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even though it has always been basically the same thing since its debut in
1946. The marketers at Procter & Gamble want people to attend to the
impression of discontinuity between the new and the old that this creates,
of course, because they know that consumers associate “new” with “better.”
Many consumer products are aligned with progress in this fashion, but this
backfires sometimes (remember the “New Coke”?) simply because the value
of newness never completely overcomes the value of continuity. No matter
how powerful the spell of newness, it is always tied up with some sense of
historical continuity that must also value what is old. The newness of the
“all-new Toyota Camry of 2011” for buyers is only meaningful because it
is still a “Camry,” a car with a history of reliability. This is the pattern that
we need to understand in order to recognize why Enlightenment writers
would have advanced a version of the Baconian narrative while being utterly
opposed to its religious viewpoint. Only a seemingly secular and thus new
story could succeed in accomplishing what the Enlightenment was about,
the complete undermining of Europe's traditional power structures; but
there were attractions in the old story that a genuinely new one could not
reproduce. To unseat powers predicated upon the assumption that God and
king were destined to rule by providence required that their replacements
should also have providence-like authority.
I believe that the learned forgetfulness that resolved this double bind
for Enlightenment writers may be explained in terms of what Northrop
Frye has called “displacement,” a literary pattern that is in fact much older
than the Enlightenment. A displaced narrative is one that typically treats
some contemporary or at least secular subject matter but orders it in accor-
dance with a narrative form that descends from myth. Because narrative
form (plot or mythos ) is itself a conveyance of meaning ( dianoia or theme),
such impersonations also bring into secular narratives some of the religious
meaning that one would find in their sacred antecedents. 69 Frye believed
that the displacement executed through romance, the narrative genre most
evident in evolutionism, is the most potent conveyance of this kind. “In
every age,” he wrote in his classic survey of Western literature, “the rul-
ing social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of
romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the
ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy.” 70 The ability of
romance to situate traditional notions of the sacred in some present social
order, of course, accounts for this pattern. Romance seems not to belong
to the older world from which its religious meanings are drawn, and yet it
draws upon them nonetheless.
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