The Educated Imagination ch 4 by Northrop Frye

Chapter 4 - The Keys to Dreamland

Our world, artificial as it is, seems perfectly normal to us because we're so accustomed to it. But an alien first seeing our world might notice how much we all stick to convention -- we wear similar clothes, drive cars the same basic colors, adhere to accepted notions of beauty, etc, because nobody wants to appear odd. Even what we accept as truth is usually status quo, and attempts to expose new truth (like Galileo did) are resisted.

In literature, there's convention in its form: poetry couplets might have the same number of syllables, dramatic climax needs events to lead up to it, the good man always wins or gets the girl. Even literary irony has its own conventions--things happen that would never happen in real life, but are common within 'the maddened ethics of fairyland.' Symbols are very conventional. For example, song is compared to birds. Swans, being a bird that doesn't sing, has come to represent Shakespeare's poetry, which is beautiful but not a song. Certain authors focused on a particular symbol. Yeats had fairies, Shaw had life-force, Hemingway had bullfights, Dickens had bad writing to bring his characters to life. These things become conventions. To get around in the literary world, it's useful to know the alliterative vocabulary.

Prose is a written, cultivated language that's totally unlike what real people talk like. Nobody really talks like they do in books. Literary convention means that words have to be assembled in a literary way, not like casual speech. Or, in a novel, it's the how the events fit together, too.

Since literature is so removed from the real world, you can't confine it to the rules of real life. Here, Frye makes a case for why literature is above rules like obscenity and morality, but I'm not quite following him. (Maybe I'm one of the 'cranks' he's writing about who can't fully remove literature from any kind of accountability?)

Scientists need imagination as much as authors. After all, they have to get ideas and hunches and theories. But scientific ideas have to prove they work to be accepted. Literature doesn't have to 'work,' because literature doesn't relate to real life. Literature relates to other literature.

Although many people read as a form of escape, that's not really the purpose of literature. Many authors had a burning need to say what was in them, and faced persecution for it. They didn't do it so people could have a pleasant way to escape. They didn't do it to entertain (Shakespeare's scene of King Lear getting his eyes put out is hardly entertaining!) Literature can portray horror, yet it isn't *real* horror. We aren't supposed to enjoy the horror and cruelty in literature, that would be sadistic. But experiencing it in literature can help us to avoid the events that might lead to it in real life--it can serve as a warning and express our anxieties.

Then there's another kind of literature that envelopes us in beauty or heroism, the kind that would be too much in real life. Thus, in a sense, literature allows us to experience both heaven and hell vicariously.

We can imagine mankind as a whole experiencing these things as we read, thus taking us out of ourselves and uniting us with humanity. No one person could ever have the amount and variety of experiences first-hand that can be had from literature. Thus, in a sense, we can experience more of life by reading than we can by living. And when lots of people read the same books, they all share those experiences, forming a bond of community. [When people read timeless classics, they join the community of men throughout history who have read and discussed those classics. It's a community that crosses the barrier of place and time, and it allows us to share experience with them, and join in their 'great discussion.' It's a community of the ages, uniting men from every time and country, and all we have to do to join in, is to read the books they read and wrote.]

When we judge a book, we're not so much rating our personal like or dislike of it, but we're trying to discover how and where it fits in with other literature.