Category Archives: Anatomy of Criticism

Demonic Modulation

The Educated Imagination was the first book by Frye I read, and it’s therefore always a touchstone for me. You never forget your first love. Meanwhile, Fearful Symmetry remains Frye’s most mind-blowing text, The Great Code his most challenging, and Words With Power his most expansive for practical critical purposes. But like many Frygians, I’m guessing, I regularly return to Anatomy of Criticism, and, it seems, almost involuntarily. Every once in awhile I find myself preoccupied by something from it that I seem to recall out of the blue. Thanks to an email exchange with Peter Yan and the cumulative effect of posts over the last week or so, I have been pondering an issue Frye briefly raises in Anatomy that gets relatively little attention (the exception perhaps being Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye and Critical Method): “demonic modulation.”

With demonic modulation Frye makes a much needed distinction between “the moral” and “the desirable”:

The moral and the desirable have many important and significant connections, but still morality, which comes to terms with experience and necessity, is one thing, and desire, which tries to escape from necessity, is quite another. Thus literature is as a rule less inflexible than morality, and it owes much of its status as a liberal art to that fact. The qualities that religion and morality call ribald, obscene, subversive, lewd and blasphemous have an essential place in literature but often they can achieve expression only through ingenious techniques of displacement. (AC 156)

How does demonic modulation manage this? By way of “the deliberate reversal of the customary moral associations of archetypes.” For example, in literature, whatever the current status of received moral standards,

a free and equal society may be symbolized by a band of robbers, pirates, or gypsies; or true love may be symbolized by the triumph of an adulterous liaison over marriage, as in most triangle comedy; by a homosexual passion (if it is true love that is celebrated in Virgil’s second eclogue) or an incestuous one, as in many Romantics. (AC 156-7)

A.C. Hamilton in Northrop Frye: Anatomy of his Criticism describes Anatomy, published in 1957, as very much a book of its time — so Frye’s reference to various forms of forbidden love as “modulations” must have been eyebrow-raising for many conventionally-minded readers. Frye does not call it that here, but what he is clearly talking about is literature’s unique ability to express primary concerns beyond the pervasive gravitational pull of secondary ones.

I’m pretty sure I can remember the first time I ever became aware of this in my own reading experience: Graham Green’s The Power and the Glory, which was an assigned text back when I was in the 11th grade. I remember struggling with the contradiction between Greene’s “whiskey priest”‘s all too human frailty and his compelling nature as a human being I felt I could love and identify with, despite his obvious failings. I’m also pretty sure that even though I wondered about it at the time, I was nevertheless grateful to accept that it was so. Literature was showing me something I otherwise couldn’t account for with any certainty; and within a year I read The Educated Imagination for the first time which articulated what I in some sense already knew but simply could not yet say.

Literature references ideology but does not promote it. Literature gives expression to primary concerns, most especially when they are contrary to the ideologies that readily suppress them. Desire may on occasion be moral, but the moral can never contain desire — and in the struggle between the moral as a secondary concern and desire as a primary one, desire always prevails. That, paraphrasing Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, is what fiction means.

Frye and the Funny

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Frye says of Robert Burton that his “tremendous erudition never blunted the edge of his sense of humor” (“The Times of the Signs”), and we might say the same about Frye. Here are a few of the hundreds of passages in which Frye writes of humor:

For many readers of Paradise Lost the contrast between the domestic, highly cultivated atmosphere of Eden and the nudity of the inhabitants seems grotesque, like Manet’s picture Déjeuner sur l’herbe. But Milton’s approach to his subject is thoroughly consistent with his view of the human state, and it is by no means humorless: in fact a careful reader of Paradise Lost can easily see that one of the most important things Adam loses in his fall is his sense of humor. Humor, innocence, and nakedness go together, as do solemnity, aggressiveness, and fig leaves. (Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 86)

A sense of humor, like a sense of beauty, is a part of reality, and belongs to the cosmetic cosmos: its context is neither subjective nor objective, because it’s communicable. (Late Notebooks, 1:227)

All literature is literally ironic, which is why humor is so close to the hypothetical. If you don’t mean what you say, you’re either joking or poetizing. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism,” 264)

In Synge’s Riders to the Sea a mother, after losing her husband and five sons at sea, finally loses her last son, and the result is a very beautiful and moving play. But if it had been a full-length tragedy plodding glumly through the seven drownings one after another, the audience would have been helpless with unsympathetic laughter long before it was over. The principle of repetition as the basis of humor both in Jonson’s sense and in ours is well known to the creators of comic strips, in which a character is established as a parasite, a glutton (often confined to one dish), or a shrew, and who begins to be funny after the point has been made every day for several months. Continuous comic radio programs, too, are much more amusing to habitués than to neophytes. The girth of Falstaff and the hallucinations of Quixote are based on much the same comic laws. Mr. E.M. Forster speaks with disdain of Dickens’s Mrs. Micawber, who never says anything except that she will never desert Mr. Micawber: a strong contrast is marked here between the refined writer too finicky for popular formulas, and the major one who exploits them ruthlessly. (Anatomy of Criticism, 168-9)

Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack. Attack without humor, or pure denunciation, forms one of the boundaries of satire. It is a very hazy boundary, because invective is one of the most readable forms of literary art, just as panegyric is one of the dullest. It is an established datum of literature that we like hearing people cursed and are bored with hearing them praised, and almost any denunciation, if vigorous enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of pleasure that soon breaks into a smile. (ibid., 224)

Humor, like attack, is founded on convention. The world of humor is a rigidly stylized world in which generous Scotchmen, obedient wives, beloved mothers-in-law, and professors with presence of mind are not permitted to exist. All humor demands agreement that certain things, such as a picture of a wife beating her husband in a comic strip, are conventionally funny. To introduce a comic strip in which a husband beats his wife would distress the reader, because it would mean learning a new convention. The humor of pure fantasy, the other boundary of satire, belongs to romance, though it is uneasy there, as humor perceives the incongruous, and the conventions of romance are idealized. Most fantasy is pulled back into satire by a powerful undertow often called allegory, which may be described as the implicit reference to experience in the perception of the incongruous. The White Knight in Alice who felt that one should be provided for everything, and therefore put anklets around his horse’s feet to guard against the bites of sharks [Through the Looking Glass, chap. 8], may pass as pure fantasy. But when he goes on to sing an elaborate parody of Wordsworth [ibid.] we begin to sniff the acrid, pungent smell of satire, and when we take a second look at the White Knight we recognize a character type closely related both to Quixote and to the pedant of comedy. (ibid., 225)

Yes, I think you are right in ascribing the failure of so many earnest men to a lack of humor. Humor arises from the perception of incongruities and discrepancies in human nature. The reformer is impatient of these discrepancies; he calls them the result of cynicism and skepticism. His outlook is too exclusive and narrow for them, because he wants to apply a few formulas to the world which, universally accepted, would cure all of that world’s evils. Now a man who has a panacea in any sphere is a quack. And a quack is always a nuisance, generally a menace. Whether he makes himself ridiculous or not depends on the amount of humor possessed by his portrayer or auditor, not on his own. (This is the sample of the workings of a mind with mould clinging to it, as aforesaid). (Frye to Helen Kemp, on his 20th birthday, 15 July 1922)

The Five Phases of Symbolism

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Clayton Chrusch, in response to Trevor Losh-Johnson:

First of all, thanks so much to Joe and Bob for extremely helpful responses.

Trevor, my master’s thesis was about the theory of symbols [Five Kinds of Freedom: Northrop Frye’s Theory of Symbols and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Old Path and White Clouds. McMaster University. 2002 ]

I have to admit the phases are difficult to distinguish. The descriptive phase is the odd one out, but the other phases can be thought of as expanding concentric spheres. In each one, the context of the poem is wider than in the previous. So in the literal phase, the context is simply the verbal structure of the poem itself, and the assumption of its criticism is the unity of the poem. In the formal phase, the context is the imaginative world constructed by the poem, and the assumption of the criticism is the unity of imagery. In the mythical phase, the context is the imaginative structure constructed by all of literature, and its assumption is the reality of such a structure (”the order of words”) and its relevance to the poem in question. In the anagogic phase, which I don’t really understand, I think the context is the infinite potential of the imaginative universe, and the assumption of anagogic phase criticism is that the poem is the expression of infinite creative human power. I’m probably wrong about anagogy, but I’m more certain about the others.

It seems to me that not much of interest happens at the literal phase that is not also part of higher phases. I’ve written an essay about grammar in Virginia Woolf’s writing that probably counts as literal phase criticism. I think of Gertrude Stein’s work but even that can be responded to at the level of imagery. So I would say interesting work on the poem as an imaginative unit all happens in the formal phase. Frye seems to want to associate the new critics with the literal phase but based on my reading of Cleanth Brooks, at least, they belong at the formal phase (or maybe both, but not the literal phase exclusively).

So I would say that if you are interested in the unity of imagery in The Faerie Queene without explicit reference to the use of that imagery in other poems, what you may need is a new critical reading.

Who’s Anatomy?

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AnatomyOfCriticism

“The present cannot really be known or understood except through the past. It follows inescapably that the more we know of the past the more we know of the present. As T.S. Eliot has . . . said, the poet is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

“I sometimes think with Oscar Wilde that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

Do these two passages have a faint Frygian ring to them? They are from Anatomy of Criticism. Not Frye’s Anatomy but The Anatomy of Criticism by Henry Hazlitt, pp. 155 and 239.

While on the topic––In 1982 Wayne Booth wrote to Frye to apologize for listing Anatomy of Criticism as The Anatomy of Criticism in the bibliography of The Rhetoric of Fiction, saying that it would be corrected in the next edition. Frye replied: “Well, I don’t suppose it did any harm to either book to have mine listed as “The” Anatomy for a brief time. Most people when speaking to me about it say ‘your Anatomy,’ which is much more disconcerting. In the meantime, I am very pleased that ‘The’ Rhetoric of Fiction continues to do so well.”

Centripetal Meaning and Primary Concern

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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“The Bondage of History”

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Robarts Library, University of Toronto

Joe Adamson’s post of 27 September gives a really vivid sense of literary studies in the 1980s. I was in graduate school at roughly the same time (1983-87), in the English department at the University of Toronto, and his description brings to mind those days of intellectual ferment, when for students in English the weekly public seminar of the Comp. Lit. centre (held on the 14^th floor of the Robarts Library) had all the allure of a revolutionary cell, and when Yale French Studies was virtually required reading for anyone in English who wanted to be in the know.

The way I recall the history of that time, there was a turning point late in the ’80s, when people started to abandon deconstruction in favour of ideology. I can recall hearing one scholar at a conference attacking Marxist criticism in the name of scholarly inquiry in the hermeneutic tradition, but a year later the same person was saying that “whenever I read there is an invisible Marxist looking over my shoulder,” or words to that effect. No doubt the scandal concerning Paul de Man’s wartime writings hastened the turn towards history and ideology, and away from the austere textual scrutiny which characterized the so-called “Yale school” of criticism.

Perhaps I should here explain the somewhat anomalous position from which I write about Frye. For one thing, being an Anglo-Catholic Frye scholar is hardly a common self-identification, let alone an unproblematic one! Secondly, I write about Frye alongside my other work on Victorian and 20^th century British literature, which draws significantly on the work of feminist criticism and the reception-theory of Hans Robert Jauss. In the only conversation I ever had with Northrop Frye, I asked him what he thought of the uses to which Jauss had put his work. Frye replied, graciously but firmly, that he didn’t like to comment on such matters; they was something that younger scholars like myself would have to figure out on our own. I suppose by continuing to study Frye I am, among other things, still trying to figure out the answer to my question.

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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?

The Greek Modes and the Circle of Fifths

Adam Bradley Responds to Peter Yan on Romance and the Key of C