THE READING RHEUM: THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1902)

I've probably read Doyle's HOUND two or three times just for pleasure, but not since starting this blog in 2007. I recall occasionally ascribing high mythicity to the novel in this or that essay, but I never analyzed the book, even though the story is one of the best-known in literature, making it something of a "popular myth." That, however, doesn't count in terms of my charting a narrative's epistemological patterns. I have reviewed at least four cinematic adaptations of HOUND on the movie-blog, and I've never discerned high mythicity even in the two best and most famous films, the 1939 Fox film and the 1959 Hammer outing. 

Having reread the book now with my myth-stalker's hat on, I find that Doyle was in no way subtle about his primary myth-theme. The author hints at that theme in the first chapter, when Holmes and Watson discuss the pedigree of their client Dr. Mortimer by consulting a medical directory (the Victorian version of the Internet). They find that the doctor has authored articles with titles like "Is Disease a Reversion?" and "Some Freaks of Atavism." This concern with the distant past plays into the case Mortimer had brought to Holmes. The doctor tells Holmes and Watson that he half-believes in the Baskerville curse, that may have killed the former baronet Charles and may yet take the life of the sole heir. Sir Henry.

I've mentioned in one film-review that there's never a possibility, in Holmes' modern London, that there exists a demon-hound that slew the Baskervilles' degenerate ancestor in the 17th century, or one that might take the life of Sir Henry. Holmes duly mocks the very idea, despite taking the case. In the end the existence of a demon-hound matters less than the fact that the world that bred such superstitions still endures. Thus the still-savage land of Dartmoor can cast a spell upon some Victorian men, as attested by Watson when, as Holmes' agent, he first views the wild moorland around Baskerville Hall:

MY DEAR HOLMES: My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.

The curse of the Baskervilles might not extend back to the days of prehistoric menhirs, but the event that brought about the supposed curse, in which a hot-blooded lord dedicated his soul to Satan for the sexual possession of an innocent maiden, remains no less remote from the experience of Victorian Londoners. 

And yet, England has its share of non-superstitious degeneracy. Selden, the murderer who haunts the moors, is directly compared to a caveman when Watson first sees him. Master plotter Stapleton, the one who arranged his uncle's death and tries to do the same with his cousin Henry, is called a "throwback" when Holmes descries how much a portrait of a 17th-century Baskerville resembles Stapleton. Stapleton's real name is the same as that of his father Rodger Baskerville, and no one knew of Stapleton's existence because he was born abroad, when his father left England under some cloud. In fact, a fair number of modern Britons have similar clouds. Stapleton and his wife Beryl get involved in some vague corruption long before the hound plot, and Laura Lyons, one of Stapleton's pawns, suffers from having made a bad marriage, though Doyle imputes all the wrongdoing to a no-good husband. If, as Mortimer believes, all disease really is a "reversion" to some less exalted state, that would include the disease of crime, which can be cured only by the relentless logic of a master detective.

While the cinema has its own ways of conveying mythicity, so far even the most faithful adaptations of HOUND known to me haven't been able to tune into Doyle's myth-theme. After finishing the novel, I re-watched the 1939 version again. Sure enough, the script only uses the prehistoric settings briefly and doesn't even show the villain meeting the harsh justice of a death in the Grimpen Mire. It's not impossible, though, that there's some HOUND-film I've not seen that taps into the deeper theme, and I look forward to finding it. 

ADDENDUM: I didn't originally apply the "clansgression" label to the 1902 novel, because Doyle downplays the fact that Stapleton is Sir Henry's cousin. And the author certainly does not pass comment on the fact that when Stapleton seeks to pimp out his wife by causing Sir Henry to fall for the glamorous Beryl, he's "sharing" her with a first cousin, even though (1) no sexual congress takes place, (2) Beryl does not become emotionally entwined with Henry as he does with her, and (3) Stapleton/Baskerville becomes jealous of the tete-a-tete even though no transgression has occurred. The novel ends with Stapleton's death and the assertion that Beryl knew nothing of the murder plot, implying that she'll be exonerated of complicity-- though Doyle also devotes little space to the cooling of Henry's passion for his cousin's wife.  

        

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.      

THE READING RHEUM: TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET (1984)

 

Over a decade after Cay Van Ash, former secretary to Sax Rohmer, completed the only book-length Rohmer biography, he published this work, a major crossover of the iconic figures of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. 

The title, TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, clearly spotlights the superior fame of the Great Detective, who had remained immensely popular through numerous film, TV and prose pastiches, while the Devil-Doctor had his notoriety stoked only by a handful of films and a Marvel comic book. But there was a substantial connection between the two characters, even though Holmes had debuted roughly 25 years before Fu. When Rohmer began the Fu Manchu series around 1912, the first stories emulated the pattern of almost all of Doyle's Holmes stories, in that the stories were "told" to the reader by the assistant of a heroic crusader, a sidekick who purports to be narrating real exploits. Thus, where Holmes had Doctor Watson, Nayland Smith (main opponent of Fu Manchu) had Doctor Petrie. Given Sherlock's immense popularity in the Victorian era and beyond, there's little to no chance that Rohmer wasn't sedulously imitating Doyle's narrative formula, though after the first few novels other characters take Petrie's place, simply telling the story of their involvement in a given adventure, with no pretense of "recording adventures."

Speaking of the recorder-pretense, Author Van Ash claims that both this book and its only sequel (to be reviewed separately) were compiled by him from notes left behind by the fictional Doctor Petrie in the years before the character's role as amaneunses was usurped. Van Ash in his "fictional" role even makes the interesting claim that unlike Doctor Watson-- who claimed that the final Holmes adventure occurred in 1914, in the months before World War Two broke out-- Doctor Petrie never dated anything he wrote. This conceit allows Van Ash to imagine a story interpolated between the histories of Doyle and Rohmer's characters. According to Van Ash, BAKER takes place during the months in which the Great Detective is completing "his last bow," that of completing a massive espionage plot against England's enemies. This has a salubrious effect of not contradicting Doyle as to Holmes' final exploit. And even though Rohmer's HAND OF FU MANCHU was published in book form in 1917-- the same year Doyle published "His Last Bow"-- Van Ash fudges the dates in the Rohmer work, claiming that this story also transpires in 1914. Indeed, the whole of BAKER takes place over the course of a few months between Chapter 29 and Chapter 30 of HAND. 

All this fine attention to dating-detail would of course be wasted if the author had not managed to get the best out of having two titanic popular-fiction icons cross paths. Happily I can "record" that Van Ash accomplished this aim. Without going into an extensive contrast of the literary legacies of Doyle and Rohmer, I'll generalize that Doyle's detective stories, even with their use of blood-and-thunder, often emphasize what Faulkner called "the problems of the human heart." By contrast, most of Sax Rohmer's thrillers, though they often appeared in high-prestige "slick" magazines, are more pulpish and extravagant in tone and content. Amazingly, Van Ash manages to blend the two approaches.

So, the plot. In 1914, Nayland Smith disappears, and it's clear to Doctor Petrie that the agents of Fu Manchu committed the deed. Lacking any leads, and not being a detective himself, Petrie just happens to have met John Watson at a medical conference, and so imposes on Watson to write an introduction to Holmes. Petrie meets Holmes, who has officially retired from the profession of consulting detective, but who as noted earlier is still covertly pursuing his espionage aim. However, Si-Fan agents learn of the meeting. One of them, fearing that Holmes will ally himself to Petrie, tries to kill Holmes but murders one of the detective's servants. Thus Holmes comes out of retirement to avenge the man's death, teaming up with Petrie to track down Nayland Smith-- which inevitably leads to the uncovering of Fu Manchu's latest scheme to cripple Western Europe.

I distinguished between "tone" and "content" above. The content of BAKER is indisputably that of Rohmer, as Petrie and Holmes chart a peripatetic course, exposing various Fu-crimes, often following the "rational Gothic" pattern in which supernatural-seeming events are explained by some quick of improbable "science." But Van Ash infuses the novel with the humanitarian (if still melodramatic) tone of Conan Doyle's stories. I haven't read every Rohmer story, but I would be surprised to find one in which any of that author's heroes empathize with societal underdogs, as Holmes and Petrie empathize with the short, nasty lives of Welsh coal-miners. Rohmer just didn't put those sort of humanistic touches into his stories.

Van Ash pays just as much close attention to place as he does to time. Every setting comes alive so well, I would find it hard to believe that Van Ash himself didn't visit the locations described. And he does a good job of playing Holmes off Petrie, in that the two of them have never worked together and are more accustomed to their own respective partners. 

But again, all of the lesser challenges faced by the two heroes would have been for naught, if Van Ash failed to deliver on his "clash of titans." In keeping with the Rohmer books, Fu Manchu rarely appears "on stage," which serves to increase the sense of his omnipotence-- though Van Ash pays more attention than did Rohmer to the limitations of the Devil-Doctor's resources. For that matter, Holmes himself excuses himself from the investigation, but it's only so that he can don a disguise, BASKERVILLES-style, and pull a fast one on both Petrie and their opponents. There's only one face-to-face encouiiter between Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu, but it's a small masterpiece. The two are of course aware of each others' stellar reputations, and Fu Manchu-- who has not yet found his "fountain of youth"-- expresses regret that Holmes is too old to be of service to the Si-Fan, or else he Fu would be happy to turn Holmes into one of his brainwashed slaves.

Van Ash also brings in Petrie's future wife, the Egyptian slave-girl Karameneh, who I believe gets liberated from her servitude to the Doctor in the later chapters of HAND OF FU MANCHU. Amusingly, because all the events of BAKER take place just before Chapter 30 of HAND, there are no references in Van Ash's book to Fah Lo Suee, because Petrie has his first fleeting encounter with the daughter of Fu Manchu-- in Chapter 30 of HAND!

For all the uses of "uncanny science" to explain Fu's various enterprises, Van Ash climaxes with a dynamite example of Devil-Doctor super-science (essentially, one of the many "death rays" that became popular in early 20th century pop fiction). Holmes contributes a crucial effort to foiling Fu and then returns to finish out his last adventure a la Doyle-- while the Manchurian mastermind is just getting started on his long career of venerable villainy.

In closing I'll note that Van Ash also responds to critics who correctly pointed out that Sax Rohmer knew next to nothing about Chinese culture when he created Fu Manchu. In compensation, Van Ash has his heroes interview a prominent Sinologist, who works out some enthralling ideas as to how Fu Manchu came to be, without contradicting any of the intriguing hints Rohmer himself provided.

And so the curtain falls upon this meeting of literary masterworks. I'll probably briefly revive my old blog-project, THE 100 GREATEST CROSSOVERS OF ALL TIME, just long enough to append BAKER to that list. 

PUPPETS GOTTA DO THE LIMBO ROCK

Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when [the authors] failed to find a suitable existing puppet.-- Flann O'Brien, AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, 1939. 

I didn't get much out of O'Brien's metatextual novel, which concerns, in very loose fashion, an author who apparently starts hanging out with his characters. But the above passage is interesting partly because it resonates with the rise of postmodern fiction as a reaction against the predominant realism of literary modernism. For the most part modernist authors maintain a strict distance between the domain of the "real" world of the author/creator and the "unreal" world of the author's creations.

O'Brien wasn't saying anything all that original in 1939. In the years before the rise of copyright law, an author like Shakespeare could swipe characters and plotlines from pretty much anywhere. And even after copyright became the law of the land, authors like Mark Twain and John Kendrick Bangs worked Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes into their stories, arguably using the rubric of parody to get away with a little literary larceny. In 1916, psychologist Carl Jung began writing the first of many essays on a concept he'd eventually name "the collective unconscious," which may the closest human culture ever came to imagining a "limbo" in which all fictional and legendary characters might exist, if only as symbolic patterns. Authors as diverse as Philip Jose Farmer and Alan Moore have entertained themselves and others by imagining wonderlands in which a panoply of independently created literary characters rub shoulders with one another.

I'm sure that when O'Brien wrote the lines above, he knew good and well most authors would not want to make their copyrighted works open to public plundering, not least because popular characters can be an author's meal ticket. O'Brien was probably just spoofing the modernist idea of "originality" by claiming that writers should just take whatever they needed from other writers, rather than just making pale copies of characters they admired. 

The quote is also apposite in a small way to my own theory of literary emulation as laid forth in last August's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2. For most of human history, oral literature was created by mostly unknown authors picking up and transmitting traditional stories about familiar figures of history and folklore. This is the pattern I call "icon emulation," in which icons like Heracles or King Arthur might have any number of new adventures appended to their histories. At the same time, sometimes later authors did not emulate a particular icon, but a set of tropes associated with that icon. Supposing, for instance, that, as Wikipedia suggests, the Greek tale of Rhodopis is the earliest extant "Cinderella story." Later authors did not, so far as we know, keep the name "Rhodopis." Instead they utilized "trope emulation," borrowing tropes from the generating first story and reworking the Rhodopis persona to take on whatever name or background would best please a particular audience, including the name and background of the medieval Cinderella of Europe. Ironically, for exigent reasons the late name of Cinderella came to subsume all versions before and after her official creation.

Whether or not O'Brien was being funny about claiming that all of literature should become a "collective commons" as needed, in a real sense, this is how literature really functions. There's nothing new under the sun, except for the way an old wine looks when displayed in a new bottle.

CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS PT. 2

 

I ended Part 1 on this observation: that even though it was possible for raconteurs to use the name of a famous literary character for any number of secondary doppelgangers, the mere use of the name did not confer a prior status or charisma upon a doppelganger that shared no points of continuity with the original. Thus, a few dozen Dracula-doppelgangers may register as either strong or weak template deviations of the Stoker creation—but “Dracula, Superhero” did not. The latter would be a “total template deviation,” in that he has no gradations of “strong” or “weak” points of continuity.

A similar “total deviation” appears in the case of impostors who assume a familiar guise for some clandestine motive. A few months before Marvel Comics revived the 1940s hero Captain America, Stan Lee had a criminal impostor, the Acrobat, assume the guise of the WII hero in order to deceive the Human Torch. The Acrobat was a total deviation because he clearly shared no continuity with any previous version of the star-spangled adventurer. 

Once a continuity was forged between the forties and sixties version of the character, a “retcon” had to be devised to explain away a previous fifties-era iteration of both Captain American and his sidekick Bucky. Those characters then became demonstrably separate from the original iterations.

The clandestine motive may even remain hidden only from the doppelganger. In the amusing script for issue #4 of THE JOKER, an actor playing Sherlock Holmes suffers amnesia, and becomes convinced that he is Holmes. He then assumes the Holmes persona in order to track down and defeat the Clown Prince, though neither the Joker nor any reader of the comic thinks that the actor is the real thing.

Cycling back in the other direction, it’s possible to have a valid template derivation even without using a famous name, by invoking only images or tropes familiar to an audience. A major plotline of the first LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN sequence includes a turf war in 1890s London between perennial Holmes-foe Moriarty and a mysterious figure called “the Doctor.” Moore used both images and verbal tropes to imply that the Doctor was Fu Manchu, but he never named the character since Fu Manchu is still trademarked, unlike all the public-domain characters in the LEAGUE franchise. 

Similarly, Moore may not have been sure as to whether the prose-and-film character Bulldog Drummond was free and clear. Thus when a version of the character appears in BLACK DOSSIER, Moore changed the doppelganger’s given name from the “Hugh” of the original prose books to “Hugo.” Ironically, the prose character is barely known to modern audiences, having been eclipsed by cinema’s heavily glamorized “strong template deviation,” but Moore’s “Hugo” bears more resemblance to the rude, brutish character in the original prose series.

However, also in DOSSIER we find a “total template deviation” of a different nature: the spoof. The story also includes “Jimmy,” an easily recognizable parody of James Bond, but Jimmy has no significant points of commonality with the Bond of either prose or films. Moore created Jimmy to mock what he deemed the unlikable aspects of James Bond, but he lays it on so thick that the reader no longer believes that there exists any continuity between the two agents, any more than one could believe that “Bats-Man,” a spoof of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries, had anything in common with any version of Batman.

Some points of continuity may exist when the doppelgangers are not merely impostors, but re-creations of the originals that invoke specific memories in those that observe them. In the story “Santa Claus in Wonderland,” Santa never actually meets any denizen of that Lewis Carroll domain; he merely dreams his encounters with Alice, the Mad Hatter et al. But these dream-figures maintain at least a weak continuity with the originals, because Santa imagines that they are like the characters in the books (which for the most part, they are).

However, in SCOOBY DOO 2, the teen detectives and their Great Dane encounter doppelgangers who are artificially concocted versions of ”spooks” who were all originally just costumed human beings. As entertaining as it is to see the Scooby Gang attacked by a “legion of doom” that seems made up of their old enemies, these artificial menaces no more share identity with their originals than a Hulk-robot does with the Incredible Hulk.

One more "total deviation" will suffice for the time being: the type openly based on some familiar characters but who are meant to be entirely separate characters. The four main characters of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS do not claim to be identical in any way with their 1950s SF-movie models, who are, going left from right, the Fly, the Fifty-Foot Woman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Blob. Because they don't share any continuity with their models, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS does not qualify as any kind of crossover, though it is a "mashup," in which diverse characters with some similar aspects but also with different backgrounds are jammed together in one narrative. It might be fairly argued that all crossovers may be called mashups, but that all mashups are not crossovers.

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1

My currently definitive statement on the factors that distinguish superordinate from subordinate characters, formulated in EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PART 2, comes down to this: only the superordinate presences, or Primes, can possess *stature,* which indicates their role as the organizing factors of the given narrative. Subordinate presences, or Subs, possess only *charisma,* which term I evolved in response to, and in disagreement with, Nancy Springer's tendency to locate centricity in the most charismatic characters of a narrative, her example being Scott's IVANHOE. To reiterate the "vector" argument, the Primes possess *stature* solely possess the unique vectors of the type of authorial will relating to centricity, while the Subs possess *charisma* simply because they exist to play off the activities of the Primes. 

Now, I have not devoted more than a handful of ARCHIVE posts to crossovers, even though that literary phenomenon has some interesting applications to my many posts on the concept of centricity-- not least because when a character created for one narrative crosses over into another narrative mythos, the character may either retain the same stature, have slightly less stature, or may simply have variable degrees of charisma but no stature at all. 

Take as a quick example the character of Fu Manchu. Within all of the Sax Rohmer stories, the "devil doctor" is without question the superordinate character. Rohmer often brings in other heroes to assist the doctor's implacable foe Sir Denis Nayland Smith, mostly in order to pursue new romantic arcs for the younger men, but even Smith, who appears in all of the stories, cannot surpass Fu Manchu in either stature or charisma. So in the original stories, the doctor is a Prime.

However, when the character was licensed to Marvel in the 1970s, he became a Sub, a subordinate presence, to his son Shang-Chi in the comics series MASTER OF KUNG FU. Some stories pitting son against father were quite good while many were inferior, though it's arguable that even in the worst stories, Fu still displayed a greater vector of charisma than your average toss-off villain. 

All that said, it's certainly not impossible for someone to use Fu Manchu-- or any other narrative presence-- as a figure with a very small vector of both stature AND charisma. In the 1938 theater-cartoon HAVE YOU GOT ANY CASTLES, four "literary monsters"-- Fu, Mister Hyde, Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera-- appear in one small vignette where they start out roaring at the audience, and then perform a foofy minuet to undercut their own fierceness.

Yet in 1984, Fu finally received at least co-starring Prime status in a crossover novel, Cay Van Ash's TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, in which the doctor crosses swords with an aging Sherlock Holmes.

Most of my posts on crossovers appeared on what I like to call my "junk-drawer" blog, OUROBOROS DREAMS. I pursued a "best crossovers" project for a time, but the essay that concretized my earliest thoughts on the subject appeared in a 2014 post. The relevant insights are as follows:

Some Marxist critics will view such character-crossovers as one of many strategies by which the evil Masters of Mass Culture manipulate their audiences. While such explanations may seem to answer all questions as to the motives of the stories' producers, they don't say anything substantive about why the audiences choose to patronize not just works of mass culture in general, but works in which characters or concepts from different storylines happen to intersect. The usual Marxist explanation is that these audiences want nothing more than mindless divertissement. However, the overlapping of distinct storylines would seem to intensify the degree of mental effort an audience-member must exert in order to participate in the crossover's intersecting universes.  For instance, when Rider Haggard takes a character who exists in a moderately realistic universe, i.e., Allan Quatermain, and causes him to encounter a character whose nature is overtly supernatural, Haggard must find some way to treat both characters with integrity, even though the ground rules of their universes are in conflict.  I'll discuss this particular example in more depth in an essay devoted to this novel.

It's something of a given in literary criticism to state that audiences, literary or sub-literary, maintain interest in fictional characters by identifying with them.  This commonplace observation is not so much wrong as overly simple. As I am what has been called a "myth-critic," I assert that the process of identification comes about as a reader (or viewer) realizes what kind of role the character plays in the story, and what that fictional role means to the reader. This does not mean "identification" in the simple-minded sense of "I want to be like this person," for identification can take place with any number of villains (the Joker, Freddy Krueger), monsters (Godzilla) or even mysterious locales (the subterranean domain of Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth.")  It is more properly an appreciation of what I will call the "mana" appropriate to the character or concept's role in the story. 

A crossover features at least two characters who have established-- or will establish-- the "mana" that has or might make them popular. In the above example, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed has one type of "mana," while Quatermain has a different type.  It is this "clash of energies" that I believe readers enjoy in crossovers, a clash that is radically different from the normative encounters of a hero and his villains.

I would say that what I called "mana" in this post is essentially the same as what I'm now calling "charisma." However, not all crossovers maintain the same levels of stature or charisma. For that reason, I find myself making a major distinction about whether or not the narrative presences within a crossover are HIGH in stature, LOW in stature, HIGH in charisma or LOW in charisma. One of the main determinants of a character's "high" scores in either stature or charisma is that of sheer *durability." Whether he's a character with just one narrative, like Ivanhoe, or with several, like Fu Manchu, the character may have greater stature or charisma due to his, her, or its role in popular culture.

I will devote the next four posts to various examples of each of the four constellations.

STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 2

I introduced the term "stature" into my ongoing investigations of focal presences in SUBS AND COES PT. 1.  I doubt that I or anyone can provide a systematic description as to how stature works in narrative, and how it operates in some cases to bring about the coordination of some presences with one another, while in other cases it brings about the subordination of some presences to others. A simple, non-systematic description would simply consist of my re-stating my conviction that stature correlates with the "narrative emphasis" that the author(s) use to structure the narrative. However, being non-systematic is not one of my strengths.

One way to approach a literary process that is not defined by discourse-- where the property under discussion is a given once the narrative is complete-- is by process of elimination. In other words, what qualities do NOT define stature?

In SUBS AND COES PART 1, I indicated that in the BATMAN feature, Robin was coordinated with Batman, while in the DICK TRACY feature, Junior Tracy was subordinated to Dick Tracy. But this might not have been the most balanced comparison. After all, both the original Robin and various later iterations appear regularly in the Batman-mythos over many decades, whereas Junior largely disappears from TRACY once the artist ran out of things to do with him.

Therefore, a better side-by-side comparison would be one between Robin and Doctor Watson of the Sherlock Holmes mythos. I'll concentrate here on the canonical Holmes series of Conan Doyle, though I think it's inarguable that nearly every other later iteration of Sherlock Holmes brings in some version of Watson as well. By this standard, one might argue that the character of Watson is actually more thoroughly imbricated with the character of Holmes, whereas there have been many more Batman stories in which Batman has no partner at his side. So longevity within a serial narrative *might* be seen as a possible quality relevant to stature.

However, two characters in a serial narrative are not necessarily coordinated even if they appear together in every story. In order to be coordinated, each character in such an ensemble must have an independent, autonomous existence, just as, to reiterate my previous metaphor, two coordinate clauses in the same sentence must be able to stand alone.

In contrast, a subordinate clause cannot stand apart from the structure to which it's attached, which is, ideally speaking, a sentence that can stand alone without the clause. Going by these two definitions, longevity is irrelevant.

The question then arises: does dynamicity bear any relation to the stature of characters as being either coordinated or subordinated? When one sees that there have been one or two features devoted to Robin or one of his later epigoni, while to my knowledge Doctor Watson has no ongoing serials devoted to his exploits, one might think it had something to do with the fact that Watson, while courageous, doesn't usually bring much to the table in terms of his ability to trounce evildoers, while Robin's acrobatic abilities give him the ability to take on a variety of enemies without any help from his senior partner.

However, though megadynamicity insures that a given character doesn't need someone else to handle fights, it doesn't necessarily mean that said character and his partner are coordinated. The woods are full of superheroes who have tough sidekicks who are plainly subordinated to the stars of the features, with two prominent examples being "Doiby Dickles" from the Golden Age GREEN LANTERN and "Stretch Skinner" from the Golden Age WILDCAT.

Further, since most incarnations of the Sherlock Holmes concept are more about detection than fisticuffs, the fighting-ability of either Holmes or Watson has little significance in the Doyle stories. It's not impossible to imagine a take on the canonical Doyle stories in which Holmes and Watson are two detectives whose different strengths complement one another, along the lines, say, of the teleseries BONES. But to my knowledge Watson is always both intellectually and physically secondary to Holmes, with the exception of the spoof-tale seen above, WITHOUT A CLUE. There are even some serial concepts in which there's a starring detective who handles all the mental work while he has some legman do his heavy lifting, as per Nero Wolfe and his aide Archie Goodwin, or Ironside and his little coterie. But in these cases, the super-thinker is superordinate to his stooges.

Thus dynamicity, going by these disparate examples, would also seem inapplicable to the concept of stature. The only guide would seem to be that of pure functionality. Robin is coordinated to Batman because the reader expects a hero's sidekick to be able to operate on his own from time to time. In contrast, Watson's main function in the Holmes mythos is to be "the cat who looks at a king," and nothing more. His main status is to be a "subordinate clause" that adds important information to the main sentence-- if only that of making Holmes's feats of detection emotionally relatable-- but he's not important in and of himself.

More to come.

GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 3

In GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2 I said:

But although "density/complexity" is the primary criterion of fictional excellence in any potentiality, there is a role for Raymond Durgnat's "aesthetic of simplicity." Simplicity is the mode or modes through which an author seeks to communicate complexity in a pleasing manner, so that the reader absorbs the complexity without the sense of having it forced down his throat. More on this point later.

I invoked the base idea of simplicity-- though not as an "aesthetic"-- in a February 2008 essay, MOVING FURNITURE, TRADINGS SYMBOLIC SPACES.  

To repeat what I said in “Myths Without Fantasy,” any kind of story may attain to the complexity of myth, and any element of narrative storytelling—a plot-event, a setting, a piece of dialogue, or a turn of characterization—can have the potential to go from a simple variable to a complex one. At the simple level, such elements are manipulated by the author to serve the ends of the story, which (as per this article’s title) I consider to be akin to the simple act of moving one’s furniture from one place to another. However, where one encounters the author bringing in extra levels of associational complexity, often not necessary as such for the story’s smooth functioning, one is dealing with another level of symbolic discourse, where the simple is “traded” for the complex, rather than simply being moved from one spot to another.

 I didn't mention Frye in this essay, but he was credited for the "complex variable" insight in a related essay, DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE, where I further built upon the simple/complex dichotomy.

Back in this essay I spoke of functions without any great associative complexity as "simple variables," akin to narrative "furniture" that an author had to move about. Somewhat later I used "null-myth" as a term of evaluating such simple variables in terms of their lack of mythicity. "Function" is meant to be more inclusive. Say that I consider Sherlock Holmes mythic while I deem August Derleth's imitation-Holmes "Solar Pons" to be null-mythic. That does not mean that I might not be amused in some way by a Solar Pons tale, depending on how well the author presents his material on the purely kinetic level. But I would not expect the level of associative complexity that makes the Sherlock stories generally more appealing.

Both Holmes and Pons stories share functions that their respective authors did not "invent." The Holmes stories, because of their added associative qualities, may be said to be "super-functional" in that author Doyle forges more felicitous associative connections within the literary elements of his tales than Derleth does. But Doyle doesn't escape the need for narrative functionality.

"Narrative functionality" means that whether a story is symbolically simple or complex, it has to satisfy certain some audience's narrative expectations, even if that audience might be limited to the author's idealized image of "the perfect audience." This is easy to descry with genre-stories: once Conan Doyle establishes (but does not invent) the trope that every detective-story concludes with the detective solving some mystery, then most other stories in that genre will follow the same pattern, in order to be "pleasing" to the reader. And though many literary elitists like to think that artistic fiction is immune to this sort of narrative expectations, I've noted the same distinction between complex and simple forms of art-fiction on assorted occasions, as per my unfavorable comparison of Daniel Clowes to Harvey Kurtzman here.

In the second part of DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE, I also associated the simply functional elements of literature with the linguistic concept of the *denotative:* 

Even I, a pluralist, would rather read works that strike me as "super-functional" rather than only functional. But that which is purely functional informs every narrative ever conceived, if only insofar as all narratives need the denotative as a buttress for the connotative. So fearing and/or hating the functional is, in the final analysis, not much more profound than the activity of moving around one's old furniture.

Nowadays, I would not associate my idea of the "null-myth" with this base denotative functionality: over time it's come to mean a work that had "super-functional" potential coded into the narrative but which became denatured by authorial confusion or misjudgment. I note that in these older essays I only referenced the potentialities of "the kinetic" and "the mythopoeic." However, I've given other examples in recent essays as to how the other two potentialities are also embraced by the concepts of narrative complexity and simplicity.

To return to the last two examples cited above, the better work of Harvey Kurtzman has a desirable level of complexity, but it is presented in such a way that the author does not "force [the complexity] down the audience's throat." In contrast, though I do not consider Daniel Clowes' to be very complex in terms of any potentiality-- though I suppose it's strongest in the domain of "the didactic"-- it also sins in regard to the aesthetic of simplicity, by conveying his intellectual take on life in a poorly executed emulation of Alfred Hitchcock's storytelling practices.

OUT WITH THE BAD WILL, IN WITH THE GOOD

On this blog I've written a good deal about the theories of "will" expoused by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and have formulated a literary "theory of two wills," influenced by Schopenhauer, in which literary characters are dominated either by the "idealizing will" or the "existential will." However, the English word "will" doesn't adapt well to the adjectival form, which is what I need in reconsidering the arguments stated in 2014's EGO, MEET OBJECT.

In that essay, I meditated on Jung's distinctions between "extrovert and introvert" in his book PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, also classified as "object-oriented" and "ego-oriented." I've sometimes considered applying the former set of terms to the two different ways focal presences resolve themselves in fiction. However, the informal meanings of "extrovert and introvert" are far too limiting, while the terms "ego-oriented" and "object-oriented," while closer to my needs, are cumbersome.

Now, in 2009's SEVEN WAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER, I defined the philosopher's idea of "Will" as "the radical root of all literary activity." This means that, no matter what sort of viewpoint character the author may choose, he may focus as easily upon the "will" within the viewpoint character (or on some figure allied to him, or an ensemble of such characters), OR upon things, people, or phenomena that are perceived as "the other" to the viewpoint character's will.

The Greek word for will is (more or less) *thel.* Thanks to the wonders of search-engines, I've discovered that one author has coined the term "thelic" as an adjective for will, and also that he's using that term for a purpose quite unlike my own. Therefore I will appropriate the term for fiction only, and apply it only to the orientation of the focal presence in narrative.

In place of "ego-oriented," I'll speak of the *endothelic,* meaning that the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests.

In place of "object-oriented," I'll speak of the *exothelic,* meaning that the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.

This adjectival terminology solves the clumsiness I mentioned in EGO, MEET OBJECT in that a term like "exothelic" applies as well to a place like Wonderland or a character like Dracula. In addition, since I allow for the association between the ego of the viewpoint character and any representative affiliated figure within the same "endothelic" constellation, that not only subsumes narratives like Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" prose tales-- where the star of the show only rarely becomes the viewpoint character-- but also for examples of *exteriorization,* as seen in the essay DJINN WITH SUMMONER. By this logic, the non-sentient Gigantor-- the star of the teleseries and of (presumably) the manga series as well-- is *endothelic* even though he has no diegetic "will" of his own, because Gigantor is associated with a sentient will through his controller Jimmy Sparks. In contrast, a cognate robot-hero like Astro Boy displays sentience, and therefore does not actually need an interaction with humans to be his "summoners," although the associations don't hurt the robot-boy's claims to human sympathy.

I mentioned Wonderland above, which is clearly the focus of Lewis Carroll's books, which would be *exothelic,* as are most film-adaptations, with the exception of the 2010 Tim Burton film, which becomes *endothelic* by virtue of emphasizing the will of Alice rather than of Wonderland.

Keeping to the context of environments, in OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER. I used the example of the 1950 WEIRD SCIENCE story "The Destruction of the Earth" in order to demonstrate that the narrative's focus was not upon any of the niggling human characters, but upon the Destroyed Earth itself, whose death-throes are given the most attention. I called it "object-oriented" before, but now it is *exothelic.*

In contrast, there are hundreds of stories dealing with the world's destruction that focus upon the aggrieved reactions of the viewpoint characters, all of which would be *endothelic.* Yet aggrieved reactions are not necessary, as I noted in my examinations of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Last Night of the World." In my first consideration of the story, I averred that the viewpoint characters' sanguinity about the world's end might be viewed as a form of negative will, akin to Nietzsche's "will to nothingness." But in my revised outlook here, I decided that even though the nameless viewpoint characters do nothing to bring about the cataclysm, they are stand-ins for the author's POV.

Thus Bradbury's strategy for giving "new life and force" to the overly familiar threat of nuclear war was to undercut its power by invoking a greater power, one that simply chooses to end the story of mankind in the manner of "the closing of a book"-- an apt metaphor for a writer frustrated with the follies of mankind.

Therefore in this case, although the narrative still concerns the world's end, the focal presences are the two nearly anonymous "husband and wife" who calmly observe that ending with a dignity that the author finds appropriate-- while the nature of the world's end is at best a subsidiary phenomenon.

POWER AND POTENCY PT. 1

[Hamlet] is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with death... Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental essence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. They are helpless before his very inactivity and fall one after the other, like victims of an infectious disease.-- G. Wilson Knight, THE WHEEL OF FIRE, 1930.

Later in the essay Knight says that Hamlet "is, as it were, the channel of a mysterious force, a force which derives largely from his having seen through [all the other characters]."

Obviously, when Knight calls Hamlet a "superman," he's not speaking of him in the comic-book sense of the word; he's almost certainly referencing Nietzsche's concept of an ubermensch whose mental outlook simply outstrips that of ordinary men. I find Knight's idea of a force which is not really a force-- one that derives from a simple change in perspective-- to be intriguing for my category of the uncanny as expressed by the NUM formula.

Whenever I have written about either the Shakespeare play or various cinematic adaptations, I've almost entirely analyzed it in terms of the trope I call the "phantasmal figuration." This means that there is some entity or occurrence in the narrative that is witnessed by a given subject-- usually a viewpoint character-- and that said entity/occurrence is dubious as to its true nature. Many films use this trope to conjure with "ghosts" who are merely masquerading human beings. HAMLET, in contrast, has a ghost whose existence one cannot doubt, though the spirit's true nature is unfathomable. Knight calls it "the devil of the knowledge of death," but in contrast to many of the "specious spectres" of Gothic literature, the ghost is not the star of the play. The imaginative center of the play is Hamlet, who brings death to almost every major member of the Danish court, outstripping his uncle by far.

Until reading the Knight essay, it hadn't really occurred to me to think of Hamlet as having an infectious potency. But he is a man transformed by a "converse with death," who has in a sense become one with Death, not least because the ghost bears his own name. He does not literally channel any "mysterious force" to bring down the Danish court, and he doesn't even out-maneuver his foes in the cunning manner of his literary ancestor, the original Amleth. Yet he does seem to be protected by something more than his author's desire to give him good or bad fortune as the story demands.

I pored over all of the "phantasmal figuration" films I had thus far reviewed for my movie-blog. In all of them, none included a phantasm that somehow transformed the outlook of the subject who viewed it. The closest thing I found were films in which some individual dressed up like a spectre in order to make a murderer recall his or her crimes, but no "infectious potency." as I've termed it, appears as a result of this exposure.

However, in the essay OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT 2, I did discuss a certain interesting interface between the villain who conceives of a "bizarre crime" and the detective who solves it.

 ...the villain of SPECKLED BAND may conceive of his bizarre murder-method, but the hero mirrors the villain's ingenuity by being able to deduce the plot by piecing together such disparate clues as a useless bell-cord and a mysterious whistling sound-- the one being the snake's method of entry, the other being the method by which the snake's owner calls the creature back up the cord.  In this story, Sherlock accomplishes his feat of detection by drawing upon his encyclopedic knowledge of exotica, rather than by making deductions based on reasonable premises.  In contrast, Holmes' solution of the HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES mystery depends not on special knowledge but on a careful observation of available facts.  Holmes' knowledge of exotica then may qualify him as an uncanny entity in this story, just as a similar body of knowledge elevates Professor Van Helsing in the DRACULA novel to a status above that of an ordinary individual.  

So is there an "infectious potency" between the villain's conception of the crime and the sleuth's fathoming of it? If so, the interface is far more beneficial to society than anything one sees in HAMLET, for all that the hero is also engaging in a kind of "detective work."

Knight's essay has got me thinking further on the subject of a "potency" that is not quite the same as "power," even though some dictionaries view the words as essentially covalent.  Part II will be devoted to these thoughts.

PSYCHO VS. PSYCHO

At the conclusion of GHOSTS AMERICAN STYLE I wrote:

The mere fact that the mystery killer is not exceptional in his dynamicity would keep this from being a "combative" film.  However, would things be different if the killer had a more prepossessing aspect, if he had some sort of bizarre identity like "the Bat?"

First, just to get this tidbit off my mind, there actually were a trio of Mexican films from the late 1950s and early 1960s in which a supernatural avenger-- albeit not a ghost like the one in TOPPER RETURNS-- had regular encounters with a villain called "the Bat."  This was what might called the "Aztec Mummy trilogy," in which a mummy named Popoca continually defended an Aztec temple from a mad scientist with a chiropteran cognomen.  He's seen in a shot below, readying a "human robot" for its coming battle with the Aztec Mummy.

But I started here on the subject of "the phenomenality of psychos" by considering the opposition of two megadynamic figures, Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper, taking the initial position that this was also a metaphenomenal combative film because the Ripper almost always qualifies as an "uncanny" being, even though Sherlock Holmes is "naturalistic" in most iterations.  In my system the anti-intelligibility of the "monster" trumps the intelligibility of the "hero" (which terms I put in quotes to denote their relation to my discussion of "persona-types.")

It is possible for one of the two [combatants] to be *naturalistic* in nature-- which was my original estimation of this version of Holmes-- but for a work to be both combative and metaphenomenal, the other combatant must be either uncanny or marvelous.

Most films about "perilous psychos," however, do not employ the combative mode. The dominant mode is subcombative.  Usually a megadynamic character-- whether "exemplary" in his level of power, like Norman Bates, or "exceptional," like the original "uncanny" version of Jason Voorhees-- is able to mow down his (or her) victims like grassblades. Typically the perilous psycho is opposed by a viewpoint character who is either microdynamic or mesodynamic, and this character's survival-- if he or she does survive-- comes about due to dumb luck, not because of superior dynamicity. Films like STUDY IN TERROR or the seventh outing of FRIDAY THE 13TH are exceptions to this pattern.

Oddly, though, "psycho stars" on television in recent years come somewhat closer to the combative mode. While I have not yet examined the original "Hannibal Lecter" novels of Thomas Harris, I found that the first two Lecter films-- MANHUNTER and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS -- did not satisfy my criteria for both the narrative and significant values of the combative mode.

The 2013 teleseries HANNIBAL-- which will air its season finale the Friday after I write this-- comes much closer to the mark. The series' conceit is to trace in greater detail the events of the first encounters of Lecter and his nemesis, FBI  profiler Will Graham-- encounters that were only sketched out in the Harris novel and the 1986 film. The film, directed by Michael Mann, conveys a keen sense of the extent to which Graham has been polluted by the disturbing power of the godlike killer, which he witnesses first in Lecter and later in "the Tooth Fairy."  However, at no time is Graham himself a "psycho." He is, in the end, a figure like Holmes is in STUDY IN TERROR, a man capable of intuiting the thought-patterns of killers but not a "perilous psycho" himself.

The teleseries' version of Graham is far more ambivalent. Even though the internal continuity of the Lecter story establishes that Graham will take Lecter prisoner and go on to pursue the Tooth Fairy in later years, producer Bryan Fuller creates a mood of baroque pessimism that implicates all of the characters, not just Graham, in Lecter's insanity.  Not every episode culminates in a literal combat, though some stories establish that Hannibal Lecter can kick ass on a Jason-esque level of dynamicity. But on further examination of the completed series, I may come to the conclusion that Fuller's version of Lecter and Graham is not "sanity vs. insanity," but "psycho vs. psycho."

Kevin Williamson's THE FOLLOWING debuted the same year as HANNIBAL.  Just as Hannibal is the star of his titular series, Joe Carroll, the Poe-loving leader of a murder-cult, is the true star of THE FOLLOWING. Carroll's persistent foe is another FBI profiler, Ryan Hardy, who like Will Graham has become compromised by his contact with evil. Unlike Graham in HANNIBAL, though, Hardy, though tormented on many levels, does not become quite as implicated in his enemy's madness. In addition, THE FOLLOWING depicts incidents of spectacular violence far more regularly. Joe Carroll's murder-cult also qualifies for the uncanny version of "outre outfits," in that they are sometimes-- though not always-- seen dressed in outrageous costumes, particularly those episodes in which some of the killers wear Edgar Allen Poe masks.  But as with HANNIBAL, I would have to study the collected episodes in order to determine whether or not this is a combative serial.

The novel and television serials of Dexter Morgan will bear further investigation as well.  Jeff Lindsay's concept places the titular psycho in the role of the avenger of crimes, in essence melding the character-types of Lecter and Graham. I have not read Lindsay's novels, any more than Harris.' But based on viewing a handful of the Showtime TV episodes, Dexter Morgan is a man who is born with the same psychotic tendencies as Hannibal Lecter, but who is able to channel them into relatively altruistic acts, killing exceptionally evil criminals who have escaped the justice system. Apparently on occasion he has even contended against other "master psychos" like himself, though on the whole most of his enemies tend to be more mundane, and he is almost as much an invincible dispenser of justice as Jerry Siegel's Spectre. Still, even if Dexter had never encountered a psycho on his own level, DEXTER the teleseries would be as combative as the SPECTRE comic-book series, in that the criminals Dexter attacks represent an exceptional level of evil, as I discussed here in GHOSTS AMERICAN STYLE:

...criminals in THE SPECTRE represent more than just ordinary crooks: collectively they are the evil that forces the undead avenger to keep up his crusade, rather than going to his eternal rest.

THE PHENOMENALITY OF PSYCHOS

In my last essay I emphasized the essential independence of dynamicity, mythicity, and their respective significant sublimity-values.  However, I also noted that their affects could become "intricately intertangled." Since I've been addressing the phenomenality of the "perilous psycho" intermittently this year, starting with the essay OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS, I'll stick with this theme as a source of examples.

In the aforesaid essay I questioned in part whether or not Sherlock Holmes was always a naturalistic figure in all of his iterations.  In the third essay in this series, I observed an opposing tendency in the villain of the Holmes film A STUDY IN TERROR:

I have yet to encounter a fictionalized Jack the Ripper, however, whose spectre does not suggest either "the uncanny" or "the marvelous."  This is in contrast to many other perilous psychos. 

The character in STUDY is of the "uncanny" type, which means that he does not violate the regularity aspect of causality, but does transgress upon the expectations of intelligibility. Jack the Ripper in STUDY IN TERROR is uncanny because he is "anti-intelligible," because he cannot be reduced to naturalistic causes, even though his real-life model probably was no more than a crazy man.

A STUDY IN TERROR is also a combative film in that its hero and villain engage in a battle of spectacular violence near the film's climax.  Because this Ripper is no more than an ordinary man possessed of uncanny madness, he is also "megadynamic" in the sense I used the term here.

It may be harder, though, to see all such uncanny figures as megadynamic, since not all of them are as combative.  In the 1960 PSYCHO, Norman Bates is a megadynamic figure only while he pretends to be his crazed, axe-murdering mother, and only when he is assaulting women in a relatively helpless position. When this psycho is caught by an ordinary husky man, Norman's appearance of power is stripped from him like his phony white-haired wig.

I suppose that I could solve the dilemma the same way I solved the fluctuation of power-levels in the three dynamicities in DYNAMIC DUOS PT. 2: Norman is merely an "exemplary" psycho, while Jack the Ripper is an "exceptional" one.  But I find it worth noting that Norman, both in his initial prose and film incarnations, is superior in terms of his mythicity to the Ripper-character from STUDY IN TERROR.  This suggests that he is a better conduit for the "combinatory-sublime," even as the Ripper is a better conduit for "the dynamic-sublime."

At present I have not found a necessary connection between the two forms of the sublime.  It does suggest to me how some figures of comparatively low dynamicity can suggest that they are more powerful than they really are. I conclude that it is because of the effect of the combinatory-sublime, which seems to invest such figures with a larger-than-life "mana."

RIDDLE, MYSTERY, ENIGMA

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...-- Winston Churchill (or maybe his speech-writer(s), BBC broadcast, 1939.

The primary definitions of Churchill's three metaphors for Russia from Dictionary.com are as follows:

RIDDLE: "a question or statement so framed as to exercise one's ingenuity in answering it or discovering its meaning; conundrum."

MYSTERY: "anything that is kept secret or remains unexplained or unknown."

ENIGMA: "a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation."

Macmillan Online has the following:

RIDDLE:  " a question that seems impossible or silly but has a clever or funny answer"

MYSTERY: " something that you are not able to understand, explain, or get information about"

ENIGMA: "someone or something that is mysterious and difficult to understand"


With infinite time and patience I could list all cited definitions to these three overlapping yet different words.  But even if I did so and determined that there is a statistically dominant definition for each, I don't think those statistically-arrived-at definitions would cancel out my conviction that Churchill's three words have a particular function in that speech about Russia.  In short, in order to make his point about the unfathomability of Russia, Churchill chooses three words that all connote unfathomability in increasingly greater degrees.  And this becomes important to my theory of literary causality in that each of the three phenomenalities the degree of intelligibility becomes greater.  

Just as a "riddle" is a perplexing arrangement of words that does (as Macmillan says) does finally have some rational or quasi-rational answer, the domain of the naturalistic is one in which all objects and situations, however perplexing they may be at a given time, are ultimately intelligible to reason.

A "mystery," as both cited definitions note, does not automatically have an answer-- which might mean that the majority of the ratiocinative works generally called "mysteries" perhaps ought to have been called "riddles," since almost all of them have answers of some sort.  The two cited definitions place an emphasis on the attempt of a subject to gain knowledge or information that is hard of access.  There is no guarantee, as with a literal riddle, that the mystery will be unveiled, though I would argue that this does not mean it cannot be.  Further, not all mysteries are revealed as plays upon rational understanding, since one also finds the word used for the set of initiation ceremonies known as the Eleusianian Mysteries.

Of the two cited definitions for "enigma," I believe that Macmillan's is essentially identical to its definition for "mystery," so I disagree with it. Dictionary.com's suits me more in that it suggests that the "occurrence or situation" referenced may be not just temporarily unknowable, but may be permanently "puzzling or inexplicable."

Now, the best way to show how this eventuates in the world of literature is to focus on how intelligibility is reflected in the narrative function of "the anomaly."  Once again, I draw upon the definition supplied by academic Frank Cioffi:

This reality [of a traditional narrative] is disrupted by some anomaly or change--invasion, invention, or atmospheric disturbance, for example--and most of the story involves combating or otherwise dealing with this disruption.

Unlike Cioffi-- who does note that anomalies can stem from such mundane factors "such as family, the love ethic, manly heroism, the American Way, and the like"-- I link the nature of the anomaly to its function within a bifurcated causality, one comprised of both a regularity aspect and an intelligibility aspect.  In recent essays I've given copious examples as to how narratives conform to, bend, or break with the regularity aspect, but the "riddle, mystery, enigma" progression suggests to me a way to provide a structure for the differing degrees of intelligibility. 

In this essay, I attempted to assess to employ an argument about "degrees of probability" the same way I now advocate "degrees of intelligibility." I don't dismiss the arguments re: evidential probability, but they are not as useful as I had hoped to catch the affective distinctions between the three phenomenalities.  But the examples I provided work just as well for this current argument:

Sticking only with the Doyle stories this time:

THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS is a naturalistic RIDDLE. The conspiracy Holmes unmasks is one that is fully intelligible to reason, and once the answer is known, it has no further repercussions.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES is an uncanny MYSTERY. In the earlier essay I argued then, and still argue, that "the explanation of the Hound via the rules of ordinary causality, while it serves a valid narrative purpose, does not dismiss the affective sense of strangeness from the narrative."

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN is a marvelous ENIGMA, because the anomaly around which the plot is structured is something outside the rules of "causality's regularity aspect," i.e., "a special drug that can somehow transfer the attributes of an animal to a man."  This level of intelligibility is enigmatic and insoluble specifically because the author must introduce some "fudge factor" that allows him to justify the appearance and/or behavior of the anomaly. 


I should note that the sheer number of "fudge factors" is irrelevant to the degree of enigmatic intelligibility.  It's quite true that Jules Verne did not need to provide as many "fudge-factors" in justifying the existence of his imagined submarine as H.G. Wells did in justifying the existence of gravity-nullifying Cavorite in FIRST MEN IN THE MOON-- nor does it matter, contrary to Verne's opinion, that in real life human beings could and did create real submarines, while no one has come close to synthesizing anything like Cavorite.  Both devices are equally marvelous, and equally enigmatic, within the sphere of the fictional universe their authors create.

I should also note that in some narratives it's possible that an uncanny or marvelous situation or entity may appear as a "throwaway," rather than being as central to the narrative as Cioffi's anomalies are. In this essay I reviewed two films in which marvelous occurrences or entities appear within the scope of comparatively mundane storylines.  But I tend to think that even when an uncanny or marvelous item intrudes upon a naturalistic framework in this marginal manner, they still transfer their qualities to the whole, as much as if they were central to the narrative.