POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2

I've studied various colloquial definitions of the words "power" and "potency," and, as mentioned before, some dictionaries make them virtually identical. The Oxford online reference, though, suggests a discontinuity useful for my purposes:

POWER: The ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality

POTENCY: The power of something to affect the mind or body

These primary definitions show a tendency to speak of "power" in terms of physical action, whereas "potency" can affect "mind or body."

This in turn lines up with my distinctions between the marvelous and the uncanny. I've consistently defined the marvelous as some object, entity or occurrence that breaks with causal law, be it something nominally justified through some new scientific technique-- Verne's Nautilus, obviously-- or something with no justification at all, like a cartoon rabbit who can defy gravity when it happens to be funny to do so.  Not all marvelous entities register as having high dynamicity, as I pointed out here, yet even a character whose marvelous nature gives him no special power of physical action still displays a "power" to flout natural law.

Going by the Oxford definition, though, "potency" can be used to affect both the physical and the mental planes of existence, or, as Octavio Paz put it, "body" and "non-body."  Paz's dichotomy was useful to me in sorting out the three phenomenalities with respect to a bifurcated causality in THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2:

...both the "naturalistic" and "marvelous" phenomenalities are unitary in terms of what I chose at that time to call the aspects of "body" and "non-body"-- also roughly comparable to Cassirer's "causality" and "efficacy." In contrast, the phenomenenality of "the uncanny" was one in which "body" was at odds with "non-body."

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.

Until reading Knight, I had always classified HAMLET and most of its film adaptations as instances of the trope I call "phantasmal figuration." However, Knight's description makes Hamlet sound very much like the type of uncanny-or-naturalistic figure of another trope: "the perilous psycho."  In terms of the play proper, one may argue back and forth whether or not Hamlet, in feigning madness, may have actually gone mad. But whether the Danish prince is mad or merely infected with a pestilential cynicism, his attitude has given him a special "potency," even though he has no special power-- just like all of the "psycho" characters I've studied.

The primary subject of the aforementioned INTELLIGIBITY essay was to survey instances of my ten phenomenality tropes, in both their naturalistic and uncanny manifestations. I demonstrated that even though all of the cited examples fell within the bounds of causal coherence, the "uncanny" examples broke with causal intelligibility while the "naturalistic" ones did not. Now I refine that statement to add that the process of breaking with causal intelligibility is one that also confers a "potency" that is not "power."

The above phrase *SEEMS LIKE* proves applicable to all of the chosen examples, and, I assume, to any other examples that might be provided:

The Moby Dick of Melville's novel is identical in POWER to the Moby Dick of John Huson's 1956 film-adaptation. However, the original White Whale surpasses his naturalistic imitation in POTENCY, precisely because he *SEEMS LIKE* he is more than an ordinary whale.

Tod Slaughter's naturalistic perpetrator of "bizarre crimes" Perceval Glyde has no more POWER than the actor's more famous character Sweeney Todd, but Sweeney exceeds Glyde in POTENCY because he *SEEMS LIKE* more than a common criminal.

Hawk of the Wilderness and Tarzan are equals in POWER-- indeed, Olympic star Bruce Bennett played both-- but Tarzan clearly *SEEMS LIKE* he is more than a mortal man, even though he is not-- and the same applies to the huge horde of animal-skinned jungle-people who have imitated Tarzan.

And finally-- since I need not repeat the formula for all ten-- "perilous psycho" Joanna Eris of EYE OF THE BEHOLDER kills men for the crimes of her father, just as the fellow who popularized the very term "psycho" kills women for the crimes of his mother. But even though Norman Bates isn't a particularly powerful example of a psycho-- as I mentioned here-- he *SEEMS LIKE* he has a far greater ability to dispense death.

In contrast to the Oxford definition above, then, I will use "potency" exclusively to denote this semblance of a "non-body" form of *dynamicity.* However, since in earlier essays I've defined "dynamicity* exclusively in terms of that power that affect physical bodies within a given narrative, at best potency must be interpreted as extrinsic, rather than intrinsic. to that narrative-- which may line it up more properly with my conception of the combinatory-sublime.

VERTICAL VIRTUES

In this essay I said: "In a future essay I will also draw comparisons between Campbell's heuristic system and the forms of transcendence that are not reasonable; that can mount to the heavens or descend into the darkness of Hades..."  However,Campbell will have to wait, as I delve a little more into the heuristics of Aldous Huxley, the man who conceptualized the concepts of vertical and horizontal forms of transcendence.

I noted in this essay that Huxley's essay on self-transcendence included barely any examples of "upward transcendence," but he may have felt it unnecessary to do so given his previous book, 1945's THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY. This book, which I have not read, represents itself as "an attempt to present this Highest Common Factor of all theologies by assembling passages from the writings of those saints and prophets who have approached a direct spiritual knowledge of the Divine."

One may fairly speculate that this book's pluralistic vision of mankind's ongoing attempts to seek for a mystical "ground of being" parallels the dynamics of the 1953 "self-transcendence" essay, which appeared as an epilog to Huxley's non-fiction work THE DEVILS OF LOUDON. Throughout the essay Huxley scorns the tendency of human beings to lose themselves within the mazes of the countervailing "downward transcendence." However, he's fair-minded enough to admit that some of the techniques used to produce this sense of transcendence-- what Mircea Eliade has called "techniques of ecstasy"-- can be used in a disciplined fashion. When Tantric priests utilize "elementary sexuality" as part of their sacred rites, they do so in order to "transform the downward self-transcendence of elementary sexuality into an upward self-transcendence."

What's puzzling about the 1953 essay is that even though Huxley had been publishing fictional works since 1921, he does not apply his concept of transcendence to any aspect of art, which has, as much as religion, a reputation for allowing its audiences to escape "the tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves." That is not to say that he never addressed this possibility elsewhere in his voluminous writings. However, since Huxley was not a systematic literary critic, I find it probable that he never explored this aspect of "transcendence."

In my essay UP THE DOWN TRANSCENDENCE  I drew a brief comparison between Huxley's two forms of vertical transcendence and two categories proposed by SF-critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay.
Csicsery-Ronay asserted that "sublimity" was produced by an "expansion of apprehension"-- an argument very much in line with philosophers of sublimity like Burke and Kant-- and added that his parallel category, "the grotesque" was produced by "a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction." I reject Csiscery-Ronay's separation of these two affects, and instead regard them as "expansive" and "contractive" forms of the same affect: the affect of of the sublime. Further, these forms differ with respect to whether the art-work producing the affect is more dominated by "sympathetic affects" or "antipathetic affects." Sympathetic affects produce feelings of expansion and harmony, while antipathetic affects produce feelings of contraction and separation. (I first posted my conception of these affects on this blog here, though I formulated them long before I ever began this blog, in dissatisfaction with Aristotle's inadequate categories of "pity and terror.")

Here I should specify that I am not limiting either type of affects to works that produce the sublime. Every conceivable narrative is defined by these affects, and the reader generally orients himself within a text according what the focal characters "like" or "don't like." This is not to say that the reader is confined to the feelings of the viewpoint character alone, a matter I've covered in some detail here. But his reactions, so far as he is engaged by at least one character in the text, will be patterned by what the story's significant characters like or dislike. I concluded the above essay by adapting Huxley's schema to one suggested by Octavio Paz:

Horizontal transcendence= Paz's "the body"
Upward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense of Ronay's "expansion of apprehension"
Downward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense that "the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization; i.e., contractive"

Thus the domain of horizontal transcendence is one where the reader experiences things as one experiences one's own body in a state of relative stability. Whether one encounters things one likes or does not like, those things have no special power to inspire either the expansion or the contraction of apprehension. In this state, one can self-identify with any human activity-- collecting stamps or studying birds, to cite two of Huxley's examples-- or, equally, one can choose not to find these things of interest. But one's sympathy or antipathy to the activity of collecting stamps remains on a stable, horizontal plane; the activity cannot act as (to use Campbell's felicitous phrase) as a "supernormal sign stimulus" that propels one into either a radical expansion or a contraction of one's consciousness.

In my next essay I'll use this formulations as a springboard to discuss the problems I have detected in the overly "horizontal" critical attempt to run roughshod over narratives that possess a more vertical appeal.

OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS

The motive for my recent meditations on the "nonbody" nature of the uncanny in this essay came about as I meditated on my analysis of the 1965 film A STUDY IN TERROR.

Sherlock Holmes, both in the canonical stories and in the character's many public domain adaptations, has been valuable to my studies in that he has been all over the phenomenal map.  In addition, though I've judged that the original canon does not generally manifest the mode of the combative, many of the adaptations-- including STUDY-- have been instructive about the ways in which a character known primarily for deduction became equally associated with martial adventures.

Now, when I declare STUDY IN TERROR to be a metaphenomenal film, I do so in the conviction that its use of the "perilous psycho" trope-- incarnate in the film's version of Jack the Ripper-- conveys the element of "strangeness" necessary for any metaphenomenal work. 

I also find that STUDY satisfies my requirements for a combative work: a narrative focus upon a plotline leading to an important battle at or near the story's climax, and a battle that depicts "spectacular violence" between two or more entities.  It is possible for one of the two to be *naturalistic* in nature-- which was my original estimation of this version of Holmes-- but for a work to be both combative and metaphenomenal, the other combatant must be either uncanny or marvelous.

I started thinking, though: in what qualities does Jack the Ripper's metaphenomenality inhere?  As his only qualification for the metaphenomenal is his status as a "perilous psycho," that metaphenomenality must inhere in a mental, "non-body" quality.  His madness is his method, and therefore his metaphenomenality.

So far so good.  But I began to wonder-- what about Sherlock's own mental attributes?  He isn't a psycho, at least in this version.  But his polymath deductive skills might qualify Holmes-- or some versions of Holmes-- as a metaphenomenal figure, in keeping with another trope, "Outre Outfits Skills and Devices."  Holmes does not use any special devices in most iterations, and though his traditional appearance has become iconic it is not in itself "outre."  But what of his mental skills?

The last time I weighed in on Sherlock's mental propensities, I judged that they were entirely naturalistic.  In my review of the 1922 SHERLOCK HOLMES I wrote:

Many of Doyle's Holmes tales inhabit a world between the naturalistic and the uncanny. In contrast to many detectives, who seem merely clever, Holmes repeatedly conveys the impression of an all-knowing psychic. However, this impression is always (both in original stories and media-adaptations) quickly dispelled by Holmes himself explaining his intuitions in terms of empirical observations. Holmes' deductive skills thus always register in the naturalistic mode and never in the uncanny.

But now I'm not so sure.  True, Holmes always offers rational reasons for his amazing deductions, and, unlike his creator, frowns upon the idea of psychic phenomena.  But in some sense, his abilities to descry peoples' occupations or peregrinations from their appearance appears much like the tricks of mentalists, who appear to be psychic by virtue of "knowing" things about strangers.  This comparison would also give Holmes a link to the trope of "enthralling illusionism."

After weighing the matter, I would say that most of Holmes' amazing observations about people still tend to belong to the naturalistic, as they do not create a sense of strangeness.  So Holmes uses a naturalistic, not an uncanny, version of the "illusionism" trope. 

However, I must consider that another aspect of his mental skill-set seems more uncanny. I called him a "polymath" before, and in truth one key to Holmes' deductions is his ability to know more than the common man knows.  There are many naturalistic characters who are virtual storehouses of knowledge.  Yet Holmes' fount of knowledge does, at times, seem to verge into the territory of the uncanny.  It might be best to posit that Holmes-stories are uncanny only when he taps into some knowledge that seems too recondite for even a consulting detective to know.

This in turn leads me to consider that other characters may have uncanny propensities due to their outre levels of knowledge. In Bram Stoker's DRACULA the human opponents of the vampire would be practically powerless to fight Dracula, if not for Van Helsing's knowledge of the occult.  By this logic Van Helsing would be an even stronger candidate to be considered an "uncanny" opponent to the "marvelous" central character.

Other polymaths appear throughout popular literature, and many of them show excessive abilities to devise a wide number of devices by virtue of scientific genius.  In A SHORT HISTORY OF HEROIC FANTASY-ADVENTURE I concluded that the dime novel "Steam Man of the Plains" seems to have been one of the first modernistic works of heroic fantasy-adventure, as well as depicting a combative encounter between the titular Steam Man and a band of nasty Indians.  The protagonist of that story, then, might be deemed to have an uncanny skill in being able to devise such a creation, even though the dominant phenomenality of the story is "marvelous." 

THE INTERSECTING AXES OF BODY AND NON-BODY IN THE NUM-THEORY

For reasons I'll explore in a future essay, I'm addressing the ways in which a given phenomenality manifests its qualities of what some have loosely called "mind" and "body"-- qualities which the poet Octavio Paz re-christened "non-body" and "body."

I first mentioned Paz's formulation in this essay:

I take the phrases "body" and "non-body" from an essay by Octavio Paz in CONJUNCTIONS AND DISJUNCTIONS. Paz was mindful of the fact that a lot of the words used by human beings in opposition to the physical body (as well as physical phenomena generally) are highly speculative, such as "soul" and "spirit." For that matter, even words like "mind" and "the unconscious," while more commonly used by materialists, are still "iffy."


"Non-body," then, was Paz's portmanteau term for all that intangible shit. I believe he meant it not as a viable category in itself but just as a means of spotlighting how human beings regard everything that informs their symbolic universe (that's Cassirer, again, BTW), be it tangible or intangible, corporeal or incorporeal, body or "non-body." It appeals to me as a means to subsume aspects of humanity that are sometimes ascribed to "mind," sometimes to "spirit."

It occurs to me that with both my categories of "the naturalistic" and "the marvelous," all of the "intangible shit" is highly dependent on whether or not the diegetic world depicted is one in which causality can or cannot be disrupted.  Whether the range of affects is dominated by the spectrum of fear and admiration (the naturalistic), or the spectrum of awe and exaltation (the marvelous), those "non-body" affects are dependent on the nature of the "body;" i.e., the causal universe.


In contrast, within the intermediate category of "the uncanny," body and non-body are somewhat in equilibrium.  Causality is not violated, and yet the affects that arise from works of the uncanny-- dominantly dread and fascination-- exceed in tonality the range of affects that dominate the category of the naturalistic.  Given that I have formulated my "ten tropes" as a means of showing how certain works exceed naturalistic limitations, it seems apposite to explore those tropes in terms of how they reveal the uncanny affects in terms of the ambivalence between body and non-body.

Going alphabetically:

ASTOUNDING ANIMALS-- Any animal whose behavior exceeds the limits of common expectations, be it Moby Dick or Jaws, belongs here.  Though an uncanny animal does not exceed causal limitations, its attitude can, as when I describe Jaws as demonstrating an "almost supernatural ferocity." 

BIZARRE CRIMES-- This trope concerns the commission of crimes for motives that go beyond the ordinary ends of "acquisition," and are done more or less for their own sake. This trope frequently crosses over into the terrain of the "perilous psycho," well represented by the 1935 film THE RAVEN, but it also takes in types who are not truly insane in the diegetic sense, as with Sade's character Juliette and certain criminal masterminds, like Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

DELIRIOUS DREAMS AND FALLACIOUS FIGMENTS-- Here the ambivalence is between the dreamer-- or daydreamer-- who conjures forth "dreams that become more real to [the audience] than reality."

ENTHRALLING HYPNOTISM AND ILLUSIONISM-- In the essay TEN DYNAMIC DEMONS I used the famous hypnotist Svengali as an example of a character who could extend his will over his victims even though he had no literal power.  But it also extends to the use of objects in such a way that they fool an audience into believing in magical transformations, even when that audience is aware that no magic has taken place. 

EXOTIC LANDS AND CUSTOMS-- The idea that there are real places on the earth that seem strange in and of themselves-- and that the people living in those places practice customs which seem like inversions of the audience's-- is a conceit that probably dates back to the first travelers' tales, though we know such stories best from Europeans like John Mandeville and Marco Polo.  For whatever reason, Africa became a nexus for the maintenance of peculiar peoples and their customs.  Many of these were imagined out of whole cloth but at times they were based on real cultures whose customs seemed strange to viewers, as with the serial JUNGLE GIRL, which bases its fictional lion-worshipping society on the real Masai.

FREAKISH FLESH-- This is the trope which places the most emphasis on "body," since it intimately concerns the body's many deviations from a hypothetical normality-- whether it be actual "freakish" distortions, as with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, or atypical phenomena like twins or dwarves, which are not distortions as such but which may convey a sense of supernatural "strangeness" under the correct conditions.

OUTRE OUTFITS SKILLS AND DEVICES-- This trope includes three bodily aspects beneath its "umbrella" because they often collude in creating an overall sense of dread or fascination for a given character, though all three can act independently. James Bond is probably the character best known for utilizing unusual, though not marvelous, devices, Tarzan for possessing perternatural skills due to his upbringing-- to say nothing of being additionally "outre" for wearing almost no outfit at all-- and the Lone Ranger for being a character who creates constant suspense re: maintaining a masked identity in a naturalistic setting.

PERILOUS PSYCHOS-- While there are some psychos who use uncanny gimmicks or commit bizarre crimes in addition to their being crazy, their insanity remains the baseline of their uncanny nature.  Many of them, such as Norman Bates, are not overly prepossessing apart from their mad qualities; in the 1960 PSYCHO Norman, after providing terror to the audience for roughly an hour, is easily sudbued by an entirely ordinary individual.  This more than anything suggests that a psycho need not be physically formidable to invoke dread and fear, in contrast to the more hefty maniacs seen in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART II and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.

PHANTASMAL FIGURATIONS-- This trope has often been seen as providing a "victory" for causal reality, whenever a given heroine-- be it Jane Eyre or Velma Dinkley-- proves that the hideous, marvelous-seeming spectre is merely some masquerade or misunderstanding.  What is rarely understood is that the effort that has gone into creating the illusion is a source of strangeness in itself, much as one sees in stage-magician's illusions, even though the latter are done with the audience's partial complicity.  When a figure like the Hound of the Baskervilles remains a formidable spectre in the story, even after it has been revealed to be a phosphorescent dog, one cannot claim that reality has entirely won the game.

WEIRD FAMILIES AND SOCIETIES-- This parallels some of the same conceptual territory as "exotic lands and customs."  However, in the previous trope, the customs and the people who practice them have evolved as the dominant culture of a given location.  In the "weird families" trope, the unusual society exists within the sphere of a "normative" society, and is usually in opposition to its values.  A strong example of this trope is seen in the Satanist cult in THE SEVENTH VICTIM.

UP THE DOWN TRANSCENDENCE

"The sublime is a response to an imaginative shock, the complex recoil and recuperation of consciousness coping with objects too great to be encompassed. The grotesque, on the other hand, is a quality usually attributed to objects, the strange conflation of disparate elements not found in nature. This distinction is true to their difference. The sublime expands consciousness inward as it encompasses limits to its outward expansion of apprehension; the grotesque is a projection of fascinated repulsion/attraction out into objects that consciousness cannot accommodate, because the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization. In both cases, the reader/perceiver is shocked by a sudden estrangement from habitual perception, and in both cases the response is to suspend one's confidence in knowledge about the world, and to attempt to redefine the real in thought's relation to nature."-- Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. 'On the Grotesque in Science Fiction', Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Mar., 2002), pp. 71-99.

I confess that as of this writing I've only skimmed this academic's essay, but at present I see no reason why it would apply only to that branch of metaphenomenal narrative labelled "science fiction"-- especially since
Csicsery-Ronay also notes within the text of the essay that in some science-fiction tropes the sublime and the grotesque appear to unite, as with the T-1000 from James Cameron's TERMINATOR 2: "Its fascinating shape-shifting would be the object of sublime awe were it not for its sadistic violation of mundane flesh."  This is a convenient admission from my standpoint, as I think that the interpenetration of Ronay's concepts of "the sublime" and "the grotesque" demonstrates that they are best seen as mirror-images of transcendence, but transcendence that is, as I examined here, so radically different from the commonplace that it feels as if it is either "upward" or "downward." 

I've noted in the aforesaid essay that most of the phenomena Huxley uses to characterize "downward transcendence" suggest, as Ronay suggests, "fascinated repulsion/attraction out into objects that consciousness cannot accomodate," for they relate to the human body being subjected to various kinds of stress-- principally drugs, degrading sex, and crowd-induced delirium, though Huxley also mentions the effects of "rhythmic movement," "rhythmic sound," and "corporal penance."  Huxley unfortunately does not provide as many examples of upward transcendence, though in this follow-up essay I noted how Joseph Campbell tended to focus only on images that I find suggestive of Huxley's upward transcendence, as well as having the effect of "expanding consciousness" in a manner shared by both traditional accounts of the sublime and modern accounts of the "sense of wonder."

Re-establishing my earlier suggestion that sublimity and "sense of wonder" are fundamentally covalent, it follows then that although science-fiction enthusiasts often use the latter phrase only to connote wonder in this "upward" end of its spectrum, it should be used no less to connote the aspect of terror in the "downward" manifestation.  Both of these forms of sublimity share the nature of what I called, in this essay, the "strange-sublime," and are phenomenologically opposed to the remaining form, "the odd-sublime," which can be roughly correlated with Huxley's horizontal transcendence, the transcendence in which one does not truly exceed what Ronay calls "habitual perception."

The two extremes of the "strange-sublime" suggest a possible parallel with Octavio Paz's dichotomy of "body/non-body."  I've already made a purely illustrative (i.e., not constitutive) comparison between my NUM formula and Paz's dichotomy in this essay, so I don't want to confuse matters by bringing sublimity into that mix.  But given that Huxley's downward transcendence suggests becoming overly attracted by, and perhaps subsumed by, the body, while upward transcendence suggests becoming liberated from same, into "non-body" in some manifestation, I will venture this comparison:

Horizontal transcendence= Paz's "the body"
Upward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense of Ronay's "expansion of apprehension"
Downward transcendence= "non-body" in the sense that "the object disturbs the sense of rational, natural categorization"

I must note then that neither "the marvelous" nor "the uncanny" firmly line up with either form of transcendence exclusively.  It's true that we're perhaps more likely to associate "expansion of apprehension" with thinking about wonderful things like Campbell's dragons or Ronay's molten cyborg, and "repulson/attraction" with icons of terror.  Yet "the marvelous" also includes a horror like ALIEN, while the "the uncanny" can include cheery upbeat action-fantasies like Miyazaki's CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO, reviewed here.  For the latter, obviously, "attraction" to those things that suggest but are not reducible to "the body" would supersede "repulsion."

Having more or less concluded this game of intellectual connect-the-academics, the only thing that remains will be to cite three specific examples of my perceived sublimity: the "odd-sublime" in a naturalistic context, the "strange-sublime" that suggest upward transcendence, and the "strange-sublime" that suggests downward transcendence.  More on that in a separate essay.

THREE INTO TWO WILL GO, SOMETIMES (part 2)

In Part 3 of the INCEST WE TRUST series, I said:

In Part I I went to some pains to explain why Georges Bataille was right to say that no particular transgressive form of sexuality was any more important to human development than any other (in contradistinction to Freud and Levi-Strauss). That distinction made, I will note that the phenomenon of incest is probably the best possible metaphor FOR transgressive sexuality as a whole. Unlike homosexuality and bestiality (for two), incest in its most popular conception-- that is, its heterosexual form-- can give rise to living progeny whose proper relationships will thus be confused...

In Jung’s essay, "Concerning the archetypes, with special reference to the anima concept," Jung faults Freud for claiming that all psychological problems could be reduced to “physiological concepts.” He further suggests that the “superordinate ideas,” ideas found most often in religion (though in other human arenas as well, like politics), are a better measure of the psyche’s true nature. To illustrate his point, he cites an example of a patient with a “castration-complex,” but pursues a methodology opposite to Freud’s. Where Freud would view all patients as implicated in the Oedipus complex, and would seek the roots in the patient’s problem in “physiological concepts,” Jung asserts that the patient’s complex came about not because of his sexual fantasies, but because he possessed an almost religious concept of his mother’s goodness—a concept which the parent herself, being a mere mortal, could not satisfy.


In IMAGO-GO I took issue with Jung’s extreme rejection of “physiological concepts.” I believe such concepts do inform all manner of human fantasies, whether they take place within an individual’s personal psyche or in a narrative designed to provoke an affective response in an audience. A sound pluralist conception of literature must deal with the fact that fantasies evolve from both aspects of human corporeal life (“physiological concepts”) and aspects of incorporeal experience (“superordinate ideas.”) And this includes the fantasy, literary or otherwise, of incest.

Part 1 of this series showed how my three categories of literary phenomality could be rated either (a) dominantly corporeal, (b) dominantly incorporeal, or (c) midway between the two. The same schema applies to my rewriting of both Freud and Jung.


Now, throughout literary history “incest” is a word that has been used in a wide variety of denotative or connotative ways. Still, for many individuals, it has its deepest roots in its most corporeal conception: incest is sex between two individuals who share a genetic heritage. This shared heritage usually motivates society to taboo such unions, though many societies attenuate the importance of this or that familial relation. For instance, Levi-Strauss cites assorted tribal societies which permit the marriage of one group of cousins but forbid it to other cousin-groupings not any more removed in time or circumstance.

Freud grounds his theory of incest in the developmental processes of juvenile sexuality, positing that children model their concept of sexual attractiveness upon one of the parents. Thus sexual development for Freud is rooted entirely in the domain of the cognitive order of cause-and-effect, e.g., “the corporeal.” It follows, then, that within the domain of literary criticism, any depiction of sex between biological relations is “corporeal incest,” irrespective of any culture-specific standards as to what group can marry what group of near-relations.


Jung, however, asserts in the example above that a “superordinate idea”—what I deem an icon of “the incorporeal”—can influence an individual’s incest-fantasy more than the individual’s particular developmental history. In literature this takes many shapes. One might be called the “counter-Oedipus complex,” in which a male character never sees his birth-mother but somehow gravitates toward her identical twin in later life, rather than modeling his concept of sexual attractiveness on a foster mother. This is, incidentally, a complex that has appeared in works ranging from Faulkner’s LIGHT IN AUGUST to Siegel and Shuster’s SUPERMAN. Another manifestation would be the superordinate idea that all persons roughly 15-20 years older than a given character symbolize the character’s mother or father even when no questions of dubious paternity are raised. When people voice the familiar cliché, “X is old enough to be your [parental unit],” it’s not because they literally fear that every May-September liaison will result in corporeal incest. Rather, aversion to such liaisons seems more rooted in a quasi-religious sense of the proper order of life: young with young, old with old. These are just two examples of what I term “incorporeal incest.”



This brings me to my “amphibian” category, which might be termed “legal incest.” Characters in such liaisons—step-relations, for one example-- share no biological connection. However, their liaisons are still marked by a corporeal element in that they are often, though not without exception, forced into familial closeness: sharing the same house, the same dinner-table-- and the same aura of sexual propinquity that Freud finds so pervasive within the old homestead. Yet the thing that forces the unrelated individuals into this sphere of influence is a legal abstraction that says, “X and Y are related by marriage,” or, alternately, “A and B are related through adoption/foster-care/wardship.”


I’ve also noted in fictional narratives a difference in intensity of the taboo on “legal incest” based on the presence or absence of the legalism. If two brothers vie for the same girl, and one wins, then she will become the loser’s sister-in-law after the fact. Most societies would not label this phenomenon incest, though my literary theory would include it within the sphere of the “incorporeal” variety. However, if one brother already has a legal relationship to the woman in question—even if only at the level of “fiancée”—then the other brother’s violation of that legal contract would carry a deeper sense of societal transgression.


I mentioned earlier that I needed a schema regarding this particular transgression to avoid any over-identification with Sigmund Freud’s theory (though it also keeps me clear of a few Jungian pitfalls as well). I’ve mentioned that such a schema will have relevance when my “1001 myths” takes on the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, but I may be able to provide a short example of the schema’s utility sooner than that.

THREE INTO TWO WILL GO, SOMETIMES (part 1)

The body/nonbody opposition advanced by Octavio Paz provides an elegant simplication of the many unwieldly dichotomies that have haunted Western philosophy: body/mind, body/spirit, etc. One can, if one chooses, follow Sigmund Freud in believing that in the world of common experience, “nonbody” is merely an epiphenomenon to the fundamental reality of “body.” But in literary studies one cannot say this. As Frye observed, all literary narratives have a centrifugal and a centripetal aspect.

A narrative is centrifugal in that its author cannot help but reference the world extrinsic to the narrative, the primary world of bodily experience for himself and his audience. Whether the author writes of New York or Narnia, he will reference the "body" of the corporeal world.

However, narratives also possess a centripetal aspect, for they turn inward, connecting their serries internal elements to produce a symbolic discourse, a "nonbody" that is entirely conceptual in basis, since no can prove that anything similar exists in common experience. This dual nature clearly separates literary representations from those of experience, where the degree to which mind and body interpenetrate is infinitely arguable.

In my literary theory, then, “body” represent the totality of aspects in a work that appear governed by the cognitive order of cause-and-effect, while “nonbody” represents the totality of aspects in a work that seem outside the cognitive order of cause-and-effect. In addition, some aspects are amphibian, managing to dwell in both worlds at once.


I demonstrated in my examination of Tzvetan Todorov’s THE FANTASTIC that Todorov’s theory of fantasy (for which I henceforth use my term, “the metaphenomenal”) is overly indebted to cognitively-oriented Freudian conceptions of “reality” and “fantasy.” This duality, however, resulted in a trinity of categories for Todorov, to wit:


The category of “the marvelous” concerns narratives that openly transgress the cognitive order of cause-and-effect.


The category of “the uncanny” contains narratives that seem to transgress the cognitive order but ultimately prove to be governed by cause-and-effect.


The category of “the fantastic” contains narratives in which either the reader, the viewpoint character or both aren’t sure whether or not the order has been transgressed.


Todorov is very clear that the affective aspect of fantasy is beyond the pale of his theory. This restates the Freudian position aptly. Affectivity, like Paz’s concept of “nonbody,” is essentially the tail wagged by the cognitive dog.


In contrast, my AUM theory argues that the “non-body” aspects of a narrative are as real within the narrative as those aspects that are directly derived from the physical experience of author and/or audience. My theory essentially agrees with Todorov that a given narrative presents an “equilibrium” that is meant to be transgressed in such a way that a new equilibrium is established, but my theory of transgression includes both cognitive and affective aspects equally.


I reworked Todorov’s trinity so as to include all so-called “realistic” works. In all three of my categorizations, the narrative functions by virtue of an “anomaly” that creates the above-mentioned disequilibrium.


If the anomaly takes place within a world where the cognitive order rules, and where affectivity is indeed the tail wagged by the dog, then the narrative’s phenomenality is “atypical.”


If it takes place within a world that breaks with the cognitive order, in which causs-and-effect is in some way suspended, then the phenomality is “marvelous,” and the affectivity produced is one that also strives to go beyond the cognitive order.


If the work seems to suggest that the cognitive order is violated, when in fact it is not, its phenomenality will be “uncanny” as long as the work succeeds in evoking an affectivity that symbolically exceeds the cognitive order.


“The uncanny” is my “amphibian” category. “Atypical” narratives depict worlds where cause-and-effect rules absolutely, so it would be dominantly ruled by “body,” or corporeality. “Marvelous” narratives present worlds where cognitivity and affectivity merge, signifying the dominance of “nonbody,” incorporeality. “Uncanny” narratives occupy a space between, for though cognitive cause-and-effect rules their phenomenal nature, the narratives carry associations that, so to speak, allow the tail-phenomenon to wag the dog-phenomeon. These associations manifest in the world of common experience in the form of fantasy-film guides that include “uncanny” films like PSYCHO chock-a-block with “marvelous” films like CHRONICLES OF NARNIA and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.


My earlier repetition of the word “transgress” is not accidental, for Bataille’s theory of “literature as transgression” informs some aspects of my rewriting of Todorov. In the second part of THREE INTO TWO WILL GO, SOMETIMES, I’ll offer another tripartite schema, also informed by Bataille’s philosophy, but this time I’ll be rewriting Freud’s concept of the transgression he thought fundamental to the human psyche: that famed “vice” that was not merely “nice,” but the “best” of all.

WAKE ME UP BEFORE I IMAGO-GO

"We must therefore assume that, over and above the incest-fantasy, highly emotional contents are still bound up with the parental images and need to be made conscious. They are obviously more difficult to make conscious than the incest-fantasies, which are supposed to have been repressed through violent resistance and to be unconscious for that reason. Supposing this view is correct, we are driven to the conclusion that besides the incest-fantasy there must be contents which are repressed through a still greater resistance. Since it is difficult to imagine anything more repellent than incest, we find ourselves rather at a loss to answer this question."-- Jung,
Concerning the archetypes, with special reference to the anima concept.

In this 1936 essay Carl Jung offered a counterstroke to the emphasis his former mentor Freud had placed upon a purely empirical (i.e., referencing only physical patterns and processes) interpretation of human psychological problems. Early in the essay Jung takes issue with Freud's emphasis with physiological processes alone:

"All the same, it was Freud who cleared the ground for the investigation of complex phenomena, at least in the field of neurosis. But the ground he cleared extended only so far as certain basic physiological concepts permitted, so that it looked almost as if psychology were an offshoot of the physiology of the instincts."

By the time Jung reaches the point of the later quote, he asks rhetorically whether or not Freud was really correct in thinking that "physiological concepts" were really the base of the psyche's "highly emotional contents," which he asserts are more elusive, and therefore more repressed, than the incest-fantasies which Freud viewed as the sine qua non of psychology.

Jung's answer to his own question is that what he calls "religious ideas" are actually far more subterranean material than one's sex fantasies. After observing that people are sometimes more leery of talking about religion than sex, and noting that the Freudian concept of "resistance" may be overrated, Jung speaks of religious ideas as taking any sort of "superordinate idea" that suggests the subsumptive power of religion.

Now religious ideas, as history shows, are charged with an extremely suggestive, emotional power. Among them I naturally reckon all "representations collectives," everything that we learn from the history of religion, and anything that has an "ism" attached to it. The latter is only a modern variant of the denominational religions. A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating "representation collective." His very materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism, or what not, testifies against his innocence. Somewhere or other, overtly or covertly, he is possessed by a supraordinate idea.

Thus Jung attempted to trump Freud by stating that collective representations are in fact more repressed, and more indicative of true psychological processes, than "physiological concepts."

For an amateur literary theorist such as myself, I find the argument between Freud and Jung brings me back to a dichotomy formulated by the poet Octavio Paz, which I explored in the OUR BODIES, OUR NONBODIES essay-series.

I take the phrases "body" and "non-body" from an essay by Octavio Paz in CONJUNCTIONS AND DISJUNCTIONS. Paz was mindful of the fact that a lot of the words used by human beings in opposition to the physical body (as well as physical phenomena generally) are highly speculative, such as "soul" and "spirit." For that matter, even words like "mind" and "the unconscious," while more commonly used by materialists, are still "iffy."

"Non-body," then, was Paz's portmanteau term for all that intangible shit. I believe he meant it not as a viable category in itself but just as a means of spotlighting how human beings regard everything that informs their symbolic universe (that's Cassirer, again, BTW), be it tangible or intangible, corporeal or incorporeal, body or "non-body." It appeals to me as a means to subsume aspects of humanity that are sometimes ascribed to "mind," sometimes to "spirit."

I believe, contrary to both Freud and Jung (at least as Jung expresses himself in the above essay), that both human psychology and human literature recapitulate what I'll term corporeal and incorporeal concepts. Just as the soundest possible psychology might take from both Freud and Jung, the soundest possible literary theory might be the offspring of, say, Northrop Frye and Leslie Fiedler.

As example, take my recent essay on THE NEW MUTANTS story "To Build a Fire," by Simonson and Muth.

In analyzing this tale of Young Mutants in Love, I tended to emphasize the incorporeal aspects of the characters' relationship, as in this sentence:

Amara's self-identification with the rainforest, though not stressed, follows the mythic motif by which femininity is equated with the earth and growing things.

This "imago" (what Jung called "the image of the subjective relation of the object") would certainly stand as one of his "representations collectives," since it stems from a cultural history in which one gender's characteristics are abstractly related to a nonhuman phenomenon.

However, I can see how one could analyze "Build a Fire" purely from the standpoint of "physiological processes." One could build, with some logic, a Freudian scenario in which Amara is afraid of a domineering father, who threatens her sense of integrity not by direct sexual contact but through a proxy whom he chooses for her. Manuel, despite having less pure power than Amara does, as well as less experience in the savage jungle, could be figured as a displacement of the threat of rape through a proxy, which is itself further displaced by using psychic rather than physical rape.

I don't think a purely Freudian reading is adequate to take in the complexity of the Simonson-Muth story. I indulge in one here to illustrate that there are times when corporeally-derived concepts may dominate a particular literary narrative. I touched on this fact in my comparison of the use of violence in two Golden Age comics, PLASTIC MAN and WONDER WOMAN, and I imagine that there will be other works that invite the same preponderance of one set of concepts over the other.

RAPT IN PLASTIC

In SUPERHUMAN ALL TOO SUPERHUMAN I used the William Moulton Marston WONDER WOMAN as my exemplar of the use of "dynamic violence," with attention to the fact that what makes the violence in WONDER WOMAN "dynamic" is that the characters possess some degree of interiority, of a capacity for transformation that has consequences for the way conflict and violence play out in the story's structure.

For my example of the opposite use of violence, the "static" kind, I offer up Jack Cole's Sadean PLASTIC MAN.

To say that the Cole PLASTIC MAN is esteemed over the Marston WONDER WOMAN would be putting it mildly. There are some good reasons for this, for though the art of H.G. Peter has been dismissed unfairly by many critics, there can be no doubt that Jack Cole was the more innovative of the two artists. Consequently, it's Cole's eyeball-stretching depictions of his "India Rubber Man" that caused a highbrow type like Art Spiegelman to co-author a book on Cole's creativity with collaborator Chip Kidd.

Nevertheless, the exceptional nature of Cole's artwork is of secondary consideration to this essay, which deals with the nature of violence in Cole's work.

Now when I say that I find Cole's work-- both on PLASTIC MAN and other creations-- to be "Sadean," I don't mean that I believe that Cole was literally turned on by his own images of death, torture and mayhem, as the Marquis de Sade reputedly was by his own autopornography. I do however think that Cole was personally fascinated by violent and transgressive materials. I'm sure that on one level he *may* have viewed the labor of grossing out the kiddies as just another aspect of a job, but even so Cole doesn't seem as distanced with such material as, say, his contemporaries Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Around the same time PLASTIC MAN got started, Simon and Kirby could ladle out bucketsfuls of juvenile-appropriate gore and grue in Timely's CAPTAIN AMERICA. And yet the two of them could, without muss or fuss, transition to a "clean" style of violence the moment they started working on features like NEWSBOY LEGION for DC Comics, while Cole continually pursued transgressive images throughout his 14 years in comic books and on into his work for PLAYBOY, in which Paul Tumey of COLE'S COMICS finds "themes of virility and impotence, wholeness and fragmentation."

In support of Tumey's analysis, one finds that even in the first year of PLASTIC MAN, when Cole was still finding his way with the new genre of the superhero, images of violence, death and grotesquerie abound, next to which even the grim BATMAN stories seem rather tame. Plastic Man's first major villain-- a very butch (and implicitly lesbian) woman named "Madame Brawn"-- appears first in PC #4 and makes her first and last comeback in #5, where she dies when she takes a fall and hits her head on a spike. PC #6 includes a victim whose hands are cut off and then used by evildoers for malicious mischief; PC #9 features a villain named "Hairy Arms," who appears to have a shrunken torso out of proportion with the rest of his body. And

then there's POLICE COMICS #11. The cover at left suggests playful fantasy-slapstick, but inside is neck-breaking, bodies blown apart, brain transplantation, and a giant who (a) walks on his hands because he can't walk on his useless legs, and (b) tries to eat Plastic Man alive.

Now, pound for pound Marston's WONDER WOMAN may be no less violent, but as with my comparison of STAR WARS and ALIEN in this essay, WONDER WOMAN never seems as transgressive because the violence is of the *clean* variety. (And if anyone cares, with respect to the other category mentioned in said essay, both works belong to the "spectacular" rather than "functional" category in terms of whether the violence is a means or an end in the story.) But an additional reason as to why WONDER WOMAN might appear less transgressive is precisely because the feature so frequently focuses on the interiority of the characters, with their melodramatic miracles of personal transformation, their better living through the chains of lovingkindness.

There's nearly no interiority in the stories of Jack Cole. Cole gives Plastic Man a couple of stories where the hero expresses his guilt over his antisocial acts as Eel O'Brien, but those are soon forgotten, and, as Paul Tumey points out, the very identity of Eel O'Brien disappears in time as well. Both villains and victims know themselves but slenderly, and so have barely any rational motive for getting involved with criminal doings. The non-body aspect of symbolism only occasionally appears in Cole: often it seems like nothing but body, body, body. Bodies hit, bodies stab, bodies kill or get killed (though Plastic Man seems to stay above the carnage, his unique physique in its way as invulnerable as that of Superman).

Of course that invulnerability is certainly key to understanding the Sadean meaning of PLASTIC MAN. Physically the hero is as above the sufferings of victims and villains, loosely in the same way that a Sade protagonist's money and aristocratic standing put him above those he debauches. The curse of ordinary mortality is what Tumey calls "fragmentation:" only a fantasy-body can be absolutely above it.

Given the unique viewpoints of Marston and Cole respectively, it's not surprising that later iterations of their most famous characters have failed to duplicate the complex symbolisms at their heart. However, of the two WONDER WOMAN has been treated somewhat better. Even when latter-day raconteurs abjure following Marston's specific programs, often the essence of gender-conflict still informs their stories, and invariably some aspects of the Marston mythology are used, with whatever success.

Cole's PLASTIC MAN suffers a more peculiar form of erasure, for with that character latter-day raconteurs labor to imitate only the aforementioned formal aspects of the artwork-- how many crazy shapes can Plastic Man assume-- and the elements of goofy slapstick. It's almost as if they never read the actual Cole stories, but only looked at the pictures. It seems odd that in these days of superhero decadence and the dawning of adult pulp comics, even Kyle Baker's PLASTIC MAN should resemble LOONEY TUNES more than the violent and Sadean world of Jack Cole.

THE GENRE-GENDER WARS PART 2

The more atrocious the hurt [which the strong individual] inflicts upon the helpless, the greater shall be the voluptuous vibrations in him... it is now that he makes the greatest use of the gifts Nature has bestowed upon him.-- One of Sade's many identical mouthpieces, JULIETTE, p. 119.

Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty—this is my proposition; the "wild beast" has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely become—deified. That which constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; that which produces a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity, indeed fundamentally in everything sublime up to the highest and most refined thrills of metaphysics, derives its sweetness solely from the ingredient of cruelty mixed in with it."-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Section 229, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

Disparaging references to both Sade and Nietzsche are scattered throughout Frederic Wertham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, and the good doctor isn't any better at distinguishing the differences between them than he is at sussing out differences between different comics-genres. But whatever common ground the two philosophers share (including, apparently, a liking for the word "voluptuous" in connection with "cruelty"), such distinctions are important. Wertham is long gone, but one still encounters new versions of his simplistic view of both philosophers as fascist power-mongers, to say nothing of his characterization of comic books.

Even from these two quotes, though, it should be clear that the two men are not coming from the same place.

Sade's "strong individual," as much as the "weak individual" on whom he also discourses, is a fixed entity; the recipient of "gifts" or tendencies bestowed by Nature. Even Sade's concept of "voluptous vibrations" is based in the positivistic science of his day with regard to concepts of neurology. To return once more to the Octavio Paz Dichotomy, Sade is concerned only with "Body."

Nietzsche, however, is advocating not physical inertia but a transformation taking place within the dynamics of the human mind: i.e., of "Non-Body." Cruelty, which focuses first upon a fascination with bodily suffering, is an "ingredient" within the spectrum of "higher culture," but it's one that must undergo the alchemical-sounding "spiritualization and intensification" in order to partake of "everything sublime."

Most pundits who decry violence in the comics, whether the violence may be dominantly sexual or nonsexual in character, tend to project the Sadean ideal onto the patron of violent fiction, with little if any reflection as to the role that the element of violence has played in "higher culture." SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT complains that a CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED comic book dumbs down HAMLET to the level of bloody swordfights, but says nothing about the fact that there ARE bloody swordfights in HAMLET, not to mention poisoning, a suicide and diverse offscreen murders. In what way does a pundit such as Wertham enjoy an Elizabethan play such as HAMLET and somehow ignore its bloody-mindedness? The answer will never be known in Wertham's case, but one may assume that the way involves some sort of mental alchemy corresponding to Nietzsche's spiritualization and sublimation.

Nietzsche himself was probably not very interested in anything but "higher culture," though some scholars, following remarks made by Antonio Gramsci, have asserted that Nietzsche's *ubermensch* concept had its roots in the "pop culture" of his time, specifically Dumas' THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. However, some moderns have managed to adapt Nietzsche's theories in interesting new ways, so as to show that the creative alchemy extends across the board, finding expression in both "low" and "high"-- as I'll demonstrate in Part 3.

OUR BODIES, OUR NONBODIES: Part 2

I take the phrases "body" and "non-body" from an essay by Octavio Paz in CONJUNCTIONS AND DISJUNCTIONS. Paz was mindful of the fact that a lot of the words used by human beings in opposition to the physical body (as well as physical phenomena generally) are highly speculative, such as "soul" and "spirit." For that matter, even words like "mind" and "the unconscious," while more commonly used by materialists, are still "iffy."


"Non-body," then, was Paz's portmanteau term for all that intangible shit. I believe he meant it not as a viable category in itself but just as a means of spotlighting how human beings regard everything that informs their symbolic universe (that's Cassirer, again, BTW), be it tangible or intangible, corporeal or incorporeal, body or "non-body." It appeals to me as a means to subsume aspects of humanity that are sometimes ascribed to "mind," sometimes to "spirit."


So. Back to Superman and his not-so-coy mistress. Here they are in ACTION #5 (Oct 38):






Here one would think that we see a pretty strong verification of Superman's innate, or at least dominant, heterosexuality. But how should we read the fact that even though Superman will at least kiss Lois, he won't go any further that that? Since Superman is stolidly unreflective during the Siegel years, there will be no deep musings on his motivations for assuming the Clark Kent guise. I haven't read all of the Golden Age Superman stories, but I doubt that the diegetic logic ever gets any more complex than it is in the 2-page prologue of SUPERMAN #1, where Pa Kent says:


"This great strength of yours-- you've got to hide it from people or they'll be scared of you."

Concomitantly, his mother then lays on him the injunction to "assist humanity." In a nutshell the reader is given the essence of the self-sacrificial superhero mission, the contradictions of which Siegel did not explore but which Marvel Comics would mine (particularly in THE X-MEN) to great effect twenty years later. Diegetically speaking, though the motivation for the secret identity isn't as solid as it is for mere mortals like Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel, the basic logic does hold. Even a Superman doesn't want torch-bearing peasants constantly interrupting his quiet time.


Now, these diegetic factors don't make a queer reading of Superman impossible. But if one dismisses these factors out of hand, the reading begins to sound more like special pleading. Any deep reading, queer or otherwise, has to take into account Siegel's construction of Superman as the archetypal savior who sacrifices personal happiness (bodily pleasures, i.e., ""body") in the name of ethical ideals ("non-body.")


Certainly it's possible to claim that the reasons for sacrificing bodily desires aren't the *real* reasons. The earliest theoretical critics of comic books, Gerson Legman and Frederic Wertham, paid no attention to psychologizing Superman's Clark Kent persona; they were concerned only with the notion that the representation of the muscular male body enabled rampant homosexuality:


Legman: "the fainting adultation of thick necks, ham fists, and well-filled jockstraps.." (L&D, p. 43)


Wertham: "The muscular male stereotype... is in the setting of certain stories the object of homoerotic sexual curiosity and stimulation." (SOTI, p. 188)


I don't deny that some individuals who read comics then or read comics now were/are so stimulated. I do deny that this overrode, for the majority of the audience, a more fundamental dynamization relating to the challenges of armed combat, as channeled through generic formats.
The fact that such factors are still ignored by many modern textual critics comes as little surprise.


On the other hand, it might be a factor in the deep-readers' favor that questioning the sexuality of Superman isn't confined to elitists such as Wertham, Legman, and the majority of Marxists and Lacanians. Superman also finds his sexuality on trial in the work of the man I regard as the first person to advance a pluralist theory specifically focused on comic books: Jules Feiffer. Feiffer might not be the first person to find something odd (and maybe even a little queer) in what he called the "hairshirt" persona of Clark Kent, but his argument in THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES does strike one as more than special pleading.


Having devoted the whole of this essay to setup, I'll be looking at Feiffer's extremely informal but nevertheless influential thesis in OUR BODIES Part 3.