Category Archives: Literary Criticism

“The Greatest Critic of His Time (Potentially)”

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GerardManleyHopkins

Re: Bob Denham’s “Frye’s Superlatives“

“If Hopkins could only have got rid of his silly moral anxieties, his perpetually calling Goethe a rascal and Whitman a scoundrel and the like, he’d have been the greatest critic of his time.” [RN, 325]

Thanks, Bob, for an intriguing post.

When I worked on my article on “Frye and Catholicism,” the Notebooks on Romance had not been published (in fact, the article and Notebooks both appeared in 2004). It would have been nice to have been able to use the following passage, one of the most interesting statements Frye makes about Catholicism:
“By the way, I must get rid of my fear of Catholicism long enough to distinguish the kinds of it that are purely Fascist & therefore factional (the paranomasia of national & natural religion as the Satanic analogy should be noted) from a cosmopolitan & liberal residue. In Dante the former is Antichrist, the Avignon Pope. In Dickens there is a real catholicity of the latter kind.” (RN 28)

I wonder whether Frye didn’t feel a degree of anxiety about the fact that some of the writers he admired most, and who play a significant role in his theory of literature, were Catholic Christians, like Dante, Hopkins or T. S. Eliot.

The reference to Hopkins’s “silly moral anxieties” recalls a number of comments he makes about Chesterton and Ruskin (I intend to pursue the former in a future post). Gerard Manley Hopkins as the greatest critic (potentially) of his time is a truly surprising statement. Hopkins certainly makes some very influential and significant comments concerning his sacramental theory of poetry. Concepts such as “inscape” give rise to many fascinating classroom discussions, in my experience. But Hopkins was also a dreamer, someone who concocted large intellectual and literary projects that he was never able to bring to fruition (rather like Coleridge in that respect). It is hard to imagine him producing enough significant work to be a truly great critic. As for calling Whitman a scoundrel, he nevertheless registered his influence in his own poetry, I think.

A major critical influence on Frye was Oscar Wilde, author of “two almost unreasonably brilliant” critical dialogues (NFR 87), “The Critic as Artist” and “The Decay of Lying.” The conclusion of Wilde’s De Profundis is another place where he anticipates Frye’s ideas. My teacher at the University of Toronto, W. David Shaw, argued that by the end of De Profundis the regimentation of time and space in Reading Gaol have become metaphors for the categories of time and space in general, which can be overcome by the poetic imagination. A couple of years ago I was inspired by a comment Michael Dolzani made in a CBC Ideas programme about Frye to explore the affinities between Frye and Wilde. Both critics shared a preference for the idea of literature as a visionary new creation to the idea of literature holding the mirror up to nature.

It’s interesting that there has been some lively recent scholarship on Wilde and Catholicism. (I have myself shocked several people, at least some of them evangelical Christians, by including Wilde in a course on the Catholic tradition in English literature. I like to tell them the story about how he was baptized three times: the details are in Richard Ellman’s biography).

I wonder who was the greatest of all English critics of any period for Frye, to indulge in some more “literary chit-chat,” if not “sonorous nonsense.” William Blake, who was his preceptor in all things? Frye’s marginalia seem to emulate Blake’s sometimes. Sir Philip Sidney, Protestant humanist and intellectual, might be another candidate (with his visionary golden world as opposed to the brazen world of nature). And Frye, of course, uses Sidney and Aristotle as key elements in his own theory of literature in the Anatomy.

Michael Sinding: Frye and the Curriculum

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1957

Michael Sinding responds to Russell Perkin.

Russell Perkins’ question “How do Frye’s ideas relate to the state of literary studies today?” is an excellent one, and deserves some airing out.

One’s initial impression of the answer may be, “not at all.” But Bob Denham has done plenty of work to show how Frye’s ideas continue to inform research and teaching in all kinds of ways. So why do we get that impression?

What I find striking is that when you look at the history of specific topics and questions in literary studies, it’s not unusual to find that Frye has made a major and permanent contribution. As a fr’instance, I’ve been going through studies of satire. In a recent anthology, Ruben Quintero’s Companion to Satire (Blackwell, 2007), Frye is still pretty prominent, though not so prominent as Bakhtin. Paul Simpson’s On the Discourse of Satire (John Benjamins, 2003) says that Frye’s study shaped much criticism, and that his definition of satire seems to be more widely referenced than any other. And Frye makes a respectable showing in John Frow’s Genre (Routledge, 2006), along with Aristotle, Bakhtin, Derrida, Todorov. These are pretty different kinds of books, too. The Companion is fairly introductory, Simpson’s is mainly a linguistic study, Frow is more poststructuralist, especially Foucauldian (it’s in the New Critical Idiom series). I think you’d find this is true with many other topics, though no doubt some (genre, structure & form generally) more than others.

And yet for all of our interest, there is not (yet?) a strong momentum continuing to develop his ideas, as there is with, say, Bakhtin. Something about Frye’s assumptions and style seems uncongenial to the sea-changes literary studies underwent with post-structuralism and afterwards. So even though Hayden White and Fredric Jameson greatly admired Frye, their followers don’t seem to share the interest, and you don’t see Frye talked about much in e.g. PMLA. Perhaps it’s that he never did engage much with those sea-changes. He continued to work with his own assumptions and system, despite occasional references to Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, et al. Bakhtin didn’t engage with them at all, of course, but his ideas were simply better suited to poststructuralism’s impulses and directions.

But I don’t think we want a defensive / defiant celebration of Frye’s supposed old-fashioned-ness, or unfashionable-ness. In short, Frye’s connections with current literary studies seem peripheral, not central, or in the background rather than the foreground.

I’d like to see Frye have more of the kind of continuing reconsideration that Bakhtin does: putting his main ideas into play with current movements, themes, and questions, and tested and developed accordingly. Think of how much he has to say about culture, including popular culture, worldview and ideology, the social contexts of literature and criticism, as well as all the brilliant structural studies … . There’s a lot that is untapped.

Merv Nicholson: “What Makes Frye Different” (1)

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adam&eve

Mervyn Nicholson, in the first of what promises to be a series, considers what makes Frye different.  In this installment: Desire.

Frye is unusual as a literary-cultural critic-theorist in many, many ways.  But one way that I find fascinating is Frye’s attitude toward human desire.  Frye was a champion of human desire, as was his mentor, William Blake.

But in this Frye, like Blake, is opposed to practically the entire history of culture, a history of hostility to desire.  For Christianity, human desire is corrupted by the Fall, and can not be trusted.  What is needed is obedience to authority; by contrast, human desire is in fundamental conflict with the requirements of obedience.  The problem began with Adam and Eve who disobeyed, followed desire, and thus brought death into the world along with everything else that is bad, from mosquitoes to forest fires.

Christianity is not alone in distrusting and even disowning human desire.  Philosophy has rarely had much respect for desire, which it typically puts somewhere in the basement of human faculties, right next to if not actually in the trash barrel, along with illusion, opinion, prejudice, and other detritus of consciousness. Post-structuralism in its core form of deconstruction maintains the same hostility to desire.  Deconstruction as theorized by Jacques Derrida and practiced for example by Paul de Man, has for its keynote a conviction that desire equates with the unreal.  An entire attitude is summed up in the dictum of Paul de Man: “Metaphor is error because it feigns to believe in its own referential meaning.”  Metaphor and metaphoric thought is indistinguishable from deception, above all self-deception.  Political economy—economics—has stressed the dangers of human desire, from at least Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population on.  The standard economics text begins with the premise that “economics is the science of scarcity”: there isn’t enough to go around.  In the conflict between what we want and what we can have, necessity always wins.  People must keep desire in check, or disaster will result.

Freud, despite his liberal views, is consistent with traditional attitudes. The entire psychoanalytic tradition is deeply mistrustful of desire.  What you want but cannot have, you then create imaginary satisfactions for.  For example, we fear to die, so we “make up” an afterlife, an imaginary compensation.  This view of desire, as the origin of illusion, is fundamental to Freud, who lays it out with particular clarity in The Future of an Illusion.  The test of an illusion is whether it is a wish fulfilment.  “What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes,” Freud explains.  “Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation . . . the illusion itself sets no store by verification.”  Dreams are of course illusory satisfactions, as Freud argues in The Interpretation of Dreams: dreams are all wish-fulfilments.  But wish-fulfilments are by definition illusory satisfactions.  This is also a theme of the revisionist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, as well as of Melanie Klein and the “object relations” school of psychology.  Make-believe compensates for loss and alleviates frustration.  But it is still make-believe, and make-believe causes problems.  Similarly, Freud insisted that fantasies, conscious and unconscious, cause neurosis—fantasies so endemic in fallible human nature that they begin in infancy.  In Freud’s view, infants fantasize pretty weird things because they want weird things, and that weird wanting affects them for the rest of their lives.—our lives, in fact

Frye is so different from this tradition! he insists throughout his writing and throughout his career that human desire is good, that it is a guide, that the distinction between what we want and what we do not want — as Frye himself argues in The Educated Imagination — is the basic axis of existence and of civilization itself.  Literature is a product of human desire, as is all of civilization.  By showing us what we want and what we do not want, literature functions as a guide to ourselves and a means of evaluating the society we have created and that we also have the power to change.  For Frye, desire is who we really are.

Frye’s “Inductive Survey” and the English Curriculum

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 VanityFair

Some observations in a time of transition (and at the start of a new academic year).

 Frye’s claim that literary criticism was a science was quite controversial when the Anatomy of Criticism first appeared.  One of the things that Frye meant by this claim was that criticism should be more inductive than deductive.  Instead of applying a preconceived model from another discipline (his usual examples are Marxist, Freudian, and neo-Thomist criticism), the literary scholar should derive his or her conceptual framework “from an inductive survey of the literary field” (Anatomy of Criticism; Collected Works 22:9).  The implications of this for the teaching of literature are obvious.  From undergraduate curricula and required texts to PhD course requirements and comprehensive examination reading lists, the aim should be to survey as wide a range of the literary field as is possible.

 In terms of literary value, Frye of course famously opposed the idea that literary judgments could be demonstrated, but he was equally sure that some texts were more rewarding to study than others.  The frequency with which he refers to Shakespeare and Milton would suggest that they should figure prominently in any programme of English-language literary education.

 How do Frye’s ideas relate to the state of literary studies today?  For one thing, as he observed through the decade before his death, some of the deterministic forms of criticism of his youth have returned, along with new but analogous models.  At the same time, and as a result of some of these theoretical positions, the idea that there is a distinct literary field with certain established “monuments” has become much more problematic (there are a few exceptions such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and possibly Henry James).

 In my own field of Victorian studies, I would like to make a modest defence of the idea that the aspiring scholar should make a fairly extensive inductive survey as part of his or her professional training.  One useful barometer of the state of Victorian studies is the conversation on the VICTORIA listserv (which is archived here).  It would be invidious to single out examples, especially since graduate students are often required to post questions on the list as part of a course requirement.  But speaking generally, the questions that are posted sometimes reveal that students are able to reach the stage of independent research for their PhD in a state of apparent ignorance of what I would regard as key texts of relevance to their work.  One well-known scholar lamented on the VICTORIA list a couple of years ago that courses require fewer and fewer texts, and those that are assigned tend to be shorter, so that Hard Times generally represents Dickens, to the exclusion of the longer and more characteristic works, while Thackeray is gradually disappearing from view altogether.  Another Victorianist, elsewhere, notes sadly the fact the Oxford World’s Classics series no longer includes all of George Eliot’s novels.  At the same time, the sensation novel has become far more prominent, so that Lady Audley’s Secret, once a vague rumour even to most PhD students, is now among the most frequently taught of all Victorian texts.

 Obviously I have opened up larger questions about the changing nature of reading and education, which I will not develop here.  Nor do I want to deplore in neoconservative manner all the recent developments in my field, some of which I have in fact contributed to.  I am simply arguing that those of us who teach and who determine syllabuses and reading lists should consider our responsibility to promote the reading of a wide variety of Victorian texts, including novels such as Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Bleak House, or the longer novels of George Eliot.  Or, thinking of Frye’s own fascination with the Victorian sages, it would be nice if students were exposed to Carlyle, Ruskin, Mill, Arnold, and Newman more frequently than now tends to be the case. There is nothing wrong with studying Lady Audley’s Secret, whether as a Victorian scholar or in an undergraduate classroom, but Vanity Fair remains for me a more significant literary experience; just as, in Frye’s words, “The critic will find soon, and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet to work with than Blackmore” (CW 22:26).  (Lest any of my fellow-Victorianists feel that I am chiding them for their choice of research topics or class texts, I admit to publishing on Dinah Maria Mulock and Charlotte Mary Yonge, and to teaching John Halifax Gentleman and Tom Brown’s Schooldays!)  A last quotation from the Anatomy: “A critic may spend a thesis, a book, or even a life work on something that he candidly admits to be third-rate, simply because it is connected with something else he thinks sufficiently important for his pains” (CW 21:29).