NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 3

In the first two sections of this intermittent essay-series, I argued with myself that the "significant values" of a given work, or set of works, could affect the "narrative values" of the item under discussion.  However, only recently did I consider this effect could be metaphorically illustrated in mathematical terms.

In the original ACTIVE SHARES, PASSIVE SHARES argument, I surveyed the Silver Age Marvel comic-series, of which I said:

I could and did do a statistical survey on another Old West hero: the Rawhide Kid of Marvel Comics, the company descended from the publisher who did "Ringo Kid" in the 1950s. When I counted the number of Rawhide's purely isophenomenal adventures, and compared them with those in which he'd enjoyed encounters with metaphenomenal entities, the latter worked out to about eight percent of the total stories. So, by the "51 percent rule," Rawhide could not belong to "the superhero idiom" any more than could the Ringo Kid.

But this presumes that every metaphenomenal story in the series has exactly the same value as every isophenomenal story; that one story equals a value of "one." Yet in EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, I said:

So I have at least made the essential statement that for the combinatory mode as for the dynamicity-mode, "excess of strength is proof of strength," as Nietzsche aptly said.

By this paradigm, a story with metaphenomenal elements is "stronger" than one without them, if only in the degree to which the former type forces the reader to utilize his imagination. Given that strength even in the non-imaginary world carries more value than comparative weakness, then it's arguable that every metaphenomenal RAWHIDE KID story ought to have a value of more than one.

To be sure, I fudged the original percentages by allowing a value of "one" simply to each issue of RAWHIDE KID, even though some of the earlier issues contain more than one story with the starring character. Since I felt that the feature progressed away from multiple stories fairly soon, I decided I didn't want to count out every story, with the result that I regarded the whole run of the KID as comprising 113 "points" (at least two issues featured reprints before the title went all-reprint).  Of those 113, I considered that 15 of the stories had metaphenomenal content, though I'll note here, as I did not in the earlier essay, that only two of them are "marvelous" and all of the others are "uncanny."

Now, whatever calculator gave me eight percent I evidently misused, because when I tried the operation today, it came out as a little over 14 percent. The error makes no difference to the 51 percent rule: eight and fourteen are equally unable to enjoy a "controlling interest."

So, if I posit that each isophenomenal story, because it makes no great appeal to the imagination, is only worth one point, then that gives 98 points for the roughly 98 isophenomenal stories in the Kid's original run.

Now suppose that I say that a marvelous-metaphenomenal story is worth not one, but five points. Only two stories in the run are unquestionably marvelous in nature, the "Red Raven" story and the "Living Totem" tale, so with those added we have 10 points for the stories themselves, 108 points for the grand total.

Then there are thirteen "uncanny" stories, so I'll arbitrarily assign them three points to each of these. So the subtotal of metaphenomenal stories becomes 10 + 39, equaling 49, and the total points overall are 147. Out of 147, 49 is roughly 33 percent. It's still not 51 percent or more, but it begins to look more like the sort of "passive share" I argued about earlier.

Now, I could continue to jigger the ratings of the metaphenomenal stories until they did raise above fifty-one percent, but if I set that standard in stone, then it would be totally arbitrary. By asserting greater values for the metaphenomenal stories in a merely theoretical manner, this adjusted paradigm adequately illustrates the principle of the passive share I sought to explore.

A contrasting example, brought up in NARRATIVE AND SIGNIFICANT AMPLITUDE PT. 2. was that of the 1960s TV serial LOST IN SPACE. I wasn't concerned with sussing out phenomenology here, but the appearance of the combative mode, and as with RAWHIDE I assigned every story (including parts of continued stories) just one point. Eighty-three stories meant eighty-three total points, Nineteen of the episodes were combative, which registers as 23 percent of the whole.

But to be consistent with my assertions in EXCESSIVE COMBINATORY FORCE, the higher dynamicities of a combative work should be valued higher than those that lack this dynamicity. So the total number of points for the subcombative episodes, assigning each one point, is 64.

Since combative dynamicity doesn't make quite the same appeal to the imagination as does metaphenomenality, I'll conservatively assign the value of three to the nineteen episodes. So the subtotal for the combative episodes is 57 and the overall total is 121. The subtotal is about 44 percent of the total, so it too does not meet the 51 percent criteria, though it too is closer to being a "passive share." However, because combative adventure does not seem to have been as important to LOST IN SPACE as metaphenomenal content was to RAWHIDE KID, it's possible that the significant value of the former might have a negativizing effect upon the whole of the teleseries. More on that later, if I get suitably inspired.