)
In my first talk I shipwrecked you on a South Sea island and
tried to distinguish the attitudes of mind that might result. I
suggested that there would be^three main attitudes. First, a state
of consciousness or awareness that separates you as an individual
from the rest of the world. Second,, a practical attitude of creating a human way of life in that world. Third,, an imaginative
attitude, a vision or model of the world as you could imagine it
and would like it to be.'I said that there was a language for
each attitude, and that these languages appear in our society as
the language of ordinary conversation, the language of practical
skills, and the language of literature. We discovered that the
language of literature was associative: it uses figures of speech,
like the simile and the metaphor, to suggest an identity between
the human mind and the world outside it, that identity being
what the imagination is chiefly concerned with.
You notice that we've gradually shifted off the island back to
twentieth-century Canada. There'd be precious little literature
produced on your island, and what there'd be would be of a
severely practical kind, like messages in bottles, if you had any
bottles. The reason for that is that you're not a genuine primitive:
your imagination couldn't operate on such a world except in
terms of the world you know. We'll see how important a point
this is in a moment. In the meantime, think of Robinson Crusoe,
an eighteenth-century Englishman from a nation of shop-keepers.
He didn't write poetry: what he did was to open a journal and
a ledger.
But suppose you were enough of a primitive to develop a
genuinely imaginative life of your own. You'd start by identifying
the human and the non-human worlds in all sorts of ways. The
commonest, and the most important for literature, is the god,
the being who is human in general form and character, but seems
to have some particular connexion with the outer world, a stormgod or sun-god or tree-god. Some peoples identify themselves
with certain animals or plants, called totems; some link certain
animals, real or imaginary, bulls or dragons, with forces of nature;
some ascribe powers of controlling nature to certain human
beings, usually magicians, sometimes kings. You may say that
these things belong to comparative religion or anthropology, not
to literary criticism. I'm saying that they are all products of an
impulse to identify human and natural worlds; that they're really
metaphors, and become purely metaphors, part of the language
of poetry, as soon as they cease to be beliefs, or even sooner.
Horace, in a particularly boastful mood, once said his verse would
last as long as the vestal virgins kept going up the Capitoline
Hill to worship at the temple of Jupiter. But Horace's poetry
has lasted longer than Jupiter's religion, and Jupiter himself has
only survived because he disappeared into literature.
No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become
distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in
religion, magic, and social ceremonies. But we can see literary
expression taking shape in these things, and forming an imaginative framework, so to speak, that contains the literature descending from it. Stories are told about gods, and form a mythology.
The gods take on certain characteristics: there's a trickster god,
a mocking god, a boastful god: the same types of characters get
into legends and folk tales, and, as literature develops, into fiction. Rituals and dances take on dramatic form, and eventually
an independent drama develops. Poems used for certain occasions,
12
Th& Singing School
THE SINGING SCHOOL
THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION