THE GATE OF THE GODS, Part 3

"Delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy: instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only instructs as it delights."—John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

It may not be evident, given the sometimes dry intellectual tone of this blog, but like Dryden (who was almost certainly building on the dichotomy of delight and instruction put forth by Horace in ARS POETICA), I too favor a poetics that puts delight before instruction.

The above should be abundantly clear from this essay, where I rejected any dominantly ideological theory of art. Ideological concepts are always spun off from what Northrop Frye terms "secondary concerns," which are no more than the assorted mental strategies humankind devises whereby they get or secure the "primary concerns," which are humankind's primary conduit to both sustenance and its concomitant pleasures. I suggested that the "primary concerns" come down to what some pagans termed the "four F's"-- flags (housing), flax (clothing), fodder and frig. To take "frig" as an example, any theory that primarily defines, say, a fictional work's exhibition of feminine charms as "exploitation of women's bodies" is simply a theory conceived to stroke its user in an intellectual rather than a sensuous manner.

In itself the "primary/secondary" dichotomy is sufficient to refute the errors of ideological criticism, but the terms aren't descriptive enough to be used for art itself; to understand how "delight" and "instruction" operate within the spectrum of artistic endeavor. So the terms require further elaboration and cross-comparison.

I stated here that I had encountered "interesting" works whose only real appeal was to sensationalism. I termed these works "drive-in junk," though I didn't give examples (possibly in a future essay). It should be noted that all of Frye's "primary concerns" are oriented upon the satisfaction of bodily needs, whose need is ineluctably communicated to the brain through physical sensations. As a general rule Frye seems, unlike the ideological critics, "rooted" in his consciousness of the fact of human physicality and how it bears on humankind's need to produce art as a non-biological ritual that to some degree orients humans the way biological rituals orient "lower" animals. (This is enlarged upon in the essay "Archetypes of Literature," parts of which I quoted here.)
Naturally, as a highbrow critic (however pluralist) Frye did not explore the possibility that simple "junk" could serve as sources of cultural ritual as much, or perhaps more, than the more elevated forms of art. And I won't explore that possibility right now, though it does indirectly figure into my search for a deeper application of the primary/secondary dichotomy.

"Primary concerns," then, begin with sensation. But is it a straight step from there to "secondary concerns," to an instrumental mode of consciousness that says, "Here's HOW to get and keep them?"

I don't believe so, and I don't think Frye's concept of ritual-- as expressed in the "Archetypes" essay-- is congruent with such a quick jump to an instrumental consciousness. Before humankind begins to think about ways to get and keep the things that convey pleasure, it had to see them as part of what Ernst Cassirer called the "symbolic universe" which human beings alone inhabit. Once again, let's take "frig" for example. We surmise that at some point early man began to codify customs that he thought would better control or maintain the practice of pleasurable intercourse with the least amount of friction (of the fatal kind, that is). But before those "secondary concerns" could be codified, we should also surmise that the existential fact of sexuality would have taken on symbolic resonance as a thing apart from the sensational stimulations of intercourse. We don't know if early man made associative links like those of later cultures, where, say, "man" became poetically associated with the sun and "woman" with the moon. (Not that the aforementioned was at all universal even in later cultures.) But it seems to me likely that a certain symbolic resonance was born from the stimulations of those primary concerns, to say nothing of a whole lotta physical progeny.

So, assuming that the other "primary concerns" give rise to the same sort of symbolic resonance, then we have a dichotomy within one half of the dichotomy. And, all things being equal, one might suppose that "secondary concerns" may not come down to just a broad instrumental consciousness; that it too will have a dual aspect--

Which is exactly what that little old Swiss psychologist Carl Jung found, whose concept of mental functions I'll explore more fully next time.