ADLER PATED PT. 3

Not that I've mentioned it before, but I've been working on a book explaining my take on the superhero idiom. What I'm printing here now is a section that I wrote for a first draft, only to decide that it no longer fit the general plan any more. This excerpt may repeat some of the points from the ADLER PATED series, beginning here, but that's because it wasn't written for this blog.

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As I noted in Chapter 1, Aristotle’s assertion that all fiction includes an agon or conflict has become a commonplace principle in literary criticism. Aristotle says nothing about any type of conflict being inherently better than another form. However, combative forms of conflict—those in which a dispute was resolved through two or more characters coming to violent blows—became less commonplace in literature as poetic epics gave way to realistic fiction. Violence still occurred in realistic fiction, but it usually lacked archetypal dimensions. There was no sense of a monumental contest when Robinson Crusoe simply used a rifle to shoot down a tribe of bloodthirsty cannibals. In some metamundane works of the post-Renaissance period, such as Gulliver’s Travels, conflict tended toward absurd resolutions. When Lilliput suffers an attack by an enemy fleet, gigantic Gulliver discourages the invasion by urinating on the attackers. Not exactly in line with the Marquise of Queensbury rules.

After I watched an action-movie with a friend, I asked him afterward what if any meaning he assigned to the film’s climactic fight-scene. Why was it pleasurable? His answer was one that most readers will find familiar: audiences enjoy watching characters engage in life-and-death struggles because audience members can’t enjoy such visceral pleasures in real life without consequences. Punch out your mean boss in real life; you get fired and/or go to jail.

Between the years 1907 and 1911, psychologist Alfred Adler formulated the concept of “compensation.” Having studied the ways in which the human body compensated for “innate anomalies of organs”—for instance, weakness of sight—Adler extended his observations into the realm of psychology. Adler argued that from childhood on, human beings inevitably found themselves challenged by their physical and social experiences. For instance, Adler, a second child himself, sometimes discussed how sibling rivalries could evolve when a child felt that his sibling was receiving all the parental affection, thus leading to feelings of inferiority and emotional deprivation that could affect the child even in later life

Though Adler is not as well known today as his contemporaries Freud and Jung, his compensation theory has become axiomatic in modern culture, particularly when dealing with questions like “why people like fictional stories.” The usual response goes something like, “People lead boring lives, so they like to compensate by reading about fictional characters who lead exciting lives.”

There’s undoubtedly a partial truth in this. Even some fictional works, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, focus upon characters unable to separate reality from fantasy. However, Alfred Adler was a little more nuanced than the routine reading of compensation theory. The psychologist distinguished between positive and negative forms of compensation, one being an activity that strengthens the individual, while the other activity has a weakening effect. For instance, in his lecture “Outcomes of Overcompensation,” he points out that paranoiacs are so obsessed with seeing their perceived truths that they manifest “hallucinatory fits.” However, an artist can channel his desire for better sight into art. Adler cites the example of Johann Schiller, a playwright known to have suffered from weak eyesight. Rather than seeking to see better than he could in real life, Schiller channeled his desire for superlative sight into fiction, by creating a hero who could see well enough to shoot an apple off his son’s head: the semi-legendary William Tell.

The “negative compensation” explanation for fictional pleasure is often applied to combative forms of fiction, but it would seem to apply across the board to everything. Do you read stories about romantic love? You don’t have enough love in real life. Do you read stories about faraway places? You’re fed up with your current location. Do you read stories about mad kings and melancholy Danes? You must have a deep-seated envy for the privileges of the monarchical system. By its nature, this concept of compensation accentuates the negative to such an extent that anyone’s taste can be reduced to a simple equation: “You only like X in order to compensate for Y.” Indeed, critics have so often put forth the negative compensation argument against things they don’t like—be it cozy mysteries or big-budget superhero movies—that even the fans of those types of fiction have been known to utter the same arguments, along the lines of “I know it’s junk, but I like it.”

What would criticism look like if it used Alfred Adler’s full proposition, rather than just the half that makes the critics feel good about themselves? Then critics would have to agree that readers of any type of fiction are capable of approaching that genre or form in a positive, self-strengthening manner or in a negative, self-weakening manner. If this is the case, then there must be ways in which combative stories exemplify positive compensation, rather than simply being substitutes for experiences that the audience cannot access.

I said in Chapter 2 that fantasy elements in fiction had the power to open the nearly limitless powers of the imagination. Fictional combat stimulates the imagination as well, though it’s oriented largely on a specific theme: what I’ve called ‘the archetypal battle of good and evil.” In real life, outbreaks of violence are often stupid, pointless, and chaotic. Certain sports-games, like wrestling and football, pit athletes against one another in violent activities, though the activities are dictated by a set of rules. Some fans become so invested in these games that they have been known to riot— usually because their team has lost, though on occasion they even do so when their team wins. But at the core, the society as a whole doesn’t believe that the “villain” in the wrestling-ring is really evil, or that the home-team’s victory makes the community’s life any better.

In fiction, fantasies of a struggle between good and evil can be fully explored, the better to understand one’s ideas of good and evil when they’ve been embodied in the forms of heroes and villains. The fact that the combative form of fiction has been able to prosper over centuries, despite the opposition of so-called “higher culture,” speaks to its pertinacity.