Northrop Frye

The Theoretical Imagination

Jonathan Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134904365
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An indispensable introduction to one of the great critics of the twentieth century, whose work on ideology, aesthetics and social criticism has ensured his place at the centre of cultural studies and contemporary theoretical debates.

1
The theoretical imagination

Northrop Frye is one of the greatest critics to have written in English. His work has been translated into many languages round the world. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made an enduring contribution to Western criticism, to an understanding of theory and literature, and to readings of individual authors and texts. Frye is best known for his argument that literature and criticism are each autonomous, by which he means that they are disciplines like any other and should not play secondary and subordinate roles in ideological systems by deferring to science, history, politics, psychology, anthropology, or any other discipline. He wants literary criticism to be scientific, to approach social science, to constitute a method and a body of knowledge. Frye builds his system on the structural principles of mythology but is not simply a myth critic who would subordinate literature to an ur-literature —mythology. He thinks that literature is the most complex and interesting manifestation or translation of mythology and that without literature a study of mythology would become sterile. Conversely, he considers a literary criticism without an understanding of mythology to be, given mythology’s historical priority, ahistorical if not anti-historical. Frye admits that ideology is everywhere, but he thinks that mythology is prior to it. Literature and criticism, according to Frye, use myth and metaphor to create an imaginative language that complicates and creates problems for those who think that all discourse is dialectic or argument and that literature and criticism are entirely ideological constructs or historical documents. His understanding of convention and genre has made this blurring of all distinctions, this homogenization of all types or kinds of writing into Writing, difficult to accept. Like Sidney, Milton, Blake, Shelley, he belongs to the radical Protestant tradition that defends poetry but shows social and political concern. Frye resembles Sidney and Shelley in making overt defences of poetry. Even though Frye has been sympathetic to the Commonwealth Confederation Party (CCF) and to its successor, the New Democratic Party (NDP), which are socially progressive and ‘socialist’ political parties, and, from about 1948 to 1950, was managing editor of Canada’s progressive magazine Canadian Forum, he is less enthusiastic about political revolution than Blake and Shelley were (‘Ideas’ 1990:12, Cayley: 1991:29).

Like that of many great writers, Frye’s work is various and difficult: to call him a myth critic, or a New Critic, a structuralist or protostructuralist, or anything else may be helpful to some, but to me they are partial insights. Like Frye, I am not much interested in arguments or labels, although argument and classification are what many of Frye’s readers will think about when they think about his work. But Frye’s schema in his work on Blake, Anatomy of Criticism, and the Bible, the major projects of his life, are fluid and heuristic. He puts into play a dance between theory and imagination, literature and criticism, the Bible and literature, the literary and the social world. He does not retreat from the pressing issues of our time—ideology and language, literary production and politics—but he has his own point of view that may not be that popular among theorists during the 1980s and 1990s, though he shares with them more misgivings, ambivalences and social concerns than younger theorists might like to admit. Although Frye died in Toronto on 23 January 1991 at the age of 78, he will continue to play a role in the theoretical and critical debates for years to come. To think otherwise is to have been blinded by fashion, a myth of progress, or a political agenda. The world has changed and will always change. To embrace change does not mean that we have to forget our cultural past.

We need, as Albert Einstein said, a new way of thinking to survive in an atomic age. While remaking ourselves, we should not throw out all history. Instead, to transform the world and our understanding of literature and criticism, we need to take what is helpful from the past to that end. Frye admits the historical and social roots of black studies, feminism and the ecology movement, all of which he thinks legitimate. They will help in the transformation. Although he initially sympathized with the student movement of the 1960s, particularly in the students’ desire to be treated in a more humane way, he came to see it as a movement without deep social roots and disliked what he took to be the fascist tactics of sit-ins and the occupation of buildings as well as a totalitarian and anti-intellectual stance behind these actions (‘Ideas’ 1990: 12). For Frye, who found so much in the university to transform his life and to free him intellectually, to be anti-intellectual in the only intellectual place in society was inexcusable. It is precisely the ability of the university to transform our thought to meet the changes in the world and in ourselves that prompted Frye to become a leading defender of the university. He admits that the university he envisages is an ideal university, but he uses that ideal as a means of representing the ways we could aspire intellectually and as a society. This is the utopian Frye of the liberal imagination.

Frye always fought fascism. He wrote against it repeatedly from the 1930s and never flagged in his attack on totalitarianism and his advocacy of liberalism and democracy. In 1936, when he was in Cheltenham on his way to Oxford, he had a long conversation with Jackson Knight, who taught classics at Exeter College and was the brother of G.Wilson Knight. Although Frye wrote to his fiancé, Helen Kemp, that ‘the Knights are the only people I have met who really speak my language’, that is they understood mythology, he admits in a letter to her that he was uneasy about a pro-fascist British poet to whom Jackson Knight had introduced him. In the same letter, Frye says that this poet showed the exaggerated respect for nature, which Frye thinks is part of fascism, that occurs in D.H.Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, and that no matter how clever the pro-fascist poet, ‘he represents everything in this world I detest and fear… when civilization approaches a precipice, there is always a group seized with an instant desire for suicide. That’s what the Fascists represent and what he represents’ (Ayre 1989:127). In the August 1940 issue of Canadian Forum, Frye contributes an article, ‘War on the Cultural Front’, in which he defends democracy and attacks fascism:

A world-state would be therefore a handful of dictators backed up by huge armies of Praetorian guards ready to supply more when they die, ruling over vast slave populations. After criticism has been clubbed, reform machine-gunned, art degraded to the poster and circus, religion to caesar-worship, science to engineering, the surviving slaves would be well-fed and clothed, and nothing could overthrow such a state but an invasion from Mars…. In the present war it is our business to disintegrate and disorganize the world state whatever else happens.

(Frye 1940; see also Ayre 1989:170)

Frye also criticizes fascism and Communism as religious or synthetic modes of thought that represent ‘efforts of an organized social will to compel human life and science to fit a certain pattern of ideas’ (1940; see also Ayre 1989:169). Frye exhibits something akin to the reforming spirit of Voltaire and something that is and is not a latter-day version of the Whig history. It is possible to be grateful to the men and women who have uncovered the darker side, hidden tyrannies and propaganda of liberalism, but still interested in its possibilities.

The radical and revolutionary tradition in England, New England and, more generally, British North America are part of Frye’s heritage as they are of mine. Part of the reason I feel close to Frye is that we share a heritage derived from the English radical tradition and the New England myth of religious freedom and political experiment. Frye also complicates Canadian literature and experience by contrasting them with those in Britain and the United States and by emphasizing the regionalism in Canada and the great changes the country has undergone (‘Ideas’ 1990:14–17, Cayley 1991:28–30). This political liberalism in Frye is coupled with an understanding of textual instabilities and the human construction of meaning. But Frye’s view does not abide a disintegration of the text and a shift of authority (not authoritarianism) from the author to the reader. His radicalism has, as well as gets to, roots: it conserves as well as controverts. In his youth Northrop Frye was less leery of anarchy and revolution than he came to be. Perhaps, like Frye, I think that liberalism and social democracy, which includes democratic socialism, are quiet revolutions. There is no excuse for tyranny, especially in the name of liberal democracy. In its language and organization literature is multiple, pluralistic, ambivalent and ambiguous and offers a critique of ideology, tyranny and single-mindedness. That is not to deny the existence, pervasiveness or ubiquity of the ideological, the tyrannical and the single-minded. Nor am I saying that in the world anything that is not Western liberalism has to display these traits. Literature can act as a critique of bourgeois liberal humanism, which is the place Frye claims for himself whenever he characterizes himself (Cayley 1991:26). Although, like Frye, I am not a member of any political party, am suspicious of the goals of political interests and can see the flaws of liberalism and democracy, I prefer liberal democracy to other political systems. It has been criticized by those within its bounds, which is the very life of the system. I am suspicious of illiberalism, from the left and the right, which are old and inadequate terms but recognizable shorthand. Frye appeals to me partly because he would not cast off liberalism, which has become an unfashionable garment. The term ‘liberalism’ is probably not adequate to define Frye’s critical path and social criticism. The danger with liberalism is that it can subsume and appropriate other options in a society. While stating my situation in relation to Frye’s, which is de rigueur in today’s theoretical climate, I do so with some irony because the assumptions we set out are often less telling than those we repress or of which we are unaware. On the other hand, however uncomfortable I am talking about my ‘position’ when Northrop Frye is the subject of the book, I do not want to appear to hide when a central part of my concern is with social vision and ideology. Like Frye, I hope not to solidify into a‘position’ but to work towards an expansion and transformation.

Before I proceed, I want to say what my book is not attempting and then what it is. It is not an extended explication of Frye’s most famous book, Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Others have covered that ground very well indeed, especially Robert Denham (1978) and A.C.Hamilton (1990). Although I look at Anatomy closely, I have tried not to reproduce good critical work that has already been done. Anatomy is a great work, but Fearful Symmetry (1947), Frye’s commentary on William Blake, prefigures it. Frye’s best-known book is an important part of his achievement but not all of it. I am glad that in a recent book on Frye, Ian Balfour has also emphasized the importance of Fearful Symmetry. Even though I share some of Balfour’s concerns, I am writing a different kind of book and have avoided repeating material in detail on Northrop Frye’s role in Canadian literature, which Balfour and others have looked at so well (Balfour 1988:ix-x, 78–88). Nor am I writing a study of Frye’s liberal social vision from the point of view of social science as David Cook (1985) has done, though the terms ‘liberal’, ‘social’ and ‘vision’ recur in this study. Cook also includes a discussion of Frye and the Canadian identity, a subject that I shall not address, except incidentally and tangentially. Jan Ulrik Dyrkjob (1979) has published a book on Frye in Danish that examines the relation between the vision in poetry with that of utopian politics. Dyrkjob also thinks that Frye’s ideological assumptions derive from the left-wing Protestant tradition in England, the romantic celebration of creativity and nineteenth-century liberalism. Dyrkjob’s study uses a Marxist critique to examine Frye’s theory of literature (see Denham 1987: 190). Denham, Balfour and Hamilton dismiss or ignore the first book on Frye, Pauline Kogan’s (1969), which is a polemic against him because she sees Frye as a clerical obscurantist and reactionary critic (see Denham 1978:204). While her method may not be sophisticated and her rhetoric forceful and unsubtle, which may have caused embarrassment among those who preceded me in the field, Kogan’s claims will be answered by the very existence of my book. Others within the university have hinted that Frye is trying to recuperate literature for the dominant ideology and have suggested that he is conservative and religious, so that he is not a critic for our times. Frye is not a reactionary. His views on literature and the Bible are liberal and sometimes radical. Since so few books have been written on Frye, I also want to mention Ronald Bates’ early book. This brief study (1971), the tenth book in McClelland and Stewart’s Canadian Writers Series, was part of an effort to establish in the minds of Canadians that they too have a literature, as strange as that might sound to someone from outside the country. Bates’ book examines Frye’s criticism of Blake, Shakespeare, Milton, and Canadian literature, as well as discussing Anatomy. Bates sees the influence of the public lecture on Frye’s production and stresses his aphoristic style, which he thinks is more important than Frye’s systematic approach. Robert Denham’s annotated bibliography (1987) and John Ayre’s biography (1989) are both indispensable but are not the kinds of book I am writing. I shall also refer to some of the essays in the two collections on Frye edited by Murray Krieger (1966) and by Eleanor Cook and others (1983). Unfortunately, because of time and space, my study will not examine other aspects of Frye’s work. Frye is one of the great Shakespearian critics of this century. He has many influential things to say about Milton, the modernists (Joyce, Eliot, Yeats), Romanticism, romance, comedy and other topics. Although in addition to critical theory my training is primarily in the Renaissance and the twentieth century, I have decided that in rediscovering the scope of Frye’s work, I have had to lay aside his practical criticism and some of the areas where others have preceded me (see my bibliography). In addition to the few books that have been written on Frye, Denham’s large bibliography will testify to the large number of essays and articles on these and the other aspects of Frye’s oeuvre that I have chosen not to discuss in detail. My study will suggest ways in which Frye is a writer and storyteller and touch on his relation to literary history, but not as exhaustively as I would like.

This study will examine what I consider the most important aspects of Frye’s work. It often focuses on his later works because of their concentration on history, ideology and society. These are topics at the heart of contemporary theory and criticism. No study has focused on this phase of his work. Words with Power is significant for this study because it faces the contemporary context of critical theory. It was published after all the books on Frye except Hamilton’s, which came out the same year. One of the major goals of my argument is to complicate the common version, that Frye is the author of a great book, Anatomy, of which the other books and essays are paler versions. There is no denying the critical and rhetorical power of Anatomy, but Frye built on it as he built it on his early articles on genre and education and on Fearful Symmetry. In no work is Frye a critic who turns from the world. This is an understandable but common misconception of his work. To value literature and criticism for themselves is difficult, and to create a schema—no matter how fluid—as Frye does is to read against the grain in society, if not now in the academy, because (in North America at least) literature and literary studies are not considered central to economic and political power. The fascination with what’s difficult might please Yeats but not the instant society, and the schematic approach to literature is associated in the minds of many humanists with the dread science, with a reduction of individuality and individualism because such schemata do not consider the uniqueness of a literary work. This book is one of the steps some critics have taken in attempting to enable a better understanding of Frye’s work.

In successive chapters my book will attempt to give a general overview of Frye’s theory; will set out the grounds of his theoretical and critical work, particularly as they were established in Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism and The Critical Path and developed in relation to the Bible in The Great Code; discuss Frye’s notion of history, especially in regard to the ‘Tentative Conclusion’ of Anatomy, examine Frye’s ideas about education and their relation to his work in the 1960s and the student unrest in that decade; place Frye’s view of mythology and ideology in the theoretical context of the past two decades and comment more specifically on his view of the ideological in Words with Power (1990); elaborate Frye’s visionary criticism, which begins with Blake and ends with the vision at the end of The Double Vision (1991); and conclude with suggestions on how Frye is a writer and how his work constitutes a defence and celebration of the imagination and of writing in a community. In reading Frye’s work for this book my view of him was transformed: I hope that this study will do the same for those coming to Frye or returning to him. My basic method is to accept Frye’s basic theoretical assumptions and then see where he goes with them. It is not always possible, except in an alternative idealized world, to suspend disbelief or to stop reading against the grain from occurring while one reads with it. My differences from Frye, which must by definition occur, will arise in the course of the book, but it is my wish to read with him, to see where he will lead us. My reading of Frye should be sympathetic but not uncritical.

To give a general view of Frye’s thought, let me begin with illustrations that come from the Introduction of Words with Power (1990), from interviews with Imre Salusinszky in 1985 and with David Cayley about thirteen months before Frye’s death (pub. 1991), and from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio programme, The Ideas of Northrop Frye (1990), which involved Frye, Cayley and others and is a longer and more intricate version of Cayley’s interview (see Appendix for notice of Cayley’s Northrop Frye in Conversation (1992)). In conversations or public lectures Frye often reiterates in a simpler way the main points he elaborates in the arguments of his books. This is a teaching technique and mnemonic device. But Frye is also like the piano player in one of the epigraphs to this book: he practises the right note over and over where freedom meets necessity. Since Frye often claimed that all his books were teaching books, it seems fair to return to his oral and public voice, which informs the books but appears here in a more basic form. I encountered Frye as a teacher at about the same time I encountered him as a critic. I soon realized that I was hearing his books in his lectures and later learned that I would hear his lectures in his books. The interview in a displaced form is a conversation overheard (with some editing). Later in the book, his lectures will be overheard in public lectures, his favourite mode of production, as essays or parts of books.

Frye’s general views on criticism are my first concern. In Words with Power Frye defines the nature of criticism: it ‘has the paradoxical task of both defining and opening the boundaries of literature, but there still has to be a continuous dialogue between criticism and what it criticizes’ (1990e: xviii). Frye is taking aim at the division between theory and practical criticism. He does not think that metacriticism, which debates the abstract principles of theory, should be cut off from the literature to which it is related. Unity is one of the fundamental principles of Frye’s criticism. Beneath the surface squabbles of contemporary criticism, by which Frye means theory and criticism, Frye sees a potential unity among the major critics:

There remains however a genuinely ‘productive’ group, who, though operating in a variety of ‘schools,’ seem to me to have, for all their surface disagreements, an underlying consensus of attitude, out of which a progress toward some unified comprehension of the subject could emerge, and lead to a construction far more significant than any deconstruction of it could possibly be. This corresponds to the situation of literature itself, where ‘original’ writers form a core within a larger group that follows fashionable conventions and idées reçues.

(1990e: xviii; see Cayley 1991:26 for a similar passage)

Frye has sought and thinks that we should seek a field theory. He sees much wisdom in some of the criticism on historical periods and single authors and says that many humanists feel threatened by the possibility of a coherent criticism (xviii–xix). He thinks that ‘the pluralistic tendency’ must work itself out until effective ‘unifying movements’ will be able to replace it (xix). My own tendencies are towards pluralism, but the pluralism of pluralisms, which I have discussed in relation to comparative literature and possible world theory, may be such a unity out of pluralities (Hart 1988). The dang...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• 1: The Theoretical Imagination
• 2: Reconstructing Blake
• 3: Reconstructing Criticism
• 4: The Great Code
• 5: History
• 6: On Education
• 7: Mythology and Ideology
• 8: A Visionary Criticism
• 9: The Critic as Writer
• 10: The Power of Words
• Appendix
• References