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).