Critical Myth
The Modern Century.
by Northrop Frye.
Oxford University Press. 112 pp. $3.00.
Like Aristotle, Northrop Frye is a taxonomic critic, a biologist of the body of literature. Just as a biologist sees the structure and function of each part of an organism both in isolation and in relation to the whole, so in The Anatomy of Criticism (first published in 1957, and still his most important book) Frye isolates each genre, myth, and archtypal literary symbol and then describes it in terms of the total structure and function of literature. For Frye, literature, like biology, is an autonomous and coherent discipline. In the manner of a primitive biologist, he has given us a system of classification, the first coherent theory which enables a student to tell where, in the totality of his literary experiences, an individual experience belongs.
Frye sees criticism as systematically and neutrally descriptive, as not based on anything outside the structures of literature as they present themselves to an informed imagination. In so defining criticism, he willingly abrogates the critic's moral function: he does not provide a basis on which to formulate ethics or justify life-styles, and his vocabulary is inevitably non political. Nevertheless, there are suggestions in The Anatomy of Criticism itself, and in some of Frye's subsequent books like The Educated Imagination, of a mode of thought which is, perhaps in the broadest possible sense, “political.” For Frye is concerned not only with the forms of literature as they affect an audience, but with the ultimate goals of literary study.
By having systematically connected literature with myth and ritual, Frye has suggested that part of the structure and function of literature is the creation of community. For Frye, the mythical aspect of art presents an audience with an ideal world, with the vision of a society which is more permanent and therefore more “real” than the one we know. In The Educated Imagination, originally delivered as six radio talks, Frye defines the way in which literature and the arts are absorbed into society through education. The title of the final chapter of this book, “The Vocation of Eloquence,” comes from a poem by St. John Perse, the theme of which is the founding of a new city. In that chapter Frye suggests a program of literary study by which the imaginations of the young may be educated around a coherent set of symbols and stories. The Bible, considered to be our most complete mythology and therefore the basis of later literature, should be taught “so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it.” Similarly, pagan myths should be studied in such a way as to make clear their similarities to the myths of the Bible. The mythological basis of humanistic education, according to Frye, has a social value, since “the myths and images of literature . . . enter into and give form to all the structures we build out of words,” even if those structures operate only as advertising, propaganda, or political rhetoric. A coherent understanding of mythology enables us to criticize, as free men, the incoherent and debased mythologies of our own time. Such an educational program would, Frye thinks, become the common experience of the literate and the humane. It would liberate the imagination to do its fundamental job, which is “to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”
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The myth that organizes The Educated Imagination is, Frye tells us, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. What the myth tells us is this: once, we all had a single language, not some imaginary tongue which is the basis of English, Russian, and Chinese, but “the language of human nature, the language which makes both Shakespeare and Pushkin authentic poets.” Like the myth of the Fall, the story of the Tower of Babel implies the antecedent existence of a superior condition, a community which fulfilled desires and organized the imagination around a coherent set of symbols. This community is the paradise we have lost, and it is, Frye implies, the state to which we must return.
Frye's theory of literary education is an example of what Frye himself calls “ethical” criticism, that is, criticism which deals with literature in its contemporary application. Ethical criticism derives its power to set the conditions for value-judgment from its concern with the presence of culture in the community. This type of criticism defines the personal uses of literature as the re-creation of the self through that “vision of a decisive act of spiritual freedom” which art presents to its audience. Learning how to read involves the reader, therefore, in the creation of his identity as a free man, and in the creation of a new community of free men. And so the kind of literary criticism which teaches us how to read properly, assumes the largest sort of cultural importance.
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The modern century is a book-length example of “ethical criticism.” In it Frye attempts to describe the modern “mythology,” which he defines as the “structure of ideas, images, beliefs, assumptions, anxieties, and hopes which express the view of man's situation and destiny generally held” in our time. The first chapter of the book, called “City of the End of Things,” describes “the alienation of progress,” one of the elements which constitute the modern mythology. Modern consciousness, in this reading, ends in despair because of its obsessive need to “keep up” with an impossibly fast stream of events. Its mythical analogue is the medieval legend of the Wild Hunt, “in which souls of the dead had to keep marching to nowhere all day and all night at top speed.” In modern times, the conception of alienation has become psychological, and its “central symbol” is “the overkill bomb.”
In a world where the tyrant-enemy can be recognized, even defined, and yet cannot be projected on anything or anybody, he remains part of ourselves, or more precisely of our own death-wish, a cancer which gradually disintegrates the sense of community.
It is also Frye's contention that modern technology has created a new sense of time. Technology involves “the continued sacrificing of a visible present to an invisible future”:
. . . progress is a social projection of the individual's sense of the passing of time. But the individual, as such, is not progressing to anything except his own death. Hence the collapse of belief in progress reinforces the sense of anxiety which is rooted in the consciousness of death. Alienation and anxiety become the same thing. . . .
For all its concision and clarity, this description of the modern situation ignores those political or historical facts which are the causes and consequences of alienation and anxiety. A radical distrust of the benevolence of progress is indeed one of the emotions which constitute the modern mythology. But that this distrust can issue in a new set of moral choices and political actions is a fact which Frye's vocabulary of cultural forms can engage only in a peripheral way. He can deal with such choices and actions only insofar as they can be “placed” in conceptual space, either juxtaposed or in opposition to other “elements” or “phenomena” that have been sim ilarly isolated and defined by his vocabulary.
To be sure, Frye's vocabulary also brings him to a number of fine critical insights. “Improved Binoculars,” the second chapter of The Modern Century, is concerned to define what is “modern” in modern art and literature. Modern art, Frye says, is “born on a battlefield, where the enemies are the anti-arts of passive impression.” Frye claims that the militant situation in which modern art finds itself has created a radical split, even an antagonism, between the artist and his audience. From this situation has derived the modern affinity for extreme states of feeling, for primitivism, for the outcast, the criminal, and the sadistic, for whatever threatens a passive or a bourgeois response to experience. The adversary position of the artist requires, therefore, that he engage his audience in an intensely active response to his creation.
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Like the description of alienation and anxiety, this description is accurate and clear. But it fails, strangely enough in a writer of Frye's logical power, to fit into his theory of the autonomy of art. The active response which modern literature asks of its audience is not a response simply to the art-work “as such.” On the contrary: the desired response involves a revaluation of experience as newly perceived with the artist's aid; sometimes, as in Brecht and Lawrence, literature might even demand of the reader that he engage in a specific set of actions. These actions are likely to be political, for in our time, as Thomas Mann observed, the destiny of man presents itself in political terms.
Now if we accept Mann's statement as at least one element in our modern situation, we must, in order to make our destiny benevolent, act as political men, and in the realm of public affairs. But it is just this form of action which cannot be included in Frye's purview. Not only is the vocabulary of politics missing from his work, it is devalued. Indeed, no such vocabulary can be derived from the terms in which Frye has consistently chosen to understand experience.
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Finally, Frye's vocabulary ends by imitating what it describes: it becomes autonomous, and loses the power to relate itself to our non-literary concerns in any but the most general way. One sometimes has the sense, in following his brilliant and crowded career, of being in a world completely understood by a mind wholly conscious of its own ironies, a world in which insight is possible or valued insofar as it can be assimilated into a pre-established, formal theory of literature and culture. At the end of The Modern Century, Frye describes the world we live in as not the world of Blake's lamb but the world of his “tyger”; not the world of the child, a world which has parents too, but the adult's world, “which was never created or seen to be good.” Still
. . . in all our efforts to imagine or realize a better society, some shadow falls across it of the child's innocent vision of the impossible created world that makes human sense.
Having said that, having described the vision of an ideal city, he has to stop. He can only accept the consequences of the vocabulary he has chosen; he is reduced to ironic silence. This silence is as far as the mythical mode of thought can take him, and should be enough to indicate its limitations.
