Frye-myth of deliverance

A brief overview of northrop Frye's myth of deliverance

I made it through a majority of Frye's myth of deliverance before i decided that it would probably take me another month to honestly sit down and focus on it (just being realistic). Northrop frye begins with the assumption of meaning and helps us to realize what the play really means, defining different types of comedies, etc. frye gives fairly general descriptions first of "problem plays" (realistic plays more concerned with serious social problems). These plays also illustrate the myth of deliverance that "it's all going to be ok, after all" as do typical comedies in which energies are released by forgiveness and reconciliation.

He also seems enthused with shakespeare's magical device, the bed trick (confusion of lovers in the dark...discussed a lot in class). Many pf Shakespeare's plays are retellings of folk tales, frye notes, taking on complex plots such as aristotles poetics, and the reversal and recognition (peripeteia and anagnorisis/discovery).

I took a lot of notes when reading this, but not having the boo in front of me (since i had to return it) makes it difficult for me to remember why i noted certain things. I am at a loss for words in a way, as i always am with frye, but will do my best to relay the rest.

Frye talks about the two poles of the arts and sciences: the social pole of origin and the opposite pole. Within the social pole the artist does things because society thinks it is important for them to do it. Tis reminds me of Shakespeare's problem plays because we are dealing with real life situations that are either mythologized or exaggerated to add to the comedy. For example, AMSND the lovers are loving and leaving. Granted the play becomes a fairy world and comedic, but yes, this does happen in real life. You love, you leave, and somehow everything connects. Th opposite pole was more difficult for me to come up with an example for, or honestly to understand. It desks with the inner laws of structure and making technical discoveries within it. I will have to look into this more.

Comedy has structure and like literature is a reflection or a mirror of social and historical concerns from which they arise. It does not necessarily reflect time, but the event or idea itself. With the mirror image comes illusions (Henry iv) in which only a "slice of real" is shown through illusions "inspired by fortune and victory".

I was disappointed that the idea of "the green world" was not explained further in this piece. There was a separation of the objective world and the subjective though. Ordinary experience and what we think is "the real" is associated with the objective, whereas illusion, love, hatred, emotions and dream correspond with the subjective. These two are connected through our "distortion" through emotion in which our perspective of "the real" changes. In Shakespeare, the real world contains the conventional ideas of reality, courts, order and justice while his fairytale world reflects magic, enchantment, unreasonable law and comic resolution.

Lastly, i loved that frye chose cressida's words to reflect the Way problem comedies work, it shows how human beings get into a mess requiring green world to intervene in order for resolution to be possible. Troillus and Cressida is also about the wooing of women largely apparent...

Cressida says-
"men concentrate on women only as long as they are out of reach; once the women are possessed, the men revert to their former interests." and it is a viscous cycle, i believe. Bitterness, hatred, love, the cyclical nature of relationships. It's all right their and it doesn't really take much to see it.

Rejection. Tragedy. The dream.

I was reading some blogs this morning and a few made me think about simple, every day life things. First, Anne takes a very interesting view on Venus and Adonis and she was so bothered by this play. I loved the play so to listen to her reasonings why was interesting and kind of fun to look at from her point of view. She talks about the denial of love in her blog and then centers her sonnet around this idea. But Anne, I question why you use the word denial when it actually seems more of a rejection of love in Venus and Adonis. Similar, yes...but denial is just the act of not admitting love whereas rejection is literally throwing that love away (a total slap in the face). Do you get what I am saying? I am not saying that denial was not present perhaps I just looked at it differently but just something to think about.

Lisette talks about her hatred for the ending as "it was all a dream". I agree, this can be extraordinarily frustrating but i think so often i have a hard time deciphering my own dream and reality that I have simply come to "not care" if i can say that. It makes me think that so much of our lives is dreamlike and the dream is so much more like reality than we realize. Whether dreaming or not, we constantly are left wanting more, wanting answers, or simply wanting an END, even in real life situations.

Like the dream, the play within the play can become so frustrating. As I was getting ready this morning, I was thinking about this concept some more. In my presentation i briefly touched on how the comedy of the play within the play overtakes the tragedy in the play, making it comedic. I find myself doing this a lot. In my own little life I so often attempt to make comedy of the tragedy, cover it with something to make it hurt a little less. It is so much easier to say "dance" than to accept and acknowledge that rejection and tragedy. I am not saying that Shakespeare writes this way to get us to think about things like this (it just happens) because we all know he wrote to entertain. That is what i am loving about this class. We get the entertainment but minds can also take these play, poems, and sonnets somewhere else completely.

Remembrance...

Misunderstandings

The group presentations went rather well i thought considering that none of us really knew where to start with that question, or so it seemed. I presented on a few ideas revolving around dream/illusion and why i thought act 5 truly expressed the comedic aspects of the play, reflecting that while there was tragedy, it was after all a comedy for entertainment.

One thing i can't stop saying to myself but did not even bother mentioning in my presentation was the play within the play....to me it represents the play (as a dream) within a play (as the reality). Even explaining this idea to my group they looked at me a bit quizzically because i can't seem to explain this the way i want, even now. Our whole life is a play within a play- going back to the concept if all the world's a stage.

For me act 5 reflected the comedy through this idea, but it also opened way to even more confusion creating a more "dreamlike" state for audience or reader. As if we are thinking as we so often do upon waking, "did this really happen?"

i have also been reading Frye's "Myth of Deliverance" which i am so selfishly keeping for quite awhile from the library! Frye says that comedy is a mix of festive and ironic. That is exactly what we have in act5. It is accurately shown in the last part of the play within the play through the desire for dance rather than epilogue. Since i am not horribly deep into this book yet because of my own distractions, the last thing i will mention is the dream vs. Reality. It is really about the dream and the illusion, the imagination that comes with both rather than the reality. I then ask myself why focus on the dream though? Which one is more important? What really happened or what could have or what we think/ want to happen? The latter. Both can be harsh to face so why not add some myth and illusion to our thoughts.

Shakespeare's sonnets

Last night while i was working i was able to read the shakespeare sonnets that we were assigned. Surprisingly, i was able to focus on the sonnets and really understand what Shakespeare was getting at with each one, or i think i did. Though i enjoyed venus and Adonis, the sonnets were thus far my favorite to read. I loved the imagery within them and the many ways that he describes the passage of time and lovers. Wile the imagery of nature among the romantic poets is widely used, i can't help but be drawn to it. With Keats and Shakespeare especially, the naturalistic images are so descriptive and real. Yu can. Actually see "thy eternal summer sun" (sonnet 18), men as plants (sonnet 15), and death creeping up (sonnet 73).

The memory has never ceased to fascinate me and i have had many conversations about this with various people. What makes us remember some things so clearly while other things can drift away more quickly than they happened? Don't give me the simple answer of "well, some things just stick or must have been that important". No, it has to be something more, something we just haven't figured out yet. His sonnets are a reflection of life, things past and lost, the sorrows of what had been. These sonnets remind me so much of 2 of my favorite poets, Keats and Eliot. Most of the time i am simply speechless i can't even seem to get out a coherent blog. It's like my breath is stopped momentarily and all my thoughts run together....so much to say yet i am silent. Perhaps, they are that powerful and whatever it is making me think of is possibly better kept to myself. Sonnets 55 and 129 are what i had in mind as i was trying to get this out.

Sonnet 130 makes me laugh every time. It reminds me of that saying "a face only a mother could love" How horrible! But then again he does describe it as a rare love. As i neared the end of the sonnets, I had to pause. Sonnet 129 confused me a little. He talks of this murderous lust, like a sort of rage. I wondered if this is more like venus and Adonis or if it is talking about fighting for a lover, was there a love affair going on that created these feelings? The reason i thought of lovers cheating was because of the lines "on purpose laid to make the taker mad". I could be completely off track....but i think either way i like my interpretation until things are made clear.

Lastly, i want to put a word in about sonnet 60. I had responded to some blogs, one of them speaking about time as lunar not linear, and this sonnet reflected that. There is the image of the sea and its constant rolling action. The sea has always been a powerful image for me; it creates an interesting uneasiness and meditation for me. Of course the moon and stars Coincide wonderfully with each other, feeding off one another like animals.

Turner's School of Night

I keep looking over Turner's school of night but don't really know what to think. While i am fascinated by it all, I can't help but get sidetracked from all the science, etc intertwined. I must get used to it though since it is "the school of night".

I was one sentence through Turner's blog when I immediately thought of Beckett. I have read Beckett's plays , but recently began reading his three stories. "They come, they go" (Florio's translation), is definitely a central theme of Beckett's in his writings. The simple, yet important idea of coming and going plays a role in not only Beckett, but Shakespeare. It connects to the central theme of love and destruction in Shakespeare's works. I am constantly pondering over this idea of love and its complexities. It never ceases to amaze me. Everything in life seems to come and go: people, love, stories- all of these revolving around one another. Wow- no pun on Turner's name here.

Aside from that, Turner touches on so many topics as we have discussed in class that it becomes difficult to follow. There was no way that I could possibly read his blog in one sitting. Having read the book "The Plague" in high school I
was very interested to see how he spoke about that. Torments, rage, despair- this accurately describes not only the plague but Shakespeare's poems and plays. How can love and hate, loneliness and boredom, torment and joy go hand in hand?

The mind and the soul fascinate me. When Turner touched on these subjects I was anxious to see how he was going to incorporate them into the School of Night blog. "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." The mind is a very powerful thing and something we often do not give enough attention to. The way that the mind can create a place in itself, and abstract other places or thoughts is absolutely terrifying.

TO be honest, I am touching so vaguely on all these points (suffering from pure exhaustion) and I cannot seem to grasp all these thoughts in the article at once. While I found this article to be absolutely intriguing, I find it to be complex and confusing. I feel like it is going to be something I continue to re-read until I have my light bulb moment and clarification from class discussion before I can really post a worthwhile blog.

Then, I will touch on the soul in Shakespeare and The School of Night.

In response to a few other blogs...

I have been trying to keep up with all the blogs and read through some that I really took something from. First, I must say...discussing the school of Night requirements, I was brought back to Dr. Sexson's literary criticism class from many years ago in which I actually did rock a mustache..for one afternoon...because I was forced to. In fact, I think a majority of the ladies in our group rocked the facial hair that day. Unforgettable.

As I read Jon Orsi's blog, I was drawn to his reference to Siddhartha. I was assigned this book in High School and recently picked up another Herman Hesse novel. Thinking about Siddhartha always brings me to the question of "what would we be, or rather who would we be if we took time to live that solitary life as he did? What would we then see or learn about not only life, but ourselves? Getting at this idea of life as "lunar, not linear", is something that we see every day. Again, cycling me back to T.S. Eliot's thoughts on time...is it cyclical or linear? I agree, life and stories are cyclical, everything is connected in some way. We sometimes don't figure this out until we have taken numerous classes from Dr. Sexson...they all connect, the chances are great that we will continuously cycle through the same things over and over but in a much different way, a way that will connect forwards and backwards.

I have already lost my train of thought and cannot seem to explain what I am thinking very clearly, so I will have to come back to this blog later...perhaps in the morning.

Editing: I looked over Geoffrey rice's blog this morning and found that while i am not familiar with Titus and am not required to read it, i couldn't help but keep reading his blog. I think what drew me in was his reference to the darkness. As he is, i am optimistic and most days quite excited about life, but at the same time i am mesmerized by the idea of darkness, longing, and failure. Is this strange? A girl with nothing to lose, but drawn to only the worst of things. I don't get it and don't really like admitting it....so let's just leave it at that. I won't yet attempt to respond to the aspect of faith.

Venus and Adonis

I have thoroughly been enjoying reading Venus and Adonis. I was at first a bit reluctant because as with many I have trouble getting through Shakespeare. I read the introduction as well and I think that this is why I was able to really engage in the poem, it helped a lot to clarify not only the works of Shakespeare but this poem specifically. The introduction sparked many questions for me and I found myself deep in thought before I had even gotten to the poem.

I love the imagery in Shakespeare's poem, perhaps because I can actually understand it. My favorite image though is one pointed out in the introduction:
"Whereat her tears began to turn their tide, being prisoned in her eye like pearls in glass." Lines 979- 980
These lines portray a sort of innocence in Venus, which is ironic because she is everything but that. The image of the pearls makes me think of purity, simplicity, and solitariness. Again, ironic because the poem is filled with neither simplicity or purity, but it is with solitariness. When I imagined the pearl and what it meant to me, I was reminded of what we think love should be...simple, pure- it is everything except those things.

The introduction talks about Venus and her maternal reflection. The image of the stallion seems significant here because it's reflecting a want to tame the stallion. The representation of the stallion is a strong image by itself, pairing a powerful, controlling, older female with this image is a clear representation of Venus and Adonis' relationship.

In the middle of the introduction it is said, "In a sense, everyone loses." Yes, in those tormenting love affairs everyone does lose, but I can't help but point out that even in the most tragic or tormenting of situations there is a growth of some sort.

Starting the poem (lines 43-54), I couldn't help but ask myself a lot of questions/ present myself with many different thoughts to which I seemed to have absolutely no answers. Thoughts and questions...answerless. In these lines though, I couldn't help but see only the sadness in Venus. Here she is, this powerful female, controlling the younger male she is infatuated with, yet still there is sadness. Of course there is sadness, how horrible to be THE goddess of love...any goddess...any lover...and know that the one you want so badly, love so much is not in love with you.

I guess in the end, everyone really does lose.