STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS

 In contrast to some of my revisions, these two should be relatively painless.

I've only used the term "postulate" three times. In the essay THE INFORMAL POSTULATE, I tossed out the titular term in response to a critic's use of the phrase "formal postulate." Then I wrote two linked essays, Part 1 and Part 2 of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE. The only limitation I see in the use of the word "postulate" is that I don't think it has as much broad applicability as my previously used term "proposition," even though the two words mean approximately the same thing. So from now on, I will only speak of formal and informal propositions.

I have used the linked terms "master thread" and "bachelor thread" more often, both beginning in 2020. Here's my rationale for the metaphor from the first part of MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD:

I’ve frequently pictured these vertical meanings as either being “over” or “under” a narrative’s lateral meaning, but for current purposes maybe it might be better to imagine them as many disparate threads running through the (potentially) labyrinthine structure of the narrative. A single narrative can incorporate more than one vertical meaning. However, to be coherent said narrative needs what I’ll henceforth call a “master thread.”

About two months later, I formulated the complementary term "bachelor thread" as a pun on "masters' degrees" and "bachelors' degrees." In the essay DEGREES OF MASTERY AND BACHELORDOM, I was particularly focused upon the fact that what I called "open serials" usually did not manifest master-threads.

All of these types of open serials are far too disorganized to maintain a master thread as such. At best—and here I reference the setup of my essay-title—one could devise “bachelor-threads,” which are, as per the collegiate metaphor, not as advanced as the masters. Bachelor-threads simply codify the most prominent story-motifs used in the open serial, but there’s no sense that they all add up to a coherent discourse.

Of course, this formulation was not exclusive only to serials, open or otherwise. It's possible for any narrative, whether a serial, part of a serial or a monad, to sustain only a master thread and nothing more, which is the way I used that term in MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3, even though I specified that the master threads in my first two examples were relatively simple in symbolic development next to my third example. In monad-narratives, bachelor threads usually manifest when the author chooses to develop other concerns peripheral to the master thread. In MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2, I spoke of "meaning-threads" in MOBY DICK being subordinate to the book's master thread, and this conception was simply later borne out in the formulation of the complementary "bachelor thread" term.

However, though I still like the "thread" metaphor, henceforth I'll speak only of "master tropes" and "bachelor tropes," in order to make my take on literary thematics hew closer to my analysis of what literature is made of, as per my statement in 2021'S QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM.

just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”

Indeed, all of the statements I've made about both types of "threads" are symbolic scenarios that take the same form as "tropes," and thus I don't see any difficulty in making the change, except that now all the categories that used to read "thread" will now read "thread/trope" to reflect this altered priority.

 

 

 

SO, A THREAD-PULLING VECTOR

 My title for this essay spoofs a title I used for two essays way back in 2011, SO, A THREAD-PULLING NEEDLE, Part 1 and Part 2, which in their turn had punned on one of the lyrics from THE SOUND OF MUSIC. I confess I didn't even remember what those essays were about. I just wanted to create a title for this essay that brought the terms "thread" and "vector" together in some halfway-felicitous manner. As it happens, I did find some relevant content in those 2011 essays-- more on which at this essay's conclusion.

This essay sprung into being the way a lot of them do: taking a morning walk for exercise and letting my mind ruminate over the various categories I've created like the proverbial cow chewing her cud. This time, I randomly started associating my idea of "the master thread"-- which usurped all my old conceptions of "theme statements" in this April 2020 essay-- with the Whitehead-ian idea of "vectors" that I first broached in August 2020. Whereas the master thread concept was oriented only upon the way the author organized the "vertical meaning" of his narrative, vectors were designed to describe all category-domains in my system.

...all aspects of art—characters, settings, plot-tropes—derive from authorial will. Similarly, all of the multifarious literary categories I’ve introduced on this blog—dynamicity, mythicity, the combinatory-sublime and so on—are the prisms I use to view patterns of authorial will, patterns formed by the unceasing interactions of authors swiping from each other, competing with each other, and writing love letters to each other.

So far, I have applied the vector-term to such domains as centricity and phenomenality, but not to the differing emphases of a narrative's vertical meaning. However, something akin to vectors is implicit within the first example I offered of those differing emphases, in the essay MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2.

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

So what, aside from my bare assertion, determines that the trope of "The Hunter and the Hunted" is the "master thread" of MOBY DICK, and not one of the subordinate threads (which I later dubbed "bachelor threads")? When I state that removing the putative master thread would "unravel the whole kit and kaboodle," that should imply that it's too big and complicated to be removed without damaging the whole. And the master thread got big and complicated because Herman Melville concentrated the greatest vector of his authorial will upon that theme, while the bachelor-threads, while important, might be removed without necessarily damaging the whole. 

The idea of removing such a master-thread is not mere theory; it's the sort of thing that often takes place with adaptations of famous works. I have not yet reviewed the 1956 film adaptation of Melville's nautical novel, nor have I seen it in several years. But my recollection is that scripter Ray Bradbury decided to elide most of the religious content of the novel, except for a puerile "Ahab overstepped the bounds of a reasonable mortal" that sounds more like FRANKENSTEIN than MOBY DICK. Banal as this vertical meaning is, though, it's still the master-thread for the 1956 movie because it shows the greatest vector of Bradbury's authorial intent. I should note in passing that my conception of vertical meaning-- in which there is one superordinate thread amidst one or more subordinate threads-- mirrors my conception of centricity, in which one icon, or group of icons, proves superordinate and everything else in the narrative is subordinate in nature. The subordinate threads, like subordinate icons, just don't have that much authorial attention given to them, resulting in lesser will-vectors.

Jumping back eleven years, the first part of SO A THREAD PULLING NEEDLE came about when AT-AT Pilot asked me to provide some guidance on the subject of what I'd called "myth criticism." I responded in part with a perhaps labored metaphor in which I would seek to provide an "Ariadne's thread" through the "labyrinth" of modern discourse about mythology. It didn't occur to me back then that the usual interaction of threads and needles, that of binding cloth together, was the exact opposite of the use of thread in the Minotaur story. However, Part 1 at least shows that the thread-metaphor was one I liked then as much as I do now.

Part 2, though, is the essay with the aforementioned "relevant content" with respect to more recent writings. Riffing on a famous misquote of Heidegger, I wondered whether one could discern a "unifying thread" in all of my ruminations on this blog, and I came up with the quest for an answer to the question:

"Why is there complexity where there doesn't need to be any?"

And my answer, seeking to get away from the more abstract explanations, was to posit that mythic complexity is simply a fun thing for authors to put in their stories, even when they don't expect anyone to find that particular Easter-egg. I still believe this, that all the factors that go into making fiction come about because authors like best the play-element in fiction. Thus in fiction the sense of play has the greatest force-- the greatest vector, one might say-- than even the most sedulous desire to convert others to some moral message. 

NEAR-MYTHS: HUSH (2003), HEART OF HUSH (2008)

 

HUSH, the 2003 work by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee, is a work I would have liked to rate as a mythcomic. It’s definitely one of the best Batman stories to have appeared within the rather limited period of the twenty-first century. Even if the story had been crap, I imagine I still would have got a buzz at seeing how Jim Lee—by no means a favorite of mine—rendered the Bat-characters with his lush, photo-realistic art. Yet Lee’s contribution is matched by that of Jeph Loeb, who spins a cool mystery involving many of Batman’s famous foes, as well as introducing a new one, the titular Hush, who may go on to classic status eventually. HUSH is certainly a much better story than Loeb’s LONG HALLOWEEN, another Bat-villain rally from about five years previous. But try though I did, I didn’t find enough of a symbolic discourse to make this a mythcomic—though there’s at least an interesting bachelor-thread relating to Batman’s alienation from all the other characters who comprise his Bat-family.

Hush makes his first appearance in the collected work’s second chapter, entitled “The Friend.” The first words of the master villain—largely responsible for the assemblage of eight Bat-villains as part of a grand anti-Batman plot—are also on the subject of friendship, quoting Aristotle: “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” Hush’s true identity is a big deal in the narrative, but it’s old news now, so—

USUAL SPOILERS

Hush is actually Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend, one Thomas Elliott, a character whom Loeb created from whole cloth. I’ve seen one review that scorned the new character’s introduction as a transparent setup, but I’m more interested in whether or not Loeb succeeded in painting a good psychological picture of Elliott as more than just “a dark version of Bruce Wayne.” For the most part, Loeb succeeds in giving Elliott some psychological heft. Given that content, the mystery angle didn’t matter as much to me, not even when the character’s appearance—that of a man in a trench coat with bandages over his face-- is meant to suggest that of a more established evildoer.

Loeb and Lee model Hush’s general appearance not upon the iconic visuals of Two-Face, but upon that character’s appearance in Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. In that work, Two-Face’s disfigurement has been cured and he appears for the most part only a man in a coat, wearing surgical bandages over his face. Since HUSH also features an appearance of Two-Face's alter ego, attorney Harvey Dent, it seems clear that Loeb sought to trick the reader into thinking that Hush was simply a new incarnation of an old foe. Of course, had that been the case, then the writer would’ve had no reason to devote so much space to Thomas Elliott—who is apparently killed late in a late chapter, some time prior to the Big Reveal. As for Dent, he ends up being almost the only former Bat-foe who’s on Batman’s side, aside from the always mercurial Catwoman. Hush’s reasons for warring on Batman and Bruce Wayne are reasonably consistent, though they never become more interesting than the high-octane fights between the heroes—Batman, Nightwing, Tim Drake-Robin, and Huntress—and such opponents as Joker, Harley Quinn, Riddler, Poison Ivy, Killer Croc, Scarecrow, Lady Shiva, and Ra’s Al Ghul. On top of all this, Superman is also unwillingly dragooned to fight on the side of the devils, and Catwoman, despite being on the side of the angels this time, gets an intense battle with another goodguy, Huntress. To be sure, without a penciller as skilled as Lee, most of these punch-ups would have been no better than those of the average comic book.

Hush’s plan to destroy Batman fails of course, and he appears to “die” at the hands of his doppelganger Harvey Dent. Another five years later, Hush, who had made one or two intervening appearances, commanded the spotlight once more in HEART OF HUSH by writer Paul Dini and penciler Dustin Nguyen. There’s far more detail about Elliot’s background and his relationship with childhood friend Bruce Wayne, and while Catwoman once again plays a romantic role in the hero’s life, there aren’t nearly enough other villains here to qualify as a rally. Nguyen’s art is more attenuated and stylized than that of Lee, emphasizing mood rather than action, but this matches Dini’s attempt to flesh out the central villain, even expanding on the character’s repeated citations of Aristotle. Still, though HEART OF HUSH provides a literal “loss of heart” for one character, Dini doesn’t extend Hush’s potential into the realm of the mythic any more than Loeb did. Still, I certainly think the character has more potential than many other latter-day additions to the mythos.

THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD

I concluded my GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES post without formulating a “bachelor thread” for the Batman comics-series, because I wanted to rethink the matter somewhat more in relation to the influential 1966 teleseries. I’m never going to attempt to review all the Batman comic books, but I have considered doing an episode-by-episode myth-analysis of the teleseries. To do so, I would need to determine what aspects of the comic’s “bachelor-thread" the series-writers chose to follow, and what aspects they replaced with others.

My original thought for the Batman comic in toto was going to be something like, “the darkness of trauma, though usually breeding monsters, may also breed a slayer of monsters.” I even had this approximate notion in mind as I began GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES, but in the midst of crafting the essay, I began to think a lot more about how Robin had altered the aesthetic of the series. Though he as much as Batman suffered a trauma that caused him to become a crusader against evil, Robin certainly does not become a “creature of the night.” If anything, his bright, colorful costume suggests the stubborn renewal of life and light after the temporary reign of darkness. The legendary Robin Hood was almost certainly the exemplar on which the teen hero was modeled, but arguably over time the more important connotation was that of the robin as “the first bird of spring.”

 Robin’s vernal presence certainly doesn’t dispel the monsters of fear and darkness, of course. He debuts after Batman’s encounters with a handful of early, somewhat crude grotesques—Professor Hugo Strange, the Monk, and the Duc D’Orterre—but the Boy Wonder is on the scene for all the major grotesques: the Joker, Clayface, Scarecrow, Two-Face. And because of the visual and narrative interplay of the grim Dark Knight and his playful “squire,” the writers began coming up with more villains who were more sprightly in nature, foremost being the Penguin. (As noted elsewhere, it took the writers a while to come up with a well defined version of Catwoman.)

So, having made Robin’s presence more essential to the overall developm ent of the Bat-mythos, the bachelor-thread for the overall series must balance the elements of darkness and brightness. Additionally, although the heroes are victims of trauma, many of the villains are less traumatized than simply maladjusted, usually by virtue of greed. Obsession rather than trauma as such seems to define the Bat-mythos. Batman himself starts the ball rolling by extending his chosen identity to such tools as the Batarang and the Batmobile; the Joker follows suit with a poison that causes his victims to laugh themselves to death, and so on. So perhaps a trial thread might read something like, “Though the Greeks wanted to find beauty only in bright things and ugliness in dark ones, virtue and vice have equal propensities to be either light or dark, depending on the nature of the obsession.” This thread-concept would even remain in operation during the era I call “Candyland Batman,” when Batman himself is very nearly the only character who projects any grotesque affects, and nearly every new villain is conceived along the lines of the Penguin’s arabesque obsessions, thus leading to crooks who base their crimes on the use of kites and freeze-rays and polka dots.

The idea of obsession, incidentally, glosses my earlier ruminations on the nature of artifice. Most if not all familiar literary tropes incite in their ardent readers a heightened feeling like that of obsession, but one channeled through the matrix of game-playing. The very attraction of a literary trope lies in the fact that it is artificial, like the rules of any game. Truly ardent lovers of mystery-fiction never tire of the consummatory pleasures they receive from the masterful resolution of a whodunit, while an outsider to such pleasures can only wonder, as did Edmund Wilson, “who cares who murdered Roger Ackroyd?” Obviously the love of the game runs deeper in some than in others. A Gary Groth may start out loving the aggressive fantasies of superheroes and barbarians, only to lose his taste for those pleasures, and to spend most of his career lecturing other readers on the childish nature of their fantasies.

When such fantasies are seen through a distancing lens, such as that of the campy irony present in the Batman teleseries, some audiences are pleased to think that they’ve escaped the hidebound rule of the old game, and entered a more challenging, more adult form of play. This would seem to the case with a 2014 essay by Noah Berlatsky, in which the author could not imagine why Bat-fans didn’t want to toss out old; childish Batman in favor with new, ironic Batman. I answered his question with my essay-series THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY, but for the purpose of this essay, I want to look at how the teleseries attempted to rewrite the rules of the comic book’s scenario.

The essence of the word “irony” is that of saying one thing and meaning something else. William Dozier and his collaborators were certainly not the first pop-culture dabblers in this domain. Al Capp’s LI’L ABNER, though dominantly a broad comedy, is full of instances where characters revisit familiar story-tropes to indirectly make fun of them.The most famous of these appeared when simple-minded Abner would geek out on the gory misdeeds of his comic-strip hero Fearless Fosdick, a blatant send-up of DICK TRACY. There had been various superhero spoofs in comics and in cartoons before ’66 BATMAN. But Dozier and Co had the inspired notion to adapt the overall mythos of an established superhero-serial, playing it straight for kid-viewers but injecting any number of sly asides to please the adult audience.

This was, of course, a game no less restrictive than the rules of the Bat-comic, and nothing shows this more than the pastel-filled visual approach of the ’66 show. At the time of the show’s airing, DC’s two Bat-features had just made an attempt to reject the aesthetics of Candyland Batman, since the books weren’t selling as well as desired. This shift in editorial policy led to a very modest revival of grotesque/Gothic imagery, as seen in the May ’66 appearance of the Death-Man.

 However, though Dozier et al borrowed from a few stories that appeared during the post-Candyland phase, the show-runners were largely married to the aesthetics of Candyland Batman, where villains with weird obsessive traits popped up for no particular reason, almost existing purely to counter Batman’s own crime-fighting obsession. Mister Freeze was one of the few TV-villains to be given a particular reason for his criminal career. Usually, though, if there wasn’t something about a villain’s modus operandi that really begged for explanation, the writers dispensed with even simple melodramatic motivations.

In the universe of ’66 BATMAN—a admixture of both adventure-tropes and ironized versions of them— both the heroes and their villains still had their obsessions, but they barely tied in to any life-events (Batman mentions the cause of his crimefighting obsession once or twice, almost as an afterthought; Robin, like the majority of villains, gets no origin at all.) Thus the rules of the show were far more formalized than those of the comic book. For instance, during the first two seasons, the two-part episodes all have cliffhangers at the end of the first segment. Building on producers’ statements about their audience, presumably the idea was that kids would be worried about the heroes’ survival while adults would wonder what absurd trick the writers would use to save the good guys. Since all episodes in those seasons had to have a cliffhanger, every villain had to nurture the impossible dream of devising a deathtrap good enough to extinguish the Dynamic Duo. In such a ritualized world, neither darkness nor dark obsessions really exist. So my makeshift Bat-bachelor thread, when passed through the devouring gullet of the ’66 Bat-serial, becomes: “Virtue and vice alike take the form of pastel, often psychedelic arabesques, and virtuous arabesques only triumph over those of vice because the rules say that they must.”

That said, Dozier et al knew that they couldn’t quite undercut all the rules of the comics-feature, or they couldn’t be sure of winning over the kids. Thus, Batman and Robin’s fights are never burlesqued as one sees in most superhero spoofs. The gigantic sound-effects provide a distancing effect for adults, but do not efface the effects of two heroes who are just so good with their dukes that they can outfight three or four plug-uglies at once. Similarly, though Robin no longer serves the purpose of “brightening” Batman’s Gothic domain, he still fulfills the same role of the junior hero receiving tutelage from his elder. Though the duo’s goody-good personas are often subverted, the familial affection between the two is played straight.

To conclude, if I was ever to perform a critical analysis of ’66 BATMAN, I would have to look at each episode to see how well it balanced the use of adventure-tropes with irony-tropes, and whether or not the balance attained the higher levels of mythic discourse—just as a sustained analysis of all Batman stories might emphasize the balance between dark grotesques and colorful arabesques.

DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES

As I’ve noted here and thee, most serial narratives never evolve any sort of discourse-thread beyond the level of “good will triumph over evil.” Though I’ve defended the idea of the Golden Age Superman more than once, I can’t say that the execution of the idea rises above this level in its first fifteen years.

Although Bob Kane and Bill Finger created Batman as a response to Siperman’s sudden popularity, they evolved a far more creative property than either the Man of Steel or the great majority of Golden Age serial concepts. During the first six years of the feature’s history—the period I’ve termed “Gothic Batman”—displayed a unique approach to the characters, even though the stories might appear to advocate simple “good vs. evil” morals for the kid-readers. I, like many critics, have emphasized that the early years possess an extravagant, somewhat morbid creativity that bears some comparison with the better prose Gothics. And yet, it’s recently occurred to me that those years are also marked by a certain amount of whimsical fantasy, closer in spirit to stories of swashbuckling adventure than to Gothic deeds of darkness.

To be sure, both adventure tales and Gothic horrors loosely descend from the courtly romances of the Late Middle Ages, so such an alliance has a certain appeal. I’m now of the opinion that the introduction of Robin to Batman’s grim world insured that sinister Gothicism and fanciful adventure would become conjoined; a true marriage of the grotesque and the arabesque.

(I could write a long sidebar as to why I chose to hijack these art-history terms for my own purposes, without agreeing with the way the terms are used in art history, or by such luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Walter Scott. But at present, it seems to me that commonplace dictionary definitions back up my usages, so I’ll let it go at that.)

As I stated earlier, Batman’s pre-Robin world depicts the hero battling common criminals, malefic masterminds and supernatural horrors with stoic determination. Batman’s seventh adventure, scripted by Gardner Fox, roots the crimefighter’s joyless struggle in personal tragedy. To be sure, though, a lot of earlier heroes began with traumatic backstories, ranging from Dick Tracy to the Lone Ranger to the Shadow. Indeed, Batman’s devotion to stamping out evil—with no reference to finding the killer of his parents—bears strong resemblance to the origin of the first Phantom, who devotes himself to fighting evil after losing a parent to vicious pirates, and then passes the same cause along to his descendants. But Golden Age authors did not tend to revisit origin-tales as have later generations. In a world where Robin never joined Batman, it would have been routine had readers eventually forgot the reason why Batman became a costumed hero.

Now, I’m not saying that the Golden Age stories, as we have them, make any more reference to the origins of either Batman or Robin than, say, the CAPTAIN AMERICA title kept coming back to the origins of that hero and his sidekick. However, in contrast to most features that paired superheroes and kid sidekicks, BATMAN continuously emphasized the daily familial interactions of Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward. Thus, even if a reader didn’t know exactly how the two characters came together, he’d be able to find out from readers-in-the-know that Batman quasi-adopted the Boy Wonder because they’d shared a similar tragedy. And even if some readers never knew about these interlinked origins, the authors knew, and they played the contrast of the worldly adult with the exuberant youth for all it was worth. (To be sure, once Robin shows up Batman rarely affects his original obsessed, near-humorless attitude, though on occasion the writers allowed the Big Bat a few moments of fear-inspiring brutality.)

Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues, and some of his garments, such as boots and tunic, are designed to evoke famed swashbuckler Robin Hood. Even his main weapon in early stories, a David-style sling, carries an arabesque quality in comparison with Batman’s deadly looking Batarang.

The dynamic between Batman and Robin also extended to the way the raconteurs created their super-villains.

Some villains project fearful visages, just as does Batman. These include such notabes as the Joker, the original Clayface, the Scarecrow, Two-Face, the Monk and Doctor Death.

Yet others, however destructive, project images that are more fanciful in character. Thus, the somewhat shorter list of notable arabesques includes the Penguin, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cavalier, and the Catwoman (who, it should be noted, had as her first costume a simple dress and a cat-head mask).

With the grotesque-arabesque distinction in mind, it’s possible to see that later creative eras can be seen as putting increasing emphasis on one mode over the other. “Dark Procedural Batman” doesn’t entirely eliminate all sinister content from the feature, but the Joker becomes more of a harmless clown, while villains like the Riddler and Killer Moth never project any sort of fearful aspects. I sardonically termed the period after the Comics Code ‘Candyland Batman” because the dominant art-style emphasized lots of daytime scenes and new villains who were usually characterized by bright colors, ranging from goony aliens to goofy one-note villains like the Kite-Man and Mister Polka Dot. This overemphasis on the arabesque resulted in a downturn of the BATMAN franchise, and the following era, “Gothic Procedural,” borrows from all three previous periods, emphasizing ratiocinative detective tales and occasional forays into the Gothic, but not entirely dropping goony sci-fi menaces. Probably most of Bronze Age Batman, to which I’ve assigned no name, became almost totally focused upon Gothic images and tropes.

What I find interesting is that in the 21^st century, some fans-turned-writers have become intrigued by the arabesque craziness of the Candyland era. Grant Morrison revived bizarre figures like the Rainbow Creature, and the teleseries BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD celebrated all the light-hearted aspects of both the Bat-comics and numerous other DC features. Arguably, though, the biggest influence that the Candyland era ever had on the career of the Dark Knight was its effect on the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries, which took the wacky kid-fantasies of the early sixties and viewed them through an ironic prism. (And yes, I know that they borrowed story-content from the following era as well, but the show’s producers never showed much interest in the franchise’s more grotesque aspects from any era.)

Thus, there's definitely something to be said for the aspect of Bat-mythology that Alan Moore called "funny uncle Batman." At some point in the future, I may incorporate this bachelor-thread concept into a wider analysis of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries.

DEGREES OF MASTERY AND BACHELORDOM

Back in April 2020 I formulated the term “master thread” as a perhaps less didactic substitute for the common literary phrase “theme statement.” Therefore earlier essays, such as February's CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PART 3, don’t use the term, though that particular essay does mention a “structuring principle” and its significance with the operations of concrescence.

Had I coined the new term back at the time of the February essay, I probably would have said something like, “Because a hyperconcrescent symbolic dialogue requires a very strong master thread, it’s impossible for the form termed a ‘basic serial’ to exhibit more than a fair level of mythicity.” This type of serial narrative—which henceforth I’ll term the “open serial”—lacks any potential for the closure one can generally find in the eight narrative forms discussed previously. “Closure” in this sense refers to the closure of the discourse, symbolic or otherwise, and has nothing to do with whether or not there currently exist a finite number of installments in the open serial.

The open serial, as I remarked before, can be comprised of several long or short arcs, several short stories, or combinations thereof. It’s because the open serial depends on a loose assemblage of sub-narratives that the overall narrative cannot attain closure. Not that its authors want such closure: the entire appeal of the open serial is that it gives its audience a constant situation that either does not change at all or changes very slowly. Open serials fall into three categories:

The Story with a Planned Conclusion—here, though the overall narrative may include any number of sub-narratives that don’t tie into one another, the author intentionally designs for the narrative to end with a culminating incident. LOVE HINA and many other manga fall into this category. The FUGITIVE teleseries also managed to wrap up its hero’s arc in its final season. In some cases, producers may plan for a serial to be open-ended, but upon receiving bad reviews, the show-runners successfully manage to wrap up a saga’s continuing arc just before termination, as with the one-season wonder GUNS OF WILL SONNETT.

The Story with an Accidental Conclusion—in this category, the narrative, though designed to be open-ended, is terminated by outside forces. Serials consisting of unconnected short stories, like Classic STAR TREK, have no culmination as such; they simply have a last episode. Dozens of serial narratives have simply stopped at an arbitrary point, leaving protagonists in mid-cliffhanger, a phenomenon I’ve frequently observed in the first few years of DC’s early title ADVENTURE COMICS. Up to the filming of the last episode of DARK SHADOWS, the production team apparently didn’t know whether there would be another season or not, so that the last episode concluded with a tacked-on narration explaining how things finally shook out. On rare occasions an arbitrary last episode seems to provide an accidental summing-up. MARRIED WITH CHILDREN’s final episode just happened to spotlight Kelly Bundy’s incredible lubricity and Bud’s eternal victimization, certainly a recurring motif throughout the show’s history.

The Never-Ending Story— in terms of structure this type is identical to the Story with the Accidental Conclusion, but this feature/franchise has existed continuously over many generations, executed by dozens of raconteurs. Thus, though a critic should know when the feature began, he may have no indication as to when it might end. Certainly I expect that, whenever Superman and Batman finally cease publication, I won’t be around to witness it.

All of these types of open serials are far too disorganized to maintain a master thread as such. At best—and here I reference the setup of my essay-title—one could devise “bachelor-threads,” which are, as per the collegiate metaphor, not as advanced as the masters. Bachelor-threads simply codify the most prominent story-motifs used in the open serial, but there’s no sense that they all add up to a coherent discourse.

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN, for instance, came close to expressing its own bachelor-thread with Al Bundy’s comic credo, “A Bundy never wins, but a Bundy never quits.” Still, this could use a little modification. The Bundys actually do win a few minor conflicts, but it’s usually because they’ve worked together. But because they feed off of fighting with one another, the thread might read more like, “Hell is the other members of your family.”

To segue to a serial more focused on long arcs, I could codify the thread of LOVE HINA as, “Constantly bothering girls (whether intentionally or not) gets you punched a lot, but at least that way you’re bound to wind up with a hot-looking sadist.”

Classic STAR TREK certainly lends itself to a more profound-sounding bachelor-thread, if one renders it as, “Humans, though advancing to the heavens with logic and reason, forever carry with them their primitive natures, which must always be controlled, sublimated, or, more rarely, weaponized (see “I,Mudd.”) But again, one can always find episodes that don’t exemplify this quasi-theme, usually because some writer has chosen to plop Captain Kirk down in a Roman arena or at the O.K. Corral.

A “never-ending story” is even harder to break down, since its focus may change over generations. In my essay THE MANY MYTHOI OF BATMAN, I attempted to break down the Cowled Crusader’s career into different “creative eras,” characterizing each era by the dominant visual and/or narrative tropes used by the storytellers. It would be functionally impossible to find even a single bachelor-thread that described all of the eras together. However, in my next essay, I’ll take a shot at formulating a bachelor-thread for the many disparate creative eras of the Dark Knight’s career.