TWO ESCALATIONS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

I've used my own term "escalation" twice on this blog for separate literary operations, though with the sense that they do connect up in a general sense. In 2012's ESCALATION PROCLAMATION I said:

Though I specified in NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PT 2 that narrative conflict did not require literal violence, narrative violence does have a potential, beyond that of any other literary device, for escalating the immediacy of the conflict.  Even the kinetic appeal of sex—so earnestly defended by Legman above—cannot match violence in terms of fomenting the narrative principle of escalation. 

So "escalation" in this sense refers to the way in which narrative conflict is increased when violent threats are made or carried out in a repeated fashion, in order to better engross an audience in the resolution of said conflict.

Then in 2021's ESCALATION PROCLAMATION PT. 2, I shifted the term's use "with respect to the concepts of high and low forms of both stature and charisma." I began by distinguishing two types of escalation, quantitative (which has a direct parallel to the quantitative uses of narrative violence in the previous formulation) and qualitative. My main criterion for the latter was that of a work, or a series of works, becoming a "cultural touchstone." A more precise way of wording this would be to specify that the only works that become cultural touchstones are those that realize concrescence in one or more of the four potentialities. Though I didn't consider the idea at the time of writing Part 1, I'll now state that there is also a qualitative form of "conflict-escalation," and that this is identical with the term I styled "variety." 

I articulate this distinction in order to focus upon the quantitative aspects of both forms. Within a given text, narrative conflict is enhanced by repetition of a threat even if the text manifests an extremely low level of concrescence-- for example, one of the worst slashers of the 1980s, TO ALL A GOODNIGHT. But levels of stature and charisma do not multiply within one text; only in a series of texts with icons in common. In ESCALATION 2 I mentioned two characters, Miss Victory and Magik, whose levels of individual stature were low because they simply hadn't starred in many serial stories as solo characters-- but who went on to accrue greater collective stature once they became members of comparatively more popular teams, respectively "Femforce" and "The New Mutants." In a separate post I mentioned that despite the fact that Marvel's Ant-Man/Giant-Man had enjoyed a solo series for a couple of years, and was better known to contemporary readers than either of my other two examples, over the next sixty years he also became better known for his participation as an Avenger, and thus his fictive career was dominated by collective rather than individual stature.

In yet another 2012 essay, GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4, I set down two significant values that should serve to explicate these two functions of escalation. 

One significant value I termed "conviction," which I aligned with the reader's generally subconscious sussing out as to how much emotion, and of what type, he should invest in a text. Conflict-escalation within a text is one technique used to stoke a reader's identification with fictional concerns, though clearly there are very types of conviction involved between, say, a slasher in which a killer knocks off several victims, and a Roadrunner cartoon in which the Coyote suffers one injury after another until the story reaches some usually arbitrary conclusion. Though I didn't continue using the term "conviction" on a regular basis, I've never contradicted this 2012 formulation, and I may find new ways to better incorporate this formulation in future.

In contrast, I've devoted several thousand words to centricity, and the entire formulation of stature/charisma is dependent on showing how this or that icon has the greatest resonance while the other icons in the narrative are of a lesser narrative order. So escalation that comes about due to an icon having appeared a few times, or many many times, is entirely congruent with all of my writings on centricity.

And all of these terminological ruminations will tie into an essay intended for tomorrow.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PT. 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PART 3

Here I'll be bringing my formulations in Part 1 and Part 2 into line with some of my observations regarding audience-conviction.

In the FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS series, I argued that there were four states of "dynamis," which both Northrop Frye and I use to signify the "power of action" of characters in fiction. and that those four states parallel the four-staged development of human beings as described by Ovid in his METAMORPHOSES. In the poem Ovid asserts that every human being starts out as being like Spring, "quickening yet shy," develops into "Summer's hardiness," loses those "first flushes" upon entering Autumn's "temperate season," and finally enters the domain of "senile Winter," which is marked by the "terror in palsy" that will precede Death. These states I then compared to my four quasi-Fryean mythoi, respectively comedy, adventure, drama and irony.

Now, all of my formulations regarding kenosis and plerosis, informed largely by the analyses of Theodore Gaster and Jane Ellen Harrison, which are focused not on individual growth and decay but upon a given society's attempt to maintain itself in what Gaster calls the "durative" sense. Thus there are four forms of ritual-- what Gaster calls "the jubilative,""the invigorative," "the purgative," and the morificative," all of which also align with the four mythoi, and in the same order.

So the four mythoi line up well when paralleled to the "ages of man," or to the yearly rituals of archaic societies , which are intended to maintain the society as if it were a cyclical living entity, able to reconstitute itself indefinitely, unlike individual persons. However, there's far less uniformity in terms of the ways each mythos works with the audience's *conviction* regarding the narratives of each mythoi, since it's possible for audiences to take some mythoi seriously and others unseriously:

The drama and the adventure, often perceived as two "serious" types of entertainment, are easy to confound, even as are the two types of "unserious" entertainment, comedy and irony.-- GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, PART 1.

In the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW series, I meditated upon the attitudes of "serious conviction" and "unserious lack of conviction." In the POETICS, Aristotle had characterized these states of audience-perception as "weighty" and "light" respectively. I followed this formulation somewhat by speaking of the first category as being dominantly characterized by "tonal gravity," while the other was dominantly characterized by "tonal levity." Assuming that one keeps to the order by which Frye arranged his mythoi, explicitly patterned after the four seasons, then here we have not a smooth progression, but a sort of oscillation. We start with the jubilative form of the unserious, which is perhaps the "lightest" of the four, and proceed to the invigorative, which is dominantly serious. The purgative mythos then increases the "gravity" and instills an even greater sense of seriousness-- and yet, this particular center cannot hold, and the mortificative mythos arises from the purgative, taking on a new form of "levity," one so free of the bonds of literary gravity that hardly anything can be valued.

Similarly, the ritual processes of *kenosis* (emptying) and *plerosis* (filling) also follow this oscillating progress, as I pointed out in SOMETIMES THEY WIN, SOMETIMES THEY LOSE:

I generalized that two of the four Fryean mythoi allow the protagonist to win sometimes, lose sometimes.  One of the two is *drama,* a mythos which possesses a serious tone and a *kenotic* (emptying) audience-function, and *comedy,* a mythos which possesses an unserious tone and a  *plerotic* (filling) audience-function. In contrast, as I also stated in that essay, the function of *adventure* is "to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat," while in contrast "the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction."  Just to keep symmetry with the above assertions, I'll reiterate that *adventure* is a mythos with a serious tone and a *plerotic* audience-function, while *irony* is a mythos with an unserious tone and a *kenotic* audience-function.

So here too we see an oscillation between modes:

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

In the same essay plerosis-kenosis essay, I specified that what society is being "filled with" is whatever a given society perceives to be "life-supporting" elements, while the same society attempts to "empty itself" of "life-denying" elements. But then the objection arises: if the jubilative and mortificative mythoi address their respective processes of filling and emptying with only a "light" sense of conviction, why would those processes have any societal importance?

My best solution for the time being is that most if not all societies need what I've called "vacations from morals," and that works of tonal levity, simply by the fact that they are NOT meant to fill the audience with a sense of "the grave and the constant," serve as a counterpoint to their more serious-minded counterparts. Hard to say if this line of thought will bear more fruit.

FANTASIES OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

In my review of Wally Wood's THE KING OF THE WORLD, I had to give some thought as to what Fryean mythos it fit. I alluded to the differences between Wood's work and the work of Tolkien, whose Middle-Earth tales had some degree of influence upon KING.

Tolkien's good characters are largely good all-through, except when unduly influenced by the corruption of the One Ring. But not only is Odkin a natural born deceiver himself, he clearly lives in a world where deceit lurks around every corner. This aligns KING OF THE WORLD with Frye's concept of the "irony-mythos," which I'll discuss in a separate essay.

When Northrop Frye used the term "irony" as a category for a type of storytelling, he was of course aware that the word originally connoted a sort of intentional deceit, as per Merriam-Webster; "the use of words that mean the opposite of what you really think especially in order to be funny."

But the nature of irony is elusive, and is often confused with comedy. I've discussed the difference in various essays and won't repeat it here. But it's far more rare to see the "mortificative" effects of the irony-mythos strongly associated with the "invigorating" effects of the adventure-mythos. The majority of ironic jests at the expense of heroes and heroic fantasy are usually too emotionally distanced to allow for invigoration, a pattern seen in such films as 1967's FEARLESS FRANK and 2013's THE LONE RANGER. In my essay SOMETIMES THEY WIN, SOMETIMES THEY LOSE I noted the opposed dynamic of the two mythoi:

...the function of *adventure* is "to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat," while in contrast "the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction."

And yet, though I hold to the belief that every coherent story is dominated by one myth-radical, it's not impossible to juggle the fundamental appeals of two or more mythoi so that they *seem* almost inextricable-- one prominent example being the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries. In A WHIFF OF BAT-IRONY  I wrote:

It's often been observed that the teleseries-producers pursued a two-tier approach with BATMAN.  They knew that children and some adolescents would take the adventure-elements seriously, while the adults would be entertained by the ironic distancing conveyed by the dialogue and some of the more overtly absurd situations (e.g., Batgirl almost fails to rescue Batman and Robin from a death-trap because she's careful to obey local traffic laws).  Yet, because of the two-tiered approach, Dozier and Co. couldn't avoid validating-- rather than subverting-- the most representative element of the adventure-genre: the *agon*, the fight-scene in which good wins out over evil.

My initial difficulties in determining the myth-radical of KING OF THE WORLD may have stemmed from the fact that Wood also pursued something of a two-tier approach. As I stated in the review, Wood's original idea for his fantasy was formed in his childhood, and so the adult Wood surely wanted to call to mind his youthful, "innocent" love of fantasy-tropes in the course of KING. Thus KING shows invigorative elements as the young, somewhat cynical hero encounters simple wonders like an eye in the door of Alcazar's sanctum--

Or when Odkin finds himself caught up in the fury of large-scale battles, as if he had wandered into the world of Hal Foster's PRINCE VALIANT (reputedly one of Wood's early loves).

But note that even on the page depicting pitched battle, there's an element of deceitfulness that would have been foreign to Foster's classical-art approach. Odkin's people "the Immi" ally themselves to human soldiers against the Un-Men, and they battle with a "two-tiered approach," the Immi striking low while the soldiers strike high. The page even ends with the main character appearing to flee the battle. As it turns out, Odkin has fled to enlist the help of the giants called "the Earthmen," which became the cover-image of the original release.

But despite all these moments of exciting adventure, the reader loses some conviction in the significance of the victory for assorted reasons-- the main one being the final page, wherein Odkin realizes that the sword's influence is making him uncharacteristically heroic. He tries, and fails, to fling the sword away, and so the installment ends with the picture of him being obliged to pursue the role of stalwart hero.

There's nothing comparable to this will-lessness in William Dozier's BATMAN. Dozier's hero may be corny and square as hell, but no one forces him to dress up in a bat-suit. Dozier mocked a lot of the heroic fantasies associated with superheroes, but as I said above, the *agon,* the fight-scene, still carries its invigorating charge, even with the POWs and BAMs inserted-- largely because Dozier guessed that the younger part of his audience would not accept Batman being turned into a comic stumblebum.

In contrast, Wood's long association with the fantasy-genre gave him an almost peerless ability to conjure forth spectacles of exciting, enthralling strangeness. However, perhaps because the domain of comic books was a cutthroat business, or perhaps because he gained signal fame through his association with EC Comics, Wood chose to undercut the fantasies of heroism with Odkin-- whose wits and survival skills become the tools of a manipulative, if benign, controller.

What's interesting is that while Dozier's creative choices may have been informed by his reading of television audiences, Wood was seeking to create an audience for his own work. He could have done a "fantasy of innocence" that was barely influenced by the "fantasies of experience:" a work fully in the tradition of Tolkien, if not Foster. Yet KING OF THE WORLD, when read attentively, is a deeply ironic narrative that would seem to reflect Wood's own acerbic personality, at least far more than a straight Tolkien knock-off would have.

MONSTROUS MISCELLANY

"[Leatherface] is never an object of pity per se, but is clearly not your standard masked maniac who delights in the torments of his victims.  He is the very banality of our primal basic animal nature; no motive, no ambitions, no conscience and no soul.  It exists merely to survive and provide for itself and its family."-- "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," essay by Michael Feischer, HORRORHOUND magazine, Jan/Feb 2013.
 

Though I don't quite get why essayist Feischer changes pronouns in midstream from "he" to "it," the fact that he does so might demonstrate that the concept of the monster is one that makes it hard to distinguish between sentient life and non-sentient objects.  A few of the monster-movies I've reviewed on NATURALISTIC! UNCANNY! MARVELOUS! even include "monsters" who are nothing more than non-sentient phenomena gone berserk, though it's more often that they're giant versions of creatures found in nature-- spiders, birds, octopi, etc.

Feischer (presumably no relation to the similarly named comics-writer Michael FLEISCHER) is only talking about one monstrous figure, but I would say that parts of his description work for my concept of the monster-persona, particularly the reference to "basic animal nature" and the focus upon survival of itself and its ingroup.

I certainly would not typify monsters as being without "motive," "ambitions," "conscience," or "soul," however.  A mad scientist like Wells' Doctor Moreau, examined here, has both motives and ambitions, although he has no conscience and arguably no soul.  In contrast, many monsters are appealing precisely because they are aware of their monstrous nature and struggle to some extent against it, even if they fail to triumph, as I recently observed in the case of the two BLACULA films.
Perhaps one appeal of the monster is that he has an "animal nature"-- which for me is the same as an "instinctive will"-- that he often fights against, though often unsuccessfully.  The rare monsters that manage to succeed are those that, like the Hulk and the Swamp Thing, do manage to become serious heroic protagonists. Comic monsters like Dick Briefer's Frankenstein must be considered successes of a sort, though since they occupy a comic universe, their struggles are by their nature lacking in deep conviction.

On another matter, I wrote in the above-cited essay:

The difference in the degree of negativity, however, makes me label Wells' Doctor Moreau a "monster" rather than a "demihero."

This doesn't contradict anything I've written, but I want to clarify that though the demihero does have some potential as a vessel for negative, life-denying forces-- and can even transform rather easily into the figure of the monster-- on the whole the "instinctive will" governing the demihero is the positive mirror-image of the "animal nature" Feischer references.  At times demiheroes are set up to be unequivocal victims, whether they are sympathetic  or not, but they have a quality of "persistence" equal to that of the monster, and so are capable of turning the tables on their monstrous doubles-- though usually without the sort of "glorious" attitude of the hero triumphing over the villain.

 

THE COMPLICATIONS OF COMEDY

At the conclusion of PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION I said:

The great failing of Quiller-Couch's breakdown is that its arrangement suggests that the "man" in the position of "protagonist" must be the main concern of the story, whereas I've detailed many examples in which the imaginative center can be the protagonist's villainous/monstrous opponent, whether it's a specific human threat (Fu Manchu), a natural phenomenon (Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth"), an unusual society, or a separate manifestation of one's own, as with Edward Hyde. 

Quiller-Couch's arrangement, by its use of the opposed terms "protagonist" and "antagonist," also suggests opposition in every sense.  And yet, it's possible-- particularly in comedy-- for the conflict to be one that results in accomodation rather than confrontation.  In this essay I cited the sociopolitical work of Francis Fukuyama, with special attention to his distinction between two "thymotic" processes, "megalothymia" and "isothymia:"

"Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifstations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood." (The End of History and the Last Man, p. 182).

I summed up my application of Fukuyama to literary studies thusly:

The phenomenon of sthenolagnia, of "strength-worship" in both real and literary worlds, could be said to abide in both of Fukuyama's categories. In "megalothymia" one worships a superior force which extends its power vertically downward. In "isothymia" one worships a commonality of interlinked and interdependent forces.

I'll admit that in most of my recent writings on the "persona-pairs" of "hero/villain" and "monster/demihero," I have tended to focus upon "megalothymic" conflicts, because so much genre fiction depends on such conflict.  I would argue that of Northrop Frye's four mythoi, adventure, drama, and irony are particularly dependent on this form of conflict.

Comedy, however, complicates the matter.  I should perhaps suspect some such permutation, though, given that I wrote in GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4 that the comedy-mythos was characterized by the least degree of audience-conviction in the fates of the characters:

This arbitrariness, this freedom from real consequence, is the reason I consider the comedy-mythos to be the one in which the audience holds the least degree of conviction—though such levity is precisely comedy’s appeal.

This is not to say that there aren't a lot of comedy-works that hinge on violent, megalothymotic conflict.  I'd hardly argue that after having frequently used the example of Rumiko Takahashi's RANMA 1/2 as a example of a "combative comedy."

However, it should be noted that the prime focus of the series-narrative-- one of the factors that trumps the adventure-elements of the stories-- is the romantic relationship of star Ranma Saotome and support-character Akane Tendou. Not every story in the series is about their rocky romance, but it sets the tone for the series; one that I call (in imitation of Theodor Gaster) the *jubilative.*

Ranma intrudes on the essentially placid home life of the Tendous and creates comic chaos.  To be sure, he isn't responsible for all of the chaos: before he arrives Akane has been having regular duels with Tatewaki Kuno in her attempts to fend off Kuno's ardor.  But once Ranma does arrive, the household is constantly invaded by people with grudges against Ranma.  Although Ranma certainly functions as a comic hero in the eyes of the audience, one might forgive Akane for regarding him as something of a "monster."

In many other comedies, however, the "monster" is neither heroic nor physically monstrous.

As this still from Rene Clair's 1942 film I MARRIED A WITCH suggests, Jennifer, the comely witch played by Veronica Lake, casts a forbidding shadow as she makes up to Fredric March's character Wallace.  She starts out the film intending to cause Wallace nothing but trouble, but accidentally drinks a potion that causes her to fall in love with him.  Though she is still in my reckoning the "focal presence" of the story, she becomes Wallace's ally against both her hostile witch-father and Wallace's shrewish fiancee.  Of my four "persona-types," Jennifer the Witch is still closest to that of the "monster," but plainly a benign one, like some of those discussed at the end of this essay.

As noted in ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE a story may have more than one focal presence, as seen in the 1937 comedy TOPPER, based like WITCH on a Thorne Smith novel.

In this film there's no literal "antagonist," comparable to Jennifer's witch-father, against which the merrymaking ghosts George and Marion Kirby strive: theirs might be called a "man vs. society" struggle in that they endeavor to free up their henpecked, mousey buddy Cosmo Topper by encouraging him to act out and to remind his wife of his needs.

In both WITCH and TOPPER, supernatural beings bring conflict into the lives of drab humans, but it's clearly conflict that the humans need to break out of their respective ruts.  One might consider WITCH to still have some *megalothymic* elements given that Jennifer must at least outmaneuver her nasty daddy.  However, the Kirbys supply an entirely *isothymic* form of conflict.  Topper's narrative position approximates that of Jonathan Harker in DRACULA, but where "demihero" Harker is oppressed by the vampire's power, Topper's *thymos*, his power to be recognized as a willing subject, is enchanced by the ghosts' machinations.

Note that I'm not stating that no such *isothymic* arrangements pertain in drama, adventure, or irony.  But since all three mythoi are stronger in terms of the element of reader-conviction, one may speculate that *isothymic* scenarios simply don't appear as often.  It may that comedy can best deal with the idea of an anomaly that exists just to improve the life of a viewpoint character.

STATURE REQUIREMENTS

In the second paragraph of the Poetics Aristotle speaks of the differences in works of fiction which are caused by the different elevations of the characters in them. In some fictions, he says, the characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others on the same level. This passage has not received much attention from modern critics, as the importance Aristotle assigns to goodness and badness seems to indicate a somewhat narrowly moralistic view of literature. Aristotle's words for good and bad, however, are spouddos and phaulos, which have a figurative sense of weighty and light. In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, there fore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero's power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same. -- opening paragraph of Frye's "Theory of Modes" in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

 Definitions of "stature":
1 : natural height (as of a person) in an upright position
2 : quality or status gained by growth, development, or achievement--
Merriam-Webster online.

It now seems to me that although the significant value of "conviction" provides an ancillary function in terms of how readers apportion value to different characters in different mythoi, the central value is best covered by the word "stature."  I note that in Frye's paragraph he speaks of the "different elevations" of the characters, which may be fairly considered an assignment of their "stature," whether it's within the quasi-aristocratic schema of Aristotle or within Frye's Spenglerian conception.

Further, "stature." unlike "conviction," has a more direct connection with the concept of *dynamis.*  As the dictionary says, stature is a positive quality resulting from "growth, development, or achievement"-- an abstract quality based upon the physical nature of human growth-patterns. One may consider the aforesaid achievement as the result of exercising one's energies-- or *dynamis*-- to their fullest as per Nietzsche's dictum on the "will-to-power." 

Yet, within the vagaries of literature, great power doesn't always convey great stature (or contrary to Stan Lee, "great responsibility").  Or, to be more precise, the four mythoi each bestow a different type of *stature* upon their focal presences.  Given my pluralistic stance, it would be incorrect to assume that a comic hero has *less* stature than a serious hero.  The comic hero fulfills the stature appropriate to an unserious character, just as the serious hero does for his endeavors.

At the end of PARADIGM SHIFTING I chose four series-characters who were similar in that all four possessed a high level of *dynamis* within a *marvelous* metaphenomenality-- meaning that all can do fantastic things like breaking brick walls, casting magic spells, etc. I broke down their affinites with the Fryean mythoi as follows:

BUFFY SUMMERS-- Adventure
HARRY POTTER-- Drama
MARSHAL LAW-- Irony
RANMA SAOTOME-- Comedy


I should note that the scheme I propose does not depend on focal presences who possess marvelous powers.  It could be illustrated just as easily with protagonists who fell into either the "uncanny" or "naturalistic" phenomenalities that I've described in great detail elsewhere.  I did wish, however, to choose only characters with a high level of *dynamis* appropriate to a particular phenomenality, as well as characters who all tended to win their serial victories, since that uniformity helps me illustrate the different *stature* that accrues to each character, despite the similarities in terms of narrative values.

"I always win," Buffy Summers says as she squares off against a demonic Ubervamp in the seventh-season episode "Showtime."  To be sure, the super-vampire has beaten her on a previous occasion, but like most if not all adventure-heroes, Buffy's ultimate triumph is guaranteed by her mythos.  Adventure-heroes are meant to overcome the forces of evil, and in general the worst they can do is to die with their opponents, as the medieval Beowulf does while slaying a fearsome dragon at the same time.  To reference the terminology of myth-ritualist Theodor Gaster, the entire point of this mythos is to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat."

In contrast, the heroes of the dramatic mythos don't necessarily always win, although it's significant that when Aristotle speaks of tragedy he includes an example of a "happy-ending tragedy," Euripides' IPHIGENIA AT TAURIS.  J.K. Rowlings' Harry Potter series  is a series which focuses far less on the thrill of victory than on what Frye calls the heroic "pathos" and what Gaster deems the "purgative" quality of ritual myth.  The presence of pathos implies the strong possibility that the hero may, like Orestes in the aforementioned Euripides play, become a sacrifice rather than a victor.  Throughout the Potter book-series, the central character wins most of his significant battles either singly or with the help of his retinue, but he's constantly stalked by the threat of the evil Voldemort and by prophecies that suggest, however ambivalently, that Voldemort will eventually kill him.  Harry Potter survives his trip to Calvary, but the series' emotional tone focuses upon the all-too-human pathos of its teenaged characters, and their need to control and/or purge their emotions in order to win out.

Now, I've noted in other essays that the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction, as I noted in respect to Paul Verhoeven's ironic SF-film STARSHIP TROOPERS.  The Mills/O'Neill character Marshal Law conforms to this pattern, as shown by this Wikipedia entry:

 The title character, Marshal Law, is the government-sanctioned "super hero hunter" (aka law enforcement officer, or “cape killer”) with superpowers in the city of San Futuro, the near-future metropolis built from the ruins of San Francisco following a massive earthquake. Law's job is to take down other superheroes who have gone rogue, which he does with maximum force and great pleasure. Aided by the wheelchair-using “Danny” and his physically imposing (but extremely polite) partner “Kiloton”, the Marshal operates from a secret police precinct hidden below the city, dispensing just enough brutal justice to keep the city’s many super-powered gangs in a balanced détente while safeguarding the ordinary citizenry.

Although Marshal Law wins all of his battles against the superheroes-- who are seen as being stupid and venal even when they are not lawbreakers-- he generally exists in a world to which no redemption is possible.  Whereas it matters a great deal whether or not Buffy Summers triumphs over the monsters menacing her world, the Marshal's victories merely illustrate that he shares the venality of his enemies in no small part.  Thus the stature that accrues to Marshal Law is "mortificative" in Gaster's terms: the hero takes pleasure in scoring satiric points off the creators' targets, the superheroes, but the world he exists in has no positive aspects worth speaking of.

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

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

I have not yet decided on a means of labelling the respective types of mythos-stature.  This will probably appear in a forthcoming essay, however.

PARADIGM SHIFTING

At the beginning of the final section of GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW, I said that I had "discerned only two (though there may be more) universally applicable significant values" within the sphere of literature-- "signficant values" that in theory should apply to any characters in any literary genre thus far conceived.  As in Frye's formulation, "significant values" go hand-in-glove with the "narrative values" that determine what elements function within the narrative to erect the framework of that narrative, as opposed to the way they work to create a sense of extrinsic meaning.

One of the values I cited was *centricity.*  This functions as both values: a narrative must center around some "focal presence," or a group of presences-- usually characters who are human or have human-like responses, though on some occasions this function can be filled by simple "viewpoint characters" who react to a focal presence that is nothing more than a discrete phenomenon-- for instance, a bizarre environment like Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, within which viewpoint-character Alice can only stand as flummoxed witness.  This value does not require modification.

The other value was *dynamis.*  In NOTES ON NORTHROP FRYE AND THE NUM-THEORY I summed up the way Frye had assigned characters in terms of their "power of action" based on the schema from Aristotle's POETICS:

Whereas Aristotle’s division of *dynamis* has the fixed arrangement of an aristocratic pecking-order—noble / less noble / ignoble—Frye’s reformulation suggests a more Spenglerian vision of *dynamis*, in which human power of action becomes less and less efficacious as each mythos in its turn becomes less “romantic” and more “realistic.” 

Later in that essay I critiqued Frye's Spenglerian vision in terms of its applicability:

The most problematic aspect of Frye’s *dynamis* schema is that in its attempt to cohere with Aristotle’s pattern, it implies that “the marvelous” is located purely within the mythoi of myth and romance. I’m sure that, even staying within the confines of the canonical “high” literature with which Frye concerns himself, the scholar was quite cognizant that there exist many literary works which have marvelous content but which are not adventure-romances as Frye himself defines that mythos.

I concluded by saying, in part:

The real strength of Frye’s schema is to be found not in the implied “narrative values”— how each *dynamis* manifests in physical terms—but in terms of one “significant value” that more neatly characterizes each mythos, irrespective of whether its phenomenality is marvelous, uncanny, or naturalistic...

I went on to expatiate in GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4 that I felt that whenever *dynamis* was expressed through a particular mythos, it took on a characteristic "significant value" I called *conviction,* meaning that the narrative value of a focal *dynamis* took on significance in terms of the dominant mythos with which it was associated. 

To be as forthright as one can be in this sort of philosophical exploration, I've determined that "conviction" does not sufficiently serve to differentiate the signficance of a given focal presence within a given mythos.   I don't repudiate what I wrote on the subject, but now it seems to be that "conviction" must serve as an ancillary term, not a central one. By itself the term doesn't serve well enough to describe the significant tonality that separates, say, an adventure-comedy from a comedy-adventure. 

My revised term for the significant value corresponding to the narrative value "dynamis" will be covered in the next essay, which will describe more fully the philosophical underpinnings of this concept.

To illustrate the value across the four mythoi, I'll make use of *almost* the same four examples that I used early on in my mythos-investigations, in the essay BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER.  In that essay I contrasted four serial conceptions in terms of their mythos-alignments.  Of those four, three concern single protagonists (Buffy Summers, Harry Potter, and Ranma Saotome), while the fourth concerned a team (the "masks" of the Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN).  I've decided that this time around I'd prefer to compare single-protagonist conceptions straight across, so in place of WATCHMEN as my example of the irony-mythos, I'll substitute the Pat Mills/Kevin O'Neill comic book MARSHAL LAW.

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST

Having arrived at a deductive conclusion as to the progression of the affect of identificatory conviction throughout the four mythoi, I should add that the same degrees of conviction apply to the *dynamis* of the characters typical of these mythoi.

I've seen a fair number of superhero lists over the years.  Mikel Midnight  still maintains a page that correlates many of them, though unfortunately the most inclusive known to me, THE COMICS INTERNATIONAL WEBSITE, seems to have gone the way of the dodo.  Jess Nevins still maintains a list called the GOLDEN AGE HERO DIRECTORY, but this list aims at collating all adventure-heroes in Golden Age comic books.  But the most problematic aspect of most such lists is that they're generally focused purely on external points of similarity.  I'm aware of no list that seeks to list any protagonists, superheroic or otherwise, according to the Fryean mythos to which they belong.

I've compiled a provisional list for my own use, but I admit that when I first began it, I focused, as most comics-fans do, upon external resemblances.  Thus I would list, say, THE INFERIOR FIVE within the superheroic idiom simply because the characters did their thing in costumes. 

Now, as a result of investigations such as this one, however, I've determined that the Inferior Five would be appropriate only in a list of superhero-idiom types within the comedy-mythos.  Considered in terms of the level of conviction aroused by the Inferior Five, they have more in common with "non-costumed" types like Johnny Thunder or Ranma Saotome than with even the most tongue-in-cheek version of Batman or Plastic Man.

This formulation doesn't merely help distinguish between types of superheroes, of course.  Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are both magically-powered teen heroes, which would move some critics to dump them both in a vague category called "young adult fantasy."  But, if I can judge Percy Jackson by his one film adaptation, that character is far more oriented toward adventure than toward the *purgative* aspect of drama seen in J.K. Rowling's famous character.

I will note in passing that it is possible for different iterations to change a given character in terms of his mythic alignment.  An example appears here on You Tube, a 5-minute Wonder Woman pilot commissioned by producer William Dozier after the success of the BATMAN teleseries.  IMDB describes it thusly:

'At the height of the popularity of "Batman" (1966), producer William Dozier produced this short film in hopes of getting approval from Warner Brothers to produce a pilot episode for a "Wonder Woman" series, based on the comic book. Unlike "Batman," which was campy adventure, "Wonder Woman" was going to be a straight comedy series, along the lines of "Captain Nice." The resulting short written by several writers on the Batman series failed to win Dozier that approval.'

It's interesting that the synopsis-writer makes the same distinction I did above, to the effect that an adventure with comedic touches is not the same as a "straight comedy," oxymoronic though that phrase may sound.

There are perhaps more impressive examples of mythos-shifting than this unsold pilot, of course.  The late Don Markstein's TOONOPEDIA chronicles one example in Dick Briefer's Golden Age FRANKENSTEIN feature, noting how Briefer's version of the famous monsters started out with serious undertones (what I'd probably label "drama"), then shifted to comedy for a time, and then back to a serious theme before the feature perished.  This degree of change might encourage some critics to scoff at any attempts to schematize such a character, precisely because he and his author could shift in approach that much from year to year.  But I reject that as a know-nothing approach to the problems of categorization.

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.*

The same rule can be adapted for use in determination of the more limited categorizations that we call "genre," and my next essay will explore such genre-divisions in response to another online fan's genre-dicing endeavors.

CORRECTION TO EARLIER STATEMENT: Apparently it was only the link I tried that was bad:
AN INTERNATIONAL CATALOGUE OF SUPERHEROES is still extant after all.

THE STRENGTH OF OUR CONVICTIONS

From GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 1:

Taking the two statements together, it seems not unreasonable to hypothesize that in narrative fiction "the perfect agreement of the concept, or the idea, with what is perceptive, with reality" accords with the idea of a reader's investment in the narrative's events as if they arouse straightforward "concern or sympathy." However, if events in the narrative undermines the reader's investment because they seem incongruous, then the reader, while not necessarily losing all "concern and sympathy," is moved to a humorous reaction, which may vary along a wide spectrum of affects from the deep belly-laugh to the more intellectualized "I laugh that I might not weep" response.

By the conclusion of this essay-series I hope I've made clear that my term for the "agreement" of readers' concerns with the concerns of fictional characters can be subsumed under the term "conviction." 

Correspondingly, I need to clarify that the degree of conviction of readers toward a given mythos does not imply any superiority or inferiority of that mythos to others.  Though I do believe that the adventure mythos involves the greatest such degree-- perhaps because it is, as Frye observes, the closest in structure to a "wish fulfillment dream"-- this does not make that mythos superior to drama, irony or comedy (though there have been no shortage of false critics willing to place adventure at the bottom of the artistic totem-pole).  The entire concept of dynamization, which underlies the emotive context derived from conviction, is posited on a pluralistic ethos:

"Dynamization," however, does work as a term for what the reader of a given work perceives to be happening within him, whether he seeks for unearned or earned gratification.

This perceived dichotomy as to what types of dynamization are or are not approved in society and culture-- with some being viewed as "earned" and others as "unearned"-- is well glossed by Frye's essay "Mouldy Tales," which I covered in this essay.

Frye goes on to point out that because the more "realistic" forms of literature foreground what he terms (following Freud) "the reality principle." Thus even though tragedies like MACBETH and ironies like THE CASTLE (my examples) have a certain storytelling verve to them as well, there's a sort of proto-critical experience one generally has while experiencing them.

This "proto-critical experience" Frye describes doubtlessly influences my conviction about conviction: that, for instance, the same subject matter in an adventure-story, which may be accepted in terms of the *invigorative* emotion it conjures, may be examined more critically in terms of a drama, where the dynamizing emotion is *purgative* in nature.  Thus the original Hamlet stories of the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus, taking an adventurous approach, present the hero as cleverly pretending madness as a ruse to deceive his enemies.  Shakespeare transforms this notion into a critique of Hamlet's own rational mind and of his responses to his father's murder-- and in so doing, signals that the reader must be more critical toward Hamlet than Hamlet is.  Whereas in the adventure-themed folklore story of Hamlet the evil can be cast out without harm to the society, in a drama the hero is implicated in the evil and is "purged" no less than the villain.


Following the Gasterian scheme outlined here, in the next artistic/expressive stage, that of irony, becomes critical of all experience in the world itself, and thus we enter a *mortificative* stage, in which the reader realizes that he must pull back from identification with a world " in which all human efficacy is missing, and all passion spent."  And yet, precisely because one cannot remain in this spiritual darkness indefinitely, the next cyclical stage is that of the *jubilative* emotion, which dominates the comedy-mythos and puts the reader back on the track of identification, though I argue that the degree of conviction is at its "lightest" simply because there remains a sizeable gulf between "the reality principle" and "the fantasy principle"-- one that is efficiently eradicated when the cycle goes back to the adventure-mythos, in that the protagonist's desires are made real not by dumb luck but by skill and hard battle.

Frye believes that the "proto-critical experience" critics derive from the drama and the irony explains much about why they are more respected in works canonical criticism than either comedy or adventure.  I disagree with this slightly. It's true that the comedy is often rated as less respectable than the irony or the drama, BUT it still gets better critical plaudits overall than adventure.  Indeed, I'm aware of no critics who have accused comedies of being advertisements for fascism, as one regularly reads from critics as diverse as Frederic Wertham and Frederic Jameson.  (Hmm, is there something about the name "Frederic" that encourages this tedious trope?)

I've invoked Theodor Gaster already, and I'll do so again in respect to the "less critical" and "more critical" aspects of literature:

...Gaster introduces two Greek terms that identify how the respective rites work. Rites of jubilation and invigoration are both characterized by *plerosis,* or "filling," because both give the sense that the ritual fills the community with new life. Rites of mortification and purgation are both characterized by *kenosis,* or "emptying," because they "empty out" the community of "noxious elements" one way or another.

I believe that the drama and the irony are more popular with canonical lit-critics (or those who aspire to be like them) not just because they offer a supposed opportunity for critical thought, but because the process of *kenosis* is one that seems to be more "tough-minded," because it puts the reader in the position of being increasingly divorced from the fictional heroes' interests.  Consequently, adventure and comedy smack of that other William James-ian term, the "tender-minded," simply because it's popularly assumed that the readers of such works are identifying outright with the interests of the protagonists.  There's some justice in this; however, I maintain that the level of conviction in the comedy is still in its "lightest" phase, and for that reason the comedy still appeals more to the canon-minded critic than the heavy investment of the adventure-mythos.

Now, I'm not contradicting the earlier-expressed notion that the comedy is characterized by *plerosis,* the feeling that new life is filling the imaginal community.  But it does so precisely by appealing to a different species of "wish fulfillment" than that which underlies its plerotic kindred: the adventure-mythos.

By exploring the possible reasons as to why different types of dynamization are accepted or rejected by non-pluralistic critics, it becomes possible to transcend these elitist tendencies.  To some extent this transcendence has manifested in contemporary critical sites like SLAYAGE, wherein critical investigation of an outstanding adventure-themed work, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, receives as much treatment as any dramatic or ironic work.  Of course BUFFY may be an exception in that, as I noted here, it manages to tap into the dominant dynamizations of the other three mythoi in varying degrees.  But it's a hopeful sign nonetheless.

GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4

I established in Part 3 that Northrop Frye had dealt with the nature of protagonists’ power-of-action—henceforth called *dynamis*—purely in terms of its physical nature within the story, which would make it a “narrative value.” However, *dynamis* of any kind or degree must possess “significant values” as well.  As I observed here, *dynamis* can apply to either of the principal axes of narrative—plot or character—though in this essay I will deal with it only with respect to characters.

At present I’ve discerned only two (though there may be more) universally applicable significant values.  Universality means that they will apply to any *dynamis,* no matter whether one speaks of characters who symbolize “might” in their respective narrative worlds—which can be anything from Superman to Dirty Harry—or those who represent a more compromised form of *dynamis,* as with Kafla’s “Joseph K” or Graham Greene’s Henry Scobie, who both exist primarly not to act but to suffer.

The first significant value is “centricity.”  As noted here it is possible that a “focal presence” need not be the viewpoint character; rather, the focal character is simply the focus of the author’s narrative concerns, which the viewpoint character may only exist to illuminate.  The “focal presence” can even be a setting rather than a character, such as Carroll’s Wonderland or Verne’s Center of the Earth.  I note that this need not contradict my earlier statement re: character if one remembers that Aristotle deemed setting and character as subsumable under “ethos.”

  I’ll explore the permutations of centricity further in another essay, but for now, what I’ve written on focal presences seems sufficient.  As a significant value it serves to clarify that the focal presence’s power-of-action may be more important to the story than that of an opponent’s, even if in a physical sense the opponent’s power may seem greater, as seen in the contest between Wagner’s knight Parzival and his sorcerer-villain Klingsor.

The other significant value, the one I referenced at the end of NOTES, requires much more explanation.  The value alludes to the unique ways in which audience-members relate to each mythos in terms of identifying their real-world concerns with those of the characters.  Readers should recall that in Part 1 of this essay-series, I based my discussion of this interaction in terms of Schopenhauer’s incongruity theory of humor.  Works which demonstrated a strong degree of congruence between character-concerns and audience-concerns I characterized as possessing “tonal gravity;” works which demonstrated a strong degree of incongruence between character-concerns and audience-concerns I characterized as possessing “tonal levity.”

For this reason I considered using “congruence” as a rubric to describe a significant value that embraces all these manifestations.  But the idea of congruence is purely relational: it doesn’t adequately define the affects arising from “gravity” and “levity.”

Thus I choose to swipe another academic’s term and put my spin on it: in this case, film-critic James Monaco’s concept of *conviction,* which in my re-interpretation adequately describes the emotional tenor experienced by the audience-members as they discern what level of gravity or levity is appropriate to the narrative mythos in question.

Now, in “Theory of Modes” Frye explores the manifestation of the physical *dynamis* in his mythoi along the pattern of Aristotle, so that this schema follows this downward progression:

Romance / Tragedy / Comedy / Irony

However, this is not the order Frye follows when he’s describing how the mythoi progress in accordance with the patterning of seasonal rituals.  This progression is as follows:

Romance—The ritual of summer
Tragedy—The ritual of autumn
Irony—The ritual of winter
Comedy—The ritual of spring

Of these two patterns, I see the process of the audience’s identificatory conviction as matching that of the seasons.

Conviction, I assert, is at its strongest and most elemental when one is invested in the visceral struggles of the adventure-mythos.  This does not mean that every work in the adventure-mythos conjures forth this deep level of conviction: obviously many make the attempt but do not succeed.  But when the mythos is executed at its height of performance, the audience will experience near-total identification with the hero’s struggle to thwart the forces of evil and destruction.  Summer is still a period of relative vitality, so the audience can invest fully in the possibility of the hero’s triumph.  For tribal man, such victories became relevant to assert the martial spirit of the tribe, for in just three months the forces of seasonal “evil” would begin to eclipse those of good.

Conviction becomes somewhat weaker in the autumnal drama.  As noted many times before, I chose the term “drama” over “tragedy” because in common parlance many people assume that every tragedy ends badly.  Not even Aristotle claimed this, despite the fact that his endorsement of what we now call “the fatal flaw” contributed to the confusion.  In contrast, audiences are accustomed to thinking of dramatic stories as being narratives that may turn out well or badly for the protagonist(s).  However, the mere fact that the audience knows that failure is more possible results in a pulling-back from identification to some degree.  One wants to watch the logical consequences of Gloucester blinding himself as a self-punishment for his figurative blindness, but one does not identify with Gloucester or even Lear in quite the same uncritical manner.  Even in a drama that turns out well for the protagonists in the end, such as Euripides’ IPHEGENIA AT TAURUS, the possibilities of triumph seem yet dimmer, the protagonists’ *dynamis* more in danger of being outmatched.

Autumn still allows for good or bad fortune to win out, but winter is the domain of the irony, where the forces of vitality and *dynamis* are at their lowest ebb.  Conviction is even “lighter” as this point: the audience recognizes that the odds are stacked against the protagonists from the beginning and that the best the heroes can achieve is to find some marginal haven from the ever-present forces of evil, a fate which befalls the surviving protagonists of both CANDIDE and THE WATCHMEN.  Since the very meaning of “irony” is that it says one thing but means another, the audience can take some measure of pleasure from seeing the near-powerless heroes put through their paces, and even treat their fates as a sort of gigantic cosmic joke.

However, winter is at last banished by the forces of good, albeit in a more innocent, less bellicose guise than they assume in summertime.  In spring, the world is reborn from what seems absolute darkness and lack of vitality.  This redemption elicits a joyful response to the very absurdity that, within the mythos of irony, is only a cruel sort of joke.  The unserious aspects of life then assume a life-enhancing quality, comparable to the triumphs of the adventure-mythos but with less sense that the triumphs have been earned in a “serious” sense.  Dumb luck tends to govern the mythos of comedy, as Frye himself observes: “As the main character interest in comedy is so often focused on the defeated characters [at the story’s beginning, I think Frye means], comedy regularly illustrates a victory of arbitrary plot over consistency of character.”  This arbitrariness, this freedom from real consequence, is the reason I consider the comedy-mythos to be the one in which the audience holds the least degree of conviction—though such levity is precisely comedy’s appeal. I note in passing that in common parlance the word “levity” almost applies to this sort of humor, not to the more dolorous forms of irony and satire.  But even if human desire could keep one up in Cloud-Cuckoo Land forever, the seasons will continue their relentless turnings, and so the audience will inevitably proceed from least conviction to greatest conviction, as it readies itself to fight the forces of evil once again.

While the significant value of centricity applies across the board to all mythoi—though I note that I’ve never seen an adventure-story in which the setting was the real star— the significant value of identificatory conviction waxes and wanes according to the audience’s expectations of a given mythos.

Apart from being used to chart the admittedly abstract progressions of literary response, the concept of conviction also provides a tool for better sussing out how different fictional characters align with a given mythos.  In BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER I placed four supernormal characters within each of the four mythoi, but their placements become more logical once the value of conviction provides an intersubjectively-objective justification for their respective assignments.