AUTHORITIES, PLEROTIC AND KENOTIC PART 2

In Part 1 I said, "I'd been giving more thought to the categorization of different types of presences, focal or non-focal, that appear in fiction." To be more specific, while most of my writings here about persona-types have concerned focal presences-- i.e., the stars of whatever stories I'm discussing-- the idea of personas applies just as much to any support-characters. I've touched on these classifications on occasion, though it's occurred to me that it might be enlightening to explore a particular type of supporting-character: the authority-figure who either empowers or initiates the central protagonist (what Vladimir Propp might call the *donor.*)

I did touch on an example of a powerful figure who was not the star of his show in PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES:

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

As I said in my review of the manga-collection, the two stars of the series are Rintaro, a minor sinner consigned after his death to a lesser form of Hell, and Koyori, the female demon assigned to levy punishment on him. However, Hell itself is a "character" in the story, for most of the narrative deals with Rintaro learning the ropes of an afterlife that looks suspiciously like the life of a living wage-slave. Both Hell and its usually-unseen ruler mirror the quality I've termed elsewhere "positive persistence," and so they, like the protagonists, are also demiheroic.

"Negative persistence," however, dominates the persona of the monster. The monster desires the ordinary life which the demihero usually obtains as a matter of course, but for whatever reason the monster cannot fit into that matrix, and usually either parodies its nature (the vampire, who seeks a new aristocracy of the undead ruling the living) or tears the matrix to pieces in fits of unreasoning rage (Godzilla, the Frankenstein Monster). The persona of the monster can even be attached to entire races of sentient beings who function as monsters to human protagonists: the Martians of H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS are a familiar type, and in the same line are Buck Rogers' nonhuman adversaries, The Tiger Men of Mars.

Villains, however, have a quality of "negative glory" that makes them more pro-active than monsters. I touched on two authority-type villains, both of whom were coterminous with their environments, in ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2:

In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

As for heroes, it's fairly easy to see the heroic virtue of "positive glory" in support-characters like Odin, Lord of Asgard, or Doctor Strange's perceptor The Ancient One. It's perhaps a little harder to conger the mantle of heroism on donor-figures who merely gets the ball rolling, such as the mysterious "Voice" that gives powers to the Hawk and the Dove, or the goddess Rama Kushna in the original DEADMAN story. Still, even if these presences don't do anything more than place the heroes on the path of heroism, they too align with the plerotic value of positive glory.

The same formula applies with respect to donor-figures who initiate heroes but are not sources of numinous authority. This would include types like Mr. Miracle's teacher from the story "Himon," who seems relatively human even though technically he, like the aforementioned Highfather, is a "good New God." Another parallel example is the character of Io from the 2010 film CLASH OF THE TITANS. A new creation with no parallel in the original 1981 film. Io doesn't precisely set Perseus on his heroic path, but she does watch over him from his childhood onward, and she gives him a certain modicum of martial training that aligns her with the figure of the authoritative donor.

PROPPIAN PONDERINGS PT. 2

"I don't like brutality.  I like heroics. I like the blood of heroes."-- THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989)


In this essay I review-compared the 1987 film THE RUNNING MAN with the 1989 film THE BLOOD OF HEROES.  Both are films about violent futuristic sports. The first story is literally a "bloodsport"-- one in which the main player is supposed to be killed by the game-- while the second tale is more comparable to modern-day sports stories, in which players may be expected to wreak great violence upon one another in order to win, but not to kill one another.  The first is centered upon one centric hero, a "Ben Richards" (Arnold Schwarzenegger), whose few allies do not share the main stage with him.  The second revolves more around the fortunes of a team that plays the futuristic "Game," which I described as "a combination of football, hockey, and gladiatorial combat."  However, only two of the players, "Kidda" (Joan Chen) and "Sallow" (Rutger Hauer) are centric characters, with their fellow players functioning as support-cast.

Neither the solo-hero Richards nor the ensemble-team of Kidda and Sallow are unambiguous examples of Vladmir Propp's "seeker" function, which Propp defined along these lines: "if a young girl is kidnapped,,,, and if Ivan goes off in search of her, then the hero of the tale is Ivan and not the kidnapped girl.  Heroes of this type may be termed seekers." 

With respect to RUNNING MAN's Richards, the hero is initially not "seeking" to overthrow the corrupt government of his future world.  I've commented that, in contrast to Stephen King's novel, Richards' "light bulb" realization that The Repressive Government Is Bad does not prove credible and seems to be just a tired device to make film-audiences identify with Richards.  Though Richards has risen to the position as the pilot of the police department's helicopter, he's genuinely shocked when his bosses tell him to shoot down civilians.  One might observe that Richards is "victimized" for this action by being sentenced to prison-- which sentence eventually leads him to be recruited by the "Running Man" game-show.  Still, the character's act of disobedience is meant to signal his innate heroism.  In prison, prior to being recruited by the game-show, Richards encounters some members of a resistance group that does wish to overthrow the evil government.  At first he sneers at the rebels, and his words sound like those of a demihero: "I'm not into politics. I'm into survival."  But his actions bely these words: the villain Killian is only able to coerce Richards into entering the game by threatening the lives of the rebels.  And of course Richards' triumphant conquests of the various "Running Man" executioners are part and parcel of the normative image of the adventure-hero.  Thus, though RUNNING MAN is far from being the best example of this hero-type-- in fact, it's pretty crappy next to inspired efforts like Schwarzenegger's TOTAL RECALL-- it still displays the pattern of a "seeker" type of hero, who in turn represents the "idealizing will."

The team of "juggers" in BLOOD OF HEROES really are primarily concerned with survival, at least at the outset.  And also in contrast to RUNNING MAN, there's never any suggestion that they can do anything to alter the political status quo of their futuristic world.  Rutger Hauer's character Sallow is, as I note in my review, the old pro with the tragic past. Long ago he was feted in the big cities, but he offended the aristocrats and so found himself playing his game in rude "dog-towns."  In contrast, the considerably younger character Kidda covets what Sallow lost.  Once she manages to join Sallow's team, she convinces him to return to one of the cities that exiled him, to challenge the professional players in the "Big Leagues."  Kidda hopes to be noticed by League scouts so that she can reap the financial rewards of professionalism.  Sallow, however, is motivated more by his own past grievances, not any practical considerations.  Not only does he not expect to overthrow the aristocracy, he also has no illusions of regaining his lost social status.  But when the professionals accept the challenge, the Game, not its financial rewards, becomes paramount in their minds. Kidda becomes the focus of the game at its climax, since her function is to make the equivalent of a dramatic "touchdown."  Though Kidda has no dialogue during this sequence, the tension of the scene suggests that even in her the spirit of the sport has triumphed over motives of financial advancement.

That said, even if I find Sallow and Kidda to conform to Propp's notion of "the seeker"-- since they certainly aren't forced to challenge the establishment-- they remain representations of "the existential will."  The same admixture of "idealizing will" and "existential will" also appears in my earlier examples LOST IN SPACE and LOST WORLD, and this is consistent with what I wrote on this theory in APES AND ANGELS 2:

I should have said earlier that these two forms of will, these "two souls" that seem to dwell in every human's breast, only appear in fictional characters to the extent that their creators choose to emphasize one or both.  It is possible to have characters who are purely devoted to glorious ideals, or purely devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence.  It is also possible to have combinations of the two, but one form of will must dominate over the other, by the same logic I pursued in JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY and other essays with regard to the admixture of mythos-elements in a given work.

This will probably be all that I have to say for the present on Propp's categories, though I anticipate at least one more essay on the topic of "sports heroes" and "sports demiheroes."



 

PROPPIAN PONDERINGS PT. 1

Though I've sustained some limited influence from Vladimir Propp, I've only referred to him in three essays so far-- here, here, and here-- and I didn't include him among my TWELVE PILLARS OF WISDOM.

On one level, I admire the simplicity of his attempt to study folklore-personae as "functions," which led to this pellucid generalization on the nature of folkloric protagonists:

The hero of the tale may be one of two types: (1) if a young girl is kidnapped,,,, and if Ivan goes off in search of her, then the hero of the tale is Ivan and not the kidnapped girl.  Heroes of this type may be termed seekers. (2) If a young girl or boy is seized or driven out, and the thread of the narrative is linked to his or her fate and not to those who remain behind, then the hero of the tale is the seized or banished boy or girl. There are no seekers in such tales.  Heroes of this variety may be called victimized heroes.-- Vladimir Propp, MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE, p. 36.

On another level, I've been less enthusiastic about his manifestation of what I call the "recipe mentality," and in the last of the three essays I stated my credo:

 the Proppian distinction doesn’t capture the difference in character-attitude, which might be fairly deemed a failure of Propp’s analysis

Years ago on some comics-forum I did "feel out" the idea as to whether one could divide pop-fictional heroes by whether they were proactive, like Propp's "seeker," or reactive, like Propp's "victimized hero." This was long before I coined my term "demihero," but even then, I was looking for some method to separate protagonists who looked for trouble from those who simply coped with trouble when it came their way.  Yet following Propp in his concentration on plot-elements alone proved to be a dead end. In this essay I gave an example of two sets of "victimized heroes"-- the respective casts of two teleserials, 1965'S LOST IN SPACE and 1999's THE LOST WORLD.  I demonstrated that despite similarities of continuing plot-situations, the "goal-affects" of the first series represented the affect of "persistence" while the second series represented the affect of "glory."

When I wrote the EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS series of essays, I had not yet formulated my terms for the type of "will" represented by each affect.  I formulated these terms a few months later in APES AND ANGELS.  If I had, I would have said, in addition to terming the LOST IN SPACE crew "demiheroes" and the LOST WORLD group "heroes," that each represented respectively the "existential will" and the "idealizing will."

The converse of course would be equally true.  Though the term "seeker" sounds like the sort of protagonist who actively seeks trouble, it's just as possible to posit a seeker who represented the dyad "persistence/existential will" as the dyad "glory/idealizing will."  Indeed, one of my recent dual-reviews of two films with loosely similar topics supplied just such an opposition, which I'll discuss more fully in Part 2.

EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS PT. 4

In Part 3 I contrasted two teleseries—LOST IN SPACE and THE LOST WORLD-- which shared the same base concept—a group of castaways journeying through strange worlds, often obliged to help others in keeping with a dominant moral outlook of Good Samaritanism.  I did so to clarify that the differences between the personas of “heroes” and “demiheroes” are not determined by what they do, but how they do it.

The emphasis on "what they do" is one I've started calling “the recipe mentality.”  Vladimir Propp’s folktale-morphology, which I’ve admired hugely, is one example of this mentality.  For Propp the difference between his two types of protagonist, the “seeker” and the “victimized hero,” is a difference based in their orientation in terms of folkloric plot: one is largely active, the other is largely passive.

I admire Propp’s intent, to focus on the bare rudiments of narrative as closely as possible, presumably to avoid imposing some heuristic vision of his own upon the original materials. However, some time ago I realized that in popular fiction at least, there was no clear division between such plot-based actions, and I doubt that one exists in folktales either.  LOST IN SPACE and LOST WORLD are two serials with essentially the same premise, but their respective protagonist-ensembles combine, in varying proportions, the actions of Propp’s “seekers” as well as his “victimized heroes.”  In terms of dominant plotlines, I would have to say that more often than not the ensembles are placed in the position of the “victimized heroes,” in that trouble usually seeks them out rather than the other way round. Still, the Proppian distinction doesn’t capture the difference in character-attitude, which might be fairly deemed a failure of Propp’s analysis (one attacked in general terms by J.R.R. Tolkien, as mentioned here).

A parallel difference in character-attitude must also be the determining factor between the personas of the villain and the monster.  I’ve observed in past essays that some critics have tried to see the persona of “the monster” as applying only to creatures that seem without “motives, ambitions, or soul.”  In CREATED AND CREATOR ENSEMBLED HE THEM I gave evidence as to why even a very intellectual type of character, such as Wells’ Doctor Moreau, could still be a “monster.”  This reasoning also applies as to what qualities would separate Moreau’s monstrous nature from the nature of a “villain” who might employ the same modus operandi, that of making animals from men.  At some point I may try to make a direct comparison between Wells’ Moreau and some more villainous version of his type.  For the time being I’ll illustrate my “villain/monster” divide with reference to two of the most famous “mad scientists” in popular literature, Victor Frankenstein and Doctor Fu Manchu.

When this opposition occurred to me, I realized that it might have been awkward to compare the original novel-characters.  Mary Shelley’s mad scientist (who technically never becomes a licensed doctor) begins and ends within the scope of one novel.  Sax Rohmer’s “devil-doctor” seems to have been intended as a serial character from the beginning.  To keep the parallels closer, I decided to examine how each character was constructed in terms of works that were both intended as ongoing serial works.

I’ve now reviewed only the first entries of the Hammer FRANKENSTEIN series and the Harry Alan Towers-produced FU MANCHU series.  Both serials starred British actors and focused upon characters created by British authors.  The Hammer series debuted in the late 1950s and lasted sporadically until the early 1970s.  The Towers series debuted in the middle 1960s and lasted only about five more years, and arguably it coattailed on the success of the Hammer horror-films, since the Fu Manchu series starred an actor made internationally famous by his assocation with Hammer.  The Hammer Frankenstein series is well regarded in some critical circles, while Towers’ Fu Manchu films are generally beneath any critical radar.  But for my purposes, the serials’ most important point of comparison is how each uses the “mad scientist” trope.

The Shelley novel devotes considerable time to Frankenstein’s backstory, and Rohmer’s novels build up a complex if indirect portrait of Fu Manchu’s character.  Neither THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN nor THEFACE OF FU MANCHU delves into motivation, however.  As I remarked in my CURSE review, the only motivation Victor Frankenstein has for his experiments is that he is a “precocious child of privilege” who also happens to be a genius and wishes to prove it.  Towers’ Fu Manchu doesn’t even get this much.  Nayland Smith describes the devil-doctor as “the most dangerous and evil man in the world,” and that’s the only motive needed, with Towers eschewing even the minimal political motivations of the novels (i.e., Fu Manchu may have been a product of China’s Boxer Rebellion).

Nevertheless, even with spotty depictions of character, it can be demonstrated that of the two characters—both devoted to a consciensce-less pursuit of science for personal gain-- one of the two conforms to the persona of the monster, and the other to that of the villain.

I indicated in EXPENDITURE PT. 3 that LOST IN SPACE’s characters were characterized by the value of “persistence.”  The characters in that series comprised a family whose primary concern was one of homeostasis; the ability to survive from day to day while allowing the children to mature under the best achievable circumstances. In the Shelley novel Victor Frankenstein—whom I would view as the demihero counterpart of his monstrous creation—also seeks a homeostasis, but in a thoroughly negative sense. Threatened by the agency of other people, Frankenstein subconsciously wants to be a community of one, and so allows his monster-doppelganger to kill all those that threaten his solitary hegemony.

The Victor Frankenstein of CURSE extends this scientific preoccupation to Sadean proportions.  Like his novelistic forbear, Hammer-Frankenstein becomes the prisoner of his own idée fixee, but the Hammer version is much more calculatingly cruel than Shelley’s original.  Whereas the novel version agonizes over his love for his cousin Elizabeth, Frankenstein barely wants his beauteous cousin in his life. At most he consents to marry her for societal convenience, though he may also be aware that his tutor Paul loves her, and so wants to keep Elizabeth around in order to manipulate Paul.  Sex for Frankenstein is an itch that he scratches with his convenient maid Justine.  When Justine has the temerity to get pregnant, Frankenstein has no interest in the fact that she carries his child, and he sets up the mother of his child—and his child—to be killed by his captive creature.  As I pointed out with regard to Doctor Moreau, the negative manifestations of the demihero—dominantly a positive persona-- are never as extreme as those of the monster, a persona statistically dominated by a negative nature.  Like Moreau, Frankenstein prates about having his genius recognized by others, but neither of them really cares about fame.  They exist to unleash the dark forces of their respective obsessions, and their genius-intellects are merely the vehicle for those obsessions.  The voice of a more humanistic side of genius is heard early in the film, before Baron Frankenstein harvests the genius’ brain for his obscene creation:   

“… we [scientists] quickly tire of our discoveries.  We hand them over to people who are not ready for them—while we go off again into the darkness of ignorance—searching for other discoveries, which will be mishandled in just the same way.”—Doctor Bernstein, courtesty of CURSE scribe Jimmy Sangster.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that scribe Sangster associates the productions of science with the delving into “the darkness of ignorance.” Normally one imagines science as a light that dispels ignorance, but Sangster’s Bernstein sees it as unleashing dark forces in a human community ill-prepared for such revelations, while those doing the unleashing are no less prisoners of their own obsessed psyches.  Thus science, rather than dispelling darkness, merely allowes it to propagate new forms, like Frankenstein’s monster.  Thus the intelligent genius of a Frankenstein conveys the same value of a “negative persistence” that we see in unthinking monsters like Leatherface or the Blob.

I said earlier that Hammer-Frankenstein’s obsession had been extended to Sadean proportions.  By that I meant that his cruelty is more deliberate than that of the demihero-protagonist of the Shelley novel.  However, it’s a cruelty that is largely reactive to circumstances, like the threat Justine poses to Frankenstein’s operations.  True Sadean sentiments are proactive; they seek cruelty for its own sake, not simply to achieve homeostasis.

The Towers Fu Manchu, as I noted earlier, shows no political motivations in his desire for world domination.  The Fu Manchu of the Rohmer novels dreams an impossible dream, seeking the return of the hegemony of ancient China in the face of European dominance and (in the later novels) in opposition to Chinese Communism.  True, since Towers’ Fu Manchu is served mostly by Asian aides—his Chinese daughter, his dacoits, who strangle people with their “Tibetan prayer scarves”—one presumes that if Fu Manchu achieved world conquest, the result would be a world with Asians on top. So the threat of the “Yellow Peril” is still one of Asian hegemony, even though Towers tries to stay away from real-world politics.   

       

Whereas Frankenstein’s senseless ambition merely stems from the “negative persistence” of his own ego, Fu Manchu’s mad science is informed by “negative glory.”  Admittedly, the Towers Fu Manchu doesn’t seem to defy history quite as much as the Rohmer character does with his passion to revive dynastic China.  Still, Fu’s central plan might be deemed a pre-technological take on nuclear brinkmanship.  He eschews dirtying his hands with modern technology; Fu wants to destroy Western hegemony with a natural weapon born in the remote wilds of the East, specifically Tibet. Today modern audiences would never place credence in a death-drug brewed from some rare Eastern flower.  These audiences have too much belief that the next source of chemical warfare will come from some terrorists’ laboratory.  Such weapons, even if conceived by Eastern enemies of the West, would still be a continuation of Western science, but would not be the exclusive properties of the mysterious East.

Because of this primitivist urge, Towers’ Fu Manchu still carries the aura of Satanic defiance, of purposefully transgressing the norms of society, as all good villains must. Monsters, in contrast, usually transgress norms without as much conscious intention, or else by using some false rationale, as do mad doctors like Moreau and Hammer-Frankenstein.  Thus Fu Manchu is also a Sadean in the true sense of the word, in that he desires power for its own sake—though in FACE it is his daughter, rather than the devil-doctor, who shows a desire to take erotic pleasure in cruelty.  

I must note in closing that in the first Towers Fu Manchu film, the devil-doctor isn’t seen showing off his own scientific genius as Victor Frankenstein does in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN.  In FACE OF FU MANCHU the evil genius allows other experts to brew the death-drug of the Black Lotus, and one never sees his own perfidious inventions.  However, later Towers entries do show Fu Manchu conceiving weird weapons of his own, so I would say that the Black Lotus peril of FACE is still evidence of Fu’s scientific aegis, even if he has others doing the work for him.  Certainly he comes across as more of a wonder-worker in FACE than he does in MYSTERIOUS DR. FU MANCHU, where he just knows a few exotic poisons. 

Even the endings of the respective films differ in their presentations of “persistence” and “glory.”  CURSE ends with Frankenstein about to go to the guilloutine, but since the film proved successful, Hammer’s producers found a way to show that the baron escaped execution so that there could be further appearances of Peter Cushing’s obsessed scientist.  FACE OF FU MANCHU starts from the other extreme: Fu Manchu appears to die in the film’s first scene, but his nemesis Nayland Smith still imagines that he lives despite being beheaded.  Nayland Smith eventually figures out how the evil doctor pulled off the trick, and attempts to kill Fu Manchu in the film’s final scene.  But Fu Manchu implicitly survives any and all devastating dooms levied upon him, due to the villainous glory attaching to him.  Hammer’s Victor Frankenstein also persists from film to film, destined to come up with a new monster each time.  But Frankenstein never becomes a glorious figure.  No matter how many innocents die for his experiments, he, the wandering monster, is arguably more pathetic than any of them—as I hope to show with further examinations of the Hammer series.

PLAYING MERRY HOBBES WITH HEROES AND DEMIHEROES

IIn this essay I commented on my use of the terms "courage" and "endurance" to distinguish the persona-types of "hero" and "demihero:"

I still believe that Reeve's opposed categories of "courage" and "endurance" have strong applicability, though I never meant to imply that these categories summarized all distinctions between hero and demihero.
 

I'm glad I said that, given that the Hobbes comment I recently employed for the posts on goal-affects also seems to have broad applicability to personas.

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
 

These three motives-for-violence-- which I usually summarized as "gain," "safety,"  and "passion" of a specifically thymotic type-- also apply well to the motives of heroes in fictional narratives.  Or at least the second two do; more often than not, the motive of "gain/competition" is the motive assigned to the villain.

Thus, without dismissing the applicability of the "courage/endurance" reading, I'll offer a quick look at my proposed hero/demihero distinctions using "diffidence" (aka "safety") and "glory" (aka "passion").

As an example for a hero who evinces "glory," I'll use an example of one of the most microdynamic heroes known to me.

MIGHTY MAX, a character devised to promote a toy line in a 1993 tv cartoon, was one of the oddest "heroes" I've encountered in terms of his dynamicity. Though this simple Earth-boy was frequently referred to as "the Mighty One," he had no powers whatsoever, except a magical cap that could transport him to other realms.  In the company of a chicken-like entity ("fowl, actually") who supplied information on the threat of the week and a big warrior named Norman who provided the heavy lifting, Max foiled dozens of vile villains over the course of 40 episodes.  He did so largely through neither power nor skill, but just by having the dumb luck to constantly avoid being squashed by werewolves or dragons or whatever.

And yet, weakling though he was, he was still a hero squarely in the genre of adventure, in that the stories were all about his invigorating victories over evil.  He may prove a better example of a microdynamic hero than some of those I've used before, such as Brenda Starr and Doctor Who.

In contrast, there's the character of Mrs. Brisby from Don Bluth's dramatic cartoon THE SECRET OF NIMH.  As I mention in my review of the film, I have not read the juvenile book on which the film is based, so I confine myself to the character as depicted in the Bluth film.  From what I understand, only in the film does this mouse-character demonstrate what might termed "super-powers."

These powers are entirely the gift of a magical talisman, which Mrs. Brisby can summon only because, despite her humble appearance, she possesses the necessary virtue of "courage"--which characterization is ironic to me because I would have assigned her persona the quality of "endurance."  The magic she summons isn't used in any combative scenario, but to solve a non-violent conflict: how to transport her home to a place of safety.  But even if this mousey protagonist had used her power offensively-- as does Doctor Craven, an equally mousey protagonist whom I used as one of my first examples of a "demihero" -- would she have qualified as a hero?

By my current reasoning, no.  Brisby is a good example of "instinctive will" in that although she possesses courage, as the script says, it isn't the sort of courage that distinguishes the "intellectual will"-- a will which I link to the Hobbesian concept of "glory."  Everything Brisby does in the film is motivated by the Hobbesian concept of "diffidence/ safety," which might be characterized as more "reactive" than "proactive."

I've not advanced a "proactive/reactive" dichotomy here in so many words, but it does have applicability to what I wrote here about folklorist Vladimir Propp's opposition of the "seeker" and the "victimized hero."

I would say that the qualities of "glory" and "diffidence" also seem better matches for the characters discussed in that earlier essay, with Johnny Thunder following a pattern of "glory" while Jimmy Olsen follows one of "safety" (which I find that I prefer to "diffidence," as that seems to imply a trait of the character rather than a plot-action).

More explorations of glory and safety will probably follow, though probably not until next year.

COMIC HERO VS. COMIC DEMIHERO

The hero of the tale may be one of two types: (1) if a young girl is kidnapped,,,, and if Ivan goes off in search of her, then the hero of the tale is Ivan and not the kidnapped girl.  Heroes of this type may be termed seekers. (2) If a young girl or boy is seized or driven out, and the thread of the narrative is linked to his or her fate and not to those who remain behind, then the hero of the tale is the seized or banished boy or girl. There are no seekers in such tales.  Heroes of this variety may be called victimized heroes.-- Vladimir Propp, MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE, p. 36.

"Fellow members! I vote to install Johnny [Thunder] as a member of the Justice Society!  Anybody with his luck ought to be a member!"-- Hawkman, ALL-STAR COMICS #6.

In the MORPHOLOGY Propp doesn't discuss the nature of heroes much beyond the above quote.  The Russian folklorist's sole purpose in that book was to emphasize the way different "dramatis personae" acted in terms of storytelling devices, what Propp calls "functions."  Nevertheless, though Propp doesn't apply any aspect of his function-theory to any narrative outside folklore, it has strong applicability to my own theory of literary personae.

Now, in this essay I offered one distinction between the "hero" and the "demihero" based loosely on the observations of Christopher Reeve.  To re-quote the actor:

“What is a hero? I remember how easily I’d talk about it, the glib response I repeated so many times. My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous act without considering the consequences… Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to perservere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”

I still believe that Reeve's opposed categories of "courage" and "endurance" have strong applicability, though I never meant to imply that these categories summarized all distinctions between hero and demihero.  It is interesting, however, that Propp's summation of his two protagonist-types also turns on a distinction between a protagonist who makes a grand gesture based in "courage"-- that of the seeker following a villain who's seized someone else-- and the survival-instincts of a "victimized hero," whose principal virtue is one of "endurance."

"Courage" and "endurance" may not adequately describe the values of Propp's protagonist-functions,though, because Propp is attempting to produce a scientific, value-free description of folklore practices.  Similarly, my Schopenhauerean distinction between "intellectual will" and "instinctive will" would probably be too value-laden for Propp.  What Propp's paradigm describes is essentially a difference between "heroism in activity" versus "heroism in passivity."  "Heroism" in this context must be divorced from the nature of any particular hero: in folklore studies it connotes simply the actions (or non-actions) of the characters with whom the audience is supposed to sympathize.  The same parallel obtains with characters who dominantly represent the forces of chaos, with villains representing a very active form of evil, while monsters tend toward greater passivity (dragons who are minding their own business guarding their hoards when knights come calling, and so on.)

I've produced a couple of essays to explicate the differences between "hero" and "demihero."  The first was DEMIHERO DELIBERATIONS,which compares a comedy demihero (Dr. Craven) with a dramatic hero (Harry Potter); the second, MORE DEMIHERO DELIBERATIONS, pursued the Craven/Potter comparison and made a brief comparison between comic demihero Craven and comic hero Ranma Saotome.

However, Craven, as a character in a stand-alone narrative, doesn't make a symmetrical comparison with characters designed for serial formats.  So for this essay, I'll focus on two serial characters from the same medium-- comic books-- and who are dominantly viewed as "comic bumblers" who, like most of their kind, tend to get by on luck (an important element in the mythos of comedy, as explicated here).

First up is Johnny Thunder, of whom I've written before:

JOHNNY THUNDER, on the other hand, frequently shows the titular hero falling afoul of hoods and gunmen, whom he usually vanquishes with the help of his magical powers. However, in his first adventure he’s unaware of the power, which is conferred on him for an hour’s time when he pronounces the holy word “Cei-U” (which Johnny only does when he accidentally uses the words “say” and “you” consecutively). The same “origin story” establishes that Johnny, though moderately skilled as a fighter, is “just an ordinary guy trying to lead an ordinary life,” which aligns him less with heroic magicians like Mandrake than with the comic protagonists of Thorne Smith.


I would grant that within the comic mythos, Johnny Thunder is, like the Inferior Five analyzed earlier, a hero who gets into a fair number of fights. But these agonic elements are subdominant to the comic elements, such as the scene where Johnny, unaware of his power, tells a man to “go jump at a duck,” which of course the fellow does. In later stories, Johnny’s power becomes embodied in a separate character, a genie called “Thunderbolt,” but the presence of this super-being never takes the focus away from Johnny’s status as a good-hearted bumbler. Even as a member of the heroic Justice Society, Johnny plays the funny sidekick to the “serious” superheroes. Thus even in this adventure-oriented feature Johnny Thunder remained a visitor from a strangely comical domain.

The only correction I'd make to this is that although Thunder does indeed have a different "mythos-stature" than a character like Mandrake, given that one belongs to the comedy and the other to adventure, in terms of "persona-stature" the two of them are closer to one another than either is to a demihero character like Thorne Smith's Topper or his comic-monster ghost-buddies.

Although Thunder is a dimwit who often survives more by luck than by skill, he does show a tendency toward the intellectual will of heroism-- which is not to say that he himself is ever intellectual-- in that he does, as shown in ALL-STAR COMICS #6, audition for and successfully join the Justice Society.  In JUSTICE SOCIETY he is, as I said earlier, a comic hero hanging out with straight adventure-heroes; in his own 1940s feature he tended to simply blunder into trouble. Yet even in the solo series he is an "active" hero in the sense that he makes it his personal business to play crimefighter.

Jimmy Olsen, in contrast, seems a more passive character, for all that he like Thunder frequently blunders into conflict with criminals, invading aliens, etc.  Olsen debuts as a minor supporting character for the SUPERMAN radio show in 1940-- though some fans have tagged an unnamed office boy from a 1938 comics-story as "Jimmy" simply because the character wore a bow-tie.  Olsen made scattered appearances in the comics, and disappeared for roughly a decade until he was revived, again as a support-character, in the 1952-58 ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN teleseries.  Two years following the character's return, Olsen became the central character of his own comic-book series.

Strangley, though the Olsen of the teleseries was played as comic relief, the first three issues of the comic book attempted to portray him as a resourceful "Hardy Boys" type of hero, able to fight thugs with his own skills and one or two trick-weapons.  By the fourth issue of SUPERMAN'S PAL JIMMY OLSEN, Olsen started having wackier adventures, and this became the norm for the series until it was cancelled.  During those years Olsen sometimes became a "superhero manque," occasionally transforming himself into "Elastic Lad" to fight crime in Metropolis or into "Flamebird" to battle evil in the bottle city of Kandor.  But the only sustained period in which Olsen was treated as a formidable adventure-hero was during Jack Kirby's tenure on the title from 1970 to 1972.

Though Olsen blunders into trouble just as Thunder does, the similarity ends there.  While popular media had seen any number of heroic crime-busting reporters, Olsen doesn't crusade against crime in his adventures as a Daily Planet reporter.  Reporting the news is the character's first love, not fighting crime.  For all of his flirtations with heroism, Olsen is first and foremost an "ordinary guy," which allowed him to show an "endurance" sort of heroism in some stories, and to be a pure "victim" in others.  Johnny Thunder is seen with a mundane job in his first appearance, but over time he becomes a rootless do-gooder with no visible means of support, as if getting into trouble and fighting crooks has become his job in a diegetic, as well as an extra-diegetic, manner.

At present I don't plan to explore these distinctions within the mythoi of adventure and irony. I will note in closing that my persona-theory as expressed here probably necessitates a modification of this statement from this essay:

Because of the lack of spectacular violence, I see VOYAGE as a subcombative form of adventure. The heroes are perhaps a little better at combat than the average man-on-the-street, but not by much. This type of hero thus fits my definition of the mesodynamic hero from this essay as possessed of a dynamicity ranging from "good to fair," a grouping that thus far also includes the original version of Aladdin, Doctor Who and Brenda Starr, three other subcombative types analyzed here.

I haven't changed my dynamicity-ratings for any of the characters discussed here, but would probably distinguish the Seaview crew and Doctor Who as belonging to the persona-category of the hero, while Brenda Starr and the folkloric version of Aladdin belong to the persona-category of the demihero.