Author Archives: Matthew Griffin

Robert Kroetsch

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Robert Kroetsch died in a car accident today. Below is a reposting of Matthew Griffin’s September 12th 2009 post, “Influence without Anxiety”

While much of the discussion on this blog has revolved around how Frye has been an influence on other critics, I think it also worth remembering his potent effect on novelists and poets as well. A reflection on what it is to write and to think about literature that has been formative for me is Robert Kroetsch’s essay, “Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye” (It’s perhaps easiest to find in The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New.  Don Mills: Oxford, 1989. 151-162.)  While we’d do well to remember an axiom from the Polemical Introduction, that the author “has a peculiar interest, but not a peculiar authority” as a critic of the author’s own work (CW 29: 7), Kroetsch writes that it was an encounter with Frye’s thought “that exhausted me into language” (151). He describes giving a seminar on Milton, using the just published Anatomy of Criticism as his “critical starting point,” only to be asked what the ideas therein were all about (154). Kroetsch describes his answer as follows:

I began, in answering that request, to talk about the hero, the nature of the hero, in literature, in the modern world, in my Canadian world, and in a way I haven’t stopped, and here, today, thirty years later, I’m still giving the report, though now Northrop Frye himself has become the hero under discussion, a peculiarly Canadian hero, in a modern world that has assigned to critics and theorists a hero’s many tasks.  We live at a time when the young critic as tram faces the uncomfortable fate of becoming the old critic as god. (154)

Kroetsch’s essay marvels at just what influence Kroetsch has had on Canadian writing in particular, before finally concluding of Frye, that in “his collected criticism, he locates the poetry of our unlocatable poem.  In talking about that poem, he becomes our epic poet. Grazie” (161).

Perhaps in this idea is fodder for our own reflections about how we might relax our own anxieties of influence, and look to see Frye’s impact upon writers beyond the sphere of criticism proper?

“Community as God Wants to See It”

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“The Emanation of The Giant Albion” from Blake’s Jerusalem (1804)

Further to Michael’s earlier post “Laissez-Faire is Anti-Christian,” in this week’s issue of The New Statesman, guest edited by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Dr. Rowan Williams, there’s a fascinating editorial about the corporatist actions of the coalition government in Britain. Perhaps most interesting, and in line with my understanding of Frye’s politics, are the last three paragraphs:

For someone like myself, there is an ironic satisfaction in the way several political thinkers today are quarrying theological traditions for ways forward. True, religious perspectives on these issues have often got bogged down in varieties of paternalism. But there is another theological strand to be retrieved that is not about “the poor” as objects of kindness but about the nature of sustainable community, seeing it as one in which what circulates – like the flow of blood – is the mutual creation of capacity, building the ability of the other person or group to become, in turn, a giver of life and responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this is what is at the heart of St Paul’s ideas about community at its fullest; community, in his terms, as God wants to see it.

A democracy that would measure up to this sort of ideal – religious in its roots but not exclusive or confessional – would be one in which the central question about any policy would be: how far does it equip a person or group to engage generously and for the long term in building the resourcefulness and well-being of any other person or group, with the state seen as a “community of communities”, to use a phrase popular among syndicalists of an earlier generation?

A democracy going beyond populism or majoritarianism but also beyond a Balkanised focus on the local that fixed in stone a variety of postcode lotteries; a democracy capable of real argument about shared needs and hopes and real generosity: any takers?

Many years ago, a younger and more intense then-Mr. Williams quoted a Russian theologian named Nikolai Fyodorov to get at the same basic point of what society based on Christian principles might look like: “Our social program is the dogma of the Holy Trinity.” Reaction to the Archbishop’s statements has largely cast his editorial as attacking the government, rather than seeing it as a call to conversation about serving the best interests of the people. (A summary of reactions here.)  This  rhetorical strategy attacks without engaging, seeking to sweep the concerns he raises to one side–a tactic overused on this side of the pond, too. Consider as just one example the concern of senior Democrats about how the media is focusing on Rep. Anthony Wiener instead of on Republican efforts to drastically cut Medicare–a programme that provides health insurance for those over 65.

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time?

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walrus

The July/August issue of the Walrus has a piece called “The Long Decline” by André Alexis.  In it, he argues that there’s been a marked degeneration of criticism in popular fora.  He suggests, strikingly, that Frye’s work was one of the principal “catalysts” against which critics reacted to move away from taxonomy to  personal opinions and something more akin to the stock market of authors’ worth.  The attack  Alexis makes is in some ways predictable — there has been a marked decline in both the quantity and the quality of mainstream book reviewing — and in other ways fascinating.  Among other questions Alexis raises, we might ask is John Metcalf really the primary culprit in the changes in Canadian criticism?  Is James Wood’s How Fiction Works a way forward out of a criticism too limited to individual assessments of worth?  Has Alexis captured something of what the anti-Frye reaction is all about?  I think this piece might stimulate our own debate.