David Rampton
“ASCENT MAY be to the new: when it is, descent is the recovery of the old that was excluded by repression, forgetting, or lack of awareness. It’s a harrowing of hell or rather limbo: a redemption of the dead, a recalling of past to present. Similarly new formulations of myth recapture lost and neglected implications. The Grail stories are profounder than cauldrons-of-plenty myths, and my reading of them is profounder than they are.”1
Northrop Frye, the curious universal scholar who wrote this confident and prophetic account, liked to use the short paragraph as a mode for his extemporized formulations. This one posits links between essential notions in psychology, religion, and literature and suggests innumerable others to the receptive reader. His mind works fast and makes ours work faster. Both the originality of such an approach and the cool assessment of the value he added in the process of articulating it help explain the perennial interest in his work. When Frye’s oeuvre was made the subject for the annual Canadian Literature symposium at the University of Ottawa, the date seemed auspicious: 2007 was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Anatomy of Criticism and various people had been thinking that a conference should be held to celebrate the event. Contributors were therefore invited to draw on any aspect of Frye’s work, to range as widely as possible and to work at bringing seemingly disparate things together. With a rubric as non-specific as “New Directions from Old,” the contributions themselves ended up determining the focus, since much of what is new in Frye studies is dedicated to the old in a chronological sense, namely, the correspondence, diaries, and early essays recently published in the Collected Works series. And much of what is old seems new to those who have come to literary criticism long after Anatomy of Criticism ceased to be the vade mecum for graduate students that it was in the years immediately following its publication.
The idea of making this tribute a sort of omnium-gatherum was also inspired in part by the astonishing range of Frye’s interests, about which we have learned a great deal since his death in 1991. The energy with which he pursued them and the audacity of the imaginative leaps he made in asserting their conjunction have become that much more apparent as we read the entries in the diaries he wrote as his career was taking shape and the notebooks in which he wrestled with his daimons. He once defined the object of his search as the “grammar of poetic language that would bring all of literature together,” and one feels that only someone with Frye’s erudition and single-mindedness could have attempted it. When he asks (in The Critical Path), “What is the total subject of study of which criticism forms a part?” the answer is still far from clear to him, but on the basis of the early diaries, the late notebooks, the volumes that made his reputation, and the clutch of articles that have been described as “pure gold,” we can perceive its outlines more clearly.
The overwhelming impression of these new materials is a sense of what a busy guy Frye was, from his undergraduate years to his hectic retirement, recovering the past, redeeming the dead, and searching for the Grail. If one looks, for example, at Volume 8 of the Collected Works, the one devoted to the 1942–1955 diaries, one gets a vivid sense of an impossibly energetic purveyor of literary insights, endlessly positing original ways of reading an astonishing variety of texts, whirling up data from literature and contiguous disciplines and working it into bold new configurations. The start of the winter term in 1950 is typical (Diaries 223–230). On Monday, 9 January, Frye described in his diary how his graduate seminar at Victoria College that day had gone:
I started to try to work out the progressive & regressive characters of romance: virgin or heroine-anima against the harlot, wise old man against the malignant old man, and so on. I must realize that, as the monster usually contains the old man, so the hero is supported by the bearing animal (horse), in which, as Jung showed, there’s some suggestion of a progressive mother. It also occurred to me that the hero-monster antithesis is always a victim-tyrant one. The hero is always in a revolutionary role: he releases the victim from the tyrant, which is why the giant is usually an enemy. Feudal or chivalric aristocracy owed its power to its militant struggle for order against rapacity: its decline began with the regularizing of the crusading impulse on which it was founded into an external war, & so a defence of the senex order in Christendom. Also, if the bearing animal can become a machine, the old-man monster could too—the labyrinth is a machine, & so is the mill with its revolving wheels.
Again, when one counts up the disciplines evoked and thinks about the energy and inspired guesswork that bring them together, one is left with the impression of a mind that is different in kind. There’s a sense of urgency too—“I must realize”—that gives the passage a hortatory feel, a sense of things out there waiting to be discovered.
The next day’s entry included a summary of a lecture on John Henry Newman: “In the middle of it I got a strong vision of the identity of the Roman law and the Roman Church, and of both, especially the law, as intimately connected with the Aristotelian entelechy or law of the organized being, a biological conception that seems to permeate all our thinking.” On Wednesday, it was Hooker’s turn:
I gave them the idea of law spread out over the chain of being. Man halfway between the angelic & the animal, hence a threefold law; the law of the church, which is “intuitive,” a symbol or [ Joseph] Butlerian “analogy” of Eternal law; the law of society, which is rational and distinctively human, & the law of instinct, which produces the army of Caesar (I added this for completeness). How law begins as external & arbitrary command, then becomes the inner discipline of reason, then the reconstructed accuracy of instinct, via ceremonial & ritual, on the higher level.
That was in the morning. At noon it was Newman again, a lecture that linked his “genetic & pragmatic (‘skeptical,’ he calls it) view of probability with his choice of the genetic confession form and his primarily historical cast of mind.” In the Thursday lecture on Milton, Frye identified sin and death with Scylla and Charybdis, tried to work out the symbolic significance of Eden’s topography, and mused about the importance of olfactory imagery in Paradise Lost (“the ‘myopic’ visualization is in Book iv shifted to perfumes, smell being the most languorous & least critical of the senses”). That would have to suffice that day, for his noonhour lecture on Job “had nothing new in it.”
To round out the week it was Paradise Lost again. Frye used “He for God only” as his text:
Humanity is descended from Eve in its natural form & needs a mediator with God who can only be a new Adam. More on the dream as the revolt of the egocentric libido, the principle of pride, against a law which it regards as an external censor—this clicks with an old hunch I’ve had that Freud describes the man under the law—it’s not an accident that he wrote a book on Moses and regards the conquest of the Promised Land as the “future of an illusion.” Then how Satan in the temptation communicates directly with the proud libido in Eve, a parody of the way the Holy [S]pirit in man answers to the Word. The problem of the ultimate externality of both libido & Spirit remains unsolved. Also of the fact that unfallen Eve is the “passion” part of Adam’s own body, whereas the fallen Eve is the entering wedge of an external “nature.”
On the sixth and seventh days, he rested—or at least tried to. Though he intended to deal with the correspondence he’d been neglecting, Frye worked instead on Dante’s Inferno, instructively comparing it to Milton’s epic and Orwell’s 1984, and ending up contradicting one of his own essential tenets about literature:
I can’t help feeling that there is some development in literature, for all I say to the contrary. George Orwell’s 1984 presents a real hell, not just one we happen to be more scared of, & his book is morally an infinitely better book than the Inferno. Surely this moral superiority has some relevance to critical standards.
Frye also noted he didn’t have to read Dante’s great poem in the original because he had already memorized most of it in the original.
The diaries also make clear that he fitted all this thinking into days made very full by other things. During the same week, Frye marked dozens of student essays, met with his Tuesday creative writing group (an informal weekly gathering he volunteered to coordinate), dedicated a couple of evenings to Canadian Forum business, ministered to his wife when she suddenly fell ill, discussed the prospect of a series of Renaissance lectures for later in the year, attended lectures on Bacon and Francis Thompson, mused about the possibility of a job offer from Princeton, and attended to all the other business associated with a new term. And all of this frenetic activity took place in the depths of a Canadian winter, a still point of the year that often has academics dreaming of a long hibernation.
Two more things: anyone who thinks I have loaded the dice by choosing a particularly charged week is welcome to look at the entries for the next one, 16–22 January 1950, which feature a set of equally suggestive musings on Browne’s Religio Medici, rationalist readings of history, Arnold, Bentham, Carlyle, and Marx on class in the 19th century, and Gnosticism, along with more detailed accounts of Canadian Forum work, Paradise Lost, Dante, administrative affairs, and so on. The other thing to note is that during that first week, when one of his early classes was cancelled, Frye lamented having “dawdled” away the morning and called himself a “lazy bastard.”
These entries and hundreds of others like them are the essence of what makes Frye so special. Such dazzling combinations so confidently asserted remind us of just how difficult it is to explain adequately the extent to which Frye revolutionized literary criticism in the 1950s. Reading these thumbnail sketches of how Frye thought, musing about what the actual hour-long lectures must have been like—the details noted above are just the barest of bare outlines, after all—conjuring with the leaps of synthetic imagination recorded in such matter-of-fact detail, one is struck most perhaps by the extraordinary restlessness of Frye’s mind, the originality of his formulations, the eclectic nature of the resources he drew on, the indivisibility of his teaching and scholarship, the dialogic nature of his imagination, and the startling combination of the intuitive and the schematic that characterizes his critical endeavours in general. True, all of these things were well known, amply documented, and much discussed when Frye was the best-known literary critic in the Englishspeaking world. Yet it is rapidly becoming obvious that the publication of the Collected Works has launched an important new stage in Frye criticism. It has provided readers with detailed accounts of the context and background for the work to come, the multiple points of departure, the sense of Frye feeling his way, a better understanding of how crucial guesses and hunches are in this sort of work and of how arbitrary he has to be while starting to work things out (“I added this for completeness”), and, finally, a clearer grasp of the almost infinite series of vistas and possibilities that presented themselves to him. For anyone interested in language, metaphor, narrative, myth, society, politics, religion, the visionary, or simply the interpenetration of literature and life on a daily basis, here is God’s plenty.
In his introduction to a collection of essays on Frye and religion, Jeffery Donaldson notes, “We are only just beginning to appreciate the rhetorical impact and function of Frye’s assembling of evidence, his avoidance of strict narrative argument in favour of non-linear metaphoric juxtapositions of observed details, his emphasis on showing rather than telling” (17). In other words, the man whose name rapidly became a household word for his ability to engage in ultra-arcane mental operations (“He’s no Northrop Frye” was a standard putdown for a long time) is someone who can instruct us in the importance of non-linear ways of thinking as well.
The first section of this book features three essays on Frye’s status in the academy, the different ways his contributions to how we talk about literature have been assessed, and what it is that makes him distinctive.
We begin with Alvin Lee’s account of the publishing history of the Collected Works. Involved in the project from its inception and currently general editor of the series, Lee is in an ideal position to give readers an overview of how Frye’s posthumous publications have taken shape. He makes three essential points: First, that a scholarly edition of Frye’s works represented an almost inevitable next step in a sequence of events designed to ensure some sort of permanent status for Frye studies. Because Frye had already been the centre of critical attention for a number of decades, because critics and readers had for so long wanted to apply his insights, imitate his methods, argue over his propositions, or just get together to talk about him, when the subject of the Collected Works was first broached the University of Toronto was already collecting material by and about Frye, and the centre named after him was fully operational. Although Lee doesn’t say it, the names of critics whose work has been commemorated in such a way would make a very short list indeed. Second, the actual encounter with the material in the diaries, notebooks, and correspondence obviously made it clear to the editorial committee just what an unpublished treasure trove Frye had left behind. Negotiating the terms of publication with lawyers and administrators, publishers and granting agencies, Lee and his committee were unwavering in their conviction that Frye’s work should be made available to as large a readership as possible. Finally, there is the clear sense that those at work on the project knew from the beginning that, despite the range of Frye’s interests and the different modes in which he articulated them, his work constituted a unity, and their labours would help reveal both that unity and the extraordinary mix of materials of which it was composed. The quality of the works published thus far and their public reception have amply confirmed Lee’s determination to see the project through to its end.
Robert Denham’s account of Frye’s current status begins with a series of epitaphs on his demise, collected from a range of critics who insist that Frye’s work is now obsolescent. Such a reaction was perhaps the inevitable result of Frye’s conviction that the study of literature in and of itself was a supremely important thing. Many of those who came after Frye have been deeply suspicious of such claims, hence the impatience with his work felt by feminists, postmodernists and political critics of various stripes, and what is perceived as the démodé quality of his totalizing vision. For Denham, who knows more about Frye’s reception than anyone, such claims must be measured against a lot of contradictory evidence: the fact that his name figures on reading lists at all sorts of universities in North America and Europe, that the number of students writing dissertations on his work continues to grow, that since 1980 translations of it have appeared in a startling array of tongues, and that the way Frye’s ideas “have been applied by philosophers, historians, geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, and by writers in the fields of advertising, communication studies, nursing, political economy, legal theory, organization science, and consumer research” shows just how relevant he still is for readers in the 21st century.
One of the most interesting things about the evidence Denham assembles is that it shows Frye as one of those critics dedicated to creating a new kind of canon by putting the old and the new, the literary and the non-literary, in conversation with each other. In suggesting that readers might profit from thinking about why so much work is still being done on Frye, Denham implicitly posits the existence of something larger and more all-encompassing than a sequence of critical trends. For Denham, Frye’s ideas about literature represent a perpetual renewal of possibilities, which will in turn continue to make him an important guide for those in search of innovative ways of reading.
Thomas Willard tackles the question of Frye’s extraordinary critical gifts in a different way, by meditating on how we should interpret Frye’s description of himself as a genius in an anticipatory obituary he wrote. Willard distinguishes between the Classical and the Romantic inflections of this particular word and muses about whether there is some identifiable quality that distinguishes Frye’s work from that of his contemporaries, something that makes it different in kind. Genius can also mean “guide” or “tutelary spirit” or “guardian angel,” something one has rather than something one is. The mention of Socrates’s daimon in this context leads to a discussion of Frye’s ideas concerning education and the importance of the visionary in his work. Then there is the impersonal form of genius, the genius of an imaginative space or genre. The ideal order of words that is literature, decisions about what constitutes the canon, the recognition of the power of tradition in determining the forces that shape readers and critics—all of these are related to this impersonal idea on which Willard rightly focuses. The final context for his inquiry into Frye’s use of the word “genius” is the religious one. In a Christian sense, genius is related to the presence of a power in which we move and have our being, something shared that connects us with the spiritual world, something we aspire to rather than possess. Willard builds on this notion to conclude that “the genius that guided Frye through his writing and teaching, and guided us to the writing, is one that remains to be found in the writing,” and invites us to contemplate the implications of that process for Frye’s continued relevance.
Part ii treats Frye and Canadian literature. For a substantial part of his career, Frye was a central figure in Canadian Studies. His essays and reviews made important contributions to its development, but he is a more marginal figure in this area now. Frye was always convinced that Canadian literature was somehow belated, and the early texts that fascinate many critics these days were often the objects of his scorn. In one diary entry, he wrote, “We hear a lot about the wonderful respect for the humanities everybody had around 1900. Well, what did they do with it? Was Canada, in 1900, turning out poets & novelists worth a shit in a cow barn? Was it turning out real scholars who could write important & lasting books? Nonsense” (Diaries 226). This view, bracing as it is, is no longer widely shared. The essays included in this section focus on Frye’s conviction that Canadian literature was best seen as part of a historical rather than literary tradition, and they come to intriguingly different conclusions about his most famous discussion of the topic, namely, the “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.”
David Bentley uses Frye’s “Conclusion” as a means of assessing his overall usefulness as a critic of Canadian literature. Bentley begins by pointing out how significant Frye’s contribution has been in this regard, and the critics he cites show how influential certain ideas Frye articulated came to be for a whole generation of Canadian writers. Frye’s intense dislike of physical nature, amply documented by his comments on Canadian landscapes and topography in the notebooks and diaries, is crucial for understanding his response to its literature. The “ghastly nightmares, Gothic dread, and a sense of personal disintegration” he finds there are, suggests Bentley, the product of Frye’s own “psychophysical reaction to the unhumanized and non-human aspects of the Canadian environment.” Even as he praises Frye as a cartographer of the spaces created by the mythic imagination, Bentley points out how misleading his attempts to mythologize parts of the Canadian experience actually are, as when Frye argues that the lack of an Atlantic seaboard and the consequent journey up the St. Lawrence River led to the creation of an image of a country that swallows its early immigrants by involving them in a sort of slow-motion disappearing act. As Bentley demonstrates, not only does this run counter to the testimony of all kinds of people whose first port of call was in the Maritimes, but it also fails to take into account the descriptions of writers who recorded their reactions on their arrival from Europe by sea. Bentley submits Frye’s famous “garrison mentality” trope to similar scrutiny and finds it wanting, although he does see it as important for understanding the desire to control the environment as an essential tenet of Frye’s thinking. In Bentley’s view, Frye’s great contribution to Canadian culture turns out to be not his writings on Canadian literature but the exercise in self-creation that made him an iconic figure and a literary theorist whose name became associated with his country’s most important literary achievements.
Robert David Stacey tackles the “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada from a rather different perspective. In “History, Tradition, and the Work of the Pastoral,” he takes up Bentley’s point about the importance of the “Conclusion’s” influence, describing its primary function as “not to present a coherent theory of Canadian literature … but to construct a coherent critic who might preside over a single unified (and unifying) critical approach.” Stacey supports this contention by focusing on the discussion of the pastoral in the “Conclusion,” seeing it as “a generic trope of origin and identity, of communal belonging and spiritual immanence” that helps explain Frye’s seemingly contradictory statements on the status of Canadian literature and brings his local cultural and international theoretical projects together. Stacey notes that the champion of literary continuity argues for the discontinuity of Canadian literature as early as 1943 and notes that “environment” for Frye is both physical and socio-cultural. He also invites us to think of the “garrison mentality” as one of Fredric Jameson’s “ideologemes” and suggests “displacement” as a useful term for understanding the Canadian writer’s relation to the European tradition. In addition, Stacey points out that for Frye’s Canadian writer “meaning is never simply present” but “exists in a dialectic between the pre-existing forms and the social and historical circumstances of their production and use.” Frye’s emphasis on displacement and belatedness in the “Conclusion” confirms this take on Canadian literature, and his focus on the pastoral brings together Canadian literature and its traditional mythological framework. All of this proves that even Frye’s refuted claims possess a suggestiveness that makes them a rich source of new syntheses and provocative reconsiderations.
The next section comprises three essays on Frye and the sacred. Long before he published his studies on the Bible, critics had noticed just how interested Frye was in religious ideas, and we know that his knowledge of the esoteric tradition was extensive. Add to that his readings on mysticism and the visionary, Buddhism, the I Ching, and even subjects as arcane as astrology and numerology, and the importance of this aspect of Frye’s work becomes clearer.
Ian Sloan’s essay discusses Frye’s importance as a theologian. He points out that when Frye was ordained as a minister of the United Church in 1936, he joined a church that not only brought together Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians but also sought to unite other Christian communions that shared its ideals. Sloan sees an important link between Frye’s adherence to a church founded by such a unifying movement and characterized by its theological pragmatism and its inclusivity, on the one hand, and his idea about the autonomy of the critic and one’s desire to become what one identifies with, something most clearly associated with his totalizing approach to literary criticism, on the other. Sloan also reminds us that Frye’s critique of organized religion is bound up with its being a mere analogy “of the imaginative universe of the individual in community.” Sloan develops his argument by using Blake’s theory of contraries, noting that for both Blake and Frye the idea of throwing off imaginative passivity in the face of abstract authoritarian structures is especially important. This in turn leads to a discussion of the importance of the sacraments to any Christian and Frye’s ambiguous attitudes toward them. Sloan points out how a better understanding of Blake’s attack on organized religion can help us make sense of the choice Frye made in deciding to remain a minister of the church while seeking refuge in the university, staying away from church, and teaching students how literature contributes to what he called the architecture of the spiritual world.
Sára Tóth takes as her point of departure the description of God as “a spiritual Other” (in Frye’s posthumously published Double Vision) and sets out to determine how Frye’s views on religion led him to such a formulation. This is a subject that has received considerable attention of late, most notably in the book of essays edited by Donaldson and Mendelson (2004) and Denham’s 2003 study of Frye the religious thinker. Tóth follows Denham by claiming that what’s at stake in such questions is inextricably bound up with Frye’s take on our literary experience. As she points out, without Frye’s vision of a shared imaginative community shaped by something more than human, the very possibility of being moved by what we read is undermined. If otherness involves in some sense the text itself, then a sustained encounter with it bespeaks some genuine attempt at identification. In the process of making her case, Tóth shows how Lacan’s narrative of alienation was important for Frye, and how it enabled him to see in Buber a sort of comic reversal of that narrative, one that replaces the mystic’s self-abnegation with the idea of interpenetration. Tóth also examines Frye’s translation of the dialogic principle into Christian terms, his identification of Narcissus as a type of the fall of Adam, his reading of the book of Job as a manifestation of the paradoxes of divine power and human incomprehension, and the crucial role otherness plays in the human relations informed by this matrix of notions.
Garry Sherbert is also interested in the relation between the sacred and the secular in Frye. In his exploration of this subject, he repeatedly shows how useful Derrida’s thoughts on religion as a discourse can be in piecing together what Frye thinks about the “word within the Word.” Late Derrida is full of evocative formulations that attempt to define the sacred, and Sherbert uses them skilfully to support the series of rapprochements on which his argument depends. He shows how interested Frye was in “pure speech” throughout his career, from Fearful Symmetry to The Critical Path to Words With Power. He links Frye’s fascination with Heidegger to their mutual interest in the limits of language and points out the ways Frye’s interest in myth is related to “the suspension of reference in both literature and religious writing.” For Frye, Mallarmé is a figure who looms almost as large as Blake, and Sherbert illustrates the analogy between religion and literature by citing an apposite comment by Mallarmé on the need that both religion and literature have for mystery. Using this as a springboard for his claim that Mallarmé “exemplifies the literary version” of negative theology, Sherbert goes on to analyze how important this notion is in Frye’s own work. This leads to a discussion of the parable and the aphorism and Frye’s suggestive comments about them. In the rest of the essay Sherbert explores Frye’s comparison of literary discourse to the visionary language of the mystics and quotes him to show that the social function of the poet, such as it is, is bound up with Eliot’s notion of purifying the language of the tribe. Sherbert also invokes Frye’s comments on Foucault to fill in a tentative definition of what “God” might mean and concludes by showing how for Frye the secrets at the heart of literature and religion are bound up with the nature of the creative imagination itself. Reading Tóth on Frye and Lacan or Sherbert on Frye and Heidegger, one is struck by how potentially useful such connections could finally prove to be, not only because they compel us to revise our views on the secular and the sacred but also because they enable us to see as figures on a continuum a range of writers who are often discussed as if they lived on different planets.
The next group of essays “recapture[s] lost and neglected implications,” to use Frye’s term, in ways that show how much mileage there still is in new studies of the old.
Frye’s biographer John Ayre begins by musing on the relative lack of tables, diagrams, and visual aids generally in English studies, and the resistance schematic formulations often create. When Frye encountered such resistance after submitting his book to Princeton, he removed several diagrams, and they were not published until the Collected Works edition of 2006. Ayre contends that the impulse to downplay this aspect of Frye’s work is understandable but unfortunate, since it deprives us of important assumptions he makes about the ways in which his subject can be represented. As Ayre explains, the structure of the mandala Frye used for Anatomy of Criticism is actually quite simple and incorporates traditional associations with the vertical and the horizontal, with the positive and exalted things at the top of the circle and the degraded and destructive ones that figure at the bottom. Of course Frye encountered such diagrams in Blake, but Ayre adduces as evidence other sources he must have drawn on, including Dante, Milton, and Dickens. The contemporary critical figure he focuses on is Wilson Knight, Frye’s colleague at the University of Toronto in the 1930s, who in his study of Shakespeare argued that “a Shakespearian tragedy is set spatially as well as temporally in the mind.” Ayre quotes Frye to very similar effect and goes on to suggest how important such schemata were to Frye in his teaching as well as his writing. Like Einstein in his search for a unified field theory, Frye hoped to find what he called “the kind of diagrammatic basis of poetry that haunts the occults & others.” Heraclitus’s double gyre, the Four Zoas, the evolution of cosmologies in the Romantic period, Spengler, Frazer, and Hesse—all of these are useful as Ayre plots the course of the battle that Frye fought with himself to “reinvent the wheel.” In offering us the outlines of this struggle, Ayre manages to tell the story of an intellectual and spiritual quest of great interest.
Michael Dolzani’s essay treats one of Frye’s most persistent preoccupations, the utopia. Dolzani links it to the mandala patterns that Ayre sees as central to Anatomy of Criticism and to Frye’s thinking more generally. Dolzani then surveys works in which the utopian theme prominently figures, ranging from The Odyssey to The Tempest to utopias in our own time. This in turn leads to a meditation on why the genre seems to be so limited. Dolzani notes, “With the exception of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, it is hard to think of another utopia that qualifies as a major work of literature.” For Dolzani, this speaks to the primacy of ideology in utopian fiction, which makes it a genre characterized by attempts to describe possible worlds governed by all-too-human limitations. Offering his own typology of utopias, Dolzani suggests that “the varieties of utopian experience” involve healing “particular modes of alienation.” He goes on to cite different examples: “The ego can be alienated (1) even from itself, as in various states of split consciousness; (2) from the body; (3) from the refractory instrument of language; (4) from lovers; (5) from society; (6) from nature; and (7) ultimately from God.” The subsequent examination of these categories leads Dolzani into a discussion of subjects as various as B.F. Skinner, Herbert Marcuse, Aldous Huxley, courtly love, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Thoreau’s Walden, Milton’s Areopagitica, Rousseau’s notion of the general will, and Jameson’s study of utopia, Archeologies of the Future. In other words, Dolzani ranges as widely and synthesizes as effortlessly as Frye himself. In the process, he reminds us that yet another reason for asserting Frye’s topicality is how endlessly interesting his topics are. The ideas that swirl around utopian visions are the ones that have found their way into every sort of human dream, and this makes Frye’s work seem timeless. The critic who participated so actively in the debates that shaped his century and his country keeps on forcing us to enlarge our perspective.
Russell Perkin considers Frye’s complex relations with Victorian writers in an essay that seeks to build on various conceptions of realism. He starts by reminding his readers how at home in the 19th century Frye was, both in terms of his upbringing and his early literary interests. Frye read Ruskin as part of the tradition of biblical typology, and Perkin notes how helpful it is to think of them in conjunction. He compares their definitions of myth, the role of anagogy in their vision, their pedagogical interests, and their importance as “secular preachers.” The heart of the essay is the discussion of Frye’s attitude to realism. Why, for example, is he more interested in William Morris than George Eliot, in James’s The Other House than Portrait of a Lady, in Trollope’s plots rather than his depiction of Victorian mores, and so on? Perkin suggests that in reacting against the influence of F.R. Leavis, Frye’s work constitutes a veiled critique of a criticism that focuses on estimations of value based on notions of maturity and verisimilitude. This leads to a concluding section on the links between Frye and Wilde, in which the latter’s notion of the centrality of creativity in criticism, his attack on Victorian naïve realism, the emphasis he puts on the liberating power of the creative imagination, and his interest in the anagogic and the archetypal all make him an intriguing precursor for the 20th-century critic who admired him so much.
Jean O’Grady takes up Frye’s stance on value judgments in her essay with a view to exploring its implications for a range of things in which he was interested. Having surveyed the deprecatory claims he made about such judgments in Anatomy, O’Grady notes how often Frye resorted to them in his reviews. In invoking criteria such as sincerity or genuineness, says O’Grady, Frye is engaging in an experienced reader’s “intuitive evaluations of the author’s commitment.” She goes on to track another criterion by which Frye is prone to judge works of art—that is, its capacity for leading us to what he calls “the centre of our imaginative experience.” O’Grady wants to argue for a shift in emphasis toward this valuation of the visionary, one that occurs over the last two decades of Frye’s life. It corresponds in her view with Frye’s increasing emphasis on the links between literature and society, a new interest in the role of the reader, and a conviction that literature and works of art more generally constitute what he describes as “ways of cultivating, focusing and ordering one’s mental processes.” This involves O’Grady in a discussion of the importance and complexity of Frye’s notion of the kerygmatic, one that enables her to say penetrating things about Frye and the Bible, Arnold’s touchstone theory, Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime, the prophetic quality in literature, the responsibilities of the critic, canon formation, and the idea of criticism as prophecy. The essay illustrates just how richly significant the idea of value is when thinking about Frye’s work, and how many contiguous areas it opens up for those interested in revisiting it.
This final section is comprised of essays in which Frye’s work is used to shed light on issues or approaches that have not been part of mainstream Frye studies. The essays in this section show just how helpfully his work can be adapted to the most disparate sorts of inquiry and how much light it has to shed on them.
Troni Grande chooses to explore how feminists can use Frye’s criticism in new and interesting ways. She argues that “feminist critics have not attended to the ways in which the woman in Frye time and again becomes a crucial vehicle of divine inspiration and resurrection, moving society to a new order,” and sets out to show how a more attentive reading of Frye demonstrates how “the woman comes to occupy the centre as an absent presence.” Her paper focuses on the image of the silent Beatrice in Frye’s reading of Dante, and on the way women are characterized in his notebooks and diaries. Grande claims that, for Frye, Beatrice is a beatific symbol of the maternal, a manifestation of divine grace, and Dante’s means of escape from sin: she is both Virgin Mary and scolding mother, at once immanent and embodied. Grande goes on to examine Frye’s interest in female sacrality, in the character of the earth mother and Graves’s Triple White Goddess, noting his early interest in fertility cults and his conception of the death-rebirth archetype as “feminine or maternal.” In support of these arguments she touches on Shakespearean comedy and romance, the Cinderella archetype, gender exclusive language, and the fact that female scholars have been responsible for so much of the important work done on ritual and archetype. In the last section, Grande writes movingly about Frye’s discussion of the death of his wife Helen, the “silent Beatrice” who served as his guide and companion for so many years, concluding that “Frye’s search for renewal takes place in and through the woman whose body, now absent, still marks the site of plenitude.”
In his essay on Frye and film, David Jarraway begins by citing Frye who quotes Plato on the subject of art as “a dream for awakened minds,” a formulation that neatly sets up the investigation of Frye and film that follows. Before designating film noir as the particular area in which he is interested, Jarraway speculates about what an encyclopaedic account of film along the lines of Anatomy of Criticism might look like, and one is instantly struck by a dozen different ways that this vast array of material might be re-contextualized from Frye’s critical perspective. The ways in which Frye’s work on the romance alone sheds light on all those westerns, comedies, and musicals his generation grew up with have often been remarked on but never comprehensively dealt with. Here Jarraway limits himself to an exploration of the ironies in Hitchcock’s early films in light of Frye’s comments about “the communicative arts’ sense of critical or ironic detachment.” This insight leads him to an account of the complex ways in which identity functions in the murder mystery and in Hitchcock’s work more generally, with some intriguing detours into Lacan on the “corps morcelé,” Deleuze on embryology, the queer subtext in Hitchcock’s film, the usefulness of seeing ways of maintaining a sense of ironic detachment as attempts to protect identity, “the organic reification of American culture in economic terms,” Frye’s distinction (following Coleridge) between “stupid” and “prophetic” realism, and American sexual politics in the postwar era. Putting Frye into conversation with so many different interlocutors should help readers come up with other ways of discussing film that show how much he has to offer those interested in studying this particular aspect of culture.
Michael Sinding’s “Reframing Frye” is an exploration of what Frye’s work has in common with two recent critical movements, namely, Cultural Studies and Cognitive Linguistics. In this essay Sinding confines his analysis to how such movements approach the question of “how cultural meaning creates political common sense.” The example he chooses to concentrate on involves the linguistic choices made in arguments between liberals and conservatives. Here Sinding focuses on George Lakoff ’s cognitive studies of politics, particularly his explanations of the frames used in political arguments that imply certain ways of seeing the world and work at forcing voters to accept them. Lakoff distinguishes the political world view that ensues by breaking it down to reveal its moral coherence. Frye’s work, Sinding argues, can tell us important things about the literary aspects of these political visions. Drawing on Frye’s account in The Critical Path of the myth of freedom and the myth of concern, Sinding shows how Frye’s equation of the conservative with the social contract and the liberal with the utopia complements Lakoff ’s account. The narratives implicit in Lakoff ’s frames constitute the myths Frye sees as organizing the verbal universe. By using Frye’s work to explore the extent to which metaphor, narrative, and conceptual reasoning come together, Sinding illustrates how relevant that work still is for those intent on understanding how the words we use and the stories we tell create ideology and cultural meaning. He suggests that, in reminding us of the literary dimensions of ordinary discourse, Frye can help us escape the potential insularity of semiological approaches to culture.
The last of the new directions, proposed by Jeffery Donaldson, involves comparing Daniel Dennett’s approach to consciousness and Frye’s commentary on the book of Job. Donaldson’s intention is to show how useful Frye’s work can be for those interested in science and theories of language. In Dennett’s recent book on the origins of religion, he examines the evolutionary advantages of the religious attitude but goes on to suggest that it is now time to move beyond religion itself. Reversing Dennett’s terms of reference, Donaldson invites us to consider “tying spirit to the advent of consciousness and metaphoric thinking,” with a view to understanding better how the contiguity that he sees “between neuronal synapses and spirit might manifest itself in our understanding of imaginative and scientific thinking.” Donaldson uses Frye’s commentary on the Book of Job as his text, comparing the series of events that instruct Job to the way consciousness developed in the human species, in order to show how the biblical story can offer insights into a scientific process. Along the way, he manages to touch on subjects as diverse as Dennett’s metaphors for consciousness, the nature of “unconscious neurological inputs and outputs,” the links between these and Frye’s mythopoeic worlds, and the ones between consciousness of self and consciousness of God. Donaldson goes on to note that the latter phrase means God as both an object of conscious thought (e.g., scientific enquiry) and the object of the search for the spiritual (looking beyond the facts provided by such enquiry). He concludes that Dennett’s description of how we learn about the world is strikingly similar to Frye’s own, and using the Book of Job as an example of a text that can help us define what ultimately constitutes the self, he brings together Frye’s and Dennett’s versions of how human beings cope with their environment.
There is a special tone that characterizes the conclusions of many of Frye’s essays and books (O’Grady and Perkin both comment interestingly on this), which makes it tempting to try to imitate him here. That tone hints at first and last things, interpenetrating worlds and their implications, great aspirations and dying falls, and the implication that posterity will have to be the final judge of all these enquiries into the mysteries of how literary structures organize themselves. This is the meditative counterpart of the sprightly, confident tone of the excerpt I quoted at the outset. In the conclusion to an essay called “Criticism Visible and Invisible,” for example, Frye writes, “All the poet or critic can do is to hope that somehow, somewhere, and for someone, the struggle to unify and to relate, because it is an honest struggle and not because of any success in what it does, may be touched with a radiance not its own” (StS 89). Such wistful cadences quickly disabused the first generation of Frye’s readers of any preconceptions they might have had about Frye as a bloodless taxonomist or gloomy systematiser. As we can see by this collection, his struggle to synthesize and move beyond conventional approaches continues to inspire all sorts of readers and thinkers to make their own attempts “to unify and to relate.”
ENDNOTES
1 Robert D. Denham, ed., Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 12.
WORKS CITED
Donaldson, Jeffery, and Alan Mendelson, eds. 2004. Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Frye, Northrop. 2001. The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Vol. 8. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 1970. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society London: Methuen.