LEGENDS OF YESTERYEAR PT 2

 In the first LEGENDS OF YESTERYEAR, I said:

I won't pause at this time for a rigorous definition of what I mean by "legends," but I think it important to stress that though there are hundreds of famous historical figures who have been committed to fiction, very few of them have taken on the quasi-unreal status of legends. Billy the Kid is such a legend. A later author can imagine him doing all sorts of unhistorical things-- becoming a vampire who fights Bloodrayne, or being taught gunmanship by the Two-Gun Kid, but each fictionalized Billy has that legendary quality. Thus even in a story in which the Kid is a superordinate character, Billy sustains only "crossover-charisma" when he appears alongside a stature-bearing character like Bloodrayne or Two-Gun. In contrast, the vast majority of historical figures, even when they're shown doing unhistorical things, are still no greater than what the reader/audience knows of the originals. Winston Churchill is just Winston Churchill even if he's seen consulting with The Invaders. Adolf Hitler is just Hitler, even if he's depicted as the secret creator of The Red Skull.

When I wrote the above passage almost a full year ago, I was concentrating on creating a coherent lexicon for all possible manifestations of crossovers, so I back-burnered any possible definitions of what I tentatively called "legendary quality." But it came to me recently that legendary or historical fictionalized figures with this "quality," are subsumed by the literary mode I have termed "artifice," while fictionalized figures without such a quality are subsumed by the literary mode I have termed "verisimilitude." 

My most direct comparison of these two modes appeared in ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4, where I paralleled the modes with their literary effects of "affective freedom" (for artifice) and "cognitive restraint" (for verisimilitude):

 "Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude...

Also, in the same essay, I specified that "artifice-tropes" were the source of everything I might have previously styled as "larger than life" in its literary effects. "Verisimilitude-tropes," by contrast, always signal that phenomena within their purview can only be "life-size," reflecting that "adherence" to ordinary, limited experience. (I'll forbear to pursue my additional parallels to the categories of "the limitless" and "the limited" at this time.)

Now, in other essays I've judged as *innominate* both fictionalized figures of history-- which are all I discussed in the except above-- and fictionalized figures of legend. The distinction, which I may not have made clear, is that historical figures are generally well documented as to when they lived and what deeds they performed, while legendary figures are not as well documented. Some of the latter may never have existed at all, which seems to have been the case for the 19th century outlaw Joaquin Murrieta. Some, like King Arthur, Robin Hood and Gilgamesh, may have been based, VERY tenuously, upon historical figures. But whether the legend-figures were totally imaginary or were based on real, once-living people, legends are manifestly dominated by "artifice-tropes."

Historical figures, when subjected to fictionalization, can go either the way of artifice or the way of verisimilitude. To repeat one of my earlier counter-examples to Billy the Kid, Adolf Hitler's historical record can never be diminished by fictionalization. Hundreds of years in the future, he might become a legend of evil, but at present his presence in literature is always dwarfed by his presence in history. A fiction-story can depict Hitler in dozens of completely artificial situations-- he creates the Red Skull, he gets burned to death by The Human Torch, his body (or, more frequently, just his brain) gets preserved so that he can be revived in some new, world-conquering form. But these artifice-tropes never supersede the historical record.

In the case of Billy the Kid, the record of his real-life exploits as a hired killer ARE superseded by all the artifice-tropes built around the name, "Billy the Kid." In fact, only a relative handful of fictional depictions even make the Kid a nasty customer. His conversion into a righteous hero may have started in 19th century dime novels, but I would venture that none of these remained available to pop-fiction audiences by the beginning of the 20th century. Somehow, just the name "kid" seemed to connote not only youth, but righteousness. In the 1940s, Buster Crabbe made ten B-westerns about a heroic Billy, while Charlton's baby-faced crusader earned a comics-title in 1957 and endured until 1983. But good Billy or bad Billy, the name of the character has become divorced from almost every aspect of the historical figure. And the legend that grew out of the long dead Henry McCarty even engendered countless "western kids" in cinema and comics, who borrowed the artifice-trope inherent in the name and nothing else.