The Educated Imagination by Northrop Frye.

[midnight_birth]

Title: The Educated Imagination.
Author: Northrop Frye.
Genre: Non-fiction, essays, lectures, literary criticism.
Country: Canada.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1962 (published 1964).
Summary: A book of 6 lectures. In The Motive for Metaphor, Frye attempts to answer such questions of literature as: What good is it? What is the social value? What is the place of the imagination that literature addresses itself to in the learning process? and Will we outgrow it?, as well as comparing the ways of literature and science. In The Singing School Frye talks about all literature being inspire by other literature, and examines the conventions on which Western literature and mythology are primarily built. In Giants in Time, Frye addresses the question of reality in literature, as well as the progressive element in its study and teaching. In The Keys to Dreamland, Frye looks at the roles of both writers and readers of literature, as well as speaking on where the inspiration for literature does, and doesn't, come from. In Verticals of Adam, Frye discusses the place of literature in education, and how to teach literature, especially to children. The Vocation of Eloquence is addressed to readers rather than writers, consumers of literature, and explains “what literature can do and what its uses are, apart from the pleasure it gives."

My rating: 8.5/10.
My review:


♥ In my early days I thought very little about such questions, not because I had any of the answers, but because I assumed that anybody who asked them was naïve. I think now that the simplest questions are not only the hardest to answer, but the most important to ask, so I'm going to raise them and try to suggest what my present answers are. I say try to suggest, because there are only more or less inadequate answers to such questions-there aren't any right answers. The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever "solve". Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions.

♥ In school, and in university, there's a subject called "English" in English-speaking countries. English means, in the first place, the mother tongue. As that, it's the most practical subject in the world: you can't understand anything or take any part in your society without it. Wherever illiteracy is a problem, it's as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep. The native language takes precedence over every other subject of study: nothing else can compare with it in usefulness. But then you find that every mother tongue, in any developed or civilized society, turns into something called literature. If you keep on studying "English", you find yourself trying to read Shakespeare and Milton. Literature, we're told, is one of the arts, along with painting and music, and, after you've looked up all the hard words and the Classical allusions and learned what words like imagery and diction are supposed to mean, what you use in understanding it, or so you're told, is your imagination.

♥ The language you use on this level of the mind is the language of consciousness or awareness. It's largely a language of nouns and adjectives. You have to have names for things, and you need qualities like "wet" or "green" or "beautiful" to describe how things seem to you. This is the speculative or contemplative position of the mind, the position in which the arts and sciences begin, although they don't stay there very long. The sciences begin by accepting the facts and the evidence about an outside world without trying to alter them. Science proceeds by accurate measurement and description, and follows the demands of the reason rather than the emotions,. What it deals with is there, either we like it or not. The emotions are unreasonable: for them it's what they like and don't like that comes first. We'd be naturally inclined to think that the arts follow the path of emotion, in contrast to the sciences. Up to a point they do, but there's a complicating factor.

That complicating factor is the contrast between "I like this" and "I don't like this". In this Robinson Crusoe life I've assigned you, you may have moods of complete peacefulness and joy, moods when you accept your island and everything around you. You wouldn't have such moods very often, and when you had them, they'd be moods of identification, when you felt that the island was a part of you and you a part of it. That is not the feeling of consciousness or awareness, where you feel split off from everything that's not your perceiving self. Your habitual state of mind is the feeling of separation which goes with being conscious, and the feeling "this is not a part of me" soon becomes "this is not what I want".

♥ One person by himself is not a complete human being..

♥ What makes our practical life really human is a third level of the mind, a level where consciousness and practical skill come together.

♥ We have three levels of the mind now, and a language for each of them, which in English-speaking societies means an English for each of them. There's the level of consciousnesses and awareness, where the most important thing is the difference between me and everything else. The English of this level is the English of ordinary conversation, which is mostly monologue, as you'll soon realize if you do a bit of eavesdropping, or listening to yourself. We can call it the language of self-expression. Then there's the level of social participation, the working or technological language of teachers and preachers and politicians and advertisers and lawyers and journalists and scientists. We've already called this the language of practical sense. Then there's the level of imagination, which produces the literary language of poems and plays and novels. They're not really different languages, of course, but three different reasons for using words.

On this basis, perhaps, we can distinguish the arts from the sciences. Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves towards the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works towards ordinary experience: that is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can. You can see why we tend to think of the sciences as intellectual and the arts as emotional: one starts with the world as it is, the other with the world we want to have. Up to a point it is true that science gives an intellectual view of reality, and that the arts try to make the emotions as precise and disciplined as sciences do the intellect. But of course it's nonsense to think of the scientist as a cold unemotional reasoner and the artist as somebody who's in a perpetual emotional tizzy. You can't distinguish the arts from the sciences by the mental processes the people in them use: they both operate on a mixture of hunch and common sense. A highly developed science and a highly developed arts are very close together, psychologically and otherwise.

♥ Science learns more and more about the world as it goes on: it evolves and improves. A physicist today knows more physics than Newton did, even if he's not as great a scientist. But literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic. Literature doesn't evolve or improve or progress. We may have dramatists in the future who will write plays as good as King Lear, though they'll be very different ones, but drama as a whole will never get better than King Lear. King Lear is it, as far as drama ids concerned; so is Oedipus Rex, written two thousand years earlier than that, and both will be models of dramatic writing as long as the human race endures. Social conditions may improve: most of us would rather live in nineteenth-century United States than in thirteenth-century Italy, and for most of us Whitman's celebration of democracy makes a lot more sense than Dante's Inferno. But it doesn't follow that Whitman is a better poet than Dante: literature won't line up with that kind of improvement.

♥ The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment. Literature's world is a concrete human world of immediate experience. The poet uses images and objects and sensations much more than he uses abstract ideas; the novelist is concerned with telling stories, not with working out arguments. The world of literature is human in shape, a world where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west over the edge of a flat earth in three dimensions, where the primary realities are not atoms or electrons but bodies, and the primary forces not energy or gravitation but love and death and passion and joy. It's not surprising if writers are often rather simple people, not always what we think of as intellectuals, and certainly not always any freer of silliness or perversity than anyone else. What concerns us is what they produce, not what they are, and poetry, according to Milton, who ought to have known, is "more simple, sensuous and passionate" than philosophy or science.

♥ Art begins as soon as "I don't like this" turns into "this is not the way I could imagine it". We notice in passing that the creative and the neurotic minds have a lot in common. They're both dissatisfied with what they see; they both believe that something else ought to be there, and they try to pretend it is there or to make it be there. The differences are more important, but we're not ready for them yet.

~~The Motive for Metaphor.

♥ But suppose you were enough of a primitive to develop a genuinely imaginative life of your own. You'd start by identifying the human and the non-human worlds in all sorts of ways. The commonest, and the most important for literature, is the god, the being who is human in general form and character, but seems to have some particular connexion with the outer world, a storm-god or sun-god or tree-god. Some peoples identify themselves with certain animals or plants, called totems; some link certain animals, real or imaginary, bulls or dragons, with forces of nature; some ascribe powers of controlling nature to certain human beings, usually magicians, sometimes kings. You may say that these things belong to comparative religion or anthropology, not to literary criticism. I'm saying that they are all products of an impulse to identify human and natural worlds; that they're really metaphors, and become purely metaphors, part of the language of poetry, as soon as they cease to be beliefs, or even sooner. Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has only survived because he disappeared into literature.

♥ In fiction, the technical problems of shaping a story to make it interesting to read, or provide for suspense, to find the logical points where the story should begin and end, can't change much in whatever time or culture the story's being told E.M. Forster once remarked that if it weren't for wedding bells or funeral bells a novelist would hardly know where to stop: he might have added a third conventional ending, the point of self-knowledge, at which a character finds something out about himself as a result of some crucial experience. But weddings and deaths and initiation ceremonies have always been points at which the creative imagination came into focus, both now and thousands of years ago. If you open the Bible, you'll soon come to the story of the finding of the infant Moses by Pharaoh's daughter. That's a conventional type of story, the mysterious birth of the hero. It was told about a Mesopotamian king long before there was any Bible; it was told of Perseus of Greek legend; then it passed into literature with Euripides' play Ion; then it was used by Plautus and Terence and other writers of comedies; then it became a device in fiction, used in Tom Jones and Oliver Twist, and it's still going strong.

You notice that popular literature, the kind of stories that are read for relaxation, is always very highly conventionalized. If you pick up a detective story, you may not know until the last page who done it, but you always know before you start reading exactly the kind of thing that's going to happen. If you read the fiction in women's magazines, you read the story of Cinderella over and over again. If you read thrillers, you read the story of Bluebeard over and over again. If you read Westerns, you're reading a development of a pastoral convention, which turns up in writers of all ages, including Shakespeare. It's the same with characterization. The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. I mentioned Plautus and Terence, writers of comedies in Rome two hundred years before Christ, who took their plots mainly from still earlier Greek plays. Usually what happens is that a young man is in love with a courtesan; his father says nothing doing, but a clever slave fools the father and the young man gets his girl. Change the courtesan to a chorus-girl, the slave to a butler and the father to Aunt Agatha, and you've got the same plot and the same cast of characters that you find in a novel of P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse is a popular writer, and the fact that he is a popular writer has as lot to do with his use of stock plots. Of course he doesn't take his own plots seriously; he makes fun of them by the way he uses them; but so did Plautus and Terence.

♥ [When Thou Must Home to Shades of Underground] is written in the convention that poets of that age used for love poetry: the poet is always in love with some obdurate and unresponsive mistress, whose neglect of the lover may even cause his madness or death. It's pure convention, and it's a complete waste of time trying to find out about the women in Campion's life-there can't possibly be any real experience behind it. Campion himself was a poet and critic, and a composer who set his poems to his own musical settings. He was also a professional man who started out in law but switched over to medicine, and served for some time in the army. In other words, he was a busy man, who didn't have much time for getting himself murdered by cruel mistresses. The poem uses religious language, but not a religion that Campion could ever have believed in. At the same time it's a superbly lovely poem; it's perfection itself, and if you think that a conventional poem can only be just a literary exercise, and that you could write a better poem out of real experience, I'd be doubtful of your success.

♥ ..the winter solstice is Christmas time, the low point of the year, when we set logs on fire or hang lights on a tree, originally to help make sure that the light of the world won't go out altogether.

♥ This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature. Inside it comes the story of the hero with a thousand faces, as one critic calls him, whose adventures, death, disappearance and marriage or resurrection are the focal points of what later become romance and tragedy and satire and comedy in fiction, and the emotional moods that take their place in such forms as the lyric, which normally doesn't tell a story.

We notice that modern writers speak of these visions of sacred golden cities and happy gardens very rarely, though when they do they clearly mean what they say. They spend a good deal more of their time on the misery, frustration or absurdity of human existence. In other words, literature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from. The tone literature takes toward this world is not a moralizing tone, but the tone we call ironic. The effect of irony is to enable us to see over the head of a situation-we have irony in a play, for example, when we know more about what's going on than the characters do-and so to detach us, at least in imagination, from the world we'd prefer not to be involved with.

As civilization develops, we become more preoccupied with human life, and less conscious of our relation to non-human nature. Literature reflects this, and the more advanced the civilization, the more literature seems to concern itself with purely human problems and conflicts. The gods and heroes of the old myths fade away and give place to people like ourselves. In Shakespeare we can still have heroes who can see ghosts and talk in magnificent poetry, but by the time we get to Beckett's Waiting for Godot they're speaking prose and have turned into ghosts themselves. We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us. Above all, we have to look at the total design of a writer's work, the title he gives to it, and his main theme, which means his point in writing it, to understand that literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.

~~The Singing School

♥ ..what kind of reality does literature have? When you see a play of Shakespeare, you know that there never were any such people as Hamlet or Falstaff. There may once have been a prince in Denmark named Amleth, or there may have been somebody called Sir John Fastolf-in fact there was, and he comes into an earlier play of Shakespeare's. But these historical figures have no more to do with Shakespeare's Hamlet or Falstaff than you or I have. Poets are fond of telling people, especially people with money or influence, that they can make them immortal by mentioning them in poems. Sometimes they're right. If there ever was any huge sulky bruiser in the Greek army named Achilles, he'd no doubt be surprised to find that his name was still well known after three thousand years. Whether he'd be pleased or not is another question. Assuming that there was a historical Achilles, there are two reasons why his name is still well known. One reason is that Homer wrote about him. The other reason is that practically everything Homer said about him was preposterous. Nobody was ever made invulnerable by being dipped in a river; nobody ever fought with a river god; nobody had a sea-nymph for a mother. Whether it's Achilles or Hamlet or King Arthur or Charles Dickens's father, once anyone gets put into literature he's taken over by literature, and whatever he was in real life could hardly matter less. Still, if Homer's Achilles isn't the real Achilles, he isn't unreal either. Unrealities don't seem so full of life after three thousand years as Homer's Achilles does. This is the kind of problem we have to tackle next: the fact that what we meet in literature is neither real nor unreal. We have two words, imaginary, meaning unreal, and imaginative, meaning what the writer produces, and they mean entirely different things.

We can understand though how the poet got his reputation as a kind of licensed liar. The word poet itself means liar in some languages, and the words we use in literary criticism, fable, fiction, myth, have all come to mean something we can't believe.

♥ But the poet, Aristotle says, never makes any real statements at all, certainly no particular or specific ones. The poet's job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place. He gives you the typical, recurring, or what Aristotle calls universal event. You wouldn't go to Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland-you go to it to learn what a man feels like after he's gained a kingdom and lost his soul. When you meet such a character as Micawber in Dickens, you don't feel that there must have been a man Dickens knew who was exactly like this: you feel that there's a bit of Micawber in almost everybody you know, including yourself. Our impressions of human life are picked up one by one, and remain for most of us loose and disorganized. But we constantly find things in literature that suddenly co-ordinate and bring into focus a great many such impressions, and this is part of what Aristotle means by the typical or universal human event.

♥ Achilles was invulnerable except for his heel, and he was the son of a sea-nymph. Neither of these things can be true of anybody, so how does that make Achilles a typical or universal figure? Here there's another kind of principle involved. We said earlier that the more realistic a writer is, and the more his characters and incidents seem to be people like ourselves, the more apt he is to become ironic, which involves putting you, as the reader, in a position of superiority to them, so that you can detach your imagination from the world they live in by seeing it clearly and in the round. Homer's Achilles represents the opposite technique, where the character is a hero, much larger than life. Achilles is more than what any man could be, because he's also what a man wishes he could be, and he does what most men would do if they were strong enough. He's not a portrait of an individual hero, but a great smouldering force of human desire and frustration and discontent, something we all have in us too, part of mankind as a whole. And because he's that he can be partly a god, involved with nature to the point of having a mother in the sea and an enemy in the river, besides having other gods in the sky directly interested in him and what he's doing. And because with all his superhuman strength he's still up against something he can't understand, there's an ironic perspective too. Nobody cares now about the historical Achilles, if there ever was one, but the mythical Achilles reflects a part of our own lives.

♥ There's a great deal of allegory in literature, much more than we usually realize, but straightforward allegory is out of fashion now: most modern writers dislike having their images pinned down in this specific way, and so modern critics think of allegory as a bit simple-minded. The reason is that allegory, where literature is illustrating moral or political or religious truths, means that both the writer and his public have to be pretty firmly convinced of the reality and importance of those truths, and modern writers and publics, on the whole, aren't.

♥ This allusiveness in literature is significant, because it shows what we've been saying all along, that in literature you don't just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a completer world of which every work of literature forms part. This affects the writer as much as it does the reader. Many people think that the original writer is always directly inspired by life, and that only commonplace or derivative writers get inspired by books. That's nonsense: the only inspiration worth having is an inspiration that clarifies the form of what's being written, and that's more likely to come from something that already has a literary form.

♥ The general principle involved is that there is really no such thing as self-expression in literature.

In other words, it isn't just the historical figure who gets taken over by literature: the poet gets taken over too. As we said in our first talk, the poet as a person is no wiser or better a man than anyone else. He's a man with a special craft of putting words together, but he may have no claim on our attention beyond that. Most of the well-known poets have well-known lives, and some of them, like Byron, have had some highly publicized love affairs. But it's only for incidental interest that we relate what a poet writes to his own life. Byron wrote a poem to a maid of Athens, and there really was a maid of Athens, a twelve-year-old girl whose price, set by her mother, was 30,000 piastres, which Byron refused to pay. Wordsworth wrote some lovely poems about a girl named Lucy, but he made Lucy up. But Lucy is just as real as the maid of Athens. With some poets, with Milton for example, we feel that there is a great man who happened to be a poet, but would still have been great whatever he did. With other equally great poets, including Homer and Shakespeare, we feel only that they were great poets. We known nothing about Homer: some people think there were two Homers or a committee of Homers. We think of a blind old man, but we get that notion from one of Homer's characters. We know nothing about Shakespeare except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot. We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other. Literature is a world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.

♥ You remember that Theseus, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, remarked that:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.

Theseus is not a literary critic; he's an amiable stuffed shirt, but just the same his remark has an important truth in it. The lunatic and the lover are trying to identify themselves with totems or animals or spirits. I spoke of the magic in Blake's poem: that's usually a very vague word in criticism, but magic is really a belief in identity of the same kind: the magician makes a wax image of somebody he doesn't like, sticks a pin in it, and the person it's identified with gets a pain. The poet, too, is an identifier: everything he sees in nature he identifies with human life. That's why literature, and more particularly poetry, shows the analogy to primitive minds that I mentioned in my first talk.

The difference is more important. Magic and primitive religion are forms of belief: lunacy and love are forms of experience or action.

♥ So, you may ask, what is the use of studying a world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.

♥ When experience is removed from us a bit, as the experience of the Napoleonic war is in Tolstoy's War and Peace, there's a tremendous increase of dignity and exhilaration. I mention Tolstoy because he'd be the last writer to try to glamorize the war itself, or pretend that its horror wasn't horrible. There is an element of illusion even in War and Peace, but the illusion gives us a reality that isn't in the actual experience of the war itself: the reality of proportion and perspective, of seeing what it's all about, that only detachment can give. Literature helps to give us that detachment, and so do history and philosophy and science and everything else worth studying. But literature has something more to give peculiarly its own: something as absurd and impossible as the primitive magic it so closely resembles.

♥ Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it. And the imagination won't stop until it's swallowed everything. No matter what direction we start off in, the signposts of literature always keep pointing the same way, to a world where nothing is outside the human imagination. If even time, the enemy of all living things, and to poets, at least, the most hated and feared of all tyrants, can be broken down by the imagination, anything can be. We come back to the limit of the imagination that I referred to in my first talk, a universe entirely possessed and occupied by human life, a city of which the stars are suburbs. Nobody can believe in any such universe: literature is not religion, and it doesn't address itself to belief. But if we shut the vision of it completely out of our minds, or insist on its being limited in various ways, something goes dead inside us, perhaps the one thing that it's really important to keep alive.

~~Giants in Time.

♥ There's clearly a strong force making toward conformity in society, so strong that it seems to have something to do with the stability of society itself. In ordinary life even the most splendid things we can think of, like goodness and truth and beauty, all mean essentially what we're accustomed to. As I hinted just now in speaking of female make-up, most of our ideas of beauty are pure convention, and even truth has been defined as whatever doesn't disturb the pattern of what we already know.

♥ Singing suggests birds, and so for their typical songbird and emblem of themselves, the poets chose the swan, a bird that can't sing. Because it can't sing, they made up a legend that it sang once before death, when nobody was listening. But Shakespeare didn't burst into song before his death: he wrote two plays a year until he'd made enough money to retire, and spent the last five years of his life counting his take.

♥ In fact, whenever literature gets too probable, too much like life, some self-defeating process, some mysterious law of diminishing returns, seems to set in. There's a vivid and expertly written novel by H.G. Wells called Kipps, about a lower-middle-class, inarticulate, very likeable Cockney, the kind of character we often find in Dickens. Kipps is carefully studied: he never says anything that a man like Kipps wouldn't say; he never sounds the "h" in home or head; nothing he does is out of line with what we expect such a person to be like. It's an admirable novel, well worth reading, and yet I have a nagging feeling that there's some inner secret ion bringing him completely to life that Dickens would have and that Wells doesn't have. All right, then, what would Dickens have done? Well, one of the things that Dickens often does do it write badly. He might have given Kipps sentimental speeches and false heroics and all sorts of inappropriate verbiage to say; and some readers would have clucked and tut-tutted over the passages and explained to each other how bad Dickens's taste was and how uncertain his hold on character could be. Perhaps they'd be right too. But we'd have had Kipps a few times the way he'd look to himself or the way he'd sometimes wish he could be: that's part of his reality, and the effect would remain with us however much we disapproved of it. Whether I'm right about this book or not, and I'm not at all sure I am, I think my general principle is right. What we'd never see except in a book is often what we go to books to find. Whatever is completely lifelike in literature is a bit of a laboratory specimen there. To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like.

♥ If you read the beautiful sentences of Elizabeth Bennett's conversation in Pride and Prejudice, you can see how in that book they give a powerfully convincing impression of a sensible and intelligent girl. But any girl who talked as coherently as that on a street car would be stared at as though she had green hair. It isn't only the difference between 1813 and 1962 that's involved either, as you'll see if you compare her speech with her mother's. The poet Emily Dickinson complained that everybody said "What?" to her, until finally she practically gave up trying to talk altogether, and confined herself to writing notes.

♥ Imagination is certainly essential to science, applied or pure. Without a constructive power in the mind to make models of experience, get hunches and follow them out, play freely around with hypotheses, and so forth, no scientist could get anywhere. But all imaginative effort in practical fields has to meet the rest of practicability, otherwise it's discarded. The imagination in literature has no such test to meet. You don't relate it directly to life or reality: you relate works of literature, as we've said earlier, to each other. Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we've built, and keep adding new wings to all the time.

♥ No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself. It seems to be very difficult for many people to understand the reality and intensity of literary experience. To give an example that you may think a bit irrelevant: why have so many people managed to convince themselves that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare's plays, when there is not an atom of evidence that anybody else did? Apparently because they feel that poetry must be written out of person experience, and that Shakespeare didn't have enough experience of the right kind. But Shakespeare's plays weren't produced by his experience: they were produced by his imagination, and the way to develop the imagination is to read a good book or two. As for us, we can't speak or think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established for us by our great writers.

Literature, then, is not a dream-world: it's two dreams, a wish-fulfilment dream and an anxiety dream, that are focussed together, like a pair of glasses, and become a fully conscious vision. Art, according to Plato, is a dream of awakened minds, a work of imagination withdrawn from ordinary life, dominated by the same forces that dominate the dream, and yet giving us a perspective and dimension on reality that we don't get from any other approach to reality. So the poet and the dreamer are distinct, as Keats says. Ordinary life forms a community, and literature is among other things an art of communication, so it forms a community too. In ordinary life we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination. Underneath literature there's another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols, like the Queen and the flag, or around certain gods that represent order and stability, or becoming and change, or death and rebirth to a new life. This is the myth-making power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another.

♥ The critic's function is to interpret every work of literature in the light of all the literature he knows, to keep constantly struggling to understand what literature as a whole is about. Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell. Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.

~~The Keys to Dreamland.

♥ The most complete form of this myth is given in the Christian Bible, and so the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that is sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it. That, I am aware, is a highly controversial statement, and can be misunderstood in all kinds of ways, so please remember that I'm speaking as a literary critic about the teaching of literature. There are all sorts of secondary reasons for teaching the Bible as literature: the fact that it's so endlessly quoted from and alluded to, the fact that the cadences and phrases of the King James translation are built into our minds and way of thought, the fact that it's full of the greatest and best known stories we have, and so on. There are also the moral and religious reasons for its importance, which are different reasons. But in the particular context in which I'm speaking now, it's the total shape and structure of the Bible which is most important: the fact that it's a continuous narrative beginning with the creation and ending with the Last Judgement, and surveying the whole history of mankind, under the symbolic names of Adam and Israel, in between. In other words, it's the myth of the Bible that should be the basis of literary training, its imaginative survey of the human situation which is so broad and comprehensive that everything else finds its place inside it. Remember too that to me the word myth, like the words fable and fiction, is a technical term in criticism, and the popular sense in which it means something untrue I regard as a debasing of language. Further, the Bible may be more things than a work of literature, but it certainly is a work of literature too: no book can have had its influence on literature without itself having literary qualities. For the purpose I have in mind, however, the Bible could only be taught in school by someone with a well-developed sense of literary structure.

♥ To see these resemblances in structure will not, by itself, give any sense of comparative value, any notion why Shakespeare is better than the television movie. In my opinion value-judgements on literature should not be hurried. It does a student little good to be told that A is better than B, especially if he prefers B at the time. He has to feel values for himself, and should follow his individual rhythm in doing so. In the meantime, he can read almost anything in any order, just as he can eat mixtures of food that would have his elders reaching for the baking soda. A sensible teacher or librarian can soon learn how to give guidance to a youth's reading that allows for undeveloped taste and still doesn't turn him into a gourmet or a dyspeptic before his time.

♥ The art of listening to stories is a basic training for the imagination. You don't start arguing with the writer: you accept his postulates, even if he tells you that the cow jumped over the moon, and you don't react until you've taken in all of what he has to say. If Bertrand Russell is right in saying that suspension of judgement is one of the essential operations of the mind, the benefits of learning to do this go far beyond literature. And even then what you react to is the total structure of the story as a whole, not to some message or moral of Great Thought that you can snatch out of it and run away with. Equal in importance to this training is that of getting the student to write himself. No matter how little of this he does, he's bound to have the experience sooner or later of feeling he's said something that he can't explain except in exactly the same way that he's said it. That should help to make him more tolerant about difficulties he encounters in his reading, although the benefits of trying to express oneself in different literary ways naturally extends a lot further than mere tolerance.

♥ I've even heard it said that thought is inner speech, though how you'd apply that statement to what Beethoven was doing when he was thinking about his ninth symphony I don't know. But the study of other arts, such as painting and music, has many values for literary training apart from their value as subjects in themselves. Everything man does that's worth doing is some kind of construction for its own sake. The units don't have to be words; they can be numbers or tones or colours or bricks or pieces of marble. It's hardly possible to understand what the imagination is doing with words without seeing how it operates with some of these other units.

♥ In every properly taught subject, we start at the centre and work outwards. To try to teach literature by starting with the applied use of words, or "effective communication", as it's often called, then gradually work into literature through the more documentary forms of prose fiction and finally into poetry, seem to me a futile procedure. If literature is to be properly taught, we have to start at its centre, which is poetry, then work outwards to literate prose, then outwards from there to the applied languages of business and professions and ordinary life. Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean. Some languages, such as Chinese, have kept differences of pitch in the spoken word: where Canadians got the monotone honk that you're listening to now I don't know-probably from the Canada goose.

♥ From poetry one can go on to prose, and if one's literary education is sound the first thing one should demand from prose is rhythm. My own teacher, Pelham Edgar, once told me that if the rhythm of a sentence was right, its sense could look after itself. Of course I was at university then, and I admit that this would be a dangerous thing to say to a ten-year-old. But it said one thing that was true. We're often told that to write we must have something to say, but that in its turn means having a certain potential of verbal energy.

♥ ..a great work of literature is also a place in which the whole cultural history of the nation that produced it comes info focus. I've mentioned Robinson Crusoe: you can get from that book a kind of detached vision of the British Empire, imposing its own pattern whenever it goes, catching its man Friday and trying to turn him into an eighteenth-century Nonconformist, never dreaming of "going native", that history alone would hardly give. If you read Anna and the King of Siam or saw The King and I, you remember the story of the Victorian lady in an Oriental country which had never had any tradition of chivalry or deference to women. She expected to be treated like a Victorian lady, but she didn't so much say so as express by her whole bearing and attitude that nothing else was possible, and eventually Siam fell into line. As you read or see that story, the shadow of an even greater Victorian lady appears behind her: Alice in Wonderland, remembering the manners her governess taught her, politely starting topics of conversation and pausing for a reply, unperturbed by the fact that what she's talking to may be a mock turtle or a caterpillar, surprised only by any rudeness or similar failure to conform to the proper standards of behaviour.

This aspect of literature in which it's a kind of imaginative key to history is particularly clear in the novel, and more elusive and difficult in Shakespeare or Milton. American literature falls mainly in the period of fiction, and in such books as Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Walden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a great deal of American social life, history, religion and cultural mythology is reflected. I think it's a mistake to approach such books inside out, as is often done, starting with the history and sociology and the rest of it and treating the book as though it were an allegory of such things. The book itself is a literary form, descended from and related to other literary forms: everything else follows from that. The constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don't get in any other way.

♥ Still, it takes me to a point at which I can perhaps venture a suggestion about what the real place of literature in education is. I think it has somewhat the same relationship to the studies built out of words, history, philosophy, the social sciences, law, and theology, that mathematics has to the physical sciences. The pure mathematician proceeds by making postulates and assumptions and seeing what comes out of them, and what the poet or novelist does is rather similar. The great mathematical geniuses often do their best work in early life, like most of the great lyrical poets. Pure mathematics enters into and gives form to the physical sciences, and I have a notion that the myths and images of literature also enter into and give form to all the structures we build out of words.

♥ If we think of any period in the past-say eighteenth-century England-we think of the writers and scholars and artists, Fielding and Johnson and Hogarth and Adam Smith and a hundred more, and the cultivated and educated audience which made their work possible. But these writers and artists and their entire public, added all together, would make up only a minute fraction of the total population of England at that time-so minute that my guess is we'd hardly believe the statistics if we had them. In these days we're in a hare-and-tortoise race between mob rule and education: to avoid collapsing into mob rule we have to try to educate a minority that'll stand out against it. The fable says the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.

♥ It's clear that the end of literary teaching is not simply the admiration of literature; it's something more like the transfer of imaginative energy from literature to the student. The student's response to this transfer of energy may be to become a writer himself, but the great majority of students will do other things with it.

~~Verticals of Adam.

♥ I said at the beginning that nothing can be more obviously useful than learning to read and write and talk, but that a lot of people, especially young and inexperienced people, don’t see why studying literature should be a necessary part of this. One of the things I’ve been trying to do in these talks is to distinguish the language of the imagination, which is literature, from two other ways of using words: ordinary speech and the conveying of information. It’s probably occurred to you already that these three ways of using words overlap a good deal. Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we’re asleep. Consequently we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not.

♥ Society attaches an immense importance to saying the right thing at the right time. In this conception of the “right thing,” there are two factors involved, one moral and one aesthetic. They are inseparable, and equally important. Some of the right things said may be only partly true, or they may be so little of the truth as to be actually hypocritical or false, at least in the eyes of the Recording Angel. It doesn’t matter: in society’s eyes the virtue of saying the right thing at the right time is more important than the virtue of telling the whole truth, or sometimes even of telling the truth at all. We even have a law of libel to prevent us from telling some truths about some people unless it’s in the public interest. So when Bernard Shaw remarks that a temptation to tell the truth should be just as carefully considered as a temptation to tell a lie, he’s pointing to a social standard beyond the merely intellectual standards of truth and falsehood, which has the power of final veto, and which only the imagination can grasp. We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them. Suppose we’re talking to somebody, let’s say a woman, who’s in a difficult mood. We’re faced at once with the problem: does what she is saying represent her actual meaning, or is it just a disguised way of representing her emotional state of mind? Usually we assume the latter but pretend to be assuming the former. This is a problem in rhetoric, and our decision is an act of literary criticism. The importance of rhetoric proves, once again, that the imagination uses words to express a certain kind of social vision. The social vision of rhetoric is that of society dressed up in its Sunday clothes, people parading in front of each other, and keeping up the polite, necessary and not always true assumption that they are what they appear to be.

♥ Our reaction to advertising is really a form of literary criticism. We don’t take it literally, and we aren’t supposed to: anyone who believed literally what every advertiser said would hardly be capable of managing his own affairs. I recently went past two teen-age girls looking at the display in front of a movie which told them that inside was the thrill of a lifetime, on no account to be missed, and I heard one of them say: “Do you suppose it’s any good?” That was the voice of sanity trying to get its bearings in a world of illusion. We may think of it as the voice of reason, but it’s really the voice of the imagination doing its proper job. You remember that I spoke of irony, which means saying one thing and meaning another, as a device which a writer uses to detach our imaginations from a world of absurdity or frustration by letting us see around it. To protect ourselves in a society like ours, we have to look at such advertising as that movie display ironically: it means something to us which is different from what it says. The end of the process is not to reject all advertising, but to develop our own vision of society to the point at which we can choose what we want out of what’s offered to us and let the rest go. What we choose is what fits that vision of society.

♥ he society we have to live in, which for us happens to be a twentieth-century Canadian society, presents our imagination with its own substitute for literature. This is a social mythology, with its own folklore and its own literary conventions, or what corresponds to them. The purpose of this mythology is to persuade us to accept our society’s standards and values, to “adjust” to it, as we say. Every society produces such a mythology: it’s a necessary part of its coherence, and we have to accept some of it if we’re to live in it, even things that we don’t believe. The more slowly a society changes, the more solidly based its mythology seems to be. In the Middle Ages the mythology of protection and obedience seemed one of the eternal verities, something that could never change. But change it did, at least all of it that depended on a certain kind of social structure. A hundred years ago a mythology of independence, hard work, thrift and saving for a rainy day looked equally immortal, but, again, everything that was based on weak social services and stable values of money had to go. If a society changes very rapidly, and our society certainly does, we have to recognize the large element of illusion in all social mythology as a simple matter of self-protection. The first thing our imaginations have to do for us, as soon as we can handle words well enough to read and write and talk, is to fight to protect us from falling into the illusions that society threatens us with. The illusion is itself produced by the social imagination, of course, but it’s an inverted form of imagination. What it creates is the imaginary, which as I said earlier is different from the imaginative.

♥ Then there’s the use of what we call jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call federal prose, the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement. There’s a particular reason for using gobbledygook which makes it a part of social mythology. People write this way when they want to sound as impersonal as possible, and the reason why they want to sound impersonal is that they want to suggest that the social machine they’re operating, usually a government agency, is running smoothly, and that no human factors are going to disturb it. Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don’t want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring.

♥ Then there’s all the mythology about the “good old days,” when everything was simpler and more leisurely and everybody was much closer to nature and got their milk out of cows instead of out of bottles. Literary critics call these reveries pastoral myths, because they correspond to the same kind of convention in literature that produces stories about happy shepherds and milkmaids. Many people like to assume that the society of their childhood was a solid and coherent structure which is now falling apart, as morals have become looser and social conditions more chaotic and the arts more unintelligible to ordinary people, and so forth. Some time ago an archaeologist in the Near East dug up an inscription five thousand years old which told him that “children no longer obey their parents, and the end of the world is rapidly approaching.” It’s characteristic of such social myth-making that it can swing from one extreme to the other without any sense of inconsistency, and so we also have progress myths, of the kind that rationalize the spreading of filling stations and suburban bungalows and four-lane highways over the Canadian landscape. Progress myths come into all the phony history that people use when they say that someone is a “Puritan,” meaning that he’s a prude, or that someone else is “medieval” or “mid-Victorian,” meaning that he’s old-fashioned. The effect of such words is to give the impression that all past history was a kind of bad dream, which in these enlightened days we’ve shaken off.

♥ In a totalitarian state the competition in propaganda largely disappears, and consequently the power of imaginative choice is sealed off. In our hatred and fear of war and of totalitarian government, one central element is a sense of claustrophobia that the imagination develops when it isn’t allowed to function properly. This is the aspect of tyranny that’s so prominently displayed in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Orwell even goes so far as to suggest that the only way to make tyranny permanent and unshakable, the only way in other words to create a literal hell on earth, is deliberately to debase our language by turning our speech into an automatic gabble. The fear of being reduced to such a life is a genuine fear, but of course as soon as we express it in hysterical clichés we are in the same state ourselves. As the poet William Blake says in describing something very similar, we become what we behold.

♥ I don’t see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. The area of ordinary speech, as I see it, is a battleground between two forms of social speech, the speech of a mob and the speech of a free society. One stands for cliché, ready-made idea and automatic babble, and it leads us inevitably from illusion into hysteria. There can be no free speech in a mob: free speech is one thing a mob can’t stand. You notice that the people who allow their fear of Communism to become hysterical eventually get to screaming that every sane man they see is a Communist. Free speech, again, has nothing to do with grousing or saying that the country’s in a mess and that all politicians are liars and cheats, and so on and so on. Grousing never gets any further than clichés of this kind, and the sort of vague cynicism they express is the attitude of somebody who’s looking for a mob to join.

You see, freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You’re not free to move unless you’ve learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practise. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at. The only exceptions, and they are exceptions that prove the rule, are people who, in some crisis, show that they have a social imagination strong and mature enough to stand out against a mob. .. For most of us, free speech is cultivated speech, but cultivating speech is not just a skill, like playing chess. You can’t cultivate speech, beyond a certain point, unless you have something to say, and the basis of what you have to say is your vision of society. So while free speech may be, at least at present, important only to a very small minority, that very small minority is what makes the difference between living in Canada and living in East Berlin or South Africa.

♥ Let us suppose that some intelligent man has been chasing status symbols all his life, until suddenly the bottom falls out of his world and he sees no reason for going on. He can’t make his solid gold Cadillac represent his success or his reputation or his sexual potency any more: now it seems to him only absurd and a little pathetic. No psychiatrist or clergyman can do him any good, because his state of mind is neither sick nor sinful: he’s wrestling with his angel. He discovers immediately that he wants more education, and he wants it in the same way that a starving man wants food. But he wants education of a particular kind. His intelligence and emotions may quite well be in fine shape. It’s his imagination that’s been starved and fed on shadows, and it’s education in that that he specifically wants and needs.

What has happened is that he’s so far recognized only one society, the society he has to live in, the middle-class twentieth-century Canadian society that he sees around him. That is, the society he does live in is identical with the one he wants to live in. So all he has to do is to adjust to that society, to see how it works and find opportunities for getting ahead in it. Nothing wrong with that: it’s what we all do. But it’s not all of what we all do. He’s beginning to realize that if he recognizes no other society except the one around him, he can never be anything more than a parasite on that society. And no mentally healthy man wants to be a parasite: he wants to feel he has some function, something to contribute to the world, something that would make the world poorer if he weren’t in it. But as soon as that notion dawns in the mind, the world we live in and the world we want to live in become different worlds. One is around us, the other is a vision inside our minds, born and fostered by the imagination,yet real enough for us to try to make the world we see conform to its shape. This second world is the world we want to live in, but the word “want” is now appealing to something impersonal and unselfish in us. Nobody can enter a profession unless he makes at least a gesture recognizing the ideal existence of a world beyond his own interests: a world of health for the doctor, of justice for the lawyer, of peace for the social worker, a redeemed world for the clergyman, and so on.

♥ My subject is the educated imagination, and education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn’t just train the mind: it’s a social and moral development too. But now that we’ve discovered that the imaginative world and the world around us are different worlds, and that the imaginative world is more important, we have to take one more step. The society around us looks like the real world, but we’ve just seen that there’s a great deal of illusion in it, the kind of illusion that propaganda and slanted news and prejudice and a great deal of advertising appeal to. For one thing, as we’ve been saying, it changes very rapidly, and people who don’t know of any other world can never understand what makes it change. If Canada in 1962 is a different society from the Canada of 1942, it can’t be real society, but only a temporary appearance of real society. And just as it looks real, so this ideal world that our imaginations develop inside us looks like a dream that came out of nowhere, and has no reality except what we put into it. But it isn’t. It’s the real world, the real form of human society hidden behind the one we see. It’s the world of what humanity has done, and therefore can do, the world revealed to us in the arts and sciences. This is the world that won’t go away, the world out of which we built the Canada of 1942, are now building the Canada of 1962, and will be building the quite different Canada of 1982.

♥ The first is the level of ordinary experience and of self-expression. On this level we use words to say the right thing at the right time, to keep the social machinery running, faces saved, self-respect preserved, and social situations intact. It’s not the noblest thing that words can do, but it’s essential, and it creates and diffuses a social mythology, which is a structure of words developed by the imagination. For we find that to use words properly even in this way we have to use our imaginations, otherwise they become mechanical clichés, and get further and further removed from any kind of reality. There’s something in all of us that wants to drift toward a mob, where we can all say the same thing without having to think about it, because everybody is all alike except people that we can hate or persecute. Every time we use words, we’re either fighting against this tendency or giving in to it. When we fight against it, we’re taking the side of genuine and permanent human civilization.

♥ The particular myth that’s been organizing this talk, and in a way the whole series, is the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. The civilization we live in at present is a gigantic technological structure, a skyscraper almost high enough to reach the moon. It looks like a single world-wide effort, but it’s really a deadlock of rivalries; it looks very impressive, except that it has no genuine human dignity. For all its wonderful machinery, we know it’s really a crazy ramshackle building, and at any time may crash around our ears. What the myth tells us is that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues. All had originally one language, the myth says. That language is not English or Russian or Chinese or any common ancestor, if there was one. It is the language of human nature, the language that makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets, that gives a social vision to both Lincoln and Gandhi. It never speaks unless we take the time to listen in leisure, and it speaks only in a voice too quiet for panic to hear. And then all it has to tell us, when we look over the edge of our leaning tower, is that we are not getting any nearer heaven, and that it is time to return to the earth.

~~The Vocation of Eloquence.