GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1

 Let's see if I can get in one last new analytical term before the year ends...

I was musing on the concept of dynamis in the literary sense that Northrop Frye promoted it, or at least as I extrapolated that usage within my own Frye-influenced system. In essays like 2012's STATURE REQUIREMENTS, I focused most on the notion that dynamis, which Frye defined as a "power of action," applied specifically to the differing ways in which characters in different literary mythoi have their power of action determined by their respective mythoi. Here's my breakdown of the mythoi according to the protagonists' power of action:

Adventure-heroes always win, or at least lose so rarely that most audiences take no account of the losses.  Ironic heroes rarely win, and when they do, the victories mean nothing.  Dramatic heroes occasionally win but they go through such pathos-inducing straits that they don't get much of a thrill out of it.  What's left for the comic heroes?

Comic heroes, whether they are as powerful as Ranma Saotome or as bumbling as Johnny Thunder, tend to win out, though they tend to do so less by superlative skill than by dumb luck.  Ranma usually displays superlative fighting-skills, and he does win most of his assorted battles with other comedic kung-fu opponents, but the emphasis is clearly upon finding ways to amuse the audience by undercutting the hero's triumph with silly pratfalls, comic embarrassments and the like.  Thus his stature within his mythos exists to be a vehicle not for thrills but for the jubilative mood of the *incognitio,* the comic incongruity-- which, in Ranma's series, often takes the form of his transforming from a young guy to a big-breasted young girl.

 Anyone who reads that essay now should observe that back then I was floating my first use of the term "stature" to describe how the characters compared with one another. in terms of their mythoi-associations, which I would later bring into line with Ovid's famous formulation in 2018's THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS. But I didn't utilize stature in this sense more than a few more times. In 2019's SUBS AND COES PT. 1, I tipped my hat goodbye to the old usage of that term. Then I began using both "stature" and "charisma" exclusively to describe the forms of authorial will as they manifest in superordinate ("starring") icons and in subordinate ("supporting") icons, and so those terms became completely associated with my concepts of centricity.

At one point, while loosely associating my current concept of "mythos-dynamis" to the concepts of stature and charisma, I made the correlation: "dynamis is agency," though that proved to be something of an oversimplification. "Agency," for one thing, has only one major connotation in contemporary criticism; when a critic uses the term, he or she means that a given fictional icon is empowered in comparison to some less empowered fictional icon. Since this is a determination a critic can only make by comparing icons within one or more narratives, "empowerment-agency" qualifies as what Frye called a **narrative value,** a value that relates only to relationships "from inside" a narrative. In contrast, "mythos-dynamis" was purely a **significant value,** a value perceived by a reader who examines an entire work as a whole in order to discern patterns in the work, which means looking at the work "from outside," as it were.

 I found myself then revising the current concept of agency to serve a wider purpose, to distinguish what separates a superordinate icon possessed of both stature and charisma from a subordinate icon possessed only of charisma. I've been writing about my concept of centricity since the early days of this blog, and though I feel I know it when I see it, it's been hard to describe it except through concrete examples.

Therefore from this post on, "agency" will be used to describe interordination comparisons, which will be seen to possess both narrative and significant values.

In 2018's KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 1, I agreed with Nancy Springer that the central hero of Walter Scott's IVANHOE was not the novel's most "charismatic" character. For Springer, the lack of charisma (in the ordinary sense of the word) was enough reason for her to disallow Ivanhoe as being anything more than a "common thread" who united a bunch of more interesting characters. But I believe Springer was treating her concept of "real heroism" in a **narrative-value** sense. To her, Ivanhoe was not interesting in comparison to other characters, so she did not deem him t he "real hero." I argued that Ivanhoe being the "common thread" was exactly what did make him the main character. This form of agency would be a **significant value,** because the interpreter is looking at the entire design of the work "from outside" in order to decide which icon (or group of icons) gets the most narrative emphasis, regardless as to how interesting the icon may be compared to other characters in the story.

The same principle applies to many modern fictional characters who had far less colorful lives than that of Ivanhoe. Willy Loman of Miller's DEATH OF A SALESMAN has no "agency" in a narrative sense, and in fact he exists to be a failure as a salesman and as a father. But this is still agency with respect to the principle of centricity, because Loman is the focus of the author's will to depict a dire and depressing outcome.

Now, how can agency also be a **narrative value?** I return to the example of Ivanhoe. I've mentioned earlier that Scott's novel is an example of a stature-crossover, in that the centric character, whose base level of stature is boosted thanks to the literary fame of the book, crosses paths with the legendary character of Robin Hood. This is a *narrative value** because Robin Hood's legend is of importance within the story as well as holding significance to the readers of the story. Even though Robin Hood functions as a Sub in comparison to Ivanhoe's Prime, the bandit of Sherwood has a special level of agency because his legend possesses an irreducible (and qualitative) stature. This means that by analyzing the relations of the characters within the narrative, IVANHOE qualifies as what I termed a HIGH STATURE CROSSOVER in this essay. 

A similar analysis of intra-narrative factors may lead the critic to determine how the vectors of agency function in other interordinate relationships, and so other crossovers may be also by low-stature, high-charisma, or low-charisma, as detailed in the essays of the CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS essay-series.

More to come in Part 2.

COMBATIVELY YOURS

                 

In the three-part LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW) series, starting here, I listed five of the mythcomics I’d reviewed here because I deemed that they all rated as “accommodation narratives” rather than “confrontation narratives.” In my many observations on the combative mode in confrontation narratives, I’ve continually sought to make clear that although many narratives resolve conflict through violence, said narratives are only combative if the violence has a particular level of organization. I further observed that many other narratives of the accommodation type resolve conflict through romance and/or sexual activity, and that they would follow the same dichotomy. The stories would only be “combative,” so to speak, if two or more characters with *megadynamic * wills are brought into conflict, with that conflict resolved by their romantic interaction. 

That essay-series didn’t look at any of the accommodation narratives through the lens of the four mythoi, as I did with four confrontation narratives in STATURE REQUIREMENTS. I’ve now improved my interpretation of the mythoi through the metaphors of “the four ages of man” in the DYNAMIS essays, starting here, and so I’ll use that approach in comparing and contrasting four accommodation stories, one for each of the four mythoi.

Again, for an accommodation narrative to register as combative, the contending wills must have a high level of dynamicity, expressed in terms of sexual rather than martial conflict. If the tropes of combative energies in battle are embodied by famous myth-stories like Odysseus slaying the suitors (“extroversive”), the tropes of energetic sexual cooperation are embodied by a model like the one in Yeats’ “Solomon and the Witch,” wherein Solomon and Sheba have such great sex together that it seems as if the whole word has been temporarily annihilated (“introversive”). This would be the kind of interaction that Hollywood advertising calls “tempestuous,” so that’s what I sought in the four examples I’ll examine. Three of the examples are taken from the LOVE OVER WILL series, while the fourth is new to these considerations.

In the DYNAMIS essays, I’ve allotted the mythos of comedy to the first age of man, in which the main character, regardless of how old he may be, is placed in the situation of a child seeking to negotiate his way through the arbitrary, often ludicrous rules of society and/or nature. In “She Tried Her Own On,” a self-contained story from the series DOMINA NO DO, the humor proceeds out of nature. Lead female Hikari has been keeping her supposed boyfriend Takeshi in her mansion for some time, subjecting him to her confused sadomasochistic attentions. Then, like the Melancholy Dane, she begins to have “bad dreams.” She imagines that Takeshi menaces her with a titanic phallus, despite the fact that she’s seen his actual joystick and wasn’t consciously impressed. But Hikari begins to feel guilty about having abused Takeshi, so she decides to “walk a mile in his wang” by having her sorcerous grandma give Hikari a temporary penis. The experience doesn’t fill the young woman with anything akin to “penis envy,” but the ordeal does solve Hikari’s nightmare-problem, because now she can imagine “dueling” Takeshi in her dreams.       

Next of the four ages is that of adolescence, when the thoughts of young men and women turn to goals of heroic accomplishment. In the NEW MUTANTS story “To Build a Fire,” one of the titular heroes, Magma, finds herself stranded in the Amazonian rainforest with Empath, a member of the Hellions. Though the New Mutants and the Hellions belong to rival mutant schools, the ongoing continuity had Magma leave her team to sojourn with the “bad” mutants. The reasoning for the “school transfer” always remained murky, but the author’s main purpose was probably just to get Magma and Empath together. As her name suggests, Magma can call streams of lava from the vasty depths of the Earth. In contrast, Empath’s mutant power is entirely mental: he can persuade almost any woman to fall in love with him. When the two teens are stranded in the forest, they quarrel about whether Magma should use her power to call attention to their plight. The young woman gives evidence that she’s attracted to the rather skeevy Hellion even when he’s not using his power on her, and the mere fact that he might try to master her—albeit only mentally—may have a lot to do with her refusal to “give it up.” The story concludes with an accommodation between the two, in that Magma does use her power the way Empath wants, but only after both belting him and kissing him, leaving him confused about whether he influenced her at all.

Like “To Build a Fire,” “Rite of Spring” is a nonviolent story within a series that is dominantly violent (and within the combative mode as well). Like most stories centered upon a monster-protagonist, the SWAMP THING series falls into the dramatic mythos, particularly because Swamp Thing’s experiences as a monster don’t emphasize thrilling physical triumph (as with say, the Thing of the FANTASTIC FOUR), but the tragic dimensions of life, of the limitations that dog every mortal’s tracks when he transitions into the third age of man. The swampy protagonist, however, gets a bit of a new lease on life, when his female companion Abby, after having followed him around for years as a friend-in-need, suddenly confesses feelings of love for the plant-monster. He for his part reciprocates. Since the Swamp Thing is a mass of plant-growths in humanoid form, he doesn’t have the equipment to consummate a romantic relationship after the human fashion. So instead he encourages Abby to “eat of his flesh,” a specific tuber growing from his body. Not only is the tuber psychotropic, it apparently enhances Abby’s psychic senses so that she can behold the spirit-energies of living things that Swamp Thing can normally see. Swamp Thing and Abby then link minds and experience an ecstatic communion with all the surrounding life-forms of the swamp—which is portrayed as being both as intense and as intimate as any human coitus. Yet the advancement of their relationship into a sort of sexual congress signals that they've moved outside the sphere of triumphant adventure; that they've entered the sphere in which men and women have congress in order to create their replacements when they pass on-- even if the exigencies of comic book ensure that neither Abby nor Swamp Thing shall perish from their earth.

The hero of RAT GOD is actually more of a demihero, an upright New England man who finds himself entrapped in a Lovecraftian cosmos, including a degenerate town that I called “an Innsmouth for rats.” Clark Elwood, like many protagonists of such stories, finds himself forced to fend off a cult that worships the titular rat god. But whereas H.P. Lovecraft would have emphasized the brooding terror of the rat god and his followers, Richard Corben focuses on Elwood’s overly flattering view of his own racial heritage, as against, say, the local Indians. The only reason Elwood gets embroiled with the rat-worshippers is out of sexual passion, as he pursues his love-interest Kito. The real cosmic joke on Elwood is that he doesn’t realize that Kito is an Indian girl, meaning that cohabitation with her ought to be verboten for an upright Caucasian. This sort of a joke, in which the protagonist is caught in some ludicrous situation that he has no power to meliorate, is characteristic of the final age of man, as a person loses his health and faculties with increasing age. To Elwood’s credit, he does overcome his prejudices on a basic “but I really want her” level, and though Elwood’s not a real fighter he does show enough determination to outwit the rat-worshippers. Afterward, Elwood settles down to some sort of romantic accomodation with not only Kito, but also with a rather degenerate looking white woman named Gharlena. This is about as close to a happy ending as one ever gets from a predominantly ironic narrative. As seen in the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide, the protagonist does not so much triumph as escape from the craziness of the madding world.

I mentioned in QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2 that the master tropes governing the organization of the violent combative mode were either “univectoral” or “multivectoral.” The first three of these “combative love-attacks” emphasize the back-and-forth exchanges of Hikari and Takeshi, of Swamp Thing and Abby, and of Empath and Magma, so all three would be multivectoral in nature. Only RAT GOD would be univectoral, since the story’s main emphasis is upon Elwood, with Kito, despite her erotic charms, taking the position of a support character.  

FRYEAN BLIND

 One detail I didn’t mention in my quasi-review of THE POETICS OF MYTH is that when the author presents his rather rushed summary of Northrop Frye’s contributions to myth-criticism, Meletinsky conflates two different selections of Frye’s work, quoting from both ANATOMY OF CRITICISM and from an essay from six years earlier, “The Archetypes of Literature.” But Frye’s arrangement of his mythoi is not the same in these two works. Meletinsky ends up telling readers that Frye has equated comedy and romance with the seasons of summer and of spring, which is true in the essay. But in ANATOMY, Frye reversed the two comparisons. Given that the book represents the fullness of the critic’s thought, this was a rather clumsy mistake on Meletinsky’s part.

However, Meletinsky’s section on Frye did remind me of a topic I brought up in my essay THE FOUR AGES OFDYNAMIS. I said in that essay that I couldn’t find any evidence that Frye had based his four-season, four-mythos schema on anything in Ovid. A fresh scrutiny, though, reveals that a page or two before Frye begins his first section on this subject, entitled “The Mythos of Comedy: Spring,” he does make reference to other famous quaternities, including “the four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death).” There’s not much chance that Frye was unaware of Ovid’s famous poem. It’s more likely that the “Four Ages of Man” as Ovid conceived them simply did not line up with Frye’s conception of his four mythoi, which took its principal influences from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray and Theodor Gaster.

Without question Ovid’s four ages are more persuasive than Frye’s foursome, not least because “death” is not really a period of life. In the ANATOMY Frye is acutely conscious that spring is associated with images of rebirth, not least in his own religion of Christianity, and also that historically Greek New Comedy tended to focus on the attempts of young men and women to be married despite the opposition of tyrannical authority figures. Thus, the critic leapfrogs over the period of actual childhood—Ovid’s “frail shoots and grasses”—so that he Frye can draw symbolic comparisons between mundane marriages of young people and the sacred union of God and humankind. In my early readings of the ANATOMY I was blown away by all of these mythopoeic allusions. Yet in later years I’ve come to decide that there are some problems with pages and pages of criticism on the subject of comedy that barely addressed the functions of humor.

Just as problematic is Frye’s attempt to disassociate the mythos of adventure-oriented romance with the “age” in which heroes venture forth to battle dragons and witches. Since Frye’s spring-protagonists must necessarily be adolescents, his summer-protagonists would have to be of a somewhat later age in order to represent “maturity.” In real life, however, adolescent males are more likely to seek combat-glory before they marry and settle down, even if New Comedies and their descendants tend not to depict that aspect of life. In my own writings, I tend to see that all of the strivings of adolescents, whether relating to Eros or Thanatos, belong on the same plane, since both activities are dominantly associated with persons in their “hardened” summer-phase. Raymond’s FLASH GORDON provides an example of focusing upon both romantic love and on romance in its connotation of a story of great conflict and adventure.

As I stated in FOUR AGES, comedy depends upon the frustrations of incongruity, and these frustrations aren’t exclusive to, say, the “heavy fathers” of Greek New Comedy. Slapstick humor, which may well have been prominent in Greek Old Comedy, may involve no romantic interest whatsoever. The incongruity can arise when the victim’s expectation of immunity from harm is thwarted by a banana peel under the shoe or a pie in the face. Yet Frye was right in thinking that comedy was essentially a mythos about “coming together:” it’s just not a union defined by romance. Rather, nearly every mortal ever born can laugh when a fictional character, good or bad, gets humiliated because every mortal ever born had experienced humiliation in some form, if only during the vicissitudes of childhood. Frye’s concept of comedy, centered upon the experience of adolescents, would seem to have nothing to say about a humor feature like SUGAR ‘N’ SPIKE, where the titular toddlers are constantly trying to make sense of the confusing adult world, but always fail because they see things “through a milk-bottle darkly.”

Frye’s period of “age” lines up loosely with what Ovid calls “the temperate season…midway between quick youth and growing age,” but Ovid’s conception remains superior here as well. The protagonists of serious drama need not be middle-aged, any more than the protagonists of comedy need be children (although it’s been remarked that Hamlet seems to have been a student at Wittenberg long enough to have left adolescence behind him). But in the mythos of drama the protagonists begin to feel the limitations of their personal power, just as living things begin to wane in autumn. Despite many of the adventure-trappings in the teleseries STAR TREK, the serial is at its heart a drama, given that it constantly deals with such limitations, even in such triumphant narratives as “Arena” and “Day of the Dove.”

Clearly what Frye means by “death” is a specific period of human decrepitude, the last phase for any given mortal before he or she dies, and Frye is entirely correct in lining up this state of existence with the season of winter and the mythos of the irony. Comedy levels human beings because everyone shares the humiliations of early life, but in a state of being in which life still holds endless hopes. Irony levels human beings in the opposite manner, separating rather than uniting, reminding us that we all die alone. The only redemption from the season of winter in actual life is the knowledge that one’s limited life may be perpetuated by either literal offspring or by “good works” that go down in history. In literature this slight satisfaction may give rise to a bittersweet black humor, so that even when an irony-tale ends with some sort of romantic alliance—as we see in both Voltaire’s CANDIDE and Elio Perti’s THE TENTH VICTIM —the romance only succeeds because the principals manage to isolate themselves from the madding world.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PT. 4

One more line of thought did indeed develop from my meditations here on the alignment of the four Fryean mythoi with my concepts of tonal gravity and tonal levitty, and that is to consider how the current arrangement, patterned after Ovid's "Four Ages of Man," lines up with Frye's own meditations on the ways in which critics validate or do not validate the four mythoi.

"...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme..."-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

So, in Part 3, I sorted out the four mythoi thusly with respect to the orientations of levity and gravity:

COMEDY-- plerotic and levity-oriented
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and gravity-oriented
DRAMA-- kenotic and gravity-oriented
IRONY-- kenotic and levity-oriented

Now, Frye's main point in the "Mouldy Tales" essay is to state that "Iliad critics" tend to prefer irony and drama because these seem to appeal to what Frye, borrowing from Freud, calls "the reality principle." Frye does not in that essay invoke the corresponding "pleasure principle," but it seems evident that he means to say that the mythoi of adventure and comedy align with the latter principle, if only because the other two mythoi tend to embrace "happy endings" for the main characters.

Now, my formulations of "tonal gravity" and "tonal levity" did not arise from the question of what mythoi were most popular with critics. Rather, the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW series started with the question of whether or not "the sense of wonder" thrived in the "levity-oriented" mythoi as well as it did in the "gravity-oriented" mythoi.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of  *tonal gravity,* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity,* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

But most critics are not concentrating upon whether or not a work delivers "the sense of wonder," which elsewhere I've compared to Huxley's ideas of "upward and downward transcendence." If one agrees with Frye, what they want is "the reality principle," which Frye compares to the notion of "high seriousness." Yet, even if this is true of drama, works of irony are not predominantly serious, even though their humor is what many would call "dark" or "black," suggesting a strong difference in tone between works of irony and works of comedy.

I tend to validate Frye's judgment on "Iliadic critics" since I feel myself to be, like Frye, part of the minority of "Odyssey critics." Certainly during my tenure writing reviews for THE COMICS JOURNAL in the day suggested that most of the people writing for Gary Groth tended to emulate the critics of canonical literature, and that even if some of them valued comedy more than the average canon-critic, they were foursquare against the mythos that most dominated American comic books, that of adventure.

This suggests to me that my original writings on levity and gravity need some modification, which caused me to contemplate different concentrations of these concepts of identificatory investment.  Thus I would now alter the above definitions of the mythoi to read to address the strength of the levity-orientation or the gravity-orientation:

COMEDY-- plerotic and oriented on light levity
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and oriented on light gravity
DRAMA-- kenotic and oriented on high gravity
IRONY-- kenotic and oriented on high levity

Now, as it happens, in arranging the four mythoi, I followed Frye's season-based arrangement, which to the best of my recollection did not involve Ovid's "four ages." In the first two FOUR AGES essays, I said that the *dynamis* of each mythos compared well with one of the "ages of man:" child, adolescent, mature adult, older adult. Thus I perceive that even though adventure is "serious" in terms of how its readers are expected to invest themselves in the character's struggles, it is a "light seriousness" that canon-critics do not regard as covalent with their "high serousness." Adventure-stories, while they may not involve adolescent characters, are often regarded as adolescent in nature because they tend to have happy endings, no matter what sufferings their characters may endure  to reach said ending. Not all works within the dramatic mythos have unhappy endings, of course. But critics tend to prefer dramas because there is a certain expectation of a stronger chance for a dolorous, and therefore more bracing, conclusion to the story. Thus dramas meet the critic's desire for high seriousness.

With the two "mythoi of levity," comedy, more than irony, still allows for more identification with its characters than does irony, and thus comedy also shows a predilection for happy endings. Though the phrase "light comedy" does not apply to all comedies across the board, it suggests something of the attitude that the Iliadic critic has toward comedy in general: there's still enough of a tendency for viewers to invest in the characters' fates and to want to see said characters validated to some degree. This is not true of the irony, for the creator of the irony has, so to speak, turned up the dial on his levity-making machines until everything in the story floats free of any readerly attachment. Again, some ironies-- such as Voltaire's CANDIDE-- may have relatively "happy" endings in comparison to other, more relentless ironies. But there is no sense, to paraphrase Frye, that the world has been reborn by a ritual of jubiliation: if anything, even the worlds with relatively happy endings are doomed, just as "older adults" are doomed to end their days and their experience of the ongoing world.

Thus, this current rethinking invalidates the verdict of the GRAVITY'S RAINBOW series, in that I would now opine that both adventures and comedies show a greater tendency toward encouraging reader identification than one sees in dramas or ironies. To pursue the metaphor of the four ages once more, it's as if the comedy and the adventure allow for the most identification because their characters were designed to be triumphant, while the drama and the irony are designed to allow the reader to pull back from the characters, even if for very different reasons.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PT. 2

I should first note that my statements about the *dynamis* appropriate to each of the 'four ages of man," as mentioned in Part 1, does not imply anything regarding the amount of actual power any given character within a mythos can display. In GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PT. 3 I cited examples of protagonists in four features, each of which represented one of the four Fryean mythoi, noting that all of them were roughly comparable in terms of their power, even though each of the four-- Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, Ranma Saotome, and Doctor Manhattan-- was conceived to obey a very different "power-of-action." Later, in BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER, I referenced this foursome again, but decided to change the representative of irony into "Marshal Law," simply because Doctor Manhattan was just one starring character in the graphic novel WATCHMEN.


My discussion of "the four ages" in Part 1, though, makes me realize that in both arguments, I subconsciously chose at least three protagonists who were in the "summer" portions of their lives, even though only one, Buffy Summers, belonged to the mythos appropriate to summer. Harry and Ranma are, like Buffy, both within the same "summer" range, going from late teen years through the twenties. Only the two protagonists I chose for the irony-representative-- first Manhattan and then Marshal Law-- suggest something more of the protagonist who is tending toward the "autumn" of middle age.

So, just as a mental exercise, I decided to look through some of the combative ironies I'd analyzed, to see if any of them even starred characters in their "summer" years. And here's the closest I've found to a "combative irony" hero in his summer-years, pictured in a particularly doleful sketch by creator Wally Wood.

I've discussed Wood's Wizard KIng "duology" in two essays, as well as devoting a separate essay to the reasons I determined the story of Odkin to be an irony-story rather than an adventure-tale. Odkin, though an extremely reluctant hero, proves himself capable of cutting goblin-throats--

Or contending with giant insects.

To be sure, since Odkin's people "the Immi" are said to be capable of living to age 300, it's hard to say what age he is. Further, Wood undercuts the reader's Tolkien-esque expectations by making the Immi, unlike Tolkien's hobbits, to be so sexually active that Odkin's father is also his brother. This detail, which is disclosed early in the first volume of the duology, aptly communicates the tendency of the irony-mythos to depict a world dominated by irrational laws. Since our own world is governed by laws that many persons consider rational-- include proscrptions against incest-- the world that Odkin regards as normative must perforce seem somewhat out of whack.

Having established four summer-age protagonists for the four mythoi, my next inquiry leads me back to the exemplary actions formulated by Theodore Gaster for his four types of religious ritual. In Part One, I boiled these actions down to:

COMEDY-- the presentation of incongruity
ADVENTURE-- the presentation of combat
DRAMA-- the presentation of a scapegoat's explusion
IRONY-- the presentation of communal mortification

Ranma Saotome adheres strongly to the first exemplary action, given that he's a male character who's constantly humiliated after being cursed to transform into a girl when struck with cold water.

Buffy Summers, as discussed in greater detail, is focused primarily on acts of combat, encoded in her nickname of "vampire slayer."

For Harry Potter, his entire status as "the Boy Who Lived" suggests a death averted. His creator pursues this theme to the final book, DEATHLY HALLOWS, with many suggestions that Harry may meet his doom, much in the manner of the scapegoat who perishes to avert evil from the community. Harry seems to accept his doom with lamb-like equanimity, but other forces save him and death takes his enemy instead.

Odkin seems a bit like a scapegoat as well, since early on he's expelled from his community by a drawing of the shortest straw. However, the longer that the Immi-- who is a tricky type by nature-- travels in the greater culture, the more he's besieged by deceptions greater than any he can muster. Granted, the elf-like protagonist is too pragmatic to indulge in the sort of histrionics Gaster finds characteristic of the mortificative mood; actions like fasting and lamentation. Nevertheless, Odkin, unlike Harry Potter, really does die, and he only survives the remainder of his narrative because his wizard friend Alcazar creates a duplicate of him, telling the second Odkin "in a sense you are your own father and mother." Following the defeat of the evil enemy, Odkin's final words in the duology are the ironic pronouncement, "It is living that can kill you." This may be the closest Odkin can come to voicing a lament of the world's fundamental corruption.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS

“Look at the four-spaced year
That imitates four seasons of our lives;
First Spring, that delicate season, bright with flowers,
Quickening, yet shy, and like a milk-fed child,
Its way unsteady while the countryman
Delights in promise of another year.
Green meadows wake to bloom, frail shoots and grasses,
And then Spring turns to Summer's hardiness,
The boy to manhood. There's no time of year
Of greater richness, warmth, and love of living,
New strength untried. And after Summer, Autumn,
First flushes gone, the temperate season here
Midway between quick youth and growing age,
And grey hair glinting when the head turns toward us, 
Then senile Winter, bald or with white hair,
Terror in palsy as he walks alone.” -- Ovid, METAMORPHOSES

...in future uses, I'll define *dynamis* only as a significant value, in that the character "power of action" in the story is pre-ordained by the type of story in which he finds himself, be it adventure, comedy, irony or drama.-- DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY.

My thoughts recently turned to Frye's application of the four seasons to his four mythoi, which I've frequently glossed with the four "moods" cited by Theodor H. Gaster in his THESPIS, as seen in REFINING THE DEFINING:

ADVENTURE conveys the INVIGORATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how protagonists who defend life and/or goodness from whatever forces are inimical to them. The protagonists' power of action is at its highest here.
COMEDY conveys the JUBILATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how the heroes seek happiness/contentment in a world that has some element of craziness to it (what I've termed the "incognitive" myth-radical), yet does not deny the heroes some power of action.
IRONY conveys the MORTIFICATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon characters in a world where the "power of action" is fundamentally lacking.
DRAMA conveys the PURGATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon "individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society." Power of action here is more ambivalent than that of the adventure-mythos but seems more crucial to the individual's problem than it does for that of the comic hero.

It then occurred to me that these different forms of dynamis, of the power-of-action, might line up rather well with the so-called "four ages of man." I read through Frye's original formulation of the mythoi in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, and could not see that he'd made any Ovidian comparisons between the seasons  and the ages of man, though it's not impossible that I saw someone else make such a correlation. Theodor Gaster didn't make any such correlations either, but in THESPIS he provided examples of the dominant characteristics of each religious ritual that summoned the four Gasterian moods. The invigorative ritual, according to Gaster, always revolves around acts of combat. The purgative ritual centers upon the expulsion of the scapegoat. The mortificative ritual emphasizes ceremonies of abjection, such as fasting and lamentation for vanished communal energy. Lastly, Gaster addresses the jubilative ritual, but does not go into nearly as much detail as he does with the others, merely stating that there's already a wealth of data on such jubilative rituals, most of which accord with the idea of harvest-celebrations. Curiously, I've criticized Frye in past essays for not quite being able to get a handle on the radical of the comedy mythos, so that I had to come up with my own, "the incognitive," which may or may not accord with the formulations of the ancient world.

So which mood/mythos aligns with which "age of man?" In this I'm guided by Frye's remarks on comedy, which he asserts to be guided by a passage from "law" to "liberty," as when the protagonist starts out being constrained by some seemingly arbitrary restriction-- as in Greek New Comedy, it's the young man being denied access to his lady-love by a "heavy father." But although this familiar trope suggests the activities of the adolescent, I find that the dynamis involved in moving from a state of restriction to one of liberty most resembles the struggle of EveryChild. All kids are born into cultures whose values must be accepted as given, and though no child escapes being influenced by his or her culture, the child also defines him/herself in terms of struggling against that matrix. The comic mood arises from the incongruity of the child's struggle to "delight in promise of another year," to find his/her place in the culture of one's birth, even while rejecting some aspect of the culture.

The real star of "Summer's hardiness" is therefore the protagonist of the adventure-story, who exists to invigorate the audience by showing a desirable outcome to the war between Good and Evil, Summer and Winter, etc. This is a state of affairs where, following Frye's pattern, "law" in the sense of onerous restrictions ceases to exist, and the hero has almost untrammeled "liberty" to remake the world in line with his heroic ideals. Even heroes who perish at the end of their stories, like Beowulf, leave the reader with this sense of societal transformation.

Following close on the dynamis-heels of the adventure-story is the drama, whose protagonist is often a figure with some claim to heroic status, but who has become dangerous to his society in some way. The dynamis of the dramatic hero reverses that of the comic hero, for the protagonist is first seen in some condition of relative "liberty," at which point he begins to succumb to some arbitrary "law." Ovid's phrase, "quick youth and growing age," catches the sense that the dramatic protagonist is succumbing just as the person in his middle years, the "temperate season," is slowly losing his hold on the "first flushes" of youthful energy.

Finally, it should be obvious that the domain of the irony-mythos is one that is almost entirely dominated by that of arbitrary "law," with precious little "liberty" to speak of. This is the world of the last age, wherein the protagonist displays "terror in palsy as he walks alone"-- knowing, of course, that the society cannot rescue him from being conquered by the law of death, when there is no "promise of another year."

I may investigate these four age-oriented radicals in terms of some specific examples in a future essay.

PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES

The strongest influence on my theory of the four persona-types has been the work of Schopenhauer, but I'll confess that Northrop Frye's writings on literary dynamis had an impact on the theory, even if I renounced his confusion between dynamis and dynamicity in the essay DYNAMIS AND DYNAMICITY. Frye showed a slight tendency to equate social station with "power of action," probably because he was following Aristotle in his groundbreaking formulations in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

To quickly summarize between the personas of the "hero" and the "demihero," one incarnates the value I've called "positive glory" while the other incarnates that of "positive persistence." I won't repeat the distinctions I've made in earlier essays' I merely revisit this topic to correct my possible tendency to assign the persona of the demihero to the "ordinary man" rather than figures of high social station. (Not that this is a dominant tendency, as seen in some of the characters cited in DEMIHERO RALLIES.) 

Since positive persistence is not really correlated with social station, it's entirely feasible for demiheroes to be not only aristocrats, but rulers of whole domains, who may command considerable forces. However, not all kings and princes function to display "glory," and many function simply to keep their positions stable, a practice which allies with the value of persistence, as much as any of the "ordinary man" protagonists I've touched on.

Within the medium of comic books, one example of a powerful ruler is DC Comics' Morpheus, a.k.a. The Sandman. I've reviewed only two works in Neil Gaiman's corpus of Sand-stories, here and here, and in both of these storylines Morpheus is largely concerned with simply keeping his dream-empire stable for however long the universe lasts. He does undertake a personal duel of sorts in "A Hope in Hell," so he's certainly not without courage. However, for the most part Morpheus does not engage in any form of combat, nor is he concerned with the hero's goals of casting out evil in order to promote good. Thus the Lord of the Dream-World aligns with similar demiheroes who only perform positive actions when pressed to do so, like the LOST IN SPACE characters, to whom I've perhaps devoted the most analysis, starting here.

An example of heroic rulership appears in Nozomu Tamaki's DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND. The "bund" of the title is the domain ruled by Mina Tepes, queen of the world's vampires. Mina, like Morpheus, spends a fair amount of time protecting her empire from incursions, and though she and her retinue are much more violent than Lord Moepheus, the difference between them is more one of their personas than of physical dynamicity.  In the arc titled THE SCARLET ORDER, the origin of the vampire race is revealed, and Tamaki makes this narrative reflect elements of heroic glory:

Vampires are in essence spawned by a mystic force known only as "the Darkness," and its goal is much the same as that of the three vampire-lords from the first arc: to successfully begat a child to perpetuate its heritage. Tamaki's description of the Darkness' methods reminded me somewhat of the Hindu myth of Prajapati, who creates a woman to be his mate. Like Prajapati, the Darkness must then seek to overcome the woman's resistance to spawn the offspring he desires. But the unnamed "Woman" does resist the dark god's purpose, just as Mina resisted the corrupt desires of the three lords, and from the fact of the Woman's defiance springs the history of the vampire race.

By comparison, Gaiman's work in THE SANDMAN generally rejects the heroism expoused by earlier DC characters who shared the "Sandman" name. Nor is Morpheus alone in being a great ruler who exists largely to police his domain: this principle also applies to the character Lord Emma in LOVE IN HELL, though admittedly he (she?) is a support-character to the starring demiheroes of the series.

Interestingly, very few American-made superheroes have any propensity to be rulers, whether due to aristocratic birth or simply taking power by force of will. Thus they must be seen as "ordinary men" who make the transition to heroic status, which only shows that even characters who start out as demiheroes can feel the demands of "noblesse oblige."

MY DALLIANCE WITH DYNAMIS

It was about four years ago that I wrote I made a distinction between *dynamicity* and *dynamis.* I've noted that though I continued to write about the former without stinting, *dynamis* fell by the wayside. By 2013 the concept was more or less subsumed by the notion of the "combinatory-sublime," in its turn subsumed by a more generalized "combinatory mode."

I'm sure that I dwelt on the Greek term for so long purely because Frye had invoked it to mean "power of action" in THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM. Frye actually does not use the term all that often in the whole of the book, though I would say that his Aristotle-derived concept of dynamis informs the framework of his theory. But I found that Frye had failed to distinguish between physical power of action of characters within the narrative, and the power of action conferred upon those characters by extra-diegetical forces, meaning, the author and/or the culture of the author.

In NOTES ON NORTHROP FRYE AND THE NUM-THEORY, written contemporaneously with the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW essay-series, I said:

The most problematic aspect of Frye’s *dynamis* schema is that in its attempt to cohere with Aristotle’s pattern, it implies that “the marvelous” is located purely within the mythoi of myth and romance.  I’m sure that, even staying within the confines of the canonical “high” literature with which Frye concerns himself, the scholar was quite cognizant that there exist many literary works which have marvelous content but which are not adventure-romances as Frye himself defines that mythos.  Apuleis’ novel THE GOLDEN ASS concerns a man magically changed into an ass, who then listens in on the secret conversations of human beings, while Shakespeare’s TEMPEST concerns a genuine practitioner of magic—but neither work is centered upon what Frye terms the *agon,* the conflict between representatives of good and evil.  If one agrees with me that these two works belong to other mythoi—my choices would be “comedy” for one and “drama” for the other—then it does not make logical sense to say, or even to imply, that aspects of marvelous phenomenality appear only in the adventure-romance category.

GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 3 used Frye to fight Frye, counteracting the logical problems of one work with solutions from another:

...I've drawn attention to a dichotomy Frye introduced about 4-5 years before the publication of ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, in an essay entitled "The Archetypes of Literature," sort of a dry run for ANATOMY.  The dichotomy was between what he called the "narrative values" and the "significant values" of any given narrative.  The former set of values denote those aspects of the narrative that are important to its function as a narrative, while the latter set are relevant to those that cause the narrative to be significant to audiences in a moral, ethical or aesthetic sense (my definition).  As it happens, though Frye does not repeat these terms in ANATOMY, he does, within the same chapter that introduces his reformulation of "power of action," draw a distinction between "fictional modes" and "thematic modes."  These are so close in essence to the earlier terms that I choose to keep using the earlier ones.

Later, in the aforementioned DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY, I gave a pertinent example:

...in future uses, I'll define *dynamis* only as a significant value, in that the character "power of action" in the story is pre-ordained by the type of story in which he finds himself, be it adventure, comedy, irony or drama.

*Dynamicity,* in contrast, denotes a "narrative value" in that the level or character of a protagonist (as well as that of his allies or antagonists) is a value *within* the sphere of the narrative.  To cite one of my earlier examples, Ranma Saotome doesn't know that he's in a comic universe. His level of power, as well as his struggles against the aforesaid antagonists, are no less dynamic than those of adventure-heroine Buffy Summers.

Without pressing the point too much, this means that even though Buffy Summers and Ranma Saotome may have roughly covalent levels of *dynamicity,* their *dynamis* is very different. Buffy is not made "the goat" nearly as often as Ranma is, and this disparity in *dynamis* comes about because of those extra-diegetical forces I mentioned above.  Joss Whedon and Rumiko Takahashi both display a strong penchant for intense action and for incongruous moments of humor, but in these two particular works, Whedon has chosen to emphasize the "adventure mythos" while Takahashi has concentrated upon the "comedy mythos."

Frye's concept of a "power of action" based in his four mythoi was, in essence, a little too limiting as I continued, throughout 2012 and 2013, to investigate the concepts of Kantian sublimity as it applied to literature. However, the more I investigated sublimity, the less it seemed to me that it could be explained purely by the reader's experience of fictional dynamicity, which was the only part of Kant's sublimity-concept that I found useful for literature. I did, slightly before the CROSSBOW series, intuit a parallel between the affects of "the dynamic-sublime" and those of mythicity, as seen in SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY, where I quoted a section from a 2011 essay:

Neither Burke nor Kant demonstrate any great fascination with mythic symbolism as such. However, I would expand some of the terms they use to describe the sublime, such as "might" or "magnificence," to include the sense of a greater mythic pattern that brings the events of a given story into the wider "family" of mythic narrative.

Yet it still took me another year to realize that the "greater mythic pattern," for authors more than philosophers, is the totality of plot-functions and character-types from which they may choose, This led to the TWO SUBLIMITIES HAVE I series, whose key statement appears in Part II:

The "infinity" of which Yeats speaks here-- like the "richness and profusion of images" I found in Edmund Burke-- suggests another form of the sublime with a different nature than the "dynamically sublime."  It is one that overwhelms in a manner roughly analogous to the "mathematically sublime," but the "magnitude" is one that stems not from physical size, but from the magnitude of how many conceivable connections can be made within a given phenomenality.

I then followed up on my phenomenality-statement in OUT WITH THE OLD PROBABILITY, IN WITH THE NEW INTELLIGIBILITY:

Now I would rephrase [my earlier statement] to say that the combinatory-sublime arises rather from the transgression upon the reader's expectations in terms of intelligibility and regularity. DIRTY HARRY, a naturalistic work which conforms to general expectations regarding intelligibility and regularity, has its own proper level of mythicity but is not likely to inspire a high level of the combinatory-sublime because of said conformity. ENTER THE DRAGON conforms to expectations regarding regularity but not intelligibility; being "anti-intelligible," it has a higher potential to arouse the combinatory-sublime. And STAR WARS, which violates both intelligibility and regularity, has the greatest mythicity of the three in reality, as well as the greatest potential for symbolic combinations and thus for the combinatory-sublime.

In this essay I reversed an earlier claim in which I opined that mythicity was not affected by the narrative's phenomenality. I still maintain that a given metaphenomenal work, in contrast to any given isophenomenal work, inherently possesses more potential for "symbolic combinations" by virtue of violating one or more of the expectations regarding causal nature.  These combinations, however, are also pre-determined not only by the author selecting the nature of his work's phenomenality, but also by his selecting the types of plots and characters that will determine his "thematic" or "significant" approach. Thus, in 2014 I meditated on the role of a character's mythic type, rather than his power, as having a noteworthy impact on the impression he makes:

At present I have not found a necessary connection between the two forms of the sublime.  It does suggest to me how some figures of comparatively low dynamicity can suggest that they are more powerful than they really are. I conclude that it is because of the effect of the combinatory-sublime, which seems to invest such figures with a larger-than-life "mana."-- THE PHENOMENALITY OF PSYCHOS.

Or, to put it as I might have back in 2012: "Norman Bates might not have much in the way of *dynamicity,* but he sure does have a dynamic *dynamis.*"

GHOSTS, AMERICAN STYLE

At the conclusion of THE PHENOMENALITY OF PSYCHOS I wrote:

At present I have not found a necessary connection between the two forms of the sublime.  It does suggest to me how some figures of comparatively low dynamicity can suggest that they are more powerful than they really are. I conclude that it is because of the effect of the combinatory-sublime, which seems to invest such figures with a larger-than-life "mana."

To toss out a more concrete example, PSYCHO's Norman Bates and the Jason Voorhees who debuts in FRIDAY THE 13TH--PART II are both "perilous psychos" within the category of "the uncanny." They are not equals in terms of their dynamicity-- Norman is at best at the low end of the "x-type" level of dynamicity, while Jason, even when he's supposed to be no more than a deranged human being, clearly occupies the high end. But they may be deemed as equals in terms of their mythicity, a narrative value that has its roots in the affects I have termed the combinatory-sublime. 

I emphasize again that mythicity is not coeval with popularity.  The mad killer from 1983's CURTAINS is probably no more formidable than Norman Bates in terms of dynamicity, but she isn't anything to write home about in mythic terms. However, the psycho-killer in 1971's BLOOD AND LACE is barely known outside the halls of horror-fanatics, but I rated her mythicity as "good" in my review, if not quite as good as that of Norman and Jason.

One thought I'm toying with is that although I still believe that the mode of the combative is determined by the presence of both *dynamicity* (an exceptional level of power is expressed in the combat of at least two opposed entities) and *centricity* (their combat is central to the plot), the aspect of the combinatory-sublime may affect the way in which a given protagonist's *dynamis* is received.

For instance, I wrote in this essay that even though ordinary gangsters are not able to fight the Golden Age version of the Spectre, the author had to throw in complications so that the Spectre would have struggle on some level.  I would add to this observation that criminals in THE SPECTRE represent more than just ordinary crooks: collectively they are the evil that forces the undead avenger to keep up his crusade, rather than going to his eternal rest. On this admittedly limited level, then, even the most mundane crooks assume greater mythicity than they would in a less ambitious story.

A less ambitious story involving another undead avenger appears in the 1941 ghost-comedy film TOPPER RETURNS.

This engaging if simple comedy-- barely a TOPPER film at all, as the titular character has little to do in it-- is really about co-star Joan Blondell's character Gail Richards. While staying at a typical Hollywood "old dark house," Gail is murdered by an unknown assailant.  Gail rises again as a ghost who wants to bring her murderer to justice, and forces the twittery Topper to help her.  To be sure, though, like other ghosts in the TOPPER oeuvre, Gail is able to affect the physical world. In one scene the masked murderer attempts to kill again, and Gail, turning invisible, rains punches down on the confused killer until he flees. At the climax she does manage to ferret out her killer and cause his death too. 

The mere fact that the mystery killer is not exceptional in his dynamicity would keep this from being a "combative" film.  However, would things be different if the killer had a more prepossessing aspect, if he had some sort of bizarre identity like "the Bat?"

Such an added fillip might indeed make a difference, and in future essays I'll discuss some reasons why.

SUBCOMBATIVE SUPERHEROES PT. 3

In Part 2 I demonstrated proofs as to why the Spirit was a combative hero and his imitator The Masked Man was subcombative.  I did not elaborate on their natures vis-a-vis my concepts of "Reach vs. Grasp" because I felt it implicit that the "reach" of both characters was radically different due to their unequal dynamicities.  The "grasp" concept is a little more complicated, given that The Masked Man in its short run remains always within the mythos of drama, while the long-running Spirit, as I mentioned before, dipped its wick into all four mythoi at one time or another.  However, at this point in my analysis I would say that differences in grasp, a.k.a. "dynamis-stature," do not have any effect on whether or not a given feature does or does not utilize the combative mode.  Even if the majority of the Spirit's adventures had been comedies or adventures rather than dramas, as I've suggested earlier, the different "dynamis-stature" would have no effect on whether or not it was a combative work.  The primary determinants for the combative mode are, as I formulated in MYTHOS VS. MODE PART 2, the interdependent factors of a narrative combative value and a significant combative value.

This time I'll again deal with features within the same mythos, that of comedy, but will give reasons as to why only the first one is combative, while the other two are subcombative due to their lacking either a narrative or significant value.

DC Comics' original version of INFERIOR FIVE appeared in a total of thirteen full-length stories, which I'll analyze as a unit, factoring no revivals-- if any-- into my equations.  Not all of these stories had both a narrative and significant value; some had neither.  But only four of the issues were subcombative for either reason, and the other nine were clearly combative.  To be sure, since INFERIOR FIVE was an extremely broad comedy, most of the goofy heroes' triumphs were comically constructed.

In addition to their winning by accident, they also won by the intervention of guest-stars, as when Superman himself drops in to save the day. But, as I've established in this essay, the narrative combative value is not disrupted if some character other than the featured hero(es) is responsible for the final blow, so this issue remains combative. Statistically speaking, this series satisfies the "narrrative value" of the mode because the overall adventurers are dominantly combative in accordance with my "51 percent rule." Additionally, because the heroes demonstrate high dynamicity-- even if it is altered by its manifestation within a comic mythos-- the INFERIOR FIVE satisfies the "significant value" of the mode.


The significant mode is entirely lacking in Don Martin's equally broad comic take on superheroes, in the handful of adventures he devoted to his 1960s creation Captain Klutz.

Like the Inferior Five, Captain Klutz escaped perils from his equally silly group of supervillains through comic maneuvers.  In one adventure his enemy "Sissyman" traps him in a giant pile of ice cream.

Naturally, he eats his way out.  But Klutz not only had no super-powers, he had no discernible physical skills and only occasionally used mundane weapons.  Facing off the villainous "Granny," he admits that he dares not strike a woman, but that he has no problem shooting one.  In any case, though one might argue that the Klutz adventures satisfy the narrative value, in that there is a clear opposition between the hero and his enemies, there is no significant value because Klutz himself possesses no dynamicity.  He wins-- if he does at all-- through luck and/or trickery.

Finally, the current animated teleseries TEEN TITANS GO! looks for all the world like it's simply going to be a comic take on the 2003-06 adventure-series.  Being humorous, as I've showed with THE INFERIOR FIVE, does not mean that a work cannot be combative. 

In truth, the more direct influence on the teleseries was a comic book series of the same name, which I have not read.  The teleseries, however, though it features characters with roughly the same set of powers and abilities, does not often center its stories about the plot-element of combat.  The model for the teleseries seems to borrow more from the model of the American TV sitcom, in which there is some problem to be solved but not necessarily a battle to be won, as had been the case with most episodes of the 2003-06 show.  The earlier TITANS show made heavy use of humor, roughly following the example of some of the more raucous anime TV cartoons, but comedy was always subdominant to adventure.  Here, comedy is the main attraction, and the mode of the combative is often at best a side-attraction.  A recent episode, "Colors of Raven," begins with the Titans defeating frequent opponent Doctor Light, but Light's defeat is only important because it brings the heroes into contact with a magical prism.  The prism then splits heroine Raven into color-themed duplicates of herself. The remaining Titans must then corral the disparate Ravens in order to re-combine them into one entity, but little of their activities are focused on combat, even in the spoofy manner of INFERIOR FIVE.  Thus TITANS GO has the significant value of the mode, but not the narrative one.

On a non-related note, I'll add that one TITANS GO episode-- entitled "Books"-- does satisfy the narrative combative value.  However, the episode's primary focus is to make fun of the sort of thing critics like me do all the time: taking the primal experience of fictive enjoyment and making it "boring" through analysis and commentary.  It's a fair point, though it's not one that will dissuade me in any way.

REACH VS. GRASP

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?

This famous quote from Robert Browning's ANDREA DEL SARTO applies reasonably well to the distinctions I've been elaborating with regard to DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY.

In a literary world the idea of a character possessing a certain capacity to "reach" for goals and, in theory, to bring them into one's compass compares with the narrative value of *dynamicity.*

"Grasp," however, is a limitation imposed upon the capacity to reach for goals, implicitly from "outside" the subject's compass. In my critical system this aligns with the significant value of the *dynamis* applied to either a narrative's plot or its central character(s).  This significant value, quantified via the term "stature," is assessed by means of determining the Fryean mythos with which the plot and characters align, while characters alone are further determined by what I called "persona-stature" in this essay.

"Reach," in contrast, I quantify in terms of the dynamicity-ratings, which I examined last in this essay. In that essay I dealt with the problem that even all characters rated as "x-types" could not be equal.  Obviously "Dream Girl" is not as powerful in a physical sense as most of the other Legionnaires.  Yet because her predictive power can be used strategically, to extend the "reach" of the Legion's adventures and their control over circumstances, her "reach" is equal to theirs, and so has the same narrative function.

In comic narratives, the adventures are meant to have comic stature, and so a hero's ability to display power may have the same "reach" as that of an adventure-hero, but his "grasp" will be very different.  Sometimes powerful heroes win conflicts largely by luck, as is usually the case with the Inferior Five.  Sometimes they win purely through superior dynamicity, even as adventure-heroes do, as we see with Popeye or Ranma Saotome.  Yet in comedies the means by which the hero triumphs are less important than they are in adventure-narratives, because for comedies the essential point is to be amusing in some way, rather than to provoke excitement.

In various essays on this blog I've cited other ways in which the narrative's mythos-affiliation affects a focal character's *dynamis.*  I haven't used *dynamis* as much to apply to the four personas, but as I've established that they are governed by the "outside expectations" of the audience, the term applies no less to the personas than to the nexus of plot and character described by Frye's mythoi.

In the EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS series I devoted considerable space to outlining the ways in which various personas differed from one another in terms of the types of "will" they incarnated: first contrasting positive hero-figures with positive demihero-figures in PT. 3 and then a negative villain-figure with a negative monster-figure in PT. 4.  But I didn't explore any of them in terms of dynamicity or dynamis.

The term "monster" is almost as ambiguous as "hero," since the former can applied to characters who fully incarnate the stature of the hero-persona, as with the Thing.

In this sense, the Thing "monster" status does not speak to the type of will he incarnates: only to his physical appearance.  However, the Man-Thing can be deemed a monster in terms of both physical appearance and his persona.  The Man-Thing acts as one generally expects a monster to act, perpetrating acts of self-preservation, leavened with bursts of unreasoning hostility.  Within his own title, his combative adventures belong to the mythos of drama, while the Thing's belong to the mythos of adventure.

When the two are joined in a team-up, it is the Thing's adventure-mythos that dominates, though this is in no way an inevitable development.

Their differing mythoi determines one aspect of each character's "grasp," even though, as their clash makes clear, they share the same *reach* of their dynamicity.  But their personas are a separate factor in terms of their *dynamis-statute.*  Swamp Thing, for instance, might be claimed by the Man-Thing's mythos of drama as well. But despite being another species of muck-monster, he bears closer relation to the Thing in being a generally "heroic monster," rather than a monster who does good due to contingent circumstances.  He has the grasp of a hero within the mythos of drama, while Man-Thing has the grasp appropriate to a monster in that same mythos-- so that the latter swamp-creature has less in common with Swamp Thing than with Doctor Frankenstein.

TO THE POWER OF XYZ, PT. 2

In STATURE REQUIREMENTS I said:

...although the significant value of "conviction" provides an ancillary function in terms of how readers apportion value to different characters in different mythoi, the central value is best covered by the word "stature." 

Thus the original conception of the term "stature" was to distinguish the different audience-expectations within the four Fryean mythoi, as per this observation:

... the four mythoi each bestow a different type of *stature* upon their focal presences. Given my pluralistic stance, it would be incorrect to assume that a comic hero has *less* stature than a serious hero. The comic hero fulfills the stature appropriate to an unserious character, just as the serious hero does for his endeavors.

This stature qualifies purely as a "significant value," given that it depends on the audience's perception of the intentions of the narrative as either comic, dramatic, adventurous or ironic, rather than being a structuring element of the narrative, and thus a "narrative value."


In DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY I pointed out the problem with Northrop Frye's conflation of the idea of physical power within a narrative-- which I termed "dynamicity"-- and the idea of a "power of action" appropriate to a given mythos, which I termed "dynamis."  It was in this essay that I first advanced terms for the three Aristotle-derived levels of *dynamicity*: "...the X-type (for exceptional), the Y-type (for the merely good), and the Z-type (for less than good).

I then made clear in this essay that characters could possess great dynamicity but could have a stature resulting from their *dynamis* that acted in some fashion contrary to expectations.

...comic and ironic characters aren't necessarily less powerful overall than those of adventure and drama. What separates them is not lacking power to save themselves, but lacking *stature.*

In COMIC HERO VS. COMIC DEMIHERO I extended the term "stature" to apply not only to which of the four mythoi to which the narrative belonged, but also to the four "persona-types" with which I classify focal characters and/or presences.

...although Thunder does indeed have a different "mythos-stature" than a character like Mandrake, given that one belongs to the comedy and the other to adventure, in terms of "persona-stature" the two of them are closer to one another than either is to a demihero character like Thorne Smith's Topper...

This seems logical in that types of narrative form and types of focal personas must have different levels of stature according to their design by their creators.

The purpose of extending this concept to types of narrative dynamicity is to account for the way in which many stories find ways for characters of lesser dynamicity-- and thus lesser stature-- to conquer those with greater dynamicity/stature.  Whenever this formula is employed-- that of *megadynamicty* being overthrown by *mesodynamicity* (as with the film THE DEADLY MANTIS) or by *microdynamicity* (as with MIGHTY MAX), one is generally dealing with a refutation of-- or at least a temporary avoidance of-- the logic of the combative mode, which generally declares that exceptional force can only be overcome by exceptional force, or at least by exemplary force gifted with some measure of strategic ability, as we see at the conclusion of the film BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, cited here.

In the future this distinction may have some consequence for the "ethic of the combative mode" I mentioned back in March.