Frye's Themes of Ascent and Yesterday's Group Presentation

I just wanted to comment on the last group presentation and its raunchy content.  I watched the class squirm at the pure evil of the oversexed trailer trash father.  I too felt appalled.  But I couldn't stop thinking about what Frye discusses in his chapter "Themes of Ascent."  In my last blog I talked about how Frye says that modern day television, radio, and film don't reach the depth of despair necessary for the rebirth or new recognition of  the hero.  He says "The standard escape device of romance is that of escape through a shift of identity" (136).  And goes on to say "One of the things that comedy and romance as a whole are about, clearly, is the unending, irrational, absurd persistence of the human impulse to struggle, survive, and where possible escape" (136), and those who don't escape are what represents a tragedy.

Getting back to yesterday's group presentation, Frye explains in his "Themes of Ascent" chapter that "Tragedy, or threatening tragic complication in romance, often involve stresses within families, such as a father's overbearing will or the threat of incestuous relationship.  In the love-and-honor conflicts so frequent in romantic stories, the imperatives of honor usually have to do with attachments to family, tribal, or class loyalties. . . .It seems intolerably simplistic to explain all forms of nightmare by the fear of incest, as some Freudians do, yet incest is certainly a central them in night-world imagery, and the transfer of energies and affections from one's family to the new family of a marriage is the easiest kind of comic resolution.  A comic resolution, in fact, could almost be defined as an action that breaks out of the Oedipus ring, the destruction of a family or other close-knit social group by the tensions and jealousies of its members" (137).  Long quote to use, I know, but the point I'm trying to make is that the yesterdays group presentation incorporated central themes of the ascent in romance.  What else captured my attention was how we all responded to the performance.  It indicates that we have all been conditioned through popular media towards the softer themes that never quite reach the unbearable which leads to the human transformation that occurs from the intensity of hardship which are the themes in many of the stories we've read in this class.