CENTRICITY AND RESONANCE

On this blog I've devoted thousands of words attempting to imagine the diffuse operations of literary endeavor into more specified categories, but I don't feel I've managed to do so with the concept of centricity. A little while back, I played around with the idea that centricity might subsumed by the agency of a given narrative's superordinate icon or icons. But the word "agency" is too easy to confound with other principles, so I'll probably confine its use to all matters related to interordination comparisons, as laid out in GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1.

It sometimes helps, though, to imagine what abstract principles would act like if they were incarnate entities, and one day I was trying to imagine "centricity" as if the icon in it were "doing something" in order to express, as mentioned earlier, the author's priorities. And the image that came to me was that of the icon as a human singer, projecting his/her voice outward so that it enveloped all the subordinate icons within his/her span.

Since I've also specified that icons don't have to be human or even humanoid beings, another possible metaphor would be that of the tuning fork, that, when struck, sets up a resonance that affects its surroundings. 

By extension, an ensemble of superordinate icons would be like a set of tuning forks, some of which might be struck at different times in order to produce their effects.

One reason I like the resonance metaphor is that it's a means of describing how authorial will spreads out from different types of icons in similar forms of narrative.

For instance, in the 2012 essay DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 2, I compared two television shows in the "occult crusader" subgenre, the 1974 KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and the 1987 FRIDAY THE 13TH--THE SERIES. I can express the opinion that the former is centered on Kolchak, the endotheric identification-figure, or that the latter is centered on the Curious Goods shop, the exothelic source of evils for the continuing characters to thwart. But the argument, as I've previously framed it, is perhaps easier to picture (though it may not compel any greater agreement) with one's experience of the way everything in the KOLCHAK series is permeated by the resonance of the hero, while everything in the FRIDAY series is permeated by the resonance of the malefic shop of evil wonders.

A similar example can be made with respect to a type of icon that would seem to have the least possible "agency:" the dead-person-who-tells-a-story." In the 1950 film SUNSET BOULEVARD, the story is related by murder victim Joe Gillis, but the audience is barely made to care about the provenance of this character. The character with the greatest resonance is clearly Norma Desmond, the faded silent-film star who pulls Gillis into her world and ends up killing him.

So Desmond has both the greatest agency and resonance. However, in 1947's SCARED TO DEATH, I think it's arguable that Laura, the murdered narrator of the movie, has greater resonance than any of the usual "old dark house" support-characters, or even than the green-masked villain who kills said narrator. Like most of the victims in the old PERRY MASON TV show, it's the murdered person who's the center of the mystery, but what little authorial will exists in SCARED stems from Laura, whose malevolence makes the plot go. 

It's interesting that Northrop Frye made use of the term "resonance" in his book THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION, where he said that resonance was the process by which "a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance." Frye was not talking about centricity as such, more about the general function of narrative. But since I've defined narrative here in terms that focus upon the interaction of what I now call superordinate and subordinate icons, the coincidence seems felicitous.

DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PT. 2

I want to draw a connecting line of sorts between the concept of the demihero as thus far outlined here, and some of my earlier examples of how the viewpoint characters of a given story might not always be the *focal presences* of the story.  I might latterly define the *focal presence* as the "imaginative center" of that story, without which one cannot imagine the story taking the same basic shape.

Here are some demiheroes in the "occult crusader" category.  First, from the teleseries FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES, we have viewpoint characters Micki, Ryan and Jack:

Then from the telemovie and the series it spawned, we have Carl Kolchak of THE NIGHT STALKER:

Now, none of these characters possessed great *dynamicity.*  They perservered against the forces of the occult largely by using either dogged persistence, trickery, or a limited amount of knowledge about how to find occult countercharms.  All of them skew toward the "fair" end of the mesophenomenal category.  They are subcombative figures in that none are capable of manifesting any great degree of *might.*

I also assign both teleseries to the realm of the drama in its melodramatic form.  While there are occult crusaders who fall more properly into the mythos of adventure, the general tone of both teleseries emphasizes the *pathos* of how various types of monsters or occult forces are unleashed upon innocent humanity, only to be banished at the last moment by a demihero, or team of demiheroes, who can just barely manage the task.

Both Kolchak and the FRIDAY THE 13TH team are the characters with whom the audience identifies.  However, Kolchak is the imaginative center, the focal presence of all the NIGHT STALKER stories; the audience tunes in to see how the intrepid reporter gets the better of whatever fiend happens to be preying on the innocent.

In contrast, the FRIDAY team is not the focal presence of the series.  Rather, the imaginative center of the series is the antiques shop "Curious Goods" from which the late relative of Ryan and Micki, one "Uncle Louis," dispensed an infinite number of cursed objects designed to cause havoc amid mankind.  Uncle Louis only rarely appears in the series (as a shade living in hell), but his shop is the imaginative center of the show, not only because it is the source of the antagonistic forces opposed by the protagonists, but also because the antagonistic forces are the ones whose nature the audience must primarily understand.  The three demiheroes take a decided back seat to the cursed objects they are morally obliged to corral.