In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [18]
In any case, hearing a bush speak, especially in such a portentous manner, is not something a Jane Austen heroine would be likely to experience. Such an event might happen in an Ann Radcliffe Gothic shocker, but only if there were a sinister count hidden inside the bush. It could happen easily in a fairy tale, however, or a “fable” like Alice in Wonderland, or in a Greek myth at the point at which some hapless maiden is being transformed into a sapling or other item of vegetation by a god. And it could happen effortlessly on Planet X.
All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.
I went to college in the late 1950s at the University of Toronto—a place and time when thinking about mythology—or very ancient, centrally important stories and their nature and form—was at the top of the agenda. Edmund Carpenter, a noted anthropologist, was co-editing a magazine called Explorations, highly influential at the time. Working with him was Marshall McLuhan, soon to become the pre-eminent theorist in the field of media and communications. The first of McLuhan’s books was The Mechanical Bride, which analyzed such things as advertisements and comic books for their mythic and psychological content, and illustrated itself with reproductions of the ads, and thus got pulled from the market by soap flake companies and such for copyright infringement; but you could buy this book on the sly from McLuhan’s basement, which I did. Due to my interest in cereal boxes, magazine ads, and comics, I of course found this book delectable.
A third figure loomed large in the literary world of that time. His name was Northrop Frye, and he taught at Victoria College, which I myself attended. I only took half a course from him—the “Milton” half of “Spenser and Milton”—and he was not a direct influence on the kind of student writing that I was by that time doing; but he validated the literary enterprise itself by underlining its importance to civilizations. He had the added benefit of being a reader at all three brow levels, which pleased me a lot: it’s always encouraging to be told that it is intellectually acceptable to read the sorts of things that you like reading anyway.
Northrop Frye from Northrop Frye Newsletter Vol 8. No. 1:
At that time Frye had published two books of criticism that had taken academia by storm: Fearful Symmetry, a study of William Blake’s long narrative poems, which Blake called “prophecies,” and Anatomy of Criticism, a hugely ambitious project that set up a series of templates into which literary works could be slotted according to various overlapping and interlocking characteristics. Myth featured largely in this book.
Every year, Frye gave his famous Bible course, “The Bible as Literature,” which was audited by students from miles around. “Are you saying that the Bible is a myth?” one student asked him. “Yes,” Frye replied. “That is what I am saying.”
But what did he mean by “myth”? His interest in it came from his concern with story forms, and with how literary works and possibly the human imagination itself were structured. For readers, it cleared up some confusions common at the time—confusions about genre and rhetoric, for instance: there was no point in expecting from an apple the same qualities you might find praiseworthy in a steak.
Here’s a very simplified version of Frye’s theories about how “myth” and its patterns were structured. In Greek mythology there are four ages of man: the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, and the iron age. These correspond to spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and also—says Frye—to four main types of story: the romance (spring), in which the hero journeys on a quest, kills dragons, and rescues maidens; the comedy (summer), in which the hero and the maiden can’t get together due to interference by censorious old fogies, but which, after complications, ends