My first year in graduate school my enthusiasm knew no bounds. Every course I took was a literature course; all the requirements were in the world of literature; all the students in the classes we took loved the texts we were studying, and some of them even loved playing murder on the weekends. Across from the Ohio University campus was a bookstore, Logan's, where I had an account for the first time in my life and I could charge books. The manager knew my name. There were two movie theaters, numerous restaurants, and, of course, bars. It seemed like Paradise in some respects. I was 22.
I not only loved literature, I also loved literary criticism. One text in particular I found that first year was Northrup Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Frye was an archetypal critic who, it seemed had not only read every work ever written but understood how to think about them. It was an exciting text that provided the inspiration for a number of the many papers I wrote that first year, including my master's paper on Shakespeare's The Tempest. The passage that inspired me, seemed to suggest that literature had some kind of spiritual center that might actually be discovered:
"As a result of expressing the inner forms of drama with increasing force and intensity, Shakespeare arrived in his last period at the bedrock of drama, the romantic spectacle out of which all the more specialized forms of drama, such as tragedy and social comedy, have come, and to which they recurrently return. In the greatest moments of Dante and Shakespeare, in, say The Tempest or the climax of the Purgatorio, we have a feeling of converging significance, the feeling that here we are close to seeing what our whole literary experience has been about, the feeling that we have moved into the still center of the order of words. Criticism as knowledge, the criticism which is compelled to keep on talking about the subject, recognizes the fact that there is a center of the order of words." (117-118)
As I have recently said, there are no accidents. At the time I hadn't read the Purgatorio and now it too is one of my favorite works of literature. While I have come to reject the archetypal way of looking at texts, nevertheless, Frye was, for a time, an important teacher and influence, and as Charles Williams said somewhere, one should always acknowledge his or her derivations.
From this passage I was inspired to choose The Tempest as the topic for my Proseminar paper for my master's degree. At the time, 1963, a student could chose one of two route's for the master's: write a thesis or do the two semester Proseminar. The author for the course was Shakespeare. The first semester we studied 6 or 7 plays. Every two weeks we read a different play wherein the professor would pose a problem for us and we students would attempt to solve it in a paper. One such problem had us analyzing the differing stage directions in, I think, the first quarto edition of Richard 2 and the first folio edition. We thought we had been killed. Then the professor introduced us to the Arden editions of Shakespeare's texts (I, of course, now own all of them) where such information might be gleaned. I can't remember what I discovered at the time, but I know it didn't rock the world of academe. In fact I may even have received one of the lowest grades I ever got in grad school, a B+. It turned out that the teacher was singularly unimpressed with all our papers; it should be noted that we had all been in grad school for two weeks now; one young man immediately dropped out. These teachers meant business, we noted. Stage directions?
This professor, Dr. Robert McDonnell, was a really good person and an excellent teacher. The problems he presented for the other 5 plays were interesting; the only one I more or less remember was on The Tempest and had to do with the storm imagery in the play. I think the sixth or seventh play was Macbeth wherein we were to define a problem and answer it in 15 pages, more or less. It turned out that the purpose of the first semester study was to lead us to the second semester's work: a thesis length paper on one of the plays. We were to meet as a class for the first two or three weeks, then individually with the teacher the rest of the semester. I felt like Br'er Rabbit flying toward the briar patch!
I chose The Tempest and went at it from the perspective of Frye's archetypal criticism; I was going to discover what that quote really meant: "the still center of the order of words." Having read both Frye and The Tempest carefully, I saw immediately that The Tempest contained Frye's four literary types: romance, comedy, irony or satire, and tragedy. The problem was to understand how Shakespeare, at the end of his career, had applied his incredible imagination to the romance genre to achieve this magnificent play. The professor approved, we met various times, I wrote a truly magnificent paper (okay, a little irony of my own there, perhaps; tell the truth but tell it slant after all). At this point I hear a literary voice in my head saying that here is where the story turns sad, but I don't think it is too sad. (Ah, I know whose voice it is: Sammy in Updike's short story, "A & P"). I did write an excellent paper; this was the precomputer era; we typed our papers (pounded them out, so to speak, on hard to correct typewriters). We xeroxed a copy. I did. The teacher truly praised my paper. In fact he told me to let him have the xeroxed copy, as well as the one for the archives so that he could comment and return it for possible publication. My idea about Prospero was that good and new. I was elated. The teacher whom we all loved and trusted at this point was also offered a superior position at a graduate school elsewhere. He left that summer. I never got the paper back, edited or unedited.
So, I wrote a brilliant paper, no doubt in my mind; 51 years later it exists only in my mind and the mind of God. I would have given anything for a while to be able to read its fifty some pages again, primarily just to see how I understood what Shakespeare's mighty accomplishment was then. There are no accidents. The next year in grad school I met a marvellous teacher who transformed the way I looked at and understood literature, Eric Thompson. In a sense I ditched Frye for Thompson and archetypal criticism for an ontological criticism that puts us inside the text to see the text from its own perspective, so to speak. Remember Frost's "Stopping by woods"? What does it mean to see the text through the eyes of the man in the sleigh? How is the "betweenness" in the poem an expression of the narrator's ontological dilemma? How is the storm at the beginning of The Tempest an expression of the dilemma operating throughout the play until the action of the play transforms it? Last year I thought I had finally understood that, but I didn't take notes and once again I do not know, which makes every reading or viewing an exciting challenge and experience.
As for Professor McDonnell, I have come to understand that he was actually an angel sent by God to direct us (all of us in the class, even the one who ran for the hills of southern Ohio) into a proper delight for the study of literature, Shakespeare in particular; I see him as a literary John the Baptist preparing the way for Professor Thompson (dead at 72!), everything matters, or nothing. My best friend in that course, and in graduate school, Bill Elkins, is also dead (age 62).