The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Northrop Frye

be so amorous?” And who would believe, before the notebooks were published, that Frye longed to write a novel — indeed, to write eight novels, each in a different mode, covering between them all types of fiction from the comedy of manners to the war novel.

      He is sometimes accused of being exclusively concerned with Western literature, yet these notebooks and diaries reveal that he was reading about Eastern philosophy in the 1940s, long before it became fashionable, and that he hoped to write what he called a “Bardo” novel based on inter-life existence as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

      His published works seem complicated enough, but it now appears that they were just the tip of the iceberg. His ambition was to write a series of eight books that he called the “ogdoad,” which would survey the whole of human speculation, providing a guide to the symbolic universe, or what he once described as “the architecture of the spiritual world.” Hayden White spoke more truly than he knew when he remarked that he sensed a subterranean Frye — that when talking to Frye he “had the feeling that he was always in that shop in the back of the mind of which Montaigne spoke, working on some intellectual issue.”

      In suggesting this series of contrasts, between inner man and public persona, awkward figure and eloquent speaker, Toronto teacher and international icon, I’m working with categories that are not exactly parallel. But I feel I have a warrant in the practice of Frye himself, that inveterate manipulator of equivalents, correspondences, and categories. The particular binary oppositions I’ve been suggesting seem to me important because they lead in to something very central to Frye’s thought, which might best be described as the relation between the individual and his society. In Frye’s case, the question involves his own Canadianness and his Protestant inheritance. How is the individual absolutely himself yet the committed member of a corporate entity? The question is parallel to one encountered in his literary criticism, where Frye maintained that he recognized the uniqueness of the work of art, while his critics complained that he was obliterating it by relating the work to generic and archetypal patterns.

      As background to these matters, I’d like to look briefly at the outlines of Frye’s thought as a whole. Though Frye first gained recognition with his book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, in 1947, it was Anatomy of Criticism, published in 1957, that brought him worldwide attention. Written with verve and wit, this Canadian classic not only ushered in that explosion of serious critical thought that made “theory” the dominant genre in the last half of the twentieth century, but it also constituted a readable, civilized contribution to literary discourse in the tradition of Johnson, Arnold, and Eliot.

      When it was written in the 1950s, literary criticism was a mixture of appreciation, explication of themes, study of sources and influences, biographies of authors, historical background, and the “New Criticism” that studied lyrical poems line-by-line. The Anatomy’s revolutionary proposal was that criticism was a science, of which all these practices were constituent parts, and it was so in virtue of the fact that literature itself forms its own universe with its own laws. Authors shape their works according to these laws or conventions, however much they may seem to be capturing life or expressing their emotions. Poems are made from other poems; or, in the words of Yeats,

      There is no singing school but studying

       Monuments of its own magnificence.

      Thus, instead of a collection of individual works, organized mainly chronologically, you had a body of work that could be anatomized just as a human body could; and this is what Frye proceeded to do.

      Criticism may look at literature from several different perspectives, expounded in the four main chapters of the book. In “First Essay: Historical Criticism,” Frye sees the history of literature as the increasing displacement of a mythic core toward realism. As we move through the various modes — mythic in earliest time, romantic in the Middle Ages, high mimetic in the Renaissance, low mimetic in the nineteenth century, and ironic today — so the status and power of the hero decline from the god or godlike man of myth, through the ordinary man, to the victim or powerless man in irony. (Frye said that he used the term “man” for “man or woman” on Sydney Smith’s principle that “man generally embraces woman.”) Non-narrative or thematic literature, such as most poetry, goes through a parallel sequence of five modes based on the relation between poet and audience.

      The “Second Essay” approaches literature not as developing through time but as an organism spread out simultaneously in space. Here Frye introduces his notion of “polysemous meaning,” that a text can be looked at on different levels; he suggests five such types of criticism, based largely on the approaches their practitioners take to symbolism — the literal, the descriptive, the formal, and then the archetypal and the anagogic, which are his particular province. On the archetypal level, we relate the poem to literature as a whole, studying genres, conventions, and images that are repeated from poem to poem. Seen as a whole, in its archetypal phase, literature visualizes the goal of human work, or of Paradise regained. The final phase, the anagogic, is difficult to grasp: in it, universal archetypal symbols such as the city, garden, quest, and marriage define a literature that has “swallowed” nature: the distinction between man as perceiving subject and nature as object has disappeared, and “nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who constructs his cities out of the milky way.” Sometimes I think of this as the ecologist’s nightmare.

      The details of archetypal criticism, studied in the “Third Essay,” are organized into two areas, the static and the dynamic. Statically, Frye discerns two groups of archetypal symbols, corresponding to the two extremes of wish and nightmare: the apocalyptic imagery of gardens, sheepfolds, bread and wine, and so on, which are the metaphors of human desire, and the demonic imagery of monsters, waste lands, and fiery furnaces, which define all that man rejects. For the dynamic movement of plot, Frye invokes one of the most basic patterns, the cycle, as in the changing of the year from spring, to summer, to fall, to winter, and back to spring. He distinguishes four basic, pre-generic plot types — comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, which he positions on this circle.

      Finally, the “Fourth Essay” discusses rhetorical criticism, in which literature is looked at according to the genres such as epic, lyric, and satire.

      This approach to literature was so novel and so suggestive that within a few years Frye had become the darling of North American graduate-school English departments; carrying a copy of his book was the very hallmark of the serious and up-to-date student. He was the first individual critic to have a conference of the English Institute dedicated to his work, in 1965, at which time Murray Krieger made his oft-quoted remark that “he has had an influence — indeed an absolute hold — on a generation of developing critics greater and more exclusive than that of any one theorist in recent critical history.” Of course, this influence was subject to historical fluctuation: during the heyday of Deconstruction some years later, any attempt to see a grand structure was suspect, and Frye became for a while a past number.

      But even at the time of its publication, there was considerable resistance to The Anatomy of Criticism. Some critics, appalled at the Anatomy’s encyclopaedic subdivisions, balked at the thought that swallowing such an enormous pill was necessary for its salutary effects. Frye always denied the accusation that he was trying to make everyone accept his whole “system,” or that his project was like a straitjacket; he remarked to an interviewer that perhaps he would ultimately be found less useful as a systematizer than as a quarry for later thinkers, “a kind of lumber-room … a resource person for anyone to explore and get ideas from.” He also declared his own indifference to his future reputation: “If posterity doesn’t like me, the hell with posterity — I won’t be living in it anyway.”

      Perhaps the major contemporary criticism of the Anatomy was that the book minimized the writer’s immediate involvement in and meaning for his society. To Frye’s annoyance, the literary establishment associated him particularly with two specific ideas, that criticism should be a science, and that the role of the critic was not to evaluate individual works. For some objectors, this turned literature into an autonomous verbal structure to be studied in and for itself, cut off from social history, from its authors’ concerns, and from the realistic representation of the world. The Fryegian critic seemed a dry anatomist, utterly uninvolved in the needs of his readers