Fryed

Well, as I was reading Frye's third section on Myth I grew more and more alarmed because I felt that nothing was really hitting home. No light bulbs were flashing. And this made me sad, (and a little frustrated) But then I reached the section entitled Theory of Archetypal Meaning: Demonic Imagery. And finally I came across a passage that reminded me of Kevin's blog and our previous class discussion on baseball.

"We met in the first essay the principle that the transmutation of act into mime, the advance from acting out a rite to playing at the rite, is one of the central features of development from savagery into culture. It is easy to see a mimesis of conflict in tennis and football, but, precisely for that very reason, tennis and football players represent a culture superiors to the culture of student duellists and gladiators."
-Frye pg. 148
















Here again Frye uses a very well known analogy of sports. The evolution of the spectator sport from deadly barbaric display to civilized competitive sport concreted the formation of civilization. And one may argue that Rome was a great civilization with all their great buildings and inventions such as the aqueducts, but I agree with Frye. There was very little that was civil about Rome, for they forced innocent people into the deadly slavery of gladiators and the arena. But I digress...

"The turning of literal act into play is a fundamental form of liberalizing of life which appears in more intellectual levels as liberal education, the release of fact into imagination."
-Frye pg. 149












So just as Kevin discussed in his blog; in baseball the umpire is the "play" version of the scapegoat, the emperor is the umpire of the gladiator arena. The crowd boos the umpire for making a "bad" call as they would jeer the emperor, or what have you, if they gave a "thumbs up" when the crowd wanted a "thumbs down". And the "arena" has never really left our culture no matter how "civilized" we have become (or think we have). There will always be a sudo-sacred place, be it an arena, field, court or table, where the grand ritual of competition and defeat will take place. A crowd will flock and much-a-ruckus will be arisen by the throngs of avid fans of challenge and blood pumping spectacle that competition produces.












Sports have replaced our thirst for barbaric competition. We still get our violence with football, hockey, and rugby and with our growing ( and depleting, but that's a different blog) "civilness" we are entertained with less violent but still competitive sports such as tennis, golf, table tennis along with the many other sports that I don't pay attention to. The ritual of athletic entertainment no longer requires the blood sacrifice of death. The losers now only hang their heads when defeated instead of losing them all together.

Don Quixote

I have now reached page 576. I'd like to start off with Chapter XI and Don Quixote's odd encounter with the wagon of traveling actors. I felt this encounter was very much unlike all of D.Q.'s previous ones because he believed the actors to be actors instead of the ghastly and mythical creators and beings they appeared to be.

"By my faith as a knight errant, " responded Don Quixote, "as soon as I saw this wagon I imagined that a great adventure was awaiting be, and now I say that it is necessary to touch appearances with one's hand to avoid being deceived."
-pg 523-524

The key word here is imagined. Don Quixote openly admits he had imagined that a wagon full of demons and sorcerers, just as he had imagined a giant instead of a windmill, a group of thugs kidnapping a woman instead of a collection of holly men carrying the Virgin Marry. I was greatly troubled when I first read this because it was so outside and foreign to the Don Quixote we have all grown to love and cherish...well at least I do. And then the actors attacked Sancho's donkey, Sancho, and Don Quixote in such a nonsensical and unprovoked manner it seemed as if they were the ones plagued with the madness of chivalry and knights errant, and thought Sancho's donkey to be a giant Minator ready to eat them all alive.

But then, oh, but then a thought stuck me. Actors, like Don Quixote live physically in the low mimetic world of realism but belong spiritually and mentally to the world of Romance. Both
actors and our beloved knight prefer a world of romantic adventures, evil enchanters, courageous knights, and Devils driving wagons over steady paying jobs, madness, crazy old men, and rushed, costumed actors. So Don Quixote was able to accept their ghastly appearances because they were just like his suit of armor; a tool in which to transport them into the Romantic world. Like him, actors are on a quest to better the world; calm mobs, aid widows, and save poor, sad children. But instead of a lance and a squire, the actors are armed with entertainment in their imitations of life, death, and of the beyond.

















This next part isn't deeply profound or anything, but I just loved the subtlety in Chapter XIV in the changing of the name of The Knight of the Wood to The Knight of the Mirrors. It happens seamlessly, so much so I had to read read it to make sure I got his name right in the first place. The subtle change of the name unconsciously prepares the reader for the character change. And more importantly, the name builds to the climax of the revealing of Senor Sanson Carrasco. His unveiling answers the mysterious question as to why Senor Sanson was encouraging Don Quixote and Sancho to go back out on their adventuring in the first place, at the beginning or part 2. It was all smoke and mirrors, to employ a favorite cliche. The Knight of the Mirrors was just that, he looked like a knight, lamented and was in love like a knight. He was so convincing that Don Quixote knew he was a knight just by listening to his poem. The Knight of Mirrors was so exquisitely imitative that he was a mirror held up to Don Quixote. Quite letterly since Sanson was using all he knew about Don Quixote's adventures and personal traits as a knight to form his imitation in an attempt to convince Don Quixote to return and stay at home.

This brings me to my last major light bulb moment in my reading Don Quixote.

" A poet is born; that is to say, the natural poet is a poet when he comes from his mother's womb...The natural poet who makes use of art will be a much better and more accomplished poet than the one who knows only the art and wishes to be a poet; the reason is that art does not surpass nature but perfects it; therefore; when nature is mixed with art, and art with nature, the result is a perfect poet. "

And because it's beautiful: "The pen is the tongue of the soul."
pg 557

Ding Ding Ding! Light Bulb! If you've ever tried to write a poem you'd understand my enthusiasm. You aren't a poet by choice. You can write poetry all you want but it doesn't make you a poet. When you read a poem by some one who wasn't born a poet, you can tell that it's a poem about nature instead of a natural poem embodying and beautifying the truth that is nature. A natural poet will embody the beauty and fury of the sea and the intrinsic frailty of a flower with their mere employment of letters. They don't try to make nature something it's not, they just take all the beauty of it and stick it under a magnifying glass. Together, a poem should be nature and art; a unified wording of nature's potential and existing beauty.
A unnatural poet; a poet not born but self created, will try and take nature and only write of the art of it. Instead of a colorful Impressionist painting we get a black and white Polaroid.

Links

http://mr.pcvs.org/delirium/pater_-_conclusion_from_the_renaissance.html
-Walter Pater

http://67.104.146.36/english/Romantic/Rm-Ks.html
-Keats

http://www.bartleby.com/28/5.html
-Arnold

Keats

And I thought understanding Frye was a stretch. I found some of the passages from several of Keats letters to be almost impossible to decipher. I don't know if it was the writing style of one ling sentence, without much real punctuation, the fact that they were merely excerpts from a larger whole, or what. But I found it very difficult to find never the less understand the point he was trying to make. I could only hold on to a few sentences here and there and I'm not sure if I even understand them correctly.

Well, there were a few parts of Keats' letters that I actually understood...I think. I do believe that this will be a piece that I will need to revisit over and over again. and possibly with the company of others, before I can really understand what Keats is saying.

"Every man has his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

This line however immediately set off my light bulb. This line echoes Frye, and especially Frye in his article The Archetypes of Literature. Frye's whole motivation to writing the article was to set the faulty critics on the right path. The critics who "broods" and "peacocks" his own interpretations of texts. Interpretations that are based on flakey values pertaining to opinions and personal feelings about the author of the Work. It's about the work, not the author, and definitely not the critic who only "wants to brighten the corner in which they are in".













"Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with it's subject."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

This was actually a pretty big light bulb for me. Not too much in the sense that it directly relates to something specific from my previous readings (although I'm sure it does and I'm not seeing the connection), but it gives me something to mull over when I think about poetry. I used to always think of poetry as an organization of beautiful words that describe something, and I emphasized the pretty words more than the subject. Now when I look at poetry, I'll think about how effective of a description it is. If I can feel the sensation or see the scene. A poem is less about the author's ability to string interesting, beautiful, or provocative words together, and more about how they are stringed to embody it's subject. The poem is not about the beauty of the strategically organized words; "She sang beyond the genius of the sea", but what those words mean about the she, about the sea, and what it means when she sings "beyond the genius" of it. Are we actually talking about a girl singing quite loudly on a beach, so that the shrill tone of her voice carries over the deafening crashes and whooshes , or is there something deeper? A creation myth perhaps? Keats has another line that adds to this thoughts;








"Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity--it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance."
-Dear Reynolds pg 3

Poetry should be a description of an experience that anyone has or could have experienced. But I'm having trouble with wrapping my mind around the concept of "fine excess". I'm not sure what that means. I get what he means in the last part, that poetry should describe an event/ thing as well as not overly describe in a scholarly or typically "poetic" way. But "surprise by a fine excess". Hmm. I wonder if I might need another day to ponder this.
Maybe fine excess really means details. Everything needs to be in a poem that surrounds the subject. But these details, these descriptive words, need to fine tune the beauty and truth of the subject. The reader must get the sensation that where were there; standing by that waterfall, reading that book, hearing those sounds, but at the same time these details cannot be so specific, so Singular to the poet and their experience that any random reader couldn't pick up the poem and really experience the subject of the poem without really being there themselves.

Film and Books

I'll start off by saying I really loved this little film. Being both an English and a Film student I loved seeing how they could be used together to support one another. I can't help feel a little amused when I see or hear about a film about books (and they are few) To me, it seems that these two fictional mediums are sometimes at war with one another; film can seem to turn books or reading into an assignment or chore. But that's a whole different blog.

The first thing that happened to me as I watched this film was I was brought whooshing (yes, whooshing) back to my childhood years of playing dress up. Whenever I played dress-up, (which let me tell you, was often) I always had these two old books tucked in my purse or rolled up in a scarf. You know those real books, those old cloth covered books with tiny print and old sketched pictures. Well, to this day I don't know what they were about, but by god I can remember their colors and what parts they played in my magical little girl world. Old books carry with them a sense of mystisism. Like they might be the spellbook of some old wizard or the diary of a queen...or maybe I have problems with growing up. But what I do know is, when ever you place an old, tattered book in someones hands, they hold it as if it was the most delicate spun glass. And, even if they don't admit it, they feel a surge of pure romantic power tingle through their finger tips as they carefully turn the yellow-old pages.


The second thing I thought about was the innocence of children question. What are we expecting our children to be, or to become. It seems so shocking to us to see how the books for and directed at children (because, yes, there is a difference) focus on the issue of death and other bodily harm. I heard a-many a gasps during the dark limericks and poems. But think about television and if people of the past saw how, instead of death, we hurl sex and violence at our youth. True death was much more prominent and "in your face" back in the day, what with poorer living conditions, medical care, and shorter life spans, but does that mean sex is more prominent now? Do children have to deal with the sexual acts of their family like they do a death? (ok that's a weird way to go...but it's too late now!)

Society has always been telling our youth what do think, how to act, and what to believe in. And fear used to be a pretty darn good way of doing it. Fear the wolf , the stranger, the trouble maker, the inconvenience. Save the heathen; teach they our way, and much like how poetry should imitate the worse to prove a point of illustrate a moral, do those little children's tales those fables, show the naughty child as wrong and the goody two shoes as an angel.
The fact that this was a film on books, on lost literature, plays nicely with my evolution of the tools of propaganda But a books on films doesn't hold the same tiny jewel of (nerdy) irony as does a film on books.

Light bulbs and don Quixote

First I'd like to jot down a few light bulbs I had light up while reading Frye's section on the anagogic phase:

"The anagogic view of criticism thus leads to the conception of literature as existing in it's own universe, no longer a commentary on life and reality, but containing life and reality in a system of verbal relationships."
pg. 122

I think I used this quote when I was investigating Wallace's poem or if not I thought about it or wish I had (Wow you can't tell midterms are getting to me or anything). Now I'm thinking, since the anagogic has a connection with the divine and the line:

" And when she sang, the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song, for she was the maker."

She, the maker, the poet, sang her poem, her song, of a world with a sea. And while she sang, she walked on an ordinary beach by an ordinary sea. But her sea was like no other sea. A sea so grand in a world so beautiful that the sea envied her poem and it wanted to change itself, and so did those who heard it. And so they did change, and saw the world of her song what was a poem, much like the one containing this very line.
That's just a little rant on what anagogy made me think while was trying to cram all the words from the poem into my squishy brain.

Anyway, this I just found interesting:

"The literary critic, like the historian, is compelled to treat every religion in the same way that religions treat each other, as though it were human hypothesis, whatever else he may in other contexts believe it to be."
pg. 126


This leads me to Don Quixote and it's delightful relevance and joyous freedom from "theory". I'm now on page 498 with the miraculous pearls from Sancho. But what I found most interesting was on page 476.

" 'That is true, ' said Sanson, 'but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.' "

Aha! This rings of Sidney, Shelly and of course Aristotle/Plato. ( It's hard to keep straight who said what.)I can just picture the glee on Dr. Sexson's face if he saw me reading that and making the connection.
Short sad blog, but midterms are hovering.

Sidney quotes of importance

"Among the Romans a poet was called 'vates', which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet, as by his conjoined words, vaticinium and vacticinari, in manifest; so heavenly a title did that excellent people bestow upon this hear-ravishing knowledge."
-pg 3, paragraph 7

The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example; but both not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule...For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general that happy is that man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand...The historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.

22

Now doth the peerless poet perform both; for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example....he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth. -pg 7, paragraph 22-23 But he cometh to you with words set in delightdul proportion, either acconpanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting skills of music; and with a tale, forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue... -pg 10 paragraph 36

More on The Idea of Order and anagogy

In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of reality.
-Frye 119

In it's anagogic phase, then , poetry imitates human action as total ritual, and so imitates the action of the omnipotent human society that contains all the powers of nature within itself.
-Frye 120

As I was revisiting my thoughts on Steven's The Idea of Order at Key West, I found some new and interesting connections. It starts with the idea presented on page 119. This passage was another sort of light bulb in that the human dream, which is a kind of all seeing all knowing powerful representation of human life and interaction, is not at the center of reality projecting out, but at the edges holding it all together. We take out dreams and thoughts and wrap them around the reality that is presented before us, either to understand or to control. This poem demonstrates through out it's entirety how it's not only she, the singing maker, who is involved in this changing of reality, but also the bystanders who experience the effects of her reality altering song.

"But it was more than that, more even than her voice, and ours, among the theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped on High horizons, mountainous atmospheres of sky and sea."

But is was more than both her and the regular human onlookers. The reality, the dark sea, outer voice of the sky, and of the summer air are more than the human persona, or society. It, the reality, the world in which the poem breaths was more than the onlookers, more even that that of she who sang it's creation or alteration. They, the human society is not at the center of this reality, but at the edges, holding this dream, thie other reality of Key West together.

In regards to the second quote from Frye : In it's anagogic phase, then , poetry imitates human action as total ritual, and so imitates the action of the omnipotent human society that contains all the powers of nature within itself.

This second passage from Frye embodies the entirety of what the poem is I think. She is singing, as a maker, a poem. This poem not only imitates the omnipotent human, in all her powers of creation, but it contains all the powers of nature within itself. The entire third verse contains and imitates nature.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of shy
And cloud, of sunken coral water-walled
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And so on.

She, the maker, contains all the secrets and powers of nature otherwise how could she alter the reality of nature around her and her audience?

Now for something completely different...
I have reached page 472 in Don Quixote and have successfully started part two in this impressive novel. It began with the author defending his second section of Don Quixote because it seems there was some controversy whether the second installment was as authentic as the first. But all that aside, the story picks up where it left off, with poor old Don bedridden and staying true in his madness despite the efforts of the barber, the priest, his niece, and the housekeeper. And poor Sancho still striving to achieve is promised insula.

"And no doubt this was a kind of prophecy; poets are calledvates, which means they are soothsayers."
-468
Don Quixote says this when defending his books of chivalry ( and his madness of believing them a reality) and I think it ties in beautifully with what we've been discussing in our readings of Phillips and Frye.

Light Bulb..again

"The reason for producing the literature structure is apparently that the inward meaning, the self-contained verbal pattern, is the field of responses connected with pleasure, beauty and interest."
Frye-74
This simple sentence can sum up a good 10 to 15 pages of what Frye is trying to get across, and it's lovely and friendly in it's simplicity. The bottom line of Frye's book, his arguments, and his criticism is that we must not look at the surface (the author, our tastes and opinions, or even literally just the cover) of a piece of literature, but the internal patterns, rhythms, and different phases.

And broken down even more, this passage is like the secret of literature that is being whispered around the exam room. Everyone wants it even if they don't know it's available. Everyone wants to know what to look for when judging, or not even judging, when interpreting a piece of literature. For if you know how to correctly look at a piece of literature critically you can not only fully understand it, but enjoy it's beauty for what it is.

This passage not only subtly tells you what really matters when critically looking at a piece of literature but it tells you that it was written simply for the beauty and intricacy of the words themselves. And when you read them, you don't realize that you're enjoying the book is because the writing as that particular repeating pattern and combination of irony and comedy.
What makes someone enjoy a piece of literature has to do more with the subtleties of the verbal patterns and rhythms then the fetching hero or fearless heroine, even though those characters are contributing factors.

Just a quick short post on my thoughts.

Light Bulb

"When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature."
Frye-119

" This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic [or] the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate."
Frye-119

As I read this second entry from Frye I had a little epiphany about Wallace Steven's "The Idea of Order at Key West." Or more specifically I had an epiphany about the first verse in the poem:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea
The water never formed to mind or voice
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
It's empty sleeves; and yet it's mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

This made me ask myself, what if she was this infinite eternal living body, either human or not, that embodies the imaginative concept of nature? And then it all became all the more clear as I read is lines such as, But it was she and not the sea we heard, It was her voice that made the sky acutest at it's vanishing, She was the single artificer of the world.

This poem is what Frye calls apocalyptic in the world of anagogy, because there is this "She" singing and creating or altering the reality, or the world around the speaker in the poem. In this poem "she" is the image in the anagogical sense because she sort of represents what Frye names as a characteristic of anagogy; "the sense of unlimited power in a humanized form"
The poem never explicitly describes this "she" as being a goddess or of possessing any obvious magical or higher powers other than an exceptionally powerful singing voice, but it is implied in the last two concluding verses what she did indeed project some sort of power or change over them or the world. Something changed : "The maker's rage to order words of sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, and of ourselves and of our origins"

It almost sounds to me that the Maker, this "she" somehow altered language, or words themselves. And in changing the word base of a thing (sea, fishing boats, what have you) the entirety of the thing now is seemingly completely different. I like to imagine that when the speaker of the poem turns around he doesn't understand any of what he sees because this She has changed around the order of everything and now nothing is as it was. "In ghostlier demarcations" What was one way is now another and only the ghost of "ourselves" and/or the sea remain while the newly sung version stands in it's new ordered place.