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Re: Frye’s choice for “greatest English critic<\/a>“:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n I think Shelley<\/a> would be a strong candidate for Frye\u2019s \u201cgreatest English critic\u201d\u2013I\u2019m thinking mainly about the Shelley that appears in The Critical Path<\/em>. I was talking to Frye once about his affinities with Coleridge<\/a>, and he said he wondered why nobody had ever remarked on his closeness to Shelley. But who knows? Maybe it\u2019s the \u201cdivine Oscar,\u201d as Bloom<\/a> calls Wilde.<\/p>\n Michael Happy writes, \u201cIn Creation and Recreation<\/em> Frye does Wilde the compliment he grants no one else, that I can recall: he adopts his critical outlook with little filtering or conditions. When I was an undergrad, I loved Wilde\u2019s criticism, which I discovered all by myself and couldn\u2019t get anyone else to read. When I finally read Creation and Recreation<\/em>, I was delighted to discover that Frye had been there before me. But, then, that\u2019s where he always is, isn\u2019t he?\u201d<\/p>\n Here are the passages in Creation and Recreation<\/em> Happy was referring to, followed by other places in Frye\u2019s writing where Wilde makes an appearance:<\/p>\n A year or so ago, after agreeing to help teach an undergraduate course in Shakespeare, I settled down to reread one of my favourite pieces of Shakespearean criticism, Oscar Wilde\u2019s essay on \u201cThe Truth of Masks<\/a>.\u201d The essay, however, was one in a collected volume of Wilde\u2019s critical essays, and I find it easy to get hooked on Wilde. His style often makes him sound dated, and yet he is consistently writing from a point of view at least half a century later than his actual time. He is one of our few genuinely prophetic writers, and, as with other prophets, everything he writes seems either to lead up to his tragic confrontation with society or reflect back on it. Partly because of this, he deliberately restricts his audience. He sets up a palisade of self-conscious and rather mechanical wit, which not merely infuriates those who have no idea what he is talking about but often puts off those who do. We may get so annoyed at his dandies waving their hands languidly at thick volumes labelled \u201cPlato\u201d or \u201cAristotle\u201d that we may forget that Wilde could, and did, read Greek, and that his references to classical authors are usually quite precise. So before long I was back in the world of the essay called \u201cThe Decay of Lying<\/a>,\u201d now widely recognized to have said a great deal of what modern theories of criticism have been annotating in more garbled language ever since.<\/p>\n The main thesis of this essay is that man does not live directly and nakedly in nature like the animals, but within an envelope that he has constructed out of nature, the enve\u00aclope usually called culture or civilization. When Words\u00acworth urges his reader to leave his books, go outdoors, and let nature be his teacher, his \u201cnature\u201d is a north temperate zone nature which in nineteenth-century England had become, even in the Lake District, largely a human artefact. One can see the importance, for poets and others, of the remoteness and otherness of nature: the feeling that the eighteenth century expressed in the word \u201csublime\u201d conveys to us that there is such a thing as creative alienation. The principle laid down by the Italian philosopher Vico<\/a> of verum factum<\/em>, that we understand only what we have made ourselves, needs to be refreshed sometimes by the contempla\u00action of something we did not make and do not understand. The difficulty with Wordsworth\u2019s view is in the word \u201cteacher.\u201d A nature which was not primarily a human artefact could teach man nothing except that he was not it. We are taught by our own cultural conditioning, and by that alone.<\/p>\n We may see already that the word \u201ccreation\u201d involves us in a state of mind that is closely parallel with certain types of paranoia, which may give us a clue to what Wilde means by \u201clying.\u201d Our envelope, as I have called it, the cultural insulation that separates us from nature, is rather like (to use a figure that has haunted me from childhood) the window of a lit-up railway carriage at night. Most of the time it is a mirror of our own concerns, including our concern about nature. As a mirror, it fills us with the sense that the world is something which exists primarily in reference to us: it was created for us; we are the centre of it and the whole point of its existence. But occasionally the mirror turns into a real window, through which we can see only the vision of an indifferent nature that got along for untold aeons of time without us, seems to have produced us only by accident, and, if it were conscious, could only regret having done so. This vision propels us instantly into the opposite pole of paranoia, where we seem to be victims of a huge conspiracy, finding ourselves, through no will of our own, arbitrarily assigned to a dramatic role which we have been given no script to learn, in a state of what Heidegger calls \u201cthrown\u00acness.\u201d \u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> <\/a>36-7<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n There is a kind of painting known as trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em>, which endeavours to render pictorial objects so accurately that the viewer might be deceived into thinking that he was looking at the real thing. Trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em> is a quite legitimate form of painting, but the word \u201cdeceive\u201d indicates the paradox in it. Returning to our figure again, when it comes to representing the outer world, no painting can compare with a window pane. This principle applies much more forcibly to literature, because there is no verbal equivalent of the window pane. Words can describe things only approximately: all they do with any real accuracy is hang together, in puns, metaphor, assonances, and the self-contained fictions of grammar and syntax.<\/p>\n All this is contained in Wilde\u2019s conception of the creative arts as essentially forms of \u201clying,\u201d or turning away from the external world. As long as we can keep telling one another that we see the same things \u201cout there,\u201d we feel that we have a basis for what we call truth and reality. When a work of literature is based on this kind of reality, however, it often tells us only what we no longer want to know. For this reason Wilde makes fun of the careful documentary realism of Zola<\/a> and others which had such a vogue in his time, of Zola settling down to give us a definitive study of the Second Empire at the moment when the Second Empire had gone hopelessly out of date. But the attack on realism is a side-\u00acissue of a far more insidious disease of writing: the morbid lust for what Matthew Arnold<\/a> calls seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. \u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> 38-9<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What Wilde calls realism, the attempt to base the arts on the recognizable, to find a common ground of reality with the audience, is, he suggests, a search for some kind of emotional reassurance. I hear an echo of this whenever I listen to complaints about the difficulty or obscurity of contemporary art, complaints which often take the form, \u201cbut I think a work of art ought to communicate something.\u201d The function of the recognizable in the arts is not aesthetic but anaesthetic. A painter of cows in a field is bound to be addressing some people who want to be reminded of cows more than they want to see pictures. The cows function as a tranquillizer, so that the more genuinely attentive part of the viewer\u2019s mind is released for pictorial experience. A painter may, however, get fed up with the compromise involved, as most painters today in fact have done, and say: to hell with the cows; look at the form and colour of the picture. If this is his attitude he is not withdrawing from \u201creality\u201d: he is seeing more intensely by means of his medium. The recognizable as such is, in human terms, the non-creative; it is the disturbing insight into it that we associate with the word \u201ccreation.\u201d<\/p>\n All this has become a commonplace in a time like ours when we are so much more heavily insulated against \u201cnature\u201d than we were even in Wilde\u2019s time. A glance out of the win\u00acdow of an aeroplane, to the patterns of the landscape or city lights below, will tell us why this is the century of Kandin\u00acsky and not that of Constable or Ruysdael; more important, it will also tell us that space for us has become a set of co-ordinated points: we do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres. In \u201cThe Decay of Lying\u201d Wilde is, verbally, defending the romantic against the realis\u00actic, but these are only the terms of his age: the positive thing he is defending is not the romantic but the unmediated. His point is that what is called realism is not founded on nature or reality at all. We never see these things directly; we see them only through a prism of conventionalized common\u00acplaces, outworn formulas within the art itself, the fossilized forms of earlier attempts to escape from nature and reality. Only a distorted imagination that breaks away from all this and sees reality as a strange, wonderful, terrible, fantastic world is creative in the human sense of the term. \u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> 40-1<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I turn the pages of my Wilde book to the next essay, \u201cThe Critic as Artist<\/a>,\u201d and there I read near the beginning the wonderful passage about music: First, of course, we cannot restrict the scope of this passage to music; it applies to all the arts, though it may well be true that music has some special mystery about its evocations. Second, we see that Wilde is postulating two levels of experi\u00acence, in which one level is remembered and the other repressed, though he gives repression a very different context from Freud. \u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> 41<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This principle of the arts evoking the real and repressed past is familiar to us from Proust<\/a>, whose narrator Marcel perceives the pattern of his own real past through an acci\u00acdental glimpse of it, so that he comes to the beginning of the imaginative vision of his life at the moment when his reader comes to the end of it. The implication is that what Marcel sees at the end of his experience is the possibility of looking at it in the way that the reader should have been looking at it all along. This opens up the issue of the creative reader and his role in literature, which is Wilde\u2019s main concern in this essay, and to which I shall return in the last chapter. \u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> 42<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Wilde attempted to deal with this aspect of creation too, in his essay \u201cThe Soul of Man under Socialism<\/a>.\u201d He remarks there that \u201ca map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.\u201d By \u201csocialism,\u201d however, Wilde means apparently only distributing wealth and opportunity more evenly, so that all people can become pure individualists, and hence, to some degree, artists. He says that in his ideal world the state is to produce the useful, and the individual or artist the beautiful. But beauty, like nature and reality, is merely another of those reassuring words indicating a good deal of ready-made social acceptance. Wilde is preoccupied in this essay by his contempt for censorship, and is optimistic that what he calls socialism would bring about the end of the tyranny of an ignorant and mischievous public opinion. This has not been our experience of socialism or any other system since Wilde\u2019s time, and his prophetic vision in this essay seems to have gone out of focus. But, as usual, his sense of context is very accurate: he identifies the two aspects of our subject, the creation of a future society and the continuing of the creativity of the past in spite of the past. As he says: \u201cthe past is what man should not have been; the present is what man ought not to be; the future is what artists are.\u201d \u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> 44-5<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It has puzzled many people that it is possible for someone, the commandant of a Nazi death camp, for example, to have a cultivated taste for the arts and still be what he is. It is possible because the response to the arts can also exist on an aesthetic level, of the sort indicated by Wilde\u2019s term \u201cbeautiful,\u201d where they are objects to be admired or valued or possessed. \u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> 46<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The status of the opening of Genesis as a factual historical record is no longer an issue for many of us, and to try to accept it as one is merely running scared. To go back to the argument of Oscar Wilde\u2019s essay on \u201cThe Decay of Lying\u201d discussed in the previous chapter, it is only when the creation story is considered factually false that it can be of any conceivable use to us. The hero of Eliot\u2019s Family Reunion<\/a> complains that his family understands \u201conly events, not what has happened.\u201d It is myth, and only myth, that tells us what has happened. \u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> 52<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In my first chapter I quoted a passage from Oscar Wilde\u2019s essay \u201cThe Critic as Artist.\u201d This essay builds up an argument that seems to make an exaggerated and quite unrealistic importance out of the reader of literature, the critic being the representative reader. He is paralleled with the artist in a way that seems to give him an equal share at least in what the artist is doing. Here again Wilde is writing from the point of view of a later generation. For many centuries the centre of gravity in literature was the hero, the man whose deeds the poet celebrated. As society slowly changed its shape, the hero modulated to the \u201ccharacter,\u201d and in Wilde\u2019s day it was still the creation of character, as one sees it so impressively in Shakespeare, Dickens<\/a>, and Browning<\/a>, that was the primary mark of poetic power. At the same time the Romantic movement<\/a> had brought with it a shift of interest from the hero to the poet himself, as not merely the creator of the hero but as the person whose inner life was the real, as distinct from the projected, subject of the poem. There resulted an extraordinary mystique of creativity, in which the artist became somehow a unique if not actually superior species of human being, with qualities of prophet, genius, wise man, and social leader. Wilde realized that in a short time the centre of gravity in literature and critical theory would shift again, this time from the poet to the reader. The dividing line in English literature is probably Finnegans Wake<\/a>, where it is so obvious that the reader has a heroic role to play. -\u2013\u2013from Creation and Recreation<\/em> in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> 75<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Oscar Wilde said that only an auctioneer could be equally appreciative of all kinds of art: he had of course the public critic in mind, but even the public critic\u2019s job of getting the treasures of culture into the hands of the people who want them is largely an auctioneer\u2019s job. And if this is true of him, it is a fortiori true of the scholarly critic. [\u201cIt is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art\u201d (Oscar Wilde, \u201cThe Critic as Artist,\u201d in Intentions <\/em>[London: Methuen and Co., 1913], 189)] \u2013\u2013from Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> <\/a>25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The arrogance of Jonson<\/a> and Congreve<\/a>, the mocking of bourgeois sentiment in Goldsmith<\/a>, the parody of melodramatic situations in Wilde and Shaw<\/a>, belong to a consistent tradition. \u2013\u2013from Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> 48.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I must expand the conception of dandyism as, essentially, a comic literary convention entering life around the second half of the 19th c. The dandy develops out of the Cl\u00e9ante<\/a> type of comic moral norm, detached from what is seen as a crowd of preoccupied attached obsessed people, all facing in the same direction. The dandy is essentially conservative, because the facing-one-direction people make an assumption of progress, yet his impact is that of a devil\u2019s advocate, reversing the melodramatic maxims in which society believes. Apart from the French developments, Oscar Wilde popularized the attitude, the progenitor of which in England is really Matthew Arnold, both in his life & in his comedies. An Ideal Husband<\/a><\/em> has the dandy in one of his proper roles\u2014that of gracioso-hero. His attitude is comic-existential, puncturing the balloons of false idealism. A Woman of No Importance<\/a><\/em> has a far more brilliant dandy, but Wilde, partly through an effort to be \u201cfair\u201d to the other side, partly through a streak of masochism, & partly through sheer laziness, completely foozled the conclusion. \u2013\u2013from Notebooks for \u201cAnatomy of Criticism<\/a>“<\/em> 264\u20135<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Myth is the essential form of Mill\u2019s deductive withdrawal. Oscar Wilde\u2019s remark [in \u201cThe Decay of Lying\u201d] that life imitates literature is so far only an amusing paradox. Someday it will be the cornerstone of the humanities & social sciences alike. \u2013\u2013from Notebooks for \u201cAnatomy of Criticism<\/em>” 229<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If we read an Elizabethan sonnet sequence without taking account of the conventional nature of every feature in it, including the poet\u2019s protests that he is not following convention and is really in love with a real person, we shall merely substitute the wrong context for the right one. That is, the sonnet sequence will become a biographical allegory, as the sonnets of Shakespeare do when, with Oscar Wilde, we reach the conclusion that the profoundest understanding of these sonnets, the deepest appreciation of all their eloquence and passion and power, comes when we identify the \u201cman in hue\u201d of Sonnet 20 with an unknown Elizabethan pansy named Willie Hughes. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Road of Excess\u201d in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake<\/em> <\/a>326<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In his book Odysseus Ever Returning<\/em> George Woodcock<\/a> quotes a review by Oscar Wilde in which Wilde praises an American writer for being concerned with the literature he loves rather than the country in which he lives, adding \u201cthe Muses care so little for geography.\u201d As usual, Wilde\u2019s critical instinct is sound: a writer cannot try to be anything except a writer, and a poet must adhere to literature, which is where his technical equipment comes from, not to the false rhetoric of the factitious and the voulu. But the last comment seems to me dead wrong. No Muse can function outside human space and time, that is, outside geography and history. Wilde himself owed his whole being as a writer to the tiny area of Anglo Irish ascendancy which provided his own space and time. So while a Canadian writer may go anywhere and make any sort of statement about the place of Canada in his life, positive or negative, his formative environment and his ability as a writer will be interdependent, however different. \u2013\u2013from \u201cAcross the River and Out of the Trees\u201d in Northrop Frye on Canada<\/em> <\/a>552.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What I do think is that the text before us is something other than ourselves, that we have to struggle with it as Jacob did with the angel [Genesis 32:24\u201332], but that there is nothing to come up from behind, like the Prussian army at Waterloo, to assist us. The otherness is the text itself. However, we are not quite as much on our own as Jacob was: there are other critics, and we do become increasingly aware that a text is the focus of a community.<\/p>\n This does not mean that all critics are going to agree any better than before, but that in their disagreements an element that we may call the egocentric can get gradually diminished. It was Oscar Wilde who defined, in two almost unreasonably brilliant essays, the situation of criticism today. One was called \u201cThe Decay of Lying,\u201d which attacked the view that literature gains dignity and validity from its reference to something beyond itself. The word \u201clying\u201d calls attention to the fact that literature turns its back on all such reference. The other was called \u201cThe Critic as Artist,\u201d which promoted the reader to a co-creator with the poet, completing the operation that the poet is compelled to leave half done. By a \u201ccritic\u201d Wilde meant, I think, a serious and representative reader, who knows that his response is socially and culturally conditioned, but is none the less capable of weeding out of that response an egocentric element, such as, \u201cI don\u2019t like the way this poem ends because if I were writing it I wouldn\u2019t end it that way.\u201d I have always connected this egocentric element with the conception of the critic as judge or evaluator. It is a commonplace now that observation is affected by the observer, even in the most quantitative sciences, and the necessity for observing the observer is now fairly acute in literary criticism. What I think happens is a struggle for identity in the course of which the false subject or ego and the false object or the referential signified get thrown out together. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Double Mirror\u201d in Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em> <\/a>87<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The traditional, common-sense view is that literature is an imitation of life, or reality, or nature, or whatever we may think of as outside it, and owes what truth it has to its relation to whatever is not literature. The reversed thesis of Oscar Wilde\u2019s Decay of Lying, that life imitates literature, and is not real life unless it resembles a literary form, is more recent, but is something much more than just the clever paradox it seems to be. We notice, for example, that we are continually playing roles in society. We are reading by ourselves, let us say: a friend comes in to talk to us, and we instantly throw ourselves into the social role suggested by his presence. Or we decide to maintain a certain public attitude, say in politics, and find that everything we say, or even believe, is being carefully selected by ourselves to fit the role demanded by that attitude. \u2013\u2013from \u201cOn Teaching Literature\u201d in Northrop Frye on Education<\/em> <\/a>457<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Many of my university friends are still in a stage I\u2019m sure I\u2019ve outgrown: a stage of violent attachment to art. This begins in an assumption of the moral duty of self-expression, an egocentric notion, much more the last infirmity of noble mind than love of fame is, which I am gradually shaking off. It\u2019s connected too with a desire to perfect attachment by organizing the rhythms of attachment. A woman, married, can live this way, but a man who undertakes it has really had it, as he has to unite the feats of male & female organization. A man like Robert Finch<\/a> must be very preoccupied with rhythms, & I don\u2019t know why the strain hasn\u2019t killed him! Pure laziness helped me past that stage. The life of Oscar Wilde seems to me an almost quixotically heroic saga of integrated rhythms, like John Milton\u2019s father writing an In Nomine <\/a>of 40 parts. The homosexual streak in him was perhaps at bottom\u2014his bottom, not his lover\u2019s\u2014a hermaphroditic one, a desire for completeness. Whatever it was, calling him a pansy is like calling Mark Antony a pimp: true on one level of truth, but not a very interesting level. \u2013\u2013from Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em> <\/a>63<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Music, says Oscar Wilde, \u201ccreates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one\u2019s tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.\u201d This seems to me a wonderful insight, with overtones that go far beyond music, true as I think it is of music. It verges close to my notion of myth as what really happened, as distinct from history, which is only what we\u2019d have seen happening. \u2013\u2013from Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em> 285<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Winter\u2019s Tale<\/a><\/em> again: there\u2019s nature and art, and nature seems to be linked to rebirth and the future, the rising younger generation getting its way in spite of senile opposition. The sheep-shearing festival and the dance of the twelve satyrs are central. Art seems to be linked to the reintegrating of the older generation (painting, sculpture, music and magic are all featured in the final scene, besides poetry), and to be concerned with the resurrection of the past. The basis here is that remark of Oscar Wilde quoted earlier [previous entry]. \u2013\u2013from Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em> 303<\/p><\/blockquote>\n BOGDAN: In Creation and Recreation<\/em>, you quote Oscar Wilde on what it means to play Chopin as the recreation of \u201cunlived experience, [NFR, 41].\u201d How does that relate to emotional stability? I\u2019ve probably got the point that in the Promethean<\/a> set-up we often climb to the future, so that descent themes have to do with recovering the past. I sidled into this by way of William Morris<\/a> and my \u201cprerevolutionary\u201d idea about the artist. Also that Oscar Wilde passage about music and the intensity of experience we have without knowing we have it, which makes, e.g., King Lear recognizable. \u2013\u2013from The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> <\/a>1: 17<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The penetration into holiness is connected with the possibility of understanding, say, the language of King Lear. As I\u2019ve always maintained, something about such language is recognizable, something that in a sense we\u2019ve said already in unknown areas of our experience. I\u2019m still revolving around that remark that Oscar Wilde so casually threw out about the music of Chopin\u2014and my own about Rilke<\/a> in the Masseys. \u2013\u2013from The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 1:209<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Literature begins in lying (Oscar Wilde): it proceeds from \u201cyou\u2019re just making all this up\u201d to \u201cyou\u2019re (just) making this.\u201d \u2013\u2013 from The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 2:695<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Urquhart of Cromarty<\/a>, an ardent Royalist, is reputed to have laughed on King Charles\u2019s Restoration<\/a> until he burst himself and died. And anyone who has glanced at an old copy of Punch<\/a> can see that their cartoons, with their enormous captions, elaborately festooned with garrulous explanations and parenthetic postscripts, are aimed at a John Bull<\/a> or fox-hunting squire for whom a laugh was an exhausting indoor exercise. Such a fox-hunting squire might survive to hear himself described by Oscar Wilde as the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. There is an entirely different kind of laughter; not the forte of invective but the piano of irony, which, like the poisoned rings of the Renaissance, distils its venom in a friendly handshake, unnoticed by its bulky victim. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Nature of Satire\u201d in <\/a>\u201cThe Educated Imagination\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/a> <\/em>48<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The difference in level between shallow platitude and profound aphorism makes for a good deal of parody in this region of literature. Modern wit would be considerably impoverished if it did not have clich\u00e9s and accepted ideas to make fun of or reverse. Any comedy of Oscar Wilde will furnish a gret number of such inverted clich\u00e9s. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Well Tempered Critic (II)\u201d in \u201cThe Educated Imagination\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory <\/em>371\u20132<\/p><\/blockquote>\n We know from the critical gossip surrounding T.S. Eliot\u2019s The Confidential Clerk<\/em> <\/a>that its author was aware of its resemblance to Euripides<\/a>\u2019 Ion<\/a><\/em>, and of the mythical patterns behind that play; we have no reason to suppose Oscar Wilde or W.S. Gilbert<\/a> equally aware of similar resemblances in The Importance of Being Earnest<\/em> or The Gondoliers<\/a><\/em>. The resemblances are based on the structural principles of comedy, not on the author\u2019s erudition. \u2013\u2013from \u201cMyth and Poetry\u201d in\u201dThe Critical Path\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/a><\/em> <\/a>137\u20138<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And even given Mr. Wimsatt\u2019s<\/a> premises, it is clear that he finds much more than beautifully cadenced nonsense in me, otherwise he could hardly put his finger on so many central things: Plato\u2019s Ion<\/a>; Oscar Wilde\u2019s Decay of Lying<\/em> (which Messrs. Ellmann and Feidelson were quite right in putting at the beginning of their collection of documents of The Modern Tradition<\/em>); the conception of poetry (not criticism) as a kind of forgery of myth. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Well Tempered Critic (II)\u201d in \u201cThe Educated Imagination\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 219<\/p><\/blockquote>\n When drama revives in Great Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century, the formulas of New Comedy<\/a> are used increasingly for purposes of parody, parody being the usual sign in literature that some conventions are getting worn out. We begin with parodies of foundling and mysterious-heir plots in Gilbert and Sullivan, notably in Pinafore<\/a><\/em> and The Gondoliers<\/em>; then we have Wilde\u2019s urbane treatment of the foundling plot in The Importance of Being Ernest<\/em>, where the hero has to overcome a refusal to \u201cmarry into a waiting room, and contract an alliance with a parcel.\u201d Wilde is followed by Bernard Shaw, who was well aware of the extent to which some standard New Comedy devices, such as the hero\u2019s being attracted by a girl whom he does not know to be his sister, had already been parodied by Ibsen<\/a>. \u2013\u2013from \u201cMyth and Poetry\u201d in \u201cThe Critical Path\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 287\u20138<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eliot begins his dramatic efforts with the exuberant and superbly original Sweeney Agonistes<\/a>, subtitled \u201cFragment of an Agon,\u201d where, besides the obvious and avowed influence of Aristophanes<\/a>, many of the features noted above appear, such as the assimilation to musical comedy and vaudeville forms. When he settles down to write seriously for the stage, however, we get such confections as The Confidential Clerk<\/em>, where the main influence is Euripides\u2019 Ion<\/em>, usually taken as the starting point of New Comedy. But this play seems, in comparison with Sweeney Agonistes, a somewhat pedantic joke, an attempt to do over again what Oscar Wilde (and, for that matter, Gilbert) had already done with more freshness. By turning his back on history, the realist records the world in front of him, and in due course his picture of that world becomes something of a historical document. In the pastiche of Gibbon<\/a> in Scott\u2019s Count Robert of Paris<\/a><\/em>, or of Commines in Anne of Geierstein<\/a><\/em>, there is little of much historical value, entertaining as these stories may be on other grounds. But in Mansfield Park<\/a><\/em>, though of course the structure of comic romance is still there, the reflection of the life of the Regency period has a genuine historical importance. Later in the century, Oscar Wilde remarked, in \u201cThe Decay of Lying,\u201d which is really a manifesto of romantic and mythical writing as opposed to realism: \u201cM. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of life.\u201d \u2013\u2013from\u201cThe Critical Path\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 368<\/p><\/blockquote>\n But when English drama revived towards the end of the nineteenth century, the formulas of New Comedy were used mainly for purposes of parody, parody being the usual sign in literature that some conventions are getting worn out. We begin with mysterious heir parodies in Gilbert and Sullivan, notably in H.M.S. Pinafore and The Gondoliers; then we have Wilde\u2019s urbane spoof of the foundling plot in The Importance of Being Earnest. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 127<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the eighteenth century the comic formulas expanded into the genre of prose fiction, and can be found in Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, and Dickens. With Oscar Wilde and the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, the formulas are presented in the form of parody, indicating that the conventions were wearing out. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 368<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The beginning of a new kind of criticism is marked by Oscar Wilde\u2019s The Decay of Lying<\/em>, which explains very lucidly that, as life has no shape and literature has, literature is throwing away its one distinctive quality when it tries to imitate life. It follows for Wilde that what is called realism does not create but can only record things on a subcreative level.<\/p>\n M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.<\/em><\/p>\n Wilde was clearly the herald of a new age in literature, which would take another century or so to penetrate the awareness of critics. He is looking forward to a culture which would use mythical and romantic formulas in its literature with great explicitness, making once more the essential discovery about the human imagination, that it is always a form of \u201clying,\u201d that is, of turning away from the descriptive use of language and the correspondence form of truth. The nineteenth century was also an age that threw up such philosophical schools as \u201cidealism\u201d and (in a different context) \u201crealism,\u201d which may be described as two sets of reasons for feeling confident about the adequacy of words to represent external reality. Twentieth-century literature and painting are part of the same cultural movement that in philosophy has shifted the centre of interest back to the linguistic structure itself, after destroying much of our old naive confidence that words have an unlimited ability to represent things outside themselves. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 32\u20133<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The reflection of one\u2019s personality may take the form of a container where the hero\u2019s soul or life is kept, and of such objects the closest to the central Narcissus theme is the portrait, as we have it in Oscar Wilde\u2019s Picture of Dorian Gray<\/em> <\/a>and elsewhere. \u2013\u2013from \u201cThe Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 78<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Eliot has found the right word for Dickens: \u201cdecadent.\u201d That\u2019s a big word, to be applied to a big man: it\u2019s inaccurate to call Oscar Wilde decadent when it matters so little to English literature what Oscar Wilde was. \u2013\u2013from Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings<\/em> 128<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The hero of FW is so obviously the reader that it really consolidates the third age of literature, the hero as warrior being followed by the hero as poet in Romanticism, and that in turn, with Oscar Wilde, shifts the heroic role to the reader. (Joyce didn\u2019t think much of Wilde, because, mainly, he had a prudish dislike for homosexuals, but Joyce almost never shows any critical ability.) Everybody in FW is in a dream: the reader, \u201cthe ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia,\u201d is the one person involved who\u2019s never allowed to dream. \u2013\u2013from Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings<\/em> 291<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I was reading recently Oscar Wilde\u2019s essay on \u201cThe Decay of Lying\u201d [\u201cThe Critic as Artist\u201d], which is to some extent the manifesto of modern criticism, and in that essay Wilde makes a wonderfully profound insight in a very casual way, throwing it out as though it were a kind of joke. Two young men are talking together, and one of them says, Shall I play something for you? The other one says, No, I don\u2019t want to hear music at this point, because what music does is create the full range of our own past experience. That is, if a person suddenly, without warning, came across somebody playing a piece of great music he might suddenly realize at that point that he had in his past gone through immense ranges of ex\u00acperience of which he was totally unconscious. Now in that form the statement sounds paradoxical, but surely it is an essential function of art to acquaint us with the whole possible range of our experience as distinct from what we actually experience, and to that extent it not only fills the gap in our experience but reintegrates our past. Our five senses are, after all, filters. They screen out far more than they take in. And the brain, I suspect, is not the generator of consciousness but a machine for filtering consciousness. There is a whole universe of significance of which we get glimpses in the arts but which our ordinary experience misses. \u2013\u2013from Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings<\/em> 324<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Modern criticism, as such, begins with Oscar Wilde\u2019s dialogue, The Decay of Lying,<\/em> the main object of which is to point out the shortcomings of any kind of literature that accepts the obligation to imitate \u201cnature,\u201d or \u201creal life.\u201d The speakers in Wilde refer to Charles Reade, who wrote one outstanding romance, The Cloister and the Hearth<\/a><\/em>, followed by a number of inferior realistic stories, as an example of the fact that the popular notion of the greater weight and dignity of realism can often mislead a writer. They also say that Romola<\/a><\/em> is a better novel than Daniel Deronda<\/a><\/em>, not a statement that many admirers of George Eliot would accept, but again expressing a preference for romance over realism. Again:<\/p>\n M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.<\/em><\/p>\n Literature, we are told, does not necessarily gain in seriousness or value when it imitates nature or real life, but nature and real life do gain in seriousness or value when they imitate literature, that is, when something like a literary shape can be discerned in their chaotic phenomena. Wilde\u2019s argument is presented as a good humoured paradox, but for us to go on thinking of it as one is living in the past: it expresses a simple truth reflected in many aspects of our cultural situation, especially from the mid 1950s to our own day. \u2013\u2013from Northrop Frye on Modern Culture<\/a> <\/em>147\u20138<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In his essay \u201cThe Decay of Lying\u201d Oscar Wilde says of music that it \u201ccreates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one\u2019s tears.\u201d Perhaps it is the function of all art to \u201ccreate a past\u201d in this sense of revealing to us the range of experience that our timid senses and reasonings largely screen out. The power of nature gives us a hope that helps us to face the future: the power of art gives us a faith that helps us to face the past. \u2013\u2013from \u201cShakespeare\u2019s The Tempest\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The primitivistic theory, thus, works through historically to its direct opposite, for if poets or poet natures can alone evaluate poetry, it follows that the appeal of poetry is an esoteric one, and this idea is developed by Arnold, Pater, Swinburne, and others until it reaches its extreme statement in Wilde: \u201cMan has two duties in life. The first duty is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has yet discovered.\u201d \u2013\u2013from Northrop Frye\u2019s Student Essays<\/a><\/em> 7<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The atmosphere of demure farce is sustained throughout, and, as the hero remarks rather dazedly, everybody seems to have a heart of gold. The plot complications [of Eliot\u2019s The Confidential Clerk] are closer to Menandrine New Comedy than to Ion (to which however New Comedy owed a good deal), and still closer to Wilde\u2019s Importance of Being Ernest, though it lacks the exuberance of Wilde (\u201cmarry into a waiting room, and contract an alliance with a parcel?\u201d). \u2013\u2013from T.S. Eliot<\/em> 95<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The development of realistic fiction, on the contrary, was often accompanied by the assumption implied in the word \u201crealistic\u201d itself, that literature needed to get out and mingle with the nonliterary world if it were to avoid becoming oversubjective, self-indulgent, ingrown, snobbish, elitist, and all the other things that are so often assumed to be endemic diseases in literature and criticism. This attitude is still going strong in Edmund Wilson\u2019s <\/a>Ax\u00ebl\u2019s Castle,<\/em> but had been earlier opposed with great wit and charm by Oscar Wilde, especially in his essay \u201cThe Decay of Lying.\u201d \u2013\u2013from Words with Power<\/a> <\/em>148<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Re: Frye’s choice for “greatest English critic“: I think Shelley would be a strong candidate for Frye\u2019s \u201cgreatest English critic\u201d\u2013I\u2019m thinking mainly about the Shelley that appears in The Critical Path. I was talking to Frye once about his affinities with Coleridge, and he said he wondered why nobody had ever remarked on his closeness […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,17,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-call-for-papers","category-literary-criticism"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nAfter playing Chopin<\/a>, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one\u2019s tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.<\/p>\n
\nFRYE: Well, I suppose it\u2019s a matter of recollection in tranquillity, as something that has been there for some time. That\u2019s a very profound remark of Wilde\u2019s, that music seems to recreate the experiences for you that you didn\u2019t actually go through. \u2013\u2013from Interviews with Northrop Frye <\/a><\/em>779\u2013800<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\n\u2013\u2013from\u201cThe Critical Path\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 291. See a similar statement in \u201cThe Secular Scripture\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 130<\/p><\/blockquote>\n