Frye - Anatomy of criticism : four essays

ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

Four Essays

Anatomy of Criticism

FOUR ESSAYS

by NORTHROP FRYE

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

1957

Copyright 1957, by Princeton University Press

All Rights Reserved

L.C. Card No. 56-8380

ISBN 0-691-01298-9 (paperback edn.)

ISBN 0-691-06004-5 (hardcover edn.)

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University, and the Class of 1932 Lectureship.

First Princeton Paperback Printing, 1971

Tenth Hardcover Printing, 1971

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of without the publishers consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Printed in the United States of America

by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

HELENAE UXORI

PREFATORY STATEMENTS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS book forced itself on me while I was trying to write something else, and it probably still bears the marks of the reluctance with which a great part of it was composed. After completing a study of William Blake (Fearful Symmetry, 1947), I determined to apply the principles of literary symbolism and Biblical typology which I had learned from Blake to another poet, preferably one who had taken these principles from the critical theories of his own day, instead of working them out by himself as Blake did. I therefore began a study of Spensers Faerie Queene, only to discover that in my beginning was my end. The introduction to Spenser became an introduction to the theory of allegory, and that theory obstinately adhered to a much larger theoretical structure. The basis of argument became more and more discursive, and less and less historical and Spenserian. I soon found myself entangled in those parts of criticism that have to do with such words as myth, symbol, ritual, and archetype, and my efforts to make sense of these words in various published articles met with enough interest to encourage me to proceed further along these lines. Eventually the theoretical and the practical aspects of the task I had begun completely separated. What is here offered is pure critical theory, and the omission of all specific criticism, even, in three of the four essays, of quotation, is deliberate. The present book seems to me, so far as I can judge at present, to need a complementary volume concerned with practical criticism, a sort of morphology of literary symbolism.

I am grateful to the J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a Fellowship (1950-1951) which gave me leisure and freedom to deal with my Protean subject at the time when it stood in the greatest need of both.

I am also grateful to the Class of 1932 of Princeton University, and to the Committee of the Special Program in the Humanities at Princeton, for providing me with a most stimulating term of work, in the course of which a good deal of the present book took its final shape. This book contains the substance of the four public lectures delivered in Princeton in March 1954.

The Polemical Introduction is a revised version of The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, University of Toronto Quarterly, October 1949, also reprinted in Our Sense of Identity, ed. Malcolm Ross, Toronto, 1954. The first essay is a revised and expanded version of Towards a Theory of Cultural History, University of Toronto Quarterly, July 1953. The second essay incorporates the material of Levels of Meaning in Literature, Kenyon Review, Spring 1950; of Three Meanings of Symbolism, Yale French Studies No. 9 (1952); of The Language of Poetry, Explorations 4 (Toronto, 1955); and of The Archetypes of Literature, Kenyon Review, Winter 1951. The third essay contains the material of The Argument of Comedy, English Institute Essays 1948, Columbia University Press, 1949; of Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy, Shakespeare Quarterly, July 1953; of Comic Myth in Shakespeare, Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada (Section II), June 1952; and of The Nature of Satire, University of Toronto Quarterly, October 1944. The fourth essay contains the material of Music in Poetry, University of Toronto Quarterly, January 1942; of A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres, Kenyon Review, Autumn 1951; of The Four Forms of Prose Fiction, Hudson Review, Winter 1950; and of Myth as Information, Hudson Review, Summer 1954. I am greatly obliged to the courtesy of the editors of the above-mentioned periodicals, the Columbia University Press, and the Royal Society of Canada, for permission to reprint this material. I have also transplanted a few sentences from other articles and reviews of mine, all from the same periodicals, when they appeared to fit the present context.

For my further obligations, all that can be said here, and is not less true for being routine, is that many of the virtues of this book are due to others: the errors of fact, taste, logic, and proportion are poor things, but my own.

N. F.

Victoria College
University of Toronto

Contents

ANATOMY OF CRITICISM

Four Essays

Polemical Introduction

THIS BOOK consists of essays, in the words original sense of a trial or incomplete attempt, on the possibility of a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism. The primary aim of the book is to give my reasons for believing in such a synoptic view; its secondary aim is to provide a tentative version of it which will make enough sense to convince my readers that a view, of the kind that I outline, is attainable. The gaps in the subject as treated here are too enormous for the book ever to be regarded as presenting my system, or even my theory. It is to be regarded rather as an interconnected group of suggestions which it is hoped will be of some practical use to critics and students of literature. Whatever is of no practical use to anybody is expendable. My approach is based on Matthew Arnolds precept of letting the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been much endeavor and little attempt at perspective. All the essays deal with criticism, but by criticism I mean the whole work of scholarship and taste concerned with literature which is a part of what is variously called liberal education, culture, or the study of the humanities. I start from the principle that criticism is not simply a part of this larger activity, but an essential part of it.

The subject-matter of literary criticism is an art, and criticism is evidently something of an art too. This sounds as though criticism were a parasitic form of literary expression, an art based on pre-existing art, a second-hand imitation of creative power. On this theory critics are intellectuals who have a taste for art but lack both the power to produce it and the money to patronize it, and thus form a class of cultural middlemen, distributing culture to society at a profit to themselves while exploiting the artist and increasing the strain on his public. The conception of the critic as a parasite or artist manqu is still very popular, especially among artists. It is sometimes reinforced by a dubious analogy between the creative and the procreative functions, so that we hear about the impotence and dryness of the critic, of his hatred for genuinely creative people, and so on. The golden age of anticritical criticism was the latter part of the nineteenth century, but some of its prejudices are still around.

However, the fate of art that tries to do without criticism is instructive. The attempt to reach the public directly through popular art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative folk. These theories have had a fair trial; they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history and experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them. An extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated with the art for arts sake catchword, thinks of art in precisely the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual masonic gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.