The Stubborn Structure (Routledge Revivals)

Essays on Criticism and Society

Northrop Frye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415696227
• eBook ISBN: 9781136498176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

First published in 1970, this collection is made up of a selection of essays composed between 1962 and 1968, written by distinguished humanist and literary critic Northrop Frye. The book is divided into two parts: one deals largely with the contexts of literary criticism; the other offers more specific studies of literary works in roughly historical sequence. One of the essays is Frye's own elucidation of the development of his critical premises out of his early concern with the poetry of William Blake. Taken together, the essays offer a continuous and coherent argument, making a whole that is entirely equal to the sum of its parts.

Part One

CONTEXTS

1 THE INSTRUMENTS OF MENTAL PRODUCTION

The question assigned is: ‘What Knowledge Is Most Worth Having?’ but I want to quarrel with assumptions in that question. In the first place, the knowledge of most worth, whatever it may be, is not something one has: it is something one is, and the correct response to such a question, if a student were to ask it, would be another question – ‘With what body of knowledge do you wish to identify yourself?’ In the second place, the phrase ‘most worth’ is apt to introduce comparative value judgements into areas where they are irrelevant. Whenever students ask me if I would advise them to ‘take’ sociology or anthropology, ancient history or modern history, a science option or a language option, I realize that there are no objective answers, and no possible means of arriving at any. The answer depends on what criteria they adopt, but not on anything in the structure of knowledge itself that I or anyone else can demonstrate to them. I suppose there is such a thing as practically and inherently useless knowledge, that is, subjects without content or founded on false assumptions, like palmistry or the racial theories cherished by the Nazis; but the danger of a student’s being deflected by them is remote. The knowledge of most worth, for a genuine student, is that body of knowledge to which he has already made an unconscious commitment. I speak of an unconscious commitment because for a genuine student, knowledge, like marriage, is too important a matter to be left entirely to conscious choice. Conscious choice is for the uncommitted, and for those the standards employed in the choice can come only from various factors in their own lives, such as a picture of one’s future career, a sense of what one is good at, a guess about the market value of one kind of knowledge as compared with another, or simply the kind of instinctive preference that it is not really necessary to rationalize.

I’ begin by separating general education and scholarship, which are not integrally connected. Intellectually, the world is specialized and pluralistic, and learning, like the amoeba, can reproduce only by subdividing. One may organize colloquia around general topics like communication, and get specialized scholars to ‘communicate’ with each other in an unsubstantial Eucharist. Scholars may do this kind of thing under pressure, but for the most part they will do it dutifully, like voting, and not with the exhilaration that they would get from discussing their own specialization with some of the very few people in the world who share it. Actual scholarship is esoteric, almost conspiratorial, and the principles of academic freedom require that it should be left that way. The scholar qua scholar is responsible only to his subject. Students should not try to ‘evaluate’ him as a public performer in the classroom; administrators and private foundations should not harass him by telling him that he ought to learn more about different fields; journalists and politicians should not repeat silly clichés like ‘ivory tower’ to describe his intellectual home. In an age when the word ‘dialogue’ has acquired so potent a charge of verbal magic, it is worth reminding ourselves that in Plato, who seems to have invented the conception, dialogue exists solely for the purpose of destroying false knowledge. As soon as any genuine knowledge (or what Plato regarded as such) is present, the dialogue turns into a punctuated monologue. What the world of scholarship requires is not two but at least a hundred and two cultures, all more or less unintelligible to one another, and the improvement of scholarship is toward more and not fewer.

What I have just described is the routine of scholarship only. Its patron saint is Sherlock Holmes, who never failed to solve any problem put before him because of the purity of his dedication to scholarship. Sherlock Holmes rather resented the fact that Watson had never read his little monograph on the distinguishing of 140 varieties of cigar ash, but when Watson told him that the earth was a globe revolving around the sun, he remarked that that was an irrelevant piece of information that he would do his best to forget. But of course many other things go on as well as the routine of scholarship, notably a process of mutation and metamorphosis. Subjects regroup themselves and other subjects take shape from the shifting relations of existing ones, as geophysics takes shape from a new relation of geology and physics. It is in these moments of regrouping that the great genius, with his colossal simplifying vision, gets his best chance to emerge. I wonder if anyone of Freud’s stature could emerge from psychology now: there might be a feeling that he was an armchair theorist who had not served enough time in laboratory routine to be a proper professional psychologist. The Freuds of the future are more likely to emerge, as Freud himself did, from a point of mutation at which psychology begins to turn into something unrecognizable to its scholarly establishment. But these mutations occur from within existing disciplines at a certain stage in their inner development: they cannot be planned or even directly encouraged from the outside.

General education is a social and not primarily an intellectual matter, and has no authority over productive scholarship. All discussion of it must be related to the state of society and the needs, desires, and ideals of that society. There is a body of information and skill that everybody has to know and possess in order to participate in our complex society, and the question is how far up, subjectively in life and objectively in the structure of knowledge, such a body extends, or can profitably be extended. We may assume that we can distinguish two levels in general education: an average or elementary level and a cultivated level; roughly, the difference between being able to read and write and being able to read with some depth and direction and write with some articulateness. At present many believe that raising people to the cultivated level on a huge and unprecedented scale is not merely desirable in itself but a necessity if our civilization is to survive. There has always been a practical distinction between what is important, like cathedrals, and what is necessary, like privies: in our day the important seems, possibly for the first time in history, to be becoming necessary as well.

Ever since Adam was thrown out of Paradise and told to go and till an accursed ground, the most important distinction in human life has been the distinction between labour and leisure. By labour, here, I mean the whole productive aspect of society, the accumulating and distribut-ing of food and the means of shelter and the more specific wants of a settled social order. According to Veblen, Adam soon tires of tilling the ground and compels Eve to do it instead, confining his own activities to hunting and fishing and thereby beginning a ‘leisure class’, the class that is defined as superior because it contributes nothing to social production. When leisure and labour become personified as an upper and a lower class, the conceptions of waste and alienation come into society: alienation for the worker, who is cheated out of nearly all the fruit of his own labour, and waste for the leisurely consumer, who can put nothing to productive use. American democracy has blurred these social distinctions and has replaced the leisure class with the affluent society, but it has not thereby lessened the feelings of waste and alienation. The sense that society, considered in its producing and distributing aspect, is something cheap and ignoble, that it is not worth loyalty, that many of its products are absurdities and that operating its obsessively busy machinery is spiritually futile, is at least as strong as it ever was. And this time there is nobody to hate, no tyrants or silk-hatted capitalists or swaggering lords, no one essentially different from ourselves for whom can relieve our feelings by abusing.

In a society devoted wholly to labour, leisure would be thought of as merely rest or spare time: if there is continuous leisure, it becomes idleness or distraction. Idleness and distraction are reactions against the unpleasantness or dullness of labour: they make up for the time wasted on work by wasting time in other ways. A life divided only between dull work and distracted play is not life but essentially a mere waiting for death, and war comes to such a society as deliverance, because it relieves the strain of waiting. It is generally realized that idleness and distraction are very close to the kind of boredom that expresses itself in smashing things, and hence there is a widespread feeling, which is at least a century old, that mass education is needed simply to keep people out of mischief. This is not a very inspiring philosophy of education, nor one at all likely to effect its purposes.

Education has nothing to do with this vicious circle of labour and idleness: it begins in that moment of genuine leisure in which Adam is neither tilling the ground nor going fishing and leaving the real work to Eve, but remembering his lost Paradise. Even as late as Milton, articulating the dream of a lost Paradise is still the definition of education. More prosaically, we may say that education is the product of a vision of human society that is more permanent and coherent than actual society. When the students of today were babies, the King of England was Emperor of India, China was a bourgeois friend, Japan a totalitarian enemy, and Nazi Germany was ruling as powerful an empire as the world had ever seen. It is clear that what we think of as real society is not that at all, but only the transient appearance of society. A society in which the presidency of the United States can be changed by one psychotic with a rifle is not sufficiently real for any thoughtful person to want to live wholly within it. What real society is, is indicated by the structure of the arts and sciences in a university. This is the permanent body of what humanity has done and is still doing, and the explanations of why the world around us changes so suddenly and so drastically are to be found only there.

A theory of education, then, implies a theory of society: a theory of society demands the construction of a social model, and all social models, as Max Weber remarks, have something Utopian about them. Conversely, all Utopias are really embodiments of educational theories. We cannot discuss educational theory simply in relation to an existing society, for no educational theory is worth anything unless it can be conceived as transforming that society and, at least to some extent, assimilating it to its own pattern. The moment of leisure, as I have defined it, is that moment which can come only to a fully conscious human being, when he is able to draw back from his activities and compare what he is doing with what he would like to do, or could conceive as better worth doing. This is also the moment at which the sense of a need for education begins, for our words school and scholarship, as Aristotle pointed out, are connected with schole, leisure. That is why I spoke of education as something that has for its ultimate goal the vision of an ideal, that is, a theoretically coherent and permanent, social order. In moral terms, we could call this the pattern of the just state.

This leads us to the traditional conception of education that we have inherited from Plato. Plato divides knowledge into two levels: an upper level of theoretical knowledge (theoretical in the sense of theoria, vision), which unites itself to permanent ideas or forms, and a lower level of practical knowledge, whose function is to embody these forms or ideas on the level of physical life. What I have referred to in my title as the instruments of mental production consist of the arts, and we may see the major arts in Plato’s terms as forming a group of six. Three of these are the arts of mousike: music, mathematics, and poetry, and they make up the main body of what Plato means by philosophy, the identifying of the soul of man with the forms or ideas of the world. The other three are the imitative or embodying arts, the arts of techne, painting, sculpture, and architecture, which, along with all their satellites and derivatives, unite the body of man with the physical world. In the just state this conception of education is reflected in a hierarchy in which a philosopher-king, supported by guards who have been educated from his point of view, is set in authority over the artisans or producers. Poets who desert their heritage and try to make their art a technical or imitative art have no place in such a state.

The Platonic conception of the relation of education to society is a revolutionary one: the shape of a just society, as education conceives it, is so different from that of society as we know it that the two cannot co-exist: one is bound to regard the other as its enemy. When the conception was revived in the Renaissance, it was modified by a more accommodating outlook. Renaissance education still forms a vision of the permanent form of society, and theoretically, the most important person to impart this vision to is the ruler. Society is best off when its king is a philosopher-king, and the ideal of education is the institute of a Christian prince. In this view, however, the education of the prince does not radically alter the existing structure of society: it merely illuminates it. The model here is Xenophon’s Cyropaedia rather than Plato’s Republic. But, as is shown in Machiavelli, the actual prince is much more likely to be a man of force and cunning than of wisdom: an incarnation of will, not of reason. Hence in practice the social role of education is more likely to be found in the courtier, the servant and adviser of the prince. The Renaissance had, besides, inherited a medieval tradition in which the most highly educated people were more likely to be clerics than princes, and hence, in the temporal sphere, confined to a similar supporting and advisory role, a civil service rather than a directing power.

The collision between revolutionary and accommodating views of the just state is clearly set out in More’s Utopia, in a dialogue between More and his friend Hythlodaye, who has been in Utopia. Hythlodaye has returned from Utopia with a Platonic revolutionary view: only the most drastic recasting of Europe into a Utopian mould will do any good to a society in which the ‘commonwealth’ is actually a conspiracy of the rich and powerful. More himself, in the first book, displays a different view: Hythlodaye should, he suggests, come to terms with existing society, at least to the extent of using his Utopian vision in an advisory capacity – informing, modifying, improving and rationalizing the structure of that society, and doing what practically can be done toward assimilating sixteenth-century Europe to a more coherent vision of life. The attitude here is closer to Aristotle’s conception of justice than to Plato’s, yet included in it is a Christian and Augustinian view that is a logical extension of Plato. If the philosopher-king seeks an identity of his immortal soul with a world of immortal forms, he will eventually have to abdicate as king, as full identity would belong to a contemplative rather than an active life. The ultimate form of the just state can only be embodied in a church or monastic community where the real philosopher-king is God. More’s Utopia thus has the same elusive relation to the Christian Church that it has to sixteenth-century Europe. There is a real relation to both, along with an underlying antagonism that goes equally deep.

The Renaissance, then, carried on the traditional conception of education as a vision of the just state, but it had ready at hand a power-ful practical method of achieving it. This was humanism, the study, not of an ideal civilization, but of an actual one which, having disappeared, could be studied in its ideal form as a structure of arts and sciences. This was an educational instrument of a kind foreshadowed by Plato when he went from his vision of the just state in the Republic to its sequel, the story of the civilization of Atlantis learned by the Athenians from the older civilization of Egypt. To a considerable extent Roman culture was humanistic in the sense of re-creating an earlier Greek culture in its own context, and the Renaissance followed the Romans in re-creating a Latinized classical culture in their context. The genuine humanists studied the classics, not as immutable cultural forms in another world, but as informing cultural principles in their world. The classics, in their totality, including Vitruvius on architecture and Columella on agriculture as well as Virgil and Cicero, made up a coherent structure of knowledge that, properly applied, could transform Renaissance society into something like its own pattern of coherence, as the ‘embers of dead tongues’, in Milton’s phrase, kindled a new flame, and the old Roman Empire became renewed into the Holy Roman Empire, the temporal power of Christian Europe. At its best, the study of classical culture promoted a liberalism of outlook that might otherwise have been impossible in ages so heavily burdened with religious and political anxieties. The Greek and Roman cultures could be studied with a genuine detachment, as the student was committed neither to their religions nor to their political views, and hence was able to separate the ideal or permanent structure from the historical one.

The humanist conception of education, as late as Arnold and New-man, still envisaged a roughly Platonic society on two levels. On the lower level were the producers and artisans, the workers and tradesmen, and those who were concerned with the practical and technical arts. On the upper level was an aristocracy or leisure class, freed from the necessity of contributing to social production. The function of education, on this higher social level, was to transform a leisure class into a responsible ruling class, trained in the arts of war and peace, the knowledge of Plato’s guards and of his philosopher-king. The arts of peace were primarily the musical arts in Plato’s sense: they had expanded into the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages, but had retained their associations with music, mathematics, and literature. The ‘music’ part of it, of course, never did have much to do with what we now think of as music, but was rather a branch of speculative cosmology. The supremacy of classics and mathematics, however, was maintained for centuries in university curricula. These arts represented a permanence that the technical arts could not match: buildings crumble, even monuments of perennial brass can disappear, but books, while individually expendable, have a unique power of self-perpetuation. Hence a book culture and the study of words and numbers can be used to build and rebuild the permanent forms of society, to establish the sense of continuity that is the genuine control of the social order, statesmanship as distinct from ‘policy, that heretic’¹, as Shakespeare calls it, which merely swims on the stream of time.

By the nineteenth century, humanist education had to meet the challenge of an entirely new conception of society. This new conception was, once again, clearest in its most revolutionary and Utopian form, as, first, the ideals of the American and more particularly of the French Revolution, and, second, the goals of the socialist revolutionary movement as set out by Marx. This view, like that of Hythlodaye in More, regarded the relation of the upper to the lower level of society as essentially predatory and parasitic. The education that made the ruling class feel responsible was thus primarily a rationalization of their power: it constituted what Marx calls an ideology. In its fully developed form society would be identical with productive society: it would consist entirely of workers and producers. According to Carlyle, who expounded a good deal of this attitude while trying to reverse its movement, the real distinction is not between cultivated leisure and work, but between genuine work, as the expression of the energy and intelligence of man, and the two forms of antiwork that corrupt society. One of these is the idleness, or dandyism as Carlyle calls it, of an un-working aristocracy; the other is drudgery, the menial and degrading results of exploitation and the mechanical division of labour. The distinction between genuine work and drudgery, the subject of a recent study by Hannah Arendt², is developed in Ruskin and in William Morris: Morris is of particular interest to us here because he thinks of the technical arts as the instruments of social revolution. Architecture and the so-called minor arts, the arts mainly of gr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Full Title
• Copyright Page
• The Stubborn Structure
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART ONE: CONTEXTS
• PART TWO: APPLICATIONS
• Notes