December 6, 2024

Why do people write? Of course, most people don’t write, and some will tell you that they dislike writing. Given the awful pseudo-formal thus-we-see style they have been forced to use in high school, I don’t blame them. The first thing I do as a writing teacher is forbid them to write formally, and push them to write conversationally, searching for their own voice. They have one, but they are going to have to listen inwardly to find it. To do so, I tell them to find a subject that engages them, awakens some kind of energy and passion in them, and then to try to communicate about that subject to a real human reader who just might come to share their enthusiasm if they can bridge the gap between them. Many tell me they have never in 12 years of schooling been allowed to write on a subject that meant something to them personally, and that is unutterably sad. If they write with real feeling, their individual voice will come through. When you grade hundreds of papers by hundreds of students over years, you begin to realize that the way we use language is as subtly distinctive as the way we walk or laugh. I encourage them to listen for that voice, for it is uniquely theirs, and it is who they are.

A surprising number, however, do think of writing something, are attracted by the idea, and at least contemplate it even if they never somehow get around to acting on it. Despite the best efforts of the educational system to squelch their enthusiasm, the idea of writing appeals to a good number of people. I always encourage them, for reasons that have nothing to do with having “enough talent,” whatever that is, to get published, which is not the point, or not the first point. I try to help them make their work what they want it to be, not take it over and impose my own agendas on it, and I promise that I will read anything they send me after graduation, no matter how many years it has been—and I am friends with people who were my students over 30 years ago. What is this urge to write, which helps to prop my faith that there is something redeemable in humanity? Why write, given that it is an intellectually and emotionally demanding process?

“To express myself” is a reasonable answer, but we must follow the advice of science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who counseled us to “Ask the next question”—that is, the one after the obvious one. What does it mean to express onself? Sturgeon himself gave one answer, in a classic science fiction story called “A Saucer of Loneliness.” It is the story of two lonely people who stop being lonely and bond by sharing the contents of a “flying saucer.” As one of the characters puts it, we think of alien beings as super-intellects. It does not occur to us that they may have a superior depth of feeling as well. The saucer is the vehicle of a missive launched into the void, a cry of loneliness, a message in a bottle. The story’s gentle irony is that the message does not help the godlike, yet solitary, being who composed it, yet it enables the two lonely people who discover it to bond with each other.

Sensitive people may find themselves isolated, unable to communicate with those around them. So they write. They write “for themselves,” cover pages and pages with poems and journal entries, often hiding their writing as if it were a shameful secret. They have good reason for their secrecy. The “mawkish sentimentality” of adolescence is a favorite object of critical ridicule, one that tells you something about some critics and their defense system, one of sophisticated irony and skepticism. Sturgeon’s story meant the world to me when I was a sentimental, mawkish adolescent, and, really, I haven’t much changed. My first piece of writing that was more than a school exercise was in response to a prompt that was something like “What writing means to you.” I said, at the age of 16, that it was a message in a bottle, and I don’t think I had read Sturgeon yet, though I am not sure. “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me,” says Emily Dickinson, a recluse who wrote 1700 poems, every one of them a message in a bottle.

But letters can be responded to, and the reply can be the beginning of an epistolary relationship. I am reading, day by day, some Internet repostings of one of the greatest comic strips of all time, Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, which began in 1918 and is still running. One reprint sequence from the 1940’s has reached the point in which major character Skeezix is in the Army in the South Pacific during World War II. Hopping from island to island, he misses his mail, until finally he receives a whole armful of letters—including one from his wife telling him that he is going to be a father. My dad was in the Navy in the South Pacific during the war. Just the other day, preparing to move, I came upon and looked through one of the scrapbooks of the life aboard the two destroyer escorts on which he was crew. What struck me powerfully about the photos was, They are all so young! Young, lively, often handsome men in their 20’s, on a floating tin can in the middle of nowhere, facing death and uncertainty. I knew some of them, but only later, when they were all old and nostalgic about those days. I know that there were letters back and forth overseas between my dad and the woman who would become my mom, although they have been destroyed for the sake of privacy. Of course, it does not always work out. In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Lieutenant Cross thinks yearningly of his girlfriend back home, but her letters are carefully distanced, chatting about attending classes as a college English major. There is no way he can communicate to her his hellish experiences in Vietnam. In the end, he knows that they live in different worlds, and that the relationship is doomed.

Alice Munro has an extraordinary story called “Carried Away” about a librarian named Louisa who receives letters from a soldier who had seen her once at the library and fell in love with her. After the war, Louisa loses track of him, then finds that he has married. At the end of her life, she imagines—or hallucinates—that she meets him. She is obviously still in love, even as a dying old woman, even though their love affair had been carried on entirely by letter, without even a single in-person meeting. Is it possible to fall in love, to carry on a love relationship, that is entirely epistolary? Yes, it is possible. I know, for I did it, for four years. Details not forthcoming, but it is possible. One of the most highly praised science fiction stories of recent years is This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which, in a clean sweep, won the Locus, Hugo, and Nebula awards for best novella of 2020. It is a dazzling tour de force, told in letters between characters we know only as Red and Blue, who are military agents on opposite sides of a time war, which is fought by changing events in time so that your side wins, a concept invented by Fritz Leiber in his classic novel The Big Time. But the two agents (who use she/her pronouns) fall in love, despite never having met in person, despite being enemies, and it is easy to see why. Their sentimental, mawkish love (as some negative reviews complained) elicits an eruption of dazzling, prismatic language, poetic, punning, allusive. Language is what they share. Their love of language and their love for each other are really one. The embarrassment of linguistic riches is virtually Shakespearean—and, sure enough, there is a telling allusion to Romeo and Juliet, those lovers separated by feuding houses, which apparently in some time threads is a tragedy but in some a comedy, which fits Northrop Frye’s description of it as a comedy gone wrong. Not only is the story epistolary, but so was the writing: Gladstone and El-Mohtar not only each wrote one of the characters, but wrote back and forth, each responding to their collaborator’s previous letter.

To “express oneself” in these cases, then, is dialogical, attempts at back-and-forth conversation even when the partner is imagined and not physically present. The kind of self-expression that is disapproved of is, in contrast, really a narcissistic monologue. The fact that the dramatic monologue, usually of some self-absorbed character like Eliot’s Prufrock, has become a central form of modern literature points to the problematic nature of modern subjectivity, of which more later.

We also write to preserve, to fix in words what it is important to remember in defiance of time, whose essence is dementia. Time forgets everything, and we have to keep remembering and remembering, like bailing and bailing a boat that would otherwise sink into oblivion. However hard we try, we still forget, although it is always possible for the forgotten to return, sometimes by ways so strange they seem uncanny. Going through the contents of a house in which one has lived for two decades becomes an exercise in archeological excavation. You never know what you are going to turn up. A couple of days ago, I found in my comics collection a letter from a writer named Reed Waller, whose comic Omaha the Cat Dancer I had admired in the 90’s. The letter was a thank-you for contributing to the fund for treatment of his cancer. I had totally forgotten this, and turned to the Internet, curious to see when he had died. But he lived. In fact, he is alive to this day, and has a website describing his new work. However, I discovered other things I had never known. He and his collaborator Kate Worley began as a folksinger duo before they turned to comics. Eventually, they broke up acrimoniously, and Worley married James Vance, creator of another comic I greatly admired, Journey. Then Worley died of lung cancer at 46, and Waller and Vance, the two men who had a relationship with her, brought Omaha to a close based on her notes. So Waller lived, but Worley died. Life is sometimes too strange even to draw morals from it, but I think I will write Waller a letter, after checking out his newer work. I am glad he is with us. I am glad I sent that little bit of money.

The compulsion to preserve through writing runs in the family to a degree I had not fully appreciated until going through the contents of my house, preparing to move. Both my parents documented everything! My dad, bless him, pasted little notes on the undersides of the furniture my carpenter grandfather made. He also carefully wrote the genealogy on the back of three huge portraits of my great-grandparents. I am grateful, as I would otherwise have no idea whose these ancestors are. My mother did the same thing with her beautiful collection of ruby and milk glass, which I have also inherited. Many of those pieces also have labels on their undersides, plus there is a list in a notebook of each piece and when and how it was acquired. My mother compiled so many scrapbooks of photos and memorabilia that they used to fill a huge steamer trunk—a trunk that preserved them from the fire that destroyed the rest of her house, accidents being another weapon in the time war, which is to say the war we are fighting against time. My brother will take some of these things, as he and his fiancée now have a large house, but neither of us has children, so what will happen to all these preserved memories?

Sometimes posterity means not just one’s immediate descendants but the whole race. In his Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov imagined a future historian, Hari Selden, who invents a way of predicting the historical cycles of rise and fall that will eventually spell the demise of the Galactic Empire in the far future. Selden uses his quasi-mathematical “psychohistory” to predict what should be happening at later points, and he has recorded videos to be played only when those historical moments arrive. So a man centuries dead lectures people on what he has predicted to be happening in their present. This inspired yet another important comics creator, Tom Batiuk, in his graphic novel Lisa’s Story. As Lisa is dying of cancer, she makes videos (before the Internet) that her daughter will play only when she arrives at the correct age. I wonder if people have actually done such things. Ernest Becker speaks ironically of “immortality projects” in his book The Denial of Death, written while he was dying in his early 50’s—what is it with all the deaths from cancer that are finding their way into this newsletter? I would respond that, yes, there are monuments to megalomania, including just about every project by Elon Musk. But not all monuments are megalomaniacal. Carl Sagan was a vocal admirer of Theodore Sturgeon, and I very much wonder if “Saucer of Loneliness” was on his mind when he and Ann Druyan created the Golden Record, a written, audio, and visual letter sent in the figurative bottle of the Voyager satellites in 1977 because it was known ahead of time that they would become the first human-made objects to leave the solar system, plunging into the interstellar unknown to be picked up—who knows, maybe by the alien intelligence that wrote the message in “Saucer of Loneliness.” The Golden Record is a scrapbook, like those my mother compiled. Both my parents succumbed to late-life dementia, the one helped by a lifetime of alcoholism, the other by a lifetime of powerful anti-psychotic drugs. But they surround me still. My parents wrote themselves in various ways, and not just themselves but the whole family and ancestral line. They did their best to preserve, through various forms of writing, some of the history we all lived through. In addition to compiling scrapbooks and photo albums, my mother wrote a whole family history. My father kept an illegal diary of his days at sea. My parents only had high school educations, but they were writers by instinct.

Yet our most famous writer, William Shakespeare, did not write out of a desire for self-expression, at least not in any evident way. Indeed, he is the most self-effacing of all major poets. We know nothing that really matters about Shakespeare’s personality or his life, so much so that Matthew Arnold’s sonnet to him complains that he is a Sphinx. He appears to have been a nondescript personality who did nothing but write and work in the theatre. He made no attempt to collect and preserve his plays. He did not have a university education like Ben Jonson, nor did he consort with statesmen and members of the elite. How could he possibly have acquired the breadth of knowledge reflected in the plays? Someone else must have written them—perhaps someone like Francis Bacon, who had the requisite education and experience but for whom writing for the popular theatre would have been disgraceful, so perhaps he published his plays under another’s name. In addition to the Baconians, there are the Oxfordians, whose candidate as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays is Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Reputable Shakespeare scholars believe in none of these theories. To put it as politely as I can, I think it is highly appropriate that the man whose book first nominated Oxford in 1920 was named J. Thomas Looney. Conspiracy theories, for that is what these are, build up a kind of momentum as speculations inspire further speculations, each a bit wilder than the last. For example, the plays are so widely knowledgeable that some feel they must have been created by a committee—after all, a committee produced the King James translation of the Bible. Sadly, the fact that such theories are not backed by a shred of evidence does not keep even some brilliant people from falling for them, including, in this case, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Sigmund Freud. The inconvenient truth that there demonstrably was a man named William Shakespeare who really did act, work for, and partly own the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men, is simply waved away. He allowed his name and identity to be used. All this because some people cannot imagine that art can be anything but self-expression, and great art must be the expression of a great personality. Incidentally, a byproduct of this bardolatry is the impulse to claim relationship to a celebrity. I have had a student named De Vere who claimed to be descended from the Earl of Oxford, and another who claimed relationship to Ann Hathaway. The irony is that our biggest literary celebrity remains, despite enormous efforts to “out” him, basically anonymous.

But the idea that art is fundamentally self-expression, on some level personal even if sometimes that level is unconscious, is a relatively recent and revolutionary theory, coming in with the Romantics. Some lyric poetry has always been personal, at times intensely personal. The Anglo-Saxon poem “The Wanderer” is spoken by a warrior who has lost his lord, and who wanders the world alone, desperately, heartbreakingly lonely. Even if the speaker is a fiction, the emotion is intensely personal. The same is true of some of the love poems of Sappho. Nevertheless, lyric poetry was regarded as a minor form. The major forms of epic and tragedy were objective. In the epic, the poet was only the vehicle of a story that was the defining story of his people. We know one thing about Homer, that he was a blind bard from the island of Chios—and that may not be true. The poet’s importance lay in serving the story, retelling it and thus preserving it from the oblivion of time. The same is true of the anonymous craftsmen of the Middle Ages who built the great cathedrals and filled them with an encyclopedic version of the Biblical story in sculpture, painting, and stained glass. None of them have a name, other than, perhaps, “Master of Such-and-Such Altarpiece,” even when their patrons were included in a minor corner of a scene. This begins to change with Milton, whose four invocations in Paradise Lost are far more than the usual calls to a Muse for inspiration. In them, Milton talks about his relationship to his own writing, stressing his isolation: he is old, blind, the great cause of his life defeated. Once again the motive for writing is loneliness: Paradise Lost is a message cast upon the waters of time, its author hoping to find “fit audience, though few” somewhere, somehow.

With the great Romantic poets, all of whom regarded Milton as their forefather, personal poetry became the norm. Wordsworth’s epic, The Prelude, is his autobiography in verse, the story of the growth of his imagination. Schiller’s influential essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry distinguishes between the old objective poetry, which is “naïve” in the sense of unself-conscious, and the new subjective or “sentimental” poetry of his time. The modern poet has lost his traditional story, because the old mythology of the Western world has died or is dying, and the only subject the poet has left is himself. Some poets are fine with this: Whitman opens Leaves of Grass with the enthusiastic proclamation “I celebrate myself and sing myself.” Other poets, however, are wary of the danger of narcissistic self-absorption. Keats complained of Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime,” and in a famous passage of his letters says that the poet, through his imagination, loses himself and becomes other. He sees the sparrow pecking in the grass and becomes the sparrow. Keats sensed the subjective nature of his own poetry, but regarded it as part of the self-consciousness of adolescence, something he would hopefully outgrow with maturity. He was not the only one to hold up Shakespeare as the model of the self-abnegating poet. It is not only Shakespeare who is impersonal but his medium. Drama is perhaps the most objective of all literary genres: there is not even a narrator, only the direct presentation of life. It is also collective, not the expression of private feeling in solitude but a communal experience shared with an audience. Drawn by the allure of such extraversion, there is a whole line of important writers down to our own time who have attempted “poetic drama,” but without major success. Keats’s reputation is not going to rest upon Otho the Great.

T.S. Eliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was an attack on the expressivist theory that dominated Romantic and Victorian poetry. It calls for a return to impersonal poetry:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. (58)

The essay calls for a resumption of the older model of the self-effacing poet:

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. (52-53)

And the “something” that is more valuable is what Eliot calls “tradition.” A tradition is a set of stories, a mythology, that gives a culture its value system and locates it in relation to the cosmic mysteries that surround it. But personal poetry became the norm precisely because Western mythology, which includes Christianity but is far wider than it, has become worn out, so that poets are thrown back upon themselves. At least if they do not succumb to the temptation to substitute some ideology for tradition. To the extent that Eliot did so in some of his critical work—his poetry is another matter—he became merely reactionary, as in his notorious statement that he was classicist in literature, Anglo-Catholic in religion, and royalist in politics. Taken literally, the statement is nonsense. What does it even mean to be a royalist in the 20^th century—especially if you are from Missouri? What the statement is really signaling is allegiance, not to a myth, but to an ideological position. The words “classicist,” “Anglo-Catholic,” and “royalist” are all euphemisms for “social order” in their respective contexts.

But Eliot’s true myth, that makes his poetry unforgettable even if you find his ideology insufferable, is a version of the Romantic descent quest: central images in The Waste Land are of drowning and being buried. Eliot’s real theology was not an Anglo-Catholic “orthodoxy” that liked to condemn “heresy” but the via negativa of some of the mystics, the descent, through paradox and negation, by means of suffering and, yes, solitary loneliness, towards the unknowable, towards Nothing. The style of The Waste Land is anything but classical. Its fragmentation and nightmare-like disorientation is the style of madness: Eliot wrote the poem while recovering from a nervous breakdown. As for “royalist,” the royalty in The Waste Land is the Fisher King, and he lies wounded and impotent, sexually and psychically, and he is all of us. The Fisher King comes from the Grail quest, but the Grail is so completely lost that it is never mentioned in the poem.

Eliot is not a personal poet in a direct sense, but the whole poem is a dramatic monologue of Tiresias, the blind prophet-seer, who contains the poem’s whole action and all its characters within his psyche. Eliot wrote not one but two essays attacking Milton as everything he disapproved of in literature, religion, and politics. Yet The Waste Land as the monologue of a blind, inward-looking poet-prophet bears a real relationship to Milton’s invocations in Paradise Lost. The grounding myth of our culture has died, and the poet has to descend into the Waste Land of himself to attempt to recreate it. We cannot return to an old tradition: we have to “make it new,” in the famous phrase of The Waste Land’s editor Ezra Pound. Eliot the ideologue said that he disapproved of a poet like Blake who created his own mythology as opposed to one who, like Dante, accepted the mythology given by “tradition.” But “personal” means more than directly autobiographical. Eliot created his own mythology, even if it syncretically makes use of elements borrowed from tradition.

Still, Eliot’s theory of poetry, of writing in general, as an escape from personality, is true in certain contexts, especially for a certain type of writer. Northrop Frye was such a writer. In an essay called “The Search for Acceptable Words,” he said,

I notice that, at the age of sixty, I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me. The reason for this unconscious choice is that, for me, an obliteration of incident was necessary to keep the sense of continuity in the memory that fostered the germinating process I have spoken of. And it is clear to me, though not demonstrable to anyone else, that this has been imitated, on a level that consciousness and memory cannot reach, from Blake, who similarly obliterated incident in his own life, and for similar reasons. One who found Byron more congenial as a preceptor would doubtless adopt a different life-style. (321)

To this, I would add that writing is, as Frye often said, a kind of meditation. To be subsumed into the writing process is, to me at least, to be liberated both from the trivial and vexing details of daily life and from the neurotic aspects of my personality. All of that falls away for a time, and I enter a world of intellect and imagination that does not merely run away from the world of experience but rather recreates it in a larger context, expands its horizons beyond the perspective of the ordinary self. It helps me keep my sanity, and I suspect it did that for Frye too, which is why he did the tremendous amount of writing that he did—the 4000 pages of notebook meditation in addition to all the published works. He wrote constantly and compulsively, as have other writers who have no “need” to write so much. Stephen King keeps producing new books, and not just perfunctory or formulaic ones either. The same was once true of Joyce Carol Oates, who said she wrote two novels for every one she published.

We are perhaps by this point beginning to realize that all writing has both a personal and an impersonal aspect, and that this explains some of the paradoxes complicating the discussion. Eliot admired impersonal poets who devoted themselves selflessly to a tradition. Yet his favorite poet was Dante, who boldly made himself, as Wordsworth did, the hero of his own epic. Why is Dante not an early example of the “egotistical sublime”? In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus pontificates about the ideal of artistic impersonality: “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” It is, however, a typically Joycean joke that Stephen says this within an autobiographical novel. It seems that “impersonal” must refer to a detached attitude about a work’s content and not just to the content itself. Eliot later admitted that Yeats made great poetry out of his own life. But Yeats himself said that, nonetheless, the poet was not just “the bundle of accidents that sits down to breakfast.” The ego is personal; the imagination is impersonal, and recreates personal experience in terms of what Frye called the order of words. In order to communicate our experience, we have to enter into all the conventions of language, from the rhetorical conventions of “style” to larger conventions such as genre. The first lesson students learn in an introductory creative writing class is that deep feelings cannot be expressed directly. When students attempt to do so, they become inarticulate, or just substitute formulas and clichés. In order to speak, we have to enter into language, and, in putting ourselves into words, we suffer a sea change. The wiser critics learn to be wary of easy assumptions about what is personal and “sincere” and what is “formal.”

Wariness is especially called for in a highly conventional genre such as the sonnet sequence—which brings us back to Shakespeare again. The obsession with “Shakespeare the man” inevitably comes to focus on the sonnets. Most critics are aware that the sonnet sequence is a highly conventional form, and that the sonneteer who claims that his passion is matched only by his sincerity may well be playing a courtly game, and that the beloved he is writing to may be a convenient fiction. But Shakespeare’s sonnets are tempting because they play such original variations on the conventions that it leads us to wonder about whether the situations described do not have at least some basis in Shakespeare’s life, all the more so because in more than one sonnet Shakespeare puns on the word “will” in a manner that definitely includes his own name. It is quite possible. But it is equally possible that the sonnets are one more example of how Shakespeare transforms any conventions that he adopts. Both the dramatic situations in the double sequence are strikingly unusual: the aging speaker in love with a beautiful young man, and also with a Dark Lady who is, at least in a few poems, a good deal darker than the average Cruel Mistress. The portrait of a gender-fluid Shakespeare caught up in some highly ambiguous situations is appealing because it seems to mirror the gender situation of our age. But it is hard to say whether such an interpretation holds the mirror up to Shakespeare or to ourselves.

The personal and the impersonal in writing turn out to be Blakean Contraries, without which is no progression. I can certainly understand why someone like Thomas Pynchon uses writing as a kind of witness protection program. Pynchon is a recluse who gives no interviews; when he did a cameo on The Simpsons, the joke was that his character had a bag over his head. And Pynchon’s secretiveness predates social media, in which cultivation of the self seems to run to virulent extremes. But I love personal writing: Montaigne, inventor of the personal essay, is one of my favorite authors, and I think May Sarton’s journals are deservedly her most popular works. The subjective is not just a post-Romantic deficiency disease, not just the narcissism of poets writing about themselves, and then writing about themselves writing about themselves.

The ego has its claims. Radical critics notwithstanding, it is not just a construct of social forces, a puppet that thinks it’s a human being. The ego, in fact, is at the center of the story, at the center of the modern myth. It has an agon, a temptation scene. The ego or ordinary self is the new Adam, who, like the old one, is given a choice to become a better self or a worse one. It is in fact the seed of freedom. Only if it gives in does it become inflated, collectivized, possessed by what Jung calls the shadow. The ego is Frodo Baggins, charged with the responsibility for destroying the ring of power without yielding to the temptation to be taken over by that power. In the recent election, millions of people became, essentially, Gollum, yielded to the seductions of the will to power, rationalizing as a “desire for change” what was in fact a desire to destroy. This fateful choice will be at the center of the personal writing of the future. A major theme of the writing of the coming years is going to be self-confrontation. Who is responsible for the destruction that is going to ensue? Above all, writing is exploration, a way of discovery that can only be personal.

But you never know who is going to find your message in a bottle, and at that point, writing becomes not merely personal but interpersonal. Connections established with an audience form a webwork—the word “text” is related to “textile—and out of those connections may develop the society that could replace the one being destroyed. What can we do to survive the next four years? We write, and read, and find that we are together even in our solitude.

References

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Methuen, 1920, 1960. 47-59.

Frye, Northrop. “The Search for Acceptable Words.” In ‘The Critical Path’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963-1975. Edited by Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner. Volume 27 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2009. 310-330. Originally published in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Indiana University Press, 1976.