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Northrop Frye - An Anatomy of Criticism
Posted by Michael Sympson on 22/9/2001, 8:38:14
What ever your college teacher has told you, imaginative literature is not about ideas and
opinions. What we look for instead is sensitivity, sensual quality, lucidity of image and thought,
fantasy, and diction. It is a mode of perception and representation, the interface between the
world and the author's temperament. In the beginning was the word, style and composition are of the essence and grand ideas are merely functional props to propel a story or the poetry. Great
books need no external referent, they are alternative worlds in their own right. It is the critic's task to unlock these worlds and outfit the reader with the right gear for his own journey of discovery. It is not the critic's task to be the surrogate reader who substitutes his own generalizations for all the so lovingly crafted details a good writer has put into his work.
The Nobel-laureate Joseph Brodsky maintained that language and literature are more ancient
and inevitable than any form of social organization. This might be. But there is such a thing as
development and evolution, even in the arts. To define literature basically as a myth-building
activity is a tat one-sided. In fact it was never really true: Homer dealt with the facts and fantasies of a bygone era in the fashion of his own period. And when Aristotle in his poetics mentions the word "myth," he simply means "story." But a story is only the vehicle. The specific detail, the significant trifle, a disdain for generalities, attention to subtleties, curiosity for what lays beyond the mythological paradigm - these are the hallmarks of genuine art and indicative of quality.
From 1984 to 1992 I lived in China, almost completely isolated from the Western world. When I came home I realized that I had some catching up to do. For instance the bookshops reserved separate shelf-space for "Gay & Lesbian," "Women's Fiction," and even something labeled as "New Age" - a spooky term which seemed to have cropped up straight from Huxley's "Brave New World.' I soon learned that it meant something very different and I realized that the late Northrop Frye, would have fitted in splendidly in this new age of bogus spirituality, bogus science, and bogus academia. In fact his disciples already have made it all the way to Hollywood. Today every film-script submitted is gauged by its compliance with the mythological structure that underpins the "Wizard of Oz." Wow!
Mr. Frye attempted to provide a sort of Cabala for the critical profession. He declared to ascribe to the laudable premise that the principles of criticism must arise from an empirical study of the texts themselves. Consequently Frye was never really interested in the author's voice as such. In fact he thought it ok to ignore authors altogether: never mind how carefully Proust has crafted his subtle structure of counter points and hidden references, never mind how original a multi-layered temperament may reflect on its perception - this is just "lifeless text," we got to stuff the pastry, give me "proto-generic forms," give me "archetypes!" Let us bring it down to our own level of cliched thinking and readily available formula. Shakespeare didn't mean to say that? In fact he wouldn't even have a clue what we are talking about? Who cares?! This is an exercise for our academic society of mutual masturbation. Not for people interested in Kafka.
So in Frye's scheme of things, Montaigne, or Marcel Proust, by default, wither on the fringes. So do Flaubert, Dos Passos, (is he actually mentioned at all?) Auden, T.S.Eliot, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov - "What's the use?" you ask, when you wrestle with deadlines and the daily task of 3000 printable words. Frye utterly lacks application. Armed with nothing but his typology you will never be able to recognize a talent when you see it. But of course if all you aspire is a parasitic career in academia on the bones of already dead poets - Mr. Frye is the man. Consequently, Frye summarily dismissed as insufficient and individualistic any honest effort to explore the specifics of a text. In his view, a long tradition of critical appreciation, which had begun with Longinus and found in Nabokov its most vociferous advocate, has barely a right to exist.
Frye was a pigeonholer. He wanted to classify and label. For him the world of literature since Aristotle hadn't moved an inch. When Frye divided his essay in four sections on "historical,"
"ethical,' "archetypical," and "rhetorical" criticism, or modes, symbols, myths, and genres,
he made it look as if he deals with matters of great complexity, but it always comes down to the
most general, i.e. emptiest, denominator. Of course Mr. Frye was neither stupid nor did he lack a certain turn of phrase. But a man of genius is able to frame this whole book in one aphorism. In
"Kafka and his Precursors" Jorge Luis Borges first gave an example and then made the point
that all this classifying is a product of hindsight. Suppose Kafka had died in his cradle, then
nobody would ever see what Kierkegaard, Browning and Melville have in common. Good writing begins where the cliches end. Mr. Frye's book is a glorified Anatomy" of literary cliches. People seem still to build academic careers on this crap, and college teachers continue to
regurgitate these "illuminations" to their students. It boggles your mind.
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