COSMIC ALIGNMENT

The sort of "cosmos" I'm talking about in this essay is essentially the same as the word "mythos" as I've been using it to apply the totality of elements within any narrative, where a variety of Subs-- mostly antagonists and supporting characters-- interact with one or more Primes. This cosmos may be generated within the space of one narrative, as per my earlier example of the novel IVANHOE, or throughout the progress of a series, be it short-lived or long-lived. All subordinate presences within a narrative-- characters, settings, and certain types of artifacts-- are defined by their *alignment* with the stories generated by the superordinate character(s).

I indirectly alluded to this concept, not then named, in A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1,  regarding the character of Fu Manchu. Since Fu is the sole superordinate character of the series of books named for him, all other characters in those books are aligned with him, even those opposing him. However, when Fu becomes a subordinate character in the MASTER OF KUNG FU series, he then becomes an aligned figure within the Shang-Chi cosmos.

The first appearance of an antagonist often determines his alignment for the foreseeable future. No matter how often the Joker appears in features other than those of Batman, he remains known as a Batman foe. However, it's possible, particularly when the individual features of a given publisher share continuity, for subordinate presences to cross over into other features. In CROSSOVERS PT. 3,  I reviewed the way in which two villains, Mister Hyde and the Cobra, had debuted in the THOR feature but were recycled into that of DAREDEVIL. The two super-crooks never became firmly attached to the latter feature either, and they subsequently drifted into such venues as SPIDER-MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA. Since the two evildoers never became strongly associated with any single feature, I would still tend to view them as Thor-villains who bring about a charisma-crossover every time they venture into a new character-cosmos.

 OTOH, in comic books Thanos first appeared in an IRON MAN story, but he was never established, via escalated appearances, as an Iron Man villain. Instead, his creator Starlin aligned Thanos first with the third Captain Marvel and then with Warlock, and given the demise of the former, I would tend to think that he aligns most strongly with Warlock. However, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the nasty titan becomes an Avengers foe-- and will probably never be re-interpreted further in the movie-medium.

As it happens, a number of famous historical figures also cross paths, though of course these events are not being contrived for anyone's entertainment. In this essay, I addressed the subject of notorious western marauder Billy the Kid, focusing on how little all fictional treatments of the outlaw related to the real historical personage. But even though the real Billy the Kid never met a lot of the famous people of his time, much less Dracula, some "real crossovers" did take place. The Kid's sometimes criminal associate Dave Rudabaugh, for instance, is credited in this Wiki-article with also encountering Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday. Earp and Holliday may have met for the first time due to Earp's hunt for Rudabaugh.

The real-life association of Earp and Holliday became the stuff of many fictional westerns, most of which tended to make Earp a Prime protagonist while Holliday was relegated to Sub status. Nevertheless, Holliday had enough charisma that he occasionally migrated into other fictional cosmoses, dueling with the Rawhide Kid in one comic and making an appearance in an episode of the TV show THE HIGH CHAPPARAL.

Strangely, Holliday gets a post-mortem encounter with three western folk-heroes in the 1999 movie PURGATORY, none of whom he knew in life: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Wild Bill Hickock (though the last character seems more like a faux Wyatt Earp in his characterization, since he's not that "wild.") Again, these would all be high-charisma crossovers, since all of the folk-legends attached to these westerns would be *innominate* by nature.

Moving from folk-legends to folklore, there are a wide number of crossovers which focus on associating figures from folktales and fairy tales. Usually these type of tales are too amorphous to establish a "cosmos" for, say, Little Red Riding Hood. But on occasion the Wolf, aligned as a subordinate character in that story, becomes the star of a given story, or he may become one of many stock folk-figures to cross over with some superordinate character, often a new, non-traditional character like Shrek.

In conclusion, I will admit that full-fledged myths are harder than folk-tales to judge in terms of alignment. Suzanne Langer and others have noted that in mythology proper figures like gods and their monstrous antagonists often become set in their own "continuity," however often this or that detail may change. Yet some gods and heroes, theoretically in the same universe, never really cross paths, despite "continuties" like those of the Iliad or the Argonautica. Does it count as a crossover if Perseus and Jason, who never meet in the old myths, appear in the same story? I would not tend to consider it a crossover if some ordinary schmuck conjures up the goddess Venus. But Venus crossing over with the mythology of Satan would certainly be a different matter. More on these matters later, perhaps.

VECTORS OF INTENTIONALITY

 

In the three-part EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS series, beginning here, I referenced the way authorial well manifested in all of the conceptual categories on which I’ve meditated here, though the three essays were concerned only with the category of centricity. This essay will be concerned with the category of literary phenomenality.

A word first, though, about my use of the word “intentionality” in the title. This term has various associations in various schools of philosophy, but here it means exactly the same as the concept of “authorial will.” Based on my readings I’ve often thought the twentieth-century concepts of “intentionality” were not substantially different from what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he spoke of “will,” and that the later term might have been introduced by writers who didn’t necessarily want to seem overly indebted to Schopenhauer. I’ve resisted using the term “intentionality” because my system does owe a lot to the Gloomy Philosopher. Yet I must admit that at times “will” is a lot less malleable as a term than the later conception. “Vectors of intentionality” simply sounds better to my ear.

My 2017 essay ECCENTRIC ORBITS supplies a case in point. At that time, I was still heavily influenced by the “circle metaphors” propounded by Northrop Frye, and so I attempted to conceive of different forms of phenomenality in terms of “centric will” and “eccentric will.” At some point I abandoned these terms, even though I still deem the logic of the ORBITS argument sound. One problem with the circle metaphors is that though they work fairly well for a complete finished work, such as a Dickens novel, said metaphors don’t work as well for serials conceived as open-ended works, whether they come to a definite end or remain indefinitely open. Whitehead’s metaphor of force-vectors works better for a teleseries like ANGEL, which, as I mentioned in the first VECTORS essay, changed its centricity-vectors from non-distributive to distributive during the process of serialization, Clearly one would not see such a transformation in a novel, even one that appeared in serialized form. It is at least easier to state, if not any easier to prove, that the character of Spike doesn’t have a centricity-vector equal to that of Buffy in her series but does have a vector equal to Angel’s.

The ORBITS essay gives several examples where the phenomenality becomes fuzzy due to authorial intentionality. There’s no doubt, for instance, that Frank Miller has a definite purpose in putting a ghost into “Nancy’s Last Dance,” one of the sub-stories of the movie SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR. This would seem to be the first time Miller put any sort of marvelous phenomenon into any SIN CITY tale. The presence of John Hartigan’s ghost, though, does not transform Miller’s cosmos into a place where ghosts or any other marvelous phenomena can be reasonably expected to make appearances. Thus, within the SIN CITY cosmos, the marvelous phenomenality possesses a subordinate vector. In contrast, Miller’s creative preoccupation with tropes of the uncanny—bizarre crimes, freakish flesh, superlative skills—appears with enough regularity that the entire series can be fairly judged as uncanny in its phenomenality. Thus even if there are occasional SIN CITY stories that lack uncanny tropes, the naturalistic phenomenality also possesses a subordinate vector.

Now, when I used the word “regularity” above, I do so while renouncing all previous attempts to *quantify * the appearances of this or that phenomenality within a work or series of works. My current conception of vectors supersedes even the concepts of “active and passive shares,” a critical stratagem by which I attempted to formulate a logical alternative to making a simple “head count” of each depiction of metaphenomenality in a series.

To hearken back to the RAWHIDE KID/RINGO KID contrast I offered while working on the active/passive formulations, both of these series, unlike SIN CITY, did not offer regular depictions of metaphenomenality, and so it would be easy to perceive both serials as dominantly isophenomenal. But where RINGO KID only has one measly mad doctor who departs from all the other naturalistic threats that the titular hero encounter, RAWHIDE KID used metaphenomenal opponents in a peripatetic manner. With RINGO, my perception is that the workaday creators, with or without the input of editors, assumed that their readers wanted westerns that were dominantly naturalistic in terms of what could happen in them: gunfights, cattle stampedes, et al. With RAWHIDE, though, the creators attempted to vary the mix. In contrast, the Rawhide Kid usually encountered gunfights and cattle stampedes, but from the earliest to the last of the series initiated by Lee and Kirby, there was always a strong vector encouraging the appearance of the metaphenomenal. As with SIN CITY, RAWHIDE KID had so few examples of marvelous phenomenality that the corresponding vector would be subordinate. However, even though the RAWHIDE creators did not keep uncanny phenomenalities front-and-center as Miller did in SIN CITY, I judge that the potential for the uncanny becomes a superordinate vector, rendering the naturalistic vector subordinate, even though the number of naturalistic stories proved superior.

A third example appears in yet another “weird western,” the teleseries KUNG FU. When I first started my project of reviewing all of the episodes in 2013, I knew that the series did not boast a huge number of episodes with a marvelous phenomenality, though on finishing the project I did find more than I anticipated (often using mild forms of marvelous tropes like telepathy or oracular pronouncements). But I knew in advance of the project that some episodes depicted Caine’s Shaolin skills as no more than naturalistic in essence—probably because those scripts didn’t need anything more—while other tales took evident pleasure in showing the priest showing off “superlative skills,” whether in minor actions like bending jailhouse bars or in major accomplishments like walking unharmed through a pit of rattlesnakes. As with RAWHIDE KID, it doesn’t matter how often the episodes were either naturalistic, uncanny, or marvelous. It only matters as to which of the three phenomenalities assumed a superordinate position. That determination can’t be deduced from a simple head count, but by an intuitive assessment of a given serial’s total concept, as it is perpetuated through various creators, usually following what insiders term a “series bible.”

Over the centuries, the disciplines of science and philosophy have remained in strife. Much of this strife may be seen as a conflict between science’s intention to judge the world’s phenomena in terms of quantity, while philosophy is far more concerned with quality. Literature, though not allied to philosophy in any fundamental sense, is conceived along roughly the same propositional lines: propositions have truth based on the qualities they enhance in the lives of audiences. I attempted to see if there was any method by which arguments regarding quantity could be used to buttress those regarding quality, but I have of late decided that the conceptual divide is insuperable.

NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 3

In the first two sections of this intermittent essay-series, I argued with myself that the "significant values" of a given work, or set of works, could affect the "narrative values" of the item under discussion.  However, only recently did I consider this effect could be metaphorically illustrated in mathematical terms.

In the original ACTIVE SHARES, PASSIVE SHARES argument, I surveyed the Silver Age Marvel comic-series, of which I said:

I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid.

But this presumes that every metaphenomenal story in the series has exactly the same value as every isophenomenal story; that one story equals a value of "one." Yet in EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, I said:

So I have at least made the essential statement that for the combinatory mode as for the dynamicity-mode, "excess of strength is proof of strength," as Nietzsche aptly said.

By this paradigm, a story with metaphenomenal elements is "stronger" than one without them, if only in the degree to which the former type forces the reader to utilize his imagination. Given that strength even in the non-imaginary world carries more value than comparative weakness, then it's arguable that every metaphenomenal RAWHIDE KID story ought to have a value of more than one.

To be sure, I fudged the original percentages by allowing a value of "one" simply to each issue of RAWHIDE KID, even though some of the earlier issues contain more than one story with the starring character. Since I felt that the feature progressed away from multiple stories fairly soon, I decided I didn't want to count out every story, with the result that I regarded the whole run of the KID as comprising 113 "points" (at least two issues featured reprints before the title went all-reprint).  Of those 113, I considered that 15 of the stories had metaphenomenal content, though I'll note here, as I did not in the earlier essay, that only two of them are "marvelous" and all of the others are "uncanny."

Now, whatever calculator gave me eight percent I evidently misused, because when I tried the operation today, it came out as a little over 14 percent. The error makes no difference to the 51 percent rule: eight and fourteen are equally unable to enjoy a "controlling interest."

So, if I posit that each isophenomenal story, because it makes no great appeal to the imagination, is only worth one point, then that gives 98 points for the roughly 98 isophenomenal stories in the Kid's original run.

Now suppose that I say that a marvelous-metaphenomenal story is worth not one, but five points. Only two stories in the run are unquestionably marvelous in nature, the "Red Raven" story and the "Living Totem" tale, so with those added we have 10 points for the stories themselves, 108 points for the grand total.

Then there are thirteen "uncanny" stories, so I'll arbitrarily assign them three points to each of these. So the subtotal of metaphenomenal stories becomes 10 + 39, equaling 49, and the total points overall are 147. Out of 147, 49 is roughly 33 percent. It's still not 51 percent or more, but it begins to look more like the sort of "passive share" I argued about earlier.

Now, I could continue to jigger the ratings of the metaphenomenal stories until they did raise above fifty-one percent, but if I set that standard in stone, then it would be totally arbitrary. By asserting greater values for the metaphenomenal stories in a merely theoretical manner, this adjusted paradigm adequately illustrates the principle of the passive share I sought to explore.

A contrasting example, brought up in NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 2. was that of the 1960s TV serial LOST IN SPACE. I wasn't concerned with sussing out phenomenology here, but the appearance of the combative mode, and as with RAWHIDE I assigned every story (including parts of continued stories) just one point. Eighty-three stories meant eighty-three total points, Nineteen of the episodes were combative, which registers as 23 percent of the whole.

But to be consistent with my assertions in EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, the higher dynamicities of a combative work should be valued higher than those that lack this dynamicity. So the total number of points for the subcombative episodes, assigning each one point, is 64.

Since combative dynamicity doesn't make quite the same appeal to the imagination as does metaphenomenality, I'll conservatively assign the value of three to the nineteen episodes. So the subtotal for the combative episodes is 57 and the overall total is 121. The subtotal is about 44 percent of the total, so it too does not meet the 51 percent criteria, though it too is closer to being a "passive share." However, because combative adventure does not seem to have been as important to LOST IN SPACE as metaphenomenal content was to RAWHIDE KID, it's possible that the significant value of the former might have a negativizing effect upon the whole of the teleseries. More on that later, if I get suitably inspired.

PASSIVELY AGGRESSIVE

I've now completed my survey of the 1965-68 teleseries LOST IN SPACE, in order to determine whether or not this clearly marvelous-metaphenomenal series should be judged as belonging to the combative mode, and therefore as belonging to the category of "the superhero idiom." I've addressed this topic in various essays but the essay most relevant to this investigation is 2012's CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST.  Though this piece concentrated primarily on how to make determinations as to a given work's "Fryean mythos," it was in this essay that I put forth the "51 percent rule,"which I'd formulated earlier in order to suss out what serial works belonged to the superhero idiom by virtue of being dominantly both metaphenomenal and combative. Here's what I wrote about the rule in CHALLENGE:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  Only an unqualified 50/50 split between mythoi would make such a determination useless, but the paucity of these exceptions proves the rule: most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

In 2015 I decided that the 51 percent rule, modeled on my perceptions of economic patterns, needed to be supplemented by a corollary principle, described in ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE:

Yet as I played around with the rule in the provisional "super-idiom list" that I mentioned in the first "51 percent" essay, I realized that even some characters who didn't satisfy the "51 percent rule" seemed important to the list... [so] I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid. And yet, it's evident that for a time, the Kid's creators Lee and Kirby were making a significant attempt to place their combative cowpoke into superhero situations.

Thanks to a little more research, I evolved my corollary principle:

...from the strict view of the "51 percent rule," both Ringo and Rawhide are "minority shareholders" in the realm of the metaphenomenal. However, to extend the above distinction into the realm of literature, Ringo Kid's adventures display only a "minority passive interest" in matters metaphenomenal, while Rawhide Kid's display a "minority active interest"-- that is, Rawhide's encounters with metaphenomenal presences remain a vital part of his mythos, even if they're not numerically superior to all the naturalistic exploits.

So the "Marvel" serial character The Ringo Kid does not belong to the category of the superhero idiom because he satisfies the combative qualification but does not satisfy the qualification of the necessary phenomenality. LOST IN SPACE was my first attempt to evaluate a serial work in terms that was clearly metaphenomenal but was more "ambivalent" in terms of its combative elements. I posed the question thusly in the first LIS-survey essay:

...on what occasions is it possible for a given series to achieve the combative mode, less because of an emphasis on the continual encounter of megadynamic forces than because of an emphasis upon the outward *form* of such an encounter?...By way of exploring this "outward form" possibility further, I'm going to devote a series of posts to a television series whose status with regard to the combative mode has always been dubious to me.

"Outward form" was a clumsy way of saying that the work under investigation reproduced the form of some pattern that had been articulated frequently enough to become a literary archetype. My example in that essay, the Spectre of the Golden Age, conforms to the archetype of the "metaphenomenal combative" even though he spends an awful lot of time taking on enemies who can't really fight him, and only occasionally vying against entities of comparable power. So the Spectre would be an example of an "active share" type of character-- not in terms of his pheomenality, which is clearly marvelous-- but in terms of the rarity of his truly megadynamic encounters. Mundane gangsters are thus a lower manifestation of the general evil that the Spectre fights.

Now, I've defined the LOST IN SPACE characters as demiheroes in this essay, but characters belonging to that persona can belong to the category of the superhero idiom as easily as the other three personas of hero, villain, and monster. It's easy to determine a demihero's status with respect to the combative mode when he gets into fights all the time, like the one examined here.

From 1965 to 1968 LOST IN SPACE portrayed an ensemble of eight regular spacefaring characters: John Robinson and his wife Maureen, their children Will, Judy, and Penny, ship's navigator Don West, the cowardly stowaway Doctor Smith, and the ship's robot, known only as "the Robot." Doctor Smith had no combative abilities whatever, and Maureen and her three kids sometimes wielded guns but were never seen doing much of anything. As for Don West, he acted like a tough guy and could clearly handle a gun, but he was always played as "the sidekick who gets knocked out to make the main character look good." Ship's captain John Robinson-- played by the same actor who had played Zorro in a 1957-59 teleseries-- was the only human character who showed megadynamic power in his battle with aliens and androids. However, the Robot became something of an "ace in the hole" for the space travelers, and often used his superior technological arsenal against enemies too tough to be taken down by a human wielding a ray-gun (or a sword). Since the Robot soon evolved from a simple resource into a full-fledged (if cornball) character, I have no problem in judging him to be part of the ensemble, and thus the automaton and the ship's captain are the only "megadynamic" presences who starred in the series.

Since 19 episodes out of the total of 83 were combative, this means that 23% of the show's episodes featured megadynamic forces in contention. In my analysis of Marvel's RAWHIDE KID stories from 1960 to 1973, I found that only about seven percent of that character's stories were metaphenomenal, but I still judged that the *WAY* they were employed gave Rawhide a "minority active interest" in that phenomenality.

However, once one is below the 50th percentile, the quantity does not matter with respect to judging either phenomenal or combative elements. I judged that the Rawhide Kid saga showed a repeated intent to associate the hero with metaphenomenal elements, and that these became a vital part of his mythos. John Robinson and the Robot sometimes accomplish superhero-like feats-- Robinson sword-demifighting his way through an army of androids in "Space Destructors," or the Robot defeating a universe-conquering "robotoid" in "The War of the Robots"-- but these seem to be anomalies in the "mythos" of this series. (NOTE: in this and in ACTIVE SHARE PASSIVE SHARE, I'm using the word "mythos" in a general, non-Fryean sense.)

Some stories are resolved by overt peacemaking between factions who just need to know each other better, as in "The Sky is Falling." There are also enemies who display megadynamic powers and use those powers to menace the Robinson party, as in "Kidnapped in Space," wherein the group is attacked by androids serving a super-computer. However, in that story a combative conclusion is put aside in favor of another negotiation. Sometimes enemies are persuaded to abandon their hostile intentions, as with the Junkman of "Junkyard of Space," and sometimes villains who are utterly intransigent are destroyed by chance rather than pitched combat, as when Doctor Smith accidentally blows up the nasty alien in "The Golden Man." And as I covered in the survey, there are many stories in which some functional violence occurs at a narrative's end, but none of the spectacle one needs to create megadynamic conflict.

Thus I conclude that despite the presence of a few "superhero-like" adventures within the mythos of LOST IN SPACE, the dominant ethos is directed away from combative resolutions, in contrast to the serial's contemporary competitor STAR TREK, which talked a lot about peace and understanding but took a lot of pleasure in the spectacle of fight-scenes. For this reason LOST IN SPACE possesses only a "minority passive share" in the category of the combative, and so does not belong to the larger category of the superhero idiom.

ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE PT. 2

In Part 1,  I observed that as far as the "dynamic-sublime" was concerned, the domains they generate were strictly separated from one another:.

The dynamicities of the marvelous and the uncanny cannot manifest within the sphere of the naturalistic at all, because they depend on the alteration of one or both of the rules of causation, and anything that even resembles the tropes of the uncanny or marvelous is subsumed into the naturalistic.

By this general rule, both of the examples cited in the earlier essay-- the totality of serial adventures of both Atlas' RINGO KID and Marvel's RAWHIDE KID-- would be metaphenomenal. Even if the Ringo Kid only has one measly adventure with metaphenomenal content, it means that his universe obeys some if not all of the fictional rules common to other fantasy-worlds-- for instance, the greater "Marvel Universe" into which Ringo was officially inducted in the course of a 1970s AVENGERS story.

And yet, it seems counter-intuitive to place Ringo in the exact same type of marvelous domain as a literal superhuman like Captain America, or a domain that seems dominantly uncanny when considered apart from the Marvel Universe, like the domain of Marvel's masked western hero the Two-Gun Kid. Even if Two-Gun Kid had never encountered anything but naturalistic opponents, his attire would still conform to the uncanny trope of "outre outfits," thus placing him within the phenomenal domain of the uncanny.

In the case of the combinatory-sublime, however, tropes that relate to the metaphenomenal domains do not automatically overrule those of the isopheomenal, at least not within the realm of a serial concept. In a serial, if the focal presence does not itself reproduce significant tropes of the metaphenomenal, then one must examine the phenomenality of all ancillary presences in the totality of the stories.

Both RINGO KID and RAWHIDE KID concern isophenomenal cowpokes who dominantly battle against isophenomenal opponents. Both, using the "shareholder" metaphor I introduced, "majority shareholders" in the isophenomenal and "minority shareholders" in the metaphenomenal.  Being a "minority shareholder" means a dimunition of the serial's overall potential for symbolic combinations. Rawhide has a more extensive history of metaphenomenal encounters, so while he's still not in the same kind of fictional world as Captain America and the Two-Gun Kid, he is closer to their combinatory potential than Ringo is.

Heroes whose adventures almost always have elements of the metaphenomenal-- whether marvelous like Captain America, or uncanny like Two-Gun-- would subsume the other two phenomenalities within the dominant one. So the geometrical model would look much like the one used for the DSD, except with the stipulation that the whole is solid, rather than having each circle isolated from the other:

Rawhide's serial adventures don't comprise a unitary sphere of activity, so the phenomenal domains are connected but distinct. One may regard the whole left circle as Rawhide's adventures, with the isophenomenal taking up the majority of the sphere, while the minority "share" within the circle is all of his metaphenomenal activity-- the other circle being simply a set of metaphenomenal tropes possible for a Western comic-book character.

The next figure, however, better describes that of the Ringo Kid, if only because the metaphenomenal portion of the left circle is much smaller than it is in the first example.

More on these convolutions later.

ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE

In my previous essay I visualized the "geometrical approximations of the two sublimities" as a series of "fields of force,." or "domains." In both cases the sublimity-affects were determined by what sort of phenomenal universe they took place in. However, the domains relating to dynamicity did not interpenetrate. For the time being I will designate these domains as DSDs, "dynamic-sublime domains."

The dynamicities of the marvelous and the uncanny cannot manifest within the sphere of the naturalistic at all, because they depend on the alteration of one or both of the rules of causation, and anything that even resembles the tropes of the uncanny or marvelous is subsumed into the naturalistic. An example of this process is cited in this essay, where the uncanny character of PSYCHO'S Norman Bates is recast into naturalistic terms for the teleseries BATES MOTEL.

 In the sphere of the uncanny, marvelous dynamicity cannot manifest, and though naturalistic dynamicity does exist in this sphere, the dynamicity of the uncanny, given the special name "potency," overrules all naturalistic dynamicity. An example of this process is cited in this essay, wherein the only source of the uncanny is the masked vigilante the Durango Kid, whose presence dominates storylines that are in all other respects identical to those of more naturalistic "horse operas."

Finally, dynamicities of the uncanny and the naturalistic can manifest within the sphere of the marvelous, as I showed here with regard to the serial ACE DRUMMOND, where the science-fictional nature of the villain's ray-gun defines the entire narrative as marevelous, overruling the potency of the same villain's uncanny death-trap as well as the naturalistic prowess of the titular hero.

In contrast, the domains relating to the combinatory-sublime-- the CSDs-- interpenetrate quite a bit, because their form of the sublime is not physical, but symbolic. It was because of this symbolic interpenetration of the three phenomenalities that I evolved my 51 percent rule:

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.

From the beginnings of this blog, I've frequently dealt with the problems of how narratives contain diverse elements that may conflict with one another-- not just elements of phenomenality, but also elements relating to Frye's four mythoi, genre-elements, and so on. It's impossible-- and not really desirable-- to come up with a formula that would faultlessly determine what element held "sovereignty," as Jung called it. The "51 percent rule" was my only attempt to imagine what a statistically determined rule might look like, and I applied it in only a few essays, here, here, and here.  The second essay brings up the example of the Atlas Comics character the Ringo Kid, whose series I decided not to deem metaphenomenal, given that the hero had only one encounter with a metaphenomenal antagonist. a "Doctor Saturn."

  The cinematic version of Ace Drummond also had only one metaphenomenal protagonist, but this version of Drummond-- whom I don't consider identical with the one from the 1936 comic strip-- only had one installment. Thus Ace Drummond satisfies the "51 percent rule," and the Ringo Kid doesn't.

Yet as I played around with the rule in the provisional "super-idiom list" that I mentioned in the first "51 percent" essay, I realized that even some characters who didn't satisfy the "51 percent rule" seemed important to the list. I mentioned in one essay that the protagonists of the comic strips LI'L ABNER and DICK TRACY encountered a substantial number of marvelous or uncanny presences, but that it wasn't feasible to make a statistical breakdown for strips that ran for many years.

But I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid.

And yet, it's evident that for a time, the Kid's creators Lee and Kirby were making a significant attempt to place their combative cowpoke into superhero situations.

Sometimes he encountered crooks who simply wore uncanny outfits, like the Bat from RH #25:

In #35, he encountered a costumed crook with a literally marvelous power.

Like a fair number of Western heroes, he also encountered at least one lost civilization:

And few Marvel-readers can forget Rawhide's momentous "first contact" with an alien resembling an Indian totem pole.

The sum total of these adventures pale in comparison to Rawhide's more mundane adventures-- and yet, something's going on here that isn't going on in the RINGO KID feature. The creators-- not always Lee and Kirby, BTW-- are making substantial use of metaphenomenal elements, so they make up an important, if subordinate, part of Rawhide's fictional mythos.  The "51 percent rule," while helpful as a guiding principle, is too rigid to deal with this loosey-goosey approach to phenomenal integrity.

So, by dint of reading a few posts on shareholder rules, I've happily come across a definition that solves my cowboy conundrum, on this site:

The minority investment can be either minority passive interest or minority active interest. Passive means that the company does not have material influence on the company in which it has this minority interest. Active means that the company is in a position to influence the company in which it has minority interest.

Thus, from the strict view of the "51 percent rule," both Ringo and Rawhide are "minority shareholders" in the realm of the metaphenomenal. However, to extend the above distinction into the realm of literature, Ringo Kid's adventures display only a "minority passive interest" in matters metaphenomenal, while Rawhide Kid's display a "minority active interest"-- that is, Rawhide's encounters with metaphenomenal presences remain a vital part of his mythos, even if they're not numerically superior to all the naturalistic exploits.

This metaphor also solves my above-referenced problem as to how I should rate long-running strips like LI'L ABNER. It have enough fantastic content to satisfy the 51 percent rule, or it may not-- but certainly a strip that produces such weird entities as "Evil-Eye Fleegle" and "the Schmoos" has at least a "minority active interest" in matters metaphenomenal.