Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays | Northrop Frye

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays | Northrop Frye | One cannot explain it all

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Anatomy of Critici...

	Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays Northrop Frye Princeton University Press, 2000 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, employing examples of world literature from ancient times to the present, Frye reconceived literary criticism as a total history rather than a linear progression through time.

Literature, Frye wrote, is "the place where our imaginations find the ideal that they try to pass on to belief and action, where they find the vision which is the source of both the dignity and the joy of life." And the critical study of literature provides a basic way "to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in."

Harold Bloom contributes a fascinating and highly personal preface that examines Frye's mode of criticism and thought (as opposed to Frye's criticism itself) as being indispensable in the modern literary world.

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sweeping vision

In this classic work Frye takes a long view of literature, and discerns deep structural patterns. In Essay I he charts a progression in the history of western literature from myth through romance through realism to irony in which the hero becomes increasingly human. Essay III envisions different archetypal literary forms (comedy, romance, tragedy, satire) as continuous phases of a central quest-myth that recurs throughout the history of western literature, and lays out a rich and resonant typology of their symbolism.

I found Essays II and IV, which are concerned with forms of symbolism, and genres, respectively, to be somewhat muddled, and much less insightful than the other two essays.

Bottom line- if you read Essays I and III you will gain a new and lasting insight into the stories you come across and the way they work, be they novels, films, plays or poetry.

Highly recommended as an antidote to the facile post-modernism and literary identity politics that most English departments are awash in these days.

For those reading the book, I also recommend googling Everett Frost's recreation of the mandala diagram of Essay III that Frye left out of the manuscript.

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One cannot explain it all

When I was in graduate school long before the Soviet Empire fell this work was treated as if it were a kind of ' Bible '. It was the work which made the study of Literature a ' field of Knowledge' and not simply a kind of arena of diverse opinion. It took the whole history of Literature and organized it in such a way that any work could somehow find its place, and be fit into it.
I tried very hard to understand this work, and I believe I really did not get it. Perhaps it was a certain skeptical element in me which simply felt that each work , each of the real works was so unique that ' fitting it into a scheme' did not make much sense of it all. Another problem was despite my liking of the lyrical Blake I felt Frye too much gone on those Blakean mythmonster poems which I myself felt so dull and idiosyncratic.
One idea from the work remains with me certainly- and this is the idea that Literature is created not out of nothing, but out of previous Literature. I would qualify this a bit by saying that it is also created out of our experience. But I do not mean to be ' correcting ' or putting down Frye. I recognize that there is some kind of heroic effort here to put it all together for the greater understanding of us all.
It just never worked for me. And I will readily admit I may be very very wrong , and simply a poor reader here.

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Essential

It really is of no importance, whether you agree with Frye, or you do not. After all, such things only matter if you are yourself literature historian, and you already developed your own viewpoints of the literature or culture and what does it look like. But, if you are only begining your own path upon that winding road, you shouldn't walk right past Frye without stopping and looking at least for some time.

Amongst the books to which I return often, which fuel over and over again mine desire for things that are slowly, but irreversibly being forgotten, amongst E.R.Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Roland Barthes, stands Frye. Stands there as an equal. His "Anatomy of criticism" keeps shoving itself, many times over, as an endless well of themes, motives, ideas, it functions as a marvelous whole which is trying to shed some light upon the dark corners of the earth. Especially those presented in literatures of all kind.

Of course, this is a major task for any book, and question remains of Fryes successfulness. Personally, putting aside all thoughts of structuralism, deconstructionism and all kinds of isms, that emerged years after this book was published, Fryes conception of critic, and critical task still remain important and strong as ever it was.

I will not talk about it here, it makes no sense at all, retelling Frye. He's making best argue over his own position with his own words, which you will find printed here. What I should say is - putting aside Frye and his work means missing very large part of literature. Not the corpus itself, of course, but rather a certain viewpoint, manner of building worlds with bricks that are dealt beforehand, manner that breathes new life into a body that has been slowly rotting away.

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A Marvelous Book

I bought this book in 1999, under the influence of a prominent professor of English literature; I waited until now to read it, and wish I hadn't. So might you, even if eminence in literary studies is not an aspiration of yours, as it wasn't for me. In the "Polemical Introduction" to this book Northrop Frye wishes for a systematic literary criticism, and says that one proof of its existence would be "an elementary textbook expounding its fundamental principles" -- but the four "essays" he goes on to deliver are themselves the closest approximation to this goal I've seen. In other words, *Anatomy of Criticism* might be the biggest treat for someone with some intellectual footing but no especially deep knowledge of literature; Frye's explanations of fundamental literary techniques and the means of classifying them are very satisfying and productive of a greater "practical" appreciation of literary art.

Late in the book, Frye proposes we adopt the term "anatomy" as a less-misleading critical term for the prose genre more commonly known as "Menippean satire" (writing critiquing the world of ideas through characters expressly intended to be mouthpieces for one intellectual standpoint or another); and an element of his own *Anatomy* is thrown into relief, the vast but lightly worn philological and philosophical learning which informs his system. Although Frye does talk about archetypes, it would be exceptionally facile to view him as a "Jungian" critic; he borrows from many sources, in informed and non-dogmatic ways -- certainly his discreet use of some themes from Nietzsche is the most genteel appropriation of that overly-attractive thinker I've seen. His ability to anticipate the directions criticism would be heading in during the following decades is also impressive (the aforementioned professor once told us that Frye had considered titling the book "Structuralist Poetics", and although I'm unsure of the factual status of that claim there's little in the book that would be unsuitable to it).

The element of Frye's worldview which is indubitably central for his project is his having been an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada. Ordinarily "Christian" academics are intent on making a holy mess of the construal of some unpleasant corner of reality, but Frye makes a convincing case that interpreting medieval and modern literature without an understanding of Biblical typology would be like "Hamlet without the Prince" (perhaps in a very concrete way). Another recurring element of that worldview, less central to the theoretical core of the book but very admirable from the vantage point of the present, is a political liberalism which refuses to join sides against the people; although Frye was understandably critical of the idea that official Soviet culture represented a pitch of perfection regarding the enlightenment of the masses, his comments regarding the "proletarian" character of certain directions in art and his espousal of a classless society as a fundamental goal of culture leave little to be desired from a left-of-center standpoint.

Learn from my mistake: don't wait nine years to read this.

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Erudite musings

The book is moderately curious but very overrated. Btw, the author himself doesn't pretend it is more than it is: he freely admits in the preface that his book is incomplete and, for example, cannot be taken as an exposition of his theory. It is, he says, an essay in the original meaning of this word: and incomplete attempt. Bloom -- tactfully but even more crisply -- conveys this same idea in his foreword; this, he says, is a period piece, not a timeless book, and, I quote, it "will survive because it is serious, spiritual, and comprehensive, but not because it is systematic or a manifestation of genius." Finally, whatever doubts we may still have are dispelled within the first, say, ten pages. So, what to expect here?

The book is erudite, yes. Intellectually stimulating? Very much so. It'll make you want to read more (not of him, but those he talks about, like Aristotle's Poetics, for example).

But is it directly instructive? No, not really. Well thought out? No. Shapeless? Yes. Unjustified and uneven? Overwhelmingly, yes -- and, at times, descending into outright drivel. An example (p.5):

"It is generally accepted that a critic is a better judge of the value of a poem than its creator, but there is still a lingering notion that it is somehow ridiculous to regard the critic as the final judge of its meaning, even though in practice it is clear that he must be. The reason for this is an inability to distinguish literature from the descriptive or assertive writing which derives from the active will and the conscious mind, and which is primarily concerned to "say" something."

Here we have a careless pile of anecdotal evidence, ad numerum, at least two ad populums, and got only knows what else, crowned by a non sequitur. This? From a supposed prominent literary figure, a person of note? I mean, what prevents one from countering the argument above with, say, the following:

"It is generally accepted that a poet is a better judge of the value of a poem than its critic, but there is still a lingering notion that it is somehow ridiculous to regard the poet as the final judge of its meaning, even though in practice it is clear that he must be" and so on? You get my point. The whole book brims over with this kind of argumentation.

So, should you read it? Not first, and maybe not at all. This is a curious, mostly rewarding, but not a must-read piece. If you're new to Frye, first think whether and why you need him at all, and second, if you decide to dabble, go for Fearful Symmetry first.

I have to say that so far I've more enjoyed and learned from ten pages of Bloom than a hundred pages of Frye, but tastes differ, so YMMV. And besides, even though Anatomy of Criticism is definitely not the "most important work of literary theory in the 20th century", I don't regret reading this book -- after all, I could quit, but I didn't.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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