FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3

I've frequently cited this passage from Jung on the combinatory nature of archetypes:

"[The archetype's] form, however ... might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited , only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts."-- Jung, THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS, p. 79.

Pursuant to the current discussion, the aspect of the archetype that can be "inherited" is only a "possibility of representation," whereas the specific representations-- say, whether or not the sun is represented as the boat of Ra or the chariot of Helios-- are limited to whatever culture conceives them. So the pure form of the archetype may be compared to Langer's presentational symbolism, which simply discerns the role of a given archetypal trope in the culture. But given that Langer's other category, discursive symbolism, is focused on the pursuit of logic and rule-making, is there any way in which a culture's elaboration of specific representations aligns with that form?

In JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE, I wrote:

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

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

Now, Jung was a psychologist, not a theoretical anthropologist, so he never focused on the ways archaic cultures utilized myth. When he pursues the rituals of alchemy, he's not especially concerned with whether or not the ancient alchemists were alluding to real or imagined chemical processes: he's concerned with how alchemical processes parallel the experiences of patients undergoing visionary states. In contrast, Joseph Campbell was more focused on the social functions of archaic religion, and thus he's arguably been a better guide to me than Jung in terms of seeing how myths in all eras encode what I called "sacred clues." I stated as much in 2014's FOUR BY FOUR:

For the majority of my essays on both THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE and NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS!, I have somewhat privileged Campbell's functions in terms of analyzing the mythical representations found in both canonical and popular fiction. That's because Campbell's functions deal with functions of information-- forms he earlier termed "metaphysical, cosmological, sociological and psychological"-- rather than pure states of consciousness. 

I would now add that Campbell's four functions are intrinsically discursive in nature, and so he proves this in this passage from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, presented in greater context here:

... there is a third factor, furthermore, which has everywhere exerted a pervasive influence on the shaping of mythologies, a third range and context of specifically human experience, of which the developing individual becomes inevitably aware as his powers of thought and observation mature, the spectacle, namely, of the universe, the natural world in which he finds himself, and the enigma of its relation to his own existence: its magnitude, its changing forms, and yet, through these, an appearance of regularity. Mankind's understanding of the universe has greatly altered in the course of the millenniums -- particularly most recently, as our instruments of research have improved. But there were great changes also in the past: for example, in the time of the rise of the early Sumerian city-states, with their priestly observers of the heavenly courses; or in that of the Alexandrian physicists and astronomers, with their concept of an earthly globe enclosed within seven revolving celestial spheres.

However, even though discursive observations like the heavens' "appearance of regularity" appear in both religious and literary myths, they have a very different function than they do in the purely discursive discipline of science. Scientific investigations can be executed within what Wheelwright called a *monosignative* language, where every word used is intended to signify a discrete phenomenon. Myth and literature have an innate tendency toward the *plurisignative,* which, as I noted in a Cassirer-quote in Part 2, is also necessary to the formation of human language.

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

ADDENDUM: I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 2

At the end of Part 2, I said:

It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.

The "acquaintance/description" duality appeared in the works of two philosophers I've often quoted, Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer. In Cassirer's LANGUAGE, he says:

Like thought, language must pass from the known to the unknown, from what is perceived by the senses to what merely thought...

While Langer's dichotomy of "the discursive" and "the presentational" has often influenced my own examination of symbolism. In this quote, Langer aligns her concept of presentational symbolism with the immediacy of sense-impression:

  "The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational order'. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-experience is understood."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 98.

I discussed Langer's two forms of symbolism first in RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT PT. 3,  where I associated "presentational symbolism" with fantasies without an appeal of logic, while I associated "discursive symbolism" with fantasies governed by logical rules about what can or cannot happen. However, obviously the two constantly intertwine, not only in fantasy-literature but in all art, myth, and in human language itself. Prior to Kant, most European philosophers subscribed to what Cassirer called "the copy-theory of language," in which it was assumed that reason and logic guided the evolution of language. Toward the end of LANGUAGE, however, Cassirer naturally argues that the formation of language is as much aesthetic as logical.

...it lies in the very nature of language that each of these syntheses is not governed exclusively by theoretical but by imaginative factors as well, and that consequently, much of linguistic "concept formation" seems to be less of logical comparison and combination that of the linguistic fantasy... In so far as we can gain insight into them, the factors which guide language in its classifications seem closely related to primitive mythical concepts and classification"-- LANGUAGE, p. 297. 

So Cassirer offers a view of the interactions of what Langer calls 'the discursive" and "the presentational," though I would say that he does not explore  such interactions in depth, any more than does Langer. I believe that I've come up with an interesting take on the matter, courtesy of Jung's theory of archetypes.

FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 1

In WHITE NOISE I addressed two types of knowledge. I'll continue to call these "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description" after Bertrand Russell, with the stipulation that I'm not following his system, given that I've barely read Russell's work. I have read quite a bit more William James, and admire his work above what I know of Russell's philosophy, but I also have not read the particular work I cited in NOISE, the 1895 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY.

It stands to reason that even if James and Russell were among the first to frame the problem in these terms, many philosophers before them had grappled with similar questions. For instance, I quoted James's reference to perceptual and conceptual knowledge in PRINCIPLES, categories which appeared in Schopenhauer fifty years earlier (albeit in German).

Now, I've addressed something akin to the "acquaintance/ description" duality in my writings on symbolic complexity. My concerns were never epistemological, as I believe to be the case for both James and Russell. Rather, in my early definition of my terms "functionality" and "super-functionality," I was concerned with the ways in which literary constructs display complexity or its lack. Still, in one passage from DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE I touched on the epistemological matters:

....even the most avant-garde artists can't do without some representational functionality. If James Joyce wants a character to go through a door, and doesn't have it in mind to discourse on the doorness of doors everywhere, then the door through which the Joyce character steps will be no less functional-- or even "conventional"-- than the one through which a Poe or Doyle character steps.

Within the context of a purely fictional story, a merely functional representation of a door is no more real than, say, a door in another story that embodies "the doorness of doors." But the purely representational door is supposed to function within a story's diegesis as if the person seeing it knows it purely through "knowledge by acquaintance." A door that was "super-functional" would have to have its "Platonic qualities of door-ness" explicated via "knowledge by description."

In 2011 I glossed my Frye-derived remarks with my reading of Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. This book is also more concerned with evaluating literary works rather than epistemology, though I suspect that Wheelwright was familiar with the two forms of knowledge described by James and Russell-- not least because both of them are cited in FOUNTAIN, and one James reference is to PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. Without re-reading Wheelwright's book in toto, I can't be sure that it has no epistemological concerns. However, this passage from METAPHOR AND REALITY seems to imply such concerns in the author's formulations of "stheno-language" and "poeto-language:"

…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.)

 In this paragraph, Wheelwright is not talking purely about functional representations within a poetical work, but about the way said representations are built up in human society. It seems evident that all of the "common words" Wheelwright lists are common because everyone knows basic representations such as "dog" and "sky" through what Russell calls "acquaintance." More complex chains of associations, however, can only be built up through a process of description. No sky has ever looked like the representation of the Greek Ouranos, but Greeks understood the idea of Ouranos through a process of describing the sky-god's nature-- though in some ways the word used by Kim Stanley Robinson, "discursive," may fit the topic better. This is also one of the terms utilized by Ernst Cassirer in his PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS, which I'll discuss somewhat in the next post.

WHITE NOISE

I've posted a short review of Kim Stanley Robinson's MEMORY OF WHITENESS here, noting one of the more interesting philosophical observations:

Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses-- the primary way of knowing.  But discursive knowledge includes all that language does... discourse is as important as acquaintance, even if it isn't primary-- the character "Dent Ios" in THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS.

Perhaps because Robinson's characters exist in an era far removed from the twentieth century, they don't discuss in detail the archaic origin of their philosophical ideas. Indeed, Robinson has a little bit of fun with the idea of attribution, implying that over time scholars may simply get things wrong, as when one character calls modern literary critic Harold Bloom an "alchemist." However, Dent Ios's dual forms of knowledge may have been borrowed from a similar dualism propounded by Bertrand Russell in 1910: "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description." That said, Russell's duality seems to have been preceded, according to this Wikipedia entry, by similar formulations by at least three other philosophers: John Grote, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William James. I have no idea what if any indebtedness Russell might have to these predecessors, but James apparently reproduces Grote's categories exactly in James's 1890 book THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY:

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about.

Now, most of these philosophers seem to be talking about how humans organize knowledge according to what James calls "perceptual" and "conceptual" knowledge. The characters of MEMORY, however, are not concerned with the way language encodes perceptions, but with the way that music, the least "linguistic" of the arts, does so. On the next page following Dent Ios's assertion, he adds that, "Music is a dynamic, polyphonic process, while writing is linear and static." This seems like an odd thing to say right after he's claimed that discursive knowledge is as important as that of acquaintance. The second statement seems to privilege the dynamism of the direct sense-experience, and to downgrade the "static" qualities of what Grote and James call "knowledge-about." In the 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, Susanne Langer categorically downgrades music as against the more "assertive" arts:

 "[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol.  Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression.  The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.

I would tend to agree with Langer more than with Robinson's characters. For exanople, although I agree that discursive knowledge is *primarily* linear, I don't think it is necessarily "static." Great philosophers-- and critics-- always combine the linear/horizontal logic of the discursive process with what I have called "vertical meaning." Such meaning is put forth roughly along the same lines that Levi-Strauss imagines myths being a combination of "harmonic" and "melodic" elements. Plato's TIMAEUS, in seeking to describe the perfect society already envisaged in THE REPUBLIC, does not depend purely on linear logic but finesses that logic with a mythic image from outside the immediate argument: the image of the city Atlantis, whose extinction signals a counter-example to the "perfect society" once represented by its contemporary opponent Athens. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS (1985)

Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses-- the primary way of knowing. But discursive knowledge includes all that language does... discourse is as importance as acquaintance, even if it isn't primary-- the character "Dent Ios" in THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS.

I read Kim Stanley Robinson's MEMORY OF WHITENESS-- his second novel, I believe-- after forcing myself to plow through the first, ICEHENGE. While ICEHENGE was a tedious exercise in anthropological SF, MEMORY seems to be chock full of philosophical SF-elements that seem just like my cup of tea: concepts of language and music (as seen in the above quote), Romantic poetry (Shelley in particular), archaic myth, particularly that of Persian Mithraism, and even Epicurean ideas a la Lucretius. In terms of all of these elements, MEMORY is as rich as Herbert's DUNE.

However, Robinson doesn't manage to make any of the elements live, because the characters of MEMORY, like those of ICEHENGE, never grabbed me and made me feel like they were anything more than spokespersons for Robinson's thoughts. It's not entirely a matter of the skill of drawing characters. Robert Heinlein generally uses only a small handful of character-types, and no one would call him to be the equal of Dickens in terms of making fictional figures seem intensely real. Yet even in Heinlein's worst works, I've always felt that his characters are intensely involved in their own lives, whether in terms of preserving themselves from danger or just expatiating on their own philosophies. Thus, as rich as Robinson's concepts are, the characters are unable to make them "live." This may be, in part, because one of Robinson's themes is that time may be an illusion and that there is no "Becoming," only "Being." It may be that it's awfully hard for an author to make himself care about his own characters if he considers their arcs predestined.

ADDENDUM: Originally when I wrote this, I included the tag "high-mythicity fiction." However, on reconsideration, I think all of Robinson's concepts remain at the level of the purely didactic, with no room for the inventiveness of myth.   

QUICK COMMENT ON JAMES GUNN'S FIRING

Here's another one of my reworked forum-posts, beginning with a quote from my favorite literary critic, Northrop Frye:

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye wrote this in the 1950s, when some intellectuals viewed bestselling authors like Mickey Spillane (who did a LOT of "brutal thrillers") as threats to the intellectual landscape. Frye is arguing that there's a "protecting wall of play" that keeps people from becoming literally infected by the mood of the lynch-mob, which, about ten years previous, Gershon Legman seriously argued was going to happen.

How does this apply to nasty jokes? I think that there's a "wall of play" in Gunn's tweet-jokes. They may not be good jokes, but he's not claiming that he attacked some kid after watching THE EXPENDABLES (one of the more coherent jokes), he's talking about how the movie made him feel "manly" enough to do it-- which I would bet he didn't *really* believe back in the day.

The gist of your post seems to imply that if a real rape-victim read Gunn's jokes, or jokes like them, they would feel terrible to see their trauma trifled with. But if it's a joke, it's NOT REAL. I can't tell a real victim how to deal with trauma, but their pain is not coming from a joke, it's coming from a real act of violence.  Gunn's tweet-jokes are not to my taste, but I have seen black-humor jokes I found funny. Yet no matter where you go, you can find someone, somewhere, who's offended by any joke. 

Black humor is part of our culture, and maybe of every culture, even if some cultures don't want to admit it. I can understand why some people conflate the joke about something bad with the act that actually is bad. But I can't agree with the conflation.

MYTHCOMICS: ARKHAM ASYLUM (1989)

It’s often been said that early Grant Morrison shows more than a little indebtedness to the seminal comics-works of Alan Moore, for all that the two creators eventually expressed mutual animosity for one another. I can’t be sure that Morrison had read Moore’s KILLING JOKE before he wrote the 1989 ARKHAM ASYLUM. However, it seems pretty likely. Both graphic novels are not rousing adventure-stories like Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, but psychological mind-games, in which the ongoing conflict of Batman and the Joker is used to comment on human concepts of sanity and madness. Still, even at this early juncture, the two authors diverge in their treatment of said concepts. Moore takes a “modernist” approach, reading a fantastic hero and his uncanny villain in the realistic roles of weary cop and mocking serial killer, or even "a superheroic version of the Sunshine Boys." By contrast, Morrison, sort of a de facto “post-modernist,” takes a minor element in the Batman mythos and expands on it to give new dimensions to the eternally repeating battle of bat and clown.

The element in question is the asylum of the novel’s title. Arkham, named for a mystery-haunted city in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, appeared in 1970s BATMAN comics, partially in response to DC’s decision regarding depictions of the Joker. For over twenty years, the character’s stone-killer roots had been set aside, and he became simply a menacing crook who delighted in pulling outrageous crimes. However, once the 1970s Joker started killing again, DC’s creators had to come up with some reason to explain why he was never executed for murder. The solution was to rule the Joker as incurably insane, and to sentence him to a newly-created insane asylum. Over the years other super-crooks who had never been motivated by anything but greed, such as Killer Croc and the Scarecrow, joined the Joker in Arkham, as did somewhat more logical inductees like Two-Face and the Mad Hatter. Long before Morrison’s opus, the asylum began to seem less like a place to cure madness than to nourish it and breed it anew. Presumably Arkham’s reputation as a sanctum of insanity led Morrison to align the mental hospital with Lewis Carroll’s ALICE books. Golden Age BATMAN books don’t support such a conflation. For every one story that features weird masterminds like Joker, Penguin, Mad Hatter and the equally Carrollesque Tweedledum and Tweedledee, there are probably twenty stories in which Batman and Robin successfully battle and defeat ordinary career criminals.  But from the 1970s on, DC’s BATMAN books became predominant playgrounds for freakish fiends. Small wonder that Morrison prefaces ARKHAM ASYLUM with the exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat, in which the vanishing feline proclaims, “We’re all mad here.”

By way of expanding on the story of the Asylum, Morrison alternates two stories. One, taking place in modern times, concerns the Arkham inmates taking over the asylum, and Batman voluntarily entering its corridors alone for the purpose of releasing the captive staff. The other, taking place over the first twenty years of the 20^th century, deals with Amadeus Arkham, the asylum’s founder, whom I will henceforth designate as ‘Amadeus” to distinguish him from his creation. Amadeus—whose ironically chosen name means ‘love of God”—suffers a parental trauma seemingly designed to rival that of Bruce Wayne. Amadeus’ father dies in 1901, and for the next twenty years, prior to her suicide in 1920, his mother suffers a combination of madness and demonic possession. The founder’s story is related in journal-like captions, so that the reader can enjoy his scholarly comments when, for instance, he sees (or imagines) beetles coming out of his bed-ridden mother’s mouth, and Amadeus observes that mythically the beetle is “a symbol of rebirth.”

Despite a disquieting instinct that the family mansion may have become a literal gateway to “a world of fathomless signs and portents,” Amadeus seeks solace in the pursuit of psychology’s ability to heal mental defects. As a psychiatrist he encounters a mass murderer named Hawkins, who, by the law of the land, is confined to a penal institution despite the fact that he’s mentally ill. Amadeus, though blessed with a wife and a daughter, makes the unwise decision to dedicate his family’s possibly haunted home to the treatment of mental patients. The night that he makes this decision, he dreams that “the mirror people have escaped from the glass and come looking for me.”

Back in 1989, Batman is obliged to enter the mirror-world of the Asylum, and his host is of course the Joker, who informs the crimefighter that “you’re in the real world now.” Inside, Batman encounters many of his old opponents, though only Morrison’s dialogue identifies them, given that Dave McKean’s art constantly seeks to avoid depicting most of the characters with any clarity. The hero meets the hospital’s two captive administrators, Doctors Cavendish and Adams. Batman finds the two psychologists less than credible, since they insisted on staying when other hostages were released. In addition, Adams shows the hero how they’ve “cured” Two-Face of his duality obsession by altering his fixation into new channels that Batman finds less than desirable. Yet Adams seems almost an advocate of the Joker’s madness, rationalizing that it may be “a brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the end of the 20^th century.”

Back in the 1920s, Amadeus begins to dramatize his struggle with the demons of insanity, thinking, “Just as the Archangel [Michael] subdued the Old Dragon, so shall I bend this house to my will.” Yet even years before the birth of the man called Joker, Amadeus encounters portents of his advent: a lost “joker’ card found on the premises of the mansion, a pair of clown-fish selected for his aquarium. But the next blow comes from outside the house, when the mad killer Hawkins escapes prison and somehow finds his way to the mansion. Thus, months before the building is dedicated to healing the mentally ill, a corrosive madman slaughters both the wife and daughter of Amadeus. Nevertheless, Amadeus opens his asylum on schedule, naming it in the honor of his dead mother, and when Hawkins is sent to Amadeus for mental healing, Amadeus contrives to “accidentally” kill the maniac with electroshock therapy. It’s not quite the same sort of vigilantism that Batman practices, but the parallel could not be more explicit.

Back at the modern-day Arkham, Batman is subjected to a gauntlet of attacking villains. Most of these scenes are nugatory, since McKean’s art is so niggardly with details, with the sole exception of Batman’s encounter with the Mad Hatter, who, quite naturally, is rendered after the fashion of Carroll’s most famed illustrator, John Tenniel. The nominal fight-scenes are less important than two discoveries the hero makes. One is that administrator Cavendish has gone as crazy as his inmates, having released them from their cells as a deluded experiment. The other is that Amadeus Arkham believed that the asylum was a trap for demons, and that only Amadeus’s use of magic managed to contain them, just as Batman contains evil in Gotham City. In the end, the only way Batman triumphs over the Joker is by getting Two-Face to resort to his “old madness” in place of his “new madness.”

Morrison works in many other symbolic references. Some, like various Tarot-images, enhance the reading experience. Others, like the revelation that Amadeus met both Carl Jung and Aleister Crowley, seem more like name-droppings. In ASYLUM Batman’s Morrison is nothing like the super-competent master thinker that he is his 1990s JUSTICE LEAGUE stories; he’s a lot like Moore’s Batman, beleaguered and uncertain. Yet unlike Moore, Morrison seems to place conviction in the Myth of Batman. While Moore’s Batman plays second-fiddle to the tragedy of the Joker’s descent into madness, Morrison depicts the entire order-versus-chaos formula of the Bat-books as two contending manifestations of madness. Though Two-Face gets the last line—reciting Alice's line “Who cares for you?”—Batman best encapsulates the story’s core when he says, “Sometimes it’s only madness that makes us what we are.”