The dichotomy known as "power and potency" has been hanging around this blog since 2014's POWER AND POTENCY, the first essay being a response to this observation from G. Wilson Knight:
[Hamlet] is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with death... Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental essence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. They are helpless before his very inactivity and fall one after the other, like victims of an infectious disease.-- G. Wilson Knight, THE WHEEL OF FIRE, 1930.
From Knight's idea of an "infectious inactivity," I extrapolated the idea of "potency," a "power that was not power," and which I applied to such examples as (1) the Sherlock Holmes story "The Speckled Band," (2) Moby Dick, (3) Tarzan, (4) Norman Bates, (5) time-travelers empowered only by their knowledge of past or future, like the Connecticut Yankee, the Time Tunnel guys, or The Outlaws (from the obscure 1980s TV show), (6) The Phone Freak from EYES OF A STRANGER, (7) Jed Eckert of RED DAWN, (8) undead but non-powered characters like Major Victory and the four protagonists of PURGATORY, and (9) the Chinese acupuncturist from THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING.
By comparison, "activity and resonance" are the new kids on the block. I first conjured them forth in the essay ACTIVITY REPORT in January 2026, though I extrapolated these formulations partly in response to a remark by Whitehead and partly to one of my own relatively casual intuitions from 2022's I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON:
The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named.
In the two-part ACTIVITY REPORT essay, I refined this intuition into the formal proposition that literary icons were defined by activity, resonance, and a combination of the two, and that eminent icons were defined as the sources of whatever activity or resonance is most important to the narrative. "Activity" subsists in characters DOING certain things; "resonance" subsists in characters BEING certain things-- not least a power that is not a power, like Hamlet's "infectious inactivity."
The new kid "activity," then, aligns with old kid "power," since even literary characters must possess some degree of power to "do things." "Resonance," is free just to be, like Melville's Bartleby, who eventually wastes away from a "non-infectious inactivity," but who still represents the resonance of inertia. Therefore my examples of "potency" are also examples of iconic resonance.
It's worth emphasizing that although the first POWER AND POTENCY started out by discussing only examples of uncanny phenomenality, by the third part of the essay-series, I realized that potency could play important roles in works of marvelous phenomenality. A future essay will explore the possible linkages between the concepts of "power" and of the marvelous phenomenality.
No comments:
Post a Comment