LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM PT. 4

My last post (for now) on the subject of the limited/limitless dichotomy concerns a certain irony about the many concepts of archaic myth. On one hand, this sort of authorless myth is the essence of literature's combinatory mode, in that its unknown creators allowed their imaginations to roam freely in spawning stories about the Earth being formed from the bones of giants or giant bird's-eggs. And yet, the most developed forms of myth are also grounded in the world of limitations, as the mythmakers often invoke what I call "epistemological patterns," which are based in observations about the ways of human psychology and sociology, and of the ways of nature both in cosmological and metaphysical aspects.

As seen in my paraphrase of passages in Susanne Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, the author disparaged the humbler forms of folklore in favor of her idea of myth-stories:

...the psychological basis of this remarkable form of nonsense [the fairy tale] lies in the fact that the story is a fabrication out of subjective symbols, not out of observed folkways and nature-ways [in "myth," with which Langer contrasts fairy tales].-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 173.

In subsequent essays I've remarked that I have found a great deal of mythicity-- i.e., storytelling tropes linked with epistemological patterns-- in folktales and fairytales as well. Langer's not totally wrong, though, because full-fledged myths tend to develop their myth-ideas more thoroughly than do folk-stories. In a strange anticipation of the "high art/low art" dichotomy mentioned in this essay-series' first installment, myths were canonical "high art" and the tales were the "low art" that few cultures sought to preserve. 

Yet while modern "high art" does reference epistemological patterns as well, it does so with what Frye calls "high seriousness" as well, which often (though not always) obstructs the free flow of the imagination. In contrast, modern "low art," even though its basic form is comparable to that of simple-constructed folktales, demonstrates a greater tendency to develop its myth-ideas freely. This probably comes about because modern low-art stories are no longer being crafted for an oral audience, and so the raconteurs are more likely to weave together simple plots with involved myth-ideas-- one example being the delirious Origin of the Golden Age Hawkman.

MYTH AND SEXPLOITATION

 In the response-thread for EYES OF THESERPENT, reader AT-AT Pilot brought up the topic of mythic content with respect to comics using cheesecake art. After making my response there, I decided to build on it with respect to the overall topic of art with a “sexploitation” angle and its possible relation to myth-content.

To define the second term first, “myth-content” arises in fiction when its authors produce what I term “epistemological patterns” in their work. These patterns are drawn from real-world observations about the way things work in different aspects of reality: patterns of the physical and metaphysical properties of the cosmos, or patterns of human beings in both their individual and social matrices. These patterns, when transmuted into literature, should not be valued in the same fashion that scientific data is valued: as reproductions of how those factors function in reality. Rather, the patterns serve to deepen the symbolic universe of each myth-narrative, thus allowing readers to reflect upon all the different factors that make up experience, when seen through the free play of imaginative fantasy.

The first term, “sexploitation,” also requires some analysis. The term seems to have sprung into being as a tag for works that sold themselves to the public by focusing upon spectacular versions of sexual depiction and/or activity. This view assumes a sort of baseline for normative sexual depiction, which might extend even to those works that seek to avoid sex as much as possible, like Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND. Starting from this supposition, one must assume ever-increasing levels of sexual depiction, and for convenience I tallied three such levels in this essay. More on the levels of spectacular depiction later.

While a number of critics have sneered at sexual depiction as taking audiences’ minds away from “better things,” sex and myth are certainly not in conflict in my system—not least because sex is an important aspect of archaic religious mythologies. Since I’ve continually favored the analysis of literary works through the heuristic tool of Joseph Campbell’s four functions, I thought it would prove stimulating to look at four sexploitation works I’ve already reviewed, each from the viewpoint of a particular function.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION arises most often in literary myths involving sexuality, probably because each individual’s sexual nature is as a bedrock of that individual’s personality. In my review of Wally Wood’s PIPSQUEAK PAPERS, I noted that he encoded his fairly misogynistic feelings about women into a short series of riffs taking place in a burlesque (in more than one sense) fantasy-verse. Perhaps the most revealing projection in PIPSQUEAK is the way he undermines the sex-fantasies of main character Pip toward his perpetually nude mate, the nymph Nudina. Pip starts the story as an undersized sprite whose dinky wang can’t possibly satisfy Nudina. He acquires a “second body” that allows him to enjoy the naughty nymph, but soon finds that it’s a drag to always be defending her from rapacious villains. At the end his reward for remaining true to Nudina is that he loses his alternate body and falls into slavery alongside her, in a situation where he can no longer satisfy her and must also put up with the child he sired by her. Whatever psycho-demons Wood sought to lay to rest via this satire, he nevertheless gave them much more complexity than he did in a romp like SALLY FORTH.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FUNCTION looms forth wherever a given work seeks to show how human society is affected by the disparate natures of men and women. Thus, Russ Meyer’s FASTERPUSSYCAT KILL KILL, which starts out by welcoming the audience to “violence,” shows male and female social roles breaking down by the new breed of the Sixties Women. Three go-go dancers, less criminals than lovers of life in the fast lane, become involved in murder, mostly because of their bad-tempered, karate-chopping leader Varla. Instead of butting heads with the patriarchal order in the form of lawmen, the trio of hot babes—who have abducted a young, naïve woman who witnessed the murder-- comes into conflict with a trio of men living in a remote desert-cabin. Both the three men and the three women have various dark secrets, but none of the characters have “psychologies” as such. The Old Man, father to a normal young man and to a mentally impaired hulk, represents not so much abstract patriarchy as a male sexual desire to prey on women. Varla, hoping to rob the old hermit, pits both her feminine wiles and her penchant for violence against this male prerogative, but her victory proves pyrrhic. She sacrifices both of her female followers to her greed and almost destroys all three men, only to be ignominiously defeated by the girl hostage.

THE COSMOLOGICAL FUNCTION perks up with some loony effects in the 1961 film INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES. Though the viewpoint characters are Penn and Philbrick, a pair of goofy army privates, the real stars are the titular stellar villains, the risibly named “Doctor Puna” and “Professor Tanga.” CREATURES was almost certainly conceived by writer Bruno VeSota as a baggy-pants reaction to a spate of “space Amazon” films seen during American cinema’s sci-fi boom of the 1950s. As one sees in most space-babe films, Puna and Tanga are designed to provide cheesecake-fantasies for the two homely schmucks. Both alien babes are tall and stacked, and though they’ve supposedly been hidden on Earth for ten years, both have coiffed hairdos and walk around in high heels while wearing outfits that look like swimsuits with flared collars attached. They came to Earth to scout the planet for possible conquest by their people, and they’ve just managed to get their damaged ship ready to return to “the black voids of space” when the army-ants come knocking. Yet the big girls are not only spies, but also scientists, and they maintain a small standing army of “vegetable men” as guards (a conceit probably swiped from 1951’s THE THING). Unlike most space Amazons, the two women are both physically and mentally superior to the male leads, and they display impressive mastery of sciences far beyond the Earthmen. Still, the alien ladies are defeated by their biology. Tanga tells Puna that the sympathy she feels toward the puny Earthlings is the stimulation of her “maternal nature.” Nevertheless, after ten years of raising little vege-men in incubators, Puna is hard up enough that even Philbrick’s dubious charms can persuade her to “sleep with the enemy.” Tanga also falls for Penn without putting up that much resistance. Science gives you weapons and technology, but sex, even with shrimpy guys, keeps you warm at night.

THE METAPHYSICAL FUNCTION culminates with in Frank Thorne’s first graphic novel featuring GHITA OFALIZARR. Ghita, a cheerful prostitute who seems willing to have sex with nearly anyone, has her receptive feminine nature (as a metaphysician might see it) invaded by a masculine propensity for violence. Necromantic transference is at the root of it, in that Ghita gets raped by an undead king, one significantly named for a Philistine fertility-god. From then on, Ghita is a reluctant badass, able to slaughter opponents with a sword rather than inviting them to her bed. Late in the story it’s revealed that her transformation was somehow stage-managed by one of her world’s gods: Tammuz, a female deity using the name of a male Sumerian myth-figure. In this raucous ode to conjoined sex and violence, Thorne suggests that both male and female natures proceed from mirroring forces in heaven, which means that Ghita is pretty much stuck between the rock of masculinity and the soft place of femininity for the remainder of her career.

Returning quickly to the topic of the levels, I would judge that the first three of these sexploitation examples fall into the category I term “titillation.” Only GHITA falls into the most overtly spectacular category, “pornification,” insofar as Thorne is evoking the fantasy of endless, cost-free sex and violence, paralleling, though not indebted to, the dominant associations of sexual pornography.

I chose works that fit these more extreme categories since they’re the sort of thing most readers envision when they think “sexploitation.” But to be sure, sexploitation also appears in what I termed the least spectacular category, “glamor.” Examples of glamor-sexploitation might have included such works as the 1966 BATMAN—which repeatedly appealed to older male viewers with sumptuous female eye-candy—and also Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA, which I also attribute to the glamor category despite the series’ frequent use of female nudity. I may devote a future essay to discussing the aesthetic that separates the three levels, but for now, that’s all folks.

AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE

From the first posts on this blog, I've asserted a commonality, though not an absolute identity, between religious myth and all later forms of literature. I've also claimed that the basis of that commonality is "symbolic complexity." Here I want to address in greater detail the way this complexity operates in both myth and literature.

I'll start with my reading of Jung:

In Jung's view, myth, both in its archaic and modern manifestations, is a creative response to the archetypal experience.  He opposes the idea of "myth as primitive science" advanced by E.B. Tylor and James Frazer, claiming that primitive man possesses an "imperative need... to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner psychic events."  I agree, but with the caveat that in many instances primitive humans did look for aspects of "outer sense experiences" that were regularly replicated.  This is the sort of thing Tylor mistook for primitive science; the idea that, for instance, a story about a sun-god was an attempt to understand how the real sun worked.

In Jung's paradigm, it's impossible to imagine a primitive trying to explain the regular motions of the sun in terms of a figure like Helios driving his chariot across the sky.  However, it would be fair to state that many of the features of the physical world that science would study in terms of their etiology-- the movement of celestial bodies, the characteristics of vegetation, et al-- were sacred clues to the nature of divine power.  The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated.  For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.-- JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE (2012)

Since Jung was focused almost entirely upon explaining everything in myth and literature in terms of "inner psychic events," I've frequently turned to Joseph Campbell to deal with the specific ways that myth and literature translate "outer sense experiences" into archetypal discourse.

For my purpose it doesn’t matter whether or not most modern psychologists dominantly recognize the Oedipus complex as valid. Within the sphere of literature, any storytelling trope that has expressive significance to humankind is, phenomenologically speaking, “real.” This is why the “four functions” that Joseph Campbell applies to mythology have so much potential for pluralist literary studies. Campbell's approach allows not only for the psychological and the sociological aspects of humankind, which I find to be the two modes on which most literary analyses draw. Campbell's formula also allows one to interpret aspects of the “cosmological” (the nature of physical reality) and the “metaphysical,” (the nature of reality beyond the physical). And just as myth-criticism doesn't judge a myth as "wrong" because it's built upon a cosmological or metaphysical conceit that moderns don't recognize, the same holds true for literary studies. Thus the Oedipus complex, whether "real" or not in the psychological sense, becomes real in the literary continuum by virtue of its expressive power. But of course, in contrast to Freud's exaggerated claims for his complex's universality, Oedipus shares his reality with Jung's Mercurius and any number of other formulas.-- INCEST WE TRUST PART 5 (2010)

In the first citation I spoke of ancient myth-tellers orienting their stories upon "sacred clues" regarding "the nature of divine power." Such "clues" might be better termed "epistemological patterns," whether they fall into one or more of Campbell's four categories. Further, when I used the phrase "the nature of the divine power," I was not speaking of my own interpretation of the symbolic process in myth and literature. Rather, I sought to approximate the way that an ancient myth-teller *might* believe that his observations about celestial movement or vegetative reproduction reflected something vital about either his gods or the ways in which the gods chose to make the world.  For me, as a modern amateur pundit, I believe that both myth and literature utilize epistemological patterns-- whether sociological or psychological, cosmological or metaphysical-- to create structured fictional worlds in which those patterns confer meaning, or at least perspective, upon real life as it is lived, without any imposed meaning or perspective.

Now, Wikipedia supplies a detailed definition of epistemology as it is generally used in philosophy.

Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas: (1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification,^[1][2] (2) various problems of skepticism, (3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and (4) the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?",^[3] "What does it mean to say that we know something?",^[4] and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?

By this definition, neither myth nor literature are relevant to epistemology as it exists in philosophical discourse. These expressive forms assert epistemological patterns but even the most complex works of myth and literature do not seek to subject these patterns to sustained philosophical inquiry. I wrote last year:

...literature is not concerned with outright declarations as such. Sir Philip Sidney argued that "the poet never affirmeth, and therefore never lieth." This is tantamount to Sidney's stating that the poet's declarations are structured more as possibilities than absolute truths. Obviously, there are some poets who do "affirm" more than others, but Sidney's analysis is on target. Commonplace language deals with strong propositions, but literature favors weaker propositions.-- STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2.

(Parenthetically, I'll note though this quote addresses only literature, I see the same spectrum in archaic mythology as well: some myths are oriented on "affirming" truths that are pleasing to a given community, while others are more free-form.)

So if philosophical epistemology is concerned with the nature of absolute truth-- even if it might be, as in William James, to disprove its existence-- then mythico-literary epistemology is concerned only with "half-truths," with exposing its audience to pure possibilities. Supposing that one could find a particular storyteller who first contextualized the daily revolution of the sun as "Helios driving his chariot across the sky." That storyteller might "affirm" this story in a religious sense, in that he might choose to believe that Helios or some other god inspired to relate the narrative, or he might know that it was purely his own conceit. But no matter what his personal attitude toward his story might be, the story can still go one of two ways for his audience: either believing the story as a literal revelation or simply regarding the narrative as a useful metaphor for a largely incomprehensible physical phenomenon.

The phrase "epistemological patterns" more or less supplants a term I used only once in COSMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS, that of "simulacra of knowledge:"

Thus it should be seen that the forms of knowledge within a fictional universe should not be downgraded because they do not align with what is deemed "scientific knowledge" in the real world. All forms of knowledge in a fictional universe should be deemed *simulacra of knowledge.*  The same holds true for the other functions. Audiences need not believe in Jung's psychological concepts to regard Fellini's Jung-influenced films as illuminating the human condition; need not validate the socialist fallacy of "the rise of the proletariat" in order to derive pleasure from Jack London's IRON HEEL, nor even credit Dave Sim's fusion of Judaism, Islam and Christianity to get insights out of CEREBUS THE AARDVARK.

Further, the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Finally, I will trace back my preference for "half-truths" over alleged "philosophical truths" in my definition of "affective freedom from 2016's AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

What I’ve repeatedly emphasized that the world of affective freedom is a whole package: that the ability to imagine impossible things is crucial to human nature, whether it leads to specific inventions or not. Depicting a shaman as a bird-human hybrid may not have led directly to any fantasies of personal flight, and thus the shaman-dream might have no relevance at all to the development of powered flight. I argue, rather, that whether the subjective outpourings of myth and fiction do or don't lead to useful developments, all of them are equally important in determining the meaning of human freedom.

COSMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

In the first month of posts devoted to "1001 comics myths" and to their Bizarro counterparts the "null-myths," I've covered three of the four types of Campbellian function: "the psychological," "the sociological," and "the metaphysical." The next two will focus on the last of Campbell's functions, "the cosmological," which I also explored in some depth in the essay COMBINATORY CONSIDERATIONS. However, I need to expand still further on the status of the functions with respect to real-world knowledge.

In the aforesaid essay I emphasized the fact that the "regularity" of certain phenomena led to their being encoded in both archaic myths and modern literature. However, whereas regularity (aka "causal coherence," as explained here) is a paramount consideration in the domain of science, it's a secondary consideration in art and literature. In the domain of art, one can choose to adhere absolutely to the demands of a naturalistic cosmos, or one can explore the realms of the uncanny or the marvelous, without any loss of mental rigor.

Though this principle applies equally well to all four Campbellian functions, I stress it with respect to the cosmological-- the function that deals with all the various "science-based" data-- because it's become tediously routine for many fans to sneer at various comics-stories-- usually though not only superhero tales-- because they offend against the Great God Science.

This isn't to say that there aren't a lot of dopey, careless mistakes with regard to violations of physical law, and I've mocked a lot of these myself. In the circles of Marvel fandom, one of the most egregious appeared in the pages of MARVEL TEAM-UP, and was spotlighted in the MARVEL NO-PRIZE BOOK, as follows:

But the sort of tedious sneering I'm thinking of is more on the level of, "Ha ha, Peter Parker would never have received spider-powers from the bite of a radioactive spider; he would've caught CANCER and DIED." Rather than showing either wit or perspicacity, the mocker who comes up with this sort of nonsense is closer to the child playing "shoot-'em-up" who refuses to lie dead when he's shot. It shows an inability to recognize that within the sphere of a given game, the rules as established supersede the considerations of reality.

Thus it should be seen that the forms of knowledge within a fictional universe should not be downgraded because they do not align with what is deemed "scientific knowledge" in the real world. All forms of knowledge in a fictional universe should be deemed *simulacra of knowledge.*  The same holds true for the other functions. Audiences need not believe in Jung's psychological concepts to regard Fellini's Jung-influenced films as illuminating the human condition; need not validate the socialist fallacy of "the rise of the proletariat" in order to derive pleasure from Jack London's IRON HEEL, nor even credit Dave Sim's fusion of Judaism, Islam and Christianity to get insights out of CEREBUS THE AARDVARK.

I should add in closing that while many SF novels and comics have used "science-factoids" as minor gimmicks within narratives, these in themselves are no better than *motifs;* their presence does not necessarily confer high mythicity upon the story as a whole. When considering the first new cosmological myth for this series, I looked at the early stories of the Silver Age FLASH. I might have liked to have included, under "1001 myths," the first Captain Cold story. However, though the villain's origin-tale does dole out a few references to "the phenomena of cold," those references don't eventuate in a high level of cosmological mythicity.

FOUR BY FOUR

The "empty and purely formal" archetype is the principle around which these "clues" aggregated.  For Jung the emotional wonder of beholding the sun as a sacred mystery would be the keystone of making a myth about it, while the specific local details of any given myth were the "ions and molecules" upon which the organizing power acts.-- JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE.

I regard sensation as conscious, and intuition as unconscious, perception. For me sensation and intuition represent a pair of opposites, or two mutually compensating functions, like thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling as independent functions are developed, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from sensation (and equally, of course from intuition as the necessary counterpart of sensation).-- Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES.

Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function,... realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery....The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.... The third function is the sociological one – supporting and validating a certain social order.... It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date.... But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to – and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.-- Campbell, THE POWER OF MYTH.

It's long been of interest to me that both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell emphasized a quaternity of functions, though to very different ends.

Jung's four functions are quasi-Kantian deductions about the nature of consciousness, which I consider identical to the "organizing power" of archetypal potentiality.  One might say that through the lens of these functions one views mythical representations from "the inside out."

Campbell's, however, belong to the world of the actual than of the potential. Myths leave "clues" about the "ions and molecules" that make up human experience, and from which the structures of mythical representation are assembled. Through the lens of these functions one views these representations from the "outside in."

For the majority of my essays on both THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE and NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!, I have somewhat privileged Campbell's functions in terms of analyzing the mythical representations found in both canonical and popular fiction. That's because Campbell's functions deal with functions of information-- forms he earlier termed "metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological"-- rather than pure states of consciousness.  I might attempt to use Jung's function-terms to assert that Dave Sim's cerebral CEREBUS privileges the function of "thinking" more than any other, and that Frank Miller's SIN CITY privileges the function of "sensation." But though it's easy to make such an assertion, it's less easy to demonstrate its truth through textual examples.

In contrast, if I wish to state that CEREBUS' psychological content is more complex than that of SIN CITY, I could examine both works in term of some common psychologically-informed archetype and sort out which of them provided more elaborations of the archetype.

Still, there is value in viewing Jung's functions of consciousness as potentialities of a fourfold "axial system," to evoke Jung's own metaphor.  I have not attempted to elucidate this system in detail, but I do view Jung's functions as expressing the fourfold ways in which relationships between facets of consciousness are implemented; to wit:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.

The THEMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.


In addition to calling attention to the polysemic nature of the human mind's "organizing powers," all four Jung-functions will also prove signficant to my continuing description of that form of sublimity I term "the combinatory-sublime," which in turn may provide a holistic concept of the nature of creativity.

 

 

BACK TO BATAILLE PART 1

“Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts.  The first reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of the individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity.  The second part is represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality) - all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves.  Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production.”—Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure.”

I’ve recently finished a short biography of Georges Bataille by Stuart Kendall. Like most biographies, it’s most interesting in its first half, when it’s explicating how the subject of the bio came to articulate his particular set of beliefs, passions or skills, and then the second half falls off a little, descending into assorted details that pave the way to the grave, so to speak. Kendall’s most interesting observation is as follows:

Bataille’s sngle most significant essay, ‘The Notion of Expediture,’ inverts the classical—and hence, also the Marxist—economy model by insisting that consumption rather than production determines the nature and goals of culture.

I've recently completed a response for Sequart to the Bataillean concepts on a separate theme, so I'll quote myself from that forthcoming essay:

As seen in the opening quote, “expenditure” is Bataille’s term for one of two aspects of the cultural process of consuming things; elsewhere Bataille plainly distinguishes this aspect from anything related to “production and conservation.” Marx defined all aspects of culture through the consideration of who controlled the means of production, and proposed socialism as a solution to the problem of alienated labor. But if Bataille is right, then a more fundamental and inescapable alienation exists between the two aspects of consumption: the desire to conserve and the desire to expend.

And again:

Whether the creator is an archaic Icelandic skald or a modern purveyor of artcomics, he earns his daily bread by offering cultural experiences that “have no end beyond themselves.” A cash nexus supports the exchange between artist and audience, but as Bataille suggests, this “process of acquisition” has simply layered over a more fundamental form of exchange. No artist exists without influence from his real or potential audience, even as that audience changes in response to the more provocative attempts to find the audience’s favor. This egalitarian reading stands in stark contrast to the elitist vision of an avant-gardist like Clement Greenberg, propounding the romantic notion of unalloyed geniuses leading pliable audiences into the promised land of enlightenment.

In essays like this one I’ve made no bones about my antipathy for Marxist ideology, but I confess that I haven’t explored on this blog Bataille’s formulations as an alternative to Marx’s focus on the infamous “means of production.”

Elswhere in the biography Kendall applies the Bataillean ideal of consumption to the concept of identity as mediated through fictional constructs:

Consumption is, in short, a means by which individuals negotiate their identities through expenditure.

I don't recall that Bataille makes use of the contemporary-sounding term "negotiation," but I agree with Kendall's interpretation and extend it a little further into terrain that Bataille, given his anti-idealist influences (Freud, Marx, Sade), would never have contemplated.

Bataille would probably have deemed both Joseph Campbell and his chief influence Carl Jung as overly oriented upon idealism, which Bataille despised due to both his personal history and his reading of Marx. But Jung and Campbell were far from being the foursquare defenders of Platonic Idealism that detractors claim. Both were invested in dynamic psychological processes akin to what Kendall calls “negotiation.” The principal difference between Bataille and Campbell is that Bataille focuses on images of destruction for his concept of expenditure, emphasizing customs like animal/human sacrifice and the Amerindian potlatch.  In contrast Campbell focuses on images of construction: on negotiating the identity of the world through piecing together its separable aspects: the cosmological, the metaphysical, the sociological and the psychological.  Such images of construction are also a means by which both a storyteller seeks to negotiate identity for his audiences by situating them in a world governed not by reason and logic-- which I relate to the "desire to conserve," a.k.a. Freud's "reality principle" and Jung's "directed thinking."  Instead, the worlds where mythic law pertains-- where the world is made out of the blood and bones of Ymir, or a hero who returns to his native realm ends up marrying his mother (or a semi-reasonable facsimile)-- are worlds of "unproductive expenditures."

Bataille's division of consumption into its useful and useless forms also suggests some interesting parallels with the work of Susanne Langer, which I plan to explore in Part 2.

INCEST WE TRUST PART 5

Given that Sigmund Freud regarded his Oedipus complex as the foundation of human psychological development, it’s surprising that Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of pop-Freudianism, said so little about matters Oedipal in their anti-comics screeds. They say a great deal about other perversions that are either caused or abetted by the incessant titillations offered by comic books and similarly unscrupulous media. But aside from Wertham mentioning one case where an oversexed boy wanted a look at his sister, the fear of encouraging incest is nowhere in the same ballpark as the fear of encouraging homosexuality.

Of course the Oedipus complex figures indirectly into their etiology of transgressions, derived, not without modifications, from Freud. As illustration, I'll repeat my earlier Freud-quote:

It sounds not only disagreeable but also paradoxical, yet it must nevertheless be said that anyone who is to be really free and happy in love must have surmounted his respect for women and have come to terms with the idea of incest with his mother or sister.-- Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love."

According to Freud, if an individual did not follow the path of “normal” development, that of sublimating the early libinal feelings for the mother or father so as to allow for healthy relationships, that individual was more likely to stray into the realm of polymorphous perversity. However, as I noted here, Bataille demonstrates that Freud’s concept of “normal sex” was no less fraught with transgression than any paraphilia or perversion. The most that one can say of what Freud considers “normative” is that one can call it (as I do) “cooperative transgression,” which is sex which in theory takes place with the full cooperation of the participants and the full approval of their society. Any other form of sexuality that incorporated an aspect of conflict-- being either against the will of a participant or against some edict of society-- would then be best termed “competitive transgression.”

Of course Freud himself was a past master at asserting that even when one seemed to be obeying society’s edicts, one could be subconsciously transgressing them, if only figuratively. A man could marry a woman, have a consenting relationship of which society would approve-- and yet, if the woman was in some way “a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad,” then he would have figuratively transgressed society’s laws against sleeping with his mother by finding a mother-surrogate. Indeed, Freud’s entire ideal of sublimation would seem to be tied up with this sort of figurative transgression. It certainly never seems to occur to Legman or Wertham that the fantasies experienced by young comics-readers might amount to another form of figurative transgression.

For my purpose it doesn’t matter whether or not most modern psychologists dominantly recognize the Oedipus complex as valid. Within the sphere of literature, any storytelling trope that has expressive significance to humankind is, phenomenologically speaking, “real.” This is why the “four functions” that Joseph Campbell applies to mythology have so much potential for pluralist literary studies. Campbell's approach allows not only for the psychological and the sociological aspects of humankind, which I find to be the two modes on which most literary analyses draw. Campbell's formula also allows one to interpret aspects of the “cosmological” (the nature of physical reality) and the “metaphysical,” (the nature of reality beyond the physical). And just as myth-criticism doesn't judge a myth as "wrong" because it's built upon a cosmological or metaphysical conceit that moderns don't recognize, the same holds true for literary studies. Thus the Oedipus complex, whether "real" or not in the psychological sense, becomes real in the literary continuum by virtue of its expressive power. But of course, in contrast to Freud's exaggerated claims for his complex's universality, Oedipus shares his reality with Jung's Mercurius and any number of other formulas.

Following the popularization of Freud, many literary works went out of their way to consciously reference Freud. Sometimes the authors were trying to seem trendy; sometimes they may've felt some personal resonance with the Oedipal concept. Yet the most interesting instances to me are those that resonate with Oedipal concerns even where the author would seem to have no familiarity with Freud, except perhaps in the most simplified form. A Freudian would consider such subconscious resonance to be a validation of the universality of Oedipus. I would say, rather, that it merely indicates that Artist A may have thought-processes in some way comparable to those of Sigmund Freud, while Artist B’s may be more comparable to those of Jung, and so on.

But whenever one does find an apparent agreement with Freud’s complex, one needs to prove it much more rigorously than he and most of his disciples did. Stan Lee relates a story in his biography about a psychological pundit-- possibly Gershon Legman-- who claimed that a funny-animal comics-cover featuring a long-necked giraffe was actually a display of a disguised phallus. How does one avoid creating another Legman giraffe?

The only possible course is to establish a chain of probable symbolic associations from a close reading of the text, rather than simply trying to fit every work to fit an overriding model.

For instance, a poor example of an associational chain is to be found in Michael Fleischer’s BATMAN ENCYCLOPEDIA, where he reads Batman’s relationship with Catwoman in Oedipal terms, though possibly with more debt to Melanie Klein than Freud: “Bad women, like the Catwoman, represent [to Bruce Wayne] the wicked, irresponsible, unloving mother who, by dying, ‘deserted’ him in childhood when he needed her most” (p. 106) This reading might be minimally feasible if the backstory of Bruce Wayne were only about his mother’s dying, but it fails given that he loses both mother and father in the same catastrophe. By this logic, one would have to assume that the Joker and all Batman's other male villains were all stand-ins for the late father. But even without invoking Thomas Wayne, a solid chain of associations should at very least demonstrate some textual similarity between the mother and the mother-surrogate. In early Batman stories Martha Wayne is litle more than a visual signifier that means “mother,” so her character is too marginal to bear any textual similarity to the more complex figure of the Catwoman. Fleischer’s argument depends upon the notion that every relationship that suggests “forbidden fruit”-- in this case, one between a criminal and a law-enforcer-- must automatically connote the Oedipus complex in operation. But his chain breaks easily under the least testing.

A sturdier chain can be found in SUPERMAN, though again, the precise tone resembles Freud less than yet another psychoanalyst: this time Carl Jung. Roughly a year after both Superman and his girlfriend Lois Lane debuted in ACTION COMICS #1, authors Siegel and Shuster took the very minimal origins ascribed to Superman in the comic books and expanded it into a cosmic soap opera for the first set of daily SUPERMAN comic strips. The details of the origin are as well known as Batman’s, but to my knowledge only a few fans have remarked upon an Oedipal trope in the former story.

One visual joke of the comic-strip sequence is that Superman’s parents, Jor-L and Lora, are dead-on ringers for Superman and Lois Lane, respectively. Some fans have argued that Joe Shuster was simply drawing a standard female type, but limited though his skills were, Shuster was certainly capable of having drawn Superman’s mother to look like someone other than Lois Lane, had he wished to.

In terms of tone, this is less Freudian than Jungian incest. Jor-L and Lora are “heavenly” echoes of the couple that Superman and Lois will become, however long the latter relationship may be deferred. (Critics who make windy arguments about the perpetual childhood of the superhero should remember that in 1940 Jerry Siegel attempted to set the stage for a more mature Superman-Lois relationship, but was overruled by his editors.) But even though the visual resemblance of Lois and Lora is probably just a visual joke, the resemblance of their names may carry a little more psychological heft. Critics may never be sure exactly why Jerry Siegel used the name “Lora” for Superman’s mother, in contrast to the name of the father Jor-L, whose name is certainly derived from JERry SiegEL. But as we don't know of a particular "Laura" who influenced Siegel in these years-- at least I find none in Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW-- it’s possible that consciously or subconsciously Siegel modeled the mother’s name on the girlfriend’s. Not only does “Lora” have the same number of letters/syllables as “Lois,” one finds an interesting congruence given that the first two letters of Lois Lane's first and last names come out to LO and LA. And if one makes a metathetic substitution of the letter ‘R’ for the second ‘L,’ one sees that the name of the prospective wife symbolically embodies that of the mother.

Further, it’s arguable that Jerry Siegel did find the verbal joke worth telling again. In ACTION #2, still months before the 1939 strip debuted, Lois Lane is framed by a spy named “Lola Cortez,” whose cognomen is patently derived from the real-life adventuress Lola Montes.

Years later, Siegel would introduce in 1959 one of Lois Lane’s earliest romantic competitors, mermaid Lori Lemaris, whose name strongly resembles the original name of the Kryptonian mama, though by that time she had been re-dubbed “Lara” by someone other than Siegel. And then in 1960 Siegel took his hero back to “Mother Krypton” herself. There he not only becomes friends with his parents in their youth, but also meets another beauty with a name just like the name of the girl who married dear old dad: “Lyla Lerrol,” which name seems determined to pun --probably unconsciously-- on both the “Lola” and “Lora/Lara” constructions. Within the narrative Superman’s own mother even contrives to make sure that he ends up dating the sweet young thing with the soundalike name.

I’ve argued before that there are deeper sexual symbolisms in the earliest SUPERMAN stories, and the same is even more true of the Silver Age tales. What’s interesting is that even though on these surface these stories stress the most innocent-seeming form of sexuality possible for an audience of eight-to-ten-year-olds, that sexuality still incorporates aspects of the transgressive, in keeping with Bataille’s notion that all sex is a transgression of some sort. Nevertheless, a responsible critic won’t just force everything to fit on the Procrustean beds of the Oedipus complex or queer theory or what have you. The conflict between law and crime in Batman-Catwoman tales may be transgressive enough without bringing in Freud in that particular manifestation, and it may be that one can still find elements of “cooperative transgression” even in the blandest Superman-Lois encounter, whether the name of the Kryptonian uber-mama is invoked or not.