The Myth of Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye tells a good story about how he came to teach the Bible. When he was still a junior instructor at Toronto University he talked to the chairman of his department, complaining that he wasn't able to teach his students Milton's Paradise Lost. The students weren't receptive. And he suggested teaching them the Bible instead. The chairman asked Frye how he could possibly teach students the Bible if they didn't know the difference between pharisees and philistines. Frye replied that it probably didn't make any difference considering the society they were going into.

So Frye taught the Bible, but before he started he looked at what other universities were doing with it and decided that the Bible's most important contribution is its impact as a unity upon the imagination. The unified impact of all literature is essentially the central message--if there is a central message--to the body of Frye's critical works. Maybe it's easier to understand with one work. In one of his essays, Frye speaks of a certain special moment in reading a work of literature when we no longer simply participate in the action but begin to see the overall design of the narrative. "In detective stories," he says, it's "when we find out who done it." That's the point where we stop worrying about the butler with the sinister moustache or the withered aunt with the poisonous look in her eye and we begin to understand why they were included in the story to begin with.

Frye's lectures and books always seem to have these same lightning-like points of recognition in them, too--moments when the whole dark night of everything you've ever read and remembered becomes illuminated, moments when the development of his immediate argument coalesces into a perceptible theory. But with a little more thought his overall system fades and it becomes apparent that there's a lot more participation to go and that maybe the point of recognition is never meant to be reached.

Frye's first major work was a study of William Blake. Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947. In it he attempted to demonstrate that Blake, often considered to be an inspired psychotic in the staid world of letters, is actually a "typical poet" and that his thinking was "typically poetic thinking." Frye's thesis hinges on the same notion of unity or archetype. And that is, most simply, the body of myths shared by the Western tradition as they have been expressed in its ancient rituals, and in all of its art down through the ages. In his conclusion to this first critical masterpiece. Frye points toward what may be the central archetype in the Western tradition: "A single visionary conception which the mind of man is trying to express, a vision of a created and fallen world which has been redeemed by a divine sacrifice and is proceeding to regeneration. In Blake's poetry. Frye sees an attempt to regain this single unified vision unadorned of all the trappings of his surrounding world. "His attitude of mind is a kind of reverent Philistinism, with a broad humor that delights to spread banana peelings in the paths of heroes, a simple pleasure in seeing the aura of sanctity around the traditional arcana as a fog, and a tough honesty that continues to repeat that war is always damnable and tyranny always stupid and persecution always evil, however 'necessary' at any given moment."

Blake was the inspiration that led to Frye's next most important work. The Anatomy of Criticism, published in 1957. Here Frye's theory of the archetype underscores his belief that literary criticism has to get away from the 'cultured appreciation' tempered by value. judgments and acquired tastes. He presents a system of coordination and description, a system where some poets do takes precedence over all poets should. And basically he breaks up literature into four perspective: theories of modes, symbols, myths and genres. According to Frye we can understand any single work from all four perspectives. The theory of modes classifies literature "by the hero's power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same." They theory of symbols works on the basic principle of "polysemous meaning" in works. The theory of myths expands on Frye's basic premise in Fearful Symmetry. And generic criticism (using terms like drama, epic. and lyric) explains works in the context of "conditions established between the poet and his public," how literary works "are ideally presented."

There's a lot more to Frye's criticism; this is just a rough sketch. His elegantly straight-forward approach and his vast knowledge of literature is something you will have to experience in person. Perhaps the real beauty of Northrop Frye is that be can't be classified. As he says, "those who are incapable of distinguishing between a recognition of archetypes and a Procrustean methodology which forces everything into a prefabricated scheme would be well advised to leave the whole question alone." Since Frye is something of an archetype himself, maybe it's better to let him make his own unified impact on you today.