My currently definitive statement on the factors that distinguish superordinate from subordinate characters, formulated in EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PART 2, comes down to this: all presences in a given narrative are capable of generating a certain level of *charisma*, but only the superordinate presences can possess *stature,* which indicates their role as the organizing factors of the given narrative. Subordinate presences may sometimes possess greater *charisma* than the superordinate presences, as Nancy Springer (cited in the above post) judged with regard to the characters of Scott's IVANHOE; charisma merely indicating the extent to which readers become invested in characters or other phenomena. To reiterate the "vector" argument, the presences possessing *stature* always possess superior vectors of that type of authorial will in comparison to the subordinate presences, while the presences possessing superior *charisma* vectors may be either superordinate or subordinate presences.
Now, I have not devoted more than a handful of ARCHIVE posts to crossovers, even though that literary phenomenon has some interesting applications to my many posts on the concept of centricity-- not least because when a character created for one narrative crosses over into another narrative mythos, the character may either retain the same stature, have slightly less stature, or may simply have variable degrees of charisma but no stature at all.
Take as a quick example the character of Fu Manchu. Within all of the Sax Rohmer stories, the "devil doctor" is without question the superordinate character. Rohmer often brings in other heroes to assist the doctor's implacable foe Sir Denis Nayland Smith, mostly in order to pursue new romantic arcs for the younger men, but even Smith, who appears in all of the stories, cannot surpass Fu Manchu in either stature or charisma. So in the original stories, the doctor is a Prime.
However, when the character was licensed to Marvel in the 1970s, he became a Sub, a subordinate presence, to his son Shang-Chi in the comics series MASTER OF KUNG FU. Some stories pitting son against father were quite good while many were inferior, though it's arguable that even in the worst stories, Fu still displayed a greater vector of charisma than your average toss-off villain.
All that said, it's certainly not impossible for someone to use Fu Manchu-- or any other narrative presence-- as a figure with a very small vector of both stature AND charisma. In the 1938 theater-cartoon HAVE YOU GOT ANY CASTLES, four "literary monsters"-- Fu, Mister Hyde, Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera-- appear in one small vignette where they start out roaring at the audience, and then perform a foofy minuet to undercut their own fierceness.
Yet in 1984, Fu finally received at least co-starring Prime status in a crossover novel, Cay Van Ash's TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, in which the doctor crosses swords with an aging Sherlock Holmes.
Most of my posts on crossovers appeared on what I like to call my "junk-drawer" blog, OUROBOROS DREAMS. I pursued a "best crossovers" project for a time, but the essay that concretized my earliest thoughts on the subject appeared in a 2014 post. The relevant insights are as follows:
Some Marxist critics will view such character-crossovers as one of many strategies by which the evil Masters of Mass Culture manipulate their audiences. While such explanations may seem to answer all questions as to the motives of the stories' producers, they don't say anything substantive about why the audiences choose to patronize not just works of mass culture in general, but works in which characters or concepts from different storylines happen to intersect. The usual Marxist explanation is that these audiences want nothing more than mindless divertissement. However, the overlapping of distinct storylines would seem to intensify the degree of mental effort an audience-member must exert in order to participate in the crossover's intersecting universes. For instance, when Rider Haggard takes a character who exists in a moderately realistic universe, i.e., Allan Quatermain, and causes him to encounter a character whose nature is overtly supernatural, Haggard must find some way to treat both characters with integrity, even though the ground rules of their universes are in conflict. I'll discuss this particular example in more depth in an essay devoted to this novel.
It's something of a given in literary criticism to state that audiences, literary or sub-literary, maintain interest in fictional characters by identifying with them. This commonplace observation is not so much wrong as overly simple. As I am what has been called a "myth-critic," I assert that the process of identification comes about as a reader (or viewer) realizes what kind of role the character plays in the story, and what that fictional role means to the reader. This does not mean "identification" in the simple-minded sense of "I want to be like this person," for identification can take place with any number of villains (the Joker, Freddy Krueger), monsters (Godzilla) or even mysterious locales (the subterranean domain of Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth.") It is more properly an appreciation of what I will call the "mana" appropriate to the character or concept's role in the story.
A crossover features at least two characters who have established-- or will establish-- the "mana" that has or might make them popular. In the above example, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed has one type of "mana," while Quatermain has a different type. It is this "clash of energies" that I believe readers enjoy in crossovers, a clash that is radically different from the normative encounters of a hero and his villains.
I would say that what I called "mana" in this post is essentially the same as what I'm now calling "charisma." However, as noted above, not all crossovers maintain the same levels of stature or charisma. For that reason, I find myself making a major distinction about whether or not the narrative presences within a crossover are HIGH in stature, LOW in stature, HIGH in charisma or LOW in charisma. One of the main determining in a character's "high" scores in either stature or charisma is that of sheer *durability." Whether he's a character with just one narrative, like Ivanhoe, or with several, like Fu Manchu, the character may have greater stature or charisma due to his, her, or its role in popular culture.
I will devote the next four posts to various examples of each of the four constellations.
No comments:
Post a Comment