1966
From Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 133–46. Partially reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 24, ed. Sharon R. Gunton (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), 222–3. This is a concluding piece written by Frye after he had read the other English Institute papers given at the session devoted to his work and printed in the volume: Angus Fletcher, “Utopian History and the Anatomy of Criticism” (31–74); W.K. Wimsatt, “Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth” (75–108); and Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Ghostlier Demarcations” (109–32). References to these essays will be noted in square brackets in the text.
Reading critiques of oneself is normally a distressing pastime, ranking even below the rereading of one’s own works. What variety one has usually seems to be multiplied in a wilderness of distorting mirrors. And if reading them is confusing, writing them almost affects one’s sense of identity. Whatever has been published is grown up and has to make its own way in the world, preferably without further support from its parent. It is true that I have read these papers with an attention which at times amounts to pleasure, but their very excellence makes me wish that I could leave them to speak for themselves.
For I doubt if I can describe my ambitions for criticism more accurately than Mr. Fletcher does in his figure of the Haussmann boulevards which enabled Parisians, so to speak, to see Paris [32], or than Mr. Hartman does more conceptually in speaking of my wish to help demystify and democratize criticism [110]. Mr. Hartman also notes in me a combination of interests which are partly scientific (perhaps the wrong word, though mine) and partly evangelical (certainly the right word, though not mine), the same mixture of detachment and engagement which exists in most areas of scholarship in the humanities [111]. These two aims are contradictory, but as they are both essential, they have simply got to contradict: this is part of the paradox that Mr. Wimsatt speaks of as inherent in criticism [79]. Both Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Hartman emphasize the fact that my work is designed to raise questions rather than answer them, and that my aim is not to construct a Narrenschiff to keep future critics all bound in by the same presuppositions, but to point to what Mr. Fletcher calls the open vistas and Mr. Hartman the still closed doors in the subject [40, 129]. A critic who has been compelled by such ambitions to write on far too broad a front is particularly vulnerable to objection on points of detail, but the errors and inconsistencies attributed to me by Mr. Wimsatt seldom seem to me to be really such, except on premises which are not mine. Given those premises, I do not appear to be misleading anybody very seriously, even myself. And even given Mr. Wimsatt’s 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’s Ion; Oscar Wilde’s Decay of Lying (which Messrs. Ellmann and Feidelson were quite right in putting at the beginning of their collection of documents of The Modern Tradition);1 the conception of poetry (not criticism) as a kind of forgery of myth.
When I began to work on Blake’s Prophecies, it was constantly being said to me, both in books and in conversation, “But even if you did provide a complete and self-consistent interpretation of their meaning, that wouldn’t increase my interest in them as poetry.” The phrase “as poetry” implies that the essence of poetry is somehow separable from its meaning, and the attitude underlying the statement was a value judgment opposing itself to what I hoped would become a new body of critical knowledge. It seemed to me clear that the new knowledge had, as I put it later, a power of veto over the value judgment:2 if the Prophecies could be shown to make sense, that would surely modify any view of them “as poetry.” The critic’s confidence in his value judgment was, if he were an honest critic, admittedly tentative. He did not, however, as a rule, subordinate it to greater knowledge, but, like medieval princes fighting the Pope, he appealed to a future general council. Some day all such intuitions of value would be confirmed theoretically. This article of faith was usually expressed in an oracle of the type, “The end of criticism being evaluation, it is important to find trustworthy criteria of evaluation.” I talked this way myself in an early version of the Polemical Introduction. But it became obvious that there were no such criteria, either in criticism or “elsewhere” (Mr. Bush’s word quoted by Mr. Fletcher).3 It is true that my approach to criticism does not make any functional use of value judgments: this has bewildered only the critics who have failed to notice that no criticism that actually gives us knowledge of literature, whether historical or linguistic or explicatory, does either. Perhaps a general council will yet meet and give us an apostolic creed of values, but in the meantime surely someone ought to make a simple and childish observation about the present nakedness of this venerable emperor. As I continued to work on Blake, it became inescapably clear that the kind of thinking the Prophecies displayed was normal and typical poetic thinking, and that every poet, from the first metaphor he uses, is condemned to produce what Mr. Wimsatt calls “Gnostic mythopoeia” [76] for the rest of his poetic life.
“I must create a system,” said Blake,4 and any critic going from Blake into the general theory of criticism discovers how strong and immediate the emotional overtones of the word “system” are in this fragmented age. Jail-building, pigeonholing, providing a glib answering service for undergraduates, overweening ambition on the part of the system-builder, are some of the readiest associations. In the muddled mythology of stock response, the system-builder is the spider who spins nets out of his bowels, as contrasted with the bee who flits empirically from flower to flower and staggers home under his burden of sweetness and light. I have often said that I regard criticism itself as a systematic subject, and there are systematic tendencies in the Anatomy of Criticism, particularly in the way that it tries to unite different critical methods, putting Mr. Wimsatt into what he calls a “wintry cellar” [101–2], though it might also be called a ratproof foundation. But I do not think of the Anatomy as primarily systematic: I think of it rather as schematic. The reason why it is schematic is that poetic thinking is schematic. The structure of images that C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image calls “the Model”5 was a projected schematic construct which provided the main organization for literature down to the Renaissance: it modulated into less projected forms after Newton’s time, but it did not lose its central place in literature. The attraction that poets have felt during the last two centuries for occult and other offbeat forms of thought, while very largely ignoring the advance of real science, has always seemed to me an instructive example of the affinity to pattern-making schematism which is part of the poetic process itself. The Anatomy, especially in its Third Essay, attempts to provide an outline of a schema which, as I said, I hoped would serve as a guide to practical criticism [3/5]. It is not a view of the universe, whether true or fictional, and it is not a reconstruction of any specific pattern in the past. It employs four seasons because that is the most convenient number for such a schema to have, not because I am unaware that “sumer is icumen in” means “spring is here.” Since the book appeared, I have received enough correspondence echoing Mr. Hart-man’s “it works; it is teachable” [126] to make me reasonably satisfied with its general usefulness.
In the last few years I have become more preoccupied with the context of criticism in education, and I think I understand, more clearly than I did ten years ago, why so many critics actually prefer that their subject should be theoretically addled. The “mystique” that Mr. Hartman mentions [112, 113] is certainly important here: I think that there is also another element derived from the classroom. In Mr. Trilling’s recent book there is a penetrating essay on the way in which the study of modern literature seems to have the odd effect of denaturing it.6 We recognize Rimbaud or Kafka or Lawrence or Dostoevsky as great writers because of a tremendous force of passion and power and clairvoyance that comes through them, a force so great, and carrying an anguish so unbearable, that we are not surprised to find it crippling their lives with neurosis and perversity. What such writers may incidentally have done or said does not matter: the insight is what matters, and we are anxious to confront our students with the insight, purified of the accidents of temperament. The result is that the students write more or less competent essays about the passion, power, anguish, etc., of these authors and go on about their business, while the teacher is in the position of saying, like a chairman at a lecture, “I am sure we are all deeply grateful to Mr. Rimbaud (and the others) for having contributed such a distinctive note to our understanding of human life.” There is no way out of this: for better or worse, criticism is part of an educational process in which Macbeth is taught to children, and in which a certain insulation against emotional impact is a sign of cultivated taste. Teachers are occupationally disposed to believe in magic, and it is not surprising that many of them should cherish the illusion that they are best able to charge their students’ batteries directly with the authors they teach if they do not admit, even to themselves, that all teaching is a transposition of literature into criticism, of passion and power and anguish into pattern and craftsmanship and the following of convention. If, that is, they can keep on assuming that the direct experience of literature can somehow be, if not actually taught, at least communicated.
Hence, perhaps, the resistance to attempts in criticism to make the resemblances and recurring patterns in the variety of literary experience significant. I am often told that this detracts from the distinctiveness of the work of literature, this quality being expanded into a value only by rhetorical licence, the world’s worst poem being obviously as distinctive as the best. It is as though a zoologist were to insist that the differences between mastiffs and chihuahuas made the conception “dog” a useless pedantry. Mr. Wimsatt, who is not normally this sentimental kind of critic, describes my own recurring patterns as clichés [94–5], meaning apparently that, even if the connections are there, it is bad form to call attention to them.
Mr. Ransom’s conception of “texture” is one from which every critic has learned a great deal, but his view that structure, which means ultimately the study of such recurring principles of literature as convention and genre, is somehow less relevant to criticism, is something I have never understood.7 The principle that a work of literature should not be related to anything outside itself is sound enough, but I cannot see how the rest of literature can be regarded as outside the work of literature, any more than the human race can be regarded as outside a human being. When I use the metaphor of standing back from a work of literature, as one would from a painting, to see the structural principles in it, I am trying to give some reality to the word “literature,” by placing the reader in the middle of that great museum without walls which Mr. Hartman has so well described as the form of understanding appropriate to our time [115], when technology has both unified and decentralized our relation to works of art. If Mr. Wimsatt asks who really wants to see a painting in that way, the answer is, everybody interested in twentieth-century painting, abstract expressionism being only the most dramatic of several contemporary modes of painting from precisely this perspective. Mr. Fletcher is right in connecting my interest in comedy and in Utopian forms with my interest in literature as a total community, where every resemblance is a recognition scene. Such recognition scenes are, as a rule, both sublime and ridiculous, a fact which largely accounts for what Mr. Fletcher calls the low comedy of my style.8 This is partly because parody of convention is as frequent as taking it straight. It seems to me worth notice that the opening sentences of Pride and Prejudice and of Anna Karenina are in a convention of beginning a story with a sententious statement which goes back at least to medieval rhetoric. But the fact that this convention is being used ironically, with a playful irony in one and a savage irony in the other, is equally obvious. Other recognition scenes, such as the conventional romance pattern of the cave episode which helps to establish the literary context of Tom Sawyer, seem quasi-ridiculous to those who are unaccustomed or unwilling to think in terms of literary context. They are “irrelevant” [95] (Mr. Wimsatt’s word) only if the word “literature” is meaningless. And if it is meaningless, criticism is not a very significant subject.
Such persisting conventions come down from the past, and from one point of view my emphasis on recurring structural principles seems to go back in the past until it disappears into that inaccessible powder room of the Muses, prehistoric mythology. For the way in which the recurring structural elements of literature (convention, genre, archetype) are held together by and in myth, I must refer the reader to the Anatomy of Criticism. I speak of an early mythical period of literature because it seems clear that there was such a period. But nobody can catch literature in the act of originating, and in one sense it is even illogical to speak of “a” myth at all except for convenience. We cannot really think of a myth apart from a specific verbal embodiment of that myth, just as we cannot think of a sonata in music apart from the embodiment of the sonata form in actual compositions. It is not the antiquity of myth but its permanence that makes it a structural principle of literature: not the wisdom hidden behind the story of Endymion but the art revealed, explicitly in Drayton and Lyly and Keats, implicitly in hundreds of other stories and poems that are based on the Endymion theme. I know that portentous language is often used about myths, and similar sound effects have been attributed to the Anatomy by Mr. Wimsatt, following Mr. Abrams [96–7]; but they are not there. And if they were, a few woo-woo noises about the hoary antiquity of myths would be trifling enough compared to the dismal and illiberal impoverishment of literary experience that results from ignoring the structure into which that experience enters. It is only the individual and discrete literary experience that melts “into thin air”: what does not vanish is the total vision which contains the experience.
Hence when I say that Shakespearean comedy demands a primitive response, I am not saying that our response should be similar to that of a hypothetical noble savage. My example of a primitive response is taken from Pamela: it could just as well have been taken from Dickens or Tolstoy. By a primitive response I mean an unmediated response, a response that is neither naive, like Partridge’s response to Hamlet in Tom Jones [bk. 16, chap. 5], nor so sophisticated as to be indifferent, but is the kind of direct response to the power of literature which is only possible when one stands inside the structure of literature, and is neither confusing it with life nor building an emotional barricade against it. Here we come back to our classroom problem, where we find that exposing students to anguish and nausea leads only to notes and essays about anguish and nausea. This situation grows out of an earlier one in which the student’s unmediated responses are to his comic books and television programs, while his response to Macbeth has every conceivable kind of inhibition attached to it. When I urge the early study of Biblical and Classical myths, it is because I am in search of a literary curriculum that will not only make sense as a discipline, but, by building up the sense of a literary order and putting the student inside it, will be directly concerned with developing a response of this kind, where genuine literature has the kind of effect that popular literature has now (popular is always more or less a synonym for primitive for me). It is the belief in the possibility of such response, derived from their own experience of it, that keeps teachers of English going in their often discouraging calling.
Recently a writer referred to my views on literary education as a contribution to the climate of opinion which is trying to rationalize American imperialism in Vietnam. The associative links in this argument elude me, but I can dimly glimpse one point, and it is the only point that occurs to me as a comment on the last part of Mr. Hartman’s paper. As Mr. Fletcher emphasizes [e.g., 34], my own bias is naturally a historical one, but I have never been very clear about the shape of the history of literature apart from the shape of history in general. I know that there is a complicated interplay between a work of literature and its time, and one which is far more important than the dreary kind of “background” criticism which is written on the principle of Walt Disney’s Fantasia a generation ago, where a visual barrage of Gothic arches and the like was supposed to relieve the tedium of listening to a Bach toccata. But the only shaping principles of history in literature itself that I have dealt with, as Mr. Hartman says, are those of displacement [125], the oscillating of technique from the stylizing of form to the manifesting of content and back again, and of what I call existential projection, the attributing of poetic schematism to the objective world, which takes different forms in different historical epochs. I have even compared the literary universe to Blake’s Beulah, where no dispute can come, where everything is equally an element of a liberal education, where Bunyan and Rochester are met together and Jane Austen and the Marquis de Sade have kissed each other [AC, 114/105]. This is not the way that works of literature enter history, and it is quite possible that the wars of myth in time are an aspect of criticism that I have not grasped. But one form of this historical war I think I do understand.
Myth is liberated by literature, but it also works in society as a reactionary force, providing for prejudice and stock response what vision they have, producing what Mr. Wimsatt calls the cliché [94–5], the literary formula that ought not to be repeated. Literature has the pastoral; social mythology has the cottage away from it all or the nostalgia for the world of one’s childhood. Literature has the quest; social mythology has the gospel of getting on. Literature has comedy; social mythology goes out to win friends and influence people. But, as these examples have already made clear, social mythology has its own kind of literature. The question of evaluation in criticism is thus not a matter of individual appraisal, as one would appraise the value of a diamond or a piece of antique furniture; it is part of a social and moral struggle, of what Ionesco, making an essential distinction that Mr. Wimsatt misses, calls the opposition of archetypes to stereotypes.9 All my educational views are based on this opposition, and have as their aim the attempt to win for literature the response generally given to social mythology. Whether we find them in literature or in the verbal formulas of ordinary life, myths constitute the vision that the individual man has of the human situation. But within these myths a dialectical struggle shapes up between the tendency in man merely to accept what is handed him from his environment and the effort to choose and control his vision. Those who have really changed the modern world—Rousseau, Freud, Marx—are those who have changed its mythology, and whatever is beneficent in their influence has to do with giving man increased power over his own vision. In the continuation of this struggle literary criticism has a central role, and if I can do anything to forward it I shall be quite content to be called the fulfilment of Bishop Hurd.
For it was Hurd who established the principle of the unity of design in criticism.10 Anybody can see an infinite number of exquisite touches of human nature in Shakespearean comedy, of lovely passages in Spenser, of brilliant realistic effects in Chaucer, but somehow the overall structure of their works seems quite different, something which by comparison, if we keep to the same standards, seems absurd, unnatural, or fantastic. Hurd’s principle helps us to see how the exquisite details exist, not in spite of a fantastic and incredible design, but because of it. Similarly, the exquisite and lucid lyrics of Blake could not have been written except from within the kind of mental structure that emerges more consciously in the often deplored Prophecies. Even on my own level I find from experience that something similar is true. Many who consider the structure of my view of literature repellent find useful parenthetic insights in me, but the insights would not be there unless the structure were there too. So I deduce that such readers are fitting these insights into overall structures of their own, though they may be less conscious of possessing them. What can be communicated, in this situation, is the insights themselves together with a challenge to clarify their new context.
There is thus an objective mythical structure, which is the world of literature itself, and which criticism as a whole seeks to articulate, and a subjective one, which the student achieves as a result of his literary experience. The objective structure must be as schematic as the study itself demands, but the subjective one is less obviously so. We think of the vertebrate as a higher organization than the crustacean: what articulates the cultivated and disciplined mind tends to become increasingly invisible. This does not mean that the student outgrows the systematic presentation of literature in criticism: it means that his goal is a personal vision which includes literature but is greater in scope. The mythical structure of literature is not this vision, but it is the only way of getting to it. Literature is not ultimately objective: it is not simply there, like nature: it is there to serve mankind. In Wallace Stevens’s poem Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters into Heaven, Strachey realizes that something he identifies with a new perception of myth lies ahead of him as the fulfilment of what his intense but very limited rationalism was pointing to:
Perception as an act of intelligence
And perception as an act of grace
Are two quite different things, in particular
When applied to the mythical. [stanza 5, ll. 21–4]
What is demanded from him is an expansion of perception through the “properly misunderstood” [l. 9] myth into an understanding, and this requires a good many extra qualities, including, somewhat unexpectedly, a new kind of courage. He shrinks from this, and settles for a quiet quarter in heaven, “Dixhuitième and Georgian and serene” [l. 40], when he could have had the whole city for his possession.
The real Lytton Strachey knew what he wanted, and the fact that in Stevens’s heaven he does not get what he does not want is hardly significant in itself. But it would be a disaster if the failure of nerve that Stevens portrays in this poem became a cultural phenomenon of our time, and a disaster of much more than literary importance. Mythology is curiously like technology in its development: the more man invents of it, the more strongly tempted he is to project it into something that controls him. The immense pressure toward conformity in thought and imagination is society’s anxious response to mythopoeia, creating institutional religion in one age and total political alignments in another. No one person, certainly not one critic, can kill this dragon who guards our word-hoard, but for some of us, at any rate, there can be no question of going back to our secluded Georgian quarters, from which serenity has long since disappeared.