MYTHICITY ACCORDING TO GENRE-DISPERSAL

 In the American academic criticism of both prose literature and film, so-called "myth criticism" is fairly spotty, without a dominant theoretical voice. Not that I would want everyone to sound the same. But there were a better general understanding of what distinguishes mythopoeic discourse from didactic discourse, authors like the ones who assembled this travesty might have a harder time promoting their drivel.

I believe American film criticism has one important advantage over its prose kindred, though. Because of the way commercial films were and are marketed, film critics have paid more attention to the ways mythic content can be expressed according to genre-expectations. No one has to my knowledge ever attempted a myth-history even for American popular films, and thus every interested critic, be it Raymond Durgnat, Richard Slotkin, or Geoffrey Hill, simply focuses on whatever genres or genre-products each finds most rewarding.

As a generalization based on personal reading, I find that three genres have generally attracted the most attention from myth-critics: horror, science fiction, and westerns. There's considerably less focus upon war and crime/mystery/espionage, except where critics have concentrated a particular creator with a particular genre-specialization, as with Hitchcock. And although one might argue that even silent film employed characters one might call "superheroes," understandably this quintessential comic-book genre has remained out of favor with most critics.

In comics criticism, I would say the bulk of myth-criticism has focused upon particular characters, be it perennials like Superman and Wonder Woman or relative upstarts executed by a particular creator, as with Frank Miller's Daredevil. So when I state that the bulk of comic-book criticism focuses upon superheroes, I'm talking about such focused examinations, and not so much on seeing myth broadly, through examinations of overall genre expectations. At least I'm not aware of any parallels in comics criticism to Slotkin's 1992 GUNFIGHTER NATION, which embraced a wide variety of frontier/western narratives of the 20th century.

I'm not thumping my own tub to claim that my blog seems to be the only one that has searched through the majority of comic-book  genres In Quest of Myth; it is, as far as I know, simple unadorned truth. Despite my efforts to be open to all generic forms, though, there can be no doubt that I too have found myth-discourse most often in the comic-book genre of the superhero. Probably the superhero-tale's nearest rival on this blog is the horror comic, with considerably fewer exemplars in the domains of science fiction, teen humor, and westerns.

Now, this is not so much the case on the blog I've dedicated to metaphenomenal film. Movies and television episodes with a "good" mythicity rating may actually be stronger there for both "horror" and "science fiction" than they are for "superheroes," though again, I have not attempted a precise breakdown, nor do I tend to do one.

 Now, the very fact that the NUM blog focuses only metaphenomenal film means that I almost never examine in detail one of the film-genres that earns the widest plaudits from academics: the western. Whereas horror, science fiction, and superheroes all might be expected to have heavy mythicity thanks to their evocation of metaphenomena, western narratives, even relatively simple efforts by "non-auteurs," often generate complex symbolic discourses even within purely (or largely) isophenomenal worlds. And I would say, again without making any attempt at a statistical breakdown, that western films do so much more frequently than other genres that tend to be dominantly isophenomenal, such as crime and mystery, romance, teen humor, and war.

I may come up with a theory to explain this discrepancy after doing more research into western-myth criticism as it exists, but for now, this essay serves mostly as a lead-in to my next essay: How Many Western Myths Have I Found?

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.

KNOWING THE DYNAMIS FROM THE DYNAMIC

DYNAMIC (noun): An interactive system or process, especially one involving competing or conflicting forces.

"The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; Character holds the second place."-- Aristotle, POETICS.

The "interactive system" of conflicting forces I'll discuss here are "plot" and "character," which Aristotle deems the two most important elements of "tragedy." Certain sections of the POETICS imply that the dynamic between the two applies to other forms of art as well, so I see no barrier to the idea of applying the dynamic to all narrative art, with the caveat that plot may not *always* be more significant than character: just that it is dominantly so because the plot is so often the structure within which the characters' acts are determined, rather than the characters imposing "their" will upon the structure.

In keeping with Aristotle's privileging of plot, Frye's formulation of literary categories is dominantly based upon plot-elements shared by works in the same category. At the same time, it should be noted that one of Aristotle's earliest points in the Poetics-- one which Frye reiterates and reformulates-- is that characters act within the plot according to expectations set up by their power of action, which connotes whether they are average, better than average, or worse than average. So even within Aristotelian theory it's easy to see plot and character joined in an interdependent pas de deux. Thus, despite the natural inclination toward plot-evaluation, the evaluation of character has unquestionable relevance if one desires to separate the dancers and see what each contributes to the dance.

In BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER, my argument was largely plot-based. I focused on the plot dynamics of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER TV series as a means of demonstrating why I believed that it was best placed in the category of the "adventure" mythos, even though the series also demonstrated that it contained substantial elements of the other three *mythoi*: of drama, irony, and comedy. I also made brief mentions of three other serial works which each represented one of the other three *mythoi*, and compared some of their plot-functions to those of BUFFY. These, too, I discussed in terms of how the protagonists functioned within plots typical of those *mythoi.*

However, after I examined the concept I term "myth-radicals" in SUBCATEGORIAL IMPERATIVES, and discerned that there were certain subcategories within these four divisions, it further occured to me that many of the irregularities could be explained as irregularites of either plot or character with respect to the dominant dynamic of a given mythos. As mentioned earlier I chose to focus upon the adventure mythos because (as I can't stress too much) so little of worth has been written about it, but I think my mediations on categories and subcategories apply across the board to all four mythoi.

Explanatory preamble done, I move on to two specific examples of works that seem to belong to the adventure genre but which I label "subagonistic" because they have what I called a "less agonistic value." Here for the first time I'm explicating why the difference may be one either of plot or of character.

My example for character is DOCTOR WHO, as portrayed in his initial 1963-89 series and in the current BBC version. (I disinclude the American-made TV-movie because I just don't remember much about it.) Clearly, in terms of the general range of plots used on both serials, one would tend to believe that it falls within the category of adventure. Like BUFFY, DOCTOR WHO borrows liberally from other *mythoi," most obviously from that of the comedy. But since the generic WHO plot would probably boil down to something like "Those Damn Dirty Colonial Alien Overlords," it's obvious that elements of physical peril take precedence over the dynamizations of the other three *mythoi.*

Yet against the galaxy-spanning might of Sontarans, Cybermen and Daleks we get...

THIS GUY.

In DOMINANCE, SUBMISSION I concluded with another comparison of Haggard's SHE and KING SOLOMON'S MINES, with the verdict that KSM was a true agonistic work due to its focus on the heroes' winning their battle through armed combat and perservance, while the heroes of SHE, despite a certain formidable nature, basically "get lucky" because their opponent destroys herself. The Doctor is typically portrayed by a male actor who is, for one reason or another, not meant to resemble the typical he-man of adventure-fiction, which is one element that signals the serial's intent to avoid the pattern of dynamization set by those more typical stories. The Doctor, though, does not triumph over his many foes solely by luck-- though on many occasions he is considerably outgunned, and luck is at times invoked as a force that keeps him from being vaporized. But typically, the Doctor fights his foes with the centuries-spanning knowledge of a Time Lord, not with martial abilities. His doctrine is *froda,* not *forza.* This puts him very close to the territory of the typical dramatic protagonist of mainstream science fiction, but in the end DOCTOR WHO is still about external peril rather than internal instabilities, and so it still falls within the category of the adventure mythos, for all that its protagonist lacks the *dynamis* of an adventure protagonist.

Moving on to STARGATE, the comparison of the two strikes me as felicitious, since when I first saw the 1994 feature films I thought of its "colonist alien overlords" plot as being "Doctor Who without the humor." And its plot, too, seems to belong to the category of adventure by virtue of the emphasis on physical peril, while its characters, unlike Doctor Who, are definitely typical agents of *forza:* gun-toting American soldiers and their alien allies who are out to clean up the territories dominated by various overlords-in-gods'-clothing. Indeed, one of the articles in the essay-collection SUPER/HEROES:FROM HERCULES TO SUPERMAN even refers to the star of the first TV series, the Richard Dean Anderson character, as a "superhero."

Yet I find it hard to see these rather unremarkable soldier-boys (and girls) as belonging to the idiom of the superhero.
I considered that this might simply be a matter of taste-- the fact that I didn't care that much for the movie and less for the TV show(s)-- but I dismissed that idea. I'm aware of many, many unremarkable protagonists whom I do see as belonging to that idiom, who possess roughly the same *dynamis* as the STARGATE soldier-boys. To use two othe SYFY-channel serials as counterexamples, I'm not hugely fond of the characters on either SANCTUARY or WAREHOUSE 13. But I can see both of them as having stronger ties to the superhero idiom, even if the heroes are not superheroes per se.

My final verdict, then, is that there's something about the execution of the generic STARGATE plot that edges a little too far out of the bounds of the adventure-story and into those of the dramatic story with adventure-elements. Over time the first serial and its epigoni took on an increasing resemblance to the "starship melodramas" of the STAR TREK franchise. I don't think STARGATE was ever as much about what Faulkner called "the human heart in conflict with itself," as all of the TREKshows have arguably been. But in the STARGATE franchise the adventure-mythos became somewhat dennatured. I view this as a lack of heroic *dynamis* within the overall plot-structure, rather than within the concept of the characters, as it is for DOCTOR WHO.

As I've said before, this basic rule of character-irregularities and plot-irregularities would apply across the board to the other three categories and their subcategories. At present I don't think it's possible for *both* plot and character(s) to be irregular and still deserve to be labeled a part of the regular mythos. For instance, a DOCTOR WHO without the adventurous plot-elements would probably look something more like HITCHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, and so would be more properly termed a comedy.

DOMINANCE, SUBMISSION (RADIOS APPEAR)

Here's a little history on how I came to perceive the need for "submissive" versions of the "dominant" significant values derived from the four narrative myth-radicals.

Though Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM proves vital to one's understanding of literature's mythic radicals, the ANATOMY usually defines a given mythos by the process of deduction. That is, Frye reasons from general principles as to how a mythos works (or is said to work) as a whole, and then applying it to particular examples within the mythos. I consider this a perfectly valid choice, but some might view the ANATOMY as deficient in that it rarely follows the inductive path. The approach of genre-studies academician John Cawelti takes just such an opposing course. When Cawelti tries to determine the parameters of a mythos (though he only uses the narrower term "genre") he begins with particular examples commonly held to belong to the same genre-category and susses out their likenesses as a way to define the genre. Most of the structuralists use largely inductive methods as well. Perhaps significantly, in Cawelti's ADVENTURE, MYSTERY AND ROMANCE, the author pointedly disavows any attempt to address Frye's theories of genre, though Cawelti certainly doesn't attack Frye. It may be that he simply realized that their methodologies were too far apart to make fruitful contact. I do not know if the late Professor Frye had any opinion on Cawelti, but one of Frye's early essays (which I do not have to hand) displays little enthusiasm for the structuralist approach and places emphasis on the critic's purpose to ferret out the "total vision" of literature.

All that said, I do think both methods of reasoning can play off one another in rewarding fashion, which will be my goal in sussing out some of the dimensions of the mythos of adventure. I choose it for this essay because, as I've noted before, so little of value has been written about this mythos.

By continuing to use the work "mythos," of course, I continue to subscribe to Frye's deductive vision. "Adventure" (which Frye called the "romance") is not to me a genre, or even a "supergenre" like horror or science fiction. "Adventure considered as a mythos" implies that all the works under its rubric share the fundamental aspect Frye imputes to the mythos: that the protagonists dominantly have a power-of-action greater than that of the average man.

And yet, worthwhile though this insight is, one must admit that Frye never quite defines parameters for the adventure-mythos, which he calls the "romance." His meaning as to what works belong in the category have to be reached more or less inductively from his deductively-arrived-at statements about the mythos.

In the first of the three analytical essays that make up the bulk of the ANATOMY, Frye starts with his "theory of modes." "Modes" in this chapter describes the power-of-action used by a given author of a given type of work, whereas the four *mythoi* that he describes later in the "theory of myths" essay are the categories to which the works themselves belong. Moving right along to the topic of the romance, here's what Frye first writes on the subject:

"If [the hero's power of action is] superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, marchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives."-- AOC, p. 33

After elaborating his list of modes (which I won't touch on here), he comments that "fictions of romance" dominated literature until Renaissance times, after which other modes began to emphasize protagonists of increasingly diminished power-of-action. Frye does not trace the extent to which romance/adventure continued to appear in literature in more realistic forms, such as those propagated by Stevenson and Walter Scott, or for that matter the "lower" forms of literature that flourished as the lower classes gained a degree of literacy. Frye's main concern is to show how literature in general is informed by principles of art derived from myth and ritual, which have common ground with canonical literature in its emotional/expressive spectrum. Additionally, he wishes to show that these modes (which naturally inform his *mythoi*) are not means by which one isolates one category from another in an absolute manner:

"Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must then learn to recombine them. For while one mode constitutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the other four may be simultaneously present. Much of our sense of the subtlety of great literature comes from this modal counterpoint."-- AOC, p. 50.

This statement, more than any other made by Frye, justifies the concept of Literary Genetics I've mentioned in earlier essays, but on which I haven't yet expounded. But back to Frye and the qualities of his romance-category:

From the first quote it would seem beyond dispute that Frye's romantic protagonist is superior to the average man in terms of power-of-action. A few pages after the opening of this essay, he goes on to describe this hero as "still half a god," but does not give many more specifics about romances in this essay because he's principally concerned with describing modal action rather than particular works.

In the "theory of myths" essay, Frye does become somewhat more detailed about the structure of the romance-category (though obviously not after the fashion of the structuralists). The first mythos he surveys is that of comedy, and then follows romance, though oddly enough, it's in the latter of these two sections that Frye warms to his topic enough to describe the four mythoi and their principal aspects in detail. His comments on the romance privilege its agonistic nature:

"The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which means that romance is naturally a sequential and processional form, hence we know it better from fiction than from drama. At its most naive it is an endless form in which a central character who never develops or ages goes through one adventure after an other until the author himself collapses. We see this form in comic strips, where the central characters persist for years in a state of refrigerated deathlessness."-- AOC, p. 186.

"The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero."-- AOC, p. 187.

"A quest involving conflict assumes two main characters, a protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy."-- AOC, p. 187.

I share Frye's belief that the category of the romance/adventure is certainly dominated by martial conflict, and that this is the reason to emphasize the radical of the *agon.* But perhaps in keeping with his Spengleresque view that romance as such has passed out of its historical moment, most of Frye's examples of romances hail from either medieval or Renaissance periods, and when he does make comparisons between aspects of the romance and more modern works, it tends to be works that are not actual romances, such as Melville's PIERRE and James' SENSE OF THE PAST. Frye's reasons for so doing is to show that the expressive power of romance's archetypes does not vanish simply because the culture turns toward more realistic fare. In a felicitous combination of terminologies drawn from both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Frye asserts that the archetypes (Jung) have simply been displaced (Freud) into more realistic forms or motifs. Perhaps a close examination of the romance's survival in Stevenson and Scott might have weakened Frye's schema of historical/cultural succession. Interestingly, Frye does make a tangential allusion to THE SUNDERING FLOOD, one of the Victorian-era works of William Morris, usually credited as the first English writer to revive the form of the medieval romance as a means for telling new stories. This breakthrough led to later generations deeming Morris as the progenitor of the modern "high fantasy," though admittedly fantasies like SUNDERING FLOOD were probably not as popular with Victorians as the most well-known exemplars of fantasy (LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY POTTER) are with modern audiences.

So Frye never really gives one much of a definition of "adventure" save that it is primarily about "some kind of battle." However, as I noted here, it's possible that even two works by the same author, about roughly the same subject matter, could have very different approaches to the centrality of the *agon.* Haggard's KING SOLOMON'S MINES places such a battle at the center of the plot-action, and so I view KSM as a work thoroughly dominated by the agonistic radical.

However, Haggard's SHE, though indubitably an "adventure" story due to its emphasis on peril-filled journeys and armed conflict, does not center around a final battle between a hero and his (or her) antagonist. Ayesha, the immortal "She Who Must Be Obeyed," certainly functions as an antagonist, albeit an ambivalent one to the viewpoint-protagonist Holly and his surrogate son Leo. But when Ayesha is defeated, it is certainly not by anyone's forceful action: she simply steps into the Flame of Life that first bestowed on her immortality, and finds that it has as much power to take as to give. Haggard suggests some ancient emnity between Ayesha and a long-deceased female rival, and intimates that it may have something to do with Ayesha's ill fortune, but this motif never becomes a literal conflict. Thus, I come to the conclusion that the agonistic radical in SHE has become relatively submissive compared to its manifestation in KING SOLOMON'S MINES-- though of course the agon-radical of SHE is more pronounced than it is in a work dominated by another radical. In this essay I described examples of a drama, a comedy and an irony that all had adventure-elements but were not primarily of the adventure-mythos. SHE is not any of these simply because its agon is "submissive," but it does require some special attention.

I plan to discuss another form of mode-dominance when I deal with the question of works in a serial mode. For all Frye's awareness of the "refrigerated deathlessness" of comic strips and similar pop-cultural media, I suspect he would have found challenging the question as to how a given serial could vary its significant values from story to story, and sometimes mutate from one mythos to another right before one's eyes.

SUBCATEGORIAL IMPERATIVES

In STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: AGONISTIC AND OTHERS I refined the terms I use for the significant values of the narrative myth-radicals: "agonistic" for the *agon,* "sparagmotic" for the *sparagmos,* "pathetic" for the *pathos,* and "incognitive" for my not-classically-approved *incognitio."

In AGON IN 60 SECONDS I attempted to sort out two famous narratives by Rider Haggard-- SHE and KING SOLOMON'S MINES-- with respect to how they measured in terms of their nature of conflict, using the terms "combative" for one and "subcombative" for the other. These terms have been largely superseded by the terms for the above-cited significant values, with "agonistic" taking the place of "combative."

In CONFLICT VS. COMBAT I observed that one might make place different narratives into typological perspective according to the element of combat. I showed how the element functioned in different narratives, using three examples: MEASURE FOR MEASURE for the "noncombative" (where combat either does not exist or is only implied), ROMEO AND JULIET for the "subcombative" (where combat is seen but is not the central aspect of the story) and MACBETH for the "combative," in which the element of combat is central to the story, even though the story itself may be not belong to the *mythoi* of combat, the adventure-tale.

But in a quest for greater simplicity (rare for me, at least), I've decided that some of the terminology can be elided in light of a full myth-radical system. One can certainly say that, even if MEASURE BY MEASURE has no scenes of combat, they might be implied by Shylock's use of the law to kill a hated Christian, and so "noncombative"-- or a revised verison, like "nonagonistic"--is a bit of a misnomer. The difficulty is more or less solved by simply saying that any significant value can exist in one of two configurations: a "full set," which would describe (say) MACBETH's centralized use of an agonistic value, and an "empty" or "null set," to describe those in which the use of a given value-- like the usages of the agonistic value in both MEASURE and ROMEO-- is anything less than central to the action of the plot.

Thus I find two configurations for each of the four significant values:

Agonistic/sub-agonistic
Pathetic/sub-pathetic
Sparagmotic/sub-sparagmotic
Incognitive/sub-incognitive

I'll probably never go into excrutiating detail about specific works that fall into each category. By way of general example I can see how certain melodramas might be *sub-pathetic* developments away from a "high drama" model; how certain simplistic satires might fall short of a total sparagmotic vision and thus would be merely sub-sparagmotic; how certain comedies, etc.

But since one of my theoretical projects is to better define the *mythos* of adventure, about which so little of critical value has been written, I'll be frank in saying that my main reason for forming the subcategories has been to suss out how one adventure fiction, such as Haggard's SHE, can display a less agonistic value in its narrative than another narrative, KING SOLOMON'S MINES, despite the facts that both works share the same author and many narrative plot-devices, and both works belong to a lit-mythic category I call "adventure"-- which is the way many more casual readers label them as well.

I may address some of these categories in a forthcoming essay relating to a Paradigm of Literary Genetics.