Did you startle me, Northrop?

While reading The Secular Scripture, I was startled to read Frye’s discussion on the criticisms of popular literature. It wasn’t so much startled to read it, as I was to think about it. The initial point of consideration began with the segment regarding the condescension faced by popular literature. He begins by describing romance in general as being “sensational”, but the criticisms he analyses go far beyond this sentiment. The section reads, “ Romance appears to be designed mainly to encourage irregular or excessive sexual activity. This may be masturbation, which is the usual model in the minds of those who speak with contempt of “escape” reading, or it may be a for of voyeurism.” Frye explains that the keepers of this school of thought assume that the pornographic and the erotic are the same, and then he goes on with his analysis to say that they differ in there effects of numbing and awakening respectively. This however wasn’t quite what led me down my thought process to bleakness.

            There was a quote that started connecting things for me. “They [literary critics] attach what for them are the real values of literature to something outside of literature which literature reflects.” This brought me to go back further in the book to a place where Frye talks about man’s creation of his mythological universe. He says, “A mythological universe is a vision of reality in terms of human concerns and hopes and anxieties: it is not a primitive for of science.” This idea continues into man’s natural instinct to create his own mythological universe and pretend for as long as he can that his mythological universe is the actual universe, and how this directly reflects the way popular literature, or media of any kind, allow us to create a hyper reality based on its social construct. Thinking about this gave the book, and my considerations, an existential filter.

            Frye talks about the current state of popular media being the product of an over productive society that distributes literature as a packaged commodity distributed with varying degrees of adulteration, and I found this to be harkening to a previously read essay by Jean Beaudrillard. His paper, “The Procession of Simulacra”, speaks to the nature media being ever replicating and simulating. It takes originals and so incessantly replicates to a point that we are replicating replications and simulations and then translating those actions into daily function. Therefore, after X amount of time, our social construct has become nothing more than a hyper reality consisting of a replication of what was once a replication of the idealized lifestyle. He suggests that our very existence is becoming just a simulation of something we idealize.

            This is bleak, but then I related the ideas back to Frye’s discussion on the consistency of structure in romantic literature, the idea of a fabricated mythological universe, and this concluding quote regarding the criticisms of popular literature, “Popular literature, so defined is neither better nor worse than ‘elite’ literature, nor is it really a different kind of literature: it simply represents a different social development of it.” I began to think about the bleakness on a larger scale. By existing in a genre where the structure has been proven to be consistent with only varying plots and character development is there ever really something “original” or is it just a sea of “replications”? Could we, as a cultural society, be placing ourselves in a large mythological universe that is essentially just a giant existential rat box of unoriginality that represents a degrading social development of literature? Or, could the larger argument be for the value of all literature regardless of its merit among different schools of criticism. Frye says, “ The popular helps to diversify our literary experience.” It creates an environment where a specific type of literary education cannot make a monopoly of it. I choose to air on the side of the optimistic, and think that popular literature leads to the next literary development. The hope is that more and more modern writers don’t fall victim to the literary establishment, as Frye refers to it.

            Maybe startled isn’t the right word to describe my reactions to reading this section of The Secular Scripture. Maybe intrigued or provoked are better words, but nonetheless I was driven to retracing previous readings.  I could have read into the ideas to far, or I could have gone off on an analytical tangent. At the vary least it’s food for thought.