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The mode of romance revisited.(Critical essay)
The starting point of this essay (1) is a summary of Northrop Frye's classification of Modes in Anatomy of Criticism, (2) with some incidental remarks later developed into a general Discussion. The revised Chart proposed at the end is tentative and heuristic, not final and dogmatic. And it is still what Frye calls a "conceptual framework" (7). It is concerned with modal and generic archetypal transtextuality, and thus may help to determine the coordinates of an individual work on the map of romance fiction, but only as a preliminary approach to a critical study.
I. The Outline
Myth. The hero is a divine being, and thus superior in kind both to "other men," which really means to "all of us, men," since he is divine, and to the environment of "other men," that is of all those who are defined as "mortals" by the Greek term brotoi. But Frye adds that "such stories," though they have an important place in literature, "are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories" (33). We shall see later on the implications of that reservation. We may note here that myth does not figure as a specific poetic mode in Aristotle, for whom muthos characterizes the narrative form, that of the epic as opposed to the dramatic form of the tragedy. If we take myth to mean a story about gods, it is the presentation of a world for which the operation of the mimesis, as a representation of human life, is unthinkable, and it thus falls outside the scope of Aristotelian Poetics.
Romance. The hero is superior in degree both to other men (though identified as a human being), and to his environment, since he moves in a world where "the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended" (33): he is naturally capable of prodigious feats of courage, but he also enjoys the benefit of talismans, enchanted weapons, etc. We have moved from myth to legend, folk-tale.
High Mimetic. The hero is superior in degree to other men, being a leader, but not to his environment, and he may fall a victim to it. He is the hero of the epic and of the tragedy, which are the genres Aristotle had principally in mind.
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