THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS PT. 3

 

I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. -- MY SHORTEST POST YET.

...I don't even expect plots to be fresh.  They are like skeletons.  I think one skeleton looks more or less like the others, but when they are fleshed out, you get a unique person.  So with movie plots. -- poster "atenotol" on Classic Horror Film Board (quoted with permission) 

 I doubt that I'll ever again use the terms "obvious" and "unobvious," given that I only did so in response to my having read George Orwell's 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling. Though in part 2 I disagreed with many of Orwell's criteria for evaluating Kipling, I must admit that his calling Kipling's works "a monument to the obvious" is almost as quote-worthy as many of the familiar phrases of Kipling. Indeed, the fact that Kipling's "gnomic" utterances were so eminently quotable was the main reason for Orwell to call him "monumental"-- though if familiarity of quotes were the sole measure of one's obviousness, then Shakespeare would outdo Kipling there by that appeal to across-the-intellectual-spectrum familiarity.      

It was also mostly a coincidence that I happened to have read Orwell's online essay a few days before the end of October, which is also when I re-screened, for the first time in perhaps 30 years, the famous "bad movie" BLOODY PIT OF HORROR. Thus I began thinking about what elements of PIT were or were not "obvious," not so much in the specific way Orwell used the word but in the general sense. I noted how much PIT owed to many other Gothic narratives before it, stating, "BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein." The unobvious element, though, was the idea that said entity "looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie." I was of two minds on the effects of the scripters' plunge into unpredictability. On one hand, it caused a lot of viewers to make fun of the film, though on the whole PIT has more mythopoeic content than the average "so bad it's good" flick. On the other hand, PIT's foray into a very unobvious type of menace made a lot of people watch the film who would not have watched the similarly themed PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE. 

Now, in the terms I've established in my above definitions of the terms "trope" and "icon," the basic setup for PIT would be the master trope of the story. But no audience can relate just to a trope, which is just a base description of plot, sometimes with a smattering of a character-arc. Tropes must be "solidified" into icons to make them relatable. If one boiled Orwell's screed down into a trope-icon argument, then Orwell would be saying that Kipling was popular because his tropes were so simple and direct that anyone, no matter how intellectual or non-intellectual, could relate emotionally to them, so in that sense, Kipling's tropes would be appeals to the obvious.

But in my disagreement with Orwell in Part 2, I stressed that emotional appeal was not enough; that Kipling was celebrated because he was a master of literary myth. No matter how improbable intellectuals might deem the author's Cockney soldiers or talking animals, they succeeded because Kipling had an "unobvious" approach to such material. If there was an "obvious" appeal to one of his tropes, like that of a common British soldier seeking to profit from the Raj's presence in India, Kipling was capable of "fleshing out" that trope. His fiction, then, might be considered more of a "monument to the unobvious," since he radically reinterprets the basic structure of the trope he emulates and puts a personal spin of some sort upon it. The same is true of the writers behind BLOODY PIT OF HORROR, though they did not receive, and probably will never receive, much credit for their relative innovation. (I add that being innovative alone is not my sole criterion for distinction. BLOODY PIT and TROLL 2 are both "unobvious" transformations of familiar tropes, but PIT carries an abstract meaning and TROLL 2 does not.)

I also find the poster atenotol's metaphor of skeletons and flesh persuasive. Tropes may not all be alike in design-- and indeed, all human skeletons aren't exactly the same, either. But tropes are always structuring principles, just as skeletons provide scaffolding for all the rest of the human body's organs. Human flesh, particularly with respect to countenances, provides social relatability in the real world, while in the literary world, we need icons-- even when they may be as far from flesh as Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space"-- in order to make the power of the trope come alive.

     

                 

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.2

In this 2022 post, I briefly described a few ways in which I differed from the statements Susanne Langer made in the section I quoted here. To sum up my main line of critique, I stated that I felt that the "unknown creators" of both archaic religious myths and folktales possessed the ability to allow "their imaginations to roam freely," but that both forms of narrative also channeled epistemological patterns, though myths tended to develop those patterns more "thoroughly." So I disagreed with Langer's essential claim: that tales were focused wholly upon "wish fulfillment" while myths encompassed "a world picture, an insight into life generally, not a personal imaginary biography." What I liked about her formulation is that she distinguished between the tales' supposed reliance upon "subjective symbols" and the myths' predilection for "observed folkways and nature-ways." Though I did not say so in the 2022 post, the subjectivity that Langer attributes to tales may be loosely comparable to my concept of a narrative's "lateral meaning," while her focus upon "folkways and nature-ways" parallels my criteria for "virtual meaning." That demonstration of an intersubjective pattern of thought between myself and a deceased scholar I never knew prompts me to indulge in this "compare-and-contrast" game.                                                                                          

But none of the above relates to the topic of emulation, which I've raised in my title. As it happens, 2022 was also the year I began writing a lot more about crossover, agency, and interordination, as in this August post. In that post, I used two iterations of Steve Ditko's originary character The Question to formulate the concepts of "trope emulation" and "icon emulation." To shorten the argument a bit, I said that when Alan Moore conceived Rorschach, his variation on The Question, he was in no way asserting any identity between his character and Ditko's character. Rather, what Moore did was to borrow tropes from Ditko's character and from other sources in order to create an independent icon. This, I asserted, was trope emulation. But when Denny O'Neil created his variation on the Ditko crusader, he attempted to assert an identity between his creation and that of Ditko, if only for the sake of impressing fans of the older creation. This, I asserted, was icon emulation.                                 

Since Langer was in no way attempting to form a general theory of literary narrative, naturally she started from a different place than I did. But I find it interesting that. rightly or wrongly, she characterizes all the figures of folktales as entities completely independent of one another, claiming that they are little more than the functions of various wish-fulfillment scenarios. This I regard as "trope emulation," though with the caveat that in my system characters like Cinderella are not just functions, but icons in their own right, no matter how much they fluctuate from one iteration to another. In the case of myth-figures, Langer regards that they are capable of merging with one another because "myth tends to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin enter into definite relations with one another." This I regard as "icon emulation," and there's even a loose parallel of purpose. Just as O'Neil promulgates his version of "a Question" but some but not all of the poetic tropes of the Ditko character, Irish Christians promoted a saint called Brigid in order to appeal to a laity familiar with a pagan goddess of the same name. There will probably be a few other points of comparison, because whatever my disagreements with Langer, I find her fertility of mind on matters mythopoeic to be equal to that of Jung and Campbell.

LANGER AND EMULATION PT.1

 I thought that I had gone into some detail regarding Susanne Langer's views of the distinctions between "myths" and "tales," but my previous posts on Langer don't seem to cover those distinctions in depth. In any case most of those earlier posts predate my formulation of the concept of "emulation," so that's as good a reason as any to start from scratch. Since the passage I'm reprinting from her 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY is so long, I'll confine this post to preserving the passage as a resource from which I'll draw for Part 2.                                                                                                                          Here we have a literary product belonging to the civilized 

races of Europe just as much as to the savage cultures of darker 
continents. Aristocratic beings, chiefs or princes, now play the 
leading role; dragons and ogres and wicked kings, or beautiful 
witches of great power, replace the monkeys, crocodiles, angry 
dead men, or local cannibals of the older tradition. The wish- 
ful imagination of man has been disciplined, by public expo- 
sure and realistic reflection, into a genuine art-form, as far re- 
moved from personal dreaming as the ritual dance from self- 
expressive bouncing and shouting. 

Yet this high development of fantasy has brought us no- 
where in the direction of mythology. For although fairy-story 
is probably an older form than myth, the latter is not simply 
a higher development of the former. It, too, goes back to prim- 
itive fantasy, but the point of its origin from that source Ues 
far back in cultural history, long before the evolution of our 
modern fairytale — of Kunstmarchen, as the Germans say, or 
even Volksmarchen. It required not a higher stage of story- 
telling, but a thematic shift, to initiate what Miss Harrison  

called "the myth-making instinct."                                                              For the fairytale is irresponsible; it is franlily imaginary, and 

its purpose is to gratify wishes, "as a dream doth flatter." Its 
heroes and heroines, though of delightfully high station, 
wealth, beauty, etc., are simply individuals; "a certain prince," 
"a lovely princess." The end of the story is always satisfying, 
though by no means always moral ; the hero's heroism may be 
slyness or luck quite*as readily as integrity or valor. The theme 
is generally the triumph of an unfortunate one — an enchanted 
maiden, a youngest son, a poor Cinderella, an alleged fool — 
over his or her superiors, whether these be kings, bad fairies, 
strong animals (e.g. Red Riding Hood's wolf), stepmothers, 
or elder brothers. In short, the fairytale is a form of "wishful 
thinking," and the Freudian analysis of it fully explains why 
it is perennially attractive, yet never believed by adults even 
in the telling. 

Myth, on the other hand, whether literally received or not, 
is taken with religious seriousness, either as historic fact or as 
a "mystic" truth. Its typical theme is tragic, not Utopian; and 
its personages tend to fuse into stable personalities of super- 
natural character. Two divinities of somewhat similar type — 
perhaps miraculously born, prodif'ious in strength, heroically 
defeated and slain — become identified ; they are one god under 
two names. Even those names may become mere epithets link- 
ing the god to different cults.  

This sets the hero of myth strikingly apart from the fairy- 
tale hero. No matter how closely the Prince Charming of 
Snow White's story resembles the gentleman who wakens 
Sleeping Beauty, the two characters do not become identified. 
No one thinks that the trickster "Little Glaus" is the little 
tailor who slew "seven at a stroke," or that the giant whom 
Jack killed was in any way related to the ofjre defeated by 
Puss in Boots, or that he figured elsewhere as Bluebeard. Fairy 
stories bear no relation to each other. Myths, on the other 
hand, become more and more closely woven into one fabric, 
they form cycles, their dramatis personae tend to be intimately 
connected if not identified. Their stage is the actual world — 
the Vale of Tempe, Mount Olympus, the sea, or the sky — and  

not some ungeographical fairyland...And myth has, indeed, a more difficult and more 

serious purpose than fairytale. The elements of both are much 
alike, but they are put to quite different uses. Fairytale is a 
personal gratification, the expression of desires and of their 
imaginary fulfilment, a compensation for the shortcomings of 
real life, an escape from actual frustration and conflict. Be- 
cause its function is subjective, the hero is strictly individual 
and human; for, although he may have magic powers, he is 
never regarded as divine; though he may be an oddity like 
Tom Thumb, he is not considered supernatural. For the same 
reason — namely that his mission is merely to represent the 
"self in a day-dream — he is not a savior or helper of man- 
kind. If he is good, his goodness is a personal asset, for which 
he is richly rewarded. But his humanitarian role is not the 
point of the story; it is at best the setting for his complete so- 
cial triumph. The beneficiary of his clever acts, his prowess, or 
his virtue is he himself, not mankind forever after. And be- 
cause an individual history is what the fairytale fancies, its 
interest is exhausted with the "happy ending" of each finished 
story. There is no more mutual reference between the adven- 
tures of Cinderella and those of Rapunzel than between two  

separate dreams. Myth, on the other hand, at least at its best, is a recognition 

of natural conflicts, of human desire frustrated by non-human 
powers, hostile oppression, or contrary desires; it is a story 
of the birth, passion, and defeat by death which is man's com- 
mon fate. Its ultimate end is not wishful distortion of the 
world, but serious envisagement of its fundamental truths; 
moral orientation, not escape. That is why it does not exhaust 
its whole function in the telling, and why separate myths 
cannot be left entirely unrelated to any others. Because it pre- 
sents, however metaphorically, a world-picture, an insight into 
life generally, not a personal imaginary biography, myth tends 
to become systematized; figures with the same poetic meaning 
are blended into one, and characters of quite separate origin 
enter into definite relations with each other. Moreover, because 
the mythical hero is not the subject of an egocentric day-dream, 
but a subject greater than any individual, he is always felt to 
be superhuman, even if not quite divine. He is at least a de- 
scendant of the gods, something more than a man. His sphere 
of activity is the real world, because what he symbolizes belongs 
to the real world, no matter how fantastic its expression may 
be (this is exactly contrary to the fairytale technique, which  

transports a natural individual to a fairyland outside reality) .                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Hmm, guess that will teach me the formatting perils of copying from a PDF. More shortly.

MY SHORTEST POST YET

 Since I brought up my essay COORDINATING ORDINATION 2 in the course of a new line of thought in ICONIC PROPOSITIONS 2, I found myself asking myself: "Given that I'm founding this theory on the twin literary processes of *trope emulation* and *icon emulation,* did I ever really define how tropes and icons relate to one another?" I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. And that, for once, is "'nuff said."     

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

 I first started systematically speaking of fictional narratives as "propositions" in the 2018 essay-series STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS, beginning here. True, the main thrust of this series was to talk about the differing strengths of a given work's "lateral meaning," as against the more elusive "vertical meaning." But since both of these complementary elements of narrative have always been inextricably imbricated with one another, it would be correct to state that fictional narrative as a whole was proposition-based: "icons X, Y and Z interact in such a way as to produce results A, B and C."                   

In contrast, I began writing about "centric characters" and "focal presences" close to the beginnings of this blog, though it was only in the 2022 essay I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON that I settled on the current term "icon" for any individual or collective entity within a narrative that had any significant level of resonance, using "Primes" and "Subs" to distinguish their level of those icons' respective importance to the story. By this definition even an amorphous force could be an icon, like the one that engenders chaos on Earth in the 1924 film THE CRAZY RAY, or a collection of beings that comprise an environment, like The Planet of the Apes or Kern's World.                                                                 

 However, I'd never precisely brought together the interrelated concepts of icons and propositions, though obviously no one would pay attention to any fictional propositions if there were not fictional icons with whom the audience might identify. I will now draw upon my distinction between "trope emulation" and "icon emulation" as established in 2022's COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2 by distinguishing between "originary propositions" and "variant propositions." A work like Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD would be an originary proposition because the narrative does not directly derive from an earlier narrative, even if the author uses tropes seen in other narratives: "fatherless boy endures privation," "fatherless boy finds protector," etc.                     

A "variant proposition," however, does follow some pre-existing iconic model. It might be a historical figure altered for fictional purposes, like Scott's ROB ROY--                                                         

--Or it could be a narrative based on a completely fictional figure, as with Nicholas Meyer's Sherlock Holmes pastiche SEVEN PER CENT SOLUTION. Both of these I would give a further distinction, the PURE variant proposition. The idea behind both propositions is that they are telling stories of established figures, whether historical or fictional, which vary in some way from whatever has been previously established about said figure.                                                   

The corollary category to the PURE type is of course the IMPURE type. This would be a narrative in which the main thrust of the narrative centers upon an originary icon, but the story also includes a variant take uoon some pre-established figure. Scott's IVANHOE is one I've returned to a number of times. The 12th century knight Ivanhoe is entirely fictitious, but his story is enmeshed with that of Robin Hood and some of the mythology derived from the Robin Hood cosmos. Hence, the latter example is IMPURE.

More on these matters in future.         

                                                                                                

ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 1

"The original King Kong has but one story, at the end of which he perishes, never to return, at least not at the hands of his creators. However, when the company that owned Kong leased him out to Toho Studios, Kong was revised in many respects-- most significantly, making him large enough that he could stand toe to toe with the Big G. This Kong is not really the original Kong, but there exists a sort of "crypto-continuity" between the two, so that I regard this crossover as a crossover of two Primes, simply because Kong II is meant to be a strong echo of the original icon." --A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2 (2021)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   "Lastly, a great deal of "icon emulation" relies on at least a superficial level of recognizability, even where that recognizability contradicts everything known about the icon's established history. For instance, the film BLOODRAYNE: DELIVERANCE pits its heroine against a vampire named Billy the Kid, ostensibly four hundred years old. If this version of Billy has been around that long, then clearly he has nothing to do with either the real or folkloric history of Billy the Kid, and the film-script makes no attempt to rationalize the discordances. But because the writer sought to make his villain recognizable, the film nevertheless delivers a "strong template deviation" type of crossover."" --THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD (2022)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 Since in 2021 I started assiduously pursuing the narrative pattern-analysis I *may* dub "crossology," I've struggled somewhat with trying to account for the situations described in the examples above. In both, some raconteur executes a version of an established icon that strongly deviates from previously established descriptions of the icon in one or more ways. In the case of Kong in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, no change was more monumental than the idea that Kong II, unlike the Kong of the 1933 film, was alive. The script for the 1962 movie could have specified that this was a different Kong than the earlier one, just as the Godzilla of GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN is a different but essentially identical "Godzillasaurus" as the one in the 1954 original. But the writers of KING KONG VS GODZILLA did not make any such distinction. In my view the writers wanted to encourage the identification of Kong II with Kong I, the better to sell to audiences the mythic battle between the foremost kaiju of America with the pre-eminent monster-child of Nippon.                                                                                                       

The example of Billy the Kid in BLOODRAYNE DELIVERANCE is arguably more extreme: not only was this Billy a bloodsucking vampire, he didn't even originate in the era with which both the real William Bonney and his fictional congeners are associated: the Old West. Yet the writers of that movie also wanted more recognition-value out of associating "Vampire Billy" with the legendary outlaw, or else they too could have pursued the strategy I described for Kong II: just say it's some bloodsucker who came along and assumed the identity of a famed gunfighter. I tried to rationalize this narrative identification with phrases like "recognition of motifs" and "template deviations," and while those aren't precisely wrong, they may not get to the heart of the problems inherent in the process of icon emulation. My current solution will phase out the term "template deviations" in favor of a brand-new headscratcher, "variant propositions," which Part 2 will attempt to justify.                                                                                                                                                                             

QUICK CONCRESCENCE CONTEMPLATION

 I noted in my review of Whitehead's SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD that he introduced many of his jargonistic terms therein, such as "prehension," "occasion," and "event." However, he did not employ the term I found most felicitous for my own usage: "concrescence." The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that this term may have debuted in PROCESS AND REALITY in this quote:

An actual occasion’s holistically felt and non-sequentially internalized concrete evaluations of its relationships to the rest of the world is the subject matter of the theory of “prehension,” part III of PR. This is easily one of the most difficult and complex portions of that work. The development that Whitehead is describing is so holistic and anti-sequential that it might appropriately be compared to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. An actual occasion “prehends” its world (relationally takes that world in) by feeling the “objective data” of past occasions which the new occasion utilizes in its own concrescence. This data is prehended in an atemporal and nonlinear manner, and is creatively combined into the occasion’s own manifest self-realization.

In any case, I've formulated the following relationship between prehension and concrescence, based on my literary priorities, in PREHENSIONS AND PERSONAS PT. 2.

A "prehension," as noted before, is a process by which an organism gains knowledge of and organizes its experience, whether that knowledge is organized through the concrescence of sensation (the kinetic potentiality), of feeling (the dramatic potentiality), of thinking (the didactic potentiality), of intuition (the mythopoeic potentiality), or any possible combinations of the four. All four potentialities would have been available to the human species ever since they split off from smaller-brained mammals, so none of the potentialities predate one another.

I will also recapitulate the "quantum literary theory" that I applied to each of the potentialities, which I fancy is somewhat in keeping with Whitehead's view that even subatomic particles were "occasions" whose essence was rooted in prehensive activity. I wrote the following in STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.

As I now view this formulation based on my reading of SITMW, in the world of literature a trope is probably the closest equivalent of a subatomic formation, having a bare utility with no real context, such as "Society Casts Out The Monster." In turn, particular icons within a literary text take on particular forms of concrescence according to which potentiality is most dominant in the narrative, and according to whether the narrative is based upon "trope emulation" or "icon emulation."

And that's probably going to be my last word on both prehension and concrescence for the foreseeable future. I am gratified to see from SATMW that Whitehead favored an interdisciplinary view of humankind's cultural creations, as I cited in his view that Shelley's MONT BLANC displayed "prehensive unification." In other words, he was no facile materialist, asserting that as long as human beings had science, they didn't need things like art and religion. I'm sure Whitehead, had he applied his theories to literature, would not have come up with anything like my own theory. But I believe that my attempt to confer a special form of "self-realization" to non-living quanta like tropes and icons is very much in keeping with Whitehead's priorities.

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.

PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH PT. 2

 As a result of my refinements in Part 1 of this series, I'm overturning some of the conclusions I made in COSMIC ALIGNMENT PART 2:

Marvel's Inhumans debuted in a 1965 issue of FANTASTIC FOUR, and the Black Panther appeared in the comic in the following year. It practically goes without saying that Lee and Kirby intended for both the Panther and the Inhumans to appear in serials at some point, but neither did for some time, and so for all of those appearances they register as Subs. In a special FF issue dated November 1967, both the Inhumans and the Black Panther crossed over with the Fantastic Four in fighting Psycho-Man. The Black Panther would not get a regular berth for another year, when he became a regular member of the Avengers in 1968, so within the compass of that story, he remained a Sub type. However, the special placed a more immediate push to see if readers wanted an Inhumans series, since in an issue of THOR, also dated November 1967, the denizens of Attilan received their first feature, albeit only a backup strip. So the FF ANNUAL would be a High-Stature crossover because the Inhumans had just become Primes around the time when the issue came out, while the equally enjoyable Panther had to wait another year for Prime status. 

This section is not incorrect with respect to the Black Panther and the Inhumans being Subs within the cosmos of the Prime stars, the Fantastic Four. However, the overall intent of the essay was to state that the debut stories of the new heroes did not count as crossovers because it took considerable time for any of them to get their own features. However, now I would consider that the debuts of both characters would count as "proto-crossovers," and so would any other stories produced before the "future Prime stars" got their own berths. 

Such a "proto-crossover" appears in a Captain America continuity from late 1967 through early 1968 (though all of the issues were dated1968). But Marvel did not wait to see whether or not the issues teaming up Cap with the Black Panther sold well, for the storyline culminated with the star-spangled crusader recommending the Panther for admission to The Avengers. The admission took place about a month or two later in AVENGERS #52, and this comprised the African prince's first role as a Prime in any series.

Now, all these "retroactive proto-crossovers" raise a question: if the debut of Black Panther in FANTASTIC FOUR is a proto-crossover, is the same true of an ADAPTATION of that story, such as the one that appears in an episode of the 1994-96 FANTASTIC FOUR animated series. But my answer to this question is NO. For one thing, within the corpus of existing episodes in this series, the Black Panther never had the chance to ascend to Prime status, so he's just a Sub within the series, in contrast to the comic book universe from which he comes.

Now, had the MCU adapted the FF continuity for a full-fledged FANTASTIC FOUR movie, and then spun BLACK PANTHER off into his own series, THAT would have made the hypothetical FF film a proto-crossover. CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR was the MCU movie that launched the company's version of the Panther, but it's not a straight adaptation, but a new story, and is therefore governed by a different set of rules. The MCU always had the intent to spin the Panther off into his own film, and since CIVIL WAR sets up the storyline for the 2018 BLACK PANTHER, I don't deem CIVIL WAR to be a proto-crossover, just a Full Crossover in which the MCU Panther is a strong template deviation of the one in the comic books.

However, when one is dealing with "strong template deviations" rather than the weak type seen in a direct adaptation, it isn't strictly necessary for a character to get his own feature. Nick Fury is a Prime star within Marvel comic books, though his career in the comics has probably put him most often into the role of a Sub support-character rather than that of a Prime. To date the MCU has produced a strong template deviation of Fury, and there are no indications that he's EVER going to be anything to the MCU but a Prime demoted to the level of a Sub. Yet thanks to his comic-book career Nick Fury has enough stature that even his first appearance in the 2008 IRON MAN qualifies as a Full Crossover. 

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2

In Part 1, I emphasized that when I spoke of my newly christened category of "interordination," I conceived it to be a subset of all those narrative strategies that Julie Kristaeva designated as "intertextuality," stating at the essay's conclusion: 

I don't expect to use interordination on a regular basis, except as a means to clarify the ways in which crossovers belong more properly to this specific type of "quotation" rather than to the more generalized category of intertextuality.

Upon exploring even the basic Wiki writeup of intertextuality, I find that other critics have attempted to make distinctions between different forms of the concept:

Intertextuality has been differentiated into referential and typological categories. Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts and the typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts

The term "typological" has some appeal to me because in INTERORDINATION PT. 1, I devoted particular attention to the example of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN as comprising several forms of intertextuality, none of which relate to the subcategory of interordination as I've conceived it. But even "typological" needs some finessing. What is Alan Moore doing when he bases his WATCHMEN-heroes upon the Charlton heroes? He is *emulating* certain *tropes* that he observed in the earlier stories of the heroes, after which he then crossbreeds those tropes with other tropes. Of course, all of these were borrowed from other sources as well.

In fact, all literature as we have it now is founded in "trope emulation." From caveman times on, one author puts forth an icon of some sort (not necessarily an original one) that his auditors find pleasing, so the next author tries to emulate something about the icon in order to enjoy similar popularity. In Classical times, one can observe this process in Athens' belated attempts to formulate a city-hero, their Theseus, in loose emulation of Thebes' protector Herakles.

Now, going back to Wiki: what does the essay's author mean by "referential intertextuality?" Without going into this too much, the basic contrast is that this form directly borrows from passages in earlier works. Though this concept is not a direct parallel to my line of thought, it's close enough to suggest a contrast to "trope emulation," and that is "icon emulation." In the latter formulation, a derivative author does not choose to create a new character, but attempts to tell a new story with an old character. To be sure, "newness" is difficult to ascertain with archaic figures, given that it's impossible to be 100% sure when a given Herakles story originated. At best, archaeology can tell us the earliest known record of a given story. However, we can be relatively sure that even the earliest Herakles stories were not all devised by one writer, but by innumerable authors-- some of whose stories may have simply fallen off the cultural map. 

Returning to the importance of names outlined in I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, Moore took all of the tropes he borrowed from Steve Ditko's hero The Question, plus all those he took from other sources, and thus forged a new character, Rorschach. No matter how many fan-readers know about the influence of The Question, the name of Rorschach keeps him distinct from the Ditko character, far more than any of the formal differences between the characters.

Such formal differences are of lesser importance because in many cases an author utilizing "icon emulation" may deviate from the original model just as much as does the one utilizing "trope emulation." 

Steve Ditko's character of The Question appeared in about half a dozen stories for Charlton Comics, and since these were produced under an implicit work-for-hire contract, the stories and the character both belonged to Charlton. When DC bought up all or most of the Charlton superheroes, DC then produced several new "icon emulation" variations on those characters-- and of these variants, none diverged quite as far from the original model as the 1987 Question first produced by writer Denny O"Neil and artist Denys Cowan. Ditko supplied nearly no character traits or back history for "Vic Sage," the secret identity of his crusader, and only a very marginal rationale for the hero's blank-masked appearance, since Ditko was principally concerned with using the hero as a spokesman for philosophical belief. O'Neil not only paid zero attention to any of the philosophies exposed by the Ditko character, he formulated a detailed back history for Sage-- even to the extent of stating that his name was a revision of an Eastern European cognomen-- and gave the New Question all sorts of "film noir" adventures in which the nature of good and evil was never as distinct as it was in Ditko.

Yet, by keeping the name of the character and a few choice bits of his mythology, O'Neil's Question is an icon derived from an icon, rather than being an icon created from some of the tropes that constituted the original icon.

It's because of this "crypto-continuity," as I dubbed it earlier, that it's possible to view derivative icons as being coterminous with their original models. Thus, despite all the dissimilarities between the Kong of the 1933 film and the Kong who fights Godzilla, the two Kongs are coterminous because the second icon was grounded in the identity of the first one. The same applies to all of the various icons based on non-fictional originals like Billy the Kid and Jack the Ripper. I've pointed out that such characters are based on what I term "innominate texts," meaning that the models are not purely fictional, but there's still a icon-to-icon derivation, rather than a trope-to-icon derivation.

In closing, I devoted some space in I THINK ICON to the fact that "icons" included countless entities that are not characters as such, but only cited a couple of examples. Another noteworthy example is Edgar Rice Burroughs' land of Pellucidar, an environment characterized by its assorted flora and fauna as well as its unique location at the center of the Earth. In the formal "Earth's Core" series, the entire environment of Pellucidar is simply a subordinate icon to whatever hero is the star of the story. However, in 1929 Burroughs produced his most distinctive crossover of two franchises, by having Tarzan, superordinate icon of his own series, have adventures within the environment of Pellucidar. Because Pellucidar is not normally aligned to Tarzan's adventures, this interaction rates as a "charisma-crossover."

ADDENDUM: Since I've previously made some remarks on spoof-versions of established figures, the sort I'm now calling "icons," I feel I should expand on these remarks. Spoofs are for the most part "trope emulations" because the artists simply borrow tropes from the originals, frequently (though not always) distancing the spoof-characters from the originals with goofy names like "Batboy and Rubin." But it's possible for an author to produce an "icon emulation" that is loosely coterminous with the original, even if said author decides to alter the myth-radical that dominates the established icon. Such icons as Superman, Modesty Blaise, and The Lone Ranger all belong to the mythos of adventure. However, the filmed stage play of SUPERMAN-- THE MUSICAL is a full icon emulation of Superman, but in the mode of comedy, while both Modesty Blaise and The Lone Ranger got redone into modes of irony for the big screen.

I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON

Icon: in semiotics, a sign characterized by iconicity, the resemblance to what it signifies

Since the early days of this blog I've flirted with many terms for the various presences inhabiting fictional world-scapes. I've called them  focal and non-focal, centric and eccentric, coes and subs, and finally, superordinate and subordinate presences. But I've stuck with the term "presences" since I first started writing about such things, because the term was the best one I could find for all the various fictional figures that can influence the outcome of a narrative: not just human beings but also flora, fauna, environments, imaginary beings both sentient and non-sentient, artifacts created by humans or by similar entities, or even discarnate forces like "The Crazy Ray" of Rene Clair's 1924 film.

But now, before I write the next section of COORDINATING INTERORDINATION, I have to specify a better term than "presences," because "presences" is not good enough to imply the matrix of motives that will cause one authorial will to emulate the products of another authorial will. What I formerly called "presences" I will now call "icons."

Though my above quote from Wikipedia uses the term "icon" as it appears in modern semiotics, I'm not invoking that discipline in any way. I would imagine that when some semiotician decided to import the term into his system, he was roughly thinking about how religious icons were supposed to represent either religious figures or aspects of religious belief, as opposed, say, to figures whose resemblance to what they represented was more abstract.

For the purpose of my discussion of interordination, an icon is any kind of strongly definable entity in a given narrative. Icons are either superordinate, meaning that the action of the narrative centers upon the nature of the subordinate icon, or subordinate, meaning that these icons exist to support and explicate the mythology of the superordinate icon. The superordinate icon is the icon-type which later authors most often seek to copy from earlier authors, whether those earlier authors established an earlier icon as part of a legal franchise or as a figure in informal folklore. When a later author emulates the subordinate icon produced by an earlier author, it's usually because said icon generated some level of special popularity -- the Joker, the Wicked Witch of the West. 

Now, popularity is not strictly necessary. It's possible for even the most minor figures to be adapted for whatever purpose the derivative author wishes to accomplish. For instance, in all likelihood no playgoer watching HAMLET ever gave much thought to the extremely minor characters of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. However, in 1966 Tom Stoppard made these toss-off icons into the stars of his absurdist play ROSENKRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD, and within that play, these formerly nugatory characters become the stars of the show.

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named. For instance, the giant molluscs in the 1957 film THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD have no name as such. In Jeff Rovin's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MONSTERS, he chose to denote the creatures by the action described in the title, even though the title was inaccurate in suggesting the presence of only one monster, so a better description for that assemblage of mutants would be one based on their species and inordinate size: "The Giant Molluscs" or the like. However, icons that really do very little beyond stereotypical actions don't merit iconic titles, so that no one bothered to label "that cop who shot at Spider-Man in that one Romita story" or "the 553rd lion killed by Tarzan." 

In a practical sense, even an unnamed icon must have some special identity on which a critic can hang some distinction. In INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962), Lee and Kirby devoted one panel to an anonymous soldier who gives a name to the big green monster who shows up on the soldier's base. Many years later, because the nameless soldier had that distinction, writer Peter David constructed a short, stand-alone story about "the man who named the Hulk" for one of the HULK annuals-- which one, I'm not sure at the moment. In my 2014 essay OBJECTS GIVEN LUSTER, I defined the focal presence of the EC story "The Destruction of the Earth" (WEIRD SCIENCE #14) as the Earth itself, since the story spends most of its time showing how the planet will be annihilated, while in contrast all of the human characters in the story remain bare stereotypes. So if I were making a designation of the story's focal icon, I would concoct a distinctive name for that version of the planet, such as "The Destroyed Earth."

In my next essay it will become evident as to why a more felicitous term was necessary, when I start expounding on the concept of emulation.