Sunday, May 3, 2015

This is the third part of the book framing comments, noted as Imaginary Heroes in the table of contents in the March posting. I may have been too harsh to call that other book attempt unpublishable, except that it had little original thought and was an application of Jungian archetype theory to science fiction and superheroes. I will review it and  consider parsing it up for this blog.

Saturday, May 2, 2015


            From 1981, we must jump to 1992 when I wrote a properly unpublished book titled Imaginary Heroes in the Age of Science: Archetypes in Popular Culture. There was one good idea in it worthy of publication, which was developed into this collection’s first paper, ‘Mythic Spacetime.’ Once the framework developed in 1992, it took five years of idle contemplation before that set theory insight resulted one night. I now reproduce the few paragraphs, from the 1992 book, which were my first thoughts on and coining of the term mythic spacetime.

            In standard myths, where does a hero commit violence? In the land of adventure, the fantastic other realm outside of normal society. This is part of the constructive social meaning of archetypal models, which modern society tries to erase in its rational models of law and order, but which persists as part of human nature: there is a proper place for violence. In ancient times, it was on the hunt. In modern comics, it’s on the hunt for criminals or super villains. The mythic land is the place where violence is the correct thing to do, and anywhere a superhero is on the job becomes a mythic land for the duration of the fight. This fits in with why most of reality seems to ignore superheroes in the comic book stories.
            It also fits with the history and prehistory of real humanity. The hunting mentality can be thought of as a kind of ‘mythic time’ when men access the archetypes of violence. Coming back to the hearth, they would engage in entertainment to tell of their deeds, thus recalling when they were using their instinctive skills, i.e. accessing archetypes. The original boon that they brought back was the game that they killed. Of course, the women had the superior skill of producing a boon out of childbirth. Either sex has its own version of bloody violence in the mythic space-time.
            The would-be censors of violence on TV probably give less thought to sports. This is the usual mode for people to access the mythic space-time, far more popular than the pop cultures I consider in this book. The socially acceptable channeling of aggression and violent urges into competitive sports is no doubt completely satisfying for the participants. For some spectators, it’s not completely satisfying, and they have to start fights or riot. For other spectators, it may be the equivalent of reading a comic book, with the added experience of getting to shout from the stands. Or in the TV room.

            The notion of a separate space for superheroes to slug it out nagged at me, with its resemblance to Mircea Eliade’s description of making a ritual space. One night in my caregiver years, sitting on a couch by my sleeping mother, looking at a TV screen, the notion to represent the characters as set elements occurred. The consequent idea came that elements were mapping between sets. The further explication of these ideas is presented in the first three papers, all published in the Journal of Literary Semantics, thanks to the instant approval of its founding editor Trevor Eaton.