Winter 1975
From SM, 99–122. Originally published in Critical Inquiry, 2, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 199–216, published by the University of Chicago Press. Frye’s typescript (in NFF, 1988, box 5, file v) was used as the copy for SM, as Critical Inquiry had used the Chicago Manual of Style and “put all commas in the wrong place” (letter in NFF, 1988, box 63, file 1). Apart from these wandering commas and one note added in SM, the two texts are almost identical. The article grew out of a request to Frye to respond to a generally laudatory piece by Angus Fletcher, “Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion,” Critical Inquiry, 1, no. 4 (June 1975): 741–56.
This article grew out of a profound disinclination to make the kind of comment that I was invited to make on Angus Fletcher’s article in a previous issue. I felt that such a writer as Mr. Fletcher, who clearly understands me and, more important, himself, ought to be allowed the last word on both subjects. Besides that, I have a rooted dislike of the “position paper” genre. In all the arts, adhering to a school and issuing group manifestos and statements of common aims is a sign of youthfulness, and to some degree of immaturity; as a painter or writer or other creative person grows older and acquires more authority, he tends to withdraw from all such organizations and become simply himself. Others in the same field become friends or colleagues rather than allies. I see no reason why that should not be the normal tendency in criticism and scholarship also. About twenty years ago I was asked, in a hotel lobby during an MLA conference, “What is your position relatively to Kenneth Burke?” I forget what I mumbled, but my real answer was, first, that I hadn’t the least idea, and, second, that anyone who could really answer such a question would have to be a third person, neither Burke nor Frye.
The sense of being something of a loner has always been in any case rather exceptionally true of me, with my introverted temperament, indolent habits, and Canadian nationality. When I published a study of Blake in 1947, I knew nothing of any “myth criticism” school, to which I was told afterwards I belonged: I simply knew that I had had to learn something about mythology to understand Blake. When I published Anatomy of Criticism ten years later, I had never heard the word “structuralism”: I realized only that structure was a central concern of criticism, and that the “New Critics” of that day were wrong in underrating it. I have had some influence, I know, but I neither want nor trust disciples, at least as that term is generally understood. I should be horrified to hear of anyone proposing to make his own work revolve around mine, unless I were sure that that meant a genuine freedom for him. And if I have no disciples I have no school. I think I have found a trail, and all I can do is to keep sniffing along it until either scent or nose fails me.
I have often been urged to produce a revision to Anatomy of Criticism, but that does not seem to me to be a revisable book. Apparently it is by no means out of date, but it is still a book of its own period, the mid-1950s, and to try to dress so middle-aged a production in the unisex jeans of the ‘70s would be an indignity and not a renewal of youth. My work since then has assumed the shape of what Professor Jerome Bruner would call a spiral curriculum,1 circling around the same issues, though trying to keep them open-ended. This may be only a rationalization for not having budged an inch in eighteen years, but the most serious adverse criticisms of me still seem to me to be based on assumptions too remote from mine for revision to meet them. Neither, of course, would revision stop the flow of abusive nonsense which has also been directed at me, because most of that comes from people who know quite well what nonsense it is, but have their minds on higher things. Emerson, as we know, deprecated what he called a foolish consistency,2 but there is always one form of consistency which is not foolish, and that is continuity. With some people continuity takes a revolutionary and metamorphic direction: a philosopher may repudiate everything he has written up to a certain time and start afresh. Even so, I doubt if he can start afresh until he discovers the real point of contact with his earlier work. With me, continuity has taken a more gradual direction, not because I insist that everything I have said earlier, in Anatomy of Criticism or elsewhere, must be “right,” but because the principles I have already formulated are still working as heuristic assumptions, and they are the only ones available to me.
In Anatomy of Criticism I made two polemical suggestions. One was that literary criticism seemed to me to be a potentially scientific discipline; the other was that the emphasis on value judgments was mistaken, and the attempt to make criticism into an axiological subject both futile and perverse. I have not changed my views on either point, but the amount of reaction they have provoked has got them overexposed and out of proportion, especially the second. Perhaps it would be better, instead of restating arguments for readers who still believe that they have caught me out in a contradiction whenever I say that Shakespeare is a great writer, to try to locate what appears to be the real basis of such reactions.
Literary criticism in its present form grew up in the nineteenth century, under the shadow of philology. Philology had many spokesmen who were in the direct line of Renaissance humanism, but it often became interpreted in a much more superficial way. Still, in a modified and expanded form, the philological program became the standard method of graduate training in the humanities departments of modern universities. The literary scholar learns to operate, in graduate school, a research machinery that enables him, for the rest of his life, to organize and convey information about literature and add to our stock of knowledge about it. I cannot imagine how one would frame a definition of social science that would exclude this kind of activity: it was, after all, set up on an analogy with science, though, as I think, a more simplistic analogy than the one I tried to propose. Whenever a graduate student is encouraged to do something that “hasn’t been done before,” which so often in practice means finding a new angle or gimmick for something done hundreds of times, some connection with the division of labour in a scientific activity is assumed. Humanists, of course, are supposed to write much better than social scientists, and some of them do. The real trouble—and this has always been the other half of my contention—is rather that social scientists do not yet understand that their subjects, besides being sciences, are also the applied humanities, and that the myths and metaphors of literature inform them somewhat as mathematics informs the physical sciences. Or, more accurately, the myths and metaphors of literature inform what is specifically verbal in them, as distinct from what is quantifiable or measurable or dependent on repeatable experiment.
The humanist, at the same time that he learns these techniques of scholarship, is haunted by two other feelings. One is that this kind of activity does not represent his real commitment: he clings to the idea of value partly because he knows that his scholarship does not manifest what he feels to be the worthwhileness, for him existentially, in the study of literature. The other is that he is harassed and bedevilled by the dismal sexist symbology surrounding the humanities which he meets everywhere, even in the university itself, from freshman classes to the president’s office. This symbology, or whatever one should call it, says that the sciences, especially the physical sciences, are rugged, aggressive, out in the world doing things, and so symbolically male, whereas the literatures are narcissistic, intuitive, fanciful, staying at home and making the home more beautiful but not doing anything really serious, and are therefore symbolically female. They are, however, leisure-class females, and have to be attended by a caste of ladies’ maids who prepare them for public appearance, and who are the teachers and critics of literature in schools and universities.
Such superstitions have a long history in social anxiety. Religious and political movements almost invariably assume that the real function of literature is or should be to persuade the emotions or the imagination to agree with the truth of their doctrines, in the way that a wife is traditionally supposed to use her “feminine intuition” to agree with her husband. This is still true of, for example, Marxism, where the anxiety is rationalized by arguments about the impossibility of remaining detached from the for-or-against dialectic of revolution. The humanist, even when he can see that such anxieties have only an external and inorganic relation to his subject, is still apt to be impressed by the air of relevance to the real world that they appear to exhibit.
Let us go back to the student in graduate school, learning to operate the machinery of literary scholarship. If he has a genuine vocation, we said, he will feel that his real commitment is something other than this, however important it may be in itself. His larger commitment is usually revealed by his choice of period, or by his special affection for one or two writers. In the study of literature the element of personal authority, surrendering one’s own imagination to that of some master of it, cannot be eliminated, and the relation of master and disciple always remains at its centre, though the master is more commonly a writer of the past than an actual teacher. What gets the serious student really hooked into the study of literature is likely to be a feeling of a common element in lifestyle with some author whose interest for him is not exhausted by the scholarly work he does on him (he may of course work on something quite different). I got hooked into Blake in this way very early, partly because I had been brought up in much the same evangelical subculture that Blake had developed from, and because he made an amount of imaginative sense out of that subculture that I had never dreamed was possible. Other people would find, and have found, very different points of contact with Blake: this happened to be mine.
Similarly, a woman scholar may become interested in a woman writer because of a point of contact in the specifically feminine problems of social relationship. Or a homosexual scholar may find his contact in the particular kind of sensibility that a homosexual writer often has, or a black scholar may find his in that of a black writer, and so on. Of course, it is barbaric to say that women writers can only be fully understood by women scholars, black writers by black scholars, Catholic writers by Catholic scholars. That breaks up the community of verbal imagination into a group of exclusive cliques. What I have suggested is simply a normal starting point: as a scholar gains maturity and experience, he can branch out where he likes, at any time. There may be only one such influence on a scholar or there may be a sequence of them; a scholar may remain under such an influence all his life, or may quickly dispense with all such influences. The above principle could also work in reverse: a Jewish scholar might get interested in a writer who showed anti-Semitic tendencies, and for serious reasons. However it operates, there is always a sense in which criticism is a form of autobiography, implicitly dedicated to a guru or spiritual preceptor, even if the guru is the Anonymous who wrote the great ballads, or a cultural composite like “Augustan” or “Romantic,” or a series of writers forming a psychological “tradition.”
All this indicates where the engaged or committed aspect of literary scholarship has its origin. The personal dependence of scholar on poet does not mean that scholarship is a second-class or parasitic activity: it is merely a special case of the way literary tradition always works. The poet in his turn became a poet in precisely the same way: in fact the process of personal apprenticeship and influence can be seen much more clearly within literature itself. But, as my illustrations have already made obvious, the conception of “personality” in the study of literature, or the further practice of it, moves its centre of gravity very quickly from the ordinary to the poetic personality, from the actual man to the body of what he has written, or what was written in his age.
It is hard to talk about this without resorting to what sounds like paradox. The poet has no identity, says Keats,3 and is trying to escape from personality, says Eliot;4 yet it is precisely his identity and his personality that he finds again by writing. Similarly, the relation between poet and scholar modulates into a relation between two mental attitudes or ways of thinking and imagining, in the course of which the scholar in his turn finds his own real personality. It is this core of the impersonal within the personal that distinguishes, in fact contrasts, the discipleship I am speaking of here and the kind I spoke of at the beginning in connection with myself. However grotesque it may sound to suggest that one may come to absorb or contain an influence the size of Shakespeare or Milton or Dante or Blake, still there is something in these creators that can be contained and possessed, something that expands, instead of restricting, the individuality of those who follow after them.
The real function of literary scholarship and criticism is so little understood, even by those who practise it, that it is hard not to think of it, even yet, as somehow subcreative, in contrast to the “creative” writing of poems and novels, as though creativity were an attribute of those genres rather than of the people using them. Part of the problem is the narrowness of the academic setup. To take an analogy from philosophy: no one doubts that it is essential to produce commentaries, explications, and reinterpretations of the great philosophers of the past, or to study the history of philosophy. But if there were nothing else clearly visible in academic departments of philosophy, one might well ask, Where is actual philosophy still being carried on? The corresponding question for literary scholars is, What is the real activity that Samuel Johnson and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold were concerned with? Asked who the influential thinkers of our time are, a literary critic might find it difficult, not merely to name a literary scholar whom he could regard as a leading thinker, in the sense of having influenced anyone outside his immediate field, but even to conceive the possibility of any literary critic’s having so central a place in modern thought at all. As for the public, humanists may be making the same mistake that leaders in religion have made, of examining their consciences so publicly that the public at length, and not very reluctantly, comes to believe their admissions of inadequacy.
The academic pigeonholes are of course splitting open on all sides. In the Tentative Conclusion to Anatomy of Criticism, written several years before the publication of the book in 1957, I said that a number of disciplines appeared to be converging in areas contiguous to the “myth criticism” to which so much of the preceding text had been devoted. My examples of what seemed to me then to be converging look very quaint now;5 but the prediction itself, in a more general way, has come true with such force that if I were writing such an essay today I should have to lean in the opposite direction.
Doubtless more knowledge would modify my present attitude, and in such matters I had rather be wrong than right. But structuralism, hermeneutics, phenomenalism, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, and the philosophy of language have, as I think, made a rather disappointing contribution so far to the understanding of literature, however relevant the context for it that they have set up. Their emergence certainly indicates that the rationale of modern criticism is coming closer to formulation, but their practitioners seem to be under some spell like that of the sexist myth just referred to. They still seem only incidentally interested in literature itself and in what it does or can do to people: like many historians and philosophers, they tend to resist identification with the humanities, as though they felt that they represented, or would like to associate themselves with, some Herculean force in modern thought that would not be content to remain spinning for a poetic Omphale.6
In examining the relation of one subject to another, the initial choice of metaphors and conceptual diagrams is a fateful choice. The metaphors and diagrams chosen should never be vertical, concerned with foundations and superstructures. Such metaphors invariably take some form of determinism, where one subject is assumed to provide the basis for explaining another subject. And yet, when I caution my students against trying to “base” literary criticism on something else, I usually run into the most strenuous objections. It seems utterly obvious to one student that poems come out of certain mental processes, and therefore psychological conceptions must underlie or form the foundation for any study of literature. It is equally obvious to another student that a poem is a product of specific historical and social conditions, and therefore, etc. Nothing in my teaching is more difficult to get across than the simple, “Throw that metaphor away; it’s the wrong metaphor.” It always means that we have to get something established in another subject “before” we can study literature, which of course means that we never get to study literature at all.
We seem to have passed through the worst of the age of sublimated imperialism, when there was so strong an attraction toward building some tower of Babel on a Marxist, Freudian, or Thomist model, with a determinism for its foundation and a confusion of tongues for its ground floor. But horizontal metaphors of connecting, uniting, reconciling, or bridge-building are even more dangerous, and are derived from an origin much harder to locate in oneself, the indefinite continuity that the ability to write in prose confers. Suppose that Critic A writes an essay on someone, Carlyle or Arnold or Newman or Edmund Burke—call him X. Critic A doesn’t like X much, and the point of his essay is to say that idea G in X’s work is utterly inconsistent with idea L. Along comes Critic B, also interested in X. He likes X much better, and is not averse to scoring a point or two over A. So he writes another essay in which he says that perhaps ideas G and L in X’s work may prove to be, under more careful analysis, not inconsistent at all. What this means is that the verbal formulas H, I, J, and K, which would connect G with L, have not been supplied by X, nor, of course, by A, but that he, B, can supply them. The general principle involved is that if we only write enough sentences, any statement whatever can be reconciled, or united or connected or made consistent with, any other statement. When two such statements are in different disciplines, trying to connect them destroys both their contexts.
I have explained elsewhere [e.g., p. 216, above] that I think the word “interpenetrate” a safer metaphor. For example, I consider that I know no psychology and have never studied the subject, though I must have read several hundred books that would be classified as psychology in a library. But I have read these books for whatever help they could give me as a literary critic: they interpenetrate my critical work, but keep their own context in their own discipline. For a contemporary critic interested in Freud or Wittgenstein or Lévi-Strauss, such writers, like medieval angels, do not travel through space from another subject: they manifest themselves from within his subject. These may sound like old and tired problems, but I start with them because there seems to me no other way of getting the autonomy of literary scholarship clear.
Literature, like other subjects, has a theory and a practice: poems and plays and novels form the practical side, and the centre of criticism is the theory of literature. Such a theory merges on one side with the theory of words in general, and so is inseparable from linguistics and certain areas of philosophy, and on the other side it merges with the theory of the other arts. My own contributions to literary theory are innocent of any knowledge of either linguistics or general aesthetics, but even these deficiencies may indicate that they are possibly somewhere in a central area. They came originally, of course, out of my study of Blake’s “private mythology,” where I learned, not merely that Blake’s mythology was not private, but that the phrase itself made no sense.
Blake was, even by the standards of English literature, a remarkably Biblical poet, but his interest in the Bible was primarily critical. He realized that the Bible had provided a mythological structure, which had expanded into a mythological universe, stretching from creation to apocalypse in time, from heaven to hell in space, and that this universe had formed a framework of imagery for all European poets down to his own time. It had either destroyed or absorbed other mythological structures, including the Classical, the Celtic, and the Norse, and provided the basis for the cosmologies of Dante and Milton. The existence of such a universe in Western culture was neither incidental nor accidental. Some such universe must always exist wherever any human culture does. Man lives in two worlds, the world of nature which forms his external environment, and the constructed world of civilization and culture which he has made himself because he wants to live in such a world. The mythological universe is a model of the latter world: it is usually believed to be, at least in its earlier stages, the structure of the former world also, but it is ultimately not a proto-scientific construct, even when it develops or tries to develop a science. It is a world built in the image of human desires and anxieties and preconceptions and ideals and objects of abhorrence, and it is always, and necessarily, geocentric and anthropocentric, which the actual environment is not.
By Blake’s time two things had happened to the traditional Christian universe. First, the rise of science, more particularly astronomical science, had begun to make it clear that this universe was an imaginative construct only, and had no scientific validity. Second, its isolation as a construct showed up the fact that it was an intensely conservative and authoritarian construct, and had been consistently, if often unconsciously, so used in European culture. Blake was the first poet in English literature, or so far as I know in the world, to understand how drastic an imaginative change was taking place in his time, and in his Prophecies he was trying to restructure what C.S. Lewis calls the “discarded model”7 on a basis of human desire and ambition rather than anxiety, and to see it as of human rather than of divine, so far as that means non-human, origin. More generally, he wanted to recover the mythological universe for the human imagination, and stop projecting it on an objective God or similar analogy of the external order. No contemporary poet made a comparable attempt to do this, except perhaps Goethe in the second part of Faust. But Goethe, for all his vast philosophical and poetic powers, or perhaps even because of them, did not have so firmly articulated a skeleton of the imaginative cosmos in his mind as Blake, and the curiously miscellaneous structure of the second part of Faust reflects the fact.
In Blake’s day the main challenge to the older construct had come from the separating of scientific space from mythological space. A universe in which God was up there and Satan down there could no longer hold together: Isaac Newton had blown the whistle, or, in Blake’s language, the last trumpet, on that one. The separation of the mythical spatial categories from the actual world made their reactionary shape clear: what was up in the sky was revealed as what Blake called the ghost of the priest and king,8 and what was underneath was the ghost of exploited humanity. After Blake, Darwinian evolution and the new geology blew the whistle on mythological time, and the old creation-to-apocalypse view was also reduced to a construct. It is only the universes of human imagination, evidently, that can begin or end. Blake foresaw this development, but took little interest in it, in contrast again to Goethe.
Mythological space, as Blake encountered it, consisted of four main levels. At the top was a father-God associated with the sky, who made the world, and must therefore have made a model or perfect world. A myth of artificial creation has to have a myth of man’s fall to complete it and account for the contrast with the creation we see now. This provides a second and a third level. The second level, the original home for man that God intended, is the “unfallen” world, Blake’s world of innocence; below this is our world of “experience,” and below this again a demonic and chaotic world. The first two levels are pervaded by order, harmony, concord, love, peace, and stability. On our third level, these turn into authority, hierarchy, and subordination, where God is, before anything else, the supreme sovereign, the top of a pyramid, the beginning of a chain of command that continues to operate through the structures of church and state. For traditional Christianity, the crisis of history came with the Incarnation, the descent of God into the third world, which started a specific movement of authority at a definite time and place.
For Blake the entire construct had a Heraclitian cast, the descent balanced by a rising movement, symbolized by the Resurrection, where we escape from the chain of command by dying in each other’s lives instead of living in each other’s deaths. Naturally the Resurrection was central in traditional Christianity too, but Blake saw it as the centre of what he called the “everlasting gospel.” Accepting such a gospel means, first, realizing that the creation–fall–Incarnation sequence has to be seen outside history, as a myth of the human imagination. The Resurrection meant to Blake, then, the process of abandoning the projecting of this myth, and recovering it for the human mind. Once we do this, we pass from state to community, from exploitation to imaginative work, from culture as the privilege of a few to culture as the inner condition of everyone. The arts, which tell us how the human imagination operates, are thus an untapped source of mental energy, a means of achieving social and individual freedom. Once we have recovered our imaginative birthright, we can look down on the world we have left behind and see that it forms a demonic parody of the world we are now in.
This last point cleared up for me the role of two figures who had been culture heroes of mine from my student days, Spengler and Frazer. Their conceptions seemed to get into and inform everything I worked on, yet there was never, for me, anything of the apprentice–master relation towards them that I have just spoken of. They both seemed extraordinarily limited and benighted in general intelligence and awareness of their world, and what they had that fascinated me they seemed to have almost in spite of themselves. Eventually I realized that their limitations and their usefulness to me sprang from the same source. They were both literary or cultural critics, without realizing it, and as soon as I got this clear my conception of the real area covered by the word “criticism” vastly expanded. Frazer was a Classical scholar, whose centre of gravity was in his editions of Pausanias, Apollodorus, and the Fasti: he thought he was a scientist, and collected a great deal of illustrative material from anthropology, but that did not make him primarily an anthropologist, however useful he may also be in that field. Spengler was a cultural critic like Ruskin (who had also come to influence me a good deal): his illustrations were historical, but that did not make him primarily a historian. He did something that no historian can do without ceasing to be one: showed how all the cultural products of a given age, medieval or baroque or contemporary, form a unity that can be felt or intuited, though not demonstrated, a sense of unity that approximates the feeling that a human culture is a single larger body, a giant immersed in time.
Blake’s “everlasting gospel” turns on the quest of Christ, the God-Man who descends from a higher world and returns to it, carrying human society with him in his ascent. Frazer demonstrated the existence in the human mind of a symbolism often latent in the unconscious, perhaps never emerging in any complete form, but revealed through many ritual acts and customs, of a divine man killed at the height of his powers, whose flesh and blood are ceremonially eaten and drunk. This symbolism expresses the social anxiety for a continuity of vigorous leadership and sexual vitality, and for a constant renewal of the food supply, as the bread and wine of the vegetable crops and the bodies of eaten animals are symbolically identical with the divine-human victim. The context of this natural theology is the cycle of the turning year, and it is based on an anxiety about keeping the cycle of nature going. The destroying or renouncing of whatever is most precious in the present moment because of an anxiety about the future seems to be a constant factor in the demonic or lowest level of cultural life, and informs the whole psychology of sacrifice, including the sacrifice of freedom which is postulated in most theories of social contract.
In the Biblical myth there is no complementary creative force to set against the artificial creation of God, no earth-mother or sexual creator, such as we find in many Oriental mythologies as well as the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions. A female principle, who represents the earth itself, and is therefore the mother, the mistress, and eventually the witch-destroyer of the dying god, is at the centre of all the myths studied by Frazer, but Frazer politely overlooks her existence for the most part, and it was left for Robert Graves to incorporate her into contemporary criticism in The White Goddess. Blake had set forth the whole story in The Mental Traveller and the third part of Jerusalem, and it was because he had done so that I knew how important The Golden Bough and The White Goddess were. They were important because they were books about Orc and Vala; and the two of them together outlined a vision of life as it would be if man really were, as he usually believes himself to be, wholly imprisoned within the cycle of nature. Blake not only provided the vision, but the connecting links: fatalism, the worship of nature as a closed circle, the inherent death wish or “original sin,” the instinctive acceptance of authority and hierarchy, the tendency to look outside oneself for directives. For Blake Jesus is a redeemer, but Christian civilization emphatically was not: it merely set up the old projection figures of gods, angels, priests, and kings once again.
The demonic aspect of historical time is clearer in Vico than in Spengler, though Vico came later into my reading. In Vico there is also a projecting of authority, first on gods, then on “heroes” or human leaders, then on the people themselves. Vico lived at a time when there had been no permanently successful example of a democracy, and from his study of Roman history he concluded that the people cannot recover the authority they project on others, and hence the third age of the people is followed by a ricorso that starts the cycle over again. In Spengler there is no general cyclical movement of this kind, but there is one latent in his argument. Spengler’s sense of a historically finite culture, exploiting and exhausting a certain range of imaginative possibilities, provided the basis for the conception of modes outlined in the First Essay of Anatomy of Criticism. I soon scrapped his loaded term “decline” for a more neutral conception of cultural ageing, but his vision of cultural history superseded the onward-and-upward people I had read still earlier in youth, such as Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, who had obviously got it wrong.
In ordinary life all our hopes and desires focus on the point of renewal in the cycle of nature, the turning of winter into spring, of darkness into dawn, of age into renewed youth. But the next step in the imagination shows what a donkey’s carrot this is. The exclusion of hope from Dante’s hell means that his hell is an illusion: it is the hell with hope in it that is the real hell. I noticed that the acceptance of theories of recurrence seemed to accompany either neurotic obsession, as in Nietzsche, or projected forms of self-interrogation of the most dubious kind, as in Yeats’s Vision. Also that cyclical images seemed to be central and indispensable to Fascist and Nazi views of history. I could understand too why reincarnation found no place in the Biblical myth. We do not know what is “true” in such matters, but reincarnation has two reactionary elements built into it. It makes possible a lessening of seriousness about the efforts to be made in this life, and, if one’s own life happens to be lucky, one may rationalize that as due to one’s virtue in a previous life, instead of realizing that being lucky means something very wrong in a world where most people are unlucky.
The descending movement of history is permeated by two forces expressed in mythology as Adonis and Hermes, a power and a wisdom or imagination that find their fulfilment only in death. These are the forces visualized by Frazer and by Spengler respectively. On the rising side are the forces of Prometheus and Eros, social and individual freedom. Christianity and Marxism are intensely Promethean myths—the Promethean imagery in Marx himself would make a fascinating study. In the traditional Christian universe, as we saw, the rising movement hinges on the Resurrection, which is not renewal or rebirth in time, even when it uses such imagery, but rather the opposite of rebirth, a movement upward into a different world. However, the great religions of the West, Christianity, Islam, and Marxism, have developed from the revolutionary basis of Judaism, and as they attained social power they tended to the opposite extreme, of distrusting any kind of liberation that their institutions could not control. The myth of Christianity provided only the most rigidly sacramental basis for rising out of the “fallen” state, and Marxism also apparently cannot cope with the real needs of the humanities, whenever those needs reach a point that transcends the socially predictable. In the Stalinist days, when I was working on Anatomy of Criticism, Marxist critics could talk about nothing but Marxism, which included nothing recognizable as a direct response to literature. Since then, some Marxist thinkers have made impressive contributions to criticism, but two significant conditions appear to be necessary for them. One is living outside the countries where Marxism has come to power; the other is a separation of theory from practice, Marxist vision from Marxist tactics, which official Marxism still calls a heresy.
Similarly, anxiety about authority, whether Christian or Marxist, finds it very hard to come to terms with Eros. Even the greatest Eros poets, Plato and Dante, though they clearly understand that any driving force that lifts man upward has to be Eros-based, still accompany their visions of that rising movement with the most thorough-going forms of sublimation. In Dante the journey to paradise is made by a soul floating out of Dante’s body: the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection is accepted in theory, but postponed until after the action of the poem. The mythological universe of Christianity retained a close analogy with the human body: God was associated with the sky and the brain, the devils with the organs of excretion below. Any rising movement, attempting to leave the demonic world behind, would have to determine what and how much would have to be symbolically excreted. Because of the close anatomical connection of the genital and excretory systems, and even more because of society’s constant fear of Eros, sexual love, even the physical body itself, was often included among the things that had to be left behind.
It is clear that in literature the descending order, the worlds of Adonis and Hermes, is the order that tragedy and tragic irony present from the inside, the story of fallen greatness and the subordinating of human desire and ambition to the power of the gods. The ascending order of Prometheus and Eros is similarly the order of comedy, and my special interest in comedy, which Mr. Fletcher speaks of, is connected with my constant effort to follow up Blake’s conception of the socially emancipating role of the arts. Of modern thinkers, Freud knows most about Eros, but his conception of Eros, like his conception of society, is a deeply tragic one: he sees it as squirming helplessly underneath the “reality principle,” even though much of the reality may have been created by Eros in the past, and as ending finally in death or Thanatos. More recently, Freud has been made into the prophet of a gospel of revolutionary optimism, just as Marx has been made into a prophet of neo-humanism: these developments indicate, for me, the strength and solidity of Blake’s imaginative vision, because they fit that whether they fit Freud and Marx or not.
We have long since weathered the Newtonian crisis of separating mythological from natural space, and the Darwinian crisis of separating mythological from natural time. A third crisis, more difficult and subtle, is succeeding it: the distinguishing of the ordinary waking consciousness of external reality from the creative and transforming aspects of the mind. Here the distinction between the scientific and the mythological ceases to operate, for science is a creative construct like the arts. And it seems clear that there is nothing on the rising side of human life except what is, in the largest sense, creative. The question therefore resolves itself into the question of the relation of ordinary life, which begins at birth and ends at death and is lived within the ordinary categories of linear time and extended space, to other possible perspectives on that life which our various creative powers reveal.
This is a question that the great religions have tended to dodge, except in special areas. Marxism deliberately excludes it, and the traditional religious myths project it, pushing it into an “afterlife” in heaven or hell or purgatory or this world, conceptions which, to say nothing of their inherent crudity, betray an obvious political motivation. The area to be explored is thus reduced to methods of intensifying imaginative experience. Hence, today, the drug cults; hence the vogue for techniques of meditation, including yoga, magic, and various kinds of divination like astrology. I had noticed, ever since working on Blake, how large a part, after the decline of the “discarded model” of the Ptolemaic universe, occult schematisms had played in literature, so large as to make it clear that something more than a temporary fashion is involved now.
The current interest in such matters brings a third figure into focus within the area of cultural criticism, and that is Jung. Without belittling Jung’s achievements in psychology, it is possible that he too, like Spengler and Frazer, is of greatest significance as a critical and cultural theorist. At the centre of his vision of life is a progress from the “ego,” ordinary life with its haphazard and involuntary perceptions of time and space, to the “individual,” who works with far more coordinated and schematic modes of perception. In Jung the symbol of the “individual” perception is the mandala, as he calls it (perhaps he should have called it a yantra), a symmetrical diagram recalling the geometrical cosmologies so common in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The view of literature set out in Anatomy of Criticism has many points in common with a mandala vision, so much so that many people have drawn up mandalas based on the book and have sent them to me, asking if this was what I really had in mind. I generally reply, with complete truth as far as I am concerned, that they have shown much more ingenuity in constructing their models than I could achieve myself. A mandala is not, of course, something to look at, except incidentally: it is or should become a projection of the way one sees.
I am continually asked also about my relation to Jung, and especially about the relation of my use of the word “archetype” to his. So far I have tended to resist the association, because in my experience whenever anyone mentions it his next sentence is almost certain to be nonsense. But this may actually be a reason for welcoming it. When one finds that very perceptive people are describing one as the exact opposite of what one is, one may feel that one has hit a fairly central area of social resistance. And when I, who have fought the iniquity of mystery in criticism all my life, am called a neo-Gnostic and a successor of Proclus and Iamblichus, both of them pagans,9 initiates of mystery cults, and very cloudy writers, perhaps I should feel that I am well on the road to identification. Even granting the human tendency to look in every direction except the obviously right one, it seems strange to overlook the possibility that the arts, including literature, might just conceivably be what they have always been taken to be, possible techniques of meditation, in the strictest sense of the word, ways of cultivating, focusing, and ordering one’s mental processes, on a basis of symbol rather than concept. Certainly that was what Blake thought they were: his own art was a product of his power of meditation, and he addresses his readers in terms which indicate that he was presenting his illuminated works to them also, not as icons, but as mandalas, things to contemplate to the point at which they might reflect, “Yes, we too could see things that way.”
One of the central principles in Anatomy of Criticism is founded on an analogy with music, though the usual objections to mixing up the arts, formulated in Lessing’s Laocoön and elsewhere,10 do not apply to it. I am by no means the first critic to regard music as the typical art, the one where the impact of structure is not weakened, as it has been in painting and still is in literature, by false issues derived from representation. For centuries the theory of music included a good deal of cosmological speculation, and the symmetrical grammar of classical music, with its circle of fifths, its twelve-tone chromatic and seven-tone diatonic scales, its duple and triple rhythms, its concords and cadences and formulaic progressions, makes it something of a mandala of the ear. We hear the resonance of this mandala of musical possibilities in every piece of music we listen to. Occasionally we feel that what we are listening to epitomizes, so to speak, our whole musical experience with special clarity: our profoundest response to the B Minor Mass or the Jupiter Symphony is not “this is beautiful music,” but something more like “this is the voice of music”; this is what music is all about. Such a sense of authority, an authority that is part of one’s own dignity and is not imposed from outside, comes mainly from the resonance of all our aural experience within that piece of music. I am sorry if this sounds obscure, but such a response does happen, and words like “classic” and “masterpiece” really mean very little except the fact that it happens. One difficulty here is that the response itself may be to anything at any time, even to a bird asserting his territorial rights. The classic or masterpiece is a source of such a response that won’t go away, and will not elude us if we return to it.
Anatomy of Criticism presents a vision of literature as forming a total schematic order, interconnected by recurring or conventional myths and metaphors, which I call archetypes. The vision has an objective pole: it is based on a study of literary genres and conventions, and on certain elements in Western cultural history. The order of words is there, and it is no good trying to write it off as a hallucination of my own. The fact that literature is based on unifying principles as schematic as those of music is concealed by many things, most of them psychological blocks, but the unity exists, and can be shown and taught to others, including children. But, of course, my version of that vision also has a subjective pole: it is a model only, coloured by my preferences and limited by my ignorance. Others will have different versions, and as they continue to put them forth the objective reality will emerge more clearly.
One prevailing assumption in criticism is that the work of literature is an object set over against us, as something to be admired and studied. So it is, and if criticism ended there, there would be little point in trying to substitute a vast schematic abstraction, however impressive, as the end of literary experience, instead of actual plays and poems and novels. But, first, I am not suggesting that all works of literature are much the same work, or fit into the same general scheme. I am providing a kind of resonance for literary experience, a third dimension, so to speak, in which the work we are experiencing draws strength and power from everything else we have read or may still read. And, second, the strength and power do not stop with the work out there, but pass into us. When students complain that it will kill a poem to analyse it, they think (because they have been told so) that the poem ought to remain out there, as an object to be contemplated and enjoyed. But the poem is also a power of speech to be possessed in his own way by the reader, and some death and rebirth process has to be gone through before the poem revives within him, as something now uniquely his, though still also itself.
Jung being a psychologist, he is concerned with existential archetypes, not imaginative ones: with the recurring characters and images that turn up on the way to “individuation.” His most significant book, from our present point of view, is his Psychology and Alchemy, in which he treats the “great work” of the alchemists as an allegory of self-transformation, a process of bringing an immortal body (the stone) to birth within the ordinary one (the materia prima). Such a work of transformation is the work specifically of saints, mystics, and yogis. However the alchemists managed, it seems to require teachers, oral instruction, and joining a school, and it is so unimaginably difficult that very few get far along the way, though they undoubtedly make a big difference to the world when they do. The transmission of such teaching, however, is often accompanied, especially in the East, by a total unconcern for society as a whole, or else, especially in the West, by an over-concern with the preserving of the unity of the transmitting body. In any case some powerful force of social entropy seems to affect it wherever it appears.
One of the most impressive figures in this tradition in our own century, Gurdjieff, distinguishes two elements in man: the essence and the persona, what a man really is and what he has taken on through his social relationships.11 Gurdjieff clearly thought of the kind of training that he could give as essentially a developing and educating of the essence. Perhaps there is also a way to development through the persona, through transforming oneself into a focus of a community. This includes all the activity that we ordinarily call creative, and is shown at its clearest in the production of the arts. What is particularly interesting about alchemy is the way in which it uses the same kind of symbolism that we find in literature to describe the “great work” of the mystic. If spiritual seeker and poet share a common language, perhaps we cannot fully understand either without some reference to the other.
Here we return to the point we started from: the nature of the commitment to literature. We remember Yeats:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.12
It seems to me that the first two lines express a profound insight, and that the next two are self-dramatizing nonsense. Those who seek perfection of the work, though called creators, are really, as they keep telling us, more like receptors: they are nursing mothers (the female metaphor we began with has, we see, a proper application) bringing to birth something not themselves, yet more genuinely themselves than they are. The something, call it a poem, is made out of both conscious and unconscious materials: the unconscious is something that nobody short of a bodhisattva can control, but in certain mental places it can find its own mode of expression. When it does so, it forms a kind of transformer of mental power, sending its voltage into its readers until, as Blake says, the expanding eyes of man behold the depths of wondrous worlds.13
It is at this point that the question of the social function of the arts becomes so important. Some people find it a shock to discover that, say, the commandant of a Nazi death camp can also be someone with a highly developed taste in music. If he had a thorough knowledge of organic chemistry, there would be no shock; but—well, the arts are supposed to have or be based on values, aren’t they? But that is precisely the trouble. We find it hard to escape from the notion that the arts are a secondary social luxury, something to turn to after the real standards of living have been met. On that basis they become subject to evaluation, like jewels: they are enjoyed and possessed by what Jung calls the “ego,” and something even analogous to price develops. The arts approached in that way can add pleasure and refinement and cultivation and even some serenity to life, but they have no power to transform it, and the notion that they have is for the birds.
It would be better to think of the arts as, like physical exercise, a primary human need that has been smothered under false priorities. If we look at any culture that has reduced its standard of living to the barest essentials, like that of the Eskimos, we see at once how poetry leaps into the foreground as one of those essentials. Not only so, but the kind of poetry that emerges has precisely the quality of primitive simplicity that keeps eluding the poets of a more complex society, however earnestly they seek it. One might start drawing morals here about what kind of society we should reconstruct or return to in order to achieve such simplicity, but most of them would be pretty silly. I merely stress the possibility, importance, and genuineness of a response to the arts in which we can no longer separate that response from our social context and personal commitments. As for the danger of poetry becoming a “substitute” for religion, that again is merely bad metaphor: if both poetry and religion are functioning properly, their interpenetration will take care of itself.
The descending side of our world picture is the side of the past, the chain of authority and subordination that has persisted all through history. In its most concentrated form it is a closed circle, all efforts to break with it, like revolutions, ending in real revolution, that is, the wheel turning again. Thus it is the world of the future, of hope and expectancy for the not yet, as well as the record of the no longer. The ascending side is the power of creation, directed toward the goal of creating a genuinely human community. Tragedy presents the descending world from the inside, but it is, no less than the comedy which presents the activity of creation itself, a recreation of memory and frustrated desire, where the spectres of the dead, in Blake’s phrase, who inhabit the memory take on living form.14 The central symbol of the descending side is metamorphosis, the fall of gods or other spiritual beings into mankind, of mankind, through Circean enchantments, into animals, of all living things into dead matter. On the ascending side there is a reversal of metamorphosis, a disenchanting journey back to our original identity that ends when the human creator recovers his creations from his Muses, and lives again, like Job, with the daughters of his memory transformed into a renewed presence.