CENTRICITY AND RESONANCE

On this blog I've devoted thousands of words attempting to imagine the diffuse operations of literary endeavor into more specified categories, but I don't feel I've managed to do so with the concept of centricity. A little while back, I played around with the idea that centricity might subsumed by the agency of a given narrative's superordinate icon or icons. But the word "agency" is too easy to confound with other principles, so I'll probably confine its use to all matters related to interordination comparisons, as laid out in GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1.

It sometimes helps, though, to imagine what abstract principles would act like if they were incarnate entities, and one day I was trying to imagine "centricity" as if the icon in it were "doing something" in order to express, as mentioned earlier, the author's priorities. And the image that came to me was that of the icon as a human singer, projecting his/her voice outward so that it enveloped all the subordinate icons within his/her span.

Since I've also specified that icons don't have to be human or even humanoid beings, another possible metaphor would be that of the tuning fork, that, when struck, sets up a resonance that affects its surroundings. 

By extension, an ensemble of superordinate icons would be like a set of tuning forks, some of which might be struck at different times in order to produce their effects.

One reason I like the resonance metaphor is that it's a means of describing how authorial will spreads out from different types of icons in similar forms of narrative.

For instance, in the 2012 essay DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 2, I compared two television shows in the "occult crusader" subgenre, the 1974 KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and the 1987 FRIDAY THE 13TH--THE SERIES. I can express the opinion that the former is centered on Kolchak, the endotheric identification-figure, or that the latter is centered on the Curious Goods shop, the exothelic source of evils for the continuing characters to thwart. But the argument, as I've previously framed it, is perhaps easier to picture (though it may not compel any greater agreement) with one's experience of the way everything in the KOLCHAK series is permeated by the resonance of the hero, while everything in the FRIDAY series is permeated by the resonance of the malefic shop of evil wonders.

A similar example can be made with respect to a type of icon that would seem to have the least possible "agency:" the dead-person-who-tells-a-story." In the 1950 film SUNSET BOULEVARD, the story is related by murder victim Joe Gillis, but the audience is barely made to care about the provenance of this character. The character with the greatest resonance is clearly Norma Desmond, the faded silent-film star who pulls Gillis into her world and ends up killing him.

So Desmond has both the greatest agency and resonance. However, in 1947's SCARED TO DEATH, I think it's arguable that Laura, the murdered narrator of the movie, has greater resonance than any of the usual "old dark house" support-characters, or even than the green-masked villain who kills said narrator. Like most of the victims in the old PERRY MASON TV show, it's the murdered person who's the center of the mystery, but what little authorial will exists in SCARED stems from Laura, whose malevolence makes the plot go. 

It's interesting that Northrop Frye made use of the term "resonance" in his book THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION, where he said that resonance was the process by which "a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance." Frye was not talking about centricity as such, more about the general function of narrative. But since I've defined narrative here in terms that focus upon the interaction of what I now call superordinate and subordinate icons, the coincidence seems felicitous.

THE BEST DEFINITION OF NARRATIVE

 Though I've used the literary term "narrative" frequently since the beginnings of this blog, I've never stated an explicit definition of the term. In some of my early posts I more or less deferred to the definition provided by Tvetzan Todorov, as cited in TODOROV O TODOROV PT. 4: 

Only at one point in THE FANTASTIC does Todorov make an assertion that seems to put “the Fantastic” and “the Realistic” on the same plane as literary constructs, and it’s the only point where I can entirely agree with him, though probably not with any of his extrapolations from it. This appears in his final summing-up chapter: “…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.” This is an apt restatement, in valid structuralist terms, of the narrative progress that Aristotle calls “complication and resolution” and that Frank Cioffi explores in terms of science-fiction “anomalies.”

In point of fact, I don't believe that I ever stuck to Todorov's rather value-neutral proposition, given that one of my earliest concerns was the identification of particular narratives in terms of their Fryean mythoi. My many meditations on centricity came a little later, and I've often stated, in one way or another, narratives always require organizing principles of some sort. Todorov, as a Marxist of one sort of another. probably didn't care for anything that implied hierarchical concepts. But now I would rephrase Todorov in this manner:

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

Though the Primes are the organizing principles through which the authorial expresses whatever resolution he plans for the narrative's complications, this does not mean , as a hyper-Marxist might presume, that the Prime is always the Guy in the Catbird Seat. Hamlet is the Prime presence in the play that bears his name, but although he does manage to avenge his slain father by play's end, his quest creates so much ancillary chaos that one can hardly claim he's acted as an avatar of justice. In Borges' 1944 story "Death and the Compass," the author inverts the paradigm of the "genius-detective" subgenre and has his detective Elias Lonnrot outsmarted and slain by his criminal rival. But Lonnrot is just as much a Prime presence in his story as Sherlock Holmes is, and stories with tragic or ironic conclusions for the Primes are not inherently better or more mature than those in which the Primes enjoy the relatively "happy endings" typical of comedy or adventure.

And with that avenue explored, I can proceed to the matter of how Prime and Sub presences function within that species of narrative inbreeding known as the crossover.