Sherry Chandler

I think some of my readers are sick and damned tired of Northrop Frye, but I quote him not because I’m advocating for his theories but because he provokes thought. At least in me. And also because it’s taking me so long to get through Anatomy of Criticism.

My session with Frye this morning brought me to this passage:

…Civilization is not merely an imitation of nature, but the process of making a total human form out of nature, and it is impelled by the force that we have just called desire. The desire for food and shelter is not content with roots and caves: it produces the human forms of nature we call farming and architecture. Desire is thus not a simple response to need, for an animal may need food without planting a garden to get it…There is however a moral dialectec in desire. The conception of a garden develops the conception “weed,” and building a sheepfold makes the wolf a greater enemy.

This passage made me think of the post I made this week about our prisoners at Camp Iguana. Their strong desire to plant a garden is basically an impulse to reconnect themselves to civilization. But we hold them there because our basic instinct to protect our own garden causes us, those of us with the power to take prisoners anyway, to define them as weeds (if not wolves). They have been weeded out.

I don’t know that I can go anyplace significant with that metaphor, but it does point out a basic irony in the human condition.

The Frye passage says this about poetry (used here in a very broad sense to encompass almost all of what we’d call literature):

The efficient cause of civilization is work, and poetry in its social aspect has the function of expressing, as a verbal hypothesis, a vision of the goal of work and the forms of desire…Poetry in its social or archetypal aspect, therefore, not only tries to illustrate the fulfilment of desire, but to define the obstacles to it.

So Frye would agree with Seamus Heaney that poets have a responsibility to their culture, or as I once heard Joy Harjo say, everything you write is political (or at least civilized, but according to the Romans, that meant political). A friend recently remarked to me that the only responsibility she felt was to the story. And I agree. But that is not such a simple statement as it might appear.

What is our story? What is our garden? Who are our weeds and our wolves? And what is our need for our weeds and our wolves? Think of all our hybrids that are more productive but more vulnerable than the old wild strains. Think of the superbacteria we are breeding.

Oh well, I’m starting to sound like a bad Star Trek plot. These are not questions we usually address directly when we tell the story but responsibility to the story seems to me to encompass these questions and these questions are basic to our civilization.

my own particular old Kentucky home looked like this.

The black locust:

The wild cherry:

The pawpaw:

The jack in the pulpit: