Northrop Frye
Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Frye gained international fame with his first book, Fearful Symmetry, which led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake. His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism, one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. The American critic Harold Bloom commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature." Frye's contributions to cultural and social criticism spanned a long career during which he earned widespread recognition and received many honours.
Biography
Early life and education
Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, but raised in Moncton, New Brunswick, Frye was the third child of Herman Edward Frye and of Catherine Maud Howard. His much older brother, Howard, died in World War I; he also had a sister, Vera. His first cousin was the scientist Alma Howard. Frye went to Toronto to compete in a national typing contest in 1929. He studied for his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he edited the college literary journal, Acta Victoriana. He then studied theology at Emmanuel College. After a brief stint as a student minister in Saskatchewan, he was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada. He then studied at Merton College, Oxford, where he was a member and Secretary of the Bodley Club before returning to Victoria College, where he spent the remainder of his professional career.Academic and writing career
Frye rose to international prominence as a result of his first book, Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, and considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution to the subject. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on Harold Bloom, Margaret Atwood, and others.In 1974–1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University. But his primary position was as a professor at the University of Toronto, and then chancellor of Victoria College in the University of Toronto.
Northrop Frye did not have a PhD.
The intelligence service of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police spied on Frye, watching his participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, an academic forum about China, and activism to end South African apartheid.
Family life
Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986, he remarried to Elizabeth Eedy Brown, the widow of politician James Elisha Brown and the sister of writer Alice Boissonneau. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario.Contribution to literary criticism
The insights gained from his study of Blake set Frye on his critical path and shaped his contributions to literary criticism and theory. He was the first critic to postulate a systematic theory of criticism, "to work out," in his own words, "a unified commentary on the theory of literary criticism". In so doing, he shaped the discipline of criticism. Inspired by his work on Blake, Frye developed and articulated his unified theory ten years after Fearful Symmetry, in the Anatomy of Criticism. He described this as an attempt at a "synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism". He asked, "what if criticism is a science as well as an art?", Thus, Frye launched the pursuit which was to occupy the rest of his career—that of establishing criticism as a "coherent field of study which trains the imagination quite as systematically and efficiently as the sciences train the reason".Criticism as a science
As A. C. Hamilton outlines in Northrop Frye: Anatomy of his Criticism, Frye's assumption of coherence for literarycriticism carries important implications. Firstly and most fundamentally, it presupposes that literary criticism is a discipline in its own right, independent of literature. Claiming with John Stuart Mill that "the artist… is not heard but overheard," Frye insists that
This "declaration of independence" is necessarily a measured one for Frye. For coherence requires that the autonomy of criticism, the need to eradicate its conception as "a parasitic form of literary expression,… a second-hand imitation of creative power", sits in dynamic tension with the need to establish integrity for it as a discipline. For Frye, this kind of coherent, critical integrity involves claiming a body of knowledge for criticism that, while independent of literature, is yet constrained by it: "If criticism exists," he declares, "it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field" itself.
Frye's conceptual framework for literature
In seeking integrity for criticism, Frye rejects what he termed the deterministic fallacy. He defines this as the movement of "a scholar with a special interest in geography or economics express... that interest by the rhetorical device of putting his favorite study into a causal relationship with whatever interests him less". By attaching criticism to an external framework rather than locating the framework for criticism within literature, this kind of critic essentially "substitute a critical attitude for criticism." For Frye critical integrity means that "the axioms and postulates of criticism... have to grow out of the art it deals with".Taking his cue from Aristotle, Frye's methodology in defining a conceptual framework begins inductively, "follow the natural order and begin with the primary facts". The primary facts, in this case, are the works of literature themselves. And what did Frye's inductive survey of these facts reveal? Significantly, they revealed "a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to ". This revelation prompted his next move, or rather, 'inductive leap':
I suggest that it is time for criticism to leap to a new ground from which it can discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are. Criticism seems to be badly in need of a coordinating
principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole.
Arguing that "criticism cannot be a systematic study unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so," Frye puts forward the hypothesis that "just as there is an order of nature behind the natural sciences, so literature is not a piled aggregate of 'works,' but an order of words". This order of words constitutes criticism's conceptual framework, its coordinating principle.
The order of words
The recurring primitive formulas Frye noticed in his survey of the "greatest classics" provide literature with an order of words, a "skeleton" which allows the reader "to respond imaginatively to any literary work by seeing it in the larger perspective provided by its literary and social contexts". Frye identifies these formulas as the "conventional myths and metaphors" which he calls "archetypes". The archetypes of literature exist, Frye argues, as an order of words, providing criticism with a conceptual framework and a body of knowledge derived not from an ideological system but rooted in the imagination itself. Thus, rather than interpreting literary works from some ideological 'position' — what Frye calls the "superimposed critical attitude" — criticism instead finds integrity within the literary field itself.Criticism for Frye, then, is not a task of evaluation — that is, of rejecting or accepting a literary work — but rather simply of recognizing it for what it is and understanding it in relation to other works within the 'order of words' . Imposing value judgments on literature belongs, according to Frye, "only to the history of taste, and therefore follows the vacillations of fashionable prejudice". Genuine criticism "progresses toward making the whole of literature intelligible" so that its goal is ultimately knowledge and not evaluation. For the critic in Frye's mode, then,
... a literary work should be contemplated as a pattern of knowledge, an act that must be distinguished, at least initially, from any direct experience of the work,... criticism begins when reading ends: no longer imaginatively subjected to a literary work, the critic tries to make sense out of it, not by going to some historical context or by commenting on the immediate experience of reading but by seeing its structure within literature and literature within culture.
A theory of the imagination
Once asked whether his critical theory was Romantic, Frye responded, "Oh, it's entirely Romantic, yes". It is Romantic in the same sense that Frye attributed Romanticism to Blake: that is, "in the expanded sense of giving a primary place to imagination and individual feeling". As artifacts of the imagination, literary works, including "the pre-literary categories of ritual, myth, and folk-tale" form, in Frye's vision, a potentially unified imaginative experience. He reminds us that literature is the "central and most important extension" of mythology: "... every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature". Mythology and literature thus inhabit and function within the same imaginative world, one that is "governed by conventions, by its own modes, symbols, myths and genres". Integrity for criticism requires that it too operates within the sphere of the imagination, and not seek an organizing principle in ideology. To do so, claims Frye,... leaves out the central structural principles that literature derives from myth, the principles that give literature its communicating power across the centuries through all ideological changes. Such structural principles are certainly conditioned by social and historical factors and do not transcend them, but they retain a continuity of form that points to an identity of the literary organism distinct from all its adaptations to its social environment.
Myth therefore provides structure to literature simply because literature as a whole is "displaced mythology". Hart makes the point well when he states that "For Frye, the story, and not the argument, is at the centre of literature and society. The base of society is mythical and narrative and not ideological and dialectical". This idea, which is central in Frye's criticism, was first suggested to him by Giambattista Vico.