AGAIN SUPERHEROIC IDIOMS PART 4

In Part 3 of this essay-series I dealt with two examples of the "Man vs. Man" conflict, one centered on the presence of a protagonist (or protagonists, if you include the Watson character) and one on an antagonistic presence, whereby I will justify my observation that a focal presence can as easily be a setting or a non-sentient object as a person.

MAN VS. NATURE

To doff my critical hat once more to Arthur Conan Doyle, I choose for the protagonistic type Doyle's novel THE LOST WORLD. Although the novel is named for its metaphenomenal setting, I find that the viewpoint characters are also the focal presences of the story: Doyle's irascible Professor John Challenger, budding young hero Ned Malone and experienced old hand Lord John Roxton. All three possess strong *dynamis* both in physical and psychological terms, and although the Lost World itself has its fascinations, those fascinations are in essence a reflection of the heroes' personalities, which are so wholeheartedly devoted to red-blooded adventure that the tale almost verges on parody of the genre.

However, a fair number of the adaptations of LOST WORLD have taken the opposite tack. The 1925 film, for instance, de-emphasizes the characters in favor of focusing on the miracles of modern-day prehstoric survivals, as portrayed by the stop-motion of Willis O'Brien.

Moreover, Doyle's novel took its strongest influence from a writer who tended to emphasize "Nature" as his focal presence while giving only cursory attention to his viewpoint characters: Jules Verne. In Verne's VOYAGE AU CENTRE DE LA TERRE, Verne uses the same trio of character-types Doyle would exploit: young everyman hero, wise older man, and a strong hero-type aged somewhere between the ages of the other two. Verne's characters in VOYAGE and elsewhere are not without their charms, and they have a good deal more personality than many of the simple stereotypes that followed in their wake within pulp science-fiction. But in Verne a setting like "the Center of the Earth" is the star, the focal presence, far more than any of his characters-- and much the same pattern is seen in the settings of 20,000 LEAGUES and FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.

MAN VS. SOCIETY

ODD JOHN, the Olaf Stapledon novel I mentioned in Part 3, would make a perfect example of the protagonist-centered version of the "Man vs. Society" theme, inasmuch as the main conflict for psychic superman John Wainwright is his attempt to find some place in the sun for himself and his fellow mutants. In contrast to the centered nature of ODD JOHN, however, one may view both 1984 and BRAVE NEW WORLD as examples where the antagonistic society is the focal presence of the story, not the particular (and doomed) struggles of the viewpoint characters.

In addition, I would also extend this theme to certain literary fantasy-worlds not usually referenced when the theme of "man vs. society" comes up. Nevertheless, both the OZ books of Frank Baum and his successors and the two WONDERLAND works by Lewis Carroll are also fundamentally books wherein a person from our "normal" isophenomenal world must try to suss out the nature of a fantasy-land which may not appear to be a "society" in the usual sense but which does still have some underlying metalogic behind it. But here the OZ books, even though they don't continue with Dorothy Gale as protagonist, give a strong centricity to the characters of those who explore the wonders of Oz. By contrast, though admitttedly Alice only has two books for her exploration, it's clear that Carroll isn't especially interested in using Alice for anything but as a "cat" who is continually dumbfounded by looking at a "king"-- that is, the world of Wonderland, which includes everything from kings and queens to hatters and, of course, a certain breed of cat as well.

MAN VS. HIMSELF

This type of conflict becomes trickier, as it can include anything from a character's struggle with his personal bad habits to a literal schizophrenic divide between his good and bad sides. Since I've used metaphenomenal examples for the others, I'll do the same here, but with the caveat that I believe one can find the same centered and decentered forms in isophenomenal fiction.

For the more centered type, I choose Matthew Lewis' seminal 1796 Gothic novel THE MONK. Although the novel does boast other subplots, the "star" of this show is unquestionably the non-heroic Ambrosio, a pious monk tempted into a wealth of depravities by Satan. Many "tempter" stories have been executed where the "star" of the tale was the Devil, who generally manages to tempt the tempted figure into some colossal blunder, but Ambrosio is the focus here, for Lewis devotes considerable space to making credible and personal the monk's seduction, which leads to the quasi-Oedipal fate of his unknowingly killing his mother and raping his sister.

In contrast to the emphasis on the personal disintegration of THE MONK's protagonist, Stevenson's STRANGE CASE OF DR, JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE is a story in which the viewpoint-providing protagonist is another of those almost nugatory figures seen in Verne and Carroll, while the antagonist is literally split between his doomed good side and his ascendant bad side. Indeed, most cinematic adaptations do away with the minor viewpoint character of Utterson and make Jekyll the protagonist, though almost always one whose personality recedes before the force of the novel's focal presence, the daemonic Edward Hyde.

To sum up:

Protagonistic focal presences include Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, Odd John Wainwright, Dorothy Gale and Ambrosio the Monk.

Antagonistic focal presences include Dracula, the Center of the Earth, the Brave New World, Wonderland, and Edward Hyde.

Given that the superhero is a genre formed from a confluence of other metaphenomenal genres, the above schema becomes important in answering the question as to what characters within superheroic stories can be called "superheroes," and which are simply "presences" that relate to other genres. For instance, in my "Defining the Superhero" article for COMICS INTERPRETER, I toyed with the notion that Paul Atreides of DUNE might technically fall within the range of the superhero idiom, albeit one in the *mythos* of drama rather than the more normative adventure *mythos.* But now I find it questionable, within the scope of the DUNE series, to wonder whether Atreides was the real "star of the show," as opposed to the world of Dune/Arrakis itself.

I'll deal with other applications of this schema in Part 5.