18
Literature and Society

May 1968

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 1, file y. Reprinted in RW, 177–92. Originally a lecture at the University of Saskatchewan, which Frye visited to receive an honorary degree and deliver the convocation address on 14 May.

I have become accustomed to being asked for titles of lectures long before I have started to think about the lectures themselves. Consequently I have developed a technique of inventing titles so broad and vague that they will enable me to put almost any kind of lecture underneath them. I thought, however, that tonight I would make an exception, and actually talk about literature and society, so far as I understand their relationship. The function of literature and its social relevance, the function of the poet as a social being, are interests of mine which reach back into my early youth, as I can hardly remember a time when my mind was not in some degree concerned with such questions. I shall put what I have to say into an autobiographical form, not because I think I am an interesting person to talk about, but simply to provide some narrative continuity. I find that I cannot think with any real intensity except about subjects that I have, in a sense, always been thinking about. I can hardly suppose that this is true only of me, and I imagine that for most people an occasional autobiographical excursion is a good way of reviewing one’s general position.

In my youth, in a small high school in the Maritimes,¹ I was developing an embryonic interest in literature, and, along with it, some interest in the question of its social relevance, of what difference it made to the world that we had literature. I assumed that the answers would be in books: twenty years later, I realized that if there were a book that would answer my questions satisfactorily I should have to write it myself. Some answers I did pick up, in books, between the lines of books, out of the air, to the effect that literature was a kind of legal and harmless LSD, not that that particular refuge of the ego was known then. The function of literature, I gathered, was to heighten one’s sense of reality by bringing it a little closer to the ideal: it makes what is there look better by giving it more of a resemblance to what is not there. Hence it has two effects. It idealizes experience: when one reads Shakespeare or Dickens, one should look in them primarily for the exquisite touches of nature which are so like our ordinary experience, even if on a bigger scale. At the same time it gives a sense of reality to our ideals, operating as it does through example rather than precept. Poetry, in particular, was to be thought of as a reservoir of great thoughts which would inspire one to meet the battle of life. But, in general, the value of reading literature was part of the value of reading as a whole: to improve one’s mind, to lay in a stock of ideas for one’s later life.

In the form in which it came to me, in the 1920s, this view of literature was Victorian: Victorian in its moral earnestness, its mixture of idealism and realism, and above all in being entirely a reading culture. There were no plays where I grew up, and I had read most of Shakespeare before I had any clear notion of what a dramatist was; what films penetrated to my town were only bad novels photographed; radio was beginning, but still sounded rather as most electronic music sounds to me now: like an evil spirit trying to get born and not succeeding. It took me a long time to realize what the real position of literature was in this view. Its moral bias made use of literature, but subordinated it; literature was serious if it reflected moral and rational processes, which were assumed to be more directly concerned with real issues than the poetic process. The inheritance of centuries was behind this attitude: the theologian in the Middle Ages, the philosopher in the eighteenth century, the scientist in our own time, have all been assumed to be closer to reality than the poet. The function of poetry, then, is mainly to embellish and ornament a superior view of reality, so that the poet is essentially a kind of illustrator of the reason.

It was inevitable that my reading should be based on the great nineteenth-century novelists, to be followed, in my mid-teens, with some of the realists who had succeeded them—Galsworthy, Bennett, Shaw, Sinclair Lewis. Quite by accident, in the public library, I stumbled on a book called The Doctor Looks at Literature, which had a chapter on Ulysses^.2 I am unlikely to forget the stupefaction into which the quotations from Ulysses plunged me: naturally it had never occurred to me that words could be used like that, and I instantly formed the ambition to acquire a copy of Ulysses. Many years later a copy was smuggled in to me from Buffalo by a colleague after the ban had been lifted in the United States. (It was of course still illegal in Canada, but it was as clear to me then as it is to any “new left” student today that if the standards of literature collide with the anxieties of society, the anxieties of society have to give way, whether they are embodied in law or not.)³ Some years after that, in looking over some of the criticism on Joyce, I realized for the first time that the book which had thrilled me so was actually a very silly book, designed to ridicule Joyce and discourage me from reading him. The moral seems to be that if one wishes to write a silly book on a serious subject, one should not quote too liberally from the serious subject.

At college I began to become aware of developments in literature that indicated a very different habit of mind from the one with which I had been accustomed to associate good literature. My teachers at Victoria College, Pelham Edgar, E.J. Pratt, J.D. Robins, were all unusually contemporary-minded, and helped among other things to get me less bogged down in books.⁴ Edgar would often not lecture at all, but simply read, and Robins taught me in my first term a course on the ballad, which introduced me to the conception of oral literature. The producers of literature were not, as I had assumed, invariably intellectuals: sometimes they could neither read nor write. One of the books on the freshman course was Scott’s Guy Mannering, which my mother had read to me when I was nine, and which I had listened to in breathless rapture. I greatly looked forward to rereading it, but the charm was gone: it had crumbled into dust. Eight years makes a great difference in one’s taste at that age, but I now understand that a literary principle was also involved connected with what Robins was talking about. Read aloud, Scott made a good deal of sense; read in a book, he was a pretentious windbag (or so I thought then; I am more charitable now). Edgar, again, introduced me to Virginia Woolf. If the question had been asked in the ‘20s, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” the answer would probably have been “Arnold Bennett,” because Virginia Woolf’s essay on Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown had defended certain techniques of writing which had looked more at the insides of people than at the outsides, and had suggested that the true realist was not the person who was engaged in painting the superficies of reality.⁵

I was beginning to see that there was a distinctive habit of mind which was expressed in literature, not a logical habit of mind, but something else with its own rules and its own kind of sense. Its most obvious characteristic was that it seemed to be intensely associative. In my graduate days, in the early ’30s, the movement started by I.A. Richards had begun to develop, and Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and the Survey of Modernist Poetry by Graves and Riding introduced me to the techniques of what, when it finally got around to the Modern Language Association a long time later, began to be called “the New Criticism.”⁶ Here was something that dramatized the difference between poetic and logical processes into a sharp contrast. For the poet, ambiguity is a structural principle: he wants a word to mean as many things as possible, because he thinks associatively and in verbal complexes. For the nonliterary writer, ambiguity is simply bungling or incompetent writing: he strives for lucidity, consistent definition, and the restriction of a word to one definite meaning.

Another movement that became fashionable in the ‘30s, Surrealism, also emphasized the associative habit of mind in the arts, this time an associative process closely linked to the dream. Such processes are of course largely sexual in origin. I remember many years later Dr. Kinsey of Indiana, the editor of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and its female successor,⁷ boring into me with his blazing missionary eyes, and saying, “I suppose you know that there is no object in the world that cannot be made either a male or a female sexual symbol.” As a matter of fact, I did know that. In the mid-’30s a Surrealist exhibition was brought to the CNE in Toronto, purely for laughs: to the committee’s disgust the public got quite interested in it.⁸ The so-called “happenings” of our day are not a new invention: one Surrealist exhibition at that time supplied the people who went to it with small hand hatchets in order to break up all the works of art which particularly outraged them, and at another, one artist had expressed his view of Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler by constructing an enormous umbrella of sponges. The joke was somewhat laborious, but so is a good deal of later pop art.

It became gradually clearer to me that literature was an art of resemblance and identity, expressed in the two primary poetic figures of simile and metaphor: this is like that, and this is that. Resemblance can be logically dangerous because in any rational procedure the differences between things have to be noted as well as their similarity, and until you know what your categories are your analogies are likely to be misleading. As for metaphor, where we are saying that two things are two things and yet the same thing, we are turning our back on logical processes, and joining the group of people who take metaphor seriously, including, according to Shakespeare’s Theseus, the lunatic, the lover, and the poet.⁹ To understand literature, then, I should have to surrender myself to the conditions of a mental process that flouted logic, and which I was slowly beginning to call the mythical habit of mind. It was a habit of mind that thought by configurations, and did not depend on sequential reasoning. Further, the logical habit of mind was as valid as it ever was, but it would have to give up its claim to exclusive possession of truth, and its insistence on subordinating the imagination to its categories. There must be, somehow, such a thing as poetic or mythical truth, as all poets have believed. In a book written for information, that is, for nonliterary purposes, a structure of words (A) points to a group of things described (B) and from there goes into the reader’s mind (C). Truth in this situation is truth of correspondence: the words in A must correspond to the facts in B before C can recognize it to be true. But in reading literature there is no B, only a direct contact between A and C. Truth here is not truth of correspondence or of description; it is rather a kind of truth of revelation, different from logical truth but in its own area equally valid. These seem like very simple axioms to me now, but I went through what seemed to me a long and confused labyrinth before I reached them.

Along with this came the steadily growing suspicion that a big cultural change was going on around me. Not only were there two habits of mind, the logical and the mythical, but it looked as though the old unquestioned domination of myth by logic was going. The mythical habit of mind was establishing itself, or rather its establishment was increasingly being recognized, in many different fields, social as well as literary. This suspicion deepened eventually into conviction, but not easily. For one thing, during the ’30s the Marxists were a lively and articulate group, on campus and elsewhere, and Marxism re-emphasized the old Victorian view of the domination of poetry by the rational disciplines. The function of the poet in Marxism, no less than in the bourgeois world, was to echo and support a point of view which made its primary impact through philosophy and economics. I was impressed by Marxist arguments, yet I could not assent to them, because the assumption that literature would find its true function in revolutionary protest before the revolution occurred, and in panegyric afterward, seemed to me clearly nonsense. Literature was quite obviously concerned with something else altogether, and no arguments about the poets of the past having been affected by the ruling-class propaganda of their times would alter that fact. There was still a difficulty of the opposite kind: some of the people whom I most admired in literature, including Yeats and Eliot, were also people whose social and political views struck me as preposterous to the last degree. Yet somehow this did not affect their quality as poets: obviously the same person could be a great poet and a silly sociologist.

The Marxist phase in literature was succeeded, in the early years of the war, by a religious phase. More and more poets became attracted to Catholicism or some position close to it, and more and more contemporary poetry began to sound like paraphrases of the Penitential Psalms. When this position was defended by argument, the arguments sounded remarkably like Marxism stood on its head, and religious determinism appealed to me no more than economic determinism had done. The influence of Eliot then was so powerful that it seemed almost to generate an assumption that a serious interest in literature could only go along with a nostalgic and conservative temperament, one that tended to deify tradition and look back longingly to the past. I think I have always appreciated the importance of tradition in literature, but I certainly do not feel that a conservative temperament is the only one fitted to understand literature, and even if it were, there would still be the problem of the immediate and present relationship of literature to society to solve.

I am getting ahead of my story, such as it is. After three years of theology I realized that my vocation was in university teaching, so I went to Oxford to read the undergraduate course in English. The undergraduate course was the only one that Oxford in those days taught willingly: Oxford still tended to look on graduate work as a new and dubious American importation. In fact, Oxford did not hold a very high view of English literature either as an academic subject. It had not been going long, and when it had come in it had done so under the domination of philology. There was a feeling that if students were to be allowed to read English instead of Classics, there ought to be some real intellectual discipline inserted into the course in the shape of another set of dead languages, preferably highly inflected ones. Hence there were three courses in English literature, arranged in order of prestige. Course 1 consisted largely of Gothic and Old Norse. Course 2 embraced English literature, but embraced it only as far as the year 1500. Course 3, which was strictly for the birds and the Rhodes Scholars, went on until 1830, thereby leaving all its graduates in a state of permanent confusion about the date of Wordsworth’s Prelude, which was published in 1850 but which they nevertheless had to read.

I decided to read the third course, but even so I found myself doing most of my work on the earlier period, Old and Middle English, largely because it was new to me. It also revived earlier impressions: I have mentioned the early course on the ballad from John Robins. In reading such books as Chadwick’s Heroic Age and the commentaries on Beowulf I began to understand something of what the role of the poet had at one time been, in the age of Homer, let us say, or the corresponding period in the North. In an oral or preliterate society in which writing has not yet developed as the norm, the poet is the man who remembers, and hence he is the chief instrument of education. Memory demands the simplest and most primitive form of conventionalizing verbal utterance, which is verse. (I began to realize at the same time that prose is not, as is so often vulgarly assumed, the language of ordinary speech, but a more difficult way of conventionalizing ordinary speech than verse is, which is why it comes later in time. It is the domination of the habits of a writing culture which leads us to identify prose and ordinary speech.) The oral or preliterate professional poet is the walking encyclopedia of the learning of his community. He knows its history, the names of its kings, its myths and its rituals, its proverbs and its calendar. This was, I realized, the historical basis for the feeling of dispossession that seemed to haunt poets from Sidney’s time on, and which came into Shelley’s phrase “unacknowledged legislator.”¹⁰

One of the things that fascinated me about the Old English period was its curious likeness to the earlier Canadian scene: the same combination of a sophisticated imported civilization with incredibly primitive living conditions in the country itself, the same effort to account for the strangeness and loneliness and moral indifference of nature by ready-made ethical and religious formulas. What would have attracted me to the poetry of E.J. Pratt, even if I had never known him, was among other things his affinity to oral and preliterate poets: his sense of ritual, his acceptance of a social role as a kind of unofficial laureate, his feeling for the narrative as the means of telling the great stories of one’s people. All this made him look very old-fashioned in the ‘30s and ‘40s, but I knew that there was something there that would eventually vindicate itself.

I came back to Victoria College and settled down in the English department. Before long the chairman of the department, that same John Robins through whom I had learned most of what I knew about oral literature and about Canadian literature, called me into his office and said, “I want you to teach a course in the English Bible.” I said, “Why?” “Because,” he said, “there was a time when students who came to Victoria College could be assumed to have some competence in the subject matter of the Bible, hence when they were taught such a poem as Paradise Lost they had some notion of what was being talked about. Today’s students can hardly tell a Philistine from a Pharisee.” “Given their middle-class context,” I said, “perhaps the distinction is unimportant to them.” “Never mind that,” said Robins, “I want you to teach the English Bible.”

So I began to examine other courses in the English Bible, but they did not satisfy me: they all seemed to assume that the Bible was some kind of anthology of Hebrew literature, which it clearly was not. I also looked at my theological notes, and discovered from them that, for example, the Epistle of James in the New Testament was an epistle which was quite probably early, or just as probably late, that it had quite probably been written by James, or with equal probability had been written by somebody who was not James, or possibly by somebody who was not James but called himself James, and that there were verbal parallels with Paul, which could be readily accounted for on the assumption that James had influenced Paul, if he was earlier, or had been influenced by him, if he was later. This amusement was known as New Testament criticism, and Old Testament criticism seemed to be in much the same state, except that it dealt with a language which went backwards, from right to left.

It was clear to me, as a literary critic, that the older view of the Bible, before historical criticism developed, was the right one to adopt for a literary course on it. It is doubtless true that many people who have tried to read the Bible straight through from the first chapter of Genesis have bogged down in the middle of Leviticus, but this does not alter the fact that the Bible, in the form in which it is now presented to us, is a book with a beginning, a complicated but logically followed narrative outline, and an end. It begins where time begins, with the creation; it ends where time ends, with the Last Judgment, and it surveys the history of mankind in between. What unifies it, from the point of view of the literary critic, are not its doctrines, which can only be deduced, but its imagery and symbolism, which can be directly pointed to. It begins with a garden and a river; it ends with a garden and a river in a city, and certain recurring images—the desert, the wilderness, the sea, the mountain, the city on the mountain, the king’s wedding—are what unify it. Such a book must be read with a mythical attitude of mind rather than with a logical attitude of mind. Doubtless there was a good deal of authentic history in the Bible, but it was not there because it was authentic history, but for quite different reasons. Hence works which made no pretence of being historical, such as the Book of Job, could be more profound in their wisdom and spiritual meaning than the begats in Chronicles, which may well be historical.

I was beginning to see that the language of religion and the language of literature were closely connected, but the reason for the connection did not really become clear to me until the existentialist people came along after the war and I began reading Kierkegaard and his followers. The reason for the connection is that myth is the language of concern. Man is in two worlds: there is a world around him, an objective world, which it is the business of science to study. But there is also the world that man is trying to build out of his environment, and this is the world which depends on man’s view of himself and his destiny, on his concern about where he came from and where he is going to, and all his hopes and his ideals, his anxieties and his panics, come into his view of the society that he wants to build. Within the logical habit of mind, whatever is true is also objective, which means that to some extent it is alienated. In the mythical habit of mind what is true is something that man is directly involved and concerned with. The Bible was mythical, not historical, because history speaks the language of the past, which was not a sufficiently urgent language for its authors. Myth is the only language of the present tense and it is also the language of poetry. As Aristotle said long ago, history tells us what happened; poetry tells us what happens.¹¹ The myth confronts the reader directly with something which is set over against him, and which he has to come to terms with at the moment of reading.

Much of this is familiar to students of religion by now, but when I first embarked on it thirty years ago it was still a lonely road. I had gone to a theological professor to explain what I wanted to do, and after listening to me for a while he asked me if my students read German. I said that they would be unlikely to read a book in German if I recommended it. “Then I can’t help you,” he said, “all that stuff’s in German so far.” But the German sources were not as helpful as I expected. Some of them talked about “demythologizing” the Bible when they ought to have talked about remythologizing it (as I understand they do now). There was a lurking belief that myth was, not the language of concern and the present tense, but the language of the fabulous, and that after it had been subtracted from the Biblical text the residue would be more historical, or rational, or otherwise credible. It was clear to me that if everything that was mythical was extracted from, say, the Gospels, about all that would be left would be the verse in John [11:35] which reads “Jesus wept.”

In the meantime, of course, I had been developing my own literary interests. Of those, the most important to me by far was the poetry of William Blake, especially those long, tangled, obscure poems which he called Prophecies. Everybody assured me that no one who went into that jungle ever came out alive. I went into the jungle nevertheless: it took me ten years to come out, somewhat emaciated, but I think I did come out. I had been largely concerned with trying to understand what Blake meant by those mysterious beings—Los, Urizen, Orc—which inhabited his long symbolic poems. They looked, at first, as though they were gods, and as gods they resembled the Classical gods one meets elsewhere in literature. Orc was much the same as the dying god I had read about in Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Urizen similarly resembled the white-whiskered old man in the sky who has been called Zeus and Jupiter and Jehovah and (by Hardy) the President of the Immortals. Yet Blake himself was clear that such gods were projections from states of the human mind, and that the true gods were those human states themselves. I began to realize something about myth with a more immediate social reference: it is possible for a myth to take over a whole society, so that that society may act out its life within a continuous mythology.

For example: all mythologies begin with some kind of creation myth. How did the world come into being? The simplest answer is that the world began in the same way that babies get born and seeds grow in the spring. A sexual myth of creation tends to focus on a Great Mother, associated or identified with Nature, Blake’s Vala, and to this figure, the principle of fertility in all life, there is added a subordinate male figure, the dying god who at various stages is the mother’s son, bridegroom, or sacrificial victim. This creation myth had been succeeded, apparently, by another myth reflecting a more urban and tool-using society, which thought of the world as made or shaped like an artefact, usually by a sky-god thought of as male, and as a father-figure. The latter was the version accepted by Judaism, Christianity, and philosophical Hellenism.

In modern times these two myths seem to have achieved modern forms, in which they have been to some extent recovered and thought of as states of the human mind, instead of being projected on gods. The human mind is the only creative force we can actually see: the conception of external nature as a “creation” begs a vast question. The myth of the world as artefact, derived from the fact that man shapes and makes things, becomes the myth of Prometheus, the thief of fire who defended man against the gods. The myth of Prometheus is naturally a revolutionary myth, and I think it was hardly an accident that Karl Marx was fascinated by Prometheus. He read Aeschylus’s play on Prometheus through in Greek every year, and his imagery is full of volcanoes and the stealing of fire and, of course, the developing of “instruments of production.” The American way of life, on the other hand, appears to me to be derived rather from the sexual or mother myth, and has developed a containing myth of Eros, in which the presiding genius is not so much Marx as Freud, the greatest of modern Eros-thinkers. We notice in passing how the thinkers who have most directly changed civilization, such as Freud, Marx, or Rousseau, are thinkers who have changed our mythology, and hence are really mythological thinkers rather than economists or psychologists or philosophers. Such movements as the beatniks and the later hippies are, it seems to me, attempts to define a proletariat in erotic or Freudian terms rather than in Marxist terms; and the kind of pastoral innocence that so many critics of American culture have seen in it seems to me also consistent with a pervading Eros mythology.

One of my colleagues at Victoria College was a professor of Classics, Eric Havelock, who soon afterwards went to Harvard. He has recently written a brilliant book called A Preface to Plato.¹² But of course he had been thinking about the ideas in this book for many years, and I remember a public lecture that he gave at Victoria on Homer that impressed me deeply. The point of his book on Plato is that in Plato’s time a preliterate oral culture had been largely entrusted to the poets, so that Homer had acquired a gigantic authority in Greek religion and education. This culture was being succeeded in Plato’s time by a logical habit of mind, based on writing, of which Plato himself, as the world’s first major philosopher, was the spokesman. Hence Plato’s attack on poetry at the end of the Republic means what it says: that poetry cannot reach truth as directly as a philosophy founded on logic and dialectic. I could see that similar developments must have taken place in Hebrew culture around the Deuteronomic reform, in the course of which a mass of traditional poems and legends and oracles became edited and codified into a sacred book.

Certain characteristics of an oral or preliterate culture are becoming more familiar to us now. One is a formulaic habit of mind, a use of certain fixed phrases, like the epithets in Homer. In poetry such units are useful because they are constructed to fit the metre, and can be moved around at will in a poetry which is always close to improvisation. Other formulaic units are fixed because they are established in society, like popular proverbs. Such units are closely related to the clichés that people use as a substitute for thinking. Then again, an oral culture is necessarily a highly ritualized culture, preoccupied with the right way of doing things, with a sense of ceremonial and of what might be called formulaic units of action.

As you all know, within recent times another colleague of mine at Toronto, Marshall McLuhan, has attacked the same question on a much broader front. He has pointed to the immense impact that other media of communication besides books are now making, and has drawn from his observation of this impact the principle, which seems sound enough in itself, that we are returning to some of the social features of a preliterate culture, which means a retribalizing of society, as he calls it, hence his phrase about the global village.¹³ What worries me about this thesis is the way in which it has been received by what I call the Eros mentality of the American public. A facile and shallow optimism, a belief in automatic progress, a confidence that a new civilization can be brought about by certain gadgets merely because the gadgets are there, is always close to the surface of American feeling. Along with it goes a constant wish to abdicate moral dignity and responsibility. I am not speaking of McLuhan himself here, but there is one feature in his writing that seems to me to help to encourage such a response, the feature that I have called determinism. I have learned to distrust all determinisms, whether they are economic or religious or mediumistic: they seem to me essentially rhetorical devices, which help to make a doctrine more popular and easier to grasp. New media of communication are not causes of social change: they are only the conditions of change, and we cannot discover the direction of social change from them; it is society itself that will determine the direction of change.

I suppose that if a historian of the future were asked what was the most important social event of our time, he would say that it was the extraordinary retribalizing of Red China. There, a formulaic culture has been imposed on hundreds of millions of people, all of whom must learn the “thoughts of Chairman Mao,” whatever else they learn, and must then learn to inform everything else they know with these “thoughts,” or formulaic units of thought. This has been tried before in China: we are told that the Emperor who ordered the Great Wall to be built also ordered the destruction of all earlier literature and history, on the ground that those who opposed his will tended to rely on their cultural traditions for support and quotations. Mao Tse-tung has done much the same thing, except that he realizes that a verbal wall is the only kind that will not fall down. Colossal as this event is, I think all of us would agree that this is not the kind of society that we want for ourselves, and that we want very different social results from the retribalizing process. As soon as oral and preliterate characteristics make themselves felt in society, a patriarchal figure is very likely to make his appearance in the middle of that society. This patriarchal figure may be at first simply an amiable figurehead (Eisenhower), or counter-tendencies in society may throw up opposing symbols of youth and energy (Trudeau, the Kennedys); but if society does not arrest the drift it is likely to go from King Log to King Stork,¹⁴ from reassuring images to Big Brother. Considering that McLuhan has very explicitly warned us against precisely this danger, it would be unfairly ironic if he were to become the Pied Piper of our generation.

I seem to have lived through, then, three quite different phases in the relationship of literature to society. First was a Victorian reading culture, where literature was one of the amenities of a middle-class standard of living. Underneath it was middle-class Philistinism, which showed through in times of economic stress like the Depression, in the constant moral sniping at serious literature by censors and the like, in the pervasive belief that real life had nothing to do with cultivation, but was made up entirely of work and distraction. The second phase was a response to a revolutionary situation brought about by the Depression and the growth of Fascist and Communist movements. Here literature was assumed to have a social context relating it immediately either to the ideology of revolution or to the defence of liberal and traditional cultural values against it. One by-product of this situation was a development of critical theory in which I have been professionally engaged myself. In the course of this a few things have become clearer to me, such as the fact that literature inherits a mythology, and that the ideologies of revolution and counter-revolution are ultimately poetic creations. The Bible is for the literary critic the best place to study the mythological framework that Western culture has inherited.

Now we are in a different kind of revolutionary situation, one that in many respects is more like anarchism than the movements of a generation ago. The latter, whether bourgeois or Marxist, were equally attached to a producer’s work ethic and to the conviction that literature was a secondary social product. The unrest of our time is partly directed against the work ethic itself, and against the anxieties and prejudices of an affluent society. In other words, it is a situation in which one kind of social imagination is pitted against another kind, and hence it is a situation in which those who work with their imaginations, such as poets and artists, ought to have, and doubtless increasingly will have, a central and crucial role. This last situation is also contemporary with the rise of communications media other than writing, which have brought back into society many characteristics of oral cultures, like those out of which the Bible and Greek philosophy developed. As in all revolutionary situations, society is under great pressure to abdicate its moral responsibility and throw away its freedom. Such pressures exist in every aspect of the situation: there is no side devoted to freedom or to suppressing it. The critic, whose role in the last two decades has expanded from studying literature to studying the mythologies of society, has to join with all other men of good will, and keep to the difficult and narrow way between indifference and hysteria.