Rescuing Romance

W>HEN NORTHROP FRYE came to Harvard last year to give the Charles Eliot Norton lecture on poetry, he was greeted with an enthusiasm similar to that granted Christ upon his entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Here, finally, was the redeemer of English Literature and--through some kind of magical transformation--of the humanities. Here was the man who could bring together all of the specialists entrenched in the battlelines of literary criticism--the New Critics, the Freudian, the historical-approachers, the biographical-literati, the "high culture" mongerers, and the platitudinists of Christian and Marxist interpretations of literature. Here was the critic who had begun to negotiate the peace in the '50s, with the Anatomy of Criticism, which outlined the science of literary criticism as a value-free system meant to classify all of the aspects of our own "verbal experience." Here was the boy-genius of sorts, with his shy smile and ingenuous delight n applause, who seemed to command all of Western literature and more. Here too was the wizened sage who not only possessed a comprehensive knowledge of literature, but brought it together in a perapatetic lecture-style, roaming up and down the superhighways and obscure paths of literary endeavors. His reliance on a notion of "some poets do"--instead of "all poets should"--formed the basis of an all-encompassing theory of literature, a theory demonstrating that works as diverse as Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and the Nigerian story, The Palm Wine Drinkard shared special affinities.

But when Frye left Harvard, things returned pretty much to normal; the intellectual battlelines remained sharply defined. If some of the combatants wavered in their beliefs, they still fought on. The redemption would have to wait a second coming.

If such a dramatic rendering of Frye's presence at Harvard betrays the theories he elaborated in his Norton lectures, if should convey at least a small portion of their urgency. Their central subject, Romance, is what Frye means when he refers to "secular scripture." Spencer's The Faerie Queen, Sir Walter Scott's novels, such as Ivanhoe and Redgauntlet, and the fantasies of William Morris, such as Earthly Paradise and New From Nowhere, are some of the more important works of Romance, which broadly speaking, is the literary development of formulas rooted in folklore. Romance is called secular scripture in Frye's theory because of its structural similarities to the Bible, which is especially important in the West because of its socially determined authority and function. The central "myths" (i.e., the Bible, and later, the great novels) of a society illustrate its primary concerns: "they help to explain certain features in that society's religions, laws, social structure, environment, history, or cosmology." The "fabulous" stories of romance, on the other hand, meet the imaginative needs of the community in the form of entertainment. And just as the Bible is an epic f the Creator, Romance "brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to a sense of fiction, considered as a whole, as epic of creation, man's vision of his own life as a quest." Romance isn't necessarily just a love story. Sometimes it's an adventure story and some of its common conventions, according to Frye, include stories of miraculous birth, oracular prophecies, foster parents, capture by pirates, narrow escapes from death, recognition of the true identity of the hero and his eventual marriage with the heroine.

Aspects of Frye's thesis are often as complex as his style is weighty. In brief, Frye's concept of Romance is based on the two charts of archetypal worlds he used so often in classes last year: the cyclical world moving around the earth, upward to heaven, downward toward hell, and then back to earth again; and the polarized world of identity and alienation. These worlds form the backdrop for his vast catalogue of common ascent and descent motifs in Romance, and the redemptive/demonic or fulfilled/alienated heroes and heroines that people them.

But what is really interesting in The Secular Scripture is the theory of society Frye develops to make the distinction between "myth" (the central canon of a society) and "romance" (stories on the periphery of a society). Again the argument is heady, based on Plato and Christianity's abridgement of the Greek philosopher to form a "hierarchy of verbal structures." In a quick and hopelessly inadequate phrase, this means some types of stories are "in" in a particular society and others are "out." What's accepted at one point may be unaccepted at another, but always the romance, the lowest form on the totem pole of stories, took over during phases between one set of accepted stories and the next. Even then romance will eventually fade from the scene:

Any serious discussion of romance has to take into account its curiously proletarian status as a form generally disapproved of, in most ages, by the guardians of taste and learning, except when they use it for their purposes.

Frye goes on from here to give two different ways of looking at popular literature, one as a "packaged commodity" that an overproductive economy, "capitalist or socialist" feeds the masses, and the other, "the literature that demands the minimum of previous verbal experience and special education of the reader."

Clearly, then, romance is closest to the people or at least a good deal of them. Frye, however, stresses that just because romance isn't part of the elite or status quo in literature and the society it defines, it shouldn't be idealized. It simply represents, in Frye's words, "a different social development of literature."

This different social development, though, is important for all of us to understand, as Frye seems to suggest when he says "true indoctrination is the real social function of literature." In other words, those few who understand how particular forms of popular literature reflect a different social development will be able to control a lot of people. In the past Romance has largely been "kidnapped," according to Frye, by the ascendant classes. But new forms always rise up out of the anonymous people. Frye concludes that the study of literature, or at least a part of it, should teach students how it conditions them.

Frye's whole concept of literature, since the 1950s, tries to extract literary criticism from the kind of scholarly biases that determine what's "good" and what's "bad" on some kind of stock market of literature. He parodies the idea in Anatomy of Criticism by talking about how T.S. Eliot used to say Milton was bearish and Spenser bullish one year, and vice-versa the next. He also warns against attaching certain cultural values to particular works and therefore making them important, or parts of the "myth" of a particular society. This, anyway, is his ideal for criticism as scholarly endeavor.

B>UT HOWEVER "pure" criticism can become, it still has political consequences. And the same holds true for literature in general. If critics won't invoke certain works as representing their society--as say, British critics might have done with Kipling and Tennyson to support British imperialism at the turn of the century--Somebody surely will. That's when it becomes important for Marxists to be aware of the abuses of romance, which in its latest form--science fiction--still hasn't been completely absorbed by bourgeois values (some of H.G. Wells's novels and Stat Trek are examples of forms of science fiction that have).

But aside from being wary of the abuses of romance as propaganda, Marxism can probably benefit from learning about the people who create new romances according to old patterns, by looking at the way they diverge from and conform to old patterns. It is an indication of how important romance is to modern political ideology that most modern Chinese short stories are romances (with an underlying revolutionary message, of course). William Morris, on the other hand, a radical socialist, didn't seem to be aware of the uses of his romances to inculcate upper-class values, and Frye says that's the reason his comrades rejected him.

Romance's maleability in the hands of various groups seems to be a good indicator that literature does have its uses.