Residence window, Victoria College

It has become apparent that there is something rather fascinating about the place of Frye in the academy.  As I have suggested previously, when I came to graduate school, Frye’s value on the academic stock market was low – despite the fact that the University of Toronto was publishing on a regular basis volumes of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  As a somewhat naïve graduate student, I assumed the University of Toronto would be the ideal place to study Frye.  Frye’s archives, his annotated library — his presence and influence still linger at Victoria College at least.  And yet, Frye remains something of an enigma at Toronto.  At the annual Victoria book sale, when I generally buy whatever book on Frye I can find, the sales people almost always tell me stories about when they were students sitting in one of Professor Frye’s lectures.  So Frye is not “dead” at Victoria; instead, he seems to be caught between silence and shadows and yet remains a conspicuous presence: Northrop Frye Hall, various portraits throughout the college, and some of his former students still roaming the halls.  So what does the graduate student today, at Toronto, do?  How does the graduate student approach Frye? 

Joe Adamson recently spoke of wanting to teach Frye and Cultural Studies.  This graduate student of Comparative Literature says: please, please teach a course like this.  Cultural Studies are taking hold in literary studies; Frye seems an ideal candidate to be included in that debate.  In Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader, the editors – Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurshou – include a few selections from Frye.  This is one way to bring Frye into the twenty-first century.

Likewise, David Clark at McMaster write, when asked to compare Frye’s work to Derrida: What does Jacques Derrida’s work have that Frye’s doesn’t?, “I want to say right away that Frye’s work is richly significant. He played a crucially important role in the history of Canadian letters and in the life of a particular Canadian academic imaginary, signs of which are still to be found in the university. One of the things we have yet to see, though, are slow readers–to remember something Nietzsche once said–of Frye’s work, i.e. readers who put enough confidence in the complexity and critical power of his work to be willing and able to read it resistantly and against the grain, and to read it symptomatically, with an eye to its productive self-differences, occlusions, and unconsciousnesses.”  This is, perhaps, another response to how to engage with Frye and one that will likely offer many new perspectives and likely revisionary readings as well. 

I’m not certain if this is or is not Frye’s Golden Age, but I’m inclined to think that Frye is ready for a “come-back” and will likely return in ways that are just now being conceived of. 

Frye is being read, of this I am certain – at least I am thinking and writing about Frye and hope to offer work that helps to re-energize the debate.  But my work tries to negotiate Frye with the phenomena of critical theory, popular theoretical models, and taking him places Frye himself didn’t go; for instance, Latin American narrative.  I recognize Frye thought about Borges and a copy of Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude sits in the annotated collection, as does the Popol Vuh – but Frye still has so much more to offer.  I am sure that readers will continue to find him and academics will inspire a new generation of students to return to Frye.

Responding to Michael Sinding:

I really liked this post, but I’d like to focus on the paragraph I disagree with about the use of ad hominem.

Ad hominem fallacies make an inference from a person’s character or motivations to the falsehood of their ideas. Making statements about a person’s character or motivations in itself is not fallacious, nor is the belief that a person’s character can affect the quality of their ideas.

Statements about motivations are not unduly speculative. They constitute practical knowledge that we cannot live without. Similarly they are not unanswerable, since human relationships often depend on clarifications of motivation.

“Obnoxious motivations” are not always inventions, they are often clearly perceived realities.

Your point about ad hominem statements missing the point is very debatable as well since the truth of an idea is not something that adheres to the idea alone, but it is something that depends on a person’s motivations for holding the idea and a person’s way of putting that idea into practice.

I agree that speaking to the best representatives of an idea should be a basic principle for furthering knowledge, but in the real world we often don’t have the luxury of ignoring everyone we would prefer to ignore.

These are principles that go way beyond literary studies, and so its important that we don’t insist here that reality be nicer or more PC than it actually is.

Michael Sinding responding to the responses to his original post:

Thanks for responses, all. I’ve got a couple more responses to your responses, but let me start with this. 

I am sympathetic to the frustration at the current landscape and how it arose, and the regret at what was lost. But I think the frustration can lead to an over-stark picture of the landscape and the people in it, and I think that is counter-productive. 

Let me explain my motivation for this view. Since we’re talking about Frye, I think what’s most important to preserving and developing Frye’s ideas is to get them back into circulation, which means getting them back into the scholarly conversation. To do that, we need to see him in a relation to the current landscape that is not simply contradiction, and for that we need a richer picture of it, what it’s talking about and how, its pros as well as its cons, how it’s contributed new perspectives on important topics. Once we’ve got that, then we can develop his ideas in some kind of dialogue with other theories and thinkers. I’m talking about a genuine dialogue, of course, not twisting Frye out of shape to fit a trend, or sneaking him in the back door while currying favour with the Powers. No theory should be swallowed whole or taken up uncritically (bricolage should be the norm), and the conversation should be geared towards improving our understanding of literature and culture (not theory wars). 

But if instead we frame the situation just as a disastrous fall from a golden age of Frye, the natural response is to lament the fall, deplore the current situation, wish for some kind of miraculous return in the future. Miraculous, because there’s no foreseeable way for it to happen. To squeeze the metaphor a little further, we need some kind of detailed map of the landscape in order to move in it at all, never mind get through or beyond it—and you can’t get that with a huge brush that paints it all the same way all at once. 

That’s why Bérubé’s view from the other side is a helpful corrective: the new paradigm was partly an understandable reaction to an existing entrenched paradigm that similarly dominated scholarship and teaching: literature as Timeless Transcendent Truths, unsullied by the world. I’ve read enough pre-1970s criticism to know he’s got a point, and that it has its very fair share of oversimplification, caricature, and distortion too. So I never had a strong sense of great loss after the revolution, though I couldn’t understand why some people were so gung-ho about it and so un-gung-ho about Frye. (By the way, I had the impression that the revolution was more against New Criticism and Structuralism, and Frye got lumped in with both.) 

As I indicated, I don’t wholly agree with any of the critics I mentioned, so I wouldn’t hold them up as ideal models to follow. But that’s not the point. Some authors are not worth the trouble, but with most, I can see past the things I disagree with or dislike to see what’s valuable about them. Same goes for Bakhtin, in fact: he’s repetitive, and he can be sweeping: his monologic/ dialogic distinction is exaggerated, as is his praise of carnival. Nor do I agree with everything about Frye. But Bakhtin and Frye and some of the others are intelligent enough that I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt and make an effort to see the potential in their writings. 

So, no doubt it’s a matter of taste, but I find Greenblatt interesting. Going by “The Improvisation of Power” (from Renaissance Self-Fashioning) in my New Historicism Reader, I find him far more readable than some of the other big names, I don’t find him unduly jargony, and I think he’s got some important ideas. I do find his assumptions about psychology, society, and history quite limiting, though. The attitude of suspicion towards the human mind and culture and what they claim for themselves, suspicion that it’s really all about power and self-interest and nothing else, is too absolute. A skeptical attitude towards self-serving pieties is in order, of course, but when it becomes knee-jerk and never seriously questions itself, it becomes unrealistic. This tendency seems to go far beyond Greenblatt (compare Moretti). Maybe there’s a myth behind it. I don’t know the Said book you mention, Joe, I’ll keep an eye out for it. Maybe I’ll say more about him later. Frye’s remarks are fascinating, as always. But I wonder if anyone else can really do this kind of thing? Not just because it’s so dazzling, but also there doesn’t seem much method in it. “Follow the archetypes.” How? (Maybe more context would explain.) 

I notice too that the responses offer criticisms that are often ad hominem—e.g. about the psychology of the revolution, e.g. how it appealed to what’s worst in the academic character, etc. Such arguments are I think essentially unfair, because they’re purely speculative and basically unanswerable. Isn’t such invention of obnoxious motives similar to what we’ve been complaining about in some ideological criticism? Moreover, they can hardly be accurate for everyone in all of these schools. Surely many critics dealing with race, class, gender, ideology, etc. are motivated by genuine social concern, not simply superiority and entitlement. I know enough of them, profs & students, to know this is so. Finally, ad hominem criticisms miss the point because they turn the focus away from the ideas, and it is far more important to deal with the ideas, rather than whatever personal motives and dynamics may be imputed to those who hold them. And it should be a basic principle that in dealing with any approach or school, we deal with the best representatives of it and the best arguments for it, not just any hack job that can be trotted out or invented.

Dealing directly with the ideas can be difficult. As has been said before, Frye’s theories and those that followed are in many ways divergent. If we can use Thomas Kuhn’s over-used idea of paradigms and paradigm shifts for the humanities as well as the history of science, as I have been doing, then the revolution in literary theory was a paradigm shift. (It would be more accurate to say there is a cluster of related paradigms, but I’m speaking in general terms.) And it is much easier to work within a paradigm than to try to change it, or to use some previous paradigm, or to create or use some alternative paradigm. In a sense, this is not fair. Why should people who want to study and teach literature suffer for not buying into a certain paradigm? But there it is. I suppose any field of study always has some paradigm, or a handful of them, and you have to deal with it as you find it. And to once again flatter the cup as half full, we can also see this as an opportunity. There are signs that people are hungry for new ideas. If you have to work harder to budge an entrenched paradigm, the rewards are also potentially greater. And paradigms in the humanities, being looser than those in the sciences, are also more amenable to combination with one another.