ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 3

 

Arguably a lot more uncanny narratives invoke passive potency than do marvelous ones...-- ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 2.

Aesop's famous tale, "The North Wind and the Sun," has often been used to describe the difference between "active power" and "passive potency"-- more typically known as "force and persuasion." The titular wind and sun make a bet as to who can make a certain mortal man take off his coat. The wind bombards the man with chilly gales, but that manifestation of force only makes the fellow clutch his coat around him more tightly. Then the sun slowly increases his heat-- and in due time, the man removes his coat of his own volition.

I just lied a bit, for effect. Both of the sky-entities are exerting force/active power; the sun's exertions are just subtler. A true illustration of passive persuasion might involve the sun assuming the appearance of another mortal, and in that form, he could mess with the coated man's head, suggesting how hot it was, until the power of suggestion caused the guy to remove his garment. Since the folktale-sun would not be exerting direct force, only indirect persuasion, my ad hoc revision of Aesop would fit the category I've termed "passive potency." The example loosely parallels that of Mulan's supernormal allies cited in ANOMALIES PT 1, who don't give the heroine any active aid, only bits of information or (often unhelpful) advice.      

In the quote above I mentioned the generalization that "the marvelous" most often deals with "power" and "the uncanny" with "potency," and in many past essays, I've drawn the distinction between marvelous and uncanny as that of "reality" and "fantasy," as in this statement from 2015's OUTRE OUTFITS OVERVIEW: 

When attire is not actually marvelous-- that is, when it does not confer marvelous power on a character, like Iron Man's armor-- it must conform to the rules of causal coherence. However, it can still be "uncanny" rather than "naturalistic" on the terms cited in POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2.  It's not that clothes "make the superman," as they do with Iron Man. But if they are uncanny, they can make the man SEEM LIKE a superman.

 

This is not so much a rule, though, as a broad generalization with respect to all twelve of the "uncanny trope" categories I devised.  (Tangentially, it doesn't look like I've done any surveys of all twelve categories here since 2014's THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2 -- and that was written before I severed the "outre outfits" category from those of "superlative skills" and "diabolical devices.") At present I can't think of any uncanny costumes that confer "passive power." They only confer "passive potency," in that they persuade witnesses to deem the wearers to be larger-than-life representations of justice or of corruption. 

However, in Part 2 I briefly referenced Tarzan. He doesn't "seem" like a superman within the uncanny domain; he would only "seem" like a superman if compared to a superman from the marvelous domain. But Tarzan possessing the utmost strength and speed attainable to a human makes his skill "superlative." Both Tarzan and Superman possess "active power" despite their disparate phenomenalities, while the previously mentioned Major Victory has only "passive power" by virtue of having been restored to life after his death. "Passive potency" applies to beings that may be marvelous or uncanny, but who operate more on the level of suggestion. Mulan's dragon is marvelous but cannot do anything beyond the level of "persuasion," and every hero who dresses up in a non-powered uncanny costume is using the art of persuasion to make himself seem more than normal. 

Finally, the best examples of "passive power" would seem to be in the category of "diabolical devices." As originally conceived, the Batarang was just a fancy version of a naturalistic boomerang, and so it possesses the same level of power when used. Aside from that usage, the Batarang can't do anything but look a little cooler than a regular 'rang.

However, if Batman attaches any sort of specialized tech to his Batarang-- even something as relatively simple as a smoke-bomb-- then it's no longer functioning as a boomerang, and the tech-addition registers as "active power" once more. Fin ally, examples of "active potency" are rare by my reckoning, with the most fruitful category being that of "enthralling hypnotism," since hypnotists are using specialized skills of persuasion. Somewhat similarly, the metaphenomenon that started these ruminations-- a Chinese doctor's use of weird acupuncture in LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING-- coheres with active potency, since the doctor was working with his patient's "chi meridians" to produce a curious metaphenomenal effect.

                  

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 2

 I encountered the word "anomaly" used as a literary term in a book I referenced here:

“Status quo” science fiction. . . opens with a conventional picture of social reality. . .  This reality is disrupted by some anomaly or change--invasion, invention, or atmospheric disturbance, for example--and most of the story involves combating or otherwise dealing with this disruption. At the story’s conclusion, the initial reality (the status quo) reasserts itself (ix).

Later in the quotation, it's clear that Frank Cioffi applies the term "anomaly" to isophenomenal works as well as metaphenomenal, given that he mentions "crime" serving the same disruptive function in a mundane detective story. One problem with his concept, though, is that the "status quo society" may just as anomalous to the reader's mundane experience as the entity/circumstance that disrupts the society. Thus Dick Tracy's status quo can accomodate anomalous, quasi-futuristic technology like the "wrist radio" in the detective's battle against a horde of freakish criminals, and the status quo of DUNE's Atreides family, with its space-opera resources, is disrupted by the resistance of the equally anomalous Fremen. Cioffi even mentions a similar work himself, Van Vogt's story "Black Destroyer," which pits the crew of a futuristic spaceship against a powerful alien creature. 

I spent all this time reworking Cioffi's overly simple schema because I want to rescue a perfectly good term for my own use, which only concerns metaphenomenal anomalies, whichever "side" utilizes them. And that leads me into a development of my somewhat neglected distinctions between "power and potency." given its fullest articulation here.      

In that essay I favored these definitions of "power" and "potency." 

POWER: The ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality

POTENCY: The power of something to affect the mind or body

That essay spoke of distinctions between "body" and "non-body" concepts, more or less derived from my reading of an Octavio Paz analysis. Now, in place of that dichotomy, I would favor the idea that an anomaly that displays "power" to be "active" in nature, while one that displays "potency" is "passive" in nature. 

Examples of powerful anomalies are legion, but the POWER AND POTENCY series mentions a number of anomalies, both uncanny and marvelous, in which the anomaly conveys more or less "indirect" influence. 

For instance, Part 4 and Part 5 both concern marvelous narratives about formerly mortal men who are brought back to life to fight evil, but who don't possess any special powers beyond the "passive" condition of having been thus resuscitated. Arguably a lot more uncanny narratives invoke passive potency than do marvelous ones, and in LUNATIC LAWMEN I referenced such examples as the psycho-film EYES OF A STRANGER and the near-future "alternate history" film RED DAWN. In both of these movies, the eminent icons-- one a monster and the other a hero-- were in terms of power almost indistinguishable from isophenomenal versions of similar menaces or champions. But both possess what I've called a "larger-than-life" quality, one that references their dependence on artifice more than verisimilitude-- and this emphasis upon the artifice of their natures too is a form of passive potency.     

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE ANOMALIES PT 1

 My December review of the comedy-western LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING caused me to knock down some of my old mental dominoes and set them up in new configurations.

The key factor to my conception of the "superhero idiom" is that the character must be a high-dynamicity icon (which can include all of the four personas, not just heroes) who has some "super" attributes or affiliations. As I hadn't watched FRENCHIE in its entirety for over fifty years-- though I'd frequently enjoyed discrete parts of the movie--I was surprised to find that it did include a minor metaphenomenon: that of a peculiar, non-realistic form of acupuncture. The metaphenomenon is not directly associated with either of the film's two "likeable villains," Frenchie (Brigitte Bardot) and her friendly enemy Maria (Claudia Cardinale), and neither of them even witnesses said phenomenon. The audience alone bears witness while the movie's "unlikable villain," murderous Doc Miller, is given the acupuncture treatment by a Chinese doctor, a treatment which both heals Miller of his wounds but also delays him long enough to keep him from impeding the Frenchie-Maria dust-up. After the fight, Miller shows up and throws some weight around, only to get killed, almost as an afterthought. But even the small metaphenomenon of pseudo-acupuncture shifts FRENCHIE's world away from the domain of the standard isophenomenal western. 

I decided to include FRENCHIE as one of the "superhero idiom" films on my GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA blog, but this got me thinking about some of the narratives that I tended to disallow in earlier posts here. For instance, in the 2016 essay THIRD PRESENCE, PERIPHERAL, I then favored the concept that if the metaphenomenon was peripheral to the narrative action of the eminent icon, the icon, no matter how megadynamic, was not metaphenomenal in nature. Of the handful of works I examined, the best known was the 1998 MULAN. The only metaphenomena I recall from the Disney film were two Sub icons who are theoretically on Mulan's side-- an intelligent cricket and a dinky ancestral dragon -- but they contribute nothing to Mulan's climactic battle with the Mongol chieftain, which seemed to me then to be isophenomenal in nature. Now, however, I would tend to say that just the presence of two metaphenomenal entities in the story makes the entire narrative metaphenomenal. So now I would include Disney's Mulan as a member of the superhero idiom as well.   

It's possible that to some extent I remained slightly influenced by the conceptions of the "rational Gothic" writers of the late 18th century and of their spiritual kindred, Tzvetan Todorov. Both Todorov and the rationale Gothicists viewed all types of fantasy as reactions against the "reality" experienced by real-world readers and thus viewed both uncanny and marvelous phenomena as escapes from reality. I've never agreed with that simplistic view, but I can look at some of my older essays, like THIRD PERSON PERIPHERAL, and see a small tendency on my own part to privilege the world of the isophenomenal. My 2025 essay QUICK NUM NOTES marks a shift in this viewpoint, in that now I see both uncanny and marvelous phenomena as equal departures from consensual reality. This doesn't invalidate anything I've written on Prime icons who lack high dynamicity, though. Hubert Hawkins of THE COURT JESTER exists in a fictional world where hypnosis can transform an ordinary fellow (albeit with some terpsichorean skills) into a master swordsman. But he himself remains low-dynamicity. Because Hawkins is never able to consciously tap the sword-skills the hypnotist brings out in him, his world is dominantly uncanny, but Hawkins doesn't possess any metaphenomenal attributes or affiliations that play into his combative status.

This part of the essay ran so long that I didn't get to the "anomaly" part, so that'll be for Part 2.                     

  

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 5

This is just a quick follow-up to Part 4, which discussed the knotty problem of imputing "power" to fictional characters who have no power save that of being alive when they used to be dead. SPOILERS in advance.

In Part 4, I noted that Golden Age character Major Victory was one such character. Some afterlife judge returned a nameless patriot to life, giving him a costume and a mandate to fight the Axis. One story imputed a limited super-power to Victory, but this is seemed to have been created for the writer's convenience in that one tale. However, most readers would still deem Victory a superhero, if only because he wears a costume.

My newest inductions into the superhero idiom don't wear costumes, but like Victory, they are characters who were dead and became alive again through supernatural means. I've just finished my review of the 1999 telefilm PURGATORY, and in that review, I noted that though the story starts with a band of outlaws, it actually centers on five characters-- the one savable member of the gang, and four residents of the town Refuge. The four residents are all famous gunfighters-- Wild Bill Hickock, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, and Jesse James-- who, like the rest of the townfolk, have been brought back to life to serve a purgatorial sentence, to see if they're worthy to enter heaven.

The four reborn gunfighters, obviously, don't look like anything but ordinary men in ordinary clothes, and they have no special abilities. The rules of the game seem to suggest that they can be wounded by the guns of the mortal outlaws, although none of them are so wounded. The principal threat to their well-being is that, by fighting the bad guys, they may lose their chance at heaven. Nevertheless, there's no question that the climactic gunfight has the same combative value that it would in any commonplace western-- and since one side of the fight is fought in part by dead-alive men, it also becomes relevant to the world of metaphenomenal narratives.

Thus the four gunfighters of PURGATORY would be another example, like others discussed in this series, where the heroes have "potency" but not "power" as such.

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 4

While reading some online Golden Age comics courtesy of the site COMIC BOOK PLUS, I investigated the now-obscure company known as "Chesler/Dynamic." Scarcely any of the superheroes published by Chesler became renowned, even within the small enclave of Golden Age enthusiasts, but one character caught my eye because he (almost) fits my parameters for the concept of "potency" as expressed in earlier sections of this essay-series.

MAJOR VICTORY didn't create much fuss in his time. He only had about four-five adventures, and though he appeared in three issues of his own comic, all of the Major's stories in the comic were reprints of stuff that had appeared earlier, particularly in DYNAMIC COMICS, where the Major almost lost the cover-spot to Chesler's hero "Dynamic Man."

Nevertheless, he had an interesting origin. Unlike many costumed heroes, Victory never has a name. He's introduced as a guard at a wartime facility. A saboteur breaks in, and the guard sacrifices himself trying (and failing) to defuse the saboteur's bomb.

Simply coming back from the dead was nothing special even in the 1940s, nor was it unusual to see a revival take place thanks to some celestial presence with some vague patriotic appeal-- this one being "Father Patriot," who I guess is the propaganda-version of "Father Christmas." Anyway, the mentor revives the heroic no-name and gives a flag-themed costume, resources, and a superhero name so that he can go forth and battle the Axis evil. It's a decent enough costume, but one wrinkle I for one have rarely encountered. Major Victory has no powers here. He shows off admirable athleticism as he boards a plane and manages to take out an enemy squadron--

But he had no real powers as such, unlike comparable types like Kid Eternity and the Fighting Yank.

To be sure, there's one incident when Victory gets his strength ramped up by hearing a simulacrum of the Liberty Bell. But this seems to have been a toss-off, not integral to the original idea, particularly since he doesn't use the super-strength for the remainder of the story.

So if one were going to ignore the temporary super-strength and focus only on what makes the Major "marvelous," it would be the fact that he's come back from the dead, Since he tries to avoid getting shot or falling from great heights, the implication is that he can't come back to life ever again, either in his original body or another one. So he's marvelous not in terms of his personal powers, but in what might called an "existential" sense: the fact that he's a man alive when he shouldn't be. This provides a strong parallel to the line of thought in POWER AND POTENCY PT. 3, where I discussed various time-traveling protagonists whose only "super power" was that of existing in a time-frame where they never would have existed, except for a time-travel device. I will attempt to explore these parallels in the concepts of potency at a later time.

LUNATIC LAWMEN

While messing around in Merriam-Webster's online thesaurus in search of a title for this essay, I was surprised that a search for synonyms for "heroic" included the following:

crazy, foolish, half-witted, insane, lunatic, mad, nutty

I think this connotation of "heroic" occurs only under specialized circumstances, as when someone of faint heart thinks that a hero is "crazy" for attempting some heroic act. Yet it's a fortuitous cross-comparison, because I gave some thought today on the significance of "crazy heroes" for my NUM formula.

As I've noted on many occasions, there are certain works which just barely seem to cross the threshold of the naturalistic into the uncanny. In this 2012 essay, I gave three examples of thriller-films that had a very "naturalistic" look overall, though I asserted that one of them, EYES OF A STRANGER, registered as "uncanny" thanks to certain diegetic factors:

EYES debuted in theaters at a time when psycho-slasher films were still in ascendance, but this film's killer has little in common with the more colorful fiends of the period: he isn't deformed, wears no distinctive mask or clothing, and uses no special gimmicks or bizarre methods to commit his murders-- all in spite of the fact that one of the writers credited with the EYES screenplay also worked on the seminal 1980 FRIDAY THE 13TH.  Nevertheless, for all the naturalistic touches here, the script does give the villain a larger-than-life quality that confers a sense of dread to the proceedings.  For one thing, though the psycho-rapist never earns a distinctive nom du crime, on occasion the heroine, news reporter Jane Harris (Lauren Tewes), dubs him "the Phone Freak" because he preys on women after tormenting them with lascivious phone calls. 

I mentioned the example of "the Phone Freak" earlier on this blog in my more recent essay ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4, as one of a handful of examples of "psycho killers" who attained a "larger-than-life" quality that I subsumed under the term "artifice."

But this conception returns me to the line of thought expressed in my "Power and Potency" series, where I drew a comparison between G. Wilson Knight's thoughts on Shakespeare's character Hamlet and the general idea of the "perilous psycho."

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.
Until reading Knight, I had always classified HAMLET and most of its film adaptations as instances of the trope I call "phantasmal figuration." However, Knight's description makes Hamlet sound very much like the type of uncanny-or-naturalistic figure of another trope: "the perilous psycho."  In terms of the play proper, one may argue back and forth whether or not Hamlet, in feigning madness, may have actually gone mad. But whether the Danish prince is mad or merely infected with a pestilential cynicism, his attitude has given him a special "potency," even though he has no special power-- just like all of the "psycho" characters I've studied.

The "psycho" usually takes the persona of either a monster or a demihero, but I began thinking: is it possible to view any mostly naturalistic "heroes" as being uncanny purely because they're, well, somewhat crazy?

Often I've put forth examples of heroes who are uncanny in terms of their appearance. In this essay, I asserted that the oater-hero the Durango Kid was one such uncanny hero, even thought there was absolutely nothing to separate one of his adventures from a Roy Rogers western except for the Kid's uncanny garb.

I've also defined some heroes as being in an uncanny phenomenality due to the monsters they oppose, as I did in my review of 1984's FEAR CITY, wherein traumatized boxer Matt Rossi makes it his business to take down a weird serial-killer.

But to be a direct parallel to the example of EYES OF A STRANGER, my hypothetical "lunatic lawman" would have to have nothing special about his appearance, his resources, or his antagonists.

Now, as it happens, vigilante lawmen are frequently figures of terror to criminals in a manner analogous to the way serial killers terrorize ordinary citizens. But since I've said that the Phone Freak invokes "dread" rather than just simple "fear," as my 2012 essay argues in detail, a mostly naturalistic hero would have to do the same thing. This is less common for heroes than for monsters, since heroes are usually pretty flamboyant about who they are and what they do.

One possible example of a "crazy hero" type might be the ex-'Nam vigilante hero. This hero-type was largely initiated by the incredible popularity of the paperback hero The Executioner, who in 1969 began his run of over 400 novels and almost certainly influenced Marvel Comics' Punisher. I've read only one of these novels and so could not make any determinations about the series without much more research. However, according to my system, the only way that such a hero could be uncanny would be if his acts were so crazy that they went beyond the basics of the heroic type. For instance, here's a description by blogger Joe Kenney of a particularly horrific execution pulled off by one of the Executioner-imitators, the Penetrator:

The battles are mostly one-sided, with the goons no match for Hardin's skills. Regardless the action sequences are all well staged and expertly rendered, particularly a great scene where Hardin gets a small army of mobsters stuck in a canyon and lobs white phosphorous down upon them. This is probably the most brutal treatment I've ever seen delivered to the mob in a men's adventure novel! 

Having read few works in this genre, I probably can't do more than make general hypothetical statements. However, another possible example of a "crazy hero" might be seen in 1984's RED DAWN. I judged this film as uncanny largely because of it's "what if" situation of showing a Russian invasion of the United States. But the heroes of the film, Jed Eckert and his "Wolverines," have taken a certain uncanny potency by virtue of following in the footsteps of aboriginal Americans. Thus Eckert may be the "crazy hero" who offers the best contrast to the almost naturalistic "crazy monster."

GEOMETRIC APPROXIMATIONS OF THE TWO SUBLIMITES

As one of my intermittent attempts to better illustrate the complexity of my theory of the two sublimities, I decided to explore some visual comparisons.

In the March essay WITH ENFOLDED HANDS, I compared the three phenomenalities to the three distinct parts of a seed. Though I still like this image, I have to admit that it doesn't capture the way all of these abstractions interact in the world of finished artworks. I noted in that essay that even in a work as devoted to loopy fantasy as Carroll's ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, some references to coherence still had to exist for the story to make sense. Thus the Cheshire Cat may take his leave of Alice in a fantastic manner, but when the feline fades out, it still serves the same narrative purpose as if he simply got up and walked away.

Thus I turn to the pleasures of geometry, and find more satisfaction in describing the three phenomenalities as three interlocking circles.

Each of the circles should be seen as representing not a distinct section of physical matter, as is the case with the seed, but rather a non-physical "field of force." Because there are no true physical boundaries between the three phenomenal domains, it may be easier to imagine each of them having limited influences over the other than would be the case with my earlier seed-metaphor.

In this 2014 essay I described the workings of the combinatory-sublime according to the two principles of causality, "intelligibility" and "regularity" (later superseded by a better term, "coherence," which I've edited into this passage):

...the combinatory-sublime arises rather from the transgression upon the reader's expectations in terms of intelligibility and causal coherence. DIRTY HARRY, a naturalistic work which conforms to general expectations regarding intelligibility and coherence, 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 coherence but not intelligibility; being "anti-intelligible," it has a higher potential to arouse the combinatory-sublime. And STAR WARS, which violates both intelligibility and coherence, has the greatest mythicity of the three in reality, as well as the greatest potential for symbolic combinations and thus for the combinatory-sublime.

This geometrical arrangement approximates the way the phenomenalities evolve from one another. Had I found on the Net an image of three rings that were both interlocked and surmounting one another, that would have hewed closer to my conceptual premise. But this one works tolerably well. The red ring is the naturalistic phenomenality, representing adherence to both coherence and intelligibility. The blue ring, only indirectly tied to the Region of the Red, flouts both coherence and intelligibility. The interceding green ring takes one principle from each of its neighbors: abiding by the principle of causal coherence like Region Red, but transgressing the principle of intelligibility like Region Blue. (If I cared about exact parallels, Region Red ought to be Region Yellow, and the parallel would be stronger-- but it doesn't exactly weigh heavily in my scales.)

Thus, for the sublimity of the combinatory. But what about the dynamic-sublime, to which I've devoted much more space on this blog?

Here's the geometrical visual on the sublimity of power:

My reason for choosing concentric circles is because each "field of force," and the sublimity it represents, registers as independent of the other two, perhaps more like three planetary orbits rather than interlocked rings. I established this principle in SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PT. 3:

As far as the film DIRTY HARRY is concerned, there is no being more powerful than Harry Callahan, though some of his foes, particularly Scorpio, are capable of challenging the hero.  The same holds true for Lee and his foe Han in ENTER THE DRAGON, and for Luke Skywalker and his opponent Darth Vader in the first three STAR WARS films. 

To pursue the orbit-simile, Dirty Harry's "planet" is one that obeys all the laws of a naturalistic cosmos, so that's why his type of power elicits the *admiration* of the audience.

The "planet" of DRAGON's Lee, however, allows for a transgression of the law of intelligibility. This doesn't precisely give Lee more physical power than Dirty Harry, but the flouting of intelligibility means that Lee *seems like* he possesses a greater *potency,* as defined here in a three-part essay series beginning here. This quality of anti-intelligible potency gives rise to the audience's *fascination.*

And finally, Luke Skywalker exists on a "planet" that allows for the transgression of both intelligibility and causal coherence. This doesn't necessary mean that every protagonist in a marvelous phenomenality necessarily has powers that transgress coherence, just because Skywalker does: obviously Indiana Jones does not have such powers. But he too exists in phenomenal worlds wherein such powers are possible. Thus, when a non-powered hero like Indiana Jones triumphs over, say, a Thuggee priest who can rip peoples' hearts out of their chests, Jones acquires roughly the same aspect of the "dynamic-sublime" as Luke Skywalker-- and both characters elicit the audience's *wonder* (also sometimes called *exaltation* in various essays here).

However, this aspect is only "real" on the "planets" of the marvelous phenomenality, because it is a narrative, rather than a significant, value. Both Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker have no power, or even potency, within the narrative worlds of Lee and Harry Callahan, because these are worlds where causal coherence cannot be transgressed.

I'm strongly considering adding yet another specialized term to my already overburdened lit-crit continuum: "domains." The word would connote all of the above-described fields of force, whether they pertain to combinatory values or dynamicity values. In the near future I'll probably experiment with it in a planned follow-up to UNCANNY CITY.  But what will be the use of it, at least over the long haul, is more than I can say.

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 3

In Part 2 I've defined "potency" as a "dynamicity that is not a dynamicity," one that I applied principally to works of the uncanny. I believe that this will be the dominant use of the term in my system. By virtue of this logic I can assign greater potency, say, to the Durango Kid as opposed to Roy Rogers, even though the two characters have equivalent levels of power and appear in narratives that are almost identical, and the only uncanny element is the former hero's masked identity.

However, as I have experimented with categorizing many types of marvelous protagonists, it's come to my attention that some of them, too, are distinguished only by a type of potency, one dependent on the conditions of their temporal placement.

Mark Twain's 1899 A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT is among the earliest novels in which a man travels to a time not his own, and uses the knowledge of his own time-period to advance himself.

To an extent the same process is true of Wells' 1895 THE TIME MACHINE, though there are fewer examples of the Time Traveler using his knowledge of the past to enhance his survival.

Now, neither of these works is directly relevant to my project of categorizing combative types in fiction, for these are not combative works.  But both the Twain novel and the Wells work have influenced combative works, and therefore they also influence the questions of what powers and/or potency those works' heroes possess.

The 1966-67 teleseries THE TIME TUNNEL is one of the more unqualified combative works in the oeuvre of producer Irwin Allen. Two uncommonly athletic young scientists, Tony Newman and Doug Phillips, become victims of the U.S. government's "time tunnel" experiment, so that both men find themselves hurled willy-nilly from one time-period to another. Not every episode contained a big concluding battle, but Newman and Phillips frequently used both their fists and their futuristic knowledge against such adversaries as the ancient warriors of Troy, King John and Billy the Kid.  If one were evaluating them purely in terms of what "powers" they possess, Doug and Tony would be entirely naturalistic. However, the knowledge that they bring from their own time into other times confers on them a strategic "potency" as well.

Nor is this process unique to examples of people from our time traveling to times past. In the 1986 teleseries OUTLAWS, five men from the American Old West-- a sheriff and four relatively noble "outlaws"-- are unceremoniously transported to America in the 1980s. Like Newman and Phillips, the outlaws have no special powers to help them survive in the modern world, though the former westerners acclimatize well enough to start their own detective agency. Unlike Newman and Phillips, the outlaws generally don't have any special knowledge derived from their time that helps them in the alien time-period.  However, their status of being men from another time-period confers upon them a marvelous "potency," given that they view everything they see in the 1980s through a 1880s perspective.

At present this seems to be the only way in which I am likely to apply the concept of potency to the category of the marvelous. That doesn't mean I won't find other applications, though.

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 2

I've studied various colloquial definitions of the words "power" and "potency," and, as mentioned before, some dictionaries make them virtually identical. The Oxford online reference, though, suggests a discontinuity useful for my purposes:

POWER: The ability to do something or act in a particular way, especially as a faculty or quality

POTENCY: The power of something to affect the mind or body

These primary definitions show a tendency to speak of "power" in terms of physical action, whereas "potency" can affect "mind or body."

This in turn lines up with my distinctions between the marvelous and the uncanny. I've consistently defined the marvelous as some object, entity or occurrence that breaks with causal law, be it something nominally justified through some new scientific technique-- Verne's Nautilus, obviously-- or something with no justification at all, like a cartoon rabbit who can defy gravity when it happens to be funny to do so.  Not all marvelous entities register as having high dynamicity, as I pointed out here, yet even a character whose marvelous nature gives him no special power of physical action still displays a "power" to flout natural law.

Going by the Oxford definition, though, "potency" can be used to affect both the physical and the mental planes of existence, or, as Octavio Paz put it, "body" and "non-body."  Paz's dichotomy was useful to me in sorting out the three phenomenalities with respect to a bifurcated causality in THE INTELLIGIBILITY QUOTIENT PT. 2:

...both the "naturalistic" and "marvelous" phenomenalities are unitary in terms of what I chose at that time to call the aspects of "body" and "non-body"-- also roughly comparable to Cassirer's "causality" and "efficacy." In contrast, the phenomenenality of "the uncanny" was one in which "body" was at odds with "non-body."

G. Wilson Knight's essay on HAMLET implies this opposition between body and non-body when, as I showed in Part 1, Knight imputed to the moody Prince of Denmark a power that was not a literal power, saying that "the poison of [Hamlet's] mental essence spreads outward among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal."  When he wrote this, Knight was not being at all literal, as his use of the acid simile demonstrates. Hamlet has no more physical power than any other human being, but because he has "held converse with death," he *SEEMS LIKE* he has become something more than human. But the "seeming" takes place purely upon the mental/spiritual/"non-body" plane of being.

Until reading Knight, I had always classified HAMLET and most of its film adaptations as instances of the trope I call "phantasmal figuration." However, Knight's description makes Hamlet sound very much like the type of uncanny-or-naturalistic figure of another trope: "the perilous psycho."  In terms of the play proper, one may argue back and forth whether or not Hamlet, in feigning madness, may have actually gone mad. But whether the Danish prince is mad or merely infected with a pestilential cynicism, his attitude has given him a special "potency," even though he has no special power-- just like all of the "psycho" characters I've studied.

The primary subject of the aforementioned INTELLIGIBITY essay was to survey instances of my ten phenomenality tropes, in both their naturalistic and uncanny manifestations. I demonstrated that even though all of the cited examples fell within the bounds of causal coherence, the "uncanny" examples broke with causal intelligibility while the "naturalistic" ones did not. Now I refine that statement to add that the process of breaking with causal intelligibility is one that also confers a "potency" that is not "power."

The above phrase *SEEMS LIKE* proves applicable to all of the chosen examples, and, I assume, to any other examples that might be provided:

The Moby Dick of Melville's novel is identical in POWER to the Moby Dick of John Huson's 1956 film-adaptation. However, the original White Whale surpasses his naturalistic imitation in POTENCY, precisely because he *SEEMS LIKE* he is more than an ordinary whale.

Tod Slaughter's naturalistic perpetrator of "bizarre crimes" Perceval Glyde has no more POWER than the actor's more famous character Sweeney Todd, but Sweeney exceeds Glyde in POTENCY because he *SEEMS LIKE* more than a common criminal.

Hawk of the Wilderness and Tarzan are equals in POWER-- indeed, Olympic star Bruce Bennett played both-- but Tarzan clearly *SEEMS LIKE* he is more than a mortal man, even though he is not-- and the same applies to the huge horde of animal-skinned jungle-people who have imitated Tarzan.

And finally-- since I need not repeat the formula for all ten-- "perilous psycho" Joanna Eris of EYE OF THE BEHOLDER kills men for the crimes of her father, just as the fellow who popularized the very term "psycho" kills women for the crimes of his mother. But even though Norman Bates isn't a particularly powerful example of a psycho-- as I mentioned here-- he *SEEMS LIKE* he has a far greater ability to dispense death.

In contrast to the Oxford definition above, then, I will use "potency" exclusively to denote this semblance of a "non-body" form of *dynamicity.* However, since in earlier essays I've defined "dynamicity* exclusively in terms of that power that affect physical bodies within a given narrative, at best potency must be interpreted as extrinsic, rather than intrinsic. to that narrative-- which may line it up more properly with my conception of the combinatory-sublime.

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 1

[Hamlet] is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with death... Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental essence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. They are helpless before his very inactivity and fall one after the other, like victims of an infectious disease.-- G. Wilson Knight, THE WHEEL OF FIRE, 1930.

Later in the essay Knight says that Hamlet "is, as it were, the channel of a mysterious force, a force which derives largely from his having seen through [all the other characters]."

Obviously, when Knight calls Hamlet a "superman," he's not speaking of him in the comic-book sense of the word; he's almost certainly referencing Nietzsche's concept of an ubermensch whose mental outlook simply outstrips that of ordinary men. I find Knight's idea of a force which is not really a force-- one that derives from a simple change in perspective-- to be intriguing for my category of the uncanny as expressed by the NUM formula.

Whenever I have written about either the Shakespeare play or various cinematic adaptations, I've almost entirely analyzed it in terms of the trope I call the "phantasmal figuration." This means that there is some entity or occurrence in the narrative that is witnessed by a given subject-- usually a viewpoint character-- and that said entity/occurrence is dubious as to its true nature. Many films use this trope to conjure with "ghosts" who are merely masquerading human beings. HAMLET, in contrast, has a ghost whose existence one cannot doubt, though the spirit's true nature is unfathomable. Knight calls it "the devil of the knowledge of death," but in contrast to many of the "specious spectres" of Gothic literature, the ghost is not the star of the play. The imaginative center of the play is Hamlet, who brings death to almost every major member of the Danish court, outstripping his uncle by far.

Until reading the Knight essay, it hadn't really occurred to me to think of Hamlet as having an infectious potency. But he is a man transformed by a "converse with death," who has in a sense become one with Death, not least because the ghost bears his own name. He does not literally channel any "mysterious force" to bring down the Danish court, and he doesn't even out-maneuver his foes in the cunning manner of his literary ancestor, the original Amleth. Yet he does seem to be protected by something more than his author's desire to give him good or bad fortune as the story demands.

I pored over all of the "phantasmal figuration" films I had thus far reviewed for my movie-blog. In all of them, none included a phantasm that somehow transformed the outlook of the subject who viewed it. The closest thing I found were films in which some individual dressed up like a spectre in order to make a murderer recall his or her crimes, but no "infectious potency." as I've termed it, appears as a result of this exposure.

However, in the essay OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT 2, I did discuss a certain interesting interface between the villain who conceives of a "bizarre crime" and the detective who solves it.

 ...the villain of SPECKLED BAND may conceive of his bizarre murder-method, but the hero mirrors the villain's ingenuity by being able to deduce the plot by piecing together such disparate clues as a useless bell-cord and a mysterious whistling sound-- the one being the snake's method of entry, the other being the method by which the snake's owner calls the creature back up the cord.  In this story, Sherlock accomplishes his feat of detection by drawing upon his encyclopedic knowledge of exotica, rather than by making deductions based on reasonable premises.  In contrast, Holmes' solution of the HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES mystery depends not on special knowledge but on a careful observation of available facts.  Holmes' knowledge of exotica then may qualify him as an uncanny entity in this story, just as a similar body of knowledge elevates Professor Van Helsing in the DRACULA novel to a status above that of an ordinary individual.  

So is there an "infectious potency" between the villain's conception of the crime and the sleuth's fathoming of it? If so, the interface is far more beneficial to society than anything one sees in HAMLET, for all that the hero is also engaging in a kind of "detective work."

Knight's essay has got me thinking further on the subject of a "potency" that is not quite the same as "power," even though some dictionaries view the words as essentially covalent.  Part II will be devoted to these thoughts.