Imagery in the Comedies of Christopher Fry

IMAGERY IN THE COMEDIES OF CHRISTOPHER FRY AN INDUCTIVE STUDY of the imagery of Fry's comedies reveals a great deal about the closeness of his theory and practice, his place in the metaphysical tradition, and the workings of the creative imagination. Far from an automatic versifier, Christopher Fry is a deliberate craftsman who works by design. Although his second religious play, The Firstborn, was begun in 1938, it was not published until 1946 or produced until 1948; moreover, it has been revised twice, in 1952 and in 1958. Curtmantle was only recently produced (1961) although it was reported "in progress" ten years ago. In An Experience of Critics, Fry has sharply defined the painstaking deliberation of playwriting : The Lady's not for Burning, the play which first gave rise to the bacchic figure vomiting his careless words, was five or six months finding its shape before writing began, and eight months in writing. I don't mean that slowness in writing is a virtue: it is an incapacity; but it's hard to relate it to verbal intoxication; it feels more like slow death by ground glass.1 The question of relevance focuses attention squarely on the poet's world-view and on his use of language to articulate it. To organize the imagery in his four comedies, Fry uses a Copernican world·view to mock or parody an older, more stable Ptolemaic universe. Psychologically , the daily routine of most people is determined by the daily journey of a sun(-god) across the sky followed by a mysterious passage through the dark underworld. But the more difficult, scientific view-even if it is more correct-is that our platform, the world, is never stable. It never stops rotating on its axis or rushing through space around the sun. Up and down, light and dark, and their spiritual equivalents, heaven and hell, may be poetically reversed at any moment, depending on "perspective." This metaphysical "doubleness " of perspective is clearly evident in the imagery of animated fire, light and dark, and deified planets in the titles of Fry's comedies: A Phoenix Too Frequent, The Lady's not for Burning, Venus Observed, and The Dark Is Light Enough. It can also be discovered in the horizontally divided settings. That Fry has fully "intended" these interrelationships is clear from his criticism. Of "poetic precision" he has said, 1 New York, 1963, pp. 113-24. 79 80 MODERN DRAMA May The whole structure depends upon it, what scene follows another, what character goes and what character enters, where description or landscape becomes part of the action, or where it needs a bare exchange. The poetry and the construction are inseparate.2 In this study, "poetry" will be taken to mean "imagery," without doing too much violence to Fry's intentions. As the title implies, the imagery in Fry's first one-act comedy, A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946), is organized by the rhythmic phoenixmyth : a binding paralysis of life is released by a rush of vitality. More specifically, the spiritual tension of Hades and Paradise, the sexual balance of maleness and femaleness, and the cosmic alternations of day and night are assimilated within an underlying system of recurrences: going round and round, out and in, or as Tegeus calls it, "gress"-ing. The two lovers, Tegeus and Dynamene, are both seeking a "new perspective," a "climax to the vision"; they want an epiphany which illuminates "the apparition of the world within one body." Kenneth Burke would suggest that their roles "dovetail" to compose the comic progression of the imagery. From metaphorical hallucination and dizziness they achieve clarity and stability. The sense that life is a closed, meaningless cycle is conveyed by circular images of chaos, chains of metaphors of disease, pain, and sickness, and natural imagery of winter, sterility, and deathly quiescence . Metaphors of circles, spirals, and funnels like the spinning tomb, spider's web, whirlpool, and gales of dust all suggest the repression of lawless instincts by an artificial social order. When Tegeus calls the sky an "oval twirling blasphemy," he reinforces Dynamene's nightmare of a spitting cyclops. Moreover, the combination of Tegeus' sex-drive and Dynamene's death-urge resembles...