ACTIVITY REPORT PT 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACTIVITY REPORT PT 1

 In this essay from last May, I preserved this nugget from Whitehead's book SYMBOLISM:

Here [Whitehead] states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A." 

For whatever reason I reread that section recently and later found myself comparing it to what I remembered writing about my definition of icons in the first essay where I coined the term, I THINK ICON I THINK ICON. Had I said something about defining icons in terms of action? Turns out the answer is, "a little bit yes, a little bit no."

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named.  

I also noted that while one could formally term any entity within a fictional story to be an icon, in practice we only pay attention to the icons that either perform some action or represent some principle within the narrative, while those entities that don't meet those criteria (as I'm now refining things) 'don't merit iconic titles, so that no one bothered to label "that cop who shot at Spider-Man in that one Romita story" or "the 553rd lion killed by Tarzan."'

Whitehead, of course, is speaking of entities within the real world, so his baseline of "activity" is logical. In fictional narratives, all of the icons exist as propositions, so they are not always defined by "kinetic activity," by actually doing things in the story, but also by representing an abstract quality, or qualities-- which is what I take from my words "some characteristic"-- that are important to the story. A pertinent example of an inactive character whose significance stems wholly of his enigmatic characteristics is the title character of Herman Melville's BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER. As the Wiki summary indicates, the title character is a young 19th-century clerk who goes to work for a legal firm, and then, for no evident reason, simply ceases to work, yet will not actually leave the premises of the firm. Even when taken to prison for his intransigence, Bartleby simply declines to take any action at all, even that of eating, and so expires. In my 2013 essay THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT, I said that Ray Bradbury's story "The Last Night of the World" might possess the absolute least amount of conflict that I'd ever encountered. But BARTLEBY is at least the equal of "Last Night" in that respect.

So fictional icons are not definable only by what Whitehead calls "activity." What should one call the form of authorial will that manifests not in actions, but in simply "embodying" what I called a "characteristic?" I think I finally found a use for my earlier term "resonance," which back in May 2023 I considered as a metaphor for centricity, only to discard that theory in favor of eminence last July. It now seems to me that those icons that are not active, like Bartleby, still impinge upon readers because whatever abstractions they embody have a resonance between the universality of fictional depictions and the particularity of actual reader-experience. 

More to come.

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.         

                                                                                                

CENTRICITY AND RESONANCE

On this blog I've devoted thousands of words attempting to imagine the diffuse operations of literary endeavor into more specified categories, but I don't feel I've managed to do so with the concept of centricity. A little while back, I played around with the idea that centricity might subsumed by the agency of a given narrative's superordinate icon or icons. But the word "agency" is too easy to confound with other principles, so I'll probably confine its use to all matters related to interordination comparisons, as laid out in GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1.

It sometimes helps, though, to imagine what abstract principles would act like if they were incarnate entities, and one day I was trying to imagine "centricity" as if the icon in it were "doing something" in order to express, as mentioned earlier, the author's priorities. And the image that came to me was that of the icon as a human singer, projecting his/her voice outward so that it enveloped all the subordinate icons within his/her span.

Since I've also specified that icons don't have to be human or even humanoid beings, another possible metaphor would be that of the tuning fork, that, when struck, sets up a resonance that affects its surroundings. 

By extension, an ensemble of superordinate icons would be like a set of tuning forks, some of which might be struck at different times in order to produce their effects.

One reason I like the resonance metaphor is that it's a means of describing how authorial will spreads out from different types of icons in similar forms of narrative.

For instance, in the 2012 essay DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 2, I compared two television shows in the "occult crusader" subgenre, the 1974 KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and the 1987 FRIDAY THE 13TH--THE SERIES. I can express the opinion that the former is centered on Kolchak, the endotheric identification-figure, or that the latter is centered on the Curious Goods shop, the exothelic source of evils for the continuing characters to thwart. But the argument, as I've previously framed it, is perhaps easier to picture (though it may not compel any greater agreement) with one's experience of the way everything in the KOLCHAK series is permeated by the resonance of the hero, while everything in the FRIDAY series is permeated by the resonance of the malefic shop of evil wonders.

A similar example can be made with respect to a type of icon that would seem to have the least possible "agency:" the dead-person-who-tells-a-story." In the 1950 film SUNSET BOULEVARD, the story is related by murder victim Joe Gillis, but the audience is barely made to care about the provenance of this character. The character with the greatest resonance is clearly Norma Desmond, the faded silent-film star who pulls Gillis into her world and ends up killing him.

So Desmond has both the greatest agency and resonance. However, in 1947's SCARED TO DEATH, I think it's arguable that Laura, the murdered narrator of the movie, has greater resonance than any of the usual "old dark house" support-characters, or even than the green-masked villain who kills said narrator. Like most of the victims in the old PERRY MASON TV show, it's the murdered person who's the center of the mystery, but what little authorial will exists in SCARED stems from Laura, whose malevolence makes the plot go. 

It's interesting that Northrop Frye made use of the term "resonance" in his book THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION, where he said that resonance was the process by which "a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance." Frye was not talking about centricity as such, more about the general function of narrative. But since I've defined narrative here in terms that focus upon the interaction of what I now call superordinate and subordinate icons, the coincidence seems felicitous.