FRYEAN BLIND

 One detail I didn’t mention in my quasi-review of THE POETICS OF MYTH is that when the author presents his rather rushed summary of Northrop Frye’s contributions to myth-criticism, Meletinsky conflates two different selections of Frye’s work, quoting from both ANATOMY OF CRITICISM and from an essay from six years earlier, “The Archetypes of Literature.” But Frye’s arrangement of his mythoi is not the same in these two works. Meletinsky ends up telling readers that Frye has equated comedy and romance with the seasons of summer and of spring, which is true in the essay. But in ANATOMY, Frye reversed the two comparisons. Given that the book represents the fullness of the critic’s thought, this was a rather clumsy mistake on Meletinsky’s part.

However, Meletinsky’s section on Frye did remind me of a topic I brought up in my essay THE FOUR AGES OFDYNAMIS. I said in that essay that I couldn’t find any evidence that Frye had based his four-season, four-mythos schema on anything in Ovid. A fresh scrutiny, though, reveals that a page or two before Frye begins his first section on this subject, entitled “The Mythos of Comedy: Spring,” he does make reference to other famous quaternities, including “the four periods of life (youth, maturity, age, death).” There’s not much chance that Frye was unaware of Ovid’s famous poem. It’s more likely that the “Four Ages of Man” as Ovid conceived them simply did not line up with Frye’s conception of his four mythoi, which took its principal influences from myth-ritual scholars like Gilbert Murray and Theodor Gaster.

Without question Ovid’s four ages are more persuasive than Frye’s foursome, not least because “death” is not really a period of life. In the ANATOMY Frye is acutely conscious that spring is associated with images of rebirth, not least in his own religion of Christianity, and also that historically Greek New Comedy tended to focus on the attempts of young men and women to be married despite the opposition of tyrannical authority figures. Thus, the critic leapfrogs over the period of actual childhood—Ovid’s “frail shoots and grasses”—so that he Frye can draw symbolic comparisons between mundane marriages of young people and the sacred union of God and humankind. In my early readings of the ANATOMY I was blown away by all of these mythopoeic allusions. Yet in later years I’ve come to decide that there are some problems with pages and pages of criticism on the subject of comedy that barely addressed the functions of humor.

Just as problematic is Frye’s attempt to disassociate the mythos of adventure-oriented romance with the “age” in which heroes venture forth to battle dragons and witches. Since Frye’s spring-protagonists must necessarily be adolescents, his summer-protagonists would have to be of a somewhat later age in order to represent “maturity.” In real life, however, adolescent males are more likely to seek combat-glory before they marry and settle down, even if New Comedies and their descendants tend not to depict that aspect of life. In my own writings, I tend to see that all of the strivings of adolescents, whether relating to Eros or Thanatos, belong on the same plane, since both activities are dominantly associated with persons in their “hardened” summer-phase. Raymond’s FLASH GORDON provides an example of focusing upon both romantic love and on romance in its connotation of a story of great conflict and adventure.

As I stated in FOUR AGES, comedy depends upon the frustrations of incongruity, and these frustrations aren’t exclusive to, say, the “heavy fathers” of Greek New Comedy. Slapstick humor, which may well have been prominent in Greek Old Comedy, may involve no romantic interest whatsoever. The incongruity can arise when the victim’s expectation of immunity from harm is thwarted by a banana peel under the shoe or a pie in the face. Yet Frye was right in thinking that comedy was essentially a mythos about “coming together:” it’s just not a union defined by romance. Rather, nearly every mortal ever born can laugh when a fictional character, good or bad, gets humiliated because every mortal ever born had experienced humiliation in some form, if only during the vicissitudes of childhood. Frye’s concept of comedy, centered upon the experience of adolescents, would seem to have nothing to say about a humor feature like SUGAR ‘N’ SPIKE, where the titular toddlers are constantly trying to make sense of the confusing adult world, but always fail because they see things “through a milk-bottle darkly.”

Frye’s period of “age” lines up loosely with what Ovid calls “the temperate season…midway between quick youth and growing age,” but Ovid’s conception remains superior here as well. The protagonists of serious drama need not be middle-aged, any more than the protagonists of comedy need be children (although it’s been remarked that Hamlet seems to have been a student at Wittenberg long enough to have left adolescence behind him). But in the mythos of drama the protagonists begin to feel the limitations of their personal power, just as living things begin to wane in autumn. Despite many of the adventure-trappings in the teleseries STAR TREK, the serial is at its heart a drama, given that it constantly deals with such limitations, even in such triumphant narratives as “Arena” and “Day of the Dove.”

Clearly what Frye means by “death” is a specific period of human decrepitude, the last phase for any given mortal before he or she dies, and Frye is entirely correct in lining up this state of existence with the season of winter and the mythos of the irony. Comedy levels human beings because everyone shares the humiliations of early life, but in a state of being in which life still holds endless hopes. Irony levels human beings in the opposite manner, separating rather than uniting, reminding us that we all die alone. The only redemption from the season of winter in actual life is the knowledge that one’s limited life may be perpetuated by either literal offspring or by “good works” that go down in history. In literature this slight satisfaction may give rise to a bittersweet black humor, so that even when an irony-tale ends with some sort of romantic alliance—as we see in both Voltaire’s CANDIDE and Elio Perti’s THE TENTH VICTIM —the romance only succeeds because the principals manage to isolate themselves from the madding world.