Category Archives: Anatomy of Criticism

Mervyn Nicholson: Frye, Freud, Displacement

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It’s true that Frye used Freud in a variety of ways, but that does not mean that their “models” or outlook were similar.  As I noted earlier, their attitudes toward human desire were very different.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Freud re-creates a key concept in Freud’s great book, The Interpretation of Dreams (and elsewhere), namely:  displacement.  This term is a fascinating illustration of the way Frye’s thinking worked, the way he absorbed and adapted earlier conceptions.

In Freud, “displacement” is a technique of dreams:  dreams shift emotional emphasis from important to unimportant objects.  Intense emotion is thus “cathected” from its actual inspiration to an object that stands in for it, that “displaces” it, in order to conceal from the conscious mind the source of anxiety (or desire, desire being normally the cause of anxiety in Freud).  Neurosis does the same thing: the emotion causing the neurosis is “displaced” from its real object to things that are irrelevant or connected by some chain of association.

Frye picks up the term and changes its meaning.  In Frye, “displacement” refers to literature’s habit of adapting mythical forms to standards of plausibility or accepted morality.  In Anatomy of Criticism [150, Princeton edition] he illustrates displacement with an ingenious exposition of the use of ghosts.  Displacement is a function of the modes he outlines in the first essay—the kind of things you can have in a story is determined by the kind of world assumed in the story, and that world is indicated by the powers of the protagonist.  Displacement in this sense is a vital and powerful conception, showing how mythical formulas are adapted and reappear in realist texts, but in displaced form.  Instead of a man turning into a bat and flying away, you might have him associated with bats in some significant way, or wishing he could fly away with bats (my example — OK, Bram Stoker’s example).

Frye’s use of “displacement” gave the term new life.  From Frye, it went on its merry way in literary theory, being a natural sort of concept for deconstruction, where what is is not and what is not is what is, and “dis placement” is also “placement”.

My book 13 Ways of Looking at Images deals with Freud’s conceptions at length.  The Interpretation of Dreams is one of the great books, when it is detached from Freud’s psychoanalytic apparatus.  In this respect, I think my adaptation of Freud is close to the kind of method Frye worked with.

The Circle of Fifths, Romance, and the Key of C

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A nice observation from Peter Yan:

Frye used the musical term mode to describe and order the character’s power in relation to us readers; and how these modes change over time, giving us, in the first chapter of Anatomy of Criticism, how a genuine historical method should work in literature.

What is curious is that the ultimate myth/genre for Frye was the Quest Romance, which he assigned the key signature of C, the key which all keys can be translated into, and the key which all modes musical take off from. The Quest Romance myth is the mode which includes all the other myths in its epic form.

Circle of Fifths and the Great Doodle

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Some very interesting comments from Michael Sinding:

Many thanks for this information, Bob, fascinating as always.

Re: the Circle of Fifths. I’m only going by the Wikipedia article, and I don’t know if I’m saying anything new here, but beyond the relations of harmony and discord in the Circle, it’s also worth noting the important of progression, resolution and mood in both the Circle and the Anatomy’s theory of myths.

The article says: “To the ear, the sequence of fourths gives an impression of settling, or resolution. (see cadence)… [T]he tonic is considered the end of the line towards which a chord progression derived from the circle of fifths progresses.” Also, progression-resolution in the Circle seems to be often either upwards or downwards.

In Anatomy, myths are defined by certain resolutions and moods. And resolution and mood imply a certain foregoing sequence of elements.

Examples:

“The obstacles to the hero’s desire, then, form the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution” (164).

“In drama, characterization depends on function; what a character is follows from what he has to do in the play. Dramatic function in its turn depends on the structure of the play; the character has certain things to do because the play has such and such a shape. The structure of the play in its turn depends on the category of the play; if it is a comedy, its structure will require a comic resolution and a prevailing comic mood” (171-72).

Re: Logic and Literature

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 miracle

Frye, I think, would never attempt to dismiss logic –– a word (with its congeners) that appears seventy nine times in the Anatomy –– as a keystone of intellectual inquiry. And logic, along with grammar and rhetoric, is one of the three pillars in Frye’s analysis of discourse in the Fourth Essay of the Anatomy –– an analysis in which he greatly expands the meaning of the terms of the medieval trivium. The best analysis of this is Paul Hernadi’s “Ratio Contained by Oratio: Northrop Frye on the Rhetoric of Non Literary Prose,” in Northrop Frye: Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye’s Criticism New York: Lang, 1991), 137–53. And, of course, Frye was fond of drawing analogies between literature and mathematics, as in this passage:

Mathematics, like literature, proceeds hypothetically and by internal consistency, not descriptively and by outward fidelity to nature. When it is applied to external facts, it is not its truth but its applicability that is being verified. As I seem to have fastened on the cat for my semantic emblem in this essay, I note that this point comes out sharply in the discussion between Yeats and Sturge Moore over the problem of Ruskin’s cat, the animal that was picked up and flung out of a window by Ruskin although it was not there. Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith. The distinction between an empirical fact and an illusion is not a rational distinction, and cannot be logically proved. It is “proved” only by the practical and emotional necessity of assuming the distinction. For the poet, qua poet, this necessity does not exist, and there is no poetic reason why he should either assert or deny the existence of any cat, real or Ruskinian. (Anatomy, 93).

The question is not, I think, whether Frye denigrated logic and mathematics. The question, rather, is whether ratio or oratio is prior. If Frye had thought logic and mathematics were prior, he would not have ended up being a literary critic.

In 1979 Frye wrote to Ruth El Safar, “As I said, I had not had your letter before I returned home so it was all the more pleasant to have it when I got home. It was extremely helpful to me, because Denham’s book on me is just out [Northrop Frye and Critical Method], and it reminds me that almost everybody seems to be preoccupied with my charts and diagrams and with the question of whether they are logically airtight or not, instead of reading me as you do for what incidental help I may give to them in their own work.” This stung a bit, but it helped me to see that a kind of hard headed application of neo Aristotelian logic applied to Frye’s distinctions rather misses the point.

Frye and Logic

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Blake's Angel of Revelation

Over the last couple of days the Comments section for a number of posts have lit up, especially for Adamson and Chrusch: “Both/And”.  Michael Sinding’s comment below brings some interesting elements into play.

The question of logic in language, in literature, and in Frye’s ideas has at times bothered me also. First, we should remember that even though standards of logic and reference don’t apply directly to literature, they certainly do apply to Frye’s criticism, and I think that’s one thing Clayton is getting at. But how do you apply such standards to the use of metaphor and analogy in argument?

I don’t think we should rush to toss logic overboard just by appealing to centripetal attention and human concern, as opposed to centrifugal attention and reference. With metaphor and literature, do we leave behind the world of either/ or for the world of both/ and, where anything goes? But then what principles of structure and order are left? How can we explain why some metaphors are sensible and powerful, and others aren’t? Do they have their own kind of logic?

Let me suggest another way of approaching these things—one that I’ve been working with, and find persuasive. It’s closer to these topics than is formal logic.

Frye argues that language, concepts, logic, even mathematics, have metaphorical and mythical (narrative) structure. In fact, there’s been a big movement in linguistics in the past few decades, to treat metaphor in this way, as pervasive in language and conceptual structure. In “cognitive linguistics,” a key idea is that a metaphor is a mapping of structure from one concept to another. Metaphors carry language, imagery, and inferential structure from concept A (usually well-understood, often concrete) to concept B (usually less well-understood: abstract or subjective). That transfer of inference, or logical entailments, is essential: it means metaphor is genuinely cognitive—not simply ornamental or aesthetic. So people can and do study the metaphorical structure of linguistic concepts, logical concepts, and mathematical concepts.

For example, we can talk about our lives using expressions like “I’ve come a long way,” “I’m at a dead end,” “I’m moving on,” “I burned my bridges,” etc. This indicates an underlying mapping of Life as a Journey. Thinking with this metaphor highlights some aspects of life, and hides others. For an example from logic, categories are seen metaphorically as containers. Thing X can be “in” category A, or “out” of it. If B is a subcategory of A, then it is a smaller container inside container A. If thing X is in B, then it is necessarily also in A. So the logic of categories borrows the logic of containers.

There’s lot of information about CL out there, and it’s been used in literary studies a fair bit. A few references:

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. 1980 (2nd ed., 2003). The book that started it all.
—. Philosophy in the Flesh. 1999. Applies their theory of metaphor to basic philosophical concepts, like time, mind, causation, being, etc., then to some major philosophical systems.
George Lakoff and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason. 1989. Develops the theory for poetic metaphor.

These are all crystal clear, highly readable, and intellectually sophisticated. I find them reminiscent of some of Frye’s ideas, though I don’t find any evidence of him being an influence on them (to go back to that influence stuff). They go into more detail than Frye does about the structure of concepts, and how they get mapped in metaphor, and how metaphors can combine, etc.

This idea, I think, also helps us be cautious about how far our language and concepts actually fit the world. Metaphors and analogies are very useful, but we should always ask just how they fit what they refer to, and how they may clash with it. Things in the world certainly don’t fit the above category logic in any simple way. So seeming contradictions may be only contradictions in terms (semantic, as Joe says), linguistic oppositions mistaken for logical ones. Frye is good at noticing and resolving these. For what it’s worth, I think interpenetration is in large part a way of perceiving or experiencing things. To what extent it’s reflected in the physical world I don’t know. But if Blake’s line ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’ expresses the idea, then the stress is on the seeing: interpenetration arises from attention. By the way, Bob Denham has a great essay in Rereading Frye about Frye’s ideas of interpenetration and where they came from.

Perhaps it should be emphasized that Frye does not in any way forsake logic.  However, he does subordinate it.  The big reveal in “The Tentative Conclusion” of Anatomy is that the “literary universe” he explores across four essays turns out to be the entire “verbal universe.”  It’s not either/or when it comes to  centripetal and centrifugal meaning, of course; it’s both/and.  However, centripetal meaning is prior, and the increasingly centifugal dialectic of language in “Theory of Symbols” returns metaliterarily to its centripetal singularity as anagogic metaphor.  That is not to say that all of the other applications of language have been abandoned or supplanted.  They have been fulfilled.  What ought to be the epiphanic recognition of primary concern (which Frye calls “intensified consciousness” in Words with Power) has passed through logic and is informed by it, although it can’t be limited or wholly defined by it.  It’s this kind of thing that makes Frye a visionary: his ability to articulate the way in which literature is extra-rational; not to mention that “literary” language is the foundation of all language — something even literary scholars are often not very clear on.

Literal Metaphor, Literal Paradox

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A number of posts and comments over the last few days have touched on the matter of Frye and paradox.  Yesterday I cited Wilde’s aphorism that “The way of paradoxes is the way of truth.”  Matthew Griffin responds:

Wilde is cribbing, and making more pronounced, a point Coleridge makes in the Biographia Literaria – itself a neat book for Frygians – that any meaningful truth can only be expressed in paradox.

So Coleridge — whose Biographia Literaria is one of Frye’s critical touchstones — is now in play. Is “paradox” an essential aspect of Frye’s criticism?  If so, where is it articulated?

I think paradox is for Frye a primal creative condition of language as laid out in essay two of Anatomy, “Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols.” 

Frye’s theory of symbols presents an expanding dialectic of metaphorical meaning: the literal (symbol as motif), the descriptive (symbol as sign), the formal (symbol as image), the mythical (symbol as archetype), and the anagogic (symbol as monad).  The only one of these I will deal with in any detail here is “literal” metaphor, effectively the singularity or big bang of verbal phenomenon from which Frye’s “verbal universe” expands. 

Frye points out in this essay what he repeats elsewhere; that language has both “centrifugal” or outwardly directed, and “centripetal” or inwardly directed reference. When reference is primarily outwardly directed we have a “sign” whose function is to point to “the thing represented or symbolized by it” (AC 73). Hence, “cat”.  However, when reference is primarily inwardly directed we have a “motif” whose function is to “connect” elements of verbal phenomenon. Hence, “c – a – t”: that is, the discrete constituents, whether written or uttered, that make up the centrifugally referenced sign “cat.”  Frye, in a famous reversal, calls the centripetal direction of meaning “literal” metaphor, not because it ensures accurate and reliable descriptive reference (as the word is most commonly used), but because it refers to artfully ambiguous “units of verbal structure” — or that which is proper to the “letter” — whose primary internal relation is a necessary condition for meaning of any kind.

As Frye goes on to observe, these “two modes of understanding take place simultaneously in all reading.” However, a distinction can still be made between verbal structures whose final direction of meaning is either inward or outward.  In “descriptive or assertive writing,” reassuringly enough, the direction of meaning is centrifugal.  In all literary verbal structures, on the other hand, the direction is centripetal:

In literature the standards of outward meaning are secondary, for literary works do not pretend to describe or assert, and hence are not true, not false, and yet not tautological either, or at least not in the sense in which such a statement is “the good is better than bad” is tautological. Literary meaning may best be described, perhaps, as hypothetical, and a hypothetical or assumed relation to the external world is part of what is usually meant by the word “imaginative.” This word is to be distinguished from “imaginary,” which usually refers to an assertive verbal structure that fails to make good on its assertions. In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aim of producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs. (AC 74)

The significance of this imaginative, hypothetical, and centripetally “literal” meaning to a properly literary criticism is crucial:

Now as a poem is literally a poem, it belongs, in its literal context, to the class of things called poems, which in their turn form part of the larger class known as works of art. The poem from this point of view presents a flow of sounds approximating music on one side, and an integrated pattern of imagery approximating the pictorial on the other. Literally, then, a poem’s narrative is its rhythm or movement of words… Similarly, a poem’s meaning is literally its pattern or its integrity as a verbal structure. Its words cannot be separated and attached to sign-values: all possible sign-values of a word are absorbed into a complexity of verbal relationships. (AC 78)

The dialectical direction of what Frye calls a “complexity of verbal relationships” is to a large extent what the remainder of this essay addresses as he works through literal meaning to the  anagogic, where the apocalyptic turn of the imagination perceives at last that the whole of nature may be regarded as a human artifact recreated by specifically human concerns.  But here, at the very genesis of meaning, is a centripetal verbal power to assert that which is not, but which nevertheless possesses dialectically expanding significance.  Metaphor, as Frye regularly reminds us, expresses both what is and is not.  What it expresses, however, is real, inasmuch as it articulates a human condition — including our capacity for language — that has the (anagogic) potential to become fully aware of itself as such.

The famous illustration above is M.C. Escher’s “Relativity,” which nicely captures the “what is” / “what is not” capability of the human imagination where even an “absence” is still a “presence” because it can be expressed.  The concept of “relativity” is as distinct from “relativism” as the “imaginative” is from the “imaginary.” “Relativism” seems to dominate current literary criticism which somehow finds its criteria (in ideological constructions such as gender, class, race, and so on) outside of literature as though literature were primarily centrifugal in reference. “Relativity,” on the other hand, requires a constant: in Einstein’s case, that constant accounts for bodies in motion relative to one another.  And, it seems, the same is true for Frye as well; the constant in this case being those primary human concerns which are everywhere evident in literature and provide the impetus for us to communicate at all. Concern is the gestalt of verbal expression; and literature — in its simultaneous acknowledgement of what is and is not as an integral part of its saying — confronts the inadequacies of the world we inhabit with a world we are trying to create through the imaginative expression of our universally shared but individually possessed concerns.

Jonathan Allan on “Disciples”

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Regarding Michael Sinding’s earlier post on Frye and the Curriculum, Jonathan Allan makes this interesting observation:

Another aspect of this discussion, perhaps, is the place of Frye’s early “disciples” or critics deeply influenced by Frye. Fredric Jameson in his recent book, Archaeologies of the Future, reluctantly admits the importance of Frye: “Any reflection on genre today owes a debt — sometimes an unwilling one — to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism” (257 n.3). The other central example being Harold Bloom whose anxiety of influence seems to have completely taken him over (something Frye noticed already in the late 70s). In his introduction to the latest Princeton edition of the Anatomy, Bloom writes: “I am not so fond of the Anatomy now, as I was more than forty years ago, but I probably absorbed it in ways I can no longer apprehend” (in Anatomy vii). In 2009, in the Hopkins Review, he writes: “Now, at seventy-eight, I would not have the patience to read anything by Frye” (27). Thus, a query that seems to be part of this is why these critics have left Frye behind or distanced their work from Frye’s work.

A Note on C. S. Lewis and Northrop Frye

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“…the sophisticated allegories of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis in our day . . . are largely based on the formulas of the Boy’s Own Paper”  (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Second Essay) 

“My reading was now mainly rubbish. . . .  I read twaddling school-stories in The Captain”  (C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Chapter 2)

Northrop Frye attended C.S. Lewis’s lectures during the time he spent in Oxford in the late 1930s; much later he would recall Lewis as the only lecturer in Oxford worth listening to.  The two men would not seem to have much in common: Lewis took a leading role in the revival of a consciously orthodox form of Christianity that is poles apart from Frye’s visionary Blakean Protestantism.  Nor does Frye seem to care for Lewis’s fiction: in the diary for 1949 he expostulates against Charles Williams, noting that “C.S. Lewis must be an influence too, & a bad one” (Feb. 26).  The passage from the Anatomy quoted above, identifying the fiction of the Inklings with the formulas of the Boy’s Own Paper, is hardly complimentary.  But the lectures Frye heard at Oxford were later published as The Discarded Image, a study of medieval cosmology that outlines a “Model” that persists until the end of the seventeenth century.  The affinities with the cosmological schemes in Frye’s work are readily apparent. 

Recently I was struck by another passage in Lewis, this one in his 1955 autobiography Surprised by Joy.  Lewis gives a fascinating account of his development as a reader, and in so doing he assumes something very like Frye’s conception of all of literature comprising a single system, an idea that was most extensively formulated in the Anatomy of Criticism (1957).  Lewis writes of his time at Campbell College in Belfast:

Much the most important thing that happened to me at Campbell was that I there read Sohrab and Rustum in form under an excellent master whom we called Octie.  I loved the poem at first sight and have loved it ever since. . . .  Arnold gave me at once (and the best of Arnold gives me still) a sense, not indeed of passionless vision, but of a passionate, silent gazing at things a long way off.  And here observe how literature actually works.  Parrot critics say that Sohrab is a poem for classicists, to be enjoyed only by those who recognise the Homeric echoes.  But I, in Octie’s form room (and on Octie be peace) knew nothing of Homer.  For me the relation between Arnold and Homer worked the other way; when I came, years later, to read the Iliad I liked it partly because it was for me reminiscent of Sohrab.  Plainly, it does not matter at what point you first break into the system of European poetry.  Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will lead you to everything else in the end.  (Chapter 3) 

There are also, of course, similarities with T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” For Eliot, “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”  In the Introduction to the Anatomy, Frye calls this passage from Eliot “very fundamental criticism.”