Post by urthona2 on Apr 11, 2013 9:25:28 GMT -8
ramhornd.blogspot.com/
Sunday, April 07, 2013
CLOVEN FICTION
Alfred Ames in reviewing Fearful Symmetry in 1947 soon after its publication comments:
"The typical poet, Frye believes, as he becomes wiser becomes less lyrical and more didactic, progressively rejecting the “cloven fictions†that: delight and instruction are separable objectives, and that subject and object of experience are discrete entities."
Blake speaks of 'cloven fiction' as a shorthand for the false dichotomy which we create between things, people or ideas of equal value by calling them opposites. By using the term 'contrary' himself, Blake recognizes that what seems to be unlike may be equally true. The problem to Blake arises when our first parents eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Vision of Last Judgment, (E 564)
"Satan thinks that Sin is displeasing to God he ought to know that
Nothing is displeasing to God but Unbelief & Eating of the Tree
of Knowledge of Good & Evil"
The knowledge they gained introduced a dualistic viewpoint which began to categorize everything they encountered as either good or evil. As Northrop Frey explains the situation:
"The same distinction between a contrary and a negation occurs in Blake's theory of ideas. All real thing have qualities in them, and qualities have opposites.This is particularly true of moral qualities, as every virtue has its corresponding vice. All 'good' men by any standards may be 'bad' by other standards, just as an egg that is bad to eat may be good to throw at someone. But the believer in the cloven fiction prefers to identify a real thing with one of its qualities, because things become easier to generalize about when classified into qualities. Now as things are good or bad according to circumstances, the cloven fiction leads to absolutizing of circumstance. The deader a thing is, the more obedient it is to circumstances, and the more alive it is the less predictable it becomes. Hence the believer in the cloven fiction finds it much easier to understand the behavior of dead things, the objects of exact science under the laws of 'mathematic form.' And in studying human activity he again finds it easiest to understand what is most automatic. So insensibly he tends to call 'the passive that obeys Reason' good, and the active springing from Energy' bad." (Page 189)
Sunday, April 07, 2013
CLOVEN FICTION
Alfred Ames in reviewing Fearful Symmetry in 1947 soon after its publication comments:
"The typical poet, Frye believes, as he becomes wiser becomes less lyrical and more didactic, progressively rejecting the “cloven fictions†that: delight and instruction are separable objectives, and that subject and object of experience are discrete entities."
Blake speaks of 'cloven fiction' as a shorthand for the false dichotomy which we create between things, people or ideas of equal value by calling them opposites. By using the term 'contrary' himself, Blake recognizes that what seems to be unlike may be equally true. The problem to Blake arises when our first parents eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Vision of Last Judgment, (E 564)
"Satan thinks that Sin is displeasing to God he ought to know that
Nothing is displeasing to God but Unbelief & Eating of the Tree
of Knowledge of Good & Evil"
The knowledge they gained introduced a dualistic viewpoint which began to categorize everything they encountered as either good or evil. As Northrop Frey explains the situation:
"The same distinction between a contrary and a negation occurs in Blake's theory of ideas. All real thing have qualities in them, and qualities have opposites.This is particularly true of moral qualities, as every virtue has its corresponding vice. All 'good' men by any standards may be 'bad' by other standards, just as an egg that is bad to eat may be good to throw at someone. But the believer in the cloven fiction prefers to identify a real thing with one of its qualities, because things become easier to generalize about when classified into qualities. Now as things are good or bad according to circumstances, the cloven fiction leads to absolutizing of circumstance. The deader a thing is, the more obedient it is to circumstances, and the more alive it is the less predictable it becomes. Hence the believer in the cloven fiction finds it much easier to understand the behavior of dead things, the objects of exact science under the laws of 'mathematic form.' And in studying human activity he again finds it easiest to understand what is most automatic. So insensibly he tends to call 'the passive that obeys Reason' good, and the active springing from Energy' bad." (Page 189)