RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.-- FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY.

I considered making a continued use of the title RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS after reviving it here. Yet I soon realized that I would be talking about a lot of cultural manifestations that weren't exclusively "nerdy," and so I switched to RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS.

In the NERDS essay, I provided a lengthy Nietzsche quote in which he contrasted the "noble man" with "the man of ressentiment." His definition of ressentiment served his philosophical purposes, but I'm more interested in the application of the concept to literary theory. Over the years I've devoted no small attention to Frank Fukuyama's adaptation of Nietzsche's distinctions into the concepts of *megalothymia* and *isothymia," and how these concepts in turn can be applied to fiction, as in (for example) my October 2011 essay THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4.

Nietzsche scorns the "man of ressentiment" for many reasons, and only faults the "noble man" for being "naive," at least in the excerpt I'm considering. But of course the history of Classic liberalism has been rife with criticisms of the *megalothymotic* type, who rules by strength, and the earliest extensive critique of popular comic books was that of Frederic Wertham, who complained of super-characters "how did Nietzsche get into the nursery?" 

Most of these critiques were simplistic in the extreme, but it's at least fair to state that the noble man can dehumanize those he conquers, reducing them into an underclass. The man of ressentiment pursues the opposite course: the "overclass" is the class of "pale kings and princes," and that is meant to be despised and rejected in every way. 

Both of these rhetorical stances influence literature, but as I noted in my quote from FUN FROM PHENOMENOLOGY, they're both reducible to epistemological patterns. These patterns 'exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination.' 

That doesn't mean, of course, that artists don't create works which advocate one political stance or the other. In MYSTERY OF MASTERY 4 I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures. Both authors have created a wealth of genuinely mythic works, but neither has been able to avoid taking ideological positions that usually result in inferior works, such as Miller's HOLY TERROR and Moore's KILLING JOKE.

"Non-nerd literature" boasts its own ideological tendencies, which come down to "things would be great if we could control/destroy that damned overclass/underclass." Two authors who produced their best known works within the same literary period would be underclass-despiser Thomas Dixon Jr (THE CLANSMAN, 1905) and overclass-despiser Upton Sinclair (THE JUNGLE, 1906). Both novels are fantasies of mastery, but they lack what Nietzsche termed "self-overcoming," and which I have renamed "self-mastery"-- and which I have associated with the artist's capacity for "free variation."

Nietzsche argued that the noble man is more capable of self-mastery than the man of ressentiment, which argument I explored more fully in COURAGE OVER FEAR. Whether or not this is true in real culture, I tend to think that the "noble man fantasy" tends to favor self-mastery/free variation more than the "man of ressentiment fantasy," because the former is more overtly a product of artifice than the latter, while the latter often appears to be a response to the need for verisimilitude in fiction. I noted in SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

The tropes belonging to "artifice" are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is..."

Since I have defined fiction and general literature more in terms of artifice than of verisimilitude, I find myself unreceptive to a lot of literature devoted to ressentiment: to the fantasies of overthrowing some tyrannical overclass seen in, say, Marxist lectures like Sinclair's JUNGLE or racial ideologies like the oeuvre of Spike Lee. However, I hope to find time in the near future to review one of the few novels I've encountered that manages to portray the ressentiment fantasy through the lens of free variation, which allowed the author to imbue self-mastery upon the standard fantasy.