WESTERN CULTURE, 2000 AD

by Guido Mina di Sospiro 

Prophets are the incarnation of a dilemma. Their message is quintessentially esoteric, yet they are driven to make it exoteric. As all dilemmas, this cannot be solved, and the usual outcome is the immolation or downfall of the prophet, unless exceptional circumstances temporarily suspend this predicament. Moreover, that there should be the initiate (the prophet) and the uninitiate (the disciples), has become a rather indigestible concept.

Indeed, traditional values such as the teacher-disciple relationship, training, patience, methodicalness, and constancy, have been lost in the sacred and profane spheres alike. For example, in the figurative arts, think for a moment of Jackson Pollock, who based his life’s work on trying to reproduce in paint the patterns made by his long-lost father urinating on stone. Such paintings, to which I used to refer, perhaps flatteringly, as “unappetising spaghetti”, are on display in many major museums the world over. Clearly, this is not the environment for Cimabue to say to his pupil Giotto, “You have surpassed your teacher.”

And yet, a “prophetic” forum such as this, one that rethinks one’s basic assumptions, feels the duty to promote and divulge esoteric ideas into the public domain. But, what is the state of  popular western culture in the year 2000?

Mythopoeia of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings

A Guardian article by Damien Walter lays out something I've long found both fascinating and troubling about Tolkien's mythology:

It’s a double-edged magical sword, being a fan of JRR Tolkien. On one hand we’ve had the joy of watching Lord of the Rings go from cult success to, arguably, the most successful and influential story of the last century. And we get to laugh in the face of critics who claimed LotR would never amount to anything, while watching a sumptuous (if absurdly long) adaption of The Hobbit.
On the other hand, you also have to consider the serious criticisms made of Tolkien’s writing, such as Michael Moorcock’s in his 1978 essay, Epic Pooh. As a storyteller Tolkien is on a par with Homer or the anonymous bard behind Beowulf, the epic poets who so influenced his work. But as works of modern mythology, the art Tolkien called “mythopoeia”, both Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are open to serious criticism.

As well as giving some sense of what we've long been laying bare here on this site:

To understand why takes a little consideration of what we really mean by the word “myth”. The world can be a bafflingly complex place. Why is the sky blue? What’s this rocky stuff I’m standing on? Who are all these hairless chimps I’m surrounded by? The only way we don’t just keep babbling endless questions like hyperactive six-year-olds is by reducing the infinite complexities of existence to something more simple. To a story. Stories that we call myths.
Science gives us far more accurate answers to our questions than ever before. But we’re still dependent on myths to actually comprehend the science. The multi-dimensional expansion of energy, space and time we call the Big Bang wasn’t literally a bang any more than God saying “Let there be light” was literally how the universe was created. They’re both mythic ideas that point at an actual truth our mammalian minds aren’t equipped to grasp.

As well put as this article is in some senses, there are a number of issues that need to be pointed out.

First, the idea that the political views of an author are necessarily reflected in a work, and if they are, they we must agree with them to appreciate the work, is clearly flawed.

This article seems to take the stance that the ideology put forth by a work of art must be the authors, or furthermore if it is, that the audience must agree with it – that you are somehow supporting the underlying ideology merely by reading it. Aren't we better off when exposed to ideologies that are not necessarily our own? Isn't this the troubling danger presented by our online "bubbles" feeding us only the content that support our existing ideology?

This is dangerous territory, if we take it a step further from ideology to act. Is the identity of an artist so wrapped up in the art itself that merely watching it conveys some acceptance of their acts unrelated to the piece?

Second, Walter's analysis of Tolkien's politics is also somewhat questionable. Even if we're to label him "conservative," conservatism of his time is different than it is today. Take an example in his own words,

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. ... Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo efiscopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes' hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don't seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals. The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as 'patriotism', may remain a habit! But it won't do any good, if it is not universal.

Hardly liberal, but also not something that would fly on Fox News.

Finally, the supposed xenophobia exhibited in his work often turns this idea on its head, where throughout suspicion and racism is met with despair, and the collective efforts of different people are rewarded. This collective effort is made toward some concept of universal good, and in that we might see a version of conservatism, that old myth of good versus evil, which stands in opposition to the decentered liberalism which I myself generally believe – of no universals, no centers, no absolutes. All the same, such liberal pluralism generally asks we open our minds to ideas of difference.

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Party At The World's End unveils Free Chapter

Party at the Worlds End Free Sample by James Curcio

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

The Hope We Seek (review)

The Hope We Seek by Rich Shapero
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was an interesting coincidence that the publisher for "The Hope We Seek" offered an ARC right around the time when my general research was leading me back to the history and myth of the American West. This book fits very soundly within the current, as it is essentially an exploration of those symbols--mining, in some sense, for an American myth, rather than gold.

The prose is at its best when it describes the land itself as an outpouring of the human spirit; at times the craft actually reaches the sublime that the author is clearly reaching for throughout. However, the flip side of this is that at times it feels as though we aren't so much coming along on the journey as watching someone else's religious experience from afar. That goes a way toward saying that my experience of the book is that it isn't nearly as gripping or even interesting as it is good -- and this raises a big question for me of what "good" even means, in this context.

But that question will have to wait for another day. I applaud the effort invested in plumbing the shared psychological history of hope and loss which represents not only the best and worst of the West, but also all of our own personal journeys. That it doesn't seem to speak to the heart as much as it seeks, however earnest the effort seems, is the only flaw in what might otherwise be a five star effort.

View all my reviews

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

If you haven't read this book already -- read it. It will likely take a while. I had to look up a great number of terms and details... in the process you will learn a lot about systems theory. But it is well worth the effort.

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Slobodan Velevski

Pick up the book if this format is too hard to read. 

[Take a Trip with us... Mythos Media.]

Sex and Books

I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one with a "hot babysitter reading bedtime stories" fetish. This project is interesting, in addition to the obvious, for pushing ever so slightly at the boundaries of what is considered sexual media. In Philadelphia there is an ongoing project involving attractive women reading stories naked, but I find this project far more interesting, as they are clothed and the texts are chosen by the reader as some of their favorites, rather than being erotica as in the first instance.

Now we just need to figure out how to wire our brains to have orgasms from reading alone, and us authors will have a much easier time selling books!

It’s a beyond sexy project called Hysterical Literature, and the idea is as simple as it is brilliant: gorgeous, gorgeous girls are sitting down at a table, filmed in black and white by one fixed camera, fully clothed in nice outfits. They are reading a passage from one of their favorite books. Under the table, however, something else is happening.
“I’ve been told to dress as I would for a date with a man, not a boy”, remembers Stoya.

Full article. 

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

Georges Bataille: On The 50th Anniversary Of His Death (video)

Today, we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Georges Bataille. I wrote and recorded the following lecture for presentation at Acephalia Encyclopaedica: Conversations on Georges Bataille, which was held today in Portugal. 

My reflections take Bataille's final text, the preface to The Impossible, as their point of departure. The preface was written with a sense of great urgency during January of 1962, as his correspondence with the publisher indicates. During the time between then and the appearance of The Impossible in print that spring, Bataille at last overcame his propensity to "erect artificial obstacles [and] without even knowing me yet, was trying through me to forbid himself from rejoining Laure [his lover, whose death in 1938 profoundly changed him], nevertheless lost forever." After years of delay, Bataille contacted the author of the preceding lines, Jérôme Peignot, the nephew of his long-lost love, expressing his strong desire to meet him (again; they had met while the latter was a child). Of their meeting, Jérôme Peignot wrote only the following poignant words: 

When I arrived at the Pont-Royal bar, there was a man with gray hair waiting for me. What we said to each other then is not important. What is, on the other hand, were the tears I saw rolling down his cheeks. (Jérôme Peignot, "My Diagonal Mother")

In the vocabulary of Buddhism, by publishing The Impossible and at last meeting the nephew of his lost love, Bataille was able to relinquish the last attachments that bound him to this world of the living. Approximately three months later, he died like a cat: peacefully in his sleep, while his wife and young daughter were vacationing in England. I imagine that Georges rejoined Laure in death, and that perhaps, in another life, they would find one another once again.





Other writings by Prof. Rowan on Georges Bataille:
In Memoriam Georges Bataille: (2012; a version of the text of video lecture)
Friendship d'après Georges Bataille (2011)
The Logic of the Lost Moment (2009)
Communism in an Economy of Excess: Toward a General Economics of an Enduring Communist Society (2009)
Par-délà la Poésie (2007)
On Bataille and Desire (2005)


Translations by Prof. Rowan
Schizogenesis (La Scissiparité): Part 1, Part 2
The Oresteia (L'Orestie), Manuscript Version

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

In Memoriam Georges Bataille: Truth, Love & Death

Portrait of "Dianus" by Alberto Giacommetti

“As I sought it out I have never found it.”

Truth. Comprehending the truth of love, of death, of laughter and tears: such experiences disclose the Impossible. This truth is strictly speaking ungraspable. It exists inextricably bound by a relationship of complementarity, a discordant accord, with that other side of truth which is the business of lucid scientific rationality, i.e. the production of knowledge as an objective description of the world of things, of what is possible. Irreducible to objectivity, such experiences as love, laughter and tears are no less real and no less a part of the world in which we live and die. They escape the grasp of knowledge, properly speaking, and yet without the perspective given therein, truth would remain forever incomplete; and what's more, the unknowability of death itself guarantees the necessarily incomplete status of life, of history, of the world, and of the totality of the universe.

Georges Bataille à Oréans, 1961

“Science is silent about the moment in which reflection loses its moorings within the impossible.”

The truth of love and of death, viz. the impossible can only come into the purview of objective knowledge (whether according to the methods dictated by scientific reason or by philosophies such as phenomenology or logical positivism) by means of a reduction: any objective description and knowledge of love, of death, is possible only from without and après coup: to mistake love or death for merely biological phenomena amounts to an amputation of all that arises from (inner) experience. While a work of decidedly broader perspective and (in my view) greater intellectual rigor and honesty, P.-L. Landsberg's Essai sur l'expérience de la mort remains the fruit of a project doomed in advance, one that could only fall short or fail utterly: one simply cannot have knowledge the experience of death from the perspective of the one who dies – for death is essentially the permanent disappearance of the very subject of knowledge.

Laure and Georges: once again united by death.

“In so may ways, the ensemble of mankind has fallen into a trap. This much we can grasp.”

Our inevitable, final fall into the impossible is our common destiny: slipping beyond the bounds of meaning into absolute senselessness, every being does finally escape from the twin prison-houses of self and world; likewise from that of language. That final destiny which we share with every living being is to at last venture beyond every possibility, to transgress the most distant of limits. We are bound to joyously disappear into that unknown domain to take leave of the world, of knowledge, without so much as a shadow of self. Dissolution into boundless immanence is our final destination, for the world in which we live is that of false, reified – deified – transcendence. The lie of transcendence is supplanted by truth in the final reckoning, for “the totality of the world rests finally on my precarious self, and on death.” In truth, we are bound together by the universal and inevitable disappearance of our selves.

Would this then not be the “nothing of transcendence?" 

No, let us not be seduced by the thought of nothingness. Human existence is always in suspense of death: beneath the surface there is an inconceivable abyss into which, one day, we will fall. Does the end of all possibility and knowledge signify or reveal nothingness, non-being, as the ultimate truth of life, of being? No, for we can only speak of nothing as poets, as dupes, or as liars: for nothing exists only as the abstract negation of the something that is. There is no nothing: no experience of nothing. What's more: even in the vacuum a sort of creation ex nihilo takes place - an ephemeral creation destined to return to its origin and to repetition.

"Experience is immeasurable," and the universe is inconceivable. When we confuse our impossible destiny with absolute annihilation we succumb to the seductive, cold comfort of nihilism: we suppose that we have attained absolute knowledge, an immutable, ultimate truth, and thereby forget that human existence is of its essence an unanswerable, open question, forever incomplete(able). 

"We are never within our rights in preferring seduction: truth has rights over us. Indeed, it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must, respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights, only by accepting disappearance.”

The preceding reflections, composed on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death (7 July 1962), are to a great extent inspired by the final expression of the thought of Georges Bataille, the preface to The Impossible. This text was written with a sense of great urgency, as his correspondence with the publisher indicate, and the book had been in print less than three months before he died peacefully, like a cat, in his sleep, while his wife and young daughter were vacationing in England. With the exception of the last, which concludes the published preface, all quotations are drawn from the manuscript version found in Tome III of his Oeuvres Complètes (my translations).

Modernism to Postmodernism to Postmortemism

By P. Emerson Williams


We cultural types do love to declare death wherever we cast our jaded blood-shot eyes. When our imaginations are exhausted, hard-ons for the latest arising only with greater efforts require new extremes of fetishism. A point comes when completed work crowds out attention. Art, empire, economy, politics look to us to be sated with days and ready to give in to sweet oblivion.

Lady Gaga killed sex, says the once much discussed Camille Paglia, who quotes her subject who declaims “Music is a lie”, “Art is a lie”, “Gaga is a lie”. The death of the novel is an idea so oft repeated that one can envision members of the literary establishment daring each other to intone the phrase three times in front of a mirror in expectation of the candyman to appear. And closer to home for us here, the right honourable psychonaut James L. Kent writing for Acceler8or the new transhumanist vehicle established by R. U. Sirius says we've come to rest after years of the deceler8ing of music as a living mode of expression. Nice opening shot.

Every style of traditional, ethnic, and world music has been incorporated into the modern pop uber-genre. There are no more Afro beats, throat singers, Middle Eastern microtonal scales, Buddhist Ohms, Irish sea shanties, American folk songs, Navajo ancestral chants, and so on, that haven’t already been chewed up, digested, and shat out by modern pop composers.

Forcing sound snippets into a twelve-tone, four on the floor format is for sure a denigration of these traditions, but it's a very colonial Western POV that would consider that this raiding of sampled sounds a cancelling out of entire traditions of music and culture. I recall a thread in an occult social site that began from a post that stated basically that Eastern philosophies were being killed by Western adoption through Western seekers not understanding the finer points or getting entire belief systems wrong. Well, I have news – taking a photo of a person does not trap their soul in the camera and Americans weaving Tibetan buddhism into candy-coated self help material doesn't make all the monks in exile disappear from the universe.

Maybe he's right. Perhaps the hum that is plaguing many towns across the globe with no detectable source is just the musicological equivalent of the smell of dead plague victims piling up.

Arthur Krystal is a voice in the Death of the Novel chorus for some time. In an interview in Harper's magazine he expands his theme:

Leaving film aside, since it’s a relatively recent art, the arts as we know them have run their course. You can argue this until your face is blue, but it won’t change the historical fact. Time and technology wait for no artist, and unfortunately history has seen fit to alter our sense of time by the invention of new technologies.

Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
Philip Roth has devoted his life to creating novels, but he’s pessimistic about their future.
“The book can’t compete with the screen,” Roth tells Tina Brown in this video, and even the Kindle won’t change that.
“It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen," Roth says. "It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.”

Schizogenesis: a "fiction" by Georges Bataille (2/2)

 

Schizogenesis

Georges Bataille

Translation by Prof. Rowan 

 

 

V

Today, when I make love, my pleasure is no longer obscured by the feeling that it will end – and that I will die without having been satisfied. It came to me like a dream, during that happy excess  which burning pleasure itself annuls: I imagine a time where I would no longer possess the means to renew it. I lacked the feeling of the exuberant richness of the festival, the puerile malice and laughter which is equal to God! It is true, this power itself is declining: it is of the same nature as pain. Abandon myself to my moods? Rather, I give myself to an impossible and I come like a dying monster.

Rome, a taxi-cab, Mme E...Violent lightning of an electrical storm. Rains and moon in the white streets of comic-opera: pines, delights and indolence.

I accept life on one condition.
Through sublimity, eternity, lies, to have sung at the top of my lungs, carried by a theatre-chorus.
   
Bought a wolf for Mme E... Thirsty for insolence, it was I who put on the parties of Monsignor.

I become intoxicated by unusual ways.
That singing to the masses, except for the old and grey.
Ten thousand eyes in the night are the starry sky.

The more anxious the man, the happier the man.
Invoking death, he cries:
– Sate your comical knives, sharpen them on the teeth holding them –

The woman partly disrobed (indecent, I have said, profoundly): her nakedness to the degree of death, death to the degree of her nakedness.

VI

Village idiot!

The sole measure of my design exists before the casings and the counterfeit (that part which I'd adopted of all to reunite in the night, saying no more of that which occupied us). That it is necessary to go far... To be a star and disgrace the heights of the skies. Listening to nothing, cries or discourse in the solitude of the sky. I call Monsignor on the phone.

And we, we arrive within an hour.
Alpha, Beta (thus we distinguish the twin faces of a doubling), Mme E... and me.

Like me, Mme E...,  naked in the taxi, drunk without alcohol, and laughing as though deaf:
– But who spoke to you? Alpha? Beta?
The disturbance gave her features a convulsion, both slow and voluptuous.

The prelate descended the stone staircase, came to us, our hands extended.
Mme E..., impatient, said to him with a girlish laugh:
–  Bonjour Beta!

When Mme E... said to “Bonjour Beta” to him, what struck me (thus I feel as happy at the foot of the sunlit staircase as the panels where, like spicy little dishes, trussed and robed goddesses pay sly homage to pleasure) was the vulgarity of my friend. Bowing herself, she kissed the priest's ring, and this movement of humility, like the instant before her course laughter, called out her nature, which, left to become that of an animal, was beneath that of the village tailor. I recalled what one does not habitually see in Mme E..., aside from the girl, and, in this unreal richness, I became happier as this true poverty responded to my passions.

Without transition the moment became serious.
Suddenly I knew that at the top of the staircase, in an obscene disorder, I would see the other side.

  Of this palace of tragedy, which appears empty, because the threshold is no longer bloody, and out of which the dogs of Jezebel have fled, I understand that, in spite of their agreeable appearance, they remained disposed to more debauched vows.
  That which struck within a palace, - as though in a sudden theatrical blow, - is the hatred of men they shared. The top of the monumental staircase that Monsignor and Mme E... climbed in laughter did not attract me solely as the threshold to a dreadful kingdom. I could not prevent myself from seeing in contrast, - to Mme E...'s triumphal moment, her high waist and her too bold airs, a lady ennobled by the stone framework, - the image of a stone woman. Not that I then saw anything more than a royal entrance. I don't see my friend on the terrace, in blood, in mud, in the unworldly noise of the crowd. (The roof does not suggest a crushed body but brings about vertigo.)

Rarely, my friend's desire took me in a more bestial manner. A heat, icy in some sense, gives me satisfaction. I had the feeling of the crowd at a stoning, perspiring hatred.
  Which cannot wait for an instant.
  Mme E... rapidly crossed the threshold.
  Alpha opened the door after two knocks.
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011. (Or sign up to be notified of its release on Amazon.com)

Schizogenesis: a "fiction" by Georges Bataille (1/2)

"...the moment of continuity that is the processes of schizogenesis creates a bridge between the one and others.... I can thence grasp the unbreakable chain between all beings formed of these moments of continuity... not with an abstract concept but rather in moments of comic subversion.” - Unpublished Philosophical Epilogue to On Nietzsche
“Transcendence has fallen into comedy. It's still possible to transcend states of apathy, but only on condition of losing ourselves in immanence – and given that we fight for others too... “Reduced to comedy, transcendence produces men whose vulgarity sheds light on deep immanence... the sense of immanence with the masses relates to needs as necessary for me as physical lovemaking.” - On Nietzsche

Schizogenesis

Georges Bataille 

Translation by Prof. Rowan

Prefatory Note

Published in 1949, La Scissiparité, which I have here translated as Schizogenesis - in order to dissociate the purely biological meaning of the word as a synonym for mitosis - constitutes the last work of fiction published by Georges Bataille that has until now remained unavailable in English translation. This enigmatic text is closely intertwined with the fictions of The Impossible, in which Dianus and Father A. are portrayed as twin brothers - as doubles [the word dédoublement plays an important role here, meaning at once doubling, duplicity and duplication]. It, however, presents in literary form Bataille's philosophical alternative to the metaphysics of transcendence and the myth of the subject - of the self that endures time relatively "unchanged."

I
Possessed by rage and enraged.
My head? A nail, a nail newly born
I cry. No one hears me. The opacity, eternity, empty silence – mine, of course.
In screaming out I suppress myself: this conviction is worthy of praise.
I will eat, d..., write, laugh, fear death, and grow pale at the idea of my nails being turned back.

II

I would like to take hold of an unyielding idea of myself, to raise my furrowed brow into the air, denying the odor of death.
I would like to forget the imperceptible slippage of myself into corruption.
I'm nauseated by the sky whose blinding sweetness has the obscenity of a “girl” going to bed.
I imagine an attractive prostitute, elegant, naked and dispirited, with her piglet-like gaity.

A festive sun flooded the room. I shaved myself clean before the mirror bordered with an ornate gilded frame. Standing up, I turned back toward the orb of the sun, but the mirror reproduced its image before my face. Who am I? I ought to have had the strength in me to trace clearly the letters of my name and today's date upon the sun-lit window: there, I should have stopped thinking and laughed at it all the more. Am I but an effect of the mirror's duplicity [mensonge], the illuminated immensity, and of this too easy relation with myself?

I ought to have a sublime idea of myself: for that, I have the necessary strength. I equate love (bodies touching indecently) with the limitlessness of being – with nausea, the sun, and death. Obscenity reveals a moment which flows into a delirium of sense.

It is that part within my character that is least often accused (but, at last): the side gustave (or pig).

Going non-verbal: Art Break!

It's been established that I'm one verbose and sometimes abstruse motherfucker.What's less known is that sometimes I cast off the verbal and just art. Here's the latest: art with meta-meanings.

The Visionary Movie: A Manifesto

This essay caught my attention on a number of levels, but most particularly that of engaging with film as a mythic medium.

"Over the past forty years the dominant art form in America has shifted from the novel to the movie. Yet for the most part, the movie–and the popular movie, in particular–is not addressed with the same level of critical analysis as the novel. The purpose of this site is to remedy that lack.

As the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin noted, the novel is the youngest of all literary media, the only literary form, in fact, that has arisen within the context of literate civilization, for all the others–the epic, the lyric and the dramatic–are pre-literate in origin. If we take a moment to survey the evolution of Western literature, it becomes evident that each of its literary media have evolved through a three-phase cycle of formative, dominant and climactic stages. Pausing here to survey this overall evolution will give us a larger sense of perspective within which to characterize the place of cinema as a medium that has evolved out of the Western literary tradition."