SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 2

 in 1924, Freud elaborated on masochism, suggesting for the first time that it is quintessentially feminine to find pleasure in pain—indeed that masochism is “an expression of the feminine nature.” -- Freud quote from "The Economic Problem of Masochism."

Sublimation (psychology):  the diversion of the energy of a sexual or other biological impulse from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use. -- Dictionary.com

Freud located the etiology of masochism in personal guilt. I assert that the real source of true, syndromic masochism is that of a transpersonal manifestation of shame, arising from being physically or psychologically unable to protect oneself. 

Having never been a woman, I don't know how mothers talk to their daughters (or any parallel relationship) about their gender's getting the short end of the sexual dimorphism stick, at least in terms of self-defense. Mothers may tell their young ones that there's nothing they can do about the biological factors that make men stronger, except to figure out ways to get around the male of the species. But internally, there should be, in females as much as males, some distress at knowing that one's physical nature puts one in danger of humiliation and/or death. 

One coping mechanism-- termed "sublimation" by Freud and others -- might be for female humans to enhance their potential for reproductive security by feeling awe at superior male strength, which then serves the long-term biological purpose of benefitting their offspring's survival. This biological imperative may be the source for female preference for a male type that Leon Seltzer called a "caring caveman." The caveman part might not be strictly necessary once humans were no longer living in caves, but aesthetic programming is not easily superseded, even in an era where, in theory at least, money takes the place of muscle as a means of males protecting females from incursions.  

Sigmund Freud certainly understood that sublimation was necessary to allow any humans, males or females, to cope with uncomfortable social situations, judging from this quotation:

What we call the character of a person is built up to a great extent from the material of sexual excitations; it is composed of impulses fixed since infancy and won through sublimation...-- "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex."

 So I don't know why Big Sigmund had to characterize women alone as "masochistic" for embracing whatever aspects of pain and/or humiliation were involved with the act of coitus. It's possible that the first human to experience pleasurable pain was of the female persuasion, but if so, I suggest that the pleasure didn't stem from a uniquely feminine nature. And compared to the females of various lower species-- such as lionesses, who have to put up with barbed penises-- human females have it fairly easy in the copulation department.

At base sublimation might be best viewed as an endurance test, one that also applies to males. What did it mean to caveman males-- assuming that any of them figured out how much a role their primeval thrusts played, in the formation of progeny-- to know that for all their strength, only women could keep the race alive? Going on archaeological evidence, it seems that humankind's earliest human-form deities were the so-called "Venus figurines," embodiments of female procreative power. Did males sometimes feel irrelevant before that power? Did they sublimate that sense of powerlessness into other goddesses? That might explain the rise, in historical times, of war-goddesses like Athena, Anath and Ishtar' deities who broke down the normal categories of "men make war, women make babies." And maybe, in later eras, this sublimated sense of humiliation resulted in quotations like the following, from the pen of the man whose name was used to categorize the syndrome called "masochism."

I saw sensuality as sacred, indeed the only sacredness, I saw woman and her beauty as divine since her calling is the most important task of existence: the propagation of the species. I saw woman as the personification of nature, as Isis, and man as her priest, her slave; and I pictured her treating him as cruelly as Nature, who, when she no longer needs something that has served her, tosses it away, while her abuses, indeed her killing it, are its lascivious bliss.

My guess as to why Freud didn't intuit masochism in both genders as a sublimating activity is that for him, anything that wasn't normative heterosexual intercourse flew in the face of his idea of sublimation. For him, sublimation was all about adapting to reality, rather than indulging formulating elaborate fantasies, be they of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch or of Margaret Mitchell. 

 

SUBLIMATING SHAME PT. 1

 In the history of humankind, the reasons for cultures to impute shame to their members are as varied as snowflakes-- failure to honor dead parents, marrying outside one's clan, and so on. However, I submit that there's a universal source of shame in all cultures: an individual's inability to protect oneself, or at least to try to protect oneself.

All human cultures have some form of marriage to ensure the promulgation of their offspring. Cultures surely vary as to how long the children are protected by the elders of their communities. But since all children must become adults in time, all kids in all cultures are given some imperatives about how to deal with conflicts as they progress toward that goal.   

In current American culture, kids very likely receive more cumulative oversight than they do in primitive cultures, due to the long years that juveniles endure in public school. Thus I'll skip over the more personal imperatives that are communicated to juveniles by their older family-members, and address how both male and female children develop systems of social validation while within the educational system.

While kids are in theory still protected by adults within that system, clearly school is where kids begin sorting themselves into mini-communities, primarily based on gender. Boys hang with boys, and girls with girls, and this inevitably leads to conflicts based on gender expectations. In these mini-communities of virtual strangers, it's easy for insecure kids to boost their egos by attempting to shame potential victims. This practice is termed bullying, and whether the groups use direct violence or indirect gossip to reduce victims to a state of abjection, the motive remains identical. Those who are singled out as victims by the aggressors usually have only two options for response: "fight" or "flight."

Now obviously there are even smaller communities-- clubs, for instance-- in which males and females interact-- but these are generally under close adult supervision. Except in incidents of extreme anger, bullying activities are frequently committed "on the sly," as there's also some ego-boost to be had, not just from shaming a fellow student, but also doing so without a teacher being aware of the act. Arguably, when males bully females, or vice versa-- more often through insults than through acts of force-- the bullies must be especially circumspect, to avoid accusations of sexual impropriety.

I should add, as I wind up this prelude, that I distinguish between simple social testing-- in which members of the kid-communities seek to suss out other members-- from bullying, which is a one-way street, in which the bully imposes shame for egoistic reasons. But there's also one source of shame that transcends all cultures-- that of female-male relations-- and it's the only type of shame that can be transformed into a source of pleasure. 

     

  

THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 5

 I decided I needed to follow up PART 4 with a couple of variations on the thymotic/epithymotic word-pair-- but this time, taken from American rather than Japanese cartoons.

In my previous writings on thymos, I've drawn to some extent on Thomas Hobbes in defining what I now call "epithymotic" as actions taken for either "gain" or "security." The anime example I used in Part 4 was that of the character Sakura in URUSEI YATSURA, who repeatedly beats up Ataru to defend her personal security vis-a-vis not having him paw her. But a "gain" example can be found in the 1944 Warner Brothers short PLANE DAFFY, written by Warren Foster and directed by Frank Tashlin.

PLANE is set in a cartoon version of WWII, in which the noble American warbirds are having their plans stolen by the insidious Axis spy Hatta Mari. Hatta romances naive flyers into giving her their secret plans and then convinces them to kill themselves. The high command sends their best "woman-hating" pilot into enemy territory, Daffy Duck. Daffy is ambushed by Matta, who almost does melt him into a pool of goo with her ardor. However, Daffy rallies, giving as good as he got, and then tries to escape with the secret plans. 

As he tries to escape, Matta tries to kill Daffy in various ways, failing only because he's such a darn-fool duck. He swallows the secret paper to keep it out of her hands, but she seizes him and sticks him in an X-ray machine so that she and her leaders can see what's written on the paper. The big conclusion is that the secret is no secret, but the point is that all Matta's actions are oriented upon "gain," the gain of military advantage for her allies. There's no indication that she enjoys the activities of killing or seducing for their own sake, so all of her gain-focused violence would be epithymotic in nature.

Another flavor of the opposite category, the thymotic, appears in the 1952 Daffy Duck short THE SUPER SNOOPER (reviewed here), written by Tedd Pierce and directed by Robert McKimson. The flavor I described in Part 4 focused on the general pattern of Lum of URUSEI YATSURA. Whereas Sakura whales on Ataru to protect her own security, Lum does so because she's in love with him and wants to bend him to her will. This is a particular form of thymotic activity I've previously labeled "megalothymia," indicating that the person exercising his/her will seeks supremacy (though it's suggested that if Ataru settled down to be a good husband, Lum would become a good wife-- or at least, a better one than, say, Peg Bundy). 

The opposite flavor to megalothymia goes by the name of "isothymia," and it applies to the violence unleashed upon Daffy by the statuesque seductress, "The Body." Isothymia strives to bring about equality of recognition, and in SNOOPER's parody of gumshoe-fiction, Daffy-- a very different, often-self-defeating form of the duck than we see in PLANE-- barges into The Body's home in the belief that a murder's been committed. Because The Body comes on to Daffy, he assumes she's trying to cover up a murder she committed, so he starts tossing out wild scenarios about How She Dunnit.

 The Body is of course no more complex than Hatta Mari, but the script gives the former a little more nuance. The Body keeps trying to make whoopee with the detective, but he just keeps trying to justify his fantasies by setting up murder-methods and casting himself as the murder-victim. Of the four gags in the short, only the last one shows The Body lying back and letting Daffy half-kill himself. The other three culminate with the Body either shooting Daffy or dropping a heavy weight on his head. In two of the three, she seems slightly shocked when she accidentally precipitates violence on him, and in the third-- the rifle-scenario shown above-- the artists draw her in a stoic mode, neither pleasured nor troubled by her action of shooting Daffy a dozen times. The overall suggestion is that she's just patiently indulging the goofy gumshoe's fantasies, until she finally gets a chance to explain that he's in the wrong house. Prior to the revelation, she's only mildly protested her innocence, and when he finally agrees with her, she uses that as an excuse to go after him again-- and he flees, because he has no (theoretical) defense against the menace of wedded bliss. The Body does not show any passion to hurt Daffy, but she's willing to accomodate his fantasies if it keeps him close to her. And so the Daffy Duck (of this isolated short, at least) meets the matrimonial fate Lum threatens Ataru with, but without the implication that the guy's better half will always get her way with the help of electric shocks.            

INNOCENT SADISTS, BROADLY PT. 1

 

In THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4, I gave two examples of my new categories, thymotic and epithymotic, as they applied to two characters from Rumiko Takahashi's URUSEI YATSURA venting slapstick violence on the same character, Ataru. One character committed violence in self-defense, to stave off Ataru's attentions, which I labeled epithymotic because it was not concerned with anything but self-maintenance. The other committed violence with the purpose of forcing Ataru to give her recognition as his proper wife and only love, and because it involved recognition, I labeled the action thymotic. The same thymotic characterization applies to all of Lum's actions, even those in which she takes the role of "innocent sadist," causing Ataru harm or humiliation without seeming to have any conscious intention to do so. 

I've most often used my term "innocent sadist," though, when analyzing episodes of the Fox teleseries MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. While I didn't feel like surveying every episode to support my views on the show's use of slapstick violence, I checked online summaries for the first two seasons of MWC to see how often, and in what ways, the two female characters acted the part of "dommes" to the male "subbes" of the series.      

The PILOT, while much less extreme in its use of violence than the later seasons, sets some ground rules. From the start, it's evident that Peg Bundy enjoys running husband Al down, so any time she causes him harm or humiliation, it's a given that she really means to do so, no matter what protests she may voice. In PILOT, she moves Al's alarm clock and puts a cactus in its place, and when he questions her capricious actions, she makes a lame excuse. For the length and the breadth of the series, Peg is a thymotic torturer: she does it because it gives her a buzz, not for any reasons of gain or security.

Kelly isn't quite as obvious at the beginning of things. However, for the first two seasons, the writers didn't really do that much with either Kelly or Bud. I imagine this was because the two young actors playing them were somewhat unknown quantities, while the two adult leads, O'Neill and Sagal, were the primary stars. Most of the stories in the first two seasons revolve around Al and Peg, or with their actions with their upper-middle class neighbors Steve and Marcy Rhodes. However, the PILOT does establish a degree of animosity between Kelly and Bud, though oddly, Bud's the aggressor. In one scene, he comes up behind Kelly, seated on the couch, and mimes cutting her throat with a rubber knife. Nothing more is said about the incident; Bud is nothing more than a typical annoying little brother. He annoys Kelly a couple more times in the first season-- he steals her diary twice-- before she really retaliates. And when she does so in the seventh episode-- the one entitled MARRIED WITHOUT CHILDREN-- the action goes a little beyond the mundane level of slugging him or giving him a wedgie. After it's established that Kelly's blasting out music from speakers in her room, Bud yells that "Kelly's tied my face to the speaker" in order to torture him with the racket. No reason for her action is stated.

Season Two doesn't have much more Kelly-sadism than the first season. The most notable episode is BORN TO WALK, the eighth one, in which Kelly gets her license to drive, and repeatedly threatens to turn her brother into "car meat." She never does anything overtly violent at this point in the show, though a much later episode had her run down her motorcycle-riding dad with a car. However, in the same episode Peg claims that at some earlier time Kelly shaved Bud's head, forcing him to celebrate Halloween that year by posing as TV detective Kojak. BORN TO WALK, though, seems to be the only second-season episode with that level of sadism.             

I won't go into all the ensuing seasons, but I would say that Season Three finally sets the Kelly-Bud relationship in stone, and to a mutual escalation in hostilities throughout the series, usually with Kelly getting the upper hand. THE CAMPING SHOW has Al, Steve, and Bud trapped in a rustic cabin with Peg, Marcy and Kelly, who are filled with hatred for men by their synchronized periods. At one point, the three women are alone in the cabin with Bud, and Kelly suggests, "Let's pretend Bud's a man and kill him." A little later, THE BALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL has Kelly torment Bud by pranking him that he's losing his hair, and when she asks Peg if she minds, Peg delivers the classic line, "No, that's why we had him!" From then on, even on those occasions when Bud provokes Kelly to retaliation, none of Kelly's actions can be considered epithymotic, because she, like her mother, enjoys male suffering far too much.          

THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 4

The last installment of THYMOS BE DE PLACE appeared in 2009, while the last time I wrote about Frank Fukuyama's magisterial application of Plato's "thymos" concept in a theoretical manner was 2015's MEETINGS WITH RECOGNIZABLE PRESENCES, which focused upon Fukuyama's extrapolation of "recognition" as the process by which human beings experience the abstract faculty of *thymos.*  

In contrast, the concept of literary sadism has continued to crop up fairly consistently on this blog over the years. Yet only in THYMOS Part 3 did I draw explicit parallels between the operations of thymos as described by Fukuyama (who does not address sadism in any way in END OF HISTORY) and George Bataille's formulation that the world of Sadean thrills belonged in the category of non-productive, esteem-related human activities.

Bataille's primary insight for literary criticism is the image he uses to present eroticism and violence as equivalent phenomena: "sensuous frenzy" (p. 192). Whether this adequately describes real-life sex and violence does not matter for the purposes of literary criticism, but I suggest that Bataillean "frenzy" does describe how fictional sex and violence impact upon the majority of readers. Bataille doesn't substantially address literature in EROTISM, except for the sensualized violence-scenarios presented by the Marquis de Sade, but elsewhere he makes the trope of "transgression against the norm" his hallmark, so I feel secure in adapting his terms for the purpose of literary criticism.

What EROTISM makes clear is that even though one may be experiencing fantasies of sex and/or violence through an intellectualized medium (Plato's "copy of a copy"), this is still the essence of a human (as opposed to animal) activity. He does not, as noted before, directly relate this to the subject of thymos, but because fiction is not the "real thing," it is not eros in the raw. Rather, it's closer to the nature of thymos in the same way that the sexual conqueror's boast, his tall tale of sexual conquest, represents thymotic rather than erotic stimulation.        

 

Most of my descriptions of sensual violence in literature have also taken the Bataillean POV. However, I have in various essays specified that there is a distinction between COMMON AND UNCOMMON EVIL. In short, the common form of evil is people doing bad things to another for the purpose of either gaining or protecting some concrete possession, even one's own bodily integrity, while the uncommon form is motivated primarily by the desire of esteem-based recognition. 

Thymos, as mentioned in previous essays, is one of the constituent parts of Plato's tripartite soul, which one Wiki essay sums up thusly:

• nous ("intellect", "reason"), which is or should be the controlling part which subjugates the appetites with the help of thumos.
• thumos ("passion"), the emotional element in virtue of which we feel joy, amusement, etc. (the Republic IV, 439e);
• epithumia ("appetite", "affection"), to which are ascribed bodily desires;

It now occurs to me that if the "uncommon form of evil" aligns with what Plato calls "spiritedness," then the "common form of evil" would align with the concept of "appetite." Further, though I'm in no way an expert on Greek language, I note that the word "epithumia" uses the same word-element found in "thumos," but qualified by the prefix "epi-." There are several contexts for the prefix "epi-" but here it seems to agree with this one:

1. Secondary: a consequence, by-product, additional, or lesser version.

   epilanguage is a second language used regularly for some purpose or purposes, epiphenomenon is an activity, process, or state that is the result of another, epitoxoid is a toxoid that generates less of an immune response than an original one

This would seem to accord with many if not all Greek oppositions between "appetite' and "passion," where the former is of lesser philosophical consequence than the latter.   

And now, with all these considerations in mind, I want to specify that only the "uncommon" operations of sadism are thymotic in nature, while the "common" ones are epithymotic.

This formulation may have a number of applications but I'll wrap up with just two, both from the manga URUSEI YATSURA, one of my "Domme Coms."   

Now, in URUSEI the male lead Ataru is the one who most often suffers comical outpourings of violence. However, some of these violent attacks are *epithymotic,* in that the attacker is retaliating in order to protect himself or herself. For instance, when Ataru is in full horndog mode, and seeks to grope a woman like Sakura, he gets slapped, punched, kicked or otherwise battered. Throughout the series Sakura has absolutely no romantic interest in Ataru, so whenever she hits him, it's for the "common" purpose of maintaining her bodily integrity by repelling unwanted attentions. This may not be exactly what Plato had in mind with respect to "appetite," but the correlation makes sense when seen through the lenses of Bataille and Fukuyama.

In contrast, the reigning champion for torturing Ataru is Lum, the alien wench who falls in love with him and demands that he reciprocate. As extreme as her actions are, they flow from a desire for thymotic recognition; that Ataru should recognize Lum as his one true love. Of course, if Ataru wasn't capable of feeling love for Lum, his continued tortures would just become dull, but author Takahashi is careful to keep hinting that on some level Ataru does reciprocate. However, he refuses to capitulate to Lum's attacks, and so continues to flirt with numerous other women, even though he has almost no chance with any of them and usually gets served just as Sakura serves him. So all of Lum's attacks, or her stratagems to otherwise manipulate her reluctant lover, flow from *thymotic* passion, which, while still comic, embodies the uncommon nature of love rather than common motivations like gain or self-protection.  

If and when I write further about these concepts, I'll probably cease to use any of Bataille's terms for these opposed operations and invoke "thymotic and epithymotic" instead. And as for what if any function Plato's concept of "reason" might play in these literary domains, that's a subject for some other essay.

    

TWO ESCALATIONS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

I've used my own term "escalation" twice on this blog for separate literary operations, though with the sense that they do connect up in a general sense. In 2012's ESCALATION PROCLAMATION I said:

Though I specified in NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PT 2 that narrative conflict did not require literal violence, narrative violence does have a potential, beyond that of any other literary device, for escalating the immediacy of the conflict.  Even the kinetic appeal of sex—so earnestly defended by Legman above—cannot match violence in terms of fomenting the narrative principle of escalation. 

So "escalation" in this sense refers to the way in which narrative conflict is increased when violent threats are made or carried out in a repeated fashion, in order to better engross an audience in the resolution of said conflict.

Then in 2021's ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2, I shifted the term's use "with respect to the concepts of high and low forms of both stature and charisma." I began by distinguishing two types of escalation, quantitative (which has a direct parallel to the quantitative uses of narrative violence in the previous formulation) and qualitative. My main criterion for the latter was that of a work, or a series of works, becoming a "cultural touchstone." A more precise way of wording this would be to specify that the only works that become cultural touchstones are those that realize concrescence in one or more of the four potentialities. Though I didn't consider the idea at the time of writing Part 1, I'll now state that there is also a qualitative form of "conflict-escalation," and that this is identical with the term I styled "variety." 

I articulate this distinction in order to focus upon the quantitative aspects of both forms. Within a given text, narrative conflict is enhanced by repetition of a threat even if the text manifests an extremely low level of concrescence-- for example, one of the worst slashers of the 1980s, TO ALL A GOODNIGHT. But levels of stature and charisma do not multiply within one text; only in a series of texts with icons in common. In ESCALATION 2 I mentioned two characters, Miss Victory and Magik, whose levels of individual stature were low because they simply hadn't starred in many serial stories as solo characters-- but who went on to accrue greater collective stature once they became members of comparatively more popular teams, respectively "Femforce" and "The New Mutants." In a separate post I mentioned that despite the fact that Marvel's Ant-Man/Giant-Man had enjoyed a solo series for a couple of years, and was better known to contemporary readers than either of my other two examples, over the next sixty years he also became better known for his participation as an Avenger, and thus his fictive career was dominated by collective rather than individual stature.

In yet another 2012 essay, GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4, I set down two significant values that should serve to explicate these two functions of escalation. 

One significant value I termed "conviction," which I aligned with the reader's generally subconscious sussing out as to how much emotion, and of what type, he should invest in a text. Conflict-escalation within a text is one technique used to stoke a reader's identification with fictional concerns, though clearly there are very types of conviction involved between, say, a slasher in which a killer knocks off several victims, and a Roadrunner cartoon in which the Coyote suffers one injury after another until the story reaches some usually arbitrary conclusion. Though I didn't continue using the term "conviction" on a regular basis, I've never contradicted this 2012 formulation, and I may find new ways to better incorporate this formulation in future.

In contrast, I've devoted several thousand words to centricity, and the entire formulation of stature/charisma is dependent on showing how this or that icon has the greatest resonance while the other icons in the narrative are of a lesser narrative order. So escalation that comes about due to an icon having appeared a few times, or many many times, is entirely congruent with all of my writings on centricity.

And all of these terminological ruminations will tie into an essay intended for tomorrow.

NULL-MYTHS: PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL VOL. 1 (2018)

I''ve never read any of the PUNISHER features with any regularity, even back when the character's popularity skyrocketed in the nineties. I've enjoyed odd issues in the same way that I've enjoy Chuck Norris films: lots of extravagant action with not much plot or characterization. Nevertheless, the Punisher has gone through many permutations, and so it's possible that he might take on mythic stature in one tale or another.

I picked up a library copy collecting PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL from the 2010s. I had some vague memory of having heard that this one was one of the better Punisher titles, though now that I've read the collection, I feel sure that I must've heard some compliments for an earlier incarnation of the title. All of the stories in this collection, authored by Matt Fraction, are lightweight in the extreme. I've read little or none of the work for which Fraction became popular in the 2010s, but his other work must have more content than this garbage. 

The eighties was a time in which many comics professionals, particularly those from Merrie Old England, began producing "grim and gritty" versions of superhero features aimed at the dominantly older DM comics-audience. Yet all of these pros had been raised on the G-rated comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages, and many of them sang the praises of the comics' "age of innocence." Grant Morrison did a story of an aging superhero in some issue of ANIMAL MAN, Neil Gaiman did a Riddler story, and Alan Moore wept crocodile tears for lost innocence with the Kool Aid Man.

A reader could read any of these and get the gist of Fraction's work on the first twelve issues of WAR JOURNAL. Of course, Moore, Morrison and Gaiman all showed numerous times that they could do much more than self-conscious parody. But that's all there is to Fraction's Punisher.

Here's Frank Castle deciding that he just won't put up with the silliness of the Silver Age, by blowing away the Stilt Man's junk.

Later, at the supervillain's wake, a bunch of classic and not-so-classic villains, mostly from the Silver Age, get together and talk about the Good Old Days as if it was all a big game, and didn't involve them trying to murder the heroes who interfered with them.

(On a side-note: even though these old villains used G-rated violence, G-rated violence can still kill a person! One of the main virtues of SPIDER MAN HOMECOMING was the bracing scene in which the movie's version of the Vulture shows just how dangerous a flying villain can be to a non-flying crusader.)

There's not much more to these twelve issues than the dubious pleasure of seeing a "realistic" hero blow away all these colorful fantasy-figures. Fraction has no psychological insight, even of a deconstructive kind, into either the Punisher, his allies (an obscure seventies villain, Rampage, gets recast into the role of the main hero's weapons maker), or any of the villains. It's all pseudo-Moore sardonicism with none of Moore's skill with satire. It's as if Fraction read Moore and the other "adult pulp" writers of the eighties and thought that their pretensions to realism were the only things worth imitating. 

Oh, and I don't know if Fraction started this, but now the vigilante hero has a deep and abiding regard for Captain America for some reason-- apparently because Cap beat up Frank Castle during some army training maneuvers? These issues take place around the time that Steve Rogers was temporarily killed off, so there's an arc of stories dealing with how a new, white-nationalist version of the Hate-Monger tries to usurp Captain America's uniform. Fraction is just as incompetent in dealing with "real problems" like racism as he is in playing games within Marvel's immense fantasy-cosmos.

Next to self-important tripe like this, even throwaway trash-tales of Castle shooting up a bunch of drug-dealers are preferable by far.

SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2

In the essay SADISM OF THE CASUALKIND, I pointed out that writers like Legman and Wertham viewed every apparent act of fictional sadism to be deeply revelatory of how messed up the audiences were. In this the two authors followed the example of Sigmund Freud, who, despite his disavowals to the contrary, hardly ever met a cigar he didn’t deem a phallic symbol.

I’ve pointed out various salient differences between Wertham and Legman, but historically they’re on the same page insofar as both men believed that American popular entertainment offered far too much sex and violence for a healthy culture. At times both authors slanted their arguments to apply to the effects of such unwholesome diversions upon children, but both also caviled at the effects of bad books and movies on adults as well. Neither of them seemed capable of imagining that for the majority of consumers, the depiction of excessive sex and violence, even those configured into sadistic actions, provided little more than “casual” entertainment, temporary respite from the dull round of the workaday world.

Instead, for these worthies, everything in popular entertainment—the muscles of comic book superheroes, the “bitch-heroines” of paperback thrillers—denoted something deep and syndromic in American culture. Wertham in particular expressed the belief that children could be bent into deviance as easily as the proverbial twig, as if psychological syndromes sprang out of some “monkey see, monkey do” impulse. By saying this, I don’t deny that some individuals may have psychological syndromes that are brought to the fore by their encounters with various types of art. But this phenomenon certainly isn’t confined to encounters with popular entertainment. One of the most famous syndromic avatars of literary sadism was the Eton-educated Algernon Charles Swinburne, who didn’t need crime novels (or crime comic books) to write such odes to sadistic women as “Anactoria” and “Faustine.”

I should further note in some cases an author may repeatedly use transgressive materials not because they express some syndromic aspect of the author’s psychology, but simply as an avenue of captivating a large audience. Though I considered most of Gershon Legman’s identifications of sadistic entertainments to be fatuous, I agreed with him to some extent regarding Chic Young’s newspaper comic BLONDIE. Still, when I read a collection of the original BLONDIE strips from 1930, I found barely any such sadisterotic motifs there. The early strips are all over the place, even writing Dagwood out of the story for a time. The feature didn’t enjoy sustained success until Blondie became a hausfrau and Dagwood a harried victim of the middle-class rat-race. This suggests to me that Young may have happened on his formula — “torture the husband”—by sheer accident, and that he and others who followed the formula did so simply to make a buck. I would not even argue that a syndromic consciousness was behind the one BLONDIE episode that I’ve thus far identified as mythically concrescent, a two-page comic book story signed (but probably not produced) by Young.

Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals—though, as I showed in the analysis of “Shaved and Clipped,” she seems to have no problems telling him that she can cut off his meals any time she pleases.

I’ve also differed with Legman on the sadistic content of teen humor comics, for reasons I detailed in the BLONDIE essay and won’t repeat here. But because Legman made the assertion, I have at times sought to test his hypothesis, perhaps more rigorously than he did—as I will show in the ensuing “near myth” essay.

SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICISM PT. 1

 When I began this blog in 2007, ultraliberal SJWs were still in the process of attempting to brainwash American audiences into viewing straight white male privilege as an unforgivable sin. Back then, the paradigm claimed, this privilege was expressed in the form of the hegemony’s employment of sadistic acts upon the bodies of all those who did not share this privilege, be they women, nonwhites or LGBT. In the world of comic books, Superman could get beaten to death and Batman could have his back broken, and those manifestations of extreme violence said nothing about the repressiveness of conservative America. But ifa female hero like Tigra got beaten up, or if Spider-Woman lifted herbutt up high enough for males to gawk at,  SJWs insisted that this represented nasty straight white males exercising their privilege, and so It Had to Stop. It was, as I’ve pointed out before, the rebirth of a liberal form of lynch law that had in the forties had been largely confined to outliers like Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman.

In the greater world beyond comics, most such lynchings came from the conservative side of the tracks, as per the Moral Majority’s ill-fated 1980s attempts to “cancel” extreme sex and violence in popular entertainment. However, the 1990s gave rise to a subtler form of censure: the view of America as the “fruit of the poisoned tree.” In the 1960s the radical Malcolm X had more power to inspire the aggrieved than to effect change for Black people. However, American culture’s uncritical acceptance of Spike Lee’s 1992 biography (or hagiography) of Malcolm X might serve as a flashpoint for future developments, promoting the view that those who had suffered most from the old hegemony ought to become the arbiters of the new one.

The past five years gave rise to spectacles like the 2017 Oscar Awards, in which Hollywood liberals lined up to be flogged for the sin of whiteness. But once Americans started seeing once marginal groups achieving dominance, we started seeing less of the politics-as-sadism argument. Once the new boss is in charge, how credibly can he complain that the old boss is still putting the screws to him? Given far fewer depictions of marginalized groups being subjected to physical torments, the SJWs found a new lyric for an old song: preaching that SWM privilege leads to everlasting economic abjection. Since it’s also a given that, as someone in the Bible said, “there will be poor always,” ultraliberals finally found a cornucopia from which they can draw endless supplies of social outrage.

Most of the SJWs in the comics subculture who had pursued the old Wertham-Legman legacy seem to have dropped the sadism angle. I confess I don’t read THE BEAT regularly these days, but I’ve the impression in the past five years none of the BEAT’s clickbait has been as audacious as the 2008 post “The One with All the Comments.” In this blogpost—which did indeed garner a lot of comments —Heidi McDonald aligned American superhero readers with the audiences of the woman-bashing site “Superheroines Demise.” The Heidi-post has been deleted for whatever reasons, so it may be that the only surviving references to its audacity (and philosophical dishonesty) are those on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, particularly an essay entitled SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND.

I suppose that nothing I wrote back then to refute Wertham, Legman and McDonald can be used to combat current SJWs and their reliance on the “economic abjection” argument. Still, on occasion the anti-sadism meme still crops up, most often in modern anti-pornography crusades that often sound barely distinguishable from the WAP crusades of the 1970s. I’ve repeatedly argued that sex and violence are integral components of literature, though without validating a given work just for being either sexy, violent or both. Therefore, in part 2, and the “near myths” essay following, I’ll explore some of the ways that sadism in literature can be fairly evaluated.

THE READING RHEUM: A PRINCESS OF MARS (1912)

 

In one crucial respect, the French writers of the degeneracy school differed from their American counterparts. Where Mather and his cohorts saw the Indian as insatiably lustful, a being of overbearing sexual power, these European writers saw him as sexually weak, cold-blooded, insensitive to pleasure or pain, passionless—perhaps even defective in his manhood.”—Richard Slotkin, REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE, p.203.

Numerous critics have remarked that in A PRINCESS OF MARS, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his “myth of Mars” out of myths of the American West. Prior to publication of PRINCESS (serialized under a different title), Burroughs had already penned three or four traditional westerns. John Carter, the protagonist of the first Martian novel, claims that he remembers no personal history, but nevertheless his main identity is that of a native of Civil-War Virginia and a former Confederate officer. Having become impoverished because his side lost—which is Burroughs’ only direct comment upon Carter’s Southern heritage—Carter goes West. He teams up with another former Rebel officer and seeks riches. However, savage Indians attack the two white adventurers. Carter’s partner is killed and Carter is cornered inside a cave by the hostiles. Believing himself doomed, he suffers a strange paralysis, after which a part of him separates from his mortal body, and he looks down upon what he deems his own “lifeless clay.” His “alternate self” then gazes up at the heavens and beholds the planet Mars, with which he identifies as a “fighting man.” In no time, Carter’s other identity manifests on Mars, where he seems to have as physical an existence as he did on Earth. He learns that Martian gravity gives him fantastic strength, and this leads in turn to Carter becoming the supreme warrior on the planet, as well as winning the hand of a red-skinned princess, Dejah Thoris.

In keeping with the theme of the Roman god of war, all denizens of Mars are warlike, but their warring nature springs from their world’s geological catastrophes, resulting in the planet’s slow loss of its atmosphere. Earlier Martian generations possessed a higher level of technology, which makes it possible for the natives to use super-science on occasion. Nevertheless, every race on Mars—red, white, black, or green—fights with pre-industrial weapons: swords, spears, bows and arrows. The people of Dejah Thoris, who are red-hued like the Indians of Earth, are somewhat more sophisticated than their fellow Martians, but in PRINCESS Burroughs is far less interested in them than in the bizarre green men, the Tharks and the Warhoons. These science-fictional ogres, Burroughs’ most memorable monsters, do not share the humanoid characteristics of most Martians, in that they have four arms and tusks in place of teeth. In addition, they incarnate the deepest idea of the ruthless savage, appearing to have no concept of pity or kindness. Carter will eventually learn that “nurture” rather than “nature” makes the Tharks pitiless, thanks to their habit of being raised by an impersonal village rather than by natural parents. That said, a couple of Thark characters prove themselves capable of being ennobled by Carter’s example. John Carter himself clearly loves the savage life—never once is he disheartened by killing an opponent, since all of his killings are justified—but he is a savage who has not forgotten the benefits of civilized life.

But the closest similitude between Carter and the Tharks is their reserve toward sexuality (hence the opening quote). In Burroughs’s cosmos, the unrelenting chaos of Martian life has made it difficult for the Martians to have more than perfunctory interest in spawning. There are occasional “degenerates”—though “throwbacks” might be a better term—among the Tharks, as with one of the book’s main villains, Thark chieftain Tal Hajus. Of this nasty villain, who later comes close to committing inter-species rape on Dejah Thoris, Burroughs writes:

[Tal Hajus] was, in contrast to most of his fellows, a slave to that brute passion which the waning demands for procreation upon this dying planet had almost stilled in the Martian breast.

Burroughs writes this in Chapter 12, and not until Chapter 27 does Tal Hajus attempt to assault the comely princess. Thus, long before the threat manifests, Burroughs has Carter meditating (on the same page of Chapter 12) that it may be necessary for Dejah Thoris to take her own life as did “those brave frontier women of my own land rather than fall into the hands of the Indian braves.” In Tal Hajus, then, Burroughs allows for the reader to imagine the savage as “insatiably lustful.”

But even though John Carter wanders through a world where he and everyone else walk around near-naked, he himself seems as “underfunded” as the majority of Tharks—and for the same reason, that of being almost wholly oriented on the arts of Mars, with little experience in the ways of Venus. In Chapter 14, Carter gives readers their only view of his own sexual experiences as he thinks about his burgeoning affection for the princess.

So this was love! I had escaped it for all the years I had roamed the five continents and their encircling seas; in spite of beautiful women and urging opportunity; in spite of a half-desire for love and a constant search for my ideal, it had remained for me to fall furiously and hopelessly in love with a creature from another world, of a species similar possibly, yet not identical with mine.

In other words, in Burroughs’ cosmos, inter-species sex is okay when sanctioned by the goddess of love. Yet in contrast to the author’s same-year TARZAN OF THE APES, there’s not a lot of lust in the pages of PRINCESS, except from villains like Tal Hajus and the spite-filled Thark villainess Sarkoja. But then, the loyalty of Carter and most other Martians to the martial spirit mirrors the author’s dedication to spectacular violence. Even though Burroughs does not dwell on the resultant gore from blades piercing flesh, he provides so many guttings and slicings that it’s impossible for readers not to imagine the sights the author denies them. It would be interesting to compare the sheer quantity of violent acts in any Mars book to those in the contemporaneous novels of the period. I tend to think that Burroughs had no literary peers in the realm of spectacular violence until Robert E. Howard came along—but even I am not dedicated enough to the spirit of Mars to undertake such a comparative study.

MYTHCOMICS: TYPHOID #1-4 (1995-96)

If Stanley Kubrick's film A CLOCKWORK ORANGE had married a 1990s Freudian treatise on the inter-relation of sex and violence, their baby would probably have looked like the four-issue miniseries TYPHOID by writer Ann Nocenti and artist John Van Fleet.

In an earlier review of another Nocenti story, I mentioned that my reading of the author's run on Marvel's DAREDEVIL comic title had been somewhat inconsistent. That said, even during my incomplete reading, I had some appreciation for Nocenti's original addition to the blind hero's mythos, a schizophrenic character who was essentially three personas in one body. Born Mary Walker, a shy and introverted artist, various circumstances cause her to manifest a second personality, the sexy and assertive Typhoid Mary, and then a third one, an ultraviolent man-hater named Bloody Mary. One character in the mini-series styles the trio as "virgin, whore and killer," thus separating off Mary's propensity for bloody violence from her enthusiasm for sex-play.

I didn't read enough of Nocenti's DAREDEVIL to know what the author last did with Typhoid in that feature, though according to Wiki the vixenish villain continued to make appearances in other Marvel features. In 1995, however, Nocenti had the deranged quasi-dominatrix escape an asylum, after which Mary Walker attempted to live an ordinary life despite her intrusive extra personalities. She even has a boyfriend named John (as in "John and Mary," maybe), but he only has a minor role in TYPHOID. The mini-series is far more concerned with what feminists now call "toxic masculinity," though Nocenti's skilled enough that the narrative isn't a pure paean to wonderful womanhood. Mary's first solo adventure is devoted to portraying her as a "schizophrenic private detective,"  though to my knowledge this was her only series.

Each of the four parts is given a subtitle derived from a famous fairy-tale female, respectively Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Red Riding Hood. In addition, issue one also sports an additional title, "A Fairytale of Violence," though none of the other issues have such this add-on. Nocenti explicitly links all of these famed females together in terms of their suffering at the hands of males, and though the add-on title suggests that there's some disconnect between the linked ideas of "fairy-tales" and "violence," Nocenti almost certainly knows that both original folktales and their literary imitators utilized quite a bit of violence, not always directed purely at women. In any case, the TYPHOID narrative extends the split between innocent Mary and her demonic other selves to society in general, where innocence is continually victimized by violent acts, largely though not exclusively associated with masculinity.

Two plotlines dominate TYPHOID. The more overt plot deals with a serial killer preying on New York prostitutes. The local cops are unable to solve the case, whether they're corrupt male cops like Detective Richards, or dedicated rookies like sincere policewoman Clair Dodge, so Mary decides to track down the murderer. In the second plot, two loopy film-students, Quince and Trent, get the idea to capture the schizophrenic quasi-heroine and make a movie about her psychological aberrations. (This includes fixing her eyelids so that she has to look at a series of assaultive videos, a clear homage to a scene in Kubrick's movie.) Nocenti more or less brings the two plots together in the last issue, but no one should read TYPHOID looking for a well-wrought mystery. Nocenti has followed the pattern of hardboiled detectives, in which the sleuth solves the case not by ratiocination but by being enough of a nuisance to attract violent attraction from guilty parties.

I won't claim that Nocenti's basic idea is any more original than it is well-crafted. However, even if the overall intellectual heft of the story proves somewhat weak, Nocenti brings a rough-hewn poetry to her interactions of sex and violence. The murders are committed by a killer (or killers?) who force hookers to suck on the barrel of a gun before firing, and it's impossible to read this without thinking of Freud's concept of oral fixation. But the opening page gives readers a pun that goes beyond Freud's reductivism, as an unseen person asks Typhoid why she kills, and she responds (in part) that she does so "to lighten the load." The element of humor makes Nocenti's "fairy-tale of violence" a far more evocative realm than most of the Neopuritan screeds that followed in the next twenty years.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE 24-HOUR MAN" (AMAZING ADVENTURES #35, 1976)

H.G. Wells' 1897 WAR OF THE WORLDS novel spawned countless "BEM-chases-babes" stories along the lines of this image from INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN:

Despite later uses of Wells' alien invasion concept, though, the novel barely alludes to sex. Marvel's 1970s "War of the Worlds" comic book, however, almost had to delve into such matters, given that it was designed to emulate the success of the company's own CONAN comic. That said, whereas the original "Conan" stories and most sword-and-sorcery stories replaced "BEM-and-babe" with "beast-and-babe," Marvel's take on Wells was not nearly as given to outright usages of sex appeal. "War of the Worlds"-- later retitled "Killraven, Warrior of the Worlds"-- thus kept a foot in both the world of barbarian fantasy and that of the science-fiction invasion-drama. When the Martians return to Earth after their failed attack at the turn of the 20th century, their second invasion proves wildly successful, and one of the few Earth-men capable of mounting a defense is buff, long-haired warrior Killraven, who wields a sword as often as he fires a ray-gun. Killraven is joined by a small coterie of freedom-fighters. though in issue #35, Carmilla Frost, M'Shulla Scott, and the slightly dim stalwart Old Skull are the only ones following the main hero. Hot female characters, good and bad, are frequently seen, but rarely does the hero get rewarded with sexual favors, as did most sword-and-sorcery heroes. Indeed, the only ongoing sexiness was between Carmilla and M'Shulla, one of the first white/black racial hookups in commercial comic books.

Further, Earth under the Martians sometimes resembles Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, for almost every issue pits Killraven and his buddies against some perversion of humanity, brought into being by Martian experimental science. Even Killraven himself is a perversion of sorts, since from the first issue by Gerry Conway and Howard Chaykin, he's been given a special psychic affinity with the invading aliens, the better to spy on the Martians and learn their weaknesses.

Not until writer Don McGregor teamed with artist Craig Russell, however, did the series earn plaudits with Bronze Age readers. Thus at the time they worked on "The 24-Hour Man," the creators had been receiving some acclaim, which may have encouraged them to experiment along lines of science-fiction speculation. (I should note here that Russell only supplies layouts to this 1976 story, with Keith Giffen receiving pencil-credits.) As in many science-fiction novels, the apocalyptic devastation of the existing world is an excuse to cast aspects of real history into new shapes. This may be one reason that McGregor chose to set the story in Atlanta, Georgia-- though, as I noted here, he barely references the city's Civil War history, except in relation to the movie "Gone with the Wind." McGregor's allusion to the spousal rape of Scarlett O'Hara has little or nothing to do with Margaret Mitchell's meaning, so it would seem that McGregor largely mentions the Mitchell work simply as a jumping-off point for his own concerns, the evocation of the Gothic theme of the persecuted woman.

Killraven and his friends stumble onto a cemetery outside the no-longer-inhabited Atlanta, and in said graveyard they find a never-named young woman ranting over the body of a withered humanoid figure clad in golden armor. When the apparent madwoman flees the cemetery, the warriors chase her, to keep her from harming herself. Then it becomes apparent that the woman has a guardian, a huge, multi-legged serpent-beast, whom she calls by the name G'Rath, and who prevents her from leaving. Killraven and the others intervene to defend the woman, but unbeknownst to them, G'Rath has a ally named Emmanuel ("God is with us" in Hebrew). human-looking except for possessing green hair and green skin.While the heroes battle the monster, Emmanuel covertly takes the gold armor from the dead humanoid, dons it, and proceeds to steal Carmilla from her allies.

Given the earlier mention of rape on the story's first page, the reader would be justified in assuming that Emmanuel abducts Carmilla in order to rape her-- though the unnamed madwoman's has already raved about having carried "G'Rath's child." In Emmanuel's conversation with Carmilla, it's implied that he does not plan to violate her. He wants feminine understanding from her, but he and G'Rath are symbiotically bound to one another in some way. The previous child of G'Rath perished after nine months in his mother's womb and one day outside it, for he was a "24-hour man"-- and so is Emmanuel. McGregor supplies no details as to how this symbiosis came about, nor does he even attribute this biological anomaly to Martian science. In apocalyptic worlds, of course, "mad science" sometimes just happens on its own, and apparently that's what gives a non-human creature like G'Rath the power to impregnate a human woman with a changeling. Emmanel's role in the symbiosis is never clear, though if he didn't have green hair and flesh, maybe he could pass as a "judas goat," able to move freely among humans long enough to catch a potential mate for his "father/sibling."

At any rate, Killraven's group manages to interrupt G'Rath's impending nuptials, and though both G'Rath and Emmanuel are destroyed, the heroes mourn the passing, since the two of them no more chose their own biological destiny than does a mayfly. One page is particularly strong in evoking Carmilla's fear of having her own biology hijacked by an invader, of possibly going as mad as the unnamed madwoman as a result.

Though I'm not a Freudian, it's hard not to perceive some psychosexual symbolism here. Though in actual mythology serpents can be as readily feminine as masculine-- a point Freud missed in his analysis of the Medusa figure-- it's hard to imagine G'Rath as anything but a "penis-monster." And if G'Rath is a penis, then what could Emmanuel be, but that which transmits male genes, that which is doomed to perish if *it* does not unite with a female egg? As I said, this similitude begs to be acknowledged, though not for a moment do I think that it "explains" the story, which is more concerned with grand tragedy than with Freud's reductive concepts.

McGregor and Russell even manage to tie Emmanuel's tragedy in with that of Killraven, the only member of the group who has been biologically altered. Toward the story's end, Killraven says, "You were right, Carmilla Frost. We could not save him. By our  separate natures and needs, we were forged as opponents, for our own survival. He would shattered you, the way his mother was shattered-- but it is more than passing odd-- it is still as if we shared a common curse."

The common curse may be that of all humanity in the Killraven world has been permanently reduced to a state of abjection by the Martian incursion. And yet McGregor adds in the final panel that the heroes "are only vaguely aware of the hint of beauty amid the darkly perverse events." This observation might bring some critics back to the jumping-off point, wherein spousal rape is more "romantic" than vanilla sex-- or it might also say something about the interactions, however unwelcome, of violence and sexuality.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 2

My essay THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS was the primary argument in which I connected Nietzsche's specific idea of "high spirits" with my concept of megadynamicity, extrapolated from Kant's considerations of "might" in CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. In EXCESS I argued that Nietzsche's philosophical championing of the "excess of strength" had a parallel within literary narratives, where "excess of strength" manifests as the megadynamic power of one or more characters.

Now, for the majority of my posts on the "conflict and combat" subject, I have analyzed the appearances of megadynamic power within what I termed, in ACCOMODATING ACCOMODATION, "confrontation narratives." Historically, such narratives have been devalued by critics, who disparaged violence-based narratives as being either vulgar or counter-progressive. I still value confrontation narratives as much as I ever did, and I focus upon accomodation narratives merely for the purpose of exploring other aspects of the dynamicity theory. I hope I will never be accused of sharing the views of those jejune critics have often championed accomodation narratives for idiotic reasons like "they're more like real life."

Now, I've specified in various essays that Kantian "might" did not necessarily manifest only in violent forms. The three-part essay A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE, beginning here, cites how a non-violent form of might informs the ending of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN. I would deem this graphic novel a "confrontation narrative" even though it's one in which the "good guys" essentially lose. Yet although the heroes are forced to cover up the villain's perfidy for a perceived public good, it's the journal of the slain crusader Rorschach that *may* have the power to defeat the villain's long-term aims. I would not call the journal "megadynamic," of course. It serves as an objective correlative for the power of the people, who will presumably rise up against the villain's hoax *if* they are given the knowledge to do so.

The journal also has nothing to do with Nietzsche's "high spirits," which is appropriate, since Moore makes poor usage of Nietzsche in "The Abyss Gazes Also." I bring it up, though, to show that "forms of might" can inhere in a variety of situations that do not involve violent confrontation.

So I began to ask myself: what would "high-spirited," megadynamic might look like within the context of that subset of "accomodation narratives" known as "love stories?" And here's one of the first examples that came to mind, provided by Yeats in his 1921 poem "Solomon and the Witch:"

'A cockerel 
Crew from a blossoming apple bough 
Three hundred years before the Fall, 
And never crew again till now, 
And would not now but that he thought, 
Chance being at one with Choice at last, 
All that the brigand apple brought 
And this foul world were dead at last. 
He that crowed out eternity 
Thought to have crowed it in again. "

Some critics aver  that this is a reference to the idea that Solomon and Sheba had such great, mutually-satisfying intercourse that the cock that had crowed when the world started crowed again because the bird thought the end of the world had come. This is probably as "megadynamic" as sex can get, and provides an illustration of the theoretical upward limit of sexual ecstasy in its fullest sense of "high spirits."

Part 3 will explore other, less cosmic examples.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 1

Nietzsche's "high spirits" line from TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS prompted this current line of thought. Once more, with (high) feeling:

"Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part."

I last used the "high spirits" in M FOR EFFORT to assert that such spirited-ness was a necessary component to both of my "big M's," megadynamicity and metaphenomenality. I won't be addressing the latter, because I've decided to focus on a (comparatively) new concept: viewing the mode of the combative through the lens of sex rather than violence.

The combative mode, as I've generally defined it, comes about only when two or more megadynamic agents in a narrative contend with one another. Combative works are, I've specified, a subset of the total set of works dealing with any form of conflict, be it physical, moral, psychological, etc. Over the years I've tended to compare combative works with works that included some form of violence that was not combative, though I've also frequently written about works that have no violence, or works in which the conflict is extrinsic to the narrative.

So in recent weeks I've been meditating on the following topic: if in combative works "high spirits" are best shown by the act of combat between near-equals-- the quintessential "male" theme of war-- then what do "high spirits" look like in works in which the conflict-emphasis is more oriented upon the "female" theme of love?

It's axiomatic that male audiences generally like violence and contentious situations, and female audiences generally like love and domestic situations. There are basically just two extant explanations for this differentiation of gender-taste: either the tastes are expressive of the physical natures of the respective genders, or the tastes have been manipulated into existence by the Evil Culture Industry. Anyone who reads this should be able to guess which explanation I find more credible, but even though I agree that physical nature is a primary influence, I don't agree with those who consider it determinative.

I'm aware, of course, that the latter explanation is the one most favored, possibly because it gives its adherents the chance to wallow in victimhood. To them, absolute equity between the genders is the only possible ideal. In this essay I took issue with Heidi McDonald's ideal of equity by saying:

The whole "who's exposed more" question should never have been one of pure equity.  Equity is something to be observed in the workplace or the boardroom, but not in fiction.  Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.  I tend to think that this is because in general men are hornier bastards than women, but others' mileage may vary.

A couple of years previous, I wrote DEFINING PSUEDOFEMINISM, in which I contrasted remarks by a writer I considered a "pseudo-feminist" with remarks by noted "anti-feminist" Dave Sim. Both, I pointed out, attempted to shore up their opinions with appeals to what each of them considered empirical fact. Sim's views about female athletes dispensed with any considerations of equity whatever. I observed:

Sim "proves" that women are "inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings" by asserting that women cannot beat men on an equal footing.  Hence fantasies of women kicking butt, in sports or in other forms of entertainment, are related to "the Charlie's Angels Syndrome," and so stand as further proof of women's inferiority.

In addition to disproving Sim's view in that essay, I championed the concept of the "fighting woman" archetype in several essays, and showed in NON-ADDICTIVE VICTIMAGE that I was not allied to the "biology is destiny" crowd.

I wouldn't have written as much as I have on the subject of "the Fighting Woman Archetype" if I believed that the greater body mass of the human male decided all questions of supremacy. But if it's almost inevitable that most men are stronger than most women, then this physical factor inevitably will be reflected in fiction. This inequity will at all times comprise an "is" that cannot be negated by any *ought.*  Even comic books, which have arguably been a greater haven for the Femme Formidable than any other medium, can't refute the basics of physical law. 

To re-state: even though I don't believe that biology is the sole determinant of gender differentiation, I categorically do believe that the biological potential of males to develop greater strength and body-mass makes a crucial difference in their tastes in fiction. The next logical questions, then, would be:

(1) What tendency of females can be seen as the "objective correlative" (borrowed from T.S. Eliot, even if I don't agree with his application of it) for the female preference for "love and domestic situations?"

(2) Assuming that I find such an objective correlative, in what way do fictional love-narratives express "high spirits," paralleling the expression of similar spirits in fictional war-narratives?

More in Part 2.

IN MEDIA RESOLUTION

The essay's title is a pun on the Latin expression "in media res," "in the middle of things," which is generally only directed at stories that don't begin at a standard beginning, but start at a theoretical middle and then fill in the blanks about what went before. "Res" by itself denotes "a particular thing," as one sees in such Cartesian terms as "res extensa," and the word "resolution" is traced from the same root.

My response to the Scott novel IVANHOE was the proximate cause for me to write KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2-- in which I examined the novel as an exception to the general principles exposed in the 2013 essay PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX. However, IVANHOE was not the first time I'd ever taken note of combative works which did not actually conclude with an act of combat.

Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS is arguably the most influential combative fantasy-work in which there's a great deal of fighting throughout the early and middle parts of the epic, not unlike IVANHOE. Yet none of the battles can unseat Sauron, who for some critics is really the titular "lord of the rings." Only by Frodo's action-- casting the One Ring into the inferno of Mount Doom-- can Sauron be destroyed. But Frodo's attempt to complete his act of renunciation fails, as his will bends to the ring's insuperable power.

The only thing that saves Middle-Earth from subjugation is the accidental intrusion of another hobbit, even more obsessed with the ring than Frodo. Gollum springs upon Frodo and bites off the finger on which Frodo has placed the ring, after which Gollum conveniently falls, "precious' and all, into the lava pit below.

Oddly, this essay makes clear that at one point Tolkien did consider a fully combative conclusion, which would have included Frodo and Samwise battling one of the Ringwraiths on Mount Doom. But this does not change the fact that Tolkien did indeed choose the less combative ending, even as Scott did with IVANHOE.

Thus, both of these are exceptions to my general rule that the narrative value of the combative mode arises when there exists "some sort of spectacle-oriented struggle at or very near the climax." I still believe that this formulation applies to the great majority of combative works. but that it's also possible for the mode to manifest at least when such spectacle has appeared in the middle portion of the narrative.

In truth, I'd already deemed some narratives to be combative even when they, like LORD OF THE RINGS, featured most of the spectacular violence in the middle and concluded with a menace being defeated by some "Achilles heel" maneuver. After the armies of man fail to vanquish the 1954 Gojira, the apocalyptic beast is defeated with a comparative lack of spectacle when he's dissolved by "the oxygen destroyer."

At the same time, there's a transitive equivalence between the mundane weapons of the military and the super-weapon. I made a similar point, without invoking the transitive effect, when discussing the 1956 film FORBIDDEN PLANET in this essay:

To be sure, when the Id Monster is defeated, it isn't because of the clash between the weapons of Earth-science and the power of the Krell machines.  The Monster is defeated by undermining the source of its power in Morbius, who is in essence the Monster's Achilles heel.
Nevertheless, without the clash of energies that establishes how potent the Id Monster is, there would be no narrative perception of the need to seek such a vulnerable point. 

An intransitive effect, however, rears its head in the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS adaptation of H.G. Wells, as I wrote in this essay: 

In the film as in the Wells novel, what saves the human race is not some last-minute strategy or new weapon, but a lucky break having nothing to do with Earth's defenders.  In the book, Wells stresses only irony in the fact that the Martians perish from Earth-bacteria, while the 1953 film reverses this ideological interpretation, regarding the bacteria's presence as an expression of divine providence.  But regardless of which interpretation is favored, in neither case can Earth's defenders take any credit for the Martian defeat.

Another corollary to this formulation is that some of the works that have violence "in the middle" are, like WAR OF THE WORLDS, not really deeply concerned with the spectacle of combat. My main example of such a film in PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX is 2002's MINORITY REPORT, which has one spectacle-scene inserted into a middle section, and my "in media" formulation does nothing to change REPORT's subcombative status. In the end, it comes down to something of a judgment call, not unlike my ruminations on "active and passive shares," in which the critic must decide how important the elements of spectacular violence are to the narrative.