NEAR MYTHS: [LI'L ADAM"], THE SPIRIT (1947)

 This seven-page SPIRIT strip, dubbed "Li'l Adam" in reprints, was one of many clever parodies Will Eisner produced in the postwar period. "Adam" is arguably somewhat mythic in terms of one narrative commenting upon the underlying propositions of other strips. 

Following an establishing page, the hero, preparing to leave on a fishing trip, is forced to return to the crimefighting grind when Al Slapp, creator of the popular "Li'l Adam" hillbilly-humor strip, is severely injured by an unknown assailant. The manager of Slapp's syndicate helpfully implicates two other comic-strip rivals of Slapp: Elmer Hay (Harold Gray) and Hector Ghoul (Chester Gould). The manager also mentions a "Maggie Malone," but as I'll discuss later, there was good reason that both Eisner and the Spirit did not pursue that particular quarry.

   Page 3 establishes one of Eisner's main conceits: all of the suspect-artists both look like, and hang out with, characters from the strips being parodied. Thus Elmer Hay, creator of the "Little Homeless Brenda" strip looks like Daddy Warbucks of "Little Orphan Annie," and has in his company doppelgangers for Annie's dog Sandy and Warbucks' Hindu aide Punjab. (Annie/Brenda is represented by a drawing on the wall.) After dispatching the minor threat of Punjab, the Spirit learns from Hay that he had no reason to attack Slapp, because "Adam" has so outpaced "Brenda" that the older strip only excites interest in the public whenever Slapp skewers the orphan-girl.   

The Spirit then seeks out the low-rent apartment of Harold Ghoul, who looks just like Dick Tracy, while in a flashback Slapp is seen to look roughly like Li'l Abner. Ghoul spins an even sadder tale of woe, telling the hero how he poured his heart and love into the exploits of hero-cop Nick Stacy-- only to see Slapp's parody, "Fearful Fooznick," reduce the heroic policeman to a publishing non-entity. The distraught artist tries to take his own life and is knocked out by the Spirit-- but by the time Slapp has emerged from his coma at some hospital, the Spirit has doped out that the syndicate manager tried to kill Slapp for reasons also related to economic disadvantage. For an end-joke Slapp gets clocked by a dead ringer for Li'l Abner's pappy, albeit a Pappy who's got bodybuilder-muscles like his "son."

I took these images from this extant but discontinued site. The comments-section contains some interesting speculation, that Eisner probably intended this story to be part of a phony "artist-feud" between him and Capp-- but if so, Capp never reciprocated by spoofing the Spirit. Other respondents mention that Capp also participated in a "phony feud" with Allen Saunders of "Mary Worth," and that Capp also spoofed "Peanuts" in addition to "Dick Tracy." However, the most consequential spoof in the history of "Li'l Abner" was Capp's attempt to spoof the popular novel GONE WITH THE WIND. Margaret Mitchell-- aka Eisner's "Maggie Malone"-- assailed Capp with so much legal firepower that, despite the law's protections of parody, the artist and his syndicate decided to discontinue the WIND parody, with Mammy Yokum explaining to the audience why the story would never be finished. Contrary to Eisner's pronouncement on Maggie Malone, Mitchell in real life had in fact shut down Capp's mockery and forced an independent syndicate to do her bidding. I'm sure in 1947 Eisner knew that Capp's mockery had nothing to do with Mitchell never writing another novel, since GONE WITH THE WIND was such a hit that not only was Mitchell made wealthy, she was unlikely to ever write anything that would not be overshadowed by that one big novel. But I doubt Mitchell ever read Eisner's toss-off joke-- and as one of the blog-respondents noted, Harold Gray probably took no notice of the fake feud.

     Perhaps less well known than the Eisner strip, however, was this "Hey Look" strip by Harvey Kurtzman, appearing one year after Eisner's strip. According to my recollection of a Kurtzman interview in COMICS JOURNAL, the artist, in addition to drawing assorted junky humor strips for Timely, got permission from Stan Lee-- who admired Kurtzman's turn of mind-- to do one-page, free-form humor strips under the title "Hey, Look." Usually there was almost no point to these strips from the creator of MAD Magazine (four years in Kurtzman's future). However, using a schtick not unlike MAD's habit of distorting the names of celebrities or characters for parodies, the unnamed speaker of this one-pager sticks the consonants "Shm" in front of every name evoked, beginning with "Shmill Shmeisner." There's not much question that the story Kurtzman is referencing is "Li'l Adam," though I doubt the majority of Timely's kid-readers knew what the monologist was talking about. They might have just barely grasped that "Shmill," whoever he was, had parodied Li'l Abner and Dick Tracy, which was true. Interestingly, Kurtzman does NOT mention "Shmeisner's" parody of Little Orphan Annie, though the figures of that strip would have been just as recognizable. 

Instead, Kurtzman makes it sound as if Chic Young's "Blondie" was somehow part of the mix. I don't think either Eisner or Capp ever parodied "Blondie." However, though I can't verify it from GCD, I have read somewhere that Kurtzman might have done some work for the Timely comic "Rusty," whose star "Rusty Rumple" was a knock-off of "Blondie Bumstead," complete with an idiot husband who was the series' goat. Whether Kurtzman worked on the "Rusty" strip or not, "Hey Look" also appeared in the "Rusty" comic, so Kurtzman had to be aware of the comic's existence. Maybe Kurtzman was implicating himself in the whole "knock-off/parody" concept-- though in 1948 he could hardly have guessed how dependent his own career would center upon parody.         

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS

 A random thought struck me the other day: that, if I was trying to convey what distinguished a story's centric icon (assuming there's just one) from all the other icons in the story, I might have said that all centric icons were "organizational matrices." As soon as I thought this thought, I realized that even to most literary pundits the phrase would be about as clear as the view from beneath the La Brea tar pits.

The thought did take me back to some of the various ways I'd attempted to think about centricity in terms of categorical abstractions, at least going back to this key essay, 2018's KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY, PT. 1. In that essay, I cited a remark by author Nancy Springer about her conviction that the true hero of Scott's IVANHOE was not Ivanhoe:

Who is the real hero of Ivanhoe? Certainly not Wilfred of Ivanhoe himself, for never was a title character more palely drawn. Even though he is the common thread that strings the novel together, he is all but invisible... He is a pawn, exercising no control of the events around him, a piece of plastic with almost no personality...

 I refuted this in part by comparing Ivanhoe, a monadic centric icon, with the example of The Spirit, a serial centric icon:

From all my statements on centricity, it should be plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own. For me Ivanhoe is as much the star of Scott's only story with the character as the Spirit is of his long-running serial adventures. Springer's metaphor of a "common thread" catches some of the sense of Ivanhoe's role in the narrative, but she apparently does not realize how often famous works may be organized around an essentially unremarkable character. The Spirit is not really any better-characterized than Ivanhoe-- Eisner tended to refer to his hero as something along the lines of a "big dumb Irishman"-- and as I mentioned above, most of the mythicity of the Spirit's serial adventures inhere in his supporting characters, just as figures like Rebecca, Richard and Robin Hood are more mythic than Ivanhoe himself. In both cases the under-characterized, under-mythicized character functions as an organizing factor.   

Later in the same essay, I admitted that there were times in which a viewpoint icon might be very dull and NOT be the center of the story, using the example of Lemuel Gulliver. But Gulliver does not provide an "organizing factor" as do Ivanhoe and The Spirit. That's because GULLIVER'S TRAVELS is not about Gulliver, but about the exotic places to which he travels, making it *exothelic* rather than *endothelic." I've discoursed about these structural distinctions elsewhere, but they're not germane to the problem under discussion here, which concerns defining the nature of centricity.

However I may choose to define centricity in light of the "organizing factor" thesis, this line of thought puts paid to my brief consideration of centricity as a form of resonance, which I advanced in this 2023 essay, and then barely used thereafter. The metaphor of resonance, as I expressed it there, was something like whatever voice in a narrative happened to be the loudest-- which is not unlike the poor logic I critiqued Nancy Springer for. In future, if I use resonance at all, I'll try to keep it closer to the cited definition by Northrop Frye, where resonance connotes a reader's ability to see the universal in the particular.  

So if centric icons within a narrative are "organizational matrices," is there a better term to assign to the organizing principle? Astute readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) will guess that the previously unused term of "eminence" will now assume that position, but the rationale must wait until Part 2.  

    

 

NEAR-MYTHS: "EUSTACE THE TURKEY" (THE SPIRIT, 1943)

I'm aware of no fully mythic Thanksgiving stories. But Will Eisner managed a cute near-myth with a tale of a turkey who is seemingly spared his grisly holiday fate, but who ends up sacrificing his life to save his fellow birds (sort of). Strangely, Eisner does not make the predictable comparison to the Nazarene, but to-- that gloomy Dane, Hamlet?

Just for good measure, here's a bit from GIGGLE COMICS in which an endangered turkey pleads for the main cat-hero to become his "Lincoln."

ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES PT. 3

 At the end of 2020's EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2, I wrote:

The same dynamic also applies to those serials that often or always focus upon “guest stars”who never again appear in the series. Early installments of Will Eisner’s SPIRIT are structured like almost every other adventure-hero feature, in which the Spirit helps good people and vanquishes bad people. However, even in the earliest years Eisner sometimes devoted stories to one-shot characters who seemed to take center stage, in that their triumphs or tragedies received the most attention. However, the Spirit was still the thread holding all of those one-shot characters together, and so he retained the greatest stature, even in stories like THE CURSE, in which the hero barely appears. As discussed in HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE, the only exception to this centricity formulation appears in certain anthology titles. When a continuing character merely appears as an interlocutor—Jorkens in Arthur C. Clarke’s TALES OF THE WHITE HART, or the many “horror hosts” in comic-book titles—then whatever focal presence inspires the most conviction in each story possesses the greatest stature-vector, though not necessarily the greater charisma-vector.

But, it's occurred to me from time to time, what if the interlocutor telling the stories is also a part of them, as the Spirit always has potential agency in the anthology-stories in his series? 

My conception of "agency" came up at the end of last year, with GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1, where I defined the term thusly:

..."agency" will be used to describe interordination comparisons, which will be seen to possess both narrative and significant values.

The relevance of such comparison to the current question goes like this: if the Spirit can have dominant agency even in all of his stories, even those where he does next to nothing, then why would the same NOT be true of icons who appear in all the stories within a self-contained anthology?

In the above essay, the reason I split agency into both "narrative" and "significant" values was because it's more than evident that central characters may have no agency at all within the diegesis of their stories, but may have it in an extra-diegetic sense. My example was Willy Loman of Miller's play DEATH OF A SALESMAN, who has no power within his story to change his circumstances, but has agency insofar as his fate manifests the primary concerns of the author's will. Similarly, though the serial character of The Spirit may not have much narrative agency in all of his stories, he has significant agency as the source of the authorial ethos that ties together all the characters in his world.

So, when an interlocutor-like character participates within the diegesis of a story, one must ask if the author's will is most fully expressed in this icon's actions and outcome. 

The 1981 HEAVY METAL presents viewers with a frame-story in which a glowing green sphere, billed in credits as "Loc-Nar," accosts a young girl, whose father he has just killed, and tells her stories about the many ways Loc-Nar has spread, or tried to spread, evil throughout the universe. 

In one of the narrated stories-- which the listening girl views, as if Loc-Nar were a crystal ball-- Loc-Nar has only a minor effect, encouraging a robot to go sex-mad in "So Beautiful, So Dangerous."

In two stories, "B-17" and "Captain Sternn," Loc-Nar wreaks capricious changes on human beings, reviving dead pilots as zombies in "B-17" and mutating a not-quite-innocent individual in "Sternn." 

In the story "Harry Canyon" Loc -Nar, pretending to be a priceless artifact, leads two subordinate characters to their doom. However, the centric character is never even aware of Loc-Nar's power, and fortune so favors him that he makes a pile of money off the weaknesses of those who seek to profit from the artifact.

In the other two stories, "Den" and "Taarna," Loc-Nar's influence takes different shapes. The entity does not directly seek to tempt the heroic Den, but other characters present Den with the possibility of using Loc-Nar to rule his new world, and Den nobly refuses.

 In "Taarna" Loc-Nar seeks to dominate an entire future-world. Some denizens of that world summon the heroine Taarna to oppose Loc-Nar's forces, and after several battles, Taarna makes a direct assault upon Loc-Nar. The entity makes its only direct attempt at temptation, offering Taarna rulership, but the warrior-woman destroys Loc-Nar-- which, through some unfathomable resonance, causes the interlocutor Loc-Nar in the frame-story to perish as well. The movie ends upon a triumphant note, even though of the six stories, Loc-Nar succeeding in promulgating evil in three narratives, but did not wholly succeed in the other three. 

In essence, the same paradigm applies to Loc-Nar that applied to Willy Loman. Loc-Nar has considerable narrative agency, but the point of the author(s) is to show that his agency can be defeated, and so in each story the centric icon is whatever entity the Loc-Nar impinges upon. Therefore he does not have significant agency across all six stories, as the Spirit does in all of his tales.

However, some of the characters appeared in other comics-stories before their adaptation in HEAVY METAL, and of course Loc-Nar, as conceived by the movie's authors, did not appear in the stories of "Den," "Captain Sternn," and "So Beautiful So Dangerous." Therefore, since these are "familiarity icons" being "crossed over" with the "novelty-icon" of Loc-Nar, HEAVY METAL qualifies as a crossover-film.

(Note: the name Loc-Nar comes from one of the "Den" comics-stories but there's no connection between that name and the movie's icon. Additionally, though Wiki says that "Harry Canyon" and "Taarna" are derived from two separate Moebius stories, neither qualifies as an adaptation.)

MYTHCOMICS: "THE SHADOW OF DUSK" (THE SPIRIT SECTION,, 6-16-42)

 Though READ COMICS ONLINE has become my go-to site for scans of obscure comics, even they couldn't provide assistance for this essay: reviewing "The Shadow of Dusk," thus far reprinted only in the fifth issue of THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES, and nowhere online.

The titular adversary featured in "Shadow," in fact, was only used four times by Will Eisner (and any collaborators involved). Mister Dusk first appears in June 1941, and appears to be a loony who kills a man for no particular reason. He then comes across the Spirit, invites him to his lair to meet his crazy wife Twilight (called a "savage" but not given any particular nationality). Inevitably both Dusk and Twilight try to kill the hero, who captures them and has them put away in an asylum. The two of them get free that same year for a Halloween story and then obligingly go back to the asylum once the holiday is over. Both of these are amusing but not particularly mythic.

The third story, though, shows Eisner in a different sort of antic moon-- metaphysically antic, that is. He starts out with a splash panel that shows the Spirit standing in a roughly cruciform position with his own amplified shadow behind him, while to the right appears a quote from a Walt Whitman poem about the questionable identity between the speaker and his own shadow.

The story proper opens with a thunder-storm erupting over the asylum where Dusk is imprisoned. (His wife Twilight is mentioned but not seen.) The madman dances in his cell to the "symphony" of thunder and  lightning, only to stop when he notices that his shadow has wandered off. Providentially the storm then blasts open Dusk's cell, so that he can go looking for his missing other half.

Meanwhile, at the Spirit's lair, his buddy Ebony sees a menacing shadow show up and try to strangle Ebony's own shadow. The bad shade disappears when the Spirit shows up.

Dusk goes looking for his other half at police HQ, and Commissioner Dolan, apparently infected by the villain's nuttiness, takes Dusk home with him. Dusk then handcuffs and slugs Dolan and abducts the cop's daughter Ellen. Moments later the Spirit shows up at Dolan's house, bursting to tell the commish about Ebony's weird experience and to go into a diatribe about shadow-folklore-- at least until the hero finds out his girlfriend has been kidnapped.

The Spirit and Dolan decide to check out the villain's former hideout, and the Spirit is highly amused to see that Ellen has somehow turned the tables on Dusk, threatening him with nothing but her fists. Possibly Dusk was de-powered by the loss of his shadow? In any case, Dusk's shadow appears and starts strangling the shadow of the hero, who chokes as if personally assaulted. However, the Spirit just happens to have brought along a camera, and he "captures" the spirit in the camera-film. (Here one presumes Eisner was playing around with the belief attributed to primitives, that a camera could capture the spirit of anyone photographed.) 

Dolan then hauls Dusk back to the asylum. The Spirit shows the camera-film to a scientist, who confirms that the image of the shadow is there. However, somehow the shadow gets loose again, and when it's seen elsewhere, the Spirit and his scientist friend confirm that the image has vanished from the film. At story's end the shadow remains on the loose and is never reunited with Dusk.

With or without his shadow, Dusk makes one more appearance, but in reduced stature. In a story spoofing the late forties' rise of Jane Russell's star, Dusk tries to kill the Spirit and launch a blackmail operation-- all far from the sustained looniness of his first three appearances.

EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2

The visual metaphor of vectors mentioned in the previous essay has led me to invert one of the ideas stated in STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT.5. In that essay, I made a brief comparison between an earlier centricity-term, “stature,” and a newer one, “charisma.” I’ve now decided to reverse my formulations in that essay and to give stature more importance than charisma.

When I consider the base meanings of the words, stature signifies the result of physical growth, while charisma suggests a mysterious inner quality that appears from we-know-not-where. I first spoke of stature with respect to the Fryean mythoi, extrapolating the term from Aristotle’s assertion that the characters of tragedies were weightier than the characters of comedies. Thus my term “stature” connoted the different levels of conviction that readers could find in characters belonging to each of the mythoi. It now occurs to me that the idea of conviction also applies to centricity; the focal presences that occupy center stage are those around whom a given narrative revolves—which in turn means that they inspire maximum conviction in comparison to other presences within said narrative. I used “charisma” to denote this special status. Yet now it occurs to me that it makes more sense to speak of a superior vector of stature. For instance, in KNIGHTS OF COMBAT ANDCENTRICITY PT. 1, I examined Nancy Springer’s opinion that the titular hero of Ivanhoe was not the star simply because he was not as interesting as other characters in the novel. I rejected this idea. Yet I must admit that Ivanhoe does not have much of what one would call “charisma” in the ordinary sense of the word. However, what he does have is “stature.” He is the hero because his moral compass inspires maximum conviction in the reader. One may not believe that Ivanhoe resembles anyone in real life, but as the embodiment of the author's principal idea the knight is the glue that holds this particular novel together. The same principle would apply to those ensembles that I’ve judged to be distributive in nature, such as the Blackhawks and the Avengers.

However, charisma can be used to account for the fact that subsidiary characters in a narrative may hold more sheer appeal than those who enjoy the greatest stature. I would not disagree, for instance, that in IVANHOE the character of the Jewess Rowena proves more interesting than Ivanhoe. But now I would say that this fact merely indicates that Rowena has a charisma-vector superior to that of Ivanhoe, while he still has a stature-vector superior to hers. In terms of centricity, though, stature is always the sole indicator.

Charisma only affects centricity indirectly, and only in the evolution of serial narratives. For instance, in season 2 of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, the creators introduced Spike as a more confrontational enemy for the heroine. One could easily hold the opinion that Spike possessed greater charisma than Buffy, even though, being both a subordinate character and a villain, he could not possess greater stature. Hypothetically, the producers might have chosen, for whatever reason, to make Spike a co-equal partner to the Slayer, and then he might have attained a distributive stature. The showrunners did not go in such a direction, and so, for the length of his tenure on the BUFFY show, Spike always had a stature-vector unequal to that of the non-distributive heroine. Then the character migrated to the show ANGEL—which for some time had been of the distributive model, with Angel sharing stature with other members—and only here, whether they outshone others in charisma or not, Spike finally acquired stature equal to that of the other regular members.

This model also proves useful for describing a work in which a subordinate character seems to steal the center stage from the apparent star. For instance, I’ve written here that even though BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE is dominated by the story of the Joker’s origin, it’s still a “Batman story.” This is because the story does not diverge from the dominant model of the continuing Batman series, wherein Batman always possesses greater stature than any of his villains. However, there’s no question that in KILLING JOKE the Joker possesses a charisma-vector greater than that of Batman, whom, as I remarked in my review of the graphic novel, often seems in the nature of a tired old cop.

The same dynamic also applies to those serials that often or always focus upon “guest stars”who never again appear in the series. Early installments of Will Eisner’s SPIRIT are structured like almost every other adventure-hero feature, in which the Spirit helps good people and vanquishes bad people. However, even in the earliest years Eisner sometimes devoted stories to one-shot characters who seemed to take center stage, in that their triumphs or tragedies received the most attention. However, the Spirit was still the thread holding all of those one-shot characters together, and so he retained the greatest stature, even in stories like THE CURSE, in which the hero barely appears. As discussed in HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE, the only exception to this centricity formulation appears in certain anthology titles. When a continuing character merely appears as an interlocutor—Jorkens in Arthur C. Clarke’s TALES OF THE WHITE HART, or the many “horror hosts” in comic-book titles—then whatever focal presence inspires the most conviction in each story possesses the greatest stature-vector, though not necessarily the greater charisma-vector.

MYTHCOMICS: "MAD MOES" (THE SPIRIT, 1947)

For a city boy, Will Eisner occasionally displayed a flair for emulating the feel of country folklore. MAD MOES isn’t quite as good as his two-years-later hillbilly-yarn THE CURSE, in that the former jams a few too many events into its short space. But Eisner does succeed, more than in other tales using personification of non-human things or entities, in transforming a force of nature into something akin to a deity.

Eisner begins in a mock-Biblical mode, telling the reader that “In the beginning there was the desert, the dust, Mad Moes the river, and Lizard.” The character named Lizard is one of Eisner’s many eccentric old coots, and his nickname presumably stems from his habit of lazily sitting in the sun outside his shack, erected on a small island amidst the river. But Lizard is only important as an ally to Mad Moes, “a no good, shiftless, ornery river.” “Shiftless” in this case means being useless to most forms of life, for a caption relates that for vague reasons the river can’t be used for human trading and even fish can’t live in it. The “ornery” part comes about every spring, when snow melting in the mountains causes the river to flood the surrounding habitations of man—all except Lizard’s shack, which always gets miraculously spared.

The state authorities finally get fed up with Moes’s madness, and plan to dam the river. Surveyors ask Lizard for assistance, but the old fellow runs them off, claiming that he and Mad Moes are bosom friends. Much as the authorities would like to evict Lizard, they live in some peculiar state where eminent domain is trumped by squatters’ rights. Nevertheless, the old man can’t keep the authorities from setting up a boom town to house the personnel building the dam. But to make sure Lizard stays out of the way, the forces of law and order designate the land around Lizard’s island to be a national park, so that if he leaves, he gets arrested for trespassing. The story moves so fast that no one asks where Lizard gets his food (leftover victory garden?), and the scene shifts to the technical hero of the tale.

The Spirit happens to be in a neighboring city, breaking up an illegal gambling operation (supposedly aimed at “minors”) and sending its operators packing. But experienced criminals know how to use the law to their own ends. The gambler Stud Sharpe and his moll Queeny find their way to the boom town, which spells easy fleecings, and then stumble across Lizard’s island-shack. When they find out that the old guy’s shack is technically outside the bounds of the law, the gamblers set up a very humble version of a poker palace on his island. By luring in the local dam-workers, the gamblers not only line their pockets, they please Lizard, who’s willing to do anything that impedes the dam’s construction.

The unlikely ploy works, and the dam-project suffers from absenteeism (sort of like the dam-workers, who are talked about but not seen). Because the authorities are stymied by their own laws, they resort to calling in that famed “outlaw,” the Spirit. While the vigilante lays his plans for acing out the gamblers, the occupants of the shack have a falling out. Lizard tries to get romantic with Queeny, and to entice her, he reveals that he has a cache of gold nuggets, a bounty perpetually washed up on his island by the shiftless river. Up to this point the gamblers have apparently been planning to cut out as soon as they made a pile, but the promise of gold changes their plans. Sharpe easily swindles Lizard out of the rights to his land (a good trick, since Lizard doesn’t actually own the land) and kicks the old man out. Providentially, the Spriit shows up, and with a lit stick of dynamite forces Sharpe to play cards for everything the gamblers made off their victims.

While the card-game proceeds, Lizard seeks to invoke the river-god for vengeance. Though Eisner tells us that the dam-work has stalled, apparently it got far enough to confine part of Mad Moes’s bulk behind a sluice gate— and because it’s been raining hard, Moes once more has enough water to unleash a killing fury. Lizard unlocks the sluice gate, hoping that his friend the river will annihilate his former allies in the shack.

Back at the shack, the Spirit shows that a clean gambler can always beat a dirty one, recovering all the lost winnings. This is apparently not a good enough reason to extinguish his stick of dynamite, which has to remain lit so that Lizard can use it. Best not to ask how Lizard, swept along by the river-waters, manages to reach the island before the worst of the deluge, but the old coot grabs the dynamite, trying to use it against Sharpe and Queeny. Instead, the explosion somehow blocks off the deluge, so that no one perishes. Presumably once the Spirit delivers the workers’ lost wages, they hunker down and get the job done, for the last panel shows “the great renegade river” at last penned up behind a mammoth concrete dam, and the forces of law and order triumphant. Since the authorrties no longer need to isolate Lizard’s shack, the park-order is rescinded, and what was once Mad Moes’s river-bed is paved over for a superhighway. Yet in a visual sense at least, Lizard continues to attach himself to Mad Moes like a votary of a deserted temple, for now his shack has become a gas station, and the desert rat is still there, sunning himself.

Online research shows multiple origins for the name from which the river takes its monicker. “Old Man Mose” can be viewed as a generic term for any old guy, as a figure in American folklore, as a character in a LI’L ABNER story and as the subject of a Louis Armstrong song, possibly based on the Al Capp strip. Eisner’s use of the name plays to his love of puns, but the process is the reverse of what he would later do in THE CURSE. There, the famed bay known as the Zuiderzee is transformed into the name of the story’s female character, Cider Sue. Here, Eisner tinkers with the name of a folklore-figure and makes him into a river, a river somehow coeval with a real old man. Though MAD MOES is haphazard in terms of verisimilitude, this doesn’t affect Eisner’s ability to use a force of nature to illustrate the mythic war between law and lawlessness, a war that ends by dethroning a rather ornery minor god.

HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE

In KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 1, I argued against Nancy Springer's view that Ivanhoe was not the central character of the book named after him. I compared him to the serial hero The Spirit, saying in part:

From all my statements on centricity, it should plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own. For me Ivanhoe is as much the star of Scott's only story with the character as the Spirit is of his long-running serial adventures. Springer's metaphor of a "common thread" catches some of the sense of Ivanhoe's role in the narrative, but she apparently does not realize how often famous works may be organized around an essentially unremarkable character. The Spirit is not really any better-characterized than Ivanhoe-- Eisner tended to refer to his hero as something along the lines of a "big dumb Irishman"-- and as I mentioned above, most of the mythicity of the Spirit's serial adventures inhere in his supporting characters, just as figures like Rebecca, Richard and Robin Hood are more mythic than Ivanhoe himself.

To adjust this slightly to the new terminology introduced in the STATURE REQUIREMENTS essays,  both Ivanhoe and the Spirit enjoy the centric position because their respective authors have invested them with charisma, which is identical to the "organizing factor" I used in place of Springer's "common thread." In the case of non-serial hero Ivanhoe, his charisma is established early in the novel and remains the main organizing factor based on the "charismatic action" he takes then, even though other characters later shine more brightly. Ivanhoe doesn't even get to best the villain at the climax, though the hero's mere presence does ensure the villain's defeat.

Now, though one might say that Ivanhoe "plays host" to the supporting characters of his novel-- making him what I would call a "non-distributive" type-- the Spirit, as a serial hero, has a related but distinct dynamic. Though the Spirit is the undisputed star of many of his exploits, he plays very little role in some SPIRIT tales, sometimes appearing for no more than a single panel, having no actual impact on the story's events but still serving as an organizing factor. It should be a narrative given that no serial feature lasts long by focusing only upon the hero: usually he is required to become involved in the dilemmas of other people, whose stories take the forefront in a literal sense even if they still remain under the aegis of the star. In STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 5, I pointed out how the Joker provides most of the plot-action in THE KILLING JOKE, while Charlie Collins is the plot-center of the TV-episode "Joker's Favor." But I maintained that these were still Batman stories, that his charisma was only distributed to a partner such as one of the Robins.

The Spirit's only long-term partner was Ebony, but none of the Spirit's charisma was distributed to him, nor was it distributed to any of the many characters who provide the main plot-action of stories like "Wild Rice"  or "The Curse." The Spirit is thus non-distributive. There are many other ensembles that are arguably more varied than that of Batman and Robin: the three-man team of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in Classic STAR TREK, Gil Favor and Rowdy Yates in RAWHIDE, and some (though not all) of Jason's allies in THE ARGONAUTICA. However, though these ensembles are distributive in the sense that there isn't just one non-distributive character at the center of the mix, one might view the ensembles themselves to be non-distributive in comparison to a given narrative's support-characters. Thus all of the fabled TREK side-characters, despite their fame, do not receive any distributed charisma due to the original serial's concentration on its "holy trio."

Structurally, though, many exploits of THE SPIRIT are much more obvious about their status as "short stories brought under the SPIRIT umbrella" than are comparable TREK stories in which Spock, Kirk and McCoy have to involve themselves in, say, the personal affairs of the problematic lovers in "Metamorphosis." Both the Spirit and the TREK-team are non-distributive with respect to all of the (usually) one-shot characters they encounter, but the Spirit seems much more akin to the figure of "the storytelling host."

I won't try to trace the lineage of the storytelling host in modern times, but will note that one of the oldest examples of a continuing host would be Lord Dunsany's "Jorkens tales." In modern media everyone is familiar both with real-life celebrities playing the role of story-host, such as Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock, and with totally fictional characters created for this purpose, as with EC Comics' famed characters the Old Witch and the Crypt Keeper.

But here's the rub: though it could be argued that the presence of, say, the Crypt Keeper provides a familiar point of reference within a given narrative, he does not become an "organizing factor" because he's not actually a part of any of his stories (with the exception of one humorous "origin of the Crypt Keeper" tale). Thus none of the charismatic action from the author centers upon the Crypt-Keeper, Doctor Graves, Baron Weirwulf or any of these fictional types, except in those rare cases where they become focal presences in a given story. In contrast to the way Charlie Collins is a player in a BATMAN story, or Zephram Cochrane is a player in a "Kirk, Spock and McCoy" story, the stars of a TALES FROM THE CRYPT story like "Lower Berth" are the two monsters who join in unholy bliss-- not the familiar Crypt Keeper.

MYTHCOMICS: "BLACK GOLD" (THE SPIRIT, 1947)

Like most of the SPIRIT stories I've classified as mythcomics, "Black Gold" is not one of the better known stories in the canon. To make a loose generalization, I would say that most of the stories that other critics esteem-- whether for Will Eisner's mastery of storytelling tropes or for their appeals to comedy or sentimentality-- don't represent Eisner "digging deep" into his own power of symbol-making.

I've occasionally commented that Eisner showed a penchant for spoofing ethnicities and nationalities, and one can see an example of this in his comic Arab villain Ahmed-the-Trader in the late-1947 story "Money, Money." However, about six months prior to that tale, Eisner produced a somewhat elegaic look at the Arab world, playing off the West's discovery of oil-- a.k.a. "black gold"-- in various North African countries following the end of WWII.

Eisner begins the story with an improvised, but none the less serious, elegy for the waning fortunes of an Arab landholder, Abu Ben Adim. (Presumably the author chose the surname to signify "son of Adam," for reasons that become clearer later.) Though in antique times Abu's tribe was rich, in 1947 his land has become unfruitful and Abu is almost the last of his line. Like the original Adam, Abu has two quarreling sons, Abu's being named Hanash and Ali. Both are, to borrow from a much later Christian text, "prodigal sons" insofar as they both deserted their father's orchards to seek success in the Western world. The only reason Hanash and Ali return to their father's house is because he's on his death-bed, and both "jackals," as Abu calls them, want nothing but their unearned inheritance. Further, both of them are thoroughly rotten. Hanash in particular brings a prisoner in tow: none other than the crime-fighting Spirit. As for Ali, he has a Western woman in his company, though her face is cloaked by a veil, and as soon as he receives his bequest, he heartlessly leaves the woman behind, presumably having enjoyed some romantic tryst with her previously.

As for the bequest, Abu leaves to Ali all of his land, which Abu considers barren, and bequeaths the "family sword" to Hanash, though in dying he curses both sons for their faithlessness. Hanash believes that he's been given the stick's short end, since both brothers know that the Ben Adim land is rich in oil, and that Western petroleum companies will pay top dollar for access. Hanash retaliates by making a particularly odd attempt on his brother's life: bludgeoning him with the covered-up body of the Spirit.

This doesn't serve to kill Ali, but while one of Hanash's henchmen takes the crimefighter away for an eventually fatal encounter, Hanash executes Ali, impaling Ali with the family sword, and in effect "exchanging" their bequests.. Ali's widow pretends to go along with Hanash, who then decides to kill off the Spirit by shooting the bound and covered figure. To no reader's surprise, it's soon revealed that the hero escaped and left the henchman bound and covered, so that the henchman dies and the Spirit can keep following Hanash. (Hanash seems a particularly dim villain, not to even check the face of the enemy he plans to execute.)

Within a few pages of this fast-paced tale, Hanash makes plans to sell off the deed he's stolen from his dead sibling, and the Spirit, trailing the villain, learns that the veiled woman is none other than his old sparring-partner P'Gell. This time the money-hungry adventuress is working hand-in-glove with the Western powers to make sure her employers get the deed, and the Spirit is fine with that, so long as he still gets to take Hanash into custody for his assorted crimes.

The story then rushes to the big twist ending: P'Gell's employers don't want just the land, they also want the family sword with which Hanash killed Ali, because there's a map on the sword that will guide the buyers to the only oil cache on the Ben Adim land. Crazed by this revelation, Hanash escapes and runs into the desert, intending to regain the sword from his murdered brother's body, but he simply perishes in the desert heat. Eisner then adds a double twist, revealing only to the reader that Ali survived his stabbing for a time. Ali crawled away from the scene of his murder, trying to slake his thirst with water, and all he found was-- oil.

In Kitchen Sink's 1986 reprint of "Black Gold," commentator Dave Schreiner elicited from Eisner the observation that "If I were doing the story today, I'd have done something about Israel becoming a state." Though this did not take place in real history until 1948, I would guess Eisner knew, even in 1947, that revolutionary Jews in Palestine were trying to oust British rule with the object of forming such a state, which become possible when the Brits left and the Israelis defeated the Arabs in the 1948 war. However, "Black Gold" is a much more mythic story by not referencing politics directly. Archaic Israel is mentioned only fleetingly, and the real bone of contention stems from the quasi-colonial efforts of the European powers to get access to the oil hidden with the earth controlled by the impoverished Arabian people. That said, Eisner certainly does not make the European powers any sort of villainous figures, and even P'Gell is relatively tame this time around. One may hazard that for Eisner the Europeans' interests would have been in line with those of America, while the interests of the Arabs would have been, to say the least, unfriendly to the interests of Jews everywhere. The idea of the cursed bequest brought to my mind the wrangling between two other Biblical siblings, Esau and Jacob, in that Jacob manages to steal Esau's birthright. In "Black Gold," though, both siblings attempt to supplant one another, and end up bringing about one another's deaths. Whether or not this is a comment on the dwindling fortunes of Arabs as Eisner saw them in 1947 is up to the individual reader.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE

Once more I return to the endlessly fascinating subject of the process of domain-transgression, of moving from the domain of the subcombative to the combative, from the isophenomenal to the metaphenomenal, from the functional to the super-functional, and so on. In FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN, BURNING BRIGHT, I used the term "amplitude," or more specifically "peak amplitude," to designate the energy a creator needs to bring to a work to move from one level to another:

Wheelwright is not saying that there is an archetype of "Eagle-ness" that sends its *eidolos* down to the huddled masses that they might worship the Glory of the Eagle. The "characteristic amplitude" is not bestowed upon the "eminent instances" by something outside history, and yet, the eminence of the eagle is not *simply* the humdrum concatenation of all the particular times that various human cultures decided that eagles looked cool, as a materialistic blockhead like Roland Barthes would insist. Wheelwright compares his notion of "archetypal content" and "amplitude" to Goethe's concepts of beauty, though personally I think Kant's concept of the beautiful and the sublime might make a better comparison.

I enlarged upon this idea with respect to functionality in THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE PART 3:

"Peak amplitude," then, represents the artist's ability to go beyond the mean values of both modes, and to "storm" into the more rarified domains of the sublime. Of course the artist will always have some need of the mean values, what I've also called "the purely functional." But the term amplitude may serve better to bridge abstract concepts like "functional" and "super-functional," or any other such concepts I continue to explore here.

One "abstract concept" to which I've not yet applied the "amplitude" concept is the knotty problem of assigning serial works to a given domain-- that of the combative mode, or of the metaphenomenal-- when all stories in the series don't share the same characteristics. I first addressed this in 2012's  CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST, putting forth the idea of a "51 percent rule:"

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  Only an unqualified 50/50 split between mythoi would make such a determination useless, but the paucity of these exceptions proves the rule: most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

Yet I decided that this was not quite enough. Therefore I articulated the idea of "active shares and passive shares" in an essay of the same name, seeking to explore why it should seem to me that, say, a gunfighter who fought just one metaphenomenal threat was an example of a passive share, while another gunfighter who fought a greater number of metaphenomenal threats-- though not even close to a "51 percent majority"-- comprised an "active share."

Still, even this was an imperfect solution, given that in the real world of high finance, active minority shares are still based on their numerical superiority over passive minority shares. If I were to state that RAWHIDE KID could be metaphenomenal based on 7% of his adventures, then why would I not state that the teleseries LOST IN SPACE was in the combative mode, since 23% of that show's adventures qualified as combative, as I put forth in PASSIVELY AGGRESSIVE:

Since 19 episodes out of the total of 83 were combative, this means that 23% of the show's episodes featured megadynamic forces in contention. In my analysis of Marvel's RAWHIDE KID stories from 1960 to 1973, I found that only about seven percent of that character's stories were metaphenomenal, but I still judged that the *WAY* they were employed gave Rawhide a "minority active interest" in that phenomenality. However, once one is below the 50th percentile, the quantity does not matter with respect to judging either phenomenal or combative elements. I judged that the Rawhide Kid saga showed a repeated intent to associate the hero with metaphenomenal elements, and that these became a vital part of his mythos. John Robinson and the Robot sometimes accomplish superhero-like feats-- Robinson sword-demifighting his way through an army of androids in "Space Destructors," or the Robot defeating a universe-conquering "robotoid" in "The War of the Robots"-- but these seem to be anomalies in the "mythos" of this series.

However, there was a better way to speak of this distinction than the perhaps confusing references to a given serial work's "mythos." Thus I return to the distinction Northrop Frye made in his essay "Archetypes of Literature:"

We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer's total pattern we 'see' what he means.

Since both the original run of THE RAWHIDE KID and the original broadcast of LOST IN SPACE are completed serials, it's possible to look back at them and gain a "mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance." Neither serial satisfies the "51 percent rule," which might be best compared to one of Frye's "narrative values." But RAWHIDE KID satisfies the significant value of the metaphenomenal, giving it an "active minority share." By contrast, LOST IN SPACE  does not satisify the significant value of the combative mode, for the reasons stated above, and so it proves a "minority passive share."

This linking of two disparate critical concepts, then, provides a more systematic rationale for the verdict announced at the end of KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2:

...it's often occurred to me that the Spirit himself might not be a combative hero, were I going purely by the 51 percent rule. Yet over the years I've refined this theory to take in the possibility that a series, such as that of the Spirit, may participate in the combative mode even if the majority of the character's individual adventures are not combat-oriented. In my final post on the LOST IN SPACE series, I mentioned that the series, despite various spectacle-oriented episodes, had a "dominant ethos" that was "directed away from combative resolutions." This is pretty much the same as saying that the dominant "significant value" of a series can overrule any disparate elements in the series. I have not yet applied this principle to stand-alone works like IVANHOE, but I have already implied that the subcombative significant value of TROILUS overrules the effect of any battle-scenes in the play. Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 2

Though it's possible that I'll encounter some exceptions, there seems no way to demonstrate the persistence of the narrative combative value [in a given work] unless there is some sort of spectacle-oriented struggle at or very near the climax.-- PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX.

"Centricity" with respect to the Walter Scott novel IVANHOE, was addressed in Part 1, and in this section I'll be addressed the other subject in the post-title: combat-- or, more specifically, the way combat is handled at the climax of IVANHOE.

I wrote PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX in 2013, about a year after I settled on a definition of the combative mode in this essay. For the most part, I've been satisfied with the broad applicability of the statement seen above, but now that I've read Scott's most famous work, I'm glad that I hedged my bets somewhat with the statement about "exceptions." In this case, the exceptions don't "prove the rule," but they do make it necessary to expand the rule somewhat, to account for special cases.

For most of the novel, Scott arranges events that lead the reader to expect a major fight-scene at the novel's climax, between the title character and the principal villain, the Templar Knight Bois-Guilbert. It's established that the two of them previously clashed, with Ivanhoe coming out the victor. Their quarrel is not specified, but given that much of the story concerns the cultural tensions between English Saxons like Ivanhoe, and their Norman, French-speaking overlords, like Bois-Guilbert, it stands to reason that the knights probably quarreled for cultural reasons. Scott knows that by novel's end the truculent Saxons will be relatively placated when the righteous Norman Richard the Lion-Hearted ousts his bad Norman brother John. But even with that foreknowledge, Scott gives the reader every reason to want to see another "bad Norman," Bois-Guilbert, bested in direct combat.

Further, the two men are indirectly romantic rivals. Bois-Guilbert falls in love with the lovely Jewess Rebecca, and after taking her and her father prisoner for purposes of ransom, Bois-Guilbert is even willing to sacrifice his position with the Templars if Rebecca becomes his willing consort. However, Rebecca has conceived a "forbidden love" for Ivanhoe, though he is engaged to another woman, one of Christian upbringing. Ivanhoe's first encounter with Rebecca is marked by attraction on his part as well, but unlike Bois-Guilbert, Ivanhoe represses that attraction, obedient to the cultural laws forbidding intermarriage between Jews and Christians. (This is probably one reason a lot of readers don't like Ivanhoe, for not flouting those laws, though admittedly he's already defied his father earlier, by opposing that noble's intention to make a political marriage for Rowena.)

But later events oblige Ivanhoe to play the knightly rescuer to this "forbidden fruit." A group of Templars, having seen the extent of Bois-Guilbert's affection for the Jewess, accuse Rebecca of literal witchcraft, and plan to execute her. She can save herself only if a champion fights on her behalf, and Bois-Guilbert is assigned to oppose any champion she may summon. At this point Rebecca has once again rejected him, but he's still in love with her, and he tells himself that as long as he doesn't actually have to fight an opponent, her murder will be the fault of the Grand Templar. Then, Ivanhoe appears, and the two square off for a joust. The reader expects that Ivanhoe, even though he's taken wounds in a previous battle, will call upon inner reserves of strength and best his formidable enemy anyway. But that's not how Scott handles things.

The trumpets sounded, and the knights charged each other in full career. The wearied horse of Ivanhoe, and its no less exhausted rider, went down, as all had expected, before the well-aimed lance and vigorous steed of the Templar. This issue of the combat all had foreseen; but although the spear of Ivanhoe did but, in comparison, touch the shield of Bois-Guilbert, that champion, to the astonishment of all who beheld it reeled in his saddle, lost his stirrups, and fell in the lists.

Ivanhoe, extricating himself from his fallen horse, was soon on foot, hastening to mend his fortune with his sword; but his antagonist arose not. Wilfred, placing his foot on his breast, and the sword’s point to his throat, commanded him to yield him, or die on the spot. Bois-Guilbert returned no answer.

“Slay him not, Sir Knight,” cried the Grand Master, “unshriven and unabsolved—kill not body and soul! We allow him vanquished.”

He descended into the lists, and commanded them to unhelm the conquered champion. His eyes were closed—the dark red flush was still on his brow. As they looked on him in astonishment, the eyes opened—but they were fixed and glazed. The flush passed from his brow, and gave way to the pallid hue of death. Unscathed by the lance of his enemy, he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.

“This is indeed the judgment of God,” said the Grand Master, looking upwards—“‘Fiat voluntas tua!’”

Scott does not enlarge upon the "contending passions" that cause Bois-Guilbert to expire without taking any real injury, though the author devotes a great deal of space before the death to showing that the Templar's desire for Rebecca torments him. He has the power to kill Ivanhoe, but if he does so, Rebecca also perishes-- and since he cannot simply surrender to Ivanhoe, his only alternative is apparently to "will himself to death." The mythopoeically inclined reader may choose to view Bois-Guilbert as the "negative image" of Ivanhoe, given that he can act on the desire that Ivanhoe will not countenance.

But what does the Templar's death mean, within the structure of the novel? There's no shortage of fight-scenes throughout the story, for IVANHOE is a novel aimed primarily at male readers. True, there are a number of scenes that take issue with the 13th-century code of honor, not only with respect to the treatment of Jews but also regarding the noblemen's nasty habit of raising money by ransoming people. Rebecca is every bit a spokesperson for the feminine penchant for peace as Ivanhoe and Bois-Guilbert are proponents of the masculine penchant for conflict.

And yet the central appeal of the novel is not really a critique of the knightly codes of honor and combat; it's more of a side-comment. In the past I've shown how certain works proved subcombative precisely because the author led readers to expect a major conflict, and then undermined that expectation. In MYTHOS AND MODE 2 I wrote this of Shakespeare's CORIOLANUS:

Despite the suggestions that [longtime enemies Coriolanus and Aufidius] may finally sort out the question of superiority by play’s end, CORIOLANUS is, unlike MACBETH, not centered around a combat.  Instead, Coriolanus’ arrogance brings about his disaffection from his fellow Romans, leading to a temporary alliance with Aufidius and the Volscians, and finally to an ignomious demise rather than a heroic confrontation.

Shakespeare goes after the "warrior code" in TROILUS AND CRESSISA with even greater vigor, as I suggested in THE TOILS OF TROILUS.

So, in essence, Shakespeare undercuts all the glory and honor associated with the great duel [between Achilles and Hector]-- though, to be sure, Homer seems quite aware of the innate brutality of the war itself-- and makes Achilles into a honorless dog who orders his personal guards, the Myrmidons, to chop down Hector when the latter has partly doffed his armor. 

Clearly, in a narrative sense, Scott undercuts reader-expectations for a rousing final fight-scene in IVANHOE just as Shakespeare does in the cited plays. But-- does Scott do it for the same reasons that Shakespeare does it?

The answer is obviously no. The fact that Ivanhoe, even though he's not yet recovered from his wounds, is willing to risk his life for the gentle Rebecca clearly validates the better values of the knightly code; values which are entirely negative within both CORIOLANUS and TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. So how should my statement from PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX be amended?

Technically, I've already implied a solution in earlier essays. In KNIGHTS PART 1 I made a loose comparison between Scott's Ivanhoe and Will Eisner's Spirit only in terms of the relative simplicity of both starring characters. For the most part, it would be awkward to draw more extended comparisons, particularly because Ivanhoe was intended to be the star of one stand-alone work, while the Spirit was devised as a serial hero, intended to last over the course of potentially endless adventures.

However, it's often occurred to me that the Spirit himself might not be a combative hero, were I going purely by the 51 percent rule. Yet over the years I've refined this theory to take in the possibility that a series, such as that of the Spirit, may participate in the combative mode even if the majority of the character's individual adventures are not combat-oriented. In my final post on the LOST IN SPACE series, I mentioned that the series, despite various spectacle-oriented episodes, had a "dominant ethos" that was "directed away from combative resolutions." This is pretty much the same as saying that the dominant "significant value" of a series can overrule any disparate elements in the series. I have not yet applied this principle to stand-alone works like IVANHOE, but I have already implied that the subcombative significant value of TROILUS overrules the effect of any battle-scenes in the play. Thus IVANHOE would seem to be an exception of a combative work that does not have the traditional climactic fight-scene, even though it's still thematically important that the hero be willing to undertake such a conflict. These formulations may also call for a modification of my positions on the narrative-significant schism as it related to the combative mode.

KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY, PT. 1

One of the great curiosities of comic-book mythography is that even though the heroes-- and occasionally, the demiheroes-- are the protagonists with whose will the audience identifies, often much of the mythicity resides within the villains and/or monsters who are in the position of supporting players....as I detailed here, Will Eisner's feature THE SPIRIT was such a genre-chameleon that it's arguable that the titular hero had little myth to call his own, and most of his villains were no better.-- BAD WILL ON TOP (not a reference to Will Eisner), April 2016.

I touched on the importance of the Sir Walter Scott oeuvre in this 2013 essay, but the truth is that I had not then and do not now have a deep acquaintance with Scott's works, unless one counts film adaptations. I did read one book, THE TALISMAN, over thirty years ago, but despite enjoying the work, I wasn't moved to keep reading Scott, probably because he wrote little or no metaphenomenal fiction. I've now finally amended this lack somewhat by finishing what is arguably Scott's most famous novel, IVANHOE.

Though there haven't been that many film/TV adaptations of IVANHOE in comparison to assorted other classics, it's still a name to conjure with, even among people who don't know much about Scott or 19th-century literature. It seems to be the first novel to successfully revive the medieval tradition seen in European courtly romances, but in a naturalistic world, without dragons, faeries, etc.  But according to writer Nancy Springer, who penned both a foreword and an afterword to the 2000 Tor edition of the public domain novel, the knightly hero himself is something less than successful.

Who is the real hero of Ivanhoe? Certainly not Wilfred of Ivanhoe himself, for never was a title character more palely drawn. Even though he is the common thread that strings the novel together, he is all but invisible... He is a pawn, exercising no control of the events around him, a piece of plastic with almost no personality...

Springer then goes on to argue that the true heroes of the novel are two of Scott's supporting characters. One is Richard the Lion-Hearted, newly returned to England following his captivity during the Crusades, a "vibrant, quirky personality" who makes common cause with Robin Hood and his Merry Men in order to recover his throne from Prince John. (IVANHOE is said to be a key influence on the 20th century's development of the Robin Hood narrative.) The other hero is Rebecca, a beautiful Jewess and daughter of money-lender Isaac. Rebecca is easily the most vivid character in the novel. She's also, to bring in my concern for mythicity, the most mythic character, for it's through Rebecca and Isaac that Scott addresses the contemporary sociological concerns of his culture, regarding the emancipation of the Jews in England. Although the novel takes place in a 12th-century England where such an emancipation is not possible, Scott constantly calls attention to the travails of the Jewish people through the experiences of the Jewess and her father. For years prior to my reading of the novel itself, I occasionally encountered statements that Ivanhoe, who inspired romantic interest in both Jewish Rebecca and his Christian inamorata Rowena, should have wed Rebecca. I share the sentiment, though Scott sets things up so that such a marriage is socially impossible, which may well have been the state of the real world in those days.

Since my opening quote references "villains and monsters," who are usually the carriers of what I call "bad will," I should note in passing that not much of IVANHOE's mythicity inheres in its villains. These are largely the Norman overlords allied to the reign of Prince John, but except for one, most of them seem to me to be standard bad guys, only differentiated by their particular circumstances. The exception is the Templar Knight Sir Brian deBois-Guilbert, who, like Ivanhoe, has returned to England from the Crusades, though the two apparently clashed for some reason even though they were on the same side. At one of John's tournaments Sir Brian espies the lovely Rebecca, and he spends most of the novel trying to win her over. Scott does devote some attention to the torments of the lovelorn knight, whose affection is not reciprocated even before Rebecca falls for Ivanhoe. But Sir Brian doesn't sustain much of a symbolic discourse, for all that Scott makes an effort to critique the elitist and "bigoted" order of the Knights Templar through the evil knight.

From all my statements on centricity, it should be plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own. For me Ivanhoe is as much the star of Scott's only story with the character as the Spirit is of his long-running serial adventures. Springer's metaphor of a "common thread" catches some of the sense of Ivanhoe's role in the narrative, but she apparently does not realize how often famous works may be organized around an essentially unremarkable character. The Spirit is not really any better-characterized than Ivanhoe-- Eisner tended to refer to his hero as something along the lines of a "big dumb Irishman"-- and as I mentioned above, most of the mythicity of the Spirit's serial adventures inhere in his supporting characters, just as figures like Rebecca, Richard and Robin Hood are more mythic than Ivanhoe himself.

In both cases the undercharacterized, under-mythicized character functions as an organizing factor. In place of Springer's thread-metaphor, I've repeatedly used the image of the circle with diverse elements swirling about inside it, as when I described these elements as incarnations of "centric and eccentric will." My formulation suggests that there is no firm rule that the hero of a given narrative, whether it is of a serial or a stand-alone nature, must be "the most interesting man in the room." At the same time, there's no rule that he cannot be. Further, the narrative's centric will may include an ensemble of characters who are at least strongly interconnected in some way, be it no more than two or so many that their number is functionally indeterminate.

(Examples of the former, the "no more than two," would include pairings like those discussed in ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE: the two monstrous enemies in 1934's BLACK CAT and the literal monsters in 1968's THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS. Examples of the latter would include "swarm-types" like the Aliens from the ALIEN franchise and the Martians from Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS. The latter category also takes in what I'll tentatively call the "diversified swarm," in which the entities have a common origin but take on diverse-looking appearances, like the Cartagrans from the two-film WAXWORKS franchise.)

My screed is obviously not a one-on-one response to Springer's assertion: she's concerned only with vividness of characterization. Her meditations on Ivanhoe, according to my system, concern only "the relationships of discrete personalities" and so belong to the potentiality I've called "the dramatic," while "the mythopoeic" deals with the "relationships of symbols." Further, "the dramatic," like "the kinetic," belongs in a different bailiwick than "the mythopoeic" and its kissing-cousin "the didactic."

From THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL:

Plainly, what I call a work's "lateral meaning," glossed with a combination of two of Jung's psychological functions, is confined to what sort of things happen to the story's characters (sensation) and how they feel about those developments (feeling). The function that Jung calls "intuition" finds expression through the author's sense of symbolic combinations, which provides the *underthought* of a given work, while the function of "thinking" finds expression through the author's efforts at discursive cogitation, which provides the work's *overthought.* 

(I note, with yet another digression, that the opposite of "lateral meaning" ought to be "vertical meaning," which takes in both underthought and overthought, in keeping with my use of the term "vertical" here. More on this in another essay.)

Thus, I reject Springer's thesis that a work's "real hero" must be its most dramatically interesting person. A given author may merely wish to use the "centric will" of a given protagonist as an organizing factor, and nothing more, and there have certainly been other good stories that starred protagonists even duller than either Ivanhoe or the Spirit. Still, this should not overlook one last structural quibble: that a dull viewpoint character is not the same as a dull centric protagonist. Ivanhoe is the star of his show because he provides this linking function, and this contributes to what I've called an *endothelic* status, wherein the "narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests." A contrary example of this would be Lemuel Gulliver. He's every bit as dull as Ivanhoe but Gulliver's not at the center of his narrative, which is focused rather upon the worlds Gulliver explores. Thus GULLIVER'S TRAVELS fits the category of the *exothelic* in that the narrative is focused on "something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them."