Jean O’Grady
SIR EDWARD ELGAR, that sublime and melancholy composer, found it a lasting source of wormwood and gall to be identified in the British public mind with his minor, patriotic Pomp and Circumstance marches. I suspect that, after the publication of his Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, Frye found it similarly irksome to have a reputation not as the cartographer of the literary universe but as that man who argued that critics should avoid value judgments. He certainly became tired of being asked what he meant by such an assertion. “I have nothing new to say on this question,” he began somewhat testily at a special session of the mla on the subject (“On Value” 311). Frye had emphasized in the Anatomy that he was talking about the academic critic or theorist of literature, not the reviewer in the local newspaper, but still his assertion had been found highly controversial. The polemical introduction had actually made two points that kept coming back to haunt Frye: first, that criticism was, or should be, a science, and second, that the critic’s function was not to judge whether a work of literature was good or bad but rather to tell us what sort of work it was. The two points are of course related, both being part of Frye’s attempt to move criticism from gifted amateur appreciation to the status of an academic discipline, a structure of knowledge that, like a coral reef, could be built up by the contributions of each scholar and taught as rationally as the sciences and social sciences. As he said in The Well-Tempered Critic, “Without the possibility of criticism as a structure of knowledge, culture … would be forever condemned to a morbid antagonism between the supercilious refined and the resentful unrefined” (136).
The inclusiveness of the Anatomy, its openness to works of popular literature or of dubious morality, should surely endear Frye to the various postmodernist, feminist, or post-colonial critics who complain of the formation of a “canon” with its concomitant marginalization. Frye’s aim in the Anatomy was not to rank works according to their perceived value—as had been done, for instance, by Leavis in The Great Tradition—but rather to study the articulation of the literary universe and the relations between literary works of all types. Moral criteria of judgment are specifically repudiated: “morally the lion lies down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Sade and Jane Austen, … all are equally elements of a liberal education” (14). As Frye told Imre Salusinszky, “The real, genuine advance in criticism came when every work of literature, regardless of its merit, was seen to be a document of potential interest, or value, or insight into the culture of the age” (INF 754).
Critics have sometimes argued that Frye was mistaken in believing his approach in the Anatomy to be value free, and that the very perception of what constitutes literature is an act of judgment. When Murray Krieger developed an elaborate critique along these lines at the mla session on value judgments in 1967 (which was prompted by Frye’s notorious espousal of the question), Frye responded that he could not discuss it on this level. His subsequent remarks show that this is not what constitutes, for him, a judgment of value; he had all along been concerned with the more practical and commonsense notion of judgment as praise and blame. Other critics might suggest that the Anatomy shows Frye’s own biases, for instance his preference for comedy and for the Romantic period. Evidently replying to a perception by eighteenth-century scholars that their period was unfairly slighted in the work, Frye said that “Actually I thought it was rather a compliment to the eighteenth century that I felt I could let it speak for itself ” (“Response” 481). Most critics have agreed that in spite of such variations of emphasis the Anatomy does indeed encompass the whole field of English literature as never before.
For Frye at this time, the value in literature is found in the ensemble, in the imaginative structure the reader comes to possess, both of apocalyptic or demonic imagery and of the archetypal shapes of comedy, tragedy, romance, and irony. As he put it in The Educated Imagination, “Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time” (470). The emphasis in teaching literature is not directly on improving the student’s judgment, but on leading him or her to see patterns that link different works together. The total pattern, “the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell,” is what Frye calls “man’s revelation to man” (474). Such a verbal universe may be built up equally by biblical epics and lurid adventure stories; as Frye remarks, “archetypes are most easily studied in highly conventional literature,” and “superficial literature … is of great value to archetypal criticism simply because it is conventional” (AC 104). It is the archetypal pattern that provides a model or goal for humankind’s work, thus giving literature a vital role in the building up of civilization.
Does this mean, then, that we should not in fact judge between great art and junk, or prefer one to the other? This was the question that annoyed Frye so. Of course we may, he would reply, but these judgments are not really scientific, being private, personal, and unpredictable. They form part of the individual’s developing maturity, but should not be incorporated into criticism as a discipline. To make the discrimination of quality one’s goal would be like the direct pursuit of happiness, a chimera: happiness and good taste are a by-product of pursuing something else. Over the years, Frye elaborated his compelling reasons for distrusting or downplaying such pronouncements. In the first place, no critical work can be based on them. If you say that Shakespeare is the greatest writer who ever lived, for instance, this judgment is neither a help nor a hindrance to your analysis of the plays, and adds no new knowledge. Judgments like these are legitimate as “tentative working assumptions,” indicating that a writer is likely to be worth working on, but are only provisional and heuristic (GC xvi).
Second, Frye argued, value judgments cannot be taught. In The Well-Tempered Critic he gives a typical example of an exchange between teacher and student:
(Teacher) Yeats’s Among School Children is one of the great poems of the twentieth century. (Student) But I don’t like it; it seems to me a lot of clap-trap; I get a lot more out of The Cremation of Sam McGee. (Teacher) The answer is simple: your taste is inferior to mine. (Student) How do you know it’s inferior? (Teacher) I just know, that’s all. (135)
As Frye often said, if a teacher finds that a student really enjoyed a sitcom on television last night, the best procedure is not to tell him that the Shakespeare he’s studying in class is far superior and would do him more good, but rather to show how the sitcom uses the same plot shapes and character types as Shakespeare’s plays. As the student’s knowledge grows, so will his sense of value improve: “the more we know about literature, the better the chances that intensity of response and the greatness of the stimulus to it will coincide” (WTC 145). But Frye contends that no one of the many attempts to establish what makes a work great— or, in the terms of his youth, “swell” as opposed to “lousy” (“On Value” 317)—has been convincing enough to provide the basis for teaching literature.
Every such judgment is limited by the personal experience of the critic or the outlook and anxieties of its own age. Should we praise perfection of form? On these grounds Ben Jonson might well be valued more highly than Shakespeare, as indeed sometimes happened in the 18th century. Should we prize a complex, ironic attitude as did the New Critics of the 1950s? Such a criterion would exclude melodramatic, sentimental writers like Dickens who have a towering presence. Some critics value writers who are realistic and offer penetrating insight into their own society, but Frye is a champion of romance, of the magic of the unlikely, the marvellous, and the happy ending, and considers realism a mere blip on the literary radar. Or should we prize particularly the psychological realists, with their penetrating insight into the human heart? Frye could appreciate as well as anyone a complex, well-rounded literary character, but he saw equal value in allegorical works or anatomies, in which the characters are often abstractions or one-dimensional representatives of ideas.
As for the privileging of those writers who convey some interesting idea or enlightening theme, Frye calls this the theory of looking on literature as “a reservoir of great thoughts which would inspire one to meet the battle of life,” and identifies it as a Victorian approach that lingered on in his childhood (“Literature and Society” 178). He is adamant that the supposed “message” of an author is not what he really means at all; his real meaning resides in his pattern of images, and his so-called message is the ideological part that can be snipped off—meat thrown by the burglar to keep the dog quiet, in Eliot’s image. In fact, Frye has rather wicked fun in the Anatomy with Matthew Arnold’s “touchstone” theory of selected expressions that are guides to the high seriousness of a first-rate author. Quoting Arnold’s chosen line from The Tempest, “in the dark backward and abysm of time,” Frye remarks that the line, “Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch,” is equally essential to the same play (21).
Perhaps at the deepest level Frye was reacting against the notion of the study of literature as developing a refined, cultured elite: the mystique of the English school, as expressed by F.R. Leavis.1 The snobbery of such a conception is described in currently fashionable idiom by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, in connection with I.A. Richards and his condescending remarks on those who enjoy an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet: “the privileging of the self through the pathologizing of the Other” (Contingencies 38). For Frye, all negative judgments turn out to be expendable, and the critic who thinks he is showing his discrimination by condemning certain works is, finally, only judging himself (“On Value” 314). Only positive recognition of what an author was about is a contribution to knowledge.
When pressed with the objection that, for all that, Among School Children is generally taken as a better poem than The Cremation of Sam McGee, and must there not be some quality in them to account for this, Frye would agree that there might well be, but, refusing to set down any misleading criteria, usually settled for the somewhat lame-sounding conclusion that a masterpiece or classic is a work that “won’t go away” (NFR 90), that, no matter how many times you read it, stays around to be interrogated again. This seems questionable on the individual level: for many captive students of Paradise Lost, for instance, the poem goes away utterly and completely soon after the final exam. But it is true enough on the social level. Good works pass the test of time, revealing new meanings to different generations, remaining sources of interest and enthusiasm, though for differing reasons. It is simply not Frye’s main aim, at this stage, to single them out.
Certainly, in his private life Frye did not hesitate to make judgments. In Robert Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, his book of selections from Frye’s notebooks, there are twenty-seven entries under “greatest,” ranging from the expected praise of Plato, Bach, or War and Peace to the offbeat judgment that “the greatest literary genius this side of Blake is Edgar Allan Poe” (113). It is interesting to see the criteria Frye himself used. In 1975 he told interviewer Justin Kaplan that “the primary criterion of value is a certain sense of genuineness” (INF 314); evidently, he picked up this conception from T.S. Eliot, as he began a 1943 review by saying that
T.S. Eliot says somewhere … that in dealing with a contemporary poet one should not worry about whether he is great or inspired or immortal and avoid all comparisons with dead poets who admittedly are. One should, he says, look rather for some such quality as “genuineness.”2
For ten years, 1950–1960, when Frye did act as a reviewer for the University of Toronto Quarterly’s annual literary survey, it was often a poet’s sincerity or genuineness that he praised. In one review, he remarks that “it is the critic’s job to tell [the poet] and the public that whatever his stuff means, it sounds genuine enough” (C 114). Sincerity, genuineness, conviction—these are not formal criteria but intuitive evaluations of the author’s commitment by the experienced reader. In these reviews, Frye is of course alert to the more technical felicities of diction, sound pattern, and imagery. Sometimes he is even seduced by theme. Particularly striking is his high valuation of E.J. Pratt’s poem The Truant, which he called in print “the greatest poem in Canadian literature” (C 265), and, orally in 1964, “not only the greatest of Canadian poems, but one of the almost definitive poetic statements of our time” (C 337). Surely it is the Blakean theme of the poem—the refusal of mankind to kowtow to a tyrannical God or a mechanical nature—that is speaking to Frye: the note of cosmic defiance.
There is another and more important criterion of judgment for the early or middle Frye. Some works, he says, are valuable because they lead to the centre of our imaginative experience. This sense of a higher level of authority is perhaps clearest when he is talking about music, where he was not a professional critic bound by his conception of his craft but rather an enthusiastic amateur. Here he draws a distinction “between listening to music, say, on the level of Tchaikovsky, where you feel that this is a very skilful, ingenious, and interesting composer, and music on the level of Mozart or Bach, where you feel that this is the voice of music […] this is what music is all about” (INF 489, “Expanding” 213). In the same way, in literature, some great works are resonant; they focus our experience. The closing cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio, for example:
Here we are in the centre of the Commedia, and therefore at the centre of our whole literary experience, and so the memory of other things near the centre, late plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles, the Bible, some moments in Plato and in modern poetry, crowd into our minds, and we glimpse a mass of converging rays of significance, as though there were one great thing that the whole of literature had to say to us. (EICT 182)
In the seminal early essay “The Archetypes of Literature” Frye had remarked that
the study of mediocre works of art, however energetic, obstinately remains a random and peripheral form of critical experience, whereas the profound masterpiece seems to draw us to a point at which we can see an enormous number of converging patterns of significance. (EICT 127)
It is this sense of the value of certain key writers that I want to pursue in the rest of my paper. I will not argue that Frye reversed himself and began to urge the critic to make conventional value judgments; that never changed. Indeed, it was probably because he believed his point had been generally accepted in the academy that he felt free to ease up on its presentation. But I do want to suggest that his later works constitute a sort of re-valuation of the value question, in that they highlight those valuable works that have a special intensity of vision and that he came to characterize as kerygmatic or prophetic. It is not precisely (as I had originally hoped to show) that Frye repented of the formalism of his earlier criticism and began smuggling in content by the back door, as it were, in emphasizing the illumination or insight generated by a supreme work of imagination. He would not make this form/content distinction: it is form, or imagery and diction, that is the vehicle for the illumination, and the insight is not equivalent to a “message.” Nor is there a sharp division between this and earlier concerns; all of Frye’s work unfolds from seeds one can trace back to Fearful Symmetry, and the kerygmatic interest grows particularly, perhaps, out of the consideration of high style in The Well-Tempered Critic. Nevertheless, I believe that Frye’s focus shifted from literature as a whole toward valuing or celebrating the visionary insight of individual works, and that this shift is part of a natural evolution of his concerns in the latter part of his career. While never abandoning his belief in the unity of the literary universe, he became more interested in those “epiphanic … moments of focussed consciousness” that are typical of our fragmented age.3
There are several ways of contextualizing this changed emphasis, which began roughly in the mid-1970s. The Anatomy had been criticized (somewhat unfairly) for presenting literature as a self-contained universe, and so in The Critical Path of 1971 Frye had stressed the social bearings of literary criticism. Increasingly thereafter he investigated the various, not necessarily literary, uses of language in society. As he told Art Cuthbert in 1978, when he was working on The Great Code:
I’m continually developing critical instruments and tools in order to break out of what I consider the one really hampering category, … the category of literature…. There is a point at which the response to Shakespeare, to Milton, to Dante, to major works of literature, begins to smash through the category of literature into something much more open—the social use of words. (INF 420)
Unlike some modern critics, Frye did not want to abolish all distinctions in an amorphous notion of “text,” but he was increasingly interested in exploring the continuum of sacred literature, literature proper, and critical or other descriptive works. In this regard the objection that the Anatomy arbitrarily delimits the field of literature is no longer cogent.
At the same time as Frye began to leave the purely literary critic behind and become the critic of language, he also (like many of his fellow critics) turned his attention to the reader. The Anatomy had considered literature objectively as structure, without concerning itself with what the writer may have put in, or what the reader might take out. The actual reading of any particular text was what Frye called precritical—a personal, varied experience where value judgments were most appropriate; criticism proper started after the reading was complete, with a simultaneous perception of the whole work. But now he began to think of reading as what he would call the excluded initiative of his Anatomy criticism. In Words With Power he admitted that “the literary work, then, does not stop with being an object of study, something confronting us: sooner or later we have to study our own experience in reading it, the results of the merging of the work with ourselves” (75). In a notebook he even talks about Words With Power as a book “where the recovery and incorporating of the excluded initiative of experiencing literature marked the first step from the Anatomy that I’ve taken” (LN 297).
A third new perspective is a preoccupation with what had always been Frye’s basic concern, the expansion of consciousness: the apprehension of new realms accessible only to the imagination, rising to an intimation of infinity and eternity. I might remark here that Frye’s notion that the literary universe as a whole provides the goal for humankind’s work has always seemed somewhat problematical. What need of all those works to tell us we prefer vernal paradises to stony deserts, and spring awakenings to wintry deaths? Indeed, what need one?4 Be that as it may, as Frye wrote more about literature and society, he made it clear that the literary model was not there to facilitate the construction of an actual paradisal society: in the real world utopias can only be horrible tyrannies. The literary universe rather provides an ideal in the present, a vision to guide and inspire the worker. And Frye began to describe not so much a model of mankind’s goal as a plurality of models—hypothetical constructions for consideration, or what he calls in The Critical Path “the encyclopedia of visions of human life and destiny” (128). The later Frye is increasingly concerned with the way in which individual works may create this perspective in an individual mind. As he wrote in 1975, “It seems strange to overlook the possibility that arts, including literature, might just conceivably be what they have always been taken to be, possible techniques of meditation … ways of cultivating, focussing and ordering one’s mental processes” (“Expanding Eyes” 213).
The term Frye used to characterize works that addressed the imagination most powerfully was “kerygmatic.” There is a certain difficulty with the application of this term, linked to the genuinely puzzling nature of Frye’s distinction between sacred and secular literature. Initially it was used to characterize a mode of language peculiar to the Bible. In Frye’s final formulation in Words With Power (developed out of a slightly different ordering in The Great Code), there are four general types of language: descriptive, conceptual, rhetorical or ideological, and imaginative or poetic. Frye’s reading of the Bible centred on the notion that its language is mythical and metaphorical or imaginative, not to be taken as “literally true,” as fundamentalists understand this term. But imaginative language was to Frye inherently hypothetical, whereas the Bible addresses its readers oratorically. However, unwilling to characterize its language as simply rhetorical, either, because of its claim to be revelation, Frye introduced in The Great Code the term “kerygma” (29). In Words With Power the biblical kerygmatic is situated “on the other side” of the poetic as a fifth type (101); unlike hypothetical imaginative literature, it proposes a total way of life or “myth to live by” (WP 117).
It would not be honest to ignore Frye’s frequent assertions that the myths and metaphors of secular literature are always hypothetical, whereas those of the Bible are existential, having designs on the reader’s consciousness and aiming to change his life. “Actual literature … even on the highest level,” Frye says in “On the Bible,” “does not suggest a myth to live by, or if it does it is essentially betraying its literary function” (163). As late as The Double Vision, his last book, Frye was arguing that the New Testament’s “myths become, as purely literary myths cannot, myths to live by; its metaphors become, as purely literary metaphors cannot, metaphors to live in” (179). He adduces Don Quixote and Emma Bovary as dreadful examples of trying to live by literary models (LN 695). In his last interview he explained the distinction to a puzzled Peter Yan:
YAN: You mentioned vision. Does the vision or imagination of the writers of the Bible differ from the writers of literature?
FRYE: There is no difference.
YAN: I ask that because in Words With Power I was surprised when you wrote that in terms of a final cause or a program of action or the myths we live by, even Shakespeare didn’t go as far as the Bible does in showing what we should be doing [117].
FRYE: I’m trying to distinguish the sacred book, the Bible, from secular literature. That literature is written in the imaginative language of myth and metaphor, but it doesn’t provide a model to adopt as a way of life, whereas the object of the writers of the Gospels writing about Jesus was the imitation of Christ, in the sense that they were telling a story just as the writers of literature tell a story. But the particular story they told was the one that they wanted to make a model of the life of the person reading it.5
Nevertheless, the thrust of much of Frye’s later work is to suggest that secular literature can be a source of revelation equally with scripture. His book on romance is called The Secular Scripture, and about this time he noted that, now that the biblical prophecies have been absorbed into the establishment, “the power of prophecy is starting to come from the printing press rather than the pulpit, from secular rather than sacerdotal contexts” (“Responsibilities” 163). In this context he recognized that the notion of literature as hypothetical does not reflect the way people characteristically read and write. In 1984, looking back on the Anatomy, he remarked, “At the same time I was not happy with the merely ‘let’s pretend’ or ‘let’s assume’ attitude to literature. Nobody wants to eliminate the element of play from literature, but most poets clearly felt that what they were doing was more complex” (sesct 349). The difference between the intent of literature and sacred scripture becomes less absolute when we reflect that at least some writers, like D.H. Lawrence, evidently have designs on us, and that on the other hand it is possible to read and appreciate the Bible on a secular level, as the students in Frye’s Bible course did. There is something of an intentional fallacy in insisting that the Bible “was clearly not intended to be a work of literature” (INF 657); in practice the sharp distinction based on language type is blurred.
The important fourth chapter of Words With Power bears this out, explaining that the second half of the book will explore “the mysterious borderlands between the poetic and the kerygmatic” (111). The “genuine kerygmatic” can be found equally “in the Sermon on the Mount, the Deer Park Sermon of Buddha, the Koran, or in a secular book that revolutionizes our consciousness” (116). But kerygmatic, Frye explains (100), is a term he had preferred hesitantly to prophetic or apocalyptic in The Great Code, and in the second half of Words With Power the term “prophetic” is generally used for literature, kerygmatic being reserved for works that set out a total “model myth” for imitation. “At this point the term prophetic falls into place as indicating both a metaliterary dimension within literature and the human medium transmitting the kerygmatic to the idiom of ordinary language” (117–118). In fact it is mostly in the more uninhibited context of his notebooks that the word “kerygma” is used in connection with secular writers.
Thus Frye began to pay more attention to those writers who reach out, like the Bible, with an involving rhetoric, and to those existential, precritical readings in which the individual responds with a sense of commitment, finding metaphors to live in. In the essay “Expanding Eyes,” he talks of Blake’s offering his works in this spirit, as mandalas, things for the reader to contemplate to the point at which he or she might reflect, “yes, we too could see things that way” (213). When the youthful Frye said to Helen, “Read Blake or go to hell: that’s my message to the modern world” (NFHK 426), he surely had in mind not a detached contemplation of Blake but an active embracing of his vision. Readings of this sort may occur equally with what is normally called literature and with “literary prose” such as prophetic works of philosophy or history, works that retain their power over the mind long after their particular scientific scheme has been discredited.
From this point of view Arnold’s touchstone theory begins to make more sense, as certain key passages stand out from their context; thus, a passage in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale may suddenly open a window in the mind “to suggest different orders of existence” (WP 66). In Words With Power, Frye describes the way in which the reader begins to notice and respond to “that’s for me” details in his reading (113), beginning the process of transforming literature from an object to be admired to a power to be possessed. The failure of this step helps explain the paradox of the Nazi who loves Mozart or Goethe: the Nazi’s appreciation has remained on the aesthetic level. Literature has a transforming power only if we approach it actively, incorporating it with ourselves by a process of what Frye called, starting with The Secular Scripture in 1976, recreation.
One important vehicle for such personal involvement is ecstatic metaphor. The original or primitive ecstatic metaphor identified an individual’s consciousness with something in the natural world, or expressed his possession by a god (sesct 346, 324–325). Literary metaphors, though more hypothetical, still retain the power to “take us out of ourselves,” as we say, to overcome our separate selfhood and link us with the rest of creation. Such is the metaphor that “not merely identifies one thing with another in words, but something of ourselves with both” (WP 75–76). Frye invokes Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime in describing these dazzling moments in our response to art when the ego is dispossessed, and “all the doors of perception in the psyche, the doors of dream and fantasy as well as of waking consciousness, are thrown open” (WP 111, 82–83).
These peak moments of revelation can only be brief, and correspondingly Frye talks of the authors who are most kergymatic as those who tend to write in intense, oracular fragments. Speaking of the analogy between the ancient biblical prophets and the modern writer, he says,
The creative people that we most instinctively call or think of as prophetic—Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Blake, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, Strindberg—show the analogy very clearly. Some people pursue wholeness and integration; others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach. (WP 82–83)
At another point he remarks, “We recognize Rimbaud or Kafka or Lawrence or Dostoevsky as great writers because of a tremendous force of passion and power and clairvoyance that comes through them” (“Reflections” 137). A value judgment of sorts is obviously being applied to such writers. Is prophetic, then, equivalent to most valuable? In a way it is, not in the sense of describing the “perfect work of art,” but in the more personal sense of doing what literature should, breaking through the normal defences of the ego and allowing us to revolutionize our ordinary perception.
Shakespeare and Milton did not write prophetic, fragmentary works of this kind. But they have another quality that can be equally kerygmatic: the ability to evoke our whole literary experience. Frye himself was drawn to works whose encylopedic scope put them next door to sacred scriptures; for instance, he speaks of the writings of Homer and Shakespeare as having “passed through the stage of formal unity and come out on the other side.” Here, comeliness of form is subordinated to the sense of “a world in itself … which one can study to the end of time and still feel that one is inside an epitome of the entire literary cosmos” (sesct 481).
Words With Power studies the way certain Bible-derived clusters of imagery are used in secular literature. “This book may help one to understand,” Frye writes, “why the poets whom we consider most serious and worthy of exhaustive study are invariably those who have explicitly used the kind of imagery studied here” (xxii). As we have seen, Frye had previously noted the clarity of archetypes in popular literature; evidently these greater writers employ the archetypes in a more authoritative and persuasive manner. In this sense they exhibit most clearly the grammar of the human imagination that the archetypes provide. In his notebook jottings while composing Words With Power, Frye remarked that he had been ducking the point that the poetic has an oracular aspect that merges into kerygma, and continued, “I can hardly say explicitly that it’s the function of criticism to see a super-kerygma forming out of literature; but what else do I mean? And what else does the book mean?” (LN 341)
In “The Responsibilities of the Critic,” an important essay of 1976 and almost a manifesto of the second half of his career, Frye had in fact suggested a role for the critic in connection with kerygma. In this address, originally given at Johns Hopkins University and twice reprinted, he focused on the prophetic authority of literature and suggested that the critic’s task is to identify it. Characteristically, he emphasized that “this act, I have so often urged, is not an act of judgment but of recognition […] The door to our Eden is still locked, but [the critic] has a key, and the key is the act of recognition” (167).
Frye will not fall back into the heresy of canon formation, even of kerygmatic works; he knows that “no kerygmatic canon will ever be drawn up: it would be impossible to find a committee to agree on the selections.”6 The sense of value has a subjective pole, and “anyone could make up an anthology of kerygmatic writing” meaningful to him- or herself (WP 117). Indeed, by the principle of interpenetration, so important for the later Frye, all works are linked to the whole and “every work of art is a possible medium for kerygma” (LN 643). Still, the critic has a role to play in guiding and clarifying response: his “recognition” does involve powers of discrimination. A critical consensus tends to build about which works are most worthwhile; it is partly because of social acceptance that the Bible has its status as “uniquely kergymatic in the cultural tradition of the West” (WP 117). What the critic recognizes is not any supposed theme but an image structure:
What the critic tries to do is to lead us from what poets and prophets meant, or thought they meant, to the inner structure of what they said. At that point the verbal structure turns inside out, and a vortex opens out of the present moment … into the created world. (“Responsibilities” 168)
The vortex, the turning inside out: these suggestive but untranslatable terms recall the anagogic perspective of the Anatomy, in which the critic sees the whole of literature as a universe of “infinite and boundless hypothesis” (AC 120). But whereas the austere heights of anagogy were unavailable for the ordinary practising critic, Frye now seems to open the door for him or her to celebrate insight, convey enthusiasm, and even (dare one say) guide and shape taste: a marvellous opening up of the predominantly structural approach of the Anatomy.7
Finally, if literary prose can be kerygmatic, why should criticism be excluded? One begins to see a kerygmatic impulse in the writings of Frye himself. There is an interesting passage in a late notebook: “I’ve so often been asked: but can’t you do anything creative like writing poetry or fiction? My creative powers, I’ve said, have to do with professional rhetoric, on both sides of myth-metaphor”—the far side of myth-metaphor, we recall, being kerygma. “To carry this farther [sic],” he continues, “I’d need a distinction between specific (Biblical) and general kerygma”: a distinction one wishes he had pursued (LN 415). As with the kerygmatic writers he most admired, his ideas came to him in aphoristic fragments, though he laboured afterward to join them into a whole. His pieces often end with a new cadence, a heightening of tone that Alvin Lee likens to preacherly “anagogic conclusions” (NFR xix). All four of Frye’s books on Shakespeare end with The Tempest, The Secular Scripture ends with Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Words With Power ends with the Book of Job. It is as if he were consciously drawing on the resonance of these central works to open up a wider perspective. “Literature is seed,” he wrote in a late notebook; “criticism is the kerygma of what’s in literature” (LN 334). In “The Responsibilities of the Critic, he noted, “If the critic is to recognize the prophetic … he needs to be prophetic too: his model is John the Baptist, the greatest prophet of his age, whose critical moment came with recognizing a still greater power than his own” (166). In his private musings Frye sometimes envisaged himself in this role, hoping for instance that a book he planned to write “may even become prophetic, a sacred book like the one it studies” (TBN 270).
Sir Edward Elgar may still suffer from the identification with the Pomp and Circumstance marches, but we owe it to Frye not to tie him down to an initial and necessary fulmination against disdainful value judgments.8 To progress from dispassionate anatomist to fiery John the Baptist is indeed to take new directions from old.
ENDNOTES
1 On this subject there are suggestive remarks by A.C. Hamilton in Northrop Frye: Anatomy of his Criticism, 11–12, 23–25, and “Northrop Frye as a Cultural Theorist,” 112.
2 Review of Voices and Genesis, 68. Eliot’s remark comes from his introduction to Marianne Moore’s Selected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1935), vii.
3 Robert D. Denham elaborates this point in his introduction to FM, liv–lv.
4 Frye’s later formulation, that literature addresses primary concerns, while the secondary concerns (or ideology) of individual authors can be snipped away, similarly ends in banal generalities that scarcely need the support of great writers: that life is better than death, health nicer than sickness, and peace preferable to war.
5 INF 1099. Compare a similar point made to interviewer Andrew Kaufman: “Even the greatest writers—Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer—are still bounded by the category of literature, whereas the Bible is not” (INF 678).
6 LN 366. Frye remarks here that his personal list would include “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, some fables of Dostoevsky and Kafka, the opening of Buber’s I and Thou, some Rimbaud & Holderlin”: by no means the standard list of acknowledged “masterpieces.”
7 Compare the earlier essay “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (1964), in which the criticism that is teachable is said to be confined to “knowledge about literature,” or objective knowledge. A higher level of “knowledge of literature,” or possession of it, is “criticism at once glorified and invisible” and can only be pointed toward. More and more Frye concerned himself with the “invisible” upper limit.
8 In Contingencies of Value (1988), Smith focuses on the opposition to value judgments in ac, partly for its influence on subsequent criticism. While Smith wholeheartedly embraces Frye’s arguments about the variability and cultural conditioning of value judgments, she argues against him that studying the dynamics of these evaluatory practices is an important component of a systematic criticism.
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