COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4

 At the end of Part 3 I wrote: "Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives."  

The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band as support-characters to Ivanhoe, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY.   

Serial-works, whether by one author or several authors, have the ability to evolve over time, which means that the status of icons may change in many ways in terms of both forms of escalation. Serials that possess an ensemble of Prime icons need not be as inflexible as those with a solo protagonist; a character in the ensemble may be killed for any number of reasons without affecting the longevity of the series. If anything, the termination of the character Thunderbird during the early issues of "The New X-Men" probably benefitted the series in terms of making the other characters seem more at-risk. Yet because Thunderbird appeared in two ensemble-stories before he was killed, he possesses ELEVATED ICONICITY-- an elevation due entirely to quantitative escalation in his case.         

I've mentioned earlier that the prose icon of Fu Manchu possesses durability born of both qualitative and quantitative escalation. The first cinematic adaptation of the character in film's sound era, though, possesses only the quantitative type, consisting of just three rather cheap films from Paramount Films in 1929, 1930, and 1931. Moreover, in the third and last film, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, Fu Manchu is slain early in the movie, because the script downgrades him to support-status in order to make his daughter Ling Moy the Prime icon of this installment of the series. I doubt that this people behind this low-budget series planned for any more appearances for Ling Moy when they began the project; they were probably simply told to play up Fu Manchu's daughter because Rohmer's book DAUGHTER OF FU MANCHU was being sold around the same time. As the star of a single film, Ling Moy would, like Ivanhoe, possess only BASAL ICONICITY. However, she like Ivanhoe would still possess stature, rather than charisma, even though Ling Moy was just a knockoff of Fah Lo Suee, a character who in the Rohmer books was only a charisma-type, and who never became a cultural touchstone as her prose-father did.

The distinction between base and elevated forms of iconicity is particularly important in serials wherein Sub icons make repeated appearances. Almost none of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories contain "repeat offenders" among Holmes' foes, and the celebrated Professor Moriarty only escapes sharing the lowly basal status of Stapleton and Grimesby Roylott by having full appearances in two Doyle stories-- even though one of them is a prequel to the story in which Moriarty appears to bite the big one. Other prose serials toyed with bringing back favorite villains to oppose series-heroes, though it would seem that no one exploited "elevated iconicity" for Sub icons as thoroughly as did Golden Age comic books.      

A Sub icon who appears only once can only possess Basal Iconicity with respect to quantitative escalation but may take on greater durability in terms of qualitative analysis. The Death-Man, who made his only appearance in BATMAN #180 (1966), was never meant by his creator to have any future appearances, and indeed he's only been "bought back" in a couple of later iterations that may not be identical with the original evildoer. Most Bat-fans did not want to see Death-Man keep returning like Joker and Penguin, because Death-Man's only schtick was that of making himself appear to have died-- something he only did so to cheat the executioner. The single "Death-Man" story also does not give him more than basal iconicity, but he does have durability in Batfan-circles because of the perceived high quality of the story.      

The rule of "one doesn't count but two does" can be illustrated with two other Bat-foes, but from the '66 teleseries. In one episode, "The Sandman Cometh," Michael Rennie makes his only appearance as master crook Sandman. This episode counts as a "villain-mashup" since Sandman teams up with Catwoman, a high-charisma "repeat offender" in the comics and one who'd been the main Bat-enemy in three previous episodes. But because Sandman possesses only basal iconicity, it's not a "villain-crossover." 

However, though Sandman is not more than an average one-shot villain-- not nearly as good as either False Face or Chandell-- he gets outscored in terms of iconicity by two-timer Olga, Queen of the Cossacks. She like Sandman first appears in the company of an established Bat-foe-- though Vincent Price's Egghead had only made one previous appearance-- and if she'd never appeared again, she would have stayed at the basal level. But the "Olga-Egghead" team made one more appearance, and so she earns the "elevated" level. (And since I brought up qualitative analysis before, Olga's maybe a little better than Sandman, but not anywhere as bad as Anne Baxter's previous one-shot evildoer, Zelda the Great.)      

More on these matters as they occur to me. 

       

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 3

 I began devoting lots of space to literary crossovers in 2021, but I don't think that concentration appreciably changed the narratological project with which this blog began. I'm sure I would have conceived something along the lines of my "Primes and Subs" distinction, but the crossover-factor allowed me a perspective one may not find in a lot of other lit-crit circles-- certainly not those I have dubbed "the ideological critics." Thus, in the first COORDINATING INTERORDINATION, I asserted that the term interordination, more than Julia Kristeva's better-known "intertextuality," best described my definition of narrative:

All narrative is a movement consisting of the interaction of one or more Primes (superordinate presences) with one or more Subs (subordinate presences).

However, I've become aware of a shortcoming in my explication of interordination with respect to how it plays out in the two main forms of fiction: "serials" and "monads." Prior to 2022 I'd written a great deal about the nature of serials, but not much about that of monads until THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD. Now I'll try for a more synoptic view of both monads and serials with respect to interordination.

In DANCE I only defined monads as "stand-alone works," but this needs finessing. The purest example of a monadic fictional work is one in which every icon in the story, both Prime and Sub, is entirely fictional, whether one is dealing with a short work like London's "To Build a Fire" or a long work like Dickens' OLIVER TWIST. I make this specification only because along such "pure works" exist "impure monadic works" in which one or more icons, whether Primes or Subs, have some existence outside the stand-alone work. Such icons fall into three categories:

Historical figures, like Louis XI in Hugo's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME.      

Legendary figures that may have no firm grounding in history (such as Joaquin Murrieta) or who have been transmuted, by fictional treatment, into figures more of legend than of history (such as King Arthur and Jack the Ripper).

Fictional figures not created by the author(s) of the monadic work, such as the appearance of a character implied to be James Bond in the TV-movie RETURN OF THE MAN FROM UNCLE.  

As I've established elsewhere, works in the latter two categories may be crossover-works, while works in the first category will not be, since purely historical figures lack a purely fictional nature. But all stand-alone works can only be valued in terms of what I call "qualitative escalation," which is the process by which critics and their culture distinguish important works from non-important works. I commented in EMINENCE AND DURABILITY:

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad.

The same essay also specifies how serial works can be analyzed for their durability, or lack of same, in terms of either qualitative or quantitative escalation, but only when the serial actually produces two or more works. A work that is intended to spawn further serial stories, but does not do so-- say, a pilot-film for a never-realized teleseries-- defaults to monad-status.    

Having addressed here the structural differences of monads and serials in terms, Part 4 will deal only with the interordination of icons within differing narratives.  

 

    

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 

So if centric icons within a narrative are "organizational matrices," is there a better term to assign to the organizing principle? Astute readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) will guess that the previously unused term of "eminence" will now assume that position...-- EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS.

Looking over this essay and its companion from last July, I don't think I adequately defined the organizational interactions of icons and propositions, which takes place through the agency of a master trope, rather than just tropes in general, as I said here.

I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. --MY SHORTEST POST YET. 

The one thing I left out in the above formulation is that any professional author decides in advance what sort of proposition will govern his narrative, and this means becoming more specific as to what sort of icons will work best for his master trope. Charles Dickens can't just put "orphan must learn the secret of his birth" out there; he must decide who the orphan is-- Oliver Twist-- and what the secret is; that Oliver still has a living relative from whom he and his mother got separated. 

Thus, there's an operative difference between a "generalized trope," which can be applied to many works, and a "specialized trope," which applies only to a particular work, or a particular linked set of works. Other aspects of the work will include "bachelor tropes" that are not nearly as important as the master trope. Oliver must meet some opposition so that his discovery of his secret heritage doesn't seem to be too easy. That opposition doesn't have to be Fagin and his faux-family of thieves, so that part of the proposition comprises a bachelor trope in relation to the master trope.  

OLIVER TWIST is a monadic work with no further iterations, so its proposition is unitary. Serial works are cumulative, given that even the most stereotypical serial-- I might cite my earlier example of the Golden Age BLUE BEETLE from a related essay-- may have a specialized trope (Blue Beetle protects his city from crime) that is barely distinguishable from a generalized trope ("hero protects his city from crime.") 

However, in cases where the cumulative narratives of the series are not broadly stereotypical, the specialized trope must be refined. Will Eisner's SPIRIT varies between direct confrontations with evildoers and indirect encounters with either human error or simple fallibility. In the cover Will Eisner prepared for a Kitchen Sink reprint of the 1940s SPIRIT stories, the artist depicts a scene that doesn't literally transpire in the story "Gerhard Shnobble," but one which symbolizes a key moment in the tale. The Spirit's crimefighting activities take second place in "Shnobble" to the tragic end of the title character, which the Spirit doesn't even personally witness. Nevertheless, even in stories where the dominant action takes place in the life of a one-shot character, the Spirit still provides a moral compass for Eisner's implied reader, even when he has no impact upon the one-shot character's life. So even though the SPIRIT series started out with a specialized trope like "The Spirit protects his city from crime," that master trope became in time inaccurate because of changes in the propositional priorities. Thus a more appropriate specialized trope, capable of taking in all of the propositions Eisner offered to readers, would be something more like, "The Spirit bears witness to the many manifestations of human fallibility."  

 

EMINENCE AND DURABILITY

 Following up on my observations in the essays of EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS, I'm moved to observe that eminence should be deemed a *structural metaphor* for the authorial process by which an icon or proposition assumes centricity. I also want to distinguish between eminence and the not dissimilar structural metaphor of "escalation," which serves to illustrate how durability operates for both stature-bearing and charisma-bearing icons. To do so I first have to revive my term for "stand-alone works" from this earlier essay-- that of "monads"-- as a counterpoint to the more familiar concept of "serials."

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.

Serial works can be subject to either Quantitative or Qualitative Escalation, as I've already established, and so can possess either kind of durability. Most, though, become famous from the Quantitative form only. The Golden Age hero "Blue Beetle" lasted from 1939 to 1948, but even I, a defender of mythopoeic motifs in obscure superheroes, could never argue Qualitative Escalation took place within this series. The specialized community of Golden Age comics patrons liked something about the original Beetle, but didn't like another azure avenger, The Blue Diamond, who only enjoyed two adventures. There's no way that the Diamond could exceed the Beetle in terms of durability based on quantity, and, as I've read the former's two adventures, there's no chance that the former possessed any durability based on quality either.    

Now, because most serials need several installments to establish the perception of quality in a given audience, it's rare for a short-lived serial to demonstrate durability based on quality. One aborted serial that certainly had more potential than the Blue Diamond was Steve Gerber's 1984 VOID INDIGO, consisting of one softbound graphic novel and two "regular-sized" comic books. I must admit that INDIGO does not have a stellar reputation as a great unfinished Gerber work. But because Gerber is considered one of the important American comics-artists, an ambitious if flawed work by him will inevitably rate higher for anyone seeking to understand his creative process, in contrast to gauging the quality of a tossed-off superhero who was merely all about keeping the pot boiling. So even though BLUE DIAMOND had only two installments and VOID INDIGO had three, the latter is essentially equal to the former in terms of quantitative durability but far superior in terms of qualitative durability.      

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD

Though there are ways in which my new categories, "novelty" and "recognizability," apply to stand-alone works (henceforth called "monads"). the categories are intended mostly to describe the dynamics of old stuff and new stuff in a serial format.

I.A. Richards, summing up his definition of all mental activity as "sorting," imagines the response of a single-celled organism to a stimulus and recognizing it as something encountered before.

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Such a sorting, of course, is only possible if the organism can distinguish between things it has or has not encountered before. I think Richards is correct in his intuition, though with the caveat that the amoeba can't conceptualize anything about the things it finds familiar or unfamiliar.

Serial franchises depend on a constant "new and old" dynamic. The majority of serials focus on a particular character or ensemble of characters. (I have addressed the concept of non-character icons here.) Even if no other elements are repeated within the serial, the main character(s) provide the reader with "recognizability." In adventure-oriented serials, "novelty" is most often supplied by the hero's opponents, though after a time they too may take on a strong aura of recognizability.

To be sure, serials with a domestic tone may focus not upon opponents but upon foils. The comic strip BLONDIE stars the duo of Blondie and Dagwood, and most of their conflicts with other characters stem from stock figures in the subordinate ensemble: the neighbors, Dagwood's boss, the mailman. New characters may appear-- for instance, Dagwood constantly faces an onslaught of annoying salesmen who importune the house-holder with aggressive sales techniques-- but usually these characters have no names and never make a second appearance as such.

Crossovers exist to extend the "cosmos" of a given icon by relating it to the "cosmos" of another icon. Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE is one of the first such crossovers. The entirely fictional main character encounters a few historical characters, such as Richard the Lion-Hearted, but they are not crossovers because they are aligned with the cosmos of Ivanhoe. However, Scott also works the mythology of Robin Hood into the narrative, and Robin Hood even in 1819 was a highly recognizable figure with his own "cosmos." Since IVANHOE is a novel without sequels, everything aligned to the knight's mythology-- the hero himself, his romantic interests, and his enemies-- are all "novel" compared to the mythos of Robin Hood, at least from the viewpoint of most readers.

In serial narratives, it's more often the case that the author seeks to promote two separate fictional universes by having them intersect. Often this means the encounter of two characters-- She and Allan Quatermain, Daredevil and Spider-Man-- though it can also mean a crossover of a character and an established physical environment. TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE does include David Innes, one of the heroes of the "Earth's Core" series, but Innes barely appears in the story, and the greater focus is upon Tarzan's encounter with the savage world of Pellucidar.

Now, while the author of such a work knows that the intersecting icons may both be recognizable to some readers, the base idea is to interest those readers to whom one of the icons is "novel," the better to convert that audience. Usually, within the diegesis of the story, the first meeting of two icons is marked by novelty, just as it is in real experience, though afterward the icons are generally familiar with one another, and within the diegesis they become recognizable, even if their next interaction may provide some elements of novelty.

Lastly, a great deal of "icon emulation" relies on at least a superficial level of recognizability, even where that recognizability contradicts everything known about the icon's established history. For instance, the film BLOODRAYNE: DELIVERANCE pits its heroine against a vampire named Billy the Kid, ostensibly four hundred years old. If this version of Billy has been around that long, then clearly he has nothing to do with either the real or folkloric history of Billy the Kid, and the film-script makes no attempt to rationalize the discordances. But because the writer sought to make his villain recognizable, the film nevertheless delivers a "strong template deviation" type of crossover.