STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 6

Before going on to the essay I mentioned in PART 5, I'll follow up on my remarks regarding distributive and non-distributive applications of charisma.

I mentioned in PART 4 that there were situations in which heroic characters could remain on the periphery of a ensemble while remaining subordinate to the ensemble. It's also possible for a very large group to be subordinate to one centric protagonist, even when that group has elements in common with the centric ensemble.

I've already discussed my determination that Ivanhoe, the protagonist of Scott's novel, is inextricably the focal presence of the narrative, even though the character may not be nearly as interesting as many other characters in the story. But few of the support-characters of IVANHOE play off one another to the extent one expects of a real ensemble-narrative.

To turn to an example generally deemed the centerpiece of Western fiction, Aristotle opined in the POETICS that THE ILIAD served as a model for his concept of "unity of action." The philosopher states that, despite all the many side-stories involving both Greek and Trojan warriors, the epic poem is primarily about "the anger of Achilles," in that the story begins with Achilles withdrawn from the battlefield in anger, and concludes with the hero mastering his rage to some extent when he releases the body of Hector to Priam. If Aristotle is judged right, then all of the other characters in THE ILIAD are subordinate to Achilles. Thus the charisma of the Greek warrior, at least in Homer's rendition, is non-distributive.

In contrast, at a much later date Apollonius Rhodius attempted his own epic, THE ARGONAUTICA, which like THE ILIAD consisted of imposing a single order upon an assortment of myth-tales. That said, although one may argue, after Aristotle, that the quest of heroic Jason for the Golden Fleece is a single action, the quest isn't as indubitably tied only to Jason's charisma as THE ILIAD is to the charisma of Achilles. Not a few comic-book people have asserted a basic identity between Jason's assemblage of many heroes for the quest and the 20th century's invention of the "superhero team." Questions of direct influence, however, are less important than discerning basic structural similarities, and I would say that the idea of  a multi-character ensemble is far more important to THE ARGONAUTICA than it is to THE ILIAD. The most prominent warriors of Homer's epic-- Odysseus, Ajax, et al-- tend to have adventures that are simply side-notes to the theme of the great Achilles' anger, which, both extrinsically and extrinsically, determines the course of the poem. However, in THE ARGONAUTICA, there are assorted moments where this or that hero performs a task that advances the achievement of the quest. Examples of these feats include Calias and Zetes driving the harpies away from Phineus, and Polydeuces using his specialized boxing skill to defeat a mountainous enemy. So in Apollonius's work, the charisma is clearly distributive, and characters like Polydeuces and Heracles are clearly coordinated with Jason's centricity .

That said, it isn't necessarily the case that every single character who went along with Jason is a crucial part of the ensemble. Hylas, allegedly the lover of Heracles, exists in the poem simply to be swept away to his doom by a water-nympth, and this event provides the occasion for Heracles to leave the quest. Whatever the provenance of this story-element in oral myth, this circumstance does give Apollonius the chance to create suspense as to whether the endeavor can succeed without the presence of the Greek strongman.

So perhaps the true determining factor here is whether or not the characters associated with the ensemble undertake a particular type of action important to the story-- possibly "charismatic action." I devoted Part 4 to explaining why the Black Widow in the 1960s AVENGERS series did not belong to the centric ensemble, in contrast to Marvel's Hercules, and my distinction was not that the Widow simply was not a member of the team, but the fact that her actions in the story did not contribute substantially to the ensemble's assorted "quests."

Thus, even though THE ARGONAUTICA, unlike THE ILIAD, distributes its charisma to a group of characters, all of whom are "coordinate clauses" to one another, some characters allied to the group remain subordinate, or, as the lingo of the theater has it, they remain 'spear-carriers."

This brings me back, in my usual circuitous fashion, to the comment I made at the end of ENSEMBLES DISASSEMBLED:

....if I were ever moved to list exactly which characters in the compendious CRISIS [ON INFINITE EARTHS] belonged to the ensemble, I would probably include only those that had a very strong influence upon the outcome of the overall plot.

At some future point I may investigate why I deem that certain long-running serials, like the manga-serials DRAGONBALL and BLEACH, are non-distributive like THE ILIAD, rather than distributive like the Jason epic.

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 5

This is just a quick follow-up to Part 4, which discussed the knotty problem of imputing "power" to fictional characters who have no power save that of being alive when they used to be dead. SPOILERS in advance.

In Part 4, I noted that Golden Age character Major Victory was one such character. Some afterlife judge returned a nameless patriot to life, giving him a costume and a mandate to fight the Axis. One story imputed a limited super-power to Victory, but this is seemed to have been created for the writer's convenience in that one tale. However, most readers would still deem Victory a superhero, if only because he wears a costume.

My newest inductions into the superhero idiom don't wear costumes, but like Victory, they are characters who were dead and became alive again through supernatural means. I've just finished my review of the 1999 telefilm PURGATORY, and in that review, I noted that though the story starts with a band of outlaws, it actually centers on five characters-- the one savable member of the gang, and four residents of the town Refuge. The four residents are all famous gunfighters-- Wild Bill Hickock, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, and Jesse James-- who, like the rest of the townfolk, have been brought back to life to serve a purgatorial sentence, to see if they're worthy to enter heaven.

The four reborn gunfighters, obviously, don't look like anything but ordinary men in ordinary clothes, and they have no special abilities. The rules of the game seem to suggest that they can be wounded by the guns of the mortal outlaws, although none of them are so wounded. The principal threat to their well-being is that, by fighting the bad guys, they may lose their chance at heaven. Nevertheless, there's no question that the climactic gunfight has the same combative value that it would in any commonplace western-- and since one side of the fight is fought in part by dead-alive men, it also becomes relevant to the world of metaphenomenal narratives.

Thus the four gunfighters of PURGATORY would be another example, like others discussed in this series, where the heroes have "potency" but not "power" as such.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE METAL WOMEN BLUES" (METAL MEN #32, 1968)

The DC feature METAL MEN provides a variety of good examples of my current metaphor for literary complication as seen in this essay.

The original creators of the franchise, writer Robert Kanigher and penciler Ross Andru, didn't work on this particular issue, though they had collaborated on most if not all issues up until issue #29. The next two issues were written by Otto Binder and penciled by Gil Kane, and on #32, Binder's story was illustrated by Mike Sekowsky. Since Sekowsky became editor on the feature with #33, replacing long-time writer-editor Kanigher, it seems very likely that Kanigher was being edged off the title, even though he collaborated with Sekowsky for a time. However, clearly before Sekowsky became the new boss, Binder was instructed to follow the storytelling example of the almost-old boss. Back in the day, I could hardly tell the difference between the Binder stories and the preceding Kanigher tales, though now I can see that Binder's plotting was much tighter, despite his emulation of Kanigher's writing-practices.

"The Metal Women Blues" begins typically enough. Tin is being fawned over by his girlfriend Nameless, the only robot in the group not created by Doc Magnus, and the second of two female group-members, the other being Tina, the platinum doll infatuated with her creator. The other male robots-- Gold, Lead, Iron, and Mercury-- petition Magnus to creates mates for all of them. Magnus initially refuses, until Tina points out that if he creates a mate for her, she might become less enamored with Magnus. (Admittedly this is something Kanigher's lovelorn platinum robot would never say, but possibly she's merely trying to help her male comrades.)

In no time, five new robots join the group, known collectively as "the Metal Women" even though they have one male member-- which is just good payback for the years in which the Metal Men sported not one but two female members. However, though the four lady automatons are attracted to their opposite numbers, Platinum Man has no desire for Tina, preferring to keep their association formal-- which puts Magnus back behind the romantic eight-ball.

Just like in a Kanigher story, the two groups are immediately called into action against an alien threat: a giant automated machine. And it's at this point that the girl robots evince something less than shrinking-violet behavior.

"I know I made a mistake," says Magnus, "when I didn't incorporate 'timidity' in the metal women's responsometers. But I didn't want them to be too 'tame' for the Metal Men." However, not only are the lady-bots fairly aggressive, they're actually good at the business of being mechanical superheroes, which causes the males to label them "female glory-hogs." (To be sure, Nameless is unchanged, though for a time she sides with the other "girls," and Lead Girl isn't a glory-hog, just so dumb she makes Lead look swift of wit.)

However, the beings who sent the automated destroyer are observing the contumely, and they decide to take advantage of the situation. The villains are a group of nearly identical 'female robot Amazons," who are all haggish-looking and who are given no raison d'etre at all, just as many of Kanigher's menaces came from no place and had no rationale for their existence. (Maybe some robot-maker made them all look like his shrewish wife, a la I, MUDD?) The Amazon Queen, realizing that the males' vanity has been wounded, sends a "cute girl-robot" to lure the metal guys into a trap. (The cute but unnamed robot-girl even goes armed with "Chan-oil #5 perfume.")

In no time, the trap closes on the guys, who are reluctant to fight "weak women.' The Amazons promptly kick the Metal males' asses and get their broken bodies out of sight, except for Platinum Man, who gets his weight boosted so much that he sinks beneath the earth.

The girls do follow, but they catch sight of Platinum Man in his hole, and he briefs the lady-bots on the strategies the Amazons used against the Metal Males. Thus the Metal Women defeat the Amazons tout suite.

However, since the feature's status quo had to be maintained, the Metal Women then try to rescue Platinum Man, just as a flood of magma flows up into the hole he made. And so the Metal Men return to their normal lineup. Magnus offers to build more inamorata but the guys all decline-- though as a final joke, Mercury gets caught trying to keep the cute girl-robot for himself (being an inferior creation, she simply falls apart in the wake of her creators' destruction).

"Metal Women Blues"-- which is titled "Robot Amazon Blues" on the cover-- is as cornball as anything Kanigher wrote. However, it does maintain a good level of symbolic complexity as well. It begins by showing the guys, who just want women to fawn over them, having their lives complicated by female crusaders generally as competent as they are. While the Metal Women are just "sisters doing it for themselves," though, the Robot Amazons are thoroughly negative incarnations of negative female aggression-- made even less appealing by the fact that they're all ugly.

Binder's most interesting symbolic touch isn't, strictly speaking, necessary for the story's plot, and it illustrates how even a juvenile story sometimes has deeper layers. While the Amazon Queen is busy working on the cutesy robot, the former observes that the unnamed femme metale is made of an alloy of all the metals being lured-- mercury, lead, tin, iron, and gold-- which brings up the loony but amusing idea that in this universe, intelligent robots "stick with their own kind."

CONCRESCENCE AND COMPLICATION

...though Cioffi's book doesn't reference Aristotle, clearly his structural summation of how anomalous presences impact on "conventional social reality" is of a piece with Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")--
ANOMALOUS ENCOUNTERS: RESOURCE.

 This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.-- INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

I've been using the imagery of wave formations whenever I've invoked the idea of amplitude, but here's another metaphor for connectedness: that of the knot-imagery put forth by Aristotle.

Since the beginnings of this blog, I've defined the significance of literary symbolic activity in terms of complexity. The idea of complexity as a value does not seem to appear as such in Aristotle's POETICS, in that the bulk of his argument focuses on art's ability to describe the good and the beautiful. The philosopher does use the categories of "simple" and "complex," but the categories reflect nothing save whether or not a given work contains what Aristotle called "the recognition scene." A simple narrative doesn't have a recognition scene; a complex narrative does.

Aristotle doesn't connect these categories to the "desis/lusis" dichotomy, which I assume was not original to him. However, I think that Aristotle found a moral value in the recognition scene, and that by the trope's presence, it gave a given narrative a greater moral potential. Thus a play like Euripides' MEDEA is simple because it possesses no turnabout scene, in which a protagonist realizes his "connectedness" to some other person or event, as Sophocles' OEDIPUS does.

For my purposes, the presence or absence of a recognition scene makes no difference. However, I find it interesting that the literary activity Aristotle calls "tying" is often rendered in English as "complication," while "untying" is often rendered with the French word "denouement," which originally had the same meaning of "unraveling."

Aristotle's logic is persuasive. Clearly he has examined, in his analytical manner, the way a given author creates interest in his protagonist's struggles by "tying" him up with one or more complications, and then "untying" him in such a way that the hero is either delivered up to good or bad fortune.

As a description of the authorial process, this is accurate, but I don't think it describes the finished literary narrative. I would certainly agree that the process by which Oedipus pieces together the clues regarding his true identity is a complex process. However, the metaphor of an unraveled knot doesn't adequately describe the conclusion of OEDIPUS REX, which is no less complex than all the knotty complications that lead up to the conclusion. The only way in which the play's denouement resembled an untied knot is in terms of a viewer's relief once he knows what has happened to the protagonist and all other significant characters. But the actual narrative process, by my lights, is either (1) simple all the way through, (2) simple in some places and complex in others, or (3) complex all the way through. Not surprisingly, these three levels of complication line up fairly well with my analysis of the levels of literary quality I called "poor," "fair," and "good." At the time I wrote that essay, I was using Aristotle's term "unity of action" to explain the presence of complexity in a given discourse; now, the concept of concrescence has largely usurped the place of said unity.

Thus, for me, every narrative is a knot, perhaps most visually approachable through this representation of different levels of complexity in molecular knots:

Now, since I've gone to great effort to expound upon the ways in which complexity can only be judged through examination of the four potentialities, I won't repeat that argument here, except to say that I've allowed for the possibility that symbolic complexity is not the only form of complexity. I've also allowed that "simplicity" has a role to play even in the most complex narratives. But focusing just on symbolic discourse, then a symbolically poor work would resemble the simple knot "A," a fair work would resemble B or C, which are more complex by virtue of having more crossings, and a good work would resemble D or E.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 3

Just a quick follow-up to this quote from John W. Campbell Jr. in the last essay--

A bum of Italian ancestry is a W; a bum of Jewish ancestry is a K, and a bum of Negro ancestry is a N.

In that essay I observed that this statement, by itself, is not an indicator of true racism. It suggests that the speaker is aware of the basic truth that every ingroup- be it racial, religious, ethnic or political-- has its share of "good apples" and "bad apples." This is such a commonplace to verge on truism, though it's still better than the sort of identity politics that extends the grace of great suffering even upon the rottenest apples in the barrel.

In that essay, I defended that one statement, though I concurred with Alex Nevala-Lee that other Campbell statements were indefensible. But now I'll point out that even though I believe that Campbell's statement as it stands has a basic logical truth, it's utterly useless in a societal sense.

Obviously, Chris Rock can get away with telling a largely black audience that some black people really are "niggahs," because of the way they act. And one can find no small quantity of other examples in which a member of an ingroup uses a slur to apply to himself, but would not accept hearing the same slur from a member of an outgroup.

It's all but impossible for a member of an outgroup-- as WASP Campbell would have been to the three groups he references-- to use any given slur to apply only to the rotten apples of a particular ingroup. The assumption will always be that the slur is being used across the board, and this applies as much to people who claim marginalized status as to anyone else. To cite a personal example, I once happened to provoke the ire of a black panhandler by simply looking in his direction. His precise motives for calling me a nigger I'll never know, but I would guess that-- aside from hoping I'd throw money at him to get rid of his odious presence-- he felt he was getting even with flinging at me an epithet used against his people. Further, I don't think he was using the epithet purely against me; he almost certainly would have used the insult against any white person who ticked him off.

So Campbell's rationale, while consistent logically on its own, has no use-value within culture as a whole. Obviously the only real societal solution of the problem of ingroup epithets is that no one, even without the ingroup, ought to use them. However, making a taboo of any word insures that its power will become even stronger, so neither general nor specific taboos have any use-value either.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 2

Following up directly on PT. 1--

As I said, Nevala-Lee's evidence from the final chapter of ASTOUNDING leaves no doubt in my mind that John W. Campbell Jr. was more than a casual racist. However, there's one citation Nevala-Lee tosses out as if it proved the case for racism as much as, say, the editor stating that "the Negro does not learn from example."

In a mid-1960s letter (page 360), Campbell justifies the use of racial epithets to describe specific individuals within a given ethnicity who are what Campbell calls "bums." And while I don't think I have any overly sensitive readers of this blog (mostly because I don't usually have any), I will palliate the editor's offensive language with the use of initials in place of words:

A bum of Italian ancestry is a W; a bum of Jewish ancestry is a K, and a bum of Negro ancestry is a N.

As I said, Nevala-Lee presents this bit of evidence as if it supported his case as well as the one about Negroid learning capacity.

In truth, it does not, and it coincidentally bears a strong resemblance to the train of comedic logic used by Chris Rock in stand-up routines like this one.

Now, since Nevala-Lee presents other evidence that Campbell did not confine his application of racial epithets only to persons who sinned against probity in some way, one may decide to consider the "bums only" argument moot, since it was being made by a racist. I don't consider it so, although I will cheerfully agree that Campbell probably only used the argument as a justification of his general racism.

However, Nevala-Lee's uncritical citation of this passage indicates to me that he's not capable of sussing out the difference between the statements "Everyone of Race X is a N" and "Only rotten people in Race X are Ns."

And that, without belaboring the point any further, constitutes negative equity: the use of accusations of unfairness to perpetuate unfairness.

Case closed.

AGAIN, DANGEROUS EQUITY PT. 1

To preface this essay, I'll quote myself once more on the topic of negative and positive equity:

'In finance the word "equity" transmuted from connoting a principle of social fairness to something closer to a properly modulated exchange of capital.  The financial term has also begotten the offspring "positive equity" and "negative equity." On this site I found a felicitously simple definition of these secondary terms: from the point of view of a bank, "positive equity adds value to the bank, while negative equity takes value away"... In short, "positive equity" is achieved when someone points out a genuine abuse of fairness, while "negative equity" is achieved when someone uses the concept of fairness incorrectly, to be unfair to someone else.'

In Part 2 of January's essay-series EMANICIPATION VS. FREEDOM,  I commented on the opening chapters of Alex Nevala-Lee's ASTOUNDING. I commented upon the promising nature of a book on the "neglected topic" of the effect of John W. Campbell's editorial reign at ASTOUNDING SCI-FI, but I also found fault with the author's need to "virtue signal" on what Campbell should or should not have done in his heyday with respect to racial matters.

As I've now finished the book, my early anticipations of the work's quality as a cultural biography of the men profiled was fully justified. Further, though I do not retract anything I wrote about Nevala-Lee's opening remarks, I should note that he does not "virtue signal" throughout the text, which would certainly have damaged the credibility of the work. Only in the last chapter (not counting an epilogue) does Nevala-Lee substantially return to the topic of "race in modern America" that he raised in the first sections.

In my remarks, I made this statement:

Campbell may have been racist in specific ways-- and this is something Nevala-Lee may well be able to demonstrate in future chapters-- but he certainly was not racist because he didn't have some visionary apprehension of another generation's concept of equity.

In that last chapter-- titled "Twilight" after one of Campbell's most famous short stories, and referencing the editor's declining years and death-- Nevala-Lee does indeed demonstrate that John W. Campbell was more than a casual racist. To be sure, I had heard the accusation once or twice from other sources, though I personally would not have been able to weigh in with any informed opinion. I had read a fair number of Campbell's reactionary editorials from the last decade of his life, when ASTOUNDING had been remolded into ANALOG. Said editorials usually stayed away from the topic of race, though I do remember one essay in which Campbell inveighed against the "burn baby burn" politics of Stokely Carmichael and gave his approval to the accomodationist approach of Martin Luther King Jr. And Nevala-Lee does not reference Campbell's editorials either, finding more than circumstantial evidence both in Campbell's letters and in anecdotes from people who knew the editor. There is, for instance, more than enough evidence to state that Campbell nurtured an animus against the Negro race, and that even some of his favorable judgments-- as when he told Jewish writer William Tenn that he Campbell considers the Jews "homo superior"-- were also couched in racist diatribes. In my earlier essay I scoffed at Nevala-Lee for suggesting that Campbell could have made any difference to American racial politics in the 1940s with his little SF-magazine, and I still scoff at that. However, I also argued:

In the 1950s and 1960s, there were marginal changes that went against the cultural grain, such as Sidney Poitier movies and the presence of non-white heroes in ensembles like those of I SPY, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and Marvel Comics's THE AVENGERS. During this period, perhaps one might fairly fault a given editor or writer for keeping things too WASPy

And, mirable dictu, one anecdote attests to Campbell's having resisted the currents of the new cultural paradigm, in that he reportedly refused to publish Samuel R. Delany's NOVA because it had a non-white protagonist.

So, it would appear, from everything I've summarized about Nevala-Lee's disclosures, that the balance of his complaints against Campbell should constitute "positive equity." And for the most part, this holds true. Except---

See Part 2.