EFFICACY AND THE NUM FORMULA

 I've only touched upon Ernst Cassirer's concept of efficacy in passing in previous essays, but I did recently conceive of a possible adaptation of the term for my own system.

Once more with feeling, here's what Cassirer wrote of the concept in MYTHICAL THOUGHT:

…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

Cassirer is concerned only with contrasting efficacy, elsewhere described as a "free selection of causes," with the scientific concept of limited causality, so I have no reason to think that the philosopher would have had any reason to apply his categories to the subject of literary phenomenality. But it occurred to me recently that "free selection of causes" is a choice that potentially faces any reader/audience-member when presented with any narrative: that it may be dominated by either the naturalistic, the uncanny, or the marvelous phenomenality.

For once I won't put forth new examples of each phenomenality, but will default to the statement I made in last year's LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE:

In my discussion of Aristotle I mentioned that Classic Greek literature could embrace both “naturalistic tropes,” which were often with the limitations of human fallibility and mortality,” and with “marvelous tropes” about gods and ghosts, describing imagined states of existence beyond the realm of human limitations. Gothic fiction was instrumental, however, in promulgating the interstitial category of “uncanny tropes.” Such tropes had existed even in mankind’s prehistory, and in my essay UNCANNY GENESIS I cited some examples of uncanny tropes from archaic story-cycles, such as the extra-Biblical “Bel and the Dragon” and “the Six Labors of Theseus.” But there’s no doubt that Gothic practitioners like Ann Radcliffe had a much more sustained effect in elaborating stories in which supernatural occurrences were “explained rationally.” In truth, though, the “rationality” of uncanny stories like THE ITALIAN and THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO is compromised from the start by even allowing for the possibility of the supernatural, in contrast, say, to Jane Austen’s Gothic spoof NORTHANGER ABBEY, in which the existence of the supernatural is not even slightly validated.

 All of these examples require that the reader fall into sympathy with whatever attitude the author projects regarding "the world of subjective emotions," even if that attitude may include total dismissal of said emotions. 

In life, each person makes a similar choice: whether or not to believe that emotions have "objective existence," or to credence that whatever abstract forms those emotional continua may assume-- Heaven, Hell, the astral plane-- have any meaning to them. But in fiction, the choice always remains open to interpretation with each new text-- which is one reason literature will always be oriented more toward freedom than to restraint.