There’s not much introduction to do. Anatomy of Criticism, being a book, continues. Here’s part one of my reading of the first essay, “Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes.” I’ve broken this up into two parts partly because I’m really tired and I’m not sure if I’m processing very well today, and partly because the essay is broken into sections on tragedy and comedy, making my tired-decision easier to make.
Here’s a very simple breakdown of the modes Frye delineates in this essay:
Yes, I drew it myself. With a pen, not a photoshop.
He sets it up as a vertical scale, but claims the scale does not imply value. I feel it’s easier to visualize it without the valuation in a circle, rather than a scale. He does come to the conclusion, in the end, that it’s a cycle, so no worries there. Start at “myth,” which involves characters greater than humans in kind and surroundings, they’re gods, divine. Romance features characters greater in degree and surroundings, they’re traditional heroes, like Arthur. ”High” mimetic (the term refers to that vertical scale, and again, is not supposed to imply virtue) has characters greater than humans in degree but not surroundings — so they’re leaders of men, basically. ”Low” mimetic has characters equal to humans in every way. Irony features characters lesser in degree or surroundings, putting the reader at a vantage above them to watch — even if the character is a regular Joe, the reader is placed above, like the story of Job. He considers these variations to be differences in the hero’s “power of action,” or ability to do stuff.
He claims storytelling has gone down the scale, or clockwise from myth, through history, and in his current time most writing was in the ironic mode. I think the historical tendency may be a scale as well, since there’s this push toward fantasy and sci-fi again in literature through all the striations of form and prestige, even if the old guard of literature and creative writing don’t want to admit it.
The first section applies this to tragedy. He marks tragedy as the form in which the hero ends up being isolated from society. I wondered if that would, necessarily, mark Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann as a tragedy, according to Frye, as Simon ends up wandering, alone, at the show’s end. I’m not arguing it’s a tragedy, just wondering. There are other mitigating factors, even in Frye’s classifications, to say otherwise. Just a thought.
Frye points out the reflection of the hero’s suffering in nature is generally a romantic motif — like the deaths of gods occuring in Autumn (or, more mythically, causing Autumn). He engages in a pretty good example of how this sort of taxonomy has a practical use:
The use of “solemn sympathy” in a piece of more realistic fiction indicates that the author is trying to give his hero some of the overtones of the mythical mode. Ruskin’s example of a pathetic fallacy is “the cruel, crawling foam” from Kingsley’s ballad about a girl drowned in the tide. But the fact that the foam is so described gives to Kingsley’s Mary a faint coloring of the myth of Andromeda. (36).
Tragic romance, Frye claims, is about a spirit passing out of nature, and about loss as inevitable — and removed from its social context (that’s reserved for the mimetic modes). The Lord of the Rings suits this description well, which he even names “elegiac.”
“Low” mimetic tragedy concerns the exclusion of a character like us from society — he marks one of the prototypical figures of this as a kind of pretender to something he or she is not, and mentions the obsessive as one type. He then goes on to say the figure is popular in Gothic “thrillers,” but claims they’re not tragedy, but melodrama. He either forgets about Frankenstein or considers it something else. It seems a great lack, to me, as he mentions the type as also featuring in the “popular” trope of the mad scientist.
Interesting note for the theory of creative writing: Frye mentions the technique of saying little and implying much as an ironic one, tied specifically to the mode, which he has already set up as one that passes into and out of popularity through time. What is taken as an absolute in writing classes — that “less is more” — is quite specifically linked to a time, and will eventually be out of fashion again. I think, with the rise of writers like Susanna Clarke, who actively hearken back to writers like Austen, the change is already occuring.
One of the key types of ironic figures is the “pharmakos,” the Greek term for the scapegoat. This guy is just boned — he didn’t do anything, or didn’t do anything nearly as bad as the punishment he receives. I immediately thought of the poor bastard who’s the main character of Air. What the fuck did he do? Puppet-shows. And his metamorphosis lends weight to Frye’s claim that irony tends toward the mythic, that read as mimetic, the happenstance of irony that persecutes the individual makes no sense, but read as myth it falls into place. His example was James’s The Altar of the Dead. In tragedy, ironic modes generally indicate a level of complicit guilt simply for being human, rather than an individual guilt. Everyone is isolate, the ironic tragedy says.
Haruki Murakami comes to mind. He’s most often classified as a writer of “literary” fiction and a champion of postmodernism, but it’s easy enough to glean that Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (the latter of which quickly became one of my all-time favorite novels) are both contemporary sci-fi/fantasy, or, barring genre labels, that they contain truckloads of those sorts of speculative elements. So, yeah, I think your charting the modes as a cycle is very appropriate.
I like this definition of tragedy; the logic behind my last big paper as an undergrad, an examination of Ulysses as tragedy, more or less hinged upon it, and I got the idea in the first place from how similar low mimetic tragedy and irony seem to be. I wish I’d thought of the fiction modes as a cycle at the time; it all would’ve made even more sense to me.
In other news, nested comments should now go out to ten levels, so have fun building pyramids of text, everyone.
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