EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 

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...-- EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS.

Looking over this essay and its companion from last July, I don't think I adequately defined the organizational interactions of icons and propositions, which takes place through the agency of a master trope, rather than just tropes in general, as I said here.

I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. --MY SHORTEST POST YET. 

The one thing I left out in the above formulation is that any professional author decides in advance what sort of proposition will govern his narrative, and this means becoming more specific as to what sort of icons will work best for his master trope. Charles Dickens can't just put "orphan must learn the secret of his birth" out there; he must decide who the orphan is-- Oliver Twist-- and what the secret is; that Oliver still has a living relative from whom he and his mother got separated. 

Thus, there's an operative difference between a "generalized trope," which can be applied to many works, and a "specialized trope," which applies only to a particular work, or a particular linked set of works. Other aspects of the work will include "bachelor tropes" that are not nearly as important as the master trope. Oliver must meet some opposition so that his discovery of his secret heritage doesn't seem to be too easy. That opposition doesn't have to be Fagin and his faux-family of thieves, so that part of the proposition comprises a bachelor trope in relation to the master trope.  

OLIVER TWIST is a monadic work with no further iterations, so its proposition is unitary. Serial works are cumulative, given that even the most stereotypical serial-- I might cite my earlier example of the Golden Age BLUE BEETLE from a related essay-- may have a specialized trope (Blue Beetle protects his city from crime) that is barely distinguishable from a generalized trope ("hero protects his city from crime.") 

However, in cases where the cumulative narratives of the series are not broadly stereotypical, the specialized trope must be refined. Will Eisner's SPIRIT varies between direct confrontations with evildoers and indirect encounters with either human error or simple fallibility. In the cover Will Eisner prepared for a Kitchen Sink reprint of the 1940s SPIRIT stories, the artist depicts a scene that doesn't literally transpire in the story "Gerhard Shnobble," but one which symbolizes a key moment in the tale. The Spirit's crimefighting activities take second place in "Shnobble" to the tragic end of the title character, which the Spirit doesn't even personally witness. Nevertheless, even in stories where the dominant action takes place in the life of a one-shot character, the Spirit still provides a moral compass for Eisner's implied reader, even when he has no impact upon the one-shot character's life. So even though the SPIRIT series started out with a specialized trope like "The Spirit protects his city from crime," that master trope became in time inaccurate because of changes in the propositional priorities. Thus a more appropriate specialized trope, capable of taking in all of the propositions Eisner offered to readers, would be something more like, "The Spirit bears witness to the many manifestations of human fallibility."  

 

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD

Though there are ways in which my new categories, "novelty" and "recognizability," apply to stand-alone works (henceforth called "monads"). the categories are intended mostly to describe the dynamics of old stuff and new stuff in a serial format.

I.A. Richards, summing up his definition of all mental activity as "sorting," imagines the response of a single-celled organism to a stimulus and recognizing it as something encountered before.

...the lowliest organism-- a polyp or an amoeba-- if it learns from its past, if it exclaims in its acts, 'Hallo! Thingembob again!' it thereby shows itself to be a conceptual thinker.

Such a sorting, of course, is only possible if the organism can distinguish between things it has or has not encountered before. I think Richards is correct in his intuition, though with the caveat that the amoeba can't conceptualize anything about the things it finds familiar or unfamiliar.

Serial franchises depend on a constant "new and old" dynamic. The majority of serials focus on a particular character or ensemble of characters. (I have addressed the concept of non-character icons here.) Even if no other elements are repeated within the serial, the main character(s) provide the reader with "recognizability." In adventure-oriented serials, "novelty" is most often supplied by the hero's opponents, though after a time they too may take on a strong aura of recognizability.

To be sure, serials with a domestic tone may focus not upon opponents but upon foils. The comic strip BLONDIE stars the duo of Blondie and Dagwood, and most of their conflicts with other characters stem from stock figures in the subordinate ensemble: the neighbors, Dagwood's boss, the mailman. New characters may appear-- for instance, Dagwood constantly faces an onslaught of annoying salesmen who importune the house-holder with aggressive sales techniques-- but usually these characters have no names and never make a second appearance as such.

Crossovers exist to extend the "cosmos" of a given icon by relating it to the "cosmos" of another icon. Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE is one of the first such crossovers. The entirely fictional main character encounters a few historical characters, such as Richard the Lion-Hearted, but they are not crossovers because they are aligned with the cosmos of Ivanhoe. However, Scott also works the mythology of Robin Hood into the narrative, and Robin Hood even in 1819 was a highly recognizable figure with his own "cosmos." Since IVANHOE is a novel without sequels, everything aligned to the knight's mythology-- the hero himself, his romantic interests, and his enemies-- are all "novel" compared to the mythos of Robin Hood, at least from the viewpoint of most readers.

In serial narratives, it's more often the case that the author seeks to promote two separate fictional universes by having them intersect. Often this means the encounter of two characters-- She and Allan Quatermain, Daredevil and Spider-Man-- though it can also mean a crossover of a character and an established physical environment. TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE does include David Innes, one of the heroes of the "Earth's Core" series, but Innes barely appears in the story, and the greater focus is upon Tarzan's encounter with the savage world of Pellucidar.

Now, while the author of such a work knows that the intersecting icons may both be recognizable to some readers, the base idea is to interest those readers to whom one of the icons is "novel," the better to convert that audience. Usually, within the diegesis of the story, the first meeting of two icons is marked by novelty, just as it is in real experience, though afterward the icons are generally familiar with one another, and within the diegesis they become recognizable, even if their next interaction may provide some elements of novelty.

Lastly, a great deal of "icon emulation" relies on at least a superficial level of recognizability, even where that recognizability contradicts everything known about the icon's established history. For instance, the film BLOODRAYNE: DELIVERANCE pits its heroine against a vampire named Billy the Kid, ostensibly four hundred years old. If this version of Billy has been around that long, then clearly he has nothing to do with either the real or folkloric history of Billy the Kid, and the film-script makes no attempt to rationalize the discordances. But because the writer sought to make his villain recognizable, the film nevertheless delivers a "strong template deviation" type of crossover.