The Educated Imagination: A Pedophile’s Appropriation of Northrop Frye’s Radical Pedagogy
Greetings fellow childlovers, humanlovers and occasional “troll”. So I was doing a little light reading on literary criticism in a wonderfully accessible book entitled “The Educated Imagination” by the late Canadian critic Northrop Frye. I was turned on to this book by my own mentor and teacher who said during a “bitch session” over coffee, “A large amount of what’s coming out of university education programs are not teachers but people pretending to be teachers, people who have no desire to teach children but a great greed to be called ‘teachers’.” In the course of our conversation he gave me this tattered little book published in 1964; in it, towards the very end, Frye makes an observation that profoundly resonates with our current situation, the freedom of speech, which is language, and language’s freedom.
Frye, p. 146:
“Ordinary speech is largely concerned with registering our reactions to what goes on outside us. In all such reactions there’s a large automatic or mechanical element. And if our only aim is to say what gets by in society, our reactions will become almost completely mechanical. That’s the direction in which the use of clichés takes us. In a society which changes rapidly, many things happen that frighten us or make us feel threatened. People who can do nothing but accept their social mythology can only try to huddle more closely together when they feel frightened or threatened, and in that situation their clichés turn hysterical. Naturally that doesn’t make them any less mechanical. Some years ago, in a town in the United States, I heard somebody say “those yellow bastards,” meaning the Japanese. More recently, in another town, I heard somebody else use the same phrase, but meaning the Chinese. There are many reasons, not connected with literary criticism, why nobody should use a phrase like that about anybody. But the literary reason is that the phrase is pure reflex: it’s no more a product of a conscious mind than the bark of a dog is.”
Pedophile, boylover, girlover, are all “clichés”. They are clichés here in our own community, but to much, if not most, of society they are also the dangerous type of clichés that Frye is talking about when he mentions the derogatory terms used towards Japanese–and I don’t think it would take much argumentation, here, to propose that we are living in an hysterical time in a technological age that allows rhetoric to move at a speed that, were Frye alive today, would make the old professor’s head swim.
On the next page of his book, Frye touches on the concept that when we are hit by wave after wave of mass media, of bombardments that are carefully and powerfully crafted to influence (his example is political advertisements at election time) our reality, we can step back and objectively observe that what is going on around us is an illusion, a willful act of rhetoric. In this situation we needn’t believe or reject anything completely, “but [we can choose] in accordance with our own vision of society. The essential thing is the power of choice” (147).
I have watched with a morbid and sad fascination at the social sparagmos (Greek for ripping apart of the flesh) of one pedophile by the name of Jack McClellan. Jack was chased out of Washington state to California where he lived/lives in his car; there he was marked and hunted by “normal” citizens; a lawyer even succeeded in making it illegal (in the form of an order of protection) for this one man to be near any person under the age of 18. From California Jack went to Chicago where he appeared on a sordid talk show (“The Steve Wilkos Show” yet to be aired as of this posting) that, by all accounts, turned into a lynch mob. Even the man who spearheaded the hunting of Jack McClellan, Ron Tebo, was ashamed to have been involved in that angry tempest. Biblically speaking, Jack has become Cain, only without the protection of God. And what did Jack do? What was his sin? He wrote words, and he posted them on his website. Which means his crime was much more fundamental, much more mythical: Jack’s crime was that he was born in the first place, that he was different, and that he revealed his thoughts about his condition.
Today you, me, Jack, and anyone who would like, should, according to Frye and the Constitution of the United States, be allowed to choose the language that reflects the vision of the society in which we want to live, if only in our imaginations. But Jack has tried this, others have tried this, I have tried this, and the result of literature, of voicing our language has been a type and level of suffering unknown to most of the world, for only this type of suffering can come at the hands of most of the world.
Frye says,
“In war time this power of choice is greatly curtailed, and we resign ourselves to living by half-truths for the duration. In a totalitarian state the competition in propaganda largely disappears, and consequently the power of imaginative choice is sealed off. In our hatred and fear of war and of totalitarian government, one central element is a sense of claustrophobia that the imagination develops when it isn’t allowed to function properly. This is the aspect of tyranny that’s so prominently displayed in George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell even goes so far as to suggest that the only way to make tyranny permanent and unshakable, the only way in other words to create a literal hell on earth, is deliberately to debase our language by turning speech into an automatic gabble. The fear of being reduced to such a life is a genuine fear, but of course as soon as we express it in hysterical clichés we are in the same state ourselves. As the poet William Blake says in describing something very similar, we become what we behold” (147, emphasis mine).
Over the past few months Jack McClellan must have felt that he’s been living that “hell on earth”. I know this because a few years ago I was the unfortunate one listening to the late night harassing phone messages by anonymous “pedophile hunters”. I lost my apartment, some friends, and my job. I became severely paranoid, jagged and hateful. There are even times now when I feel my personal rhetoric, the feelings I have inside, verges on that “automatic gabble”. Luckily my storm has blown over, for now. It is, however, telling that those who have set up shop against us are most enraged not by the very real and telling physical and sexual abuse that some children undergo, but by our audacity to speak, to write, and ultimately to think.
In the end Frye’s idea of the educated imagination is quite radical when applied to the situation in which we pedophiles find ourselves today. At the beginning of his book, Northrop Frye asks his readers to imagine themselves shipwrecked alone on a deserted island; there are three phases of imagination from this point on: 1) that of one’s self separate and distinct from the hostile environment, 2) that of living practically within the world we find ourselves, 3) and “an imaginative attitude, a vision or model of the world as you could imagine it and would like it to be” (37). In my opinion it is this third phase that embodies everything we hold sacred when we speak of things such as “freedom,” “civil rights,” and “humanity”. And it is this phase upon which the “gabble” of those who oppose us levels its attacks. Time and again we come across “concerned citizens” who are outraged that we speak, that we write, that we engage in the social discourse via the Internet, the most important literary tool since the advent of the printing press, probably, in my opinion, many times more important than the printing press.
It has long been my educated belief that we (me in the United States, and others abroad) are living in a state of “war” defined by professor Frye by that state of society that seeks to limit the freedom of the imagination. Call it the “pedophile imagination,” or better yet the “sexual imagination”. But it is this genre of freedom that is being attacked in the physical world. By this I mean that pedophile activists are being attacked for simply expressing, and sadly even children are being attacked for expressing sexuality. An intuitive, rational person can easily confirm my statement by searching the Internet for cases where MAAs (Minor Attracted Adults) have been systematically murdered by the citizenry. Likewise, similar cases can be found of children suffering at the hands of a society that view their sexuality as perverse and abhorrent. (I’m sure as the course of Daniel’s groundbreaking blog progresses, I will explore these statements in more depth and accuracy. However, for a clear thinking mind these are self-evident truths.)
Like the writer Salman Rushdie living under fatwa of death, for a pedophile like me to flex his verbal muscle means that I, that we, live under the constant threat of retaliation. And as soon as we enter into this conflict of freedom (pedophiles) vs. the suppression of freedom (those leading the fight against pedophile activists and the civil/sexual rights of children) we have entered the footprints of those freedom writers (fighters?) who have gone before us, be it in Nazi Germany or slave owning America, or apartheid South Africa. This is also the mytho-poetic fight of Good vs. Evil.
Literature has always engaged in the quiet revolution, for it is a discipline of time and patience. So too will the technology today only amplify the time and patience of our struggle for our place in the common humanity of the social fabric. We shall continue to read, to study and learn and write, and project our “social vision” (a term Frye uses, 156) into the world.
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Recruitment drive9 comments on "The Educated Imagination: A Pedophile’s Appropriation of Northrop Frye’s Radical Pedagogy"
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The importance of Raven’s post is revealed in the breadth of its application, i.e. not simply to boylovers or girllovers, or even to ‘minority’ groups generally; but it is fundamentally concerned with the value of an individual in an increasingly globalized society. In the blurring of national boundaries and the stampede to forge a global marketplace, we have lost sight of the fact that society exists to serve the individual, not the other way around. We emerged from our caves and formed small communities in order to enhance our ability to utilize nature’s resources and to protect this investment. Society functioned from bottom to top; individual freedom was paramount.
As societies exploded through the industrial age, and became increasingly interdependent, this position has almost entirely reversed. An individual’s “worth” is proportional only to his or her ability to contribute to the national and international economy. Globalization demands homogeneity; individuals are consumers, and to be effective consumers it is essential that they can be treated as a single unit: thinking in the same way, making the same choices, buying the same products. It is this uniformity that is essential to corporations, the mass media and governments. Consequently they share a single goal: obliterating the individual. Individuality means diversity, options and choice. All of which are incongruous with a consumer marketplace.
And herein lies the power of recent technology. As Raven states, literature has always ‘engaged in the quiet revolution’ – for it is in essence an individualistic process of learning and thought. The antithesis has been the growth of television, particularly in the last 40 years. Television is the tool of corporations, media and government – it’s goal is to simplify; to distill complex ideas into simple slogans; to substitute for individual thought the spoon-feeding of a single message. It is more recent technology, and specifically the Internet as a communication medium, that threatens to reverse this seemingly irreversible slide into the individual as automaton buyer. For the Internet is fundamentally a structure that operates outside of the traditional Estates: it connects individual to individual in ways never previously conceivable. And those of us who hover at the margins of society, scapegoated and ostracized for not becoming the unthinking consumer that contemporary society demands that we be, must join to harness and protect the capabilities of this medium; we must use it to emerge from the darkness of the cells into which have been incarcerated. The mindless majority may make for a profitable society for those who run it, but a society without the benefit of diversity and individual thought is truly an ugly, meaningless existence. The boylove movement is not a minority battle, but typifies the war that those of us desiring the freedom of individual vision must join in waging.
Jack Mclellan is another fuckwit pedophile, who is just about fucked now by his own stupidity!
It will only be a matter of time before society is able to view what is the current situation in the terms that Raven has used.
Indeed, a term such as “pedophilia” has been mercilessly expanded to include child pornography, rape, advocacy, “indecent” behaviour, but at the same time simplified, since all these things represent one “problem” in the popular mind. Maybe the first step of activists will be to undo this damage via the application of new words or old definitions.
Some authors have mirrored the comments made by Strato. The internet can be seen as far more democratic, diverse and less defined than TV. There is very little control over what is published; one of the things that disturbs Llort so much. Still, I think it’s important that the distribution of the internet becomes more democratic, and that we can fight to keep the corporate censors (Google, Google and Google) at bay.
I’d just like to mention that I’ve updated the profiles section…
http://newgon.com/ninvolved.php
…feedback welcome.
Daniel,
It all looks very good! Your wallpaper, though, reminds me of a shroom trip I took a couple years ago, but that’s a subject for another blog ;P
Strato, I will have to take more time to apply all of your theory to my theory, and then find the inter-theory relationship as it relates to some theory I might not be thinking about. Ha, Ha, and little theory humor, eh?
Seriously, though, you raise some excellent points that I don’t have time to completely address. First and foremost, however, is the fact that MAA-theory is on the cutting edge of post-modern/post-modern-queer intellectualism. All carnage aside, we should be very proud of that, for as time goes by and minor-adult sexuality moves into the mainstream the radicals will become the conservatives.
And your discussion of my post has finally helped clarify a concept that has been elusive for me: smooth social spaces vs. striated social spaces. These two terms were made popular by the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their incomprehensible but utterly relevant book “1000 Plateaus”. (For a quick, applicable summary of “smooth” and “striated” check out this website – http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/6.2/coverweb/de/pass/index2.htm
In short “striated” space is the rigid law of hetero-homo-capitalistic hegemony, and “smooth” space is the world occupied by the MAA-mutant-pedophile-cyborg-freedomfighter-child-internet-gorilla-guru.
(You can’t have too many hyphens in smooth space!!!)
I know this might be simplifying–and I reserve the right to alter my ideas–but as per that website above “striated space” = everything our friend Llort stands for, and “smooth space” = everything we in the pedophile/MAA movement have been talking about: freedom, choice, transformation, breaking-boundaries, crossing boarders.
The “praxis” (theory + action, or action born out of theory) of the MAA movement also embodies these post-modern concepts of smoothness. For example, many times we are forced by the violence of striation to enter “survival mode”, a mode defined by a mercurial quality to our existence: secret names, undergroundness, and a bit of necessary trickster. Daniel with is amazing ability the thwart the “antis” is a fantastic and inspiring example of this! Every time they think he’s down, he ain’t, he just went “underground” and you can be sure he’ll emerge again in version 2.0, 2.5, 3.0…
At any rate, to both of you, (and you too llort) thanks for the stimulation.
p.s. any typos in this post are ok with me.
No matter how well thought out your arguments and theories are, it is inherently wrong to take the pure innocence of a child and destroy it for your own, selfish pleasure.
Hello, motherwhois disgusted, and thanks for appreciating the level of debate here.
The pure innocence of children (read as preteen) in relation to sexual experience is something that does exist, albeit in a rather coerced form. As you probably know, sexual drives, capability for erection and orgasm and the draw towards sexual interaction (away from adult overseers) have all been proven indisputably for even very young “children”. On the other hand, I suppose that you are for the construction of innocence via the withholding of information, teaching of “bad touch” and parental neglect of the genital regions, etc.
Although we are using positive examples of explicitly sexual behaviour involving minors (generally aged 10 – 16, see Sandfort http://www.ipce.info/host/sandfort_87/) in situations where that contact was totally or partially illegal, I don’t think that you cut to the point with your implication that our arguments are about “taking / destroying innocence”. Remember, that in the sexual utopian society that we advocate for, this innocence would not exist anyway. Just as with the multitude of historical and anthropological examples that may be eluded to ( http://kalapa.nfshost.com/viewtopic.php?id=25 http://almapintada.puellula.com/Main.html http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php?p=4684715&postcount=294 http://kalapa.nfshost.com/viewtopic.php?id=24 ), there will be no expectation of either innocence or harm. Sexual expression would be encouraged from a young age, and without the guilt that western societies lump onto it, “it” would probably come to be naturally dispersed within the daily lives of “children”.
As a result, the natural curiousity of young people and the innate drive and knowledge of older partners would make great partners in erotic mentorship. The interaction would be far from “selfish”, and that’s not to say that it ever was (again read what the boys in Sandfort had to say). Would you label your own sexual interests as “selfish”? If not, then why is an age – differentaited interest so different in nature, when we already know that young people can be curious, reciprocative and above all, experience erotic sensations and interactions in a positive way?
I am delighted that you are aware of Northrop Frye, he is a popular Canadian figure. He was aware of social programming. It is our responsibility to the greater good of our culture, to deprogram the masses.
This is a wonderful article, Raven.
I shall look into Frye.
Thank you.
Disgusted mother…
You should take some time to research on human, sexual development. Children are not asexual.
…In fact, they are prime candidates, in need of sexual exploration, sexual guidance and sexual (relationship) teachings, from a caring and experienced partner.
People have taken this natural path of discovery, learning and growth, that fortunate children get to experience…and turned it into some fairytale of “doom”.
Must it always be about “selfishness”, and “destroying”, when the real such relationships are beautiful, nurturing and supportive?
People attack the stereotype all the time…They never honestly attack the reality.