MYTHCOMICS: "TONDELEYO" (MILITARY COMICS #14, 1942)

In Steranko's HISTORY OF COMICS, the author records a statement from Golden Age comics-writer Bill Woolfolk, in which Woolfolk admits having ripped off the story of the 1942 film WHITE CARGO (reviewed here) for the story "Tondeleyo." If Steranko correctly quoted the former comics-writer-- and Steranko's quotes are problematic, since he didn't cite sources-- then Woolfolk didn't really remember the story he'd written, since the only thing the Blackhawk-tale takes from the movie is the name and alluring appearance of the title character.

The 1942 movie is an entirely naturalistic story of a white trader who "goes native" in Africa when he succumbs to a dark vixen's charms. The Tondeleyo of comics is also a temptress, but it's implied-- without any outright verification-- that she may the incarnation of some metaphysical evil. Since her nature and even her final fate remain ambiguous, the adventure falls into the sphere of the uncanny, as determined by the trope I term "phantasmal figurations," similar to the films reviewed here.

For one thing, even though the splash suggests an alliance between the sarong-clad woman and the Master of Evil, Tondeleyo plays no favorites in the game between the Allies and the Axis. The first page depicts the unexplained suicide of a famed German flyer, Oberst, and the only clue left behind is a white rose, identical to one Tondeleyo wears in her hair.

As for Blackhawk, he's first seen issuing a challenge to a whole German compound, tossing around Nazis as he invites them to come for a dogfight above Blackhawk Island. The hero gets away with ridiculous ease, while the Nazis plot to attack in force, rather than in an honorable equal combat.

When Blackhawk gets back to his refuge, though, he finds a surprise: a sarong-clad young woman, Tondeleyo, has showed up on the island. Her beauty has such an effect on Blackhawk and his subordinates (except, as will be seen later, the comic-relief Chop-Chop) that they agree to let her intrude upon their all-male ranks. The heroes aren't portrayed as eager to prey on a beautiful woman, for they barely if at all make any passes at the mystery girl. Possibly the writer meant to imply that their initial motive is chivalry to a helpless woman. Then the news comes that their aerial challenge will be met. The pilots are all glad to meet the foe, but Tondeleyo suddenly begins to exert her insidious will upon the oldest member of the Blackhawks, Hendrickson. While the others go out to meet the foe, Hendrickson loses the will to fight, makes a lame excuse, and remains behind.

An air battle ensues, complete with some comedic action from the Chinese mascot. The victorious heroes return to their HQ, and Blackhawk arrives just in time to keep Hendrickson from killing himself-- the same way Oberst did, out of fear that he'd turned into a coward.

Blackhawk then interacts with Tondeleyo, who turns on her full charms. He almost kisses her-- which is the closest the story comes to anything overtly sexual-- but is interrupted. In the "days that follow," Tondeleyo slowly saps the fighting-spirit of all the pilots. In WHITE CARGO, it's clear that the victim of the vixen's charms has been physically seduced by her, but this story portrays more a seduction of the spirit, since it seems unlikely that this Tondeleyo has actually slept with any of the Blackhawks. Chop-Chop seems immune, but it's not clear whether or not she troubled to turn her charms his way.

Finally, when another German air-attack approaches, only Blackhawk is able to summon the gumption to get into a plane and meet the enemy. His plane crashes into one of the German crafts, and the other heroes, enraged by his apparent death, are mobilized to charge into their planes and handily defeat the enemy.

Blackhawk, however, has not died-- though the story doesn't trouble to explain just how he survived a mid-air crash. He's evidently sussed out, on some dim psychological level, that Tondeleyo is the seed of his men's ennervation, even though there's no attempt to portray her as a literal spirit, demon, etc. In a last act of quasi-chivalry, Blackhawk prevents Chop-Chop from killing the native girl. However, as she flees male wrath, she's apparently killed by one of the crashing German planes, very indirectly avenging her murder of Oberst. The story ends with Blackhawk musing, "She was evil-- who can say when evil really dies?" Earlier Blackhawk intuits some deeper aspect of her nature-- as witness his unusual idea that he's met her somewhere before-- so he's apparently realized that she was either a spirit or a mortal possessed by such a spirit. In any case Woolfolk's story gains considerable symbolic amplitude by refusing to put a name to her nature, and thus transcends the narrow racism of WHITE CARGO.

The entire story, with all of the meticulous Reed Crandall art, can be read here.

MYTHCOMICS: "MISTER MONSTER:ORIGINS" (1992)

My analysis of MARSHAL LAW: FEAR AND LOATHING pointed out how Mills and O'Neill crafted a darkly ironic world that existed "between shit and piss," wherein human striving was essentially futile in the face of an Oedipal stranglehold. However, though Freud's writings often seem just as thoroughly pessimistic, it isn't impossible (with a nod to SEINFELD) to have a "Festivus for Oedipus"-- that is, to use Freudian tropes to put across themes of adventure and comedy.

Though the genres of horror and the superhero have often been at odds in the minds of fans and practitioners, Michael T. Gilbert's MISTER MONSTER feature is a happy exception, and to judge from his essays in ALTER EGO, Gilbert himself is that rare animal able to appreciate the strengths of both genres, and to see them with a certain humorous tone without assuming (as I think Mills does) that "satirical disdain= truth."

The character of Mister Monster might qualify for the definition of "found art," since in 1971 Gilbert happened across a 1947 issue of the Canadian SUPER DUPER COMICS. In this issue, an artist named Fred Casey had just taken a monster-fighting plainclothes hero, "Doc Stearne," and put him in the superhero togs of "Mister Monster" for the costumed character's first and only appearance. As Mister Monster was obviously in public domain, Gilbert chose to revive the character, keeping both the superhero name and his not-especially-secret ID (while giving "Doc" the somewhat humorous personal name of "Strongfort.") Since Gilbert's re-creation of the character in 1984, Mister Monster-- a hard-nosed fighter against evil, though made somewhat lovable by his occasional blunders-- battled vampires, Martians, mummies, and even a doppelganger for Godzilla (whose trademarked name was obviously off-limits to casual usage). But in all his peripatetic adventures, he didn't have an origin.

I should note up-front that one major element of this origin is a variation on a fantasy-theme largely originated by Lee Falk's PHANTOM and popularized by Michael Moorcock: "the Eternal Champion." In ORIGINS we learn that Mister Monster is part of such a tradition: that for centuries there has been a line of heroes who took the name "Mister Monster" in various historical periods, always with an eye to fighting supernatural evil. 

In ORIGINS, however, the foremost scions of evil, the Inner Circle, lay an insidious plan to bring an end to the "Monster" family line, by compromising his ability to have an heir. 

Jim Stearne, who would eventually be the father to the current crusader Strongfort Stearne, had a "steady girlfriend," Gloria, who under ideal circumstances would have become the mother to Strongfort. However, the Inner Circle manipulated events so that Gloria became disenchanted with the demands of the hero's life, and married someone else. 

The Circle then maneuvers Jim Stearne into marrying one of their own kind. Not only will she talk him out of continuing his career as a monster-fighter, she's in theory unable to bear a child, being that she is a vampire able to "pass" for human. But before the vampiress-- significantly named "Lilith," after the "bad mother" demoness of Jewish lore--  can manage to kill Jim with her emasculating attentions (mostly through over-feeding him), Lilith does give birth to a male child, Strongfort. The psychological myth here has some resonance with the standard Freudian narrative, given that Young Strongfort, a potential monster-hunter from the first, begins to realize that his mother is a hostile force in his life, while his father has become a fat, useless hulk. To further complicate the story, the adult Strongfort has blocked all of this out, partly because he's ashamed of knowing that his father shirked his heroic duty, so that Gilbert has to have other character reconstruct the past action in one way or another.

A more negative artist would have used the Oedipal conflict of son and mother to satirize the impotence of human relationships. But although Gilbert does play the conflict up to its melodramatic heights, he also emphasizes the sheer force of Young Strongfort's innate heroism, as he resists the adult vampires who try to kill him near the story's end.

I won't give away the ending, which reveals the most important reason why the adult Strongfort has blocked out most of his childhood experiences. But, as if to put the Freudian cherry atop the milkshake, it's also revealed that Strongfort's current girlfriend Kelly Friday is actually the daughter of Gloria and the man she married on the rebound. But though Strongfort is evidently having sex with the daughter of the woman who was almost his own mother, here too the emphasis is on the invigorating effects of self-knowledge. The hero ends up learning that the father he'd learned to be ashamed of died a hero, and though the reader is meant to laugh at some of Mister Monster's pretensions, Gilbert shows this voyage to self-knowledge as essentially ennobling. At the same time, there are a lot of jokes in ORIGINS that reflect Gilbert's own nostalgic pleasure in weird popular creations. Whereas in MARSHAL LAW Mills  his version of "Mars Attacks" cards in order to sneer at American pop culture, Gilbert enjoys "sending up" famous tropes like the "injury-to-the-eye" motif, in such a way that one can step back from the tropes while still seeing their fundamental appeal.

ADDENDA TO MARSHAL LAW REVIEW

Re: last week's mythcomics review: I spent so much time recapitulating the backstory of the hero that I somewhat neglected the "psychological myth" that I credited with making it a "mythcomic." I usually don't have any scruples about disclosing plot-developments, short of tossing out a spoiler warning at times, but for anyone who wants to know what the Oedipal narrative was behind Mills and O'Neill's FEAR AND LOATHING, here's a short summary.

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MARSHAL LAW #1-6 (CB) (1986-87)--  “Fear and Loathing”—(M/S):I/S.1, (M/S):I/V.3 (+)—The superhero-hating policeman MARSHAL LAW is faced with a mystery: who is the SLEEPMAN, who goes around raping and killing women dressed like the celebrity-superheroine CELESTE? It eventually comes out that the killer is DANNY, the offspring of (1) CELESTE’s current superhero- boyfriend THE PUBLIC SPIRIT, and (2) the SPIRIT’s previous lover VIRAGO, whom the SPIRIT tried to murder when she revealed herself pregnant. VIRAGO survived the murder-attempt and raised DANNY with an eye to avenging herself when her son was old enough. During his childhood his mother punishes DANNY for any display of his powers, so that he acquired a sense of inferiority and worthlessness. Additionally, he may have associated his mother with pain, so that when he became the SLEEPMAN in adulthood, he was in part raping and killing his tyrannical mother—who may or may not have used a few feminine wiles on him to make him do her bidding. It’s also clear that DANNY has the same tastes as his father, so in killing women who look like CELESTE—as well as, eventually, the real thing—he’s transgressing against his evil, neglectful father. To complicate matters further, DANNY works for MARSHAL LAW as a computer-tech, and admires the lawman as a substitute father, and in his killing-campaign he also manages to kill off LYNN, the girlfriend of his “good father.” In the final confrontation THE PUBLIC SPIRIT finally manages to murder his former inamorata VIRAGO for real, and MARSHAL LAW takes out both him and his demented son. 

QUICK DOCTOR DOOM COMMENT

I recently defended Marvel's Doctor Doom from the imputation of racism on a CBR thread. I won't bother to cite the thread, since it's so freaking long no one who might read this will bother to seek it out, but here's the gist of my defense, referencing a two-part ASTONISHING STORIES (scripted by two separate authors, Larry Leiber and Gerry Conway) in which the master villain encountered the Black Panther and made some politically incorrect remarks about Panther's subjects being "vicious primitives:"

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I think the author is trying to say that Doom recognizes in the Panther the image of nobility that he himself has internalized. It's true that he has no respect for Panther's subjects, but keep in mind that he also has no respect for his own Caucasian subjects. Doom is generally portrayed as a supreme egotist: he resented the Latverian nobility not because they tyrannized his people but because they tyrannized him and his family. Lee and Kirby, focused on writing exciting adventures for juvenile readers, probably wouldn't have wondered why Doom never put his former people in positions of Latverian power. Yet the way Doom's (admittedly limited) psychology is constructed, it makes total sense that he wouldn't. Being a villain of almost solipsistic proportions, he cares only about his own suffering, his own ideology of success-- which means becoming an icon of aristocratic tyranny, like the nameless aristocrat who causes the death of Doom's father. Yet he also wants to believe that he's not a petty man. That's why he spares the Wakandan from further torture, not because he cares about the man's sufferings, but because gratuitous sadism lessens the majesty to which he aspires. In the Over-Mind arc, Lee memorably has Doom say that "many demons" rule him, but "not those of pettiness or fear"-- or for that matter, racism, which would also diminish his sense of personal majesty.

MYTHCOMICS: MARSHAL LAW; FEAR AND LOATHING (1987-88)

(Note: I'm using the graphic novel designation for the untitled six-part story as originally released by Epic Comics. I have not read any additional materials within the TPB collection.)

I've referenced the Pat Mills-Kevin O'Neill creation MARSHAL LAW in various essays, like this one, but this essay is the first one I've devoted to its status as a mythcomic.

It's nearly impossible to imagine this project having been published without the influence of the 1986 WATCHMEN. Like the Moore-Gibbons work, MARSHAL LAW conforms to the mythos of the irony, but the Mills/O'Neill approach to satirizing superheroes diverges from many of the Moore/Gibbons strategies.

For one thing, the WATCHMEN superheroes evolve in much the same way as normative American superheroes: assorted characters who possess independent origins.  The superheroes of the MARSHAL LAW world share the same origin, aligning them with the "one-gimme" rule propounded by prose science fiction-- which, so far as I can tell, seems to be a rule Pat Mills usually followed in the serials he wrote for British comics. Most if not all superheroes in the LAW world are created by the technology of the U.S. government in a near-future timescape, and all for the purpose of making "supersoldiers" to serve in foreign wars. Some of the super-types merely have enhanced strength or endurance, while others have more exotic super-powers, like flying or "pumping ions."

For another comparison, whereas WATCHMEN only devotes one narrative thread to the employment of super-types as the tools of American imperialism-- mainly, the character-arc of the Comedian-- this is the primary focus of MARSHAL LAW: that supersoldiers exist so that the U.S. can ride herd on other countries. FEAR AND LOATHING does resemble WATCHMEN in that the reader barely encounters any reference to political situations or technological advancements in the world outside the U.S.: both are clearly focused upon portraying America as a thousand-pound gorilla that no other nation can oppose, and that can only be challenged, if at all, from within.

Mills and O'Neill also diverge from WATCHMEN's acknowledgement of the existence of American crime and even super-criminals, for in MARSHAL LAW, all the criminals are superheroes home from foreign wars. A few super-types have attained the lofty heights of public celebrities, usually because they function as mouthpieces for the government. But most of the retired supersoldiers have deteriorated into costumed, ultraviolent gangbangers, while a few others are simply shell-shocked basket cases.

Joe Gilmore is the only veteran seen in FEAR AND LOATHING who isn't either a basket case or a gangbanger, though everything he does is still in a sense determined by his former military service. Loathing what the modern superheroes have become, he somehow becomes a special police operative in the city of San Futuro (a bombed-out version of San Francisco). As the masked officer Marshal Law-- who wears something like a policeman's fancy dress-uniform crossed with fetish-wear-- Gilmore is able to use his special powers, and even a special superhero hideout, to monitor the activities of rogue superheroes when they cross the line and break the law. The narrative makes it clear that Gilmore hunts superheroes-- and no other criminals-- because he hates their perversions of morality, and possibly because he himself, as a former supersoldier, did things in wartime that he's not proud of. More than one character remarks that Marshal Law's outfit looks "gay," though any gayness Gilmore may possess is laced with sado-masochistic elements (Law's mask looks like bondage gear and his bare arms are encircled with lines of barbed wire).

WATCHMEN's events are triggered by one murder, but the narrative of FEAR AND LOATHING spring from the serial rape-murders of young women. All of the victims are killed while wearing the costumes of Celeste, a cape-celebrity whose sole accomplishments come down to being born with huge knockers and being affianced to America's greatest superhero, the Public Spirit (patently Mills' derogatory take on the original superhero, Superman). Marshal Law has no proof that the Public Spirit is the serial killer-- eventually identified as an ulcerous-looking "Batman type" called "the Sleepman." But for years the Marshal has borne a grudge against the Public Spirit for being the respectable face of America's imperialistic policies, and also suspects that years ago the Spirit murdered his previous fiancee, a cape-celebrity named Virago, to keep his name clear of scandal. I won't discuss the Sleepman's true identity, except to say that from the first it's plain that he's not going to be Marshal Law's most hated super-type, since there wouldn't be any suspense to such an easy resolution-- though the script comes up with a valid reason for the "hero-hunter" to go after his most loathed opponent as well.

The simplistic political outlook wouldn't give FEAR AND LOATHING any status as a mythcomic, but its psychological myths, heavily indebted to Freud, do display the necessary complexity. Marshal Law, the Public Spirit, the Sleepman and two other major characters are locked together in a complicated "family romance" that I won't attempt to lay out here. It's perhaps enough to note that one of the principal characters remarks on the "Oedipal" nature of his conflict, and then promptly tries to claim it doesn't mean that much. I take this to be the author's own process of disavowal: he wants to be able to evoke the emotional charge of Freudian tropes and patterns, but he has one of the characters distance himself from said patterns, as if trying to proclaim independence from his destiny as an authorially determined figure. While I've said many times on this blog-- even this very week-- that I don't think Freud counts for much as an observer of human nature, his tropes and patterns still possess great power within the expressive world of literature. Indeed, the Freudian matrix is perfect for this level of irony, as it helps Mills and O'Neill consistently depict a world born "inter faeces et urinam," between shit and piss.

An unintended irony of MARSHAL LAW is that the only time Mills seeks to place any positive value on anything, it's devoted to human beings who are safely deceased. After the dubious hero of the story has vanquished all of the evildoers-- and has even found himself implicated in the same evil of the Freudian "authority-figure" that takes in the Public Spirit-- he visits the gravesite of his girlfriend, one of the victims of the Sleepman. He mentally repeats his catchphrase-- "I'm a hero hunter. I hunt heroes. Haven't found any yet." Then for the final panel, the camera shows him walking through the cemetery, surrounded by gravestones and monuments, and finishes by thinking, "But I know where they are." This implies that there is some nobility to be found in the departed, implicitly the deceased soldiers with whom Gilmore served. And yet, the satire of Mills and O'Neill has shown nearly every other aspect of human activity to be fraught with hypocrisy and concupiscence, so it seems a bit of a cop-out to give special dispensation to the dead-- particularly those who willingly served in imperialistic wars.

I'll note in closing that though FEAR AND LOATHING shows that Marshal Law is implicated in the evil he fights, most of the other installments in this erratic series don't follow up on this trope. Thus the series largely devolves to assorted scenes of the hero finding new and increasingly repetitive ways to destroy superheroes, with very mixed results in terms of scoring satiricial points.

JUDGING DREAD PART 3

Before getting into the last of my current meditations on the nature of literary dread, it occurs to me that I ought to supply a definition for the term "superordinate," as used by Jung in his (translated) quote about "superordinate ideas"-- particularly since I've usually validated Jung's approach over that of Freud and his "physiological factors."

a word that includes the meaning of more specific words. For example, “vehicle” is the superordinate of words such as “car” and “truck.”-- Macmillan Online.

In the passage I originally quoted,  Jung does not get into the standard contrasts between "the concrete" and "the abstract," but elsewhere he regarded Freud as a reductionist while his own approach depended on the "amplification" of meanings."Superordinate," then, means looking for an abstract formulation that designates a greater order within which a phenomenon fits, as opposed to finding a base phenomenon toward to which a phenomenon can be reduced.

Now, though I prefer Jung to Freud, the latter's focus on "physiological factors" can be stimulating, and the same applies to his followers, such as James Twitchell.

I came back to Twitchell because the other week I was meditating on the nature of the "threshhold experience" that takes place when a given trope is transformed from its naturalistic potential to an uncanny actuality. I've said many times that the various uncanny tropes, while being no less defined by causal coherence than their naturalistic kindred, manage to become "anti-intelligible," thus comprising a phenomenality midway between the naturalistic and the marvelous.

But what does it mean to become "anti-intelligible?" My meditations at the end of EFFICACY, MEET MYTH includes this observation:

....while I would still support this basic construction [of the "death-trap trope"], I would not emphasize the fact that the "death-trap" is "improbable," but that it is an extreme example of "literary artifice." That artifice would exist even in a story where a given trap was justified in some quasi-realistic context, and does exist even in Dickens' naturalistic version of a "birth-mystery plot." But even within the context of "myth as artifice," the concept of a "mythopoeic purpose" lying behind said artifice is still applicable, even after the concept of probability has gone down the tubes.

What the Batman death-trap and the Dickens "birth-mystery plot" have in common is not a presence or absence of probability or verisimilitude, but the fact that they call attention to their status as fictional creations, thanks to their having been so frequently used over the years. "Artifice," while not exactly a principle in itself, stands counter to "verisimilitude," which is dependent on the author's observations about the workings of the experiential world.

For whatever reason, while I was thinking about the nature of literary artifice-- which I do not deem to be identical to "myth," as Northrop Frye did-- I thought of James Twitchell's attempt to define his brand of "horror" as a set of Freudian tropes. In JUDGING DREAD PART 2 I quoted the author's association of horror with the idea of "creeping flesh," and thought something along the lines of, "If 'creeping flesh' is the ideal physiological factor that underlies Twitchell's summary concept of horror, what would be a 'superordinate idea' that might support a Jungian concept, not just of horror, but all forms of metaphenomenal literature, both uncanny and marvelous?"

Oddly, though Twitchell isn't that invested in semiology, he says:

The art of horror is the art of generating breakdown, where signified and signifier no longer can be kept separate-- p. 16.

This language-based metaphor describes not a physical interaction, but that of two abstractions of language, locked together in an eternal dance in which it's almost impossible to know one from the other. This is also the nature of both verisimilitude and artifice, since as Frye observed, literary narrative needs both.

Thus, when I say that Norman Bates is an uncanny psycho while Christopher Gill is a naturalistic one, I am saying that Norman's status as an artifice has assumed greater importance than his potential verisimilitude, and that this sense of artifice-- apart from how much *mythicity* he may incarnate-- is what makes him "anti-intelligible," more "signified" than "signifier."

More on these matters later, possibly.

JUDGING DREAD PART 2

That the experience of horror is first physiological, and only then maybe numinous, is revealed by all its hybrid and mutant linguistic forms.-- James Twitchell, DREADFUL PLEASURES, p. 11.

...though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.-- Kant, CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON.

By this early statement in DREADFUL PLEASURES, Twitchell makes clear his Freudian, and counter-Kantian, position: the "experience of horror" arises principally from physiological factors:

...the shiver that we associate with horror is the result of the constricton of the skin that firms up the subcutaneous hair follicles... From this comes the most appropriate trope of horror: creeping flesh, or "the creeps."-- PLEASURES, p. 10.

Kant's concept of "a priori"influences upon human experience doesn't come up in the course of the book, but Twitchell does find time for a few disparaging words on Jung, making clear that he would probably also dismiss the Swiss psychologist's concept of "superordinate ideas" as well, much less that of the collective unconscious.

In defense of his primarily physiological definition of horror, Twitchell follows an interesting, if ultimately incorrect, line of thought. Whereas, as I showed here, Ann Radcliffe promoted the sublime superiority of terror over horror due to the former's greater ability to "expand the soul," Twitchell rethinks both terror and horror along doctrinaire Freudian lines, and valorizes horror precisely because it emphasizes "body" over "non-body." In contradistinction, while Radcliffe wanted to minimize the significance of horror because it was too explicit, Twitchell minimizes his version of terror because he deems it rooted only in transitory phenomena:

...terror will pass... but horror will never disappear, no matter how rational we become about it"-- p. 16.

Shortly after this statement, Twitchell makes a statement that almost sounds Jungian:

;;;the eriology of horror is always in dreams, while the basis of terror is in actuality."-- p. 19.

 However, the "dreams" Twitchell has in mind are what might termed the Freudian "collective unconscious," because they are a concatenation of images and symbols rooted purely in physiological factors. Twitchell's figures of horror are primarily those literary figures that have stood the test of time-- Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, Mister Hyde--because he believes that they all owe their long-lived nature to being in tune with Freudian complexes. In contrast, figures of "terror" are not so much those that are "actual" in the sense of a naturalistic phenomenality, but in the sense of being overly dependent on transitory "fads" and obsessions of a particular time-frame. Thus he finds most of the sci-fi terrors of the 1950s to be beneath his scholarly notice, because they're merely rooted in transitory fears of The Bomb or Communist invasion. (He does devote some space to 1956's FORBIDDEN PLANET, surely because it upholds his Freudian paradigm.)

As I noted in Part 1, Twitchell is aware of Rudolf Otto's use of the term "dread," but he's not interested in the "numinosity" of Otto or of C.S. Lewis, only in the Freudian concept of "the uncanny." Freud's "uncanny" is no less subsumed by physiological factors than anything else: it's just that these factors have "gone underground," becoming what Twitchell calls "projections of sublimated desire." This is the reason that Dracula and his kindred outlast terror-figures like "big bug films" and "The Leech Woman," because the latter represent transitory, overt fears, rather than those that have (so to speak) become "sublime" by virtue of being "sublimated."

Though Twitchell's book stimulated new trains of thought for me when I read it in the 1990s, it was rather painful to read the early chapters this time. For one thing, it's easy to refute his idea that "the Freudian collective unconscious" (as I'm calling it) was responsible only for the great figures of Dracula et al. Plainly one can also find numerous Freudian tropes in any number of the 1950s SF-flicks that Twitchell sneers at, such as THE BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES. I'm not saying that BEAST is an exemplary film by my own lights. But if one is going to claim that "sublimation of desire" is the key to the excellence of Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN or Stoker's DRACULA, then that criterion ought to apply to every work that fits that formula, and not just to those works that have already acquired some cachet in literary circles.

Further, because Twitchell is something of a literary snob, he fills the pages of DREADFUL PLEASURES with numerous pontifications on the history of horror in legitimate art and literature, while showing considerable ambivalence on the status of pop-fiction horrors. Sometimes it sounds as if the "slasher-killers" of the 1980s are mere figures of terror, and other times it sounds like they may participate in the same Freudian dreamscape as any other "Mr. Hyde"-like figure. I think that Twitchell, like many academics who seek to deal with popular art as if it was as simple as its critics aver, falls victim to the same tyranny of "the literary" that I criticized in Todorov:

I suspect Todorov's emphasis on horror-story authors stems from literary elitism. In 1970, names like Poe and Hoffman were still accepted in the Land of the Literary Canon, but Wells and Verne had barely established a foothold in academia, much less modern authors of SF (including Lem himself), or any authors of fantasy except for perhaps Carroll. By the mid-to-late 70s this would change, but clearly Todorov's theory is geared to highbrow tastes only. Arguably the horror genre is privileged by Todorov not because it possesses the best or more fulfilling examples of "the fantastic," but because artists known for their more naturalistic works, such as Balzac and Dostoyevsky (also briefly mentioned in TF), dabbled in it.

It's a mark of Twitchell's literary elitism, that he chooses to focus on just one form of the metaphenomenal and builds his entire theory around that aspect, rather than seeking to see that form (in this case, horror) in a continuum with its kindred. This approach may be designed as a sort of "defense mechanism"-- in Freudianism, a "disavowal"-- to convince other academicians that the speaker does not plan to overthrow the standard categories of literary excellence. It's a shame that Twitchell's schema doesn't stand serious scrutiny, but at least it does provide me with some interesting insights into my own more pluralistic conception of the narrative arts-- as I'll discuss in Part 3.