... who has made use of a principle he calls resonance. "Through resonance," he writes, "a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance." Frye offers as an opening example the phrase "the grapes of wrath," which first appears in Isaiah in the context of a celebration of a prospective massacre of Edomites. But the phrase, Frye continues, "has long ago flown away from this context into many new contexts, contexts that give dignity to the human situation instead of merely reflecting its bigotries." Having said this, Frye extends the idea of resonance so that it goes beond phrases and sentences. A character in a play or story - Hamlet, for example, or Lewis Carroll's Alice - may have resonance. Objects may have resonance, and so may countries: "The smallest details of the geography of two tiny chopped-up countries, Greece and Israel, have imposed themselves on our consciousness until they have become part of the map of our own imaginative world, whether we have ever seen these countries or not."
In addressing the question of the source of resonance, Frye concludes that metaphor is the generative force -- that is, the power of a phrase, a book, a character, or a history ot unify and invest with meaning a variety of attitudes or experiences. Thus, Athens becomes a metaphor of intellectual excellence, wherever we find it; Hamlet, a metaphor of brooding indecisiveness; Alice's wanderings, a metaphor of a search for order in a world of semantic nonsense.
I now depart from Frye (who, I am certain, would raise no objection) but I take his word alon with me. Every medium of communication, I am claiming, has resonance, for resonance is metaphor writ large.
I wanted to put this down here, as a bard in training, because I Have never heard someone -- let alone an academic -- describe "etherics" by way of art so well described. I will have more on this in the future, but first I want to read some of Northrup Frye before I continue this thread.
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