FINDING SIGMUND PART 2

These days Freudianism is not given great credence in many psychological circles. Still, one still finds a number of literary academics building theories on Freudian concepts or those of Freud's followers, i.e., Lacan. Most of them do not seem to be evoking it as I do here: as one particular archetypal complex out of many in humankind's expressive cosmology, or as a concept of the "reproductive imagination" that takes on archetypal resonance when hybridized with concepts of the "productive imagination." Rather, these academics seem to wish to validate Freudian concepts as if they were sufficient in themselves to describe the literary cosmos.

To be sure, there have been trailblazing critics who used such concepts brilliantly, like Leslie Fiedler. Others, like Roland Barthes, shed less light but at least attempted to locate Freud within a cultural cosmos of greater scope, such as crossbreeding Freud's concepts with those of Marx. But the question remains: what is the appeal of Freud for moderns?

The appeal comes down to that of security: the security of a Newtonian materialism. Though Freud was certainly not the first "psychologist," his concept of latent sexuality offered a new gloss on the theories of empiricist philosophers like Hume and Burke. By theorizing that the elements of a given psyche's sexual proclivities were set for that individual in the latent, non-sexual stage of his life, Freud promoted a Newtonian physics of the mind. As noted in Part 1, everyone had an Oedipus complex because everyone went through the stages of pre-sexual attachment to a parent (usually though not exclusively the individual's opposite-sex parent), which in turn led to the processes of sublimating one's early sexual influences:

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

This universality offers the benefits of security; all roads lead to Magna Mater, and the roads always follow the orderly processes of Newtonian physics. Man A is, say, a cross-dresser not, as Plato's PHILEBUS would suggest, because Man A's soul resonated with the idea of cross-dressing while Man B's did not. Rather, pure historical contingency led Man A to cross-dressing, and under the right circumstances Man B could have found himself responding with the same patterns of disavowal/sublimation.

Now, though Freud's schema does not hold water for real-world psychology, it can work well as a literary myth-pattern not because the pattern itself is universal but because it arouses the strong expressive emotion a literary work, high or low, most needs. However, sometimes the patterns are simple, sometimes complex. When they remain simple, they best fit Kant's concept of the "reproductive imagination."

For instance, Freud's analysis of Shakespeare's HAMLET reduced all of the complex motives of the play's characters to the Oedipus complex. As I noted in this review of Laurence Olivier's HAMLET (1948), the film largely follows Freud's interpretation and thus compromises some of the deeper ethical issues of the play. I assign it "fair" in its mythicity simply because Freud's concepts have become quasi-myths in their own right, and thus Olivier does realize this symbolism, albeit excluding a more expansive reading of Shakespeare.

As noted above Freud's empiricist concept can take on greater symbolic resonance when hybridized, as I said above, with concepts of the "productive imagination." In Part 3 of FINDING SIGMUND, I'll cite an example of this "productive-reproductive" hybridization.

MYTHCOMICS #12: LADY SNOWBLOOD (1972)

PLOT-SUMMARY of “Rokumeikan Murder Panorama” (wr) Koike, (ar) Kamimura, (1972). In Japan of the the late 1800s Lady Snowblood uses both womanly wiles (including frequent disrobings) and sword-skills to serve at times as assassin, at other times as an agent provocateur. In “Rokumiekan,” she serves more as the latter, working for statesman Ishizaka. Ishizaka, a proponent of traditional Japanese values, abhors the extreme pro-Western voices in Japanese government and wants Snowblood to destroy the “international social hall” Rokumeikan, where Japanese officials entertain Western visitors with all manner of debauched activities. As part of her plot against Rokumeikan, Snowblood spends a month learning the skill of picking pockets. She waylays a coach bound for Rokumeikan and murders its female passenger. Then she forces the coachman to help her impersonate the dead woman. While she dances with the officials who run Rokumeikan, she picks their pockets of assorted items. Then she lures a Western official out of the hall with the promise of sex, kills both him and her coachman-accomplice, and leaves their bodies in a heap with the dead woman. The owners of Rokumeikan finds the bodies, and then Snowblood turns up, accusing them of the murders and claiming that she has proof, in the form of the telltale items she picked from their pockets. The officials sic their guards on Snowblood, and she kills a few (while wearing no clothes, incidentally) before Ishizaka shows up, asserting that he’ll expose the controversy to the public unless the officials close Rokumeikan. The officials capitulate, and Snowblood departs for her next mission.


MYTH-ANALYSIS: As with CEREBUS, Koike and Kamimura’s LADY SNOWBLOOD is a complex tapestry in which it’s difficult to analyze any single sequence without making at least passing reference to others. “Rokumeikan” is one of the earliest Snowblood adventures, however, so that prior to it are only two debut stories showing the protagonist as a mystery woman, and then some stories that reveal at least part of her origin. The first two “mystery woman” stories have considerable bearing on this story, in that the two earlier tales put Snowblood in the position of defending an orthodoxy, just as she essentially does in “Rokumeikan.” In both, the owners of criminal or shady enterprises hire Snowblood to get rid of their rivals, who have gained economic ascendancy through some new innovation. For example, in the first Snowblood story the assassin is sent to kill a gambler who has attracted greater custom than his rivals through offering prostitute-services aboard “entertainment boats.”


Now in “Rokumeikan,” the orthodoxy is a good deal more sympathetic than a bunch of aggrieved gamblers. Koike’s script makes clear that the social hall is simply a means for unworthy men to advance politically by pimping out their daughters to both Japanese and Western officials. In addition, Ishizaka is appalled that the pro-Westerners, in their desire to equal the Western imperialists, consider such extreme measures as abandoning the Japanese language for English and sponsoring massive interbreeding with Caucasians in order to spawn a new, less “inferior” race. Both measures--which Koike says were genuinely considered in 1880s Japan--are clearly assaults on Japanese culture in favor of assuming a Westernized façade for profit motives. Thus in “Rokumeikan” Snowblood becomes a mythic defender of her culture against Western barbarism, represented by both institutionalized racism and sexual license.


Of course, the relationship of the SNOWBLOOD series to sex is a double-edged sword, both in the diegetic and extra-diegetic senses. In the diegesis Snowblood uses her beauty both to beguile men into compromising themselves, and when she fights, her nudity implicitly serves to distract them, making them vulnerable to her blade. Extra-diegetically, though, her displays of nudity appeal to mostly male readers, who on some level are “getting their rocks off.” Amusingly, this makes them closer in spirit to the story’s villains, like the dissolute officials of the Rokumeikan.


George Bataille, a philosopher strongly influenced by Marx but not enslaved to his narrow economic dictums, attempted in his fiction to go beyond what he called “libinal economy,” to devise sexual scenarios so outrageous that they would no longer serve the purpose of simple economic exchange, be it that of a john buying real sex from a prositute or a customer buying sexy fiction for a sexual thrill. In fact, the exchange of a “cash nexus” for an object or a service parallels the most disinterested form of sexual exchange, which is in its turn comparable to Buber’s “I-it” relationship.


Does LADY SNOWBLOOD also exceed “libinal economy?” Not in the same manner as Bataille’s fiction, to be sure. The SNOWBLOOD manga-customer in the real world expects to see a lot of sex-action for his money, just as do the inhabitants of the SNOWBLOOD world do for their money. However, in the extra-diegetic world, the customer also expects to see the lady assassin slice and dice assorted villains, so the extra-diegetic customer is also getting the thrill of action. One can imagine a slavish Marxist interpreter believing that Snowblood’s attacks are an attack on capitalist economy, and thus implicitly a validation of Marx’s anti-capitalist wish-dream.


I called Snowblood a “mythic defender” of her culture earlier because she falls in with a long line of Japanese heroes whose raison d’etre concerns committing brutal actions with a near-mystical detachment. Though “Rokumeikan” opposes her to Western imperial control and sexual license, Koike and Kamimura show that traditional Japanese culture is no less given to economic abuse than the West. Indeed, in the story of Snowblood’s origin, her samurai path is determined, prior to her birth, by the murder of her father and the rape of her mother by individuals attempting a moneymaking scheme no less crass than that of “Rokumeikan.”


SNOWBLOOD thus avoids the ratiocentrist conceits of Marxist fictions, for the story is concerned, first and foremost, with the elemental conflicts of human life and thought. At the conclusion of “Rokumeikan,” Snowblood, having brought down the social hall, takes her leave. Though she’s naked, she’s utterly unaffected by the gazes of the men around her, and some of them lower their eyes deferentially, after the fashion of the “Lady Godiva” legend. Ishizaka defines, as best he can, the mystery of Lady Snowblood, using the Japanese concept of "syura" (Hell):

“What purifies the turbid state of this world isn’t white snow, but the scarlet, fierce snow of syura.”

MYTHCOMICS #11: KAMANDI #30

PLOT-SUMMARY for “UFO: the Wildest Trip Ever”: On Kamandi’s future-Earth, most humans have devolved to animal status while intelligent, humanoid animals now rule the world. Kamandi and his older male friend, mutant Ben Boxer, seek shelter one night in a structure they mistake for an abandoned bunker. In truth it’s a flying saucer, which takes the two Earthmen on a “wild trip” many miles away, to an island that’s little more than a great sand-pit. The saucer’s owner, a humanoid whose features are hidden by his helmet and flight-gear, never communicates with the humans but turns Kamandi and Ben loose on the island. They find that it’s the alien’s repository for assorted objects representing the lost glories of humanity—mostly large sculptures and ancient vehicles, one of which is an airliner full of dead, quick-frozen passengers. Ben deduces that the two of them are to be living “samples” in the alien’s collection. As soon as he hazards that speculation, it’s confirmed as an enormous circular space-warp materializes in the sky and begins sucking the alien’s collection into the sky and swallowing buildings, ocean liners, et al. The humans see no escape but fortunately their investigation of the airliner turns up an “atomic satchel bomb,” which they accidentally activate. The bomb stays aboard the airliner as the warp draws it up, and detonates so as to close off the sky-door. The alien, cut off from his passage home, tries to ray-blast Ben and Kamandi. In the ensuing battle Kamandi ruptures the alien’s suit, and bolts of energy blast out of it, for it turns out that the alien was “living cohesive energy.” Without his suit the alien is out of commission for the time being, but his suit’s explosion exposes Ben to massive amounts of radiation. The story ends on a cliffhanger, as Kamandi finds that Ben has become a giant.

MYTH-ANALYSIS: KAMANDI #30 is the first part of a multi-issue continuity that takes place on the island. This rather rambling storyline involves various adventures for Kamandi and Ben—Ben eventually having his gigantic condition reversed, an invasion by competing animal armies, and Kamandi’s discovery that the nameless alien can become his ally once “he” regains a body—which, as it happens, turns out to be female. Kirby’s assorted plotlines are enjoyable enough but only this first section—almost a stand-alone tale save for the cliffhanger--carries the symbolic resonance of myth.


The story’s first panel includes a caption stating that “an invader stalks the dreams of Kamandi,” and by extension, those of his buddy Ben as well. But though Kirby leaves no doubt that their adventure is not a dream, the entire story has a more dreamlike tone than most KAMANDI stories. Possibly this is because the story is clearly patterned on the various “UFO narratives” that were receiving considerable media-exposure in the 1970s, and skeptics derided these stories as hallucinations or dreams, if not outright lies. In fact, while aboard the saucer Kamandi and Ben are even “probed.” Naturally, given Jack Kirby’s propensities for “G-rated” work, this brief incident carries none of the quasi-sexual content of the UFO-narratives; rather, for two brief panels thin wires extend from the saucer’s walls and attach themselves to the heroes, with one closeup of the wires attaching to their faces.


The opening caption also mentions that Kamandi’s post-disaster Earth “has violently buried the past and created new and terrifying mysteries.” To be sure, the nameless alien and his space-warp aren’t created by the future-Earth’s disaster, but their agency is certainly drawn to Earth out of some unexplained curiosity about mankind’s vanished glories. Many stories in the KAMANDI series, following the pattern suggested by the PLANET OF THE APES films, mediate on such transitory glories, but KAMANDI #30 is the only Kirby tale that takes the APES theme a little further. The image of buried vehicles and statuary in the island’s “sand-pit” is certainly derived from the conclusion of the 1968 film, in which the remnants of Lady Liberty lie half-buried on a sandy beach. However, though PLANET OF THE APES has nightmarish moments, it never seems dreamlike, as KAMANDI #30 does. Kirby’s story could be read in Jungian terms as an “anamnesis,” in which the ego of the viewing subject finds itself hurled into a “collective unconsciousness” consisting of images and icons from mankind’s past.


The space-warp also carries a symbolic resonance that goes beyond its base functionality in the story. Kirby’s captions imply that the warp is the means by which the alien traverses “the vastness of space,” but its principal purpose in the story is to transport the glories of mankind to some undiscovered country. Since Kirby never has the alien explain his purpose, the alien’s enterprise takes on an eerie ambiguity, and the warp seems less like a standard SF-device and more like a numinous presence—a gateway not to an alien world, but to some celestial firmament, into which the detritus of the phenomenal world is being converted back into the nothingness of the originary world. Kirby largely eschews direct religious references in KAMANDI #30, but on page 6 he does describe the saucer in flight as pouring forth “gobbets of angel fire.” Even the fact that the alien has no real body suggests the Judeo-Christian concept of angels that can assume or discard human form at will.





Against such supernormal visitors, Kirby’s humans must rely on dogged perserverance. Throughout the KAMANDI series Kirby alludes to (but does not state outright) the possibility than nuclear weapons contributed to the disaster. Yet the one nuclear knickknack that appears in this story plays an ambivalent role. Though originally intended for the “horrible crime” of slaughtering an airplane full of people, the satchel-bomb saves two humans from being captured or destroyed by alien technology, and so represents a positive aspect of human inventiveness. On page 16 two Kirby-captions suggest the thought processes of the inscrutable alien as he tries to kill Ben and Kamandi: “To deal with ‘men’ is a classic error. They accept nothing—not even death.” Significantly, Ben Boxer—who in other stories displays the power to change into a metallic colossus—uses no more super-power than does Kamandi in wrestling with this intergalactic “angel.” Thus the alien’s incomprehensible designs are defeated by the complementary factors of human insight and human determination.


I mentioned in the first paragraph that in later issues the energy-alien takes on the form of a human female, albeit one with bright crimson skin and able to shoot bolts of cosmic flame. Despite gaining the name “Pretty Pyra” and the ability to speak, Pyra never tells the readers the purpose of her enterprise; only after Jack Kirby left the feature did a later writer venture a full explanation of her mission. This suggests that Kirby didn’t really want to reduce the “UFO” adventure to the level of standard science fiction tropes, though in earlier features, such as GREEN ARROW and CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, he had used such tropes in purely functional fashion. Unfortunately Pyra’s embodiment robs her of her mythic identity. With the help of another Kamandi-ally, the scientist Doctor Canus, Pyra takes on human form by using Kamandi’s own body as a template. However, though this cosmic take on the Frankenstein myth had great potential, Kirby doesn’t establish any meaningful connection between the “Last Boy on Earth” and his fiery “offspring.” Kirby probably meant Pyra to be another iteration of the “cosmic innocent” type so well realized with his Silver Surfer. But Pyra never fits the scope of Kamandi’s earthbound adventures, and her assumption of feminine form seems merely an idle fancy, as her femininity has no impact on future Kirby stories.


Having invoked Jung, I suppose I should note that the “hole in the sky” could in Freudian terms be read as a “cosmic vagina,” devouring instead of giving birth. The fact that the owner of the “hole” turns out to have feminine aspects might partly support such a reading. However, in most of his oeuvre Jack Kirby’s fantasies tended more toward Jungian abstraction than to Freudian concrete physicality. In a 1972 interview republished in THE JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #52, Kirby’s questioners, in apparent seriousness, state: “Maybe we have dirty minds but the Mother Box means one thing to us and we just wondered if you had that in mind.” Kirby replies that he only noticed the association only when he “really began to think about the label I put on it.” Later in the same interview he doesn’t rule out Freudian interpretations but claims that his main thought was that, “I saw it as gaining simple strength from the mystic. I feel that man has the capacity to gain strength from the mystic, something outside himself, something beyond his body.” This remark makes an excellent gloss on this KAMANDI continuity, for though the hero’s initial encounter with a “mystic ET” is a negative one, in the long run that ET becomes an ally in the adventures of the Last Boy on Earth.

TWO IF BY TUESDAY

New rule:

If I miss posting something new on "1001 comics" between one Mythic Monday and the next, as I recently did, I have to do two posts by Tuesday.

That's it.

FINDING SIGMUND PART 1

"Insofar as imagination is spontaneity, I also sometimes entitle it productive imagination, to distinguish it from reproductive imagination,whose synthesis is entirely subject to empirical laws, namely, of association, and which therefore contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of an *a priori* cognition."-- Immanuel Kant.

Sigmund Freud was, as I've noted elsewhere, a foursquare empiricist in both his psychological theories and his personal philosophy. He considered his Oedipus complex to be a universal experience of all mankind because every human psyche, like every human organism, was designed (at least under optimal conditions) to pass through a series of developmental phases of which the complex was the foundation. When proper development did not take place, the psyche, just like the physical organism, could become deformed. (Deleuze points out Freud's early concerns with and influence by the science of teratology.) For Freud, there was no such thing as a "productive imagination" able to perceive the "pure representations of space and time": all imagination was the product of associations based in a given subject's experience.

Kant clearly opposed the Empiricists of his time, who viewed all imagination as experience-based, as well as the Rationalists who attempted to conceive it as fundamentally transcending experience. But as Kant's dichotomy shows, he does not deny the existence of a "reproductive imagination," an imagination based in pure experience; rather, Kant demonstrates that its existence does not rule out a dichotomous form of the imagination which does reach beyond individual experience.

Kant's formulation of two complementary forms of imagination proves useful for the critic seeking to suss out why Freud's schema applies well to some literary works, both canonical and popular, but not to others. For every ROSMERSHOLM that seems to validate the Oedipus complex, in part because the Ibsen play appeared prior to Freud's seminal INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, there are dozens of works, from MOBY DICK to BATMAN, where Freudian analysis has been fallaciously, and often comically, misapplied.

Alternately, because in contemporary times Freud is not really considered to be that good an empiricist in terms of using experimental evidence, academics will often employ the "old wine in new bottles" trick, applying to literary works the doctrines of intellectuals strongly influenced by Freud, whether they actually styled themselves as Freudians (like Lacan) or not.

As a critical idealist myself, I reject any doctrine that reduces all facets of imagination to random associations, or to cognitively-reasoned associations (i.e., allegory), or any combinations thereof.

However, I can't deny the likelihood that there must something to the Oedipus complex if Henrik Ibsen wrote a play that seems to reproduce the fundamentals of that schema (specifically in its feminine iteration) long before Freud had made the complex famous enough to be liberally referenced in literature, as by writers as diverse as Eugene O'Neill and Robert Bloch.

In short, it's my contention that Freud's Oedipal fantasy is a real archetype, though obviously not as univerally pervasive as he liked to think. But it is an archetype that springs from the "reproductive imagination" in that it's an archetype concerned more with experience than essence in the critical-idealist sense. The archetype's central message is always the blending of *eros* with all other forms of love-- *agape, caritas,* et al-- and in that sense it is dominantly associational. There are a few exceptions to this general rule, in that the base Oedipal can be crossbred as it were with images of the productive imagination.

In future installments of this series I'll deal with some of the right and wrong ways to impose Freud's "reproductive imaginings" upon fictional works.

MYTHCOMICS #10: JAR OF FOOLS

"It ain't a magician's world anymore."


PLOT-SUMMARY: Ernie Weiss is a professional magician. At the story's opening he's become a penniless drunk, traumatized by the death of his brother Howard, who perished in a bungled escape-artist stunt, possibly committing suicide. Ernie has also split from Esther, his girlfriend, but he dreams about her and she finds herself unable to bond to a new boyfriend. Ernie is then forced out of his torpor when Al Flosso, the elderly magician who taught him his trade, escapes a senior-care institution and takes refuge with Ernie. To dodge the institution's orderlies who come looking for Flosso, Ernie throws in with confidence-man Nathan Lender, who allows Ernie and Flosso to live with him and his little daughter Claire in Nathan's car, which is hidden under the pilings of a major bridge. In exchange Lender requires Ernie and Al to teach Claire the magician's trade. Lender says that he wants her to learn a "legitimate" trade. However, he ends up using Claire's talents to rip off a cafeteria cash-register. By this time Esther has by chance happened across the quartet's hiding-place, which works out well for Ernie; his obsession with his brother's death boil over and only Esther manages to stop him from fatally imitating Howard's deadly stunt. Then Ernie and Esther see a police patrol about to descend on Lender and Claire. To distract the cops Lender lets the cops catch him with the cash register, and pleads with Esther to take Claire back to her mother. As she does so, Ernie and Al head toward an uncertain future, though Al seems strangely confident about their fate.

MYTH-ANALYSIS: As Flosso's quote above suggests, there is no magic, not even "magic-realism," in Jason Lutes' world, and yet the vibe of JAR is much like that of the magic realists. Visually this impression is supported by the leitmotif seen in the above illustration: grids of power-lines suspended over the cityscape, which Flosso compares to "some kind of spider's nest-- and I don't wanna be here when the owner comes home." Despite the fact that the wires are never anything but the tools with which human beings communicate, Lutes uses the power-grid as a symbol for the failures of communication, which haunt the characters like so many bad dreams.

All of the characters are to some extent haunted by the past. Ernie is the most obvious, in that his obsession with his dead brother almost costs him his life, but Esther is haunted by the failure of her relationship with Ernie, Al by the memories of his vanished youth, and both Lender and Claire by the breakup of Lender's marriage. Yet Lutes does allow for the possibility of communicative breakthroughs, though none of them take place over the phonelines, except for an early scene when Flosso calls Ernie for the first time.

Not covered in the above summation are some other details: Lender, who just wants to make it easier for Ernie to teach Claire tricks, happens across a pawn-shop where he obtains, to Ernie's horror, the very strait-jacket in which Howard perished. Briefly the story takes on a Pyncheonesque air as Ernie tries to find out who pawned Howard's jacket; the trail leads to an electrician's union whose company logo resembles one seen later in the scene where Flosso ruminates about the spidery nature of the power-lines. However, given that Lutes wants his characters to triumph over their obsessions and failures-- a rare attitude in artcomics-- Ernie never learns the secret behind the jacket's pawning and ceases to pursue the matter once Esther saves him from self-immolation.

Lender's backstory isn't pursued in as much detail as Ernie's, but he's no less poignant. Lender insists to Flosso that his confidence-games are illusions that make people feel good, even as the illusions of magic do-- though both professions are being marginalized by the world of technological advancement. It's certainly no coincidence that Lutes names him "Lender" when in truth he lives by "borrowing" on human needs. But he does manage a moderate triumph by sacrificing himself to save Claire and returning her to a normal life.

Esther, Claire and Flosso don't face turnabouts quite as vivid as those of Ernie and Lender. But Lutes gives attention to the negative forces in their lives as well-- Flosso by seeing his world pass away, Claire by the uncertainty of her parental breakup. As for Esther, Lender also indirectly spurs her out of her lethargy in what would ordinarily seem a negative influence. He swindles her with a con-game and flees her wrath, which she then vents on a loudmouth who makes remarks about Esther's resemblance to a "brick shithouse." This gets a warrant declared against Esther, but this bit of bad luck forces her to flee her old life so that she stumbles across Lender's camp and providentially saves Ernie from his fatal obsession. It's also fitting that although Ernie and Esther do to some extent recover some of their love, JAR ends with them separating, muting the relative triumph and allowing the reader to realize that all the characters still have a long road to travel.

THE NARROWING GYRE

When I posted the part of my essay on Matena which dealt with the current state of artcomics, I had a board-poster ask me:

What falls under "capital L" literature or "little l" literature according to you?

I replied:

"Small-l" literature means the totality of literary productions as we know them: popular fiction, "Art" fiction, and some forms of nonfiction that may be relevant to literary understanding, like deQuincey's CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER.

"Capital-L" literature means the Good Stuff that cultural critics decide is important enough to write about and to preserve as examples of fine writing or great literary insight.

Now, that was simply a broad working definition. I wanted to make clear that even though (as my earlier essay should indicate) that I don't personally *like* the more ultra-realistic works celebrated in artcomics circles, as against works that make more sustained use of literary concepts and symbolic discourse, there's no doubt that the former works, even when they may claim not to be fiction at all (ranging from deQuincey's CONFESSIONS to Harvey Pekar's AMERICAN SPLENDOR), can occupy a real place in the cosmos of "Capital-L literature."

Now, I've quoted Northrop Frye before on the subject of literature's spectrum of literary concerns:

As Frye notes in the ANATOMY, verisimilitude is only one pole in a spectrum of literary concerns, with "myth"-- which I'll define as the totality of symbolic potential in literature-- occupying the other pole.

However, of late I've perceived that Philip Wheelwright's works may prove a better guide than Frye for understanding how literature itself mirrors the variability of language.

For instance, it's hard to say that a fictional work that appears true to "realistic" concerns possesses more intrinsic verisimilitude than an artful nonfiction work like Capote's IN COLD BLOOD, even though one is only figuratively "real" and the other is "really real," albeit filtered through an interpreter. However, Wheelwright introduces his concept of "steno-language," which applies to purely denotative representation. Such language communicates:

…meanings that can be shared in exactly the same way by a very large number of persons—in general, by all persons using the same language or the same group of inter-translatable languages. Examples are so obvious that they may be mentioned without explanation. Common words like child, parent, dog, tree, sky, etc., are steno-symbols, and their accepted meanings are steno-meanings, because what each of the words indicates is a set of definable experiences (whether actual or only possible) which are, in certain recognizable respects, the same for all who use the word correctly. (Metaphor and Reality, p. 33.)

This idea of "steno-language" would be potentially more useful in addressing the differences between that which represents a real event and that which simply puts forth the expectations of realism in fictional terms.

Against this type of language Wheelwright views expressive language, or "poeto-language," as one that is plurisignative, potentially carrying many meanings. Yet at the beginning of Chapter 5 of THE BURNING FOUNTAIN, Wheelwright makes explicit that he's not endorsing the "unnatural dichotomy 'science vs. poetry.' promoted by [S.T.] Colerdige and [I.A.] Richards." Rather:

"...the distinction between the two modes of linguistic procedure should be conceived not as a dichotomy, not as a frontier between two equal armies, but rather on the model of variables approaching a limit."

Naturally, as I've also built a fair amount of my theory around Frye's definition of the symbol as a "complex variable," I find the two systems complementary, even though Wheelwright has an advantage in that his books are focusing primarily on language as such, rather than language in the form of literary genres.

It's possible, then, to see such works as AMERICAN SPLENDOR or Chester Brown's PAYING FOR IT as a steno-linguistic procedure, in that the works seek to reproduce "a set of defineable experiences" with some degree of artfulness, but always privileging the reported experience over the aesthetic presentation. A work like Lutes' JAR OF FOOLS, by contrast, does not pretend to be any sort of reportage, and though responsive to realistic representation is freer to verge into a wider range of expressive literary strategies. Further from realism still we would have Brown's YUMMY FUR and a small handful of comics-works that embrace fantasy but are also responsive to the themes and symbols common to "Capital-L" literature in other media.