June 1968
In June 1968 Frye delivered a lecture entitled “Mythos and Logos” at the summer session of the Indiana School of Letters, Bloomington. It was published in the booklet School of Letters: Twentieth Anniversary, 1948–1968 (Bloomington: n.p., 1968), 27–40, and reprinted in Yearbook of Contemporary Literature, 18 (1969): 5–18, and in Italian translation as “Mito e logos,” Strumenti Critica, 3 (1969): 122–43. Since this address is identical, except for the opening paragraph and a few sentences, to that delivered as “The Social Context of Literary Criticism” at Cornell University, 18 April 1968, and already published in full in LS, 347–65, a summary is given here.
The title of this text announces a holistic treatment of two dominant and deeply interrelated concepts in Frye’s vision of literature and culture: Mythos and Logos. Yet the text begins in an almost casual way by recounting how the study of Blake had led Frye to two fundamental questions: “What is the total subject of study of which criticism forms a part?” and “How do we arrive at poetic meaning?” It can immediately be seen that the underlying purpose of this questioning is to understand literature in its specificity, and simultaneously to safeguard the specificity of the discipline which studies literature, that is, of criticism. In the late 1940s and still in the late 1960s Frye sees multiple tendencies to make the study of literature dependent on a variety of concepts drawn from other disciplines. Criticism is therefore doubly vulnerable: because it appears to be without a central object of its own, and because its conceptual tools are not its own. The point of our text is therefore to obviate this quandary. Frye begins by consulting two defenders of poetry, Sidney and Shelley. Sidney looks back upon the prophetic role of the poet—mythical or historical—in preliterate culture with admiration and nostalgia because such a poet was thought to possess universal knowledge and because formulaic oral poetry had a compelling effect upon the listener. But in a literate culture a differentiation occurs between the historical and factual and the expression of it, between what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls a poet’s “overthought,” i.e., explicit meaning, and his “underthought,” the “texture of images and metaphors.” We now begin to see a long process of differentiation between the once factual, historical, even scientific mission of poetry and the analogical function it assumes when prose takes over as the medium of information. Frye bluntly asserts that “[a]mbiguity, which simply means bad or incompetent writing in any logical or descriptive context, is a structural principle of poetry.” As Peacock does when commenting on the rise of the Romantic movement, Frye sees poetry, even in the twentieth century, as “having lost the traditional function inherited from preliterate days,” and in a sense separated from society. But it is precisely when it is recognized for its own sake and freed from logical thought that poetry assumes its visionary status. It no longer carries the responsibility of conveying ethical and religious values though, paradoxically, the language of poetry may at times recapture the ambience of spiritual bonding with the universe which it possessed in primitive times. The fundamental difference between what Sidney and Shelley defended lies in their respective views of the roots and destination of the mythopoeic function of poetry. With Shelley, “poetry once again, as in primitive times, becomes mythopoeic, but this time its myths embody and express man’s creation of his own culture, and not his reception of it from a divine source.” Its role is the articulating of concern. In that sense it rejoins the imaginative creativeness of the poet of preliterate times. The Sidney–Shelley confrontation has led Frye to his own major point that “[t]he imagination operates in a counter-historical direction … and literature exists totally in the present tense as a total form of verbal imagination.” And this in turn leads to the question of poetic meaning which is not referential in respect of the context of external reality, but “archetypal” in relation to literature as a whole. This general view enables Frye, for instance, to welcome into the poetic family some of the renewals of orality characteristic of the late 1960s, and to link poetry with a “permanent revolution in the strictest sense, society engaged in a perpetual critique of itself, reforming and clarifying its own mythology, its own troubled and inconsistent but still crusading vision of what it might be.” At every turn of individual and collective history Mythos can challenge Logos by overcoming uniformity, boredom, inability to participate joyfully in the present.