October 10, 2025
Last week I spoke of childhood, yet didn’t manage to arrive at what had originally inspired me to write about that subject. What I had wanted to talk about was toys.
I am now an old man, though I am not admitting it, and I still have a lot of my childhood toys. That has always just seemed natural, and it has not until now occurred to me to wonder whether this is true of others, or whether it is one more manifestation of my refusal to give up childhood. I am now supposed to be entering upon my second childhood, so perhaps I have come full circle.
Toys are a wonderful mystery. I think the secret of our humanity may be bound up with them. Not that they are unique to human beings. Dogs and cats love toys. I have a sudden image of my friends’ dog playing ecstatically with a stuffed elephant that makes a most un-elephantlike squeak when bit into, bounding around with it, shaking it madly, dropping it and pretending to jump on it as if it were prey, racing after it when someone throws it, the very image of a sheer love of life. Another friend’s two cats batting small toys all around the apartment, also chasing the bright dot made by a small laser-toy. Do other animals play with toys? I do not know: another of my many areas of ignorance. I think I have read that chimps bond with dolls. In other words, the animals we feel most akin to share our love of toys.
“Bonding with” is indeed the mystery of toys. Children’s relationship to their toys varies according to the degree of that bonding. I am no psychologist, just musing on common experience. A child may have fun with a pail and shovel in a sandpile, but does not really bond with them. But with some toys, a special relationship may be formed, and it is these that the “object relations” school of Freudian psychology refers to as “transitional objects.” The idea is that a baby does not begin with a distinction between self and other. Gradually it has to learn that there is a world out there of objects (including other people) separate from itself. That slowly dawning awareness is the beginning of the subject-object split that is the origin of ego consciousness. “Ego” means “I,” and we know “I” only by contrast with “not-I.” The “objective” world is not only apart from us but indifferent to us. It does not share our feelings or respond to our desires. But a toy such as a doll or a stuffed animal is “transitional”: it is not fully separate, but is animated by the child’s feelings and imagination, in which it participates. The early 20th century anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl called this mental state participation mystique, and claimed it was the characteristic mode of consciousness of “primitive” peoples, who are therefore like children. There was such an outcry against the colonialist stereotyping in this theory that Lévy-Bruhl withdrew it, which was both appropriate and unfortunate, for it was a genuine insight wrongly understood and wrongly applied.
The split between subjective ego consciousness and an objective reality is felt to be inevitable and taken to be normal. Yet it has been a problematic notion since Descartes in the 17th century formulated it in his famous aphorism, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes was one of the formulators of scientific method, and conventional science strives for “objectivity.” Scientists are trained to be detached observers, setting aside their feelings and values so as not to bias their observations. The social sciences strive to emulate such objectivity. Freudian psychology teaches us to be wary of “projecting” our feelings onto other people. In an era of “realism,” even literature began to be wary of contaminating the representation of reality with anthropomorphisms. The late 19th century attacked the “pathetic fallacy,” the attributing of human characteristics or moods to the external world. Frye quotes a line about the “cruel, crawling foam” of the sea. Foam isn’t cruel. And it is naive to think that the weather has anything to do with human moods. The big showdown with the villain or the final romantic tragedy takes place in a thunderstorm only in naive popular art.
But Blake called this split the “cloven fiction,” an illusion, and he attacked the promulgators of the new “scientific” view, Bacon, Newton, and Locke, in a way that makes him sound cranky but is actually prescient. Objectivity is indeed a fiction that we are tempted to think is real. But in fact no one has ever experienced it. It is an impossible state, and the attempt to reach it is dehumanizing. Nobody’s experience is like that, nor ever could be. What is our experience really like? Wallace Stevens says,
I am what is around me. Women understand this. One is not a duchess A hundred yards from a carriage
This is from a minor little poem with the significant title of “Theory.” In fact, I do not really know where I end and the other begins. I am always interinvolved with my world, and the attempt to detach from it only lands me in the state of solipsistic abstraction that Blake calls Ulro. Eventually in the 20th century, some philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty began to catch on to this. Participation mystique is neither primitive nor infantile. Objectification can only go on within the prior and original state of participation. Yes, I can perceive an other, even one that seems alien and distanced. Yet it will turn out that I am connected to the other, even to an other that may be hated and feared, by mysterious underlying affinities.
Children animate their toys, as I said in an early newsletter on “animism,” which was once thought to be perhaps the origin of all religion. But fancy philosophy is not necessary. The makers of Toy Story and Barbie understood this perfectly well. The pathos of the abandonment of childhood toys was exactly the source of Toy Story’s imaginative resonance, and a related pathos surrounds the abandonment of girls’ Barbies, and with them the world of girls’ imaginations in which women were vital, dynamic, and free. Dolls, teddy bears, and the like are a special kind of toy, a comfort-toy to which the child bonds so intensely that the toy becomes an inseparable companion. One of the immortal comic strips, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, is based on such a companionship. Hobbes is a stuffed tiger who shares a whole imaginative world of wild adventures with Calvin, and if Hobbes is misplaced or accidentally left behind, Calvin is seized with hysterical panic. I didn’t have a teddy bear, but during a certain period when family life was even more dysfunctional than usual, I regressed and became desperately attached to a blue stuffed dog at an age when I should have perhaps been too old for it. I wonder now what became of that dog. I suppose that in a fit of adulthood I must have given it up at some point, as I recall that it was increasingly bedraggled. But that thought makes me sad. I know that my former wife has kept her Barbies. What parts of the past to give up must be a very careful choice. My dad made the decision to give a lot of my brother’s and my toys, a whole big box of them, to his grandchildren by his second wife. I told him that was a good decision, that I was glad that a new generation would play with them and hopefully not reject them as old fashioned. But those weren’t the special toys.
Among the latter is my electric train, an American Flyer bequeathed from my slightly older cousin, which sits on the mantel immediately above me as I write. The train is one year younger than I am. I even still have the instruction book, dated 1952. I doubt that children have electric trains nowadays. Much of their play seems to be virtual, PlayStation-style, with the “toys” being images on a screen. Ah, but I am attached to the American Flyer because it was the anchor, so to speak, for a whole “virtual” world created out of my imagination. I did not need digital assistance. My dad built me a train table in the basement so the train could be up year round, and on that table I built a world. There were no “action figures” then, so I used plastic toy soldiers to create a superhero world that somehow incorporated my electric train—a really cool one that in its heyday even had smoke coming out of its smokestack courtesy of a chemical you put in it and heated until it vaporized. There were metal tunnels, which are also still around, now being used, to my delight, as guinea pig shelters. I cannot tell you how many hours I spent in that world.
But as I look around the apartment, I see that I have surrounded myself with objects to which I am attached, which are in a very real way part of me. The whole place is a created world like that train table, and I am dwelling in it. Some objects are toys proper, most prominently the 53—yes, 53—stuffed monkeys once collected by my former wife in another era. I got child custody in the divorce, you might say, and I am unwilling to give them up to Goodwill. Back in the house they hung, lounged, and sat everywhere, in every room. Here I have made them less obtrusive by giving most of them the entire top shelve of an extended bookcase that runs the whole length of the wall of a large bedroom. But there are two that sit on the bed, to which I say good morning and good night each day. I should, of course, not be admitting this. I am, I protest, capable of being a mature adult when I need to. But I am coming out, you might say, because I think I am not the only one to have these private attachments to objects that are somehow part of us. I know it was true of my cousin Wanda. At the age of 100, she still kept with her one of those stuffed kitties that moved and meowed realistically, her consolation for losing a real cat so beloved that its ashes were buried with her. I also have decorative boxes for the ashes of each one of 20 years of hamsters and guinea pigs.
I am unconventional, a polite word for eccentric, but the eccentricity is, I would argue, only a more thoroughgoing version of practices considered normal in the world. For instance, I have my baby shoes, lacquered or whatever it is, made permanent, a common practice among my mother’s generation. They sit next to the round disk of clay with my handprint, made in kindergarten, also a common practice once. But those are the only items that are actually about me in the whole place. There are no pictures of me, no awards or trophies, no diplomas, not that I think there is anything wrong with displaying such things. If this place is a museum, it is not a museum of the self but of those whom I have loved and cared for, and who have given gifts to me that are something of themselves. There are small gifts in every room, each of which has a story attached to it. Just as one example, there are two tiny hippopotami, one brass, one clay, from my first wife, a private reference to a joke in Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”: “What would you do if you saw two hippos” walking down the streets of Swansea in the snow? Meaningless to anyone else, deeply poignant to me now that she is gone. There are gifts from friends and from former students over a career now in its fifth decade. A framed copy of the music for “Dolzani’s Jig,” composed by a former Conservatory violinist who also liked Celtic music. There are also the objects I have inherited, starting with several pieces of furniture made by my Italian grandfather, trained in Italy as a cabinetmaker though forced to make his living as a carpenter in the coal mines over here. The oak table that has been my desk ever since I can remember was made by him. On the maternal side, there is my mother’s beautiful collection or ruby and milk glass, which she built up over most of a lifetime.
I own thousands of books, none of them valuable in a collectors’ sense. I have a deep attachment to the collection as a whole, but some books have a personal significance. These include books that used to belong to former colleagues who retired or passed away. I especially value books from my friend and mentor Ted Harakas, who introduced me to the work of both Blake and Frye. Some of the books have not only Ted’s name inscribed by his notes and underlining, and I am always curious what he wrote. Ted is to me alive in those books: they are imbued with his presence. There has probably never been a time since I could read when I was not collecting books, and I have kept some books with me for most of a lifetime. I own two of Robert Heinlein’s “juvenile” science fiction novels that are doubtless first editions, although extremely battered, from 1947 and 1953 respectively, stamped “Canton Public Library,” the library of my boyhood, amazing old place with glass floors. These are from a discard sale—I was a good boy and would never have stolen books. Those are not the oldest. I have my mother’s copy of Heidi, which she read to us, inscribed “Property of Beaverdam School, 1933,” the one-room school she attended, and also Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men, which my mom bought because she raised two sons, copyright 1940. I have copies of the Golden Books for small children that were our bedtime stories.
The point is that we live our lives in a state of participation mystique. If we are “primitives,” so be it. Our soul is lodged outside ourselves in material objects. Some while back, I wrote about the German philosopher Peter Sloterdyck’s idea that we are all unconsciously attempting to return, not just to childhood paradise but to the paradise before paradise, the womb. This is, needless to say, condemned as “infantile regression.” But in fact we try to raise children in a warm, womblike family environment. “Home” means a cozy, safe place, like a hobbit’s burrow in Tolkien. My place, large as it is, is nonetheless cozy: I have made my own hobbit’s burrow. This is quite different from “A man’s home is his castle,” a saying I have never liked. Castles are places of defense, walled off against enemies, and patriarchal ones at that. Nor would I want to live in the enormous mansions of the rich. Surely there can be little intimacy in an enormous mansion, where I assume that size merely denotes status. In visiting someone else’s home, I always have a feeling of slight discomfort. This is a private space, even though there is the convention that the living room is a relatively public space in the front of the house for receiving guests, apart from private studies and bedrooms further in. But even in the common space of the living room, I always feel I am invading, however warm the welcome. To see how someone lives, which style they decorate in, what kind of housekeepers they are, is to learn something private about them. The home is an intimate space. Entering it is equivalent to entering into someone’s inner being.
Homes grow like trees, accumulating layers over the years. The young begin with nothing. They are like castaways on a desert island. Often that means not even having furniture, or at best cast-off furniture from family. I remember a former relationship telling me that in her first marriage, she and her husband ate dinner on a card table. But even if they can afford good furniture, the personal items of the sort I have been cataloguing have to be accumulated slowly over a lifetime. Some people have a pack-rat tendency. For them, living in one place for years, things have a tendency to accumulate, not because they are beloved but on a “maybe this will come in useful” basis. Moving then becomes a relief, a chance to slough off some of this excess accumulation. But some people outright hoard, which I assume must come from an anxiety about transience. When one keeps memos about faculty meetings in 1990, as did a colleague whose office I cleaned out after she died, it is clearly not out of fond memory, but simply out of a reluctance to give anything up to time. I have no tendency to hoard, and in fact get impatient when crap starts piling up—I have an impulse to start hurling. At the same time, the longer you live, the more you will have acquired of items precious to you but which mean nothing to others, and it is painful to think of what will happen to these things after your death. Especially if you have no spouse and no children.
A good deal of what we have been talking about in terms of participation mystique was more famously discussed by the philosopher Heidegger in phenomenological terms as “Being-in-the-world.” He was interested in our intimate relationship to objects, not so much because they are emotionally invested as because we actually use them, are physically connected to them, unite with them in a common action. His particular example was tools. To a master carpenter, a tool is not just a thing but becomes a kind of extension of the self: the relationship to the tool is what Heidegger calls “readiness to hand.” This kind of identification of self and object is, I am sure, familiar to athletes: the relationship of tennis players with their rackets, golfers with their clubs, baseball players with their bats, so that choosing one particular piece of equipment becomes a deeply personal act. As I have said elsewhere, I think of this most of all in terms of musicians’ relationships to their instruments. I am mediocre yet serious in playing acoustic guitar, which I have done since I was 18, and the participation mystique of acoustic guitarists with their instruments is real and deep. It takes various forms. For some guitarists, it means this particular guitar and no other: it is true love, a monogamous relationship. For Willie Nelson to play a guitar other than his nylon-stringed Trigger is unthinkable. Trigger is so famous that it has its own Wikipedia article, in which Nelson is quoted articulating exactly what we are talking about:
My battered old Martin guitar, Trigger, has the greatest tone I’ve ever heard from a guitar. ... If I picked up the finest guitar made this year and tried to play my solos exactly the way you heard them on the radio or even at last night’s show, I’d always be a copy of myself and we’d all end up bored. But if I play an instrument that is now a part of me, and do it according to the way that feels right for me ... I’ll always be an original.
It is not just Nelson and his technique, nor is it just Trigger’s unique tone, but the synergetic union of the two that creates magic. And, believe me, when you play, you believe in magic. The guitar is alive in your hand in the way that some magic swords are said to be alive in romance and fantasy. Not just your hand, indeed, but your whole body. Just as a random example, in the August issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine, the folk artist Valerie June, asked if she uses fingerpicks, says, “No, I like to feel the strings on my skin, the vibration of the instrument against my body, the smell of the wood” (14). With all due respect to Heidegger, “readiness to hand” is an experience that some have understood for a very long time. At the climactic moment of the Odyssey, Odysseus finally gets his bow into his hands, the special bow that only he can draw. In a moment out of time, before all hell breaks loose in the hall, Odysseus takes the bow into his hands and examines it with intimate care:
And Odysseus took his time, turning the bow, tapping it, every inch, for borings that termites might have made while the master of the weapon was abroad.
The suitors jeer at him, but he ignores them, totally bound up with his weapon in a manner that Homer evokes with a significant metaphor:
But the man skilled in all ways of contending, satisfied by the great bow’s look and heft, like a musician, like a harper, when with quiet hand upon his instrument he draws between his thumb and forefinger a sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly Odysseus in one motion strung the bow. Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it, so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang a swallow’s note. (Book 21, Robert Fitzgerald translation)
Wallace Stevens did not play guitar, but he too understood. In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” he, or at least the poem’s speaker, says, “The blue guitar / And I are one” (section xii). And that leads him, in the same section, to think, “Where / Do I begin and end? And where, / As I strum the thing, do I pick up / That which momentously declares / Itself not to be I and yet/ Must be.”
We zoom outward in perspective, so to speak, to realize that there is participation mystique between us and our larger environment. Which is why architecture matters. We have a psychological relationship with what surrounds us, a relationship explored by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. I have spent 35 years on the small campus of a private college that has tried to preserve the small scale, the peacefulness, the greenery of a traditional liberal arts school. Perhaps, if you put it unkindly, you could dismiss the style as “Oxford wannabe,” although I would respond that it could also be thought of as Oxford for the non-elite. At any rate, the physical environment is actually part of the experience of Baldwin Wallace University. Years spent on the campus of a huge research university with high-rise dorms and modernist architecture, in the middle of a big city, are going to produce a different experience—something we shamelessly urge prospective students to consider. Where you live affects your state of mind. Our most recent campus building unfortunately, to my mind, breaks with the traditional style of the school and goes full modernist: a huge facade of enormous panes of glass, lots of bare concrete, institutional-looking rooms, painfully artificial lighting. To me, it is sterile and soulless, and not on a human scale—one feels dwarfed standing in the huge vaulted foyer. It is impersonal, which is incongruous for an institution that used to advertise its “personal touch.” Mind you, BW has had to compromise. Desks and tables are no longer made of wood, and I remember the beautiful wood wainscoting on the walls and stairwells of my building, Marting Hall, back in the old days, before remodeling. But we do not want to cut down more trees, and the wainscotting was deemed a fire hazard. Still, being surrounded by natural wood instead of plastic, metal, and concrete would be a humanizing experience.
Downtown Cleveland has its skyscrapers of steel and glass, reflecting the impersonality of global capitalism, and in their shadows are the places people go to be human: the little shops and restaurant-bars, intimate cubbyholes, often a bit grungy but in a friendly way. Moreover, urban surroundings are not just the buildings. There is also the madness of traffic and the impossibility of parking. There are those who praise the urban experience, such as the major literary science fiction author Samuel R. Delany—but Delany has never learned to drive. If we wanted to build utopia, it would probably not look like The Jetsons. In News from Nowhere, William Morris imagined a utopia of small, green communities. This is not necessarily reactionary nostalgia. Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous houses are just as “modern” as huge towers of glass, and they could be described as houses in a participation mystique with the surrounding landscape—so much so that they are close to becoming part of that landscape, even to the extent of incorporating such things as waterfalls. We tend to minimize the effect of our surroundings on us because, as a defensive measure, we tune it out. But Blake repeats a phrase throughout his Prophecies: “They became what they beheld.” Its implications for modern lifestyle are rather ominous.
Wallace Stevens, who seems to be the presiding spirit of this newsletter, spent an entire poetic career refuting the pathetic fallacy. Much of his poetic output assumes an equivalence between the mental and the meteorological. To Stevens, the seasons as he knew them in Hartford, Connecticut were Blakean States: not just moods but different orders of reality. One of his poems is titled “The Poems of Our Climate.” A section of one poem states that “The World Is Larger in Summer,” an theme expanded in the long poem “Credences of Summer,” a title that refers to those things we are able to believe in when both nature and our natural powers are at their zenith. In contrast, “The Snow Man,” which could be called the ultimate poem of seasonal affective disorder, shows winter as a contraction of reality towards the ultimate limit of non-being. He who has a “mind of winter,” and is “nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In another early poem, Stevens says at the outset, “Man is the intelligence of his soil.” Later in the poem he reverses it and says, “His soil is man’s intelligence,” and comments, “That’s better,” presumably because it disclaims a kind of arrogant claim of human superiority. But our land and its seasons are somehow part of our intelligence.
We tend to think of our communal and natural surroundings, precisely because they do surround us, as more powerful than we are, and therefore as shaping us. But that is a half-truth. We are not just passively molded by our environment. The shaping is mutual and synergetic. Reality and imagination may seem to be opposites, at times even enemies, but, as we said earlier, the other that we wrestle with is somehow another form of ourselves. For out of given reality, the imagination makes what Stevens calls “description” in one of the greatest of his poems, “Description without Place.” By “place” he means given reality. But description is “A little different from reality: / The difference that we make in what we see.” And how do we make that difference? Through those greatest of all toys, words. Stevens may sound as if he is overreaching when he says, “It is the theory of the word for those / For whom the word is the making of the world,” but he goes on to show that, in a manner that is not mere wishful thinking or philosophical Idealism, “It is a world of words to the end of it.”
First there is the relationship to our native language, the one we acquired as babies. Words are not little counters that we manipulate. They are somehow part of us, generated and emerging from the depths of our own bodies, and they carry within them somehow all of our thoughts, feelings, intuitions, even sensory experiences in a way that linguists will never to fully explain with their subject-object language of signifier and signified. I say this with complete respect for linguists. It is just that the relationship of mystical participation we have with our language lies outside the framework in which they work. As well expect a fish to be able to explain water.
I was still in middle school when I read a remark by British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that has stuck with me for a lifetime. He made it before he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey, in whose famous first scene an Australopithecine invents the first tool by being inspired to use a leg bone as a weapon. We say that man invented tools, Clarke said, but it might turn out to be more accurate to say that tools invented man. The manipulation of tools, of objects ready-to-hand, may have stimulated the brain of some primate ancestors enough to earn them the label sapiens. I would add to that the speculation that language was not born out of practical concern—“Well, we need a way to communicate, so let’s invent some kind of code to use to give us an advantage in this ‘survival of the fittest’ business.” I suspect language was born at its origins as it is born anew with every child—out of playing with sound, the “babbling” and “cooing” that linguists identify as babies practicing future phonemes. I suspect those phonemes are the first toys, that children are not “practicing” but fascinated by them as they are by shiny objects bobbing on a string over their crib. Words are the first toys, language is the first play, and there are some of us who have never given up playing with those toys as well. Of course words can be used for work as well as play, which means that out of them we have developed the factual and conceptual modes of language used to represent the subject-object world. But that is a later and adapted function. This mutual participation of self and native language renders the colonialist tactic of forbidding native children to speak their own language even more savagely cruel. It is like cutting out their tongues.
Through language, humanity creates the great work of art we call culture. Yet the relation is once again reciprocal, and culture also creates us. Stevens says:
As, men make themselves their speech: the hard hidalgo Lives in the mountainous character of his speech; And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires The knowledge of Spain and the hidalgo’s hat— A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life, The invention of a nation in a phrase.
Frye sums up this passage in a down-to-earth way: “description” is why everything in Spain looks Spanish. The hidalgos invented the Spanish language and Spanish culture. Or: the hidalgo is invented by being born into the Spanish language and Spanish culture, and is thus made “Spanish.” Mutual participation.
A doctoral dissertation awaits someone: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as Description. Given the ambition to write an epic fantasy novel, common sense might be inclined to start with plot and characters, then set them down into a fantasy setting as into a diorama. But sometimes both science fiction and fantasy writers start with “world building”: they imagine an Otherworld, and it in turn generates the characters and story. I had a student who had been building her own fantasy world since childhood. She showed me elaborate maps of different lands, and explained that she imagined a multivolume work in which different volumes were set in different lands, part of a larger interlocking whole. Tessa had lived in this world. It was her identity, far more so than her social security number and the mundane details of her biography. Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea fantasies grew out of the map of Earthsea that precedes each of the six volumes. Tolkien was a philologist, that is, a historical linguist. He went one step further than that. He played with languages, and out of his play arose a number of invented languages. Out of those languages arose Middle Earth, and out of Middle Earth arose a story.
We may add briefly that verbal language is only one kind of language, and words are only one kind of toy. There are also the sounds and patterns of sound out of which we “play” music, the patterns of line and shape and color that are the toys of the visual arts. It is often the case that these toys fascinate future creators at a very young age. A pianist friend of mine recounted once that older people told her that when she was only three, after the other children had banged around on the piano, she went up to it and sounded a single note, and listened, and then another, and listened.
We have been speaking of writers, but participation mystique manifests itself in readers as well. When we read for utilitarian purposes, the book may be merely a convenient repository of information, like a computer file. But for those who identify themselves as readers, the relationship to books, at least to certain books, is quite different. I count myself among them. I write, but I am first of all a reader, and was one, odd as it sounds, even before I could read. My mother read to me, and she assured me more than once that I was insatiable—the metaphor of eating is not accidental, because the food we eat literally is assimilated and becomes part of ourselves. There is a type of reading that Northrop Frye repeatedly referred to as “possession.” That word is also metaphorical, with connotations of being possessed by the spirit of another. We think of words as a bridge between isolated selves, but sometimes the gap is closed and two spirits somehow become one. These are not popular things to say in an age in which criticism is, well, possessed by a spirit of ironic doubt, which would doubtless dismiss such possession and other states of participation as “mystification.” I do not feel defensive about this—plenty of things deserve to be demystified—and would only respond that relentless demystification can itself become the last mystification. At any rate, Frye often speaks of “the actual possession of literature, when it becomes really a part of yourself” (306). This is from an essay called “Literature as Possession,” whose final sentence says that “the possession of literature is something which at a certain point has to be transformed into a state of mind in which literature possesses you, in which it is a regenerating influence into which you enter, in which you participate, and which at the same time keeps moving you on more and more towards some kind of vision, and the fact that you are moving towards it is the important thing” (306).
Frye came to understand possession through his relationship to Blake: it is a common remark about his book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, that one does not always know where Blake ends and Frye begins. In the latter part of his career, Frye wrote two works on the Bible and literature, and central to them is the concept of kerygma, a term out of Biblical scholarship to which he gave his own meaning. Kerygma is often translated “proclamation,” but in Frye it leads towards what he proposes is an understanding of “faith” as something other than mere blind belief. Kerygma is a form of sacred rhetoric, the kind of language that reaches out and not merely informs but attempts to persuade, at its most intense to possess, a listener or reader. A passage is kerygmatic, he says, when there is a sort of “that’s for me” quality about it to the reader, producing a kind of identification wwith it and commitment to it that is the true form of faith. In The Great Code, despite his eagerness to avoid reducing the Bible to a work of literature or literature to a form of aesthetic religion, Frye finally says that literature too may have keygmatic qualities. I think it may be this phenomenon of reading as possession that led Alberto Manguel to devote himself to studying the act of reading, writing multiple books about it, and now founding a Center for the Study of Reading in Portugal. He in turn learned about reading as possession from Jorge Luis Borges, whom he knew when he was young. Rather than keep his “influences” implicit and out of sight, Borges’ fictions are often a kind of conversation with what he has read, and Borges had read everything.
Our toys will be thrown away someday when there is no one left to value them. Citizen Kane’s sled Rosebud goes up in a bonfire. You can’t take it with you. But that may not be the last word. Toys as material objects are, after all, only the vehicles of the real toys, which are the mental forms the imagination creates out of them. In a late poem about death, “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” Wallace Stevens—one final time—softly tells us that everything the human race has created, including the mythical forms of its gods, are in fact its toys:
It is a child that sings itself to sleep, The mind, among the creatures that it makes, The people, those by which it lives and dies.
But if the physical forms perish, the mental forms may persist in a State beyond the time and space of the subject-object world that we call real, yet which is really an illusion that fades and leaves not a wrack behind. That is why we write: to preserve what we have loved within the words, transformed, and yet somehow more real than the shadow puppets we make on the walls of Plato’s cave. In a poem called “Safe in the Toy Box,” Loren Eiseley looks at a museum exhibit of “toys” collected from the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh who lived 4000 years ago. “These toys are not the toys of children,” he explains. They are figurines by which the pharaoh may go into eternity, not just immortal himself but taking his whole kingdom along with him: “the brown-skinned miller does his work, / men beat the grain with flails, / the overseer tallies sacks beside the door.” There is a little boat that “rowers row to steer you to that place beyond the grave.” At the end of the poem, Eiseley is drawn by participation mystique into the pharaoh’s world: “Master, I am commanded at the oar. / I have already entered your small box of toys.” Here too, the material toys are only the pretexts of the real toys, which are mental forms. What we preserve in those toys we call words may also sail like a boat down the waters of time. In the “Prologue” to his collected poems, Dylan Thomas speaks of himself as a “moonshine drinking Noah of the bay,” who holds “Wales in my arms.” Who believes in such survival? As Frye said, it is in the end not a matter of belief. What we are invited to say instead is “That’s for me,” and choose to participate. After all, the words are still there, still speaking, still waiting, like a princess in a fairy tale, ready to awaken to the kiss of one who cares.
References
Eiseley, Loren. “Safe in the Toy Box.” In Another Kind of Autumn. Scribners, 1977. 18.
Frye, Northrop. “Literature as Possession.” In ‘The Educated Imagination’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1963. Edited by Germaine Warkentin. Volume 21 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 1966. 295-306.