I remember one time ,in my youth, where I began to modify and edit Northrop Frye’s theories for fun. I never quite respected Frye after that. I thought he needed a good edit. A younger man’s mistake, for sure. I now returned to him the other day and respect him very much.
I don’t remember much about my youth. But I do remember that one of my early responses to Frye was my Theory Of Innocence. It simply states that the younger a person is, the more potential they have. I applied this to art objects, which were, scientific objects, too: the younger art was, the more potential it had.
My ignorant, half-assed poem on the internet could be, in theory, more famous than a masterpiece in sanskrit which nearly nobody could read. It was young, it was new, it was in English. At least, that’s what my younger self projected. And if my confusions and misunderstandings are correct, perhaps we might see the rise of Chinese art in a century or two, and the setting of the sun of the entire English language thereafter.
I don’t know where the future lies. But I do know this: I aught to write some of my whacky and zany theories down. I never wrote or published whilst I was young; I just read quite a bit. But now I’m 41 and won’t live forever. Might as well start to write a-now.
a-Lack-a-Day!
“Steve Mini from the 6”.
PS: Northrop Frye makes short work of my doubts in his Polemical Introduction to his Anatomy Of Criticism, where he sums up the situation of Literary Criticism rather well. Will I ever modify Frye satisfactorily? Probably not. But I definitely have some literary criticism in me – perhaps a few essays should suffice. I’d like to publish a collection of essays some day. We’ll see. Fiction first, most likely.
