EXCITING REACTIONS! REACTIVE EXCITEMENT!

Because few things in life can possibly be more exciting than an essay in which I revise some old terms.

I was never quite satisfied with the terms I devised in 2020 and 2021 for the basic oppositional setup of the roles of protagonist and antagonist, which are fundamentally integral to all narrative. I started out with a three-part series, starting here, in which I used the terms "challenger" and "defender." Later I sought to substitute "aggressor" for "challenger," but I never found myself using any of the terms on a regular basis. From experience, this indicates that I'm not fully comfortable with a given term or set of terms, because when I am comfortable, I start interweaving new and old on a regular basis, as can be seen with all the stuff I've been doing lately with "eminence."

It hit me that I needed terms that were more neutral in terms of moral nature, since some icons have no morality as such. This line of thought led me back to the beginnings of life, at least as conceived by Ernst Cassirer:      

Every organism, even the lowest... [possesses] a receptor system and an effector system... The receptor system by which a biological species receives outward stimuli and the effector system by which it reacts to them are in all cases closely interwoven...

This struck me as so basic to the fundament of all life that I wanted my new terms to reflect this process in lit-crit terms, and this led me to two terms, most often used in chemistry. From Merriam-Webster: 

EXCITANT: tending to excite or stimulate

REACTANT: a substance that enters into and is altered in the course of a chemical reaction   

Examples time:

In the original debut-film of GODZILLA, the sulky saurian rises from the depths, and whether he's out to trash Modern Japan for its sins or is just looking for old feeding-grounds, he parallels the stimulus, the excitant, that hits an organism's receptor-system-- said organism being Japan. Japan then takes the role of "reactant," marshaling the energies of its "effector system" to protect itself. As in many monster-movies, not least those devoted to Rodan and Mothra, the excitant, the thing that shakes up the status quo, is the Prime icon.

Godzilla becomes one of an ensemble of three Prime icons in GHIDORAH THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER, but this time, all of them are reactants. The titular Ghidorah provides the excitant, invading Earth and threatening its destruction. Humankind can do nothing to stop Ghidorah, but some humans are able to intercede with the fundamentally beneficent Mothra, and she attempts to enlist Godzilla and Rodan into defending the Earth. Though the scene of the "monster-conversation" might be one of the looniest things ever in a giant monster film, it still culminates in the three rampaging titans joining together like a Jurassic Justice League to stomp three-headed butt. This time the three former excitants become reactants, but they're still the Prime icons here.

Things get more complicated in those situations where excitant and reactant share the Prime spotlight, rare though it is. In KING KONG VS GODZILLA, the Big G still doesn't quite have the moxie to get first billing. But as in his previous two films, he functions as the excitant. Now, having said that. KKVG was not the first of Tojo Picture's "monster duel" films. That was GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN-- but in that film, Godzilla is faced with two separate reactants: the humans with their guns and tanks, and another colossal critter, Angilas. Both Angilas and all of the humans are Sub antagonists to Prime Godzilla. Angilas was probably created only because it was cheaper to film a battle between two men in rubber suits than to have Godzilla stomp all over Tokyo again. But Kong had more stature than Godzilla, and so he, the "reactant," gets an arc as developed as that of the "excitant." Though Kong is originally brought to Japan for the same reason an American entrepreneur takes his first iteration to New York, his desire to pick a fight with the big reptile ends up making his interests converge with those of humanity, who make Kong into their unwitting catspaw. Despite the role of the humans in arranging the battle of the two Primes, they remain Sub icons only.        

The sort of human string-pulling seen in both KKVG and GHIDORAH is not strictly necessary, though. THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS concerns two brother-monsters-- one that seeks to avoid conflict and only feeds on fish, another who feeds on humans. This leads to human armies seeking to exterminate both giant beasts, but even if no humans appeared in the story, the main conflict would still be between "excitant" Gaira and "reactant" Sanda, who comprise the Prime icons of the narrative.   

More examples to come, as they occur to me.

      

ACTIVITY REPORT PT 2

 In Part 1, I advanced my new concept that iconicity, the nature of fictional icons, stemmed from two factors: activity, what the icons do, and resonance, what the icons represent. By extension this means that whatever icon or icons are superordinate to the other icons are so judged in terms of "eminent activity," "eminent resonance," or a combination of the two. In Part 1, I gave the example of Melville's short story BARTLEBY, whose eminent icon is defined only by the quality he represents-- that of an inexplicable inertia that prevents Bartleby from taking any action whatever, even to maintain his own life.

In order to describe "eminent activity," I've chosen to survey a subgenre within various media rather than just one literary work: the subgenre called "the old dark house" story. The subgenre has its roots in what some critics have called the "rational Gothic" of the 18th and 19th centuries, but I'll stick to the 20th century manifestations since (a) that's when the "old dark house" expression started, and (b) I've already written various essays on the cinema's versions of the subgenre.

The earliest prose manifestation that comes to mind is Mary Roberts Rinehart's THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE (1908), which I have not read except in summary. The story takes place at a country house and includes someone posing as a ghost who commits one or more murders, and it received a 1915 film adaptation. Two years later, Rinehart began working on a theatrical version of STAIRCASE, which became the popular play THE BAT in 1920. This iteration may have jumpstarted many of the later suspense-plays of the decade, as well as spawning two silent film versions, both of which are still well-remembered today by enthusiasts. The costumed villain "The Bat" evidently takes the place of the criminal pretending to be a ghost in STAIRCASE, though any claims the master-thief might have to being the first costumed villain, even in cinema, are pre-empted by The Clutching Hand in the 1914 EXPLOITS OF ELAINE serial. Of passing interest too is Gaston Leroux's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, which was first serialized in a 1909 magazine, though I for one consider his persona to be that of a "monster" rather than that of a "villain."  

Whatever characters would have been eminent icons of Rinehart's novel, there can be no doubt that in the BAT play and its movie versions, the Bat became eminent due to his peerless activities as a master thief, with little if any specific resonance otherwise. The same is true of Paul Leni's 1927 THE CAT AND THE CANARY, where "the Cat" is the menace that unites all the nugatory subordinate characters. However, the same story was reworked for a 1939 iteration, and then the eminence shifted from activity to resonance, for the 1939 CANARY had been retooled to focus upon Bob Hope's persona of the "scaredycat-ladies' man."

Less well known is the 1956 Mexican horror-comedy, PHANTOM OF THE RED HOUSE. This is another ODH movie in which one of the "good guys" (who are often little more than clay pigeons) is more resonant than either the mystery killer or a detective stalking the malefactor. In HOUSE I judged that the narrative was built around the comedic persona of "Mercedes Benz de Carrera," as essayed by the actress Alma Rosa Aguirre.

The very simplicity of the ODH subgenre makes it fairly easy to isolate whether the superordinate icons are eminent only through their activity or only through their emotional resonance. I haven't come across a PURE example of an ODH work in which I thought both activity and resonance were eminent. Still, I have mentioned Leroux's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA as being "subgenre-adjacent," even though it takes place not in a standard "house" but in a "haunted opera house." But in my view, there's no question that Leroux's prose Phantom is eminent in terms of both his activity, that of being a "demon music teacher" to the ingenue Christine, and in terms of his fascinating character as a deformed man seeking some surcease from sorrow. I can't say that such combinatory types are always the most popular eminent icons, but I tend to think that most authors strive to create characters who are resonant in terms of both their personalities and the actions they take in the narrative.           

EMINENCE AND STATURE

Technically, "eminence" and "stature" are the same words with which I characterize the significant value of centricity in literature, but each one was reached by a different path, so I'll probably keep using both in their respective contexts.

Though I wrote four essays here in which "charisma" was the term I applied to superordinate icons and "stature" to all subordinate icons, I reversed this terminological use in the 2020 essay EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2. That formulation of both "stature" and "charisma," then, was tied to my effort to finding a broad terminology for all the icons in a given narrative.

"Eminence," though, was an attempt to find a structural metaphor that described how centricity looks when one focuses only upon a given centric icon, in comparison to everything else in the narrative. As my most recent essay on the topic specifies, "eminence" is more explicitly linked to what sort of "master-trope" dominates the author's propositional conceptions. Thus, for example, no individual character dominates either Pierre Boulle's PLANET OF THE APES novel or any of the film versions, for the icon of the environment is the star of the show. Wells' TIME MACHINE depicts a similar situation, though the nameless time-traveler visits two distinct time-periods. I tend to think both of them share eminence because they share a common purpose in Wells' proposition: to show the complete irrelevance of human ambitions and priorities in the face of a universal principle of entropy.   

EMINENCE AND DURABILITY

 Following up on my observations in the essays of EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS, I'm moved to observe that eminence should be deemed a *structural metaphor* for the authorial process by which an icon or proposition assumes centricity. I also want to distinguish between eminence and the not dissimilar structural metaphor of "escalation," which serves to illustrate how durability operates for both stature-bearing and charisma-bearing icons. To do so I first have to revive my term for "stand-alone works" from this earlier essay-- that of "monads"-- as a counterpoint to the more familiar concept of "serials."

All monad-works have eminence, for regardless of how famous or obscure they may be, they all possess eminent icons that determine the centricity of the narrative's overall structure. But monads cannot benefit from Quantitative Escalation, since they only have one iteration. A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.

Serial works can be subject to either Quantitative or Qualitative Escalation, as I've already established, and so can possess either kind of durability. Most, though, become famous from the Quantitative form only. The Golden Age hero "Blue Beetle" lasted from 1939 to 1948, but even I, a defender of mythopoeic motifs in obscure superheroes, could never argue Qualitative Escalation took place within this series. The specialized community of Golden Age comics patrons liked something about the original Beetle, but didn't like another azure avenger, The Blue Diamond, who only enjoyed two adventures. There's no way that the Diamond could exceed the Beetle in terms of durability based on quantity, and, as I've read the former's two adventures, there's no chance that the former possessed any durability based on quality either.    

Now, because most serials need several installments to establish the perception of quality in a given audience, it's rare for a short-lived serial to demonstrate durability based on quality. One aborted serial that certainly had more potential than the Blue Diamond was Steve Gerber's 1984 VOID INDIGO, consisting of one softbound graphic novel and two "regular-sized" comic books. I must admit that INDIGO does not have a stellar reputation as a great unfinished Gerber work. But because Gerber is considered one of the important American comics-artists, an ambitious if flawed work by him will inevitably rate higher for anyone seeking to understand his creative process, in contrast to gauging the quality of a tossed-off superhero who was merely all about keeping the pot boiling. So even though BLUE DIAMOND had only two installments and VOID INDIGO had three, the latter is essentially equal to the former in terms of quantitative durability but far superior in terms of qualitative durability.      

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

 Before preceding to the discussion of the new category "eminence," which will connote "the organizational power of centric icons," I'll touch on another line of thought about centricity, though one that, unlike the resonance formulation, won't need to be discarded.

The 2020 essay EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL, PART 1 was my first attempt to apply Whitehead's concept of vectors to my Schopenhauer-influenced concept of authorial will, going back to 2009's SEVEN WAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER. The definition I cited for "vectors" is worth repeating.

A quantity that has magnitude and direction and that is commonly represented by a directional line segment whose length represents the magnitude and whose orientation in space represents the direction.

"Magnitude and direction" are still applicable in my system, but it's worth reiterating that, in contrast to the discrete forces we know from physics, these are vectors of the author's intentionality-- often conscious intention, sometimes subconscious as well. The author gives his centric icon or icons the magnitude and direction that makes its/their vector superordinate to those qualities in other icons. But he does so because the proposition he most wants to advance can best be organized around one icon rather than any of the others.  

I use the phrase "the proposition he most wants to advance" in keeping with my previous observations that a given work may advance many propositions as easily as one. In short narratives, there's usually only room for one proposition. However, longer works can incorporate a wide variety of propositions. In MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2, my main example was Melville's monolithic MOBY DICK, and I argued that the organizing proposition of the book-- what I called the "master thread," and later rechristened "the master trope"-- was that of the "myth of the Hunter and the Hunted." 

I'm not sure that, prior to this essay-series, I'd ever noticed that over the course of my investigations, I had attributed an organizing principle both to the abstract propositions put forth by a fictional narrative AND to the icons within that narrative, the icons which (as I mentioned here) make possible audience-identification. However, after discarding the unhelpful concept of resonance as a metaphor for the organizing principle, I found myself turning back to the thoughts expressed in the 2013 essay JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY.

Wherever Jung derived the term "sovereignty" from, he used in a manner apposite to my own: to suggest an organizing factor within the multiplicities of the human mind. His argument doesn't have any great relevance to literary criticism, but I did consider using his term for my principle of organization. However, the word "sovereign" suggests an uncompromising rulership, which is not quite in line with some of my literary concepts. Yet a trip to the synonym dictionary gave me "eminence," and that birthed my new term birthed my new term for all of a narrative's organizing factors, whether related to icons, propositions, or some combination thereof. It also didn't hurt the new term's appeal that Philip Wheelwright had used the term "eminent instances" in his book THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. Wheelwright's use of the phrase, appropriately derived from Melville's BILLY BUDD, is not identical to my evocation of the word here, but the base meaning still seems roughly parallel.

Lastly-- and there must be an ending, for the time being-- I prefer "eminence" to "sovereignty" because the former seems more malleable. In PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 3, I asserted that when Lois Lane stars in her own series, a "phase shift" occurs in which she and Superman reverse their respective subordinate/superordinate positions. This alteration in their respective centricities is elucidated by my formulation that Lois, a charisma-figure within SUPERMAN stories, shifts into a position of eminence while Superman's eminence recedes. This takes place for the purpose of relating propositions not possible in the SUPERMAN features-- propositions about what it might mean to be "Superman's girlfriend," which are also the sort of stories might have held particular appeal for young female readers. I added that Lois will probably always be considered "charisma-dominant" because Superman is, culturally speaking, a much more "eminent instance." But she does still have a low degree of stature thanks to having been in a position of organizational eminence.          

ADDENDUM: I must admit that the word "eminence" doesn't automatically connote the idea of an organizational principle. But a person who is "eminent" is, like a sovereign, often the person whose authority serves to organizes others into action, and thus the word works for me to denote how authors organize the elements of their stories/propositions to have a desired effect. An interesting coincidence: the day after writing this, I encountered the word "eminence" in its little-used geographical sense-- that of "a natural elevation"-- in a re-read of Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH.      

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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