7 September 1965
This letter was read on Frye’s behalf at the opening of a session of the English Institute1 devoted to a discussion of his criticism. The session was chaired by Murray Krieger and included papers by Angus Fletcher, W.K. Wimsatt, and Geoffrey Hartman as described in the headnote to no. 13. The proceedings were later published in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Murray Krieger (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1966), from which the present text (27–30) is taken. Partially reprinted in Modern Literary Criticism, 1900–1970, ed. Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 244–5.
I am very appreciative of the great honour done me by the English Institute, and my absence is due to a proper sense of it. I should want the discussion, in particular, to be as uninhibited as possible, which it can only be if the corpus delicti is not, like Finnegan, able to obtrude on the proceedings.2 I have no itch to demonstrate that my views are “right” and that those who disagree with me are “wrong,” but my presence would almost force me into some such role, to the great detriment of free speech. Nor do I wish to correct others for “misunderstanding my position”: I dislike and distrust what is generally implied in the word “position.” Language is the dwelling-house of being, according to Heidegger,3 but no writer who is not completely paranoid wants his house to be either a fortress or a prison.
I thoroughly approve of the Institute’s policy in devoting a group to the study of a contemporary critic, and I can think of one reason why I may be a good critic to choose. Every critic tries to be coherent and consistent, and to avoid contradicting himself. Thus he develops his insight into literature out of a systematic framework of ideas about it. But some are better at concealing this framework than others, especially those who are unconscious of it, and so conceal it from themselves. I have been quite unable to conceal it, hence the question of the systematic nature of criticism itself bulks prominently in my writing. On the first page of the Anatomy I tried to explain that the system was there for the sake of the insights it contained: the insights were not there for the sake of the system. I put this on the first page because I thought that that page was more likely to be read than others. In spite of this, I am often regarded as a critic equipped with a summa critica who approaches all his readers much as Jonah’s whale approached Jonah. Actually I am grateful to be read on any terms, but the role of system and schema in my work has another kind of importance. Whatever the light it throws on literature, it throws a good deal of light on me in the act of criticizing. It is the schematic thinker, not the introspective thinker, who most fully reveals his mind in process, and so most clearly illustrates how he arrives at his conclusions.
I think that criticism as a whole is a systematic subject. But I do not think that the criticism of the future will all be contained within the critical system set out in my books. Still less do I think that it will be contained in an eclectic system, a tutti-frutti collection of the best ideas of the best critics. One of the most accurately drawn characters in drama is Reuben the Reconciler, who is listed in the dramatis personae of Ben Jonson’s Sad Shepherd, and whose role was apparently to set everybody right at the end. Jonson never finished the play, so he never appeared. I wish we could throw away the notion of “reconciling,” and use instead some such conception as “interpenetration.” Literature itself is not a field of conflicting arguments but of interpenetrating visions. I suspect that this is true even of philosophy, where the place of argument seems more functional. The irrefutable philosopher is not the one who cannot be refuted, but the one who is still there after he has been refuted. This is the principle on which I base my view of value judgments in criticism. I have never said that there were no literary values or that critics should never make value judgments: what I have said is that literary values are not established by critical value judgments. Every work of literature establishes its own value; in the past, much critical energy has been wasted in trying to reject or minimize these values. But all genuine literature, including Shakespeare, kept turning up, like the neurotic return of a ghost, to haunt and perplex the criticism that rejected it. I think criticism becomes more sensible when it realizes that it has nothing to do with rejection, only with recognition. To recognize is of the gods, as Euripides says.4 In criticism, as in philosophy, argument is functional, and there is bound to be disagreement. But disagreement is one thing, rejection is another, and critics have no more business rejecting each other than they have rejecting literature. The genuine critic works out his own views of literature while realizing that there are also a great number of other views, actual and possible, which are neither reconcilable nor irreconcilable with his own. They interpenetrate with him, and he with them, each a monad as full of windows as a Park Avenue building.
I think that this argument also describes the atmosphere and pervading attitudes of the English Institute as I have experienced it: candid, receptive, courteous, and individualized. It is a pleasure as well as an honour to entrust my own work to its judgment.