MYTHCOMICS: "THE GHOST WHO LOVED A GIRL!" (ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN #156, 1964)

Though I've often asserted that I think that the comic-book medium has lost out on the juvenile market for a host of reasons-- the economics of the business, the influence of the fan-subculture-- I can sympathize somewhat with those fans who associate comic books exclusively with children's entertainment. Even allowing for these fans' tendency to remember only to the outstanding kids' comics and to gloss over the many mediocre efforts, one can't help but be a little nostaglic for the days when childish whimsy was a viable commodity.

I've never made a detailed study of the Golden Age era of American Comics Group. During that era the company is best known for producing the first ongoing horror-tale comic book, ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN, but though I believe I've read one or two reprints from this period, I don't get the impression that this was a "golden age" for the company in particular. Editor Richard Hughes is known for having both edited and scripted a wide range of material in many genres, but he probably attained his greatest following in comic-book fandom for his Silver Age titles: his two superhero books NEMESIS and MAGICMAN, and the supernatural-comedy series HERBIE, which also became a sort-of-superhero feature at one point. In my review of MAGICMAN I commented that the feature NEMESIS had a little more "heft" than MAGICMAN, even though in both titles the superheroes maintained the wacky, whimsical tone of HERBIE and the various one-off stories.

There was a good economic reason for this: ACQ had managed to survive the institution of the Comics Code by eschewing the visceral horror that had earned the medium such opprobrium. In place of chills and thrills, ACG pursued supernatural comedy as its dominant aesthetic. As Hughes was never interviewed in his lifetime, there's no way of knowing whether or not Hughes took any personal satisfaction in this alteration, though naturally he defended his company's approach in the Silver Age lettercols. But I will note that an awful lot of his stories, both in one-off stories and within regular features, dwell upon the separation of persons in love in life and their consoling reconciliation in the afterlife.

NEMESIS was essentially DC's Golden Age Spectre (note the slight resemblance of the cowled costume) filtered through the whimsy of Fawcett's Captain Marvel. Like the Spectre, Nemesis was the ghost of a murdered crime-fighting mortal who was allowed to return to Earth and fight all forms of evil. He had a wealth of supernatural powers but despite being a ghost was more vulnerable to injury than either the Spectre or Captain Marvel: he could be knocked out by gas or have his power reduced if he saw his own reflection. Nemesis had two routine crime-fighting adventures before Hughes decided to emulate one other aspect of the Spectre's Golden Age adventures: the hero's attempts to maintain a relationship with a living, mortal woman.

I did a quick re-read of the other Nemesis adventures and found that none of them, except for "The Ghost That Loved a Girl," were anything but pleasant but superficial exercises in whimsy. Thus I'm not claiming that the series as a whole is any neglected treasure-trove; only the story in #156 displays an interesting take on a metaphysical myth-motif.

The first two Nemesis stories involve Nemesis battling the Mafia gangster who was responsible for the death of the hero's mortal incarnation, detective Steve Flint. Just as Nemesis received power from heaven, the Mafioso received power from his master Satan (surely one of the Devil's few literal appearances in commercial comics of the early 1960s). In #156 Nemesis finally puts paid to his murderer by descending into Hell and consigning the thug's "ectoplasm" to destruction in ghost-destroying hellfire. Satan, irritated at the loss of a promising henchman, grapples with Nemesis. The hero, despite his godlike powers, finds that he's no match for the Lord of Evil, the only being in the universe who possesses "devil essence." Nemesis barely manages to escape back to the living world. However, he's fearful that Satan will come looking for him, so he starts researching ways to "beat the Devil."

Hughes promptly makes up a tradition of "devil kryptonite." Nemesis learns that Satan once fell in love in bygone centuries, and that though the mortal woman spurned him, the Devil lost much of his power. Hughes' primary consideration here was surely finding a way to cause the ghost-hero to encounter a contemporary lady-love,but it's nevertheless interesting that Hughes doesn't provide any metaphysical rationale as to why the Devil should lose power as a result of feeling love. In the absence of any such rationale, it seems likely that Hughes accidentally evoked a common trope of folklore: that men "lose power" in the presence of women, whether they actually make love to them or not.

By sheer dumb luck Nemesis stumbles across Lita Craig, the modern-day descendant of the woman Satan loved, so the hero assumes the appearance of his former living identity Steve Flint in order to meet Lita. He promptly saves the young woman from some marauding thugs, who shoot at him without having any effect. Despite this incident, Lita doesn't immediately tip to the fact that Steve's a ghost until she researches his name and finds out that he's dead. By that time, they're both hopelessly in love, but Lita agrees to let Steve/Nemesis take her to Hell so that he can use her in his anti-Satan campaign. Down to Hell the lovers go, and sure enough, Satan goes soft as soon as he sees Lita. Nemesis then beats up the source of all evil and forces him to behave himself from then on, or at least not to go beyond his usual devilish pursuits.  For the remainder of the series, Nemesis and Lita continue to date one another, defying heaven's rules about non-fraternization between the living and the dead.

I've detailed my numerous disagreements with Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex on this blog, but I would say that this tale is one of the few that conforms to the complex in a naive manner-- that is, without any suggestion that Hughes himself drew Freudian parallels. Satan isn't just the master of Hell evil here; he's also an evil authority-figure whose power utterly dwarfs that of the young hero. I find it interesting that while Nemesis can't defeat the Devil one-on-one, he can do so when he enlists a female presence against the "older man"-- a female whose earlier incarnation Satan could not seduce, and whose mere presence saps him of his infernal mojo.

On a side-note: I will note that Hughes' minimal "superhero line" at ACG-- launched in early 1964-- seems not to have been influenced by news of ABC's BATMAN teleseries. News of this impending series did spark a fair number of comic-book companies-- Harvey, Dell, etc-- to launch superhero-lines in order to coat-tail on the TV-show. Some sources assert that some TV producers were trying to make a deal for the rights to Batman as early as 1963, and perhaps Hughes, who had a business-relationship with DC Comics, knew about these dealings. But since no show had been announced in early 1964, it seems more likely that Hughes, even though he didn't show any affinity for the superhero genre, was seeking to emulate the genre's popularity on newstands.

NULL-MYTHS: "THE PLAGUE THAT STRUCK THE JUSTICE LEAGUE" (JUSTICE LEAGUE #44, 1966)

By some chance I seem to have fallen into a pattern of dealing with comic-book "contagions" of one kind or another, since my last three analyses have dealt with one kind of sickness or another, in stories respectively from LOVE AND ROCKETS, BINKY BROWN, and AQUAMAN. In the comic under consideration now, four members of the Justice League-- the Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, and the Atom (not shown on this cover) contract an alien disease that makes them grow to giant-size and threatens them with, as Batman says, an eventual "king-size death."

Before getting into the question of why this is an inconsummate tale, I have to note that one panel in the story has received more attention in the past ten years than perhaps any other JLA story of the period.

Yes, ha ha yuk yuk. I'll concede that this unintentional parallelism-- in which three of the heroes worry about their wives or girlfriends while Batman worries about Robin-- is a little bit funny. At least it's not placing a straight-jacket of "queer theory" upon Batman stories as a whole, as was the case with an essay I critiqued here.

Anyway, I must admit that there's a good reason that even fans of Silver Age DC comics don't reference this story much: it shows a paucity of the imagination that writer Gardner Fox tended to bring to the Justice League. Of course Fox wrote comic books pretty regularly from the late 1930s into the early 1970s, and so he, like anyone else, produced a lot of merely functional stories. Fox was probably at his best in devising weird threats whose nature his heroes-- whether Earth-bound like Batman or transmundane like Adam Strange-- had to figure out in order to beat said threat. He wasn't IMO nearly as good with DC's company-wide schtick of "heroes undergo weird transformations." JLA editor Julius Schwartz showed a penchant for this trope in most of the titles he edited, and I'd like to think that maybe this goofy idea-- four DC heroes become afflicted with gigantism-- might have been Schwartz's idea. The cover-image, showing three of the four bursting through their costumes, was surely meant to be arresting to readers. Instead, it merely looks stupid, and I seem to remember thinking much the same as a juvenile reader of the comic.

"Plague" is a follow-up to JUSTICE LEAGUE #42. This was no great prize of a story either, but it did have a certain wonky charm. Just as the Justice League approaches Metamorpho with the offer of membership-- which the newbie hero rejects out of hand-- an alien who calls himself "the Unimaginable" jumps up and demands that the Justice Leaguers unanimously vote him into membership. The alien has no specific reason for wanting to join the League; Fox is merely indulging in a vague parallelism-- hero unexpectedly doesn't want to join the hero-group, villain unexpectedly does want to join and jealously attacks both Metamorpho and the League. At the end of the adventure all of the heroes defeat the Unimaginable-- whose outer form is never seen, like one of Lovecraft's more arcane monster-gods-- by entering the alien's bloodstream and irritating him until he flees.

"Plague" is the follow-up to that tale, and the only other Silver Age appearance of the Unimaginable-- who perhaps should've been named "the Unmemorable," given how rarely later raconteurs chose to revive him. Having been within the alien's bloodstream has infected four of the heroes from the previous story with gigantism. While searching for clues about their condition, the heroes stumble across a red-skinned alien with the very Earth-y sounding name of "Doctor Bendorion." (This inspires Green Lantern-- whom Fox must have decided to make a repository of all bad puns-- to refer to the red guy as "Bendorion Casey.")

The heroes take Bendorion to Earth because he claims he can synthesize a cure for their fatal condition, as well as the infection that the heroes have passed on to their loved ones. But while the alien physician labors, weird phenomena-- thieves with strange super-powers, a rogue aurora borealis-- break forth, forcing all available heroes to battle them. After these Herculean labors are done, the Leaguers return to their redoubt-- and learn that Bendorion's body has been inhabited by the Unimaginable since they met him. The alien still wants to be a member of the League that almost destroyed him, and not only will he withhold a cure if the heroes don't obey, he'll also destroy all of Earth. However, the heroes have seen through his disguise, and defeat the villain-- having learned also that they don't even need a cure; all they had to do was to rest-- and then they can revert back to normality, and normal-sized costumes. Presumably Robin and the womenfolk are apprised of the rest-cure as well.

In my critique of a 1950s WONDER WOMAN tale here, I said:

Though the plot abounds with improbabilities and happy coincidences, I don't attack it as a null-myth for those deficiencies. What makes "Comets" an inconsummate story is that unlike the best juvenile SF from DC's writers, it fails to create a *sustained* sense of wonder.

Without question Gardner Fox' was far more accomplished in bringing forth the sense of wonder than was Robert Kanigher. But "Plague" is not one of Fox's best stories: here he's just moving the symbolic furniture around, without any sense of artful design.

Happily, Fox wrote better JLA stories, some of which will in future make the mythcomics list.

MORE NULL-MYTHS NOODLINGS

Enlarging on what I last wrote on the subject here:

It occurred to me that I should expound a little on the fact that when I originally started using the term "null-myth" here, I was primarily applying it to story-elements whose mythic content was negligible in their execution (albeit not potential):

No narrative element is literally empty, of course, any more than "zero" exists as more than an abstraction in this our macroverse. But it's certainly possible for a narrative element to be "negligible in some sense," and it is in that sense that henceforth I'll be using the term "null-myth."

Though I did not link this notion to that of "functionality and super-functionality," I think it's implicit that the null-myth applies to any element that is no more than barely functional in the story.  I recall that in one early essay I noted that even an author like Joyce, who sought to invest one day in Dublin with arcane mythic symbolism, had to sometimes use a door as nothing but something through which "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" might enter, if he Joyce didn't happen to have any reason to emphasize the mythicity of that particular door.

The trouble with establishing the term to mean "bare functionality" is that once you've established it, there's nothing much left to say about it. In my last post, I cited an Aquaman story as a "super-functional" mythcomic. I considered citing the following Aquaman comic as a "null-myth."

This is an infamously bad comic book, in which the raconteurs decided to kill off Aquaman's infant son just to give the hero a reason to go full-bore after the villain responsible. But there's no point in stating that its symbolism falls into the level of "bare functionality." Clearly the creators weren't trying to invoke anything from their readers but a very low level of "feeling."

But because of my realization that on occasions a given work may have symbolic potential, and yet does not use it because of some flaw in the execution, I've started utilizing "null-myth" as a label for all examples of "frustrated mythicity." Thus far all of the null-myths I've identified thus far have frustrated their potential due to one of two reasons:

Either they UNDERTHINK the UNDERTHOUGHT-- that is, the authors show some realization of the power of myth-symbols on their own, but said authors use the symbols as if they were static functions, like Joyce's door-- which is the case with my first example of an "inconsummate" myth-comic, Jack Kirby's first CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN story--

Or they OVERTHINK the OVERTHOUGHT, in that they impose some mental straight-jacket around the potentially free-flowing images and symbols. This might include phenomena as intellectually disparate as the over-intellectualizations of figures like Sim and Ditko, as well as instances where some editorial consideration overrides the free flow. Thus, though the first null-myth in the current series-- "The Wedding of Jimmy Olsen"-- is not in any way "intellectual," the transgressive potential of the set-up is nullified, since someone behind the scenes apparently decided that Jimmy Olsen could not evince lust for Superman's girlfriend Lois. Thus the creators self-consciously "edited" the Jimmy character so that in the finished story Jimmy acts more like a child than a nearly adult man.

Both conditions are undesirable, but at the same time inevitable, the equivalent of the "Apple of Knowledge" whose taste propels us out of Eden, and yet for all that makes the memory of Paradise all the sweeter.

MYTHCOMICS: "WHEN THE SEA DIES" (AQUAMAN #37, 1968)

At the end of RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT I mentioned that some of the comics I enjoyed for their "lateral meaning," such as the Drake-Premiani DOOM PATROL, were not noteworthy for a lot of abstract meanings.  The Silver Age AQUAMAN was much in the same vein. Though the character lasted throughout the early Golden Age, not until the early 1960s did DC Comics try to build him up in his own comic book. The stories of this period range from the ephemeral to the mildly enjoyable. Though the 1968 animated cartoon gave the Sea King a media-boost like nothing he'd ever seen before, the stories of the late 1960s comic book by Bob Haney and Nick Cardy became slightly more ambitious than the cartoon. During the decade the hero had slowly accrued a substantial supporting cast-- sidekick Aqualad, girlfriend-cum-wife Mera, son Aquababy-- which helped maintain the series' light-hearted tone. Yet Haney and Cardy added a note of seriousness by giving Aquaman a new recurring villain, the Ocean Master, who was in truth (though he didn't know it) the Sea King's half-brother. This gave the hero various melodramatic whim-whams whenever he was forced to battle Ocean Master's perfidious plans for world conquest.

"When the Sea Dies" is one of the few stories in the period to get the most out of Nick Cardy's superlative draftsmanship. The story opens with Aquaman and his extended family running into Ocean Master once more, but he's not the main villain this time. The primary foe, the Scavenger, announces himself by infecting Aquaman's oceans with a weird "rotting" disease, so that the water is replaced by discolored pockets of air. Scavenger's purpose: he wants Aquaman to find an alien artifact, the Time Decelerator. Aquaman doesn't know where it is, so he tries to fight Scavenger and his "scorpion-ship."  However, the ship is strong enough to withstand a whale's headbutt, and for that matter it becomes difficult for Aquaman and his coterie to fight in a seascape with no sea in it.

As I've said before, cosmological myths are not governed by actual science. The Haney-Cardy concept is nonsense by the actual definition of rotting, which deals with the decomposition of organic matter. Water, not being organic matter, cannot "rot"-- to say nothing of the fact that Haney never explains why the "hollowed-out" parts of the sea simply don't get filled by the rest of the ocean rushing into the empty spaces.  Yet visually, it's an inspired notion. The Aqua-family's life beneath the sea isn't really governed by the laws of marine biology anyway. Within the space of the story, the ocean functions not so much as a real-world body of water as like the cytoplasm within a cell. Neither Haney nor Cardy make this explicit comparison-- it's entirely my own interpolation. I simply find it interesting to imagine Aquaman, Mera and the rest as being self-aware occupants of a decomposing cell, aghast to find the very substrate in which they exist falling apart.

And why does Scavenger want the Time Decelerator? Why, to become immortal, so that he won't age and his body won't break down-- the same doom that he assigns to Aquaman's seas. Aquaman and Ocean Master are forced to team up against the common enemy, and as it happens Ocean Master is the one who actually locates the immortality-bestowing device. Aquaman has to slug Ocean Master to keep him from blowing up Scavenger's ship (because Mera and her kid are held hostage inside), and he battles Scavenger once the villain has charged himself up with immortality-juice. However, as an ironic touch that hadn't been done to death in 1968, Scavenger's immortality ends up devolving him to the level of protoplasm. He vanishes and the seas go back to normal, thus concluding the aqua-hero's one Silver Age adventure into apocalyptic destruction.

NIETZSCHE VS. THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES

The first thing I thought after reading the section "On Science" in Nietzsche's THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, as mentioned here, was that it described not only the attitude of science toward human motivation, but that of ideological critics as well. Such critics, like the "conscientious man" of ZARATHUSTRA, represent humankind as being in a perpetual state of insecurity. Rather than seeing the struggle of "temporary master" and "temporary slave" as inherent to the nature of man, the ideologue constantly rails against the struggle, as if it should never have existed in a just world.

Such extreme rectitude might be admirable, except that the ideologue is willing to lie for his alleged cause. Nietzsche wrote that "no one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant," and in my June essay ULTRALIBERAL LYNCH LAW I took exception with Noah Berlatsky choosing to scold Joss Whedon for the high crime of showing a fictional black man shot with tranquilizer darts, as if this was a tacit endorsement of the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

I had planned to explore this fear-based attitude in general terms. But by a wild coincidence, I stumbled across a recent HU post, in which NB and his followers were complaining about superhero movies in their usual manner. Bored, I happened to follow a link therein-- and lo and behold, it led me to another HU post in which another Berlatsky was willing to tell an all too familiar lie:

It is worth recalling, in this regard, that the superhero idea is a variation on the notion of the übermensch, popularized by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. 

This was followed by a lot of typical twaddle about the eugenics movement and the Ku Klux Klan, all of which were fatuously linked to superheroes, but I didn't bother to read that part. I've read so much of this drivel that I could probably write my own version that would round up all the usual suspects-- patriarchy, whiteness, both vigilante law and duly constituted authority. But I decided to see whether or not Berlatsky II could in any way justify his calumny against Nietzsche:

Can you list even one characteristic that Nietzsche’s ubermensch– as he represents it in the book, not in popular distortions of the philosopher’s idea– holds in common with the superhero, aside from loose similarities in terminology? 

Of course he didn't bother to do so, so I responded once more:

The really funny thing is, you don’t even need to defame Nietzsche– whose opposition to tyranny and anti-Semitism is right there, in his books– to report accurately that a lot of people, including the philosopher’s sister, took over his work and used it as a justification of tyranny and anti-Semitism.

But then elitists, as much as regular comics-fans, like their “origin stories.” You must have someone to castigate as the origin of all the troubles. By so doing, of course, you subscribe to the same logic as your perceived enemies, but hey, it’s never stopped you guys before…

I've said before that I know this sort of Internet wrangling is tedious to most if not all readers. Still, the synchronicity amuses me, that I'd just finished re-reading ZARATHUSTRA and then happened across an essay written months ago, in which the author spun forth a lie that was old when Frederic Wertham popularized it. 

I should add that when I read ZARATHUSTRA again, I naturally studied the ways in which the book defines not just the *ubermensch,* but all topics that might relate in any way to the superhero concept that has so often been conflated with Nietzsche. Had I found any one-to-one correspondences, readers can be sure that I would have been ecstatic to find Nietzsche to be one of the ancestors of the 20th-century version of "the superman"-- though I'm sure I would never have been foolish enough to believe Nietzsche to be the primary originator of the trope.

In the end, though, Zarathustra does not define his "overman" in terms of a fictional hero's willingness to fight evil or protect the vulnerable, although he does evoke those tropes in a very minor way. The definition of the overman is "self-overcoming:" though he is born into a society in which most of the people subsume their wills to the greater good-- sometimes called "the Spirit of Gravity"-- the overman is one who can smash the society's "table of values," which is the only way anything new can be created from the old and outworn. Nietzsche does not speak of using actual violence to overthrow society-- which is more than either the Left or the Right can claim-- though he does speak of war in praiseworthy terms:

Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long.
You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your peace be a victory!
One can only be silent and sit peacefully when one hath arrow and bow; otherwise one prateth and quarrelleth. Let your peace be a victory!
Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.
War and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your sympathy, but your bravery hath hitherto saved the victims.

At the same time, Nietzsche makes clear that the virtue of heroes is not an end in itself. and is likely to end catastrophically for the virtuous man:

I love him who loveth his virtue: for virtue is the will to down-going, and an arrow of longing.

Not only is this not the language one uses to extol a Superman, it's not even appropriate to describe Superman's real ancestors; characters like Samson, Heracles, and King Arthur. Nietzsche is interested in war and violence only as forces within humankind that must be overcome by the overman-- not indulged in, like the Nazis to whom Frederic Wertham compared the philosopher. The overman was Nietzsche's solution to the vagaries of rule by the mob or by the tyrant:

Therefore, O my brethren, a NEW NOBILITY is needed, which shall be the adversary of all populace and potentate rule, and shall inscribe anew the word "noble" on new tables.

The only thing that moves the "Neopuritan nannies," as I'm now calling them, to dislike Nietzsche is that he doesn't join with them in defining the world in terms of "the good and the just," while the nannies can define things in no other way-- when they can be bothered to define them at all.

_________________

ADDENDUM: Just in case this newest volley goes, uh, missing-- I just posted this on the thread referenced earlier:

Who said Nietzsche was pure of heart and could do no wrong? Not me. But I believe that what he actually wrote is more important than what latter-day ideologues have chosen to make of it.
"Ranting" in your world= asking an essayist to back up his statement. Good to know.
Nietzsche didn't defend the common herd and I never said he did. I'm the one defending "the common herd of superhero fans" from the allegation of elitists who won't let anyone, not even Joss Whedon, into their social justice sewing-circle unless he demonstrates lockstep conformity with their set of values.
Now that kind of elitism, Nietzsche scorned even more than he did the common herd.

SECOND VERSE, SAME AS THE FIRST:

"I mention Nietzsche exactly once above, so it’s worth saying that this piece was not meant as a critique of Nietzsche or a deep investigation of his philosophy. The specific reference above is about how the ubermensch concept is linked to Eugenics."

Originally I asked for one thing: a justification of this statement:
"It is worth recalling, in this regard, that the superhero idea is a variation on the notion of the übermensch, popularized by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra.” 

This was indeed a brief mention of Nietzsche. But I couldn't address the main body of the essay, all the rhetoric about white patriarchy etc., or I'd be here the rest of the year, and neither of us wants that. HOODED UTILITARIAN is like a bag of spicy potato chips that I know in advance will disagree with me, so I've resolved to try to minimize any comment to matters of fact-- as in, is there any strong factual linkage between "the superhero idea" and "the notion of the ubermensch" as it was "popularized" by Nietzsche? 

I also stated my belief, in the original CT and elsewhere, that Nietzsche's notion had been bastardized. I didn't think I'd convince anyone of this, but I wanted to see whether or not anyone would acknowledge at least the bare statement of fact that not everyone agrees that Nietzsche's ubermensch is coterminous with the beliefs of eugenics movements, the Nazis and whoever else. You've kinda-sorta done that, so I consider that a miniscule victory, and so won't bother further interrogating the still dubious connection between eugenics and pop-fictional superheroes.

Thanks (equally sarcastically) for listing Gershon Legman as an authority whom you credence. 

COURAGE OVER FEAR

Suddenly, might is not an overwhelming force that exists outside the human subject, imposing fear as the lord does to the bondsman.  Might is something that can be summoned from within oneself, and is thus available to all human subjects who manifest the necessary will.  In addition, might is plural in nature: it has many faces, and in folktales and fairytales this many-sidedness often appears when a beleaguered viewpoint character receives supernatural help from some benign donor to "even the odds" against a powerful enemy.Thus, within stories that emphasize "might vs. might"-- which is to say, combative stories-- the plurality of might implies that no lord is ever so mighty that a bondsman cannot assume his power and knock him from his lofty position. -- THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE, PART 2.

Despite my liking for Nietzsche's concept of the *ubermensch*, I can't say that THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA is my favorite book on the subject. The philosopher's alter ego Zarathustra uses the concept to illustrate his ideal of "self-overcoming," a point which was resolutely ignored by later pundits in favor of the calumny that Nietzsche was a worshiper of violence, an anti-Semite, and a proto-Nazi. Though Nietzsche is clear enough on his core philosophy to anyone willing to read closely, it's not always pellucid as to what he's opposing. Zarathustra, speaking largely in a series of quasi-poetic, incantatory aphorisms, rails against all sorts of metaphorical evils that represented the mediocrity of European, calling them things like "the small men," "the Ultimate Man," "the fleas," and "the tarantulas."

Keeping this criticism in mind, in the section "On Science" Nietzsche is extremely clear when he advances a doctrine about "fear" and "courage." Since ZARATHUSTRA was not one of my favorite Nietzsche-reads, I think it's unlikely that this particular section influenced my "ethic of the combative," which as I've noted began from the seeds spread by Hegel and tended by Kojeve and Fukuyama. It's possible that Nietzsche, who's known to have read at least some Hegel (whom he did not overly like), may have absorbed some aspects of Hegel's "master-slave" dialectic. If so, he clarified some of the aspects of the dialectic that I found too obscure in Hegel.

"On Science" (translation here by Thomas Common) carries over from earlier sections in which Zarathustra has been convening with several disciples ("higher men," as Nietzsche calls them). One of the disciples, whom is described as "the conscientious man," advances a doctrine that defines humankind as the product of fear.

"Thou praisest me," replied the conscientious one, "in that thou
separatest me from thyself; very well! But, ye others, what do I see? Ye
still sit there, all of you, with lusting eyes--:

Ye free spirits, whither hath your freedom gone! Ye almost seem to me
to resemble those who have long looked at bad girls dancing naked: your
souls themselves dance!

In you, ye higher men, there must be more of that which the magician
calleth his evil spirit of magic and deceit:--we must indeed be
different.

And verily, we spake and thought long enough together ere Zarathustra
came home to his cave, for me not to be unaware that we ARE different.

We SEEK different things even here aloft, ye and I. For I seek more
SECURITY; on that account have I come to Zarathustra. For he is still
the most steadfast tower and will--

--To-day, when everything tottereth, when all the earth quaketh. Ye,
however, when I see what eyes ye make, it almost seemeth to me that ye
seek MORE INSECURITY,

--More horror, more danger, more earthquake. Ye long (it almost seemeth
so to me--forgive my presumption, ye higher men)--

--Ye long for the worst and dangerousest life, which frighteneth ME
most,--for the life of wild beasts, for forests, caves, steep mountains
and labyrinthine gorges.

And it is not those who lead OUT OF danger that please you best, but
those who lead you away from all paths, the misleaders. But if
such longing in you be ACTUAL, it seemeth to me nevertheless to be
IMPOSSIBLE.

For fear--that is man's original and fundamental feeling; through fear
everything is explained, original sin and original virtue. Through fear
there grew also MY virtue, that is to say: Science.

For fear of wild animals--that hath been longest fostered in
man, inclusive of the animal which he concealeth and feareth in
himself:--Zarathustra calleth it 'the beast inside.'

Such prolonged ancient fear, at last become subtle, spiritual and
intellectual--at present, me thinketh, it is called SCIENCE."--

Zarathustra counters with an argument that defines humanity in completely opposite terms.

Thus spake the conscientious one; but Zarathustra, who had just come
back into his cave and had heard and divined the last discourse, threw a
handful of roses to the conscientious one, and laughed on account of
his "truths." "Why!" he exclaimed, "what did I hear just now? Verily, it
seemeth to me, thou art a fool, or else I myself am one: and quietly and
quickly will I put thy 'truth' upside down.

For FEAR--is an exception with us. Courage, however, and adventure, and
delight in the uncertain, in the unattempted--COURAGE seemeth to me the
entire primitive history of man.

The wildest and most courageous animals hath he envied and robbed of all
their virtues: thus only did he become--man.

I'd love to know what scientists of his period Nietzsche believed to be guilty of defining humankind predominantly in terms of fear. Regardless, I believe that he was fundamentally correct. Adherents of empirical science validate the logic of "cause and effect" above all other principles, with "Occam's Razor" wagging its tail behind. Thus if the simplest explanation seems to be that humankind developed out of a need for security, to reduce fear's sway, then that would also be the correct explanation. It's surely no coincidence that H.P. Lovecraft, whose early flirtations with religion were dispelled by his conviction in the empirical sciences, penned the following:

THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Nietzsche was no less influenced than Lovecraft by the empirical science of his time. However, to judge from the words Nietzsche places in the mouth of his prophet, the philosopher believed that "courage" was "the entire primitive history of man"-- and that's keeping in mind that he's speaking of the "man" who is not even close to becoming the transcendent "superman:" the superman that, by his own attestation, Zarathustra believes in but has not actually seen. Whereas Lovecraft, who loved horror stories, defined humankind in terms of a negative reaction to "fear of the unknown," Nietzsche founds his vision of humanity in terms of "delight in the uncertain." I'll mention that these opposing viewpoints may also be glossed by Adler's notions of positive and negative compensation, on which I expatiated here.

I'll explore some of the ramifications of Nietzsche's viewpoint in future essays, but this essay is constructed largely as a resource for the viewpoint as such.

NULL-MYTHS: BINKY BROWN MEETS THE HOLY VIRGIN MARY (1972)

                                       

Cited as one of THE COMICS JOURNAL’s top 100 English-language comics, Justin Green’s “Binky Brown” story—originally published as a stand-alone comic of 44 pages—remains one of the representative works of the “underground comix” movement. I never read the work in its original form, but only in Last Gasp’s 1995 reprint, which also included sundry other related short works and a fulsome foreword by Art Spiegelman. In said foreword, Spiegelman credits Green with launching the subgenre of “confessional autobiographical comix.” This may well be true—I’m far from an expert on the underground movement—but I don’t know how much I’d trust the acumen of someone who credits the Bronte sisters with inventing “Gothic romance” and Tolkien with inventing “sword and sorcery.” 

Over-ambitious compliments aside, Spiegelnan makes clear that he considers Green a genius from whom he Spiegelman took no small inspiration in his own confessional work. He also scorns the many inferior autobio comics that implicitly don’t do credit to the subgenre. I, however, find that Green’s BINKY BROWN is guilty of many of the sins of the underground movement as a whole: both a lack of free-flowing imagination and a lack of ordered intellectual discourse.

The story of Binky Brown—an alter ego for Green himself— follows Binky from grade-school to adulthood with emphasis upon one aspect of his life: the conflict between the Catholic faith in which he is reared and his natural, budding sexuality. There’s a minor reference to Binky’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but on the whole it’s all about Binky’s problems with the strictures of the Catholic Church. The Virgin Mary isn’t so much a character in Binky’s dreams and fantasies as a leitmotif. She pops in and out of Binky’s fevered consciousness, sometimes tasking him with his sins, sometimes becoming the subject of his tormented sexual imaginings.

Given that I subscribe to Bataille’s idea that all transgressions are capable of completing-- rather than simply contravening-- the taboos that they violate, I don’t have any moral qualms against Green’s blasphemous fantasies. My qualms are aesthetic, for on the whole I find most of Green;s fantasies superficial and dull. Through grade school and high school, Binky seems a pretty ordinary kid. Once or twice he questions his religious preceptors, the nuns who teach the classes and the priests who take confession, but his questions are routine ones: “What happens to people outside the Church who live moral lives,” and so on. The religious authorities don’t come off well in these encounters, but Binky doesn’t seem like sharpest tack in the drawer either.

I don’t deny that BINKY BROWN is a lot livelier than most autobio comics; certainly I’d rather reread his work than the pretentious “just the facts, ma’am” works of Harvey Pekar. His fantasies about nuns and the Virgin Mary may be par for the course among tormented adolescents, but how many confessional comics show a young boy achieving his first orgasm by accidentally “scalping” a toy rubber pig? Later, Binky starts seeing penises in everything around him, and finally he’s shooting “penis-rays” out of various areas of his body. Finally, as a young man he leaves the Catholic Church, trying a variety of distractions to drive away his early religious influences, including drugs, the novels of Herman Hesse, and “gambolling.” But nothing works until he walks by the status of a Spanish Madonna and manages to avoid his syndromic feelings of guilt by singing “Lady of Spain.”  This fires him up enough to exorcise the Virgin from his soul by buying a dozen cheap replicas of Mary and smashing almost all of them. One of  the statues accidentally survives, but because the icon no longer holds power over Binky, he places it in his window and remarks, “Guess I’ll build up some new associations around you now.”

As with most if not all of the works that I’ve judged to be inconsummate, BINKY BROWN has a lot of potential, but it’s underdeveloped and sometimes incoherent. Prior to his icon-smashing ritual, he castigates Mary for making the birth process a big mystery (“It doesn’t matter—it’s only matter!”)  He also reels forth a knee-jerk Freudian interpretation of Mary’s appeal: “What I did was to transfer a healthy dread of incest onto you—until every step I take is a perverse act.” But there’s not a lot of evidence of incestuous urges in the chronicle of Binky’s life. As a reader I don’t care whether or not the real-life Green experienced such urges, but incest here is the equivalent of Chekhov’s gun: if you bring it on stage, you should be ready to use it. Perhaps Green’s reticence on the subject indicates a weakness in the confessional form, in that actual fiction may allow the author more freedom than the inevitable self-editing of the confessional.

There’s also a distinct limitation in Green’c conception of the “well-meaning institution” of the Catholic Church. Binky never tries to sort out what’s good and what’s bad about his religion, or about religion generally: all he knows is that its strictures make him crazy about sex. Still, since nearly every adolescent gets hormone-crazy at some point, it’s difficult to imagine Binky’s life being all that different had he been raised without religion. At least when Robert Crumb wrote his confessional essays, he was unflinching in admitting that his quirks came from his own messed-up psychology. Binky’s religious journey verges on solipsism—which in a sense made it perfect for the underground comix movement. Religion, like government, was The Great Satan to iconoclasts, and readers of underground comix certainly would not have faulted BINKY BROWN for talking more about his own neuroses than about any Big Picture. But this is the sort of purblind oppositional thinking that has kept the majority of so-called "art-comics" from rating alongside the best "thematic realism" art, and relegates the imagination to nothing more than a hormone-addled consciousness.