Responding to Michael Sinding:

Yes, Michael, you make a number of good points, and I admit to making incidental ad hominem characterizations of the motives of contemporary scholars, especially with regard to their response to Frye.  But given the toxic degree of misrepresentation of his work over many decades now, I think it constitutes fair comment.  (Is Terry Eagleton, for example, capable of producing a single paragraph about Frye that does not contain at least one demonstrable error? See also Joe Admson’s reading of Edward Said.) It’s a matter of value judgment, isn’t it?  Frye says that value judgments are inevitable, you just can’t base literary criticism upon them.  But I don’t think those who advocate Frye intend to do that.  I make judgments about the criticism that’s succeeded Frye based primarily upon what it can’t do.  Sure, I don’t trust the motives of those who dimiss him as readily and unreliably as they do, and I don’t think I’m required to.  But I still turn to the superior method and opportunities Frye offers instead.  My judgments are a byproduct of my response to Frye; my response to Frye does not depend upon those judgments.

So when I am confronted with cant and jargon and endlessly self-perpetuating discourse, I may include value judgments in my assessment of it.  But in the end I’m more concerned with what Frye makes available to us as readers while assessing what those who supplanted him clearly cannot.  In a way, your argument confirms as much.  If you can name critics who are more comprehensive and reliable than Frye, then please identify them.

Finally, with regard to the “genuine” social concern of those who address “race, class, gender, ideology, and so on,” one begins to understand what Blake means by the road to hell being paved with good intentions.  Literature doesn’t need much help in identifying injustices of any kind or providing a prophetic sense of what we might do about them.  As always, the difference between ideology and literature is that ideology requires a program of belief and literature does not; ideology compels and literature invites, and that’s a distinction that matters.  Frye’s singularly literary criticism (as compared to a species of sociology whose subject of study happens to be literature) not only gets us where we need to go, but does so by liberating the power of literature that most other critics seem hardly aware of — and highly influential critics too, like Stephen Greenblatt.  It’s why you’ll find some degree of impatience among some Frye scholars on  issues of gender, class, and race, etc.  It’s not that we don’t care passionately about them as compelling social issues that must be confronted and corrected, it’s that we appreciate that the power of literature offers the best response to and remedy for them.  Therefore, the ongoing demotion of literature from its proper status as an autonomous authority in its own right by literary scholars themselves is the real cause of distress here.  It makes me cranky, anyway.

10        It is possible to live without criticism and just experience reading. Just as it is possible to listen and enjoy music without knowing any musical theory. Just as it is possible to enjoy nature without knowing geology, chemistry, physics, biology, all subjects whose object of study is nature. But as Aristotle says all people desire to know.

9          Criticism and its potential exist the moment a work of literature comes into being. Once a writer writes in conventions like iambic pentameter, couplets, rhyme, then the criticism which examines these conventions become relevant — in this case in the form of the New Criticism.

ANALOGY: Once living things and the human body evolved, then the subject of biology potentially exists.

 8          Criticism shows us how to teach literature. There are critical methods, which parallel scientific methods. There are finite methods of reading, as some readings are valid and some are not. Academic subjects are not democratic in the sense that everyone’s opinions matter. (Science does not admit the notion of a flat earth.) Consequently criticism should reveal the valid methods of reading which contribute to knowledge.   

7.         Criticism is defined as the theory of the use of words, the awareness of the use of words. It is a social science that studies the effect of words on society, the use of words and images by literary writers, as well as the mass media, advertising, politics. It shows us the different ways of reading art, the verbal arts, applied arts, sciences, applied sciences, people and society. 

6.         We are affected by words as much as we are by the weather. Orwell’s major theme: If words are smashed and deprived of their meaning and readers become illiterate, then society cannot change for the better and most likely will turn for the worse. 

5          Criticism helps to relate literature to society. For better or worse, the critic is the pioneer and shaper of culture, a professional reader of writers.

ANALOGY: for better or worse, the law is in the hands of a judge, who is not morally superior to anyone, but merely knows the law more than the average person. 

4.         Criticism has the same relationship to literature as philosophy has to wisdom, aesthetics to art, and science to nature. It relays literature’s vision of the human condition.  Criticism should and ought to progress, to explain these infinite visions of literature, which continues to relate itself to culture, now and in the future.  We do not judge works of literature. They judge us: how well we encounter and engage literature’s vision or revelation. 

3.         Literature is mute, dumb, and cannot speak. It is “not heard but overheard,”  in Mill’s phrase. It shows rather than tells. It does not, like an essay, state its theme/thesis explicitly.  Our experience of anything, including literature, is often incomplete — we need criticism to fill in the gaps and prepare us for the kind of experience we may still potentially have. 

2          A writer should be read, experienced, assessed according to the literary conventions (s)he inherits. We need the critic, the professional reader, to clarify those conventions for the average reader. 

1          The act of criticism — reading, interpreting, translating, understanding — can be as CREATIVE as the act of producing literature. There is a creative literary imagination and a creative theoretical imagination, a power to create and a power to understand. Creativity, therefore, resides not simply in literary genre (plays, poems, prose, essay) but in the writer/artist as well as the reader.

Responding to Michael Sinding:

Thank you, Michael, for the recommendations in your last post. I have enjoyed reading Bérubé‘s blog, and I am planning to check out some of his books to get a better sense of his criticism. Some of the other names you mention I am much less enthusiastic about. My main objection to Said and Greenblatt, for example, is their want of intellectual integrity and honesty, which manifests itself in different ways. As my sometimes cryptic brother Al might say, it is something that makes me automatically distrust them (by the way, Al, I am still trying to figure out the point of your strange comment on Bob’s Don Harron post, and I’m not sure the smiley face helps). If Said and Greenblatt are examples of the best of the lot we are seriously in trouble. I tried to make my way through one of Greenblatt’s books once, but threw in the towel after forty pages. I felt there must be some point to what he was saying but it didn’t seem to be worth all the trouble he was taking to get there. I need to get paid for that kind of reading. Michael Happy puts it well when he alludes to the sense of entitlement that is constantly exuded in what is essentially rhetoric passing for argument: very little information and whole lot of glib and smart-sounding noise. As far as I can tell, the kind of narcissistic posturing that has been the norm over the last twenty-five years really only began to thrive with the critical theory boom: before then many of the people writing now and gaining celebrity for it would have been laughed out of the conference room. There was really a seismic shift in the intellectual standards of criticism and scholarship.

Said, as you may know, takes on Frye in his Humanism and Democratic Criticism and caricatures the Anatomy in the worst manner as the last bastion of what he calls “the humanistic system.” Frye is simply a whipping-boy, and from Said’s discussion there is little evidence that he actually ever read the Anatomy with any attention whatsoever. Ironically, his argument is the very opposite of what Frederic Jameson has to say about Frye in The Political Unconscious when he applauds his unique understanding of the literary imagination as the expression of a social vision. Instead, Said lumps Frye in with Arnold and Eliot as “disengaged humanists” who had no sense of the importance of history, social struggle or social class, or economic and political history. Frye, of course, knew volumes more about these things and their application to literary and cultural studies than Said, who is always, in the most gratuitous ways, showing off what he has read and knows (which is not as much as he pretends, as his absurd treatment of Frye makes clear). Far from ignoring the social and the historical Frye weaves them seamlessly, and in the most illuminating ways, into his insights and arguments about literature.

Here is a good example I read this morning. Now bear in mind that this–a brief paragraph among countless others of the same kind in his published writings and notebooks– was written by a critic who, according to Said, tried to insulate literature and culture from social reality and ran away from any discussion of history and class struggle:

In mimetic times there’s a social establishment in the middle of society, with an upper & lower class both dependent on it, parasitic to that extent, and hence, qua classes, essentially animal classes. The aristocracy acquires a powerful sexual smell from Romanticism once Lord Byron & the Marquis de Sade inherit the devil, along with the Gothic heroes. They get this partly from the fact that Eros has shifted from pastoral & garden metaphors to the numinous nature of forest and wilderness. The sexual symbolism of a lower class is less easily established, but there are traces of it in [Wyndham] Lewis’s Paleface images: Nazi sadism & the whipping of Jewesses in [Robert] Briffault’s Europa; the black man as a sexual symbol; the virile worker & the effete bourgeois (Lawrence’s gamekeeper); even Heathcliff). The beat & hippie people revive the childlike radical of aristocracy which makes it an Eros symbol, including the cavalier symbol hair. The “artist” too, of course, is an intermediate figure between aristocrat & beat, with the same satyrical display of balls.

This is what I would call serious cultural studies, of a quality and of a kind that Greenblatt and Said could never even dream of doing. Because they don’t know how to think about literature as a mythological, imaginative language; they are always reading at a descriptive level, or at an ironic level that is translated into a descriptive allegory. It is no accident that Said turns to Eric Auerbach and Mimesis as his model for how we should think about the relationship between literature and history. Ideological critics like Said are always thinking at a descriptive level, or at an ironic one that they immediately translate into a descriptive allegory. Frye’s rule-of-thumb, however, applies to the entire verbal universe, not a little corner of it: follow the archetype, and eventually it will give you everything you need: philosophy, history, society, race, class, gender (as the mantra goes), ideology (secondary concerns), and of course primary concerns all rolled into one.

And that’s the kind of reading I’ve got all the time in the world for. As the old song goes: H-h-h-how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?

Responding to Michael Sinding’s post:

There are many points that one could engage with in Michael Sinding’s post; I plan to come back to some of them in relation to Michael Happy’s response. For the present, a few random comments: I enjoyed and largely agree with the assessment of “the brilliant, the wrong, and the batty.” Eve Sedgwick is undoubtedly important, but her prose is off-putting: Susan Gubar noted in a review of Epistemology of the Closet that she turns English into a foreign language with her critical jargon, arcane vocabulary, and elaborate qualifications. As for Michael Berube’s blog, having gone through quite a few posts at random, he seems to have missed his true calling as a political commentator. Though I agree that he is a good writer, as well as something of a satirist. I also see he is a candidate for the MLA presidency.

Regarding the Cornel West quotation, with its reference to Zora Neale Hurston’s Republican affiliation: John Dos Passos is another example of an American writer with a problematically complex political identity, beginning as a radical leftist, and moving to support of Barry Goldwater and writing for the National Review. The case has been made that underlying the shift of allegiance was a commitment to the individual and to ideas of liberty and democracy; on the other hand, few people seem to read the later works of Dos Passos (and I am not among them, and so cannot comment personally on them). Perhaps there’s somewhat of a parallel with Wordsworth – in relation to whom T. S. Eliot wrote (with some self-reference?) “when a man takes politics and social affairs seriously the difference between revolution and reaction may be by the breadth of a hair, and … Wordsworth may possibly have been no renegade but a man who thought, so far as he thought at all, for himself.”