I've introduced a panoply of new terms this year, and so I'm going to try to coordinate them better, starting with one literary work: Walter Scott's IVANHOE. This novel bears a number of distinctions in general literary history, having fomented the genre of the historical novel, as well as being one of the few Scott novels that educated people remember fairly well. Within my own critical system, it also bears other distinctions.
After two centuries in which European and American literature produced no significant combative works, IVANHOE was the first truly popular work of that type, even though, as I've discussed, Scott's long poem LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL occupies "pride of place." IVANHOE seems to be the first important work of crossover-fiction of the "Moder Era," given Scott's usage of the legendary hero Robin Hood within the narrative of the totally fictional hero Wilfred of Ivanhoe. And the novel was central to my discussion of "centricity" in this 2018 essay, even though the term centricity has become somewhat subsumed by the term "eminence." But before I procced to the topic of elevating eminences, I'll detail the substance of the IVANHOE novel with attention to my new narrative terms "excitant" and "reactant."
The novel's setting is 12th-century England. Prince John sits the throne, representing the obnoxious Norman lords who came from France and took control of the country from the earlier occupants, the Anglo-Saxon populace. Not all of the Normans are bad guys, though. The noble protagonist faces disinheritance by his Anglo-Saxon father for Ivanhoe's loyalty to King Richard, even though Richard left John on the throne so that he the King wanted to go off and fight in the Crusades. That said, the "bad Normans" are the "excitants" of the story; they create the conflict with which Ivanhoe must deal. Historically, the Normans will remain in power, and so the only thing Ivanhoe, the "reactant," can do to fix the situation is to help the good Norman king Richard regain the throne. Ivanhoe cannot defeat all bad Normans, but he can defeat one of their foremost paladins, Sir Brian-- even though Brian's defeat also comes about due to other factors as well.
Now, one of my main concerns in the 2018 "centricity" essay was to dispute the claim made by Nancy Springer: that she did not consider Ivanhoe the book's "real hero," because despite being the "common thread" binding all the other characters into Scott's pattern, he had "no personality." I responded in part:
From all my statements on centricity, it should be plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own.
What I called "color" probably corresponds with what Springer deems "personality," even I don't find Ivanhoe as colorless as she did. Springer preferred characters with more pronounced character traits, but I don't deem that to be the defining factor of what makes a particular icon centric/eminent. This year I defined all forms of eminence, superordinate and subordinate, in terms of the dual factors of activity and resonance:
I advanced my new concept that iconicity, the nature of fictional icons, stemmed from two factors: activity, what the icons do, and resonance, what the icons represent. By extension this means that whatever icon or icons are superordinate to the other icons are so judged in terms of "eminent activity," "eminent resonance," or a combination of the two.
In Ivanhoe's case, his superordinate eminence stems from both activity (he's an admirably strong warrior) and resonance (he's a tolerant square-shooter, treating the Jews Isaac and Rebecca decently when many of his contemporaries see them as victims to be exploited). If IVANHOE has been more of a pure romance-tale revolving around the forbidden liaison of a Christian knight and a Jewish female, then Rebecca could have shared Ivanhoe's eminence, as Romeo and Juliet are equal eminences in the Shakespeare play. But Scott is more concerned with bringing about the end of Bad Norman rule and the return of Richard's just reign (in fiction, at least), so Ivanhoe's activity and resonance pervades the novel as no other character's qualities do.
The last set of terms I want to interpolate are the concepts of "base iconicity" and "elevated iconicity" as elaborated in the February essay COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 4. Ivanhoe and all of his subordinate characters were defined as having only "base iconicity" because the novel is a monadic work, wherein even characters drawn from history (King Richard) and from legend (Robin Hood) exist in fixed conditions, not capable, as serials are, of being influenced by the quantitative form of escalation.
The icons within both pure and impure monad-works alike are judged solely by qualitative escalation. IVANHOE, unlike OLIVER TWIST, is an impure work because it includes alongside its completely fictional characters the legendary Robin Hood and his merry band, as well as the historical figure of Richard the Lion-Hearted. But Robin and Richard exist only in the novel as Scott's fixed portraits of them as support-characters to Ivanhoe. All of the icons in IVANHOE have a default valence of BASAL ICONICITY.
Serials thus can have their eminent qualities enhanced according to qualitative or quantitative escalation. With regard to the quantitative form, I gave a couple of examples of subordinate characters who graduated to ELEVATED ICONICITY simply because they appeared twice rather than once. Two appearances does not confer any qualitative mojo; it just means that some storyteller thought he could enthrall an audience with Character X by dint of repeating him/her--in this case, Olga the Cossack Queen in the third season of BATMAN '66. From the quantitative view, Olga rates a bit more highly than other one-shot villains.
At the same time, though monadic characters like those of IVANHOE cannot be elevated quantitatively (because they only appear once in the medium of their creation), the activity-and-resonance of all monadic characters may be elevated qualitatively going by the reception they receive from an audience. I took pains to emphasize, in the essay EMINENCE AND DURABILITY:
A monad can benefit from Qualitative Escalation, as with my frequent example of Scott's IVANHOE, which therefore possesses a concomitant durability. But this escalation comes about through social consensus, not through the formal properties of the monad. I can argue that a forgotten monad story-- such as the obscure 1951 horror-story "Death by Witchcraft"-- possesses some formal properties that prove rewarding. But only a social consensus, even within some specialized community like that of horror-comics fandom, could bestow Qualitative Escalation upon that story.
Yet, it's not impossible for a one-shot icon in a serial format to also attain qualitative eminence, even for a subordinate icon. Thua in the INTERORDINATION essay, I cited the example of the Batman villain "Death-Man." As much as any icon within a monadic work, Death-Man was meant to be used once, and despite the fact that many fans of the time liked him, no one revived the precise character within the corpus of Batman comics. My conclusion was that though it was rare for a subordinate character in a serial work to attain "durability" despite only appearing once, Death-Man was one such character. In my next essay, I'll take an attitude not unlike that of Nancy Springer, and examine a work where the subordinate icons seem more important, even though none of them possess stature.
