Northrop Frye (1912–1991)

In this book, Northrop Frye sets out to further the practice of literary criticism, which has yet to progress very far, in his opinion, from Aristotle. His aim is not to eliminate various schools of criticism, whether historical and formal or what was in his day the New Criticism. Instead, he constructs a system of organization capable of containing them all, one whose orientation is not the individual literary work as much as literature as some sort of Platonic ideal (which is not simply the aggregate of all literary works).

The result is what Terry Eagleton calls “a mighty ‘totalization’ of all literary genres.” It is a structuralist approach, as reflected in his original title, Structural Poetics (which his editor insisted on changing). The intended title combined his debt to Aristotle’s enduring work on literary criticism, from whom he borrowed his organizing principles, and what Frye sought to bring to the discussion. The title adopted in its place also owes a telling debt: to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, one of Frye’s favorite books.

However, Frye’s structure is not imposed a priori; he works inductively, based on seemingly omnivorous yet attentive reading.

Frye combats the notion that criticism is a parasitic endeavor by citing an analogy, physics. Physics, he writes, is “an organized body of knowledge about nature. A student of it says he is learning physics, not nature.” He envisages a similar relation of criticism to literature.

It’s easy to imagine how this approach might calcify in the hands of adepts, devolving into rigid classification. Frye, however, is not a slave to his system: “Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must learn to recombine them.” Many pleasurable works have elements of more than one mode. It seems that Frye offers a typology (or system of typologies), useful for coming to grips with any work of literature.

The value of this becomes apparent when he turns to literary works in prose, for which, he notes, Aristotle and the other Greeks did not provide us with a term, as they did for other genres. Frye notes the misunderstanding caused by the everyday use of the term fiction (the opposite of fact), as well as the widespread use of the term novel, which is but one of four chief strands of fiction he identifies (the others being confession, anatomy, and romance; as always, combinations are possible and do exist). Failure to recognize these strands results in judging Wuthering Heights a less successful novel than Pride and Prejudice when it is not a novel in Frye’s estimation but a romance.

Since Frye’s terminology abounds in transliterated Greek terms, neologisms, and words commonly used in another sense in everyday parlance, I found the Glossary at the end of the book helpful.
This book was a challenging read. Many passages were enjoyable and enlightening, while others were a slog. Yet the effort I expended to stay with it was amply rewarded. It helped that the text is peppered with memorable aphorisms such as, “The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows” and, “At the centre of liberal education, something surely ought to get liberated.”

That last sentiment alone might cause this book to be removed from the library shelf in some states, so read it while you can.… (mehr)

I first learned of Northrop Frye from reading Harold Bloom. In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Bloom wrote: “Yet when I think of the modern critics I most admire - Wilson Knight, Empson, Northrop Frye, Kenneth Burke - what I remember first is neither theories nor methods, let alone readings. What return first are expressions of vehement and colorful personalities: …Frye cheerfully characterizing T.S. Eliot's neo-Christian account of civilization’s decline as the myth of the Great Western Butterslide...”

Continue reading here: https://www.bankswesterncanyon.com/post/book-review-anatomy-of-criticism… (mehr)