Category Archives: Guest Bloggers

Clayton Chrusch: Five Questions about Archetype

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Responding to Joe Adamson:

I’m not anti-archetypist. I’d actually like to see more of this kind of spirited defence of the the term and the concept.

The reason I suggested Frye’s word choice was a disaster and not just a misfortune was that I think archetypes are very important, and that they are so easily dismissed actually is a disaster.

I was having lunch last week with a good friend on the other side of the critical divide (I said imagination was the matrix of human meaning and she said it was ideology) and when the conversation came to archetypes, what I really needed at that moment was not a more profound appreciation of archetypes but short and simple responses to all the common criticisms:

1. What did Frye actually mean by the word?

2. What are some examples other than hero and whore?

3. Aren’t archetypes psychological entities described by Jung?

4. How can you say archetypes are universal when they are based on northern hemisphere climate imagery? Aren’t Frye’s archetypes Eurocentric?

5. How can transcendent entities have any explanatory power?

I muddled through but was disappointed by inability to offer good answers to these questions.

What would you, Joe, or anyone else have answered?

Summary of Chapter Four of Fearful Symmetry: A Literalist of the Imagination

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Here is Clayton Chrusch’s excellent summary of Chapter Four of Fearful Symmetry:

A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.

1. Blake’s view of art: “proud and demonic”

In this chapter, Frye explains Blake’s views about art in general and specifically about visual art.

Blake was a practicing artist which distinguishes him from other thinkers who otherwise had similar views. His views about art are highly developed, central to his thought, and distinguish him as a thinker. For Blake, art stabilizes our experience by removing it from the world of time and space where everything is necessarily blurred. It does not seek to escape from reality but to perceive it clearly and recreate it as a permanent and living form.

Art is superior to abstract thought because it addresses the whole person, not just the conceptual intellect, and demands a total response, including a physical response. A generalization never has the vividness of an example or an illustration. Christ, in this sense, was an artist. Frye writes,

Christ brought no new doctrines: he brought new stories. He did not save souls; he saved bodies, healing the blind and deaf that they might hear his parables and see his imagery. He stands outside the history of general thought; he stands in the center of individual wisdom.

By wisdom, Frye means, “the application of the imaginative vision taught us by art.”

Some people have knowledge without wisdom, which means they possess an unorganized collection of information. Wisdom takes knowledge, abstract or otherwise, organizes it according to a grand pattern, and fits it into a universal imaginative vision. We cannot be satisfied by acquiring knowledge until we have a universal vision that it all fits in.

Here Frye turns to the relationship between art and religion. He recognizes that art cannot give the objective support to religion that dogma can be, but he prefers it that way. Frye claims this kind of objective support leads to a perpetual spiritual infancy and the worship of nature. It is okay to rely on dogma in our most difficult moments, but otherwise dogma must itself be treated as an art form, infinitely suggestive but also flawed and provisional. Frye writes,

The state of Eden [the free and exuberant creativity of an artist] to [dogmatic religions] is proud and demonic, a state in which one forgets God. But one forgets God in that state only in the sense in which one forgets one’s health by being healthy: one is merely released from the tyranny of “memory.”

And so Blake is clear that one cannot be a true Christian without being an artist.

2. Art builds up a permanent structure above time.

Culture or civilization is the totality of art, and art is every worthwhile task done well. Though culture supports society, society, being fallen, constantly resists and attacks culture. Art is ornament, it requires and manifests a freedom above the restrictions of necessity, but the fallen world attempts to eliminate all ornament and to bind people in the chains of necessity. People can only achieve happiness by being artists, that is, by living a free and creative life. Compulsion cannot result in order because it develops out of anarchy which itself develops out of Selfhood or self-absorption.

So divinity is the origin of inspiration; art arises from inspiration; culture and civilization are built up by art; and culture, being the totality of eternal imaginative acts, builds up a permanent structure above time called Golgonooza in Blake’s mythology.

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Clayton Chrusch: Hermeneutics of Charity

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Responding to Russell Perkin:

You write, “All of the above may seem rather an anecdotal collage, but my point is that these examples are signs of the times, and that they are at least superficially at odds with the concerns and practices of Northrop Frye, especially his writings about the Bible and religion. If my account is granted at least some degree of plausibility, the question becomes in what way Frye’s writings fit into the context I have described?”

Frye rejects orthodoxy, and I don’t think putting a “neo-” or a “radical” in front of the word changes anything. It seems like the one, or at least the strongest, either/or position in Frye’s thought. Frye’s views are incompatible both with the traditional content of orthodoxy (particularly damnation) and the necessary form of orthodoxy (intellectual assent before love). Orthodoxy for Frye is just a smilier form of fundamentalism, an idolotry of one’s current understanding of God.

Somewhere, I am not sure where, Frye speaks about the hermeneutic of charity. In my own words, the idea is this: since it is impossible to love a God we see as evil, and since the first commandment of Jesus is to love God, we must not accept any doctrine or passage of scripture until we positively see that it is an expression of God’s goodness. The clearest articulation of this principle that I know of is in George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons.

We can see immediately how the hermeneutic of charity is opposed to orthodoxy. Orthodoxy gets things exactly backwards by requiring people to start with truth and end in love. You cannot start with truth, only with settled opinions, and if you start with settled opinions you will end up not with love but bigotry and cruelty. Love is what we are capable of now. It is God’s immediate command. It alone is what brings us to truth by opening our eyes and ears.

Frye doesn’t generally speak about love, but about desire, concern, and imagination, but I think it amounts to the same thing.

Matthew Griffin: Frye and the Bible

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Responding to Russell Perkin:

Frye has been formative to how I read the Bible. Well before I ever went to seminary and sat through biblical studies courses (which are almost universally boring to anyone who’s had a bibliography course or two), it was obvious to me that the Bible was a set of widely disparate texts in a multitude of genres–some books even mishmashes of a half dozen different viewpoints and sources of history. I’m a product of my age, culture, and education, and as such I don’t find even remotely off-putting Benjamin Jowett’s then radical notion in Essays and Reviews that we should read the Bible like any other book. It should and does bear careful study. At the same time, I’ve been completely influenced by Frye, and read the Bible as a complete verbal structure (or universe) that is cohesive and consistent in its own peculiar and delightful way. The discussion on the blog the other day of first encounters with Frye made me remember buying The Great Code in Bryan Prince Booksellers a dozen years ago, and smiling at how battered my copy is — and how many of those ghastly multi-coloured post-it tabs are sticking out of it! It’s Frye’s thought that has helped me to hold these two poles in a way that’s allowed me some measure of ability for self-polyvalent reading. 

The experience of kerygma reveals an odd tension: it generates a revelation of the divine, the Holy Other, through the use of myth by the one experiencing the myth.  Put another way, when scripture is read by believers to encounter God, metaphor is functioning because the story we read is at once the story of the faith of our forebears and our story.  For example: the challenge I face with the composition of a funeral sermon is that, at its best, it seeks to take the stories of the deceased and to overlay them upon the story of our encounter with the divine in the person of Jesus: not to make the person out to be Jesus, but to help us to see how the person lived on the border of the holy in such a way as to reveal God to us.  A funeral has the three tasks of celebrating the life of the deceased, mourning his or her passing, and proclaiming our hope—and the preacher’s noblest desire is to be a vehicle for the metaphor that shows how the story of the dead is at once the story of the dead and our story and God’s story.  This pastoral task is only possible if the stories of scripture do cohere in some way: if every story, indeed, is a vehicle for the divine.

The challenge I face as I read and spend time with radical orthodoxy and the like is that these “new” forms of theology insist on a post-modern fragmentation of meaning and yet ultimately can’t eschew the fact that there is a referent, that the many stories of scripture are one story of God’s active presence and love in history.  (And here an aside: just as Frye argues that there’s no such thing as a new form of literature, that each form is heavily dependent on the literature that informs it, I would myself argue the same thing about theology and theological movements.)  Yet there’s a desire for eschewal that may explain the tension in the first of Russell Perkin’s numbered points, and why people may move away from Frye.  It’s not a perspective that makes much sense to me, given that sensitivity to different lenses for reading, so very needed in theology, can’t really move all that far from the one story–though we might focus on any one aspect, from honour/shame dynamics to feminist criticism to liberation theology—without ceasing to recognise the myth being engaged as kerygmatic. 

I have one or two other challenges with what Russell writes.  One is that I’m not convinced that radical orthodoxy, to return to the example he used, really moves all that far from what he calls the liberal Protestantism that dominated the middle of the twentieth century.  Radical orthodoxy’s focus on social justice is more contextual and partnership-based than the earnest and somewhat patronizing way of living out the “social dimension of religion” that marks Frye’s era.  Yet a realised eschatology—“the kingdom of God is within you”—still marks our lives and the current context, and is at the heart of a renewed understanding of the missio Dei within the Church (see David Bosch’s Transforming Mission for a better unpacking of that idea).

For me, Frye has been a religious and spiritual teacher because his work continues to shape how I re-encounter scripture.  I’ll never forget reading his dismissal as silliness of the idea of trying to talk about what is true in the Bible—clearly Bill Phipps didn’t read enough Frye, back when he was the moderator of the United Church of Canada!—and the corollary that the stories are truth: after all, truth is their genre.    Frye may not help me as I try figure out just what I’m going to say on Sunday morning about the healing of Bartimaeus.  He does help me to enter into that universe, though, and I think that’s always the only possible first step in trying to share what I experience as good news.

Jonathan Allan: Northrop Frye and the Twenty-First Century

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Residence window, Victoria College

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.

Summary of Chapter Three of Fearful Symmetry: Beyond Good and Evil

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Here is Clayton Chrusch’s excellent summary of Chapter Three of Fearful Symmetry. Beyond Good and Evil:

But as only the worst of men would torture other men in hell endlessly, given the power, those who believe God does this worship the devil, or the worst elements in man.

1. Evil is turning away from the imagination and restraining action.

I’ll let Frye introduce this chapter:

We now come to Blake’s ethical and political ideas, which, like his religion, are founded on his theory of knowledge. It is impossible for a human being to live completely in the world of sense. Somehow or other the floating linear series of impressions must be ordered and united by the mind. One must adopt either the way of imagination or the way of memory; no compromise or neutrality is possible. He who is not for the imagination is against it.

This whole introductory section is worth reading in the original. In short, evil is turning away from perception rather than passing through it to vision. Evil is an attempt to restrain the imagination, to restrain life, and so it is ultimately a death impulse. Restraint is what characterizes all evil–restraining oneself or restraining another. Evil is not active except where the purpose is to frustrate further activity. And so all vices are negative things–negations of action, negations of one’s senses, negations of imagination. It follows, as Blake writes, “all Act is Virtue.”

The negation of the imagination can also be thought of as a perversion of it. A perverted imagination descends quickly into either fear or cruelty. Cruelty is mischievous curiosity, and fear “is not so much the horror of the unknown as a fascinated attraction to it.” In society, the cruel become tyrants and the fearful become victims. Imaginative people are rare enough that history in retrospect looks very much like an unchanging parasitic relationship between tyrant and victim, a relationship supported as much by the cowardice of the victim as the cruelty of the tyrant.

The imagination is self-development, which “leads us into a higher state of integration with a larger imaginative unit which is ultimately God.” What is egocentric in us is incapable of the expansion outward that characterizes self-development. And so Blake accepts a view of original sin in which there are two parts to us, a part capable of only good, and a part capable of evil as well as good. So Frye writes, “Man has within him the principle of life and the principle of death: one is the imagination, the other the natural man.”

The cure for original sin is vision, a recognition that the world we live in is fallen but not final–that a better world and a better humanity are possible. Good, honest people who lack this vision are on the right side, but still have not achieved all they can. A person with vision is a prophet. Prophecy is not a mysterious ability of telling the future, it is simply the imaginative activity of “an honest man with a sharper perception and a clearer perspective than other honest men possess.” This perception reveals an “infinite and eternal reality.”

2. State religion is that of the self-righteous prig who is the Prince of this world.

The source of all tyranny is not in the temporal world, but in the sense of “a mysterious power lurking behind” powerful people. Generating this sense of mystery is the work of state religion and the caste of priests who administer it. So as pernicious as tyrants are, we cannot end tyranny by overthrowing tyrants. Tyranny is founded on false religion and the only cure for it is true religion.

You can tell false religion because it posits a God “who is unknown and mysterious because he is not inside us but somewhere else: where, only God knows. Second, it preaches submission, acceptance and unquestioning obedience.” False religion is state religion and exists to rationalize power, but it is constantly under attack by the imagination. The imagination causes false religion to constantly alter and solidify its form and eventually can succeed in forcing false religion into a consolidation of error, which is a perfect negation of truth. This consolidation of error makes false religion much more vulnerable than would the vagueness and fog which are its preferred anti-imaginative weapons.

False religion achieves its highest form in the God of official Christianity who was invented to counter the genuine teachings of Jesus. Frye writes,

This God is good and we are evil; yet, though he created us, he is somehow or other not responsible for our being evil, though he would consider it blasphemous either to assert that he is or to deny his omnipotence. All calamities and miseries are his will, and to that will we must be absolutely resigned even in thought and desire. The powers that be are ordained of him, and all might is divine right. The visions of artists and prophets are of little importance to him: he did not ordain those, but an invariable ritual and a set of immovable dogmas, which are more in keeping with the ideas of order. Both of these are deep mysteries, to be entrusted to a specially initiated class of servants. He keeps a grim watch over everything men do, and will finally put most of them in hell to scream eternally in torment, eternally meaning, of course, endlessly in time. A few, however, who have done as they have been told, that is, have done nothing creative, will be granted an immortality of the “pie in the sky when you die” variety.

Frye then qualifies this by saying, “It is easy to call this popular misunderstanding, but perhaps harder to deny that orthodox religion is founded on a compromise with it.” Worshipping a God who, among other things, tortures men forever, means worshipping the devil. This devil does not exist except as bogeyman projected by priests and rulers, and yet somehow this does not prevent him from being the “Prince of this world.”

As the Prince of this world, the devil demands obediance, uniformity, and mediocrity, all of which are called good in official morality. Thus, “all that is independent, free and energetic comes to be associated with evil.” Satan, who is the accuser of sin, is “not himself a sinner but a self-righteous prig.”

For Blake, engaging in good vs. evil battles, whatever one’s conception of good and evil, is an expression of a death impulse. Life requires a battle, but it is a battle between truth and error.

Satanism, in Blake’s time, was most perfectly expressed as Deism, characterized by a belief in the physical world as the only real one and an almost enthusiastic resignation to the conditions and restrictions the physical world imposes on human life. Though contentment seems like a reasonable approach to life, it fails spectacularly in practice, leading to hysteria and warfare. Furthermore, the imagination can never accept the fallen world that it finds itself in.

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Clayton Chrusch Re: Big Picture, Cont’d

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ad hominem

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: Big Picture, Cont’d

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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.

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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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.