RADICAL CONFLICTS

It is true of the good man too that he does many acts for the sake of his friends and his country, and if necessary dies for them; for he will throw away both wealth and honours and in general the goods that are objects of competition, gaining for himself nobility;since he would prefer a short period of intense pleasure to a long one of mild enjoyment, a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of humdrum existence, and one great and noble action to many trivial ones. -- Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, tr. W.D Ross (from the Internet Archive) 

It's been quite a while since I descanted on the topic of Frye's myth-radicals, as my last listing for the topic was in AFFECT VS. MOOD in 2014. Of course I've continued, here and on the film-review blog, to label narratives as one of the four "mythoi," more or less following the line of thought I formulated in the first "51 percent rule" essay:

...most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

The proposed "51 percent rule" has been modified by the introduction of the "active share/ passive share" corollary put forth last November. But even in this blog's early history, it's clear to me that in essays like BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER and STATURE REQUIREMENTS were seeking for an "active share" solution to the problem of "which mythos is the most dominant." Later, I would ask the same questions with regard to a given narrative's dominant phenomenality or its participation in the "combative mode." A downside to the 51 percent rule as stated is that it was devised with serial concepts in mind. Of course, anyone who seeks to label to a narrative that gives "mixed signals" must attempt something in the nature of an "active share" solution as well, unless the person chooses the strategy of Polonius, adopting weird conflations like the "tragical-comical-historical-pastoral"-- or even the "dramedy," sometimes attributed to Steven Bochco in the 1980s.

As should be evident from my other essays on Aristotle, I don't subscribe to his observations on morality as such, but he was an unqualified genius in terms of seeking to glean what qualities make certain things better, or at least more elevated, than others. The quote above from the ETHICS makes clear that although Aristotle had his "realistic" aspects, he was not a realist in our sense of the word, since he values "a twelvemonth of noble life to many years of humdrum existence." His POETICS is just as informed by this process of sussing-out, and my STATURE REQUIREMENTS essay explores some of the ways in which the philosopher assigned differing values to the literary genres of his time.

Now, Frye's concept of mythoi from the ANATOMY OF CRITICISM took some inspiration from such 20th-century authors as Theodore Gaster and the considerably earlier myth-ritual school. But Frye's primary influence, as he himself admits, is the POETICS, and though Frye does not say so, he implicitly accepts Aristotle's valorization of "plot" over "character," as seen in Book 6 of THE POETICS:

Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.--Aristotle, POETICS, book 6. 

Aristotle's "artistically constructed incidents" are not as schematically laid out as Frye's four myth-radicals, though Frye primarily derives all of his terms from the POETICS: "agon," "pathos," "sparagmos," and what Frye calls "anagnorisis" or "cognitio"-- though, without raising a new issue, I've expressed some disagreement with Frye as to the applicability of this last term.

The interesting thing that Aristotle and Frye have in common is that both are trying to advance entirely secular explanations for the wide appeal of narrative actions that are certainly not "incidents" in the way that English speakers use the word. All of these radicals, around which the narrative action coalesces, are intended to produce "intense pleasure" rather than "mild enjoyment"-- though we don't precisely know what Aristotle made of the pleasures of comedy and other literary genres, as opposed to the tragedies to which he devotes so much attention.

Now, in the POETICS Aristotle clearly gives pride of place to the plot-function of "recognition," choosing to term plots without a revelation-scene as "simple" and those with one as "complex." I believe that his preference is rooted in his belief as a philosopher that all literary pleasure itself stemmed from the recognition of familiarity, brought about the author's successful imitation, or "mimesis," of the real world. Unlike Zola, Aristotle did not insist that imitation included only the documentary recording of familiar experiences, for he allowed that it also included things like familiar stories about the nature of the gods, and other sources of the "wonder" that he finds necessary for tragedies.

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 of course this is certainly 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. However, I've already attested to my probable reasons for focusing on the "great and noble action" of combative strife in essays like this one, so I won't repeat myself on that score. I will add, though, that conflict, albeit not combat, is implied by all of the other three radicals-- and that's one other reason as to why I find the *agon* to be the "first among equals" in this archetypal grouping.

DIVINING COMEDY

I don't know how long this site has had Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM online, but it'll certainly be of particular use to me in copying text for the purpose of either supporting or refuting Frye's theories. This essay will be a partial refutation of Frye's theory of the comic.

"The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it. The mythical comedy corresponding to the death of the Dionysiac god is Apollonian, the story of how a hero is accepted by a society of gods. In Classical literature the theme of acceptance forms part of the stories of Hercules, Mercury, and other deities who had a probation to go through, and in Christian literature it is the theme of salvation, or, in a more concentrated form, of assumption: the comedy that stands just at the end of Dante's Commedia."-- p. 43.

"Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy."-- p. 190.

The obvious pun in my title plays off of Frye's tendency to conflate the tendency of comedies toward social integration with that of religious salvation, as presented in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY. I believe I understand his logic but I disagree with his conclusions. I don't find much that is comic in the DIVINE COMEDY, or most similar stories emphasizing something akin to "salvation," and these narratives I tend to categorize under my heading of "non-agonistic" adventure-romance, in that Dante's work takes place in the context of an ongoing struggle between Good and Evil.

A larger question concerns the identification of comic integration with religious triumphalism, in that I view the latter as also more typical of adventure-genres than of most of the works that people consider to be "comedies." In making this equation Frye was probably influenced by his personal religion, in that he was a practicing Christian. It should be said that in most respects Frye's system is more liberal and pluralistic than the systems of those who worship only their own intellects-- which is all right with me as long as they show that they actually posses significant intellects. (This leaves out Barthes and Adorno right off). Only in this respect, in his identification of the theme underlying the *mythos* of comedy, does his religion steer him in what I deem an incorrect direction, though it doesn't undermine his system by any means.

In previous essays I've noted how various works that contemporary society deems comedies, such as the BLONDIE comic strip and the Three Stooges shorts, don't conform either to Frye's general propositions on comedy or his "six phase" design of comic modes, on which I don't plan to discourse here. As I've also stated before I think that the root of our disagreement is that Frye, like Henri Bergson, considers the root of comedy to be "repetitive activity," while I favor the root to be "incongruity," following the arguments of Arthur Schopenhauer.

On page 185 of THE ANATOMY Frye makes another telling equation between the structure of the Greco-Roman New Comedy and the structure of the Christian salvation-narrative:

"...we realize that the crudest of Plautine comedy-formulas has much the same structure as the central Christian myth itself, with its divine son appeasing the wrath of a father and redeeming what is at once a society and a bride."

In stating this Frye does not mean that every "comedy-formula" is like that of the New Comedy, with its concerns over winning a "bride." His "same structure" is an ideal model, not a prescriptive one. But the question remains as to whether his ideal is ideal in all respects. For instance, one of Plautus's best-known comedies is something of a reversal of New Comic themes, for THE AMPHITRYON deals with the comic misadventures that result when Zeus, preparatory to siring Heracles, decides to assume the guise of a Greek lord named Amphitryon in order to sleep with Amphitryon's wife. If anything AMPHITRYON resembles BLONDIE far more than any New Comedy story.

Now, while Frye thought that the "young-man-winning-a-bride" formula was structurally similar to that of a salvation-narrative like THE DIVINE COMEDY, because both ended the repetitious sequence of comic misadventures, I would say that both AMPHITRYON and BLONDIE are better explained by incongruity than by repetition. What they have in common are not young men seeking brides but older men who are for one reason or another embarassed as they seek to maintain order in their households. There is nothing inherently "repetitious" in Amphitryon's predicament: he does what any husband would do when he thinks his wife is sleeping with another man, and only the revelation of Zeus' trickeries mollifies him. Dagwood Bumstead's situation, as it occurs in a serial format, shows more repetitions, but I would suggest that what they have in common is the incongruity of their seeking to have the patriarch's ideal control of his world, and how they fail so miserably as to be funny in their humiliations.

Repetition, for me, is a tool that only works within a greater scheme of incongruous activities that one finds funny because the sufferings depicted are so essentially harmless. If there is any ideal underlying it, it is not Christian grace but a sort of perdurability in the characters who suffer so many zany misadventures. It is this perdurability in the face of the absurd that led me to feel that the emotional affect one should associate with comedy's *mythos* is that of a happy absurdity, which is the affect I wish to suggest with my revised term for Frye's *anagnorisis*-theme: the "incognitio."

Oddly, even though I find nothing comic in the DIVINE COMEDY, or even "the action of the Christian Bible" that Frye also finds comparable with comic action, I do think one early Church Father captured the essence of the incognitio. Asked why he believed in the Resurrection, Church Father Tertullian allegedly said:

"I believe--

--Because it is absurd."

COGNITIO/ DISSONANCE

Once again I return to Northrop Frye's concept of the four "archetypal themes" or "radical roots" of his four mythoi: for romance/adventure, the agon, for tragedy/drama, the pathos, for irony, the sparagmos, and for comedy the anagnorisis, which he asserts is more or less equivalent to the Latin cognitio.

Back in this essay I expressed more than a little discomfort with Frye's analysis of the comedy mythos, in which he tended to overemphasize, in keeping with Greek New Comedy, comedy's power to join together disparate parts of society, often through a climactic banquet or wedding-scene. It's true that there are some indications that the tradition of the "happy ending" climax might even go back to Greek Old Comedy, so that aspect of comedy may predate New Comedy's concentration of romantic plot-devices.

That said, when Frye writes something like this--

"These five phases of comedy may be seen as a sequence of stages in the life of a redeemed society."

-- I can't help but feel that something's being left out of the equation, like the question of whether the archetypal theme of comedy should relate to aspects of life we find funny, not redeeming as such. Surely one can find aspects of redemptive value in the other three mythoi as well.

Here's the longest thing Frye writes on the question of why we find things funny:

"The principle of the humor is the principle that unincremental repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny...Repetition overdone or not going anywhere belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern... The principle of repetition... is well known to the creators of comic strips, in which a character is established as a parasite, a glutton... or a shrew, and who begins to be funny after the point has been made every day for several months."

This passage, whose theory of humor sounds strikingly like that of Henri Bergson's, demonstrates that Frye was well acquainted with modern forms of repetitive comedy. Indeed, his description of the glutton sounds a lot like Dagwood Bumstead.

The problem, however, is that a comic strip like BLONDIE is so repetitive that it's hard to imagine it being one of the "stages in the life of a redeemed society." Rather, BLONDIE seems a New Comedy in reverse, where the romantic plot that originally drove the feature was concluded, so that from then on all the humor stemmed not from a young man overcoming opposition to his romance but from an older man finding himself trapped in what Marshal McLuhan called the strip's "mothering-wedlock."

So anagnorisis does not really seem to apply to a work as fiercely repetitive as BLONDIE, which makes one wonder if the term really serves for the archetypal theme of comedy. In that earlier essay I noted that I might use Frye's term with the caveat that I really referenced not his notion of "comedy as redemption" but something more like Kant's "comedy as incongruity," but since that's an easy point to fall by the wayside, I'm now planning to use the Latin cognitio in place of the Greek one. And I seem not to be the first to need something more expansive than the Aristotelian term: according to Terence Cave's study of the concept of literary recognition, Renaissance critics (covered in Chapter 2) also used cognitio to denote a wider concept of recognition that the one favored by Aristotle, which Frye channels into his interpretation of characters experiencing some epiphanic redemption.

I mentioned in the Comedy-and-Irony essay that I thought the archetypal theme of comedy should be capable of embracing every form of incongruity from the philosophical ruminations of Woody Allen to the slapstick of the Three Stooges. I still believe that, but if one believes that the essence of humor is not repetition but incongruity, then it implies that the pleasure we get from humor is not in cognitive knowledge but in knowing nothing in life ever quite coheres the way we think it ought to, as in Milton's encomium on Socrates:

“The first and wisest of them all professed
To know this only, that he nothing knew.”

Thus my theme of cognitio is fundamentally about knowing that humans don't really know anything, but whereas this "discovery" is often a cause for despair or deep reflection in the other three mythoi, in comedy such knowledge is the source of the pleasure itself.

This attempt to refine aspects of Frye's archetypal themes will tie in with a later essay that will cover my earlier-mentioned reading of Theodor Gaster's THESPIS, and why its influence on Frye's ANATOMY might be extended into new territory.