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."  

 

VARIATIONS STRONG AND WEAK

 Though I've used the terms "strong" and "weak" at times to denote the way later authors render their variations on originary fictional propositions, a better pair of terms would be "continuous" and "discontinuous."

The continuous variation, usually (though not always) produced by a succeeding author dealing with an earlier author's originary proposition, makes some effort to make it seem as if what he the secondary author writes is largely "in continuity" with most or all of what has gone before.

The author of the discontinuous variation, however, makes little effort to assert continuity with the originary proposition, and may even call attention to the lack of continuity.

To illustrate this, I will mostly concentrate on the examples I used in the two VARIANT REVISIONS essays from last July.

One example cited was the intertwined propositions of DC's first two Green Lanterns. The Hal Jordan Green Lantern was initially "out of continuity" with the Alan Scott Lantern, because the Jordan-creators had only borrowed a few tropes from the Scott version, be the tropes visual (hero wears a ring he can use to conjure up weapons) or explanatory (hero has one specific weakness to his powers). However, DC editor Julie Schwartz decided that since he and John Broome had introduced a spiritual connection between the then-contemporary Flash and his Golden Age ancestor, there should be a similar association between Scott and Jordan. I'd say this never panned out because the rationales for each hero's powers were too different, making it harder to play one off the other. However, from then on the two characters shared an intertwined continuity that most if not all subsequent authors respected. 

 

Not much later, though, Bob Haney attempted to bring back a character he created, The Gargoyle, for a second appearance. But although this second story only took place a few years after the first one, Haney either forgot aspects of the originary proposition or just ignored those elements in order to churn out a quickie filler-tale. This second story was discontinuous with the first proposition, and yet became accepted as the reigning continuity, on which at least one other author based his variation.  

   

In contrast to both, though, when Grant Morrison concocted his new version of Animal-Man, he intended from the start to play up the fact that he was producing a variation on another author's concept. Thus, when he has the current Animal-Man encounter the previous avatar, there are no attempts to paper over the discontinuities. Indeed, putting said discontinuities on display is the whole point, and arguably the entire "Deus Ex Machina" arc in that title is meant to question the validity of an overly niggling continuity-consciousness.

I also pointed out the example of HEKYLL AND JEKYLL. There's no way to imagine a "retcon" that would resolve the differences between the first magpie pair, a married couple, and the second, a pair of mischievous males-- unless one wanted to follow the multiversal path, and claim that they existed in separate universes, having parallel sets of adventures-- though who would want to bother?  

Yet even when there is no direct benefit to observing continuity, it's interesting to see that some franchises generate an expectation of continuous variations. Sherlock Holmes is a public domain character and has been for some time. Yet most authors, like Cay Van Ash in the above pastiche, seek to keep some continuity with the Doyle canon-- and this seems to be the case even with the more preposterous propositions, in which Doyle encounters vampires and Martians and so on. There are a few examples where an author seeks to upend the usual setup, as with the 1988 movie WITHOUT A CLUE, in which Watson is the brains behind the mystery-solving and Holmes is just an actor hired by the doctor.

In contrast, Dracula is just as much in public domain as Holmes, but only a minority of authors seek to abide by the Stoker canon, the most obvious being FRANCIS COPPOLA'S DRACULA. Possibly the early success of the stage play and movie variations, which did not closely follow the original story, encouraged the majority of authors to riff on the bare bones of the vampire, so to speak. Hundreds of discontinuous variations of Dracula have been produced over the last century, often making Dracula a member of a monster-mash and nothing more. Dracula too often gets crossed over with assorted icons, ranging from Billy the Kid to the Filmation Ghostbusters, but in these crossovers, unlike the ones for Holmes, Drac is little more than a shadow of his original self. Marvel's TOMB OF DRACULA falls somewhere in the middle. The comic book's plots don't abandon all the backstories from the Stoker novel, but the emphasis is upon all the new characters devised for the Marvel version of the vampire lord. Similarly, Marvel-Dracula's character is only loosely similar to the one in the Stoker proposition, the better to make him blend somewhat with the multitudinous icons of Marvel, like Doctor Strange and the Silver Surfer.      

VARIANT REVISIONS PT. 2

 Some of my current terminology re: "originary and variant propositions" was preceded by the two essay-series CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS, starting here. In those essays I more or less used "template" to stand in for the current "originary proposition," "template deviation" to stand in for "variant propositions," and "total deviation" to stand in for "null-variant propositions." All of these terms, though, are predicated on analyzing the propositions "from outside," seen from the POV of the "real" reader.

However, it's not impossible to see many if not all such variations "from inside," as if all of the propositions weren't just created by isolated raconteurs but were instead variations on archetypal tropes that precede even the first "originary proposition." 

It's true thar often the originary proposition is the strongest one in terms of evoking one or more of the four potentialities, which is why I previously compared such propositions to the sort of template used, say, in early printing technology. I mentioned in the CRYPTO series major icons like KING KONG and DRACULA, and it would be hard to argue that any of the variations on these figures, however entertaining, exceeded the originals in any way. 

      

  However, there are times that the originary proposition is not the most compelling, even on simpler levels. The durable Terrytoons stars "Heckle and Jeckle" are known by most viewers as a pair of wisecracking male magpies. However, the first cartoon in the series, 1946's "The Talking Magpies," posited them as a married male-and-female couple that caused no end of trouble for Farmer Al Falfa. Paul Terry then chose to issue a "rebooted" Heckle and Jeckle that same year with "The Uninvited Pests," and as two identical males with differing accents, the characters enjoyed another 51 theatrical cartoons. So in terms of popular success, the variant proposition was the more successful, not least because two obnoxious males could be used in many more slapstick situations than a married magpie pair.

Now, if one wanted to take the archetypal perspective I suggested above, one could imagine two parallel worlds, one in which Heckle and Jeckle were both male, and one in which they were a married couple. Most fictional propositions regarding parallel worlds are not much less chimerical. The parallel-world explanation for duplicate versions of DC characters such as Flash and Green Lantern sometimes verged on expressions of archetypal realities, though usually in fairly clumsy terms. The first Green Lantern begins very poorly-- I read the first volume of Golden Age reprints and could barely see any reasons for the success of the character beyond the base idea of a hero with a wonder-working "magic ring." Later in the series writers conceived a few subordinate characters-- Solomon Grundy, Vandal Savage-- evocative enough that DC Comics made them major figures in the company's later cosmology. But I'm not sure that, taken just on their Golden Age appearances, Grundy or Savage were as good IN THEIR TIME as the better villains of that era, from serials like Batman, Wonder Woman, or even Airboy and The Hangman. In contrast, the Silver Age Green Lantern, which crossbred the rudimentary Alan Scott concept with the "space ranger" ideas of the prose "Lensmen" series, displayed excellence in the kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities within a few years.

Even "soft reboots" within the same cosmos-- which make no use of "parallel worlds" as such-- are often treated as constituting variant propositions in, say, fandom-wikis like the DC Database. The 1988 ANIMAL MAN, reviewed here, dispenses with any idea that two separate Animal-Men co-exist in two distinct worlds. Rather, the first one knows that he was created by one author and rejected in favor of an updated hero with the same name by another author. Yet at the same time, Grant Morrison suggests that there's some loosely archetypal limbo where even the lamest characters ever created (hello, Ultra the Multi-Alien) continue to exist. And some soft reboots are performed not through intention but through error. In the first VARIANT REVISIONS, I took pains to analyze how Bob Haney first created a reasonably evocative mystery villain in one TEEN TITANS story. Yet when Haney later needed a make-work villain to plug into a hastily conceived scenario, the writer simply rewrote the established character's motivations to suit his current needs. As if to compound the error, George Perez constructed yet another ramshackle artifice on top of Haney's blunder and, to the extent that DC fans think of The Gargoyle at all, they probably defer to the Perez interpretation.

Some soft reboots even occur simply in response to changing tastes or priorities. Jerry Siegel's original Superman, while always devoted to justice, sometimes played fast and loose with legalities. DC editors didn't like that, possibly fearing a profitable character would get targeted by moral watchdogs-- which eventually happened anyway-- and so Silver Age Superman became an absolute stickler for obeying the law, even the law of made-up planets. Here too I would probably argue that Silver Age Superman surpassed the originary proposition in many though not all respects-- though the more creative Golden Age concepts of Siegel and his collaborators became the essential foundation for the Silver Age proposition.  

More to come.

        

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.  

    

 

VARIANT REVISIONS

 In ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 2, I gave two examples of established literary works, ROB ROY and IVANHOE, which respectively represented PURE and IMPURE forms of variant propositions, said purity being based on how much the narrative is based on previously established figures. However, particular icons within variant narratives may be deemed originary.

In the previous essay I analyzed "Requiem for a Titan," a TEEN TITANS story which related the first appearance of the Gargoyle. The character didn't appear very often, but because he did not, he offers a fair illustration of the way an originary icon-- albeit one situated within a variant proposition about a team of sidekicks--gets changed over time, even by the icon's creator.

 Bob Haney returned to the Gargoyle twice, but the first story, "A Titan is Born" (TEEN TITANS #35, 1971), wasn't an auspicious return. In this tale Haney tried to find something interesting to do with non-powered Titan Mal Duncan, a character introduced by Robert Kanigher during the "Relevant Titans" phase. In these seven pages, Mal pulls solitary computer-watching duty at the Titans HQ. A scientist named Heller-- the Gargoyle in disguise-- intrudes on Mal's solitude, claiming to be a colleague of the group's patron. Haney's vague on a vital point-- that somehow the Titans computer, set to perform some unspecified experiment, opened a dimensional doorway, allowing the Gargoyle to return to Earth. By story's end Mal manages to reverse the experiment and send the villain packing. The odd variance in the tale is the Gargoyle's own creator seems to have forgotten his original idea. In "Requiem," there's no indication that the tale Gargoyle told about his being an ex-convict was anything but a dodge to seed doubt into the heroes' minds. Since in "Requiem" Haney gave Gargoyle no real identity, and since in "Titan" he needed a quick-and-dirty motivation for the villain's actions, he faked one. Haney could never have anticipated how many odd turns his minor deviation from his originary story would later generate.               

Haney wrote one last story with Gargoyle, which I reviewed in detail here, and I don't need to say anything more about it except that Haney just treats the villain like a demon escaping its domain. Then in TEEN TITANS #53 (1978), writer Bob Rozakis contributed another link in the confusion. Rozakis imagines a story that supposedly took place between the canonical first and second adventures. Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Speedy and Wonder Girl team up for this "actual second Titans tale." All the sidekicks' mentors-- Batman, Flash, Aquaman, Green Arrow and Wonder Woman-- have suddenly turned into remorseless criminals. The young heroes prove their stuff by capturing the evil-ized good guys, and then, by dumb luck, the Titans stumble across the solution to the mystery by attempting to hold the Justice Leaguers at the JLA headquarters. There, the Titans meet one of the dumbest looking aliens ever conceived in comics (by artists Delbo and Fuller) -- The Antithesis. 

Rozakis gives no reason as to why the Antithesis is hanging out at the JLA HQ, and the heroes don't even smoke him out. The villain pops up to keep the Titans from contacting other Leaguers, but at the same time he shows absolutely no ability to attack anyone. He followed the Leaguers "from a far corner of the galaxy" because he could gain great energy by dominating heroes and making them do bad things. (This story has nothing to do with Haney's Gargoyle, but the Antithesis and Gargoyle are not dissimilar in that raison d'etre.) As the Titans attack Antithesis, he proves immaterial, but that's because they've cut off his supply of corrupted-hero energy. The evil ET seems to be hoping his last pawn will win in the field, though that pawn is defeated and Antithesis vanishes, wailing something about "power generators." From what Rozakis writes, the only "power generators" Antithesis has access to would be his heroic pawns.     

It was left to George Perez, long after he and Marv Wolfman had reworked the TEEN TITANS concept into a sales success, to link Haney's Gargoyle with Rozakis' Antithesis, and with a separate character as well. "Pieces of the Puzzle" (SECRET ORIGINS ANNUAL #3, 1989) is mostly a mashup of selected stories from the Haney, Rozakis and Wolfman-Perez eras, conveyed to the reader by dream-scenes experienced by Nightwing as he's tormented by a cowled enemy. As a story "Puzzle" may be worse than that the Rozakis "Antithesis" tale, though the art is much better. But to make his story work, Perez interpolates an odd new detail; that the Antithesis was hiding in the JLA's own computers. This detail seems to serve no purpose, and I hypothesize that Perez confused the origin of the Antithesis with Haney's "Titan is Born" tale, where Gargoyle gets out of limbo thanks to the Titans HQ computer. Perez recounts the Haney tale at the end of "Puzzle" as he's retconning it into the narrative of Mal Duncan, but that retcon doesn't actually require the revision of the Rozakis story.      

The big Three Reveals, if one can call them such, is that (a) the cowled figure giving Nightwing bad dreams is The Gargoyle, (b) The Gargoyle is really the Titans' first foe Mister Twister (which factoid could be used to justify Haney's erroneous 1971 story), and (c) Gargoyle got all his powers, in both identities, from the Antithesis. Whenever I read this, I remember thinking it was a good idea to combine the best enemy of the original Titans with their first one. But now I recognize that Perez was a little too desperate to shoehorn together unrelated stories for a superficial effect. In fact, there's are so many retcons in "Puzzle" that there was no room for the author to expatiate on the Gargoyle-Antithesis relationship in the story proper, so it all had to be explained in a prose sidebar. 

Of course, heavy-continuity stories can be done well. But since my next essay will discuss the mythic tropes surrounding the Titans' first antagonist, I felt it necessary to explain why I thought all of these variant propositions were badly framed.         

THE READING RHEUM: A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA (1968)

 I probably first read A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA and its two sequels no later than the 1970s. Within the last ten years I re-read them all for a book-group. I confess that despite that re-read I remember little about the sequels. I emphasize this reading history to underscore the fact that even though I seem to remember liking Ursula Le Guin's ambitious, arguably anti-Tolkienian trilogy, I don't think I tended to re-read the series, as I did with similar serials by Frank Herbert and the aforementioned Tolkien.                                                                                       

 I won't chart the loose plot of the novel here. What LeGuin presents to the reader are a loose series of incidents in the life of an islander in the fantasy-world of Earthsea: Ged, who comes from humble origins but who advances, sometimes in spite of himself. to become one of the foremost wizards in the world. I'm more concerned with pinpointing the major themes and tropes found in EARTHSEA. I find these to be "anti-Tolkienian" in that LeGuin is not concerned with the major good-vs-evil conflicts characteristic of most epic fantasy, but with an exploration of interiority, of what some call "the self."                                                                                                             

The defining problem Ged faces in his youth, and in his early years mastering the skills of wizardry, is that of his own pride. His pride leads him to unleash upon himself a pursuing Shadow, a form of "second self" which provides much of EARTHSEA's narrative drive. Roughly halfway through the book, while Ged is fleeing his personal demon, he takes refuge with his teacher Ogion, who tells him:                                                                                                                          

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”                                       

     Passages like this one demonstrate that LeGuin, in contrast to the Judeo-Christian focus found in Tolkein and Lewis, advocated the monistic approach of Taoism, at least as she understood it. This is not to say that Ged is a non-combative protagonist. EARTHSEA includes fascinating sections where the young wizard, once he's gained greater control of his own psyche, forces a powerful (and intelligent) dragon to yield to Ged's will, and overcomes the temptation of an archaic evil spirit. (To be sure, there's the suggestion of a Faustian trope, but by this time in the novel Ged, unlike Faust, has advanced beyond worldly temptation.)                                               

While I enjoyed my third reading of EARTHSEA, I concluded that I find the morality of LeGuin too arid. I noticed on this reading that although two or three of Ged's teachers seem to intuit the great mistakes he's going to make, none of them ever proffers any advice to guide him away from those errors. Had any of them done so, of course, that might have prevented Ged from bringing about the book's central conflict, which could have been a major problem for LeGuin. But I still find her actual approach overly schematic, as if she wants to put Ged under a microscope to observe the things he does. Though EARTHSEA probably has a much better literary reputation than the 1970s teleseries KUNG FU, I find that the better scripts of that program more involving that this fantasy-novel, particularly with respect to how the hero Caine is advised by his perceptors. The hero's Shaolin teachers are always seen in flashback, rendering bits of abstruse philosophy to Young Caine, which insights Modern Caine reflects upon in order to draw current conclusions about how to act in a current situation. Caine's absent teachers don't do his thinking for him, but they pass on their knowledge so that he can take advantage of it later. Ged is like one of the many islands that make up the world of Earthsea, isolated from his fellow humans even though he chooses to perform good deeds on their behalf. In both her non-fiction and her fiction, LeGuin abjures the visceral in favor of the intellectual-- which doesn't always make for the ideal re-reading experience. Incidentally, the first EARTHSEA book is definitely a candidate for a category of proposition/postulate I discussed here: one which "includes a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates."        

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 3

 Following up on my previous proposition that it makes the most sense to discuss narratives as propositions about fictional constructs, I should specify that the category of "variant propositions," those that are playing off familiar icons, includes the subcategory "null-variant propositions." These are variant propositions in which the author conjures with one or more familiar icons, icons not within the cosmos of a featured icon or group of icons, but also takes some strategy to distance the familiar-seeming icon from the original on which it's been modeled.                                                                                                   

   In this essay  I discussed a particular type of null-variant, the replacement character. One of my examples dealt with a pair of heroes named The Black Owl from Prize Comics. While a lot of Golden Age features simply changed a given hero's personal name or powers at the drop of a hat, some writer or editor at Prize decided he wanted to distinguish a "new Black Owl" from the old one. So the previous Owl simply hung up his wings, so that the author could dovetail the history of the new Owl with another new Prize feature, "Yank and Doodle," twin teen heroes who just happened to be the sons of the new Black Owl. The author of the new Owl wanted to keep whatever audience the old Owl had garnered, while clearing the decks, so to speak, so that he didn't have to concern himself with the old Owl's identity.                                                                               

    My first example is a very overt form of the null-variant, as are the countless stories in which a hero encounters a son, daughter or great-grand-nephew of Frankenstein. But there's also a covert form, in which the author teases his audience with the possibility that a familiar icon has entered the sphere of the featured icon. I touched upon one of these here, dealing with a 1952 story in which the Frankenstein Monster seems to show up in the cosmos of the 1950s Ghost Rider. However, the Monster proves to be just another example of a schmuck dressing up like some familiar icon to spread fear, or something like that. I thought this was a shame, since there was no reason that a Ghost Rider story could not have had the Phantom of the Plains encounter a version of Mary Shelley's creature.                                                                                                             

  Most if not all dreams or illusory representations of familiar icons fall into the null-variant category. In TALES OF SUSPENSE #67, the villain Count Nefaria uses a dream-controlling machine to project Iron Man into a nightmare-world where he fights simulacra of old foes, some of whom are no longer among the living. This is another overt use of a null-variant, while the covert type would be found in the sort of story that ends with the climactic revelation that "it was all a dream." The one possible exception would be those dreams where it's suggested that the dreamer 's act of dreaming has actually put him in contact with a plane of being where literary characters have their own reality, as may be the case with the 1943 tale "Santa in Wonderland," where the jolly old elf finds himself less than amused by the japes of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland weirdos. 

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

 I first started systematically speaking of fictional narratives as "propositions" in the 2018 essay-series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, beginning here. True, the main thrust of this series was to talk about the differing strengths of a given work's "lateral meaning," as against the more elusive "vertical meaning." But since both of these complementary elements of narrative have always been inextricably imbricated with one another, it would be correct to state that fictional narrative as a whole was proposition-based: "icons X, Y and Z interact in such a way as to produce results A, B and C."                   

In contrast, I began writing about "centric characters" and "focal presences" close to the beginnings of this blog, though it was only in the 2022 essay I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON that I settled on the current term "icon" for any individual or collective entity within a narrative that had any significant level of resonance, using "Primes" and "Subs" to distinguish their level of those icons' respective importance to the story. By this definition even an amorphous force could be an icon, like the one that engenders chaos on Earth in the 1924 film THE CRAZY RAY, or a collection of beings that comprise an environment, like The Planet of the Apes or Kern's World.                                                                 

 However, I'd never precisely brought together the interrelated concepts of icons and propositions, though obviously no one would pay attention to any fictional propositions if there were not fictional icons with whom the audience might identify. I will now draw upon my distinction between "trope emulation" and "icon emulation" as established in 2022's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2 by distinguishing between "originary propositions" and "variant propositions." A work like Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD would be an originary proposition because the narrative does not directly derive from an earlier narrative, even if the author uses tropes seen in other narratives: "fatherless boy endures privation," "fatherless boy finds protector," etc.                     

A "variant proposition," however, does follow some pre-existing iconic model. It might be a historical figure altered for fictional purposes, like Scott's ROB ROY--                                                         

--Or it could be a narrative based on a completely fictional figure, as with Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes pastiche SEVEN PER CENT SOLUTION. Both of these I would give a further distinction, the PURE variant proposition. The idea behind both propositions is that they are telling stories of established figures, whether historical or fictional, which vary in some way from whatever has been previously established about said figure.                                                   

The corollary category to the PURE type is of course the IMPURE type. This would be a narrative in which the main thrust of the narrative centers upon an originary icon, but the story also includes a variant take uoon some pre-established figure. Scott's IVANHOE is one I've returned to a number of times. The 12th century knight Ivanhoe is entirely fictitious, but his story is enmeshed with that of Robin Hood and some of the mythology derived from the Robin Hood cosmos. Hence, the latter example is IMPURE.

More on these matters in future.         

                                                                                                

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 1

"The original King Kong has but one story, at the end of which he perishes, never to return, at least not at the hands of his creators. However, when the company that owned Kong leased him out to Toho Studios, Kong was revised in many respects-- most significantly, making him large enough that he could stand toe to toe with the Big G. This Kong is not really the original Kong, but there exists a sort of "crypto-continuity" between the two, so that I regard this crossover as a crossover of two Primes, simply because Kong II is meant to be a strong echo of the original icon." --A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2 (2021)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   "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."" --THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD (2022)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 Since in 2021 I started assiduously pursuing the narrative pattern-analysis I *may* dub "crossology," I've struggled somewhat with trying to account for the situations described in the examples above. In both, some raconteur executes a version of an established icon that strongly deviates from previously established descriptions of the icon in one or more ways. In the case of Kong in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, no change was more monumental than the idea that Kong II, unlike the Kong of the 1933 film, was alive. The script for the 1962 movie could have specified that this was a different Kong than the earlier one, just as the Godzilla of GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN is a different but essentially identical "Godzillasaurus" as the one in the 1954 original. But the writers of KING KONG VS GODZILLA did not make any such distinction. In my view the writers wanted to encourage the identification of Kong II with Kong I, the better to sell to audiences the mythic battle between the foremost kaiju of America with the pre-eminent monster-child of Nippon.                                                                                                       

The example of Billy the Kid in BLOODRAYNE DELIVERANCE is arguably more extreme: not only was this Billy a bloodsucking vampire, he didn't even originate in the era with which both the real William Bonney and his fictional congeners are associated: the Old West. Yet the writers of that movie also wanted more recognition-value out of associating "Vampire Billy" with the legendary outlaw, or else they too could have pursued the strategy I described for Kong II: just say it's some bloodsucker who came along and assumed the identity of a famed gunfighter. I tried to rationalize this narrative identification with phrases like "recognition of motifs" and "template deviations," and while those aren't precisely wrong, they may not get to the heart of the problems inherent in the process of icon emulation. My current solution will phase out the term "template deviations" in favor of a brand-new headscratcher, "variant propositions," which Part 2 will attempt to justify.                                                                                                                                                                             

CROSSING T'S, DOTTING I'S

 Yet the weakness of weak propositions is also their strength, for readers inevitably seek to justify their appreciation of favored artists via abstract propositions.-- STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 2.

 

In STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS, I announced that I would retire the barely used term "postulate" in term of "proposition." But my saying this means that I must transfer everything I said about the two forms of postulates, especially in FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, to a "formal proposition" that represents the didactic form of vertical meaning, and to "informal proposition," that represents the mythopoeic form of vertical meaning.

The one potential problem with these determinations is that way back in 2018's three-essay series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, I stated that I considered both the lateral and vertical meanings of a given work were propositional in nature.

But the solution is easily solved by a quick visit to Schopenhauer. In his principal work THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, the gloomy philosopher created a lot of dualisms, but one of the simplest is to contrast "the concrete" of our physical experience and "the abstract" of our mental experience. 

So, since I've already assigned (as in the quote above) abstractions to the world of vertical meaning, then by default (as well as the PROPOSITIONS series) the world of lateral meaning is aligned with the concrete, because the lateral is also the "literal" record of what happens to characters in the narrative and how they feel about it. 

So, to apply full symmetry to the formulations of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE, all four potentialities line up like so:

THE KINETIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete excitations 

THE DRAMATIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate concrete emotions

THE MYTHOPOEIC-- informal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract correlations

THE DIDACTIC-- formal propositions based on fictional phenomena meant to generate abstract cogitations

TUTELARY SPIRITS

In DOWNGRADING (OR DEGRADING) ON A CURVE, I discussed the dynamics of the BEWITCHED teleseries. I stated that even though the characters of Samantha and Darrin were the superordinate icons of the ongoing narrative, the subordinate character of Endora was the one most often used to generate stories, often by her desire to "teach Darrin a lesson," whether her reasoning was good or bad.

Though on this blog I've mostly discussed accomodation narratives featuring romantic ensembles, another frequently seen trope is that of two characters linked by some tutelary activity. These may be entirely distanced from anything resembling romantic pairing, as seen in both GOOD WILL HUNTING and the more recent HOLDOVERS, where the give-and-take relationship of a teacher and a student makes them both superordinate characters. Another variation appears in the 1956 TEA AND SYMPATHY play-adaptation. In this story, an older woman, not a teacher but connected to a school through her husband, perceives a young man's confusion about his sexuality and dispels his fears by initiating him into manhood. Somewhat related are narratives focusing upon a psychologist and his patient, such as Peter Schaffer's EQUUS, wherein the former must play detective to comprehend the latter's malady, and in so doing experiences some insight about himself.

So, after all those examples of highbrow theater and cinema, my main illustration of a tutleary superordinate ensemble in this essay will be-- the completely lowbrow hijinks of Jack H. Harris' MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO.

Though Darrin Stevens never learns any lessons, Tom Hastings of MOTHER desperately wants to find out what's causing him to freeze up when he tried to have marital relations with his newlywed bride. But I wondered, "Is that enough to make him the main character?" He's a mystery to be solved, but his neglected wife certainly does not function in the narrative as the Samantha to his Darrin. Rather, only psychotherapist Marilyn Richards can unlock the secrets of Ted's impotence and its goofy association with Mother Goose imagery.

Now, whereas both EQUUS and TEA AND SYMPATHY seek to produce reasonable, rational propositions about human behavior, all of MOTHER's propositions are, to use an earlier phrase, "informal." Writer Harris wasn't concerned with probability: he wanted a smarmy sex-comedy. So the script has Marilyn's sexy professional woman, whom I term a "mother-imago," ends up liberating Ted from a subconsciously prohibition accidentally laid upon him during his childhood by his real mother. Toward the end of the movie, Marilyn kinda-sorta makes an erotic move on Ted, justifying the move as "therapy." But long before any such move has been made, Ted has a fairytale-dream-- the second in the story-- wherein he imagines Marilyn as the Evil Queen in "Snow White," who seeks to keep Snow, "played" by Ted's wife, from uniting with Kirk's Prince Charming. 

At the climax, when Marilyn has managed to call forth the nature of Ted's prohibition from his buried memories. she discourages Ted from seeking out his wife, claiming that he ought to use her as a test-case for his restored virility. Then the script has Marilyn change her mind for no good reason and fend Ted off, probably because Harris guessed that his target audience wouldn't like seeing the male lead cheat on his loving wife. So even though Marilyn and Ted don't end up in bed together, they provide a fascinating example of a tutelary ensemble with a strange mother-and-son dynamic, though it stops short of a TEA AND SYMPATHY resolution.

STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS

 In contrast to some of my revisions, these two should be relatively painless.

I've only used the term "postulate" three times. In the essay THE INFORMAL POSTULATE, I tossed out the titular term in response to a critic's use of the phrase "formal postulate." Then I wrote two linked essays, Part 1 and Part 2 of FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE. The only limitation I see in the use of the word "postulate" is that I don't think it has as much broad applicability as my previously used term "proposition," even though the two words mean approximately the same thing. So from now on, I will only speak of formal and informal propositions.

I have used the linked terms "master thread" and "bachelor thread" more often, both beginning in 2020. Here's my rationale for the metaphor from the first part of MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD:

I’ve frequently pictured these vertical meanings as either being “over” or “under” a narrative’s lateral meaning, but for current purposes maybe it might be better to imagine them as many disparate threads running through the (potentially) labyrinthine structure of the narrative. A single narrative can incorporate more than one vertical meaning. However, to be coherent said narrative needs what I’ll henceforth call a “master thread.”

About two months later, I formulated the complementary term "bachelor thread" as a pun on "masters' degrees" and "bachelors' degrees." In the essay DEGREES OF MASTERY AND BACHELORDOM, I was particularly focused upon the fact that what I called "open serials" usually did not manifest master-threads.

All of these types of open serials are far too disorganized to maintain a master thread as such. At best—and here I reference the setup of my essay-title—one could devise “bachelor-threads,” which are, as per the collegiate metaphor, not as advanced as the masters. Bachelor-threads simply codify the most prominent story-motifs used in the open serial, but there’s no sense that they all add up to a coherent discourse.

Of course, this formulation was not exclusive only to serials, open or otherwise. It's possible for any narrative, whether a serial, part of a serial or a monad, to sustain only a master thread and nothing more, which is the way I used that term in MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 3, even though I specified that the master threads in my first two examples were relatively simple in symbolic development next to my third example. In monad-narratives, bachelor threads usually manifest when the author chooses to develop other concerns peripheral to the master thread. In MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2, I spoke of "meaning-threads" in MOBY DICK being subordinate to the book's master thread, and this conception was simply later borne out in the formulation of the complementary "bachelor thread" term.

However, though I still like the "thread" metaphor, henceforth I'll speak only of "master tropes" and "bachelor tropes," in order to make my take on literary thematics hew closer to my analysis of what literature is made of, as per my statement in 2021'S QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM.

just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”

Indeed, all of the statements I've made about both types of "threads" are symbolic scenarios that take the same form as "tropes," and thus I don't see any difficulty in making the change, except that now all the categories that used to read "thread" will now read "thread/trope" to reflect this altered priority.

 

 

 

FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2

 I first used the terms "formal postulate" and "informal postulate" here, but I've devoted many earlier posts to sussing out which aspects of  a story appeal to the intellect, which to the imagination, and which to a combination of both abstract "vertical values."

But as I want to try out the new terms on something, it's time to break down some examples in terms of the didactic and/or the mythopoeic potentiality.

The famous EC Comics story "Judgment Day" (WEIRD FANTASY #18, 1953) is my selection of a story that appeals only to the didactic potentiality, and thus is a pure formal postulate. Symbol-hunters like myself would search in vain throughout Al Feldstein's story for any of the symbolic discourses familiar in prose science fiction-- discourses about whether robots can take on a wide variety of human traits, or man's quest to conquer the cosmos. Feldstein subordinates everything in this one-story universe to making one pedagogical point: that even in the far future, the scourge of bigotry will still exist, improbably incarnated in artificial beings-- despite the intimation that actual humans have overcome bigotry, which is the point of showing the galactic inspector to a Black man.

Since this essay-series started with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the reader will notice that it's no coincidence that I'm going to pick particular stories by each to illustrate two other types of vertical value.

I mentioned that some stories combine the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities, and this combination appears in the Stan Lee-John Buscema story "Origin of the Silver Surfer." For this story, Lee-- almost certainly the dominantly creative member of the team-- sought to give the character more humanity than the "science fiction angel" in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR, who was essentially beyond commonplace humanity. Lee's new origin not only posited that the  Surfer had once been a mortal alien humanoid, Norrin Radd, but also that he hailed from Zenn-La, a civilization that had advanced so far that it held no challenges for one as restless as the future hero. This new element had a didactic purpose-- beware of becoming too coddled by advanced technology-- but there's a mythopoeic quality to Norrin's discontent as well. He's seen as a throwback to a more venturesome era, one who would be more suited to Zenn-La's frontier era. In other words, the Silver Surfer was just a "space cowboy."

Then Galactus comes calling, making a mockery of Zenn-La's defenses as the gigantic alien prepares to devour Norrin Radd's homeworld. Here Lee follows through on the loose God the Father/Jesus the Son opposition that arguably appeared in the Galactus Trilogy. But this time the Surfer is not an inhuman angel sacrificing himself for Earth-humanity; he's a mortal sacrificing his freedom to save his own world. So he's a cosmic Christ-cowboy, but significantly, this mythopoeisis still carries a didactic message. As the Surfer bids his beloved farewell before beginning his servitude to Galactus, he tells her. "Let not the spirit of our ancestors be lost a second time! Let not our people grow soft and indolent!" Norrin Radd gets his earlier wish, to emulate the ways of Zenn-La's early explorers, for now he can range the entire universe in his quest to find non-inhabited worlds for his master. Even the Surfer's estrangement from his girlfriend resembles the sacrifice of similar pleasures by heroes in Western films, in order that they may serve a greater cultural cause. So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.

Lee's story-- which may be the finest single story he ever wrote without input from "The Other Big Two"-- was the beginning of a series, but for my selection from Kirby, I choose a conclusion, the end of the NEW GODS series, issue #11, which bears the curious title, "Darkseid and Sons." Some fans speculate that prior to scripting this story, Kirby had been told the axe was about to fall upon the majority of the Fourth World. Thus he had but one issue to present some rough thematic conclusion to his series, while leaving the door open for a follow-up. An earlier issue had established Kalibak, son of Darkseid, had been captured by humans following Kalibak's inconclusive battle with his frequent rival, the heroic Orion. So Kirby chooses to match the two powerhouses against one another for his NEW GODS finale.

In early NEW GODS issues, Kirby had dropped broad hints that Orion might bear some shadowy relationship to Darkseid, Lord of Apokolips, and then he let fall the other shoe in NEW GODS #7. That story explicitly stated that Orion, Darkseid's son, was raised on New Genesis from perhaps age five onward, while Highfather's son Scott Free was raised on Apokolips, in an exchange one might call "hostage-fosterage." So it's a little anti-climactic when Darkseid makes a reference to Orion and Kalibak having fought as "children," though apparently neither warrior remembers growing up alongside the other. During Orion's battle, he more or less guesses that he and Kalibak are brothers. Kalibak himself has apparently never told of his parentage, but even the basic idea inflames him with nascent sibling rivalry.

The title actually gives the game away: the final revelation is not that either sibling, but that of Darkseid's own history. NEW GODS #7 also introduced the reader to both Heggra, Darkseid's mother, and Tigra his wife, also Orion's mother. There's no didactic point to this revelation, but there's a very big mythopoeic quality evoked by Kirby. Darkseid he complains that his two sons "darken my future as surely as their maternal forbears ruled my past! My mother, Queen Heggra! Orion's mother, Tigra! And the sorceress Suli!" It's not just an instance of misspeaking for him to include Heggra, who was obviously not mother to either of Darkseid's sons. Symbolically, he's including himself alongside his sons as having been "hag-ridden" (or "Heggra-ridden?") by powerful women. He wanted Suli, who possibly complemented Darkseid's own evil by spawning the brutish Kalibak. But Tigra, the choice of Darkseid's mother Heggra, unleashed from the seed of Darkseid's loins a force for good, a son capable of opposing his father rather than serving him. The story strongly suggests that Darkseid comes to admire the son who fights him, even though he retaliated for Heggra's murder of Suli by an act of indirect matricide. 

Kirby got one final chance at a sequel to NEW GODS in the graphic novel HUNGER DOGS in 1985, but he didn't bring up this maternal trope again. Did the artist, who was at least lightly conversant with some of the famous plays of Shakespeare and the Greeks, just happen upon the same trope so frequently evoked by Greek playwrights, in which stalwart heroes are undone by conniving females like Medea, Electra, and Clytemnestra? I think he incorporated the maternal motif into NEW GODS because he understood its dramatic appeal, at least on an instinctive, mythopeoic level. But because he doesn't have a didactic point to make with these revelations, "Darkseid and Sons" can only be what I term an "informal postulate," because there's no attempt to subject the correlation to intellectual cogitation.