BREAKING OPEN MOULDY TALES

"...all critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance... Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience... They value lifelike characterization, incidents close enough to actual experience to be imaginatively credible, and above all they value 'high seriousness' in theme..."-- Northrop Frye, "Mouldy Tales," A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE, pp. 1-2.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Frye then goes on to describe himself as belonging to the "minority" that comprises the "Odyssean critics" as against those whose outlook favors the Iliadic view, whom later in the essay he also calls, tellingly, "moral critics." Then, of course, he relates how the Odyssean critic differs from the Iliadic one in terms of a greater appreciation of form for form's sake, identifying such formalism with the appreciation of comedy and romance, which, in truth, even most non-critics tend to view as more "escapist" and less "realistic" than tragedy and irony (the last of which most people know only as "satire.")

One of the significances of this essay for me is that, without my necessarily accepting Frye's terms, I'm in the same minority-boat as Frye. Most contemporary comics-critics-- by which I mean those who expouse an organized theory of literature, not just reviewers who discourse on whether or not they like something-- take their cues from such Iliadic influences as Roland Barthes, the Frankfurt School and sundry other Marxists, with occasional dollops of Freud here and there. I have encountered a few critics I consider to be pluralists and even a few elitists who contradict their main outlooks by expousing pluralist notions when it suits them. All I can do about this state of affairs is take refuge in the Ibsenian observation that "the minority is always right" and plug along.


It does strike me that the essay "Mouldy Tales" (the title was taken from a broadside Ben Jonson took at Shakespeare for the latter's investment in mouldy old folktales) has a possible significance for anyone interested in reading up on the critic I've most often recommended here. I don't expect that anything I write will move a comics-fan to attempt plowing through ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, but any interested party might find it relatively easy to make it through the thirty pages of this one essay. Of course, because the essay's not online, that would mean finding the outtaprint book through an interlibrary loan, so-- probably won't happen. So consider this essay a primer on what "Mouldy Tales" *might* signify to any pluralist critics.


Of strong interest is the way MT confirms my earlier opinion that Frye was a pluralist at heart, for all that he penned some rather elitist statements in the early 195os. By 1963, though Frye was still basically an academic with only mild interest in contemporary popular culture, he had developed enough to write:

"Reading a detective story indicates a liking for comic and romantic forms, and for the contemplation of a fiction for its own sake. We begin by shutting out or deliberately excluding our ordinary experience, for we accept, as part of the convention of the form, things that we know are not often found in actual experience, such as an ingenious murderer and an imaginative policeman. We do no want to think about the truth or likelihood of what we are reading, as long as it does not utterly outrage us; we simply want to see what is going to happen in the story."

Frye goes on to point out that because the more "realistic" forms of literature foreground what he terms (following Freud) "the reality principle." Thus even though tragedies like MACBETH and ironies like THE CASTLE (my examples) have a certain storytelling verve to them as well, there's a sort of proto-critical experience one generally has while experiencing them. To use a set of terms introduced in a separate Frye essay, the audience is oriented upon discovering what "significant values" are allegorized in the narrative, thereby to learn what meaning the work has for "reality." In contrast, comedy and romance, being oriented upon the "pleasure principle" (one presumes), lend themselves more to the enjoyment of "narrative values,"and of the "variety" one finds in the story's conventions. (I've elaborated elsewhere on my dislike for this term but since Frye's meaning is a pluralistic one, I'll continue to use it here.)

Perhaps the greatest mountain an Odyssean critic has to scale is that because comedy and romance are not as often intellectualized as tragedy and irony, their "variety" is perhaps harder to analyze.

Take the question of narrative "outrage." Even with comedy and romance, not everyone agrees as to what real-world notions should or should not be suspended. Probably anyone invested in BATMAN to any extent is willing to suspend disbelief in the costume, the car, the secret cave underneath the mansion. But a convention like "the sidekick" may outrage an audience-member who cannot let go of consensual reality. Said reader may become exercised about the theoretical immorality of an adult endangering a child by taking him into battle. Another reader may be incredulous as to the innocence of the original Batman-Robin relationship, and may choose to read the two characters as gay in order to give the fantasy greater "realism." In both cases the readers may be genuinely outraged, though there is a temptation to believe that they may be succumbing to the cultural tendency to project "significant values" where none are indicated.

But if the conventions have any strength with a general audience, they will survive these sort of objections. Conventions are popular formulas of dynamization: they give audiences pleasure by establishing the superiority of one set of characters or conditions over others, be it a hero over a villain or a happy marriage over a loveless one. The carpings of the realists may even provide new challenges for the artist interested in the Odyssean forms. For instance, Clint Eastwood's 1992 western UNFORGIVEN is essentially as much a "combative" form of narrative as many westerns before it, but early in the picture Eastwood begins by suggesting that he intends to deconstruct his hero, after the fashion of Robert Altman's 1971 MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER. Then, having gulled the audience, he turns the tables and gives them the big shootout that he knows most of them really want. One may critique UNFORGIVEN however one likes, but it was a clever way to manipulate an audience largely disaffected from the western genre because of concerns of "realism."
Anyone who's read this blog knows that my chosen preference is to analyze the "variety" of popular narratives in terms of the Campbellian functions, though I've mentioned from time to time that this isn't the only viable approach. As a pluralist I don't actually believe that the less realistic mythoi should have to "justify" themselves against the more realistic ones, but pressed to present one, Frye's conclusion of his essay might serve:

"The kernel of the Jonsonian [realistic] tradition is something abstract and sophisticated; the kernel of the Shakespearean [escapist] tradition is something childlike and concrete. There is no need to prefer one to the other, but there is some value in distinguishing them, if only to show that both are always with us, the light and the heat of one flickering but unquenched flame."