The Educated Imagination chapter 6 by Northrop Frye

I started writing my own summaries of this book as a way to help myself absorb more of it. Previous chapter summaries are here:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

I had to set the book aside for a couple of weeks to tend to other things, but I finished the sixth (and last) chapter just now, and it was the best chapter in the book! He explains how education needs to expand our entire beings, not just bits and pieces of us, and we need to have a vision, not just cliches and opinions . . . it all ties right in with why CM thought that the whole *person* needed to be educated, and taught to reflect and think. Very CM, this book is. ;)

Chapter 6 - The Vocation of Eloquence

Everyone should know how to read and write, but why does that have to include literature? Language/communication is on three levels, and reading and writing needs to be done at all three levels. We all have an imagination. It's what makes us dream when we sleep. And some of us have educated our imaginations, and some don't.

The way we experience society is based on our imaginations, it's our perception of what the world is that makes us act the way we do. Our worldview isn't a tangible reality, it's how we perceive reality--it's within our imagination. We rarely speak totally honestly--it wouldn't be proper. We don't say how awful our friend looks, or we choose to overlook an awkward remark, or we keep our discomfort to ourselves for the benefit of others. Frye likens this kind of speech to wearing Sunday clothes. Our words clothe our real feelings and hide what would be improper to show publicly. On the receiving end, we pretend to take what we hear at face value. When a friend insists that she's fine, we may opt not to pry, even though we know she's upset. It's a kind of dance we do, reading between the lines while being polite about taking the words at face value.

As a society, we have a bigger dance. We refer to a country or our own government as a single individual. Advertisers have gotten wise to this aspect of society and they use it for their own ends, to sell the public an image of status, acceptance and security that everybody idealizes, yet knows doesn't really exist. It's a world of illusion, and we choose what to accept and believe, and what to reject as false. Politicians attempt to appeal to our emotions by presenting only part of the truth. If we're not wise, we can be swept up, like the Nazis were under Hitler. Our part is to accept a certain amount of status quo, to adapt to the illusion enough to survive in the world without rocking the boat.

When people in a society get insecure, usually because changes are coming too fast, they huddle for security behind cliches and stereotypes. They label those who are different ('commie,' 'imperialist pig,' racial slurs) in an attempt to dehumanize or even demonize them. People who wholeheartedly buy into those stereotypes are not thnking freely, they're refusing to see the whole truth. Real people are complex and never fit neatly into a stereotype.

Then there's jargon, where lots of impressive but vague words really mean nothing, or hide the truth (the kind of language that turns a housewife into a 'domestic engineer.') Politicians use it to hide or soften the truth. Ordinary people use it for diplomacy, or tact. Direct speech is forceful, but jargon makes things sound less imposing than they really are. For instance, an email moderator might say, "We'll activate your membership when we've assessed your interest in this list," instead of "We don't want spammers! If you're a spammer, stay away!" LOL!

There are other illusions that society uses--the myth that it was better in the simple, good old days and that the world is declining and society is getting more and more immoral. The truth is, every society has always thought the world was getting worse and youth was corrupt and rebellious. Or, conversely, that progress with its factories and technology will bring a better world for everyone. The truth is rarely that black and white.

Generalizations and stereotypes aren't useful to someone seeking the truth. They tend to be used by people who want to sway the masses with fear. When people feel threatened, they react without consciously thinking through their actions--they resort to name-calling and labelling.

Wise people understand that they need to exercise discernment and choice. In wartime, a society agrees to accept propaganda, understanding the need for half-truths until the war is over. In a totalitarian regime, discernment and choice are limited by only allowing one view to be spoken. In George Orwell's book 1984, language was so debased that only meaningless jargon was allowed.

What does this have to do with studying literature? Language and literature are part of our right to free speech. Mob rule has no free speech--the mob overrides and drowns out everything in a cliche or slogan. Generalizations (the kind of liberalism that criticizes Bush every time he opens his mouth, or right-wing fanaticism that sees a conspiracy in every bit of environmental legislation) aren't really free speech. They're hysteria that's blinded to the truth. They're vague cynicism looking for a mob to follow along. And a mob can never exercise freedom.

Mobs operate on fear and ignorance. Freedom operates on truth, and that takes education. To improvise freely on the piano, you need training and practice. To go wherever you want, you need to be able to walk, and that takes practice. In the same way, freedom of speech doesn't happen all by itself. It takes more than skill with rhetoric and grammar. It takes years of practice handling ideas until you have something worthwhile to *say.* So, freedom of speech is really something that's exercised fully by only a very few thinkers.

Most people adapt to the illusion of society, they accept status quo. But in order to find meaning in life, people need more than that. They need more than keeping pace with the illusion of reality. it's those who see beyond the illusion with their imagination, and imagine something better. Then they use their freedom of speech to pass that vision on to others and make it a reality. It's the few educated people whose ideas inspire people to work together to make the real world a better place. That's why people become doctors, or work for peace as a social worker, or teach. Their vision for a better world becomes an unselfish act.

Humanity is a constant. People are always people, whether they live in 1500 or 2005. And the spirits of those people are immortalized their ideas and thoughts, which are stored in books. So, while fashions may come and go, and buildings may crumble, the human spirit lives on in books. The vision of a better world (or the warning about not seeking a better world) is what we find in the best of literature. That's usually what's meant by 'culture.' It's in the records of those visions for a better world that we find the standards and values that are more eternal than the shadowy illusion of current society. If we're going to go beyond just existing and keeping the status quo, we need to read those books.

It's natural to use language to express our immediate needs, and to be diplomatic. That keeps society running. But the world pressures us to live in fear and join the mob, labelling anyone who's different and regarding new ideas with suspicion. Every time we resist that pressure, we're using language to express something beyond our own immediate needs, and beyond diplomatic politeness. We're exercising our free speech and joining the 'great conversation' that tries to preserve the permanent spirit of man. We're using our imagination to go beyond the illusion and to join with the voices of all of humanity.

The Educated Imagination ch 5 by Northrop Frye

Chapter 5 - Verticals of Adam

The last chapters outlined Frye's theory. Now he'll examine how his theory works in the practical world of teaching literature.

The general principle is that literature follows after a mythology in a sequence that parallels history. (I think that's what he's saying.) Myths are man's first step in trying to find his place in the world. Myths begin as stories about the deity and then become the form with which to pass on oral stories. It forms the foundation on which the rest of literature rests. The Bible might be considered a form of literature that falls into this category. So, then, scripture should be the child's earliest exposure to literature so that it forms the foundation for all later books. Frye isn't speaking as a Christian, but as a literary scholar. The Bible is often quoted and alluded to, and a student of literature won't get far without some familiarity with those references. And he's not talking about the spiritual truths, but the storyline from a literary perspective--the history and fate of the world as an epic tale.

On top of the Biblical framework should come classical mythology, its familiar characters and its cycles of life and rebirth, seasons, trials and victories. Patterns should be noted: the same patterns and plots from the Bible are repeated in mythology (and again in classics like Paradise Lost.) It's not easy to understand later literature if you miss the parallels between the Bible and myths. Early Bible developed into Psalms and Job as surely as mythology developed into Homer and the Greek dramas. Then came comedy, heroic romance, tragedy and irony. Comedy and heroic romance should be taught next. Tragedy and irony should be saved for older (middle school) students.

A student will get more out of Lorna Doone if he's seen the pattern of heroism and love from mythology, and if he can see the same pattern in a recent movie imitating Shakespeare. It doesn't matter if the student can't make value judgments and understand why Shakespeare is better than the movie. That will come with time and experience. Trying to rush him to value classics will just turn him off.

Stories should be read for what they are: just stories, whether they're myths, or classics, or modern romances. It doesn't help to try to find cryptic meaning where there is none.

Reading in other languages can teach students to value precise wording and using the correct phrase to convey exact meaning. It can be easy for students to become verbose unnecessarily just because they like wordiness. Language should convey thought and ideas, although it's not the only way. Music, art, architecture can also convey thought.

As students get older, they will begin to see that literature doesn't just relate to language, but to subjects like philosophy and science (because literature isn't just a bunch of words, but vital ideas. Sounds like CM!)

Most subjects are taught from the center and then move outward. But literature is often taught backwards, by trying to teach language application first, and then move into prose, and then poetry. But literature needs to start at the center--poetry--and then work outward. Nursery rhymes, and word rhythym, and the 'surge and sweep of Homer' shouldn't have to wait until techniques of language are mastered.

One reason some works are classics is because they capture a certain culture in time, such as Robinson Crusoe, or Tom Sawyer, or the Gettysburg Address, or the Victorian emphasis on manners to absurd lengths in Alice in Wonderland.

The purpose in teaching literature isn't so much to make writers of all students, but to transfer some of the imaginative element to him so he can taste heaven and hell and think beyond the narrow confines of his immediate surroundings.

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.

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.

Chapter 2 - The Singing School

The Educated Imagination - Chapter 2 - The Singing School

In the first chapter, Frye described three attitudes with their corresponding languages of expression:
1 - awareness that self is separate from world leads to ordinary conversation
2 - attempt to adapt the environment for survival and comfort leads to informative, practical language
3 - imagination of how things could be leads to the figurative language of art

Early cultures begin by identifying with some kind of deity or magic, so primitive imaginative literature is always in the form of legends or myths. Epic poems and ballads, early Greek drama are two examples.

Writers follow convention. An ancient Greek could not have written To Kill a Mockingbird, he could only express what he knew in the form he knew. Literature can only exist in certain forms: a story has to have a beginning, middle and end. Suspense makes it interesting, the plot revolves around characters. A character usually discovers something about himself as a result of some crucial experience. Detective stories tend to follow a certain formula, romances do, too. Even plots aren't very original. What's original in literature isn't so much what's said as the way they're said within the conventional form.

Writers tend to reference other works and themes and characters to make their own allegories, similes and comparisons. And one story will sound somehow similar to another, or one character will remind us vaguely of a character in another book. It's like all of literature is a complex intertwining of characters. The same themes and the same characters keep on popping up as we read more and more, so that, for someone who reads a lot, literature itself starts to seem like one main theme with a few main characters, and each book is like a variation in the way the story is told.

One recurring theme is a cycle: seasons, water, even life all represent variations of the cycle theme. In myths, heroes may go through a cycle of adventure, and rebirth (perhaps as a constellation.) There's the recurring theme of the female who is sometimes good and beautiful, but can turn treacherous. Loss of identity and regaining it is a popular theme in literature.

Some speculate that all stories are really just reminders of one main story from long, long ago that we can't quite remember, but that we continue to try to recapture (this reminds me of the book Lucy found in the magician's house in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader!) Frye wonders if we somehow sense that we were once in a different place, and we're trying to re-create that place. It might be the Garden of Eden, or Atlantis. We yearn to get back because, in that place, we felt like we belonged and like we were at one with our environment.

Modern literature doesn't try to take us back to that lost place so often. Instead, it describes man's misery. But that still fits with the theme: it's an attempt to drive home the point that we don't belong here, we belong somewhere else. It also reflects that, as we get more civilized and technical, we're getting more absorbed with our day to day routine and contemplating less about our relation to the the universal scheme of things. And the characters and themes in modern literature are less vague and more sharp, more similar to ourselves and the world we know than a vague, misty hint of what we yearn for. They're still the same recurring themes and characters, just portrayed more to modern expectations.

The Motive for Metaphor

Notes from The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye

Chapter 1 - The Motive for Metaphor

No matter what the language, if you go very far getting an education in that language, you'll end up studying its literature. Every language has its Shakespeare and Milton. Literature (novels, plays and poetry) is an art. It has no direct utilitarian value. So what good is it?

Frye has us imagine that we're shipwrecked on an island. First, we survey the area and note that it's wild and barren of human intelligence. That makes us feel alone and scared. Second, we're curious about the place and we have an opinion about it - we like it, or we don't. Those are intellectual and emotional responses. To express this, we use a specific level of language--lots of nouns and descriptive adjectives. On an emotional level, our opinion tends to focus on what we feel belongs as a part of us, and what we like or want. We want to feel at home, so after our basic needs are met with a shelter and food supply, we start working on our wants to make ourselves more comfortable. We might plant a garden and distinguish between plants--those we want (our crop) and those we don't want (which we perceive as weeds.) At this level, we have things we have to do (find food) and things we choose to do (weed the garden.)

Later, another person is shipwrecked, too, and the two of you marry and start a family. Now you have a society and the place starts taking on the form of civilization with engineered buildings, agriculture, medicine--applied arts and sciences. This requires practical language with lots of verbs and action words. We're adapting our environment to suit us. Animals (beavers, for example) do that, too--we still haven't really gone beyond the level of animals.

What separates us from animals is a conscious awareness that we exist, paired with practical skill. We envision what we want and bring it to reality. But first, we have to see it in our mind. That's the imagination, and it uses a third level of language. This is the language of literature and poetry, and it's less practical.

Art differs from science in this way: science starts with what's there and works outward, trying to make sense of it by discovering its laws, which often brings it into the realm of math, which is abstract and in the realm of the imagination. It goes from the world to the mind. Art goes in the opposite direction. It starts in the mind, in the imagination, and then tries to fit it to the real world. Science seeks to progress, to learn more and more. But art can't progress. Drama will never improve and leave Shakespeare in the dust, poetry will never progress and be better than Dante. Art's masterpieces are timeless and not improvable. And, since art seeks to find meaning and help us find our place in the world, then we can't outgrow our need for it, no matter how much the world evolves and makes progress. We'll always be asking the same questions about why we're here.

Perhaps, somewhere in our mind, we're seeking to return and recapture a sense of belonging, or being united with our environment, identifying with something. Some think of this as a return to the Garden of Eden, or nirvana, or heaven, or some other explanation. Art seeks to free man's spirit from the bondage of time and space.

Writing is either describing the world, or is instructive (practical), or else it's an abstract association with the mind (art). Being abstract and associative, artistic writing (literature) tends to use a lot of suggestive similes and metaphors. But practical writing has to be precise, so it tries to steer clear of vague suggestive clichés.

The Educated Imagination

Literature encourages tolerance - 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 also as possibilities.

-Northrop Frye, writer (1912-1991)

This quote was posted this morning on the Jackson Browne message board I frequent. It's from the 1964 book The Educated Imagination. I started reading that book a few days ago because it kept coming up in some of my favorite blogs. Then I checked my email, and someone mentioned the book in her email to me. It's really eerie how that book keeps coming up lately. I don't know what it all means, but I guess I'll do the only thing I know how to do. I'll take notes as I read the book and post my notes. Maybe something will come of it??