Monthly Archives: December 2009

Recent Contest Answers: Spielberg, Seuss, and Milton

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Greenegg

Recent responses to my contest post :

From Russell Perkin:

Joe, I vaguely mentioned the Spielberg War of the Worlds in relation to romance in an earlier post. Looking more specifically at your list, like most Spielberg films it features a disintegrating family and a threatened child. Dakota Fanning’s panic attacks and terror are one of the reasons it is such a gripping film. Most of the film is a stage 3 descent, covering most of the bases in the list, with destruction of the domestic world, reduction of human beings to animal-like fighting for resources, scenes of apocalyptic destruction, and most vividly a descent into the belly of the monster (Tom Cruise taken inside the tripod, escaping and leaving a hand grenade behind).

As for the recognition scene at the end of the film, there is an element of parody in the way the Boston ex-in-laws have been unscathed through all the horror, looking in the final scene like something out of an LL Bean catalogue while Tom Cruise and his daughter have been to the depths of hell and back!

I have some material on Frye and Graham Greene that I will be posting soon that relates directly to this contest/game.

From Clayton Chrusch:

There are a lot of images of ascent and descent in Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.

The unnamed protagonist thinks he is someone who does not like green eggs and ham, which is a loss of identity, irrational anger, and a rash vow all at once that drives him from home in pursuit of his lost identity, or rather in flight from his proper identity into a world of trees and foxes (forests and animals) and increasing distance from home and family. Throughout there is a doubling of his identity with Sam-I-am, his other and better self whom he has alienated by choosing not to like. He descends into a cave and encounters a goat (an oracular animal helper). He then is involved in a shipwreck and descends into the ocean where the whole circus that has been following him falls away and with his last breath he denies liking green eggs and ham, a judgement and death.

At this point the ascent, primarily an escape, begins. Floating on the ocean, the protagonist rejects his persistent ignorance (revolt of the intelligence), recognizes that he does like green eggs and ham, takes the plate from Sam-I-am (reversal of twins), discovers his true identity as a lover of green eggs and ham, comes out of the water (recovery from the sea). The name “Sam-I-am” is used towards the end to suggest that the protagonist has discovered his true name, which I think is the significance of the final words: “Thank you!/Thank you,/Sam-I-am!” (a higher state of identity, breaking of enchantment).

From Russell Perkins:

“Floating on the ocean”: the protagonist is “a fragile container of sensitive and imaginative values threatened by a chaotic and unconscious power below it” (CW 17:89) aka a drunken boat.

From Clayton Chrusch:

Thank you so much for that quote Russell. Now that I’ve heard the main character of Green Eggs and Ham described as “a fragile container of sensitive and imaginative values threatened by a chaotic and unconscious power below it,” my life is complete.

From Trevor Losh-Johnson:

I would suggest that Milton’s Satan is an example of both structures aligning. His basic course is his awaking in Hell, constructing Pandemonium, encountering Sin and Death (a parody both of God’s creation of the Son and of Eve from Adam), escaping Hell’s gates and disguising himself to intrude into Paradise, all followed by his return to Hell and subsequent punishment- this course oscillates between both structures and hits all the major buttons. The wrath of God engenders a parodic structure of demonic doubles. Satan’s escape involves a sequence of disguises akin to Ovidian metamorphosis. His remembrance of his former glory as Lucifer reinforces his resolve towards evil. The temptation of Eve is extremely sexual and ends in Eve’s and Adam’s recognition of their nakedness, displacing their original, innocent identities. Satan’s final return to Hell culminates is a scene of punishment, where the parody is punished by a parody of his deeds in the garden. Beyond this, the enchantment of Man’s fall may only be broken by the submission of the Son to be sacrificed to Death.

. . .  It is certainly no contender compared to Clayton’s post, but I think any day Dr. Seuss beats Milton is worthwhile enough

Tom Willard’s Study Guide for The Educated Imagination

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Tom Willard has generously given us permission to publish his study guide for The Educated Imagination, which he prepared for a freshman seminar back in the nineties and posted at his website; the page references are to the Indiana UP edition. Tom teaches in the department of English at the University of Arizona; you can visit his website, which features a beautiful photo of Frye taken by Tom’s wife.

Study Guide for The Educated Imagination

Northrop Frye (1912-1991) read his Massey Lectures over the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC radio) in 1962. First published by Indiana University Press in 1964, the six lectures present key concepts from Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957).

Chapter One. “The Motive for Metaphor.”

Frye begins by exploring the relation of language and literature. “What is the relation of English as the mother tongue to English as a literature?” he asks (p. 16), and before he can give an answer, he has to explain why people use words. He identifies three different uses of language, which he also terms types or levels of language.

1. “The language of consciousness or awareness” is our means of “self-expression,” our means of responding to the natural environment: “the world as it is.” This language produces conversation.
2. “The language of practical sense” is our means of “social participation,” our means of taking part in our civilization. This language produces information.
3. “The language of literature” is our means of entering the world of imagination: “the world we want to have.” This language produces poetry, first of all.

Science and literature move in opposite directions. Science begins with the external world and adds imagination. (Mathematics is the imaginative language of science, Frye suggests in a later chapter.) Literature begins in the imaginative world and becomes involved in civilization.

Frye now deals with the distinctive feature of literary language. When language implies an identification of the speaker and the object, it becomes metaphoric. “The desire to associate,” and to find connections between inner experience and the external world, is what Wallace Stevens calls “The Motive for Metaphor.”

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It raises questions that will not be answered until Frye has set out a general theory of literature. These include the question of education–“What is the place of the imagination … in the learning process?” (p. 16)–answered in chapter 5. They also include a series of questions about the social function of literature and literary education, to be answered in chapter 6:

“What good is the study of literature?” (p. 13)

“Does it help us to think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it?” (p. 13)

“What is the relation of English as the mother tongue to English as a literature?” (p. 16)

“What is the social value of the study of literature?” (p. 16)

What is “the relevance of literature in the world of today?” (p. 27)

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The Stages of Descent-and-Ascent Contest

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Alice down the hole c Disney

I thought I might create a little game out of my last post on The Secular Scripture. I am going to call it “The Stages of Descent-and-Ascent Contest.” The point is to encourage anyone out there–regular and occasional contributors, or silent visitors and lurkers of any kind (we’d like to her from you!), whether scholars, teachers (of elementary school and beyond), just plain avid readers and thinkers, amateurs of literature, ideas, and the imagination–to take a look at the stages of descent and ascent (which I will post again here), and comment with any examples you can think of from literature (which includes plays and most definitely film and television as well) of the different stages I have sketched out in my summary. Feel free to elaborate on any examples you come up with, to develop or explain their particular significance. Also, any discussion, corrections or refinements of the scheme I have come up with are equally welcome.

And don’t worry if some of the examples you come up with happen to be ones Frye uses himself in The Secular Scripture or elsewhere (such as Words with Power where an analogous scheme is at play in the second part of the book). In fact, it would be helpful,  since his range is so great, to know of  good examples from his other writings, published and unpublished.

But the real fun is often in discovering examples in literature and film where you might not have expected.

I call it a contest, but it is really a co-operative game, and an ongoing research project, one that I have often played with my students when we read The Secular Scripture. The results are always stimulating, and invariably validate Frye’s remarkable insight into literature.  Eventually,  I’ll compile them and post the results.

Here, again, is the descent/ascent scheme:

STAGES OF DESCENT:

Stage One (Departures from identity, turning on a loss of status, cognition, amnesia, or break in consciousness of some other kind):

Displaced or mysterious birth, hence removal from rightful parents

Mother and child threatened in various ways: shrouding and hiding of mother, flight and exile, birth in secrecy, oracular announcement to frighten the father or father-figure

Wrath of a god (or surrogate figure in fiction), usually incurred by boastfulness

Usurping of reason by passion, as in jealous, irrational anger, or in rash vow

Amnesia through drugs, love potions, catalepsy, etc.

Break in consciousness of some other kind: traumatic event that leads to a dramatic change in status, mental state, or identity

Falling asleep, entry into a dream world, forest (pursuit of false identity), close to metamorphosis or enchantment theme

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Re: Frye Was Different (4)

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roadsignschool3

Further to Merv’s latest post:

Or younger than nineteen?

How about 15?  “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship”

The separation of images into the contrasting worlds or states of mind that Blake calls innocence and experience, and that religions call heaven and hell, is the dialectical framework of literature, and is the aspect of it that enables literature, without moralizing, to create a moral reality in imaginative experience. The full understanding of these two structures is complicated for the teacher, but their elementary principles are exceedingly simple, and can be demonstrated to any class of normally intelligent fifteen-year-olds. Analysis of this simple kind is, in my opinion, the key to understanding, not merely the conventions and the major genres of literature, but the much more important fact that literature, considered as a whole, is not the aggregate of all the works of literature that have got written, but an order of words, a coherent field of study which trains the imagination quite as systematically and efficiently as the sciences train the reason. If the teacher can communicate this principle, he will have done all he can for his student.

Or six?  “Criticism as Education”

I did not begin to believe in my own critical theories until I began to see ways of applying them to elementary education. In a book published over twenty years ago, I wrote that literature is not a coherent subject at all unless its elementary principles could be explained to any intelligent nineteen-year-old [Anatomy of Criticism, 14]. Since then, Buckminster Fuller has remarked that unless a first principle can be grasped by a six-year-old, it is not really a first principle, and perhaps his statement is more nearly right than mine. My estimate of the age at which a person can grasp the elementary principles of literature has been steadily going down over the last twenty years. So I am genuinely honoured to be able to pay tribute to an educator who has always insisted on the central importance of children’s literature.