ORTHROP FRYE
573
approximately, standing outside oneself: a state in which the real self, what–
ever reality is and whatever the self is in this context, enters a different or–
der of things from that of the now dispossessed ego. There are many vari–
eties of this ecstatic state in the arts: for example, we expect an actor to be
ecstatically identified with his role in a play.
It
seems clear from aU accounts
that the ecstatic state, no less than the erotic tate, is one that one cannot re–
main in very long. Many writers who enter it in their great moments de–
velop a ferocious ego for their rest periods.
The imaginative element in the poetic means that all the doors of per–
ception in the psyche, the doors of dream and fantasy as well as of waking
consciousness, are thrown open. Thi is the point at which the metaphor of
seeing a poem becomes inadequate, and the word
vision,
suggesting a
greater intensity of the same thing, becomes more appropriate. Vision also
suggests the fragmentary and the temporary, not necessarily something seen
steadily and whole, to paraphra e Arnold, but more frequently providing
only an elusive and vanishing glimpse. Glimpse of what? To try to answer
this question is to remove it to a different category of experience.
If
we
knew what it was, it would be an object perceived in time and space. And it
is
not an object, but something uniting the objective with ourselves.
Our metaphors of hearing foUowed by seeing are beginning to give out
at this point, and need reinforcing by other metaphors. We may characterize
the following of a narrative by the metaphor of a horizontal line, and of the
thematic contemplation of the complete structure by a vertical one. In looking
at a picture we are looking mainly up and down. But if narrative is
metaphorically horizontal, irony is built into the very conception of narrative.
The fact that there must be a last page and a final "cadence," or falling away
from the reader, infuses narrative from the beginning with the sense that the
reader is above and the action of the text below. This sense of irony in–
creases in proportion to the degree of irony in the text itself: we have irony
in tragedy, for example, when we know more about what is going on than
the characters do. In an age when practically all narrative, fictional or other–
wise, is ironic in its pervading tone, the reader must be in possession of some
norm of vision that oversees what he sees. There are various paradoxes in
criticism, designed to show how deeply the reader is involved in the irony of
what he reads, suggesting that no such norm really exists. But without it
irony could not make its point as irony. There is one consciousness that sub–
jects itself to the text and understands, and another that, so to speak, over–
stands. It is only the possession of the latter that makes the operation of
reading worthwhile: without it a reader is a pedant who understands but
does not comprehend.
