THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS

“Look at the four-spaced year
That imitates four seasons of our lives;
First Spring, that delicate season, bright with flowers,
Quickening, yet shy, and like a milk-fed child,
Its way unsteady while the countryman
Delights in promise of another year.
Green meadows wake to bloom, frail shoots and grasses,
And then Spring turns to Summer's hardiness,
The boy to manhood. There's no time of year
Of greater richness, warmth, and love of living,
New strength untried. And after Summer, Autumn,
First flushes gone, the temperate season here
Midway between quick youth and growing age,
And grey hair glinting when the head turns toward us, 
Then senile Winter, bald or with white hair,
Terror in palsy as he walks alone.” -- Ovid, METAMORPHOSES

...in future uses, I'll define *dynamis* only as a significant value, in that the character "power of action" in the story is pre-ordained by the type of story in which he finds himself, be it adventure, comedy, irony or drama.-- DYNAMIS VS. DYNAMICITY.

My thoughts recently turned to Frye's application of the four seasons to his four mythoi, which I've frequently glossed with the four "moods" cited by Theodor H. Gaster in his THESPIS, as seen in REFINING THE DEFINING:

ADVENTURE conveys the INVIGORATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how protagonists who defend life and/or goodness from whatever forces are inimical to them. The protagonists' power of action is at its highest here.
COMEDY conveys the JUBILATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon how the heroes seek happiness/contentment in a world that has some element of craziness to it (what I've termed the "incognitive" myth-radical), yet does not deny the heroes some power of action.
IRONY conveys the MORTIFICATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon characters in a world where the "power of action" is fundamentally lacking.
DRAMA conveys the PURGATIVE mood, and does so by centering upon "individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society." Power of action here is more ambivalent than that of the adventure-mythos but seems more crucial to the individual's problem than it does for that of the comic hero.

It then occurred to me that these different forms of dynamis, of the power-of-action, might line up rather well with the so-called "four ages of man." I read through Frye's original formulation of the mythoi in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, and could not see that he'd made any Ovidian comparisons between the seasons  and the ages of man, though it's not impossible that I saw someone else make such a correlation. Theodor Gaster didn't make any such correlations either, but in THESPIS he provided examples of the dominant characteristics of each religious ritual that summoned the four Gasterian moods. The invigorative ritual, according to Gaster, always revolves around acts of combat. The purgative ritual centers upon the expulsion of the scapegoat. The mortificative ritual emphasizes ceremonies of abjection, such as fasting and lamentation for vanished communal energy. Lastly, Gaster addresses the jubilative ritual, but does not go into nearly as much detail as he does with the others, merely stating that there's already a wealth of data on such jubilative rituals, most of which accord with the idea of harvest-celebrations. Curiously, I've criticized Frye in past essays for not quite being able to get a handle on the radical of the comedy mythos, so that I had to come up with my own, "the incognitive," which may or may not accord with the formulations of the ancient world.

So which mood/mythos aligns with which "age of man?" In this I'm guided by Frye's remarks on comedy, which he asserts to be guided by a passage from "law" to "liberty," as when the protagonist starts out being constrained by some seemingly arbitrary restriction-- as in Greek New Comedy, it's the young man being denied access to his lady-love by a "heavy father." But although this familiar trope suggests the activities of the adolescent, I find that the dynamis involved in moving from a state of restriction to one of liberty most resembles the struggle of EveryChild. All kids are born into cultures whose values must be accepted as given, and though no child escapes being influenced by his or her culture, the child also defines him/herself in terms of struggling against that matrix. The comic mood arises from the incongruity of the child's struggle to "delight in promise of another year," to find his/her place in the culture of one's birth, even while rejecting some aspect of the culture.

The real star of "Summer's hardiness" is therefore the protagonist of the adventure-story, who exists to invigorate the audience by showing a desirable outcome to the war between Good and Evil, Summer and Winter, etc. This is a state of affairs where, following Frye's pattern, "law" in the sense of onerous restrictions ceases to exist, and the hero has almost untrammeled "liberty" to remake the world in line with his heroic ideals. Even heroes who perish at the end of their stories, like Beowulf, leave the reader with this sense of societal transformation.

Following close on the dynamis-heels of the adventure-story is the drama, whose protagonist is often a figure with some claim to heroic status, but who has become dangerous to his society in some way. The dynamis of the dramatic hero reverses that of the comic hero, for the protagonist is first seen in some condition of relative "liberty," at which point he begins to succumb to some arbitrary "law." Ovid's phrase, "quick youth and growing age," catches the sense that the dramatic protagonist is succumbing just as the person in his middle years, the "temperate season," is slowly losing his hold on the "first flushes" of youthful energy.

Finally, it should be obvious that the domain of the irony-mythos is one that is almost entirely dominated by that of arbitrary "law," with precious little "liberty" to speak of. This is the world of the last age, wherein the protagonist displays "terror in palsy as he walks alone"-- knowing, of course, that the society cannot rescue him from being conquered by the law of death, when there is no "promise of another year."

I may investigate these four age-oriented radicals in terms of some specific examples in a future essay.