Responding to Michael Sinding’s The Big Picture:

Thanks for your post, Michael.  The following comments are a revised and augmented version of my original comment to your post.

I think the discussion we are having is very useful, as it forces each of us to examine, clarify, and perhaps even change our positions, which is the point of good dialogue and dialectic. I have found your arguments have made me do a lot of thinking and at least consider that there may be indeed a blindness and stubbornness in my own way of thinking that is worth taking a harder look at. At the same time, I think it is important that someone make as strong a case for Frye as possible. This is after all a Frye blog.

Three specific points you make that I wanted to address:

First, I agree completely that a lot of postmodern criticism is driven by genuine social concern, but, as the saying goes:  the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Nor are genuine concern and good intentions, I am sure you would agree, an excuse for intellectual dishonesty or incoherent writing and forms of argument.

Beyond this,  I might make a further point by quoting from an essay I wrote a while back on what I then called the intellectual “treason” of the recent critical schools. Instead of protecting the authority of literature and culture, they have set out to undermine the foundations of that autonomy by the facile equation of literature with ideology.  In doing so they undermine the foundations of their own belief in social justice, since

the intense conviction that lies behind so much contemporary criticism–the belief that it is our duty to root out the effects of power in discourse and to expose the complexity of ideology in all its intricate and cunning disguises–this conviction cannot stand on its own. Ultimately, it depends on something that, however self-evident, however much we may take it for granted, can have come to us only from a myth produced and fostered by the human imagination–an affirmative “vision of fulfilled primary concerns, freedom, health, equality, happiness, love” (WP 310), the vision of a world that, once and for all, makes human sense. (“The Treason of the Clerks,” in Re-Reading Frye, 99)

It is the function of literature, Frye argues, to recreate that myth and vision, and the function of criticism to clarify the vision literature offers, not to project our own ideological anxieties on it.

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Responding to Michael Sinding:

Thank you, Michael, for the recommendations in your last post. I have enjoyed reading Bérubé‘s blog, and I am planning to check out some of his books to get a better sense of his criticism. Some of the other names you mention I am much less enthusiastic about. My main objection to Said and Greenblatt, for example, is their want of intellectual integrity and honesty, which manifests itself in different ways. As my sometimes cryptic brother Al might say, it is something that makes me automatically distrust them (by the way, Al, I am still trying to figure out the point of your strange comment on Bob’s Don Harron post, and I’m not sure the smiley face helps). If Said and Greenblatt are examples of the best of the lot we are seriously in trouble. I tried to make my way through one of Greenblatt’s books once, but threw in the towel after forty pages. I felt there must be some point to what he was saying but it didn’t seem to be worth all the trouble he was taking to get there. I need to get paid for that kind of reading. Michael Happy puts it well when he alludes to the sense of entitlement that is constantly exuded in what is essentially rhetoric passing for argument: very little information and whole lot of glib and smart-sounding noise. As far as I can tell, the kind of narcissistic posturing that has been the norm over the last twenty-five years really only began to thrive with the critical theory boom: before then many of the people writing now and gaining celebrity for it would have been laughed out of the conference room. There was really a seismic shift in the intellectual standards of criticism and scholarship.

Said, as you may know, takes on Frye in his Humanism and Democratic Criticism and caricatures the Anatomy in the worst manner as the last bastion of what he calls “the humanistic system.” Frye is simply a whipping-boy, and from Said’s discussion there is little evidence that he actually ever read the Anatomy with any attention whatsoever. Ironically, his argument is the very opposite of what Frederic Jameson has to say about Frye in The Political Unconscious when he applauds his unique understanding of the literary imagination as the expression of a social vision. Instead, Said lumps Frye in with Arnold and Eliot as “disengaged humanists” who had no sense of the importance of history, social struggle or social class, or economic and political history. Frye, of course, knew volumes more about these things and their application to literary and cultural studies than Said, who is always, in the most gratuitous ways, showing off what he has read and knows (which is not as much as he pretends, as his absurd treatment of Frye makes clear). Far from ignoring the social and the historical Frye weaves them seamlessly, and in the most illuminating ways, into his insights and arguments about literature.

Here is a good example I read this morning. Now bear in mind that this–a brief paragraph among countless others of the same kind in his published writings and notebooks– was written by a critic who, according to Said, tried to insulate literature and culture from social reality and ran away from any discussion of history and class struggle:

In mimetic times there’s a social establishment in the middle of society, with an upper & lower class both dependent on it, parasitic to that extent, and hence, qua classes, essentially animal classes. The aristocracy acquires a powerful sexual smell from Romanticism once Lord Byron & the Marquis de Sade inherit the devil, along with the Gothic heroes. They get this partly from the fact that Eros has shifted from pastoral & garden metaphors to the numinous nature of forest and wilderness. The sexual symbolism of a lower class is less easily established, but there are traces of it in [Wyndham] Lewis’s Paleface images: Nazi sadism & the whipping of Jewesses in [Robert] Briffault’s Europa; the black man as a sexual symbol; the virile worker & the effete bourgeois (Lawrence’s gamekeeper); even Heathcliff). The beat & hippie people revive the childlike radical of aristocracy which makes it an Eros symbol, including the cavalier symbol hair. The “artist” too, of course, is an intermediate figure between aristocrat & beat, with the same satyrical display of balls.

This is what I would call serious cultural studies, of a quality and of a kind that Greenblatt and Said could never even dream of doing. Because they don’t know how to think about literature as a mythological, imaginative language; they are always reading at a descriptive level, or at an ironic level that is translated into a descriptive allegory. It is no accident that Said turns to Eric Auerbach and Mimesis as his model for how we should think about the relationship between literature and history. Ideological critics like Said are always thinking at a descriptive level, or at an ironic one that they immediately translate into a descriptive allegory. Frye’s rule-of-thumb, however, applies to the entire verbal universe, not a little corner of it: follow the archetype, and eventually it will give you everything you need: philosophy, history, society, race, class, gender (as the mantra goes), ideology (secondary concerns), and of course primary concerns all rolled into one.

And that’s the kind of reading I’ve got all the time in the world for. As the old song goes: H-h-h-how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?

Russell Perkin’s last post has raised some important questions. He expresses his sympathy with Deanne Bogdan’s realization “that literary experience could be negative as well as positive.” One of my questions would be: who decides what is negative or what is positive? On what basis do we decide that something is a positive or a negative experience. To pretend that one can answer that question without difficulty is the stance of ideological criticism, the posture of cultural studies, which assumes that the answer is more or less straightforward. Maybe it seems straightforward in certain instances, but even here I would emphasize the “seems.” It is the indispensable function of the liberal arts and their criticism that they require us to suspend any final decision that is based on an ideological assumption, left or right, feminist or patriarchal.

The compelling reasons for a defense of free speech, so eloquently made by Milton, and so lucidly and unassailably by Mill, speak to the very essence of the imaginative vision embodied in literature. The response to literature is not monolithic, but inevitably various–it demands and allows for a great variety of response–and this is inherent in its imaginative and therefore hypothetical nature. It means that a work may strike one person as sexist, and another as liberating and feminist–something that is evident even in the ongoing debates among feminists since the movement began.

One aspect of a work, experienced as negative to one person, may be experienced as positive by another. Sade is an excellent example; his work is, in my mind, unquestionably a part of a liberal culture and the arts, and yet I can see that much of it is hard not to judge as repugnant, and many would see his work as irredeemably obscene, misogynistic and dangerous to read, and therefore would seek to suppress it. And yet some of the most visionary poets of the last two centuries regard Sade as a prophet, not of misogyny, but of emancipation.

Let us ponder where the question raised by Bogdan can lead: it is very tempting to assume that we have the truth, and we know what is offensive and what is not: what is feminist and anti-feminist, what is racist and what isn’t, what is wrong and what is right. But where did we get the assumptions for any such conviction at all: that this is grotesque, and this the norm or goal? Presumably from some “myth to live by,” some vision embodied in religion, literature, philosophy, and the arts and science, the basis of liberal culture, the core of which is an informing vision that is available, not only in the ideas and emotions evoked in the experience of the arts, but in their underlying structures, their under-thought, their poetic and mythological underpinnings.

The concern about the bad or good experience that literature might afford is definitely not something that Frye ignored, not at all. Frye had no objections to feminist criticism; he had an objection to feminist criticism, or Marxist criticism, or minority criticism, or majority criticism, for that matter, becoming the basis, the arbiter of criticism.

The question Russell raises is a good one, and the beginnings of an answer, I think, is in the very passage he quotes from Frye:

Anything that emerges from the total experience of criticism to form part of a liberal education becomes, by virtue of that fact, part of the emancipated and humane community of culture, whatever its original reference. Thus liberal education liberates the works of culture themselves as well as the mind they educate.

This is Frye’s point about the nature of a liberal education and their core, the arts: art and literature, because they demand an imaginative response, are submitted to a different kind of judgment, which demands both engagement and detachment, not moral or ideological judgment.

Unfortunately, once you insist that a certain literary work can only evoke a “negative experience,” it is not hard to take the next step: to refuse to entertain any reading of that work except as an example of what one ought not to think or say. And then you have subordinated criticism to an ideological agenda, to a matter of belief. This is, unfortunately, what has taken place in many areas of literary criticism and scholarship today.

Excellent post, Michael. As Peter Yan noted, every argument implies a counter-argument, and there have been a number of excellent counters to my post on The Extraliterary. It is doubtless an over-reaction on my part, and likely the consequence of passing my days in a seemingly unassailable fortress of cultural studies. As you and others have pointed out, Frye himself was remarkably interdisciplinary, both in his adaptations of thinking in other disciplines and, as Bob emphasizes, in his influence on thinkers in other disciplines.

I like the fact that you emphasize both the need and difficulty of striking a balance when adapting other disciplines to the study of literature. I suppose this is what I find so problematic in cultural studies, which is essentially applied sociology (of the social constructionist variety), but without any grounding of the application in either expertise in sociology or any coherent understanding of the authority of literature in its own right. It is the latter that is most disturbing: the absence of any conception of a vision that transcends ordinary human experience, or rather the denial of the value of any such vision, on doctrinal grounds, as anything other than an imaginary representation of ideology. And this in spite of the fact that Frye’s dialectic of “the world we want and the world we don’t want” is clearly implied in the assumption made by such scholars that the world we live in is more often than not a complete nightmare. It is the arts and literature that provide us with that vision, and so it seems perverse that literary scholars themselves should be engaged in deliberate efforts to obstruct it.

This I think is the point of Merv Nicholson’s vehement insistence on the value Frye gave to desire and how fundamentally he departed from Freud when it came to the latter’s view of the neurotic as someone who just needed to abandon his fantasies and grow up. That Frye himself believed and stated many times that the purpose of a university education was to ensure that the student was maladjusted to his society would come as a great surprise to many of my colleagues.

I think part of my apparent resistance to efforts to apply logical, scientific, or mathematical models to account for literary phenomena is due to the long-standing and ongoing tacit contempt within the university and elsewhere for the value of literature and literary studies. This attitude is sadly the case even within English departments or literature departments. Certainly at my university there is no avoiding the sense that one belongs to the “special needs” group, and that we must be both pitied and patronized by those who are in the real business of scholarship and research, since what they do actually means something in the “real world”: curing cancer, building bridges, producing wealth. How far this attitude is from Frye’s conception of the university he has eloquently articulated in writings too numerous to mention here.

The problem, however, is that this attitude has been internalized by literary scholars themselves, and swallowed whole by cultural studies scholars who have decided that since literature is a confidence game, a shill for the social establishment, the purpose of critical analysis must be to demythologize literature. In contrast, Frye believed in the authority of literature. It was criticism and literary scholarship that were incoherent. The central purpose of the Anatomy was to clarify and establish the parts and principles of criticism, to derive and synthesize a working structural poetics from an inductive survey of literature itself, and to begin building an autonomous body of knowledge on these discoveries. Literary criticism would then no longer feel it needed to seek outside itself for verification of its validity, like a toddler anxiously turning to its mother for permission to walk. There is always something about explanations of literature from other disciplines that smacks of this attitude of dependency that Frye did his best to discredit, and of course these explanations are largely the work of literary scholars themselves. How can we possibly know what to say about literature and myth and metaphor unless we apply real knowledge–from history, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, now neuroscience even, etc.– to explain them? It couldn’t possibly come from literature itself.

I was on a thesis defense in English a couple of years ago and one of the external examiners was a professor of psychology, a specialist in cognitive science. He used his period of questioning as a teaching moment, as he patiently explained to us what a great tool cognitive science would be to literary scholars in understanding something like metaphor. I am sure that cognitive science can teach us a good deal. On the other hand, it was pretty clear that it had never occurred to him that, when it came to metaphor, reading someone like Northrop Frye might be a greater benefit to him than his particular discipline would be to us.

The fact that my own department here at McMaster is a cultural studies stronghold may account for my particular sensitivity on this point. On my desk right now is a thesis I have been asked to read entitled “Redefining the Victorian Ideal: the Productive Transnormative Family in Sensation Fiction,” which focuses on two popular sensational novels of the Victorian era, one of which, Lady Audley’s Secret, was mentioned by Russell Perkin in an earlier post. The title of the thesis makes my point.

It seems so easy to subordinate literature to something else, something other than story and imagery, something other than the literary universe itself, that a certain amount of knee-jerk resistance may not be out of order.