MYTHCOMICS: JIHAD #1-2 (1991)

I've provided a brief sketch of the concept of JIHAD's status as one of pop culture's best crossovers in this post on my blog OUROBOROS DREAMS, which is more or less my "stuff I've been reading" blog.  This neglected graphic novel consists of a pair of squarebound 48-page books issued by Epic Comics during their creative roundelay with Clive Barker. I detailed my personal acquaintance with the Hellraiser and Nightbreed franchises on the OUROBOROS post so that I wouldn't have to explain all that here.

I'm also not going to spend a lot of time on the complicated plot and the extremely crowded cast of characters in JIHAD. As noted in the other essay, the base goal of JIHAD's plotline, as scripted by D.G. Chicester and painted by Paul Johnson, is to meld the loose mythologies of the Hellraiser and Nightbreed franchises. However, there's quite a bit more going on in JIHAD's theme than the customary cross-franchise meet-and-greet.

For one thing, JIHAD offers one of the few complex meditations on the metaphysical theme of "order and chaos." In Greek creation-myths these contrary forces are more often styled as "kosmos and chaos." The English rendition has been used by many authors, but may be most familiar to fantasy-fiction readers in its utlization by author Michael Moorcock in some of his sword-and-sorcery works, notably the "Elric" series. Though I haven't read every Moorcock work, I've found his handling of the dichotomy to be routine at best, and the same applies to similar adaptations in DC Comics' "Doctor Fate" franchise.

In contrast, JIHAD begins with a syncopated juxtaposition of images that contrast the worlds of the Nightbreed and the Cenobites as emblematic of "chaos" and "order." Yet. instead of picturing chaos as simply some sort of nasty world-conquerors opposed to the reigning hegemony, the Nightbreed embody the messy chaos of the unbridled life-force. It's violent, but also sexy in a visceral fashion.

-

In contrast, the Cenobites, who practice a form of extremely violent mortification that surpasses anything that the flagellants of medieval times could have imagined, seek to impose a ruthless form of order upon their bodies and of all those within the hell of their god Leviathan. In keeping with the HELLBOUND film, the Lord of Hell is an abstract polygon-shape whose precision the Cenobites seek to emulate. Chichester takes screenwriter Atkins' conceit-- probably borrowed from similar motifs in the horror stories of Arthur Machen-- and expands upon the conceit, satirizing the attempt of all religions to impose an artificial orderliness and to restrain the chaos of life.

The force that brings the two factions into conflict is a group of inferior Cenobites who aren't satisfied to suffer under the banner of Leviathan, as is the nameless leader known as "Pinhead." These Cenobites are led by an accursed couple, Alastor and Chalkis, who urge Leviathan to allow them to declare a jihad against the resurgent Nightbreed. The true aim of this purgatorial power couple, however, is to elevate themselves to become deities in their own right and take over Hell. Pinhead opposes their ambitions, not least because such desires possess "the stench of chaos," but his many-faceted deity overrules the Cenobite leader and allows Alastor and Chalkis to make war on the monstrous Nightbreed. The villains' plans involve a blasphemous parody of the Christian host and the suborning of a Knight Templar (based on the historical Jacques de Molay). The Nightbreed fight back with both bestial fury and subtle alchemies. One of these involves bringing back a dead man to be the vessel of their long-absent deity Baphomet, who is more or less the deific opposite of Leviathan. In the Johnson-Chichester cosmos, the order represented by the Christian mythology is every bit as inverted as that of Christianity's versions of sin and suffering. Indeed, I strongly suspect that one of the creators had read his Bataille, for on page 19 of Book 1, one of the Cenobites recites an injunction from hell's holy books that is an almost verbatim reprise of a phrase from Bataille's EROTISM: "And do not deny the taboo, but rather transcend it and complete it."

I've discussed various aspects of Bataille's taboo-and-transgression formula in essays like LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION and HOLY NUMINOSITY PART 4, so I won't comment further on this theme here. Suffice to say that whereas a lot of horror-writers, both in prose and comics, merely play at transgression, Johnson and Chichester display a predilection for physical distortions worthy of the celebrated Hieronymous Bosch.

To be sure, JIHAD is as as dense as-- well, hell. Not all readers will catch its learned references, but I'll note that my favorite is the Thomas Malory FAUSTUS quote on the last page, which offers a tragic perspective on the dedicated diabolist Pinhead; one that the extremely uneven film-series certainly never managed to articulate.

A PAUSE FOR POTENTIALITIES

At the end of Part 1 of REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, I said that Part 2 would deal with grounding my myth-critical approach within "a sound understanding of the way popular art works." But before I do that, I have to investigate the nature of the potentiality with which I'm dealing with a myth-critic: the potentiality of the mythopoeic.

In FOUR BY FOUR I formulated the four potentialities in response to Jung's four functions. I didn't go into great detail as to how Jung deduced his four functions, but chose to reread the relevant sections of PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES in preparation for Part 2 of the MERCURIAL essay. 

At one point Jung provides his simplest breakdown of the operations of the four functions:

The essential function of sensation is to establish that something exists, thinking tells us what it means, feeling what its value is, and intuition surmises whence it comes and whither it goes. 

In this and related passages, Jung characterizes the intuition as the complement to sensation: sensation perceives things in the present, while intuition senses the ways in which present-day sensations relate to the past and/or the future. I suppose that for some readers this might seem like a rather radical extension of the colloquial use of the word "intuition"-- assuming, of course, that the culture of the Swiss psychologist also used the term in colloquial ways cognate with the English-language idea of "women's intuition." Jung escapes any accusations of over-amplification by specifying that there are two forms of intuition: a concrete type, which "mediates perceptions concerned with the actuality of things," and an abstract type, which "mediates perceptions of ideational connnections." The latter aspect of intuition is the one that relates to the art of literary narrative, and indeed in a few remarks Jung credits intuition with making the "connections" necessary for poetry, though he never develops these observations into a general "Jungian poetics."

Now, Jung being Jung, his concept of the archetypes was never far from his mind.

like sensation, intuition is a characteristic of infantile and primitive psychology. It counterbalances the powerful sense impressions of the child and the primitive by mediating perceptions of mythological images, the precursors of ideas. 

Now, I agree with Jung's comment that "ideas" are developed out of what might as well be called "images" (Kant called these lesser elements "notions.") However, I want to specify that one need not buy into Jung's specific concept of inherited mythological images in order to validate his basic schema. Jung's predecessor-and-influence Cassirer said much the same thing, sans the inherited images. From the 2012 essay MYTH MATTERS:

Once it is evident that the dividing-line between religious myths and literary myths is real only insofar as individuals “believe” in the distinction, one may be open to an interdisciplinary approach like that of Ernst Cassirer, who devoted his book MYTHICAL THOUGHT to the proposition that “mythical thinking” was a fundamental proclivity of humankind that was not confined those narratives which nominalists choose to call “myths.”  In essence “mythical thinking” is the counterpoint to what Cassirer calls variously “empirical” or “theoretical” thought.

Later, Susanne Langer, who took no small influence from Cassirer, advocated a similar position, which I discussed in GESTURE AND GESTALT PART 2:

What we should look for is the first indication of symbolic behavior [in man's predecessors the anthropoids], which is not likely to be anything as specialized, conscious, or rational as the use of semantic. Language is a very high form of symbolism; presentational forms are much lower than discursive, and the appreciation of meaning probably earlier than its expression... It is absurd to suppose that the earliest symbols could be *invented;* they are merely *Gestalten* furnished to the senses of a creature ready to give them some diffuse meaning."-- NEW KEY, p. 110.

Therefore, when I interrogate the role that the mythopoeic potentiality plays within my system, it should be understood that it doesn't constitute complete alliance with Jung's explanation of inherited images. For the purpose of literary analysis, it doesn't matter whether mythological images are programmed into our beings, or whether they simply re-occur as necessary structual precursors to the rational activity Jung calls "thinking."

REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, PT. 1

For once I'm going to link to a UTILITARIAN post without dumping on its author. I'll still disagree with him, but this time I can see the difficulty of his position.

For some time a writer named Robert Stanley Martin has providing HU with an abbreviated look at the chronological publication of key North American comic books. He focuses only on what he calls "the aesthetic cream of the crop," an elitist position with which I disagree, as did a poster who replied:

Apparently, the “history of North American comic-book publishing” includes almost nothing other than Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, and Plastic Man books, with a bit of Disney thrown in. Seriously??? -

Martin defends his concentration on the cream of the crop, stating that he doesn't plan to include anything from, say, the Batman title except things like "the first appearances of Batman and Robin" and "the debuts of the better known villains."  By so doing, it goes without saying that Martin is deferring to the community of comics-critics who tend to marginalize Batman in favor of, say, Plastic Man. I might advance the counter-argument that even though Cole's Plastic Man may boast superior design-work than the best of the Batman artists, the former is not necessarily better written than the latter. Indeed, many of the Cole issues Martin cites are bland tales from the standpoint of the writing, and would never have earned their place amid the "aesthetic cream" if they had been drawn by a less heralded artist-- even if it was by one who was arguably Cole's equal in formal talent, like Paul Gustavson or Lou Fine.

Still, though I disagree with Martin's emphasis on artists who have been validated above their peers for dubious reasons, one of his points is unassailable. Neither he nor anyone else could or should try to include everything. If I attempted such a list, I'm sure that on first consideration I would default to the fannish tendency seen in comic book price guides: to focus on events in DC or Timely Comics that affected the later avatars of those companies-- the first battle between the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, or the first appearance of the Injustice Gang of the World in the JUSTICE SOCIETY feature. Yet on second consideration, I think I'd realize that these events shouldn't be any more important than events that influenced comics whose publishers did not survive into the Silver Age.

Companies like Hillman, whose big seller was AIRBOY, seen here encountering the ghoulish villain Misery...

Or Lev-Gleason, which gave us the memorable multi-issue crossover of the villainous Claw and the original Daredevil-- part of which was drawn by Jack Cole.

As a pluralist I would maintain that these are as good examples of their genre as Plastic Man is, so I wouldn't concur with the elitist POV that puts them beyond consideration. (The reasons for that superficial opinion I'll detail elsewhere.) However, these examples raise another point: are only the "big events" worth considering in a pluralist "best of" list? Further, to extrapolate from a point Martin makes: are the first appearances of Batman's iconic villains their best "aesthetic" moments? Is the first Joker story the one every comics-fan ought to read? Will it tell the non-hardcore reader everything he wants to know about the Joker? Or would the reader be better off reading a less Gothic but arguably more "aesthetically pleasing' story like "The Joker's Millions" from DETECTIVE COMICS #180 (1952)?

Yet even with the most pluralist will in the world, something has to be left out, and one has to form some criteria for disinclusion. As a reader I feel less fondness for Carl Burgos' seminal "Human Torch" character than for his earlier, much goofier hero "the Iron Skull," shown below (with art by Sam Gilman) bouncing bullets off his indestructible noggin--

--yet I know that if push came to shove, my Golden-Age list would have to include some notation on Burgos' Human Torch, even if I thought it was a great concept that Burgos totally muffed. Old Iron Skull would have to be left behind in the annals of obscurity, because the Torch had one thing going for him that the Skull did not: a superior design, albeit by a less than superior artist.

I can't speak to Martin's aesthetic priorities, but I'll take a wild guess: like many critics influenced by the COMICS JOURNAL-- an influence he cites in another of his posts-- his choices are informed by a vision of comics becoming something other than what they were in the Golden Age. Cole's "Plastic Man" feature didn't really escape the genre-boundaries of the superhero, but a lot of critics, not least Art Spiegelman, pleased themselves to think that it did. That gave Cole's stretchy dogooder a luster that lifted it above the majority of Golden Age work-- not to mention the majority of Jack Cole's other comics work.

But, then, the question arises: how does one form standards for formula-work that was meant to be standard-less? I'm certainly not speaking only of the superhero genre, for which comics became famous, but all of the genres that were meant to be read quickly and tossed away. Is there anything in the first twenty years of ARCHIE that merits celebration, and if so, what makes those ARCHIE stories better than other comics in that genre, like Harry Lucey's GINGER and Morris Weiss' MARGIE?

My "mythcomics" feature was instituted to explore one of the four "potentialities" around which creators organize their narratives, and through which audiences experience them. This is an entirely feasible approach to assigning merit to formulaic material that sought to meet "aesthetic standards" only insofar as they promoted good sales, and thereby put money in the creators' pockets. However, though I consider myth-analysis to be a heuristic device to that of aesthetic criticism-- whose failings I pointed out here-- I must admit that the myth-criticism methodology must be firmly grounded in a sound understanding of the way popular art works-- which I'll cover in Part 2.

NULL-MYTHS: "HOW DO YOU FIGHT A NIGHTMARE?" (GREEN LANTERN #82. 1971)

My choice for a null-myth mirrors the theme of the week's mythcomic: the theme of feminine sovereignty.

As written by Denny O'Neil and pencilled by Neal Adams, the last fourteen issues of the Silver Age GREEN LANTERN feature-- which changed its masthead title to GREEN LANTERN/ GREEN ARROW during that period-- remains one of the touchstones of the early Bronze Age. I won't attempt to critique the entire rum here, which has both its fans and its detractors. It's enough to say that the revised feature followed the lead of the "relevance craze" in popular fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This meant that the GL/GA stories dealt with social problems in a compartmentalized, one-social-topic-per-story fashion, whether the problem was drugs, Native American problems, censorship, Black American problems, and so on.

I don't know whether or not advance advertising on "Nightmare" positioned the story as an examination of the "problem" of feminist concerns. I recall that at least some of the lettercol mail attacked the story as a travesty of those concerns, but the text of O'Neil's story doesn't foreground the narrative as a "cause of the month." Mythologems about femininity make their appearance in the story, but it's hard to see what value O'Neil meant them to have. Hence, "Nightmare" qualifies not as just a mere bad story, but also an inconsummate one, in terms of its symbolic discourse.

Long before the beginning of the Silver Age, the writers of DC comics became notorious for the use of heavily plotted stories which often depended on the contrivances of villains seeking to trap or hoodwink the stories' heroes. "Nightmare" is first and foremost a "trap" story, beginning with an absurd but eye-catching opening. Green Arrow, somewhat on the outs with his girlfriend Black Canary, decides to buy her a box of roses. He shows up at her house, greets her (in her civilian ID as Dinah Lance), gives her the box-- and out of the box spring a pair of creatures that resemble the harpies of Greek myth. Arrow and Canary try to fight the monsters, then flee the house-- only to find that the harpies disappear a moment or two later. The archer calls on his power-ring partner to help him investigate the attack-- and therein lies the trap. Without dwelling too much on the particulars of the ramshackle plot, Green Lantern's old foe Sinestro and his previously-unseen sister are behind the whole thing: they contrive to menace the Lantern's friends in order to draw him out of hiding, so that they can lay their trap.

It's useless to critique O'Neil's story in terms of verisimilitude-- to object that a villain as resourceful as Sinestro surely could have found a more efficacious way to draw out the Emerald Guardian; one less dependent on anticipating Green Arrow's wooing habits. In all likelihood O'Neil contrived this wild, thoroughly improbable opening primarily to sell the issue to young readers and for no other reason. A secondary benefit is that the flower-store gimmick gives Arrow and Canary something to investigate after the Lantern has been trapped, and the same gimmick makes it possible for them to save their friend after having accidentally put him in danger. But more importantly, such a critique is ultimately irrelevant, since I'm concerning myself not with consistency of character, but the way the symbols are utilized.

The substance of Sinestro's trap is that he tricks an entire civilization-- one made up of the harpies, a group of huge Amazon women, and a ruler who calls herself Medusa-- into doing his dirty work in trying to kill his enemy. Green Lantern, upon encountering these leftovers from the mythic past, gets a quick-and-dirty explanation for their animus toward men. Their entire city was hurled into a dimensional other-world by an ancient wizard, who was pissed because Medusa laughed at his marriage-proposal. Apparently this is the only "feminist" issue in the story-- essentially, that some men do some shitty things to women-- although once or twice Black Canary gives Green Arrow a hard time for his overbearing masculinity.

Even for comic books, dumping together harpies, Amazons, and snake-haired Medusa makes for a pretty motley myth-crew (further complicated by Adams dropping the motif of Medusa's scary petrifying face, and instead giving her a headful of snakes that can strangle their victims). I must admit that some mythographers, notably Robert Graves, have argued that the legendary Amazons of Libya worshipped Medusa as a more horrific version of the martial goddess Athena. I suppose it's possible that Denny O'Neil happened across this factoid and wrote it into his story, but I've read many of O'Neil's comics-tales and he doesn't impress me as a mythophile. It could just as easily be true that O'Neil was unaware of the mythographers' connection between Medusa and the Amazons, and that he just associated these figures because in their traditional stories they are opposed to normative Greek patriarchy-- the Amazons, because they maintain a role-reversed female-centric society, and Medusa because she's raped by Poseidon but goes on to menace mortals as a monstrous gorgon. Still, harpies don't really have a place in the equation. They've been variously interpreted as wind spirits and spirits who torment the dead, so they really don't fit in with the theme of women treated badly by patriarchal males. It may be that they're only there because Neal Adams felt like drawing harpies.

O'Neil's script states that Sinestro stumbled across the exiled Amazons by accident, somehow figured out that they were man-haters, and so enlisted his sister, the so-called "Witch Queen" to approach the Amazons. One of the martial maidens sums up their program: "to make all men pay for the crime of the wizard." But, even granting comics' penchant for absurd premises, it's hard to see how Sinestro's sister could convince the Amazons and harpies that any particular man should be pulled into their world and executed, as they attempt to do to Green Lantern.

One fan complained that the O'Neil/Adams story trivialized the subject of feminism by simply using a bunch of female monsters as the hero's adversaries. I might have validated a story that was simply out-and-out gynophobic, like certain EC horror-stories that I'll be addressing in future. But O'Neil and Adams maintain the butt-kicking Black Canary as an icon of formidable femininity, so the creators certainly aren't downgrading women as a whole. Perhaps the key to this awkward, inconsistent tale is that of male melodrama, for when Green Lantern is hauled before Medusa, he's condemned to death simply for "being like he who banished us" Black Canary shows up and talks Medusa out of killing the hero by revealing that they've been manipulated by another man, rather than being helped by a fellow female. So the moral, such as it is, is not to assume that shared sex organs mean shared interests.

It's also interesting that although the Amazons don't like being in the dimensional otherverse, nothing whatever is said in the story's hurry-up-and-finish conclusion about Green Lantern or his fellow superheroes freeing them from their exile. Granted, such a motley crew wouldn't fit in on modern Earth, but it seems like even the narrative's author wanted to get rid of these female foes as soon as he'd conceived them-- an interesting contrast to the more incisive treatment of feminine concerns in the earlier "Star Sapphire" stories in this title.

MYTHCOMICS: "BEWARE OF POISON IVY" (BATMAN #181, 1966)

(NOTE: In my essay on one of Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN "null-mythic" stories, I mentioned that the author occasionally managed to put together some decent myth-tales in the pages of a title of his own creation, METAL MEN. I anticipate getting to one of these in the future. But if I had to name the Kanigher story that possesses the strongest mythicity, it would be the story in which he introduced Poison Ivy to the Batman mythos-- though it's been said that the new villainess was created in part because allegedly the producers of the ABC Bat-teleseries requested more female characters in the comics franchise, and that both editor Julie Scwhartz and artist Carmine Infantino were involved in Ivy's conception.)

SUMMARY: As the story opens, there are three super-villainesses—Dragon Fly, Silken Spider, and Tiger Moth; none of whom had appeared before this story—on the loose in Gotham City. At a museum gathering attended by Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, a fourth villainess, Poison Ivy, appears and claims to be greater than the other three curvaceous crooks.   Ivy flirts with Wayne before she flees the museum in the company of a cadre of henchmen. Wayne and Grayson don their crusader-guises and battle the henchmen while Ivy meditates about whether Wayne or Batman ought to be her next beloved.  Ivy, having made her escape, sends out messages to both Batman and Wayne, inviting them to show up at a prearranged location and battle one another for her favor.  At the same time Ivy also sends false messages to the other three super-villainesses, causing them to assemble at the same location with their gangs, in order to fight for the right to be called “Queen of Crime.”   Bruce Wayne doesn’t attend the gathering, but Batman and Robin arrive and began thrashing thugs,. Meanwhile Ivy puts her three rivals out of commission.   Ivy tries to conquer Batman’s crimefighting resolve with drugged lipstick, but his willpower proves greater, and Ivy also ends up in jail.

Since the “real world” we live in generally produces more male criminals than females of the species, it's perhaps inevitable than most if not all fictional serial-heroes also have more males than females in their "rogues' galleries."

That said, it still seems odd that Batman, a serial hero whose adventures were published continuously since 1939, should endure for his first twenty-five years with only one significant female opponent in his mythos. Admittedly the Catwoman is probably the most famous lady lawbreaker to have been birthed from the comic-book medium.   Still, twenty-five years is a long time, and one might conjecture that Catwoman cast such a long shadow over the Bat-mythos that the raconteurs of that mythos could not even contemplate breaking the Feline Felon's monopoly.   Only in 1966 did writer Robert Kanigher introduce the first challenge to that monopoly: Poison Ivy, who would remain a major player in Batman’s cosmos, thanks in large part to the way Kanigher’s original story celebrated the felicities of feminine feloniousness.

“Beware,” aside from introducing Poison Ivy, also makes evident how little the costumed criminals of Batman’s world function like real-world criminals, and how much more they resemble the deities of Greek myth: eager to show off their divine attributes before astounded mortals, and quick to take offense at any perceived slight.  In keeping with this attitude, Kanigher may have borrowed, consciously or not, certain elements from the Greek myth of the Apple of Discord.   This myth explained the origins of the Trojan War as stemming from the mischief of Eris, Goddess of Discord.  She fomented strife amidst the female Olympians—Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite—by hurling into their midst a golden apple inscribed, “To the prettiest one,” which prize each of the goddesses claimed.   Zeus passed the decision on this “beauty contest” to Paris of Troy, and when each goddess in turn gave Paris a bribe, he chose the bribe proffered by Aphrodite, which was Helen, wife of Agamemnon, whose abduction led to the war against Troy—a fitting piece of mischief from the Goddess of Discord.

Kanigher’s tale is not quite this ambitious, but there are a number of similarities between the archaic and modern tales.   In the archaic tale, all the strife of the Trojan War takes place due to the squabbling of goddesses, while all of the conflict in the Bat-tale proceeds out of Poison Ivy's schemes against her female rivals.   Ivy’s plan is on one level more audacious than that of Eris, for while Eris merely wants general strife, Ivy wishes to totally unseat the ruling “goddesses” of Gotham’s crime-world.

Discounting a “teaser” panel that depicts an event from a later part of the tale, the first panel of "Beware" literally frames the story's three goddesses for the delectation of all onlookers, both inside and outside the story. The tale begins in a Gotham museum, which has on display huge pictures of three at-large villainesses: Dragon Fly, Silken Spider, and Tiger Moth. These pictures are closer to being a combination of wanted posters and girly-art, though Kanigher explains them in terms of contemporaneous art-movements by calling the display a “pop art show.”   Since in 1966 even Catwoman had not appeared in a Batman comic for over ten years, this sudden profusion of felonious femininity—consisting of three bad girls who had never appeared in comics before—seems  grounded in the desire to put some lustiness back into Batman’s somewhat chaste mythos.    Both Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson show their appreciation for these gigantic images of femininity, and Wayne even tells Grayson, “Stop drooling!  You’re too young!” For his part, Grayson imagines being someday old enough to “catch” the illegal ladies.

Poison Ivy then appears, and observes that though the three insect-named villains may be judged as numbers 1, 2, and 3 on the scale of “World Public Enemies,” only Ivy is really no. 1. She's not only better looking, she argues, but she's managed to commit crimes without having them detected.   Having made this statement, she bows out, frustrating attempts by both Bruce Wayne and his alter ego to “catch” her. In truth, Ivy's the one who plans to catch both Wayne and Batman.

Ivy projects the aura of a pagan goddess in her utter confidence in her attractiveness, and Kanigher frequently uses metaphors about the infectiousness of real poison ivy to describe the way her beauty dazzles Batman.   The other three crime-queens are never given as much personality, yet because all three share the same insect-motif, one may wonder if Kanigher meant them to suggest the rapacity of certain females of the insect/arachnid kingdoms that consume their male counterparts.   Strangely, Kanigher never makes any comparisons to the natural world’s frequent antipathies between insects and plants, though if he had, one assumes he would’ve been drawn to yet another plant with feminine symbolism: Ivy-as-Venus-flytrap.

At any rate, now that Batman is smitten, it’s Robin who must play the part of Jiminy Cricket-- and sort of a roundabout daddy-figure-- by trying to keep Batman’s mind off the verdant vixen.  Strangely, though the story starts out with Robin showing off his adolescent lusts, he's immune to Ivy's charms.

Ivy then sends out certain “poison pen” letters, which cause the three insect-girls to meet and fight it out, for the honor of being the prettiest crime-queen.  Oddly enough, her messages to Batman and Wayne are without guile, but this is her own feminine ego at work: she assumes that as both have seen her, both will want her.   Thus the second and final act of the tale turns upon her double play: to overcome the rival females and co-opt the most powerful male.

Of the two actions, Ivy’s device to usurp her rivals is the most telling: again pursuing the “beauty contest” comparisons, Ivy presents the three female felons with a “priceless crown.”  As with Eris’ golden apple, the three females all try to possess the prize, but with more harmful results, since Ivy rigs the crown to shock them all into unconsciousness.   

Ivy then takes possession of her second objective, as she beguiles Batman into kissing her, over the futile protests of Jiminy Robin.  It should be noted that although Ivy does use drugged lipstick on the senior hero, the drug doesn't have anything to do with him allowing her access to his lips in the first place.

Ivy then attempts a rather unlikely form of escape—“climbing straight up that wall, like she was Ivy,” Robin exclaims. She confidently proclaims that Batman won’t stop her-- her kiss essentially having “unmanned” him. But since it's Batman’s book, he recovers his huevos and brings her to justice.

In conclusion, I should note that despite the plant-motif of her costume, the original Poison Ivy has nothing to do with using exotic plants: the Ivy that uses plant-weapons is a later revision, followed by the current version that's a plant-human hybrid.   Kanigher’s Ivy uses weapons modeled on aspects of femininity. In the next (and last) Batman story Kanigher wrote with her, Ivy uses weapons like a hypnotic face-mirror and explosive “hairs” concealed in her own hair.   Kanigher clearly meant her to be the epitome of feminine evil.   And though Catwoman still outshines her in many departments, at least Kanigher might be pleased that she remains an unrepentant villain for most of her career.

COMBAT PLAY

I've often remarked that ideological critics are a superstitious, humorless lot, in that they're obsessed with performing "purity tests" for artists-- not just for those that advance reactionary political schemes, like Margaret Mitchell, but even for creators who show liberal tendencies, like Joss Whedon and Quentin Tarantino, but aren't quite militant enough for the ultraliberals' tastes. Yet I use the word "militant" advisedly, because most ideological critics are particularly superstitious about any expression of force or violence, as I examined in detail in Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3 of A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE.

In that essay-series I mentioned how a pacifist political figure of the 19th century, Adin Ballou, coined the phrase "Might makes right." Throughout the following century, most ideological critics have shared Ballou's implicit opposition to this state of human affairs. Throughout the 20th century all types of heroes-- not even just the boulder-shouldered supermen, but also the purely ratiocinative detectives-- have been accused of promulgating "lynch law" in the name of some murky governmental organization.  This mood of continual ressentiment leads, ironically enough, to its own form of "lynch law," in which the ideologues can condemn anybody for anything, without providing any sort of internally consistent proof. I cited various non-HU examples in Part 1 and Part 2 of VICTIMOLOGY 101.

That said, I'm not utterly opposed to reading fictional narratives in terms of what moral lessons they *may* directly convey to audiences, but all such readings require (1) a basic understanding that fiction is not a form of direct moral address in the same way that non-fiction is, and (2) the courage to to build a solid case against a narrative's alleged immorality, rather than simply depending on simplistic, knee-jerk associations. Most ideological critics are not willing to go to this much effort, though many of them will pay lip service to preferring logical examination of issues over "the rule of force."

I've often theorized that the emotional pay-off from the ideological outlook is that it makes the ideologue feel as if he's made a difference by talking about the "tough issues" of racism, sexism, and so on. Ideologues ranging from Nathanael West to Rod Serling have chosen to view heroic fantasies as being "negative compensation" at best, and "bread and circuses" at worst. But if we go with Alfred Adler's own definition of the term he invented, then "negative compensation" only takes place when the person fails to show "courage" in adapting to a negative situation. One will never get an ideologue devoted to the ideal of social realism to view any form of heroic-or-violent fantasy as "positive compensation." But when the ideologues cite simplistic, knee-jerk ideas in lieu of solid evidence, they themselves are guilty of a failure of courage, and so fall within the vale of "negative compensation" by the terms of their own ideology.

Now, I've put forth a high-flown, Hegelian defense of "the combative mode," despite my knowledge that few if any popular critics will be able to grapple with the issues this defense raises. Yet the defense is not, in itself, my own "emotional pay-off." For me to have typed so many words fine-tuning all ideas relating to "the combat myth," it obviously carries some personal association, which I'll deal with more fully in Part 2. Clearly no form of "the combat myth" means anything to the ideologues, either because the myth never meant anything to them, or because they felt its impact as children but have come to associate it entirely with childhood. By the standard of *intersubjectivity* as I've outlined it here, the ideologues are not wrong, in terms of taste, not to like something that I like. They are only wrong in terms of promulgating bad logic to lift up whatever they like at the expense of what I like.

There's a key irony here. I'm fully aware that one of the very things I like about the "combat myth" is that it doesn't resemble the way real life arranges its various conflicts-- say, with courts and governments and insurance companies. That's one of my main reasons for liking it, whether one cares to believe that's "negative compensation" or not. In contrast, the ideologues want fictional narrative to conform perfectly not to reality as it is lived, but to one that clearly marks out who are the good people and the bad people-- yet not in any escapist terms, but in terms that are supposedly responsive to "reality."

More later.

FRYE UNDER FIRE

I have strayed into the fields of the Hubristic Underminers once more, but in this essay at least, I'll confine myself to reflecting on some of the blog's recent comments on my favorite critic, Northrop Frye.

Actually, I was a little surprised to see any mentions of Frye on HU at all. I had seen one of their contributors dismiss Frye as "old-fashioned"-- albeit on a forum, not on HU itself. Thus I thought it unlikely that any of HU's pundits would display an interest in the late Canadian myth-critic-- if only because his synoptic orientation, relating to seeing all literature as part of a vast pattern, would mean little in terms of HU's vaunted ideological aims.

Frye did get mentioned, albeit in passing, in Chris Gavaler's THE PHYSICS OF FICTION. After I read this essay, I googled Frye's name alongside that of HU, and saw a handful of essays that cited Frye, though none did so in a more substantive manner than Gavaler's piece. While I'm still surprised that the HU crew is even aware of Frye, the paucity of substantive writing suggests that he's merely a name to conjure with for these essayists, not someone that they trouble to research with the same intensity that they pursue the tortuous tautologies of Marx and Freud.

Gavaler's primary reference to Frye appears only because Frye is quoted by a critic with whom Gavaler disagrees:

Rothman resurrects Northrop Frye to fill the vacuum left by the collapsing genre system, but the Frye model’s four-part structure (novel, romance, anatomy, confession) is more likely to spread chaos (“novel” is a kind of novel?). 

Now, I myself expressed some ambivalence about Rothman's citation, to wit:

As for Rothman, I see where he’s going with the invocation of Frye, but the four forms Rothman cites are not especially relevant to current literature. However, in the ANATOMY Frye also elucidated four *mythoi”– which he termed the romance, the comedy, the tragedy, and the irony– that are far more applicable.

For instance, some critics might say that WATCHMEN is good because it skewers the traditions of the adventure-oriented superhero narrative, which in Fryean terms would be “romance.” But that view is simplistic. WATCHMEN is a good work within its own mythos, that of the “irony,” whose nature is to satirize and downgrade all forms of human experience, not just types of disreputable pop-fiction. If adventure-oriented superheroes are good, they are either good or bad according to the romantic parameters they follow– but not because they don’t have enough satirical shit in them.

So I can give Gavaler a pass regarding his ambivalence on the "novel category" thing, since I myself don't think it's currently useful. However, later Gavaler once again assails Frye on his supposed lack of consistency:

Literary fiction is another problematic term. It traditionally denotes narrative realism, fiction that appears to take place here on Earth, but it’s also been used as shorthand for works of artistic worth. With the second half of the definition provisionally struck, we’re left with realism. Its solar center is mimesis, the mirror that works of literature are held against to test their ability to reflect our world. Northrop Frye declared mimesis one of the two defining poles of literature, though he had trouble naming its opposite. Frye located romance—a category that includes romance as well as all other popular genres (and so another conceptual strike against the Frye model)—in the idealized world, so Harlequin romances are part fantasy too (real guys just aren’t that gorgeous and wonderful). 

In my own adaptation of Frye, I foreswore his term "romance" in favor of "adventure," in part because currently the word "romance" does have this modern connotation. However, I pointed out that Gavaler had falsified Frye's supposed "trouble" in naming the literary mode opposed to verisimilitude. I commented:

[The center’s] more like a binary star, and the people facing the other “sun” are the ones who like Borges more than Trollope.

I don’t think Frye had any difficulty naming the opposite of mimetic realism. In the ANATOMY he contrasts “versimilitude”– which is the reigning principle of the mimetic– with “myth.” And I quote:

“Our survey of fictional modes has also shown us that the mimetic tendency itself, the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle’s word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth. That is, it is a tendency to tell a story which is in origin a story about characters who can do anything, and only gradually becomes attracted toward a tendency to tell a plausible or credible story.”

There have been defenders of “literary myth” in the humanities long before Frye, such as Andrew Lang. Their voices just weren’t as loud– hence, Gavaler’s description of modern criticism as being totally oriented upon verisimilitude/ mimeticism.

Interested parties may check out Gavaler's response for themselves, but I found it superficial at best. I suggest that Gavaler dismissed Frye's image of a spectrum with two opposed modes because he's thoroughly in love with his "mimetic solar center" image, and Frye's continuum simply doesn't allow for such centrality.

Gavaler's confidence in the centrality of "the mimetic" extends to describing a experiment that supposedly demonstrates the pre-eminence of the mimetic mode. I won't spend any time describing it-- again, interested parties can check it out for themselves-- but I view it as a stunningly useless pseudo-experiment, one which doesn't even begin to answer my implied question, "If mimeticism is so on top of it all, how did Jose Luis Borges become a Literary Light?"

No big changes here, so no surprise that everything at HU stays the same.