The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963-1975 9781442687783

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye VO LUM E 2 7

The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1963–1975

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee

General Editor Alvin A. Lee Associate Editor Jean O’Grady Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis Paul Gooch Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1963–1975 VOLUME 27

Edited by Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner (preface, introduction, annotation 2009) Printed in Canada www.utppublishing.com isbn 978-0-8020-9625-8

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 Critical path and other writings on critical theory, 1963–1975 / Northrop Frye ; edited by Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner (Collected works of Northrop Frye ; v. 27) Includes bibliographical references and index isbn 978-0-8020-9625-8 1. Literature – History and criticism. 2. Criticism. I. O’Grady, Jean, 1943– II. Kushner, Eva III. Title. IV. Series. pn81.f752 2008

809

c2008-903838-x

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface ix Credits xiii Abbreviations xv Introduction xix 1 The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism 3 2 Literary Criticism 118 3 Myth and Poetry 134 4 Preface to Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire 139 5 After the Invocation, a Lapse into Litany 143 6 Criticism, Visible and Invisible 147

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Contents 7 The Structure and Spirit of Comedy 162 8 The Norms of Satire 170 9 Allegory 171 10 Verse and Prose 178 11 Varieties of Literary Utopias 191 12 Letter to the English Institute, 1965 215 13 Reflections in a Mirror 218 14 Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts 228 15 Literature and Myth 238 16 Welcoming Remarks to Conference on Editorial Problems, 1967 256 17 On Value Judgments 258 18 Literature and Society 266 19 Mythos and Logos 280 20 The Myth of Light 282 21 Old and New Comedy 285

Contents

vii 22 Sign and Significance 293 23 Literature and the Law 301 24 The Search for Acceptable Words 310 25 The Times of the Signs 331 26 The Rhythms of Time 358 27 Charms and Riddles 369 28 Expanding Eyes 391 Notes 411 Emendations 457 Index 459

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Preface

This volume includes twenty-seven articles pertaining to literary theory and criticism that Frye wrote during the central period of his career, those coming between critical articles of 1933 to 1963 (in vol. 21 of the Collected Works) and those of 1976 to 1991 (in vol. 18). The earliest-written work, “Literary Criticism,” dates from 1963, while the latest, “Expanding Eyes,” was published in 1975. The items in the present volume have been arranged chronologically, except that the text of the book The Critical Path (1971) has been placed first as the cornerstone of the volume. Articles originally given as speeches are ordered according to date of delivery rather than that of publication, though the text may be taken from the printed version; those items with a year date only precede those with a specific day or month. Headnotes to the individual items specify the copy-text (which is generally the last edition to have been supervised or corrected by Frye), list all known reprintings of the item in English, and also note the existence of typescripts and where they can be found in the Northrop Frye Fonds at the E.J. Pratt Library of Victoria University. All substantive changes to the copy-text are noted in the list of emendations, though changes of accidentals are made silently. All authoritative printed versions have been collated, and, although this is a reading edition rather than a fully critical one, variants of particular interest are given in notes. In preparing the text, we have followed the general practice of the Collected Works in handling published material from a variety of sources. That is to say, since the conventions of spelling, typography, and to some extent punctuation derive from the different publishers’ house styles rather than from Frye, we have regularized them silently throughout the volume. For instance, Canadian spellings ending in -our have been sub-

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stituted for American -or ones, commas have been added before the “and” in sequences of three, and titles of poems have been italicized. Frye’s quotations have been regularized to correspond with the source cited: minor changes of punctuation or capitalization have been made silently, but any substantive change is noted in the emendations list. When, as often, Frye has modernized the spelling, his modernization is retained and remarked upon in the note. Notes identify the source of all quotations that we have been able to track down. Short identifications of section, act, scene, or line number, of Bible verses, or of page number, have been placed in the text, in square brackets to distinguish them from Frye’s own occasional inserted references which are in regular parentheses. Our references, in the case of Classical works, were found in the Loeb editions; for Shakespeare, we used the Riverside Shakespeare. References to Blake’s poetry give the plate and line number or appropriate reference, followed by “E” and the page number The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Page numbers for Frye’s major works give the original page number, followed after a slash by the page number in the Collected Works edition, as in FS, 193/195. Notes provided by Frye himself are identified by “[NF]” following the note; the form of Frye’s references has sometimes been changed to correspond with Collected Works style (for instance, roman volume numbers become arabic). Editorial expansions of these notes are in square brackets. Authors and titles mentioned in passing are not annotated, but life dates and date of first publication of books are provided in the index. Acknowledgments A number of people have helped us in the preparation of this volume. We were fortunate in having the research assistance of two dedicated graduate students, Scott Schofield and Erin Reynolds, whom we thank for their substantial contributions to the notes. The staff of Victoria University Library were unfailingly helpful in providing original typescripts from the Northrop Frye Fonds. Others who have answered queries and provided information include Tom Allen, John Baird, Deanne Bogdan, Ellen Charendoff, Robert D. Denham, Michael Dolzani, Rosemary Feal, Nicholas Graham, Troni Grande, Cyrus Hamlin, Alvin Lee, and Stephen Tardif. We are indebted to Germaine Warkentin for her discovery and

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acquisition of the frontispiece photograph; Stephen Graubard and Jonathan Arac assisted her to identify the occasion and the people depicted. The index was prepared by Jean O’Grady. The articles were originally typed or scanned by Alex Stephens. We thank him and also Margaret Burgess, who copy-edited the text with her usual thoroughness and expert knowledge, and saved us from a number of errors. Finally, we are grateful to Alvin Lee for his constant support and encouragement, and to the Northrop Frye Centre for providing us with agreeable colleagues and a favourable space for our work.

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Credits

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to reprint works previously published by them. We have not been able to determine the copyright status of all the works included in this volume, and welcome notice from any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments. Beacon Press, for “Preface,” from The Psychoanalysis of Fire by Gaston Bachelard, copyright © 1964 by Alan C.M. Ross. Originally published in French under the title La Psychanalyse du feu, copyright © 1938 by Librairie Gallimard. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. Cambridge University Press for “Old and New Comedy,” from Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969). Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Claremont Graduate School for “Sign and Significance,” from Claremont Reading Conference: Thirty-Third Yearbook (1969). Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” from the issue Utopia (94, no. 2 [Spring 1965]); and for “The Search for Acceptable Words,” from the issue The Search for Knowledge (102, no. 2 [Spring 1973]). Reprinted by permission of Daedalus. John Honsberger, Q.C., on behalf of the Law Society of Upper Canada, for “Literature and the Law,” from the Law Society of Upper Canada Gazette, 4 (1970).

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Indiana University Press for The Critical Path (1971); and for “Charms and Riddles” from Spiritus Mundi (1976). Prof. Murray Krieger for “Letter to the English Institute, 1965” and “Reflections in a Mirror,” from Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Murray Krieger (Columbia University Press, 1966). Modern Language Association for “Literary Criticism,” from The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. James Thorpe (1963); and for “Literature and Myth,” from Relations of Literary Studies: Essays on Interdisciplinary Study, ed. James Thorpe (1967). National Council of Teachers of English for “Criticism, Visible and Invisible,” from College English, 26 (1964). Princeton University Press for “Allegory” and “Verse and Prose,” from the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger. © 1965 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission. The Royal Society of Canada for “The Times of the Signs: An Essay on Science and Mythology,” from On a Disquieting Earth: Five Hundred Years after Copernicus (1973). University of Chicago Press for “Expanding Eyes,” from Critical Inquiry, 2, no. 2 (1975), ed. Sheldon Sacks. © 1975 by the University of Chicago. University of Wisconsin Press for “On Value Judgments,” from Contemporary Literature, 9, no. 3. © 1968. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. With the exception of those listed above, all works are printed by courtesy of the Estate of Northrop Frye/Victoria University.

Abbreviations

note: Works are by Frye unless otherwise noted.

AC AC2 C CP CW E EI EICT

FI FS FS2 INF LN

Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Anatomy of Criticism. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 22. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Northrop Frye on Canada. Ed. Jean O’Grady and David Staines. CW, 12. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Collected Works of Northrop Frye The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Rev. ed. Ed. David Erdman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963. “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. CW, 21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Ed. Nicholas Halmi. CW, 14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Interviews with Northrop Frye. Ed. Jean O’Grady. CW, 24. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spir-

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itual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 5–6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. LS Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. M&B Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. CW, 16. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. MC The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. MLA The Modern Language Association of America MM Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. NF Northrop Frye NFF Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library NFHK The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 1–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. NFL The books in Frye’s personal library that were annotated, now in the Victoria University Library NFMC Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. CW, 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. NP A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. RE The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. RT Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 13. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. RW Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935–1976. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. SeSCT “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991. Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. CW, 18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. SM Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. StS The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. TBN The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. TSE T.S. Eliot. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963.

Abbreviations WE WP

WTC

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Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French. CW, 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Northrop Frye. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. Northrop Frye. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

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Introduction

The present volume of middle period writings on critical theory, 1963– 75, shows Frye at the height of his reputation as a literary critic. By the end of this period, as the editors of the final volume of critical writings point out, his influence had begun to wane as poststructuralism, deconstruction, and the New Historicism began to dominate the field (SeSCT, xxvi). But in 1963, Anatomy of Criticism, published in 1957, had become part of the essential equipment of literary scholars throughout North America. Indeed nineteen of the twenty-eight essays in this volume were published in the United States, as Frye was invited to speak all over the continent.1 But he also drew the regard of British critics, as witnessed humorously by British academic David Lodge: “Wherever Frye is performing, a circus-like atmosphere of excitement and suspense is generated. Attention is focussed on the daring critic on the flying trapeze: will he fall, can he bring off another somersault, is it all faked?”2 In a number of the pieces in this volume, Frye is promulgating, explaining, and elaborating the ideas of the Anatomy—reusing material, as was his wont, but also introducing new examples to supplement the highly compressed discussions of the book. Other short works are a result of his being called upon, as an established scholar, to write reviews and occasional pieces. But this is also the period during which he took a turn in his critical path. On the issues that he considered most basic, Frye’s thought was well integrated from the beginning of his critical activity, so that innovations would occur as aspects or consequences of that body of thought, rather than as unexpected new elements. This does not mean that, in the area of critical theory, originality was unlikely once his system was in place, but that it would take the form of myriads of questionings, findings, reformulations, and asides forming a most di-

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verse and living, but consistent whole. The Anatomy had appeared to some critics to present literature without regard for its social bearings, and though this was an unfair view of the book’s theoretical stance, it is true that the emphasis is on the structure of the imaginative verbal universe; voluntarily, the author focused on this self-contained literary universe, or at least postulated and treated it as self-contained. Self-contained does not mean impenetrable, if only because the literary universe is also a verbal universe, sharing its linguistic structures with a number of other aesthetic, cultural, scientific pursuits. The next step for Frye was to deal with the role of that imaginative verbal universe in human life, with the vocation of critical theory and of the critical theoretician in society, and all the educational responsibilities to which this vocation leads. The cornerstone of this volume, the monograph The Critical Path, is a vital “hinge” in this transition; with its elaboration of the concept of concern, it marks Frye’s evolution from literary critic to critic in the wider sense, or student of myth, and lays the groundwork for the broader considerations of language, myth, and culture in The Great Code and Words with Power. Many of the shorter pieces included here may be seen to be leading up to The Critical Path, or gravitating around its basic inquiry. But they are also—like all of Frye’s published essays and talks—polished pieces in their own right, and extremely varied in terms of their venues as well as their themes. In this introduction we shall attempt to honour their diversity, as well as the continuity of Frye’s reflection. One of his many talents was his ability to address specific occasions, without ever losing sight of his overall core problematics. Several of the earlier pieces in the volume are testimony to the extent to which Frye had “arrived” as a critic. “Literary Criticism” (no. 2) is addressed partly to “the profession” (an expression often used by members of the MLA to designate the languages and literatures professoriate) in a widely read MLA handbook designed for aspiring scholars: The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe.3 In this essay, which follows essays on linguistics, textual criticism, and literary history, Frye is given free rein to set forth the teachings of Anatomy of Criticism. Much of the essay in fact echoes the “sweeping of the interpreter’s parlour” in the Polemical Introduction, with lengthy arguments against faulty critical procedures such as the attempt to make value judgments (which necessarily reflect the taste of the critic’s own time and personal biases), the defining of a selected tradition, the attempt to introduce the direct experience of literature into criticism, and

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the intentional fallacy. The remaining, and shorter, part of the essay maintains that literature forms a total order of words and that criticism is a systematic and progressive study of it. (Frye avoids using the word “science” that had proved so contentious in the Anatomy). Such “academic criticism” is an innovative complement to scholarship. Scholarship calls for specialization; criticism calls on the totality of the critic’s intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological resources. It enables him or her to understand and appreciate the literary work in its unity, including apparent discrepancies which contradict the commonly accepted image of it. The academic critic will perceive the total design of a work as revealed by repetition (of images in poetry, characters in fiction) and modulation of these in different contexts, knowing that it is the structure of the poem, rather than everyday usage, which determines the meaning of its words. But above all such a critic will situate the poem in its literary context. In the case of Shakespeare, this means concentrating less on contemporaries and more on such authors as Aeschylus and Sophocles who gave tragedy its form. Genre, convention, and allusion are the guiding threads enabling the critic to situate a given work in the totality of literature, and thus to justify criticism as the complement to literature. In 1967 Frye contributed to a second MLA volume edited by Thorpe, Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Study. This handbook, its editor suggested, was designed for students who had mastered the basic techniques outlined in Aims and Methods and could now extend their vision from a series of perspectives established in the last generation or two;4 the essays included such subjects as “Literature and Biography” and “Literature and Religion.” Frye’s contribution, “Literature and Myth” (no. 15), is probably the most daring text included in this compendium in that it tackles the presence and workings of myth in all societies, and points to the mythical substrata of world religions, including Christianity. Throughout the text, Frye emphasizes the universality of mythical structures: societies and civilizations may transform, edit, censor, diversify, or simplify their mythologies but their forms are strikingly permanent and often survive belief in the historicity of their stories. To Frye, literature derives from mythology; in fact it is in its totality “a civilized, expanded, and developed mythology” (248). He can then characterize “myth criticism” (254) or archetypal criticism as the approach to this body that takes account of its conventions, genres, and recurring images. Outside the MLA, also, Frye was becoming an authoritative voice in the dissemination of critical theory. “Myth and Poetry” (no. 3) predates

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the article on myth discussed above. It was a contribution to The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, a British work that included other distinguished contributors such as Ian Fletcher, Hugh Kenner, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender (one of the editors), and Kathleen Raine. The aim of the encyclopedia was to “allow contemporary critics to report on current literary theory and opinion” in a way that reflected a diversity of approaches.5 In this piece Frye restates the Anatomy’s argument that literature derives from myth by a process of progressive displacement towards realism (137). He traces the evolution of myths as canonical stories, initially oral, in various world religions, through their gradual integration into mythologies embodying those religions, and on to their literary functions once they are partly or wholly detached from their sacred significance. Frye points to the endless imaginative possibilities myth offers, from mere allusion to clothing religious truths in profane stories to retelling old myths in new ways. “Allegory” (no. 9) is another contribution to a prestigious contemporary encyclopedia, Princeton’s Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965). The topic is very close to the heart of the critical path, namely the modes of encounter of mythos and logos. For that very reason allegory offers an excellent springboard for reflection upon the fictional translation of ideas and events. It was crucial to delimit a field which by its very nature resists limits. The first limit is that there must be a narrative basis. The second is that an allegorical principle must be explicitly involved in the structure of the work, and there must be continuous reference to the idea or event that is fictionally represented. But beyond these formal allegories, Frye points out, there is a multiplicity of works in which the allegorical principle is present; allegory is “not the name of a form or genre, but of a structural principle in fiction” (172). The bulk of the article actually concerns not literary allegory as such but allegorical criticism. In the background, and briefly alluded to here (174), are the four levels of meaning derived from Dante—literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic—in which allegorical is the medieval mode of interpretation corresponding to the formal phase in the Anatomy. In fact the encyclopedia article is an expanded form of part of the discussion of formal criticism in Anatomy, pp. 89–92/82–5, which begins, “It is not often realized that all commentary is allegorical interpretation.” The article concerns itself mainly with commentaries on fictions that have an acknowledged allegorical basis, or with the allegorical interpretation of works not initially, or not primarily, conceived as allegories, whether in

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the rational interpretation of Greek myths or in Christian typology, which shows the Old Testament prefiguring the New (or the New fulfilling the Old). The looser conception of commentary as allegory is alluded to in, for instance, the remarks on psychological and biographical commentary (176). “Verse and Prose” (no. 10) is a second contribution to the same encyclopedia. The piece, whose subject matter springs from the Fourth Essay of the Anatomy, is actually a condensed reworking of “Manual of Style,” the central section of The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), using many of the same examples. Lacking the latter’s concern with literary education and the social use of words, and also its further distinctions, in the case of each rhythm, between high, middle, and low styles, and between demotic and hieratic tendencies, the encyclopedia article is potentially more straightforward. But Frye’s initial exposition is somewhat confusing. He starts with a distinction between three types of language—ordinary speech, discursive or logical writing, and literature. The second type is ordinary speech conventionalized by sentence structure, and the third is ordinary speech conventionalized by rhythm—except when it is literary prose, in which case it is an imitation of the second type for literary purposes. He then introduces a third way of conventionalizing ordinary speech, associational rhythm, which the reader has difficulty in fitting into the opening division. The Well-Tempered Critic, at least initially, more simply aligns ordinary speech with associative rhythm, prose with sentence rhythm, and verse with regular recurring rhythm (EICT, 342, 343). The bulk of the article is a dazzling survey of the permutations and combinations of the three rhythms—metrical, discursive, and associational—using examples chosen mainly from English literature. These speculations were an early investigation into the uses of language which would eventually result in the different distinctions (metaphorical, conceptual, and descriptive) of The Great Code—in which “ordinary speech” is swallowed up in the descriptive or scientific mode. Frye’s theories had also drawn the attention and interest of the National Council of Teachers of English, who had been concerned since 1959 with the establishment of an “articulated English program” of sequential learning. Frye’s writings on education and the English curriculum, such as Design for Learning (1962) and “Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” (1964), were obviously relevant here; but the immediate impetus for a conference on the university English curriculum was the publication, in College English, of Kenneth Rothwell’s article

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on programmed learning in college English courses, which advocated the embracing of the Anatomy’s “frank acknowledgment that criticism is a science.”6 Frye was invited to address the conference to provide general background. Perhaps in reaction to the extreme empiricism of Rothwell’s article, which proposed most un-Frye-like “teaching machines” and “a periodic table of narrative elements,” Frye’s “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (no. 6) may well be the most personal text presented in this volume, one that comes closest to a confession of faith, since at times its tone is one of deep commitment to ultimate values. Frye begins by noting the difference (deriving from Plato, as he points out) between knowledge about things and knowledge of things. Knowledge about things is objective; knowledge of them involves some identity of knower and known. Ultimately, what Frye craves for the learner, whether a student or a superbly informed critic, is knowledge of literature: a personal appropriation of the literary work which in turn will bring him/her into contact, potentially, with the entire body of literature. Yet “knowledge about things is the limit of teaching” (147); criticism, the “visible” part of the title, “must point beyond itself, and cannot get to where it is pointing” (150). Thus, criticism is not an end in itself; it is part of education. Understanding places the student on the road to possession; in a way, criticism self-destructs once it has served that purpose. Yet the teaching of literature, understood as opening up the world of words in the widest sense, is crucial towards facilitating the student’s entry into the imaginative experience of that world. Such is the undemonstrable end of the “criticism at once glorified and invisible” (161) of the title. In another example of outreach, Frye was invited to explain his ideas to the Claremont Reading Conference, a gathering that typically featured more educators, neurologists, and psychologists than literary critics. “Sign and Significance” (no. 22) begins with the familiar distinction between centripetal and centrifugal ways of reading. This distinction, the basis for dividing the literary from the nonliterary, is then applied to criticism, as Frye sees two equally valid approaches, the centripetal (viewing literature as literature), and the centrifugal (viewing it as instrumental to the exposition of truth, the biography or psychology of the poet, or the understanding of the cultural milieu). Centripetal criticism, which grew up as a necessary complement to centrifugal, can itself lead to excessive separation from the context of literature; that is the case with text explication as practised by early New Criticism, a tendency which Frye wishes to remedy by seeing literature as a “unified, coherent, and autonomous

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body of imaginative experience historically conditioned but not historically determined” (299). The relevance of these distinctions to the teaching of literature and reading is that poetic imagery and rhythm should displace conceptual prose as the centre of a literary education. The most notable honour to Frye in these years was the holding of a special session on his criticism at the English Institute in 1965—a sign, in the memorable words of Murray Krieger, that “he has had an influence—indeed an absolute hold—on a generation of developing literary critics greater and more exclusive than that of any one theorist in recent critical history.”7 In fact he was the first individual critic, as well as the first living individual, to be so honoured. In “Letter to the English Institute” (no. 12), his explanation for his diplomatic absence from the proceedings, Frye briefly reflects on the systematic nature of his criticism and denies his desire to impose his “system” on other critics. Notable is his use of the concept of “interpenetration,” to become seminal in his later critical work, both for works of literature and for the fruitful plurality of critical approaches. It is in this spirit of critical charity that he entrusts his work to the judgment of the English Institute. After having read the individual critiques, Frye wrote “Reflections in a Mirror” (no. 13) for inclusion in the volume of proceedings. In the essays there was much to please him, as well as food for thought and no doubt sometimes irritation. The organizers had commissioned one paper by a writer influenced by Frye: Angus Fletcher, who defended Frye’s historical awareness and stressed the Utopian nature of the Anatomy as “a vision of the end towards which criticism tends” (58). This was followed by what Krieger described as “a paper dedicated to respectful dissent” but which its author, William K. Wimsatt, more truly characterized as being in the spirit of the devil’s advocate (75)—if not of the devil himself. Wimsatt, one of the New Critics whose narrowly text-based focus Frye regularly criticized, gave Frye a rough ride: from his perspective Frye was guilty of “violations of logic and order” (84) in his tricksterlike conjuring up of patterns that came from his own imagination rather than inhering in literature, and the whole of his scheme was no more than a visionary phantom. Finally, there was a paper from a less committed position which might transcend the polemic: Geoffrey Hartman’s “Ghostlier Demarcations.” This paper obviously gratified Frye by drawing attention to Frye’s aim to “demystify” literature (a most Blakean desire), and its somewhat ambiguous comparison of the Anatomy’s mapping of the literary universe with Baron Haussmann’s wholesale clearing

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and reordering of Paris. In spite of some philosophical reservations, Hartman found Frye’s criticism “empirically sound: it works; it is teachable; above all it reveals the permanence of Romance” (126). An introductory paper by Krieger summing up the whole volume was not seen beforehand by Frye. Though sympathetic, this piece was in some ways Wimsatt’s view with a positive spin: characterizing Frye as a “Blakean poet-critic” who “claims, in his lunar dialectic, to soar beyond our downward pull” (7), it absolved him from the normal demands of discursive prose and essentially suggested the futility of criticizing him.8 Frye’s response to the three papers he read is measured and courteous, bearing out his lifelong practice of avoiding individual arguments. His discussion of his own criticism returns again to the vexed questions of value judgments, “schematism,” and the notion that the direct experience of literature is pre-critical. He defends the practice of “standing back” from the individual work to see it in outline, viewing in it recurring structural elements that are universal. Therein lies the power of literature: it proposes objective mythical structures to our imagination, making us capable of perceiving and understanding, of resisting conformity, of generating myths of freedom. Thus from a consideration of details he rises to an impassioned statement of his mission. The teaching of literature is seen as part of a social and moral struggle, “the opposition of archetypes to stereotypes,” or the winning for individual and nuanced literary works the response generally given to conventional social mythology (225). This sense of literature as part of the defence against society’s mythological conditioning was to bear fruit in The Modern Century (1967), as well as in the later Critical Path (1971). Frye’s contention that the critic’s task was not to judge literature— which was part of his attempt to “demystify” literature, to break up what Hartman called “the mystique of English studies” (113) associated with Leavis—proved to be a perpetual thorn in his side, constantly needing explanation and defence. As we saw, he had provided such explanation in the MLA’s Aims and Methods of Scholarship in 1963. Some two years after defending his point of view again, against Wimsatt’s criticism at the English Institute (219–20), he was summoned to the MLA’s annual convention to take part in a debate on value judgments with Murray Krieger. One can understand his rather testy beginning, “I have nothing new to say on this question” (258). He does in fact ignore the epistemological subtleties of Krieger’s argument that to perceive a work as literature in the first place is an act of judgment, and restricts himself to the

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commonsense notion of judgment as a pronunciation of merit from on high. The resulting talk is a fine and surely persuasive summary of his reasons for distrusting such judgments: the fact that criticism is a structure of knowledge, whereas value judgments relate to private experience; the importance to the scholar of accepting all data in the field; the fact that value judgments vary with historical circumstances; and the impossibility of establishing valid criteria for greatness. This is not one of the pieces in which Frye makes great claims for the teaching and study of literature. In this context, in which he is defending knowledge over an indefinable “taste,” it suits him to end rather by satirizing the current treatment of literature as a way to experience “the uniqueness of human beings,” “the fulness of humanity,” or other vaguely impressive obfuscations, rather than as “something to be taught and studied like anything else” (265). During this period Frye was understandably in great demand as a speaker. His reputation as a Shakespearean scholar was based largely on work on the comedies,9 and “The Structure and Spirit of Comedy” (no. 7) marks his participation in the seminars given in connection with the 1964 Stratford Shakespearean Festival. Since the Shakespearean plays offered that year were both tragedies, Frye’s outline of the most basic pattern of characters and plots of comedy is drawn largely from the non-Shakespearean comedies and musical productions on view, though he gives frequent examples from Shakespeare. His analysis is based on the four pregeneric mythoi of the Third Essay of the Anatomy. In contrast with the tragic, which dramatizes “the primary contract between man and the state of nature,” and the ironic, which acts out “the secondary contract between the individual and his society” (163), the comic and the romantic show human beings liberated from these contracts. While romance tends to depict human beings in unity with nature, comedy tends towards emancipating them from the more oppressive forms of the social contract. The piece ends with Frye’s characteristic appreciation of the profound and liberating nature of the illusion presented by comedy. “Old and New Comedy” (no. 21) shows his taking part in a similar series of lectures on Shakespeare in the English Stratford-on-Avon in 1968. Frye begins by admitting that Old and New Comedy are two welldefined, historically determined conventional forms of Greek theatre “that can never recur” (285); yet he proceeds to trace their subsequent evolution into two much wider types of comedy. It is New Comedy that gives rise to the typical comic structure discussed in no. 7 and used by

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Shakespeare and Molière. The structure of Old Comedy, on the other hand, is dialectical rather than teleological; based on an agon or conflict, it is more argumentative and conceptual than New Comedy and can accommodate seemingly extraneous or plotless elements such as monologue; its characters are vehicles of the contest rather than functions of the plot. Frye shows the ramifications of these patterns in related genres such as vaudeville dialogue, the sentimental novel, and Rabelaisian satire in a wide-ranging survey that must have left his audience breathless. Comedy and romance are the genres with which Frye is most commonly associated (he famously called himself an Odyssey critic on the first page of A Natural Perspective). It is not always recognized that he also had a particular interest in satire, part of his attraction to anatomies and other exuberant forms of prose fiction.10 This interest did not result in a large volume of published work on satire, but he was on the board of a short-lived journal on the subject, and as such produced a brief statement (no. 8) on the question of whether reference to a moral norm is essential to satire. His argument is that the norm is implicit, being the standard against which the thing satirized appears grotesque, but that it need not have a spokesman or representation in the text: “it is the reader who is responsible for ‘putting in’ the moral norm, not the satirist” (170). Since the question had arisen in connection with Arnold Kettle’s having maintained that Jonathan Wild was a failure because it had no strong character to embody the morally good position, Frye typically spends one paragraph of his two in attacking the critical fallacy of saying that any accepted work is a “failure” for any reason. By his very presence and his delivery of the opening remarks to the conference on editorial problems held at the University of Toronto (no. 16), Frye showed his willingness to welcome editors as “a central part of the conception of a community of scholars” (256). Apart from this opening courtesy, however, the remarks are remarkable for what they do not say. The scholars might well have expected to be greeted with a gratifying acknowledgment of how editors are an essential if underappreciated part of the literary endeavour, helping new authors to achieve clarity, or, in this eighteenth-century context, restoring corrupt texts and bringing hitherto lost works to light. No such compliments emerge. Essentially, the editors are told to stand back, and are treated to a diatribe against the “editorial zeal for improvement and consistency” which leads them egotistically to emend and correct authors and—in an obvious allusion to Frye’s bête noire, The Chicago Manual of Style—“put commas wherever

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they were most likely to spoil the rhythm and blur the sense” (257).11 In a backhanded gesture towards fairness, Frye says that bad editors are just the same as bad critics who make value judgments. Like the ideal critic, the ideal editor should strive for transparency, so as to offer to the reader’s understanding, not a recreated object but an object for the reader to recreate. The ideas on criticism that Frye expressed in such public appearances and lectures, far-reaching as they are, are nevertheless only the polished outcroppings of a vast imaginative structure he was elaborating in his mind and notebooks during this period. It had always been part of his ambition to study the whole range of human culture; at the age of twentyfour he announced that he proposed to spend the rest of his life “on various problems connected with religion and art” which “constitute, in fact, the only reality of existence” (NFHK, 425–6). Having moved from a study of an individual author in Fearful Symmetry to a survey of all literature in Anatomy of Criticism, his sense of context demanded now a “Third Book” to investigate the verbal universe of which that literature formed a part. Throughout the period covered by the present collection he speculated on this Third Book in notebooks that have now appeared as volume 9 of the Collected Works. Its editor Michael Dolzani has described in detail the mandala diagram by which Frye envisaged the order of words as a whole: a circle with four quadrants formed by two intersecting axes (TBN, xxxii–xxxvi). The Third Book—a “kind of critical Divine Comedy” provisionally entitled The Critical Path (TBN, 123)—was never written, and the present Critical Path is a small spinoff more narrowly focused on the critic and society. But the knowledge of its presence in the background does provide a guide through some of Frye’s contemporary essays and illuminate the direction in which he was moving. The essence of the envisaged Third Book was the conception of myth as the origin of all human verbal constructs; the work was to study its various displacements and embodiments. As we have seen, Frye had already established a reputation as an authority on the relations between literature and myth: the Anatomy was generally viewed as the definitive outline of “myth criticism.” But at the end of no. 15—encouraged, perhaps, by the interdisciplinary nature of the booklet he was writing for— Frye widened his purview to that larger area of which literature is a part: the “total mythopoeic structure of concern” (254), no less than the entire domain of the humanities and in many ways the social sciences, the totality of humankind’s visions of itself through the ages as it dreams of

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ever-renewed metamorphoses. This key notion of concern had first been used in the speech “Speculation and Concern” of 1965 (WE, 242–60), which sought the essential distinction between the sciences and humanities. Thereafter Frye frequently referred to such subjects as literature, religion, political science, and philosophy as the mythical, concerned, or existential subjects,12 as opposed to the more objective sciences. The speech “Literature and Society” (no. 18) gives a brief story of the evolution of this widening cultural perspective. Gradually, Frye realized that literature does not convey information or truth straightforwardly, that it communicates in a variety of indirect, associative, ambiguous, and metaphorical ways. This led him to accept the existence of a mythical, as opposed to a logical habit of mind, of situations where truth of correspondence must give way to “a kind of truth of revelation” (270). His course on the Bible was based on the premise that the Bible, too, required to be read with a “mythical” rather than a logical attitude; that is, to be read as a representation of human destiny rather than of its exact history. Once again, Frye characterizes myth as the language of concern, here described as “man’s view of himself and his destiny . . . his concern about where he came from and where he is going to . . . all his hopes and his ideals, his anxieties and his panics” (274). Thus moving myth to the centre of the human endeavour to build society, he points out that the thinkers who change civilization (such as Freud, Marx, or Rousseau) are the ones who reformulate mythology. All who are acquainted with The Critical Path will hear a startling resonance in the (evidently autobiographical) concluding sentence: “The critic, whose role in the last two decades has expanded from studying literature to studying the mythologies of society, has to join with all other men of good will, and keep to the difficult and narrow way between indifference and hysteria” (279). Several items in this collection bear witness to Frye’s immersion in the study of myth and its ramifications. It might be said that the publication in 1964 of the English translation of Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire with a preface by Frye (no. 4) constitutes in itself a significant event in the history of critical theory internationally. Bachelard died in 1962, and it was apparently Frye who persuaded the Beacon Press to publish his work in English.13 In France, Bachelard, although his background and his earlier writings were on the philosophy of science, became known in the literary area as the father of Nouvelle Critique. This dual role was by no means as paradoxical as might first appear. As an historian and philosopher of science he deconstructed the dominance of

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rationality by showing the irrationality of reason in the writings of even the most rigorous scientists and philosophers, who were often epistemologically vulnerable owing to emotional factors. This journey into the recesses of the psyche made him acknowledge that poetic imagery also originates in the psyche, and that poets and scientists share certain basic primal patterns. Thus the scientist, conscious of the psychological sources of his views, must be self-critical in regard to his own rationality, and the critic, in explicating poetry, can claim and practice a certain measure of science. In approaching Bachelard, Frye finds a kindred spirit in that the “complexes” observed by Bachelard may well correspond to Frye’s archetypes. These are detected by the imagination on the basis of analogy (with experience) and identity (among series of images). The Psychoanalysis of Fire focuses on myths and poetic representations of fire, and on poetic visions whose common denominator is fire, one of the four elements traditionally seen as composing the inorganic world. By his fourfold classification of poetic images and the myths they animate Bachelard creates a typology which inspires Frye to credit him with an “expanding insight into literature” (142). Joseph Campbell was another of the modern investigators of myth who—like Bachelard, Jung, and Eliade—in some way influenced Frye.14 In a late notebook Frye remarks that Campbell’s well-known The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) is “a book I’m now finally reading for the first time” (LN, 444), but if so he must have engaged in a certain academic fakery, as he comments in The Educated Imagination on Campbell’s myth of the hero (EICT, 455); the book also appears in a note to the Anatomy (361/399n. 87).15 “After the Invocation, a Lapse into Litany” (no. 5) is a review of Occidental Mythology, the third volume of Campbell’s The Masks of God, but it quickly by-passes the relative simplicity of the book review genre. Frye’s puzzling title refers ironically to the fact that Campbell had, at the outset, a chance to describe a universal system of religious mythologies; Frye presents the “invocation”or introductory survey as doing just that, by contrasting the Western religions based on a personal and creating deity with Eastern ones based on an unconditioned experience of the cycles of nature. But the construction of such a vast scenario is aborted by the author’s decision to treat the various religions historically, that is, narratively and diachronically: this constitutes the lapse into “litany,” or humdrum formulaic units. Thus Campbell settles in to describe the genesis and evolution of single myths, rather than

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the ultimately interconnected mythological structure of religions, Eastern and Western. In 1968, Frye had occasion to produce a piece of “applied Bachelard” when he contributed “The Myth of Light” (no. 20) to an issue of the visual arts magazine artscanada devoted to light. Frye’s aim is to show the quintessential importance of light from prehistoric to modern times and across all fields of human endeavour. Characteristically he treats light as a myth; “symbol” might be the more appropriate term, since there are few extended stories about light here, but Frye is concerned to show, through light, how myth is used to shape our perception of the world. He treats light as a symbol with a certain core meaning (roughly, the ideal of clarity or truth) and a range of variable implications; as he commented later, “myths and archetypes have no unchangeable substance: they are infinitely flexible and adaptable.”16 He rapidly traces the phases of the understanding of light in human history, moving through the religious, the psychological, and the scientific eras; again characteristically, he includes the formulations of modern physics in order to show that the scientific world view is also based on a mythical framework. In his Third Book speculations, Frye organized the mainly nonliterary displacements of myth along the two axes of his circular diagram: a horizontal “axis of speculation” or political and historical thought, and a vertical “axis of concern” or religious and philosophical conceptions. One of the chief Third Book topics was to be “contracts and Utopias,” which Frye considered to lie at the Western and Eastern ends respectively of the axis of speculation—the Western end being associated with the fall, necessity, and law, the Eastern with sunrise, freedom, and social optimism. “Varieties of Literary Utopias” (no. 11) could be considered a preliminary study. The axis of speculation is not named, but nevertheless contract and Utopia are presented as two contrasting conceptions involving the nature, possession, and uses of power which need to be expressed mythically. The social contract looks to origins, whereas the Utopia is oriented towards a future telos; the contract has some pretensions to historicity, while the Utopia is purely imaginative and hypothetical, being dedicated to “visualizing possibilities” (197). Later the two are polarized again in terms of their affinity for tragedy or comedy (204). Besides “straight” Utopias and Utopian satires, a number of constructions mentioned by Frye are in some ways only shaped by Utopian thought without completely fulfilling the definition of Utopia as genre: the pastoral, topsy-turvy worlds such as the Land of Cockayne, the

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worlds created by science fiction on the basis of a catastrophic event or invention, returns to the simplicity of nature and to a state of innocence or peacefulness favourable to the fulfilment of the individual, and the many forms of protest against the invasiveness of modern civilization. Thus what lies at the heart of this inquiry is not the desire to define and classify Utopias, but the portrayal of the Utopian imagination whereby certain literary works communicate a constructive vision inspiring us to modify the present existentially. So close is this to the goal of education itself as Frye conceives it17 that he is led to suggest that the Utopia is really a projection into the future of a systematic view of education (203). An invitation to address the Ontario branch of the Canadian Bar Association in 1970 provided an opportunity for Frye to discuss some considerations relating to the Western or “contract” end of the axis of speculation, though of course the bedrock from which the piece is hewn is not obtruded on the audience. “Literature and the Law” (no. 23) is a tour de force, notable not only for its urbane style and witticisms (Frazer is “one of the most impressive examples of how much can be contributed to culture and learning by someone who is called to the bar and who does not respond” (301), but also for the immense vistas it opens. Beginning with a survey of legal themes in nineteenth-century British novels, Frye links these to the class structure, current social attitudes, and even the national character in a display of historical awareness he is often said to lack. The paper moves on to larger questions of the nature of law and its limitations, with some topical allusions to current attempts to stifle social protest in connection with the war in Vietnam (304, 308). Frye points out that gradually a more critical attitude towards what is and what is not legal, including what should and should not be censored, has arisen, and that literature has been a social pioneer in challenging laws that embodied mere class prejudice or taste. (He himself feels that hate literature and vocabulary are far more offensive than pornography.) He contrasts the police state with the society that has an open and visible legal system, in connection with which the word “contract” appears (307), derived from the Bible’s contract between God and fallen man. Literature emancipates, both in showing the horror of situations where law is perverted, as in Kafka’s The Trial, and in helping to form the social imagination of the free man who internalizes and in a sense rises above the law. Art, according to Dolzani, is located at the point of intersection of the two axes in Frye’s mandala diagram, as it unites subjective and objective perception at a point of epiphany (TBN, xxxvi). Dolzani considers

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no. 14, “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts,” to be related to this line of thought, which includes the importance of arts education. The paper turns on the commonality between arts. Thus in the visual arts, with the rise of democracy, artistic creation and utilitarian production have been brought much closer by a common factor: design. When realistic and representational art loses impetus, abstract art comes in experimenting with form—but that is also true of “folk art.” As the study of the arts becomes internationalized due to unprecedented resources in the media, museums, and galleries, both artists and art educators can make innovative comparisons on the basis of design. In literature, pure abstraction is impossible owing to the referential nature of words, and differences between languages slow down the internationalizing tendency. Nevertheless there are structural principles analogous to design in the repeated motifs of myth and metaphor. Frye suggests that these could provide a more fruitful basis for the study of Comparative Literature than the “myopic” one (presumably based on traditional literary history viewed internationally) at present used.18 In “Charms and Riddles” (no. 27) Frye embarks upon an investigation which he intentionally introduces as a genre study, noting how fragile the concept of genre remains. He refers to a “botanical analogy,” but he does not call on botany as a classificatory field of knowledge to show how, similarly, genre distinctions help us to classify literary works. Rather, he uses the analogy to show how certain basic narrative forms (the trees and branches) bear leaves and flowers and fruit (corresponding to conventions), and how innovation occurs in the manner of seeds and kernels developing, charm and riddle being such kernels. This talk too could be considered in the light of the Third Book speculations, which among other things sought to study the growth of nonliterary forms from prose kernels. Here Frye surveys not just the folklore originals and the literary imitation of charm and riddle but their ramifications: propaganda and advertising can also exploit the techniques of charms, but so can religious practices, even of the highest order (e.g., vows or invocations). In one Third Book notebook, charm and riddle are names for the opposing poles of the axis of speculation (TBN, 43). In this piece the two are contrasted in various ways, charm being associated with sound and music and riddle with sight and shapes, charm with magic and riddle with the escape from magic, and so on. The transition from charm to riddle, Frye says, has analogies with the way the emotional involvement

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with oracle “may suddenly reverse itself and become intellectual detachment” or laughter (381)—a covert allusion to a mysterious “oracle to wit” epiphany he once experienced.19 As he wrote in a notebook, “The function of the work of art is to epiphanize the centre . . . . One primitive appeal is the charm or riddle that catches the epiphany in a trap” (TBN, 18). In this case the sense of revelation occurs when the writer of charm or riddle renounces power over the world of things to recreate a verbal world close to the world of things, yet free of it, and liberating. What we have been saying suggests that Frye’s critical path was leading him naturally to the study of the displacements of myth—and thus eventually to the Bible as the main source of that myth for Western culture. But there were pressures in the late 1960s that also drew him from literary criticism proper to the role of the verbal disciplines in society. At the end of Fearful Symmetry and in the Anatomy and its elaborations, Frye had been incidentally emphasizing the role of the literary critic—in practice, the university English professor—as the guide to a grammar of literary symbolism that could be objectively taught regardless of its spiritual significance. But during the West’s Cultural Revolution, the student protest movement, it was precisely this detached attention to literary shapes and structures that came under attack. Calls were made for the university to be on the cutting edge of social progress: instead of training conformists to run the Establishment, it should concentrate instead on raising consciousness, and thus naturally oppose the war in Vietnam, the consumer society, and the military-industrial complex and all its works. In this new dispensation, the “mythological” subjects or humanities were to be “concerned” to the point of being morally committed. To Frye, however, this was a total misunderstanding of the “social context of literary criticism”; his reaction was to explore more deeply the value to society itself of impartial and disinterested scholarship, which he did in a series of talks and articles culminating in The Critical Path. The tone of the preface is playfully self-deprecating: The Critical Path is a “farce” both because the initial text is stuffed with new elements (in French “farcir” means to stuff) and because it is a farcically over-developed form of a number of lectures. Unfortunately we lack the text of two of them, those at Berkeley “which outlined the concern-and-freedom thesis” (5). This central thesis of The Critical Path, as we shall see, posits a necessary and constant tension between freedom and concern; in educational terms, Frye makes a distinction between the concerned subject matter of the humanities and the freedom of the critic studying it, who is

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“not himself concerned but detached” and whose “criteria are those of the myth of freedom, depending on evidence and verification” (67). “The universities are the social centres of the myth of freedom, and are, by necessity, devoted to the virtues of the truth of correspondence, including objectivity and detachment” (95); their goal is to examine the myth of concern by the standards of the myth of freedom (75, 92). Whereas Frye in no. 11 had seen Utopias as essentially liberating hypothetical models, he now associates the influx of radical and Utopian schemes of reform with a new kind of commitment, a desire to establish an improved social contract and at the same time “to transform the university, in particular, into a society of concern, like a church or political party” (95). The classical Utopias, however, shadow forth an “educational contract,” centred in the university, that eschews this kind of committed action. In this sense The Critical Path may be viewed, as it was by more than one reviewer, as a counter-statement to the student revolution.20 But as Frye astutely noted in a contemporary notebook, “The Children’s Crusade is obviously running out of gas, & too much of it in CP would date it” (RT, 116). The essay survives splendidly the passing of its occasion, and could be considered a classical modern statement of the liberal humanist position that it examines historically.21 The titles of many of Frye’s books succeed in conveying briefly and brilliantly the core of the thoughts he will develop; this is particularly the case of The Critical Path. The fact that the text only gradually became an independent book does not detract from its specific identity as a program of theoretical orientation devised by Frye for himself at first. He indicates the mixed origin of the “critical path” metaphor: on the one hand it comes from an expression used by the management of the 1967 Expo in Montreal to emphasize the need for guiding their complex plan to completion efficiently; and on the other hand it was used by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason when, dismissing both scepticism and dogmatism, he sees the “critical path” as the only open one. It is our view that the metaphor indeed continued to guide Frye on his journey through complex territories offering many choices and therefore risks of straying from his main purpose. At the outset, Frye sought to formulate a theory of literary criticism; but this depends upon a theory of literature itself. Thus Frye affirms, first of all, the specificity of literature, a “unity in itself” (15) to which all works of literature belong, so that the role of criticism is to elaborate upon the relationship between single works and the universal body. This is the point at which the critical path begins; how-

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ever, the reader soon discovers that it is a challenging and complicated path leading to a number of crossroads, since literature, the object of the inquiry, is of a paradoxical nature. Limiting our study to the literary system would certainly be faithful to the concept of literature as self-subsistent unity which Frye affirms. On the other hand it would leave unexplored the obvious and universal interaction between literature and society, which he also affirms. The path “comes together” when it is realized that criticism is itself a social function because literature is rooted in civilization and the knowledge and experience of it cannot be severed from these roots. Criticism must therefore take into account this implicit duality. Detours continue to appear along the path. One of these is that of the epistemological and methodological identification between criticism and a range of human sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology. Criticism must find its own way of accounting for the creations of literature, and that principle also leads to the rejection of biographical, philological, and historical circumstances as their causes. Even an author’s intention fails to establish the case for such causation. Frye’s watchfulness over the specific development of literature among human phenomena, along with the consequent need for literary criticism to base its findings upon literature alone, is congruent with a number of theoretical stances already current in the 1960s and early 1970s. In his paper entitled “The Fall of Literary History,” read at the sixth congress of the International Comparative Literature Association,22 René Wellek argued that a number of denials of the specificity of literary history can be shown to arise at least in part from a common misconception regarding the concept of cause: alone, literary phenomena relating to other literary phenomena can give rise to a history of literature. This view was common to Czech structuralism, Russian formalism, New Criticism, Nouvelle critique, and the American-based reaction in Comparative Literature studies against what was perceived as the “continental” practice of literary history exemplified by the ghost of “Lansonisme” in France, with its theoretically flawed notion of “fact.” Should the path venture into comparative aesthetics? In this text Frye makes short shrift of this question on the basis of what he perceives as a lack of interest for the subject among “technically competent” (7) literary critics. Yet “interarts” studies were being actively pursued, among other venues, in the “Literature and other Arts” discussion groups of the MLA. Frye does not deny that there exist imaginative universes other than the

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“verbal imaginative universe” the critical path is to explore. His inquiry will, however, be limited to the latter. Once the critic treads this territory of his very own the central question arises: how to derive “poetic meaning” from “poetic language”? Here, Frye diverges from New Criticism, which he sees as limiting itself to the “linear” reading of single works instead of proceeding from the structure of imagery of an individual poet’s works to its concordance with genres, conventions, and archetypes which are universal. Frye does not seem to take into account that in their detailed readings New Critics often pursued, implicitly or explicitly, the goal he describes, thus avoiding the “centripetal fallacy.” The critic’s territory has now been delimited but a new crossroads appears. Throughout the ages and across borders and continents, literature has been anything but static, and its function within culture and society constantly undergoes fundamental changes. At this point, the critical path encounters the dichotomy of mythos and logos, their partings and coincidings, and their intimate connection with the development of “myths of concern.” Often, the poet has been the keeper of the myth of concern couched in “the language of belief” (23). In describing the myth of concern, and the “myth of freedom” which it often generates and at other times limits, Frye has brought the path to a territory which could perhaps best be identified as psychohistory (“histoire des mentalités”), so vast is the range of phenomena and time spans it encompasses. The myth of freedom arises when the writer challenges the myth of concern rather than reinforcing it. A major instance occurs when aspirations to “truth of correspondence” (28) challenge loyalties to belief. This, of course, is no less than the rise of scientific discourse as it detaches itself from mythological and/or theological discourse in describing phenomena of nature, as for example in the case of the Copernican revolution. Myths of concern can be world religions—most often Frye brings in the Judaeo-Christian world view with its Biblical foundations—or they can be other vast doctrinal constructs such as Marxism with its at times iron grip upon machinery of state and economy. Such “myths” generate conservative loyalties or movements of opposition and dissent. This is where Frye sees a major function for criticism in service to a liberalizing spirit. The poet sometimes indicts, sometimes denounces the reigning tyranny, and the critic has been known to call the poet to order in service to concern, or to sustain him in his clamour for redress. While it is true that innumerable writers at innumerable times—

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prominently, resisters against Nazism before and during the Second World War—have embodied this aspect of the myth of freedom, it can hardly be said that protest is the primary function of poets and critics; and Frye (if that were his message here) might be faulted for portraying the dialectic of freedom and concern in a way that betrays the very criticality of the path. But at its core the message primarily emphasizes the evocative power of the written word, which enables the reader’s mind to judge its discursive content. Today we witness the dramatic opposition between Islamic fundamentalism and less dogmatic, more liberal and peaceful interpretations of the Koran; Frye would undoubtedly encourage scholars to further read the Koran as literature, and reflect upon its structural linkages with world literature and thought. From ancient times, but particularly from the Renaissance on, critics have been social complements to poets, maintaining the equilibrium between concern and freedom. The critical path relentlessly returns to the function of literature in a postmodern society where mythos is completely divorced from logos and literary discourse from informative discourse of any discipline. In this world, the function of literature, according to Frye, constantly renews itself as the poet’s universe of verbal imagination, connotation, and figuration brings the individual reader into contact with culture at large. In Frye’s own words, we thus return to “where our critical path began, in the contrast between an existing world and . . . an unborn world” (115) of imagination, an analogical world which offers respite but soon demands that we return, with expanded horizons, to the existing world. To make this possible is the vocation of criticism. The Critical Path thus delivers an openly idealistic message oriented towards the cultivation of human happiness and social harmony. In this regard it has been said that Frye is the last of the Modernists. That would apply primarily with respect to his thought of the ’60s, of which The Critical Path is a major expression, rather than to his subsequent work. It could also be said that the panoramas of the critical path seldom if ever feature Canadian realities, except, perhaps, unconsciously, when Frye reacts to “the American way of life” as the myth of concern which challenges us to be ourselves. Frye was pleased with The Critical Path; in one of his notebooks he writes that the book “turned out to be one of the most articulate & central pieces of writing I’ve ever done,”23 while in another he remarks on “the lucidity, almost the luminousness, of my Critical Path essay” (RT, 113). Its

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main “concern and freedom” thesis is, indeed, clearly articulated and illuminating. But there remain a few puzzles for the careful reader. One of these has to do with the nature of the myth of freedom. Concern can readily be envisaged as embodied in a myth, but where is the mythos or story for freedom, which often appears rather as a scientific or critical habit of mind, or the writings that exemplify this attitude, stressing nonmythical elements (29)? This is perhaps a question of terminology and not too serious a stumbling block;24 more challenging for the reader is to follow the somersaults of the interchange between concern and freedom. Poets are the original spokesmen for concern, yet they become part of the myth of freedom in Renaissance humanism—not because they upheld the scientific attitude, but because they studied Classical authors, who favoured liberty. Yet these same Renaissance poets provide a rhetorical analogue to concerned truth according to Sidney. And the Classical poets embody the true myth of concern for Matthew Arnold because they inform culture, which is a more inclusive basis for society than the Christian myth. Arnold’s culture becomes, however, one version of the educational contract at the centre of the myth of freedom (112). Poets, as children of concern, can never be the focus of a myth of freedom (61), but they appear to be so when they protest against a tyrannical “scientism” which is a myth of concern formed from the perversion of the myth of freedom. These may perhaps be difficulties attendant upon making generalizations about any historical situation. But Frye himself came to a welcome clarification when, in the years after The Critical Path, he worked out a distinction between primary and secondary concern. Primary concern— the basic needs of survival, food, and so on—became the sum of what poets express through archetypal myth and metaphor, while secondary concern is ideology, whether social and religious mythology or the “message” that individual poets think they are conveying. The spiritual dimension of primary concern then takes on some of the aspects of the myth of freedom—not in the sense of scientific questioning, but in enabling the imaginative freedom that the end of The Critical Path calls the “concern beyond concern,” the grammar or language of all concern. The remaining essays to be discussed, written like no. 27 after the completion of The Critical Path, fall into a Frye-like pattern of pairs. The first pair, nos. 25 and 26, are focused on space and time respectively, while nos. 24 and 28 are autobiographical reflections on Frye’s scholarly career. The title of no. 25, “The Times of the Signs,” is designed to capture the

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reader’s attention by reversing the well-known expression “the signs of the times,” and thus asserting that a crucially significant epoch will be discussed in terms of learning better to read the signs that the universe allows mankind to intercept. That epoch is of course that of the Copernican revolution. The piece, basically a study of scientific and literary cosmology, continues Frye’s meditations on concern and freedom, myth and science. Nowhere is Frye disputing the autonomy of science. He is establishing and asserting the enduring and complementary presence of imaginative thinking in all its forms, which he gathers under the name of mythology; and he proceeds to deal with the many confusions which have arisen between the two visions. Only gradually did science emancipate itself from social anxiety. But establishing the physical universe as an absolutely separate object of knowledge and research, while yielding incalculable benefits for mankind’s life in it, does not alleviate, and even intensifies, the need to perceive that universe as a human home. And that is the function of the mythopoeic imagination in all its many forms, whether religious or aesthetic. The interrelated myths of concern and freedom are functions of the human spirit in its struggle to resist submitting to a technological model. Science can and must develop autonomously, but turning the scientific mind upon humankind itself, which is what occurs in the social sciences, will not quench humanity’s unending thirst for new imaginary worlds, those of the arts, with their power to transform reality. “The Rhythms of Time” (no. 26), an address to a thematic conference on time in Romanticism, provides Frye with another opportunity to situate himself in relation to the fundamental paradox of the critical path. The study of a theme such as time in a purely “thematological” way, as it was conceived, for example, by Jean-Pierre Richard and Raymond Trousson, would go a long way towards embodying Frye’s drive towards the search for literariness as the supreme criterion; yet he could not avoid the central reality of time in human life: that of the individual person, that of society, that of the church, that of the universe. The result is an astonishingly philosophical excursion into the poetry of time as it sometimes succeeds in eliciting from language the image or symbol that will awaken the poet’s and through him or her the reader’s imagination to the omnipresence and omnipotence of time. Traditional visions of the rhythms of the cosmos once provided a way of transcending the time of ordinary experience; the time consciousness of the Romantics, a consequence of the new cosmology discussed in no. 25, “tends to be immanent

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rather than transcendent” (365). While extolling the redemption of time through Romantic mythopoeia, Frye ends with the paradox that we gain a sense of real historical awareness from the realistic novelists who have resisted the pull of Romanticism. “The Search for Acceptable Words” (no. 24) arose out of an invitation to participate in a conference on institutional support for research in the humanities; Frye declined, perhaps because his type of scholarship is not what is normally known as “research.” (One is reminded of his remark that “There are critics who can find things in the Public Records Office, and there are critics who, like myself, could not find the Public Records Office.”)25 But he did submit a written paper, which defines, in a very personal way, the vocation of the humanities in the present world. This was his way of responding to the concern which was current among Canadian institutions—and still is—of describing the work of the humanist and even to some extent of the social scientist in a way that would creatively compare with that of their colleagues in the exact sciences. In spite of his belief in the possibility of a science of criticism, he rejects the “pseudoscientific analogy” (313) as seen, for instance, in the “philological” model with its overemphasis on Quellenforschung regarding individual works, and on old rather than recent literature. Rather he stresses the importance of personal influence in the humanities. Drawing attention to the mythological universe which lies behind all verbal disciplines, he suggests that interdisciplinary scholarship may be the way forward in the humanities. His contribution to the topic of the university’s support for research focuses mainly on the importance of stocking the library, for which he advocates a nonjudgmental inclusion of popular literature and noncanonical works. “Expanding Eyes” (no. 28) was written as a response to Angus Fletcher’s discussion of Frye’s criticism in Critical Inquiry. Though Frye declines at the opening to discuss Fletcher’s particular points, and indeed barely alludes to him in his essay, it seems probable that he was responding chiefly to Fletcher’s observation that Frye followed the accepted literary canon with its acknowledged masterpieces,26 and that he lacked a developed phenomenology of reading. While upholding his original condemnation of value judgments, Frye now feels free to acknowledge the importance of personal enthusiasms and influences; his point is that the verbal universe, with its central classics, resonates with and enriches whatever writer interests us as individuals. What young scholars really need, and many have experienced as Frye himself did

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with Blake, is to immerse themselves in the imaginative world of some major writer, a personal experience with an impersonal core. In the third part of the essay Frye emphasizes some of the positive, creative, and participatory virtues of the arts. They are “possible techniques of meditation, in the strictest sense of the word, ways of cultivating, focusing, and ordering one’s mental processes, on a basis of symbol rather than concept” (406). In fact they can be mandalas; Frye even invokes the four gods Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus, the presiding deities of the four quadrants of his Third Book diagram, arranged here not in a circle but in a line of ascent and descent which prefigures the axis mundi of creative insight in Words with Power. Literature has the potential to draw the critic and the reader into a personal response, into renewed and renewing participation in the experience of mankind; the philosopher of culture is himself/herself involved as witness to this redeeming power. The title of the piece, “Expanding Eyes,” refers to Blake’s vision of the ability of mankind to “behold the depths of wondrous worlds” once the poetic unconscious is given free rein. Such an image is an excellent one with which to associate Frye as he continues into the final stage of his ever-widening critical path. Jean O’Grady Eva Kushner

Conference on the humanities at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy, September 1969. At this conference Frye presented his essay “The Critical Path,” published in Daedalus, Spring 1970. Standing, left to right: M.H. Abrams, Paul De Man, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Eugene D. Genovese, Northrop Frye, E.D. Hirsch, Clifford Geertz, Richard Hoggart, Asa Briggs, Walter J. Ong, J. Hillis Miller, and Nils Enkvist. Seated, left to right: Frank Manuel, Eric Weil, Stephen Graubard, Roy Harvey Pearce, Morton W. Bloomfield, Talcott Parsons, Geno A. Ballotti, and Henry Nash Smith.

The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1963–1975

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1 The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism 1971

The text which follows is entitled The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). The book appeared in both hard and soft cover in North America, and in paperback in the United Kingdom (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983); it has been translated into Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Chinese. It is the result of several rewritings, some of which, in typescript form, are conserved in NFF, 1988, box 23, files 1–3. After receiving his copy, Frye wrote to the publishers pointing out two typographical errors (see NFF, 1988, box 62, file 8), but these were not corrected in the paperback reprints. The main version prior to that published in book form in 1971 bears the same title and appeared in Daedalus, 99 (Spring 1970): 268–342, reprinted in In Search of Literary Theory, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972), 91–193. It is not included in the Collected Works, as large parts of the book are repetitions of the earlier essay. We have chosen to outline some of the significant differences between the two texts because, despite the short interval between their dates of publication, they are indicators of evolving thoughts and shifts of emphasis. Frye’s own view about the process of revision is that the final text proceeds more historically. For the purposes of this brief commentary we shall call the 1970 text T1 and the 1971 book T2, the page references for which are to the present volume. Occasionally, sequences of paragraphs or even sentences are inverted or displaced in the respective texts, and thus become parts of different trends of thought. For example, in T1, after discussing ut pictura poesis as suggested by Sidney, Frye summarizes “the critical situation which Sidney is implicitly accepting” (T1, 288) by pointing to the contrast between discursive prose writers “who really mean what they say,” and poets who communicate experience indirectly, emotionally, “through various devices of rhetorical embellishment”; he

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ends by pointing out that if the critic’s role is evaluative, he has to comment on the poet’s success in communicating content. This shows T1 preoccupied with the role of the critic, and, so to speak, the professional aspect of the critical path, an emphasis more typical of T1 at this particular juncture. On the other hand, the new text goes on directly to “when we look at Shakespeare” (T2, 46), thus pursuing an ongoing analysis of the continuity of the role of the poet which in Shakespeare’s time still occurs in a partly oral culture; and this analysis is part of a much longer treatment of the role of Renaissance humanism in changing the direction of the critical path as it gradually veers away from identifying with religious concern, ventures into and out of freedom, and becomes conscious of both its distance from, and its in-depth relationship with, philosophy and science. Insertions into the original text providing illustrations or further comments upon it are frequent. A whole paragraph is added (T2, 9–10) to emphasize how absurd it is to expect that “every real poet must be a certain kind of person.” Another example among many: after both texts have shown how Shakespeare appears to espouse the prejudices of his contemporaries, if only with respect to Joan of Arc or to the Jews, and yet enables the spectator to transcend these, T2 comments on the way in which implicit poetic meaning surpasses and outlasts literal meaning and makes possible“varieties of interpretation and emphasis, both in commentary and, with a play, in performance” (47). At times, insertions reflect a current preoccupation or experience of Frye’s in his own environment. This may occur when Frye remarks that he finds in Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy traces of an earlier “Thomist determinism,” an example of which is the “curiously exaggerated distinction [McLuhan] draws between the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages and the book culture of the printed page that followed it” (T2, 13). Brief addenda also serve to sharpen a thought which has been building up, and can lead to a more definitive summary. After both T1 and T2 have remained parallel in showing that the critic should “see literature as a coherent structure” (T2, 15) which shapes its own history and can be studied “through its larger structural principles” such as conventions, genres, and archetypes, T2 adds: “These structural principles are largely ignored by most social critics. Their treatment of literature, in consequence, is usually superficial, a matter of picking things out of literary works that seem interesting for nonliterary reasons” (15). Clearly Frye takes a polemical stand, distancing himself with alacrity from “most social critics”—one can almost follow his finger impatiently pointing to contemporary French “sociocritique”—and thereby confirms his own theory of a historical criticism fulfilling its social vocation by unrelentingly focusing on literary phenomena. While the building blocks which make up T2, the definitive text, are far from

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being interchangeable in their substance, they can be spatially displaced for the sake of the overall argumentation. This kind of interchange clearly occurs between part 3 of T1 and part 4 of T2. At the end of the former, the evolving role of the poet between oral and writing cultures is discussed at length in terms of the paradoxes illustrated by Peacock in The Four Ages of Poetry. These lengthy passages are reused by T2, no longer solely in the context of defences of poetry by Sidney and Shelley in their respective periods, but in that of a far more universalizing depiction of “the primitive and mythical” nature of poetry everywhere and always, challenging “concern” without becoming “the focus of a myth of freedom” (63, 61). Both “micro-changes” and “macro-changes” between T1 and T2 provide the reader with insights into the architectonic workings of Frye’s mind.

Preface This book is a farce, in the etymological sense: a fifty-minute lecture stuffed with its own implications until it swelled into the present monograph. In the spring of 1968, while visiting the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, I gave a public lecture, which in turn engendered another lecture, “Mythos and Logos,” given at the School of Letters in Indiana University that summer.1 These lectures form the basis of the present third and fourth sections, on the defence of poetry in Sidney and in Shelley. In the spring of 1969 I was visiting professor at Berkeley, under the sponsorship of the Mrs. William Beckman Foundation, and gave there two lectures which outlined the concern-and-freedom thesis. Meanwhile “student unrest” had been growing, and I was required to make several statements about it, of which the most relevant, to use that word, were addresses at Queen’s University and at a conference at Quail Roost, Duke University, in the fall of 1968. These were published by, respectively, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Tavistock Press, in books entitled The Ethics of Change and Higher Education: Demand and Response (both 1969),2 and parts of their arguments reappear here. At that stage a long essay took shape, under its present title, which was contributed to a conference on the role of theory in humanistic studies held at Bellagio, Italy, in September 1969, and published in the spring issue of Daedalus in 1970. During this period I had been made an advisory member of the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, which had compelled me to think a certain amount about the relation of literary criticism to communication theory—somewhat unwillingly, as I had as-

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sumed that my colleague Professor Marshall McLuhan was taking care of that subject. Consistently with the main theme of this essay, the references to McLuhan in it are less about him than about the social stereotypes of McLuhanism. After the essay had appeared in Daedalus, and after I had given a number of lectures in places as far apart as Southern California and Pakistan, I revised and expanded it to about twice its size, adopting, after some inner resistance, a more historical method of exposition, of a type I often find facile, but which seemed to be right for this argument. I then began what I assumed would be a brief and perfunctory revision, and found myself completely rewriting the book again. This last operation took place at Oxford, and I am deeply grateful to the Association of Commonwealth Universities, and to the Warden and Fellows of Merton College, for conspiring to provide me with such pleasant conditions of work. During this time I chopped out part of the sixth section for a BBC talk on communications, reprinted in The Listener.3 I also owe much more than I can express here to a great number of other people. I think first of the hosts at my various lectures, whose encouragement and hospitality meant so much; then of a good many members of the FILLM conference in Pakistan4 and of practically everybody at the Bellagio conference; then of many students and staff who attended my lectures and asked questions and made objections. They have been responsible for a few additions, and for many deletions and modifications. It is only because of such friendly interest, often coming from people whose names I did not get, that the list of “Faults Escaped,” if long, is perhaps not interminable. In a sense most of the main points in this book have been expounded elsewhere in other connections. I reflect however that a writer has increasingly less that is radically new to say unless he has previously been wrong. One of my less perceptive reviewers remarked recently that I seemed to be rewriting my central myth in every book I produced. I certainly do, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so. But one hopes for some growth in lucidity, or at least an increase of the presbyopia that normally comes in later life, as one proceeds. N.F. Massey College Victoria College University of Toronto July 1970

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I The phrase “The Critical Path” is, I understand, a term in business administration, and was one that I began hearing extensively used during the preparations for the Montreal Expo of 1967. It associated itself in my mind with the closing sentences of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he says that dogmatism and scepticism have both had it as tenable philosophical positions, and that “the critical path is alone open.”5 It also associated itself with a turning point in my own development. About twenty-five years ago, when still in middle life, I lost my way in the dark wood of Blake’s Prophecies, and looked around for some path that would get me out of there. There were many paths, some well trodden and equipped with signposts, but all pointing in what for me were the wrong directions. They directed me to the social conditions of Blake’s time, to the history of the occult tradition, to psychological factors in Blake’s mind, and other subjects quite valid in themselves. But my task was the specific one of trying to crack Blake’s symbolic code, and I had a feeling that the way to that led directly through literature itself. The critical path I wanted was a theory of criticism which would, first, account for the major phenomena of literary experience, and, second, would lead to some view of the place of literature in civilization as a whole. Following the bent that Blake had given me, I became particularly interested in two questions. One was, What is the total subject of study of which criticism forms part? I rejected the answer, “Criticism is a subdivision of literature,” because it was such obvious nonsense. Criticism is the theory of literature, not a minor and nonessential element in its practice. This latter notion of it is not surprising in outsiders, or in poets, but how a critic himself can be so confused about his function as to take the same view I could not (and cannot yet) understand. Of course criticism has a peculiar disability in the number of people who have drifted into it without any vocation for it, and who may therefore have, however unconsciously, some interest in keeping it theoretically incoherent. Literary criticism in its turn seemed to be a part of two larger but undeveloped subjects. One was the unified criticism of all the arts; the other was some area of verbal expression which had not yet been defined, and which in the present book is called mythology. The latter seemed more immediately promising: the former I felt was the ultimate destiny of the subject called aesthetics, in which (at least at that time) relatively few technically competent literary critics appeared to be much

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interested.6 I noticed also the strong centrifugal drift from criticism toward social, philosophical, and religious interests, which had set in at least as early as Coleridge. Some of this seemed to me badly motivated. A critic devoting himself to literature, but without any sense of his distinctive function, is often tempted to feel that he can never be anything more than a second-class writer or thinker, because his work is derived from the work of what by his postulates are greater men. I felt, then, that a conception of criticism was needed which would set the critic’s activity in its proper light, and that once we had that, a critic’s other interests would represent a natural expansion of criticism rather than an escape from it. The other question was, How do we arrive at poetic meaning? It is a generally accepted principle that meaning is derived from context. But there are two contexts for verbal meaning: the imaginative context of literature, and the context of ordinary intentional discourse. I felt that no critic had given his full attention to what seemed to me to be the first operation of criticism: trying to see what meaning could be discovered in works of literature from their context in literature. All meaning in literature seemed to be referred first of all to the context of intentional meaning, always a secondary and sometimes the wrong context. That is, the primary meaning of a literary work was assumed to be the kind of meaning that a prose paraphrase could represent. This primary meaning was called the “literal” meaning, a phrase with a luxuriant growth of semantic tangles around it which I have discussed elsewhere and return to more briefly here. When I first began to write on critical theory, I was startled to realize how general was the agreement that criticism had no presuppositions of its own, but had to be “grounded” on some other subject. The disagreements were not over that, but over the question of what the proper subjects were that criticism ought to depend on. The older European philological basis, a very sound one, at least in the form in which it was expounded by August Boeckh7 and others in the nineteenth century, had largely disappeared in English-speaking countries. In some places, notably Oxford, where I studied in the ’30s, it had declined into a much narrower conception of philology. This was partly because the shifting of the centre of literary study from the Classical to the modern languages had developed a prejudice, derived from one of the more bizarre perversions of the work ethic, that English literature at least was a merely entertaining subject, and should not be admitted to universities unless the

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main emphasis fell on something more beneficial to the moral fibre, like learning the classes of Old English strong verbs. In most North American universities the critical establishment rested on a mixture of history and philosophy, evidently on the assumption that every work of literature is what Sir Walter Raleigh said Paradise Lost was, a monument to dead ideas.8 I myself was soon identified as one of the critics who took their assumptions from anthropology and psychology, then still widely regarded as the wrong subjects. I have always insisted that criticism cannot take presuppositions from elsewhere, which always means wrenching them out of their real context, and must work out its own. But mental habits are hard to break, especially bad habits, and, because I found the term “archetype” an essential one, I am still often called a Jungian critic, and classified with Miss Maud Bodkin, whose book9 I have read with interest, but whom, on the evidence of that book, I resemble about as closely as I resemble the late Sarah Bernhardt. The reason for this rather silly situation was obvious enough. As long as the meaning of a poem, let us say for short, is sought primarily within the context of intentional discourse, it becomes a document, to be related to some verbal area of study outside literature. Hence criticism, like Los Angeles, becomes an aggregate of suburbs, with no central area in literature itself. One of these suburbs is the biographical one, where the literary work is taken to be a document illustrating something in the writer’s life. The most fashionable time for this approach was the nineteenth century, and its strongest proponent Carlyle, for whom great poetry could only be the personal rhetoric of a great man. The theory demands that Shakespeare, for instance, should be an obviously and overwhelmingly great man, which is why so much nineteenth-century critical energy was expended in trying to invent a sufficiently interesting biography for Shakespeare out of fancied allusions in the poetry. This misguided industry has now largely been restricted to the sonnets, where, as Mutt says in Finnegans Wake, “he who runes may rede it on all fours.”10 Carlyle’s essay on Shakespeare, in Heroes and Hero-Worship, comes as close to pure verbiage, to rhetoric without content, as prose sentences can in the nature of things get. Something seems to be wrong with the theory, at least in this form. One is better off with Goethe, but even there the sense of personal greatness may be connected less with the quality of the poetry than with the number of things Goethe had been able to do besides writing poetry. I am not talking here about real biography, but about the assumption

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that the poet’s life is the essential key to the deeper understanding of the poetry. It often happens that interesting literature is produced by an uninteresting man, in the sense of one who disappoints us if we are looking for some kind of culture hero. In fact it happens so often that there is clearly no correlation between the ability to write poetry and any other ability, or, at least, it is clearly absurd to assume that every real poet must be a certain kind of person. Hence the formula “this poem is particularly notable for the way in which it throws light on,” etc., soon ceases to carry much conviction for all but a selected group of poets. Something else, more deeply founded in a wider literary experience, is needed for critical understanding. In these days, a biographical approach is likely to move from the manifest to the latent personal content of the poem, and from a biographical approach properly speaking to a psychological one. At the present time and place this means very largely a Freudian, or what I think of as a Luther-on-the-privy, approach. A considerable amount of determinism enters at this stage. All documentary conceptions of literature are allegorical conceptions of it, and this fact becomes even more obvious when poems are taken to be allegories of Freudian repressions, unresolved conflicts, or tensions between ego and id, or, for another school, of the Jungian process of individuation. But what is true of allegorical poetry is equally true of allegorical criticism: that allegory is a technique calling for tact. Tact is violated when the whiteness of Moby Dick is explained as a Lockian tabula rasa, or when Alice in Wonderland is discussed in terms of her hypothetical toilet training, or when Matthew Arnold’s line in Dover Beach, “Where ignorant armies clash by night,” is taken as a covert reference to the copulation of his parents. One is reminded of the exempla from natural history made by medieval preachers. According to Richard Rolle in the fourteenth century, the bee carries earth in its feet to ballast itself when it flies, and thereby reminds us of the Incarnation, when God took up an earthly form.11 The example is ingenious and entertaining, and only unsatisfying if one happens to be interested in bees. If we tire of the shadow-play of explaining real poems by assumed mental states, we may be driven to realize that the ultimate source of a poem is not so much the individual poet as the social situation from which he springs, and of which he is the spokesman and the medium. This takes us into the area of historical criticism. Here again no one can or should deny the relevance of literature to history, but only rarely in

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historical criticism is there any real sense of the fact that literature is itself an active part of the historical process. Poets are assumed to have a sensitive litmus-paper response to social trends, hence literature as a whole is taken to be something that the historical process acts on, and we have still not escaped from a documentary and allegorical procedure. Once more, some historical critics, like the biographical ones, will want to go from manifest to latent social content, from the historical context of the poem to its context in some unified overview of history. Here again determinism, the impulse to find the ultimate meaning of literature in something that is not literature, is unmistakable. At the time of which I am speaking, a generation ago, a conservative Catholic determinism was fashionable, strongly influenced by Eliot, which adopted Thomism, or at least made references to it, as the summit of Western cultural values, and looked down benignantly on everything that followed it as a kind of toboggan slide, rushing through nominalism, Protestantism, liberalism, subjective idealism, and so on to the solipsism in which the critic’s non-Thomist contemporaries were assumed to be enclosed.12 Marxism is another enlarged historical perspective, widely adopted, and perhaps inherently the most serious one of them all. Literature is a part of a social process; hence that process as a whole forms the genuine context of literature. Theoretically, Marxism takes a social view of literature which is comprehensive enough to see it within this genuine context. In practice, however, Marxism operates as merely one more determinism, which avoids every aspect of literature except one allegorical interpretation of its content. All these documentary and external approaches, even when correctly handled, are subject to at least three limitations which every experienced scholar has to reckon with. In the first place, they do not account for the literary form of what they are discussing. Identifying Edward King and documenting Milton’s attitude to the Church of England will throw no light on Lycidas as a pastoral elegy with specific Classical and Italian lines of ancestry. Secondly, they do not account for the poetic and metaphorical language of the literary work, but assume its primary meaning to be a nonpoetic meaning. Thirdly, they do not account for the fact that the genuine quality of a poet is often in a negative relation to the chosen context. To understand Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem it is useful to know something of his quarrel with Hayley and his sedition trial.13 But one also needs to be aware of the vast disproportion between these minor events in a quiet life and their apocalyptic transformation in the poems.

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One should also know enough of criticism, as well as of Blake, not to ascribe the disproportion to paranoia on Blake’s part. Similarly, a scholar may write a whole shelf of books about the life of Milton studied in connection with the history of his time, and still fail to notice that Milton’s greatness as a poet has a good deal to do with his profound and perverse misunderstanding of the history of his time. By the time I began writing criticism, the so-called “New Criticism” had established itself as a technique of explication. This was a rhetorical form of criticism, and from the beginning rhetoric has meant two things: the figuration of language and the persuasive powers of an orator. New Criticism dealt with rhetoric in the former sense, and established a counterweight to the biographical approach which treated poetry as a personal rhetoric. The great merit of explicatory criticism was that it accepted poetic language and form as the basis for poetic meaning. On this basis it built up a resistance to all “background” criticism that explained the literary in terms of the nonliterary. At the same time, it deprived itself of the great strength of documentary criticism: the sense of context. It simply explicated one work after another, paying little attention to genre or to any larger structural principles connecting the different works explicated.14 The limitations of this approach soon became obvious, and most of the New Critics sooner or later fell back on one of the established documentary contexts, generally the historical one, although they were regarded at first as antihistorical. One or two have even been Marxists, but in general the movement, at least in America, was anti-Marxist. Marxists had previously condemned the somewhat similar tendency in Russian criticism called “formalism,” because they realized that if they began by conceding literary form as the basis for literary significance, the assumptions on which Marxist bureaucracies rationalized their censorship of the arts would be greatly weakened. They would logically have to end, in fact, in giving poets and novelists the same kind of freedom that they had reluctantly been compelled to grant to the physical scientists. More recently, Marshall McLuhan has placed a formalist theory, expressed in the phrase “the medium is the message,” within the context of a neo-Marxist determinism in which communication media play the same role that instruments of production do in more orthodox Marxism. Professor McLuhan drafted his new Mosaic code under a strong influence from the conservative wing of the New Critical movement, and many traces of an earlier Thomist determinism can be found in The

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Gutenberg Galaxy. An example is the curiously exaggerated distinction he draws between the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages and the book culture of the printed page that followed it.15 It seemed to me obvious that, after accepting the poetic form of a poem as its primary basis of meaning, the next step was to look for its context within literature itself. And of course the most obvious literary context for a poem is the entire output of its author. Just as explication, by stressing the more objective aspect of rhetoric, had formed a corrective to the excesses of biographical criticism, so a study of a poet’s whole work might form the basis of a kind of “psychological” criticism that would operate within literature, and so provide some balance for the kind that ends in the bosom of Freud. Poetry is, after all, a technique of communication: it engages the conscious part of the mind as well as the murkier areas, and what a poet succeeds in communicating to others is at least as important as what he fails to resolve for himself. We soon become aware that every poet has his own distinctive structure of imagery, which usually emerges even in his earliest work, and which does not and cannot essentially change. This larger context of the poem within its author’s entire “mental landscape” is assumed in all the best explication—Spitzer’s, for example.16 I became aware of its importance myself, when working on Blake, as soon as I realized that Blake’s special symbolic names and the like did form a genuine structure of poetic imagery and not, despite his use of the word, a “system” to which he was bound like an administrator to a computer. The structure of imagery, however, as I continued to study it, began to show an increasing number of similarities to the structures of other poets. Blake had always been regarded as a poet with a “private symbolism” locked up in his own mind, but this conception of him was so fantastically untrue that overcoming it carried me much further than merely correcting a mistaken notion of Blake. I was led to three conclusions in particular. First, there is no private symbolism: the phrase makes no sense. There may be private allusions or associations that need footnotes, but they cannot form a poetic structure, even if the poet himself is a psychotic. The structure of the poem remains an effort at communication, however utterly it may fail to communicate. Second, as just said, every poet has his own structure of imagery, every detail of which has its analogue in that of all other poets. Third, when we follow out this pattern of analogous structures, we find that it leads, not to similarity, but to identity. Similarity implies unifor-

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mity and monotony, and any conclusion that all poets are much alike, in whatever respect, is too false to our literary experience to be tenable. It is identity that makes individuality possible: poems are made out of the same images, just as poems in English are all made out of the same language. This contrast of similarity and identity is one of the most difficult problems in critical theory, and we shall have to return to it several times in this book. I was still not satisfied: I wanted a historical approach to literature, but an approach that would be or include a genuine history of literature, and not simply the assimilating of literature to some other kind of history. It was at this point that the immense importance of certain structural elements in the literary tradition, such as conventions, genres, and the recurring use of certain images or image clusters, which I came to call archetypes, forced itself on me. T.S. Eliot had already spoken of tradition as a creative and informing power operating on the poet specifically as a craftsman, and not vaguely as a merely cultivated person.17 But neither he nor anyone else seemed to get to the point of identifying the factors of that tradition, of what it is that makes possible the creation of new works of literature out of earlier ones. The New Critics had resisted the background approach to criticism, but they had not destroyed the oratorical conception of poetry as a personal rhetoric. And yet convention, within literature, seemed to be a force even stronger than history. The difference between the conventions of medieval poets writing in the London of Richard II and those of Cavalier poets writing in the London of Charles II is far less than the difference in social conditions between the two ages. I began to suspect that a poet’s relation to poetry was much more like a scholar’s relation to his scholarship than was generally thought. Whatever one is producing, the psychological processes involved seem much the same. The scholar cannot be a scholar until he immerses himself in his subject, until he attaches his own thinking to the body of what is thought in his day about that subject. A scholar, qua scholar, cannot think for himself or think at random: he can only expand an organic body of thought, add something logically related to what he or someone else has already thought. But this is precisely the way that poets have always talked about their relation to poetry. From Homer onward, poets have continually insisted that they were simply places where something new in literature was able to take its own shape. From here it is clear that one has to take a final step. Criticism must develop a sense of history within literature to complement the historical

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criticism that relates literature to its nonliterary historical background. Similarly, it must develop its own form of historical overview, on the basis of what is inside literature rather than outside it. Instead of fitting literature into a prefabricated scheme of history, the critic should see literature as a coherent structure, historically conditioned but shaping its own history, responding to but not determined in its form by an external historical process. This total body of literature can be studied through its larger structural principles, which I have just described as conventions, genres, and recurring image-groups or archetypes. These structural principles are largely ignored by most social critics. Their treatment of literature, in consequence, is usually superficial, a matter of picking things out of literary works that seem interesting for nonliterary reasons. When criticism develops a proper sense of the history of literature, the history beyond literature does not cease to exist or to be relevant to the critic. Similarly, seeing literature as a unity in itself does not withdraw it from a social context: on the contrary, it becomes far easier to see what its place in civilization is. Criticism will always have two aspects, one turned toward the structure of literature and one turned toward the other cultural phenomena that form the social environment of literature. Together, they balance each other: when one is worked on to the exclusion of the other, the critical perspective goes out of focus. If criticism is in proper balance, the tendency of critics to move from critical to larger social issues becomes more intelligible. Such a movement need not, and should not, be due to a dissatisfaction with the narrowness of criticism as a discipline, but should be simply the result of a sense of social context, a sense present in all critics from whom one is in the least likely to learn anything. There was another difficulty with New Criticism which was only a technical one, but still pointed to the necessity for a sense of context. Whenever we read anything there are two mental operations we perform, which succeed one another in time. First we follow the narrative movement in the act of reading, turning over the pages and pursuing the trail from top left to bottom right. Afterwards, we can look at the work as a simultaneous unity and study its structure. This latter act is the critical response properly speaking: the ordinary reader seldom needs to bother with it. The chief material of rhetorical analysis consists of a study of the poetic “texture,” and such a study plunges one into a complicated labyrinth of ambiguities, multiple meanings, recurring images, and echoes of both sound and sense. A full explication of a long and complex work

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which was based on the reading process could well become much longer, and more difficult to read, than the work itself. Such linear explications have some advantages as a teaching technique, but for publishing purposes it is more practicable to start with the second stage. This involves attaching the rhetorical analysis to a deductive framework derived from a study of the structure, and the context of that structure is what shows us where we should begin to look for our central images and ambiguities. The difficulty in transferring explication from the reading process to the study of structure has left some curious traces in New Critical theory. One of them is in Ransom, with his arbitrary assumption that texture is somehow more important for the critic than structure;18 another is again in McLuhan, who has expanded the two unresolved factors of explication into a portentous historical contrast between the “linear” demands of the old printed media and the “simultaneous” impact of the new electronic ones. The real distinction however is not between different kinds of media, but between the two operations of the mind which are employed in every contact with every medium. There is a “simultaneous” response to print; there is a “linear” response to a painting, for there is a preliminary dance of the eye before we take in the whole picture; music, at the opposite end of experience, has its score, the spatial presentation symbolizing a simultaneous understanding of it. In reading a newspaper there are two preliminary linear operations, the glance over the headlines and the following down of a story. This point is crucial for critical theory, because the whole prose-paraphrase conception of “literal” meaning is based on an understanding which is really precritical. It is while we are striving to take in what is being presented to us that we are reducing the poetic to the intentional meaning, attending to what the work explicitly says rather than to what it is. The precritical experience of literature is wordless, and all criticism which attempts to ground itself on such experience tends to assume that the primary critical act is a wordless reaction, to be described in some metaphor of immediate and nonverbal contact, such as “taste.” Verbal criticism, in this view, is a secondary operation of trying to find words to describe the taste. Students who have been encouraged to think along these lines often ask me why I pay so little attention to the “uniqueness” of a work of literature. It may be absurd that “unique” should become a value-term, the world’s worst poem being obviously as unique as any other, but the word brings out the underlying confusion of thought very

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clearly. Criticism is a structure of knowledge, and the unique as such is unknowable; uniqueness is a quality of experience, not of knowledge, and of precisely the aspect of experience which cannot form part of a structure of knowledge. A better word, such as “individuality,” would raise deeper problems. The basis of critical knowledge is the direct experience of literature, certainly, but experience as such is never adequate. We are always reading Paradise Lost with a hangover or seeing King Lear with an incompetent Cordelia or disliking a novel because some scene in it connects with something suppressed in our memories, and our most deeply satisfying responses are often made in childhood, to be seen later as immature overreacting. The right occasion, the right mood, the right state of development to meet the occasion, can hardly coincide more than once or twice in a lifetime. Nevertheless, the conception of a definitive experience in time seems to be the hypothesis on which criticism is based. Criticism, surely, is designed to reconstruct the kind of experience that we could and should have had, and thereby to bring us into line with that experience, even if the “Shadow” of Eliot’s The Hollow Men has forever darkened it.19 As a structure of knowledge, then, criticism, like other structures of knowledge, is in one sense a monument to a failure of experience, a tower of Babel or one of the “ruins of time” which, in Blake’s phrase, “build mansions in eternity.”20 Hence the popularity of the evaluative or taste criticism which seems to point backwards to a greater intensity of response than the criticism itself can convey. It corresponds to a popular view of poetry itself, that whatever the poet writes down is merely salvaged from an original “inspiration” of a much more numinous kind. There is a real truth here, though it needs to be differently stated. There are two categories of response to literature, which could be well described by Schiller’s terms “naive” and “sentimental,” if used in his sense but transferred from qualities inherent in literature to qualities in the experience of it.21 The “naive” experience is the one we are now discussing, the linear, participating, precritical response which is thrown forward to the conclusion of the work as the reader turns pages or the theatre audience expectantly listens. The conclusion is not simply the last page or spoken line, but the “recognition” which, in a work of fiction particularly, brings the end into line with the beginning and pulls the straight line of response around into a parabola. A pure, self-contained pleasure of participating response is the end at which all writers aim

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who think of themselves as primarily entertainers, and some of them ignore, resist, or resent the critical operation that follows it. Such pleasure is however a state of innocence rarely attained in adult life. Many of us have “favourite” authors who set up for us a kind of enclosed garden in which we can wander in a state of completely satisfied receptivity. But for each reader there are very few of these, and they are usually discovered and read fairly early. The sense of guilt about reading “escape” literature is a moral anxiety mainly derived from a feeling that it is a substitute for an unattained experience, and that if escape literature really did what it professes to do it would not be escape literature. As a rule our pleasure in direct response is of a more muted and disseminated kind. It arises from a habit of reading or theatre-going, and much of this pleasure comes from a greatly enlarged kind of expectation, extending over many works and many years. Instead of trying to operate the gambling machine of an ideal experience, which may never pay off, we are building something up, accumulating a total fund of experience, each individual response being an investment in it. It is a central function of criticism to explain what is going on in the habit of reading, using “reading” as a general term for all literary experience. If reading formed simply an unconnected series of experiences, one novel or poem or play after another, it would have the sense of distraction or idle time-filling about it which so many of those who are afraid of leisure believe it to have. The real reader knows better: he knows that he is entering into a coherent structure of experience, and the criticism which studies literature through its organizing patterns of convention, genre, and archetype enables him to see what that structure is. Such criticism can hardly injure the “uniqueness” of each experience: on the contrary, it rejects the evaluating hierarchy that limits us to the evaluator’s reading list, and encourages each reader to accept no substitutes in his search for infinite variety. It is simply not true that the “great” writers supply all the varieties of experience offered by the merely “good” ones: if Massinger is not a substitute for Shakespeare, neither is Shakespeare a substitute for Massinger.22 Still less does the study of the recurring structural patterns of literature lead the reader to the conviction that literature is everywhere much alike. For such study, as just said, does not keep bringing the student back to similar points, but to the same point, to the sense of an identity in literary experience which is the objective counterpart to his own identity. That variety and novelty can be found only at the place of identity is the theme

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of much of the most influential writing in our century, of the Eliot Quartets with their garlic and sapphires clotting a bedded axle-tree,23 of the Pound Cantos which insist on “making it new” but remain at the centre of the “unwobbling pivot,”24 of that tremendous hymn to the eternal newness of the same which is Finnegans Wake. Twentieth-century criticism which does not understand a central theme of the literature of its own time can hardly be expected to make much sense of the literature of the past. This brings us to the “sentimental” type of response, which starts where criticism starts, with the unity of the work being read. In modern literature there has been a strong emphasis on demanding a response from the reader which minimizes everything “naive,” everything connected with suspense or expectation. This emphasis begins in English literature with the Blake Prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem particularly, which avoid the sense of linear narration and keep repeating the central theme in an expanding series of contexts. Fiction tends increasingly to abolish the teleological plot which keeps the reader wondering “how it turns out”; poetry drops its connective tissue of narrative in favour of discontinuous episodes; in Mallarmé and elsewhere it even avoids the centrifugal movement of naming or pointing to objects thought of as external to the poem. The emphasis, though it starts with unity, is not on unity for its own sake, but on intensity, a word which brings us back to the conception of an ideal experience. Hopkins with his “inscape” and “instress,”25 Proust with his instants of remembrance and recognition, Eliot with his timeless moments at the world’s axis,26 and a host of more recent writers with their mystiques of orgasm, drugs, and quasi-Buddhist moments of enlightenment, are all talking about a form of ideal experience, which in one way or another seems to be the real goal of life. The ideal experience itself, for the shrewder of these writers at least, never occurs, but with intense practice and concentration a deeply satisfying approximation may occur very rarely. The curious link with religion—for even writers who are not religious still often employ religious terminology or symbolism in this connection, as Joyce and Proust do— indicates that this direct analogy of ideal experience is typically the way of the mystic or saint rather than the artist—“an occupation for the saint,” as Eliot calls it, though he immediately adds that it cannot be in any sense an occupation.27 Traditional Christian thought had an explanation for the dilemma of experience which at least made sense within its own postulates. Accord-

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ing to it, Adam was capable of a preternatural power of experience before his fall, and we have lost this capacity. Our structures of reason and imagination are therefore analogical constructs designed to recapture, within the mental processes that belong to our present state, something of a lost directness of apprehension. Thus Milton can define education as an “attempt to repair the ruin of our first parents by regaining to know God aright.”28 Similar language continues in our day. Proust concludes his colossal analysis of experience by saying that the only paradises are lost paradises; Yeats, in a much more light-hearted way, tells us in Solomon and the Witch, anticipating the more recent orgasm cults, that a single act of perfect intercourse would restore the unfallen world. In this view, literature, philosophy, and religion at least are all articulate analogies of an experience that goes not only beyond articulateness, but beyond human capacity as well. The Christian fallen world is only one form of a conception which has run through human imagination and thought from earliest times to the present, according to which the existing world is, so to speak, the lower level of being or reality. Above it is a world which may not exist (we do not actually know that it exists even if we seem to have an experience of it), but is not nothing or nonexistence; is not a merely ideal world, because it can act as an informing principle of existence, and yet cannot convincingly be assigned to any intermediate category of existence, such as the potential. This world, related by analogy to the intelligible world of the philosopher and scientist, the imaginable world of the poet, and the revealed world of religion, is increasingly referred to in our day by the term “model.” In religion, as noted, this model world is usually projected as an actually existing world created by God, though at present out of human reach. In philosophy it appears in such concepts as Aristotle’s final cause, and in the more uninhibited structures of the poets it is the idealized world of romance, pastoral, or apocalyptic vision. As such it suggests a world with which we should wish to identify ourselves, or something in ourselves, and so it becomes the world indicated by the analogy of ideal experience just mentioned. A direct experience or apprehension of such a world would be a microcosmic experience, an intelligence or imagination finding itself at the centre of an intelligible or imaginable totality, and so experiencing, for however brief an instant, without any residue of alienation. It would thus also be an experience of finally attained or recovered identity. Most of us, at least, never reach it directly in experience, if it is attainable in

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experience at all, but only through one of the articulated analogies, of which literature is a central one. Whatever it is, it represents the end of our critical path, though we have not as yet traversed the path. As we proceed to do this, we must keep to a middle way between two uncritical extremes. One is the centrifugal fallacy of determinism, the feeling that literature lacks a social reference unless its structure is ignored and its content associated with something nonliterary. No theory is any good unless it explains facts, but theory and facts have to be in the same plane. Psychological and political theories can explain only psychological and political facts; no literary facts can be explained by anything except a literary theory. I remember a student, interested in the Victorian period, who dismissed several standard critical works in that area as “totally lacking in any sense of social awareness.” I eventually learned that social awareness, for him, meant the amount of space given in the book, whatever the announced subject, to the Chartist movement. Chartism and similar social movements have their relevance to literature, certainly; but literature is all about something else, even when social protest is its explicit theme. The other extreme is the centripetal fallacy, where we fail to separate criticism from the precritical direct experience of literature. This leads to an evaluating criticism which imposes the critic’s own values, derived from the prejudices and anxieties of his own time, on the whole literature of the past. Criticism, like religion, is one of the subacademic areas in which a large number of people are still free to indulge their anxieties instead of studying their subject. Any mention of this fact is apt to provoke the response, “Of course you don’t understand how important our anxieties are.” I understand it sufficiently to have devoted a good deal of this essay to the subject of social anxiety and its relation to genuine criticism. We notice that the two fallacies mentioned above turn out to be essentially the same fallacy, as opposed extremes so often do. II The conventions, genres, and archetypes of literature do not simply appear: they must develop historically from origins, or perhaps from a common origin. In pursuing this line of thought, I have turned repeatedly to Vico, one of the very few thinkers to understand anything of the historical role of the poetic impulse in civilization as a whole.29 Vico describes how a society, in its earliest phase, sets up a framework of

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mythology, out of which all its verbal culture grows, including its literature. Vico’s main interest is in the history of law, but it is not difficult to apply his principles to other disciplines. Early verbal culture consists of, among other things, a group of stories. Some of these stories, as time goes on, take on a central and canonical importance: they are believed to have really happened, or else to explain or recount something that is centrally important for a society’s history, religion, or social structure. These canonical stories are, or become, what Vico calls “true fables or myths.” Myths are similar in literary form to folk tales and legends, but they have a different social function. They instruct as well as amuse, and sometimes a group of them become esoteric stories, to be revealed only to initiates. Of course any given society may be quite unconscious of any such distinction, but retrospectively we can see how the specific social function or situation of a myth sets it apart from other kinds of story. In the first place, myths stick together to form a mythology, whereas folk tales simply interchange themes and motifs. Thus folk tales can hardly develop characters much beyond the most skeletal types of trickster and ogre and clever riddle-guesser and the like, whereas myths produce gods or cultic heroes who have some permanence, along with a personality distinctive enough to have statues made of them and hymns addressed to them. The story of Odysseus and Polyphemus is not different in literary structure from a folk tale, but it belongs to the group of stories told about Odysseus that make him a recognizable member of a literary family. And because the story is in Homer, it becomes ancestral, the form of the tale that later writers turn to first. Hence myths not only make up a larger body of mythology, but strike their roots into a specific culture, developing what Ezra Pound, following Frobenius, calls a paideuma.30 The distinction between myth and folk tale is thus a fateful one for the critic, because the whole historical dimension of literature is bound up with it. Folk tales lead a nomadic literary existence, travelling over the world and passing easily through every barrier of language and custom. If we were to attend only to the similarity in form between myth and folk tale, our approach to literature could not get beyond a facile structuralism. But when a mythology crystallizes in the centre of a culture, a temenos or magic circle is drawn around that culture, and a literature develops historically within a limited orbit of language, reference, allusion, belief, transmitted and shared tradition. In this book we are dealing primarily with the literary aspects of mythology, but as a culture develops, its mythology tends to become en-

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cyclopedic, expanding into a total myth covering a society’s view of its past, present, and future, its relation to its gods and its neighbours, its traditions, its social and religious duties, and its ultimate destiny. We naturally think of a mythology as a human cultural product, but few societies think of their mythologies at the beginning as something that they have themselves created. They think of them rather as a revelation given them from the gods, or their ancestors, or a period before time began. It is particularly law and religious ritual that are most frequently thought of as divinely revealed. A fully developed or encyclopedic myth comprises everything that it most concerns its society to know, and I shall therefore speak of it as a mythology of concern, or more briefly as a myth of concern. The myth of concern exists to hold society together, so far as words can help to do this. For it, truth and reality are not directly connected with reasoning or evidence, but are socially established. What is true, for concern, is what society does and believes in response to authority, and a belief, so far as a belief is verbalized, is a statement of willingness to participate in a myth of concern. The typical language of concern therefore tends to become the language of belief. In origin, a myth of concern is largely undifferentiated: it has its roots in religion, but religion has also at that stage the function of religio, the binding together of the community in common acts and assumptions. Later, a myth of concern develops different social, political, legal, and literary branches, and at this stage religion becomes more exclusively the myth of what Tillich calls ultimate concern,31 the myth of man’s relation to other worlds, other beings, other lives, other dimensions of time and space. For a long time this “ultimate” aspect of religion remains in the centre of the total myth of concern. The myth of concern which European and American culture has inherited is, of course, the Judaeo-Christian myth as set out in the Bible, and as taught in the form of doctrine by the Christian church. The encyclopedic form of the Bible, stretching from creation to apocalypse, makes it particularly well fitted to provide a mythical framework for a culture, and the form itself illustrates the encyclopedic inner drive of all developed mythologies. Concern, so far as it is a feeling, is very close to anxiety, especially when threatened. The anxiety of coherence is central: normally, voices of doubt or dissent are to be muted at all times, and silenced altogether if there is real danger, as in a war. Of almost equal importance is the anxiety of continuity. Religions are deeply conservative in their ritual and in at least the

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verbal expression of their beliefs; and the etymology of the word “superstition” associates it with what persists out of mechanical habit. The influence of social concern on literature is to make it intensely traditional, repeating the legends and learning which have most to do with that concern, and which are as a rule well known to the poet’s audience. The poet before such an audience is not permitted to depart from the received tradition. We can see this anxiety recurring, phylogenetically, so to speak, in children, with their demands for the invariable repetition of nursery rhymes and tales. Wisdom, in origin, is the tried and tested way, the way of the elders— for wherever there is anxiety of continuity, parental authority, and the authority of seniors in general, is taken for granted as essential to social security. The archetype of the father handing on the wisdom of his generation to his son, in the form of proverbs or maxims of conduct, has run through literature from the wisdom books of the Old Testament (themselves based on Egyptian and Mesopotamian models which are many centuries older) to Polonius haranguing Laertes and Lord Chesterfield instructing his heir in a way of life that according to Samuel Johnson combined the morals of a whore with the manners of a dancing master.32 In stories based on this archetype (such as the story of Ahikar,33 which has left its traces in the Apocrypha, the New Testament, the fables of Aesop, and the Koran), the son is frequently ungrateful, scatterbrained, or determined to do his own thing. This assimilates the archetype to an even larger and more significant pattern. Before time began, many mythologies tell us, the right way of life, in a body of laws, doctrines, or ritual duties, was given by gods or ancestors to their wilful and disobedient children, who forgot or corrupted it. All disaster and bad luck follows from departing from that way, all prosperity from returning to it. Vico was also the first, so far as I know, to indicate something of the crucial importance of a distinction which has been vigorously pursued by some scholars quite recently.34 This is the distinction between the oral or preliterate culture in which the myth of concern normally begins, and the writing culture which succeeds it. It is true that Vico assigns a written language to all three of his historical ages, but the differences among these forms of language, and his insistence that laws can exist independently of writing, give a very different perspective to his argument. An oral culture depends on memory, and consequently it also depends heavily on verse, the simplest and most memorable way of conventionalizing the rhythm of speech. In oral culture mythology and literature

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are almost coterminous: the chief transmitters of the myth are poets, or people with skills akin to the poetic, who survive in legend or history as bards, prophets, religious teachers, or culture heroes of various kinds. Thus in an oral society the poet is a teacher, because he is a man who knows. That is, he is a man who remembers, and who consequently knows the traditional and proper formulas of knowledge. He knows the names of the gods, their genealogy, and their dealings with men; the names of the kings and the tribal legends, the stories of battles won and enemies conquered, the popular wisdom of proverbs and the esoteric wisdom of oracles, the calendar and the seasons, the lucky and unlucky days and the phases of the moon, charms and spells, the right methods of sacrifice, appropriate prayers, and formulas for greeting strangers. In short, he knows the kind of thing that lies behind the poetry of Homer and Hesiod and the heroic poetry of the North, and survives in the popular ballads and folk epics of Slavic countries and Central Asia. I am speaking particularly of the professional oral poet; there are of course other kinds. The characteristics of oral poetry are familiar, the most familiar being the formulaic unit, the stock epithets and the metrical phrases that can be moved around at will in a poetic process which is always close to improvisation. Such poetry has strong affinities with magic. There is magic in the great roll calls of names, like the Greek ships in Homer or the elemental spirits in Hesiod, in the carefully stereotyped descriptions of ritual and councils of war, in the oblique and riddling epithets like the Teutonic kenning, in the sententious reflections that express the inevitable reactions to certain recurring human situations. Magic means secret wisdom, the keys to all knowledge, as becomes more obvious when the poet’s repertory of legend expands into an interlocking epic cycle, which begins in turn to suggest the outlines of an encyclopedic myth of concern. The ideal of universal knowledge achieved in and through poetry has haunted poets and their students from the beginning. Oral formulaic poetry has a driving power behind it that is very hard to recapture in individually conceived and written poetry. The sinewy strength of Homer is the despair of imitators and translators alike: the style is neither lofty nor familiar, neither naive nor ingenious, but passes beyond all such distinctions. We can get a clearer idea of the effect of such poetry, perhaps, from another formulaic art, the music of the high Baroque. In an intensely formulaic composer, such as Vivaldi, the same scale and chord passages, the same harmonic and melodic progressions,

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the same cadences, appear over and over again, yet the effect is not monotony but the release of a self-propelled energy. One of the keenest sources of pleasure in listening to poetry or music is the fulfilling of a general expectation, of a sort that is possible only in highly conventionalized art. If a particular expectation is being fulfilled, when we know exactly what is going to be said, as in listening to something very familiar, our attention is relaxed, and what we are participating in tends to become either a ritual or a bore, or possibly both. If we have no idea what is coming next, our attention is tense and subject to fatigue. The intermediate area, where we do not know what Pope will say but do know that he will say it in a beautifully turned couplet, where we do not know in a detective story who murdered X but do know that somebody did, is the area of closest unity between poet and audience. So far as it is a technique, Homer’s energy can be matched by the later poets of a writing culture, but the kind of general expectation he raises is based on something that hardly can be. This is the total empathy between poet and audience which arises when the poet is not so much a teacher of his audience or a spokesman for them, as both at once. Such a poet needs to make no moral judgments, for the standards implied are already shared. We cannot even call him a conservative, for that is still a partisan term, and in every judgment or reflective statement he does make he is formulating his hearer’s thought as well as his own. In general, it may be said that oral verbal culture expresses itself in continuous verse and discontinuous prose. Continuous prose is based, not on the physical pulsation of verse, but on a conceptual or semantic rhythm which is much more difficult and sophisticated, and develops later in time. The prose of an oral period, which I shall call the prose of concern, normally takes the form of a discontinuous sequence of easily remembered statements. This type of prose, which is of course written but shows a clear line of oral descent, may be easily illustrated from the Bible and from the fragments of Presocratic philosophers. We can isolate certain genres of oral prose, which are the kernels, so to speak, of later prose developments, though in their original form it is often difficult to distinguish prose and verse rhythms. The kernel of law is the commandment, the prescribed ritual or moral observance; the kernel of philosophy is the aphorism, which has several different social contexts. One is that of the proverb. The proverb is typically the expression of popular wisdom: it is generally addressed to those who are without exceptional advantages of birth or wealth, and it is

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much preoccupied with prudence and caution, with avoiding extremes, with knowing one’s place, with being respectful to superiors and courteous to inferiors. The ambiguous oracle and the dark sayings of the wise are more esoteric forms of aphorism. Of more purely literary potential are the parable and the fable, and the later developments of the riddle. The brief anecdote in the life of a teacher which is called a pericope, a set-up situation leading as quickly as possible to some crucial statement or incident, such as a healing, is very conspicuous in the Gospels, which are written throughout in the discontinuous prose of concern. The effect of discontinuity is to suggest that the statements are existential, and have to be absorbed into the consciousness one at a time, instead of being linked with each other by argument. Oracular prose writers from Heraclitus to McLuhan have exploited the sense of extra profundity that comes from leaving more time and space and less sequential connection at the end of a sentence. The discontinuity of the essays of Bacon, for example, where (at least in the earliest ones) each sentence is really a paragraph in itself, is connected with his design to “come home to men’s business and bosoms,” as he put it.35 A writing culture36 reverses the development of oral culture, as its tendency is toward continuous prose and discontinuous verse. This last takes a very long time to manifest itself, poets being a conservative breed inclined to imitate their predecessors, and many centuries of development lie behind the brief lyrics, with the strong visual focus that writing provides, which we find in the Greek Anthology, in Chinese and Japanese poetry, and in French literature of the symboliste period. Much earlier, the antithetical patterns of Hebrew parallelism, the Latin elegiac, the English heroic couplet, show the influence of writing in arresting a continuous rhythm and making it return on itself, with the sense of covering a second dimension in space, up and down a page. More immediate, however, is the fact that writing enables continuous prose to develop. Continuous prose means the development of philosophy into a mode of thought articulated by logic and dialectic, and of history into a continuous narrative of events. Such ideas as knowledge for its own sake, or Aristotle’s axiom that all men by nature desire to know,37 are conceptions depending on the existence of written documents, and the metaphor in the phrase “the pursuit of truth (or knowledge) wherever it may lead” shows how closely the sense of knowledge and of the continuous prose made possible by writing are interconnected. Writing also has obviously a central role to play in shifting the main language of concern

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from the language of prescription, as in the commandment (thou shalt; this do in remembrance of me, etc.), or of myth, as in the story that accounts for the origin of something, into the conceptual and propositional language of belief. The mental habits brought in by a writing culture thus make a considerable modification in concern. The driving forces binding society together have relaxed somewhat, and man may think of himself, not only as forming part of a community, but also as confronting an objective world or order of nature. In heroic poetry particularly we see how intensely preoccupying is the anxiety of social coherence: the worst and most despicable of vices are those that tend to break down the community of concern, such as treachery or cowardice. In tragedy, where there is a marked tendency to archaism and the use of traditional and primitive settings, characters are defined by their social function, and tragedy itself often turns on the isolating of a central character from his society. Such isolation, whether brought about through external forces or through the unexpected consequences of an act, normally leads to the dissolving of identity, as in the tragedies of Timon and Lear. Whenever a central tragic figure voluntarily isolates himself, like Shakespeare’s Richard III with his “I am myself alone,” we may be sure that he is up to no good.38 But what is terrifyingly abnormal in tragedy is quite normal for a philosopher. From Descartes at least it has been a convention for the philosopher to approach certain problems, such as those of epistemology, in the theoretical isolation of a “subject.” He pretends to be alone, cut off from all social preconceptions, and the convention is so well established that it comes as something of a shock to realize that one cannot be without such preconceptions. It is clear that another approach to truth and reality is being made here, and one that tends to individualize a culture. In this context, truth becomes truth of correspondence, the alignment of a structure of words or numbers with a body of external phenomena. I say numbers, because in a writing culture the number also becomes a visual image, hence a writing culture is a counting and measuring culture as well, and scientific and mathematical procedures form part of the change in the mental attitude. We are told that early buildings, including Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, embody precise and complex astronomical observations. But a building, at least one requiring so immense an organization of labour, is the most socially concerned response that it is possible to make to the order of nature. It is not socially disinterested response, any more than the American moon landings of 1969 were dis-

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interested astronomy. “Disinterested” is of course a relative term, never an absolute one, but the relative degrees of it are of great social importance. The normal tendency of the truth of correspondence is nonmythical, appealing not directly to concern but to more self-validating criteria, such as logicality of argument or (usually a later stage) impersonal evidence and verification. The mental attitudes it develops, however, which include objectivity, suspension of judgment, tolerance, and respect for the individual, become social attitudes as well, and consolidate around a central relationship to society. The verbal expression of concern for these attitudes I shall call the myth of freedom. The myth of freedom is part of the myth of concern, but is a part that stresses the importance of the nonmythical elements in culture, of the truths and realities that are studied rather than created, provided by nature rather than by a social vision. It thus extends to the safeguarding of certain social values not directly connected with the myth of concern, such as the tolerance of opinion which dissents from it. Concern by itself (so far as we can consider it by itself) has great difficulty in separating appearance from reality. When there is so strong an emphasis on coherence and continuity, what one is and what one does are much the same thing, and similarly society as a whole is essentially what it does. Concern is deeply attached to ritual, to coronations, weddings, funerals, parades, demonstrations, where something is publicly done that expresses an inner social identity. The socially critical attitudes, which perceive hypocrisy, corruption, failure to meet standards, gaps between the real and the ideal, and the like, are antiritualistic, and cannot attract much social notice without the support of their one powerful ally, the truth of correspondence revealed through reason and evidence. The myth of freedom thus constitutes the “liberal” element in society, as the myth of concern constitutes the conservative one, and those who hold it are unlikely to form a much larger group than a critical, and usually an educated, minority. To form the community as a whole is not the function of the myth of freedom: it has to find its place in, and come to terms with, the society of which it forms part. Its relation to that society is symbiotic, though sometimes regarded, in times of deep conflict, as simply parasitic. In oral cultures verbal continuity is preserved mainly in the purely linear form of remembering and passing on. Writing breaks into this temporal movement by providing a visual and spatial focus for a com-

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munity. In that visual focus there is the source of a greater stability, so that the anxiety of continuity is no longer dependent wholly on memory. According to Socrates in the Phaedrus [274e ff.], the Egyptian god Thoth, having invented writing, boasted that his invention would immensely improve the memory, but was told by the other gods that on the contrary it would destroy the memory. The deadlock between a technological expert’s enthusiasm and the conservatism of his public has never been more incisively described. Thoth and his critics were talking about different kinds of memory: writing does greatly reduce the social importance of one kind, but it creates another kind of memory, based on a document or physical object which can be compared with other objects. To the extent that the skill of reading and writing spreads, the document acts, potentially, as a democratizing force in society by providing an accessible source as a check on tradition, though other social forces, general illiteracy, rare hand-copied manuscripts, censorship, may delay such a development for centuries. In the oral tradition there is a persistent bias toward the esoteric. In the ancient world, Greek culture made the transition to the mental habits of writing, as far as its minority of cultural leaders was concerned, with fair completeness. The expulsion of poets from Plato’s republic was the sign that Greek culture was no longer to be confined by the idioms of the poets. The result for us has been that our whole liberal tradition in education, as the etymology of the word “academic” shows, comes mainly from the Greeks, and our scientific, philosophical, mathematical, and historical presuppositions are essentially of Greek origin. A parallel shift to writing and prose took place in Hebrew culture around the time of the Deuteronomic reform, which transformed a mass of legends and oracles into a sacred book written mainly in prose. But the Old Testament maintains a much closer link with the oral tradition and the prose of concern. Philosophy, within the Biblical canon, still retains the form of proverb and oracle; Biblical history is at no time clearly separable from legend or historical reminiscence. This link with oral tradition is still there in Talmudic times, and whatever secular Hebrew or Jewish culture developed did so outside the canon and its commentary. The specific contribution of Hebrew and Biblical mythology to our own culture was in its concentration on a central myth of concern, and the rigorous subordination of all other cultural factors to it. In Greece, on the other hand, Plato’s program of revising and expurgating Greek mythology was not carried out, hence no definitive Greek mythological canon took shape.

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Homer is not Scripture in the way that the Bible is, and the stories of the gods, for all his authority, remained within the orbit of oral tradition with its formula of “some men say.” The Judaeo-Christian tradition shows us very clearly how truth and reality are conceived by concern. For Judaism, what is true and real is what God says and does; for Christianity, truth is ultimately truth of personality, specifically the personality of Christ. Within Christianity there has always been a feeling that whatever in one’s faith is true owes its truth to being in the Bible, or to being taught by the church on the basis of the Bible. In the First Epistle of John there is a verse setting forth the doctrine of the Trinity [5:7] which New Testament scholars generally recognize to be a late insertion. The insertion is not simply a pious fraud: if one believes the doctrine of the Trinity, then, from the point of view of the myth of concern, the way to make it true is to get it into the Bible. Nor is the procedure any different from what had gone on in the holy book for centuries: we cannot trace any part of the Bible back to a time when it was not being edited, redacted, conflated, glossed, and expurgated. When we ask what impelled Hebrew culture to develop its unique conception of a definitive sacred book, one of the answers clearly has to do with the fact that Israel was a defeated and subjected nation, with few intervals of military success and a long memory for them. Monotheism is an idea that would be most naturally suggested by the conception of a world empire. Just as a warrior aristocracy produces an aristocracy of gods, who are assigned to different departments on the analogy of administration, so the conception of a single ruling god seems the appropriate theology for a dominant world state. The first monotheist on record was an Egyptian Pharaoh, and among the most devout monotheists of the ancient world were the world-conquering Persians. The monotheism of the Hebrews, by contrast, was bound up with the dream of achieving some more satisfactory world order in the future. The one God was their God, united in a contract with them, whose will would eventually re-establish their kingdom and overthrow the great empires of the earth. The Jewish conception of a “Day of Jehovah,” which was adopted into Christianity as the Last Judgment, points to something very different from imperial monotheism. Hebrew monotheism differed from similar creeds in being a socially and politically revolutionary belief, and this revolutionary quality was inherited by Christianity. It is hard to overstate the importance for today of the fact that the Western myth of concern is in its origin a revolutionary myth. It amounts to

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the discovery of a whole new dimension of social time, the sense of a distanced future, as distinct from the pragmatic future revealed by oracle or divination, which is concerned mainly with inquiries about the immediate fortunes of some project, or, at most, about the inquirer’s individual fate. Many such discoveries are made easier, or even possible, by something suggesting them in the grammar of a language, such as a verb-tense system which includes a future: the absence of this in the Hebrew language indicates how powerful was the social energy behind the discovery. The same culture, for the same reasons, produced the conception of the apocryphon, the book which is to be sealed up in its own time and opened when its time has come, which underlies a good deal of the psychology of creation in Western literature, especially in the last two or three centuries. The reaction to early Christianity was typical of conservative reactions to revolutionary movements. The earliest external reference to Christians, in Tacitus’s Annals, speaks of them with a blistering contempt which is highly significant, coming as it does from a by no means weak or hysterical writer. Much later, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius complained that he had tried to get rid of the Christians by persecution, but had been unable to make much impression on them because of their parataxis, their military discipline.39 Even he did not recognize that the Christian church had been duplicating the Roman authority with a power structure which could go underground in time of persecution until the time came for it to emerge and take over. Eventually that time came, and then, of course, the cyclical movement which is inherent in the very word “revolution” began to operate. In every structured society the ascendant class attempts to take over the myth of concern and make it, or an essential part of it, a rationalization of its ascendancy. In proportion as Christianity gained secular authority, its myth of concern tended to associate itself with the myths of the various ascendant classes as they succeeded one another. In the Middle Ages, the conception of a structure of authority, requiring protection from above and obedience from below, found its way into the religious myth as well as the social system. The connection between Protestantism and the rise of the bourgeoisie has been considerably overlaboured by historians and social scientists, but still in the nineteenth century Matthew Arnold was able, with some plausibility, to associate the “Hebraic” or Judaeo-Christian tradition with the mores of the Victorian middle class.40 Certainly the association of Christianity with the middle class did

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a good deal to popularize the Marxist conception of a proletarian or excluded-class myth of concern. Yet Christianity has always remained a revolutionary myth, never completely merging with any ascendant-class myth in the way that, apparently, Hinduism and Confucianism did in the Far East. This fact gives Christianity a positive vitality in our own day; it also, however, gave it a negative vitality which eventually began to produce rivals to it. We saw that a religious myth of concern tends increasingly as it goes on to specialize in another world, and by the eighteenth century the growing ineffectiveness of the politically revolutionary element in Christianity, despite such movements as Methodism, brought about a crisis. The Christian monopoly of the Western myth of concern began to give way to a more pluralistic situation in which a number of new and more secular myths shared the field with it. Naturally, there were many who insisted that the true myth of concern could only be found in a revived Christianity, and the production of such manifestos has been a cultural heavy industry ever since. But not many of these—not even those of Kierkegaard, who was more aware of the kind of implications we have been considering here than most—have been able or willing to recognize the revolutionary element in Christianity as essential to its effectiveness, perhaps even to its validity. Of the new political myths of concern that began to arise from the eighteenth century on, the most important were the myth of democracy and the revolutionary working-class myth which eventually found its focus in Marxism. The former, which drew from both Classical and Christian sources, was a myth of concern which attempted to incorporate a myth of freedom within itself; the latter was a more direct descendant of the original Judaeo-Christian revolutionary attitude. The link of continuity between Christianity and Marxism is superficially less obvious than the Greek ancestry of our academic and liberal attitudes, because every revolution forms itself in opposite to its predecessor. But the link is there: it is not easy to break out of the mental habits formed by a mythical framework, or what is often called tradition, and even if it is possible we must first know what that tradition is. There are in particular three characteristics of a revolutionary movement that Christianity and Marxism share. One of these is the belief in a unique historical revelation. This belief, which gives so many liberals so much difficulty with Christianity, is an essential part of a revolutionary mode of thought: a revolution starts then and there, not at various places

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and times. It begins with Jesus and not with the Pharisees or Essenes; with Marx and not with Owen or the Saint-Simonians. Along with the uniqueness goes the conception of a canon of essential and approved texts, and a clear drawing of lines against even the most neighbourly of heresies. In fact, the attack on the heresy helps to define a revolutionary doctrine in a way that an attack on total opposition does not. Christianity defined itself, not by attacking unbelievers, but by attacking Arians or Gnostics and calling them unbelievers; Marxism defines itself, not by attacking capitalist imperialism, but by attacking Trotsky or Liu Shao-chi and calling them agents of capitalist imperialism.41 A third characteristic is the resistance to any kind of “revisionism,” or incorporating of other cultural elements into the thought of the revolutionary leadership. The revolutions within Christianity, notably the Protestant ones, usually professed to be a return to the pure gospel of their founder, and this must also be the professed aim of new Marxist party lines. There is even an ultra-Puritan movement in Marxism back to the early alienation essays of Marx, before social and institutional Marxism began. The antirevisionist tendency is normally an antiliberal tendency. Revolutions, naturally, are directed against a power-holding ascendancy, and liberals, from “enervate Origen,” as Eliot calls him,42 to Erasmus, and from Erasmus to the political liberals of our own day, are regularly taken by revolutionaries to be, consciously or unconsciously, spokesmen for the opposed establishment. In the earlier Christian centuries, the dethroned “pagan” tradition began slowly to form a liberal opposition, modifying, relaxing, and expanding the revolutionary narrowness of the Christian myth of concern, and so forming the basis of a myth of freedom. Some of this was reflected in literature: we shall return to this later, but may note here the convention of love poetry, developed mainly from Ovid. This made it imaginatively clear that Eros was a mighty force to be reckoned with, in contrast to official Christianity, which, like most revolutionary movements, required from its most dedicated followers the extra energy that comes from sexual sublimation. Again, the Christian myth, by remaining so close to the oral tradition, had thrown a strong emphasis on the ear, on the hearing of the word, on the receptivity to authority that binds a society together. In the word “idolatry,” and in its recurring iconoclasm, Christianity expressed its antagonism to the hypnotizing power of the external visible world. It was a more liberal expansion of Christian culture that developed the visual arts, including the arts of the theatre, so

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much disliked by the more rigorous Christians, including Pascal and many of the Puritans. The growing realism and direct observation of experience and nature in Western art also helped to relax the Christian preoccupation with unifying society in a common bond of belief. The Christian teaching that there were no gods and nothing numinous in nature, that nature was a fellow-creature of man, and that the gods men had previously discovered in nature were all devils, reflects a fear of turning away from social concern to the order of nature. After the turn had become irrevocable, the belief persisted for centuries that the order which the scientist finds in nature could only be accounted for as a product of a divine mind. This assumption has no intellectual function in science; its function is social, an attempt on the part of a dominant myth of concern to contain a restive and struggling myth of freedom. The central question of concern, What must we do to be saved? is much the same in all ages, but naturally the conceptions of salvation vary. There are two worlds for man: one is the environment of nature, which is presented to man objectively and must be studied and examined; the other is the civilization that he accepts or tries to modify. For traditional Christianity, God alone is creative, and he created not only the order of nature but the models of human civilization as well. God built the first city and planted the first garden; God was the first artist, nature being the art of God; God designed the primary laws of mankind and revealed to him the true religion. For most myths of concern in our day, and for all radical ones, the only creative power in the situation comes from man himself, hence its truth or reality is connected with human desire, with what we want to see exist, and with human practical skill, with what we are able to make exist. Marx did not, so far as I know, speak of this created reality as myth: that association for revolutionary thought was made later, chiefly by Sorel, though it is implied in Hegel’s shift of the absolute from substance to subject which is adopted in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. When we hear that it is more important to change the world than to study it, we know that there is, once again, a social movement on foot to subordinate all philosophical myths of freedom to a new myth of concern. The greater myths of concern, the ones that have permanently altered the social consciousness of man, have usually begun in a mood perhaps best called abhorrence. Abhorrence of idolatry, of sin, of exploitation, of what the soul in Yeats calls the crime of death and birth:43 these are great revulsions that have produced the Jewish law, the Christian church, the

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Marxist party, the teachings of the compassionate Buddha. The real enemies of such movements are not those who oppose but those who are indifferent: the opposite of faith is not doubt, but the inability to see what all the fuss is about. It is possible that similar moods are growing among us. We tend to associate the physical enemies of society, poverty and disease and filth, mainly with “underdeveloped” nations. But we may also feel that the same words apply equally to our mean streets, our vacuous mass media, our stinking and murderous automobiles. When such feelings are reinforced by more theoretical conceptions like the “profit motive,” a myth of concern is developing. In the past, such revulsions, when deep enough, have turned the cycle of history again by forming a new organization that has dominated its culture, sometimes for centuries. According to Vico, history takes the form of a series of cycles of this kind, starting off with a revulsion, which he symbolizes by the fear of thunder, from a mindless and undirected existence. There comes a stage of development in history, however, at which we feel that we have outgrown certain previous stages that were cruel or superstitious, and all cyclical movements bring with them the dreary humiliation of having to return to these earlier stages. The moment of this return coincides closely with the coming of a new myth of concern to social supremacy. It is an ancient axiom, transmitted by Lucretius,44 that the social effects of religions, that is, structures of belief and concern generally, are evil in direct proportion to their temporal power and influence. In Christian times there were some thinkers, including the authors of the medieval Defensor Pacis, who found temporal authority to be the essential source of corruption in the church.45 Even yet, whenever a new and powerful myth of concern develops, we can see a dark age, or what Gibbon called the triumph of barbarism and religion,46 in its penumbra, as soon as it turns from exhortation to organization. As the “Decline and Fall” of Gibbon’s title shows, there is a rhythm of death and rebirth in concern: what declined and fell was perhaps as much a mystique as an actual authority collecting taxes and administering laws. But there is no fatality in such matters, no necessity to go around a circle again, no need to relinquish what we have wrested from bigotry and cruelty. The abhorred world is the other aspect of what we met in the previous section as the model world: in literature it is primarily the world of irony and satire, as the model world is most directly expressed in idyll and pastoral and idealized romance. Like the model

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world, it is most useful to us when kept before us in the present, both as an imaginative vision and as an enemy to be fought, not projected into the past, as part of a lost-paradise or other alienation myth, or into the future, where escaping from it is associated with some progressive or revolutionary donkey’s carrot. When we look at whatever it is in our own world that makes it not quite the abhorred world, but something we can live with in the meantime, we find that one of the most important elements is the tension between concern and freedom. When a myth of concern has everything its own way, it becomes the most squalid of tyrannies, with no moral principles except those of its own tactics, and a hatred of all human life that escapes from its particular obsessions. When a myth of freedom has everything its own way, it becomes a lazy and selfish parasite on a power structure. Satire shows us in 1984 the society that has destroyed its freedom, and in Brave New World the society that has forgotten its concern. They must both be there, and the genuine individual and the free society can exist only when they are. III In trying to see where literature belongs in this dialectic of concern and freedom, we can, I think, gain a great deal from a renewed study of the two classical “defences” of poetry in English literature by Sidney and Shelley. Both works are familiar, but in the present context they may show less familiar aspects. They come out of the centres of two movements in English culture, Renaissance humanism and Romanticism, which are stages of major importance on our critical path. Defence implies attack: Sidney’s essay is usually contrasted with the kind of antipoetic statement often called “Puritan,” such as Gosson’s School of Abuse (although technically Gosson was less of a Puritan than Sidney),47 and Shelley takes off from his friend Peacock’s satire, The Four Ages of Poetry. Attacks on poetry in their turn can tell us a good deal about the social anxieties which work against the poet in every age. Man lives, we remarked, in two worlds. There is the world he is actually in, the world of nature or his objective environment, and there is the civilization he is trying to build or maintain out of his environment, a world rooted in the conception of art, as the environment is rooted in the conception of nature. For the objective world he develops a logical language of fact, reason, description, and verification: for the potentially

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created world he develops a mythical language of hope, desire, belief, anxiety, polemic, fantasy, and construction. This kind of language is always related in some way or other to an ideal form of civilization. For most people today the ideal form is associated with the future, as the world we want to live in; in previous ages it was usually associated with the past or a timeless period before history began. In its “pure” form, concern is expressed by an unquestioning belief that cares little for evidence or reason, or, at least, does not depend on them. But as the sense of the importance of truth of correspondence makes itself felt, concern must meet and reckon with this other aspect of the mind’s sense of reality. Its first attempt to do so is to construct a deductive synthesis of experience, in which the principles of concern form the major premises and the facts of experience are supposed to be logically related to them. This is the tendency in medieval philosophy which reached its culmination in Thomism. Underlying it was a gigantic effort to show that Christianity possessed the truth of correspondence as well as the truth of revelation, and was true by the tests of reason and historical evidence. Christian faith, or central body of articulated concern, thus became the basis for the deductive rational structure provided by theology, from which in turn principles of philosophy, and eventually science, were, at least ideally, to be deduced. Marxism is still struggling with a similar deductive scholasticism, maintaining that its principles are “scientific,” that is, valid major premises of science. In the democracies, too, a strong hankering for an encyclopedic synthesis of thought, which would have a solidly established body of scientific facts and laws as its foundation and the premises of belief and hope as its superstructure, keeps recurring in every generation. After Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, such ambitions gave a strongly cosmological slant to nineteenth-century philosophy, when constructing encyclopedic “systems,” or verbal cathedrals of knowledge and faith, was so often regarded as philosophy’s primary task. It may be significant that really thoroughgoing efforts to “reconcile” the two kinds of reality turn out to be cannibalistic ones: in Hegel knowledge ultimately swallows faith, as in the Summa contra Gentiles faith ultimately swallows knowledge. Still, the medieval Christian mythical framework was comprehensive enough to contain what we have called the “liberal opposition” of Classical-based learning and culture—which, of course, was not an opposition in the sense of a different group of people holding a different

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myth of concern. By the sixteenth century the deductive synthesis, though still there, existed in what Wallace Stevens calls ghostlier demarcations.48 It had been weakened by the attacks on one of its main supports, the real universal, in nominalist philosophy, and was still further weakened, in England, by the Protestant Reformation, the general tendency of Protestantism being to separate the areas of faith and knowledge. In this situation the “liberal opposition,” aided by the spread of higher education among the laity, the invention of the printing press, and the increase of centralized authority in nations and city states, consolidated into humanism, and took on a central role in Renaissance society. Humanism may be seen, from our present point of view, as a stage in the accommodation of a society’s literary culture to a dominant myth of concern. Historically, it was the inevitable second stage after the breakdown of the effort at deductive synthesis. The humanists were mainly, to use a somewhat worn phrase, “Christian humanists”: they would have thought it absurd to try to go back to paganism or polytheism, and to construct a new myth of concern would have destroyed the whole idea of humanism. For all the interest that the humanists took in Biblical and theological scholarship, and for all the broad range of their practical interests, the idea of humanism is of something different from, and complementary to, the religious and political concerns of their age. For many centuries the mental habits of a writing culture had got sufficiently in the ascendant for the language of prose and reason to be regarded as the primary verbal expression of reality. It was accepted that no poet can be regarded as having, in religion, the kind of authority that the theologian has; and in history and morals too the language of poetry falls short of the language of what is considered literal truth. Once a writing culture has been established, the central oral figure in it becomes the orator. Humanism took over the central conceptions of the oratorical culture of Augustan Rome, including the conception of an encyclopedic learning acquired through a rhetorical training. The theory of this is set out in Cicero’s De Oratore, and its presence or assumed presence in Virgil was one of the things that gave him so legendary a reputation in the Middle and later ages. Augustan culture was contemporary with two other social developments, which for the historical perspective of humanism were definitive: the centralizing of temporal authority in the emperor and the beginning of Christianity. Naturally the humanists, like their medieval predecessors, assumed the connections between the infant empire and the infant

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church to be much closer than they were. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and the “Great Pan is dead” story in Plutarch49 were assumed to be Messianic prophecies; Seneca was believed to be a correspondent of St. Paul; Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a kind of pagan Bible, stretching as it does from creation and flood stories to visions of the end of nature. In Ovid, Virgil, Horace, and elsewhere there are moods haunted by a sense of a fateful change in human affairs, which Yeats expresses in the phrase “Full Moon in March,” a phrase linking the murder of Caesar and the Resurrection,50 and such moods were naturally associated with the birth of Christ by Christian ages. Thus the period of Augustus had something about it of a secular as well as a sacred incarnation. As such it had a particular significance for a movement which claimed neither the spiritual authority of Christianity nor the temporal power of prince or emperor, but attempted to establish a kind of elite balancing group in society, enabling the scholarship and culture of that society to develop under the protection of the two authorities. Christianity had the truth, but it did not have style: St. Paul wrote inferior Greek, and patristic Latin was not to be compared to Cicero. The prince had power, and theoretically he was the most important person to be given the encyclopedic orator’s training, hence such treatises as Erasmus’s Institute of a Christian Prince or Elyot’s The Governour, for which the great Classical prototype was Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the ideal education of the ideal prince. But in practice the prince was more likely to be a man of will, and the humanist’s social function, in practice, was closer to that of the servant and adviser of the prince, the courtier whose education is outlined in Castiglione. In medieval literature we often meet the conception of the chivalric ring, the group of knights united by some circular symbol like the Garter or the Round Table, who are dedicated to the service of the prince and to the social ideals of the church. The theme of the chivalric ring, which usually dissolves in some tragic or elegiac conclusion, has run through English literature from the comitatus groups in the earliest heroic poetry to Tennyson—in fact to T.H. White and Tolkien. In some respects the humanists formed a civilian and intellectual counterpart to the chivalric ring, and the connection between them is the theme of the greatest English poem of Renaissance humanism, Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Here a group of knights go through the regular chivalric routines of rescuing maidens and killing dragons and giants, but all this activity really symbolizes the ideal cultural and religious education of the ideal Christian and Renaissance prince.

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The humanist was typically scholar and critic rather than poet, and humanism saw itself as establishing a social framework for the poet as well as suggesting to him the conventions and norms of his expression. Not only were there major and minor poets, there were major and minor genres as well, the major genres, epic in particular, having the particular social role of dealing with ruling-class figures and of requiring from the poet something of the encyclopedic range of learning that Homer and Virgil were assumed to have possessed before him. This learning was to be derived from the whole body of Classical literature, as well as Christian literature, and for the humanist Greek and Latin authors were authoritative in all branches of learning, Vitruvius in architecture and Galen in medicine no less than Cicero and Virgil in literature. The printing press, by enabling scholars to establish an editio princeps and lift a Classical text out of the corrupting stream of time with all its hazards of scribal errors and manuscripts neglected by ignorance, had a central role in dramatizing this sense of authority and intellectual community. Thus it represents a higher stage in the creation of a spatial focus for a community which we have seen to be inherent in all forms of writing. The literary genres of humanism itself, which were those of Cicero, and before him of Plato, represent the kind of development of concerned prose that we should expect from its cultural situation. They include the formal epistle, where the writer speaks as one member of a dedicated community to another, the rhetorical defence of which Sidney’s apology is an example, the dialogue with a symposium setting, and the educational treatise, sometimes taking the form of a Utopia, in imitation of Plato’s Republic and the parallel treatise of Cicero from which the Somnium Scipionis comes. All of these are genres expressing the sense of the social importance of literary education. Encyclopedic learning is not specialized learning: versatility is a humanist ideal, because only through versatility can one keep a sense of social perspective, seeing the whole range and scope of a community’s culture. As a scholar, the humanist might be specialized to the degree of Browning’s grammarian, but, like him, he related his specialization to a comprehensive social vision.51 This vision was never far from that of the amateur, who is the courtly ideal of Castiglione, and whose primary social function is to be a patron and connoisseur of the arts. For Castiglione the courtly amateur does everything with an ease and a lightness (sprezzatura) that suggests play, which in its turn suggests the social rank of the gentleman, the person freed, not from social responsibility, but from the obligations of labour.52

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The humanist tended to distrust technical language, of the kind that cannot be digested into cultivated conversation, because it suggested the laborious or professional activities of a lower social rank. This prejudice was carried to the point of making the name of the great analytical genius Duns Scotus, with his technical philosophical vocabulary, into a synonym of stupidity.53 The humanist’s training was rhetorical, and rhetoric had developed a formidable jargon of its own, but nevertheless gentlemen do not use “inkhorn terms” in their conversation or writing. This social attitude is reflected in the fact that the great philosophers of the next two centuries were, in the strict sense, amateurs, unconnected with the profession of the “schoolmen.” “Ye know not,” said Roger Ascham, “what hurt ye do to learning, that care not for words, but for matter, and so make a divorce betwixt the tongue and the heart. For mark all ages . . . and ye shall surely find that, when apt and good words began to be neglected . . . then also began ill deeds to spring, strange manners to oppress good orders, new and fond opinions to strive with old and true doctrine, first in Philosophy, and after in Religion.”54 We notice the strength of what we have called the anxiety of continuity in this passage, which is typical of humanism; but the same topos is being repeated in the next century by Milton in a more revolutionary context: “For let the words of a country be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare but, by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long prepared for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, any state, did not flourish moderately at least as long as liking and care for its own language lasted.” Ascham indicates how humanism thought of itself as providing the complement to social authority. Real authority comes from church and state, who implement the spiritual and secular forms of what we have been calling the myth of concern. Precise, disciplined, elegant speech is the manifestation, or audible presence, of this order and stability in society. The order of the community and the order of communication are connected, not magically, but as reality and appearance. Humanism was not scientific nor particularly sympathetic to the new science: it was a cult of authority, precisely because it was a literary movement, revolving around its classics rather than developing and advancing in time, as science does. And yet, as we see in Milton, this deeply conservative attitude

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of humanism, its devotion to order and discipline, is not necessarily a part of an authoritarian view of society. Humanism provides a social situation for the poet in a writing and reasoning culture in which the poet, like Cressida, deserts the defending camp for the besieging one. That is, instead of being the teacher of the myth of concern, he becomes a part of the myth of freedom, deeply indebted to Classical culture, which he uses as a kind of liberal and imaginative counterpoint against a Christian theme. He has, of course, little connection with anything that we put at the basis of the myth of freedom, the nonmythical elements of logic, evidence, and verification that underlie philosophy and the sciences. He does, however, represent something of the spirit of “ancient liberty” that Milton always associates with Classical literature in its best periods. In the oratorical tradition there had always been an association with political freedom, beginning with Demosthenes and his struggle against Macedonian imperialism. Even Cicero, for all his political ineptness, carried something of this aura, some of which rubbed off on his very un-oratorical contemporary Cato. I am setting Sidney’s defence in the context of the humanist movement because his view of poetry is so centrally typical of it. As soon as we ask why a defence of poetry should be needed, we are carried into the centre of the humanist situation. Many people in Sidney’s day and later were obsessed with the values of a writing culture. Religion for most of them was derived from a book; it was spiritually dangerous to be illiterate, yet the religion had to be understood from the book in the plainest prose terms. Hence the attitude of such pamphleteers as Gosson, who demanded to know why Plato was not right, and why the poets with their outworn modes of thought and their hankering for the fabulous should still have a claim on our attention.55 Gosson is something of a straw man in Sidney, if he is there at all, and the sense of social threat is not very oppressive. Nevertheless there is something in Sidney, as in most of his contemporaries, of a feeling that the poet has been dispossessed from a greater heritage. In a distant past, even before Homer, a period associated with such legendary names as Musaeus, Linus, and Orpheus, along with Zoroaster in religion and Hermes Trismegistus in philosophy, the poet, we are so often told in Renaissance criticism, was the lawgiver of society, the founder of civilization. This refers, as noted previously, to the social conditions of an oral or preliterate culture, in which the professional poet is, if not exactly a lawgiver, at least an educator, the man who knows because he remembers.

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The encyclopedic drive in a myth of concern was also sensed by Elizabethan critics as something that was in or immediately behind Homer, and they had the same kind of sentimental admiration for it that many people in our day have had for the cultural synthesis of the Middle Ages—a comparison which, as we have seen, is not a random one. Sidney stresses such themes less than many of his contemporaries—Chapman, for example—but still they are there, attached to the common Renaissance assumption that in all human achievements the greatest are the earliest. The poet is now in a subordinate social role and must come to terms with it, even to the point of writing a defence of poetry. But he can never forget the glamour of his ancient heritage, the days when divine inspiration descended on him with the raptus of authentic prophecy. “Est deus in nobis,” said Ovid.56 This “deus” is not a god any more, only a psychological and subjective power, but it is still numinous, still speaks with a mysterious and awful authority, and is still dangerous to trifle with. The general critical position of Sidney is contained within the same Christian framework of assumptions as that of the detractors of poetry. In a writing culture the norms of meaning are established by the nonliterary writers: it is the discursive prose writers who really mean what they say, and align their words accurately with the facts or propositions they are conveying. Compared with them, the poet’s meaning is indirect, or ironic, as we should say now. The apologist for poetry has first of all to consider the question, Is poetry genuinely educational? For Sidney, as for his contemporaries generally, the aim of education, in the broadest sense, is the reform of the will, which is born in sin and headed the wrong way. Truth, by itself, cannot turn the will, but poetry in alliance with truth, using the vividness and the emotional resonance peculiar to it, may move the feelings to align themselves with the intelligence, and so help to get the will moving. The function of poetry, then, is to provide a rhetorical analogue to concerned truth. Rhetoric, said Aristotle, is the antistrophos, the answering chorus, of truth [Rhetoric, 1354a], and whatever genuine social function the poet has depends on the consonance between his rhetoric and the rational disciplines, with their more exact relation to reality. Thus the conception of poetry in Sidney is an application of the general humanist view of disciplined speech as the manifestation or audible presence of social authority. In its relation to secular concern, more particularly to military courage, we discover that poetry is, not a corrupter

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of courage, but “the companion of camps.”57 In relation to Christian concern, poetry leads us out of the lower level of nature, the ordinary physical world which is essentially alien to man, to the upper level of genuinely human nature, where man ought to be and originally was, the level symbolized in myths of Paradise and a Golden Age. Hence Sidney says that nature’s world is brazen, and that only the poets give us a golden one, and also that poetry develops a “second nature” by relating itself to an ideal world where the distinction between art and nature has ceased to exist [156–7]. The next question to meet is the one raised by the attack on poetry as dealing only with the untrue or the fabulous. Here Sidney follows the line of argument which had descended from Aristotle, that the truthful statement is the specific and particular statement. There are two kinds of such statements: the historical or factual, and the predicated or conceptual: the former are examples or instances, the latter principles or precepts. Poetry withdraws from particular statements: the poet, Sidney says, never affirms or denies [184]. He produces his own distinctive kind of statement, which combines the example of the historian with the precept of the moral philosopher. As compared with the historian, the poet gives us not the existential but the recurring or essential event; as compared with the moralist, he tells us not the essential but the existential truth, the kind of truth that can only be presented through illustration or parable. What is most distinctive about poetry is the poet’s power of illustration, a power which is partly an ability to popularize and make more accessible the truths of revelation and reason. Here is the reason for the importance, for humanist critics, of the tag ut pictura poesis. Poetry is a speaking picture, presenting vividly and without pedantry or jargon what it most concerns us to understand. There is thus no inconsistency in saying, on the one hand, that the poet popularizes the rational disciplines, sugar-coats the pill, provides instruction for the simple, and on the other hand that great poetry is a treasure trove of esoteric wisdom which poets hid in parables “lest by profane wits it should be abused” [206], as Sidney says. Both these views of poetry can be understood through the same axiom of ut pictura poesis, which assumes that only the simple and the vivid can be genuinely profound. Pedantry and jargon, the languages of specialized learning, produce obscurity, but the profundity of obscurity is not genuine. We see from this how the documentary or “background” interests of later criticism have originated. The way to make sense of the study of

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poetry, in this view, is to relate it to the two neighbouring disciplines that make literal statements and actually tell the truth and give the facts. We are back at the theoretical muddle referred to earlier, where we understand a poem “literally” through the kind of meaning which it shares with nonliterary writing. The axiom ut pictura poesis, however, clearly implies that the poem really means, not what it says, but what it illustrates or shows forth. Sidney himself is not fully conscious of this implication, which is of immense importance for critical theory, but it agrees with the drift of his argument. What the poet says is of limited importance: whatever it is, other forms of verbal expression say it in a way that comes closer to “literal” truth. The poet in Sidney’s day was, of course, greatly prized for his capacity to make sententious statements, of the kind that readers and schoolboys copied out in their commonplace books. But the more admirable the sentence, the more it is an echo of what we already know in a different way. Gerard Manley Hopkins draws a distinction between a poet’s “overthought,” or explicit meaning, and his “underthought,” or texture of images and metaphors.58 But a poet’s underthought, his metaphorical or pictured meaning, is clearly his real thought, and in a writing culture it to some degree even separates itself from the explicit statement. When we look at Shakespeare, we realize that Elizabethan culture is still very largely oral, and that the existence of a popular poetic theatre is evidence of the fact. In Shakespeare we see a good deal of the poet’s original oral educating function still going on, most obviously in the histories. Shakespeare also shows the identification with the audience’s attitude that the oral poet has. On the level of explicit statement, or what the play appears to be saying, he seems willing to accept the assumption, or implication, that Henry V was a glorious conqueror and Joan of Arc a wicked witch, that Shylock is typical of Jews and Judaism, that peasants are to be seen through the eyes of the gentry, that the recognized sovereign is the Lord’s anointed and can cure diseases in virtue of being so, and many other things that the modern critic passes over in embarrassed silence. With Shakespeare we are still many centuries removed from T.S. Eliot’s comparison of the explicit meaning of a poem to a piece of meat that a burglar throws to a watchdog to keep him quiet.59 But there is clearly something in the uncritical postulates of Shakespeare that has to do with soothing popular anxieties and keeping a vigilant and by no means unintelligent censorship from getting stirred up. I am not of course speaking of a conscious policy on Shakespeare’s

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part: I am merely applying to him a central critical principle. Questionable or dated social attitudes, as expressed in what appears to be the surface meaning, do not affect the real meaning of poetry, which is conveyed through a structure of imagery and action. When we examine the imagery of Henry V, and listen carefully to the moods and overtones which that imagery suggests, we realize that the play is very far from expressing the simple-minded patriotism that it appears to be expressing. Of course we do not ignore or set aside the explicit meaning (unless what we are reading happens to be an ironic allegory), but if we give primary importance to the primary meaning, the explicit meaning will take on a very different relation to it. Two corollaries are important here. One is, that there can be no definitive rendering of the real poetic meaning: it cannot, like the explicit meaning, be grasped in a way that makes it possible for us to say that this is what Shakespeare really meant, or had in mind, or was trying to say, or whatever such silly phrase we use. Grasping the real meaning of poetry gives us an orbit or circumference of meaning, within which there is still some latitude for varieties of interpretation and emphasis, both in commentary and, with a play, in performance. The other relates to the question whether a translation should be literal or faithful merely to the general spirit. This is not an either–or question at all: a translation should be as literal a rendering as possible of the metaphorical structure of the original, as it is in all the best translations of the humanist period, from Wyatt’s paraphrases of Petrarch to the 1611 Bible. Ever since Plato the question has been raised, In what sense does the poet know what he is talking about? The poet seems to have some educational function without being himself necessarily an educator: he knows what he is doing, certainly what he is saying, but qua poet can say it only in the form of his poem. After poetic meaning becomes more obviously, with the rise of writing, what is imaged or shown forth rather than what is said, the educational aspect of the poet’s function clearly has to be taken over by someone else. In oral days the poet had, for interpreter, only the rhapsode, who, as Socrates demonstrates in the Ion, really knows nothing at all; with the coming of more sequential forms of thinking the critic appears as the poet’s social complement. The critic was, from ancient times to the Renaissance, related to an elite community of scholars, orators, and intellectuals concerned with words; but it was particularly Renaissance humanism that established the critic as the judge of the poet. From the humanist point of view the

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critic was in a superior position to the poet, not personally or socially, but as the spokesman for the society which established the norms to which the poet conformed. This society was primarily the humanist elite, but the humanist elite in its turn spoke for and interpreted the norms of society as a whole. When Addison says, in Spectator 29, that the arts “are to deduce their Laws and Rules from the general Sense and Taste of Mankind, and not from the Principles of those Arts themselves; or in other Words, the Taste is not to conform to the Art, but the Art to the Taste,” he is talking stark nonsense from the modern critic’s point of view.60 But he speaks for a humanistic society that was confident of its standards, believed in a progressive refinement of manners, and felt that it was entitled to represent the general sense and taste of mankind. In Sidney’s day humanism had little interest in science, with its appeal to experience and verification, but in the next century the atmosphere changed. One of the speakers in Dryden’s Essay on Dramatic Poesy says, “If natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection.”61 This comment indicates a growing rapprochement between humanism and science, when the gentleman amateur had begun to develop an interest in the study of nature. Hence the humanist’s preoccupation with Classical literature began to include a more philosophical and scientific spirit as well. The effect of such expanded Classicism on literature was to encourage a cult of good sense, a coherent and articulate literary community, and an assimilation of culture and taste: in short the eighteenth-century culture which we still instinctively call “Augustan.” This consolidated Classicism was mainly, except for some of the Deists, still thought of as analogous and complementary to Christianity, and the influence of Newton reinforced this attitude. Later on, in Shelley and several of the German Romantics, we find the suggestion that the real myth of concern in Western culture is Classical rather than Christian in origin. This suggestion recurs in the restatement of the traditional humanist position in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. I am writing in the centenary year of that book (1969), and nobody can be writing on such a subject as mine in this year without being aware that the confrontation of culture and anarchy has taken a very different form from the one that Arnold envisaged. According to Arnold, the “Hebraic” revolutionary myth of concern was losing its impetus, running into the desert sands of bourgeois morality. Other revolutionary movements were beginning to take shape. One

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was a cult of “doing as one likes,” the other a working-class movement that was making ominous noises after the passing of the Second Reform Bill. Both represented anarchy, and the remedy for them was “culture,” for Arnold a myth of concern which held the essence of everything good in conservative, liberal, and radical values. It was conservative because it was aware of and accepted its tradition, and because it was a source of social authority. It was liberal because it was held, not through faith or dogma, but through reason and imagination, incorporating a sense of beauty and the virtues of the liberal attitude, including tolerance and suspended judgment. Consequently the real source of its tradition was Hellenic rather than Hebraic. It was radical because its authority was ultimately a spiritual authority, and so its long-run influence was an equalizing one, dissolving the hierarchy of classes by subordinating class conflict to a wider conception of social concern. “Culture,” by articulating right reason and developing the best self, creates within society an inner elect group which mediates the ideals of society. The standards of such a group ought to provide, Arnold feels, what the Academy in France sought to provide, without altogether succeeding, a criterion against which not simply literature, but social attitudes in general, may be measured. Such a culture liberalizes society by relaxing the anxieties of ignorant or bigoted concern. For it, moral and aesthetic standards are inseparable, united in the conception of good taste. Hence in the light of the cultured society, such behaviour as the Catholic-baiting among nineteenth-century British Protestants can be seen to be, not simply wrong, but silly and vulgar as well. The impossibility of separating moral and aesthetic criteria indicates the importance of the critical function in society. Arnold’s argument gives a genuine social dimension to the study and teaching of the humanities, and does not, like Newman’s, insist that we sell out to a concerned interest, such as the Christian church. But when he comes to describe the community of culture, Arnold begins to sound less convincing, partly through his own honesty in recognizing that, while culture is at the centre of society, those who are at the centre with it are an isolated, in fact an alienated, group. With one hand Arnold writes of sweetness and light and of the one thing needful, which culture can provide; with the other he writes Dover Beach and The Scholar Gypsy, imaginative evidence that the happy few at the centre have become something more like a saving remnant. Humanist education in the Renaissance was closely geared to social

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position: the students belonged mainly to the ascendant class, and were educated in the light of their future responsibilities, at least in theory. Victorian humanism, too, was inseparable from the conception of the “gentleman,” who was emancipated from “working,” in the class-conscious sense of that word. In nineteenth-century defences of Classical education, including Arnold’s, the social context of education presents an issue that is often not squarely faced. To say that the Classics are the source of much of Western culture, and of nearly all the more liberal part of it, is one kind of statement; to say that the study of the Classics should be a compulsory curriculum for everyone in quest of higher education is another. The Classical monopoly of education disappeared, but its social framework survived in the compulsory education which was growing up in Arnold’s time, and which tended to standardize a course of study. The result was to carry over the two-tiered education, with an upper liberal level for gentlemen and a lower vocational one for others, into a society which was trying to outgrow such stereotypes. In our day it has become accepted that everybody who has a genuine relation to society is a worker, consequently the term “gentleman” is no longer a socially functional term. The conception “gentleman’s education,” with which humanism was so long bound up, is no longer functional either. The tendency of democracy, ideally, is not so much to abolish an elite as to decentralize elites. In a society where everyone was at work, everybody would belong to an elite of some kind; and the survival of the older elitism in the notion that those who stay longest in school and go on to university get the “best” kind of education is obviously a considerable social nuisance. It is even more obvious that in the century since Arnold’s book, the humanist society, which barely existed even then, has entirely disappeared. Arnold has had many successors who have followed him in his moral and judicial process of critical evaluation without noticing this fact. There are students of the humanities in universities and elsewhere, but that is not the same thing as a community of humanists. The mediating society which provides the norms for judging and evaluating literature has gone, and consequently each judicial critic can speak only for himself, though a merciful provision of nature may conceal from him the extent of his self-exposure. He may try to believe that his norms and values still exist in some kind of Platonic heaven, but even if they did they would not carry much authority. Today each intellectual is, socially speaking, in the position of Archimedes in Syracuse, who could perhaps move the world if he were standing in a

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different position, but, being where he is, is able to continue his work only so long as he is unnoticed by the murderous louts of Rome. In tracing the development of the myths of concern and freedom, we come in humanism to a point at which they seem to interchange their original characteristics. The myth of concern takes on a reasoning aspect, claiming the support of logic and historical evidence; the myth of freedom becomes literary and imaginative, as the poet, excluded from primary authority in the myth of concern, finds his social function in a complementary activity, which liberalizes concern but also (apart from some tension here and there) reinforces it. The Romantic movement, as we shall see, brought in a quite different conception of the poet’s role, but Marxism, in this century, has returned to the view of Sidney. Its program for the arts is essentially protest before revolution, panegyric afterwards: once the revolution has been established, the artist’s duty is to produce what we called in connection with Sidney a rhetorical analogue to Marxism, convincing the emotions and imagination of the validity of the socialist ideals which are more literally set out in Marxist philosophy and economics. Many of the best Russian writers do fall within this orbit, but the prescriptions of “socialist realism” have been notoriously incapable of coming to terms with much in modern art which is genuinely revolutionary in form, and not merely in content. The literary imagination is clearly the nucleus of the undeveloped myth of freedom in Soviet society. Earlier in this discussion we quoted Ascham and Milton on the central belief of humanism in the social importance of disciplined speech. For Ascham, devoted to the principles of the Elizabethan settlement, good style, like law, was a manifestation of the order and security which church and state gave to society. Ascham may represent for us here all the conservative and usually Classically minded writers who need to feel, behind them, the reality of the spiritual and temporal authority which their writing manifests. Such writers find their social function in illuminating that authority for the social imagination. Dryden was, however, perhaps the last major writer who felt this reality in both spheres; after him, social authority becomes increasingly associated with an idealized conservatism or some intellectual construct like a “cultural tradition.” A good deal of literature after the Romantic movement reflects the conception of the writer’s having assumed a spiritual authority by default, so to speak. Poetry, in particular, acquires the oracular, overdetermined emotional resonance of something speaking authoritatively to

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an age that has most of its attention directed elsewhere. Romantic poetry, in Keats and Coleridge, preserves the sense of a charm or spell woven around some guarded place, and a corresponding sense of ritual separation from its audience. The later movement associated with Eliot, Pound, Hulme, and Wyndham Lewis thought of itself as revolting against this attitude, but for the most part merely intensified it. Eliot followed a number of French predecessors in holding that if a tradition of authority had gone, it would have to be re-established before poetry could function properly, and in postulating “royalism” as a temporal counterpart to an established church. In others, including Mallarmé, Rilke, and perhaps Flaubert, there is rather a sense of the artist as a secular and initiating priest of a cultural tradition which preserves the lost authority of church and state in an ideal form. Wyndham Lewis, ridiculing what he called the “dithyrambic spectator,” the member of the audience bumptious enough to imagine that his presence made any difference to the creative process, speaks from a similar position.62 In him and in many others, this reliance on an ideal order led to the exalting of archaic art, which the distance in time had tended to make inscrutably authoritative. The idealizing of the primitive suggests a certain affinity between modern art and modern religion: both become parts of a traditional myth of concern surviving as a kind of palladium or cultural monument, supported by a tolerance, even a respect, which is really based on indifference. The French Impressionists, excluded from the Academy, set up their own “salon des refusés,” but it is difficult even to imagine what sort of works of art would go into a salon des refusés today. Such tolerance, however, can hardly be supposed to mean that the authority of the arts has been generally accepted. For Milton, on the other hand, so deeply suspicious of constituted authority in both church and state, the implications of the humanist attitude are very different. For him the relation of reality and appearance is reversed: it is constituted authority that is the outward manifestation of the real source of authority in society. The real source is the prophetic authority revealed in the inspired writer, which is derived from the Word of God. The impact of the Word of God on society, being a message from an infinite mind to a finite one, is always subversive and revolutionary. In Milton’s view, the prophetic writer has recovered the poet’s original role of teaching the myth of concern; and because of the revolutionary impact of the prophetic tradition, the message of concern is identical with the message of freedom. Liberty is what the will of God

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intends for man, but it is not anything that man naturally wants, his nature being perverted. What man naturally wants is either mastery or conformity to custom and to what we have been calling the anxiety of continuity. The prophetic writer is not just any good or even great writer, but the elect writer, whose devotion to his craft has extended to a dedication of himself as a prophet of God, and whose dedication has been accepted. This conception of the prophetic poet as the medium of both the concern and the freedom of society is worked out in a Christian, and more particularly a Protestant, context by Milton, but its tradition is carried on outside that context by Shelley and others, and we shall have to examine it in the next section. IV As literature becomes assimilated to the mental habits of a writing culture, it comes to be thought of as an ornament of leisure, a secondary product of an advanced civilization. In the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates asserts that the poet’s version of reality is inferior, not merely to the philosopher’s, but to the artisan’s or craftsman’s as well. The artisan makes what is, within the limits of his reality, a real bed; the painter has only the shadow of a bed. Most devaluations of poetry ever since, whether Platonic, Puritan, Marxist, or Philistine, have been attached to some version of a work ethic which makes it a secondary or leisure-time activity; and when poetry has been socially accepted, it is normally accepted on the same assumptions, more positively regarded. This seems a curious conception of poetry in view of its original social role. In a technologically simple society preoccupied with the means of survival, like that of the Eskimos, poetry appears to be a primary need rather than a superfluous refinement. But increasingly, as Western culture became more complex, works of art came to be thought of as a series of objects to be enjoyed and appreciated by a liberalized leisure class. A necessary part of this view of art is a decline of the sense of convention and, in poetry, of a community of words. The poet no longer has a communal “word-hoard,” and only in the most subtle and indirect way is he thought of as possessing and retelling the essential myths of the society he lives in. The individual poem or novel comes rather to represent a unique or sealed-in experience, and a law of copyright assimilates literature to private property. Literature could not go as far in this direc-

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tion as painting, where a picture acquires a purchaser or sole owner, but it went as far as it could. Kierkegaard, in contrasting Christian concern with the liberal and speculative attitude of his day, was so impressed by the similarity of the latter to the place of the arts in society that he called it the “aesthetic” attitude, and symbolized it by Mozart’s Don Giovanni, more particularly by the catalogue of mistresses in that opera, the picture of the universal lover surrounded by a mass of attractive objects.63 But as it became more “aesthetic,” poetry began to be curtailed of some of its traditional attributes. Sidney’s case for the poet depends on a body of generally accepted social ideas and values. As society becomes more confident about these values, the help of the poet in publicizing them becomes less essential. For Sidney, as we saw, the poet is potentially a religious teacher. In a later age, under Boileau’s influence, the mysteries of religion are thought to be too high for the poet’s ornamentation: on the other hand, the puerilities of heathen mythology are too low, and the poet should outgrow his hankering for them. Of the traditional qualities of oral poetry, the one that chiefly survives, in the age of Pope, is the sententious, the capacity to formulate “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”64 The high value set on this aspect of poetry continues well into Victorian times, partly because the sententious is a quality that assimilates poetry to prose. Otherwise, the elements that make Homer the cornerstone of our poetic tradition are precisely the elements that come to be most despised. Catalogues and lists and mnemonic verses of the “Thirty days hath September” type, quoted by Coleridge,65 are now regarded as poetry’s lowest achievement: the formulaic unit becomes the cliché; the reverence for convention, of doing things because this is the way they are done, gives place to a reverence for “originality.” The poet’s role of telling his society what his society should know also goes out of focus. The most intellectually tolerant of critics, studying the ideas or opinions of many major writers of the last century, is bound to be puzzled, even distressed, by the high proportion of freakish and obscurantist views he finds and the lack of contact they show with whatever the ideas are that actually do hold society together. In the twentieth century an important and significant writer may be reactionary or superstitious: the one thing apparently that he cannot be is a spokesman of ordinary social values. The popular poems of our day are usually poems of explicit statement, continuing the sententious tradition; but such poems seem as a rule to be out of touch with the real poetic idioms of

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their times. Recently, in an interviewing program on the Canadian radio, a Toronto hippie remarked that the world would have no problems left if everyone would only read Kipling’s If and live by it. One feels that in our day a remark of that kind could be attached only to a substandard poem. Those who express the ideas and symbols that hold society together are no longer the poets; they are rather men of action with a power over the sententious utterance operating mainly outside literature, who usually arise in a revolutionary situation. Such men of action include Jefferson, and later Lincoln, in America, and the great Marxist leaders, Lenin and Mao. The “thoughts” of Mao in particular seem to have succeeded in putting Marxism into the aphoristic prose of concern, something that Marx himself rarely attempted after the Communist Manifesto. The more completely the techniques of writing and the mental disciplines they create pervade a community, the more socially isolated poetry becomes. Prose grows into full maturity and in command of its characteristic powers, and thereby begins to break away from poetry, which has nothing like its capacity for conceptual expression. In proportion as scientific and philosophical pictures of the world develop, the starkly primitive nature of poetic thought stands out more clearly. One might have thought that, as the authority of science established itself, poets would become the heralds of science, as they had earlier been the heralds of religion. Many great poets, such as Dante, had in fact absorbed and used much of the science of their day. But after about Newton’s time it became increasingly clear that most really important poets were not going to make much more than a random and occasional use of imagery derived from science or technology. Many poets, naturally, have taken a keen and well-informed interest in science, but it is true even of Shelley and Goethe that their best poetry does not really absorb scientific conceptions and vocabularies and express them with full poetic resonance. Cosmological and speculative themes have been central to poetry throughout its history, but versified science and abstract conceptual language have always been eccentric to it. There have been many efforts on the part of poets to get intellectually with it: there was the “aureate” pseudo-philosophical diction of fifteenth-century allegories, the Newtonian poetry of the early eighteenth century, and the “futurist” movement in the early twentieth. But all these trends, whatever their merits, also demonstrated that poetry has a limited capacity for abstract and technical language. What had attracted earlier poets to the science contemporary with

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them was clearly not the science itself, but a certain schematic and mythical quality in it, associations of seven planets with seven metals and the like, which science itself eventually outgrew. This schematic quality, after about Newton’s time, survived increasingly in a curious intellectual underground inhabited by occultists, theosophists, mystagogues, and the like. Yet this was where many poets turned for intellectual support. Further, as we see in Yeats, such interests are so triumphantly vindicated in the poetry itself that it seems clear that they are connected with the actual language of poetry, and are not simply a removable obstacle to appreciating it. Truth of correspondence grows and progresses, and each age of science stands on the shoulders of its predecessors; poetry knows nothing of progress, only of recurrence. Whatever science may say, the poet’s world continues to be built out of a flat earth with a rising and setting sun, with four elements and an animate nature, the concrete world of emotions and sensations and fancies and transforming memories and dreams. Chemistry, with Boyle, becomes “sceptical” of the schematic constructs of alchemy, and eventually develops an elaborate periodical table of elements. But the four elements are still there in Dylan Thomas and the Eliot Quartets, and are likely to remain in poetry until that remote time in the future when chemistry, or whatever the appropriate science will then be, will have discovered that there are in fact four elements, and that their names are earth, air, fire, and water. Apparently poetry cannot really escape the fact that it was originally founded, not on the sense of an objective order of nature, but on the sense of social concern. Hence its approach to nature is primarily constructive and associational, and only becomes descriptive as a kind of tour de force. Poetry attempts to unite the physical environment to man through the most archaic of categories, the categories of analogy and identity, simile and metaphor, which the poet shares with the lunatic and the lover, and which are essentially the categories of magic. The figure of the magician, who, like Orpheus, can charm the trees by his song, is a figure of the poet as well. The function of magic, said Pico della Mirandola, is to “marry the world” (maritare mundum),66 and this naive anthropomorphic image remains close to the centre of all poetic metaphor. But magic, as soon as writing develops, drops out of line with the rest of thought. Many other factors, too, such as ambiguity, which is a structural principle of poetry but simply means bad writing in any conceptual context, point to the fundamental incongruity between poetic and logical outlooks. No matter what compromises or social arrange-

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ments may be made, poetry speaks the language of myth and not the language of reason or fact: further, it represents something primitive in society, not something that progressively improves or refines itself. In what sense is poetry “primitive”? Usually, the term is used historically, to mean something very early, or something that has survived unchanged from very early times. Certainly we have been talking so far about a historically primitive period, an oral culture in which the poet had a distinctive social role. And when the sense of the essential primitiveness of the poetic attitude revived in the eighteenth century, it is not surprising that it was accompanied, not only by the study of what were regarded as primitive literatures, such as Celtic and Norse, and not only by the revaluing of Homer as a primitive poet, but by actual pseudepigrapha like the Ossian and Rowley poems, contemporary writing ascribed to a remote past. The other side of this primitivism is the antipoetic myth of progress, which grew up around the same time, and after the publication of The Origin of Species took on some more sinister forms. The conception of evolution is of little use to a literary critic, for much the same reason that the measurement of a light year is of no use to a carpenter. Nothing justifies us in assuming that the contemporaries of the painters of Lascaux and Altamira were less intelligent than we are; our knowledge of literature does not go so far back; therefore criticism has to assume much the same standard of human ability for the entire history of literature. Unhappily, evolution came to be regarded as the scientific proof of a myth of progress, and the combination became, as has often been shown,67 part of an imperialist ideology, designed to rationalize the aggressiveness with which the white man assumed his burden. According to the myth of progress, history shows a progress from primitive to civilized states, which turns out on investigation to be a progress in technology, though it is often called science. If two cultures collide, the one that gets enslaved or exterminated is the primitive one. The victorious one was more progressive because it had better weapons and armies—that is, it was better organized socially for destruction. It can often, of course, also prove that its people are more intelligent, because it is in a position to set the intelligence tests according to its own cultural pattern. The doctrine of progress embraced both a complacent comparison of Western societies to those in other parts of the world, and a parallel comparison of ourselves to our ancestors, as a means, as T.S. Eliot puts it, of disowning the past.68 Hence during the latter part of the

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nineteenth century, in particular, it came to be widely assumed that the rational or commonsense view of history was one that made all human beings as stupid as possible as recently as possible. It even reached the point of faking a “Piltdown man” to dramatize man’s ascent from apelike savage to monkeying professor.69 This conception of the “primitive” as meaning “inferior to us” is less fashionable now that it has become more obvious that the triumph of civilization, from its point of view, is also the possession of the means of total destruction. But it has been and still remains a considerable force. I often turn to a favourite book of my childhood, H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, which is a fascinating source book for progressive mythology. There, the “outline of history” is appended to a brief introductory account of the evolution of life, on the assumption that history follows the same direction of development that evolution does. We read near the beginning of a Neanderthal man who was “quite a passable human being,” in spite of not being able to walk erect “as all living men do.”70 I understand that the evidence for this statement depended on a single specimen who was later proved to have had arthritis. The important thing for the present context is not the adequacy of the evidence, but the symmetry of a gradualist myth, in which somebody had to shamble before homo sapiens could walk upright. A gradualist myth of this form, in other words, needs inferior races, in order to lead up dramatically to the final epiphany of what Wells calls the “true men.” Wells not being a fool, he does not identify these inferior races with Mongol hordes or the accursed progeny of Ham, so he puts them at the beginning of history, where they are both out of harm’s way and are more convincingly related to their natural superiors, who have proved their superiority in two gradualist ways: by coming later and by still surviving. One principle involved here is that nearly all popular historical myths are, like the myth of Christianity itself, related to comic romance, the story of the successfully achieved quest. As G.K. Chesterton remarks, the Victorians assimilated history to a three-volume novel, with themselves as the happily ending third volume.71 Wells’s post-Victorian version of this romance myth emphasizes the sequential structure inherent in all romance. The successful quest in romance is usually the third attempt, and in the passage referred to we have the evolution of man summarized in three stages. I dwell on this point here because the progressive perspective on culture, which sees it as a hierarchy of values with our own cultural norms on top and something that looks vaguely shaggy and

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brutish below, goes back to a form of snobbery which is really of humanist origin, and of which such historical terms as “Dark Ages” and “Enlightenment” are fossilized remnants. The belief in the continuity and in the manifesting of an inner purpose in history, and in the movement of time generally, had been built into Western religious and political thought from the earliest times. It was still there in the culture of the nineteenth century, not only in its thought but in the long novels that rolled through complication and crisis to an inevitable conclusion, in the symphonies that took off from and returned to the same tonality, in the pictures that were moments of arrested movement, like the self-portraits of Van Gogh or the dancers of Degas. The bourgeois progressive myth, which assumed a benevolent future on the whole, began to break down under the shocks of twentieth-century disasters, and the inherent paradox in the myth, that progress is a good thing and yet leads to increasing stability,72 became more obvious. Marxism could interpret the disasters more plausibly as the death agonies of bourgeois culture, but while the two teleological myths continue to dominate much of our thinking, they do so increasingly out of habit rather than genuine conviction. The progress of science and technology produces an uneasy sense of a confused and rapid process of change that is just about to become clear: this sense has of course nothing to do with either science or technology, but is a social mirage, like flying saucers. There is, however, a very cruel deception concealed in both bourgeois and Marxist progressive myths. Both project an ideal into the future; both can rationalize the most atrocious present acts as leading to a future good; both promise the gratitude of some hazy posterity for very real sacrifices of life and happiness to be made now; both present us with leaders who have the abstracted gaze of the car driver, looking away from the immediate community into the imminent; both constantly tell us that we can really enjoy the blessings of our civilization only after some particular social hurdle is got over first. The “we can’t do this until” formula seems plausible until we start noticing that there is a series of hurdles, that the series never comes to an end, and that an earlier religious view was probably more realistic in assuming that the temporary hurdle could only be life itself, and could only be cleared by death. In the society of our day the unhappiest people are those who, in Sir Charles Snow’s phrase, have the future in their bones:73 who convince themselves, every night, that Godot will infallibly come tomorrow. The myth of gradualism comes increasingly to be a reflection of what

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suggested it in the first place: the fact that science advances and progresses, and that the technology which science makes possible affects human life in a progressive way. Whether this latter form of progress is always an improvement or not depends on what aspects of it are selected for argument. Few of us want to go back to medieval dentistry or plumbing, but as soon as the standard of improvement declines from the humanist “refinement of manners” to technological convenience, some ambivalence arises. Most gradualist myths assume a greater freedom in the future through the shifting of drudgery from men to machines; experience notices an increase of legislative restriction in response to every major technological change, such as the invention of the automobile, a steady pressing of life into the mechanistic patterns suggested by the machines themselves. Hence among the poets, in particular, a strong movement takes shape, of the type that Snow, in the essay glanced at above, calls “Luddite.”74 The Luddite tendency is really a protest against the mechanical dehumanizing of life, however, and it only looks reactionary when its opposite is assumed to be beneficent. This brings us to the kind of primitivism which is more directly characteristic of poetry, where the term “primitive” is used rather in a psychological sense. Man driving a car, writing at a desk, playing golf, or selling razor blades is civilized or technological man. Man admiring a sunset, quarrelling with his wife, demonstrating for peace, or committing suicide is primitive man. That is, he is man preoccupied with the existential situation of his own humanity, with the emotions, speculations, hopes, despairs, and desires which belong to that situation. Even in Sidney, in his appreciation of The Ballad of Chevy Chase75 or his famous phrase about the poet coming to us “with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner” [172], we are reminded that there is always something primitive about poetry in this sense. Poetry is continually bringing us back to the starting point, not necessarily of time, but of social attitude. And as society becomes more dominated by mechanical and technological features, and as a myth of progress tends increasingly to alienate the poet from his society, the poet’s conception of his social role changes accordingly. Humanism thought of the writer, at least the established writer, as socially an insider, near the centre of his society. The typical humanist strives to be sane, balanced, judicious; he is not a prophet nor an angry man, nor does he seek a transvaluation of values. He avoids both technical and colloquial language, and has a deep respect for conventions, both

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social and literary. As a professional rhetorician, his instinct is to save the face of the situations he encounters by finding the appropriate words for them. Grace and tact, for him, are not mere accomplishments: they are evidence of the social importance of a literary training. If we compare such an attitude with that of, say, Ezra Pound, we can see how far a creative and imaginative writer of our time has moved from the traditional humanist position. Pound is a Classical scholar with most of the humanist attitudes and interests, including the view that disciplined verbal utterance is essential to the welfare of society, a view he associates with Confucius. What is different is his place in society, by which I mean something more fundamental than the fact that he is an expatriate who has been accused of treason. The latter was also true of Dante, who was much closer to traditional humanism. It is rather that Pound’s admiration for Mussolini was a somewhat pathetic effort to adopt a viable social role, and the failure of the effort was not merely personal but was symbolic of a profound malaise in contemporary society. Other poets have tried to attach themselves to left-wing causes, often with equally futile or tragic results. The significant writer today is not necessarily an exile, expatriate, or martyr, though a disconcerting number of modern writers have had these roles, but he seldom seems to be geared to the social machinery, wherever he is. D.H. Lawrence is another writer whose opposition to the mechanizing of life has taken a psychologically primitive form. Much of Lawrence’s work, like much of Wordsworth’s, really belongs to the pastoral convention, and stresses a fundamental kinship between human and physical nature which a good many aspects of civilized life have betrayed or denied. As we can see in The Plumed Serpent and elsewhere, the psychologically primitive tends to lapse into the historically primitive, to a quixotic return to idealized earlier types of society, when visualized as a goal of social action. The regressive myth in Lawrence has much the relation to his pastoral vision that the “noble savage” myth has to Rousseau’s conception of a natural society. That is, it is separable from his real social vision—“in details I’m sure I’m wrong,” as he says in one of his letters.76 In his strange essays on the unconscious,77 again, we see how the force which the poet opposes to the enslaving of man by his own technology is the mythopoeic imagination, the associative and constructive creative power as it operates in words. Everywhere in Lawrence, as with most major writers of our time, we see that the poet cannot become the focus of a myth of freedom. Poets have always been the children of concern:

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they still show a liking for being converted to dogmatic creeds of all kinds, sometimes with the greatest contempt for the toleration they receive; they are a competitive and traditionally an irritable group; their genius is one of intensity rather than wisdom or serenity. The tradition associating the poet with an existential protest against the increased mechanizing of life goes back in English literature to Blake, with his “dark Satanic mills” and his vision of society as a machine . . . wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other.78

Blake links this growth of tyranny with Lockian philosophy and Newtonian science. For an attitude which begins in the detached study of nature or an objective world is very apt to end in a conviction that moral law is, or ought to be, as predictable as natural law. One can trace similar attitudes in Milton, what with the technological interests he gives to Satan, and his very ambiguous treatment of Galileo in Paradise Lost.79 Shelley, in the notes to Queen Mab, was later to say that the “miserable tale” which is the subject of Milton’s epic is inconsistent with knowledge of the stars,80 and it is not impossible that some feeling that Galileo represents an element in the human mind that might eventually blow up the whole story of Adam and Eve was close to Milton’s own consciousness. At any rate, Adam is certainly not encouraged to devote too much attention to the stars. Thus again the mythopoeic imagination is the force opposed by Milton and Blake to what they both, in different ways, consider Satanic. And just as Matthew Arnold is the last of the great humanists, so the turning point toward the present antitechnological attitude of the artist is marked by Ruskin, who also shows a profound interest in the cultural importance of mythology. For some time science has been regarded as something that might, if transmuted into “scientism,” or a similar form of progressive mythology, provide the basis for a new and very sinister myth of concern. A century ago Samuel Butler expressed a preference for Christianity over any such new scientism, without having much belief in either, on the ground that it would be a disaster to exchange an old and sophisticated myth, which had been deprived of its inquisitorial powers and been forced to come to terms with tolerance and suspended judgment, for a young and naively dogmatic one, which preferred the temporary excitement of change to considering the consequences of the change.81 The

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nightmare of a conspiracy which has retained one element of science, the element of predictability, and used it as a means of imposing a permanent tyranny in society is one of the commonest themes of recent fiction, especially science fiction, where sometimes (e.g., in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451) the cause of freedom is represented by the artist. This completes the interchange of functions that begins with humanism, where the elements of the myth of freedom are seen as perverted into a conspiracy to betray freedom, which only the artist is left to defend. The new recognition of the primitive and mythical nature of poetry is the essential point that Peacock seizes on in his brilliant satire The Four Ages of Poetry, perhaps the nearest to Vico of any piece of writing in English literature. Here Peacock pretends to accept the assumption that mankind progresses through reason to greater enlightenment, and shows on the basis of this assumption that poetry, like the less interesting types of religion, is committed to the values of an outworn past. In other words, he identifies the primitive element in poetry with the historically primitive, and builds his paradoxes on that. According to Peacock, poetry began in early times as “the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society.”82 The chief form of primitive poetry was, Peacock says, panegyric, which points to the identification of the poet with his community that we find in oral cultures. Poetry has its greatest flowering, or Golden Age, in the times immediately following, when habits of thought are still close to the primitive. But as civilization develops, Plato’s prophecy becomes fulfilled, and the poet becomes more and more of an atavistic survival. “A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.”83 With the rise of the Romantic movement, and its interest in the ballad and other forms of primitive verbal culture, its use of superstition and magic as poetic imagery, its withdrawal from urban culture and its tendency to seek its subjects in the simplest kinds of rural life, the historical cycle has run its course. The poet can hardly be a teacher of a society he does not even understand. “As to that small portion of our contemporary poetry . . . which, for want of a better name, may be called ethical, the most distinguished portion of it, consisting merely of querulous, egotistical rhapsodies, to express the writer’s high dissatisfaction with the world and every thing in it, serves only to confirm what has been said of

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the semi-barbarous character of poets, who from singing dithyrambics and ‘Io Triumphe,’ while society was savage, grow rabid, and out of their element, as it becomes polished and enlightened.”84 Peacock’s reference is to the Romantic poets, but the statement is hardly less true, within its ironic context, a century later. Shelley’s defence, though it looks as though it were ignoring Peacock’s thesis, actually provides a close and searching answer to it. The main point of the answer consists in the shifting of the emphasis from the historically to the psychologically primitive. Shelley begins by neatly inverting the hierarchy of values assumed in Sidney. Sidney is concerned to show that poetry is a genuine instrument of education, along with religion, morality, and law, but their claim to be educational is prior and unquestioned. Shelley puts all the discursive disciplines into an inferior group of “analytic” operations of reason.85 They are aggressive; they think of ideas as weapons; they seek the irrefutable argument, which keeps eluding them because all arguments are theses, and theses are half-truths implying their own opposites. Some of the discursive writers are defenders of the social status quo: not only do they fail to defend it, but they exasperate and embitter a society in which the rich get richer and the poor poorer. There are also liberal and radical discursive writers: they are on Shelley’s side and he approves of them, but being only the other half of the argumentative disciplines, the amount of good they can do is limited. The works of imagination, by contrast, cannot be refuted: poetry is the dialectic of love, which treats everything it encounters as another form of itself, and never attacks, only includes. Thus there appears in Shelley, as in his predecessors, the conception of a model world above the existing world. This model world for him, however, is associated not with the Christian unfallen world, nor even with the Classical Golden Age, in spite of some allusions to the latter in the Defence, but rather with the higher reason, Vernunft as distinct from Verstand, which so many Romantics identified with the imagination. This argument assumes, not only that the language of poetry is mythical, but that poetry, in its totality, is in fact society’s real myth of concern, and that the poet is still the teacher of that myth. He may be an “unacknowledged legislator” [80], but he is still the lawgiver of civilization, as in ancient times, even if nobody realizes it. There is a reality out there, a reality which is given and has in itself no moral significance, which the lower understanding studies, and there is the reality which does not exist to begin with, but is brought into being through a certain

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kind of creative activity. The metaphor of creation, if it is a metaphor, is not new with the Romantics, and most of the better Elizabethan critics understood what is meant by “creative” very well. But in Sidney’s day it was accepted that the models of creation were established by God: for Shelley, man makes his own civilization, and at the centre of man’s creation are the poets, whose work provides the models of human society. The myths of poetry embody and express man’s creation of his own culture, rather than his reception of it from a divine source. The imagination thus reverses the direction of the tragedy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the story of how man enslaves himself to what he creates. A religion, considered as a creed and as a social institution, is, for Shelley, a projected, and consequently a perverted, creation of the human imagination. The creative element in literature is therefore connected essentially with the recovery by the imagination of what it has projected. There is no question of a poem’s being a rhetorical analogue to historical or moral or religious truth, and the expression of poetry is no longer thought of as improved or developed by rhetorical training, which undercuts a central humanist conception. The poet’s authority is derived from the oracular power in his mind that was formerly ascribed to God’s revelation. This power is “that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man” [32]. It is clear from such a phrase that a new conception of rhetoric is forming, one which is based on intensity of emotional feeling rather than on craftsmanship and calculated effects, like the rhetoric of Spenser, or for that matter of Milton. Poetry, says Shelley, is “that to which all science must be referred” [70]. The mythical confronts the logical, assimilating it to the concerns of human existence. The act of imaginative recovery of what was formerly projected into religion thus separates the created reality of poetry from the presented reality of the objective world. Poetry “defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions” [74]. One implication here, which takes us beyond Shelley, is that there are two cultures in society, one the main area of the sciences, the other an area covered by something that we are here calling mythology. They coexist, but are not essentially interconnected. The more immediate implication is that the poetic and the revolutionary impulses are interdependent. The primitive nature of poetry does not make it reactionary: it makes it rather, as we saw, the human protest against the dehumanizing elements in society. Our perception of a given reality, the world out there, tends to become habitual, hence a pernicious

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mental habit develops of regarding the unchanging as the unchangeable, and of assimilating human life to a conception of predictable order. But poetry, Shelley says, “creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration” [75]. The imagination, which conceives the forms of human society, is the source of the power to change that society. Every great poem is a product of its time, and is consequently subject to the anxieties of its time. It is essential to Shelley’s argument that the authentic reading of poetry reads it by its imaginative “underthought” and not by its explicit conformity to contemporary prejudice, or what he calls, in connection with Calderón, “the rigidly-defined and everrepeated idealisms of a distorted superstition” [44]. If, for instance, we read Dante’s Inferno as a poem designed to increase our anxieties about a life of unending torment after death awaiting most of those who do not make an acceptable deal with the church, then, from Shelley’s normal point of view, writing such a poem would be an act of treachery to the human race far lower than anything done by Dante’s three traitors, Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot, all of whom must have acted from better motives. But, of course, we read the Inferno through its imagery and action, as a representation of the actual life of man, and as such it instantly becomes overwhelmingly relevant, not a malicious and superstitious nightmare. We quoted a critic earlier as calling Paradise Lost a monument to dead ideas.86 There are no dead ideas in literature; there are only tired readers. When the imagination is doing the reading, it operates in a counterhistorical direction—it redeems time, to use a phrase which is Shelleyan as well as Biblical, if in a different context— and literature for it exists totally in the present tense as a total form of verbal imagination. Shelley speaks of this total form as “that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world” [51]. The lightning flash of this image illuminates the contemporary critic’s pons asinorum, the bridge leading over to the other shore of criticism, where the social context and reference of criticism is to be found. We saw that the conception of the critic as the judge or evaluator of literature makes sense only in relation to a humanist elite society which operates within an established framework of concern. When this society disappears, the critic has to abandon this function, and see what his real function is. The argument of this section has led us to the view that literature represents the language of human concern. Literature is not itself a

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myth of concern, but it displays the imaginative possibilities of concern, the total range of verbal fictions and models and images and metaphors out of which all myths of concern are constructed. The modern critic is therefore a student of mythology, and his total subject embraces not merely literature, but the areas of concern which the mythical language of construction and belief enters and informs. These areas constitute the mythological subjects, and they include large parts of religion, philosophy, political theory, and the social sciences. Students of mythology often acquire the primitive qualities of mythopoeic poets. I have read a good many of them, from medieval writers through Bacon and Henry Reynolds and Warburton and Jacob Bryant and Ruskin to our own time, and I have noted two things in particular. First, a high proportion of them are cranks, even nuts, and, second, they often show a superstitious reverence for the “wisdom of the ancients.” These qualities are not hard to account for: their crankiness is partly the result of the intensely associative quality of myth, where almost any kind of analogy may be significant, and their respect for antiquity is connected with the fact that literature does not improve, but revolves around its classics. Even the greatest mythological explorers of the last generation, Frazer and Freud, are apt to sound dated as soon as they attempt to be rational. The modern critic’s approach, however, is, in the terms of my opening section, not allegorical but archetypal: he seeks not so much to explain a poem in terms of its external relation to history or philosophy, but to preserve its identity as a poem and see it in its total mythological context. Hence the critic qua critic is not himself concerned but detached. His criteria are those of the myth of freedom, depending on evidence and verification wherever they come into the picture. (The implication, that concern can be studied with detachment, we shall have to examine in the next section.) Once the critic is released from the preoccupations of a moral and evaluating approach, he is obliged to preserve a tolerance for every variety of poetic expression and a respect for every poet’s individuality. Such a phrase as “of course I don’t like this kind of poetry” can never be uttered by a serious critic. According to Shelley the poets of the past have been subject to the anxieties of their times, but there is also a way of reading poetry that redeems it from these anxieties and sees it in its context as a part of the total poem that the human imagination has made. The critic, however, is in the opposite cultural situation from the poet: he is subject to the anxieties of his time, and it is the poet’s relation to the poet’s own age that is

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the liberal element in the critic’s study. The critic dealing with Shakespeare, let us say, has to try to grasp the implications of the fact that Shakespeare still holds the stage and still communicates with the present age, for reasons that would have been unintelligible to most of Shakespeare’s contemporaries and quite probably to Shakespeare himself. At the same time Shakespeare lived in a specific age and addressed a specific audience which was remote from ours in cultural assumptions. The attempt to understand Shakespeare somewhat as his contemporaries may be supposed to have understood him brings us into contact with an alien culture and expands our own notions of cultural possibilities. (I am not assuming the elementary fallacy that all reactions in 1600 would be alike, only that all of them, like all of ours, revolved in the same cultural orbit.) Shakespeare’s relation to us is that of one more voice of concern, speaking with the authority of what Wallace Stevens calls the essential poem at the centre of things.87 It is not a contemporary voice, and it has the oracular quality of something definitively revealed in the past. The critic has to establish a pattern of continuity linking present culture with its heritage, and therefore with its inheritors, for a culture that is careless of its past has no defences against the future. As a historical critic he continues the humanist tradition, which owed so much of its liberal quality to the fact that it studied a vanished culture with detachment, uncommitted to its religious and political concern. As a contemporary he is a student of our own concern, and has to see how the past bears on it. The crux of the critic’s problem is in his attitude to what we have been calling the model world, and which we should now call the imaginative world. It is obvious that for Shelley, as for Milton before him, concern and freedom are the same thing, and the poet’s message proclaims both at once. But to the extent that the poet is a liberator, Shelley’s imaginative world becomes a potentially existent world, something to be brought into being by a certain kind of social action. As Shelley has no very clear notion of what such action should be, his message of freedom comes to us, not with the trumpet of a prophecy, but with the shrill, hectoring voice of anxiety, and in the didactic tone which he elsewhere calls, more shrewdly if less truthfully, his abhorrence.88 What is true of Shelley’s poetry is true mutatis mutandis of all poetry: it can express concerned protest, but for the elements of a myth of freedom we must look elsewhere. Literature is the embodiment of a language, not of belief or thought: it will say anything, and therefore in a sense it says nothing. It provides the technical resources for formulating the myths of concern, but does not

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itself formulate: for formulation we must turn from literature back to the myths of concern themselves. The humanist ideal offered a “liberal” education to those who were economically liberated: for it, the study of the greatest achievements of humanity provided the only genuine vision of freedom that society possessed. As the social focus of education slowly shifted from a community of gentlemen released from servile work to a community in which everyone is some kind of worker, the artist took on a new social importance as the model for the worker. Genuine work, which dignifies the worker by uniting him to his society, is distinguished from labour or drudgery, which humiliates because there is always a large element of exploitation in it. This distinction is developed out of Carlyle by Ruskin, in whom work is identified with creative act, with what expresses the identity of the worker. Parallel arguments could be drawn from the early work of Marx, including the Communist Manifesto, though I find it hard to accept the neo-humanistic Marx that is sometimes reconstructed from them, but Ruskin is closer to the present issue. In William Morris the conception of work as creative act combines with some revolutionary features of an anarchist cast. For Morris, the “major” arts, including literature, have some social associations of ruling-class privilege about them; the “minor” or practical arts are potentially revolutionary, because they relate art directly to social conditions, and their development can help to break down the drudgery and exploitation of factory and machine production and transform society into a community of brains and hands. Morris perhaps never escaped from a social paradox in his own life: his practice as a designer, much as it diversified the Victorian cultural scene, did not really illustrate his theories. The voice was the voice of a revolutionary Esau, but the hands were the hands of a smooth and accommodating Jacob. In spite of this, Morris in News from Nowhere gives a picture of a “liberal” education which is the radical counterpart to Arnold’s humanism, and is in many respects almost disconcertingly contemporary. Education in Morris’s dream world is practical, active, entirely voluntary, and unbookish. It is even anti-intellectual: scholars are tolerated, but they are an oddity. A greater contrast to Arnold’s reading and thinking humanist contemplating the best that has been thought and said would be difficult to imagine than this super-kindergarten where everyone is digging and building and picnicking and whittling. The only humanist feature is the sprezzatura that does work as though it

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were play (which it is on the Tom Sawyer principle, as nobody is obliged to work).89 The reason for such an emphasis in this book is dramatically appropriate: Morris’s people are not simply children let out of school; they have been let out of history, the prison of the past with its treadmills of war and slavery. The one form of the anxiety of continuity that deeply affected Morris, the preservation of old buildings, is resolved when man stops allowing machines to enslave him and so recovers the power of good design. Thus, just as Arnold sums up the “Classical” humanist conception of culture, so Morris comes nearest to summing up the “Romantic” conception of culture as the primitive revulsion against the mechanizing of life. Toward the end of the book, however, the heroine remarks that it is probably a mistake to neglect history and scholarship as much as they do, because “happy as we are, times may alter; we may be bitten with some impulse towards change, and many things may seem too wonderful for us to resist, too exciting not to catch at, if we do not know that they are but phases of what has been before.”90 The primary safeguard of freedom, then, is even in Morris the contemplative element in education which is science in its primary sense of scientia, the study of the world presented to the mind. The rest of Morris’s book, on the other hand, demonstrates that part, and an essential part, of the sense of freedom comes from the release of the creative imagination. It is still true that literature is the embodiment of a language rather than of belief or thought. But there is a point at which the analogy with language breaks down. Nobody would accept a conception of literature as a mere dictionary or grammar of symbols and images which tells us nothing in itself. Everyone deeply devoted to literature knows that it says something, and says something as a whole, not only in its individual works. In turning from formulated belief to imagination we get glimpses of a concern behind concern, of intuitions of human nature and destiny that have inspired the great religious and revolutionary movements of history. Precisely because its variety is infinite, literature suggests an encyclopedic range of concern greater than any formulation of concern in religious or political myth can express. The examining of this expanding of the mind as we move from concern to imagination is the fifth stage of our critical path. V We may perhaps arrive at some tentative conclusions from our quasi-his-

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torical survey before we turn to the contemporary scene. In the first place, the great dream of the deductive synthesis, in which faith and knowledge are indissolubly linked, seems to be fading. The confidence in the completeness and adequacy of the Thomist synthesis, expressed so eloquently by Maritain in the last generation, is clearly not what it was in this more fragmented age. In Marxism it is obvious that the deductive synthesis, whenever it has become socially established, comes to depend more and more for its support on third-rate bureaucrats rather than on first-rate writers or thinkers. Evidently we must come to terms with the fact that mythical and logical languages are distinct. The vision of things as they could or should be certainly has to depend on the vision of things as they are. But what is between them is not so much a point of contact as an existential gap, a revolutionary and transforming act of choice. The beliefs we hold and the kind of society we try to construct are chosen from infinite possibilities, and the notion that our choices are inevitably connected with things as they are, whether through the mind of God or the constitution of nature, always turns out to be an illusion of habit. The mythical and the factual or logical attitudes are really connected by analogy. If, for example, such a philosopher as Bergson or Lloyd Morgan bases a metaphysical or religious structure on the conception of evolution, what he is working with is not really the same principle as the biological hypothesis of evolution, but is rather a mythical analogy of that hypothesis.91 It seems equally futile to expect any one myth of concern to establish itself all over the world. The more widely any such myth spreads, the deeper the rifts that develop within it. One reason for this is that concern, if unchecked by any internal or intellectual opposition, must have an enemy. Marxist countries must have imperialistic aggressors; bourgeois societies must have Communist subversives, just as medieval Christendom had to have a pretext for starting the Crusades. We said earlier that a myth of concern draws a temenos or spellbinding line around a society. This bounding line has two aspects. A society enriches itself by what it includes; it defines itself by what it excludes. Whether or not good fences make good neighbours, the fence creates the neighbour. In A Passage to India E.M. Forster shows us how three great cultural complexes, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, each accept ideals of universal brotherhood; their better and more sensitive members believe in these ideals and struggle to achieve them. And yet in the long run they all define themselves by exclusion, and those who do not wish to exclude anything run the risk of losing their identity and having their total inclusiveness turn

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into its terrible opposite, the sense of a totally meaningless universe, the ironic vision of the absurd, which comes to Mrs. Moore in the cave. The only practicable solution seems to be the one hit on by democracy when it was trying to pare the claws of Christian temporal power. This is to accept, as part of a permanent tension between concern and freedom, a plurality of myths of concern, in which the state assumes the responsibility for keeping the peace among them. I return here to a distinction I have made elsewhere between closed and open mythologies. A society with a closed myth of concern makes it compulsory for all its citizens to say that they support it, or at least will not overtly oppose it. Only a society with an open mythology is capable of a genuine and functional toleration. There are limits to toleration, of course, but the distinction between a society that imposes a belief and a society that imposes a kind of rules-of-the-game order within which dissent and opposition can operate is a practical distinction, however difficult to formulate in theory. We saw earlier that every myth of concern is religious, in the sense of establishing a religio or common body of acts and beliefs for the community. Such a religion may be theistic and deny the finality of death, like Christianity, or atheistic and assert it, like Marxism. Marxism, and Christianity as long as it had temporal power, have tended to assume that a definite position on such points was obligatory on society as a whole, and hence, even if they could tolerate a group with a different position, they could not recognize such a difference as inevitable, certainly not as desirable. The tendency of a closed myth is to move from such broad general principles to more specific ones, prescribing more and more of a citizen’s beliefs, and obliterating the varieties of social attitude. Jews, for instance, are a minority group with a myth of concern peculiar to themselves: consequently any society with a closed myth which contains Jews is bound sooner or later to turn anti-Semitic. Occasionally we find it suggested that breaking up closed myths of concern may be part of the historical function of Judaism. The King of Persia complains, in (the Greek additions to) the Book of Esther: “in all nations throughout the world there is scattered a certain malicious people, that have laws contrary to all nations . . . so as the uniting of our kingdoms, honorably intended by us, cannot go forward.”92 A society with an open mythology may still have its own predominant myth of concern. Nobody would say that “the American way of life” was less concerned than any other community’s way of life. The principle of openness, however, is, so far as I can see, the only possible basis for a world community, assuming that no myth of concern can ever become

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worldwide. What is potentially worldwide is an assumption, too broad in itself to constitute a myth of concern, that life is better than death, freedom better than slavery, happiness better than misery, health better than sickness, for all men everywhere without exception. A society with an open myth can accommodate itself to such an assumption; a society with a closed one cannot. The latter can only pursue its own ends, deciding at each step how much misery and slavery may be necessary (of course only temporarily, it is always added) to advance those ends. An open mythology establishes the relativity of each myth of concern within it, and so emphasizes the element of construct or imaginative vision in the myth. This would not affect the reality of, say, the Christian myth for anyone who holds it, but it puts it on the kind of basis on which communication, or what is now often called “dialogue,” becomes possible with Jews or Moslems or Marxists, or even other Christians. When a myth of concern claims truth of correspondence as well as truth of vision, and assumes that its postulates are or can be established as facts, it can hardly produce any “dialogue” except the single exasperated formula, “But can’t you see how wrong you are?” When it renounces this claim, it acquires the kind of humility which makes it possible to see intellectual honesty on the other side too. As for one’s own side, one is not renouncing its truth: what one renounces is the finality of one’s own understanding of that truth. In all societies the pressure in the direction of a closed myth is also the tendency within society to become a mob, that is, a social body without individuals or critical attitudes, united by slogans or clichés against some focus of hatred. A myth of concern, by itself, cannot prevent this kind of social degeneration. Faith, or participation in a myth of concern, is not in itself verifiable, but to some extent it can be verified in experience. Some myths of concern obviously make a fuller life possible than others do. Charity, in the sense of respect for human life, is doubtless the primary criterion, but there is an important secondary one: the ability of a myth of concern to come to terms with the myth of freedom. A faith which permits intellectual honesty is clearly better in practice than one which tries to deny elementary facts of history or science. And perhaps the two standards, of charity and of intellectual honesty, are ultimately the same standard. Certainly such a myth of concern as Nazism, which ranks so low on the scale of charity, could not avoid the falsifying of history and science, and I suspect that the two vices always go together. The basis of all tolerance in society, the condition in which a plurality of concerns can coexist, is the recognition of the tension between concern

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and freedom. This issue becomes crucial as soon as it is obvious that the study of man’s environment cannot be confined to the nonhuman environment. Human society, in the present as in the past, is an objective fact too. Sooner or later, therefore, the scientific spirit and the search for truth of correspondence will invade the structures of concern themselves, studying human mythology in the same spirit that they study nature. This collision between concern and freedom may well be the most important kind of what is now called “culture shock” that we have. In weak or insecure minds such a collision produces immediate panic, followed by elaborate defensive reactions. Efforts to bring the spirit of inquiry into the Christian religion meet with such responses as (to give a relatively mild example), “If you destroy our faith with your rational and analytical questions, what will you put in its place?” Many Marxist theologians similarly insist that, as everybody exists in a specific social context, there is no such thing as complete detachment from a social attitude, and consequently all inquiry is rooted in a social attitude which must be either revolutionary, and so in agreement with them, or counterrevolutionary. One still often hears the argument among student militants and others that because complete objectivity is impossible, differences in degree of objectivity are not significant. It would be a grave error to associate this kind of resistance only with the immature or the easily frightened. We all have such fears, and can look at them in perspective only from a later historical age, when battles previously fought have since been won, or at least stopped. Meanwhile, it is clearly one of the unavoidable responsibilities of educated people to show by example that beliefs may be held and examined at the same time. We noted the encyclopedic drive of concern: there is nothing that is not the concern of concern, and similarly there is nothing that can be excluded from free inquiry and the truth of correspondence. Concern and freedom both occupy the whole of the same universe: they interpenetrate, and it is no good trying to set up boundary stones. Some, of course, meet the collision of concern and freedom from the opposite side, with a naive rationalism which expects that before long all myths of concern will be outgrown and only the appeal to reason and evidence and experiment will be taken seriously. I hope it is clear from the general argument of this essay why I consider such a view entirely impossible. The growth of nonmythical knowledge tends to eliminate the incredible from belief, and helps to shape the myth of concern according to the outlines of what experience finds possible and vision desirable. But the

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growth of knowledge cannot in itself provide us with the social vision which will suggest what we should do with our knowledge. This is where the central question of the present essay, the social function of criticism, comes in. Let us follow up this problem of the examining of a myth of concern by the standards of a myth of freedom, and see what happens as a result. The obvious example to choose is Christianity and the myth centred in the Bible. Within the last century there has been a crisis in the response to the Biblical Christian myth which is often called a crisis of belief, but is really a crisis in understanding the language of belief. The crisis begins in Victorian times, and immediately provokes the kind of resistance that one expects at the beginning of such a movement. In Newman’s lectures on education, particularly in connection with science, we see how calmly reasonable the tone is as long as mathematics and the physical sciences are being discussed, and how edgy and nervous it becomes as soon liberal theology begins to appear, however distantly, on the horizon. Then we are sharply warned that science ought not to go beyond its province and invade the field of religion. Matthew Arnold, though holding an entirely different view of religion, reacted quite as strongly to the iconoclastic attacks of Bishop Colenso on the historicity of the Pentateuch. It was wrong to confuse science and religion; it was wrong to take such matters to the general public, because only a few are capable, etc.; above all it was wrong to write crudely and bluntly about these subjects, as Colenso did.93 However, of course, the movement proceeded in spite of such resistance. When I am asked if I “believe in” ghosts, I usually reply that ghosts, from all accounts, appear to be matters of experience rather than of belief, and that so far I have had no experience of them. But the fact that the question takes such a form indicates that belief is usually connected in the mind with a vision of possibilities, of what might or could be true. On the other hand, we often use the term “believe” to mean a suspended sense experience. “I believe you will find a telephone on the next floor” means that if I were on the next floor I should see a telephone. In reference to past time this suspended sense experience becomes the acceptance of a historical fact. “I believe Julius Caesar existed” implies that I think that if I had lived when and where he is said to have lived I should have seen him. “I believe in God” can hardly refer to a belief of this kind, but under the influence of the mental habits of a writing culture, concerned belief also has come to be associated with historical fact. This leads to such curious aberrations as “believing the Bible,” i.e., of

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ascribing special virtue to asserting that in another culture, a few years ago and a few miles away, Jonah was swallowed by a great fish and Elijah carried up to heaven in a fiery chariot, and that if we had been present at those events we should have seen precisely what is described in the sacred text. Such belief is really a voluntarily induced schizophrenia, and is probably a fruitful source of the infantilism and the hysterical anxieties about belief which are so frequently found in the neighbourhood of religion, at least in its more uncritical areas. One thinks of Don Quixote’s remark to Sancho Panza, that the Golden Age would soon return if people would only see things as they are, and not allow themselves to be deluded by enchanters who make hundred-armed giants look like windmills.94 In the seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne, reflecting on such matters as the fact that conditions in Noah’s ark, after thirty-eight days or so, might become a trifle slummy, remarked “methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.”95 But of course when a faith beyond reason is looked at in this sort of playful or ironic light, it tends to become unconcerned. The more genuinely concerned faith is, the more quickly a hierarchy is established in it, in which “essential” beliefs are retained and less essential ones regarded as expendable. But this conception of “essential” belief is, in spite of the word, introducing an existential element into belief. What we really believe is not what we say or think we believe but what our actions show that we believe, and no belief which is not an axiom of behaviour is a genuinely concerned belief. Marxism has a similar conception of unessential belief, the “ideology” which is to be talked about but not acted upon, and which has the function of decorating the façade of a conservative attitude. Many of my readers would call what I am calling a myth of concern an ideology, and though, as I have indicated, I have specific reasons for using the term “myth,” those who prefer “ideology” may substitute it in most contexts. For Milton writing Paradise Lost Adam and Eve were historical characters, his own literal ancestors, and Milton is fond of contrasting the plain and sober Scriptural accounts with the extravagances of the heathen. Simplicity however is not an infallible sign of historical credibility, and we today are struck rather by the similarity of the Biblical stories of the fall and the flood to other myths in other cultures. As the Old Testament narrative proceeds, myth gives place to legend and what German critics call Sage, legend to historical reminiscence, historical reminiscence to

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didactic and manipulated history, and so on. But there are no clear boundary lines: all that seems clear is that whatever in the Old Testament may be historically accurate is not there because it is historically accurate, but for quite different reasons. Further, historical accuracy has no relation to spiritual significance. The Book of Job, which is avowedly an imaginative drama, is clearly more significant in the development of religion than the begats in Chronicles, which may well contain authentic records. With the Gospels, however, surely things must be different, for Christianity has always insisted on the historical nature of its central event. We soon begin to wonder, however, whether the verbal presentation of that event is as historical as the event itself. We notice that the life of Christ in the Gospels is not presented biographically, as a piece of continuous prose writing founded on historical evidence, but as a discontinuous sequence of appearances (pericopes), which have a strongly mythical quality about them. If the approach were biographical we should want only one definitive Gospel, and of course the historical belief in them has always rested on some “harmony” of their narratives rather than on the four as they stand. Naturally many efforts have been made to extract a credible continuous narrative from what seems a mass of mythical accretions. Thus a century ago Ernest Renan, in his Vie de Jésus, began confidently with the statement that Jesus was born in Nazareth, the story that he was born in Bethlehem having been inserted later to harmonize with Micah’s prophecy that the Messiah was to be born in Bethlehem. But, arguing on those terms, if the only reason for associating Jesus with Bethlehem is the passage in Micah, the only reason for associating him with Galilee is a similar passage in Isaiah (9[:1]), and the only reason for associating him with Nazareth is to enable Matthew to make a dubious pun on “Nazirite.” Renan’s historical and credible statement, on his own basis of argument, dissolves into two more myths. As we go through the Gospels, with their miracles of healing and miraculous feeding and raising the dead and the like, we begin to wonder how much there is that must be historical, that is unambiguous evidence for a historical Jesus. The authors of the Gospels seem to care nothing for the kind of evidence that would interest a biographer; the only evidence they concern themselves with is coincidence with Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah. The result is that our historical evidence for the life of Jesus, besides being hermetically sealed within the

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New Testament, seems to melt away, as we try to grasp it, into echoes from the Old Testament or from contemporary Jewish ritual. As some factual basis for Jesus’ life was obviously available to the authors, why did they make so oblique and limited a use of it? For any uncommitted reader of the Gospels, the question, “Could it really have happened just like that?” is bound to occur with great frequency. But at a certain point the question begins to turn into the form, “If I had been there, is that what I should have seen and experienced?” At this point the doubts become overwhelming, because most of these doubts are of one’s own capacity for spiritual experience. Sir Thomas Browne’s “I thank God that I never saw Christ or his disciples” begins to sound like a very shrewd remark.96 If I had been out on the hills of Bethlehem on the night of the birth of Christ, with the angels singing to the shepherds, I think that I should not have heard any angels singing. The reason why I think so is that I do not hear them now, and there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped. If, under the influence of the mental habits of a writing culture, we insist on regarding a myth as a disguised way of presenting a real situation, we should have to regard the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels as highly suspect, if not actually fraudulent. But the impression of authority they convey is too strong to take the possibility of fraud seriously. It is much more probable that it is our conception of myth that is wrong, and it seems better to think of the authors as too concerned about the importance of their message to entrust what they had to say to merely historical or biographical idioms of language. The historian tries to put his reader where the event is, in the past. If he is writing about the assassination of Julius Caesar, he tries to make us see what we should have seen if we had been there, while keeping the additional understanding afforded by the distance in time. The apostle feels that if we had been “there,” we should have seen nothing, or seen something utterly commonplace, or missed the whole significance of what we did see. So he comes to us, with his ritual drama of a Messiah, presenting a speaking picture which has to be, as Paul says, spiritually discerned.97 Myth is the language of the present tense, even of what is expressed by the vogue-word “confrontation.” There is a moral aspect of literature, stressed by Sidney among others, which literature possesses through its power of idealized example. When poetry is the “companion of camps,”98 a heroic achievement in the past is linked to another in the future of which the reader is the potential hero. The best way to connect

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the two, for Sidney, is to present the former in its universal shape, combining the historical example with the abstract precept or model. If we wish to be inspired by Achilles we must read Homer, and may well thank God that we never saw Achilles or his Myrmidons. Of course the historical criticism of the Bible plays the same liberalizing role here that it does elsewhere: it helps to ensure that a book set in an ancient Near Eastern culture, remote from ours in language and social assumptions, can never be completely kidnapped by provincial bigotry in our day. But the direct connection of religion with concern, where “Go, and do thou likewise” is always a part of the presentation, decreases the importance of this. The Bible, it may be said, is not a storybook or an epic poem; but it is much closer to being a work of literature than it is to being a work of history or doctrine, and the kind of mental response that we bring to poetry has to be in the forefront of our understanding of it. This is, I think, what Matthew Arnold meant when he suggested that poetry would increasingly take on a religious importance in modern culture.99 It is not that poetry will become a substitute or replacement for religion, a situation that could only produce phony literature as well as a phony religion. It is rather that religion will come to be understood increasingly as having a poetic rather than a rational language, and that it can be more effectively taught and learned through the imagination than through doctrine or history. Imagination is not in itself concern, but for a culture with a highly developed sense of fact and of the limits of experience, the road to concern runs through the language of imagination. What applies to the Bible applies also, in some degree, to every scripture of concern, from the Vedic hymns to the Communist Manifesto. One question that arises is evidently the relation of myth to the ordinary standards of truth of correspondence. The connection between the growth of a myth of concern and the falsifying of history is so frequent as to be the rule, and it is not merely a vulgarizing of language that has given the word “mythical” the overtones of “false.” When we see a myth of concern in process of formation, as with the contemporary black myth, we can see that rigid adherence to historical or sociological fact may not be the only moral principle involved. There is also the conflict of loyalties between the demands of objective truth and the demands of concerned tactics, especially, in our day, the tactics of publicity. I remember a friend who was deeply committed to what he felt was a genuine social issue, and found himself watching a carefully rigged scene in which a member of his side produced an im-

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pression, for the benefit of television cameras, of being brutally beaten by members of the other side. He was told that this kind of thing was tactically necessary, with the implication that if he so much as remembered that he saw what he did see he was working for the other side. A properly disciplined faith, perhaps, would forget, rationalize, or make no account of the total unreality of the incident. One would surely have a much higher opinion, however, of a person who felt, as my friend felt, some sense of violated integrity. It seems curious that hardly anybody rejects the values of contemporary civilization to the point of disbelieving in the necessity or effectiveness of public relations. Yet the invariable tendency of public relations, whatever they are working for, is to destroy the critical intelligence and its sense of the gap between appearance and reality. Bertrand Russell remarked in an interview just before his death that the sceptical element in him was stronger than the positive one, but “when you’re in propaganda you have to make positive statements.”100 He was clearly implying that the sceptical side of him would have considered many of his positive statements false if he had allowed it to do so. A more disturbing question is whether there can ever be truth of concern that is not in some degree falsehood of correspondence; whether myth must lie, and whether there can be any piety, to whatever church or state, without some kind of pious fraud. Certainly in a world as complicated as ours there is bound to be the kind of oversimplifying tactic that may be called concerned tokenism. One of the commonest features of concern is the anxiety, usually conservative, that finds a symbolic focus in some change of fashion or custom. A history of preaching would include a long record of thunderous denunciations of new fashions in clothes or entertainment, where there has clearly been an unconscious choice of something relatively trivial to represent the devil’s master plan to destroy mankind. Even yet, the few square inches of the body still covered on bathing beaches can serve as an intense focus of anxiety for the anxious. But even serious concern has to pick one issue out of many, and sometimes the disproportion between the concern and the chosen issue indicates the ascendancy of rhetoric over reality that is an element in all lying. Thus Bryan’s “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” sounds a trifle overapocalyptic for the fact that his party had decided to fight an election on the issue of bimetallism.101 And while one may not warmly sympathize with Arnold’s attitude to the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill in Culture and Anarchy, one does have to recognize the existence of deceased-wife’s-sister

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liberalism (or radicalism or conservatism): the choosing of an issue more or less at random, not only to satisfy the need for action but to serve as a symbolic anxiety-substitute for a more demanding concern. 102 All scapegoat figures, from Shelley’s king and priest to Ezra Pound’s usurers, are symbolic substitutes of this kind. We have recurrently found throughout this discussion that there is an element in concern that resists final or ultimate formulation. Every myth of concern, as we pursue it, eventually retreats from what can be believed to what can be imagined. It seems clear that the standards of a myth of freedom, the standards of logic and evidence and a sense of objective reality, are also approximations. They too are analogies of a model world that may not exist, yet they must be there as ideals of procedure, however impossible it may be to realize them completely. In times of stress the inadequacy or impossibility of objective truth, and the consequent necessity of noble lies, is much insisted on, though as a rule with a kind of bravado that indicates some self-hypnotism. The original noble lie, in Plato’s Republic, was to the effect that some men are golden, others silver, others of base metal. I suspect that every tactically necessary lie is a variant of the Platonic one, and has for its ultimate end the setting up of a hierarchy in which some people are assumed to be of more human worth than others. As Orwell’s 1984 in particular has so trenchantly shown, lying weakens the will power, and therefore the will to resist being taken over by a police state. There is also a philosophical issue involved which concerns the degree to which anything in words can tell the truth at all, in terms of the truth of correspondence. In truth of correspondence a verbal structure is aligned with the phenomena it describes, but every verbal structure contains mythical and fictional features simply because it is a verbal structure. Even the subject–predicate–object relationship is a verbal fiction, and arises from the conditions of grammar, not from those of the subject being studied. Then again, anything presented in words has a narrative shape (mythos) and is partly conditioned by the demands of narrative. These demands are those of a verbal causality which is sui generis, and has no direct connection with any other kind of causality or sequence of events. To go further with this subject would take another book, and one that I am not in the least competent to write, although it would deal with a central issue of literary criticism. Some less ambitious considerations may be dealt with here. We have seen that the integrity of the Bible as a myth has a good deal

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to do with its unreliability as history. Its relation to doctrine and concept is very similar. The conceptual aspect of the Bible is presented mainly in the discontinuous or concerned prose that we have already discussed, in such forms as commandment, oracle, proverb, parable, pericope, dialogue, and fable. Once again we see that the Biblical tradition adheres closely to its oral origin. A body of teachings presented in this way, assuming an overall coherence, can readily be systematized, that is, translated into the sequential and continuous prose of doctrine. But, like the “underthought” of poetry, it resists the definitive synthesis, because the discontinuity indicates other contexts than that of logical or sequential connection. So the question arises, To what other contexts do such statements of concern belong? In theistic religions, God speaks and man listens. Neither conception is simple, for all the efforts to make them so. God speaks, by hypothesis, in accommodated language, putting his thoughts and commandments into a humanly comprehensible form. Once the primary revelation is received, in prophecy or gospel or sura or oracle, man’s listening takes the form of interpretation, which means critical reconstruction. There is no “literal” way of receiving a message from an infinite mind in finite language. So every myth of concern, even if it is assumed to start with the voice of God himself, is involved by its own nature in a complex operation of critical commentary. Statements of belief or concern are existential, and therefore one very obvious context for them, apart from doctrinal synthesis, is the life of the person who makes or inspires them, and who is usually a leader or culture hero of some kind. In religious leaders particularly we notice the link with the oral tradition. Jesus, Buddha, even Mohammed, do not write, but make their utterances usually in connection with specific occasions, some of their disciples acting as secretaries, like the author of the collection of sayings of Jesus (Q) which is preserved in Matthew and Luke.103 Once a myth of concern is socially established, the personal focus falls on the leader or interpreter who is centrally responsible for sustaining the myth in history. This line of succession may derive from such figures as Paul, whose letters, like the pamphlets of Lenin later, deal with specific tactical decisions in a way that leads to far-reaching theoretical principles. Or it may take the form of a succession of leaders who are regarded as definitive interpreters of the myth of concern, like the Pope with his ex cathedra infallibility in Catholic Christianity or the Marxist leaders. Such leaders

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are regarded as incarnations of a dialectic, like Plato’s philosopher-king. In other contexts the incarnation may be a purely symbolic figure like Elizabeth II, in her role of “defender of the faith.” The most primitive form of such a conception is the kind represented by the Führerprinzip of Nazism. A much more open and sophisticated one is that of the Constitution of the United States, which was theoretically dictated by an inspired people to a prophetic group of founding fathers. When two myths of concern collide, this personal focus is usually prominent in the collision. It was the repudiation of the largely symbolic cult of the deified Caesar that marked Christians and Jews off from the Roman world; and when Julian the Apostate tried to set up a more philosophical and “open” alternative to Christianity he could hardly avoid putting his own cult at the centre of it. The earlier stages of a myth of concern usually include a development of an oracular and mainly oral philosophy, associated with wise men, prophets, or gurus whose sayings may also be recorded, often very haphazardly, by disciples or scribes. A strong esoteric tendency to distinguish between an inner and an outer court of hearers, or between deep and shallow comprehension of the same doctrines, is notable here. The practice of reserving special teachings for a smaller group of initiates has run through philosophy from Pythagoras to Wittgenstein. Similar esoteric movements make their way, sometimes in the form of philosophical heresies, into the great religions, producing various Gnostic developments in Christianity, Sufism in Islam, and what eventually became the Mahayana form of Buddhism.104 A secret tradition, believed to be authentically derived from the same source as the exoteric one, but possessing qualities that the latter would fear and distrust, may serve as a kind of back door or fire escape for a myth of freedom in persecuting times. Any personality at the centre of a myth of concern whose life is the context of a body of teaching must be regarded as having reached a definitive level of truth. But as truth of concern is not truth of correspondence, and cannot be verified and expanded like the established principles of a science, it follows that such a central personality is bound to create a hierarchy of response. This hierarchy of response is often represented, as above, by an inner group of specially enlightened followers. But in a socially ascendant myth it tends to become formalized in an institution, which becomes the acknowledged interpreter of the myth of concern, again on a hierarchical basis.

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The more open the myth, the more the task of interpreting it begins to show analogies to literary criticism. The myth of concern usually exists as a body of words drawn up in the past, sometimes a remote past, and this body of words is, like the critic’s text, unalterable. The variable factor is the new social situation provided by the interpreter’s age; and, as there is an indefinite series of such new situations, it follows that the original structure, again like the critic’s text, is not only unalterable but must be inexhaustible in reference. Thus the Supreme Court in America may not alter the Constitution, but must say what an eighteenth-century principle means in a twentieth-century world. The assumption is that the principles are comprehensive enough to be applicable to any current situation. We notice that in this interpreting process what may have been originally sequential or systematic arguments tend to break down into a discontinuous series of general principles, each of which acquires a different context in the commentary attached to it. In other words it acquires the detached oracular structure of the prose of concern. Such commentary is of course very similar to criticism in literature, and it is clear that the different forms of critical interpretation cannot be sharply separated, whether they are applied to the plays of Shakespeare, the manuscripts of the Bible, the American Constitution, or the oral traditions of an aboriginal tribe. In the area of general concern they converge, however widely the technical contexts in law, theology, literature, or anthropology may differ. The analogy of literary criticism to the interpreting of a myth of concern suggests that statements of belief or concern can have a literary context as well as the existential one of a leader’s life. In literature such statements have the context of a story, from which they emerge as comments or applications. From a literary point of view every statement of belief or concern can be seen as the moral of a fable. We referred earlier to the importance of the sententious element in literature: for centuries epigrams on the human situation, embedded in a Classical author, were regarded as the pearls of literature, worth opening the oyster to get. We also noted a social and intellectual contrast in the forms of concerned prose between oracular statements, the dark sayings of the wise, which tend to be esoteric in reference, and proverbs, which tend to be the expression of popular wisdom and to circulate in gregarious swarms, there being something about the proverb, in all ages, that seems to stir the collector’s instinct. It is not surprising that in later literature we find

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oracular aphorisms more frequently attached to tragedies and proverbial ones to comedy and satire. The fable traditionally has a moral at the end: the convention of beginning a story with a sententious comment, already well established in Boccaccio, appears in Rasselas and is expanded into a major feature of Tom Jones. It is still going strong in the opening sentences of Anna Karenina and (in the key of delicate parody) Pride and Prejudice. On a larger scale, statements of Christian belief are inseparable from the story of the Bible, which in its literary aspect is a comic romance. Similarly the Greek belief in fate, or whatever was meant by such words as ananke, moira, and heimarmene,105 is essentially chorus comment on the narrative form of tragedy which the Greeks invented. In our day we tend to go from the three R’s in our education to a belief in, or at least an assent to, the three A’s: anxiety, alienation, and absurdity. But these concepts again are noble sentiments derived from a prevailingly ironic age of fable. When Raphael in Paradise Lost was sent down to talk to Adam, the reason for sending him was to impress Adam with the importance of not touching the forbidden tree. Raphael, however, refers only obliquely to the tree: what he mainly does is to tell Adam the story of the fall of Satan. The implication is that teaching through parable, the typical method of Jesus, is the appropriate way of educating a free man, like Adam before his fall. After his fall, Adam gets from Michael a similar emblematic and illustrative instruction, though within his new and fallen category of linear time, where the events are prophecies of an inevitable future to him, records of an inescapable past to the reader. Yet education is still by story or “speaking picture,” with morals attached, and the total containing structure of the teaching is the Christian romantic comedy of salvation. Angels, evidently, teach by fable; teaching by morals is merely human, and only the officially and institutionally human at that. Educating through the fable rather than through the moral involves all the responsibilities of a greater freedom, including the responsibility of rejecting censorship. Of all the things that Milton says about censorship in the Areopagitica, the most far-reaching in its implications seems to me to be his remark that a wise man will make a better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool would of Holy Scripture.106 That is, the reader himself is responsible for the moral quality of what he reads, and it is the desire to dodge this responsibility, either on one’s own behalf or that of others, that produces censorship. Statements of concern are either right or

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wrong, which means, as the truth involved is not directly verifiable, that they are accepted as right or wrong. For the deeply concerned, all arguments are personal, in a bad sense, because all arguments are either for them or against them, and hence their proponent, to be acclaimed or refuted, needs simply to be identified as one of us or one of the enemy. In a tense situation within an open myth of concern, when pressure groups are starting up to try to close it, the formula “you only say that because you’re a (whatever is appropriate)” is often regarded as penetrating the reality behind a hypocritical façade. The preservation of the open myth depends on giving the foreground of impersonal argument its own validity; the other direction leads inevitably to censorship and an index expurgatorius. One sees the hierarchical institution beginning to take shape here, with the censors forming an elite. The most unattractive quality of the censor is his contempt for other people. The censor says, “I want this play banned, because, while it can’t possibly do me any harm, there are all those people over there who will be irreparably damaged in their morals if they see it.” Similarly, the person who attaches a smear label to whatever he disagrees with is really saying, “It may be all very well to appeal to me with logical arguments, because I can see through them; but there are all those people over there who are not so astute.” The same habit of mind is common among those who are anxious to save themselves trouble in thinking or reading. I note in several Freudian books a tendency to describe Freudian revisionists or heretics as “reactionary.” I mention Freud because he was in so many respects a conservative, pessimistic, even “reactionary” thinker who has been made into the founder of a myth of revolutionary optimism. The implication is that calling anyone a reactionary, or any similar epithet, if it relates to qualities assumed to be inherent in his work, is intellectually dishonest. Nobody’s work is inherently revolutionary or reactionary, whatever the writer’s own views in his lifetime: it is the use made of the work which determines what it is, and any writer may be potentially useful to anybody, in any way. A more difficult assumption of responsibility relates to the writer’s beliefs, and the particular concerns that he participates in. We have already met the principle that in reading poetry the “overthought,” or explicit statement, is expendable to some degree, and that the “underthought” or progression of image and metaphor is the decisive meaning. When a myth of concern is derived from the teachings of a single man, or series of accredited teachers, those teachers must be regarded as in a very

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special sense wise or inspired men. No such respect need be accorded the poet so far as he represents a belief or attitude, however important and essential the belief may be to the poet himself. Hopkins and Claudel would probably never have bothered to keep on writing poetry without the drive of a powerful Catholic belief; but what makes them poets is their skill in using the language of concern, and hence they can be studied with the greatest devotion by readers who share none of their commitments. Still, most reasonable readers would respect a Catholic belief, whatever their own: a much more crucial example would be, say, Céline, who is a significant and important writer to many readers who could not possibly regard his views with anything but contempt.107 The principles involved here are, first, that while the teacher of a myth of concern must be a wise or great or inspired man to his followers, the poet, or speaker of the language of concern, may be an important poet, and yet, in certain other respects, almost any kind of a damned fool. Second, the subordination of reader to poet is tactical only: he studies his author with full attention, but the end at which he aims is a transfer of the poet’s vision to himself. Poetry is not, then, to be merely enjoyed and appreciated, but to be possessed as well. Third, there are no negative visions: all poets are potentially positive contributors to man’s body of vision, and no index expurgatorius or literary hell (to use Milton’s figure in Areopagitica) exists on any basis acceptable to a student of literature. Therefore, fourth, criticism does not aim at evaluation, which always means that the critic wants to get into the concern game himself, choosing a canon out of literature and so making literature a single gigantic allegory of his own anxieties. We spoke earlier, however, of a canonical group of myths at the centre of an oral verbal culture. As writing, secular literature, and a myth of concern develop, the language of concern shifts to the conceptual, the statement of belief. Doctrine and creed replace such formulas as “in the eternal dream time.” Meanwhile, literature goes its own way, continuing to produce stories, images, and metaphors. When the critic arrives at the stage indicated by Shelley’s Defence, of being able to conceive of literature as a totality, an imaginative body and not simply an aggregate, the centrifugal movements of concern and literature begin to come together again. The critic begins to see literature as presenting the range of imaginative possibilities of belief, its stories the encyclopedia of visions of human life and destiny which form the context of belief. “The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art,” said

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Blake,108 indicating the context of his own work, and similarly literature is the “great code” of concern. Many mythical stories, like those of the fall or the flood, seem increasingly puerile when one tries to rationalize or historicize them, but approached in the universalized terms of the imagination, they become conceivable as visionary sources of belief. Other myths of concern, democratic, Marxist, or what not, are also founded on visions of human life with a generic literary shape, usually comic. Literature as a whole is also, like religious and political movements, to be related to a central life, but its central life is the life of humanity, and its inspired teacher the verbal imagination of man. Once again, literature in its totality is not a super-myth of concern, truer because more comprehensive than all existing ones combined. Literature is not to be believed in: there is no “religion of poetry”: the whole point about literature is that it has no direct connection with belief. That is why it has such a vast importance in indicating the horizons beyond all formulations of belief, in pointing to an infinite total concern that can never be expressed, but only indicated in the variety of the arts themselves. In modern times the classical statement of the relation of concern and freedom is Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, from which the existentialist traditions of our day mainly descend. For Kierkegaard the detached, liberal, and impersonal attitude fostered by the study of an objective environment, and which flowers into comprehensive intellectual systems like that of Hegel, is an “aesthetic” attitude. It is fundamentally immature because with this attitude man tries to fit himself into a larger container, the general outlines of which he can see with his reason, but forgetting that his reason built the container. The crisis of life comes when we pass over into the commitment represented by “or,” take up our primary concern, and thus enter the sphere of genuine personality and ethical freedom. The postulates of Kierkegaard’s ethical freedom are Christian postulates, and his commitment is an acceptance of faith. The acceptance is fundamentally uncritical, because, so the argument runs, man is not a spectator of his own life. But, we saw, the context of Christian faith is a context of vision and fable and myth, and Kierkegaard does not really come to terms with the implications of this fact. Milton’s portrayal of Adam looking at the sequence of Adamic life presented in the Bible, where the Christian faith becomes a total informing vision which Adam contemplates as a spectator, shows a far profounder grasp, not only of Christianity, but of the whole problem of concern. If we stop with the

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voluntary self-blinkering of commitment, we are no better off than the “aesthetic”: on the other side of “or” is another step to be taken, a step from the committed to the creative, from iconoclastic concern to what the literary critic above all ought to be able to see, that in literature man is a spectator of his own life, or at least of the larger vision in which his life is contained. This vision is nothing external to himself and is not born out of nature or any objective environment. Yet it is not subjective either, because it is produced by the power of imaginative communication, the power that enables men, in Aristotle’s phrase, not merely to come together to form a social life, but to remain together to form the good life.109 What applies to a Christian commitment in Kierkegaard applies also to commitments to other myths of concern, where Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic” would be replaced by “escapist” or “idealistic” or what not. Kierkegaard is saying, in our terms, that concern is primary and freedom a derivation from it, as the present discussion has also maintained. The individual who does not understand the primacy of concern, the fact that we belong to something before we are anything, is, it is quite true, in a falsely individualized position, and his “aesthetic” attitude may well be parasitic. But Kierkegaard, like so many deeply concerned people, is also saying that passing over to concern gives us the genuine form of freedom, that concern and freedom are ultimately the same thing. This is the bait attached to all “either–or” arguments, but it does not make the hook any more digestible. It is worth pausing a moment on this point, because Kierkegaard is not really satisfied with his own argument. He clearly understood the fact that freedom can only be realized in the individual, and sought for a Christianity that would escape from what he calls “Christendom,” the merely social conformity or religio of Christianity. He speaks of the personal as in itself a subversive and revolutionary force, and sees the threat of what we should now call the totalitarian mob in the “impersonal.” For him the highest form of truth is personally possessed truth, and he is not afraid to face the implications of what I think of as the “paranoia principle.” This is the principle, lurking in all conceptions of a personal truth transcending the truth of concern, that it is only what is true only for me that is really true. This principle brings us back to the conception of a definitive experience, which we met at the end of the first section, as an unattained reality of which literature appears to be an analogy. Concern raises the question of belief, and belief raises the question of

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authority, the question, “Who says so?” I have tried to show that the authority of concern, in itself, is always the authority of a social establishment. Even if its answer is, “God says so,” its effective answer is always, “It doesn’t matter who originally said so: we say so now, and you will accept it or else.” It is different with the authority of reason and evidence and repeatable experiment: granted that there is no absolute objectivity, etc., it is still true that this kind of authority is the only genuine form of spiritual authority. That is, it is the only kind of authority that enhances, instead of encroaching on, the dignity and the freedom of the individual who accepts it. Unless the autonomy of this kind of authority is fully recognized and respected, there can be no escape from “Christendom” or whatever other conforming mob may be thrown up by concern. What I have been calling an open mythology is really the recognition of this autonomy, a readiness on the part of society to accept a “both–and” rather than an “either–or” situation. The context of the myth of freedom is the environment of physical nature, and this environment is one of alienation, a submoral and subhuman world. Concern is an essential part of the attempt to escape from this alienation by forming a human community. The myth of freedom is born from concern, and can never replace concern or exist without it; nevertheless it creates a tension against it. One necessary development of this tension is the collision between the two kinds of authority when a myth of concern is approached from the standards of a myth of freedom. What emerges from the conflict is the sense of an imaginative world as forming the wider context of belief, a total potential of myth from which every specific myth of concern has been crystallized. The imaginative world opens up for us a new dimension of freedom, in which the individual finds himself again, detached but not separated from his community. Hence, though we cannot simply accept the view of Shelley that the poetic imagination speaks the language of freedom as well as concern, still one essential aspect of freedom is the release of the language of concern, or allowing freedom to the poetic imagination. Again, this new dimension of freedom, which includes the released imagination, cannot take the place of concern: we can neither live continuously in the imaginative world nor bring it into existence. The tension has to continue. But maintaining the tension is difficult, like standing on a pinnacle, and there are constant temptations to throw ourselves off. The temptation listened to by Kierkegaard, and by so many existentialists and others since, is the temptation to identify freedom with the

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power of choice. As we can really choose only what commits us, this means that, like Adam in Eden, we can express our freedom only by annihilating it. This is an irony of the human situation. But irony, as students of literature realize, is not the centre of human reality but only one of several modes of imaginative expression, and it is a function of the critic to provide some perspective for irony. Irony in literature has a great deal to do with a conception of freedom which identifies freedom with freedom of the will. Such freedom is usually thought of as opposed to necessity, and the irony consists in the fact that such freedom eventually collapses into the fatality it tries to fight against. If we associate a free will of this kind with God, we embark on that dismal theological chess game that ends with predestination in time, with the God of Burns’s Holy Willie who Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell A’ for thy glory110 and whom anyone less obsessed with concern would find great difficulty in distinguishing from the devil. If we associate it with an individual, he soon becomes a tyrant who acts by whim and caprice, and so is not free but a slave of his own compulsions. If we associate it with a society, we get the kind of “will of the people” which is mob rule, where the leaders play the same enslaving role that compulsions do in the tyrant. The only genuine freedom is a freedom of the will which is informed by a vision, and this vision can only come to us through the intellect and the imagination, and through the arts and sciences which embody them, the analogies of whatever truth and beauty we can reach. In this kind of freedom the opposition to necessity disappears: for scientists and artists and scholars, as such, what they want to do and what they have to do become the same thing. This is the core of the freedom that no concern can ever include or replace, and everything else that we associate with freedom proceeds from it. VI We get two kinds of education in life. The primary kind is an education in concern, an understanding of the axioms and assumptions on which the people around us act, or say they act. It is an education in loyalties, attachments, beliefs, responses, and ideals, though later it may be modi-

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fied by a growing sense of dissonance between professed and genuine beliefs, between ideals and realities. We study relatively little of it, and get most of it out of the air from our parents, teachers, and contemporaries. But every society has ways of ensuring that we learn it, and learn it thoroughly and early, even though some aspects of it, such as the teaching of religion, may be left to private enterprise. The fact that in America today one is free to be of whatever religion one pleases, or of no religion at all, means that religion, in its specialized sense, is no longer a central area of social concern. The situation is very different with what is called the American way of life, where there is a powerful pressure toward conformity. This education in concern is followed by, or goes along with, a secondary education, mainly in the truth of correspondence, which is education properly speaking, and is the chief business of schools and universities. From the universities in particular, the concern of the educated minority, which is centred on the myth of freedom, leaks out to society as a whole. In a society that has what I have called an open mythology, there is a certain critical element in education, which consists in becoming increasingly aware of one’s own mythological conditioning. Some of the subjects studied in the university are the mythological subjects, and they include the myths of concern belonging to the society in which they are studied. Whatever the theoretical complications, the distinction between studying a myth of concern and promoting it is quite familiar in practice. A publicly supported university is assumed to teach a religion within the orbit of the truth of correspondence, presenting it simply as a faith that as a matter of historical fact has been or is held. Similarly, the university’s role with other myths of concern is to study, for example, Marxism, but not to support the kind of “seminar” on Marxism which consists only of charging the batteries of the Marxist faithful, and which is really a kind of religious service. The same principle applies to the myth of democracy itself: it is not the function of a university to indoctrinate even that myth, because the public indoctrination of any myth tends to close it. Something of the difference in social atmosphere between open and closed mythologies is perhaps expressed by the difference between the words “advertising” and “propaganda.” Advertising implies a competitive market and an absence of monopoly; propaganda implies a centralizing of power. If advertising is selling soap we know that it is only a soap, not the exclusive way of cleanliness. Hence the statements of advertising contain a residual irony. They are not expected to be literally

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believed by normal adults, and the gullible and impressionable audience which advertising assumes is a largely fictitious one. Such advertising is generally recognized to be a kind of game: it is hypocrisy in the original sense of acting a part. In religion and politics there is, one hopes, less hypocrisy, but some residual irony is still there in the competition of parties and “denominations.” Irony is however an adult and individual attitude, a considerable strain to keep up, and for weaker members the narcotic charm of self-hypnotism, which is essential in totalitarian societies, has a strong attraction. Thus in Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant satire, The Crying of Lot 49, an announcer, finding that he cannot pronounce such formulas as “rich, chocolaty goodness” with the requisite sincerity, goes on drugs, which disintegrate him as an individual and turn him into a voice of the mob.111 The principle of openness in a myth of concern does not, we said, prevent a society from having a central myth of concern. What it does do is to break up what is so often called its “monolithic” aspect. Expressions of faith in the closed myth of medieval Christianity ranged from the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to the crudest forms of relic fetishism. But all intense orthodoxy, however subtle or sophisticated on its highest levels, rests on a compromise with less enlightened versions of the same views. The latter can be deprecated, but not repudiated. Erasmus may ridicule or Luther denounce the popularity of indulgences and relics, but the Council of Trent must reaffirm the genuineness of these phenomena. Our own society is less orthodox in that sense. As in all societies, we are first introduced in childhood to popular social mythology, the steady rain of clichés and prejudices and assumptions that come to us from elementary schooling, from mass media, from entertainment, from conversation and gossip. In a society with an open mythology this process has little if any conscious aim, but unconsciously it aims, very precisely, at the same goal as that consciously sought in societies with closed myths, that is, the docile and obedient (or “adjusted”) citizen. A few years ago (things have improved lately) the bulk of American education up to about grade 8 was essentially an education in the clichés of American social mythology, the teaching of what purported to be literature being almost entirely so. But in an open mythology we encounter, as we go up the educational ladder, other forms of social mythology, some confirming the more elementary ones, others rejecting or repudiating them. The situation has the great advantage, not merely of keeping American social mythology open, but of making a critical attitude toward that

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mythology, along with the education which fosters the attitude, functional in society. It has the disadvantage of making disillusionment so much a part of social education that it may leave one’s permanent loyalties unformulated and undefined. There are those who accept American social mythology uncritically; there are those who reject much of it in theory but come to terms with it in practice; and there are those who repudiate it in practice but are unable to say where their real loyalties belong. Much of the social energy that a myth of concern generates leaks away through the openings of critical and analytical attitudes. This is not a bad thing in itself, as a free society must have these attitudes, but it creates other problems. For example, American society is usually called a “capitalist” society, especially in Communist countries. The belief in capitalism, so far as capitalism commands a belief, appears to rest mainly on an analogy between laissez-faire and liberalism, between the entrepreneur and the creative, adventurous, or emancipated individual, of the kind that the phrase “free enterprise” suggests. This analogy is deeply embedded in the elementary social mythology I just referred to, and of course many Americans hold it for life. Others find it dishonest, or, at best, vague and unconvincing, and feel that social education involves outgrowing it. In general, it is perhaps true to say that in the countries technically called capitalist, capitalism is not a belief that is desperately defended as a myth of concern. It is otherwise with “democracy,” as most of us take in, through the pores of our primary education, a concerned belief in democracy as an inclusive social ideal that works toward giving equal rights to all citizens. Among those for whom democracy is a genuine myth of concern and capitalism not one, many feel that in America the democratic ideal was kidnapped at the beginning by a social movement which was really oligarchical, based on various forms of exploitation, including slavery and later racism, and hence exclusive, which built up a hysterically competitive economy on a thunderous cannonade of systematic lying, and finally began to spill over into imperialistic crusades like the Vietnam War. The lunatic obsessiveness of a foreign policy that keeps on making aggressive gestures at a time when any serious war would wipe out the human race carries the situation beyond the point of normal loyalties. The result is that many people, especially in the under-thirty age group, feel alienated from their own society, to the point of what is sometimes called an identity crisis. As a result there has been a strongly revived sense of concern, which

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finds much of its focus in the universities. The universities are the social centres of the myth of freedom, and are, by necessity, devoted to the virtues of the truth of correspondence, including objectivity and detachment. These are felt to be insufficient virtues in the face of a direct threat to human survival, and hence there is a strong desire to transform the university, in particular, into a society of concern, like a church or political party. One reason for this curious and confused situation is that education itself, during the last century, has taken on many of the features of a myth of concern: compulsory and universal schooling, combined with the attempt to instil concerned social attitudes as part of the educational process (saluting the flag and the like), have turned the schools into a kind of secular church. We note in passing that whenever, in society, the sense of concern receives a shock, whenever the sense of a solid social order that we accept and go along with is weakened, we realize how primary social concern is. If concern is damaged, that damage must be patched up first, no matter what happens to the virtues fostered by reason and evidence. It seems obvious that, for people on this continent at least, the cure for the identity crisis just mentioned is the recovery of their own revolutionary and democratic myth of concern. A number of radicals may profess a democratic mythology who are actually fascinated by some monopolistic myth that permits of no dissent, and others may look to whatever Marxist leadership appears to be still in the age of innocence, like that of Che Guevara. But this search for a heroic ideal just beyond the frontier is itself a central part of American mythology, and, as with the pool of Narcissus, the real source of its attractiveness is not difficult to find. Certainly there is a tremendous radical force in American culture, in Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, in Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience, in Jefferson’s view of local self-determination, in Lincoln’s conception of the Civil War as a revolution against the inner spirit of slavery, which could give a very different social slant to the American myth of concern. Ezra Pound, for all his crankiness, was trying to portray something of this innate radicalism in his John Adams Cantos. There is also of course a right wing that would like to make the American way of life a closed myth, but its prospects at the moment do not seem bright. Thirty years ago, during the Depression, the last thing that anyone would have predicted was the rise of anarchism as a revolutionary force. It seemed to have been destroyed by Stalinist Communism once and for all. But we seem to be in an anarchist age, and need to retrace our steps to

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take another look at our historical situation. One reason why the radical mood of today is so strongly anarchist, in America, is that the American radical tradition just referred to, especially in Jefferson and Thoreau, shows many affinities with the decentralizing and separatist tendencies of anarchism, in striking contrast to orthodox Marxism, which had very little in the American tradition to attach itself to. There are some curious parallels between the present and the nineteenth-century American scene, between contemporary turn-on sessions and nineteenth-century ecstatic revivalism, between beatnik and hippie communes and some of the nineteenth-century Utopian projects; and the populist movements at the turn of the century showed the same revolutionary ambivalence, tending equally to the left or to the right, that one sees today. Again, today’s radical has inherited the heroic gloom of existentialism, with its doctrine that all genuine commitment begins in the revolt of the individual personality against an impersonal or otherwise absurd environment. The conception of the personal as inherently a revolutionary force, which, as we saw, began in a Christian context in Kierkegaard, was developed in a secular one by French writers associated with the resistance against the Nazis, this resistance being the direct ancestor of the more localized revolutionary movements of our day. The emphasis on individuality makes it possible for contemporary anarchism to absorb more cultural elements than the Stalinism of the last generation seemed able to absorb. One of these is a middle-class disillusionment with the values of what is called an affluent society. This kind of disaffection is not, like orthodox Marxism, directed at the centres of economic power: it is rather a psychologically based revolution, a movement of protest directed at the anxieties of privilege. It does not fight for workers against exploiters so much as attack and ridicule the work ethic itself. It does not see Negro segregation or the Vietnam War merely as by-products of a class struggle: it sees the fears and prejudices involved in these issues as primary, and the insecurity that inspires them as the real enemy. Here the radical mood of our time attaches itself to a revolutionary movement that started up in the nineteenth century, mainly in France, which had little in common with other revolutionary movements of its time except its opposition to the bourgeois ascendancy. This was what the nineteenth century called Bohemianism, the way of life pursued by many creative artists, both poets and painters, in opposition to the mores of their society. The vie de Bohème was more hedonistic and freer in its

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sexual standards than its more respectable rival, and it carried on a guerrilla campaign against the kind of middle-class anxieties that are usually expressed by the word “decency.” The symbols of its social opposition included drugs, specifically hashish, which is prominent in the imagery of Baudelaire, and a not-so-sweet disorder in the dress (“je m’encrapule le plus possible,” said Rimbaud).112 When this movement revived in the twentieth century, it expanded from the arts into the expression of a revolutionary lifestyle, for which the spokesman was Freud rather than Marx. This was hardly a role that Freud would have envisaged for himself, but in the beat movement of the ’50s, even in their hippie successors, one sees a curious effort to define a social proletariat in Freudian rather than Marxist terms. From its point of view, bourgeois society is a repressive anxiety-structure which is particularly disturbed by the sexual instinct, hence the renewal of society is bound up with the emancipating of that instinct, though this also involves associating it with the creative process. The addition of a sexual and erotic component to the revolutionary scene fulfils the original revolutionary prophecies of Blake and Shelley, for whom all political freedom was inextricably bound up with what Blake calls “an improvement of sensual enjoyment.”113 Another element in this is what we may call a kind of “sartor resartus” situation. In the symbolism of Carlyle’s book, clothes reveal the body, by enabling it to become publicly visible, and at the same time they conceal and disguise it. When society is properly functioning, according to Carlyle, its institutions are a clothing that fits it and reveals its form; when society has outgrown its institutions and is due for a radical change, those institutions have become merely a disguise. In the present mood of concern, the “establishment” seems to wear an outward semblance of liberal tolerance, expressed in the university and elsewhere, but the naked reality underneath it is a death wish. The impetus toward revealing nakedness, which often takes very literal forms, goes in both directions. In one direction is the attempt to tear off the disguises of tolerance and good will, of rationalization and liberal rhetoric, from the “establishment,” and in the other there is the popularity of encounter groups and similar devices for uncovering one’s “real” emotions. The ultimate result is assumed to be a confrontation of innocent with guilty nakedness. Prudery, it is felt, is an important element in ruling-class mythology for many reasons, one of which is a feeling that sex should be concealed and subordinated because it is something

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equally accessible to the working classes. Hence the shock tactics of “bad” words and an explicit emphasis on sexuality in radicalism. These shock tactics have already largely accomplished, I should think, one of their original aims, which was to change the focus of the obscene expression. The celebrated four-letter words raise few eyebrows today, because the taboo on them never was based on much more than reflex. The real obscenities of our time, the words that no self-respecting person would seriously use, are the words that express hatred or contempt for people of different religion or nationality or skin colour, and disapproval of such words is based on a more solid idea of what is socially dangerous. A revolutionary movement of this partly psychological kind is one in which the arts can play a central and functional role. This is the point at which the literary critic’s specific interests enter the contemporary social scene. The growth of a new sense of concern brings with it the urgent necessity of understanding, not merely its psychology or historical causation, but its mythical and poetic language. The greater relevance of the arts to social protest today is connected with another cultural fact of central importance in our present argument. This is the quite sudden revival of oral culture, at least in the North American and European democracies. Oral culture had been fostered a good deal in Communist countries, where in any case the traditions of oral poetry had been much more active. But for us it is a new experience to think of poetry as consisting not so much of a small group of great poets as of a kind of diffused creative energy, much of which takes quite ephemeral forms. It used to be assumed that every creative effort worthy the name was aiming at permanence, and so was really addressed to posterity, but this notion does not have the prestige it once had. A fair amount of this creative energy takes the form of a poetry read or recited to listening groups which is close to improvisation, usually has some kind of musical accompaniment or background, and includes commentary on current social issues. Wyndham Lewis’s contempt for the “dithyrambic spectator”114 seems very remote in the age of folk singers: we are once again in a culture of formulaic units and semi-improvised “happenings,” where the role of the audience is of primary importance, and which demands some consolidation of social opinion. We shall not, I hope, go so far as to retribalize our culture completely around formulaic units, as China is now doing with the thoughts of Chairman Mao. But a similar oral context, and a similar appeal to immediate emotional response, is obviously reappearing in our literature.

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When I began teaching, a generation ago, literature had become so assimilated to a writing culture that it was being looked at in reverse, and taught the wrong way round. Poetry is at the centre of literature; literary prose, in novels and plays and the like, forms the periphery; outside that again is utilitarian prose, the use of words for nonliterary purposes. Educational theory assumed that literature was first of all an art of communication, interpreting the word “communication” of course in antiimaginative terms. So its centre of gravity was utilitarian prose, which moved on to literary prose by way of relaxation, and finally, with the greatest reluctance, approached poetry as though it were boiling oil. Students were told that the conventionalizing of speech known as prose, which is actually a very difficult and sophisticated convention, was in fact the natural way to talk and to think; hence they were compelled to compose sentences in what for them was a dead language, with nothing of the actual rhythms of speech in it. However, by the time they reached the university they had finally become more or less convinced that prose really was the language of ordinary speech, though they still could not write it and seldom or never spoke it, and that poetry was a perverse way of distorting ordinary prose statements. Educators today appear to be as ignorant as ever, but their victims are less helpless. They have been educating themselves, partly through the film, with its unparalleled power of presenting things in terms of symbol and archetype, and partly through the oral tradition of popular contemporary poetry. (Again, a generation ago, such a phrase as “popular contemporary poetry” would hardly have made sense.) As a result many students have begun to think of poetic imagery and symbolism as a relatively normal form of thought and speech. Along with this, and partly as a result of the influence of science fiction, there has grown up a new tolerance for schematic patterns in thinking, of a kind that, as we saw earlier, is deeply congenial to poetry. Astrology, Tarot cards, the I Ching, maverick writers like Velikovsky or Gurdjieff, all have their student following; and even more orthodox thinkers can make use of schematic constructs, such as the “culinary triangle” of Lévi-Strauss, that they could hardly have got away with a generation ago.115 Then again, folk singers often make a quite uninhibited use of mythological, even Biblical, imagery. A line from an early ballad of Bob Dylan’s, “There are no truths outside the gates of Eden,”116 may make the central thesis of this essay more intelligible to some of its readers: certainly it makes Paradise Lost easier to teach to students familiar

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with it. This allusiveness is all the more remarkable in that while critics tend increasingly to read poetry by its symbolic “underthought,” folk singers and other poets with a listening audience have to make a surface of explicit statement a part of their communication as well. All this does not mean that a great age of poetry is about to dawn upon us: it means rather the opposite, an absorption of the poetic habit of mind into ordinary experience. The situation is so new that not all its social implications are clear yet. It is still not quite realized that the closer an art is to improvisation, the more it depends on a rigorous convention, as we see in the commedia dell’arte. The oral poet is concerned with the ritualized acts, or what Yeats calls the ceremony of innocence,117 around which social activity revolves in an oral culture. Both oral poetry and the life it reflects rely on a spontaneity which has a thoroughly predictable general convention underlying it. It is consistent with this kind of culture that young people should be concerned, in McLuhan’s formulaic phrase, more with roles than with goals,118 with a dramatic rather than a teleological conception of social function. One result of this has been a concerted effort to break down the distinction between art and life, between stage and audience, drama and event or “happening,” display and participation, social role and individual lifestyle. We thus have, among other things, new forms of social activity which are really improvised symbolic dramas. An example that I witnessed recently was the extraordinary sleepwalking ritual of the “people’s park” crisis in Berkeley in the summer of 1969. Here a vacant lot with a fence around it became assimilated to the archetype of the expulsion from Eden, dramatizing the conflict of the democratic community and the oligarchical conspiracy in a pastoral mode related to some common conventions of the Western story. A student editorial informed us that the lot was “covered with blood” because, like all the rest of the land in North America, it had been stolen from the Indians (murder of Abel archetype). The expelling angels in this symbolism were (as in Blake’s version of it) demonic, and the police, with their helmets and bayonets and gas masks, were endeavouring, with considerable success, to represent the demonic in its popular science-fiction form, of robots or bug-eyed monsters from outer space. But while the role solves the problem of sincerity, as the actor’s sincerity consists in putting on his show and not in believing what he says, it does not solve the greater problem of identity. The role is usually a part in someone else’s play, and much radical idealism wavers between the desire to do one’s own thing and the desire to surrender unconditionally

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to some externally imposed social program. All we can clearly see so far is that, first, the revival of oral culture and the growth of a radical sense of social concern are part of the same process. Second, a society in which the distinction between work of art and social event frequently breaks down is clearly one in which a literary critic cannot ignore the social context of his subject. The immediate social context of this new verbal culture is provided by the communication media. All these media have a close connection with the centres of social authority and reflect their anxieties. In socialist countries they reflect the anxiety of the political establishment to retain power; in the United States they reflect the anxiety of the economic establishment to keep production running. As Joyce realized, the twentieth century is pre-eminently the age of the perce-oreille,119 the steady insinuating of suggested social attitudes and responses that comes pouring from the active mouth of A into the passive ear of B. Wherever we turn, there is the same implacable voice, unctuous, caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders, ideologies, culture, contemporary issues, and remedies against the migraine we get from listening to it. As I have tried to suggest by this list, it is not only the voice we hear that haunts us, but the voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming our social attitudes, our habits of speech, our processes of thought. If people did not resent and resist this they would not be human, and the nightmares about society turning into an insect state would come true. The democracies are at a peculiar disadvantage, in comparison with the Marxist empires, in that they cannot suggest a socially participatory role for their listeners. They have to treat them primarily as consumers, and hence as objects to be stimulated. As with erotic stimulation, or rather as with other forms of erotic stimulation, there is a large element of mechanical and involuntary response. But there is resentment too, a resentment which turns to panic when it becomes obviously impossible to escape, and it seems clear that a good deal of the shouting and smashing and looting and burning of our times is to be connected with this panic. We hear of meetings broken up and speakers howled down by organized gangs; we try to phone from a public booth and find the telephone torn out; we read of hijacked planes and of bombs in letter boxes; hoodlums go berserk in summer resorts and adolescents scream all the words they know that used to be called obscene. All such acts, however silly or vicious in themselves, are acts of counter-communica-

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tion, acts noisy enough or outrageous enough to shout down that voice and spit at that image, if only for a few moments. But hysterical violence is self-defeating, not merely because it is violence but because, as counter-communication, it can only provoke more of what it attacks. Every outbreak of violence releases more floods of alarm, understanding, deep reservations, comment in perspective, denunciation, concern, sympathy, analysis, and reasoned argument. In other words, and other and other and other words, it develops more and more and more communication from talking A to listening B, while violence, however long it lasts, continues to go around in the circles of lost direction. There is a vaguely Freudian notion that there is something therapeutic in releasing inhibitions; but it is clear that releasing inhibitions is quite as compulsive, repetitive, and hysterical an operation as the repressing of them. All this is very puzzling to, say, an advertiser who does not understand that a television set is not only his way of reaching his market, but his market’s way of looking at him. If the viewer is black and the advertiser presents a vision of a white society gorging itself on privilege and luxury goods, the results can be explosive. Many other forms of contemporary “unrest” seem to me to have much to do with the fact that verbal communication is a one-way street. In university demonstrations it has been noticed that a good many students acquire their deeper convictions after the newsreel cameras arrive: they express their aggressiveness, in other words, by getting on the other side of the television set. The decline in the prestige of the more conventional types of monologue, such as lectures in universities and sermons in churches, doubtless has similar origins. The instinctive resistance offered to mass communication is apathy, but the communicating techniques of our times have learned how to get past apathy, and no longer find it a real barrier. Much more strenuous forms of resistance then develop: drugs, for instance, which may promise genuinely new sensory experiences, of a kind that mass media cheat us out of and that the socially approved narcotics fail to provide; or rock music, which wraps up the listener in an impermeable cloak of noise. Still more significant is the political resistance. The age which has achieved an instant delivery of news from all parts of the world is also the age in which the strongest political development is separatism. If the world is becoming a global village, we should not forget that the primary characteristics of village life include cliques, feuds, and impassable social barriers. The direction of most of the technological developments of our time

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has been towards greater introversion. The automobile, the passenger aeroplane, the movie, the television set, the highrise apartment, are more introverted than their predecessors, and the result is increased alienation and a decline in the sense of festivity, the sense of pleasure in belonging to a community. Even our one technically festive season, Christmas, is an introverted German Romantic affair, based on a myth of retreat into the cave of a big Dickensian family life of a type that hardly exists any more. The same introversion comes into a good deal of contemporary art, with its abstract monotony, its rejection of the external world, its neo-neolithic geometrizing. The one advantage of an introverted situation is privacy; but for us the growing introversion goes along with a steady decrease in privacy. This means that the psychological conditions of life, whatever the physical conditions, become increasingly like those of life in a prison, where there is introversion but no privacy and no real community. Against such a background, the growth of a sense of festivity connected with poetry and music, however noisy or strident, could be an encouraging sign. The revival of oral culture in our day has been variously interpreted, and one interpretation, suggested and strongly influenced by McLuhan, is that print represents a “linear” and time-bound approach to reality, and that the electronic media, by reviving the oral tradition, have brought in a new “simultaneous” or mosaic form of understanding. Contemporary unrest, in this view, is part of an attempt to adjust to a new situation and break away from the domination of print. We saw in the first section, however, that the difference between the linear and the simultaneous is not a difference between two kinds of media, but a difference between two mental operations within all media, that there is always a linear response followed by a simultaneous one whatever the medium. For words, the document, the written or printed record, is the technical device that makes the critical or simultaneous response possible. The document is the model of all teaching, because it is infinitely patient, repeating the same words however often one consults it, and the spatial focus it provides makes it possible to return on the experience, a repetition of the kind that underlies all genuine education. The document is also the focus of a community of readers, and while this community may be restricted to one group for centuries, its natural tendency is to expand over the community as a whole. Thus it is only writing that makes democracy technically possible. It is significant that our symbolic term for a tyrant is “dictator,” that is, an uninterrupted oral speaker. The domination of print in Western society, then, has not simply made

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possible the technical and engineering efficiency of that society, as McLuhan emphasizes; it has also created all the conditions of freedom within that society: democratic government, universal education, tolerance of dissent, and (because the book individualizes its audience) the sense of the importance of privacy, leisure, and freedom of movement. Democracy and book culture are interdependent, and the rise of oral and visual media represents, not a new order to adjust to, but a subordinate order to be contained. What the oral media have brought in is, by itself, anarchist in its social affinities. They suggest the primitive and tribal conditions of a preliterate culture, and to regard them as a new and autonomous order would lead, once again, to adopting a cyclical view of history, resigning ourselves to going around the circle again, back to conditions that we have long ago outgrown. As remarked above, the circle is the symbol of lost direction, and, because the future qua future is only the analogy of the past, it is also the only possible form of an untried direction. In every generation the inexperience of youth revolts against the wasted experience of its elders, and repeats the cycle in its turn. In the present age this situation has gigantically expanded, but the main effect of the new media is to turn the wheel faster. So far from encouraging a shift from linear and fragmented to simultaneous and versatile response, the electronic media have intensified the sense of a purely linear experience which can only be repeated or forgotten. Hence the “linear” panic about keeping up, getting with it, meeting the demands of a changed situation, and the like, is similarly intensified. It is all very well to say that the medium is the message, but as we seem to get much the same message from all the media, it follows that all media, within a given social environment like that of the Soviet Union or the United States, are much the same medium. This is because the real communicating media are still, as they always have been, words, images, and rhythms, not the electronic gadgets that convey them. The differences among the gadgets, whether they are of high or low definition and the like, must be of great technical interest, especially to those working with them, but they are clearly of limited social importance. If a country goes to war after developing television, the use of a “cooler” medium does not, unfortunately, cool off the war. The identification of medium and message is derived from the arts: painting, for instance, has no “message” except the medium of painting itself. But it is a false analogy to apply this principle to interested, or baited-trap, communication from A to B. There, one identifies form and content only as long as one is

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relatively unconscious of the form and still bemused by its novelty: but in direct communication, as soon as one becomes aware of the form, the content separates from it. I have spoken of the anxiety of continuity in society, which is not only a social feeling, but reappears in the personal life as well. What it is anxious about is the threat to one’s identity which is contained in experience. There is all the variety in moods, so great that one often hardly seems to be the same person throughout a day; there is the variety of social relationships which compels us to change our idioms of expression as often as our clothes; there is the variety of opinions and attitudes suggested to us by discussion and the effect of other personalities. One sets up a pattern of repetition, of habit, custom, convention, doing what one has always done, in order to preserve the feeling that one is the same person throughout one’s experience, that behind the caprice of mood is consistency of purpose, behind the change of opinion consistency of principle, and that such consistency is the containing form of one’s real existence. Such a consistency operates on two levels: a superficial level in which habit and custom become ends in themselves, and a deeper level in which they serve their real purpose of creating a constant sense of identity. Thus if an opinion that one has held all one’s life becomes obviously inadequate, clinging to the opinion in order to resist the thought of change is a superficial consistency, discarding or modifying it a sign of a deeper consistency of attitude. Similarly in the arts: once a convention is established, the writers or painters who follow it closely become quickly fashionable. An original artist comes along, and we say he is unconventional, that he represents a discontinuity with tradition. But if he is genuinely original he will soon show a traditional quality, though on a deeper level of tradition. Shallow and deep consistency represent two different and opposed uses of the memory. A consistency motivated only by the fear of change uses the memory to live in the past, preserve the status quo in the present, and make the future as predictable as possible. For a more organic consistency memory becomes practice memory, using habit and repetition to develop skills and learning processes. Whatever virtues we have, such as honesty or truthfulness, are also consistent habits in this sense. Remembering that it is the electronic media which most strongly suggest the linear and the fragmented, we can see that they help to create a powerful sense of discontinuity in society. Their influence is reinforced

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by muddled educational theories which do not distinguish the two forms of memory in learning, and so confuse the repetition underlying the learning process itself with “mere learning by rote” and the like. When the sense of a continuum of identity in life is weakened, individual life breaks down into a discontinuous sequence of experiences, in which the sexual experiences loom up very prominently. The reason why they do become prominent is that one’s sexual life, as such, is not so much individual as generic: people may love in individual ways, but copulation in itself, like birth and death, is of the species. I spoke of Kierkegaard’s use of Leporello’s catalogue of mistresses in Don Giovanni as a symbol of the “aesthetic,” or falsely individualized, attitude to experience,120 and of course there is a sense in which all Don Giovanni’s mistresses are the same woman, or the same female object. In the mechanical sexuality of so much contemporary entertainment there comes back into our culture something of the fetishism that we have in that quaint little Palaeolithic object called the Venus of Willendorf, all belly and teats and gaping vulva, but no face. The confusion between the physically intimate and the genuinely personal is parallel to, and doubtless related to, the confusion between the introverted and the creative experience in the drug cults. In universities today the demand for “relevance” has two main sources. One is the sense of the threat to identity created by the discontinuity in contemporary experience; the other (because of course the sense of identity is social as well as individual) is the feeling that one’s life is not related to a sufficiently articulate myth of concern, and so lacks an essential dimension of its meaning. We notice how the demand for relevance reflects the inner drive of all concerned thinking to become encyclopedic, covering every aspect of human life and destiny. From this point of view, scholarship, in the arts and sciences, seems to reinforce the threat to identity. For scholarship is intensely pluralistic, continually forming pockets of research which are sealed off even from their nearest neighbours. Again, while it begins by being impersonal in a good sense, depending on an intellectual honesty that refuses to manipulate evidence, it seems to be easy for it to lose its sense of social perspective, and so become impersonal in the bad sense of being indifferent to human values. It is at this point that the distinction between closed and open mythologies becomes crucial. A certain amount of contemporary agitation seems to be beating the track of the “think with your blood” exhortations of the Nazis a generation ago, for whom also “relevance” (Zweckwissen-

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schaft, u.s.w.) was a constant watchword.121 Such agitation aims, consciously or unconsciously, at a closed myth of concern, which is thought of as already containing all the essential answers, at least potentially, so that it contains the power of veto over scholarship and imagination. Marcuse’s notion of “repressive tolerance,” that concerned issues have a right and a wrong side, and that those who are simply right need not bother tolerating those who are merely wrong, is typical of the kind of hysteria that an age like ours throws up.122 That age is so precariously balanced, however, that a closed myth can only maintain a static tyranny until it is blown to pieces, either externally in war or internally through the explosion of what it tries to suppress. A society with an open mythology has to recognize the autonomy of scholarship, along with its necessary pluralism and specialization, and recognize also that scholarship contains a power of veto over any aspect of any concerned mythology, as it may at any time provide evidence that contradicts widely held tenets. Again, as noted, it has to release the language of concern itself, allowing the creative imagination in its artists to follow whatever paths the conventions of the arts in their time suggest. Literature, left to itself, follows the encyclopedic pattern of concern, and covers the entire range of imaginative possibilities, although of course every age stresses some conventions more than others. It has also to recognize that a power structure or establishment, at any given moment, does not manifest the real form of that society, but only its transient appearance; hence all genuine effort at social change aims, not at creating “another society,” or even a “new society,” but at releasing the real form of the society it is in. Preserving a myth of freedom along with a myth of concern in society is difficult and dangerous, for while a society with an open mythology is obviously better for human life than a society with a closed one, yet an open mythology is by no means a panacea. Not only is there a constant pressure within society to close its mythology, from both radical and conservative wings, but the efforts to keep it open have to be strenuous, constant, delicate, unpopular, and above all largely negative. When it comes to meeting the threat to identity, a myth of freedom seems very ineffective in comparison with the narcotic charm of a closed myth of concern, with its instant, convinced, and final answers. It takes time to realize that these answers are not only not genuine answers, but that only the questions can be genuine, and all such answers cheat us out of our real birthright, which is the right to ask the questions.

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For a closed myth of concern, the question of relevance could hardly be easier to answer: anything is relevant that is relevant to it. It is equally easy to apply, for this kind of relevance relates the subject to the student: the slithering downward way of mindless educators, not the flinty uphill path of relating the student to the subject, which is the way of genuine education. For the myth of freedom, no built-in or inherent relevance exists in any subject: only the student himself can establish the relevance of what he studies, and being a student means accepting the responsibility for doing so. To make such a commitment in the midst of the confusion of our time is an act of historical significance, civilization being the sane man’s burden. To return to Kant’s use of the phrase which is my title, those who are paralysed either by the dogmatism of unliberated concern or by the scepticism of unconcerned freedom have to be written off, however large a majority they may form. It is only those who have embarked on some critical path who are living in the history of their time. VII Social mythology is polarized by two mythical conceptions, the conception of the social contract and the conception of the Utopia or ideal state. These two principles of contract and Utopia descend historically, as myths, from their Christian predecessors, the alienation myth of the fall of man and the fulfilment myth of the City of God. Behind the contract myth in particular we can catch a glimpse of the legal metaphor in the Christian tradition expressed by the word “testament” to describe the structure of the Bible, where God voluntarily binds himself to a contract (diatheke, not a syntheke or contract on equal terms) with man. The contract myth begins as a fiction about a transfer of social authority in the distant past, but it soon becomes clear that a contract myth is an attempt to account for the present structure of society as it presents itself to the mythmaker. Modern contract mythology begins with Edmund Burke, for whom a society’s real contract is its existing structure of authority. Before we are born, we are predestined to a certain social position at a certain point in time; before we have any personality we have a social context. Because we are given our loyalties before we are capable of choosing them, to try to reject what one is already committed to can only lead to chaos, both in personal and social life. Further, it is the permanence and continuity of

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social institutions, including church and state, that not only civilizes man, but adds the dimension of historical significance to his life. A similar association of social concern with historical continuity appears in T.S. Eliot close to our own day. I have so far said nothing about the secular or national myths of concern, which had always been there, but became immensely powerful in the nineteenth century. As myths, they are very largely interchangeable, and they are all simple forms of contract mythology: because we have been born British or German or French or what not, the constituted authority of that society has a right not only to our unquestioned loyalty but, in time of war, to our lives. In our day nationalism usually has to sell itself under some more universal label to make much appeal. The weak spot in the conservative emphasis on the contract, on playing the hand dealt to one at birth, so to speak, is the uncritical element in it. Being involuntarily born into a certain nation seems hardly enough to compel one to adopt the maxim “my country right or wrong.” The primary justification for authority, in the conservative view, is the fact that it is there, and this makes it difficult to distinguish reality from appearance in society, what authority actually is from what it seems or pretends to be. If we compare Burke on this subject with Paine, we can see how Burke’s position practically forces him to speak of the façade of society as though it were society, as though greed and snobbery and injustice and superstition played no essential role in, for instance, maintaining the ascendancy of the aristocracy. We see a trivial form of the same desire to identify social reality and appearance in the passive or negative concern of the person who automatically switches over to situation comedy as soon as his television set begins to talk about public affairs or education. For such people the fantasies of advertising are not simply part of an ironic game, but are rather a form of drug culture. The more serious conservative acceptance of the social contract throws a strong emphasis on what is now called “commitment” or “engagement.” These are not only largely uncritical attitudes, but also somewhat humourless: their instinct is to rationalize whatever they find existing in society, instead of recognizing anomalies or absurdities in it. Commitment and engagement are attitudes that imply the superiority of the continuum of society to the person who is caught up by it, even if his original commitment was a voluntary choice. The authority of the social contract however is a de facto authority: it lacks a genuinely ideal dimension, and so keeps ideals in an empty world of wish or hope or promise,

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at best in a vague and unspecified future. Thus the complete acceptance of the contract, conceived as the existing structure of authority in society, can only end either in resigned cynicism or in the identifying of reality and appearance just mentioned. Hence there grows up in society a radical or Utopian social view, which has steadily increased, not merely in strength but in authority, during the last century. The radical view of the contract focuses on the uncritical element in it, and feels that maturity and development are a matter of becoming aware of our social conditioning, and so of making a choice between presented and discovered loyalties. The only real loyalty, from this point of view, is the voluntary or self-chosen loyalty, which is often loyalty to a social ideal not yet in existence. This transfer of loyalty from one’s native society to another society still to be constructed creates an intensely Utopian state of mind, which attaches its loyalty to an ideal, and then works toward gathering enough force around this ideal to smash the existing contract, and thereby become a new de facto authority. As such it postulates an ideal contract, buried underneath the actual one, which the society of the future is to restore or manifest. In our day the Marxist revolutionary myth is the Utopian counterpart to the more conservative and nationalistic conceptions of society, including the progressive gradualism referred to earlier. When Engels contrasted Utopian and “scientific” socialism he was really completing the Utopian conception.123 In a world like ours a limited Utopia in a restricted or enclosed space is an empty fantasy: Utopia must be a worldwide transformation of the whole social order or it is nothing. But for it to be this it must be conceived, not as an a priori rational construct, as in most Utopian romances, but as the telos of history, the end to which history points. The “scientific” element in Engels’s socialism, then, is a religious or concerned belief in the teleology of history. We see this in the intensely teleological nature of Marxist revolutionary tactics, in which every strike or demonstration is one more step in the advance to the final takeover. But of course this potential society of the future will also demand commitment, of a much more intense kind. The radical Utopian attitude recognizes anomalies and absurdities in existing society, but its own loyalty is still less critical, even more eager to rationalize, more impatient with dissent, more anxious to suppress the perception of anomalies in itself. No myth of freedom can ever emerge out of this situation: instead of getting more liberalism and tolerance out of the conflict of concerns we

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eventually get less, as each side progressively identifies these qualities with the disguises of its enemy. We have noticed how frequently a myth of concern rests on a false version of history, or, at best, on a very strained interpretation of it. The Utopian vision of a future classless society is similarly distorted, as ideals projected into the future get us involved in a pernicious means-to-an-end process which ignores the fact that means cannot lead to ends, because they condition and eventually replace those ends. One suspects that there must be some reality in the present moment of which this future-directed fiction is the shadow. If we look at the greatest writers who deal with ideal societies, such as Plato, More, Locke, or Rousseau, we begin to suspect that they are not really writing about contracts or Utopias at all, but about the theory of education. It is clearly education that these four writers at least most care about, and their fictions about what happened in a remote past or might conceivably happen in a remote future or other place are expendable. The institutions to which man is attached are mainly products of concern, and they form the complex of temporal authority. He may spend his whole life in this context, but an educated man in a complex society also becomes aware, through his education, of another kind of authority, which has only an internal or inherent compulsion: the authority of the rational argument, the accurate measurement, the repeatable experiment, the compelling imagination. Out of this comes the community of those who appeal to the largely nonmythical features of civilization, the features which suggest an environment outside the immediate society and its enemies, and which form the basis of the myth of freedom. This community constitutes a genuine de jure or spiritual authority in society. The ideal state, then, is a projection into the future of a source of spiritual authority, founded on the myth of freedom, that sits in the middle of society, and which I shall call the educational contract. The educational contract is the process by which the arts and sciences, with their methods of logic, experiment, amassing of evidence, and imaginative presentation, actually operate as a source of spiritual authority in society. What they create is a free authority, something coherent enough to help form a community, but not an authority in the sense of being able to apply external compulsion. The sense of the permanence and continuity of social institutions, so powerful in Burke’s day, is now greatly weakened, along with the belief that they are any better for being permanent. There still remains the continuity of the arts and sciences. This is not a gradualist continuity: every subject of knowledge has

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gone through a long series of revolutionary transformations. It is rather the form of continuity that we have called deep or organic consistency, and this consistency is something that everyone experiences in his own education, as he recapitulates the earlier stages of the subjects he studies. The conception of an educational contract was the main contribution made by the development of educational theory in nineteenth-century England, which is also usually regarded as one of the world’s greatest eras of liberal thought. The educational contract is the area of free thought and discussion at the centre of John Stuart Mill’s view of liberty, and which he thought of as a kind of intellectual counterpart of Parliament. It differs from Parliament, for Mill, in that the liberals can never have a majority, which is why democracy has to function as an illogical but deeply humane combination of majority rule and minority right. In Arnold the educational contract is called culture, and Arnold is explicit about culture’s being the source of genuine authority in society and at the same time operating in a Utopian direction by breaking down the barriers of class conflict. Newman draws a distinction between liberal and useful knowledge, in which only the former belongs to the educational contract, but this is really a difference between two aspects of knowledge rather than two kinds of knowledge. The educational contract is what the university in society primarily stands for. The conceptions of Mill, Arnold, and Newman are wider than the university, but the university is their engine room, and free authority can last only so long as the university keeps operating. The university is its centre, not as an institution, but as the place where the appeal to reason, experiment, evidence, and imagination is constantly going on. It is not and never can be a concerned organization, like a church or a political party, and the tactics of trying to revolutionize society by harassing and bedevilling the university are not serious tactics. Of course the university is easy to harass, hence doing so gives a false sense of accomplishment. Going back to our writers on Utopias, we notice that, for example, Socrates in the Republic is not interested in setting up his ideal state anywhere: what he is interested in is the analogy between his ideal state and the structure of the wise man’s mind. The latter is an absolute dictatorship of reason controlling desire through the will, and these three elements correspond to the philosopher-king, soldiers, and artisans of the political myth. The ideal state exists, so far as we know, only in such wise minds, who will obey its laws whatever society they are actually living in. In More’s Utopia, the narrator Hythloday is a revolutionary communist,

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but More himself suggests using the knowledge of Utopia rather as a means of bringing about an improvement in European society from within. Thus the real Utopia becomes the social vision of the wise counsellor’s mind, founded on a humanistic education. Plato and More realize that while the wise man’s mind is rigidly disciplined, and while the mature state is ordered, we cannot take the analogy between the disciplined mind and the disciplined state too literally: if we did we should get the most frightful tyranny in the latter. The real Utopia is an individual goal, of which the disciplined society is an allegory. The end of commitment and engagement is the community: the logical end of detachment is the individual. But this is not an antithesis: the genuine individual is so only after he has come to terms with his community. This is the reason why the individual goal is symbolized by a political analogy. The Utopian ideal points beyond the individual to a condition in which, as in Kant’s kingdom of ends, society and individual are no longer in conflict, but have become different aspects of the same human body. We do not now think of the wise man’s mind as a dictatorship of reason, of which an authoritarian society could be an allegory: in fact we do not think about the wise man’s mind at all. We think rather, in more Freudian terms, of a mind in which a principle of sanity is fighting for its life against a thundering herd of chaotic impulses, which cannot be simply suppressed but must be frequently indulged and humoured, allowed to have their say however perverse or infantile. In short, we think of the mind as a participatory democracy; and our social ideals become, as before, an idealized political allegory of such a mind. In this analogy there is no place for the inner-directed person who resists society, like Socrates, or like More himself, and for that very reason the analogy seems more compelling. We cannot, therefore, recognize the autonomy of the arts and sciences on the ground that objective truth exists in a Platonic world of forms or a Christian unfallen world which the wise or good man inhabits. We may believe that it exists, but in practice it is a world not to see but to see by, an informing power rather than an objective goal to be attained. It is for this reason that the liberty of the arts, more particularly literature, forms an essential part of the myth of freedom. To liberate the language of concern is to ensure that the whole imaginative range of concern is being expressed in society, instead of being confined to a selected type of imagination which is hitched to the tactics of one social group, as propaganda for it, or what we have called a rhetorical analogue to it.

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The chief mythical schemata of the twentieth century were outlined in the nineteenth, and a critic concerned with the stereotypes of social mythology finds little that is essentially new in this field in the century since Culture and Anarchy. In that book Arnold, whose thinking is more schematic than he himself realized, speaks of the three classes of society, upper, middle, and lower, as elements in the ultimate classless society towards which “culture” leads. So far as they are classes, their jockeying for power hinders and retards the growth of culture: it would have seemed the wildest paradox to Arnold to think of arriving at a classless society through increasing the ascendancy of one of its classes. Reactivating the aristocracy, as Carlyle was urging, would merely create a new barbarism; the dictatorship of the proletariat would reduce society to a “populace”; and the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie in Arnold’s own Victorian England was producing only Philistinism. Yet each class contains a classless idea to contribute to culture as a whole, which is genuine only when detached from its class context. The bourgeois class contains the idea of “liberty,” that is, the assumption that the well-being of a society is measured by the degree of individual life it permits. Many aspects of this liberty fall outside the scope of the present essay, but the elements in what we have been calling the myth of freedom are central to Arnold’s conception of culture, though, as explained earlier, the humanist context of that conception no longer exists. As a class concept, of course, liberty can hardly be distinguished from laissezfaire, the liberty to exploit. Hence the necessity for considering also the working-class contribution to culture, which is the idea of equality. Arnold frequently reminded his British middle-class readers that it was possible to pursue liberty to the point of forgetting about equality, just as other writers say of other societies that it is possible to pursue equality to the point of forgetting about liberty. It appears that the idea of equality forms the nucleus of most myths of concern in our day, in both Marxist and democratic countries. It is not itself a myth of concern, but a concerned feeling entering into every serious myth, whatever its reference. In the democracies there is a deeply concerned opposition charging that democracies are still dominated by oligarchical and exclusivist habits of thought, that the treatment of the black or “third world” elements in democratic society is still not good enough by the standard of equality. There is also a strong feeling in the democracies (held mainly, though not entirely, by a different group of people) that middle-class societies preserve essential elements of free-

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dom which get lost in proletarian movements. The defence of freedom by itself has the disadvantage that the myth of freedom is a secondary and derivative myth, appropriate chiefly to societies that have already attained some success in meeting the primary requirements of concern. Hence those who feel that democratic societies should be dissolved and reconstituted on a basis of total equality find it easy to assume that questions of freedom are not important, or will take care of themselves, or should be postponed and wait their turn. Marxist countries, on the other hand, have begun to develop a fiercely persecuted but steadily growing liberal opposition which sees the real Utopian goal of society as an individualized one. There is an implicit, if not explicit, link in Arnold’s mind between his third class, the aristocracy, and the third revolutionary ideal of fraternity. Just as the class-bound conceptions of liberty and equality lead inevitably to American troops in Cambodia and Russian troops in Czechoslovakia, so a class-bound conception of fraternity could lead only to Nazism and Fascism, with their phony hero cults. But if we detach the fundamental idea of aristocracy, respecting a man because of his birth, from its class context, it becomes the ultimate social ideal of respecting a man because he has been born, because he is there. This dream of a world in which there is no difference between loyalty to society and loyalty to individuals, including one’s self, is occasionally glimpsed in literature, in the pastoral tradition, in Rabelais’s Abbey of Thélème, in Yeats’s lords and ladies of Byzantium, but always with a sense of lurking paradox. In an age dominated by Hegelian and Marxist schematisms of antitheses resolving in a new and wider unity, it may be thought that this ideal society could be the synthesis that will arise in future out of the present form of the struggle of concern and freedom. An older, and perhaps wiser, philosophical tradition tells us that the synthesis never in fact comes into existence, and that antithesis or tension of opposites is the only form in which it can exist. So we come back to where our critical path began, in the contrast between an existing world and a world which may not exist but is pointed to by the articulate orders of experience, the intelligible world of the thinker and the imaginative world of the artist, which are or seem to be analogies of it. This world is frequently called (in Buddhism, for example) an unborn world, a world that never quite enters existence. Its presence, however, or, more accurately, the lively feeling of its absence, is what accounts for the quality of pleasure in the arts. There is a false

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form of imaginative pleasure, connected with what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic attitude to experience, which is passive, a sense of a pleasantly stimulated subject contemplating an inscrutably beautiful object. This leads to an idolatry of art, a second-rate pseudo-concern in which art itself becomes an object of concern, something to be believed in. The genuine form of it brings us face to face with the myths of concern we have been examining. Pleasure seems a most unlikely development out of concern, which is so often only a hair’s breadth away from bigotry and fanaticism, violence and terror. Yet the poet’s role clearly has to do with providing pleasure, even though all the bogies and demons of obsession are inside his magic circle. Myths of concern enable members of a society to hold together, to accept authority, to be loyal to each other and courageous against attack. Such myths are verbal constructions designed for specific social purposes. In literature myths are disinterested: they are forms of human creativity, and as such they communicate the joy—a more concrete word than pleasure—that belongs to pure creation. They are formed out of every conceivable horror and iniquity of human life, and yet an inner exuberance lifts them clear of that life. Literature is unique among the arts in being able to reflect the world escaped from, in its conventions of tragedy and irony and satire, along with the world escaped to, in its conventions of pastoral and romance and comedy. The world of imagination, from this point of view, is partly a holiday or Sabbath world where we rest from belief and commitment, the greater mystery beyond whatever can be formulated and presented for acceptance. On earth and in history, Christianity destroyed the belief in the Classical gods, but the Classical gods promptly went to the imaginative heaven of poetry, and Venus was perhaps more genuinely revered in Renaissance Europe, as one of what Emily Dickinson calls “our confiscated gods,”124 than she ever was in her temple at Cyprus. As that very wise man J.L. Borges has remarked, literature not only begins in a myth, it also ends in one.125 He made this remark in connection with Don Quixote, who begins in the narrowest possible confinement, a neurotic fanaticism, a commitment to a myth of concern that makes no sense, and ends by haunting the imagination of the entire world. One of the mysterious and yet central facts about literature is that it is capable of this kind of growth, growth through space, through time, through all the barriers of belief and of cultural differentiation: and criticism is its growth. But the arts are witnesses to something more than a rest after labour,

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however important that may be in itself. At the basis of human existence is the instinct for social coherence, which in our day is trying to escape in some degree from the exclusiveness that in the past has always marked the boundaries of specific myths of concern. Concern by itself can never be entirely free from the clattering of anxiety, the fear of heresy, the hysteria of intolerance and violence. It is the basis of all community, but in itself it cannot distinguish a community from a mob. Above it is individual life, and only the individual is capable of happiness. The basis of happiness is a sense of freedom or unimpeded movement in society, a detachment that does not withdraw; and the basis of that sense of independence is consciousness. It is the articulated worlds of consciousness, the intelligible and imaginative worlds, that are at once the reward of freedom and the guarantee of it. But just as society is never free from hysteria, so individual freedom is never itself entirely free from a privilege that somebody else is partly paying for. It is out of the tension between concern and freedom that glimpses of a third order of experience emerge, of a world that may not exist but completes existence, the world of the definitive experience that poetry urges us to have but which we never quite get. If such a world existed, no individual could live in it, because the society he belongs to is part of himself, including all those who are too cold and hungry and sick ever to get near it. No society, even the smallest and most dedicated community, could live in it, because the innocence needed to live continuously in such a world would require a nakedness far beyond anything that removing one’s clothes could reach. If we could live in it, of course, criticism would cease and the distinction between literature and life would disappear, because life itself would then be the continuous incarnation of the creative word.

2 Literary Criticism 1963

From the pamphlet issued by the MLA’s Committee on Research Activities, The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe, 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1970), 69–81. First appeared in first edition of 1963, 57–69. When a second edition was called for, Thorpe wrote to Frye asking whether he wanted to revise his piece. Frye responded that he felt it “does not call for very much in the way of revision. It seems to me that when it does go out of date, or if it is out of date now, it ought to be replaced with another essay by somebody else” (NFF, 1988, box 60, file 7). Apart from changes of accidentals reflecting current uses of hyphens, commas, and spelling, there was only one small change in wording in the second edition (see n. 8). The work was translated into Japanese in 1972.

The previous essays in this series have dealt with the essential techniques to be learned by scholars in the humanities.1 What is meant here by criticism is a further stage in the scholarly organization of literature. It is not necessary for a literary scholar to become a critic in this sense, but he must be conversant with one or more of the techniques dealt with in the previous part of this handbook before setting up as a critic. I have attempted criticism myself without knowing very much about some of them, and I have never found my deficiencies to be anything less than a constant handicap. Still, if one’s interest is really in criticism, it is perhaps well not to become too expert in them. They are so demanding that one may easily fall into the error of assuming that, if criticism is posterior to scholarship, it must be a final whole of which the other scholarly techniques are preliminary parts, and so be something requiring superhuman abilities.

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Such psychological hazards may be more common in Classical scholarship, where literary criticism seems to be somewhat deprecated. A.E. Housman speaks in this exaggerated way of criticism at the opening of his essay The Name and Nature of Poetry, which, it is true, is not very successful as criticism, though for other reasons than his intense specialization as an editor of Classical texts.2 There is less diffidence in the criticism of modern literature: in Mr. Stuart Gilbert’s commentary on Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, we are told that as Ulysses, like all great works of art, is a microcosm of the universe, a knowledge of the universe will provide a solution to the obscurities of Ulysses.3 This is closer to the kind of exuberance the critic needs for tackling difficult and complex literature. In the modern field, at least, a much greater hazard for critics than stage fright is the general fuzziness about the aims, purposes, limitations, and scope of academic criticism. And, as critics are occupationally disposed to write most about what puzzles them most, this uncertainty has already produced a bulky literature of its own, which has done more to express the confusion than to clear it up. Much of what we are here calling criticism has traditionally been regarded as something different from scholarship, a matter of taste, feeling, subjective reaction, or sensitivity. Statements produced by such factors, like the statements of literature itself, are pseudo-statements in the sense that they cannot be verified or refuted. It seems therefore difficult, if not impossible, to establish standards that will distinguish good from mediocre criticism. Every scholar develops something analogous to a sense of smell, and if a book has declared itself intellectually bankrupt on page 2 the experienced scholar, left to himself, will not read on to page 502. But he may not have only himself to consider, and may have to give reasons for rejecting the book. One can perhaps get some lead from the style: if the writing is illiterate the handling of the subject is likely to be insensitive. A surgeon with rusty knives and dirty scalpels does not inspire confidence, nor does a critic whose style is rusty with abstraction and dirty with jargon. But this is only a lead and nothing more, as some badly written books do say something, and there are elegantly written ones which are as empty as Marlowe’s tomb, if less absurd than the conception of criticism that opened it.4 It is not socially acceptable merely to say in a review, “Mr. X has written a book on the subject Y, a subject his intelligence is not sufficient to grasp,” and if it were the chances of a reviewer’s being in a position to make such a remark are remote. Hence mediocre books are often treated

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with much the same respect as good ones, and get on all the bibliographies as part of the graduate student’s obstacle race. It is in fact a standard rhetorical device to begin an article with a footnote referring to the contributions of twenty-seven predecessors to the same subject, in which the three critics who know what they are talking about are lumped in with the twenty-four who do not, as part of the chaos out of which the new article is creating order. It is not much wonder, then, that many scholars should regard literary criticism proper as an inferior mental discipline to historical criticism or editing, where at least there are definite facts to get wrong. In this essay I am dealing with scholarly or academic criticism, which I should connect with the other scholarly disciplines treated in this handbook, and which I should want to distinguish clearly, though not in the least pejoratively, from journalistic criticism or reviewing, much of which, of course, is done by the same people. There is a traditional metaphor which makes the critic the “judge” of literature. Such a metaphor may imply that Shakespeare and Milton and other impressive people are, relatively to the critic, in the role of prisoners or petitioners, a prospect so exhilarating that many critics wish to leap into a judicial role at once, on the Alice-in-Wonderland principle of sentence first, verdict afterward. I am aware of the weight and influence of critics today who insist that criticism is primarily evaluative, and my next sentence, whether right or wrong, has been carefully considered. The metaphor of the judge, and in fact the whole practice of judicial criticism, is entirely confined to reviewing, or surveying current literature or scholarship: all the metaphors transferred from it to academic criticism are misleading and all the practices derived from it are mistaken. The reviewer of a current book, whatever its content, is expected to lead up to a value judgment, to give a clear indication of whether or not he thinks the book worth reading. But an academic critic, concerned with the scholarly organization of literature, is never in this judicial position. He is dealing with a body of literature which has all, whatever its merits, been accepted as a valid subject of scholarly study. For current literature there is an audience that wants to select its reading, but for Lydgate’s poems or Heywood’s plays there is no such audience—except students, and selecting for them is a function of teaching and not of criticism. Yeats, writing an essay on Swift, remarks that he is unable to check a remark made by a critic about Swift’s letters to Vanessa, because those letters bore him.5 He is really saying that he does not wish to be a scholar, for no scholar

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can afford the luxury of being bored by anything that is in the least relevant to his area of study. It is worth insisting on this point, because the whole concept of academic criticism, as something which grows out of and completes the work of scholarship, is a relatively new one. One feels that criticism has played a rather minor role in the literature of the past; that, especially in English literature, it has not had enough authority to affect the main body of literary creation, and that it is extremely fortunate for literature that it has not had such authority. The reason for this is that most criticism in the past, as well as much of it in the present, is judicial criticism, which is very apt to go wrong when it assumes an academic function. Academic criticism is partly historical, studying past literature in its original context, and partly an attempt to express what past literature can communicate beyond its own time to ours. Some tension between these two attitudes is inevitable, and neither should gain a complete victory. Overstatements of historical criticism tend to belittle great writers by forcing them down into a historical process. Take statements of the type: “Classical writers are A, B, and C, whereas Romantic writers are D, E, and F” (the letters stand for contrasting groups of adjectives). In some contexts such statements may be useful, but if they lead to assuming that Dryden or Keats, by virtue of being labelled one or the other, was able to present only half a vision of reality, they clearly lose their usefulness. This is one extreme; reading everything in the past by our own standards, which means turning all criticism into the judicial process we use in reviewing a contemporary book, is the other. Rymer’s essay on Othello is the stock example of an extreme assimilation of academic to judicial criticism.6 We have to avoid of course the blunder that is called the intentional fallacy in criticism. The question, “What did the author mean by this?” is always illegitimate. First, we can never know; second, there is no reason to suppose that the author knew; third, the question confuses imaginative with discursive writing. The legitimate form of the question is, “What does the text say?” But what a text says it says in the language of its own time, and although that language can be intelligible to us, we have to try to read Milton’s theology and Swift’s politics precisely as we read Langland’s West Midland dialect, without translating. I say try to read, because reading something in the language of its own time is always, beyond a certain point, a conjectural reconstruction. If we ask what Samuel Beckett or J.D. Salinger meant to their own time, we find

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ourselves confronting a vast fog, and the original audience of Shakespeare or the original purchasers of Paradise Lost were no better off. Critics of the twenty-third century, if there are any, will insist, and rightly, that Beckett and Salinger should be related to the assumptions of their own age; but we do not know what those assumptions are, nor do Beckett or Salinger. There has always been a view that the writer’s function is to instruct and delight. Judicial criticism, at least of literature proper, puts a strong emphasis on the latter: writers of plays, particularly, must please to live. But if we think of “instruction” not as illustrating moral precepts, but as expanding our vision, then instruction is quite as important in literature, and our instinct for regarding “escape” reading as to some extent substandard partly justified. Every writer, past or present, big or little, is, by the act of writing, making a bid for authority, for filling a place in our imaginative experience that no one else can fill in quite the same way. The first task of a responsible judicial critic dealing with a living and not yet established writer is to try to determine what the quality of his authority is. In academic criticism the authority has for most writers already been established. One may dislike Donne or Shelley, but it is critical malpractice to pretend that they are not important poets; writers of the past who have no importance in themselves still carry, for academic purposes, something of the authority of the literary traditions and conventions that they so pallidly, and therefore so lucidly, illustrate. The academic critic needs, not judiciousness, but humility, though he needs that less as a moral virtue than as an intellectual precaution. What gives a judge the right to be on a bench is knowledge of law, and what gives a critic the right to be a critic is knowledge of literature, but there the parallel stops. If the critic is faced with a major work of literature, he is the one being judged, and the best he has to offer is still none too good. What is required from him is not evaluation, but, first, understanding as little inadequate as possible, and, second, some power of communicating that understanding which will make him worth reading as well as his subject. It is not difficult to give an impression of raising one’s standards by limiting one’s sympathies, but this is not a legitimate academic ambition. The scholarly critic must never forget that his permanent value as a critic depends exclusively on what he accepts. T.S. Eliot is a critic of permanent value because of what he says about Dante, Donne, Dryden, Johnson, Marvell, and other poets he likes and appreciates. He does not

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need to write a second essay on them trying to correct what he said previously; nothing he has said need cause his reader the least embarrassment or uneasiness. When he writes of Milton and Shelley he is in the position of a bridge player saying “I pass”; we feel that we must wait for another critic who will do better with them. Yeats is a critic of permanent value because of what he says about the Irish National Theatre, about Blake, or about Shelley; when he writes of T.S. Eliot or Wilfred Owen he is merely demonstrating where his limitations are. In other words, most of a critic’s mistakes are rejections, and if he is dealing with the established dead, all his rejections are mistakes. Even in reviewing, a “this will never do” critique is of limited usefulness, because if it is justified the review will seldom outlive its subject, and if it is not the best that can happen to the reviewer is a booby immortality.7 But in academic criticism the relevant value judgments are all implicitly assumed. One cannot work on a writer without implying that there is some reason that makes working on him worthwhile, and the normal reason is his intrinsic merit as a writer. When it is not, value judgments may point out the fact.8 Thus C.S. Lewis, in The Allegory of Love, devotes several pages to John Rolland’s Court of Venus, mainly for historical reasons, and therefore makes explicit critical judgments warning us that if we read the poem we may not find it very exciting. This is an example of value judgments playing a legitimate and essential role in academic criticism.9 But the academic critic’s function is to add to our understanding of the writer, and this is bound to make his merits, if he has any, more obvious. To praise or blame the writer, to inflate or deflate his reputation, is not the academic critic’s primary function at all. In judicial criticism the standard on which the critic’s taste is founded is usually the actual or ideal taste of his own time, for which he is the spokesman. The unconventional is normally regarded with suspicion or hostility, unless it is conventional to be unconventional, though even that takes conventional forms, like the “angry,” “beat,” and “absurd” schools of writing in our day. The literature of the past conforms to the conventions of its own time, and hence is usually unconventional to the judicial critic as such. A Restoration or Victorian judicial critic of Shakespeare, or a modern critic like the late Wolcott Gibbs of the New Yorker, will tend to judge Shakespeare by the qualities that would please him if they were exhibited by a contemporary. The view of history implied is an evolutionary or progressive one. In some respects Shakespeare shows the correctness (Restoration), the refinement of manners (Victorian), or the liberality

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of social views (modern) that is required of a sensitive contemporary writer. To that extent he has something to say to us. If he shows negligence of the rules, coarse manners, or illiberal political and social views, the assumption is that he illustrates a cruder and more barbaric time, however this assumption may be modified or rationalized in statement. The history of critical judgments on Shakespeare, or any other major author, will show every variety of such attitudes, and no critic can avoid them if his criticism is fundamentally judicial. Edmund Wilson is perhaps the finest judicial critic of our time, with an academic orbit of about a century or so, and it is instructive to see how his judgment goes out of focus when dealing with anything outside that orbit, such as Swift or Ben Jonson or the Book of Genesis. The judicial critic who is only incidentally a critic, and primarily a poet or novelist himself, has a still narrower range, as he is likely to be, at least unconsciously, using his own work as the criterion for his judgments. The most notorious examples of critical duncery, such as the contemporary reviews of Keats’s Endymion, can still hardly be compared, in their lack of comprehension, to many of the things that great writers have said about one another. Academic criticism is part of the systematic study of literature of which the other parts are the subjects dealt with earlier in this handbook. Its approach is categorical and descriptive: it tries to identify a writer’s work. Now even judicial criticism never leads logically to a value judgment: value judgments may be assumed at one end or emitted at the other, but the relation between them is rhetorical only. The source of the confusions involved here is the failure to distinguish criticism from the direct experience of literature. Direct experience, developed by practice and habit, is the basis of good taste, and the normal result of good taste is a value judgment. Good taste in itself is inarticulate: it feels and knows, but cannot speak. Value judgments may be asserted, intuited, assumed, argued about, explained, attacked, or defended: what they never can be is demonstrated. I may know that Wallace Stevens is a better poet than a writer of inspirational doggerel in a newspaper, but I can give no evidence to anyone who likes the doggerel, except my own opinion and that of others whom I respect because they agree with me. I can, of course, analyse a passage from Stevens and demonstrate a density of texture in it that the doggerel does not have, but that proves nothing unless I am willing to assert that poetry with this density is always better than poetry without it. Such an assertion, besides being wrong in itself,

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would still leave me unable to demonstrate the superiority of Sir Patrick Spens or Burns’s Farewell to Nancy, which I also prefer to the doggerel. The same thing is a fortiori true of academic criticism. If a critic writes a book on Keats, his feeling that Keats is a superb poet may, and should, permeate all his writing. But his criticism will never prove Keats’s merit or value or superiority to any other poet; the fact that he has written the book is his testimony to that value, and such testimony implies only; it cannot infer or be inferred. It is on this basis that we have to determine the relative authority of judicial and academic criticism. Judicial criticism is based on good taste, and good taste is a skill founded by practice on the knowledge the critic has; academic criticism is a structure of knowledge. Lapses of taste and value judgment, when made by highly experienced critics, are usually the result of insufficient knowledge of literature. Consequently knowledge always has the power of veto over taste. Let us take the criticism of the new literature that appeared around 1922—recent enough for judicial criticism to be still relevant, but far back enough for us to see something of the academic process too. The judicial critics of this literature varied greatly: some of them denounced much of the best of it as morbid, precious, decadent, literary Bolshevism, and what not. They were wrong, obviously, but, if value judgments cannot be demonstrated, how do we know they were wrong? On the writers of this period whom we now take most seriously, such as Eliot and Joyce, a good deal of academic criticism has been done. The general direction of this academic criticism has been to show that writers who seemed in 1922 to be bringing something utterly new and unprecedented into literature were in fact deeply traditional writers. The rejecting critics went wrong, not through the failure of their taste or judgment, but through not knowing enough about literature. They did not understand the traditions of literature that made Ulysses and The Waste Land possible; they did not in consequence realize that literature could do this kind of thing too. It is out of the expansion of knowledge brought by the academic critics that the importance of Eliot and Joyce has been established, not through any contest of pro and con value judgments. We have now to try to translate these general principles into axioms of procedure. In the scholarly techniques dealt with in previous essays there is a ratio between accuracy and limitation of perspective. In editing or bibliography there is a goal: one may do something in these fields that may be definitive, not needing doing again in the foreseeable future.

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Here, as Brahms said of a contemporary composer, one’s work may be immortal for quite some time. But in historical or literary criticism there is no possibility of being definitive: one can only do the best one can and cut one’s inevitable losses. At the same time the opposite extreme, expressed by such phrases as de gustibus non est disputandum and similar indications of too great an ascendancy of judicial criticism, is equally fallacious. The academic critic is, or should be, contributing positively to a growing body of knowledge; and if there is no goal for him, there is for the total work of criticism of which he is part. The more a work of scholarship depends on the kind of statement of fact that can be definitely verified or contradicted, the narrower in range it is likely to be. In historical criticism accuracy of fact is subordinate to interpretation and organization of argument, but it is still sufficiently important to keep one limited to one or at most two special fields. These fields steadily broaden with growing seniority, but still they are always readily identifiable. The scholar’s work is highly specialized, and the expenditure of time and energy needed to keep up with everything published in any scholarly field is in itself prodigious. At the same time the scholar is likely to have many other literary interests: he may teach courses, or at least texts, outside his field; he needs more than a superficial knowledge of the major classics of literature that do lie outside it; he has presumably some interest in contemporary literature or in “what’s going on”; he may be a poet or novelist himself. In any event he will be a cultivated person with many more literary interests than his primary scholarship covers. These peripheral interests become relevant as soon as he moves from scholarship to criticism. The first principle of academic criticism is that in it the critic is attempting to interpret something in the light of all the literature he knows. This will in fact include everything else he knows, and, if he has seen a great deal of life and profited by his seeing, even nonliterary experience may be relevant. But for the most part one’s experience of life has a minor role to play in criticism: it is one’s literary experience, and the training of the imagination and sensitivity that reading and writing alone can give, that is its basis. For criticism, wisdom and virtue are doubtful aids, and only the madness of much learning can be consistently trusted. The primary understanding of any work of literature has to be based on an assumption of its unity. However mistaken such an assumption may eventually prove to be, nothing can be done unless we start with it

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as a heuristic principle. Further, every effort should be directed toward understanding the whole of what we read, as though it were all on the same level of achievement. We often use such phrases as “see what the author was trying to do,” and the like; these of course are inaccurate, but they do express something of this conception of an ideal or perfect product. We should hold to this conception as long as possible, in defiance of everything our taste tells us, even if the work we are studying is as obviously uneven in achievement as The Revolt of Islam or Oliver Twist. The critic may meet something that puzzles him, like, say, Mercutio’s speech on Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet [1.4.55–94], and feel that it does not fit. This means either that Shakespeare was a slapdash dramatist or that the critic’s conception of the play is inadequate. The odds in favour of the latter conclusion are overwhelming: consequently he would do well to try to arrive at some understanding of the relevance of the puzzling episode. Even if the best he can do for the time being is a far-fetched or obviously rationalized explanation, that is still his sanest and soundest procedure. Or, again, if a critic is working on Paradise Lost or The Prelude, his taste and discrimination as a reader are likely to tell him that parts of these poems are duller than others. But his taste should not be allowed to interfere with the serious work of criticism. For that, the fact that Milton or Wordsworth found these passages relevant to their total scheme is primary; the dullness of the passage itself is incidental. If the attempt to understand the poem leads to some explanation of why the passage is dull, then the estimate of value may come into its own. When as a student I first read the speech in book 3 of Paradise Lost in which “God the Father turns a school divine,” I thought it was grotesquely bad.10 I have been teaching and studying Paradise Lost for many years, and my visceral reaction to that speech is still exactly the same. But I see much more clearly than I did at first why Milton wanted such a speech at such a point. I also think I know one reason why I find the speech so unsatisfying: it is inconsistent with the Christian view that no one can know the Father except through the Son, and this makes it lack conviction, not because I or any other reader holds that view, but because Milton did. I am not giving my own reactions as models; I am merely trying to illustrate what seems to me the normal academic process. Finally, what holds for major literature holds also for minor literature. Ordinary fairness demands that every poet must be treated as though he were potentially first-rate, as far as the initial act of understanding is concerned.

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What is true of the individual work applies to a writer’s entire work. Every poet writes good and bad poems, but again the critic’s primary task is to understand and explain, and a poet’s worst poem may be as relevant to the full understanding of him as his best one. Sometimes full understanding corrects stock value judgments that may have been parroted from the poet’s own day. Wordsworth is a good example: many a teacher proceeds as though the reactions of Wordsworth’s less perceptive contemporaries to The Idiot Boy or the original version of The Thorn were definitive. He may have been accustomed to ridicule these poems to his students, and to have his judgment confirmed by appreciative chuckles. If, however, he tried to understand, not only why Wordsworth wrote these poems, but why Wordsworth wrote them in the particular way he did, he might make a fresh critical discovery of his own, at a possible cost of injuring his popularity as a lecturer. In what follows I take “poem” as representative of everything else in literature, because it is a short word. The process of academic criticism begins, then, with reading a poem through to the end, suspending value judgments while doing so. Once the end is reached, we can see the whole design of the work as a unity. It is now a simultaneous pattern radiating out from a centre, not a narrative moving in time. The structure is what we call the theme, and the identifying of the theme is the next step. By “identifying” a theme I do not mean spotting it: the theme is not something in the poem, much less a moral precept suggested by it, but the structural principle of the poem. In Robert Frost’s Mending Wall, for instance, the theme is not the question whether good fences do or do not make good neighbours: the theme is the identity of the “something” with which the poem begins. We are not told definitely what it is, except that it is not elves; but whatever it is, the contrast of the two human attitudes toward the wall and the two directions of the seasons, toward winter and toward spring, radiate from it as the centre of the poem. The theme cannot be identified, in this sense, without revealing to us the general structure of the poem. This soon brings us to the ordinary structural units of literature, the images, which in works of fiction include characters. There are two aspects of imagery of particular importance. One is repetition, a study of which normally gives us the clue to the theme, as the repetition of images of water and fire leads us to the themes of The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding in the Eliot Quartets. The other is modulation, or the reappearance of an image in a different context. An example is the image of Nature hiding her guilty front with

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innocent snow in Milton’s Nativity Ode, reappearing later in the poem in the form “And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould” [l. 110]. After the study of the imagery, we move up still more closely to the “texture” of the poem, and give our attention to the ambiguities of the syntax and the complex meanings of the words used. Poetry is not a structure of words aligned with an external meaning, but a structure of words that contains meaning, hence such ambiguities and complexities may be functional to poetry, and so relevant to criticism. Analysis of this sort can become very intricate, hence I suggest a deductive process, starting with the central theme and moving from structure to texture, in order to keep the perspective of the poem in view, the unity to which everything else must be relevant. If, for example, I am studying The Ancient Mariner, it may occur to me that the Ancient Mariner is suffering from remorse. This in turn may remind me that remorse is connected etymologically with biting, hence “I bit my arm, I sucked the blood” [l. 160], and that it is connected in sound with remora, the fish supposed to be responsible for the becalming of ships. Here I am no longer in touch with The Ancient Mariner, but have wandered off into an associative fantasy of my own. Such irrelevance is not a hazard to an experienced critic, but it may be one to the beginner. The critical techniques so far dealt with may be summed up under the heading of commentary. Commentary means, in general, the translating of as much as possible of a poem’s meaning into discursive meaning. Commentary is always allegorical, in the sense that it aligns the poem’s meaning with another structure of meaning to which it is related point by point. Commentary is also, when it deals with major literature at least, inexhaustible. Just as clergymen can preach sermons on the Prodigal Son to the end of time, so an infinite number of critical commentaries could be written on the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of Balzac. Such criticism is the lineal descendant of the allegorical commentaries on the Bible and Classical mythology which bulk so large in medieval and Renaissance culture. The critic should be aware that while commentary is an essential part of criticism, it is also relatively easy to write. If he is interested in a major writer, he will get critical ideas suggesting commentary from that writer: or at least if he cannot get such ideas from a major writer he should certainly be in some other line of business. It is also not difficult to set up analogical patterns between a writer’s work and the generally accepted ideas of his time, to see parallels between Shakespearean comedy and the mythical structure of Christianity, be-

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tween Tennyson or Hardy and the emotional impact of Darwinism. But the critic has still much to do before he is in the central area of literary criticism. What commentary does not do, by itself, is to identify the poem, which we said earlier [124] was the aim of academic criticism. To identify something means seeing it as an individual of a class, and criticism has not seriously begun until it puts the poem into its proper literary context, as one of a family of poems. We saw that criticism was neither purely historical nor purely contemporary in attitude, but a combination of both. We are now ready to take another step and see that it is a third category which unites these contrasting and often opposed attitudes. This category is literature itself, considered not as the bibliography of literature, not as the aggregate of plays and poems and novels that have got themselves written, but as an order of words, the study of which can be as systematic and progressive as the study of anything else. The sense that every work of literature has a context in literature makes criticism finite, not in the sense of limiting the critic, but in the sense of giving his work a direction and an aim. Nobody can write a definitive book on a major poet, but, we said, the sense that important criticism contributes to a consolidating structure of knowledge is very strong. Commentary alone cannot give any indication of what this larger structure is to which the critic is contributing. First, every poem belongs to the total body of writing produced by its author. The more important the poet, the more obviously everything he produces will assume the appearance of a single larger poem. Reading in context is an essential principle of all reading, whether of literature or not, and to study, for example, Yeats’s Vacillation as a poem by itself, without comparing the similar contrasts of cycle and ascent in Dialogue of Self and Soul or Among School Children, or without following up similar ideas in A Vision and Rosa Alchemica, is simply to read the poem out of context. The next step takes us into an aspect of historical criticism. We cannot think long and deeply about, say, Keats’s Ode on Melancholy without feeling that its essential relationships cannot be confined to Keats, but that there is a larger reference which is one of the things that the term “Romantic” expresses. This larger reference makes the work of completely different poets, such as Shelley and Byron, or even French and German Romantics that Keats had never heard of, part of the context for Keats’s poem. Criticism, in the limited sense used here, is, we said at the beginning,

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the attempt of a student of literature to interpret works of literature in the light of all the literature he knows. We are now, perhaps, in a better position to see how this is true. Suppose a student of literature is interested in Shakespeare. He will start by attaining some familiarity with the aspects of Shakespearean scholarship outlined elsewhere in this handbook: the struggles of editors with Quartos and Folios and Bad Quartos, the research on the structure and acting conditions of Elizabethan theatres, the evidence amassed for the order and dating of the plays. His bent for criticism, however, will soon take him toward reading Shakespeare against a background of other Elizabethan writers. The more he knows about sonnet conventions in Sidney and Spenser and their predecessors back to Petrarch and Dante, the less time he will want to waste in trying to ascertain what or who Mr. W.H. or the dark lady may have been outside literature. He will concentrate on the sonnets as poems, therefore as subject to the conditions of literary expression. In studying the tragedies, he will eventually come to find Shakespeare’s contemporaries less immediately relevant to his investigation than Sophocles or Aeschylus, not because Shakespeare drew from them, but because tragedy is a certain kind of literary structure, and the greater the writer of tragedy, the more clearly he exemplifies the structure and meaning of tragedy. Thus criticism, as soon as it disentangles itself from other forms of literary scholarship and evolves beyond commentary, finds itself preoccupied with two aspects of literature in particular: convention and genre. With the next step we enter what for some unfathomable reason is a less explored area of criticism. Works of literature are not created out of nothing: they are created out of literature itself, so far as the poet knows it. Literature bears testimony to its own literary origin by being highly allusive, and allusions in literature are not stuck in: they are a part of the larger structure to which the poem belongs. We should be reading Lycidas out of context if we detached it from the rest of Milton’s work, but we should equally be reading it out of context if we detached it from Theocritus and Virgil, to whom the poem itself explicitly and repeatedly alludes. The structure of every poem is in one respect unique, but there is also a conventional element in the structure derived from the conventions and genres the poet is using. Lycidas is a pastoral elegy, and this structure is in it much as the conventional sonata form is in a Mozart symphony. We also find a conventional element in the imagery, particularly noticeable in such things as the “sanguine flower inscrib’d with

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woe” [l. 106], which turns up in every poem of this type from ancient Greece to our own day. As we continue to study works of literature in the context of literature itself, as indicated by convention, genre, and allusion, something of the shape of literature as a total order of words begins to dawn on us. Literature associates, by words, the nonhuman world of physical nature with the human world, and the units of this association are analogy and identity, which appear in the two commonest figures of speech, the simile and the metaphor. The clearest forms of such association are in mythical images, where, for example, we have a “god,” who is human in shape and character and yet identified with something in nature like the sun or the sea. Looked at in this way, literature as a whole appears as the direct descendant of mythology, filling in many areas, especially in realism and irony, that mythology barely touches, but keeping the mythological sense of a panoramic view of the human situation, a perspective to which the greatest works of literature invariably return. This will enable us to understand why our inherited mythologies, Biblical and Classical, form by far the largest body of allusions in literature, and seem to be sitting in the exact centre of our whole imaginative heritage. Many critics, including the present writer, think of the conventional structures mentioned above as myths, because all of them derive from myths. Similarly, we may call the conventional images that recur throughout the whole of our literary experience “archetypes,” a word which has been used since Plato in the sense of a pattern or model used in creation. We said that there is always some tension or polarity between what a work of literature meant to its own time and what it means to us now. One perspective does something to correct the other, but the two remain balancing one another more or less illogically and paradoxically. Eventually the historical perspective expands into the sense of tradition, where the writer’s own age is seen as part of a continuum, handing on what has reached it from earlier ages and reaching down to our own time. The contemporary perspective, similarly, expands from a judicial attitude into a scholarly or academic one, and by doing so reaches the counterpart of tradition, the sense of the total form or telos of criticism as the theory of literature, studying literature as a coherent and unified order of words, and becoming in itself a coherent and unified body of knowledge by virtue of that order. The historical and contemporary attitudes can never be really reconciled, but tradition and telos can be. This is the point at which criticism moves into the conception described by Matthew

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Arnold as culture, where the study of the best that has been thought and said becomes an organized force in society, dissolving its grosser inequalities, refining manners, disciplining the emotions as well as the intellect, and assimilating the actualities to the ideals of human civilization.11 One would naturally think that the social and moral benefits of studying literature come from the content of literature, from its power to express great thoughts with the appropriate emotional resonance. Yet we have been saying all through this paper that the primary axiom of critical procedure is: Go for the structure, not for the content. This must be the invariable attitude of every genuine critic, whether he is teaching Paradise Lost in a church college or on a witness stand testifying to the merits of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. We begin now to see how it is only the study of the structure of literature that can lead to culture in Arnold’s sense. For we soon discover that structure is not self-contained, that individual works of literature are not locked up in windowless monads separated from each other, but that there are family likenesses resembling the species, genera, and phyla of biology. Eventually we come to the point at which the form of literature as a whole becomes the content of criticism as a whole. It is here that we begin to be interested in larger questions: why man produces literature, what it does for society, what its connections are with other uses of the mother tongue. It is perhaps worth remarking, in conclusion, that, while literature and scholarship have been around for quite a time, criticism in the sense used here has hardly begun. The development of criticism is bound to lead— has already led—to an enormous increase of self-consciousness in literature itself, and not all of that will be good. But for better or worse, our civilization, if it survives at all, will be one in which criticism and literature, that is, the theory and practice of literature itself, will be two parts of one thing.

3 Myth and Poetry 1963

From The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, ed. Stephen Spender and Donald Hall, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1970), 187–90. First appeared in the first edition of the encyclopedia (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1963), 225–8; the reprint corrects two minor typographical errors.

A myth, in its simplest meaning, is a story about a god, or some being comparable to a god. Hence myths usually grow up in close association with religions, but, because they are stories, they also belong to literature, especially to narrative, fictional, and dramatic literature with internal characters. It makes no difference to its relation to literature whether a myth is believed to be true or false. Classical mythology became purely literary after the religions associated with it died, but from a literary point of view we may speak of Christian or Hindu mythology even when the attitude towards it is also one of religious acceptance. Most of the stories we call myths are ancient and arose in the period of oral tradition along with folk tales. Primitive cultures generally have in their oral tradition a special group of canonical tales which are regarded as particularly serious or important, as having “really happened,” or as being of special significance in explaining certain features of the society, such as a ritual of the origin of a tribe or class; these are myths. In structure, however, there is little to distinguish a myth from a folk tale. Such Classical legends as the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass have many analogues in folk tale, and so have the Hebrew legends of the creation, the fall, and the flood. The difference is that myths, because of their central and canonical importance, tend to stick

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together and form mythologies, whereas folk tales simply disseminate and interchange motifs. It is not any structural feature in the stories of Phaethon or Endymion that makes them myths, for we could—and do— have folk tales of the same kind: it is their attachment to a growing body of stories told about a sun-god and a moon-goddess, and the further attachment of these deities to Apollo and Artemis in the Olympian hierarchy, that makes them myths. The true myth, then, is an episode in a mythology, and a developed mythology tends to become encyclopedic, that is, to provide a complete set of stories dealing with a society’s religious observances, its origin, and its earlier history. A mythology, we may say, undertakes to tell the definitive story of how a given culture or society came to be what it is. Besides this, it supplies a number of episodic tales illustrating the relations of gods with one another or with man, usually with a cautionary moral. It identifies or interrelates the various gods of local cults; it sanctions the law by giving it a divine origin; it provides a divine ancestry for its kings and heroes. At a certain stage of development a mythology produces a theogony, a connected narrative beginning with the origin of the gods and of the departments of nature they personify, such as heaven and earth, the creation and original state of mankind, the inauguration of law and culture, and so on down to the writer’s own time. Some theogonies carry on the story to the end of time and the future annihilation of the world. The theogonic narrative structure, as well as all the subordinate functions of myth just listed, occur both in sacred books, such as the Christian Bible, which have a major literary influence, and in literature itself, as in Hesiod, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the theogony a mythology has expanded into a story with larger religious and philosophical outlines, where we are reading about the origin, situation, and destiny of mankind as a whole. As a society develops, its myths naturally become revised, selected, expurgated, or reinterpreted to suit its changing religious needs. An immense amount of editorial labour lies between the myths of the Old Testament and the same myths in their modern form. The more archaic stories are often felt to be in bad theological taste: as Plutarch says, gods represented as doing unworthy things are no gods [Moralia, 417e–f]. In this way is developed a tradition of explaining or accounting for myths. Myths may be interpreted as allegories illustrating moral truths. Hence the device known in Greek culture as hyponoia, the attempt, say, to save the faces of both Homer and Aphrodite by explaining the story of

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Hephaestus’s net in the Odyssey as an allegory of something profound and morally respectable.1 Or mythology as a whole may be interpreted allegorically, as primitive science, as esoteric philosophy, as distorted history, or (since the rise of Freudian psychology) as sexually directed dream. The interpretation of myth, chiefly as moral allegory, was one of the cultural heavy industries of Western Europe between Plutarch and the late Renaissance, and it played a very important role in literature, as Renaissance poets were accustomed to make great use of such allegorical handbooks as Natalis Comes’ Mythologia or Sandys’ translation of Ovid. Similar handbooks were used by Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Goethe in the Romantic period, and they were still being written as late as Ruskin’s Queen of the Air. For poets, however, myth remains primarily a story: its meaning is implicit in the story itself, and the poet’s impulse is to retell the story, or invent a new one with the same characters. Plato, for example, ridicules hyponoia [Republic, 378d], but he uses his own myths, usually with the familiar names of Zeus and Prometheus. Whether a poet is interested simply in the story or in giving a particular meaning to the story will depend, of course, on his temperament and circumstances. But there are at least three reasons why myth has a distinctive connection with poetry. In the first place, a fully developed mythology, especially one that has produced a definitive theogony or sacred book, provides the outlines of a total verbal communication. There is nothing about the duties, destiny, meaning, or context of human life, nothing at least which can be expressed in words, that is not explained or provided for in the accepted myth. This is the normal attitude of an orthodox Christian or Mohammedan to the Bible or the Koran, and it is the usual attitude of all religions to their sacred books. The poet can seldom claim such authority, but if he is a poet of great imaginative scope, inclined to think deeply on the largest possible issues of life, and attracted to the genres of greatest range, such as the epic, he is likely to make his major poem a recreation of a myth. Milton’s Paradise Lost deals primarily with the Biblical myths of the creation and the fall, but of course the whole structure of Biblical mythology, from the beginning to the end of time, is recreated in it. In Dante it is the sacramental system of the church rather than the narrative of the Bible that is primarily recreated, but the same encyclopedic reconstruction of a traditional mythology has taken place. And whenever a poet chooses a theme of particular significance in expressing his conception of life as a whole, it is likely to be a traditional mythical theme. Shel-

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ley’s Prometheus Unbound, Byron’s Cain, Victor Hugo’s Fin de Satan, are random examples. Classical mythology is particularly useful to Western poets whenever doctrinal reasons prevent them from using the Bible: thus if Ariosto wishes to provide a mythical ancestry for his patrons, he will turn to Virgil and the Trojan War. In the second place, myths are about gods, and gods are usually associated with some (or, as with Christ, all) aspects of the physical world. The association is usually one of identity, expressed by metaphor: thus we speak of Apollo, in pure metaphor, as a “sun-god.” Hence myth enables a poet to make an unusually full use of metaphor, of natural imagery, of an imaginative identification of human emotion and nature. If Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis had been about more realistically conceived characters, like Romeo and Juliet, there might have been certain advantages, but the young poet would not have had nearly so much fun playing with his imagery and working out such associations as the “solemn sympathy” between the crimson flower and the death of Adonis.2 And even when the explicit connection with myth is dropped, the metaphorical concentration of myth is likely to remain. Thus the language of myth tends to become the language of poetry. Keats’s Ode to Psyche is explicitly addressed to a goddess; the odes to autumn and the nightingale are not; but Autumn with her hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind is no less a goddess, and the nightingale no less a light-winged Dryad of the trees, even if not directly associated with what Cowper calls Philomela’s “mechanic woe.”3 Finally, myths are stories about characters who, almost by definition, can do what they like—which means in practice what the storyteller likes. Hence myths are abstract literary patterns, stories told without adjustment to demands for realism, plausibility, logical motivation, or the conditions of limited power. Later on, in literature, these demands are met, but they are met only by “displacement,” that is, by adaptation of the mythical pattern to a realistic setting. Thus the plots of Tom Jones and Oliver Twist are realistic adaptations of stories of the mysterious birth of a hero that can be traced through New Comedy and Euripides to such myths as those of Perseus and Moses. New plots are not invented; the old plots are adapted, not because they are old, but because there is a very limited number of effective ways in which a story may be told, and the mythology which does not provide examples of the entire number is rare indeed. An author’s awareness of the traditional affinities of his plot matters little. We know from the critical gossip surrounding T.S. Eliot’s

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The Confidential Clerk that its author was aware of its resemblance to Euripides’ Ion, and of the mythical patterns behind that play;4 we have no reason to suppose Oscar Wilde or W.S. Gilbert equally aware of similar resemblances in The Importance of Being Earnest or The Gondoliers. The resemblances are based on the structural principles of comedy, not on the author’s erudition. The conclusion from all this is that a fully developed literature, as a whole, is what a fully developed mythology is in earlier ages: a total structure of imaginative verbal communication. It fills up its space more completely: a myth may recall an entire mythology to one familiar with it, but most literary works, unlike the Divina Commedia or Paradise Lost, give little indication, except of a very indirect and oblique kind, of the whole range of literary experience. Again, literary criticism does not have a word, or a conception, for literature as a whole which would have the same relation to individual works of literature that “mythology” has to individual myths. If it had, the true relation of myth to poetry would be self-evident.

4 Preface to Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire 1964

Preface to Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C.M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), v–viii. This was the first English translation of Bachelard’s La Psychanalyse du Feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).

Literary critics have been aware of the great importance of Bachelard’s work for many years, but this is the first time The Psychoanalysis of Fire has been available in English. Professor Ross’s lucid and eloquent translation gives an excellent sense of the original, which has a subversive wit reminding the English reader of the prose style of the nineteenth-century Samuel Butler. I speak of literary critics, because, as its conclusion makes clear, this is the area in which The Psychoanalysis of Fire lies, despite its title and the numerous references to its author’s earlier scientific works. Nearly a century ago Thomas Huxley, discussing the limitations of the scientific method, remarked, “I cannot conceive [. . . ] how the phenomena of consciousness, as such [ . . . ], are to be brought within the bounds of physical science.”1 He did not mean that no science of psychology would ever be possible, but that the process of perception could not nullify itself, so to speak, by becoming objective to itself. Sciences are placed at various angles to the perceiving process, as physics is at an angle to the primitive categories of hot, cold, moist, and dry, or to the primitive perception of red and blue. Psychology occupies another angle of perception, and Bachelard has begun to isolate still another, a basis for a systematic development of the critical study of the arts. The scientific procedure normally begins empirically, with reality thought of first of all as “out there,” after which it gradually becomes incorporated into an intellectual construct. The arts, on the other hand,

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begin with a constructing power, generally called imagination, and embody it in forms with a clarity of communication that makes them objects of perception to others. The units of this constructing power are analogy and identity, which appear in literature as the figures of simile and metaphor. To the imagination, fire is not a separable datum of experience: it is already linked by analogy and identity with a dozen other aspects of experience. Its heat is analogous to the internal heat we feel as warmblooded animals; its sparks are analogous to seeds, the units of life; its flickering movement is analogous to vitality; its flames are phallic symbols, providing a further analogy to the sexual act, as the ambiguity of the word “consummation” indicates; its transforming power is analogous to purgation. These links of analogy are so adhesive that they spread all over the universe: we see in this book, as often elsewhere, how the pursuit of one mythical complex tends to absorb all other myths into it. The reader should consult Bachelard’s books on the other three elements for a corrective.2 It is possible to take up a construct based on such analogies and correspondences, and then apply it to the external world as a key to the explanation of its phenomena. The typical examples of such constructs are in occultism, though they exist also in the Ptolemaic cosmology of the Middle Ages, with its correspondences of the seven metals, seven planets, seven days of the week, and the like. From one point of view, a somewhat narrow one, such constructs are both bastard art and bastard science, combining the limitations of the two with the genuine achievements of neither. A more liberal view might see them rather as helping to expand the horizons of both. We notice that poetry shows a strong affinity for constructs based on analogy and symmetry, Ptolemaic in Dante, occult in the Romantics and their successors down to Yeats. For the poet, the elements will always be earth, air, fire, and water; for the poet, the sun will always rise and set as it moves around the earth. It is only in science that such myths are a nuisance; yet even in science the tendency to make them is extraordinarily persistent. Almost every major group of discoveries in science brings with it a great wave of speculative cosmologies based on analogies to them. Bachelard gives many quaint examples from eighteenth-century science, along with such analogy-myths as “spontaneous combustion.” He could have gone on with the nineteenth-century speculations about “odic force” and the vitalist philosophies that followed early Darwinism, both of them pure fire-myths. The proper place for all such analogy-making is literature, or, in earlier

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times, the mythology which eventually develops into literature. Bachelard does not explicitly say that mythology, considered as a body of stories, is potential literature, but the whole trend of his book is towards that principle. He quotes some of the myths about the origin of fire which include the theme of a woman’s hiding fire in her belly. This feat is known to be anatomically impossible by those who are telling and listening to the story, so why should it be told? We recall that many similar stories are told about water, that there are more highly developed stories of the Jonah type, where a human being disappears into a monstrous belly, that the conception of a hidden interior world of fire is the basis of Dante’s Inferno—in short, the story illustrates a structural principle of storytelling, and its study eventually falls into the area of literary criticism. Centuries ago it was believed that the four possible combinations of the four “principles,” hot, cold, moist, and dry, produced, in the organic world, the four humours, and, in the inorganic world, the four elements. The hot and dry combination produced choler and fire, the hot and moist blood and air, the cold and moist phlegm and water, the cold and dry melancholy and earth. The four elements are not a conception of much use to modern chemistry—that is, they are not the elements of nature. But, as Bachelard’s book and its companion works show, and as an abundance of literature down to Eliot’s Quartets also shows, earth, air, water, and fire are still the four elements of imaginative experience, and always will be. Similarly, the four humours are not a conception of any use to modern medicine; they are not the constituents of human temperament. But they may be the elements of imaginative perception, and Bachelard’s analysis of Hoffmann’s fire-images is linked to a suggestion that poets may be “humours” not in their bodies or characters but in their poetry, a poetic temperament being reflected in a preference for the corresponding element.3 What Bachelard calls a “complex” might better be called something else, to avoid confusion with the purely psychological complexes of actual life. I should call it a myth, because to me a myth is a structural principle in literature. For example, there is, in Bachelard’s sense, a literary Oedipus complex: it appears in every comedy in which the hero is a son outwitting his father to get possession of a courtesan or other tabooed female. It is undoubtedly related to the Oedipus complex discussed by Freud, but can hardly be treated as identical with it. The “complexes” dealt with in this book are actually the points at which literary myth

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becomes focused on its cardinal points of creation, redemption, and apocalypse. In the earlier part of our cultural tradition the fire-world was most significantly the world of heavenly bodies between heaven proper and the earth. The Spirit descends from above in tongues of fire; the seraphim are angels of fire; the gods who preceded the angels are in charge of the planets; for Christianity the world of superior spirits is all that is left of the unfallen world that God originally planned. The fire-world as the unfallen world of pre-creation appears in Bachelard as the “Novalis complex.” The return of man to his original home, the complementary myth of ascending fire, is symbolized by the funeral pyre of Hercules (in the fourth section of Eliot’s Little Gidding, for example, this image is brought into direct contrast with the image of fire descending from the Holy Spirit), and comes into all the imagery of purgatorial fire in Dante and elsewhere. With the Romantics this more specifically human fire, which symbolizes the raising of the human state to a quasi-divine destiny, becomes more purely a “Prometheus complex,” especially to the more revolutionary Romantics, Shelley, Byron, Victor Hugo, who feel, like Ahab in Moby Dick, that the right form of fire-worship is defiance. The Last Judgment, the destruction of the world by fire and the absorption of the human soul into the soul of fire, is the “Empedocles complex.” Thus the myth of “spontaneous combustion” is used by Dickens in Bleak House to describe the death of Krook. In his preface Dickens stubbornly defends the actuality of the conception, and refers to some of the authorities quoted by Bachelard, including Le Cat. When Dickens finally says, “I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received”4—in other words the Last Judgment— we begin to get a clue to the real reason why Dickens felt that such a device was essential to his story. This is merely one example of the kind of expanding insight into literature which can take off from Bachelard’s witty and pungent study.

5 After the Invocation, A Lapse into Litany March 1964

From Book Week, 22 (March 1964): 6, 19. This is a review of Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking, 1964), vol. 3 of his series The Masks of God. Page references to this volume, which is in Frye’s library, are in brackets in the text.

The chief difference between Eastern and Western mythology, Mr. Campbell feels, is the difference between a monistic and a theistic attitude. In the great Eastern religions the goal of religious experience is unconditioned; in the great Western ones it is a personal creating God, and the dialectic of a transcendent Creator and a worshipping creature allows nothing beyond it [3–4]. The Hindu or Buddhist works toward an identification of himself with the ground of his being (“Thou art That”); the Christian, Jew, or Mohammedan tries to make himself an instrument of a divine personal will. This distinction is theological rather than mythological. The chief mythological difference is that Western mythology has to have a strong historical bias, deriving from a moment in time at which a divine will was revealed to man through Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed. Oriental mythology is based on the conception, as old as the Bronze Age at least, of an eternal cyclical round of nature as forming the model for human life on earth. Western mythology, starting with Zoroaster in Persia, is based on the conception of a historical drama that begins with a beginning of time, at the creation, and ends at the end of time, with an apocalypse. A corollary of this historical bias is that Western religions are compelled to assert that their myths are historically true in a way that does not oppress Oriental belief to such an extent. Mr. Campbell aptly com-

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pares the development of Gnosticism in Christianity to Mahayana Buddhism,1 and the contrast in their fortunes, the one a suppressed and persecuted heresy and the other the religion of the majority of practising Buddhists, is instructive enough. Religion is obviously a very deep and sore part of that massive structure of libido-repression which, according to Freud, is civilization. Mr. Campbell seems to feel that what is usually called mysticism is the least neurotic development of it, and that this fact gives the Eastern religions more flexibility than the Western socio-religious anxiety machines. This third volume of Mr. Campbell’s projected four-volume work on mythology—the first two volumes were Primitive Mythology and Oriental Mythology—is more genial and less self-conscious in style than at least Primitive Mythology, where some technical sociological language perplexed the narrative. Mr. Campbell begins his story with the Bachofen principle of an original cult of a mother-goddess, to whom a dying young male god is subordinated, as the general religion of the ancient world, later displaced by the historical religions which were father-centred rather than mothercentred, sky-centred rather than earth-centred, solar rather than lunar.2 Like Robert Graves, Mr. Campbell shows some hankering to idealize the earlier cult,3 though it seems clear that as far as its social and ceremonial effects are concerned it was quite as repulsive a superstition as its successors. In any case Mr. Campbell traces the change whereby the ancient Sumerian “serpent’s bride” was degraded to Medusa in Classical religion, and the serpent himself cursed as demonic in the Hebraic one.4 Certain themes are thus stated at the outset and are repeated later: the cult of Eros in Platonic dialogue is a late recrudescence of the ancient mother of love and her son, and the Mithraic ritual bull-slaying takes us back to the beautiful Minoan artefacts where the Great Mother is portrayed as the consort of the lunar bull. So far, the organization and argument, an exposition based on a sequence of illustrations, are excellent. Mythology, however, is part of religion; religion is part of history, and a strong centrifugal drift away from mythology in the strict sense towards historical narrative sets in very early. Before long the book has settled down to being an introductory survey of the history of religions in the West. Perhaps this is not a bad thing for a book to be, but one had expected a greater novelty in the structure, if not in the material itself. Mr. Campbell’s writing is always lucid: sometimes he quotes a good deal from readily accessible sources, including the Bible (the Passion ac-

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cording to Mark takes up five pages), but there are illuminating passages from the Gnostics, from Plutarch (whom he describes as a “sober Roman”),5 and from Spengler, whose account of “Magian” culture has clearly fascinated him.6 At every point he uses the right and obvious authorities: Josephus for a lively account of the Maccabean dynasty, Gibbon for the theological squabbles of Justinian’s time, and the most reputable modern scholars throughout. But one has read about all this before, probably in his sources: one would have hoped, from the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for a much more concentrated study of the vicissitudes and modulations of the earth-goddess, the thundering skygod, the dying god, the demonic adversary, and the rest of the divine personae as they fluctuate and change roles through their Greek, Hebrew, Roman, Christian, and Moslem incarnations. Mythology is not theology, not ritual, not ecclesiastical history, not religion in general, but a definable subject that can, up to a point, be separated from other aspects of religion and culture and unified by its own nature. As Mr. Campbell rightly says, “the vocabulary of symbol is to such an extent constant through the world that it must be recognized to represent a single pictorial script” [312]. Of course mythologies run parallel to social developments: in fact, one would like a more precise paralleling of local and epiphanic gods with tribal society, departmental and Olympian gods with warrior aristocracies, and monotheism and syncretism with world empires. But what seems to prevent Mr. Campbell from sticking to his subject is the relentless chronological sequence of his narrative. A chapter called “The Persian Period” starts with Zoroaster, summarizes the history of the age of Cyrus and Darius, and then, when we come to Darius’s invasion of Greece, we switch over to Greece and read about Plato. The effect of this is to uproot mythology, when actual mythology is treated, from its cultural context. We get no connected account of Greek mythology: Plato is not seen against the background of the Homeric religion that he tried to purify, and we are thrown back to the old oversimplified half-truths about Greek sweetness and light and devotion to beauty and science. Similarly, Christianity is largely deprived of its Jewish context—the reluctant passage of Judaism from monolatry to monotheism is mentioned, but not connected with the historicizing tendency that made Christianity a possible Jewish heresy—and the mythical parallels suggested with the Gospel stories are, even morphologically, remote. So much elementary history is included that events of no direct myth-

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ological significance, such as Xerxes’ invasion of Greece or the burning of Huss, get the same amount of space as, say, the introduction of Cybeleworship into Rome. It would be harsh to say that Mr. Campbell has simply not bothered to write his book, but the reader determined to read about Occidental mythology has to pick things out in bits and pieces. Many of the bits and pieces are extremely good in themselves. There is a brief but clear account of Mithraism, some sensitive and astute remarks on the homosexual cult in Plato, with its resistance to “the female system of seriousness” [229], some interesting comments on solar and lunar symbolism in the Odyssey and in the mythologies of Northern Europe, some good passages on the smith-and-fire symbolism of the Celtic Iron Age, and many other things that one would like to see much further developed. Perhaps in the fourth and final volume they will be.

6 Criticism, Visible and Invisible April 1964

From StS, 74–89. Originally published in College English, 26 (October 1964): 3–12, in an issue entitled “Sequence and Change in the College English Curriculum.” Some minor revisions for StS are pointed out in notes. Reprinted in The English Critical Tradition, ed. S. Ramaswami and V.S. Seturaman (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), vol. 2, and in Polish and Chinese translations. This was an address given at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., at a conference in April 1964 organized to study the development of a sequential program of English teaching.

There is a distinction, certainly as old as Plato and possibly as old as the human mind, between two levels of understanding. I say levels, because one is nearly always regarded as superior to the other, whether in kind or in degree. Plato calls them, in his discussion of the divided line in the Republic, the level of nous and the level of dianoia, knowledge of things and knowledge about things.1 Knowledge about things preserves the split between subject and object which is the first fact in ordinary consciousness. “I” learn “that”: what I learn is an objective body of facts set over against me and essentially unrelated to me. Knowledge of things, on the other hand, implies some kind of identification or essential unity of subject and object. What is learned and the mind of the learner become interdependent, indivisible parts of one thing. Three principles are involved in this conception. First, learning about things is the necessary and indispensable prelude to the knowledge of things: confrontation is the only possible beginning of identity. Second, knowledge about things is the limit of teaching. Knowledge of things cannot be taught: for one thing, the possibility that there is some princi-

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ple of identity that can link the knower and the known in some essential relation is indemonstrable. It can only be accepted, unconsciously as an axiom or deliberately as an act of faith. He who knows on the upper level knows that he knows, as a fact of his experience, but he cannot impart this knowledge directly. Third, nous is (or is usually considered to be) the same knowledge as dianoia: it is the relation between knower and known that is different. The difference is that something conceptual has become existential: this is the basis of the traditional contrast between knowledge and wisdom. This distinction is of great importance in religion: Maritain’s Degrees of Knowledge is one of many attempts to distinguish a lower comprehension from a higher apprehension in religious experience. When St. Thomas Aquinas remarked on his deathbed that all his work seemed to him so much straw, he did not mean that his books were worthless, but that he himself was passing from the dianoia to the nous of what he had been writing about. I mention the religious parallel only to emphasize a principle which runs through all education: that what Plato calls nous is attainable only through something analogous to faith, which implies habit or consistent will, the necessary persistence in pursuing the goals of the faith. I am dealing here, however, only with the application of the principle of two levels of knowledge to the ordinary learning process. Here the clearest illustration is that of a manual skill. In beginning to learn a skill like driving a car, a conscious mind comes in contact with an alien and emotionally disturbing object. When the skill is learned, the object ceases to be objective and becomes an extension of the personality, and the learning process has moved from the conscious mind to something that we call unconscious, subconscious, instinctive, or whatever best expresses to us the idea of unmediated unity. We think of this subconscious, usually, as more withdrawn, less turned outward to the world, than the consciousness: yet it is far less solipsistic. It is the nervous novice who is the solipsist: it is the trained driver, with a hidden skill that he cannot directly impart to others, who is in the community of the turnpike highway, such as it is. Literature presents the same distinction. There is the dianoia of literature, or criticism, which constitutes the whole of what can be directly taught and learned about literature. I have explained elsewhere that it is impossible to teach or learn literature: what one teaches and learns is criticism. We do not regard this area of direct teaching and learning as an

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end but as a means to another end. A person who is absorbed wholly by knowledge about something is what we ordinarily mean by a pedant. Beyond this is the experience of literature itself, and the goal of this is something that we call vaguely the cultivated man, the person for whom literature is a possession, a possession that cannot be directly transmitted, and yet is not private, for it belongs in a community. Nothing that we can teach a student is an acceptable substitute for the faith that a higher kind of contact with literature is possible, much less for the persistence in that faith which we call the love of reading. Even here there is the possibility of pedantry: literature is an essential part of the cultivated life, but not the whole of it, nor is the form of the cultivated life itself a literary form. The great strength of humanism, as a conception of teaching literature, was that it accepted certain classics or models in literature, but directed its attention beyond the study of them to the possession of them, and insisted on their relevance to civilized or cultivated life. We spoke of pedantry, and there was undoubtedly much pedantry in humanism, especially at the level of elementary teaching, but not enough to destroy its effectiveness. Browning’s grammarian was not a pedant, because he settled hoti’s business and based oun in the light of a blindingly clear vision of a community of knowledge.2 The act of faith in literary experience which humanism defended was closely associated with a more specific faith in the greatness of certain Greek and Latin Classics. The Classics were great, certainly, and produced an astonishingly fertile progeny in the vernaculars. But the conception of literature involved tended to be an aristocratic one, and had the limitations of aristocracy built in to it. It saw literature as a hierarchy of comparative greatness, the summit of which provided the standards for the critics. In the philologists of the nineteenth century, dealing with the vernaculars themselves, one sometimes detects a late humanistic pedantry which takes the form of critical arrogance. All too often the philologists, one feels, form an initiated clique, with literary standards and models derived (at several removes) from the “great” poets, which are then applied to the “lesser” ones. Old-fashioned books on English literature which touch on “lesser” poets, such as Skelton and Wyatt in the early sixteenth century, maintain an attitude toward them of slightly injured condescension. Criticism of this sort had to be superseded by a democratizing of literary experience, not merely to do justice to underrated poets, but to revise the whole attitude to literature in which a poet could

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be judged by standards derived from another poet, however much “greater.” Every writer must be examined on his own terms, to see what kind of literary experience he can supply that no one else can supply in quite the same way. The objection “But Skelton isn’t as great a poet as Milton” may not be without truth, but it is without critical point. Literary experience is far more flexible and varied than it was a century ago, but hierarchical standards still linger, and the subjection of the critic to the uniqueness of the work being criticized is still not a wholly accepted axiom. Also, the relevance to criticism of what used to be regarded as subliterary material, primitive myths and the like, is still resisted in many quarters. All teaching of literature, which is literary dianoia or criticism, must point beyond itself, and cannot get to where it is pointing. The revolution in the teaching of English associated with the phrase “New Criticism” began by challenging the tendency (less a tendency of teachers, perhaps, than of examination-haunted students) to accept knowledge about literature as a substitute for literary experience. The New Critics set the object of literary experience directly in front of the student and insisted that he grapple with it and not try to find its meaning or his understanding of it in the introduction and footnotes. So far, so good. No serious teaching of literature can ever put the object of literary experience in any other position. But New Criticism was criticism too: it developed its own techniques of talking about the work, and providing another critical counterpart of the work to read instead. No method of criticism, as such, can avoid doing this. What criticism can do, to point beyond itself, is to try to undermine the student’s sense of the ultimate objectivity of the literary work. That, I fear, is not a very intelligible sentence, but the idea it expresses is unfamiliar. The student is confronted by an alien structure of imagination, set over against him, strange in its conventions and often in its values.3 It is not to remain so: it must become possessed by and identified with the student. Criticism cannot make this act of possession for the student; what it can do is to weaken those tendencies within criticism that keep the literary work objective and separated. Criticism, in order to point beyond itself, needs to be actively iconoclastic about itself.4 The metaphor of “taste” expresses a real truth in criticism, but no metaphor is without pitfalls. The sense of taste is a contact sense: the major arts are based on the senses of distance, and it is easy to think of critical taste as a sublimation, the critic being an astral gourmet and literature

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itself being, as Plato said of rhetoric, a kind of disembodied cookery [Georgias, 462d–465d]. This gastronomic metaphor is frequently employed by writers, for instance at the opening of Tom Jones, though when recognized as a metaphor it is usually only a joke.5 It suggests that the literary work is presented for enjoyment and evaluation, like a wine. The conception of taste is a popular one because it confers great social prestige on the critic. The man of taste is by definition a gentleman, and a critic who has a particular hankering to be a gentleman is bound to attach a good deal of importance to his taste. A generation ago the early essays of Eliot owed much of their influence and popularity to their cavalierism, their suggestion that the social affinities of good poetry were closer to the landed gentry than to the Hebrew prophets. Taste leads to a specific judgment: the metaphor of the critic as “judge” is parallel to the metaphor of taste, and the assumption underlying such criticism is usually that the test of one’s critical ability is a value judgment on the literary work. If this is true, the critic’s contribution to literature, however gentlemanly, seems a curiously futile one, the futility being most obvious with negative judgments. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Middleton Murry, F.R. Leavis, are only a few of the eminent critics who have abused Milton. Milton’s greatness as a poet is unaffected by this: as far as the central fact of his importance in literature is concerned, these eminent critics might as well have said nothing at all. A journal interested in satire recently quoted a critic as saying that satire must have a moral norm, and that Fielding’s Jonathan Wild was a failure because no character in it represented a moral norm. The question was referred to me, and I said, somewhat irritably, that of course a moral norm was essential to satire, but it was the reader and not the satirist who was responsible for supplying it.6 My real objection, however, was to the critical procedure involved in the “X is a failure because” formula. No critical principle can possibly follow the “because” which is of any importance at all compared to the fact of Jonathan Wild’s position in the history of satire and in eighteenth-century English culture. The fact is a fact about literature, and, as I have tried to show elsewhere, nothing can follow “because” except some kind of pseudo-critical moral anxiety. Thus: “King Lear is a failure because it is indecorous to represent a king on the stage as insane.” We recognize this statement to be nonsense, because we are no longer burdened with the particular social anxiety it refers to, but all such anxieties are equally without content. Matthew Arnold decided that Empedocles on Etna was a

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failure because its situation was one “in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.”7 These phrases would exactly describe, for instance, Eliot’s Prufrock, one of the most penetrating poems of our time, or a good deal of Arnold’s contemporary, Baudelaire. We cannot question Arnold’s sincerity in excluding his poem from his 1853 volume, but all he demonstrated by excluding it was his own anxious fear of irony. The attitude that we may call critical dandyism, where the operative conceptions are vogue words of approval or the reverse, like “interesting” or “dreary,” is an extreme but logical form of evaluating criticism, where the critic’s real subject is his own social position. Such criticism belongs to the wrong side of Kierkegaard’s “either/or” dialectic: it is an attitude for which the work of art remains permanently a detached object of contemplation, to be admired because the critic enjoys it or blamed because he does not. Kierkegaard himself was so impressed by the prevalence of this attitude in art that he called it the aesthetic attitude, and tended to identify the arts with it.8 We do not escape from the limitations of the attitude by transposing its judgments from an aesthetic into a moral key. F.R. Leavis has always commanded a good deal of often reluctant respect because of the moral intensity he brings to his criticism, and because of his refusal to make unreal separations between moral and aesthetic values. Reading through the recent reprint of Scrutiny, one feels at first that this deep concern for literature, whether the individual judgments are right or wrong, is the real key to literary experience, and the real introduction that criticism can make to it. But as one goes on one has the feeling that this concern, which is there and is a very real virtue, gets deflected at some crucial point, and is prevented from fully emerging out of the shadow-battles of anxieties. Perhaps what the point is is indicated by such comments of Leavis himself as “the poem is a determinate thing: it is there,” and, “unappreciated, the poem isn’t there.”9 An insistence on the “thereness” or separation of critic and literary work forces one, for all one’s concern, to go on playing the same “aesthetic” game. The paradox is that the “aesthetic” attitude is not a genuinely critical one at all, but social: concern makes the social reference more impersonal, but does not remove it. Evaluating criticism is mainly effective as criticism only when its valuations are favourable. Thus Ezra Pound, in the middle of his Guide to

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Kulchur, expresses some disinterested admiration for the lyrical elegies of Thomas Hardy, and the effect, in that book, is as though a garrulous drunk had suddenly sobered up, focused his eyes, and begun to talk sense.10 But, of course, if my argument suggests that everything which has acquired some reputation in literature should be placed “beyond criticism,” or that histories of literature should be as bland and official as possible, I should merely be intensifying the attitude I am attacking, turning the verbal icon into a verbal idol. My point is a very different one, and it begins with the fact that the work of literature is “beyond criticism” now: criticism can do nothing but lead into it. There are two contexts in which a work of literature is potential, an internal context and an external one. Internally, the writer has a potential theme and tries to actualize it in what he writes. Externally, the literary work, actualized in itself, becomes a potential experience for student, critic, or reader. A “bad” poem or novel is one in which, so the critic feels, a potential literary experience has not been actualized. Such a judgment implies a consensus: the critic speaks for all critics, even if he happens to be wrong. But an actualized work of literature may still fail to become an actualized experience for its reader. The judgment here implies withdrawal from a consensus: however many critics may like this, I don’t. The first type of judgment belongs primarily to the critical reaction to contemporary literature, reviewing and the like, where a variety of new authors are struggling to establish their authority. The second type belongs primarily to the tactics of critical pressure groups that attempt to redistribute the traditional valuations of the writers of the past in order to display certain new writers, usually including themselves, to better advantage. There is no genuinely critical reason for “revaluation.” Both activities correspond in the sexual life to what Freud calls the “polymorphous perverse,” the preliminaries of contact with the object.11 Judicial criticism, or reviewing, is necessarily incomplete: it can never free itself from historical variables, such as the direct appeal of certain in-group conventions to the sophisticated critic. The kind of criticism that is expressed by the term “insight,” the noticing of things in the literary work of particular relevance to one’s own experience, is perhaps the nearest that criticism can get to demonstrating the value of what it is dealing with. Insight criticism of this kind, however, is a form of divination, an extension of the principle of sortes Virgilianae: it is essentially random both in invention and in communication.12 In short, all methods of criticism and teaching are bad if they encour-

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age the persisting separation of student and literary work: all methods are good if they try to overcome it. The tendency to persistent separation is the result of shifting the critical attention from the object of literary experience to something else, usually something in the critic’s mind, and this deprives criticism of content. I know that I have said this before, but the same issues keep turning up every year. This year the issue was raised by Professor Rowse’s book on Shakespeare. The questions usually asked about Shakespeare’s sonnets, such as who was W.H., have nothing to do with Shakespeare’s sonnets or with literary criticism, and have only been attached to criticism because, owing to Shakespeare’s portentous reputation, critics have acquired an impertinent itch to know more about his private life than they need to know. It seemed to Professor Rowse that such questions were properly the concern of a historian, and he was quite right. True, he had no new facts about the sonnets and added nothing to our knowledge of this alleged subject, but his principle was sound. But Professor Rowse went further. It occurred to him that perhaps literary criticism was not a genuine intellectual discipline at all, and that there could be no issues connected with it that could not be better dealt with by someone who did belong to a genuine discipline, such as history. One of his sentences, for instance, begins: “A real writer understands better than a mere critic.”13 Literary criticism ought to be profoundly grateful to Professor Rowse for writing so bad a book: it practically proves that writing a good book on Shakespeare is a task for a mere critic. Still, the fact that a responsible scholar in a related field could assume, in 1964, that literary criticism was a parasitic pseudo-subject with no facts to build with and no concepts to think with, deserves to be noted. I do not believe, ultimately, in a plurality of critical methods, though I can see a division of labour in critical operations. I do not believe that there are different “schools” of criticism today, attached to different and irreconcilable metaphysical assumptions: the notion seems to me to reflect nothing but the confusion in critical theory. In particular, the notion that I belong to a school or have invented a school of mythical or archetypal criticism reflects nothing but confusion about me. I make this personal comment with some hesitation, in view of the great generosity with which my books have been received, but everyone who is understood by anybody is misunderstood by somebody. It is true that I call the elements of literary structure myths, because they are myths; it is true that I call the elements of imagery archetypes, because I want a word

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which suggests something that changes its context but not its essence. James Beattie, in The Minstrel, says of the poet’s activity From Nature’s beauties, variously compared And variously combined, he learns to frame Those forms of bright perfection

and adds a footnote to the last phrase, “General ideas of excellence, the immediate archetypes of sublime imitation, both in painting and in poetry.”14 It was natural for an eighteenth-century poet to think of poetic images as reflecting “general ideas of excellence”; it is natural for a twentieth-century critic to think of them as reflecting the same images in other poems. But I think of the term as indigenous to criticism, not as transferred from Neoplatonic philosophy or Jungian psychology. However, I would not fight for a word, and I hold to no “method” of criticism beyond assuming that the structure and imagery of literature are central considerations of criticism. Nor, I think, does my practical criticism illustrate the use of a patented critical method of my own, different in kind from the approaches of other critics. The end of criticism and teaching, in any case, is not an aesthetic but an ethical and participating end: for it, ultimately, works of literature are not things to be contemplated but powers to be absorbed. This completes the paradox of which the first half has already been given. The “aesthetic” attitude, persisted in, loses its connection with literature as an art and becomes socially or morally anxious: to treat literature seriously as a social and moral force is to pass into the genuine experience of it. The advantage of using established classics in teaching, the literary works that have proved their effectiveness, is that one can skip preliminary stages and clear everything out of the way except understanding, which is the only road to possession. At the same time it is easy for understanding to become an end in itself too. The established classics are, for the most part, historically removed from us, and to approach them as new works involves a certain historical astigmatism: but to consider them as historical documents only is again to separate student and literary work. In teaching manual skills, such as car-driving, an examination can test the skill on the higher level; but an examination in English literature cannot pass beyond the level of theoretical knowledge. We may guess the quality of a student’s literary experience from the quality of his writing, but there is no assured way of telling from the outside the difference

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between a student who knows literature and a student who merely knows about it. Thus the teaching of literature, an activity of criticism which attempts to cast its bread on the waters without knowing when or how or by whom it will be picked up, is involved in paradox and ambiguity. The object of literary experience must be placed directly in front of the student, and he should be urged to respond to it and accept no substitutes as the end of his understanding. Yet it does not matter a tinker’s curse what a student thinks and feels about literature until he can think and feel, which is not until he passes the stage of stock response. And although the cruder forms of stock response can be identified and the student released from them, there are subtler forms that are too circular to be easily refuted. There is, for instance, critical narcissism, or assuming that a writer’s “real” meaning is the critic’s own attitude (or the opposite of it, if the reaction is negative). There is no “real” meaning in literature, nothing to be “got out of it” or abstracted from the total experience; yet all criticism seems to be concerned with approaching such a meaning. There is no way out of these ambiguities: criticism is a phoenix preoccupied with constructing its own funeral pyre, without any guarantee that a bigger and better phoenix will manifest itself as a result. A large part of criticism is concerned with commentary, and a major work of literature has a vast amount of commentary attached to it. With writers of the size of Shakespeare and Milton, such a body of work is a proper and necessary part of our cultural heritage; and so it may be with, say, Melville or Henry James or Joyce or T.S. Eliot. The existence of a large amount of commentary on a writer is a testimony to the sense of the importance of that writer among critics. As the first critic in The Pooh Perplex says, on the opening page of the book, “Our ideal in English studies is to amass as much commentary as possible upon the literary work, so as to let the world know how deeply we respect it.”15 An important critical principle is concealed in this remark. It is an illusion that only great literature can be commented on, and that the existence of such commentary proves or demonstrates its greatness. It is a writer’s merits that make the criticism on him rewarding, as a rule, but it is not his merits that make it possible. The techniques of criticism can be turned loose on anything whatever. If this were not so, a clever parody like The Pooh Perplex could hardly make its point. Hence a mere display of critical dexterity or ingenuity, even as an act of devotion, is not enough: criticism, to be useful both to literature and to the public, needs to contain some sense

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of the progressive or the systematic, some feeling that irrevocable forward steps in understanding are being taken. We notice that all the contributors to The Pooh Perplex claim to be supplying the one essential thing needed to provide this sense of progress, though of course none of them does. Thus the piling up of commentary around the major writers of literature may in itself simply be another way of barricading those writers from us. Yeats tells us that what fascinates is the most difficult among things not impossible.16 Literary criticism is not in so simple a position. Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult. Yet it must be tried, tried constantly and indefatigably, and placed at the centre of the whole educational process, for at every level the understanding of words is as urgent and crucial a necessity as it is on its lowest level of learning to read and write. Whatever is educational is also therapeutic. The therapeutic power of the arts has been intermittently recognized, especially in music since David played his harp before Saul, but the fact that literature is essential to the mental health of society seldom enters our speculations about it. But if I am to take seriously my own principle that works of literature are not so much things to be studied as powers to be possessed, I need to face the implications of that principle. I wish all teachers of English, at every level, could feel that they were concerned with the whole of a student’s verbal, or in fact imaginative, experience, not merely with the small part of it that is conventionally called literary. The incessant verbal bombardment that students get from conversation, advertising, the mass media, or even such verbal games as Scrabble or crossword puzzles, is addressed to the same part of the mind that literature addresses, and it does far more to mould their literary imagination than poetry or fiction. It often happens that new developments in literature meet with resistance merely because they bring to life conventions that the critics had decided were subliterary. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads met with resistance of this kind, and in our day teachers and critics who think literature should be a matter of direct feeling and are prejudiced against the verbal puzzle find that their students, unlike themselves, are living in the age of Finnegans Wake. There is a real truth, for all of what has been said above, in the belief that the critic is deeply concerned with evaluation, and with separating the good from the bad in literature. But I would modify this belief in three ways. First, as just said, the area of literature should not be restricted to the conventionally literary, but expanded to the entire area of verbal experience. Hence the

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evaluating activity should not be concerned solely with civil wars in the conventionally literary field. Second, the distinction of good and bad is not a simple opposing of the conventionally literary to the conventionally subliterary, a matter of demonstrating the superiority of Henry James to Mickey Spillane. On the contrary, it seems to me that an important and neglected aspect of literary teaching is to illustrate the affinities in structure and imagery between the “best” and the “worst” of what every young person reads or listens to. Third, if I am right in saying that literature is a power to be possessed, and not a body of objects to be studied, then the difference between good and bad is not something inherent in literary works themselves, but the difference between two ways of using literary experience. The belief that good and bad can be determined as inherent qualities is the belief that inspires censorship, and the attempt to establish grades and hierarchies in literature itself, to distinguish what is canonical from what is apocryphal, is really an “aesthetic” form of censorship. Milton remarked in Areopagitica that a wise man would make better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool would of Holy Scripture,17 and this, I take it, is an application of the Gospel principle that man is defiled not by what goes into him but by what comes out of him [Matthew 15:11]. The question of censorship takes us back to the metaphor of taste by a different road, for censorship is apparently based on an analogy between mental and physical nourishment, what is censorable being inherently poisonous. But there is something all wrong with this analogy: it has often been pointed out that the censor himself never admits to being adversely affected by what he reads. We need to approach the problem that censorship fails to solve in another way. In primitive societies art is closely bound up with magic: the creative impulse is attached to a less disinterested hope that its products may affect the external world in one’s favour. Drawing pictures of animals is part of a design to catch them; songs about bad weather are partly charms to ensure good weather. The magical attachments of primitive art, though they may have stimulated the creative impulse, also come to hamper it, and as society develops they wear off or become isolated in special ritual compartments. Many works of art, including Shakespeare’s Tempest, remind us that the imaginative powers are released by the renunciation of magic. In the next stage of civilization the magical or natural attachment is replaced by a social one. Literature expresses the preoccupations of the society that produced it, and it is pressed into ser-

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vice to illustrate other social values, religious or political. This means that it has an attachment to other verbal structures in religion or history or morals which is allegorical. Here, too, is something that both hampers and stimulates the creative impulse. Much of Dante’s Commedia and Milton’s Paradise Lost is concerned with political and religious issues that we regard now as merely partisan or superstitious. The poems would never have been written without the desire to raise these issues, and as long as we are studying the poems the issues are relevant to our study. But when we pass from the study to the possession of the poems, a dialectical separation of a permanent imaginative structure from a mass of historical anxieties takes place. This is the critical principle that Shelley was attempting to formulate in his Defence of Poetry,18 and in fact the Romantic movement marks the beginning of a third stage in the attachments of the arts, and one that we are still in. This third stage (to some extent “decadent,” as the first one is primitive, though we should be careful not to get trapped by the word) is both social and magical, and is founded on the desire to make art act kinetically on other people, startling, shocking, or otherwise stimulating them into a response of heightened awareness. It belongs to an age in which kinetic verbal stimulus, in advertising, propaganda, and mass media, plays a large and increasing role in our verbal experience. Sometimes the arts try to make use of similar techniques, as the Italian Futurist movement did, but more frequently the attempt is to create a kind of counterstimulus. In the various shocking, absurd, angry, and similar conventions in contemporary art one may recognize a strong kinetic motivation. Even in the succession of fashions there is something of this, for the succession of vogues and movements in the arts is part of the economy of waste. Most cultivated people realize that they should overlook or ignore these attachments in responding to the imaginative product itself, and meet all such assaults on their sense of decorum with a tolerant aplomb that sometimes infuriates the artist still more. Here again, the attachment begins as a stimulus and may eventually become a hindrance, unless the artist is astute enough to detach himself at the point where the hindrance begins. It is the critic’s task, in every age, to fight for the autonomy of the arts, and never under any circumstances allow himself to be seduced into judging the arts, positively or negatively, by their attachments. The fact that, for instance, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch is written in the convention of the psychological shocker does not make it either a good or a bad

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book, and the fashion for pop-art painting is neither good because painters ought to rediscover content nor bad because they ought not. But an essential part of the critic’s strategy, to the extent that the critic is a teacher, is in leading his students to realize that in responding to art without attachments they are at the same time building up a resistance to kinetic stimulus themselves. Literary education is not doing the whole of its proper work unless it marshals the verbal imagination against the assaults of advertising and propaganda that try to bludgeon it into passivity. This is a battle that should be fought long before university, because university comes too late in a student’s life to alter his mental habits more than superficially. I think of a public school teacher I know who got his grade 8 students to analyse the rhetorical devices in a series of magazine advertisements. The effect was so shattering that he thought at first he must be working with too young an age group: children who were contemptuous of Santa Claus and the stork were still not ready to discover that advertising was no more factual than the stories they told their parents. Eventually, however, he realized that he was right, and that he had uncovered a deeper level of literary response than literature as such can ordinarily reach at that age. The direct response to a verbal kinetic stimulus persists into adult life, and is, of course, what makes the propaganda of totalitarian states effective for their own people. Such response is not an inability to distinguish rhetorical from factual statement, but a will to unite them. Even though a Communist, for example, understands the difference between what is said and the political necessity of saying it, he has been conditioned to associate rhetoric and fact when they are produced in a certain area of authority, not to separate them. In the democracies we are not trained in this way, but we are continually being persuaded to fall into the habit, by pressure groups trying to establish the same kind of authority, and by certain types of entertainment in which the kinetic stimulus is erotic. I recently saw a documentary movie of the rock-and-roll singer Paul Anka.19 The reporter pried one of the squealing little sexballs out of the audience and asked her what she found so ecstatic about listening to Anka. She said, still in a daze, “He’s so sincere.” The will to unite rhetorical and direct address is very clear here. The central activity of criticism, which is the understanding of literature, is essentially one of establishing a context for the works of literature being studied. This means relating them to other things: to their context in the writer’s life, in the writer’s time, in the history of literature, and

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above all in the total structure of literature itself, or what I call the order of words. Relation to context accounts for nearly the whole of the factual basis of criticism, the aspect of it that can progress through being verified or refuted by later criticism. This central activity itself has a further context, a lower and an upper limit, with which I have been mainly concerned in this paper. On the lower limit is criticism militant, a therapeutic activity of evaluation, or separating the good from the bad, in which good and bad are not two kinds of literature, but, respectively, the active and the passive approaches to verbal experience. This kind of criticism is essentially the defence of those aspects of civilization loosely described as freedom of speech and freedom of thought. On the higher limit is criticism triumphant, the inner possession of literature as an imaginative force to which all study of literature leads, and which is criticism at once glorified and invisible. We remember the discussion in Joyce’s Portrait in which the characteristics of beauty are said to be integritas, consonantia, and claritas; unity, harmony, and radiance.20 Poet and critic alike struggle to unify and to relate; the critic, in particular, struggles to demonstrate the unity of the work of literature he is studying and to relate it to its context in literature. There remains the peculiar claritas or intensity, which cannot be demonstrated in either literature or criticism, though all literature and criticism point toward it. No darkness can comprehend any light; no ignorance or indifference can ever see any claritas in literature itself or in the criticism that attempts to convey it, just as no saint in ordinary life wears a visible gold plate around his head. All poet or critic can do is to hope that somehow, somewhere, and for someone, the struggle to unify and to relate, because it is an honest struggle and not because of any success in what it does, may be touched with a radiance not its own.

7 The Structure and Spirit of Comedy 2 August 1964

From Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, 1964, ed. B.W. Jackson (Toronto: W.J. Gage, 1965), 1–9. Frye was speaking at the first seminar for attendees of the 1964 season of plays at the Shakespearean Festival at Stratford, Ontario, 2–8 August. His was the first lecture, given on Sunday evening in the Festival Theatre before 157 people. The productions for that year included, besides the Shakespearean tragedies Richard II and King Lear, Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeoman of the Guard, and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

This year, besides the two major Shakespeare performances, there are four non-Shakespearean productions, all of them varieties of comedy. It seemed to me that, when you had so many distinguished critics to introduce you to King Lear, what I could most usefully do would be to speak about comedy, referring to what we are going to see this week, but keeping in mind the fact that Shakespeare is central to our interests. It seems to me that in this ironic age comedy is greatly underestimated and misunderstood, except in its ironic form, which on the whole was not Shakespeare’s form. There are two forms of literary experience which are based on the limitations of human life: these are the tragic and the ironic. The fundamental conception of tragedy is that of the primary contract between man and the state of nature: that great bond, as Macbeth calls it, between human and natural order.1 Some underlying mystery, whether we call it the gods, fate, or the psychology of revenge, operates to keep this order in a roughly balanced state: the rough balance called by the Greeks ananke, moira, or, in a different context, nemesis. The fundamental concep-

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tion of irony is the social contract properly speaking, the secondary contract between the individual and his society. The state of nature for man is a social state, hence there is always an ironic component of tragedy. But tragedy focuses on the hero, the man at the top of the social scale; irony as such focuses on the victim of society. Tragedy is concerned with Lear and Oedipus; irony with Willy Loman and Tess Durbeyfield. Tragedy is Adam, the king of men, driven from Eden into the wilderness; irony is Israel in bondage to Egypt, and finding in the wilderness its path of escape. Similarly, there are two forms of literary experience that are based on the conception of the emancipating of human life from these contracts. They are the comic and the romantic. The romance tends to be anti-tragic in the sense that it stresses the unity of man and nature, idyllic, pastoral, or paradisal forms of society, and a heroism that preserves its innocence. It throws the emphasis on individual and sexual rather than social fulfilment. The fundamental conception of romance, therefore, is deliverance from the primary or tragic contract between man and an indifferent or hostile nature. Comedy is anti-ironic in its tendency, and moves from a constricting or absurd society to a more sensible and workable set of social relationships. The more ironic the comedy, the more frustrated or ambiguous this movement becomes, but its structure can still be traced in everything that preserves the festival ending, in feast or marriage or dance or general chorus, which is so typical of comedy. The idea of comedy, then, is emancipation from a confining form of social contract into one that confines less. The simplest form of comic structure is the one in which a young man wishes to marry a young woman, with the sympathy of the audience, but is prevented from doing so by some sinister or absurd social situation. Such a comedy demands a minimum of four characters: the hero, the heroine, the person originally possessing the heroine who is to be outwitted, and who is usually the gull or butt of the comic action, and the character who helps the hero do the outwitting. This last character was a tricky slave in Roman comedy; later he became a clever servant or valet like the Jeeves of P.G. Wodehouse. I take Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville, written in the eighteenth century, as an example of this simple type of comedy. Here the heroine, Rosina, is in the care of an older man, Don Bartolo, her guardian, who is insanely jealous of her and proposes to complete his possession of her by marrying her. Thus he has most of the traditional attributes of this role.

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As her guardian he is in a parental relation to her, and resembles the heavy fathers of all such comedies from Menander to Molière and beyond. As her suitor he is the hero’s foolish or repellent rival. As jealous lover he is her keeper or jailer, like the pimp of Roman comedy. The hero, Count Almaviva, enlists the help of the clever and resourceful barber Figaro, whose song about his cleverness in Rossini’s opera based on the play, “Largo al factotum,” is perhaps the apotheosis of the tricky slave in literature.2 In those days a barber was supposed to do minor medical repair jobs as well, and Figaro has the entrée to the Bartolo household. He gives one servant a sleeping powder, another a sneezing powder, bleeds the housekeeper in the foot on some pretext so that she is unable to walk; he even blindfolds the family mule. Finally, when he has the entire household immobilized, he sends Count Almaviva in various disguises to woo Rosina. One of these disguises is that of her substitute music teacher. The Count protests that this will never fool Don Bartolo, as it is a stale and outmoded device of stage comedies. He is, of course, quite right: the device had been used in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew two centuries earlier, and was not new then. But the conventions of comedy are much more durable than the facts of life: the devices do work, and the Count carries off Rosina in triumph. In the sequel to The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, on which Da Ponte and Mozart based the opera we are hearing this week, the structure is essentially the same but more complex in its overtones. Here Count Almaviva has been married to Rosina for years, is bored with his own happiness, and has his eye on Figaro’s own fiancée, Susanna. This means that he now has the role of comic butt, the absurd older man or rival who is to be outwitted, whereas Figaro is hero as well as tricky slave. Here, however, we notice an underlying social tension caused by the fact that Figaro is a servant and the Count his master. The Count soliloquizes indignantly about the effrontery of a mere servant in trying to thwart his lordly will. Figaro, in his turn, has a soliloquy in which he inquires what the Count has ever done except get himself born, while he has to work hard for what little he has. He goes on to tell the story of his life, and says that he was a journalist for a time in Spain, and promptly found himself in prison. After release, he was told that the laws had just been greatly liberalized, and that now, as long as he said nothing about politics or the government, nothing about religion, nothing about theatre or opera or the arts, nothing about anybody at all who was active in anything, he was at perfect liberty to write what he liked, under the supervi-

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sion of two or three censors. This, of course, was pretty inflammatory talk for prerevolutionary France, and Louis XVI, who saw the play, is said to have remarked, in an unconsciously prophetic flash, that before such plays could be rendered harmless the Bastille would have to be destroyed. So when Da Ponte and Mozart made their opera, the play itself was still under ban. The censorship speech was replaced in the opera by an aria, sung by Don Basilio, about an ass’s skin, so innocuously allegorical that I have never quite understood it.3 These comedies illustrate the main principles of comic structure, and we find the same principles also in Shakespeare. The theme of deliverance from a constricting or binding social contract may take two forms: the form of an absurd law in society itself, or the form of some perverse obsession on the part of someone who is in a position to block the action. In The Marriage of Figaro the absurd law takes the form of the legendary droit du seigneur, which may not have existed historically but is most useful to a comic dramatist. The Count has abrogated this law, but regrets his own generosity, and wishes to make an exception of Susanna. Thus the irrational law has become a private whim but without changing the comic structure. In Molière the obstacle to the love interest is usually an obsession in the mind of the heroine’s father, who may be a miser, a hypochondriac, or the gull of a hypocrite. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme the particular obsession of the heroine’s father is, of course, to be a gentleman in the technical seventeenth-century sense of that word, and shows the typical Molière structure very clearly. The same themes are frequent in Shakespeare, who prefers the irrational law, as Ben Jonson prefers the obsession, which he calls a “humour.” In As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale the comic conclusion is blocked by the whim of a tyrant; elsewhere, as in Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Comedy of Errors, and The Merchant of Venice, by some grotesque and preposterous law. We notice that the law, even in a very light-hearted comedy, may carry with it an inherent cruelty and viciousness that sometimes threatens to upset the comic tone. The Comedy of Errors begins with a speech of a man under sentence of death, and the threat of death hangs over him for nearly the whole play. Shylock’s bond is not without sharp teeth, and Measure for Measure is preoccupied with the theme of violent and cruel death, which overshadows all the male characters in turn. In The Yeomen of the Guard the hero is similarly under sentence of death, and the atmosphere of menace and torture generated by the Tower of London is never

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wholly dispelled. An unpleasant streak of sadism in Gilbert himself undoubtedly intensifies this, but its presence is in accord with the normal comic structure. But while social change, in the direction of improvement, is a central theme of comedy, only a minority of comedies are revolutionary even in the very limited way that The Marriage of Figaro is. The change is from a bogey world to a world where young people have a chance to live happily ever after, and which, because it is that, has to be left socially undefined. Similarly, the comic action may run into an equivocal conclusion. In the conventional structure, the sinister or absurd character is baffled, the hero and heroine, and often several other pairs as well, move toward a quiet consummation offstage, and the tricky slave is rewarded, or sometimes, in the Roman comedies where he really was a slave, set free. But a number of things may complicate this simple progression and turn it into something more ironic. There may be a suggestion that in the final marriages not all the human tensions have been resolved, and that the fairy-tale formula about living happily ever after may not be going to cover them. Thus in Much Ado and All’s Well we wonder if Claudio and Bertram are really good enough for the women they marry; in Measure for Measure we wonder if Angelo will really make a much better husband than Lucio, granted a very different temperament; in As You Like It we wonder, with Jaques, how long the Audrey–Touchstone ménage will last; we may even wonder in Twelfth Night whether Sir Toby’s enormous act of condescension in marrying Maria is really quite that. Again, in The Yeomen of the Guard the festive ending and the multiple marriages are corroded by a much more ironic tone, a sense that they are not quite the marriages that all those engaged in them want to make. Or, again, our attention may be called to some character who does not join the festivity, but remains isolated from it, and by his isolation suggests other than festive feelings. Sometimes this character is a kind of comic spirit or mischief-maker, a “vice” as at one time he was called, like Puck or Ariel in Shakespeare. Sometimes he is an Eros-figure who represents in himself the fundamentally sexual drive of comedy, like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro, whose role in the opera is half male and half female, a wistful impulse to love that has not broken out of self-love and found its identity. The heroines disguised as boys in Shakespeare, a device recurring even in Wycherley’s Country Wife, have the same function. In Shakespeare an isolated character may be the blocking character himself, like Shylock, or a vice who is not merely mischievous but genu-

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inely vicious, like Don John in Much Ado. But he is often someone isolated by his own temperament, like Jaques in As You Like It, or the clown. For the clown is also an actor by profession, and he often sets up a kind of counter-dramatic movement within the play, like the company of Peter Quince in the Dream who put on a play of their own. In The Taming of the Shrew, Christopher Sly, though a clown by temperament rather than by profession, has a role of this sort, the centre of a play within the play from which he watches the main action as a spectator. In Twelfth Night, Feste, the old clown who takes no part in the final marriages, steps out at the end to sing his song of a wistful loneliness in which, ending as it does with the line “We’ll strive to please you every day,” there seems some identification with the playwright himself, the professional actor who has made himself a motley to the view and wonders how many Malvolios in the audience will think him a pitiful barren rascal. The feeling that the clown is a possible focus of pathos is exploited in The Yeomen of the Guard, where there is again a good deal of self-identification, and where the isolation of the figure from the festival conclusion could hardly go much further. The action of comedy normally moves from what is unnatural or artificial (in the modern sense of something constructed in defiance of nature rather than in accord with it) to what is natural, that is, young men and women getting possession of each other. This is “natural” in the sense of being what we want rather than natural in the sense of being simply there as something we have to come to terms with. The more natural state of things, such as Leontes’ renewed life with Hermione, may include some very unlikely incidents. In Shakespeare’s day “nature” was thought of as existing on two levels. One level was that of the physical world, the world of animals and plants; the other and higher level was that of “human nature” properly speaking. It is natural to man to live, not like animals, but in a social, civilized, and rational state. Thus the action of a Shakespearean comedy, in moving from the unnatural to the humanly natural, passes across a middle area of the physically natural. This is a world often represented by a forest, where the comic resolution is achieved. In human terms it is, again, often symbolized by the fool, who is allowed the privilege of uninhibited speech because he is a “natural,” the possessor of a simplified vision of life withdrawn equally from the world of vicious laws and irrational whims at the beginning of the action and from the happy marriages at the end of it. The fool’s function, like that of the child in Andersen’s fairy tale, is simply to point to the

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nakedness of the emperor, whether the clothes we think we see are supposed to fit or not. In Wycherley’s Country Wife we have an ironic comedy based on the two levels of nature just mentioned, but related in a very un-Shakespearean way. Normally the happy ending of comedy is the ending that the audience is pulling for. But nobody can possibly care whether Horner’s little scheme succeeds or not.4 It does succeed, and the conventional comic structure is to that extent preserved. But it is preserved as parody: the action does not move from the unnatural to the natural. The natural, the sense of intelligent and candid social life, is not in the play, except fitfully in Alithea: it is what the audience is assumed to have in its mind as a standard or norm from which to judge the absurdity of the comic action itself. Whenever Restoration dramatists defended their procedures on moral grounds, this was always the line they took: nobody is expected to applaud the comic conclusion, but only the success of presenting a hypocritical and preposterous society throughout. So in Wycherley’s play we look for a focus of sympathy, and find it, so far as we find it at all, in the country wife herself. For Margery is, again, a “natural,” a simple rustic creature trying to take what is grotesquely artificial on its own terms, and throwing its absurdity into high relief by doing so. And although Alithea’s name means “truth,” it is only Margery Pinchwife who is prepared to tell the truth about Horner at the end, whereupon the entire cast descends on her in a dense black cloud to keep the action in the same state of illusion that it began in. In comedy the vision of the absurd or preposterous is not only a vision of the unnatural but of illusion, the unrealities that human folly creates for itself. What is natural in terms of desire, the festival conclusion, is a vision of what is, at least comparatively, reality. In such a play as The Country Wife the question of which is which becomes very complicated. There the so-called happy ending, with the hero triumphant over his women, is part of the illusion; reality is in the norm or standard of human behaviour that the audience is assumed to possess. This is one pole of comedy: at the other pole is the kind of interchange of reality and illusion that we have in the Shakespearean romances. There, what reminds us of real life, such as the plotting of Antonio and Sebastian against Alonso or the jealousy of Leontes, disappears into illusion, and we are led into a new vision of reality through the magical and the incredible. In Wycherley’s play the society on the stage are puppets in a shadow world; the substance of what makes them a society is in the

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audience outside them. In Shakespeare’s romances the shadow, the statue of Hermione, the “block” of the dead Thaisa, the greed and avarice of Antonio and Sebastian where “no man was his own,” is all that is lost. The substance is regained: Hermione and Thaisa come to life and the Court Party find their “proper selves” through the incredible illusion of the play itself. In Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme the interchange of reality and illusion is of a different kind. Superficially, what happens is simple enough. Two nice young people want to get married; the girl’s father obstructs this by a perverse whim about wanting to marry into the gentry; he is properly bamboozled, and everything ends happily. But there may be another dimension to the action. Jourdain has no life beyond the play, and as long as the play lasts he remains within his illusion. And Jourdain is not a mere Texas millionaire who thinks his money can buy him anything: if he were, he would be shrewd enough to see through the Shriners’ convention farce of his initiation into the Turkish nobility. Jourdain is a quixotic figure, a genuine romantic, with a tremendous admiration for the aristocracy and for the fantasy world, as it is to him, of art and music and literature and swordsmanship and fine clothes that they surround themselves with. Gradually this fantasy world takes on a “Turkish” form, with no relation to any kind of reality—except, of course, the vision of something wonderfully picturesque which has inspired his obsession in the first place. That remains, and, perhaps, is a more genuine social creation than the actual French aristocracy, of which the only representative actually known to Jourdain is a rather shoddy sponger. The ideal societies created by comedy are seldom more real than Jourdain’s Turkish one, yet some of them stay around in our minds after the progression of leaders and elections and celebrities in the society outside us has come and gone, leaving no rack behind.

8 The Norms of Satire Fall 1964

From Satire Newsletter, 2 (Fall 1964): 9–10. This was Frye’s contribution to a symposium on the question, “Is reference to moral norms essential to satire?” Fourteen critics gave their answers to this question, including Frye, Alvin Kernan, and W.S. Anderson, all members of the advisory board of the journal. Most argued in some way for the reader’s supplying the norm. For Frye’s comments on the occasion for this symposium, see p. 151, above.

Of course a moral norm is inherent in satire: satire presents something as grotesque: the grotesque is by definition a deviant from a norm: the norm makes the satire satiric. This is a very different thing from saying that the satirist must “put something in” to represent a moral norm. It is the reader who is responsible for “putting in” the moral norm, not the satirist. The satirist may simply be presenting something as grotesque and appealing to the reader’s sense of the norm in seeing it as such. Or the satirist may be opinionated, wrong-headed, or malicious, in which case we may accept some of his moral norms and reject the rest. There seems to me to be a larger critical principle involved here. Any work of literature which is well known and regarded as compulsory reading in its field has already proved its literary effectiveness by being so. I distrust all criticism that approaches such a work with value judgments of the “X is a failure because” type. No critical principle can possibly follow the “because” which is nearly so important as the fact of the work’s effectiveness as literature. What ought to follow the “because,” in practically every case, is “I didn’t read it properly.”

9 Allegory 1965

From the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; enlarged ed. entitled Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1974), 12–15. Selections reprinted in Topics in Literary Criticism, ed. Christopher Butler and Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), items 185 and 195. The text uses short forms, chiefly “a.” for “allegory,” which have here been expanded.

Allegory (Greek allos, “other,” and agoreuein, “to speak”) is a term denoting a technique of literature which in turn gives rise to a method of criticism. As a technique of literature, allegory is a technique of fiction-writing, for there must be some kind of narrative basis for allegory. We have allegory when the events of a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure of events or ideas, whether historical events, moral or philosophical ideas, or natural phenomena. The myth and the fable are forms closely related to, or frequently used for, allegory, and the works usually called allegories are genres of fiction: epic (Dante’s Divina Commedia), romance (Spenser’s Faerie Queene), prose fiction (Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), or drama (Everyman). It is continuity that distinguishes allegory from ambiguity or simple allusion. Fictionwriting has two aspects: (1) a progression of incidents which are imitations of actions, and (2) elements of meaning or thought which represent a poetic use of ideas. Hence there are two main types of allegory: historical or political allegory, referring to characters or events beyond those purportedly described in the fiction; and moral, philosophical, religious, or scientific allegories, referring to an additional set of ideas. If the allegorical reference is continuous throughout the narrative, the fiction “is”

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an allegory. If it is intermittent, if allegory is picked up and dropped again at pleasure, as in many works of Ariosto, Goethe, Ibsen, and Hawthorne, we say only that the fiction shows allegorical tendencies. Allegory is thus not the name of a form or a genre, but of a structural principle in fiction. Allegory may be simple or complex. In simple allegory the fiction is wholly subordinate to the abstract “moral,” hence it often impresses the literary critic as naive. An example is the fable, which is directed primarily at the set of ideas expressed in its moral. Simple historical allegories (simple at least as regards their literary structure) occur in some of the later prophecies of the Bible, such as the allegory of the four kingdoms in Daniel.1 More complex historical and political allegories tend to develop a strongly ironic tone, resulting from the fact that the allegorist is pretending to talk about one series of incidents when he is actually talking about another. Hence there is a close connection between historical or political allegory and satire, a connection marked in Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale (Prosopopoeia), which uses a beast-fable to satirize a contemporary political situation; in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, which uses an Old Testament story for the same purpose; in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and elsewhere. Moral allegories are apt to be deeply serious in tone. In these the fiction is supposed to provide entertainment and the allegory instruction. The basic technique of moral allegory is personification, where a character represents an abstract idea. The simpler the allegory, the more urgently the reader’s attention is directed to the allegorical meaning. Hence simple or naive moral allegory belongs primarily to educational literature: to the fables and moralities of the schoolroom, the parables and exempla of the pulpit, the murals and statuary which illustrate familiar ideas in official buildings. Often the allegorist is too interested in his additional meaning to care whether his fiction is consistent or not as a fiction. Bunyan, even Spenser, occasionally drop into naive allegory. In the first book of The Faerie Queene, the Redcross Knight is being taught by Faith, Hope, and Charity, and Hope urges him to take hold of her anchor, the traditional emblem of hope. It is possible to think of Hope as a female teacher lugging this anchor into the lecture room to make her point—such emblems are still brought into classrooms—but it is simpler to think that the literal narrative is being naively distorted by the allegorical interest. Allegorical interpretation, as a method of criticism, begins with the

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fact that allegory is a structural element in narrative: it has to be there, and is not added by critical interpretation alone. In fact, all commentary, or the relating of the events of a narrative to conceptual terminology, is in one sense allegorical interpretation. To say that Hamlet is a tragedy of indecision is to start setting up beside Hamlet the kind of moral counterpart to its events that an allegory has as a part of its structure. Whole libraries of criticism may be written on the fictions of Hamlet or Macbeth, bringing out aspects of their meaning that would not occur to other readers, and all such commentary might be said, by a ready extension of the term, to allegorize the plays. But this does not, as is sometimes said, turn the plays into allegories. A glance at Hamlet is enough to show that it is not structurally an allegory to begin with. If it were, the range of commentary would be greatly limited, because the presence of allegory prescribes the direction in which commentary must go. As Hamlet is not an allegory, it has an implicit relation only to other sets of events or ideas, and hence can carry an infinite amount of commentary. Strictly defined, allegorical interpretation is the specific form of commentary that deals with fictions which are structurally allegories. This leaves considerable latitude still, for there are many fictions, notably ancient myths, where the presence or absence of allegory is disputable. In this situation the critic must content himself with offering his allegorical interpretation as one of many possible ones, or—the more traditional method—he may assume that the poet has, deliberately or unconsciously, concealed allegorical meanings in his fiction. The history of allegorical interpretation is essentially the history of typical forms of commentary applied to fictions where allegory is present, or is assumed to be so. Of these, one of the earliest and most important is the rationalization of myth, especially Classical myth. The stories about the gods in Homer and Hesiod were felt by many early Greek philosophers to be not serious enough for religion: as Plutarch urged much later, gods who behave foolishly are no gods [Moralia, 417e–f]. A system of interpreting the gods as personifications either of moral principles or of physical or natural forces grew up, known at first not as allegory but as hyponoia.2 The practice is ridiculed by Plato in the Republic [378d] and elsewhere, but it increased with the rise of the more ethical and speculative cults, notably Stoicism. Judaism had similar difficulties, and the extensive commentaries of Philo on the Pentateuch are the most ambitious of the earliest Jewish efforts to demonstrate that philosophical and moral truths are concealed in the Old Testament stories.3

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With Christianity a special problem arose, that of typology, of which allegory formed a part. To some extent the Old Testament had to be read allegorically by the Christian, according to the principle later enunciated by St. Augustine: “In the Old Testament the New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament the Old Testament is revealed.”4 Certain Messianic passages in the Old Testament were held to refer specifically to Jesus; the Jewish law was abolished as a ceremony but fulfilled as a type of the spiritual life. St. Paul in Galatians, commenting on the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, explicitly says that the story is an allegory [4:22–6], though it later became more exact to say that such stories had or contained allegorical meanings. Hence a doctrine of multiple meanings in Scripture was elaborated which could be applied to religious literature as well. Dante has given us the best-known formulation of the medieval scheme in his Tenth Epistle, to Can Grande (also at the beginning of the second part of the Convito), partly in explanation of his own practice. We begin with the “literal” meaning, which simply tells us what happened; this narrative illustrates certain principles which we can see to be true (quid credas, as a popular tag had it), and this is the allegory proper. At the same time the narrative illustrates the proper course of action (quid agas); this is its moral meaning, and is particularly the meaning aimed at in the exemplum or moral fable used in sermons and elsewhere, and which is also employed a good deal by Dante, especially in the Purgatorio. Finally there is its anagogic or universal meaning, its place within the total scheme of Christian economy, the Creation, Redemption, and Judgment of the world. These last two meanings may also be called allegorical in an extended use of the term. The allegorization of Classical myth continued throughout the Middle Ages, though the emphasis shifted to Latin literature, through the popularity of allegorical commentaries on Virgil and Ovid which remained in vogue for well over a millennium.5 The use of allegory for educational purposes, largely popularized by Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and Philosophy (early fifth century), is still going strong in England in Stephen Hawes’s Passtyme of Pleasure (ca. 1510). In secular literature, the most popular form of allegory was the allegory of Courtly Love, which employed an elaborate system of parallels to religion, its God being Eros or Cupid, its Mother Venus, its great lovers saints and martyrs, and so on. Allegory also of course pervaded the plastic arts, and the emblem books which became popular in the sixteenth century are an example of the literary absorption of pictorial iconology.

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The original motivation for allegorical systems of commentary had been the defence of the sobriety and profundity of religious myths which appeared, on the face of it, to ascribe capriciousness or indecency to the gods. Hence attacks on Homeric theology by Plato, or on early Christianity by anti-Christian apologists, normally included a rejection, usually with some ridicule, of all such face-saving interpretations. With the rise both of Protestantism and of post-Tridentine Catholicism, the same problem entered literary criticism. Puritans attacked Classical mythology as puerile fable, and scoffed at all efforts to allegorize it. In Elizabethan England Gosson’s School of Abuse was one of the most articulate of such attacks, and was replied to by Sir Philip Sidney and by Thomas Lodge. Lodge concerned himself more particularly with the question of allegory: “Why may not Juno resemble the air?” he protested; “must men write that you may know their meaning?”6 Tasso in Italy also defended his Jerusalem Delivered along allegorical lines. The conception of major poetry as concealing enormous reserves of knowledge through an allegorical technique was widely accepted in the Renaissance: the preface to Chapman’s translation of Homer expresses it eloquently, and other men of letters discovered their own philosophical interests in Classical mythology, as Francis Bacon did in his Wisdom of the Ancients.7 Gradually the Aristotelian conception of poetry became the main basis for the defence, as well as for much of the practice, of imaginative literature. In the Poetics, which influenced criticism increasingly from about 1540 on, poetry is conceived as an imitation of nature which expresses the general and the typical rather than the specific and particular, and which consequently is not to be judged by canons of truth or falsehood. This is obviously far more flexible a principle than the assumption of concealed allegorical meanings, and the latter interpretations fell out of favour. In the Romantic period a renewed interest in myth, where the myth became subjective and psychological, a part of the poet’s own creative processes, developed a new conception of allegory, expressed in Goethe, Friederich Schlegel, and Coleridge (notably in the Statesman’s Manual). In this conception allegory is thought of as essentially the translating of a nonpoetic structure, usually of abstract ideas, into poetic imagery, and is thereby contrasted with symbolism, which is thought of as starting with the poetic image, and attaching concepts to it. This contrast then becomes the basis of a value judgment, symbolism being good and allegory bad. The distinction is uncritical, because it identifies all allegory with naive allegory, but it became very popular, and helped to

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rationalize the growing prejudice against allegory which still exists. The good allegorists, such as Dante and Spenser, were explained away by other means: readers were taught to think of allegory as tedious or pedantic, or were encouraged to read Spenser or Bunyan for the story and let the allegory go. Such criticism reflects the Romantic conception of a direct firsthand encounter with experience as the key to great literature, in contrast to the secondhand approach to it through books. Nevertheless, the allegorical tradition survived fitfully. In criticism, it is found notably in Ruskin, whose Queen of the Air, a treatise on Classical mythology, practically defines a myth as an allegorical story,8 and classifies the canonical allegories into the moral and the cosmological. In poetry, more or less straightforward allegory is found in the second part of Goethe’s Faust; in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; in Keats’s Endymion; in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. The new Romantic conception of symbolism is illustrated by such fictions as Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Golden Bowl, To the Lighthouse, and others, where there is a central symbol, usually named in the title, with a great variety of suggestive implications, but which lacks the continuity necessary for genuine allegory. Hawthorne is frequently allegorical in his technique—some of his stories, such as “The Bosom Serpent,” might almost be called naive allegories—but the nineteenth and twentieth century are notable for fictions which carry a great deal of conceptual weight, such as War and Peace, or are mythopoeic, such as The Plumed Serpent, and yet are not strictly allegorical. The use of an archetypal model for a fiction, as Joyce uses the Odyssey in Ulysses and Faulkner the Passion in A Fable, is closer to traditional allegorical techniques. Continuous allegory, as we have it in Anatole France’s Penguin Island, usually favours the historical type, with its natural affinity for satire;9 but the recent vogue of Franz Kafka indicates that even serious moral allegory still makes a powerful appeal. Since 1900 two new forms of allegorical interpretation have crowded out nearly all the older ones. Dreams have been from ancient times recognized as close to allegory, but it was only after the appearance of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams that there developed in criticism a technique of reading works of literature as psychological allegories, revealing the latent sexual drives and conflicts either of their authors or of their readers. There is now an extensive bibliography of such allegorical criticism in literature, most of it either Freudian or Jungian in reference. About the same time Frazer’s Golden Bough began a school of criticism

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which approaches literature much as Christian typology related the New Testament to the Old. Works of literature, especially of ancient literature, are regarded as myths which contain and at the same time reveal the significance of earlier rituals and ceremonies. This form of allegorical interpretation, like the other, assumes the unconscious rather than the deliberate concealment of the allegorical allusion. There is no comprehensive work on the subject: an immense amount of scholarly research has been done on Classical and medieval allegory, much of it in areas remote from literature; critical treatments of modern literature usually deal with mythopoeia rather than allegory. The following studies are helpful: C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936); R.P. Hinks, Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (1939); J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. B. Sessions (1953); E.D. Leyburn, Satiric Allegory: Mirror of Man (1956); H. Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper (1957); E. Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959); M.P. Parker, The Allegory of the Faerie Queene (1960); A.C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene” (1961); P.E. McLane, Spenser’s “Shepheardes Calender”: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (1961); A. Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964).

10 Verse and Prose 1965

From the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965; enlarged ed. entitled Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1974), 885–90. Frye felt that his article needed “no essential changes” in the new edition (NFF, 1988, box 17, file p11). The article uses some abbreviations which have been expanded.

Verse and Prose. Words are used (1) for ordinary speech, (2) for discursive or logical thought, and (3) for literature. Discursive language makes statements of fact, is judged by standards of truth and falsehood, and is in the form of prose. Literature makes no real statements of fact, proceeds hypothetically, and is judged by its imaginative consistency. Literature includes a great deal which is written in some form of regular recurrence, whether metre, accent, vowel quantity, rhyme, alliteration, parallelism, or any combination of these, and which we may call verse. All verse is literary, and philosophical or historical works written in verse are almost invariably classified as literature. We can exclude them from literature only by some kind of value judgment, not by a categorical judgment, and to introduce value judgments before we understand what our categories are is only to invite confusion. But although verse seems to be in some central and peculiar way the typical language of literature, all literature is not verse. The question thus arises, What is the status of literary prose? The best way to distinguish literary from nonliterary prose is by what we may call, cautiously and tentatively, its intention. If it is intended to describe and represent facts and to be judged by its truth, it normally belongs in some nonliterary category; if it is to be judged primarily by its imaginative consistency,

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it normally belongs to literature. We say “normally,” because it is quite possible to look at some works, such as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, from either point of view. A subordinate problem also arises in passing: what is the meaning of the word “poetry”? Aristotle remarked in the Poetics that metre was not the distinguishing feature of “poetry.” But Aristotle also remarked that the work of literary art as such, whether poem or play or essay, is “to this day without a name,” and to this day, 2,500 years later, the statement is still true.1 The word “poetry” has always meant primarily “composition in metre,” so that while Tom Jones, for instance, is certainly a work of literature, nobody would call it a poem. The first point to get clear about prose is that the language of ordinary speech is not prose, or at least is prose only to the extent that it is not verse. Ordinary speech, especially colloquial or vulgar speech, is a discontinuous, repetitive, heavily accented rhetoric which is as readily distinguishable from prose as it is from regular metre. Any fiction writer who is a close observer of common speech will show in his dialogue a markedly different rhythm from what he himself uses in narration or description. Prose is ordinary speech on its best behaviour: it is the conventionalization of speech that is made by the educated or articulate person when he is trying to assimilate his speech to the patterns of discursive thought. Anyone listening to the asyntactic prolixity of uneducated speech, or to the chanting or whining of children, can see that regular metre is in fact a much simpler way of stylizing ordinary speech than prose is, which explains why prose is normally a late and sophisticated development in the history of a literature. There are, then, at least two ways of conventionalizing ordinary speech: the simple and primitive way of regularly recurring metre, and the more intellectualized way of developing a consistent and logical sentence structure. When recurrent rhythm takes the lead and the sentence structure is subordinated to it, we have verse. When the sentence structure takes the lead and all patterns of repetition are subordinated to it and become irregular, we have prose. Literary prose results from the imitation for literary purposes of the language of discursive thought. Of all the differentia between prose and verse, the only essential one is this difference of rhythm. Verse is able to absorb a much higher concentration of metaphorical and figurative speech than prose, but this difference is one of degree; the difference in rhythm which makes the higher concentration possible is a difference of kind.

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This division between prose and verse is however complicated by the various forms of “free verse,” which are unmistakably literary and yet are not in metre or any other form of regular recurrence. The naive assumption that any poetry not in some recognizable recurrent pattern must really be prose clearly will not do, and we have to assume the existence of a third type of conventionalized utterance. This third type has a peculiar relation to ordinary speech, or at least to soliloquy and inner speech. We may call it an oracular or associational rhythm, the unit of which is neither the prose sentence nor the metrical line, but a kind of thought-breath or phrase. Associational rhythm predominates in free verse and in certain types of literary prose, such as “stream of consciousness” prose. A historical treatment of this threefold division of verbal rhythm—discursive, metrical, and associational—would require an encyclopedia in itself. It will be best if we proceed inductively, confining our examples to the single language of English, and look at some of the literary phenomena which may be explained by it. Each of the three rhythms, in literature, may exist in a relatively pure state or in combination with either of its neighbours. Varieties of Prose Rhythm Prose, we have said, is typically either the language of discursive thought or an imitation of that language for literary purposes. In pure prose the logical or descriptive features are at a maximum, and the stylistic, or rhetorical, features at a minimum. The rhythm of the sentence predominates; all repetition, whether of sound or rhythm, is eliminated as far as possible, and recurring rhetorical devices, or tricks of style, are noticed only with irritation. The aim is to present a certain content or meaning in as unobtrusive and transparent a way as possible. When prose is like this it is at the furthest possible remove from metrical or associative influences. Pure prose has two chief types of rhythm: the more informal and colloquial type which represents the rhythm of educated speech transferred to the printed page, and the more formal type which is thought of from the beginning as something to be read in a book. Let us take a passage from Darwin’s Origin of Species: The great and inherited development of the udders in cows and goats in countries where they are habitually milked, in comparison with these organs

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in other countries, is probably another instance of the effects of use. Not one of our domestic animals can be named which has not in some country drooping ears; and the view which has been suggested that the drooping is due to the disuse of the muscles of the ear, from the animals being seldom much alarmed, seems probable.2

This passage plainly does not lack either rhythm or readability; there is certainly a literary pleasure in reading it. The pleasure however is in seeing prose expertly used for its own descriptive purposes, and from our confidence that such alliteration as “the drooping is due to the disuse” is purely accidental. Let us compare Darwin’s prose with a passage from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: The mystic sacrifices were performed, during three nights, on the banks of the Tiber; and the Campus Martius resounded with music and dances, and was illuminated with innumerable lamps and torches. . . . A chorus of twenty-seven youths, and as many virgins, of noble families, and whose parents were both alive, implored the propitious gods in favour of the present, and for the hope of the rising generation; requesting in religious hymns, that, according to the faith of their ancient oracles, they would still maintain the virtue, the felicity, and the empire of the Roman people.3

Here, along with the information given about the secular games of Philip, we are aware of certain tricks of style, such as antithetical balance and doubled adjectives. If we are intent only on the history, the tricks of style obstruct our path. But we notice that a specifically literary intention is visible in Gibbon beside the descriptive one. He is suggesting a meditative interest in the decline of Rome, and for this meditative interest a certain formal symmetry in the style is appropriate. We notice also that the more obtrusive stylizing of Gibbon’s prose makes it more oratorical, a quality of deliberate rhetoric being present. Another step would take us all the way into oratorical prose, where the formalized style is of equal importance with the subject matter. This is the normal area of all great oratory, as from Cicero down to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Churchill’s 1940 speeches, the most memorable passages of oratory have usually been passages of formal repetition. Samuel Johnson’s letter to Chesterfield provides similar examples: The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been

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early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.4

With the increase of the rhetorical or symmetrical element in the style, the prose is taking on an increasingly metrical quality, and is moving closer to verse. This metrical quality is strongly marked in Ciceronian prose, in the long formal sentences broken in two by an “and” out of which the seventeenth-century character books are constructed, in the deliberately symmetrical arrangements of phrases and clauses in Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial and Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying. A slight exaggeration of this metrical element would take us into the area of euphuism, which is a deliberate attempt to give to prose the rhetorical features of verse, including rhyme and alliteration as well as metrical balance.5 Here is a sentence from Robert Greene’s euphuistic romance The Carde of Fancie: This loathsome lyfe of Gwydonius, was such a cutting corasive to his Fathers carefull conscience, and such a haplesse clogge to his heavie heart, that no joye could make him injoye any joye, no mirth could make him merrie, no prosperitie could make him pleasant, but abandoning all delight, and avoyding all companie, he spent his dolefull dayes in dumpes and dolours, which he uttered in these words.6

Here we are almost as far away as we can get from anything that we now think of as prose: the predominating rhythm is still the sentence, but the writer has done everything that a descriptive prose writer would try to avoid. Euphuism is of course an intensely rhetorical form of prose: one would expect to find it in sermons, where it has been prominent from Anglo-Saxon times; and in euphuist stories the writer strives for situations where the characters may write letters, lament, or harangue. We notice that the sentence quoted above leads up to a harangue. Now let us return to the type of pure prose that is more informal and colloquial, designed to suggest good talk rather than good exposition, of which perhaps the greatest practitioner is Montaigne.7 Let us take a passage from one of Bernard Shaw’s Prefaces: After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to himself? Those who try to

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believe it postulate that they shall be made perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself, nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton.8

As compared with the Darwin passage, there is here some influence of an associational rhythm: we can see the easy use of parenthesis, the imaginary conversation with the reader, and similar signs of the associative process of speech. But everything here is on an impersonal plane, the conscious mind and logical argument being assumed to be in charge. Continuous prose, or writing with a logical shape, assumes an equality between writer and reader. The writer buttonholes his reader, so to speak, when he talks to him continuously. If he wishes to suggest aloofness or some barrier against his reader, or if he simply wishes to suggest that there are greater reserves in his mind than he is ready to display all at once, he would naturally turn to a more discontinuous form. We find such a form in the series of aphorisms of which many prose works, such as books of recorded table talk, are constructed. Philosophers in particular seem to be fond of it: Pascal, Bacon, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, are a few random examples. The aphorism is oracular: it suggests that one should stop and ponder on it. Like oratorical prose, it suggests meditation, but the reader is being directed into the writer’s mind instead of outward to the subject. In such discontinuous and aphoristic prose the associational rhythm can be clearly heard. Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions provide examples, especially in those passages cast in the form of prayer, where the reader is not being directly addressed: thou callest Gennezareth, which was but a Lake, and not salt, a Sea; so thou callest the Mediterranean Sea, still the great Sea, because the inhabitants saw no other Sea; they that dwelt there, thought a Lake, a Sea, and the others thought a little Sea, the greatest, and wee that know not the afflictions of others, call our owne the heaviest.9

A step further in this direction takes us toward the oracular and associational prose poem of which Ossian is the best-known English example, though there is so little intellectual or logical interest in Ossian that there is not much sense of prose left. English does not provide as clear

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examples of the aphoristic prose poem as German has in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra or as French has in Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer. But it is clear that in the opening of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood prose is being as strongly influenced by an associational rhythm as it can well be and still remain prose: It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

Varieties of Verse Rhythm This subject really belongs to [the article] “Prosody,” but a few additional suggestions may find a place here. In English such forms as the stopped heroic couplet and the octosyllabic couplet represent the rhythm of metrical verse at its purest, equidistant from prose and from the associational rhythm. The following passage from Pope is typical: Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!10

The one recurrent sound is the rhyme; assonance and alliteration are kept to a minimum, and even the sentence structure tends to fall into the suggested metrical unit; hence the inevitable and unforced use of antithesis and the regular fall of the caesura. In Dryden and Pope, in the octosyllabics of Marvell, in the simple quatrains of Housman, where a strictly controlled metre makes the words step along in a precise and disciplined order, the predominant sense is one of conscious wit. This sense arises from the technical dexterity displayed in neutralizing prose sense with associative sound, on approximately equal terms. In blank verse, so easy to write accurately and so hard to write well, we move much further in the direction of prose. For in blank verse there is little place for the metrical absorption of the sentence structure: a long

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series of blank-verse lines in which the sentence structure closely followed the iambic pentameter would produce intolerable singsong. Hence blank verse tends to develop syncopation and run-on lines, and as it does so a second prose rhythm is set up beside the metrical one. This process may continue until the pentameter approximates prose. The following passage from Browning’s Ring and the Book has been chosen as less extreme in its approximation than many that might have been selected: So Did I stand question, and make answer, still With the same result of smiling disbelief, Polite impossibility of faith In such affected virtue in a priest; But a showing fair play, an indulgence, even, To one no worse than others after all— Who had not brought disgrace to the order, played Discreetly, ruffled gown nor ripped the cloth In a bungling game at romps . . . [bk. 6, ll. 1707–16]

In such discursive or narrative blank verse as the above the listener hardly hears a definite pentameter at all: what he hears is a rhythm that seems just on the point of becoming prose, but is prevented from achieving the distinctively semantic rhythm of prose by some other rhythmical influence. The rhythm of Jacobean blank-verse drama has its centre of gravity somewhere between verse and prose, so that it can move easily from one to the other at the requirements of dramatic decorum, which are chiefly the mood and the social rank of the speaker. In The Tempest, especially the speeches of Caliban, and in some late plays of Webster and Tourneur, the barrier between verse and prose often comes near dissolving, and hence the third associational rhythm peeps through, as in this passage from The Tempest: I will stand to, and feed, Although my last: no matter, since I feel The best is past. Brother, my lord the Duke, Stand to, and do as we. [3.3.49–52]

A strong bias toward a prose sentence structure combined with a more elaborate rhyming scheme often produces the kind of intentional doggerel that is a regular feature of satire, as in Hudibras or Don Juan, or in

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Ogden Nash today. Wordsworth, who stressed the identity of language between verse and prose, sometimes had trouble in keeping the simple flat sentences in the Lyrical Ballads from sounding like doggerel. One of Donne’s Satires (the Fourth) opens as follows: Well; I may now receive, and die; My sinne Indeed is great, but I have beene in A Purgatorie, such as fear’d hell is A recreation to, and scarse map of this.

Nobody hearing these lines read aloud would realize that they were pentameter couplets: the whole metrical scheme is parody, and as such it fits the satirical context. In relation to prose, associational writing shows itself chiefly in a change of direction in meaning, away from the logical and toward the emotional and private. In relation to verse, it shows its influence chiefly in an increase in sound patterns. We notice this particularly in stanzaic verse, for the natural tendency of the stanza is to develop elaborate rhyming patterns, often supported by alliteration, assonance, and similar devices. Words tend to echo each other, and an evocative rhythm is superimposed on the metrical one, as in this lovely madrigal from The Faerie Queene: Wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue do thus expell: Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede, Griefe is a flood, and loue a monster fell; The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede, The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede: But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay; The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed, The drops dry vp, and filth wipe cleane away: So shall wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue dye and decay. [bk. 2, canto 4, st. 35]

A further step in this direction would make the sound patterns obsessive, as happens occasionally, by way of experiment, in The Faerie Queene itself. Edgar Allan Poe, who made the discontinuity and the evocative effect of verse his “poetic principle,” shows in such experiments in sound as The Bells and in such lines as the famous “The viol, the violet and the vine”11 the permeation of metre by associative sound. In Hopkins a sim-

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ilar unifying of metrical and associative rhythms takes place, but in a much more intellectualized context: “Some find me a sword; some The flange and the rail; flame Fang, or flood” goes Death on drum, And storms bugle his fame. But we dream we are rooted in earth—Dust! Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same, Wave with the meadow, forget that there must The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come. [The Wreck of the Deutschland, ll. 81–8]

This passage illustrates another important principle. As associational patterns increase, and as alliteration and assonance appear beside rhyme, a more vigorous rhythm than a strict metre may be required to prevent the poem from becoming a soggy mass of echolalia. The rhythm in the Hopkins passage is accentual rather than metrical: like the rhythm of music, which it closely resembles, it sets up a series of accented beats, with a good deal of variety in the number of syllables that may intervene between beats. The sixth line of the above passage begins with an accentual spondee, though the prevailing rhythm of the line is anapestic. This accentual rhythm, usually with four main beats to a line, has run through English from Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse to our own day, and often syncopates against the metrical rhythm. Thus “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,” “To be or not to be, that is the question,” and “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit” are all iambic pentameter lines with four accented beats.12 Varieties of Associational Rhythm It is only in the more experimental writing of the last century or so, with its strongly psychological bias and its interest in the processes of creation, that any serious attempts have been made to isolate the associational rhythm in literature. Owing to this late development, its earlier manifestations have fallen within the normal categories of prose and metrical verse.

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The associational rhythm has always been a feature of oracular writing, as in the Koran and in many parts of the Bible, as well as a regular literary device for expressing insanity, as in some of the Tom o’ Bedlam speeches in King Lear. These uses are solemn or tragic, yet associative rhythms and mental processes have also a close connection with the comic, and, in the form of puns and malapropisms, have been one of the chief sources of humour. The conscious wit that was mentioned as an effect of expertly handled metre is quite distinct from associational wit, which results rather from an involuntary release from the subconscious. The most striking examples of associational rhythm at its purest before our own day are dramatic attempts to render the speech of uneducated or confused people who make no effort to organize their language into prose, such as Mistress Quickly in Shakespeare or Jingle and Mrs. Nickleby in Dickens. This curious duality of the oracular and the comic is peculiar to associational rhythm, and has been illustrated in passages quoted above. Rabelais is the great progenitor of associational prose, especially in passages depicting drunkenness or other oracular states of mind, as in the fifth chapter of Gargantua.13 But of course in English the tradition of associational prose writing was established by Sterne. Almost any page of Sterne, notably the famous opening page of the Sentimental Journey, illustrates the lightning changes of mood and rhythm and the dislocation of the ordinary logic of narrative or thought that are characteristic of associative style. Modern “stream of consciousness” writing is heavily indebted to Sterne. In such passages as this from Ulysses we can see the predominance of what we have called the “thought-breath” rhythm of association as distinct from the poetic line and the prose sentence: Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears. Husband learn to his surprise. God’s little joke. Then out she comes. Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and Holy Mary.14

The speed of this is andante and the monologue of Molly Bloom at the end of the book presto, but the rhythmical units are the same. Associational prose develops in two directions, which may be called the disjunctive and the conjunctive. In disjunctive writing, as illustrated

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most typically by Gertrude Stein, and also found in Hemingway, Faulkner, and D.H. Lawrence, there is a technique of deliberate prolixity, a hypnotic repetition of words and ideas. In dialogue this may express simple inarticulateness or fumbling for meaning: in short, the original naive speech out of which associational writing grows. In more sophisticated contexts it expresses rather a breaking down of the more customary logical prose structures preparatory to replacing them with the psychological and emotional structures of associational prose. In conjunctive writing the aim is the reverse: to pack into the words as great a concentration of association as possible, whether of allusion, of sound (as in punning or paronomasia), or of ideas. The logical culmination of this process is Finnegans Wake, where the dream language used shows the influence of Freud’s demonstrations of the incredible associative complexity of states of mind below consciousness. In verse, associational rhythm very seldom predominates over metre before Whitman’s time: about the only clear examples are poems written in abnormal states of mind, such as Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. Whitman’s own rhythm shows many formalizing influences, such as that of Biblical parallelism, and the relation to prose is also often close. But in Whitman’s oracular lines, with a strong pause at the end of each and with no regular metrical pattern connecting them, the distinctive associational rhythm has been fully emancipated. Whitman’s natural tendency is disjunctive, and in some later free verse, especially in imagism (q.v.), this tendency is developed. Thus Amy Lowell: Lilacs, False blue, White, Purple, Color of lilac, Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, Lilac in me because I am New England . . . [Lilacs, ll. 95–102]

But the prevailing tendency in modern associational verse is conjunctive or evocative, as it is in the erudite literary allusiveness of Eliot and Pound, in the catachresis (q.v.) metaphors of Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, or in the symbolic clusters of the later Yeats. In pure prose, where the emphasis is on descriptive meaning, figures

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of speech are used sparingly, an occasional illustration or analogy being normally the only figuration employed. The more rhetorical the prose, the more naturally figurative the style becomes. In Jeremy Taylor, for instance, there appear elaborately drawn-out similes, and in euphuism similes from natural history (or what then passed as such) are a regularly recurring feature. Verse also, when it steers its middle course between prose and associational rhythm, often finds its figurative centre of gravity in the illustrative simile, so prominent in the Classical epic. But in verse, words are associated for sound as well as sense, rhyme being as important as reason, and the more intensified the sound patterns are, the greater the opportunities for puns and similar verbal echoes. Associational writing, when conjunctive, tends to violently juxtaposed metaphor and to a thick figurative texture. S. Lanier, The Science of English Verse (1880); T.S. Omond, A Study of Metre (1903) and English Metrists (1921); G. Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (3 vols., 1906–10) and A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912); [J.M.] Schipper[, Englische Metrik (3 vols., 1881–88)]; L. Abercrombie, Poetry and Contemporary Speech (1914; English Association pamphlet no. 14); [P.F.] Baum[, The Principles of English Versification (1922)]; D.L. Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (1922); C.P. Smith, Pattern and Variation in Poetry (1932); O. Barfield, Poetic Diction (2nd ed., 1952); M. Boulton, Anatomy of Poetry (1953) and Anatomy of Prose (1954); J. Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (1961).

11 Varieties of Literary Utopias Spring 1965

From StS, 109–34. Originally published, with a few minor differences, in Daedalus, 94 (Spring 1965): 323–47; reprinted in Utopias and Modern Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 25–49. Translated into German (1970) and Turkish (1971).

I There are two social conceptions which can be expressed only in terms of myth. One is the social contract, which presents an account of the origins of society. The other is the Utopia, which presents an imaginative vision of the telos or end at which social life aims. These two myths both begin in an analysis of the present, the society that confronts the mythmaker, and they project this analysis in time or space. The contract projects it into the past, the Utopia into the future or some distant place. To Hobbes, a contemporary of the Puritan Revolution, the most important social principle was the maintenance of de facto power; hence he constructs a myth of contract turning on the conception of society’s surrender of that power. To Locke, a contemporary of the Whig Revolution, the most important social principle was the relation of de facto power to legitimate or de jure authority; hence he constructs a myth turning on society’s delegation of power. The value of such a myth as theory depends on the depth and penetration of the social analysis which inspires it. The social contract, though a genuine myth which, in John Stuart Mill’s phrase, passes a fiction off as a fact,1 is usually regarded as an integral part of social theory. The Utopia, on the other hand, although its origin is much the same, belongs primarily to fiction. The reason is that the

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emphasis in the contract myth falls on the present facts of society which it is supposed to explain. And even to the extent that the contract myth is projected into the past, the past is the area where historical evidence lies; and so the myth preserves at least the gesture of making assertions that can be definitely verified or refuted. The Utopia is a speculative myth; it is designed to contain or provide a vision for one’s social ideas, not to be a theory connecting social facts together. There have been one or two attempts to take Utopian constructions literally by trying to set them up as actual communities, but the histories of these communities make melancholy reading. Life imitates literature up to a point, but hardly up to that point. The Utopian writer looks at his own society first and tries to see what, for his purposes, its significant elements are. The Utopia itself shows what society would be like if those elements were fully developed. Plato looked at his society and saw its structure as a hierarchy of priests, warriors, artisans, and servants—much the same structure that inspired the caste system of India. The Republic shows what a society would be like in which such a hierarchy functioned on the principle of justice, that is, each man doing his own work. More, thinking within a Christian framework of ideas, assumed that the significant elements of society were the natural virtues: justice, temperance, fortitude, prudence. The Utopia itself, in its second or constructive book, shows what a society would be like in which the natural virtues were allowed to assume their natural forms. Bacon, on the other hand, anticipates Marx by assuming that the most significant of social factors is technological productivity, and his New Atlantis constructs accordingly. The procedure of constructing a Utopia produces two literary qualities which are typical, almost invariable, in the genre. In the first place, the behaviour of society is described ritually. A ritual is a significant social act, and the Utopia writer is concerned only with the typical actions which are significant of those social elements he is stressing. In Utopian stories a frequent device is for someone, generally a first-person narrator, to enter the Utopia and be shown around it by a sort of Intourist guide. The story is made up largely of a Socratic dialogue between guide and narrator, in which the narrator asks questions or thinks up objections and the guide answers them. One gets a little weary, in reading a series of such stories, of what seems a pervading smugness of tone. As a rule the guide is completely identified with his society and seldom admits to any discrepancy between the reality and the appearance of

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what he is describing. But we recognize that this is inevitable given the conventions employed. In the second place, rituals are apparently irrational acts which become rational when their significance is explained. In such Utopias the guide explains the structure of the society and thereby the significance of the behaviour being observed. Hence, the behaviour of society is presented as rationally motivated. It is a common objection to Utopias that they present human nature as governed more by reason than it is or can be. But this rational emphasis, again, is the result of using certain literary conventions. The Utopian romance does not present society as governed by reason; it presents it as governed by ritual habit, or prescribed social behaviour, which is explained rationally. Every society, of course, imposes a good deal of prescribed social behaviour on its citizens, much of it being followed unconsciously, anything completely accepted by convention and custom having in it a large automatic element. But even automatic ritual habits are explicable, and so every society can be seen or described to some extent as a product of conscious design. The symbol of conscious design in society is the city, with its abstract pattern of streets and buildings, and with the complex economic cycle of production, distribution, and consumption that it sets up. The Utopia is primarily a vision of the orderly city and of a city-dominated society. Plato’s republic is a city state, Athenian in culture and Spartan in discipline. It was inevitable that the Utopia, as a literary genre, should be revived at the time of the Renaissance, the period in which the medieval social order was breaking down again into city-state units or nations governed from a capital city. Again, the Utopia, in its typical form, contrasts, implicitly or explicitly, the writer’s own society with the more desirable one he describes. The desirable society, or the Utopia proper, is essentially the writer’s own society with its unconscious ritual habits transposed into their conscious equivalents. The contrast in value between the two societies implies a satire on the writer’s own society, and the basis for the satire is the unconsciousness or inconsistency in the social behaviour he observes around him. More’s Utopia begins with a satire on the chaos of sixteenth-century life in England and presents the Utopia itself as a contrast to it. Thus the typical Utopia contains, if only by implication, a satire on the anarchy inherent in the writer’s own society, and the Utopia form flourishes best when anarchy seems most a social threat. Since More, Utopias have appeared regularly but sporadically in literature, with a great increase around the close of the nineteenth century. This later vogue clearly had much to do with the

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distrust and dismay aroused by extreme laissez-faire versions of capitalism, which were thought of as manifestations of anarchy. Most Utopia writers follow either More (and Plato) in stressing the legal structure of their societies, or Bacon in stressing its technological power. The former type of Utopia is closer to actual social and political theory; the latter overlaps with what is now called science fiction. Naturally, since the Industrial Revolution a serious Utopia can hardly avoid introducing technological themes. And because technology is progressive, getting to the Utopia has tended increasingly to be a journey in time rather than space, a vision of the future and not of a society located in some isolated spot on the globe (or outside it: journeys to the moon are a very old form of fiction, and some of them are Utopian). The growth of science and technology brings with it a prodigious increase in the legal complications of existence. As soon as medical science identifies the source of a contagious disease in a germ, laws of quarantine go into effect; as soon as technology produces the automobile, an immense amount of legal apparatus is imported into life, and thousands of noncriminal citizens become involved in fines and police-court actions. This means a corresponding increase in the amount of ritual habit necessary to life, and a new ritual habit must be conscious, and so constraining, before it becomes automatic or unconscious. Science and technology, especially the latter, introduce into society the conception of directed social change, change with logical consequences attached to it. These consequences turn on the increase of ritual habit. And as long as ritual habit can still be seen as an imminent possibility, as something we may or may not acquire, there can be an emotional attitude toward it either of acceptance or repugnance. The direction of social change may be thought of as exhilarating, as in most theories of progress, or as horrible, as in pessimistic or apprehensive social theories. Or it may be thought that whether the direction of change is good or bad will depend on the attitude society takes toward it. If the attitude is active and resolute, it may be good; if helpless and ignorant, bad. A certain amount of claustrophobia enters this argument when it is realized, as it is from about 1850 on, that technology tends to unify the whole world. The conception of an isolated Utopia like that of More or Plato or Bacon gradually evaporates in the face of this fact. Out of this situation come two kinds of Utopian romance: the straight Utopia, which visualizes a world state assumed to be ideal, at least in comparison with what we have, and the Utopian satire or parody, which presents the

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same kind of social goal in terms of slavery, tyranny, or anarchy. Examples of the former in the literature of the last century include Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Morris’s News from Nowhere, and H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia. Wells is one of the few writers who have constructed both serious and satirical Utopias. Examples of the Utopian satire include Zamiatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984. There are other types of Utopian satire which we shall mention in a moment, but this particular kind is a product of modern technological society, its growing sense that the whole world is destined to the same social fate with no place to hide, and its increasing realization that technology moves toward the control not merely of nature but of the operations of the mind. We may note that what is a serious Utopia to its author, and to many of its readers, could be read as a satire by a reader whose emotional attitudes were different. Looking Backward had, in its day, a stimulating and emancipating influence on the social thinking of the time in a way that very few books in the history of literature have ever had. Yet most of us today would tend to read it as a sinister blueprint of tyranny, with its industrial “army,” its stentorian propaganda delivered over the “telephone” to the homes of its citizens, and the like. The nineteenth-century Utopia had a close connection with the growth of socialist political thought and shared its tendency to think in global terms. When Engels attacked “Utopian” socialism and contrasted it with his own “scientific” kind, his scientific socialism was Utopian in the sense in which we are using that term, but what he rejected under the category of “Utopian” was the tendency to think in terms of a delimited socialist society, a place of refuge like the phalansteries of Fourier.2 For Engels, as for Marxist thinkers generally, there was a worldwide historical process going in a certain direction; and humanity had the choice either of seizing and directing this process in a revolutionary act or of drifting into greater anarchy or slavery. The goal, a classless society in which the state had withered away, was Utopian; the means adopted to reach this goal were “scientific” and anti-Utopian, dismissing the possibility of setting up a Utopia within a presocialist world. We are concerned here with Utopian literature, not with social attitudes; but literature is rooted in the social attitudes of its time. In the literature of the democracies today we notice that Utopian satire is very prominent (for example, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies), but that there is something of a paralysis of Utopian thought and imagination. We can hardly understand this unless we realize the extent to which it is

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the result of a repudiation of Communism. In the United States particularly the attitude toward a definite social ideal as a planned goal is antiUtopian: such an ideal, it is widely felt, can produce in practice only some form of totalitarian state. And whereas the Communist program calls for a revolutionary seizure of the machinery of production, there is a strong popular feeling in the democracies that the Utopian goal can be reached only by allowing the machinery of production to function by itself, as an automatic and continuous process. Further, it is often felt that such an automatic process tends to decentralize authority and break down monopolies of political power. This combination of an anti-Utopian attitude toward centralized planning and a Utopian attitude toward the economic process naturally creates some inconsistencies. When I was recently in Houston, I was told that Houston had no zoning laws: that indicates a strongly anti-Utopian sentiment in Houston, yet Houston was building sewers, highways, cloverleaf intersections, and shopping centres in the most uninhibited Utopian way. There is, however, something of a donkey’s carrot in attaching Utopian feelings to a machinery of production largely concerned with consumer goods. We can see this if we look at some of the Utopian romances of the last century. The technological Utopia has one literary disadvantage: its predictions are likely to fall short of what comes true, so that what the writer saw in the glow of vision we see only as a crude version of ordinary life. Thus Edgar Allan Poe has people crossing the Atlantic in balloons at a hundred miles an hour one thousand years after his own time. I could describe the way I get to work in the morning, because it is a form of ritual habit, in the idiom of a Utopia, riding on a subway, guiding myself by street signs, and the like, showing how the element of social design conditions my behaviour at every point. It might sound Utopian if I had written it as a prophecy a century ago, or now to a native of a New Guinea jungle, but it would hardly do so to my present readers. Similarly with the prediction of the radio (called, as noted above, the telephone, which had been invented) in Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888). A slightly earlier romance, said to be the original of Bellamy’s book, is The Diothas, by John MacNie (1883). It predicts a general use of a horseless carriage, with a speed of twenty miles an hour (faster downhill). One passage shows very clearly how something commonplace to us could be part of a Utopian romance in 1883: “You see the white line running along the centre of the road,” resumed Utis. “The rule of the road requires that line to be kept on the left, except when

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passing a vehicle in front. Then the line may be crossed, provided the way on that side is clear.”3

But while technology has advanced far beyond the wildest Utopian dreams even of the last century, the essential quality of human life has hardly improved to the point that it could be called Utopian. The real strength and importance of the Utopian imagination, both for literature and for life, if it has any at all, must lie elsewhere. The popular view of the Utopia, and the one which in practice is accepted by many if not most Utopia writers, is that a Utopia is an ideal or flawless state, not only logically consistent in its structure but permitting as much freedom and happiness for its inhabitants as is possible to human life. Considered as a final or definitive social ideal, the Utopia is a static society; and most Utopias have built-in safeguards against radical alteration of the structure. This feature gives it a somewhat forbidding quality to a reader not yet committed to it. An imaginary dialogue between a Utopia writer and such a reader might begin somewhat as follows: Reader: “I can see that this society might work, but I wouldn’t want to live in it.” Writer: “What you mean is that you don’t want your present ritual habits disturbed. My Utopia would feel different from the inside, where the ritual habits would be customary and so carry with them a sense of freedom rather than constraint.” Reader: “Maybe so, but my sense of freedom right now is derived from not being involved in your society. If I were, I’d either feel constraint or I’d be too unconscious to be living a fully human life at all.” If this argument went on, some compromise might be reached: the writer might realize that freedom really depends on a sense of constraint, and the reader might realize that a Utopia should not be read simply as a description of a most perfect state, even if the author believes it to be one. Utopian thought is imaginative, with its roots in literature, and the literary imagination is less concerned with achieving ends than with visualizing possibilities. There are many reasons why an encouragement of Utopian thinking would be of considerable benefit to us. An example would be an attempt to see what the social results of automation might be, or might be made to be; and surely some speculation along this line is almost essential to self-preservation. Again, the intellectual separation of the “two cultures” is said to be a problem of our time,4 but this separation is inevitable, it is going steadily to increase, not decrease, and it cannot possibly be cured by having humanists read more popular science or scientists read more poetry. The real problem is not the humanist’s ignorance of science or

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vice versa, but the ignorance of both humanist and scientist about the society of which they are both citizens. The quality of an intellectual’s social imagination is the quality of his maturity as a thinker, whatever his brilliance in his own line. In the year that George Orwell published 1984, two other books appeared in the Utopian tradition, one by a humanist, Robert Graves’s Watch the North Wind Rise, the other by a social scientist, B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two. Neither book was intended very seriously: they reflect the current view that Utopian thinking is not serious. It is all the more significant that both books show the infantilism of specialists who see society merely as an extension of their own speciality. The Graves book is about the revival of mother-goddess cults in Crete, and its preoccupation with the more lugubrious superstitions of the past makes it almost a caricature of the pedantry of humanism. Skinner’s book shows how to develop children’s will power by hanging lollipops around their necks and giving them rewards for not eating them: its Philistine vulgarity makes it a caricature of the pedantry of social science. The Utopia, the effort at social imagination, is an area in which specialized disciplines can meet and interpenetrate with a mutual respect for each other, concerned with clarifying their common social context. The word “imaginative” refers to hypothetical constructions, like those of literature or mathematics. The word “imaginary” refers to something that does not exist. Doubtless many writers of Utopias think of their state as something that does not exist but which they wish did exist; hence their intention as writers is descriptive rather than constructive. But we cannot possibly discuss the Utopia as a literary genre on this negatively ontological basis.5 We have to see it as a species of the constructive literary imagination, and we should expect to find that the more penetrating the Utopian writer’s mind is, the more clearly he understands that he is communicating a vision to his readers, not sharing a power or fantasy dream with them. II Plato’s Republic begins with an argument between Socrates and Thrasymachus over the nature of justice. Thrasymachus attempts, not very successfully, to show that justice is a verbal and rhetorical conception used for certain social purposes, and that existentially there is no such thing as justice. He has to use words to say this, and the words he uses are derived from, and unconsciously accept the assumptions of, a discussion

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started by Socrates. So Socrates has little difficulty in demonstrating that in the verbal pattern Thrasymachus is employing justice has its normal place, associated with all other good and real things. Others in the group are not satisfied that an existential situation can be so easily refuted by an essentialist argument, and they attempt to restate Thrasymachus’s position. Socrates’ argument remains essential to the end, but it takes the form of another kind of verbal pattern, a descriptive model of a state in which justice is the existential principle. The question then arises: what relation has this model to existing society? If what seems the obvious answer is the right one, Plato’s imaginary republic is the ideal society that we do not live in, but ought to be living in. Not many readers would so accept it, for Plato’s state has in full measure the forbidding quality that we have noted as a characteristic of Utopias. Surely most people today would see in its rigorous autocracy, its unscrupulous use of lies for propaganda, its ruthlessly censored art, and its subordination of all the creative and productive life of the state to a fanatical military caste, all the evils that we call totalitarian. Granted all the Greek fascination with the myth of Lycurgus, the fact that Sparta defeated Athens is hardly enough to make us want to adopt so many of the features of that hideous community.6 Plato admits that dictatorial tyranny is very like his state pattern entrusted to the wrong men. But to assume much of a difference between tyranny and Plato’s state we should have to believe in the perfectibility of intellectuals, which neither history nor experience gives us much encouragement to do. We notice, however, that as early as the fifth book Socrates has begun to deprecate the question of the practicability of establishing his republic, on the ground that thought is one thing and action another. And as the argument goes on there is an increasing emphasis on the analogy of the just state to the wise man’s mind. The hierarchy of philosopher, guard, and artisan in the just state corresponds to the hierarchy of reason, will, and appetite in the disciplined individual. And the disciplined individual is the only free individual. The free man is free because his chaotic and lustful desires are hunted down and exterminated, or else compelled to express themselves in ways prescribed by the dictatorship of his reason. He is free because a powerful will is ready to spring into action to help reason do whatever it sees fit, acting as a kind of thought police suppressing every impulse not directly related to its immediate interests. It is true that what frees the individual seems to enslave society, and that something goes all wrong with human freedom when we

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take an analogy between individual and social order literally. But Plato is really arguing from his social model to the individual, not from the individual to society. The censorship of Homer and the other poets, for example, illustrates how the wise man uses literature, what he accepts and rejects of it in forming his own beliefs, rather than what society ought to do to literature. At the end of the ninth book we reach what is the end of the Republic for our purposes, as the tenth book raises issues beyond our present scope. There it is made clear that the republic exists in the present, not in the future. It is not a dream to be realized in practice; it is an informing power in the mind: I understand; you speak of that city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only; for I do not think that there is such an one anywhere on earth. In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of such a city, and he who desires may behold this, and beholding, govern himself accordingly. But whether there really is or ever will be such an one is of no importance to him; for he will act according to the laws of that city and of no other.7

In Christianity the two myths that polarize social thought, the contract and the Utopia, the myth of origin and the myth of telos, are given in their purely mythical or undisplaced forms. The myth of contract becomes the myth of creation, and of placing man in the garden of Eden, the ensuing fall being the result of a breach of the contract. Instead of the Utopia we have the City of God, a Utopian metaphor most elaborately developed in St. Augustine. To this city men, or some men, are admitted at the end of time, but of course human nature is entirely incapable of reaching it in its present state, much less of establishing it. Still, the attainment of the City of God in literature must be classified as a form of Utopian fiction, its most famous literary treatment being the Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante. The conception of the millennium, the Messianic kingdom to be established on earth, comes closer to the conventional idea of the Utopia, but that again does not depend primarily on human effort. The church, in this scheme of things, is not a Utopian society, but it is a more highly ritualized community than ordinary society; and its relation to the latter has some analogies to the relation of Plato’s republic to the individual mind. That is, it acts as an informing power on society, drawing it closer to the pattern of the City of God. Most Utopias are conceived as elite societies in which a small group is entrusted with essential

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responsibilities, and this elite is usually some analogy of a priesthood. For in Utopia, as in India, the priestly caste has reached the highest place. H.G. Wells divides society into the Poietic, or creative, the Kinetic, or executive, the Dull, and the Base.8 This reads like an uncharitable version of the four Indian castes—particularly uncharitable considering that the only essential doctrine in Wells’s Utopian religion is the rejection of original sin. Wells’s writing in general illustrates the common principle that the belief that man is by nature good does not lead to a very goodnatured view of man. In any case his “samurai” belong to the first group, in spite of their warrior name. The Utopias of science fiction are generally controlled by scientists, who, of course, are another form of priestly elite. Another highly ritualized society, the monastic community, though not intended as a Utopia, has some Utopian characteristics. Its members spend their whole time within it; individual life takes its pattern from the community; certain activities of the civilized good life, farming, gardening, reclaiming land, copying manuscripts, teaching, form part of its structure. The influence of the monastic community on Utopian thought has been enormous. It is strong in More’s Utopia, and much stronger in Campanella’s City of the Sun, which is more explicitly conceived on the analogy of the church and monastery. The conception of the ideal society as a secularized reversal of the monastery, the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience transposed into economic security, monogamous marriage, and personal independence, appears in Rabelais’s scheme for the Abbey of Thélème.9 Something like this reappears in many nineteenthcentury Utopias, not only the literary ones but in the more explicitly political schemes of St. Simon, Fourier, and Comte, of whose writings it seems safe to say that they lack Rabelais’s lightness of touch. The government of the monastery, with its mixture of the elective and the dictatorial principles, is still going strong as a social model in Carlyle’s Past and Present. Utopian satire sometimes introduces celibate groups of fanatics by way of parody, as in 1984 and in Huxley’s Ape and Essence. It is obvious from what we have said that a Christian Utopia, in the sense of an ideal state to be attained in human life, is impossible: if it were possible it would be the kingdom of heaven, and trying to realize it on earth would be the chief end of man. Hence More does not present his Utopia as a Christian state: it is a state, as we remarked earlier, in which the natural virtues are allowed to assume their natural forms. In that case, what is the point of the Utopia, which is certainly a Christian book?

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Some critics feel that More could have meant it only as a jeu d’esprit for an in-group of humanist intellectuals. But that conception makes it something more trivial than anything that More would write or Rabelais and Erasmus much appreciate. The second book of Utopia must have been intended quite as seriously as the trenchant social criticism of the first. We note that the Utopia, again, takes the form of a dialogue between a first-person narrator and a guide. The guide is Hythloday, who has been to Utopia, and whose description of it takes up the second book. The narrator is More himself. In the first book the social attitudes of the two men are skilfully contrasted. More is a gradualist, a reformer; he feels that Hythloday should use his experience and knowledge in advising the princes of Europe on the principles of social justice. Hythloday has come back from Utopia a convinced Communist and a revolutionary. All Europe’s misery, blundering, and hypocrisy spring from its attachment to private property: unless this is renounced nothing good can be done, and as this renunciation is unlikely he sees no hope for Europe. At the end More remarks that, although he himself has not been converted to Hythloday’s all-out Utopianism, there are many things in Utopia that he would hope for rather than expect to see in his own society. The implication seems clear that the ideal state to More, as to Plato, is not a future ideal but a hypothetical one, an informing power and not a goal of action. For More, as for Plato, Utopia is the kind of model of justice and common sense which, once established in the mind, clarifies its standards and values. It does not lead to a desire to abolish sixteenth-century Europe and replace it with Utopia, but it enables one to see Europe, and to work within it, more clearly. As H.G. Wells says of his Utopia, it is good discipline to enter it occasionally.10 There is, however, an element of paradox in More’s construct that is absent from Plato’s. More’s state is not Eutopia, the good place, but Utopia, nowhere. It is achieved by the natural virtues without revelation, and its eclectic state religion, its toleration (in certain circumstances) of suicide and divorce, its married priesthood, and its epicurean philosophy all mean that it is not, like the republic, the invisible city whose laws More himself, or his readers, would continually and constantly obey. It has often been pointed out that More died a martyr to some very un-Utopian causes. The point of the paradox is something like this: Europe has revelation, but the natural basis of its society is an extremely rickety structure; and if Europe pretends to greater wisdom than Utopia it ought to have at least something of the Utopian solidity and consistency in the

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wisdom it shares with Utopia. This paradoxical argument in More reappears in Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals, where it is demonstrated that cannibals have many virtues we have not, and if we disdain to be cannibals we should have at least something of those virtues.11 Similarly Gulliver returns from the society of rational horses to that of human beings feeling a passionate hatred not of the human race, as careless readers of Swift are apt to say, but of its pride, including its pride in not being horses. In most Utopias the state predominates over the individual: property is usually held in common and the characteristic features of individual life, leisure, privacy, and freedom of movement, are as a rule minimized. Most of this is, once more, simply the result of writing a Utopia and accepting its conventions: the Utopia is designed to describe a unified society, not individual varieties of existence. Still, the sense of the individual as submerged in a social mass is very strong. But as soon as we adopt the principle of paradeigma which Plato sets forth in his ninth book, the relation of society to individual is reversed. The ideal state now becomes an element in the liberal education of the individual free man, permitting him a greater liberty of mental perspective than he had before. The republic built up by Socrates and entered into by his hearers is derived from their ability to see society on two levels, a lower natural level and an upper ideal level. What gives them the ability to perceive this upper level is education. The vision of the Republic is inextricably bound up with a theory of education. The bodily senses perceive the “actual” or objective state of things; the soul, through education, perceives the intelligible world. And though not all Utopia writers are Platonists, nearly all of them make their Utopias depend on education for their permanent establishment. It seems clear that the literary convention of an ideal state is really a by-product of a systematic view of education. That is, education, considered as a unified view of reality, grasps society by its intelligible rather than its actual form, and the Utopia is a projection of the ability to see society, not as an aggregate of buildings and bodies, but as a structure of arts and sciences. The thought suggests itself that the paralysis in Utopian imagination we have mentioned in our society may be connected with a confusion about both the objectives and the inner structure of our educational system. It is a theory of education, in any case, that connects a Utopian myth with a myth of contract. This is abundantly clear in Plato and later in Rousseau, whose Émile is the Utopian and educational counterpart of his

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Contrat social. In the sixteenth century, Machiavelli’s Prince, Castiglione’s Courtier, and More’s Utopia form a well-unified Renaissance trilogy, the first two providing a contract myth and an educational structure respectively, based on the two central facts of Renaissance society, the prince and the courtier. Other Renaissance works, such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, set forth a social ideal and so belong peripherally to the Utopian tradition, but are based on an educational myth rather than a Utopian one. For Spenser, as he says in his letter to Raleigh, the Classical model was not Plato’s Republic but Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the ideal education of the ideal prince. Both the contract myth and the Utopia myth, we said, derive from an analysis of the mythmaker’s own society, or at least if they do not they have little social point. The overtones of the contract myth, unless the writer is much more complacent than anyone I have read, are tragic. All contract theories, whatever their origin or direction, have to account for the necessity of a social condition far below what one could imagine as a desirable, or even possible, ideal. The contract myth thus incorporates an element of what in the corresponding religious myth appears as the fall of man. Tragedy is a form which proceeds toward an epiphany of law, or at least of something inevitable and ineluctable; and a contract myth is by definition a legal one. The telos myth is comic in direction: it moves toward the actualizing of something better. Any serious Utopia has to assume some kind of contract theory as the complement of itself, if only to explain what is wrong with the state of things the Utopia is going to improve. But the vision of something better has to appeal to some contract behind the contract, something which existing society has lost, forfeited, rejected, or violated, and which the Utopia itself is to restore. The ideal or desirable quality in the Utopia has to be recognized, that is, seen as manifesting something that the reader can understand as a latent or potential element in his own society and his own thinking. Thus Plato’s Republic takes off from a rather gloomy and cynical contract theory, adapted apparently from the Sophists by Glaucon and Adeimantus for the pleasure of hearing Socrates refute it. But the vision of justice which Socrates substitutes for it restores a state of things earlier than anything this contract theory refers to. This antecedent state is associated with the Golden Age in the Laws and with the story of Atlantis in the two sequels to the Republic, the Timaeus and the Critias. In the Christian myth, of course, the precontract ideal state is that of paradise. We have now to try to isolate the paradisal or Golden Age element in the Utopian myth, the seed which it brings to fruition.

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The Utopian writer looks at the ritual habits of his own society and tries to see what society would be like if these ritual habits were made more consistent and more inclusive. But it is possible to think of a good many ritual habits as not so much inconsistent as unnecessary or superstitious. Some social habits express the needs of society; others express its anxieties. And although we tend to attach more emotional importance to our anxieties than to our needs or genuine beliefs, many anxieties are largely or entirely unreal. Plato’s conception of the role of women in his community, whatever one thinks of it, was an extraordinary imaginative break from the anxieties of Athens with its almost Oriental seclusion of married women. Every Utopian writer has to struggle with the anxieties suggested to him by his own society, trying to distinguish the moral from the conventional, what would be really disastrous from what merely inspires a vague feeling of panic, uneasiness, or ridicule. So far we have been considering the typical Utopia, the rational city or world state, and the Utopian satire which is a product of a specifically modern fear, the Frankenstein myth of the enslavement of man by his own technology and by his perverse desire to build himself an ingenious trap merely for the pleasure of getting caught in it. But another kind of Utopian satire is obviously possible, one in which social rituals are seen from the outside, not to make them more consistent but simply to demonstrate their inconsistency, their hypocrisy, or their unreality. Satire of this kind holds up a mirror to society which distorts it, but distorts it consistently. An early example is Bishop Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (1605), much ridiculed by Milton, but perhaps more of an influence on him than he was willing to admit. A more famous one is Gulliver’s Travels, especially the first part, the voyage to Lilliput. The Lilliputian society is essentially the society of Swift’s England, with its rituals looked at satirically. In the voyage to Brobdingnag the ridicule of the gigantic society is softened down, in the portrayal of the king even minimized, the satirical emphasis being thrown on Gulliver’s account of his own society. The shift of emphasis indicates the close connection between this kind of satire and Utopian fiction, the connection being much closer in the last part, where the rational society of the Houyhnhnms is contrasted with the Yahoos. In Butler’s Erewhon, we have an early example of technological Utopian satire: the Erewhonians are afraid of machines, and their philosophers have proved that machines will take over if not suppressed in

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time. We could trace this theme back to Gulliver’s Travels itself, where the flying island of Laputa demonstrates some of the perils in combining human mechanical ingenuity with human folly and greed. But most of Erewhon adheres to the earlier tradition of the mirror satire. The Erewhonians, for example, treat disease as a crime and crime as a disease, but they do so with exactly the same rationalizations that the Victorians use in enforcing the opposite procedure. Following out this line of thought, perhaps what ails ordinary society is not the inconsistency but the multiplicity of its ritual habits. If so, then the real social ideal would be a greatly simplified society, and the quickest way to Utopia would be through providing the absolute minimum of social structure and organization. This conception of the ideal society as simplified, even primitive, is of far more literary importance than the Utopia itself, which in literature is a relatively minor genre never quite detached from political theory. For the simplified society is the basis of the pastoral convention, one of the central conventions of literature at every stage of its development. In Christianity the city is the form of the myth of telos, the New Jerusalem that is the end of the human pilgrimage. But there is no city in the Christian, or Judaeo-Christian, myth of origin: that has only a garden, and the two progenitors of what was clearly intended to be a simple and patriarchal society. In the story which follows, the story of Cain and Abel, Abel is a shepherd and Cain a farmer whose descendants build cities and develop the arts. The murder of Abel appears to symbolize the blotting out of an idealized pastoral society by a more complex civilization. In Classical mythology the original society appears as the Golden Age, to which we have referred more than once, again a peaceful and primitive society without the complications of later ones. In both our main literary traditions, therefore, the tendency to see the ideal society in terms of a lost simple paradise has a ready origin. In the Renaissance, when society was so strongly urban and centripetal, focused on the capital city and on the court in the centre of it, the pastoral established an alternative ideal which was not strictly Utopian, and which we might distinguish by the term Arcadian. The characteristics of this ideal were simplicity and equality: it was a society of shepherds without distinction of class, engaged in a life that permitted the maximum of peace and of leisure. The arts appeared in this society spontaneously, as these shepherds were assumed to have natural musical and poetic gifts. In most Utopias the relation of the sexes is hedged around

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with the strictest regulations, even taboos; in the pastoral, though the Courtly Love theme of frustrated devotion is prominent, it is assumed that making love is a major occupation, requiring much more time and attention than the sheep, and thus more important than the economic productivity of society. The Arcadia has two ideal characteristics that the Utopia hardly if ever has. In the first place, it puts an emphasis on the integration of man with his physical environment. The Utopia is a city, and it expresses rather the human ascendancy over nature, the domination of the environment by abstract and conceptual mental patterns. In the pastoral, man is at peace with nature, which implies that he is also at peace with his own nature, the reasonable and the natural being associated. A pastoral society might become stupid or ignorant, but it could hardly go mad. In the second place, the pastoral, by simplifying human desires, throws more stress on the satisfaction of such desires as remain, especially, of course, sexual desire. Thus it can accommodate, as the typical Utopia cannot, something of that outlawed and furtive social ideal known as the Land of Cockayne, the fairyland where all desires can be instantly gratified.12 This last is an ideal half-way between the paradisal and the pastoral, and is seldom taken seriously. The reason is that it does not derive from an analysis of the writer’s present society, but is primarily a dream or wish-fulfilment fantasy. In the fourteenth-century poem called The Land of Cockayne, roast geese walk around advertising their edibility: the line of descent to the shmoos of “Li’l Abner” is clear enough.13 The same theme exists in a more reflective and sentimental form, where it tends to be an illusory or vanishing vision, often a childhood memory. This theme is common as a social cliché and in the popular literature which expresses social clichés: the cottage away from it all, happy days on the farm, the great open spaces of the west, and the like. A typical and wellknown literary example is James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, a neo-Kantian kingdom of both ends, so to speak, with its mixture of Oriental wisdom and American plumbing. But though the Land of Cockayne belongs to social mythology more than to the imaginative mythology of literature, it is a genuine ideal, and we shall meet other forms of it. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, already alluded to, is an example of the sort of courtier literature common in the Renaissance, which had for its theme the idealizing of the court or the reigning monarch. This literature was not directly Utopian, but its imaginative premises were allied to the Uto-

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pia. That is, it assumed that for mankind the state of nature is the state of society and of civilization and that, whether man is in his nature good or bad, life can be improved by improving his institutions. The pastoral, though of no importance politically, nevertheless kept open the suggestion that the state of nature and the state of society were different, perhaps opposing states. The pastoral was allied to the spirit of satire which, as in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Cornelius Agrippa’s Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, called the whole value of civilization into question. In the eighteenth century these two attitudes both assumed political importance, and met in a head-on collision. The eighteenth-century descendant of the pastoral myth was the conception of the “natural society” in Bolingbroke, and later in Rousseau. Here the natural state of man is thought of as distinct from and, so to speak, underlying the state of society. The state of nature is reasonable, the state of society full of anomalies and pointless inequalities. The conservative or traditional view opposed to this is, in Great Britain, most articulate in Burke, who, following Montesquieu, and in opposition to the principles of the French Revolution, asserted that the state of nature and the state of society were the same thing. The difference between the two views is primarily one of contract theory. For Burke the existing social order in any nation is that nation’s real contract: for Rousseau it is essentially a corruption of its contract. The telos myths differ accordingly. For Burke improvement is possible only if we preserve the existing structure. This is not a Utopian view, but it is not necessarily anti-Utopian: it still keeps the Utopian premise of the improvability of institutions. For Rousseau the telos myth becomes revolutionary: only an overthrow of the existing social order can manifest the natural and reasonable social order that it has disguised. The fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels is a pastoral satire representing the conservative opposition to the pastoral conception of a natural society. The Yahoo is the natural man, man as he would be if he were purely an animal, filthy, treacherous, and disgusting. Gulliver has more intelligence than the Yahoos, but what he learns from his sojourn with the Houyhnhnms is that his nature is essentially Yahoo nature. His intelligence, he discovers, is nothing he can take pride in, for human beings back home make “no other use of reason than to improve and multiply those vices whereof their brethren in this country had only the share that nature allotted them.”14 The natural society, if it could be attained at all, could be attained only by some kind of animal like the Houyhnhnm, who possessed a genuine reason not needing the disciplines of state and

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church. The Houyhnhnms can live in a genuinely pastoral world; human beings have to put up with the curse of civilization. The terms of this argument naturally changed after the Industrial Revolution, which introduced the conception of revolutionary process into society. This led to the present division of social attitudes mentioned above, between the Marxist Utopia as distant end and the common American belief in the Utopianizing tendency of the productive process, often taking the form of a belief that Utopian standards of living can be reached in America alone. This belief, though rudely shaken by every disruptive historical event at least since the stock market crash of 1929, still inspires an obstinate and resilient confidence. The popular American view and the Communist one, superficially different as they are, have in common the assumption that to increase man’s control over his environment is also to increase his control over his destiny. The refusal to accept this assumption is the principle of modern Utopian satire. Whatever Utopian thought and imagination has survived this state of affairs in democratic literature has been much more affected by pastoral or Arcadian themes than by the Utopian conception of the rational city. Both Plato and More lay stress on limiting the city state to what would now be called an “optimum” size. And almost anyone today, considering the problems of present-day society, would soon find himself saying “too many people.” He could hardly visualize a Utopia without assuming some disaster that would reduce the population—at least, those who did not survive might reasonably consider it a disaster. Thus Don Marquis, in The Almost Perfect State, speaks of a United States with a total population of five million.15 The assumption that a more desirable society must be a greatly simplified one marks the influence of the pastoral tradition. We do find, in fact, a type of Utopian satire based on the theme of cyclical return: contemporary civilization goes to pieces with an appalling crash, and life starts again under primitive conditions like those of some earlier period of history. The best story of this type I know is Richard Jefferies’s After London, but the theme enters the Robert Graves book referred to earlier and is a common one in science fiction (for example, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and some of John Wyndham’s stories, especially Re-Birth).16 And even in the nineteenth-century industrial Utopias, with their clicking machinery and happy factory crowds and fast-talking interpreters, an occasional one, such as W.H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age, takes a different tone, and reminds us that ideals of peace,

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dignity, and quiet are too important to be squeezed into a few intervals of bustling routine. Of the famous Utopias, the one which shows pastoral influence most consistently is William Morris’s News from Nowhere. This work was, significantly, written as a reaction to Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and, even more significantly, it scandalized the Communist associates of Morris’s magazine, The Commonweal, in which it appeared. It was an attempt to visualize the ultimate Utopian goal of Communism after the classless society had been reached, and the reader is not asked whether he thinks the social conception practicable, but simply whether or not he likes the picture. The picture is considerably more anarchist than Communist: the local community is the sole source of a completely decentralized authority, and the centralizing economic tendencies have disappeared along with the political ones. There is, in other words, a minimum of industrial and factory production. Morris started out, not with the Marxist question “Who are the workers?” but with the more deeply revolutionary question “What is work?” It is perhaps because Socrates never asked this question, but simply took the agenda of the work done in his own society as the basis of his definition of justice, that Plato’s Republic is the authoritarian structure it is. Morris was influenced by Carlyle, who, though he tended to imply that all work was good, and unpleasant work particularly beneficial to the moral fibre, still did succeed, in Sartor Resartus, in distinguishing work from drudgery as well as from idleness.17 Ruskin, though also with a good deal of dithering, followed this up, and established the principle that Morris never departed from: work is creative act, the expression of what is creative in the worker. Any work that falls short of this is drudgery, and drudgery is exploitation, producing only the mechanical, the ugly, and the useless. We notice that in Morris we need an aesthetic, and hence imaginative, criterion to make any significant social judgment. According to Morris the pleasure in craftsmanship was what kept the medieval workers from revolution: this leads to the unexpected inference that, in an exploiting society, genuine work is the opiate of the people. In the society of the future, however, work has become a direct expression of the controlled energy of conscious life. In Morris’s state “manufacture” has become hand work, and the basis of production is in what are still called the minor or lesser arts, those that are directly related to living conditions. In terms of the societies we know, Morris’s ideal is closer to the Scandinavian way of life than to the Russian or the American. To make craftsmanship the basis of industry

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implies an immense simplification of human wants—this is the pastoral element in Morris’s vision. The population has stabilized because people have stopped exploiting their sexual instincts as well as each other’s work. England has become a green and pleasant land—something even seems to have happened to the climate—with a great deal of fresh air and exercise. The pastoral theme of the unity of man and physical nature is very prominent. Around the corner, perhaps, looms the spectre of endless picnics and jolly community gatherings and similar forms of extroverted cheer; but the sense of this is hardly oppressive even to a cynical reader. There is a certain anti-intellectual quality, perhaps, in the rather childlike inhabitants, their carefree ignorance of history and their neglect of the whole contemplative side of education. It is briefly suggested at the end that perhaps this society will need to mature sufficiently to take account of the more contemplative virtues if it is to escape the danger of losing its inheritance, as Adam did, through an uncritical perverseness of curiosity. In the meantime we are indebted to the most unreligious of the great English writers for one of the most convincing pictures of the state of innocence. The social ideal is an essential and primary human ideal, but it is not the only one, nor does it necessarily include the others. Human fulfilment has a singular and a dual form as well as a plural one. Marvell’s The Garden speaks of individual and solitary fulfilment in which one is detached from society and reaches a silent incorporation into nature which the poet symbolizes by the word “green.” It is further suggested that this solitary apotheosis was the genuine paradisal state, before a blundering God created Eve and turned Eden into a suburban development of the City of God.18 Yet the creation of Eve, in itself, introduced a sexual fulfilment which, as long as man remained unfallen, had no objective beyond itself. Theoretically, the higher religions recognize and provide for these dreams of lost solitary and sexual paradises; in practice, being socially organized, they tend to be socially obsessed. Christianity is opposed to Communism and other forms of state-worship, but church and family are equally social units. Traditionally, Christianity frowns on the sexual relationship except as a means of producing the family, and on the solitary illumination except as a variety of socially accepted belief. If even religion tends to divide human impulses into the social and the antisocial, we can hardly expect more tolerance from ordinary society, which is a neurotically jealous mistress, suspicious and resentful of any sign of preferring a less gregarious experience.

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Yet less socialized ideals continue to hover around the locked gates of their garden, trying to elude the angels of anxiety and censorship. Through the pastoral they achieve some imaginative expression, and it is largely its connection with the pastoral that makes Thoreau’s Walden so central and so subversive a book in American culture. The theme of the sage who makes a voluntary break with society in order to discover his genuine self in a context of solitude and nature is common in the Orient and has been a major influence on the arts there, but it is rare in the West. Even Wordsworth, though he has much of the theory, speaks, at the opening of the Prelude and elsewhere, more as someone on sabbatical leave from society than as someone aloof from it. Thoreau achieves a genuine social detachment, and has the sensitive, loving kinship with nature that characterizes the pastoral at its best. What makes him relevant to a paper on Utopias is the social criticism implied in his book. He sets out to show how little a man actually needs for the best life, best in the sense of providing for the greatest possible amount of physical and mental well-being. And while one may quarrel over the details of his experiment in economy, there is no doubt that he makes his main point. Man obviously needs far less for the best life than he thinks he needs; and civilization as we know it is grounded on the technique of complicating wants. In fact, this technique is widely believed, in America, to be the American way of life par excellence. Thoreau says, “the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavour to compel you to sustain the slavery, and war, and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”19 The pastoral revolutionary tradition is still at work in this remark, still pointing to the natural and reasonable society buried beneath the false one. For Thoreau the place of human identity is not the city or even the community, but the home. In constructing his cabin he remarks, “It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man.”20 Whatever the standards and values are that make a social ideal better than the reality, they cannot appear unless the essence of society has been separated from nonessentials. It is its feeling for what is socially essential that makes the pastoral convention central to literature, and no book has expressed this feeling more uncompromisingly than Walden. Walden devotes itself to the theme of individual fulfilment: its social

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criticism is implicit only and the complications in human existence caused by the sexual instinct are not dealt with at all. The attempt to see the sexual relationship as something in itself, and not merely as a kind of social relationship, is something that gives a strongly pastoral quality to the work of D.H. Lawrence. For him the sexual relation is natural in the sense that it has its closest and most immediate affinities with the physical environment, the world of animals and plants and walks in the country and sunshine and rain. The idyllic sense of this world as helping to protect and insulate true love from the noisy city-world of disembodied consciousness runs through all Lawrence’s work from the early White Peacock to the late Lady Chatterley’s Lover. People complain, Lawrence says, that he wants them to be “savages,” but the gentian flowering on its coarse stem is not savage.21 Lawrence has been a major influence on the social attitude which has grown up in the United States since the Second World War, and which may be described as a development of Freudianism. Like the Marxism of which it is, to some extent, a democratic counterpart, it is a revolutionary attitude, but unlike Marxism it imposes no specific social obligations on the person who holds it. The enemy is still the bourgeois, not the bourgeois as capitalist, but the bourgeois as “square,” as the representative of repressive morality. Freud himself had little hope that society would ever cease to be a repressive anxiety structure, but some of the most uninhibited Utopian thinking today comes from such Freudians as Norman O. Brown (Life against Death) and Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization), who urge us at least to consider the possibility of a nonrepressive society. In literature, some manifestations of this quasi-Freudian movement, like the beatniks, are rigidly conventionalized social ones, but what is relevant to us at present is rather the literature of protest, the theme of vagabondage and the picaresque in Kerouac and Henry Miller, the cult of violence in Mailer, the exploration of drugs and perversions, the struggle for a direct asocial experience which is apparently what the interest in Zen Buddhism symbolizes. The motto of all this is that of the starling in Sterne: “I can’t get out”:22 it expresses the claustrophobia of individual and sexual impulses imprisoned by the alien social consciousness that has created civilization. This sounds as though the contemporary literature of protest was intensely anti-Utopian, and so in many respects it is. It is, however, for the most part a militant or “Luddite” pastoralism, trying to break the hold of a way of life which has replaced the perspective of the human body with the perspective of its mechanical

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extensions, the extensions of transportation and social planning and advertising which are now turning on the body and strangling it as the serpents did Laocoön. The great classical Utopias derived their form from city states and, though imaginary, were thought of as being, like the city state, exactly locatable in space. Modern Utopias derive their form from a uniform pattern of civilization spread over the whole globe, and so are thought of as world states, taking up all the available space. It is clear that if there is to be any revival of Utopian imagination in the near future, it cannot return to the old-style spatial Utopias. New Utopias would have to derive their form from the shifting and dissolving movement of society that is gradually replacing the fixed locations of life. They would not be rational cities evolved by a philosopher’s dialectic: they would be rooted in the body as well as in the mind, in the unconscious as well as the conscious, in forests and deserts as well as in highways and buildings, in bed as well as in the symposium. Do you not agree, asks Socrates in the Republic, that the worst of men is the man who expresses in waking reality the character of man in his dreams?23 But modern Utopias will have to pay some attention to the lawless and violent lusts of the dreamer, for their foundations will still be in dreamland. A fixed location in space is “there,” and “there” is the only answer to the spatial question “where?” Utopia, in fact and in etymology, is not a place; and when the society it seeks to transcend is everywhere, it can only fit into what is left, the invisible nonspatial point in the centre of space. The question, “Where is Utopia?” is the same as the question, “Where is nowhere?” and the only answer to that question is “Here.”

12 Letter to the English Institute, 1965 7 September 1965

This letter was read on Frye’s behalf at the opening of a session of the English Institute1 devoted to a discussion of his criticism. The session was chaired by Murray Krieger and included papers by Angus Fletcher, W.K. Wimsatt, and Geoffrey Hartman as described in the headnote to no. 13. The proceedings were later published in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Murray Krieger (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1966), from which the present text (27–30) is taken. Partially reprinted in Modern Literary Criticism, 1900–1970, ed. Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 244–5.

I am very appreciative of the great honour done me by the English Institute, and my absence is due to a proper sense of it. I should want the discussion, in particular, to be as uninhibited as possible, which it can only be if the corpus delicti is not, like Finnegan, able to obtrude on the proceedings.2 I have no itch to demonstrate that my views are “right” and that those who disagree with me are “wrong,” but my presence would almost force me into some such role, to the great detriment of free speech. Nor do I wish to correct others for “misunderstanding my position”: I dislike and distrust what is generally implied in the word “position.” Language is the dwelling-house of being, according to Heidegger,3 but no writer who is not completely paranoid wants his house to be either a fortress or a prison. I thoroughly approve of the Institute’s policy in devoting a group to the study of a contemporary critic, and I can think of one reason why I may be a good critic to choose. Every critic tries to be coherent and consistent, and to avoid contradicting himself. Thus he develops his insight into lit-

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erature out of a systematic framework of ideas about it. But some are better at concealing this framework than others, especially those who are unconscious of it, and so conceal it from themselves. I have been quite unable to conceal it, hence the question of the systematic nature of criticism itself bulks prominently in my writing. On the first page of the Anatomy I tried to explain that the system was there for the sake of the insights it contained: the insights were not there for the sake of the system. I put this on the first page because I thought that that page was more likely to be read than others. In spite of this, I am often regarded as a critic equipped with a summa critica who approaches all his readers much as Jonah’s whale approached Jonah. Actually I am grateful to be read on any terms, but the role of system and schema in my work has another kind of importance. Whatever the light it throws on literature, it throws a good deal of light on me in the act of criticizing. It is the schematic thinker, not the introspective thinker, who most fully reveals his mind in process, and so most clearly illustrates how he arrives at his conclusions. I think that criticism as a whole is a systematic subject. But I do not think that the criticism of the future will all be contained within the critical system set out in my books. Still less do I think that it will be contained in an eclectic system, a tutti-frutti collection of the best ideas of the best critics. One of the most accurately drawn characters in drama is Reuben the Reconciler, who is listed in the dramatis personae of Ben Jonson’s Sad Shepherd, and whose role was apparently to set everybody right at the end. Jonson never finished the play, so he never appeared. I wish we could throw away the notion of “reconciling,” and use instead some such conception as “interpenetration.” Literature itself is not a field of conflicting arguments but of interpenetrating visions. I suspect that this is true even of philosophy, where the place of argument seems more functional. The irrefutable philosopher is not the one who cannot be refuted, but the one who is still there after he has been refuted. This is the principle on which I base my view of value judgments in criticism. I have never said that there were no literary values or that critics should never make value judgments: what I have said is that literary values are not established by critical value judgments. Every work of literature establishes its own value; in the past, much critical energy has been wasted in trying to reject or minimize these values. But all genuine literature, including Shakespeare, kept turning up, like the neurotic return of a ghost, to haunt and perplex the criticism that rejected it. I think criticism becomes more sensible when it realizes that it has nothing to do with

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rejection, only with recognition. To recognize is of the gods, as Euripides says.4 In criticism, as in philosophy, argument is functional, and there is bound to be disagreement. But disagreement is one thing, rejection is another, and critics have no more business rejecting each other than they have rejecting literature. The genuine critic works out his own views of literature while realizing that there are also a great number of other views, actual and possible, which are neither reconcilable nor irreconcilable with his own. They interpenetrate with him, and he with them, each a monad as full of windows as a Park Avenue building. I think that this argument also describes the atmosphere and pervading attitudes of the English Institute as I have experienced it: candid, receptive, courteous, and individualized. It is a pleasure as well as an honour to entrust my own work to its judgment.

13 Reflections in a Mirror 1966

From Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 133–46. Partially reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 24, ed. Sharon R. Gunton (Detroit: Gale Research, 1983), 222–3. This is a concluding piece written by Frye after he had read the other English Institute papers given at the session devoted to his work and printed in the volume: Angus Fletcher, “Utopian History and the Anatomy of Criticism” (31–74); W.K. Wimsatt, “Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth” (75– 108); and Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Ghostlier Demarcations” (109–32). References to these essays will be noted in square brackets in the text.

Reading critiques of oneself is normally a distressing pastime, ranking even below the rereading of one’s own works. What variety one has usually seems to be multiplied in a wilderness of distorting mirrors. And if reading them is confusing, writing them almost affects one’s sense of identity. Whatever has been published is grown up and has to make its own way in the world, preferably without further support from its parent. It is true that I have read these papers with an attention which at times amounts to pleasure, but their very excellence makes me wish that I could leave them to speak for themselves. For I doubt if I can describe my ambitions for criticism more accurately than Mr. Fletcher does in his figure of the Haussmann boulevards which enabled Parisians, so to speak, to see Paris [32], or than Mr. Hartman does more conceptually in speaking of my wish to help demystify and democratize criticism [110]. Mr. Hartman also notes in me a combination of interests which are partly scientific (perhaps the wrong word, though

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mine) and partly evangelical (certainly the right word, though not mine), the same mixture of detachment and engagement which exists in most areas of scholarship in the humanities [111]. These two aims are contradictory, but as they are both essential, they have simply got to contradict: this is part of the paradox that Mr. Wimsatt speaks of as inherent in criticism [79]. Both Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Hartman emphasize the fact that my work is designed to raise questions rather than answer them, and that my aim is not to construct a Narrenschiff to keep future critics all bound in by the same presuppositions, but to point to what Mr. Fletcher calls the open vistas and Mr. Hartman the still closed doors in the subject [40, 129]. A critic who has been compelled by such ambitions to write on far too broad a front is particularly vulnerable to objection on points of detail, but the errors and inconsistencies attributed to me by Mr. Wimsatt seldom seem to me to be really such, except on premises which are not mine. Given those premises, I do not appear to be misleading anybody very seriously, even myself. And even given Mr. Wimsatt’s premises, it is clear that he finds much more than beautifully cadenced nonsense in me, otherwise he could hardly put his finger on so many central things: Plato’s Ion; Oscar Wilde’s Decay of Lying (which Messrs. Ellmann and Feidelson were quite right in putting at the beginning of their collection of documents of The Modern Tradition);1 the conception of poetry (not criticism) as a kind of forgery of myth. When I began to work on Blake’s Prophecies, it was constantly being said to me, both in books and in conversation, “But even if you did provide a complete and self-consistent interpretation of their meaning, that wouldn’t increase my interest in them as poetry.” The phrase “as poetry” implies that the essence of poetry is somehow separable from its meaning, and the attitude underlying the statement was a value judgment opposing itself to what I hoped would become a new body of critical knowledge. It seemed to me clear that the new knowledge had, as I put it later, a power of veto over the value judgment:2 if the Prophecies could be shown to make sense, that would surely modify any view of them “as poetry.” The critic’s confidence in his value judgment was, if he were an honest critic, admittedly tentative. He did not, however, as a rule, subordinate it to greater knowledge, but, like medieval princes fighting the Pope, he appealed to a future general council. Some day all such intuitions of value would be confirmed theoretically. This article of faith was usually expressed in an oracle of the type, “The end of criticism being

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evaluation, it is important to find trustworthy criteria of evaluation.” I talked this way myself in an early version of the Polemical Introduction. But it became obvious that there were no such criteria, either in criticism or “elsewhere” (Mr. Bush’s word quoted by Mr. Fletcher).3 It is true that my approach to criticism does not make any functional use of value judgments: this has bewildered only the critics who have failed to notice that no criticism that actually gives us knowledge of literature, whether historical or linguistic or explicatory, does either. Perhaps a general council will yet meet and give us an apostolic creed of values, but in the meantime surely someone ought to make a simple and childish observation about the present nakedness of this venerable emperor. As I continued to work on Blake, it became inescapably clear that the kind of thinking the Prophecies displayed was normal and typical poetic thinking, and that every poet, from the first metaphor he uses, is condemned to produce what Mr. Wimsatt calls “Gnostic mythopoeia” [76] for the rest of his poetic life. “I must create a system,” said Blake,4 and any critic going from Blake into the general theory of criticism discovers how strong and immediate the emotional overtones of the word “system” are in this fragmented age. Jail-building, pigeonholing, providing a glib answering service for undergraduates, overweening ambition on the part of the system-builder, are some of the readiest associations. In the muddled mythology of stock response, the system-builder is the spider who spins nets out of his bowels, as contrasted with the bee who flits empirically from flower to flower and staggers home under his burden of sweetness and light. I have often said that I regard criticism itself as a systematic subject, and there are systematic tendencies in the Anatomy of Criticism, particularly in the way that it tries to unite different critical methods, putting Mr. Wimsatt into what he calls a “wintry cellar” [101–2], though it might also be called a ratproof foundation. But I do not think of the Anatomy as primarily systematic: I think of it rather as schematic. The reason why it is schematic is that poetic thinking is schematic. The structure of images that C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image calls “the Model”5 was a projected schematic construct which provided the main organization for literature down to the Renaissance: it modulated into less projected forms after Newton’s time, but it did not lose its central place in literature. The attraction that poets have felt during the last two centuries for occult and other offbeat forms of thought, while very largely ignoring the advance of real science, has always seemed to me an instructive example of the affinity to pattern-making schematism

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which is part of the poetic process itself. The Anatomy, especially in its Third Essay, attempts to provide an outline of a schema which, as I said, I hoped would serve as a guide to practical criticism [3/5]. It is not a view of the universe, whether true or fictional, and it is not a reconstruction of any specific pattern in the past. It employs four seasons because that is the most convenient number for such a schema to have, not because I am unaware that “sumer is icumen in” means “spring is here.” Since the book appeared, I have received enough correspondence echoing Mr. Hartman’s “it works; it is teachable” [126] to make me reasonably satisfied with its general usefulness. In the last few years I have become more preoccupied with the context of criticism in education, and I think I understand, more clearly than I did ten years ago, why so many critics actually prefer that their subject should be theoretically addled. The “mystique” that Mr. Hartman mentions [112, 113] is certainly important here: I think that there is also another element derived from the classroom. In Mr. Trilling’s recent book there is a penetrating essay on the way in which the study of modern literature seems to have the odd effect of denaturing it.6 We recognize Rimbaud or Kafka or Lawrence or Dostoevsky as great writers because of a tremendous force of passion and power and clairvoyance that comes through them, a force so great, and carrying an anguish so unbearable, that we are not surprised to find it crippling their lives with neurosis and perversity. What such writers may incidentally have done or said does not matter: the insight is what matters, and we are anxious to confront our students with the insight, purified of the accidents of temperament. The result is that the students write more or less competent essays about the passion, power, anguish, etc., of these authors and go on about their business, while the teacher is in the position of saying, like a chairman at a lecture, “I am sure we are all deeply grateful to Mr. Rimbaud (and the others) for having contributed such a distinctive note to our understanding of human life.” There is no way out of this: for better or worse, criticism is part of an educational process in which Macbeth is taught to children, and in which a certain insulation against emotional impact is a sign of cultivated taste. Teachers are occupationally disposed to believe in magic, and it is not surprising that many of them should cherish the illusion that they are best able to charge their students’ batteries directly with the authors they teach if they do not admit, even to themselves, that all teaching is a transposition of literature into criticism, of passion and power and anguish into pattern and craftsmanship and

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the following of convention. If, that is, they can keep on assuming that the direct experience of literature can somehow be, if not actually taught, at least communicated. Hence, perhaps, the resistance to attempts in criticism to make the resemblances and recurring patterns in the variety of literary experience significant. I am often told that this detracts from the distinctiveness of the work of literature, this quality being expanded into a value only by rhetorical licence, the world’s worst poem being obviously as distinctive as the best. It is as though a zoologist were to insist that the differences between mastiffs and chihuahuas made the conception “dog” a useless pedantry. Mr. Wimsatt, who is not normally this sentimental kind of critic, describes my own recurring patterns as clichés [94–5], meaning apparently that, even if the connections are there, it is bad form to call attention to them. Mr. Ransom’s conception of “texture” is one from which every critic has learned a great deal, but his view that structure, which means ultimately the study of such recurring principles of literature as convention and genre, is somehow less relevant to criticism, is something I have never understood.7 The principle that a work of literature should not be related to anything outside itself is sound enough, but I cannot see how the rest of literature can be regarded as outside the work of literature, any more than the human race can be regarded as outside a human being. When I use the metaphor of standing back from a work of literature, as one would from a painting, to see the structural principles in it, I am trying to give some reality to the word “literature,” by placing the reader in the middle of that great museum without walls which Mr. Hartman has so well described as the form of understanding appropriate to our time [115], when technology has both unified and decentralized our relation to works of art. If Mr. Wimsatt asks who really wants to see a painting in that way, the answer is, everybody interested in twentieth-century painting, abstract expressionism being only the most dramatic of several contemporary modes of painting from precisely this perspective. Mr. Fletcher is right in connecting my interest in comedy and in Utopian forms with my interest in literature as a total community, where every resemblance is a recognition scene. Such recognition scenes are, as a rule, both sublime and ridiculous, a fact which largely accounts for what Mr. Fletcher calls the low comedy of my style.8 This is partly because parody of convention is as frequent as taking it straight. It seems to me worth notice that the opening sentences of Pride and Prejudice and of Anna Karen-

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ina are in a convention of beginning a story with a sententious statement which goes back at least to medieval rhetoric. But the fact that this convention is being used ironically, with a playful irony in one and a savage irony in the other, is equally obvious. Other recognition scenes, such as the conventional romance pattern of the cave episode which helps to establish the literary context of Tom Sawyer, seem quasi-ridiculous to those who are unaccustomed or unwilling to think in terms of literary context. They are “irrelevant” [95] (Mr. Wimsatt’s word) only if the word “literature” is meaningless. And if it is meaningless, criticism is not a very significant subject. Such persisting conventions come down from the past, and from one point of view my emphasis on recurring structural principles seems to go back in the past until it disappears into that inaccessible powder room of the Muses, prehistoric mythology. For the way in which the recurring structural elements of literature (convention, genre, archetype) are held together by and in myth, I must refer the reader to the Anatomy of Criticism. I speak of an early mythical period of literature because it seems clear that there was such a period. But nobody can catch literature in the act of originating, and in one sense it is even illogical to speak of “a” myth at all except for convenience. We cannot really think of a myth apart from a specific verbal embodiment of that myth, just as we cannot think of a sonata in music apart from the embodiment of the sonata form in actual compositions. It is not the antiquity of myth but its permanence that makes it a structural principle of literature: not the wisdom hidden behind the story of Endymion but the art revealed, explicitly in Drayton and Lyly and Keats, implicitly in hundreds of other stories and poems that are based on the Endymion theme. I know that portentous language is often used about myths, and similar sound effects have been attributed to the Anatomy by Mr. Wimsatt, following Mr. Abrams [96–7]; but they are not there. And if they were, a few woo-woo noises about the hoary antiquity of myths would be trifling enough compared to the dismal and illiberal impoverishment of literary experience that results from ignoring the structure into which that experience enters. It is only the individual and discrete literary experience that melts “into thin air”: what does not vanish is the total vision which contains the experience. Hence when I say that Shakespearean comedy demands a primitive response, I am not saying that our response should be similar to that of a hypothetical noble savage. My example of a primitive response is taken from Pamela: it could just as well have been taken from Dickens or

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Tolstoy. By a primitive response I mean an unmediated response, a response that is neither naive, like Partridge’s response to Hamlet in Tom Jones [bk. 16, chap. 5], nor so sophisticated as to be indifferent, but is the kind of direct response to the power of literature which is only possible when one stands inside the structure of literature, and is neither confusing it with life nor building an emotional barricade against it. Here we come back to our classroom problem, where we find that exposing students to anguish and nausea leads only to notes and essays about anguish and nausea. This situation grows out of an earlier one in which the student’s unmediated responses are to his comic books and television programs, while his response to Macbeth has every conceivable kind of inhibition attached to it. When I urge the early study of Biblical and Classical myths, it is because I am in search of a literary curriculum that will not only make sense as a discipline, but, by building up the sense of a literary order and putting the student inside it, will be directly concerned with developing a response of this kind, where genuine literature has the kind of effect that popular literature has now (popular is always more or less a synonym for primitive for me). It is the belief in the possibility of such response, derived from their own experience of it, that keeps teachers of English going in their often discouraging calling. Recently a writer referred to my views on literary education as a contribution to the climate of opinion which is trying to rationalize American imperialism in Vietnam. The associative links in this argument elude me, but I can dimly glimpse one point, and it is the only point that occurs to me as a comment on the last part of Mr. Hartman’s paper. As Mr. Fletcher emphasizes [e.g., 34], my own bias is naturally a historical one, but I have never been very clear about the shape of the history of literature apart from the shape of history in general. I know that there is a complicated interplay between a work of literature and its time, and one which is far more important than the dreary kind of “background” criticism which is written on the principle of Walt Disney’s Fantasia a generation ago, where a visual barrage of Gothic arches and the like was supposed to relieve the tedium of listening to a Bach toccata. But the only shaping principles of history in literature itself that I have dealt with, as Mr. Hartman says, are those of displacement [125], the oscillating of technique from the stylizing of form to the manifesting of content and back again, and of what I call existential projection, the attributing of poetic schematism to the objective world, which takes different forms in different historical epochs. I have even compared the literary universe to

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Blake’s Beulah, where no dispute can come, where everything is equally an element of a liberal education, where Bunyan and Rochester are met together and Jane Austen and the Marquis de Sade have kissed each other [AC, 114/105]. This is not the way that works of literature enter history, and it is quite possible that the wars of myth in time are an aspect of criticism that I have not grasped. But one form of this historical war I think I do understand. Myth is liberated by literature, but it also works in society as a reactionary force, providing for prejudice and stock response what vision they have, producing what Mr. Wimsatt calls the cliché [94–5], the literary formula that ought not to be repeated. Literature has the pastoral; social mythology has the cottage away from it all or the nostalgia for the world of one’s childhood. Literature has the quest; social mythology has the gospel of getting on. Literature has comedy; social mythology goes out to win friends and influence people. But, as these examples have already made clear, social mythology has its own kind of literature. The question of evaluation in criticism is thus not a matter of individual appraisal, as one would appraise the value of a diamond or a piece of antique furniture; it is part of a social and moral struggle, of what Ionesco, making an essential distinction that Mr. Wimsatt misses, calls the opposition of archetypes to stereotypes.9 All my educational views are based on this opposition, and have as their aim the attempt to win for literature the response generally given to social mythology. Whether we find them in literature or in the verbal formulas of ordinary life, myths constitute the vision that the individual man has of the human situation. But within these myths a dialectical struggle shapes up between the tendency in man merely to accept what is handed him from his environment and the effort to choose and control his vision. Those who have really changed the modern world—Rousseau, Freud, Marx—are those who have changed its mythology, and whatever is beneficent in their influence has to do with giving man increased power over his own vision. In the continuation of this struggle literary criticism has a central role, and if I can do anything to forward it I shall be quite content to be called the fulfilment of Bishop Hurd. For it was Hurd who established the principle of the unity of design in criticism.10 Anybody can see an infinite number of exquisite touches of human nature in Shakespearean comedy, of lovely passages in Spenser, of brilliant realistic effects in Chaucer, but somehow the overall structure of their works seems quite different, something which by comparison, if

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we keep to the same standards, seems absurd, unnatural, or fantastic. Hurd’s principle helps us to see how the exquisite details exist, not in spite of a fantastic and incredible design, but because of it. Similarly, the exquisite and lucid lyrics of Blake could not have been written except from within the kind of mental structure that emerges more consciously in the often deplored Prophecies. Even on my own level I find from experience that something similar is true. Many who consider the structure of my view of literature repellent find useful parenthetic insights in me, but the insights would not be there unless the structure were there too. So I deduce that such readers are fitting these insights into overall structures of their own, though they may be less conscious of possessing them. What can be communicated, in this situation, is the insights themselves together with a challenge to clarify their new context. There is thus an objective mythical structure, which is the world of literature itself, and which criticism as a whole seeks to articulate, and a subjective one, which the student achieves as a result of his literary experience. The objective structure must be as schematic as the study itself demands, but the subjective one is less obviously so. We think of the vertebrate as a higher organization than the crustacean: what articulates the cultivated and disciplined mind tends to become increasingly invisible. This does not mean that the student outgrows the systematic presentation of literature in criticism: it means that his goal is a personal vision which includes literature but is greater in scope. The mythical structure of literature is not this vision, but it is the only way of getting to it. Literature is not ultimately objective: it is not simply there, like nature: it is there to serve mankind. In Wallace Stevens’s poem Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters into Heaven, Strachey realizes that something he identifies with a new perception of myth lies ahead of him as the fulfilment of what his intense but very limited rationalism was pointing to: Perception as an act of intelligence And perception as an act of grace Are two quite different things, in particular When applied to the mythical. [stanza 5, ll. 21–4]

What is demanded from him is an expansion of perception through the “properly misunderstood” [l. 9] myth into an understanding, and this requires a good many extra qualities, including, somewhat unexpectedly, a new kind of courage. He shrinks from this, and settles for a quiet

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quarter in heaven, “Dixhuitième and Georgian and serene” [l. 40], when he could have had the whole city for his possession. The real Lytton Strachey knew what he wanted, and the fact that in Stevens’s heaven he does not get what he does not want is hardly significant in itself. But it would be a disaster if the failure of nerve that Stevens portrays in this poem became a cultural phenomenon of our time, and a disaster of much more than literary importance. Mythology is curiously like technology in its development: the more man invents of it, the more strongly tempted he is to project it into something that controls him. The immense pressure toward conformity in thought and imagination is society’s anxious response to mythopoeia, creating institutional religion in one age and total political alignments in another. No one person, certainly not one critic, can kill this dragon who guards our word-hoard, but for some of us, at any rate, there can be no question of going back to our secluded Georgian quarters, from which serenity has long since disappeared.

14 Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts 1966

From StS, 56–65. Originally published (without the notes, and with two minor variations) in The Hidden Harmony: Essays in Honor of Philip Wheelwright, ed. Oliver Johnson et al. (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), 13–22. Translated into Chinese in 1997. Philip Wheelwright (1901–70) was a friend of Frye’s who taught philosophy at different American universities; Frye often cited his work on Heraclitus and the Presocratics. He had most memorably been the driver of the car involved in a crash in which Frye’s arm was broken in 1950 (see Ayre, Northrop Frye, 226). The Festschrift was prepared for his sixty-fifth birthday and presented at the University of California at Riverside in 1966. Apparently the essay was not written specifically for this purpose, but was based on a lecture Frye had given at the University of Rochester (see letter to Oliver J. Johnson, NFF, 1988, box 60, file 7). Since it has proved impossible to date this appearance or to locate an original text for comparison, the 1966 date has been retained.

There is a time-honoured distinction which divides the arts into a major and a minor group, the fine and the useful, but this distinction is rapidly losing all its fineness and most of its usefulness, and is now practically vestigial. It was never in any case a distinction among artists, only among the arts themselves. In reading Cellini’s autobiography we can see how the well-trained artist of that day was ready to switch from a commission in the “major” arts to one in the “minor” ones and back again, with no loss of status or feeling of incongruity. We think of Michelangelo as dwelling on the loftiest summits of the major arts, but Michelangelo too had his handyman assignments, such as designing the uniform of the

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Papal Guards, in which he acquitted himself indifferently but not incompetently. Similar conditions still prevail. In the early years of our marriage, when finances were a bit difficult, my wife assisted the family fortunes by getting a job painting magnolias on coffee trays. She met a sculptress at a party, and approached her with some trepidation, feeling that anyone who practised so majestic an art might take a dim view of her magnolia project. The sculptress, however, had been living on a private income cut off at the source as a result of the war, and she was making her living painting roses on babies’ chamber pots. One of the primitive functions of art is the production of luxury goods for a ruling class: armour for the warrior, vestments for the priest, jewellery and regalia for the king. Eventually the same kind of social demand produces temples, cathedrals, castles, and palaces, with all their contained treasures. Such art is often characterized by great complexity and ingenious skill, a skill sometimes regarded with superstitious awe by contemporaries who do not possess it. One thinks of the legends of the mysterious smiths and forgers of weapons like Weyland and Hephaestus, of the long series of enchanted spears, magic swords, and helmets of invisibility in romance, of the deities begotten by the Greek veneration for such work, the Cabeiroi and Dactyls and Cyclops and Telchines,1 of the many elaborate descriptions of works of “minor” art from Homer’s shield of Achilles onward. The Beowulf poet’s favourite aesthetic judgment is “curiously wrought,” a phrase he usually applies to armour.2 In our own day we notice how often an unsophisticated eye falls with particular delight on elaborate embroideries or Chinese ivory carvings, the delight being expressed in some such formula as “look at all the work in that.” As a ruling class becomes less primitive, the work done for it begins to look more and more like unusually expensive and elaborate toys, as we can see in Fabergé, for example. It is understandable that Yeats should associate his nostalgia for aristocracy with “many ingenious lovely things” of this sort, including the toy bird in Sailing to Byzantium.3 At the same time, as an ascendant class gets more and more of a monopoly of the art produced in its society, it extends its ownership over the “major” arts, too, especially of painting and sculpture, which, unlike works of literature, may become the exclusive possession of their purchaser. And although patronage normally restricts such works of art to a small minority, other patrons, such as the church, may in the stained glass and frescoes of its cathedrals make them to some degree a genu-

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inely public art. I say to some degree, as the old cliché about the art of cathedrals being a “Bible of the poor”4 could apply only to those of the poor who had exceedingly long-range vision. Sheer elaboration, as an aesthetic form of conspicuous consumption, still exists, or did until recently. My own city of Toronto possesses an extraordinary example: a palace of an exuberant millionaire known as “Casa Loma,” one wing of which is bastard French Renaissance and the other wing bastard Spanish Renaissance, like Siamese twins born out of wedlock. But the rise of democracy (in contrast to the oligarchy of which Casa Loma is an expression) gives a functional cast to public art, and thereby to public taste generally, and the industrial revolution has transferred the “curiously wrought” arts from craftsmanship to mechanism. Elaboration is now mainly in the area represented by the housewife with a new garbage-disposal unit or the teenager with his attention absorbed by the viscera of a motorcycle. Such things, of course, belong to the useful rather than the fine arts, but so did their ancestors: even the most useless of aristocratic toys still had the social role of dramatizing a certain standard of living. As a result the “creative” arts have tended increasingly to form a united front, with the “major” and “minor” distinction becoming of less account. We can see this tendency starting in William Morris. For Morris there were two forms of production, the creative and the mechanical. The former is genuine work, and in Morris’s thought work is identified with the creative act. Genuine work is true “manufacture,” in the original sense of something made by a brain-directed hand, and it tends towards social freedom as surely as mechanical production leads toward exploitation and mass slavery.5 Morris thus assigns a revolutionary social role to the creative arts, but what he sees as essentially creative in the creative arts is design, and design is something that fine and useful arts have in common. Because of his interest in the social role of art, Morris found his centre of gravity in the “minor” arts, and when he practised painting and poetry he treated them as “minor” arts. In doing so he threw down a challenge to the theory of criticism. Is not what we consider “major” about the major arts simply their association with the luxury goods of a ruling class? Even literature has always regarded the most major forms of its art as being connected, as in epic and tragedy, with the portrayal of ruling-class figures. Any exhibition of abstract or nonobjective art today will illustrate how far we have gone in the direction of emphasizing design in painting and

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sculpture. And if we compare such an exhibition with one of handcrafts or industrial design, we can see that the real relation between them now is not that of major to minor art, but of theory to practice, the disinterested to the applied forms of the same constructive principles. The kind of modern building which seems the result of an armaments race between the makers of glass and the makers of curtains shows similar tendencies. It seems almost as though in the visual arts there is now only one art, the art of design, and what used to be different arts are variations of it in different media. This is naturally a considerable overstatement, though it may have some value as that. Painting and sculpture differ from the applied arts most markedly in the extent of their capacity for representation. Hence representationalism tends to separate the major from the minor visual arts, and formalism tends to unify them. We notice that the more successful nations show a matter-of-fact realism in their arts, but that many aspects of such realism seem to have little creative staying power. Roman art is a good example of the way in which a realistic approach to art tends to become, first derivative, then pedestrian, and finally insipid, while the real creative energy of the culture goes into engineering. Something similar has happened in the totalitarian societies of our time, and there are strong tendencies toward it in the democracies. The reason is that what representational public art represents is mainly a society’s idealized picture of itself. A Roman goddess, say the Barberini Juno, suggests, not awe or veneration or majesty, but the impressiveness of a well-to-do Roman matron. “Beauty” in the human form tends to mean, in such an art, the representing of youth, good looks, and physical health. One feels of the wax mannequins in a modern shop window that any girl who succeeded in being as haughty and aloof as they look would be in an advanced stage of narcissism, and ought to see a psychiatrist before going out of business entirely. But the abstracted gaze of these models is directly descended from the placid idols of earlier cultures who mirror their own society’s dream of realizable pleasure. Realism in a healthy condition is another form of socially revolutionary art: it explores society, shows compassion with misery, brings strange gleams of beauty out of suffering, and ridicules absurdity and pomposity, especially in those with authority. In an unhealthy condition it expresses the will of the ascendant social group to preserve its status quo, and when it does this it seeks the facile idealizing which is what the word “beauty” so often means. Marxist criticism in Russia is now strug-

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gling to work out the paradox of a “socialist realism” which works properly in a genuinely revolutionary context, but can only turn sickly and parasitic when designed to support the party which achieved its revolution and has now the role of a ruling class. Realism is often associated with, and often rationalized as, a scientific view of the world, but the impetus behind realistic art, good or bad, is of social and not scientific origin. There is a curious law of art, seen in Van Gogh and in some of the Surrealists, that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination. There are two aspects of contemporary art in the democracies which are of particular importance as indicating that democracy is a genuinely revolutionary society, neither about to be revolutionized nor trying to retain its present structure, but mature enough to provide for both change and stability. One of these is realism doing its proper job of social criticism; the other is experimentalism in pure or abstract form. It is, quite consistently, an essential part of Marxist theory to attack “formalism” as the essence of the bourgeois in art. Both of the democratic tendencies are signs of a society that regards its social order as expendable and created for its convenience, the order being made for the sake of man and not man for the sake of the order. We said that with the growth of democracy and industry the production of luxury goods for a small minority gradually extends itself over a greater part of society. In proportion as it does this, it tends to extinguish another form of art: the popular creation of the minor arts. The immediate production of domestic arts, from pottery to household fetishes, and from peasants’ blouses to the weathervanes and bowsprits of American folk museums, can lead only the most furtive existence in our society, for what we call handcraft follows a different tradition, as we have just seen. Folk art is both popular and primitive, two words which mean much the same thing in the arts. These terms ordinarily mean that representation is subordinated to more geometrical and abstract forms of expression, sometimes merely through incompetence in drawing, sometimes through a naive but genuinely simple wisdom. But despite the pleasure with which we seize on any sign of such creativity, especially when it reaches into the major arts, as it does with painting by Grandma Moses and others, this current of creative energy in our society is now largely diverted into more expert and sophisticated channels (or canals, which mixes the metaphor

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less). It is still active and influential as a tradition, but hardly as a source of production in its own right. In contrast to the luxury goods spoken of earlier, which are produced for the centralizing forces in society, the aristocracy and the church, the popular arts are decentralized. William Morris’s conception of the social role of art takes off from here. Morris’s association of the minor arts with social freedom and stability is anarchist rather than Communist, and assumes as its goal a decentralizing of society. For Morris the state, and a fortiori the huge industrial empire, is a crude form of human community, the genuine form of which he restores and depicts in his News from Nowhere. If we realize that we associate the minor arts today mainly with the smaller countries, and think most readily of Swedish furniture, Swiss watches, Irish linen, or (until recently) Czechoslovakian glass, we can see some force in his idea. News from Nowhere is, however, an application of a more general principle that all culture, including the major arts, demands the decentralizing of society. Shelley’s preface to Prometheus Unbound proposes to break England down into a group of small communities, in which anonymous masses would become identifiable people, so that each community could follow in its own way the tradition of the small-town cultures of Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, or Elizabethan London.6 T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture is preoccupied with Welsh nationalism, Scottish nationalism, the encouraging of local peculiarities of all kinds, and with the advisability, for most people, of never leaving the place where they were born.7 But whatever the merits of the art produced in our time, it will certainly be an international art,8 and decentralizing theories seem at present to be a hopeless anachronism. I am a Canadian intellectual, and therefore (in Canada it is a therefore) I am a cultural regionalist, but the extent to which Canadian culture can grow out of the Canadian soil I realize in advance to be an exceedingly limited one. The present organization of educational media in the universities, the museums, the art galleries, seems almost deliberately designed to bring about a change from decentralized to international culture. For the contemporary artist, all the arts of all traditions and epochs are available for comparative study, the primitive and the historical, the barbaric and the sophisticated. The basis for comparison, when any is made, is obviously design. The contemporary artist is as free to follow the influences of Benin bronzes as of Rodin, of Etruscan cave paintings as of Cézanne. The

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enormous expansion of technical resources has united the artist more closely with the educational media, so closely, in fact, that an “arts” course can be a preparation for the understanding of contemporary art in a way that it could hardly have been a century ago. At the same time most of the expansion, as compared with the cultural traditions of a century ago, has been in the area of the popular and primitive arts. If these somewhat random remarks about the visual arts have any cogency, is it possible to see analogies between the visual arts and literature which will throw any light on the situation of literature and its criticism today? Analogies are tricky things, and even striking analogies may be specious. Some of the phenomena noted above have no genuine literary analogues at all. If the visual arts have many practitioners who, like Cellini, can tackle either a statue or a salt cellar, one might expect the same situation in literature. The poet or novelist could well be a verbal handyman, able to turn out a piece of advertising copy or a newspaper report or ghostwrite a politician’s speech as part of his professional competence with words. This is by no means the rule, because the applied verbal arts, especially journalism and advertising, are imprisoned in conventions so rigid that no one who has learned them is fit for anything else unless he starts all over again. Those who followed in the New Yorker the record of Miss Marianne Moore’s struggles to make her poetic talents useful to the Ford Motor Company in its search for a name for its new car (it was finally called “Edsel”) will understand that the gap between the poet and society is one that the poet cannot do much to bridge.9 In the production of luxury goods, again, the role of literature is not always easy to trace. One can see that in literature, as elsewhere, what is designed as a toy or plaything is mechanically complex: detective stories are more ingenious than serious novels, and light verse is more deliberately contrived than heavy verse. There has, of course, been a constant demand for the services of the poet in congratulatory odes, masques, and the kind of work associated with the office of poet laureate. The masque, however, as Ben Jonson, the first official poet laureate, discovered, follows the general rule of drama that the more spectacular the conception of the drama is, the less important the poet’s role. The remarks above on the importance of experimentalism in a democratic society and of keeping realism to its proper critical role would apply to literature equally with the other arts. But there are two features of literature which make all analogies with visual arts difficult. One is the way in which literature

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is decentralized by the barriers of language. The other is the fact that no art of words can ever be wholly abstract, in the way that painting and sculpture and music can be. There must always be an identifiable content, which corresponds to representation in painting and sculpture. Content, unlike design, demands some knowledge of the cultural background of the work. Hence the presence of a representational core, along with a specific language to learn, helps to slow down the internationalizing of literature. Perhaps it is a good thing that it is slowed down, but it is reasonable to expect that literature will to some degree follow the tendencies of the other arts, and, if so, its criticism needs to be prepared for such tendencies. The real problem for our analogy is this: what are the principles of design in literature which enable us to take something of the same perspective towards it that we can take toward the visual arts and music? We notice that one form of literature seems to make its way easily across all barriers of language and culture, and this is the folk tale. The reason for its ability to travel is clearly that it is pure verbal design. It is made up of a number of stock themes that can be counted and indexed; its plot belongs to an identifiable type; there is hardly any content beyond the plot, and therefore the plot can be readily abstracted from the language in which it is expressed. There is little of the feeling, which every translator of a fully developed work of literature has, that some elements are so bound up with the conventions of a specific culture that they are hard to convey, and that other elements are so bound up with the features of a specific language that they cannot be conveyed at all. It is, then, the mythos, Aristotle’s word for plot or narrative, which is the element of design in literature. It has been an established principle in literary criticism ever since Aristotle that the poetic, as distinct from the historical, narrative presents the typical or universal event rather than the specific and particular one.10 If we keep the plot in mind as the principle of design in any work of literature which contains a fiction, we can see a host of family likenesses which ought to make “comparative literature” as comprehensible and systematic a study as the comparative study of folk tales. What begins to emerge from the chaos of literature are certain recurring principles of verbal design, embodied in such conventions and genres as comedy, romance, and tragedy, which link Shakespeare with Kalidasa, Melville with the Old Testament, Proust with Lady Murasaki. This is a less myopic

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approach to the study of comparative literature than the one employed at present, but one which promises more fruitful results.11 Such typical plots (mythoi) show also a clear line of descent from the myths of early mythologies, and illustrate the place of literary fiction and drama as a cultural descendant of mythology. Plot is a clear and simple example of overall verbal design; but, apart from the fact that not all works of literature have plots, we need to isolate also an example of a unit of design. Poetic language is associative rather than descriptive language, and the primitive function of poetry, a function it never loses and frequently returns to, seems to have something to do with identifying the human and the nonhuman worlds. We see this function clearly in the kind of mythology out of which a great deal of literature grows: stories of gods who are human in conception and character and yet are identified with aspects of nature, and are sun-gods or tree-gods or sky-gods. The unit of identity, where two things are said to be the same thing and yet preserve a twofold aspect, appears in poetry as metaphor, and this I take to be the fundamental unit of verbal design in literature. Here again the actual process of identification is one that does not depend either on language (though of course there may be linguistic identifications, as in puns), or on the peculiarities of a specific culture. When an Italian and a Chinese poet both employ metaphor, it makes for very little difficulty if one chooses a rose and the other a lotus. The tendency of contemporary poets, and many novelists and dramatists as well, to be attracted toward myth and metaphor, rather than toward a realistic emphasis on content, is thus a cultural tendency parallel to the emphasis on abstract design in the visual arts. It exhibits also the same paradox, or seeming paradox: it is usually a highly sophisticated, even erudite and academic, approach to the art, yet the features of the art which are most interesting to it are primitive and popular features. Dylan Thomas seems more complex and baffling than Theodore Dreiser, yet it is easier for me to imagine Dylan Thomas genuinely popular than to imagine Dreiser, for all his obvious and considerable merits, genuinely popular. This is not to suggest a preference between two utterly incomparable things, but to suggest that writers who concentrate on literary design rather than content, despite their superficial difficulties, are the writers most likely to reach the widest public most quickly. The principles of literary design are also the readiest means by which literature can be effectively taught, at any level from kindergarten to graduate school. And as myth and metaphor are habits of mind and not

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merely artificial devices, such teaching should lead us, not simply to admire works of literature more, but to transfer something of their imaginative energy to our own lives. It is that transfer of imaginative energy which is the aim of all education in the arts, and to the possibility of which the arts themselves bear witness.

15 Literature and Myth 1967

From Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Study, ed. James Thorpe (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1967), 27–54. French translation by Jacques Ponthoreau published as “Littérature et mythe” in Poétique: revue de théorie et d’analyse littéraires, no. 8 (1971): 489–514. Also translated into German (1977). The essay in its English form was accompanied by a thirteen-page bibliography of myth criticism, not reproduced here, for which Frye provided the following headnote: This bibliography cannot do more than indicate the general scope and range of myth criticism, and the sort of subject with which it is most likely to be connected: comparative religion, anthropology, psychology, iconography, Biblical typology, allegory, and the like. The arrangement is roughly chronological, and lists mainly secondary sources. It begins with works of Classical and Biblical scholarship, and proceeds to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, taking particular account of the cosmology, iconography, mythological handbooks, and emblem books in those two periods. The next great mythopoeic age is the Romantic one, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth, when a more scientific approach to comparative mythology began, to Frazer and Freud at the end of the century. There follows a selected list of books since Frazer, most of them strongly influenced by him, a number of works of a type of mythical fiction that would hardly have developed without a similar interest in criticism (it is hardly practicable to list all the parallel tendencies in modern poetry, such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Dylan Thomas’s Altarwise by Owl-Light sequence), and a few examples of works of myth criticism in literature, including more specialized studies of single myth figures. Some attempt is made also to document the remark in the essay about the peculiar aptitude of American (and Canadian) literature for this kind of critical treatment.

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At every age myth criticism has been close to highly speculative thinking, in or near the occult area, and as applied to literature it is still in an experimental stage, its scholarly organization not yet completed. Hence, while omission from this bibliography proves nothing whatever about the merits of what may have been omitted only by accident or oversight, there has been a real effort to screen out books of doubtful value. One or two have been listed which do not stand on the same level of scholarship or historical interest as the others, but nothing has been included which would really mislead an experienced reader. I am greatly indebted to my research associate, Professor Jay Macpherson, for her work on this bibliography.

N.F.

A myth, in its simplest and most normal significance, is a certain kind of story, generally about a god or other divine being. Myths in this sense are associated with primitive cultures or with archaic stages of developed ones, and when we describe certain features of our own time as myths, we tend to imply that they are fixations or survivals. A myth may be studied in regard to its content or in regard to its form. The content of a myth relates it to specific social functions. Seen as content, it becomes at once obvious that myths are not stories told just for fun: they are stories told to explain certain features in the society to which they belong. They explain why rituals are performed; they account for the origin of law, of totems, of clans, of the ascendant social class, of the social structure resulting from earlier revolutions or conquests. They chronicle the dealings of gods with man, or describe how certain natural phenomena came to be as they are. Such myths can hardly be understood, in this context, apart from the cultural pattern of the societies that produced them, and they form the main body of what might be called, and in later religion is called, revelation, the understanding of its traditions, its customs, its situation in the world, which a society accepts as primary data. For although every society produces its own myths, it is rare for a society to realize that its myths are its own creations. Myths are usually thought of as given, as dictated by a deity or descending from a remote antiquity existing before history began: in illo tempore, in Mircea Eliade’s phrase.1 And, of course, as myths continue to be repeated in traditional form, the fact that they are given rather than invented becomes increasingly true. Thus there is a curious but persistent connection between myth and false history. That is, what the myth presents is not what happened in the

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past, but what is said to have happened in the past in order to justify what is in the present. Such myth has the social function of rationalizing the status quo: it explains, not merely why we do the things we do, but why we ought to go on doing them. When a mythology becomes codified in a sacred book, this connection with false history still shows itself. Sacred books often turn on an alleged historical event, like the giving of the law to Moses, or purport to record the teachings of a charismatic religious leader. But under historical analysis the event usually turns into a myth and the teachings into the body of doctrine which is already held by those who revere the teacher. The Analects of Confucius, according to Arthur Waley, tell us not so much what Confucius said as what Confucians believed,2 and the Christian Gospels are now generally recognized to be written within the framework of the beliefs of the early church. It is often assumed that the mythical features of a religion are later accretions on what was originally a historical event, but no sacred book of any of the great religions allows us to separate the historical from the mythical. That is, we cannot with any certainty reconstruct a premythical stage in the establishment of any religion. In some religions, such as Islam or some of the nineteenth-century cults, the sacred book can be seen emerging as part of the historical process, but even there the beliefs are founded on the acceptance of the sacred book as inspired by something outside history. We notice too how often such religions (Mormonism, Anglo-Israelitism)3 involve a mythical reshaping of history, like the Mosaic contract in the Old Testament. Myths are thus stories of a peculiar seriousness or importance: the events they recount are believed to have really happened, or at least to explain something of crucial importance to the community. They are mainly stories about the permanent gods of the community who are still worshipped, and so they tend to become permanent stories, attached to others told about the same gods. The power ascribed to the gods, again, gives the stories about them a peculiar significance for and relevance to human destiny. Hence myths expand into a definite canon of stories which we call a mythology. As localities are welded into larger political units, the gods of one locality also tend to become identified with the corresponding gods of another, and this accelerates the growth of a unified mythology. But the more seriously the mythology is taken, the more it acts as a conservative braking force on social change. It presents, in short, a society’s view of its own social contract with gods, ancestors, and the order of nature, and later contract theories are rationalized myths of a

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most significant kind. The importance of myths, studied in relation to their content, is thus mainly sociological, and their study eventually becomes an aspect of social science, assuming that comparative religion, which is one form of such study, is a social science. The relation of myth to physical science is of little importance. Perhaps some myths may have satisfied some primitive form of scientific curiosity, but it is not easy to find myths which were primarily designed for this purpose. Myths are stories told in connection with natural phenomena, rather than stories told as explanations of those phenomena, however allegorical. And to the extent that they are accepted as explanations, as in the Hebrew myth of creation, the rise of science simply annihilates the myth: there is no mutation of the myth into another form, as there is in theories of social contract. In characterizing the gods of myths, the obvious models are the human beings of the ruling class, who are privileged to be more passionate and capricious than their inferiors. Gods have also some connection with the order of nature, and the more arbitrary and unpredictable events, such as storms, attract more immediate attention than the orderly circling of the stars in their courses. Hence it is hardly surprising to find gods in myths, even in the myths of a high civilization, presented as cowardly, lustful, or treacherous, as well as taking the high arrogant line with man that masters of indisputable power can afford to take. This causes some conflict when the feeling grows that gods ought to practise what they preach, or have actually been practising it all along and have been libelled by the poets. Hence the attack of Plato on the Homeric mythology,4 and Plutarch’s determination to equate what is true of the gods with what is morally acceptable.5 But the general conclusion of later Greek philosophy, that all gods were emblems or aspects of a uniform divine or natural order, never coincided with a fixed canon of mythology. The stories told about the gods remained on the “some men say” level. Hebraic religion, on the other hand, did achieve such a canon, as a result of a long and relentless process of editing its traditional myths. The mythological and conceptual aspects of Hebrew religion were unified to such lasting effect that even a century ago Christians were only with great trepidation and soul-searching beginning to admit that the Biblical stories of Adam and Noah were myths. But the conservative and hampering effect of this unified mythology on the development of philosophy and science, even on art and literature, is obvious in Hebrew culture itself, and persisted into the Christian period.

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When myths are studied in regard to their form, they are studied primarily as stories, and are to be primarily related, not to their own specific culture, but to other stories of the same shape and kind. If a Greek myth shows a strong similarity in form to an Eskimo one, the similarity is irrelevant to a historian studying the Greeks or to an anthropologist studying the Eskimos: it is not irrelevant to a literary critic. As we shall see more fully later, myths were studied primarily for their content, or supposed content, as long as scholars had only Classical and Biblical myths to study. But the nineteenth-century explosion of knowledge about the myths of other cultures brought about a shift of attention from the content of one specific canon of myths to the forms of many similar ones. The great dividing line is Frazer’s Golden Bough, which collects myths and rituals of the same general shape from all over the world without regard to the cultural differences involved. This work was intended by Frazer to be a work of anthropology using a “comparative” method much in vogue in the nineteenth century. But it has become increasingly obvious that The Golden Bough is not primarily a book on anthropology at all, but, like Frazer’s editions of Pausanias, Apollodorus, and the Fasti, primarily a work of Classical scholarship using anthropological illustrations and parallels. That is, it is a work of literary criticism, the only field in which his type of “comparative method” is really valid. It is much the same method that is used by scholars who catalogue the themes and motifs of folk tales. The difference between such terms as “myth,” “folk tale,” and “legend” begins to blur as soon as we think of such things formally, as types of stories. The word “legend” is perhaps more proto-historical in reference. We have myths of Zeus and Aphrodite; we have legends of beings, like Theseus or Oedipus, thought of as culture-heroes or figures whose descendants can still be pointed to as long as the legend and the culture are connected. Legend, then, is an early and easy-going form of tradition, before there is a general demand for history, conceived as the study of what actually happened. But the boundary line between myth and legend is impossible to draw: the same kinds of stories appear in both. Folk tales, again, are stories similar to, even identical with, myths in their structure. The chief difference seems to be that folk tales lack the particular seriousness that is characteristic of myth: even if they are traditional and believed, they are not central to tradition and belief. But myth, folk tale, and legend form a single corpus of stories: whichever category we concentrate on, the other two adhere to it. In the Old Testament, we rec-

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ognize myth in the story of Adam, legend in the stories of the patriarchs, folk tale in the story of Samson, and what German critics call sage in the story of Elijah. But these are differences of emphasis and context rather than of actual genre. Nowhere is there a clear line between myth, legend, historical reminiscence, history manipulated for didactic purposes, and actual history. It is clear that whatever in the Bible is historically accurate is not there because it is historically accurate, but for reasons that would make inaccurate history (or pure literature, like the Book of Job) equally acceptable. The total corpus of stories has two characteristics that are important for us. First, it is impossible to trace its origin. Our evidence cannot go back beyond the age of writing, and such story-types vanish into the long ages of oral tradition that must have preceded all written literature. Second, such stories, even when believed to be true, are not obviously credible: that is, they are not plausible. They belong in a world of marvels and mysteries and arbitrary acts, and the obligation to believe them is recognized, from Plato to Sir Thomas Browne and beyond, as an intellectual humiliation, whether the humiliation is resented, as it is by Plato, or gladly accepted as a sacrificium intellectus, as it is by Browne.6 What a man really believes, however, is what his actions show that he believes. By this standard Don Quixote’s belief that his windmill was a giant was a genuine belief. But Quixote also remarks to Sancho Panza that the Golden Age would soon return if people would only see things as they are, and not allow themselves to be deluded by enchanters who make giants look like windmills.7 In other words, a belief which is voluntarily assumed as an intellectual handicap, as something that conflicts with the rest of one’s experience, soon modulates from actual belief into an anxiety about belief. Myths, we said, because of their central and permanent importance in a culture, tend to stick together and form a mythology, whereas folk tales simply travel over the world interchanging their motifs and themes. Folk tales thus have a nomadic cultural history, while myths grow up in connection with a culturally rooted religion. It is not any structural feature in the stories of Phaethon or Endymion that makes them myths, for we could have—and do have—folk tales of the same kind: it is their attachment to a growing body of stories told about Apollo and Artemis, and the further attachment of Apollo and Artemis to the Olympian hierarchy, that makes them myths. Apollo does not appear to begin as a sun-god, but he becomes one, and in doing so he eventually absorbs the Helios of

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the Phaethon story. The true myth thus becomes an episode in a mythology. And as a culture develops, its mythology, or body of traditional and religious data, tends to become encyclopedic. At a certain stage of development a mythology produces a theogony, a connected narrative beginning with the origin of the gods and of the departments of nature they personify, such as heaven and earth, the creation and original state of mankind, the inauguration of law and culture, and so on down to what may be called the cultural present. Some theogonies carry on the story to the end of time and the future annihilation of the world, though this is an extension of their normal function, which is to present a version of society’s original contract. Besides this, mythology supplies a number of episodic tales illustrating the relations of gods with one another or with man, usually with a cautionary moral; it identifies or interrelates the various gods of local cults; it sanctions the law by giving it a divine origin; it provides a divine ancestry for its kings and heroes. Such a mythological canon does not necessarily exist in one specifically codified form, but it has a real existence nonetheless. Thus a mythology expands into an account of the origin, situation, and destiny of mankind, or the relevant portion of mankind, an account which is still, in form, a series of stories, but stories with obvious philosophical and moral implications. As a society develops, its myths become revised, selected, expurgated, or reinterpreted to suit its changing needs. We have noticed that an immense amount of editorial labour obviously intervened between the origins of the myths in the Old Testament and their present form. The more archaic stories are often felt to be in bad theological taste: as Plutarch says, gods represented as doing unworthy things are no gods [Moralia, 417e–f]. Similarly in the Bible: the mistaken impulse of King David to break an ancient taboo and take a census was prompted by an angry Jehovah in the earlier book of Kings, by Satan in the later book of Chronicles. In this way a tradition develops of explaining or rationalizing earlier and more primitive myths. Myths may be interpreted as allegories illustrating moral truths. Hence the device known in Greek culture as hyponoia, the attempt, say, to save the faces of both Homer and Aphrodite by explaining the story of Hephaestus’s net in the Odyssey as an allegory of something profound and respectable.8 Or mythology as a whole may be interpreted allegorically, as primitive science, as esoteric philosophy, as distorted history. The interpreting of myth, chiefly as moral allegory, was one of the cultural heavy industries of Western Europe between Plutarch and the late Renaissance, and survived as late as

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Ruskin. The natural direction of hyponoia, or the moralizing and allegorizing of myth, is away from the story towards the conception. Thus the story of Narcissus “really means” that pride goes before a fall, or that self-hypnosis is induced by egoism. Story and personality come to be thought of as archaic nuisances or mere disguises for something more serious, intended either to deceive or amuse the superficial. Eventually the story is replaced by the conceptual myth, the abstract ethical or metaphysical doctrine. Even where religious anxieties demand that some myths, at any rate, must still be accepted as true stories, the conceptualizing tendency goes as far as it can. A second tendency in mythology, already mentioned, is also important for literature: the tendency to identify all the characters, usually gods, who are sufficiently similar for identification to be at all plausible. The most primitive gods appear to be epiphanic or local ones; a large settled civilization develops a definite number of gods, associated with various departments of nature, who absorb a great many of such local divinities by such identification. Sometimes differences in the characters of the local divinities are reflected in some inconsistency in the canonical accounts of the god or hero who absorbs them: the stories of Heracles afford instructive examples. As large civilizations expand into world states, the idea of one God appears, and identification by absorption then becomes total. The wholesale identifying of Greek and Roman gods which has given us Jupiter and Venus as names for Greek deities is a stage in this process. The same tendencies continue after a monotheistic religion has been established: in Christianity the saints play a prominent role in absorbing local gods, and Notre Dame de Chartres is the same person as Notre Dame de Crabtree Mills, Quebec. It is obvious from what we have said that the corpus of myth, folk tale, legend, and the rest that emerges from the oral tradition is, in one of its aspects, already literature: it is not something else that develops into literature. It is only by a necessary economy of language that we can speak of a myth, a folk tale, or a legend at all: none of these things really exist except in specific verbal forms, and these verbal forms are literary forms. We notice that the development of literature tends to parallel the social development of the corpus. We might expect to find the growing point of literature in folk tale rather than in myth, so far as these areas can be distinguished. Folk tales are often told purely for entertainment; there is not usually any obligation to believe them; they afford more scope to the storyteller’s ingenuity and impulse to vary his material. And of course folk

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tale, along with legend, is of immense importance in literature. Myths, again, take on a new lease of literary life once their connection with belief and cult disappears, as Classical mythology did in Christian Europe. It seems curious that collections of myths and stories near to myths should be made for purely literary purposes, as they are in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and that poets should be constantly turning to such stories at a time when nobody believed in or worshipped the deities who figure in them, but so it is. It looks as though there were some inherent connection between myth and poetry that is closer than the connection with folk tale and legend. In the first place, the central and permanent significance of myth is reflected in the history of literature as well. As later critics constantly pointed out, the original mythmakers were the poets, and in Greece, where mythology never quite became theology, Homer and Hesiod had a cultural authority that extended beyond literature. In Christian times, we find Dante and Milton turning to different aspects of the mythical structure of Christianity, in spite of the subordination of poetic genius to other cultural demands that the choice of such themes made necessary. When poets recreate myth, they work in a different direction from the conceptual tendencies of the allegorists. The poet’s impulse is to retell the story, or invent a new one with the same characters, instead of rationalizing the story. His cultural influence is thus in stressing the concrete, personal, storytelling elements in the myth which the conceptualizers tend to pass over or treat as archaic. Thus Plato was enough of a philosopher to want to censor the poets, and ridicule those who tried to justify them, but enough of a poet to invent his own myths, usually with the familiar names of Zeus and Prometheus. The gods, who are the normal characters of myth, are usually identified with various aspects of nature, and identity makes a relationship metaphorical. Neptune can cause a storm at sea because he is a sea-god: in other words he is a metaphor for the sea. This metaphorical link between a natural event and a personality is an obstacle to the allegorist, but essential to the poet. The allegorist tends to try to drop the divine personality and concentrate on the event: the poet tends to see the event only as symbolic of the activity of the personality. To sum up our argument thus far: myths are a part of the corpus of stories that every society has in its earlier phases of development. They are similar in form to other stories, some of which we distinguish as legends or folk tales, but are regarded as having in their content an element of peculiar and central importance. The question arises, How are we to

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respond to this importance? One obvious answer is, By believing what the myth says; by attaching its content to the rest of our experience. This is the answer primarily insisted on in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and for centuries the notion persists that, for example, if the Bible says a great fish swallowed Jonah, there are special rewards for the reader who can swallow both. But even a dogmatic mythology deals with divine beings who can do anything, and who, being so often identified with elements of nature, take little pains to be credible or even moral. Sometimes attempts are made to rationalize a myth on a literal basis: thus either the fish were exempted from the curse of Noah’s flood or some special act must have drowned them too. But such efforts soon perish through their inherent fatuity. From here the response to the myth takes one of two directions. Either the myth represents something which is true in spite of the story, or it is a story to be responded to as a story. We may call the first type of response allegorical, the second archetypal. They are not mutually exclusive: they are distinguishable, but they coexist, and help each other to develop. The allegorical response is a semi-poetic one: it shifts the basis, as Aristotle says the poet does in comparison with the historian, from what was true, or did happen, to the kind of thing that is true, or does happen.9 Hence it rescues the dignity of a mythology no longer believed in, like the Classical mythology in the Christian period, as well as providing what Browne calls “an easie and Platonick description” of matters of faith.10 But it sets up a drift away from the story into the moral or historical truths illustrated by the story. To the allegorist, a myth’s nearest relations are with other myths closest to it in subject matter: the stories of Narcissus and of Phaethon are both exempla of pride, different in their fabulous disguise, but identical in their moral truth. But mythology, regarded as a corpus of stories, united in form to legend and folk tale (and of course to other literary forms, such as hymns, which attach themselves to the myths that are part of a cult), has literary characteristics. The essential link is indicated by the Greek word mythos, which means the plot or narrative of a story. Literature inherits a mythology: in this sense the poet finds before him certain stories to which a good deal of traditional weight and authority has already been attached. The distinction between canonical and apocryphal stories reappears in literature, as when European poets inherited a Judaeo-Christian mythology related to what Tillich calls ultimate concern,11 and a Classical mythology which had lost its connection with belief and had become purely imaginative and poetic. One would expect poets to concentrate entirely on the

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latter, as their peculiar province, but in fact we find that the central position of Christianity in Western culture is reflected in its literature. Now just as the allegorical interpretation of myth is semi-poetic, so the poetic recreation of it is semi-conceptual. The poet tries to make his traditional story imaginatively credible, and he also interprets it incidentally. His primary task, however, is not to interpret but to represent; he transfers an ancient tale from the past to the present, from something inherited to something that confronts the reader immediately; from (if the myth is canonical) the particular event in the past, the truth of which is believed, to the universal event, the significance of which is comprehended. Individual myths form a mythology; individual works of literature form an imaginative body for which there is (as Aristotle remarked two thousand years ago) no word.12 If there were such a word, it would be much easier to understand that literature, conceived as such a total imaginative body, is in fact a civilized, expanded, and developed mythology. We saw that one important social function of a mythology is to give a society an imaginative sense of its contract, of its abiding relations with the gods, with the order of nature, and within itself. When a mythology becomes a literature, its social function of providing a society with an imaginative vision of the human situation directly descends from its mythological parent. In this development the typical forms of myth become the conventions and genres of literature, and it is only when convention and genre are recognized to be essential aspects of literary form that the connection of literature with myth becomes self-evident. The mythical Golden Age thus becomes the pastoral convention; the mythical accounts of man’s fallen and helpless state become the conventions of irony; the mythical sense of the separation between the power of the gods and the pride of man becomes the convention of tragedy; myths of heroic adventures become the conventions of romance. The relation of literature to mythology may be explicit or implicit. We have explicit relation when Dante and Milton recreate the central Christian myths of redemption or fall, or when Keats and Shelley recreate the myths of Endymion or Prometheus, or when French dramatists from Racine to Cocteau recreate the Greek myths that were already recreated in Greek drama. One reason for the explicit attraction of poets to mythology is technical. Because myths so often deal with divine beings who are identified with aspects of nature or society, the language of myth is metaphorical, and it is the metaphorical freedom that, for instance, the myth of Prometheus gives to Shelley that attracts him to the myth rather than

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to a contemporary social or political theme, where such mythical conceptions as the return of Atlantis would be absurd. Again, we spoke of the tendency on the part of a mythology to become encyclopedic, providing a vision of the human situation from myths of beginning (creation, fall, Golden Age, lost paradise, killing the dragon of chaos, etc.) to myths of end (apocalypse, millennium, Utopia; or else visions of annihilation and Götterdämmerung). Sacred books, notably the Bible, show a tendency to reflect this encyclopedic form in their structure, and a work of literature, when explicitly mythological, finds an implicit context for its myth in relation to literature as a whole, as a total imaginative body. Thus while the interpreter or commentator on a myth finds the profundity of the myth in its meaning as allegory, the poet, in recreating the myth, finds its profundity in its archetypal framework. On the other hand, it often happens that a specific language of mythology petrifies into highbrow slang, as Philomela became a merely facile substitute for the imaginative experience of a nightingale’s song in the eighteenth century. Keats’s nightingale ode is no less mythical in its treatment of this experience than it would have been if Keats had explicitly alluded to the Ovidian story; the poem is not different in kind from the Ode to Psyche, which is explicitly mythical. But the nightingale ode follows the Wordsworthian practice, the theory of which appears to be the principle that archetypes of myth are most vividly experienced when they are not directly named, but when they are rediscovered in ordinary experience. This is one form of the implicit approach to mythology; another form is exemplified by Shakespeare, whose basis of operations is not myth, but legend in tragedy and history and folk tale in comedy. In modern times a great deal of realistic and ironic literature is implicitly mythical in the same way, but may be made explicitly so by a single allusion or sometimes by a title (Resurrection, Germinal, Sodome et Gomorrhe, Absalom! Absalom!, etc.).13 The allusion indicates the author’s view of the archetypal context of his work, its place in the total framework that literature reveals to the imagination. The fact that poets think archetypally is often indicated by a reference to myth. When Yeats hopes that his daughter will think opinions are accursed because he once knew a woman who was beautiful and opinionated,14 a reader may feel that Yeats should have made a statistical survey before making assertions about the correlation between female beauty and female opinions, or that no daughter’s opinions were likely to be more absurd than some that Yeats himself held. But Yeats’s thought, being poetic thought, is

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moving up towards the vision of an archetype, to Venus in her aspect as the wife of Vulcan, and to this archetype both his daughter and Maud Gonne, as well as everything else in that area of his experience, are assimilated. The moral allegorization of myth depends on a general belief in a permanent body of moral truths which the wisdom of all ages has endeavoured to express. As the sense of the relativity of moral and philosophical truth grows, the study of myth tends to become the anthropological and historical placing of the myth in its cultural context which we spoke of at first. The historical student of myth, however, inherits the conception of the myth as a disguise for a real truth. In this new context a great many myths tend to become historical reminiscences, allegories of something that happened earlier. The Biblical flood story is Sumerian in origin, and a layer of mud in Sumerian excavations indicates that a deluge did occur there. Frazer, in his Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, finds that there are flood stories all over the world (except in Africa, where a story about the sky falling seems to have replaced it) and ascribes them all to local catastrophes of the same type. This, however, seems a kind of unconscious reductio ad absurdum of the method, perhaps even an example of the way that Frazer’s industry often seems to be part of a curious imaginative obtuseness. Any given myth may have resulted from a local accident, but if it resembles dozens of other myths in form, surely we may suspect a feature in that form which does not oblige us to believe in an indefinite number of local accidents. I have mentioned this point because it illustrates the difficulty of dealing with similarities of form among myths of different cultures and periods on a purely historical basis. If we keep to the disguise conception of myth, all similarities among myths must result from similarities in the phenomena which they obliquely describe. Hence the student of myth, unless he ignores these similarities and confines himself to the myths of one culture, is strongly tempted to account for them on some general theory of origin. There have been many such theories. Once upon a time there was a school of wise men who concealed all mysteries in fables, and our existing myths are all distortions of these. This version, originally developed to explain the resemblances between Biblical and extra-Biblical myths, keeps turning up in various occult forms, the school of wise men being located in Atlantis or India or ancient Egypt, whence their doctrines and symbols were diffused around the world like the trade winds. Traces of this view still linger in, for instance, Jessie Weston’s From Ritual

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to Romance. Once upon a time there was a worldwide mythology of tree-worship, sun-worship, megalithic monuments, and reincarnation: this is the eighteenth-century “Druid” theory, still doing duty in H.G. Wells’s Outline of History. Once upon a time there was a matriarchal and lunar mythology with a dying god who was the Great Mother’s lover, perverted by a later patriarchal and solar myth which made the dying god a sacrifice offered by a father. Thus in Robert Graves, who adopts this version, our present notion of the Judgment of Paris must be the result of a misunderstanding: originally Paris must have been getting the apple from the triple goddess, not giving it.15 The Golden Bough itself, read in the same way, seems to suggest that once upon a time all mankind was organized into tribes with divine leaders who were killed and ceremonially eaten as soon as their strength began to fail. Other schematizations of the origin of myths, reducing them all to sun myths, zodiacal or astrological myths, ancestor or dead-hero myths, and the like, are by-products of the same tendencies. Now any (or possibly all) of these general theories of origin may eventually be confirmed by archaeology, but in the meantime they are somewhat conjectural. We have so little evidence even from archaeology. Stonehenge appears to be carefully oriented to the sun, but we do not know that its builders had a verbalized mythology. But this kind of prehistoric hypothesis, of a type so remarkably similar to the mythical histories of sacred books, already mentioned, becomes unnecessary if we think of myths as potential literary forms. For the literary critic, at least, the real meaning of a myth is revealed, not by its origin, which we know nothing about, but by its later literary career, as it becomes recreated by the poets. As Ruskin says, in a fine passage of The Queen of the Air: “The great question in reading a story is always, not what wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it; but what wise man first perfectly told, and what strong people first perfectly lived by it. And the real meaning of any myth is that which it has at the noblest age of the nations among whom it is current.”16 Thus a mythical story or theme is not a Platonic idea of which all later treatments are approximations, but an informing structural principle of literature, and the more we study the literary developments of a myth the more we learn about the myth. The book in the Bible known as the Song of Songs may have developed from village festival songs centring on a fertility-and-marriage myth like that of the Lord and Lady of the May in medieval England. Once in the Bible, it became assimilated to the mythical structure of the Bible and

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had a flourishing career in mystical poetry as an allegory of God’s love for the Church or human soul. The word “allegory” indicates that the tradition of allegorical interpretation played an important role in this literary development, as it often has done, but it would be uncritical to think of the development as a distortion or corruption of the original myth—so far as there was one. Normally, however, mythical stories tend to develop by response to a public’s growing demand for the plausible or credible, and the waning of its taste for the marvellous. I have elsewhere given the term (borrowed from Freud, though naturally the context is different in him) “displacement”17 to the process by which mythical stories about gods who can do anything become romances about heroes who can do almost anything, or heroines of tantalizing elusiveness or unshakable fidelity, and from there become stories of the foundling Tom Jones, the whorish but unquenchable Moll Flanders, or the virtue-rewarded Pamela. In this development the preservation of the original mythical outline of the story, as the feature that continues to give it shape, suspense, and denouement, is something that it is the concern of the critic to call to our attention. In literary criticism itself the allegorical tendency reappears in two types of criticism. A work of literature may be studied in relation to its time: that is, it may be studied as a historical allegory. Or it may be studied in relation to the life and experience of the man who wrote it, as a biographical or psychological allegory. As a historical allegory, the work of literature reflects the social facts of its own age: its historical events, its obsessive ideas, the conflicts and tensions in the social structure. Shelley’s treatment of the Prometheus myth is unintelligible unless we relate it to the situation of Europe as Shelley saw it in 1819, after the French Revolution and Napoleon, before the greater revolution that he saw as imminent. We have to think of it also as a product of the cultural Zeitgeist that we sum up in the word “Romanticism.” There are many other elements in the relation of a literary work to its time that the critic is concerned with, and historical criticism gets out of proportion only when it freezes into a dogma, as it tends to do in most if not all Marxist criticism, asserting that what a poem is in relation to the life of its time outside it is in fact what the poem “really means,” and that the work of the critic is done when he has established that relation. I have phrased this in such a way as to show that such a critical doctrine is directly descended from the allegorical tradition. Yet the mere fact that Shelley’s poem is about Prometheus, and that Shelley in his preface

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explicitly links his hero with the Prometheus of Aeschylus and the Satan of Milton, indicates that there is another dimension to the myth that is to be sought within literature itself. All literary works have pedigrees of this kind whether they say so or not, even whether the author realizes it or not. Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, besides being a work of its time, impresses us also as a portent of the future: we see in it an anticipation of later portrayals of conflicts between an establishment and an antihero. But if Rameau’s Nephew has this literary extension into the future it must have one into the past as well, and if we see it as belonging to the tradition of the Solomon-and-Saturn dialogue, the opposition between socially accepted and socially rejected wisdom, we are, again, seeing it in its archetypal framework or total cultural context. So far as the work of literature is to be thought of as a conscious and voluntary production of its author, there is little if any difference between its historical and its biographical aspects: the author is simply seen as a man of his time. Since Romanticism we have been increasingly impressed by the involuntary aspects of imaginative work, and by the way, in particular, in which the specifically mythopoeic faculty, the creation of the central metaphorical form of a literary work, seems to be associated with the mental powers which are or seem to be below consciousness. The more thoroughly the unconscious mind has been explored, the more remarkable are the parallels of literature with the dream and other aspects of the struggles of desire and reality in the mind. Certainly since Freud we have been accustomed to see creation as revealing tensions and conflicts within the poet’s own psyche as well as in his society. Thus a poem may also be, to some extent, an allegory of the poet’s inner life, and there are not lacking those who would claim that what the poet unconsciously reveals of himself in his poem is what that poem “really means.” But however remarkable the analogies between the mythopoeic faculty and the unconscious mind, and however true the fact poets do unconsciously reveal and to some extent release their inner tensions in their work, still the mythopoeic faculty can hardly be the same thing as the Freudian repressed unconscious. Unlike the dream, it seeks communication and is aware of an audience, hence it must be something much nearer to consciousness. The poet’s craftsmanship may work on a purely conscious level, or it may operate on a level that we vaguely describe as instinctive, intuitive, inspired, or involuntary, when his skill as a writer tells him that something belongs or fits, whether he can explain why or not. And so, just as a poet may con-

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sciously relate his work to literary tradition, as Shelley does by his use of the name Prometheus, so he may unconsciously establish similar links in his diction, his imagery, his echoes of work that has influenced him, and the like. What is called myth criticism in literature, then, is not the study of a certain kind or aspect of literature, much less a patented critical methodology, but the study of the structural principles of literature itself, more particularly its conventions, its genres, and its archetypes or recurring images. As this process goes on, certain external relations of literature come into view, though they have not been much explored as yet, and we can only hint briefly here what they are. In the first place, the identity of mythology and literature indicates that even matters of belief, in religion, have much more to do with vision and with an imaginative response than with the kind of belief that is based on evidence and sense experience. The connection of myth with assumed history, already mentioned, does not mean that such mythical structures as the Gospels and the Pentateuch are fraudulent: it means that they have been written in the only form which can address a reader in the present tense, as something confronting him with an imperative rather than revealing a mystery out of the past. Myth, in short, is the only possible language of concern, just as science, with its appeal to evidence, accurate measurement, and rational deduction, is the only possible language of detachment. Myth begins in a projected form, in stories about gods who are largely powers of nature and are often indifferent to man, but as a mythology develops it increasingly recovers for its human creators what it originally projected, and finally becomes purely existential, dependent not on assumptions about external reality, whether in time or space, but on imaginative experience. Its truth is not descriptive or evidential, but implicit, contained in the mythos or story which is the expression of experience. That is one reason why the real meaning of a myth emerges from its historical development and not from any guess about its original form. Thus literature is only a part, though a central part, of the total mythopoeic structure of concern which extends into religion, philosophy, political theory, and many aspects of history, the vision a society has of its situation, destiny, and ideals, and of reality in terms of those human factors. It expresses not so much the world that man lives in as the world that he builds. I call it a structure, and sometimes, as in the Middle Ages, it really looks like one, unifying a vast number of imaginative patterns in

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the different mythopoeic fields just mentioned. Our own age is more aware of the variety and inner disagreements in our visions of concern, yet it is still true that those who have most effectively changed the attitudes of society—Rousseau, Freud, Marx—are those who changed its mythology. This mythology comes to us on every level, from the greatest works of imagination to the steady rain of clichés that come through conversation and mass media. It is particularly in American culture that critics can see the connection between literary and social mythology, between, say, pastoral conventions in Thoreau or Melville and the same conventions in popular pastoral (e.g., the Western story) or in the pastoral mythology of cliché (the cottage away from it all, the simple log-cabin life corrupted by the big city, etc.). Here we return to the point at which we began, that while the study of myth is an essential activity of literary criticism, it is also essential to the study of the structure of society.

16 Welcoming Remarks to Conference on Editorial Problems, 1967 27 October 1967

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 1, file x. Most of the last paragraph was published in D.I.B. Smith’s Introduction to the conference papers, Editing Eighteenth-Century Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 3. Frye’s remarks were given to the third annual conference on editorial problems at the University of Toronto; according to a hand-written annotation on the typescript, he spoke from notes and wrote the remarks out later at Smith’s request.

It is a privilege, and a genuine pleasure, to be able to speak in the name of the University of Toronto and welcome you, most cordially, to this conference on editorial problems. A conference of editors seems to me a central part of the conception of a community of scholars. I am thinking of what a late colleague of mine once told me about a teacher of his, a Biblical scholar who had been invited by the headmistress of a girls’ school to address her young ladies, mostly aged eleven to fourteen. He spoke for an hour on “Recent Developments in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament,” after which he offered prayer. In the prayer he thanked his Creator, not only for the revelation through his Word, but, he added, “for the power to emend it according to thy will.” The contempt for one’s audience displayed is impressive, but it is also a trifle solipsistic, and I can think of no area of scholarship where solipsism is more dangerous than in editing. This conference is, I understand, concerned mainly with editorial problems of the later eighteenth century: perhaps if editorial conferences had got under way early enough in that century, Bentley might have been deterred from attacking the text of Paradise Lost as though it were a Classical manuscript; and we might have been spared those hundreds of conjectural emendations of Shakespeare

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which give us, not what Shakespeare wrote, but what he might have written if he had thought of it. Editors, it seems to me, are in many ways very like elemental spirits. They can be compelled by certain verbal formulas; they ought to be, and sometimes are, for the most part invisible; and, on their own, they have a propensity to, and an unrivalled opportunity for, mischief-making. I am not thinking here of such spectacular examples as Collier and T.J. Wise,1 but of much more routine procedures. In our day every publisher of books and learned journals employs functionaries whose duty it is to see that every twentieth-century text shall be corrupted at its source. This is a part of the editorial zeal for improvement and consistency which in the past has straightened out the metres of difficult poets, brought spelling and punctuation into line with a “policy,” altered syntax, and substituted usual for unusual words, not to speak of such larger matters as bowdlerization and ideological revision. The editorial improvers were already going strong in Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557, and I have occasionally wondered whether the Adam Scriveyn whose incompetence Chaucer cursed so fervently was not, from his own point of view, improving Chaucer’s text instead of corrupting it. Perhaps he too had been guided by some fourteenth-century style manual which instructed him to put commas wherever they were most likely to spoil the rhythm and blur the sense. The struggle to “establish” something so essentially Protean, even whimsical, as the written word is of course full of frustrations, and it is only fair to say that there is at least as much mischief-making in the authorial process as in the editorial one. Still, the editor’s education is an education in humility, precisely paralleling the education of the critic. The youthful critic starts out full of enthusiasm for the metaphor of the judge: it is he who has been singled out to evaluate the greatest writers of the past, to decide precisely what in them is relevant to our concerns and what must be considered the relative failures in their achievement. Many bitter years later, he discovers that if he judges he will be judged, and not favourably: that the person the critic criticizes is not the poet but himself, and that his function is to interpret his poet and pass judgment only on his own ignorance and insensitivity. The ultimate aim of critic, teacher, and editor alike is to become a transparent medium for whatever one criticizes, teaches, or edits. The first step in achieving such scholarly transparency is to learn to see through oneself and one’s colleagues, which brings me again to welcoming this conference and extending the best wishes for its success.

17 On Value Judgments December 1967

From Contemporary Literature, 9 (Summer 1968): 311–18. Reprinted in Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L.S. Dembo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 37–44, and with minor changes as “Contexts of Literary Evaluation” in Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 14– 21. Frye revised the paper slightly for StS, 66–73, removing two personal references to Murray Kreiger. Also translated into German (1986). Frye and Krieger both presented papers on evaluation in criticism to the Poetics and Literary Theory Group of the MLA after Christmas 1967. The summer 1968 issue of Contemporary Literature included the two papers (Krieger’s revised and considerably enlarged) and also essays on the same topic by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and Wayne Schumaker. In his talk Krieger had argued that it is impossible to eliminate taste and evaluation, since the critic uses his own limiting categories of perception or judgments to define the field; he felt Frye bypassed the discreteness of our encounter with a work.

I should warn you at once that I have nothing new to say on this question, nor can I discuss it on Mr. Krieger’s level. I must bring it down to the context of our own professional routine, and though I might rationalize this context as being existential, committed, and the like, even here all I can offer1 is an analogy that seems to me pedagogically instructive. The pursuit of values in criticism is like the pursuit of happiness in the American Constitution: one may have some sympathy with the stated aim, but one deplores the grammar. One cannot pursue happiness, because happiness is not a possible goal of activity: it is rather an emotional reaction to activity, a feeling we get from pursuing something else. The more gen-

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uine that something else is, the greater the chance of happiness: the more energetically we pursue happiness, the sooner we arrive at frustration. The more one says he is happy, the more quickly we get out of his way to prevent him from making us miserable. So with the sense of value in the study of literature. One cannot pursue that study with the object of arriving at value judgments, because the only possible goal of study is knowledge. The sense of value is an individual, unpredictable, variable, incommunicable, indemonstrable, and mainly intuitive reaction to knowledge. In knowledge the context of the work of literature is literature; in value judgment, the context of the work of literature is the reader’s experience. When knowledge is limited, the sense of value is naive; when knowledge improves, the sense of value improves too, but it must wait upon knowledge for its improvement. When two value judgments conflict, nothing can resolve the conflict except greater knowledge. The sense of value develops out of the struggle with one’s cultural environment, and consists largely of getting an instinct for the different conventions of verbal expression. All verbal expression is conventionalized, but we quickly realize that some conventions are more acceptable to the social group we are associated with than others. In some societies, including our own until quite recent times, the different conventions were linked to different social classes, and high and low speech were at least symbolic of the conventions of lord and peasant respectively. Today we still have, despite the linguists, distinctions between standard and substandard speech, and a corresponding distinction, though one quite different in its application, between standard and substandard writing. The critic who fights his way through to some kind of intuitive feeling for what literary conventions are accepted in his society becomes a representative of the good taste of his age. Thus value judgments carry with them, as part of their penumbra, so to speak, a sense of social acceptance. One of the first papers I heard at an MLA conference was a paper on Yeats by W.H. Auden, given at Detroit in 1947. He referred to Yeats’s spiritualism in terms of its social overtones of lower-middle-class credulity and drawn blinds in dingy suburban streets, and remarked that A.E. Housman’s Stoicism, while it may have been no less nonsense, was at any rate nonsense that a gentleman could believe.2 There was of course an intentional touch of parody here, but actually Auden was putting an evaluating criticism into its proper, and its only proper, context. Every attempt to exalt taste over knowledge

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has behind it the feeling that the possessor of taste is certainly a gentleman, while the possessor of knowledge may be only a pedant. The task of the evaluating critics, who review contemporary books and plays, is partly to prevent us from trying to read all the books or see all the plays. Their work is quite distinct from that of the literary scholar who is trying to organize our knowledge of our past culture, even though it is called by the same name and engaged in by many of the same people. The literary scholar has nothing to do with sifting out what it will be less rewarding to experience. He has value judgments of selectivity, just as any scholar in any field would have, but his canons of greater and less importance are related to the conditions of his specific research, not directly to the literary qualities of his material. There is a vague notion that historical criticism is a scholarly establishment, and that all critical methods which are not simply branches of historical study, whether explicatory or archetypal, are antihistorical, and ought to be applauded or denounced as such. But of course every great writer who lived in a different time or cultural orbit from ourselves is a challenge to the assumptions on which our evaluative statements are made, and knowledge of his assumptions makes our own more flexible. The fundamental critical act, I have said elsewhere, is the act of recognition, seeing what is there,3 as distinct from merely seeing a Narcissus mirror of our own experience and social and moral prejudice. Recognition includes a good many things, including commentary and interpretation. It may be said—in fact it has been said by Mr. Krieger, and said very well—that it is not really possible4 to draw a line between interpretation and evaluation, and that the latter will always remain in criticism as a part of the general messiness of the human situation. This may often be true as regards the individual critic. Nevertheless there is a boundary line which in the course of time inexorably separates interpreting from evaluating. When a critic interprets, he is talking about his poet; when he evaluates, he is talking about himself, or, at most, about himself as a representative of his age. Every age, left to itself, is incredibly narrow in its cultural range, and the critic, unless he is a greater genius than the world has yet seen, shares that narrowness in proportion to his confidence in his taste. Suppose we were to read something like this in an essay published, say, in the 1820s: “In reading Shakespeare we often feel how lofty and genuine are the touches of nature by which he refines our perceptions of the heroic and virtuous, and yet how ignobly he condescends to the grovelling passions

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of the lowest among his audience. We are particularly struck with this in reading the excellent edition by Doctor Bowdler, which for the first time has enabled us to distinguish what is immortal in our great poet from what the taste of his time compelled him to acquiesce in.”5 End of false quote. We should see at once that that was not a statement about Shakespeare, but a statement about the anxieties of the 1820s. Now let us suppose that an evaluating critic of our own age goes to work on Dickens. He will discover that melodrama, sentimentality, and humour bulk very large in Dickens. He feels that a critic of our time can accept the humour, but that the melodrama and sentimentality are an embarrassment. He has to pretend that melodrama and sentimentality are not as important as they seem, or that Dickens has a vitality which carries him along in spite of them. He will also realize that his own age sets a high value on irony, and disapproves of coincidence or manipulated happy endings in plots and of exaggerated purity in characters. So he will bring out everything in Dickens, real or fancied, that is darkly and ambiguously ironic, or hostile to Victorian social standards, and the coincidences and the pure heroines and the rest of it will be passed over—in short, bowdlerized. To interpret Dickens is first of all to accept Dickens’s own terms as the conditions of the study: to evaluate Dickens is to set up our own terms, producing a hideous caricature of Dickens which soon becomes a most revealing and accurate caricature of ourselves, and of the anxieties of the 1960s. As long as criticize means evaluate, the answer to the question, “Whom does the critic criticize?” seems at first a very easy one. The person the critic criticizes is, of course, the poet, whom the critic, in the traditional metaphor, judges. The drama critic attends a play and then writes a review judging it; if he is a literary scholar, then he reads the great poets in order to judge them too. Who would bother to be a critic unless one could be in the position of judging the greatest poets of the past? Alas, this carryover from studying to judging does not work, and the literary scholar, many bitter and frustrating years later, discovers that he is not judging the great poets at all. They judge him: every aspect of past culture shows up his ignorance, his blind spots, his provinciality, and his naiveté. When criticize means evaluate, the answer to the question, “Whom does the critic criticize?” turns out to be, in scholarship, “The critic himself.” The only value judgment which is consistently and invariably useful to the scholarly critic is the judgment that his own writings, like the morals of a whore, are no better than they should be.

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Of course literature, as an object of study, is a limitless reservoir of potential values. Think of how largely American nineteenth-century writers bulk in our cultural imaginations today, and of how impoverished those imaginations would be if they did not include such figures as Ethan Brand or Billy Budd or Huckleberry Finn.6 Yet it is not so long ago that the question was frequently and seriously asked, “What on earth could you find to say about American literature?” There is in fact nothing in past literature that cannot become a source of imaginative illumination. One would say that few subjects could be duller or less rewarding than the handbooks studied by Miss Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, yet her study has all the mental exhilaration of the discovery of a fine new poet.7 But when value is totally generalized in this way, it becomes a superfluous conception. Or rather, it is changed into the principle that there is value in the study of literature, which is an unobjectionable way of stating the relationship. The experience of literature is not criticism, just as religious experience is not theology, and mental experience not psychology. In the experience of literature a great many things are felt, and can be said, which have no functional role to play in criticism. A student of literature may be aware of many things that he need not say as a critic, such as the fact that the poem he is discussing is a good poem. If he does say so, the statement forms part of his own personal rhetoric, and may be legitimate enough in that context. Naturally a reader of a work of criticism likes to feel that his author is a man of taste too, that he enjoys literature and is capable of the same kind of sensitivity and expertise that we demand from a good reviewer. But a writer’s value-sense can never be logically a part of a critical discussion: it can only be psychologically and rhetorically related to that discussion. The value-sense is, as the phenomenological people say, pre-predicative. The study of literature, then, produces a sense of the values of that study incidentally. The attempt to make criticism either begin or end in value judgments turns the subject wrong side out, and the frequency of these attempts accounts for the fact that more nonsense is written in literary criticism, especially on matters of theory, than in any other scholarly discipline, not excluding education. Fortunately, its practice is considerably better than its theory, even when its practice includes MLA papers and doctoral theses on the birthday odes of Colley Cibber.8 No one deplores more than I do the purblind perspectives of scholarly critics, or the fact that so much criticism is produced with so little intellec-

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tual energy that it has all to be done over again. Still, it is better not to adopt a critical approach which makes the writing of sense impossible, however lugubrious the result of better premises may often be. With the enormous increase of personnel required in the humanities, I foresee a time when demands that every scholar be productive may be reversed into efforts at scholarly contraception. This may lead to a growing awareness of the difference between the criticism which expands our understanding of literature and the criticism which merely reflects and repeats it. In the meantime, the effort to reverse the critical machinery continues to be made, usually in some such terms as these: Is not a value judgment implied in, say, choosing Chaucer rather than Lydgate for an undergraduate course? Surely if we were to elaborate a theory explaining why some writer is of the first magnitude, and another only of the tenth, we should be doing something far more significant than just carefully studying them both, because we should also be proving that it was less important to study the smaller man. I do not know of anybody who claims that a valid theory of this sort exists, but I have often been reproached for not devoting my energies to trying to work one out. The argument reminds one a little of that of Sir Thomas Browne that a theory of final causes, working through universal principles of design like the quincunx, would give us a master key to all the sciences.9 It is also part of the great Northwest-Passage fallacy of criticism which always gets stuck in the ice of tautology. The greatest writers are—let me see—imaginative rather than fanciful, or possessed of high seriousness, or illustrative of the sharpest possible tension between id and superego. The critic invariably discovers these qualities in the writers he considers best, overlooking the fact that they are merely synonyms for his preferences. The circumambulation of this prickly pear can go on for centuries, as long as the terms are brought up to date in each generation. Or one may draw up a list of categories that appeal to the sensibilities of the critic because they are fashionable in his age, and call them characteristic of all great literature of all periods. The effect of this is to canonize the taste of that age, and make it into a dogma binding on future generations. I.A. Richards made a parenthetical suggestion about such universal categories in Practical Criticism, but obviously soon realized, not only that the procedure involved was a circular one, but that, once again, such phrases as the “inexplicable oddity” of birth and death merely echoed the anxieties of the 1920s.10 For those who wish to persist with this or

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similar methods, a certain degree of paranoia will be found most helpful, if not essential. It is because I believe in the value of literary scholarship that I doubt that value judgments have a genuine function in acquiring it. Those who try to subordinate knowledge to value judgments are similarly led, with similar consistency, to doubt that genuine knowledge of literature is possible, or, if possible, desirable. There are many ways of expressing this doubt, or disapproval. One is the chorus that has for its refrain: “But literature is alive, and you’re anatomizing a corpse.” Such metaphors take us back to the vitalism that has long since disappeared from biology, and the scholarly critic is constantly being told that he is leaving out whatever the objector regards as the seat of the author’s soul, whether his heart, his blood, his guts, or his testicles. The basis of this response is a fixation derived from adolescence, when the sense of social approval is so highly developed, and when it seems so utterly obvious that the end of reading is to assimilate everything into the two great dialectical categories of value judgment, which in my own adolescence were “swell” and “lousy.” But it seems to me (if we must use these metaphors) that there is only one thing that can “kill” literature, and that is the stock response. The attempt of genuine criticism is to bring literature to “life” by annihilating stock responses, which of course are always value judgments, and regularly confuse literature with life. On the next level there is the notion that university deans and chairmen demand a certain amount of historical research from new recruits as part of a kind of hazing process, before one is allowed to start on one’s proper evaluating work. This research is assumed to exist all on one level, and to be nearly exhausted, so that one is now forced to look for something like the Latin exercise books of Thomas Flatman or the washing bills of Shackerley Marmion. The appearance of every genuine work of literary scholarship knocks the bottom out of this notion, but it revives in each generation of graduate students. More sophisticated versions of the rejection of knowledge are, first, the helpless historical relativism which says that as Samuel Johnson or Coleridge made some of the mistakes likely to be made in their day, so we can only go on making a fresh set of mistakes, and can learn nothing from our predecessors. Second is the assumption that most interpretation, if at all subtle or difficult, is something that the author could not have understood, and hence has simply been imposed on him by the critic, a pretext for an activity begun in self-hypnosis and sustained by group hysteria. If anyone doubts that

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such a reaction exists, he has probably never written a book on Blake’s Prophecies. In short, the more consistently one conceives of criticism as the pursuit of values, the more firmly one becomes attached to that great sect of anti-intellectualism. At present it seems to be fashionable to take an aggressive stand in the undergraduate classroom, and demand to know what, after all, we are really trying to teach. It appears that we are concerned, as teachers, with the uniqueness of human beings, or with the fullness of humanity, or with the freedom to be aware, or with life itself, or with the committed ironies of consciousness, or with learning to be at home in the world, or in fact with anything at all, so long as it sounds vaguely impressive and is not reducible to treating literature as something to be taught and studied like anything else. Seek ye first the shadow, we are urged, and the mere substance will be added unto you, if for some reason you should want it. It seems to be in literature that the teacher is most strongly tempted to cooperate with the student’s innate resistance to the learning process, make himself into an opaque substitute for his subject instead of a transparent medium of it, and thereby develop his charisma, which is Greek for ham. But as values cannot be demonstrated, the possession of them is realized only by their possessors, hence the more evangelical the sales pitch, the more esoteric the product. I would of course not deny that teaching is a different activity from scholarship, and that many assertions of value are relevant to the classroom that are not relevant to the learned journal. But I think that in literature, as in other subjects, the best students are those who respond to intellectual honesty, who distrust the high a priori road, and who sense that there may be some connection between limited claims and unlimited rewards.

18 Literature and Society May 1968

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 1, file y. Reprinted in RW, 177–92. Originally a lecture at the University of Saskatchewan, which Frye visited to receive an honorary degree and deliver the convocation address on 14 May.

I have become accustomed to being asked for titles of lectures long before I have started to think about the lectures themselves. Consequently I have developed a technique of inventing titles so broad and vague that they will enable me to put almost any kind of lecture underneath them. I thought, however, that tonight I would make an exception, and actually talk about literature and society, so far as I understand their relationship. The function of literature and its social relevance, the function of the poet as a social being, are interests of mine which reach back into my early youth, as I can hardly remember a time when my mind was not in some degree concerned with such questions. I shall put what I have to say into an autobiographical form, not because I think I am an interesting person to talk about, but simply to provide some narrative continuity. I find that I cannot think with any real intensity except about subjects that I have, in a sense, always been thinking about. I can hardly suppose that this is true only of me, and I imagine that for most people an occasional autobiographical excursion is a good way of reviewing one’s general position. In my youth, in a small high school in the Maritimes,1 I was developing an embryonic interest in literature, and, along with it, some interest in the question of its social relevance, of what difference it made to the world that we had literature. I assumed that the answers would be in books: twenty years later, I realized that if there were a book that would

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answer my questions satisfactorily I should have to write it myself. Some answers I did pick up, in books, between the lines of books, out of the air, to the effect that literature was a kind of legal and harmless LSD, not that that particular refuge of the ego was known then. The function of literature, I gathered, was to heighten one’s sense of reality by bringing it a little closer to the ideal: it makes what is there look better by giving it more of a resemblance to what is not there. Hence it has two effects. It idealizes experience: when one reads Shakespeare or Dickens, one should look in them primarily for the exquisite touches of nature which are so like our ordinary experience, even if on a bigger scale. At the same time it gives a sense of reality to our ideals, operating as it does through example rather than precept. Poetry, in particular, was to be thought of as a reservoir of great thoughts which would inspire one to meet the battle of life. But, in general, the value of reading literature was part of the value of reading as a whole: to improve one’s mind, to lay in a stock of ideas for one’s later life. In the form in which it came to me, in the 1920s, this view of literature was Victorian: Victorian in its moral earnestness, its mixture of idealism and realism, and above all in being entirely a reading culture. There were no plays where I grew up, and I had read most of Shakespeare before I had any clear notion of what a dramatist was; what films penetrated to my town were only bad novels photographed; radio was beginning, but still sounded rather as most electronic music sounds to me now: like an evil spirit trying to get born and not succeeding. It took me a long time to realize what the real position of literature was in this view. Its moral bias made use of literature, but subordinated it; literature was serious if it reflected moral and rational processes, which were assumed to be more directly concerned with real issues than the poetic process. The inheritance of centuries was behind this attitude: the theologian in the Middle Ages, the philosopher in the eighteenth century, the scientist in our own time, have all been assumed to be closer to reality than the poet. The function of poetry, then, is mainly to embellish and ornament a superior view of reality, so that the poet is essentially a kind of illustrator of the reason. It was inevitable that my reading should be based on the great nineteenth-century novelists, to be followed, in my mid-teens, with some of the realists who had succeeded them—Galsworthy, Bennett, Shaw, Sinclair Lewis. Quite by accident, in the public library, I stumbled on a book called The Doctor Looks at Literature, which had a chapter on Ulysses.2 I am

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unlikely to forget the stupefaction into which the quotations from Ulysses plunged me: naturally it had never occurred to me that words could be used like that, and I instantly formed the ambition to acquire a copy of Ulysses. Many years later a copy was smuggled in to me from Buffalo by a colleague after the ban had been lifted in the United States. (It was of course still illegal in Canada, but it was as clear to me then as it is to any “new left” student today that if the standards of literature collide with the anxieties of society, the anxieties of society have to give way, whether they are embodied in law or not.)3 Some years after that, in looking over some of the criticism on Joyce, I realized for the first time that the book which had thrilled me so was actually a very silly book, designed to ridicule Joyce and discourage me from reading him. The moral seems to be that if one wishes to write a silly book on a serious subject, one should not quote too liberally from the serious subject. At college I began to become aware of developments in literature that indicated a very different habit of mind from the one with which I had been accustomed to associate good literature. My teachers at Victoria College, Pelham Edgar, E.J. Pratt, J.D. Robins, were all unusually contemporary-minded, and helped among other things to get me less bogged down in books.4 Edgar would often not lecture at all, but simply read, and Robins taught me in my first term a course on the ballad, which introduced me to the conception of oral literature. The producers of literature were not, as I had assumed, invariably intellectuals: sometimes they could neither read nor write. One of the books on the freshman course was Scott’s Guy Mannering, which my mother had read to me when I was nine, and which I had listened to in breathless rapture. I greatly looked forward to rereading it, but the charm was gone: it had crumbled into dust. Eight years makes a great difference in one’s taste at that age, but I now understand that a literary principle was also involved connected with what Robins was talking about. Read aloud, Scott made a good deal of sense; read in a book, he was a pretentious windbag (or so I thought then; I am more charitable now). Edgar, again, introduced me to Virginia Woolf. If the question had been asked in the ’20s, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” the answer would probably have been “Arnold Bennett,” because Virginia Woolf’s essay on Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown had defended certain techniques of writing which had looked more at the insides of people than at the outsides, and had suggested that the true realist was not the person who was engaged in painting the superficies of reality.5

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I was beginning to see that there was a distinctive habit of mind which was expressed in literature, not a logical habit of mind, but something else with its own rules and its own kind of sense. Its most obvious characteristic was that it seemed to be intensely associative. In my graduate days, in the early ’30s, the movement started by I.A. Richards had begun to develop, and Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity and the Survey of Modernist Poetry by Graves and Riding introduced me to the techniques of what, when it finally got around to the Modern Language Association a long time later, began to be called “the New Criticism.”6 Here was something that dramatized the difference between poetic and logical processes into a sharp contrast. For the poet, ambiguity is a structural principle: he wants a word to mean as many things as possible, because he thinks associatively and in verbal complexes. For the nonliterary writer, ambiguity is simply bungling or incompetent writing: he strives for lucidity, consistent definition, and the restriction of a word to one definite meaning. Another movement that became fashionable in the ’30s, Surrealism, also emphasized the associative habit of mind in the arts, this time an associative process closely linked to the dream. Such processes are of course largely sexual in origin. I remember many years later Dr. Kinsey of Indiana, the editor of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and its female successor,7 boring into me with his blazing missionary eyes, and saying, “I suppose you know that there is no object in the world that cannot be made either a male or a female sexual symbol.” As a matter of fact, I did know that. In the mid-’30s a Surrealist exhibition was brought to the CNE in Toronto, purely for laughs: to the committee’s disgust the public got quite interested in it.8 The so-called “happenings” of our day are not a new invention: one Surrealist exhibition at that time supplied the people who went to it with small hand hatchets in order to break up all the works of art which particularly outraged them, and at another, one artist had expressed his view of Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler by constructing an enormous umbrella of sponges. The joke was somewhat laborious, but so is a good deal of later pop art. It became gradually clearer to me that literature was an art of resemblance and identity, expressed in the two primary poetic figures of simile and metaphor: this is like that, and this is that. Resemblance can be logically dangerous because in any rational procedure the differences between things have to be noted as well as their similarity, and until you know what your categories are your analogies are likely to be misleading. As for metaphor, where we are saying that two things are two things

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and yet the same thing, we are turning our back on logical processes, and joining the group of people who take metaphor seriously, including, according to Shakespeare’s Theseus, the lunatic, the lover, and the poet.9 To understand literature, then, I should have to surrender myself to the conditions of a mental process that flouted logic, and which I was slowly beginning to call the mythical habit of mind. It was a habit of mind that thought by configurations, and did not depend on sequential reasoning. Further, the logical habit of mind was as valid as it ever was, but it would have to give up its claim to exclusive possession of truth, and its insistence on subordinating the imagination to its categories. There must be, somehow, such a thing as poetic or mythical truth, as all poets have believed. In a book written for information, that is, for nonliterary purposes, a structure of words (A) points to a group of things described (B) and from there goes into the reader’s mind (C). Truth in this situation is truth of correspondence: the words in A must correspond to the facts in B before C can recognize it to be true. But in reading literature there is no B, only a direct contact between A and C. Truth here is not truth of correspondence or of description; it is rather a kind of truth of revelation, different from logical truth but in its own area equally valid. These seem like very simple axioms to me now, but I went through what seemed to me a long and confused labyrinth before I reached them. Along with this came the steadily growing suspicion that a big cultural change was going on around me. Not only were there two habits of mind, the logical and the mythical, but it looked as though the old unquestioned domination of myth by logic was going. The mythical habit of mind was establishing itself, or rather its establishment was increasingly being recognized, in many different fields, social as well as literary. This suspicion deepened eventually into conviction, but not easily. For one thing, during the ’30s the Marxists were a lively and articulate group, on campus and elsewhere, and Marxism re-emphasized the old Victorian view of the domination of poetry by the rational disciplines. The function of the poet in Marxism, no less than in the bourgeois world, was to echo and support a point of view which made its primary impact through philosophy and economics. I was impressed by Marxist arguments, yet I could not assent to them, because the assumption that literature would find its true function in revolutionary protest before the revolution occurred, and in panegyric afterward, seemed to me clearly nonsense. Literature was quite obviously concerned with something else altogether, and no arguments

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about the poets of the past having been affected by the ruling-class propaganda of their times would alter that fact. There was still a difficulty of the opposite kind: some of the people whom I most admired in literature, including Yeats and Eliot, were also people whose social and political views struck me as preposterous to the last degree. Yet somehow this did not affect their quality as poets: obviously the same person could be a great poet and a silly sociologist. The Marxist phase in literature was succeeded, in the early years of the war, by a religious phase. More and more poets became attracted to Catholicism or some position close to it, and more and more contemporary poetry began to sound like paraphrases of the Penitential Psalms. When this position was defended by argument, the arguments sounded remarkably like Marxism stood on its head, and religious determinism appealed to me no more than economic determinism had done. The influence of Eliot then was so powerful that it seemed almost to generate an assumption that a serious interest in literature could only go along with a nostalgic and conservative temperament, one that tended to deify tradition and look back longingly to the past. I think I have always appreciated the importance of tradition in literature, but I certainly do not feel that a conservative temperament is the only one fitted to understand literature, and even if it were, there would still be the problem of the immediate and present relationship of literature to society to solve. I am getting ahead of my story, such as it is. After three years of theology I realized that my vocation was in university teaching, so I went to Oxford to read the undergraduate course in English. The undergraduate course was the only one that Oxford in those days taught willingly: Oxford still tended to look on graduate work as a new and dubious American importation. In fact, Oxford did not hold a very high view of English literature either as an academic subject. It had not been going long, and when it had come in it had done so under the domination of philology. There was a feeling that if students were to be allowed to read English instead of Classics, there ought to be some real intellectual discipline inserted into the course in the shape of another set of dead languages, preferably highly inflected ones. Hence there were three courses in English literature, arranged in order of prestige. Course 1 consisted largely of Gothic and Old Norse. Course 2 embraced English literature, but embraced it only as far as the year 1500. Course 3, which was strictly for the birds and the Rhodes Scholars, went on until 1830, thereby leav-

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ing all its graduates in a state of permanent confusion about the date of Wordsworth’s Prelude, which was published in 1850 but which they nevertheless had to read. I decided to read the third course, but even so I found myself doing most of my work on the earlier period, Old and Middle English, largely because it was new to me. It also revived earlier impressions: I have mentioned the early course on the ballad from John Robins. In reading such books as Chadwick’s Heroic Age and the commentaries on Beowulf I began to understand something of what the role of the poet had at one time been, in the age of Homer, let us say, or the corresponding period in the North. In an oral or preliterate society in which writing has not yet developed as the norm, the poet is the man who remembers, and hence he is the chief instrument of education. Memory demands the simplest and most primitive form of conventionalizing verbal utterance, which is verse. (I began to realize at the same time that prose is not, as is so often vulgarly assumed, the language of ordinary speech, but a more difficult way of conventionalizing ordinary speech than verse is, which is why it comes later in time. It is the domination of the habits of a writing culture which leads us to identify prose and ordinary speech.) The oral or preliterate professional poet is the walking encyclopedia of the learning of his community. He knows its history, the names of its kings, its myths and its rituals, its proverbs and its calendar. This was, I realized, the historical basis for the feeling of dispossession that seemed to haunt poets from Sidney’s time on, and which came into Shelley’s phrase “unacknowledged legislator.”10 One of the things that fascinated me about the Old English period was its curious likeness to the earlier Canadian scene: the same combination of a sophisticated imported civilization with incredibly primitive living conditions in the country itself, the same effort to account for the strangeness and loneliness and moral indifference of nature by ready-made ethical and religious formulas. What would have attracted me to the poetry of E.J. Pratt, even if I had never known him, was among other things his affinity to oral and preliterate poets: his sense of ritual, his acceptance of a social role as a kind of unofficial laureate, his feeling for the narrative as the means of telling the great stories of one’s people. All this made him look very old-fashioned in the ’30s and ’40s, but I knew that there was something there that would eventually vindicate itself. I came back to Victoria College and settled down in the English department. Before long the chairman of the department, that same John Robins

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through whom I had learned most of what I knew about oral literature and about Canadian literature, called me into his office and said, “I want you to teach a course in the English Bible.” I said, “Why?” “Because,” he said, “there was a time when students who came to Victoria College could be assumed to have some competence in the subject matter of the Bible, hence when they were taught such a poem as Paradise Lost they had some notion of what was being talked about. Today’s students can hardly tell a Philistine from a Pharisee.” “Given their middle-class context,” I said, “perhaps the distinction is unimportant to them.” “Never mind that,” said Robins, “I want you to teach the English Bible.” So I began to examine other courses in the English Bible, but they did not satisfy me: they all seemed to assume that the Bible was some kind of anthology of Hebrew literature, which it clearly was not. I also looked at my theological notes, and discovered from them that, for example, the Epistle of James in the New Testament was an epistle which was quite probably early, or just as probably late, that it had quite probably been written by James, or with equal probability had been written by somebody who was not James, or possibly by somebody who was not James but called himself James, and that there were verbal parallels with Paul, which could be readily accounted for on the assumption that James had influenced Paul, if he was earlier, or had been influenced by him, if he was later. This amusement was known as New Testament criticism, and Old Testament criticism seemed to be in much the same state, except that it dealt with a language which went backwards, from right to left. It was clear to me, as a literary critic, that the older view of the Bible, before historical criticism developed, was the right one to adopt for a literary course on it. It is doubtless true that many people who have tried to read the Bible straight through from the first chapter of Genesis have bogged down in the middle of Leviticus, but this does not alter the fact that the Bible, in the form in which it is now presented to us, is a book with a beginning, a complicated but logically followed narrative outline, and an end. It begins where time begins, with the creation; it ends where time ends, with the Last Judgment, and it surveys the history of mankind in between. What unifies it, from the point of view of the literary critic, are not its doctrines, which can only be deduced, but its imagery and symbolism, which can be directly pointed to. It begins with a garden and a river; it ends with a garden and a river in a city, and certain recurring images—the desert, the wilderness, the sea, the mountain, the city on the mountain, the king’s wedding—are what unify it. Such a book must be

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read with a mythical attitude of mind rather than with a logical attitude of mind. Doubtless there was a good deal of authentic history in the Bible, but it was not there because it was authentic history, but for quite different reasons. Hence works which made no pretence of being historical, such as the Book of Job, could be more profound in their wisdom and spiritual meaning than the begats in Chronicles, which may well be historical. I was beginning to see that the language of religion and the language of literature were closely connected, but the reason for the connection did not really become clear to me until the existentialist people came along after the war and I began reading Kierkegaard and his followers. The reason for the connection is that myth is the language of concern. Man is in two worlds: there is a world around him, an objective world, which it is the business of science to study. But there is also the world that man is trying to build out of his environment, and this is the world which depends on man’s view of himself and his destiny, on his concern about where he came from and where he is going to, and all his hopes and his ideals, his anxieties and his panics, come into his view of the society that he wants to build. Within the logical habit of mind, whatever is true is also objective, which means that to some extent it is alienated. In the mythical habit of mind what is true is something that man is directly involved and concerned with. The Bible was mythical, not historical, because history speaks the language of the past, which was not a sufficiently urgent language for its authors. Myth is the only language of the present tense and it is also the language of poetry. As Aristotle said long ago, history tells us what happened; poetry tells us what happens.11 The myth confronts the reader directly with something which is set over against him, and which he has to come to terms with at the moment of reading. Much of this is familiar to students of religion by now, but when I first embarked on it thirty years ago it was still a lonely road. I had gone to a theological professor to explain what I wanted to do, and after listening to me for a while he asked me if my students read German. I said that they would be unlikely to read a book in German if I recommended it. “Then I can’t help you,” he said, “all that stuff’s in German so far.” But the German sources were not as helpful as I expected. Some of them talked about “demythologizing” the Bible when they ought to have talked about remythologizing it (as I understand they do now). There was a lurking belief that myth was, not the language of concern and the

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present tense, but the language of the fabulous, and that after it had been subtracted from the Biblical text the residue would be more historical, or rational, or otherwise credible. It was clear to me that if everything that was mythical was extracted from, say, the Gospels, about all that would be left would be the verse in John [11:35] which reads “Jesus wept.” In the meantime, of course, I had been developing my own literary interests. Of those, the most important to me by far was the poetry of William Blake, especially those long, tangled, obscure poems which he called Prophecies. Everybody assured me that no one who went into that jungle ever came out alive. I went into the jungle nevertheless: it took me ten years to come out, somewhat emaciated, but I think I did come out. I had been largely concerned with trying to understand what Blake meant by those mysterious beings—Los, Urizen, Orc—which inhabited his long symbolic poems. They looked, at first, as though they were gods, and as gods they resembled the Classical gods one meets elsewhere in literature. Orc was much the same as the dying god I had read about in Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Urizen similarly resembled the white-whiskered old man in the sky who has been called Zeus and Jupiter and Jehovah and (by Hardy) the President of the Immortals. Yet Blake himself was clear that such gods were projections from states of the human mind, and that the true gods were those human states themselves. I began to realize something about myth with a more immediate social reference: it is possible for a myth to take over a whole society, so that that society may act out its life within a continuous mythology. For example: all mythologies begin with some kind of creation myth. How did the world come into being? The simplest answer is that the world began in the same way that babies get born and seeds grow in the spring. A sexual myth of creation tends to focus on a Great Mother, associated or identified with Nature, Blake’s Vala, and to this figure, the principle of fertility in all life, there is added a subordinate male figure, the dying god who at various stages is the mother’s son, bridegroom, or sacrificial victim. This creation myth had been succeeded, apparently, by another myth reflecting a more urban and tool-using society, which thought of the world as made or shaped like an artefact, usually by a sky-god thought of as male, and as a father-figure. The latter was the version accepted by Judaism, Christianity, and philosophical Hellenism. In modern times these two myths seem to have achieved modern forms, in which they have been to some extent recovered and thought of as states of the human mind, instead of being projected on gods. The

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human mind is the only creative force we can actually see: the conception of external nature as a “creation” begs a vast question. The myth of the world as artefact, derived from the fact that man shapes and makes things, becomes the myth of Prometheus, the thief of fire who defended man against the gods. The myth of Prometheus is naturally a revolutionary myth, and I think it was hardly an accident that Karl Marx was fascinated by Prometheus. He read Aeschylus’s play on Prometheus through in Greek every year, and his imagery is full of volcanoes and the stealing of fire and, of course, the developing of “instruments of production.” The American way of life, on the other hand, appears to me to be derived rather from the sexual or mother myth, and has developed a containing myth of Eros, in which the presiding genius is not so much Marx as Freud, the greatest of modern Eros-thinkers. We notice in passing how the thinkers who have most directly changed civilization, such as Freud, Marx, or Rousseau, are thinkers who have changed our mythology, and hence are really mythological thinkers rather than economists or psychologists or philosophers. Such movements as the beatniks and the later hippies are, it seems to me, attempts to define a proletariat in erotic or Freudian terms rather than in Marxist terms; and the kind of pastoral innocence that so many critics of American culture have seen in it seems to me also consistent with a pervading Eros mythology. One of my colleagues at Victoria College was a professor of Classics, Eric Havelock, who soon afterwards went to Harvard. He has recently written a brilliant book called A Preface to Plato.12 But of course he had been thinking about the ideas in this book for many years, and I remember a public lecture that he gave at Victoria on Homer that impressed me deeply. The point of his book on Plato is that in Plato’s time a preliterate oral culture had been largely entrusted to the poets, so that Homer had acquired a gigantic authority in Greek religion and education. This culture was being succeeded in Plato’s time by a logical habit of mind, based on writing, of which Plato himself, as the world’s first major philosopher, was the spokesman. Hence Plato’s attack on poetry at the end of the Republic means what it says: that poetry cannot reach truth as directly as a philosophy founded on logic and dialectic. I could see that similar developments must have taken place in Hebrew culture around the Deuteronomic reform, in the course of which a mass of traditional poems and legends and oracles became edited and codified into a sacred book. Certain characteristics of an oral or preliterate culture are becoming more familiar to us now. One is a formulaic habit of mind, a use of cer-

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tain fixed phrases, like the epithets in Homer. In poetry such units are useful because they are constructed to fit the metre, and can be moved around at will in a poetry which is always close to improvisation. Other formulaic units are fixed because they are established in society, like popular proverbs. Such units are closely related to the clichés that people use as a substitute for thinking. Then again, an oral culture is necessarily a highly ritualized culture, preoccupied with the right way of doing things, with a sense of ceremonial and of what might be called formulaic units of action. As you all know, within recent times another colleague of mine at Toronto, Marshall McLuhan, has attacked the same question on a much broader front. He has pointed to the immense impact that other media of communication besides books are now making, and has drawn from his observation of this impact the principle, which seems sound enough in itself, that we are returning to some of the social features of a preliterate culture, which means a retribalizing of society, as he calls it, hence his phrase about the global village.13 What worries me about this thesis is the way in which it has been received by what I call the Eros mentality of the American public. A facile and shallow optimism, a belief in automatic progress, a confidence that a new civilization can be brought about by certain gadgets merely because the gadgets are there, is always close to the surface of American feeling. Along with it goes a constant wish to abdicate moral dignity and responsibility. I am not speaking of McLuhan himself here, but there is one feature in his writing that seems to me to help to encourage such a response, the feature that I have called determinism. I have learned to distrust all determinisms, whether they are economic or religious or mediumistic: they seem to me essentially rhetorical devices, which help to make a doctrine more popular and easier to grasp. New media of communication are not causes of social change: they are only the conditions of change, and we cannot discover the direction of social change from them; it is society itself that will determine the direction of change. I suppose that if a historian of the future were asked what was the most important social event of our time, he would say that it was the extraordinary retribalizing of Red China. There, a formulaic culture has been imposed on hundreds of millions of people, all of whom must learn the “thoughts of Chairman Mao,” whatever else they learn, and must then learn to inform everything else they know with these “thoughts,” or formulaic units of thought. This has been tried before in China: we are

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told that the Emperor who ordered the Great Wall to be built also ordered the destruction of all earlier literature and history, on the ground that those who opposed his will tended to rely on their cultural traditions for support and quotations. Mao Tse-tung has done much the same thing, except that he realizes that a verbal wall is the only kind that will not fall down. Colossal as this event is, I think all of us would agree that this is not the kind of society that we want for ourselves, and that we want very different social results from the retribalizing process. As soon as oral and preliterate characteristics make themselves felt in society, a patriarchal figure is very likely to make his appearance in the middle of that society. This patriarchal figure may be at first simply an amiable figurehead (Eisenhower), or counter-tendencies in society may throw up opposing symbols of youth and energy (Trudeau, the Kennedys); but if society does not arrest the drift it is likely to go from King Log to King Stork,14 from reassuring images to Big Brother. Considering that McLuhan has very explicitly warned us against precisely this danger, it would be unfairly ironic if he were to become the Pied Piper of our generation. I seem to have lived through, then, three quite different phases in the relationship of literature to society. First was a Victorian reading culture, where literature was one of the amenities of a middle-class standard of living. Underneath it was middle-class Philistinism, which showed through in times of economic stress like the Depression, in the constant moral sniping at serious literature by censors and the like, in the pervasive belief that real life had nothing to do with cultivation, but was made up entirely of work and distraction. The second phase was a response to a revolutionary situation brought about by the Depression and the growth of Fascist and Communist movements. Here literature was assumed to have a social context relating it immediately either to the ideology of revolution or to the defence of liberal and traditional cultural values against it. One by-product of this situation was a development of critical theory in which I have been professionally engaged myself. In the course of this a few things have become clearer to me, such as the fact that literature inherits a mythology, and that the ideologies of revolution and counter-revolution are ultimately poetic creations. The Bible is for the literary critic the best place to study the mythological framework that Western culture has inherited. Now we are in a different kind of revolutionary situation, one that in many respects is more like anarchism than the movements of a generation ago. The latter, whether bourgeois or Marxist, were equally attached

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to a producer’s work ethic and to the conviction that literature was a secondary social product. The unrest of our time is partly directed against the work ethic itself, and against the anxieties and prejudices of an affluent society. In other words, it is a situation in which one kind of social imagination is pitted against another kind, and hence it is a situation in which those who work with their imaginations, such as poets and artists, ought to have, and doubtless increasingly will have, a central and crucial role. This last situation is also contemporary with the rise of communications media other than writing, which have brought back into society many characteristics of oral cultures, like those out of which the Bible and Greek philosophy developed. As in all revolutionary situations, society is under great pressure to abdicate its moral responsibility and throw away its freedom. Such pressures exist in every aspect of the situation: there is no side devoted to freedom or to suppressing it. The critic, whose role in the last two decades has expanded from studying literature to studying the mythologies of society, has to join with all other men of good will, and keep to the difficult and narrow way between indifference and hysteria.

19 Mythos and Logos June 1968

In June 1968 Frye delivered a lecture entitled “Mythos and Logos” at the summer session of the Indiana School of Letters, Bloomington. It was published in the booklet School of Letters: Twentieth Anniversary, 1948–1968 (Bloomington: n.p., 1968), 27–40, and reprinted in Yearbook of Contemporary Literature, 18 (1969): 5–18, and in Italian translation as “Mito e logos,” Strumenti Critica, 3 (1969): 122–43. Since this address is identical, except for the opening paragraph and a few sentences, to that delivered as “The Social Context of Literary Criticism” at Cornell University, 18 April 1968, and already published in full in LS, 347–65, a summary is given here.

The title of this text announces a holistic treatment of two dominant and deeply interrelated concepts in Frye’s vision of literature and culture: Mythos and Logos. Yet the text begins in an almost casual way by recounting how the study of Blake had led Frye to two fundamental questions: “What is the total subject of study of which criticism forms a part?” and “How do we arrive at poetic meaning?” It can immediately be seen that the underlying purpose of this questioning is to understand literature in its specificity, and simultaneously to safeguard the specificity of the discipline which studies literature, that is, of criticism. In the late 1940s and still in the late 1960s Frye sees multiple tendencies to make the study of literature dependent on a variety of concepts drawn from other disciplines. Criticism is therefore doubly vulnerable: because it appears to be without a central object of its own, and because its conceptual tools are not its own. The point of our text is therefore to obviate this quandary. Frye begins by consulting two defenders of poetry, Sidney and Shelley. Sidney looks back upon the prophetic role of the poet—mythical or historical—in preliterate culture with admiration and nostalgia because such a poet was thought to possess universal

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knowledge and because formulaic oral poetry had a compelling effect upon the listener. But in a literate culture a differentiation occurs between the historical and factual and the expression of it, between what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls a poet’s “overthought,” i.e., explicit meaning, and his “underthought,” the “texture of images and metaphors.” We now begin to see a long process of differentiation between the once factual, historical, even scientific mission of poetry and the analogical function it assumes when prose takes over as the medium of information. Frye bluntly asserts that “[a]mbiguity, which simply means bad or incompetent writing in any logical or descriptive context, is a structural principle of poetry.” As Peacock does when commenting on the rise of the Romantic movement, Frye sees poetry, even in the twentieth century, as “having lost the traditional function inherited from preliterate days,” and in a sense separated from society. But it is precisely when it is recognized for its own sake and freed from logical thought that poetry assumes its visionary status. It no longer carries the responsibility of conveying ethical and religious values though, paradoxically, the language of poetry may at times recapture the ambience of spiritual bonding with the universe which it possessed in primitive times. The fundamental difference between what Sidney and Shelley defended lies in their respective views of the roots and destination of the mythopoeic function of poetry. With Shelley, “poetry once again, as in primitive times, becomes mythopoeic, but this time its myths embody and express man’s creation of his own culture, and not his reception of it from a divine source.” Its role is the articulating of concern. In that sense it rejoins the imaginative creativeness of the poet of preliterate times. The Sidney–Shelley confrontation has led Frye to his own major point that “[t]he imagination operates in a counter-historical direction . . . and literature exists totally in the present tense as a total form of verbal imagination.” And this in turn leads to the question of poetic meaning which is not referential in respect of the context of external reality, but “archetypal” in relation to literature as a whole. This general view enables Frye, for instance, to welcome into the poetic family some of the renewals of orality characteristic of the late 1960s, and to link poetry with a “permanent revolution in the strictest sense, society engaged in a perpetual critique of itself, reforming and clarifying its own mythology, its own troubled and inconsistent but still crusading vision of what it might be.” At every turn of individual and collective history Mythos can challenge Logos by overcoming uniformity, boredom, inability to participate joyfully in the present.

20 The Myth of Light December 1968

From artscanada, 25 (December 1968): 8. Reprinted in RW, 55–7. This article was a contribution to a special issue on light.

The first phase of the myth of light begins with God, as the maker of things visible and invisible. The primary senses of consciousness are sight and hearing, and the creation is usually thought of as starting with them. In the Bible the myth of creation begins, “God said, Let there be light.” First there is an articulate sound in the darkness of chaos, then light appears, before the sun or any agent of light is in existence. Later religion drew the inference that God himself was a word and a light shining in darkness, and that light is “Of the eternal co-eternal beam,” as Milton says.1 For Heraclitus, at the beginning of Greek philosophy, all things move upward from the moist and dark to the dry light of fire, which is also the Logos or word, the light of reason common to all men.2 Light, the condition of visibility, is also the central symbol for all knowledge and understanding. Eventually, this myth says, the created world will go back to darkness, and man will enter an eternal home of light, symbolized by a city glowing with gold and jewels. The image of this home of light is the sun, which Shakespeare sees as “Gilding the streams with heavenly alchemy,”3 alchemy being one of the symbols of the return to the Golden Age of light. The second phase of the myth of light begins with man, which means beginning in myths of alienation and anxiety. In religion, man is thought of as “fallen,” as surrounded by darkness but provided with two lights, the light of revelation and the light of nature. With their aid he discovers a third light within himself, the wisdom which the Bible calls “the candle

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of the Lord,”4 the light of love which, according to Jesus, is not to be hidden under a bushel but allowed to shine clearly.5 As religious myths give way to more secular ones, around the time of the French Revolution, the inner light of man is thought of in more social terms as a buried Promethean fire, like that of a volcano, which may at any time explode and burn the world. Such a burning would, according to the Romantic poets, destroy only the darkness of slavery and superstition. Man would walk in fires unconsumed, according to Blake, like the three in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace,6 and would assume “the powers of a world of perfect light,” according to Shelley.7 In this second phase light is thought of as struggling with darkness, like a lighthouse beam, where increasing the understanding of anything is throwing light on it. The third phase of the myth of light begins with nature, when light is studied as a part of the physical world and obeying physical laws. Here light is thought of as existing in a time–space unity, travelling at a definite speed, though a speed at which, so far as we know, nothing material can travel. It may be corpuscular or wave-like, but whichever it is it seems to disturb the old associations around the words “matter” and “substance.” It is rather a form of energy which we translate into visibility, the primordial power of a self-creating nature, which exists in the invisible form of electricity as well as in colour. It is no longer thought of as illuminating forms already in existence, but as the visible aspect of a force which unites the subject and the object in a world that in itself contains no such separation. This light is the “quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight” of Hart Crane,8 the manifesting of a world in which we are challenged by Wallace Stevens to Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor. [Credences of Summer, ll. 21–2]

The arts respond to all these phases. In the art of the first phase, light is thought of as being of the essence of the object: light and object cannot exist apart from each other. In primitive paintings, in the temples of the Acropolis glowing in the Greek sunlight, objects are simply visible: they are not “lit up.” In the art of the second phase, light is an attribute of the object: it streams in and dispels the darkness, or streams outward from its source, like the halos of saints. The window, especially the stainedglass window of the medieval cathedral, is the central architectural symbol of this conception of light: in painting it appears as “chiaroscuro,” the

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battle of light and darkness, where the point of diffusing light, as so often in Rembrandt, is the visual focus. In the art of the third phase, light is the energy underlying form, the form being in a sense a kind of arbitrary recreation of what light gives us directly. In Turner and the Impressionists, the sense of forms as about to be dissolved in their original light-energy is very strong. Later, representation tends to disappear altogether. The painter, from Kandinsky on, tries to escape from the perspective of a subject looking at objects, and the architect tries similarly to escape from the walled-in building, the building which symbolizes a subject set over against a world of objects instead of uniting with it. Perhaps a fourth phase of the myth of light, in which light is once again objective, though objective in a very different way, is about to develop. If so, the contents of this issue may provide some clue to its nature.

21 Old and New Comedy 1969

From Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969): 1–5. Incorporated in revised form into part 1 of “Romance as Masque” in SM, 148–56. Reprinted in Types of Drama, ed. Sylvan Barret et al. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 450–4. The piece had been given in a slightly shorter form as a lecture at the Thirteenth International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon, England, 6 September 1968; typescripts with revisions are in NFF, 1988, box 2, file oo.

The Old and New Comedy forms in Greek literature are highly stylized and conventionalized forms, each the product of very specific cultural and historical conditions that can never recur. Each may be of course imitated in later ages: The Comedy of Errors adapts Plautus, and there is some imitation of Aristophanes in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. But more important than the possibility of imitation is the fact that the two Greek forms are species of larger dramatic genera. The kind of comedy they represent may and inevitably will recur, when a larger pattern of cultural and historical factors makes it possible. I begin with New Comedy, as the more familiar, and as having something more like a continuous line of tradition. The distinguishing feature of New Comedy is the teleological plot: perhaps this feature had something to do with Aristotle’s approval of it. As a rule the main theme of this plot is that of the alienated lover moving towards sexual fulfilment. New Comedy reaches a telos in its final scene, which is superficially marriage, and, more profoundly, a rebirth. A new society is created on the stage in the last moments of a typical New Comedy, when objections, oppositions, misunderstandings, and the schemes of rivals are all cleared out of the way. This newborn society is frequently balanced by a

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recognition scene and a theme of the restoring of a birthright, the recognition (cognitio) being connected with the secret of somebody’s birth in the very common device of the foundling plot. Much simpler and more popular is the comedy in which a hero, after many setbacks, succeeds in doing something that wins him the heroine and a new sense of identity. In such a structure the characters are essentially functions of the plot. However fully realized they may be, they are always organically related to the roles on which the plot turns, whether senex, parasite, bragging rival, or whatever it is.1 The commedia dell’arte indicates with particular clarity how a group of stock characters related to a stock plot is the basis of the comic structures of Shakespeare and Molière, both of whom show many affinities with the commedia dell’arte. In Ben Jonson’s “humour” theory the New Comedy conception of character as a plot function is rationalized in a most ingenious way. The character as plot function has something predictable at his basis: the “humour” is a character who is completely dominated by a predictable reaction. But predictability of response is also one of the main sources of the comic mood, as has been emphasized in most theories of comedy and laughter down to Bergson. Thus the “humour” is the appropriate type of character for a New Comedy plot because in the humour comic structure and comic mood are unified. The imagery and characterization of New Comedy belong to an extensive area of literary symbolism which I shall call Eros symbolism. Eros symbolism includes all the medieval poetry in which an alienated lover is stimulated by his love to make some gigantic achievement, whether his goal is explicitly sexual, as it is in The Romaunt of the Rose, or spiritual and sublimated, as it is in the Purgatorio. The two climaxes of the Eros quest we may call, following Milton, the allegro and the penseroso forms. The Biblical archetypes of Dante’s quest are the journey of man towards the garden of Eden, the journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land, and the vision of the hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs which in its Christian form is the epiphany of the virgin mother and divine child. Here the transcendence of a sexual goal goes along with the vision of a divine childhood which is partly the poet’s childhood as well, for Dante in Eden regains his generic childhood as a son of an unfallen Adam. In all these quests we notice the figure of the lonely old man who can see but not enter the sacred garden. This figure is represented by Moses in the Old Testament, by Joseph in the New, and by Virgil in Dante. He corresponds in New Comedy to the defeated or reconciled senex. In

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Shakespeare we notice how in As You Like It the quadruple marriage is contrasted with the melancholy Jaques, who goes off to consult a hermit, and how in The Tempest the festivities of Ferdinand and Miranda are an emotional contrast to the world-weariness of Prospero. New Comedy develops two main forms, the romantic form of Shakespeare and the more realistic and displaced form of the Neoclassical tradition, of which the greatest name is Molière. The more realistic such comedy becomes, the more it is in danger of becoming a sentimental domestic comedy, like the comédie larmoyante of the eighteenth century. A combination of realistic treatment and comic structure has a tendency to sentimentality inherent in it, as its theme approximates very closely the favourite rubric of the agony column: “Come home; all is forgiven.” Molière avoids this by focusing nearly all the dramatic interest on a central senex or blocking figure, whose particular folly, whether avarice or snobbery or hypochondria, keeps the tone well away from the sentimental.2 But in Sheridan and Goldsmith the effort to keep the texture dry and witty is more of a strain. The domestic virtues do not appear to have attracted the loyalty of a major dramatic genius, unless we wish to call Beethoven a major dramatic genius. Fidelio is a bachelor’s tribute to the domestic virtues, but the extraordinary unevenness of the music indicates some doubts even in his mind. Naturally, too, anything in the nature of a “well-made play,” like the plays of Scribe and Sardou, or in general of what Bernard Shaw called “Sardoodledom,”3 belongs to the New Comedy tradition. Eventually the New Comedy structure tends to desert the stage for the domestic novel, where a sentimental tone is easier to accommodate. The foundling plot reappears in Tom Jones, and reaches perhaps its culmination in Dickens. For in Dickens, while the story normally ends in marriage, a great deal is made of the mystery of birth. The production of the parents of the hero or heroine, even when they are bare names unrelated to the story, like the father of Oliver Twist or the parents of Little Nell, seems to be a feature of great importance. And, of course, the whole conception of characterization in Dickens is very close to that of the Jonsonian humour, except that the looser fictional form can find room for a greater number of peripheral characters who are not directly concerned in the central plot. When drama revives in Great Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century, the formulas of New Comedy are used increasingly for purposes of parody, parody being the usual sign in literature that some

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conventions are getting worn out. We begin with parodies of foundling and mysterious-heir plots in Gilbert and Sullivan, notably in Pinafore and The Gondoliers; then we have Wilde’s urbane treatment of the foundling plot in The Importance of Being Ernest, where the hero has to overcome a refusal to “marry into a waiting room, and contract an alliance with a parcel.”4 Wilde is followed by Bernard Shaw, who was well aware of the extent to which some standard New Comedy devices, such as the hero’s being attracted by a girl whom he does not know to be his sister, had already been parodied by Ibsen. Among Shaw’s parodies of recognition scenes we may note the ingenious device that enables Undershaft to adopt his son-in-law as his successor in Major Barbara, and the discovery in Arms and the Man that Captain Bluntschli is of the highest social rank possible in his country, being an ordinary Swiss citizen, besides being made rich enough, by inheriting a hotel business, to upstage his rival Sergius. In the next generation, the writer who most closely followed the New Comedy structure as laid down by Plautus and Terence was P.G. Wodehouse. In other words, the teleological New Comedy structure seems to have dropped out of the centre of serious literature in the twentieth century. In this situation writers of comedy clearly have to do something else, and what they are doing may be easier to understand if we think of Old Comedy, not simply as the form of Aristophanes, but as a genus of comedy—I should be inclined to suggest that it is the alternative genus— which is open to writers bored or inhibited by the other conventions. The structure of Old Comedy is dialectical rather than teleological, and its distinguishing feature is the agon or contest. This feature makes for a processional or sequential form, in which characters may appear without introduction and disappear without explanation. In this form characters are not functions of a plot, but vehicles or embodiments of the contest. For a dramatic contest is as a rule not simply between personalities as such, but between personalities as representatives of larger social forces. These forces may be those of a class struggle, as they are in Brecht, or they may be more concrete situations like a war or an election, or they may be psychological forces or attitudes of mind. Such a form is the appropriate one for introducing historical figures. We recall how Socrates and Euripides appear in Aristophanes; in Bernard Shaw, who shows the transition to Old Comedy conventions very clearly, we have the caricatures of Asquith and Lloyd George in Back to Methuselah; and this prepares the way for more recent plays about Churchill, the Pope,

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and various analogues of Hitler. Or such characters may come from literature: I think, as a random example, of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, which begins with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza entering from the audience, in a way curiously reminiscent of The Frogs. We notice in Aristophanes that while the agon may conclude with the victory of something the dramatist approves of, it may equally well be a victory of something patently absurd, as in The Birds. A comic structure based on a contest in which absurdity is the victor of the contest is clearly antiteleological, the greatest possible contrast to the more idealistic New Comedy form. Although Aristophanes himself is a high-spirited writer, full of jokes and slapstick, the form he uses, in its larger context, is the appropriate form for black or absurd comedy. The darker tone latent in Old Comedy was recognized in Elizabethan times: Puttenham says, for example: “this bitter poem called the old Comedy being disused and taken away, the new Comedy came in place, more civil and pleasant by a great deal.”5 It was perhaps the more deeply sardonic tone of Every Man out of His Humour that made Jonson speak of it as closer to Old Comedy, though it is still within the conventions of New Comedy in its structure. In our day the black comedy is normal, but half a century ago, when Chekhov showed characters slowly freezing in the grip of a dying class, many audiences found it difficult to believe that The Cherry Orchard or The Three Sisters were comedies at all. New Comedy may go either in a romantic or in a realistic direction: the natural development of Old Comedy is towards fantasy, which now seems to us a peculiarly modern technique. Where characters are embodiments of social or psychological conflicts, the conception of the individual as defined by sanity, wakefulness, and ordinary experience is only one of many possible points of view. In New Comedy we are continually aware of the predominance of the chain of being: we notice this, for example, in the rigid social hierarchy of Shakespearean comedy, which the action of the comedy never essentially disturbs. Old Comedy, by contrast, may be called the drama of unchained being. In Aristophanes characters may be gods, as in The Birds, or the dead, as in The Frogs, or pure allegories, as in Peace. A similar tendency to introduce characters who are not coterminous with the bodies of individuals is marked in the theatre of the absurd, especially in Ionesco. One form of this is the archetypal characterization that we find, for instance, in Waiting for Godot, where the two main characters identify themselves with a number of representative figures, such as the two thieves crucified with Christ.

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Waiting for Godot is also, in one of its aspects, a parody of the vaudeville dialogue, which bears much the same relation to Old Comedy that the commedia dell’arte does to New Comedy. In more sophisticated versions of such dialogue, as we have it in Nichols and May, it becomes more clearly a verbal agon.6 When the contest is one of incident rather than words, we may have the loose sequential structure of some of the early Chaplin films, where there is a series of collisions between the hero and a number of unsympathetic antagonists, very similar in form to, for example, the last part of Aristophanes’ The Acharnians. In New Comedy the essential meaning of the play, or what Aristotle calls its dianoia, is bound up with the revelation of the plot, but such a meaning may be crystallized in a number of sententious axioms that express reflections arising from the various stages of the plot. Menander was famous for his sententious or proverbial utterances, one of which was quoted by St. Paul; Terence was highly prized for the same quality in the Renaissance; and the same characteristic recurs in Shakespeare, as in the well-known line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The course of true love never did run smooth” [1.1.134]. Old Comedy is less sententious but more argumentative and conceptual than New Comedy, hence it can find a place for the long harangue or monologue, which tends to disrupt the action of a New Comedy, and so appears in it only as a technical tour de force, like the speech of Jaques on the seven ages of man.7 In Aristophanes we have the parabasis or direct address to the audience; in Shaw the parabasis is transferred to a preface which the audience is expected to read along with the play; and many recent comedies not only include but are based on monologue, as we see in several plays of Beckett and in Albee’s Zoo Story. Two other characteristics of Old Comedy may be more briefly mentioned. As we see in Aristophanes’ use of a chorus, Old Comedy, because of its looser processional form, can be more spectacular and less purely verbal than New Comedy. In New Comedy, once we go beyond the incidental songs that we find in Shakespeare, music and spectacle tend to caricature the complications of the plot, as in The Marriage of Figaro. But Old Comedy is in its nature closer to musical comedy, and we notice again how the plays of Shaw, despite their intensely verbal texture, make surprisingly good musical comedies. Again, the fact that Old Comedy is less preoccupied with the game of love and the rituals of courtship makes it a better medium for a franker and more explicit treatment of the workings of the sexual instinct. Even the scurrility which is so conspicu-

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ous in Aristophanes recurs in MacBird! and similar forms of undercover drama.8 Of modern dramatists, perhaps T.S. Eliot shows most clearly the conflict between the two types of comedy. Eliot begins his dramatic efforts with the exuberant and superbly original Sweeney Agonistes, subtitled Fragment of an Agon, where, besides the obvious and avowed influence of Aristophanes, many of the features noted above appear, such as the assimilation to musical comedy and vaudeville forms. When he settles down to write seriously for the stage, however, we get such confections as The Confidential Clerk, where the main influence is Euripides’ Ion, usually taken as the starting point of New Comedy. But this play seems, in comparison with Sweeney Agonistes, a somewhat pedantic joke, an attempt to do over again what Oscar Wilde (and, for that matter, Gilbert) had already done with more freshness. Shakespeare’s comedies conform for the most part to a romantic development of New Comedy. But Shakespeare was a versatile experimenter, and there is at least one play which falls within the genus of Old Comedy as we have been dealing with it here. This play is, of course, Troilus and Cressida. Here the characters are well-known figures from history or literature; the structure is a simple sequential one, built up on the background movement of Helen from Greece to Troy and the foreground movement of Cressida in the reverse direction; the characters are both embodiments and prisoners of the social codes they adopt, and so far as the action of the play itself is concerned, the only clear victor of the contest is absurdity. The reasons why this play seems to us a peculiarly “modern” one should be clear by now. New Comedy, especially in its more romantic or Shakespearean form, tends to be an ideal structure with strong analogies to religion. The sense in which Christianity is a divine comedy is a New Comedy sense: here history is a teleological drama of which the hero is Christ, and the heroine who becomes his bride is also a reborn society. Similar affinities between romantic New Comedy and religious myth may occur outside Christianity, as we see in Sakuntala and other Indian comedies. Old Comedy is a more existential form in which the central theme is mockery, which may include mockery of the gods, above or below. The presiding genius of New Comedy is Eros, but the presiding genius of Old Comedy is more like Prometheus, a titanic power involved by his contempt for the gods in a chaotic world of absurdity and anguish. The fictional counterpart of New Comedy is the classical novel as it develops from Fielding

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to Henry James; the fictional counterpart of Old Comedy is the kind of satire that we have in Lucian, Apuleius, and more particularly Rabelais, where the theme of descent into a lower and more chaotic mode of existence occupies a prominent place. A hero may escape from this chaos, as Odysseus does from the cave of Polyphemus, or all the characters may remain involved in it. Such titles as Huis clos and Endgame suggest that the latter is the more conventional form today. Whatever its conventions, the dramatic genus of Old Comedy is the one now established on our stage, and as we enter the age of anarchism it is likely to remain there.

22 Sign and Significance 7 February 1969

From Claremont Reading Conference: Thirty-Third Yearbook, ed. Malcolm P. Douglass (Claremont, Calif.: Claremont Graduate School, 1969), 1–8. Originally given as a lecture at the conference; NF mislaid his notes and constructed a new version for the yearbook (NFF, 1988, box 60, file 7). A clean typescript is in NFF, 1988, box 2, file xx.

I begin with a very simple distinction, and one which I have used elsewhere. Whenever we read anything, we find our attention moving in two directions at once. One direction is centripetal, trying to form a context out of what we are reading. The other is centrifugal, where we keep going outside what we are reading to our memory of the conventional meaning of the words used. We become aware of the continuity of this latter movement when we read something in a language we imperfectly know, and have to keep consulting a dictionary. In my Anatomy Of Criticism I suggested that this distinction might serve as a rough but workable basis for dividing literary structures into the literary and the nonliterary. If the verbal structure has been made primarily for the sake of a body of facts or concepts which it reproduces, it is discursive and nonliterary; if it exists for its own sake as an interesting verbal pattern, it is literary, and can no longer be judged by the accuracy with which it represents phenomena outside itself [AC, 73–4/67–8]. This difference is usually in the intentionality of the work itself, but sometimes social acceptance has a power of veto over it; thus a work originally intended to be historical, or even medical, like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, may come to survive as literature. Let us now apply this distinction to criticism. When we read a work of

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literature we are always subconsciously trying to answer the question, “What does this mean?” It is clear from what we have said that there are two answers. The centrifugal answer, when we are reading a poem particularly, usually involves giving a prose paraphrase of the poem and saying, “This is what it means.” If we insert an adverb of value into that remark, we reveal a good deal about our critical attitude. If we say, “This is roughly, or more or less, what it means,” we are conceding the autonomy of the form of the poem. If we say, “This is literally what it means,” we are reflecting the assumptions of a writing culture, in which the norms of verbal meaning are established by nonliterary writers, and the poet is a licensed liar. If we say, “This is essentially what it means,” we have committed ourselves to taking a position about where the essence of a poem is which is very common but ultimately indefensible. Nevertheless, giving a prose paraphrase of a poem’s meaning is not only defensible but necessary as a basis for certain types of criticism. These forms of criticism are centrifugal, in the sense that they take the poem to be a document illustrating some context established outside the poem. The simplest way of doing this is to regard the poem as a statement by the poet of his own views or attitudes to life. Here the context is biographical, and the critical attention is focused on the manifest content of the poem as a communication from poet to reader. No one can doubt the relevance of biography to criticism as a whole, but of course the biographical context is a limited one. It depends on our possession of a fully documented body of material about a poet’s life, and we normally need some explicit statements from the poet himself. Where the poet’s life is imperfectly known, the limitations in this form of understanding show up very clearly. Thus in the nineteenth century, the heyday of biographical criticism, a critic would simply have to invent a poet’s biography if he did not possess it. Hence we get editors of Horace explaining that we know from Horace’s poems that he was violently in love with a series of damsels named Lydia, Delia, and Phaedria, and students of Shakespeare would tell us that the key to understanding Shakespeare’s sonnets consists in identifying the Mr. W.H. of the publisher’s blurb with the appropriate pansy, hopefully a noble one. In any case, in the twentieth century at least, a biographical context tends to expand into a psychological one. Here we are moving from the manifest content to the latent content as our area of study. The approach is still documentary, and therefore allegorical: that is, the poem is treated as an allegory illustrating the poet’s own attitude to life. The manifest

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content is usually rendered by some kind of conceptual allegory: the poem illustrates a certain aspect of the poet’s view of life, and this aspect is normally some theme such as love, death, ecstasy, or fatality. Here the poem is being assimilated to conceptual and discursive structures which are produced voluntarily and with a conscious mind. Since we recognize a latent content as well as a manifest one, we concede the importance of unconscious and involuntary factors in the creative process. The poem thus records, perhaps unconsciously, various tensions and conflicts in the poet’s mind, and hence it becomes an allegory of certain typical and recurring psychological situations, such as the contest of ego and id in Freud or the individuation process in Jung. In this area a certain determinism is apt to make its appearance. The psychological conflicts are often regarded as the origin of the poem, and as essentially accounting for the poem’s structure as well as its content. Another aspect of unconscious meaning is that every poet addresses his own time, and yet may be able to communicate to future generations through qualities that would not be fully known to him. Thus when Tillyard writes about the unconscious meaning of Paradise Lost, he is really writing about that aspect of the poem which makes it relevant to the twentieth century, and not merely to the seventeenth.1 At this point we begin to wonder whether in fact we can accept the poet as being the sole source of his poem. Perhaps, after all, the poem does not come so much from the poet as through the poet from somewhere else. That somewhere else is, most obviously, the society to which he belongs and of which he is a spokesman. At this point centrifugal criticism becomes historical criticism, including the history of ideas, and the poem is studied as a social, historical, and cultural document. This aspect of criticism is too familiar to need further explanation. It is not only essential to criticism but one of its most liberalizing aspects. To concentrate solely upon a poet’s relevance to our own time is to translate him into our own conventions and modes of thought, which both distorts him and increases our own complacent provincialism. To anchor a poet solidly in his own age is also to become acquainted with alien cultures and habits of thought, and so to enlarge our own experience. Thus historical criticism becomes a means of liberalizing our study of the humanities, and is part of the general sense of responsibility and respect for subject matter that impels us to read everything we can in its original language, or at least to demand the most literal possible translation if we do not know the language.

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But here, as with the individual poet, the critical interest is likely to extend from manifest content to latent content, from what a historical period explicitly tells us to what it unconsciously reveals of its class tensions, its sense of its own context in time and space and history. This means the development of a historical criticism content within a unified view of history. There have been several of these. The earliest one, which flourished from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, saw Western culture as reaching a Golden Age in the time of Augustus, as declining through silver and brass to iron with what Gibbon called “the triumph of barbarism and religion,”2 and then going through the “dark” age to a new light with the revival of Classical learning. This was succeeded by the Romantic view, which exactly reversed this and saw culture as reaching its height in the medieval period. This survived into the last generation with a conservative, and usually Catholic, view of history which placed the summit of cultural integration in the age of St. Thomas. The Classical view modulated into the Hegelian one, which saw a gradual actualizing of the idea of liberty in history. And this, metamorphosed into the revolutionary view of Marx, still occupies a good deal of critical thought today. Here again we find determinism, and a tendency to explain form as well as content by the controlling view of history. All these centrifugal types of criticism are, I repeat, essential to the entire critical process. It is only when we refuse to concede the validity of other types of criticism that we begin to go wrong. Every form of documentary criticism is in the long run analytic: it takes the poem apart in order to put it together again in a nonliterary context. Thus it does not account for the fact that the poem was in the first place written as a poem. We need to develop a complementary type of criticism which accepts the poetic form of utterance as its basis or literal meaning. The types of criticism we have been dealing with have as their great strength a sense of context, a place to put the poem. But, in themselves, they can only give us an education through literature, not an education in literature. It was inevitable, therefore, that there should have been a reaction against historical criticism in favour of a type of criticism which preserved the poetic form of the poem as its basis of operations. Such a reaction took place with the explicatory school of critics which were called the “New Critics” in America a quarter of a century ago. In some respects this movement resembled the “formalism” in Russian literature which had been attacked by the Marxists as a form of bourgeois idealism. The Marxists were shrewd enough to see that once we begin to concede the formal

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autonomy of the poem, the whole structure of Marxist determinism and “socialist realism” would begin to crumble, and Marxist bureaucracies would be compelled to give novelists and poets the same kind of freedom that they had reluctantly been compelled to grant to scientists. As with all reactions, there were excesses on both sides: some New Critics went to simplistic extremes in ruling out every kind of “background” from the critical operation, and some historical critics assumed that explication was nothing but a kind of solitaire-playing, with no rules in history or culture. And in fact, explication did run into one difficulty: the absence of the sense of context which had been the great strength of historical criticism. Hence most of the more responsible New Critics, as they developed, tended to accept one of the contexts that were already provided. In most cases this was ordinary historical criticism: a few, because of the anti-Marxist historical setting of the movement, adopted the conservative and Catholic type of determinism; one or two were even Marxists. In Marshall McLuhan, who was trained essentially in this school as a critic, an extreme and somewhat paradoxical formalism, which identifies medium and message, has been placed in a neo-Marxist context of determinism in which communications media play the role that “means of production” do in more orthodox Marxism. A good many traces of an older religious determinism can be found in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Another difficulty with explication takes a little more space to describe. In addition to the two directions of attention we speak of, which go on simultaneously, there are also two actions which succeed one another in time. While we are reading a poem or listening to a play on the stage, we are participating in a linear narrative: this linear participation is essentially precritical. Once finished, the poem or play tends to freeze into a single simultaneous unity. This sense of simultaneous unity is what is symbolized by “recognition,” which may be a crucial point in the play towards the end or some crucial emblematic image, like a scarlet letter or a golden bowl, and which is usually indicated in the title. It is in this sense of total comprehension of structure, or “verbal icon,”3 that the critic can begin. The process of explication is consequently easiest to follow, and best organized, when it starts with a sense of the poem’s unity and works deductively from there. Explication sometimes gets so involved in retracing the process of reading, and with mapping out the intricacies of ambiguity and the like encountered on the way, that it tends to lead one away from the sense of unity. McLuhan, again, reflects this difficulty, which he

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makes the basis of a distinction between print and electronic media. This is of course a technical difficulty only, but explicators who have been most successful in overcoming it, such as Spitzer and Auerbach,4 raise implicitly other questions of theory. Explication, in any case, has established itself as the centripetal counterpart to biographical criticism. It studies the poem rather than the poet, but it approaches every work of literature without much regard to its genre, and without building up any connecting links between one explication and the next. The next step in centripetal criticism is clearly to try to create a context which binds together our different efforts in critical reading. Such a context can only be sought for within literature itself. The most obvious context within a literature for an individual poem is, of course, the entire output of its author. This is best studied through the consideration of the poet’s structure of imagery, as every poet puts images together in his own way, and in a way that does not and cannot essentially change throughout his productive life. This is a “psychological” criticism based on the principle that what a poet succeeds in communicating to others is at least as important as what he fails to resolve for himself. The more important the poet, the more obvious it is that to read any poem of his without also reading the whole of his work is simply reading out of context, and leads to all the fallacies of isolated reading. As soon as one thinks seriously about this, one begins to understand something of the immense importance of such features as convention, genre, and the recurring images of literature, which I call archetypes. To read a comedy of Shakespeare is not a very serious critical activity in itself until one has read all the comedies of Shakespeare. But as soon as one has done this, one becomes aware of certain conventional laws underlying the comic structure, which apply to all other writers of comedy. One begins, not merely to note the fact that the heroine often disguises herself as a boy, but to understand the reason for such conventions and their place in comedy as a whole. Such a study begins to clarify the outlines of a history of literature that operates within literature itself, and is not simply an external historical and nonliterary “background” to literature. At this point one begins to suspect that a poet’s relation to poetry is very like a scientist’s relation to his science or a scholar’s to his scholarship. The scientist cannot think as a scientist until he has immersed himself in the structure of his science, and until whatever he thinks becomes an organic extension and development of the science, so that in a sense the science itself is thinking through him. Similarly, a poet immerses

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himself in the conventions of his time, writing in the same way that all his contemporaries are writing. As he matures, he takes on more individuality. But this individuality does not break away from the conventions of literature: it sinks more deeply into them. This is not the way in which criticism usually thinks of poets. Under the influence of the documentary or centrifugal conception of poetic meaning, they think rather of the poet as an ordinary man with a special knack of writing up an imaginative experience. But it is certainly the way in which poets have invariably talked about themselves. From Homer invoking a Muse to dictate his poem to him down to Rimbaud saying that for the poet the statement “je pense” ought to be “on me pense,”5 poets have always insisted that they were simply places where something new, and yet something recognizably poetic, took place in poetry. From here it is clear that one must take a final step, corresponding to the more unified historical perspectives of the Marxists and other social determinists. One has to see literature as a unified, coherent, and autonomous body of imaginative experience historically conditioned but not historically determined. Conventions of literature are, within literature, stronger forces than social change; and poets in the London of Charles II, using the Courtly Love conventions, differ far less from their predecessors in the London of Richard II, using the same conventions, than the difference in the two ages would suggest. From here one would have to proceed historically, and show how poetry arose in oral and preliterate cultures, and how, after writing and continuous prose developed, poetry became assimilated to the habits of a writing culture. The dead end of this assimilation is the present educational attitude to the teaching of literature. One normally studies a subject by starting at the centre and working outwards to the periphery. A literary education which started a child off by teaching him the simpler rhythmical movements of poetry and by telling him stories, along with encouraging him to tell stories on his own, would be both following the child’s mental education and recapitulating the history of human culture. As such education developed, it could become more conceptual and abstract, moving outwards to prose and finally to utilitarian prose. The more usual practice today is to present literature in reverse, starting with it as a technique of communication, and moving cautiously from utilitarian to literary speech, finally approaching the mystery of poetry, as cautiously as though it were boiling oil. This approach is founded on an absurd identification of prose with the language of ordinary speech.

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Actually prose is a very difficult and sophisticated way of conventionalizing ordinary speech, far more difficult than verse, and for younger children, at least, prose is a dead language with no direct relation to the way they actually speak. The results of this educational muddle are clear to every teacher of literature. They are especially clear to me, teaching at the university level, when I see how many of my students regard poetry as a perverse and hopelessly obscure way of distorting ordinary prose statements. But two things have happened in the last decade or so. In the first place, oral culture has made a very strong resurgence, and we are once again in the age of the balladeer and the folk singer, whose poetry is directly addressed to a listening audience. In the second place, a habit of thinking in symbols and images has been fostered not only by this change in literature, but by the development of movies and television, which show extraordinary power of communicating through symbols. The result is that, while educators appear to be as ignorant and confused as ever, their victims are less helpless, and have been teaching themselves to a point at which poets who a generation ago were regarded as fantastically difficult are now regarded with much less panic. It only remains for educational theory to catch up with contemporary practice.

23 Literature and the Law 7 February 1970

From Law Society of Upper Canada Gazette, 4, no. 2 (June 1970): 70–7. Reprinted in The Advocate, 12 (November–December 1977): 2–8, and in RW, 340–9. This was a lecture to the Ontario branch of the Canadian Bar Association, given on the occasion of their annual dinner. A typescript is in NFF, 1991, box 26, file 2.

I am very pleased to be here, not only because of the great honour you have done me by asking me to speak at so special an event, but because the topic suggested to me by the chairman, “Literature and the Law,” was one which immediately interested me. The associations between the two go very deep and a long way. Of course leisure long ago disappeared from the academic profession, but there was a time when it did have leisure, and I think a good deal of at least the British part of our cultural inheritance has been produced by three groups of people who produced it because they had very little else to do. These three groups have been the academic dons, the country clergymen, and the briefless barristers. In our own century, Sir James Frazer, who wrote The Golden Bough and several hundred cubic feet of other books, is one of the most impressive examples of how much can be contributed to culture and learning by someone who is called to the bar and who does not respond. My starting point is easy enough. Nineteen seventy is the centenary of the death of Charles Dickens, and there will be dozens of conferences called together this year to celebrate the fact. And Dickens kept turning incessantly to the law for his material: there is hardly a novel of his in which a lawyer or court case is not prominently featured. In the early novels, the legal scenes have a large element of slapstick, turning on the

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confrontation of a dignified judge in a full-bottomed wig with Cockney impudence like that of Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers or the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist. It is also in Oliver Twist that Bumble makes his celebrated remark that “the law is a ass.”1 The reason why the law is a ass, according to Bumble, is that it assumes that a wife acts under her husband’s direction, and Bumble, who is married to one of the most repulsive shrews in English literature, knows better. But in the later books the tone turns darker and more sardonic. In Bleak House we have the Chancery case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce, which steadily accumulates more and more complication, like a cancer, sucking the lives out of everyone involved in it, until finally the whole of the estate being contested is absorbed in costs. Flanking this case are the figures of the pathetic Miss Flite, who has been driven insane by a similar case, and the sinister Tulkinghorn, who finally gets murdered, a family solicitor who worms out family secrets. He is not technically a blackmailer, but nevertheless he finds it necessary to behave very much like one in order to preserve the reputation of the families from whom he gets his living. His attitude is consistent with what Dickens says, that the legal establishment in Victorian England is not intended to be a public service, but to be a self-perpetuating social parasite. (I should add that Dickens usually presents education also as a racket.) In Little Dorrit we have the Circumlocution Office, another legal and administrative labyrinth where the motto is “how not to do it.” Here we realize that Dickens is only incidentally after the lawyers: what he is really attacking is the bureaucracy. Little Dorrit came out shortly after the investigations following the Crimean War, which had revealed so much bungling and ineptitude, and made it clear that a major reason for the inefficiency was the fact that giving jobs to the friends and relatives of influential people was always something that had top priority given to it. So Dickens portrays for us the family of the Barnacles, who, as their name indicates, are a well-to-do family of parasites who get the top jobs in everything and can always be found, Dickens says, meeting any crisis with their drawn salaries in their hands. But Dickens is by no means the only Victorian writer to be interested in the law. There is a similar interest in almost every important British nineteenth-century novelist. When we begin Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, we meet, first of all, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett and their five daughters including the heroine Elizabeth, and then we are introduced to that unutterable slob Collins, who proposes to Elizabeth and is promptly turned down,

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with the thorough approval of the reader. But even here there is a complicated legal situation in the background which gives the whole scene an additional ironic dimension. Mr. Bennett’s estate is entailed to Collins in default of male heirs: he has produced nothing but this great houseful of women, and consequently in rejecting Collins Elizabeth has turned down her only chance of keeping her father’s property in the family. There is a similar legal tangle in the background even of that titanic and passionate novel, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where the villain-hero Heathcliff acquires his property through marriage. Wuthering Heights, with its tremendous intensity of emotional power, terrified most of its contemporary readers, but there was one reviewer who, though he deplored the novel, finally decided that it had a moral message after all, because it showed “what Satan could do with the law of entail.”2 This fascination with the law on the part of British writers seems to me particularly interesting, because so far as I know there is no counterpart to it either in American literature or in the literature of the Continent. One reason, perhaps, is that conservatives and liberals alike, in the nineteenth century, were proud of the inductive British Constitution, where, as Tennyson says, freedom emerges from broadening precedents.3 Something too has to be allowed for the temperament of a nation which actually seems to like lining up in queues and closing their pubs at ten o’clock at night. It is this kind of temperament which makes the British detective story so unique a product, where the relations of policemen and criminals become a kind of ritual game, following rules which even the criminals observe. A more important reason connects with the general principle that any group of people in society is law-abiding in proportion to its stake in that society. This of course means that the most law-abiding part of society is the propertied middle class; and the extraordinarily ingenious devices by which that class has maintained its ascendancy throughout British history has given a strongly legal bias to all its culture, including its literature. In any case there is hardly an important nineteenth-century British novelist who does not make a major character out of the law: even Alice in Wonderland ends with a trial and a courtroom scene. It is obvious too that Dickens and his contemporaries show the turn towards the feeling of self-criticism about the law which had begun in the nineteenth century with Jeremy Bentham and the historical researches of Maine. Primitive people think of their laws as given to them by their gods, and even as late as Blackstone in the eighteenth century, British

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lawyers retained a good deal of complacency about the perfection of their machinery of justice. But in the nineteenth century it had finally been accepted that law was a human product, full of human frailty, and subject to human criticism. There is also a growing sense, which is visible in Dickens, that this self-critical attitude to law ought to increase rather than decrease. At that time there was a good deal of belief in progress, and a vague feeling that man would have greater freedom after he had turned most of the drudgery of labour over to machines. Experience shows, however, that every major technological change, such as the invention of the automobile, carries with it an enormous complication of laws, in which thousands of noncriminal citizens find themselves involved in courtroom actions and negotiations with the police. In such things as the Circumlocution Office there is expressed the fear, which is at least as old as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, that man is constantly in danger of enslaving himself to what he creates. The most obviously vulnerable point, in criticizing the law, is the extent to which legislation embodies class privilege and class prejudice. It is a commonplace that the more ferocious and vindictive the penalty for a crime is, the more directly that crime is thought of as a threat to the class structure. An example is the law against counterfeiting money, for which one could be burned alive in the eighteenth century, according to Defoe. It is equally a commonplace of our time that in totalitarian countries actual criminals are treated much more leniently than political prisoners. As recent events in Chicago have indicated, such things may not be confined only to these countries.4 A somewhat milder form of legislation embodying class prejudice is one in which literature has taken an active reforming role. There are certain kinds of legislation which seem to be enacted primarily to keep the working class in their place. When Blackstone comes to the law of Sunday observance, he seems to feel that this particular law needs a personal plug from him rather than simple description. He says of it that Sunday observance “humanizes by the help of conversation and society the manners of the lower class, which would otherwise degenerate into a sordid ferocity and savage selfishness of spirit.”5 One hardly knows which is more impressive, the command of alliteration or the acute social nervousness which has clearly inspired it. Similarly, the American enthusiasm for Prohibition fifty years ago, misguided as it was, obviously had much to do with the American enthusiasm for productivity and for keeping workers sober and therefore industrious. And it is clear that the

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middle-class feeling that there is something obscene about the sexual side of life is connected with the realization that sex is something equally available to the working class. One indication that laws against obscene literature have no real legal basis is the impossibility of framing a legal definition of obscenity. One hopeful American court in the 1890s said that it was anything which would give offence to a modest woman. Then all it had to do was to define a modest woman. Along with class prejudice goes the instinct to keep women and children in a secluded social position. In the nineteenth century it was particularly women and children that had to be protected from explicit references to sex. It seems clear, however, that the desire to shelter and protect is closely related to the desire to domineer and exploit. Women began to resent this treatment a century ago, and young people are beginning to resent it today, although young people today, like women before them, have been protected so thoroughly that they find it very difficult to assume an independent social role. This is a field where literature has been a social pioneer. The cases of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Joyce’s Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, have forced the censors and the moral watchdogs into so defensive a position that they are now unwilling to return to the attack. A few years ago a distinguished British jurist complained mildly of the low comedy inherent in forcing judges to read books in order to see whether they found themselves being corrupted and depraved by doing so. This is a part of the law that nobody, even its most vociferous defenders, can really respect. It is true that an overworked police force is still required occasionally to break up sculpture exhibitions and make sure that pasties stay on topless dancers. But on the whole there has been a growing recognition that legislation should get rid of things that are not really subjects for legislation but are only middle-class twitters. There is, of course, such a thing as genuine obscenity: there are words that no self-respecting person would seriously use. But those are not the celebrated four-letter words: they are words that express hatred or contempt for people of different religion or nationality or skin colour. Spreading hate and prejudice is of course a genuine danger to society, but even that, as no one will know better than yourselves, is a very tricky matter to be put into legislation. Of course Canadians are also involved in a legal tradition very different from the British one. This is the American tradition, which is revolutionary in origin, and takes the more deductive form of a written and

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reinterpreted constitution. What I am more concerned with here is the social effect of a revolutionary tradition. The oldest literary theme is probably the breaking of law, in other words violence, and the addressing of panegyrics to conquerors of other nations. More serious literature begins where law also begins, in counter-violence, which is the law in its crudest and most barbaric form as lex talionis, the law of revenge. The cornerstone of our literary tradition is the Iliad, the story of the Greek revenge on Troy for the rape of Helen, which nevertheless manages to give the Trojans full tragic dignity. The same theme of counter-violence enters the revenge tragedy, which is one of the central forms of Shakespeare. In Hamlet, for example, we see Hamlet debating whether he should murder Claudius when Claudius has his back to him and is kneeling in prayer. Such a murder would be as squalid and treacherous an act as one could conceive, but nevertheless the suggestion comes to Hamlet in the form of a moral obligation, as something his conscience tells him he really ought to do. In the ethic of revenge the main question is the question of children’s quarrels: who started it? In all serious literature it becomes obvious that there is really no answer to the question of the origin of violence: aggression and revenge for aggression are part of an unending process with no beginning and above all no end. A revolution of course establishes a society on the basis of an act of counter-violence. Consequently a country with a revolutionary tradition is constantly subject to the temptation to become impatient with law. Whenever we hear demands for “law and order” made in the context of panic or righteous indignation, we know that what is being called for is not really law at all, but lawlessness. Law and order means safeguarding the civil rights of accused people and public trials conducted in accord with the rules of evidence. But the people who demand law and order as a means of ending a crisis are thinking of law mainly as a means for getting hold of troublesome people more efficiently. This leads to the paradox, which we have already seen operating in Hitler’s Germany, of appealing to law while establishing a police state in which all trials are publicity stunts and all judges political stooges. In Orwell’s 1984 we are told at the beginning that theoretically every citizen was free to do as he liked, because there were no longer any laws. But we soon realize that what this really means is that nobody has the freedom to do anything at all, and that slavery and anarchy are exactly the same condition. Of all works of modern literature, perhaps Franz Kafka’s The Trial is the most

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vivid and convincing presentation of the kind of terror one feels in living in a society where all normal social landmarks have been removed, where merely to have been arrested is evidence of guilt. The nightmare of the police state raises a much larger issue connected with literature and the law. One of the courses I teach is on the typology of the English Bible, and when I was dealing with the Book of Job recently it occurred to me that the two great religions which have formed the framework of our imaginative and cultural heritage, the Jewish and the Christian, consist very largely of two or three legal metaphors. Job says, according to the King James Bible, “I know that my redeemer liveth” [19:25], but the word translated as “redeemer” actually means someone on one’s own side in a law case, whether an advocate or a relative who would be good for bail. Similarly, our word “devil” comes from the Greek diabolos, but the original diabolos was somebody on the opposite side of a law case, an accuser or prosecutor. In Christianity the culminating act of God is visualized as a Last Judgment, an open trial in which all secret sins come to light. The imaginative appeal of such a final judgment is clearly that it represents the exact opposite of the fear inspired by secret power. Similarly when young people in universities today agitate for having all meetings open to the public, what they propose may be impracticable or impossible in detail, but one has to sympathize with the motivation, which springs from a genuinely democratic and often religious instinct. Then again, there is the metaphor preserved in the word “testament” to describe the two parts of the Bible. This word means a contract or a covenant, and our whole way of looking at things has been deeply conditioned by the conception of God as having voluntarily entered into a contract with man, which men may break but which God will not break. I should think that even our philosophy, and ultimately our science, derives from a corresponding feeling of an intellectual contract: that God has created an intelligible universe and will not go back on it. This feeling is still going strong in Einstein, when he remarks that Nature may puzzle but does not cheat.6 Here again, this sense of contract is the exact opposite of the unconditional will and the arbitrary power which are still among our deepest fears. It is this larger symbolic aspect of law which we find in some of the comedies of Shakespeare. It has been asserted, mainly by lawyers, that Shakespeare shows such a knowledge of law that he must have been a

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lawyer. I find this very doubtful as a critical axiom: Shakespeare, after all, knew quite a lot about the psychology of murderers. Besides, nobody should know better than a lawyer how easy it is to get up a mass of detailed information for a special occasion. In any case, Shakespeare has nothing of the specific interest in law as such that Dickens has. No magistrate would allow such a document as Shylock’s bond to be brought into his court: the story of The Merchant of Venice is not law, but folk tale and symbolism. Its point is not the rights or wrongs of Shylock’s case, but the supremacy of mercy over justice. Similarly, the story of Measure for Measure deals with a law prescribing death for extramarital sexual relations: a law so absurd that its only other appearance in English literature is in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. Again, the point is not legal, but the supremacy of the state of the inner mind over the outward act and its social consequence: the same point made by Christianity in its distinction between law and gospel. The principle which emerges from this distinction is that the more mature and better disciplined our minds are, the easier and more relaxed law should be. It is on this basis that Milton, for instance, attacked the laws of censorship and of divorce in his day. It seemed obvious to most people in his time that if Jesus declared marriage to be indissoluble except by death, the law should make divorce impossible. Milton, on the other hand, maintained that so exalted a view of marriage ought to make the law of divorce easier, because in actual life not every marriage is what Jesus meant by a marriage. Milton is the greatest figure in a long revolutionary tradition in English literature which includes Blake and Shelley, and even at this moment, with Allen Ginsberg quoting Blake in the Chicago conspiracy trials and the judge demanding that the name of Blake be stricken from the record,7 we see that literature is still a mighty force making for the emancipation of life under the law. What I am really saying, I suppose, is that all respect for the law is a product of the social imagination, and the social imagination is what literature directly addresses. One possible end of law is its annihilation in the police state, and literature in our own century has done much to show what a hideous nightmare such a state is. The other end of law is its annihilation, which is also a fulfilment, in the inner discipline of the individual. Obviously, society could not hold together if an honest man were nothing more than a man who had never been convicted of stealing: where the law ends is where genuinely civilized life begins. If the law were to be completely absorbed into the internal discipline of honest

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men, there would be no more law, and we should all be living in the garden of Eden. We are not there, but in the meantime law still depends upon the imagination, and the fostering and cherishing of the imagination by the arts is mainly what makes your profession honourable, perhaps even what makes it possible.

24 The Search for Acceptable Words Spring 1973

From SM, 3–26. Originally published in Daedalus, 102, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 11–26, in an issue on “The Search for Knowledge.” Reprinted in Daedalus, 117 (Summer 1988): 251–72; translated into Chinese. The article was written as a contribution to a conference organized by Daedalus in Paris, 12–14 September 1972, on the adequacy of institutional supports for research in different disciplines. Frye could not attend, and felt he was not the kind of scholar who depended much on research institutions, but agreed to write a paper on his type of scholarship which could be circulated ahead of time among the participants. In NFF, 1988, box 4, files y–z are typescripts which are presumably of this circulated paper. As a result of feedback from the conference participants, Frye revised his paper for the issue of Daedalus devoted to the conference. (See correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 10, files d3, d4). For SM, Frye added two notes and cut out one sentence, for which see n. 2. Frye’s title alludes to Ecclesiastes 12:10: “The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth.”

I had grave doubts about my fitness to discuss the question of research in the humanities, because I have been deflected from everything that could conventionally be described as research, in the sense of reading material that other people have not read, or have read for a different purpose. The reason why I take an autobiographical line in what follows, even at the risk of sounding egocentric, is that my experiences as a scholar have seemed to me, for a long time, to be atypical, and that more recently I have begun to think that they may be more typical than I have suspected. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the system of Ph.D. training was established in American universities, largely, it is said, on a Ger-

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man model. The idea of the Ph.D. was to define the condition that a practising scholar was supposed to keep himself in. His thesis was there to demonstrate that he had the capacity to make original contributions to scholarship, and the rest of the training was to prepare him to teach over a wider field than his special scholarship covered, and to be able to make use of research materials in other languages. Scholarship in the humanities was conceived at that time largely in terms of the division of labour, and the model, implicitly or explicitly, was science. The scholar was by definition a specialist, connected with his community through his teaching. The implication was that the highest reward of the scholar would be relief from teaching duties, at least in the undergraduate school, so that he could devote his time to his speciality. Behind this lay a further assumption about the place of the university in the community at large. Because of its innate tendency to build smaller compartments in knowledge, research gives an illusion of withdrawing from social issues, hence a hierarchy of scholarship in which pure research is at the top also assumes a university that constitutes a social counter-environment. At this time and later a number of learned journals were established, many of them with the word “philology” in their titles, which indicated that the scholarly organization of literature had been derived from the comparative study of languages. And though the Ph.D. took a much longer time to establish itself in the British universities, especially Oxford, where I studied during the ’30s, still Oxford had also adopted the philological conception of literature. There were three courses in the English school at Oxford when I was there: Course 1, which had the highest rating, featured Gothic and Old Norse; Course 2 covered English literature down to 1500; Course 3, established for the benefit of Rhodes scholars and the like, covered English literature down to 1830. Whatever the course, the emphasis was on philological elements, rather than on literary or critical ones. On both sides of the Atlantic it has been relatively recently that we have had a sustained body of scholarship in the Old and Middle English periods that is not critically infantile. The excuse offered for this was that, as any cultivated person ought to be reading literature on his own, giving academic credit for doing so was a weak permissiveness. There are colleges in Oxford which to this day refuse to employ a tutor in English for this reason. It is part of the same perverted ethos that what is regarded as serious in the study of the modern languages is the philological aspect of it. It strengthens the moral fibre to learn the classes of Old English strong verbs; it weakens it to

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study the rhetorical devices in Ulysses. Here again is a lurking analogy to science, and when nineteenth-century philology gave place to twentieth-century linguistics, some of the old prejudices against literature as such revived. A dissatisfaction with this ethos reached its climax around the ’40s of the century in America, when a movement described as “New Criticism,” because it was new to the Wissenschaft mentality, raised a question that was almost a moral one. Why should people be regarded as scholars in the area of literature who did not know the first thing about literature? For the first thing about literature to know is how to read a poem as a poem and not as a philological document. In endeavouring to develop this, the New Criticism lost itself in a labyrinth of explication. Many aspects of the reaction, as usually happens in such cases, were carried to absurd lengths. A strong undergraduate feeling developed that departments of English in universities were under a moral obligation to be as contemporary as possible, and a similar feeling expressed itself recently under the neo-Nazi slogan of “relevance.”1 There were also graduate students who would propound the thesis that literary works could be properly read only when they were deprived of all context in language, history, and experience. In the meantime the old philological journals had begun to lose their prestige and were being replaced by new journals, most of them with “review” in their titles, and which printed poetry and fiction as well as criticism. For all the excesses, the reaction itself was inevitable and in its main emphasis healthy. After a long period of specialized scholarship concerned with literature which had no real basis in literature, a great body of information about literature had been built up which very seldom led to any increased insight into it. Hence there had to be a period of drawing things together, of trying to look at literature itself in a broader and more general way. It seemed to me, entering this situation a generation ago, that the first thing to look for was a basis for critical principles within criticism itself, trying to avoid the kind of externalized determinism in which criticism has to be “based on” something else, carried around in some kind of religious or Marxist or Freudian wheelchair. At that time, scholars who regarded their work as historical assumed that anyone dissatisfied with their methods must be antihistorical. This was the reverse of my own attitude: I was dissatisfied with the methods of historical scholars who did not know any history. That is, who did not know the history of literature. There were many who knew dates and the numbers of the centu-

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ries and a certain amount of nonliterary history, but who did not know anything about the actual development of the conventions and genres of literature itself. I think that enough theoretical work has been done now to make visible a shift of emphasis, and that we are at the beginning of another phase of scholarship, based more solidly on a properly established critical theory of literature. There may again be some specialization and division of labour, but the old pseudoscientific analogy has had it. I should be very pleased if I were to become regarded as one of the people who had assisted in the process of transition. It is true that I have also suggested that criticism may become a scientific activity. But the conception of science involved is different. The older conception rested on a work-and-play antithesis: philology was the one way of working with words, so far as was then known, which seemed to have affinities with scientific procedure. Consequently philology was work, whereas literature, to which only a purely emotional reaction was thought of as appropriate, escaped every form of systematic and progressive study. I have tried to show, or help show, that literature itself is a structure, and can be studied in sequence like anything else; hence for me the entire study of it can assume a scientific shape. I am thinking, of course, of a future development of science in which the social sciences will have rediscovered the fact that they are equidistant from the humanities and the physical sciences, and are as closely related to the former as to the latter. The transition however leaves many problems unsolved, notably the question of the Ph.D. The humanities resist the division of labour much more actively than the sciences, and the collapse of the scientific analogy in graduate work in the humanities puts this degree in a curiously paradoxical position. In the humanities, things stick together, get involved with one another, and merge into larger configurated patterns. Consequently, the graduate student’s Ph.D. thesis is almost always going to be his first book. So, obviously, he has to get the thesis done, because if he doesn’t it will block up everything else he might do. It is possible to pick a thesis topic which is a pure academic exercise, and can be done in a limited time, but such topics are rare, and many of them are exercises in which the student will learn nothing except the technique of the exercise. Much more frequently, he gets discouraged by the terrible waste of time and effort involved in writing first a dissertation and then a book on the same material. There are many things in the Ph.D. program which are extremely valu-

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able, as I know to my cost. I avoided the Ph.D. myself by sheer accident, but there were elements in the training which I wish I had got in the regular way, and have always felt the lack of. Some efforts have been made to put in additional degrees in place of the Ph.D., with very limited success. To put in a degree that is simply an inferior degree seems to me entirely useless. A few years ago, some graduate departments at Toronto, including English, experimented with an M.Phil. degree, but soon abandoned it.2 The attempt was part of a move to get qualified teachers into classrooms in a hurry during a period of rapid expansion. But periods of rapid expansion in the university never last: depression is the university’s normal state, and second-class degrees merely supply a pretext for cutting staff in harder times. The same thing is true, I should imagine, of degrees regarded as theoretically equivalent to the Ph.D., but with emphasis on teaching rather than research. In the new conception of the university’s place in the community which is now emerging, teaching and research cannot be separated even in emphasis. If research is subordinated to teaching, the instructor soon falls behind in his subject, and his teaching suffers accordingly. If teaching is subordinated to research, the instructor, unless he leaves the university and attaches himself to a research institute, loses touch with the social context of his research. I understand that in the University of London a doctoral degree is awarded on the completion of a certain body of work, but is independent of graduate study as such. This seems to me to make very good sense for the humanities. But in general I really have no solution to the doctoral problem in literature, and can only offer one or two observations about the nature of the academic area which may be of some use. I notice that whenever I publish an article and get offprints, I may send the offprints to friends, but I seldom get any requests for them. On the other hand, when I gave an address to a convention of psychiatrists that was printed in a psychiatric journal, I got over a hundred requests for offprints.3 It was no surprise to me to learn that scientists tend to work with offprints and abstracts, but I had not realized before so strongly how much the humanist tends to wait for the book. It is as though the humanist cannot really understand any aspect of his subject unless he studies a large configuration of it. The book is a by-product of the art of writing, and is the technological instrument that makes democracy a working possibility. The expository treatise, in particular, is a democratic form in which the writer is putting

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all his cards on the table, avoiding all rhetorical tricks designed to induce hypnosis in an audience, relying on nothing but the inner force and continuity of his argument. The reader cannot directly reply, but he can always turn back in the book to a previous point, and find that the same words are repeated no matter how often they are consulted, a model of patience for the teacher in itself. Behind the book is the larger social context of a body of written documents to which there is public access, the guarantee of the fairness of that internal debate on which democracy rests. The authority established here goes back to the fateful point in Greek philosophy represented by Socrates. Students of Pythagoras or Heraclitus were expected to be disciples, pondering the dark sayings like “change is a rest,” “all things flow,” “don’t eat beans,” and the like, which had the unquestioned authority of a guru or oral teacher. Then we have Socrates approaching the youth of Athens and saying, in effect: “I don’t know anything, but I’m looking for something. Come and help me look.” Those who responded found themselves pursuing a straight line of dialectic, an argument which had its own authority and autonomy independent of the teacher. Socrates was not a writer, but his linear habit of thought made him an inspiration to writers, beginning with Plato and Xenophon. Socrates was also a philosopher, and philosophy has, up until quite recent times, also been based on the book. The centrifugal drift towards scientific procedures has affected philosophy as well, with, possibly, though I speak with very little authority, the same result. I remember as a student of the subject having to read, for example, Lotze’s Mikrokosmus. I have totally forgotten what Lotze’s philosophical “position” was, or into what ocean of thought the delta of his argument debouched itself. But I do remember feeling that I was reading a wise and humane book, which had got to be that through the relaxed and comprehensive form adopted.4 The shape of the book, in short, has a great deal to do with the liberality of the discipline that produces it. I am on a commission in Canada concerned with communications,5 and when I first joined it I read a policy report which recommended that publications should be issued from time to time. The recommendation began: “Despite the disadvantages inherent in the linear representation of a world that is increasingly simultaneous, print still retains its medieval authority.” This sentence is typical of the nitwitted McLuhanism (I am not speaking of McLuhan himself) which is confusing the educational scene. I recently spoke to an audience of university graduates, and

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was asked, quite seriously, what I thought of the university’s building such a huge library when the book would be out of date by the time it was opened. The book qua book is not linear: we follow a line while we are reading it, but the book itself is a stationary visual focus of a community. It is the electronic media that increase the amount of linear experience, of things seen and heard that are as quickly forgotten. One sees the effects on students: a superficial alertness combined with increased difficulty in preserving the intellectual continuity that is the chief characteristic of education. I mentioned the fact that scholarship tends to become pluralistic and increasingly specialized, increasingly unintelligible even to its nearest neighbours. The core of truth in the older conception of the scholarly life, which placed pure research at the top of a hierarchy, is that scholarship always holds a potential power of veto over everything else. That is, the tiniest alteration of established fact may have repercussions that will totally change the generally held view of the whole subject. But the scholar remains connected with his community as a teacher, as a public figure, and as a popularizer (in the best sense, naturally) of his own subject. This is the level for which the book is the inevitable form of presentation. Perhaps, as remarked above, we may expect in the humanities a new crop of research articles and special studies which can be produced after new theoretical principles have been established. I gather from talking to scientists that they feel that they are at the other end of the cycle, and that all the sciences, even the physical ones, are feeling a greater need for books and for larger and more comprehensive patterns of thought. The book raises the question of the nature of influence in literature. This is one aspect of literary study that has received a good deal of attention, because its basis appears to be historical.6 But scholars trained in extraliterary perception, interested in the history of ideas and the like, are apt to think of an influence transmitted from A to B as a large body of consciously held ideas. This is hardly the way that influence exerts itself among poets. One may assume, for example, that Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth would all have made an intensive study of Milton. But what they got from Milton they got as poets, and consequently the derivation is a mainly unconscious derivation of phrases, even words, that flow from a single source into four very different contexts. Probably the best way to document the influence of Milton on these poets is to run their texts through a computer: the result would not, in general, tell us

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much that we could not already guess, but the documentation would be useful. The computer has made, or can make, other changes in the structure of literary study. A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, there was a strong existential reason for emphasizing values in the study of literature. It was one thing to decide to commit a large part of your life to making a concordance to Shakespeare or to collating manuscript variants of Chaucer, but would you want to do that kind of work for medieval homilies, or for the kind of poetic achievement represented by Googe or Churchyard?7 The computer has not only altered the answer to the question, but has helped to erode the fallacy of hierarchical values behind it. When Professor Douglas Bush produced his book on Classical mythology in the Renaissance a generation ago, he tells us that he had made an immense number of observations about the treatment of some Ovidian myths in minor Elizabethan poets. He regarded this work as largely a waste of time, and remarked that even though he knew more than anyone else about such subjects he should keep his information to himself.8 I suspect that this information was not really too trivial to be passed on, but I think it may indicate an area where some kind of mechanical aid might be of assistance. Whatever was highly regarded in its day, such as the Pyramus and Thisbe legend, is of great importance merely for that reason, whatever a contemporary scholar may think of it. But there is another type of influence that it is impossible to trace except by an occasional accident. Every creative person has an interconnected body of images and ideas underneath his consciousness which it is his creative work to fish up in bits and pieces.9 Sometimes a phrase or a word comes to him as a kind of hook or bait with which to catch something that he knows is down there. Reading Yeats, one would think that he owed a large-scale debt to the writings of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and to Axël in particular, which would be a ready-made subject for the scholar to explicate. On examination, we find that Yeats had been fascinated by a single phrase, “As for living, our servants will do that for us,” extracted, totally out of its context, from a play he could hardly understand in the original French, and applied in contexts even more remote.10 Poets are full of influences of this kind, vagrant seeds blown toward a responsive soil, and not only poets. When one reads the studies of influence made on creative people by their teachers, by factors in their early environment, by their reading, one is usually struck by the great plausibility of these constructs: one does, in

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fact, become what one is through influences. At the same time we should remember that it almost certainly did not happen like this at all. Anyone reading Finnegans Wake thinks he can see at a glance that Alice Through the Looking-Glass was a major formative influence on it, especially the figure of Humpty Dumpty and his portmanteau words. Yet we learn that Joyce had not in fact known what was in that book until it was called to his attention by others. Again, one can see that of all writers in the past, the one closest to Joyce in both temperament and technique is Rabelais, and one could study the parallels between them exhaustively. Yet Joyce says that he had not read Rabelais, though he expects nobody to believe him.11 Even in my own work I can occasionally trace the same process of transmission by seed. When I began teaching, the University of Toronto possessed an Honour Course in English Language and Literature (now destroyed, in a fit of hysterical exuberance, because it was said to be “elitist”), which was spread over four colleges, each of which had its own department.12 This meant that I not only had to teach Milton, but teach Milton opposite Professors A.S.P. Woodhouse and A.E. Barker, two of the best Milton scholars anywhere, who were teaching it in the other colleges. One result of this was that for several years I confined my reading to primary sources, there being no time to read secondary ones. Later on, when the pressure slackened a bit, I attempted to adopt the normal routine of checking through learned journals. I soon cut down on that activity, not because I regarded the articles as useless, but for the opposite reason: I was interested in everything, everything seemed to have some relevance to my interests, and yet the pursuit of knowledge in all directions at once was impracticable. Ever since then, I have realized that scholarship is as much a matter of knowing what not to read as of knowing what to read. While writing Anatomy of Criticism in particular, endless tantalizing vistas opened up on all sides, yet I had to close my eyes to them, as Ulysses closed his ears to the sirens, because exploring them would get my main thesis out of proportion. Fortunately, one of my colleagues when I began teaching was Professor Wilson Knight, later of Leeds. I think Wilson Knight influenced me more than I realized at the time. At that time he was completely possessed by Shakespeare, and gave the impression of not knowing a Quarto from a Folio text, certainly of caring even less. He showed me once his main instrument of scholarship—a Globe Shakespeare with a mass of pencilled annotations. Like most students of my generation, Knight’s

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books had much the effect on me that Chapman’s Homer had on Keats,13 and the method indicated, of concentrating on the author’s text but recreating it by studying the structure of imagery and metaphor, seemed to me then, and seems to me still, the sort of thing that criticism is centrally about. Nevertheless, I went through a long period in which every publication of mine was followed by neurotic fears of being confronted with proof of having plagiarized it from some source I had not read—or, worse still, had forgotten having read. I gradually became more fatalistic about this, besides realizing that the more obvious what I said seemed to me, the less likely it was that anyone had said it before. I can also trace one or two examples of influence so trivial that I hesitate to record them, except as evidence that the kind of influence I postulate for Joyce and Yeats works on all levels of intellectual activity. Once, when an undergraduate, I was discussing the keyboard music of Bach with a friend interested in the same subject, and spoke of my great interest in the fugues Bach had made on themes by Albinoni. My friend made some such comment as “very scholarly,” and the word “scholarly” as applied to Bach’s music stuck in my mind. I had always known that it was scholarly, of course, but to know a thing is not to realize it: one may know many things that are still not attached to that submarine body of ideas one is trying to fish up. Forty-odd years later, I wrote an essay on Shakespearean comedy trying to show that Shakespeare is as scholarly a writer as Ben Jonson, except that his scholarship, being connected with the oral tradition, is harder to recognize as such.14 The analogies with Bach’s music are there also, so that here is one example of a seed that I have accidentally caught in the act of germinating. To carry this point a step further: my first big project was a book on the interpretation of William Blake’s longer and more didactic poems, generally called “Prophecies.” There were many reasons for getting interested in Blake: perhaps one may be of general interest. I am, in cultural background, what is known as a WASP, and thus belong to the only group in society which it is entirely safe to ridicule. I expected that a good deal of contemporary literature would be devoted to attacking the alleged complacency of the values and standards I had been brought up in, and was not greatly disturbed when it did. But with the rise of Hitler in Germany, the agony of the Spanish Civil War, and the massacres and deportations of Stalinism, things began to get more serious. For Eliot to announce that he was Classical in literature, royalist in politics, and

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Anglo-Catholic in religion was all part of the game.15 But the feeling of personal outrage and betrayal that I felt when I opened After Strange Gods was something else again.16 And when Eliot was accompanied by Pound’s admiration for Mussolini, Yeats’s flirtations with the most irresponsible of the Irish leaders, Wyndham Lewis’s interest in Hitler, and the callow Marxism of younger writers, I felt that I could hardly get interested in any poet who was not closer to being the opposite in all respects to what Eliot thought he was. Or, if that was too specific, at least a poet who, even if dead, was still fighting for something that was alive. When I began work on Blake, around 1933, there was one serious book available on the subject of the symbolism of the Prophecies, Foster Damon’s book, which had appeared in 1924.17 Apart from this there had been hundreds of books, articles, and essays on Blake, to say nothing of thousands of incidental references. There was nothing in any of this material, so far as I know, and I know more about it than most people, which was of the slightest use to me. No device of “information retrieval” would be of any help: the important thing was to get rid of the alleged information, not to get hold of it. And yet, many years later, I was asked to write a bibliographical essay on Blake which was in fact a history of Blake criticism. For it, I had to go over this material again, and I discovered, to my great surprise, that it was a most fascinating and rewarding exercise. The books still told me nothing about Blake, but they told me a great deal about the history of taste in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More generally, they told me a great deal about the human ability to stare at what is straight in front of one’s eyes and not be able to focus one’s eyes on it. I know now much that I could hardly have learned in any other way about the anxieties and obsessions which prevent a great writer from being properly estimated in his day and for some time after. I note from a reprint catalogue that four of these early books have recently been reissued. As far as telling us anything about Blake is concerned, all these books are trash, and one of them would be a strong contender in the admittedly stiff competition for the title of the world’s worst book on Blake.18 But in a sense, you can’t lose in the humanities: if your book is any good, it’s a contribution to scholarship; if it’s no good, it’s a document in the history of taste. Two morals seem to me to be relevant. First, it is a part of the fallacy of the scientific analogy that, before deciding on a thesis topic, one should look to see whether or not “it’s already been done.” Of course this did not apply to my Blake project. But in general, in literary criticism, noth-

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ing can ever be done in a definitive way, except very specific projects, such as editing texts. I have supervised a good many doctoral theses on Joyce, Yeats, Stevens, and other much-processed writers, and have been well aware that all these theses were saying very similar things. But each represented an individual point of view, and this kind of individuality has to be taken account of in the humanities when we speak of a contribution to knowledge. In this situation the “review of recent scholarship” article emerges as an indispensable scholarly tool. Second, a principle which follows from the first, the question of personal authority is relevant to the humanities in general, and literary criticism in particular. I think it advisable for every critic proposing to devote his life to literary scholarship to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual preceptor for himself, whatever the subject of his thesis. I am not speaking, of course, of any sort of moral model, but it seems to me that growing up inside a mind so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane studies. Some kind of transmission by seed goes on here too. I am venturing on an area which so far as I know has been very little discussed, and what I say is bound to be tentative. Keats remarks that the life of a man of genius is a continuous allegory,19 which I take to mean, among other things, that a creative life has something to do with choosing a lifestyle. I think the scholarly life has something to do with this too, and one chooses a preceptor among the poets who has something congenial to oneself in this respect. I notice that, at the age of sixty, I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me. The reason for this unconscious choice is that, for me, an obliteration of incident was necessary to keep the sense of continuity in the memory that fostered the germinating process I have spoken of. And it is clear to me, though not demonstrable to anyone else, that this has been imitated, on a level that consciousness and memory cannot reach, from Blake, who similarly obliterated incident in his own life, and for similar reasons. One who found Byron more congenial as a preceptor would doubtless adopt a different lifestyle. Blake, while he is very much a man of his time, tends to pull his critic out of the historical period in which he falls. So while I naturally had to become familiar with Ossian and Gray and Chatterton, I also found myself looking through a great variety of other writers in search of ideas that would give me some clue to Blake. I do not mean that I read very

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systematically in mystical or occult literature. Most of the misguided critics I mentioned above told me that that was where the real analogues to Blake’s thinking were. But I found it hard to understand why Blake interested me so much when most mystical and occult writing interested me not at all. I soon discovered that I had to take seriously Blake’s own statement that he belonged with the poets and artists, and read accordingly. But again, reading simply in the 1750–1820 period of Blake’s own lifetime was not only insufficient, but in many respects misleading. This fact was important to me, because it dramatized the difficulty of knowing what not to read, which I have already alluded to. The historical period has firmly established itself as the normal area of scholarship because it both limits and directs one’s reading, and in nearly every case it is a safe guide to follow. Blake was an exception, and a very significant one. When I was taking a course in Blake from the late Herbert Davis, I was assigned a paper on Blake’s Milton, which I sat down to write, as was my regular bad habit in those days, the night before. The foreground of the paper was commentary, which was assuredly difficult enough for that poem, but in the background there was some principle that kept eluding me. On inspection, the principle seemed to be that Milton and Blake were connected by their use of the Bible, which was not merely commonplace but seemed antiliterary as well. If Milton and Blake were alike on this point, that likeness merely concealed what was individual about each of them, so that in pursuing the likeness I was chasing a shadow and avoiding the substance. Around about three in the morning a different kind of intuition hit me, though it took me twenty years to articulate it. The two poets were connected by the same thing, and sameness leads to individual variety, just as likeness leads to monotony. I began dimly to see that the principle pulling me away from the historical period was the principle of mythological framework. The Bible had provided a frame of mythology for European poets: an immense number of critical problems began to solve themselves as soon as one realized this. Further, Biblical mythology had not remained static, but had grown with a catholicity greater than that of the church itself, annexing the whole of Classical mythology, and the erotic or “Courtly Love” literature as well, as contrapuntal descants on its own theme. The fact that one mythology could absorb another indicated that all mythologies were imaginatively much alike. Christianity had similarly absorbed the older Teutonic mythology, because the latter also had a world tree like that of

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Eden, a world-girdling serpent like Leviathan, a god hung on a tree as a sacrifice to himself, a last day, and a creation. A literature grows out of the primitive verbal culture which contains a mythology; it can grow out of any mythology, but it is a historical fact that our literature is most directly descended from the Biblical myth. Of course this particular discovery was a natural one for me to make at a time when I was actually a student of theology. This latter fact has proved useful to many people. A “Maoist” pamphlet, for example, describes me as “the High Priest of clerical obscurantism,” and its cover depicts a series of black-cloaked monks, with hoods suggesting the Ku Klux Klan.20 I think the actual effect of my theological training has been rather the opposite of that. It is true that my attitude to teaching, and probably to scholarship as well, has always been an evangelical attitude, and that I was not satisfied with my own theories until I began to see how they could be made the basis for a system of teaching literature in sequence, at all levels from kindergarten to graduate school. But actually the Bible preoccupied me, not because it represented a religious “position” congenial to my own, but for the opposite reason. It illustrated the imaginative assumptions on which Western poets had proceeded; consequently the study of it pointed the way towards a phenomenological criticism which would be as far as possible free of presuppositions. I am not by any means sure that it is possible really to get free of presuppositions, but it is obvious that all genuine advance in knowledge goes along with a continued attempt to objectify and become aware of the assumptions one is starting from. Poets do not write, like Swift’s spider, “out of their own bowels, and in a restricted compass.”21 The poet is taken over by a mythical and metaphorical organism, with its historical roots in the Bible, and the integrity of that organism is his Muse, the mother that brings to life a being separate both from herself and from him. So far from hitching literature to a structure of belief, this principle actually emancipates literature from questions of belief altogether. But, of course, for many centuries the poet was regarded as subordinate in authority to other types of writers, such as theologians. Their method of writing, it was thought, had more direct access to truth; the poet’s function was to produce a rhetorical echo of that truth, addressing the emotions and will and trying to persuade them to align themselves on the side of truth. This view assumed that literature was serious in proportion to its allegorical relationship to religion. Later on, as religious anxieties gave place to more secular and political ones, it continued to be believed

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that the realist, who studied the life around him and reflected it in his writing, had a seriousness that the mere romancer who told stories for fun could not match. The historian of nineteenth-century fiction, for example, finds that the backbone of his historical study is constituted by the great realists, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Thackeray, and certain carefully selected aspects of Scott, Dickens, and Henry James. Such a book as Alice in Wonderland is obviously a masterpiece of its kind, was immensely popular in its day, and has never lost its popularity, but somehow it doesn’t fit the history. And just as a highbrow in Old English times would probably regard a saint’s life as more serious than Beowulf, so most modern critics would regard social realism, of the kind that clearly reflects the life around it, as more serious than fantasy or adventure where there is a strong emphasis on the structure of the story, designed primarily to keep the reader turning the pages. This leads to another far-reaching critical principle. Every primitive verbal culture contains a number of stories, of which some gradually assume a particular importance as “true,” or in some way more deeply significant. These are the stories that are most readily describable as myths, and they are the ones that take root in a specific society and provide for that society a network of shared allusion and experience. Such myths differ in social function, but not in structure, from the folk tales and legends that are often told simply for fun by wandering storytellers. Thus in European literature the Biblical stories have a seriousness not ascribed to folk tales or legends which are closely analogous, if not identical, in structure. As literature develops, some poets, such as Dante and Milton, recreate the central myths; others, such as Shakespeare, have the social role of entertainers, and turn rather to folk tale and legend. But the former group recreate the central myths on the same imaginative basis that the latter are using, and the latter group, if they treat their themes with enough intensity, give them the same kind of significance that the central myths have. Some time ago I had occasion to read Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools. It is not a favourite novel of mine, but it struggles hard to be a serious one, and it seeks seriousness through allegory, like the Sebastian Brant poem from which it derives its name. The setting is a German ship sailing from Mexico to Germany in 1932, and every episode, such as the excluding of a Jew from the captain’s table, is part of an allegorical relationship of the story to the rise of Nazism in Germany. Later, when stranded in an airport, I pulled another ship story off the paperback

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shelves, Paul Gallico’s The Poseidon Adventure. This was a thriller about a ship that turned upside down in a wreck, leaving the surviving passengers to climb upwards towards the bottom of the ship. This story being designed for entertainment, it concentrated on the shape of the story, and the shape of the story derives from what I call an archetype, a story type that has been used thousands of times before, for which the Biblical model is the Exodus. The author being a professional and intelligent writer, I knew that he would indicate some awareness of this fact before long, and two-thirds of the way through he did so. He explained that the passengers were undertaking this desperate and apparently futile climb because up had always been good and down bad, that damnation went down, the resurrection up, that mythology puts monsters underground and graceful fantasies of light in the upper air. In the same chapter the leader of the expedition, a clergyman, gets fed up with his own notion of God and commits suicide: not a very convincing episode, but an Exodus story needs a Moses figure who doesn’t make it all the way. I am not comparing the two books: I am noting the survival of the distinction between a more serious literature that reflects important truths allegorically, and a less serious literature, designed for entertainment, that follows a certain storytelling formula. I am also suggesting that an a priori value distinction between them is critically unsound. The reading of a formulaic book, such as a detective story, may not be in itself a significant experience. But even such a book can take on significance through the resonance of context. A detective story is normally a comedy, and while any individual comedy, from Plautus to modern television, may be silly or trifling, the importance of studying comedy itself, as a whole, is very considerable. For one thing, once a literal belief in a mythology declines, and Biblical stories are no longer generally assumed to be historically factual, it becomes increasingly obvious that the real affinities of a mythology are not with the waking world but with the dream world. A mythology is a construct belonging to art and not to nature: it is not a description of the outer world, a crude form of philosophy or science, but a cultural model, expressing the way in which man wants to shape and reshape the civilization he himself has made. Comedy, which tends toward the victory of desire over reality, indicates this fact more clearly than any other archetypal form. The same principle is central to the teaching of literature, especially in the most elementary stages. From kindergarten onwards, the teacher is not instilling literature into a mind that doesn’t know any, but reshaping

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the student’s total verbal experience. This experience has been built up by television, movies, and the conversation of his parents and classmates as well as by his reading. It already contains a great deal of mythology, much of it phony, derived from advertising or class stereotypes, and literature is or should be the means of leading the student from his present subjective social vision into the total social vision of mankind. All this may not be very helpful in discussing the question of the university’s support of research. The humanities usually get the lion’s share of the library budget, but apart from that they are usually regarded by administrators as low-budget departments. In fact there are times when I wonder whether “low-budget departments” would not be the best definition of the humanities. Some branches of the humanities, of course, are inherently expensive, an obvious example being archaeology, on which a good many humane disciplines are heavily dependent. But it is still possible to bring a man into a university at a senior level in the humanities without the great expenditure for equipment and the like which an equivalent appointment in the sciences would necessitate. Universities however are caught in a paradoxical situation: they have to build up as good a library as they can, and yet they must maintain travel grants to enable scholars in the humanities to go to still better libraries. The immense resources of modern libraries, which can bring so much to the scholar’s doorstep, are of course indispensable, but most of them imply that the scholar already knows what he is looking for. If he is doing original research, he may not know. In that case he has still to be turned loose in the British Museum or the Library of Congress with a sense of serendipity built up by his previous experience of the subject. We have all heard how the Bodleian Library in Oxford got rid of its Shakespeare Folio, which it later had to buy back again at much greater expense. The inference is often that the Oxford librarians of that day were fools. Actually, they were entirely right: in terms of what Oxford then taught and studied, Shakespeare was no more use to them than collections of nineteenth-century sermons would be now to the kind of college that hands out diplomas to young women studying ballet. After the modern languages were established in universities, library buying was largely confined to a select canon of approved writers. The minor writers came in on a preferential list, those that had been dead the longest getting the most attention. The scholarly revolution which I have helped to agitate has resulted in weakening the distinction between classical and popular literature. Some years ago, when I was visiting a university in the

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United States, a professor responsible for much of the library buying in the Romantic period came in to see me with a catalogue. He had a chance of buying a large amount of the “horrid mysteries” of the 1790s, and was hesitating. I said, “Grab it at once.” But he was doubtful whether the inherent value of this work justified the expenditure, because his was a small college with a restricted budget. I imagine that he now regrets his caution, in an age when “Gothic is in” and the best and brightest graduate students are likely to be paying attention to Rider Haggard as well as to George Eliot. For university library purposes, there certainly is such a thing as junk, but junk is no longer definable in terms of a conventional standard of literary values. The problem of preserving the personal community is crucial to the university, and to all aspects of it. One should always be aware of the limitations of what is technically possible, because the future that is technically possible is not necessarily the future that society wants or can absorb. One is constantly hearing from gadget-happy technocrats about how it is, or soon will be, no longer necessary to give lectures or attend them, to build libraries or staff them, to write papers or deliver them to audiences. What such fantasies do not take in is the importance of community and personal contact in the scholarly life. Any student faced by a television screen instead of a human countenance could tell them about this. It is for the same reason that all educational hardware has to be confined to certain specialized uses. Similarly, many libraries acquire a great deal of material that is really archival, and should perhaps be in another institution. This would include the foul papers and other excreta of contemporary poets, for which there was such a vogue a few years ago, and which for some poets made the faking of draft papers quite a profitable business. In my own case, I have had to throw my energy into a more centripetal movement of scholarship, trying to avoid specialization in order to articulate a number of central problems of critical theory. This meant that a specialized research library was only intermittently useful to me, and I have often found myself drifting from the research library into the undergraduate working library, because of the increasing affinity of my work to obvious books. But there is something too of finding one’s way back to the focus of the university community. When I mention this tendency of mine to my colleagues, I find that a large number of them share it. I have always remained in Canada, and perhaps the influences of the

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Canadian environment have played a significant role in my life, allowing for the indirectness of influence that I have already mentioned. I think in any case that the effect of one’s teachers and senior colleagues is derived mainly from the reflections that one is impelled to make as a result of having known them, rather than from what they have directly taught or said. My own teachers in Toronto22 included Pelham Edgar, whose main academic interest was Henry James and James’s treatment of the North Atlantic schizophrenia which is so central to Canadian life also. Then there was E.J. Pratt, Canada’s most important English poet, who was a full-time teaching member of the department. His existence helped me to become more detached from the romantic mystique that opposes creative writers to critical ones. In Canada poets are conditioned to utter a good deal of anti-academic patter as a part of their own sales pitch, even when they are struggling for tenure appointments in universities themselves. The mystique tends to assume that creative people are the people who write poems or stories, and feels that such people ought to have a specially protected place in the community, somewhat analogous to that of the people who can speak Irish in Ireland. There is nothing wrong with this except the fallacy of attaching the conception of creativity to the genres of poetry and fiction rather than to the people working in them. This fallacy is worldwide, and extends, for instance, to the Nobel Prize Committee in Sweden, who search over the world for poets and novelists but never consider the claims of critical or expository writing.23 My third teacher, John Robins, was interested in ballads, folk tales, and popular literature, along with Old and Middle English. He had much to do with my understanding of the main features of Canadian literature, including Pratt’s poetry, which are so like those of Old English in reflecting a paradoxical tension between the primitive and the overcivilized. He probably had something to do too with my notion of archetypes, which are really an expansion of the themes and motifs of folk tale into the rest of literature. Later on, I began to understand the extent to which this almost onedimensional country has been preoccupied with communications of all kinds, from the most physical to the most ethereal. Many Canadians, including Harold Innis and Innis’s disciple Marshall McLuhan, have been interested in the totality of communication, and the essential unity of its activity, whether it is building railways or sending messages. Innis developed out of his study of the fur trade in Canada a vast historical

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communication theory, concerned with the ways in which the control of communication media by a certain class or group in society conditions that society. A similar sense of the unity of communication has affected me, and has had a good deal to do with what I have called my evangelical attitude to the teaching of literature. The first thing one realizes, of course, is that communication media are formidably efficient, and the effect of this is among other things to make every senior professor a cock-shy of rapid transit. He has his growing body of former students, who send him everything they write as a simple routine act; colleagues who ask his advice about everything from changing jobs or making appointments to rearranging the arguments of their current books; publishers who keep sending new books to him for comment; chairmen of program committees who have found that jet planes make it possible for anyone to visit anywhere, and for conferences to be held in Pakistan or Brazil as easily as closer to home. There is also a continuous cataract of unsolicited material, stacks of song from hopeful poets and theses with notes attached saying in effect, “My supervisor says I’m crazy, but I know you’ll understand.” In this situation, an enlightened university administration should understand that the most important form of assistance they can offer him is that of the nonacademic secretary.24 Such a secretary can make all the difference between a properly functioning scholar and a harried intellectual carpetbagger, and he should not have to undertake an uncongenial administrative job in order to acquire one. There seem to me to be three main stages in communication. There is the initial stage of separation, where communication is physically difficult and precarious. This developed in Canadian culture what I have elsewhere called a “garrison mentality,”25 and which survives in Canadian separatist movements. The garrison mentality however had its positive, even its heroic, side, as we can see when we think of the sheer physical, to say nothing of the mental, effort that scholars in Saskatchewan or Alberta had to make to maintain their standards before the days of planes and microfilm. The first impact of improved communication is destructive. If one is building a road from point A to point B, the first thing one has to do is bulldoze and cut through underbrush. If a student is being taught at school, the effort to reach him has to cut through the underbrush of the anxieties and prejudices and snobberies by which he attempts to maintain his isolated security. The immediate result of this

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destructive activity is a sense of uniformity and a loss of individuality. This is the stage that the communication crisis of the ’60s is trying to emerge from now. Similar stages have affected the universities internally. Each department tends to become a garrison in itself; every development of scholarship batters at its barriers. My own conception of mythology is one that attacks the separation of one language department from another, the separation of literature from comparative religion, even the separation of the humanities from the social sciences. One response to this is to introduce interdisciplinary courses, where representatives of departments meet politely but suspiciously, like diplomats arranging for a cease-fire, or courses in general education or general humanities or great books or Western civilization. This is the second, or uniform, stage of improved communications, which is less a solution to the problem than a symptom of it. One hopes for rapid emergence to the third stage, when it is clearly realized that knowledge, like St. Augustine’s God, has its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere.26

25 The Times of the Signs 27 November 1973

From SM, 66–96. Written as a paper for a special conference of the Royal Society of Canada held in Ottawa in November 1973 to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543). Originally published under the title “The Times of the Signs: An Essay on Science and Mythology,” in On a Disquieting Earth: Five Hundred Years after Copernicus (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1974), 59–84. Clean typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 4, files ii–jj. The version in SM provides two notes and corrects a number of typographic errors.

To say the solar chariot is junk Is not a variation but an end. Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor Is still to stick to the contents of the mind And the desire to believe in a metaphor. (Wallace Stevens, The Pure Good of Theory [sec. 3, ll. 15–19])

The seventy years of the life of Copernicus were, as we all know, the time when the Middle Ages ended and the modern world came into being. Educated men had known for many centuries that the earth was a sphere, and that one could get to the east by sailing to the west. Perhaps a jealous God would see to it that one got to hell instead, as he did Ulysses in Dante: when there is no reason for crossing the Atlantic, there are any number of reasons for not doing so. But with the voyages of

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Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan, humanity as a whole began to realize that the earth was round, and to order their lives on that assumption. Up till then, the centre of the world had been, as the word itself makes obvious, the Mediterranean, and the people who sat like frogs around a pool, in Plato’s phrase, on the shores of the sea in the middle of the earth.1 But after 1492 the nations on the Atlantic seaboard began to realize that it was they who were now in the middle of the world. In an age which went through this gigantic spatial displacement, it was appropriate that someone should put forward the thesis that the earth is not the unmoved centre of the universe, but one of the planets or wandering stars, and that we must look for another centre for the earth. In the age of Humanism and the increased authority of ancient writers, it was also appropriate that someone should revive the ancient Greek doctrine, propounded by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century B.C., that the earth went round the sun. So when Copernicus published a tentative summary of his views, the Little Commentary (Commentariolus), he attracted a good deal of friendly attention, including the encouragement of the Pope. But as the Reformation began to split Christendom down the middle, the mood changed, and Copernicus changed with it. His later book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, which appeared in the year of his death, began with a weaseling preface, not by Copernicus, explaining that it contained only hypotheses to be studied by mathematicians, and that what it said was perhaps not true or even probable, only a device to simplify the calculations. Although Copernicus’s central thesis eventually destroyed the old Ptolemaic picture of the world, Copernicus himself clung to the two Ptolemaic principles of circular motion and uniform speed for all heavenly bodies. Hence the book, though its essential idea is a simplifying one, got into bewildering complications, and it has been very little read. The first English translation (a very bad one, apparently) was published in 1952, as part of a relentless search for “Great Books” carried out by a then fashionable program at the University of Chicago.2 So Copernicus had little impact on his own time, and nearly a century had to pass before the work of Kepler and Galileo consolidated his thesis and removed most of the serious objections to it. It is at this point that the first references to Copernicus begin to enter English literature. Most of the references are in a context of utter disbelief: the heliocentric view was not universally accepted in England until Newton’s time, two centuries after Copernicus was born. Francis Bacon refers to Copernicus very slightingly, almost contemptuously, as promoting a tremendous hypoth-

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esis on very inadequate grounds.3 Bacon was wrong, but he was wrong for some good reasons. In his Novum Organum he enumerates four great fallacies, which he calls “idols,” that stand in the way of scientific advance. One, probably the subtlest, of these fallacies is the idol of the theatre, or aesthetic thinking, the desire to impose elegantly symmetrical patterns on an untidy mass of facts, instead of patiently waiting to see what general principles really do emerge from them. Copernicus, for Bacon, was typical of the kind of pseudoscientific speculator who gets a hunch and rebuilds the universe on the strength of it, making the earth go around the sun only because the mathematics of that situation look nicer. And when we remember that curious preface to Copernicus’s book, we can at least see what Bacon means. It may even be true that Copernicus was not primarily an observer of the stars, but primarily a speculative mathematical philosopher. By that time there were strenuous efforts being made to stop the new philosophy. Bruno was burned alive in 1600, and Copernicus’s book placed on the Index in 1616, the year in which the first attempt was made by the Inquisition to silence Galileo. As always happens in revolutionary situations, there was a swarm of revisionists putting forward compromise solutions, such as keeping the earth at the centre but having the other planets revolve around the sun. In the superb “Digression of Air” in the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, whose tremendous erudition never blunted the edge of his sense of humour, began to suggest that some of the resulting complications had a funny side. He is speaking of an astronomer named Roeslin, who had attacked Copernicus (Burton himself seems to have been, however reluctantly, rather impressed with Copernicus): Roeslin censures all, and Ptolemaeus himself as insufficient. . . . In his own hypothesis he makes the earth as before the universal centre, the sun to the five upper planets, to the eighth sphere he ascribes diurnal motion, eccentrics and epicycles to the seven planets, which hath been formerly exploded; and so, Dum vitant stulti vitia in contraria currunt, as a tinker stops one hole and makes two, he corrects them and doth worse himself, reforms some and mars all. In the meantime, the world is tossed in a blanket amongst them, they hoist the earth up and down like a ball, make it stand and go at their pleasures; one saith the sun stands, another he moves; a third comes in, taking them all at rebound, and, lest there should any paradox be wanting, he finds certain spots and clouds in the sun, by the help of glasses. . . .4

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The situation reminds one a little of the various atomic cosmologies in physics during the early part of this century. A third reference to Copernicus in the English literature of this period is, to my mind, the most deeply significant of all. It occurs in John Donne’s anti-Jesuit satire, Ignatius His Conclave, where Copernicus clamours for entry into a distinguished place of authority in hell. He says to Lucifer: I am he, which Pitying thee who wert thrust into the Center of the world, raised both thee, and thy prison, the Earth, up into the Heavens; so as by my means God doth not enjoy his revenge upon thee. The sun, which was an officious spy, and a betrayer of faults, and so thine enemy, I have appointed to go into the lowest part of the world. Shall these gates be open to such as have innovated in small matters? and shall they be shut against me, who have turned the whole frame of the world, and am thereby almost a new Creator?5

The full implications of this passage may not have been clear to Donne himself, but it will serve me as a text. The dispute between the geocentric and the heliocentric views of the solar system looks to me, being a literary critic, essentially a collision between two mythologies, two pictures or visions, not of reality, but of man’s sense of the meaning of reality in relation to himself. The geocentric or Ptolemaic view had on its side the religious feeling that the moral and natural orders had been made by the same God, that man was the highest development of nature, that God had died and risen again for man, and that therefore the notion of a plurality of worlds could be dismissed. It was too much to ask anyone to believe that Christ had had to die again to save the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter, much less accept an infinite number of inhabited worlds. The Ptolemaic view was also supported by the powerful mythical analogy of the macrocosm. Man, the microcosm, was the epitome of the universe: he contained everything that it contained, and hence the universe was really a larger body like that of man. The Ptolemaic universe, with its onion shape and its concentric spheres, nevertheless had a top and a bottom, like the human body. The regular circling of the stars overhead suggested planning, order, intelligence, everything that goes with a human brain; down below was a world of death and corruption leading to hell. And hell had many characteristics of the less highly regarded aspects of the body: there was always a strong smell of sulphur about the

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devils, and their horns and tails suggested the kind of erotic interest that we should expect to find among such low forms of spirituality. Further, the macrocosm was finite in both time and space. Just as man lives for only seventy years, so the universe was created to last for seven thousand years, six thousand years of history and a thousand years of millennium, corresponding to the six days of creation and the Sabbath of rest. Creation took place four thousand years before the birth of Christ, who was born in 4 B.C.: therefore the millennium will begin in 1996. Some of you will be around to check up on the statement. As for space, the universe was certainly thought of as vast, and Ptolemy himself had said that the earth was only a point compared to the whole natural order. The phrase is still echoing fifteen centuries later in the Elizabethan poet Thomas Campion: Earth’s but a point to the world, and a man Is but a point to the earth’s compared centre; Shall then the point of a point be so vain As to triumph in a silly point’s adventure?6

But still the universe was finite, and the finite is always comprehensible, no matter how big. However, the heliocentric view had some mythological trump cards too. The sun is the source of light, and therefore the symbol of consciousness. And the Renaissance brought with it a new and expanded sense of consciousness, a feeling that consciousness represented something that tore man loose from the lower part of nature and united him with a higher destiny. For such a feeling the centrality of the sun, a much “nobler” object than the earth, was an obvious focus. The earth is rather a symbol of man’s fall into nature, and at its centre, according to Dante, is the devil, or more precisely the devil’s arse. This heightened sense of consciousness is not necessarily, as is so often said, a new sense of the dignity of the individual. The sun consciousness of Descartes is quite consistent with the absolutism of the Sun King, Louis XIV.7 It was rather a new sense of aggressiveness, a feeling that man was capable of dominating nature, exploring it and forcing his own logical patterns on it, the higher mechanism of the awareness which knows that it knows. Of course, it happens to be true that the earth goes around the sun, and not true that the sun goes around the earth. When mythologies collide, it is doubtless an advantage to have the truth, or more of the truth, on one’s

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side. But it is not a clinching advantage. The words “sunrise” and “sunset” are as familiar to us as ever: we “know” that what they describe is really an illusion, but they are metaphorically efficient, and man can live indefinitely with metaphor. It is fascinating to read medical treatises of the pre-Harvey period and see the complete authority and lucidity with which they diagnose diseases in terms of what we should call the metaphor of the four humours. The psychoanalytical treatises of our day are based on hydraulic metaphors of drives and channels and blocks and cathects,8 and will no doubt look equally quaint in a few years, but they are no less implicitly accepted now. The autonomy of science goes along with its reliance on mathematics, which can apparently penetrate much further into the external world than words can do. For mythology is not primarily an attempt to picture reality: it is not a primitive form of science or philosophy, however crude. It is rather an attempt to articulate what is of greatest human concern to the society that produces it. Myths tell us the names, functions, and genealogies of the gods; they explain how certain features in the social structure and organization came to be as they are. They do this mainly by stories or fictions. Mythology is a form of imaginative thinking, and its direct descendant in culture is literature, more particularly fiction, works of literature that tell stories. There is thus also a central place in literature for schematic thinking, an emphasis on design and symmetry for their own sakes. Such pattern-making is also inherited from mythology. As society develops, however, mythology tends to project itself on the outer world, which means that science, at a certain stage of social development, finds itself imprisoned in a schematic, symmetrical, mythological framework of pseudoscientific presuppositions. This is Bacon’s idol of the theatre, already mentioned. Science cannot proceed further without destroying every trace of this mythological thinking in its own area. I emphasize the last four words because there is no reason why mythological thinking should be destroyed in areas where it belongs. Bernard Shaw remarks that if William the Conqueror had been told by a bishop that the moon was seventy-seven miles from the earth, he would have thought that a very proper distance for the moon, seven being a sacred number.9 This is an excellent example of mythological thinking in a place where it has no business to be. Dante uses all he can get of the science of his own day, and many passages in the Commedia, such as the early cantos of the Purgatorio, where Dante and Virgil are looking at a different set of stars on the other side of the earth and discuss what time it would now be

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in Jerusalem, are pure science fiction. But still Dante’s universe was held together by the Scotch tape of symmetrical correspondences, such as the correspondence of the seven planets with the seven metals that they were supposed to engender in the ground. There is not much left of Dante’s science today, but the feature that makes his science obsolete is also one of the features that make his poetry as contemporary as it ever was. Why does a mythology keep such a stranglehold on the scientific impulse, and for so long a time? The simplest answer is that the mythology provides a humanly comprehensible structure, which for most people is far more important than a true or valid structure. It seems self-evident that man and his concerns are at the centre of time and space, and that time and space should be the narrative and setting respectively of a story told by God to instruct man, a story beginning with the creation and ending with the Last Judgment. Then again, if God made the world, the principles on which he made it would be drawn from human art, the only model for conscious creativity that we know. It is “natural” that there should be seven planets and twelve signs of the Zodiac: after all, our music is based on a diatonic scale of seven tones and a chromatic scale of twelve semitones. This analogy of music, astronomy, and mathematics was built into the medieval “quadrivium.”10 If a circle is the central human symbol for eternity, the heavenly bodies must move in circles: why would so conscientious an artist as God have them staggering around in ellipses? This principle, that the fundamental laws of the universe must be aesthetically satisfying, was incorporated into Plato’s Timaeus, which may well have done more to retard science than any other piece of writing in history: Now if so be that this Cosmos is beautiful and its Constructor good, it is plain that he fixed his gaze on the Eternal; but if otherwise (which is an impious supposition), his gaze was on that which has come into existence. But it is clear to everyone that his gaze was on the Eternal; for the Cosmos is the fairest of all that has come into existence, and He the best of all the Causes.11

The growth of science however destroys only what is unscientific: mythology has its own sphere and its own function, and what takes place is a separating of the two, not the replacing of one by the other. Dante was able to use the science of his day in his epic poem because the science of his day was still mythological in shape. As the two areas sep-

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arated, symmetrical pattern-making went underground into the area generally called occult science, the area of alchemy, astrology, kabbalism, and magic. When we look at the sources of nineteenth-century poetry, we find that occultism has had a far more pervasive influence on poetry than actual science has had. The reason is not difficult to understand: occult thought is schematic thought, like the thinking of poetry. As an example of the gradual separating of poetic and scientific modes of thinking, let us take astrology. Astrology is, like the science of astronomy, a study of the stars, but it studies the stars from a geocentric point of view: it is interested mainly in the “influence” (this word was originally a technical term in astrology) that the movements of the stars have, or are believed to have, on human concerns. 1473. Astrology and astronomy are much the same subject, and most of those who study the stars are interested primarily in astrology. 1573. The situation is not very different, despite Copernicus. There had always been theological reservations about astrology, mainly on the score of an implied fatalism, and these had been increased by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. But still astrology was generally accepted as a reasonable hypothesis, and in the next generation Kepler was an energetic caster of horoscopes. 1673. This is the age of the Royal Society, and by now most of the star-gazers are interested only in astronomy. The astrologer is becoming a figure of fun in contemporary comedies (e.g., Congreve’s Love for Love), and Swift’s ridicule of the astrologer Partridge (1708) is a turning point in popular acceptance.12 1773. With the discovery of Uranus imminent, belief and interest in astrology is abandoned by most educated people. 1873. Astrology is firmly consigned to the scrap heap of exploded superstitions. 1973. Astrology is a major industry, with newspapers printing horoscopes, a large number of books expounding the subject, and a great many practising astrologers plying their trade.13 At the same time astrology has separated from astronomy: the two studies are carried on by different people and their literatures are addressed to different publics. There are many who “believe in” astrology, i.e., would like to feel that there is “something in it,” but I should imagine that relatively few of them are astronomers. It is conceivable that astrology will eventually validate its claim to be a coherent subject, and, if so, 2073 may see it reunited with astronomy, as

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it was when Copernicus was born. In the meantime, the popularity of astrology indicates a growing acceptance, by society as a whole, of the schematic and symmetrical type of pattern-thinking which the poets use. Let us look a little more closely into this process of separation. What Copernicus began was a revolution in perspective. If we confine his achievement to him, disregarding the long-term developments through Galileo and Newton, his revolution was a shift from an earthcentred to a sun-centred mythology, but it does not take us outside the area of mythological synthesis. For Copernicus still assumed the sun to be fixed and to be at the centre of the entire universe. Naturally these notions soon went by the board, and in proportion as they did so the shadow of something much more frightening began to appear, the shadow of a universe so huge, so totally unrelated to any human principles of construction at all, as to be, in human terms, alienating and absurd. This is of course the feeling encapsulated by Pascal’s famous aphorism, Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.14 But Pascal was exceptional here as elsewhere. For most people, including most poets, it was not until well into the nineteenth century that the new view of nature became imaginatively oppressive.15 Dante’s colossal vision ends with “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” The word “moves” indicates why Aristotelian physics kept such a grip on the medieval mind. To that mind, moving things don’t just go on until something stops them, as they do in Newton: motion for the Middle Ages was purposeful, directed toward a telos or end, and the ultimate end of all movement was the Great Unmoved Mover at the circumference of the universe, identified with the Christian God. The possibility of undirected movement begins with the Copernican hypothesis. One of the more reasonable objections to Copernicus was: if the earth rotates, why do we keep seeing the same stars in the sky, with no perceptible change in their positions except for the planets? The answer put more of a strain on the human imagination than it had ever been subjected to before, perhaps. It was all very well to say, “Earth’s but a point to the world”; it was all very well for Copernicus to say that the distance from the earth to the sun was insignificant compared to the distance from the earth to the stars. But to have to think concretely in terms of billions of miles was something else again. The next step, of course, is the possibility of reversing Dante’s final phrase. If the sun is one of the stars, it is at least conceivable that the stars are suns, centres of other systems with no relation to man. The espousal of this doctrine by Giordano Bruno was one of

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the reasons why he seemed so horrifying a figure to the jittery church of 1600. Over the next three centuries we may see the three figures of Kepler, Newton, and Swedenborg as representing three stages in the gradual separation of science and mythology. Kepler backed into the discovery of his laws of planetary motion by way of an a priori theory that the distance of the five planets from one another was in proportion to the five solid figures of geometry. He eventually got away from this, but he never abandoned his astrological and other schematic beliefs. Newton was keenly interested in Biblical numerology, even in alchemy, and psychologically these interests must have been connected with his science. But as far as publication was concerned, he kept these interests in separate compartments. Still, it could be said that Newton’s religious interests had a good deal to do, not merely with his popular appeal in the eighteenth century, but with the cushioning of the shock of the emotional effect of the new scientific universe. That God was a good Anglican could be taken for granted, but that Newton was a good Anglican, if a somewhat heterodox one, was much more profoundly reassuring. By 1773 one of the leading spiritual influences in Europe was Swedenborg, who started out as a scientist, but changed completely over to visionary religion, Biblical commentary, and various occult doctrines. He represents a stage of culture in which the mythological and the scientific views are mutually exclusive, even if they coexist in the same mind. If we compare Milton’s epic synthesis with Dante’s, we can see that poetic mythology has made a minimal accommodation to the new science. Milton disapproves of Dante’s devil-centred earth, on the ground that the earth had not been cursed before the fall of Adam, which came later than Satan’s fall, and so Milton puts heaven and hell outside the order of nature, whereas Dante had put them inside. Then again, the only person outside the Bible who is repeatedly and pointedly alluded to in Paradise Lost is Galileo, whose telescope is brought in several times, in rather curious contexts. Milton is well aware of the view of the universe that Galileo held (he had met Galileo in Italy), and sometimes, in discussing the movements of the heavenly bodies, he puts the Ptolemaic and the Copernican explanations beside each other without committing himself. But it is clear that the older model has more of his sympathy, and from what we have said we can see why: the Ptolemaic universe, however rationalized, is a mythological and therefore essentially a poetic con-

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struction; hence it makes poetic sense. Galileo’s world is much more difficult for a poet to visualize. In book 1 of Paradise Lost we are introduced to the shield of Satan. Epics have to have shields, because of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, which is most elaborately and minutely described. The shield of Achilles depicts a world of security and peace, and forms a most effective contrast to the weary gut-cutting which goes on through most of the action. Satan’s shield has the opposite effect: it is an ironic anticipation of the catastrophe which is to follow with the fall of Adam: The broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening, from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe.16

According to the Ptolemaic view, the moon has spots because it is nearest the “sublunary” world of death and corruption: it would not have been a “spotty globe” before Adam’s fall. The heavenly bodies above it are too far up to have spots: we remember that Burton, in the passage quoted from the Anatomy of Melancholy, regarded the discovery of sunspots as the last word in paradox. So Milton’s comparison of Satan’s shield to the moon gazed at by Galileo implies (a) that Galileo’s kind of knowledge is an insecure knowledge founded on the fallen state of nature and (b) that such knowledge is potentially idolatrous (hence the association with Satan), because it concentrates on the visible work of God without instead of on the invisible word within. This attitude comes into focus in book 8, where Adam is being instructed by the angel Raphael. It occurs to Adam to ask whether other worlds than his own are inhabited by intelligent beings: after all, as even Raphael admits, it seems unlikely that the only function of the stars is to shine for man, considering how many of them there are and how little light each one gives. There follows what from one point of view might be considered as repulsive and ridiculous a passage as English poetry affords. Raphael obviously hasn’t a clue what the answer is, but instead of honestly saying so he harrumphs, hums and haws, and finally tells Adam that he needn’t, and therefore shouldn’t, ask such a question.

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“Solicit not thy thought with matters hid,” he says [l. 167]: one shouldn’t pry into God’s secrets. And Adam is “cleared of doubt” [l. 179], satisfied with the answer. The view that it is a sin, or at least a part of original sin, to want to know merely for the sake of knowing had been deeply entrenched in the Christian tradition since Augustine at least. But for the revolutionary Milton to be conniving at such notions seems very strange. Yet, before we dismiss Milton, who is clearly endorsing Raphael’s attitude, as a tedious obscurantist, we should look at the historical context of this dialogue. It is, in effect, the first clear example in English literature of the drawing of battle lines between mythological and scientific worldoutlooks, and the first clear statement that the poet belongs on the mythological side. Leave Galileo alone with his telescope, and he will eventually discover a universe in which man’s place gets smaller and smaller, until it seems so insignificant as to make it of no importance what he does or desires. Such a view must be counterbalanced by a more practical and existential view of things in which human life and human concerns are still central. Adam’s primary task is to preserve his state of freedom against the coming assault of Satan: if he does that, knowledge, including knowledge of the stars, will take its rightful place. For us, the most important thing is to attain the freedom which, according to Milton, God wants us to have, and the practical reason that helps us to do this is superior to the speculative reason that contemplates the nonhuman world. However, Milton looks back to an earlier age: his younger contemporaries were beginning a policy of accommodating themselves to the new science by appeasement. When Milton was writing Paradise Lost, one of his chief rivals in poetry was Abraham Cowley, who wrote odes on Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of blood, on the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and on the Royal Society, in which he described Bacon as the Moses who had led the modern age out of superstition into reason. He was very much a man of the new age. In his unfinished epic on King David (Davideis), Cowley describes David as a youthful musician playing his harp before Saul to cure Saul’s melancholy, in a passage which I quote at some length because of the number of traditional symbolic topoi or commonplaces which it includes: As first a various unform’d hint we find Rise in some god-like poet’s fertile mind,

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Till all the parts and words their places take, And with just marches verse and music make; Such was God’s poem, this world’s new essay; So wild and rude in its first draft it lay; Th’ ungovern’d parts no correspondence knew, An artless war from thwarting motions grew; Till they to number and fix’d rules were brought By the eternal mind’s poetic thought. Water and air he for the tenor chose, Earth made the bass, the treble flame arose; To th’ active moon a quick brisk stroke he gave, To Saturn’s string a touch more soft and grave. The motions straight, and round, and swift, and slow, And short, and long, were mix’d and woven so, Did in such artful figures smoothly fall, As made this decent measur’d dance of all. And this is music; sounds that charm our ears, Are but one dressing that rich science wears. Though no man hear’t, though no man it rehearse, Yet will there still be music in my verse. In this great world so much of it we see; The lesser, man, is all o’er harmony. Storehouse of all proportions! Single choir! Which first God’s breath did tunefully inspire! From hence blest music’s heavenly charms arise, From sympathy which them and man allies. . . . Thus the strange cure on our spilt blood applied, Sympathy to the distant wound does guide. Thus when two brethren strings are set alike, To move them both, but one of them we strike, Thus David’s lyre did Saul’s wild rage control, And tun’d the harsh disorders of his soul.17

Ever since Christianity had elaborated its doctrine of the fall of man, the stars in the sky had been the image of the original unfallen order of nature, as God had created it and designed it for man. I said earlier that human art supplies the models for the belief in a divine creation, and an integral part of the traditional imagery of the starry spheres was the anal-

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ogy of music. The spheres gave out a “harmony” which symbolized their unchanging order, and Cowley associates the four elements of the creation with contrapuntal part-writing. The music was also often symbolized, as here, as an unending dance, into which Cowley manages to accommodate the new scientific realization that the heavenly bodies moved at different speeds. He goes on to make the commonplace analogy between the harmony of the spheres and the harmony which characterizes the soul of the good and wise man, the analogy based on the doctrine of the microcosm. David’s method of curing Saul was the Biblical proof of the genuineness of these metaphors of “harmony,” and of the therapeutic value of music. Cowley even accounts for the popular contemporary belief in sympathetic magic on the same principles. Cowley shows us very clearly how dense the texture of this symbolic cosmology was, and how many values and beliefs were still bound up with it. And yet we cannot help wondering whether this highly enlightened and with-it poet really believes much of what he is saying. He provides immensely erudite footnotes to his poem, and in one of them he makes it clear that the “music of the spheres” is really a metaphor for the fact that the universe can be studied mathematically: “This order and proportion of things,” he says, “is the true music of the world, and not that which Pythagoras, Plato, Tully, Macrobius, and many of the Fathers imagined, to arise audibly from the circumvolution of the Heavens.”18 But if all this business about “harmony” is only metaphorical, can we really attach anything more to the conception of the microcosm, also invoked in this passage? Are there really only four elements? Does Cowley really believe in cures by sympathetic magic? We consult his footnotes again, and find that his footnote on the last point is exceedingly detached: “There is so much to be said of this subject, that the best way is to say nothing of it.”19 It is difficult to resist the conclusion that poets talk a good deal of nonsense because nonsense sounds well in poetry. If so, perhaps the language of poetry itself represents something that the human mind may soon outgrow. This possibility is not consciously present in Cowley’s mind, but it is implied in some of the intellectual assumptions of his age. The imagery of music in the starry heavens, even if only metaphorical, suggests that, as Sir Thomas Browne had said earlier in the century, “Nature is the Art of God.”20 If so, the art of man has a very restricted scope: this had always been true in theory, but had not affected the practice of the arts

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until the rise of science began to raise questions about the adequacy of the traditional mythological language of poetry. For the contemporaries of Newton, Pope and Swift, there seem to be two kinds of reality: the scientific kind, dealt with by reason and evidence, and the religious kind, which is a matter of revelation and is accepted by faith, but is interpreted by the same rational faculties of the mind. Poetry, strictly speaking, belongs neither to revelation nor to science, and its mythological language is hardly appropriate to either. It is puerile to go on repeating the exploded fables of the Greeks and Romans, and pretentious to assume that the poet can say anything about true religion that more conceptual language cannot say better. As Boileau, a great influence on English poetry in this period, had remarked: De la foi d’un Chrétien les mystères terribles D’ornemens égayés ne sont point susceptibles. (L’Art poetique, pt. 3, ll. 199–200)

The poet’s proper sphere is a social and human one, and in this sphere we may look for a slow but steady improvement, as social manners continue to refine. We can see the influence of science here: science does improve, in the sense that it builds on the work of predecessors. One of the speakers in Dryden’s dialogue Essay on Dramatic Poesy remarks, “if natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection.”21 The analogy is a false analogy, because literature cannot improve in the way that science does, but an age fundamentally satisfied with its cultural standards may assume that it is doing so. In fact this illusion of the improvement of the arts arises in every generation, whether consciously formulated or not, but its effect is invariably to develop an elite and in-group literature, and make that elitism a critical standard for assessing literature in general. From about 1750 on, poets, critics, and literary scholars were in increasing revolt against this elitist conception of poetry. New discoveries in early Norse and Celtic literatures, new ways of looking at the poetry of Homer and the Old Testament, the collecting of ballads and the poetry of the oral tradition, all helped to popularize a new sense that there is something socially primitive about poetry.22 Poetry thrives on the simple sensational language which nature inspires in human emotion: myth,

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legend, the fabulous, superstition itself, are the very lifeblood of poetry. In his Ode to the Royal Society, Cowley had praised Bacon for his revolution in language: From words, which are but pictures of the thought . . . To things, the mind’s right object, he it brought.23

But for the poets and critics of a later age it seemed rather that the pure and original language was the metaphorical language of poetry, and that Bacon’s effort to make language descriptively accurate was a later, secondary and derivative development of it. Still, what does all this do except confirm and make explicit the latent suspicions that poetry is falling out of line with social advance, and is fit only for the scrap heap of discarded notions and beliefs? Let us go back to the traditional belief that the visible heaven is the appropriate image of the invisible one, that the sky symbolizes the world as it was originally created, and is now all that is left of that original. The impact of the new science on poets was, at first, to confirm them in this belief. Addison paraphrases the nineteenth Psalm in language reflecting a confidence that his own age is updating its great vision: The spacious firmament on high, And all the blue ethereal sky, And spangled heavens, a shining frame, Their great Original proclaim. [ll. 1–4]24

And yet other imaginative influences were already at work eroding this acceptance of the sky as the symbol of divine order. To “proclaim” a personal creator one needs intelligent beings or angels, such as earlier cosmologies from Plato to Dante had liberally supplied, guiding the planets in their ordained courses. But now the starry heaven was dead, and the law of gravitation, however remarkable an intellectual achievement, could not bring it to life. The stars had not been made out of immortal quintessence, but out of the same substances as our own earth; they do not move in perfect circles around the earth, but attend to their own concerns in the vast depths of empty space. It was not that the symbolism was becoming untrue—truth and falsehood do not apply to mythology in this direct way—but that it was becoming emotionally unconvincing. What we appear to have, up in the sky, is an essentially

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mechanical order. Can an infinite personality be appropriately symbolized by a mechanism, however complex and well running? By the time we get to the Prologue to Goethe’s Faust, the conception of God as the infinitely skilful juggler of planets is only a subject for parody.25 For an English equivalent, we may cite Byron’s Vision of the Last Judgment: The angels all were singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two . . . [ll. 9–12]

Much more is involved here than the vitality of one particular poetic image. Once the starry heavens begin to go as a symbol of divine intelligence, we begin to wonder if the traditional images of divine and demonic do not need reversing. If the symbol of divine order is an empty, dead mechanism, perhaps the idealized cosmological image is merely a front for a political one, a rationalization of conservative authority. Perhaps the erotic and the rebellious are potentially good things, indications of a greater and fuller human freedom. And if the language of poetry seems to be a primitive language, may not that language be the language of human freedom itself, which is now smothered over by the autocracy of civilization and by the rationalizing parasites of that autocracy? This way of looking at things, which gathered force after the American and French Revolutions, was seized on particularly by William Blake, who, though without influence in his own time, saw more deeply and clearly into the mythological situation of his day than anyone else. In his great poem Europe (1794), Blake summarizes the history of Europe from the birth of Christ to the French Revolution. In the Roman world at the time of Christ, the gods had finally become identified almost entirely with the stars. The spirits of the spheres, called intelligences in Plato and angels in the Middle Ages, are really, according to Blake, the exploiting ascendant class, their “dance” an expression of the carefree leisurely lives that are supported by the slavery and misery of others. In the symbolism of the music of the spheres, the trumpet spoken of by Paul as announcing the Last Judgment would be the last musical sound.26 In Blake’s poem the last trumpet is blown by Isaac Newton, after several unsuccessful attempts by an angel. Blake means that after Newton’s time it is no longer possible to worship the sky as an image of deity. For worship there must

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be what in our time Martin Buber has called an “I–Thou” relationship, and science turns everything in nature, sooner or later, from a “Thou” into an “It.” It is natural for primitive people to worship the sun, but difficult to feel worshipful about a blast furnace ninety million miles off, however impressive it may be otherwise. And even though Christianity had transformed the idolatry of star worship into the iconology of star imagery, the principle remains: we cannot go on associating God with a subhuman mechanism. Newton has taught us too much about the deadness and remoteness of the objects in the sky. So after Newton, the reign of autocracies founded on a symbol of unchanging order is over, and the French Revolution, Blake thinks at this time, indicates an entirely new feeling spreading over humanity. We remember that John Donne, in Ignatius His Conclave, had represented Copernicus as calling himself a “second Creator,” and as having put the earth at the top and the sun at the bottom of the creation, reversing the traditional order. He has thus emancipated the devil, he claims, because the devil’s habitation is conventionally at the centre of the earth. Donne is thus, however unconsciously, looking forward to an imagery in which the sky will be associated with Satan rather than with God, and in which a suppressed demonic figure may prove to be the image of human freedom. Paul had already associated the devil with the sky in the New Testament, calling him “the prince of the power of the air” [Ephesians 2:2]. The poetry of English Romanticism, beginning with Blake, greatly developed this symbolism. Blake was a painter and engraver as well as a poet, and his poems are illustrated by himself. The frontispiece to Europe depicts a naked old man with a pair of compasses (deriving from the description of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs) setting bounds both to nature and the human mind. His name in Blake’s mythology, Urizen, is from the same root as “horizon.” The traditional Christian view is that the world was created by the Word of God, starting with the command “Let there be light,” and that this Word became incarnate later as a young God put to death by a reactionary society. Blake’s figure is the kind of cloud-gathering Zeus, or crabby old man in the sky, that all authoritarian religions eventually collapse on. The same type of figure appears in Shelley as the Jupiter of Prometheus Unbound. Jupiter again is the old symbol of divine intelligence which is really a symbol of a political establishment relying on the belief in such a God for its support. The psychological effect of contemplating a symbol

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of changeless order as an image of deity is to make us feel that whatever happens is inevitable, and to accept all evil and disaster as the will of God. Poetry, which helps us to create rather than simply contemplate what is there, is for Shelley a powerful agent in helping to free the Prometheus in the human mind from the tyranny of Jupiter. A later poet, Thomas Hardy, is never tired of showing us what an imbecile God turns out to be if we create him in the image of the starry order. Hardy has a poem called God’s Education, in which God is represented as learning from the misery of man, in the manner of middle-class people reluctantly coming to realize that some people are not only poor but poorer than they should be. He has another called By the Earth’s Corpse, where God remarks, at the end of time, that he wishes he had never started on this creation business, for which he clearly has so little talent. The novels take the same view: here is the narcissistic and rather stupid heroine of The Return of the Native: Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alternation of caresses and blows that we endure now.27

Blake and Shelley belong to the Romantic period, but Hardy comes on the other side of Darwin, and it was Darwin who completed the revolution in perspective that Copernicus had begun. Copernicus started the displacing of man from the spatial centre of the universe, and by the nineteenth century his place in that universe looked small indeed. But for long it was still assumed, however vaguely, that the universe was finite in time: that there must have been a creation, and therefore at some time a conclusion to the whole operation. Thus Dryden, writing an ode in honour of St. Cecilia, the patron of music, begins with the customary image of the world as created from “heavenly harmony,” and ends with the corresponding image of the end of time:

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This passage rather frightened Samuel Johnson, who remarked that the image is “so awful in itself, that it can owe little to poetry; and I could wish the antithesis of music untuning had found some other place.”28 By saying that it owes little to poetry Johnson means that Dryden’s conclusion is for him a simple statement of fact about a situation in which we shall all certainly find ourselves. Another result of this uneasy compromise was eighteenth-century Deism, which was essentially the doctrine that we need a creating God but not a sustaining one: the natural order runs itself automatically, though the perfection of that automatism guarantees its divine origin. Deism had a good deal of influence in America after 1776, as it seemed to provide a formula for uniting most religious groups around the argument that if the world exists, somebody must have made it. The strength of millennial and apocalyptic movements in the same country seems to indicate something rather exhilarating in the notion of an approaching end of the world, despite Samuel Johnson’s attitude. For beginning and ending are human, finite, and comprehensible notions, and when the stars in the sky have become increasingly the image of something demonic and alienating, the sense of a beginning and an end becomes proportionately more attractive. I say this because it seems to me that in the various apocalyptic symbols of our time, annihilation warfare, the atom bomb, the increase of population and shrinking of natural resources, there is something that appeals to self-indulgence as well as genuine concern, and a latent nihilism that may prove to be more dangerous than the problems themselves. The doctrine of evolution made time as huge and frightening as space: the past, after Darwin, was no more emotionally reassuring than the skies had come to be. Once the starry heavens become an image of mechanism, we are left with the organism as the highest development of existence we know of. But the behaviour of organisms in nature exhibits a process of cut-throat competition very similar to that of the worst aspects of the human community. Then again, by showing a creative process forming itself within nature, evolution made it unnecessary to assume a personal creator outside it: it made nature not only alien but autonomous, a self-regulating process needing no God to start it or man to improve it.

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What conclusions are we to draw from the long historical process that we are here tracing back to the hypothesis of Copernicus? In the first place, man lives in two worlds, the worlds traditionally called the worlds of nature and art. We live in an actual world, our physical environment in time and space, and this is the world studied mainly by the natural or physical sciences. At the same time we keep trying to create a culture and civilization of our own. This represents the world we want to live in, as well as the world we are creating out of our environment. It is where our values and desires and hopes and ideals belong, and this world is always geocentric, always anthropocentric, always centred on man and man’s concerns. It is obvious that the basis of the world we want to live in is mythological. That is, the world we construct is built to the model of a common social vision produced by the imagination. Poetry, which is at the heart of all mythology, finds its function in providing verbal imaginative models for human civilization, and seeing reality in terms of human desires and emotions. In the science that studies nature there is, of course, an essential place for the imaginative and creative powers, but still the ultimate end of science is verification, coincidence with an external reality. Similarly, in the mythology that expresses human vision, there is an essential place for reality: we do not believe the poet as such, but we applaud him for producing something credible. Yet the end of mythology is the conceivable, not the real, or, as Aristotle said, the impossible made probable.29 We have to separate these two worlds in our minds, rigorously and completely, before we can address ourselves to the next question, of how to unite them again. Of course everything we do is in one aspect an attempt to unite them, but unless we distinguish them first we shall not know what we are trying to unite. On one side is the world of vision, the world presented to us by poetry and myth, which has being but not existence: it is real but it is not there. On the other side is the world that is there, presented to us in the constructs of science. This world has existence, but it is, so far as we can see, a subhuman, submoral, subintelligent world, with nothing in it that directly responds to human desires or ideals. In between is the world that we create, or try to realize, out of the merely internal reality of the one and the merely external reality of the other. We want a human community that will conform to our hopes and ideals and our sense of what might be; we need a knowledge of our environment that will give it foundations and keep it from being a castle in the air.

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It seems clear that the uniting area must be something like an area of belief. But belief in this sense has to be rather precisely characterized. A genuine belief is an axiom of behaviour: whatever we may believe we believe, our behaviour shows what we really believe, and a belief which cannot become an axiom of behaviour is useless lumber in the mind. Thus genuine belief is the source of whatever is positive or creative in one’s life. It may be founded on the flattest truisms: a preference of life to death, freedom to slavery, happiness to misery, gentleness to brutality, truth to falsehood, cleanliness to filth. But it is genuine belief if it makes creative behaviour possible. If I believe something, then I should order my life on its practical consequences, and if I cannot do so, I must either discard the belief or recognize that it is discarding me. Assent to verified facts is not belief in this sense: I know that the earth goes round the sun, but it would be unbearably pretentious to say that that was part of my faith. Traditionally, belief has been connected with religion, and often conceived as an uncritical and unquestioning trust in something unproved or unprovable. But it is hard to see how belief in this sense can be a virtue. Neither does it seem to be the original emphasis in religion. Whenever faith is spoken of approvingly in the New Testament, for example, it seems to have something to do with the concentrating of one’s imagination or will power. It is defined in the Epistle to the Hebrews as the hypostasis, the substantial reality, of what is hoped for; the elenchos, the proof or evidence, of unseen things [Hebrews 11:1]. Belief so defined seems to be much the same thing as creativity, the power of bringing into existence something that was not there before, but which, once there, brings us a little closer to our model vision. In Copernicus’s day the uniting force was unquestionably religion, and there was still a good deal of prestige attached to the great medieval dream of uniting the two worlds by making the axioms of faith, given by revealed religion, major premises from which to deduce a trustworthy philosophy and science. This dream is still with us, and revives in each generation, but things fall apart: that centre, it seems, cannot hold. At present, at any rate, it seems that religion has its roots in the model or mythological world only. This is the reason for the curious and persistent relationship between the language of poetry and the language of religion. They are both developments of mythology, verbal constructs made out of myth and metaphor. As long as God was assumed to have a functional place in scientific thought, as the Creator of the order of nature, this fact was concealed. But it seems clear now that for us, in our generation, the conception of God as a Creator has been projected from

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the fact that man makes things. The revolution that began with Copernicus has clearly ended in the abolition of the conception “God” from the world of time and space, so far as science deals with that world. At the same time that the Romantic movement had begun the final separation of mythology and science, the Industrial Revolution was making technology a central factor in society. Both Marxism and the theory of progress in the democracies seized on industrial production as the central uniting force of society, and the realizing power of civilization. Their conception of technology was much the same: they differed only on whether a capitalist or a socialist economy should control it. The great advantage of having technology in such a role was that it seemed to develop automatically, with the minimum of reference to the nagging mythological question, Is this really what man most wants and needs? Marxist poets were urged to celebrate the glories of technology under socialism as their ancestors had celebrated gods and heroes. A magnificent Hungarian poem by Ferenc Juhász, The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets, translated by the Canadian poet Kenneth McRobbie with Ilona Duczynska, thus describes the apotheosis of its transformed hero: There he stood on the renewing crags of time, stood on the ringed summit of the sublime universe, there stood the lad at the gate of secrets, his antler prongs were playing with the stars . . . Mother, my mother, I cannot go back: pure gold seethes in my hundred wounds . . . each prong of my antlers is a dual-based pylon each branch of my antlers a high-tension wire, my eyes are ports for ocean-going merchantmen, my veins are tarry cables, these teeth are iron bridges, and in my heart the surge of monster-infested seas, each vertebra is a teeming metropolis, for a spleen I have a smoke-puffing barge each of my cells is a factory, my atoms are solar systems sun and moon swing in my testicles, the Milky Way is my bone marrow, each point of space is one part of my body my brain impulse is out in the curling galaxies.30

There seem to be some lurking ironies even here, and in any case poets, at least in the democracies, have not responded to pylons and factories

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with much enthusiasm. Most of them appear to agree with the humanists who were scolded by Sir Charles Snow, in his famous “two cultures” lecture, for being what he called “Luddites,” reactionary machine-breakers, who for Snow were such a contrast to the scientists who “have the future in their bones.”31 It is instructive to turn to William Morris, because he was one of the relatively few English poets who was a socialist, even something of a Marxist, if a somewhat unorthodox one. We find that he quite explicitly prefers medieval to modern London: Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town; Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, And dream of London, small, and white, and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green . . .32

This is supposed to be Chaucer’s London, though Chaucer himself might have been startled to hear it described as “clean,” but it is not the reference to the past which is important. There are doubtless people even yet who would dismiss such writing impatiently as escapist fantasy, but it is just barely possible that in the age of pollution and the energy crisis we may feel that the poets may have some of the future in their bones too. In any case the real reason for the “Luddite” attitude of so many poets to technology is of some interest. Technically, a machine is an extension of organic life: a telescope is an extension of the eye, an automobile of the feet, a computer of the calculating aspect of the brain. A car can run faster than a human body and a computer calculate faster than a human mind, but the machine left to itself has no will to do these things, despite all the science-fiction horror stories about malignant computers and insurgent robots. Nevertheless, there is a sinister tendency in the human mind to project itself into its mechanisms. The demonic is, like the divine, something within the human mind, not something out there, but it is peculiarly characteristic of the demonic to build itself an external prison in order to have the fun of crawling into it. The civilization produced by the automobile, with its network of highways, the blasted deserts of its parking lots, the grid plan of cities, and the human sacrifices offered to it on every holiday, clearly raises the question of who is enslaving whom. Again, every social “system” or “structure,” as these words imply, is essentially a mechanism for

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providing a human community, but the impulse to make a social structure into a divinely sanctioned prison has run consistently through history from Pharaoh’s Egypt to Stalin’s Russia. We remember that the great technological invention of primitive man was the wheel, and that the wheel promptly became in mythology a symbol of external compulsion, an emblem of fate or fortune. When Blake or Morris or D.H. Lawrence attack or repudiate our technological culture, therefore, they are really saying that if man is too lazy to mould his world according to his real beliefs, and tries to abdicate his responsibilities by trusting to some kind of automated progress, he is actually releasing the most sinister and vicious impulses in himself, and the end of it is logically either the total destruction made possible by modern physics or, far worse, the unending tyranny made possible by modern communications. Hence the preoccupation of so many writers with the themes of mad scientists and parody Utopias like 1984. One thinks particularly of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose monster is popularly supposed to be a symbol of man’s enslavement to the mechanisms he has created. Actually the monster is portrayed with a good deal of sympathy: the many references to Milton’s Paradise Lost in her story make it clear that her real theme is the responsibility that man takes on when he recognizes the extent of his own creative powers. If what he creates is monstrous, merely viewing it with horror is hardly enough. The moral of such fables is that man can never avoid the challenge to examine his own beliefs, his desires, and his visions of society at every step of new discovery. The future that is technically possible is not necessarily the future that society wants or can accept. To be fatalistic about this, to assume that whatever can happen must happen, is the way to develop “future shock” into a coma.33 The central issue of our own time, five hundred years away from Copernicus, is often described as a crisis in belief. I have no quarrel with this way of putting it, but I have a rather sceptical suggestion to make about it. Just as we have a principle of economy of means in the arts, and of economy of hypotheses in the sciences, so we need a principle of economy of belief. It is no light matter to adopt a real belief, or axiom of behaviour, and the loss of influence today of the traditional religions seems to me connected with a widespread feeling that a good many “believers” are rather frivolous people. I have a friend who taught for a year at a college in India, and was told by a genuinely worried student that because he ate beef the best he could hope for in his next incarnation

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was to be reborn as a dog. Now, of course, one cannot prove that one will not be reborn as a dog in one’s next incarnation, or even that one will or will not have another incarnation. But still his attitude was an impatient “to hell with all that stuff.” What is significant is that this is the only attitude for which one could possibly have the slightest respect. It is relatively easy for us to see this when the beliefs are unfamiliar, but the general principle is inescapable that when belief is a matter of uncritical acceptance of the unprovable, the less we believe the better. Sin is traditionally countered by faith, but when we see Bunyan’s Christian, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, staggering off towards the Gate of Good Will under the burden of his sins, we cannot help wondering if the burden of his beliefs was not even heavier, and perhaps worse for him. The self-pitying moans exhaled from many nineteenth-century and later writers about the tragedy of their loss of faith never quite conceal an underlying exhilaration. In our time we are about to be faced with new scientific developments, in such fields as genetics, which will affect human life profoundly, and which will have to be met with genuine belief in what we can accept or reject for our own social life. To try to encounter such problems as clonal reproduction with a clutter of vestigial superstitions and polemical pseudo-beliefs inspired by an overactive superego, by resentments (e.g., “I feel this must be true because my parents, or my children, deny it”), or by expediency, is like trying to rely on the vermiform appendix for digesting our food. My opposition of mythology and the physical sciences will of course remind you that we have developed the ability to study our own civilized institutions in the same detached and objective spirit with which we study nature. This development has given us the social sciences, which are obviously a powerful element in the process of realizing the kind of society we want. The social sciences are still gravely handicapped, it seems to me, by not realizing that they are also the applied humanities, but the importance of bringing the scientific spirit to bear on man himself is undeniable. What they represent is the power of criticism in society. We often speak glibly of the need for questioning and challenging our beliefs: it is the kind of thing we say to avoid any real thought or action. But of course the criticism of a genuine belief is not a negative activity, but is the same thing as the recreation and renewal of that belief. This takes me back to the epigraph from Wallace Stevens with which I began this paper:

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To say the solar chariot is junk Is not a variation but an end. Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor Is still to stick to the contents of the mind And the desire to believe in a metaphor.

Stevens is also opposing mythology to science, and is telling us that we cannot live wholly within either construct. The scientific perspective on reality is one that destroys mythology in its own field. In science there can never be any sun-gods or solar chariots: they are scientifically junk. It does not follow that they have no place in mythology, though it is true that as science extends our knowledge of the sun, poets get tired of solar chariots as no longer effective metaphors, so that they eventually become junk in poetry too. We cannot however live in a world where there is no mythology, where everything the imagination produces is junk. Yet there is no escape in running to the other extreme and retreating to a self-contained world of the imagination. Such a world, Stevens’s believed-in metaphor, would be not imaginative but imaginary, a narcissistic mirror of our own minds, a facile conquest of the unreal. Ever since Copernicus began the displacement of man in space, we have been progressively discovering that the physical environment seems to be an order of existence without human value, including the supreme human value of finiteness. Hence it is easy for poets to call it alien or absurd, a world which, however we may have blundered into it, is not ours, except for the tiny piece that we have made ours for the time being. It may be better to think of it, however, as something other, something not ourselves which nonetheless extends and expands us. It is one of the primary functions of science to remind us of how much we still do not know, to present to us a universe of infinite scope and infinite possibilities of further discovery. Mythology does not expand and progress in the way that science does, but it keeps constantly transforming itself, as though there were a power of renewal within it as infinite as the galaxies. If the Royal Society of Canada survives to 2073, mankind may by that time have realized more clearly that there may be an otherness of the spirit as well as of nature, and that a tiny part of that too may become ourselves.

26 The Rhythms of Time 29 March 1974

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 5, file e. This was an address to a conference given by the graduate program in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto on “Romanticism and Historicism.” Frye’s panel dealt specifically with the role of time in Romantic poetry. A preliminary typescript with holograph corrections is in 1988, box 5, file c. First published in MM, 157–67.

I am not a scholar in the Romantic period, except by fits and starts, so it seems to me that what I can most usefully do is to provide some sort of context for the theme of “Time and the Poetic Self.” The great difficulty about time, of course, has always been that it is the primary category of experience, the most important and fundamental aspect of life, and yet apparently it does not exist. Its centre seems to be in the present moment, the now, but when we try to grasp this “now,” we find ourselves pursuing an elusive never quite that keeps vanishing between the no longer and the not yet. As Dylan Thomas says, The atlas-eater with a jaw for news Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow’s scream.1

We try to cope with time facing the past, with our backs to the future, and in relation to time human life seems to be a kind of untied Andromeda, constantly stepping back from a devouring monster whose mouth is the mouth of hell, in the sense that each moment passes from the possible into the eternally unchangeable being of the past. At death we back into a solid wall, and the monster then devours us too.

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The time-honoured way of dealing with problems we don’t understand is to project them on God, who presumably does understand them. In the traditional view, as incorporated into medieval and later Christianity, the human experience of time has always been contrasted with what must be the experience of God, whose mind can be only in a pure present comprehending both past and future. Our ordinary experience of time, we have been assured ever since St. Augustine at least, results from the fall, when we acquired a consciousness that can attend to only one thing “at a time,” from which this slippery linear perspective on time has been derived. As the Elizabethan poet Sir John Davies says, in his philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum: But we that measure times by first and last, The sight of things successively do take, When God on all at once His view doth cast, And of all times, doth but one instant make.2

On the human level there are, according to this traditional Christian view, three kinds of temporal experience. At the furthest pole from the mind of God, where time is an eternal now, is demonic time, time experienced as simply one clock-tick after another, an unending duration without direction or purpose, of which we know nothing except that it annihilates everything, including us. Hell is usually conceived as this experience of time with death removed, and Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech [5.5.19] is the best-known literary evocation of it. Above this is our ordinary sense of time as a mixture of linear and cyclical movement. We see time as the universal devourer, with a unique capacity for wiping things out of existence; but we also experience a rotary movement in which spring follows winter, dawn the darkness, and new life death. In these brief instants of renewal there is some sense of hope and confidence, some feeling that a benevolent power may after all be concealed in the machinery. But this view of time is founded on the alienation myth of the fall of man, so two other questions about time arise. One is, What was time like in the garden of Eden, in the world God originally made for Adam before his fall? The other is, To what extent can this unfallen sense of time be attained in our present life? A higher awareness of time must be connected somehow with the one reassuring aspect of time in our ordinary experience, the sense of renewal

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in the cycles of nature. This aspect is seen in its complete form in the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, where there is cycle without decline or decay, a continuous renewal. The heavenly bodies represent, for us, not mechanical obedience to divine law, but the release of freedom that such obedience makes possible. Their rotation is something to be associated with music and the dance, a movement which brings the highest kind of pleasure with it, and which is symbolized by the myth of the “music of the spheres.” We turn to Sir John Davies’ other long poem, Orchestra, where we have the finest and best-known treatment in English poetry of the creation of nature as a dance, a “harmony” of joyous and integrated rhythm which was the characteristic of the world as God originally made it. The experience of time in the unfallen state, then, would be the kind of experience represented by the dancer, whose world is not timeless but where time is the effect of exuberance, its cycles taking place, as Milton says, “for change delectable, not need.”3 As Davies says, How justly then is dancing termed new Which with the world in point of time began? Yea, Time itself, whose birth Jove never knew, And which is far more ancient than the sun, Had not one moment of his age outrun When out leaped Dancing from the heap of things And lightly rode upon his nimble wings. Reason hath both their pictures in her treasure, Where Time the measure of all moving is And Dancing is a moving all in measure. Now if you do resemble that to this, And think both one, I think you think amiss; But if you judge them twins, together got, And Time first born, your judgment erreth not.4

That is, time and dancing, the measure of movement and the movement in measure, are not the same thing, but time is the mode of the dancing existence, the ultimate context within which it operates, just as the ordinary kind of time is for life on this level. Davies’ poem is said to be sung to Penelope by the chief of her suitors, Antinous, during the absence of Odysseus. The reason is that Penelope’s web was often taken to be an allegory of nature, its weaving and

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unweaving the process of change and mutation that goes on around us. What Antinous’s song does is to bring out the inner secret of nature, the form that time assumes in its originally created state. The poet says, So subtile and curious was the measure, With such unlooked-for change in every strain, As that Penelope, rapt with sweet pleasure, Ween’d she beheld the true proportion plain Of her own web, weaved and unweaved again: But that her art was somewhat less, she thought, And on a mere ignoble subject wrought. [st. 134, ll. 1–7]

Somewhat less, because the world we live in, which her web symbolizes, is not equal to the great orchestra celebrated by her suitor. The poet uses an ingenious image to express this: while Penelope weaves, her hands are moving in the great dance, but if she were in a completely liberated world, her feet and whole body would be moving too. The prevailing assumption, down to Milton’s time at least, was that everything that is genuinely good for man, that is in the largest sense of the term educational, tends to raise him from ordinary experience a little nearer to the unfallen level that he was originally created to live on. In this educational activity the cycles of the heavenly bodies symbolize a creative form of repetition, like the repetitions of practice. If we want to learn to play a musical instrument or to read the Latin language, we set ourselves free for these activities through practice, which builds up a habit ending in an extension of freedom. This kind of creative repetition was represented by the sacraments of the church in particular. A great deal of the measuring of time in this period was a by-product of religion, with clocks and bells marking the hours of worship or devotion. The two aspects of cyclical movement, the ordinary and the cultivated, are distinguished in Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos: in fact the distinguishing of them is the whole point of the poem. Mutability dominates our world, and nobody disputes her claim to it. But she also claims the starry heavens above, on the ground that they too move in cyclical rotation, and hence are phenomena of becoming and change. The evidence she brings forth is the evidence of the natural cycle: the four seasons, day and night, the twelve months with their Zodiacal signs, life and death. But Nature decides against her claim to the upper world on the ground that there are

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two aspects to cyclical movement. The stars being made, not of the dissoluble four elements, but of immortal quintessence, their cycle is unchanging and not subject to decay: I well consider all that ye have said, And find that all things steadfastness do hate And changed be: yet being rightly weighed They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being do dilate: And turning to themselves at length again, Do work their own perfection so by fate: Then over them Change doth not rule and reign; But they reign over Change, and do their states maintain.5

The line “Do work their own perfection so by fate” indicates the element of what we have called habit or creative repetition in the upper cycle: the rotation of heavenly bodies symbolizes not simply an unending cycle but a telos, a purposive movement back to their Creator. As elsewhere in The Faerie Queene, the top and bottom of the four levels of time are only hinted at. The top level is referred to explicitly only in the very last stanza of the poem, as the “rest” or “Sabbath’s sight” which the poet prays to have at the end of his life.6 The demonic level is indicated in Nature’s comment to Mutability, “For thy decay thou seek’st by thy desire”7—that is, the ultimate thrust of the force of change and decay in time as we know it is into perpetual annihilation, the chaos of fluctuating chance that Milton says is “the womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave.”8 So far we have been following the poets in their purely religious themes. But outside the Christian mythology was Eros, the power of love that has a sexual basis, however sublimated it may later become. For the poets Eros was another force that could raise man to a higher awareness of time. Davies makes it abundantly clear, not only that his poem is a love song, but that his conception of the cosmological dance is also a manifestation of Eros. Similarly, it is Dante’s love for Beatrice that impels him up the purgatorial mountain to reach the unfallen form of his own existence, which is in the garden of Eden on the top of the mountain. Even unhappy, frustrated, or rejected love may have the same result. In Shakespeare’s sonnets we hear a great deal about time as the devourer and annihilator of all being. But in the beautiful-youth sequence there are certain intervals—three in all—where there is a sense of renewed

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energy and power, obviously connected with the imagery of spring. At the beginning of the sequence the poet urges the youth to marry and beget a son, a futile effort to prolong his beauty in time; then the poet drops this theme and falls in love with the youth himself. After a great deal of suffering and misery, along with a few gleams of ecstasy, the total experience of love on the poet’s part lifts him clear of the dissolution and decay in time. The beautiful youth is left to nature’s “audit,” in other words to age and death, but the poet’s love is in a ver perpetuum like the garden of Eden in Dante, “That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.”9 As nearly all the poets in this period, apart from the dramatists, represented themselves as lovers, they were able, even without a doctrine of creative imagination as such, to suggest that poetry itself was also a means of acquiring a higher awareness of time, and coming closer to the exuberant pulsation of the dance which is its real form. The word “grace,” with its double set of associations in love and religion, was of great importance here. At the end of The Faerie Queene Spenser introduces himself, under his earlier pseudonym of Colin Clout, the lover of Rosalind, as evoking a vision centred on four “Graces,” Rosalind being the addition to the conventional three, and in her turn being placed “under the feet” of Queen Elizabeth, who usually took this role of fourth Grace.10 The implication is that Spenser, as lover, is able to create the entire world of “faerie,” and enable his reader to enter it. In modern poetry the Eliot Quartets give us once again this traditional view of time on four levels of experience. In Burnt Norton, which owes a good deal to Davies’ Orchestra, we begin again with the sense of overwhelming unreality in the ordinary experience of time, where nothing but the most rigid kind of fatalism can unite its three dimensions. Perhaps nothing can happen except what must happen, which means that the future has, in a sense, already occurred, and so is indistinguishable from the past. In this kind of fatalism there could be no redemption, for “all time is unredeemable” [sec. 1, ll. 1–5]: such a world would be hell if there were no death. Redemption requires a God, but a God within time is no better off than we are, and a God wholly free of time is of no use to us. Fortunately we have the Incarnation, the descent of something outside time into time, and this creates in time the possibility of a genuine present moment. The recurrence of this moment, suggesting that it is continuously latent, is represented by the church’s daily repetition of the Incarnation in the Mass, and its possible emergence in life is the basis of

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the arts, hence the sense of a moment in which “past and future are gathered” [sec. 2, l. 18], when “all is always now” [sec. 5, ll. 11–13], is one of the things that poetry is about. In Little Gidding the conception of Eros is added, for the sake of completeness and tradition, but Eliot is not much of a votary of Eros, and the theological subordination of Eros to Agape, or God’s love for man, takes over and organizes the argument. So the traditional view of time is still poetically viable, as Eliot shows. But its traditional symbol, the sky with its heavenly bodies, has lost most of its prestige. We no longer believe that the heavenly bodies are made of immortal quintessence, or that they move in intelligently guided perfect circles around the earth. In fact the heavenly bodies now, with their colossal distances from the earth and their obvious indifference to human concerns, are more likely to be a symbol of human alienation than of divine providence. Eliot does give us the traditional cosmological dance, at the beginning of the second section of Burnt Norton, with all the rhythms of nature pulsating around “the bedded axle-tree” [sec. 2, l. 2]. But the old spatial metaphors of sky and mountain have largely vanished, the Incarnation-moment being a kind of vortex or shadow-mountain. By a century after Newton’s time, at least, the heavenly bodies were becoming increasingly an image of mechanism rather than of divine providence and the original condition of creation. Hence the number of evil or stupid sky-gods in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, along with the use of the older construct for parody, as in Byron’s Vision of Judgment and the Prologue to Goethe’s Faust.11 When the movements in the sky become thought of as mechanical, we are left with the organism as the highest symbol of being, with man, the conscious organism, at the centre. In the older construct man turns away from his natural environment and attaches himself, through love or religion, to an ideal form of human community. But now man is thought of as immersed in, first, his social, and then his physical, environment. His time-consciousness, first of all, expands into the more leisurely temporal rhythms of social continuity. The “short time” that so haunted Spenser is still short for the individual, but the individual’s life is interpenetrated by instants when he becomes aware of the slow growth or decline of ideas, religions, institutions, and, of course, empires. A very obvious symbol of this enlarged view of time is the Wandering Jew who appears in Shelley’s Hellas. It follows that both a specifically historical consciousness and a speculative consciousness of the future become elements of the Romantic awareness of time.

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In the background are the still slower rhythms of nature, a nature which is not itself human, and yet contains something that complements human experience, where life and death assume different patterns and suggest different proportions. To take an example practically at random from The Prelude, Wordsworth sees a ruined convent as a roofless Pile And not by reverential touch of Time Dismantled, but by violence abrupt.12

This complementary sense of time in nature develops from the eighteenth-century vision of the sublime, as manifested later in, for instance, the Mont Blanc that confronts Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, and inspires them to different and yet curiously interrelated reactions.13 The sublime, by definition, is not the lovable, and although, in Shelley particularly, the association of love and the poetic imagination may still be very close, the basis of the poet’s enlarged time-consciousness is not his role as a lover, but his function as a poet. Hence that function is separable from the poet’s personality, real or projected. The barrage of Scriptural echoes in the Defence of Poetry shows how deliberately Shelley is replacing the older construct with a new one: “Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.”14 This deification of time is parallel to Blake’s conception of Los as both Time and the Holy Spirit. To use a somewhat oversimplifying formula, the Romantic time-consciousness tends to be immanent rather than transcendent, and its emotional tone is not ecstatic so much as elegiac. The older ubi sunt theme, of time as the devourer, is of course still there, but it is qualified by occasional instants where our unconscious participation in larger rhythms of history and nature come to the surface and “We feel that we are greater than we know.”15 The Romantic poet, working as he normally does without the professional rhetorical training that Spenser and Milton had, is well aware of the large involuntary element in creative writing, the times when the will to write must be employed to relax the will, and let the slower autonomous rhythms welling up from lower strata of the mind take over. These rhythms are often identified with historical or natural processes, as in Prometheus Unbound, where the liberation of Prometheus is part of a huge cosmological culbute in which Demogorgon, whose

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name is “Eternity,” ascends from the depths of the earth on a car piloted by the “Spirit of the Hour” to pull Jupiter off his throne, in a kind of reversal of Eliot’s vision of the Incarnation. Shelley’s vision is in fact founded on the myth of resurrection, which is complementary to that of incarnation, though of course in Shelley it is not specifically the resurrection of Christ which is involved, as it is in Blake’s America, for example. Resurrection, where the power bringing the new sense of time comes from below, is most naturally a revolutionary myth, just as incarnation, which visualizes that power as descending from a higher world of greater order, is most naturally an authoritarian one. Shelley’s visions of liberation are comic visions, and derive from the structure of comedy as we have it in The Winter’s Tale, where the tragic complications are metamorphosed into a comic conclusion by the discovery of Perdita’s identity at the appointed time. Time himself is a personified chorus in Shakespeare’s play, and the play’s main source, Greene’s Pandosto, is subtitled “The Triumph of Time.” The Incarnation, on the other hand, repeats, on a voluntary and conscious level, the earlier fall of Adam into a lower world, the archetype of tragedy, the theme of which is regularly the theme of the breaking of time, the disruption of the proper rhythms of the creation by something violent and hurried. But both the rhythms of descent from above and emergence from below break into the continuity of our ordinary experience of time with something discontinuous. Eliot’s Quartets make a good deal of the discontinuity that the real present, the still point of the turning world, makes in time. Eliot shows us that it is folly to try to unify our linear sense of time, to assume that we get wiser as we get older, to think that we build a continuous structure of achievement out of our past that will follow us into the future. In The Dry Salvages popular myths of evolution and progress, along with the practice of fortune-telling through various occult means, are condemned as illusions and vanity, as compared to the humility which sees in every moment a fresh beginning, discontinuous with its predecessor: Men’s curiosity searches past and future And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint . . . [sec. 5, ll. 16–19]

Auden’s For the Time Being uses the Romantic mythological framework,

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and sees the Incarnation as appearing in obscurity and darkness in the midst of a much more specifically historical situation. Nonetheless, when it comes, it disrupts Herod’s futile efforts to establish continuity and progress in his society (“Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little”), and because it does, it turns a well-meaning liberal into an enemy of God.16 There are naturally an infinite number of issues involved with these Romantic views of time, but time affects me as well as the Romantics, and allows me only one to conclude with. In the Defence of Poetry Shelley speaks of a polarization in our awareness of time. On one side is the perception of the environment as familiar and routine. The same things keep turning up, the same cycles of nature go round and round, life is involuntary and death invariable, and so a tendency develops to think of life in time fatalistically, a passive acceptance of what must be. This corresponds in Shelley to demonic time. The poetic or creative faculty pulls in the opposite direction: its vision is always a renewal of the freshness and energy of man’s view of nature. The next step is to realize that there are two powers in the consciousness, one analytic and the other synthetic, and that the latter is the poetic faculty properly speaking. “Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.”17 The poet constructs wholes or configurations; these become in their turn part of the one great poem that all the poets in history have helped to construct, that is, the mythological universe which is the model for the world man wants to live in, as distinct from the world that is there. However, Shelley’s separation of the analytic reasoning faculty and the synthetic creative or poetic one points to a curious paradox in the Romantic treatment of history. History, qua history, is the record of what actually occurred: the reason, sifting evidence and rejecting whatever cannot have existed in the past, plays a primary role in the awareness of it. What imagination, attending only to the similitudes of things, gets from the past is not history but myth—the same thing that it gets from the future, as, according to Shelley, poets are “the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”18 Myth normally appears in the form of romance when the genre employed is that of prose fiction. In the Romantic period a good deal of fiction appeared under the category of “historical novel,” and we note that such historical novels are actually romances, in which whatever is historical is inserted as a kind of tour de force. Thus in the Waverley Novels, we get a lively characterization of James I in The Fortunes of Nigel, with probably some relevance to

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the original king. In Ivanhoe and The Talisman, however, the John Bullish patriot king Richard I has little resemblance to the obsessed gangster of history, whose only interest in the countries he ruled over was to mulct them for crusades. Such things do not really matter: it is the form of romance that matters. The formulas of Scott are very close to the formulas of the late Classical writers of the Second Sophistic—Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Longus—who also called their romances by such names as Ethiopica or Babyloniaca in order to claim some affinity with the historian. The same romance formulas reappear in contemporary science fiction, where the mythical shape is projected on the future rather than the past. The writer of the period who really succeeds in giving us a sense of historical awareness is rather the writer who concentrates on the immediate data of sense experience and waking consciousness—in short, the compensatory form of Romantic whom we call the realist. By turning his back on history, the realist records the world in front of him, and in due course his picture of that world becomes something of a historical document. In the pastiche of Gibbon in Scott’s Count Robert of Paris, or of Commines in Anne of Geierstein, there is little of much historical value, entertaining as these stories may be on other grounds. But in Mansfield Park, though of course the structure of comic romance is still there, the reflection of the life of the Regency period has a genuine historical importance. Later in the century, Oscar Wilde remarked, in “The Decay of Lying,” which is really a manifesto of romantic and mythical writing as opposed to realism, “M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of life.”19 Put less polemically, we may say that, of the two categories of this conference, Romanticism deals with the recurring constants of myth and romance, Historicism with the specific features of an age, normally the age contemporary with the writer, which are most successfully recorded by those who most successfully resist the temptations represented by the word “Romanticism.”

27 Charms and Riddles 3 March 1975

From SM, 123–47. Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box file, files i, l, and r. Translated into Italian (1988). Originally given as an address to the New England Stylistics Club, Northeastern University, Boston.

I The study of genres, or the differentiating factors in literary experience, is not yet begun. Despite a book called Beyond Genre,1 we have not got to the subject yet, much less beyond it: we do not even know where the conception stops. But clearly there are different kinds of genres, and perhaps a botanical analogy may be helpful in approaching their variety. There are genres of imagery, the roots of literature, a vast subterranean tangle of metaphors and image clusters, attached to and drawing in sustenance from experience outside literature, yet showing typical forms of relationship to that experience. There are genres of narrative, the stems and branches, typical ways of beginning, proceeding, and ending. There are genres of structure, the leaf–flower–fruit cycles of literature: these are based on what we call conventions, and are where all the familiar generic terms, such as epic and drama, belong. And finally, there are generic seeds or kernels, possibilities of expression sprouting and exfoliating into new literary phenomena. Two of these last, charms and riddles, I should like to consider here, picking up and expanding a theme in my Anatomy of Criticism. Charm is from carmen, song, and the primary associations of charm are with music, sound, and rhythm. The native word for charm is “spell,” which is related, if somewhat indirectly, to the other meaning of spell in the sense of reading letter by letter, or sound by sound. Riddle is from

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the same root as read: in fact “read a riddle” was once practically a verb with a cognate object, like “tell a tale” or “sing a song.” And just as the connections of charm are closer to music, so the riddle has pictorial affinities, related to ciphers, acrostics, rebuses, concrete and shape poetry, and everything that emphasizes the visual aspect of literature. Emblem books are a flourishing development of riddle poetry, and any picture that needs a verbal commentary to make its point may be said to be a pictorial riddle. Hieroglyphics and Chinese characters have a large element of riddle-reading obviously built into them: alphabetic systems also have it, though less noticeably. Hence charm and riddle illustrate the fact that literature, with its combination of rhythm and imagery, is intermediate between the musical and the pictorial arts. They also represent the contrasting aspects of literature that we call sound and sense, rhyme and reason. These two factors, taken together, show that the riddle, in particular, illustrates the association in the human mind between the visual and the conceptual. What is understood must, at least metaphorically, be spread out in space: whatever is taken in through the ear has to form a series of simultaneous patterns (Gestalten) in order to be intelligible. Factors which inhibit this, such as too high a speed of utterance, prevent understanding. We may illustrate by a dialogue in Through the Looking Glass: “Can you do Addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?” “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”2

The White Queen is not employing a charm, but she illustrates the overwhelming of sense by sound, which is where charm starts. Charms have their roots in magic, and the central idea of the magic of charm is to reduce freedom of action, either by compelling a certain course of action or by stopping action altogether. The technique is hypnotic: if A charms B, B is compelled to do what A wants; if a woman charms a man, the man, according to convention, becomes her slave. One very simple kind of charm is a formula to get rid of a disease or some parallel evil. You may compel the evil by possessing a name: you can compel a devil to clear out either by knowing his name or the name of someone like Jesus he’s afraid of. Or you can compel by the force of rhythm and sound alone, by getting the right words into the right order at the right speed, and so setting up a kind of movement that the thing

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being charmed will be forced to imitate. The fiddle that compels everyone who hears it to dance is a familiar folk-tale theme, and expresses one of the central conceptions of charm very clearly. Thus in a fourteenth-century charm against rats: I command all the ratons that are here about That none dwell in this place, within ne without, Through the virtue of Jesu Christ, that Mary bare about, That all creatures owen for to lout, And through the virtue of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, All four Evangels corden into one . . .3

The basis of this charm, obviously, is the reciting of powerful names which set up an energy capable of driving out everything opposed to them. At the same time, when you drive something out, you cleanse or protect the space that the enemy has vacated. The invoking of the evangelists reminds us of the bedtime charm Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Bless the bed that I lie on

where there have to be four protectors, one for each corner of the bed, to keep hostile powers away. The outlining of the protected space is as important as the driving out of the enemy: this frequently means that the enemy may have a counter-spell that also has to be kept at bay, as in the song for Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Never harm Nor spell nor charm Come our lovely lady nigh. So good night, with lullaby. [2.2.16–19]

The rhetoric of charm is dissociative and incantatory: it sets up a pattern of sound so complex and repetitive that the ordinary processes of response are short-circuited. Refrain, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, pun, antithesis: every repetitive device known to rhetoric is called into play. Such repetitive formulas break down and confuse the conscious will, hypnotize, and compel to certain courses of action. Or they may simply put to sleep, which is one of the primary aims of hypnotism: one

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obvious example of charm poetry is the lullaby, which we have just met in the Midsummer Night’s Dream song. Drowsy and narcotic repetitions of sound, with analogies to lullabies, turn up frequently in Spenser among others: And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft, A trickling streame from high rocke tumbling downe And ever-drizling raine upon the loft, Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swowne: No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes, As still are wont t’annoy the walled towne, Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes, Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes.4

The assonance of “noyse” and “annoy,” which would be a mere blunder in an incompetent poet, is here a carefully calculated discord designed to express the mingling of mental impressions that precedes the coming of sleep. The association with less freedom of action leads us from the lullaby to the more sinister sleeping song, the siren song that may lure one to one’s death. Spenser again has many passages of this type: the context of the one just quoted is sinister, and the first book of The Faerie Queene, from which it comes, reaches a rhetorical climax of sinister charm with the temptation of Despair. Falling asleep in a world of echoic associations is in turn close to the elegiac tone in poetry, the kind of rhetoric appropriate for talking about death or the vanishing of things into the past, as in the ubi sunt convention in medieval poetry.5 Here is another Spenserian example: as often in Spenser, the alexandrine at the end of a stanza announces the theme of the following stanza, which is a rhetorical exercise on that theme: Wrath, gelosie, griefe, love this Squire have laide thus low. Wrath, gealosie, griefe, love do thus expell: Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede, Griefe is a flood, and love a monster fell; The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede, The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede:

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But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay: The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed, The drops dry up, and filth wipe cleane away: So shall wrath, gealosie, griefe, love dye and decay.6

This passage was quoted in a rhetoric book before it was published, but the point is not simply rhetorical virtuosity. The use of repeated sound, alliteration, rhyme, assonance, and refrain invokes a meditative mood cutting through the normal waking responses. Similarly with poems that pick up echoes of the “dust to dust” formula of burial services: Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh; erthe other erthe to the erthe droh; erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh. Tho hevede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.7

Perhaps there was originally, in such elegiac rhetoric, a magical attempt to quiet down a restless ghost. Certainly there is something protective in it against a much deeper anxiety. Elegiac poetry includes the danse macabre, a form like that of the theme and variations in music, where Death is the theme and a number of people who die are the variations. Here the repetitions, like the refrain in Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris, “Timor mortis conturbat me,” express, not a charm imposed by Death—Death is too powerful to need charms—but the poet’s anxiety about dying. Anxieties, when they become sufficiently obsessive, often generate an uncontrollable mechanism of verbal dissociation, in which (to use an example I once encountered) one may spend a night pondering the implications of “break up” and “break down.” Such states of mind, where one experiences the real horror and malignancy of being under a spell, are usually states of nightmare or insomnia, and from this point of view the charm techniques associated with sleep and death are really counter-charms, modes of escape from them. They may be projected as a fear of witches, or, more profoundly, a fear of hell, a world where one can never sleep or die. The vision of “Corps pourriz et ames en flammes” is central in Villon,8 whose favourite form is the testament, where the speaker is about to die and disintegrate into aspects of himself which he distributes to others, and whose ballades sometimes use repetitive techniques to the point of suggesting obsession. In English literature the repetitive rhetoric of anxiety appears in Donne’s Devotions

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upon Emergent Occasions, more particularly in the terrible fifteenth “Expostulation,” under the rubric “I sleep not day nor night.”9 Charms can also be social, and one use of repetition is to bind the community into a single enterprise. Political oratory depends on patterns of repetition (“of the people, by the people, for the people”),10 and so do sermons and similar types of communal exhortation. If we look through a Protestant hymn book, we may notice that the more evangelical and aggressive the sect that the hymn has originated in, the more likely it is to throw its emphasis on a refrain or chorus. Yet even in community songs there may still be something of the cleared and protected place, with charms to keep off those who threaten it, even if they merely withdraw from it. In one of the most festive drinking songs in English, for instance, it is interesting to see that the main emotional focus is not on the convivial group at all: And he that will this toast deny, Down among the dead men, Down among the dead men, Down, Down, Down, Down, Down among the dead men let him lie.

The compulsion inherent in charm means that authority and subordination are integral to it. Words of command in an army are not in the usual sense of the term “charming,” but they are highly stylized in rhetoric, and they depend for their effectiveness on a long training in what is essentially a form of hypnosis, automatic response to a verbal stimulus. When the television commercial comes on, and the ordinary viewer goes to the bathroom, the literary critic should stay where he is, listening to the alliteration, antithesis, epigram (i.e., slogan-writing), and similar rhetorical devices that invade the soundtrack as soon as the subject becomes really important. The products are presented as magical objects, and the hypnotic voice of the announcer compels us to go straight down to the store and demand that product, not forgetting the name. Here the tone of giving orders to a mesmerized subordinate is naturally disguised, but the mood is still imperative and the rhetoric repetitive. In English poetry of the 1590–1640 period, particularly, all areas of

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order and authority are thought of as protected areas, dependent on something analogous to a spell to keep off the powers of anarchy. Love, similarly, had a cosmological aspect as the charm that created order out of chaos, and love in turn was, in its Christian context, part of the creation by the Word of God itself, which pronounced the original spell to keep chaos away. The Book of Job expresses this spell as, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed” [38:11]. Similarly with the beginning of the creation in Milton: “Silence, ye troubl’d waves, and thou Deep, peace!” Said then th’ omnific Word: “your discord end!”11

The word “discord” emphasizes the connection of the creative Word with music, the “harmony” which was also of the essence of the original charm imposed on chaos. The spells of love, harmony, and the Word of God come down to us from a superior world: if we wish to assert our authority over, say, rats, we invoke this higher authority and join ourselves to it. As a result the rhetoric of charm incorporates an analogical formula of an “as that, so this” type. In the word “spellbound,” the conception of “binding” suggests inhibition generally, but also implies a mythical system of some kind invoked by specific names and other formulas. The charmer is bound into this system and gets his power from it; whatever is charmed is externally bound by it. In the second Idyll of Theocritus (Pharmaketyriai), a girl is performing a rite to bring back her lost lover. She melts a waxen image, and says, “as this puppet melts, so may Daphnis melt” (i.e., into affection for me). This is uncomplicated sympathetic magic, where the “as that, so this” formula merely connects two objects. But she then says, in a negative formula, “as Theseus forsook Ariadne, so may Daphnis forsake the girl he’s got now.” Here we have an extension of the binding notion: something in a myth is used as an archetypal model to be followed by the present situation. Exorcism incorporates this pattern: as Jesus compelled the devils to leave possessed men, so I compel these rats to leave this house. The whole principle of sacramental imitation in religion, the binding of one’s life into a pattern following the model prescribed by scripture or the life of a saint, flowers out of this. The vow, the verbal formula that binds one to a certain course of life, is a self-administered charm of the same type. Here we have, of course, moved out of the orbit of magic, but, as we shall see in a moment, the literary devices employed are very little changed.

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The girl in Theocritus turns a wheel which she addresses as “iynx,” the name of a bird who was doubtless in the original rite, if not in this one, pinioned to the wheel and turned with it. The magic involved here is that of gaining power by imprisoning some spirit or force of life. Such a conception gives us a nonreligious motive for the popularity of the crucifix in the Christian world, as well as for the belief in its peculiar efficacy against demons. The address to the iynx and the wheel forms a refrain, which as we saw is one of the technical devices typical of charms. Whenever we find this combination of refrain, elegiac mood, efforts to reinforce one’s own power, and archetypal allusions on the “as that, so this” model, we have charm poetry, as in the Old English Complaint of Deor. When we drive out rats in the name of Christ and his evangelists, we are using a magic that keeps in with the establishment, so to speak; when a young woman invokes Hecate, as the speaker in Theocritus does, to bring back the affections of her lover, something else is involved. Divine charms founded the orders of creation and of human society; magic that starts at the human level, searching for powers greater than itself, is more likely to turn to the mysterious beings in the lower world, who in the Christian centuries were nearly all demonic, and had been sinister and dangerous long before that. Such beings, expressions of man’s fear of an indifferent and powerful natural order, may operate on their own initiative to work disaster for us. The typical response to this kind of threat is the negative or ironic charm that says, in effect, there is nothing here for you; please go away. This wistful little Eskimo chant is, we are told, a charm to ensure fine weather: Poor it is: this land, Poor it is: this ice, Poor it is: this air, Poor it is: this sea, Poor it is.12

Sinister charms, which may operate on us from the unknown, or which we may gain possession of to control others, are normally powers pushing us or our enemies into a lower state of existence. The typical form of this movement is descending metamorphosis, the changing of a conscious being into an animal or vegetable or inanimate form, as the charms of Circe changed men to animals. (The reason for inserting the word “descending” will be clearer when we come to riddles.) We notice in the

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elegy over the dead squire in Spenser the imagery of elements dissolving back into chaos. The lower state is often symbolized as a subterranean or submarine world, where, like Narcissus, we pass from substance to shadow or reflection. What Narcissus was to the eye his mistress Echo was to the ear, and the echo song is a standard literary development of charm poetry. The “harmony” of the music of the spheres is reproduced, or, much more frequently, parodied, in the harmony of the siren or Lorelei song. Thus the crucial temptation in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss takes the form of a five-part madrigal, where a strong emphasis is laid on harmony and concord: For all that pleasing is to living eare, Was there consorted in one harmonee, Birdes, voyces, instruments, windes, waters, all agree. The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade, Their notes unto the voyce attempred sweet; Th’Angelicall soft trembling voyces made To th’ instruments divine respondence meet: The silver sounding instruments did meet With the base murmure of the waters fall: The waters fall with difference discreet, Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call: The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.13

We may note the concord of the identical rhyme on two meanings of “meet,” very possibly the only word in the English language that would have been meet for such a purpose. The last line quoted from the rat charm, “All four Evangels corden into one,” illustrates the upper dimension of harmony. The fact that the four Gospels are a harmony is a central Christian doctrine, and of course one gets four times as much power over rats by using all four names. But beyond this there is the sense of a concord or harmony brought into play which the rats cannot disrupt. Such magic may be reversed in direction when we want not to expel something, but to make something or somebody appear. Thus in the invocation to Sabrina in Milton’s Comus: Listen, and appear to us, In name of great Oceanus,

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The Critical Path and Other Writings By the earth-shaking Neptune’s mace, And Tethys’ grave majestic pace; By hoary Nereus’ wrinkled look, And the Carpathian wizard’s hook; By scaly Triton’s winding shell, And old soothsaying Glaucus’ spell; By Leucothea’s lovely hands, And her son that rules the strands; By Thetis’ tinsel-slippered feet, And the songs of Sirens sweet; By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb, And fair Ligea’s golden comb, Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks Sleeking her soft alluring locks; By all the nymphs that nightly dance Upon thy streams with wily glance; Rise, rise, and heave thy rosy head From thy coral-paven bed, And bridle in thy headlong wave, Till thou our summons answered have. Listen and save! [ll. 867–89]

The average reader has to look up something like seventeen Classical allusions in the notes to make sense of this passage. If he does, he may miss the point that the vagueness and mystery of the names is one of the reasons for using them. But if he does not, he may miss the equally important point that the names are being used with great precision. The simple archetypal parallel of “as that, so this” has greatly expanded here: a whole mythological construct is being set up, one assumed to be so powerful that Sabrina will be compelled to manifest herself within it. The address is to a water-nymph, a benevolent and not a sinister one, but connecting with the same Lorelei imagery of webs, veils, shrouding hair, and other threshold images of sinking into sleep, as well as of a reflecting water-world like that of Narcissus. In the Pervigilium Veneris, where the refrain, the elegiac tone, and the theme of compelling love to return make it clear that the poem is generically a charm poem, the imagery takes on similar qualities: In spring lovers form harmonies (concordant); in spring the birds mate, and the grove unbinds her hair (nemus comam resolvit).14

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The traditional realm of magical power is normally the area symbolized by the diva triformis or threefold goddess, the Hecate of the lower world, invoked in Theocritus, the Diana of the woodland, and the moon. The power of drawing down the moon is a conventional attribute of magicians and witches, and has been constantly alluded to since Virgil’s Eighth Eclogue, which is partly an adaptation of Theocritus’s charm poem, popularized it (“carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam”). What is meant by it is not so much actual control of the lunar cycle as the acquiring of magical powers from the highest level of our “sublunary” world, the moon beneath whose mirror reflection we are all imprisoned. The link of the upper mirror of the moon and the lower mirrors of seas and lakes runs all through the poetry of charm. Edgar Allan Poe is full of images of reflections, from the moon itself to the house of Usher crumbling into its mirror in the “tarn.” Sometimes what we have is a “wilderness of mirrors,” in Eliot’s phrase,15 reflections reflecting reflections: And now, as the night was senescent And star-dials pointed to morn— As the star-dials hinted of morn— At the end of our path a liquescent And nebulous lustre was born, Out of which a miraculous crescent Arose with a duplicate horn— Astarte’s bediamonded crescent Distinct with its duplicate horn.16

One obvious question about charm in its magical context is, Who or what can be compelled by a charm? Magicians seem in practice to be confined mainly to elemental spirits, the shades of the dead, and a few very minor lower gods, or, in Christianity, minor devils. Superior powers, even if infernal like Hecate, may be invoked, but not compelled. The language of invocation, however, differs rhetorically very little from the language of compulsion. This is why religious poetry tends to use the same repetitive and dissociative techniques that we glanced at earlier. Here the poet is on the other end of the charm, so to speak, trying to break down his own resistances to the influx of a greater spirit. Examples range from the fourteenth-century Pearl to the opening paragraph of the fifth section of Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, and include Donne, though the Donne of the sermons rather than of the sacred poetry. Further, if greater powers cannot be compelled, they can compel us,

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and hence we should expect similar techniques in sacred scriptures embodying a divine revelation. If we pick up the Koran, for instance, and try to read it as we should read any other book, we may well find its repetitiveness intolerable: surely, we feel, the God who inspired this book was not only monotheistic but monomaniacal. And even this response comes only from a translation: the original is so dependent on the interlocking sound patterns of Arabic that in practice the Arabic language has had to go everywhere the Islamic religion has gone. Yet, for anyone brought up in the religion of Islam, hearing the Koran from infancy, and memorizing great parts of it consciously and unconsciously, the Koran does precisely the rhetorical job it is set up to do. The conception of the human will assumed is that of a puppy on a leash: it plunges about in every direction but the right one, and has to be brought back and back and back to the same controlling power. The rhetoric of God, then, according to the Koran, is essentially the kind of rhetoric we have associated with charm. This principle is far less true of the Bible, even though much of the Hebrew text is oracular in style and contains many puns and sound associations, invocations to God, commandments, proverbs or general maxims of prudent conduct, prophetic oracles, and, in the New Testament, the parables of Jesus which end “Go, and do thou likewise” [Luke 10:37]. But the specific techniques of dissociative writing are still rather rare: the Old Testament, with its fondness for acrostic poems and the like, has more in common with the riddle, and in the New Testament dissociative rhetoric almost disappears. There is some of it in the first Epistle of John— That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life (and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us): that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you also.17

—but it is so isolated as to give almost the effect of senility, which is perhaps why some scholars insist on ascribing it to the apostolic John writing at the age of a hundred and twenty or so. The more closely the magical aspect of charm is adhered to in poetry, the more likely the poem is to present some kind of specific ritual, as the Theocritus poem does. When the “as that, so this” formula is employed in such a context, the “this” refers to the ritual being performed and the

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“that” to an archetypal myth which the ritual is not only referring to but recreating. The ritual is, so to speak, the epiphany or manifestation of myth, as the ritual of the mass in Christianity manifests the myth of incarnation. In highly developed cultures, myths, as I have tried to show elsewhere [e.g., pp. 134–5, 243–4, above], stick together to form mythologies, and mythologies eventually expand into mythological universes, as the mythology of Christianity in medieval times expanded into the universe that forms the setting of Dante’s Commedia. Wherever we turn in charm poetry, we seem to be led back to some kind of mythological universe, a world of interlocking names of mysterious powers and potencies which are above, but not wholly beyond reach of, the world of time and space. This mythological universe may be thought of as a real existence revealed to us in a scripture of divine origin, or it may be simply regarded as an imaginative human construct. But it is artificial, whether the artificer is divine or human: it is not the actual outward environment of man, nor is it a primitive attempt to describe that environment, even when it tries to develop a philosophy and a science. It is a separate world that is reached through imagination or belief or acceptance of traditional authority, not through direct sense experience, or, except in very limited ways, through reason. This is as far as we can take the problem of charm before turning to riddles. II Those who consult oracles usually do so with a sense of uncritical awe, but oracles and oracular prophecies frequently turn on puns, ambiguous or double-faced statements, or sometimes, as in Macbeth, on quibbles that sound like feeble-minded jokes. There is a point at which emotional involvement may suddenly reverse itself and become intellectual detachment, the typical expression of which is laughter. In Zen Buddhism there is a conventional dialogue form in which an earnest disciple asks a deeply serious question of a master, expecting an oracular answer: he gets a brush-off answer which is designed to push him into this mental reversal. Thus: Disciple: Can a dog have a Buddha-nature? Master: Bow-wow.

Similarly, the riddle is essentially a charm in reverse: it represents the revolt of the intelligence against the hypnotic power of commanding

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words. In the riddle a verbal trap is set, but if one can “guess,” that is, point to an outside object to which the verbal construct can be related, the something outside destroys it as a charm, and we have sprung the trap without being caught in it. The pun on “meet” that we noted in Spenser is part of the hypnotizing and spellbinding quality of the stanza, where different things are drawn into a single focus by similar sounds. But the puns which answer riddles of the “Why is A like B?” type are jokes, and so emphasize the disparity that a conscious mind perceives between two things. Charms and riddles, however, are psychologically very close together, as the unguessed or unguessable riddle is or may be a charm. Amulets, abracadabras, Latin tags, jargon words, formulas like the in principio of Chaucer’s friar,18 are all charms, or act like charms, as long as they are not understood. Again, the charm you have may be a riddle for somebody else to smash or solve. In Beowulf much is made of wound and twisted and curiously wrought objects, often weapons or pieces of armour.19 These have affinities with the crucifixes and similar power-imprisoning charms mentioned above, but of course an enemy would be out to destroy them. Hence riddles often imply some kind of enmity-situation or contest, where you will lose a great deal, perhaps your life, if you don’t know the answer. The reversal of a charm can be clearly seen in such contests. In a fifteenth-century dialogue between the devil and a virgin, the devil poses a number of riddles, the implication being that the girl will lose her soul if she can’t answer. She prays to Jesus for assistance, gets the answers, and the last one, “What’s worse than a woman?” has for answer, “The devil.” As soon as he’s named, the devil flies away.20 A variant of this type of riddle poem is a dialogue between a “false knight” and a schoolboy. The boy is asked questions and various imprecations are hurled at him: again the assumption is, or originally was, that if he doesn’t answer the question or can’t think of a rejoinder he’s done for. In cosier and more domesticated versions, a knight seduces a damsel who protests that he ought to marry her: he says he will if she can guess riddles of the same type: she does and he does. Hence just as charm is connected with sinking into a lower world with less freedom of movement in it, so riddle is connected with comic resolutions, comic recognition scenes of escape or rescue, or with such folktale themes as performing the impossible task, which occurs in the story of Psyche in Apuleius. The guessing of a name, as in Grimm’s Rumpel-

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stiltskin story, may be an impossible task of this kind. The riddle is also connected with the very common type of recognition scene which turns on a shift of identity, where, say, the heroine is proved to have been stolen by pirates in infancy, so that her present social status is lower than the one she ought to have. The idea behind such a device is, more or less, “Guess who she is,” where the link with the riddle becomes clear. In the enmity-situation or contest, the audience’s sympathy is normally on the side of the successful riddle-guesser. He is the antithesis of the magician or charmer, and the magician often takes a demonic role as his opposite. The life of Jesus in the Gospels is full of skilful answers to malignant dilemma-questions which mark an affinity to the same literary type. Oedipus and Samson, on the other hand, are tragic figures because their riddle-solving or propounding powers have disappeared into an irrecoverable past. With the Old English riddles we come to a form which is not so much a verbal trap as a verbal spider web: they describe something obliquely, and often end with some such formula as, “Ask what is my name,” implying that the guessing is an integral part of the poetic experience involved: My head is forged by a hammer, wounded with pointed tools, rubbed by the file. Often I gape at what is fixed opposite to me, when, girded with rings, I must needs thrust stoutly against the hard bolt; pierced from behind I must shove forward that which guards the joy of my lord’s mind at midnight. At times I drag my nose, the guardian of the treasure, backwards, when my lord desires to take the stores of those whom at his will he commanded to be driven out of life by murderous power. (Key.) I saw two hard captives carried into the dwelling under the roof of the hall; they were companions fettered fast together by strait bonds. Close to one of them was a dark-haired slave-woman who controlled both of them fast in bonds in their course. (Flail.)21

What one notices first of all in such poems is the tremendous energy of movement around the objects: the hard physical effort both in creating them and in using them is what is suggested. Here we are again in a world of metamorphosis, but one of a different kind. Just as a picture may seem to us an arrest of energy, rhythm, and movement suddenly caught for a motionless instant, so these riddles show us a dissolving and

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reshaping movement that comes into a stationary focus as soon as we guess, that is, infer what the solid physical object is that the swirling energy leads up to. The movement is towards identity rather than, as in Ovidian metamorphosis, away from it. Naming such objects also has analogies to waking up from a dream, in the way that Scrooge’s ghost of Christmas Future in Dickens was finally identified as a bedpost. The two examples quoted show that Old English riddles are of two kinds. The object may be described by the poet, or the object may speak for itself and then challenge the reader to guess its name. The latter uses the figure of speech known as prosopopoeia, and develops into such extended forms as Shelley’s The Cloud. In descending or charm metamorphosis, where, say, Circe transforms men into animals, something once capable of speech and consciousness is obliged to fall silent. The power of words over things, the central principle of charm, eventually separates the magician who has the power of words from the bewitched creature who has lost it and become a mere object. The speaking object reverses the direction of charm, and from the speaking object it is a short step, in imagination, to the identification of the poet, not only with the object, but with all the energy that, as we saw, is reflected in the object. In the collection of Chinese poems known as the Ch’u Tz’u there are many passages like this which, according to the translator, show the influence of shamanism, with its ecstatic and erotic flights up to a higher identity with nature: I aim my long arrow and shoot the Wolf of Heaven; I seize the Dipper to ladle cinnamon wine. Then holding my reins I plunge down to my setting On my gloomy night journey back to the east.22

The popular Restoration poet Tom Durfey is unlikely to have been in touch with Siberian shamans, so it is all the more interesting that the same type of imagery appears in him: I’ll sail upon the dog-star, And then pursue the morning: I’ll chase the moon till it be noon, But I’ll make her leave her horning.23

The difference between charm and riddle is thus mainly in imaginative direction. In the Old English period we have, besides the riddles in

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the Exeter Book mentioned above, the Latin riddles of Bishop Aldhelm, which begin with an acrostic, make many references to books and writing materials, the visual aspect of the producing of words, and conclude with a long and remarkable poem on the creation, in which the poet sees all the objects he had mentioned as contained within the providence of God’s creation. One would think, then, that if the charm takes us, as we said, into the mythological universe of traditional names and mysterious powers, the riddle seems rather to take us into the actual world explored by sense experience, where the eye is overwhelmingly prominent, and the reason. Its context appears to be nature, traditionally regarded in the Christian centuries as a secondary word of God, less dependent on special revelation and more accessible to the unaided intellect. But there are difficulties in this view of riddles, difficulties which are indicated by the strong bias of the riddle toward humour and joking, to puzzle and paradox, to a sense of absurdity in the juxtaposing of visual images and ideas. When a verbal account of an object is followed by the “guess,” actual or simulated, at what the object is, we may feel that it provides an avenue of escape into the outer world of sense. But it is something of an illusory escape, as poetry cannot really take us outside the world of poetry. Poem and object are very quizzically related: there seems to be some riddle behind all riddles which we have not yet guessed. In literature, where there is no attempt at actual magic, a poet may work with either form, and in modern times, at least, a poet interested in charm techniques is likely to be interested in riddle techniques also, if only because both present technical problems. We quoted a stanza from Poe’s Ulalume which is essentially charm poetry, but Poe also dealt in riddles, and some of his poems are complicated acrostics. Similarly in Finnegans Wake we have a kind of language that could be read either as oracular dream language or as associative wit. Joyce’s contemporary Gertrude Stein came to be thought of as the very type of dissociative writer, was often ridiculed or caricatured on that basis, and of course it is true that she was greatly interested in dissociative techniques. Here is an example from Tender Buttons: A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since.24

But many of the vignettes in Tender Buttons are riddles of a fairly conventional type, with the solution, as often happens, provided in the title.

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Thus under the title “A Petticoat” we have “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.”25 But with works less relentlessly experimental than Finnegans Wake or Tender Buttons, we can see shifts in emphasis from one to the other. Charm poetry represents one aspect of what Eliot calls a dissociation of sensibility: a mood is summoned up and everything excluded which would disturb that mood. The polemical context of Eliot’s phrase reminds us that charm poetry, shown at its subtlest in Keats and Tennyson and at its clearest in Poe and Swinburne, dominated taste until about 1915, after which a mental attitude more closely related to the riddle began to supersede it, one more preoccupied with the visual and the conceptual. Thus Eliot also contrasted the “clear visual images” of Dante with the musical myopia of Milton, spoke of Swinburne as a poet who does not think, and found a more congenial precedent in Donne’s “metaphysical” combinations of concrete and abstract imagery.26 One of the first products of the newer taste was the imagist movement, with its concentration on visualized imagery and description. The tendency itself was of course not new: here for example is Josh Billings, in the nineteenth century: The crane iz neither flesh, beast, nor fowl, but a sad mixtur ov all theze things. He mopes along the brinks of kreeks and wet places, looking for sumthing he haz lost. He has a long bill, long wings, long legs, and iz long all over. When he flies thru the air, he iz az graceful az a windmill, broke loose from its fastenings.

This poem (it is a poem, whatever Billings meant it to be) is not technically a riddle poem, because the object it describes is named in it, but it is clearly an imagist poem.27 I quote it for two reasons. First, its humorous tone marks its affinity with the riddle tradition more clearly than, say, a poem of Amy Lowell; second, it suggests another feature with some links to the riddle tradition, the rhetorical device of the pseudo-definition, which appears in another riddle-poet, Emily Dickinson: Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue—28

This is also the device on which the character books of the seventeenth

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century were built. The character books derive from Theophrastus in Greek literature, but develop his fairly sober and straightforward observation into epigram and paradox, written in a kind of singsong antithetical prose. Thus Samuel Butler: A Sailor Leaves his native earth to become an inhabitant of the sea, and is but a kind of naturaliz’d fish. He is of no place, though he is always said to be bound for one or other, but a mere citizen of the sea, as vagabonds are of the world . . .29

We noticed that it is common to give the “solution” of riddle poems in their titles, and in such poems we move from work to title. Here is what I have to say about something; guess what it is. In the above technique we move from title to the work. Here is what I’m talking about; you’ll never guess what I can find to say about it. Emily Dickinson shows us another aspect of the rhetoric of riddles in this poem on a hummingbird: A Route of Evanescence With a revolving Wheel— A Resonance of Emerald— A Rush of Cochineal— And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts its Tumbled Head— The mail from Tunis probably, An easy Morning’s Ride—30

Here the object is described in terms of its energy of movement, and the vivid colours are, as in Impressionist paintings, seen as vibrations of light rather than as attributes of a static object. The longer words “evanescence” and “resonance” are obviously used because their sound reinforces the imagery of spinning and humming. But this poet seems to be fond of such words in their own right: in another poem she says of the bluebird, Her conscientious Voice will soar unmoved Above ostensible Vicissitude.31

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We tend to think of long Latin words as gray and abstract, because the concrete metaphors that they originally conveyed have largely faded out. When they were new, in the fifteenth century, they were thought of as “colours” of rhetoric, strange exotic terms belonging to what was called “aureate” diction. Emily Dickinson clearly shares something of this feeling, and so does Poe: the diction of Ulalume is also full of Latin words, although, this being a charm poem, the effect of such words as “senescent” and “nebulous” is rather a drowsy and blurring one. Milton also uses a good many Latin words, mainly because they have a large number of unstressed syllables, and relieve the heavy monosyllabic thump of the native vocabulary. Milton is, of course, always well aware of the metaphorical basis of such words: “elephants indorsed with towers” means elephants with towers on their backs.32 But except for such special cases, poetry has a limited tolerance for words likely to become abstract. Literary practice does not confirm the enthusiasm of Stephen Hawes, in the early sixteenth century, for this type of rhetoric: In few words sweet and sententious Depainted with gold, hard in construction, To the artic [artistic] ears sweet and delicious The golden rhetoric is good refection And to the reader right consolation As we do gold from copper purify So that elocution doth right well clarify The dulcet speech from the language rude . . .33

This brings us to the other half of Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility, the kind of poetry that is made out of ideas and thoughts, that expresses emotion by talking about it. The formula of William Carlos Williams, “not ideas about the thing but the thing itself,” sums up several decades of reaction against this kind of rhetoric.34 We have noted that in the riddle there are two foci of imaginative interest, one visual and the other conceptual. In medieval bestiaries, for example, the alleged behaviour patterns of various animals are described, but we are led, not merely to their names, but to the moral or typological “significance” of their behaviour. Similarly with the relation of pictures to commentary in the emblem books. The paradox here is that of a world where, as Wallace Stevens says, “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,”35 where human

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efforts to get control of the external world through mental constructs seem rather desperate. The sense of strain and irony in the relation of the mind to nature becomes highly self-conscious in Donne and the metaphysicals, and gives a humorous twist to the kind of imagery most typical of them. Eliot, noting this quality also in the nineteenth-century French symbolistes, suggests that preserving the tone of ironic strain and difficulty is almost a moral duty for a twentieth-century poet.36 The trouble with Williams’s anticonceptual statement, however, is that in poetry there is, so to speak, no such thing as a thing. Word and thing are frozen in two separate worlds, and the reality of each can be expressed only by the other in its world. This paradoxical deadlock is precisely the essence of the riddle. Eliot is also clear that such imagery really comes into its own during times of waning spiritual authority. In the Renaissance, Nicholas of Cusa, the inventor of the doctrine of “learned ignorance,” also invented a series of riddle games designed to express certain paradoxes in the nature of God that show up the limitations of the human mind in trying to grasp that nature. God is absent yet present; he is within the world and yet outside it; his eyes follow us everywhere and yet never move, and so on. Some of these paradoxes are made into actual riddles by Ben Jonson and incorporated into his masque Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, where the answers to them are not “God,” but King James and the land of Britain.37 Jonson, however, takes a low view of riddles, which he regards as the refuge of stupidity: his attitude is anti-“metaphysical,” here as elsewhere. Hence the “Ignorance” of his masque is identified with the Sphinx, who asks the riddles. But the Cusanus paradoxes are still haunting Eliot in our century, struggling to express the meaning of an incarnation which is neither in nor out of time, and is surrounded by “a white light still and moving.”38 When Mallarmé says that the poet does not name or point, but describes the mood evoked by the object, he seems to suggest a method of riddle-writing without guessing, which appears to destroy the whole point of the riddle.39 It may be, though, that he is also suggesting a way of getting past the deadlock we encountered above. In the typical riddle there is a question implied in the poem, of which the guess is the answer. But an answer to a question accepts the assumptions in the question, and consequently consolidates the mental level on which the question is asked. This is adequate for information, where we simply want to stop or neutralize the question. But in religion, in philosophy, in science, all

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answers wear out sooner or later, because these subjects keep growing and expanding through a series of better formulated questions. Something similar must surely be true of literature, even if the processes of growth and expansion take different forms there. One of the Old English riddles reads: The monster came sailing, wondrous along the wave; it called out in its comeliness to the land from the ship; loud was its din; its laughter was terrible, dreadful on earth; its edges were sharp. It was malignantly cruel, not easily brought to battle but fierce in the fighting; it stove in the ship’s sides, relentless and ravaging. It bound it with a baleful charm; it spoke with cunning of its own nature: “My mother is of the dearest race of maidens, she is my daughter grown to greatness, as it is known to men, to people among the folk, that she shall stand with joy on the earth in all lands.”40

The answer is supposed to be “iceberg,” which has water for its mother and daughter because it comes from and returns to water. But the answer hardly does justice to the poem: like all interpretations that profess to say “this is what the poem means,” the answer is wrong because it is an answer. The real answer to the question implied in a riddle is not a “thing” outside it, but that which is both word and thing, and is both inside and outside the poem. This is the universal of which the poem is the manifestation, the order of words that tells us of battles and shipwrecks, of the intimate connection of beauty and terror, of cycles of life and death, of mutability and apocalypse, of the echoes of Leviathan and Virgil’s Juno and Demeter and Kali and Circe and Tiamat and Midgard and the mermaids and the Valkyries, all of which is focused on and stirred up by this “iceberg.” The charm comes out of a mythological universe of mysterious names and beings: the magician derives from that world the power that he applies to things. The poet is a magician who renounces his magic, and thereby recreates the universe of power instead of trying to exploit it. Riddle goes in the opposite direction, and has to make the corresponding renunciation of the answer or guess. The answer is another way of trying to get control over things, the conceptual way, and renouncing it means, again, being set free to create. As Paul says, we see now in a riddle in a mirror,41 but we solve the riddle by coming out of the mirror, into the world that words and things reflect.

28 Expanding Eyes Winter 1975

From SM, 99–122. Originally published in Critical Inquiry, 2, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 199–216, published by the University of Chicago Press. Frye’s typescript (in NFF, 1988, box 5, file v) was used as the copy for SM, as Critical Inquiry had used the Chicago Manual of Style and “put all commas in the wrong place” (letter in NFF, 1988, box 63, file 1). Apart from these wandering commas and one note added in SM, the two texts are almost identical. The article grew out of a request to Frye to respond to a generally laudatory piece by Angus Fletcher, “Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion,” Critical Inquiry, 1, no. 4 (June 1975): 741–56.

I This article grew out of a profound disinclination to make the kind of comment that I was invited to make on Angus Fletcher’s article in a previous issue. I felt that such a writer as Mr. Fletcher, who clearly understands me and, more important, himself, ought to be allowed the last word on both subjects. Besides that, I have a rooted dislike of the “position paper” genre. In all the arts, adhering to a school and issuing group manifestos and statements of common aims is a sign of youthfulness, and to some degree of immaturity; as a painter or writer or other creative person grows older and acquires more authority, he tends to withdraw from all such organizations and become simply himself. Others in the same field become friends or colleagues rather than allies. I see no reason why that should not be the normal tendency in criticism and scholarship also. About twenty years ago I was asked, in a hotel lobby during an MLA conference, “What is your position relatively to Kenneth Burke?” I

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forget what I mumbled, but my real answer was, first, that I hadn’t the least idea, and, second, that anyone who could really answer such a question would have to be a third person, neither Burke nor Frye. The sense of being something of a loner has always been in any case rather exceptionally true of me, with my introverted temperament, indolent habits, and Canadian nationality. When I published a study of Blake in 1947, I knew nothing of any “myth criticism” school, to which I was told afterwards I belonged: I simply knew that I had had to learn something about mythology to understand Blake. When I published Anatomy of Criticism ten years later, I had never heard the word “structuralism”: I realized only that structure was a central concern of criticism, and that the “New Critics” of that day were wrong in underrating it. I have had some influence, I know, but I neither want nor trust disciples, at least as that term is generally understood. I should be horrified to hear of anyone proposing to make his own work revolve around mine, unless I were sure that that meant a genuine freedom for him. And if I have no disciples I have no school. I think I have found a trail, and all I can do is to keep sniffing along it until either scent or nose fails me. I have often been urged to produce a revision to Anatomy of Criticism, but that does not seem to me to be a revisable book. Apparently it is by no means out of date, but it is still a book of its own period, the mid-1950s, and to try to dress so middle-aged a production in the unisex jeans of the ’70s would be an indignity and not a renewal of youth. My work since then has assumed the shape of what Professor Jerome Bruner would call a spiral curriculum,1 circling around the same issues, though trying to keep them open-ended. This may be only a rationalization for not having budged an inch in eighteen years, but the most serious adverse criticisms of me still seem to me to be based on assumptions too remote from mine for revision to meet them. Neither, of course, would revision stop the flow of abusive nonsense which has also been directed at me, because most of that comes from people who know quite well what nonsense it is, but have their minds on higher things. Emerson, as we know, deprecated what he called a foolish consistency,2 but there is always one form of consistency which is not foolish, and that is continuity. With some people continuity takes a revolutionary and metamorphic direction: a philosopher may repudiate everything he has written up to a certain time and start afresh. Even so, I doubt if he can start afresh until he discovers the real point of contact with his earlier work. With me, continuity has taken a more gradual direction, not because I insist that

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everything I have said earlier, in Anatomy of Criticism or elsewhere, must be “right,” but because the principles I have already formulated are still working as heuristic assumptions, and they are the only ones available to me. In Anatomy of Criticism I made two polemical suggestions. One was that literary criticism seemed to me to be a potentially scientific discipline; the other was that the emphasis on value judgments was mistaken, and the attempt to make criticism into an axiological subject both futile and perverse. I have not changed my views on either point, but the amount of reaction they have provoked has got them overexposed and out of proportion, especially the second. Perhaps it would be better, instead of restating arguments for readers who still believe that they have caught me out in a contradiction whenever I say that Shakespeare is a great writer, to try to locate what appears to be the real basis of such reactions. Literary criticism in its present form grew up in the nineteenth century, under the shadow of philology. Philology had many spokesmen who were in the direct line of Renaissance humanism, but it often became interpreted in a much more superficial way. Still, in a modified and expanded form, the philological program became the standard method of graduate training in the humanities departments of modern universities. The literary scholar learns to operate, in graduate school, a research machinery that enables him, for the rest of his life, to organize and convey information about literature and add to our stock of knowledge about it. I cannot imagine how one would frame a definition of social science that would exclude this kind of activity: it was, after all, set up on an analogy with science, though, as I think, a more simplistic analogy than the one I tried to propose. Whenever a graduate student is encouraged to do something that “hasn’t been done before,” which so often in practice means finding a new angle or gimmick for something done hundreds of times, some connection with the division of labour in a scientific activity is assumed. Humanists, of course, are supposed to write much better than social scientists, and some of them do. The real trouble—and this has always been the other half of my contention—is rather that social scientists do not yet understand that their subjects, besides being sciences, are also the applied humanities, and that the myths and metaphors of literature inform them somewhat as mathematics informs the physical sciences. Or, more accurately, the myths and metaphors of literature inform what is specifically verbal in them, as dis-

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tinct from what is quantifiable or measurable or dependent on repeatable experiment. The humanist, at the same time that he learns these techniques of scholarship, is haunted by two other feelings. One is that this kind of activity does not represent his real commitment: he clings to the idea of value partly because he knows that his scholarship does not manifest what he feels to be the worthwhileness, for him existentially, in the study of literature. The other is that he is harassed and bedevilled by the dismal sexist symbology surrounding the humanities which he meets everywhere, even in the university itself, from freshman classes to the president’s office. This symbology, or whatever one should call it, says that the sciences, especially the physical sciences, are rugged, aggressive, out in the world doing things, and so symbolically male, whereas the literatures are narcissistic, intuitive, fanciful, staying at home and making the home more beautiful but not doing anything really serious, and are therefore symbolically female. They are, however, leisure-class females, and have to be attended by a caste of ladies’ maids who prepare them for public appearance, and who are the teachers and critics of literature in schools and universities. Such superstitions have a long history in social anxiety. Religious and political movements almost invariably assume that the real function of literature is or should be to persuade the emotions or the imagination to agree with the truth of their doctrines, in the way that a wife is traditionally supposed to use her “feminine intuition” to agree with her husband. This is still true of, for example, Marxism, where the anxiety is rationalized by arguments about the impossibility of remaining detached from the for-or-against dialectic of revolution. The humanist, even when he can see that such anxieties have only an external and inorganic relation to his subject, is still apt to be impressed by the air of relevance to the real world that they appear to exhibit. Let us go back to the student in graduate school, learning to operate the machinery of literary scholarship. If he has a genuine vocation, we said, he will feel that his real commitment is something other than this, however important it may be in itself. His larger commitment is usually revealed by his choice of period, or by his special affection for one or two writers. In the study of literature the element of personal authority, surrendering one’s own imagination to that of some master of it, cannot be eliminated, and the relation of master and disciple always remains at its centre, though the master is more commonly a writer of the past than an

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actual teacher. What gets the serious student really hooked into the study of literature is likely to be a feeling of a common element in lifestyle with some author whose interest for him is not exhausted by the scholarly work he does on him (he may of course work on something quite different). I got hooked into Blake in this way very early, partly because I had been brought up in much the same evangelical subculture that Blake had developed from, and because he made an amount of imaginative sense out of that subculture that I had never dreamed was possible. Other people would find, and have found, very different points of contact with Blake: this happened to be mine. Similarly, a woman scholar may become interested in a woman writer because of a point of contact in the specifically feminine problems of social relationship. Or a homosexual scholar may find his contact in the particular kind of sensibility that a homosexual writer often has, or a black scholar may find his in that of a black writer, and so on. Of course, it is barbaric to say that women writers can only be fully understood by women scholars, black writers by black scholars, Catholic writers by Catholic scholars. That breaks up the community of verbal imagination into a group of exclusive cliques. What I have suggested is simply a normal starting point: as a scholar gains maturity and experience, he can branch out where he likes, at any time. There may be only one such influence on a scholar or there may be a sequence of them; a scholar may remain under such an influence all his life, or may quickly dispense with all such influences. The above principle could also work in reverse: a Jewish scholar might get interested in a writer who showed anti-Semitic tendencies, and for serious reasons. However it operates, there is always a sense in which criticism is a form of autobiography, implicitly dedicated to a guru or spiritual preceptor, even if the guru is the Anonymous who wrote the great ballads, or a cultural composite like “Augustan” or “Romantic,” or a series of writers forming a psychological “tradition.” All this indicates where the engaged or committed aspect of literary scholarship has its origin. The personal dependence of scholar on poet does not mean that scholarship is a second-class or parasitic activity: it is merely a special case of the way literary tradition always works. The poet in his turn became a poet in precisely the same way: in fact the process of personal apprenticeship and influence can be seen much more clearly within literature itself. But, as my illustrations have already made obvious, the conception of “personality” in the study of literature, or the further practice of it, moves its centre of gravity very quickly from the

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ordinary to the poetic personality, from the actual man to the body of what he has written, or what was written in his age. It is hard to talk about this without resorting to what sounds like paradox. The poet has no identity, says Keats,3 and is trying to escape from personality, says Eliot;4 yet it is precisely his identity and his personality that he finds again by writing. Similarly, the relation between poet and scholar modulates into a relation between two mental attitudes or ways of thinking and imagining, in the course of which the scholar in his turn finds his own real personality. It is this core of the impersonal within the personal that distinguishes, in fact contrasts, the discipleship I am speaking of here and the kind I spoke of at the beginning in connection with myself. However grotesque it may sound to suggest that one may come to absorb or contain an influence the size of Shakespeare or Milton or Dante or Blake, still there is something in these creators that can be contained and possessed, something that expands, instead of restricting, the individuality of those who follow after them. The real function of literary scholarship and criticism is so little understood, even by those who practise it, that it is hard not to think of it, even yet, as somehow subcreative, in contrast to the “creative” writing of poems and novels, as though creativity were an attribute of those genres rather than of the people using them. Part of the problem is the narrowness of the academic setup. To take an analogy from philosophy: no one doubts that it is essential to produce commentaries, explications, and reinterpretations of the great philosophers of the past, or to study the history of philosophy. But if there were nothing else clearly visible in academic departments of philosophy, one might well ask, Where is actual philosophy still being carried on? The corresponding question for literary scholars is, What is the real activity that Samuel Johnson and Coleridge and Matthew Arnold were concerned with? Asked who the influential thinkers of our time are, a literary critic might find it difficult, not merely to name a literary scholar whom he could regard as a leading thinker, in the sense of having influenced anyone outside his immediate field, but even to conceive the possibility of any literary critic’s having so central a place in modern thought at all. As for the public, humanists may be making the same mistake that leaders in religion have made, of examining their consciences so publicly that the public at length, and not very reluctantly, comes to believe their admissions of inadequacy. The academic pigeonholes are of course splitting open on all sides. In the Tentative Conclusion to Anatomy of Criticism, written several years

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before the publication of the book in 1957, I said that a number of disciplines appeared to be converging in areas contiguous to the “myth criticism” to which so much of the preceding text had been devoted. My examples of what seemed to me then to be converging look very quaint now;5 but the prediction itself, in a more general way, has come true with such force that if I were writing such an essay today I should have to lean in the opposite direction. Doubtless more knowledge would modify my present attitude, and in such matters I had rather be wrong than right. But structuralism, hermeneutics, phenomenalism, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, and the philosophy of language have, as I think, made a rather disappointing contribution so far to the understanding of literature, however relevant the context for it that they have set up. Their emergence certainly indicates that the rationale of modern criticism is coming closer to formulation, but their practitioners seem to be under some spell like that of the sexist myth just referred to. They still seem only incidentally interested in literature itself and in what it does or can do to people: like many historians and philosophers, they tend to resist identification with the humanities, as though they felt that they represented, or would like to associate themselves with, some Herculean force in modern thought that would not be content to remain spinning for a poetic Omphale.6 In examining the relation of one subject to another, the initial choice of metaphors and conceptual diagrams is a fateful choice. The metaphors and diagrams chosen should never be vertical, concerned with foundations and superstructures. Such metaphors invariably take some form of determinism, where one subject is assumed to provide the basis for explaining another subject. And yet, when I caution my students against trying to “base” literary criticism on something else, I usually run into the most strenuous objections. It seems utterly obvious to one student that poems come out of certain mental processes, and therefore psychological conceptions must underlie or form the foundation for any study of literature. It is equally obvious to another student that a poem is a product of specific historical and social conditions, and therefore, etc. Nothing in my teaching is more difficult to get across than the simple, “Throw that metaphor away; it’s the wrong metaphor.” It always means that we have to get something established in another subject “before” we can study literature, which of course means that we never get to study literature at all. We seem to have passed through the worst of the age of sublimated imperialism, when there was so strong an attraction toward building

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some tower of Babel on a Marxist, Freudian, or Thomist model, with a determinism for its foundation and a confusion of tongues for its ground floor. But horizontal metaphors of connecting, uniting, reconciling, or bridge-building are even more dangerous, and are derived from an origin much harder to locate in oneself, the indefinite continuity that the ability to write in prose confers. Suppose that Critic A writes an essay on someone, Carlyle or Arnold or Newman or Edmund Burke—call him X. Critic A doesn’t like X much, and the point of his essay is to say that idea G in X’s work is utterly inconsistent with idea L. Along comes Critic B, also interested in X. He likes X much better, and is not averse to scoring a point or two over A. So he writes another essay in which he says that perhaps ideas G and L in X’s work may prove to be, under more careful analysis, not inconsistent at all. What this means is that the verbal formulas H, I, J, and K, which would connect G with L, have not been supplied by X, nor, of course, by A, but that he, B, can supply them. The general principle involved is that if we only write enough sentences, any statement whatever can be reconciled, or united or connected or made consistent with, any other statement. When two such statements are in different disciplines, trying to connect them destroys both their contexts. I have explained elsewhere [e.g., p. 216, above] that I think the word “interpenetrate” a safer metaphor. For example, I consider that I know no psychology and have never studied the subject, though I must have read several hundred books that would be classified as psychology in a library. But I have read these books for whatever help they could give me as a literary critic: they interpenetrate my critical work, but keep their own context in their own discipline. For a contemporary critic interested in Freud or Wittgenstein or Lévi-Strauss, such writers, like medieval angels, do not travel through space from another subject: they manifest themselves from within his subject. These may sound like old and tired problems, but I start with them because there seems to me no other way of getting the autonomy of literary scholarship clear. II Literature, like other subjects, has a theory and a practice: poems and plays and novels form the practical side, and the centre of criticism is the theory of literature. Such a theory merges on one side with the theory of words in general, and so is inseparable from linguistics and certain areas of philosophy, and on the other side it merges with the theory of the

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other arts. My own contributions to literary theory are innocent of any knowledge of either linguistics or general aesthetics, but even these deficiencies may indicate that they are possibly somewhere in a central area. They came originally, of course, out of my study of Blake’s “private mythology,” where I learned, not merely that Blake’s mythology was not private, but that the phrase itself made no sense. Blake was, even by the standards of English literature, a remarkably Biblical poet, but his interest in the Bible was primarily critical. He realized that the Bible had provided a mythological structure, which had expanded into a mythological universe, stretching from creation to apocalypse in time, from heaven to hell in space, and that this universe had formed a framework of imagery for all European poets down to his own time. It had either destroyed or absorbed other mythological structures, including the Classical, the Celtic, and the Norse, and provided the basis for the cosmologies of Dante and Milton. The existence of such a universe in Western culture was neither incidental nor accidental. Some such universe must always exist wherever any human culture does. Man lives in two worlds, the world of nature which forms his external environment, and the constructed world of civilization and culture which he has made himself because he wants to live in such a world. The mythological universe is a model of the latter world: it is usually believed to be, at least in its earlier stages, the structure of the former world also, but it is ultimately not a proto-scientific construct, even when it develops or tries to develop a science. It is a world built in the image of human desires and anxieties and preconceptions and ideals and objects of abhorrence, and it is always, and necessarily, geocentric and anthropocentric, which the actual environment is not. By Blake’s time two things had happened to the traditional Christian universe. First, the rise of science, more particularly astronomical science, had begun to make it clear that this universe was an imaginative construct only, and had no scientific validity. Second, its isolation as a construct showed up the fact that it was an intensely conservative and authoritarian construct, and had been consistently, if often unconsciously, so used in European culture. Blake was the first poet in English literature, or so far as I know in the world, to understand how drastic an imaginative change was taking place in his time, and in his Prophecies he was trying to restructure what C.S. Lewis calls the “discarded model”7 on a basis of human desire and ambition rather than anxiety, and to see it as of human rather than of divine, so far as that means non-

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human, origin. More generally, he wanted to recover the mythological universe for the human imagination, and stop projecting it on an objective God or similar analogy of the external order. No contemporary poet made a comparable attempt to do this, except perhaps Goethe in the second part of Faust. But Goethe, for all his vast philosophical and poetic powers, or perhaps even because of them, did not have so firmly articulated a skeleton of the imaginative cosmos in his mind as Blake, and the curiously miscellaneous structure of the second part of Faust reflects the fact. In Blake’s day the main challenge to the older construct had come from the separating of scientific space from mythological space. A universe in which God was up there and Satan down there could no longer hold together: Isaac Newton had blown the whistle, or, in Blake’s language, the last trumpet, on that one. The separation of the mythical spatial categories from the actual world made their reactionary shape clear: what was up in the sky was revealed as what Blake called the ghost of the priest and king,8 and what was underneath was the ghost of exploited humanity. After Blake, Darwinian evolution and the new geology blew the whistle on mythological time, and the old creation-to-apocalypse view was also reduced to a construct. It is only the universes of human imagination, evidently, that can begin or end. Blake foresaw this development, but took little interest in it, in contrast again to Goethe. Mythological space, as Blake encountered it, consisted of four main levels. At the top was a father-God associated with the sky, who made the world, and must therefore have made a model or perfect world. A myth of artificial creation has to have a myth of man’s fall to complete it and account for the contrast with the creation we see now. This provides a second and a third level. The second level, the original home for man that God intended, is the “unfallen” world, Blake’s world of innocence; below this is our world of “experience,” and below this again a demonic and chaotic world. The first two levels are pervaded by order, harmony, concord, love, peace, and stability. On our third level, these turn into authority, hierarchy, and subordination, where God is, before anything else, the supreme sovereign, the top of a pyramid, the beginning of a chain of command that continues to operate through the structures of church and state. For traditional Christianity, the crisis of history came with the Incarnation, the descent of God into the third world, which started a specific movement of authority at a definite time and place. For Blake the entire construct had a Heraclitian cast, the descent bal-

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anced by a rising movement, symbolized by the Resurrection, where we escape from the chain of command by dying in each other’s lives instead of living in each other’s deaths. Naturally the Resurrection was central in traditional Christianity too, but Blake saw it as the centre of what he called the “everlasting gospel.” Accepting such a gospel means, first, realizing that the creation–fall–Incarnation sequence has to be seen outside history, as a myth of the human imagination. The Resurrection meant to Blake, then, the process of abandoning the projecting of this myth, and recovering it for the human mind. Once we do this, we pass from state to community, from exploitation to imaginative work, from culture as the privilege of a few to culture as the inner condition of everyone. The arts, which tell us how the human imagination operates, are thus an untapped source of mental energy, a means of achieving social and individual freedom. Once we have recovered our imaginative birthright, we can look down on the world we have left behind and see that it forms a demonic parody of the world we are now in. This last point cleared up for me the role of two figures who had been culture heroes of mine from my student days, Spengler and Frazer. Their conceptions seemed to get into and inform everything I worked on, yet there was never, for me, anything of the apprentice–master relation towards them that I have just spoken of. They both seemed extraordinarily limited and benighted in general intelligence and awareness of their world, and what they had that fascinated me they seemed to have almost in spite of themselves. Eventually I realized that their limitations and their usefulness to me sprang from the same source. They were both literary or cultural critics, without realizing it, and as soon as I got this clear my conception of the real area covered by the word “criticism” vastly expanded. Frazer was a Classical scholar, whose centre of gravity was in his editions of Pausanias, Apollodorus, and the Fasti: he thought he was a scientist, and collected a great deal of illustrative material from anthropology, but that did not make him primarily an anthropologist, however useful he may also be in that field. Spengler was a cultural critic like Ruskin (who had also come to influence me a good deal): his illustrations were historical, but that did not make him primarily a historian. He did something that no historian can do without ceasing to be one: showed how all the cultural products of a given age, medieval or baroque or contemporary, form a unity that can be felt or intuited, though not demonstrated, a sense of unity that approximates the feeling that a human culture is a single larger body, a giant immersed in time.

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Blake’s “everlasting gospel” turns on the quest of Christ, the God-Man who descends from a higher world and returns to it, carrying human society with him in his ascent. Frazer demonstrated the existence in the human mind of a symbolism often latent in the unconscious, perhaps never emerging in any complete form, but revealed through many ritual acts and customs, of a divine man killed at the height of his powers, whose flesh and blood are ceremonially eaten and drunk. This symbolism expresses the social anxiety for a continuity of vigorous leadership and sexual vitality, and for a constant renewal of the food supply, as the bread and wine of the vegetable crops and the bodies of eaten animals are symbolically identical with the divine-human victim. The context of this natural theology is the cycle of the turning year, and it is based on an anxiety about keeping the cycle of nature going. The destroying or renouncing of whatever is most precious in the present moment because of an anxiety about the future seems to be a constant factor in the demonic or lowest level of cultural life, and informs the whole psychology of sacrifice, including the sacrifice of freedom which is postulated in most theories of social contract. In the Biblical myth there is no complementary creative force to set against the artificial creation of God, no earth-mother or sexual creator, such as we find in many Oriental mythologies as well as the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions. A female principle, who represents the earth itself, and is therefore the mother, the mistress, and eventually the witch-destroyer of the dying god, is at the centre of all the myths studied by Frazer, but Frazer politely overlooks her existence for the most part, and it was left for Robert Graves to incorporate her into contemporary criticism in The White Goddess. Blake had set forth the whole story in The Mental Traveller and the third part of Jerusalem, and it was because he had done so that I knew how important The Golden Bough and The White Goddess were. They were important because they were books about Orc and Vala; and the two of them together outlined a vision of life as it would be if man really were, as he usually believes himself to be, wholly imprisoned within the cycle of nature. Blake not only provided the vision, but the connecting links: fatalism, the worship of nature as a closed circle, the inherent death wish or “original sin,” the instinctive acceptance of authority and hierarchy, the tendency to look outside oneself for directives. For Blake Jesus is a redeemer, but Christian civilization emphatically was not: it merely set up the old projection figures of gods, angels, priests, and kings once again.

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The demonic aspect of historical time is clearer in Vico than in Spengler, though Vico came later into my reading. In Vico there is also a projecting of authority, first on gods, then on “heroes” or human leaders, then on the people themselves. Vico lived at a time when there had been no permanently successful example of a democracy, and from his study of Roman history he concluded that the people cannot recover the authority they project on others, and hence the third age of the people is followed by a ricorso that starts the cycle over again. In Spengler there is no general cyclical movement of this kind, but there is one latent in his argument. Spengler’s sense of a historically finite culture, exploiting and exhausting a certain range of imaginative possibilities, provided the basis for the conception of modes outlined in the First Essay of Anatomy of Criticism. I soon scrapped his loaded term “decline” for a more neutral conception of cultural ageing, but his vision of cultural history superseded the onward-and-upward people I had read still earlier in youth, such as Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, who had obviously got it wrong. In ordinary life all our hopes and desires focus on the point of renewal in the cycle of nature, the turning of winter into spring, of darkness into dawn, of age into renewed youth. But the next step in the imagination shows what a donkey’s carrot this is. The exclusion of hope from Dante’s hell means that his hell is an illusion: it is the hell with hope in it that is the real hell. I noticed that the acceptance of theories of recurrence seemed to accompany either neurotic obsession, as in Nietzsche, or projected forms of self-interrogation of the most dubious kind, as in Yeats’s Vision. Also that cyclical images seemed to be central and indispensable to Fascist and Nazi views of history. I could understand too why reincarnation found no place in the Biblical myth. We do not know what is “true” in such matters, but reincarnation has two reactionary elements built into it. It makes possible a lessening of seriousness about the efforts to be made in this life, and, if one’s own life happens to be lucky, one may rationalize that as due to one’s virtue in a previous life, instead of realizing that being lucky means something very wrong in a world where most people are unlucky. The descending movement of history is permeated by two forces expressed in mythology as Adonis and Hermes, a power and a wisdom or imagination that find their fulfilment only in death. These are the forces visualized by Frazer and by Spengler respectively. On the rising side are the forces of Prometheus and Eros, social and individual freedom. Christianity and Marxism are intensely Promethean myths—the

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Promethean imagery in Marx himself would make a fascinating study. In the traditional Christian universe, as we saw, the rising movement hinges on the Resurrection, which is not renewal or rebirth in time, even when it uses such imagery, but rather the opposite of rebirth, a movement upward into a different world. However, the great religions of the West, Christianity, Islam, and Marxism, have developed from the revolutionary basis of Judaism, and as they attained social power they tended to the opposite extreme, of distrusting any kind of liberation that their institutions could not control. The myth of Christianity provided only the most rigidly sacramental basis for rising out of the “fallen” state, and Marxism also apparently cannot cope with the real needs of the humanities, whenever those needs reach a point that transcends the socially predictable. In the Stalinist days, when I was working on Anatomy of Criticism, Marxist critics could talk about nothing but Marxism, which included nothing recognizable as a direct response to literature. Since then, some Marxist thinkers have made impressive contributions to criticism, but two significant conditions appear to be necessary for them. One is living outside the countries where Marxism has come to power; the other is a separation of theory from practice, Marxist vision from Marxist tactics, which official Marxism still calls a heresy. Similarly, anxiety about authority, whether Christian or Marxist, finds it very hard to come to terms with Eros. Even the greatest Eros poets, Plato and Dante, though they clearly understand that any driving force that lifts man upward has to be Eros-based, still accompany their visions of that rising movement with the most thorough-going forms of sublimation. In Dante the journey to paradise is made by a soul floating out of Dante’s body: the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection is accepted in theory, but postponed until after the action of the poem. The mythological universe of Christianity retained a close analogy with the human body: God was associated with the sky and the brain, the devils with the organs of excretion below. Any rising movement, attempting to leave the demonic world behind, would have to determine what and how much would have to be symbolically excreted. Because of the close anatomical connection of the genital and excretory systems, and even more because of society’s constant fear of Eros, sexual love, even the physical body itself, was often included among the things that had to be left behind. It is clear that in literature the descending order, the worlds of Adonis and Hermes, is the order that tragedy and tragic irony present from the inside, the story of fallen greatness and the subordinating of human

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desire and ambition to the power of the gods. The ascending order of Prometheus and Eros is similarly the order of comedy, and my special interest in comedy, which Mr. Fletcher speaks of, is connected with my constant effort to follow up Blake’s conception of the socially emancipating role of the arts. Of modern thinkers, Freud knows most about Eros, but his conception of Eros, like his conception of society, is a deeply tragic one: he sees it as squirming helplessly underneath the “reality principle,” even though much of the reality may have been created by Eros in the past, and as ending finally in death or Thanatos. More recently, Freud has been made into the prophet of a gospel of revolutionary optimism, just as Marx has been made into a prophet of neo-humanism: these developments indicate, for me, the strength and solidity of Blake’s imaginative vision, because they fit that whether they fit Freud and Marx or not. III We have long since weathered the Newtonian crisis of separating mythological from natural space, and the Darwinian crisis of separating mythological from natural time. A third crisis, more difficult and subtle, is succeeding it: the distinguishing of the ordinary waking consciousness of external reality from the creative and transforming aspects of the mind. Here the distinction between the scientific and the mythological ceases to operate, for science is a creative construct like the arts. And it seems clear that there is nothing on the rising side of human life except what is, in the largest sense, creative. The question therefore resolves itself into the question of the relation of ordinary life, which begins at birth and ends at death and is lived within the ordinary categories of linear time and extended space, to other possible perspectives on that life which our various creative powers reveal. This is a question that the great religions have tended to dodge, except in special areas. Marxism deliberately excludes it, and the traditional religious myths project it, pushing it into an “afterlife” in heaven or hell or purgatory or this world, conceptions which, to say nothing of their inherent crudity, betray an obvious political motivation. The area to be explored is thus reduced to methods of intensifying imaginative experience. Hence, today, the drug cults; hence the vogue for techniques of meditation, including yoga, magic, and various kinds of divination like astrology. I had noticed, ever since working on Blake, how large a part,

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after the decline of the “discarded model” of the Ptolemaic universe, occult schematisms had played in literature, so large as to make it clear that something more than a temporary fashion is involved now. The current interest in such matters brings a third figure into focus within the area of cultural criticism, and that is Jung. Without belittling Jung’s achievements in psychology, it is possible that he too, like Spengler and Frazer, is of greatest significance as a critical and cultural theorist. At the centre of his vision of life is a progress from the “ego,” ordinary life with its haphazard and involuntary perceptions of time and space, to the “individual,” who works with far more coordinated and schematic modes of perception. In Jung the symbol of the “individual” perception is the mandala, as he calls it (perhaps he should have called it a yantra), a symmetrical diagram recalling the geometrical cosmologies so common in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The view of literature set out in Anatomy of Criticism has many points in common with a mandala vision, so much so that many people have drawn up mandalas based on the book and have sent them to me, asking if this was what I really had in mind. I generally reply, with complete truth as far as I am concerned, that they have shown much more ingenuity in constructing their models than I could achieve myself. A mandala is not, of course, something to look at, except incidentally: it is or should become a projection of the way one sees. I am continually asked also about my relation to Jung, and especially about the relation of my use of the word “archetype” to his. So far I have tended to resist the association, because in my experience whenever anyone mentions it his next sentence is almost certain to be nonsense. But this may actually be a reason for welcoming it. When one finds that very perceptive people are describing one as the exact opposite of what one is, one may feel that one has hit a fairly central area of social resistance. And when I, who have fought the iniquity of mystery in criticism all my life, am called a neo-Gnostic and a successor of Proclus and Iamblichus, both of them pagans,9 initiates of mystery cults, and very cloudy writers, perhaps I should feel that I am well on the road to identification. Even granting the human tendency to look in every direction except the obviously right one, it seems strange to overlook the possibility that the arts, including literature, might just conceivably be what they have always been taken to be, possible techniques of meditation, in the strictest sense of the word, ways of cultivating, focusing, and ordering one’s mental processes, on a basis of symbol rather than concept. Certainly that was what

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Blake thought they were: his own art was a product of his power of meditation, and he addresses his readers in terms which indicate that he was presenting his illuminated works to them also, not as icons, but as mandalas, things to contemplate to the point at which they might reflect, “Yes, we too could see things that way.” One of the central principles in Anatomy of Criticism is founded on an analogy with music, though the usual objections to mixing up the arts, formulated in Lessing’s Laocoön and elsewhere,10 do not apply to it. I am by no means the first critic to regard music as the typical art, the one where the impact of structure is not weakened, as it has been in painting and still is in literature, by false issues derived from representation. For centuries the theory of music included a good deal of cosmological speculation, and the symmetrical grammar of classical music, with its circle of fifths, its twelve-tone chromatic and seven-tone diatonic scales, its duple and triple rhythms, its concords and cadences and formulaic progressions, makes it something of a mandala of the ear. We hear the resonance of this mandala of musical possibilities in every piece of music we listen to. Occasionally we feel that what we are listening to epitomizes, so to speak, our whole musical experience with special clarity: our profoundest response to the B Minor Mass or the Jupiter Symphony is not “this is beautiful music,” but something more like “this is the voice of music”; this is what music is all about. Such a sense of authority, an authority that is part of one’s own dignity and is not imposed from outside, comes mainly from the resonance of all our aural experience within that piece of music. I am sorry if this sounds obscure, but such a response does happen, and words like “classic” and “masterpiece” really mean very little except the fact that it happens. One difficulty here is that the response itself may be to anything at any time, even to a bird asserting his territorial rights. The classic or masterpiece is a source of such a response that won’t go away, and will not elude us if we return to it. Anatomy of Criticism presents a vision of literature as forming a total schematic order, interconnected by recurring or conventional myths and metaphors, which I call archetypes. The vision has an objective pole: it is based on a study of literary genres and conventions, and on certain elements in Western cultural history. The order of words is there, and it is no good trying to write it off as a hallucination of my own. The fact that literature is based on unifying principles as schematic as those of music is concealed by many things, most of them psychological blocks, but the unity exists, and can be shown and taught to others, including children.

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But, of course, my version of that vision also has a subjective pole: it is a model only, coloured by my preferences and limited by my ignorance. Others will have different versions, and as they continue to put them forth the objective reality will emerge more clearly. One prevailing assumption in criticism is that the work of literature is an object set over against us, as something to be admired and studied. So it is, and if criticism ended there, there would be little point in trying to substitute a vast schematic abstraction, however impressive, as the end of literary experience, instead of actual plays and poems and novels. But, first, I am not suggesting that all works of literature are much the same work, or fit into the same general scheme. I am providing a kind of resonance for literary experience, a third dimension, so to speak, in which the work we are experiencing draws strength and power from everything else we have read or may still read. And, second, the strength and power do not stop with the work out there, but pass into us. When students complain that it will kill a poem to analyse it, they think (because they have been told so) that the poem ought to remain out there, as an object to be contemplated and enjoyed. But the poem is also a power of speech to be possessed in his own way by the reader, and some death and rebirth process has to be gone through before the poem revives within him, as something now uniquely his, though still also itself. Jung being a psychologist, he is concerned with existential archetypes, not imaginative ones: with the recurring characters and images that turn up on the way to “individuation.” His most significant book, from our present point of view, is his Psychology and Alchemy, in which he treats the “great work” of the alchemists as an allegory of self-transformation, a process of bringing an immortal body (the stone) to birth within the ordinary one (the materia prima). Such a work of transformation is the work specifically of saints, mystics, and yogis. However the alchemists managed, it seems to require teachers, oral instruction, and joining a school, and it is so unimaginably difficult that very few get far along the way, though they undoubtedly make a big difference to the world when they do. The transmission of such teaching, however, is often accompanied, especially in the East, by a total unconcern for society as a whole, or else, especially in the West, by an over-concern with the preserving of the unity of the transmitting body. In any case some powerful force of social entropy seems to affect it wherever it appears. One of the most impressive figures in this tradition in our own century, Gurdjieff, distinguishes two elements in man: the essence and the

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persona, what a man really is and what he has taken on through his social relationships.11 Gurdjieff clearly thought of the kind of training that he could give as essentially a developing and educating of the essence. Perhaps there is also a way to development through the persona, through transforming oneself into a focus of a community. This includes all the activity that we ordinarily call creative, and is shown at its clearest in the production of the arts. What is particularly interesting about alchemy is the way in which it uses the same kind of symbolism that we find in literature to describe the “great work” of the mystic. If spiritual seeker and poet share a common language, perhaps we cannot fully understand either without some reference to the other. Here we return to the point we started from: the nature of the commitment to literature. We remember Yeats: The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.12

It seems to me that the first two lines express a profound insight, and that the next two are self-dramatizing nonsense. Those who seek perfection of the work, though called creators, are really, as they keep telling us, more like receptors: they are nursing mothers (the female metaphor we began with has, we see, a proper application) bringing to birth something not themselves, yet more genuinely themselves than they are. The something, call it a poem, is made out of both conscious and unconscious materials: the unconscious is something that nobody short of a bodhisattva can control, but in certain mental places it can find its own mode of expression. When it does so, it forms a kind of transformer of mental power, sending its voltage into its readers until, as Blake says, the expanding eyes of man behold the depths of wondrous worlds.13 It is at this point that the question of the social function of the arts becomes so important. Some people find it a shock to discover that, say, the commandant of a Nazi death camp can also be someone with a highly developed taste in music. If he had a thorough knowledge of organic chemistry, there would be no shock; but—well, the arts are supposed to have or be based on values, aren’t they? But that is precisely the trouble. We find it hard to escape from the notion that the arts are a secondary social luxury, something to turn to after the real standards of liv-

410

The Critical Path and Other Writings

ing have been met. On that basis they become subject to evaluation, like jewels: they are enjoyed and possessed by what Jung calls the “ego,” and something even analogous to price develops. The arts approached in that way can add pleasure and refinement and cultivation and even some serenity to life, but they have no power to transform it, and the notion that they have is for the birds. It would be better to think of the arts as, like physical exercise, a primary human need that has been smothered under false priorities. If we look at any culture that has reduced its standard of living to the barest essentials, like that of the Eskimos, we see at once how poetry leaps into the foreground as one of those essentials. Not only so, but the kind of poetry that emerges has precisely the quality of primitive simplicity that keeps eluding the poets of a more complex society, however earnestly they seek it. One might start drawing morals here about what kind of society we should reconstruct or return to in order to achieve such simplicity, but most of them would be pretty silly. I merely stress the possibility, importance, and genuineness of a response to the arts in which we can no longer separate that response from our social context and personal commitments. As for the danger of poetry becoming a “substitute” for religion, that again is merely bad metaphor: if both poetry and religion are functioning properly, their interpenetration will take care of itself. The descending side of our world picture is the side of the past, the chain of authority and subordination that has persisted all through history. In its most concentrated form it is a closed circle, all efforts to break with it, like revolutions, ending in real revolution, that is, the wheel turning again. Thus it is the world of the future, of hope and expectancy for the not yet, as well as the record of the no longer. The ascending side is the power of creation, directed toward the goal of creating a genuinely human community. Tragedy presents the descending world from the inside, but it is, no less than the comedy which presents the activity of creation itself, a recreation of memory and frustrated desire, where the spectres of the dead, in Blake’s phrase, who inhabit the memory take on living form.14 The central symbol of the descending side is metamorphosis, the fall of gods or other spiritual beings into mankind, of mankind, through Circean enchantments, into animals, of all living things into dead matter. On the ascending side there is a reversal of metamorphosis, a disenchanting journey back to our original identity that ends when the human creator recovers his creations from his Muses, and lives again, like Job, with the daughters of his memory transformed into a renewed presence.

Notes

Introduction 1 Two were published in England (nos. 3 and 21), while seven could be considered Canadian—two of these, however (nos. 18 and 26), being speeches delivered in Canada that remained unpublished until they appeared in collections edited in the U.S. by Robert D. Denham. 2 David Lodge, “Current Critical Theory,” Critical Quarterly, 9 (Spring 1967): 84. 3 The first ed. of the booklet sold out by 1968 and the second ed. was printed in 10,000 copies, bringing the total printed to 30,000 copies (see memorandum in NFF, 1988, box 60, file 7). The MLA is the major learned society in the United States concerned with language and literature studies. NF was an active member, participating in its conventions and publications, and serving as vice-president (1975) and president (1976), the first Canadian to occupy that position. 4 Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Study, ed. James Thorpe (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1967), xi, xiv. 5 NF’s article is specifically singled out in the introduction in this regard. See The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets and Poetry, ed. Stephen Spender and Donald Hall, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1970), unnumbered p. [x]. 6 Kenneth Rothwell, “Programmed Learning: A Back Door to Empiricism in English Studies,” College English, 23, no. 4 (January 1962): 248. College English is issued by the National Council of Teachers of English; the conference, held at Trinity College, Hartford, was sponsored jointly by the New England College English Association and the Connecticut Council of Teachers of English. 7 Murray Krieger, ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 1. Subsequent references to this volume are in parentheses in the text.

412

Notes to pages xxiv–xxxiv

8 For further discussion of these critiques, see Germaine Warkentin’s Introduction to EICT, xlv–xlvii. 9 The Shakespearean essays include the often-reprinted “Argument of Comedy” (1948), “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (1952), “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy” (1953), “Shakespeare’s Experimental Comedy” (on Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1961), and “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale” (1962). The lectures that were to form NP (on Shakespearean comedy and romance, 1965) had been given in November 1963. 10 NF’s own early attempts at fiction were in a satiric vein; in FS he remarks of his mentor, Blake, that “one may wonder whether satire was not his real medium, whether in the long run he was not of the race of Rabelais and Apuleius” (193/195)—the two latter also favourites of NF’s. For the 1944 essay “The Nature of Satire,” see EICT, 39–57. 11 Cf. the complaint against the manual quoted in the headnote to no. 28. 12 See, e.g., an interview of December 1968, in which NF says of the humanities as contrasted with the sciences, “I would call these subjects which deal with the world that man is trying to build, rather than the world that man lives in, the concerned subjects, the mythological subjects. . . . Literature is at the centre, and then around it come religion and very large areas of history and political theory and psychology and philosophy and so on” (INF, 170). 13 John Ayre relates that Karl Miller, who managed the Beacon Press paperbacks in Boston, put NF on his editorial board to tap his knowledge. “As a result, Frye managed to make accessible such ostensibly unpromising items as . . . Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychonanlysis of Fire” (Northrop Frye: a Biography [Toronto: Random House, 1989], 278). 14 For an interesting discussion of similarities and differences between Jung, Eliade, Campbell, and Frye as mythographers, see Glen Gill, Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 15 There is an annotated copy of the 1949 ed. in NFL, though we cannot be sure when it was annotated. 16 Interview with Laura Innocenti (1987), INF, 827. 17 For social vision as the end of education, see EICT, 492–4; WE, 94, 104–5, 175, 190. 18 See pp. 235–6. This approach was already being questioned by Comparative Literature specialists during the 1964 congress on “Source and Influence” (see no. 24, n. 6), and was to be attacked definitively by René Wellek in 1970 (for which see p. xxxv). 19 Otherwise known as the Seattle epiphany. See TBN, li, for an explanation; a number of other references are gathered in LN, 728n. 24. 20 See George Levine, “Our Culture and Our Convictions,” Partisan Review, 39, no. 1 (1972): 63–79, a consideration of three works which respond to the stu-

Notes to pages xxxiv–6

21

22 23 24

25 26

413

dent questioning of traditional liberalism; and Robert Gorham Davis, “The Problematic State of Literature,” New Leader, 54 (17 May 1971): 7–8. It is so taken by Graham Good in his Humanism Betrayed: Theory, Ideology, and Culture in the Contemporary University (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), where NF’s position is contrasted with that of the poststructuralist theory that has taken over the university. NF seems to have sometimes thought of CP as “my humanism essay” (RT, 109; cf. 113–15). Bordeaux, 1970; published in the Proceedings (Stuttgart: Bieber, 1976). TBN, 217; cf. the remark that it may be a vade mecum through the present confusion, “a small unpretentious book of some sanity & sequence” (TBN, 270). NF in fact later regretted his choice of terminology: “I’m not entirely happy with the phrase ‘myth of’ any more. . . . I realized that that was not really a proper description of what I was talking about. I wouldn’t, I think, use the phrase ‘myth of concern’ now. I would speak more of concern expressing itself in myths.” David Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation (Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992), 113–14; INF, 966. “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas,” M&B, 34. Fletcher maintained that “the archetypes themselves are ‘canonical’”; “Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion,” Critical Inquiry, 1, no. 4 (June 1975): 746. 1. The Critical Path

1 The talk at Cornell on 18 April 1968 is entitled “The Social Context of Literary Criticism,” which is the subtitle of CP. It is printed in LS, 347–65; in the headnote Robert D. Denham notes that talks with the same title were given at Ithaca College on 30 October 1969 and at Wells College on 1 November 1969. For the very similar “Mythos and Logos,” see the summary at no. 19. 2 “The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University” (7 November 1968) and “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract” (9 December 1968); rpt. in WE, 345–78. 3 “Communications,” The Listener, 84 (9 July 1970): 33–5; rpt. in NFMC, 134–9. 4 The paper NF gave at the 1969 congress of the International Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures/Fédération internationale des langues et littératures modernes in Islamabad, Pakistan, “Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism,” is published in LS, 243–52. The congress was an intense and memorable occasion. The Pakistani organizers provided their international guests with a week of excursions to Lahore and Rawalpindi, to typical villages, to archaeological and religious sites, and to the Khyber Pass on the Afghan border, where participants were hosted by a local tribe. NF fully participated in this tour and in the following week of paper sessions and discussions.

414

Notes to pages 7–12

5 So most translations, though Kant’s word is Weg [way], not Pfad [path]. [NF] Kant says that “As regards those who wish to pursue a scientific method, they have now the choice of following either the dogmatical or the sceptical, while they are bound never to desert the systematic mode of procedure. When I mention, in relation to the former, the celebrated Wolf, and as regards the latter, David Hume, I may leave, in accordance with my present intention, all others unnamed. The critical path alone is still open” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn [London: Dent; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1934], 483; copy in NFL). In the German original, the phrase is: “Der kritische Weg ist allein noch offen.” 6 For an opposed view, see F.E. Sparshott, The Structure of Aesthetics (Toronto, 1963). [NF] 7 See Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig, 1877), especially the opening chapter, “Die Idee der Philologie.” [NF] 8 Sir Walter Raleigh, Milton (London: Edward Arnold, 1922), 88. 9 Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934). [NF] 10 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking, 1949), 18 (pt. 1, chap. 1). 11 Richard Rolle describes the bee’s ballast in his short essay “The Bee.” He actually uses the figure to describe righteous men: “They take earth; that is, they hold themselves vile and earthly, that they be not blown about with the wind of vanity and of pride.” Selected Works of Richard Rolle, Hermit, ed. G.C. Heseltine (London: Longmans, Green, 1930), 103. A copy is in NFL. 12 Eliot famously declared that he was Classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion (“Preface,” For Lancelot Andrewes [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929], vii). In TSE, NF suggests that Eliot was thus taking a side in the English civil war of the seventeenth century, which to Eliot contained in embryo all the disintegrating tendencies of modern times (19). On p. 7, above, he refers to Jacques Maritain, who came regularly to teach at the University of Toronto, as an upholder of the Thomist synthesis. Elsewhere NF calls the conservative theory of decline the “butterslide” theory of history. 13 The reference is to Blake’s increasing annoyance with his patron William Hayley, who had set him up in seclusion at Felpham, but whom Blake came to suspect of trying to pervert his genius into socially acceptable channels. At this time Blake was also accused of treason by a drunken soldier named Schofield whom he ejected from his garden, and sometimes he suspected that Hayley was behind the incident. As NF explains in FS, the quarrel forms part of the autobiographical background of Milton, in which Hayley is portrayed as Satan. 14 NF credits American New Criticism with having emancipated criticism from remains of nineteenth-century philological practices, and turned its attention to the literary text. But he faults it with losing sight of the main goal by focus-

Notes to pages 13–19

15 16 17

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20 21

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ing on detailed textual explication instead of tracing relationships with the total body of literature. He avoids, here and elsewhere (except perhaps when he quotes Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire, cf. no. 4 above) allusions to Continental Nouvelle Critique, which in so many ways participated in freeing criticism from any extraliterary causation. But when, for example, Lucien Goldmann identifies sociological patterns in the literary work; when Tzvetan Todorov visualizes linguistic patterns in it; when Georges Poulet pursues in it the theme of time and Charles Mauron explores its hidden psychological data, their intratextual research still seems to fail in the main task of criticism as NF sees it. This may explain his near-silence on the entire Nouvelle Critique movement. This is the theme of much of The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), esp. pp. 84–166. Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), linguist and critic, author of numerous books and articles on literature, style, and syntax. “We shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his [the poet’s] works may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 14. New Critic John Crowe Ransom argued that structure, or the argument of a poem, is necessary but not so valuable as the texture, or rich local values and irrelevancies, which give a kind of knowledge not offered by science. See, e.g., The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), esp. 219–20. “Between the conception / And the creation / Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the Shadow” (The Hollow Men, sec. 5, ll. 11–15). Eliot is speaking in general of the incompleteness of human experience. Blake, Letter to William Hayley (6 May 1800), E705. I have used these already in a different context in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), 35 [AC2, 33]. [NF] Schiller’s essay is Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795–96). Philip Massinger (1583–1640), author of some fifty-five plays, was popular in the eighteenth century. The Oxford Companion to English Literature (rev. ed., 1998) comments on “the present comparative neglect of one of the most serious professional dramatists of the post-Shakespearian period.” Eliot, Burnt Norton, sec. 2, ll. 1–2. “Tching prayed on the mountain and / wrote MAKE IT NEW / on his bath tub / Day by Day make it new / cut underbrush, / pile the logs / keep it growing” (Canto 53, ll. 51–7). Pound translated Confucius’s The Unwobbling Pivot. His introductory note reads, “THE UNWOBBLING PIVOT, contains what is usually supposed not to exist, namely the Confucian metaphysics.” See Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1969), 95.

416

Notes to pages 19–28

25 For these frequently used terms in Hopkins, see, e.g., Letter to Robert Bridges, 15 February 1879, in A Hopkins Reader, rev. and enlarged, ed. John Pick (New York: Image, 1966), 149–50; also 46, 11, 210. See also n. 58, below. 26 For the timeless moments that are a major theme in Four Quartets, see for instance Little Gidding, sec. 5, ll. 21–2, and next note. 27 “But to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time, is an occupation for the saint— / No occupation either, but something given / And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and selfsurrender.” The Dry Salvages, sec. 5, ll. 17–23. 28 Milton, “Of Education,” in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 4:277. 29 Scienza Nuova, etc., translated as The New Science of Giambattista Vico, by T[homas] G. Bergin and M[ax] H. Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948, rev. 1968). See especially bk. 2, “Poetic Wisdom.” [NF] 30 See Ezra Pound, “Date Line,” in Literary Essays [of Ezra Pound], ed. T.S. Eliot [(New York: New Directions, 1935)], 77. [NF] The Greek paideuma can mean “lesson”; when mythologies coalesce with specific cultures, myths can assume educational functions, and be seen as lessons. 31 Tillich’s definition of religion as “ultimate concern” appears throughout his work. See, e.g., Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper, 1957), 1–4, 62; and Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–63), 1:211– 15. 32 For Polonius haranguing Laertes, see Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.3.59–80; for Johnson’s condemnation of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son (written 1732–68), see James Boswell, Life of Johnson, in Life of Johnson, together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. and enl. L.F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 1:266. 33 See R.H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament ([Oxford: Clarendon Press,] 1913), 2: 715 ff. [NF] 34 I have been particularly indebted to Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960); E.A. Havelock, A Preface to Plato (1963); Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (1967). [NF] 35 Bacon thus described the intent of his Essays in the dedication to the revised and enlarged edition of 1625. 36 Of course by this phrase I do not mean simply a culture that uses writing for legal, commercial, or religious purposes, but one that publicly and habitually uses writing for its imaginative and intellectual expression. Cf. Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (1951), chap. 2. [NF] 37 See the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 38 More accurately, the Duke of Gloucester [the future Richard III] in 3 Henry VI, 5.6.[82.] [NF]

Notes to pages 32–7

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39 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations, bk. 11, sec. 3. The editor of the Penguin edition notes: “If these words are authentic and not a later insertion, they are the only reference which Marcus makes to the Christians. C.R. Haines, however, in the Loeb edition of the Meditations, points out that the clause is ‘outside the construction, and in fact ungrammatical. It is in the very form of a marginal note, and has every appearance of being a gloss foisted into the text.’” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin, 1964), 166. 40 See particularly chap. 1 of Culture and Anarchy, in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 416–23. Here Arnold notes the want of “sweetness and light” in middle-class liberalism and Protestantism, with its emphasis on moral perfection. See also the last chapter, “Hebraism and Hellenism,” which stresses English Hebraism (474). 41 Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), colleague of Lenin and active theorist of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, was ousted from the Communist Party in 1927 by Stalin, exiled, and eventually assassinated in Mexico. Liu Shao-chi (1895–1969) was a colleague and rival of Chairman Mao; criticized, for instance, for believing in a common human nature and denying the classbound character of art, he was expelled from the party in 1968. 42 See Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service, ll. 5–8: “In the beginning was the Word. / Superfetation of to; e{n, / And at the mensual turn of time, / Produced enervate Origen.” 43 Yeats, A Dialogue of Self and Soul, l. 24. 44 De Rerum Natura, 1.63 ff. [NF] 45 Defensor Pacis is usually ascribed to Marsilio Dei Mainardini, often listed as Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1275–ca. 1342). In 1326 papal condemnation of the work as subversive of existing institutions—i.e., the church—forced Marsilius into exile in Nuremberg. For his condemnation of the Pope’s claim of universal secular jurisdiction, and of the Roman bishops’ usurpation of the civil laws by their own courts, see Defensor Pacis, trans. Alan Gewirth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 361. 46 In the last chapter of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon famously summed up his achievement by saying that he had described the triumph of barbarism and religion. 47 Arthur Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974), argues that, although Stephen Gosson is often labelled a Puritan, this is an “uninformed oversimplification” (24n. 64), and that in major ways “Gosson’s ideas are radically opposed to the basic outlook of the most popular and influential Puritans of his day” (26–8). William Ringler, Stephen Gosson: A Biographical and Critical Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

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52

53 54

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Notes to pages 39–43

1942) likewise maintains that the arguments of the Schoole of Abuse are “remarkable for their essential temperance and reasonableness” and that Gosson attacks abuses, not the art themselves (65–6). Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West, l. 55. See Plutarch’s Moralia, sec. 17, “The Obsolescence of the Oracles,” in which the helmsman of a ship is told to call out, “Great Pan is dead,” and a great cry of lamentation is heard from the land. Yeats uses this phrase both as the title for a collection of poems (1935) and in his play Resurrection (The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats [London: MacMillan, 1953], 586). In A Vision: A Reissue with the Author’s Final Revisions (New York: Macmillan, 1956), he points out that Caesar was killed on the 15th of March and that “Christ rose from the dead at a full moon in the first month of the year [March]” (245, 250). In his copy of this ed. in NFL, NF wrote in the margin opposite the latter, “and, presumably, was conceived at roughly the same time.” The grammarian, living shortly after the revival of learning in Europe, dedicated himself to knowledge. Browning is affectionately satirical: “He settled Hoti’s business—let it be!— / Properly based Oun— / Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, / Dead from the waist down” (ll. 129–32). A note in the Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. John C. Berkey et al. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969–) gives the meaning of these Greek words: “O{ti acts as a conjunction meaning ‘that’ or ‘because’; Oujn means ‘then’ in the sense of ‘therefore’; and De means ‘towards.’” The editors go on to say that “B[rowning] was asked to explain this passage more than once. He wrote to Tennyson in 1863: ‘I wanted the grammarian . . . to spend his last breath on the biggest of littleness’” (4:414). To celebrate the man’s high reach—“Let me know all!”—Browning has him buried on a mountain top. Sprezzatura is a crucial concept in The Book of the Courtier; it means grace, naturalness, lack of affectation, in every aspect of conduct and every activity: “If I well remember, Count,” says Cesare Gonzaga, “it seems to me you have repeated several times this evening that the Courtier must accompany his actions, his gestures, his habits, in short, his every movement, with grace.” Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York and London: Norton, 2002), 30. It is because of the reputed obscurity and complication of his language that in English his name has come to be associated with the word “dunce.” The passage from Roger Ascham is in The Scholemaster, bk. 2 (English Works, ed. [William Aldis] Wright [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], 1904, 265–6) and from Milton in Familiar Letters, no. 8 [to Benedetto Bonmattei, ed. Donald Lemen Clark], trans. David Masson [Works of John Milton, 12:33]. [NF] NF has modernized Ascham’s spelling and punctuation. As stated by NF on p. 37, above, the occasion of Sidney’s Defence of Poetry

Notes to pages 44–58

56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68

69

70

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was to refute Stephen Gosson’s The Schoole of Abuse (1579). Most of Gosson’s arguments against poetry were drawn from Plato. Fasti, 6.5. [NF] “Poetry is the companion of the campes”: Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (1595; also known as The Defence of Poesie), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1:88. Subsequent references to this essay in vol. 1 are in square brackets in the text. A copy of Smith’s edition is in NFL. NF has modernized the Elizabethan spelling. Letter to Alexander Baillie, 14 January 1883 [in A Hopkins Reader, 177–8]. [NF] From “Conclusion” to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism ([London: Faber & Faber,] 1933), 151. [NF] Spectator, 29 (3 April 1711): 2. Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy, an Essay (1668), in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), 1:44. See Lewis’s The Dithyrambic Spectator, published with The Diabolical Principle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931). Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843) consist of two parts, the first containing the writings of “A,” an aesthete and sensualist, and the second a rebuttal and defence of marriage and the ethical by “B,” Judge Vilhelm. In A’s essay on the musical erotic, Mozart’s Don Giovanni features as the culminating stage. See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, abridged and trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), esp. 102, 133–4. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, l. 297. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in Selected Poetry and Prose of Coleridge, ed. Donald A. Stauffer (New York: Modern Library, 1951), 266 (chap. 14). In his Conclusiones, Philosophicae, Cabalisticae et Theologicae, posthumously published in 1495. See for example Richard Hofstader, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944). [NF] Eliot, The Dry Salvages, sec. 2, ll. 39–41: “ development: the latter a partial fallacy / Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, / Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.” In 1912, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward announced that they had found the fossilized bones of this prehistoric “Piltdown Man” in an English gravel pit. The fossils were not exposed as unequivocally fraudulent until 1953. As NF notes, Piltdown Man confirmed the evolutionary theories of the day: Arthur Smith Woodward argued that the combination of human and ape features had been “long previously anticipated as an almost necessary stage in the course of human evolution.” Charles Blinderman, The Piltdown Inquest (Buffalo, N.Y. : Prometheus Books, 1986), 23. “A Neanderthal Man was thick-skulled and heavy-boned, he stooped for-

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75 76

77 78 79

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Notes to pages 58–63

ward and could not hold his head as erect as living men do, he was chinless and perhaps incapable of speech, he was very thick-set, he was, indeed, not quite one of our present species, but his brain-case was at least as large as ours and there can be no dispute about his inclusion in the genus Homo.” H.G. Wells, The Outline of History (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 63. G.K. Chesterton, Chaucer, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, ed. George Marlin and Lawrence J. Clipper (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 18:174. For NF’s elaboration of the paradox that progress assumes the superiority of dynamic change, yet can only lead to a stultifying state of rest, see MC, 33 (NFMC, 17). In his Rede lecture Sir Charles P. Snow contrasted the reactionary humanists with the scientists who had the future in their bones. See The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 11. In chap. 2 of The Two Cultures Snow argues that “intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites” (23) who want nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution. The original Luddites were nineteenth-century English labourers who smashed newly introduced machinery. See Apologie for Poetrie, 178: “I neuer heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooued more then with a Trumpet.” It is actually in an essay that Lawrence speculates amusingly about what he can possibly say to a group asking him for a letter of encouragement in the battle of life: “My dear young people: I daren’t advise you to do as I do, for it’s no fun, writing books. And I won’t advise you, for your own sakes, to do as I say. For in details I’m sure I’m wrong. My dear young people, perhaps I need your encouragement more than you need mine.” D.H. Lawrence, “Accumulated Mail,” in Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 292. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). Jerusalem, pl. 15 [ll. 18–19, E159]. [NF] For NF’s comments on the allusions to Galileo in Paradise Lost, see RE, where he remarks that though they are not hostile, “they are curiously deprecatory. Milton seems to regard Galileo, most inaccurately, as concerned primarily with the question of whether the heavenly bodies, more particularly the moon, are habitable—as a pioneer of science fiction rather than of science” (M&B, 74). See also pp. 340–2, above. Notes to Queen Mab, in The Poems of Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 801. Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (London: A.C. Fitfield, 1910), 39–41. Peacock, The Four Ages of Poetry, in “A Defence of Poetry” [by] Percy Bysshe Shelley; “The Four Ages of Poetry” [by] Thomas Love Peacock, ed. John E. Jordan (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 18.

Notes to pages 63–76

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83 Ibid., 17. The crab allusion is from Hamlet, 2.2.206. 84 Ibid., 19. 85 Shelley distinguishes the principles of synthesis and analysis on p. 26 of A Defence of Poetry, in “A Defence of Poetry” [by] Percy Bysshe Shelley; “The Four Ages of Poetry” [by] Thomas Love Peacock. Future page references to this ed. are in brackets in the text. 86 See p. 9. 87 Wallace Stevens, A Primitive Like an Orb, l. 1. 88 “Didactic poetry is my abhorrence,” Preface to Prometheus Unbound, in The Poems of Shelley, 207. 89 For Arnold’s notion that culture “seeks to . . . make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere,“ see Culture and Anarchy, in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, 426. In his essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) Arnold first introduced the term “the best that is known and thought,” ascribing the task of propagating it to criticism (ibid., 245, 256). In chap. 2 of Tom Sawyer, Tom gets other boys to whitewash the fence, a job he has been assigned, by pretending it’s a privilege he does not want to give up. Thus he learns “that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, ed. John G. Gerber, Paul Baender, and Terry Firkins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 50. 90 William Morris, News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest (London: Longmans, Green, 1935), 227 (chap. 29). In his copy of this ed. in NFL, NF has written in the margin, “preservation of tradition.” 91 In his book Creative Evolution (1907) French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) argued that evolution was impelled by an élan vital that warred against entropy. British psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936), in his book Emergent Evolution (1923) and elsewhere, distinguished three rising levels of consciousness: the percipient, the perceptive, and the reflective. He studied this mental evolution partly by probing the boundary between instinct and intelligence in animals. 92 The Rest of the Chapters of the Book of Esther, 13:4, in the Apocrypha. 93 J.W. Colenso, Bishop of Natal, had written The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862–79), a five-volume work which cast doubt on the authorship and historical accuracy of these parts of the Bible. For Arnold’s belief that it is not always wise to address advanced, unedifying truths to the uneducated, see his “The Bishop and the Philosopher,” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), 3:44. 94 “And I would have thee know, Sancho, that if [Truth] were to appear before the Princes, in its native Simplicity, and disrobed of the odious Disguise of Flattery, we should see happier Days; this Age would be chang’d into an

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Notes to pages 76–82 Age of Gold, and former times compared to this, would be call’d the Iron Age.” Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Peter Motteux, revised by John Ozell (New York: Modern Library, 1930), 457 (bk. 2, chap. 2). In his copy of this ed. in NFL, NF has bracketed this sentence, with the note “same pattern: wonderful irony.” Browne’s remark on faith occurs in pt. 1, sec. 9 of Religio Medici; his discussion of the ark, which alludes to some of the practical problems though not specifically to sanitation, occurs in pt. 1, sec. 22. See Religio Medici (London: Dent, 1906), 10, 26–7. In the margin of the former passage in his copy in NFL, NF has written “White-Queen [Protsm.]” “Some believe the better for seeing CHRIST’S Sepulchre; and, when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now, contrarily, I bless my self and am thankful that I lived not in the days of Miracles, that I never saw CHRIST nor His Disciples.” Religio Medici, 18 (pt. 1, sec. 9). 1 Corinthians 2:14: “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God . . . because they are spiritually discerned.” See n. 57, above. NF is alluding to Arnold’s assertion that “The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” According to Arnold, “Our religion has materialised itself in the fact . . . and now the fact is failing it,” whereas for poetry “the idea is everything,” so that in the future “most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.” “The Study of Poetry,” in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, 306. Quoted in his obituary in the New York Times, 3 February 1970. This rhetorical appeal against the gold standard at the Democratic convention of 1896 is credited with winning for then congressman William Jennings Bryan the nomination as Democratic presidential candidate. Marriage with one’s deceased wife’s sister had been illegal in England since 1835. A “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill” was introduced into Parliament almost every year from 1846 on to permit the practice, until finally accepted in 1907. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) Arnold makes the bill a symbol of the mindless worship of “doing what one likes.” “A German scholar hypothesized that there once existed a source document for Matthew and Luke. He referred to it as Quelle, which means ‘source’ in German. The abbreviation Q was adopted from this word. According to the hypothesis, someone wrote at Jerusalem in Aramaic a collection of Sayings of Jesus, and of stories which recalled some of the circumstances of the Sayings. Two editors—the editor of Matthew as we read it now, and the editor of Luke, as it was put out in the first edition, older than Luke as we read it now—took this Q as the written authority from which they could copy

Notes to pages 83–99

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down authentic accounts”. J.M.C. Crum, The Original Jerusalem Gospel: Being Essays on the Document Q (London: Constable, 1927), 1. For NF’s probable source in the linkage of Gnosticism and Mahayana Buddhism, see his discussion of Joseph Campbell, p. 144. Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1968) gives the definitions for ajnagkavzw, movra, and e ivmarto", respectively, as “necessity,” “destiny” or “one’s portion in life,” and “fixed by fate.” NF’s comments on the meaning of ananke in the conclusion of FS are relevant here: “It is impossible that a Greek tragedian can have meant by ananke what the average English reader means by ‘necessity’. . . . The meaning of ananke must be sought in the meaning of the poetic form in which it is found, in the raison d’être of Greek tragedy” (427/413–14). John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Works of John Milton, 4:315. (Milton has “then” for “than.”) French writer Louis-Fernand Destouches (1894–1961), who wrote under the name of Céline, was innovative in his use of slang and vulgarities and his fragmentation of narrative. NF may be alluding to his anti-Semitism (as seen in books such as L’École des cadavres [1938]), or more generally to his misanthropy, despair, and nihilism. In an interview NF commented on “the anarchistic, or perverse, or muddle-headed type of culture being promulgated by people like, say, Céline, who are quite able and significant writers and yet at the same time are simply bloody-minded kooks” (INF, 151–2). Blake, Laocoön Aphorisms, E274. Aristotle says of the city state that “while it comes into existence for the sake of life, it exists for the good life.” Politics, bk. 1, sec. 1. Robert Burns, Holy Willie’s Prayer (1799), ll. 3–4. Mucho takes LSD after describing how “you’d have this big, God, maybe a couple hundred million chorus saying ‘rich, chocolaty goodness’ together, and it would all be the same voice.” Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Perennial Classics, 1965), 116–17. Letter to George Izambard, 13 May 1871. [NF] Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 14, E39. See n. 62, above. Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979) believed that myths and supposedly miraculous Biblical events were based on real global catastrophes resulting from earth’s close encounters with other planets. Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (ca. 1872–1949) was a mystic spiritual teacher who stressed self-awareness. Structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) produced a triangular diagram of the three main ways of cooking meat—boiling, roasting, and smoking—and discussed their cultural characteristics. Dylan’s song, “Gates of Eden,” appeared on the album Bringing It All Back Home in 1965.

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Notes to pages 100–118

117 Yeats, The Second Coming, l. 6. 118 McLuhan uses this precise phrase in an interview in Playboy magazine in March 1969, when he says that “From Tokyo to Paris to Columbia, youth mindlessly acts out its identity quest in the theater of the streets, searching not for goals but for roles, striving for an identity that eludes them.” A similar idea is expressed in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 335. 119 This is the French word for earwig, whose name is incorporated into that of the hero of Finnegans Wake, H.C. Earwicker, the twentieth-century everyman. One of his avatars is Persse O’Reilly. 120 See n. 63, above. 121 In an interview with Bruce Mickleburgh, NF remarked that the term “relevance” was a favourite of the Nazi youth movement around 1934, when it was used to hound professors out of their employment; to David Cayley he added that “the Nazis talked about Fachwissenschaft, about target knowledge, and sooner or later the useful came to mean what was essential for waging war. That attitude not only destroyed art and science in Germany for a whole generation; it also helped materially in losing the war for the Germans” (INF, 167, 992). 122 See Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), for the notion that “the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed” (81). 123 According to Engels, nineteenth-century socialist thinkers such as Fourier and Saint-Simon were Utopian (in a pejorative sense) because they were attempting to create an ideal community of restricted size prior to the two requirements of Marxism: the advent of a classless society and the withering away of the state. In that perspective, their Utopian idealism was “unscientific” whereas Marxism would be “scientific” in its rejection of such a partial Utopia. 124 See the last line of Poem 1260, Because that you are going. 125 See Labyrinths (1962), 262. [NF] In NFL is an annotated copy of the augmented ed., ed. Donald A. Yaltes and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964). 2. Literary Criticism 1 The essays in question are “Linguistics” by William G. Moulton, “Textual Criticism” by Fredson Bowers, and “Literary History” by Robert E. Spiller. NF’s essay concludes what he calls the series by dealing with “Literary Criticism” in a way which implies that this field of endeavour will not be

Notes to pages 119–123

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merely one of the sets of “essential techniques” represented by the other three, but a new departure altogether. Because the publications of the MLA enjoyed (and still enjoy) a wide circulation in North America and Europe and are geared to deal with the most up-to-date problematics in literary studies and the humanities in general, the configuration of the book accurately reflects NF’s position as innovator in the eyes of “the profession” as well as in his own perspective. By saying that “what is meant here by criticism is a further stage in the scholarly organization of literature” (118) he is implying that although linguistics, literary history, and critical editing have each experienced important advances, their role may (or will) become increasingly instrumental in the new dispensation. Housman remarks that “Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are commoner than returns of Halley’s comet: literary critics are less common.” A.E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 5. Gilbert remarks that “Ulysses is a book of life, a microcosm which is a smallscale replica of the universe, and the methods which lead to an understanding of the latter will provide a solution to the obscurities in Ulysses.” Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), 52. In support of the thesis that Marlowe was not killed in a duel in 1593 but survived to write the plays mistakenly ascribed to Shakespeare, Calvin Hoffman opened the tomb of Sir Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s reputed lover (the precise location of Marlowe’s own tomb being lost). He found neither helpful documents nor Sir Thomas’s body. See Calvin Hoffman, The Murder of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (1955). W.B. Yeats, Wheels and Butterflies (London: MacMillan, 1934), 27–8. The critic in question is Shane Leslie. See Rymer’s A Short View of Tragedy (1692), chap. 7. The quoted phrase is the opening one of Francis Jeffrey’s famous review of Wordsworth’s Excursion in the Edinburgh Review of 1814; it has become a byword for a critical put-down. This was where NF made his small change, from “point the fact out.” The question, in relation to this example, is in what manner C.S. Lewis fulfils—or does not fulfil—the task ascribed by NF to the academic critic. It is true that Lewis, in discussing Rolland’s Court of Venus, makes derogatory value judgments reflecting his own initial reaction. He says, for example, that the book, printed in 1575, has had few readers; and that its “‘haltand verse’ and its excessively dull prologue are likely to deter any student who is not supported by some historical interest. To recover, at this time of day, the taste for its peculiarly Scottish and medieval blend of galantry, satire, fantasy and pedantry is all but impossible” (The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition [London: Oxford University Press, 1958], 292). But NF, while

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Notes to pages 127–39

admitting that this is an example of value judgment, quickly exonerates Lewis by stating that value judgments are essential to academic criticism when they contribute to our understanding of the writer, and that elucidation in turn may change the reader’s evaluation of him. That is precisely how Lewis proceeds in this case, demonstrating that the Court of Venus provides allegorically a “realistic presentation, in some degree satiric, of the contemporary legal world” (293), and a sense of romance, or at least “fantasy or extravaganza” (294). Finally, Lewis admits that there is “real poetry in the words of Desperance as he hears the song of the Muses” (296). 10 “In quibbles angel and archangel join, / And God the Father turns a schooldivine” was Alexander Pope’s criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Imitations of Horace, l. 102). 11 Arnold’s conception of culture as a force in society is best expressed in Culture and Anarchy, where a knowledge centred on the “best self” of each class is opposed to the anarchy of individual and class egos. 3. Myth and Poetry 1 The Greek uJpovnoia means opinion or conjecture based on slight evidence; suspicion; conjecture. 2 Venus and Adonis, l. 1057. Venus had noted that “No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf, or weed / But stole his blood and seem’d with him to bleed” (ll. 1055–6). 3 The phrase comes from l. 52 of the poem An Ode Secundum Artem, which is ascribed to Cowper provisionally in The Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. H.S. Milford, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 288–9, and in earlier editions, one of which NF once owned. Milford gives, “And sweetly, warbling Philomel, shall flow / Thy soothing Sadness in mechanic woe.” The poem is now attributed to Cowper’s friend Charles Lloyd. 4 With this allusion to “critical gossip” having revealed the relationship between The Confidential Clerk and Euripides’ Ion, NF ironically understates Eliot’s predilection for Greek myths, both as poet and playwright. Eliot consciously exploits the “metaphorical concentration” (p. 137) of Greek mythology; in his plays this results in a modern, Christian, very personal transformation of characters and situations. Thus The Family Reunion draws on Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and The Elder Statesman on Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. 4. Preface to Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire 1 Thomas Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (New York: Appleton, 1929), 122.

Notes to pages 140–4

427

2 These three books are: (1) L’Eau et les rêves (Paris: Corti, 1942), translated as part of her doctoral dissertation by Edith Rogers Farrell as “Water and Dreams” by Gaston Bachelard: An Annotated Translation with Introduction by the Translator (Dissertation, State University of Iowa, 1965); (2) L’Air et les songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement (Paris: Corti, 1943), trans. as Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, ca. 1988); and (3) La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté: Essai sur l’imagination des forces (Paris: Corti, 1948), for which see Liliana Zancu, Transcendental Dynamics: A Bachelardian Romantic Perspective including the English Translation of “Earth and Reveries of Volition: An Essay on the Imagination of Forces” by Gaston Bachelard (Dissertation, Kent State University, 1975). Bachelard also wrote another book on the element Earth: La Terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris: Corti, 1948). 3 In chap. 6 of The Psychoanalysis of Fire Bachelard uses some of Hoffmann’s fire-related imagery as an example of the manner in which the creator’s imagination selects and systematically privileges one of the four elements. Here, NF speaks of “poetic temperament” as the source of this selection, which results in a “complex,” a panoply of images linking the poet’s psyche to a more universal structural principle. Chap. 6 begins with the seductiveness, in Bachelard’s youth, of the making and consuming of “punch” or “fire-water” (“eau-de-vie”) and associates its delights with the fiery imagination which inhabits the tales of Hoffmann and the life and mind of those animated by it. The conclusion of the chapter confirms the philosophical kinship between Bachelard and NF by affirming the initial complementarity of poetic and scientific thought: “Thus story-tellers, doctors, physicists, novelists, all of them dreamers, start off from the same images and pass on to the same thoughts” (97). 4 Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Norman Page (London: Penguin, 1971), 42. In this preface Dickens refers to the authorities Giuseppe Bianchini and Le Cat; in chap. 33, Krook’s inquest, he also mentions MM. Foderé and Mere. Bachelard mentions Le Cat on p. 94. 5. After the Invocation, a Lapse into Litany 1 On pp. 364–6 Campbell notes the similarity between the Gnostic and Mahayana Buddhist attitudes to the body; on p. 371 he remarks that both believe the creator of the world was evil. NF chooses Gnosticism and Campbell’s treatment of it as a most significant example among a variety of “Oriental” tendencies which historically have made it possible for “Western” religions to appear more acceptable to the religious mindsets of “Eastern” populations. Gnosticism was a major irritant to the Christian Church throughout the process of defining its theology, and especially its Christology, because the

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Notes to pages 144–9

Gnostics’ unrelenting dualism was incompatible with the idea of a Redeemer assuming human form, and with that of the world and its inhabitants being redeemable. Matter being evil in their eyes, spirit can perhaps temporarily inhabit a human body but never merge with it. NF shows understanding for Campbell’s seeming receptiveness to such forms of belief as Gnosticism with its long history in and far beyond the Graeco-Roman world, because it offers a mythology without institutional and dogmatic borders. In Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World (1861), the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen argued that the first stage of human society was “a matriarchal society out of which modern patriarchal societies evolved” (xvii); he also held that the first stages of “spiritual maturation” were “dominated by the female point of view” (xlvi). See George Boas, Preface, and Joseph Campbell, Introduction, in Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). For Graves’s idealization of the mother-goddess as the poet’s Muse and the centre of all stories, see his The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber & Faber, 1948). “The Serpent’s Bride” is the title of Campbell’s first chapter, discussing the powerful mother-goddess; Medusa is discussed on pp. 152–3, and the degraded serpent on p. 70. On p. 318 of his copy, NF has underlined “Roman” in this phrase, and put a question mark in the margin. Plutarch was in fact a Greek. Spengler’s views on Levantine or Magian culture are quoted on pp. 223–4, 399–401, 407–8, 435–6, 437–8, and 454. 6. Criticism, Visible and Invisible

1 In the Republic, bk. 6, 510–13, Plato uses the simile of the divided line to distinguish, first of all, between two levels of objects of knowledge (the realm of the visible and that of the intelligible), and secondly, within each of these divisions, the degree of knowledge, and therefore truth, which can be attained (from opinion to belief to understanding). Plato’s metaphysical dualism requires an epistemological dualism: knowledge of ideas is more certain than that of images. The inquiring soul devises hypotheses and travels between the two levels but its ultimate aspiration is to reach the invisible “first principle of the whole” in the world of ideas. NF’s use of Plato’s imagery is analogical, perhaps arbitrary; mainly, he wishes the inquiring subject to identify with the object, which is literature, wisely, that is to apprehend and appropriate its innermost principles. 2 See no. 1, n. 51.

Notes to pages 150–3

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3 The original version in College English added at the end of this sentence, “, a mysterious and stylized ‘verbal icon.’” The reference is to W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954), which is recalled later, p. 153. 4 The original version of this sentence read, “Criticism, in order to point beyond itself, must be more than merely aware of its limitations: it needs to be actively iconoclastic about itself.” 5 The first chapter of Fielding’s Tom Jones, “The Introduction to the Work, or Bill of Fare to the Feast,” is based on an elaborate simile in which an author is compared to an innkeeper who must display his menu to prospective customers. Fielding says that he will serve up Human Nature, first plain (in the country), and then hashed, fricasséed, or spiced (in the town). 6 Arnold Kettle’s criticism of Jonathan Wild for having no strong character to represent the ethically good position, made originally in his Introduction to the English Novel, was mentioned twice in Satire Newsletter, 1, no. 2 (Spring 1964): once in an article on Heartfree’s function in Jonathan Wild (34), and once by the editors in the course of announcing a symposium on the subject of moral norms in satire (71). For the printed text of NF’s reply, see no. 8. 7 Arnold, Preface to Poems (1853), in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, 204. 8 See no. 1, n. 63. 9 In 1963 Cambridge University Press reprinted the twenty volumes of the academic journal Scrutiny (1932–53). For Leavis’s use of the phrase “the poem is a determinate thing; it is there,” see his “The Responsible Critic” (in the Spring 1953 issue), 19:174. For “unappreciated, the poem isn’t ‘there,’” see “Education and the University (III): Literary Studies” (March 1941), 9:308. 10 Chaps. 51 and 52 of Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Faber & Faber, 1938), 284–95. 11 In what is perhaps his most severe comment anywhere on evaluative criticism, all the more biting because of its brevity, NF compares it here with infantile sexual activity because both the child as seen by Freud, and the evaluative critic, engage in “preliminary,” superficial, incomplete contact with their object. Freud had written that “Children may thus be described as ‘polymorphously perverse,’ and if these impulses only show traces of activity, that is because on the one hand they are of less intensity compared with those in later life and on the other hand all a child’s sexual manifestations are at once energetically suppressed by education” (Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, pt. 2, chap. 13); the topic is further developed in pt. 3, chap. 10. See the Standard edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 15:209 and 16:311–16.

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Notes to pages 153–65

12 Sortes Virgilianae were a form of divination popular in late Roman and medieval times, when Virgil was credited with prophetic powers. A copy of Virgil’s Aeneid was opened at random, and the first passage lighted upon was interpreted as a prophecy applicable to the present situation. 13 This sentence has not been found in Rowse’s work. Rowse often mocks critics in his Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Macmillan, 1964). His general attitude is illustrated by the remark on Sonnet 107, “All commentators have found its difficulties insurmountable. But to the historian they are not” (221). 14 The quotation comes from canto 63, bk. 2 of The Minstrel (1771–74). See The Poetical Works of James Beattie (London: Bell & Daldy, 1870), 59, for both quotation and footnote. 15 Frederick C. Crews, The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman’s Casebook (New York: Dutton, 1963), 3. The Pooh Perplex is a satire on academic writing, particularly literary criticism. The author has compiled a series of pretentious articles on Winnie the Pooh, which he places under a list of different fictitious authors, the first being Harvey C. Window. 16 In Yeats’s The Phases of the Moon, one character type “follows whatever whim’s most difficult / Among whims not impossible” (ll. 42–3), while one at a different phase chooses “whatever task’s most difficult / Among tasks not impossible” (ll. 96–7). 17 See no. 1, n. 106. 18 See, e.g., the assertion that “Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors . . . . But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty.” Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 38–9. 19 A Paul Anka documentary entitled Lonely Boy, after one of his songs, was released in 1962. 20 “Aquinas says: ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.” James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking, 1968), 212. 7. The Structure and Spirit of Comedy 1 Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.2.49. 2 The first line of the song says “Largo al factotum della città,” which means “make way for the top man of all trades of this city.” It continues by dramatizing the multiple calls for Figaro’s help in all his capacities; everyone calls for him, and therefore his fortune is sure to last . 3 When NF says that Don Basilio’s song is “innocuously allegorical” and that he has never understood it, he is undoubtedly being ironical. The allegory is

Notes to pages 168–74

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vulgar and obvious: Beaumarchais may have crafted it in accordance with the character of Don Basilio. Figaro is beginning to doubt Susanna’s faithfulness, and Basilio tells Bartolo that Figaro should develop a thick skin and accept his subordinate rank vis-à-vis the Count: “In those years when callow / reason is of little worth, / I too had the same hot passion, / [. . .] But as time and peril passed / Dame Composure appeared [. . .] She led me one day / to a small cottage / and taking an ass’s skin / down from the wall [. . .] Take this, my son! she said [. . .] The storm abated, I set forth, when lo! / I was confronted by a horrible wild beast; [. . .] I lost all hope of defending myself, / but the wild stench of my garment / so robbed the beast of appetite / that despising me, back to the wood it went. / Fate thus taught me / that one can avoid insults, dangers, / shame and death with an ass’s hide!” (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. A translation into English and French accompanied a 1976 recording from Kingsway Hall, London). 4 Horner in The Country Wife is a notorious gallant, who poses as a eunuch to disarm the suspicion of jealous husbands. His scheme to seduce Mrs. Margery Pinchwife involves her impersonating her sister Alithea, putting it about that the latter is secretly in love with Horner. Alithea herself has two real suitors, her fiancé and her true love. After many complications, Pinchwife is reassured of his wife’s virtue as the neighbours all confirm that Horner is a eunuch, and Alithea marries the man she loves. 9. Allegory 1 In the dream that King Nebuchadnezzar has summoned Daniel to reconstruct and explain to him (Daniel 2:31–45), there appears a statue the head of which is gold, while its breast and arms are made of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, and its feet of iron and clay. A huge stone falls from the mountain and shatters these feet of clay. The golden head, according to Daniel, represents Nebuchadnezzar’s own kingdom, which will be followed by an inferior one symbolized by silver, in turn to be replaced by a “bronze” kingdom which will dominate the whole world and will be followed by an “iron” kingdom destined to be divided, because the iron was mixed with clay. Obviously, the allegory is a graphic warning to the king that God will control history. 2 See no. 3, n. 1. 3 Philo Judaeus wrote a number of commentaries on the Pentateuch, including On the Creation of the World, On the Allegories of the Sacred Laws, On the Unchangeableness of God, On the Confusion of Languages, and On the Migration of Abraham. 4 Quæstionum S. Augustini in Heptateuchum, Quæstionum 2.73, in Patrologiæ

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5 6

7

8

9

Notes to pages 174–9

cursus completus, ed. J.P. Migne and A.G. Hamman (Paris: Migne, 1845), 34:625. The fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé (France) is a good example. Thomas Lodge, “A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse in Defence of Poetry Musik and Stage Plays,” in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge (New York: Johnson Reprint Co., 1966), 1:8. NF has modernized the spelling. On Bacon’s discussion of the importance of Classical myth and fable for the reform of science in his De Sapientia veterum (1609) (The Wisdom of the Ancients), see Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge, 1968), chap. 3. “A myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with a meaning attached to it other than it seems to have at first.” John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air, in The Crown of Wild Olive and The Queen of the Air, ed. W.F. Melton (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 118. In Anatole France’s L’Île des pingouins the imaginary incident which sparks the whole narrative, and becomes its diegetic basis, is that a medieval priest sees a population of penguins off the coast of Brittany, mistakes them for human beings on the basis of their appearance from a distance and, seized by evangelical fervour, baptizes them. There ensues a period of controversy on earth and in heaven as to the significance and consequences of this unusual act. Eventually it is decided that since the penguins have been baptized, they must be human. Anatole France proceeds to write a whole detailed history of this humanized population which of course satirizes the contemporary French state, and thus constitutes a “continuous allegory” in NF’s sense. 10. Verse and Prose

1 In Poetics 1.1 (1447a–b) Aristotle describes how various arts imitate, and how they differ by their means, their objects, and their manner of imitation. “But the art which employs words either in bare prose or in metres, either in one kind of metre or combining several, happens up to the present day to have no name. For we can find no common term to apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and to the Socratic dialogues: nor again supposing a poet were to make his representation in iambics or elegiacs or any other such metre—except that people attach the word poet (maker) to the name of the metre and speak of elegiac poets and of others as epic poets” (Aristotle: The Poetics. “Longinus”: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960], 7). The commonality between the arts of language in Aristotle’s text seems to reside in their being arts of “imitation,” like the playing of musical instruments, and dance. The body formed by verse and prose, according to this passage, does not have a common name, it is true; but does this mean that

Notes to pages 181–8

2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9

10 11

12 13

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Aristotle had in mind the entire body as yet unnamed of verbal arts of imagination, rather than a series of poetic genres? In other words, is NF attributing to Aristotle his own universalizing concept? Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Modern Library, 1932), 1:167–8. Letter of 7 February 1755. In Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Birkbeck Hill, 1:262. It is the rhetoricity of euphuism, with special reference to sound effects and antitheses, rather than its satirical depiction of affected speech, that serves NF’s argument here. Euphuism, which Lowry Nelson describes elsewhere in the same encyclopedia as this “highly analytical style which ceaselessly dissects, catalogues, compares, and contrasts” (258–9) cultivates form for its own sake and thus diverges from “pure prose,” meant to describe. Robert Greene, Gwydonius, or The Card of Fancy, ed. Carmine di Biase (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2001), 83. Here, NF appears to accept Montaigne’s own stylistic ideal as Montaigne himself practises it—one of complete naturalness which, however, conceals deep rhetorical underpinnings. Cf. Frank Lestringant, ed., “Rhétorique de Montaigne,” Actes réunis par Frank Lestringant (Paris: Champion, 1995). George Bernard Shaw, “A Treatise on Parents and Children” (the preface to Misalliance), sec. 1, in Misalliance: A Debate in One Sitting (New York: Samuel French, ca. 1914), 8. John Donne, “Nineteenth Expostulation,” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975), 100–1. Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 2, pt. 1, ll. 11–18. The line quoted is from Poe’s The City in the Sea, l. 23. NF refers to the position Poe developed in his essay “The Poetic Principle” that a long poem is a contradiction in terms as poetic intensity cannot be maintained. Respectively the first line of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Hamlet’s soliloquy from Hamlet, 3.1.56, and the first line of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Gargantua, chap. 5, is famous for its evocative language, “disjunctive” in the extreme, to use NF’s term for poetic devices which by way of connotation invite the reader to imaginatively associate fragmented realities. Entitled “Propos des bien-yvres” in French and “How they chirped over their cups” in the “Bibliophilist Society” English translation illustrated by Gustave Doré, the chapter explosively expresses the collective joy of King Grandgousier’s subjects in learning about the pregnancy of Queen Gargamelle, which will result in the birth of giant baby Gargantua. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), 81. The passage appears near the end of “Lotus Eaters.”

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Notes to pages 191–203 11. Varieties of Literary Utopias

1 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 252–3. 2 See no. 1, n. 123. 3 I owe my knowledge of The Diothas, and much else in this paper, to the admirable collection The Quest for Utopia, An Anthology of Imaginary Societies by Glenn Negley and J. Max Patrick (New York: Schuman, 1952). [NF] See John MacNie, writing as Ismar Thiusen, The Diothas or, A Far Look Ahead (New York: Arno Press & The New York Times, 1971), 35. 4 See no. 1, nn. 73 and 74. 5 In Daedalus the phrase is “negatively existential basis”; perhaps the change was made because of the use of “existentially” and “existential” in the next paragraph. 6 Myth and history intermingle in what we know of Lycurgus, believed to be the author of the constitution of Sparta. Herodotus records as history many aspects of Lycurgus’s centralizing activity, while Plutarch signals uncertainties. In any case, the Greek imagination enshrines Lycurgus as the author of the most rigid system of education, and of the strongest state control of the individual, yet seen anywhere. 7 Jowett trans. [NF] See The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Scribner’s, 1872), 2:423–4. This ed. is in NFL. The quotation is accurate, except that both paragraphs end with a question mark in the original. 8 H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 366. 9 In chap. 57 of Gargantua the Abbey of Thélème is indeed an anti-monastery because of its reversal of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in its co-educational rule, and a Utopian replacement for monasteries with its economic prosperity, possibility of marriage, and a personal independence that goes beyond the possibility of free use of one’s own time: the motto “do what you will,” which relies on the Thélèmites’ innate sense of the good, announces confidence in man’s freedom and carries Utopian thinking, fictionally, a step further. 10 A Modern Utopia, 265. 11 In his essay “Of Cannibals” Montaigne uses the manner in which the cannibals treat their prisoners to show the greater cruelty of European practices. Europeans “mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense,” whereas the cannibals roast the prisoner, and eat his flesh, only after killing him. Also the cannibals—unlike the Europeans—engage in war only to show their valour, not to conquer territories. Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (London: Dent, 1910), 215–29.

Notes to pages 207–14

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12 The English poem The Land of Cockaygne (dating from the fourteenth century) is a satire of monastic life; the French fabliau entitled Cocaigne dates back to the thirteenth century. Both represent tongue-in-cheek treatments of the fantasy of a land of wish-fulfilment. 13 A wildly popular character in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner, the Shmoo was first introduced in 1948. The “Official Li’l Abner Website” gives a description of this creature: “According to Shmoo legend, the lovable creature laid eggs, gave milk and died of sheer esctasy [sic] when looked at with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten and tasted like any food desired.”Available at http://www.lil-abner.com/shmoo.html (accessed 4 June 2007). 14 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York and London: Norton, 2002), 234. 15 “We should say that for a territory the size of the United States five millions of people would be about right. . . . the human population of the entire world should be kept well under a hundred millions.” Don Marquis, The Almost Perfect State (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927), 10. 16 Re-Birth is the title under which John Wyndham’s novel The Chrysalids (1955) was published in the United States. 17 In bk. 3, chap. 10 of Sartor Resartus, Carlyle speaks of the two sects of Dandies and Drudges in the nation. 18 “Such was that happy Garden-state / While man there walk’d without a mate / . . . Two paradises ’twere in one, / To live in Paradise alone” (Marvell, Thoughts in a Garden, ll. 57–8, 63–4). 19 Henry Thoreau, Walden (London: Dent, 1908), 181 (chap. “Baker Farm”). 20 Ibid., 39 (chap. “Economy”). 21 “Oh leave off saying I want you to be savages. / Tell me, is the gentian savage, at the top of its coarse stem? / Oh what in you can answer to this blueness?” D.H. Lawrence, Flowers and Men, ll. 8–10. 22 Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), 107 (chap. “The Passport: The Hotel at Paris”). The caged starling makes Sterne realize the bitterness of slavery, which he had just been minimizing. In the margin of his copy of this edition in NFL, NF has written “effective if somewhat over-slick dovetailing” beside the starling’s words. 23 Socrates talks about the night time when “the wild beast in our nature, gorged with meat or drink, starts up and walks about naked, and surfeits after his manner, and there is no conceivable folly or crime . . . of which such a nature may not be guilty.” He later sums up the character of the worst man as “the waking reality of what we dreamed.” The Republic, in The Dialogues of Plato, 2:400, 405 (bk. 9).

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Notes to pages 215–25 12. Letter to the English Institute

1 The English Institute was founded in 1939 with the primary goal of re-evaluating English studies as a discipline. It recommended, among other changes, a shift from a positivist, philologically based approach to a more theoretical one. Columbia University played a major role in promoting the English Institute. 2 The Irish ballad-hero Tim Finnegan jumps up and joins in the festivities at his own wake. He provided the title and a symbol of death and resurrection in one of NF’s favourite novels, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. 3 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper, 1993), 424. 4 “Oh gods! For surely it’s the work of the gods to recognize one’s loved ones!” Euripides, Helen, l. 560. 13. Reflections in a Mirror 1 See The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 17–24. This book is in NFL, annotated no. 1949. 2 See, e.g., p. 125. 3 The reference to Douglas Bush is on p. 62 of Fletcher’s essay. In n. 35 Fletcher cites Douglas Bush, “Literary History and Literary Criticism,” in Literary History and Literary Criticism, ed. Leon Edel, Kenneth McKee, and William M. Gibson (New York, 1965), 6. 4 Jerusalem, pl. 10, l. 20, E153. 5 C.S. Lewis, “The Influence of the Model,” in The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 198–215. 6 Lionel Trilling, “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York: The Viking Press, 1965), 3–30. This was a new and enlarged edition of a book first published in 1955. 7 See no. 1, n. 18. 8 On p. 72 Fletcher comments on NF’s Utopian style and says that “the low seriousness of the Odyssey permeates the Anatomy,” which explores the coherence of the critical world. He also links NF’s style to the Odyssey, contrasting it with the “high seriousness” of the Iliad. 9 “In the long run I am all for classicism: that is what the ‘avant-garde’ is. The discovery of forgotten archetypes, changeless but expressed in a new way: any true creative artist is classical . . . [ellipses in original] the petit bourgeois is the person who has forgotten the archetype and is absorbed in the stereotype. The archetype is always young.” Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre, trans. Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 131.

Notes to pages 225–33

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10 It was Hartman who compared NF to Hurd (130). In addition to his religious writings, Bishop Richard Hurd (1720–1808) produced a series of important literary works. His Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), an instant success, brought renewed attention to the study of medieval and Renaissance literature. Here he says that “This, it is true, is not the classic Unity, which consists in the representation of one entire action: but it is an Unity of another sort, an unity resulting from the respect which a number of related actions have to one common purpose. In other words, It is a unity of design, and not of action.” Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, ed. Hoyt Trowbridge (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), 66–7. An annotated copy of a 1911 ed. is in NFL. 14. Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts 1 NF’s source for this information was probably Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (in NFL), which on p. 62 quotes from Charles Theodore Stelman’s Approach to Greek Art (New York: Dutton, 1960) the following passage: “Even in the distant age of bronze the inhabitants of Greece and the islands held the skilled worker in metal in very high regard. His art was both a mystery and a delight, and he was thought to owe his gifts to supernatural beings around whom many legends grew. There were creatures called Dactyls, smelters of bronze; Curetes and Corybantes, armourers; Cabeiroi, who were skilful smiths; Telchines, gifted workers in gold, silver and bronze who made weapons for gods and the earliest statues; and lastly the mighty Cyclopes forging the bolts of Zeus. All these are vague giants, goblins and godlings . . .” (12). 2 See, for instance, Beowulf, ll. 1441–4: “Gyrede hine B•owulf / eorl-gewæum, nalles for ealdre mearn; / scolde here-byrne hondum gebr den, / sμd ond searo-fàh, sund cunnian” (“Then Beowulf showed / no care for his life, / put on his armor. / His broad mail-shirt was to explore the mere, / closely handlinked, woven by craft”). From Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition, trans. Howell D. Chickering, Jr. (New York: Doubleday, 1999). The word “searo-fàh,” a compound of “searo,” “contrivance, skill, cunning,” and “fàh,” “decorated, shining, variegated,” is plausibly translated as “curiously or cunningly wrought.” “Searo” and its compounds occur about twenty times in Beowulf, usually in connection with weapons and fighting. 3 Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, l. 1, “Many ingenious lovely things are gone.” 4 I am not speaking specifically of the Biblia pauperum, but of a generalization about religious art based on the phrase. [NF] 5 See pp. 210–11 for an elaboration of this idea. 6 Preface to Prometheus Bound, in The Poems of Shelley, 206.

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Notes to pages 233–41

7 T.S. Eliot’s discussion of Welsh and Scottish nationalism, etc., appears especially in his chapter “Unity and Diversity: The Region,” in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber & Faber, 1967; first pub. 1948), 50–66. 8 I have developed this argument further in MC (1967): see particularly the second lecture, “Improved Binoculars.” [NF] Rpt. in NFMC, 27–48. 9 See the exchange of letters printed in the New Yorker, 13 April 1957, 130–6, in which Ford solicits Moore’s suggestions for a name for a new series of cars, which would convey “some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design” (19 October 1955). Moore’s suggestions, including Pastelogram, The Resilient Bullet, The Mongoose Civique, and Turbotorc, were not adopted. 10 “What we have said already makes it further clear that a poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between the historian and the poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse . . . . The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particulars facts.” Poetics, sec. 9 (1451a), in Aristotle: The Poetics. “Longinus”: On the Sublime. Demetrius: On Style, 35. 11 See Introduction, n. 18. 15. Literature and Myth 1 Eliade uses the phrase in several of his books, but see The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R.Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 4: “they are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning (‘in those days,’ in illo tempore, ab origine), by gods, ancestors, or heroes.” 2 Discussing the historicity of Confucius, Waley remarks that “I use the term ‘Confucius’ throughout this book in a conventional sense, simply meaning the particular early Confucians whose ideas are embodied in the sayings.” The Analects of Confucius, trans. and ed. Arthur Waley (New York: Random House, 1938), 25. NF has written “Confucianism” beside this sentence in his copy of the book in NFL. 3 Anglo-Israelitism is the belief that the Anglo-Saxon peoples, especially Great Britain and the United States, are descended from the tribes of Israel of the Northern Kingdom, and therefore inherit the promises, guarantees, and responsibilities addressed in the Scriptures to Israel. See O. Michael Friedman, Origins of the British Israelites: The Lost Tribes (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993); and Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002). 4 In The Republic, bks. 2 and 3, Plato, in the form of a discussion between

Notes to pages 241–57

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17

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Socrates and Adeimantus, repeatedly reproaches narrators, and particularly Homer, for representing gods and heroes in a disrespectful way. Such storytelling is characterized as inappropriate for the young, and a number of Homeric or Hesiodic excerpts are singled out for such criticism. The link with NF’s argument here is that, Plato notwithstanding (but then he too invents myths of his own!), mythical beings cannot be constantly ideal, both because their models in society (i.e. its dominant figures) are usually imperfect, and because the forces of nature often affect human life adversely. See pp. 135, and 244, above. For Browne’s remark that “Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith,” see Religio Medici, 10 (pt. 1, sec. 9). See no. 1, n. 94. See no. 3, n. 1. See no. 14, n. 10. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 19 (pt. 1, chap.10). See no. 1, n. 31. See no. 10, n. 1. Titles of novels by Tolstoy, Zola, Proust, and Faulkner, respectively. In A Prayer for My Daughter, st. 8, Yeats reflects on how he has seen “the loveliest woman born” (Maud Gonne) become an opinionated “old bellows full of angry wind.” Robert Graves’s view of the dying god is summed up near the end of The White Goddess when he refers to “the single grand theme of poetry: the life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year, the Goddess’s son and lover” (369). He discusses the Judgment of Paris on pp. 232–3. NF has marked the passage with a line in his copy of the book in NFL. Ruskin, Queen of the Air, 123. The original quotation reads “nation,” which may be a typographical error. See, e.g., AC, 136–8/126–8; “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” (1961), FI, 21– 38/EICT, 401–19. 16. Welcoming Remarks to Conference on Editorial Problems, 1967

1 John Payne Collier (1789–1883) was an English critic involved with several questionable editions. In particular, he claimed to have discovered a rare Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (known as the Perkins folio) with thousands of emendations in a seventeenth-century hand, apparently based on original editions. Used for his corrected edition of Shakespeare (1853), these marginal notes were later discovered to be modern forgeries, probably his own. Thomas James Wise (1859–1936) was an English scholar and book collector who published many bibliographies and around three hundred editions of English authors. Some of the latter were exposed as skilful forgeries in 1934.

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Notes to pages 258–63 17. On Value Judgments

1 StS reads, “I have nothing new to say on this question, and I must bring it down to the context of professional routine. I might rationalize this context as being existential, committed, and the like, but even here all I can offer . . .” 2 W.H. Auden’s “Yeats as an Example” was originally published in The Kenyon Review, 10, no. 2 (Spring 1948): 187–95. Auden remarked of Yeats’s occultism: “I have a further bewilderment, which may be due to my English upbringing, one of snobbery. How could Yeats, with his great aesthetic appreciation of aristocracy, ancestral houses, ceremonious tradition, take up something so essentially lower-middle class . . . . A.E. Housman’s pessimistic stoicism seems to me nonsense too, but at least it is a kind of nonsense that can be believed by a gentleman—but mediums, spells, the Mysterious Orient—how embarrassing.” See The Complete Works of W.H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 2:385. 3 See, e.g., pp. 216–17, “I think criticism becomes more sensible when it realizes that it has nothing to do with rejection, only with recognition.” 4 StS reads simply, “It may be said that it is not really possible . . .” 5 Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825) was an English physician renowned for his expurgation of classical texts in which he deleted “objectionable” material in order to make the works suitable for a refined audience of all ages. His bestknown expurgated text is the Family Shakespeare, published in 1818. 6 Eponymous heroes of works by Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain. 7 NF’s choice of Yates’s Art of Memory to illustrate his point that there is “nothing in past literature that cannot become a source of imaginative illumination” is indeed relevant on condition that “literature” is understood as part of the wider world of culture. Yates leads the reader through the history of the arts of memory with excitement, in a most personal way, and indeed shows that the objects of her study are sources of “imaginative illumination.” But she does more than convert “dull” and less than “rewarding” handbooks into literary objects; they are about the creative relationship between text and image in the history of culture, and about the psychological and philosophical aspects of memory in that history. Literature is there in the widest sense. 8 Poet laureate Colley Cibber (1671–1757) wrote chiefly for the theatre. He was mocked both in Pope’s Dunciad, a satiric celebration of dullness, and in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. 9 In The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Sir Thomas Browne talked about basic designs such as the quincunx (an arrangement of five objects with four at the corners of a square or rectangle and one at the centre), which might delineate the whole world. 10 I.A. Richards, considering the difficulty of deciding whether one’s reaction

Notes to pages 266–70

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to a poem was sincere or “an accident of fashion,” suggested comparing it with the feelings aroused by certain universal themes such as “the facts of birth, and of death, in their inexplicable oddity.” See Practical Criticism (London: Routledge, 1929), 290. 18. Literature and Society 1 NF attended Aberdeen High School on St. George Street in Moncton, N.B., graduating in 1928. In grade 10 he received 92 per cent in English literature. 2 Joseph Collins, The Doctor Looks at Literature: Psychological Studies of Life and Letters (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1923). 3 The American Little Review began publishing Ulysses in March 1918, but publication was suspended in February 1921, when about half the book had been published. The book was published in England and France in 1922. Publication became legally possible in the U.S. in December 1933, and in Canada in 1950. 4 Pelham Edgar (1871–1948) was professor first of French and then of English at Victoria College, serving as head of English until he retired in 1938. He taught NF his second-year Shakespeare course. Poet E.J. Pratt (1882–1964) taught in the Department of English at Victoria 1919–50. John D. Robins (1884–1952) taught first German and then English at Victoria, eventually serving as head of the English department until his retirement in 1952. 5 Woolf had criticized Bennett and novelists like him for their presentation of a hypothetical Mrs. Brown, whom she imagines travelling in a railway carriage: “With all his powers of observation, which are marvellous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner. . . . They [the realists] have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out the window; . . . but never at her, never at life, never at human nature” (Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown [London: Hogarth Press, 1928], 16). 6 NF’s tone of irony here signals the fact that the MLA, in his view, is very slow in acknowledging new cultural developments, even those intimately connected with its core interests. 7 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, was published in 1948 (Philadelphia: W. Saunders). It was followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, by the staff of the Institute for Sex Research, Indiana University, including Kinsey himself, with the same publisher. 8 The Surrealist exhibition was held in Toronto at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in the summer of 1938. For NF’s article on it in the Canadian Forum, see NFMC, 92–5. 9 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.7–8.

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Notes to pages 272–83

10 The reference is to the concluding sentence of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (80). 11 Aristotle, Poetics, 9. See no. 14, n. 10. 12 Eric Havelock (1903–88), a professor in Classics, joined Victoria College in 1929, when NF began his studies. For a summary of Havelock’s political writings in the Canadian Forum and their influence on NF, see NFMC, xxvii– xxix. Havelock’s A Preface to Plato was published in 1963. 13 The heading on p. 31 of The Gutenberg Galaxy, “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village,” encapsulates a main theme of the book, the retribalization of contemporary society. 14 See Aesop’s fable, “King Log and King Stork,” about the frogs who asked for a king. Jupiter first threw them down a log. When they complained at the log’s inaction, he then sent down a stork who ate them up. 20. The Myth of Light 1 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 3, l. 2. 2 According to Heraclitus, fire (rather than light) is the primary, uncreated substance of the universe. “This world [. . .] has been made by none of the gods or men; but it ever was and is and ever shall be an eternal, living Fire, kindled and extinguished measure for measure” (Fragment 30). The substance of things arises from fire and returns to fire, since everything changes into its opposite and back again in the universal process of transformation. Heraclitus recognizes three elements rather than four: “In its transformation the primary substance passes through three fundamental forms; from fire it becomes water, from water earth; in the reverse direction from earth it changes into water and from water into fire” (Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950], 47). Indirectly the example of Heraclitus does fit in with NF’s argument since according to Heraclitus man’s soul partakes of fire; and also since the sun revives every day, is extinguished every night, and arises again from the mist of the sea, light is indeed the implicit quality of fire. 3 In Sonnet 33, Full many a glorious morning have I seen, Shakespeare speaks of the morning as “Gilding pale streams with heavenly alcumy” (l. 4). 4 Cf. Proverbs 20:27, “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts of the belly.” 5 Matthew 5:15–16: “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick: and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” 6 For NF’s discussion of the apocalypse and resurrection in Blake, and his linking it to the three men in the furnace who walked with the Son of God (Daniel 3:25), see FS, 196/197–8).

Notes to pages 283–95

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7 Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, act 4, l. 168. 8 “O quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight! / The basalt surface drags a jungle grace / Ochreous and lynx-barred in lengthening might; / Patience! and you shall reach the biding place!” Hart Crane, The River, ll. 133–6. 21. Old and New Comedy 1 AC discusses the character types of comedy in the Third Essay under the Mythos of Spring. The senex iratus is defined as the “heavy father” who is blocking the desires of the hero (172/160). 2 Avarice is embodied in L’Avare (The Miser), 1668; snobbery in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman), 1671; and hypochondria in Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), 1673. 3 The Oxford English Dictionary attributes this phrase to Shaw, who first used it in a review entitled “Sardoodledom,” Saturday Review, 1 June 1895. He also used the term in the Saturday Review of 17 April 1897. The French dramatist Victorien Sardou (1831–1908) was immensely popular for his wide range of moralizing plays. Some of them derided contemporary mores, and some depicted famous historical figures, but all were heavily “teleological,” which accounts for Shaw’s sarcastic deformation of Sardou’s name, and NF’s adoption of it in drawing attention to extreme examples of the New Comedy tradition. 4 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie (New York and London: Norton, 2006), 20. The correct form of the quotation is, “to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?” 5 George Puttenham, “Of Poets and Poesy,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2:34. NF has modernized the spelling. 6 Theatre director Mike Nichols and actress Elaine May gained great popularity in the late 1950s with their humorous dialogues satirizing American life. 7 As You Like It, 2.7.139–66. 8 MacBird! was a satirical anti-establishment drama by Barbara Garson based on Macbeth, with a thinly veiled Lyndon Johnson as Macbeth and John Kennedy as Duncan. It was produced in 1966 during the anti-Vietnam War protests and first published later that year. 22. Sign and Significance 1 Tillyard writes, for instance, “It may be surmised that if Milton belonged to the present generation he would have distrusted profoundly the idea that a good deal should be yielded to our subconscious desires.” E.M.W. Tillyard, “Paradise Lost: Conscious and Unconscious Meanings,” in Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. James Thorpe (London: Routledge, 1965),

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2 3 4

5

Notes to pages 296–312

190. Reprinted from E.M.W. Tillyard, Milton (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930), 268–9. See no. 1, n. 46. See no. 6, n. 3. For Spitzer, see no. 1, n. 16. Literary critic Eric Auerbach (1892–1957) was best known for his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953), in which a fragment was examined to yield the vital characteristics of the whole. Letter to Georges Izambard (13 May 1871), in Lettres de la vie littéraire d’Arthur Rimbaud, ed. Jean-Marie Carré (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 39. 23. Literature and the Law

1 “‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, ‘the law is a ass—a idiot.’” Dickens, Oliver Twist, chap. 51. 2 Anonymous review in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, February 1848, in Emily Brontë, “Wuthering Heights”: A Casebook, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Macmillan, 1970), 47. 3 Tennyson speaks of a land “Where Freedom slowly broadens down / From precedent to precedent” (You ask me, why, though ill at ease, ll. 11–12). 4 The reference is to the proceedings following the 1968 convention of the Democratic party in Chicago, where opponents of the Vietnam war organized a major demonstration and were forcibly dispersed by armed police. The “Chicago seven” (originally eight) demonstrators had been on trial since 24 September 1969. Actually, shortly after NF’s lecture, on 18 February 1970, all the defendants were acquitted of conspiracy charges. Five were sentenced to prison and a fine for crossing state lines to incite a riot, and for contempt of court, though most of these sentences were abolished on appeal. 5 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 4:59. 6 NF may be thinking of the remark that “It is a matter of faith that nature—as she is perceptible to our five senses—takes the character of . . . a well-formulated puzzle. The successes reaped up to now by science do, it is true, give a certain encouragement for this faith.” Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Crown, 1954), 295. 7 See n. 4, above. American poet Allen Ginsberg was not one of the seven but gave testimony on their behalf (later published, San Francisco: City Lights, 1975). Blake was one of his favourite poets. 24. The Search for Acceptable Words 1 For student and Nazi demands for “relevance,” see pp. 106–7. The term “neo-Nazi” qualifies the dictatorial peremptoriness of calls for making the

Notes to pages 314–17

2 3

4

5 6

7

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study of the humanities meaningful to society at large and therefore, more particularly, to the present-day undergraduate. The term “relevance” had acquired a very negative meaning for the humanities research community in Canada as it was facing demands from government and the public at large for justifying the budgetary needs of humanities research. Consciously or not, the students whose dissatisfaction NF describes were “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” so to speak, when they failed to distinguish between the endlessly relevant exploration of the literary system in all its dimensions, and mere literary archaeology. In Daedalus, NF added, “I am afraid too that they also abandoned most of the students ill-advised enough to take it.” “Fellowship Lecture: The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” an address to the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, Toronto, May 1962, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 119 (October 1962): 289–98, and rpt. in FI, 151–67 and EICT, 420–35, as “The Imaginative and the Imaginary.” Hermann Lotze, Microcosmus: An Essay concerning Man and his Relation to the World, trans. Elizabeth Hamilton and E.E. Constance Jones, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1888). The work is divided into nine books, dealing respectively with The Body, The Soul, Life, Man, Mind, The Microcosmic Order, History, Progress, and The Unity of Things. These books are further subdivided into five chapters each. Finally, the chapters are broken down individually into smaller topical sections, such as “Forces and their Universal Laws.” The result is a book that appears to deal with vast concepts in an orderly and manageable fashion. NF served as a part-time advisor to the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC), 1968–77. Here, once again, NF takes an independent position, while at the same time appearing to be in dialogue with major trends in Comparative Literature and in literary theory both in Europe and North America. Indeed the multipronged attacks on traditional literary history focused on its use of the concept of influence as a theoretically unsound causal factor for explaining change and innovation in literature. In 1964 the International Comparative Literature Association, meeting in Fribourg, devoted half of its fourth congress to the concepts of imitation, influence, and originality. See its Proceedings, vol. 2, ed. François Jost (The Hague: Mouton, 1966); and even earlier, among many other examples, Claudio Guillén, “The Aesthetics of Influence Studies in Comparative Literature,” in Comparative Literature: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, ed. W.P. Friederich (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 1: 175–92. Barnabe Googe (1540–94), composer of eclogues and translations; Thomas Churchyard (ca. 1520–1604), a wandering soldier and hanger-on of the court, composer of numerous small volumes of verse and prose.

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Notes to pages 317–20

8 Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932); see, e.g., his p. 50, n. 7. 9 The image comes from the “Conclusion” of T.S. Eliot’s The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). [NF] 10 Yeats wrote the preface to Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, trans. H.P.R. Finberg (London: Jarrolds, 1925), in which he confessed to having poor French when he first read the play, which “seemed all the more profound, all the more beautiful, because I was never certain I had read a page correctly” (7). He quotes the line “as to living, our servants will do that for us,” which in the actual translation appears as “Live? Our servants will do that for us!” (284). 11 NF himself shows, in AC, the kinship created between the two authors by their practice of “third-phase” satire: “The gigantic figures in Rabelais, the awakened forms of the bound or sleeping giants that meet us in Finnegans Wake and the opening of Gulliver’s Travels, are expressions of a creative exuberance of which the most typical and obvious sign is the verbal tempest, the tremendous outpouring of words in catalogues, abusive epithets and erudite technicalities which since the third chapter of Isaiah (a satire on female ornament) has been a feature, and almost a monopoly, of third-phase satire. . . . Nobody except Joyce has in modern English made much sustained effort to carry on this tradition of verbal exuberance” (236/220–1). For a study of the similarities in their inventive approach to language, see, e.g., Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, The World’s Words: A Semiotic Reading of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” and Rabelais’ “Gargantua et Pantagruel” (Paris: Alyscamps Press, 1993). In Joyce et Rabelais (Paris: Didier, 1972), Claude Jacquet shows that Joyce jotted down in a notebook many of the words discussed in a secondary study, L. Sainéan, La Langue de Rabelais (Paris: Boccard, 1922), and used them in Finnegans Wake. 12 In 1967, as a result of student unrest, the Macpherson Committee published its Report, recommending the abolition of Toronto’s Honour Courses; they were replaced in 1969 by a “New Program” with a less rigid structure and more choice. The individual college departments at the University of Toronto were amalgamated after the Memorandum of Understanding in 1974. 13 See the sonnet by Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, in which he compares his amazement to that of Cortez on first seeing the Pacific Ocean. 14 See NP, 5–6, 21–2. 15 See no. 1, n. 12. 16 In After Strange Gods Eliot expressed his belief in the value of a settled, traditional society and deplored the effects of individualism and cosmopolitanism on modern literature. NF was probably particularly outraged by Eliot’s advocacy of a homogeneous population: “What is still more important is

Notes to pages 320–30

17 18

19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26

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unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” See After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, [1934]), 20. S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924). NF’s bibliographical survey, “William Blake,” appeared in The English Romantic Poets and Essayists: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Carol W. and Lawrence H. Houtchens (New York: MLA, 1957), 1–31; M&B, 266–89. Between 1957 and 1973 several of the early books that NF mentions without praise had been republished: Arthur Symons’s William Blake (1907) by Cooper Square, 1970; Alfred T. Story’s William Blake: His Life, Character, and Genius (1893) by Haskell House, 1970; Basil de Selincourt’s William Blake (1909) by Kennikat Press, 1972; Allardyce Nicoll’s William Blake and His Poetry (1922) by A.M.S. Press, 1971; and Ernest Short’s Blake (1925) by Haskell House, 1970. The prize for the world’s worst book on Blake is not awarded, but NF does list the two latter among five studies of that period that are “expendable.” John Keats, letter to George Keats, 19 February 1819, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:67. Pauline Kogan [pseud.], Northrop Frye: The High Priest of Clerical Obscurantism (1969). Swift contrasts the ancient poets, or bees, with the modern, or spiders, who boast “of drawing and spinning out all from yourself” and “[turn] all into excrement and venom.” Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, ed. A. Guthkelch (London: Chatto & Windus, 1908), 18. The phrase NF quotes is from Bacon’s The New Logic, bk. 1, aphorism 95, which contrasts the rationalists (spiders) with true philosophers (bees). For the dates of Edgar, Pratt, and Robins, see no. 18, n. 4. Read “seldom,” in view of the award to Bertrand Russell. The word “never” is a word that humanists should seldom use. [NF] NF had such a secretary from 1967 on in Jane Widdicombe. Conclusion to the first edition of Literary History of Canada, C, 351. This Plotinian topos was perhaps what Augustine had in mind when he wrote in the Confessions that God was “everywhere and nowhere in space” (bk. 6, chap. 3). In his essay “Circles” Emerson writes, “St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere” (Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher [Boston: Houghton, 1957], 168). For an overview of the origin of the definition, see William A. Nitze, “Pascal and the Medieval Definition of God,” Modern Language Notes, 57, no. 7 (November 1942): 552–8; and Warren Kirkendale, “‘Circulatio’-Tradition, ‘Maria Lactans,’ and Josquin as Musical Orator,” Acta Musicologica, 56, fasc. 1 (January–June 1984): 78.

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Notes to pages 332–5 25. The Times of the Signs

1 Socrates stated that he believed that the earth is vast, “and that we who dwell between the river Phasis and the Pillars of Hercules inhabit only a minute portion of it—we live around the sea like ants or frogs around a pond—and there are many other people inhabiting similar regions” (Phaedo, 109a–b). 2 Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, 1929–51, had instituted a course for freshmen based on “great books of the Western world” to counter the dominant “progressive” theories of education. He himself was editor of Nicolas Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), vol. 16 of the series Great Books of the Western World. 3 Bacon speaks of Copernicus’s “assumptions” as “the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer.” Francis Bacon, “Description of the Intellectual Globe,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., 15 vols. (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1963), 5:517 (chap. 4). 4 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Dent, 1932), 2:57 (pt. 2, sec. 2, memb. 3). Against this passage in his copy in NFL, NF has written, “same sceptical conclusion as Milton, but more cheerful, and the cancelling out of authorities is a genuine dialectic.” The work Burton refers to is Helisaeus Roeslin, De Opere Dei creationis (Frankfurt: 1597). 5 John Donne, Ignatius His Conclave (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977), 13–14. NF has modernized the spelling. 6 Thomas Campion, What if a day, or a month, or a yeare, ll. 13–16. 7 To what extent can Descartes’s use of the image of the sun be associated with a radical change in the history of consciousness? The sun as source of light and therefore as a symbol of consciousness are pre-existent notions; the question is whether and how Descartes innovates by emancipating consciousness from merely reproducing images drawn from what NF calls “the lower part of nature” (335). In the Third Meditation, Descartes compares two ideas of the sun: one drawn from everyday experience, which makes it appear small, and one drawn from “astronomical reasoning” which makes it appear much larger. This gradually leads Descartes to state that “the nature of an idea is such that of itself it requires no formal reality except what it derives from my thought, of which it is a mode” (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 2:28). There follows a process of distinguishing between ideas which originate in objective reality, and those originating in the self. In the case of ideas of corporeal things, such as the sun, Descartes sees nothing in them which would “make it seem impossible that it originated in myself”

Notes to pages 336–41

8 9 10

11

12

13

14 15

16

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(2:29). Hence a gradually more active role for consciousness in the production of knowledge. Cathects are objects injected with libidinal energy. George Bernard Shaw, preface to Androcles and the Lion, in Androcles and the Lion, Overruled, Pygmalion (London: Constable, 1931), 45–6. This is the second section of the medieval university curriculum, taught after the trivium of logic, rhetoric, and grammar, and comprising arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Timaeus, 29a. The translation is not that of either of those in NFL (Lee in the Penguin ed., and Jowett), but is close to that of F.M. Cornford in Plato’s Cosmology (1937) and the Loeb version by R.G. Bury (1929). Swift published several papers under the pseudonym Bickerstaff satirizing Partridge as a quack, beginning in 1708 with the publication of “The Accomplishment of the First of Mr Bickerstaff’s Predictions; being an account of the death of Mr Partridge, the almanack-maker, upon the 29th instant,” followed by “An Elegy on the supposed Death of Partridge, the Almanack-Maker” and “An Epitaph on Partridge.” Examples from 1968–72 include Fred Gettings, The Book of the Zodiac: An Historical Anthology of Astrology (London: Hamlyn, 1972); Daniel Logan, Your Eastern Star: Oriental Astrology, Reincarnation and the Future (New York: W. Morrow, 1972); Sybil Leek, My Life in Astrology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972) and Sybil Leek’s Astrological Guide to Successful Everyday Living (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970); Edward Lyndoe, Astrology for Everyone (New York: Dutton, 1970); Dal Lee, Dictionary of Astrology (New York: Paperback Library, 1968); and Rupert Gleadow, Your Character in the Zodiac (London: Phoenix House, [©1968]). No. 206 of his Pensées, normally translated “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” This became particularly manifest in French Romanticism. Alfred de Vigny, whose pessimistic vision in many ways reflects Pascal’s anxiety in the face of an infinite universe, writes to a mysterious female entity named Eva: “Vivez, froide Nature, et revivez sans cesse / Sous nos pieds, sur nos fronts, puisque c’est votre loi; / Vivez, et dédaignez, si vous êtes déesse, / L’Homme, humble passager, qui dût vous être un Roi; / Plus que tout votre règne et que ses splendeurs vaines / J’aime la majesté des souffrances humaines: / Vous ne recevrez pas un cri d’amour de moi” (La Maison du berger, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. F. Baldensperger [Paris: Gallimard, 1948], 1:181). Alphonse de Lamartine, in his famous Le Lac, deplores the immensity and inhumanity of time: “Ainsi, toujours poussés vers de nouveaux rivages, / Dans la nuit éternelle emportés sans retour, / Ne pourrons-nous jamais sur l’océan des ages / Jeter l’ancre un seul jour?” (Poésies [Paris: Hachette, 1962], 50). Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1, ll. 286–91.

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Notes to pages 343–55

17 Abraham Cowley, Davideis: A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David, in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of William Cowley, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 2:58 (bk. 1, ll. 447–82). In this and the following quotations, NF has modernized the spelling. 18 Ibid., 2:68n. 34. 19 Ibid., 2:68n. 37. 20 Browne, Religio Medici, 19 (pt. 1, sec. 16). In the margin of his copy NF has written, “God is Man.” 21 See no. 1, n. 61. 22 This is an important aspect of CP (no. 1), but also of the entire theoretical stance as described in the fourth part of the book. It relates to the social function which the poet as mouthpiece of myths held in common fulfilled in primitive societies, but fulfils less and less as formulations of truth increasingly become objective truths of correspondence; poetry needs to return to the earlier language of myth rather than to mimic the myth of progress. 23 Abraham Cowley, To the Royal Society, in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of William Cowley, 1:167–8 (stanza 4, ll. 1, 3). 24 The ode, originally published without a title in The Spectator, 465 (23 August 1712), can be found in Addison: Selections from Addison’s Papers Contributed to the Spectator, ed. Thomas Arnold (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), 471. 25 In Goethe’s Faust, the Prologue in Heaven, in which Raphael and Gabriel describe the cosmos (“The sun proclaims its old devotion / In rival song with brother spheres”), is preceded by a humorous Prelude in which the Director boasts of the marvels of German stagecraft (“We have stars galore . . . . Thus on these narrow boards you’ll seem / To explore the entire creation’s scheme”). See Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), ll. 231–51. 26 1 Corinthians 15:52, “For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.” 27 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 63. 28 For Johnson’s comment on the last stanza of An Ode in Honour of St. Cecilia’s Day (ll. 55–63), see The Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Octagon Books, 1967), 1:440. 29 In the Poetics, 24.10, Aristotle argues that the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. 30 Quoted from The Plough and the Pen: Writings from Hungary, 1930–1956, ed. Ilona Duczynska and Karl Polanyi (1963). [NF] 31 See no. 1, nn. 73 and 74. 32 William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, Prologue: The Wanderers, ll. 1–6. 33 NF refers to Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970).

Notes to pages 358–67

451 26. The Rhythms of Time

1 Dylan Thomas, Altarwise by Owl-Light, Sonnet 1, ll. 5–6 2 Sir John Davies, Nosce Teipsum, pt. 2, Of the Soule of Man and the Immortalite Thereof, in The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Chatto & Windus, 1876), 1:54 (st. 145, ll. 581–4). NF’s modernized spelling perhaps suggests he was quoting from a different edition. 3 As the angel Raphael explains to Adam, “For wee have also our Ev’ning and our Morn, / Wee ours for change delectable, not need” (Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 5, ll. 628–9). 4 Orchestra, in Complete Poems, 1:168–9 (sts. 22–3, ll. 148–61). NF quotes l. 4 as it appeared in Davies’ first edition; later it was changed to “And which indeed is elder then [sic] the sun.” 5 Spenser, Mutabilitie Cantos, canto 7, st. 58, ll. 1–9. In this and the next item, NF quotes from the Cambridge edition (in NFL) of Spenser’s Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1908), which slightly modernizes the spelling. 6 “For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight: / But thence-forth shall rest eternally / With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: / O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.” Mutabilitie Cantos, canto 8, st. 2, ll. 6–9. 7 Mutabilitie Cantos, canto 7, st. 59, l. 3. 8 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 2, l. 911. 9 Shakespeare, Sonnet 124, l. 12. 10 Colin Clout’s vision is in Faerie Queene, bk. 6, canto 10, st. 15, l. 1–st. 16, l. 5. In st. 28 Spenser asks permission of Queen Elizabeth “underneath thy feete to place her prayse” (l. 7). 11 See p. 347, above. 12 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), bk. 9, ll. 468–70. 13 Wordsworth encounters Mont Blanc in The Prelude (1850), bk. 6, and grieves to have a “soulless image” replacing a “living thought” (ll. 523–8). Coleridge in his Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni (1802), invokes the “dread and silent Mount” until it vanished from his thought and he “worshipped the Invisible alone” (ll. 1–16). Shelley describes the mountain’s appearance in his Mont Blanc (1817), ll. 60–4. 14 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 76. 15 Wordsworth, Sonnets from the River Duddon: After-Thought (1820), l. 14. 16 Herod remarks that, “It is a long time since anyone stole the park benches or murdered the swans. There are children in this province who have never seen a louse, shopkeepers who have never handled a counterfeit coin, women of forty who have never hidden in a ditch except for fun. Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course . . . Still it is

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Notes to pages 367–78

a beginning.” W.H. Auden, For the Time Being (London: Faber & Faber, 1945),113. 17 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 26. 18 Ibid., 80. 19 Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, in The Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 195. 27. Charms and Riddles 1 Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre ([Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,] 1972): the comment is only on the title, not on the book itself. [NF] In Beyond Genre, Paul Hernadi concurs with what NF states here—ironically perhaps—about genre theory still being in its infancy; he calls for a not purely classificatory view of genre, but one that would be inductive and hermeneutically effective towards the understanding of the literary work. 2 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, chap. 9. 3 Anonymous, Rats Away, in Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, ed. Kenneth Sisam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 170, ll. 1–6. This is annotated no. 364 in NFL. 4 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 1, canto 1, st. 41. 5 François Villon’s Ballade des Dames du temps jadis (fifteenth century) provides an example of the “ubi sunt” convention with its well-known refrain, “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (Where are the snows of yesteryear?). 6 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 2, canto 4, st. 35, and the preceding line. 7 Anonymous, Erthe upon Erthe, ll. 1–4. See Hilda M.R. Murray, The Middle English Poem, Erthe upon Erthe, Printed from Twenty-Four Manuscripts (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1. 8 Villon, Le Grand Testament, in Poésies complètes, ed. Pierre Michel (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1972), st. 81, l. 3. The phrase translates as “bodies rotten and souls in flames.” 9 Donne’s Devotion 15 (Meditation, Expostulation, and Prayer) is prefaced with the line: “Interea insomnes noctes Ego duco, Diesque” (I sleepe not day nor night). John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Raspa, 77. 10 Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863). 11 John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 7, ll. 216–17. 12 Quoted from Anerca (1960), edited by Edmund Carpenter. [NF] NF reviewed this volume for “Letters in Canada: Poetry: 1959” in the University of Toronto Quarterly, July 1960 (C, 220–2). 13 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, bk. 2, canto 12, st. 70, l. 7–st. 71. 14 NF quotes from the first four lines of the poem; the refrain, in l. 8, begins “cras amet qui numquam amauit,” translated in this ed. as “Are ye loveless

Notes to pages 379–86

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

24 25 26

27

453

or love-lorn? Yours be love to-morrow morn!” Pervigilium Veneris (The Vigil of Venus), ed. Cecil Clementi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1936), 192–3. “With pungent sauces, multiply variety / In a wilderness of mirrors.” T.S. Eliot, Gerontion, ll. 64–5. Poe, Ulalume, ll. 30–8. First Epistle of John 1:1–3, as translated in the American Standard Version of 1901. At AC, 329/309, NF quotes the Authorized Version. Chaucer’s friar, a satirical figure, is said in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales to use this formulaic expression for gain: “So plesaunt was his “In principio,” / Yet wold he have a farthing, er he wente. / His purchas was wel better than his rente” (Prologue, ll. 254–6). See no. 14, n. 2. The riddle, “What’s worse than a woman?” occurs in multiple ballads, referred to by Child as “Riddles Wisely Expounded,” but the one that most closely fits NF’s description is version “C,” an anonymous Scottish ballad titled The Unco Knicht’s Wowing. See The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis James Child (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 1:4–5. Anglo-Saxon Poetry, trans. R.K. Gordon (London: Dent, 1926), 308, 305. This is annotated no. 84 in NFL. The passage is quoted from Ch’u Tz’u, The Songs of the South, trans. David Hawkes (1959); Beacon Press ed. (1962), 42. [NF] Thomas D’Urfey’s The Fool’s Preferment, or The Three Dukes of Dunstable was set to music by Henry Purcell: “I’ll Sail Upon the Dog Star,” in English Songs Renaissance to Baroque: High Voice, ed. Steven Stolen and Richard Walters (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1996), 74–5. Gertrude Stein, “Orange In,” in Tender Buttons (New York: Haskell, 1970), 58. Ibid., 22. Dissociation of sensibility is Eliot’s term for the characteristic shortcoming of poets after the sixteenth century. Having lost the ability to amalgamate disparate experiences, they either thought or felt, but could not do both together. Tennyson, Eliot complained, “ruminates” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 288). Eliot stresses Dante’s “clear visual images” in “Dante,” Selected Essays, 242. In On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), he comments on Milton’s failure in visual images; in his copy of the work in NFL, NF has bracketed the sentences “At no period is the visual imagination conspicuous in Milton’s poetry” (139) and “in reading Paradise Lost, . . . our sense of sight must be blurred, so that our hearing may become more acute” (157). For the judgment on Swinburne as a poet of words, in whom meaning is “merely the hallucination of meaning,” see the essay “Swinburne as Poet” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920), esp. 149. Quoted from Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter ([New York: Simon & Schuster,] 1936)[, 175]. [NF] Taken from Josh Billings, Everybody’s Friend, or;

454

28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38 39

40 41

Notes to pages 386–92

Josh Billing’s [sic] Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (Hartford: American Publishing, 1874), 192. Poem 745, l. 1, in Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber & Faber, 1970). Samuel Butler, Characters, ed. Charles W. Davies (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 306–7. Dickinson, Poem 1463 in its entirety. Dickinson, Poem 1395, ll. 3–4. Milton, Paradise Regain’d, bk. 3, l. 329. Stephen Hawes, The Passtyme of Pleasure, ed. William Edward Mead (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 40–1 (ll. 911–18). NF has modernized the spelling. Not Ideas about the Thing But the Thing Itself is a poem by Wallace Stevens (1964). Williams’s expressions are similar: “No ideas but in things,” in The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (N.Y.: New Directions, 1967), 390; “no ideas but in things,” Paterson, bk. 1, pt. 1, l. 14. Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos, ll. 13–18. See the end of the essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 289–90. See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958), chap. 14. [NF] T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, sec. 2, l. 28. For Mallarmé’s notion that poetry lies “in the image emanating from the reveries which things arouse in us,” and that “To name an object is largely to destroy the poetic enjoyment,” see Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Evolution of Literature,” in Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 21. Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 300. NF is referring to Paul’s famous statement in 1 Corinthians 13:12, translated in the AV as “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” According to a note in the New American Standard Bible, which translates the clause as “Now we see in a mirror dimly,” “dimly” is literally “in a riddle.” The words “dimly” or “darkly” translate ejn aijnivgmati, etymologically related to “enigma.” 28. Expanding Eyes

1 See Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 52–4. 2 “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great mind simply has nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1982), 183.

Notes to pages 396–410

455

3 Letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818), in The Letters of John Keats, 1:389. 4 “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.” Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 17. The whole essay propounds the “impersonal theory of poetry” and makes the comparison of the poet to a catalyst frequently referred to by NF. 5 At AC, 350/325–6, NF comments on “the confused swirl of new intellectual activities today associated with such words as ‘communication,’ ‘symbolism,’ ‘semantics,’ ‘linguistics,’ ‘metalinguistics,’ ‘pragmatics,’ ‘cybernetics,’ and the ideas generated by and around Cassirer, Korzybsky, and dozens of others in fields as remote . . . as prehistory and mathematics, logic and engineering, sociology and physics.” 6 The reference is to the legend according to which Hercules, the strong man, fell in love with the strong-willed Omphale, Queen of Lydia, and for three years led an effeminate life as her slave spinning wool for her. 7 See no. 13, n. 5. 8 Blake, Annotations to Thornton, p. 10, E669. 9 Critical Inquiry reads “who were pagans.” The reference is to the Neoplatonist philosophers Iamblichus of Chalcis (ca. C.E. 245–325), a disciple of Pythagoras and defender of polytheism, and Proclus (ca. C.E. 410–85), who championed paganism above Christianity. Fletcher had quoted Harold Bloom’s remark, in his A Map of Misprision (30), that NF “increasingly looks like the Proclus or Iamblichus of our day” (751). In regard to his being called a neo-Gnostic, NF may have in mind the criticism of his “Gnostic mythopoeia” by Wimsatt, quoted on p. 220. 10 In his Laocoön; or, The Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), aesthetic philosopher G.E. Lessing used the Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön and his sons entwined by a serpent to discuss the separate functions of painting and poetry (painting bound to the moment, poetry depicting sequence and movement) and to deplore their confusion. 11 P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (1959), 248. [NF] 12 W.B. Yeats, The Choice, ll. 1–4. 13 Blake, The Four Zoas: Night the Ninth, p. 138, l. 25, E406. 14 “The Eternal Great Humanity Divine. planted his Paradise, / And in it caused the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms / In likeness of himself.” Blake, Milton: Book the First, pl. 2, ll. 8–10, E96.

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Emendations

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under the sponsorship of for on began for begun (as at 1/5/6) On this basis for On the basis Phenomenology of Spirit for Phenomenology of the Spirit the Principles for Principles (as in source) France sought for France ought “socialist realism” for “social realism” “impossibilities enough in Religion” for “enough impossibilities in religion” (as in source) “Go, and do thou likewise” for “go thou and do likewise” (as in AV) truth of correspondence for truth as correspondence (as elsewhere in essay) gates for garden mature for nature (as in earliest TS) reason why for reason way (as in TS; NF’s letter to publisher points out the error, but suggests “This is the reason was,” which must be a slip) will for shall (as in source) in science that for in science where yet is not private for yet not private droit du seigneur for droit de seigneur The Comedy for A Comedy Une Saison for Saison Donne’s Satires for Donne’s Satire shared for shares (as in Daedalus) socialist realism for social realism towards the Definition for towards a Definition

458 236/3 251/32 270/14 272/19 273/34 274/16 282/24–5 289/15–16 290/38 297/2 303/4 304/38 305/29 327/12–13 339/16 360/22 363/26 367/32 380/21 409/31 416/39

Emendations show for shows (as in The Hidden Harmony) story or theme for story of theme goes for go leads for lead the literary critic for literary critic on his concern for of his concern thought of as “fallen” for thought of “fallen” by a great deal for a great deal (as in source) makes for make socialist realism for social realism has produced for as produced to do for to do do are only for are really only (to avoid repetition) the university for all universities silence éternal for silence leaped for heaped (as in source) deal to for deal of mirrors for mirror (as in source) “Go, and do thou likewise” for “go thou and do likewise” (as in AV) depths for depth (as in source) Bias for Basis (as in letter to publisher from NF)

Index

note: The date given for Frye’s works is that of first publication rather than (as in the headnotes) the date of delivery as a speech. The date of books is that of first publication in the language of the title, which may differ from the edition cited by NF. Abel, 100 Abercrombie, Lascelles (1881–1938): Poetry and Contemporary Speech (1914), 190 Abhorrence, 35, 36–7 Abraham, wives and sons of, 174 Abrams, M(eyer) H(oward) (Mike) (b. 1912), 223 Abstract Expressionism, 222 Absurd, 85, 123 Achilles Tatius (fl. 2nd c. c.e.), 368 Adam, 163, 241, 243; fall of, 20; freedom of, 91 Addison, Joseph (1672–1719), 346; on taste, 48 Adonis, as presiding deity, 403, 404 Advertising, 102, 109, 234; irony in, 92; and propaganda, 160; rhetoric of, 374 Aeschylus (ca. 525–ca. 456 b.c.e.), 131; Prometheus Bound, 253, 276 Aesop (6th c. b.c.e.), 24 Aesthetics, and criticism, 7, 399 Afterlife, 405

Agrippa, Cornelius (1486–1535): Vanity of the Arts and Sciences (1530), 208 Ahikar or Ahiqar of Assyria, 24 Airplanes, 103 Albee, Edward (b. 1928): The Zoo Story (1958), 290 Alberta, 329 Albinoni, Tomasso Giovanni (1671– 1751), 319 Alchemy, 56, 282, 338, 408–9 Aldhelm, St. (ca. c.e. 640–709), 385 Alienation, 85 Allegorical interpretation: as approach to literature, 10–11, 129, 172–7, 252–4, 294–5; of myths, 135– 6, 173, 244–5, 247, 249, 250 Allegory, 171–2, 176 Ambiguity, in poetry, 56, 129, 269, 281 American Constitution, 83, 84, 258 American literature, 262 American Revolution, 347 Anagogic level of meaning, 174

460 Analogy, 56, 140 Anarchism, and protest movements, 95–6, 278–9 Andersen, Hans Christian (1805–75), 167–8 Angels, 346, 347 Anglican church, 340 Anglo-Israelitism, 240 Anglo-Saxons: cultural situation of similar to Canadian, 272, 328; language of, 182, 311; riddles, 383–5, 390 Anka, Paul (b. 1941), 160 Anthropology, and criticism, 9, 84, 397 Anxiety, 28, 85; and concern, 23–4, 80 Aphorisms: as kernel, 26; as prose form, 183 Aphrodite, 135, 242, 244 Apocrypha, 24 Apocryphon, 32 Apollo, 135, 137, 243 Apollodorus (fl. 140 b.c.e.), 242, 401 Appearance, and reality, 29, 109 Apuleius, Lucius (ca. c.e. 125–ca. 180), 292, 382; The Golden Ass, 134 Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225–74), 93, 148, 296; Summa contra gentiles, 38 Arcadia, and Utopia, 206–7, 209 Archaeology, 251, 326 Archetypal criticism, 154 Archetype, 9, 14, 15, 21, 132, 223, 249, 298, 406, 407; from Beattie, 154–5; and folk tale, 328; and stereotype, 225 Archimedes (ca. 287–212 b.c.e.), 50–1 Architecture, 284 Arians, 34 Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533), 137, 172 Aristarchus of Samos (fl. 270 b.c.e.), 332

Index Aristocracy, 115 Aristophanes (ca. 448–ca. 388 b.c.e.): and Old Comedy, 285, 288–92 passim; The Acharnians, 290; The Birds, 289; The Frogs, 289; Peace, 289 Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), 27, 89, 351; on cause, 20; on dianoia, 290; on no word for work of literature, 179, 248; on plot, 285; on poetry, 45, 175, 235, 247, 274; on rhetoric, 44; Poetics, 175, 179 Army, 374 Arnold, Matthew (1822–88), 32, 396, 398; on classes, 114–15; and Colenso, 75; on culture, 48–9, 112, 132–3; as humanist, 62, 69–70; on poetry and religion, 79; Culture and Anarchy (1869), 48–50, 80, 114; Dover Beach (1867), 10, 49; Empedocles on Etna (1852), 151–2; The Scholar Gypsy (1853–54), 49 Artemis, 135, 243 Art(s): contemporary, 103; and convention, 100, 107; do not improve, 344–5; and life, 100; light in, 283–4; and magic, 158; major vs. minor, 228–33; and meditation, 406–7; and nature, 37, 45, 139–40; “pop art,” 160, 269; popular, 232–3, 236; schools in, 391; social function of, 98, 116–17, 401, 405, 409–10 Arts and sciences, authority of, 111– 12, 113 Ascham, Roger (1515–68), on language, 42, 51 Astrology, 99, 405; and astronomy, 338–9 Astronomy, 337, 399; and astrology, 338–9 Athens, 233; women in, 205 Atlantis, 250; Plato on, 204 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907–73):

Index on Yeats, 259; For the Time Being (1944), 366–7 Auerbach, Erich (1892–1957), 298 Augustine, St. (c.e. 354–430), 342; on the Bible, 174; on City of God, 200; on God, 330; on time, 359 Augustus, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (63–14 b.c.e.), 39, 40, 296 Aureate diction, 55, 388 Austen, Jane (1775–1817), 225, 324: Mansfield Park (1814), 368; Pride and Prejudice (1813), 85, 222–3, 302–3 Authority: social, 109–10; spiritual, 90, 111 Automobiles, 103, 354 Axis mundi, xl Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750), 224; as scholarly, 319; Mass in B Minor (1749), 407 Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962): The Psychoanalysis of Fire (trans. 1964), xxviii–xxix, 139–42 Bachofen, Johann Jakob (1815–87), 144 Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans and Baron Verulam (1561–1626), 67, 183; on Copernicus, 332–3; Cowley on, 342, 346; essays of, 27; The New Atlantis (1627), 192, 194; Novum Organum (1620), 333, 336; The Wisdom of the Ancients (1609; trans. 1619), 175 Ballad, 63, 268, 300, 345 Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1856), 129 Barfield, Owen (1898–1997): Poetic Diction (2nd ed., 1952), 190 Barker, Arthur E. (1911–90), 318 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821–67), 97, 152 Baum, Paull Franklin (1886–1964): The Principles of English Versification (1922), 190

461 BBC, 6 Beatniks, 96, 97, 123, 213, 276 Beattie, James (1735–1803): The Minstrel (1771–74), 155 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de (1732–99): Le Barbier de Séville (1775), 163–4; La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), 164– 5, 166 Beaumont, Francis (1584–1616), and John Fletcher (1579–1625): The Knight of the Burning Pestle (pub. 1613), 285 Beauty, in art, 231 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–89), 121–2, 290; Endgame (1957), 292; Waiting for Godot (1954), 289–90 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827): Fidelio (1814), 287 Belief, 74; concerned, 23, 73; language of, 28; the less the better, 355–6; nature of, 75–6; professed and actual, 352. See also Faith Bellamy, Edward (1850–98): Looking Backward (1888), 195, 196, 210 Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold (1867–1931), 267, 268 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832), 303 Bentley, Richard (1662–1742), 256 Beowulf, 229, 272, 324, 382 Berger, Harry, Jr.: The Allegorical Temper (1957), 177 Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), 71, 286 Berkeley, NF at, 5, 100 Bernhardt, Sarah (1844–1923), not NF, 9 Bestiaries, 388 Bible, 23, 26, 135, 136, 188, 249, 279; Christian attitude to, 31; as comic romance, 85; contract in, 108; creation myth in, 402; criticism and scholarship on, 75–9, 84, 256, 273,

462 274; as Great Code, 87; and history, 243, 274; imagery of, 273; language of, 81–2, 380; and literature, 132, 224, 278, 322–3; mythology of, 30, 250, 399; narrative shape of, 273; NF’s course in, see “Symbolism in the Bible” – editions of: Authorized Version, 47; Paupers’ (Biblia pauperum), 437n. 4. See also individual books and testaments Bibliography, 125 Billings, Josh (Henry Wheeler Shaw) (1818–85), 386 Biography, and criticism, 9–12, 13, 253–4, 294 Biology, 264; and criticism, 133 Blacks: as scholars, 395; segregation of, 96 Blackstone, Sir William (1723–80), 303; on the Sabbath, 304 Blake, William (1757–1827), 17, 97, 100, 136, 275, 280, 283, 308, 396, 405, 409, 410; Beulah in, 225; his characters as states, 275; criticism of, 320; imagery of, 13; importance of to NF, 7, 319–20, 321, 395; life of, 11–12; Los in, 365; and Milton, 316; his reversal of traditional cosmos, 347–8, 399– 402 passim, 405; Yeats on, 123 – ideas on: art, 407; Bible as Great Code, 87–8; everlasting gospel, 401, 402; science, 62, 355 – works: America (1793), 366; Europe (1794), 347–8; Jerusalem (Prophecy, 1804–20), 11, 19, 402; The Mental Traveller (ca. 1800–4), 402; Milton (1804–8), 11, 19, 322; Prophecies, 219–20, 226, 265, 275, 399 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75), 85 Bodkin, Maud (1875–1967): Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934), 9

Index Boeckh, (Philipp) August (1785– 1867), 8 Bohemianism, 96 Boileau (-Despreaux), Nicolas (1636– 1711), 54, 345 Bolingbroke, Viscount (Henry St. John Bolingbroke) (1678–1751), 208 Books: and the humanities, 314–16, 320; patience of, 103–4; sacred, 240 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), 116 Botany, as analogy, 369 Boulton, Marjorie (b. 1924): Anatomy of Poetry (1953), 190; Anatomy of Prose (1954), 190 Bourgeoisie, 32, 71; and myth of progress, 59; revolt against, 97, 213 Bowdler, Thomas (1754–1825): The Family Shakespeare (1818), 261 Boyle, Robert (1627–91), 56 Bradbury, Ray (b. 1920): Fahrenheit 451 (1953), 63 Brahms, Johannes (1833–97), 126 Brant, Sebastian (1457–1521): Ship of Fools (1494), 324 Brecht, Bertold (1898–1956), 288 Brontë, Emily (1818–48): Wuthering Heights (1837), 303 Brown, Norman Oliver (1913–2002): Life against Death (1959), 213 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–82), 243; on belief, 76; on Christ, 78; on “easie and Platonick description,” 247; on nature as the art of God, 344; quincunx in, 263; Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial (1658), 182 Browning, Robert (1812–89): A Grammarian’s Funeral (1855), 41, 149; The Ring and the Book (1868–69), 185 Bruner, Jerome Seymour (b. 1915), 392 Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600), 333, 339–40

Index Bryan, William Jennings (1860–1925), 80 Bryant, Jacob (1715–1804), 67 Buber, Martin (1878–1965), on I– Thou, 348 Buddha, 36; did not write, 82 Buddhism, 115, 143–4; Mahayana, 83, 144. See also Zen Bunyan, John (1628–88), 172, 176, 225; The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84), 171, 356 Burke, Edmund (1729–97), 111, 398; on social continuum, 108, 109; on social contract, 208 Burke, Kenneth Duva (1897–1993), 391–2 Burns, Robert (1759–96): Farewell to Nancy (Ae Fond Kiss) (1791), 125; Holy Willie’s Prayer (1799), 91 Burroughs, William Seward (1914– 97): The Naked Lunch (1959), 159 Burton, Robert (1577–1640): Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 293, 333, 341 Bush, Douglas (1896–1983), 220; Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (1932), 317 Butler, Samuel (ca. 1612–80), 387; Hudibras (1663), 185 Butler, Samuel (1835–1902), 62, 139; Erewhon (1872), 205–6 Byron, George Gordon, Baron (1788– 1824), 130, 142, 321; Cain: A Mystery (1821), 137; Don Juan (1819–24), 185; The Vision of Judgment (1822), 347, 364 Caesar (generic), 83 Caesar, Gaius Julius (ca. 100–44 b.c.e.), 40, 75, 78 Cain, and Abel, 206 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600– 81), 66

463 Cambodia, 115 Campanella, Tommaso (1568–1639): City of the Sun (1623), 201 Campbell, Joseph (1904–87), xxix; The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), xxix, 145; The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (1964), xxix, 143–6; Oriental Mythology (1960), 144; Primitive Mythology (1959), 144 Campion, Thomas (1567–1620), 335 Canada: and Anglo-Saxon culture, 272, 328; communications in, 328–9; contemporary culture of as international, 233; garrison mentality in, 329; legal tradition of, 305; NF and, 327–8 Canadian Bar Association, xxxi Canon, 34 Capitalism, and democracy and oligarchy, 94 Capp, Al (Alfred Gerald Caplin) (1909–79): Li’l Abner, 207 Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), 69, 114, 398; on Shakespeare, 9; on work, 210; On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), 9; Past and Present (1843), 201; Sartor Resartus (1833–34), 97, 210 Carpenter, Edmund Snow (b. 1922): ed., Anerca (1960), 452n. 12 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832–98): Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), 10, 120, 303, 324; Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), 318, 370 Castiglione, Baldassarre, Conte di Novilava (1478–1529), 40, 41; The Courtier (1528), 204 Cathedrals, art in, 229–30 Cato, Marcus Porcius, the Younger (95–46 b.c.e.), 43

464 Cave art, 57, 233 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894–1961), 87 Cellini, Benvenuto (1500–71), 228, 234 Celts, 146; literature of, 57, 345; mythology of, 399 Censorship, 85–6, 158, 305 Centrifugal and centripetal meaning, 293 Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616): Don Quixote (1605–15), 76, 116, 243, 289 Cézanne, Paul (1839–1906), 233 Chadwick, H(ector) Munro (1870– 1947): The Heroic Age (1926), 272 Chain of being, 289 Chamberlain, (Arthur) Neville (1869– 1940), 269 Chaplin, Sir Charles (Charlie) Spencer (1889–1977), 290 Chapman, George (ca. 1559–1634), 44; trans. Homer, 175, 319 Character books, 182, 386–7 Charity, 73 Charles II of England (1630–85), 14, 299 Charles, R.H. (1855–1931): ed., Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913), 416n. 33 Charm: and riddle, xxxii–xxxiii, 369– 70, 381–2, 384, 385, 386, 390; varieties of, 370–81 Chartism, 21 Chatterton, Thomas (1752–70), 57, 321 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345–1400), 225, 257, 354, 382; value judgment on, 263, 317; Canterbury Tales, 187 & n. 14 Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860– 1904): The Cherry Orchard (1904), 289; The Three Sisters (1901), 289 Chemistry, 56

Index Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of (1694–1773), 181; letters to his son, 24 Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (1874– 1936), 58 Chicago, conspiracy trial in, 304, 308 Chicago Manual of Style, xxvi–xxvii Children, 24; speech of, 179 China: art in, 229; ideogram in, 370; literature of, 27, 236, 384; Maoism in, 277–8; retribalization of, 98 Chivalry, 40 Christ. See Jesus Christianity, 64, 83, 142, 175, 241, 275, 348; attitude to Old Testament in, 174, 177; Blake on, 402; Butler on, 62; and Classical culture, 43, 48, 116, 246, 247, 322; as comedy, 58, 85, 291; early, 39–40; and Eastern religions, 143–4; and humanism, 39, 40, 45; iconoclastic, 34–5; and Judaism, 31, 145; in Kierkegaard, 88, 89, 96; and the law, 307, 308; as myth of concern, 32–4, 38–9, 71–3; mythology of, 134, 381, 403–4; and other mythologies, 322–3; questioning of, 74, 75–8; revolutionary, 31–4; saints in, 245; and social units, 211; and Utopia, 200, 201, 204, 206 – beliefs of, 31, 85; on creation, 348; on crucifix, 376; on fall, 19–20; on nature, 35; on time, 359 Christmas, 103 Chronicles, Book of, 77, 244, 274 Church: function of, 200; sermons in, 102 – Christian, 23, 35, 49, 361; and art, 229–30; structure of, 32 Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965), 288; oratory of, 181 Churchyard, Thomas (ca. 1520–1604), 317

Index Ch’u Tz’u, The Songs of the South (trans. 1959), 384 Cibber, Colley (1671–1757), 262 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 b.c.e.), 181, 182, 344; and humanism, 40, 41, 43; De Oratore, 39; Somnium Scipionis, 41 Circe, 376, 410 City, 193; of God, 108, 200 Civilization, 35, 37 Civil War, American, 95 Claremont Reading Conference, xxii Clark, Donald Lemen (1886–1966): Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (1922), 190 Classes, social, Arnold on, 114–15 Classic: meaning of, 407; in teaching, 149, 155 Classical age, 33; and humanism, 38–9, 41, 43, 48–9, 149; religion in, 144 – literature of, 8, 84; criticism of, 119; in education, 50; epic in, 190 – mythology of, 132, 134, 345, 399; allegorical interpretation of, 173, 174–5; and Christianity, 116, 246, 247, 322; importance of teaching, 224 Claudel, Paul (1868–1955), 87 Clothes symbolism, 97 CNE (Canadian National Exhibition), art at, 269 Cockayne, Land of, 207 Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963), 248 Colenso, J(ohn) W(illiam) (1814–83), 75 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772– 1834), 8, 52, 54, 264, 365, 396; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), 129; The Statesman’s Manual (1816), 175 Collier, John Payne (1789–1883), 257

465 Collins, Joseph (1866–1950): The Doctor Looks at Literature (1923), 267–8 Columbus, Christopher (1451–1506), 332 Comedy, 116, 222; importance of, 325; structure of, 162–9; and tragedy, 85, 404–5, 410; and Utopia, 204 Comes, Natalis (Natale Conti) (1520– 82), and mythology, 136 Commandment, 28; as kernel, 26 Commedia dell’arte, 286, 290 Commentary, 129–30, 156–7; as allegory, 173 Commines, Philippe de (1447–ca. 1511), 368 Commitment, 109, 110, 113 Commonweal, The, 210 Communications, 355; effect of, 328– 30. See also Media Communism, 94, 278; Morris and, 210; and oral culture, 98; persecution for, 71; and propaganda, 160; and Utopia, 196. See also Stalinism Comparative Literature, xxxii, xxxv, 235–6 Complaint of Deor, 376 Computers, and literary study, 316– 17 Comte, Auguste (1798–1857), 201 Concern, xxvii–xxviii; and anxiety, 80; axis of, xxx; education in, 91–2; enemies needed in, 71; and freedom, 5, 68, 88–91, 117; in the humanities, xxxiii; importance of, 95; language of, xxviii, 23, 27–8, 107, 113, 254–5, 274–5; literature and, 24, 56–7, 61–2, 66–7, 68–9, 70, 87–8, 107, 281; primary vs. secondary, xxxviii; ultimate, 247 – myth of, 67; and art, 116; and Classical learning, 48–9; contemporary, 114; and history, 111; interpretation

466 of, 82–4; in Middle Ages, 38–9; and myth of freedom, xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxvi–xxxviii, 37, 51, 52, 62–3, 73–5, 90; national, 109; nature of, 23–37; need for plurality of, 71–3, 86; in open society, 93–4; and Renaissance humanism, 39–48 passim, 51; and truth of correspondence, 79–82; in universities, 92, 95, 106–8 Confucianism, 33 Confucius (K’ung Fu–tzu) (551–479 b.c.e.), 61, 240 Congreve, William (1670–1729): Love for Love (1695), 338 Consciousness, 117, 335; intensification of, 405; and unconscious, 148 Conservatism: and myth of concern, 29; social views of, 109–10 Contemporary art, 159, 233 Content, 235. See also Form Context, in literary criticism, 8, 13, 15, 130, 161, 259, 298 Continuity, 392; anxiety of, 23–4, 105 Contract: God and, 108, 307; and Utopia, xxx–xxxi, 200, 203–4 – social, 240–1, 402; different theories of, 191, 208; as theory of education, 111; and Utopia, 108–11, 191–2 Conventions: in the arts, 100, 105; literary, 14–15, 21, 105, 116, 122, 131, 223, 248, 298, 299, 369; of speech, 259 Copernicus, Nicolas (1473–1543): significance and influence of, 331–57 passim; Little Commentary (MS, ca. 1514), 332; On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (Latin, 1543), 332, 333 Copyright, law of, 53–4 Cosmology: four-level (traditional) and its reversal, 331–57, 364, 399– 401; and poetry, 140

Index Council of Trent, 93 Counter-Reformation, 338 Couplet, 27, 184 Courtly love, 174, 207, 299, 322 Cowley, Abraham (1618–67): Davideis (1656), 342–4; Ode to the Royal Society (1667), 342, 346 Cowper, William (1731–1800), 137 Crane, (Harold) Hart (1899–1932), 189, 283 Creation: and charm, 375; date of, 335; myths of, 134, 241, 275–6, 282, 348, 402. See also Creativity Creativity (human creation), 32, 253– 4, 405, 409; and criticism, 328, 396; vs. divine creation, 35, 65, 337 Crews, Frederick C. (b. 1933): The Pooh Perplex (1963), 156–7 Crimean War, Dickens and, 302 Criticism, 81, 116, 117, 251, 394; aims and methods of, 118–33; and biography, 9–12, 13, 253–4, 294; and choice of critic’s preceptor, 321; and communications, 5–6; context in, see Context; and creativity, 328, 396; as critical path, 7; documentary, 10– 11, 45–6, 296; evaluation in, see Value judgments; vs. experience of literature, 15–18, 21, 124, 149–61 passim, 221–2, 262, 297; Freudian, 10, 176, 312, 398; historical, 10–11, 12, 14–15, 121, 252–3, 260, 295–6; interpenetrating views in, 216–17; and interpretation of myth of concern, 84; and language, 98; learning of, not learning of literature, 148; and literature, 17, 133, 226, 398, 408; Marxist, 252, 312, 398, 404; “myth criticism,” 238–9, 254–5, 392; NF’s, xvii–xviii, xxxiii, 9, 118, 154–5, 215– 16, 218–27 passim, 327, 392–3, 406; not parasitic, 8–9, 21, 154, 312; as

Index part of larger subject, 7, 280; personal element in, 395; and philology, 393; psychological, 10, 13, 294– 5, 298; Renaissance view of, 47–8; role of, xxii, xxxiii, xxxvi–xxxvii, 4, 66–8, 75, 264, 279; schools of, 154; scientific aspect of, 313, 393; social context of, 14–15, 66, 101; theory of, 262, 278; Thomist, 398; and the writer, 121. See also Reviewing CRTC, NF’s work for, 5, 315 Crusades, 71 Culture: Arnold on, 48–9, 112, 114, 133; decentralization in, 233; humanist vs. Romantic conception of, 70; international, 233; “two cultures,” 65, 197 Cybele, 146 Cycle, 104; in history, 36; of nature, 360, 402–3 Cyrus the Great (of Persia) (d. 529), 145 Czechoslovakia, 115, 233 Damon, S. Foster: William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924), 320 Dance, and time, 360, 363 Daniel, Book of, 172 Danse macabre, 373 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 55, 61, 131, 142, 246, 248, 331, 335, 396; allegory in, 176; cosmology of, 136, 140, 336–7, 339, 340, 346, 399; Eden in, 362–3; Eliot on, 122, 386; as Eros poet, 286, 404; hell in, 403; levels of meaning in, 174; his mythology, 324; Commedia, 138, 159, 171, 336–7, 381; Convito, 174; Epistle to Can Grande, 174; Inferno, 66, 141; Paradiso, 200; Purgatorio, 174, 200, 286, 336 Da Ponte, Lorenzo (1749–1838), 164

467 Darius I (the Great) (548–486 b.c.e.), 145 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82): and new idea of time, 349, 350, 400, 405; The Origin of Species (1859), 57, 180–1 Darwinism, 130, 140 David, 157, 244 Davies, Sir John (1569–1626): Nosce Teipsum (1599), 359; Orchestra (1596), 360–1, 362, 363 Davis, Herbert J. (1893–1967), 322 Day of Jehovah, 31 Defoe, Daniel (1660–1731), 304; Moll Flanders (1722), 252 Degas, Edgar (1834–1917), 59 Deism, 48, 350 Delight and instruction, 122 Democracy, 112; art in, 230, 232; and elites, 50; as myth of concern, 33, 88, 72, 92, 94, 95, 114–15; vs. socialism, 101; and written documents, 30, 103–4, 314–15 Demosthenes (384–322 b.c.e.), 43 Demythologizing, 274–5 Depression, the, 278 Descartes, René (1596–1650), 28, 335 Design: in literature, 235–7; in visual arts, 230–4 Detachment: as attitude to society, 74, 117; in university studies, 95 Detective stories, 26, 234, 303, 325 Deuteronomic reform, 30, 276 Diagrams, in thought, 397 Dialogue, 41 Dianoia, as type of knowledge, 147–8 Dickens, Charles (1812–70), 103, 188, 223, 267, 324, 384; and the law, 301– 2, 303, 304, 308; New Comedy in, 287; value judgments on, 261; Bleak House (1852–53), 142, 302; Little Dorrit (1855–57), 302, 304; The Old Curi-

468 osity Shop (1840–41), 287; Oliver Twist (1837), 127, 137, 287, 302; The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), 302 Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (1830–86): on confiscated gods, 116; and riddle tradition, 386–8 Diderot, Denis (1713–84): Le Neveu de Rameau (1761), 253 Discursive writing, 178, 180–1, 294; Shelley on limits of, 64 Disney, Walt (Walter Elias) (1901–66): Fantasia (1940), 224 Displacement, 137, 224, 252 Divorce, Milton on, 308 Dolzani, Michael (b. 1951), xxvii, xxxi Donne, John (1572–1631), 122, 379, 389; Eliot on, 122, 386; Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), 183, 373–4; Ignatius His Conclave (1611), 334, 348; Satire 4 (1633), 186 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81), as prophetic, 221 Drayton, Michael (1563–1631), 223 Dream, 176, 269, 325; and literature, 253 Dreiser, Theodore Herman Albert (1871–1945), 236 Drugs, 97, 102, 106, 213, 405 Dryden, John (1631–1700), 51, 121, 184; Eliot on, 122; Absalom and Achitophel (1681), 172; Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), 48, 345; A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687 (1687), 349–50 Duczynska, Ilona (1897–1978), 353 Dunbar, William (ca. 1456–ca. 1513): Lament for the Makaris, 373 Duns Scotus, Johannes (ca. 1265– 1308), 42 D’Urfey, Thomas (Tom Durfey) (1653–1723), 384 Dylan, Bob (Robert Allen Zimmerman) (b. 1941), 99

Index Earth-mother goddess, 144, 251, 275, 402 Eastern religion, vs. Western, 143–4 Eastman, Max (1883–1969): Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), 453n. 27 Eden, garden of, 99, 100, 206, 359; in Dante, 362–3 Edgar, Pelham (1871–1948): influence of on NF, 268, 328 Editing, 125; modest role of editors, xxvi, 256–7 Education, 108; and habit or repetition, 103, 106; humanist, 49–50, 149; liberal, 30, 69, 225; Milton on, 20; Morris on, 69–70; Renaissance, 41, 44; and society, 91–5; theory of, 300; and Utopia, 203–4 Educational contract, 111–12 Egypt, 24, 250, 355; Pharaoh in, 31; pyramids in, 28 Eighteenth century: culture in, 48; drama in, 287; new movements in, 33; political thought in, 208; primitivism in, 57 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), 307 Eisenhower, Dwight David (1890– 1969), 278 Electronic media, 316; vs. print, 103–4, 105 Elegiac poetry, 372–3 Elements, four, 141 Eliade, Mircea (1907–86), xxix; on in illo tempore, 239 Elijah, 76, 243 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819–80), 324, 327 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888–1965), 19, 34, 52, 57, 156, 189, 379; as critic, 122–3, 151; criticism on, 125; on difficulty, 389; on dissociation of sensibility, 386, 388, 389; dramas of, 291; on history, 11; on the Incarnation,

Index 389; on meaning in poetry, 46; on poet as catalyst, 396 & n. 4; social views of, 109, 271, 319–20; on timeless moment, 19; on tradition, 14; Yeats on, 123; After Strange Gods (1934), 320; Ash-Wednesday (1930), 379; The Confidential Clerk (1954), 137–8, 291; The Dry Salvages (1941), 128; Four Quartets (1935–42), 19, 56, 141, 363–4, 366; The Hollow Men (1925), 17; Little Gidding (1942), 128, 142; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), 152; Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), 233; Sweeney Agonistes (1932), 291; The Waste Land (1922), 125, 238 Elites, 50 Elizabeth I (1533–1603), 363 Elizabeth II (b. 1926), 83 Elizabethan Age, 233; criticism in, 43– 4, 65, 175; oral culture in, 46. See also Renaissance Ellmann, Richard (1918–87), and Charles Feidelson, Jr.: The Modern Tradition (1965), 219 Elyot, Sir Thomas (ca. 1490–1546): The Governour (1531), 40 Emblem books, 174, 370, 388 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82), 392 Empson, William (1906–84): Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), 269 Endymion, 135, 223, 243 Engagement. See Commitment Engels, Friedrich (1820–95), on scientific socialism, 110, 195 English (discipline): Department of, at University of Toronto, 314; Honour Course in, 318; NF teaches, 272–3; at Oxford, 271–2, 311; in university, xxi–xxii, xxxiii, 8–9 English Institute, xxiii–xxiv, 215, 217

469 English literature, value judgments on, 149 Epic, 25, 41, 190, 230 Epiphany, NF’s, xxxiii Epistemology, 28 Epistle, 41 Equality, and liberty and fraternity, 114–15 Erasmus, Desiderius (ca. 1466–1536), 34, 93, 202; Encomium moriae (In Praise of Folly) (1509), 208; Institute [or Education] of a Christian Prince (1516), 40 Eros, 34, 174; in American culture, 276, 277; cult of, 144; and New Comedy, 291; as presiding deity, 403–5; symbolism, 286; and time, 362–3 Erthe upon Erthe, 373 Eskimos, 242; poetry of, 53, 376, 410 Essenes, 34 Esther, Book of, 72 Euphuism, 182, 190 Euripides (ca. 480–406 b.c.e.), 137, 217, 288; Ion, 138, 291 Eve, creation of, 211 Everlasting gospel, 401, 402 Everyman, 171 Evolution: and ideas of time, 350, 400; and theory of progress, 57, 58, 71 Existentialism, 90, 96 Experience, ideal, 17, 19–21 Expo ’67, 7 Fabergé, Peter Carl (1846–1920), 229 Fable, 27, 171, 172; teaching through, 84–5 Faith: and doubt, 36; and knowledge, 38, 71; New Testament on, 352. See also Belief Fall, the, 343; myths of, 20, 76, 134; and social contract, 108, 200

470 Fantasy, 324 Fascism, 115, 278, 403 Fate, in Greek tragedy, 85 Faulkner, William (1897–1962), 189; Absalom, Absalom! (1936), 249; A Fable (1954), 176 Fiction, 336; allegory in, 171–2; dialogue in, 179; modern, 19 Fielding, Henry (1707–54), 291; The History of Tom Jones (1749), 85, 137, 151, 179, 224, 252, 287; The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), xxvi, 151 FILLM (International Federation of Modern Languages and Literatures/Fédération internationale des langues et littératures modernes), 6 Film: early, 267; and introversion, 103; symbol in, 99, 300 Fire, associations of, 140–2 Flatman, Thomas (1637–88), 264 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–80), 52; Madame Bovary (1857), 305 Fletcher, Angus (b. 1930): on NF, xxiii, xl, 218–24 passim, 391, 405; Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964), 177 Flood myths, 76, 134, 250 Florence, 233 Folk song, 99, 300 Folk tale: archetypes in, 328; and literature, 245–6; vs. myth, 22, 134–5, 242–3, 247, 324; as plot, 235 Fool, 167 Ford Motor Co., 234 Form: and content, 104–5, 133, 224; and meaning, 11–13 Formalism, xxxv, 12, 231, 232, 296. See also Design Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1879– 1970): A Passage to India (1923), 71–2

Index Fourier, François Marie Charles (1772–1837), 195, 201 France, 52; Academy in, 49; Bohemianism in, 96; criticism in, 4; Impressionism in, 52; literature in, 27; Resistance in, 96; Romanticism in, 130 France, Anatole (1844–1924): L’Île des pingouins (1908), 176 Fraternity, and liberty and equality, 115 Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941), 67, 238; as cultural critic, 401–2, 403, 406; and literary criticism, 242; FolkLore in the Old Testament (1918), 250; The Golden Bough (1907–15), 176, 242, 251, 275, 301, 402 Freedom: and necessity, 91 – myth of, 83, 110, 114; critic and, 67; and myth of concern, xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxvi–xxxviii, 37, 51, 52, 63, 68, 72, 73–5, 88–91, 111, 113, 115; nature of, 29–37; poet and, 43, 61, 68; standards of, 81; in universities, 92, 95, 106–8 French Revolution, 208, 283; Blake on, 347, 348 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 67, 86, 97, 144, 153, 225, 238, 253, 255, 398; on dream, 189; and Eros, 276, 405; and Oedipus complex, 141; The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), 176 Freudianism, 86, 97, 102, 113, 136, 213; in criticism, 10, 13, 176, 295, 312, 398 Frobenius, Leo (1873–1938), 22 Frost, Robert Lee (1874–1963): Mending Wall, 128 Frye, Catharine Mary Maud Howard (Cassie) (NF’s mother; 1870–1940), and Scott, 268 Frye, Helen Kemp (NF’s first wife; 1910–86), 229

Index Frye, (Herman) Northrop (1912–91): his reputation, xvii, xxiii; rewrites central myth, 6; his teaching as evangelical, 323, 329 – life of: early reading, 267–8; education, 266–7; eventless, 321 – works: AC (see below); “After the Invocation, a Lapse into Litany” (1964), xxix; “Allegory” (1965), xx– xxi; “Charms and Riddles” (1976), xxxii–xxxiii; “Communications” (1970), 6 & n. 3; CP (1971), xviii, xxiv, xxvii, xxviii, xxxiii–xxxviii, 5– 6; “The Critical Path” (1970), 3–4, 5–6; “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (1964), xxii; “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts” (1966), xxxii; EI (1963), xxix; “The Ethics of Change” (1969), 5 & n. 2; “Expanding Eyes” (1975), xl–xli; FS, xxvii, xxxiii, 321–2, 392; GC, xviii, xxi; “The Imaginative and the Imaginary” (1962), 314 & n. 3; “Letter to the English Institute” (1966), xxiii; “Literary Criticism” (1963), xviii– xix; “Literature and Myth” (1967), xix; “Literature and Society” (1968), xxviii; “Literature and the Law” (1970), xxxi; MC (1967), xxiv, 438 n. 8; “The Myth of Light” (1968), xxx; “Mythos and Logos” (1968), 5; “Myth and Poetry” (1963), xix–xx; NP (1965), xxvi, 319 & n. 14; “Old and New Comedy” (1969), xxv; Preface to Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1964), xxviii–xxix; “Reflections in a Mirror” (1966), xxiii–xxiv; “The Rhythms of Time” (1990), xxxix–xl; “The Search for Acceptable Words” (1973), xl; “Sign and Significance” (1969), xxii–xxiii; “The Social Context of Literary Criticism” (1968), 5

471 & n. 1; “Speculation and Concern” (1966), xxviii; “The Structure and Spirit of Comedy” (1965), xxv; Third Book, xxvii, xxx, xxxii, xli; “The Times of the Signs” (1974), xxxviii–xxxix; “The University and Personal Life” (1969), 5 & n. 2; “Varieties of Literary Utopias” (1965), xxx–xxxi; “Verse and Prose” (1965), xxi; “William Blake” (1957), 320 & n. 18; WP (1990), xviii, xl; WTC (1963), xxi – AC (1957), xxxiii, 216, 293, 318, 369, 404, 415n. 21; on myth, 223; and NF’s subsequent works, xvii–xxv passim, xxvii; not revisable, 392–3; Polemical Introduction to, 220; schematism in, 220–1, 406–8; and structuralism, 392; Tentative Conclusion to, 396–7; theory of modes in, 403 Future, 32, 38, 355 Futurist movement, 55, 159 Galatians, Epistle to the, 174 Galen (Claudius Galenus) (ca. c.e. 130–ca. 201), 41 Galileo (Galileo Galilei) (1564–1642), 332, 333, 339; Milton on, 62, 340–2 Gallico, Paul (1897–1976): The Poseidon Adventure (1969), 325 Galsworthy, John (1867–1933), 267 Gama, Vasco da (ca. 1469–1525), 332 Garrison mentality, 329 Garson, Barbara (b. 1941): MacBird! (1966), 291 Genesis, Book of, 124 Genetics, recent developments in, 356 Genre, 12, 14–15, 21, 131, 223, 248, 298; botanical analogy for, 369; major and minor, 41 Gentleman, 50

472 Germany, 103; Biblical scholarship in, 274; under Hitler, 306; Romanticism in, 48, 130 Ghosts, 75 Gibbon, Edward (1737–94), 145, 296, 368; Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), 36, 179, 181, 293 Gibbs, Wolcott (1902–58), 123 Gilbert, Stuart (1883–1969): James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1930), 119 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836– 1911), 291; and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900): The Gondoliers (1889), 138, 288; H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), 288; The Mikado (1885), 308; The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), 165– 6, 167 Ginsberg, Allen (1926–97), 308 Gnosticism, 34, 83, 144, 145, 406; and poetry, 220 God: City of, 108, 200; as Creator, 282, 337, 352–3; existence of, 75; and free will, 91; and gods, 31, 245; and human language, 82; and time, 359 Gods, 240; allegorization of, 135–6, 173, 175; bad behaviour of, 241, 244; Blake on, 275; development of, 145, 244; dying, 275; and God, 31, 245; and metaphor, 132, 137, 236, 246 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749– 1832), 9, 55, 136, 172, 175; Faust (1808–32), 176, 347, 364; pt. 2, 400 Golden Age, 45, 64, 204, 206, 248, 282 Golding, Sir William (1911–93): Lord of the Flies (1954), 195 Goldsmith, Oliver (ca. 1730–74), 287 Gonne, Maud (1866–1953), 250 Googe, Barnabe (1540–94), 317 Gospels, 240, 254, 275; language of, 27; presentation of Jesus in, 77–8

Index Gosson, Stephen (1554–1624): The Schoole of Abuse (1579), 37, 43, 175 Gothic fiction, 327 Grace, 363 Graduate students, 393, 394–5 Grammar, 32, 81 Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895– 1985), 144; on white goddess, 251, 402; Watch the North Wind Rise (1949), 198, 209; and Laura Riding (later Jackson, 1901–91): A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), 269 Gray, Thomas (1716–71), 321 Great Britain: national character in, 303; NF’s reputation in, xvii Greece, ancient, 332; art in, 229, 283; culture of, 145; influence of, 30, 33; mythology of, 30–1, 241, 242, 246, 248; philosophy of, 279; tragedy in, 85. See also Classical age; New Comedy; Old Comedy Greek Anthology, 27 Greene, Robert (1558–92): Card of Fancy (1584), 182; Pandosto (1588), 366 Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 382–3 Guevara, Ernesto (“Che”) (1928–67), 95 Gurdjieff, Georges Ivanovitch (1872– 1949), 99, 408–9 Habit: and personal identity, 105; as practice or repetition, 106, 361 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider (1856– 1925), 327 Hall, Joseph, Bishop (1574–1656): Mundus Alter et Idem (1605), 205 Hamilton, A(lbert) C. (b. 1921): The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene” (1961), 177 Happiness, pursuit of, 258–9 Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928), 153, 275;

Index and evolution, 130; on God, 349; The Return of the Native (1878), 349; Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), 163 Hartman, Geoffrey H. (b. 1929), on NF, xxiii–xxiv, 218–24 passim Harvey, William (1578–1657), 336, 342 Haussmann, George Eugène, Baron (1809–91), xxiii, 218 Havelock, Eric Alfred (1903–88): A Preface to Plato (1963), 276, 416n. 34 Hawes, Stephen (ca. 1475–1511): The Pastime of Pleasure (1512), 174, 388 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64): allegory in, 172, 176; Ethan Brand (1851), 262; The Scarlet Letter (1850), 176 Hayley, William (1745–1820), 11 Hearing vs. seeing, 34 Hebrew (language), 27, 32, 380 Hebrews (people): development of culture of, 30–2; legends of, 134; religion of, 241. See also Judaism Hebrews, Epistle to the, on faith, 352 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), 35, 88; knowledge in, 38; Phenomenology of Spirit [or Mind] (German, 1807), 38 Hegelianism, 115, 296 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), on language, 215 Heliodorus (3rd c. c.e.), 368 Helios, 243 Hell, 334–5, 359 Hellenism, 275 Hemingway, Ernest Millar (1899– 1961), 189 Hephaestus, 229 Heraclitus (ca. 540–ca. 480 b.c.e.), 27, 282, 315 Hercules (Heracles), 142, 245 Heresy, 34 Hermeneutics, 397

473 Hermes, as presiding deity, 403, 404 Hermes Trismegistus, 43 Hernadi, Paul (b. 1936): Beyond Genre (1972), 369 Hesiod (8th c. b.c.e.), 25, 135, 173, 246 Heywood, Thomas (ca. 1574–1641), 120 Hieroglyphics, 370 Hilton, James (1900–54): Lost Horizon (1933), 207 Hinduism, 33, 71, 143; mythology of, 134 Hinks, Roger Packman (1903–63): Myth and Allegory in Ancient Art (1939), 177 Hippies, 55, 96, 97, 276 History, 27; as concerned subject, 254; cycles in, 36; in fiction, 367–8; Greek basis of, 30; Marxist view of, 110; and myth, 239–40; and poetry, 45, 274; progressive view of, 57–9; theories of, 296; writing of, 78. See also Criticism, historical Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 269, 289, 306, 319, 320 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), 342; on social contract, 191 Hoffmann, E(rnst) T(heodor) A(madeus) (1776–1822), 141 Hofstader, Richard: Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), 419n. 67 Holy Spirit, 142 Homer (8th c. b.c.e.), 14, 22, 25, 41, 43, 44, 54, 57, 79, 145, 173, 175, 241, 246, 272, 276, 299, 345; authority of, 31; rhythm of, 277; style of, 25, 26; Iliad, 229, 306, 341; Odyssey, 135–6, 146, 176, 244, 292 Homosexuality, 395 Honig, Edwin (b. 1919): Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959), 177 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–89),

474 87; on inscape, 19; on overthought and underthought, 46, 281; rhythm in, 186–7 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 b.c.e.), 40; criticism of, 294 Housman, A(lfred) E(dward) (1859– 1936), 119, 184, 259 Houston, Texas, 196 Hudson, William Henry (1841–1922): A Crystal Age (1887), 209–10 Hugo, Victor Marie (1802–85), 142; La Fin de Satan (1886), 137 Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) (1883– 1917), 52 Humanism, xxxiv, 59; educational theory of, 48–50, 68–70, 149; and social concern, 60–1 – Renaissance, 37, 332, 393; and myth of concern, 39–48 passim, 51 Humanities, 50, 263, 396; and concern, xxxiii–xxxiv; nature of research in, 310–30; role of, xl; and sciences, 197–8, 393–4; and social sciences, 330, 356, 393 Humours (four), theory of, 141, 336 Hurd, Richard (1720–1808): Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), 225–6 & n. 10 Huss, John (ca. 1369–1415), 146 Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894–1963): Ape and Essence (1948), 201; Brave New World (1932), 37, 195 Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–95), 139 Hymns, 247, 374 Hyponoia, 135–6, 173, 244–5 Iamblichus of Chalcis (ca. c.e. 245– 325), 406 Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906), 172, 288; Peer Gynt (1867), 176 I Ching, 99 Iconoclasm, 34

Index Identity, 56, 140; recovery of, 20; threats to personal, 105–6; and variety, 18–19 Ideology, as myth of concern, 76 Idolatry, 34 Idyll, 36 Illusion, in drama, 168–9 Imagery, 128, 369; and meaning, 47; structure of, 13–15, 298 Imagination, 64, 68, 70, 116, 117; and concern, 79; and freedom, 90; vs. imaginary, 198; Shelley on, 66 Imagism, 189, 386 Impressionism, 52, 284, 387 Incarnation, 366 – of Jesus, 10, 366, 400; Eliot on, 363, 366, 389 India, 250, 291; caste system in, 201; religion in, 355–6 Indians, North American, 100 Individual, and society, 113 Industrial Revolution, 209, 353; effect on art, 230 Influence, nature of in literature and scholarship, 316–21 Innis, Harold Adams (1894–1952), 328–9; The Bias of Communication (1951), 416n. 346 Inquisition, 333 Intentional fallacy, 121 International style, 233 Interpenetration, in criticism, 216–17, 398 Introversion, and technology, 102–3 Ionesco, Eugène (1909–94), 225, 289 Ireland, 233, 328; National Theatre in, 123 Irony: in advertising, 92; in literature, 36, 85, 91, 116, 163, 248, 249; as modern, 261 Isaiah, Book of, 77 Islam, 71, 73, 83, 163, 240, 404; vs.

Index Eastern religions, 143; Koran in, 380 Israel, 163; as powerless kingdom, 31 Italy, literature in, 236; modern art in, 159; NF in, 5, 6 James I (1566–1625), 367, 389 James, Epistle of, 273 James, Henry (1843–1916), 156, 158, 292, 324, 328; The Golden Bowl (1904), 176 Japan, poetry in, 27 Jargon, 119 Jefferies, (John) Richard (1848–87): After London (1885), 209 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826), 55, 95, 96 Jehovah, 275 Jesus, 34, 143, 334, 375; Blake on, 402; did not write, 82; historical existence of, 77–8; life of, 40, 383 – teaching of, 283; on marriage, 308; through parable, 85 Jews, 73; persecution of, 72 Job, 410 – Book of, 77, 243, 274, 307, 375 John: First Epistle of, 31, 380; Gospel according to, 275 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), 264, 350, 396; on Chesterfield, 24; Eliot on, 122; Letter to Chesterfield, 181–2; Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), 85 Jonah, 76, 141, 216, 247 Jonson, Ben (1572–1637), 124, 234, 319; humour theory of, 165, 286, 287; Every Man out of His Humour (1599), 289; Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611), 389; The Sad Shepherd (1641), 216 Joseph (New Testament), 286 Josephus, Flavius (ca. c.e. 37–100), 145

475 Journalism, 234 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882–1941), 19, 101, 156, 319, 321; criticism on, 119, 125; and Rabelais, 318; Finnegans Wake (1939), 9, 19, 157, 189, 318, 385–6; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 161; Ulysses (1922), 125, 176, 188, 267–8, 305, 312 Judaeo-Christian: mythology, 23; tradition, 247 Judaism, 83, 173, 275; and Christianity, 145, 174; and Eastern religions, 143; and the law, 35, 307; as revolutionary, 31–2, 404; and scholarship, 395. See also Hebrew culture Juhász, Ferenc (b. 1960), 353 Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus) (ca. c.e. 331–63), 83 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961), 410; on archetypes, 406, 408; as cultural critic, 406; NF and, xxix, 9, 155; Psychology and Alchemy (1944; trans. 1953), 408 Jungian criticism, 10, 176, 231, 295 Juno, 231 Jupiter, 245, 275 Justinian I (Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus) (ca. 482–565), 145 Kabbalism, 338 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), 176; as prophetic, 221; The Trial (1937), 306–7 Kalidasa (fl. 5th c. c.e.), 235; Sakuntala, 291 Kandinsky, Vasily (Wassily) (1866– 1944), 284 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 113; Critique of Pure Reason (1781), 7, 108 Keats, John (1795–1821), 52, 121, 136, 223, 319, 386; on life as allegory, 321; and Milton, 316; on poet’s lack

476 of identity, 396; value judgments on, 125; Endymion (1818), 124, 176, 248; Ode to Autumn (1820), 137; Ode on Melancholy (1820), 130; Ode to a Nightingale (1820), 137, 249; Ode to Psyche (1820), 137, 249 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (1917–63), 278 Kennedy, Robert Francis (Bobby) (1925–68), 278 Kenning, 25 Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630), 332, 338, 340 Kernels, 26, 369 Kerouac, Jack (Jean Louis) (1922–69), 213 Kettle, Arnold Charles (1916–86), xxvi, 151 & n. 6 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55), 274; on aesthetic attitude, 54, 106, 116; and Christianity, 33, 96; his either/or dilemma, 88–9, 90, 152 Kings, Book of, 244 Kinsey, Alfred C. (1894–1956): NF meets, 269; Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), 269 Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936): If— (1895), 55 Knight, G(eorge) Wilson (1897–1985), influence of on NF, 318–19 Knowledge, 330; and continuous prose, 27; and faith, 38, 71; and value judgments, 125, 219, 259, 260, 264; and vision, 75; and wisdom, 147–8 Kogan, Pauline [pseud.]: Northrop Frye: The High Priest of Clerical Obscurantism (1969), 323 Koran, 24, 136, 188; and Arabic language, 380 Krieger, Murray (b. 1923), xxii, xxiv, 258, 260

Index Land of Cockayne, 207 Langland, William (ca. 1330–ca. 1400), 121 Language: humanist attitude to, 42; philosophy of, 397 – types of, xxi; descriptive vs. literary, 37–8, 39, 44, 71, 294; poetic, 11, 12. See also Speech; Words Lanier, Sidney (1842–81): The Science of English Verse (1880), 190 Last Judgment, 31, 142, 307 Latin, 27, 40; and English, 388. See also Classical age Law, 23, 64, 84; and commandment, 26; in literature, 301–9; and order, 306 – Biblical, 35, 307; Christian attitude to, 174, 308 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885– 1930), 189; primitivism in, 61; as prophetic, 221; sex in, 213; on technology, 355; Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), 61; Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), 133, 213, 305; The Plumed Serpent (1926), 61, 176; The White Peacock (1911), 213 Leavis, F(rank) R(aymond) (1895– 1978), xxiv, 151; as “aesthetic” critic, 152 Le Cat, Claude Nicolas (1700–68), 142 Legend: and literature, 246; vs. myth, 22, 242–3, 247, 324 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924), 55, 82 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81): Laokoön (1766), 407 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (b. 1908), 99, 398 Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (1898–1963): on discarded model, 220, 399; The Allegory of Love (1936), 123, 177 Lewis, (Harry) Sinclair (1885–1951), 267

Index Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (1882– 1957), 52; on dithyrambic spectator, 52, 98; social views of, 320 Leyburn, E.D.: Satiric Allegory: Mirror of Man (1956), 177 Liberalism, 33, 34; and myth of freedom, 29; NF and, xxxiv Liberty: Classical, 43; and equality and fraternity, 114–15; Mill on, 112; Milton on, 43, 52–3 Libraries, stocking of, 326–7 Light, myth of, 282–4 Lincoln, Abraham (1809–65), 55, 95; Gettysburg Address (1863), 181 Linear vs. simultaneous apprehension, 103–4; in reading, 15–18, 128, 297 Linguistics, 312; and criticism, 398 Linus, 43 Literal meaning: common use of term re literature, 8, 16, 46; as first level of interpretation, 174 Literature, 20, 21, 84, 216, 390; and the Bible, 322–3; boundaries of, 178–9; built out of other literature, 131; and concern, 66–7, 68–9, 70, 87–8, 107, 113; convention in, see Convention; and criticism, 7, 17, 121, 133, 226, 398, 408; design in, 235–7; does not improve, 67; escape, 18; experience of as precritical, 124, 148–61 passim, 222, 262, 297; and history, 11; history of, xxxv, 14–15, 224–5, 298, 312–13; as hypothetical, 293; and ideology, 158–9; influence in, 316–21; law in, 301–9; and life, 117; meaning in, 8, 9, 11, 16 (see also Poetry); moral aspect of, 78–9; and music, 370; and myth/mythology, 7, 22, 116, 132, 134, 136–8, 141, 223, 245–50, 252, 336, 367; no word for work of, 179, 248; pastness and

477 presence of, 68, 121–2, 132, 260–2, 295; personal authority in, 394–5; popular, 224, 326–7; and religion, 323; representation in, 407; response to, 17–21, 224; and the ruling class, 230; social function of, 225, 266–79 passim; as total order, 15, 87, 130, 132, 138, 222–4, 299; and vision, 89; and visual arts, 234–5, 370 – teaching of, 394; aim of, 236–7, 265; as coherent structure, 224, 323; as criticism, 148, 221; paradox of, 155– 6, 157; poetry central to, 299–300; theory of, 99; and total verbal experience of student, 157–8, 160, 325–6. See also Criticism; Imagination; Modern literature; Poetry; Reading Liu Shao-chi (1895–1969), 34 Locke, John (1632–1704), 111; Blake on, 62; on social contract, 191 Lodge, David (b. 1935), xvii, 175 Logos: Heraclitus on, 282; and mythos, 280–1 London, 233 Longus (3rd c. c.e.), 368 Lord, Albert Bates (1912–91): The Singer of Tales (1960), 416n. 34 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann (1817–91): Microcosmus (1869; trans. 1885), 315 Louis XIV (1638–1715), 335 Louis XVI (1754–93), 165 Love, 375; poetry of, 34 Lowell, Amy Lawrence (1874–1925), 386; Lilacs (1925), 189 Lucian (ca. c.e. 120–80), 292 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (ca. 99–55 b.c.e.), 36 Luke, Gospel according to, 82 Lullaby, 372 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 93; on the privy, 10

478 Lydgate, John (ca. 1370–ca. 1451), 120, 263 Lyly, John (ca. 1554–1606), 223 Lyric, 27 Maccabees, 145 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527): The Prince (1532), 204 Machinery, 354 McLane, Paul E.: Spenser’s “Shepheardes Calender” (1961), 177 McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (1911– 80), 27, 100, 328; determinism in, 12–13, 297; on linear vs. simultaneous media, 16, 103–4, 297–8; on retribalizing of society, 277, 278; The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), 12–13, 297 McLuhanism, 6, 315 MacNie, John (pseud. Ismar Thiusen) (1836–1909): The Diothas (1883), 196–7 Macpherson, (Jean) Jay (b. 1931), 239 McRobbie, Kenneth (b. 1929), 353 Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius (5th c. c.e.), 344 Macrocosm and microcosm, 334–5, 344 Magellan, Ferdinand (ca. 1480–1521), 332 Magic, 25, 56, 158, 338; and charm, 370–81 passim, 390, 405 Mailer, Norman Kingsley (1923– 2007), 213 Maine, 303 Majority, and minority, 112 Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842–98), 19, 52; on poetry, 389 Mandala, 406, 407 Maoism, 323 Mao Tse-tung (or Zedong) (1893– 1976), 55, 98, 277–8

Index Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (c.e. 121– 80), 32 Marcuse, Herbert (1898–1979), 107; Eros and Civilization (1955), 213 Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973), 71; The Degrees of Knowledge (1937), 148 Mark, Gospel according to, 145 Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93), 119 Marmion, Shackerley (1603–39), 264 Marquis, Don (1878–1937): The Almost Perfect State (1927), 209 Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1280–1342): Defensor Pacis, 36 & n. 45 Martianus Capella (Martianus Minneus Felix Capella) (fl. c.e. 480): The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 174 Marvell, Andrew (1621–78), 184; Eliot on, 122; The Garden (1681), 211 Marx, Karl (1818–83), 34, 35, 97, 225, 256, 276, 296, 404, 405; and Prometheus, 276; Communist Manifesto (1848), 55, 69, 79; Theses on Feuerbach (1932), 35 Marxism, 33, 36, 53, 55, 95, 96, 115, 278–9, 394, 405; and Christianity, 33–4, 73; and democracy, 101; and Freudianism, 213; on ideology, 76; as myth of concern, 71, 72, 74, 82–3, 88, 114, 115; and myth of progress, 59; mythology of, 403–4; scientific, 38, 110; study of, 92; and technology, 353; theory of art and literature in, 11, 12, 51, 231–2, 270–1, 296–7; and Utopia, 195, 209. See also Socialism Marxist criticism, 312, 398, 404 Mary, Virgin, 286 Masque, 234 Massinger, Philip (1583–1640),18 Mathematics, 28, 337; Greek basis of, 30; as language of science, 393

Index Matthew, Gospel according to, 77, 82 May, Elaine (b. 1932), 290 Meaning: centrifugal vs. centripetal, 293–4; levels of, 174; poetic (literary), 8, 9, 11, 13, 16, 46–7, 86, 280–1 Media, mass: McLuhan on, 12 –13, 16, 277, 297; resistance to, 101–4 Meditation, 405, 406–7 Medium, and message, 104–5 Medusa, 144 Melodrama, 261 Melville, Herman (1819–91), 156, 235, 255; Billy Budd (pub. 1924), 262; Moby Dick (1851), 10, 142, 176 Memory: two kinds of, 105–6; and writing, 30 Menander (ca. 343–291 b.c.e.), 164, 290 Merton College, NF at, 6 Mesopotamia, 24 Metamorphosis, 410 Metaphor, 56, 132, 137, 140, 269–70; as principle of design, 236; significance of in thought, 397–8 Metaphysical poetry, 389 Methodism, 33 Micah, 77 Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti) (1475–1564), 228–9 Middle Ages, 140, 238, 255, 267; bestiaries in, 388; cathedrals of, 283; chivalric ring in, 40; Christianity in, 32; cosmology in, 331, 339, 347; faith in, 352; idealization of, 44; levels of meaning in, 174; love poetry in, 286; myth of concern in, 38–9, 254–5; Virgil in, 39 Middle English, 272, 311 Mill, John Stuart (1806–73): on liberty, 112; on social contract, 191

479 Millennium, 200, 335, 350 Miller, Arthur (1915–2005): Death of a Salesman (1949), 163 Miller, Henry (1891–1980), 213 Miller, Walter M. (1923–96): A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), 209 Milton, John (1608–74), 65, 68, 121, 156, 205, 246, 248, 253, 282, 286, 360, 361, 362, 365, 396; and Blake, 322; cosmology of, 399; on divorce, 308; on education, 20; Eliot on, 123, 386; influence of, 316; on language, 42, 51; language of, 388; on liberty, 43, 52–3; life of, 12; his mythology, 324; NF teaches, 318; on role of poet, 52– 3; value judgments on, 120, 150, 151; Areopagitica (1644), 85, 87, 158; Comus (prod. 1634; pub. 1637), 377– 8; Lycidas (1638), 11, 131–2; Nativity Ode (On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity) (1645), 129 – Paradise Lost (1667), 9, 17, 66, 76, 88, 99, 122, 133, 136, 138, 159, 187 & n. 14, 256, 273, 295, 355; cosmology of, 340–2; on creation, 375; Galileo in, 62; God in, 127; speeches of Raphael and Michael in, 85 Mind, models of, 112–13 Mithraism, 144, 146 MLA, 259, 262, 269; NF at, xviii–xix, xxiv, 391 Mob, 73 Model world, 20–1, 36, 64, 68 Modern age: arts in, 52; communication in, 101; ghastliness of, 36 Modern literature: alienated writers in, 61; characteristics of, 19; perverse writers in, 54 Mohammed (ca. 570–ca. 632), 143; did not write, 82 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622–73): comedies of, 164, 165,

480 286, 287; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1671), 165, 169 Monasticism, and Utopia, 201 Monotheism, imperial vs. revolutionary, 31 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533– 92), 182; on cannibals, 203 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de (1689–1755), 208 Moon: journeys to, 194; landing on, 28; power over, 379 Moore, Marianne Craig (1887–1972), 234 Morality, 64 Moral level of meaning, 174 More, Sir Thomas, St. (1478–1535): Utopia (1516), 111, 112–13, 192–204 passim, 209 Morgan, C(onwy) Lloyd (1852–1936), 71 Mormonism, 240 Morris, William (1834–96): on art, 230, 233; on education, 69–70; on London, 354; on technology, 355; on work, 69; News from Nowhere (1891), 69–70, 195, 210–11, 233 Moses, 137, 143, 240, 286 Moses, Anna Mary (“Grandma Moses”) (1860–1961), 232 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756– 91), 131; Don Giovanni (1787), 54, 106; The Marriage of Figaro (1786), 164–5, 166, 290; Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter), 407 Murasaki, Shikibu (978–ca. 1031), 235 Murry, John Middleton (1889–1957), 151 Musaeus, 43 Music, 16, 337; as abstract art, 235; Baroque, 25–6; classics in, 407; form

Index in, 223; and literature, 370; rock, 102; of the spheres, 344, 360 Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945), 61, 320 Mysticism, 144, 322 Myth/Mythology, 28, 35, 171; allegorical interpretation of, 135–6, 173, 174–6; bibliography of, 238–9; Campbell on, 143–6; and concern, 254–5; development of, 22–3, 134–5; and folk tale, 324; importance of, 325; as interdisciplinary, 330; interpretation of, 250–2; language of, 78, 274–5; and literature, 7, 22, 116, 132, 134, 136–8, 141, 223, 236, 245–50, 252, 336, 367; nature of, 239–45; NF on, xxvii–xxxiii; open and closed, 72–3, 90, 92–4, 106–8; and projection, 227; and ritual, 381; and science, xxxix, 65, 336–57 passim; social, 93–4, 108, 225; students of, 67. See also Cosmology Mythological universe, 381 Mythos, and logos, 280–1. See also Plot Narcissus, 245, 247 Narrative, 369; and causality, 81 Nash, Ogden (1902–71), 186 National Council of Teachers of English, xxi Nationalism, 109 Nature: Christian attitude to, 35; light in, 283; and mankind, 28, 35, 37, 45, 335; as mother, 275; Romantic view of, 365; and society, 208–9; two levels of, 167 Nazis: may love art, 409–10; and relevance, 106–7; resistance against, 96 Nazism, 73, 83, 115, 403 Neanderthal man, 58 Nebuchadnezzar, 283

Index Negley, Glen Robert (1907–81), and J. Max Patrick (1911–96): The Quest for Utopia (1952), 434n. 3 Neoplatonism, 155 Neptune, 246 New Comedy, 137; as genre, 285–92 passim New Criticism, xxiii, xxxv, xxxvi, 12, 14, 150, 269, 312, 392; difficulties of, 12, 15–16, 296–8 Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801–90), 49, 398; on knowledge, 112; on liberal theology, 75 Newspapers, 16 New Testament, 24; and Old Testament, 77–8, 174, 177 Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), 48, 55, 220, 332, 339, 345; and the Bible, 340; Blake on, 62, 347–8; and new idea of space, 364, 400, 405; and poetry, 55–6 New Yorker, 123, 234 Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), 389 Nichols, Mike (b. 1931), 290 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844– 1900), 183; on eternal recurrence, 403; Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883– 92), 184 Nineteenth century, 114; criticism in, 9, 149, 294; drama in, 287–8; educational theory in, 112; history in, 58– 9; nationalist myths in, 109; philosophy in, 38; poetry in, 338, 339, 356; protest movements in, 96; Utopia in, 193, 195, 201, 209–10 Noah: ark of, 76, 241; flood of, 247 Nobel Prize, 328 Nominalism, 39 Norse: literature, 57, 345; mythology, 399 North America, universities in, 9 Nous, 147–8

481 Nouvelle critique, xxxv Novel, historical, 367–8 Objectivity, 95; impossibility of, 81 Obscenity, 98; censorship of, 305 Occultism: Blake and, 322; and literature, 56, 140, 220, 338, 406 Odysseus, 22 Oedipus, 242, 383; complex, 141 Old Comedy, as genre, 285, 288–92 Old English: language, 9, 272; literature, 311, 324; rhythm in, 187. See also Anglo-Saxon Old Testament, 24, 30, 135, 173, 235, 242–3, 244, 345; history in, 76–7; and New Testament, 77–8, 174, 177 Ong, Walter J. (1912–2003): The Presence of the Word (1967), 416n. 34 Oracle, 27, 30, 32; and wit, xxxiii, 381 Oracular prose, 27, 84, 188 Oral culture, 24–7, 276–7, 345; modern revival of, 98–101, 103–4, 279, 300; poetry of, 25, 54, 272 Oratory, 374; and tradition of freedom, 43; in humanism, 39; in prose, 181–2 Orc, 275 Origen (ca. c.e. 185–ca. 254), 34 Ormond, Thomas Stewart (1846– 1923): English Metrists (1921), 190; A Study of Metre (1903), 190 Orpheus, 43, 56 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903–50): 1984 (1949), 37, 81, 195, 198, 201, 306, 355 Ossian (James Macpherson) (1736– 96), 57, 183, 321 Ouspensky, Peter Demianovich (1878–1947): In Search of the Miraculous (1947), 455n. 11 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 b.c.e.–c.e. 17), 34, 44, 136, 174, 317;

482 Fasti, 242, 401; Metamorphoses, 40, 135, 246, 249, 384 Owen, Robert (1771–1858), 34 Owen, Wilfred (1893–1918), 123 Oxford, University of: Bodleian Library at, 326; NF at, 6, 271–2; teaching of English at, 8–9, 311 Paganism, 34 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809), 109 Painting, 16; abstract, 230, 235; convention in, 105; design in, 230–1; form and content in, 104, 160; light in, 283–4; may be owned, 54, 229; representation in, 407; structure in, 222 Pakistan, NF in, 6 Parable, 27 Paradise, 45; lost, 37 Paris, France, 218 Paris, judgment of, 251 Parker, M. Pauline: The Allegory of the Faerie Queene (1960), 177 Parody, 287–8 Partridge, John (1644–1715), 338 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), 35, 183; on spaces, 339 Passion, the, 144–5, 176 Past, 38 Pastoral, 20, 36, 116, 248; and Utopia, 206–14 passim Paul, St., 40, 82, 273, 290, 347; on allegory of Abraham’s wives and sons, 174; on reading Bible spiritually, 78; on Satan, 348; on seeing through a glass, 390 Pausanius (5th c. b.c.e.), 242, 401 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785–1866), 281; The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), 37, 63–4 Pearl, 379 Pentateuch, 254

Index Pericope, 27 Perseus, 137 Persia, 31, 72 Pervigilium Veneris, 378 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304– 74), 47, 131 Phaethon, 135, 243, 247 Pharisees, 34 Ph.D.: alternatives to, 314; idea behind, 310–11; thesis, 313, 320–1 Phenomenalism, 397 Philip II (Philip of Macedon) (382–336 b.c.e.), 181 Philo Judaeus (Philo of Alexandria) (1st c. c.e.), 173 Philology, and criticism, 8, 149, 271, 311–12, 313, 393 Philomela, 249 Philosophy, 20, 27, 42, 389–90; academic study of, 396; and aphorism, 26; argument in, 216; as concerned or mythological subject, 67, 254; and criticism, 398; Greek basis of, 30; and literature/poetry, 45, 267; medieval, 38, 39; nineteenth-century, 38; and science, 315; truth in, 28 Physics, 139, 334, 339, 355 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, Comte (1463–94), 56 Piltdown man, 58 Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 b.c.e.), 41, 83, 111, 145, 243, 315, 332, 344, 346, 347; on archetype, 132; and Eros, 144, 146, 404; on Homeric or Greek mythology, 30, 175, 241; language of, 276; myth in, 136, 246; on poetry, 43, 47, 63; on rhetoric, 151; Critias, 204; Ion, 47, 219; Laws, 204; Phaedrus, 30; Timaeus, 204, 337 – Republic, 81, 173; on nous and dianoia, 147–8; on poets, 30, 53, 276;

Index and Utopian tradition, 41, 112–13, 192–205 passim, 209, 210, 214 Plautus, Titus Maccius (ca. 250–184 b.c.e.), 285, 288, 325 Plot, as principle of design, 235–6 Plutarch (ca. c.e. 46–ca. 120), 40, 145; on badly behaved gods, 135–6, 173, 241, 244 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), 196; and charm poetry, 379, 385, 386, 388; sound in, 186; The Bells (1849), 186; Ulalume, 379 & n. 16, 385, 388 Poem, sometimes used to mean work of literature, 128 Poetry, 117; ambiguity in, 129; and concern, 24, 56–7, 61–2; and cosmology, 140; function of, 236, 280–1; and history, 45, 274; impersonality in, 14, 298–9, 395–6; importance of, 410; language of, 344–6, 351, 352; meaning in, 13, 46–7, 86, 280–1, 294, 296; modern, 19; and painting (ut pictura poesis), 45–6; Plato on, 30, 43; primitivism in, 57, 60–4; and prose, 3, 55, 99; and religion, 79, 88, 410; response to, 87; revival of oral, 98– 100, 300; and science, 55–6; Shelley on, 64–6, 67, 367; Sidney on, 43–8, 54, 64; and theology, 39; thought in, 220, 269–71; and the tradition, 323; and verse, 179. See also Literature; Oral poetry; Poets Poets: humours of, 141; preposterous social views of, 271; role of, 3–5, 25– 6, 41, 43, 51–3, 53–5, 60–1, 116, 234, 246, 272, 323 Political theory, as concerned or mythological subject, 67, 254 Polyphemus, 22 Pope, the, 82, 288, 332 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), 26, 54, 345; rhythm of, 184

483 Porter, Katherine Anne (1890–1980): Ship of Fools (1962), 324, 325 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885–1972), 22, 52, 81, 151, 189; social views of, 61, 320; Cantos (1917–59), 19, 95; Guide to Kulchur (1938), 152–3 Pratt, E(dwin) J(ohn) (1882–1964): influence of on NF, 268, 328; as oral poet, 272 Predestination, 91 Presocratics, 26 Primitivism, 57, 60–4, 232, 236 Printing, effect of, 41 Proclus (ca. c.e. 410–85), 406 Prodigal Son, 129 Professors, burdens upon modern, 329 Progress, theory of, 57–60, 304, 353 Prohibition, 304 Projection, and recovery, 65 Prometheus, 276; imagery of, 142, 283; and Old Comedy, 291; as presiding deity, 403–4, 405 Propaganda, 80 Prose: continuous and discontinuous, 26–8, 183; discontinuous, 82, 84; genres of in Renaissance, 41; and ordinary speech, 99, 179, 272, 299– 300; and poetry, 3, 44, 55, 99; rhetorical or literary, 178–9, 180, 181–2, 190; rhythm of, 180–4 Protestantism, 34, 39; and the bourgeoisie, 32; hymns in, 374; and Roman Catholicism, 49 Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), 19, 235; on lost paradise, 20; Sodome et Gomorrhe (1922), 249 Proverbs, 24, 26–7, 30, 84; Book of, 348 Psalms, 271 Psychiatry, 314 Psychoanalysis, 336

484 Psychology: and criticism, 9, 10, 397, 398; as a science, 139 Ptolemaic universe, 140, 332, 334, 340– 1, 406 Ptolemy of Alexandria (ca c.e. 90– 168), 335 Publicity, 79–80 Puritanism, 35, 37, 53, 175, 191 Puttenham, George (d. 1590), on Old Comedy, 289 Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937): The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), 93 Pyramis and Thisbe, 317 Pythagoras (6th c. b.c.e.), 83, 315, 344 Question, and answer, 389–90 Quest myth, 58 Rabelais, François (ca. 1494–1553), 202, 292; Abbey of Thélème in, 115, 201; and Joyce, 318; Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–35), 188 Racine, Jean (1639–99), 248 Radicals, 96–8, 100–1; Utopian, 110–11 Radio, early, 267 Raleigh, Sir Walter Alexander (1861– 1922), 9, 66 Ransom, John Crowe (1888–1974), on texture vs. structure, 16, 222 Rats Away, 371, 377 Readers, community of, 103 Reading: process of, 15–18, 128, 293, 297; value of, 267 Realism, 35, 249; healthy vs. unhealthy, 231–2; and historical knowledge, 368; vs. romance, 324; socialist, 51, 232 Reality, two kinds of, 29, 35, 37–8, 64– 5, 274, 345, 351, 399. See also Truth Reason, higher, 64 Recognition: in reading, 17, 297; scene, 222–3, 286

Index Reformation, 332, 338 Reincarnation, 403 Relevance, demand for, 106–8, 312 Religion, 20, 64, 148, 389–90; and the afterlife, 405; Joseph Campbell on, 143–6; as concerned or mythological subject, 67, 254, 352; lessening influence of, 355–6; and literature, 19, 274, 323; and myth, 240; as myth of concern, 23–4, 36, 72; and poetry, 54, 63, 65, 79, 88, 271, 352, 410; and science, 75, 345; teaching of, 92 Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn) (1606–69), 284 Renaissance, 129, 220, 233, 238; and the Classics, 116, 136, 175; humanism in, 37, 39–48 passim, 49, 51, 393; pastoral in, 206; Utopia in, 193. See also Elizabethan age Renan, Ernest (1823–92): La Vie de Jésus (1863), 77 Representationalism. See Realism Research. See Scholarship Restoration, drama in, 168 Resurrection, vs. incarnation, 366 – of Jesus, 40, 404; Blake on, 401 Revenge, 306 Reviewing, value judgments in, 119, 120, 121, 123, 153, 260 Revolution, 32; characteristics of, 33–4 Reynolds, Henry (fl. 1627–32), 67 Rhetoric, 65, 371; Aristotle on, 44; in humanism, 42, 61; Plato on, 151; in prose, 181–2, 190; teaching of, 160; two meanings of, 12 Rhodes Scholarship, 271, 311 Rhythm, associational, 180, 183–4, 186, 187–90 Richard I, Coeur de Lion (1157–99), 368 Richard II (1367–1400), 14, 299

Index Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong) (1893– 1979), 269; Practical Criticism (1929), 263 Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761): Pamela (1740–41), 223, 252 Riddle, xxxii–xxxiii, 27; and charm, 369–70, 381–2, 390; varieties of, 382– 90 Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926), 52 Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur (1854–91), 97; on “on me pense,” 299; as prophetic, 221; Une Saison en enfer (1873), 184 Ritual, 29; and myth, 23, 380–1 Robins, John Daniel (1884–1952), influence of on NF, 268, 272, 273, 328 Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot) (1647–80), 225 Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917), 233 Roeslin, Helisaeus (1544–1616), 333 Rolland, John (fl. 1560): The Court of Venus (1575), 123 Rolle of Hampole, Richard (ca. 1290– 1349), 10 Roman Catholicism, 82, 87, 271; and Protestantism, 49; and scholarship, 395; view of history in, 11, 296 Romance: as model world, 20, 36, 116; as mythos (literary form), 163, 248; quest in, 58; and realism, 324, 367–8 Roman Empire, 347; Augustan age in, 39–40; Christianity in, 83 Romantic movement, 37, 103, 142, 159, 252, 283, 353; vs. Classicism, 48, 70; cosmology in, 140, 348; creation in, 253; and imagination, 64; Keats and, 130; myth in, 136, 175–6, 238; poetry in, 51–2; primitivism in, 63– 4; time in, xxxix–xl, 358, 365–8; views of history in, 296

485 Romaunt of the Rose, 286 Rome, ancient: art in, 231; comedy in, 163, 164, 166 Ross, Alan C.M., 139 Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio (1792– 1868): The Barber of Seville (perf. 1816), 164 Rothwell, Kenneth, xxi–xxii Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712–78), 61, 111, 225, 255, 276; on state of nature, 208; Du Contrat social (1762), 204; Émile (1762), 203 Rowley poems. See Chatterton Rowse, Alfred Leslie (1903–97), on Shakespeare, 154 Royal Society, 338; of Canada, 357 Rumpelstiltskin, 382–3 Ruskin, John (1819–1900), 62, 67, 245, 401; on work, 69, 210; The Queen of the Air (1869), 136, 176, 251 Russell, Bertrand, Earl (1872–1970), 447n. 23; on propaganda, 80 Russia, 355; art in, 231–2; formalism in, 12, 296; imperialism in, 115; literature in, 51 Rymer, Thomas (1641–1713), on Othello, 121 Sacred books, 136 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, marquis de (1740–1814), 225 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de (1760–1825), 34, 201 Saintsbury, George Edward Bateman (1845–1933): A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912), 190; A History of English Prosody (1906–10), 190 Sakuntala. See Kalidasa Salinger, J(erome) D(avid) (b. 1919), 121–2 Salvation, 35 Samson, 243, 383

486 Sandys, George (1578–1664): Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures (1626), 136 Sardou, Victorien (1831–1908), 287 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80): Huis clos (No Exit) (1943; perf. 1944), 292 Saskatchewan, 329 Satire, 36, 85, 116, 185; moral norm in, 151, 170; NF and, xxvi Saul, 157 Scandinavia, 210 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759–1805), on naive and sentimental, 17 Schipper, Jakob (1842–1915): Englische Metrik (1881–88), 190 Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829), 175 Scholarship (research): barren, 262–3; and concern, 106–7; and criticism, 118–21, 126; and leisure, 301; nature of, 14, 310–30 passim; and teaching, 311, 314; values in, 394–6 Science, 28, 38, 42, 70, 254, 267, 274, 298, 389–90; Greek basis of, 30; and the humanities, 48, 197–8, 311–16 passim, 326, 393–4; method of, 139; and mythology, xxxix, 65, 140, 241, 336–57 passim, 399; and nature, 35; and poetry, 55–6; progress of, 59, 60, 62–3 Science fiction, 63, 99, 100, 368; and Utopia, 194, 201 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), 324; Anne of Geierstein (1829), 368; Count Robert of Paris (1831), 368; The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), 367; Guy Mannering (1815), 268; Ivanhoe (1819), 368; The Talisman (1825), 368 Scotus, Johannes Duns. See Duns Scotus, Johannes

Index Scribe, (Augustin) Eugène (1791– 1861), 287 Scrutiny, 152 Sculpture: as abstract art, 235; design in, 231; may be owned, 229 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger (ca. 4 b.c.e.–c.e. 65), 40 Senex, 286, 287 Separatism, 102 Sermons, 374 Serpent, 144 Sex, 305; and liberation, 97–8; in modern culture, 106; symbolism of in fields of study, 394 Seznec, Jean (1905–83): The Survival of the Pagan Gods (trans. 1953), 177 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), 122, 156, 188, 235, 249, 267, 282, 324, 396; comedies of, 165–9 passim, 223, 225, 286–91 passim, 298, 319; criticism of, 9, 84, 129, 131, 294, 318; editing of, 256–7; First Folio of, 326; law in, 307–8; meaning in, 46–7; pastness and presence of, 68; romances of, 168–9; value judgments on, 18, 120, 123–4, 216, 260–1, 317, 393; All’s Well That Ends Well (1623), 166; As You Like It (1623), 165, 166, 167, 287, 290 & n. 6; Comedy of Errors (1623), 165, 285; Hamlet (1603), 24, 173, 187 & n. 14, 224, 306; Henry V (1600), 46, 47; 3 Henry VI (1595), 28 & n. 38; King Lear (1608), 17, 28, 151, 162, 163, 188; Macbeth (1623), 173, 221, 224, 359, 381; Measure for Measure (1623), 165, 166, 308; The Merchant of Venice (1600), 46, 165, 166, 308; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), 165, 167, 270, 290, 371–2; Much Ado about Nothing (1600), 166, 167; Othello (1622), 121; Romeo and Juliet (1597), 127, 137;

Index Sonnets (1609), 9, 131, 154, 294, 362– 3; The Taming of the Shrew (1623), 164, 167; The Tempest (1623), 158, 185, 287; Timon of Athens (1623), 28; Troilus and Cressida (1609), 291; Twelfth Night (1623), 166, 167; Venus and Adonis (1593), 137; The Winter’s Tale (1623), 165, 366 Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), 267, 336, 403; comic patterns in, 288, 290; rhythm of, 182–3; on Sardoodledom, 287; Arms and the Man (1898), 288; Back to Methuselah (1921), 288; Major Barbara (1907), 288 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797– 1851): Frankenstein (1818), 65, 304, 355 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), 5, 48, 55, 81, 97, 122, 130, 136, 142, 283, 308, 365; on didacticism, 68; Eliot on, 123; on imagination, 90; and Milton, 316; on Paradise Lost, 62; on poets, 272, 280–1; Yeats on, 123; The Cloud (1820), 384; A Defence of Poetry (1821), 37, 64–6, 68, 87, 159, 365, 367; Hellas (1822), 364; Prometheus Unbound (1820), 136–7, 176, 233, 248–9, 252–3, 254, 348–9, 365–6; Queen Mab (1813), 62; The Revolt of Islam (1818), 127 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751– 1816), 287 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–86), 5, 51, 131, 272; A Defence of Poetry (1595), 37, 41, 43–8 passim, 54, 60, 64, 175, 280–1 Simile, 56, 132, 140, 269 Sir Patrick Spens, 125 Skelton, John (ca. 1460–1529), 149, 150 Skinner, B(urrhus) F(rederic) (1904– 90): Walden Two (1948), 198

487 Sky-father god, 275 Smart, Christopher (1722–71): Jubilate Agno (1939; composed 1759–63), 189 Smith, Chad Powers (1894–1977): Pattern and Variation in Poetry (1932), 190 Smith symbol, 146 Snow, Sir C(harles) P(ercy) (1905–80): The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), 59 & n. 73, 60, 354 Socialism, scientific, 110, 195 Social sciences: and humanities, 313, 330, 356, 393; as mythological subject, 67 Social vision, 75 Sociolinguistics, and criticism, 397 Socrates (469–399 b.c.e.), 113, 288; revolution of, 315 Song of Songs, 251–2, 286 Sophists, 204 Sophocles (ca. 496–405 b.c.e.), 131; Oedipus Rex, 163 Sorel, Georges (1847–1922), 35 Soviet Union, 104 Spanish Civil War, 319 Sparshott, Francis Edward (b. 1926): The Structure of Aesthetics (1963), 414n. 6 Sparta, 199 Speculation, axis of, xxx, xxxii Speech: conventionalization of ordinary, xxi, 24, 99, 179–80, 272, 300; humanists on, 42, 44, 51; levels of, 259. See also Language; Words Spengler, 145; as cultural critic, 401, 403, 406 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552–99), 65, 131, 225, 364, 365; allegory in, 176; Faerie Queene (1590–96), 40, 171, 172, 186, 204, 207, 362, 363, 372–3, 377, 382; Mother Hubberds Tale (1591),

488 172; Mutabilitie Cantos (1599), 361– 2 Spillane, Frank Morrison (“Mickey”) (1918–2006), 158 Spinoza, Baruch de (or Benedictus) (1632–77), 183 Spitzer, Leo (1887–1960), 13, 298 Spontaneous combustion, 140, 142 Stalin, Joseph (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879–1953), 355 Stalinism, 95, 96, 319, 404 Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), 189; Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914), 385–6 Stereotypes, 225 Sterne, Laurence (1713–68), 213; A Sentimental Journey (1767), 188 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), 39, 68, 283, 321; on squirming facts, 388; value judgments on, 124; Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters into Heaven (1935), 226–7; The Pure Good of Theory (1947), 331, 356–7 Stock response, 156, 264 Stoicism, 173, 259 Stonehenge, 28, 251 Strachey, Lytton (1880–1932), 227 Stratford-on-Avon, xxv Stratford Shakespearean Festival (Ontario), NF at, xxv, 162 Stream of consciousness technique, 180, 188 Structuralism, xxxv, 22, 397; AC and, 392 Structure: in literature, 15–16, 133, 222–4, 369; as theme, 128–9 Student protest movement, xxxiii, 5, 74, 102, 307 Students: effect of electronic media on, 316; verbal experience of, 326 Style, 119 Subject, and object, 147

Index Subjects (of study): mythological, 67, 92, 254; worth of all, 108 Sublime, 365 Sufism, 83 Sumeria, 144, 250 Sun: symbolism, 335, 357; worship of, 348 Surrealism, 232, 269 Sweden, 233 Swedenborg, Emmanuel (1688–1772), science and religion in, 340 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), 121, 124, 323, 338, 345; Yeats on, 120; Gulliver’s Travels (1726), 203, 205–6, 208–9; A Tale of a Tub (1704), 172 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837– 1909), Eliot on, 386 Switzerland, 233 Symbolism: vs. allegory, 175–6; in films, 99, 300 Symbolisme, 27, 389 “Symbolism in the Bible” (NF’s course), genesis of, 273 Tacitus, Gaius Cornelius (ca. c.e. 55– 120): Annals, 32 Tarot cards, 99 Tasso, Torquato (1544–95): Gerusalemme liberata, 175 Taste, 124–5, 150–1, 259–60 Taylor, Jeremy (1613–67), 190; Holy Dying (1651), 182 Teachers, 394; as medium for subject, 265 Teaching, 329; limits of, 147–8; and scholarship, 311, 314 Technology: and introversion, 102–3; poets’ attitude to, 353–5; progress of, 59, 60; and teaching, 327; in Utopias, 194–5, 196–7 Television, 109; commercials on, 374; effect of, 102, 103, 300

Index Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809–92), 40, 386; and evolution, 130; on freedom, 303 Terence, Publius Terentius Afer (ca. 190–159 b.c.e.), 288, 290 Testament, meaning of, 307 Teutonic mythology, 322–3 Texture, and structure, 15–16, 129, 222 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63), 324 Theme, structure as, 128 Theocritus (fl. 270 b.c.e.), 131; Second Idyll, 375–6, 379, 380 Theogony, 135, 136, 244 Theology, 84; and literature, 267; medieval, 38; NF studies, 323; and poetry, 39 Theophrastus (ca. 372–ca. 287 b.c.e.), 387 Theseus, 242 Thinking, nonconceptual (mythical, poetic), 220, 269–71, 300 Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914–53), 56, 189, 236, 358; Altarwise by Owl-Light (1936), 238; Under Milk Wood (1954), 184 Thomism, 11, 12, 38, 71; Thomist criticism, 398 Thompson, John (1918–2002): The Founding of English Metre (1961), 190 Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62), 255; and civil disobedience, 95; Walden (1854), 95, 96, 212–13 Thorpe, James Ernest (b. 1915), xviii, xix Tillich, Paul Johannes (1886–1965), on ultimate concern, 23, 247 Tillyard, E(ustace) M(andeville) W(etenhall) (1889–1962), on Paradise Lost, 295 Time: in Romanticism, xxxix–xl, 358,

489 365–8; transcending of ordinary conception of, 358–67 – and space: new conceptions of, 350, 400, 405 Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) (1892–1973), 40 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich (1828–1910), 224; Anna Karenina (1875–77), 85, 222–3; Resurrection (1899–1900), 249; War and Peace (1863–69), 176 Toronto, Casa Loma in, 230 Tottel, Richard (ca. 1530–94): Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), 257 Tourneur, Cyril (ca. 1575–1626), 185 Tradition, literary, 14, 132, 271, 323 Tragedy, 131, 230; and comedy, 85, 404–5, 410; Greek, 85; of isolation, 28; and law, 204; as mythos (literary form), 116, 162–3, 248 Translation, 47, 235 Trilling, Lionel (1905–75), 221 Trinity, 31 Trojan War, 137 Trotsky, Leon (alias of Lev Davidovich Bronstein) (1879–1940), 34 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott (1919–2000), 278 Truth: of correspondence, 28–9, 38, 56, 74, 81, 92, 95, 270; in myth of concern, 23, 31, 38, 79–82; personal, 89; poetic, 270; and rhetoric, 44. See also Reality Turner, Joseph Mallord William (1775–1851), 284 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835–1910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 262; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), 70, 223 Twentieth century. See Modern age Typology, 174, 177

490 Tyranny, 103 Unconscious, in learning, 148 Uniqueness, 16–17, 18 United States, 104; and American way of life, 72; Deism in, 350; Eros in, 276, 277; imperialism in, 115, 224; media in, 101; and moon landings, 28; NF’s influence in, xvii; revolutionary tradition of, 305–6; social mythology of, 92–6 passim, 212–13, 255; Utopia and anti-Utopia in, 196, 209. See also American University: and concern, xxxiii–xxxiv, 102, 112, 160; myth of freedom vs. myth of concern in, 92, 95, 106–8; and society, 311, 314; support of research in, 326–7 University of Chicago, great books program at, 332 University of London, 314 University of Toronto, M.Phil. at, 314 Urizen, 275 Utopia, 222; contract and, xxx–xxxi, 108, 110–11, 191–2, 204; as educational theory, xxxiv, 41, 111, 203–4; as mental model, 112–13; types of literary, 191–214; and Utopian communes, 96 Vala, 275 Value judgments, xl, xxiv–xxv, 17, 18, 21, 87, 393; arguments against, 120– 8, 151–3, 170, 258–65; fallacy of, 149–50, 317; judge the critic, 257; knowledge and, 219; no criteria for, 220; true type of, 157–8, 161, 216–17, 225, 394–6 Van Gogh, Vincent (1853–90), 59, 232 Vedic hymns, 79 Velikovsky, Immanuel (1895–1979), 99

Index Venus, 116, 174, 245, 250; of Willendorf, 106 Verbal structures, truth in, 81 Verse: blank, 184–5; free, 180; and prose, 178–80, 272, 300; rhythm of, 184–7 “Vice” (comic character), 166 Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744), 63; on history, 36, 403; on language, 24; on myth, 21–2 Victoria College: NF as student at, 268; NF as teacher at, 272–3 Victorian Age, 21, 32, 206; Biblical criticism in, 75; culture of, 267, 278; education in, 50; literature in, 54. See also Nineteenth century Vietnam War, 94, 96, 224 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Comte Auguste (1840–89): Axël (1885), 317 Villon, François (ca. 1431–ca. 1463), 373 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70–19 b.c.e.), 131, 137; and humanism, 41; medieval attitude to, 39, 174; Eighth Eclogue, 379; Fourth Eclogue, 40 Vision, 91; apocalyptic, 20 Vitruvius (1st c. b.c.e.), 41 Vivaldi, Antonio (1678–1741), 25–6 Waley, Arthur (1889–1969), 240 War, 104 Warburton, William (1698–1779), and myth criticism, 67 Webster, John (ca. 1580–ca. 1626), 185 Wellek, René (1903–95), xxxv Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866– 1946), 403; A Modern Utopia (1905), 195, 201, 202; The Outline of History (1920), 58, 251 Western story, 100, 255 Weston, Jessie L. (1850–1928): From Ritual to Romance (1920), 250–1

Index Weyland the Smith, 229 Wheel symbol, 355 Whigs, 191 White, T(erence) H(anbury) (1906– 64), 40 Whitman, Walt (1819–92): rhythm of, 189; Democratic Vistas (1871), 95 Widdicombe, Jane (b. 1943), 329 & n. 24 Wilde, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills (1854–1900), 291; “The Decay of Lying” (1889), 219, 368; The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), 138, 288 Will, relaxation of in writing, 365 William I (the Conqueror) (1027–87), 336 Williams, Tennessee (1911–83): Camino Real (1953), 289 Williams, William Carlos (1883–1963), on ideas, 388–9 Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972), as critic, 124 Wimsatt, William K. (1907–75): on NF, xxiii, xxiv, 218–25 passim; and Monroe C. Beardsley (1915–85), The Verbal Icon (1954), 153, 429n. 3 Wind, Edgar (1900–71): Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958), 454n. 37 Wisdom, 24, 348; and knowledge, 148 Wise, Thomas James (1859–1936), 257 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Joseph Johann (1889–1951), 83, 183, 398 Wodehouse, P.G. (Sir Pelham Grenville) (1881–1975), 163, 288 Women: in scholarship, 395; subjection of, 305 Woodhouse, A(rthur) S(utherland) P(igott) (1895–1964), 318 Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882– 1941): “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), 268; To the Lighthouse (1927), 176

491 Word of God: and charm, 375; Milton on, 52 Wordsworth, William (1770–1850), 61, 249; criticism on, 128; language of, 186; and Milton, 316; nature in, 365; The Idiot Boy (1798), 128; Lyrical Ballads (1798), 157, 186; The Prelude (1805, 1850), 127, 212, 272, 365; The Thorn (1798), 128 Work: and drudgery, 69, 210; ethic, 96; Morris on, 230 World, actual vs. unborn, 115, 117 Worlds, two. See Reality, two types of Writers: as critics, 124; may have preposterous social views, 54, 86–7 Writing: effect of, 27–31, 39, 41, 43, 55; written records as guarantee of open society, 103–4, 314–15 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503–42), 47, 149 Wycherley, William (1641–1715): The Country Wife (1675), 166, 168 Wyndham, John (John Wyndham Harris) (1903–69): The Chrysalids (1955), 209 & n. 16 Xenophon (ca. 435–354 b.c.e.), 315; Cyropaedia, 40, 204 Xerxes (ca. 519–465 b.c.e.), 146 Yates, Dame Frances (1899–1981): The Art of Memory (1966), 262 Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), 35, 40, 56, 100, 115, 140, 157, 189, 319, 321; Auden on, 259; as critic, 123; on servants, 317; social views of, 271, 320; on Swift, 120; Among School Children (1927), 130; The Choice (1933), 409; A Dialogue of Self and Soul (1933), 130; A Prayer for My Daughter (1919), 249–50; Rosa Alchemica (1913), 130; Sailing to Byzantium (1928), 229; Solomon and the

492 Witch (1921), 20; Vacillation (1932), 130; A Vision (1937), 130, 403 Yoga, 405 Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich (1884– 1937): We (trans. 1924), 195 Zen Buddhism, 213, 381

Index Zeus, 242, 275 Zodiac, 337 Zola, Émile (1840–1902): Germinal (1885), 249 Zoroaster (ca. 630–ca. 553 b.c.e.), 43, 143, 145