July 26, 2024

Plato and Aristotle defined art as imitation, or mimesis.  Art imitates or represents reality.  Yes, but why?  Why do we enjoy such imitation, and is it, beyond its entertainment value, of any real use?   We are accustomed by now to the demand that all human behavior be explained in terms of its evolutionary value.  But in what way is imitation useful for survival and not just a party trick?  The first step in answering such a question is to point out that artistic mimesis is a higher-order version of what seems to be a widespread pattern of human behavior, one that takes many forms in many areas of life.  Imitation is, indeed, a defining aspect of human identity. 

It is, first of all, how we learn, from the very earliest moments.  Infants only a few weeks old imitate a caregiver’s facial expressions.  Moreover, the infants are not only looking but listening, and soon will be imitating what they hear.  We often overhear them practicing.  They go through a stage called “cooing,” where what they are doing is rehearsing what will later become vowel sounds.  Somewhat later, they go through the “babbling” stage, in which they are practicing consonant sounds—more difficult than vowel sounds because consonants involve stopping or impeding the flow of air and sound rather than merely shaping it by changing the inner shape of the mouth. They may lie in their cribs, “talking” to themselves, identifying and learning the significant units of sound we call phonemes.  Eventually, they practice intonation—the rise and fall of the voice that carries information:  the voice rises at the end of a question.  Thus, body language and vocal language emerge from mimesis.  

We also learn actions involving motor skills most easily by imitating.  The most effective method of teaching an action is usually watching how it’s done while someone explains fine points that might not be clear from mere observation.  I remember my dad teaching me how to throw a football properly, a skill for which I have had absolutely no use but which I am glad to know.  He showed me visually, but needed also to explain how you have to put spin on the ball by having it leave your hand off the tips of your fingers, or it will wobble out of control.  A bad teacher just shows—“Do it like that”—and is unwilling or unable to explain.  Some of that is male stuff—real men don’t explain.  But you learn by imitating and getting feedback.  I am a better acoustic guitar player than I am a thrower of footballs, which is not saying very much, but I learned to play entirely through imitating.  When I taught myself as a beginner in the late 1960’s, the only method of guitar self-instruction was tablature, a form of notation that tells you exactly on which strings and frets to put your fingers.  I hate tablature:  it is abstract, laborious, unbelievably tedious.  I learned basic chords and a few basic fingerpicking patterns from The Leonard Cohen Songbook, and after that imitated by listening and trying to imitate what I heard.  It was like being blind, trying to deduce from recordings what guitarists must necessarily be doing with their fingers.  Indeed, it was exactly like being blind, for a startling number of the most virtuosic folk guitarists, such as Doc Watson and the Rev. Gary Davis, were blind.  Not only virtuosic but inventive:  both of those men dramatically extended people’s idea of what the guitar is capable of, and did it without being able to see a fretboard. 

By the time I got serious about becoming a better guitar player, VHS tapes had become the standard method of teaching, eventually replaced by DVD’s and now digital downloads.  At that point, watching a guitarist’s hands while listening to their verbal instructions, I was imitating a second generation of guitarists—sighted guitarists who made pilgrimages, as one of my guitar mentors Ernie Hawkins did at the age of 18 to Gary Davis, simultaneously watching the Reverend’s hands and listening to his teaching.  To this day, when I am at a concert, my eyes rarely leave the guitarist’s fingers.  It has become a reflex to try to figure out how they are playing, maybe pick up a few tricks.  So, monkey see, monkey do.  The origin of that phrase is disputed, but apparently it is true that primates do learn by imitation, which we humans expedite by combining the imitation with verbal instruction.  And, if you are trying to play like Gary Davis or Ernie Hawkins, imitation is quite truly the sincerest form of flattery.  Or Jorma Kaukonen, another mentor.  When I heard the first Hot Tuna album in 1970, I thought, if I could play like that, I’d die happy.  I never dreamed that I would be twice in Jorma’s class at his guitar ranch decades later, watching his hands, listening to his explanations, imitating, and happy. 

We learn not just physical skills but social roles by imitation: how to act, how to dress, how to talk.  This means that we have to become actors—interesting, since Aristotle’s famous treatment of mimesis occurs in his discussion of tragic drama.  All the world’s a stage, and we have to learn, not just one part, but a whole repertoire.  We have to learn a professional role, and we learn much of it by imitating how to walk the walk and talk the talk, and, while learning, how to fake it till we make it—the very number of clichés that surround the subject is indicative.  We also learn gender roles by imitation, for better or worse.  Young women are bombarded by examples of how a woman is supposed to look and act, and some feminists have written that gender is an act, not an essence.  There is no biological “womanhood”: there is a role that women are forced to act out, even when it may have little to do with their sense of their own real identity.  Young men look for role models of manhood, and various influencers tempt them to imitate misogynist behaviors that, as with women, may have little to do with their real sense of self—but they are at the age of insecurity, and therefore very suggestible. Young women and men both feel the pressure to imitate the actions, dress, attitudes, opinions, and even slang of their peer group. 

 Historian and literary critic René Girard, in such works as Violence and the Sacred (1972), has put forth a whole radical theory of human nature as based on what he calls “mimetic desire.”  We think our desires are expressions of our authentic inner needs, but in fact, he says, we desire what we see others desiring.  If you have spent any time around kids, you know what Girard is talking about:  the fact that the child only wants the toy when he sees his sibling playing with it.  Usually, this means a squabble.  Girard’s point is that we only pretend to outgrow this  “childish” behavior.  In fact, it is the origin of the violence of Homer’s Iliad:  Agamemnon and Achilles both desire the same “war prize,” the captured woman Briseis, and both clearly desire her because the other claims her.  Whether or not it can be stretched wide enough to become a total theory of human nature, there is no doubt that mimetic desire fuels the competition for social status.  The role of fashion, of “status symbols,” of influencers, is to present objects of desire that everyone is lured to imitate.  On the one hand, the motivation is social cohesion, fitting into a peer group.  Yet at the same time, it is competitive, the need to excel and stand out as better than the group, a very curious double bind.  But the need to imitate what’s “in” explains social status behavior on all levels, from high school students doctoring their Facebook profiles to their parents’ quest to “keep up with the Joneses” to the need of billionaires for $500-billion-dollar yachts and rockets that are bigger than the other guy’s.  

We may distinguish two levels of social imitation, the first of which could be called mimicry, the art of the chameleon.  Here, there is a gap between the performer and the role, an awareness that the performance is to some extent a pretense.  There is an ambivalent attitude towards mimicry, a feeling that it is hypocrisy—in fact, “hypocrite,” which literally means something like “interpreter from beneath,” was the name for a Greek actor, who wore a mask signifying his character.  Jung, however, felt that there is, up to a point, such a thing as a saving hypocrisy.  Society demands that certain professional roles, usually of service professions such as minister, doctor, and teacher, be accompanied by a benevolent, if not outright saintly, manner.  This necessitates an amount of reasonable dishonesty:  no one is that nice or perfect.  The pressure to present an always-smiling persona is for some reason getting worse:  nowadays, clerks, servers, and customer service representatives are all required to exude, not just professional courtesy and respect, but an over-the-top friendliness and desire to satisfy every demand—even when, in fact especially when, the customer is being a jerk.  Jung spoke of a social mask we all wear, a persona—again the connection with theatre, for “persona” is the Latin name for the mask worn by an actor in the old theatre, signifying the character being played.  Jung warned that someone who thinks they really are their persona is in for trouble, for the persona is idealized, and the parts of one’s personality that are less than perfect are then repressed into the unconscious, only to escape at odd moments and create situations ranging from the embarrassing to the disastrous.  A minister who knows himself so little as to believe in his own saintliness may find himself admitting, like Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, that, “Oops, I seem to have gotten this married woman pregnant.  I don’t know what came over me.” 

On the other hand, knowing oneself from one’s persona can be difficult, at times perhaps impossible, because often our identity is defined for us by other people and the way they judge our persona.  There is a demand by the public and the media that the British royal family members be identical to their public roles, and an irrational fury when the mask slips and the all-too-human becomes visible.  André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (1927) plays on the paradoxes of original and copy.  If a coin is taken for genuine, it is accepted for use, even if it is counterfeit; conversely, a genuine coin may be rejected if it is assumed to be counterfeit.  Likewise, a painting may hang in a famous museum for years, only to be finally judged a copy of the work of a famous artist.  The same ambiguities haunt human identity, and can be used to advantage by real hypocrites and con artists, as in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith, in which the title character murders a wealthy young man whom he physically resembles and successfully takes over his identity.  These days, identity theft is less literal, because much of our identity consists of information that can be digitally procured.  Or falsified: Donald Trump continues to be accepted as a successful businessman even though he has made little attempt to hide the fact that his businesses are counterfeit, a result of accounting tricks and outright falsifying of financial information.

Jung notwithstanding, the alternative to mimicry, identification, in which the gap is closed, and the actor becomes the role, is not always neurotic.  Theatrically, identification is “method acting,” and some actors take it to extremes, refusing to drop out of character between scenes on a movie set, gaining 40 pounds to match the part, learning martial arts or classical piano.  Once a radical innovation, it is now the standard.  All acting is now method acting.  If you watch a film or television show from, say, the 1950’s, such as Twelve Angry Men (1954), which consists of a lot of debates among members of a jury, the acting, which is declamatory in the old manner of stage acting, will come off as stilted and unnatural.  Identification is an act of empathy, a surrender of the ego in order to become the other.  In Abstraction and Empathy (1908), Wilhelm Wörringer introduced a distinction that continues to haunt the theory of the visual arts.  Realism in art, as it was born in Classical Greece and again in the Renaissance out of previous non-realistic styles, is, he said, characterized by an empathetic attitude to the subjects it portrays, whether the subject is a portrait, a landscape, or a still life.  There is a love of the world and all the variety of things and beings and personalities in it, a sympathetic opening to reality in all its sensory vividness and wonder.  Jung devotes a whole chapter of his book Psychological Types to Wörringer, and identifies empathy with extraversion. 

The Romantics envied such empathetic extraversion.  In Keats’s definition, the poet loses his self and becomes one with the sparrow pecking outside.  He contrasts this with Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime.”  All the Romantics had Shakespeare envy, Keats included, because Shakespeare, more than any other great poet, seems to have effaced his personality entirely, subsuming it into his characters.  The problem is that, due to the introverted nature of Romantic art, that was an envy for exactly what they could not have.  Their way was downward and inward, which  mean a turning away from realism towards a symbolic poetry.  They had to learn that that did not necessarily mean a rejection of the common world in favor of some hermetic esotericism.  It was Wordsworth, egotistical or no,  who taught empathy with the common things and common people of life, the Lucy’s and leech gatherers that others disregard.  In the visual arts, empathetic identification widened the definition of the beautiful beyond what is merely idealized and perfect and high-status.  Van Gogh’s famous painting of a pair of muddy peasant boots is beautiful in its own way. 

The birth of realistic style out of the hieratic non-realism of pre-Classical and medieval art has tempted art history to think in terms of a myth of progress, in which after centuries of drawing the equivalent of a child’s stick figures, finally the Classical and Renaissance artists learned how to draw.  But the history of Paleolithic art is a surprising refutation of that notion.  The oldest visual art of the human race seems to consist of two more or less simultaneous traditions, dating from perhaps 11,000 to 30,000 years ago, one realistic and one abstract.  The Paleolithic cave art of southern France and northern Spain portrays thousands of animal figures with breathtaking realism and grace.  In roughly the same period, elsewhere, was an utterly different tradition of art consisting of abstractly stylized female figurines, women without faces but with exaggerated breasts, buttocks, and vulvas.  The animals figures belong to a hunting culture:  the animals portrayed are all animals that would have been hunted.  Presumably the female figurines represent fertility.  Thus, they are opposites: a culture devoted to killing that portrays its victims with empathetic realism and a culture devoted to life and birth whose figurines lack all individuality, simultaneous but separate choices of different cultures with different values.  The conclusion is that abstraction and empathy are the two equally valid  options for art.  A "progress" from one to the other represents a shifting of cultural values, not a refinement or aesthetic improvement.   

What has always troubled and fascinated me is the association of the vital and graceful animal figures with hunting.  I am a vegetarian because I shrink from the idea of killing animals, so my reflexive response is bafflement at people who observed animals with extraordinary empathetic intensity and then killed them.  The young man who just tried to kill Donald Trump wore hunting clothes and was reportedly into hunting culture.  But people who become mass shooters are sociopaths who lack empathy.  They do not think of their victims as fellow human beings with feelings, and might as well be mowing down targets in a video game.  One speculation is that the Paleolithic animal pictures were part of a ritual meditation that was, essentially, a way of keeping people whose lives depended on killing from going mad from horror and guilt, or else turning into cold, psychopathic killers.  They identified with the animal so much that killing the animal became the redemptive sacrifice of a redeemer figure—as in fact Jesus became the sacrificial Lamb of God.  The animal gives itself so that we may live. It is an appealing speculation.  But, mind you, it only works when there is no alternative, which is not true in our culture. 

Empathetic identification can be a way of revaluing the other, healing the alienation of subject from object, self from the world, but it can also be used as a way to transform the self, by playing a role until we become that role.  One of Robert Heinlein’s best science fiction novels, Double Star (1956) forms a kind of ideal counterpart to Gide’s ironic The Counterfeiters.  A down-and-out actor is hired to play the part of a high-level political figure who has been kidnapped by political factions.  When the political figure is returned too damaged to function, the actor ends up playing him permanently, in effect becoming him—and since the political figure was admirable, the actor/con artist slowly acquires the more admirable identity that he has been imitating.  If we want to change, we may adopt a persona in hopes of eventually becoming that different identity.  This is the poet Yeats’s theory of the “mask,” which emerged out of his own life crisis.  He became disillusioned with his younger personality, which was timid and passive, and with his early poetry, which was languid, elegiac, and pessimistic.  He was crushed when the love of his life, Maud Gonne, rejected him in favor of a soldier, and blamed it on his own effeminacy:  he does not use the word, but that is what he means. So he adopted the mask of a bold, passionate, strong-minded personality—and it worked, at least in his poetry.  It is partly the powerful voice of the late poems that makes them famous.  As for love, he has a dialogue poem called “The Mask,” in which the male speaker refuses to drop his mask so that the woman can see whether what is behind it is “Love or deceit.”  The man refuses, saying, “It was the mask engaged your mind, / And after set your heart to beat, / Not what’s behind.”  Besides, as Shakespeare implies in Much Ado about Nothing, all we know are one another’s masks.  If we drop the mask, there is only another mask behind it.  It’s how well you act the part that matters. 

Mimesis as empathetic identification, as Wörringer speaks of it, is ecstatic in the root sense of “going out of oneself.”  But that is not its major function historically.  There is more than one kind of mimesis, and the type that has gotten greatest attention is contemplative rather than ecstatic.  The commonest image of contemplative imitation is the mirror, which stands at a distance from reality but reflects it so that we can know it.  Hamlet says that the true function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature.  The reflected image becomes a model of reality for the purposes of understanding.  The 20^th century philosopher Richard Rorty wrote an influential book called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), in which this kind of mirroring knowledge is called “truth of correspondence”:  the image corresponds to the reality.  Hamlet’s kind of mimesis came into its own with the rise of realism and naturalism in the following two centuries.  Eventually, the mirror was replaced by the camera, and there was talk of “photographic realism.”  The assumption underlying realism and naturalism is that the real is the empirical, the data of the senses objectively recorded by a detached observer, as in the materialistic science of the era.  Such realism often saw itself, and still sees itself, as an unmasking, an exposing of the ugly reality of life behind the beautifying and expedient lies.  At the same time, there is a certain wariness.  Photos can be doctored, and the evidence of film footage altered and controlled through clever editing and camera angles.  But there is still some faith that words and images may give an honest account of the real. 

Plato had no such faith, and began the conversation about mimesis by denying that art is capable of it.  That is because the data of the senses is to Plato illusion, not reality.  Reality is what he called the Forms or Ideas that can only be grasped by the intellect, not the senses.  The forms of ordinary experience are only imperfect imitations of those true Forms, so that the representations of art are imitations of imitations, twice removed from truth.  Only the philosopher knows reality.  But if Plato rejected art, the later movement of Neo-Platonism was a powerful influence on a very different kind of art—a kind that works through abstraction rather than empathy.  At this point we begin to recognize that abstraction or formalism is not a rejection of mimesis but another kind of it—a kind that has been perhaps more common than realistic imitation.  What we could call formal mimesis imitates reality, not by reflecting it, however, but by recreating it in terms of form and pattern, of design, cutting through the sensory fog to discern the true patterns of reality underneath. 

Formal imitation thus works by abstraction rather than empathy.  As Jung identified empathetic identification with extraversion, he identified abstraction with introversion.  In empathetic identification, the self is subsumed to the world; in abstraction, the world is subsumed into the subject and recreated in terms of form-giving mental categories.  Abstract art is thus symbolic art.  There are, as I see it, two traditions of formally imitative or abstract art, the intelligible and the expressive.  Intelligible abstraction transforms the data of experience into ideas or Ideas.  The process is inherently reductive, but sometimes we want reduction for the sake of clarity.  Yes, the map is not the territory, but we want the map because it reduces the territory to a clarified pattern that we can use in navigating.  We want the blueprint precisely because it reduces the house to a usable diagram.  You can’t live in a blueprint, but that is not the point of the blueprint.  This has to be explained endlessly to critics of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, which provides an “anatomy” of the whole order of words.  Yes, the anatomy is a skeletal x-ray and omits all the difference and variety of individual works.  That’s the point.  It is as if someone criticized a mathematician for using the number 5, arguing that that ignores the huge differences between 5 pencils, 5 houses, and 5 galaxies.  This was clever when Nietzsche used it iconoclastically as a stick with which to beat rationalists in “On Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-Moral Sense,” basically accusing all language whatsoever as consisting of lies, of identifications that ignore the fact that everything is different, never exactly the same.  However, that was a while ago, and the post-structuralist reductio ad absurdum of this theory perhaps exhausted its usefulness. 

Abstractive imitation provides what Wallace Stevens calls “description” and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls “redescription.”  In non-realistic art, reality is redescribed, and in intelligible abstraction, as I am calling it, redescribed for the purpose of intellectual clarification.  The most familiar form of intelligible abstraction in literature is allegory, from the Greek allos, other.  In allegory, a character, thing, or event is both itself and something other, that something being an idea.  A character may be named “Christian” or “Everyman” to indicate the idea they stand for.  Or their actions may unfold the idea that they embody, as Spenser’s Sir Guyon represents the ideal of Temperance by portraying Temperance in action, as a form of becoming.  Allegory was the most important literary technique of the Middle Ages, and was reinforced by a Neo-Platonic line of thought that granted the power of sensory images to point beyond themselves towards something transcendent.  The transcendent—ultimately God—is after a point beyond human understanding and therefore must be accepted on faith, but reason is capable of a partial understanding based on analogy, on likeness.  God is beyond fatherhood, but we grasp something of his nature by thinking of him as Father, who is basically an allegorical figure standing for the fatherly concepts of Creator, order figure, bestower of rewards and punishments, and so on.  This analogical method of understanding spiritual realities is that of medieval scholasticism, whose central figure is Thomas Aquinas. 

 Some medieval writers, such as Spenser, are thoroughgoingly allegorical; Dante incorporates a good deal of realism with his allegory, which makes him seem more modern.  In prose, the genre that Frye identified as the “anatomy” provided an encyclopedic treatment of life in intellectual rather than realistic form; a dramatic version of the anatomy is the kind of witty, discursive drama we find in Shaw, who influenced Frye, and was probably influenced himself by the dialogues of Plato, which are as much art as philosophy, whatever Plato would have thought of the notion.  These forms imitate reality, but imitate it intellectually rather than empirically.  The models of intellectual art do not have to “look like” the reality they model.  A thermometer models reality, but it does not “look like” temperature, or “feel like” the sensory experience of heat.  It gives us the concept of degrees of heat. 

Allegory to some extent fell out of fashion with the advent of new forms of mythmaking in the Romantic and post-Romantic periods, but reports of its death have been exaggerated.  I went to the new Pixar film the other day, Inside Out 2, and watched a modern version of an old medieval mode of allegory, the psychomachia or internal battle, an allegory of the personifications of various mental forces in conflict.  Riley, the protagonist, has hit the age of 13 and her psyche been predictably scrambled by adolescence in the form of new, irrational emotions—personifications of Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy, and Ennui, who temporarily take her over, obliterating her sense of self, which has to be rescued by her old emotions Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. However, the Romantics sometimes claimed to reject allegory out of a growing realization that human mental life was ruled by psychological forces on a level deeper than reason.  The “symbol” was a mental or imaginative image that was significant but could not be reduced to a concept.  Jung used the term “archetype” for such symbols. 

But in practice, Romantic mythmaking combined allegory and symbolism, and Blake was content to describe his poems as “allegory addressed to the intellectual powers.”  The Four Zoas is a psychomachia in which Blake’s “Giant Forms,” as he called them, stand for mental powers in conflict, but those powers are at least partly allegorized.  Urthona is the imagination; Urizen is abstract reason; Orc is the energy of desire, sexual, political, and artistic.  At the same time, they are not just talking labels.  The subtitle of The Four Zoas is A Dream of Nine Nights, and the characters coalesce and are interinvolved very much in the manner of Freud’s description of the process of dreams, in which images are governed by “condensation,” fused with one another, and “displacement,” metamorphosing into one another.  Allegory, with its “clear and distinct ideas,” fails to describe the activity of symbols on this deep level, which the Romantics were not the first to employ.  A traditional allegory like Spenser’s Faerie Queene employs multiple kinds of allegory.  Error in Book 1 is purely conceptual allegory:  not only is she an embodied idea, but her attributes and typical actions, such as vomiting false books (of Catholic theology, of course) are easily explicatable.  But when Britomart enters the strange, and again nightmarish atmosphere of the castle of Busirane in Book 3, she encounters images from a deep and disturbing level of the mind.  Some of them evoke sexual taboos, especially sado-masochistic ones.  There is a lot more than labeling and ticketing going on in this episode.  

At the same time that I was following the allegorical plot of Inside Out 2, I was experiencing a secondary form of abstractive mimesis: the form of the cartoon itself.  The allegory was the content, but the form of the cartoon was also abstractive.  I have cited in a previous newsletter the analysis of Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, who shows a series of faces, starting with one rendered with photographic realism, becoming more and more stylized and abstract until the last one is basically an ideograph, the visual idea of a face, a smiley-button circle with two dots for eyes and a curve for a mouth—yet inescapably an imitation of a face.  Some comic art is highly realistic, some highly abstract, most somewhere in the middle.  Why does such stylization please?  It is the same kind of stylization that we see in the “Venus” figurines of thousands of years ago, or in Cycladic art, or in African masks.  Human figures are caught in an act of metamorphosis, of being recreated into pattern. 

The abstract painting and sculpture of the 20^th and 21^st centuries may dispense with representation altogether, becoming an art of pure design of a sort that in past eras was reserved for the decoration of things such as pots and clothing.  Is non-representational abstraction a rejection of mimesis, then?  Not really, as we shall see, but I think that some modern practitioners have thought in those terms:  they have sought freedom from the things of this world as fervently as any medieval hermit ever did, sometimes employing the religious language of transcendence to do so.  They are Shakespeare’s Ariel, impatient for his freedom.  In poetry, a Symbolist such as Mallarmé seems to regard all meanings, all signifieds, as conceptual labels constraining language to the utilitarian.  There is a longing for a verbal language free of signification in the way that abstract painting is a visual vocabulary free of representation.  The exemplary non-representational art is music, the art altogether free of meaning, reference, subject matter.  All art aspires to the condition of music, it was said.  Yet Aristotle asserted that even music is a mimetic art.  What does it imitate, then?  The emotions, he said.  Music imitates an inner reality, the world of feeling.  It is here that we finally encounter the second variety of abstraction:  expressive abstraction, counterpart of the intelligible.  Thus, all art is mimetic: the empathetic or realistic and the abstractive or formal are its Contraries, moving in opposite directions. 

I confess my own prejudice here.  I am not as moved by total abstraction, whether in poetry or painting, as I am by art which, as I experience it, dramatizes the creative tension between the realistic and formal Contraries.  In painting, I prefer Picasso, Miró, Klee to any purely abstract painter, enjoy seeing the world transfigured yet not transcended.  In poetry, I prefer the oracular and yet meaningful style of Dylan Thomas to Symbolist or surrealist evocativeness, or the dadaist absurdism of someone like John Ashbery, who almost makes sense.  Even in music, while I enjoy purely instrumental music, I am fascinated by the marriage of melody and language we call song.  All these to me dramatize what Wallace Stevens was always talking about—and exemplifying—the perpetual contest between imagination and reality.  Imagination is the home of human life, but home is a ground.  I do not want to be ungrounded, but also do not want to be rooted in the ground like a vegetable.  Nonetheless, the contest does not always have to be a war.  Horace said that art should instruct and delight.  The art that seeks truth and reality is an art of instruction and high seriousness.  Like Frye, I have always been drawn to the art that gives delight, that grants the pleasure principle its importance.  In our culture, that often means popular art, for the pleasure principle is distrusted in the realms of high culture and its austere ambitions.  It means art associated with the childlike, such as comics and animation; art accused of immaturity and vulgarity, such as fantasy and science fiction; art associated with ignorance, such as folk and blues.  But such art at its best is grounded in the primary manifestation of the pleasure principle:  play.  In his great book Homo Ludens (1938, 1949), the historian Johann Huizinga portrayed all of culture as arising from the principle of play, following the example of Schiller in the Romantic period.

And play is mimesis.  Children love costumes at Halloween.  They still understand that to put on a mask is to become another identity, and that is magic, that is exciting.  My students who major in theatre and musical theatre have never lost this sense of magic, and I bless them for it.  Young people dress to the hilt for proms and weddings: it is amazing to see how young women whom you have only seen in jeans and t-shirts know how to transform themselves so that you hardly know them. (The men dress up, but do not transform). Though  I am not fond of them, I understand that the wild and sometimes bizarre gowns worn by the stars at Academy Awards ceremonies are a release from the Puritan demand to dress sensibly and soberly.  The aristocratic opponents of the Puritans would have understood, for they wore outfits so ornate as to be almost beyond belief, not to mention almost too heavy to wear. The spirit of play is manifest in the style of some poets too, such as Wallace Stevens, one of whose requirements for the “supreme fiction” was “It Must Give Pleasure.”  Dylan Thomas played with language with an inventiveness and intricacy to rival the Celtic bards of his Welsh ancestry.  Such playfulness imitates the energy of life:  the energy of the spirit that bloweth where it listeth; the energy of nature as natura naturans, nature as process and metamorphosis rather than structure and order; the energy of the imagination itself, the energy that the Odyssey calls polytropos, “of many turnings,” and personifies in its hero, Odysseus the Trickster, the man who is a master of imitation, of disguises and lies, who twists and turns, invents and improvises  identities, trying to find his way back to the home of human life.  Just like the rest of us. 

Empathy

          1.  Ecstatic mimesis

                (empathetic identification)

          2.  Contemplative mimesis

                 (realism, mirroring)

Abstraction

(Formal mimesis)

          1.  Intelligible mimesis

                 (allegory, symbol)

          2.  Expressive mimesis

                  (“pure” pattern or design)