Author Archives: Joseph Adamson

The “Point of Ritual Death”: Frye, Capra, and the Structure of Comedy

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In the third essay of Anatomy of Criticism Frye isolates four story shapes–romance, tragedy, irony/satire, and comedy–which he understands as stages in a hypothetically complete narrative structure. Romance and irony concern movement within, respectively, an idealized world and a world of experience; tragedy and comedy concern the direction of that movement. Frye outlines and illustrates in detail these “narrative pregeneric elements of literature,” or “generic plots,” which are “narrative categories broader than, or logically prior to, the ordinary literary genres” (162). Frye’s work has been, even if noted, generally ignored by narratologists. And yet its elegance–its simplicity, comprehensiveness, and explanatory power–which allows it to account for such an extraordinary diversity of narrative literature remains unparalleled.  As it is impossible to outline Frye’s very complex argument here, I will content myself with a brief illustration of the dynamic nature of his view of narrative structure.

For the sake of demonstration, I would like to look at his understanding of comic plot and in particular the assertion  in Frye’s “The Argument of Comedy” that “tragedy is really implicit or uncompleted comedy” and that “comedy contains a potential tragedy within itself” (65). This  statement is crucial to Frye’s understanding of narrative structure as based on conventions that derive their logic from ritual, an assumption shared, among others, by a formalist approach to narrative such Vladmir Propp’s.

One of the modern masters of comic structure is the director Frank Capra, one of the great creators of American film comedy of the thirties and forties. In many of his films he was fond of bringing “his action,” to use Frye’s description, “as close to a tragic overthrow of the hero as he can get it, and [reversing] this movement as suddenly as possible” (65). This feature is central to the “U-shaped plot” of comedy, “with the action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending” (FI 25). This darkening downturn near the end of his films, often noted by critics as a mark of Capra’s particular style, a part of his signature, is in fact, if we follow Frye, a conventional feature of comic structure in general. Frye calls it the point of ritual death, and he gives a formulation of it in the discussion of comedy in Anatomy. He speaks of the action of comedy as

mov[ing] toward a deliverance from something which, if absurd, is by no means invariably harmless. . . .  Any reader can think of many comedies in which the fear of death, sometimes a hideous death, hangs over the central character to the end, and is dispelled so quickly that one has almost the sense of awakening from nightmare. . . . An extraordinary number of comic stories, both in drama and fiction, seem to approach a potentially tragic crisis near the end, a feature that I may call the  “point of ritual death”–a clumsy expression that I would gladly surrender for a better one. It is a feature not often noticed by critics, but when it is present it is as unmistakably present as a stretto in a fugue, which it somewhat resembles. (178-79)

The hero or heroine in comedy, then, is at a certain point threatened with death or a displaced version of it (false accusation and imprisonment) and then at the last minute escapes. In Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe (which is not always thought of as a comedy), Mr Smith goes to Washington, and It’s A Wonderful Life, the hero struggles against insurmountable odds to overthrow a usurping, “humorous” society which threatens to destroy him and the ideals he represents. In each case, he is isolated and falsely accused by his enemies, and threatened with disgrace, imprisonment, or death. The point of ritual death in comedy corresponds to the death of the hero in tragedy, the phase of pathos in the complete structure of quest-romance; in comedy pathos is invoked, but a tragic result is avoided, often only narrowly.

In the first three of the abovementioned films, often seen as forming a trilogy, it is worth noting how the suggestion of crucifixion attaches to the hero at this point. The word crucifixion is in fact explicitly used in all three to describe the fate that awaits the hero, as he is falsely accused, set up in a mock trial, and then only at the last moment delivered from the hands of his enemies. Mr Deeds is imprisoned, put on trial to decide his sanity, and is about to be defeated because he refuses to speak and defend himself at his own hearing; at the last minute, the situation is turned around by the woman he loves who inspires him to break silence, and the humorous society is at the last moment routed: the film ends with Mr Deeds being carried out of the courtroom in triumph by a cheering crowd and then the couple escaping behind closed doors. In the last frame Mr Deeds picks up his “bride” and kisses her, in a classic comic ending. As formulated by Frye: “The resolution of comedy comes, so to speak, from the audience’s side of the stage; in a tragedy it comes from some mysterious world on the opposite side. In the movie, where darkness permits a more erotically oriented audience, the plot usually moves toward an act which,  like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by a closing embrace” (164).

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Frye, Borges, and the Power of the Imaginable

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I  just finished teaching, in my last few classes of this term, a number of the remarkable pieces of fiction in Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths. The more I return to the great Argentinian writer the more I see the deep affinities between his work and another writer I have grown more and more fascinated with, Edgar Allan Poe, “the greatest literary genius this side of William Blake,” according to Frye. Frye speaks of Poe admiringly in Anatomy as being a much more radical and uninhibited archetypal abstractionist than his contemporary romanticist Hawthorne. He means by this that Poe dispenses with the normal constraints of logic, realism, and conventional morality that hobbled a writer like Hawthorne and made him feel he had to contain the world of Ideality within the confines of a morally responsible allegory. Unlike Hawthorne, however, Borges, like Poe, utterly disregarded any “general distinction between serious and responsible literature on the one hand, and the trifling and fantastic on the other.” As Frye points out,  such distinctions

are not literary categories, or qualities inherent in literary works themselves. They are the primary elements of the social acceptance of or response to literature. Hence what is accepted as serious or dismissed as trifling may vary from one age to another, depending on currents of fashion or cultural attitudes operating for the most part outside literature.

Because he so thoroughly abandoned any such sense of responsibility or seriousness, Poe was able to give himself over completely to a trust in his own imaginative life. Borges followed his own imaginative instincts in the same way. Both writers exemplify the idea of “pure” literature and the sheer power of the conceivable.

In the opening chapter of Words with Power, Frye outlines the sequence of modes that make up the verbal universe and shows how each mode (the descriptive, conceptual, rhetorical, imaginative, and kerygmatic) is founded on an excluded initiative, an aspect of the power of words it must deny in order to assert its own ascendent authority.  Thus the mythological or imaginative is the excluded initiative of dogma and ideology, and the excluded initiative of the imaginative is the kerygmatic or anagogic, the world of the meta-literary, a prophetic mode responsive to both the existential and the spiritually transcendent. However, the latter is not a negation of the literary, but literature plus: there is not spiritual reality which is not also an imaginative vision. Perversely, with the current dogmatic hegemony of post-structuralism and cultural studies the imaginative is precisely what is  excluded from study by many contemporary critics and scholars. It is against this dogmatic tendency, whether from the right or the left, that writers like Poe and Borges assert and champion the pure autonomy of the imagination.

Literature, Frye writes, is the product of

the need for a more inclusive mode of verbal communication of a type that since the Romantic period has usually been called imaginative. Such a mode takes us into a more open-ended world, breaking apart the solidified dogmas that ideologies seem to hanker for.

An imaginative response is one in which the distinction between the emotional and the intellectual has disappeared, and in which ordinary consciousness is only one of many possible psychic elements, the fantastic and the dreamlike having conventionally an equal status. The criterion of the imaginative is the conceivable, not the real, and it expresses the hypothetical or assumed, not the actual. It is clear that such a criterion takes us into the verbal area we call literature.

Nowhere is this criterion of the conceivable and the hypothetical more fully at the centre of a writer’s concern than in Borges’ work where the imaginative or subjective element of dreaming and fantasy reigns supreme. In perhaps his most famous tale, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the universe is conceived of as a laybrinthine temporal multi-verse, a maze of time consisting of potentially infinite alternative story-lines: the legendary garden of the demiurge Tsui Pen is in fact a book, a work of fiction (compare Mallarme’s “le monde va s’aboutir a un livre”).  It is a parable “whose theme is time,” an image of the universe as “an infinite series of time, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times, of the universe as embracing “all possibilities of time.”

Another story, “The Circular Ruins,” concerns the paradoxical relationship between illusion and reality, creator and creature: a man arrives on the shores of a deserted part of the jungle, where there is a circular ruin, apparently a demolished temple, “long ago drowned by fire”: he is a shaman, a magus, who has come to this place to invoke the power of the fire god in order to engage in the demiurgic feat of creating a man:  to do so he must “dream” a man and then insert him, by the fullest concentration of his mind, into reality.  After great struggle he succeeds in his task, but suffers from the awareness that his child must some day be awakened to the knowledge that he is nothing but a dream. However, he is now an exhausted old man, ready for death, and as a conflagration engulfs the rebuilt temple of the fire god he stoically walks into the flames. Not feeling any pain, he realizes that he is himself the dream of another man, who is, according to an ironic infinite regress, perhaps himself a dream of someone else, who is dreaming of a man who creates a man by dreaming: “Not to be a man, to be the projection of another man’s dream, what a feeling of humiliation, of vertigo!”

In Borges, the hypothetical and virtual always trump reality. In one of my favorite “ficciones,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the narrator and his friend and alter ego discover the existence of a complex, centuries-old fictional project undertaken in secret by an elite group of illuminati to create a completely illusory and fictional world: the discovery of a hoax in an encyclopedia about a country called Tlön leads to the further, astonishing discovery of an entire planet intricately imagined and recorded in an encyclopedia : the fiction is so successful that what is thus imagined takes on the force of an inexorable pressure on the existing world as the fictional universe begins to insert itself into reality.

The impossible, the non-existent, the unreal is actualized, in much the same way as described by Rilke in Sonnets to Orpheus (sonnet 2 of the second part), in which a the purely hypothetical creature, the unicorn, appears at least by virtue of those who lovingly imagined it and fed it “only with the possibility that it truly was”:

O this is the creature that does not exist.
They knew nothing and yet without a doubt
—his gait, his posture, his neck, down
to the silent light of his gaze—they had loved.

Indeed, it wasn’t real. But because they loved,
it became a pure animal. Always, they gave it space.
And in that space, clear and spare
it raised lightly its head and needed scarcely

to be. They nourished it not with grain,
but with only the possibility that it truly was.
And this gave such strength to the animal

that it grew a horn from its brow. But one horn.
It passed in its whiteness a young maiden—
and appeared in the silver mirror, and in her.

Borges’ writings, like Frye’s criticism, are always laid on the surest of foundations: the bedrock substance of the possible, the conceivable, the imaginable– creators of the real.

Northrop Frye and the Social Function of Literature

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I recall that in the earliest days of the blog we had a discussion about a possible course on Frye’s theory of literature and criticism and the ways in which they relate to wider culture, existential concerns, and social vision: Frye’s brand of “cultural studies” in short. I have put together an outline for a graduate course on just that subject and thought I might post it in the hope it may stir some discussion. I won’t be teaching the course until the winter terms of 2013 and I’d appreciate any helpful ideas or suggestions readers of the blog might have (a jazzier title might help catch the eye of theoretically jaded grad students). Here it is:

Northrop Frye and the Social Function of Literature

This course will explore the work of Northrop Frye’s mid to late career, after the publication of Anatomy of Criticism (1957). It was during this period that Frye’s attention turned more fully to the social function of literature and the exploration of its particular authority in society. In what ways do literature and the arts relate to social and existential concerns? What role does the study of literature have in education? What is the particular authority of literature, the humanities, and the arts and sciences in society? In what way does literature, as one of the liberal arts, exert a critical, liberalizing and even prophetic influence in a society? In what way is literature the expression of a particular historical culture, regional and national, and in what way does it have a more universal and trans-historical range of communication?

Frye remains today arguably the most important intellectual this country has produced, and yet many aspects of his thought have not yet received the engagement they deserve, largely because of the impact of Anatomy. And yet the latter is only the second of over twenty books he subsequently published, many of them with titles (or subtitles) such as “Essays on Criticism and Society,” “An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism,” “On Education,” and “Essays on Canadian Culture.” His final body of work, now fully represented in the thirty volumes of The Collected Works, contains an enormous amount of writing devoted to social and cultural criticism, much of which–most notably the fascinating material in his notebooks–was never published during his lifetime.

Along with a teasing out of the most important concepts and schemes of Frye’s thought, I hope the course will provide a lively forum to engage the ways in which Frye’s ideas about literature and society challenge many of the very different conceptions that have gained ascendency over the last twenty-five years. As a way of encouraging such a discussion, I am proposing, as a test case, to set Frye’s ideas against Jean-Paul Sartre’s landmark “What is Literature?” and Other Essays (1947), an essay which in many ways anticipates the issue-oriented, ideological, and politically committed critical theory that now represents the mainstream in literary studies.

Texts:  The texts listed below will be supplemented with selections from other collections of essays and books.

Northrop Frye: The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (1970); The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (1971); Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture (1982); Creation and Recreation (1980);The Double Vision (1991)

 Jean-Paul Sartre: “What is Literature?” and Other Essays (1947)

On Relevance: Frye on Universities and the Deluge of Cant

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Frye’s bust in Northrop Frye Hall, Victoria College, University of Toronto. His interview with Ramsay Cook, referenced below, can be found here.

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The last six words of my heading are, in fact, the title of an essay (CW 7: 465-69) by Frye about the “bureaucratic cant” that floods any discussion of the role of the university in society, at least from the news media and, even more significantly, within educational bureaucracies themselves, which have internalized the prejudices of larger society outside the colleges and universities.

Bob Denham’s essay “Common Cause” (in his new book published here in our library) draws out the core assumptions of Frye’s understanding of the links identifying criticism, art and literature, and education. The threat to university education has continued to grow over the last four decades. Like any other university, and like the Soviet Union under Stalin, the institution to which I belong, McMaster University, has been regularly subjected to presidential five-year year plans, and now, once again, we have been presented with a new vision from our president, now in the second year of his term. Vision, however, is not the word for what is essentially, to use Frye’s phrase, a deluge of cant, a torrent of clichés and platitudes about the new directions university education must take if we are to keep up with the Joneses and not end up in the dust-bin of history, as if such logic were not the surest guarantee of the oblivion we should be trying to avoid. Predictably, we hear the same old mantras about the necessity of change and the need for “relevance.” In the current political climate, this means that change must go in the direction of digital technology and the immediate utilitarian needs of the economic system and social policies as set by provincial and federal governments. At the federal level, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has already introduced changes tying doctoral and research grants to the perceived immediate needs of society. In an unprecedented way, justification for funding must fall in line with what governments have decided is most useful for society at this particular moment in time; never before in this country has university education been asked to mirror so closely society as it presently exists outside it.

The concept of “relevance” and the meaningfulness of a university education first arose in the late sixties at the time of student unrest on campuses across North America; it was part of protest movements that questioned the absurdity and evil of a society implicated in the horrors of the Vietnam war. Frye was sympathetic to the reasons for the unrest, to the desire of young people at universities to participate fully in society and transform existing arrangements in ways that would bring it closer to a world that makes human sense. But he also believed that the only thing that has had any power to change the world in a positive direction are the arts and sciences. He makes the very illuminating distinction between society as it exists and the genuine and permanent society that remains, even as the ephemeral society of history keeps disappearing. The only enduring society is the one we build up from the study of the physical universe and the study of the imaginative or virtual one that presents us with a vision of the world as it might be if we had the will to change it.

Since the sixties, the idea of relevance urged by a sense of absurdity and alienation has largely shifted to a much more utilitarian one. The exception perhaps has been in the teaching of literature and related humanistic disciplines where the old New Left still holds sway.  Frye observes more than once that relevance as an educational concept on a large scale was invented by the Nazis. In his Northrop Frye in Conversation, a transcription of a series of interviews with David Cayley aired on the CBC in 1989, the word appears in print as Fachwissenschaft. My German is wildly imperfect, but from what I can tell this word simply means subject of knowledge. There may have been an error in transcribing the German word as it was filtered through the goose-honk of Frye’s Maritime accent. The word Frye uses is, I believe, Zweckwissenschaft, or target-knowledge. The Nazis threw all their scientific resources into military and related technology as they prepared for war, but they also, of course, on the cultural front, overhauled humanistic teaching in a ruthless way to make it consistent with their racist theories and propaganda. Everything else was purged. The spectre of such a totalitarian control of education always haunts us, even in a democracy; or, more precisely, it haunts us because fascism, as Frye observed, is a disease of democracy. Among the students of the New Left who came of age in the sixties are many who swallowed their apparent disgust with the irrelevance of the universities and ended up teaching in the humanities. As they took over departments they became instrumental in creating a sea-change of “relevance” in the teaching of literature and the arts. They are now the champions of post-structuralism, New Historicism, cultural studies, and the proliferating sub-disciplines of these essentially ideological forms of criticism. They have overhauled the curriculum so that it now conforms to the issue-oriented dictates of political correctness. They see themselves, to use Frye’s apt phrase, as turning the wheel of history. But the problem, as Frye knew, is that that particular wheel turns on its own, so that what appears to be the permanent form of reality very quickly proves to be another illusion. In the meantime, however, what becomes of the permanent form of society–the world of the arts and sciences–when we pursue a will-of-the wisp and destroy the structures of the university that provide it with a home?

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Bob Denham on Frye, Esoterica, and Education

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Bob Denham’s “Northrop Frye’s ‘Kook Books’ and the Esoteric Tradition,” mentioned earlier in a recent discussion here, is now available in his new book published in our library. The essay was originally published in Frye and the Word, and appears in an expanded version in Bob’s Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World. It makes for very stimulating reading. It is, among other things, a powerful demonstration of what it means to have a genuinely open mind. Frye had one, and so does Bob, who takes seriously Frye’s interest in a host of books, most of which no self-respecting critic would normally be caught dead with. The material covers an astonishing variety of subjects usually regarded as lacking any scientific or scholarly credibility – the kinds of things you’d expect to see in occult or New Age bookshops. It is almost unbelievable the number of these volumes Frye went through and annotated. Bob’s essay offers an exhaustive catalogue of Frye’s reading in this area – a list that is itself over nine pages long – and painstakingly clarifies the source and nature of Frye’s critical interest in such apparently bizarre and arcane texts. As Bob shows, Frye was not just a liberal thinker, he was an utterly free thinker in view of what he refused to dismiss as unworthy of attention simply on the basis of restrictive scholarly norms. He was compelled solely by the degree to which any of these works offered a door of perception into the mythological, imaginative, and spiritual universe. Frye, it is clear, had pretty well permanently removed the mind-forged manacles most of us wear most of the time. This is a very lively essay, and I wish we had a YouTube version of Bob reading it with that wonderful smile and warm Southern drawl of his, as he did at the Frye and the Word conference a decade ago.

I have read the essay before, including its earlier versions, but this time it resonated in a completely new way with my ongoing reading of Poe, who has been much on my mind after three weeks of engagement with him in my American literature course. Bob very acutely draws the distinction between Frye’s negative view of religious Gnosticism and its rejection of the creator and the material world as inherently evil, and his sympathetic attitude to those gnostic poets who viewed the imagination as a means of spiritual transcendence. The latter are “bees of the invisible,” as Rilke called them: masters of metaphor, visionaries in service of the anagogic and kerygmatic, they transform the pollen of the visible into the golden honey of the invisible world of spiritual reality. As Bob points out, the exemplary poets for Frye in this regard were Mallarmé, most notably, and Rilke. He may also have had in mind Poe, whose literary genius he held in high regard. Poe of course was a revered figure for Mallarmé and the Symbolists, the first to “purify the language of the tribe,” and Rilke is clearly a descendent of the same movement. Many knowledgeable readers of Poe have never really come to terms with this critical judgment, underestimating Poet’s artistry and attributing his exalted reputation in Europe to the creative misprisions that occur when translating from one language and culture to another.  Fortunately, there are exceptions to the obtuseness with which American and English critics have treated Poe. The most splendid instance is the American poet and translator Richard Wilbur, whose take on Poe, though not devoid of moral reservations, is unmatched for its ability to read on an esoteric and allegorical level – that is, archetypally. Wilbur never cites Frye, and I don’t know if he was at all informed as a critic by his work, but his approach to Poe as a brilliant symbolic writer is reminiscent of Frye’s in many respects. They would have benefited greatly from reading one another.

In the Anatomy Frye calls Poe an uninhibited and “more radical abstractionist than Hawthorne” (139). Another way of putting it is that Hawthorne resisted his own “kookiness” and consequently his social and moral anxieties were at odds with his archetypal genius. Poe had no such anxieties. It was the clarity and lucidity of Poe’s cosmological vision, his unapologetic gnosticism and his trust in the power of imagery, that made him a great symbolic writer, one whose poetic vision is perhaps most fully realized not in his lyric poetry but in his tales. His writings always reveal both an exoteric and an esoteric level. There is no question about Poe’s exoteric appeal; he is an extremely popular writer even today. At the esoteric level, the level that appealed to the Symbolists, and to Wilde and Borges, the tales are all, in one way or another, about the destiny and struggle of the soul to escape the fetters of space and time and achieve transcendence in the invisible world. As did Blake, Mallarmé, and Rilke, Poe viewed art and literature as the Great Code, another Way – another way than religion – to achieve that transcendence.

Even the mystifications and hoaxing in Poe’s writings appear to be part of the hermetic tradition, as is the smearing of his reputation by accusations of charlatanism and immoral behaviour. Bob points out that Frye’s final judgment on Helena Blavatsky was a positive one, and that he ascribes her reputation as a confidence woman to the inevitable adversity of someone communicating an oracular wisdom that is out of the ordinary and difficult to make public without meeting scepticism and hostility. This is doubtless why, as Bob reminds us more than once, any references to the hermetic tradition, and all the more so to the “kooks,” Frye mostly confined to his notebooks. Be gentle as the dove, and wise as the serpent. It may have been a whiff of this interest in the occult on Frye’s part that Marshall McLuhan recruited as one piece of evidence in his paranoid fantasy that Frye was a Freemason. As Bob’s essay makes clear, there is no question about Frye’s interest in the occult and the paranormal. Frye made use of everything he could lay his hands on, but very little of what he used was a matter of belief.

I also had a chance to read another essay in Bob’s book, “Common Cause,” which offers a very perspicuous overview of Frye’s ideas on education. The common cause here is not the society that exists but the society we have failed to create. It is an exhilarating read, especially these days when so much that is most essential to education, at every level, is being swept aside in the name of technological advancement and the requirements of corporate capitalism. The primary role of education, in Frye’s view, had only one final cause, in the Aristotelian sense. The purpose of education is the creation of a society informed by a genuine social vision.  Bob brings this visionary conception of education very much to the fore of Frye’s thought.

One of my favourite moments is a passage by Frye Bob quotes near the close. More and more we are hearing terms like self-directed or inquiry-based learning celebrated as the new and better way to provide for the instruction of our students, more “relevant” – a word Frye excoriated – more aligned to the alleged contemporary economic necessity of “life-long learning.” Necessity is always the apology of ideology. As Frye puts it: “An ideology normally conveys something of this kind: ‘Your social order is not always the way you would have it, but it is the best you can hope for at present, as well as the one the gods have decreed for you: Obey and work’” (WP 24). What these buzz words really come down to is an abdication of the teacher’s responsibility in the classroom, the result, of course, of the hapless response of educational administrations to the expediency of empty pockets and the consequent mushrooming of class sizes beyond any reasonable scale. What is self-directed education if not the demand that students take over their own education, in the absence of a structured classroom and a teacher they can engage with as someone with authority who is genuinely engaged and concerned with them and the subject matter? Imagine a tennis instructor throwing someone a tennis racket and ball, and saying I’ll be back in an hour when the lesson is over and you can tell me how your game is coming along. Bob quotes the following passage from Frye:

[E]verything connected with the university, with education, and with knowledge must be structured and continuous. Until this is grasped, there can be no question of “learning to think for oneself.” In education one cannot think at random. However imaginative we may be, and however hard we try to remove our censors and inhibitions, thinking is an acquired habit founded on practice. . . . We do not start to think about a subject: we enter into a body of thought and try to add to it. It is only out of a long discipline in continuous and structured thinking, whether in the university, in a profession, or in the experience of life, that any genuine wisdom can emerge. (Education, 376–7)

This is all by way of a strong recommendation to take a look at Bob’s wonderful collection of essays. There is no one reading Frye who can do what he does, and with such infallibility and graceful ease.

More Frye and Bloom

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As Bob Denham keeps reminding us, Frye continues to be read and used by scholars. Robert Milder, a very influential Americanist, uses Frye extensively in both his most recently published books, on Thoreau and on Melville, and he does so unapologetically. I am reading a book on Poe right now–admittedly published twenty years ago, but that would be at the very apex of high theory–by Charles E. May, the short story theorist, and the basic paradigm he uses is drawn from Anatomy of Criticism. I am also reviewing a book on Victorian poetry at this moment, and again the use of Frye is deep and extensive.

Frye saw his role for other critics and scholars as something to be measured by his usefulness. And for anyone honestly interested in literature and criticism and who reads him without prejudice, he is enormously useful. And this is why his work has lasted: it makes sense, it coheres, it is insightful. It opens up the doors of perception and cuts away the mind-forged manacles. Not to mention that it`s always a delight to read, unlike the portentous grandiloquence of so many other critical theorists, Bloom among them.

Frye comes up with a great way of describing such prose style in one of his notebooks. The entry concerns, in fact, Frye`s feeling that he was old and out of fashion, but also his suspicion that the new wave of theory was long on cleverness, and short on insight.

I am old and on the shelf now, and much that is going on I no longer understand. I’m reading Samuel Delaney, an sf [science fiction] writer interested in semiotics, and he begins with a sentence from Julia Kristeva I can no more understand than I could eat a lobster with its shell on. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from masticating and ruminating such sentences, but I`d like to think (or perhaps only my ego would) that my greater simplicity came from a deeper level than the labyrinth of the brain. (CW 5: 61-62)

Note the introspection and examination of conscience here–the questioning of possible egotistical motivation. The next entry runs:

Except that my ego has also intruded into my writing and caused me to write nonsense. My adversary has not, like Job’s, written a book [Job 31: 35], but he’s written IN all my books, and not always on the margins. I’d like to write one book free of the ego before I go. I also wish my clearest intervals of thought weren’t accompanied by laziness and selfishness.

If Frye could castigate himself for his laziness and selfishness, what terrible Dantean afterlife awaits the rest of us? Sorry to beat a dead horse, but this defines for me the problem I have with Bloom: his ego keeps getting in the way; any possible insight he might have is smothered by it. He became a lunatic of one idea, and it wasn’t even a very good idea to start with: a strange amalgam of Nietzschean will to power and Freudian castration anxiety. As Christopher asks in his comments (here and here), how does this obsession with the power struggle between poetic geniuses help us understand literature better? The letter in the LRB Christopher refers us to is even more telling: it demonstrates the speciousness of Bloom’s “knee-jerk” interpretive procedures. It is really no better when he is dealing with literary texts written in English and not making obvious errors in translating Hebrew. You can’t trust the man.

Perhaps, Jonathan, you might explain in more detail why you find Boom so useful. The post-Anxiety of Influence Bloom, that is (he actually did valuable work when he saw himself as a Romantics scholar and still regarded Frye as his mentor.)

The Influence of Anxiety

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I’d like to add to the recent discussion thread on Harold Bloom

The reason Bloom, in this interview, does not mention Frye in his list of “my greatest influences” is that Frye’s influence ended when Bloom had a nervous breakdown and began to write nonsense after deciding that literature was primarily “based upon agonistic competition,” as he puts it in the interview. It is all about the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety. It is all about which writers are greater, stronger, more powerful than others: in other words, which writers Bloom identifies with, and which ones he dismisses. His judgment of Poe is a perfect instance (see his attack on Poe in the New York Review of Books, “Inescapable Poe”): “Poe’s survival raises perpetually the issue whether literary merit and canonical status necessarily go together. I can think of no other American writer, down to this moment, at once so inescapable and so dubious.” He ridicules, for example, the overwrought prose style of the narrators in Poe’s great tales, a style that is in fact carefully attuned to the states of mind of the characters, who are often criminally insane or on the threshold of consciousness. It is as if a critic were to ridicule Mark Twain’s prose style in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because the narrator writes ungrammatically and uses cuss words. In contrast, Frye regarded Poe as a literary genius.

Here is how Bloom sums up his ‘literary theory’ of influence: ”I use the Shakespearean term ‘misprision,’ which is a kind of deliberate creativeness. The later work overturns an earlier work in order to get free of it. The new poem, new story, new drama or new novel is a creative misreading of the work that engendered it.” Literature is thus reduced to a Nietzschean or Oedipal struggle between grand creative minds. When literature is not that, for Bloom, it is the “touchstone theory” all over again: as he quotes Curtius, literature is “a reservoir of spiritual energies through which we can flavour and ennoble our present-day life.” Is this really what literature is all about? A kind of aesthetic and spiritual gilding of our prosperous middle-class life? Such an ennobling influence, however, doesn’t seem to have had much effect on Bloom. Read the interview, which starts, not very nobly, with a rant about attacks on the canon and his “desperate” but futile attempts to defend the curriculum of great books against the invasion of feminist Visigoths:

I do not give in to political considerations, however they mask themselves. All this business about gender, social class, sexual orientation and skin pigmentation is nonsense. I’m 81. I’m not prepared to temporise any more. I’ve been prophesying like Jeremiah since 1968, warning the profession that it was destroying itself. And it has.

It is interesting that Bloom began his jeremiad around the same time he broke with Frye. That’s over forty years, I guess, of not temporising. But this harangue is no better than Lynne Cheney (“not for me”) and Alan Bloom in the Closing of the American Mind. It is the tedious and angry voice of a reactionary. Frye was certainly concerned about the ascendency of ideological criticism but he countered it with a defence of the liberality and autonomy of imaginative culture. He did not speak contemptuously (“all this business about gender, etc.”), and he never whined and railed. He did not dismiss other people’s genuine concerns, even when he thought they were misguided; he tried to engage them, with as much graciousness as possible. And then there is Bloom’s vanity, transparent throughout, and the maudlin sentiment, the name-dropping, the emphasis on close “personal” friends (“Those are the five books. Four of them are by personal friends, and one is by someone I corresponded with.”), the nauseating idolatry of genius, and the wheedling allusions to the enormous number of enormous books he has written, one volume after another dedicated to the memory of his own opinions.

As Frye points out,

Criticism founded on comparative values falls into two main divisions, according to where the work of art is regarded as a product or as a possession. The former develops biographical criticism, which relates the work of art primarily to the man who wrote it. . . . Biographical criticism concerns itself largely with comparative questions of greatness and personal authority. It regards the poem as the oratory of its creator, and it feels most secure when it knows of a definite, and preferably heroic, personality behind the poetry. If it cannot find such a personalty, it may try to project one of out of rhetorical ectoplasm, as Carlyle does in his essay on Shakespeare as a ‘heroic’ poet.

Bloom is not a serious critic or a serious literary theorist. He has no critical theory to speak of. He is an extremely well-read man with an inflated ego and a photographic memory. It is no accident that he feels the need to present such a personal list of great works of literary scholarship, a list of the works that most influenced him, not the profession, as the interviewer requested. It is exactly what he does with literature. His books, as he says himself, reveal a man “desperately trying to battle for canonical standards.” It is the critic as judge, as maker of value-judgments. Frye, of course, demonstrated the perversity of such a basis for literary study in his polemical introduction to Anatomy; it is an essay that is always worth reading again, because value-judgments, like bedbugs, seem impossible to eradicate: they just keep coming back in new mutations. Enough of Bloom. Frye has already summed it up: “The odious comparisons of greatness, then, may be left to take care of themselves, for even when we feel obliged to assent to them they are still only unproductive platitudes.”

The Decline of Literary and Critical Theory

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In response to yesterday’s quote of the day on the decline of literary studies, Jonathan Allan commented:

I think this is a debate that is needed, but at the same time, I appreciate and enjoy literary theory. Whenever I hear the “death of the discipline,” I always, for one reason or another, feel a need to rebel. I don’t think it is “theory” that killed literary studies or devalued literary studies, and yet, I am not certain what is the cause of this devaluation.

The problem with the term “literary theory,” is that it has come to mean anything but literary theory: what passes as literary theory is sociology, or linguistic theory, or psychoanalytic theory, or history, or queer theory, feminist theory, even evolutionary theory now, as Scott Herring alludes to in his article. None of this is, properly speaking, literary theory, which would be a theory of literature as an imaginative form of communication that is distinct from other uses of language. This is all laid out in the opening chapters of Words with Power, where Frye distinguishes the logical, descriptive, and rhetorical uses of language from “mythological” or “imaginative” uses of words. The same goes for the term “critical theory,” which is not in its current use a theory of (literary) criticism at all. The latter can only be, according to Frye, a theory concerning the principles of literary criticism, the contexts of which he attempts to outline in Anatomy of Criticism: historical criticism (theory of modes), ethical criticism (theory of symbols), archetypal criticism (theory of myths), rhetorical criticism (theory of genres).

What Lynne Cheney and the radical left (as it has manifested itself in literary studies) have in common is an ideological bias that cares little for literature as an autonomous activity of imaginative recreation, as Frye understands it. By “autonomous,” Frye does not mean that literature is “pure” of historical or ideological content, but that what most matters in literature is the imaginative shaping of that content. This aspect is also the genuinely “critical” aspect of literature that gives it its authority and has the power to remind us of how far, how grotesquely the world we have created departs from a world that makes human sense.

In that light, I do think we can speak of a deterioration, if not the death, of a discipline, when so many of its practitioners are seduced and distracted by principles belonging to other academic or scholarly disciplines than its own, and especially when the approach subordinates the study of literature and culture to socially and politically activist agendas, right or left. It is in fact in pursuing his theory of literature and criticism as an autonomous activity and discipline that Frye came to produce at the same time cultural and social criticism of a very high order–not because he turned for his insights to the worlds of sociology and history.

More Chagall

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Chagall’s “Birthday,” 1915

Further to Michael’s previous post:

It goes without saying that Frye’s encyclopedic range of interest in and knowledge of the variety of art forms that make up a society’s imaginative culture is remarkable, unmatched by anyone I can think of. A good example is his essay “Literature and the Visual Arts” in CW 18, originally published in Myth and Metaphor. Frye’s wife Helen, of course, had a blossoming career as an art historian before Frye became a going concern and all hell broke loose; doubtless her interests, and of course his interest in Blake, helped to awaken his own affinity for the visual arts.

It is worth mentioning that the Art Gallery of Ontario is hosting an exhibit of Chagall’s work (and some Kandinsky), October to January. You can check it out here.

The AGO, by the way, has had a great new face lift, and is really worth visiting. I caught the New York Abstract/Expressionism (Pollock et al) this spring, and it was a real treat. The new CEO of the gallery, Matthew Teitelbaum, seems to have a magic touch.

“Free Speech” and “Mob Language”

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Michael’s recent posting of Sarah Palin’s latest free association on, er, whatever that guy’s name is, came to mind today as I was reading The Well-Tempered Critic, one of Frye’s undeservedly lesser known books. Frye’s discussion of the dangers of a bastardized use of language casts a glaring light on America’s ongoing descent into mental darkness. Characteristically, he approaches the problem from the perspective of education, language, and the imagination. What he has to say bears directly on the kind of “automatic gabble,” to borrow his phrase, that issues from the mouths of so many American politicians and pundits, this being the only verbal form that could possibly give expression to the mob mentality of the most recent incarnations of the American right-wing. His insights clarify, in particular, ongoing debates about freedom of speech, and what that freedom actually demands of us as members of a free and democratic society.

To set the context, Frye points out that “rhetoric from the beginning has been divided into three levels, high, middle, and low,” “originally suggested by the three classes of society,” but which Frye suggests should be used in a way that dispenses with “the misleading analogy of social classes” and “some of the metaphors lurking in the words ‘high’ and ‘low’.” The middle style is “the ordinary speaking style of the articulate person,” and “its basis is a relaxed and informal prose, that is, prose influenced by an associative rhythm.” This is “the language of what ordinarily passes for thought and rational discussion,” Low style is “a colloquial or familiar style,” which Frye believes “should be regarded simply as a separate rhetorical style, appropriate for some situations and not for others.” High style, he observes, is, conventionally, more often identified with its literary form, those moments of the sublime associated, for example, with “great passages in Shakespeare or Milton.” But in ordinary speech it “emerges whenever the middle style rises from communication to community, and achieves a vision of society which draws speaker and hearers together into a closer bond. It is the voice of the genuine individual reminding us of our genuine selves, and of our role as members of a society, in contrast to a mob.” It is “is ordinary style, or even low style, in an exceptional situation which gives it exceptional authority.”

Frye, typically, illustrates his argument at one point with a number of historical allusions appropriate to the time (the book was published in 1961): he refers, for example, to Joseph Welch, the man whose spontaneous and impassioned eloquence abruptly ended the career of Joe McCarthy. The insights, it is safe to say, are just as resonant and illuminating with reference to our contemporary scene:

Genuine speech is the expression of a genuine personality. Because it takes pains to make itself intelligible, it assumes that the hearer is a genuine personality too—in other words, wherever it is spoken it creates a community. Bastard speech is not the voice of the genuine self: it is more typically the voice of what I shall here call the ego. The ego has no interest in communication, but only in expression. What it says is always a monologue, though if engaged with others, it resigns itself to a temporary stop, so that the other person’s monologue may have its turn to flow. But while it seeks only expression, the ego is not the genuine individual, consequently it has nothing distinctive to express. It can express only the generic: food, sex, possessions, gossip, aggressiveness, and resentments. Its natural affinity is for the ready-made phrase, the cliche, because it tends to address itself to the reflexes of its hearer, not to his intelligence or emotions. I am not suggesting that society can do without a great deal of automatic babble on ready-made subjects: I am merely saying that we limit the aspects of our personality that we can express with words if we devote ourselves entirely to such verbal quackery. (CW 21, 351)

*

But of course freedom has nothing to do with lack of training. We are not free to move until we have learned to walk; we are not free to express ourselves musically until we have learned music; we are not capable of free thought unless we can think. Similarly, free speech cannot have anything to do with the mumbling and grousing of the ego. Free speech is cultivated and precise speech, which means that there are far too many people who are neither capable of it nor would know if they lost it.

A group of individuals, who retain the power and desire of genuine communication, is a society. An aggregate of egos is a mob. A mob can only respond to reflex and cliche; it can only express itself, directly or through a spokesman, in reflex and cliche. A mob always implies some object of resentment, and political leaders who speak for the mob aspect of their society develop a special kind of tantrum style, a style constructed almost entirely out of unexamined cliches. Examples may be heard in the United Nations every day. What is disturbing about the prevalence of bad language in our society is that bad language, if it is the only idiom habitually at command, is really mob language. (352)

*

High style in ordinary speech is heard whenever a speaker is honestly struggling to express what his society, as a society, is trying to be and do. It is even more unmistakably heard, as we should expect, in the voice of an individual facing a mob, or some incarnation of the mob spirit, in the death speech of Vanzetti, in Joseph Welch’s annihilating rebuke of McCarthy during the McCarthy hearings, in the dignity with which a. New Orleans mother explained her reasons for sending her white child to an unsegregated school. All these represent in different ways the authority of high style in action, moving, not on the middle level of thought, but on the higher level of imagination and social vision. The mob’s version of high style is advertising, the verbal art of penetrating the mind by prodding the reflexes of the ego. As long as society retains any freedom, such advertising may be largely harmless, because everybody knows that it is only a kind of ironic game. As soon as society loses its freedom, mob high style is taken over by the new masters, to become what is usually called propaganda. Then, of course, the moral effects become much more pernicious. Both advertising and propaganda, however, represent the conscious or unconscious pressure on a genuine society to force it into a mass society, which can only-be done by debasing the arts. (353)

*

Except in the nonverbal arts, like mathematics or music, there are no wordless thoughts, nor can any genuine ideas be expressed in undeveloped speech or writing. The undeveloped associative rhythm can only reproduce the associative process: by itself it can never express thought, much less imagination. What it can express, and effectively, is hatred, arrogance, and fear. This makes it a considerable danger at a time when, though some of us are afraid of science, we hive so much less to fear from science than from a misuse of words. However uninhibited, it is not free speech, and at a time when most of us feel rather helpless about how much we can do in the world, free speech is the one aspect of a genuine society that we all hold in our hands, or mouths. What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former. If free speech is cultivated speech, we should think of free speech, not merely as an uninhibited reaction to the social order, a release of the querulous ego, but as the verbal response to human situations, a response which establishes a context of freedom. The subliterary associative response is antisocial; the cliche or accepted idea response is a symptom of social stagnation; the free response, when verbal, is one participating in the lucidity of prose and the energy of verse. (353-354)