ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 4

Here I'll cite a couple more categorizations with respect to classifying environments as potential focal presences. In ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2 I wrote:

...though much of LOVE IN HELL's narrative is devoted to describing the infernal domain, I would not go so far as to say that Hell is the"main character" of the story, in the manner that I've said that Wonderland is the "main character" of Carroll's Alice books. In this essay I said that the Alice books were *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.' LOVE IN HELL comes very close to this, but in the final analysis it's still more focused upon the evolving relationship of Rintaro and Koyori as they interact both with each other and the strange requirements of their domain-- so that LOVE IN HELL is as *endothelic,* wherein "the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests."

The same designation applies to last week's mythcomic, LUCIFER RISING. In this 1985 manga story, the mysterious tenth planet Lucifer is a phenomenon that the two main characters, Father Chavez and Doctor Cleaver, must investigate in order to learn its nature, both in its cosmological and metaphysical. There are any number of science fiction stories in which the narrative focuses upon the viewpoint characters sussing out the nature of a star or planet, so that in effect the phenomenon is "the star." However, LUCIFER RISING is endothelic, since the story focuses on the human conflict of faith and science, as represented by the initial outlooks of, respectively, Father Chavez and Doctor Cleaver.

A narrative may also focus upon an environment as the concatenation of the sentient culture. This is the case with the Byrne-Mignola WORLD OF KRYPTON. In my review I noted that writer Byrne had failed to invest his characters with much in the way of "dramatic heft:"

Given Byrne's tendency to rewrite earlier stories. it's not hard for me to believe that he caught onto the way Jerry Siegel concealed the quasi-incestuous theme of his story by giving Superman's Kryptonian lover the name "Lyla Lerrol," a shuffling of the name "Lara," Byrne thus creates both a bad mother and a not-so-good girlfriend, Nyra and Vara, before introducing the "good mother" who will make possible the birth of a "savior" of sorts. Byrne doesn't devote nearly as much attention to the two main male characters, dramatically or symbolically. Van-L's name doesn't seem to hold any strong associations, though an old SUPERBOY story does state that one of Superboy's ancestors is named "Val-El." As for "Kan-Z," I can't help but note that his name resembles that of the American heartland where the infant Kal-El ends up; i.e., "Kansas." But the latter confluence may not have been consciously intended.

Yet none of these characters looms larger than the world they inhabit, although the perverse mother Nyra, a sort of "anti-Lara," has the greatest mythicity. Rather, Krypton is the exothelic focus of the narrative, as I showed in this passage:

 I will give props to the schematic sociological myth he devises for Krypton: first too sensuous, then too abstemious. This stratagem succeeds in characterizing the homeworld of DC:s pre-eminent hero in terms of unpleasant extremes, as against the "divine middle" embodied by the Planet Earth.