The Marbled Hive

The Marbled Hive archive is an attempted catalog of recurring story elements (motifs, archetypes, themes, etc.) in the fiction stories of author Dennis Cooper.

The format is a partial imitation of the web site TV Tropes that similarly aimed to catalog and cross-reference plot devices and tropes across all fiction media. Notably, in October 2010, Google withdrew AdSense service from the TV Tropes site because the site content included discussions of monetization-unfriendly subjects. Under this continued disincentivization, the TV Tropes site administrators purged and restricted all discussions of rape in fiction media. In June 2012, Aja Romano published an article on why this was a bad idea.

A similar incident involving the very same robotic corporate overlords saw to it that author Dennis Cooper's blog was deleted without warning in 2016. Cooper, lauded as "the last literary outlaw" in American fiction by fellow literary outlaw in American fiction Brett Easton Ellis, has ever championed artistic expression even into the most transgressive subjects.

It's my personal belief that fiction has the best symbiosis with reality when content develops freely from the stifling imposition of real-life oppression. By the nature of fiction, it creates an otherworld in which permission is granted for audiences to feel scared or angry or unacceptably sexual. So much has been said for more thorough escapism, fiction that is safe from all the tiresome duties and prejudices and disconnects that are such downers to ever remember the existence of; So much has been said in favor of fiction that is aspirational or wish-fulfillment. That would certainly profit our robot overlords without controversy. The intolerance of TV Tropes in 2012 of even discussing horrible things, leaves victims dismissed and silenced. The discourse surrounding controversial works reeks of the presumption that any depiction of such atrocities is endorsement, instruction, or even some aspirational escapist fantasy. A thorough examination of such works, combined with critical interpretations may reveal that presumption untrue.

Credit

Poetry & Short Story Collections

The George Miles Cycle

Novels

Works Not By This Author That I Recontextualized and/or Intertextualized For Reasons Explained On The Pages Linked

Literary Devices Listed

• Literary Minimalism
• Panopticism
• Unreality

"We have to understand the way in which what we do and say, what we write in our papers and articles, is grounded in theoretical premises which, if we don't come to terms with them, we will simply naively reproduce without being fully aware of how we're using them...and how, indeed, they are using us." — Paul H. Fry, Professor of English Literature 1Fry, Paul H. "Introduction to Theory of Literature." 02 September 2009. Yale University. Lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YY4CTSQ8nY&t=16m18s

How This Site Does Analysis

This site is run by an autodidact whose method is a patchwork of whatever seems to work and ring true, so this page on this site should roughly map what I think that method even is.

At the time of this writing, at the start of the year 2025CE, Media Literacy is a groovy phrase that I think absolutely applies to this endeavor if only it weren't so slithery to define. "Analysis of definitions of media literacy" by W. James Potter in the July 2022 issue of Journal of Media Literacy Education found 434 elements across the phase space of definitions of people talking about it.

media

I think of media as a passive thing: A ray of light passing through a more or less uniform chunk of atmosphere into a more or less uniform chunk of water is going to change (get bendy) because the atmosphere and the water are two different mediums. In art, it's more active: photography is a different medium than music or paint. The information conveyed by the significant forms 2Bell, Clive. Art. "The Aesthetic Hypothesis". Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York: 1914. of those art mediums—I am guessing is what got 20th century people calling film and radio "mass-media"3 Donald Horton & R. Richard Wohl (1956) Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction, Psychiatry, 19:3, 215-229, DOI: 10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049. Media was not qualified by a separation of fiction/entertainment versus reality4“The War of the Worlds.” The Mercury Theatre on the Air. CBS Radio Network, 30 October 1938.5Campbell, Professor W Joseph. “The Halloween Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic.” BBC News, The British Broadcasting Corporation, 29 Oct. 2011, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15470903., because news media would be the beginning film reels of movies, and broadcast over radio.

What I think made media Media was towers sending out radio waves to tune into, and a television set in every middle-class home. Government propagandists, the vested interests of big corporations, and the artists—musicians and television stars—who would be their puppets or else shunned to mediocrity and death, all set the groundwork for what was mass-media. When that term was coined, nobody predicted the Eternal September and Social Media...except maybe high-on-life philosopher Jacques Derrida for whom everthing is text, or Clifford Geertz for whom real-life culture is literature, equally insufferable wankers in different ways (I say that affectionately.)

I will probably use none of the above elements, it's only there because I thought it would look like a good intro.

Intermediate Analysis

When defining "the thing" the unit or work of media, I want to begin with Bascom, 8Bascom, William. "The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives". The Journal of American Folklore, Vol.78, No.307. [ Jan. - Mar., 1965 ], pp. 3-20.) who defined the difference in oral-tradition culture stories between myths, legend, and folktale. Myths in this context were religious mythology that were literally believed in and cited as authorities for the conduct and customs of the people who elevated such stories into religion. Legends may or may not have its origins in some historical fact but are more freely embellished and more easily dismissed than religious mythology: urban legends, for example; or how Arthurian legends might have had a historical King Arthur whether he was Welsh or Roman...but the thing with dragons and magical fairy godmothers from Avalon and knights getting turned into swans, was all probably a fabrication. Folktales are invented and re-told for entertainment and everyone knows it's all fake for fun. These culture stories are shared and replicated as freely as access and popularity allows. Even pre-modern scholars would frequently take on pseudonyms of other past scholars to pay tribute to them, with no consideration for intellectual property rights that had not been invented yet or the rigorous standards of future scholars who usually want to know at a glance who really wrote the damnable thing.

In the Western canon of literature, I attribute the concept of authorship to Miguel de Cervantes, who inadvertently invented fanfiction9De Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel. Don Quixote. Translated by Thomas A. Lathrop, Alma Classics, Surrey United Kingdom: 2014. by taking a stand against Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda's sequel to Cervantes's very own Don Quixote. Avellaneda's writing was terrible, Cervantes hated it, and wrote an "official" sequel to Don Quixote that the foreword assures the reader is of far better quality to read than any imitators who are not Cervantes the Author of the Original Don Quixote would make.

It is to Cervantes that I attribute the "intuition" that good writing and good reading comprehension is the alignment between what the author meant and what the reader understands.

In the middle of the 20th century, New Criticism threw that away and centered interpretations on the relationship between the reader and the text: a work of literature became a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. Deferring to author intentions was no longer the only definition of good literacy. 10Ransom, J. C. The New Criticism. Greenwood Press, 1968. (Originally published 1941.)

A plethora of other modes of interpretation has emerged since Cervantes' time: Historicism (John Dover Wilson, Shakespeare, history influences literature more than literature influences history, and fortunately there is a way to be objective and correct about history all the time), New Historicism (Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare, literature influences history more than history influences literature, and also ye olde guard of historicists are pretentious and arrogant pricks to think they can be right about times none of us were alive for and nobody is an objective observer anyway), an intersection and synthesis of Feminist Criticism and Postcolonial Readings (Elaine Showalter, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Michael George Cooke who consolidated "The Achievement of Intimacy" in literature: marginalized people may develop literary canon through "Veiling" or imitation of the predominant forms, followed by "Solitude" or injecting marginalized experiences into the literature being created, followed by "Kinship" in which the target readership is other marginalized people, and then finally "Intimacy" in which the writer can authentically write whatever the fuck they want to without pressure from either the hegemony or other marginalized people), Marxist readings, Freudian interpretations, Formalism which is somehow distinctly different from Russian Formalism in ways that I can never remember except that the latter is Russian, the return of Author-Intentionalism heralded by renowned transphobe Kathleen Stock whomst we side-eye on this site we side-eye so hard, and various other frameworks of literary analysis.

From the mess of everything above, I aim to state in every essay listed below my standpoint or approach, then present the information that I am working with, and finally be able to make a case for my purposes, effectively, and within the stated framework.