The Sequel, Resplendent

          Why do sequels exist? I have been gradually coming to terms with the justification of sequels, being brought slowly to enlightenment more and more through each story I read. I have started this semester loathing sequels, regarding them as folly and fluff, something to fill up time, but nothing substantial nor significant. I saw no true reason for their existence, either as serialized editions of previous plots, serving to extend our time in a story that has already been fully realized, or as a re-imagining of themes, motifs and archetypal characters that may differ in critical aspects from the original, but the literary rebirth of such tales often results in a lack-luster replica, a shadow of the original story. But as I delved deeper into the origins of stories, I was able to understand the driving logic and simplicity in reasoning that warrant the function of sequels.

          Sequels exist to bring our society, as a collective, to a newer level of consciousness by changing the original story to better reflect the status quo, updating the material to compensate for developing social mythologies while staying relevant, and bringing us to a heightened sense of awareness of that social mythology. Sequels also come to fruition through what Frye calls “kidnapping” romance, a general repurposing of stories to suit the best interests of the ruling class. They also represent the cyclical nature in life, their renewal is reflexive of the human pattern of life and death.

          At first I saw sequels as unnecessary in all their forms: books, television, cinema, even the renewal of the bell-bottom jeans fad. The recreation of supposed classics was an affront to the power of the originals, I felt. How many hackneyed revisions of The Christmas Carol must I endure? Did all these screenwriters and directors really think their vision of Charles Dickens' novel was so pure that it warranted the creation of yet another? Sequels were, to me, one of the worst things a member of a creative community could muster, the simple and easy way out, it had seemed. Yet as I came to know more of it, I found that all stories are related. I started to see an image materialize before me, a massive matte with random colors dabbing at the surface, a sea of random paints, but as I draw back and distance myself from what I've been so intent to study closely, I see that the points of color create a painting. I am able to stand back from myself and see the image, a sea of stories, all seemingly independent, but inexorably connected.

          I felt stories which assumed a premise that was previously explored were trite and creatively-starved enough to simply steal material, but I have come to know it is not the drops of color that matter, not the place or setting or even characters, but that final painting, that sea of stories, the context, the ultimate mechanism of the story. Not the moving parts—they matter little—but the sum of its parts, create the machine. I was soon to find that even the best stories which endure centuries and equate lessons that we may take to heart to this day, were not all originals. The legends of King Arthur astounded me to this day, but keeping in the tones of divine lineage, death and rebirth and all the other similarities, I found the stories, while different in form, are parallel in function to the stories of Christ. Each collection of tales brings us through the personal journey of man redeeming his own soul, but each reflects the societal norm in a different way, one based off the guilt-based culture that Christianity is typically indoctrinated with, the other meant to idealize the natural higher morality of the chivalric courts of the ruling class. They sing the same song, but who they sing to seems to have the greatest effect on the lyrics. I noticed that Frye had remarked that Lord of the Flies was originally meant to be a parody of The Coral Island. The two stories share strikingly similar qualities in their topics, but because of the way in which they are presented to us, one with decidedly better character development and recurrence of themes, one withstands the test of time as being prescribed in more English classrooms than the other. I used to feel that using a previously told story to create a new one was deplorable and lazy, but sometimes the re-conceptualization of stories with strong ideas and concepts can be told better a second time by another author.

          Not only is it often worth creating sequels to assure that important concepts are realized with more appropriate words, but often we need to update older stories to keep them relevant. It has been said that Jesus what quite the humorist, but his jokes and merriment don't entirely translate while keeping their context from biblical times. This concept can be seen in almost any Disney animated movie. They take a popular children's story and reshape it into a family-friendly rendition. They remove the death from Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, they remove the scenes with the huntsman from Snow White, they purify and reduce the stories, but in doing so they also make the story available to a wider range of people than the original would have.

          Frye talks of the social mythology that pervades us all. We are constantly bombarded by peers, parents and all sorts of people to have unconscious expectations, supposedly positioned into particular prejudices. Without reading a single word, we live in a world, already constructed with anticipation for what we have been lead to believe ought to happen. We read everything through a screen of our own personal opinion, what Fry calls our “subliterary nine-tenths” of verbal experience and literary study. The social mythology of romance is a simple one with obvious tropes of love and preset expected archetypes of romantic figures, so we begin to identify and even trust the eventual appearance of such characters. When watching a Bond film, the audience typically knows there will be a chase scene and James will get the girl. It's become so anticipated, yet the action itself still rouses suspense. In realizing the social mythologies in romance are so silly, frivolous and oftentimes outright absurd, we bring ourselves to a new level of awareness through the recognition of these overused topos that have become the precedents of romance.

Sequels also serve the purpose of updating our well-known stories for newer generations, but not for as innocent a reason as to better reflect the status quo. In medieval times we see this manifest itself in the Christian reworking of the traditional stories in the lands they sought to establish their religion. The Green Knight helped preserve the old ways, the respect for nature, but in stories of Gawain and King Arthur's court, we clearly see a Christian influence, each member of the court attributing their strength and victories as God's divine will, not a shift in the story to better attain the state of affairs among the common man, but to establish courtly rule as the right order, not only through the heroic and chivalric code of conduct with which all the men of the court conduct themselves, but through the epic adventures of such knights, and their powers always derived from prayer and following the rule of order, seemingly divine in nature. This served not only to establish England's reign as willed by God, but gave the ruling class and royal families a level of morality mirrored in the stories as divine.

          Lastly, sequels exist for the sake of their mechanism, not the story itself. Within romance we see that most actions observed are highly ritualized. That is what true romance is, not the details of what was said, but how it was said. The ritualistic fashion of chivalric courts, the process of wooing a young woman, the journey of the hero, the portrayal of jousts, the rescuing of of the damsel and the defeat of the pirates: these are all expected modes of operation. It is this ritualization of action that makes it possible to see the simplified forms of real life, to categorize and segment the social acts into forms of ritual and thus raise ourselves to that higher level and be able to both recognize and understand the social mythology present in the work. There is a cyclical nature to the act of telling a sequel, were the sequel itself serves a function by being the realization of the endlessly renewing cycle of human life. Like a soap opera or serialized stories, sequels represent the unending rebirth that is humanity while being themselves a rebirth of older narratives, through these recurring storytelling conventions, the indefinite continuity of life itself is ever present within the reborn, the renewed, the sequel, resplendent.