Category Archives: Literary Criticism

Shakespeare the Establishment Conformist, or The Virtue of Disloyalty: Northrop Frye and Graham Greene (3)

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The “Cobbe portrait,” allegedly a newly-identified image of Shakespeare fully decked out in establishment conformist finery

In an earlier post, I compared Northrop Frye’s and Graham Greene’s readings of Henry James. Greene’s criticism often seems eccentric, a product of the same obsessions that drive his fiction. His discussion of Shakespeare is as distinctive as his essays on James. In 1969, Greene received the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize, endowed by an Anglophile German, and awarded to British citizens for artistic achievement. He marked the occasion with an address entitled “The Virtue of Disloyalty” which begins,

Surely if there is one supreme poet of conservatism, of what we now call the Establishment, it is Shakespeare. . . . If there is one word which chimes through Shakespeare’s early plays it is the word “peace.” In times of political trouble the Establishment always appeals to this ideal of peace. . . . Peace as a nostalgia for a lost past: peace which Shakespeare associated like a retired colonial governor with firm administration.

In what follows, two of Greene’s major obsessions, Roman Catholicism and betrayal, coalesce in a discussion which, however inadequate as Shakespeare criticism, reveals much about Greene’s view of the writer’s role in society. One should bear in mind that the speech was given during the Cold War, at a time when Russian dissident writers were much in the minds of people in the west, and that it was given to a German audience, about twenty-five years after the end of the second world war.

Greene is deliberately provocative in the sardonic manner in which he discusses the great national poet after whom the prize was named. “There are moments,” he says, “when we revolt against this bourgeois poet on his way to the house at Stratford and his coat of arms, and we sometimes tire even of the great tragedies, where the marvellous beauty of the verse takes away the sting and the last lines heal all, with right supremacy re-established by Fortinbras, Malcolm and Octavius Caesar.” Greene then continues:

Of course he is the greatest of poets, but we who live in times just as troubled as his, times full of the deaths of tyrants, a time of secret agents, assassinations and plots and torture chambers, sometimes feel ourselves more at home with the sulphurous anger of Dante, the self-disgust of Baudelaire and the blasphemies of Villon, poets who dared to reveal themselves whatever the danger, and the danger was very real.

Shakespeare does not, for Greene, belong in the company of Russians such as Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, though, anticipating recent postcolonial critics, he detects a note of rebellious outrage in Caliban’s speech “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.”

Greene then goes on to contrast Shakespeare, “the great poet of the Establishment,” with the brilliant but minor poet and Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell. If only Shakespeare had shared Southwell’s disloyalty, Greene says, “we could have loved him better as a man.” The remainder of the short essay argues that the writer should be opposed to the State, acting as a devil’s advocate in the face of official efforts at scapegoating. The writer should always be counter-cultural, “a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one.” The writer should be ready to change sides at a moment’s notice, for “He stands for the victims, and the victims change.” This does not mean that the writer is a propagandist, but rather someone who enlarges the bounds of sympathy, “making the work of the State a degree more difficult.” Greene concludes, perhaps to the discomfort of some in his audience – apparently the lecture was received enthusiastically by the students who were present – by presenting, as his final example of the virtue of disloyalty the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who “chose to be hanged like our English poet Southwell. He is a greater hero for the writer than Shakespeare.”

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Notes on Frye, from Ten Years Ago

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Throughout the 1990s, I regularly taught an intermediate course in the Theory of Criticism. At various intervals in the course, I would give students a brief essay providing an overview of the unit we were studying. I used the Hazard Adams anthology Critical Theory Since Plato, and always assigned the selection from Frye (the second essay from the Anatomy). What follows is the last version of my notes on Northrop Frye, from the fall of 2000. After that semester, I stopped teaching the theory course in order to make room in my schedule for a new course I had developed on the Bible and Literature.

My notes may be of some slight historical interest to readers of this blog; if I were teaching the course again, I would change a few emphases, but I was struck on rereading the essay by how little I would change of the substance. I’m not sure to what extent the prophecy of my last sentence has been fulfilled; Frye does not seem to me especially influential on the liberal studies and great books programmes that claim to be in the humanist tradition, though I may be generalizing here from inadequate knowledge. Furthermore, reflecting on these comments at the beginning of 2010, my impression is that there has been something of an accommodation between literary and cultural studies in recent years. (Joe and Michael may well disagree with this as an overly sanguine opinion.) I expected to see an increasing polarization between the two approaches, but that does not seem to me to have happened. I think that PMLA is a more genuinely diverse publication than it seemed in the 1990s, and the graduate students I meet are often eclectic and flexible in their thinking, even if they are also realistic about what they have to do to get an academic job. Frye’s place in the contemporary scene is something that I am sure we will continue to discuss and argue about.

In one section of the theory class, during the mid-90s, I had an excellent student – let’s call her Antonia – who was the only person ever to choose R. P. Blackmur as an essay subject in all the times that I taught the course. A colleague told me that she had mentioned Frye in her Canadian literature class, to which Antonia responded, “I love Northrop Frye!”

Here are the notes:

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Clayton Chrusch on Frye and Education

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Responding to Mervyn Nicholson’s review of Frye’s Writings on Education, Clayton Chrusch writes:

I came across On Education when I returned to university to complete my undergraduate degree after a two year absence. I quoted it in nearly every essay I wrote for the rest of my time as an undergraduate. I had read The Educated Imagination as a teen and then again as a frosh, but did not understand it. But when I found On Education, I found something I could understand because it was essentially practical, even ethical. Not that I understood it all immediately. The remaining essays I wrote as an undergraduate had, beside the exploration of their primary subjects, the secondary agenda of coming to understand this little book of Frye’s. It was with On Education that I began my stack of index cards, and it still dominates that stack.

But the roots of my involvement with Frye’s thinking on education are even deeper than that. My grade twelve high school English teacher, Mr. Madill, handed out an article by Frye that appeared in the Toronto Star (Jan 26, 1986) called “Don’t you think it’s time to start thinking.” I still have it. The article is a humble little manifesto that I am sure Frye tossed off in twenty minutes, but it has in no way been superseded by anything I have read or thought. It is still the definitive articulation of my own views.

One of the things Frye writes is: “The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking.”

The only thing I would add to this is that the verbal formulas can become arbitrarily sophisticated without ever breaking into thought. There does seem to be a certain intangible moral element in education, as there is in everything. I suspect this intangible ultimately has something to do with whether we care for the truth itself or only our own possession of it. If we are willing to be wrong so that the truth can be right, I think we are on the right track. It’s hard to imagine Frye’s own verbal formulas being thrown up as a pretence of thought, but if Frye ever becomes as influential as he deserves to be, the false intellectuals of the world will certainly use him as they use whatever else commands authority.

I suppose what I am getting at is a defense of my more traditional idea of truth which certainly ties back to my more traditional idea of God that I alluded to it my last comment on belief. Frye shows us the necessary path to intellectual liberation, but being necessary does not make it sufficient. There’s an ingredient missing, an absolute, unconditional loyalty to a truth that we can neither have nor be. I don’t think Frye views things this way. Speaking about absolutes is a step too far for Frye, but I do not see how we can truly think unless we are willing, not only to build on what we have thought, but also dismantle what we have thought, even what we have believed passionately, and that is extremely painful and so requires a detached loyalty to something outside of us.

Michael Dolzani: Frye and Spiritual Otherness

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We are delighted to post this response by Michael Dolzani on the question of Frye’s anti-supernaturalism. Michael, editor of several of the Collected Works, will be joining us as a byline correspondent.

I think I understand why Clayton Chrusch refers to Frye’s “anti-supernaturalism,” and his entry puts its finger on one of those issues in Frye studies whose intractability proves how truly central they are. As Bob Denham says, Frye seemed open to belief in all sorts of paranormal phenomena, both the spontaneous ones that occur in séances and the significant coincidences that Jung explained by “synchronicity” and also the deliberately evoked and controlled phenomena of magic and occultism. However, Bob notes that Frye did not think of such phenomena as supernatural. A Renaissance magician like Prospero—or, in real life, Marsilio Ficino—believed that he was drawing upon the hidden powers of nature. Such “natural magic” could be white or black, good or evil, depending upon the will that summons and controls it. Witches may claim to serve the devil, but the devil’s attributes—the cloven hooves, horns, tail—clearly indicate that this kind of devil is merely a nature spirit. The hidden powers of nature can sometimes be imagined as a whole hidden realm, an Otherworld like the Celtic Faerie, and perhaps the Tibetan Bardo. But this realm is not supernatural; in the early 1947 essay “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” as well as in the early notebooks it is closely related to, Frye calls it “hyperphysical,” meaning that it is not super-natural, above nature, but an extension of nature. To mistake it as supernatural is an example of what the early notebooks repeatedly call “the deification of the void.”

But if the deification of the void is false supernaturalism, it is certainly a valid question whether Frye believed in a real supernaturalism. I am not surprised that this controversy has erupted in relation to Fearful Symmetry, where Frye is closest to Blake. Blake tended to equate “nature” with “fallen world” in a way that sometimes—misleadingly, I think—suggests that he is the kind of Gnostic who rejected the physical world altogether. That cannot really be true: a bird cannot be a world of delight closed to our senses five if it is merely fallen or illusory. But Blake is pushed in that direction by his repudiation of “natural religion,” all the more so because most of the conventional Christianity of his time and ours is really natural religion in disguise. Natural religion is what happens when the “natural man” [1 Corinthians 2:14], Paul’s term for the fallen aspect of ourselves, tries to imagine the supernatural. The result, as Browning showed, is Caliban upon Setebos, the reason being that the natural man cannot think or imagine beyond the natural. What is the natural? In this context, it is the cloven fiction, the split between the subject and a world of objects alienated from the subject. If the natural man is the subject, God must be the ultimately objectified Object, either projected into the heavens as an inscrutable sky-god (Urizen, Nobodaddy, Shelley’s Prometheus) or into the depths as the Immanent Will of Hardy and his chief influence, Schopenhauer. This is really another kind of deification of the void. Such a God is a Holy Terror, tormenting his followers as he tormented Job, afflicting them outwardly with boils and tragedy, inwardly with the theological nightmares of predestination, the terrors of eternal hellfire, and the intractable guilt of people like Luther.

I find that intelligent Christians of good will are puzzled and put off by the anger of people like Blake and Frye. Such Christians are thinking in terms of a God who is, as Clayton Chrusch says, the beautiful hope of those who are suffering. But Frye grew up in the realm of Protestant fundamentalism, and I grew up within pre-Vatican II Catholicism, with the same rebellious result. Frye, especially the younger Frye, refuses to suppress all the troubling questions; like Job, he stands up and cries out for answers. And unlike Job, but like Blake, he refuses to be shouted down because God has a bigger loudspeaker.

So the natural man cannot be truly spiritual; he can only be superstitious, worshipping and trying to placate a spook conjured by his own anxieties. But Paul’s “spiritual man” is identified by Blake with the imagination. The imagination does not “believe in” God: belief is concerned with the evidence for or against objects, and God is not an object. God is not a “fact,” at least not in this sense. The natural man thinks that, if God is not a fact, he must be a mere fiction or illusion, but it is one of the primary missions of Words with Power to get beyond that impasse.

That is why I think Sara Toth’s essay “Recovery of the Spiritual Other” (in Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old) is an important contribution to Frye studies. Sara observes that, beginning as early as the 1970s, Frye increasingly speaks of a “spiritual otherness.” To the imagination or spiritual man (or woman), God is “other” and yet not objective. In the Preface to Spiritus Mundi, Frye writes, “For Blake and Yeats, on the other hand, there is nothing creative except what the human imagination produces. Stevens polarizes the imagination against a ‘reality’ which is otherness, what the imagination is not and has to struggle with. Such reality cannot ultimately be the reality of physical nature or of constituted human society, which produce only the ‘realism’ that for Stevens is something quite different. It is rather a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves; and sooner or later all theories of creative imagination have to take account of it.” Autobiographical aside: my first contact with Frye was in 1976. At the age of twenty-five, I wrote him a fan letter thanking him graciously acceding to my visiting father-in-law’s request to autograph a copy of Spiritus Mundi for me. In my letter, I specifically mentioned the “spiritual otherness” passage as seeming like a fascinating new direction for him. He wrote back saying that he was working on a book on the Bible, and that this was one of the issues it was important to get right.

Frye is distancing himself in that Preface from Blake’s identification of the human imagination as God. Although Blake is right in a sense, there is different aspect of God which remains other. What is an otherness that is not objective? It is a “spiritual” otherness. And what does that mean? Well, I wish I knew. I edited Words with Power, including the chapter “Spirit and Symbol” that is Frye’s deepest exploration of this, and still feel I do not entirely understand it—though I feel that it does mean something, and though I have been trying to grasp it since I was twenty-five. I think Frye himself was looking for clues in other writers: Sara notes his interest in Buber’s I-Thou relationship. I myself have been struck by how, of the two great Protestant theologians of his time, Frye seems more fascinated by the neo-orthodox Barth than the liberal Tillich. What I think he found in Barth was the vision of a spiritual otherness smashing through the limitations of human desires, human understanding, human words: a transcendence whose revelation or kerygma shatters the mind-forg’d manacles of the fallen world. When David Cayley asks Frye, “Why do you take it as given that God is transcendent?” Frye responds, “I don’t know what else is transcendent. Otherwise, you’re left with human nature and physical nature….Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has grown out of physical nature. It has various ideals and hopes and wishes and concerns, but its attempts to realize these things are often abominable, cruel, and psychotic. I feel there must be something that transcends all this, or else.” When Cayley asks, “Or else what?” Frye responds, “Or else despair.”

Jan Gorak: Frye and the Instruments of Mental Production

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I’ve recently been shelving some of the volumes I inherited this summer following the death of my much-missed colleague and friend Edward Twining. As I stacked some of them, I remembered how when we first came to Denver, Ed and his wise and witty wife Mary-Beth took us on a drive into the Rocky Mountains. As we rose in altitude, Ed began to recollect, with all the vigor and enthusiasm he commanded so easily, the occasion of Frye’s visit to Denver about twenty years before. Unusually, I thought then—but not now—he warmed to the memory of Frye’s unassuming and apparently capacious knowledge of the region’s geology. (I was later to discover that Frye had been a longtime lunch partner of Charles Currelly, Professor of Geology at Toronto and had ghost-edited [ghost-written?] his volume of reminiscences We Brought the Ages Home.) Throughout, Ed punctuated his discussion with regular, and obviously warmly felt, exclamations like “What a generous mind! What an honest man!” There was no reference to Frye’s various institutional and professional honors, still less any asides about cultural power or academic acclaim. Although there were frequent reflections on admired passages from unexpected sources—the CBC broadcasts that became The Educated Imagination and The Great Code.

It was the professional Frye with whom I started to reacquaint myself as I continued in my shelving. My own paperback edition of The Stubborn Structure is no longer stubborn—invertebrate might be a more appropriate adjective. So a hardback copy was most welcome to me. As I started to leaf through the book, thoughts rapidly started to form. I became particularly interested in the essay on “The Instruments of Mental Production.” In the rest of this entry, I shall be largely concerned with what Frye says in this piece, but I pause for a moment to note that I think the network of connections he forged with universities across the world is worth thinking about: what is the relationship between the international Frye and the Frye of the 40s and 50s, who wrote for The Canadian Forum. How did he adjust his discourse to the different conditions of his utterances at that time?

One answer is of course that he didn’t, unlike many contemporary academics, who are conference revolutionaries and weekend consumers of Gucci. Instead, he brought to different audiences the fruits of what he discovered in Blake and Milton. In so doing, he rejected the premises that liberal or humanistic knowledge was ever instrumental, or that the language of ownership and production had much to do with what we do when we teach King Lear or Emma. He reiterated his conviction that education in “the creative arts” was intimately concerned with structured possibilities, not just with fitting bits of the curriculum together in what a faculty might be willing to accept after long processes of consultation and self-study had worn them down into demoralized exhaustion. He emphasized how much of what was most valuable in a liberal education was not negotiable in a roundtable manner, but depended on self-identification, unconscious commitments and, memorably, the articulation of inner vision into structured communication. “It is worth reminding ourselves,” he says, “that in Plato, who seems to have invented the conception, dialogue exists solely for the purpose of destroying false knowledge. As soon as any genuine knowledge (or what Plato regarded as such) is present, the dialogue turns into a punctuated monologue” (SS 4).

There is no substitute for reflection in the educated imagination, not any escaping the need to translate the results of that reflection into organized utterance. A punctuated monologue is not a dialogue, but it isn’t a withdrawal into deep silence either. Because even if your commitments or preferred forms of identification are not with those of a humanist education, you will still need to use the humanist instruments of word and image to communicate them. This is why a humanistic education is so seminal for Frye and for us.

I’ve been thinking about these things as I stacked some of Ed Twining’s books, and wondering if it wasn’t for reasons like these that Frye could have meant so much to a man who, for all his large reserves of play and erudition, would surely have perished in the present academic dispensation. Not so much because this regime emphasizes constant publication—in fact many administrators are anything but concerned about publication—but because we are now so pinioned on the treadmill of constant production that Frye identified in this essay as so deeply anti-educative. Only now the things we aim to produce are not articles and monographs but tolerance, a comfortable learning environment, the public good and God knows what else. In this, the postmodern academy is so often only a parody of what Frye talks about in “The Instruments of Mental Production.” Instead, it is a place best imaged in Book 4 of Gulliver’s Travels where, you will remember, Gulliver talks about the proneness to disease of the Yahoos. What strikes him as odd is that no one has: “Any more than a general Appellation for those Maladies, which is borrowed from the Name of the Beast, and called Hnea Yahoo or the Yahoo’s-Evil; and the Cure prescribed is a Mixture of their own Dung and Urine, forcibly put down the Yahoo’s Throat” (GT 4).

The perpetual administration of dubious remedies is what the postmodern academy craves and thrives on, not productive scholarship (identified as the source of rich ironies by Frye) and still less the possibilities of human life that he enjoins on us for our lifetime study in his final paragraph. But even the impossibilities, even what you don’t want, ultimately assumes “a poetic shape” as this passage from Swift shows.

In circumstances like these, I think Frye’s international presence in the scholarly community brings him into territory contemporary readers will recognize from Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Adorno’s response, it seems to me, is much more like Gulliver’s: recalcitrant misanthropy takes over from hope and, to a degree, vision—much of his discussion in MM proceeds like a discharge of tiny pellets into his own flesh. I’d like to say that, of course, Frye’s is the example we all should follow. But I’m not at all sure about this: what I do think is that the global context that a particular kind of inquirer moves towards seems to produce utopian and misanthropic types in the scholarly drama it hosts. I mean types to carry the meaning Frye has alerted us to: recurring figures in a specific structure.

More Cook on Frye

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Thanks to Eleanor Cook, Frye’s long-time colleague, for this exceptionally perceptive entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

For Cook’s other writings on Frye, see:

“Anatomies and Confessions: Northrop Frye and Contemporary Theory.” Recherches sémiotics/Semiotic Inquiry 13, no. 3 (1993): 13–22. Sees Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism as both an anatomy and a confession: the two genres inform each other.

“Against Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye.” In Agostino Lombardo, ed. Ritratto de Northrop Frye. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1989. 283–97. On the dialectical, rather than the monistic, nature of Frye’s work, and on his relation to recent Canadian criticism, especially that of Eli Mandel. Concludes with the suggestion that in Frye’s Anatomy there is the strong undercurrent of the confession, out of which emerges the dual image of Frye as both the master interpreter and the gracious servant.

“The Function of Riddles at the Present Time.” In Alvin Lee and Robert D. Denham, ed. The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. 326–34. Sees the masterplot of Frye’s criticism as a Pauline riddle that ends in recognition and revelation––as opposed to the Freudian masterplot that leads to darkness and obscurity.

“Northrop Frye as Colleague.” Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 18.

Branko Gorjup considers Cook’s view of Frye’s Canadian criticism in “Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics.” Verticals of Frye/Les Verticales de Frye. Ed. Ed Lemond. Moncton, NB: Elbow Press, 2005. 6–15. Also available at http://www.frye.ca/english/northrop-frye/symposia-lectures/01-gorjup.html.

Frye and Greene (2): Graham Greene’s Criticism

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There’s a silly essay by Graham Greene about H[enry] J[ames]’s view of Catholicism which is only about GG’s own obsessions: if there’s one thing HJ could do, it was separate a social institution from the essential proclamation it purported to carry. He wouldn’t head for any god-damned ‘fold’ on his deathbed, like Wallace Stevens. (Notebooks on Romance 356-57)

Greene’s essay “Henry James: The Religious Aspect” may approach James at rather an oblique angle, but I don’t think “silly” is really a fair description. Edwin Fussell has written a whole book on The Catholic Side of Henry James, where he says that “Henry James is far more Catholic in print than there is any evidence for his ever having been in his private life.” Fussell goes to work in a much more thorough way and scholarly way, but he is essentially building on Greene’s insights in order to provide an insightful and unexpected perspective on the Master. Greene’s characteristic obsessions enabled him to identify a pattern of references to Catholicism in James, which he related to what he called in another essay on James “a sense of evil religious in its intensity” (“Henry James: The Private Universe”). Interestingly, Frye says something similar in the same notebook in which he condemns Greene’s essay. Frye comments that a sense of evil is lacking in Jane Austen: “while she knows what evil is, she deliberately excludes it; HJ has a sense of evil comparable to Balzac’s or Dostoievsky’s, and can’t exclude it. It leaks through the walls constantly” (NR 353). The comparison between James and Dostoyevsky also can be found in Greene’s essay. With reference to the recent discussion of Frye and Harold Bloom, it’s worth pointing out that Bloom calls Greene’s essay on James “egregious” and ridicules him for comparing James and Dostoyevsky!

For me, there is a stranger moment in Greene’s criticism of James, and one more revealing of Greene’s own anxieties, when he writes in a third essay that “what deeply interested him, what was indeed his ruling passion, was the idea of treachery, the ‘Judas complex’” (“The Portrait of a Lady”). That statement would in fact serve as a good starting point for an overview of Greene’s fiction. From his first historical novel, The Man Within (1929), to the late political novels The Honorary Consul (1973) and The Human Factor (1978), betrayal is a major motif in Greene’s novels, and memories of his own troubled schooldays at Berkhamsted School, where his father was the headmaster, crop up everywhere. Greene is a novelist of obsessions – David Lodge once catalogued an impressive list of them, including dreams and dentistry – and therefore it is not surprising that his criticism is also obsessive in nature. Like the criticism of many writers, it often does illuminate his own fiction more than the ostensible subject, but in the case of Henry James he does have something to say worth listening to. In a future post I will say something about Greene on Shakespeare, in the context of Frye’s comments on ideological criticism; there is also much more to say about Frye and James, and I hope to return to that topic as well.

The Critic as Artist

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One of Frye’s favorite critics, Oscar Wilde, observed, “All bad art is the result of good intentions.”

I think Frye makes it clear enough that all bad criticism arises from the same impulse. Literature, for example, does not possess intention in any ideological sense, despite the fact that most “literary” critics have more or less assumed that it does. What literature possesses is concern, which is not intentional but prophetic. The fatalism of ideological criticism is its failure.

That is all.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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I have just finished reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I thought I should begin to address my ignorance of Japanese literature, and I began with Murakami because I was familiar with his book on marathon running. I chose The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle because I was intrigued with the description on the cover: “In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo.” Murakami’s novel provides many illustrations of the stages of ascent and descent outlined in Joe’s contest, notably falling asleep and entry into dream worlds; signs, portents, and oracular dreams; descent into the unconscious, into the horror of past war crimes, and literal descent into a well: “The best way to think about reality, I had decided,” Toru Okada says, “was to get as far away from it as possible – a place like the bottom of a well, for example. ‘When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom,’ Mr. Honda had said.” Among the many recurring motifs in the novel is the use of birds, including the mysterious “wind-up bird” that features both in the main plot and in the interpolated stories known as “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.” I won’t try to summarize this complex novel, nor to catalogue the elaborate variety of ways in which it employs the various stages of ascent and descent. It is a multi-layered, sometimes fantastic, always readable work, by a Japanese author who is steeped in western influences, and it was one of my more memorable recent reading experiences. Though be warned that the descent into the wartime past is not for the squeamish: it’s absolutely an experience of horror. Other moments have a rare lightness of touch and charm. Put The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle on your shopping list.

Reading Graham Greene with Northrop Frye

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnrYBq0SONI

Graham Greene is a writer whose celebrity has waned somewhat since the 1970s, when he was among the best-known and most widely read of literary figures. In terms of the modern literature syllabus at most universities, if my anecdotal impressions are at all representative, he has been squeezed out, like some other British writers of the mid-century (remember William Golding and Iris Murdoch?) by the new generation of postmodern and postcolonial writers. The Modernists of the early twentieth century are still going strong, and someone had to make room for Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith. On the other hand, people must still be reading Greene, as my local Chapters usually has a good selection of his novels for sale.

Greene was one of the first serious writers I read, since he was at the height of his fame during my high school and undergraduate years. Moreover my father had a large collection of Greene’s work, including some first editions from his middle period. Since I am working on a paper on Greene, I have naturally thought about him in relation to Northrop Frye. A little bit of checking turned up the fact that the two men died within a few months of each other in 1991. Greene was born in 1904, making him eight years older than Frye. He established himself as a writer fairly early on, but the book that consolidated his literary reputation as the most prominent British novelist of his time was The Heart of the Matter (1948), a dark story of wartime espionage and sexual rivalry that appeared the year after Fearful Symmetry.

Northrop Frye does not say a great deal about Graham Greene, whose major works are in the mode of ironic realism, and who shares the vision of extremity of the Modernists but without the overt mythic elements that attracted Frye. The discussion of ironic comedy in the first essay of the Anatomy refers to “the kind of intellectualized parody of melodramatic formulas represented by, for instance, the novels of Graham Greene.” Frye did allude a number of times to The Ministry of Fear (1943), one of Greene’s strangest works, which has been termed dangerously close to self-parody. It contains a number of romance elements, and it is mentioned in Words with Power and several times in the Notebooks, where Frye remarks on its use of “Amnesia & variants of the twin theme, no less” (Notebook 11e [51]; CW 13:329). He was impressed by the classic film noir, The Third Man (1949), starring Orson Welles, for which Greene wrote the screenplay, and he recorded his impressions of the film in his diary on 26 April 1950. (The unforgettable closing scene is featured above.)

There is a very good book on Greene’s later fiction by Brian Thomas (An Underground Fate: The Idiom of Romance in the Later Novels of Graham Greene, 1988) that makes extensive use of Frye’s work, and especially of The Sacred Scripture. Greene’s imagination was shaped by his childhood reading of the imperial romances of the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, as a result of which Joseph Conrad became a literary influence who caused Greene much anxiety: several of his works are essentially rewritings of Heart of Darkness, and he suppressed his second and third novels, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932), tales of adventure that read like imitations of Conrad’s weakest fiction. Thomas demonstrates a return to romance, though of a different kind, in Greene’s later novels, some of which bewildered their first readers and proved difficult for critics to assimilate to their pre-existing view of the writer.

He begins with Greene’s works of the 1950s, which include The Quiet American, a novel about Vietnam at the point where American involvement was in its earliest stages, and the war was still a French colonial war. The Quiet American (1955) contains elements of a detective novel, of travel writing, and of straightforward journalistic reporting. It can be read as a novel about sexual jealousy, or as a political novel, or both, and it was very controversial in the United States on first publication, since it expresses Greene’s deep anti-Americanism. A. J. Liebling’s negative review in The New Yorker expressed the resentment many Americans felt when The Quiet American was published, though it also inspired war journalists like David Halberstam. (See here for a discussion of the recent film of The Quiet American that points to some ambivalences in the novel’s portrayal of America and Americans.) None of the standard readings that precede Thomas’s book seems to capture the reason for The Quiet American’s profound appeal: I have read it many times, and have encountered quite a few other people for whom it is likewise a favourite book. Brian Thomas’s examination of the romance archetypes in The Quiet American provides a convincing explanation of how Greene has combined the disparate elements I have mentioned into one of the best English novels of the twentieth century, and his book is also a demonstration of how Frye’s theory of romance illuminates a writer for whom Frye himself did not have a particular affinity.

Thomas sees Greene’s later protagonists as characters who tend to be “escapists” (one of Greene’s volumes of autobiography is entitled Ways of Escape, in which he memorably describes writing as a “form of therapy”), “not merely because they are irresponsible romantics but because they need to recover a sense of identity that has somehow been lost. . . . Escape increasingly becomes a distinctively fictive business, a heroic literary pilgrimage into the archetypal underground territory of the imagination itself. And despite all Greene’s protestations that he represents the world as it ‘is,’ this territory is the real Greeneland.”