAMATIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete emotions

THE MYTHOPOEIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract correlations

THE DIDACTIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract cogitations

Saturday, March 2, 2024

THE READING RHEUM: "CARMILLA" (1872)



 

 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.


SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS 

After not having read Sheridan Le Fanu's CARMILLA in many years, I gave it a shot again last year, and found the novella underwhelming. Its status as "the first major lesbian vampire story" seemed dubious, though there's no doubt that exploitative film adaptations pursued that angle. In the story proper, though, the relationship between the vampiress and her victim Laura is strictly one-way. Laura doesn't even know what to make of Carmilla's weird claims of some shared destiny between the two of them. The closest the young woman comes to acknowledging some erotic fixation on Carmilla's part is that she briefly thinks about book-romances (possibly Byron's DON JUAN?) in which a "boyish lover" pretends to be female to gain access to a beloved. Yet Laura quickly dismisses that possibility, rationalizing that Carmilla's constant "languor" is "quite incompatible with a masculine system." Laura can hardly be a consenting partner in a lesbian affair if she can't even conceive of the possibility of girl-on-girl love. At most CARMILLA might rank as the first vampire story about lesbian rape.

However, on a more recent re-reading. I found myself interpreting the novella along lines similar to Melville's cited quote about "unfinished narration." In marked contrast to the more melodramatic vampire-novels, ranging from the 1847 VARNEY THE VAMPIRE to the 1897 DRACULA, CARMILLA feels very like a 20th-century modernist work, in love with ambiguity and "ragged edges."

One great ambiguity in the novella is that Carmilla seems to be a member of some strange network that has insinuated itself into human circles. This stands in contrast to both Varney and Dracula, who operate alone except for a few minions. But one never knows the nature of the vampire network. Numerous clues lead the reader to the discovery that Carmilla, languorous guest of Laura and her unnamed father, is Mircalla Karnstein, who has existed as an unholy bloodsucker since her death a hundred years earlier. But what about the other unnamed associates? One, the "Comtesse" who claims to be the mother of Carmilla in her various incarnations, may be a vampire herself, and may also be one of the vanished Karnsteins, whose castle stands in ruins at the start of the novella. Whoever the Comtesse is, she has resources enough to arrange the carriage that brings Carmilla to the estate where Laura lives. But who is the "hideous black man" in a turban whom Laura's governess sees inside the carriage? Similarly, when General Spielsdorf narrates the story as to how he lost his precious ward to the girlish-looking vampire-- at that time, using the name "Millarca"-- he mentions a "deathly pale" carriage driver working for the Comtesse. The later example of DRACULA invites the idea of human servants to a clutch of vampires. Yet Le Fanu proffers none of the copious explanations seen in Stoker.

How does Carmilla operate as an undead spirit? She first appears in Laura's bedroom when the latter is a girl of six. Little Laura sees the full-grown Carmilla, and feels something pierce her breast, though no wound eventuates. Then apparently Carmilla makes some chimerical decision not to trouble Laura again until the latter turns sixteen. Near the novella's conclusion, Baron Vordenburg-- Le Fanu's anticipation of Doctor Van Helsing-- claims that though vampires usually exsanguinate their victims right away, sometimes they make continued visits to a victim, as with "the gradual approaches of an artful courtship." All of the victims who are quickly slain by the vampiress are described as female. So was Le Fanu implying, very covertly, that Carmilla was a lesbian who only liked female prey? That would be a logical conclusion. But Le Fanu's characters never comment on the apparent preference, and Carmilla herself doesn't make even a passing comment on the male of the species. To be sure, Laura, living in a pre-lapsarian isolation from society, makes no comments on masculine charms either, aside from displaying a basic knowledge as to how men usually differ from women. But though Laura escapes either losing her life or becoming an undead herself, the novella certainly does not end with any ringing endorsement of the Daughters of Lesbos, and one never knows what Le Fanu thinks about the subject.

There are a lot of other "ragged edges" in CARMILLA, but I'll wind up with the matter of Carmilla's powers, contrasting Le Fanu's approach to Stoker's. DRACULA's opening chapters make the vampire's powers seem endless, but roughly halfway through the book, Van Helsing codifies all of the things vampires can and cannot do. The explications in the last couple of chapters of CARMILLA leave most questions unanswered. Why, when preying on Laura and on Spielsdorf's ward, does Carmilla manifests as a "sooty black thing," and yet as herself as well? Why does Laura manifest a wound from Carmilla's attentions when she's sixteen, but not when she's six? Carmilla is seen in her grave at the Karnstein ruins at the novel's end, but how did she get there? When Laura and her father leave their home, the father makes an excuse to Carmilla that they plan to go an errand. and he invites Carmilla to join them later for a picnic "in the ruined castle." The reader doesn't know how much the father knows at that point-- only that he's held some unreported conversations with the local doctor-- but one would think that any mention of the Karnstein ruins would keep Carmilla away from there. Instead, she makes a flagrant appearance there, before the eyes of Laura, her father and Spielsdorf. She easily thwarts Spielsdorf when he attacks her with an axe, but then, instead of attacking the three people capable of killing her, she simply vanishes. Does she take refuge in her grave because she thinks they can't find her there? Or-- is it possible that she practices bilocation? Perhaps the Carmilla at Laura's home is a magical double of the body that's confined to the grave, and only the spirit can leave, not the actual body-- which might one reason the non-physical form morphs into a shadow-creature.

So my verdict is that as a lesbian novel, CARMILLA is no great shakes. But as a horror story devoted to the utter unknowability of the twilight domain beyond the world of the living, it outstrips most if not all other vampire novels.

\\\ 

Friday, March 1, 2024

TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.
The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.
The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.
The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

           --STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES

          


So I've just finished reviewing the 1968 French thriller TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS,only to find that the movie's diegesis contained more material than I could fit into a film-review. It's a shame I'm not a Freudian, because the film is really a treasure trove of Freudian tropes, for all that the narrative was based on a story written some twenty years before Freud was born. I judged that the film has only "fair" mythicity because it was not as interested in what I have called "correlation-quanta" as on "emotion-quanta." 

Here's the setup material I wrote the review.

This English-dubbed French thriller, despite its exploitative title, boasts a distinguished lineage. The source material is partly from a legend from French history: that, in the 14th century, Margaret of Burgundy, wife to King Louis X, committed adultery within a Parisian guard-tower, the Tower of Nesle, for which offense the unhappy French queen was imprisoned for the remainder of her life. A writer named Frederic Gaillardet dramatized the incident, though Alexander Dumas rewrote the play, possibly because he'd become famous for a stage-success in 1829, prior to his later fame as a novelist. However, the Gaillardet-Dumas story only takes various names and places from the historical account, concocting a wild hybrid story I'm tempted to call a "psycho-swashbuckler." I have not read any version of the prose source material. But I theorize that one of the authors borrowed a folklore-tale about Cleopatra, which asserted that the Egyptian queen had the habit of taking male lovers into her boudoir for one night of passion, only to have them executed afterward. 

TOWER, like the play on which it's based, spins out the idea that Queen Margaret-- who, according to the story's dynamics, ought to be in her middle thirties-- uses the deserted Tower of Nesle for a series of one-night stands with young Frenchmen, whether they are or aren't "virgins" like the title says . In fact, there are usually three such encounters each night, since Margaret (Teri Tordai) sets up liaisons for her two handmaidens as well. Then comes the "screaming," as Margaret's main henchman Orsini and various hooded thugs slay the male victims and toss them into the Seine River. I don't know why any of the henchmen, or Margaret and her ladies for that matter, affect any sort of masks, since they expect all to be killing off any and all visitors. The attempts at secrecy don't keep the locals from getting the sense that nasty things are happening at the "Tower of Sin," as they call it.

Like a lot of psycho-dramas, TOWER depends on a crapload of big revelations about things that happened prior to the film's diegesis. So for purpose of deeper analysis, I'm citing the actual events of the film in order that they are said to have happened, to get a handle on the psychological constructs the adapters used, which may or may not all be in the original play, or any book adaptation thereof.

1) Some time before Margaret of Burgundy becomes Queen of 14th-century France by marrying Louis X, she's just a young noblewoman living with her father. Margaret has some conflict with her father that will lead her to plot his murder. She then has intimate relations with two young pages, hypothetically when she's in her teens or twenties, though there's no testimony as to how old the pages were. One of the pages, Orsini, she gets to poison her father, which may help her rise to power in some way. But by the other page, who later goes by the name Bouridan, plants a bun in her oven. That bun results in two non-identical twin boys, and either Margaret or Orsini gives the order to have the incriminating children killed. This apparently happens without the knowledge of Bouridan, though it's not clear what he knew and when. But the henchman (or huntsman?) in charge of the killing leaves the two infants with a church, and they're raised to manhood. They both look about twenty when they arrive in Paris, which would make Margaret at least 35 by that time (though actress Teri Tordai was in her twenties). 

2) Bouridan presumably has various adventures before he becomes celebrated for military valor in the service of Louis X, and he too should be at least in his middle thirties, though the actor playing Bouridan was in his forties. He's first seen on his way to Paris, but he takes time to chat up Blanche, who's both implicitly in her innocent twenties and played by an actress of the same age.

3) Bouridan encounters the twins, Philippe and Gautier, in Paris. He thinks it's odd because they both have old scars on their forearms, which reminds of a similar scar on the arm of his former lover, though he does not say as much. Both Bouridan and Philippe get invited to party at The Tower, and though Bouridan seems to be familiar with the place's bad rep, he doesn't try to talk Philippe out of going.

4) Bouridan is set up to have sex with one of the Queen's handmaidens and then be killed, but he avoids both fates and escapes the Tower. Philippe has sex with the Queen, all the Oedipal innocent who doesn't know he's shagging his mom. Margaret, who's sacrificed numerous victims to her lust and that of her two handmaidens, feels a little tender about Philippe and almost spares him. But the enthralled young man tries to see the face under her mask, and Margaret has Orsini kill him and dispose of the body.

5) Around the same time, Orsini-- also played by an actor in his forties-- takes a fancy to Blanche when she arrives at court. He strongarms her into becoming a handmaiden to Margaret. Later he gets her alone and tries to rape her, but he's interrupted and Blanche gets away.

6) Bouridan seems to nurture an old rivalry with Orsini, since his main concern is to blackmail the Queen, threatening to reveal her ilicit activities to King Louis X, newly returned from a foreign campaign-- though later in the film it's implied that the King suspects Margaret's doing something not quite right. However, Bouridan gets a chance to question one of Orsini's henchmen, whom they both knew from their time as pages. The henchman reveals that he spared the lives of the twins and marked them with scars, though he doesn't say why. 

7) So now Bouridan knows that the two children he sired with Margaret lived, even though Philippe died after getting sexed up by his mother. The captain doesn't seem too broken up by this revelation, and he's still more interested in forcing Margaret into giving him a special position at court, even going to the extent of confronting her with the dead body of Philippe. Bouridan also doesn't seek out his surviving son Gautier, though Gautier tries to kill the older man, thanks to Orsini telling the young fellow that Bouridan killed Philippe. 

8) Bouridan does not reveal his filial relationship to Gautier, but somehow talks him into helping Bouridan assault on the Tower while the Queen intends to have one of her orgies. The end result is that Gautier is killed by the Queen's men, though she's belatedly horrified to see her other son slain (though apparently it was okay when they were infants). Bouridan duels Orsini but it's Margaret who stabs Orsini, her former favorite, to death. Then, since the Tower has conveniently caught on fire, she consigns herself to the flames. The King, summoned by Blanche's efforts, shows up mostly to give Bouridan the commission he wants, and the hero cleaves to his (much younger) beloved.

So none of these Freud-tropes are brought together in the service of either a didactic or mythopoeic discourse, only to exploit an array of emotional responses. The Oedipal drama of a son accidentally sleeping with his mother isn't even the main focus here, though. If anything, the main plot resembles Freud's scenario from TOTEM AND TABOO, in which a male tries to keep all the nubile women to himself. Obviously, in his youth Bouridan is not able to do this, because Margaret forms an alliance with his rival Orsini. Still, she later says that she felt a deeper relationship to Bouridan than anyone else, so there's a strong implication that he was such a good lover that for years Margaret's been trying to satisfy herself with lesser (read: younger) peccadillos. 

Bouridan, though, doesn't display any longing for Margaret; he doesn't even try to kiss her at any time. The implication I take from this series of tropes is that he was betrayed by her taking up with his rival Orsini. He doesn't really care about his two sons any more than he does about Margaret. He's dominated by a "will to power," and he prospers as a result of infiltrating Margaret's murderous operation. Also of Oedipal interest is that he ends up with a woman young enough to be his daughter, though to be sure actor Jean Piat did not look to be in his forties for this role. It's also interesting that both Bouridan and Orsini desire Blanche, just as they presumably both desired Margaret as well. I might even theorize that, to Bouridan's ego, both of his sons can be easily sacrificed in his quest for power, and for sex with a younger woman. I'd call it a double standard, but of course Margaret is still the greater sinner, since she kills for her thrills.

Interestingly, I did some additional writing on another film with strong age-inappropriate clansgression. In TUTELARY SPIRITS I mostly addressed the question as to which characters were the superordinate icons of the schlock-film MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO. There the writer showed little attentiveness to anything like emotional tenor. But he did succeed in using fairytales as a means of creating a mythic discourse around a quaternity of taboos concerning age and blood-- and no such discourse appeared in TOWER OF SCREAMING FREUDIANS.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 12




And so DC's first (but far from last) rendition of PLASTIC MAN ends with a bangless whimper, though at least Drake managed a few okay gags this time.




This time the hoary plot is "sidekick gets the main hero's powers." While Plas and Gordon participate in a parade, they're attacked by murderous doll-sized humans. Plas repels the attack but in the ruckus Gordon is injured. He needs a blood transfusion right away, so Plas donates his chemically-altered corpuscles, and Gordon gets stretch-talents.




Being a straight-arrow, the former sidekick presumably grows a Plastic Man costume out of his own skin and decides he'll show Plas how a proper superhero conducts himself. Naturally, he bungles all of his efforts, though at least this yields a peppy new version of the "Mabel, Mabel" song. 



Meanwhile Master Mannequin, the mad genius behind the doll-men, unleashes his shrunken pawns upon a party thrown by Miss DeLute.



Plastic Man shows up late to the party. He's almost stymied by a doll-man who takes Micheline hostage, but Gordon's inadvertent entrance distracts the crook, and so Plas is able to overcome both the dolls and their master. The hero also gets the last words of the series, "So who needs neat?" There's more poetry than truth in this statement, for the Drake PLASTIC MAN is kind of a mess. But every once in a while, he worked a few good jokes into the chaos.


RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 11

 


Here's the weakest of the three Sparling covers.






It's also another weak Drake plot. Plastic Man prevents an assassination, and that honks off Thisbey, head of a cartel that arranges professional killings. Thisbey summons Killer Joe, the world's most artistic assassin, and Joe accepts the contract, under certain stipulations. Sparling not only manages to insert a "Mutt and Jeff" pair of identical molls, but a secretary named "Miss Zeftig." Such a in-joke, veiled by a foreign-language expression, is probably the only way the editors at Sixties DC would let even an indirect reference to female boobs be printed.



Joe traps Plas with ridiculous ease. But while setting the hero up for a murder-- so that the state will execute the innocent crusader-- Plas cleverly escapes imprisonment and finds a way to prove he was nowhere near the murder scene. 





Joe then sets a minor trap to lull the hero's suspicions, and then hypnotizes Gordon into becoming a super-strong murder-machine. The spell wears off, and this forces Joe to make a frontal assault. Ironically, Plas easily defeats Joe but is almost cancelled by Thisbey. But inevitably both malefactors end up in jail, while the reader ends up with a story with a shortage of clever gags.

RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 10

 



For the last three issues of the doomed title, Jack Sparling furnished both covers and interior art. His rather scratchy art was an odd match but some of the stretch-feats are closer to Cole's model.



This time it's the old amnesia-trope. While Plas is speaking before a stadium full of people honoring his heroism, one of the grandstands collapses. Plas holds up the structure until all the innocent girl scouts get clear, but then it buries him.




The hero comes to, but not only has he lost his memory, he's absorbed the personalities of three different people he encountered. This unique diagnosis is provided by none other than Niles Caulder, the Chief of the Doom Patrol, which Drake had been writing for most of its history, and which would conclude later the same year. After the Chief delivers his diagnosis, Gordon pegs his true identity, and Caulder steps out of character to wield his wheelchair like a bludgeon.




Unfortunately, this sequence--  IMO the funniest one in all ten issues-- is succeeded by the tired plot of a villain roping the amnesiac crusader into committing crimes. The one cute idea is that Micheline is intrigued by the thought of a crooked lover-boy, and wants to be the Bonnie to his Clyde. Disgusted when she learns he's not a real criminal, she accidentally clonks him, brings back his memory, and-- you can write the rest. Sparling does draw the hottest women in all ten issues, though.