STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 2

I introduced the term "stature" into my ongoing investigations of focal presences in SUBS AND COES PT. 1.  I doubt that I or anyone can provide a systematic description as to how stature works in narrative, and how it operates in some cases to bring about the coordination of some presences with one another, while in other cases it brings about the subordination of some presences to others. A simple, non-systematic description would simply consist of my re-stating my conviction that stature correlates with the "narrative emphasis" that the author(s) use to structure the narrative. However, being non-systematic is not one of my strengths.

One way to approach a literary process that is not defined by discourse-- where the property under discussion is a given once the narrative is complete-- is by process of elimination. In other words, what qualities do NOT define stature?

In SUBS AND COES PART 1, I indicated that in the BATMAN feature, Robin was coordinated with Batman, while in the DICK TRACY feature, Junior Tracy was subordinated to Dick Tracy. But this might not have been the most balanced comparison. After all, both the original Robin and various later iterations appear regularly in the Batman-mythos over many decades, whereas Junior largely disappears from TRACY once the artist ran out of things to do with him.

Therefore, a better side-by-side comparison would be one between Robin and Doctor Watson of the Sherlock Holmes mythos. I'll concentrate here on the canonical Holmes series of Conan Doyle, though I think it's inarguable that nearly every other later iteration of Sherlock Holmes brings in some version of Watson as well. By this standard, one might argue that the character of Watson is actually more thoroughly imbricated with the character of Holmes, whereas there have been many more Batman stories in which Batman has no partner at his side. So longevity within a serial narrative *might* be seen as a possible quality relevant to stature.

However, two characters in a serial narrative are not necessarily coordinated even if they appear together in every story. In order to be coordinated, each character in such an ensemble must have an independent, autonomous existence, just as, to reiterate my previous metaphor, two coordinate clauses in the same sentence must be able to stand alone.

In contrast, a subordinate clause cannot stand apart from the structure to which it's attached, which is, ideally speaking, a sentence that can stand alone without the clause. Going by these two definitions, longevity is irrelevant.

The question then arises: does dynamicity bear any relation to the stature of characters as being either coordinated or subordinated? When one sees that there have been one or two features devoted to Robin or one of his later epigoni, while to my knowledge Doctor Watson has no ongoing serials devoted to his exploits, one might think it had something to do with the fact that Watson, while courageous, doesn't usually bring much to the table in terms of his ability to trounce evildoers, while Robin's acrobatic abilities give him the ability to take on a variety of enemies without any help from his senior partner.

However, though megadynamicity insures that a given character doesn't need someone else to handle fights, it doesn't necessarily mean that said character and his partner are coordinated. The woods are full of superheroes who have tough sidekicks who are plainly subordinated to the stars of the features, with two prominent examples being "Doiby Dickles" from the Golden Age GREEN LANTERN and "Stretch Skinner" from the Golden Age WILDCAT.

Further, since most incarnations of the Sherlock Holmes concept are more about detection than fisticuffs, the fighting-ability of either Holmes or Watson has little significance in the Doyle stories. It's not impossible to imagine a take on the canonical Doyle stories in which Holmes and Watson are two detectives whose different strengths complement one another, along the lines, say, of the teleseries BONES. But to my knowledge Watson is always both intellectually and physically secondary to Holmes, with the exception of the spoof-tale seen above, WITHOUT A CLUE. There are even some serial concepts in which there's a starring detective who handles all the mental work while he has some legman do his heavy lifting, as per Nero Wolfe and his aide Archie Goodwin, or Ironside and his little coterie. But in these cases, the super-thinker is superordinate to his stooges.

Thus dynamicity, going by these disparate examples, would also seem inapplicable to the concept of stature. The only guide would seem to be that of pure functionality. Robin is coordinated to Batman because the reader expects a hero's sidekick to be able to operate on his own from time to time. In contrast, Watson's main function in the Holmes mythos is to be "the cat who looks at a king," and nothing more. His main status is to be a "subordinate clause" that adds important information to the main sentence-- if only that of making Holmes's feats of detection emotionally relatable-- but he's not important in and of himself.

More to come.

SUBS AND COES PT. 2

The principles of subordination and coordination also serve to further elucidate many of the complications regarding focal presences that I’ve touched on in earlier essays.

In CREATOR AND CREATED ENSEMBLED HE THEM, I gave various examples regarding the ways in which figures in horror-fiction did or did not share center-stage (and thus the centric will).

I opined that in Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN, the titular medical student and his abominable creation share center-stage, which means, in my current jargon, that they are “coordinated.” However, the Universal film-series promotes the Monster to the position of the sole focal presence, while both his creator and all of the other scientists who interact with the Monster are “subordinated.”  The Hammer film-series takes the opposite tack: Baron Frankenstein incarnates the centric will of all his films, and his various creatures are subordinated.

Stevenson’s JEKYLL AND HYDE anticipates this same pattern. No one reading the tale  cares that much about Jekyll, because he is subordinate to the presence of the mysterious Hyde. Of the film-adaptations I’ve seen, only THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL subordinates the peril of Hyde to the tortures of Jekyll.

Though most narratives have tended to emphasize the creator over the created, or vice versa, I’ve always explored some of the situations in which two opponents share center-stage, rather than following the more common paradigm in which a superordinate protagonist faces off against a subordinate antagonist.  However, in the former situations there’s usually some intrinsic connection between the characters of this sort of ensemble. I mentioned in ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE the kaiju film THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, in which a good giant monster contends with a bad giant monster. However, though the monsters are separate entities, the bad one is the de facto clone of the good one, so that they are almost as intimately tied as Jekyll and Hyde. There are no literal links between the characters of my other example of “opposed centrics,” Hjalmar Poelzig and Vitus Verdeghast of 1934’s BLACK CAT. However, though these two war-weary enemies are not even related to one another as much as are the Gargantuas, the narrative emphasizes their many similarities, to the extent that they seem like symbolic siblings.

Of course, this too is a question of emphasis. Just as creators and creations can take on individual superordinate status, so can siblings. The two films examined here, 1935's THE BLACK ROOM and 1964's DEAD RINGER, contain siblings who are aggrieved with one another, but neither film focuses on both siblings. In BLACK ROOM the “good twin” is subordinate to the bad twin, who then attempts, unsuccessfully, to emulate the good brother. DEAD RINGER takes the opposite tack: it’s a good twin who must masquerade for a time as the bad twin, and the film emphasizes that character’s “Jekyll-like” agonies rather than the menace of the film’s Hyde-figure.

The Jekyll-Hyde paradigm is the most common model for fantasy/SF narratives: the supernormal "creation" is the focus of the story, not the person who created it. However, when there's a particular type of "intrinsic connection" between creator and created, this can result in a greater focus upon the creator-figure. For instance, in the 1956 FORBIDDEN PLANET, the menacing Id Monster is the concatenation of Doctor Morbius's unleashed passions, so the centric will focuses on him, not upon the deadly thing he's created.  

To cite a (deservedly) more obscure example, I noticed upon reviewing Ulli Lommel's 1980 BOOGEYMAN that the viewpoint character had an unusually close relationship to the titular monster, unleashing the evil spirit in much the same way that Morbius releases the Id Monster:

...it's slightly interesting that although Willy is set up to look like another Michael, Lacey is both the person who revives the evil ghost and the person through which it manifests. She's also the one who apparently fantasizes about her brother killing hot women, which isn't totally off-the-beam since he almost does kill one woman. But the fact that she's both the one who unleashes her brother's madness and the malice of her mother's lover makes me wonder if she's not the true "boogieman" of the movie.

The concept of coordination is also one that allows me to break down the way centricity works with large ensembles that may, for a time, include individual members who are out to cause harm to the group as a whole, much as Hyde has a hostile attitude toward Jekyll. Some examples of this narrative strategy would include:

Wonder Man and the Swordsman in THE AVENGERS

Terra in THE NEW TEEN TITANS

Both Plastique and Lashina in SUICIDE SQUAD

Demonia in OMEGA MEN

However, again some sort of “connection” is necessary before such a “stealth enemy” might be considered as being coordinated with the rest of the ensemble. Terra, Lashina and Demonia remain in their respective ensembles for many exploits before their perfidy is uncovered, so that for a time readers may internalize them as being “real members.” However, I've stated in Part 1 that each story’s centric will is separate from that of every other story. Therefore, as long as Plastique, Wonder Man and Swordsman have functioned as members of an ensemble even for the better part of one story, then they are coordinated with the other members of the ensemble,  even if that one story ends with the “stealth enemy” being exposed and ejected. 

SUBS AND COES PT. 1

Upon re-reading my May essay TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE ENSEMBLES, I now believe that transitivity does not apply to the principle of centricity.

The word “transitive” descends from the Latin verb “to go across.” In past essays I’ve applies the term to other literary domains, such as dynamcity and phenomenality. Because there are gradations between the constituent levels within these domains. I’ve often investigated narratives in which it’s unclear as to whether a fight within a narrative “goes across” the conceptual barrier separating the subcombative from the combative, or whether a particular focal presence within a narrative goes across the conceptual barrier separating the naturalistic from the uncanny.

However, there are no comparable conceptual barriers in the domain of centricity. When I wrote the ENSEMBLES essay referenced above, I tried to apply “transitive” to characters who, though they might seem subordinate in some way to a featured character, actually participated in an ensemble with that main character, and so qualified as centric presences. My example of this was Robin, boy sidekick to Batman. Conversely, another “boy sidekick” could be “intransitive” even though that character served some of the same narrative functions as Robin to Batman, and here my example was Junior Tracy with respect to his preceptor Dick Tracy. Whereas Robin would align with the “centric will” expressed by the narrative, Junior would align with the “eccentric will,” as he existed to enhance the “centric will” incarnated only in Dick Tracy.

An author’s decisions about how much emphasis to place upon a character, or set of characters, may be made consciously, or he may proceed subconsciously, simply following other author’s templates. However, a given decision as to who gets ‘center-stage” in a given story is not constructed from the same sort of intra-textual discourses that I find in the construction of dynamicity or phenomenality. Whether the author is writing a stand-alone narrative or a serial one, each story or story-arc must keep a single focal presence, or a single ensemble of focal presences, and that is a predetermined decision, made for the sake of narrative clarity.

Within serial narratives, the ongoing composition of the centric will may change over time.  However, each change takes place within either a new story or a new story-arc. In the first few exploits of Batman, he alone incarnates the centric will of the feature. After Robin enters, the Batman and Robin team becomes an ensemble of two, still incarnating much the same centric will. Twenty years later, Batman plays a lone hand again, and then, if Robin (sometimes in the ID of Nightwing) appears, his status is that of an “eccentric” guest-star. However, when a new story presents a new Robin whom Batman must train, the ensemble-of-two is reborn as if it never left.

In contrast, the phenomenality of the BATMAN feature is built up through a discourse.  As long as Batman, with or without Robin, fights crime wearing a wild costume, this confers an element of the uncanny upon any adventure, even if the hero fights nothing but commonplace pool sharks and holdup-men. In such stories, the element of the uncanny vies with that of the naturalistic, and dominates it, satisfying the reader’s desire for a discourse in which something unreal dominates specters of the allegedly “real.” But centric will does not dominate eccentric will. The latter simply exists as a contrast to the former.

While cogitating on the possibility that centricity might be described through some better metaphor, I meditated a bit on Jung’s use of the term “superordinate.” Since this word is  defined as  “a thing that represents a superior order or category within a system of classification,” it seemed to apply to my idea of a centric will that was simply a given of the author’s whim, rather than through intra-textual discourse.

So I then meditated whether or not the different functions of “characters in an ensemble” and “characters not in an ensemble” could be related to the superordinate position of the centric will. I started playing with the terms “coordination” for the first and “subordination” for the second, and then promptly looked them up on the Net to see if anyone had made previous use of them.

As it happened, I found that the terms did have a previous usage in linguistics, albeit not one that I remember from early language classes. These terms can apply to either conjunctions or to clauses, but the clauses seem most applicable to my project.

A subordinate clause is a clause that would make no sense if taken out of the whole sentence. A coordinate clause is a clause that has meaning independent of the sentence.

It seems axiomatic that the total meaning of a given narrative can be rendered into a single sentence, since students are perpetually forced to come up with such sentences when teachers assign them to boil down a work’s “theme statement.” With that in mind, from a structural standpoint, every character, setting, or event in a narrative is not unlike a clause within the narrative’s overall “theme sentence.”

Just as it’s possible for a sentence to consist of just one clause, a narrative can have a centric will represented by just one focal presence/ clause (Batman by himself).

However, as a sentence can also consist of several clauses, the centric will can also be comprised of an ensemble of two “clauses” or more. In the latter case, the individual members of the ensemble have, at least within my analytical system, the status of “coordinated clauses.”

There are, of course, other presences within the narrative, presences that I have identified as incarnations of the “eccentric will.” Their stature is not on a par with that of any of the “coordinated clauses.” They have, as per the cited definition, no meaning when taken out of the narrative’s  “theme sentence.” Thus Junior Tracy, unlike Robin, can only be a “subordinated clause.”

What makes Robin “coordinated” and Junior Tracy “subordinated” is essentially a matter of what I’ve called *stature.” Originally I used the term in STATURE REQUIREMENTS  to denote the stature that characters in different mythoi had with respect to one another. However, in that usage as in this one, stature is a quality that can only be deduced from the author’s arrangements of the story’s focal presences, and not—as I’ll say again, hopefully for  the last time—not from intra-textual discourse.

SECOND PRESENCE, ECCENTRIC, BUT NOT PERIPHERAL

The title refers back to the 2016 essay THIRD PRESENCE, PERIPHERAL. That title referred to presences in a narrative peripheral to the concerns of the focal presences. These peripheral types might be actual characters, like the genie-figures I mentioned, or they might be presences that have no personality, like the unseen germs that devastate the Martian fleet in both H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS and the 1953 film-adaptation.

"Peripheral" was a term I was trying on for size as a permanent critical term, but "third presence" was more frivolous, merely playing on terms like "third person plural." More recently, I've replaced what I originally meant by "peripheral" with "eccentric." The latter, connoting everything outside the center of a given narrative or group of narratives, seemed to make a better pair with my opposing term "centric," connoting everything pertaining to said center.

And yet "peripheral," though not useful as an ongoing term, isn't without meaning in my system. The periphery of a circle is not just everything outside the center, but the circle's outer limits-- and this is indeed what I was talking about when I spoke of the influence of certain entities upon the combative mode of a given work.

The most normative form of a combative narrative is the one in which the narrative action is worked out between the centric"protagonist" and the dominant "eccentric element," the "antagonist." In 2013's PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX, I stated:

Though it's possible that I'll encounter some exceptions, there seems no way to demonstrate the persistence of the narrative combative value unless there is some sort of spectacle-oriented struggle at or very near the climax. 

I then provided for a few variations. For instance, the combative struggle could be interrupted so that there was no clear victory between the opponents, as is the case in the kaiju film KING KONG VS. GODZILLA. I also noted that sometimes the victory might be obtained not by the centric presence, but by someone allied to the centric presence.

Another variation is seen in my review of the 2012 DARK SHADOWS,wherein vampire protagonist Barnabas Collins has a violent conflict with the villain but is taken out of the fight, after which the villain is destroyed by the main character's allies. But as long as there has been some narrative plot-thread to leads inevitably to some sort of spectacular combat, it doesn't matter if the combat follows the dominant pattern of the main hero overcoming the villain.  In fact, though it's rare for a combative film to end in the defeat of the hero, it does happen, most memorably in 1982's BLADE RUNNER.

Now, an ally to the centric presence is, like the antagonist, an "eccentric presence." So is (to cite one of the examples from THIRD PRESENCE) a character like the witch in THE COURT JESTER. The witch uses hypnosis on protagonist Hubert, enabling him to mount a spectacular fight against his enemy, but that influence falls short of bringing about a spectacular victory, even though Hubert does (sort of) best his adversary. Specifically, I said that when "the protagonists are not not empowered by [their genies'] influence," there took place an "inconsummation of the transitive effect." Yet, I don't believe I ever stated outright that the reverse-- a consummation of the transitive effect-- took place whenever an 'eccentric presence" did indeed empower the protagonist. DARK SHADOWS is one of many film-works in which the combative mode is maintained even when the hero is aided by some eccentric presence, as I've charted in movies like HOOK, BARBARELLA, and even such obscurities as THE HOODED TERROR.

So in some scenarios, the "eccentric presence" is "closer" to the aims of the centric presence, and so it enjoys something like "secondary" status insofar as it helps the hero bring forth the spectacular climax necessary for the combative mode. Other eccentric presences, however, are closer to the "periphery," and so are closer to being "third persons" in the equation. They may have effects that are important to the narrative as a whole, for the religious theme of the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS could hardly be realized without the germs, seen here as part of God's plan, killing off the invaders. Yet the germs' influence undercuts the spectacular violence of Earth's battle against the Martian invaders, rendering Earth's military might nugatory. A contrasting example, one that consummates the transitive effect, is found in 1991's HOOK. In Barrie's PETER PAN, Peter Pan is spared of the dirty work of killing Hook by kicking the pirate off his ship, into the jaws of Hook's secondary foe, the crocodile. The novel's beast is only an unwitting ally to Peter Pan, but he furthers the combative mode just as the germs disperse it. Similarly, the taxidermically-preserved corpse of the crocodile in Spielberg's HOOK serves a similar role. Even though the creature no longer lives, its body still possesses the fatal charisma of Barrie's beast, and so it again serves the purpose of executing the villain so that the hero need not do so.

I have some additional thoughts pertaining to the transitive effect as it applies to both serials and stand-alone works, but these should be worked in the forthcoming second part of A KNIGHT OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY.

KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY, PT. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From THE LONG AND SHORT OF WILL:

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

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

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

ECCENTRIC ORBITS

I borrow the phrase "eccentric orbits" from astrodynamics. Wikipedia saith:

The orbital eccentricity of an astronomical object is a parameter that determines the amount by which its orbit around another body deviates from a perfect circle.

In my numerous reviews of and investigations into the many domains that make up fiction-- not least those of phenomenality-- I've often found myself faced with such "deviations." Most works of art, whether they are naturalistic, uncanny, or marvelous, display a "centric will" on the part of the author. Plot and characters are strongly organized around the author's concept as to what things are possible in his world. 

Three convenient examples of differing phenomenalities were first cited in NUM-INOUS CONFRONTATIONS, VIOLENT SUBLIMITY, PART 1 and PART 2. At the time I wrote these essays, I was investigating Kant's concept of sublimity only in terms of dynamicity, and had not yet formulated the corresponding concept of the combinatory-sublime. I summed up three films with respect to their phenomenalities, as follows:

In DIRTY HARRY, as noted before, the hero dwells within an entirely naturalistic cosmos... In ENTER THE DRAGON, the hero dwells within a cosmos that largely appears naturalistic but deviates in a few vital aspects, which have a marked effect on Lee's struggle for dominance...In STAR WARS, the heroes dwell witin a cosmos that may be "natural" to them but which is clearly "marvelous" to us. 

Planets that have almost no eccentricity (like Earth) come as close as is physically possible to describing circular orbits. All of these cinematic works have a similar uniformity of "orbit," there are no elements of naturalistic, uncanny, or marvelous phenomenality that conflict with the "centric will" expressed in the main story.

And yet, I've often encountered works that manifested such conflicts. For instance, here's how I strove to sort out the phenomenality of Wilkie Collins' famous 1868 crime novel THE MOONSTONE, from this film-review:

The famous plot of THE MOONSTONE deals with a fabulous diamond, originally from the head of a Hindu idol, which is stolen from India by a reprobate British officer.  After the thief dies he leaves the diamond-- rumored to be cursed-- to his niece Rachel, a heiress being courted by her two first cousins Franklin and Godfrey.  (Nowhere in the novel does anyone remark on this level of consanguinity: one assumes that both Collins and his original English audience found it unremarkable, at least for the aristocracy.)  A trio of Indians, dedicated to returning the holy diamond to India, haunts the steps of Rachel and her protectors.  Because the unnamed Indians are so fantastically dedicated to their unique task, Collins' novel *might* be classified as uncanny because the Indians' "bizarre crime" (which is only a crime in the technical sense of the English law, of course) makes such a strong affective impact on the reader, and takes on a near-supernatural aspect at the conclusion even though technically nothing supernatural occurs.  The same logic applies to the "exotic lands and customs" trope.
The one aspect that propels the novel into the "marvelous" category appears early in MOONSTONE and never comes up again.  Because Collins wanted to give his Indians an almost supernatural ability to be wherever he wanted them to be-- and because he surely knew that they would hardly blend in well with British society-- Collins has one of his characters overhear the Indians using an unnamed English boy in a divinatory ceremony.  It establishes the possibility-- which the reader must take seriously even if no one in the novel does so-- that the boy is a real medium who can tell the Indians at all times where to locate the diamond.  It's a clever device, and I personally consider it veracious enough to classify MOONSTONE as "marvelous," even though I realize most readers won't take note of it.

In my newly re-formulated terms of "centric will" and "eccentric will," I would say that the centric will of Collins' novel falls into the phenomenal domain of the uncanny, because the actions taken by the Hindu seekers to recover their sacred diamond comprises the "center" of the narrative.  Their one "marvelous" talent, that of using a medium's psychic talents for guidance, is invoked by Collins only to make it credible that the Hindus are able to track down the diamond when they have no other means to do so. Thus, the one marvelous element in THE MOONSTONE expresses an "eccentric will," a will that deviates from the novel's central-- and uncanny-- concerns.

I  mentioned a similar concern in ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES, which dealt with the often perplexing phenomenalities of stories set in Frank Miller's SIN CITY universe. After explaining that one story in the film SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR had an absolutely veracious ghost-- which provided the only example of the marvelous-metaphenomenal-- I explained:

My review therefore classifies SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR as a "marvelous" film. Over the years I've classified other films as marvelous for the same reason: a film, being a unitary construct, cannot be just a "little bit marvelous" any more than a birth-mother can be "a little bit pregnant"... I'm playing around with some possible re-classifications that might better represent the roles played by the uncanny and the marvelous, when it is clear that they do NOT cohere with any thematic underpinnings. But I confess it probably won't provide me with an effective aspirin for all my taxonomic headaches.

I also mentioned a couple of other films in which marvelous elements played very marginal roles, and played around with the term "marginal-metaphenomenal." However, this term wouldn't work over time, since there have been many works, like Collins' MOONSTONE, where the work's centric will is uncanny, while only one or more eccentric elements are marvelous. A better example than the one mentioned in the ASPIRIN essay is 1971's HANDS OF THE RIPPER, wherein the "ripper" character is a crazy girl who begins acting like Jack the Ripper, and the only marvelous element is that of a psychic who figures out what's going on.

A week or so after finishing the ASPIRIN essay, I finally formulated the "active share, passive share" corollary, first stated here and here. These essays established the precedent that in some cases a narrative's combinatory mode might overrule its dynamic mode. Thus, even though from the POV of dynamicity, the Marvel cowboy-hero The Ringo Kid technically dwells in a "marvelous" domain because of his one encounter with a mad scientist, the symbolic underpinnings of his universe are dominantly naturalistic. The marvelous elements in RINGO KID comprise what I originally called a "minority passive share," and I now choose to link that concept to the notion of "eccentric will."
Similary the psychic elements in THE MOONSTONE and HANDS OF THE RIPPER also amount to eccentric elements, putting them in the minority passive share category.

I played around with the notion of a bifurcated phenomenality in my review of a martial-arts dud called THE SHAOLIN BROTHERS, wherein the centric will (and majority share of interest) revolves around a naturalistic core, and the elements of the marvelous are out on the periphery. Hence my name for them at the time-- "the peripheral-marvelous"-- has been subsumed by the concept of eccentric will.

Going by the current hypothesis, I would probably rate SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR as dominantly uncanny, thanks to the fact the conspicuous roles of Marv and super-ninja Miho, while the ghost's appearance, while not without all importance, amounts to a sort of perturbation in the orbit of the work as a whole.

SIX KEYS TO A LITERARY GENETIC CODE

In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here, owes something to statements by literary critic Northrop Frye. Frye chose this metaphor because he imagined a given literary work as having both an inward and outward motion. The former motion determines how the elements within the narrative interact with one another, while the latter determines how the "total vision" of the narrative relates to its readers.

The circle metaphor remains useful, but its invocation of centrifugal and centripetal motion may be a little too rooted in the domain of physics. The making of a work of art involves at least one creator-- let's assume just one, for convenience-- who may be seen as one part God and two parts Frankenstein. His artwork is akin to a living creature, and if it's anything like the ones we know, then the creature's biological nature is determined by its DNA sequences. The standard illustration of the DNA sequences is usually rendered as the familiar double helix. Yet some online sources have chosen to render the genetic code in circular form for purposes of illustration.

The reason for this, I assume, is that for purposes of illustration the circle still offers a strong image as to how the dominant influences on the organism's genetic code-- what I have called "centric will" in my "literary genetics"-- assume the centermost position. Consequently, the recessive influences on the organism's genetic code revolve outward from the center, akin to my "eccentric will."

The creator may use only "intelligent design" to bring forth his work, or he may create it, so to speak, by the seat of his pants. But whether in a given work conscious design plays a larger part than the subconscious variety, or vice versa, the work always evolves its own code, consisting of both the way the narrative elements interact and the way they impact upon readers.

Since this blog began, I've practiced my own study of "literary genetics," even though I only used this label a few times. It's occurred to me that the majority of my ruminations have been devoted to sussing out what elements in any narrative are the most centric, and thus dominate the work's character, and what role, if any, all the "eccentric" elements play. These ruminations have been complicated by the fact that sometimes the patterns assumed by all of these elements relates to the way they work inside the narrative-- what I'll call "intra-diegetical" in this essay-- while others relate to the way the elements work upon their readers, and perhaps even the creator himself, since he is, after all, "the first reader."

After scanning over my blog-entries for some time, I've determined six categories of "artistic alleles" I've been examining, in one form or another, since the blog began in 2007. The six are as follows:


(1) FOUR MYTH-RADICALS-- first addressed in detail in NOTES TOWARD A SUPERHERO IDIOM. I view these plot-and-character radicals underlying four corresponding literary mythoi as "Extra-Diegetical" because over time the literary mythoi have arisen from the four "ritual moods" identified by Theodore Gaster, whose work I last referenced here.

(2) THREE PHENOMENALITIES-- first codified as the AUM theory here, though I soon altered this into the preferred acronym NUM here. I should add that my phenomenology has been guided by Aristotle's original concept of "pity and terror," which with the help of C.S. Lewis I finessed these broad categories into the more precise ones of the sympathetic and affective affects, which in turn reflect the affective potentials of the phenomenalities. All three phenomenalities are created by patterns within narratives, and so are "Intra-Diegetical."

(3) TWO MODES, THE COMBATIVE AND THE SUBCOMBATIVE, first explored in detail in STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: THE COMBATIVE.  The exploration of the differences between combative and subcombative characters led me to distinguish three levels of dynamicity. as explained in MEGA, MESO, MICRO. This category is also "Intra-diegetical" in that it pertains only to how the dynamicity of fictional characters can be sorted out. I've devoted a fair amount of space to the thematic consequences to the work as a whole when it creates opposed characters with combative potential but then chooses not to resolve the conflict in a combative manner, cf. Wells' THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.

(4) FOUR PERSONA-TYPES, which originally started out as two "word-pairs," "hero-villain" and "monster-victim." I soon determined that "victim" was too limiting a term and modified it to "demihero." Persona-types follow patterns that descend, like Gaster's four moods, from ritual and religious sources, not to mention being influenced by my readings of Hobbes and Schopenhauer. Similarly, the deternination as to whether the central persona is *exothelic* or *endothelic* depends on "Extra-Diegetical" considerations.

(5) FOUR INFORMATION-BEARING FUNCTIONS: These functions, last elaborated here, are largely extensions of Joseph Campbell's four functions. Since they deal with information from the real world being translated into fictional terms, these are "Intra-Diegetical."

(6) The most recent-- and probably the last-- of my code-categories is the four potentialities, introduced in FOUR BY FOUR, though I'd been cogitating on the subject for many years previous. Since these all deal with the creative propensities of the authors themselves-- whether favoring Jung's concepts of sensation, intuition, thinking or feeling-- this category is clearly "Extra-Diegetical."

For good measure, I'll toss in that the terms "Intra-Diegetical" and "Extra-Diegetical" line up with Northrop Frye's "narrative values / significant values" distinction. but I chose not to use Frye's terms this time, since they don't adapt well to adjectival form.

I mentioned in CLEANING AROUND THE CENTER that I considered relating these various conceptions of centric and eccentric will to my rules for sussing out centricity, the 51 percent rule and the "active share/passive share" corollary. However, that will have to wait for another essay.

CLEANING AROUND THE CENTER

In CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 3 I compared my early use of terms like "dominant" and "subdominant" in the early history of this blog, and why those terms fell to the wayside:

The word "dominance" descends from the Latin dominus, meaning a lord or master,  and this imagery more or less accords with the thoughts I expressed in JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY. And yet, though I don't reject any of these meditations, in recent years I've been drawn less to the image of a "master" lording it over lesser elements, and more drawn to the image of the circle. If a given narrative has elements characteristic of all four Fryean mythoi, one may see the centermost circle as being the myth-radical that most determines the total content of the narrative.  

I attempted, not very frequently, to work out a terminology for describing the way "lesser elements" give way to a "sovereign element," whether speaking of a given work's myth-radicals or of its distribution of spectacular and/or functional forms of violence, as seen in CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 2. In fact, most of what I've theorized about the "centric/diffuse" word-pair concerned differing forms of dynamicity, as seen in THE NECESSITY OF SPECTACLE PT. 2:

When opposed megadynamic forces exist in a narrative but are not the main focus of the narrative, such a work is "subcombative" and the opposed forces are what I will term "diffuse forces" rather than "centric forces"-- on which I may write sometime later.

On this blog I've only occasionally mentioned  Northrop Frye's geometrically based distinction between "the centrifugal and the centripetal:"

"Frye uses the terms 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' to describe his critical method. Criticism, Frye explains, is essentially centripetal when it moves inwardly, towards the structure of a text; it is centrifugal when it moves outwardly, away from the text and towards society and the outer world."-- Wikipedia, "Northrop Frye."

Despite not making reference to those precise terms, though, this section of Frye's ANATOMY was a great influence on me. I would imagine that when I wrote these words, I was thinking to some extent about the "diffuse forces" being like unto the so-called "centripetal" force, that tends outward from the center, while the "centric" were like unto "centrifugal force," tending toward the center.

The big problem, though, is that "centric" and "diffuse" aren't really viable opposites, though the former does have a more workable antonym: From Dictionary.com:

CENTRIC: "pertaining to or situated at the center."

ECCENTRIC: "not having the same center; not concentric."

Usually when I've introduced a new term in place of an old one, I've simply let the old blog-label remain unchanged and started new tracings for the new term. However, since as of today I only had six tracings for the labels "centric force" (or "will") and its original opposite, I've scrubbed away the old, mixed-up terms in the labels, but not in the essays themselves. From now on, I'll use only "centric will" for any element that assumes a central position in the narrative, and "eccentric will" for any element outside the center.

While most bloggers don't trouble to revise old essays, even in their labels, I do so whenever I come up with a formulation that better clarifies my position. I've revised these two forms of authorial will with the expectation of using them to further illustrate another theoretical concept. The concepts of both the "51 percent rule and of its corrollary of "active and passive shares," last referenced here, has become vital to my method of sussing out the importance of divergent elements within narratives. This terminological "house-cleaning" has thus come about in order to bring the two forms of authorial will in line with the general idea of how centricity is achieved, and what it means.

 

RADICAL CONFLICTS PT. 2

I've been reading a few online resources on the subject of the myth-ritual school (sometimes called the Cambridge Ritualists). I've mentioned before that I'm aware that these theories, which had a strong effect on Northrop Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, are not much in favor today. The most common complaint from recent books is that the ritualists let their enthusiasm for their subject undermine the classicist's need for absolutely scrupulous scholarship.

I can understand why academics would put consistency first. Any academic discipline is highly dependent on an accretion of both fact and opinion, wherein the facts are theoretically unassailable and the opinions are those that best accord with those facts. Careful scholarship is essential, especially when dealing with the fragmentary records of ancient cultures, be it ancient Greece or one with even less extant evidence.

At the same time, I find fatuous the much lauded logic of Occam's Razor: that whatever seems to be the simplest explanation must also be the best. If the real life of modern times proves incredibly complicated, how could the culture of bygone times be any less so? The desire for scientific simplicity that I find in the anti-ritualist books puts me in mind of a quote from Walter Cerf, first cited here:

It is typical of reflective philosophy... that it relies on arguments, proofs, and the whole apparatus of logic... that it tries to solve intellectual puzzles rather than give the true conceptual vision of the whole; that it sticks to the natural sciences as the source of the only reliable knowledge of nature, thus committing itself... to a concept of experience reduced to sense perception, and to a concept of sense perception reduced to some causal chain...

Modern academics reject the highly speculative theories of ritualism because the Ritualists were not able to provide a "causal chain" as sturdy as the Darwinian insight that linked apes and humans. However, "the concept of experience" germane to literary production does not follow one razor-straight path. It may be overreaching to claim that all dramatic productions descend from rituals originally intended to bless the community or to expel noxious influences, but it's no less foolish to dismiss any connections at all, just to expel the "noxious influence" of careless scholarship.

Though Frye based his concept of the myth-radicals on the older Cambridge ritualists, I've never been moved to read most of them, except for a little of A,B. Cook and Jane Ellen Harrison's PROLOGOMENA. I was never married to the ritualist idea that archaic Greek drama descended literally from magico-religious rituals, and so it doesn't affect me that much if some scholars find this "causal chain" dubious. The radicals, like the "mythic moods" analyzed by Theodor Gaster, function as metaphors to organize the multifarious potential of the human mind.

At the end of the first RADICAL CONFLICTS I said:

I myself would rate the familiarity of commonplace experiences as no more than a "mild enjoyment," while the familiarity of shared myths would line up better with "intense pleasure"-- and this is the reason that I've chosen to write thousands of words on the topics of myths and myth-radicals. While as a pluralist I affirm the equal importance of all four radicals, I've clearly chosen to devote myself to the radical of the *agon,* even to the extent of analyzing its presence in narratives not aligned to the adventure-mythos best known for it. 

The blanket assertion of the anti-ritualists is that the Cambridge School was too devoted to fitting the entire world of drama (and, by extension, literature) into pigeonholes derived from Classical Greek terms. It's a familiar argument, showing the reflective critic's aversion to anything that ventures beyond the realm of causality as defined by the natural sciences. Noah Berlasky's pig-ignorant dismissal of Joseph Campbell, refuted here, is based in his commitment to a criticism founded entirely in ideological politics.

But because a pluralist is free to think in broad speculative terms, he can see outside the box of ideological means and ends. For instance, I've refined the idea of the *agon* radical as one that harnessed sort of "centric" will, one that invokes a ritualized invigorative mood,  as opposed to the less ambiious forms that characterize the same radical in its stage of "diffuse" will. The same logic extends to the other three radicals: the *pathos,* the *sparagmos* and the *incognitio*: they too much have their "centric and diffuse" (or possibly "sacred and profane") Possibly I'll explore a few of these as they occur to me, but since I'm writing a blog, and not a book to compete with ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, it's unlikely that I'll spend as much time on the other three radicals as I have upon the invigorative one.

CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 3

This essay is not only a follow-up to parts one and two in the series, but also to the April essay RADICAL CONFLICTS. In addition, the endeavor to expand upon the conceptual word-pair and "centric/ diffuse" is also an attempt to formulate better language for the way in which a "dominant" story element achieves dominance over other elements.

Back in 2011, in essays like this one, I put forth the distinction of "dominant" and "subdominant" elements, and said of the latter:

"Subdominant” indicates that a given narrative makes extensive use of the elements of one mythos even though the narrative as a whole fits another mythos better.

But I never made extensive use of these terms. The word "dominance" descends from the Latin dominus, meaning a lord or master,  and this imagery more or less accords with the thoughts I expressed in JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY. And yet, though I don't reject any of these meditations, in recent years I've been drawn less to the image of a "master" lording it over lesser elements, and more drawn to the image of the circle. If a given narrative has elements characteristic of all four Fryean mythoi, one may see the centermost circle as being the myth-radical that most determines the total content of the narrative.  Below is one of the few images I could find on the Web, in which four circles (the four mythoi) are contained within a greater circle, but one of the inner circles, the smallest, approximates occupies the center position--though it's smaller than I'd like insofar as providing a useful illustration.

With this model in mind it's more feasible to see how the author of a given narrative may allow the "sphere" of his narrative to encompass all four moods represented by the four myth-radicals. In this essay I used BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER teleseries as an example of a narrative-- admittedly, an extended narrative compose of several interrelated stories-- in which the authors sought to put their central character through all four of the psychological situations that Theodor Gaster calls his moods of "the invigorative," "the jubilative," "the purgative," and "the mortificative" (cited with greater detail in the above-cited AFFECTS VS. MOODS). My conclusion, of course, was that the "centric will" of the extended narrative focused upon providing the audience with invigorative scenes of Buffy triumphing over assorted enemies.

In RADICAL CONFLICTS I alluded briefly to Aristotle's use of two terms, "simple" and "complex," which the philosopher linked to whether or not a given work possessed a particular sttrucuring element, that of the *anagnorisis.* I'll now proceed to swipe his categories for my own use.

Many narratives, extended or otherwise, never stray from one dominant myth-mood, and so these would be *simple* narratives. But if there is a pronounced use of even one other mood-element, then the narratives would be *complex.* Buffy is an example of a "sphere" that encompasses all four radicals. In the ADVENTURE/COMEDY VS. COMEDY/ADVENTURE, PART 1,  I cited two extended narratives, that of the BATMAN teleseries and the INFERIOR FIVE comic book series, which I then believed to be concentrated largely upon the invigorative and jubilative moods. I later modified this view with regard to BATMAN, in that I found a sort of gentle irony pervading that narrative. However, even INFERIOR FIVE, with only two discernible moods, would be complex, and its illustration would look something like this, where "B" was the center radical, that of comedy, while "A," representing the radical of adventure. was somewhat off to the side.

In the above example, then, the radical of jubiliation / comedy would incarnate the *centric will* of the narrative, while the radical of invigoration / adventure would be relegated to the narrative's *diffuse will."

CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 2

In Part 1 I chose to address two subjects-- that of the forms of narrative violence, and that of the four myth-radicals-- with reference to my conceptual word-pair "centric and diffuse force." In the next two essays I'll give each topic separate consideration.

In Part 1 I wrote:

For instance, I've written numerous times about the disparate effects of different forms of violence, particularly "functional violence" and "spectacular violence." Either one of these can be centric in the formal sense: that the climax of a narrative depends on one form or the other, and in fact in this essay I contrasted two films which both had violent conclusions, though only one showed enough sense of "spectacle" to be labeled "combative." I stress "sense" of spectacle because the combative film displayed the intent to produce spectacle even though the execution of said spectacle was lousy.

The gist is that the conflict expressed through the narrative will of one story is functional at the core, while for the other story it's spectacular at the core, despite poor execution. But neither of these obscure films is ideal for illustrative purposes.

Most horror-films concern themselves with one megadynamic presence in the film, against which characters of lesser dynamicity must contend. In 1931 two films, DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, set the pattern for monster-oriented horror films in the era of sound films. Each film must find some way for lesser mortals to extinguish the source of horror and thus provide narrative closure for the viewer. Both films were patterned upon the scripts for stage-adaptations of the respective prose novels, but directors Tod Browning and James Whale chose very different approaches to the material. Though the film medium was capable of depicting violence in much greater detail than anyone could manage on a theater-stage, Browning chose to follow the example of the Dracula stage-play, keeping the depiction of violence to a minimum. To be sure, the extremely muted conclusion, in which the camera watches Van Helsing execute the vampire from across the room, may have been an instance where the studio bosses would not allow the spectacle of staking, for fear of critical reprisals.

Whale, despite having had experience directing on the stage as well as on film, seems to have done as much as he could to emphasize cinematic spectacle, often focusing on images that would have been difficult or impossible to put on screen.  For instance, the climactic confrontation of Frankenstein and his creation in an old mill shows them squaring off in an old mill.

Following which they look at one another through the mill wheel, as if one were the funhouse-mirror reflection of the other.

And though the scientist can't stop his creation, the aroused populace can, by the spectacular effect of burning down the mill with the creature in it.

Now, I'll reiterate the judgment I've pronounced elsewhere: as in the majority of horror-films there is only one megadynamic presence in both of the films, neither can participate in the combative mode. However, the narrative center of FRANKENSTEIN is to show the viewer the monster's rampage and his resultant destruction in the most spectacular manner possible, and so all the "centric will" of the narrative expresses spectacular violence. This does not mean that every violent act is necessarily spectacular: Karl's whipping of the chained Monster is merely functional, as is the mid-point scene in which Frankenstein and his colleague Waldman subdue the monster with the help of a drug-injection.

In contrast, all of the violence in Browning's DRACULA must deemed functional because most of it is intimated. (Allegedly Browning didn't even want his vampire to appear on-screen, only to be suggested by the reactions of other actors.) The most violent moment in DRACULA comes near the conclusion, when the vampire thinks himself betrayed by Renfield and so breaks his pawn's neck. But if even one wished to deem this a moment of spectacular violence, then it would belong to the diffuse will of the narrative, since the centric will focuses upon functional violence. By the same token, the moments of functional violence in FRANKENSTEIN are diffuse while those of spectacular violence are centric.

The principal exception to the "rule of one powerful presence" in most horror films is the "monster mash" film. The mere existence of more monsters means more potential for spectacle, as well as for the possibility of spectacular combat between two or more monsters.


Of the four "monster mashes" that emerges from Universal in the 1940s, 1943's FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN and 1948's ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN   are the only two in which some sort of "monster-battle" takes place.

Short though it is, there can be little doubt that the conclusion of FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN satisfies the requirements for not only the same spectacular violence found in FRANKENSTEIN, but also its expression in the combative mode. Violence that is both spectacular and combative forms the core of the film's centric will.

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN-- in which the comedians meet not only the Monster but also the Wolf Man and Dracula-- is another matter altogether. All three monsters are megadynamic presences, and so the script might have chosen to have two or more monsters fight each other in the midst of the comedians' antics. But clearly the script chose to emphasize the humor of having the beleaguered protagonists constantly running from the three "titans of terror." The closest thing to a monster-fight is when Dracula and Wolf Man have a shoving-match, with Costello-on-a-gurney in between.

But the two monsters don't have a real encounter, as Dracula mostly runs away from the lycanthrope. There are moments of spectacular violence here, like the Monster punching through a wooden door.

Or the creature's demise, just as fiery as his first cinematic death in sound cinema.

But as with my example of Dracula's brief moment of violence in the 1931 film, these spectacular moments represent diffuse will because the narrative's core is the use of violence in a functional way, to provoke humor as helpless humans run for the hills at the mere suggestion of megadynamic monsters. To be sure, the Monster's death comes about because the pier he's standing upon is set ablaze by a square-jawed hero-type, but this character is strictly peripheral-- and therefore diffuse-- to the dominant will of the narrative.

More later.

CENTRIC AND DIFFUSE WILL PT. 1

The epic poet is all taken up with what he called klea andron, “glorious deeds of men,” of individual heroes; and what these heroes themselves ardently long and pray for is just this glory, this personal distinction, this deathless fame for their great deeds.-- ― Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual

When I first coined the terms "centric and diffuse force" in this essay, I was seeking to provide a distinction that accounted for my observation that even narratives that possesses "opposed megadynamic forces" might not manifest the combative mode. 1953's WAR OF THE WORLDS employs the same narrative trope seen in 1954's GODZILLA: the spectacle of modern-day humankind hurling all of its technological forces against a metaphenomenal threat. However, because that contest is not the "focus," as I called it, of the former narrative, I stated that the 1953 film could not possess the narrative value of the combative mode.

In PERIPHERAL GENIES I invoked the centric/diffuse "word pair" only in a very limited sense, to suggest some of the ways in which a given protagonist might have access to megadynamic forces, even though he himself may not register as megadynamic. Drawing upon my "djinn-summoner" distinction, I said that the examples I cited in that essay failed to achieve the narrative value because their powerful "genies" were peripheral to their own spirits. "Peripheral," going by the definition I used, means pretty much the same in my system as "diffuse." Both connote for me the image of something either out from the center, or without a center-- which in its turn relates back to my use of the term "focus."

Without indulging in any orgies of cross-comparisons, I will now put forth the notion that the "types of narrative violence" I proposed in SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 1 might be better termed "centric and diffuse will," since "will," at least according to the Schopenhauer/Nietzsche model I've constructed, takes in all forms of sex and violence, in both their isothymic and megalothymic manifestations.

For instance, I've written numerous times about the disparate effects of different forms of violence, particularly "functional violence" and "spectacular violence." Either one of these can be centric in the formal sense: that the climax of a narrative depends on one form or the other, and in fact in this essay I contrasted two films which both had violent conclusions, though only one showed enough sense of "spectacle" to be labeled "combative." I stress "sense" of spectacle because the combative film displayed the intent to produce spectacle even though the execution of said spectacle was lousy.

 But I've been toying lately with the notion that there's another potential application of the centric/diffuse terminology, and that is to distinguish the ways in which the narrative impacts the audience, rather than dealing exclusively with the way dynamicity manifests within the diegesis of the narrative. In short, "diffuse will" can apply to all of the "forces" in the narrative that are peripheral to whatever holds the "center" in the narrative-- which is usually one of the radicals that describes the narrative's primary mythos-- which "centric will" can apply purely to those forces around which the narrative is truly centered. I suggest that the centricity of the primary radical has for modern audiences a ritualistic quality, not unlike the klea andron of which Harrison writes in the above quote. That manifestation of centric will is almost always the most important thing in the story and thus provides an imaginative center, even if a given author may choose to wander from that center to some extent.

ADDENDUM: I retooled this essay-- originally set down yesterday under the title "Centric and Diffuse Violence"-- because after a little thought I decided that the use of "narrative violence" as expressed by Bataille was interesting to explore somewhat, but was ultimately too confusing for prolonged usage. Therefore I revised the essay to speak of "narrative will" instead, to better reflect one of the cornerstones of my theory, first expressed here.