THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PT. 4

One more line of thought did indeed develop from my meditations here on the alignment of the four Fryean mythoi with my concepts of tonal gravity and tonal levitty, and that is to consider how the current arrangement, patterned after Ovid's "Four Ages of Man," lines up with Frye's own meditations on the ways in which critics validate or do not validate the four mythoi.

"...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme..."-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

So, in Part 3, I sorted out the four mythoi thusly with respect to the orientations of levity and gravity:

COMEDY-- plerotic and levity-oriented
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and gravity-oriented
DRAMA-- kenotic and gravity-oriented
IRONY-- kenotic and levity-oriented

Now, Frye's main point in the "Mouldy Tales" essay is to state that "Iliad critics" tend to prefer irony and drama because these seem to appeal to what Frye, borrowing from Freud, calls "the reality principle." Frye does not in that essay invoke the corresponding "pleasure principle," but it seems evident that he means to say that the mythoi of adventure and comedy align with the latter principle, if only because the other two mythoi tend to embrace "happy endings" for the main characters.

Now, my formulations of "tonal gravity" and "tonal levity" did not arise from the question of what mythoi were most popular with critics. Rather, the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW series started with the question of whether or not "the sense of wonder" thrived in the "levity-oriented" mythoi as well as it did in the "gravity-oriented" mythoi.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of  *tonal gravity,* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity,* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

But most critics are not concentrating upon whether or not a work delivers "the sense of wonder," which elsewhere I've compared to Huxley's ideas of "upward and downward transcendence." If one agrees with Frye, what they want is "the reality principle," which Frye compares to the notion of "high seriousness." Yet, even if this is true of drama, works of irony are not predominantly serious, even though their humor is what many would call "dark" or "black," suggesting a strong difference in tone between works of irony and works of comedy.

I tend to validate Frye's judgment on "Iliadic critics" since I feel myself to be, like Frye, part of the minority of "Odyssey critics." Certainly during my tenure writing reviews for THE COMICS JOURNAL in the day suggested that most of the people writing for Gary Groth tended to emulate the critics of canonical literature, and that even if some of them valued comedy more than the average canon-critic, they were foursquare against the mythos that most dominated American comic books, that of adventure.

This suggests to me that my original writings on levity and gravity need some modification, which caused me to contemplate different concentrations of these concepts of identificatory investment.  Thus I would now alter the above definitions of the mythoi to read to address the strength of the levity-orientation or the gravity-orientation:

COMEDY-- plerotic and oriented on light levity
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and oriented on light gravity
DRAMA-- kenotic and oriented on high gravity
IRONY-- kenotic and oriented on high levity

Now, as it happens, in arranging the four mythoi, I followed Frye's season-based arrangement, which to the best of my recollection did not involve Ovid's "four ages." In the first two FOUR AGES essays, I said that the *dynamis* of each mythos compared well with one of the "ages of man:" child, adolescent, mature adult, older adult. Thus I perceive that even though adventure is "serious" in terms of how its readers are expected to invest themselves in the character's struggles, it is a "light seriousness" that canon-critics do not regard as covalent with their "high serousness." Adventure-stories, while they may not involve adolescent characters, are often regarded as adolescent in nature because they tend to have happy endings, no matter what sufferings their characters may endure  to reach said ending. Not all works within the dramatic mythos have unhappy endings, of course. But critics tend to prefer dramas because there is a certain expectation of a stronger chance for a dolorous, and therefore more bracing, conclusion to the story. Thus dramas meet the critic's desire for high seriousness.

With the two "mythoi of levity," comedy, more than irony, still allows for more identification with its characters than does irony, and thus comedy also shows a predilection for happy endings. Though the phrase "light comedy" does not apply to all comedies across the board, it suggests something of the attitude that the Iliadic critic has toward comedy in general: there's still enough of a tendency for viewers to invest in the characters' fates and to want to see said characters validated to some degree. This is not true of the irony, for the creator of the irony has, so to speak, turned up the dial on his levity-making machines until everything in the story floats free of any readerly attachment. Again, some ironies-- such as Voltaire's CANDIDE-- may have relatively "happy" endings in comparison to other, more relentless ironies. But there is no sense, to paraphrase Frye, that the world has been reborn by a ritual of jubiliation: if anything, even the worlds with relatively happy endings are doomed, just as "older adults" are doomed to end their days and their experience of the ongoing world.

Thus, this current rethinking invalidates the verdict of the GRAVITY'S RAINBOW series, in that I would now opine that both adventures and comedies show a greater tendency toward encouraging reader identification than one sees in dramas or ironies. To pursue the metaphor of the four ages once more, it's as if the comedy and the adventure allow for the most identification because their characters were designed to be triumphant, while the drama and the irony are designed to allow the reader to pull back from the characters, even if for very different reasons.

THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS PART 3

Here I'll be bringing my formulations in Part 1 and Part 2 into line with some of my observations regarding audience-conviction.

In the FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS series, I argued that there were four states of "dynamis," which both Northrop Frye and I use to signify the "power of action" of characters in fiction. and that those four states parallel the four-staged development of human beings as described by Ovid in his METAMORPHOSES. In the poem Ovid asserts that every human being starts out as being like Spring, "quickening yet shy," develops into "Summer's hardiness," loses those "first flushes" upon entering Autumn's "temperate season," and finally enters the domain of "senile Winter," which is marked by the "terror in palsy" that will precede Death. These states I then compared to my four quasi-Fryean mythoi, respectively comedy, adventure, drama and irony.

Now, all of my formulations regarding kenosis and plerosis, informed largely by the analyses of Theodore Gaster and Jane Ellen Harrison, which are focused not on individual growth and decay but upon a given society's attempt to maintain itself in what Gaster calls the "durative" sense. Thus there are four forms of ritual-- what Gaster calls "the jubilative,""the invigorative," "the purgative," and the morificative," all of which also align with the four mythoi, and in the same order.

So the four mythoi line up well when paralleled to the "ages of man," or to the yearly rituals of archaic societies , which are intended to maintain the society as if it were a cyclical living entity, able to reconstitute itself indefinitely, unlike individual persons. However, there's far less uniformity in terms of the ways each mythos works with the audience's *conviction* regarding the narratives of each mythoi, since it's possible for audiences to take some mythoi seriously and others unseriously:

The drama and the adventure, often perceived as two "serious" types of entertainment, are easy to confound, even as are the two types of "unserious" entertainment, comedy and irony.-- GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, PART 1.

In the GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW series, I meditated upon the attitudes of "serious conviction" and "unserious lack of conviction." In the POETICS, Aristotle had characterized these states of audience-perception as "weighty" and "light" respectively. I followed this formulation somewhat by speaking of the first category as being dominantly characterized by "tonal gravity," while the other was dominantly characterized by "tonal levity." Assuming that one keeps to the order by which Frye arranged his mythoi, explicitly patterned after the four seasons, then here we have not a smooth progression, but a sort of oscillation. We start with the jubilative form of the unserious, which is perhaps the "lightest" of the four, and proceed to the invigorative, which is dominantly serious. The purgative mythos then increases the "gravity" and instills an even greater sense of seriousness-- and yet, this particular center cannot hold, and the mortificative mythos arises from the purgative, taking on a new form of "levity," one so free of the bonds of literary gravity that hardly anything can be valued.

Similarly, the ritual processes of *kenosis* (emptying) and *plerosis* (filling) also follow this oscillating progress, as I pointed out in SOMETIMES THEY WIN, SOMETIMES THEY LOSE:

I generalized that two of the four Fryean mythoi allow the protagonist to win sometimes, lose sometimes.  One of the two is *drama,* a mythos which possesses a serious tone and a *kenotic* (emptying) audience-function, and *comedy,* a mythos which possesses an unserious tone and a  *plerotic* (filling) audience-function. In contrast, as I also stated in that essay, the function of *adventure* is "to impart to the audience the "invigorating" thrill of victory, with little if any "agony of defeat," while in contrast "the heroes of ironic narratives usually don't win, but when they do, it's usually a victory in which the audience can place no conviction."  Just to keep symmetry with the above assertions, I'll reiterate that *adventure* is a mythos with a serious tone and a *plerotic* audience-function, while *irony* is a mythos with an unserious tone and a *kenotic* audience-function.

So here too we see an oscillation between modes:

COMEDY-- plerotic and levity-oriented
ADVENTURE-- plerotic and gravity-oriented
DRAMA-- kenotic and gravity-oriented
IRONY-- kenotic and levity-oriented

In the same essay plerosis-kenosis essay, I specified that what society is being "filled with" is whatever a given society perceives to be "life-supporting" elements, while the same society attempts to "empty itself" of "life-denying" elements. But then the objection arises: if the jubilative and mortificative mythoi address their respective processes of filling and emptying with only a "light" sense of conviction, why would those processes have any societal importance?

My best solution for the time being is that most if not all societies need what I've called "vacations from morals," and that works of tonal levity, simply by the fact that they are NOT meant to fill the audience with a sense of "the grave and the constant," serve as a counterpoint to their more serious-minded counterparts. Hard to say if this line of thought will bear more fruit.

LOWBROW, BUT HIGHLY SERIOUS

He Chaucer lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an important part of their virtue.-- Matthew Arnold.

I seem to be one of the few people in the country who didn't like THOR: RAGNAROK, and found its over-dependence on jokes to be an indicator of how little the show-runners "got" the character.  However, the more I think about it, the failings of RAGNAROK may indicate even more about the problems of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as put forth by the fellow most associated with its success, studio chief Kevin Feige.

I say this with the full knowledge that Feige's version of "the Marvel Universe" is not likely to be surpassed within my lifetime. Feige clearly gets some of the key elements that made 1960s Marvel a success. Had there been no Marvel, it seems unlikely that (1) fans would have been motivated enough to create the direct market, and thus (2) mainstream comic books probably would not have survived their distributor problems of the 1970s.

Feige has reportedly called himself a "fanboy," and almost all of his cinematic credits support this assertion. Prior to 2008's IRON MAN, Feige worked in a production capacity on fourteen films, all based on superhero characters. In time he may be seen as being every bit as influential as Jim Shooter in promoting Marvel as a "superhero-first" company. And in some ways, Feige "got' Marvel better than Shooter. Feige understands three major aspects of Marvel's "Silver-Age" success;

(1) The Continuity Thing.

Stan Lee, as editor of the Marvel Line, probably had no aim beyond cross-promotion whenever he had Spider-Man try to join the Fantastic Four and the like. However, as time went on, he apparently found that continuity was not only popular with readers, it was a useful tool for a writer. For instance, in 1964's AVENGERS #4, he and Kirby whipped up a villain, Baron Zemo, who used a super-glue against two of the heroes, Giant-Man and Captain America.

How to get out of it? Well, you have the Avengers consult another expert on glue, the Human Torch's foe Paste-Pot Pete (whose face Kirby apparently forgot, making him look rather like his sometime partner the Wizard).

More importantly for the MCU, Lee also found a lot of material simply in having heroes from different milieus, and with different speech-patterns. Here's Daredevil trying to prove his "mad skills" to a certain thunder-god.

Whereas a lot of writers would have written the two characters indistinguishably, Lee understood that a thunder-god wasn't going to talk the same as a modern superhero. This discovery also led to another aspect of Lee's approach:


(2) Heroes with Problems.

For Stan Lee, this was clearly another device to draw readers into the fictional worlds of the Marvel characters, so that they would buy each and every issue of a given series, rather than just picking up random issues according to chance. But there's every indication that Lee himself became invested in the characters, as when he decided that he wanted to lay near-exclusive claim to chronicling the adventures of the Silver Surfer when the character graduated to his own series. I can't be positive that there might not have been some hard-boiled business decision behind Lee's claim, since he'd publicly admitted that Jack Kirby alone created the character. However, Lee definitely attempted some things he never attempted in other Marvel features, such as making his main character a Christ-figure.

(3) The Prevalence of Humor.

Of these three aspects of Marvel's success, this is clearly the one that Kevin Feige most emulates. Long before the rise of Marvel Comics, Lee's writing demonstrated an ability for "snappy patter" in humor comics like TESSIE THE TYPIST and MY FRIEND IRMA, and in many ways he simply translated that talent to the 1960s superhero books. However, he also made much of the humor flow from character, which had generally not been the rule for the superhero genre. Most of the Marvel features of the Silver Age were replete with a jazzy sense of humor, and even the more "serious" titles, like the aforementioned THOR, allowed for moments of whimsy, as seen with characters like "Volstagg the Magnificent."

Ironically, SILVER SURFER was possibly the only Lee-written title that boasted no humor of consequence, which may have contributed to the feature's early demise.


I believe that no fans familiar with Silver Age Marvel would dispute these three aspects as major factors in the Marvel success,but I think there's a fourth one that usually goes unacknowledged, and that is Lee's flirtations with what Arnold, in the quote above, called "high seriousness."

What Arnold meant by the phrase doesn't matter to me here, since the phrase has taken on a life of its own. In general it connotes a sense of gravitas, and is almost always applied to works of literary merit. At the time Lee made his first breakthroughs with Marvel, it's a given that the forty-something editor had no illusions about the status of comic books, no matter what he may have said later in his "bullpen bulletins." He knew that they were deemed lowbrow entertainment, and that any efforts he made to "elevate the form"-- like SILVER SURFER-- were aimed to impress fan-readers who wanted something a little different with their superhero action.

But even though Lee probably knew that he'd never be "taken seriously," he showed a talent for scenes of faux high seriousness, even within a lowbrow context. For instance, here's Thor facing the death-goddess Hela from the Mangog saga I analyzed here.

Granted, Jack Kirby staged the visuals that contribute at least fifty percent of the page's serious tone. Still, it's easy to imagine a modern writer-- say, Peter David-- trying to dialogue the same page, and missing the boat entirely. Lee's amateur experience in the theater, however limited, seems to have contributed to his sense of how to show characters both in their "light" and "heavy" moods.

My personal interpretation of Feige is that he's someone who may have read Marvel Comics like a demon, but who was into Marvel, like many readers, mainly for the jokes. The rapid-fire quips of Downey's Tony Stark read a lot more like the snappy patter of the Stan Lee persona than they do like the relatively sober-sided Stark of the comics. Feige even showed some facility with characters with a basically serious outlook, like the Evans version of Captain America, finding ways to exploit humor in other characters without hamming up the main hero.

In the first two THOR films, one can see Fighe and his collaborators trying to do something similar, keeping Thor basically serious while allowing support-characters-- in particular Kat Dennings' "Darcy"-- to provide the humor. That said, Fighe's Thor films don't really make any organized attempts at "high seriousness." The wars of the gods and the giants have no more mythic resonance than the opposing parties of a videogame, and thus it's not surprising that the figure of Hela the Death-Goddess becomes similarly over-simplified in RAGNAROK.

The only other time that Feige attempted another Marvel feature grounded in Lee's lowbrow version of high seriousness was the 2016 DOCTOR STRANGE. I've not yet been able to force myself to re-watch this artless adaptation for purposes of review. But the mere fact that it had to import some dumbed-down humor into the straight-laced STRANGE mythos in the form of the master magician's CAPE speaks volumes about the producers' inability to do anything without the support of jokes, no matter how inane. Thus I shouldn't have been surprised when THOR RAGNAROK stuck a bunch of pratfalls into the encounter of two of Stan Lee's more poker-faced characters, the thunder-god and the master of the mystic arts.

Before seeing RAGNAROK, I had numerous warnings as to how much comedy to expect, but I like to think that I kept an open mind, hoping for something no better or worse than the two GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY films. But when the film started out with Thor, chained in Muspelheim and teasing info out of evil Surtur--

-- and I realized that it was just a steal from a similar scene in 2012's AVENGERS, with a bound Black Widow interrogating her captors--

-- it became clear to me that Feige's MCU is beginning to cannibalize itself, and with less interesting results that when Marvel Comics began repeating themselves so badly in the 1970s.

THE ONLY DEFINITION OF ART YOU'LL EVER NEED, PT. 3

The promised definition of "art" has to be a two-part one, given that the word "art" has two different meanings in this context-- said context being apart from art as "representations through drawing, sculpture, etc." and everything that flows from this representational activity.

The word can mean the totality of all forms of art, which I've stated can be subsumed by Jung's concept of play. 

It can also mean only High Art, which as I argued in Part 2, cannot be properly described as "play" alone.

I considered putting forth a longer definition with special reference to Bataille's "two types of economic consumption," lining up "the reality-oriented aspect of consumption, "production and acquisition" with the dynamic of work and "the desire to pointlessly but satisfyingly expend one's energies" with the dynamic of play.  But as I reread the BACK TO BATAILLE essay, the comparisons seem obvious to me given my further parallels between "the two types" and my Wheelwright-derived concepts of "assertorial gravity" and "assertorial levity."  By now, anyone who's read this blog with any attention ought to be able to draw the applicable parallels.

Therefore, the second definition is as follows:

"Art is play for work's sake."

While the first, more inclusive definition would be:

"Art is play for work's sake and play for play's sake."

To quote John Keats:

"that is all /Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"

HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 2

For some time I've tended to see a polarity between the above-named scenarios.  I mentioned in this 2010 essay, which addresses the multivalence of the genres "crime" and "horror," that in practice both were dominated by the dramatic mythos.  In various academic essays I've seen efforts to treat them, at least in their 1930s film-manifestations, as parallel genres, since both deal with the destruction of a "monster" that imperils society.  Robin Wood, speaking solely of horror, boiled the genre down to the phrase, "Normalcy is threatened by the monster."

In the first part of HERO VS. VILLAIN I aligned drama with irony in terms of what Theodor Gaster terms *kenosis,* the process that expels harmful energy from society, and adventure with comedy in terms of *plerosis,* the process that brings positive energy back into the community, in the following terms:

,,,plerosis is best conceived as the life-force engendered by the contest of hero-and-villain, taken seriously for the adventure and humorously for the comedy, while life is purged or otherwise compromised in the black-comic irony and in the drama.

Now, having meditated awhile on Schopenhauer's distinctions between the homogenous status of "serious" discourse versus the heterogenous status of "comic" discourse, the above thought requires some modification.

As noted in this essay, Schopenhauer determined his assessment of either homogeneity or heterogeneity with respect to the agreement or disageement between "perceptual representations" and "conceptual representations." In order for me to apply these principles to literature, I had to make the distinction that in a literary world the former meant the verisimilitude within a given world, while the latter meant the expectations that the audience brought to the work.

In the second part, I argued that Schopenhauer's term "objective" compared well with both the irony and the drama-- and thus with Freud's so-called "reality principle"-- and the term "subjective" could be aligned with the adventure and the comedy, and thus with the "pleasure principle."  But what's the nature of the disagreement in the heterogenous forms, "irony" and "comedy?"

The nature as I express it is summed up by the different metaphors of "hero vs. villain" (pleasure principle) and "monster vs. victim" (the reality principle).

In the adventure-tale, every internal aspect of its world is dominated by the need for the hero to win out in the end, which is made credible to the audience by the fact that the hero possesses above-average combative power/skill.  Thus both "percept" and "concept" are homogenous because both are dominated by the pleasure principle. expressed by the metaphorical phrase "hero over villain."

In the dramatic story, every internal aspect is dominated by the possibility that the hero may fail, and that even if he wins, his triumph will evince substantial *pathos.*  Thus every aspect of the world is meant to convey the possibility of failure, in keeping with the expectations of the audience, rendering the two potentialities homogenous as well.  The hero's power of action is often compromised, so that it's credible when and if he meets a dire fate-- which fate is summed up by the triumph of "monster over victim," aka the reality principle.  

Now, Northrop Frye often alludes the idea that the irony reverses many tropes of the adventure, and the comedy of the drama, and Schopenhauer *might* say that it is because the latter two express heterogeneity between "percept" and "concept."  I express the first reversal as "villain over hero." As noted many times before, the hero of the irony is even more compromised than the hero of the drama, meaning that even when he has power he has no positive power-of-action.  But because the reader's level of conviction has dropped precipitously, the reader no longer identifies strongly with the disempowered hero, but instead views the hero's reduction by the reality principle in ironic, humorous terms.  Thus the reality principle dominating the world is reversed in terms of its effect, yielding a heterogenous form of pleasure.

Finally, the world of the comedy is dominated by the reversal "victim over monster."  Thus, though the comic hero usually does not possess the heroic stature one would expect of anyone able to conquer monsters (be they real monsters, criminals, heavy fathers or whatever)-- and thus sacrifices the verisimilitude logic would demand-- the world, dominated by the pleasure principle, is oriented on giving the comic hero a "free pass" that allows him to triumph-- though in some ways the compromise makes it clear that the reader gains that pleasure by "foul means" rather than the "fair means" of the adventure-mythos.  This too is entirely congruous with Schopenhauer's remarks on the nature of this type of humor.

As far as *plerosis* and *kenosis" are concerned, however, it doesn't matter whether they are reached by fair means or foul-- or homogenous or heterogenous devices.  Thus my earlier assignment of comedy and adventure to *plerosis,* and irony and drama to *kenosis,* remains applicable.

ASSERTORIAL ASIDE

Just a quick preface to the promised sequel to HERO AND VILLAIN, MONSTER AND VICTIM:

At the end of Part 2 of WHEN TITANS GET CROSS-COMPARED I assigned to each Fryean mythos a trinity of Schopenhauer-derived qualities:

ADVENTURE // "subjective" // "pleasure principle" // homogeneity of percept and concept, so "serious"
DRAMA // "objective" // "reality principle" // homogeneity of percept and concept, so "serious"
IRONY // "objective" // "reality principle" // heterogenity of percept and concept, so "humorous"
COMEDY // "subjective" // "pleasure principle" // heterogeneity of percept and concept, so "humorous"

In Part 2 I'll be exploring how comedy is heterogenous to its dominant pleasure principle whereas adventure is homogenous toward the same principle, as well as irony in comparison with drama in the same constellation.

But given the fact that Freud's famous two principles include a reference to "reality," I first want to make clear that when I say that "reality" dominates the drama and the irony, I'm talking about a principle that overarcs two other principles introduced earlier: those of "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism."  I explored these two concepts with some attention to their effects in BACK TO BATAILLE 2:

... my "works of thematic realism" are characterized by a greater degree of *assertorial gravity* than the opposing kind, while "works of thematic escapism" are characterized by a greater degree of *assertorial levity.* 

Keeping that in mind, I want to specify that this applies to thematic concerns only, and not to their opppsite, the *narrative* concerns, the question as to how the narrative itself works.

It should be clear that even though popular fiction's thematic values are closer to escapism, in a narrative sense they still follow the same patterns as works of thematic realism. 

Thus, when I say that HARRY POTTER, being a drama, is dominated by the reality principle, this means in terms of its narrative values.  One might decide that another drama involving magical characters-- let us say Shakespeare's TEMPEST-- is more devoted to thematic concerns of the realistic, rather than the escapist, variety.

*Even saying that,* it's quite possible that in a *narrative* sense, POTTER and TEMPEST can be equals no matter how they diverge in thematic terms. Narratively both Potter and Prospero follow the purgative processes of the drama, in which they survive peril but are somewhat compromised by their efforts. 

Naturally, the same principles apply across the board to the other mythoi; my other earlier examples-- BUFFY, MARSHAL LAW, and RANMA 1/2-- belong like POTTER to the world of thematic escapism.  I emphasize that narrative concerns and thematic concerns are not identical because so many critics over the last century have misunderstood this basic facet of literature.

GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4

I established in Part 3 that Northrop Frye had dealt with the nature of protagonists’ power-of-action—henceforth called *dynamis*—purely in terms of its physical nature within the story, which would make it a “narrative value.” However, *dynamis* of any kind or degree must possess “significant values” as well.  As I observed here, *dynamis* can apply to either of the principal axes of narrative—plot or character—though in this essay I will deal with it only with respect to characters.

At present I’ve discerned only two (though there may be more) universally applicable significant values.  Universality means that they will apply to any *dynamis,* no matter whether one speaks of characters who symbolize “might” in their respective narrative worlds—which can be anything from Superman to Dirty Harry—or those who represent a more compromised form of *dynamis,* as with Kafla’s “Joseph K” or Graham Greene’s Henry Scobie, who both exist primarly not to act but to suffer.

The first significant value is “centricity.”  As noted here it is possible that a “focal presence” need not be the viewpoint character; rather, the focal character is simply the focus of the author’s narrative concerns, which the viewpoint character may only exist to illuminate.  The “focal presence” can even be a setting rather than a character, such as Carroll’s Wonderland or Verne’s Center of the Earth.  I note that this need not contradict my earlier statement re: character if one remembers that Aristotle deemed setting and character as subsumable under “ethos.”

  I’ll explore the permutations of centricity further in another essay, but for now, what I’ve written on focal presences seems sufficient.  As a significant value it serves to clarify that the focal presence’s power-of-action may be more important to the story than that of an opponent’s, even if in a physical sense the opponent’s power may seem greater, as seen in the contest between Wagner’s knight Parzival and his sorcerer-villain Klingsor.

The other significant value, the one I referenced at the end of NOTES, requires much more explanation.  The value alludes to the unique ways in which audience-members relate to each mythos in terms of identifying their real-world concerns with those of the characters.  Readers should recall that in Part 1 of this essay-series, I based my discussion of this interaction in terms of Schopenhauer’s incongruity theory of humor.  Works which demonstrated a strong degree of congruence between character-concerns and audience-concerns I characterized as possessing “tonal gravity;” works which demonstrated a strong degree of incongruence between character-concerns and audience-concerns I characterized as possessing “tonal levity.”

For this reason I considered using “congruence” as a rubric to describe a significant value that embraces all these manifestations.  But the idea of congruence is purely relational: it doesn’t adequately define the affects arising from “gravity” and “levity.”

Thus I choose to swipe another academic’s term and put my spin on it: in this case, film-critic James Monaco’s concept of *conviction,* which in my re-interpretation adequately describes the emotional tenor experienced by the audience-members as they discern what level of gravity or levity is appropriate to the narrative mythos in question.

Now, in “Theory of Modes” Frye explores the manifestation of the physical *dynamis* in his mythoi along the pattern of Aristotle, so that this schema follows this downward progression:

Romance / Tragedy / Comedy / Irony

However, this is not the order Frye follows when he’s describing how the mythoi progress in accordance with the patterning of seasonal rituals.  This progression is as follows:

Romance—The ritual of summer
Tragedy—The ritual of autumn
Irony—The ritual of winter
Comedy—The ritual of spring

Of these two patterns, I see the process of the audience’s identificatory conviction as matching that of the seasons.

Conviction, I assert, is at its strongest and most elemental when one is invested in the visceral struggles of the adventure-mythos.  This does not mean that every work in the adventure-mythos conjures forth this deep level of conviction: obviously many make the attempt but do not succeed.  But when the mythos is executed at its height of performance, the audience will experience near-total identification with the hero’s struggle to thwart the forces of evil and destruction.  Summer is still a period of relative vitality, so the audience can invest fully in the possibility of the hero’s triumph.  For tribal man, such victories became relevant to assert the martial spirit of the tribe, for in just three months the forces of seasonal “evil” would begin to eclipse those of good.

Conviction becomes somewhat weaker in the autumnal drama.  As noted many times before, I chose the term “drama” over “tragedy” because in common parlance many people assume that every tragedy ends badly.  Not even Aristotle claimed this, despite the fact that his endorsement of what we now call “the fatal flaw” contributed to the confusion.  In contrast, audiences are accustomed to thinking of dramatic stories as being narratives that may turn out well or badly for the protagonist(s).  However, the mere fact that the audience knows that failure is more possible results in a pulling-back from identification to some degree.  One wants to watch the logical consequences of Gloucester blinding himself as a self-punishment for his figurative blindness, but one does not identify with Gloucester or even Lear in quite the same uncritical manner.  Even in a drama that turns out well for the protagonists in the end, such as Euripides’ IPHEGENIA AT TAURUS, the possibilities of triumph seem yet dimmer, the protagonists’ *dynamis* more in danger of being outmatched.

Autumn still allows for good or bad fortune to win out, but winter is the domain of the irony, where the forces of vitality and *dynamis* are at their lowest ebb.  Conviction is even “lighter” as this point: the audience recognizes that the odds are stacked against the protagonists from the beginning and that the best the heroes can achieve is to find some marginal haven from the ever-present forces of evil, a fate which befalls the surviving protagonists of both CANDIDE and THE WATCHMEN.  Since the very meaning of “irony” is that it says one thing but means another, the audience can take some measure of pleasure from seeing the near-powerless heroes put through their paces, and even treat their fates as a sort of gigantic cosmic joke.

However, winter is at last banished by the forces of good, albeit in a more innocent, less bellicose guise than they assume in summertime.  In spring, the world is reborn from what seems absolute darkness and lack of vitality.  This redemption elicits a joyful response to the very absurdity that, within the mythos of irony, is only a cruel sort of joke.  The unserious aspects of life then assume a life-enhancing quality, comparable to the triumphs of the adventure-mythos but with less sense that the triumphs have been earned in a “serious” sense.  Dumb luck tends to govern the mythos of comedy, as Frye himself observes: “As the main character interest in comedy is so often focused on the defeated characters [at the story’s beginning, I think Frye means], comedy regularly illustrates a victory of arbitrary plot over consistency of character.”  This arbitrariness, this freedom from real consequence, is the reason I consider the comedy-mythos to be the one in which the audience holds the least degree of conviction—though such levity is precisely comedy’s appeal. I note in passing that in common parlance the word “levity” almost applies to this sort of humor, not to the more dolorous forms of irony and satire.  But even if human desire could keep one up in Cloud-Cuckoo Land forever, the seasons will continue their relentless turnings, and so the audience will inevitably proceed from least conviction to greatest conviction, as it readies itself to fight the forces of evil once again.

While the significant value of centricity applies across the board to all mythoi—though I note that I’ve never seen an adventure-story in which the setting was the real star— the significant value of identificatory conviction waxes and wanes according to the audience’s expectations of a given mythos.

Apart from being used to chart the admittedly abstract progressions of literary response, the concept of conviction also provides a tool for better sussing out how different fictional characters align with a given mythos.  In BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER I placed four supernormal characters within each of the four mythoi, but their placements become more logical once the value of conviction provides an intersubjectively-objective justification for their respective assignments.    

GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 3

In Part 2 of this essay-series I alluded to, but did not explain, a dichotomy between two distinct aspects of the power of action, aspects which Frye suggests in other writings but does not formulate in his rethinking of Aristotle at the beginning of the "Theory of Modes" chapter of ANATOMY OF CRITICISM:

In the second paragraph of the Poetics Aristotle speaks of the differences in works of fiction which are caused by the different elevations of the characters in them. In some fictions, he says, the characters are better than we are, in others worse, in still others on the same level. This passage has not received much attention from modern critics, as the importance Aristotle assigns to goodness and badness seems to indicate a somewhat narrowly moralistic view of literature. Aristotle's words for good and bad, however, are spouddos and phaulos, which have a figurative sense of weighty and light. In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, there fore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero's power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.-- Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

Frye's interpretation of Aristotle's terms make a fair comparison with those I've introduced in previous parts of this essay: "tonal levity" for comedy and irony, "tonal gravity" for drama and adventure.  Like Frye and unlike Aristotle, I'm not interested in viewing these qualities of weightiness and lightness in terms of moral rectitude.  However, Frye may have erred by defining "power of action" purely in physical terms.  In my comparison between PLANET OF THE APES and KAMANDI, I noted that the protagonists of these works-- possessing similar subject matter though very different themes-- might have near-identical physical abilities, yet the way those abilities manifested in the narratives could be very different.

Taylor and Kamandi, both of whom are tough human beings with no fantastic powers or weapons, are identical in terms of their *physical* power of action, but not in terms of their *thematic* power of action. 

In this essay and others I've drawn attention to a dichotomy Frye introduced about 4-5 years before the publication of ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, in an essay entitled "The Archetypes of Literature," sort of a dry run for ANATOMY.  The dichotomy was between what he called the "narrative values" and the "significant values" of any given narrative.  The former set of values denote those aspects of the narrative that are important to its function as a narrative, while the latter set are relevant to those that cause the narrative to be significant to audiences in a moral, ethical or aesthetic sense (my definition).  As it happens, though Frye does not repeat these terms in ANATOMY, he does, within the same chapter that introduces his reformulation of "power of action," draw a distinction between "fictional modes" and "thematic modes."  These are so close in essence to the earlier terms that I choose to keep using the earlier ones.

In this early essay I summarized the ways in which Frye defines "power of action" into five different modes, only four of which were applicable to literature proper, and which generated the mythoi I've re-termed "adventure, comedy, drama, and irony."  Yet in essays like this one, I've tangentially pointed out that in none of these mythoi are the protagonists limited in terms of PHYSICAL power.  All four-- Buffy the Vampire Slayer (representing adventure), Harry Potter (drama), Ranma Saotome (comedy), and the so-called "Watchmen" (irony)-- incarnate various degrees of marvelous power.

A strictly "narrative values" interpretation of Frye's formula could not allow for such distribution of power.  Frye allots the idea of heroes who perform marvelous actions to the mode/mythos of "romance" alone:

If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established.

In all likelihood, given that Frye was primarily focused on medieval and Renaissance works, it's likely that within his specialty one usually did not see "prodigies of courage and endurance" or "talismans of miraculous power" anywhere in any literary category save that which he calls the "romance," and which I've termed "adventure."  But plainly in many types of later literature, marvelous powers are not confined to the heroes of the adventure-mythos.

This means that if anything separates such super-powered heroes as Buffy, Harry, Ranma and (just to choose one "Watchman") Doctor Manhattan, it's not the NARRATIVE nature of their "power of action," but the SIGNIFICANT nature, the nature that determines to what thematic ends the power is used.

More later.

GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 2

In Part 1 I formulated the concepts of "tonal levity," which governs the dynamizations of comedy and irony, and of "tonal gravity," which governs the dynamizations of drama and adventure.  The main focus of both principles is the congruity, or lack of congruity, between the interests of the fictional narrative's protagonists and those of the viewing/listening audience:

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of *tonal gravity,* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity,* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

Though I also provided a brief comparison between two SF-works, using one (PLANET OF THE APES) as an example of tonal levity, and another (STAR WARS) as an example of tonal gravity, I didn't address the original problem: why does it seem, in an intersubjective sense, that sublimity/"the sense of wonder" is more often perceived in works of tonal gravity than in works of tonal levity.

Kant suggests a starting-point in his defintion of the sublime.  For Kant, the only way a subject can experience the aspect of the sublime is if, while observing the might and magnificence of a given phenomenon (for Kant, natural wonders), the subject can feel safe enough from natural disaster to contemplate the phenomenon.  Though Kant does not clearly locate the sublime in art, as Burke and Schopenhauer do, this "position of safety" does resemble that of the invested audience-member, who is "drawn down" into investment in the interests of the characters.  Thus the viewer of Kant's sublime takes the threat of the phenomenon "seriously," in that he can imagine being caught up in it even though he is reasonably safe from that peril.  This suggests that in order to experience the sublime a sense of "gravity" is necessary.

The mode of "levity," however, convinces the subject that he is essentially independent of the world of grave consequences.  In this mood the Kantian paradigm of the subject faced with awesome natural phenomenon takes a different course: feeling himself safe, this subject laughs at the inability of natural forces to touch him.  In fictional narrative, the audience-subject may read about any number of perils to the lives of comic or ironic characters.  But the audience-member has learned not to invest too much interest in these types of characters.  The comic ones will usually be saved by fortunate fate; the ironic ones are doomed from the start.  In adventure and drama, there is generally more emphasis upon what Frye calls the characters' "power of action," which I'll be exploring more thoroughly in Part 3.

While STAR WARS and PLANET OF THE APES are adequate broad examples of my concepts, a narrower application can be seen using works that involve similar subject matter.

I would not claim that there are no attempts to conjure forth the "sense of wonder" in the 1968 film PLANET OF THE APES.  As I note in my review, roughly half an hour ensues before the film's protagonists-- a group of Earth-astronauts, who will soon be whittled down to just one protagonist named Taylor-- encounter the society of the apes. 

 
There is a strong, if possibly negative, "sense of wonder" attached to seeing humanoid apes usurp all the functions of mankind, including treating human beings as if they were mere "dumb animals." I myself, on a recent viewing, almost judged the film a "drama" in my initial review (the correction appears in the essay), until I realized that Taylor's "power of action" is not commensurate with that of the majority of dramatic protagonists, nor did the plot allow for what Aristotle termed the "reversal" that takes one from good to bad or from bad to good.  Taylor allows himself to hope that his situation may improve, but when that hope is cruelly crushed by the film's final revelation, the only "reversal" is one of "from bad to worse."  The film's scenes of social satire, though I found them overly long, are nevertheless vital to seeing that the world of the APES is one which Northrop Frye calls a "demonic epiphany"-- particularly of the type where one sees that "the goal of the quest isn't there." 

Contrast this film to KAMANDI, the popular Jack Kirby comic book which took its inspiration, however indirectly, from the APES films.

Kirby's work was of course conceived to be an ongoing serial from the beginning, while PLANET OF THE APES only begat sequels once the initial film-- potentially a stand-alone work-- proved successful.  However, though Kirby occasionally includes moments of loony comedy or even existential despair in the adventures of the "Last Boy on Earth," the cumulative emphasis is principally upon hot-blooded adventure, as with the combat-scene shown above.  Taylor and Kamandi, both of whom are tough human beings with no fantastic powers or weapons, are identical in terms of their *physical* power of action, but not in terms of their *thematic* power of action.  Because the audience-subject can potentially invest himself in the myriad adventures of Kamandi without reserve, Kamandi's world-- where assorted other humanoid animals have joined apes in usurping man's birthright-- is a place of endless wonder, and therefore, an uncompromised vision of sublimity.

The mythos of the comedy invokes tonal levity after a different fashion, and for a different purpose, though one might assert that it ends up with the same basic "unserious" affect of the irony.  For an example of this mythos, I turn from an "animal society" to an "Amazon society," largely because I have already discussed the appearance of sublimity in a review of this comically-themed film.

INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES, which is by no means as well known as the previous two examples for irony and adventure respectively, neverthless illustrates my point as to how the effect of sublimity can be present and yet be defused by the devices of tonal levity.

In my review of INVASION, I didn't prize its actual humor very highly, but I noted that the script did have some "insights" into what made the more serious versions of its SF-tropes successful.  The story's main conflict takes place between two foolish protagonists attempting to keep two representatives of an alien, Amazon-like society from conquering Earth.  I appreciated the fact that these "space Amazons" were something of a reversal of the normal depiction of such types in "serious" SF films of the time:

The space amazons are, in essence, the element of Haze’s script that most pushes the crude humor from the ridiculous to the sublime. Sci-fi cinema of the 1950s sports a fair number of stories about alien worlds ruled by women, as seen in 1954’s CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON and 1958’s QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. In these films the females possess technology superior to that of Earth, but their feminine emotions make them vulnerable to the charms of hunky Earthmen. INVASION follows this basic pattern, but Tanga and Puna are scientists who are far more intelligent than any Earth-denizen in the story, rather than simply inheriting technology from their culture. Their ability to loom over the short soldiers is of course exploited for sex appeal—lots of shots of Philbrick looking straight up into Puna’s cleavage—but it also allows an interesting reversal, in that Puna and Tanga can and do frequently push or knock the two males about with impunity.

I also had some praise for the fact that the scripter actually devoted a little thought as to how the aliens' society functioned, at least enough thought that it could've passed for the average space-opera tale.  However, though the film makes no bones about the fact that the Amazons are both physically and intellectually superior to the dim-witted Earthmen, any "sense of wonder" one might have toward the Amazons-- that is, "wonder" apart from your basic lust-- is squelched by the way the two schmuck-heroes triumph by sheer dumb luck: that "fortunate fate" I mentioned earlier.  One shot of the Amazons' reduced status by picture's end probably captures best the levity-stratagems involved here:

To complete this comparison, I'll choose one of the "serious" films that may have served as the inspiration to INVASION.  Admittedly CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON is given such a cheapjack and clumsy presentation that many viewers have probably enjoyed it less as a drama than an unintentional comedy:

Nevertheless, the basic theme of a female society seeking to subvert male-dominated Earth society is played essentially straight, in keeping with this description from the site MONSTER SHACK:

 A popular film genre during the 1950′s and 1960′s was the "Amazon" film. The plot typically revolves around a group of men who discover a secluded society of women who have no apparent need of men. The "Amazon" society is often ruled by a dictatorial "Queen" with the power of life and death over her subjects, yet despite this overbearing totalitarian government, the women somehow consider themselves to be more "advanced" than the "primitive" culture of "men". Due to the fact that they are cut off from the opposite sex, Amazons usually have underdeveloped or nonexistent emotions, often with no idea what "love" means. The dashing men swoop into the Amazon society (usually taken prisoner in the process) and are typically sentenced to death by the jealous and possessive "Queen". At the last moment, one or more of the Amazon women fall in love with the men and betray their society in an effort to save their new found "mates". The Amazon Queen almost always die in the end (at the hands of the men), thus releasing her followers from their draconian existence and giving them the freedom to feel love and emotion for the first time.

While this summation can't help but sound risible, the theme of male-dominated society-- represented by stalwart Earth-astronauts voyaging to the moon-- versus the insidious persuasive power of the alien "cat women"-- is one in which a viewer *could* be seriously invested, if the film was not handicapped in terms of its presentation.  The scene above shows Helen, the one female astronaut (Marie Windsor), being mesmerized to join the society of the Cat Women, who wish her to betray the men in the moon-expedition.  Significantly, the only way that the hero can break the spell on Helen is with good old masculine force:

Doug rushes back and tells Kip what the Cat-Women are up to. Kip, of course, is already aware of the plans from his previous chat with Helen, but it suddenly hits him that Helen is back under the Cat-Women’s control, and is getting information from Laird in the other room. (Alpha is then receiving what Laird says about the ship via telepathy.) Kip rushes into the room and finally discovers that if he can cover the moon-symbol on Helen’s hand, she will be freed of the Cat-Women’s mind control. (Are you following all this?)

Kip forcefully grabs her hand and covers the moon mark, breaking the spell.

As the review covers in greater depth, this display of force also awakens Helen to her love for Kip, which in theory is supposed to arouse the identificatory responses in the audience, since the film encourages audiences to want to see the characters together.  The defeat of the Cat Women depends less on full-fledged heroic activity than any roughly comparable situation in KAMANDI, so this is a lower level of the "power of action," one more befitting the label of "drama."  Nevertheless, Commander Kip and his buddies are not, like Penn and Philbrick of INVASION, depending on dumb luck to save their bacon.

Further, though the film botches the poetic resonance inherent in the title, it's certainly feasible that the basic association of "cats," "women," and Earth's lunar satellite could be conveyed so that the film succeeded in conjuring the sense-of-wonder.  And 1950s cinema is replete with more than a few examples where this sort of "feminine sublimity" was successfully conjured.  CAT WOMEN is, sadly, the closest thing the period offers to a "serious" take on alien Amazons. 

In conclusion, the basic effect of the comic or ironic strategies characteristic of tonal levity-works is that they defuse the "gravity" of the potentially sublime phenomenon, so that the audience-subject is no longer fully invested in it. Without full investment, the subject rises above the sense of grave consequence, and in the safety of being on the other side of the page, or screen, he can laugh-- whether heartily or bitterly-- at the storm's fury.

GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 1

For the last week I've been meditating over the question, "Does sublimity (a.k.a. "the sense of wonder") occur in all four Fryean mythoi equally?  The answer-- "no"-- is easy.  Figuring out why it should be so is a bit more involved.

I've noted before that of all the major philosophers to write about sublimity in connection with literature, Edmund Burke is one of the most profligate in providing examples.  However, I note that most of his examples fall into one of two mythoi: the "drama" (PARADISE LOST, HENRY IV) or the "adventure" (THE FAERIE QUEENE).  Schopenhauer, for his part, recognizes only "tragedy" (which I regard as identical with the category "drama") as sublime.

Moving to those readerships concerned with "the sense of wonder," it's my informal impression that when fans of fantasy and SF wax enthusiastic about those works with that quality, they rarely if ever center upon works of the other two mythoi, "comedy" and "irony."  In the domain of prose, works like Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS are celebrated for their ability to elicit wonder.  But though one can find science-fictional marvels and magical mysteries in such works as Fredric Brown's WHAT MAD UNIVERSE or the deCamp-Pratt COMPLEAT ENCHANTER, I would say such works-- both of which are comedies-- are never celebrated for the "sense of wonder."  Ironic science fiction is often celebrated for its intellectual rigor-- indeed, if one reads Kingsley Amis' NEW MAPS FROM HELL, one gets the impression that no one ever wrote good SF but Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth-- but Amis praises them for satirical visions, not for the "sense of wonder."

So, are comedy and irony in some way inimical to the sense of wonder? In the essay REFINING THE DEFINING I placed them in opposition to drama and adventure:

The drama and the adventure, often perceived as two "serious" types of entertainment, are easy to confound, even as are the two types of "unserious" entertainment, comedy and irony.

However, I haven't yet devoted a great deal of attention to what separates notions of "serious" and "unserious" fiction. Since I've noted before that I subscribe largely to Schopenhauer's "incongruity theory" of humor, it behooves me to quote "Uncle Arthur" once again:

“The opposite of laughter and joking is seriousness. This, accordingly, consists in the consciousness of the perfect agreement and congruity of the concept, or the idea, with what is perceptive, with reality. The serious person is convinced that he conceives things as they are, and that they are as he conceives them. This is just why the transition from profound seriousness to laughter is particularly easy, and can be brought about by trifles.”—Arthur Schopenhauer, WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION (trans. Payne), p. 99.

Elsewhere in WORLD the philosopher also speaks of "drama or descriptive poetry"-- which I understand to connote narrative art as a whole-- in these terms:

we call drama or descriptive poetry interesting when it represents events and actions of a kind which necessarily arouse concern or sympathy, like that which we feel in real events involving our own person.

Taking the two statements together, it seems not unreasonable to hypothesize that in narrative fiction "the perfect agreement of the concept, or the idea, with what is perceptive, with reality" accords with the idea of a reader's investment in the narrative's events as if they arouse straightforward "concern or sympathy."  However, if events in the narrative undermines the reader's investment because they seem incongruous, then the reader, while not necessarily losing all "concern and sympathy," is moved to a humorous reaction, which may vary along a wide spectrum of affects from the deep belly-laugh to the more intellectualized "I laugh that I might not weep" response.
Thus I suggest this dichotomy:

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment seems entirely congruous with the "interests" that the fictional characters have in their own fictional lives, are governed by the principle of  *tonal gravity,* in that the reader feels himself "drawn down" into the characters' interests.

Works in which the reader's identificatory investment becomes at odds with the "interests" of the fictional characters are governed by the principle of *tonal levity,* in that the reader "floats free" of that investment and is moved away from "concern and sympathy" and toward a humorous or at least distanced response.

I'm moved to add that most narrative works borrow from both principles at varying times, though I stand by my assertion that every narrative work has a fundamental core that inclines it more to one of the four mythoi over the other three.  Narratives of drama and adventure frequently use humor to break up the relentless seriousness of the story, while narratives of comedy and irony must usually invoke some notion of fateful consequence to keep the reader "interested" in the character's experiences.   But though a film like STAR WARS often uses humor to temporarily dispel tension, the audience recognizes that the humorous moments don't determine the thrust of the narrative, and so the brief appeals to "tonal levity" don't dispel the watchers' investment in seeing the characters live or die.   Conversely, PLANET OF THE APES uses many devices taken from adventure-narratives to make the audience partially invested in the fate of Charlton Heston's astronaut Taylor.  But the spectacle of the intelligent apes repeating all of mankind's old mistakes-- particularly religious fanaticism-- evokes a wry sense of humor in the viewer, confirming the dark pessimism that Taylor expresses early in the film.  Taylor's heroic exertions almost dispel his pessimism, but this development merely sets him up as the butt of a colossal ironic joke, as he's plunged back into despair by the "statuesque" proof of man's stupidity.  Admittedly PLANET's conclusion is supposed to be more sobering than funny, but I'd argue that it still conforms to the principle of "tonal levity" in that the viewer has become distanced from the protagonist's travails.

I'll explore these concepts more in further essays, but I'll note in closing that neither "levity" nor "gravity" lines up with two similar-sounding concepts introduced here long ago, "thematic realism" and "thematic escapism."  While the former terms are specifically oriented toward sussing out the nature of two opposed sets of mythoi-- one which includes two dominantly "serious" mythoi and one which includes two dominantly "unserious" mythoi-- the latter terms apply to any mythos across the board.  "Thematic realism" connotes the attempt of authors to reflect "real-world" concerns in their fiction, while "thematic escapism" connotes the attempt to take "a vacation from morals."
Thus, were I asked for a random film-example for each mythos and each thematic focus, I would write something like this:

THEMATIC REALISM                                   THEMATIC ESCAPISM

Comedy-- MODERN TIMES                        Comedy-- WAYNE'S WORLD
Adventure-- THE WIND AND THE LION           Adventure-- STAR WARS
Drama-- BLADE RUNNER                                  Drama-- DRACULA
Irony-- PLANET OF THE APES            Irony-- 1934's THE BLACK CAT