The Educated Imagination, part 2

I’m doing a lot of what I call “little writing” these days, probably as a diversion from the bigger task that I should be engaged in–revising an early novel in order to make it publishable. This revision is something that I used to think would happen, if it happened at all, at the request of a publisher/editor. But in light of the decision I’ve made to use Kindle and CreateSpace publishing and sell through Amazon, I need to submit all my work to rigorous self-editing. And so, instead of buckling down and doing this work, which is daunting even to me, a hardened writing teacher, I’m pretty much wasting time by playing around with literary theory–and not even current literary theory, but decades-old theory that no one reads anymore.

It’s the writerly equivalent of cleaning the refrigerator: it takes up time, it’s not completely self-indulgent, and it postpones the moment that you have to sit down and actually write. Like cleaning the refrigerator, no one ever thanks you for what you’re doing, but you feel good about it afterwards.

So here’s the second part of my analysis/review of Northrop Frye’s excellent little book The Educated Imagination, which I put in the same category as C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. I have only a couple of things to point out, the first of which is based on this statement by Frye:

“The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in. Obviously that can’t be a separated society, so we have to understand how to relate the two.”

This is a rich statement, one which could be examined in the light of desire (for example, “I don’t want to live in 21st-century America; I would rather live in Georgian England, which is why I’m reading this Regency romance”). It could also be examined with a view towards social change (what might have been called, in Frye’s day, “social improvement”), in which we readers are charged with the task of identifying problems in our society or culture and addressing them. But I think the key phrase is this: “we have to understand how to relate the two.” So let me focus on this for a moment in the next paragraph, because I think this is where our society–anti-intellectual as it is–falls very short in the way it addresses literature.

Let’s take a topically popular example of literature: the Game of Thrones series. Many people find it entertaining. I won’t discuss its relative merits or shortfalls, but I will point out that the problem with our consumer culture is that we simply imbibe the story, then file it away. Oh, we might talk about the “Red Wedding” episode at the water cooler (read: Facebook) on Monday morning, but we don’t really stop to figure out how this story, with these characters, and this particular plot, actually fits into the lives we have to lead. My theory is this: when literature is separated from its intrinsic value, when it exists purely as commodity (how many people can we get to buy this book?), it becomes separated from the question of how to relate what we read into how we live. Thus our activity becomes purely escapist reading, which I am not entirely condemning. However, I’d argue that anything we read in this way–be it The Hunger Games or Othello, will lose a great deal of its value. When we consume works simply to be entertained, it’s much like putting filet mignon into a smoothie solely for its protein value or mixing a Taittinger champagne in a wine spritzer. In other words, we lose the real value of the thing in by failing to give it the proper attention. Our culture today encourages this kind of activity, however, and it’s up to us, the serious readers out there, to guard against this tendency.

Frye saves his best statement for the final few pages of the book, a statement that must have sounded as conservative when it was written in the 1960s as it does today, but one which really bears some close consideration:

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 practice. 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…. 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.

Frye has got it exactly right: too many people claim their right to free speech without adding anything valuable to our culture and our society. We see this in the political world all the time; pundits, politicians, and, in recent years, media commentators insist on their right to free speech while saying nothing of value. We know this, because no real dialogue ever takes place. In 25 years of being involved in higher education, I’ve never seen a better explanation for the value of education. Frye’s point is this: in order to participate fully in our grand experiment of democracy, we must train ourselves to the task. Yet this training takes time, dedication, and a sense of responsibility, which are things we seem to be short of these days.

So we’ve reached the end of my brief analysis of Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination. Next week, I’ll take a look a break from this heavy intellectual stuff and discuss a few films that, despite my best intentions, I was unable to get through. Please check back then!