Finding Ourselves on Both Sides of The Page

I think, out of all of the quotes in the film, “My Book and Heart Shall Never Part” this one made me think the most. That as we read, we usually find ourselves on both sides of the page. It has always seemed really strange to me how I can start reading a book, and gradually I move from seeing words, to seeing a kind of movie in my head and eventually everything flows together, and as I became a better reader growing up I could make longer and longer movies in my head, just by stringing letters together.

Theory of Myths

On the bottom of page 139 and the very top and very bottom of page 140 in Frye, he has written a very brief (and I think incomplete) two paragraphs describing the rest of “The Theory of Myths.” I am going to make an attempt to use this information to my advantage and make a quick outline of the next theory here in my blog, in hopes that when I get lost in Frye I will be able to refer back to my blog and the aforementioned pages to get back on track.

Undisplaced Myth: Gods and Demons. Heaven and Hell. Desirable and Undesirable.

The general tendency called romantic: “the tendency to suggest mythical patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience.

The tendency of realism: “Ironic literature begins with realism and tends toward myth…”

THE LAYOUT OF THE ESSAY:

Dianoia: the first structure of imagery. 1. Apocalyptic 2. Demonic

The two intermediate structures of literature

Mythoi: Following the seasons, “structures of imagery in movement.”

It…

Ever since Dr. Sexson asked us what we thought “it” meant, thats almost all I have been looking for in everything we’ve read (and for connections to Don Quixote and the little I understand from Frye.) I have to admit before going further in this blog, that I just finished reading Dante to Cangrande tonight.

What really caught my eye was a passage near the end, “If therefore one takes the last thing in the universe, not just anything, it is obvious that it has being from something else, and that from which ‘it’ has being, of itself or from something else…All essence, except for the first, is caused, otherwise there would be many things which would exist by necessity of being themselves, which is impossible, for the cause is either by nature or by intellect and that which is by nature is consequently caused by the intellect, since nature is the work of intelligence.”

Because The Idea of Order at Key West is a creation story, doesn’t the life given to the creation have to come from somewhere? So “it” (being the being) must come from God. The poem says, “If it was only the outer voice of sky/ And cloud, of the 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 sound alone. But it was more than that…” The sound of singing, rather than the voice of sky, or the speech or air has something more to it, something that only a being can produce. It as far as I can tell must be what makes the singing the singing of a human, her being or essence.

I feel like I am running across a chasm on a spider-web, is anyone following?

What I Underlined in Frye (Theory of Symbols)

So far I have underlined the same passages we have discussed in Frye on the “Theory of Symbols,” as everyone else has. This probably doesn’t mean much because I have underlined almost the entire book since I have based my underlines on ten dollar words (that I Google later.)

Page 77 (Literal): “And if a poem cannot be literally anything but a poem, then the literal basis of meaning in poetry can only be its letters, its inner structure of interlocking motifs. We are always wrong, in the context of criticism, when we say ‘this poem means literally’- and then give a prose paraphrase of it. All paraphrases abstract a secondary or outward meaning. Understanding a poem literally means understanding the whole of it, as a poem, and as it stands.” Ben’s blog has much more concerning this quote.

Page 79 (Descriptive): “Literature deeply influenced by the descriptive aspect of symbolism is likely to tend toward the realistic in its narrative and the didactic or descriptive in its meaning.” (Judson)

Page 84 (Formal): Writers typical of the formal phase… are sure that they are in contact with reality and that they follow nature, yet the effect they produce is quite different from the descriptive realism of the nineteenth century, the difference being largely in the imitation involved.

Page 95 (Formal): In the formal phase the poem belongs neither to the class ‘art,’ nor the class ‘verbal’: it represents its own class. There are thus two aspects to its form. In the first place it is unique, a techne or artifact, with its own peculiar structure of imagery, to be examined by itself without immediate reference to other things like it…In the second place, the poem is one of a class of similar forms.”

Page 100 (Archetypal): “In short, we can get a whole liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature.”

Page 105 (Archetypal): “In its archetypal phase, the poem imitates nature, not (as in the formal phase) nature as a structure or system, but as a cyclical process.”

Page 119 (Anagogic): “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.”

I guess I missed this blog…

The Four Elements: World, Audience, Work, Artist

World:(mimetic-ancient)

“She sang beyond the genius of the sea…” “The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,/ Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped/ On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres/ Of sky and sea.” “It may be that in all her phrases stirred/ The grinding water and the gasping wind;/ But it was she and not the sea we heard.”

In these lines, the world is literarly described, the ocean is ancient, as are the mountains and the atmosphere, but because she sang beyond the genius of the sea she seems more ancient, as if she has been there longer than the sea to witness something older than it. The mimicry in the poem is not of her mimicing the sea, but of the sea mimicing her, the grinding water and gasping wind seem to be trying to acheieve something that she can, but that they can’t attain.

Audience: (pragmatic: (relating to matters of fact or practical affairs often to the exclusion of intellectual or artistic matters : practical as opposed to idealistic (Meriam-Webster.com))-neo-classical)

(More to follow…)

Lightbulb

“Biography will always be a part of criticism, and the biographer will naturally be interested in his subject’s poetry as a personal document, recording his private dreams, associations, ambitions, and expressed or repressed desires. Studies of such matters form an essential part of criticism.” -Frye, 110

This passage in Frye reminded me of an assigment that my AP English teacher gave me in high school after I wrote a short essay on Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  The assignment came about because my teacher was part of the group of critics that believe that what the author feels while he writes the poem, should not be considered in the analysis of the poem, and in my essay I included what I thought to be relevant habits and behaviors of the author in the analysis of this poem. My English teacher then gave me the task of figuring out how William Carlos Williams may have been feeling while writing “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Considering the poem is only sixteen words long I am pretty sure my teacher thought he had nothing to worry about. I can’t recall everything I included in my second essay but it was longer than the original.

This quote was more of a lightbulb for me than the rest because it put into perpective something I already knew. That whether or not we, as readers, want to include the psychological profile of the poet in our analysis’, it is a very hard thing to ignore once we have been enlightened of it and its relevance to the poetry.

Theory of Symbols

The “Theory of Symbols” essay in Frye was by far the hardest thing I have ever had to read. My usual reading list includes titles such as Harry Potter and numerous text books. I think the reason it took me almost two weeks to read the entire essay has something to do with the fact that I was totally lost from page 71 until page 123 where Frye gives a breif recap of each of the phases of symbols. I think Frye could have used his recap as an overview or a thesis statement instead and made this essay a lot easier to read. One statement that I did understand in this essay though (yes, one) was where Frye said that the Bible would still be popular literature if it were not a religious text. I know that I have put off reading the Bible for this reason, and I am sure many others have as well.

And now, what I understand to be the meaning of the phases of symbols:

Literal: (Ironic) Metaphor in its literal shape.

Descriptive: (Low Mimetic) “double perspective of the verbal structure an the phenomena to which it is related.”

Formal: (High Mimetic) “images of natural phenomena.”

Archetypal: (Romantic) “symbol is an associative cluster.”

Anagogical: (Myth) “conception of literature as existing in its own universe.”

So basically, all of the theories of symbols build upon one another, and as they do they also go through the literary modes.