PICKING ATTEBERRIES PT. 2

Upon finishing the second chapter, I'm not sure how much further I'll delve into Brian Attebery's STORIES ABOUT STORIES.I thought his 1980 book on American fantasy provided a good overview of the genre. But here, the critic seems to be a little too focused on trying to bring the fantasy-genre into the sphere of literary modernism. He can make a statement like, "the principal difference between the Modernists' mythic method and that of fantasy is that the latter constructs apparently seamless narratives that put the mythic on the same diegetic plane as the modern, or at least modern sensibility." And yet, Attebery keeps coming back to the notion that the two are more strongly related by their mutual desire to re-interpret archaic myths for the purpose of modern audiences.

Certainly Attebery did a lot of homework to support his thesis. Long ago, I read the Ballantine edition of Hope Mirrlees' 1926 fantasy novel LUD-IN-THE-MIST, and retained a more or less favorable impression. But I never researched Mirrlees herself, and Attebery informed me that not only did the author run in the same circles as the esteemed literary author Virginia Woolf, both of them had a "mutual mentor, the Cambridge don and classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison." I certainly find that datum of passing interest, given Harrison's key influence upon the mythic analyses of the Cambridge Ritualists-- though my online research did not confirm Attebery's claim that Harrison was Mirrlees' "life companion." But despite the author's intelligent discussion of Mirlees' sole fantasy novel, Attebery almost seems determined to name-drop figures from respectable literature and scholarship in order to build up the repute of the fantasy genre, which was in Mirrlees' day far more socially marginal than works by people like Woolf and Harrison. 

A more key point of departure for me is Attebery's definition of myth. I certainly did not expect anything comparable to my own, or even to that of my key influence Joseph Campbell (though Campbell is given various citations throughout STORIES). But on the book's second page, Attebery provides his definition: "throughout this book, myth is used to designate any collective story that encapsulates a worldview and authorizes belief." And throughout the three sections I've read, Attebery's definition is meant to draw a line between myth, stories upon which archaic cultures center belief, and fantasy, whose virtue is, as the book's subtitle says, that of "the remaking of myth."

To maintain this distinction, Attebery frequently writes as if the archaic myths were changeless, while literary fantasies are all about ringing in changes on that changelessness. I feel sure a critic as learned as Attebery is aware that myths do change over time, even though the religions built around them may insist that the sacred narratives remain immutable over generations. 

Joseph Campbell's work supplied several examples of such cultural shifts, but I'll confine myself to one. In the chapter "Ancient India" in ORIENTAL MYTHOLOGY, Campbell describes the religion of the so-called "Aryan" tribes that invaded the Indian subcontinent circa 1500 B.C., which extolled the warrior-god Indra, celebrated for having killed the demonic dragon Vrita. However, a millennium later, the epic Mahabharata introduces the idea that Vrita was a Brahmin, and that Indra's slaying was therefore a crime, no matter Vrita's actions. Campbell interprets this change in the mythic narrative surrounding Indra as a shift in India's cultural matrix, as the former Aryan overlords were assimilated, via intermarriage, by the older tribes then denoted as "Dravidian," a congeries of peoples with very different priorities.

So for me the essence of myth is not the assertion of unchanging narratives, even though religions may claim that the narratives don't change in order to persuade the laity. In Chapter 1, Attebery asserts that we don't know to what extent Roman authors like Ovid and Apuleius really believed in the myths they depicted. But by the same token, we don't really know that the first Native American to tell a story of the trickster-god Coyote was a True Believer. Maybe he'd heard another tribal storyteller tell a myth-story about Raven, and he decided to tell a different story about Coyote for his own tribe. All sorts of motives can go into the making of all sorts of stories. The most one can say is that, as long as a given religious myth endures, someone may hold belief in its literal truth. But is that really fundamentally different from the enduring appeal of literary myths? Their adherents may never believe that the stories were true accounts of the gods, but they often give just as much devotion to all the fine points of those stories, parsing out just as many meanings as the practitioners of religious hermeneutics. And as distinctions between belief and unbelief grow hazy, we find ourselves back looking into Tolkien's "cauldron of story" for our answers, if not also to Jung's collective unconscious. And, to reiterate the conclusion I made in MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 3, the base motive to myths both religious and literary may be to propel the listener into the realms of sacred space and sacred time.

THAT SOCIAL DISEASE CALLED ART

 

As Rousseau more or less pointed out, a lone man or woman doesn’t need human society just to keep fed or sheltered. But human society brought forth language, and language brought forth all forms of art, even those that, like painting and music, don’t require the use of words. Still, it’s possible to break down all forms of communication into either sensory tropes or narrative tropes. The first are standardized scenarios that transmit information through the stimulation of a recipient’s senses, while the second are standardized scenarios that transmit information through explication. I’ve noted the distinction between the two forms of communication here.

The various schools of myth-criticism are united by the proposition that the earliest forms of human narrative—whether one believes that myth or folklore was paramount—are intensely relevant to art as we know it today. The greatest difference is that while the members of a traditional tribe are for the most part limited to their traditions (though not without cross-pollination from other tribes), modernity has allowed any patron of art to sample whatever art-form he might care for, from almost any time or place.

But because art is a social disease—and by that word I mean less a malady than a necessary infection, like the bacteria that dwell in human stomachs—almost no patron consumes art without desiring to see his tastes mirrored in others’ good opinions of this or that work of art, or even a particular genre of art. Northrop Frye was one of the few critics of the 20^th century who attempted to portray the entire spectrum of art, and he did so by viewing art through the lens of archaic mythic narrative. This led in part to his formulation of the theory of the four mythoi, based in part on the general idea of the “four ages of man,” as noted here. After putting forth this epic formulation in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Frye didn’t expound that often on the mythoi in later essays. One exception, though, appears in the essay “Mouldy Tales,” pointing out that critics of his time tended to be either “Iliad critics” (preferring tragedy and/or irony) or “Odyssey critics” (preferring comedy and/or romance). Whenever I look at critics who have endured into my own time, I see a similar division. Few are the reviewers who can appreciate all four mythoi with equal enthusiasm, and those who conceive a dislike for a particular mythos often take the attitude that the world would be better off without the entertainments that take an audience’s mind away from “the finer things.”

To Iliadic critics—and I tend to think that they’re usually in the majority—the idea of “ritual” expressed by Frye and the Cambridge School would be anathema. If they have any opinions on the role of ritual in art, they may conceive all works of “unearned gratification” to be ritualistic in nature, an endless cycle of titillating bread and circuses.

It's less important to point out that the obvious reply—that there are as many bad works in the categories of dramas and ironies as in the other two less celebrated mythoi—than to note that all four mythoi depend on the ritual use of both sensory and narrative tropes to accomplish certain ritual effects. For instance, Faulkner’s A LIGHT IN AUGUST pursues tropes most relevant to the *pathos * of the drama, and the author calls attention to his chosen mythos by having the character of Joe Christmas—note the initials—slain in a mock crucifixion. To be sure, authors may avoid such overtly mythic tropes. The protagonist of Coetzee’s DISGRACE is rendered pathetic by social humiliation and non-fatal physical injury. Nevertheless, DISGRACE is still a novel about pathos, even with the absence of overt mythic references. Coetzee works with sensory and narrative tropes to put across the minatory mood most associated with the “serious drama,” though the sense of menace is not so great as to propel the novel into the realm of irony.

Critics, as much as authors, often have fixed in their minds an “ideal reader” who is without doubt a projection of whatever the critic or author himself finds desirable. But the critic is particularly vulnerable to forgetting the function of art in society. This does not mean “winning hearts and minds through constant carping,” such as one used to see on the HOODED UTILITARIAN. Rather, it means that even if one does not subscribe to Frye’s mythoi-system, a full-spectrum analysis of human art shows it to be polymorphic in every era of human existence. Because of this fact, art could not have continued to pursuit different forms unless all of the forms had a vital function in human society as a whole. I tend to think that the forms are relatively constant because the “four ages of man” are archetypal states in human consciousness, without their being confined to any particular age. Allowing for the exception of pre-teen children, who are probably not the best audience for scathing ironies like CANDIDE, most of the radicals of Frye’s mythoi—the heroic contest, the endurance of suffering, the descent into death—can in theory prove appealing to anyone at any stage of actual life. As I also mentioned in FRYEAN BLIND, I don’t agree with the radical that Frye assigns to comedy, in that I feel comedy ought to be defined by a more “jubilative” radical, though Frye”s ruminations on the subject are still invaluable even if flawed in this respect.

RADICAL CONFLICTS PT. 2

I've been reading a few online resources on the subject of the myth-ritual school (sometimes called the Cambridge Ritualists). I've mentioned before that I'm aware that these theories, which had a strong effect on Northrop Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, are not much in favor today. The most common complaint from recent books is that the ritualists let their enthusiasm for their subject undermine the classicist's need for absolutely scrupulous scholarship.

I can understand why academics would put consistency first. Any academic discipline is highly dependent on an accretion of both fact and opinion, wherein the facts are theoretically unassailable and the opinions are those that best accord with those facts. Careful scholarship is essential, especially when dealing with the fragmentary records of ancient cultures, be it ancient Greece or one with even less extant evidence.

At the same time, I find fatuous the much lauded logic of Occam's Razor: that whatever seems to be the simplest explanation must also be the best. If the real life of modern times proves incredibly complicated, how could the culture of bygone times be any less so? The desire for scientific simplicity that I find in the anti-ritualist books puts me in mind of a quote from Walter Cerf, first cited here:

It is typical of reflective philosophy... that it relies on arguments, proofs, and the whole apparatus of logic... that it tries to solve intellectual puzzles rather than give the true conceptual vision of the whole; that it sticks to the natural sciences as the source of the only reliable knowledge of nature, thus committing itself... to a concept of experience reduced to sense perception, and to a concept of sense perception reduced to some causal chain...

Modern academics reject the highly speculative theories of ritualism because the Ritualists were not able to provide a "causal chain" as sturdy as the Darwinian insight that linked apes and humans. However, "the concept of experience" germane to literary production does not follow one razor-straight path. It may be overreaching to claim that all dramatic productions descend from rituals originally intended to bless the community or to expel noxious influences, but it's no less foolish to dismiss any connections at all, just to expel the "noxious influence" of careless scholarship.

Though Frye based his concept of the myth-radicals on the older Cambridge ritualists, I've never been moved to read most of them, except for a little of A,B. Cook and Jane Ellen Harrison's PROLOGOMENA. I was never married to the ritualist idea that archaic Greek drama descended literally from magico-religious rituals, and so it doesn't affect me that much if some scholars find this "causal chain" dubious. The radicals, like the "mythic moods" analyzed by Theodor Gaster, function as metaphors to organize the multifarious potential of the human mind.

At the end of the first RADICAL CONFLICTS I said:

I myself would rate the familiarity of commonplace experiences as no more than a "mild enjoyment," while the familiarity of shared myths would line up better with "intense pleasure"-- and this is the reason that I've chosen to write thousands of words on the topics of myths and myth-radicals. While as a pluralist I affirm the equal importance of all four radicals, I've clearly chosen to devote myself to the radical of the *agon,* even to the extent of analyzing its presence in narratives not aligned to the adventure-mythos best known for it. 

The blanket assertion of the anti-ritualists is that the Cambridge School was too devoted to fitting the entire world of drama (and, by extension, literature) into pigeonholes derived from Classical Greek terms. It's a familiar argument, showing the reflective critic's aversion to anything that ventures beyond the realm of causality as defined by the natural sciences. Noah Berlasky's pig-ignorant dismissal of Joseph Campbell, refuted here, is based in his commitment to a criticism founded entirely in ideological politics.

But because a pluralist is free to think in broad speculative terms, he can see outside the box of ideological means and ends. For instance, I've refined the idea of the *agon* radical as one that harnessed sort of "centric" will, one that invokes a ritualized invigorative mood,  as opposed to the less ambiious forms that characterize the same radical in its stage of "diffuse" will. The same logic extends to the other three radicals: the *pathos,* the *sparagmos* and the *incognitio*: they too much have their "centric and diffuse" (or possibly "sacred and profane") Possibly I'll explore a few of these as they occur to me, but since I'm writing a blog, and not a book to compete with ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, it's unlikely that I'll spend as much time on the other three radicals as I have upon the invigorative one.