NOTES ON WHITEHEAD'S "SYMBOLISM:" PART i

 Though I'll probably never gain a thorough knowledge of the Whitehead philosophy due to all my other irons in the Fire of My Philosophy, I did decide to invest some time in a slim book (88 pages) of lectures the author gave at the University of Virginia in 1927. This time, since it is so short, I'm not going to do a summary review as I did with his 1925 SCIENCE IN THE NEW WORLD. Here I'll just confine myself to some quick notes as I go along.                                                                                                                                                In his first lecture, Whitehead chooses to discuss the process of human symbol-making in two phases, "Presentational Immediacy" and "Causal Efficacy." I won't explore either of these concepts at this time. Here my only interest is in noting the similarity of the first term to Susanne Langer's dyad of "presentational" and "discursive" methods of symbolization as expressed in her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY. Since I've recently learned that Langer took some degree of influence from the earlier work of Whitehead, she may have borrowed one of her terms from him. Of course, when I first started writing about the Langer dyad on this blog, I confess I did not realize that her two terms in essence recapitulated a similar dyad in the late 1800s work of William James, that of "acquaintance" and "description," as I discussed in more detail here.                                                                                                                                                                  My only other gleaning from the first lecture is that though I was puzzled by Whitehead's jargonistic term "event" in PROCESS AND REALITY, the first lecture makes his concept clearer, though he does not use that term. Here he states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A."     

THE READING RHEUM: POSEIDONIS (1973)

 As it happens, the last Ballantine collection of Clark Ashton Smith works I'm reviewing for my blog was also the last one the company published. Of the four, ZOTHIQUE was the only sub-universe for which Smith wrote enough stories to fill a paperback book. Thus, POSEIDONIS, like XICARRPH and HYPERBOREA, includes only a comparative handful of stories/poems set in the titular world. The rest of the three books were perforce filled with a lot of one-off horror and SF stories, that, while interesting, aren't Smith's strength in comparison to the magical fantasy stories.                                                                   

Since I didn't get much more than moderate entertainment from the majority of this collection, I'll get those out of the way first, though I'll pass on commenting on either the verse or prose poems. THE DOUBLE SHADOW-- A narrator from Poseidonis describes the dire fate of his perceptor Avyctes (who's loosely tied to the character Malygris, whose stories are discussed below). A VOYAGE TO SFANOMOE-- Two Atlantean inventors flee their doomed home to take refuge on the planet Venus. And Venus welcomes them with an irresistible embrace. A VINTAGE FROM ATLANTIS-- A group of buccaneers happen across an ancient bottle of Atlantean wine, and quaffing it opens their way into the limbo of its vanished glories. "And only a teetotaler escaped to tell thee." AN OFFERING TO THE MOON-- Two archaeologists investigate the moon-worship of the vanished people of Mu, little realizing that they will be offering up their own lives in their pursuit of knowledge. THE UNCHARTED ISLAND-- A castaway finds himself on an isle not quite deserted, as he encounters an ancient people who seem to be re-enacting, like habit-afflicted ghosts, the actions that led to their collective doom. THE EPIPHANY OF DEATH-- A quasi-Egyptian scholar witnesses the fate of his colleague Tomeron in his family's tomb. Worms are involved. SYMPOSIUM OF THE GORGON-- A modern New Yorker somehow ends up in the palace of Medusa just as she's beheaded. I had hopes for this one since Smith followed the part of the Medusa-myth in which Pegasus is born from the gorgon's blood. Then Pegasus takes the narrator to the place he most desires to visit, and the tale turns into a shaggy-dog story about frustrated cannibals. THE INVISIBLE CITY-- What a surprise! Two explorers in Africa comes across an invisible domain, whose denizens don't want the explorers to leave. But in a departure from the norm, both of the guys escape with their lives and the aliens are either exiled or destroyed. THE ROOT OF AMPOI-- In the best of the "fair-to-poor" stories, a conniver seeks treasure in the Papuan Mountains and finds a tribe where the women have rebelled against their gender's natural shortcomings. All the females eat a special root that makes them grow eight feet tall, thus making matriarchal rule a slam-dunk. To the adventurer's surprise, the queen takes a shine to him (the reader never knows why) and marries him. This gives the man the chance to plunder the secrets of the "tall sex," but he does not profit thereby.                                                                                                         

  Only three stories in POSEIDONIS make my cut for high-mythicity stories, and two of them take place in the titular Atlantean city, examining the doomed career of the sorcerer Malygris. In my review of the XICCARPH collection, I wondered if the sorcerer Maal Dweb, who appeared in two stories, was Smith's only continuing character. But I forgot that he devoted the same number of stories to Malygris, and I found both tales more psychologically astute and ornately written than those about the Xiccarph magician. In THE LAST INCANTATION, Malygris, who's become the world's supreme sorcerer, becomes overtaken with ennui despite his vast knowledge of cabalistic matters. He remembers his former love Nylissa, whom he lost to disease, and whose loss precipitated his pursuit of rare magicks. He gets the idea of bringing her back from the dead, but with true ambivalence, once he's done so his memory has become too distorted to know whether he conjured up the real thing or just a pleasing illusion. In THE DEATH OF MALYGRIS, several of the magician's rivals haven't seen him about for years, and become obsessed with learning whether or not Malygris has been claimed by death at last. Since it's a Smith story, the experienced reader can be pretty sure that even though the wizard is dead, he's still not too dead to take his enemies with him. Not only was the sorcerer and his magicks a correlation for the author and his ability to conjure word pictures, he also more or less marked the end of Smith's only productive writing-period, for after MALYGRIS was written in 1933, editor Lin Carter asserts that the writer only produced a handful of stories in the last 26 years of his life on Earth.                                                                                                           

But of all the stories in POSEIDONIS, the best is one I don't even remember reading the first time, however many years that may have been. Like some of those covered above, THE VENUS OF AZOMBEII is a story of a white explorer finding a lost civilization in Africa-- and though Smith probably coined the place name "Azombeii" in response (conscious or not) to Haitian voodoo's origins in Darkest Africa, nothing remotely like a zombie appears in the tale. But unlike most lost cities full of white or Asian people, Azombeii is a lost city full of Black people. However, these Blacks become appealing to explorer Julius Marsden because their ancestors intermarried with some ancient Roman legion, who bequeathed to all of their descendants "classic" Roman features and a fertility goddess, Wanaos (Venus under a new name).                                   

  However, the true "Venus" of the story is the high priestess Mybaloe, who falls in love with Marsden at first sight. The two seem destined to be united in eternal bliss-- and actually, Smith does strongly suggest that the white American and the dark African with Roman features at least have some ecstatic encounter during a pagan orgy. But there's almost always a worm in every CAS apple, and this time it's an envious high priest, Mergawe, who poisons Marsden with a mystic potion that causes his flesh and bones to contract until he perishes, which is how the story ends, after Marsden has returned to the US and a boon friend reads the backstory of his demise in a memoir. But arguably the real star of the story is Mybaloe. I've not encountered that many distinctive female characters in Smith's stories-- usually just one-dimensional vampires and undead corpses. But Smith really tries to make Mybaloe an "ideal woman," possessed of humor and courage despite her isolated origins. In fact, this story saw print in 1931, long before the rise of jungle-girls in pulps and comic books-- and to demonstrate the resourcefulness of this "Venus," Smith even gives her a "Tarzan moment," where she saves Marsden from crocodiles by stabbing two of the reptiles to death. Obviously, whether from personal taste or in deference to his mostly Caucasian readers, Smith gives Mybaloe European features so that she's not exotic in a displeasing way. But in 1931, it was pretty daring to imagine a pulp story in which a white man and a colored woman were joined in an entirely serious romance, in contrast to the many times white explorers canoodled with high priestesses on the right side of the color line. Despite my earlier statement that Smith's magical fantasy stories played best to the author's greatest strengths, I now regard this 1930s exotic tragedy to rate as one of his top ten short stories.   

PERSPECTIVISM PERMUTATIONS

 Once again, I'm structuring a post here so that I can also use it as a response on a forum-thread. All the readers of this blog need to know is that the forum-thread involves discourse on the subjects of atheism and agnosticism.  As I am an agnostic, I reject the certitudes of both theists and atheists as to whether gods do or don't exist, but one comment on the thread, with respect to Christian morals with respect to slavery, raised some interesting questions that bring me back to Nietzschean perspectivism.                                                                                                                                 _________________                                                                                                                                                                                           "Slavery would likely be inherently immoral from [Jesus'] point of view. Like thousands of isolated moral conundrums, there is no record of him responding to slavery one way or another. But he did have a take on how to love. Slavery would be in contrast to that principle."

                                                                                                                            I would tend to speak of things like "pro-slavery sentiments" and "anti-slavery sentiments" alike as being intersubjective rather than objective, but your argument as a Christian is far more interesting than the rote dogma of the atheists here, and so deserves a longer response.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         The dominant atheist response here to the question of morality has been to claim that it's purely determined by social factors. This claim is made according to atheist beliefs about the absence of any overriding human nature that simply takes different permutations in different societies. Now, though I have argued (and still argue) that atheists cannot be sure that nothing like gods or spirits existed for early man, I also have not dismissed the equal possibility that such gods and spirits did not exist except as poetic metaphors. But for this post, I will hew to the latter possibility: looking at the human custom of slavery as if its attendant morality was independent of any divine input. This is also possible to me because I am a perspectivist as well as an agnostic: I seek to understand how perspective affects morals.                                                                                                                      Jesus' most famous statement of "love" in relation to human bondage would be, to my mind, "Do as you would done by." This speaks to an innate human need: the need for cooperation in activities that are mutually beneficial to the parties involved: cooperation between families, tribe-members, nations. However, the human need for cooperation may be partly if not wholly predicated on competition as well: families gather together to keep away intruders, nations sign peace treaties to repel common enemies, and so on. There are legitimate areas of human endeavor to which the ethic of cooperation does not unilaterally apply. A merchant who never "bought cheap in order to sell dear" would embody the lovingkindness expected by Jesus's admonition. However, he might also find himself going out of business and being unable to feed his family. So in my terms both ethics, of cooperation and competition, are intersubjective in that they apply across the whole of human cultures, rather than each culture being determined by local standards.                                                                                                                                                                                                                From this formulation it follows that slavery, too, would be judged by these two competing ethics. Prior to the Old Testament, recorded history doesn't preserve a lot of moral commentary on slavery (though there's no reason to assume that there was none). We know from Exodus that Jews didn't like being slaves (even of the economic variety) in Egypt, because their slavery is depicted as being bad. Yet the Jews of the Nation of Israel kept slaves, as we know from Leviticus. How did those archaic Jews justify slavery? We don't know this in any precise sense. We do know that the custom of Jubilee encouraged slaveowners to emancipate slaves under just the right circumstances, though. This suggests that archaic Hebrews were aware that slaves of other nations didn't like being slaves in Israel any more than the Jews had liked it in Egypt. Leviticus 25:44 even seems to be justifying the taking of foreign-born slaves over the enslavement of one's fellow Jews, though we can't be certain what the actual practices were like in such a distant period.                                                                                                                                                          To wind up somewhat, if we could ask a tribesman of early humanity why his tribe took slaves, he would probably answer with some version of an ethic born out of competition: "They did it to us first," or "If we don't have some of their people held captive, the enemy tribe may try to wipe us out." At the same time, the ethic of cooperation would have co-existed. It was probably easier for two tribes, even if they disliked each other, to use tradecraft to facilitate exogamous unions rather than by going to war every time one's tribe had a bridal shortage. These contending aspects of human nature are reflected in the mythopoeic conceptions of the philosopher Empedocles, who wrote:                                                                                                                                                                                        "The force that unites the elements to become all things is Love, also called Aphrodite; Love brings together dissimilar elements into a unity, to become a composite thing. Love is the same force that human beings find at work in themselves whenever they feel joy, love and peace. Strife, on the other hand, is the force responsible for the dissolution of the one back into its many, the four elements of which it was composed."

Perhaps more pertinently, he also wrote: "Each man believes only his own experience."                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.2

In this 2022 post, I briefly described a few ways in which I differed from the statements Susanne Langer made in the section I quoted here. To sum up my main line of critique, I stated that I felt that the "unknown creators" of both archaic religious myths and folktales possessed the ability to allow "their imaginations to roam freely," but that both forms of narrative also channeled epistemological patterns, though myths tended to develop those patterns more "thoroughly." So I disagreed with Langer's essential claim: that tales were focused wholly upon "wish fulfillment" while myths encompassed "a world picture, an insight into life generally, not a personal imaginary biography." What I liked about her formulation is that she distinguished between the tales' supposed reliance upon "subjective symbols" and the myths' predilection for "observed folkways and nature-ways." Though I did not say so in the 2022 post, the subjectivity that Langer attributes to tales may be loosely comparable to my concept of a narrative's "lateral meaning," while her focus upon "folkways and nature-ways" parallels my criteria for "virtual meaning." That demonstration of an intersubjective pattern of thought between myself and a deceased scholar I never knew prompts me to indulge in this "compare-and-contrast" game.                                                                                          

But none of the above relates to the topic of emulation, which I've raised in my title. As it happens, 2022 was also the year I began writing a lot more about crossover, agency, and interordination, as in this August post. In that post, I used two iterations of Steve Ditko's originary character The Question to formulate the concepts of "trope emulation" and "icon emulation." To shorten the argument a bit, I said that when Alan Moore conceived Rorschach, his variation on The Question, he was in no way asserting any identity between his character and Ditko's character. Rather, what Moore did was to borrow tropes from Ditko's character and from other sources in order to create an independent icon. This, I asserted, was trope emulation. But when Denny O'Neil created his variation on the Ditko crusader, he attempted to assert an identity between his creation and that of Ditko, if only for the sake of impressing fans of the older creation. This, I asserted, was icon emulation.                                 

Since Langer was in no way attempting to form a general theory of literary narrative, naturally she started from a different place than I did. But I find it interesting that. rightly or wrongly, she characterizes all the figures of folktales as entities completely independent of one another, claiming that they are little more than the functions of various wish-fulfillment scenarios. This I regard as "trope emulation," though with the caveat that in my system characters like Cinderella are not just functions, but icons in their own right, no matter how much they fluctuate from one iteration to another. In the case of myth-figures, Langer regards that they are capable of merging with one another because "myth tends to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin enter into definite relations with one another." This I regard as "icon emulation," and there's even a loose parallel of purpose. Just as O'Neil promulgates his version of "a Question" but some but not all of the poetic tropes of the Ditko character, Irish Christians promoted a saint called Brigid in order to appeal to a laity familiar with a pagan goddess of the same name. There will probably be a few other points of comparison, because whatever my disagreements with Langer, I find her fertility of mind on matters mythopoeic to be equal to that of Jung and Campbell.

AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 3

 If, in my previous writings on the rationales for metaphenomenal fantasy, I've given the impression that nonsense-fantasy was a new creation, I should correct that by mentioning that a fair number of archaic tales invoke the rationale of "just because." In fact, in Chapter 7 of Susanne Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY (which I referenced in yesterday's post), Langer begins her generally unflattering description of simple folktales with some examples from Melanesian lore. Her first example, for instance, involves a buffalo and a crocodile having a dispute, whereon they ask various other animals, or even inanimate objects like a mortar and a floor-mat, to judge the quarrel. The idea of attributing life even to clearly nonliving things seems to me more extreme than that of talking animals who behave like people, though both are examples of nonsense-fantasy. Another example of non-living things being given life appears in the (presumably much later) Japanese conception of tsukumogami.                                                       

The Aesop's fables offer a lesser range of nonsense-fantasy. Sometimes the animals therein are shown only doing regular animal activities, as in "The Dog and the Bone," with the exception that the animal may be given some degree of human intelligence. Other stories show such creatures like the Fox and the Stork dining together and using human utensils.                                                              

In the annals of literature, the example of Lewis Carroll's Alice-verse stands as one of the most sustained examples of pure nonsense-fantasy. However, L. Frank Baum's later Oz books might be termed "impure nonsense-fantasies." Sometimes Baum's world follows rough rules about what its system of magic can accomplish, with its witches and flying monkeys and prophetic hats. Other times, though, the world stretches to include a number of entities I'd consider "just because" fantasies, like the Hammerheads and the porcelain-people of China Country. I'd have to read more of the Oz books to judge whether the logic of magic or that of "just because" holds greater sway overall.                                                                               

As impressive as some of the nonsense-fantasies of both oral and written stories might be, those that appeared in early American cartoons might outdo them both by sheer preponderance. Felix the Cat, rated as the first major continuing character of those early short cartoons, might be exemplary here. I don't know if he's the first character in all fantasy who could break off a part of himself-- almost always his tail-- and just will it to become some other object, like a fishhook or a question-mark. But thanks to the popularity of Felix, animated cartoons became increasingly associated with the ability to transform themselves, or aspects of their universe, into anything they pleased.           

That acceptance of the "anything goes" propensity of cartoons of course didn't keep some animators from following the more circumscribed pathways of Aesop. Donald Duck debuts in the 1934 cartoon "The Wise Little Hen," which like its source material simply depicts its anthropomorphic creatures dressing like humans and doing human things.                                                                                   

 I tend to believe that the majority of Disney's stories about anthropomorphic creatures follow the Aesopian pattern, in which clothes-wearing ducks and mice and dogs go around doing all sorts of human things, not least the mouse named Mickey owning a non-anthropomorphic dog. Carl Barks is justly celebrated for creating scores of stories about Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge having adventures indistinguishable from what humans might do in similar circumstances, with the protagonists' ducky nature being the only "nonsense" element. Once in a while, though, Barks did apprise himself of random nonsense elements, such as "Lost in the Andes," wherein Donald and his nephews encounter square chickens that lay corresponding square eggs. Some of Barks' stories might be considered another breed of "impure nonsense," in that they combine the base nonsense-fantasy of human-like animals with either scientific or magical rationales. Here's what I wrote about Barks' use of a particular type of magic in his story "Oddball Odyssey:"                                                                                                                                                                                                                       'For her part, Magica provides exposition for the reader about her great new powers, about having "scrounged secrets" from old temples and caves that have given her control over the elements. Most interestingly, Magica advances a fairly sophisticated theory for the origin of the Greek pantheon: "those gods were more likely live sorcerers than figments of ancient dreams." This theory allowed Barks to have his cake and eat it too: he doesn't have to show his witchy villain garnering power from either old gods or, for that matter, Satanic sources. Instead, it's implied that ordinary mortals can generate magic powers from study of the universe's secrets, which is certainly an odd thing to find in a Disney comic book of the period.'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Thus endeth my short history lesson, though I expect to reference some of these observations in related essays,

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.1

 I thought that I had gone into some detail regarding Susanne Langer's views of the distinctions between "myths" and "tales," but my previous posts on Langer don't seem to cover those distinctions in depth. In any case most of those earlier posts predate my formulation of the concept of "emulation," so that's as good a reason as any to start from scratch. Since the passage I'm reprinting from her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY is so long, I'll confine this post to preserving the passage as a resource from which I'll draw for Part 2.                                                                                                                          Here we have a literary product belonging to the civilized 

races of Europe just as much as to the savage cultures of darker 
continents. Aristocratic beings, chiefs or princes, now play the 
leading role; dragons and ogres and wicked kings, or beautiful 
witches of great power, replace the monkeys, crocodiles, angry 
dead men, or local cannibals of the older tradition. The wish- 
ful imagination of man has been disciplined, by public expo- 
sure and realistic reflection, into a genuine art-form, as far re- 
moved from personal dreaming as the ritual dance from self- 
expressive bouncing and shouting. 

Yet this high development of fantasy has brought us no- 
where in the direction of mythology. For although fairy-story 
is probably an older form than myth, the latter is not simply 
a higher development of the former. It, too, goes back to prim- 
itive fantasy, but the point of its origin from that source Ues 
far back in cultural history, long before the evolution of our 
modern fairytale — of Kunstmarchen, as the Germans say, or 
even Volksmarchen. It required not a higher stage of story- 
telling, but a thematic shift, to initiate what Miss Harrison  

called "the myth-making instinct."                                                              For the fairytale is irresponsible; it is franlily imaginary, and 

its purpose is to gratify wishes, "as a dream doth flatter." Its 
heroes and heroines, though of delightfully high station, 
wealth, beauty, etc., are simply individuals; "a certain prince," 
"a lovely princess." The end of the story is always satisfying, 
though by no means always moral ; the hero's heroism may be 
slyness or luck quite*as readily as integrity or valor. The theme 
is generally the triumph of an unfortunate one — an enchanted 
maiden, a youngest son, a poor Cinderella, an alleged fool — 
over his or her superiors, whether these be kings, bad fairies, 
strong animals (e.g. Red Riding Hood's wolf), stepmothers, 
or elder brothers. In short, the fairytale is a form of "wishful 
thinking," and the Freudian analysis of it fully explains why 
it is perennially attractive, yet never believed by adults even 
in the telling. 

Myth, on the other hand, whether literally received or not, 
is taken with religious seriousness, either as historic fact or as 
a "mystic" truth. Its typical theme is tragic, not Utopian; and 
its personages tend to fuse into stable personalities of super- 
natural character. Two divinities of somewhat similar type — 
perhaps miraculously born, prodif'ious in strength, heroically 
defeated and slain — become identified ; they are one god under 
two names. Even those names may become mere epithets link- 
ing the god to different cults.  

This sets the hero of myth strikingly apart from the fairy- 
tale hero. No matter how closely the Prince Charming of 
Snow White's story resembles the gentleman who wakens 
Sleeping Beauty, the two characters do not become identified. 
No one thinks that the trickster "Little Glaus" is the little 
tailor who slew "seven at a stroke," or that the giant whom 
Jack killed was in any way related to the ofjre defeated by 
Puss in Boots, or that he figured elsewhere as Bluebeard. Fairy 
stories bear no relation to each other. Myths, on the other 
hand, become more and more closely woven into one fabric, 
they form cycles, their dramatis personae tend to be intimately 
connected if not identified. Their stage is the actual world — 
the Vale of Tempe, Mount Olympus, the sea, or the sky — and  

not some ungeographical fairyland...And myth has, indeed, a more difficult and more 

serious purpose than fairytale. The elements of both are much 
alike, but they are put to quite different uses. Fairytale is a 
personal gratification, the expression of desires and of their 
imaginary fulfilment, a compensation for the shortcomings of 
real life, an escape from actual frustration and conflict. Be- 
cause its function is subjective, the hero is strictly individual 
and human; for, although he may have magic powers, he is 
never regarded as divine; though he may be an oddity like 
Tom Thumb, he is not considered supernatural. For the same 
reason — namely that his mission is merely to represent the 
"self in a day-dream — he is not a savior or helper of man- 
kind. If he is good, his goodness is a personal asset, for which 
he is richly rewarded. But his humanitarian role is not the 
point of the story; it is at best the setting for his complete so- 
cial triumph. The beneficiary of his clever acts, his prowess, or 
his virtue is he himself, not mankind forever after. And be- 
cause an individual history is what the fairytale fancies, its 
interest is exhausted with the "happy ending" of each finished 
story. There is no more mutual reference between the adven- 
tures of Cinderella and those of Rapunzel than between two  

separate dreams. Myth, on the other hand, at least at its best, is a recognition 

of natural conflicts, of human desire frustrated by non-human 
powers, hostile oppression, or contrary desires; it is a story 
of the birth, passion, and defeat by death which is man's com- 
mon fate. Its ultimate end is not wishful distortion of the 
world, but serious envisagement of its fundamental truths; 
moral orientation, not escape. That is why it does not exhaust 
its whole function in the telling, and why separate myths 
cannot be left entirely unrelated to any others. Because it pre- 
sents, however metaphorically, a world-picture, an insight into 
life generally, not a personal imaginary biography, myth tends 
to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning 
are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin 
enter into definite relations with each other. Moreover, because 
the mythical hero is not the subject of an egocentric day-dream, 
but a subject greater than any individual, he is always felt to 
be superhuman, even if not quite divine. He is at least a de- 
scendant of the gods, something more than a man. His sphere 
of activity is the real world, because what he symbolizes belongs 
to the real world, no matter how fantastic its expression may 
be (this is exactly contrary to the fairytale technique, which  

transports a natural individual to a fairyland outside reality) .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Hmm, guess that will teach me the formatting perils of copying from a PDF. More shortly.

MYTHCOMICS: "TO DREAM-- PERCHANCE TO LIVE" (FLAMING CARROT #8, 1985)

 "Certain particulars have more of an archetypal content than others; that is to say, they are 'eminent instances' which stand forth in a characteristic amplitude as representatives of many others; they enclose in themselves a certain totality, arranged in a certain way, stirring in the soul something at once familiar and strange, and thus outwardly as well as inwardly they lay claim to a certain unity and generality."-- FOUNTAIN, p. 54.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Wheelwright's borrowed (from Melville) phrase "eminent instances" parallels my repeated distinction between the simple variables and the complex variables that make up narrative fiction. Unlike Wheelwright, my definition of "eminence" is strongly if not fundamentally bound to the ways in which the elements, or "instances," of a narrative reflect epistemological patterns found throughout human culture, which patterns provide what I define as "complexity." By the same token, simple variables in a narrative might be termed "non-eminent instances," because they are purely, or almost purely, functional in nature. Often these elements are just there, providing no more than background. However, in some narratives-- particularly those of the "nonsense fantasy" category I've been discussing-- an author can invoke in his readers a particular type of strangeness by undercutting a familiar "eminent instance" by infusing it with some non-eminent depictions or associations. Take the cover of FLAMING CARROT #2.                                                             

In this single-panel joke, author Bob Burden has his main character, the demented, absurdist superhero Flaming Carrot, refuse the challenge of "Mister Death" to play a game of chess, and instead propose a game of whiffleball. Though Burden often made random substitutions of silly images to undermine the Carrot's adventures, this substitution of whiffleball for chess is not so random. There can be little doubt that the trope "Death playing chess with a mortal" is derived from Ingmar Bergman's famous scenario from his 1957 film THE SEVENTH SEAL. A reader who knows nothing of that cinematic milestone, however, may still get the essence of the joke: chess is serious, whiffleball is silly, so substituting whiffleball for chess in any context is likely meant to carry a humorous context. Often Burden's substitutions were simple inversions like this one. But in the story I'll discuss here, Burden again invokes familiar images or tropes that have "eminent" associations and then tries to undercut them with their "non-eminent" opposites-- but what he assembles still keeps some of the original epistemological patterns, mostly belonging to the metaphysical category.                                             

  The splash panel for PERCHANCE abounds in random imagery. Yet Burden can't quite manage to exclude the topic that the story is functionally about: the Carrot's descent into, and escape from, the world of death.                                                                                           

               

                               

                                                                                                                                                                           A few pages provide setup for the situation: that the Carrot fell victim to an ignominious accident that almost killed him, though a clique of "practitioners of eccentric and oddball science" revive the looney hero, and the rest of the issue is devoted to his description of the wacky limbo into which he descended. The dream of falling is fairly basic, even with the caveat that the hero falls in a drawn-out manner, like Alice, but Burden adds an interesting twist. After striking the ground, the Carrot finds himself hanging from a tree, where bugs crawl upon him. This may not be a reference to any specific story, though it did remind me of the story of Ishtar's descent into the underworld. In that myth, Ishtar is forced to surrender all of her vestments, leaving her as an empty shell to be hung on a peg until she's later rescued. In contrast, the Carrot only escapes his helpless suspension by surrendering "the things that held me to the tree"-- though he gets some help from luck, for he only gets completely free when he rolls his lucky number.                                     

             

                                                               

Carrot gets some minimal guidance from a "broadcast speaker" implanted in his chest by a person unknown, apparently in one or more previous stories, but the hero still needs a lot of input from the limbo-locals. A random association reminds Carrot of his early life, so he wanders to a suburban division where he encounters his childhood home, complete with his mother, who's now a vicious monster. Carrot escapes her with ease, and then gets advice from a "Beanhead," who tells him can only escape limbo by seeking a crossroads, though the fastest way to get there is to play a round of golf. The two of them encounter a city, though Beanhead declines to follow Carrot there.      

Carrot wanders a little in the city until he happens to enter a gambling joint. There he meets an unnamed man with an eyepatch (so I'll call him Patch), one who's been looking for Carrot to return him to the real world, sort of a reversal on the Greek psychopomp who guides souls to the underworld. Unfortunately, Patch is Limbo's version of a Lyft driver, obliged to take more than one soul back. Carrot and Patch are joined by two guys whose only function is to give Burden a few new joke-routines. However, Patch meets his fate when he seeks to pick up a third "rider," for the third man objects to the name Patch calls him, and both of them perish in a gun-duel. Carrot steals Patch's ring and the three survivors flee an unseen horror, "The Dragoon."                                                                                      

A clue inside the dead guide's ring leads the trio to another dimensional traveler, Cracked Jack (presumably a pun on the cereal Crackerjack, in which one could find cheap prizes, including rings). This decrepit individual, who has a spider living in his skull, sends the trio to Potter's Field, which is the common phrase for a cemetery dedicated to people who can't pay for funerals.                                             

  

On the belief that they can only enter Potter's Field with a bribe, the three goofuses waste a page burglarizing a rich lord's tower for some silver (pantyhose) eggs-- none of which matters, since they never meet anyone who asks for a bribe. When the three reach Potter's Field, it's not a cemetery but a movie theater, and the ticket-taker calls security on them. The guards prove to be the same long-legged wights seen on the splash page, but Carrot drives them off with his "real world" pistol (which he acquired from the very unreal simulacrum of his early home). And then the Dragoon overtakes the trio, proving to be a gigantic version of the Carrot himself. Can you say, "hero must fight evil version of himself?"                                     

              

Following the demise of Carrot's companions, he rather belatedly asks the voice in his chest how the Dragoon can get so big. The voice tells him the giant makes himself big with "the power of suggestion," but when Carrot wonders if he can do it too, the voice discourages him. However, this time the demented crusader is correct; he enlarges himself and knocks his big doppelganger for a loop. He rushes to the movie-screen, entreating entrance back to the real world, but someone on the other side wants a password. Then the chest-voice finally justifies its existence with a word "means everything," and that gets Carrot back to the world of the living. He finishes telling his story to the mad scientists, who debate its truth-value while Carrot invites a bunch of cute bar-singers to serenade him. The End-- except for my verdict that if one excised all the "non-eminent" elements with which Burden tries to make the hero's journey wacky rather than imposing, what one would have would resemble many of the "straight" after-death voyages in both canonical and pop fiction.                                                                                          

AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 2

In THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1, I outlined the three principal ways authors rationalize their fictional departures from consensual reality:                                                                                                                                                                                                           (1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."                                                                                                                                                                             

 I also wrote of a major distinction between the first two rationales and the third:                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd.                                                                                                                                 In essence, the first two rationales are "quasi-rational," because they are patterned after rationales, both magical and scientific, that can be and have been used to justify the nature of phenomena in this our "real world." "Just because," however, is "non-rational," in that there are really no rules but those the author arbitrarily declares, like Roger Rabbit claiming that he cannot perform certain actions unless they're funny-- presumably, funny to whatever audience Roger is playing to.                                                                                                                                                    But just because a nonsense-world is thoroughly without rational content, that does make it without relevance to the human condition. In my review of Lewis Carroll's "Alice books," I listed five types of tropes Carroll used to give the mad, anything-goes phenomena of Wonderland and of Looking-Glass Land their own "internal logic." Whatever efforts, conscious or subconscious, Carroll took to make his mad fantasies have human relevance provide a loose parallel to the "labour and thought" which Tolkien felt should inhere in a consistent "secondary world." I plan to put these observations to a test in a forthcoming mythcomics post, in which I will endeavor to show how a particular "nonsense fantasy" author managed to encode internal logic into his freewheeling descents into lunacy.                                                                                                                                                                

AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 1

I'll commence this assault upon the Domain of Nonsense, this attempt to make nonsense make sense, with a contrasting example drawn from J.R.R. Tolkien's signature effort to defend his conception of fantasy from all those who have sought to downgrade that uber-genre. I will build upon my discussion partly on the points I made in the COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS essay-series, beginning here, though that series did not address the concept of nonsense fiction. But instead of rehashing those essays, I'll confine this essay to a quick re-examination of Tolkien's illustration of the way authors create what he called "arresting strangeness."                                                                                                                             "Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough—though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise.  To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode."-- ON FAIRY-STORIES.                                                                                                                                                Okay, fair enough. It takes special effort to imagine a world where a phenomenon of our "Primary World," the sun that appears to most persons on Earth as yellow, is actually green. No argument there. But what if you have--                                                                                       

                                                                                                                Can one make a world with a polka-dot sun credible? If such a sun is depicted, particularly in a medium that can show rather than describe it, it will certainly seem strange to the reader and arrest any expectations that this is a world like our own. But a sun with a precise polka-dot pattern-- or even something more random, like the spots on a leopard-- is unlikely to seem credible in any way. The polka-dot sun is strange, but it departs from a causally coherent world so radically that one cannot make it credible in itself. At most, an author can posit that the world with a polka-dot sun is one where anything can come into existence "just because"-- which will lead me into Part 2 of this aesthetic endeavor.                                                                                                        

LOVE, DENSITY AND CONCRESCENCE

I haven't written much if anything since 2017 about "density," when in the essay GOOD WILL QUANTUMS, I extrapolated a brief remark by Raymond Durgnat into a general principle, one applicable to all four of the potentialities. In that essay I wrote:                                                                                                                                                                                                   'density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Elsewhere in the essay and its follow-up, I qualified this statement by noting that all literary works, whatever potentiality they favored, were all *gestural" in nature, just to distance myself from associations with any criteria about fidelity to actual "lived experience." However, in due time I felt the need of a term that described the process by which such "potentiality density" came about, and for that purpose I freely adapted the term "concrescence" from Alfred North Whitehead.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 All that said, because density has a stronger association that does concrescence with the quality of some physical substance, it also proves somewhat better for describing the finished product. I might say, using my most recent emendations of my potentiality terminology, that "Dave Sim's work excels at dealing with didactic cogitations, while Grant Morrison's work excels at dealing with mythopoeic correlations." That quality of excellence can be metaphorically expressed as a given work's density, in that such density shows how thoroughly the author was invested in a given set of fictional representations (sometimes, though not usually, on a subconscious level).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Now, knowing that level of authorial involvement doesn't intrinsically make a given work, or set of works, engrossing to all members of a potential audience. In fact, tastes are so variable that one can practically guarantee that no works will be all things to all people, if only because we esteem (or do not esteem) all phenomena according to our respective abilities to relate to those phenomena in some way. And my carefully considered positioning of the word "esteem" brings me to the "love" part of the title.                                                                                                                                                                            Some setup: in chapter 40 of the romance-manga NAGATORO, main character Naoto, a high-school student, aspires to create good art. His senior Sana (the one clad in a towel) delivers the following critique of his recent effort, followed by her criterion for good art.                                                               

                                            

In the story the discussion is interrupted, and at no point in the series does this aesthetic credo get further articulated. Given that the author Nanashi devotes the bulk of NAGATORO to the dramatic potentiality, his main reason for having the Sana character make this statement is to imply a correspondence between the way a good artist is "in love" with his material, and the way Naoto specifically needs to invest himself in life, whether it's drawing his subject matter with passion, rather than with mere polished technique, or in his romantic relationship to the titular Nagatoro. I would tend to think that Raymond Durgnat, who was my original guide to the density-metaphor, probably would not have disapproved of Nanashi's use of "love" as a metaphor for artistic investment, for wanting to "know" a subject intensely (if not actually romantically).