THAT SOCIAL DISEASE CALLED ART

 

As Rousseau more or less pointed out, a lone man or woman doesn’t need human society just to keep fed or sheltered. But human society brought forth language, and language brought forth all forms of art, even those that, like painting and music, don’t require the use of words. Still, it’s possible to break down all forms of communication into either sensory tropes or narrative tropes. The first are standardized scenarios that transmit information through the stimulation of a recipient’s senses, while the second are standardized scenarios that transmit information through explication. I’ve noted the distinction between the two forms of communication here.

The various schools of myth-criticism are united by the proposition that the earliest forms of human narrative—whether one believes that myth or folklore was paramount—are intensely relevant to art as we know it today. The greatest difference is that while the members of a traditional tribe are for the most part limited to their traditions (though not without cross-pollination from other tribes), modernity has allowed any patron of art to sample whatever art-form he might care for, from almost any time or place.

But because art is a social disease—and by that word I mean less a malady than a necessary infection, like the bacteria that dwell in human stomachs—almost no patron consumes art without desiring to see his tastes mirrored in others’ good opinions of this or that work of art, or even a particular genre of art. Northrop Frye was one of the few critics of the 20^th century who attempted to portray the entire spectrum of art, and he did so by viewing art through the lens of archaic mythic narrative. This led in part to his formulation of the theory of the four mythoi, based in part on the general idea of the “four ages of man,” as noted here. After putting forth this epic formulation in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Frye didn’t expound that often on the mythoi in later essays. One exception, though, appears in the essay “Mouldy Tales,” pointing out that critics of his time tended to be either “Iliad critics” (preferring tragedy and/or irony) or “Odyssey critics” (preferring comedy and/or romance). Whenever I look at critics who have endured into my own time, I see a similar division. Few are the reviewers who can appreciate all four mythoi with equal enthusiasm, and those who conceive a dislike for a particular mythos often take the attitude that the world would be better off without the entertainments that take an audience’s mind away from “the finer things.”

To Iliadic critics—and I tend to think that they’re usually in the majority—the idea of “ritual” expressed by Frye and the Cambridge School would be anathema. If they have any opinions on the role of ritual in art, they may conceive all works of “unearned gratification” to be ritualistic in nature, an endless cycle of titillating bread and circuses.

It's less important to point out that the obvious reply—that there are as many bad works in the categories of dramas and ironies as in the other two less celebrated mythoi—than to note that all four mythoi depend on the ritual use of both sensory and narrative tropes to accomplish certain ritual effects. For instance, Faulkner’s A LIGHT IN AUGUST pursues tropes most relevant to the *pathos * of the drama, and the author calls attention to his chosen mythos by having the character of Joe Christmas—note the initials—slain in a mock crucifixion. To be sure, authors may avoid such overtly mythic tropes. The protagonist of Coetzee’s DISGRACE is rendered pathetic by social humiliation and non-fatal physical injury. Nevertheless, DISGRACE is still a novel about pathos, even with the absence of overt mythic references. Coetzee works with sensory and narrative tropes to put across the minatory mood most associated with the “serious drama,” though the sense of menace is not so great as to propel the novel into the realm of irony.

Critics, as much as authors, often have fixed in their minds an “ideal reader” who is without doubt a projection of whatever the critic or author himself finds desirable. But the critic is particularly vulnerable to forgetting the function of art in society. This does not mean “winning hearts and minds through constant carping,” such as one used to see on the HOODED UTILITARIAN. Rather, it means that even if one does not subscribe to Frye’s mythoi-system, a full-spectrum analysis of human art shows it to be polymorphic in every era of human existence. Because of this fact, art could not have continued to pursuit different forms unless all of the forms had a vital function in human society as a whole. I tend to think that the forms are relatively constant because the “four ages of man” are archetypal states in human consciousness, without their being confined to any particular age. Allowing for the exception of pre-teen children, who are probably not the best audience for scathing ironies like CANDIDE, most of the radicals of Frye’s mythoi—the heroic contest, the endurance of suffering, the descent into death—can in theory prove appealing to anyone at any stage of actual life. As I also mentioned in FRYEAN BLIND, I don’t agree with the radical that Frye assigns to comedy, in that I feel comedy ought to be defined by a more “jubilative” radical, though Frye”s ruminations on the subject are still invaluable even if flawed in this respect.