Category Archives: Archetype

Frye’s Personae

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Frye’s “I had genius” remark reveals one of the masks he wore.  Another is revealed in his statement that The Great Code “was a silly and sloppy book” by the standards of traditional scholarship.  Frye was aware that all of us have countless personae, some no doubt troubling to himself and some troubling to others.  Here is an account of the “village” of characters in his own psyche:

The individual man comprises a multitude of other characters—Jung’s archetypes are surely only a few threshold dwellers. There is at least a good-sized village inside me. Many are children, some are women, & a few may be animals or even monsters. Some are replicas of other people I know, either in personal acquaintance or in reading. They die, but new ones move in & grow up. All this is not pure whimsy—I’m trying to get at a real fact of existence. Ever since Plato people have talked of the state in terms of the individual: what would happen if one were to look at the individual in terms of a society? Suppose Jung’s “anima” were not a feminine figure in me, but the aggregate of all the female characters in me? He says himself that the animus is regularly a group or council. So with me: in the course of a day, even a day spent in pure solitude, I should go through a bigger dramatic repertoire than any commedia dell’arte. Pedants, buffoons, comedians, debaters, politicians, hermits, saints, sages, middling-sensual men, suburban bourgeoisie all dispute within me, & everything I do & say is the calculus of probabilities resulting from their competition within me. A good deal of behavior shows this. The “censor” could be a whole Sanhedrin, & the kind of experience of conversion described by William James in his chapter on healthy-mindedness corresponds point for point to a political revolution [The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library, 1958), 76–111 (Lectures 4 and 5)]. In Victorian times it was fashionable to be patriarchal or matriarchal: only the older & graver heads spoke, & within the individual, as within society, children were seen but not heard. Nowadays democracy is fashionable: we disapprove of censors, allow our women & even children a voice in our assemblies, & if we do not allow our perverts or Calibans to speak, at least we try to locate them & keep a police record of them. Democracy turns easily into a police state, & it is easy for people with liberal & open societies inside them to become converted to a rigorous totalitarian dialectic. I suppose two-party opposition-patterns are more common—nearly everyone is aware of some dividing contrast in his attitudes & moods. I think of all these characters as dramatis personae, speaking masks. Perhaps most of them inhabit a sort of Gentiles’ outer court, the real decisions (every thought is a decision, a bill that’s had two readings & committee in a well-regulated mind) being made by a small cabinet within of high priests. Whether there is one high priest or supreme pontiff I don’t know. This veers toward an idea I’ve had for a long time, that Jesus’ cleansing of the temple & his casting of devils out of individuals were exactly the same act. The thing that’s difficult to grasp is that it’s only the holiest of holies that are socially visible: all the outer courts are hidden. Thus each man looks consistently like one man: only in anarchy do the money-changers & dove-sellers suddenly appear in his face or conversation. Ordinarily he presents the appearance of one man interpreting the will of a small & fairly homogeneous group. Thus for an elect Christian, Christ cleanses the temple, or casts out devils, or harrows hell, redeeming & releasing the bound spirits, or separates sheep from goats, all of these activities being the same.

Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn

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The first edition of Huckleberry Finn, 1885.

Yesterday was Mark Twain‘s 176th birthday. Huckleberry Finn seems to have been a treasured text from Frye’s youth. He noted that his personally favorite archetypal theme was katabasis, or descent, and Tom Sawyer (the protagonist for whom Frye appears to have had an abiding distate) along with Huckleberry Finn provide a powerful rendition of it. There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal but still interesting in itself, that Frye as a first year undergrad at Victoria College wrote home to have his copy of Huckleberry Finn shipped to him because the copy he had didn’t fall open at the right places.

There are any number of quotes to be culled from Frye on the novel, but this one from “National Consciousness in Canadian Culture,” is especially resonant, with Twain’s birthday in mind:

Everyone quotes the penultimate line in Huckleberry Finn about lighting out for the Territory, but less attention is paid to the even more significant last sentence: “I been there before.” There can be no creative return to the past; the past is absorbed into the future. . . .

“V for Vendetta” and “Demonic Modulation”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oWs_voUPkk&feature=related

V for Vendetta: “Words will always retain their power”

“First they came for the rich, and I said nothing. Because, you know, fuck the rich.” — Oral graffiti currently making the rounds.

The clip above is V’s pirate-radio speech to the people of London in V for Vendetta. V’s sardonic Guy Fawkes mask is now a favored icon among the disaffected, hacktivists especially. This movie is a hopeful relic from the Bush years, which, at the time of the film’s release, seemed they would never end.

Regarding V and his Guy Fawkes mask — as well as the repeated refrain of “Remember, remember, the fifth of November,” the day of the failed Gunpowder plot of 1605 — the literary principle involved is what Frye called “demonic modulation.” With demonic modulation Frye makes a much needed distinction between “the moral” and “the desirable”:

The moral and the desirable have many important and significant connections, but still morality, which comes to terms with experience and necessity, is one thing, and desire, which tries to escape from necessity, is quite another. Thus literature is as a rule less inflexible than morality, and it owes much of its status as a liberal art to that fact. The qualities that religion and morality call ribald, obscene, subversive, lewd and blasphemous have an essential place in literature but often they can achieve expression only through ingenious techniques of displacement. (AC 156)

Demonic modulation manages this by way of “the deliberate reversal of the customary moral associations of archetypes.” For example, in literature, whatever the current status of received moral standards,

a free and equal society may be symbolized by a band of robbers, pirates, or gypsies; or true love may be symbolized by the triumph of an adulterous liaison over marriage, as in most triangle comedy; [or] by a homosexual passion. . . . (AC 156-7)

In other words, exactly the sorts of things that oppressively “moral” forces in society get most nuts about, usually with a commensurate rise in rhetorical violence, sometimes outright threats of it, and occasionally tragic instances of it.

The traditional Catholic villain Guy Fawkes of seventeenth century England becomes in this film by way of demonic modulation the dark force of wrathful resistance in a somnolent dystopian Britain of the near-future. The movie does seem to possess the power of at least some short-term prophecy; it had picked up on something that was roiling just below the surface of the daily nightmare that was the Bush administration. The silent, simultaneous uprising of the people of London nicely prefigures what seems to have been the spontaneous generation of the Occupy movement; and, more ominously, the death of the tyrant High Chancellor Sutler doesn’t look all that different from the recent death of Muammar Quadafi. To cite another instance of oral graffiti that pops up here and there, “When people on the inside of their glass palaces are mocking the people on the outside, it never ends well for them.”

Frye and Popular Culture

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4vs2drW_Hc

Hole, “Olympia.” Why it’s Hole, why the song is “Olympia,” and why this version of it is amateur hand-held video of a 1993 performance, is clarified below.

Last Saturday night I put up a brief post to note the passing of R.E.M and the twentieth anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. The next day I posted some observations by Amanda Marcotte on Nirvana and Third Wave feminism, and added a comment to expand a little on the rise of the riot grrrl phenomenon which, like Nirvana, had the same improbable hometown of Olympia, Washington. Tomorrow night I’m putting up more video featuring riot grrrl bands, partly because the movement is so closely associated with the emergence of the Third Wave, but also because the music and the culture around it are interesting on their own.

Whenever I post anything having to do with popular culture, especially if it is music that may be unknown to or disliked by many people, I do the same gut check: is this Frye-relevant?  In this instance I’d say, as I say every time, yes it is, even though it is obviously not for all tastes. This time, however, I thought I’d sketch out my reasons for thinking so.

Frye once observed that soap operas never rise to the condition of fully realized romance because the endless narrative of serial adventures cannot reach a dialectical crisis of identity. It’s tempting to take this sort of comment as licence to dismiss popular culture generally. But Frye himself does not do this. He in fact says that there is no real distinction between high and low culture, and that any imposed distinction is about bias rather than anything intrinsic to the art itself. I have three main reasons to suggest why works of popular culture, whatever their appeal to taste, ought to be of interest to Frye critics.

The first is the assumption of imaginative value. Even the aesthetics of mass produced and distributed cultural phenomenon — particularly music, movies, television — have their own implicit value that can be tapped by critical engagement. The more consistently we are imaginatively engaged, the greater our potential for creative imaginative response. Mass produced culture has the advantage of ensuring mass circulation but introduces the danger of mass conformity. It has, however, also always been a cause for resistance and “counter-cultural” reactions. As long as this continues to happen, it is more likely to provide enough variation to prevent a debilitating decline into cliché and the kinds of reflexive response that undermine a liberated imaginative response.

Second, in much if not most of our popular culture (especially in that element with resistant counter-cultural origins) the dialectic of identity is strongly manifested in the prevailing archetypes of concern. Our only recently developed youth culture has a notably stubborn streak of resistance (which corporate interests, contrary to the conventional wisdom, do not entirely erase, but also search out at street level as the resistance reinvents itself). The lyrics of popular songs can easily be seen to be some expression, however occasionally naïve or fleeting, of discontent driven by something more like what Frye calls primary concerns: “making a living, making love, and struggling to stay free and alive,” as he puts it in Words with Power. This dialectic of identity those primary concerns represent is not much different from other “higher” forms of imaginative expression; the concerns are universal and their expression is recognizable in recurring archetypes.

Finally, there is what Frye refers to as the local and decentralizing aspect of culture. The universal is best perceived through the particular, which is why, as he once put it, William Faulkner could set his novels in a fictional county in Mississippi and still win a Nobel Prize for literature. The principle is in no way restricted to white American males; it is in the nature of the imaginative dimension of literature and all of the other arts. This fact ought to be more readily appreciable today when there is increasing evidence of the potential for a globalized popular culture, in which just about any aspect of any culture can be transferred and enjoyed anywhere else. It is typically picked up by another small, localized community and eventually transposed into the wider culture. Not surprisingly, the trend is most conspicuously present in music, which always has a massive international appeal, and therefore lends itself to innovation and synthesis. Thirty years ago a designation for “world music” came into wide use, and the increasingly hybridized nature of the music that falls under this heading has only become more obvious. It is almost a certainty these days that just about wherever there are discontented youth challenging local authority, there will be rap and hip hop: this is as true of large parts of the Muslim world, for instance, as it is of Israel.

Local culture therefore has a decentralizing effect on the more widely shared culture, and there is observable movement between the two. This makes it easier to understand why there is a cultish aspect to any counter-culture, especially among young people: these cultish communities are decentralized in the sense that they make a deliberate point of being as far away from accepted standards as they can manage, and they are local in the sense of exhibiting a sensibility and outlook assumed not to be widely shared, even if the community is international and held together by the ability to communicate through electronic media. But today’s cult always has the potential to be part of tomorrow’s culture.

Riot grrrl, for example, to end with the subject of tomorrow’s post, began in about 1990 in Olympia, Washington, which, again, was also the home of Nirvana, and quite remote from any source of the North American musical mainstream. The members of the Olympia music scene made their own music for their own enjoyment, and in a remarkably short period of time Nirvana’s local brand of grunge (an amalgam primarily of heavy metal and punk rock) became an international phenomenon. Meanwhile, the riot grrrl movement introduced a renewed expression of feminist attitudes into the alternative music scene, and that in turn allowed it to catch on just about anywhere it went. Like punk, with its anti-corporate orientation, the music is stripped down, the outlook is crankily dismissive of the status quo, and the lyrics are often profane; but the expectation tends to be hopeful, in the sense that there is anticipation, as there is throughout all of the arts, that things really could change for the better by confronting the world as it is with some sense of the way it ought to be. The fact that the perspective also tends to be ironic is, of course, not a problem because our universally shared concerns are, as Frye points out, what makes irony ironic.

Relative simplicity does not exclude a work of popular art from being imaginatively relevant or from having transferable value. It can render the dialectic of identity as reliably as any “serious” work of art, although, admittedly, with less range and nuance. But what the consumer of art does with any particular work of art is a matter of choice and discretion, and there the potential remains limitless. One of the most pleasantly surprising things about the punk movement when it first began to appear in the mid-1970s is that its indignation is typically motivated by passionately advocated concern. Because that concern is ironically expressed, it can yield a lot of wit and even unexpected tenderness. A much loved but long defunct riot grrrl band from Olympia, Bikini Kill, has a song called “I Like Fucking.” The title and the content are provocative, and, like most punk, there is a conventional épater la bourgeoisie involved. But the more localized context is, once again, what would soon become known as the Third Wave, including an energetic push back against male privilege, as well as a declaration of freedom and gender identity that is more fluid, self-confident, and defiantly sex-positive. However offensive some might find the presentation, the expectation is always reassuring if reassurance is what we are expecting to find. Approached on its own terms, this kind of music has its own authority, an authority that, like the best in all art, invites and does not compel.

I’ll hedge my bets a little by acknowledging that a lack of “range and nuance” in popular culture may be an issue worth considering in much more depth than I have here, and for some people it may be a deal breaker. I also do not address Frye’s critical but prescient observations about the youth culture of the 1960s because I think the culture has much deeper roots now. Because I teach, I am fortunate enough to be continually surprised by the sophistication of students, despite the needless compromises that have been introduced into their formal education through cutbacks and chronic under-funding. Their worldview is remarkably liberal, and it has certainly not been encouraged by the diminished opportunities we have provided them compared to their baby boomer parents. They seem to pick it up where they can, and the most obvious place to look is the culture a significant number of them seem to feel is not simply there for them to consume, but to engage to the extent their own concerns will carry them. In a society currently under seige by a plutocratic class which appears to be set upon stripping away wealth from whatever source it can find, our popular culture is a means to keep alive the determination to prevent the powers that be from being the powers that will prevail.

Previous posts on Frye and rock ‘n’ roll here, here, and here.

Casting our net a little wider on the issue of popular culture, posts on Charlie Chaplin here, here, and here; on silent movies here; a list of every movie Frye alludes to seeing here; on the New Yorker here and here; on television here; on popular art forms here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here; on popular music here; on John Lennon here; on the Beatles here; on Bob Dylan here and here; on the ’60 youth movement here; on Andy Warhol here and here; Frye’s comments on a number of movies here.

This is by no means a comprehensive collection. This is just the stuff we’ve pulled together so far.

Quote of the Day: “Women who — like Vulcans and Mothra — do not exist in real life”

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The red-band trailer for Bridesmaids

Mindy Kaling, who writes for and plays Kelly Kapoor on The Office, in this week’s New Yorker lays out her love of romantic comedies by way of “the female archetypes”:

I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

It makes sense, then, that in the romantic-comedy world there are many specimens of women who—like Vulcans or Mothra—do not exist in real life.

The types Kaling goes on to describe in detail are:

“The Klutz” (“The hundred-per-cent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way except that she constantly bonks her head on things”)

“The Ethereal Weirdo” (also known as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: “She is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and perk up his dreary life by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.”).

“The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All” (“Often, a script calls for this uptight career woman to ‘relearn’ how to seduce a man, and she has to do all sorts of crazy degrading crap, like eat a hot dog in a sexy way or something.”).

“The Forty-two-Year-Old Mother of the Thirty-Year-Old Male Lead” (“If you think about the backstory of a typical mother character in a romantic comedy, you realize this: when “Mom” was an adolescent, the very week she started to menstruate she was impregnated with a baby who would grow up to be the movie’s likable brown-haired leading man.”).

“The Sassy Best Friend” (“You know that really hilarious and horny best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? O.K., that’s this person.”).

“The Skinny Woman Who Is Beautiful and Toned but Also Gluttonous and Disgusting” (“If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.”).

“The Woman Who Works in an Art Gallery” (“The Gallery Worker character is the rare female movie archetype that has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine’s friend always says the same thing: ‘He’s really successful. He’s”—say it with me—“an architect!’”).

Read the entire thing here.

Frye on the Homosexual Jesus

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Jesus and the Beloved Disciple

It’s Gay Pride Week, which makes it an especially good time to bring bailing buckets to the leaky boat of fear and intolerance.

Frye many times uses the term “homosexual” to describe the Jesus of the gospels, which makes sense archetypally because he is the second Adam who must redeem our fallen sexuality, including the always problematical subordination of women. He therefore consorts with men and has a “beloved disciple.” This is part of the “Eros Regained” aspect of salvation, the return to innocence of our sexuality (that is, sexuality without shame rather than suffused with it), the pinnacle of which is the restoration of the female. Frye in Notes 52:

Eros Regained starts with the homosexual refined Jesus lying on the bosom of a male beloved disciple, trying to get away from his mother but still so hung up sexually that he insisted his father was not his father and that his mother was a virgin, rescuing a bride symbolically but saying “don’t touch me” as his last words to a woman. This is the first phase of [Robert] Graves’ sequel: the mother-son one, where the son has to be “pure” to stay away from the Oedipal situation . . . I think the refined pure youthful Christ who’s been such a pain in the ass to later ages goes with the perversion of his teachings into a Mother Church. If I’m right about the Virgin as (this also seems to be Jung’s view) the glorified creature, or Man as the fourth person in the Trinity (except that it’s Woman), the Catholic cult of the Virgin is really a kind of narcissism.

What this ultimately means is that the restoration of Eros completes the resurrection of love where even the sexes become interchangeable, and, as with the Angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost, sex itself becomes interpenetration where “obstacle” they “find none / Of membrane, joint or limb” (8: 625-6). Moreover, if Christ is the bridegroom and the Church his bride, then all of humanity is female at the moment of salvation.

So maybe we can throw in transvestism as also doing God’s work.

Frye at the Movies: “Detective Story”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8NnjbzsTP8

Frye refers to this movie in his 1952 diary as a “sardonic masterpiece.” Detective stories generally were a source of almost guiltless pleasure for him (even putting aside their value in studying popular and primitive archetypes), and he made reference to them often. However, this personal account in his 1942 diary of reading them is easily the most charming:

I don’t think that I have either a highbrow or a lowbrow pose about detective stories, but I don’t really quite understand why I like reading them.  I read them partly for the sake of the overtones.  I’m not a connoisseur of them: I can never guess what the hell’s up when the detective pulls out a watch and shouts: “My God, we may yet be in time!”, shoves the narrator and half the country’s police force into a taxi, dashes madly across town and finds the girl I’d placidly thought was the heroine all equipped with a blunt instrument & an animal snarl.  I’m always led by the nose up the garden path in search of a false clue, and I never notice inconsistencies.  And I always get let down when I find out who dun it.  As I say, I like overtones.  A good style, some traces of wit & characterization, a sense of atmosphere, and a lot of the professional intricacies of the game can go to hell.  Yet I want a good novel in that particular convention & no other.  The answer is, I think, that I’m naturally a slow & reflective reader, & make copious marginalia.  In the detective story I live for a moment in the pure present: I’m passively pulled along from stimulus to stimulus, and, ignorant & idle as that doubtless is, I’m fascinated by it.  Yet I seldom finish without disappointment. (CW 8, 15)

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H. Rider Haggard

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE3Vosi_iY8

A clip from the very cheesy Hammer Films 1965 adaptation of She, with the imperious Ursula Andress playing “She who must be obeyed”

H. Rider Haggard died on this date in in 1925 (born 1856).

Frye in The Secular Scripture on the archetype of the earth-mother and Haggard’s She:

In the theme of the apparently dead and buried heroine who comes to life again, one of the themes of Shakespeare‘s Cymbeline, we seem to be getting a more undisplaced glimpse of the earth-mother at the bottom of the world. In later romances there is another glimpse of such a figure in Rider Haggard’s She, a beautiful and sinister female ruler, buried in the depths of a dark continent, who is much involved with various archetypes of death and rebirth. In the Xenophon of Ephesus the hero meets an old man who continues to love and live with his wife even though she has been embalmed as a mummy: similar themes are also in Haggard’s story. Embalmed mummies suggest Egypt, which is preeminently the land of death and burial, and largely because of its Biblical role, of descent to a lower world. (CW 18, 75-6)


Stendhal

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Today is Stendhal‘s birthday (1783-1842).

From “Towards a Theory of Cultural History”:

The chief difference between the comedy of the Renaissance and the realistic period is that the resolution of the latter more frequently involves a social promotion, and, like pathos, tends to be an individual achievement.  More sophisticated writers of low mimetic comedy often present the same success story with the moral ambiguities that we have found in Aristophanes.  In Balzac or Stendhal a clever and ruthless scoundrel may achieve the same kind of success as the virtuous heroes of Samuel Smiles and Horatio Alger.  Thus the comic counterpart of the alazon seems to be the clever, likable, unprincipled picaro of the picaresque novel.  (CW 21, 161)

Earlier posts on Frye and Alger here and here.