DEGREES OF MASTERY AND BACHELORDOM

Back in April 2020 I formulated the term “master thread” as a perhaps less didactic substitute for the common literary phrase “theme statement.” Therefore earlier essays, such as February's CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PART 3, don’t use the term, though that particular essay does mention a “structuring principle” and its significance with the operations of concrescence.

Had I coined the new term back at the time of the February essay, I probably would have said something like, “Because a hyperconcrescent symbolic dialogue requires a very strong master thread, it’s impossible for the form termed a ‘basic serial’ to exhibit more than a fair level of mythicity.” This type of serial narrative—which henceforth I’ll term the “open serial”—lacks any potential for the closure one can generally find in the eight narrative forms discussed previously. “Closure” in this sense refers to the closure of the discourse, symbolic or otherwise, and has nothing to do with whether or not there currently exist a finite number of installments in the open serial.

The open serial, as I remarked before, can be comprised of several long or short arcs, several short stories, or combinations thereof. It’s because the open serial depends on a loose assemblage of sub-narratives that the overall narrative cannot attain closure. Not that its authors want such closure: the entire appeal of the open serial is that it gives its audience a constant situation that either does not change at all or changes very slowly. Open serials fall into three categories:

The Story with a Planned Conclusion—here, though the overall narrative may include any number of sub-narratives that don’t tie into one another, the author intentionally designs for the narrative to end with a culminating incident. LOVE HINA and many other manga fall into this category. The FUGITIVE teleseries also managed to wrap up its hero’s arc in its final season. In some cases, producers may plan for a serial to be open-ended, but upon receiving bad reviews, the show-runners successfully manage to wrap up a saga’s continuing arc just before termination, as with the one-season wonder GUNS OF WILL SONNETT.

The Story with an Accidental Conclusion—in this category, the narrative, though designed to be open-ended, is terminated by outside forces. Serials consisting of unconnected short stories, like Classic STAR TREK, have no culmination as such; they simply have a last episode. Dozens of serial narratives have simply stopped at an arbitrary point, leaving protagonists in mid-cliffhanger, a phenomenon I’ve frequently observed in the first few years of DC’s early title ADVENTURE COMICS. Up to the filming of the last episode of DARK SHADOWS, the production team apparently didn’t know whether there would be another season or not, so that the last episode concluded with a tacked-on narration explaining how things finally shook out. On rare occasions an arbitrary last episode seems to provide an accidental summing-up. MARRIED WITH CHILDREN’s final episode just happened to spotlight Kelly Bundy’s incredible lubricity and Bud’s eternal victimization, certainly a recurring motif throughout the show’s history.

The Never-Ending Story— in terms of structure this type is identical to the Story with the Accidental Conclusion, but this feature/franchise has existed continuously over many generations, executed by dozens of raconteurs. Thus, though a critic should know when the feature began, he may have no indication as to when it might end. Certainly I expect that, whenever Superman and Batman finally cease publication, I won’t be around to witness it.

All of these types of open serials are far too disorganized to maintain a master thread as such. At best—and here I reference the setup of my essay-title—one could devise “bachelor-threads,” which are, as per the collegiate metaphor, not as advanced as the masters. Bachelor-threads simply codify the most prominent story-motifs used in the open serial, but there’s no sense that they all add up to a coherent discourse.

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN, for instance, came close to expressing its own bachelor-thread with Al Bundy’s comic credo, “A Bundy never wins, but a Bundy never quits.” Still, this could use a little modification. The Bundys actually do win a few minor conflicts, but it’s usually because they’ve worked together. But because they feed off of fighting with one another, the thread might read more like, “Hell is the other members of your family.”

To segue to a serial more focused on long arcs, I could codify the thread of LOVE HINA as, “Constantly bothering girls (whether intentionally or not) gets you punched a lot, but at least that way you’re bound to wind up with a hot-looking sadist.”

Classic STAR TREK certainly lends itself to a more profound-sounding bachelor-thread, if one renders it as, “Humans, though advancing to the heavens with logic and reason, forever carry with them their primitive natures, which must always be controlled, sublimated, or, more rarely, weaponized (see “I,Mudd.”) But again, one can always find episodes that don’t exemplify this quasi-theme, usually because some writer has chosen to plop Captain Kirk down in a Roman arena or at the O.K. Corral.

A “never-ending story” is even harder to break down, since its focus may change over generations. In my essay THE MANY MYTHOI OF BATMAN, I attempted to break down the Cowled Crusader’s career into different “creative eras,” characterizing each era by the dominant visual and/or narrative tropes used by the storytellers. It would be functionally impossible to find even a single bachelor-thread that described all of the eras together. However, in my next essay, I’ll take a shot at formulating a bachelor-thread for the many disparate creative eras of the Dark Knight’s career.