The Educated Imagination ch 3 by Northrop Frye

A continuation of my summarizing of this book. Chapters 1 and 2 are somewhere in the archives, about 2 weeks back.

Here they are:
chapter 1 The Motive for metaphor
chapter 2 the Singing School


Chapter 3 - Giants in Time

Characters in literature are rarely real people, they're usually charicatures. Even historical figures like Shakespeare's Hamlet are removed from reality and made more as types. Or they're immortalized in name only as poems. But they're very different from the real people who inspired the work. Does that make the author a liar? No, because literature's intent isn't to accurately convey factual information in the same way as history or news. Literature is more to identify the nature of man and life, to connect things to a larger theme.

People in literature resemble real people. In fact, we can usually recognize a bit of ourselves in literatary characters. Yet characters are also larger than life. They're sometimes heroes who have the power we wish we had, sort of a representative composite of lots of different people, but with an ironic twist. They have a weakness that destroys them. They're universal symbols of everything in man, written with allegory and simile, and not intended to be exact duplicates of any one person. And those literary characters come up in other works. For instance, lots of books make comparisons to Greek gods. The more characters you know, the more you'll understand the references in other books, and what the point about them being made is. The more literature you read, the more literary characters you'll know, and the more books will seem connected to each other because of common personalities. The more allusive allegories you're aware of, the more you'll understand as you come across it in stories.

Primitive people try to identify with a deity of some kind. Lovers want to identify with the one they love. Lunatics want to identify with some great cause. But all three are trying to identify with something. Since poets relate everything they see in nature to life, they're closer to primitive people. They try to make us suspend reality and believe in the world they present. That world is a place where anything might happen and all arguments are treated as plausible. Allowing ourselves to enter this world teaches us to have tolerance and faith in what others can imagine. it can give us confidence in people's dreams and possibilies. Interesting quote: 'Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme...but such people are much less common than bigots and in our world much less dangerous.'

The reason literature teaches tolerance is because it allows us to look at different situations and opinions from a detached perspective. It allows us to imagine 'what if?' without having to actually live it. Real life happens, and we can't choose it or predict it or make meaning of it. But in literature, we can go through experiences vicariously and allow ourselves to entertain possible meanings that the author suggests.