EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL, PART 1

Though my rough reading of Whitehead’s PROCESS AND REALITY did not convert me to process philosophy, I profited once again through my exposure to his gift for terminology—with the usual caveat that my use of a Whiteheadian term will not necessarily agree with Whitehead's use of it.

In assorted sections, Whitehead speaks of what he calls “primary feelings” as “vectors.” The Merriam-Webster definition of the word is as follows:

A quantity that has magnitude and direction and that is commonly represented by a directional line segment whose length represents the magnitude and whose orientation in space represents the direction.

So in physics, a vector indicates a magnitude of physical force oriented in a particular direction. How could this concept apply to the discipline of literary studies?

I return to one of the bedrock formulations of this blog, from the essay SEVEN WAYS FROMSCHOPENHAUER:

Was Schopenhauer right about “Will” inhering in every aspect of our reality? We do not know. However, we CAN be sure that “Will” inheres in every aspect of the various LITERARY realities we humans create, since we KNOW for a fact that they are all “willed” into existence by their creators (and sometimes, however indirectly, by audiences as well).

In this essay I applied this concept of will to literary conflict. Yet all aspects of art—characters, settings, plot-tropes—derive from authorial will. Similarly, all of the multifarious literary categories I’ve introduced on this blog—dynamicity, mythicity, the combinatory-sublime and so on—are the prisms I use to view patterns of authorial will, patterns formed by the unceasing interactions of authors swiping from each other, competing with each other, and writing love letters to each other.

In other essays I may choose to investigate the vectors to be found in other domains. Here, though, I’ll address only the domain of centricity.

In STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 5, I utilized the term “charisma” to indicate the way the author dispersed his will to characters or phenomena in the narrative, asserting that the centric presence was the one that had received the greatest amount of charisma. The concept of vectors does not invalidate any of these formulations, but the vector-metaphor proves more useful, particularly since, in mathematics, one can speak of both equal and unequal vectors.

The most typical situation in narrative usually presents one protagonist in a particular situation. In most such narratives, the protagonist embodies the greatest magnitude of authorial will; whether he prospers or perishes, he’s the character on whom the reader most focuses. This is also the usual model of the endothelic mode, in that the protagonist, no matter how flawed, is the one with whom the reader identifies. However, there’s also a counter-tradition, that of the exothelic mode/ In this mode, the reader identifies less with the protagonist than with the situation enfolding the protagonist, be it a confrontation with a menace, like Dracula, or with an environment, like Wonderland. In INVESTMENT VS. FASCINATION PT. 2, I illustrated these opposed modes. H.G. Wells’ book THE TIME MACHINE proved exothelic, concerned largely with showing the reader the entropic worlds of the future. In contrast, the 1960 film-adaptation was endothelic, focusing less attention on the worlds visited by the Time-Traveler than on the deeds of the Time Traveler, WHICH in essence signified his ability to transcend entropy. To employ the new terminology, Wells’ Future-Earth possessed a centricity vector exceeding that of the main character or anything else in the novel, while in the movie the Time Traveler possessed that superior and unequal vector.

In essence, once one has identified the superior unequal vector, it doesn’t especially matter as to the magnitude of the other vectors. Some of the subordinate vectors may be equal to one another, and certainly this would be the case of all the supporting characters in the 1960 TIME MACHINE film. But none of the subordinate characters play a role in determining centricity, except in terms of sheer contrast to the dominant vector.

Now, I said that the one-protagonist schema was the most frequently used one. Still, the idea of the ensemble-schema—wherein two or more characters “share the spotlight,” so to speak—is at least as archaic as the other schema. In STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 6, I observed that I thought the ARGONAUTICA of Apollonius should be judged an ensemble-narrative. Obviously the same schema applies to most “team” narratives. At the same time, though, serial narratives can change their stance in this regard. In STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 3 I contrasted two TV-serials, ANGEL and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. BUFFY, in my current terms, would be a series built around one starring protagonist from start to finish, meaning that Buffy Summers always embodied an unequal vector of authorial will, while her helpers were all inferior to her but roughly equal to one another. However, I observed that ANGEL started out much as BUFFY did, focused largely upon the titular protagonist. Yet by the series’ second season, I noted a shift in which Angel’s associates became increasingly important to the ongoing narrative, so that by the series’ conclusion Angel and his associates shared equal vectors of authorial will.

Even some stand-alone narratives require close attention. For the first twenty minutes of the schlock-film SHE DEMONS, the film looks like it’s going to center around the adventures of its lead male and female characters, a no-nonsense he-man and a shrewish rich bitch. It would have been easy to arrange their island-encounter with a mad scientist in such a way that their triumph over him reinforced their characters. But the script for SHE DEMONS suggests that the author was more invested in his mad-scientist character. Once the Nazi madman comes on stage, the romance of the lead male and female takes second place, as the writer places far more emphasis on the evil Nazi’s inventiveness and his wavering attachment to his mutilated wife. The titular “she demons,” in addition, are nothing more than the scientist’s creations, and thus are not superior in centricity to him—though arguably their centricity-vector might be unequal to that of the romantic duo.