Frye on the imagination and its importance in a democracy
In 1964 Frye wrote an article for the Modern Language Association (MLA) entitled Elementary Teaching and Elementary Scholarship the final paragraph of which really struck home (emphasis added):
For Frye, mythology provided "the structural principles of literature" and metaphor (figures of speech) "the elements of both language and thought." Read the literature that has endured in all times and cultures to drown out what Joyce, in Finnegan's Wake, called the jinglish janglage of "barbarized" language we are inundated with from journalists, advertisers, politicians, corporations and government; in that way we can learn to recognize and separate real myths from their imposters, real human experience from staged, fake experience.
[R]emember that in a modern democracy a citizen participates in society mainly through his imagination. We often do not realize this until an actual event with some analogy to literary form takes place; but surely we do not need to wait for a president to be assassinated before we can understand what a tragedy is and what it can do in creating a community of response. Literature, however, gives us not only a means of understanding, but a power to fight. All around us is a society which demands that we adjust or come to terms with it, and what that society presents to us is a social mythology. Advertising, propaganda, the speeches of politicians, popular books and magazines, the cliches of rumour, all have their own kind of pastoral myths, quest myths, hero myths, sacrificial myths, and nothing will drive these shoddy constructs out of the mind except the genuine forms of the same thing. We all know how important the reason is in an irrational world, but the imagination, in a society of perverted imagination, is far more essential in making us understand that the phantasmagoria of current events is not real society, but only the transient appearance of real society. Real society, the total body of what humanity has done and can do, is revealed to us only by the arts and sciences; nothing but the imagination can apprehend that reality as a whole, and nothing but literature, in a culture as verbal as ours, can train the imagination to fight for the sanity and dignity of mankind. (18)
For Frye, mythology provided "the structural principles of literature" and metaphor (figures of speech) "the elements of both language and thought." Read the literature that has endured in all times and cultures to drown out what Joyce, in Finnegan's Wake, called the jinglish janglage of "barbarized" language we are inundated with from journalists, advertisers, politicians, corporations and government; in that way we can learn to recognize and separate real myths from their imposters, real human experience from staged, fake experience.