{"id":3424,"date":"2009-09-30T17:19:47","date_gmt":"2009-09-30T21:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=3424"},"modified":"2009-09-30T17:19:47","modified_gmt":"2009-09-30T21:19:47","slug":"the-taming-of-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/09\/30\/the-taming-of-anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"The Taming of Anxiety"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"taming\"<\/p>\n

Answering\u00a0Russell’s response<\/a> to my earlier post<\/a>:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I guess it’s about getting the emphasis right, Russell.\u00a0 To say, as Frye does, that literature is “primarily” centripetal is not to say that it is exclusively<\/em> centripetal.\u00a0 Frye himself\u00a0regularly makes the point\u00a0Greenblatt does in Hamlet in Purgatory<\/em>: that an understanding\u00a0of the external\u00a0“referents” in any given work of literature can only\u00a0deepen our appreciation of it.\u00a0 However, that’s about where agreement between them ends.\u00a0 Frye’s reading scenario\u00a0is usually laid out\u00a0something like this: as readers we are confronted with a work of literature with lots of hard words to be looked up and unfamiliar allusions to be\u00a0traced back\u00a0to their source, not to mention a contemporary\u00a0intellectual milieu to be absorbed.\u00a0 And, of course,\u00a0it’s a good thing we make\u00a0the necessary\u00a0effort to\u00a0do that; it\u00a0is certainly an integral part of literary scholarship, as Frye invariably points out.\u00a0 But once we have done all of that, we are still confronted with a work of literature that must be\u00a0interpreted as such <\/em>because, as Frye says in The Educated Imagination<\/em>, literature does not reflect reality, it swallows it.\u00a0 And, as he says in Anatomy<\/em>, once an ideology is taken into a work of literature, it is no longer ideological in reference, it is literary.<\/p>\n

Both of the\u00a0Shakespeare plays\u00a0you cite, Hamlet<\/em> and The Taming of the Shrew<\/em>, provide\u00a0excellent opportunities to demonstrate how this works.\u00a0 While it is true, for example, that our appreciation of the afterlife\u00a0misery of Hamlet’s father’s ghost\u00a0is enhanced by an understanding of the theological conceptions of the afterlife at the time, it’s pretty clear that no audience of Hamlet<\/em> requires anything approaching a scholarly knowledge of such a thing.\u00a0 The archetype of the dread surrounding death is more than sufficient to communicate to us what is happening at the elemental level of understanding.\u00a0 Death is terrifying, the afterlife a\u00a0nausea-inducing mystery. “To be or not to be…”\u00a0 Nuff said.<\/p>\n

The same goes with The Taming of the Shrew<\/em>.\u00a0 We don’t, as you say, have to live in a “ideal world” to see that the normative misogyny of the world of the play is ugly and absurd.\u00a0 The play itself shows us that!\u00a0 One of the things that makes Taming of the Shrew <\/em>remarkable — and, of course, entirely consistent with the canon as a whole — is its pronounced metaliterary perspective.\u00a0 In this case, it mostly\u00a0takes the form (like A Midsummer Night’s Dream<\/em>) of a dramatically superfluous fifth act.\u00a0 That is to say, the\u00a0standard New Comedy plot\u00a0is long since resolved by the time of the wedding banquet where Katherine gives her notorious speech in which she entreats the women present to submit themselves to their husbands,\u00a0even\u00a0to the point of exhorting them to “place your hands beneath your husband’s foot.”\u00a0 But this little pantomime is\u00a0no more than\u00a0that: it’s a fully self-aware show that Petruchio and Katherine are putting on for the benefit (or is it at the expense?) of their less imaginitively\u00a0adept peers.\u00a0 We in the audience proper know better.\u00a0 We know that by this point Katherine and Petruchio have successfully (albeit with a tremendous amount of rough and tumble) negotiated together a world of play where nothing is quite what it seems — where the sun may be the moon or vice versa, and an old man encountered on the road to Padua\u00a0may be mistaken for a “young budding virgin” — or, more accurately (and much more interestingly) be pretended <\/em>to be mistaken for one.\u00a0 Do I also have to mention the Christopher Sly framing device that gives the play an absolutely explicit <\/em>metaliterary dimension?\u00a0 The ironies of the fifth act are so rich and evocative that any attempt to reduce them to a flatly declarative ideological intent, however good those intentions, is demonstrably contrary to the inner workings of the play itself.<\/p>\n

Here’s my point.\u00a0 I know that many can and do dispute such a reading of the play.\u00a0\u00a0However, it\u00a0is also undeniable\u00a0that this reading is at least possible with reference to what goes on within <\/em>the play and without reference to any ideological anxiety beyond <\/em>it.\u00a0 We are, of course,\u00a0not compelled<\/em> to see the\u00a0play in these terms; but we are free<\/em> to do so\u00a0on very good authority (that is, the centripetal focus of the play as such), and that is always Frye’s point.\u00a0 All of our limits, when it comes to literature, are self-imposed.\u00a0 As Merv Nicholson might say, “what makes Frye different” is the articulation of the possibility that we might voluntarily recognize those self-imposed limitations and stroll happily and unencumbered right past them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Answering\u00a0Russell’s response to my earlier post: I guess it’s about getting the emphasis right, Russell.\u00a0 To say, as Frye does, that literature is “primarily” centripetal is not to say that it is exclusively centripetal.\u00a0 Frye himself\u00a0regularly makes the point\u00a0Greenblatt does in Hamlet in Purgatory: that an understanding\u00a0of the external\u00a0“referents” in any given work of literature […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-criticism"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Taming of Anxiety - 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