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Jonathan Allan: Writing in the Shadows of Theory

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Joe Adamson very graciously provided a lengthy response to my initial posting “Finding Frye” and highlights yet another level of the history of ideas and Frye’s place in these ideas.  I distinguished myself from Bob Denham’s experience in the 1960s, and now Joe has rightly pointed out another side of this history – coming of age during the theory boom in the early 1980s.  Though we all think we have unique positions, what is striking is our relation to theory: before theory, theory, and after theory.  Well, I do not believe in an “After theory” because we are always theorizing as we read; but, the High House of Theory seems to have reached its potential, or perhaps it is in search of a renaissance of sorts.  Recently, I read that the last great book of theory was written in the late 80s, early 90s; the author of the article cited Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, which is, at the very least, one of the finest examples of the potential of close reading alongside a practice of critical theory.  Sedgwick was a rare critic – she had a political intention, but also a fidelity to textuality.

As some readers are likely noting here, there is a sympathetic tone in my writing when speaking about theory.  It is a tone of respect, I imagine.  I respect theory but I also feel committed to not being committed to theory.  When I started graduate school (actually, when I started university), the major movers and shakers in my discipline almost seemed passé, for they were part of an historical process that seemed complete.  Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, and the list goes on and on (as readers of the Norton Anthology of Criticism can attest), had published works which were no longer “new” but rather were “commonplace.”  I had always read text alongside theory, theory alongside text.  There was never a time when I wasn’t aware of theory as a scholar of literature.  I had no canon from which to depart, even literary history was in doubt.  “The author is dead” was one of the central claims that I had heard time and time again…strangely, the “pleasure of the text” seemed lost. Hostility toward theory hardly seemed revolutionary – theories are, in many instances, always already hostile (often with one another).  To borrow from Frye: the academic stock market is always at play and the New Critics, Structuralists, and Northrop Frye (of course), were not trading well (but they were trading as the Collected Works of Northrop Frye suggests).

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Yves St. Cyr: The Quotable Northrop Frye

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Selected Quotes from Interviews with Northrop Frye, ed. Jean O’Grady, U of Toronto P, 2008

This superb collection of 111 interviews, compiled and edited by Jean O’Grady as part of the Collected Works, brings together for the first time all surviving records of Frye interviews from television, film, radio, conferences, journals, and magazines.  The range of topics covered includes literature; theory of literary criticism; Canadian culture, arts, and media; pedagogical theory (pre-school, primary, secondary, and university); the Bible and religion; and autobiographical reminiscences.  Below, I offer a selection of quotations from the collection, variously chosen on the basis of eloquence, wit, or erudition.  My hope is that these teasers will prompt those who follow this blog to purchase or borrow their own copies of Interviews with Northrop Frye, thus enriching our collective and on-going effort to understand Frye’s mind and character.

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Jonathan Allan: Frye and Comp Lit

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It is interesting to note that Northrop Frye was the first chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. He was also one of its great advocates. Recently, Professor Mario J. Valdes spoke about this at the annual Comparative Literature conference at the University of Toronto. Professor Valdes’ lecture can be found here (though it was a lecture about poetry and the Spanish Civil War, Professor Valdes spent the first part of his lecture talking about the history of Comparative Literature at U of T): http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/complit/colloquium08-9.html

Mervyn Nicholson: Frye Was Different (2)

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Frye was different in many ways.  In this respect, he was like his mentor, William Blake, who has always presented problems, even anxieties, to literary scholars.  Somehow Blake was outside the main current, and Frye sort of is, too.

Frye was different, to begin with, in the fact that he validated human desire.  I noted before that he believed desire was good.  In this, Frye was in opposition to most traditions and unlike most intellectuals.  This difference in attitude has profound significance and profound effects on his thinking generally, but the validation of desire was not the only difference that sets Frye apart.  Another important difference is that he thought a good deal about the question what is the social function of literature.

This is not a question that attracts literary scholars.  It isn’t easy to think of any conference on the topic or anybody who got a SSHRC grant to investigate the question, what is the social function of literature? even though it seems to be a rather obvious question and one of considerable, again obvious, importance.  Frye was different — he thought about this throughout his career.  The question in true Frye fashion points to a prior question, which is: does literature has a social function?  Frye insisted that it does have a social function, and then went on to investigate what that function was.

It is interesting that literary critics have not bothered with either of these questions much.  Critics did talk about this before Frye (a bit, anyway), but after Frye — after his reputation collapsed in the 1970s — no one seems to even notice that it is a question.  Poststructuralism was hardly interested.  Poststructuralism is essentially a denial of value or function to literature — this neutralization is a basic theme of Paul de Man, for example.

The logic of the New Historicism is to deny the existence of a category called ”literature” altogether; there are just texts, and what is called “literature” is just an elitist preference for one text over another.  Since there is no such thing as literature, the whole question of whether it has a function or not is superfluous, even meaningless.  What has been called literature is primarily a display of the preoccupations, prejudices, and anxieties of the author, exactly like any other text

The social function of literature is a difficult topic because it implies the further question, why study literature? (and then, why have English departments?).  In the past, there were theorists who asked what the value of literature is — “value” in the sense of some inherent importance that is realized by the individual reader-consumer of literature, some private benefit.  “Social function” is a different concept, and refers to some purpose in societal terms, not just for the individual.  For Frye, literature has both “value” and “social function,” too.

Early theorists, say Plato, saw literature as a function of delusional desires or as an instrument of instruction or indoctrination.  Aristotle’s Poetics assigns a psychological value to literature in his conception of catharsis: drama resolves difficult emotions by purging them (I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke are in this “psychological” line before Frye).  Literature may also furnish enjoyment for those with leisure to enjoy such things.  But the standard attitude is that literature, like works of art generally, belongs to an owning elite who control such works, enjoy them, and pay the artists who produce them.  Special people consume the work of art and benefit from it, as well as determining its content.  Literature is a kind of tribute to the owner, an elite gratification.

Out of this model comes the view of literature as an object — an object of consumption — a notion preserved in the tradition that literary criticism is a form of evaluation.  “Critic” after all means “judge.”  The connoisseur-judge consumes the work of art and decides its value, like a wine expert sampling a particular vintage and pronouncing its value, or to use Frye’s wonderful derisive metaphor, like a judge awarding ribbons at a cat show.

What makes Frye so interesting in this context is that he insisted that literature is a social power: it is a power with a social function.  He struggled to formulate or theorize this conviction, that literature participates in the construction of society, above all the construction of a better society.

Thus literature is part of a democratic and emancipatory struggle.  It is inevitably involved in the question, what would a better society be like? and so brings us back to the prior concern, in Frye, the concern of desire, of what we desire—and do not desire.

Again, Frye was different.

Michael Sinding: The Extraliterary and the Interdisciplinary

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Responding to Joe Adamson and Bob Denham.

I’ve got two comments, which are I think related as concerning the extraliterary. One is about logic and language again, and one is about interdisciplinarity.

Paradox and metaphor and irony and dialectic are indeed very important in Frye. But while giving them their due, I think there’s a danger that overemphasizing those rhetorical or hypothetical aspects can insulate Frye from questions and criticism. It can seem to drain his writing of any actual claims that can be discussed: we make it look as if he’s not really saying anything about anything. And I’m pretty sure he’s not doing that (not not doing that?). Such insulation occurs with some poststructuralist criticism, though for a different reason: the language can get rather opaque, to put it mildly. The effects are unfortunate.

Giving the rhetorical and hypothetical its due is not easy. One challenge is the everything-fitting-togetherness of his thinking. Within the system, things can make an amazing amount of illuminating sense. And to do justice to any part, you have to consider it in the context of the whole. (When you try to pull one brick out, a few more may come with it.)

It’s not as if he doesn’t make claims about literature, and about many other things. Even though Frye stresses ‘creating perspectives’ over taking ‘positions’, a perspective is still a perspective ON something, and it can be evaluated for how well it reveals something of its topic, proposes certain patterns, and heck, even for its rightness and wrongness. If all we can say about it is ‘hmm, interesting, another perspective … OK, what’s next?’, it hardly seems worth the candle.

It’s important not to oversimplify what Frye is saying. And it’s important to be, well, judicious in our judging: not to reach too quickly or in the wrong way after fact and reason. But I think we can and should question those claims, because it’s essential to taking Frye seriously, and to keeping the conversation alive.

As an example, if we take Frye to be saying that all language is literary language, that’s a claim about language—one which, as it stands, I don’t think has a chance of surviving serious scrutiny. All kinds of language is non-literary, is literal, referential etc. But if we consider in context the general idea of this dialectic between centripetal and centrifugal language, or attention, and the idea that all language has a centripetal, rhetorical, literary aspect (which I think is what he was actually saying), then that looks like an idea with some future in its bones.

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Jonathan Allan: Finding Frye

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Robert Denham in his article, “‘Pity the Northrop Frye Scholar’? Anatomy of Criticism Fifty Years After”, begins with his own “relatively clear memory of [his] first encounter with Anatomy of Criticism” (15), and then moves on to give account of the various ways in which Frye was gradually displaced.  Denham notes, for instance, Terry Eagleton’s (in)famous question, “Who now reads Frye?”, as well as Graham Good’s observation that “This is a wintry season for Frye’s work in the West” (17).  I entered graduate school in 2004; Derrida died a month later.  I was duly trained to think about literature critically, which is to say theoretically.  My immediate reaction to Frye when I first encountered him was that literary archetype is both universal and essential, but I knew also these are notions that cannot be accepted: theory had told me so.  Eventually, as is to be expected, I began to turn the tables on theory when it became apparent to me that I could apply theory to any book and somehow make it work – there was always a subtext of some sort that could be exploited for some theoretical purpose.  Frustration ensued.  How was I to study literature if it is just a game in theory application?  One day a professor said to me: read this book and come back in a week.  The book, of course, was Anatomy of Criticism.  My copy of the Anatomy now sits in pieces, the spine broken, the margins marked up.  (My edition includes Harold Bloom’s preface.  The next book I read was The Anxiety of Influence.)

A few months after first reading the Anatomy, I delivered a paper on Frye at a graduate conference on Canadian Studies.  During the “question” period which quickly became a “statement” period, I was summarily dismissed as a “Northrop Frye Apologist.”  Indeed, my naivete was so profound that I did not realize there is such contempt for Frye in the academy, let alone that Frye requires an apology at a Canadian Studies conference.  But, as Linda Hutcheon notes in her introduction to The Bush Garden, “Predictably (this is Canada), Frye’s particular conception came under fire – from the very start” (vii).  Hutcheon is right about The Bush Garden, but her estimation seems to extend to most if not all of Frye’s writings.  It was in that very moment I decided that Frye would be an area of study for me.  Since then, I have purchased or been given every single volume of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye (except one) and have read through many of them, most particularly the introductions to each volume.

Finding Frye in 2006 was very different from finding Frye in the early 1960s, as was the case for Robert Denham.  When I found Frye (or, as it now seems, Frye found me), the permanence of theory did not seem quite so permanent.  Frye, in most instances, is now covered in survey courses of literary theory.  I did not live through the denunciation of Frye or the distancing from Frye of the last quarter of the 20th century.  But, then again, the salad days of high theory seem to be waning.  The theory wars are in recession.  Does this mean that studying Frye in the 21st century is without challenges?  Not likely.  The literary academic establishment is still fundamentally pre-occupied with theoretical concerns, and Frye is apparently not theoretical enough to be designated “Theory.”  Likewise, writing, as I do, about Frye in the context of Comparative Literature (the House of High Theory) provides other challenges.  Even so, studying Frye in such an environment is exciting precisely because reading him “fifty years after” provides its own idiosyncratic surprises, challenges and questions, not to mention persistent doubts.  So is the goal of the Frye scholar today one of reclaiming Frye, apologizing for Frye, or simply finding him all over again?

Peter Yan: Militant Teaching

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Joe Adamson’s “Argument and Transformation” post reminds me of a recent experience in my grade 12 class. A homophobic student bragged how he would spend his Saturday nights driving in a car (crammed with six other male homophobes), harassing people he thought were gay. My discussions with him failed. However, during my lessons on logic, I had him argue why gays had no right to exist…an assignment he relished. Then after finishing his argument, I had him write the counter argument. While he was still homophobic, he did at least stop physically harassing people because he could not definitively defend his sexist views.

On the one hand, school is for Frye derived for the Greek word for leisure, or “schole,”  a higher form of civilized development, a detachment from the “real” world. But on the other hand, school is engagement, a means of fighting the forces of social conditioning, advertising, politics, and bigotry by way of words with power. Frye’s notion that every argument has a counter-argument, and that the best we can do is become aware of our social conditioning, helped moderate the views of one otherwise intansigent student.

Teaching is militant and, if we are lucky, our students might become through the power of words — and perhaps in the only way possible — born again.

Adam Bradley: La Resistance

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Wow. The anti-cultural-theorists! Until this moment, I actually thought I was alone. Reading Joe’s post and the responses to it gives me hope for the state of literary studies. It seems to me that the counter-revolution has begun.

I was an undergrad at McMaster in the middle of the cultural studies movement that swept through that English department. Except for a few professors who remained rather quiet, I felt like the lone objector in the middle of an ill advised coup d’etat. I was always much more intrigued with structuralism than with how to apply ideologies to literary texts, based on an overwhelming sense that there is a structure present within all literature. It is the repetition of these structures over time that represents our connections to one other; our like-mindedness. That is why texts written hundreds of years ago can fit into a model set out by a cultural theorist today. If this is the case, then many cultural theorists that argue vehemently against the existence of structure — or in Frye’s case, myths — would in fact be invalidating their own arguments. I find that funny. But humor aside, I think more literary arguments need to be structured by logic. We marvel at the dialogues of Plato, but then fail to see that if we structured our arguments using the same kind of logic, we may actually find some common ground with theorists of differing opinions. The lens through which the cultural theorists attack a literary work tends to filter out the fact that it is the repetition of myths that enable texts to remain relevant to current ideologies.

On the matter of logic and mathematics as they relate to literature: Is it not simply a matter of logic that if you believe in a mythical structure, as Frye suggests, then the logical extension is to be able to represent those structural constructs with numbers? That is, if there is a structure, then that means there also exists a relationship between constructs, and it would be no great task to represent those relationships numerically. I think this would in fact enhance the wonder to be found in literature, not detract from it. Physicists describe light waves with numbers all the time, but a sunset does not become any less sublime because they can describe the structure of it. In fact, the opposite is true. Being able to describe a sunset scientifcally makes the experience of it even more intense. I believe the same to be true of literature. Being able to describe the constructs of literature —  as an “objectiv(ish) ’science’ ”, as Clayton Chrusch puts it —  would only enhance the wonder of how we are moved by the written word.

If my thinking is correct and cultural theory is enabled by the structure and myths found in literature, then the insistence that there is no structure in literature by the same theorists would turn out to be a pretty obvious contradiction; and, if this is the case, I would be even more amazed if we could represent that relationship with an equation that manifests this logic. I believe that it would take our understanding from a belief to a fact. And, if Joe is correct that cognitive scientists could in fact benefit from the literary theorists’ understanding of phenomena such as metaphor, then we need to be able to bridge that gap and explain our subject in terms they can understand. This means logic, structure, and to some extent axiomatic thought. The onus is on the literary theorists to prove their own worth, if in fact the aim is to have a meaningful discussion with scientists. Science has established axioms and methods that have been in practice for thousands of years and, being that language is our business, we would do well to do the same.

Viva la counter-revolution!

Trevor Losh-Johnson: “The Phases and Modes of Language”

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Responding to Bob Denham’s earlier post.

Since my Frygian orientation is based on the Anatomy, this is certainly a new and exiting schematic for me. I wish I could have cited my source for that comment on etiological theories of language, but I have had no luck finding it. There is always the possibility that it was a sort of excluded initiative during my reading that became a center of concern when I wrote my post.

Is there a term Frye used for the movement of the excluded initiative into its subsequent center of concern (I may not be using the term “concern” correctly)? If reversed, it seems to resemble the displacement of myth into descending modes in the Anatomy – “Reading forward in history, therefore, we may think of our romantic, high mimetic and low mimetic modes as a series of displaced myths, mythoi or plot-formulas progressively moving over towards the opposite pole of verisimilitude, and then, with irony, beginning to move back” (pg. 52, the final sentence of ‘Comic Fictional Modes’).

Also, is there any circular thrust to this model, adopted, as it seems, from De Lubac’s Medieval Exegesis? From what I know of De Lubac, his adapted categories were more or less static modes of interpretation. The model adopted from Vico has its implied ricorso, but what modulation is in the second seems to be without recurrence.

But as an applicative theory of language, it is just the thing that dovetails into my interests. I am interested in theories of language that apply to literature as an order of words, even if such theories do not apply much to linguistics as the discipline stands. My complaint, that comparative literature made me into an amateur expert on everything except literature, may apply in its own way to Prof. Adamson’s lament on the extraliterary.

Trevor Losh-Johnson: Diagrams and Paraeducation

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Some days ago, I sent out letters requesting information on professors who take an active, scholastic interest in Northrop Frye.  I have a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara, and am looking for English graduate programs where I may incorporate Frye’s diagrammatic method into specific research.  Professor Adamson has kindly invited me to post something here about how my interest in Frye arose in part through working as a teacher with orthopedically handicapped students.

My experience with such students is a product of my work as a substitute teacher in the greater Los Angeles area.  It is difficult to obtain consistent teaching assignments now, especially considering our certain governor’s propensity for terminating education funds.  I have therefore found more work with less orthodox students, which is something to which my father has devoted his entire teaching career.

My work in one of these classes coincided with some cursory reading of [Roman] Jakobson].  I was taken with Jakobson’s model of metaphor and metonymy, based on his work with language acquisition and aphasia.  While my interaction with students was not nearly as systematic, it greatly reinforced my sense of the metonymic workings of language acquisition.  When a child is learning to read, an unknown word is often sounded-out, and then replaced with a known word that rhymes with those sounds- sip becomes ship, cot cat.  I can recall a student named Elijah who had had clustered brain tumors as an infant.  He would tell stories structured only on a series of metonymy- What did the monkeys do next?  They attacked the car.  What did they say?  They ate me!  What happened then?  I fed them pizza and chicken!  This of course does not do justice to Elijah’s stories.  They were products of an outrageous and brilliant associative process that defied logic, space, and mortality.  While the origins of many of the images (a TV show?  The expected vandals in his neighborhood?) were private and beyond communication, many of them were contiguous images, constantly displaced into the unfolding narrative.

While I am not an expert in cognitive science, or in cognitive approaches to narrative, my experience with Elijah certainly made me very receptive to Frye’s distinction between centrifugal and centripetal forms of criticism.  In Elijah’s stories, the etiological and centrifugal origins of the plot and characters were subordinated to the centripetal patterns of the narrative.  It was in the telling of those patterns that he found extreme communicative joy and liberation of imagination.  Near the penultimate page of the Anatomy, Frye writes, “The link between rhetoric and logic is ‘doodle’ or associative diagram, the expression of the conceptual by the spatial” [335, Princeton edition].  The only way of decoding what in Elijah’s stories made him laugh was to follow the logic of “babble,” to trace the imaginative puns and metonymic displacements of imagery.

What had initially brought me into Comparative Literature was my interest in the revelatory symbol, and how one may understand the processes and degrees of symbolization at work in such varied writers as Spenser and Joyce.  I now find most useful those dialectical oppositions that do not act as privileged dichotomies, but rather as polar continuums, allowing for maximum modulation and movement.  What seems uniquely powerful about Frye’s schemata is his capacity to set such integral distinctions while displacing them into his modal diagrams.  His passage in the Anatomy on babble and doodle, the radicals of melos/opsis [270-81], is one of the few examples I know of a critic assimilating the rudimentary and associative nature of linguistic development into a broader, synoptic view of literature.  A critic, whom I cannot remember any more, wrote that one drawback to Frye is that he does not establish an etiological theory of linguistics.  The lack of a theory of such a priori things (which may have something to do with negative capability) in no way diminishes his achievement of establishing schematic first principles to literature; first principles that may be modified as suits the subject.

The conceptual by the spatial, so totalizing in Frye, is a pragmatic and teachable method of scholarship which I hope to pursue in my graduate studies, wherever those shall be.  The above does not sum up my reasons for wishing to undertake a study of Frye and his applications to modes of symbolism,  but it does note the more humane and fundamental values I perceive in him.