Spring 1973
From SM, 3–26. Originally published in Daedalus, 102, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 11–26, in an issue on “The Search for Knowledge.” Reprinted in Daedalus, 117 (Summer 1988): 251–72; translated into Chinese. The article was written as a contribution to a conference organized by Daedalus in Paris, 12–14 September 1972, on the adequacy of institutional supports for research in different disciplines. Frye could not attend, and felt he was not the kind of scholar who depended much on research institutions, but agreed to write a paper on his type of scholarship which could be circulated ahead of time among the participants. In NFF, 1988, box 4, files y–z are typescripts which are presumably of this circulated paper. As a result of feedback from the conference participants, Frye revised his paper for the issue of Daedalus devoted to the conference. (See correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 10, files d3, d4). For SM, Frye added two notes and cut out one sentence, for which see n. 2. Frye’s title alludes to Ecclesiastes 12:10: “The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth.”
I had grave doubts about my fitness to discuss the question of research in the humanities, because I have been deflected from everything that could conventionally be described as research, in the sense of reading material that other people have not read, or have read for a different purpose. The reason why I take an autobiographical line in what follows, even at the risk of sounding egocentric, is that my experiences as a scholar have seemed to me, for a long time, to be atypical, and that more recently I have begun to think that they may be more typical than I have suspected.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the system of Ph.D. training was established in American universities, largely, it is said, on a German model. The idea of the Ph.D. was to define the condition that a practising scholar was supposed to keep himself in. His thesis was there to demonstrate that he had the capacity to make original contributions to scholarship, and the rest of the training was to prepare him to teach over a wider field than his special scholarship covered, and to be able to make use of research materials in other languages. Scholarship in the humanities was conceived at that time largely in terms of the division of labour, and the model, implicitly or explicitly, was science. The scholar was by definition a specialist, connected with his community through his teaching. The implication was that the highest reward of the scholar would be relief from teaching duties, at least in the undergraduate school, so that he could devote his time to his speciality. Behind this lay a further assumption about the place of the university in the community at large. Because of its innate tendency to build smaller compartments in knowledge, research gives an illusion of withdrawing from social issues, hence a hierarchy of scholarship in which pure research is at the top also assumes a university that constitutes a social counter-environment.
At this time and later a number of learned journals were established, many of them with the word “philology” in their titles, which indicated that the scholarly organization of literature had been derived from the comparative study of languages. And though the Ph.D. took a much longer time to establish itself in the British universities, especially Oxford, where I studied during the ’30s, still Oxford had also adopted the philological conception of literature. There were three courses in the English school at Oxford when I was there: Course 1, which had the highest rating, featured Gothic and Old Norse; Course 2 covered English literature down to 1500; Course 3, established for the benefit of Rhodes scholars and the like, covered English literature down to 1830. Whatever the course, the emphasis was on philological elements, rather than on literary or critical ones. On both sides of the Atlantic it has been relatively recently that we have had a sustained body of scholarship in the Old and Middle English periods that is not critically infantile.
The excuse offered for this was that, as any cultivated person ought to be reading literature on his own, giving academic credit for doing so was a weak permissiveness. There are colleges in Oxford which to this day refuse to employ a tutor in English for this reason. It is part of the same perverted ethos that what is regarded as serious in the study of the modern languages is the philological aspect of it. It strengthens the moral fibre to learn the classes of Old English strong verbs; it weakens it to study the rhetorical devices in Ulysses. Here again is a lurking analogy to science, and when nineteenth-century philology gave place to twentieth-century linguistics, some of the old prejudices against literature as such revived.
A dissatisfaction with this ethos reached its climax around the ’40s of the century in America, when a movement described as “New Criticism,” because it was new to the Wissenschaft mentality, raised a question that was almost a moral one. Why should people be regarded as scholars in the area of literature who did not know the first thing about literature? For the first thing about literature to know is how to read a poem as a poem and not as a philological document. In endeavouring to develop this, the New Criticism lost itself in a labyrinth of explication. Many aspects of the reaction, as usually happens in such cases, were carried to absurd lengths. A strong undergraduate feeling developed that departments of English in universities were under a moral obligation to be as contemporary as possible, and a similar feeling expressed itself recently under the neo-Nazi slogan of “relevance.”1 There were also graduate students who would propound the thesis that literary works could be properly read only when they were deprived of all context in language, history, and experience. In the meantime the old philological journals had begun to lose their prestige and were being replaced by new journals, most of them with “review” in their titles, and which printed poetry and fiction as well as criticism. For all the excesses, the reaction itself was inevitable and in its main emphasis healthy. After a long period of specialized scholarship concerned with literature which had no real basis in literature, a great body of information about literature had been built up which very seldom led to any increased insight into it. Hence there had to be a period of drawing things together, of trying to look at literature itself in a broader and more general way.
It seemed to me, entering this situation a generation ago, that the first thing to look for was a basis for critical principles within criticism itself, trying to avoid the kind of externalized determinism in which criticism has to be “based on” something else, carried around in some kind of religious or Marxist or Freudian wheelchair. At that time, scholars who regarded their work as historical assumed that anyone dissatisfied with their methods must be antihistorical. This was the reverse of my own attitude: I was dissatisfied with the methods of historical scholars who did not know any history. That is, who did not know the history of literature. There were many who knew dates and the numbers of the centuries and a certain amount of nonliterary history, but who did not know anything about the actual development of the conventions and genres of literature itself. I think that enough theoretical work has been done now to make visible a shift of emphasis, and that we are at the beginning of another phase of scholarship, based more solidly on a properly established critical theory of literature. There may again be some specialization and division of labour, but the old pseudoscientific analogy has had it. I should be very pleased if I were to become regarded as one of the people who had assisted in the process of transition.
It is true that I have also suggested that criticism may become a scientific activity. But the conception of science involved is different. The older conception rested on a work-and-play antithesis: philology was the one way of working with words, so far as was then known, which seemed to have affinities with scientific procedure. Consequently philology was work, whereas literature, to which only a purely emotional reaction was thought of as appropriate, escaped every form of systematic and progressive study. I have tried to show, or help show, that literature itself is a structure, and can be studied in sequence like anything else; hence for me the entire study of it can assume a scientific shape. I am thinking, of course, of a future development of science in which the social sciences will have rediscovered the fact that they are equidistant from the humanities and the physical sciences, and are as closely related to the former as to the latter.
The transition however leaves many problems unsolved, notably the question of the Ph.D. The humanities resist the division of labour much more actively than the sciences, and the collapse of the scientific analogy in graduate work in the humanities puts this degree in a curiously paradoxical position. In the humanities, things stick together, get involved with one another, and merge into larger configurated patterns. Consequently, the graduate student’s Ph.D. thesis is almost always going to be his first book. So, obviously, he has to get the thesis done, because if he doesn’t it will block up everything else he might do. It is possible to pick a thesis topic which is a pure academic exercise, and can be done in a limited time, but such topics are rare, and many of them are exercises in which the student will learn nothing except the technique of the exercise. Much more frequently, he gets discouraged by the terrible waste of time and effort involved in writing first a dissertation and then a book on the same material.
There are many things in the Ph.D. program which are extremely valuable, as I know to my cost. I avoided the Ph.D. myself by sheer accident, but there were elements in the training which I wish I had got in the regular way, and have always felt the lack of. Some efforts have been made to put in additional degrees in place of the Ph.D., with very limited success. To put in a degree that is simply an inferior degree seems to me entirely useless. A few years ago, some graduate departments at Toronto, including English, experimented with an M.Phil. degree, but soon abandoned it.2 The attempt was part of a move to get qualified teachers into classrooms in a hurry during a period of rapid expansion. But periods of rapid expansion in the university never last: depression is the university’s normal state, and second-class degrees merely supply a pretext for cutting staff in harder times.
The same thing is true, I should imagine, of degrees regarded as theoretically equivalent to the Ph.D., but with emphasis on teaching rather than research. In the new conception of the university’s place in the community which is now emerging, teaching and research cannot be separated even in emphasis. If research is subordinated to teaching, the instructor soon falls behind in his subject, and his teaching suffers accordingly. If teaching is subordinated to research, the instructor, unless he leaves the university and attaches himself to a research institute, loses touch with the social context of his research. I understand that in the University of London a doctoral degree is awarded on the completion of a certain body of work, but is independent of graduate study as such. This seems to me to make very good sense for the humanities. But in general I really have no solution to the doctoral problem in literature, and can only offer one or two observations about the nature of the academic area which may be of some use.
I notice that whenever I publish an article and get offprints, I may send the offprints to friends, but I seldom get any requests for them. On the other hand, when I gave an address to a convention of psychiatrists that was printed in a psychiatric journal, I got over a hundred requests for offprints.3 It was no surprise to me to learn that scientists tend to work with offprints and abstracts, but I had not realized before so strongly how much the humanist tends to wait for the book. It is as though the humanist cannot really understand any aspect of his subject unless he studies a large configuration of it.
The book is a by-product of the art of writing, and is the technological instrument that makes democracy a working possibility. The expository treatise, in particular, is a democratic form in which the writer is putting all his cards on the table, avoiding all rhetorical tricks designed to induce hypnosis in an audience, relying on nothing but the inner force and continuity of his argument. The reader cannot directly reply, but he can always turn back in the book to a previous point, and find that the same words are repeated no matter how often they are consulted, a model of patience for the teacher in itself. Behind the book is the larger social context of a body of written documents to which there is public access, the guarantee of the fairness of that internal debate on which democracy rests.
The authority established here goes back to the fateful point in Greek philosophy represented by Socrates. Students of Pythagoras or Heraclitus were expected to be disciples, pondering the dark sayings like “change is a rest,” “all things flow,” “don’t eat beans,” and the like, which had the unquestioned authority of a guru or oral teacher. Then we have Socrates approaching the youth of Athens and saying, in effect: “I don’t know anything, but I’m looking for something. Come and help me look.” Those who responded found themselves pursuing a straight line of dialectic, an argument which had its own authority and autonomy independent of the teacher. Socrates was not a writer, but his linear habit of thought made him an inspiration to writers, beginning with Plato and Xenophon. Socrates was also a philosopher, and philosophy has, up until quite recent times, also been based on the book. The centrifugal drift towards scientific procedures has affected philosophy as well, with, possibly, though I speak with very little authority, the same result. I remember as a student of the subject having to read, for example, Lotze’s Mikrokosmus. I have totally forgotten what Lotze’s philosophical “position” was, or into what ocean of thought the delta of his argument debouched itself. But I do remember feeling that I was reading a wise and humane book, which had got to be that through the relaxed and comprehensive form adopted.4 The shape of the book, in short, has a great deal to do with the liberality of the discipline that produces it.
I am on a commission in Canada concerned with communications,5 and when I first joined it I read a policy report which recommended that publications should be issued from time to time. The recommendation began: “Despite the disadvantages inherent in the linear representation of a world that is increasingly simultaneous, print still retains its medieval authority.” This sentence is typical of the nitwitted McLuhanism (I am not speaking of McLuhan himself) which is confusing the educational scene. I recently spoke to an audience of university graduates, and was asked, quite seriously, what I thought of the university’s building such a huge library when the book would be out of date by the time it was opened. The book qua book is not linear: we follow a line while we are reading it, but the book itself is a stationary visual focus of a community. It is the electronic media that increase the amount of linear experience, of things seen and heard that are as quickly forgotten. One sees the effects on students: a superficial alertness combined with increased difficulty in preserving the intellectual continuity that is the chief characteristic of education.
I mentioned the fact that scholarship tends to become pluralistic and increasingly specialized, increasingly unintelligible even to its nearest neighbours. The core of truth in the older conception of the scholarly life, which placed pure research at the top of a hierarchy, is that scholarship always holds a potential power of veto over everything else. That is, the tiniest alteration of established fact may have repercussions that will totally change the generally held view of the whole subject. But the scholar remains connected with his community as a teacher, as a public figure, and as a popularizer (in the best sense, naturally) of his own subject. This is the level for which the book is the inevitable form of presentation. Perhaps, as remarked above, we may expect in the humanities a new crop of research articles and special studies which can be produced after new theoretical principles have been established. I gather from talking to scientists that they feel that they are at the other end of the cycle, and that all the sciences, even the physical ones, are feeling a greater need for books and for larger and more comprehensive patterns of thought.
The book raises the question of the nature of influence in literature. This is one aspect of literary study that has received a good deal of attention, because its basis appears to be historical.6 But scholars trained in extraliterary perception, interested in the history of ideas and the like, are apt to think of an influence transmitted from A to B as a large body of consciously held ideas. This is hardly the way that influence exerts itself among poets. One may assume, for example, that Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth would all have made an intensive study of Milton. But what they got from Milton they got as poets, and consequently the derivation is a mainly unconscious derivation of phrases, even words, that flow from a single source into four very different contexts. Probably the best way to document the influence of Milton on these poets is to run their texts through a computer: the result would not, in general, tell us much that we could not already guess, but the documentation would be useful.
The computer has made, or can make, other changes in the structure of literary study. A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, there was a strong existential reason for emphasizing values in the study of literature. It was one thing to decide to commit a large part of your life to making a concordance to Shakespeare or to collating manuscript variants of Chaucer, but would you want to do that kind of work for medieval homilies, or for the kind of poetic achievement represented by Googe or Churchyard?7 The computer has not only altered the answer to the question, but has helped to erode the fallacy of hierarchical values behind it. When Professor Douglas Bush produced his book on Classical mythology in the Renaissance a generation ago, he tells us that he had made an immense number of observations about the treatment of some Ovidian myths in minor Elizabethan poets. He regarded this work as largely a waste of time, and remarked that even though he knew more than anyone else about such subjects he should keep his information to himself.8 I suspect that this information was not really too trivial to be passed on, but I think it may indicate an area where some kind of mechanical aid might be of assistance. Whatever was highly regarded in its day, such as the Pyramus and Thisbe legend, is of great importance merely for that reason, whatever a contemporary scholar may think of it.
But there is another type of influence that it is impossible to trace except by an occasional accident. Every creative person has an interconnected body of images and ideas underneath his consciousness which it is his creative work to fish up in bits and pieces.9 Sometimes a phrase or a word comes to him as a kind of hook or bait with which to catch something that he knows is down there. Reading Yeats, one would think that he owed a large-scale debt to the writings of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and to Axël in particular, which would be a ready-made subject for the scholar to explicate. On examination, we find that Yeats had been fascinated by a single phrase, “As for living, our servants will do that for us,” extracted, totally out of its context, from a play he could hardly understand in the original French, and applied in contexts even more remote.10 Poets are full of influences of this kind, vagrant seeds blown toward a responsive soil, and not only poets.
When one reads the studies of influence made on creative people by their teachers, by factors in their early environment, by their reading, one is usually struck by the great plausibility of these constructs: one does, in fact, become what one is through influences. At the same time we should remember that it almost certainly did not happen like this at all. Anyone reading Finnegans Wake thinks he can see at a glance that Alice Through the Looking-Glass was a major formative influence on it, especially the figure of Humpty Dumpty and his portmanteau words. Yet we learn that Joyce had not in fact known what was in that book until it was called to his attention by others. Again, one can see that of all writers in the past, the one closest to Joyce in both temperament and technique is Rabelais, and one could study the parallels between them exhaustively. Yet Joyce says that he had not read Rabelais, though he expects nobody to believe him.11
Even in my own work I can occasionally trace the same process of transmission by seed. When I began teaching, the University of Toronto possessed an Honour Course in English Language and Literature (now destroyed, in a fit of hysterical exuberance, because it was said to be “elitist”), which was spread over four colleges, each of which had its own department.12 This meant that I not only had to teach Milton, but teach Milton opposite Professors A.S.P. Woodhouse and A.E. Barker, two of the best Milton scholars anywhere, who were teaching it in the other colleges. One result of this was that for several years I confined my reading to primary sources, there being no time to read secondary ones. Later on, when the pressure slackened a bit, I attempted to adopt the normal routine of checking through learned journals. I soon cut down on that activity, not because I regarded the articles as useless, but for the opposite reason: I was interested in everything, everything seemed to have some relevance to my interests, and yet the pursuit of knowledge in all directions at once was impracticable. Ever since then, I have realized that scholarship is as much a matter of knowing what not to read as of knowing what to read. While writing Anatomy of Criticism in particular, endless tantalizing vistas opened up on all sides, yet I had to close my eyes to them, as Ulysses closed his ears to the sirens, because exploring them would get my main thesis out of proportion.
Fortunately, one of my colleagues when I began teaching was Professor Wilson Knight, later of Leeds. I think Wilson Knight influenced me more than I realized at the time. At that time he was completely possessed by Shakespeare, and gave the impression of not knowing a Quarto from a Folio text, certainly of caring even less. He showed me once his main instrument of scholarship—a Globe Shakespeare with a mass of pencilled annotations. Like most students of my generation, Knight’s books had much the effect on me that Chapman’s Homer had on Keats,13 and the method indicated, of concentrating on the author’s text but recreating it by studying the structure of imagery and metaphor, seemed to me then, and seems to me still, the sort of thing that criticism is centrally about.
Nevertheless, I went through a long period in which every publication of mine was followed by neurotic fears of being confronted with proof of having plagiarized it from some source I had not read—or, worse still, had forgotten having read. I gradually became more fatalistic about this, besides realizing that the more obvious what I said seemed to me, the less likely it was that anyone had said it before. I can also trace one or two examples of influence so trivial that I hesitate to record them, except as evidence that the kind of influence I postulate for Joyce and Yeats works on all levels of intellectual activity. Once, when an undergraduate, I was discussing the keyboard music of Bach with a friend interested in the same subject, and spoke of my great interest in the fugues Bach had made on themes by Albinoni. My friend made some such comment as “very scholarly,” and the word “scholarly” as applied to Bach’s music stuck in my mind. I had always known that it was scholarly, of course, but to know a thing is not to realize it: one may know many things that are still not attached to that submarine body of ideas one is trying to fish up. Forty-odd years later, I wrote an essay on Shakespearean comedy trying to show that Shakespeare is as scholarly a writer as Ben Jonson, except that his scholarship, being connected with the oral tradition, is harder to recognize as such.14 The analogies with Bach’s music are there also, so that here is one example of a seed that I have accidentally caught in the act of germinating.
To carry this point a step further: my first big project was a book on the interpretation of William Blake’s longer and more didactic poems, generally called “Prophecies.” There were many reasons for getting interested in Blake: perhaps one may be of general interest. I am, in cultural background, what is known as a WASP, and thus belong to the only group in society which it is entirely safe to ridicule. I expected that a good deal of contemporary literature would be devoted to attacking the alleged complacency of the values and standards I had been brought up in, and was not greatly disturbed when it did. But with the rise of Hitler in Germany, the agony of the Spanish Civil War, and the massacres and deportations of Stalinism, things began to get more serious. For Eliot to announce that he was Classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion was all part of the game.15 But the feeling of personal outrage and betrayal that I felt when I opened After Strange Gods was something else again.16 And when Eliot was accompanied by Pound’s admiration for Mussolini, Yeats’s flirtations with the most irresponsible of the Irish leaders, Wyndham Lewis’s interest in Hitler, and the callow Marxism of younger writers, I felt that I could hardly get interested in any poet who was not closer to being the opposite in all respects to what Eliot thought he was. Or, if that was too specific, at least a poet who, even if dead, was still fighting for something that was alive.
When I began work on Blake, around 1933, there was one serious book available on the subject of the symbolism of the Prophecies, Foster Damon’s book, which had appeared in 1924.17 Apart from this there had been hundreds of books, articles, and essays on Blake, to say nothing of thousands of incidental references. There was nothing in any of this material, so far as I know, and I know more about it than most people, which was of the slightest use to me. No device of “information retrieval” would be of any help: the important thing was to get rid of the alleged information, not to get hold of it. And yet, many years later, I was asked to write a bibliographical essay on Blake which was in fact a history of Blake criticism. For it, I had to go over this material again, and I discovered, to my great surprise, that it was a most fascinating and rewarding exercise. The books still told me nothing about Blake, but they told me a great deal about the history of taste in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More generally, they told me a great deal about the human ability to stare at what is straight in front of one’s eyes and not be able to focus one’s eyes on it. I know now much that I could hardly have learned in any other way about the anxieties and obsessions which prevent a great writer from being properly estimated in his day and for some time after. I note from a reprint catalogue that four of these early books have recently been reissued. As far as telling us anything about Blake is concerned, all these books are trash, and one of them would be a strong contender in the admittedly stiff competition for the title of the world’s worst book on Blake.18 But in a sense, you can’t lose in the humanities: if your book is any good, it’s a contribution to scholarship; if it’s no good, it’s a document in the history of taste.
Two morals seem to me to be relevant. First, it is a part of the fallacy of the scientific analogy that, before deciding on a thesis topic, one should look to see whether or not “it’s already been done.” Of course this did not apply to my Blake project. But in general, in literary criticism, nothing can ever be done in a definitive way, except very specific projects, such as editing texts. I have supervised a good many doctoral theses on Joyce, Yeats, Stevens, and other much-processed writers, and have been well aware that all these theses were saying very similar things. But each represented an individual point of view, and this kind of individuality has to be taken account of in the humanities when we speak of a contribution to knowledge. In this situation the “review of recent scholarship” article emerges as an indispensable scholarly tool.
Second, a principle which follows from the first, the question of personal authority is relevant to the humanities in general, and literary criticism in particular. I think it advisable for every critic proposing to devote his life to literary scholarship to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual preceptor for himself, whatever the subject of his thesis. I am not speaking, of course, of any sort of moral model, but it seems to me that growing up inside a mind so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane studies. Some kind of transmission by seed goes on here too. I am venturing on an area which so far as I know has been very little discussed, and what I say is bound to be tentative. Keats remarks that the life of a man of genius is a continuous allegory,19 which I take to mean, among other things, that a creative life has something to do with choosing a lifestyle. I think the scholarly life has something to do with this too, and one chooses a preceptor among the poets who has something congenial to oneself in this respect. I notice that, at the age of sixty, I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me. The reason for this unconscious choice is that, for me, an obliteration of incident was necessary to keep the sense of continuity in the memory that fostered the germinating process I have spoken of. And it is clear to me, though not demonstrable to anyone else, that this has been imitated, on a level that consciousness and memory cannot reach, from Blake, who similarly obliterated incident in his own life, and for similar reasons. One who found Byron more congenial as a preceptor would doubtless adopt a different lifestyle.
Blake, while he is very much a man of his time, tends to pull his critic out of the historical period in which he falls. So while I naturally had to become familiar with Ossian and Gray and Chatterton, I also found myself looking through a great variety of other writers in search of ideas that would give me some clue to Blake. I do not mean that I read very systematically in mystical or occult literature. Most of the misguided critics I mentioned above told me that that was where the real analogues to Blake’s thinking were. But I found it hard to understand why Blake interested me so much when most mystical and occult writing interested me not at all. I soon discovered that I had to take seriously Blake’s own statement that he belonged with the poets and artists, and read accordingly. But again, reading simply in the 1750–1820 period of Blake’s own lifetime was not only insufficient, but in many respects misleading. This fact was important to me, because it dramatized the difficulty of knowing what not to read, which I have already alluded to. The historical period has firmly established itself as the normal area of scholarship because it both limits and directs one’s reading, and in nearly every case it is a safe guide to follow. Blake was an exception, and a very significant one.
When I was taking a course in Blake from the late Herbert Davis, I was assigned a paper on Blake’s Milton, which I sat down to write, as was my regular bad habit in those days, the night before. The foreground of the paper was commentary, which was assuredly difficult enough for that poem, but in the background there was some principle that kept eluding me. On inspection, the principle seemed to be that Milton and Blake were connected by their use of the Bible, which was not merely commonplace but seemed antiliterary as well. If Milton and Blake were alike on this point, that likeness merely concealed what was individual about each of them, so that in pursuing the likeness I was chasing a shadow and avoiding the substance. Around about three in the morning a different kind of intuition hit me, though it took me twenty years to articulate it. The two poets were connected by the same thing, and sameness leads to individual variety, just as likeness leads to monotony. I began dimly to see that the principle pulling me away from the historical period was the principle of mythological framework. The Bible had provided a frame of mythology for European poets: an immense number of critical problems began to solve themselves as soon as one realized this.
Further, Biblical mythology had not remained static, but had grown with a catholicity greater than that of the church itself, annexing the whole of Classical mythology, and the erotic or “Courtly Love” literature as well, as contrapuntal descants on its own theme. The fact that one mythology could absorb another indicated that all mythologies were imaginatively much alike. Christianity had similarly absorbed the older Teutonic mythology, because the latter also had a world tree like that of Eden, a world-girdling serpent like Leviathan, a god hung on a tree as a sacrifice to himself, a last day, and a creation. A literature grows out of the primitive verbal culture which contains a mythology; it can grow out of any mythology, but it is a historical fact that our literature is most directly descended from the Biblical myth.
Of course this particular discovery was a natural one for me to make at a time when I was actually a student of theology. This latter fact has proved useful to many people. A “Maoist” pamphlet, for example, describes me as “the High Priest of clerical obscurantism,” and its cover depicts a series of black-cloaked monks, with hoods suggesting the Ku Klux Klan.20 I think the actual effect of my theological training has been rather the opposite of that. It is true that my attitude to teaching, and probably to scholarship as well, has always been an evangelical attitude, and that I was not satisfied with my own theories until I began to see how they could be made the basis for a system of teaching literature in sequence, at all levels from kindergarten to graduate school. But actually the Bible preoccupied me, not because it represented a religious “position” congenial to my own, but for the opposite reason. It illustrated the imaginative assumptions on which Western poets had proceeded; consequently the study of it pointed the way towards a phenomenological criticism which would be as far as possible free of presuppositions. I am not by any means sure that it is possible really to get free of presuppositions, but it is obvious that all genuine advance in knowledge goes along with a continued attempt to objectify and become aware of the assumptions one is starting from. Poets do not write, like Swift’s spider, “out of their own bowels, and in a restricted compass.”21 The poet is taken over by a mythical and metaphorical organism, with its historical roots in the Bible, and the integrity of that organism is his Muse, the mother that brings to life a being separate both from herself and from him.
So far from hitching literature to a structure of belief, this principle actually emancipates literature from questions of belief altogether. But, of course, for many centuries the poet was regarded as subordinate in authority to other types of writers, such as theologians. Their method of writing, it was thought, had more direct access to truth; the poet’s function was to produce a rhetorical echo of that truth, addressing the emotions and will and trying to persuade them to align themselves on the side of truth. This view assumed that literature was serious in proportion to its allegorical relationship to religion. Later on, as religious anxieties gave place to more secular and political ones, it continued to be believed that the realist, who studied the life around him and reflected it in his writing, had a seriousness that the mere romancer who told stories for fun could not match. The historian of nineteenth-century fiction, for example, finds that the backbone of his historical study is constituted by the great realists, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Thackeray, and certain carefully selected aspects of Scott, Dickens, and Henry James. Such a book as Alice in Wonderland is obviously a masterpiece of its kind, was immensely popular in its day, and has never lost its popularity, but somehow it doesn’t fit the history. And just as a highbrow in Old English times would probably regard a saint’s life as more serious than Beowulf, so most modern critics would regard social realism, of the kind that clearly reflects the life around it, as more serious than fantasy or adventure where there is a strong emphasis on the structure of the story, designed primarily to keep the reader turning the pages.
This leads to another far-reaching critical principle. Every primitive verbal culture contains a number of stories, of which some gradually assume a particular importance as “true,” or in some way more deeply significant. These are the stories that are most readily describable as myths, and they are the ones that take root in a specific society and provide for that society a network of shared allusion and experience. Such myths differ in social function, but not in structure, from the folk tales and legends that are often told simply for fun by wandering storytellers. Thus in European literature the Biblical stories have a seriousness not ascribed to folk tales or legends which are closely analogous, if not identical, in structure. As literature develops, some poets, such as Dante and Milton, recreate the central myths; others, such as Shakespeare, have the social role of entertainers, and turn rather to folk tale and legend. But the former group recreate the central myths on the same imaginative basis that the latter are using, and the latter group, if they treat their themes with enough intensity, give them the same kind of significance that the central myths have.
Some time ago I had occasion to read Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools. It is not a favourite novel of mine, but it struggles hard to be a serious one, and it seeks seriousness through allegory, like the Sebastian Brant poem from which it derives its name. The setting is a German ship sailing from Mexico to Germany in 1932, and every episode, such as the excluding of a Jew from the captain’s table, is part of an allegorical relationship of the story to the rise of Nazism in Germany. Later, when stranded in an airport, I pulled another ship story off the paperback shelves, Paul Gallico’s The Poseidon Adventure. This was a thriller about a ship that turned upside down in a wreck, leaving the surviving passengers to climb upwards towards the bottom of the ship. This story being designed for entertainment, it concentrated on the shape of the story, and the shape of the story derives from what I call an archetype, a story type that has been used thousands of times before, for which the Biblical model is the Exodus. The author being a professional and intelligent writer, I knew that he would indicate some awareness of this fact before long, and two-thirds of the way through he did so. He explained that the passengers were undertaking this desperate and apparently futile climb because up had always been good and down bad, that damnation went down, the resurrection up, that mythology puts monsters underground and graceful fantasies of light in the upper air. In the same chapter the leader of the expedition, a clergyman, gets fed up with his own notion of God and commits suicide: not a very convincing episode, but an Exodus story needs a Moses figure who doesn’t make it all the way.
I am not comparing the two books: I am noting the survival of the distinction between a more serious literature that reflects important truths allegorically, and a less serious literature, designed for entertainment, that follows a certain storytelling formula. I am also suggesting that an a priori value distinction between them is critically unsound. The reading of a formulaic book, such as a detective story, may not be in itself a significant experience. But even such a book can take on significance through the resonance of context. A detective story is normally a comedy, and while any individual comedy, from Plautus to modern television, may be silly or trifling, the importance of studying comedy itself, as a whole, is very considerable. For one thing, once a literal belief in a mythology declines, and Biblical stories are no longer generally assumed to be historically factual, it becomes increasingly obvious that the real affinities of a mythology are not with the waking world but with the dream world. A mythology is a construct belonging to art and not to nature: it is not a description of the outer world, a crude form of philosophy or science, but a cultural model, expressing the way in which man wants to shape and reshape the civilization he himself has made. Comedy, which tends toward the victory of desire over reality, indicates this fact more clearly than any other archetypal form.
The same principle is central to the teaching of literature, especially in the most elementary stages. From kindergarten onwards, the teacher is not instilling literature into a mind that doesn’t know any, but reshaping the student’s total verbal experience. This experience has been built up by television, movies, and the conversation of his parents and classmates as well as by his reading. It already contains a great deal of mythology, much of it phony, derived from advertising or class stereotypes, and literature is or should be the means of leading the student from his present subjective social vision into the total social vision of mankind.
All this may not be very helpful in discussing the question of the university’s support of research. The humanities usually get the lion’s share of the library budget, but apart from that they are usually regarded by administrators as low-budget departments. In fact there are times when I wonder whether “low-budget departments” would not be the best definition of the humanities. Some branches of the humanities, of course, are inherently expensive, an obvious example being archaeology, on which a good many humane disciplines are heavily dependent. But it is still possible to bring a man into a university at a senior level in the humanities without the great expenditure for equipment and the like which an equivalent appointment in the sciences would necessitate.
Universities however are caught in a paradoxical situation: they have to build up as good a library as they can, and yet they must maintain travel grants to enable scholars in the humanities to go to still better libraries. The immense resources of modern libraries, which can bring so much to the scholar’s doorstep, are of course indispensable, but most of them imply that the scholar already knows what he is looking for. If he is doing original research, he may not know. In that case he has still to be turned loose in the British Museum or the Library of Congress with a sense of serendipity built up by his previous experience of the subject.
We have all heard how the Bodleian Library in Oxford got rid of its Shakespeare Folio, which it later had to buy back again at much greater expense. The inference is often that the Oxford librarians of that day were fools. Actually, they were entirely right: in terms of what Oxford then taught and studied, Shakespeare was no more use to them than collections of nineteenth-century sermons would be now to the kind of college that hands out diplomas to young women studying ballet. After the modern languages were established in universities, library buying was largely confined to a select canon of approved writers. The minor writers came in on a preferential list, those that had been dead the longest getting the most attention. The scholarly revolution which I have helped to agitate has resulted in weakening the distinction between classical and popular literature. Some years ago, when I was visiting a university in the United States, a professor responsible for much of the library buying in the Romantic period came in to see me with a catalogue. He had a chance of buying a large amount of the “horrid mysteries” of the 1790s, and was hesitating. I said, “Grab it at once.” But he was doubtful whether the inherent value of this work justified the expenditure, because his was a small college with a restricted budget. I imagine that he now regrets his caution, in an age when “Gothic is in” and the best and brightest graduate students are likely to be paying attention to Rider Haggard as well as to George Eliot. For university library purposes, there certainly is such a thing as junk, but junk is no longer definable in terms of a conventional standard of literary values.
The problem of preserving the personal community is crucial to the university, and to all aspects of it. One should always be aware of the limitations of what is technically possible, because the future that is technically possible is not necessarily the future that society wants or can absorb. One is constantly hearing from gadget-happy technocrats about how it is, or soon will be, no longer necessary to give lectures or attend them, to build libraries or staff them, to write papers or deliver them to audiences. What such fantasies do not take in is the importance of community and personal contact in the scholarly life. Any student faced by a television screen instead of a human countenance could tell them about this.
It is for the same reason that all educational hardware has to be confined to certain specialized uses. Similarly, many libraries acquire a great deal of material that is really archival, and should perhaps be in another institution. This would include the foul papers and other excreta of contemporary poets, for which there was such a vogue a few years ago, and which for some poets made the faking of draft papers quite a profitable business. In my own case, I have had to throw my energy into a more centripetal movement of scholarship, trying to avoid specialization in order to articulate a number of central problems of critical theory. This meant that a specialized research library was only intermittently useful to me, and I have often found myself drifting from the research library into the undergraduate working library, because of the increasing affinity of my work to obvious books. But there is something too of finding one’s way back to the focus of the university community. When I mention this tendency of mine to my colleagues, I find that a large number of them share it.
I have always remained in Canada, and perhaps the influences of the Canadian environment have played a significant role in my life, allowing for the indirectness of influence that I have already mentioned. I think in any case that the effect of one’s teachers and senior colleagues is derived mainly from the reflections that one is impelled to make as a result of having known them, rather than from what they have directly taught or said. My own teachers in Toronto22 included Pelham Edgar, whose main academic interest was Henry James and James’s treatment of the North Atlantic schizophrenia which is so central to Canadian life also. Then there was E.J. Pratt, Canada’s most important English poet, who was a full-time teaching member of the department. His existence helped me to become more detached from the romantic mystique that opposes creative writers to critical ones. In Canada poets are conditioned to utter a good deal of anti-academic patter as a part of their own sales pitch, even when they are struggling for tenure appointments in universities themselves. The mystique tends to assume that creative people are the people who write poems or stories, and feels that such people ought to have a specially protected place in the community, somewhat analogous to that of the people who can speak Irish in Ireland. There is nothing wrong with this except the fallacy of attaching the conception of creativity to the genres of poetry and fiction rather than to the people working in them. This fallacy is worldwide, and extends, for instance, to the Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden, who search over the world for poets and novelists but never consider the claims of critical or expository writing.23 My third teacher, John Robins, was interested in ballads, folk tales, and popular literature, along with Old and Middle English. He had much to do with my understanding of the main features of Canadian literature, including Pratt’s poetry, which are so like those of Old English in reflecting a paradoxical tension between the primitive and the over-civilized. He probably had something to do too with my notion of archetypes, which are really an expansion of the themes and motifs of folk tale into the rest of literature.
Later on, I began to understand the extent to which this almost one-dimensional country has been preoccupied with communications of all kinds, from the most physical to the most ethereal. Many Canadians, including Harold Innis and Innis’s disciple Marshall McLuhan, have been interested in the totality of communication, and the essential unity of its activity, whether it is building railways or sending messages. Innis developed out of his study of the fur trade in Canada a vast historical communication theory, concerned with the ways in which the control of communication media by a certain class or group in society conditions that society. A similar sense of the unity of communication has affected me, and has had a good deal to do with what I have called my evangelical attitude to the teaching of literature.
The first thing one realizes, of course, is that communication media are formidably efficient, and the effect of this is among other things to make every senior professor a cock-shy of rapid transit. He has his growing body of former students, who send him everything they write as a simple routine act; colleagues who ask his advice about everything from changing jobs or making appointments to rearranging the arguments of their current books; publishers who keep sending new books to him for comment; chairmen of program committees who have found that jet planes make it possible for anyone to visit anywhere, and for conferences to be held in Pakistan or Brazil as easily as closer to home. There is also a continuous cataract of unsolicited material, stacks of song from hopeful poets and theses with notes attached saying in effect, “My supervisor says I’m crazy, but I know you’ll understand.” In this situation, an enlightened university administration should understand that the most important form of assistance they can offer him is that of the nonacademic secretary.24 Such a secretary can make all the difference between a properly functioning scholar and a harried intellectual carpetbagger, and he should not have to undertake an uncongenial administrative job in order to acquire one.
There seem to me to be three main stages in communication. There is the initial stage of separation, where communication is physically difficult and precarious. This developed in Canadian culture what I have elsewhere called a “garrison mentality,”25 and which survives in Canadian separatist movements. The garrison mentality however had its positive, even its heroic, side, as we can see when we think of the sheer physical, to say nothing of the mental, effort that scholars in Saskatchewan or Alberta had to make to maintain their standards before the days of planes and microfilm. The first impact of improved communication is destructive. If one is building a road from point A to point B, the first thing one has to do is bulldoze and cut through underbrush. If a student is being taught at school, the effort to reach him has to cut through the underbrush of the anxieties and prejudices and snobberies by which he attempts to maintain his isolated security. The immediate result of this destructive activity is a sense of uniformity and a loss of individuality. This is the stage that the communication crisis of the ’60s is trying to emerge from now.
Similar stages have affected the universities internally. Each department tends to become a garrison in itself; every development of scholarship batters at its barriers. My own conception of mythology is one that attacks the separation of one language department from another, the separation of literature from comparative religion, even the separation of the humanities from the social sciences. One response to this is to introduce interdisciplinary courses, where representatives of departments meet politely but suspiciously, like diplomats arranging for a cease-fire, or courses in general education or general humanities or great books or Western civilization. This is the second, or uniform, stage of improved communications, which is less a solution to the problem than a symptom of it. One hopes for rapid emergence to the third stage, when it is clearly realized that knowledge, like St. Augustine’s God, has its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere.26