My plans for the third and last part of UNCANNY GENESIS involve my using certain linguistic terms to expand further on my concepts of artifice, affective freedom and cognitive restraint.The primary linguistic terms I'm invoking are the two most crucial to the concept of symbolism: the *simile* and the *metaphor.* Truth to tell, the particular significance of the simile became clearer to me when I looked again at my argument in the POWER AND POTENCY series, regarding G. Wilson Knight's assertion that Shakespeare's Hamlet was "a superman among men:"
G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal." When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.
The rest of Part II I devoted to showing how other manifestations of uncanny phenomenality seemed to possess some potency that exceeded the world of naturalistic causality. Since uncanny works by definition cannot exceed the coherence aspect of causality, they can only exceed naturalistic causality in the sense of *intelligibility,* which is why I argued that such fictional presences as Herman Melville's Moby Dick and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan are more allied with the world of the metaphenomenal than that of the isophenomenal.
So, what does it mean if the world of the uncanny is governed by the construct of the simile, and do the other two phenomenalities accord with other linguistic forms of speech?
Well, as noted earlier the simile and the metaphor are often paired as related but non-identical linguistic terms. The simile draws a comparison between two or more phenomena, one which may be expressively memorable but is not meant to change one's view of consensual reality. The metaphor, however, expresses the identity of two or more phenomena, in a manner that parallels the direct association of phenomena in Cassirer's view of mythical thinking:
Mythical "metamorphosis"... is always the record of an individual event-- a change from one individual and concrete material form to another. The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees."-- Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46-47.
In THE GREAT CODE, Northrop Frye spun forth a mammoth theory of language derived from the work of Renaissance scholar Giambattista Vico. In essence, Frye asserts that human language has three phases: the *hieroglyphic,* which is the language of the gods, the *hieratic,* which is the language of the aristocrats, who also give birth to what Cassirer calls "discursive reason," and the *demotic,* the language of ordinary-world description (what Wheelwright calls "stheno-language.")
Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)
I don't intend to draw direct comparisons between Frye's formulations and mine, for as I've mentioned elsewhere, Frye has no real interest in phenomenology. But I mention Frye's schema as a prelude to outlining my own, which concerns not the nature of language but the application of linguistic terms to the three phenomenalities, to wit:
The NATURALISTIC is governed by the concept of the "stheno-symbol," of the base sign that is supposed to represent exactly what it shows and nothing more.
The UNCANNY is governed by the concept of the "simile," in that there is a restricted level of symbolism. Thus Edgar Rice Burroughs can compare his hero Tarzan to a "forest god," which gives the hero the semblance of godliness to the character, yet without actually imputing the nature of a god, or that god's power, to Tarzan in any literal way.
The MARVELOUS, however, is governed by the concept of the "metaphor," in which the symbolism is meant to imply some base identity between two or more phenomena, as seen in Cassirer's last two examples, the sun being created from a stone and men being created from rocks or trees. Within fiction, this transcendence of experienced reality may be explained by magic, by some not-yet-discovered principle of real-world science, or by nothing whatever. But the action involved is always that of an identification of two disparate phenomena, becoming associated after the "magical" fashion of the metaphorical connection.
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