MYTHCOMICS: "ANYFACE" (LI'L ABNER, April 19-May 31, 1947)

 Rather than wasting time summing up how Al Capp's "comic-within-a-comic" FEARLESS FOSDICK evolved within Al Capp's LI'L ABNER feature, here's the Wiki writeup on the subject. 

The most interesting things about the 1942 introduction of Fosdick within the continuity of the ABNER strip are (1) the fact that what one can see of Fosdick looks almost indistinguishable from Tracy, without the pencil mustache seen on later versions, and (2) the short spoof concentrates only upon the idea that Fosdick's real-world creator "Lester Gooch" puts the fictional detective into death-traps without knowing how to extricate said hero. Jay Maeder's superlative survey of Gould's groundbreaking strip, DICK TRACY: THE OFFICIAL BIOGRAPHY, attests that on occasion Chester Gould did have to scramble to find some way to save Tracy from his final curtain. However, in retrospect the critique seems petty, given that Al Capp shared Gould's penchant for placing characters in cliffhanger situations and then getting them out with ridiculous contrivances-- probably more so than Gould ever resorted to.

Over the next four years Capp continued to develop new elements of the Fosdick character. He was just as much a moral ramrod as Tracy, but Fosdick had no brains whatever and so was incapable of anything like detection. He was sexually abstemious, telling one female pursuer that no woman's lips but his mother's would ever touch his (which would lead to some Freudian conclusions Capp might not have intended). And in one adventure, cartoonish Gooch learns that his new villain for Fosdick, a rock-headed crook named "Stone Face," actually exists in Gooch's world. The criminal wants to force Gooch to destroy the fictional Fosdick's reputation with adoring kids by forcing him to get married, a fate which particularly horrifies Fosdick's number one fan, Li'l Abner Yokum. After various contrivances, Stone Face encounters Abner and tries to kill the youth by hitting Abner with his rocky noggin-- and the hard-headed hillbilly wins the contest.

The first truly ambitious Fosdick story ran through May 1947, though it includes some setup in April within the "Abner universe." Gooch's publishers harangue the artist to create yet more grotesque villains to enthrall FOSDICK's readers, "the kiddies." (Two years later, Gershon Legman would republish some of his anti-violence essays in the book LOVE AND DEATH, saying in all seriousness the same thing Capp said for a joke.) Gooch's artistic insanity gets him put into an asylum. Further, when a rival publisher threatens Gooch's life, a certain hulking hillbilly is hired to guard the artist's welfare-- and to make sure that the strips keep coming out on time. This provided Capp with the excuse to have Abner periodically interrupt the FOSDICK continuity to remind readers, "it's only a comic strip about another comic strip."

"Anyface" seems to be the first arc in which Capp steps up the ultraviolence to epic levels, to parody DICK TRACYs legendary levels of mayhem. The detective, informed that a villain named Anyface can make himself look like anyone, comes to the random conclusion that the fiend would logically make himself look like the city's most beneficent philanthropist, so Fosdick immediately shoots the innocent man through the head. Further, the real Anyface was masquerading as the official who gave Fosdick the assignment-- though, contrary to his boast, Anyface doesn't do or say anything to the klutz-cop to suggest offing the victim. (BTW, nowhere in the narrative does Capp explain how Anyface duplicates the clothes of the people he imitates, since he can only change his physical form.)

             

Unlike the majority of ABNER villains, Anyface never seems to have any specific aim in mind. He seems to exist merely to torment Fosdick, as Mr. Mxyzptlk does Superman. Anyface hits on the idea that the best way to utterly humiliate the idiot officer is to pretend to be his long-suffering girlfriend (here named "Bess Backache" in emulation of Dick Tracy's girl Tess Trueheart) and inveigle Fosdick into marrying "her," his worst enemy. Capp does not drop even the slightest hint as to how Anyface presses his suit when the real girlfriend couldn't get Fosdick to the altar over the course of twelve years. The logical conclusion that modern audiences would make, that of premarital sex, might or might not have been an idea Capp toyed with. Still, he would have known he could not have even implied the subject in a family comic strip. So, he passed over the matter. In the "real world," Abner is deeply distressed by his "ideel" being turned into a pathetic fool. Daisy Mae and Mammy become concerned that Abner might "kill himself in grief." Mammy deduces that Gooch has come up with this "worse-than-death trap" because he's gone crazy, so Mammy lays plans to go straighten the artist out.

Unfortunately for Abner, Insane Gooch finishes one more insane set of strips before Mammy makes the scene and scrambles his brains back into normalcy. Abner is initially exultant to see that Fosdick, his brain possibly prompted into something like thought by his mortification, lay a trap for Anyface, though of course it's one that shows the super-cop's utter disregard for collateral damage. Fosdick forces 69 persons suspected of being Anyface (why?) into a single room and cranks up the heat to 500 degrees, believing that the heat will melt the fiend's taffy-like features. But in the last strip produced by Insane Gooch, Fosdick's features begin melting, revealing that he, the incorruptible lawman, is actually Anyface. Abner confronts Gooch and demands a rational explanation. But Gooch has had his brains "normalized," and now he has no idea what he was thinking while insane. Capp leaves his hillbilly star on the horns of an insoluble dilemma, implying the complete identity between good and evil--

--Well, for roughly two months. Capp probably never devised an escape-hatch at all but instead exploited the situation by encouraging his readers to invent some solution that would "save" Fearless Fosdick. Capp chose a suggestion that he printed in a single strip on June 28, 1947, and that was technically the end of the "Anyface" arc. Said solution was worse than anything either Gould or Capp had ever devised. While Anyface-Fosdick's face is melting, the real Fosdick walks into the hotbox-room and captures the felon. So-- if Anyface was just masquerading as Fosdick, why did he participate in Fosdick's trap, knowing that his face would melt in front of all those witnesses? It might've made a little sense if Anyface had caught and tied up the klutz-cop, planning to kill all of the suspects in the hotbox and blame the deed on Fosdick. But I doubt that Capp cared about anything but keeping Fosdick in play, and most of the readers who liked Fosdick probably held the same opinion.

Since Capp didn't really provide the lame solution, I'd argue that the Anyface arc really does end with the revelation that hero and villain are one, even though throughout the story they've been repeatedly seen as separate beings. These fourth-wall shenanigans remind me of the overpraised Berthold Brecht, but Capp was no Brechtian ironist, just a joke-teller who felt like taking shots at any target. If I had to choose which artist, Capp or Gould, devised the greater number of lame cliffhanger resolutions, I'd choose Capp. So it's puzzling that he would jab Gould over the practice of improbable death-traps. Capp was actually more on target in his implication that the world of DICK TRACY was one in which innocents constantly got killed as Tracy pursued his crusade for justice. Thus Capp's quibbling about "death-trap anxiety," as far as it expressed a comic inversion of something Gould's TRACY took for granted, was far inferior to the concept of Fosdick piling up hecatombs of dead citizens for the sake of his god of justice. Finally, when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

ADDENDUM: Though Capp wasn't shy about dealing out dire fates to his villains-- at least, no more so than Gould-- Anyface is still alive by the end of the story. Capp continued to use him in comic-book ads, wherein Fosdick fought crime while shilling for "Wildroot hair cream." In the 1960s the villain somehow showed up in the LI'L ABNER strip, without even the piddling explanation given in the "Stone Face" arc. That arc had not been reprinted, but I recall that Anyface pops up in Dogpatch and impersonates Daisy Mae Yokum. I don't recall what becomes of the villain in that story.   

 

 

    

THE ONCE AND FUTURE REPETITION

 A qualification to my definition of repetition here: because as I said that repeated scenarios for this type of fictional sadism took place in separate time-frames, it's not strictly necessary to show more than one such scenario to establish that it either represents one in a series of past repetitions, or one that will continue in like wise in the future.

Regarding past repetitions, domestic thrillers are so replete with examples that I feel no need to provide any here. The moment a husband-character seems to wield disproportionate power over his better half, the viewer doesn't have to SEE anything; it's assumed that there have been any number of sadistic acts of one toward the other. Usually the wife-character is entirely reasonable, in order to underscore that the husband's desire for control is outside the bounds of matrimonial give-and-take. At the same time, some thrillers will confine themselves to one real-time act of sadism, which stands as a synecdoche for all past actions.

As a means of expressing a pattern of action for the future, the following "gag splash panel" should serve.

The mostly forgotten backup humor-series STELLA THE STARLET appeared in various issues of a teen-humor magazine from Ace Publications, HAP HAZARD. Except for this gag-splash from HH #18, there's not that much about STELLA worth remembering.

In truth, the gag-splash barely has anything to do with the main story. In the principal tale, Alonzo, the short-statured agent to glamorous actress Stella, seeks to overcome various pitfalls in order to propose to his client, with predictable comic results. The two characters never get to the altar in the main tale, but in the gag-splash the artist (said to be Sol Brodsky of later Marvel fame) added a clever reversal on a couple of marriage-tropes. In the background, all the female guests are smiling confidently, while all the male ones are openly weeping. And Alonzo is shocked to note that that his stautesque bride has brought not just a bridal bouquet, but a bridal rolling-pin. There's no overt suggestion that the "real" Stella of the series wants not to get laid but to lay into her boyfriend with repetitions of sadistic violence. But in the world of the gag-splash, it's not just the actress, but implicitly all women, who desire to lead guys to the altar in order to cudgel them into submission. So in a sense, the gag-splash represents both once and future sadisms.

LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 3

 My recent discourses on "the limited and the limitless" aspects of creative expression reminded me of a passage from Northrop Frye. I discussed it in greater detail in this 2009 essay, but here I'll confine myself to looking at the passage from a new perspective.

...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme...-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

Frye brackets two of his literary mythoi, tragedy and irony, as having appeal for the "realist" critic, while the other two, comedy and romance, are the preference of the "romantic" critic. In the essay Frye's principal distinction between the "Iliad critic" and the "Odyssey critic" is that the latter reads the narrative to enjoy the story for its own sake, while the former is looking for an "imaginative allegory" whose purpose is to illuminate "the immediate world outside literature." 

Frye doesn't precisely formulate a reason as to why the Iliad critic seeks his illumination in two of the four mythoi, irony and the one I've renamed "drama."  Nor does he do so for the Odyssey critic with respect to comedy and the mythos I've renamed "adventure." But I believe the essential contrast is that between "the happy ending" and "the unhappy ending." The Odyssey's denouement is moderately "happy," insofar as Odysseus, despite many ordeals and lost years with his family, succeeds in his goal to return to his homeland and to be reunited with his wife and son. In contrast, The Iliad concludes with Achilles yielding the dead body of slain Hector to his father, an outcome that looks forward to the fact that in the greater continuity Achilles too is doomed to perish before the walls of Troy come tumbling down. The Iliad fills the reader with an awareness of the dramatized limitations of life, and while The Odyssey is not unaware of those curtailments on freedom, the adventurous elements of the journey fill one with a sense of limitless potential, in that a mortal hero has managed to survive against the ill will of the gods.

Though I didn't address the limited/limitless dichotomy in my four essays on THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS, the fourth essay touches on similar territory.

Now, as it happens, in arranging the four mythoi, I followed Frye's season-based arrangement, which to the best of my recollection did not involve Ovid's "four ages." In the first two FOUR AGES essays, I said that the *dynamis* of each mythos compared well with one of the "ages of man:" child, adolescent, mature adult, older adult. Thus I perceive that even though adventure is "serious" in terms of how its readers are expected to invest themselves in the character's struggles, it is a "light seriousness" that canon-critics do not regard as covalent with their "high serousness." Adventure-stories, while they may not involve adolescent characters, are often regarded as adolescent in nature because they tend to have happy endings, no matter what sufferings their characters may endure  to reach said ending. Not all works within the dramatic mythos have unhappy endings, of course. But critics tend to prefer dramas because there is a certain expectation of a stronger chance for a dolorous, and therefore more bracing, conclusion to the story. Thus dramas meet the critic's desire for high seriousness.

With the two "mythoi of levity," comedy, more than irony, still allows for more identification with its characters than does irony, and thus comedy also shows a predilection for happy endings. Though the phrase "light comedy" does not apply to all comedies across the board, it suggests something of the attitude that the Iliadic critic has toward comedy in general: there's still enough of a tendency for viewers to invest in the characters' fates and to want to see said characters validated to some degree. This is not true of the irony, for the creator of the irony has, so to speak, turned up the dial on his levity-making machines until everything in the story floats free of any readerly attachment. Again, some ironies-- such as Voltaire's CANDIDE-- may have relatively "happy" endings in comparison to other, more relentless ironies. But there is no sense, to paraphrase Frye, that the world has been reborn by a ritual of jubiliation: if anything, even the worlds with relatively happy endings are doomed, just as "older adults" are doomed to end their days and their experience of the ongoing world.

Thus, this current rethinking invalidates the verdict of the GRAVITY'S RAINBOW series, in that I would now opine that both adventures and comedies show a greater tendency toward encouraging reader identification than one sees in dramas or ironies. To pursue the metaphor of the four ages once more, it's as if the comedy and the adventure allow for the most identification because their characters were designed to be triumphant, while the drama and the irony are designed to allow the reader to pull back from the characters, even if for very different reasons.

One more installment to go...

 

MYTHCOMICS: “THAT SERIOUS GUY IS A CRIMINAL?” LOVE HINA (2002)

I’ve discoursed several times on Ken Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA, summarizing its series concept here and condensing its joined themes of female sadism and male masochism in CROSSING THE LAWLINES5, thusly:

Ken Akamatsu's LOVE HINA, though, seems to be one of the few works that eventually admits to the sexual nature of the trope, if one can trust the Tokyopop translation. In the last volume, after innumerable incidents in which Keitaro intrudes upon Naru and gets beaten on for it, the two protagonists confess their true feelings to an interlocutor. Keitaro doesn't precisely say that he gets off on masochistic treatment, but he claims that he loves peeping on Naru so much that he doesn't care that he gets beaten for it, while Naru explicitly admits that she loves both his attentions and getting to beat on him for crossing the lines.

While keeping in mind that this sort of wacky, semi-eroticized violence is not identical with syndromic sadism, the question arises: since Ken Akamatsu himself is (I will presume) a biological male, does his idea of masculinity start and end with the vision of the male as a hopeless goof?

 

My answer is, “almost.” Keitaro Urashima begins the LOVE HINA series as a klutzy twenty-something who’s failed his college entrance exams three times. When he gets the job of managing an all-female dormitory owned by his aunt Haruka, he becomes the proverbial “rooster in the hen house”—though only if the rooster was crossed with a punching-bag, since Keitaro is forever blundering into compromising situations with the girls and then getting clobbered by them.

 

Further, Keitaro is almost the only male character in the whole 14-volume series. The only other masculine character is thirty-something Seta, who roams the world doing archaeological digs and who occasionally teaches a course at Tokyo U, the college to which Keitaro has repeatedly applied. In addition to these admirable aspects, Seta is trained in kung fu and occasionally has friendly bouts with “kendo girl” Motoko. He also tutored Keitaro’s principal love interest Naru, who had a strong crush on Seta in previous years. Yet Seta is unaware of Naru’s crush and often proves just as maladroit as Keitaro, so that he never really presents Keitaro with any real competition for the love of Naru or any other of Keitaro's other potential hookups. In the story considered here, the self-questioning “That Serious Guy is a Criminal?,” Seta does not appear, but his daughter Sara does. Sara joins the other dorm-residents in constantly belaboring Keitaro, though she’s only a “bitch-in-training” being that she’s about ten years old and not actually involved in the erotic aspects of the situation (which was probably a distinct relief to most readers).

 

 As the story commences, Naru and the other girls are enjoying a hot springs bath. Naru cautions their visitor Mutsumi that while residing at the inn she may get peeped at by the “beast” Keitaro. Naru sees Keitato approach the bath and prepares, with a look of predatory anticipation, to slug him when he trespasses once again. 

But Keitaro passes by the women's bath, goes back to his room and immerses himself in studies for his next entrance exam. Sarah and the equally mischievous Kaolla break into his room to gratuitously whale on him with blunt objects. To their surprise, Keitaro dodges their attacks without even seeming to notice their presence, because he’s so completely focused on his studies. When he does notice the girls’ presence, he remarks, with complete innocence, “Don’t you normally run in and try to jump-kick me?”

 

Soon all the girls observe that Keitaro is so focused that he isn’t making klutzy blunders anymore, nor giving them any reason to clout him. Akamatsu never makes any direct reference here to philosophical or religious precepts, but surely the artist means for his audience to understand that Keitaro has unintentionally tapped into a unique mental state, possibly one in line with the Taoist idea of “doing without doing.”

 

 

Kitsune takes up the challenge to femininity, declaring, “I’m going to use my feminine wiles to magically change Keitaro back into the pervert he deserves to be.” Clad in revealing clothes, Kitsune waltzes into Keitaro’s room during his studies. Yet he’s so focused he doesn’t notice her at first, much less getting flustered by her lady parts. If anything, Kitsune becomes attracted by Keitaro’s new aura of male reserve, and Motoko chimes in with similar sentiments. “It’s good to see him so focused and not tempted by the lure of the female.” Kaolla and Sarah want Keitaro to go back to his dipstick persona, so that they can continue to rag on him. Gentle Shinobu, the next-oldest, is the only one who doesn’t want to abuse Keitaro, but she too wants him to go back to “normal,” apparently because he seems too inaccessible in his quasi-Zen state of mind.

 

Naru is the last to behold the new Keitaro, and though she somewhat appreciates his focused attitude, she’s offended that he no longer reacts when she flashes him some tit or leg. The nubile eighteen-year-old even starts worrying that she’s losing her sex appeal.

 

At the conclusion Keitaro himself re-asserts the status quo. He bursts in on the girls while they’re bathing and explains to near-naked Naru that he’s finally solved an involved problem he’s been working on for days. However, once he solves the problem, his Taoist reserve disappears, his normal personality returns, and he becomes flustered by seeing all the girls in their birthday suits (except, happily, Sarah, who’s wearing a onesy). It’s certainly another of Akamatsu’s humorous jibes that at first the girls all ignore Keitaro’s trespass because they think he’s in his “serious guy” mode, but that, once he reacts to their charms, he again becomes a “criminal,” and thus fair game for a beating.

 

Keitaro never again gets into “Zen master” mode, but there are other stories in which he shows signs of maturation, and these signs of masculnity inevitably prove attractive to the age-appropriate girls of the dormitory. Thus Akamatsu does imply that women still like the image, if not the reality, of “men who take charge”—though in this comic universe, strength principally signifies durability, as in being able to endure any abuse doled out by the “gentler sex.”

COMBATIVELY YOURS

                 

In the three-part LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW) series, starting here, I listed five of the mythcomics I’d reviewed here because I deemed that they all rated as “accommodation narratives” rather than “confrontation narratives.” In my many observations on the combative mode in confrontation narratives, I’ve continually sought to make clear that although many narratives resolve conflict through violence, said narratives are only combative if the violence has a particular level of organization. I further observed that many other narratives of the accommodation type resolve conflict through romance and/or sexual activity, and that they would follow the same dichotomy. The stories would only be “combative,” so to speak, if two or more characters with *megadynamic * wills are brought into conflict, with that conflict resolved by their romantic interaction. 

That essay-series didn’t look at any of the accommodation narratives through the lens of the four mythoi, as I did with four confrontation narratives in STATURE REQUIREMENTS. I’ve now improved my interpretation of the mythoi through the metaphors of “the four ages of man” in the DYNAMIS essays, starting here, and so I’ll use that approach in comparing and contrasting four accommodation stories, one for each of the four mythoi.

Again, for an accommodation narrative to register as combative, the contending wills must have a high level of dynamicity, expressed in terms of sexual rather than martial conflict. If the tropes of combative energies in battle are embodied by famous myth-stories like Odysseus slaying the suitors (“extroversive”), the tropes of energetic sexual cooperation are embodied by a model like the one in Yeats’ “Solomon and the Witch,” wherein Solomon and Sheba have such great sex together that it seems as if the whole word has been temporarily annihilated (“introversive”). This would be the kind of interaction that Hollywood advertising calls “tempestuous,” so that’s what I sought in the four examples I’ll examine. Three of the examples are taken from the LOVE OVER WILL series, while the fourth is new to these considerations.

In the DYNAMIS essays, I’ve allotted the mythos of comedy to the first age of man, in which the main character, regardless of how old he may be, is placed in the situation of a child seeking to negotiate his way through the arbitrary, often ludicrous rules of society and/or nature. In “She Tried Her Own On,” a self-contained story from the series DOMINA NO DO, the humor proceeds out of nature. Lead female Hikari has been keeping her supposed boyfriend Takeshi in her mansion for some time, subjecting him to her confused sadomasochistic attentions. Then, like the Melancholy Dane, she begins to have “bad dreams.” She imagines that Takeshi menaces her with a titanic phallus, despite the fact that she’s seen his actual joystick and wasn’t consciously impressed. But Hikari begins to feel guilty about having abused Takeshi, so she decides to “walk a mile in his wang” by having her sorcerous grandma give Hikari a temporary penis. The experience doesn’t fill the young woman with anything akin to “penis envy,” but the ordeal does solve Hikari’s nightmare-problem, because now she can imagine “dueling” Takeshi in her dreams.       

Next of the four ages is that of adolescence, when the thoughts of young men and women turn to goals of heroic accomplishment. In the NEW MUTANTS story “To Build a Fire,” one of the titular heroes, Magma, finds herself stranded in the Amazonian rainforest with Empath, a member of the Hellions. Though the New Mutants and the Hellions belong to rival mutant schools, the ongoing continuity had Magma leave her team to sojourn with the “bad” mutants. The reasoning for the “school transfer” always remained murky, but the author’s main purpose was probably just to get Magma and Empath together. As her name suggests, Magma can call streams of lava from the vasty depths of the Earth. In contrast, Empath’s mutant power is entirely mental: he can persuade almost any woman to fall in love with him. When the two teens are stranded in the forest, they quarrel about whether Magma should use her power to call attention to their plight. The young woman gives evidence that she’s attracted to the rather skeevy Hellion even when he’s not using his power on her, and the mere fact that he might try to master her—albeit only mentally—may have a lot to do with her refusal to “give it up.” The story concludes with an accommodation between the two, in that Magma does use her power the way Empath wants, but only after both belting him and kissing him, leaving him confused about whether he influenced her at all.

Like “To Build a Fire,” “Rite of Spring” is a nonviolent story within a series that is dominantly violent (and within the combative mode as well). Like most stories centered upon a monster-protagonist, the SWAMP THING series falls into the dramatic mythos, particularly because Swamp Thing’s experiences as a monster don’t emphasize thrilling physical triumph (as with say, the Thing of the FANTASTIC FOUR), but the tragic dimensions of life, of the limitations that dog every mortal’s tracks when he transitions into the third age of man. The swampy protagonist, however, gets a bit of a new lease on life, when his female companion Abby, after having followed him around for years as a friend-in-need, suddenly confesses feelings of love for the plant-monster. He for his part reciprocates. Since the Swamp Thing is a mass of plant-growths in humanoid form, he doesn’t have the equipment to consummate a romantic relationship after the human fashion. So instead he encourages Abby to “eat of his flesh,” a specific tuber growing from his body. Not only is the tuber psychotropic, it apparently enhances Abby’s psychic senses so that she can behold the spirit-energies of living things that Swamp Thing can normally see. Swamp Thing and Abby then link minds and experience an ecstatic communion with all the surrounding life-forms of the swamp—which is portrayed as being both as intense and as intimate as any human coitus. Yet the advancement of their relationship into a sort of sexual congress signals that they've moved outside the sphere of triumphant adventure; that they've entered the sphere in which men and women have congress in order to create their replacements when they pass on-- even if the exigencies of comic book ensure that neither Abby nor Swamp Thing shall perish from their earth.

The hero of RAT GOD is actually more of a demihero, an upright New England man who finds himself entrapped in a Lovecraftian cosmos, including a degenerate town that I called “an Innsmouth for rats.” Clark Elwood, like many protagonists of such stories, finds himself forced to fend off a cult that worships the titular rat god. But whereas H.P. Lovecraft would have emphasized the brooding terror of the rat god and his followers, Richard Corben focuses on Elwood’s overly flattering view of his own racial heritage, as against, say, the local Indians. The only reason Elwood gets embroiled with the rat-worshippers is out of sexual passion, as he pursues his love-interest Kito. The real cosmic joke on Elwood is that he doesn’t realize that Kito is an Indian girl, meaning that cohabitation with her ought to be verboten for an upright Caucasian. This sort of a joke, in which the protagonist is caught in some ludicrous situation that he has no power to meliorate, is characteristic of the final age of man, as a person loses his health and faculties with increasing age. To Elwood’s credit, he does overcome his prejudices on a basic “but I really want her” level, and though Elwood’s not a real fighter he does show enough determination to outwit the rat-worshippers. Afterward, Elwood settles down to some sort of romantic accomodation with not only Kito, but also with a rather degenerate looking white woman named Gharlena. This is about as close to a happy ending as one ever gets from a predominantly ironic narrative. As seen in the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide, the protagonist does not so much triumph as escape from the craziness of the madding world.

I mentioned in QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2 that the master tropes governing the organization of the violent combative mode were either “univectoral” or “multivectoral.” The first three of these “combative love-attacks” emphasize the back-and-forth exchanges of Hikari and Takeshi, of Swamp Thing and Abby, and of Empath and Magma, so all three would be multivectoral in nature. Only RAT GOD would be univectoral, since the story’s main emphasis is upon Elwood, with Kito, despite her erotic charms, taking the position of a support character.  

CHALLENGER/AGGRESSOR VS. DEFENDER PT. 4

 The original series to which this essay belongs was called just “CHALLENGER VS. DEFENDER,” but I find that “aggressor” seems to capture better than “challenger” the nature of the conflict-analysis I’m attempting.

The BORIS KARLOFF story “Macgonikkle’s Monster,” already analyzed for its myth-content here, also illustrates a certain dynamic between aggressor and defender roles. Though there is a monster in the story, and an archaic knight named “the Macgonikkle” who fights the beast, both are supporting characters in the conflict taking place between focal character Reggie Belton and the people of the unnamed Scots village he occupies.

Building on the discourse in the previous essays, the villagers assume the narratological role of “defenders.” They incarnate a status quo devoted to the veneration of all the village’s Scots customs, including their (admittedly imperfect) knowledge of the history of their esteemed culture-hero the Macgonikkle, a knightly lord from medieval times.

Reggie Belton, also a Scot, purchases the crumbling castle of the long-vanished knight, but establishes right away that he cares nothing for the local culture. This by itself puts him in the narratological position I now call “the aggressor.” The unknown writer of the story also suggests a bit of class warfare, in that Reggie, instead of remaining a lower-class scion of Glasgow, worked hard enough to turn himself into “new money,” thus enabling him to buy the Macgonikkle castle.

The villagers are aghast at Reggie’s pecuniary motives for purchasing the castle. The young millionaire, whose precise business is never specified, believes that he can make back his investment by using the castle as a backdrop for photo-shoots, particularly because of the “local color” of the incredibly realistic statue showing the Macgonikkle fighting a fearsome dragon. Some dialogue suggests that Reggie also may have bought the castle in order to tweak the noses of the hidebound Scots. Implicitly, he feels that their traditions did nothing to alleviate his lowborn birth in the slums, forcing him to go to work at age thirteen—though, to be sure, this setup is not altogether at odds with the stereotypical image of the pinchpenny Scotsman. In some ways Reggie seems like a typical “new money” rich guy, but in one respect the villagers scorn him for riding around town on a noisy scooter, even though this is less ostentatious than the practice of the castle’s former lords. One villager expresses a preference for seeing the old lords ride around town in limousines, and this suggests that the village as a whole took pleasure in the old order’s display of conspicuous consumption.

Reggie’s contempt for Scottish superstitions about their beloved knight is the main source of his aggression toward the hidebound villagers. The castle’s former owner, who presumably is no longer rich enough to maintain the Macgonikkle’s ancient residence, can’t compete with Reggie and his new money, while the old owner’s daughter complains that Reggie’s photo-shoots will create “ugly pictures of our national hero.” In truth, the only photo shoot readers see is one in which a handful of models in fashionable frocks parade around the knight-and-dragon statue. So maybe the daughter’s real resentment is just that the statue is reduced to the stature of a backdrop for a profane advertisement of something-or-other. Reggie avers that he plans to feature the Macgonikkle’s backstory in some magazine, which in theory would disseminate the legend beyond Scottish shores, but it appears that the villagers care only about keeping their local legends free of outside profanation.

The photo-shoot ends up doing more for the Macgonikkle than just enhancing his reputation. The strobe lights used in the shoot inadvertently reverse the magical spell that turned both the knight and his beastly adversary into stone images, so that both are freed to continue their battle. Further, at a point where the knight comes close to losing the fight, Reggie intervenes to help the Macgonikkle, enabling the nobleman to slay his foe at last, so that the great Scots hero can pass on to whatever his eternal reward may be. (It’s not much compensation for having been deprived of a normal life by a wizard’s spell, but it’s still better than remaining a stone statue for countless more years.)

So, Reggie’s aggression against the Scottish status quo ends up benefiting the very figure whom the villagers revere. The villagers are briefly on Reggie’s side, until he announces that he still wants to use the castle for more photo-shoots, and that he plans to have a sculptor create a “New Macgonikkle, a futuristic work of stainless steel.” The story ends with the defenders of the status quo deriding Reggie once more for defying their sense of tradition with “the shock of the new.” But no reader of this nearly forgotten tale is likely to agree with the villagers. Reggie’s “aggression” is in every way rendered as more attractive than the conservative village. No change seems forthcoming, but the reader can share in the wry humor of story-host Boris Karloff as he muses upon “tradition-bound Scottish villagers” (while wearing a tam-o-shanter, no less).

FRYEAN BLIND

 One detail I didn’t mention in my quasi-review of THE POETICS OF MYTH is that when the author presents his rather rushed summary of Northrop Frye’s contributions to myth-criticism, Meletinsky conflates two different selections of Frye’s work, quoting from both ANATOMY OF CRITICISM and from an essay from six years earlier, “The Archetypes of Literature.” But Frye’s arrangement of his mythoi is not the same in these two works. Meletinsky ends up telling readers that Frye has equated comedy and romance with the seasons of summer and of spring, which is true in the essay. But in ANATOMY, Frye reversed the two comparisons. Given that the book represents the fullness of the critic’s thought, this was a rather clumsy mistake on Meletinsky’s part.

However, Meletinsky’s section on Frye did remind me of a topic I brought up in my essay THE FOUR AGES OFDYNAMIS. I said in that essay that I couldn’t find any evidence that Frye had based his four-season, four-mythos schema on anything in Ovid. A fresh scrutiny, though, reveals that a page or two before Frye begins his first section on this subject, entitled “The Mythos of Comedy: Spring,” he does make reference to other famous quaternities, including “the four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death).” There’s not much chance that Frye was unaware of Ovid’s famous poem. It’s more likely that the “Four Ages of Man” as Ovid conceived them simply did not line up with Frye’s conception of his four mythoi, which took its principal influences from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray and Theodor Gaster.

Without question Ovid’s four ages are more persuasive than Frye’s foursome, not least because “death” is not really a period of life. In the ANATOMY Frye is acutely conscious that spring is associated with images of rebirth, not least in his own religion of Christianity, and also that historically Greek New Comedy tended to focus on the attempts of young men and women to be married despite the opposition of tyrannical authority figures. Thus, the critic leapfrogs over the period of actual childhood—Ovid’s “frail shoots and grasses”—so that he Frye can draw symbolic comparisons between mundane marriages of young people and the sacred union of God and humankind. In my early readings of the ANATOMY I was blown away by all of these mythopoeic allusions. Yet in later years I’ve come to decide that there are some problems with pages and pages of criticism on the subject of comedy that barely addressed the functions of humor.

Just as problematic is Frye’s attempt to disassociate the mythos of adventure-oriented romance with the “age” in which heroes venture forth to battle dragons and witches. Since Frye’s spring-protagonists must necessarily be adolescents, his summer-protagonists would have to be of a somewhat later age in order to represent “maturity.” In real life, however, adolescent males are more likely to seek combat-glory before they marry and settle down, even if New Comedies and their descendants tend not to depict that aspect of life. In my own writings, I tend to see that all of the strivings of adolescents, whether relating to Eros or Thanatos, belong on the same plane, since both activities are dominantly associated with persons in their “hardened” summer-phase. Raymond’s FLASH GORDON provides an example of focusing upon both romantic love and on romance in its connotation of a story of great conflict and adventure.

As I stated in FOUR AGES, comedy depends upon the frustrations of incongruity, and these frustrations aren’t exclusive to, say, the “heavy fathers” of Greek New Comedy. Slapstick humor, which may well have been prominent in Greek Old Comedy, may involve no romantic interest whatsoever. The incongruity can arise when the victim’s expectation of immunity from harm is thwarted by a banana peel under the shoe or a pie in the face. Yet Frye was right in thinking that comedy was essentially a mythos about “coming together:” it’s just not a union defined by romance. Rather, nearly every mortal ever born can laugh when a fictional character, good or bad, gets humiliated because every mortal ever born had experienced humiliation in some form, if only during the vicissitudes of childhood. Frye’s concept of comedy, centered upon the experience of adolescents, would seem to have nothing to say about a humor feature like SUGAR ‘N’ SPIKE, where the titular toddlers are constantly trying to make sense of the confusing adult world, but always fail because they see things “through a milk-bottle darkly.”

Frye’s period of “age” lines up loosely with what Ovid calls “the temperate season…midway between quick youth and growing age,” but Ovid’s conception remains superior here as well. The protagonists of serious drama need not be middle-aged, any more than the protagonists of comedy need be children (although it’s been remarked that Hamlet seems to have been a student at Wittenberg long enough to have left adolescence behind him). But in the mythos of drama the protagonists begin to feel the limitations of their personal power, just as living things begin to wane in autumn. Despite many of the adventure-trappings in the teleseries STAR TREK, the serial is at its heart a drama, given that it constantly deals with such limitations, even in such triumphant narratives as “Arena” and “Day of the Dove.”

Clearly what Frye means by “death” is a specific period of human decrepitude, the last phase for any given mortal before he or she dies, and Frye is entirely correct in lining up this state of existence with the season of winter and the mythos of the irony. Comedy levels human beings because everyone shares the humiliations of early life, but in a state of being in which life still holds endless hopes. Irony levels human beings in the opposite manner, separating rather than uniting, reminding us that we all die alone. The only redemption from the season of winter in actual life is the knowledge that one’s limited life may be perpetuated by either literal offspring or by “good works” that go down in history. In literature this slight satisfaction may give rise to a bittersweet black humor, so that even when an irony-tale ends with some sort of romantic alliance—as we see in both Voltaire’s CANDIDE and Elio Perti’s THE TENTH VICTIM —the romance only succeeds because the principals manage to isolate themselves from the madding world.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE REMAINS OF DREAMS" (WEEKLY YOUNG SUNDAY, 1987?)

In my review of the ONE POUND GOSPEL arc”The Lamb Resurrected,” I called attention to the way artist-writer Rumiko Takahashi used the genre of boxing-stories to put forth “a modern-day reading of samurai battle ethics.” A naïve critic might try to impose on Takahashi’s series some superficial oppositional interpretation, in which the comical blunders of the male boxer, amiable dolt Kosaku Hatanaka, served to “deconstruct masculinity” or some such nonsense. In truth, the female author of GOSPEL shows herself to be more than a little fascinated with the ethos of the male warrior, both in this series and others like RANMA ½ and INU-YASHA. The fact that Takahashi’s male heroes often need to be taken down a peg by the women in their lives doesn’t signify a rebellion against the patriarchy. Rather, such a trope more often signals the classical notion that men and women exist to counterbalance one another, in terms of both strengths and failings.

To be sure, Kosaku’s dim-witted but sincere desire for the woman in his life, the novice nun Sister Angela, doesn’t appear in “Dreams” as more than a side-element. This five-part arc was the third storyline in the series, so the young just-turned-pro boxer has already invited Angela to become his girlfriend, only to be summarily rebuffed. Implicity Takahashi intends to line up Kosaku’s general thick-headedness in romance with his similar incomprehension as to the discipline a boxer must observe, if he has any “dreams” of attaining a level of excellence.

The first two arcs also establish the comic rationale of the series: Kosaku loves the sport of boxing, but he loves food as much or more. At one point in the story Sister Angela remarks that if not for her acquaintance with Kosaku, she would never have known that boxers had to watch their weight at all times—a remark that allows her to stand in for uninformed readers, who will have their curiosity about the sport slaked by assorted lectures on the sport. (In contrast, readers don’t get many insights on Catholicism just because Angela’s a nun. Takahashi portrays Kosaku making Angela’s acquaintance by unburdening himself to her in the confession-box—though I rather doubt that nuns usually hear confessions, even in Japan.)

For the first time in the series, Takahashi establishes the reason why Kosaku is so focused on both fighting and feeding: in his heart of hearts, he nurtures the primitive notion that the more he eats, the stronger he is. In “Dreams” the young boxer gets the chance to test his theory. At a time when Kosaku’s already got a bad rep in the fight-game for his inability to manage his weight, the boxer and his long-despairing manager Mukaida get the chance for another bout—only to find that it’s offered by a boxer, Kappei Onimaru, whose reputation isn’t much better than Kosaku’s. Further, in order to fight welterweight Onimaru, featherweight Kosaku must gain twenty pounds. Kosaku takes the fight as an opportunity to pig out in the extreme.

Mukaida allows Kosaku to chase his phantom, and sure enough, the boxer learns how badly his new diet affects his speed and coordination when, as Mukaida puts it, the youth has “twenty-two pounds of dead meat strapped to his body.” Meanwhile, challenger Onimaru is chasing his own demons— or, as the title suggests, dreams that are about to come to an end. Unlike Kosaku, who’s won some bouts despite his bad rep, Onimaru has no wins to his credit, despite the fact that he takes the sport far more seriously than Kosaku does. Initially Onimaru’s manager schedules Onimaru’s battle with Kosaku just to give the older boxer a win—not least because he’s probably going to have to give up the sport, since he’s had no success and his wife has a baby on the way. But even before the two men fight, Onimaru recognizes Kosaku’s inherent skill and power, and becomes angry with Kosaku for abusing his body so flagrantly. Kosaku and Angela even learn that Onimaru keeps a shrine to all of his previous opponents, in order that Onimaru can express how deeply he feels about the sport, even in defeat.

When the water breaks for Onimaru’s unnamed wife—who, incidentally, gives him verbal hell for his stubbornness—the dedicated boxer is on fire to get at least one victory before his child is born. Indeed, Onimaru is so certain that his masculine pride will finally be vindicated that he decides that the name of the child—which he’s sure will be a boy—will be “Victor.” (The wife sarcastically asks, “If it’s a girl, will you want to name her ‘Loser?’”) The fight ensues, and though Kosaku has a hard time of it thanks to his extra weight, he remains the superior fighter and emerges victorious. Onimaru is at last chastened enough to give up on the last remnants of his boxing-dream, and reconciles himself with his new status as father—naturally, of a little girl.

In contrast, though Kosaku no longer believes in his dream of eating anything he wants, it’s axiomatic that he’ll continue to aggravate his trainers by sneaking snacks. But Angela is encouraged both by Kosaku’s good intentions and his inability to live up to them—for this state of affairs ensures that he will always need a “mother confessor. ” Thus she will be able to remain a part of the handsome boxer’s life, even if she’s not quite ready to confess her own feelings in the matter.

THE BEAUTY OF GRAVITY

In the last two sections of FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS, I found myself questioning the conclusions I'd made in the 2012 essay-series GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW. In Part 1, I wrote:

I've noted before that of all the major philosophers to write about sublimity in connection with literature, Edmund Burke is one of the most profligate in providing examples.  However, I note that most of his examples fall into one of two mythoi: the "drama" (PARADISE LOST, HENRY IV) or the "adventure" (THE FAERIE QUEENE).  Schopenhauer, for his part, recognizes only "tragedy" (which I regard as identical with the category "drama") as sublime.
Moving to those readerships concerned with "the sense of wonder," it's my informal impression that when fans of fantasy and SF wax enthusiastic about those works with that quality, they rarely if ever center upon works of the other two mythoi, "comedy" and "irony."  In the domain of prose, works like Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS are celebrated for their ability to elicit wonder.  But though one can find science-fictional marvels and magical mysteries in such works as Fredric Brown's WHAT MAD UNIVERSE or the deCamp-Pratt COMPLEAT ENCHANTER, I would say such works-- both of which are comedies-- are never celebrated for the "sense of wonder."  Ironic science fiction is often celebrated for its intellectual rigor-- indeed, if one reads Kingsley Amis' NEW MAPS FROM HELL, one gets the impression that no one ever wrote good SF but Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth-- but Amis praises them for satirical visions, not for the "sense of wonder."
So, are comedy and irony in some way inimical to the sense of wonder? 

I then explored Schopenhauer's remarks on how the "serious" forms of literature encouraged emotional investment while the "ludicrous" forms did not, and, glossing this statement by categorizing the forms along Fryean lines, I attempted to show reasons why comedies and ironies did not manifest subimity in the form of "the sense of wonder."

Now, at the time I wrote the CROSSBOW series, my definition of sublimity was still fuzzy, as were some of the philosophical definitions available to me. A year later, I wrote the series TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I, in which I distinguished two forms of sublimity, "the dynamic-sublime," more or less identical with Kant's formulation in CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, and "the combinatory-sublime," which I considered more applicable to literature than Kant's second form, "the mathematical-sublime." Thus, early in the same month that I wrote the CROSSBOW series, I cited (in the essay SUBLIMELY SUPER) this example of the literary sublime:

This example suggests to me is that at the time I was groping toward a vision of the combinatory-sublime, which in the aforesaid essay I defined as sublime because of its appeal to "unboundedness."

So this was the kind of sublimity I found lacking in various works of SF/fantasy, among them being the above examples of works by Frederic Brown and Pohl-and-Kornbluth.

Now, my current system does not claim that comedies or ironies are unable to conjure with either "the dynamic-sublime" or "the combinatory-sublime." In 2012 I had not aligned my concept of "mythicity" with that of the combinatory mode, and so, in the mythcomics essays I began in 2011, I had no problem in finding examples of high mythicity for both comedies (the URUSEI YATSURA story "A Good Catch") and ironies (the "Ed the Happy Clown" continuity from YUMMY FUR).

However, I do think Schopenhauer's distinction does apply to one SUBCATEGORY of the combinatory-sublime. I think it's more difficult for "ludicrous narratives" to bring forth the specific "sense of wonder" theme of "unbounded beauty," the sort of thing one can also get from the great "mind-meld" in CHILDHOOD'S END or Tolkien's vision of elvish elegance in LORD OF THE RINGS. Beauty is harder to get across in works of the ludicrous, no matter the intensity of the "tonal levity" involved. In comedies the reader learns to expect to see another joke or slapstick pratfall just around the corner, while in ironies the reader certainly doesn't expect to see any form of beauty, unbounded or otherwise, to stand against the relentless ennui of entropy.

And thus what I wrote regarding the nature of "conviction" in the CROSSBOW series similarly applies not to the combinatory-sublime in general, but specifically to the subcategory of unbounded beauty.

Because even the unbounded type of beauty needs some degree of gravity, if only for contrast.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PT. 4

One more line of thought did indeed develop from my meditations here on the alignment of the four Fryean mythoi with my concepts of tonal gravity and tonal levitty, and that is to consider how the current arrangement, patterned after Ovid's "Four Ages of Man," lines up with Frye's own meditations on the ways in which critics validate or do not validate the four mythoi.

"...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme..."-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

So, in Part 3, I sorted out the four mythoi thusly with respect to the orientations of levity and gravity:

COMEDY-- plerotic and levity-oriented
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and gravity-oriented
DRAMA-- kenotic and gravity-oriented
IRONY-- kenotic and levity-oriented

Now, Frye's main point in the "Mouldy Tales" essay is to state that "Iliad critics" tend to prefer irony and drama because these seem to appeal to what Frye, borrowing from Freud, calls "the reality principle." Frye does not in that essay invoke the corresponding "pleasure principle," but it seems evident that he means to say that the mythoi of adventure and comedy align with the latter principle, if only because the other two mythoi tend to embrace "happy endings" for the main characters.

Now, my formulations of "tonal gravity" and "tonal levity" did not arise from the question of what mythoi were most popular with critics. Rather, the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW series started with the question of whether or not "the sense of wonder" thrived in the "levity-oriented" mythoi as well as it did in the "gravity-oriented" mythoi.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of  *tonal gravity,* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity,* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

But most critics are not concentrating upon whether or not a work delivers "the sense of wonder," which elsewhere I've compared to Huxley's ideas of "upward and downward transcendence." If one agrees with Frye, what they want is "the reality principle," which Frye compares to the notion of "high seriousness." Yet, even if this is true of drama, works of irony are not predominantly serious, even though their humor is what many would call "dark" or "black," suggesting a strong difference in tone between works of irony and works of comedy.

I tend to validate Frye's judgment on "Iliadic critics" since I feel myself to be, like Frye, part of the minority of "Odyssey critics." Certainly during my tenure writing reviews for THE COMICS JOURNAL in the day suggested that most of the people writing for Gary Groth tended to emulate the critics of canonical literature, and that even if some of them valued comedy more than the average canon-critic, they were foursquare against the mythos that most dominated American comic books, that of adventure.

This suggests to me that my original writings on levity and gravity need some modification, which caused me to contemplate different concentrations of these concepts of identificatory investment.  Thus I would now alter the above definitions of the mythoi to read to address the strength of the levity-orientation or the gravity-orientation:

COMEDY-- plerotic and oriented on light levity
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and oriented on light gravity
DRAMA-- kenotic and oriented on high gravity
IRONY-- kenotic and oriented on high levity

Now, as it happens, in arranging the four mythoi, I followed Frye's season-based arrangement, which to the best of my recollection did not involve Ovid's "four ages." In the first two FOUR AGES essays, I said that the *dynamis* of each mythos compared well with one of the "ages of man:" child, adolescent, mature adult, older adult. Thus I perceive that even though adventure is "serious" in terms of how its readers are expected to invest themselves in the character's struggles, it is a "light seriousness" that canon-critics do not regard as covalent with their "high serousness." Adventure-stories, while they may not involve adolescent characters, are often regarded as adolescent in nature because they tend to have happy endings, no matter what sufferings their characters may endure  to reach said ending. Not all works within the dramatic mythos have unhappy endings, of course. But critics tend to prefer dramas because there is a certain expectation of a stronger chance for a dolorous, and therefore more bracing, conclusion to the story. Thus dramas meet the critic's desire for high seriousness.

With the two "mythoi of levity," comedy, more than irony, still allows for more identification with its characters than does irony, and thus comedy also shows a predilection for happy endings. Though the phrase "light comedy" does not apply to all comedies across the board, it suggests something of the attitude that the Iliadic critic has toward comedy in general: there's still enough of a tendency for viewers to invest in the characters' fates and to want to see said characters validated to some degree. This is not true of the irony, for the creator of the irony has, so to speak, turned up the dial on his levity-making machines until everything in the story floats free of any readerly attachment. Again, some ironies-- such as Voltaire's CANDIDE-- may have relatively "happy" endings in comparison to other, more relentless ironies. But there is no sense, to paraphrase Frye, that the world has been reborn by a ritual of jubiliation: if anything, even the worlds with relatively happy endings are doomed, just as "older adults" are doomed to end their days and their experience of the ongoing world.

Thus, this current rethinking invalidates the verdict of the GRAVITY'S RAINBOW series, in that I would now opine that both adventures and comedies show a greater tendency toward encouraging reader identification than one sees in dramas or ironies. To pursue the metaphor of the four ages once more, it's as if the comedy and the adventure allow for the most identification because their characters were designed to be triumphant, while the drama and the irony are designed to allow the reader to pull back from the characters, even if for very different reasons.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PART 3

Here I'll be bringing my formulations in Part 1 and Part 2 into line with some of my observations regarding audience-conviction.

In the FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS series, I argued that there were four states of "dynamis," which both Northrop Frye and I use to signify the "power of action" of characters in fiction. and that those four states parallel the four-staged development of human beings as described by Ovid in his METAMORPHOSES. In the poem Ovid asserts that every human being starts out as being like Spring, "quickening yet shy," develops into "Summer's hardiness," loses those "first flushes" upon entering Autumn's "temperate season," and finally enters the domain of "senile Winter," which is marked by the "terror in palsy" that will precede Death. These states I then compared to my four quasi-Fryean mythoi, respectively comedy, adventure, drama and irony.

Now, all of my formulations regarding kenosis and plerosis, informed largely by the analyses of Theodore Gaster and Jane Ellen Harrison, which are focused not on individual growth and decay but upon a given society's attempt to maintain itself in what Gaster calls the "durative" sense. Thus there are four forms of ritual-- what Gaster calls "the jubilative,""the invigorative," "the purgative," and the morificative," all of which also align with the four mythoi, and in the same order.

So the four mythoi line up well when paralleled to the "ages of man," or to the yearly rituals of archaic societies , which are intended to maintain the society as if it were a cyclical living entity, able to reconstitute itself indefinitely, unlike individual persons. However, there's far less uniformity in terms of the ways each mythos works with the audience's *conviction* regarding the narratives of each mythoi, since it's possible for audiences to take some mythoi seriously and others unseriously:

The drama and the adventure, often perceived as two "serious" types of entertainment, are easy to confound, even as are the two types of "unserious" entertainment, comedy and irony.-- GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, PART 1.

In the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW series, I meditated upon the attitudes of "serious conviction" and "unserious lack of conviction." In the POETICS, Aristotle had characterized these states of audience-perception as "weighty" and "light" respectively. I followed this formulation somewhat by speaking of the first category as being dominantly characterized by "tonal gravity," while the other was dominantly characterized by "tonal levity." Assuming that one keeps to the order by which Frye arranged his mythoi, explicitly patterned after the four seasons, then here we have not a smooth progression, but a sort of oscillation. We start with the jubilative form of the unserious, which is perhaps the "lightest" of the four, and proceed to the invigorative, which is dominantly serious. The purgative mythos then increases the "gravity" and instills an even greater sense of seriousness-- and yet, this particular center cannot hold, and the mortificative mythos arises from the purgative, taking on a new form of "levity," one so free of the bonds of literary gravity that hardly anything can be valued.

Similarly, the ritual processes of *kenosis* (emptying) and *plerosis* (filling) also follow this oscillating progress, as I pointed out in SOMETIMES THEY WIN, SOMETIMES THEY LOSE:

I generalized that two of the four Fryean mythoi allow the protagonist to win sometimes, lose sometimes.  One of the two is *drama,* a mythos which possesses a serious tone and a *kenotic* (emptying) audience-function, and *comedy,* a mythos which possesses an unserious tone and a  *plerotic* (filling) audience-function. In contrast, as I also stated in that essay, the function of *adventure* is "to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat," while in contrast "the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction."  Just to keep symmetry with the above assertions, I'll reiterate that *adventure* is a mythos with a serious tone and a *plerotic* audience-function, while *irony* is a mythos with an unserious tone and a *kenotic* audience-function.

So here too we see an oscillation between modes:

COMEDY-- plerotic and levity-oriented
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and gravity-oriented
DRAMA-- kenotic and gravity-oriented
IRONY-- kenotic and levity-oriented

In the same essay plerosis-kenosis essay, I specified that what society is being "filled with" is whatever a given society perceives to be "life-supporting" elements, while the same society attempts to "empty itself" of "life-denying" elements. But then the objection arises: if the jubilative and mortificative mythoi address their respective processes of filling and emptying with only a "light" sense of conviction, why would those processes have any societal importance?

My best solution for the time being is that most if not all societies need what I've called "vacations from morals," and that works of tonal levity, simply by the fact that they are NOT meant to fill the audience with a sense of "the grave and the constant," serve as a counterpoint to their more serious-minded counterparts. Hard to say if this line of thought will bear more fruit.