Quadrant Model of Reality

FRYE FOURFOLDS- ADDS FOUR TO THREE- FOURTH TRANSCENDENT CHARACTER TYPE- BLAKE FOUR LEVELS OF VISION

https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/fryeblog/critical-method/theory-of-myths.html

Moreover, within the several cycles, Frye observes four main phases:

Seasons of the year: Spring Summer Fall Winter

Periods of the day: Morning Noon Evening Night

Aspects of water: Rains Fountains Rivers Sea, snow

Periods of life: Youth Maturity Old age Death

It is even possible to quadrisect the periods of Western culture into the Medieval Age, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth Century, and the Modern Period (AC, 160). The fourfold division has important consequences for the subsequent structure of Frye’s argument. Schematically, the cyclical paradigm is located within the order of nature, whereas the dialectical one moves from the order of nature toward or into the higher apocalyptic realm.

Frye’s method of argument at this point is based upon the similarities of “movement” between the seven categories of reality and the cyclical and dialectical processes of archetypes. Cyclically, the analogy produces four mythoi: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony or satire (this latter also called “realism”). Dialectically, it produces an upward and downward movement between innocence and experience, apocalypse and nature, the ideal and the actual, the comic and the tragic. A {68} diagrammatic representation of these movements is found in Figure 10. We have already encountered a rudimentary form of the dialectical part of this design in the First Essay, where Frye uses “comic” and “tragic” in a similar pregeneric sense to describe aspects of mythos in general.

Figure 10. Cyclical and dialectical pattern of the four mythoi. {p. 68}

Figure 10. Cyclical and dialectical pattern of the four “mythoi.”

Figure 10, showing the quadrantal and cyclic pattern of the four mythoi and the dialectical arrangement of the mythical and realistic worlds, provides only the skeletal outline for Frye’s taxonomy. The mythos of archetypes is a complex theory, the fullest and most elaborately conceived section of the Anatomy. While it accounts for but one-half of Frye’s theory of archetypes, it comprises practically one-fourth {69} of the entire book. The elaborateness of its design results chiefly from the theory of phases, the word referring in this context to the variety of literary structures which can be isolated in any one mythos.4 Frye is able to discover six phases for each of the pregeneric mythoi; this yields, of course, twenty-four separate structures.

The argument is made more complex, however, by the fact that adjacent mythoi tend to merge. “If we think of our experience of these mythoi,” Frye says, “we shall realize that they form two opposed pairs. Tragedy and comedy contrast rather than blend, and so do romance and irony, the champions respectively of the ideal and actual. On the other hand, comedy blends insensibly into satire at one extreme and into romance at the other; romance may be comic or tragic; tragic extends from high romance to bitter and ironic realism” (AC, 162). To this should be added the fourth possible relation, namely, that irony merges insensibly into tragedy and comedy. We shall examine these correspondences in more detail below.

Structure The following analysis of the archetypal structure of the mythoi is based on two of the four typical patterns that Frye isolates: his treatment of comedy and romance. The normal pattern for comedy, he says, comes from the “plot structure of Greek New Comedy, as transmitted by Plautus and Terence. . . . What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will” (AC, 163). The action of this simple comic pattern has two centers of interest: the obstruction of the hero’s desire by certain usurpers or blocking characters who dominate the internal society of the play; and the overcoming of these obstacles in the comic resolution, out of which is created a new society, often signaled by such festive rituals as weddings, dances, banquets, and the like. The way a comedy is developed depends on which of these two centers of interest is heightened. If the interest falls mainly upon the blocking characters, and therefore upon the conflict, then ironic, satiric, realistic, or mannered forms of comedy tend to result. On the other hand, if the emphasis moves toward the comic anagnorisis and the reconciliation, then the resultant form is romantic comedy of the Shakespearean kind (AC, 164–67).

This disappearance of the hero is what leads to the qualification of Frye’s three-stage romantic plot; for there are not three distinguishable aspects of the quest-myth after all, bur four. Thus to the agon, the pathos, and the anagnorisis Frye now adds the sparagmos or the tearing to pieces of the hero—which is the form his disappearance frequently takes (AC, 190–92).

We have seen how the comic plot is but one aspect of the total mythos of comedy. In a similar though more expansive way the conflict of romance is but a part of a larger mythos which neatly binds together all the mythoi. It is not insignificant that Frye’s own version of the “monomyth” is presented in connection with his theory of romance:

The four mythoi that we are dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may . . . be seen as four aspects of a central unifying myth. Agon or conflict is the basis or archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of marvellous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire. Anagnorisis, or the recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy. (AC, 192)

That each of these four aspects of the “central unifying myth” appears also in the quest-myth, which has a romantic structure, indicates that Frye conceives of romance, formally speaking, as the fullest or most comprehensive literary type.7 We shall return to Frye’s predilection for romance later in this study. What is important to observe now is that {73} the definition of the structure of a given mythos depends essentially on isolating one part of its narrative movement: in comedy it is the discovery; in romance the conflict. While these are elements of the structure of plot, Frye also refers to them as “themes.” The two words are in fact synonymous at one level, the action of a comedy, for example, being embodied in the thematic movement from illusion to reality. In another context Frye says that “narrative in literature may also be seen as theme, and theme is narrative, but narrative seen as a simultaneous unity. At a certain point in the narrative, the point which Aristotle called anagnorisis or recognition, the sense of linear continuity or participation in the action changes perspective, and what we now see is a total design or unifying structure in the narrative” (SS, 164). This appears to be very close to what Aristotle means by plot, though Frye himself often uses the word in the un-Aristotelian sense of a typical scenario (e.g., AC, 163).

Character Frye’s second aim in this section of the Third Essay is to determine the typical character of each mythos. A typical character for Frye is a “stock type,” though this expression is not meant to imply the antithesis of the lifelike character. All lifelike characters, he says, “owe their consistency to the appropriateness of the stock type which belongs to their dramatic function. That stock type is not the character but it is as necessary to the character as a skeleton is to the actor who plays it” (AC, 172). The framework for Frye’s discussion of these types is a set {74} of two pairs of categories, three of which (alazon, eiron, and bomolochos) derive from the previously mentioned Tractatus. To these Frye adds the “character whom Aristotle calls agroikos, [one we] may reasonably accept . . . as a fourth character type” (AC, 172). We are most familiar with these kinds of stock characters in comedy, yet in each of the other mythoi Frye locates types which correspond generally to the two basic oppositions: alazon (impostor) versus eiron (self-deprecator), bomolochos (buffoon) versus agroikos (churl, rustic).9

Characterization depends on function, Frye has said, and this principle underlies his differentiation of the four character types. An alazon, for example, is distinguished from an eiron on the basis of the separate roles they play in achieving a given narrative structure. However abstract the four general categories may appear, Frye’s discussion of them, in most cases, involves a wide range of particular illustrations. Moreover, the reference of each category, contrary to what the Greek label might imply, is not singularly restricted to some unambiguous prototype: alazon and eiron, for example, come to mean much more than simply impostor and self-deprecator, respectively. In fact, Frye develops a number of subtypes within each category. To illustrate the procedure he uses in denning these types and their variations, we turn once again to his analysis of the comic and romantic mythoi.

In fifth-phase comedy the ending is not so much a matter of the plot as it is the distanced perspective of the audience, who, looking down upon the action from a higher point of view, can distinguish the chaos of experience from the order of innocence. This phase, “less festive and more pensive” than fourth-phase comedy, can be called “Arcadian.” In it, says Frye, “the reader or audience feels raised above the action.” We look down on the plotting “as generic or typical human behavior: the action, or at least the tragic implication of the action, is presented as though it were a play within a play that we can see in all dimensions at once.” And what is seen is not merely the movement from winter to spring, as in green-world comedy, but one from “a lower world of confusion to an upper world of order” (AC, 184).

Now in the first five phases, according to Frye, we see a progressive movement toward the redeemed society. His own recapitulation of this grand scheme is as follows:

{80} Purely ironic comedy exhibits this society in its infancy, swaddled and smothered by the society it should replace. Quixotic comedy exhibits it in adolescence, still too ignorant of the ways of the world to impose itself. In the third phase it comes to maturity and triumphs; in the fourth it is already mature and established. In the fifth it is part of a settled order which has been there from the beginning, an order which takes on an increasingly religious cast and seems to be drawing away from human experience altogether. At this point the undisplaced commedia, the vision of Dante’s Paradiso, moves out of our circle of mythoi into the apocalyptic or abstract mythical world above it. (AC, 185)

3. The influence of Blake on Frye’s entire conception of archetypal imagery should be noted. His essay on Blake’s Milton is strikingly similar to the first section of the Third Essay. In charting the structure of Blake’s symbolism, Frye relies on the same matrix of categories as in the Anatomy. The one difference is that Blake conceives of only four levels of vision (Eden or Paradise, Beulah or Innocence, Generation or Experience, and Ulro or Hell), whereas in the Anatomy there are five. It is perhaps significant that Frye attaches no name to his additional category. He says, in fact, that he will devote little attention to it “in order to preserve the simpler undisplaced structures,” that is, the apocalyptic and demonic ones (AC, 151). The inference seems to be that in Blake’s conception of the four levels of vision we have the source for the horizontal categories of Frye’s archetypal matrix. Certainly the seven vertical categories do not derive from Blake; they are much older than that. But Frye puts them to extensive use in outlining the symbolism in each of Blake’s four “worlds.” See “Notes for a Commentary on Milton,” pp. 108–29.

4. In the Second Essay “phase” is used to describe the different kinds of symbolic interpretation. Frye also uses the word to refer to the fourfold division of cyclical symbols. See AC, 160.

5. There is a slight variation on this pattern in Frye’s treatment of the fourth mythos.

6. Frye’s earliest account of the dragon-killing theme is his discussion of Blake’s Orc symbolism in FS, 207–26.