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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Northrop Frye's recent criticism confronts the contemporary problem raised most powerfully by the Vietnam War—can we find a telos or definition of man on which we can ground our moral reactions and our visions of human development. Frye establishes this telos by an analysis of origins. Contained in a civilization's statements of “concern,” in its imaginative treatments of its own condition, one can find an underlying structure of desire which defines the ends of man. This structure and the recurrent images it produces then can serve as the middle terms people use to justify and value their actions. Frye shares his treatment of mediation with contemporary Hegelians like Sartre, Lukács, and Ricoeur, but grounds his absolute in tradition rather than in ideal absolutes or posited evolutionary patterns. Frye's idea of mediation also provides an ethical model for literary criticism: the critic tries to combine literature as product and as cultural possession by interpreting his materials as projections of imaginative desire. Furthermore, we can use Frye to criticize the relativist denial of origins in structuralist critics like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
1 The New York Review of Books, 15 (8 Oct. 1970), 3–8.
2 Northrop Frye, The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 9. My summary of Frye in the following pages is especially dependent on two essays in this book, “Speculation and Concern” and “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century.” The following abbreviations will be used for Frye's works cited in the essay : Stubborn Structure, SS; “The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism,” Daedalus, 99 (1970), 268–342, D; Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), AC; The Modern Century (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), MC; A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random, 1968), ER; and “Reflections in a Mirror,” in Murray Krieger, ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1966), RM.
3 Frye probably should admit that one can judge value by the power with which a work realizes images at once within and without the culture, but even here danger lurks. Behind Frye's general suspicion of value judgments, there lies a fear that all these acts will distance the works precisely where distance becomes a vice. Value judgments hypostasize specific works and critical methods and tend to lose sight of the fact that specific works are less important than the process of literary education which is for the student the gradual internalizing of imaginative ideals and the powers of criticism and the orientation toward action they confer, “The great strength of humanism, as a conception of teaching literature, was that it accepted certain classics or models in literature, but directed its attention beyond the study of them to the possession of them” (SS, p. 76; see also SS, pp. 65–66).
4 Studies in European Realism (New York : Universal Library, 1964), p. 5.
5 Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn. : Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 466–67 ; for my subsequent discussion, see esp. pp. 468–77.
6 Ricoeur, pp. 496, 468. Numerous neo-Freudians have concentrated their efforts on establishing a progressive middle term—Erikson's ego and Marcuse's eros being primary examples. Yet Marcuse's work, while it sharply points out how most neo-Freudian middle terms perpetuate the status quo, has its own nefarious implications. His middle term, the ideal of erotic man, supports regressive tendencies to posit wholeness as a primitivist state of origins instead of as the goal of human work.
7 “Anaesthetic Criticism,” in Crews, ed., Psychoanalysis and Literary Process (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970), and Crews, “Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?” PMLA, 85 (1970), 423–28.
8 The terms are taken from Jacques Lacan, but I do not use his interpretation of them. See Anthony Wilden, ed., The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), pp. 143–44.
9 Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), pp. 12–13. The oral metaphor is recurrent in religious writing: it pervades Augustine's Confessions and Dante's Commedia (see esp. Paradiso xxx.ii.82–87). For an argument analogous to mine here, see Kenneth Burke's discussion of Augustine in The Rhetoric of Religion (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), pp. 66–67, 114–17, 129–33, 163–70.
10 L‘‘écriture et la différence (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1967), p. 428 (my translation).
11 The language metaphor also allows Frye to handle a serious- problem in any attempt to project a teleology. Teleology must be both centered and open; it, too, must be within and without the culture if it is to be more than the expression of anxiety. To have a teleology we must be able to discover recurrent desires and their relationship' yet we also require a hermeneutic which justifies and does not succumb to the need for new specific contents of these desires. The modern view of Paradise has different contents from Dante's, though its essential form may be the same. Language makes us see how such a relationship of content to form is valid; an infinite range of contents recur in the same essential forms.
12 Roland Barthes, “Science versus Literature,” in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 413.
13 In Shakespeare, the tragic force is some kind of natural law or fate; in Miller's play it is deadening social myths. Most Renaissance humanism saw art as liberation from nature; Frye still partakes of that vision, but he more and more pictures it as the comic force freeing man from social bondage and generating a new society around itself.
14 “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Yale French Studies, Nos. 36–37 (Oct. 1966), pp. 117–18.
15 Frye sees language as the extension of human desire into the world (SS, pp. 45–48). Thus all those critical inquiries which must employ it will always participate in myths of concern and never be completely objective. One might add that if his isolation of the four basic patterns of human desire is accepted as essentially valid, his theory of the connection between desire and language receives considerable support. At least it becomes more difficult to accept theories that desire originates from language—either as a result of gaps or lacks perceived between language and an unknowable reality or as the result of the play of various systems. Both of those models should generate an infinite series of desires—-with no reason for any specific recurrence or power or even acceptability of any specific modes of it.
16 The difference between disembodied structures like that of language and structures within behavior is an important one for anthropology. Lévi-Strauss' early work on kinship systems is essentially an analysis of human acts and is thus in large part acceptable to people in the functionalist tradition like Edmund Leach. But these same people will not accept Lévi-Strauss' work on mythology which is more strictly formalistic. Language can be and has been a very useful analogy for structuralism, but it is very dangerous as an actual model for other structures. As such it becomes a metaphor, and Frye tells us that metaphor is the way myths of concern infiltrate our quests for objectivity.
17 “Structuralism: The Anglo-American Adventure,” Yale French Studies, Nos. 36–37 (Oct. 1966), pp. 161–62. Murray Krieger, “Northrop Frye and Contemporary Criticism: Ariel and the Spirit of Gravity,” in Kreiger, ed., pp. 1–26, makes similar claims that Frye's whole enterprise tends to ignore the discontinuities of man's existential condition. While both are undoubtedly correct about Frye's emphases, his work can be read with a stress on the satiric mythoi and the total discontinuity out of which new comic visions are born.
18 Several times in RM Frye refers approvingly to the link between “communicate” and “community” which Angus Fletcher, “Utopian Criticism and the Anatomy of Criticism,” in Krieger, ed., had pointed out as central in his (Frye's) vision.
