Tragedy vs. Romance: A Possible Perspective

As I was reading Frye, I came across a very familiar title by Euripides called The Trojan Women. If anything is completely counter to the romances that we have been reading, to the eternal spring that seems destined to bloom within our class, it is that play in which the women and children are either led off into slavery or murdered for fear of future uprisings. I know that they are not very happy pieces, but I decided to share with you the two most disturbing scenes from the film in '71, at least by my estimation. So without further ado, here they are.

No where, I would argue, is the sheer winter of destitution more pronounced than in these few moments of the film. Innocence is lost and what remains is only the despair of a grandmother who has lost the flower of youth upon which she so passionately doted in her waning years. Within the play, and later the film, the complete brutality of, as Frye terms them, forza conquers the subtlety of froda. There is, in essence no happy ending because the weaker individuals, the last remnants of the once proud city of Troy, find no ears to hear their pleas, no individual that can fall under the sway of their words. What is left, then, seems to be a demonic parody of the romances that we have looked at so far in which death is a far kinder fate for the boy than his mother will receive.

As I write this blog, I begin to feel almost hollow, my mind emptying itself of the thoughts that are too painful, even within a fictitious reality, to hold onto for so long, and I find myself drifting back into the story of Daphnis  and Chloe, which I finished for today. It is a tale, it can be argued I think, far less beautiful in its language, far simpler in its dialogue than that of The Trojan Women, but there is something equally beautiful within the simplicity of the tales of the two abandoned children who grow up to be goat and shepherds, and the spark of hope that their love creates not only for the other characters in the story but also for readers, who often want and need to believe that the world outside of their own reality is not as harsh and cruel as they imagine it to be.

In the end, then, I hope that you enjoyed the clips of tragedy from Euripides. I hope that they granted you a new perspective of lows, but I also hope that they allowed each of you to see the beauty in simplicity that the tales such as Daphnis and Chloe and The Ephesian Tale create. They do not create the dense, eloquent characters of tragedy, but, at the same time, they allow us to dream of worlds where such tragedies do not exist.

A Trip to the Past

Every fiber of my being tells me that I'm going to regret making this blog that digging into the past allows others to see parts of my life that, for better or worse, I want to keep locked in my head away from the world. For some reason or another, I'm imagining right now that by letting others into my own past, they will somehow judge me for what they read. Of course, that ignores the fact that all of us were at one point six years old, that we each have a past of naivete.

Looking into my own past there are two examples that I wanted to share, and although I really don't want to, I'm going to take a deep breath and keep typing.

The first romance story that I remember, if it can truly be called that. Is The Land Before Time. For those of you who may not have seen the movie, or may have forgotten the plot, it follows Frye's simple design of a cyclical shift from the world of the idyllic to the demonic or night world and back again. The story follows a young dinosaur named Little Foot whose world is, in many ways perfect. One day, however, all of that changes with the fall of a giant asteroid. The dinosaurs are forced to migrate to a new home, a paradise of legend if they want to survive. Along the way, Little Foot is first separated from the larger herd, and then his mother is killed, sadly, before he meets up with a few other small dinosaurs. I can actually remember all of the names now that I think of it. Ducky: the duckbill, Peetrie (not sure how to spell his name): the pterodactyl, Spike: the stegosaurus, and Sarah: the Triceratops. It's surprising to me that I can still remember those names after so many years. Continuing the story, the young dinosaurs travel across a barren waste land, searching for a land that they are not even sure exists. Along the way they are confronted by monstrous, carnivorous dinosaurs that I can remember being terrified of as a child among other hardships. After days and days of searching, when all hope seems lost, the five young children not only find the lost paradise that they had been looking for but also reunite with their families.

The other romance naive story that I can remember fairly well involves the, as they were called then, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Again a quick synopsis of the plot for those of you who never had the pleasure of seeing the show, it follows the adventures of five teenagers who are charged with protecting the world from the evils that threaten it. As with the story of Little Foot and his friends, the Rangers are most definitely good and their foes evil. It's harder to remember any specific details of the storyline as the plot changed from episode to episode, but there is no doubt that each week the Power Rangers fought to protect the world from the evils of a witch (that much I remember) and her no less frightening gargoyle like warrior lieutenant. Between the two of them, and the monster that they created, the world was constantly in danger, but there was no doubt that the Power Rangers would win the day and the world would return to normal.

As Frye says "[the] characterization of romance is really a feature of its mental landscape. Its heroes and villains exist primarily to symbolize a contrast between two worlds, one above the level of ordinary experience, the other below it" (53). He goes on to describe the greater world as "the idyllic world [and the] other is... the demonic or night world" (53). the last piece from Frye that I wish to include before concluding with my own thoughts involves a "plunge downward at the beginning and a bounce upward at the end. this means that most romances exhibit a cyclical movement of descent into a night world and a return to the idyllic world" (54).

In more simplistic terms, though Frye does do a good job of that himself, the romance is a story divide between the forces of good and the forces of evil, between light and darkness, and it is the loss of their ideal world and the attempt to return to that ideal world that pushes the plots of romances forward. In the case of The Land Before Time, the story is a romance because it begins in a world where everything is indeed perfect, where plant eating dinosaurs live in peace and are not threatened by any outside forces. That all changes one day as has been said above and a group of young dinosaurs fall into a world of shadows where they must struggle until they can reemerge into a world of peace and prosperity. The fact that they do so is what makes the movie a romance I would argue and allowed a child like myself to see a world with no greys but only light and darkness.

In the case of the television show Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, the world is clearly divided between the forces of good and the forces of evil. There are no ambiguities to stress a child, making him or her wonder about the motivations of either side. Rather one side is constantly struggling to destroy the world while the other struggles to stop them and save it. The fact that they do, the fact that each episode begins in peace, falls into chaos, and ends with the return of that peace, makes the Power Rangers yet another example of the Romance.

So this is the end of my current blog, and I hope that it was somewhat useful and helpful in explaining Frye's diagnosis of the Romance. As much as I was nervous about sharing these facts from my past, the process of putting them down in my blog has helped to make me at least more comfortable. It's actually been quite refreshing to return to that mindset. 

Man the Creator

“In traditional romance… the upward journey is the journey of a creature returning to its creator. In most modern writers… it is the creative power in man that is returning to its original awareness. Identity and self-recognition begin when we realize that this is not an either or question, when the great twins of divine creation and human recreation have merged into one, and we can see that the same shape is upon both” (Frye 157). T

It is this fall and eventual rise that, Frye would argue and I would agree, shapes the very foundations of western literature since the birth of Christianity and the subsequent spread of The Bible. Whether we wish to admit it or not, The Bible is at the very heart of the Romance. Man’s fall from grace, his eventual need for salvation, and the subsequent redemption of his soul have spawned countless epics and poems, novels and short stories, all focused on the principle aspect of humanities loss of purity and its constant, yearning desire to retrieve what was lost. From Dante, whom Frye mentions, to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and from T. S. Eliot to the much simpler, yet still profound, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, each of these stories deals in its own unique way with the loss of something loved and the adventures that one must undergo in order to find that lost treasure.

According to Frye, some of the older Romances are those which attempt to bring us closer to the creator, while in more modern stories, we become the creators trying to return to a purity of the story. Frye’s genius is that he suggests that both sides are one and the same thing, or at least reflections of the same individual concept. Thus, in our attempt to reach a simpler understanding, in our attempts to return to the source of the ocean of stories, we are attempting to reconnect with our roots, to remember where all these stories came from and the spark of inspiration, whether externally or internally, from the divine that caused the first man to weave a tale of stories. It is the human that becomes divine when he creates worlds within his own imagination, breathing life into characters that before were nothing but thin air. 

I am reminded here of Prospero's speech to Ferdinand in Act 4 Scene 1: "These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are mad on , and our little life is rounded with a sleep." Shakespeare has said what Frye himself seems to be indicating at the end of his chapter. Prospero has shown his future son-in-law a fantastic vision full of Gods and spirits that seem to have shaken the young man. The old sorcerer reminds his young friend that we ourselves are no more than actors on a stage. We are here one moment and gone the next.

But Prospero's words bring to mind another interesting fact. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of..." echoes almost hauntingly with the idea that Alice is afraid of when she fears that her own existence will soon be expunged when the Red King wakes up, but it is also a close parallel to the Hindu belief that we are all merely created from the dream of Vishnu, that the entire universe and its history have lasted as the god slept, and that when he wakes we will no longer exist.

Haroun, himself becomes a god, creating a world within his dreams that is shaped by the world he knew. Though Haroun's world does turn out to be real, there is still a sense that he brought the place into being, that before Haroun slept there was no Kahani. To take this to another level, Haroun and his own world never existed until Rushdie imagined them and put them to paper. Once there, the characters could live and breathe within the minds of the readers. It is this connection with the divine, I think, that Frye attempts to make in the quote at the top of the page.

I have gone far from where I had originally started this blog. Suffice it to say, there are a thousand more things (perhaps we could add one extra just to be safe) that I wish I could say right now. But my head is beginning to swim with all of the thoughts rushing about. I leave this post then with a thought from Rushdie: "To give a thing a name, a label, an handle: to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it-- well, that's a way of bringing the said thing into being" (63).

A Tale of Time

In my last blog, I discussed a few different possibilities for the importance of stories. Mostly I settled on two aspects of the story, that of the introspective reader who is able to look into the stories and find the "mirror of man" and the other was a sense of escape. The first I looked into in a little detail, and I hope that in my ramblings I was able to show that stories can be used as a differing perspective to the method of scientists. We can look at ourselves through literature rather than at the world around us. The second I touched upon briefly for a short paragraph and had thought the idea sufficiently written on until I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It is my hope then, in the next few paragraphs to look into the one aspect of the novel that captured me from the beginning: time.

Time is everywhere in Haroun. It is present when Soraya smashes the clocks at precisely eleven before leaving with Mr. Sengupta. It is there as Haroun struggles to concentrate on anything for more than eleven minutes at a time after his mother's departure. Time is present as Haroun and his friends travel on their adventures and even when he returns. In short, Time rears its head every moment of the book. Though we are not aware of it, or, perhaps more accurately, only subconsciously so, it is time that accompanies us on our journey through this tale, and time that leads us back again.

Time is such an integral part of our world that we hardly ever really think about it. We understand that it is a need to be in one place or another at a particular time that drives our world as we know it today, that wakes us up in the morning and drags us to work or school in an effort to not be late, to remain on schedule. Like the moving hands of the clock, we pass, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, along a repetitive path of waking and dreaming, eating and working. The constant repetition so absolute that the world around us sometimes begins to haze and blur passing swiftly by us like the currents of a stream and carrying us all toward the inevitable conclusion at the end: Khattam-Shud. We look to escape that constant tedium, and, in our search, many of us turn to the worlds of myth and legends created by others, stories where we can be anything, do anything, and live in worlds that we know can only exist in our dreams.

Just as we are trapped within our own time, so Haroun is trapped in his. He is trapped in a world where the time of happiness has stopped, where his mother is no longer present, and the songs she sang are now silent. He is trapped in a world where his father can no longer tell the stories that captivated his audiences and led them through magical lands. He is, therefore, trapped in a world that many of us have inhabited and from which many of us long to escape. If we look closely at the story, Haroun teaches us how.

Haroun's solution comes in the need to rekindle the fire of creation within his father that will allow the man to tell his stories again. And so, on the night before his father is set to help a greasy politician win the hearts of the people, Haroun goes on an adventure that will change his life forever. Here I must warn those that have not read the book that there are spoilers in the next few paragraphs. Do yourselves a favor and pick up the book before continuing. For those readers who have already finished the story, let us continue.

Haroun finds out shortly after arriving on the moon, Kahani, that the ocean of sea of stories is in fact poisoned. After falling in with several friends and eventually finding his father in this strange world of stories, Haroun is charged with saving the Ocean, as we knew he must be. A long story short, Haroun saves the world of stories by returning time to normal. (He actually causes the moon to begin to rotate on its axis, a process by which we measure time.) In so doing, he is able to overthrow the evil shadows, and the rest of the shadow people, along with the people of Gup, live happily ever after.

Haroun returns to the "lower world" and begins to worry for his father. After all, their adventures took place over the course of two days and the Shah of Blah was supposed to tell his tales the previous evening for the wicked politician. To Haroun's amazement, however, he soon learns that the entirety of his journey took place in one night. He had accomplished in mere hours, the events of several days. Soon Haroun and his father return home to find Soraya returned and life returns to normal, time begins again.

Let us pause, then and return to several aspects of the story of Haroun that deal with the aspects of time. First, there is the concept of the moon with one half in perpetual light while the other half remains in perpetual dark with a twilight strip in between. This at first seems natural, since the figures on the dark half are so accustomed to night and their counterparts of light so used to the sun. Yet, it is the very perpetuity of the darkness that creates the problems for the Ocean of Stories. The evil shadows, born because of endless night, create a shadow ship from which the poison the ocean and a plug that they hope to use in order to stop any new stories from forming. It is only the power of the sun, the world returned to its rightful cycle, that saves the world and the ocean.

The other concept that I wish to look at is the time lapse that occurs when Haroun travels to Kahani and back. His adventure lasts only one night. We as readers fall into stories in much the same way, I would argue. A novel can turn eons into pages, battles that last hours into minutes. And it can do the reverse. It can make a moment last a life time. Create from the last moment before death an entire world in which characters live and love and die.

Time, then, is the instrument of the story, from dreams to books to movies, it is through stories that we pass beyond the bounds of time and enter worlds where eons are but a second and seconds last an eon. It is through stories that we escape the endless circle of the clock and become the heroes of our own stories.

I realize that the beginning of my article was not very comforting, that many of the readers of this piece will be saying: "that is all well and good," but eventually we wake, eventually the story ends, and we must, however regrettably, return to the bounds of that clock. To those of you I can only quote a passage from the book itself. "The real world is full of magic and so magical worlds could easily be real." It is true that the world, itself, can be a boring place, full of the dull trappings of everyday life. But Dull Lake, as Haroun and his companions floated upon it, turned out to be anything but. It was instead a place where men made their own realities. In much the same way, I will argue one last time, and you may agree with me or not, we can make our own worlds. Even the rainiest day can bring joy if we know where and how to look for the magic within it, and if we ever find that this world has become a little too mundane for the moment, there is always a return trip to the world of stories waiting for us in the form of a Hoopoe or a flying lion, waiting to rush us with all haste back to the the Ocean of Stories and whatever dreams we wish to make realities.

What is man?

As this is my first blog in a while, and the first for this particular class, I thought that I would begin things rather broadly, start at the surface of the ocean before I dove down into its murky depths of the sea of stories. My first blog then, will not discuss any stories or novels that we will read later but only attempt to in some way capture my own thoughts of the first class and capture, in writing, some of the thoughts that are swimming around in my head.

In class today, we asked what I think is a very important question: "What is the use of stories that aren't even true?" The words ooze into my brain, filling every crack, every crevice. I have lived my entire life being asked that very question by parents and grandparents, friends and relatives, advisers and mentors each wondering the true importance of "reading for a living." Eventually, the question gets asked so much, the words become you're own, and you begin to doubt your own understanding of why you do what you do. You look into the mirror of your soul and wonder if the world knows better than you do, if perhaps science and math are the answers while those men and women who bury themselves in literature are blinding themselves to a world that is quickly changing around them, metamorphosing into a place of calculation and observation.

Yet what scientists and mathematicians do not seem to comprehend is that the first stories, the myths and legends passed down from one generation to the next, are the attempts of men to understand the world around them. Imagine a man sitting by the soft glow of a fire and looking around him. He sees plants and trees, rocks and animals. He sees the fire itself and he gazes above him into the endless expanse of space and wonders where it all came from. Without the tools of science, he shapes a world where gods sleep and in that sleep the universe is created. Or perhaps he imagines that the Earth is itself a deity and the Sky her lover, and from their union were born gods that ruled over every aspect of creation. We scoff now at the ignorance of such a man, call him foolish and unlearned, yet, in his eyes, those stories, and the realities that they created, were as real as the grass beneath his feet.

Some will say that is all fine. Let the man of the past have his illusion of reality. We now know the truth and as such can put silly notions of the divine behind us. We can instead look to experiments that will show us how the world works and operates. But to define a story as the beliefs of an ignorant people is to cut out much of what it means to be a story.

The most obvious addition to the meaning of stories is the fact that they allow us to escape our own world. Stories can transport us to mystical castles or seedy dungeons. Through stories we can become powerful wizards or witches, crafty crooks that always get away, or poor orphans that eventually find homes and love. Stories can light the candle of hope in the bleakest of moments or plunge us into sorrow on the sunniest of days. Stories are the stepping stones into realities where our greatest dreams and our darkest nightmares meet.

But they also serve another purpose. Stories are not only our past, they are our present and future. Stories help define who we were, who we are, and what we will become. They are the driving force of our identity. Each thread of the vast tapestry, woven through our own existence, redefines our view of the world, adds a new lens to the scope through which we view our own surroundings.

Perhaps the answer to "What is the use of stories that aren't even true?" comes as an alternate perspective to that of science and mathematics. While they look to the world around them and try to figure out its intricacies, to delve into its mysteries, readers of stories look within, turning the soul of man inside out much like a biologist might dissect a frog. But it is not possible to see the soul as one could the internal workings of a frog, and so the reader does only that which is available to them. They take the mind, transcribed onto the page, and break it apart, word by word, sentence by sentence. They do not ask what shapes the world, but rather what shapes man and inspires him to look at the world in such a way.

The use of stories that aren't even true, then, is their ability to illuminate. Too often we as humans are so fascinated with the world that we forget ourselves. What made us wonder at the cosmos in the first place? What drove us to look for other life in the universe or create it within our own minds? It is through the window of literature that we can begin to answer these questions and start to understand ourselves as much as we wish to understand our surroundings.