DOMINANCE, SUBMISSION (RADIOS APPEAR)

Here's a little history on how I came to perceive the need for "submissive" versions of the "dominant" significant values derived from the four narrative myth-radicals.

Though Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM proves vital to one's understanding of literature's mythic radicals, the ANATOMY usually defines a given mythos by the process of deduction. That is, Frye reasons from general principles as to how a mythos works (or is said to work) as a whole, and then applying it to particular examples within the mythos. I consider this a perfectly valid choice, but some might view the ANATOMY as deficient in that it rarely follows the inductive path. The approach of genre-studies academician John Cawelti takes just such an opposing course. When Cawelti tries to determine the parameters of a mythos (though he only uses the narrower term "genre") he begins with particular examples commonly held to belong to the same genre-category and susses out their likenesses as a way to define the genre. Most of the structuralists use largely inductive methods as well. Perhaps significantly, in Cawelti's ADVENTURE, MYSTERY AND ROMANCE, the author pointedly disavows any attempt to address Frye's theories of genre, though Cawelti certainly doesn't attack Frye. It may be that he simply realized that their methodologies were too far apart to make fruitful contact. I do not know if the late Professor Frye had any opinion on Cawelti, but one of Frye's early essays (which I do not have to hand) displays little enthusiasm for the structuralist approach and places emphasis on the critic's purpose to ferret out the "total vision" of literature.

All that said, I do think both methods of reasoning can play off one another in rewarding fashion, which will be my goal in sussing out some of the dimensions of the mythos of adventure. I choose it for this essay because, as I've noted before, so little of value has been written about this mythos.

By continuing to use the work "mythos," of course, I continue to subscribe to Frye's deductive vision. "Adventure" (which Frye called the "romance") is not to me a genre, or even a "supergenre" like horror or science fiction. "Adventure considered as a mythos" implies that all the works under its rubric share the fundamental aspect Frye imputes to the mythos: that the protagonists dominantly have a power-of-action greater than that of the average man.

And yet, worthwhile though this insight is, one must admit that Frye never quite defines parameters for the adventure-mythos, which he calls the "romance." His meaning as to what works belong in the category have to be reached more or less inductively from his deductively-arrived-at statements about the mythos.

In the first of the three analytical essays that make up the bulk of the ANATOMY, Frye starts with his "theory of modes." "Modes" in this chapter describes the power-of-action used by a given author of a given type of work, whereas the four *mythoi* that he describes later in the "theory of myths" essay are the categories to which the works themselves belong. Moving right along to the topic of the romance, here's what Frye first writes on the subject:

"If [the hero's power of action is] superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, marchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives."-- AOC, p. 33

After elaborating his list of modes (which I won't touch on here), he comments that "fictions of romance" dominated literature until Renaissance times, after which other modes began to emphasize protagonists of increasingly diminished power-of-action. Frye does not trace the extent to which romance/adventure continued to appear in literature in more realistic forms, such as those propagated by Stevenson and Walter Scott, or for that matter the "lower" forms of literature that flourished as the lower classes gained a degree of literacy. Frye's main concern is to show how literature in general is informed by principles of art derived from myth and ritual, which have common ground with canonical literature in its emotional/expressive spectrum. Additionally, he wishes to show that these modes (which naturally inform his *mythoi*) are not means by which one isolates one category from another in an absolute manner:

"Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must then learn to recombine them. For while one mode constitutes the underlying tonality of a work of fiction, any or all of the other four may be simultaneously present. Much of our sense of the subtlety of great literature comes from this modal counterpoint."-- AOC, p. 50.

This statement, more than any other made by Frye, justifies the concept of Literary Genetics I've mentioned in earlier essays, but on which I haven't yet expounded. But back to Frye and the qualities of his romance-category:

From the first quote it would seem beyond dispute that Frye's romantic protagonist is superior to the average man in terms of power-of-action. A few pages after the opening of this essay, he goes on to describe this hero as "still half a god," but does not give many more specifics about romances in this essay because he's principally concerned with describing modal action rather than particular works.

In the "theory of myths" essay, Frye does become somewhat more detailed about the structure of the romance-category (though obviously not after the fashion of the structuralists). The first mythos he surveys is that of comedy, and then follows romance, though oddly enough, it's in the latter of these two sections that Frye warms to his topic enough to describe the four mythoi and their principal aspects in detail. His comments on the romance privilege its agonistic nature:

"The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which means that romance is naturally a sequential and processional form, hence we know it better from fiction than from drama. At its most naive it is an endless form in which a central character who never develops or ages goes through one adventure after an other until the author himself collapses. We see this form in comic strips, where the central characters persist for years in a state of refrigerated deathlessness."-- AOC, p. 186.

"The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero."-- AOC, p. 187.

"A quest involving conflict assumes two main characters, a protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy."-- AOC, p. 187.

I share Frye's belief that the category of the romance/adventure is certainly dominated by martial conflict, and that this is the reason to emphasize the radical of the *agon.* But perhaps in keeping with his Spengleresque view that romance as such has passed out of its historical moment, most of Frye's examples of romances hail from either medieval or Renaissance periods, and when he does make comparisons between aspects of the romance and more modern works, it tends to be works that are not actual romances, such as Melville's PIERRE and James' SENSE OF THE PAST. Frye's reasons for so doing is to show that the expressive power of romance's archetypes does not vanish simply because the culture turns toward more realistic fare. In a felicitous combination of terminologies drawn from both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Frye asserts that the archetypes (Jung) have simply been displaced (Freud) into more realistic forms or motifs. Perhaps a close examination of the romance's survival in Stevenson and Scott might have weakened Frye's schema of historical/cultural succession. Interestingly, Frye does make a tangential allusion to THE SUNDERING FLOOD, one of the Victorian-era works of William Morris, usually credited as the first English writer to revive the form of the medieval romance as a means for telling new stories. This breakthrough led to later generations deeming Morris as the progenitor of the modern "high fantasy," though admittedly fantasies like SUNDERING FLOOD were probably not as popular with Victorians as the most well-known exemplars of fantasy (LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY POTTER) are with modern audiences.

So Frye never really gives one much of a definition of "adventure" save that it is primarily about "some kind of battle." However, as I noted here, it's possible that even two works by the same author, about roughly the same subject matter, could have very different approaches to the centrality of the *agon.* Haggard's KING SOLOMON'S MINES places such a battle at the center of the plot-action, and so I view KSM as a work thoroughly dominated by the agonistic radical.

However, Haggard's SHE, though indubitably an "adventure" story due to its emphasis on peril-filled journeys and armed conflict, does not center around a final battle between a hero and his (or her) antagonist. Ayesha, the immortal "She Who Must Be Obeyed," certainly functions as an antagonist, albeit an ambivalent one to the viewpoint-protagonist Holly and his surrogate son Leo. But when Ayesha is defeated, it is certainly not by anyone's forceful action: she simply steps into the Flame of Life that first bestowed on her immortality, and finds that it has as much power to take as to give. Haggard suggests some ancient emnity between Ayesha and a long-deceased female rival, and intimates that it may have something to do with Ayesha's ill fortune, but this motif never becomes a literal conflict. Thus, I come to the conclusion that the agonistic radical in SHE has become relatively submissive compared to its manifestation in KING SOLOMON'S MINES-- though of course the agon-radical of SHE is more pronounced than it is in a work dominated by another radical. In this essay I described examples of a drama, a comedy and an irony that all had adventure-elements but were not primarily of the adventure-mythos. SHE is not any of these simply because its agon is "submissive," but it does require some special attention.

I plan to discuss another form of mode-dominance when I deal with the question of works in a serial mode. For all Frye's awareness of the "refrigerated deathlessness" of comic strips and similar pop-cultural media, I suspect he would have found challenging the question as to how a given serial could vary its significant values from story to story, and sometimes mutate from one mythos to another right before one's eyes.