NEEDFUL SPECIALTIES

Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.

Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

SYNDROME: And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super...*no one* will be.

I have no reason to disbelieve Brad Bird, in interviews like this one, when he says that his 2004 INCREDIBLES wasn't informed by any readings of weighty philosophers like Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. It's much more likely that he was primarily seeking to invest his big-budget superhero cartoon with as much drama and comedy as he could, the better to impress the "big kids" in the audience. His principal strategy was to take the superhero concept at face value and figure out what made the concept popular, as opposed to reading it as a fascist construction or the like.

As far as THE INCREDIBLES is concerned, the core concept is that of a hero with special abilities or talents rescuing ordinary people from assorted menaces. This was how almost all superheroes and their related congeners were treated in the pulps and comics of the early 20th century. However, in the 1960s Marvel Comic Books spearheaded a new paradigm. Now superheroes still strove to rescue ordinary human beings from danger, but the people didn't always reward their saviors properly, responding instead with pettiness, greed, and superstitious fear.

To my knowledge Brad Bird has never admitted his film's borrowings from Marvel's FANTASTIC FOUR. Though this indebtedness is very likely, it's less important to me than his translation of the Marvel paradigm into a standalone cartoon form. Bird may or may not be familiar with the earliest Lee-Kirby-Ditko breakthroughs, in which petty human responses to superheroes were used largely for comic relief. Yet later comics-writers expanded on these tropes to show the full span of human intolerance, which often led to situations in which superheroes were banned from active service to humankind.

Real superhero comics started out with heroes receiving nearly unconditional accolades for their deeds in the 1940s, and began dealing with more ambivalent responses from the 1960s on. Bird's scenario begins with a time of acceptance, wherein superheroes endlessly contend with super-villains and other threats and win public gratitude, but this period only occupies the first fifteen minutes of the movie's running time.

The period of rejection begins with the film's viewpoint character, Mister Incredible, who becomes the focal point of his world's paradigm shift. In the space of one evening-- when he's scheduled to marry the costumed heroine Elastigirl-- Incredible tries to get in a few more good deeds. The first indication of trouble-to-come is his meeting the obnoxious "Incrediboy," who presumptuously demands that the superhero adopt Incrediboy as his sidekick-- a demand Incredible instantly rejects. The same night, Incredible rescues an attempted suicide. This fortuitously leads him to encounter a crime-in-progress by super-villain Bomb Voyage. But Incrediboy, not one to take "no" for an answer, intrudes, arguing that his special rocket-boots make him fit to join Incredible's crusade, A complicated set of circumstances results in one of the villain's bombs destroying an elevated train-track, though Incredible manages to save the passengers. However, both the attempted suicide and the passengers then sue Incredible for injury-claims. (All are seen wearing neck-collars, which in pop-culture has become code for "phony injury.') These suits lead to the widespread banning of superheroes, who are forced to hang up their capes and live the same ordinary lives as everyone else.

The first quote at this essay's opening is from Dash, youngest child of Incredible and Elastigirl, fretting that he's been forced to conform to an unfair standard of ordinariness. He's what I'll call "the positive face of exceptionalism," which applies to a person who possesses exceptional qualities and seeks to use them well-- be it simply for self-fulfillment, as Dash initially desires, or for the protection of people without such qualities, which is the main orientation of Mister Incredible.

But what does it mean when Syndrome-- the embittered Incrediboy turned super-villain-- expresses the same sentiment? Syndrome, though he's aged fifteen years by the time Mister Incredible encounters him again, is more like a child than Dash ever is: a being of pure ego who has no empathy for victims and merely wants to be lionized. Syndrome plays an indirect role in bringing about the circumstances that exile Mister Incredible from the game of superheroes, but this isn't enough. His ego is so deeply bruised by the rejection that he must eradicate all of the retired superheroes from existence, humiliate and kill Incredible, and eventually become the world's premiere superhero by an act of phony heroism. Thus he's clearly the negative face of exceptionalism, desiring to be seen as the pinnacle of creation. Yet, once he's satisfied himself with duplicating Mister Incredible's popularity with ordinary people, he then plans to put an end to the raison d'etre of superheroes by giving artificial super-powers to everyone.

Since Syndrome is defeated without realizing any of his goals, Bird's story doesn't have to deal with what might or might not happen if the villain succeeded. But the question remains: why would it have been bad, to have a world in which everyone had artificial super-powers?

The answer may lie in the philosophical ruminations of Nietzsche, even if Bird never read him. Nietzsche's ideal of his Ubermensch is not covalent with any version of the superhero, with one exception. the motivation of magnanimity. The Nietzschean "superman" is magnanimous because he has so much more "spirit" than common people. Superheroes generally don't show as much contempt for the rabble as Nietzsche did, but there's still a sense that superheroes are frequently magnanimous for similar reasons. But even here, there's a crucial difference. Mister Incredible enjoys getting praise and plaudits for his super-deeds, but his deeds primarily spring from empathy: from the realization that ordinary people need his help. Syndrome has no motivation beyond lionization, and so it's easy for him to restructure the world so that it reflects his own mediocrity. Once everyone has access to artificially-enhanced superpowers, will anyone feel any need to feel empathy for those weaker than themselves?

Lastly, the opposition of "natural powers" and "artificial powers" begs some consideration. The only real superheroes the viewer sees are the four Incredibles and their family friend, Frozone; any others get only brief references. These five seem gifted with "natural" powers, though, because Bird provides no origin-stories, there's no knowing if they were all born with their powers like Dash and Violet. When Incrediboy makes his second audition to be Incredible's sidekick, he claims that not all superheroes have super-powers, meaning that there may be analogues to Batman and the Green Hornet in Bird's world. But this sort of niggling would have distracted from Bird's main theme: the opposition between that which is ordinary and that which is "super" or "special." Syndrome, with his plethora of weapons, is first and foremost an evocation of classic super-villains like Luthor, able to unleash a never-ending series of challenges to a hero or group of heroes. (It's also worth mentioning that a fellow named Xereb, rather than Syndrome, was originally going to be the movie's main villain, until the character of Buddy/Incrediboy impressed people enough to rework him into Principal Villain.) There's no suggestion that artificial enhancements are wrong when used for good purposes: the whole idea of Edna, costume-maker to the superheroes, depends on her being able to pursue her own ideals of excellence with the use of technological items like expanding fabric and invisibility cloth.

DEATHBIRD DESCENDS

On the passing of Harlan Ellison this week, I wrote:

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I never met Ellison, though I saw him when he spoke at a local convention, maybe in the 1980s. He worked the crowd really well, saying that everyone in our city was "bug***k*, which got great applause, though I'm sure he said the same damn thing anywhere else he spoke. He read his story "All the Lies That Were My Life," which I didn't care for, but his reading was riveting. I saw him a couple more times at San Diego Comicon, usually teamed with Peter David, with whom he had worked out a cute routine of pretend animosity.

DAVID: "I'm just being puckish."

ELLISON: "Well, puck you."

His sixties classic tales made a big impression on me, particularly "Deathbird" and "Repent, Harlequin." I was still writing occasional reviews for COMICS JOURNAL when he and Gary Groth were sued by Michael Fleischer because of remarks Ellison had made about Fleischer in a JOURNAL interview. Personally, I think Fleischer was less offended by what Ellison had said than by the fact that a JOURNAL reviewer had just torpedoed Fleischer's prose book CHASING HAIRY around the same time. I felt like I had a ringside seat as Groth and Ellison became deadly enemies after Fleischer's suit was dismissed. The feud was incredibly convoluted, involving other players like Peter David and Charles Platt, and the magazine GAUNTLET devoted a long, well-researched essay to the mutual bad behavior of both parties, though all that took place before Ellison sued Groth to block the publication of a book touching on their involvement.

I disagreed with a lot of what both Groth and Ellison wrote, though I sympathize with Ellison's love of popular fiction. He was also an unapologetic "comic book guy" at a time when his compeers in fantastic fiction would not dream of being associated with that tawdry medium. 

I'm tempted to sum up his career with the words, "Not always deep, but never dull."

MYTHCOMICS: "SISTER SYNDROME" (LOVE HINA BOOK 12, 2001)

I've already written a long summation of the LOVE HINA manga here, and so will write this essay as if the reader has already acquainted himself with the basics.

More often than not, manga-serials are written with a definite conclusion in the author's mind. This doesn't mean that every story that has a well-conceived ending necessarily has "unity of action." Still. I did regard the completed story of HELLSING to comprise one big myth, and though DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND is still a "work in progress," I judged that the most recent addition to its storyline suggests the high amplitude of a mythcomic.

LOVE HINA ends with the culmination of the romance between young lovers Keitaro and Naru. However, the stories leading up to that culmination are much more episodic in nature than, say, those of HELLSING, or even another comedy-romance like BECAUSE I'M THE GODDESS. Author Ken Akamatsu breaks up the forward progress of his main plot with countless wacky escapades, sometimes for the purpose of expanding on character-traits, and sometimes just for fun. Thus LOVE HINA as a whole does not meet the mythcomics test. However, I've analyzed one particular episode, SECRET OF THE MYSTERIOUS GIRL, as a story that shows high mythicity. The same principle applies to one of Akamatsu's more cohesive arcs, which I've titled "Sister Syndrome" after one of the story-titles used in the Tokyopop English translation.

If the underthought of LOVE HINA could be boiled down to a binary statement, it might read something like, "The lover who is not the guy's sister triumphs over those who are almost-sisters." Of all the women in Keitaro Urashima's "harem," Naru has the least resemblance to a sibling, and so from one point of view, she would seem to be the best possible mate for Keitaro. "Sister Syndrome," however, deals with one of the greatest threats to Naru's romantic hegemony-- Kanako, who has formed a passion for her adoptive brother Keitaro. She appears in the previous arc, showing up at Hinata House at a time when Keitaro is away studying archaeology, and she uses the Urashima name to take control of the dormitory and force everyone to obey her whims. Even before Keitaro returns, Kanako regards Naru as her primary rival, while for her part, Naru;s insecurities are brought out by the prospect of meeting a female with a more profound connection to Keitaro-- that of family-- than she Naru has.

Volume 12 begins with Keitaro returning to the dormitory. At this time he has confessed his romantic devotion to Naru, but she has not made a full reciprocation, due to her ongoing insecurities. When he first sees Kanako, he doesn't recognize her as his adoptive sister, since he hasn't seen her in years.

For her part Kanako mirrors some of Natu's own insecurities, reflected by her penchant for assuming complicated disguises. Uncertain of making open advances on Keitaro, she masquerades as Naru in order to get close to him and to find out what Keitaro thinks of his sister.

Keitaro has no conscious desire for Kanako, but her constant attentions start to wear him down somewhat. Strangely, even though Naru is rather repulsed by the idea of even adoptive siblings becoming intimate, she sympathizes with her rival, telling Kanako "I know you're siblings, but sometimes you just have to come right and say what's on your mind." This, as much as Kanako's masquerades, suggests a mirroring-effect between the two characters.

Keitaro starts having dreams about marrying his sister, but as if to prove his fidelity to Naru, he renews his attempts to court her. He invites her to the "Hinata Annex," an isolated building on the same grounds as the dorm. The Annex,, which in earlier days served as an inn, has acquired the aura of legend, in that any romantic couple would become bonded if they spent the night there. However, Kanako gets there first, and in the darkness Keitaro more or less pledges his troth to her, following the myth-trope of "the statement that can't be taken back."

Then weird things start happening to Naru, as if the legendary magic of the Annex is trying to keep Kanako and Keitaro together. Keitaro fights for his true love by trying to give Naru an engagement ring, but through the usual crazy antics, it lands up on Kanako's finger.

Naru responds to this setback by fleeing Hinata House and all of her friends. This allows Akamatsu to unleash yet more goofy antics as Keitaro and his harem give chase. This leads to an outright battle between Naru and Kanako, which Kanako, a real martial artist, wins easily. Note that the engagement ring seems to take on the aspect of a Tolkienian "ring of power."

However, Keitaro's conscientious rejection of his sister's erotic feelings finally has a reverse-effect on Kanako. She seeks out Naru and badgers her to declare her true feelings to Keitaro.

Still, to give Naru more time to sort out her feelings, Kanako uses her disguise-talents to make herself look like Naru, while Naru takes the appearance of Kanako. A more obvious example of the mirroring-trope would be hard to imagine.

Finally, Kanako surrenders to Keitaro's unconquerable passion for Naru, though she hedges her bets by telling him that she's not totally giving up on him.

And then there's a big climax in which Naru and Keitaro finally get it on-- though their differences keep driving the romance for two more volumes-- and even the women who wanted them to get together become inflamed with jealousy and try to kill them both.

In conclusion, I'll note that my assignment of the phenomenality as "marvelous" is dependent mostly on elements that are nominal in the story, like Kaolla Su's super-science toys and a species of flying turtle.

TRUMP: BORDERING ON GENIUS OR INSANITY?

A CBR post on President Trump's recent signing of the executive order to "keep families together."

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Here's another thing: failing any new revelations, I don't think the GOP obstructed Obama on the matter of immigration. This even-handed essay on his status as "deporter-in-chief" makes it sound like he pretty much did what he wanted on that score. There may well be laws he wanted to pass and couldn't, but my memory is that the GOP was far more concerned with unseating Affordable Care.

Regardless of Obama's legacy, the main point of my cynical post is that people forget a lot of dicey political matters if those matters aren't constantly shoved in their face by the media. I'm saying that now that Trump has signed the executive order, he's put the ball in the court of Congress, and it should go without saying that both sides will be wrangling over their respective agendas. Neither side will be primarily motivated by the suffering of young children, in my opinion. I mention Obama's legacy in part not to claim "both sides are the same," but that there were irregularities during his administration that were simply ignored by the media. I don't endorse Trump's concept of "fake news," but I think it's smart to remain aware of how the media often makes the news to serve an agenda. I used to think FOX News was egregious about its agenda, but Trump's regime has brought out some of the worst in CNN and MSNBC.

I don't know what Trump had in mind in increasing the criminal prosecution of illegals, and neither does anyone else here. I think it's possible that he showboated in order to impress his base, but that seems improbable, since even an egotist like Trump *must* have guessed how extreme the blowback would be. He went through a campaign in which the opposition tried to shame him with the "P**** video," so he knows that the primary anti-Trump weapon in the Left's arsenal is always going to be shame. I entertain the possibility that he knew how the Left would react when he upped the criminalization process, which then increased the already ongoing legal process of separation to the point that it became much more visible, so that not even modern journalists could miss it. Did Trump orchestrate this whole thing in order to get his Border Wall? That might be giving him too much credit, just as the other scenario may give him too little. The truth may be somewhere in between, though it's certainly not anything you're going to see on 24-hour news.

MYTHCOMICS: "THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME" (NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL EDITION/X-MEN ANNUAL #9, 1985)

The original run of Silver Age X-MEN stuck close to the concept of "mutants" as articulated in prose SF: that mutants represented a step forward in evolution, implicitly governed by random materialistic factors. Chris Claremont's tenure on "the New X-Men" since 1975 opened up new terrain in the realm of metaphysical considerations. GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS subjects the heroes to a religions controversy in which a fanatic views all mutants as unclean tools of the devil. Claremont also displayed a taste for wreaking transformations on his protagonists, akin to sending them through funhouse mirrors. The best-known transformation is that of Jean Grey, who in the Silver Age was the humbly-powered Marvel Girl, and who under Claremont's handling changed into the goddess-like Phoenix. The heroine followed a trope common to both Faustian deal-makers and science-fictional overreachers, in which the characters succumb to the allure of unlimited power and liberty, which inevitably leads to some tragic downfall. Still, unlike Faust, Phoenix had no devil whispering in her ear.

Long after the climax of the Phoenix saga, this 1985 tale from Claremont and artist Art Adams goes full-bore Faustian, using one of Silver Age Marvel's favorite villains in the role of Mephistopheles (no relation to that other Silver Age Marvel villain).

The plot of "There's No Place Like Home" is as straightforward as the title's evocation of the theme from the 1939 "Wizard of Oz." The trickster-god Loki, having suffered an earlier defeat by the X-Men, strikes not at the first generation of superhero-mutants but at the next in line: the New Mutants. By chance all the New Mutants-- and their no-longer teen-aged teacher Storm-- are all feeling the blues about their travails in the world. Storm regrets the long-term loss of her weather-witch powers (eventually restored, of course), Sunspot hates the fact that mutant-hating mankind won't esteem him as a hero, and so on. And so, just as Doiothy Gale escapes mundane Kansas for the fantasy-land of Oz, Storm and the New Mutants get lured to the gleaming realm of Asgard. One New Mutant member, Magma, explicitly compares Asgard to the faerie-realms known to her Neo-Roman culture, though what Claremont probably has in mind is the Celtic version of faerie, in which everything is a deception. This is probably the first, if not the only, time that Marvel's realm of brawling Viking-gods has ever been cast in the role of a Celtic faerie-land-- while in turn, Loki, for his part, is explicitly called not just a trickster, as he is in the Nordic myths, but "the Lord of Lies," a name usually ascribed to the Judeo-Christian Satan.

This story, incidentally, roughly lines up with contemporaneous developments in the THOR comic, courtesy of Walt Simonson. Odin has died one of his many deaths, and Thor is absent, which apparently gives Loki the idea to dethrone his half-brother from his role as God of Thunder, by remolding Storm as a new thunder-mistress.

Soon after showing up in Asgard, many of the young heroes learn that the grass isn't greener on the far side. Sunspot is one of the few youths who enjoys the Viking life. But Magma, who has a thing for "the faery-folk," undergoes an unwanted transformation into a Nordic elf, Mirage somehow becomes a Valkyrie allied to the forces of Death, and of course Storm's recovery of her powers threatens to place her under Loki's control.

Fortunately the older generation of mutants, the X-Men, invade Asgard looking for the younger heroes This combination of two ensembles from two mutant-hero features means that no single character, not even cover-featured Storm, gets a lot of attention. All that's possible is that Claremont gives each of the seventeen protagonists at least one defining "character moment." That said, like "The Wizard of Oz," "Home" is coherent enough in showing how the very vivacity of youth opens young people to be seduced, both by feelings of marginalization and the desire to feel more important. Page eight has a cute moment wherein Storm and the New Mutants all voice their secret dreams, like so many Disneyesque Little Mermaids. The X-Men succeed in rescuing their young charges, and in one scene, Wolverine, the oldest hero on deck, chastises Sunspot for his boyish desire for accolades, as against fulfilling the duties of a full-grown man.

Not surprisingly, Sunspot gets on board with the program, while Storm finally rebels against Loki's control and relinquishes the facsimile Mjolnir. Everyone goes home and Loki remains in Asgard, determined to keep scheming.

Naturally, Claremont's story has its share of toss-off dramatics, like a subplot in which Wolverine is apparently going to die, and does not...

...but Art Adams contributes such a fine-lined rendering of the glories of Asgard, no less vital than those of Kirby and Simonson, that even the weaker aspects of the story have a mythic grandeur.

ADDENDUM: At the time I reviewed this, I didn't have a copy of the story's first part, "Home is Where the Heart Is" in NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL EDITION, in which the same collaborators, Claremont and Adams, detail how the New Mutants were beguiled into visiting Asgard. "Heart" shares the same mythic discourse as "Home" and so I include the two parts under the same rubric, even though I didn't analyze "Heart" in detail.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 3

In Part 2, I enlisted Jung's idea about function-sovereignty to champion Aristotle's preference for "unity of action" over Levi-Strauss's structuralist, "nothing-is-more-important-than-anything-else" approach to analyzing the themes of archaic myth. Yet the Jungian concept that most resembles Levi-Strauss's formulation of binary oppositions is that of enantiodromia. From PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES:

I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.

Naturally, since I'm concerned with the themes of literary works rather than myths as such, I'm not concerned with Jung's idea about an unconscious "counterposition" arising in reaction to a "one-sided tendency" that "dominates conscious life." The writer of fiction may be drawing on both conscious and unconscious factors in his own mind, but the work he presents to the reader depends on a conflict between at least two opposed principles, usually personified into characters. Levi-Strauss implied such a conflict in his binary oppositions, though he does not seem nearly as interested in Aristotle's idea of the *agon,* the idea that conflict is fundamental to "poetry." If anything, Levi-Strauss's approach to the way a myth-tale approaches opposed forces resembles Tzvetan Todorov's model for an aesthetics that "just happens,' based not in conflict but in changing equilibriums.

…we must inquire into the very nature of narrative. Let us begin by constructing an image of the minimum narrative, not the kind we usually find in contemporary texts, but that nucleus without which we cannot say there is any narrative at all. The image will be as follows: All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.

I suppose Todorov may have de-emphasized the radical of conflict because he was aware of literary works that appeared to dispense with overt conflict. However, in my analysis of the Ray Bradbury story "The Last Night of the World," I found that even in a story with no apparent intrinsic conflict, there existed a conflict between what the story portrayed and the audience's expectations:

In the minds of some if not all readers of the story, there will be the expectation that if humanity were faced with an "end of days," it would be an occasion of great tumult, of "raging against the dying of the light."  What Bradbury's story offers is, in keeping with the literary audience to which it is directed, is a triumph of the "will to nothingness" against all the audience's expectations.

In Part 2, I gave my "binary opposition" to describe the potential underthought in a Jack Kirby story: "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story was equally weak in terms of having a discursive overthought, which came down to nothing more than "good must triumph over evil." So what would a strong underthought on the same theme look like?

The Golden Age Origin of Hawkman might be seen as following roughly the same paltry "good vs. evil" overthought, though its development of its underthought is one of the strongest in the comics medium.

In Fox's Hawkman story, as in Kirby's Challengers story, the heroes are tough guys who prove skillful with weapons, while their respective enemies more or less align with the archetype of the evil sorcerer. So the opposition here would be not unlike that of "sword versus sorcery."

To move on to a different underthought which keeps to the same good-vs.-evil overthought, I'll cite Kanigher's 1947 "The Injustice Society of the World." In this story the underthought is more like "law vs. crime," perhaps best represented by the scene where the villains put the heroes on trial for their deeds against crime. This underthought is not nearly as well developed as Fox's Hawkman story. However, the Kanigher story is one of many that I've considered as mythcomics simply because the stories had one "binary opposition" devoted to giving readers a discourse regarding the opposed elements.

Similarly, I have at times given the mythcomics designation to works in which the overthought and underthought are both strong, though not necessarily forming a unity.

The 1982 graphic novel "God Loves, Man Kills" does provide such unity, though. This time the overthought isn't just a vague opposition of good and evil, but that of "religious doctrine versus biological reality." Various earlier X-Men stories had opposed the biological reality of mutantkind to human beliefs regarding normality. However, those earlier stories didn't reference the more controversial topic of religion, as Chris Claremont's story does.

Cyclops's speech depicts the positive opposition of the overthought, using logic to assert that mutants are part of humankind. In contrast, Reverend Stryker fulfills the negative function, anathematizing the abnormal and stressing the need for purification.

Since both of these philosophical postures relate to the history of ideas, they belong to the story's overthought. The underthought, however, is concerned more with the opposition of images and the numinous associations they carry. Elsewhere in the story, the sometime villain Magneto makes what I've termed the "separatist argument," that humans and mutants should be separated from one another. But his appearance in this panel gives Magneto a less rational appearance, making of him a sympathetic "devil"-- born up by magnetic waves rather than wings-- who storms the church-like meeting-hall of the obsessed preacher.

"God Loves" is not as rich in images and symbols as other stories, particularly the Hawkman-origin. Clearly Claremont's story functions primarily as a dramatic exploration of ideas, while the symbols are less important. However, "God Loves" is one of the better stories in which overthought and underthought form a significant unity.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 2

A careful analysis of the text of this myth, which in one version alone takes up thirteen pages of Dorsey's work, discloses that it is built on a long series of oppositions: (1) initiated shaman versus non-initiated shaman, that is, the opposition between acquired power and innate power; (2) child versus old man, since the myth insists on the youth of one protagonist and the old age of the other; (3) confusion of sexes versus differentiation of sexes; all of Pawnee metaphysical thought is actually based on the idea that at the time of the creation of the world antagonistic elements were intermingled and that the first work of the gods consisted in sorting them out. […] (7) magic which proceeds by introduction versus magic which proceeds by extraction.-- Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthology

In STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 1, I drew certain comparisons between Aristotle's concept of the unity of action with Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage. Levi-Strauss is far better known, though, for his concept of binary oppositions,  a few of which he cites in the quote above. Many of Levi-Strauss's analyses are much like the one above, citing an assortment of binary oppositions between abstract representations, such as "confusion of sexes versus differentiation of sexes." This would seem, on the face of things, to contradict Aristotle's dictum, which I last cited in THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS in February 2016.

The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. . . . The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

For the purpose of literary criticism, however, I think that these two insights can prove complementary, and once more I turn to the mediating influence of Jung, whose views of "sovereignty" I surveyed in JUNG AND CENTRICITY:

This “absolute sovereignty always belongs, empirically, to one function alone, and can belong only to one function, because the equally independent intervention of another function would necessarily produce a different orientation which, partially at least, would contradict the first. But since it is a vital condition for the conscious process of adaptation always to have clear and unambiguous aims, the presence of a second function of equal power is naturally ruled out. This other function, therefore, can have only a secondary importance.”

Jung, who devotes PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES to analyzing the many mental functions revealed by his depth psychology, ascribes "secondary importance" to any and all other functions as against the primary one, just as Aristotle says that the poet must confine his attention to "several incidents...so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole."

Of these three academics-- anthropologist, philosopher (and proto-literary critic), and psychologist-- the anthropologist is not especially interested in seeing a "unity of action" in his narratives (and here I'm considering Jung's analyses of the internal goings-on of his hypothetical patients as "narratives.") Levi-Strauss's orientation stems, I believe, from his having focused his studies primarily on the sort of often-fragmentary tales that he encountered in tribal peoples. This led him to view myths as fundamentally fragmentary, rather than being capable of forming "wholes" as Aristotle believes that stories should.

Anyone dealing with modern stories, of course, is not dealing with products of a tribal aesthetic. Such stories are usually informed by Aristotle's idea of *dianoia,* which I've loosely translated as "theme statement" elsewhere. In literature the "unity of action," the unity that arises from a given work's theme, does not preclude that other "imitations of action" that complement the main action. This concept of unity parallels Jung's concept of sovereignty, that a given personality-- or at least, Jung's abstraction of a personality-- will have other functions, but that a central function will be "in charge."

Now, often in my own myth-critical analyses of films and comic book stories, I've found that the most mythic works I've surveyed possess a strong underthought, one that often can be expressed as one of Levi-Strauss's binary oppositions.  In this essay, I summarized the potential (yet inadequately expressed) theme statement of a particular Jack Kirby-Dave Wood story:

Boiled down, the potential underthought-- for Kirby and Wood probably would never have become didactic enough to produce a complementary overthought-- might read something like, "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." 

Kirby's NEW GODS series, which I also touched on the same essay, received a fuller examination in this mythcomics essay, and there too I summarized the implied theme of the short-lived series:

...where NEW GODS excels is in Kirby’s take on a theme that Tolkien himself had evoked. In a world where mythic good and mythic evil have palpable existence, and where their battle is the proper working-out of their joint destiny, how does good keep from becoming corrupted by the power of evil?

There are patently other binary underthoughts expressed in Kirby's saga, notably that of "father vs. son," but I would regard all of these are, as Jung says, "of secondary importance." 

More in Part 3.