PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2

I may be dovetailing two subjects with only a loose relationship, since my acceptance of the Whitehead term "prehension" (as explained here) came into being about the same time that I started meditating on the hypothetical evolution of what I've labeled as the four literary personas. Nevertheless, I'm going with the conceit.

A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.

In contrast, though, I can imagine-- just as part of a large thought-experiment-- ways in which the four personas might develop diachronically. 

From 2015's COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, here's my last summary definition of how the four personas play off one another in terms of the abstractions they represent, the positive and negative forms of "glory" and "persistence":

The model I've established is one in which heroes and villains alike align themselves with *glory* by championing either the positive or the negative forms of the "idealizing will," while monsters and demiheroes align themselves with *persistence* by pursuing the negative or positive forms of the "existential will."

Prehension may be relevant here as the process by which the two forms of will distinguish themselves, in terms of how such forms of will manifest themselves, first as real human activity and secondarily as the "gestural" literary abstraction of human activity.

Assuming the usual schema for the development of early protohumans-- living in small hunter-gatherer tribes once they've come down from the trees-- then the persona of the *demihero* would have "pride of place." The demihero embodies "positive persistence" insofar as he/she is in essence the persona most concerned with immediate survival. The same need for persistence also determines that the demihero is the figure that is, or at least appears to be, the most thoroughly socialized, because in prehistoric times the tribe is the means by which the individual survives.

The next in line of development then would be "the monster," whatever figure becomes outcast from society. There's no knowing what form of rebellion would give rise to the monster, but it could be anything from an individual rebelling against codes of exogamic marriage to a victim selected as a sacrificial *pharmakon.* The monster is defined by his exclusion from society, and in most if not all his/her forms, he's always "out of place" or "out of step" in some manner.

It's not impossible that other tribes might also contribute to the idea of the monster-persona, but given that a particular tribe cannot really designate a separate tribe as being "outcasts," it's more likely that rival tribes would be the source of the "villain-persona." A given tribe may have to trade with other tribes, particularly in terms of gaining exogamous marital partners, but as long as other tribes can be perceived as a threat, they-- or more probably, their overlords-- would be the ancestors of the villain. 

When a given society faces entities too powerful to be simply cast out after the fashion of the rejected monster, the notion of the hero, the individual able to conquer the most powerful representative of the enemy tribe, is born. The hero may also take partial shape from human being's battles against non-human animals, but in a social sense, the hero is most reified by his rivalry with the villain, where both represent the tribe's greater self-expression to goals of "glory" rather than mere "persistence."

 

 

PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 1

 In NOTES ON WHITEHEAD PT. 3, I expressed my regrets that the philosopher had not chosen to define many of his terms more precisely in his most famous book, PROCESS AND REALITY. I wasn't even able to get a concise sense of what a "prehension" was, even in the chapter "Theory of Prehensions."

However, by sheer chance I found a definition without even looking for it. I happened to pick up an old book I'd not read through despite owning it some twenty years: COLIN WILSON, a literary study by one John A. Weigel, devoted to examining Wilson's works up to the year 1975. I have only read two of Wilson's philosophy books, none of which include RELIGION AND THE REBEL. It's from this book that Weigel alternately quotes and paraphrases Wilson's take on Whitehead's concept of the prehension, which is far clearer than anything Whitehead wrote in PROCESS AND REALITY.

Of central importance is Whitehead's idea of "prehension," which is dramatically defined, following Whitehead's specifications, "as that act of the soul, reaching out like an octopus to digest its experience." Fixing on "prehension" as the basic act in existentialism, an act carefully to be distinguished from "apprehension," which is based on intellectual rather than soulful understanding, Wilson rests his own case.

Wilson's "octopus" metaphor brings to mind a more primitive form of organic life: that of the one-celled amoeba, which has no perceptual organs and so assesses its contact with the "outside universe" purely by touch. I feel like I've resorted to the amoeba once or twice to suggest the base process of perception somewhere, but even if I haven't, I.A. Richards did, as I noted in my summation of his book PHILOSOPHY OF RHETORIC here:

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Richards doesn't specifically link his notion of conceptual "sorting" to Whitehead, though as I also noted, the author does mention Whitehead elsewhere in RHETORIC. Both Wilson's octopus metaphor and Richards' amoeba metaphor stress the faculty of perception through non-intellectual methods, which I would broadly compare to Jung's concept of the organism reacting to the world through the irrational functions of sensation and of intuition. Moreover, such metaphors cohere well with what I have labeled Whitehead's "theme statement" for the whole of PROCESS AND REALITY:

There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt. Also there is nothing which belongs merely to the privacy of feeling of one individual actuality. All origination is private. But what has been thus originated, publicly pervades the world.

Since I discontinued my reading of PROCESS, I cannot say whether or not Wilson's use of the term "soulful" is accurate with respect to Whitehead's heuristics. But for me, "soulful" embodies a "concrescence" of all four of the potentialities, acting in unison to sort experience in all its multi-faceted variety. And it's with this covalence in mind that I'll examine the idea of prehensions in line with my concept of the four literary personas in my next post.

 

THE READING RHEUM: XICCARPH (1972)

I started seriously reading prose science fiction in the late 1960s, and aside from horror tales, that was close to being the only form of metaphenomenal fiction around for most of the decade. There were a few exceptions to this tendency-- J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis-- but I didn't happen to read them during that decade.

As I remember, though, I got my first substantial taste for reading prose fantasy in the early 1970s, and Tolkien's best-selling LORD OF THE RINGS was the cause, because it stimulated Ballantine Books to issue a substantial series of fantasy reprints from 1969 to 1974. To be sure, Lancer Paperbacks had already started the ball rolling by issuing new editions of the works of Robert E. Howard, but somehow I didn't encounter these in the early 1970s either. 

It didn't take me long to find out that devotees of early fantasy spoke in reverent tomes of the 1930s pulp magazine WEIRD TALES, and that of all horror-and-fantasy authors who appeared in its pages, Robert E, Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were deemed the top of the heap. Lovecraft's horror-and-fantasy works had seen paperback reprint in the 1960s, but Smith-- who for most of his life was more of a verse poet than a prose-story writer-- had wait for the Ballantine imprint. Editor Lin Carter did a sterling job of selecting some of the choice stories, and though Smith never became as popular as the other two with later generations, these volumes still give one the easiest access to this writer's ouevre.

As I do these days with everything I read or re-read, I wanted to evaluate Smith's work through the lens of myth-criticism. The Carter selections are organized into four reprints, each of which is given the title of one of Smith's fantasy-lands. Not all stories in every volume take place in the titular locale, for Smith tended to toss off new landscapes at the drop of a hat rather than devoting himself to any particular one, as Howard did with Hyboria. My chosen volume, XICCARPH, boasts six subdivisions, all devoted to different locales.

Many of the tales in XICCARPH were just decent reads, but not worth discussing in detail (SPOILER warnings for those I do so discuss). Here are the exceptions:

The entries for "Xiccarph" focus upon what may be Smith's only continuing character, for just two stories. In "The Maze of Maal Dweb," a young man, native to the fantasy-planet Xiccarph, finds out that his beloved has been abducted by the evil wizard Maal Dweb, who rules the world with his magical skills. The youth successfully penetrates the wizard's sanctum, full of bizarre garden-growths and weird automatons, but Maal Dweb has the hero outpaced from the first, so it's an unhappy ending for him. The sorcerer's triumph is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he only steals young women for aesthetic purposes, turning them into beautiful stone statues for his contemplation. Smith must have liked the character, for he then wrote "The Flower-Women," in which Maal Dweb journeys to another world and decides to play hero, liberating a race of delicate flower-women from a cabal of wizards descended from lizards-- lizard-wizards, if one chooses. Smith's depiction of his worlds are highly colorful but not particularly mythic.

Three stories are set on a loose SF-locale, "Aihai," but all of these I found unexceptional. The only point of interest is that one story, "Vulthoom," is named after a Lovecraftian-styled alien god, and that comics-writer Gardner Fox recycled the name, slightly altered to "Volthoom," for a Silver Age JUSTICE LEAGUE continuity.

"The Doom of Antarion," though, presents a more mythically-dense concept. Modern-day Earthman Francis Melchior (note the Biblically inspired name) runs an antiques shop and spends all his free time star-gazing. He holds an enduring fascination with two seemingly contradictory spectacles: those that are "steeped in the mortuary shadows of dead ages," and those that suggest "the transcendent glories of other aeons." Smith incisively notes that these desires are both rooted in Melchior's distaste for "all that is present or near at hand," which might be seen as a comment on the tastes of horror-and-fantasy readers in general. While pursuing his astronomical observances, the protagonist, not unlike that other Melchior, fixates on one heavenly body in particular, "one minute star" that fills the antiquary with "intimations of loveliness and wonder." In due course, Melchior finds his earthbound spirit drawn to the planet Phandion that orbits the distant star, and that spirit merges with the living body of a poet named Antarion. But even though Phandion satisfies all of Melchior/Antarion's desire for exotic beauties-- including Antarion's beloved Thameera-- the world is doomed to perish when its sun dies. Thus "transcendent glories" fall victim to "mortuary shadows," and the antiquary Melchior then returns to his own body, haunted by the memories of the transcendence he so desired. I might observe that Edgar Allan Poe showed a similar passion for both "glories" and "shadows," and that here Smith produced a very Poe-esque take on the psychology of both passions.

Of the other four stories in the collection, only one other, "The Monster of the Prophecy," stands out, and it's interesting in that it reverses the verdict of "Antarion."  On contemporary Earth a poet named Theophilus feels estranged from his fellows by his poetic sensibilities (which may make this character a stand-in for Smith himself). Theophilus considers suicide, but a scientist invites the poet to join him in an experiment. Though the scientist looks like an Earthman, in reality he's a non-humanoid alien-- possessed of five arms, three legs, and three eyes-- from a world called Sabattor. The alien wishes to return home with a specimen of an Earthman, and asks Theophilus to accompany him voluntarily. The poet has no attachments to his Earth-life and he accepts. Though for some time the human finds it fascinating to learn the ways of an alien world, the attractions of being a scientific curiosity pale, and his existence brings him trouble from Sabattor's small-minded priesthood. Oddly, though, Smith gives Theophilus a somewhat happy, if macabre ending, as he ends up living out the rest of his life as the love-mate to one of the non-human alien females, who, like the protagonist, is a poet without an audience on her native world.  The happy ending is not without a certain irony, but here the irony is directed not at the main character but at the world in which he was born.

MYTHCOMICS: “SECRET OF THE TRANSFORMATION” (WEEKLY SHONEN SUNDAY, 1997)

Long after I wrote my first analysis ofan INU-YASHA narrative, I formulated my CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURALLENGTH in 2018. With those formulations in mind, I’ll now label Rumiko Takahashi’s “feudal fantasy” as a “basic serial,” in that the finished narrative consists of interpolated “stand-alone” stories, short arcs, and long arcs. The arc considered here, identified as SECRET OF THE TRANSFORMATION after one of the chapter-titles, is an extra-long arc that encompasses five other long arcs.

In my earlier summary of the series, I related only the factors that bore directly upon the arc under consideration, THE BLACK PEARL. Some of the things I omitted become more important in the TRANSFORMATION sequence, such as the fact that the two-person ensemble of half-demon Inu-Yasha and modern mortal girl Kagome expands to five principals. Thus for the balance of the narrative, the ensemble also includes demon-hunters Miroku and Sango, both roughly the same ages as the first two heroes, and a juvenile fox-demon, Shippo, who provides substantial comedy relief.

The quintet’s members are united by the desire to gather all the scattered shards of the Shikon Jewel and to keep the powerful shards out of the hands of both meddlesome mortals and rapacious demons. Many of the demons who menace the heroes are just one-off marauders, but there are also continuing opponents, In addition to the two ambivalent figures I mentioned in BLACK PEARL—Kikyo, a revenant version of a mortal woman Inu-Yasha once loved, and Sesshomaru, the half-demon’s hostile half-brother—there is also the series’ “big bad,” Naraku. Long before Kagome travels back to Sengoku Japan to meet Inu-Yasha and the others, the medieval bandit Naraku suffered injuries which brought him under the ministrations of the shrine-maiden Kikyo, then pledged to Inu-Yasha. Naraku lusted after Kikyo, and when he could not have her, he gave his injured body up to being consumed by demons, who molded him into a mortal-demon hybrid. In this form Naraku caused the death of Kikyo and the imprisonment of Inu-Yasha, until Kagome travels in time and releases the demon-youth from his magical confinement. From then on, Naraku continually hectors the jewel-hunters with dozens of plots, so that for its entire run INU-YASHA strongly resembles the scenarios of a RPG fantasy, with the heroes sussing out each new threat to their lives and managing to counter it.

TRANSFORMATION actually concerns two major changes at this point in the series. I mentioned in the BLACK PEARL summary that Inu-Yasha inherited from his late demon-father a magical sword, Tetsusaiga, and that throughout the series the demon-hero must learn all the ways in which the sword can transform itself through its occult powers. I left out the fact that when he first appears, Inu-Yasha is alienated from his mortal side and that he yearns to become a full demon—but that when he undergoes this “transformation,” it finds it’s not all its cracked up to be.

Some lesser transformations have already taken place: as mentioned before, Kikyo has returned as a revenant, pursuing her own obscure purposes. Sesshomaru, though as passionless as ever, allows a little human girl, Rin, to accompany him in his travels, possibly showing the demon’s potential for human growth, though he may be on some level imitating his half-brother’s penchant for acquiring human beings as allies. As for Naraku, he has just begun to unveil his most formidable talent. The villain, created from a congeries of demons, displays the ability to “split off” new entities from himself. Prior to TRANSFORMATION, he’s already used this process to create two other demon-allies, Kagura and Kanna, and the story that launches the long arc under consideration is entitled “The Third Demon.”

The ogre Goshinki, the newest of Naraku’s self-spawned servants, attacks Inu-Yasha and his allies. But when the hero wields Tetsusaiga, the ogre catches the huge blade in his teeth and snaps the metal to pieces. This not only deprives Inu-Yasha of his weapon, it breaks a preventive spell laid upon him by his late father; a spell to reign in Inu-Yasha’s demon-half. Inu-Yasha goes berserk with demon-rage and slaughters Goshinki, but now he presents a danger to his friends, even after he temporarily reverts to normal.

The swordsmith Toto-sai intervenes with some much-needed advice. He can fix Tetsusaiga—a blade carved from a fang taken from Inu-Yasha’s dead father—but only by pulling out one of Inu-Yasha’s own fangs to use in the sword’s re-construction. The smith fixes the sword, but he relates that Tetsusaiga is no longer powered by the magic of the hero’s dead sire, but by Inu-Yasha’s own resources—and thus the hero finds it much harder to wield the huge weapon. Meanwhile, Sesshomaru comes up with his own deviltry. He finds the dismembered head of Goshinki and forces a rogue smith to make a new sword from one of the ogre’s fangs—thus producing a new weapon, Tokijin. Sesshomaru uses the weapon to duel Inu-Yasha, only to be shocked when he senses his half-brother’s new demonic potential.

The fraternal conflict is put on hold when Inu-Yasha’s company is forced to deal with a new threat from Naraku. This plot comprises another long arc of stories, starting with the winsomely titled “The Fourth One,” and none of these developments directly relate to TRANSFORMATION’s master-thread. Somewhat more germane is an arc beginning with “Kikyo’s Crisis,” in which Kagome is tormented by seeing Inu-Yasha’s feelings for his former lover, though this arc largely exists to set up more developments down the road. An arc starting with “The Castle’s Ghost” then follows up on a plotline involving Sango’s brother having been suborned by Naraku.

Then we at last get to the story entitled “Secret of the Transformation,” wherein Inu-Yasha crosses paths with a minor marauding demon. After getting separated from his sword, Inu-Yasha again transforms into his full-demon form and mangles the marauder—but once more, he poses a threat to his own people. Sesshomaru chooses this moment to intrude on his brother’s life once more—and this time, there’s no question that Sesshomaru is capable of slaying the bestial version of Inu-Yasha. Yet the full demon spares his sibling, with the excuse that “there’s no virtue in killing a beast that doesn’t know who or even what it is.” Once Sesshomaru has departed, Kagome puzzles over his motives: “It’s as if he came to stop Inu-Yasha’s rampage.”

The puzzle of Inu-Yasha’s brother must wait for a future story, but Toto-sai finally reves what the hero needs to gain mastery of Tetsusaiga’s powers and thus of his own demon-nature. Inu-Yasha’s new quest is to journey to the place where his late father imprisoned a huge dragon-demon, Ryukotsusei, and slay said dragon. While in combat with this demon, Inu-Yasha is belatedly informed that his sire perished of wounds he took in the process of jailing the dragon. Thus, even though Inu-Yasha professes no goal beyond mastering his own abilities—a thing possible only if he can “surpass my old man”—the narrative of TRANSFORMATION inverts the conclusion of BLACK PEARL. In PEARL, Inu-Yasha accepted the last bequest of Tetsusaiga from the father he never knew. Here, despite claiming that “I wouldn’t waste even a drop of sweat avenging [my sire],” the hero performs the ultimate act of filial piety by slaying his father’s killer. And he does so after facing a “last temptation,” for he briefly casts his sword aside and becomes a pure-demon again to fight the dragon-thing. But he regains his purpose, reclaims the sword, and instinctively taps a new power from the sword, with which he obliterates Ryukotsusei. From then on, the accounts between the hero and his late father are squared, and Takahashi makes few if any references to either of Inu-Yasha’s parents in the rest of the continuity. Future stories continue to show Inu-Yasha finding new methods to employ his father’s bequest against his many enemies. But only once he’s discharged his last duty to his demon-father can Inu-Yasha pursue his own human destiny.

NULL-MYTHS: PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL VOL. 1 (2018)

I''ve never read any of the PUNISHER features with any regularity, even back when the character's popularity skyrocketed in the nineties. I've enjoyed odd issues in the same way that I've enjoy Chuck Norris films: lots of extravagant action with not much plot or characterization. Nevertheless, the Punisher has gone through many permutations, and so it's possible that he might take on mythic stature in one tale or another.

I picked up a library copy collecting PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL from the 2010s. I had some vague memory of having heard that this one was one of the better Punisher titles, though now that I've read the collection, I feel sure that I must've heard some compliments for an earlier incarnation of the title. All of the stories in this collection, authored by Matt Fraction, are lightweight in the extreme. I've read little or none of the work for which Fraction became popular in the 2010s, but his other work must have more content than this garbage. 

The eighties was a time in which many comics professionals, particularly those from Merrie Old England, began producing "grim and gritty" versions of superhero features aimed at the dominantly older DM comics-audience. Yet all of these pros had been raised on the G-rated comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages, and many of them sang the praises of the comics' "age of innocence." Grant Morrison did a story of an aging superhero in some issue of ANIMAL MAN, Neil Gaiman did a Riddler story, and Alan Moore wept crocodile tears for lost innocence with the Kool Aid Man.

A reader could read any of these and get the gist of Fraction's work on the first twelve issues of WAR JOURNAL. Of course, Moore, Morrison and Gaiman all showed numerous times that they could do much more than self-conscious parody. But that's all there is to Fraction's Punisher.

Here's Frank Castle deciding that he just won't put up with the silliness of the Silver Age, by blowing away the Stilt Man's junk.

Later, at the supervillain's wake, a bunch of classic and not-so-classic villains, mostly from the Silver Age, get together and talk about the Good Old Days as if it was all a big game, and didn't involve them trying to murder the heroes who interfered with them.

(On a side-note: even though these old villains used G-rated violence, G-rated violence can still kill a person! One of the main virtues of SPIDER MAN HOMECOMING was the bracing scene in which the movie's version of the Vulture shows just how dangerous a flying villain can be to a non-flying crusader.)

There's not much more to these twelve issues than the dubious pleasure of seeing a "realistic" hero blow away all these colorful fantasy-figures. Fraction has no psychological insight, even of a deconstructive kind, into either the Punisher, his allies (an obscure seventies villain, Rampage, gets recast into the role of the main hero's weapons maker), or any of the villains. It's all pseudo-Moore sardonicism with none of Moore's skill with satire. It's as if Fraction read Moore and the other "adult pulp" writers of the eighties and thought that their pretensions to realism were the only things worth imitating. 

Oh, and I don't know if Fraction started this, but now the vigilante hero has a deep and abiding regard for Captain America for some reason-- apparently because Cap beat up Frank Castle during some army training maneuvers? These issues take place around the time that Steve Rogers was temporarily killed off, so there's an arc of stories dealing with how a new, white-nationalist version of the Hate-Monger tries to usurp Captain America's uniform. Fraction is just as incompetent in dealing with "real problems" like racism as he is in playing games within Marvel's immense fantasy-cosmos.

Next to self-important tripe like this, even throwaway trash-tales of Castle shooting up a bunch of drug-dealers are preferable by far.

PROBLEMS VS. CONUNDRUMS

                     

 I’ve been meditating on the familiar opposition of “problem and dilemma” for possible application to my theories regarding the narrative interactions of lateral meaning and vertical meaning. The regular opposition goes as follows:

 

A problem is a difficulty that has to be resolved or dealt with while a dilemma is a choice that must be made between two or more equally undesirable alternatives.

 

For reasons I’ll discuss shortly, the idea of the “problem” aptly sums up the literary appeal of a text’s lateral meaning, because this is the part of the story in which the reader primarily invests himself, to see how the main character deals with the difficulties he faces, even if said character’s solution may be to avoid said difficulties.

 

However, “dilemma” in no way sums up the appeal of a text’s vertical meaning for readers. So, as my title suggests, I’m substituting the concept of the “conundrum,” variously defined as “an intricate and difficult problem” or “a difficult problem, one that is almost impossible to solve.”

 

My last major statement regarding the lateral and vertical forms of meaning appeared in 2016’s THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL. In the passage that follows, I didn’t utilize the term “vertical meaning,” since at the time I was preoccupied with seeing how that meaning could expressed by the joint terms “overthoughts and underthoughts,” but both of these together were always intended to make up my concept of vertical meaning.

 

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking"finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* It's possible for a work to be so simple that both its underthought and overthought amount to nothing more than cliched maxims, like "good must triumph over evil," but even the most incoherent work generally intends to engross the reader with some lateral meaning.

 

Nowadays I would reword this statement to elide the reference to overthoughts and underthoughts, because over time I have began to find these terms cumbersome. From my current position it’s easier to speak of all these narrative meanings in terms of their potentiality-alignments: “lateral meaning,” which is comprised of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities, and “vertical meaning,” which is comprised of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities.

 

As for the essay’s observations on the concepts of “close sight” and “far sight,” these remained unchanged, and the notions of “the problem” and “the conundrum” can be used to symbolize the different ways each of the meaning-formations appeal to readers.

 

As stated above, the lateral meaning is that which presents the reader with the immediate, close-range difficulties in the lives of one or more characters, difficulties which must be solved in some fashion, just as difficulties in the reader’s real life must be solved in some way (even if the reader, like the fictional characters, may make the wrong choice).

 

Vertical meaning, however, is the part of the story that allows the reader to contemplate the character’s conflicts from the long-range view, with the understanding that those difficulties metaphorically embody some “conundrum” regarding the nature of human life. The conundrum exists alongside the problem, and since it’s more abstract in nature, the reader doesn’t necessarily expect to see the conundrum solved, even badly, because it embodies some intellectual or imaginative conflict inherent in human life.

 

Rather than starting with an example drawn from high culture, like HAMLET or LIGHT IN AUGUST, I will begin with applying the conundrum-concept to the two examples of mythopoeic and sub-mythopoeic meanings seen in my essay regarding two Silver Age ATOM stories. Both stories dealt with the Tiny Titan's battles against an insect-themed villain, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, produced by the same creative team and within months of one another. Though I was primarily oriented on the second of the two stories to show its qualifications as a mythcomic, I also included a rationale as to why the earlier story did not qualify as a mythcomic. I argued that the first “Bug-Eyed” story did not have a strong cosmological meaning, because the villain used generic robot-insects against the hero. However, in the second “Bug-Eyed” story, author Gardner Fox more strongly patterned the robot-insects on the capabilities of real insects. This narrative strategy produced a fictional “simulacrum of knowledge” and thus gave the story a stronger mythopoeic meaning. In both stories, the hero's problem is identical; to defeat the villain, primarily through the use of kinetic displays of force. (One story also has a very minor dramatic problem, to keep the villain from kidnapping an old flame, but the kinetic problem is paramount.) There is no didactic conundrum, but the amplification of the villain's insect-theme provides a mythopoeic conundrum; one best summed up as a fascination with biological adaptations in real animals.  

Now, neither of these comic-book stories makes any pretension toward the didactic form of virtual meaning, so a more complex example is needed to show how didactic and mythopoeic conundrums may exist separately or work in tandem.

 One of the most familiar master-threads found in “Classic” STAR TREK pertains to the crew of the Enterprise seeking to interact with more primitive peoples without violating the “Prime Directive” by interfering with the primitives’ cultures. The second-season episodes “Friday’s Child” and “A Private Little War” both deal with the same range of kinetic and dramatic problems that arise when the Federation’s political rivals, the Klingons, attempt to gain favor with primitive peoples without showing the Federation’s high-minded restraint. In “Child,” a Klingon agent abets an ambitious warlord to overthrow a ruler who is friendly toward the Federation. In “War,” Klingons give relatively advanced weapons to one tribe of planetary primitives to use against another tribe.

In both stories, the Enterprise-crew must seek to mitigate the Klingons’ influence, and so the “problems” that involves the lateral meaning are virtually identical, even if the solutions are not. “Child” is more of a straight thriller, with no deep reflections about the effects of both Klingon Empire and Federation upon the lives of the primitives. “War,” on the other hand presents the viewer with conundrums that invoke both the didactic and the mythopoeic potentialties. The didactic conundrum is the more obvious, since most viewers would have noted the direct parallels to the then-current Vietnam War, in which Americans had to continually arm their allies in order to offset the forces empowered by the rival superpower of Red China. Allegedly the original script was far more caustic regarding the activities of the “Americans,” i.e., the representatives of the Federation, and series showrunner Gene Roddenberry reworked the didactic conundrum so that it implied that the heroes had to do what they did to prevent the spread of Klingon influence. Not having seen the original script, I can’t say whether or not its author utilized the same mythopoeic tropes that appeared in the finished, Roddenberry-edited script. However, because of the way Roddenberry changed the didactic meaning, the mythopoeic meaning changes somewhat as well. When at the climax Kirk muses that they must introduce “serpents” into this planetary “Eden,” the meaning carries a sense of a less didactic, more mythopoeic conundrum. The implication is that, even as the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden provided humankind with a chance for self-determination, Kirk’s ambivalent gift, putting more advanced weapons in the hands of the planetary primitives, may also be a rough but necessary means of setting the natives on their own course of self-determination.

 

As with the two ATOM stories, the problems in the two TREK stories are the same as far as involving the viewer in the travails of the main characters. However, “Private Little War” suggests an enduring conundrum that supervenes the particular problems of the particular situation. “Friday’s Child” implies a possible conundrum but does not seek in articulating it in terms of either the didactic or mythopoeic potentialities.

It's worth mentioning a couple of TREK examples which register only in terms of either a didactic or a mythopoeic conundrum. The third-season episode "The Savage Curtain" places Kirk and Spock in the position of "acting out" the struggle between good and evil for the education of some very literal-minded aliens, the Excalbians. The didactic conundrum implies that the struggle between good and evil-- essentially defined as altruism and selfishness-- is a difficulty that never ceases to confront mankind, no matter what happens to any particular heroic protagonists. But despite the evocation of legendary figures from Earth and from Vulcan-- whether historical like Abraham Lincoln and Genghis Khan, or made-up types like Sarek and Colonel Green-- none of these characters make strong use of any symbol-tropes. Even the appearance of a vaguely witchy villainess named "Zora" is given no stature as an incarnation of female evil, in marked to comparison to the "Lady Macbeth"-styled villainy of Nona from "Private Little War."

In my reviews of the first four STAR TREK theatrical films, though, I was rather surprised that the one with the weakest dramatic problem was also the one with the strongest mythopoeic conundrum: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. The closest thing the film comes to a didactic conundrum is its attempt to show Mister Spock's vaunted logic as inferior to human emotion, but this is underdeveloped in contrast to the predominant mythopoeic conundrum: that of depicting a newly-born machine intelligence recapitulating its creators' need for emotional connection, and enacting a hieros gamos with a human being in order to gain said connection.

I indicated above that I was cycling out the terminology of "overthought and underthought," originally derived from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins by way of Northrop Frye. I think the terms had a certain usefulness to me, indicating that the "overthought" springs from conscious, often utilitarian forms of thought while the "underthought" springs from subconscious, more playful cogitations. But I value symmetry above everything, and so in future I may start using the following terms:

KINETIC PROBLEM-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of kinetic applications, usually in the forms of "sex and violence." Aligned with Jung's "sensation function."

DRAMATIC PROBLEMS-- how a protagonist solves a short-range problem with the use of dramatic interactions with other characters. Aligned with Jung's "feeling function."

DIDACTIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through didactic assessments. Aligned  with Jung's "thinking function."

MYTHOPOEIC CONUNDRUM-- how a protagonist reacts to a long-range conundrum through symbolic embodiments. Aligned with Jung's "intuition function."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MAN HATER" (SECRETS OF SINISTER HOUSE #6, 1972)

 i've not usually had a very high opinion of the DC Comics horror anthologies of the late sixties and early scventies, though they did serve as the crucible for the company's rebirth of horror in the 1980s. However, since I have an abiding interest in Gothic fiction, I decided to read through the whole run of a title initially devoted to Gothic romance, SINISTER HOUSE OF SECRET LOVE. Wikipedia claims that DC sought to emulate the craze for DARK SHADOWS, though there might also be some influence from the Gothic paperbacks of the period. In any case, SECRET LOVE changed its name to SECRETS OF SINISTER HOUSE with issue #5, where the company burned off its last horror-romance tale. Then for the remainder of its run it was just another horror-anthology, complete with a female horror-host named Eve (later worked into the SWAMP THING cosmos). 

The only mythcomic I discerned from the title's eighteen total issues was "The Man Hater" by Robert Kanigher and Bill Draut, and it's like the majority of anthologized horror-stories of the period, focused mostly on the notion of "the biter bit." However, Kanigher gets a little more into sexual mythology than the rest of SINISTER's contributors-- which might be said to make the story more "Gothic" than all the other offerings.

The story first shows us the central character Valla, in the act of offing her first husband, a big game hunter, by the unlikely method of dropping his stuffed rhino-head on him and thus impaling the unfortunate fellow. The next page reveals that Valla became a "black widow" murderess because she formed an Electra-style fixation on her father-- and when her father failed to return her affection, she killed him by rigging the brakes of his car-- skills she obtained while trying to emulate the father's interest in cars, by learning the "masculine" skill needed to work on automobiles.

Kanigher doesn't dive too deeply into Freudian waters, but it's pretty clear that Valla suffers from a repetition-compulsion: she likes the feeling of having killed her nasty dad, and she seeks to re-experience the emotional thrill by marrying rich older man and killing them, ostensibly for their inheritances (she calls one of these two husbands a "dirty old man" as she murders him). She claims that her first husband called her "princess," which Valla may or may not have instigated: either way, it sounds not unlike the sort of pet-name that a father might use for his daughter. "Man-hating" mania aside, Valla does maintain a strong relationship with one older male: a Hindu whom she addresses only as "Guru." 

Kanigher wastes no time explicating Valla's relationship with Guru, and for the most part he exists just to set up the "biter bit" finish. At most one might hazard that Valla hangs out with the old fellow because he's too old to seem threatening and because he feeds her ego by telling her that she used to be a real princess in ancient India. 

However, Valla's murder-lust makes her impatient for more victims,. and the police become aware of the unusual rapidity of her three mates' deaths. So they pursue Valla, who flees to her guru for help, as if he was indeed some all-powerful father-figure. The guru seems OK with helping Valla escape the long arm of the law, and he works a reincarnation-magic that sends the man-hater back in time, so that her soul will inhabit the body of that archaic princess mentioned earlier. (What happens to Valla's body? Who knows?)

Now, even though Guru has no hostile intentions toward Valla, he's patently Kanigher's means of doling out poetic justice to the murderess. And many writers would have simply placed the princess in some terrible but unimaginative situation-- being imprisoned for the rest of her life, or being sick with a plague. But Kanigher works things so as to avenge the men who were deceived with female deceptiveness, by having her wake to find herself about to die by the Hindu custom of suttee, wherein the wife is burned alongside the body of her deceased husband. Thus patriarchy has its fit revenge, as a girl desirous of being a princess found out that in India at least, to be a princess was to be little more than an appendage to the fate of a hated man-- even when the man himself was already dead.